#I mean it's under a cut so hopefully it's not clogging dashes but I wrote quite a bit

[lesbianmaxevans]

so..... I’ve been trying not to say anything bc this fandom rlly seems to hate when ppl criticize the writing but the finale is monday and my expectations are underground. so uh. rnm negativity ig.

so, these past few episodes have made it abundantly clear to me that these writers wish max and liz weren’t the leads of the show. and before anyone tries to argue that it’s always been an ensemble show, that’s blatantly not true. jeanine and nathan have been billed as 1 and 2 since day 1. in season 1, liz is literally the cause of every single plot point, whether thru her directly setting something in motion, or other characters reacting to her. like I’m not exaggerating, literally everything that happens can be traced back to her digging into rosa’s death. she is the center of the show, and as such, given her romance with max is a very important part of her life, max should be the next most important character. at the start, this show claimed that the very heart of the story was their romance. and for season 1, that’s true. but as soon as we hit season 2, it wasn’t.

now, I think it can still be argued that liz and max remain the leads, because excluding the second half of season 2 where liz was practically shoved out of the main story line, liz and max as characters have remained at the center of this story, if only bc of jones’ interest in the two of them as max is his clone and liz is the only scientist who has the knowledge to accomplish what he wants. but their romance has very obviously taken a backseat post season 1. we had 2x06 where they basically spent the whole episode together, but then the writers worked overtime to reduce the amount of screentime they shared for the rest of season 2. like hello there was an episode where max went to the reservation to learn more about his family history and they chose to have liz stay behind in roswell??? they gave liz that horridly executed ICE storyline instead of her being by her boyfriend’s side while he learned more about his heritage???? and then they’re basically in conflict for the remaining time of the season????

and season 3 was such a joke for echo like, yeah, I got some of my favorite echo scenes, but how the hell were we at 3x09 before they had any real movement? how the hell do the two lead characters only share scenes in 6 of 13 episodes (8 if you want to be generous and count their 30 seconds at the end of 3x02 and the dream sequence in 3x04)???? I haven’t gone back and looked at the screentime, so maybe I’m wrong but I’m willing to bet liz spent just as much time, if not more, with jones than she did with max. liz and max literally shared like 10 minutes prior to 3x09 and half of that was just max in a panic bc liz was dying as an effect of that handprint dumping his heart failure onto her. if you genuinely think what echo got in season 3 was more than scraps, idk what to tell you.

and now we’re here at season 4, which just feels like the biggest fucking slap in the face. the writers on some level know that liz and max’s relationship is supposed to be the focus of the show because the goddamn season 4 promo was literally all about them. we started the season with max attempting to propose THREE times and liz asking him to wait but promising she’ll say yes the next time he does. how the fuck do you start a season like this and not have a thru line of liz conquering the fears that made her hesitate and accepting the proposal (or better yet, being the one to propose) by the end of the season??? like that’s literally just writing 101. especially when the writers have relentlessly had the two of them discuss this engagement. like how do you have max trying to propose repeatedly in 4x01, have their future engagement or a wedding be brought up almost every episode from 4x02-4x08, and then have liz spend the entirety of 4x09 in her dreamscape where she had to confront why she was hesitant to accept the proposal and they are still not engaged by 4x12????? and honestly I don’t think it’s likely that echo’s getting engaged in the finale. I hope I’m wrong, but given how the writers have been dangling this in front our faces all fucking season and how they were oh so confident about a damn season 5 order, I don’t think it’s happening. it’s just insanity, bc from a writing standpoint it makes no fucking sense. unless you don’t care that much about the couple and you think toying with fans is fun.

and worse than the writers toying with us re this proposal is the fact that they introduced a conflict that was just a retread of echo’s horrid season 2b storyline that I don’t think a single viewer liked???? like point for point it was the same fucking plot, except this time with no resolution???? bc liz refusing to respect max’s bodily autonomy has been completely swept under the rug by the writers in favor of blaming the mist for making liz be cruel... as if their conflict didn’t start in 4x07 and liz’s addiction to the mist didn’t start until 4x10.

and like regardless of whether you ship malex or not, you should see how fucked up it is that they get an engagement so easily, when echo still hasn’t managed to reach that step when they are the lead characters????? when michael and alex had never previously discussed the idea of marriage????? when we started season 4 with michael being scared to move in with alex??????? versus liz and max having been living together for six months??????? regardless of whether you ship kybel or not, you should see how fucked up it is that liz is crying and telling max that she’s terrified she’ll never see him again if he and isobel go through the portal, and that moment basically only happens to be a springboard for making kybel official??? bc this scene that should be an emotional goodbye for echo derails into liz reacting to the two of them instead??? when, again, max and liz are the leads????

and this is before I’ve even discussed the disrespect to liz and max as characters! post season 1, they’ve reduced liz to her being a scientist and she spends at least half of her screentime in a lab, either alone or with some side character who only matters for the current season. and these writers keep insisting on her shoddy ethics! like clearly her apology last season meant nothing since these writers decided to pull the same shit again! and this characterization of her prioritizing the science over everything else, of her pursuing science due to her desire for approval/validation is completely at odds with her reasoning in season 1, which was that she wanted to prevent anyone from experiencing the pain she felt when she lost rosa. like the writers completely erased that reasoning and switched it to being all about her ego and chasing accolades.

and max? he spends 5 episodes in the pod in season 2 and then he’s given absolutely nothing to do but reacting to exposition dumps the rest of the season. season 3 he thinks he’s dying and trying to help everyone else make peace with that, then he’s back in the pod for 3.5 episodes, then he’s fucking sidelined for the jones fight, as if that makes any goddamn sense bc the set up of the season was that max was the only one who could possibly fight jones. and then season 4 they just start to scratch the surface with max manifesting these new powers after jones’ death to immediately take his powers away for half the season.

like these writers have proven time and time again that they care more about their shitty, nonsensical, and (frankly) boring plot than they do actually digging into these characters. which is not how one should approach writing a tv show! how the fuck is anyone supposed to care about these characters and invest in the show when you only shallowly explore them??? how are you gonna repeatedly state that liz is the lead and then torpedo her character like this in service of focusing on other characters who are not the lead?????????? how are you gonna end season 1 giving the audience the info that max is “the savior” just to twist it into a title jones gave himself, so it’s not about max at all???? like genuinely there is no explanation for this derailment other than the writers are more interested in literally anything else. and it’s just sad how much potential was wasted.

[infiniteanalemma]

So, I said I'd do a NaNo 2023 retrospective on the things I've learned over the past month. Here this bad boy is. It took me a little longer than expected, because it's a long, long post. (Y'all know I can't help but write an essay for every little thing!) Admittedly, it's somewhat self-indulgent, but it (hopefully) has some useful information about writing strategies. As per my usual policy, under the cut so it doesn't clog anyone's dash.

Okay, so, to start ... I've been doing NaNoWriMo since 2016, but this is only my second time winning. I also won last year's NaNo, using the same project. I don't want to get too deep into what the project is, as I don't want to kill my forward movement by talking about it before I'm far enough along to get feedback. What I'll say is that it's a visual novel/game script, and I already had a pretty good chunk of content before I used it as my NaNo project.

I'll get more into why that is important later, but for now, I'll just say that I've been writing for a long time and have a long trail of unfinished projects stretched out behind me.

First, though, let me just start with some background information, to lay the foundation of some of both the problems and solutions I've discovered. If you don't care about the background stuff, and are just interested in potential strategies, look for the ** down below.

Okay, I can reasonably say that this November was a whole mess, as per usual. It seems like something insane happens to me every November, and this year was no exception in that regard. Even so, I managed to write every single day of the month except one, which was the day I wound up in the ER. Long story short, my doctor had me try out a new medicine this month and I had a bad reaction to it. (I'm fine, for the record. It took about a week to get out of my system, but I'm okay now.) That one day aside, I wrote every day and on most days, managed to write more than my necessary minimum.

Personally, I'm really proud of myself for pulling that off. As someone with Attention Deficit Disorder (inattentive variant, not hyperactive), it's remarkably difficult for me to form habits and stick with them. I have a huge problem with sticking to something every day, and there's a tendency for me to quit doing something completely if I miss even one day.

I'm also really bad about rewarding myself for success, and I don't get that natural hit of dopamine for finishing my tasks. (Thanks, brain!) This means that even when I succeed, it's hard for me to even appreciate it. Between that and my executive dysfunction, it's hard to stick to doing anything consistently for 30 days. I've had to figure out ways to make myself acknowledge and reward myself for reaching my goals, something I've struggled with for a long time.

Now, part of the problems I've had in the past with completing NaNo was that, in addition to having crazy things happen during November, I've never really had much support in my writing endeavors. I was surrounded by people who thought writing was a waste of time, and didn't understand (or, frankly, care to understand) why I wanted to do it.

As someone who both writes and creates visual art, it's hard to create when people discourage you from creating unless you're actively making money on it. Now, these people weren't trying to be malicious. On the contrary, they were trying to be helpful. They just see things like writing and art as fanciful and unnecessary, a distraction from real things that you should be doing instead. This seems to be a common problem for creatives. Believe me, I've tried relating it back to their hobbies and how they enjoy spending time on doing those things without financial compensation, but somehow my writing and art are different to them.

After a while, I quit trying to explain it to them and attempted to do all my work in (effectively) secret. Combine that with my other problems, and what you get is inconsistent output that lasts only as long as I could force myself to keep going only for myself. As you might imagine, that typically didn't work out well. If I gave up on a project, no one knew except for me, and no one cared except me. Hence, several dead projects and WIPs. It did not help to have other people encouraging me to stop writing and try it next year, only for the same thing to happen again that next year of telling me to quit and put it off again for another year.

Fast forward to last year.

It was a bad year for me in a lot of respects, but somehow, I managed to win NaNo for the first time ever. How did I manage that? It was a combination of things, honestly, but I think it boils down to three main reasons: one, instead of a new project (like I'd tried in previous years), I started NaNo on a project I'd already been working on for quite a while, something which already had a decent chunk of words. (This is the game I mentioned before.) Two, I allowed myself to "cheat" my word count by including things that were related but not directly in the manuscript (working on background lore, codex entries, and such). And three, I told a small handful of others about it who weren't in my well-meaning-but-discouraging immediate circle.

I still did my writing largely "in secret," as I didn't confide in those few other people the idea of what I was doing, only that it was "a writing thing" and explained the concept of NaNo to them. Still, having others know I was trying to reach a word count and being supportive instead of critical did wonders for having me hold myself accountable for not skipping days. Maybe that seems like common sense, but I was so used to having to hide what I was doing or be met with concerned disapproval or condescending amusement at my "fancy" that it was a whole sort of whiplash to meet people who simply thought it was incredible that I could write so many words.

Plus, by allowing myself to "cheat," I did an end-run around my perfectionism, which tells me that if I don't do the task exactly right, I shouldn't even bother to do it at all. Perfectionism (at least for me) isn't just the enemy that tells me every word has to be perfect, but also that the way I do it also has to be perfect. I "cheated" a fair bit that November, and it was incredibly freeing.

This NaNo, I decided to springboard off of last year's revelations. If merely telling others helped me hold myself accountable for my days, this year I decided I would do at least one in-person write-in and meet with other NaNo-ers. (Is that the word? What do we even call ourselves? Oh, it's WriMos, isn't it? ... Honestly, that word doesn't look much better.) I also gave myself permission again to "cheat", and while I did end up doing it one time, I actually didn't really need to this go-round. Merely knowing that I could do it was enough that it took the pressure off for having to get it perfect.

But that wasn't enough. I decided I'd try to push myself even more this go around. (Yes, I know ... some of you can possibly feel the hubris rearing its head, the pride awaiting the fall. We're getting there.) I decided I'd try out a whole bunch of strategies I'd heard or considered, but not yet given a go.

This is where it becomes somewhat relevant that I'd recently been put on a new medication. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the medicine contained a fairly powerful stimulant that is commonly used for weight loss. (That's not why I was taking it, but that information is relevant for what comes next.)

For the first time in a long time, I was feeling good. I had more energy than I'd had in years, along with a brand new ability to focus. On one particular day in my first week, I knocked out over 3,000 words. I was pretty consistently hitting above par, racking up my word count. I was getting those words in, buddy. Things were going amazingly well. It was not to last, however.

Warning: medical stuff ahead, for those who'd like to skip it!

To its credit, the medicine worked. It accomplished what it was supposed to do, which was to help my body use the energy I had and not feel so lethargic, and increase my focus. Unfortunately, it also did some things it really didn't need to do to my body alongside that. I realized in short order that I was having side effects from the medicine, and quit taking it as soon as I realized. 

I am an inherently stubborn person when I want to be, though, so I suffered for three days before having someone take me to the ER. Even then, I didn't want to go because I had convinced myself there was nothing they were going to be able to do except tell me I had to wait for the medicine to work out of my system. I told myself I could sit and suffer at home just as well as I could sit and suffer at the ER. It took my doctor telling me to go before I reluctantly gave in.

It's a good thing I did, though, as among its other side effects, the medicine left me severely dehydrated even after the copious amounts of water I'd been drinking. My veins were so shriveled up that even one of the hospital's phlebotomists couldn't find a vein in my elbow or wrist to put my IV in, so they ended up sticking it in my bicep. I was partially correct that they couldn't do anything to get the medicine out of my system any faster, but they did make sure I was at least somewhat hydrated before they let me go.

Okay, hospital stuff over!

After I went home, my body had to crash out and recover. I had to go the rest of November without that extra pep, while also recovering from the side effects. That put me at a low, while trying to keep up writing. I'd built myself a nice little buffer at the beginning of the month, but my jaunt to the ER ate a decent-sized chunk out of it.

Here's where those strategies came into play. I'd discovered a few things I felt were helpful, but I'd been pumped full of energy when I started. Now that I was working from a deficit, the true effectiveness of those strategies would show themselves. Would they still work when I was struggling to accomplish anything, or was my ease at writing purely from the stimulant?

** Here's the list of strategies that ended up sticking with me through the month:

Music - I've tried writing with music before, but I always felt it was a distraction. However, this time around, I tried writing to video game soundtracks -- and this actually worked for me. I think part of the reason it worked for me is that most music in video games doesn't have lyrics, and I think lyrics are a large part of why other music distracts me. However, listening to classical or modern classical music didn't work well to me, either. I think what made the soundtracks work for me is that I largely used music from games that I've played: as a gamer, I've been essentially conditioned to focus on in-game tasks while those tracks play on loop. That translates into writing without becoming distracted. Notably, it doesn't work with video game tracks from games I haven't played. Familiarity seems key, at least for me. This might not work for everyone, but it might work for other gamers.

Writing Sprints - I've also tried these before, and they didn't seem to work in the past. However, I think what made them work this time is a combination of two things: shorter lengths, and consistent rewards. My ideal sprint time seems to be between 10 and 20 minutes. Longer sprints become tiresome, and my attention starts to drift. Shorter sprints make me feel pressured as I try to think what to write, which causes a sort of mini-writer's block. 10 to 20 minutes seems to be my golden mean; long enough to think without feeling the pressure of the countdown, short enough not to strain my focus. Then, regardless of words written, the sprint is followed by a break with a reward. My word counts during these little sprints tend to be somewhat small, usually between 50 to 200 words at a pop, but those add up. Anything that adds words to the count works.

In-person writing events - I'm an extreme introvert, so I don't think I could do a daily or even weekly meet-up, at least not consistently. That said, I do think this helped motivate me. Sometimes it's a struggle for me to socialize, so an in-person event was an excuse to get out of the house and be around people. At the same time, the goal wasn't to have to interact, but for each of us to focus on our writing -- a "social" event, but one where each of us doing our own thing. Plus, everyone at our write-in was very nice, and also pretty small-scale. It might have been a whole different story if I'd shown up and there were a hundred people there. Ours ranged from three to about seven people. Small, low-key, informal -- and with snacks! That worked for me tremendously well.

4thewords - Now, I'm 100% committed to this one yet, as I didn't start it until over halfway through November, but so far, it seems to be working pretty well. I actually found this one in NaNo's resources. Basically, it's a RPG-like "game" where you fight monsters by doing timed writing sprints. I actually wrote this post in 4thewords. You can line up a row of monsters of your choice to "fight" in an uninterrupted stream. As of typing this right now, I'm "battling" a monster called a Kai, which has a 75 word count with a 10 minute timer. Different monsters have different word counts and time limits. As soon as you defeat a monster, it goes on to the next one in your queue until you've reached the end of the total word count. When you win, you get experience and items, which can be used for future battles and/or to customize your in-game avatar. I haven't delved deep into the more gamey aspects yet. There's in-game story lore, quests to complete, and different locations to visit. It also counts your daily writing streak, but only gives you credit for your streak if you've written at least 444 words. I know there are other timed sprint apps out there, but this one does have a whole host of features, all of which are optional. You aren't in any way punished if you break your streak, for example, and there are in-game items you can use to "repair" a broken streak if that's something that bothers you. I don't know for sure that it's something I'll stick with long term, but it does seem to be working for the moment. It is paid, though. There's a 30 day free trial, which I'm still in, and a $4 monthly membership.

Small Rewards - As I mentioned above in Writing Sprints, I made sure to reward myself for meeting my goals, whether it was reaching my daily word count or finishing a sprint. I'm bad about not keeping track of my successes, let alone reward myself for them. As a side effect, it can be hard to see the progress I make. For me, it's easy to only look at the big goals and try to come up with a reward that matches that, but that has historically never worked for me. Forcing myself to stop and acknowledge small successes has been very helpful. I've experimented with a few different types of reward. The small, consistent rewards seem to work better -- giving myself a short dose of social media/discord time for finishing a sprint, looking at video game stuff (new games I'd like to try, game mods, etc.), a little snack for hitting a thousand words. I'm trying to be careful about using food as a reward, especially sweets, because that can be a bad habit to get into. Still, it does seem work pretty well.

"Cheats" - Last year's NaNo, I gave myself permission to cheat a little, and as I said, that helped take a lot of that perfectionism pressure off. So this year, I decided to sort of bake that into my writing strategy. It doesn't have to be perfect. I know that. I've heard so many writing advice gurus talk again and again about "shitty first drafts" and I acknowledge what they say makes sense. (For everyone except me, my brain says.) My "cheats" are really just another way of doing that. I made liberal use of my *Unfinished* tag, allowing myself to skip over things that I just didn't feel like writing and move on. I gave myself permission to leave things "ugly" and repetitive. I allowed myself to just strike out things I was no longer happy with and rewrite it, while still letting that old stuff count as words written. (After all, I did write it. Why shouldn't I give myself credit for it and let it go toward my word count?) Sure, this made my manuscript look ugly, but by doing that intentionally, I managed to sort of shut down the part of my brain that criticizes me for not being "good" enough. I did it on purpose, brain. It's supposed to look that way, so shut it and let me get back to work. And it did.

There are a few other things I'm still on the fence about. I'll keep giving those a try and see how it works for me. In the meanwhile, here's some things that didn't work for me (and why they didn't work for me), but others may find useful:

Scrivener - Wait! Don't pick up your pitchfork just yet! I love Scrivener, and I use it all the time. It's super helpful for me, but -- and here's the key part -- not for writing in. It's a great little tool for planning, background lore, keeping track of important details ... just not so great for me at being a manuscript. If you're on the fence about buying it, I do recommend it. It's got a bunch of useful features, and it makes for a great story bible. But as both a "traditional" story writer and a budding game dev, I don't recommend it as a word processor.

Music - I mentioned music in my strategies that worked, but I'm also putting it here, because I tried new musical things that didn't work, too. I already mentioned lyrics and unfamiliar instrumentals in the previous bit, but another thing I noticed didn't work well for me were instrumental covers of popular songs. I found them in a lot of "study focus" type playlists and gave it a go. While I do find some of them pretty relaxing to listen to, I think the main reason they didn't work for me is that I recognized the songs and still wound up "singing along" with where I knew the lyrics were supposed to be. Apparently, my brain latches on to that familiarity and becomes distracted in the same way songs with lyrics distract me. If you have a similar brand of neuro-spiciness, this may not be the way to go for you either.

Ambient Chaos and white noise generators - Ambient Chaos is such a cool app, and I really wish it had worked for me. To give a little explanation, it's basically a sound mixer for random background noises, each with its own volume slider. Some are ones you might expect, like rain, waves or a coffee shop. Some are weird: beehive, zombie invasion, nuclear siren, alien ship. Others seem pretty counterproductive, like couple arguing, fireworks, marching band or construction site. Still, you can mix and match as you like, and some combinations are actually pretty pleasing to listen to. Like the study focus music, I found both Ambient Chaos and some white noise videos very relaxing, but on this one I'm not entirely sure why it didn't work for me. Maybe it's because I don't really like repetitive noise, but it wound up making me blank out when I was trying to think about what to write next. I guess white noise fills up the space in my brain? Who knows. Sometimes the brain just says no.

"Big" Rewards - This is probably going to seem counterintuitive, but in addition to smaller rewards for meeting smaller goals, I tried to give myself bigger rewards for bigger accomplishments. Going out to dinner for writing a certain number of days in a row, buying something I didn't really need but wanted as a treat, that sort of thing. And while I really enjoyed those things, I don't feel like they did much to actually motivate me. Again, this may be the Attention Deficit problem rearing its ugly head once more, but my sense is that those things aren't immediate enough to trigger that reward "conditioning". The smaller rewards were things I could do right away -- immediate gratification. The bigger things took a little more time to set up, and in that time, the effect was lost on me. I still knew why I did it, but that didn't make me want to do it again to any appreciable degree. It didn't hurt, mind you. It just wasn't effective. My motivation level was the same as it had been before the reward, and the monetary cost wasn't really worth it to be a viable system to continue using to motivate myself.

As always, I don't think any of the strategies that didn't work are actually bad, for what it's worth. They just didn't work for me.

If there's anything I've learned in my now years of writing, it's that writing isn't so different from the other skills we have to hone with time. When we first start out, we try all kinds of things, hoping there's some magic method or tool that will make everything work. Unfortunately, the one and only method that works above all others is doing the thing, repeatedly. Everything else is just polishing and refining that. In one way, that sucks because it never really feels much easier. In another, it's sort of reassuring that, if you keep at it, you will get better.

Anyway, this is probably long enough. It's late here, and I'm tired. This post was as much for my own benefit as anyone else, as it helps me to write things out so I can really examine it, but I do hope it proves helpful to someone out there.

[chemicalarospec]

💖 🏅👖 and 📊

💖 What do you like most about your own writing?

Oh hmm. Maybe that it's versatile? I feel like I can change it up sometimes on purpose. Or maybe that I'm good at poetic bits :D

🏅 What is something you recently felt proud of in regard to your writing (finished a fic, actually planned for once, etc)?

It was a bit ago, but maybe finishing Welcome to Jubilee? It also reached 300 hits on ao3 recently and that's pog haha. Also I showed an IRL the ghostbur poem-fic recently and they said it kinda made them want to write poetry and that was pretty pog.

👖 Are you a planner, plantser, or pantser? Is it consistent?

Oh, panster, very much. I mean, I envision scenes in beforehand sometimes, and sometimes work things out, but the most written planning I've ever done is when the Demolition Duo bullet fic kinda became planning because I'm working on a prose version lol.

📊 Current number of WIPs

FOUR. AND THEY'RE ALL TNTDUO BECAUSE MY BRAIN IS ROTTING.

(I don't have any other fandoms lol. For non-fic, there's Scholastic submissions -- still haven't finished a poetry collection for that rip (I think I'll do two: one for snippets and one that's all the B-tier poems lol) -- and I'm kinda writing a script for a video about every band named Lovejoy I could find? Gd knows if it will get made but it's farther along than I expected it would get.)

I am going to talk about them because I want to <3 but under the cut because I don't want to clog people's dashes <3

1. Benchtrio sees them at the casino. This one I finished but I haven't had the time to go over and make it funny because the writing was bad lol.

2. Demolition Duo!! (Demolition Lovers AU) - I'm most determined to finish this one. Hopefully it won't take as long as Daniel Inflammable lol (why I have written multiple things involving Youtubers and MCR worldbuilding). The plot's changed a *little* bit since the bullet fic but I'll point anyone interested there so I don't restate everything. It's currently 4k, and there's a few major sections I'll definitely add, so it's getting along haha. I think I might title it smth like "snow falls on desert sky" cuz I'm obsessed with that accidental parallel.

3. Tntduo get together within DSMP world. This is the one I'm least likely to finish lol -- basically I took some stuff out of Demolition Duo and wrote a bunch of dialogue snippets and it would be kinda awkward to work them all together. Has a solid beginning tho.

4. Modern AU inspired by the solitaire post lol but not about it. Somehow most of what I wrote here is actually about c!philza?? Idk what to do with him; he's kinda an irredeemable father but I also kinda redeemed him. Like I wrote a really good letter of apology from his POV but c!philza would need a LOT of work to get there lol.

(also in this one I was gonna name techno Techno Blake Pig but I wanted to call him Technoblade so I made that his name for continuity lol. Tommy Nut Pig. The Pig brothers. alks;djf :D ^_^ at least I please myself haha. Also idk if I'll have Fundy in it but Ace and Sally kick Wilbur out of the polycule (nicely) alksdjf)

[old-long-john]

(1/2)Ok so I was reading this Silver meta that covers his entire character arc (less episode ten because I think it was written before it aired) that made some very good and interesting points. However, one thing that stuck out to me was his lost leg was kind of glossed over, and one of the assessments regarding his character, while true of many of his actions, contradicts that particular one.

(2/2) It got me thinking. What are your thoughts on it? I came late to the fandom so this has probably been discussed before, but it’s one of the defining points of Silver’s story, and I want to know everyone’s thoughts.

Ok, so this answer got truly excessive. It’s ridiculous. I thought I was barely scratching the surface of things there were to say about the significance of the loss of Silver’s leg to his character arc, but then it got longer than most of the undergrad essays I ever wrote (final word count 3110…). Yikes. I don’t know if I went overboard, or whether there really is just that much to point out, but this became a literal essay with quotes and everything. Suffice it to say, I think my one line tl;dr is: ‘if you write about Silver’s character arc without talking about the loss of his leg then you’re really missing a lot, because it ties into everything’. Either that or I’m reaching and rambling and I need to not do that.

A longer tl;dr: The loss of his leg opened up a whole world of new experiences for Silver. It forced him to feel and do and be things he had spent a long time carefully shutting out, and in doing so it didn’t just turn him into a new person, but a person who was at odds with all of the things he had built his previous life upon.

I’ll put the rest under a cut, because otherwise I’d be a dash-clogging monster.

So this is one of those questions that feels quite difficult to know where to start with, because it’s a huge and nebulous thing, but I’m aware that I actually have a lot of thoughts about it (some only half-formed, and over a year old) floating around in the recesses of my brain. Hopefully I’ll be able to answer in a way that ends up vaguely coherent, but we’ll see. I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on it too (and I know that there are at least two people in the fandom who have similar disabilities and would probably have very insightful and perhaps different thoughts on the whole thing).

It is surprising to me that the profound importance of the loss of Silver’s leg could be glossed over at this point. Perhaps it’s because we haven’t seen him suffer with it quite so viscerally in season 4 as in season 3, but I still think acknowledging all the facets of that loss are critical to understanding his character arc right to the very end. And given the things we learned for certain about him in 4x09, I think it’s kind of incredible how much fascinating context those things give to a plotline that was always in some form set in stone thanks to the novel that shall not be named.

Oddly, I’d somehow managed to forget that one of Long John Silver’s defining characteristics was the missing leg and the crutch (I don’t think I ever read or watched TI as a kid), and so when it happened it was a complete shock to me. I’m strangely glad of that, because it meant I wasn’t waiting for it to happen and it didn’t colour my views of any of the storylines that preceded it. I kind of feel like that particular ‘holy shit’ moment was my plot twist, since I knew about James/Thomas before I watched 2x05. I think perhaps it also meant that I was even more fascinated than I might have been by his actions and reactions regarding it (though I know I’m not at all alone in that), because to me it hadn’t been an inevitability (‘Nothing is inevitable here’…). Also, Luke Arnold is a goddamn majestical actor and his micro-expressions have been murdering me for a long time now. You can tell he’s been acting opposite Toby ‘one facial twitch and you’re crying’ Stephens.

Right from the first moment we met him, we’ve known John Silver was a chancer, and a chameleon, and someone who had very deliberately chosen not to be a joiner. He didn’t need anyone, and he only allowed himself to be needed insofar as it was beneficial to him. I adore Luke Arnold’s line about how Silver’s ‘a guy who’s always had one leg out the door, and then they cut it off’. It’s funny, but it’s also amazingly accurate on multiple levels. When he lost his leg, he didn’t just lose a limb, and his mobility, and a life free of pain (which are awful enough), he lost access to most of the ways in which he had always known how to survive: the ability to be a chancer, and a chameleon, and the option not to be a joiner. It trapped him. The man who had seemingly spent his life demonstrating that ‘there’s always a way’ out of any situation, had it proved definitively that that wasn’t the case. He couldn’t talk his way out of what happened to him, and the futures it left open to him were a much narrower range of options than anyone would feel comfortable with, let alone a man like him. He never wanted to be a pirate, but suddenly making a life on that crew where he mattered looked like the only choice he had.

The one moment I’ve always found most interesting, and I’m not sure whether I’ve seen it discussed before, is the look on Silver’s face at the end of 2x10 when Flint’s being outrageously soft and gentle with his brand new baby quartermaster. Flint’s been talking about transitions and men who can be relied upon, while Silver’s hand hovers over the edge of the blanket, almost but not quite able to lift it and look at the consequences of his decisions, and only half listening to what Flint’s saying. And Flint tells Silver he’s been voted quartermaster, the other huge consequence of his decisions, and then says, ‘It’s a funny thing. The more those men need you, the more you need them, and it drives us to do the most unexpected things.’ And then Silver looks down at his leg again and he pulls this face:

(gif by sorenkingsley)

He looks so angry and disgusted, and I think it’s aimed at himself. It breaks my heart more than a little that one of the biggest lessons Silver learnt over the four seasons was a thing he already knew at the beginning: if you get close to people you will get hurt. The very first time he chose to do something truly selfless, because the crew liked him and called him a brother, he was punished for it by being mutilated. That’s truly fucking awful. In a story full of undeserved cruelties, it’s up there with the worst of them.

Silver said in 4x09 that the only meaning that could be divined from some of the events in his life was that ‘the world is a place of unending horrors’, and that he’d ‘come to peace with the knowledge that there is no storyteller imposing any coherence, nor sense, nor grace, upon those events’. I’d imagine that having it confirmed that no good deed goes unpunished, in a most violent way, only solidified that certainty. And to add insult to injury (literally), it was an event and subsequent state of being that came to define him, as he never wanted to be defined by the horrors of his past.

I find season 3 to be a really interesting time for Silver in a lot of ways. He really does undergo a huge metamorphosis. As much as we’ve joked about how season 3 Silver consistently fails the Flint Bechdel Test (he’s either talking to Flint or about Flint for a huge majority of the time), the other thing that is consistently unavoidable in his season 3 scenes is the impact of his disability on his life, and the ways in which he’s trying (and failing) to cope with it. Right from the outset we have the scene with Howell (RIP lovely sawbones 3) where we see exactly where we are in terms of Silver’s suffering, his struggling, and his refusal to appear weak or compromised in front of anyone. The boy’s a mess, pretending to be ok, and it sets up so much of what we see from him for the whole season. It’s all such a contrast to how he was we first met him. From ‘are you a coward?’, ‘yeah, you too?’ to ‘I cannot look weak. I cannot feel weak. I cannot be weak’. It’s fine to be a coward when you can actually run away. He’s having to hold his world together with both hands, because he doesn’t have both feet.

Weakness and a perceived lack of usefulness are a running theme throughout season 3 (and beyond). Silver has never had to rely on anybody else before, but has ingratiated himself with people by making them rely on him. In the scene where Howell explains that he has to take off the leg or else Silver will die, he is obviously panicking and terrified, but the moment when Muldoon says ‘the crew’ll look after you, don’t worry about that’ is the one where a look of wide-eyed horror settles on his face and he seems to realise all the things that are suddenly inevitable (and once again, ‘nothing is inevitable here’ and ‘there’s always a way’). When he wakes up and tells Flint the ‘truth’ about the gold, he says he’s telling him about ‘what we’ll likely face [in Nassau]’. He already knows he’s irrevocably bound to Flint’s crew now, and I think he knew it for certain the moment Muldoon said it, if not earlier when he called the crew ‘my men’. I love that even though they explicitly revisited and explained that moment with Muldoon later on, Silver’s horror at those words in particular was there for all to see right from the beginning.

When he and Muldoon spoke about it in 3x02, Silver said that he was ‘useless to them up top’ and that he had to ‘do [his] part somehow’, and Muldoon had to explain to him that the security of his place on the crew wasn’t based on utilitarianism and that, even if it was, it wouldn’t work like that for Silver. Basically, they didn’t need to need him, because they liked him. That’s a hell of a long way from the method by which Silver wormed his way back into their fold a season earlier: ‘They can hate me, they just need to need me.’ Losing his leg left Silver living in opposite land, where being a crafty, two-faced, snake in the grass was not going to do him any favours, and he suddenly needed people’s love for him to be genuine and unconditional. And these were men he had been lying to and betraying so recently. I wonder how far their love and respect for what he did in Charles Town would go towards forgiving him if they found out he stole the $5 million out from under them all?

Then, right after having that conversation about being being afraid of being reliant on others and being unable to contribute enough to make it an even and controllable relationship, Silver found himself completely powerless to save Muldoon from drowning. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been able to save him even if he had two legs, but you just know Silver would always wonder whether that was a situation that proved that his being ‘an invalid’ made him both useless and powerless. No wonder the darkness became so attractive to him at the end of the season; the power it gave him, and the feelings of control over his own fate that it restored, must have been such a welcome relief.

I really think losing his leg was a very specific catalyst for a lot of the best and worst things Silver grew into. They were undoubtedly in there all along, and they came out in the forms that they did partly because of all his other baggage and his personality, but the leg was the thing that pushed them into being. He gave a shit about the crew beforehand, certainly - it’s what got him into that whole mess - but the things we saw afterwards, like his angry defence of the men in the doldrums, and the way he held Muldoon’s hand as he died, were the actions of a man who had been forced by circumstance into truly caring about his men as individuals, and who was also terrified of losing their support and love, because it’s all that he had. Not only did losing his leg make Silver a quartermaster, it made him a good quartermaster. At least, up until he and Flint started opening doors for each other and he figured out he could beat the shit out of those men or send them to their deaths and still have their respect. Damn, son.  

The flip side of the caring induced by his loss was the hate, both for himself and for others. He was so unsure of himself with Flint undermining him at every turn. ‘I told you, I just don’t see a way,’ is what he said to Billy. His world had been upturned and he didn’t know what his place in it was any more. If there wasn’t always a way, then what the hell was a chameleon trickster supposed to do about his newfound lot in life? Be honest, as it turns out. He was feeling honest feelings, so he started saying honest words. There’s so much to be gleaned from his shark date conversation with Flint, and the most fundamental thing is that he’s being horribly, painfully honest for the first time. Not just about the gold and the lying, but about himself. He lays all his cards on the table and acknowledges something that Flint used against him months before: where else would he wake up in the morning and matter? ‘Without those men, all I am is an invalid.’

That self-hatred or insecurity was something we saw more than once. Even much later in the season when he had somewhat found his feet again (no pun intended) and was on decent terms with Flint. When Billy suggested he go to the tavern to announce Flint’s return, Silver said ‘who’ll be able to take their eyes off the one-legged creature?’. It seemed as though he was already learning to use it to his advantage, and perhaps that wasn’t such an example of him hating this new facet of himself, but then Dufresne tried to use it against him. His plan had been to use his words to persuade, as he always had, and I think he probably would have continued with that method for longer if Dufresne hadn’t stuck a knife in that one wound that was still festering and painful: you are less than whole, an invalid, a creature, and unworthy of the position you occupy.

For basically all of the first two seasons Silver barely cared about anyone or anything, because he was still that drifter who just happened to be clinging onto this ride for the time being. He didn’t care about anyone but himself and so he didn’t really hate anyone either, because to hate requires you to care. He also didn’t have much pride. We know he had killed for personal gain (the cook), but what happened with Dufresne was something else entirely. I don’t know how much of that violence was in response to Dufresne hitting a seriously sore spot, and how much it was because it happened in front of a room full of people and wounded his newly awoken pride as well (likely it was a perfect storm of the two), but it was an absolute red mist moment. It was his ‘good sense escapes you’ moment. It was his Singleton moment. Deliberately detached Silver was a thing of the distant past. This Silver found himself capable of such blinding rage that he could stove a man’s head in just for insulting him and then turn it into a piece of pirate theatre for his own benefit. He’d spent however long before 2x10 carving little niches for himself in the fabric of the world, wherever there was a space for him to exploit, and all of a sudden he found that he could do it again. This time, though, his act of insinuating himself into a role wasn’t a snaking, insidious thing, allowed to happen because he made himself look innocent and unthreatening, but a brazen and violent statement that he was someone to watch and fear, after being judged to be unthreatening against his will. He took his weakness, real and perceived, and made it a new strength, learning how to use it to bend the world to his will again. 

I suppose, in short, Silver’s disability, the situations it trapped him in, and the path it set him on were instrumental in forcing him to actually feel things, good and bad. But not only that, the loss itself was a fundamental reason behind why he found himself desperately trying to fill a hole that hadn’t been there before. It was becoming truly powerless that awoke his appetite for power to its fullest extent. It was being forced to feel vulnerable and unthreatening, whether he wanted it or not, that caused him to find those things so revolting and unbearable. It was needing to be loved and supported that made him open up to the realisation that the journey into the light felt just as good as the journey into the dark, and as dangerous as it might be in the long run, getting close to people was a comfort he couldn’t go back to denying himself once he’d had it.

Then season 4 happened. I think season 4 really solidified the fact that Silver had some serious self-worth issues going on, deep down and well hidden, before we even met him, and that the amputation and everything that followed only exacerbated them. His ‘would I be enough for you?’ and ‘can that be enough and there still be trust between us?’ take his season 3 insecurities and plunge them down to newly personal and upsetting levels. This wasn’t just a man who felt as though he was robbed of wholeness by one horror he had suffered, this was a man who had been running from horrors his whole life, avoiding being defined by them, and was now defined almost entirely by this one-legged persona that was completely divorced from any other versions of himself outside of the context of the war that he might once have known how to be. He found himself trapped in the body and story of Long John Silver, a fiction who mattered more than he did. Chronologically, his conversation with Flint came first, and Flint declined to answer whether Silver’s true friendship and loyalty could be enough for him. Then Madi declined to answer whether his love and the bare bones of who he was as a person could be enough for her. None of the good things he learned to feel and give through his loss made him enough for anyone, but it was too late to close that door and unlearn how to feel them. And so he panicked, and spiralled, and fell back on old tricks, like lying, and new ones, like hating.

The loss of his leg opened up a whole world of new experiences for Silver. It forced him to feel and do and be things he had spent a long time carefully shutting out, and in doing so it didn’t just turn him into a new person, but a person who was at odds with all of the things he had built his previous life upon. I think it’s incredibly fascinating how his past, present, and future were all woven together by this one event. And I didn’t even touch on the physical suffering of it and how it proved categorically that he was neither a coward nor unable to endure pain. He said in 2x01, ‘I am happy to find some other place to survive’. Perhaps it was learning what clinging on for mere survival really looked like that made him want to live a life that was something more.