#I'm not in charge here

[luckydragon10]

Ooohhh. Bad Bet question!!!

I was wondering how you created the characters. Do you have a page on each one all drawn up?

I think I'm correct in assuming you mean the original characters, so I'm going to roll that way with this question.

First of all, I want to mention that I try to avoid OCs in fanfiction unless I decide they're absolutely necessary. And in a long fic like Bad Bet, they really were unavoidable. The reason I avoid writing OCs is because, as a reader, I'm not in a fanfic for the OCs -- I'm there for the blorbos from my shows. That being said, if OCs are necessary to the fic, I don't shy away from.

But the fact that you think I have meta documentation on my OCs is very flattering and totally untrue. 🤣

The OCs have an alarming habit of walking into the story and then telling me who they are, and I actually feel wildly out of control with them.

They show up and say, "I'm doing what I want. You can just deal with it."

*** Bad Bet SPOILERS under the cut. ***

Mark was the worst offender.

He walked into the story, and suddenly I was daydreaming about who he was and what his motivations were. This was when I was writing chapter 5 back in February of 2023. Back then, I still had the utterly naive belief that Bad Bet would be less than 100k. Back then, I thought the Blue Room would be nothing more than a setting where I'd redirect Porsche back to the Theerapanyakuls. Then Mark, THIS asshole, rolled up and was so interesting to me that I suddenly realized, "Oh, shit, these guys are going to play a significant role, and I want the Blue Room to come back in the second half of the story."

He was just suddenly so fun to me. To get a set of fighters at the Blue Room who would do what they did for Porsche, I needed someone like Mark who would be highly biased in his selection of who fought in his rings, who had a motivation for selecting guys who would do what they did for Porsche. Mark had to be a leader who would lead in such a way that this behavior would be encouraged. Mark had to be SO specific for that scene to work. Without Mark, that environment normally would not support that scene. That environment, without Mark, would be "to each their own, every man for himself."

That was also when I slowly realized I was fucked and Bad Bet was going to be enormous. (That and the fact that I still hadn't gotten to the Chay reunion yet, which I originally thought would be a little sooner.)

Sure enough, when I worked out the rest of the outline, I had more than double the fic that I was expecting.

Davies similarly showed up in chapter 1, and suddenly I had a circus ringmaster on my hands. He wanted to be a showman, and all I could think was, "Sir, where did you come from?"

Alix, Santichai, Dan, Happy, Ford, Megat, they were all somewhat better behaved. But I still have no idea why they are what they are. If you told me that spirits possessed me and wrote themselves into the fic, I might actually believe you.

Mek, however, my beloved random, mature bodyguard, is my own personal running gag. Mek appears in multiple fics and will continue to appear in multiple fics.

[little-pondhead]

DP x DC Prompt

…

There are no more heroes.

Well, okay. Rewind a bit.

Danny has been doing the hero thing for a while now. He’s had a big reveal; everyone has accepted him (including his parents), the GIW disbanded, the Anti-Ecto acts repealed, and generally, everything is going great. Some of the A-Listers are even training as junior ghost hunters to help give him a break from his rogues! (Being Ghost King makes things hectic sometimes, and he just needs the extra help. Sue him!)

The point is, literally nothing is wrong with Danny Phantom’s afterlife.

And then Valerie Gray, the Red Huntress, disappears in front of his eyes.

Danny is baffled! She’s just…gone! Valerie just popped out of existence, like she was never there. But no matter how hard he searches in the Ghost Zone, he can’t find her soul anywhere. His core isn't broken in grief. So she’s not dead. Which is good. So then, where is she?

Some of the others come forward with ideas on how to find her. A few ghosts volunteer to go out into the mortal realm, an area Danny had declared off-limits, to see if she was out there. Danny approves it. He rounds up some of the friendlier (i.e., discreet) ghosts and Amity Parkers and demolishes the outside travel ban.

So everyone spreads out, looking for their dear frenemy and teammate. But it becomes apparent very quickly that something is wrong with the rest of the world.

There are no more heroes.

Every single living superhero on the face of the Earth has just…vanished. Villains are running amok; the countries are in chaos! Some aliens are invading Earth, mythical deities are trying to take over, and society is crumbling to the ground. Everything is on the brink of collapse.

Well, Danny was still there. And so were his people. They were pretty spread out, so could they just…take up the mantles? He also knew where to find the souls of dead heroes in the Zone; surely they wouldn't mind coming out of retirement for a little bit, especially if they couldn't die again. Oh! And that skeleton army leftover from Pariah Dark's reign might be useful in repelling those invading forces.

Honestly, there were more than enough hands to go around! And with the heroes gone, Danny didn't mind letting everyone out for a little break, as long as they followed his rules. They wouldn't stop the search for the other heroes, but hopefully, when they found them, the heroes wouldn't mind Danny's intervention too much. :)

In other words:

Someone fucks up, and all of Earth's living heroes are either wished out of existence or are whisked away to some far-off realm where Danny hasn't checked yet. In the attempt to figure out what's going on, Danny lets the dead run amok over the Earth as they search for clues. The skeleton army repels the invading armies, the souls of dead heroes deal with the world leaders, and his rogues and other Amity Parkers set up shop in place of famous heroes, trying to get the cities under control again.

Basically, they just do their best to keep everything from imploding until the Justice League and others are back.

(And why is it that Danny hasn't disappeared? Well, whatever caused everyone to go poof! only affected living heroes. Anyone heroes that were dead in the first place, or even just half-dead, stayed behind.)

[solradguy]

Bullshit words from Guilty Gear only the sick and deranged know the definitions of:

Garm

Fora

Walkpod

Minimerta

Zeal

Vald

Vyde

Vitae

Charge <-not what you think it is

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts 3 - Rage Form

[overtake]

Weekend Warm-Up | 2024 Miami Grand Prix

[artbyfuji]

taiyang xiao long rolls "worst joint ever." banned from summer & ravens smoke sessions for 3 days.

[nevertheless-moving]

been writing cosmere fanfic and you know what? I think I get it now brandon. I too am unable to write Kaladin Stormblessed interacting with someone without them falling a little bit in love, regardless of my intentions.

[mbohjeezart]

Im never doing this perspective again

[paintpanic]

[ya-killin-me-smalls]

your boss calls you into his office and he's waiting there for you like this wyd

[write-it-motherfuckers]

Well, that was a much bigger shitstorm than I had been expecting.

First of all, kid's ok, they just kept him over night because he's so young and concussions are a bit more of a risk, especially given his extensive medical history. Thankfully though, he seems to be on the mend, and he should be home by the time you Darlings are seeing this post.

As for why you're seeing this post, originally I was just meant to be playing emergency babysitter until the dad finished work and got home, but unfortunately he's just as big of a piece of shit as he usually is (Why they're still together and actively having more kids I have no idea) and decided that since someone was already with the kids, then instead of rushing home like he was asked to by his wife, he was going to make the best of it and go out drinking with his friends.

Both his wife and his elderly mother in law tried to contact him, but after the third set of calls, he turned off his phone. Not once did he ask who was with his kids, or how his injured son was, all he cared about was going out and drinking. (I sincerely hope she leaves his arse soon. Holy shit)

The mum did apologise to me repeatedly, but since their only living family is her elderly mother who is by no means capable of looking after five kids under the age of seven, she really didn't have a choice but to rely on me until her or her (shitty) husband could return home. And for obvious reasons, she couldn't exactly leave a four year old in the hospital by himself.

In the end, the "dad" didn't get home until about nine am this morning, stinking of grog, and I don't feel comfortable leaving them with him. I did quickly head back and grab a charger for my phone so that I could type this up, but since the youngest ones will be waking from their after feed nap soon, and the mum is still a way's off from getting back, I'm probably not going to have time to sort through my reblogs properly.

On a small positive note though, it does look like all my stuff is back now, so I should be able to go back to posting older reblogs tomorrow. For now, I'm just going to focus on the kids and then go back and crash into my own bed.

Thank you for your understanding and patience, Darling ones. Please remember to take care of yourselves 🖤

[finemealprompt]

DP x DC Prompt #67

When there’s so many souls wandering aimlessly, Danny couldn’t just not do anything to help. Honestly, he didn’t know a pipe would be so useful in helping direct souls. He also didn’t know it worked on halfa’s. Or, that there were more halfa’s out there than he realized.

[covertblizzard]

jaykyle au where they're theatre kids in the same school but they're not the actors jason's the scriptwriter/director and kyle is the prop manager (i don't know the official terms sorry) and they'd probably do an amazing job on the backstage setting if they could stop arguing for 5 whole seconds about their artistic visions and ideas and how "this would obviously work better this way"

[sage-nebula]

Kristoph Gavin's black psyche-locks have remained unbroken for 17 slutty, slutty years.

[rox-of-iu]

bought "immortal life" as a gift for myself and I'm immediately obsessed

it's stardew valley style farm sim but xianxia (said by someone who never played stardew or farm sims this is guesswork lol)

anyway it's early access now but it will come out as a full game in Jan 2024! and I guess there is a possibility that the price will go up once it's a full game cuz that happens sometimes so if ur interested now is your chance hah (its on sale rn for 11,19€)

[billdenbrough]

fundamentally disinterested in the recurring discourse about kevin's drinking that aims to a) make it his Specific Problem To Focus On And Overcome when it is a crutch and coping mechanism to get him through a Much Bigger Problem (emotional fallout he can't square with by himself, culture shock, trauma, loss of his extremely wildly co-dependent relationship w riko, losing the structure of the nest, mourning a future he was meant to have, processing a grave injustice, anger and fear and desperate grief, all of which is his Actual Specific Fox Problem) while he builds himself back up, and b) thinks that even if it is a problem (more on that later), it's the foxes' problem to deal with.

like. it's just not.

yeah, he doesn't drink until he meets them. they gave him that habit, and in traditional terms, they're (the monsters specifically) a 'bad influence'. but these are the foxes. this is kevin day, son of exy, whose meteor is crashing spectacularly through no fault of his own. there are no traditional terms to be found here. the framework for it literally doesn't exist. neil comes into the foxes with more conventional expectations—appalled at the athletes' substance use, his horror at matt's trip to columbia, his steadfast and early repeated stance that none of the foxes should let andrew treat them the way he does, and certainly not nicky—and tends to engage with them less as the series goes on and he folds himself into the foxes. the thing about the foxes is that they've all been in pits deeper than they are tall. and some of them got a helping hand on the way—erik, andrew's extreme intervention methods, stephanie walker—and wymack was always waiting for them on the other side, ready to throw down a rope, but all the foxes dragged themselves out of their own holes. often not alone, often not without assistance, but at the end of the day, they have to do it.

there's that line neil has about aaron in that scene that got deleted when the timeline shifted around, when he thinks about how aaron got this far in life on his own, surviving on willpower and sheer desperation. that applies to aaron in a way that's a little more acute than some of the rest of them—boy who doesn't let the foxes in bc of andrew, boy who doesn't let nicky in bc he doesn't know how, boy made of flinching and seeking an escape and grieving the one who hurt him—but is broadly true for the foxes en masse.

this isn't to say the foxes can't help each other, but it's not their job. it just isn't. they'll keep kevin alive, keep him safe, keep him flanked and contained within their ranks. they'll fight tooth and nail in this battle with him, fight to get him to that championship game, fight to get that trophy in his hands. but that's all they've agreed to. that's all they're responsible for, in this covenant they've made with him. he says they can make this happen, and they're going to get him to that final game, but it's up to him what state he's in when he gets there.

like. they're foxes. they've been triaging their whole lives. they hate each other and they hate everyone else more. they're the kids with their backs up against the wall. half of them are addicts. i don't think kevin is comparable, personally; he's getting through a horrific situation with a coping mechanism. that's not the same thing as battling yourself to stop using. but that's not really the point of this. what i'm getting at here is that to the foxes, it's easy math: kevin who can lean on vodka and andrew and wymack and the foxes to stay upright when he's not ready to stand on his own two feet is still a kevin who is standing. a kevin with one less piece of scaffolding to lean on is a kevin who falls over, a kevin at risk of complete collapse, a kevin one phone call away from running back to the master, a kevin one crucial loss away from not ever making it back to himself at all. they're triaging. this is low on the totem pole of things they have the room to care about. they very much have bigger problems, both individually and even just kevin-related. if alcohol makes seeing the boy he knew best in the world and moved in tandem with his whole life and who destroyed their entire legacy and his entire life in one move — if alcohol makes facing that boy easier to stomach, then, fuck, why would they take that away? they're foxes. they've all got their demons. this is what kevin needs this year and a half to let him face his, that's all. they can understand that. it doesn't have to be pretty, as long as it keeps him in the fight. that's the priority.

i think there's absolutely space to explore this in fic and art and fandom in a way that maybe does explore it as a Problem, both that it's an active problem for kevin & that it's something to explore other foxes helping him with (there's a t&n fic that i've been gnawing at the bit to read for months that seems poised to explore this premise, and that's super up my alley)! i just think we're in different territory when we're talking about the series—and its characters and dynamics—in a conversational rather than transformational way, and end up talking about this like the foxes are responsible for kevin's choices. i love kevin day. i read these back at the start of 2015 & he's so dear to me that loving him was the blueprint for how i feel abt kageyama. but it's been pretty weird to see how the conversation has been translating Loving Kevin Day into... thinking the foxes are doing wrong by him with respect to this in actual canon. like that's just not how it operates there