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[medicinalkiwis]

Remember the first time we met Seth? Yeahhh, it wasn't exactly a pleasant time. We'll get to revisit all of those moments when the BitterSweet Director's Cut drops, but tomorrow he's a much softer boy in a camping trip sleep aid!

Don't miss it here!

[medicinalkiwis]

[medicinalkiwis]

So I really liked Unpacking

[medicinalkiwis]

you can pry starting sentences with 'and' or 'but' out of my cold, dead hands

[medicinalkiwis]

words to use instead of ________

"Mad"

aggravated, angry, annoyed, boiling, cross, enraged, exasperated, fuming, furious, heated, incensed, indignant, irate, irritable, livid, offended, outraged, riled, steamed, storming, upset

"Nice"

amiable, charming, cordial, courteous, delightful, favorable, friendly, genial, gentle, gracious, helpful. inviting, kind, lovely, obliging, peaceful, peachy, pleasant, polite, swell, sympathetic, tender, welcoming, well-mannered, winning

"Pretty"

alluring, appealing, attractive, beautiful, charming, cute, delightful, desirable, elegant, eye-catching, fair, fascinating, gorgeous, graceful, intriguing, lovely, pleasing, striking, stunning, sweet

"Said"

alleged, argued, asked, asserted, babbled, bellowed, bragged, commented, complained, cried, declined, demanded, denied, encouraged, expressed, giggled, growled, inquired, moaned, nagged, rebuked, rebutted, replied, rejected, retorted, roared, scolded, shrieked, shrugged, stated, taunted, vowed, warned, whined, whispered, yelled

"Went"

avoid, bolt, bound, depart, exit, escape, flee, fly, hike, hop, jaunt, jolt, journey, leap, leave, lurch, march, mosey, move, pace, parade, pass, progress, retreat, saunter, scoot, skip, split, step, stride, stroll, tour, travel, vanish

more words to use instead other words to use instead another list of words to use instead

[medicinalkiwis]

have you guys ever realized anti ai also means things like character.ai. like the site with the fandom blorbo chatbots that scrape off actual fandom writers n shit. right. Right.

[medicinalkiwis]

idc how hard you try you will NOT get me to stop using snorted in my dialogue. i will always use growled and choked and hissed and huffed and grunted and breathed and frowned and sniffed and scoffed and spluttered and purred and snickered and exhaled and whimpered and smiled and laughed and sneered and frowned

i love you words that indicate sound and tone i love you poetics i love you dialogue tags they will never take you away from me i love you i love you i love you

[medicinalkiwis]

I just think people write out of obligation too often.

"How do I motivate myself to write through the boring part of my story?"

"How do I make this boring scene not boring?"

Don't write it.

Don't write boring things just because you think the structure of the story demands it. I promise it doesn't need to be there.

If your characters need to have gone shopping for a later part of the story to make sense you can just have a sentence about how they went shopping and move on.

You are not obligated to write the boring parts. No matter what those parts are.

You are not obligated to make the parts of your story that you're not excited to write interesting somehow.

You can just write the fun and interesting parts and gloss over and summarize boring things.

Your audience will thank you and you will thank yourself.

[medicinalkiwis]

[medicinalkiwis]

[medicinalkiwis]

Lesser-known steps of the writing process:

Finding all the paragraphs where you used some hyper-specific word more than once

Rearranging paragraphs that you swear you wrote in the right order but turned out to be totally backwards

Going for a walk, coming up with the perfect line, and forgetting it as soon as you get home and open your laptop

Creating a separate document where you can dump all of those nice sentences that no longer fit in anywhere

Waking up in a cold sweat because so-and-so was supposed to be barefoot but never actually took his shoes off

[medicinalkiwis]

[medicinalkiwis]

not to overreact but i will never ever be over this

[medicinalkiwis]

hey coco! hope ur having a good day! was wondering if u’d like to talk about why u like and what u find compelling with atton/exile? do u have a particular route or headcanon underwhich u prefer them or is it more of an overarching meta appreciation?

Hi, friend!

Thanks so much for the well-wishes. My day's kind of ehh due to continued Issues but the weather's nice and I'm feeling a little calmer. Hope your day is good!

Thank you so much for sending me this and enabling me shamelessly. I've been ride-or-die for Atton/Exile (which is M/F if you played the Jedi Exile as female, which I did and which is 'canon' but let's not talk about the latter lest we kick the hornet's nest) since summer 2011, which is almost 13 years now? Wild. Literally half my life. Anyhow, my reasons/headcanons have changed and evolved just as I've done a lot of growing up since the time I was first obsessed, but I'll do my best to synthesize/organize my thoughts! (Assume all the Restored Content is canon). More under the cut because 'synthesis' is still essay-length for me, God help me.

First off, I tended to play the Jedi Exile as light-sided and Revan as dark sided; I find the narrative of both games to be the most meaningful with these choices. This post basically puts into words why Revan works better as a Dark Sider, but the Exile, to me, as Revan's foil and mirror, works inversely best as a light sider. The game seems to want you to play her light-sided given how Kreia's best stuff/approval lies in that path. KOTOR II is one of the darkest entries to the Star Wars universe by far, but with a light sided exile, it's a story about how moving through life with an unyielding belief in love and justice for others in your heart will ignite that light in the people around you, and repair a broken world/galaxy.

Enter Atton.

KOTOR II is great in that you technically have such a wide range of shipping dynamics/options, and exactly none of them are functional, largely because it's one of the Star Wars media entries with the most harrowingly realistic depictions of war and its psychological impact on the people it touches. Atton Rand happened to be my favourite of all the love interests at the time because of his voice and his snarky meta-jokes (I was a Daria fanatic almost 2 decades too late, what do you want). Nowadays, I love him because his character basically took the Star Wars expanded universe requirement for Han Solo expys and went off the rails with it, making his 'scoundrel' archetype half-his charming and humorous personality, half-a facade to cover severe and quite realistically portrayed war PTSD as well as his actions as Jaq, the torture-happy mercenary. It's "what if the self-serving charming rogue during wartime archetype was brought to its logical conclusion" and I am here for it.

So first you have the parallels and contrasts - both committed atrocities during the Mandalorian wars, but while Atton was loyal to Revan after their fall and never faced justice for his wrongdoings, the (light-sided) Exile turned from Revan and still was scapegoated by the Council. Atton is a character mired in his own bitterness and cynicism, and you have the option to choose to play the Exile as a character driven solely by her morals, even when she'll suffer unconscionably for them, and it is through this unflinching clinging to her morals that she gains the idealism necessary to survive everything she goes through. Atton once sought to rip freewill away from his victims; the Exile unconsciously, slowly saps it through the cipher.

As a young teen, I admittedly was starry-eyed over the 'sheltered good girl manipulated and hurt by so many meets sexy bad boy recovering from his own past and they protect each other as a power couple' archetyping, but it does go a lot deeper than that. Their dialogue options have easy, natural, sexy chemistry that draws you in, but I do think my appreciation goes deeper. This isn't a simple 'fixing the bad boy' because of the narrative device of the Force cipher meaning you quite literally have "I can fix him" and "I can make him worse" as your game mechanics, lol. You get your surface-level fun of their interactions between the proper, well-mannered Jedi and the flirtatious rapscallion, but you also have two people who, for the reasons I outlined above, fundamentally understand each other after harrowing lifetimes spent alone in their pain and trauma.

I'd go so far as to say Atton is the best-placed of anyone to understand the Exile; the Sion ship is compelling and squee-worthy to any Phantom fangirl worth her salt (as I was), but she's everything he couldn't be or fathom, Visas may have felt closer to the pain the Exile did over Malachor V but her worst actions were committed under duress as a captive of Darth Nihilus and not of her own volition (so I argue she's a lot more morally innocent than Atton or the Exile), Mical/The Disciple is the innocence and warmth of the Exile's upbringing untouched by how the Mando wars reforged her and while Brianna/The Handmaiden is excellent as a potential parallel for specifically the Exile's abuse at the hands of the Jedi (Atris in particular), she's still similarly sheltered to Mical. Bao-Dur was with the Exile during the war but the game didn't develop him enough and understands that aspect of her, but they canonically per the dialogue emotionally distanced themselves given the circumstances, and Mira the Bounty Hunter is cool sister-zoned, but I suspect her family being victim to Malachor V would drive a wedge no matter how much forgiveness the game preaches.

Meanwhile, Atton knows and/or loves not pieces of the Exile, but as she is; the battered and betrayed veteran with a lifetime of wrongdoing to atone for that he recognizes in himself, and the naive Jedi she was before that the charming flirt in him likes to tease. And although his backstory is a revelation, and a harrowing one to the Exile, who sees what she might have become had she stayed with Revan, this is what their relationship is; seeing someone in their totality, and loving and honouring the worst with the best. Despite knowing what the Exile's done, Atton values her enough to still care about how she views him that he begs Kreia not to tell her the truth about his past. The two are instantly drawn to each other on Peragus, not just out of necessity but genuine, instinctive protectiveness, attraction, and a deeper sense (be it Force-Assisted or not) of understanding. Atton refers to it in his death scene (if you count that) as love at first sight, and while there was probably initial infatuation, I think there was just such an instant magnetism that grew and grew between them through shared experience. "Don't give up on me now, dammit!" and "You want her, you get through me." come to mind. Atton is the only party member that asks her to train him in the Force, whereas she has to prompt and convince the others into their awakening. He's deeply scarred by his experiences with the Force, not to mention it's actively dangerous to train as a Jedi due to the Exchange, but he's willing to face that for the Exile - he tells her that part of why he wants to train as a Jedi is to be better able to protect and fight for her. One of the first things he does is teach her to play Pazaak in her head to prevent from psychic attacks through the Force/harm through Kreia's force bond - the exact weapon he wielded against others. The tragedy of any Jedi Exile ship is the constant insecurity created by the force-wound/cipher; how much of anyone's choice to follow in their footsteps or love them is their own free will? What power dynamics, unspoken or obvious, arise from it? But Atton's fierce independence and selfishness almost serves as the clearest answer to this. He willingly reawakens himself to the Force to connect with her, to be better able to fight for her. He chose her, a thousand times over, and whatever role the Force Wound plays, he accepts her influence out of admiration for that steadfast-to-a-fault morality I talked about before.

This isn't some corny gender essentialist "she is his redemption" nonsense either, although redemption is a major theme of a light-sided KOTOR 2; by training Atton and others as a Jedi, the Exile is actively doing the work to heal the galaxy she helped to break. By protecting and teaching and bonding with the Exile, Atton is regaining his own humanity through recognizing hers, over and over, the way he failed to recognize those of his victims. They're together in this, in their recovery, in how they've experienced all extremes of morality. Love, in this story, isn't about fixing someone or breaking them, it's about meeting them where they are and walking alongside them, hopefully to someplace better than where you were when you both met. Is it any wonder that he's the one she walks away with in the end? (As if he'd let her walk alone ever again.)

With all this being said, and to address your question, while the route/headcanon preferences I prefer for Atton/Exile create, I think, the richest narrative with what's there, I've definitely got an overarching meta appreciation for them too. I spent my teen years eagerly eating up every possible iteration of them as a couple, and much of what I described above can hold true in a different aspect if people prefer to play them dark-sided, if people hold the tragic dying in your arms ending as canon, and so forth. They're compelling any way you slice them.

[medicinalkiwis]

Wyll is so fucking funny and no amount of acknowledgement about this could ever be enough. He's literally walking around being so casually hilarious completely under-the-radar. He calls Halsin a "thick hunk of an elf". He once accidently implied that he was fucking an ogre instead of killing it and then proceeded to absolutely stumble his way through explaining. He gets excited by Lae'zel talking about carnal pleasures. He canonically tells his pessimistic thoughts to shut the hell up. He volunteers to babysit Shadowheart's hypothetical werewolf babies as long as she gets him gloves. He tries to give Gale a hero moniker like his own. He jokes that his father, the Grand Duke of Baldur's Gate, can't spell. He calls Astarion "Mister Fangs". He makes up storybook chapter names for his own fucking adventures. As a child he got chased by the Flaming Fist for stealing fruit, nearly drowned trying to find mermaids in the harbor, and almost successfully broke into the Counting House. He reads monster erotica, and is not ashamed to tell you about it. He ranks eating pudding among life's greatest moments. He will, without shame and completely unprompted, meow at you. He is 24 years old.

[medicinalkiwis]

When writing emotionally reserved characters:

Show your character's struggles with holding in emotions. Just because your character won't let themself go in public, doesn't mean they don't struggle holding everything in.

Find a motive. Pride and/or consideration for those around them can make emotionally reserved people hold back more than would be considered good for them. There are other reasons too, perhaps the initial cause and the reason now are different, but try to give them a reason.

Show side-effects. Everything you bottled up shows itself in another way, whether it's physical or mental. This can be long- and short-term, depending on the severity of the emotions.

Give them coping mechanisms. Everyone who wishes not to show certain emotions has a trick or two to keep themselves in check. Taking a sip of water, not looking people in the eyes, clenching their fists, breathing just a bit too deeply.

Write subconscious signs that they give off, which close friends or family might pick on. Just because these characters want to keep their emotions to themselves, doesn't mean they don't give off signs. Some manage to keep said signs well hidden from those closest to them, but it's more common for environment to pick up on something at the very least.

[medicinalkiwis]