#// honestly I just need some things not in his main verse for variety.

[apalestar]

Plot ideas.

Would adore an Avernus rampage against the machine that is Zariel with a Karlach. Going off that comic from SunsetAgain maybe trying to retrieve her heart?

Running across a non-romanced Astarion post game. Either for a new adventure he's been roped into or a continuation of something with an old companion.

I have ideas about a vampire lord trying to overtake the Gate now that the territory is 'in dispute' having someone to help deal with it.

An alternate way of meeting him where he escaped Cazador through other means and is a courtesan at Sharess Caress.

Trying to befriend him while he's a spawn under Cazador. How this plays out is up to you.

Ascended Astarion and the power struggles of politics in the Gate. Either help his conquest or hinder him. Your choice.

Meeting the shithead magistrate Astarion at a soiree. We go from there on what happens.

Insert your idea here.

[themagnuswriters]

Writing a Muslim Character

The Mods of the Magnus Writers discord server and community are putting together a variety of resources for Magnus Archives fan creators; these have been collated from articles on the topics, our own experiences, and the experiences of the members of the Magnus Writers discord. These are definitely not comprehensive or the only viewpoints out there, and are by no means meant as a way to police fanworks, but as a way to support and inspire fan creators in creating thoughtful and diverse works. Please note that external links will be added in a reblog to outsmart tumblr’s terrible tagging system, so make sure to check those out as well!

This resource in particular was put together by Mod Jasmine: hi, all! 

While there are no canonically Muslim characters in TMA, Muslim headcanons are common in fanworks—particularly for Basira, and sometimes Jon (which I love to see!). I have cobbled together this post from my own experiences to help support and inform fans in these areas, and as part of my diabolical plan to get more Muslim!Basira and Muslim!Jon fics to shove into my brain.

First, two gigantic caveats:

I was raised Sunni Muslim in Egypt, which is a majority Sunni Muslim country, and still live there. This means my experience will be very different from someone raised in a majority Christian country like the UK, and different again if they are not Sunni and not Arab.

I am currently ex-Muslim. This does not mean I bear any ill will towards Islam or Muslims, just that it wasn’t for me, and I felt it was important to be upfront about that. I’ll be linking to resources by practicing Muslims in the reblog to this post, whether to add to my opinions and experiences or provide you with a different opinion. I am not here to put my voice over that of Muslims, just to do some of the work so they don’t have to. Obviously, if any Muslims have any additions or suggestions for this post, I’m happy to accommodate them.

Alright. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get started with the basics of writing a Muslim character.

(Warning: this is absurdly, absurdly long)

Basics:

Muslims follow two main sources of religious instruction: Quran and Hadith. 

The Quran is the holy book, considered to be dictated by the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Mohammed, who then relayed what he was told to his followers. It is composed of surahs, or chapters, which have individual ayat, or verses. There are no varying versions of the Quran, later additions, or anything considered lost in translation. Any Arabic Quran is considered to be the same text that the Prophet Mohammed relayed, unchanged. As a result, while Muslims can debate interpretations of the Quran (although that’s often still left to the scholars), none debate the actual words of the text.

Hadith, meanwhile, are the sayings or teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. Their validity can be disputed, as they were written by his followers after his death, and mainly depend on having several witnesses for a specific saying or situation. The more witnesses there were, the more valid the hadith is considered to be.

When in doubt or should there be any contradiction between the Quran and Hadith, Muslims will always refer to the Quran first and foremost.

Denominations:

The bigggest (but not only!) divisions of Islam are Sunni and Shia, and both of those have separate madhabs, which are the separate thoughts and stances of specific Imams. When writing a Muslim character, a good first step would be to decide where your character’s family might have come from, as that could help inform which denomination your character might belong to. This will in turn inform things like the beliefs they grew up with, how they pray, their holy holidays, and so on. Obviously, all denominations fall under the bigger umbrella of Muslim, but can vary in practice.

Background:

The intersection of culture and religion affects a character beyond which denomination they likely belong to, such as whether they call prayer salah or namaz, the foods they might associate with Ramadan or Eid, and their community’s stance on things like hijab and alcohol.

One thing to keep in mind is that being Muslim is not synonymous with being Arab and vice versa. Not all Arabs are Muslim, not all Muslims are Arab or even Middle Eastern. In fact, the largest Muslim country in the world is Indonesia. That said, depending on your character’s race and backround, there is the potential they may have faced Arab elitism or other strands of racism within Muslim circles. Please see the reblog of this post for an article about  one Black British Muslim woman’s experience with racism.

And, of course, your character and their family do not need to have been immigrants at all. They or their family may have been converts instead. According to most Muslim schools of thought, all that’s required for a person to be Muslim is stating the shahada in Arabic, honestly and with intent. It goes, “Ashhadu an la ilah illa Allah, wa an Mohammadan rasul Allah,” which translates as “I bear witness that there is no god but God, and that Mohammed is His prophet.” Shia Muslims, I believe, have an additional section, but otherwise that’s it. Recite that in front of witnesses with sincere belief and that’s all you need to be Muslim.

Pillars of Islam:

These are the duties or cornerstones of a Muslim’s faith and considered to be acts every Muslim should strive for. What the pillars are can, I think, differ between denominations, with Shia Muslims having additional ancillaries as well (any Shia readers, please feel free to correct me!) but both denominations agree that the following are important:

Salah—prayer

Sawm—fasting during Ramadan

Zakat—giving a certain percentage of income to charity or the community

Hajj—pilgrimage to Mecca

In all cases, these are considered mandatory only for those who are able. A person who cannot perform hajj, whether due to not being physically able to or lacking the funds to travel, is under no obligation.

Prayer:

Prayer is performed five times a day while facing the Qibla, which is the direction of Mecca. Prayer is formed of units, called rak’at, which consists of a set of actions done in a specific order. The “How to Pray Salah, Step by Step” article linked in the reblog of this post provides fairly good prayer instructions for beginners, so check it out for details!  These include bowing, prostrating, and reciting some surahs. 

Each of the five daily prayers has a different number of rak’at, as well as its own name and allotted time of day, as follows:

Fajr, which means Dawn and can be performed at any point until the sun rises (two rak’at). 

Dhuhr, which means Noon (four rak’at)

Asr, performed in the afternoon (four rak’at)

Maghreb, which means sunset and can be performed at any point until it’s dark (three rak’at)

Isha, performed at night and can be done at any point until dawn (four rak’at)

The specific time of prayer will differ day to day and place to place, according to the sun, but those are the rough timeframes for each. It’s generally preferred that a Muslim does their prayer on time, but in practice some Muslims find it difficult to wake up for Fajr, for instance, and just try to make sure they get a morning prayer in before noon.

On Friday, there is a congregational Friday prayer at Dhuhr in a mosque called the Jumu’a prayer (which, fun fact, literally means gathering and is also the Arabic name for Friday!). Only men are required to take part in the congregation, however.  

In Muslim majority countries, the time for prayer is announced by the adhaan, the call to prayer, from mosques and in media. This won’t be the case in the UK, and the character will likely have to rely on an adhaan app or looking up what time prayer should be. 

There are various requirements for a prayer to be correct, chief of which is facing the Qibla and purity. Before performing prayer, a Muslim must purify themself by performing wudu, or ablutions, which basically involves washing the hands, arms, nostrils, face, head, and feet a specific number of times using clean water. The way I was taught these must be performed in a certain order, and the person shouldn’t speak during or after until their prayer is finished. This may be different for others.

Wudu is considered valid until nullified by bodily functions such as urinating, defecating, vomiting, flatulence, or any sexual activity. For Sunni Muslims, it’s also invalidated by going to sleep. If none of these have happened, a Muslim can perform more than one prayer using the same wudu.

Notably, a Muslim cannot pray if they’re on their period, as they’re considered in a state of impurity. 

Another important requirement is that a Muslim be dressed modestly for prayer. The general guideline is that Muslim men should cover the area between their navel and knees with loose, non-revealing clothing, and that during prayer it’s preferred that they cover their chests as well  Muslim women should cover everything except their face, hands, and feet. This means that a woman who isn’t hijabi would still wrap a hijab for prayer. For nonbinary Muslims, I don’t think there are specific guidelines yet, although please feel free to correct me. 

If praying at home, a family may choose to pray together. In this case, the male head of the household usually stands at the front and acts as Imam, leading the prayer. Other men will tend to be in front of or beside women, as generally women should not pray in front of a man. This is the case even, especially, if he is not praying.

Children aren’t required to pray, as they’re considered innocent and have no obligations, but may want to take part early on or may be encouraged to practice.

Praying is one area you’ll find denominational differences. For example, while Sunnis fold their arms in prayer, Shia keep their arms to their side, and while Shia Muslims make sure their foreheads touch a piece of clay or earth when they prostrate, Sunnis do not. If you write your character praying, keep these details in mind.

Fasting:

During the holy month of Ramadan, Muslims fast from Fajr (dawn) until Maghreb (sunset) every day. This means they abstain from consuming anything—yes, even water, cigarettes, and medicine. They should also abstain from sexual activities and cursing. Most importantly, they must have the intention to be fasting. This means that not eating and drinking because they were asleep for that entire period of time or just lost track and forgot does not count as fasting.

Generally, the idea is more to try to be more pious and avoid sin throughout the month. It’s thought that the shaytan (or devil) is chained up during Ramadan, so any temptation or sinning is a person’s own doing. The way I was raised, I was taught that sawm/fasting is invalidated by sexual thoughts  and raising your voice as well. Many people also try to dress more modestly during Ramadan, with some women opting for looser clothing or a headscarf. Many Muslims will try to read the whole Quran during Ramadan. 

After Maghreb, Muslims break their fast with Iftar (which means breakfast, hah) and have a late night meal called Suhour. Since the Muslim calendar is a lunar calendar, Ramadan is 11 days earlier every year. Depending on when Ramadan falls in the year, there can be barely any time between iftar and suhour in certain parts of the world, as the sun is up for so much of the day. 

Given the length of time and difficulty involved, there are exceptions and allowances for fasting. A person is not required to fast if they are:

A child (up to puberty)

Ill or has a medical condition such as diabetes

Pregnant

Travelling

On their period

In fact, if they are on their period it will not be counted, even if they do fast. That said, sometimes people choose to fast while travelling anyway, as travel is less strenuous now than it used to be. If they’re crossing time zones they will have to consider which time zone they’re breaking their fast to. As far as I remember, it’s based on the time zone of the place they just left or started their fast in. 

If an obstacle to fasting is temporary, such as their period, they’re expected to make those days up with additional fasting before next Ramadan. Otherwise, they are allowed to make up for the lost fast in another way, such as by donating money or feeding fasting people. Whether due to societal pressure (which is formidable in Muslim-majority countries) or out of consideration for others who are fasting, those who are not fasting for whatever reason may often choose to hide this and only eat in secret.

If a person forgets they were fasting or accidentally consumes something, it does not invalidate the fast , and as soon as they remember or realise the mistake they can have the intention to fast again and continue with their day. 

While children are exempt, many families will start them off by fasting for half a day so they can build up to a full day when they hit puberty.

Ramadan traditions vary wildly from country to country and culture to culture, but generally it’s a time for family gathering and celebration. Often there are special Ramadan-specific food, drink, and decorations, and it ends with Eid ul-Fitr which has its own specific foods and celebrations. Basically, imagine if Christmas lasted a month. That’s how big a deal Ramadan is. 

In my experience, the first few days are usually the hardest. Water is what I tended to miss the most, even if I managed to stay up long enough or set an alarm to wake up to drink just before fajr, followed closely by swearing. Anyone who drinks caffeine or smokes cigarettes will likely find abstaining from those more difficult than water. By the end of the month, though, it gets much easier and I often got to the point where I barely noticed. I will say, however, that the longest I’ve had to fast has been maybe 16 hours. A summer Ramadan in the UK would be more difficult due to the much later sunsets.

Halal and Haram:

Halal means “permissible,” while haram means “forbidden.”  You might have heard these words in passing before, such as halal food, but they are used for many areas of life.  

Things that are considered haram include:

Consuming, serving, or trading in intoxicants, such as alcohol

Consuming improperly slaughtered meat or meat from forbidden animals, such as pork

Extramarital sex

Tattoos

Gambling

Men wearing silk or gold

A Muslim woman marrying a non-Muslim man (although it’s fine for a Muslim man to marry a non-Muslim woman)

Being immodest

Modesty is expected of all genders, including men. If you’ll recall from the section on prayer, the general guideline for male modesty is that they should cover the area between their navel and knees with loose, non-revealing clothing. Note that for women, modesty does not necessarily involve wearing a hijab.  There is actually a ton of controversy as to whether the hijab is a fard (requirement) or not, as described in the following section.

The Hijab:

To be hijabi takes more than just throwing on a headscarf. As a word, hijab means “barrier” or “veil,” and a hijabi person would be expected to cover everything except their face and the palms of their hands, and to ensure that their clothes are loose and non-revealing.  It all comes from an interpretation of two verses in the Quran that many scholars nowadays agree to mean the hijab is required, and that some say actually call for a face covering as well, which is called a niqab. 

This wasn’t always the case, however, and these days there is still the occasional controversial scholar (I remember a few kerfuffles coming out of Egypt’s Al-Azhar mosque recently) saying it isn’t and has never been required at all. At least in the Arab world, this is largely due to the wave of Wahhabism (which is a specifically fundamentalist interpretation of Islam) that’s taken over the region in the past half a century. Before that, the idea of a hijab being a religious requirement was less widespread.

I’m not here to argue who’s right or wrong, just to make you aware that the hijab as we know it today hasn’t always been considered a requirement for a Muslim woman. Most of the women of my family never wore any form of head covering, but more and more they are an exception rather than the norm.

The choice of whether to wear a hijab can mean very different things, depending on the surrounding culture. For instance, my grandmother, the strictest woman I have ever known, got married in a very cute sleeveless dress that went just under the knees, and when she grew older she wore a head-covering more as a cultural indication of age rather than any religious reason. In my generation, in a country with a Muslim majority, lack of visible signs of devoutness have become almost a class marker, with some upper-class women using their lack of head-covering as a sign that they are “more Westernized” or “modern.” And again, I want to emphasize that this is the case for my country only. 

This will be completely different for Muslim minorities, where the hijab can become a symbol of pride and unity.

I will say that it’s very rare for women to be forced into getting veiled, whether in Muslim minority or majority countries. I’m not saying it never happens, just that it’s not the “oppressive tool of the patriarchy” outsiders sometimes think it is. Women may face some societal pressure, but by and large it is considered a choice and often an empowering one. In fact, I have friends whose families discouraged them from wearing a hijab too young and emphasized only taking the decision when they were sure they wanted to. If writing a Muslim character when you’re non-Muslim, I strongly suggest not trying to tackle the story of someone forced into a hijab, as there’s a lot of nuance there and it’s very easy to fall into harmful stereotypes. The hijabi woman who gets “liberated” and takes off her hijab is also overdone and harmful. Please don’t.

Everyday Life:

Muslims are not a monolithic entity, and some will be more devout or religious than others. There are those who will pray their five a day and others who only pray during Ramadan or Eid, some who don’t drink and some who do, hijabis who dress only in loose clothing and those who wear tight trousers or show some of their hair, some who have tattoos, and some who may date or even have sex before marriage. However, this isn’t a carte-blanche not to do research when writing a Muslim character, because even if they break a rule of Islam, they will be conscious of it, may be concerned about their community’s response to it, and in any case will be affected by it.

For instance, I know many Muslims who drink alcohol. Some interpret the text differently, saying that since the sin is getting drunk then they won’t drink enough to get drunk, just buzzed. Some only do it on special occasions or on vacation, saying they know it’s a sin but it’s fine on occasion and they’ll repent later. All of them would probably dive under a table if they thought their family was nearby.

For more opinions on Muslims and dealing with alcohol, take a look at the “Islam and Alcohol” article linked in the reblog of this post.

Here are things that a character who is a practicing Muslim might do or be concerned about in their day to day life:

Checking ingredients to make sure they’re all halal. This goes for things like food, drink, medicine, anything consumable. Things like gelatine capsules are only halal if the source of the gelatine is itself halal, for instance.

Keeping up with their prayers. With five prayers a day, some will inevitably happen while they’re out of the house. Some Muslims prefer to just group their prayers when they get home, but since it’s preferable to do prayers on time, others may try to pray while out and about This means considering the following:

Finding a bathroom for wudu. Part of wudu involves washing feet and the head, which isn’t feasible in a public location or if the person is hijabi and doesn’t want to unwrap and rewrap their hijab. In that case, they can generally wipe a wet hand over their socks and top of their head covering. 

They may carry a prayer carpet or have one stashed in a convenient location, but it’s not a must.

Finding a clean and secluded place to pray. Generally, it’s not done to pray in a place where someone will pass in front of you, and a woman must also take care to pray away from men’s eyes. 

Figuring out where the Qibla is. Luckily, there are apps for that.

If a woman is not hijabi, she would have to carry a veil and, depending on her clothes, something to cover up so she can pray.

If they’re hijabi, they’ll probably have to adjust or re-wrap their hijab throughout the day, depending on the material and their activities. This would typically happen in bathrooms or any other space that doesn’t include men, as they can’t reveal themselves to any men who aren’t of their immediate family. For more on the hijab, and the day to day realities of wearing and wrapping one, take a look at the links provided in the reblog of this post.  

A Muslim woman may choose not to accept handshakes from men who aren’t family.  She has probably considered how to deal with that potential awkwardness.

If they’re fasting, they might carry some dates or biscuits or something in case they need to break their fast while on the go.

If making plans, they might say, “Insha’allah” which means “God willing.” I was always admonished to do so to acknowledge the future is entirely within God’s hands.

If asked how they are, they might reply with “Alhamdullilah” which means “Thanks be to God.”

When starting to eat, they may say, “Bismillah,” which means “In the name of God” and when done eating may say “Alhamdullilah.” These can also be invoked silently.

As you might have noticed, Allah’s name is invoked pretty often. While it’s not preferable to swear using God’s name just to make a point (“Wallahi”), there’s nothing against it, really.

Fundamentally, an important thing to remember is that Islam is a religion of ease and not hardship. This is an actual Quranic quote. What this means is, it may seem like there are a lot of rules to keep in mind, but there are also a ton of allowances for when those rules aren’t feasible, just like the case for fasting above. Other allowances include how an elderly or disabled person who may not be able to perform the motions of prayer can pray while sitting in a chair or even lying in bed. If there isn’t any clean water to purify before prayer or if using the water would mean lack of drinking water, a Muslim can use dust or sand to purify, and if no dust or sand is available then they don’t need to purify at all and can simply pray. 

This means that, say, if your Muslim Jon wants to pray while kidnapped by the circus, he can, even without being able to perform wudu, even without knowing where the Qibla is, even without being able to move or say anything at all.

For more day-to-day tidbits, check out the “More on writing Muslim characters” link in the reblog of this post. 

LGBTQ Muslims:

Needless to say, Queer Muslims absolutely do exist, and their being Muslim doesn’t cancel out their queerness or vice versa. While there are Quranic verses that have been interpreted as condemning homosexuality, there are also other interpretations, and queerness has existed in Muslim societies for ages. There was a ton of homoerotic imagery among Abbasid poets during the Golden Age of Islam, for example. 

However, modern-day attitudes can be difficult to get around, and queer Muslims may have difficulty finding their place in both Muslim spaces and queer spaces, the latter which often expect them to reject religiosity.

Although I am queer myself, I don’t feel it’s my place to speak for queer Muslims and their relationships with their communities beyond this, so I’ll let some queer practicing Muslims speak for themselves.  Please see the reblog of this post for valuable contributions from queer Muslims about their experiences.  

Miscellaneous:

This is mostly for all the random tidbits I thought up while writing this that didn’t fit anywhere else and also because I don’t know when to quit apparently, SO!

Allah is just Arabic for God. Muslims can and do use these terms interchangeably, such as saying “God willing,” instead of “Inshallah,” even in an Arabic-speaking country. 

Also, God has 99 names! Just a fun fact for you there. 

The Devil in Islam is pretty different from his Christian counterpart. Referred to as Iblis or Shaytan, among other names, he is not a fallen angel and there is no great revolt story, nor is he considered a root of all evil. Instead, he is a djinn made of smokeless flame who refused to bow down to Adam, as he felt he was made of superior stuff and not about to bow to a creature made of mud. His disdain for humanity is what has caused him and other shayateen/demons to try and tempt humans.

A person’s right hand is considered purer than their left, so it’s encouraged to always eat with your right hand. Unfortunately, this does mean left-handed people face something of a stigma—or at least that’s the case here in Egypt. My cousins, both lefties, both eat with their right hand, though they  do everything else with their left.

Similarly, it is considered better to enter spaces with your right foot, though only the most devout are likely to think of this all the time. This is especially considered for entering a mosque or new home.

A Muslim might say or write “Peace be Upon Him” whenever the Prophet Mohammed is mentioned, written as (PBUH), and “Subhanuh wa Taala” when mentioning Allah, written as (SWT).

The Evil Eye is mentioned in the Quran as “hasad,” and considered to be a very real thing. This jealous or envious energy is considered able to ruin good things in your life, even if the jealous person didn’t intend to. There are some surahs that are considered good to ward against it, as well as incense, the colour blue, the number five, and the symbols of the nazar (which is a round, blue-ringed eye) and the khamsa (an open five-fingered palm, also known as the Hand of Fatima). The nazar, khamsa, and belief in the evil eye aren’t unique to Islam at all. What is unique to Islam is that a Muslim might preface a compliment with “Masha’allah” which means “As God wills it,” to ward off their own evil eye. 

Much of the Quran in Arabic rhymes and is very poetic, which can make surahs easy to memorise by rhythm. It can also make recitations by a skilled reader very lovely.

[kitkatopinions]

Rambles like a pest on your ask box. Sorry🙇🏾‍♀️

I’m not really interested in the idea of Qrow vs Ironwood because oh ho no would that be the time when Qrow’s semblance is suddenly active and dangerous (ie, advantageous) for Qrow. Which for a passive semblance hasn’t done just shit even minorly but I digress and I explain like this.

RWBY as a whole

Pros: Combination attacks, Blake and Weiss are active dust users

Cons: Ironwood has more experience ( not that the show gives a damn), he is physically stronger than all of them, more than likely has been against multiple foes by himself

Weiss

Pros: Variety of uses with her sigils much like Winter, summoning abilities

Cons: Ironwood’s strength (based on the Winter fight) matches - over powers her summons

Blake

Pros: ...Her semblance which can also be used with dust for traps and trap based attacks, namely fire (and electricity ?)

Cons: Cannot use ice or solid only clones to set him up Ironwood’s gun and strength would easily destroy them

Ruby

Pros: Her semblance let’s her move fast enough to dodge and move her friends around for safety and attacks, Sniper rifle

Cons: Ironwood is very solid and (despite her semblance’s growth) and could potentially knock her out of it, Ironwood’s gun has surprisingly good range and he has steadier aim, (at least) is familiar with Qrow’s fighting style and will understand her scythe wield fairly well

Yang

Pros: High mobility, very close combat oriented assisted by her bullets, her semblance

Cons: Ironwood has extremely good mobility himself with his gun, dodges better than any appointment that Yang has ever faced, also skilled at close combat but has much more solid stance for stronger hits which could lead to a strong possibility of him being able to knock her out before using her semblance

Ironwood

Pros: Very experienced, about as sturdy as Hazel, good mobility, very strong, good aim, thanks to the Vytal Festival and use of his training area his well versed in how the girls fight and what their semblances can do

Cons: 4 vs 1 with RWBY having unique team ups, Ruby’s speed is a potential problem, Yang’s semblance is a big fucking problem, has (unless he has back up ones and time to reload) limited amount of bullets and doesn’t use dust outside of gravity dust, the plot & CRWBY (with heavy emphasis on Eddy)

Could have been a good fight 😒

This is a very interesting ask, I’m super happy to get it and give my opinion on it!

A RWBY V Ironwood fight would honestly have been so much better in my opinion than Ironwood V JNR + Winter and Em. You lay out their skills and weaknesses pretty well. I personally think Ironwood could’ve held his own against all four, and showing them full on struggle to fight one person would’ve created tension and raised the stakes by making their audience go ‘wait, are they gonna lose?’ It would’ve underlined some flaws in Team RWBY’s combat they need to work on, and could’ve been a way to show that they still have a ways to go and aren’t the gold standard and are still more or less teenagers in over their head, and another thing it could do is give the main four a chance to show some hesitance or sympathy. I’d personally prefer it if Winter or Emerald had been there and had been used as a turning point in the fight, using the element of surprise (from Winter) or skills and fighting techniques Ironwood didn’t already know about (in the case of Emerald) to help bring him down while they still struggle with it.

As for Qrow Vs Ironwood, I’d really hate it tbh only because I loved them as friends, shipped them, and I hate how CRWBY has been handling Qrow. Undoubtedly they would just up Ironwood on the scale of bad, and you’re right, make Qrow’s semblance more of a factor, and they’d have Qrow probably treat a win like some sort of victory rather than the loss of a former friend. I don’t care to see it, I think it’d only make me mad. XD

But honestly, a Qrow V Ironwood sparring match as friends/potential ship is a dream and I would’ve loved to see it. Qrow and Ironwood’s styles I feel would compliment each other and Qrow would for sure be trying to show off and look especially good and James would be indulgently exasperated and fond. And I feel like both of them being good at and skilled in hand to hand would be good, as there could be a cute moment where one of them loses their weapon, so the other one tosses aside their weapon too, and they both start throwing punches and fighting that way. Also some of the kids watching in awe and being kind of floored at a real sparring match between two experienced real hunters, and all of them rooting for Qrow except maybe for Yang and Weiss, who unexpectedly root for James would be very cute. Sorry to get on a tangent, but yeah.

TL;DR I fully agree that a RWBY VS James would’ve been more interesting and the fight could’ve been very good, think Winter and/or Emerald could’ve been used as a surprise element to turn the tides, and I’d hate a Qrow VS James fight as they are currently. But I’d love a friendly sparring match in other circumstances. XD

[gothamincarnate]

Interacting with d/Deaf muses (and d/DHH people)

for d/Deaf people reading this: I am HH but only recently Deaf so I am mostly speaking from that perspective and things I’ve heard from others in the Deaf community. If I am wrong on any point let me know. reblog this with corrections or simply send me an IM.

for hearing people reading this: like I said, my experince is incredibly personal as are most people’s navigation of Deafhood or deafness. don’t take this list and just assume it’s law. this is only tips. most of all be respectful to the individual.

putting it under a cut for length and so that i can append & correct it as needed.

I said I wasn’t going to “how to write a Deaf muse” but this needs to be said-

do not make your character d/Deaf only in a side verse. It is a lifelong thing for us.

there are people who are late deafened so chronologically this could be done, especially with regards to the Deaf journey.

but it should not be done as a side verse.

this is not to say that writing a Hearing character as Deaf is bad! In fact, I encourage you to. my main muse is Deaf Batman and I enjoy exploring his character in Deaf culture and deafness as a disability.

HOWEVER, his deafness is part of every verse that I have with him.

the reason for this is that, well, d/Deaf people face communication barriers every day and it’s not something we can take on and off for convenience. even with assistive devices we are still deaf.

Interacting with d/Deaf people in real life:

deaf & Deaf are two different things. feel free to google explanations on this.

 do not question a person’s decision on how to self identify as d/Deaf or HH. if someone is being harmful then let someone who is d/Deaf handle it

a hearing person cannot give themselves or others a sign name even if a Deaf person gave them a sign name. if you want to change a namesign, ask another Deaf person. there are a rules and a required amount of fluency. It’s not just a nickname.

let the person you’re talking to set the course for using asl if at all. some of us are oral to varying degrees or use aids that work for us. many are bilingual, which means many will switch back and forth as needed when interacting with people. many even text or type instead.

there are varying degrees of hearing loss, not everyone is fully deaf. some are even hearing but use sign as their primary means of communication and therefore can be considered Deaf

lip reading is nearly impossible and takes a lot of concentration, mostly only get a few words because your outer lips only count for 20% of how we talk.

there’s also listening fatigue where is pretty self explanatory. don’t assume we even like lipreading. it’s difficult

don’t turn your face or bend down if we’re trying to have a conversation. it’s a visual language which means we need to watch your expressions and you need to watch ours.

do not, I repeat DO NOT! stare at anyone using ASL. it’s RUDE to watch us just because it’s “interesting” to you.

do NOT come up to use and sign the three words you know and walk off, don’t sign at us at all unless you mean to have an actual conversation.

stop calling ASL beautiful. Yes, it is beautiful for a lot of historical and cultural reasons but if hearing people just think its’ “beautiful” it because it’s highly visual

many go without listening aids for a variety of reasons, don’t ask about it unless the person offers you to ask them

some people are culturally Deaf & some people want nothing to do with it

some people prefer to consider deafness a disability and this is mostly an intracommunity issue, do not correct a deaf person on this

I know you have been meaning to learn ASL. Stop telling me that every time I use ASL or talk about it. It’s frustrating. Either learn it or don’t. If you really care about the ASL user in your life you’ll learn it.

do not, like never if you can help it, say “never mind” or give up when the person is asking you to repeat yourself. many of us have spent our whole lives hearing that. we deserve communication just like everyone else.

do not give a three word summary or say “i’ll tell you later”, it’s incredibly hurtful and singles us out and deprives us of a spot in the conversation

many people who use ASL use it out of a need to communicate, it’s not something we can just take for fun

Interacting with Deaf muses (not “how to write a Deaf muse”, do research for that)

hearing people cannot give themselves a namesign. do not give your hearing muse a namesign. don’t even give your d/Deaf muse a namesign. ask someone’s who a d/Deaf RPer to help you if you really want to.

some Deaf people don’t have namesigns

namesigns can change depending on who’s talking to who about what or as a character grows up. it’s not the same as a nickname but there can be nicknames in asl if established

if your character is holding something in their hands and needs to use ASL there are options. Have them tuck it in their arm or set it down. Have them use it when they sign as part of the sign. Though this requires fluency in sign. You could also have the character use one handed signs but this requires both fluency and knowing kind of what the person is talking about already like a friend or family member

if the character is holding something they can’t set down easily or at all for some reason. they will be unable to communicate with someone who is unable to hear until the object is set down. this happens in real life as well.

it takes 3 years to become conversational but if you are honestly trying most will be patient enough to fingerspell a lot

some people sign fast. asking them to slow down is frustrating to us but some will. it literally depends on the individual’s personality and past experiences

sign users often have accents due to what they learned or didn’t learn or growing up in a certain area or simply their personality. you can give your character a sign accent but like, put thought into why it’s the way it is. did they learn from a hearing teacher or a Deaf teacher?

consider the space your characters are in. siging space is a big bubble around your head and chest. this means you need to be able to hold your fully extended arms to the side and above your head. ASL users will stand a farther apart so that they have room to sign in front of them and watch the other person’s signing back.

yelling in ASL is louder and farther away, possibly looser due to being upset. ‘whispering’ takes a few extra steps like huddling or walking away.

I prefer to just translate it to English than try to gloss it or write out every sign. Taking into consideration the visual and physical, positive and negative aspects of ASL, you can still translate it to English

if you have your character obviously speaking or communicating ineffectively for some reason make sure to let the d/Deaf mun is okay with it. we already have Dinner Table Syndrome in real life, some don’t want to RP it. it’s like trans people don’t want to RP misgendering even if it “makes sense in context”

ineffective communication can include: a character mumbling or turning away. wearing a mask. not being able to see the person’s torso and face. an environment dim lighting.

if a hearing person corrects you, run it by a Deaf person first because there are hearing people who learning Deaf culture incorrectly and will white knight for us for no reason

if your character isn’t from Amercia they might not know ASL but another form of sign. Think of it like an English person learning a a language with similar roots. some words are shared or rather obvious many aren’t because it is literally an entire different language that developed

[royal-dragonslayer-ornstein]

///Alright, little update about the status of this blog. As I’ve mentioned before, I’d like to be active over here again at some point, though I most likely won’t be able to start writing here until exams are over (they come after the winter break, so that’s gonna take a while). I’m also not completely sure how motivated or inspired I will be to write new threads here, so I can’t promise anything.

Thinking about what’s keeping me from writing here, I think the main issue is that I haven’t known what to do with the actual main verses for a while. Ornstein’s timeline is a bit of a mess, it’s so spread out and it’s missing so many gaps (and I’m talking about the ever cryptic lore of Dark Souls as well as my own ideas for him) that I feel like there’s too much vagueness in his lifespan for me to properly develop him. His origins in the Age of Dragons, his life throughout the Age of Fire, his task to find Gwyn’s firstborn, whatever is going on with the Old Dragonslayer (I made the choice back then to consider it canon, might have been a mistake but I think I’m not giving up on it just yet) and what happened to him before and during DS3. I’m honestly not sure how to approach this. On the one hand figuring out the details seems like the obvious choice and maybe I can come up with better ideas now than in my prior years, but on the other hand I wonder if it might be best to keep certain stuff vague and not bother giving a half-assed explanation for everything. I’ll have to think about it.

Ornstein’s character is also a bit limiting in the sense that he mostly interacts with the gods of Anor Londo for the majority of his life (which admittedly I’ve grown to consider to be the least interesting time for me to write), he can have a couple of interactions with some human in the middle of a mission but unless this character is a big deal he’s unlikely to interact with them for long. Most of the people whose muses were deities of Anor Londo or related to them became inactive long ago or are currently in hiatus (which to be fair is true for a good portion of the RP fandom) and I do think that having so many stories over the years, even with the same character written by a different person, be cut short prematurely has been a bit discouraging. Not that I don’t understand, I’m not bitter (that’d be pretty selfish of me) about it or anything, it’s just an unfortunate part of every hobby.

So yeah, I definitely want to tackle those verses at some point. DS3 is the one I find to be most appealing to me at the moment because Ornstein can interact with all sorts of muses much more easily, and I find that chapter of his story to be pretty interesting, reconnecting with the world after a long life of being detached and fully dedicated to his duties, being forced to go back to his roots. I wasn’t able to start much stuff in that setting, but then again I didn’t look any further than the RPers I knew at the time (something I still try to fix), so maybe now that I’m opening myself up to more writers things will go more smoothly.

It’s worth mentioning that both of my Villain AUs, Eraser of Mankind and Usurper King, are something I have enjoyed writing a lot more than the main verses in the past years, but I also feel like I’m out of ideas for them. There’s not a lot of people I really got to explore them in depth with, so I’m always willing to do more stuff with it, but at the same time I can’t help but feel like it’s a bit formulaic. I need to think of new ideas to do with those AUs.

Bloodborne Verse is the one I feel most inspired to write lately, though anyone who’s seen the OC I made a new blog for this year could probably have guessed that. I feel a little conflicted that this AU is much better developed and is more coherent than the actual main verses of this blog, and I won’t lie I’ve struggled a bit with that. I’m actually writing this one in a few threads (not in Tumblr) with some friends that aren’t on this website anymore. Now that I’ve approached a whole bunch of other soulsborne and eldritch roleplayers maybe I could start new threads for this verse with Ornstein, though I need to come up with a few ideas.

Weirdly enough, I’m feeling pretty inspired to write his full beast form (oh, and for anyone who isn’t familiar, Ornstein’s beasthood is a very peculiar version of the darkbeast, that follows a cycle of transformation more similar to the traditional stories of lycanthropy, in which it builds up gradually until he transforms and goes berserk, then later when he’s exhausted he turns back human and the cycle begins again). In fact if people are interested I’m considering writing a variety of threads in which he goes on a rampage through Yharnam and having that be his first meeting with any new muses he interacts with. So by all means feel free to message me if the idea interests you.

[thisgirlhastales]

“Wayward Son” — Is There Peace When You Are Done?

What we have here is an essay of sorts: a loosely organized mishmash of thoughts and opinions. Disclaimer that this is highly subjective, as it is based on my own experiences and expectations going into this novel :)

And, naturally, many Wayward Son spoilers below the cut! If you haven’t read it yet and are planning to do so, please do not proceed further. If you’ve already read it or don’t care about spoilers, c’mon in! Ain’t nobody here but me!

First Thing: I thought the plot was cool — I loved seeing the characters again, loved seeing the different magical culture within the United States as compared to the UK; all the geographical variety and how that impacted magical abilities and politics, the creatures and the nature of magic as it applied to people who aren’t mages, the syntax, and Shepard. All of that was fascinating. It felt organic and real, even though our main dude, Shepard, did drop a few exposition bombs. I loved it all.

The magical creatures touch on something that I think all the main characters learn and re-learn (and may be symbolic of their issues as a whole): there is no one way to do or be magic. The word magician can apply to any creature who is or practices magic. The UK’s mages have an expansive but selective history. They do not acknowledge people like Lamb (see Nicodemus), even though they are technically part of their world. I wonder if the UK vampires have something like what the Las Vegas vampires do — i.e. ways to feed without killing, ways of living without standing out so much, a hierarchal structure, their own historical narrative, etc. 

Agatha coming into her own was fabulous, driving the plot with the vampires on her end; she wasn’t a character I enjoyed in the last book too much (I thought she was very real, even practical, she just didn’t appeal to me as a person), but in this? Loved her. And she figured out her own way to be, though there’s still a ways to go for her, I think …

There is no one way to be anything, and that’s a lesson everyone in this book needs to learn (and talk about with each other, please, please, please).

Second Thing: Dealing with Trauma — I do think this was what resonated most with me, as someone who likes it when things are not perfectly hunky-dory after severely traumatic events.

Simon is Not Dealing. He stopped going to his psychologist. He thinks about the Mage, but doesn’t fully process the impact of having killed him. He’s in mourning over his magic and the Mage and all of it, but he’s choosing to not digest it fully — every time he was happy on this road trip, I, like Baz, was thrilled, but I also knew that it was fleeting because he hadn’t really dealt with anything. The underlying cause of his depression and listlessness wasn’t being addressed. His bursts of anger, his heartbreak, his inability to let go of the wings … He goes back and forth a lot, as well, tormenting himself.

Baz is Not Dealing. Baz was suicidal in Carry On. Baz barely knows anything about vampires. He lives in fear of being a monster, and of being executed as one regardless of his actions. As much as I detest Lamb, he had knowledge: How to feed without killing your prey. How to live amongst people and blend in better. He looked physically healthier. Baz’s grey complexion is actually a sign that he is starving more often than not. Remember how powerful he is now, and imagine how powerful he could be if he took better care of himself. And how much more comfortable in his own skin he’d be, which would help with so many of his bitter self-recriminations.

Penny is Not Dealing. Wow, that break-up with Micah was rough. She has a few more moments of self-realization than Simon and Baz do, but she’s also completely caught up in her own magical world, culture, and plans for the future; she has trouble reconciling what Shepard tells her, and is still processing (accepting? Healing?) from not only that breakup, but everything else that has ever happened to her and Simon. Penny copes better, but still not necessarily well. Her can-do, will-do attitude is a huge boon, but when it fails? Yikes. I rather feel like she had overly-rationalized (maybe even over-simplified) every trauma she went through with Simon, and … the world isn’t rational or simple at the best of times. I really, really hope she can come to terms with that (and that we get to see it).

Simon and Baz Together Are Not Dealing. It goes without saying that these two NEED to talk. But their separate issues are a huge roadblock — I feel like the chances of misunderstandings occurring are high. Each is convinced that they are bad for the other. Baz is slightly better about it, but he’s so afraid of the consequences of broaching the subject, he simply won’t. And the thing is? His instincts aren’t wrong. Simon does want to break up with him. It’s based on the whole you deserve better than me assumption, but Baz is actually sensing correctly that Simon is on the verge of leaving him. They need to deal with their own, separate traumas, and they can do that together or apart, but they need to start healing in some capacity. I fully believe that they can be together, even with a break, but that break needs to come with communication? Point being, we all go through healthy and unhealthy periods, as individuals, as part of a family, as part of a couple. They are right smack dab in the middle of a rough, not-so-healthy part — however they cope with it, (TALKING AND LISTENING ARE MUSTS), we at least know that they love each other. Love alone is not enough, but it is a powerful, wonderful force in their corner.

The expansion on magic implies legion of ways in which to exist, and such is the case for coping with pain, sadness, regret, and all the other fun aspects of being humans who experience trauma in innumerable ways. Sometimes we choose things that are unhealthy as a stopgap, because we’re not ready for the work and pain that is healing. Y’all, healing sometimes is on par with the issues that made it necessary — in simpler terms, it can really, really suck at the start. Again, some of you may come from different perspectives, but this struck a chord with me. 

I definitely went in with the expectation that all the issues would be laid out, and then addressed … We got the first half in spades … Did not get the second, nope.

Third Thing: The structure of this book implied right from the start that things may be unresolved, but, er, it was still a bit hard to deal with — having an epilogue at the beginning and a prologue at the end implies to me that this second book is a launch point. The prologue at the end is the start for the next (hopefully larger) narrative. That makes Wayward Son something like a sprawling behind-the-scenes look into these characters before we launch into their following, more detailed story. 

But I didn’t feel too great about having been plunged so deeply into this ‘verse, only to not have a lifesaver tossed my way … Which is to say, it kept me breathless, and knowing that people survived allowed me a reprieve, but the core of this novel — the overall mental well-being of Simon, Baz, Penny, and Agatha — had me tight in its grip from the beginning and then just … kept right on squeezing at the end. Even tighter. 

I don’t mind a plot-based cliff-hanger, but the fact that all the emotional and character arcs were left hanging as well? I felt like I got a decent resolution, or partial conclusion, on a few plot points, but next to no resolution for the emotional and/or psychological arcs. That I have a lot more trouble accepting. Particularly when I’ve spent an entire book with characters forced to live in each other’s space, in close quarters, and still not communicating. I wanted to rip out every beautiful thought Simon and Baz had about each other and throw it in the other’s face. Because they were gorgeous and wonderful, and for all that they are currently fractured and bleeding, they so clearly want what is best for each other. They are (mostly) selfless in their love (with a few selfish foibles, but they made sense to me).

I was also rather … not happy with the fact we got no mention of Lucy, of Davy, of them being Simon’s parents. I’m really, desperately hoping we get that in the next chapter of this series.

The positive thing I can take away from this point is that when we get to the next book (and I know there will be one — my copy literally has a number 2 on the spine, which heavily implies series to me), we will be firmly grounded in what is facing these characters both internally and externally.

The biggest issue that lies ahead is COMMUNICATION. I know (I hope like hell) this will be addressed in the next book, but I craved it so, so badly in this. Not just for Simon and Baz but PENNY. They are all sitting on shifting sand foundations now — their worlds have been completely overturned, over and over again in the past year or so, and they haven’t found firm footing yet. When Micah broke up with Penny, I very much thought that was the kick off for a road trip filled with introspection and epiphanies and finally, lots of talking about said introspections and epiphanies — I got half my wish. The latter half, I suppose, will have to wait until the next novel. I didn’t expect all the character/emotional beats to be acknowledged and resolved, but at least some of them, with room for others to be resolved in the next story, so we would have more (and more room) to explore in that novel.

As a result, Wayward Son, for the many things I loved about it, didn’t feel like a complete story for me. It doesn’t stand on its own quite as well as Carry On did. Maybe when the third book comes out, I will retroactively love it more, but for now I’m just sort of … floating along, waiting for that lifesaver. It did, honestly, feel a bit like half of a story. Half a good story, fantastic even, but still … Half.

In addition to these thoughts I’ve shared, here’s where I’m coming from, as a reader — we all come at these books from different places, different life experiences and wants and expectations. 

One of my most formative reading experiences was Harry Potter. I read Harry Potter practically as it came out. I had to wait years between some of the books. By the time the last book arrived, the characters had matured about as much as I had. Because the middle books were so chunky and dense (and I loved them for it!), I was a little thrown off by how slim Deathly Hallows was in comparison, and that ultimately was reflected in my reading — it went by so quickly. While I loved it and sobbed all over the damn place, when I hit that epilogue … that’s the first time while reading that I did a full stop. All the pain and agony of that book, as quick as it had been, had been amazing, and it felt like it demanded some kind of … reflection and communication between the characters, and I thought after ten years of these books, we had a definite basis for an epilogue that could’ve added another third to this novel — maybe one that jumped through the years, showed us different characters at various stages of healing? Something involved and detailed to a degree.

Wayward Son had that rushed element to it … and I think part of that feeling was enhanced due to the lack of resolution to those character/emotional arcs — we were tumbling, running forward into a free fall and then were frozen right at that point before falling.

However, Wayward Son gives me more positive feelings than that epilogue in HP. Yes, it still feels incomplete, like half a story. But Wayward Son isn’t an end. Unlike Deathly Hallows, there is more to come, and that’s what I’m looking forward to most. It definitely has its flaws in my view, but I can reconcile them somewhat, as you’ve seen.

(There is also a whole thing involving the way these sorts of arcs would resolve in fanfiction versus the medium of a book intended for a broader audience, but that would be a whole other post, methinks. Let me know if you want me to discuss that, because I do have some thoughts on it, though they’re a little haphazard at the moment. Um. Assuming all this rambling isn’t wildly boring and/or awful for you.)

Final Thoughts: At the end of the day? I loved reading this book, even for all that I wanted to reach into the pages and knock the character’s heads together. I said, “Oh no!” out loud when I reached the end, but it was because I desperately wanted more right then and there. The fact that I want more means that, despite any flaws, I’m still on board for this universe and its characters — I still love all this magic, and this dragon boy and his vampire boyfriend :)

And now, 2000 plus words later, I am done, holy crap. If anyone actually made it to the bottom of this, thank you? Not too sure how coherent I was, but I hope some of this was of value to someone :) *many hugs*

Edit: Apparently I still had some things to say, so here is a sequel to this ramble — Simon and Baz Carrying On Like Wayward Sons.

[tigerkirby215]

5e Zed the Master of Shadows build (League of Legends)

(Artwork by Riot Games)

Well; I did promise it. I’ll be honest the only reason for this build is that it’s the most obvious build to make with the new Echo Knight from Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount, and it would be an injustice not to do so. I honestly don’t care much about Zed as I feel like his popularity has sort of died down as his meta relevance has waned. Regardless this build isn’t just a straightforward “lol Echo Knight 20″ so I hope those of you who want to play the edgy shadow ninja boy are pleased.

GOALS

Living Shadow - Of course the core of Zed’s kit is his shadow clones. Man I wonder how we’re going to recreate that?

Shadow Slash - Both Zed and his shadows need an arsenal of weapons that are always on-hand and are ready to both slash and throw.

Contempt for the Weak - Zed passive is what makes him an assassin, quickly killing anyone who’s already hurt.

RACE

Zed is a Human but due to my continued determination to avoid using the Variant Human race (and also because we really don’t need a Feat in this build except maybe Skulker) we’ll be grabbing Flash from Mark of Passage from Eberron. Your Dexterity increases by 2 and you can increase one stat of your choice by 1: choose Wisdom for some later Feat investment. You can also choose one language on top of Common: if Ionian is a language choose that, but Elvish is pretty close I suppose?

You get Courier's Speed for 5 feet of extra movement from your Zeal, and  Intuitive Motion lets you add a d4 to any Acrobatics check you make or check involving land vehicles, because of all your training with the Kinkou apparently taught you how to drive a cart as well as do back-flips? But of course the main reason I said to take this race was for Magical Passage, giving you a one-time cast of Misty Step per Long Rest. Flash is a powerful summoner spell: use it to make some stylish plays.

ABILITY SCORES

15; DEXTERITY - Being a ninja is about swiftness and precision, and doing sick backflips and parkour. Wait this isn’t a Talon build?

14; WISDOM - To be a master you need to be wise; wise enough to know you enemy and how to exploit their weakness. It’s also a requirement to multiclass after all.

13; CONSTITUTION - Just because Zed isn’t a tank in-game doesn’t mean some extra tenacity (not the CC reduction type) isn’t appreciated. CON is also tied to some of our clone abilities.

12; INTELLIGENCE - The art of war is a game of intelligence. If fighting is sure to result in victory then you must fight!

10; CHARISMA - Zed runs around in Shredder cosplay and half his voice lines are literally just him grunting. He has his own order but he isn’t getting any free beers.

8; STRENGTH - Again you’re not a tank, and Strength simply isn’t needed for this build. The only thing we’d ever really use Strength for is Athletics, and we can get proficiency in the skill to remedy that.

BACKGROUND

Much like the Kayn build we’ll be going with the Faction Agent background, only this time you’re the faction head! Much like your protegee you get Insight proficiency as well as Intimidation since you’re a spooky shadow man. And of course your Shadow Order can provide you with a Safe Haven if needed, giving you a safe place to hide if your half-brother is looking for you. As for your two languages again it doesn’t matter, so pick something fun.

(Artwork by Riot Games)

THE BUILD

LEVEL 1 - ROGUE 1

Starting off as a Rogue for the extra proficencies, also because no shit you’re a ninja. Regardless Rogues get proficiency in 4 skills from the Rogue list: choose Stealth, Perception, Acrobatics, and Athletics so you can keep to the shadows and strike at the perfect time. You also get Expertise in two skills that you know: I’d opt for Stealth as well as Intimidation from your background, so you can sneak up on someone and go “boo!” before cutting out their throat.

Of course the main appeal of Rogues is their Sneak Attack, letting them add a d6 of damage against any enemy who’s close to another ally, or you have advantage on by attacking them from the shadows.

Finally your Shadow Order is well-versed in Thieves’ Cant, a secret code that neither the Noxians nor the Kinkou understand.

LEVEL 2 - ROGUE 2

Second level Rogues get Cunning Action, letting them Dash, Disengage, or Hide as a Bonus Action. The key to playing Zed well is much like the key to playing Rogue well in 5e: keep mobile and be everywhere at once. Don’t give your enemy a moment to hit you.

LEVEL 3 - ROGUE 3

You can choose your Roguish Archetype at level 3 and of course the Master of Shadows needs shadowy blades. Or should I say psychic blades? The Soul Knife subclass from the Psionics UA can create weapons as a Bonus Action with their Psychic Blade feature: these are finesse weapons that you can dual-wield, and throw 30 feet normally and up to 60 feet with disadvantage. These weapons deal a d6 of psychic damage and disappear after they hit the target you throw them at, when you dismiss them for free, or after you let go of them.

You can also choose through a variety of Psionic Enhancements. You can either give yourself 30 feet of telepathy, 5 feet of extra movement speed, or health equal to your Rogue level plus your Intelligence. You may notice that in total that would add up to a 4 currently, but that isn’t likely to go higher so I’d recommend either the telepathy or the movement speed. (5 feet of movement combined with the 5 feet from your race means you’re moving at Barbarian speed!)

WHY LOW INTELLIGENCE? - The Soul Knife, despite being a psionic class, doesn’t need Intelligence to function. A +5 in Intelligence would only mean a total of 8 extra health because we’re not going to be taking any more levels in Rogue. You need both Dexterity and Constitution more in this build, so it’s not worth investing in Intelligence just for one skill. But if you can get your Intelligence high go right ahead.

And finally your Sneak Attack increases to 2d6 now.

LEVEL 4 - FIGHTER 1

Now that you have your shuriken it’s time to get your clones. Level 1 Fighters get a Fighting Style and there’s a lot of options to choose from:

Two-Weapon Fighting is the obvious pick, letting you squeeze a bit of extra damage into your second weapon attack if you decide to opt for two-weapon fighting with your Bonus Action.

Thrown Weapon Fighting from the Class Feature Variants UA will vary in utility depending on your DM’s interpretation of “drawing a weapon.” If they let you summon your knives for free with this fighting style (as long as you throw them instantly) take this fighting style. If not Archery could also perhaps increase your ranged accuracy if your DM is cool with the rules.

When all else fails Defense provides a flat +1 to AC.

Why not Dueling? - Dueling is good in it’s own right to increase damage output but it technically only works if you have one Psiblade out. This means that you’ll be gimping yourself by only summoning one knife at a time, which means you can’t have two ranged shots before needing to “reload.” If you have a cool DM Dueling can still work for more damage.

You also get Second Wind, so you can pop a Refillable Potion to heal for 1d10 plus your fighter level once per short rest as a Bonus Action. Even at this late level that can equal up to a third of your health bar!

LEVEL 5 - FIGHTER 2

Second level Fighters get Action Surge, allowing them to take an additional action once per Short Rest. Man I love Fighters; so simple to explain.

LEVEL 6 - FIGHTER 3

HA HA FUCK ME AM I RIGHT?! Echo Knight from Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount suddenly becomes a hundred times more complex! For the sake of brevity I’m literally going to copy-paste the Echo Knight’s ability description from my Skullgirls Isaac build:

The echo (or Living Shadow, if you will) has an AC of 14 plus your proficiency bonus, 1 hit point, and immunity to all conditions. If it has to make a saving throw it uses your saving throw bonus for the roll. It’s the same size as you and occupies a space. On your turn you can make the echo to move up to 30 feet in any direction without using an action but if your echo is more than 30 feet from you at the end of your turn it is destroyed.

You have several things you can do with your echo:

* You can swap places with your echo with 15 feet of your movement, regardless of the distance between the two of you.

* Any attack you make with the Attack action can originate from the echo’s space if you choose to do so.

* When a creature that you can see within 5 feet of your echo moves away from it, you can use your reaction to make an opportunity attack against that creature as if you were in the echo’s space.

* You can use Unleash Incarnation to make one additional attack from your Echo’s location when you take the attack action, adding up to 3 attacks total. You can use Unleash Incarnation a number of times equal to your Constitution modifier.

In short: Living Shadow can attack for you. We good?

(Artwork by Riot Games)

LEVEL 7 - RANGER 1

We’ve got our Q, we’ve got our W, now it’s time for our... passive? Building characters in D&D is weird. Regardless Rangers get another skill proficiency: I’d recommend the Survival skill to survive if you decide to go into the jungle.

You also get a Favored Enemy and Favored Terrain from Natural Explorer. As per usual whenever I use the Ranger class (which I seem to do a lot) I recommend talking to your DM to find out what enemies and terrain you’ll need, or alternatively use Unearthed Arcana rules. This build is rather separate from Unearthed Arcana but regardless it’s much better than baseline Ranger so I suggest looking at it.

LEVEL 8 - RANGER 2

Second level Rangers get a Fighting Style so I’d recommend one you didn’t take from Fighter 1 (since Fighting Styles don’t stack.) But notably you get access to Spellcasting and learn two spells from the Ranger list: Detect Magic will let you check if your opponent has their ultimate up before fighting, and Hunter’s Mark will let you mark an enemy for death and do an extra d6 of damage every time you hit them.

LEVEL 9 - RANGER 3

Speaking of damage: third level Rangers can choose a conclave archetype, and the Hunter archetype is as useful to assassins as it is to hunters. You get the Hunter’s Prey feature which lets you choose from three different ways to do extra damage, but Colossus Slayer will let you show your contempt for the weak by doing an extra d8 of damage to anyone who’s injured.

You also get Primeval Awareness, letting you spend a spell slot to detect enemies that are near. (Read the ability for a better understanding of how it works.) And speaking of spells how about a smoke bomb? Fog Cloud will let you create a... cloud... of fog. The area is heavily obscured for the duration unless you lose concentration or a strong wind blows it away so you can use it to block enemy vision and get into position to hide and strike!

LEVEL 10 - FIGHTER 4

Man we skipped over our Ability Score Improvements for awhile huhn? Well thankfully there’s no more multiclassing anymore as it’s just straight down Fighter now. But we’ll first be taking a Feat to even out some of our uneven ability scores, and the Observant feat is perfect for a ninja, getting an increase to passive perception to spot assassins in the dark and being able to read the lips of an enemy so you can relay the message to your allies.

LEVEL 11 - FIGHTER 5

5th level Fighters get an Extra Attack good lord finally! The thing is that more attacks means that you’ll have to “reload” your Psychic Blades with a Bonus Action more often, which is why we opted for Colossus Slayer first. So just remember that your knives are limited.

(Artwork by Riot Games)

LEVEL 12 - FIGHTER 6

6th level Fighters get another Ability Score Improvement: increase your Dexterity and Constitution to finally get rid of those awful uneven Ability Scores.

LEVEL 13 - FIGHTER 7

7th level Echo Knights get Echo Avatar: You can see and hear through your Living Shadow, deafening and blinding yourself while you do this. You can keep it up for 10 minutes max and can end it at any time without an action. While your echo is being used this way it can be up to 1000 feet away from you without being destroyed, meaning that you can theoretically teleport to it if you so desire. One of Zed’s biggest strengths is his ability to be practically everywhere at once.

LEVEL 14 - FIGHTER 8

8th level Fighters get another Ability Score Improvement: you can finally cap off your Dexterity for maximum damage with your knives and your shurikens.

LEVEL 15 - FIGHTER 9

At level 9 in Fighter you get Indomitable, letting you reroll a saving throw once per Long Rest. You must use the new roll so be sure to only pop your QSS on an important stun you know you won’t get hit by again 3 seconds later.

LEVEL 16 - FIGHTER 10

10th level Echo Knights get Shadow Martyr. Hey it has “shadow” in the name! Regardless once per short rest you can use a reaction to have your Living Shadow defend an ally (or yourself) when being attacked, forcing the attack to hit the echo instead of you. People can’t shoot Zed’s shadows in League but that doesn’t mean he can’t block a skillshot for an ally.

LEVEL 17 - FIGHTER 11

11th level Fighters get three attacks per round thanks to an improvement to Extra Attack. Again remember that you can only throw two of your Psychic Blades before needing to reload, meaning that if you decide to throw them you can only do so twice before needing to spend a bonus action, and will run out of daggers if you decide to Action Surge. But since your echo can attack with melee it should be fine, right?

LEVEL 18 - FIGHTER 12

12th level Fighters get another Ability Score Improvement: increase your Constitution for more health and more uses of Unleash Incarnation, adding up to you dying less and your enemies dying more.

LEVEL 19 - FIGHTER 13

13th level Fighters get another use of Indomitable. Isn’t cool-down reduction a great stat?

LEVEL 20 - FIGHTER 14

Our capstone is an Ability Score Improvement from the 14th level of Fighter: 2 points in Constitution will give you a 20 HP boost and one extra use of Unleash Incarnation.

FINAL BUILD

PROS

The merest shade of me... - You have a huge array of options in combat which are almost always available for use. You can always be armed with both a melee and ranged weapon and have insane mobility with Misty Step and the ability to swap places with your Echo, not to mention that a 40 foot movement speed puts you above the average movement for humanoids and on-par with most mid-to-high level enemies, letting you easily chase them and keep up.

Our blades crave battle - You have incredibly high damage output. Three attacks with your psychic blades is good in its own right but combined with Sneak Attack, Colossus Slayer, and Hunter’s Mark you can do a grand total of 3d6 + 1d8 extra damage with one of your three strikes. Extra attacks are a great contingency for on-hit damage boosts.

Only the worthy survive - While Zed is squishy in League of Legends this build is much tankier than average. Actually being able to invest in Constitution without losing out on abilities and most of your levels being in Fighter means that your health can easily reach up to 200. Add in Second Wind and Indomitable and you have more than a Guardian Angel to protect you.

CONS

Secrets kept are weapons wasted - You have a lot of set up time to get all your abilities up. A bonus action to draw your weapons and then another bonus action to summon your Echo, plus extra bonus actions to create more blades or more echoes, which will take away from Cunning Action or your mobility abilities.

Only time can judge us - Many of your abilities are limited: limited spells, limited protection with Indomitable and Shadow Martyr, limited damage with Unleash Incarnation and Action Surge, and most notably limited ranged attacks per turn since you can only summon two Psychic Blades per turn.

Balance is weakness - The three levels of Ranger really don’t provide much. More damage is swell and all but taking 3 more Fighter levels instead of 3 Ranger levels would give you more sustainability with Reclaim Potential, another Ability Score Improvement, and most notably a third use of Indomitable and a second use of Action Surge. Ranger makes your average damage output higher but removes your ability to quickly assassinate a target, or keep alive. And it of course forces you to invest somewhat in Wisdom, which might not be possible if you didn’t roll well for stats during character creation.

But I honestly struggled to find many points of weakness in this build; I’m actually impressed with how strong it is overall. You have the tools to take on any fight that may come your way, moving around the battlefield at lightning speeds and dropping any enemy with a flurry of blows. It’s only up to you to use those tools, less you prove yourself a Faker.

(Artwork by Riot Games)

[thevagueambition]

I was tagged by @rainhalydia​ to answer some fic writing questions

AO3 name: MagicalDragon

Fandoms: Les Misérables, Dragon Age and Harry Potter are probably the main ones but I’ve done fanwork for a wide variety of things tbh

Tropes: I like to write (and read!) hurt/comfort, very close friendships (what TV Tropes calls Heterosexual Life Partners or Platonic Life Partners), explorations of identity, mental health issues, etc and what I call Queer Eye For The Straight Show lmao (I watch something straight, I apply a queer reading and then that’s a fic). Don’t think I’ve ever written this as such, but I go wild for Found Family and like.... former villains now doing the morally questionable thing to protect their loved ones/similar. Also, Lovers to Enemies lmao.

Number of fics: 32 ones on AO3, a few more very old ones on FF.net (as in, written before my English was.... competent). We shall discount these from now on lol. 

Fic I spent the most time on: For sure my canon era Les Mis wip, On the Path to Elysium.

Fic I spent the least time on: Hmmm for sure one of the ones I wrote in a trance after coming home from the cinema... probably my Norse Myth Odin/Loki smut, if we discount the time I used translating it from Danish (it was vaguely inspired by the live action Valhalla movie). Otherwise probably the Dumbledore Being Angsty About Grindelwald one I wrote after Crimes of Grindelwald. 

Longest Fic: Again, by far On the Path to Elysium. 

Shortest Fic: My old Black Magician Trilogy Dannyl/Tayend fluff, Late Night at the Great Library. I just wanted to write Dan/Tay but I didn’t really have an idea for it so it’s... nothing to write home about. 2014 was like that lol. 

Most hits: Mr. Harry Potter, a fic about trans boy!Harry that started it’s life as a headcanon post on @bisexualharrypotter​ and honestly probably because people follow the link on that post or because trans!Harry fics were pretty rare when I posted that (I mean, I don’t think theyre common, still, but certainly somewhat more so). 

Most kudos: Practice, Brooklyn Nine-Nine fic with trans, bi!Jake. 

Most comment threads: On the Path to Elysium again, probably due to length/amount of chapters. Several people are lovely enough to comment each chapter. 

Most bookmarks: Handsome as ever, my fic where the Thirteenth Doctor meets Jack Harkness :D !! This one probably got a boost with Jack’s actual cameo in the new season (it was posted about a year ago).

Total word count: 156 239 lmao 

Favourite fic I wrote: I’m most proud of Just Like That, my Disco Elysium Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi fic (a lovely soul recently translated it into Chinese!!)

Fic you want to rewrite/expand on: Hmm,,,, I’m dissatisfied with many of my pre-2018 fics but what I’m interested in writing-wise has changed enough that I’m not sure I’d want to work in the same space again... Perhaps reworking some of my Dragon Age: Inquisition snippets into an actual full thing? I also want to write more young(er), gay Dumbledore fic for the same verse as my other ones. Supppooosseeee some of the old FF.net ones don’t have bad premises so if I ever get back into writing Marauders Era Remus Angst maybe i’ll redo one lmao

Share a bit of a WIP or a story idea you’re planning on: have some depressed artist Grantaire from the upcoming Elysium chapter lol 

“I had heard you were once an artist’s student,” Enjolras said quietly. “But I did not know you still practiced the craft.”

Grantaire startled, shot Enjolras a look over his shoulder and went back to his sketch. 

“It is not in me to stop,” he answered, almost as quietly. “Though I ought to.”

Though Henri was keeping his head still as he’d been instructed to, his eyes went back and forth between Grantaire and Enjolras, as if trying to guess their conversation. 

“Whyever do you believe you ought to?” Enjolras asked. This time, Grantaire didn’t look up from his work. 

“All I can craft is this — half-finished pieces, half-formed ideas, impressions of what could be something great, if crafted by a more able hand…” Grantaire hesitated, but he’d never been able to curtail his mouth. “There is no point to keep creating what is doomed to always to be incomplete and incapable. I am deluding myself and cheating others of their francs… so yes, I ought to stop.”

God, he needed a drink. 

“It gladdens people, though. Your art. That boy, he will have a portrait of his friend because of you. And your erotica… “ Enjolras spread his hands in a vague gesture. “Well, it provides to those relegated to the shadows what others find out in the light, no?”

Grantaire stopped his sketching for a moment and looked properly at Enjolras.

“How do you know of my erotica?”

i tag @thebearmuse @teddy-stonehill @elvensemi @brilliantsnafu god who else writes fic that i know? ?? if you saw this and you write fic and you want to do it feel free to pretend i tagged you 

[morethanaprincess-a]

6, 7 & 22

Mun’s Asks: RP Edition

I’m going to answer 22 first as it’ll be the longest. Also, a disclaimer:

The question asks for five blogs I recommend to my followers. While I tried to choose five muns based on a variety of criteria, I want it to be clear that if I’m writing with you and you are not listed here, it doesn’t mean I don’t recommend you. Honestly, I could probably answer this question plenty more times with new blogs each time. The better answer to this question is to comb through my blog and see who I’m writing with, as I recommend them if we’re writing or have written threads together.

However, I tried to choose blogs/muns that really do inspire me, contribute great work and/or rph to the community, and aren’t only Danganronpa blogs. Additionally, I tried to choose blogs who have posted IC content in the past two weeks.

22. If you could recommend at least five blogs to your followers, who would they be?

Okay, here we go! Five blogs and/or muns that you should be following:

@the-taboo-king - Literally no surprise if you’ve been following me for awhile. I will always be a fan of blogs that put so much thought, time, and effort into taking a canon character and truly developing that character into their own. There’s an excellent balance between main/canon verses, AUs, aesthetics, and crack over here and if you need some writing inspiration? Just read any of their threads. Literally, any of them. Each one of my Sonia and Gundham threads pushes me to be a better writer, to develop my Sonia further from ‘safe’ canon tropes and I’m always grateful for that. These threads are just a joy to write and I’d say that if you have a Danganronpa character or verse and you’re not writing with this Gundham, you’re severely missing out.

I liked Sondam before I joined the DR RPC. Now? It’s probably my favorite DR ship for Sonia. 

@gungambled / @thawedfrost / @spiritusvendid - Because these are all the same mun, they’re all listed here. All of Kitty’s blogs deserve to be in the spotlight! Admittedly, I’m currently only writing with her Celestia at this time (Sonia and Celestia - future BFFs in the making!), but she gives each one of her muses such a unique voice and insight. Her dialogue is excellent and you really get the sense of who each one of her muses is, whether you’re familiar with the source material or not. Kitty’s also so fun to talk to OOC (possibly because we have some of the same hobbies and enjoy making crack plots about our muses)! It’s a treat when she shares mun photos, as she’s a fantastic makeup artist and cosplayer (And I always support fellow cosplayers and roleplayers, two big time-consuming hobbies!). 

@spurnedadulthood - I talk about Livi a lot over here. There’s good reason for that: Livi’s Kensuke Hibiki comes from a game and anime that aren’t too popular over here on tumblr, but with a ton of verses available, Kensuke can come pester your muse almost anywhere. And while his personality takes some getting used to (he’s. a. GREMLIN.), Livi writes him with such sincerity and devotion to his source material that, for the most part, you just have to laugh and shake your head with every response. Also? I’d never heard of the Caligula franchise before writing with Livi. It took about three RP turns for me to fire up Crunchyroll and watch the entire anime to better understand Kensuke and the Caligula verse (I’m not the greatest at those types of games, so the anime was much easier for me to digest!). It’s very rare that I’m inspired to seek out a muse’s source material if I’m unfamiliar with them, but I can attribute that to Livi’s characterizations and writing skills. I’m pretty sure Livi has more than one blog, too? An OC, I think? Anyway, if Livi’s writing a muse, follow that blog.

@trinitytalents - I admit, I am a bit picky when it comes to OC blogs. However, I really like what 7th has done with the variety of Danganronpa OCs that make up the killing game Project Trinity. With a variety of muses to choose from, 7th has made sure each one has a distinct personality, history, talent, and more, and all of them will fit right in with your Danganronpa muse or verse! I’m a bit partial to Satomi and Atsuko myself, but there’s an Ultimate Stylist Sonia needs to meet. In short, 7th brings their original creations to life so well with respect to the franchise that has inspired them and is just a fantastic example of a multi-muse OC blog. I just wish there was more art of all of the Project Trinity students!

@sadisticbloodlxst - For those who are familiar with the Diabolik Lovers franchise, you’ll know that a lot of the subjects in the games and shows are not for the faint of heart. However, this blog handles all of them with such eloquence while writing for every member of the Sakamaki and Mukami families! That’s a lot of muses with a lot of different personalities, histories, and perhaps most importantly in DL, reasons why they’re just not very nice vampires. Each character is so distinct, with writing full of emotion even when the muse themselves is determined to stay stone-faced. They’re taking a small break right now, but when they return, it’s a blog you should be reaching out to if you’re a fan of Diabolik Lovers (or dark plots, angst, nsfw, etc) at all, even just to read the various threads going on with plenty of other muses. Yes, I’m nosy and enjoy reading what all of their muses are up to! I can’t wait to keep developing Sonia’s storyline with Ruki and eventually, maybe, having her meet more of the cast.

6. What are your thoughts on the current roleplay trends on here right now?

I’m not sure what counts as a current roleplay trend, so to speak, but I’ll give this a shot:

- Google doc rules are a good thing, especially to access on mobile. I should do one myself. A lot of times I’ll get followed and I’ve only got my phone or tablet to check out a blog, and a google docs linked in mobile helps me decide much more quickly if I want to follow someone.

- Blogs and promos that focus so much on aesthetics that you cannot read the posts on their blog or you cannot find the rules/muses/info easily on the theme irk me. I’m much less likely to have the patience to move my cursor around your blog trying to find the smallest possible icon to hover over for ‘rules’ than if you have a sidebar icon that just says, plainly, ‘rules.’  My reasoning of following a blog always comes down to: do our rules/values/interests match and can I work with this mun’s writing? No matter how pretty the blog is, if I can’t work with your IC content, I’m probably not going to follow.

- Patience with replies needs to be understood more by the RPC in general. Just because memes and threads are posted doesn’t mean every mun can get to them quickly. It’s fine to ask someone after a week or so (Vacation and other hiatus reasons aside), but before that? Patience. Interact with more muns, post promos, drabble, create moodboards or song lists, or even find more muses to write. Don’t worry, people will eventually respond.

- I wish group blog promos and indie blog promos had different tags. Even in the fandom-specific promo tags. It’s irritating to try and get a promo in the appropriate tags only to have it buried by group blog promos, often mass-spammed with content that isn’t even promo content.

7. What is the one trend you miss the most that’s no longer popular or seen as much as it was before?

I’m not sure if it was just not a trend or just not as further developed, but I miss the RP days of Livejournal and Greatestjournal. A lot less weird formatting and focus on coordinating blog icons in every post. I think for OCs, icons definitely help. But for canon characters that, presumably, the person you’re writing with is familiar with, it’s tiresome to add. Especially if you’re on the tumblr app.

In general, I just miss more of the focus being on writing: developing skills, brainstorming, etc, instead of aesthetics. Whether it’s the blog style or mass-sharing aesthetic posts, I just wish it was more evenly distributed with written IC content in some places.

[365daysofsasuhina]

[ 365 Days of SasuHina || Day Three Hundred Eleven: Adventure ] [ Uchiha Sasuke, Hyūga Hinata, Uchiha Shisui, Uchiha Itachi ] [ SasuHina ] [ Verse: Virtual Vitality ] [ AO3 Link ]

Well...he can think of worse ways to go out.

Cliche as it is, the end of the world has been nigh for...quite some time. And while the rich bigwigs shuttle off for space and the poor are left to their devices, those somewhere in the middle have another option: a virtual reality for the digital records of their brains to live on for...well, there wasn’t a specific end date given. The servers are robust, robotic caretakers and spare parts galore left for maintenance in its secure, secret location, and the rest left to fate as the world breathes its last few breaths.

The queue for digitalization has been rampant for weeks. Every country has seen massive crowds gathering for a chance to achieve digital immortality. And Sasuke’s family were among them.

They managed to be among the earliest, finding a neurological scan facility within their city. It took several days of camping out along the sidewalk, slowly moving up as others dredged alongside them. But then came their turn.

To say it was chaotic would be an understatement. But so too was it obvious the staff was doing all it could to accommodate them all. Not only had they been doing it for weeks by that point, but surely they’d been trained beforehand to handle it, the numbers to be expected.

“Uchiha?”

“Yes,” Fugaku had rumbled in reply.

“Six in your party?”

“That’s right.”

Father, mother, brother...aunt, cousin, and himself, Sasuke mentally counted. The closest of their immediate family. The rest either lived far, or were simply never heard from.

“All right then...please, follow me.” A doctor with a clipboard escorted them to a room off a hallway that branched from the main lobby. Even there it felt crowded, and the tension in the air made Sasuke borderline anxious. Within the chamber were several chairs, a myriad of tech, and a head-level device attached to the ceiling, like one of those portable x-ray machines at a dentist’s office.

“All right...everyone please take a seat, and then we’ll get started as soon as I log your profiles.” The doctor turned to the computer, fingers flying over the keys as the Uchiha all settled nervously in their chairs...save for Itachi, who was put into place in his wheelchair.

“Eager to walk again?” Shisui asked quietly.

“I’m not sure ‘eager’ is the proper term given the overarching circumstances, but...relatively speaking? Yes,” was Itachi’s ever-dry answer.

“Well gee, thanks for making me feel like an asshole…”

“Sorry...I’m just...tense.”

“Yeah...I get that.”

“We will begin alphabetically, please. Fugaku, if you would?”

Giving his family a glance, Fugaku did as asked, standing and following the doc’s orders to stand perfectly still. Adjusting the scanner, they then stood back, plugging in something through the keyboard before the procedure began.

As if with a mind of its own, the machine began to move. Slowly turning about Fugaku’s head, it almost looked like some kind of wild animal cautiously circling. Doing his best to hold still, the patriarch’s eyes nonetheless swiveled in their sockets in an attempt to watch.

“And...that’s done! Itachi is next.”

Visibly relieved, Fugaku then positioned his son, the machine lowered to account for his seated posture.

And so it went, over and over until it was finally Sasuke’s turn. Standing in the proper place, he eyed the machine warily as it was set in place.

“Do your best to keep still, and we’ll wrap up with your cousin.”

“...right.”

“Now, things will go dark for the copy, and then it will wake in the server. For you, however, things will continue as normal.”

Heaving a steadying breath, Sasuke couldn’t help but flinch as it started to move. Around it went, slowly, the hum of its mechanisms sounding in his ears.

As soon as the machine stopped...everything went black.

...and then a moment later, he opens his eyes.

He’s...in some sort of...lobby…? It looks like a hotel or something, but...no one else is around. Where’s his family?

“Hey, finally! A familiar face!”

Turning, Sasuke’s brows lift. “Shisui?”

“Yeah! Apparently the data loads in small batches, so the others should be around soon...we’re advised to wait until then so no one gets separated.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Some kind of npc lady. She’s been wandering around, clearly on a script.”

“What, like...a game?”

“Sorta. Also...you might want to change your clothes. You’re still in the default.”

“Default? What -?” Jostling as his cousin turns him toward a mirror, Sasuke blanches. He’s in a plain white t-shirt, pants, and shoes. Like some kind of mannequin or something. “...how...do I…?”

“Bring up your dominant hand, palm up.”

“...uh -?” Doing as asked, Sasuke glances to his left. Then, much like a game, some kind of...menu springs up, making him holler and stumble backward.

“Yeah, it...takes some getting used to. Anyway, see that, uh...chest of drawers looking icon? That’s the wardrobe. Pick whatever you want! You can even change the colors.”

“...huh.” Still a bit leery, Sasuke presses the ‘button’, watching as an inventory does indeed bloom. He’s...really not sure what to wear, and he doesn’t feel like taking all that long to look...so he settles on a dark top, a sweatshirt, and some jeans.

“There, that’s more like the Sasuke I know! Guess now we’ll just...sit and wait for - whoa!”

Glancing to Shisui, Sasuke has to do a double take. Itachi’s data has loaded...and…

“Dude...you’ve got legs!”

Looking a bit disoriented for a moment, Itachi then looks to his cousin...and then down. “...I’ve always had legs,” he eventually retorts. “These just...function.”

“You know what I mean,” Shisui replies, waving a hand. “Come on, let’s pick you some clothes, dude! You look like that one chick from that insurance commercial…”

Brow furrowing, Itachi lets himself be guided through the motions as Mikoto, her sister, and her husband then appear.

“Looks like we all made it,” Sasuke offers, moving to help walk them through what he himself has learned so far.

And then others start to load, typically by themselves or in pairs. Knowledge passes, and soon enough fifty or so people (individually dressed) mill about in the lobby.

“If I may have your attention, please!”

Everyone turns at the voice, finding a woman standing at the head of the room: likely the one Shisui mentioned.

“Greetings, and welcome to the post-Earth survival servers. Your data has been successfully loaded! I will now give you your introductory guide to the servers.

“Servers are all interconnected through various lobbies, like this one. To travel between servers, you need only return to the proper lobby, where you can load any of the available servers! The default exit point for this lobby is the ‘fantasy RPG’ server.”

“Wait, seriously?” Shisui whispers. “I wasn’t serious when I compared this to a game…!”

“A variety of people means a variety of experiences! A full list of lobbies and their contents are available for perusal in your menu. Simply lift your dominant hand, palm up, to access your personal menu. Data collected while in a server will be stored within each: so if you leave a server and come back, your previous data will be reloaded, and you can continue your experience where you left off! You can also restart at any time, should you wish to explore the world from the beginning again!

“This lobby will be closed for one hour while this batch of data are allowed time to pick their first server. If you haven’t made a choice, you will be moved to the default server to free up the lobby to load more data! And as mentioned, you can change servers at any time.

“Specific data can also be searched and found on the server maps through your menus, so you can always locate another data should you become separated!

“If you require any further explanations, there are guides and tutorials for hundreds of subject matter in your menu’s encyclopedia! Organize them by subject, or search for a specific aspect. Your hour begins now - please, enjoy your post-Earth experience!”

After an awkward pause, everyone starts talking amongst their groups, menus opening and plans being made.

“...well, that’s...not what I was expecting,” Itachi admits as the Uchiha all gather.

“Y’know...I might actually stick with this server to start,” Shisui muses, a hand at his chin. “I’ve always loved RPGs!”

The adults, however, express a desire to find something more...normal, perhaps modern.

“We can always meet up again later,” Sasuke offers with a shrug. “I mean, the map seems pretty easy to use. Cuz honestly...I might stick with Shisui. This sounds like fun.”

“Then I shall as well,” Itachi agrees, while the trio of elders offer to establish a kind of ‘home base’ in a modern server to regroup to.

“So...guess we just...head out, then?” Sasuke asks.

“Seems that way. But I have to wonder, if this really is an RPG server...where’s all the roleplaying options? Y’know, classes and all that?”

“Perhaps we will find out when we load into the server itself,” Itachi muses.

“Um...excuse me…?”

Finding themselves interrupted, the trio turn to find a young woman standing nearby. “Can we help you?” Itachi asks, ever polite.

“I, um...I couldn’t help but overhear that you...that you plan to stay in this server?”

“Yeah, we thought we’d give it a try,” Shisui confirms.

“Could...c-could I join you? At least to start, so I’m not b-by myself? The rest of my family, um...isn’t interested.”

The three exchange glances. “...I don’t see why not,” Sasuke replies. “You got a name?”

“Oh! Yes! It’s Hinata - Hinata Hyūga.”

“Well I’m Shisui - and these are my cousins, Itachi and Sasuke,” the eldest explains with the proper gestures.

“It’s nice to meet you!”

“Well, what do you say, guys? Should we go start ourselves a little adventure?” Shisui’s eyebrows wiggle, making Hinata giggle and the other two roll their eyes.

“This is going to be a long one,” Itachi sighs.

“We’ll just feed him to the first troll we find,” Sasuke suggests with a smirk.

“Oi!”

“That’s not very nice,” Hinata replies.

“Trust me...you’ll see what I mean soon enough.”

                                                              .oOo. 

     I am SUPER tired so I'll try to be brief.      My own little take on "living in an RPG", based a little bit on that game SOMA by Frictional Games, aka the brain scan part lol - I've never actually read / watched a story of "living in an RPG" so...this is me winging it xD      I'd like to do more, if the cut-off point doesn't make that obvious. It was getting a LITTLE long, and...it's very late and I'm exhausted OTL Been ill the last two days so my brain is just blegh, lol      Aaanyway, it's sleep time for me! Thanks for reading~

[trans-cuchulainn]

is cú chulainn an incarnation of lug mac ethlenn? probably not.

okay so i said i’d talk a bit more about how the cú chulainn-is-an-incarnation-of-lug theory is totally whack and based on a scribal error, so here goes. there’s an article that talks about this called the textual tradition of compert con culainn, which is in celtica 21 for anyone who has academic library access, but i’m assuming the majority of you don’t and/or can’t be bothered to go look something up which is valid

anyway for those who aren’t familiar with cu chulainn’s birth story, it’s a little bit weird, because he’s kind of conceived multiple times. there’s a boy whom his mother adopts, but who later dies; while she’s mourning said child she drinks and a small ‘creature’ goes into her mouth, at which point lug comes to her in a dream and says she’ll be giving birth to his son sétanta (and by the way the boy who died was his son too); she’s due to marry súaltaim but she’s already pregnant with this unknown child so she induces a miscarriage, marries súaltaim, and gets pregnant again… and this third child is cú chulainn (well, sétanta, he gets his other name later)

so that’s how he was conceived; the circumstances concerning his birth are also a little complicated and vary according to different stories, as well as being contradicted in places by little references to his childhood in other stories. for example, the táin says that he was raised by his mother and father and then left for emain macha at the age of about five, whereas versions of his birth story have him being immediately fostered by the ulaid, and yet another story has it that he’s nursed by láeg’s parents (láeg being his charioteer) so that they’re raised together from infancy (which is ADORABLE and I LOVE IT)

what does any of this have to do with whether or not he’s an incarnation of lug mac ethlenn? well basically the scribe messed up and confused two lines – one line featuring lug identifying himself to dechtire, and one in which he identifies his son, saying that he’ll be called sétanta, and from this concluded that lug-cú chulainn was an incarnation situation, and wrote a verse accordingly which has confused people ever since

now it’s always dodgy to ‘correct’ medieval texts according to what they think they ‘should’ say, but in this case we can be fairly sure this is what happened because there’s more than one manuscript of the story, so can compare them to see why they’re different, and come up with a working hypothesis about how that came to be

so the problematic version is the one from the book of leinster (LL), whereas we also have the slightly older version from lebor na huidre (LU). a verse in LU therefore says “and he [lug] himself was lug mac ethlenn” and then “and the child would be called sétanta”, or something, which the author of the LL version clearly muddled up and thought it said “and he [the child] himself was lug mac ethlenn”, so inserts a verse after that saying “and lug mac ethlenn was in the form of the child […] he was cú chulainn”

because this idea isn’t in the other versions of the story, we can see that something weird’s going on with LL, and if you’ve ever seen a medieval manuscript you can imagine how easy it would be to confuse two lines while reading and draw the wrong conclusions (hell, i’ve done that with tumblr posts, and those aren’t written in insular miniscule)

essentially, this whole confusion appears to come from what we call ‘scribal eye-skip’, i.e. a scribe was tired while reading the story, got muddled, tried to explain the text based on how they’d read it, and resulted in several hundred years of people trying to argue that cú chulainn is an incarnation of lug

(i mean that may also be down to the whole ‘cut-price jesus’ idea, which is… a whole thing i’m not gonna get into right now, but basically, if you’re trying to find more parallels between cú chulainn and jesus other than the fact that he died aged 33 and also one time slept for three days – possibly in a tomb – to be healed by his divine father, then the idea that he is an incarnation of that divine father is going to help considerably with doing that)

now obviously this is an ‘error’ that’s made in the book of leinster, which was compiled some time in the twelfth century, probably by around 1160, and is our major source for various texts, including one of the two main recensions of the táin. it’s not a new, recent thing; it’s older than some of the other material we’ve got. because of this, we need to ask ourselves whether we can really make a value judgment on how valid this interpretation is. i mean, if everything we know about medieval irish texts comes from these manuscripts and it says this in one of those manuscripts, then even if we can see where they might have got that idea from and think it’s probably a mistake, is it not just as valid as anything else in that manuscript? we wouldn’t argue that something from r2 of the táin is an error just because LL differs there from LU; we just say that it’s a different recension and treat it as such

it’s difficult because it involves lug and whenever anything involves gods it starts becoming A Thing, and since people are intent on extricating pre-christian mythology from medieval texts, they want to know whether or not you can consider cú chulainn an incarnation of lug. and then that in turn has a bearing on how you read lug and, indeed, whether you consider cú chulainn himself to be a god of any variety, so that’s when it starts mattering whether or not the scribe got it ‘right’ … like if you want to take that approach, then you’d probably say that no, this idea doesn’t belong to any pre-christian mythology (NOT THAT WE CAN ACTUALLY RECONSTRUCT THAT), it’s just LL getting confused, so we shouldn’t incorporate it into reconstructions now

(i will not here get into the question of whether or not such reconstructions are a useful way of looking at this material because that’s just. a whole can of worms, both academic and theological.)

honestly, for me as someone who isn’t super engaged with the texts on, like, a mythological and/or religious level and tends just to treat them as literature, it doesn’t really matter to me, but the fact that this whole interpretation hinges on what looks to be a very simple scribal error is part of the reason i don’t buy into it and will never write about cú chulainn as if he’s an incarnation of lug

i hope all of that made sense but if you have any questions lmk and i will attempt to clarify. in the meantime i hope you enjoyed this 1200-word post, personally i’m thinking i need to start an Actual Srs Academic blog (like a wordpress or something) to post this stuff on if i’m gonna spend this much time on it, but there we are

main source for this post if you wanna know more / check that i’m not talking complete rubbish: Ó Concheanainn, Tomás, “The textual tradition of Compert Con Culainn”, Celtica 21 (1990), pp. 441–455

[thisselflovecamebacktome]

Pokemon Sword and Shield first thoughts

The Negative:

- The reduced pokedex. Hear me out before you go screaming about how we knew this was going to be a thing. While I would always be disappointed with the reduced pokedex like I was with generation 7, Sword and Shield’s pokedex somehow felt less full than generation 7 which is strange because they had about the same (small) amount of new pokemon. My guess is that it’s because a lot of the pokemon we saw in Sword and Shield feel like the ones fans use more often than not. Like sure there were combees and whatever, but I noticed most the pseudos and beloved pokemon like charizard and gengar made it in. And like there’s nothing wrong per se about that, but it honestly felt like less diversity, especially in a game that had 6 new dragon lines.

- The lack of “evil plot” until the end. Look I know there was a buildup in Sonia’s plot about the darkest day and so on, and I know pokemon has done games where the major evil plot event happens at/after the elite four before, but the lack of evil team in these games made it feel empty and lowkey like a ripoff of Lysander’s reveal in X and Y without the team flare stuff. Like I don’t know, the chairman was an interesting villain and the whole “Is he or Olenna really the mastermind?” red herrings thrown through Bede’s story (as a sidenote, justice for Bede tbh, like yeah he’s a prick but he deserved better than he got) and Olenna’s personality was good, but none of it felt developed enough. Like story wise it literally felt like I was playing X and Y but instead of the protagonist, I was Tierno until the last part. It also made the gym challenge/travelling seem a lot longer which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but again, made it feel a little empty compared to past games.

- The version exclusives. No, I don’t care if this is a product of capitalism, I’m still gonna complain about it each game lmao. And I am especially going to criticise it with these games given you had to have a Nintendo switch online account to trade. Like I am someone who despises the idea of in game purchases, so the idea you need one to fill the pokedex is scummy to me.

- Hop. Whoever decided that he needed to make a comment every time you battled and did a supereffective or critical hit move on him needs to be fired because my god was that annoying. Just in general, I felt he was under developed in a way that made him uninteresting and pretty much a Hau rip off. And the sad thing is that like there was the makings there for him to be interesting. Him feeling like he had to live up to Leon + the shame/disappointment he felt from the loss to Bede and then you at the end along with him finding his own way in life and deciding to train to be a professor all sound interesting in theory, but it just didn’t come to life in the game in the same way I found Bede and Marnie’s backstories to be. I also kinda wish they built up the him wanting to be a professor thing more rather than just feeling like they added it on at the end.

- The graphics just popping in. Look, I wasn’t expecting Breath of the Wild graphics given this is the first new pokemon game on the switch and it wasn’t in development for as long. But I am someone who hopes that this gets fixed for future games.

- It was handholdy/linear. So I will gladly admit this was much better than it was in generation 7 and again, I wasn’t expecting Breath of the Wild but when you consider that technically in generation one, once you get cut you can do gyms 3 - 6 (7 if we’re talking let’s go) in whatever order you want and explore like 80% of Kanto, it feels restrictive that they flat out block you out of any town you haven’t been to/aren’t supposed to be in.

The Mixed:

- Sonia’s arc. I love that they showed through Hop and Sonia that becoming a professor is a genuine path because I feel like if I was in the pokemon universe, I would be a professor. But I felt the execution of Sonia’s story felt off. Like she spent a lot of it reminiscing/telling us about how she used to be a battler and supposedly Leon’s best rival and having Magnolia ask her what she’s doing with her life (which in itself was weird, I mean a professor making fun of someone for working towards being a professor???) just for Magnolia to hand Sonia the coat with no on screen resolution of any of that. Like I don’t know, I guess I just would have liked a big moment where she helped with the chairman or something whether that be through battling or her expertise and have that be an “aha!” moment where she decides to be a professor and Magnolia hand her the coat then or something of that calibre.

- The beginning. Basically I thought it was perfect except it still felt too long. Like having the champion give you pokemon, those pokemon showing their personalities in the choosing scene and being able to skip the catching and pokecenter tutorials were amazing. But even with those skippable features, the introduction felt long.

- The gym leaders. I like that Piers played a notable role in the story and his inability to use dynamax pokemon intrigues me. But quite frankly, the rest of the gym leaders are among the most forgettable we’ve ever had in my honest opinion.

- TRs. I feel like this was added for more competitive players who want a challenge which is not me if I’m honest, so I get it but would prefer TMs to stay multiuse lmao. I’m also kinda surprised at which particular TMs they chose to be TRs.

- The experience share. I’ll admit, even as someone who uses the new age experience share, I thought making it compulsory would be a horrific idea. But I genuinely feel like they balanced it out really well given I versed every single trainer with the same team without facing many wild pokemon and was still under leveled for most the gyms. My only gripe with it is that I tend to switch out my strongest pokemon throughout the main story to add a pokemon I don’t plan to use just to evolve it to fill the pokedex, so it being set up to mostly make you under leveled was a bit of a pain because as someone who isn’t big on versing wild pokemon and was just aiming to catch the new ones until post game, I couldn’t afford for my main pokemon to not be getting that experience. But I do recognise that that’s a personal thing and like not an inherit flaw of the experience share and it will definitely work well for nuzlockers and so on. 

- Dynamaxing. Basically I liked them for the raids but they still feel like a worse version of mega evolutions mixed with z moves to me.

- It felt longer than most games. For the most part this is good. Like overall it felt like a fuller game, in part due to the Wild Area being somewhere you can spend literal hours in without getting sick of it. As I mentioned though, I just wish the beginning wasn’t as long and their was more to the “evil plot” part of the story throughout the games.

The Positive:

- The wild area. This was by far the best thing they added to this game. A large amount of the time I’ve spent playing this game has just been messing about in there and none of it felt like I was doing it just to pass time. The weather changes throughout also added some nice variety and change of scenery.

- The raid battles. I thought these were going to be the worst part of the game if I’m honest, but I’ve actually really enjoyed them. I do wish they had a bit more variety, but in general I feel they’re fun and well balanced.

- Bede, Marnie and Oleana. Bede was a pratt at first, but again, his backstory along with game story intrigued me and I wish we dove further into that. Marnie was just a sweetheart and I love her and wish they did more with her connection with team yell and Piers. I also wish we got more about Oleana because I loved what I saw and feel like her team was perfect for her, but wanted more.

- The music. Whoever created the Slumbering Weald music needs a pay rise because that is literally the best music track pokemon has ever had in my honest opinion.

- LionHeartShipping. Leon/Sonia is the Rivals to Friends to Lovers ship we deserve even if it’s not cannon.

- The new pokemon we got in general. Yes I wish there was more and yes there were a few that I think were among the worst we’ve ever gotten (Looking at you Thwacky, Meowth and Cramorant), but in general I liked a majority of the designs even if I didn’t pre game.

- Old pokemon getting Galarian forms and evolving.

- The attention to detail in the speaking text. While a little stereotypical, using British slang was a nice type.

- Not having an elite four. Having a more anime style championship competition to make your way up to versing Leon felt like something new and a nice change of pace. I just kinda wish that it wasn’t the gym leaders you versed in the finals. Like if they wanted to go with the major/minor idea for the gyms, it would have been cool for the gym types not included to be the ones you versed in the finals.

- Exclusive gym leaders/types. So I know they’ve done this before with Iris/Drayden, but it is something that makes playing each version feel unique. Like I don’t think just the two was enough for me to want to play sword straight after finishing shield and I wish that just say sword had grass, electric, ground, fairy, ice, normal, poison and flying types while shield had fire, water, fighting, steel, dragon, ghost, rock and bug types with Marnie and Bede keeping their dark and psychic types, especially with them emphasising the minor/major league aspect, but it was something I hope pokemon continues to do in the future.

- The fossils being created from mixing and matching parts. Feels far more creative than past games.

Final Thoughts:

- Overall this was an okay game and a decent step into the console world. While there are some spectacular aspects of the game, the story leaving something to be desired made me feel like there was something missing on this journey. Given this and the probability of pokemon improving those well done features as time goes on, I imagine this game will be one that in time will be easily forgotten. Still, despite its flaws, I definitely see it as a necessary step to whatever comes next and am excited to see where it leads us.

[margridarnauds]

A, F, G, M, S, T, V

THANKS AVERY. 

A. If you could rec a piece of music to accompany one of your fics, what would you pick? Why?

 Yakety Sax for Goosefic. 

Alright, seriously? It’s totally not like I have a playlist or something stored anywhere, because that would be insane, right? 

Illuminated by Hurts - Ah, Ça Ira. “Time waits for no one/So do you want to waste some time/Oh, oh, oh, oh/Tonight?” AKA “Ronan realizing that he might not make it back the next day and trying to get Laz to come to bed and reconcile with him, not necessarily because he wants to SLEEP with him, but because he wants his boyfriend there with him. “Swim with your sorrows/And try delusion for a while/It’s such a beautiful lie” Lazare frantically scribbling out his justifications on the paper, even though he has to KNOW that Artois’ going to abandon him and it’s going to be worthless. “Suddenly my eyes are open/Everything comes into focus/Blinding” GENERALLY I get Laz vibes from this line, with him gradually realizing how important Ronan is to him and that some part of him WANTS the new world that Ronan was, but the last few lines also work for Ronan’s (unstated, in-text, but there in canon) decision to charge in front of du Puget, realizing that he HAS to save Olympe from being orphaned like he was. 

Either Dream of Sky (Dancing Line OST) or Forbidden Friendship (HTTYD OST) - Le Cri. Both of them have that sort of tentative, new feeling where things start out so soft and with that kind of innocence but as time goes on, it becomes so much MORE. 

I’ve Seen Hell (North and South OST)/Ashes (Celine Dion) - Pour la Peine. I’ve Seen Hell is one of my go-to Period Drama songs, but I LOVE how it has that bleak feel while also not being COMPLETELY bleak and miserable, there’s that idea of PUSHING through in spite of it. And Ashes also kind of has a similar vibe, as far as openly asking how...there can be any GOOD after that kind of devastating tragedy (even though a part of me will always seen Ryan Reynolds doing interpretive dancing to it, tbh). Ashes is much more...RELIGIOUS in bent than Solène generally goes with, but I think it WORKS as far as that general feeling of despair and abandonment that she starts off with “Every word shot down in flames/What’s left to do/With these broken pieces on the floor?/I’m losing my voice/Calling on you” 

Wicked Game - Personally, I favor it for A Pressing Matter, though it really works for Peyronan in general. “What a wicked game/To make me feel this way/What a wicked thing to do/To make me dream of you” AKA “Peyrol’s ENTIRE thought process when he realizes that, against his own judgement, he’s gotten attached to Ronan and that that’s a MAJOR weakness. 

F. What stories are you planning for the future?

I have. So many WIPS that I’m DYING to release soon. One is very obviously the Fairy Tale AU, which I’m very pumped about. There’s the one that’s just called “Madame Roland is a Lesbian” that I’m excited for. At some point, I’m going to have to expand the Abomination and the Verse it encompasses, stretching from where we start off in the Beauce in 1777 to at LEAST the early 19th century, possibly into the 1840s. 

Between the Waves is going to get a LOT more added to its Verse, hopefully. I already have at least two WIPS that are partially finished and give a little bit more context to things that are happening in the next few chapters, one from Olympe’s perspective on the pre-canon events that stretches to the post, one from Artois’ on some of the events of PLP, and I either have an Afterlife AU, a Reincarnation AU, or both to wrap it up, possibly with us ending up where we began. (No, not on Marat’s printing press.) I’ve also toyed with fleshing out a little more about how Peyronan got to where we see them in A Pressing Matter, to round out the series. Either way, though, I do intend for this to end up being a VERSE, not necessarily just one or two stand-alones. There’s a lot that’s...going to pop up here or there that I INTEND at least to expand on. I rarely like to leave things HANGING like that. 

There’s also the Peasant Lazare AU which, even though it’s basically a laughing stock among my friends IRL at this point, is still very important to me and I’ve never fully given it up. 

I’m definitely going to expand the Ripples in the Rockpool Verse, HOPEFULLY dipping more into the historical events that are happening around this time and a little more on how the OT3 ended up where they get to be in Back on the Shore. 

There’s a Vampire AU that I’ve been toying with back and forth, and I STILL haven’t given up on The Zombie Apocalypse AU, though I’d like to focus on that one more when I have a fewer WIP count and I can more thoroughly outline it. Also @lehetsz-kiraly and I have toyed around with a Superhero AU that I would 100% like to see get off the ground, and I also am totally planning on toying with the TN crossover as time goes on. I obviously have no idea....WHEN or HOW, but it’s somewhere nebulously on my To-Do list. 

And, of course, the Disneyworld AU. One day, I will finish it. 

G. Where do you think you grew the most this year?

Honestly, I think the drabble challenge was a GREAT opportunity to throw myself into a variety of things that I NEVER would have considered before. I’ve gone from EXCLUSIVELY writing 1789 and Irish Mythology stuff to really working with anything that really vibes with me, which has been VERY exciting. And, between Le Cri, A Pressing Matter, and Back on the Shore, I’ve gotten several things that I’ve been talking about and tossing around for YEARS on the page and out there in some form or another. I’m still going to stick around 1789, of course, that’s still my BABY, but I really got the chance to work with a lot of things I’d have never normally have thrown myself into and had the chance to toy with my style in a way that I normally wouldn’t. 

M. Meta! Have any meta about a story you’re dying to throw out there?

Oh God, there’s ONE THING that I WANT to write the meta for but SPOILERS. That I don’t even know if it’s SPOILERS anymore. (I should honestly get into the habit of asking people “SO WHAT DO YOU THINK’S GOING TO HAPPEN NOW” like a thirteen year old who’s just uploaded their first Wattpad fic, but alas). But, since I’m working on PLP at the moment, have this: 

No, she gets no sleep tonight, her eyes locked on the bayonets as they gleam in the moonlight. She lays and waits and thinks.

Several hours later, a shot rings out in the dark. All the demons of Hell break loose, the only thought on Solène’s mind being that of another night, another volley of shots.

They mean to massacre them all.

The Queen has changed the King’s mind again and they will all be killed.

Every part of her knows it, screaming in her mind as they make their way for the Queen’s quarters, all else, all other thoughts disappearing.

A panicked voice asks them what they think they’re doing and another voice, she doesn’t know if it’s hers or one of the women with her, replies, “We’ll cut off her head, rip out her heart, fry her liver, and that won’t be the end of it!”

They are done with this, done with the queen, and they will take whatever they can get.

They have endured too much pain at this point to just curl up and die.

This wasn’t a fight they wanted to begin, but if it was a fight they needed to survive the night, they could give it to them.

They could give and give and give as they had always done, all of their lives.

A few guardsmen try to stop them, but they disappear beneath the wave of bodies flooding the palace. One of them breaks free, runs and pounds on the door, his bloodied hand staining the expensive, gilt wood as it slams against it before he’s tossed aside. “Save the Queen!”

A door slams ahead of them as they reach the room, the room itself is deserted, except for one woman who rushes in front of them all.

“I am the Queen!”

Solène recognizes the voice even before she can see her in the light of the torches, still wearing the clothing that she’d worn the night before, and she freezes.

So, for this section, I ripped a LOT from the historical record, as far as the threats the women made on the life of Marie Antoinette, the guard slamming on the door, the shot in the dark panicking the mob, BUT I also actually did look up at least one article on mob mentality to try to understand HOW someone would get involved with something like this. And the first thing I focused on was the INDIVIDUAL getting pushed aside in favor of the group. And the main way I ended up TRYING to get that to show through was in Solène’s reaction. 

At first, she starts off as a singular: “She lays and waits and thinks” “The only thought on Solène’s mind,” etc. But then, immediately AFTER that, as the panic sets in, she becomes a PLURAL, “They mean to massacre them all” “They will all be killed,” “they are done with this” “they have endured too much.” And it really reaches its height when they enter MA’s chambers, as she doesn’t even know WHO is speaking. It could’ve been her, it could’ve been the woman by her side, likewise with the guard who’s severely hurt (also, the “wave” of bodies, going back to the overall theme of water that’s there in PLP). She doesn’t know, because at this point, they’re one whole body acting out at the same time.  (There’s one brief point where Solène becomes a “her” again, but it’s only to say that her brain is NOT necessarily...its usual self, “all other thoughts disappearing,” which repeats what she’d also said when the shot first went off; she’s very much acting on INSTINCT here.) 

When does she become Solène again? When Olympe runs in front of her. She and Olympe are not a Thing per se, not at this point, even though Solène’s recognizing that she’s “a little bit in love with her,” but Solène does care enough for Olympe that she was able to be snapped out of it. In the chapter that I currently have sitting in my drafts and that SHOULD be published in the next day or so, there’s a bit where Olympe questions whether Solène would have continued on if she hadn’t been there. Solène says that she doesn’t know, because to HER this unlocked a part of herself that she didn’t really know was THERE, the kind of radicalism that she tends to associate with Ronan and the other revolutionaries (ESPECIALLY Maillard, who is kind of Ronan-By-Proxy here as a vanqueur of the Bastille who is ultimately ineffective when it comes to Solène’s complaints.) Personally? Even though I fully leave it up to interpretation, and everyone’s free to say “No, you’re wrong,” I wrote it with the idea that Solène probably would have done a Hell of a lot more harm had Olympe not been there. 

This is also fully intended as a parallel to Peyronan. (”NO, RACHEL, PEYRONAN ARE A THING? I HAD NO IDEA! THE SPOILERS!”) Both Peyrol and Solène had the same choice in this chapter, at its core: Their goal at hand, or the person they love. Peyrol let the army and his loyalty to the Monarchy get the better of him, Ronan ended up paying the price for it, and, as we see both at the funeral and at the trial at the beginning of the chapter...Laz is BROKEN by it. Solène doesn’t realize why he’s broken and even doubts that he is, because she doesn’t have the perspective, but...LOOK at him. He is not doing Well. He didn’t gain anything from what he did. In a snap-second decision, he chose his career and decades of indoctrination over Ronan, and he ended up losing both. Solène chose to break out of it and save Olympe, even if she was personally endangered by it. It doesn’t mean that one loved their person more than the other one, but it DOES mean that they get very different results. There’s a climb to the light for Laz as well, I’m not going to just...LEAVE him, but it’s going to be much, much longer than Solène’s. 

S. What’s the sexiest thing you wrote this year?

I’ll be honest: I know I have (2) Official Smut Fics to my name now, but I honestly don’t FEEL like anything I’ve written’s particularly SEXY so much as Describing Sex. This isn’t me being a Pretentious Literary Author who Does Not Write Porn, oh no; it’s that I genuinely don’t believe that what I write...qualifies as “sexy”. That being said, despite being only 100 words, “Honey Plunged Into Water” is probably the sexehiest. Which is hilarious because it’s also the kind of thing I would NEVER have written otherwise. There is one...unpublished fic for A Passage Through the Light that features Madame Roland/Marie-Anne that is....very, very gay and is probably honestly the sexiest thing I’ve ever written even without them actually doing the do. 

T. Themes, motherfucker, do you have them? What are they?

Earn Your Happy Ending, the question as far as the difference between society and what someone’s been conditioned to be like VS the individual, uncertainty, unease, that question of how much you really CAN know someone else, that general feeling of the calm before (or even during) the storm and how people can find intimacy then. There’s a lot of the gothic element there as far as the past, and the people who were THERE in the past, never really being...GONE from the narrative. Like, one way or another, they have the tendency to come back, whether it’s as a literal ghost or whether it’s just their skeleton buried underneath a tree somewhere. 

V. Which story was the most viscerally pleasing to write? Tell us your narrative kinks.

This is painfully predictable, but I THOROUGHLY enjoyed every second of writing Forgiveness. To this day, it’s probably the ONE piece of Peyronan stuff (besides Fowl Play!) that I’ve written where I’m, like, 95% happy with the final result, which is REMARKABLE for me. I really, really loved getting to WORK with their relationship and what makes it WORK at the heart of everything, the progression of it, the gradual increase in intimacy, the way they come to have that moment of “We’re in this one TOGETHER,” and an ending that’s HOPEFUL even though there’s still the ever-present promise of the Revolution in the background. All of that is a LOT of what I tend to like in my Peyronan to begin with, so it was really fantastic to just get that all out on the page. It’s one of those moments where I just want to gesture all over the page and go “THESE TWO LOVE EACH OTHER SO MUCH” even though they still have their bickering and their petty little moments. 

Another one that’s a WIP but that I feel’s far enough along to actually TALK about is the Fairy Tale AU (It has a name, but I tend to feel like announcing its name is jinxing it and I DO desperately want to get it out soon) and...it’s not my usual writing style, it’s not my usual way of doing things. There are some things that I do there that I wouldn’t necessarily do in a usual, realistic fic because it’s a FAIRY TALE that’s being given the 1789 treatment. It was really, really interesting to get to work with some of my favorite fairy tales, see some of the ways they’ve been told and retold throughout the years, especially looking for the ones that focus on commoner protagonists, elements of the gothic and dark fantasy mixed in there with the light. I’m not really that USED to getting to go wild, so it’s been a lot of fun to have one project where the research is less on the minutiae of 18th century life and more on...like....the similarities between the Italian and the Breton versions of The Travelling Companion folkstory. 

[sparklyjojos]

--[Disco Wednesdayyy 24/?] The brave new world is made out of closed rooms, or are we really switching the genre over 1000 pages into the book? Okay then. [tw: csa, child abuse, brief gore]--

Last time, Disco arrived at the World’s End, accidentally jumped to the year 2019, and discovered that a company called Styron Japan built themselves a nice new skyscraper in Chofu. As soon as Disco enters the building, a bunch of company vicepresidents introduce themselves and tell him JJ Styron is already waiting. Judging by their quick explanations, JJ naturalized himself through marriage with a Japanese woman and was planning on spreading his influence to Japan.

JJ welcomes Disco with tea and sweets and says he’s been awaiting this visit for years. He looks startingly young for his 38 years, but asked about it claims he’s just taking good care of himself, since it’s not like he can jump in time or something, haha! Already unsettled, Disco asks about Sharon Styron’s death.

“Ah, yes, she’s dead.” JJ answers casually. “I killed her. Drugged her so she couldn’t move and cut her to pieces while she was still conscious.”

“...Why?”

“Why? Because she betrayed me, of course! The only thing she cared about was protecting you. I’ve been trying to find you and your family, and she refused to give me any information. She claimed you were an orphan.” So she must have sincerely believed the lies Disco told her about his identity... “Well, but it turns out she wasn’t lying... Mr. William Eady.”

Completely confused, Disco looks at the documents JJ shows him. A birth certificate. ‘William Eady’, ‘orphan’, a slightly different day of birth, ‘St. Paul’s Church in New York’ as the place he was found in. Everything exactly like in the made up story he told Sharon. ...If emotions can take external shape, can imagination, fiction? But then Disco notices the documents were ‘found’ by the law office in which the real William Eady is employed, so it’s likely that the lawyer forged the certificate to protect Disco.

“What were you going to do to me when you found me?”

“Kill you, if you went in my way. But now that the company is big enough to no longer be threatened by you, I don’t really care. And you know what? I can’t help but feel deep respect for you for doing your best to solve the mystery. Which is why I’d love for you to become the sales promoter for our wonderful Kozue Method! I can vouch for its effectiveness -- why, I’m my company’s client as well, and look how youthful I am. Well, my body is physically 11, haha!”

He spreads a variety of pamphlets on the table.

“You’ve heard about using stem cells acquired from clones to grow organs and such, have you? The Kozue Method is bolder! You can exchange the entire body at once! It’s perfectly possible, since the personality of a person is tied to consciousness, and not their physical body. Of course, we cooperate with the Blackswan company, who’s the patent holder for the Main Child treatment and for thouroughly preparing the Jacket, that is, the vessel Sub Child. It’s the single greatest development in the world’s history, and it’s all thanks to you, Disco!”

The Kozue Method involves the following procedure. The client -- the Main Child -- is given horrible abuse, so just like it was with Kozue parts of themselves split off and take over fetuses still in the womb, pushing the original souls out. These split off parts -- the Sub Children -- are born and raised, then mysteriously disappear one day, and the empty bodies (the ‘Jackets’, as JJ calls them) are used as new vessels for the Main Child.

That’s not all. From what JJ says, it seems the global consciousness, humanity’s emotions and will, can now be curated -- after all, there’s a way to get negative emotions and violent thoughts quite literally out of you, and apparently resentment will vanish with ‘split personalities’ too. This resulted in a clean, shiny, perfectly peaceful world with apparently zero creativity, to the point that no new fictional media is really made. [I’m... honestly confused as to how this exactly works, especially considering some later parts. Maybe JJ is just overexaggerating.]

“It really is all thanks to you! You found Kozue and the six others, managed to connect them back together, and the news spread all over the world. You’re a hero, Disco!”

“...How many kids did you... did you sell?”

“In the last 10 years it’d be, hm, two hundred millions? Now, now, I understand you have reservations. There’s a little guilt involved, but it’s not like people don’t live with many little guilts on their backs anyway. We’re improving the procedures, too! We already established that sexual abuse makes the job done the quickest, and hey, the faster it is, the shorter it hurts! The kid will just forget it anyway. The Blackswan guys are true specialists, they can do a lot in just one tiny moment. In a single second the child gets, what did you call it? ‘Abuse’, and in the next, the memory has already been moved to the other personality. It’s good that the parents don’t have to see it, since nobody likes to live thinking their children are being hurt.”

Blackswan. The company’s logo on the pamphlets looks familiar.

[The name Blackswan (or Black Swan? I’m not sure of the spelling here) may be a reference to Project Bluebird, which -- at least according to all the conspiracy websites out there -- involved among other unethical experiments trying to induce DID in healthy subjects.]

“You may think: what about the parents of the Sub Children?” JJ continues. “Aren’t they angry? Here’s where one of our big achievements comes into play. You’ve heard about the vanishing twin phenomenon, right? Of course you have, you met Daibakusho Curry. It happens a lot in nature. The strongest survives. What we’re doing here is just giving the poor weak kids a chance! We retrieve and raise them, so they can get a go at living before... being reused.”

How can this future be avoided?, Disco thinks. Is the Black Bird Man involved? Maybe if Disco finds and defeats him, all this can be fixed. But no, he can’t change the future in any way... so what can he do? Find children. Somehow protect the Main Children from abuse, so this entire system breaks. So twins no longer vanish, just like he promised to Run Run -- oh God, if Run Run can speak and act like a human, does this mean...?

Disco asks JJ if Run Run was a victim of their experiments too (maybe they tried to transfer human souls into animal bodies at first?), but JJ seems to genuinely have no idea what he’s talking about.

“Ah, whatever,” JJ says, waving his hand. “You don’t seem convinced, and I’ll forget everything that happened here anyway once you leave.”

But before Disco can actually leave, JJ turns on a futuristic screen and shows him a documentary called LAMIA SYNDROME (2019), sponsored among other by Styron Japan. “Just so you know I’m not lying to you,” JJ says.

--

The documentary states that 4- to 8-year-old children have been disappearing all over the world since autumn 2006 in a phenomenon called Lamia Syndrome. A few parents talk about how their children suddenly vanished even under close supervision. We see a recording from a mall security camera showing a little girl holding her grandfather’s hand one second and disappearing the next. The footage is then repeated frame by frame. Just before the girl vanishes, another man shows up in the frame.

It’s not the Black Bird Man.

It’s future ‘Disco’. He looks around sixty and seems very happy about something. Looking straight into the camera, he gives it a thumbs up, and with the other hand holds up a sign with a single sentence:

THE WORLD IS MADE OUT OF CLOSED ROOMS

The documentary has a literary critic explain that “this is the title of Ehimegawa Juuzou’s 1996 novel, the 7th book in the Runbaba series. In it, a criminal called the Locked Room Billionaire announces that he’s going to kill a billion people in locked room situations in just ten years. Even if people may try to avoid going inside buildings or returning home, they’re nevertheless trapped in the locked rooms of their own fear.”

[Lore note: this is not even remotely what Maijo’s 2002 novel The World is Made out of Closed Rooms is about. Instead, it seems to be a combination of Seiryoin’s Cosmic and Carnival, with the main villain’s name and modus operandi being a mix of the Locked Room Lord and the Billion Killer. 1996 is when Cosmic was first released, too. I honestly wonder how different JDC is in Disco-verse if Mitamura could get away with this.]

“The crowded mall situation seems similar to one from the book,” the critic continues, “although there’s no proof that the same locked room trick was used. This time, there’s just an evil man at work. He seems similar in looks to Disco Wednesdayyy, a detective and one of the 31 people who disappeared in the Pine House case, which concerned Ehimegawa Juuzou’s death. The same man was involved in finding Yamagishi Kozue, the origin of the Kozue Method. Closed Rooms predicted our current situation in which children are sent to shelters in order to protect them from the Lamia Syndrome. Maybe by using the book’s title, the man is trying to say that he, a great detective, will eventually open the locked room... that is, bust open the shelters and kidnap the children.”

(Disco’s like, no, no, I’m not even a great detective, I’m a hardboiled detective! I don’t know shit about locked room tricks! I haven’t even read Mitamura’s books! [You know, you probably should, Mitamura seems to have put a lot of useful hints in those.] And all this must be a mistake, it’s not like I’d ever start kidnapping children... right?)

The documentary then shows an interview with the only survivor of the Pine House -- Dezuumi Style, now much older, who isn’t sure whether the man in the photo really is his friend Disco Wednesdayyy (and aw, he really refers to Disco as his friend, even if they hardly ever talked). From the interview we learn that this new world doesn’t need writers or great detectives anymore; no locked room murders or tricky false alibi cases or anything similar ever happens anymore. Dezuumi believes that ‘Disco’s’ Closed Rooms message is sarcastic, to show that “in a stiff world without different points of view or creativity, instead of people being closed in locked rooms in mystery novels, it’s now human emotions, ideas and values that are closed in new locked rooms...”

“But isn’t it right to stop the unwanted thoughts and focus on the useful ones?” the interviewer asks.

“No. People should be always thinking about new topics and coming up with new inventions. They should dare to break things. Trying to keep everyone’s thoughts perfectly ordered is terrorism.”

Next, the documentary shows Iwasaki Kousuke, the taxi driver from Nishi Akatsuki, who also isn’t sure if that’s Disco in the photo. When the interviewer brings up that Iwasaki’s family defeated cancer thanks to Kozue Method and that the idea of ‘a lifespan’ may soon be irrelevant to humanity, Iwasaki says that he’s still not sure if that’s a good thing. Death is a fact of life, after all, and we should be grateful for happiness and sadness.

The documentary then says the whoever the mysterious man is, he has kidnapped close to three hundred million children since 2006...

--

JJ stops the movie, saying that what he wanted Disco to see is that there really is only a tiny group of people in Japan standing against him, and the rest of the world is pretty much his. “But do you understand now why I have respect for you? Three hundred millions! For the first two years, we could hardly ever find the kids, since you hid the majority of them! I thought that maybe killing your family would lure you out, but that plan didn’t work out... and it’s not like the Blackswan guys haven’t already killed you seven times.” The time fold effects must have protected Disco from permanently dying in the future.

Three hundred million kids?! That’s be over 60 000 a day! You’d need an entire organization of space-jumpers to pull off something like this... or thirty one people from the Pine House. Did ‘Mercury C’ prevent everyone from leaving because they were meant to form a group, and their mysterious disappearance meant they simply moved to the shadows? Have the others spent years and years helping him hide the kids from Styron and recruit new space-jumpers?...

But where do you even hide three hundred million kids? They could probably warp any small space to accomodate even that number, and since they could jump in time they’d just make it so a child stays there for merely a second before it’s returned to their parents once the world becomes safe. But would they ever return them, considering that Styron won the battle for the world?...

Disco asks if JJ hurt the families of Disco’s accomplices, to which JJ claims he wanted to take down Disco first, so he didn’t bother yet. But anyway, JJ really wants Disco to stop this whole children kidnapping thing, because can’t Disco see how much the parents are hurt by his actions~? [You’re one to talk, buddy.] He resumes the documentary to show one last scene.

--

19-year-old Kozue says she’s not sure if the man in the photo is Disco. “I feel sympathy for the affected parents, and I think it'd be best to return the kids to them. The Disco I knew wouldn't do something horrible like that. Are you sure it's not someone else?” Then, as she’s leaving the shot, she looks back at the camera and yells that maybe it’d be better if she had never gotten involved with Disco at all.

The documentary ends by stating that the global birth rate is drastically falling, since women are afraid to bring children into the world in which the Lamia Syndrome runs rampant. It’s predicted that by 2080 the human race will stop procreating except for the purpose of prolonging their immortal lives.

--

“See? If you keep going, you’ll be the one responsible for the destruction of the human race,” JJ says. “Don’t you feel bad about it?”

But all Disco answers with is “Thank you for the movie, JJ. It was quite illuminating.”

“Huh? That’s not just some movie, that’s reality! Don’t you feel bad? Angry?”

“Not really. All it did was prove me that I’m right. Have you ever seen the kanji for ‘lifespan’ (寿命)? The first one (寿) may mean ‘congratulations’, ‘celebration’, ‘being happy with life’. There would be nothing to ‘celebrate’ if there wasn’t a finite ‘lifespan’. You really aren’t naturalized yet if you don’t get it. Japanese people understand why there would be no charm in making sakura trees bloom all year long.”

“Well, clearly Japanese people are mistaken. You can’t look at kamikaze pilots and tell me there’s nothing wrong with their heads!”

“You really don’t get sacrifices for a great cause, JJ. While kamikaze sacrificed their lives, they yelled ‘banzai’, which means ‘ten thousand years of life’. Not death, but life. You saw me smile in that photo in the documentary, did you? That smile is my banzai. If the future can’t be changed, then all this movie proves is that my future is bright: every single day spent fulfilled as I’m protecting children.”

As Disco sets to leave (again), JJ pulls out his last trump card and calls his Japanese wife to the room.

It’s Norma Brown. Or rather, Fuyuno Norma Brown. JJ’s new name is apparently Fuyuno Shinji.

--

Norma is overjoyed to see Disco and sweeps him in a hug, saying that she’s been looking for him all this time. She’s different than he remembers. Sure, she has the same personality, but she looks Japanese, which overall makes her the spitting image of Norma-faced Koeda.

“Do you not like this body of mine, Disco?” she asks seeing his reaction. “Don’t worry, it wasn’t obtained from some poor child! Shinji, haven’t you explained that to him yet?! The method has been improved, Disco! The Jackets are now cultivated in artificial wombs. No more pushing out souls out of the original to obtain a Subchild! After birth, they’re raised by good volunteer mothers. In addition, we discovered that stimulus other than ‘suffering’ works for inducing new personalities. Children aren’t hurting anymore, Disco!”

“It’s useless, honey,” JJ says. “This isn’t the Disco you knew. He no longer protects children.”

Norma tries to persuade Disco to stop taking children away, but he still won’t budge. She has a little exchange with JJ who seems to be seriously jealous (”Do you love me like you love Disco?”), and assures JJ that of course she loves him, Disco starts considering to bring out one of his hidden knives and attack JJ...

But before Disco can make a move, something explodes. It takes Disco a few seconds to realize that while he’s still holding Norma in his arms, her lower half was blown off by a small bomb hidden inside her body, much like the one Disco once pulled out of Nils. Her last words are, “You’re my hero, Disco.”

Disco desperately puts her body back together, trying not to ‘run away to the Pineapple Home’ [I like that this became a metaphore for withdrawing into your mind from shock]. But no matter what he does, she doesn’t come back to life.

“This isn’t her original body,” JJ says. He looks almost as shocked as Disco by what just happened. “The soul can’t return to it, and the original body is already gone...”

“But there’s a spare one, right? There must be!” Disco yells, mortified at his own response. Would he really sacrifice a child for her?... “No, wait... If I just return to the past, all will be undone. She’ll be alive again--”

“No. Norma is dead,” JJ says. “She’s going to be dead in every possible history from now on. Sure, this is just an imaginary, fictional future... but she wasn’t. She came from the past. We met in 2003, and the Blackswan guys helped arrange it so that she’d be taken to 2008, and then we’d get married. Now that she’s gone, her research will disappear too. She was the one who came up with all the new projects, so our progress will be lost... according to plan. Of course! The Blackswan guys must have swindled me again! She’s been kept here all this time for the sole purpose of being killed in front of you! It’s your fault!”

Was it really his fault?... No. Everything's already decided. Every attempt to change history is already contained in that history.

While JJ is still blaming him, Disco doesn’t take that shit and asks “JJ, what was the phrase activating the bomb? It was the question you asked her, wasn’t it?”

[Wait, those bombs are phrase-activated. Which means Nils openly opposing JJ Styron while in a conversation with him was even more awe-inspiring than I thought. DAMN, kid.]

Disco puts the bomb back together, slam dunks it into JJ's body, and starts the last barrage of questions.

Why isn’t JJ busy with drug cartels anymore? Apparently the Blackswan guys managed to somehow remove the hallucinatory effect of drugs, since it could destroy their idea of perfectly managed global consciousness.

So there’s peace in the world, but no new media is created, no Spielbergs or Hendrixes? Maybe so, but hey, even Disco’s beloved San Diego is now clean and pretty! (Disco finds this fact hard to imagine and honestly quite disturbing.)

What was going on with that case with JJ’s seven underlings, why were they all hanging by just one leg? “I don’t know, have you tried asking that kid that should be in the Pine House, Nils Mikami?” [Yeah, you better remember his name!]

Does JJ know about the Pineapple Home? No clue what that even is.

Alright. As Disco prepares to leave (for the nth time in this sequence), JJ says, “If you go back to the past now, the childless method Norma invented would cease to exist too, you know.”

“No. Norma was a great person, but not a unique one. There are many others like her who can come up with it.” [I assume that since the future is unchanging, somebody else really will come up with it.]

“...in the end, I’m weak and you’re weak. No matter the time or place, the weak are an easy target. No, maybe we just have different kinds of strength. After all, you didn’t run away even as Norma was dying in your arms. ...you know, she didn’t answer my question properly. She said that she loved me. But my question was... Do you love me like you love Disco?”

Disco instantly pulls the bomb out of JJ’s body and tosses it through the window, where it explodes at a safe distance. Not ouf of mercy or anything, just because fuck you, you slimy bastard, you’re not getting off that easy, and Disco will be sure to think of a much, much worse punishment later. [HELL YEAH]

--

Leaving the room (and pretty devastated looking JJ), Disco happens to glance at the sweets he was welcomed with, and notices the logo of a shop called Makuri-ya. ‘Makuri”... “Mercury”? Mercury C did say he was the owner of a traditional Japanese confectionary shop in Chofu...

It may be a good time to go shopping for some explanation.

[therightprometheanfire]

A Soundtrack For Your WIP

@dont-offend-the-bees tagged me in this the other day and I am for once getting something I was tagged in done in a sensible amount of time!! The shock!! The astonishment!! Thank you for the tag, lovely, this was fun! :)

As for other people to tag, I’m tagging @lavellington, @farah-adrienne-black, and @elijahwoodnot! Do it if you feel like it/have time/what have ye.

A snippet of your work in progress

The theme song for your WIP

The theme song for your protagonist

The theme song for your antagonist

The theme song for your protagonist’s love interest (if they have one)

The theme song for the main pairing of your WIP

The theme song for the opening chapter (if it’s a long fic)

Song for the current chapter/page (if it’s a long fic)

Any other songs you’d like to mention and why:

For this tag, I’m doing the much discussed Priestverse that @princessparadoxical and I have going! Answers + links under the cut.

SOME NOTES ABOUT THE VERSE FIRST

So this verse is essentially a giant roadtrip AU we started I think literally the day Alan Tudyk was announced as being cast for Mr. Priest where Todd, Farah, Amanda, Ken, and Vogel bust their folk out of Blackwing. They then split off into teams and start fleeing across the country from Mr. Priest and Friedkin, who are pursuing them in an effort to drag the subjects back to Blackwing. Priest and Friedkin develop a laser focus on Todd and Dirk because they keep evading them and it becomes a matter of personal pride for them.

When I say over the course of this post “the verse proper” or “the fic proper”, that’s because we envision the bulk of the verse as being that long road trip and then there’ll be stories afterwards, so “the verse/fic proper” means “the road trip”.

A snippet of your work

(this is in the middle of a chunk where Todd comes down with the flu not too long before they get together while they’re on the road which pushes at his inhibitions at physical contact from most folk and his hangups about experiencing it even when he wants to)

When Todd wakes up, he feels not really better, but his head feels a little clearer. He recognizes this at the same time he recognizes that his face is resting against Dirk’s collarbone. His hand is drifting up and down Todd’s arm, chin tucked on top of his head. Todd thinks about pressing closer. Then something occurs to him and he blinks, leaning back.

“Oh no,” he mumbles.

“What?” Dirk moves next to him. “What’s wrong?”

“I shouldn’t be…” he sits up quickly, intending to rise to his feet. It would probably be better if he didn’t get very abruptly dizzy, his vision getting a little foggy. “Oh god.”

“Whoa, don’t do that.” Dirk immediately steadies him. Todd blinks and sees his concerned face. He’s got a little bit of bedhead. It’s cute. “What is it, do you feel worse?”

“No, I can’t… I can’t be…” Todd blinks hazily. “I’ll get you sick.”

Dirk’s anxious face immediately lapses into eyerolling and maybe a little annoyance. “Oh, for the love of god, Todd.”

“Don’t-“

“Don’t don’t me, just sit back down.”

“But-“

Dirk gives him a severe look. “Todd. It is too late and you are too sick to worry about cross contamination.”

“I don’t wanna-“

Dirk leans over to the nightstand and grabs a small Gatorade bottle. “Hush, you’re going to overexert yourself and then I’m going to be cross.”

Maybe Dirk’ll let him at least put a little space between the two of them. It’d kill Todd, a little bit, he thinks, but maybe Dirk would fare better. “Can I just-“

“Probably not. Now drink this, and stay still. Your fever’s a little better but I’m still getting a new cloth for your forehead.” Dirk peels the cloth off gently. “And yes, you do need one, on account of the fact that the black plague has returned, and it has set its sights on its first victim.”

Todd grumbles but he settles back into the bed, drinking from the Gatorade bottle. It does manage to make his throat, which has ripped into flames, feel a little better, at least. Dirk returns with a cool cloth. His forehead feels a little better almost immediately.

“You’re really good at this,” Todd mumbles.

“Yes, well. Took a lot of trial and error. I mostly figured out how to take care of myself when I was sick by myself when I was sick.”

“You’re still good at it. S’nice.”

Dirk smiles a little fondly at him as he takes the Gatorade bottle from him and tosses it off the bed. Todd’s a little confused until he realizes he finished it. “I seem to recall one currently very ill individual telling me once upon a time that I was surprisingly incapable.”

“They sound like they’d probably be regretting that statement right about now.” Todd yawns wide. “You’re very capable. Sort of. You still eat like a child.” He’s starting to feel drifty and sleepy again. He motions for Dirk. “If you’re gonna insist on me getting you sick, then come back here.” He sneezes. Dirk grabs a tissue box as he settles back next to him. “Jesus, you’re so prepared.”

Dirk’s face does something funny as Todd blows his nose. “I… may have panicked a little bit at the pharmacy and… overloaded. On the bright side, we are very ready for a disease based apocalypse.”

the theme song of your WIP

ahhhhh fuck. We have so many songs accumulated for titles for chapters/stories in this verse it’s wild. The name of the entire verse (the proper name, not Priestverse as shorthand) is “but i will love you constantly (there’s precious little else to me)” from Hot Gates by Mumford & Sons, and that song is a little more bitter about the other person in the relationship than the verse is when it comes to the two of them. Probably The Deepest of Sighs, The Frankest Shadows by Gang of Youths, a song that Hannah introduced me to (“I will stand in the darkness and laugh with my heel on its throat” is a very Priestverse line), and I think there’s a lot of When You Were Young by The Killers in there (“we’re burning down the highway skyline/on the back of a hurricane that started turning when you were young” is also a very Priestverse line). Honestly, the thing is so huge at this point that I don’t know if there’s one song that can fit the whole span of it.

the theme song of your protagonist

almost the entirety of this verse proper is just Dirk and Todd rattling around the country and getting closer in a succession of cars and a variety of motel rooms, so to pick one of them out as a particular protagonist is hard, but it’s from Todd’s POV. Again, this verse is vast, and Todd undergoes significant character development throughout the course of it. The guy gets better at handling and processing and expressing his feelings and it’s this whole rocky kinda road, so finding one song for him is tricky. But Kamikaze by Walk the Moon is probably a decent shot, as well as Warning Call by CHVRCHES and The Cave by Mumford & Sons.

the theme song of your antagonist

the two main antagonists are Friedkin and Priest. Wilson is ostensibly the chief villain, but I’m not sure we ever actually see her in the verse, now that I think about it. She sets Priest and Friedkin on the two of them and I don’t think we really see her, she’s just pulling the strings. I don’t know if the lyrics fit super accurately, but reading this question, the very first thing I thought of for Priest was the cover of Bad Moon Rising by Mourning Ritual, cause it’s real slow and menacing. As for Friedkin, I’m not 100% sure (something scary but also kinda manic) but seeing as it only says antagonist singular and not plural, I’m grabbing that and running with it cause I got Priest down.

the theme song for your protagonist’s love interest (if they have one)

fuck me, I’m not sure. Dirk is a bundle of insecurities, self doubt, and self loathing (although it manifests differently to Todd’s self loathing, something I’m actually intending to touch on in a bit for the verse I’m working on in a couple days), but also a bundle of extreme determination and love. He also goes through significant character development over the course of the work (better grasping his self worth as well as better conveying his emotions similarly to how Todd does). Grah, this would be so much easier if I picked a smaller verse. I think The Last of the Real Ones by Fall Out Boy is a pretty Dirk song for this verse, and that’s probably the closest off the top of my head, but I’m sure there’s loads more.

the theme song of the main pairing of your WIP

actually two rise to mind for this, and one of them makes sense and the other doesn’t entirely. The first is Everlasting Light by The Black Keys, which is a song about love and relying on each other, which fits. The second song is Old College Try by The Mountain Goats, which as anyone who follows me knows is one of my all time favorite songs in the history of music, but is also about a couple facing the end of their marriage but resolving to face it together. However, seeing as in the song it is not depicted as specifically the end of their marriage but the end of the two of them, a lot of the lyrics are pretty fitting (“I will walk down to the end with you/if you will come all the way down with me” is pretty damn Priestverse), so I’m counting it.

the theme song for the opening chapter if it’s a long WIP

The way Hannah and I are currently discussing structuring this verse is not as a story with a boatload of chapters, but a series on AO3 with a boatload of stories, some of which may have chapters. We have a prologue-y kinda story set for the verse, but seeing as it has not yet been written (or even mapped out very much), I’m gonna go with the first chapter of the first story of the verse proper, which opens with Todd, Farah, Amanda, Ken, and Vogel busting into Blackwing to break out their people. The song I’ve been thinking about a lot is, predictably, Jailbreak by Thin Lizzy.

the theme song for the current chapter/page (if it’s a long fic)

I’m actually working on a few different chunks of the fic right now, from Todd’s first pararibulitis attack in front of Dirk to the two of them discussing feelings on a park bench not too long after they actually get together to the two of them wandering through an IKEA closer to the end of the fic. I’m gonna pick out C’mon by Panic! at the Disco and Fun. for that last one, which is not a perfect fit, but the lyric “with everything falling down around me/I’d like to believe in all the possibilities” is integral to the whole theme of that chapter/story/whatever it ends up being and really towards their state of mind towards the end of the fic.

any other songs you’d like to mention and why

This is what my word program currently looks like. The first bit tab there is a doc where I type out all the chunks of all our various verses as I work on them. The third tab is what I sent Hannah a few weeks ago that was all the chunks of the Priestverse organized as you may be able to guess chronologically. The fourth tab is the actual rough draft doc for the entire verse, where I’m putting everything in chronologically and separating the story chunks out as I’m thinking they’re going to have to be published, to be sent to Hannah once it’s in a sizable/coherent state. In the fourth tab I have a list of lyrics/quotes to be used as chapter or story titles, and it goes on two full pages. This sounds like I’m being irritable or bitchy, but honestly, I’m so fucking excited to share this with y’all, so it’s me being thorough and not cranky.

(the tab that’s open now is where I’m typing all this out so I don’t lose it if tumblr glitches out and the second tab is a separate fic I’m working on that’s essentially an amnesia fic set in a pocket dimension where you can absolutely tell that I loved Waiting for Godot in high school)

So there’s a lot of songs and a lot of them as you may have guessed by now are Mumford & Sons. But the ones I would personally throw in there (that haven’t already been mentioned) are:

-Coloring Outside the Lines by MisterWives because there is a lot of angst in this verse, but there’s also a lot of light and joy, and I think this fits the silver lining of the verse nicely

-Roll Away Your Stone by Mumford & Sons, almost entirely because I picture the whole “stars, hide your fires/these are my desires” part of the song as being Dirk’s feelings about being his own person with himself and with Todd

-Bury It by CHVRCHES ft. Hayley Williams and I can’t state all the ways this song is applicable at this current time but trust me it is

-Press Restart by Walk the Moon because the lyrics “I am not the subject/I am the experiment/I am mad scientist/invent my way out of this” has always felt very Dirk to me and I think I actually mentioned in one of the two layouts for this verse I have with Hannah that I think Dirk eventually gets a “I am not the subject/I am the experiment” tattoo at one point.

I’m gonna end with those because I could go on for a while. Hannah and I are pushing hard to get this thing done in the next few months so we can show it to y’all, and I can’t wait till you get to see it! Hannah, any thoughts?

[noxloved-archive]

Can you sort your muses from weakest to strongest?

so, for simplicity’s sake, i’m going to go with ‘how well would this muse do in a fight’ as my metric here (because if we went for emotional strength, well, we’d be here for a long time.

under the cut because i have a fuckton of muses. oops. (the real reason i decided to wait…i forgot how to do readmores on mobile lmao). as in the ask, this is going from weakest to strongest. also will be assuming main verses for them all (since phila, for example, would be much stronger prior to the fall, but i don’t want to put her twice).

frankie - frankie has zero combat experience, and due to their disabilities, melee fighting is a no-go. they do pick up archery while in askr, because they don’t feel comfortable being out in the thick of things with absolutely no means to protect themselves, but because they’re still learning (and the chronic illnesses don’t make it easy) and because their disabilities often wear them out, they wouldn’t last that long in a fight.

ethlyn - ethlyn is primarily a healer. she can use a sword, and while she’s not bad she lacks the strength to do a whole lot of damage–it’s enough to hold off an enemy until help arrives (or until she can escape), but she’s not exactly anyone’s first choice for front-line fighting.

elise - elise can use tomes, but she’s still learning, and her siblings are understandably reluctant to have her in the thick of things, since she’s thirteen. with that said, she has a natural talent for magic, so she can deal some devastating blows. 

flora - flora states herself that she’s not particularly adept at the combat arts, and she’s not. with practice and time, she could become strong enough to hold her own, but her primary role in the army is support…especially in birthright when she has to recover from all those self-inflicted burns. she’s also similar to yoshiko in that if she turned completely towards magic, she’d actually be a better fighter, but she’s forbidden from doing so under king garon’s stipulations (not that those mean much in birthright or revelations, but there’s a learning curve).

miriel - strong in magic, but not the most agile of fighters. she’s actually a little on the clumsy side, and she doesn’t care much for fighting. she does it because she needs to in order to be a shepherd.

yoshiko - if she used offensive magic, she’d actually be a force to be reckoned with. but she doesn’t, having gone for the yumi instead (as a deliberate limit to her fighting strength). that said, she is fairly decent at hand to hand combat. what she lacks in physical strength she makes up for with knowledge of the body and how to turn an opponent’s strength against them. 

rosalind - rosalind, unlike frankie or yoshiko, is actually a pretty good archer, and she also keeps a dagger or two on her person just in case someone gets close. she’s also got a lot of dirty tricks and other strategies up her sleeve, so she’s far from defenseless.

maribelle - maribelle, like elise and ethlyn and flora, is also more of a healer than a fighter, but she’s got her fair share of experience and while she’s far from bloodthirsty, she doesn’t hesitate during a fight and she’s not averse to doing what she thinks needs to be done. also, her confidence helps.

faye - faye is still in training, so she’s not the strongest of pegasus knights, but she’s got determination in spades and a good lance arm thanks to having grown up laboring in the fields. by the end of echoes, she probably ranks somewhere around the same as caeda.

florina - florina isn’t the strongest, physically, nor is she the most experienced, but thanks to a strong bond with huey she can easily hold her own. if nothing else, huey can act as a weapon. (just kidding…sort of)

aileen - aileen, in theory, makes for a pretty formidable opponent, as she has high resistance and can wallop an enemy with dark or anima magic. however, her ptsd can hinder her in battle to the point where she needs to withdraw, and she’s not physically very strong. 

phila - sure, she’s disabled, but phila still has a lot of military training under her belt, and if you give her a mount she’s still a formidable foe. it takes her time to build back her strength after being bedridden with near-fatal wounds for months, but she’s not gonna let that stop her. that said, she’d have a hard time fighting without a mount…unlike her pre-fall self.

lianna - she’s never been as inclined towards the martial arts as rowan, and it shows. but she’s not bad by any means, either.

chihiro - despite their relative lack of experience, they manage to survive garon’s suicide missions, so i’d say that counts for something. plus, they learn pretty quickly how to fight out of necessity.

myrrh - while myrrh is very strong in her draconic form, she’s more or less defenseless in human form (unless you want to count the fact that she can fly). in other words, in humanoid form she’s good at escaping fights, but not so good at actually fighting. but that also means she doesn’t get hurt too often unless she really needs to hide her identity as a dragon.

idunn - i’m ranking her above myrrh in dragon form largely because she was more or less formed into a weapon and because she’s a mage dragon, meaning that spells don’t do anything to her. however, in human form she’s likewise defenseless (well, except for her absurdly high magical resistance–she may as well retain the properties of a mage dragon as human). she’s the final boss for a reason.

nah - unlike myrrh and idunn, nah can fight in her human form. she’s not exceptional at it, but necessity dictated that she learn to do it. even though idunn is by far stronger than her in draconic form, nah’s greater sense of free will and the fact that she can defend herself in human form place her higher on the list.

panne - panne also suffers from the significantly weaker in human form thing, but like nah, she knows her way around a fight in her human form. she’s actually better at it than nah is, though, hence her being the “strongest” of my transforming muses.

nyx - nyx has had centuries to hone her craft, and it shows. her biggest drawback is that her body is a little more on the fragile side, and her chronic pain means that she doesn’t have the best stamina on the battlefield. she’s good at hitting hard and fast, and then pulling back out for the longer haul.

katarina - katarina’s biggest downfall as a fighter is that she’s too kind, honestly. it’s relatively easy to tug at her heartstrings and therefore cause her not to fight at full capacity. with that said, she’s a highly trained assassin, a decent tactician, and a competent mage. if she’s going at you with full force, you’re likely in for some trouble.

eliwood - he’s well-trained and has excellent fighting technique, but he’s not the strongest of fighters (in part because he doesn’t care for it all). putting him on a horse helps a fair amount, though, as does giving him durandal.

caeda - caeda lacks the formal training of, say, the whitewings, but as she fights alongside marth and his army, she grows to be a formidable fighter in her own right. though she’s not trained in strategy, she’s good at thinking on her feet, too.

cynthia - cynthia is a seasoned fighter out of necessity. you can tell she’s significantly self-taught, but she sure as hell is effective. if she gets caught up in her heroics, however, she sometimes leaves herself wide open. she can also be reckless during a fight.

lyn - she’s well-trained, fast, and highly determined. in other words, she’ll probably kick your ass. with that said, she can be a little hot-tempered, which can get her into trouble, and while she’s physically strong, she can still be overpowered by an enemy.

anelie - like lyn, anelie can be overpowered by an enemy, but anelie fights dirty thanks to her training as an assassin on top of her skills and speed. it’s the dirty fighting that puts her just barely above lyn. 

palla - she’s an elite whitewing, meaning she has formal military training and a boatload of skill. she had to, because the whitewings had to prove themselves useful in an army consisting mostly of wyvern riders. her mount is also fiercely protective of her. 

sonya - i’m just saying, there’s a reason she made a name for herself in grieth’s army. she has no qualms about killing those who stand in her way, and she’s a formidable mage to boot. like anelie, she’s also more than willing to fight dirty. 

hanan - hanan isn’t as good at fighting as ruya, but she’s still a strong fighter on her own, and her strategic knowledge gives her an extra edge. unfortunately in a real battle, having to find alternate means of communication puts her at a slight disadvantage. with that said, hanan is nigh-indestructible thanks to grima.

chrom - he’s physically quite strong and has an unpredictable (albeit flashy) fighting style. he’s also constantly honing his craft, and he’s able to practice with a wide variety of others due to the shepherds’ eclectic fighting force. however, he’s largely self-taught, which does leave some holes in his technique, and his flashier moves can leave him open to attack.

sigurd - his mount may as well be a weapon itself, and he’s a highly skilled knight used to fighting against tough opponents. 

camilla - her wyvern is a force to be reckoned with, and she’s got brute strength and raw magical power in spades. between her own innate fighting prowess and her ruthlessness on the field, she’s one of the strongest fighters in my muse list.

aversa - tbh, aversa and camilla are about equal in strength, though aversa is slightly stronger in magic and slightly weaker in melee combat than camilla. aversa also has a little more tactical know-how.

xander - xander is canonically one of the strongest fighters in fates, and he’s helped in no small amount by the fact that he has a divine weapon. he’s also fully capable of being ruthless when he wants to be, and his war horse is nothing to scoff at either. he’s also very strong tactically.

zeke - he’s pretty close to xander in strength, but i figure the fact that he somehow manages to survive an unplanned voyage across the sea while on the verge of death counts for something. 

ruya - before you accuse me of favoritism, I HAVE AN ACTUAL REASON. ruya might not be the best melee fighter, but she’s got strong magic and a fuckton of skill, meaning that her skills tend to trigger often, not to mention her strategic advantage. moreover, like hanan (actually i wrote this hc for her first), grima drastically boosts her defenses, meaning that she’s really fucking hard to kill.