#also. unfortunate realization that one of the characters shares a LOT of plot points (and design) with a fave character of mine

[inkedmyths]

I'm not downloading another stupid dress up game for the fucking plot I'm not I refuse goddammit I AM STRONGER THAN THIS

[ellesliterarycorner]

Writing a Retelling

I used to not like reading or writing retellings, but I actually think that writing a retelling might be on my bingo card for 2023, so I decided to do some research on writing them and share it with y’all! I think the reason I used to dislike retellings was because they can go SO wrong, and they are really hard to write. But, the more I’ve looked into this, I’ve decided writing retellings is actually a really good exercise for writers. The world’s been around for so long that there are no completely new plots, and taking the essentials plots of one story and turning them into something new is a great exercise in the basics of plotting and understanding the nature of characters. 

Back to the OG

Read the original story! That might seem like an obvious thing, but sometimes it doesn’t feel every author remembers to do this. If it’s a story you haven’t read since you were little, don’t rely on your memory, especially if its a story with a lot of different remakes. Are you writing a retelling of the Disney movie Cinderella or the original Greek folk tale? Spoiler alert, they are not the same. You can write a retelling of either, but you do need to decide early on which one you are doing and stay consistent to it. I also think rereading the original story will remind you why you decided to write a retelling. Something about the story you loved so much you wanted to bring to a new audience or maybe something that felt unfinished or unanswered, and you just had to finish it and find the answered. 

Notes, Notes, Notes

I love taking notes, and I think that especially when writing a retelling copious notes are your best friend. Unfortunately, you aren’t going to be able to fit everything into your retelling, but writing notes on the most important things in the original story will help you have a guiding light and keep you organized. I would definitely recommend that you make a list of characters and their roles in the story. Are you keeping the same protagonist? Do you want to write from the antagonists point of view? Or give a side character their time to shine? I would also make a list of all of the settings in the story. Decide whether or not you’re keeping the same setting or revamping it for your story. Finally, make a list of all the major plot points. You’ll probably add more plot points into your story, but making sure that you know and understand the major plot points in the original story will help you as you’re writing. 

Inspired By or Retelling?

This may just be a personal nit-picky, schematic thing, but imo, a book can be inspired by something without being a retelling. Point and case being my favorite book to bash: A Court of Thorns and Roses. People have stopped leaning on this as much as they used too (mostly because ACOTAR has been rebranded as adult), but when it first came out ACOTAR was very much marketed as a Beauty and the Beast retelling. Me personally, I did not realize it was supposed to be a retelling until one of my friends told me after I had read it. Now, that either means that I have a poor level of reading comprehension or that the book is not a very good retelling. Obviously, I don’t like one of those answers, so let us presume that ACOTAR is not a very good retelling. I would say agree that elements of it are inspired by Beauty and the Beast, but I do not think that it is a retelling. SJM fails to keep many of the major themes and motifs of Beauty and the Beast which I think are necessary elements to qualify under the label retelling. 

But What’s the Twist???

Don’t be afraid to take risks and try new things when you write a retelling! Just because you’re writing a retelling doesn’t mean that you aren’t writing a story in your voice and your style of writing. Stay true to yourself, so long as you treat the original story with respect. A lot of retellings either give the story a new protagonist, a new setting, or set the story in a completely different genre. To get yourself going here are are a few questions to ask yourself after you’ve finished rereading the original story help you figure out what the twist of your retelling is going to be. 

Which of these characters do you feel curious about?

Which of these characters is the most hated / misunderstood?

Which of these characters could have the most interesting growth / character transformation through the course of this story?

How would this setting affect the protagonist and the other main characters? 

How would this setting affect the major conflict of the story?

How would this setting affect the themes of the original story? 

Which themes would be preserved and which themes would no longer feel relevant?

Elle’s Retelling Recommendations

And of course, I had to end this with a few retellings recommendations! Reading other retellings and seeing what other authors did well or not well is a great way to sharpen your own skills. 

Daughters of Sparta by Claire Heywood

I actually really liked this book, but I think its because even though I like Greek mythology, I admittedly am not the most knowledgable on the subject. I know the basics of Greek mythology, but unless something was blatantly wrong, I wouldn’t be able to tell. Apparently, this book had a lot of important Greek mythology plot points missing, but I thought it told the stories of Helen and Klytemnestra very well!

Circe and The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller 

I first read Circe for school, but I went back and read it a year or two ago. I vastly prefer Circe to Song of Achilles as I didn’t really like SoA all that much, but both are definitely retelling masterclasses. Madeline Miller is definitely the Queen of Greek mythology retellings.

Beautiful Little Fools by Jillian Cantor 

This is one of my favorite books ever! I loved the Great Gatsby, and I am a Daisy Buchanan apologist. I love that this book fleshes out all of the female characters from the Great Gatsby, gives them proper back stories and answers one of the biggest questions from the original novel. 

Starcrossed by Josephine Angelini

This book is not the best book, and I only recommend it because it is in my opinion how not to do a retelling or even an inspired by book. My friend group was obsessed with this book in middle school, and the best way I can describe it is if Percy Jackson and Twilight had a baby. Take that as you will. 

[meadow-roses]

Hey can you explain the main plot of keepers?

I'll do my best, I hope this will answer your question 😂

So the main concept of "The Keepers" is a collection of stories that play with the crossover trope. It's hard to say exactly what the plot of the keepers would be at this point in the development, since we're still coming up with the plots of all the individual stories that make up the crossover.

Each of the main characters has their own story they were/are the protagonist of, who's "happy ending" is interrupted by the instability of the universe. They end up meeting and teaming up when they realize they all share exactly the same villain and he's still trying to win.

The main villain is a scientist driven mad by grief, still trying to make his vision a success despite all the loved ones he's lost along the way as a direct result of his research. His end goal isn't necessarily bad- bringing magical equality to the world- but ends don't justify the means and he's tearing apart the universe trying to make everything "fair".

Functionally, Skylar is the main protagonist, mainly because his story kicks off the plot time-bomb but also because he's kinda the one rolling around the multiverse inadvertently collecting allies. (Despite the fact he vehemently insists he's a one man show lol) The other Keepers are Ketsler, Felix, and Betty, but as you might have noticed the cast is pretty extensive. 😂

Skylar's story is a folk fairytale style adventure of two brothers trying to learn what it means to be a Man and also break a curse, but unfortunately the end of the world happens.

Felix's story is a sci-fi/fantasy superhero story set in a dystopian future about family, friendship, and what true bravery is. The main character accidentally becomes the leader of a planetary revolution and meets his true love.

Ketsler's story is about "the prophesied one" struggling to fulfill his role when deep down inside he's just another regular dude, but thankfully the power comes from outside and not within. He, his cousin, and the med student they befriend try to figure out what the source of the evil magic is and it goes terribly wrong.

Betty's is still in the early stages, so I don't quite know what the themes will be, but she is an orphan with psychic powers that lets her hear other's thoughts... including the thoughts of ghosts. In search of a way to use her powers for good and also find a place where she belongs, she moves to Earth and joins the interplanetary organization that studies and controls the supernatural. She certainly meets some supernatural things. :)

There are a Lot of other characters, but those are the main four. Other significant persons would be: Gigi (Skylar's brother), Grace (Felix's wife), Vokku (prince of the Fae), Rhyin (Ketsler's cousin), Haru (Ketsler's apprentice), Vinni (Rhyin's girlfriend), Edmund (the bard from Thistled Rose of Glishern) and the kids from the Ageless War wip.

It's a. Really big story because it's kind of like a 12 book series, so there's a lot of stuff still up in the air that could easily change next week or two years from now, but that's how it stands currently.

If you have any more questions or would like clarification on a point Please don't hesitate to send another ask! I don't want to hit you with a three page essay right off the bat lol

Thank you SO MUCH for your interest and your support!!! 😭💕

[sensitiveheartless]

🎶, 🍆, 🎯

🎶 Do you listen to music while you write? What song have you been playing on loop lately?

I do! I have tons of playlists for different fics, as well as ones that are just instrumentals for when I really need to focus. I have one that is basically just “for sad scenes in the rain”, I have one for the Skyline pigeon fic which does in fact have the song “Skyline Pigeon” in it as well as a bunch of Neighbor Totoro songs, I have a pretty giant one for the Howl AU…etc lololol as for what song I’ve been playing a lot recently…uhhh I have to check actually let’s see:

Ok so for the Howl AU, while I’m working on the epilogue and such, I’ve been listening to “Patience gets us nowhere fast” by Capital Cities, as well as “When can I see you again” by Owl City.

Also just as a general skk song: “No Lullaby” by Siames!

Oh, and less as something for a specific character and more just cause I like the song: “Loving You” by Cannons :D (I know that was more than one song but I like music alskdjfj)

🍆 Do you write the spicy stuffs? If so, what’s your most popular nsfw fic?

…Ok so I have written a singular spicy stuffs, but I posted it on anonymous because a), I know at least some minors follow me and I didn’t want to inadvertently encourage anyone to read content they aren’t ready for (speaking as someone who had too much internet access as a kid and got exposed to certain things way too early), and b), I have an irl friend who may stumble across this account at some point and if they see that fic in particular then I will die a little on the inside.

So I won’t be linking it here, but if any of y’all are adults and want me to link it to you in a DM then I wouldn’t mind, just keep in mind that I am not a particularly adept spiceologist (seriously no clue what I’m doing, that fic is mostly an excuse to mess around and experiment with character stuff in a really low-stakes premise), and also the fic spawned from a “hey wouldn’t it be funny if” thought I had, which then grew a character study around what is still essentially just a goof.

Also of course y’all can probably find it on your own, I don’t think it’d be that hard lol — but if you are a minor please do not talk to me about the fic, I would be extremely uncomfortable.

(I would offer to make a sfw version but unfortunately the nsfw is baked into the stupid premise jskdkdjfhf) (…actually some parts of it are kind of a sillier version of the Skyline Pigeon fic so I guess I am working on a more serious and sfw version of it)

All that said, this (sfw) bit from it still makes me laugh, so here:

🎯 Have any of your readers accurately guessed major plot points? Care to share which?

Just about everyone who knew the plot of Howl’s Moving Castle before reading the Howl AU (and even some people who didn’t!) guessed what the twists were going to be before the ~grand reveals~ (although fewer people caught on to the Oda reveal, I think in part cause that one was more based on the HMC book rather than the movie) and I was honestly expecting that going into it lol —

I felt like trying to make it shocking would be less fun than the readers being able to accurately piece everything together for themselves. I loved seeing people commenting “OH MY GOSH THAT’S WHAT’S HAPPENING” as they went through the chapters, because it meant they were thinking over all the clues! And that they cared about the story enough to do that! And even though most people knew what the “twists” were going to be, they still seemed excited to see how everything was going to pan out, so I had a great time :D

Ah, also, to be more specific cause I just realized I was being vague (spoiler warning lol): just about everyone knew that Chuuya was Starlight, most people guessed Rimbaud was the scarecrow, and I saw a handful of people figure out Oda before that reveal happened, too!

[viveela]

your art is ❤ I wanna squeeze them to death (affectionate) also do you read sp fanfiction? if so do you have recs? 🙈

Ah thank you sm!! I'm so glad people enjoy my fanarts, I honestly didn't think my whole shift to south park posting would go this well lol I'm very glad to be proven otherwise!!

As for sp fics ...this is gonna be a long post lol.

So I have been reading some, buuut I guess I'm kinda picky...I am kind of particular about fics in general honestly. If I love something I want to see it portrayed authentically, that goes for every fandom I've been in. I know aus are fun but I want to be able to mainly consume canon compliant content, rarely do I read anything else oops. Unfortunately I've found that to be kinda hard since aging them up and doing all sorts of aus is heavily the vast majority with the sp fandom so I don't really have too many fics I personally have to recommend; just a handful that stood out to me, but I will happily share some!! They're all style and creek tho as I haven't found any I like that aren't yet, but I hope to find some for other pairs or nonromantic ones soon.

Stan x Kyle: A Ballad of True Hearts It's ongoing but really good so far! I really enjoy it, I'm a huge sucker for the fantasy look from the show/game and when it comes to aus this is like the only one I really indulge in. I really like how they're characterized and the tense dynamic they have that reflects the one seen in the current state of the series. The underlying plot has me very intrigued too! Sign of Devotion Adorable canon feeling story where their fantasy world is rarely portrayed as in the show with them simply playing pretend (which is my fav way to see it done). I loved this one to pieces and idk I just really like the idea of some feelings arising between them from trying to stay in character!! To Be More Than My Daydream I really enjoyed this one because it really nailed down how comfortable the two boys have gotten with each other's presence. I enjoy the idea of Stan taking a while to realize how his feelings changed over time and the way awareness of this slowly comes to light. It's written so tenderly and sweet it's really cute, I love the way they are here. Say it and mean it (for both our sakes) Such an awesome fic covering the distance that has grown between the two and how they're both happier when close to one another. They are both wanting and missing what they once had before but so bad at communicating this to each other until now. It was just perfect, loved it. Tweek x Craig:

Signs Point to Yes Incredibly fun fic, super in character, felt like an actual episode. The call back to the fortune teller is great. It was just such an enjoyable fic that really captured their dynamic and the struggle to save a relationship they didn't even ask for but now want. Super cute!

A Stripe of Love This fic was made before there was that much info on Stripe I believe, but it is very cute and I enjoyed it a lot. I am also always a fan for people bringing in Tweek's unofficial/official parrot into the mix, even if briefly. Overall, it's just a really sweet read.

Baby steps

Really cute exploration of how the two would feel about the awkward transition from faking to actually putting real feelings into their actions and being a little more vocal about it. Tweek's nerves are captured really nicely too.

That's all of them, hopefully my tastes in fics overlap at least a little with yours and you gain a nice read out of this!

I also plan to write some fics myself so maybe keep an eye out for that...?

[winkle-pickers]

🦈🎁🚀 for the ask game! (If you're still doing it ofc)

Omg YES, I am doing all ask games in perpetuity 😂💞 Thank you for checking, and I'm delighted to answer!

🦈 Which character is the toughest to write?

I think last time I answered Jounouchi, and that is still true to an extent, but oh my god BAKURA. I just tried writing my first Bakura fic recently. Like yes I know being mysterious and strange and (deliberately?) confusing is like his whole thing, but if you haven't been steeped in the Bakurae/Ishtar side of the fandom for the last 20 years...it's a lot of meta to catch up on. A LOT. So many good takes, many in direct opposition to each other, many of them equally compelling despite that. WHEW. I tried my best, I hope I didn't write an offensively wrong Bakura, everyone's gotta start somewhere right?!?! ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ

🎁 Have a piece of a WIP you want to share?

Ooooh, yes!! A little Kaibros character study from years ago that has been languishing in my drafts, that I'm re-working and may actually publish someday. I'll stick it under a readmore, tell me what you think!

🚀 Do you like to outline your fic first or create as you go?

Unfortunately, I don't have the kind of brain where I can sit in front of a blank document and think a story out in bullet point form. I desperately wish I did lol. But alas I must charge in headfirst and get a few thousand words in before I have any idea of where I want things to go. Sometimes (often) I blast through the entire thing without outlining. Sometimes I hit a snag somewhere and realize I done fucked up and need to put myself back on the tracks.

And then there was the time I got 100k words into a YGO/Zelda crossover and realized oh no i think this will be MUCH more than 100k and wrote a very rough outline, then another Zelda game came out halfway through the fic and I had to spend a solid month rewriting my outline to accommodate lore from the new game, and also I somehow accidentally turned the whole thing into a huge ensemble cast with multiple concurrent plot threads balancing both YGO and Zelda character arcs, Hyrulean politics, and an imminent multiverse collapse. My Scriv file now has a 120k word planning & research section. (Oops.)

tl;dr I have exactly one fic that is well outlined and the rest are me doing the writing equivalent of a Leeroy Jenkins. congrats if you get that reference and are ancient like me

ANYWAYYYYSS thank you for the ask!!! Kaibros snippet under the cut 🐉

“Come on, nii-sama,” Mokuba pleads. It comes out weirdly desperate, more pathetic than he’d intended. “This is so unfair. It’s unfair enough that I don’t have parents, and it’s even more unfair that you won’t tell me-”

“You do have a parent.” Seto's reply is so sharp that it makes Mokuba flinch.

“I know, I know,” Mokuba replies, irritated at the pedantry. “You’re my parent legally. But you’re not, you know...I just want...”

Mokuba realizes as he’s talking that he’s said something terribly wrong. The change in his brother’s face is minuscule and significant and makes his stomach flip in shame. He trails off, the words curling up and dying as they fall off his tongue.

“Please go to bed,” Seto says. His tone of voice is so perfectly even that Mokuba gets up and leaves without another word.

Mokuba doesn’t go to school the next day, opting instead to stay in bed and stare at the wall. Seto either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.

For the first time in years, he cries. And then he thinks about the fact that it’s been years since he last cried. Mokuba spends so much time wondering what the fuck is going on in his brother’s head that he’s maybe neglected to turn the same scrutiny on himself. And he’s maybe leaned a little too far into his role as the ‘normal’ Kaiba - the charming one, the easygoing one, the one who exists to balance out the bombastic, powerful force of nature looming tall at his back.

But who had cried - just once - after Gozaburo hurled himself from the top of the Kaiba Corporation building, and who had watched the coroners wheel away the black-draped gurney with impassive, bone-dry eyes?

[sergeifyodorov]

I just reread strange trails and I'd love to know your inspirations for it! Your ideas behind the worldbuilding, the genesis of the plot, all that good stuff if you'd like to share!

the backstory

im a college student and was unemployed all summer. in order to pass the time while waiting for local jobs to reject me i started a crochet project. throughout pretty much the entire month of june. and possibly also may. i would make my squares and listen to the strange trails album. straight through. every day. i may have gone a little bit insane.

but it's okay. i'm already insane.

lord huron (the band who made the album) has like. lore. am i familiar with this lore? no i am not. am i aware nonetheless that there is lore? yes absolutely. if you listen to their discography there's definitely lore -- recurring themes (resurrection, adventuring, magical seductive women, etc), motifs (depends on the album but strange trails is big on flowers, trees, snow, although there is one song that's set in the desert), characters (they keep mentioning a guy called the world ender.) anyHway the point of all of this is that the music is [solid 7.5 out of 10 but it scratches my exact brain itches] and very evocative of the imagery and idea of a deeper world. my favourite off the album (and one of my favourites in the discography) is la belle fleur sauvage, which tells the listener about a long perilous quest for some mythical thing (a flower. also a woman. metaphor), although one of the ones whose imagery i enjoyed the most is frozen pines, which is a little less concrete but invokes images of cold, the side of a mountain, strange happenings, etc.

the idea

those songs are definitely the most direct inspiration for it but unfortunately my process for developing ideas is kind of terrible because it involves less "sitting down and coming up with stuff" and more "wait for a 60% formed idea to smack you upside the head like rapunzel in tangled and her cast-iron frying pan." which quinn and his sad little corpse did.

if you go back far enough in the quinnfic tag on my blog u can see the post right after it Happened. the idea was literally "quinn hughes carries a corpse up a mountain, and horror."

so i take this little piece of grit from which my pearl of questionable moral integrity will be built and i ask it questions. first off: quinn, why are you on that mountain? who is the corpse? is anyone else with you? soon enough petey decided to join him (although quinn is and was always the protagonist/pov character). the body was The Ghost Of Vancouver before it was brock over top of that.

another inspiration, which i realize i'm leaving out, is this

this is artist grayson perry's work "hold your beliefs lightly" from tomb of the unknown craftsman, and this image of a long perilous upward journey towards some sacred place really combined together with la belle fleur sauvage to form the base idea of the world for the work.

and of course why would you carry a corpse up a mountain to some sacred place if you couldn't resurrect it at the end?

quinn

im big on metaphor. if i'm writing something long it has to have a Point to it, some larger theme than romance and stuff (this is mostly because i'm bad at writing romance)(and also big on curses and the like.) and also because quinn hughes asexual barb i never fucked/i never fucked/all my life man, fucks sake. this was also being written right before the peak of Canucks Captaincy Debate, and in our hearts didn't we all know quinn was going to be the one to wear the c?

so it became pretty clear pretty quick that as well as my attempt at writing horror that this was going to be a quinn character study -- and this is where i should talk about my other fic scheherazade.

in scheherazade, auston actually doesn't make a lot of choices -- he tags along, arguing with the narrator/bill, and only starts to take an active role in the way the story is going near the end, when he finally gets sick of it all. quinn, however, is not at all the same kind of person as auston. he's less artistic and more practical; an older brother instead of a younger one; jewish; not nearly so squeamish. he takes an active role in the story from the very beginning, showing up to the base of the mountain with his pack full, both prepared and not for what lies ahead.

the mountain

vancouver is smack in the middle of the north shore mountains, so there's a million hiking trails about, but the one i can most easily think of (as someone who hasn't been to vancouver in several years) is the grouse grind trail, a popular and fairly short trail that the canucks prospects actually do every year, so i knew quinn and petey (both vancouver draftees) would be familiar. i've never actually done the grouse grind, which was part of the reason i decided to kind of. toy with reality. you can't call me out on inaccuracy when it's Not Real On Purpose (although the sign at the 1/4 mark is copied directly from photos i've seen.)

petey and the plot

once i added petey, i knew i'd have to get rid of him -- a lot of the scene ideas were quinn-only, and petey's way too sarcastic and useless (AFFECTIONATE) to engage seriously with the ideas presented to him like quinn would and did. so i needed to divide them up.

the original plot idea from the outline is actually pretty similar up until the end of chapter 6 (the conversation w the ghost), but it differs in a few crucial ways -- one, quinn breaks down again, crying and everything, and two, he actually does go through with the resurrection instead of using his wish to get petey down the mountain safely. i realized around then that this wouldn't work with the quinn i'd created, especially after his argument with the ghost: he's far less focused on glory than stability, less interested in the cup or his contract and more interested in the safe long bet than high rolling. in a cold, wet environment like the mountain it's a lot easier to get hypothermia without noticing than it is in a dry environment, even if the dry environment is several degrees colder than the wet one. and quinn would know that, having seen petey's thin little sweater and knowing his stubborn ass is going to freeze.

so after that it became about hypothermia. i actually had a bit of a writing pause after this because i knew i was going off-outline, so i had to kind of inch ahead until i knew where i was going. but i'm happy with how it turned out!

[unpretty]

astielle ask dump time, with spoilers through chapter 37. i did that thing where i waited too long and then felt awkward about posting when there wasn't a new chapter so there are some asks from way back in february in this (man, it's been a while). i tried to tag people but tumblr literally wouldn't let me, sorry y'all

anonymous asked:

just read thru all of astielle in one sitting while trying to guess plot points from vaguely remembered details in posts i didnt really read, dont know if that enhanced the experience necessarily, but there was a lot of 'oh is THIS the monster porn everyone was sending asks about?'

@stoppit-keepout asked:

I've slowly (ish) read Astielle over the last week or so and 1) amazing work, you're a fucking champ in every sense of those words, thank you so much for writing and sharing, and 2) is Leonas ever gonna get to be tits out? where by "get to be" I of course mean "unfortunately unable to escape being". my heart just goes out to Karzarul, u know… which leads me to 3) you are so so good at playing with characters' knowledge states and points of view for maximum emotional impact with minimal words, it's amazing 🤩

there is definitely going to be a leonas tits out moment and that is a threat

@makadragontamer asked:

Me, rereading astielle and getting to the flashbacks: nettles! 😃

Me, two chapters later: nettles! 😟

A+ good work, tapped right into my "sucker for a tragic prequel" side

@sparrow-ink asked:

doing a reread and not sure if anyone has asked this already, but in Astielle ch 32, is "She knew from experience that sometimes one interesting thing would hide in a sea of same ones. One room with a different mural, one book with a missing page, one trash can with a piece of paper where someone had written down the secret phrase to get into the secret club on the other side of town." possibly a reference to the early 2000s gba & gamecube game The Urbz: Sims in the City? I spent so fucking long trying to find the stupid goddamn password for club xizzle, that sentence threw me back in time 17 years with both force and precision. it's also possible I might just be projecting past trauma onto a benign sentence, but had to ask lmao.

my original answer to this was so long and full of salt but honestly it is just based on. a lot of old nintendo games. so many old nintendo games. there's a moment in charles barkely shut up and jam gaiden, which i cannot find a screenshot of, where charles is begging you to please stop looking in every trash can. there is nothing in the trash cans. why are you doing this. but also i looked in every trash can.

@asimovsideburns asked:

you: I have created a king of all monsters

me: you’ve ruined a perfectly good moonbeam is what you’ve done. look at him, he’s got self-esteem issues that he both takes out on and has passed on to all his not-clones.

@rose-and-bones asked:

"[. . .] a gag reflex was not something it had ever occurred to Karzarul that he should have."

SNORT

Also monster backstory aaaaaaaaaa!

@biot08 asked:

The first part of chapter thirty-six: oh wow this is hot, hot, hot Last part of chapter thirty-six: oh wow this is sad, sad, sad I am crying for these poor lost boys and their lost lives and their lost loves

@lupdracolis asked:

" “Are you jealous?” Karzarul asked as Violet climbed into bed with him, and so he must have felt it. “Hush,” Violet said instead of answering " Kitty. Kitty why.

>:3c

@pvnkassbvtch asked:

Karzarul asking Violet to call him "beautiful" after choosing the Aekhite word for "beautiful" as his name…… idk what it means but it made me feel things!!!! he just wants to be pretty! T^T

@bramblepatch asked:

Kitty EVERY TIME you let someone new have the spotlight at all I instantly have a new favorite. Sid is SO GOOD I love that there is SOMEONE on team monster who is capable of meaningful self-reflection.

anonymous asked:

i don't know why it was so unexpected for the monsters to be, you know, fully realized people, but i am surprised and intrigued. lol at Violet's "i'm not that new," has he existed for more than a month yet? and after his near-meltdown with the moon cult monsters, i cannot begin to imagine what Karzarul would do if he learned that Sid has been married twice. would he just. dissolve into a puddle? this whole thing has really driven home the extent to which that man is an open wound.

anonymous asked:

The amount of feelings I now have about the Violet/Sid ship is completely untenable. There is so much complicated lore and backstory that is completely inseparable from their early relationship dynamic and they're not even the main ship im dying omg this is so much worse than pennywaynes

violet also shipped it, until very recently

anonymous asked:

My new otp is Sid/Love & Happiness. Sid also has the most "just a guy" energy of all the monsters and I approve. He would change the oil on the car. He might be the only monster to have changed a diaper.

This replaces my old OTP of Violet/Kavid, who I was mostly shipping because of imagining the trio's reactions. I still ship them, but in a low-key rare pair way.

I look forward to Violet meeting the moon cultists & opening negotiations. Violet reminds me a lot of a precocious high schooler, especially in that convo with Sid. Super competent, emotionally astute about adults in a "I know how to manipulate them" way, but still a moron who does not understand himself as well as he thinks he does.

I am still confused by where the penises are on the savagewings, but since I am mostly reading your monster porn for the bits about tax law, I hope you will forgive me.

Very curious what the form would be if one was made for Leonas. All I can think is "semen is juice" so that Leonas doesn't get cranky.

"I am mostly reading your monster porn for the bits about tax law" is an excellent testimonial

anonymous asked:

Just sent an ask & said Sid was probably the only monster to change a diaper & thinking of this more & I love how literally all of the monsters would be the worst at babies, like good job making a story that is hard for breeders to kink. The taurils would drop the baby. The brutelings would make weird baby devices to change the diapers for them & it would be bad for the baby. The savagewings would make other people do it for them. Sid would just be like shrug and do it and move on with his life.

anonymous asked:

IT WAS A MAP OF KARAZUL (KAZARUL?) HELPING PEOPLE I HAVE SO MANY EMOTIONS

so does karzarul

anonymous asked:

Karzadillo ❤❤❤❤❤

@kingfisherblues asked:

Ch. 37 stuff: He turned into an armadillo?? Is this what he has done?? He felt too much and had to be a stone about it??

Also, I'm loving the weird dream snippets. Has this been Minnow's whole deal this entire time? If so, that explains nothing, but opens up an entirely new avenue of questions. Oh boy ....

in my head i was imagining sort of a pangolin fennec fox sort of a thing but then my partner pointed out that when you cross a pangolin with a fennec fox you just get a regular armadillo (or maybe a fairy armadillo? but they don't have the ears)

anonymous asked:

Oh my god, an armadillo-fennec fox hybrid, I need a plushie NOW (to go with a rootboar plushie I also need). "'I know,' Minnow said. 'It’s that, or you have to be the emotionally stable one for a while.''We should wait,' Leonas said." Leonas I love you so much.

@halfdeadfriedrice asked:

CHAPTER 37!! SHRIEKS!! a new-- pangolin with giant ears??? minnow has zero emotional support boyfriends and we love this for her. everyone take turns holding the emotional support ball. OH MY GOD NEW MONSTERS a;lskdfj. and the DREAMS. I love the fairytale bargain "as far as you can keep your eyes closed / I already offered to kill him." what a return!!!!

emotional support rock added to the rock collection

anonymous asked:

the ending of the new chapter!!! i love how you can deliver an emotional gut punch with one of the funniest, wry, dry jokes. but what a thing for her to have figured out and what a shock to karzarul, considering he's trying to pretend to be something else with them.

@onceuponymous asked:

I didn't realize there was a new Astielle chapter! I just thought you were reblogging your shiny new promo post for its own sake.

Wonder what Karzarul's Repression Armadillo form will end up named. The "in-game" version would probably be like Pebblits or underground Octoroks, a monster disguised as part of the environment

i actually made the new promo post a month ago and then kept it in my drafts until i had a new chapter because i didn't want to get anyone's hopes up

@knightwithakay asked:

obsessed with the implication that karzarul hasn't made new intelligent monsters or beasts in centuries and has now made TWO, the thing that happens when he experiences new emotional stimuli or wants to find new things within himself--!

@and-then-he-melted asked:

I am returning to using your askbox like AO3 comments sorry but thinking about Elias all alone without anyone he knows to ask for answers trying to work out what the fuck was going on is fucking me up I've been assuming Elias was complicit in Leland's plans somehow but that's feeling less and less right

Chapter good

that's the intended function of my askbox tbqh

@therealbeachfox asked:

You are killing me with Astielle. Chapter 37 is… Mythic? What's a good term for Fairy Tale that doesn't feel as twee? The perspective of Karzarul from the outside, from people who don't know him as King of All Monsters, let alone the sassy bundle of issues he is. The unspoken lives of regret and remembrance from those humans who crossed his path, the seeds of fairy-tales and Monster Myths that probably still exist to the present day. And Elias. Wandering the world. Finding dreams where the Big Pretty Monster Man steals him away. A lifetime spent realizing just how big a mistake he made slaying him, turning against the Sun Church that raised and trained him. And Ari's reaction to it all. Both Elias hunting for dreams of him and the fact that all those passing humans remembered him so vividly and strong that their dreams still exist in the world (and the whole Dream Lore is fascinating stuff. I can see those Sheikah Slate Memories mechanics at play). Poor Ari getting punched in the heart/gut so strong he has to turn into a rock for awhile to deal, and gives birth to a second new monster in as many months. (Is there a mechanic where Player Decisions affect what new Monsters Karzarul populates the world with throughout the game? Are there elaborate detailed forum threads arguing which ones are the best mechanically and which ones are the best storywise and which ones have the best abs? Do people mod in New Game +++ so you can get every new Monster variation at once? In my dreams, they do.)

when someone suggested that elias had a map of places where he had gay thoughts it was very difficult not to say "yes, exactly"

[thefearandnow]

Audio Drama Sunday: 12/18/22

The Sheridan Tapes

Alright so I’ve officially finished season one of the Sheridan Tapes and I think overall it was a great run. I’d say the first half of it was a little bit frustrating for me but that the last 6 episodes or so really started to feel much more consistent and focused. I get why the first 14 episodes are the way they are but for me it just felt like so much build up that never fully satisfied me. It’s probably my editor brain kicking into gear but there was a lot of early episodes that I think could’ve been simplified.

That said, I think there is an art to writing a podcast that can anticipate fandom and can play off its audience and I think The Sheridan Tapes is an incredible example of that. It’s not really my style of audio drama but the fact that it’s been able to sustain a fan base and grow a community around the story and characters is really inspiring. It’s that fandom that makes other people want to listen and it’s always amazing to watch that magic play out via different corners of the internet. And quite honestly I’m sure the things that I was frustrated by in terms of plot and pacing are what avid listeners love about it. Even if I had some issues with it, I’m glad I finished the first season and gave it a shot! The people who make it are lovely and I’ll probably at least start the final season (which got fully crowdfunded!!)

Shipworm

Two-Up Productions has produced some of my favorite fiction podcasts (36 Questions, season 1 of Limetown) and though I'm not sure this is really the "first" feature length audio drama piece, it might be the most memorable. Something that I think Two-Up does really well with their audio projects is that they treat the listener's position with a lot of care. In the case of Shipworm, the space for the listener is claustrophobically intimate and yet alienating, cleverly using spatial audio to put the listener in a liminal space between technology and consciousness. This relationship between the listener, Wallace (the main character) and the voice that may or may not be real is the main crux of this piece, holding all the character development, causing story twists and fueling a tone of paranoia throughout. The music and scoring is cinematic and impressive, the acting is masterful and even though details of the story could get confusing, there was never a point where I stopped trusting the writing to fill in the blanks and hold my hand. I recommend finding time to listen to it in all one go, I think there are some natural pause points where you'd expect an episode to end or an ad break to break up the flow but it was an incredible experience to absorb the whole story in a 116 min sprint. I can imagine relistening to this a couple times just to experience it all again, the immediacy and style was such an entertaining listen.

Joy to the World

This holiday limited series from audio drama vets like @starplanes and @innbetween is so cute and wholesome, a perfect feel good listen written for all ages. It’s a sweet little collection of audio Christmas cards in the form of holiday conversations shared over the radio waves, hosted by a lonely astronaut, Joy. It’s got some Charlie Brown Christmas references mixed with Delilah-esque intimacy and some nuanced discussions about family, vulnerability and queerness. Each episode is a snack sized scene that melted my heart, there’s 7 episodes out that I listened to all today. Really looking forward to the rest leading up to Christmas Eve! My favorite one so far is “Dorothy, Out at Sea”

Also for me, Christmas and radio is such a classic combo and it’s so cool to have holiday audio drama like this to listen to. I’m curious if there are other holiday-themed fiction podcasts out there?

Edit: didn’t realize they have a tumblr! @jttwpod

Burning Gotham

This week I listened to episodes 6-7 as well as a behind the scenes bonus episode and it unfortunately is just not doing it for me. In addition to all the other critiques I've had of the show over the last few weeks, what I realized this week is that the thing preventing me from liking this show is my editor brain flagging missed opportunities. Of course, this is kind of useless and selfish feedback because the underlying mentality is "this is what I would've done." But I think for my own ears there are a lot of choices in terms of pacing, structure and aesthetic that feel more distracting for me as a listener than engaging. And it just takes me out of the experience. Like why was there sound effects and 1835 scene audio all the way through the bonus episode? I understand the cutting into the scenes for reference but why is it present throughout people's interviews if this is the non-fiction part of the show? I can hear and see the shape of influences like 1865 or even something like NPR's Throughline which is why I was excited to listen but there isn't any particularly strong commitment to a recognizable style to get me excited to keep listening. I think there's only one episode left so I'm probably going to listen to that last one but I probably won't write about it.

Honorable Mention:

This is just sorta becoming my non-fiction podcast corner but I listened through all of the second season of Cover Story and I’m still just floored. NY Mag’s investigative series was one of my favorite podcasts last year and this season is similarly jaw dropping. In the first thirty seconds they say that most of the people they interviewed lied to them and then from there it’s an absolutely bat shit story that I won’t spoil. So many cringey texts and emails, amazing storytelling and brilliant scoring. It’s only 6 episodes and each one is just as addictive as the next!

[ghost-1-y]

For the asks!!

3, 6, 11, 14, 19, and 21!

from this ask game!

3. What’s your favorite fic that you’ve written?

Out of fics that I've published, it's probably either Sacrifice or Sabotage. For the former, I'm really proud of how I wrote Kyojuro and I felt like it was a relatively creative idea that I started out with (with him being a jotunn and reader being a nordic village chief). The latter, on the other hand, is my longest fic thus far and I put a ton of effort into the symbolism of reader's character and how her relationship with Sanemi slowly changed over time, which is why I'm gonna say that these fics so far are tied.

However, in terms of all of my fic ideas, I have a strong feeling that Desecration will be my favorite fic I've ever written. I know I've only posted the prologue for it, but this fic is something I've been brewing for months now. I have like...9 pages of bullet points and tables dedicated to the storyline/plot (and that's without any of the actual writing, those 9 pages are 100% just outline). It's also the first fic I've created a playlist for. This fic is my baby I just know it (and I hope you all will enjoy it when it gets posted).

6. Are there any fics from others you reread all the time?

I don't have a lot of time on my hands to reread larger fics unfortunately, usually things I reread are very small, one-off drabbles or headcanons because reading a larger fic is something I feel like requires commitment. I did actually reread your Phantasmagoria fic before the final part came out though so I could have the plot fresh in my mind lolol

11. Do you have specific playlists for writing fics?

The only playlist I have so far is my Desecration playlist, which, once I've rearranged it to fit the plot and have added all the songs I want, I will share on here! For my other fics I've usually just looked up playlists on youtube or spotify that fit the vibe I was looking for.

14. If you could see one of your fics adapted into a visual medium, such as comic or film, which fanfic would you pick?

Hmm...maybe Sabotage? I don't think a lot of my fics are long enough to be considered for a film adaptation lmao. Once Desecration has been written I'd probably pick that one though just because it'll be long enough (and is also my favorite storyline I've come up with so far)

19. Give us a small teaser from one of your WIPs.

<(´ཀ`」<) okay

Fleeting memories raced across your mind and rattled within your skull – short visions of sunlight reflecting across statues of women you couldn’t recognize, the brief feeling of love and fulfillment as delicate as dew drops laid upon the blades of grass overgrown in an old cathedral forgotten by time.  It was the warmth of the sun that you’d always treasured the most, its gentle rays caressing your skin just as the faint vision graced your very thoughts.  The realization of betrayal and blood splattered across the floor as darkness enshrouded the very hall in which you stood, clouds blocking out sunbeams and withering flowers in empty, desolate corners long untended. And the screams – screams building from within yourself and echoing across barren walls as you are ripped clean from your body, a mind so full within a body so hollow – an amalgamation of blood and skin and bones, but lacking the very threads that hold a being together as you become a husk of your previous self. A blurry face, a voiceless name, an unbearable cold and a feeling of lightness.  And then, nothing.

21. Have you ever deleted an entire scene after spending hours laboring over it? If so, why?

Yes, all the time lmao.

Mainly because I'm a perfectionist and I cringe whenever I read something that doesn't feel like it lives up to my own impossible standards.

In fact, I currently have an entire scene for one of my WIPs that I'm going to rewrite completely because I don't like how I went about describing it. I like the idea of the scene, so the general concept will be kept, but I'm 100% rewriting it when it comes time to actually put it in the story lol

[meanlesbean]

Chapter commentary

are people interested in seeing my chapter commentary for Cadence of a Legacy? idk. I'm posting it anyway. voila.

Chapter 1 notes are longer than the others because I included more detail about the planning of the fic. Anyway, here there be: musings on family and brotherhood and how it shows up in linked universe fanworks, Hyrule as an arsonist, Wild's economy, and more info about card games than anyone else probably cares about. minor totk spoilers about one sidequest but nothing plot related (if you need, skip the bullet that starts "pre-totk release".) Here we go:

Chapter 1 - The Woods Between

I am not joking about having a phone note that says “making peace with your inner child when your inner child has physically manifested and wants to cause problems on purpose”. I would include a screenshot of said note, but then you would all see how long I have been toying with this idea and that’s too embarrassing

IMO, there is an astounding lack of fic focusing on the relationship between Time and Twilight even though they are the only ones who interact in game canon. And I’ve read every good Time-centric fic probably a dozen times. So unfortunately that meant I had to go write my own. Unfortunately the plot that I came up with doesn’t work with Time (or Mask) as the POV character, so it evolved into a Twilight-centric fic as well. 

The bones of this chapter were mostly written in a notebook last year at my terrible job when I had a desk in the corner and nothing to do 85% of the time. Large parts of the set up of the chapter remain the same from this draft, with even a select few of the lines staying the same word for word. But the handwritten version, which covered all of Chapter 1 and parts of Chapter 2, was only about 7 pages front and back (rip to the 11k monster it became)

Literally I never would have posted this fic if I hadn’t read the the FMA fic series demon alchemist and realized that the reason I hated my draft so much was because the narrative voice was too impersonal

So I started working on this fic again last fall with a lot more attention paid to establishing a clear voice, and I finally started making solid progress, to the point where I made it a goal to share it on AO3, which I have not done in a long long time

Hyrule’s missing fingers are a reference to the demon alchemist series btw. I do imagine he lost them from an enemy’s throwing ax or mace. Twilight complaining about the number of enemies with throwing weapons is also me complaining about how hard Zelda II is. fucking Dairas. 

Other fic inspiration includes: Call Them Brothers, for getting me thinking about situations in which Warriors doesn’t know that Time is the kid he fought with in the war, and more generally, Sinnatious’ LU and LOZ fics for inspiration on Time’s voice. 

I cannot tell you how much time I spent rewriting and reworking the first half of the chapter. Honestly writing that first part was just like. Agonizing. Nothing was working for so long. Every time I tried fixing a problem, I created two more. I was very close to cutting out the scene of Twilight scouting and the camp shenanigans and skipping to Twilight meeting Mask, but then it felt like everything went way too quick. I was very relieved when people liked the wrestling scenes because that whole section had me tearing my hair out. The things that kept me going were spite and also how desperate I’ve been to get back into writing. Literally that one defunctland tweet. 

In contrast, the second half of the chapter (everything from the Epona grooming scene on) came so easy. All of the latter stuff was written and edited within like 2 weeks. My favorite scene from this chapter actually ended up being that part with Twilight and Time taking care of Epona. 

More specific notes:

My take on Twilight’s aversion/distrust of magic is that he has a really strong sense for it, but he doesn’t have much of a knowledge base of how magic works. So this results in Twilight frequently getting a lot of information that he can’t make sense of, and it really fucking freaks him out. 

I know fandom likes to characterize Wild as the group arsonist, but I think Hyrule would be just as big if not a bigger arsonist, which was why I had him be the one to suggest using fire. If you want to uncover all the hidden items/heart pieces in the OG Zelda without a guide or walkthrough, you have to burn so many trees. Like, if you are ever stuck in that game and don’t know where to go next, 70% of the time your solution is either bombs or fire. 

I played ten thousand rounds of “should their titles (ie. rancher, captain, etc) be lowercase or capitalized?” while writing this. I know people usually have them call each other their fandom names, but tbh that always throws me off just a little, even though I 100% get why people do it because good lord it would be easier.

I feel like a lot of LU works (speaking generally about the fandom output as a whole, not about any particular fic) leans heavily into the emotional support and comradery aspect of the chain as family, and does not include nearly enough of like. annoying each other on purpose and play violence and rubbing each others’ faces in the dirt. which is a big reason for why I kept the wrestling scene.

Maybe it’s because me and my family members were little demons but like. I have brothers and mostly boy cousins, and a solid 60% of our time as kids/teens was spent playing some variation of King of the Rock. I appreciate the found family softness, and there will definitely be a lot of that in this fic, but my experience with siblinghood includes a lot of chasing each other around with wiffle ball bats and trying to strangle each other. The Links are brothers! and sometimes that means that you will try to ruin your brother’s whole day just because you are mildly bored. 

Warriors and the teens are playing Rummy. I imagine that the group plays a lot of card games, and since I grew up playing tons of cards, I have put way too much thought into all of this. Other popular games among the group (depending on how many people they have) probably include Texas (Ordon?) hold em, whist, knockout, BS, gin rummy, and hearts. Hearts can get contentious with them though because you can engage in coordinated sabotage. Four and Legend are not allowed to be partners in Whist because they’re the only ones who can count all the cards in play. There is a near-unanimous group ban on Spoons because it got too violent.  

Legend having heterochromia is inspired by an Oracles manga panel redraw someone posted on here years ago that I cannot for the life of me find again

I have this headcanon that Wild, in comparison to the rest of the gang, is absurdly rich but does not really realize it because he just does not have a ton of shit to actually spend money on. This is based on the ridiculous amount of rupees/gems I have on my 100% botw file and also my own musings on the state of Hyrule’s economy post-calamity. Mostly I think that post-calamity Hyrule does not have super discrete classes like most other Hyrules do, and that a luxury economy does not really exist. 

Pre-totk release I actually thought: okay, Wild has a lot of money, but his luxury purchases are limited to like fancy armor, which is directly related to doing his job as the hero. It’s not like most other eras where you can go build wealth by buying up a ton of land. And then totk came around and let you go buy a sizable swatch of land. I still think my original idea mostly holds true, if only because the monster-free areas of Hyrule where someone could safely make a land claim still seem to be pretty limited (even the totk house has monster camps right across the road from it). 

Mask is not dressed in the green tunic for two main reasons, one of which I’ll keep to myself because it felt way too spoilery when I wrote it down. Most importantly, it shows that time has passed since Majora’s Mask. In fact, in chapter 3 we'll learn that it's been just about a year since then. The Kokiri tunic is no more because he grew out of it :( 

I didn’t find this reference until after publishing, but I imagine he’s dressed more or less like this. Except he has his green cap and a leather belt, baldric, and boots.

[teenageread]

Review: Icebreaker

Synopsis:

Anastasia Allen has worked her entire life for a shot at Team USA.

A competitive figure skater since she was five years old, a full college scholarship thanks to her place on the Maple Hills skating team, and a schedule that would make even the most driven person weep, Stassie comes to win.

No exceptions.

Nathan Hawkins has never had a problem he couldn’t solve. As captain of the Maple Hills Titans, he knows the responsibility of keeping the hockey team on the ice rests on his shoulders.

When a misunderstanding results in the two teams sharing a rink, and Anastasia’s partner gets hurt in the aftermath, Nate finds himself swapping his stick for tights, and one scary coach for an even scarier one.

The pair find themselves stuck together in more ways than one, but it’s fine, because Anastasia doesn’t even like hockey players…right?

Plot:

Stassie was going to be the best. With dreams of the Olympics, this pair-figure skater already put her goals on the line once when her high school boyfriend and partner were not dreaming as big as her. Now at Maple Hill, Stassie and her new partner and roommate Aaron, had big dreams, as long as Stassie did not eat too much. With her life planned out with her planner, Stassie eats, sleeps, and dreams of figure skating, all while keeping up with her coursework, going to therapy to manage her anxiety, and occasionally hooking up with her basketball player bestie, who while the sex is good, she will never date. Her sophomore year was going perfectly until the hockey team messed it up. With their rink destroyed, the two ice sports were forced to share the same arena, which means dividing ice time so that both teams can practice. That is where Stassie had the unfortunate pleasure to meet Nate Hawkins, captain of the hockey team. Taken with Stassie immediately, Nate tries his best to get this figure skater in his corner, or what he really wanted, in his bedroom. Where Stassie reminds aloof, she was quickly taken by Nate with his good looks, charm, and his dedication to his friends and team. Where Nate spent his senior year covering the tracks of young rookies who messed up, he also finds himself losing his heart for the first time, to a blonde figure skater with a big mouth and an even bigger heart. As our two ice athletes try to figure out their love, along with managing their sports, friendships, family, and their own expectations, they realize how much they need each other, and learn to balance love, and ice skating, together.  

Thoughts: 

Hannah Grace writes this smutty romance novel, featuring two university athletes, one rink, and a whole lot of heart. Taken from the first-person perspective of both Nate and Stassie, we got to switch between points of view with each chapter, allowing the plot to move quickly, and for us to understand both sides of our characters' stories. Stassie is an amazing character, her fun and flirty attitude towards Nate and the other hockey boys, with quick comebacks and always getting into some sort of comedic trouble, made her a great character to love. Grace also gave Stassie some depth with her struggling to live up to her adoptive parent's expectations, being bullied by Aaron, and her own doubts about her self-worth. I truly appreciate Grace for giving us the sadder side to Stassie, as Grace shows her going to therapy, and shows her working through her self doubts. On the side of narration, we got Nate, who like Stassie, is fun and flirty, but has his own serious family issues. With a dead mom and a father who does not care about his hockey career, Nate is constantly putting others before himself and struggles with his internal emotions of not acting like his father. Together they were dynamite, with chemistry off the wall, the best banter, and some great sex scenes. Yes, Grace makes this novel a smut novel, with some heavily detailed scenes throughout the novel, that upped the age range of the novel. Did it have the most complicated plot? No. Did the sex and romance overshadow the deeper meaning Grace was trying to write about? Yeah, it kind of did. But it was cute, a fun flirty novel that is drowning in romance, making you wish to find your own Nate and Stassie, and with an epilogue that sends you over the end. Where the plot had some twist, it was not very deep, and I am so thankful that Grace did not make the big event a miscommunication, because, unlike the majority of book couples, Stassie and Nate had great communication throughout the entire novel, which was amazing to finally see in print. Overall, Grace writes a cute novel, with fun characters, great side characters (the entire hockey team was fantastic), and some melodrama, but all in all this was a novel about love, and one definitely worth reading.

Read more reviews: Goodreads

Buy the book: Amazon

[babsvibes]

Hey If you don’t mind if I ask what was the inspiration for your story

It’s my party and I’ll fry if I’ll want to

Like the plot line or the character dynamic’s etc

AND AND Like WHY couldn’t Louise see that she’s in LOVE with Logan!!!!!

I absolutely don’t mind and in fact am thrilled that you want to know more about this piece! Thank you for asking!

It’s My Party (and I’ll fry if I want to): Rated E. “From the way the chairs on either side of her remain empty to the way the bartender—whose name she can’t bother to remember—never stays too long in her corner, Louise determines they’re all scared of the woman who mutters to herself while tearing paper label after paper label.”

The important thing about this story, no matter the inspiration, is that Louise, Logan, and Rudy ALL needed to be shown as complicated individuals, sympathetic and not at the same time, or none of it would have mattered. There is no completely right or wrong answer to life, and shit is messy in It’s My Party.

The inspiration for the character dynamics is actually a pretty uncomplicated answer! I asked “what would happen if I cranked these characters flaws up to 11” and then boom. Done. I wrote a few more notes on this on chapter two of this fic. As for the inspiration for the piece itself?

I won’t lie to you, this started as spite fic. It was only supposed to be the first scene in the bar, and Louise was originally going to leave with Logan then and there. I was in a place where I was tired of seeing Logan written as a villain, but never… in character? So, in the way that Linda explains how to throw a shrimp, I said “That’s not how you write Logan as a villain. THIS is how you write Logan as a villain.”

But then it… evolved? I sat down to write and just more and more things poured out until I realized I couldn’t write a spite fic, nor did I ever really want to. I had something more nuanced I wanted to say. Something that was meaningful—to me at least. And when you’re dealing with nuance, there’s not room for a Good Guy and a Bad Guy.

It also probably isn’t all that surprising that this is a… deeply personal story. Deeply personal, but also a story shared by a lot of people—usually women but not always. When you grow up being told that the way you think and act is in some way inherently wrong by institutions (for me, it was my family, my religion, my community), it’s not something you can shrug off. And sometimes you unfortunately start playing a part that isn’t right for you because maybe it’s supposed to make things “easier,” maybe it’s supposed to be “good.” And also, sometimes, it starts manifesting as self-hatred.

As an outsider, it’s easy to look at Louise’s situation and think “man… she really needs to leave Rudy,” but that undermines that she does love him and him needing her is going to mean something. Yes, she loves Logan too, but the theme of “love” isn’t what’s pulling the most strings (even though, yes, it definitely should be a focus, and that’s one of the reasons this story happens in the first place).

The relationship between Want and Need ends up playing a much bigger role. Louise may know she wants Logan but she is too disconnected from herself to be able to tell what she needs. Aren’t there some pieces of you that have wanted to be needed? Being needed is like being handed a purpose on a silver platter, and that’s hard to turn down even if it’s draining every last ounce of your spirit. This coincides with Logan and Rudy’s feelings towards her. Logan says it flat out at one point, “I want you, but he needs you.” That contraction with the “but” is meant to imply that the reverse is also true. Logan doesn’t need Louise and Rudy doesn’t want her. Or, at least, that’s how they’re presenting themselves. How is Louise supposed to be able to tell which is more valuable when she’s already so disconnected? Why does each one come with a catch?

And that’s how you get a story like It’s My Party.

Anyway, I’m just now realizing you may have wanted to know the answer behind this specific plot (ie: Louise and Rudy are in an unhappy relationship when her ex Logan moves back into town). It felt like the best way to explore closure and unmet needs by having these contrasting separations (physical and emotional) pulling Louise in different directions and confusing her.

Also, straight up, if I can be real with you… the idea of finally taking what you want even when it’s wrong is hot 🔥

[waka-chan-out]

Do you enjoy being on tumblr anymore?

i actually really appreciate this question. i’ve been thinking about it a lot, and i do really like tumblr. i like the community. i like posting. i’ve met some really great friends through this platform. i just can’t bring myself to post lately. i know i kept saying “after this happens, i’ll be posting more,” but that after hasn’t come. i love writing and i think fanfiction is an integral part of how i practice and how i grow as a writer. but it’s such an ordeal for me, if that makes sense. i can’t sit down around other writers and just pump out smut. that just feels strange. and it feels like it distracts from my other priorities sometimes, such as my larger writing projects. there’s no way i’m deactivating or stopping posting. i have too much content on the back burner to just give up on it. i do still view every project as my little baby and i know people enjoy it, so i want to share it. i do think my priorities have shifted a bit. i’ve grown out of many haikyuu characters and now feel the need to write for some that unfortunately aren’t as popular. but i think my fanbase is diverse enough to allow for that. i absolutely adore writing for obey me, for example. so if you’re here for haikyuu only, it will still be around. that is the entire point of this blog, after all. but that won’t be all i post.

i have two other points as to why i haven’t been around. the first is that i have recently been diagnosed with ADHD and i’m realizing how much it impacts how i operate. many, many, MANY of my WIPS are so backed up in my drafts to the point where they’re hard to find. this is obviously my fault and the solution is to simply clear out what’s there and organize my life, but i think anyone in my position knows how hard that is. it’s like cleaning your room. you want to do it and you know it’ll make life easier and you’ll finally find that thing you’ve been excited about using, but it’s so hard to take the step. these aren’t excuses for my lack of activity, but they are an explanation. i’m on medication and i’m still getting accustomed to that. i’m also moving into my own place soon because i got my first real genuine full time job. the place has great hours and i’ll have a lot of time at home to do the things i love rather than what i feel obligated to do, so i’m going to do better working in a few hours every few days to sit down and work on my writing, whether it’s for all 1.4k of you beautiful, unhinged people or myself and my writing career. i hope to turn this around soon.

the second reason is both simple and controversial. it also makes me feel like a bit of an asshole. my content is genuinely just not that popular. and that’s not to say i’m disappointed with the follower base or notes i have on any given post. i’m beyond grateful for everyone and everything, truly. but i’m in a space now where i cannot bring myself to write much besides dom reader and fluff, or at least porn that’s very heavy with backstory and plot. if i’m being completely fair, i think at least one of my more plot heavy things will get a fair amount of attention (atsumu angst i love you baby and i promise i’ll finish you soon), but even so, that kind of content is just not very popular on tumblr. the obvious ‘solution’ is to move my longer works to AO3, but it doesn’t stop the kinda gross feeling of seeing that there are paragraph long drabble on here with 7k notes and i poured hours and lots of love into a longer post with 2 reblogs. NOTES AREN’T EVERYTHING. i know that. i’m more than aware. but there’s such a fantastic community around those popular posts that i miss so so dearly. getting asks or messages about what i write is the best feeling thing in the universe. i don’t write because i want attention. i write because i want to see the kind of content that i’m posting, and it gets me excited to find other people that have been wanting the same thing. so even though notes aren’t the most important thing in the world and i’m so, so beyond passionate about writing, it makes me want to spend my time daydreaming or sharing my thoughts with a few friends rather than putting in that enormous amount of effort. i hate it, but it’s how i’ve been operating lately. it doesn’t help that i’m living at home too. any burst of inspiration is stopped by a “meg it’s time to eat” or “meg, mom needs you.” i love them but god, i wanna write about slutty idiotic fake people.

i hope you don’t mind me using this as a chance to stand up on my soap box and give you all excuses, but i’ve been feeling the need to post about this for a while and i’m so so happy to be getting it off my chest. i only ask for your patience and appreciate you sticking around. i love y’all. truly. and i’m excited to see where things go from here.

[birubilirubin]

I would like to share some good news for this CP fans. First of all I want to share the point of view of some fans in other countries about Shu-Ai CP. I actually don't care about sister’s ex-lover setting, after all her sister died. This CP fans in China has grown a lot. Chinese fans have actually been realize of this CP shadows for a long time, and they no longer attribute Shuichi's actions to Ai because of Akemi. Everything is purely Shuichi's own personal desire, because they see Gosho always has a single mind for love. Unfortunately, Japanese fans have not realized it at all, they are still carried away by the perspective of the plot made by the animation team, which changes many comic plots. Like Shu-Ake's car accident, Shuichi's expression when he saw the text message was changed to be sad, turning the red and black chapters into a tragic love story plot, affecting the audience Shuichi was the one who killed Akemi, making Ai clench her fists with an angry expression as she remembered M.Dai, etc. Luckily, Subaru-Ai CP has a lot of fans in Japan. They also don't care about Akemi and “cousin”. I don't know why Chinese fans are more able to find their shadow than Japanese fans.This is very funny. For international fans, Uhmm... it might be the same. They care too much about Carasuma, RUM, and guessing the future plot, only few people are realize of Shu-Ai CP shadow. Most of them are still cursing you, if you comment "I want Haibara to be with Shuichi at the end". Then they kept saying "Aren't they cousins, that's disgusting", "Shuichi can only get back with X", "Why does Haibara have to be with an old man, she should to get a guy the same age as her", “Haibara is a great scientist, does she want her child to be disabled”, and another foul comment, and still looking for a guy for Haibara which suits her. Hey... that character already appeared 20 years ago.

As for the cousin setting, I don't think Aoyama wants to destroy the love line he's been building for over 20 years. First in the early stages there is no cousin line. This cousin line may be he wants to open a drug plot or Elena. Haibara didn't know about the drug list. So, he had to get someone to know about it all, and pass this on to Haibara. I read Hannin no Hanzawa where it is a side story of Conan and checked by Aoyama. There the protagonist also likes his cousin, and also Conan in the early case there is a pair of cousins ​​who like each other and get married. So, I think this cousin line will not destroy Shu-Ai CP love line.

In terms of age, I also want to refute one of fan theories that said Tsutomu is the same age as Mary.

Tsutomu and Mary have a big age gap. Mary is 53 years old. Tsutomu is a friend of Haneda Yasuharu who has a son in the mid 20s, 17 years ago. Tsutomu and Haneda Yasuharu were supposed to be in their 60s supposedly, and Tsutomu was older than Mary. Kohji's age if he still alive should be same age as Yusaku. Mary was in her 20s, and Tsutomu was in his 30s when they had Shuichi. 

Is Akai couple a shadow of Shu-Ai CP.

[thexgrayxlady]

What I Read in January 2024

The Mask of Mirrors by M. A. Carrick - 3.5/5.00

Holy Rooks Batman! All my cards on the table, Locke Lamora ruined fantasy heists/con artists for me forever, and this book is following up one of my favorite books of last year.

This book is too damn long. It does not need to be 630 pages long. I don't mind a slow paced book, but this one is unfocused with too many unnecessary tangents and POVs. If you cut down the number of POVs, the lush world building and intricate plot and storylines could be maintained, without the bloat. That being said, you can tell that this comes from a place of ambition and love. You can tell the authors have the biggest brainworms about this story and the world they've created and they want to share it with the reader so badly and I love that for them. There is a glossary and a dramatis personae , but most of the time I feel like things were introduced with enough context that I could figure it out. I did refer to the dramatis personae for some of the minor characters with very similar names though.

It has a glacial start, but that lets the reader luxuriate in the world. Some of the magic is introduced here, but it feels very mundane in a good way. Then the genre does a hard shift at the half way point from a heist to more of a fantasy, but it takes a lot of things from the heist plot and interweaves them with the fantasy in a way that I love. The magic that was once just another fact of life in this world feels fantastic and big in a way it didn't before, but it builds that upon the strong backbone of what was established earlier. Once that shift occurs, things move a lot faster, but it's still plagued with unnecessary POVs, which cost the book whatever inertia it's built up.

The characters are interesting and enjoyable. Vargo is such an asshole and I love him. I love reading Ren's POV and watching her switch between her different personas. When she's being Arenza, it feels very different from when she's Renata. I just wish that she had been a little more morally gray. She's a con artist. She's explicitly back in the city to swindle her way onto a family's social register and steal a fuckload of money. Let her do more bad things. That being said, Sedge does not add enough to justify his inclusion in the present day. We don't get to see his reunion with Tess or feel any emotional impact from his reunion with Ren. He should have stayed the dead brother in the sad backstory.

Unfortunately, the other half of the Rook and Rose duo also leaves a lot to be desired. The Rook's mystique is ruined too early on by the scene in Mettore's study. In one scene, he goes from a mysterious Batman or Zorro figure to a generic snarky brooding guy. If they had never spoken until he pulls her out of the dream, that scene would have been stronger. The reveal about his identity doesn't quite work either because you get that character's POV too often for it to feel like a cool reveal, it's just feels cheap. He's also one of the POVs that I would have removed anyway because he's kind of insufferable and annoying. You could excise the Rook from the story and not much would change. The next book in the series needs to do a lot of work to prove that one of the titular characters needs to be there.

Despite how much this book has working against it, I liked it. I want to read the next one. It has fantastic world building and respects the reader's intelligence. The characters are really enjoyable and well defined. It just has a lot of frustrating bits and needed a stronger editor to tell the authors no.

Dragonfall by L.R. Lam - 3.25/5.00

I didn't realize when I started this that it was as romance focused as it was. That being said, I enjoyed it a lot more than a lot of other romantasy I've read. This is in part due to the fact that the author actually understands what enemies to lovers means.

The characters are all interesting, but some POVs are not needed and I wish the author had stuck to 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person. I really enjoyed Arcady and Everen bickering. I think that more books relationships should start with holding a knife to someone's throat. I like that the book ends before the relationship can really get started. And the hair dye scene is so. Good.

The beginning is a little rough and I had to reread some sections a few times to really understand what was going on, but after that it was fast and easy to read. I may have appreciated a glossary or some appendices, but by the halfway point, I figured out the parts of the magic system and culture that weren't being explained in the text. I honestly liked this because it shows that the author respected their readers' intelligence enough to trust that they can figure it out. For example, there's something weird going on with capitalizing some, but not all, pronouns that isn't explained until ~1/3 of the way through. There is enough in context to figure out the rules, but I could see how it could annoy readers.

Feathered dragons are always cool.

The Defiant Heir by Melissa Caruso - 4.25/5.00

Swords and Fire is a very underrated series. I read the first book a few years ago and I'm surprised about how much of it remembered after the first few chapters refreshed me. It gets extra points because the author is a ZooMass graduate.

After several books in a row where I felt like there were far too many POVs, sticking to one POV was so refreshing. Amalia is interesting to follow and I enjoyed getting to see her growing into her own political prowess and the deepening bond between her and Zaira. By the end of the book, she's become someone who can make a difficult choice for the greater good. The ending leaves no easy way out. There's nobody she can convince and no opponent that Zaira can burn away. All she can do is direct the fallout from Ruvan's machinations to where it can do the least harm, even if it hurts people she loves.

The other characters are also fantastic. I loved reading Zaira's growing relationship with Terika. Marcello remains a steadfast and steady presence. Istrella's ingenuity and eccentricity shines on the page like the artifice devices she creates.

And then there's Kathe. He's an asshole and I love him so much. There's a scene at the end that I went feral over, even if in it he's displaying some top tier dickery. Actually, I liked it more because he was displaying some top tier dickery. I love when characters who are supposed to be morally gray tricksters actually do shitty things.

I was surprised by how much I didn't hate the love triangle and actually kind of liked it. You understand how much Amalia cares for Marcello, but you also understand and appreciate how much she would be giving up if she didn't pursue a political match. And Amalia knows this too and it hurts so good. And you understand why she's entertaining Kathe's courtship, initially in order to make an important ally in Vaskandar, then as she develops genuine feelings for him, even if he is a shady bastard. And part of this is just because how secondary the romance is to the plot. Like yes, this is going on in the background, but Amalia's got to stop the Witch Lords from going to war and pass her reform acts.

This series is such an underrated gem.

Catalyst Gate by Megan E. O'Keefe - 3.75/5.00

I was so excited to read this and I had such a blast with it. While there are some fumbles, the author mostly sticks the landing and The Protectorate might be one of my new favorite sci-fi series.

The pacing is more varied than in Chaos Vector. It still takes you by the hand and says, "Let's fucking go!" but now, it also takes the time to slow down and let some things really sink in and build tension. Some sections, like one of Ranier's bases, feel rushed and in some ways, it feels like it should have been split into two books in order to keep up the fast pace, but not hurry through set pieces.

I really liked going to Earth and finding out what actually happened to it. It was one of the strongest sections of the book and it's horrifying. We've known for the whole series that the Earth was destroyed, but it feels like standard sci-fi set dressing. Earth was destroyed in a natural disaster, humanity took to the stars. No. What happened is horrifying and well foreshadowed and I loved it. The last book had a reveal that made me go feral. This one was chilled me.

The characters are still strong and interesting, if not particularly complex. Biran really stole the show this time around. He grows into his role as Director of Ada and you see him come into his own politicking and deceiving and having to put on a good front the face of horrifying trauma. His relationship with Vladsen is really great. In the amount of time that we got with them, I enjoyed reading how his crew comes together and the tension that still exists between them. It took me three books to really get into Sanda and Tomas, but I came around. The new ship, Bel Marduk, is such a good girl, I wish we got more of her and her emerging personality, but it's a long book and she's ultimately a minor character. I also wish we got more of Echo and the person she's growing into outside of being an offshoot of Ranier and I feel like this really was a missed opportunity. Sometimes, what the characters know and how they know it, feels a little muddy and I wish you got to see them figure these things out.

While Ranier maybe doesn't deserve to be at the table with SHODAN, GLaDOS, and Durandal, she should at least be in the same room. At first, she almost doesn't feel threatening because she's a very distant antagonist, but once she moves against the protagonists, she's horrifyingly effective and efficient. Reading about the destruction of Ada is a gut punch, especially when you get to the gardens. The narrative takes the time to point out that there are cultivars that were saved from Earth and after learning about what really happened to Earth earlier in the book, it's actually really sad. The scene where Sanda's trying to negotiate with her and realizes that she can't be negotiated with because she can't want anything beyond her corrupted programming is really effective.

The ending is, unfortunately, really rushed. There's a big reveal about one of the main characters that doesn't have enough buildup for it to have the impact it should have. I wish that humanity had more of a role in defeating Ranier. That being said, I really like that when we get to the alien precursors, they might be worse than Ranier. While this series comes to a definite ending, there's enough left open that if the author wanted to come back to this universe, they could and there would be satisfying stories to come out of it.

Raiders of the Lost Heart by Jo Segura - 1.25/5.00

My disappointment is apparently measurable on a five point scale, and my day is ruined. The main character is too stupid to be likable, and the love interest is just incompetent. The author wants you to believe that these are two intelligent and hard-working archaeologists in their thirties, yet they are immature, impulsive, and unprofessional.

I really hoped I'd get two rival archaeologists falling in love over an adventure. Instead, I want to take rivals to lovers way from this author. The characters don't fight in a way that's fun. Corrie just throws tantrums and again, Ford is way too incompetent to be a believable love interest.

It is, however, very easy to read. I read most of it while too hungover to focus on the more complicated book I actually wanted to read. While it's bad, it isn't notable enough to even be mad at.