#also is it revisiting if they've always just been on my mind i'm just incredibly slow gsdufghw

[desognthinking]

👀 More haunted house designer au?! 👀 I love that concept so much so would be overjoyed if you ever decided to revisit it :)

😎i love it too. i wish i could tell you there are finally actually haunted houses in this one but unfortunately the girls are still working through it 😭 also i am working through it (editing 😭)

so in this one they're on a scouting-slash-forced teambuilding trip and it's um Going. it's a few thousand k of Meet The Ava wherein Ava is frustrated + up against it + dramatic, but also Meets The Beatrice.

anyway anyway it starts like this (subject to me finding it too cringey and editing it):

Ava sees her at the end of the pier, a dark figure in the already-dark; a smudge of barely-moving ink on the line between wind and water. Barely, indeed – wavering less than the yearning swallow and swoop of the waves interrupted by pillars of wood, and, further back, stone. 

At night, after everything’s shut, this place is quiet until the fishermen get out in the early morning. In the off-season, even more so. Rain slings down frequently, and it’s not warm enough for balmy walks by the rocks. Not many come out, if any. Ava’s one.

She calls out as she walks down the planks, only thinking belatedly that perhaps she might not want to be disturbed. Out here behind the motel, unmoving under the preliminary drizzle of rain, embraced and cocooned by temperamentally warping air. It is, after all, that tremulous transitory phase between spring and summer that borrows its faces from both, and switches its masks sharply in the slit-time of blinks.

[experthiese]

WHAT MADE YOU PICK UP THE CURRENT MUSE/S YOU HAVE?

Much like how I started writing my others: I was talking with some friends on discord, expressed an interest in possibly-maybe-perhaps writing him, and was encouraged to do so. That aside, I've been a fan of Lupin III for years, and find Lupin himself to be a fascinating character. It helps that there's a lot of backlog to draw from, each part and movie with its own spin on his Core Characteristics, and as it's constantly retconning and contradicting itself, there's no pressure to be "canon compliant" and up to date on every tiny bit of lore ever introduced.

Do you follow TWCFM? Do you follow Lupin Zero? Do you gloss over it like the main parts do? Do you have your own, headcanon-based idea of how the group all came together?

There's a lot of freedom there. I like that :)

IS THERE ANYTHING YOU DON'T LIKE TO WRITE?

I struggle with one-liners, at least if we actually intend on continuing the interaction. My replies only tend to grow over time, and I need at least a couple sentences to get all of my dialogue out (Lupin likes to yap).

IS THERE ANYTHING YOU REALLY ENJOY WRITING?

Developing relationships is sooooooo fun. Literally nothing like it.

I love love LOVE working with my partners to decide how we're going to take our barbie dolls from their initial vibe to whatever dynamic we've got planned. Sometimes things go even further than we were expecting! Sometimes a whole new direction comes hurtling out of left field and we find a way to work with that. It works with everyone, too-- crossovers, canons, OCs, AUs, even duplicates.

HOW DO YOU COME UP WITH HEADCANONS?

Depends. The big ones are usually because I was rewatching something and found a Fun Little Detail I can expand on and flesh out. Things like the Lupin Empire, for example -- if his father was so clearly en route to building it, why is it absent from Lupin III's life? Outside of two Part 1 references, he's never even mentioned it, much less played any significant role in its development or function. Why is that?

I mean, realistically it's because Lupin Zero was made in 2022 and the show debuted in 1971, and they weren't planning a canon for 51 years into the future. Of course there's going to be inconsistencies.

But in-universe, from the perspective of Lupin III being an individual that exists within his setting... What could explain this? How can I take this inconsistency and use it to add some dimension and depth to his world?

That's usually how it happens, anyway. Other times I just get brain blasts, thoughts beamed into my head direct from god themselves, and I type them up in three sentences or less and press post.

DO YOU WRITE IN SILENCE OR PLAY MUSIC?

Music all the way! I have a Lupin playlist I listen to a lot of the time.

DO YOU PLAN YOUR REPLIES OR WING THEM?

I usually plan out Lupin's vague response, how he's feeling and what options he's likely to weigh up before actually deciding what direction to take my writing. Specific descriptions and things like dialogue are all improvised in the moment, and only really revisited if I'm not feeling the vibe or need to reshuffle the reply about.

Dialogue is always written first.

DO YOU ENJOY SHIPPING?

Yes, and having a muse like Lupin makes shipping pretty important. Sex and romance are a big part of his character and behaviours, and so it follows that ships are likely going to come as a result of that. He's quite the Casanova!

However, platonic shipping is also incredibly fun to explore. Rivals, enemies, "friends of the family", actual friends, coworkers, etc. etc. etc. are all things I'm happy to develop and write more of. I encourage people to come to me with dynamic ideas if they've got something specific in mind.

[wondrouswendy]

Revisiting Tython

So @rangerzath and I just started playing Tython last night and wooo booooy was it a lot of feels and nostalgia.

I genuinely forgot how good the game looked. Did the game get a graphical update? It feels like it did. Also, did they like... go back and touch up some of these scenes animation wise? We were putting on our thinking tin foil caps and trying to figure out if we were misremembering old scenes or if they genuinely have changed some of the "cinematography" of the old cutscenes.

Coming from playing WoW the last several years, it is kind of just gobsmacking how literally every quest in the beginning is voiced. Really hard to believe any company could budget for this level of voice work. Some of the voice work is a little silly, some of the dialogue is a little repetitive and a tiny bit cringy, but overall I don't mind it at all. We ran the Esseles again, and we were both talking about how cinematic the whole flashpoint is while also feeling incredibly Star Wars(TM). I know the degree of story content doesn't always carry over in the future to the same depth, but I remember enjoying most of the flashpoints we'll be revisiting in the future.

It's been awhile since I played a game all night and was desperate to keep playing more from a story perspective (the last one for me was Yakuza 0). We're playing through the JC story again to everyone's surprise I'm sure, and while a lot of the mechanical gameplay features they've added has been going over my head (wtf is Conquest and why am I getting so much of it), the JC story still is holding up so far.

The funny thing is that for my rewrite of Someone to Fight For, I have a lot of the Act II pieces finished and ready to go. I didn't really write a lot of pieces focusing on Act I, so the new revamped story will have plenty of new chapters to fill in and provide character background. Ultimately I don't know if anyone will read it or care about it as much as @rangerzath and I naturally will given that it's our OCs, but I'm very much enjoying going back and actually writing with a burning passion. I think that was one of my favorite things about SWTOR: how it really drove me creatively and helped me grow as a writer.