#and also because...post apocalyptic setting where an adult has to take care of a child in this world where death is at every corner

[hyper-cryptic]

Cyrus... and also that one wet muddy cat that keeps following him around (an actual angel in disguise)

Working on my Vamp Hunter AU. Feel free to reblog but Im gonna sob if it gets more than the completed version /j

[waterloggedsoliloquy]

Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth is a science fiction novella that's a retelling of Antigone. Roth's prose has improved since I read Divergent almost 10 years ago, but the way she handles the story of Antigone and its setting is... Odd.

In the story, the kingdom of Thebes is the last bastion of civilization in a post apocalyptic world. In order to prevent genetic bottlenecks in a small population, it's mandatory that citizens 1. have children and 2. do not procreate but instead use preserved sperm and/or eggs from a library of long-gone donors. They've created a faith out of this process, attributing to reincarnation. It's better to pick the genes of a long-dead hero because it means your child will grow up the same, etc.

Antigone's brother dies, and the plot kicks off because King Creon bans his genes from being added to the gene library, and Antigone wants her brother to have a chance at reincarnation. Sure, I guess this is one way to do the plot in a science fiction manner.

It's just that this is used to sidestep the incest entirely.

The crime of Antigone's-- and her siblings'-- birth is not through incest and the degradation and tragedy and horror of the family unit, but because Oedipus and Jocasta have a natural birth-- Oedipus impregnates Jocasta naturally and has 4 children. Because they're the reincarnation of nobody, the children of Oedipus are claimed to not have souls, and this is the reason why so many people believe their family line is broken beyond repair. But like... This doesn't have a real-world counterpart. There's not really any believability in a society that considers genetic relation between siblings as a degradation of the family, let alone as a metaphor of incest.

This would be a cowardly action to begin with-- this is a book for young adults and adults where they say fuck-- but the biggest offender is that they DO allude to incest, somewhere else-- Eurydike's mother recently passed away, and Eurydike wishes she could be reincarnated, but if she used her mother's DNA for a new child that'd be incestuous. So instead of one of the core pillars of conflict in the story, incest is relegated to an offhand comment about a completely speculative fiction element.

This book wants to talk about abuse, about misogyny, and lesbophobia (there's a weird tangent where Antigone observes a lesbian couple at the gene bank, and ismene is gay) about marital violence, about filial piety, but is actually really afraid to, because these topics are scary. Roth's prose may have improved since Divergent but her political literacy very much has not.

On top of that, the book gets 33 pages of preamble before Polynikes and Eteocles actually kill each other. The play of Antigone starts with those two already dead in the field. I cannot stress this enough, we have PLACES TO BE. The story should not start a THIRD of the way into the book. it's also a matter of personal distaste but i dislike the fact that chapters are written from the perspectives of different characters. i dont actually care about ismene's inner monologue, or to watch the siblings talk at a cafe. Why does Eurydike have a POV chapter before the "play" even starts??? Her entire role is one of futile passivity. She has no relevance until the point of no return. She has 4 lines of dialogue, a fact several better adaptions comment on and explore (Antigonick and Antigone Will Take The Stairs Today) and her presence this early in the area adds nothing.

Antigone's anger feels toothless and performative no matter how many f-bombs she drops. The narrative is unfocused and meandering and is overinvested in justifying its science fiction premise. Despite the attempt to characterize them in a story that doesn't need it, Polynikes and Eteocles and Ismene feel flat.

It's a bad adaption of Antigone that's fundamentally inequipped to deal with the source material and elects to disrespect the care it requires and the emotional core of the original work, and this just makes it, in general, a bad book.

[lee-scribbles-and-doodles]

My Top Ten Overlooked Movies With Female Leads In No Particular Order

Note: When you see this emoji (⚠️) I will be talking about things people may find triggering, which are spoilery more often then not. I mention things that I think may count as triggers so that people with them will be aware before going in to watch any of these.

Edited: 3/16/21

Hanna (2011)

So, before I get into why you should watch this movie, I just want to take a moment to say why it's near and dear to my heart. Growing up as a queer kid in the early 2000s, seeing portrayals of people like or similar to myself on anything was rare at best. It was mostly in more "adult" movies or shows that my parents would occasionally let me watch with them that I'd see any lgbtq+ rep at all. Often times they were either walking stereotypes, designed to be buried, evil, or all three.

Then here comes this PG-13 action thriller with a wonderfully written main female lead who, at the time, was close to my age, and who got to kiss another girl (her very first friend, Sophie) on screen in an extremely tender and heartwarming scene. To say the least, it was a life changing moment for me personally.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, Hanna is a suspenseful movie about a child super-soldier named, you guessed it, Hanna (played by Saoirse Ronan) and her adoptive (?) father Erik Heller (played by Eric Bana) exiting the snowy and isolated wilderness of their home and taking on the shadowy CIA operative, Marissa Wiegler (played by Cate Blanchette) who wants Erik dead and Hanna for herself for mysterious reasons.

It also has an amazing soundtrack by the Chemical Brothers, great action scenes, and it has an over arching fairytale motif, which I'm always a sucker for.

⚠️ Mild blood effects, some painful looking strikes, various character deaths, and child endangerment all feature in this film. However, given its PG-13 rating, a majority of viewers are presumably able to handle this one. Still, be aware of these going in.

Sidenote: It's recently gotten a TV adaptation on Amazon TV, although I have not watched it, and do not know if Hanna and Sophie's romantic/semi-romantic relationship has transferred over.

A Simple Favor

A Simple Favor is a "black-comedy mystery thriller" centered entirely around the relationship between two mothers, the reclusive, rich, mysterious, and regal Emily (played by Blake Lively), and the local recently widowed but plucky mommy blogger, Stephanie (played by Anna Kendrick). When Emily suddenly goes missing, Stephanie takes it upon herself to find out what happened to her new best friend.

It's a fantastic and entertaining movie throughout, with fun, flawed and interesting characters. The relationship between the two female leads is also implied to be at least somewhat romantic in nature, and they even share a kiss.

⚠️ The only major warnings I can think of is that the movie contains an instance of incest and one of the main plotlines revolves around child abuse, although both of these potentially triggering topics are not connected to each other, so there is thankfully no csa going on.

Edit: I legitimately forgot there was drug use in this movie until now. So, yeah, if that's a trigger, be careful of that.

I Am Mother

I became mildly obsessed with this movie when it came out. I Am Mother is a sci-fi film that centers entirely around a cast of two woman, and a female-adjacent robot who is brought to life on screen with absolutely amazing practical effects.

The plot is such, after an extinction-level event, a lone robot known only as Mother tasks herself with replenishing the human race via artifical means. She begins with the film's main protagonist, Daughter. Years go by as Mother raises her human child and the two prepare for Daughter's first sibling (a brother) to be born. However, on Daughter's 16th birthday, the arrival of an outsider known only as Woman shakes Daughter's entire world view. She begins to question Mother's very nature, as well as what's really going on outside the bunker she and her caretaker call home.

⚠️ This movie features child endangerment and reference to child death.

Lilo and Stitch

When I decided to add a single Disney film to this list I initially thought it was going to be hard but almost immediately my brain went to Lilo and Stitch, and specifically about the relationship between Lilo and Nani.

On the surface, this film is about a lonely little girl accidentally adopting a fugitive alien creature as a "dog," but underneath that the story is also about two orphaned sisters and the older sister's attempts to not let social services tear them apart by stepping up as the younger sister's primary guardian. Despite its seemingly goofy premise, Lilo and Stitch has a very emotional and thoughtful center. It's little wonder how this movie managed to spawn an entire franchise.

Despite the franchise it spawned (or possibly because of it), I often find that Lilo and Stitch is overlooked and many people only remember it for the "little girl adopts an alien as a pet" portion of its plot, and I very rarely see it on people's top 10 Disney lists.

⚠️ This movie could be potentially triggering to people who were separated from their siblings or other family members due to social service intervention. There's also a bit of child endangerment, including a scene where Lilo and Stitch both almost drown.

Nausicaä and the Valley of the Wind

Unlike the above entry, I did struggle a little bit with picking a single Studio Ghibli film. Most media of the Ghibli catalogue have strong, well-written, unique, and interesting female leads so selecting just one seemed like quite the task.

However, I eventually settled on this particular film. In recent months, Princess Nausicaä has become my absolute favorite Ghibli protagonist and I'm absolutely enchanted by the world she lives in.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world overun by giant insects and under threat of a toxic forest and its poisoness spores, Nausicaä must try to protect the Valley of the Wind from invaders as she also tries to understand the science behind the toxic forest and attempts to bridge the gap between the insects and the humans.

For those who have never seen the film, I think Nausicaä's personality can best be described as being similar to OT Luke Skywalker. Both are caring, compassionate, and gentle souls who are able to see the best in nearly anyone or anything. She's an absolutely enthralling protagonist and after rewatching the film again for the first time in well over a decade she has easily become one of my all time favorite protagonists.

Whenever I see people talk about Ghibli films, they rarely mention this one, and when they do mention it, it's often in passing. In my opinion it's a must watch.

⚠️ This movie contains some blood, and the folks who either don't like insects or who have entomophobia may not appreciate the giant bugs running about throughout the movie. (Although most insects do not directly relate to real life bugs, and are fantasy creatures).

A Silent Voice

A Silent Voice is an animated movie adaptation of a manga of the same name. While I've never had the pleasure to read the manga, the movie is phenomenal. It covers topics such a bullying, living in the world with a disability, the desire for atonement, social anxiety, and depression in a well thought out manner that ties itself together through the progression of the relationship between its two leads, Shoya and Shouko. It's also beautifully animated. Although very popular among anime viewers, I've noticed that it's often overlooked by people who watch little to no anime. So I suppose this is me urging non-anime viewers to give this film a chance.

⚠️ As mentioned above, the movie deals with bullying, anxiety, and depression (with this last one including suicidal thoughts and behaviour). If discussion of those topics are triggering to you, than you may want to proceed with caution or skip this movie all together.

In This Corner of The World

Another manga adaptation, this one taking place during WWII-era Japan. In This Corner of The World follows the life of a civilian Japanese woman, Suzu Urano, as she navigates simply living and her new marriage as the wartime invades nearly all aspects of everyday life. I think this movie is a good representation of what it must be like to be living as civilian in a country at war where the fight is sometimes fought on one's own soil. It was also an interesting look into pre-50s Japanese culture in my opinion. It's also beautifully animated featuring an art style I don't see often.

Despite it being well known among anime fans, I never really see it be brought up, even among said anime fans themselves.

Side note: I've seen many WWII dramas centering around civilians but they've almost always been about American or UK civilians. This was the first movie I'd seen that features the perspective of a Japanese civilain.

⚠️ Features the death of a child and limb loss. There's also a disturbing scene featuring a victim of one of the atomic bombs near the end.

Wolf Children: Ame and Yuki

This film follows Hana, a Japan-native woman who fell in love with a magical shape-shifting wolf-man, and her trials with raising their children, who can also magically shape-shift into wolves, on her own. It's a very heartfelt movie about a mother's love and the struggles of doing right by your children when you have limited resources to actively guide and care for them. All the characters feel unique and alive in my opinion. Also, the animation is so good that my sister and I initially mistook it for a Ghibli film.

Again, like the previous two anime entries, I don't see it ever brought up outside of anime circles.

⚠️ There's some child endangerment present in the film, although none of it is the fault of Hana as far as I can remember.

Roman Holiday

Roman Holiday is about the fictional Princess Ann (played by Audrey Hepburn), who while on a whirlwind tour of Europe, finally reaches her breaking point over having her entire life be one big schedule and all her words and actions being rehearsed. In the spur of the moment, she runs away in hopes of experiencing what life is like for other women. Unfortunately, she was previously given a sedative, meaning she doesn't get too far before it takes effect. Fortunately, she is found by the kind reporter Joe Bradley (played by Gregory Peck). Believing her to be drunk and unable to get an address from her (because she has none) he ends up taking her home for safety's sake and allows her to sleep off her suppose drunken stupor. The next day, he realizes who she is, and decides to take her on a fun sight seeing trip across Rome in hopes of getting the big scoop. Along the way, they begin to fall for each other.

This is my favorite black and white, old romance film. I think the relationship between the main characters is absolutely beautiful and I have a lot of fun watching it.

⚠️ I'm not entirely sure what kind of warning this film would need. However, it was released in 1953, so values dissonance will probably be at play for many viewers to at least some extent. For example, early in the film Ann is given sedation drugs by her doctor for her behavior, something that is very unlikely to happen today. Also, Mr Bradley deciding to take Ann home to keep her safe rather than call the police or an ambulance is a very pre-90s decision in my opinion.

[it-was-summer]

Who Do You Love? (Five x reader)

Requested: YES!! I am so so so happy that people are sending in requests! Also I am so sorry that this took me so long to write, I just started college in August and I haven’t had the motivation to write, with love em. I hope this satisfies <3. @kennahargreeves8​

Plot:Could you do a Five x reader fanfic where the reader and Five are mean to each other and they like each other. The reader kidnapped by the commission because they distracted Hazel and Cha Cha from kidnapping Klaus and the reader and Five kiss at the end.

Word Count: 4,674 (I went overboard)

He was nothing but a little boy, even in his adult body. You were working at the Commission when someone had brought up the appearance of a boy running around in the wastelands of the post apocalyptic twenty-nineteen. He wasn’t supposed to be there, and yet there he was.

It took the commission a few years to decide to let him become a field worker, like you. You were a good field worker, always got the job done right, worked alone, worked quietly and didn’t ask for too much. You didn’t enjoy it as much as they thought you did, but it paid well and it was guaranteed protection.

He needed to be trained and one day, when you were about to leave your hotel room, The Handler was standing in front of your door with number Five. “No,” you went to close the door, but a polished, red heel stopped you. “He can get trained by someone else.” You begged as you slowly opened up the door.

“I know, Sweetheart,” She reached out her hand to gently pat your face “You are simply, the best!”

You scoffed at her reasoning, stepping to the side to let her and Five enter the small room. “I’m simply the biggest pushover.” You corrected her gently as you sat on the edge of your bed, looking over at Five with a slight frown. He was inhabiting a body that was older than you envisioned. You requested to be put into a body that was in its early teens. It allowed you to stay alerted and awake, it didn't wear you down too much.

It was easy to fool people like this, but it did also attract some unwanted attention sometimes. You could feel your frown turn into a small grin at the memory of a woman asking ‘where your parents were’.

“Five won’t intervene, he will just be shadowing you for the time being,” she pat Five on the shoulder with a perfect smile. “I’ll see you later.” She waved her goodbye and then she was out the door, leaving the two of you alone.

Your partnership with Five was anything but short and sweet, the Handler wanted him to be with you for almost two months just so the commission could see just how good Five really was. He had talent that was sure, but he was too loyal. His loyalty to his family was definitely going to kill him.

He was also incredibly annoying. He wanted to do everything his way. He was always right about everything. Everything.

You wanted to go around the back, Five would blimp in before you could form a plan. His power was a major disadvantage to you, because you were just a normal assassin working for a company that dealt with the fabric of time and space.

He thought he was just so smart, so amazing. He was just so full of himself, it made you want to vomit in your mouth. If you went against any of his ideas then you were suddenly an ant. Nothing more than an ant on the sidewalk, getting yelled at by a grasshopper.

Nonetheless, he was a really talented recruit. He had the makings for a successful assassin but the talent he possessed could also lead to his downfall.

If you were being one hundred percent honest, you liked Five. You liked him because he was a hard worker and loyal friend, if you were giving him the title of friend.

He was nice to talk to and if you had to pick someone in the commission to team up with it would be Five. He was witty, never missed a beat and he let you make fun of how old he looked.

One day, while you were working you saw your friend in the briefcase room, the two of you made eye contact, you flashed him an easy smile and then you turned the corner. You didn't see him return.

Time was fluid here at the commission. It could be six days in one timeline could be an entire year at the commission, people worked fast and within the timeline. When it had been the day for the Kennedy assassination, all hell broke loose.

Normally you didn’t really care for things that caused people to run around in a hurry, yelling out orders from the Handler and panic ensuing, it wasn’t until you heard someone say, “Five’s gone awol” that you stopped in your tracks and let out a shaky breath, knowing that your friend probably wouldn’t be back alive.

No one seemed to care that much about your missing friend, a part of you wanted to ask the Handler what she was going to do to Five when they found him, but she was too stressed to even look your way.  

You played with the watch, resting on your wrist, thinking about how many days it has been since you last saw your older friend, how many weeks? It was weird. Your friendship was weird, indeed. You were in such a small and young body and he was not, he had wrinkles. He was gross, you felt a tear slide down your cheek, gently swiping it away before deciding that you need to stop thinking about him before you got even more upset.

Days passed like years and months passed like centuries. No one uttered a word to you, but Five was buzzing in everyone’s mouths. He was messing up the timeline, you shouldn’t be worried, you should be ashamed.

You felt a bitter taste in your mouth as you stood up from your desk, wandering over to the briefcase room, people entering the room and leaving the room and a man at the desk in front of it.

Before you knew it, you were slipping into the briefcase room, grabbing one and vanishing with a flash of blue light as people screamed your name.

You knew where you were, you set the time, and now you were in the front yard of a classic looking building, doors and gates cleverly embroidered with two umbrellas. You swallowed hard and opened the gate.

You couldn’t knock on the door, you just stood there paralyzed, briefcase in hand. It was so stupid, you could run someone through with knife but you couldn’t knock on a stupid door. The only reason you abandoned the doorstep was because you were sure that you could hear someone talking close to the door. You walked with your head down, moving through the narrow streets of the city, narrowly missing people and letting your head fill with anxious thoughts.

The loyal part of you wanted to go straight back to the commission and apologize, hopefully not die and hope that you wouldn’t get fired, but there was a bigger part of you that needed to save your friend. You didn't have many friends so you needed to take care of the one you had, even if it meant leaving the commission.

When everything was taken care of, removing the tracker from your arm, then you set off back towards the academy. Along the way you were trying to summon any remaining courage you had left with every heavy step, blood dripping down from your arm at a sickening slow rate.

Your plan was to hide the briefcase outside of the house, knock on the door, ask for help and get inside. You didn’t want Five to know you were here, if he opened the door you were fine with it but you didn’t want one of his siblings telling him the news without your knowing.

You stashed the briefcase amongst the bushes in the front of the house, almost invisible, and then knocked on the door. The person who opened the door was a beautiful woman, dark skin and ombre hair in tight curls. You sucked in a sharp breath, your eyes filling with false tears “Miss, could you please help me?” you asked, voice cracking ever so slightly as you lifted your sleeve to show her the deep gash in your arm.

Then you were in, sitting at a table getting stitched up by another beautiful woman, dressed in a 60′s like fashion, perfect blond hair and a pleasant smile. She smiled ever so softly as she closed up your wound, ignoring the group that was surrounding you in the kitchen.

There were just three of them, two women, one of them being the women who opened the door and the other looking much more cautious matching the face of one very large man standing behind the two of them. You winced and let out a small sound of pain as you struggled to say your name, telling the story about how you had lost your mother on the streets and how someone attacked you in an alleyway.

The three of them looked anxious as the blond beauty finished fixing your arm and stood up in a cheery manner, leaving as she pondered about a woman's life out loud. They did say his family was strange, you never got any case files on them so they weren’t your concern...well right now they were.

They soon introduced themselves, Luther was the large man, Vanya was the small woman and Allison was the glamorous woman, you shifted in your seat, drying your eyes. “I’m sorry for intruding, I just ran to this house because of the umbrella,” You explained, gently caressing your arm, feigning childlike shyness.

Luther nodded a little as Allison started to speak “They make you feel safe?”

“No, I just like the decoration.” You responded in the best way you thought a child would. You had to use this tiny body for your best interest.

Allison, advocating for you, persuading her siblings to let you stay in her room promising she would actively look for your ‘mother’, mentioning how if her daughter was in your situation she would be dying of worry. To save her, the unnecessary worry you assured her that you had called your mother at a nearby payphone and told her your location, telling her that you were going to go into the umbrella academy before you went in. She seemed skeptical, but somewhat satisfied before leaving you all along.

You knew that you were not a welcomed visitor, nor could you stay very long, you just hoped that Five would be back before you had to fake your leave.

You sat on the bed, playing with your hands, chewing slightly on your lip deep in thought when you heard the familiar sounds of guns going off down the hall. When you opened the door you saw two figures in their masks shooting up a room, backs towards you, Hazel and Cha-Cha. You ran down the hall, passing a man taking a tub taking a bath, oblivious to the events unfolding around him. You ran down the hall into a vacant room, hiding against the wall behind the door.

After a jaw clenching minute, the dripping man came into his room, oblivious to you as you pressed against the wall watching him dance. It was then the attacker came into the room that was when the dripping man was made aware of the situation he was when. Hazel advanced towards the man, your tiny structure giving you the upper hand as you moved in front of him and swiping at his feet. He dropped, grabbing your ankles and pulled you down right after. The last clear thing you saw was the man running out in a towel yelling for his siblings and then the butt of Hazel’s gun coming down on you.

You came to, your eyes struggling to adjust to the darkness of what you assumed to be the truck that surrounded you.

They were idiots. The two of them, they kept asking you where Five was, and claimed that you were one of his siblings. Every time they would ask you would answer with ‘I don’t know’, the question was so repetitive that you wanted nothing more than to scream that you were with the commission. They had yet to notice that you were a desk worker, and ex-assassin, at the commission, they were just simply so amazingly dimwitted.

You hissed as Cha-Cha slid the blade of knife across your cheek, pressing hard enough to definitely leave a scar, warm, crimson blood trickling down your cheek before you let out a soft whimper of annoyance.

“You two are just going to keep asking me the same question over and over again aren’t you?”

“Of course, we know that he would have told his siblings where he was,”

“Not this sibling,”

“Soon they’ll be looking for you and we can get them all at once, you and your freak family will be wiped out of existence.” Cha-Cha hissed as she sat down on a chair directly across from yours. “So where is he? Don’t you care about your siblings?”

“Not necessarily.” You said with a dirty smile, tired eyes burning as you stared at her confused face.

“I’m done!” she said, shoving herself off of the chair and storming over to the bathroom in a fury, leaving you alone, Hazel following her silently.

It had hours since they kidnapped you, assumed you were a sibling of Five’s, and were now torturing you. Waterboarding occurred, it felt nice to have a clean face, a close call with a finger nail removal played out, but for the most part they would just keep beating you till you felt dull. The feeling of nothing spread across your body like an invasive species. It didn’t numb the pain, but it did numb the feelings that came with the pain.

You were tired, alone and desperate for a savior. You tried to gain the attention of the cleaning lady while you were locked and gagged in the hotel closet, but that attempt was futile.

You were strapped to a chair now, once again getting asked the same question over and over again. You were getting sick of this question, probably because you shared the same question as them. Eventually they both resided into the bathroom, you were facing a window with a strip of duct tape over your mouth when you saw the outline of a woman pass by the window. Using this as a lame excuse to try and escape you started to slam your head onto the table, praying to something that you would be heard.

This is when your emotions started to return, you felt terrified, the idea of dying here was terrifying. You were so close to finding him and these dim witted assassins shouldn’t be the final stop. You needed to get out of here. You wanted to live. That’s when the door unlocked and you made eye contact with a woman holding a gun, her eyes instantly locking onto yours.

She spoke but you just nodded as she freed you from your restraints. You shakily got to your feet, but then the bathroom door started to open and the shooting started. You hit the floor and started moving towards a rather large vent, you pulled the metal covering down seeing an all too familiar briefcase as you started to crawl into the vent, pushing the briefcase with you, finally escaping from your tormentors breathlessly.  

Now you were running down a street, blood dripping from your arm again, having reopened your wound in the vents, but that didn’t matter, you were free.

You held onto the briefcase as you limped through the night streets, you didn't know where you were and you were hoping you could find a way back to the academy without those idiots following you. You needed to find Five. You sat on a park bench and fixed the briefcase to this date and time and changed the location, and suddenly you were there in a brilliant flash of blue. 

When you appeared in front of the academy the first thing you did was destroy the briefcase, you had yours and those irritating little try hards didn’t deserve a way back home. You threw the dismantled briefcase into the street, hoping it would get run over or explode or something, one of the two. You walked up to the clean glass doors, looking into the bushes for your own briefcase only to greeted by the same plain green shrub you were already searching. You cursed softly to yourself and you reached for the doors, throwing any caution to wind. 

After what you had just been through, you didn’t care. You were hoping that their ‘mother’ would care for you if she found you first. You really didn’t care what happened, you just needed to see Five. If you were being honest at this point he was your only hope, a friendly face that would hopefully give you food and water. You were hungry. 

As you walked into the ,surprisingly, unlocked house no one greeted you, silence was your host. You aimlessly walked upstairs, towards the only area you were familiar: the bedrooms. It was the last place you had been in the house, maybe that man in the towel would be there, maybe he could help you with finding Five. You could hear voices, a conversation, a conversation that hopefully involved something interesting, one where you weren’t going to get beat up at the end of it. 

You walked faster down the fall, taking a turn, getting closer and closer till you stood in the doorway of the room of the man you saved from Hazel and Cha-Cha. He was in there but he was talking to a young boy, he looked about your age, talked like he was older. 

The man’s eyes landed on you in the doorway and you saw a haunted expression on his face and you knew he must’ve been the one to take your briefcase. Nobody looked calm when coming back for their first time, especially if it wasn't intentional. You were about to say something when the boy spoke up first. 

“How did you get in here?” he asked rather alarmed. You sent him a small look of confusion before you remembered that this, in fact, was not your house. 

“I... uh, the door was open,” you answered lamely, hoping that this little boy, whoever he was, would let it drop. You pointed at the man you saved, “Why do you have a horrified look on your face and where is my briefcase?” you questioned, stepping into the room, only to be blocked by the boy. 

“What are you doing here, Y/N?” the boy said, something about the way he said your name was familiar. You took a small step away from him, how did he know your name? 

“How do you know my name?” you said retreating to the door, closely watching the two in front of you. 

“What do you mean, ‘how do I know your name’, you trained me!” he scoffed at you, letting the realization dawn on you. 

“Five,” you beamed, rushing to him “oh you're so tiny! Just like me! I was here looking for you, but then Hazel and Cha-Cha,” 

You were cut off by the older man, “She saved me from getting kidnapped from those psychos’ in the masks and then I found the briefcase out front, thought it had money in it, and I went back to Vietnam,” he breathed, sounding plain exhausted as he told his short story. You nodded a little as you watched him fall onto the bed with a groan “Now can you two please lower the volume?” he ended, frowning at you and Five at the center of the room.

You inched closer to bed, reaching up to tap his shoulder ever so gently, his eyes closed as he tried to calm his aching head “What did you do with the briefcase?” 

“Destroyed it,”

You let out a small whine before you nodded, turning around on your heel and leaving the room, let out a tiny yell in the hallway before you turned around seeing Five staring at you with a small grin on his face.  

Five had left the academy in a flash, only to return seconds later, you watched him as you were left sit in his room as he began to frantically mutter equations to himself, writing out his process on the walls around the two of you. You stood up, staring at his work on the walls with a small frown “What exactly is your plan?” you asked, looking over your shoulder at Five, seeing him pause his frenzy. 

“You aren’t involved in the plan,”

“Five, don’t be ridiculous! I’m here, I’m your ally, let me help you.” You pleaded calmly, walking over to him with a little smile. He looked better now, age wasn’t really a concept at the commission. Technically you were in your forties but you looked about fifteen or fourteen, and now Five looked the same. You thought it was funny that he used to wear clothes like this everyday. 

“You aren’t even supposed to be here, besides I need someone here at the academy to make sure something doesn't go wrong. You got promoted to a caseworker, so you know how important this must be.” 

Your smile dropped, but you nodded in agreement, knowing that he had a plan and you had to stick to it if you wanted this to pan out well. 

So now you were waiting at his house, he said he was going to go and meet Hazel and Cha-Cha, with a fake briefcase. You could tell he wasn’t telling you the whole truth, it was the way he scrunched up his nose, that's how you knew he was lying. 

You never felt so helpless, you didn’t know how to stop the apocalypse and you didn’t know if you would be any help in stopping the apocalypse. So now you laid on Five’s bed, it didn’t smell like Five. Five smelt like pine and a tiny hint of sandalwood. You smiled a little as you turned to lay on your side, letting exhaustion catch up to you as you fell into a deep sleep. 

You were pissed, it had been a day since Five disappeared, leaving you to watch over his chaotic family. They always had so much drama, and they did not trust you. You understood them not trusting you, but come on really, stop with the dramatics. You sat on a bar stool, listening to the siblings bicker among themselves for what felt like a second time when Five dropped out of the sky, slamming onto the island. 

His siblings clamored around him, asking him questions, but he stood up, stole Allison’s coffee, downed it and then lectured his siblings. He then explained that they needed to stop Harold Jenkins. You tuned out the rest of the conversation, eyeing Five carefully, something about him wasn’t right. He kept ranting on and on with his siblings continuously bombarding him questions, and yet all you could do was stare at him. 

The little brat wasn’t even acknowledging you, he was so... infuriating. You moved to follow Five out of the room, wanting to help, even if he didn’t want to. So now you were in the backseat with Allison, while the Five and Diego bickered in the front seats. When Diego left, the three of you stood outside the alleyway, and you and Five watched Allison make a call to Vanya. 

You looked over at him, a frown still etched on your face as you stared at him. “Why didn’t you tell me the whole plan?”

“You didn’t need to know the whole plan, you need to stay put and stay safe.” 

“You don’t know what I need,” you gently kicked his shoes with yours, your voice cracking slightly “,what if you died? What would I do then? My goal isn’t to save your family’s life, it’s to save yours. Tell me what I would’ve done, Five.” 

Five stared at you after that, looking a little shocked. You understand why until he reached up towards your face and brushed the falling tear off of your cheek before he let out the smallest “I’m sorry” you had ever heard in your life. 

When the four of you arrived at Harold’s house you had a small lump in your throat accompanied by a feeling that something bad was about to happen. Then when Allison called us up your eyes followed his every move, the way he gripped his stomach and swayed, and before you knew it he dropped straight to the floor without any warning. 

Your eyes were glued to the bed, it was better than looking at Five, every time you spared a glance at his unconscious body you felt your cheeks get hot and your eyes fill with tears. You hated feeling so useless, why was he making you feel so useless? It was cruel, the cruelest thing he has ever done to you. You cared for him so deeply and it was cruel of him to ignore that. 

When the sheets of the bed shifted, you lifted your eyes to look at Five, seeing that he was indeed awake. He made a move to get up, only to be greeted with your hand pushing him back down onto the bed. “You’re an idiot if you think that I am gonna let you get up from this bed.” 

“I have to get up,”

You cut him off by lightly pressing on his stomach wound, “You don’t have to do anything with that wound,” you sat down again feeling Five relax under your hand. You let out a small sigh, puffing out your cheeks as Five and you stared at each other. “You’re insufferable, Five. I have never met another person or thing more insufferable than you. You need an award.” 

“You aren’t really that great either.” 

“Keep your mouth shut Hargreeves,” you ran a hand through your hair with another sigh “I came here to help you, I left my job, sucky as it was, I left it to help you, because why? Because I didn’t want to see you get killed when you came back or hear that you were horribly terminated by those idiots that tortured me. I know you aren’t the kindest person, but I shouldn’t feel like this...” You stuttered gently looking for the word, you didn’t know how you were feeling. You were mad but something struck you deeper, maybe it was fear or concern, maybe it was disdain? Something stronger than what you were used to. 

You felt fingers ghost over yours, you looked up from your hand staring down at Five as he sat there as he silently, played with your fingers. “I shouldn’t feel so helpless, I feel like I shouldn’t have left, I shouldn’t have left the commission, especially when you don’t want me here.” 

“Who said I didn’t want you here?”

“You did,”

“I said that you shouldn’t be here, not that I didn’t want you here. I want you to be here.” Five muttered in a sweet tone as he cautiously held your hand. 

“Don’t say things to make me feel better, it’s horrible to do that to a girl,” you slowly moved your hand away before Five caught your wrist, stopping you from moving away further. “What are you doing, Hargreeves?”

“Something that I should have done when I saw you in Klaus’s room two days ago,” he said, sitting up and leaning closer, and without realizing it you were leaning closer as well. 

“I need you to come out of this alive, Hargreeves.” you said in a tiny voice, different from your usual bold volume, sounding oddly vulnerable. 

“I will,” Five then pressed a gentle kiss against your lips, pulling away quickly “and so will you.”

You smiled a little and let out a tiny laugh “Okay.” you whispered as you leaned in once again to kiss him on the lips. 

[albatris]

ok ok alriiiight ok so the plot of ATDAO

this post is not, like........... well, it’s not gonna be a blurb or a summary or a nice neat synopsis, this is not Professional Writeblr Business, this is, this is, uhhhh

this is like drunk house party logan rambles

works best if you imagine ur just like “hey man how’s it going” super casual and I grasp you firmly by the shoulders and look you dead in the eye and just ramble all of this without taking a single breath

could I have explained in a nice neat concise "elevator pitch" sort of way? probably. mind ur business. that’s not how we do things here at albatris.org

anyway the purpose of this post is “hey people seem to know a lot about the characters and the worldbuilding and the premise but have no clue what happens in the actual story” so I’m not going to be talking about said characters and worldbuilding and premise in depth

in terms of rambles, that stuff’s been covered! this post assumes you know what Ports are, n what the nature of the ATDAO apocalypse is, vaguely what the MCs are like as people......... though I can fetch this info for you if you like

but yeah if you are coming into this post with zero prior ATDAO knowledge........... deeply deeply from the bottom of my heart: sorry

also if this is your first time experiencing One Of These Rambles

also @safe-in-the-steep-cliffs​ and @siarven​ I am tagging you because you said you would like to be tagged and also hi and also I hope y’all knew what you were in for

anyway without further ado

(visual representation of my approach to this rant, not of how complicated my plot actually is)

(my plot is not that complicated)

ALRIGHT

there are two viewpoint characters! and two plotlines which converge near the end of the story, but honestly there’s a very real possibility I will decide these are two separate books meant as companion stories to each other because I love making things difficult for myself yeehaw

ATDAO’s co-protags are Tris and Noa, best buds four years and counting. their friendship is one of the single most important aspects of the story, n the ongoing love and trust they have for each other despite the way unfolding events force their relationship to change is integral to the themes and making the heart of the story what it is. I will now proceed to not mention this friendship for the entire remainder of this post. they’re bros. that’s all u need to know. listen. listen. I have a lot to cover

so yeah, ur first key player is Tris Greer, whose parents are dicks but whose siblings are chill. most notably of said siblings there is Jacob, older brother by thirteen years, whom Tris believes is just about the coolest person on the entire planet. this plotline kicks off when Jacob gets caught in the midst of a freak car accident that kills a dude and wrecks a street corner and also somehow causes Jacob to just kind of................. blip out of existence entirely and without a trace?

n Tris is understandably horrified and distressed by Very Much All Of This, but hey, at least there are responsible adults who can look into this obviously Port-related weird disappearance and figure this mess out, right?

INCORRECT

the relevant interdimensional authorities are brought in to suss out the situation and these authorities are kind of like “hmmmm idk about this” but are all set to take Tris at least somewhat seriously until they learn the following:

that Jacob had already been reported missing to police in his home state three days earlier

that Jacob was in the midst of several ongoing personal crises and at least one nervous breakdown

that Jacob was allegedly tangled up in some real weird shit that would more than account for a disappearance under suspicious circumstances

that Tris is schizophrenic, prone to hallucinations, confusion, memory issues and quote unquote “letting his imagination and anxiety get the better of him”, and precisely zero people can actually corroborate his story that Jacob was even there are the time of the accident to begin with

and after some back-and-forth and Looking Into The Evidence pretty much everyone in any position of authority comes to the conclusion that this is just Ordinary Regular People Crimes and whatever happened to Jacob had nothing to do with weird apocalyptic energies, and that Tris is (at best) stressed out and delusional or (at worst) lying through his teeth because he knows more than he’s letting on

so Tris is forced to hop pretty quick from “I’m sure someone will handle this” to “no one believes me but I’m sure if I can find some concrete proof they’ll listen and someone will handle it” to Well Fuck I Guess That Someone Is Me

cue bizarre reality-hopping fantasy quest, which is ten times easier said than done when most of the time Tris is terrified enough just, like, going to the supermarket

he enlists the help of his new classmate Shara, amateur paranormal investigator and professional weird-bullshit enthusiast, who agrees to help him puzzle out what the fuck happened to Jacob in exchange for his assistance in mapping out Adelaide’s interdimensional “fault lines” as part of her ongoing quest to track down the source of the apocalypse

she’s got big fuckin dreams, ok, go hard or go home

slso worth noting at this point that there HAS been an uptick in Ports and their related reality-bending strangeness in Adelaide recently which is why this is of particular interest to her currently. gotta find out What Makes The Weirdness Tick, gotta find out Why The Sudden Extra Weirdness

..........and also Kai is there

Kai has no nice neat reason to get involved with the plot, Kai just likes drama and being all up in people’s personal business. Tris brings them on board for one single afternoon like “hey I will pay you some money to come to my house and fix my fucked up phone so I can listen to an interdimensional voicemail” but forgot the apparently key addendum “and then leave”

their first three chapters of knowing each other is basically Tris being like “stop inviting yourself into my house we are not friends” and Kai being like “that’s a rude thing to say to your friend. also your sister gave me the netflix password and I used your kitchen to bake pastries feel free to help yourself”

but yeah so Tris’s story mostly focuses on his quest to figure out where Jacob got yeeted to and how to get him safely home (y’all probably know a bit about The Unreality already maybe?), whilst also dealing with rising family tensions, whatever shifty stuff Jacob was involved with prior to his disappearance, and his own creeping doubts about his perceptions of reality

n I’m also saying flat out it’s not a plot that’s going the “oh the whole thing was just a delusion all along” route because ew

his psychosis is a fairly involved part of his character but the explorations around it are more to do with, like......... the difficulties he has in trusting himself and whether he has the luxury of letting himself get swept into some Big Weird Implausible Adventure when this has extremely different implications for him than it would someone else. n eventually to how his success and survival is not ~in spite of~ but specifically because of the different way he understands and interprets the world and the skills he’s developed

THAT TANGENT WAS A PERSONAL RANT IT WAS NOT RELEVANT I just have words to say on the subject of how psychosis is treated in fiction and didn’t want people jumping to the “none of it is real” conclusion anyway ok moving on

ur SECOND key player is Noa Yun, who has rather a lot on her plate right now. she’s broke as fuck and her mum is sick and her car is making Noises and she’s not getting enough hours at her job at Not-IKEA and everyone is on her back about her failing studies as if that’s a thing she has the energy to care about. feeling rather backed into a corner by life’s bullshit and her financial situation, she blatantly lies her way into a field job at the Department of Interdimensional Instabilities, because A) surely it can’t be THAT bad, and B) what does she have to lose?

so more or less what she’s doing is the equivalent of emergency services for Port-related weirdness, it’s going out and dealing with highly unstable otherworldly energies head on, navigating Weird Phenomena and bendy patches in reality......... it is, among other things, a job that’s relatively easy to get into because no one wants to touch it with a ten foot pole unless they absolutely have to

n the DII is a whole other post, this shit has lots of different functions and levels and branches and corruption and secrets and a tendency to view workers who have to go out and deal with the brunt of the apocalypse head-on as vaguely expendable and I’ve talked about it a bit before and in more Serious Words

things kinda kick off for her when in true Noa fashion she hurls herself into a dangerous situation to help out a coworker, n enters a pretty standard issue “overlap” where the barriers between universes are a little fucky, but hey, she seems to come out of it with nary a scratch, so it’s reasonable to assume everything is fine, right?

INCORRECT AGAIN

she basically gets some whacked-out otherworldly energies latched onto her that are now following her through her everyday life, and it turns out she’s starting to bend the reality around her the way certain types of Ports do, which is! obviously not ideal! she’s not exactly a Port herself, because she’s pretty sure that’s impossible, but it’s clear capital s Something happened to her in that overlap, and she doubts it’s good news. and to make matters even more disconcerting, she’s now being dogged at every step by strange visions of a child who speaks in an unfamiliar language and who seems Real Fuckin Pissed at her

so her thing is basically “I acquired fucked up reality-bending powers against my will and they might be lowkey killing me ‘cause Ports are notoriously unstable like that and also I’m haunted for some godforsaken reason” which all somehow ended up being, like, the least interesting part of her plotline for me lmao

oh and Noa also enlists the help of Shara, Because Ghosts

anyway yeah so her search to find out what’s happening to her re: Weird Children, being a Port-adjacent something-or-other, and whether there’s a way to stop her own unravelling leads her to (rogue computer programmer? mad scientist? general shifty bastard?) Laurence Marrick Thiele, who claims to have suffered a similar affliction in the past and now does some real interesting research on the subject. n this guy. well. he’s got some fuckin stuff going on

he definitely knows more about the nature of Ports than he should. also is he actually researching what he says he’s researching? also what’s with all the weird tech? also did he just straight up murder that guy Avery? all will be revealed later, maybe, if I feel like it

but yeah at about the same time as Noa goes “actually fuck this you’re shady as hell I’m out” she stumbles into, like, The Actual Reality of what Marrick is up to re: manipulating Ports and interdimensional doorways for his own gain, and the various ways this spells bad news not only for her but potentially for the entire city and anyone unfortunate enough to get caught in the crossfire, and she shifts gear to “actually you know what I’m gonna kick your ass”

there are various reasons for this, but first and foremosterly you have to understand that Noa’s got a fuckload of pent-up rage and she will bring it in full force the moment you say some stupid shit like “some people are expendable” or “it’s inevitable for the greater good”

(there’s also a fun ongoing subplot with her work at the DII where she and her team are investigating a string of strange illnesses with bizarre symptoms that appear to be spreading via obscure radio stations so that’s. happening. I guess?)

but yeah the main story here mostly follows Noa’s attempts to undermine Marrick, bastard supreme, and find a way to fuck him up before he goes, like, Full Cartoon Supervillain, n also like........... her attempts to keep up her work at the DII despite her rising paranoia that the teammates she’s growing to care about will notice her increasingly unstable state and the fact that she’s all tangled up with the very forces they’re meant to be thwarting. n along the way discovering the reality of what happened to her in The Aforementioned Overlap Incident and about her visions and such

so that’s all that. did that make sense

n she’s got a whole arc going on about trust and learning to lean on others, like, she comes into this story as a very standoffish person with lots of paranoia, she’s spent much of her life feeling like she can only rely on herself, n she’s. well. yeah, like I said, she’s got a lot of anger at the world and at the various systems that have failed her and her loved ones, n the story puts her in a position to become even more isolated

and her plotline isn’t so much “you have no reason to be angry or afraid” or her learning to Not Be, It’s more, like........... yeah you have every fucking right to be furious and of course you’re afraid! but there are people around you who love you and who will jump at the chance to defend you and who will help you carry the weight of your anger and grief and none of this needs to be yours to bear alone which is extremely cheesy

which applies to both her Weird Supernatural Goings-On as well as her regular ordinary life goings-on

I feel like Alice and Jet deserve a mention for Noa’s plotline but also this went on and on too long already so. well. Alice and Jet exist! yep. they work with Noa at the DII. I have things to say about them. I will not be saying them today

and uhhhhhh

in general, for Tris, his plotline, you wanna think, like, fantasy/adventure vibes which veer pretty sharply into horror, and for Noa you wanna think...... kinda, sci-fi mystery conspiracy vibes with a dash of some superhero bullshit maybe except not really

and that

pretty much is it I think

also the fact that Kai just invites themself into the plot for funsies and then is dragged kicking and screaming into caring about themself and making positive changes in their life means there was no convenient place in this post to be like

"oh there's also a whole major subplot about a time loop"

but there's also a whole major subplot about a time loop

goodnight! thanks for coming to....................... whatever this was! have a nice saturday everyone

[hearthandhomemagick]

Cottage Witch Journal Entry - Post Yule & Christmas

Okay, so far this forum of mine has discussed some very off the wall topics that invade my head throughout the day. Some very self destructive thoughts, and some self awareness thoughts. Thoughts on religion, video games, spirituality. Hell, I may even choose to discuss sexual exploration in the future. Who knows? All I know is that after looking back at some of my posts, I’m starting to realize how chaotic one individuals thoughts can be. How genuinely complex a humans life and mind can truly be. 

Think about it, if you’ve read my posts in the past, regarding witchcraft, self care, self love, eating awareness, hyperawareness, overthinking, and so on and so forth, then you would think you’d be able to point me out in a crowd. 

The truth is, you wouldn’t. A great deal of my writing is simply the regurgitation of my persistent, sometimes unrelenting, thoughts. I’m noticing the complexities of humanity, and it’s beautiful and tragic all at once.

Last time we spoke, I discussed in a mini post that Judy Alvarez was mine for the taking a staple of independence and power to me and that getting my power back was of high priority to me. It’s been a few days, but this still remains a significant thought in my head. I find myself becoming more and more enthralled by her character and persona, drawn into why I relate to her as much as I do. Then, I noticed the underwater life she loves so much, and am reminded of the blue jellyfish behind my left ear. I see her whale tattoo and think of the same one I have under my left boob. I think of how I wanted to shave the right side of my head similar to Judy’s hair back in High School and my mom telling me it wouldn’t look good. And finally, I think of her selflessness, and her need to help a traumatized soul, and how I used to be a Sexual Violence Outreach Advocate, just trying to help a traumatized soul. I relate to her in more ways than one, as silly and stupid as it sounds, and these may be extremely minute to notice, but important for me. 

My boyfriend and I had a few conversations this weekend, all separate times, that really pinned me to myself. One conversation, he asked me what exactly I believed, in that moment, when it came to religion and spirituality. From there we got into a lengthy discussion (mostly my fault) where I explained my thoughts in detail. One quote I said stood out (I was also stoned so when I said it, it came out as a surprise to me as well), for I digress from the want to overexplain myself. 

As I told my boyfriend, Hyperawareness will destroy a man before it enlightens him. And this year, Hyperawareness seemed to be the proprietor of my mind, for it most definitely would have destroyed me had I continued.

Another conversation we had, which we both agreed to, was the power of our physical bodies directly correlating to past experiences we’ve had with other humans. Also, our relationship with unsustainable lifestyles.

Example, my body issues are founded on the idea that I wasn’t allowed to be a tomboy and play sports or take karate or MMA Fighting classes, but I also wasn’t perceived as delicate and pretty because of my weight/I was bigger than other girls. I was discouraged from doing the physical things I was interested in, and gave up as a result.

Those experiences have perpetuated in many areas of my life as well. In High School, I chose Shop as my number one elective and Weight Training as my second. They chose to put me in Theatre and Intensive Reading instead (Intensive Reading is a class kids take when they make below average on state wide tests). Now, my first choices were classes I felt would develop my character and reflect the life I wanted to live, and I was told it was a bit manly for me to choose those classes. Now, as an adult, I don’t go out of my way to work on mechanics, even though it’s an interest of mine and I haven’t done weight lifting because I thought I’d look like a man. False ideas.

When you are denied your own personality as a child, and don’t realize that is what is happening because it is still happening, it becomes a spiral of what options do you actually have? You become an open book for others influences to freely write in, because you want to be your own independent self but you don’t even know who or how that person is. So, for a while when I got out of High School I was clinging to others personalities in an attempt to find myself. That’s not a good way of doing it, either. 

I lived to please, so when people called me Sunshine, I figured the Sun didn’t wear a lot of black and didn’t act like a man. 

Reality check, I was overthinking it.

I should dress and live how I see fit, regardless of the typical aesthetic. Fuck the idea that I have to subscribe to one aesthetic anyways. If I want to own a Bee Hive, a Cottage in the Mountains by the river with a tiny self sustaining garden, all while wearing black alternative outfits that somewhat line the aesthetic of post apocalyptical,  then fuck yes I’m going to be a gentle, bright, motorcycle loving, knife wielding, MMA Fighting, Yoga and Meditation doing, soft spoken bad bitch. 

Here’s the thing, I haven’t even bought myself clothes this year, because people were literally buying clothes for me. WHICH I AM EXTREMELY GRATEFUL FOR!!!! But, over the weekend I got rid of a lot of those clothes because they restrict my personality, I never wear them or they don’t fit anymore.

After the lengthy conversations, we both agreed that our youthful selves are not finished being fully alive. We didn’t stop being young once we got out of High School, we stopped being young when we started saying we were too old. So, we are starting to set goals together. Getting rid of old clothes was the first step, and we took into consideration that we are still individuals just helping each other accomplish a common goal, so the next step is our physical selves. 

The plan is to clean out our storage room and transform it into a self-care/training area. Together, we will start the P90X after work on some days, while I try to keep up with yoga on my off days. This month, being aware of what I eat without the focus of losing weight has helped me actually lose weight. Now, focusing on my workout regime is the goal. Not to lose weight, but to be able to start MMA Fighting Classes. 

MMA Fighting is something I started in High School right before going to college, but never finished. It’s something I want to commit to so as to release anger while Yoga will help me process my anger. So, healthy eating to support energy, and healthy workouts! I have also been having more endometriosis pain than usual, so avoiding my health won’t help me!

Spiritual wise, I want to focus on my better self. I want to put more effort into me rather than letting myself go in a world of people who don’t care if my personality exists or not. I want to be open, strong and powerful in what I believe. I want to own my shit, and fuck anyone who wants to stop that type of Sunshine. In the words of Meghan Thee Stallion, “Fuck being good, I’m a bad bitch. I’m sick of motherfuckers tryna tell me how to live.”

I’m inconvenient, and I’m happy with that. I’m not perfect, but I’m a process. I’m not weak and quiet, I’m strong and silent. 

This specific post is a reclamation of my power. Somewhere along the road of this shitty adult life, I forgot the beauty in my own power. I’m equal, not less than.

Thank you for reading, if you did. This is, again, one of those things where I am journaling my thoughts, and trying to go over everything in my head without going crazy. If you thought this was annoying, just remember I deleted 5 paragraphs before posting, because I was overthinking and didn’t want to overexplain. (I do everything in copious quantities). If it bothered you, look past my post. If you related, let’s talk about it. All in all, thank you for being alive, darling. I’ll see you later!

[dogbearinggifts]

“Dad Sent Me to the Moon” vs. “Because Dad Made Me”

How Luther and Vanya Talk About Trauma, Part One

In this fandom, I’ve heard a lot about Luther and Vanya. 

Most of the things I’ve heard about Luther are negative. He constantly whines about his time on the Moon. He won’t shut up about how he had it worse than everyone else. He invalidates his siblings’ trauma. Meanwhile, Vanya is spoken of as if she’s his polar opposite: a kind, timid woman who genuinely did have it worse than everyone else but suffers nobly in silence while quietly ensuring her siblings are okay. I wanted to see if these perceptions were accurate, so I decided to take an empirical approach. During my sixth rewatch, I noted every time Luther mentions the Moon or Vanya mentions her exclusion, as well as how each of them responds to hearing of someone else’s trauma.

I want to stress that I am not out to throw one character under the bus. I’m not out to prove that Vanya is the actual worst and that Luther is the literal best, or that Vanya is amazing and Luther is awful. I’ve just heard a lot about both characters from within the fandom and I want to see how strongly the show itself supports the fandom’s perceptions. I won’t be examining every quote they have, and I won’t be looking at every scene they’re in. A deep study of both characters would certainly be fun, but for now, I’m only interested in how they address their own trauma and how they respond to the trauma of others. 

Note: I’ve chosen not to include Vanya’s book as a mention of her trauma. While her book does indeed bring it up and examine it in detail, I wasn’t sure how to quantify it for my own purposes. Do I count it as a single mention, because she only wrote it down once, and thus risk underestimating its impact? Do I count each sale as a separate mention, guesstimate the number based on how many copies sold it takes to reach bestseller status, and therefore grossly inflate her numbers? Because the book is impossible to quantify with any sort of accuracy, I’ve chosen to leave it aside. Rather, I will keep my trauma counts limited to what Luther and Vanya say to friends or family members. This also means I won’t include her voice-over while we see her writing her book, or the moments where she reads excerpts aloud. 

I’ve also chosen to write down the exact quote each time Luther or Vanya mentions their respective trauma or respond to someone else’s trauma. I’ll share my analysis, but I also want to give you all the chance to see each quote for yourselves and make your own judgments. You’re welcome to disagree with my conclusions and take or leave them as you see fit.  However, because these analyses will become lengthy in places, I plan to do only a few episodes at a time.

Episode 1: We Only See Each Other at Weddings and Funerals

No explicit mentions of trauma from either Luther or Vanya. It’s established that Luther lived on the Moon for a while and that Vanya was raised to believe she had no powers and excluded from the family dynamic as a result, but neither one addresses what they went through. 

Episode 2: Run Boy Run

Following the episode opener—a flashback to the day Five time-traveled and accidentally got stuck in the apocalypse—we hear Five share the harrowing details of his time there. Eating cockroaches, subsisting on scavenged food, learning the hard way that Twinkies do in fact expire—it’s pretty awful stuff. After Vanya takes it in stunned silence, we have this exchange: 

Five: You think I’m crazy.  Vanya: No, it’s just…it’s a lot to take in.  Five: Exactly what don’t you understand?  Vanya: Why didn’t you just time-travel back?  Five: Gee, wish I’d thought of that. Time-travel is a crapshoot. I went into the ice and never acorn-ed. You think I didn’t try everything to get back to my family?  Vanya: If you grew old there, you know, in the apocalypse, then how come you still look like a kid?  Five: I told you already. I must have got the equations wrong.  Vanya: I mean, Dad always used to say that time-travel could mess up your mind. Maybe that’s what’s happening? 

This is our first onscreen mention of trauma, and Vanya invalidates it. However, there are some factors to consider: 

Five’s story is pretty bizarre. “Yeah, after I ran away from home and time-traveled, I got stuck in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, lived there for 40 years or so, ate cockroaches and bad Twinkies, and then I jumped right back here but because math failed me almost as much as Dad failed at parenting I still look just like I did the day I left. You got any booze?” 

There is no evidence to corroborate his story. He looks exactly the way he did when he left, and he has no way to prove he visited the future at all. The most logical conclusion here is that he spent a year at most figuring out how to return and wound up jumping ahead to 17 years after his disappearance.

As we see in the flashback, Five has always been arrogant and headstrong, growing angry when corrected. His anger and impatience toward Vanya’s insinuations that he’s lost his mind are not a reliable indication that he’s telling the truth; if anything, Vanya is well within reason to assume she’s edging too close to a truth he’s not ready to face. 

Reginald Hargreeves was a terrible parent. But he was also a very smart man who knew more about his children’s powers than they themselves did. When he said that time-travel could mess up one’s mind, Vanya had every reason to assume he knew what he was talking about. 

Reginald often used “YOU CHILDREN MUST ONE DAY SAVE THE WORLD FROM AN IGNOMINIOUS END” to scare his kids into doing the dishes. Not only has Vanya probably had enough of that talk to make her decide the world is going to die a natural death billions of years after hers, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable for her to assume Five’s time-travel-addled mind latched onto those doomsday threats and twisted them into something truly strange. 

So, yes, Vanya does invalidate Five’s trauma, suggesting it’s all in his head. But when your choices of explanation are “my brother time-traveled before he was ready and it messed up his mind” or “my brother time-traveled to an apocalypse that’s going to happen in 8 days, lived there for 40 years without ever trying to get back, and now looks like a 13-year-old kid because he got the math wrong,” the former is easier to believe than the latter. 

Additionally, we see she genuinely cares for Five. His sudden reappearance, his talk of an impending apocalypse, his story that to her has holes large enough to drive a Volkswagen through—all of that has got to be terrifying. It’s clear she’s not invalidating his trauma out of any sense of malice, but rather concern. If he’s a victim of time-travel messing up his mind, she wants him to get the help he needs (as evidenced by her recommending a therapist later). Her invalidation of his trauma isn’t right, but it’s also a human response that comes from a place of genuine concern and good intentions. 

It’s also worth noting that, the very next day, she returns to the Academy to apologize for how she responded to his story. She does recommend a therapist, but only when Five says “Maybe you were right, maybe it was all in my head.”

A few scenes later, we get Vanya’s first mention of her trauma. 

Allison: No offense, Vanya, if I wanted advice, it wouldn’t be from you.  Vanya: What’s that supposed to mean?  Allison: You don’t have a child. You’ve never even been in a relationship.  Vanya: That’s not true.  Allison: So you know what it’s like to love someone like this? Like, when you’re apart from her, you can’t breathe? Like you would die—and I mean, actually die, to know she’s okay and happy? I mean, you separate yourself from everything and everyone, you always have.  Vanya: Because Dad made me.  Allison: Did Dad make you write that book about us, too? Pause You’re an adult now, Vanya. You don’t get to blame your problems on anyone but yourself. 

The first thing to note about this exchange is that, although it’s Vanya’s first mention of her own trauma, it’s Allison who brings it up first. The second is that when she brings up her trauma, it’s as an explanation for her behavior: I separate myself from everything and everyone because Dad made me. 

Vanya is definitely sympathetic here. I’m not going to argue she isn’t. She tries to be nice to her sister, catches her when she’s distressed, and gets reamed out for the attempt. That’s a shitty thing for Allison to do, which she later acknowledges. 

However, there’s also their history to consider: Allison is a movie star. As I’m sure we all know by now, image is everything to the rich and famous. I don’t mean that as a jab at their vanity (although vanity is certainly involved, more often than not) but as a fact: They are the product, and their image is part of the advertising. Everything they do in public (and much of what they do in private) is pounced on by the paparazzi and spun into the next big story. And this isn’t always fair to them; a single misspoken word can set off rumors that come back to bite them in the ass. 

And Vanya wrote a tell-all book about how Allison treated her as a child. 

As we see from the intro sequence in Episode 1, it seems Vanya’s autobiography hasn’t kept Allison off the red carpet. But it would have certainly hurt her public image. While it’s true we don’t know everything Vanya put in her autobiography, we do know Vanya harbors a lot of bitterness and resentment toward her family. We know she sees her siblings as near-strangers who had an easier time of it than she did at best, superpowered copycats of their father at worst. From the reactions we see later on—Diego taping Vanya’s author photo to a punching bag, Ben saying “I can’t believe she said that!” as Klaus shushes him—it’s safe to assume she did not say kind things about her siblings in that book. 

If the things Vanya said about Allison matched the things Allison later says about herself—that she used her power to get everything she wanted as a kid, that she grew up spoiled because of it—then that would not have done any favors for her public image. And the paparazzi would have gone apeshit for it. Yes, Allison is an incredibly popular actor, but that doesn’t mean the press wouldn’t have turned on her the second they got a juicy morsel about her past. I imagine her having to field many uncomfortable questions from trashy reporters while out for lunch with friends, having an interview about her upcoming film suddenly turn tense when the interviewer said “Now, Allison, your sister—who none of us even knew existed up to this point—wrote about you in her book, and I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say I want to know more about….” There’s even a chance Vanya’s autobiography contributed to Patrick’s continuing antagonism toward her, since reading a book detailing Allison’s childhood power abuse could have convinced him his wife had always been bad, right from the cradle. (Or it could have fostered suspicion toward his wife and led him to keep a closer eye on her and therefore is the reason why he was close to Claire’s bedroom the night he saw Allison Rumor her, but that’s another theory for another time.) 

You might say she deserved it. You might say she’d set herself up to fall and that all Vanya did was push that first domino over. You could even say her house of cards needed to topple, since part of her perfect life involved running roughshod over her own daughter’s free will, and possibly even Rumoring her husband into falling in love with her. Those arguments are absolutely fair, but they’re not my point. My point is, Allison’s harsh words to Vanya in this scene don’t come on her out of the blue. There’s a painful history there—painful for the both of them—and Allison harbors a lot of unresolved anger toward her sister for what she wrote in her book. And I don’t think that anger is unfounded, just as I don’t think Vanya’s resentment toward Allison is unwarranted. What Allison does in this scene is shitty, but Vanya has already done something shitty to her, in retaliation for shit she went through as a kid, and on and on the chain of pain goes. Vanya is far from guiltless in their relationship, but that does not make Allison’s lashing out at her okay. 

And this is getting pretty long, so I’ll cut things short here. I’m going to list the count for trauma mentions/reactions below—and since I’ve seen this show multiple times over, I know it’s going to change; so don’t take the fact Vanya’s count is higher than Luther’s as an indictment of her. It’s just where we are at the end of Episode 2. 

Own Trauma: Vanya 1, Luther 0 Trauma of Others:  Vanya 1, Luther 0

Enjoying this series? Read on to Part Two. 

[kendrixtermina]

Thoughts re: antagonists

Fair warning: I will be treating “Rhea is an antagonist” as an axiom here to base further discussion on it, if you disagree with that premise then this post isnt for you but im not gonna go into details about proving/arguing it here. 

So on the surface Fodlan appears like your standards issue medieval fantasy setting governed by the rulers of the three countries, but it’s actually a sort of post-apocalyptic leftover of a world where advanced technology once existed, a bit like those legends or pseudoscientific theories about a grand, but sinful civilization before the biblical great flood or Atlantis. Man Grey Proud, wiped out by divine punishment yadda yadda resulting in a setting with two main antagonistic forces that have control and shaped the current state of Fodlans politics through the centuries and have been locked in a costly eternal war:

There’s the remaining Agarthans who want to destroy the surface dwelling civilization AND the Nabateans to rule the surface themselves (which makes them enemies of the church) and there’s Rhea who effectively rules Fodlan from the shadows to the extent that she’s basically arranged the three countries so that her base is in the middle, since the ruling class takes its legitimacy from the church and she makes sure to indoctrinate them when theyre young. 

The result is a world thats rife with instability, inequality, xenophobia caused by isolationism, obsession with bloodlines etc. all side effects of maintaining church power, none of which is doing much to keep the Agarthans in check - they deposed the last emperor and assasinated the last king, have agents in Rhea’s own base and Rhea’s too busy lashing out against random revolts brought on by her incompetent rule to investigate and weed out the real enemy

You have Rhea representing “nothing changes”/ eternal stagnation of Fodlan’s sucky state as it is, Lawful Evil or a “rule the world” villain whereas you have the Agarthans who just plain want to destroy the order of Fodlan so they can rule it,  Chaotic Evil or “destroy the world” villains - We see what Cornelia and Arundel do in the territories they get a hold of, they just squeeze the peasants for their last tax dollar, do forced labor, institute tyrannical and capricious rule... etc suggesting that if they won the people would basically end up as livestock. 

Clearly that’s worse; Rhea’s world sucks but you can still kinda live in it and she will be nice to you if you stay on her good side. But she doesn’t see humans as capable or deserving of governing themselves either. (whereas all three lords basically end up giving the commoners varying degrees of political participation)

They’re even represented as Black (Liberation Army with Agarthan stragglers) and White (Church under rhea) on the map for the chapter introductions whereas the other factions get colors (Empire - Red, Kingdom - Blue, Alliance - yellow, resistance army/reformed church - silver/purple)

The Agarthans are fun conceptually in what they imply for the setting but as characters they don’t get much dimensionality but I don’t think they need to be _ I too used to think pure evil was boring, then I lived through 2016 et al and due to endless frustration with the remaining politicians got to appreciate that the revelant thing about pure evil isn’t the evildoers themselves but how you manage dealing with them in a world with complex webs and balances of power, conflicting self interests etc basically no unambiguos “pure good” everyone can agree on . Pure evil is ultimately an abstraction every evil person likely got evil somehow and could theoretically turn good - but many of them won’t and we still have to deal with it. And that’s the point here - what will the good and neutral people do about it? Will they fall for the traps play the games and be turned against each other? 

Often dysfunctional systems happen not so much because there are evil people (there are always evil people) but because the good and neutral people are too busy bickering to stop them even though the good want to do good and the neutral should at least want to protect their own interests from the villains.

Generally Chaotic Evil tends to be sorta more interesting because it’s the cooler villains/creatures or it’s someone lashing out, whereas lawful evil tends to be crotchery old men and kind of pathetic (See Harry Potter for example) and are often engaged with as sorta younger person rebelling against crotchery old people.

But that also comes with the idea that Lawful Evil is Not You. You can easily see your capacity for destruction as you all get mad and have negative emotions but we all like to think we wouldn’t fall prey to blindly following authority... though studies repeatedly show that ppl overestimate themselves. 

So Rhea is interesting in that she and her most uncompromising followers are semi sympathetic thoroughly examined version of Lawful Evil. (Sympathetic enough that they let you subject her to “love redeems” if you want to, though her S support still acknowledges that she used to be a villain, deceive everyone and used to care nothing for byleth until very recently - You don’t need to marry, say,  Dimitri so that he starts acting responsibly. heck, you could run off with any of his best friends!)  Ppl who are especially susceptible to authority often do so because they feel scared,  view the world as dangerous and sort of never fully made that transition from child to adolescent and subsequently young adult where you stop doing what your parents tell you and start making your own experiences. They’re scared of the unfamiliar and want a strong parent figure to swoop in and protect them and tell them what to think. 

Rhea describes herself as the “last” Child of Sothis meaning she was the youngest, she might’ve been relatively young when the massacre happened (at least by Nabatean standards). She probably survived only cause she hid in fear or because her brothers protected her. 

Eventually she raised an army, got allies and dethroned Nemesis and his ilk, effectively ending up as one of the leaders of her country. The people probably loved her alot after all she got rid of the murdery bandit king - seeing as he has a general might makes right attitude and wasnt above massacring a whole clans worth of innocents for power, he was prolly not a good ruler to live under. 

 She felt she had to live up to the mission left behind by their mother (as Seteth said they view themselves as the protectors of Fodlan) but she still acts as if she were that scared helpless little girl.  She never got the memo that she’s in power and privilege now because sometimes that’s kinda how the mind works. So as she started getting increasingly tyranical she saw it all as “protecting herself” or “doing the will of her mother”. You can see how she got to be that way and follow that progression on an emotional level

She views herself not as the leader that she is, but solely as Sothis’ representative holding down the fort till she returns, and doesn’t enjoy being a leader indeed many things like tea quotes, advice box letters, higher order supports etc. imply that she kinda hates it and finds it lonesome. 

Which also makes her a contrast for the main characters but in different ways - Claude and Edelgard (incidentally the ones who actively oppose her and find out at least some of what her deal is) are very independent, self-reliant and self-determined even at a young age, and even though they have experienced comparable crap, especially Edelgard. Meanwhile Dimitri actually had a lot in common with her in terms of backstory and character flaws and going overboard/hitting the wrong target in pursuit of initially justified revenge and tending toward black and white thinking. You kinda see why they join up in CF -  though he has tons more responsibility, empathy and self-awareness even as his very worst and in his own route he eventually winds up doing pretty much the exact opposite as hes strictly against imposing anything on people and ends up letting them have some say in how he governs them

[searchforthescars]

The 100 s6?? Haven’t seen your take yet

hhhhhhhhh oKay saddle up kids I had A Time with this

DISCLAIMER: THESE ARE ALL MY OPINIONS. ANYONE ATTACKING ME FOR THESE (and pls note that “attacking” and “respectfully disagreeing in the name of discourse or putting your two cents in” are different and I will definitely entertain the second one) WILL BE BLOCKED AND DELETED

it’s all under the cut bc Spoilers

Here's the thing: I'm glad they're taking advantage of the new setting to introduce a creepy-cool sci-fi element that I lowkey missed in this show. It's less teen-drama-y and more post-apocalyptic-moral-dilemma-y, and I like that a lot.

HOWEVER, I would like it a lot more if we had some quality character development to go along with this healthy main course of plot. I don't like storytelling where the plot happens to the characters; I like seeing the characters both react to the circumstances of Life as the plot dictates, but also making decisions that impact the plot. Like real life, these actions and events go both ways.

I feel as though we're watching many of our characters kind of waste away in the background for the sake of what is a really good plot and premise on its face, but needs a strong set of emotional performances to keep it going. I'm disappointed at the lack of character interaction, especially when it comes to dealing with the host of sins that were committed before everyone went into cryo. I understand that the characters may not have even had time to process everything given the intensity of the current conflict, but SHOW ME THAT!

On that vein, they've done a really poor job of internal conflict continuity. Murphy has one (1) crisis about dying and apparently being shown hell, and that's it. That's not something that leaves you easily, especially not for someone like Murphy who already carries around a lot of guilt. However, we're not shown that - we see him manipulating Josephine to get the immortality chips, but his actions don't seem to be motivated by that Fear Of Hell - they just seem to be happening because the script wills it so.

I'm not taking shots at Richard or any of the other actors - I think they're all doing an awesome job with what they're given. I just feel like, unlike previous seasons, we were thrust straight into the action instead of letting it build slowly. I think they could've done incredible things with both character development and plot if they had stretched all this out over one and a half or two seasons. In past seasons, we've always started off on the heels of a rising conflict from the previous season, but this time, we're starting fresh, and I don't think that was handled well.

On a final (negative) note, (and then I have some positive stuff), I'm a little tired of the endless trope of "let's have one episode per season that feeds Clarke's martyr complex and endears Poor Little Her to the audience." This is the thing: I don't particularly care for Clarke. It's not because I'm a Becho shipper (although I am). It's because - IN MY OPINION DONT NO ONE COME FOR ME OK - Clarke has been taken from a moral character Trying Her Best to do the right thing as a child-slash-new adult thrust into a world of harsh extremes with no guidance whatsoever to someone with a savior complex who uses the same excuse over and over to justify acting alone even though, at this point, help is RIGHT THERE. I was happy when she apologized to Raven at the beginning of s6, but I wasn't happy that she and the narrative both then turned around and tried to justify why Poor Baby Isn't Actually Such A Bad Person After All.

Clarke has done bad things. Periodt. No ifs, ands or buts. She, like Octavia, Abby, Indra, Lexa, Bellamy, Kane, Miller, etc. has messed up. Periodt. No ifs, ands or buts. That's part of what this show is about, and it's why I love it - I love moral greyness and that endless battle between our better angels and what we feel we need to do to stay alive. It's why I love this genre.

HOWEVER, while the narrative continuously gives Clarke a pass because she justifies that she was doing it all "for her people," Octavia, Indra, Lexa, Titus, Luna, heck, even Lincoln and Monty, don't get those same passes. They're left to carry their own guilt while also getting half-hearted reassurances from the people around then and the narrative. Meanwhile, we're all expected by the storytellers to feel sorry for Clarke because she gives insincere apologies and keeps coming back to "I did it for my people oh poor me I'm carrying your sins for you." No one asked her to do that.

Okay, rant over. I also want to give a positive nod to Marie and Ivana's acting; those two are playing off one another so well and, while I don't like Marie as a person, she is really embodying the role of a traumatized former leader who believes she's so far gone death is the only way to save her soul. Likewise, Ivana is doing a great job of taking her tough-as-nails, untouchable, snarky character and showing a softer side that doesn't detract from her power in a situation, but rather adds to her dynamic with Octavia. Last season, there's no way I could've seen her as a mother. Now I can.

[alarawriting]

I think I have figured out which of my various universes and story ideas I will be exploring with my ficlets. (Why, yes, if you hadn’t figured it out I am totally cheating; instead of coming up with a ficlet based on the prompt, I am matching the prompt to existing universes and story ideas to see what fits best.)

So far, in 7 ficlets, I’ve covered:

#arcana: The arcana are psychic/energy vampire mages, whose magic draws from life force taken from consenting clients (though not always well-informed consenting clients.) First came up with this idea when I was 16 and I actually wrote a lot of stories based on it, only one of which doesn’t suck, because I was 16. (You modern 16 year olds, with your Internet and your instant feedback and your ability to grow as authors faster than we did back in the day!... you’re awesome, keep it up. But when I was 16? I sucked.)

“zombie humans spreading spam”: Hey, I could really go for some Five Guys.

#child impersonators: I mentioned this in the ficlet -- this idea is based on P. J. Plauger’s “Child of All Ages” (but isn’t fanfic because I’ve done something drastically different with the concept). The “child impersonators” are adults who have been taking medication that suppresses their aging, entirely, since before puberty. They do not go into puberty, they do not grow and they do not age. “Grownups” refers solely to traditional adults, as “child impersonators” have all the legal rights of adults but are not grown-up.

#diane duane #young wizards #faro and ilya: I think someday I will come back to these two, but they are the only story idea I literally didn’t come up with until I saw the prompts. I’d wanted to explore the concept of a dog wizard, mostly because, as much as I love cats, they are overdone in SF and fantasy. But the only idea I’d had about dog wizards was that they probably work with human wizards, rather than in packs with other dog wizards, because unlike cats, who can come and go as they like without humans being alarmed, dogs can’t freely travel around without human supervision. A wizard can get around this, but expending extra power when you don’t need to is against their code. It became a husky and her Russian partner protecting the Arctic because the prompts were “freeze” and “husky”.

#kai diwar universe: I really love this universe and plan to explore it in detail one of these days. I got sick of “humans are special”, “humans have a quality of growth”, “humans are the only one who make alliances with other species”, etc, and decided to create a universe where the thing that’s unique about humans is that we like beer and kitty cats. No, seriously. We made friends with the galaxy’s greatest engineers because they thought they were the only ones with a love of fermented grain until we showed up, and they traded technology for novel microbrews; we made friends with the galaxy’s deadliest and most frightening warriors, the felinoid Kai, because catlike beings exist on most planets with sapient life, but Earth is the only one where they’re small enough to make pets of, so we were the only ones who saw giant cats and instead of terrifying “tigers and lions and panthers, oh my!”, we were able to think “Ooh, kitty!” instead and befriend them.

#not even past: So imagine what if Harry Potter, or a story like it, had taken place in America. And imagine that all of the teens fighting the great evil had died except the Hermione character and the Draco character. And imagine that as a result, the Hermione character had quit the world of magic entirely, gotten married to a non-magical man, had kids, and uses magic only to protect and care for her family. Imagine that she has serious PTSD about the magical world and nightmares about the deaths of her friends, which are getting worse because her own kids are getting to be the age when she went off to magic school herself. Now imagine that the bad guys are back and targeting her. That’s the plot of “Not Even Past.”

Other story ideas I plan to do ficlets on:

#nodrama: No Drama. I did a WIP promo on this. Snarky omnipotent alien is on Earth without most of his powers, investigating whether God is actually a corrupt politician of his people. Check the tag for more related ficlets.

#coldlight: The Cold At The Heart Of The Light. Did this one too. Supervillain must protect the baby of her nemeses’ mentor against her nemeses, a superhero team, because a time traveller has demonstrated that the baby will destroy the world if allowed to grow up, but the supervillain thinks she can change things. Check the tag for more related ficlets.

#proxima: Set in the same universe as Cold Light, but with different characters. The Proximas, like Marvel mutants, are people born with the capacity for superpowers, which come in during adolescence typically.

#libertyangel: Superman expy where the Clark Kent character was female. 

#demange: The demanges -- part demon, part angel -- are entities that do not belong on Earth, and generally prey on humans. Mark discovered years ago that he was half demange, and that this obligates him to do something, so he travels the world solving problems caused by demanges. If this sounds to you like the plot of Vampire Princess Miyu, congratulations, except you missed the part where I crossed it over with Hellblazer and Dresden Files.

Mad Max the librarian: This needs more fleshing out, but basically, in a post-apocalyptic world, a badass dude on a motorcycle rescues books and computer equipment and brings them home to an oasis of knowledge and (barely) working technology called The Library.

#theclos #greenworld: In a universe where Earth has a twin planet that is more like early science fiction’s take on Venus -- hot and jungle-like -- an explorer from our world who is trying to be ethical runs afoul of a member of a godawfully powerful humanoid race who are worshiped as gods on that world. Conflicts over non-interference, the human value of trade and cultural exchange vs. colonialism, and so forth, develop. Also, the human explorer and the Theclos representative fall in love. (Yes, based on Picard/Q, though in this version the Q character is female. If you want to see one that maintains the m/m dynamics keep reading.)

#mikelondon: Bears some slight resemblance to my story “Eyes That Can’t Be Mesmerized” (posted here on tumblr!), but came first. Mike London is an IT guy, and an albino, with rhythmatic nystagmus. It turns out that this protects him from vampiric mesmerism, and that makes him a target of the vampires, so he becomes a vampire slayer.

#doctorultraviolet: I posted the first bit of the first chapter of this here, years ago. Dr. Ultraviolet is The World’s Greatest Evil Genius. After surviving the superheroes’ destruction of her base and her finances, she has to take refuge with her sister... a single mother with 5 kids who lives in the suburbs and works as a real estate agent.

#sifralef: A ship captain in an era much like the Age of Sail, but with magic, is taunted by a Daemon, a mysterious entity with near-godlike power over the world. It turns out the world is a simulation, Daemons are AIs who run the simulation and maintain it, and this particular Daemon wants humanity to wake up, leave the simulation and achieve the destiny that was planned for them when the simulation was first created... for reasons of his own, and he’s chosen this ship captain as the human to awaken. Yes, it’s based on Picard/Q. Yes, this time they’re both dudes.

Plus, story ideas that I’ve posted incomplete bits of or the concept of here on Tumblr, such as the Pale Bro, Lair of Cat and Dragon, Hole in the World, or two lesbians drive across a future America in an ancient car held together by spray-can aluminum. And some other stuff I’m not going into in detail. And there may be ideas from @writing-prompt-s or concepts people posted on Tumblr in a “I wish someone would write this” or explicitly story prompt fashion.

[sometimesrosy]

The person that send the ask about JRoth refering to Echo and Madi in the past had/got made me take a sec and think because i understand refering to E in the past because i think that BE are going to break-up but why would he refer to Madi in past tense? and then i remembered aa spec that you sai regarding Madi staying in the planet and Clarke leaving with the others, i think? do you really think that would happen and can you talk more about it? 1/2

2/2 i mean i just don’t see Clarke leaving her daughter alone in another planet, altough there is always the whole flame thing, idk how that is gonna affect their relationship but i mean, would Jason really take away her daughter? that’s a new low, even for him lol

He might just have spoken about them in the past because he was speaking about what happened to Clarke and Bellamy over the time jump. That was all in the past. What happened OFF screen affected who Clarke and Bellamy were in the current timeline. 

As he’s writing, or storyboarding, that means that he’s developing THEIR story based on the past. It might have been a mistake just based on his focus as he writes. None of what they say in cons is edited, you know? You can’t expect them to be perfect or precise.

My speculation about them leaving Two Suns Planet is PURE speculation and just something they COULD do based on certain themes and foreshadowing and tropes and archetypes. It doesn’t at all have to be story they go for. Just ONE story path. 

But you say that taking a characters daughter away and leaving her on a planet alone with others is a new low for JR?

I think that is the EXACT SET UP OF THE 100. Abby Griffin lost her daughter, who was sent down alone onto a poisonous planet with 100 delinquents. 

New low? Or, hey, what this show is about?

Oh. Is it different because Madi is so young? 

Charlotte. Tris. Baby Lovejoy. Aden. Ethan. 

Kids don’t escape violence, loss or death on this show. This is BUILT IN to the narrative. 

Don’t confuse a plot line that you don’t like with something that doesn’t fit. Because it DOES fit. It’s pretty standard that kids on this show grow up a LOT faster than kids irl. And Madi HERSELF was left alone at the age of FIVE. So the concept that JR wouldn’t POSSIBLY leave a child alone is ABSOLUTELY FALSE. BTDT. Pay attention.

In many ways, this show is about the new generation, THE KIDS, learning to find their own power and stand up and change the world for the better. All our delinquents except for Bellamy were kids when they landed on earth. That is the NATURE of this show.

You identified with the kids, so you didn’t notice, except for occasionally, that our kids were actual kids, because you were inside their heads and instead you saw the freedom and the power and the challenges and the heroism. When we looked at the PARENTS, we saw them as characters who did stuff TO the kids, who abandoned them or abused them or sent them to earth or betrayed them or whatever it is. Maybe you didn’t notice because all the actors were playing younger than their real age, because the show WANTED you to think of them as active adult principals. But Jasper and Monty? What were they? 15? That’s only a few years older than Madi. And they had NEVER been left alone to survive by themselves. They weren’t as capable. Maybe the subtle shift of adults playing kids to kids playing kids means that the writers want you to think about what it means to grow up, to be responsible, to be an adult or a parent. Remember, their initial thought was to make the commander a child. They’ve actually gone BACK to their original concept. 

NOW you’ve got YOUR kid as the parent, as the person who is the hero with the motivation and desires and goals. So you see Clarke as the active principle and Madi as the passive one. But it’s the SAME story. 

Clarke raised Madi to be independent, she was driving and going off alone at 11. Hunting and gathering and facing a post apocalyptic earth alone. That’s how she raised her. Now that people are back, Clarke is clinging to Madi and trying to keep her safe when before she’d raised her to keep HERSELF safe. 

We’ve already seen Clarke struggle with the same thing Abby struggled with. Learning to LET HER DAUGHTER GO TO MAKE HER OWN DECISIONS. The audience is sometimes outraged that anyone would allow Madi to make these life or death decisions intended to save Clarke, but Clarke was making life or death decisions from ep 1, and we were outraged that Abby would try to stop her and keep her a child.

So what I’m saying here? This is a THEME we’ve seen in The 100. Madi is a bit younger, but she is also just as capable as Clarke. We have SEEN her be capable. 

Would JR have Clarke lose Madi? 

He had Abby lose Clarke, didn’t he? So yeah. He would. It isn’t some worse horror inflicted upon her. It is a cyclical story. The parent must release her child to her own future as her parent released her. The youth shall inherit the earth.

Actual literal line of dialogue. They PASSED THE BATON. 

So, we need to pay attention to these things if we want to understand something more about the story. 

so my theory about return to earth? ok

so the idea is that they will have to leave planet two suns, that they will have to DESTROY the comfortable, peaceful human society on the planet because it is, like MW, evil. I think we’ll have a parallel to MW. We already know that the eligius 4 mission was a colonization mission, intent on USING the planet for resources because the earth was used up. This is the bad kind of colony. 

We’re also contrasting “doing what is good for you people” with “doing what is right,” and I’m afraid that joining Russell in a peaceful world where their people can finally live life, which would be GOOD for their people, will actually be harming the planet and either another segment of humans OR the native aliens on the planet. 

So in order to do the right thing and be the good guys, they’ll have to destroy this “peace” and sacrifice and easy life for their people.

This would help Clarke and Bellamy resolve their trauma in MW, where they had to DESTROY an entire people, and never made peace with the fact that they HAD to because those people were not JUST another society, but a TOXIC one who was using other human beings as cattle and torturing them, and intending to take over the surface. 

So while this made her think maybe there were no good guys, the truth is, that even though they committed genocide, it was because that society was EVIL. They WERE the good guys. Sometimes you HAVE to do harm. 

So I think we’ll see this again and this time they will recognize that the choice is to let evil flourish through passive inaction and possibly benefit, or GIVE up the soft life and save a planet and a people from subjugation and STOP the cycle of violence that humanity spreads.

See, we’re working on making sure that Humanity DESERVES to survive. So being faced with a pretty, peaceful society that does not DESERVE to survive, means they have to make active choices against it.

The thought here is that they are subjugating or enslaving the aliens or alien/human hybrids or lower class humans of this planet. ECHO, being a child soldier and slave for the throne, while not feeling like she belongs to spacekru, will feel a kinship with the slaves on the planet and she will stay with them.

The other possibility is that Becca has given an ALIE AI to the new planet, so the flame is not irrelevant. Because the flame was created to STOP ALIE. So if there’s another ALIE helping to subjugate these new people, then the FLAME, aka Madi, is there to stop that. COULD someone else take the flame? Yes, because they’re all going to have to be nightbloods. But it’s possible that Madi herself feels too much responsibility and wants to stay to help the new people. but the story here would mean that Madi wouldn’t be alone, but Echo would be staying with her, as her protector. IDK. 

I don’t know it’s an idea. I got it when I realized that Raven said, “Just once I wish I could take off of a planet without it being on fire,” and she did that TWICE, which means the magic number three might have that coming true. So then I imagined raven taking off of this new planet, NOT on fire, but still needing to leave because they destroyed the “peaceful” society. Like breaking the cycle means they leave it a better place, rather than the earth, which humanity has killed. 

Also with the way the time is going, it took 75 years to fly to the new planet. If they go back to the earth, that’s 200 years total, which is the ORIGINAL speculation for how long The Ark would have to stay in space before Earth would be livable. That’s just too neat a coincidence for me. Makes me think that in, maybe s7, they might be back on the earth again. 

All just ideas. I know it’s wacky. But I’ve had a lot of wacky ideas, like using Cryo sleep to escape praimfaya. Or the exodus after they lose Eden. Heck, I told y’all after hakeldama that this show requires Clarke and Bellamy to be TOGETHER in order to work. So I have wacky ideas that I put together when I think about various narrative elements. So here. Have some more.

Also. Because we’re all responsible for our monsters when we let them out, right? Well humanity destroyed Earth. Do they really get to just ditch it and find .a new planet to ruin? I feel like they need to go home and face the mess they made of their planet. To EARN their survival, they have to fix what they did. They have to make amends. Stopping it from happening on another planet might do that, but also, taking care of the planet they hurt. 

[aion-rsa]

Author Tochi Onyebuchi Brings Anime-Inspired Giant Robots to Nigeria in War Girls

https://ift.tt/324kkoQ

We talked to speculative fiction author Tochi Onyebuchi about novellas War Girls and Riot Baby.

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Tochi Onyebuchi brings a keen eye for world-building and momentum-filled action scenes to his young adult novels. From the Pokémon-like Beasts Made of Night duology to the upcoming fantasy novella Riot Baby, he’s making waves. At NYCC 2019, we sat down to talk to him about pop culture influences, the process of building a novel, and how he wants to push back against Western perceptions of African countries. 

Riot Baby will be available from Tor.com in January 2020. War Girls comes out on Oct. 15 from Penguin Random House.

Den of Geek: Your latest book, War Girls, is a post-apocalyptic story involving both catastrophic change and nuclear war. What draws you to writing apocalypse while the real world feels so apocalyptic? 

Tochi Onyebuchi: Part of it is coping! Part of it is trying to imagine my way through crisis. Because the thing about climate change, or at least the discussion as it is happening now, has been very much dominated by Western voices. It has been very much focused on climate change in parts of the U.S., for instance. Or efforts to combat climate change in Western Europe. Whereas a lot of the really averse effects of climate change will most viscerally be felt on the African continent. 

We’re already seeing it. You see the desertification of the Sahara. And that is pushing people on the lower end, particularly nomadic tribes, further down into densely populated countries. And so you see all this unrest that’s happening right now in northern Nigeria, because you have pastoral Fulani tribes that are being pushed down into farmland that is already populated by people. So all of a sudden there are these new clashes over land rights that would not necessarily have happened were it not for climate change. 

There are islands in the Pacific that are sinking. That won’t be here in 12 years or 20 years. So I was very interested in what people in those places would consider with regards to climate change. So that was why it was particularly interesting to think about issues of climate change and post-nuclear disaster in Nigeria. 

Tell us about the two sisters at the heart of the book. What made their story compelling? 

They both carry aspects of my mother. War Girls very much has its genesis in stories that I would hear from her of her time as an internally displaced person in the Biafran war, the Nigerian civil war, that waged in Nigeria from 1967 to 1970. She was either just finishing or just getting ready to start kindergarten at the outbreak of the war. She was a child living through this! That in many ways was the genesis of the book.

I wanted to also write in a way about a lot of the other civil conflicts that raged throughout African countries in the 1990s and early 2000s and mid 2000s, and that’s where the issue of child soldiers comes in. Child soldiers weren’t necessarily prevalent in the Nigerian civil war in the 60s and 1970, but in a lot of the later conflicts in the 90s and the 2000s you saw prevalence of the instances in which adolescents and teenagers would be drawn into the conflict and faced to fight, forced to kill. I think particularly of the story of Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala, which was made into an extraordinary movie starring Idris Elba. It’s that sort of thing. 

How do you deal with that afterwards, too? As a society, but also as the person who did those things. Because there is an after. There will be an after. What does that look like? Those are very fascinating questions to me. 

War Girls is set in an alternate Nigeria. What kind of research or experiences lead to the way you portrayed it? 

While I did a lot of research on Nigeria, particularly the Biafran war, I also wanted to do a lot of research on other African countries. But one thing I wanted to make sure of was I wanted to write a specifically Nigerian story. And part of that entailed researching both conflicts and histories of other African countries.

One thing that I wanted to do also was make sure this wasn’t a doom-and-gloom, ‘everything is horrible in Africa’ story. Because a lot of the popular perception of Africa is it’s this entire uniform place that’s universally afflicted by starvation and civil war. It’s the picture of the kid with flies on their face and the bloated stomach from malnutrition. But there are 50-plus countries in Africa, many of whom have exponentially more ethnic identities in them. There are over 200 tribes in Nigeria alone. So that speaks to the diversity on every scale, whether it’s economic, social, tribal, what have you. It speaks to the overwhelming diversity of the continent. And that was something I wanted to get at.

So, in researching other countries and other traditions, it became easier for me to pick bits from other cultures but use them specifically, and not just have them be this background of ‘African traditions’ and what not thrown into the story. It was very important to me that the story was specific, the references were specific, the geography was specific. That is a lot of what drove the research that I did. 

War Girls is marketed as Black Panther inspired. Tell me more about this connection and about what pop culture influences you.  

One of the reasons Black Panther was so important, particularly to War Girls, is that it provided a reference point for a lot of people that might not have been familiar with a lot of the things that are going on in that book. War Girls is very much more inspired by Gundam Wing. I’m a huge, huge Gundam fan, so this book is very much a love letter to Gundam. When I pitched it to my agent, it was ‘Gundam in Nigeria.’ 

But at the same time I recognize that there’s a maybe somewhat limited fandom for Gundam. I feel like in the United States more people would recognize Black Panther. One of the beautiful things about it was that people could see Black Panther and have a reference point for this depiction of Africa as technological advanced. That, I think, was new to a lot of people. To see an Africa that maintains fidelity to certain traditions, and had high speed rail. That had hover cars. That had spaceships and what not. But also had specific music and dance traditions and fashion sense. 

So, in crafting a society that had all those things, it’s easier for people to understand. 

What is the idea at the core of Riot Baby, your upcoming novella? 

Riot Baby is the story of Ella and Kev, two siblings that grow up in the shadow of the L.A. Uprising in the 90s. Their story takes them from South Central, to Harlem, to Riker’s, and back to the Watts, and they have to deal with institutional racism and police violence and issues surrounding mass incarceration, while slowly discovering superpowers. 

What have you learned about writing in the course of publishing four novels? 

I’ve gotten much better at my act threes! [Note: Some of the audio in this section was disrupted. The author goes on to discuss gaining sensitivity to the quality of his own writing.]

You can write something and you can feel that it’s right, even though you may not necessarily be able to articulate all the ways in which you feel it’s right, or why this particular choice is the correct one. You can direct the plot a certain way and feel you’ve made absolutely the right choice without necessarily knowing why. Developing that intuition after having internalized so much of the craft is very important. That’s an aspect of writing I’ve grown in. 

What is your process like? Do you outline? 

It often differs by book, and also by the relationship with whichever editor I’m working with at the time. Riot Baby came together in part out of disparate pieces of existing work, and then when it coalesced it grew more of itself. There wasn’t necessarily an outline involved in that. It started with writing pieces of it and the spine of the narrative came together. Then, the rest was a result of growing it out.

Whereas with War Girls it was very schematic. I had the idea, I had a bucket of particular images in my head I wanted to figure out how to dramatize. Out of that came the outline, which of course changed shape over the course of the drafting. So I had the initial outline and then a revised outline. Then I started drafting, and events changed as I was writing. 

Would you say to an aspiring writing that process matters? Do you need to write a certain way, or do different ways work for different people?

Whatever works, works. I think that’s the way to go. There is the temptation to fall prey to a lot of the dogma early on, particularly when you’re trying to figure yourself out with regards to voice, process, how to make this writing thing work. 

We hear people say write every day. But that’s not feasible for a lot of people. Whether it’s their school schedule, whether it’s child care, whether they have a particular job that doesn’t allow for that. People are dealing with different realities, so writing every day isn’t necessarily universally applicable. 

The only thing I feel confident in terms of advice to aspiring writers is to love writing. Whether it’s the act of putting sentences together, playing with that, or whether it’s the larger discipline of storytelling, certain aspects of that—if that gets your heart racing, if that gives you the same feeling as when you see your crush from across the room, that’ll get you so far in this. Because there’s so much nonsense you have to deal with in this, and so much conflicting advice. If at the end of the day you love doing this thing, hold on to that. That’s why you do this.

You can find out more about Tochi Onyebuchi here.

Read and download the Den of Geek NYCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!

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Interview Megan Crouse

Books

Oct 10, 2019

from Books https://ift.tt/2q3NW7P

[sixeightsuited]

Horizon Zero Dawn and Cultural appropriation: A very different view.

For the first time EVER, I’m sitting on the other side of a discussion about appropriating native culture.  Why?  Well, let me lay the framework.

First off, I’m not a guy who “knows a Native American” or has a “Native friend”  I am a 100% Anishinabe (Ojibway) dude who lives on reserve and has fought racism, stereotypes, pan-Indianism, and cultural appropriation fiercely for as long as I can remember. I’ve been the victim of horrendous racial violence as a child, adolescent, and adult, and I’m also a gamer.

I am the first to point out anything that smacks of any of the above and after I saw the Dia Lacina essay on “Horizon: Zero Dawn” being culturally insensitive and appropriating Native culture, I felt for the first time in a situation like this that I had to say something in rebuttal.

Lacina takes issue with the use of the words Tribal, Primitive, Braves, and Savage being used in the game (fyi they’re used to describe predominantly white people in game and they’re White words we didn’t use to describe ourselves thus I claim no ownership of, nor want to, anymore than I want to be a redskin, Indian or Wahoo)  

It seems (IMO) that most of her beef comes from an apparent belief that numerous aspects of generic tribal culture that appear in the game (making clothing from skins, hunting with spears and bows, living in a Matriarchal society, etc) are the sole domain of the Native American and just to be safe and cleverly keep her POV less subject to scrutiny, she applies it even more broadly to indigenous people world wide (I will just refer to us in particular as NA cuz I’m lazy and I also don’t refer to myself as a Native American) and basically that anything that is remotely “tribal” shouldn’t be used in gaming without our or someone else’s permission.

 In fairness, I don’t know if she’s actually played the game but as someone who is currently in the midst of doing exactly that, I can tell you that I have a pretty good idea of what stuff triggered her being upset and why, and while I absolutely respect her right to get offended by whatever she likes, and she makes excellent points about some other games, I am going to point out that there are flaws with this logic.

First of all, the basics: HZD is set in a post-post-apocalyptic future where people are living in tribal groups in a very destroyed world.  Machines exist but as hybrid animal/dinosaur type creatures and technology is pretty much non-existent in day to day human life.  

The heroine of the story is a red haired, white girl named Aloy who lives as an outcast with her adopted father, Rost.  Without giving a lot away, they are fiercely shunned by the local tribe for something Rost did and also the fact that Aloy is motherless.  

Impressively and rightly, though somewhat dismissively remarked upon by Lacina, is the way women and especially women of color are portrayed so positively in-game as this particular tribe is a total Matriarchy run by elders of various ethnicity.  African, Asian, White, and a variety of undefined people of color are common everywhere in the game.  (The leader of one band of warriors is a very fierce, commanding, intelligently portrayed black woman with a powerful presence.)  It reflects a fairly global society from a “skin color” perspective without any horrible accents or broken speech.

They worship an “All-Mother” goddess and their culture is (at least how I saw a lot of it) fairly heavy on European i.e. Celtic, Germanic, Scandinavian, etc type symbolism and the rest is filled in with mostly generic tribal-ish stuff that you could find in countless cultures around the world.

 I really didn’t get a “Native American” vibe off the game.  Of course, I don’t automatically presume to claim sole ownership of things like tribal life, hunting with bows and spears, and worshiping spirits of various elements solely for my own.  Random fact: Because there are over 500 distinct First Nations in N. America, we, believe it or not, didn’t all ride horses, live in tipis, use bows and arrows, tobacco and sage, and worship Eagles and Wolves.  Why? Well…use your brain.  Tobacco and Sage don’t grow EVERYWHERE, horses came over with the Europeans (and if you saw where I live you couldn’t have and cant for the most part get a horse through the bush if you tried) Eagles and Wolves don’t live EVERYWHERE….get the point?  Anyways….

If you examine Rost, he like most of the men has a braided beard and other seemingly Viking/Middle Ages inspired features, is white, speaks clear, unbroken English, and is a loving, protective and very positive role model for the girl.   Aloy for her part, is also fairly Viking-esque (to the point of looking incredibly like Lagaertha from the show Vikings but with red hair) also Egrit from GoT, and is no damsel in distress who needs men to save her. NOWHERE in the game have I encountered any Tipis, wigwams, Sweatlodges, or Non-White people speaking in stereotypical “Me smoke-um peace pipe, He go dat-a way” fashion.

The  opening cinematic is very touching (and long) as we see the orphaned Aloy as a baby in Rost’s care being carried around in a bundle on his back (which pretty much every culture did in one form or another at some point in time) and him ultimately taking her to the spot where a child of the tribe receives it’s name.

I really liked this idea as it isn’t often portrayed in a lot of mediums outside of stereotypical “Dances With Wolves” bullshit. Also, naming ceremonies are not the sole domain of NA people and what occurs bears zero resemblance to any NA ceremony I know of.  (It was actually a little Lion King at one point lol) But it’s a powerful moment in the beginning with much more that occurs during it but I won’t spoil that either.

Aloy herself is a pretty complex character.  She’s extremely independent, defiant, and questions pretty much everything about why things are the way they are and wants to do something about it.  You actually begin playing her as a 6 year old which is pretty unique and even then she’s tough and fearless and determined to explore her world.  

She is in no way hyper-sexualized (I’m looking your way Overwatch) Her clothing and everyone else’s, is utilitarian and appropriate for the environments she lives in, and so far, I have not encountered anything with her or any other character that made me go “WTF?”and trust me, my radar for that shit is HIGHLY SENSITIVE.  This isn’t Avatar, people.  It’s not John Smith. It’s not The Great Wall or Pocahontas.  This isn’t white dude shows up and saves the helpless non-white people while helpless native woman falls in love with him stuff.  It’s a fictitious future where we maniacs blew it up, damn us all to hell!

But here’s the more annoying thing for me as an actual Anishinabe.  I don’t need people speaking for me or getting offended on my behalf.  I am very capable of doing that myself. I am also in no way writing this claiming to be speaking for any other NA people or persons. It’s based on my observations from actually playing HZD and examining the various fictional “cultural” elements in the game.

If you see a skin tied inside a hoop and automatically assume it’s a dreamcatcher” ripping off “our culture” (FYI Dreamcatchers are a 20th century thing whose popularity was a result of pan-Indianism that exploded in the 70s.) or if you see feathers on a spear or as part of a costume (nowhere is anyone wearing a single eagle feather in the back of a beaded headband or a Dakota looking headdress either) and automatically presume it to be ripping off NA culture, you’re REEEEEEEEEEALY reaching.  If you think caring for the environment, obeying matriarchs, worshipping elemental spirits, or making your own clothes is solely the property of NA culture, see previous statement.

By all means get offended.  Get offended by Chief Wahoo.  Get offended by the Washington Redskins.  Get offended that thousands of Native women have been murdered or gone missing and nothing’s been done about it.  Get offended by Johnny Depp or Robert Beltran playing Native people instead of actual Native people getting those roles.  Get offended by shit like Adam Sandler’s “Ridiculous 6” where a native woman is called a “hot piece of red prairie meat” or Depp’s “Lone Ranger” movie.

Get offended that my family was destroyed by the Residential Schools and that the 60s scoop took babies away from their families and people, that forced sterilizations took place and mass graves of dead Native children exist at former Residential School sites.

Don’t just jump on the I’m offended bandwagon because you saw some feathers or skins or spears or bows in a game and immediately grew indignant and wanted to claim them as OUR culture.  They’re not.  They’re almost globally universal in numerous cultures at various points in time.  Get offended, as she rightly mentioned, when the game Overwatch sexualizes the shit out of almost every female character and takes West Coast tribal art and makes a costume out of it.  

THAT is appropriation.  White people holding powwows in Europe (powwows are also pretty much not traditional and are extremely pan-Indian, not to mention full of us appropriating each other’s Native cultures ie. Dakotas wearing Jingle Dresses, Ojibway wearing Dakota regalia, etc) is appropriation.

This game……I’m just not seeing it the same way.  And I’m nobody.  I have no ties to Guerilla or anybody other than myself and my community.

[queenxmargaery]

P.S.A.

Kara’s super long plot ideas list (taken from my old blog)

Verses I have that I realize I haven’t gotten to use much of, even though I’ve had this blog for over three years.

Take any of these ideas, CLAIM THEM AS YOURS, and I will stab you in the eye.

v: Une Rose Dans de le Nord (A Rose in the North)

I know that a bunch of other Margy’s have this verse but it’s a verse I had since I started this blog, Margaery’s brought to the North by her father to be a ward for House Stark, & is betrothed to Robb Stark. The idea is that since the Tyrell’s fought for the losing side each child after Willas was sent to a different place. Garlan to the Vale, Loras to The Storm Lands, & Margaery to the North.

v: The Reluctance of The Wolf. (forced marriage au)

Forced into marriage with one another. Margaery tries to make the best of her fate. Lady Catelyn is a joy and kind to her. Wonderful in every way. While Robb… Robb is cold to her. Margaery becomes scared that she is trapped in another loveless marriage and struggles to understand her cold & grim husband.

v: Westlander (a pun on outlander and a verse in the same vein.)

Margaery Tyrell went away on a trip to the northern area of modern day Westeros. The brunette was having a nice time until she awoke after a walk to find herself not where she had fallen asleep. The land she awoke in was covered with snow.

v: Cursed

When his daughter was born, Mace Tyrell had a big party. Unknown to him, one of the gifts his daughter was given was cursed by a witch across the sea. The child would wed, but each husband would die until one came that could break the curse.

When Mace found out about the curse it was already too late, Margaery had grown into a beautiful woman and he couldn’t stop himself from setting up her marriages.

Each one ends in tragedy.

Margaery returned to Highgarden and vowed to never marry again. After all… Who would want to marry a woman who was cursed?

v; don’t let yourself be hunted

When Margaery was a child she always knew there was something different about her, and her family. She always just thought it was odd that her father could influence those around him with a word, her grandmother’s plants never died, and her brothers… Well, Willas’ super memory and intelligence were next to none, and his ability to seemingly communicate with Animals, Garlan and his super strength, Loras and his agility, she wondered what her powers would be.

At nine the voices started. She could hear them even in her sleep, it was all so very loud and overwhelming, she just wanted it to stop, but it didn’t. It just got worse and louder, it wasn’t until later that she learned these voices were not in her head, they were in the heads of others. She also learned that she could feel other’s emotions as well and project her own on them. Margaery harnesses the powers of empathy and telepathy, her grandmother does her best to help her control it.

Her family is heavily involved in the Hellfire club, and Margaery didn’t have much of a choice, but to do the same. She has always admired the X-Men though and is considering switching sides.

v: Manners Maketh Woman.

Margaery was recruited to MI6 when she was 21 years old in the middle of her third year of college. She hadn’t even planned on being an agent, but now she can’t exactly get out of it. She discovers The Kingsman and works with them more times than she thought she would. She enjoys it, though she doesn’t always trust them especially since they are a rather secret organization.

These are all listed in my verses section.

As well as these plot ideas. & THIS VERY LONG LIST BELOW!

up to date as of January 20th, 2017.

This is more of a bare bones outline. Just the titles of the AU’s I’d like. If anyone wants to plot them with me, just send me a message. I’ll add it to the verses list. (Please note: some of these might have specific people in mind already.)

Bold Italic = gimme it now Bold = are things I really want! Italic = it’s not urgent but I’d like it. Normal’s just normal things. Strike = nevermind, I don’t want that anymore.

Pride and Prejudice AU (DO I EVEN NEED TO LIST THE REASONS!)

Modern day political au

Beauty and The Beast au (MY ANIMATED FC IS BELLE SO CAN HAS?)

WWII au·(in the verses section)

Western AU

1920’s au

1950′s Film Star AU (v: wildest dreams)

Versailles verse

Reign verse

Theif!verse

Spy!verse

Reincarnation au

DARKER THINGS! ( I really want some dark ships…can has? )

Serial Killer AU Cop!Marg.

Post-apocalyptic AU: Not zombies but darker things.

Marvel au things (I have an x men verse & an MCU verse come to me!)

More family times. (With Mace, Alerie, Olenna, Willas, Garlan, & Loras!)

· · · · · · ·Specific Ship AU’s · · · · · · · · · · ·

Adult!Tommen x Margaery things (cause of reasons)

More Tommen x Margaery things in general

This!Robbaery au

An Alliance is Made AU

Reincarnation AU

A Real Dragon: AU where Margy marries Aegon… He turns out to be the real deal, and to seal an alliance with the Targaryen’s (Dany and Aegon now) Margaery marries him.

Wolf King: AU where Robb conquers King’s Landing, saves Sansa, and asks Margaery to come back to court as a companion to Sansa. (Margaery, of course, agrees with this because Sansa is her dearest friend.) During this time RobbxMargy maybe begin to spend time together. Maybe eventually leading to ship? idk just a thought rolling around.

A True Queen: Margaery marries Robert, their marriage ends up being very Anne Boleyn/Jane Seymour x Henry VIII-esque. Without the beheading/death by lack of care after childbirth.

Verse+ship specific:

Modern au things!

College INSERT SHIP HERE: They start off as friends and slowly move to become something more!

Une Rose Dans le Nord.

{subverses!}

Reine Rose dans le Nord (Rose Queen in the North): Robb’s wife and queen.

Margaery writing letters to Robb when they’re separated. (battles going on and she has to stay somewhere safe.)

Catelyn informs Margaery at Renly’s camp, that her son needs advice and asks if she will write to him. They fall in love through the letters they write.

More! Queen of the Seven Kingdoms stuff. (anything or ship will do!!!)

Margy’s relationships with her brothers. (Willas taught her how to read and how to map the stars, they have to be close. Garlan is protective. She’s so dependent on LORAS!. I HAVE A NEED!)

Runaway!Queen: King’s Landing is attacked and sacked by an army and forces. Margaery runs so she is not taken hostage by the invaders. Finding solace in the Godswood which the intruders do not touch.

Highgarden Raid: Highgarden is raided and burned by (the iron born or Dragons) In this Margaery loses a good portion of her family. Since this is a canon divergence ·the war of the five kings could still be going on.

Virgin Queen: Margaery marries Tommen, but he dies shortly after the union. With no heirs to the throne. (Myrcella is dead.) Margaery takes the throne for her own ruling as Queen after the small council decides that it’s the only way to keep the Tyrell’s in the fold. (Cersei dies shortly after Tommen)

More ouat verse things.

Random Lover/Outlander AU:

· · · · · · · (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*: ･ﾟ✧

English Rose!Margaery fighting with Highlander Norther!Lover

English Rose!Margaery not understanding the customs. Feeling out of place.

Highlander Norther!Lover has to explain things to her.

English Rose!Margaery sympathizing with their plight. Understanding that the English are the oppressors to them!

English Rose!Margaery & Highlander Norther!Lover being cute and eventually falling for one another. (After long struggles and Jacobite Rebellion things)

More Musketeer’s verse things!

Specifically things with Rochefort and Louis! BECAUSE I HAVE A NEED FOR MARGY TO ANNOY HER COUSIN IN THE VERSE!

Sense8 Verse things.

Hunger Games things.

Westworld verse: Westeros, is the other theme park in development. Margaery is a host. She has the Lady and the Knight trope storyline written and programmed within her. Parkgoers can choose to be her savior from the sept, her lover, her protector, or for a very high price, a secret king/queen.

NOTE!: A simple way to plot with me is to just look at my verses! Also! If you like any of these ideas but would rather tweak them to do them with my Sansa (louvereine), my Henriette (madamehenriette) or my Jeyne (honourofwesterling), let me know! <3

[nofomoartworld]

Flying Lotus Made a Feature Film and It's F*cking Disgusting

Steve Ellison, the artist primarily known as Flying Lotus, wants to "show people the ugly," so the Grammy-nominated producer made a film. His directorial debut, under the name mononym,"Steve," comes with Kuso, a new body horror comedy that follows the lives of disfigured men, women, and children living in Los Angeles after a catastrophic earthquake. Projected through a network of discarded televisions, Kuso bounces from screen to screen in a series of interwoven vignettes that depict intimate character profiles set in a post-apocalyptic universe.

The film has made a lot of noise since massive walkouts during its first screening at Sundance back in January prompted critics to call it both "grotesque" and straight-up "disgusting." The Verge went as far to label it "the grossest movie ever made." Within the film's 95-minute runtime, among other things, an erect penis is stabbed with a giant steel rod, a man gives birth to a cockroach anally, and a talking neck boil performs oral sex.

Beyond the profusion of bodily fluids, the costume and set design seen throughout the live action sequences are perhaps the most eye-grabbing components of the film. Kuso combines eerie animation, comedy, bizarro special effects, dynamic prosthetic work, with, expectedly, a kickass score featuring contributions from Kamasi Washington, Aphex Twin, and Akira Yamaoka. The film is also riddled with brilliant cameos from Hannibal Buress, Tim Heidecker, Anders Holm, and George Clinton. Creators recently spoke with Steve over the phone to talk about his hands-on approach to filmmaking and some of the things he learned during this two-year making of Kuso.

Creators: The physical layout of each scene, from the furniture to the props, creates a thoroughly complete image that's hard not to appreciate. How did you and the other writers work with the art department to bring this vision to the big screen?

Flying Lotus: I was so in the trenches with this film. I got to get real specific about the details. Like, the early Tim Burton movies are so him, and I knew I was gonna do that with this movie; I knew this was gonna be the one I got super dirty with. This is the movie where you see things from my sketchbook come to life. I really wanted it to be that kind of project. I really wanted to dig deep for it, but I also had really talented designers around so it was a combination of both. I had this vision of this taking place in kind of like a pre-internet world, a world where the technology hadn't really blown up yet. I wanted to show that mid-90s kind of vibe. Everything kind of stems from that place—it was a lot of fun, though. I love doing all the little details, designing the characters outfits, designing some of the prosthetic stuff, and the monsters.

What was your introduction to animation and video like?

I was just messing around in Photoshop, learning how to make things look weird and funky. And then I just kept doing it. I would have my friends send me pictures and stuff and then I would just do up their faces all crazy, just for fun. It was something else to do other than just draw in my sketchbook. And then it just kept evolving into this thing.

I imagine making electronic music and editing sound translates pretty well to using programs like Photoshop and After Effects. Was that your experience?

Absolutely. That's why it didn't feel completely unnatural to go in that direction. It just felt so similar, it just felt like now I'm editing visual, photoshop layers instead of audio. But I mean they are also so different. I think early on, when I was just fucking around with PS and AE, I saw how much the stuff I made was bothering my friends. They would be like, "Ugh, oh my god, what is that?" And I was like, "Well, something about this is doing something for them right now."

Was it your intention to make a film that would elicit that sort of reaction?

I didn't set out to make this vile film that people couldn't even sit through. More so, I wanted to show people the ugly. I wanted to show people some ugly at a time when everyone is trying to look pretty and everybody wants their face on everything. I wanted to show you your ugly ass in all its glory.

I saw that Eddie Alcazar is one of the producers on the film. Does Kuso feel like a sort of natural progression from the short you made with him last year?

It was all a perfect storm that led up to this. But yeah I think the last pieces of the puzzle came when I worked with Eddie Alcazar on FUCKKKYOUUU. To me, that film was hugely influential in my wanting to make a movie and mustering up the courage to actually do it. He and I became really good friends after that project, and while we were working on it, we pretty much came up with it together. He had the idea, I had the music. But it didn't happen until we met and were in a room together. We just kept exchanging ideas and it became what you saw. And I felt so close to that. I felt like, "Man I can do this. I'm ready. And you know what? Eddie can help me. If he says we can do it, and he knows some people, lets just do it. Fuck it." Then I got some money and so we were like, "Let's make this shit." And then Royal [a short film by Steve] happened, and the rest is history. When we first had the idea, I was already working on some animation stuff, and I had some time off of music, too, so I didn't have to focus too much on that. I had the time I could just carve out for doing something new. So it was sort of like a perfect storm.

A lot of the editing and sound design featured in Kuso reminds me of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and other Adult Swim classics. Did these programs influence your work at all?

Absolutely. I think Tim and Eric and Adult Swim were hugely influential. You know it's funny, I started showing Tim clips of the movie and he'd be like, "Wow! We never pushed this far in the show." And I was like, "Yes! I got you, motherfucker." And it was super fun. Tim was a such good sport about everything. He was so awesome. I would tell him, "Man, I'm like your child. This is the result of your efforts, too." But also, and a lot of people don't know this, but people like Dave Willis from Aqua Teen Hunger Force helped write some of this with me. I mean, Aqua Teen Hunger Force was hugely influential in the film, too. The scene with the aliens and the girl on the couch and shit. That's Aqua Teen right there. So it's got a lot of Adult Swim-ness in there definitely. We also worked with the editor from The Eric Andre Show, Luke Lynch, so he helped me out a lot, too. There's a lot of different influences in there.

You've also talked about the influence of Japanese cinema in your work, specifically horror films. How did that genre play a role in Kuso's aesthetic?

I think more than anything, what I got from Japan was their openness to the ideas; the abstractions, I love that. I also think I picked up the way I like to use the camera, and the way I like to direct scenes. I feel like I learned a lot of that stuff from watching Japanese films, period. Whether it be like [Akira] Kurosawa or Takashi Miike. Those guys are on two different sides of the spectrum, but I always followed how they put scenes together. You know, like, Seven Samurai, I love that movie. I think a lot of that influenced my decision-making with the cameras and stuff. There's one film specifically that I think is the closest thing to Kuso: Funky Forest. I feel like if anybody likes Kuso, if you're a fan of the movie, you should go check that out. It's a really cool film.

In the past, you've talked about using film as a platform to address some of your fears and anxieties, as opposed to railing about them on Twitter. How does filmmaking provide a unique outlet in terms of your self expression?

I think with films you get different interpretations of an idea, and you get a lot more room to play with different perspectives and different voices that can agree or disagree with one another. With Twitter, I just try to keep my mouth shut. Motherfuckers will try and make a headline out of anything, so I have to be careful with that. But with films, I can explore a lot of different things. And I've found that by working on this film and finding my way through this process, I've kind of figured out my place in the universe in a way. I feel like, "Oh, ok. I have to be this guy now. This is my opening. There's nobody in this lane so I'm gonna be this guy right now because there's something missing and I can fill it."

Is the film intentionally ambiguous?

I didn't want everything to be spelled out, but I did leave all the piece there for people. If anyone cares enough to watch it again, you might see something you didn't notice the first time that will make it all make sense for you. I definitely left all the pieces there, or at least I tried to without spelling out.

Are you surprised by the reception thus far?

Completely surprised. The fact that it even went to Sundance, I mean, that's every up-and-coming filmmaker's dream. Regardless of whatever happens, to me that was super fun. At the end of the day, whether or not it was a positive thing, no other movie got talked about as much as the 'grossest movie of all time' or whatever they want to call it. So I was really proud of it just existing in the landscape. It's so hard to even make a movie and just the fact that it can exist and be seen is huge to me. You know I'm new to this shit, so it feels like a miracle that we've gotten this far.

Kuso is set to release July 21st in select theaters throughout Los Angeles and online via AMC's Shudder streaming service. Learn more about the film, here.

Related:

Step Inside Flying Lotus's Mind-Blowing Performance Sculpture

Flying Lotus And Lilfuch's Animated Video Ventures Inside The New Moog Synth

The Making Of Elijah Wood's Phantom Limb In Flying Lotus' New Video "Tiny Tortures"

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[nitacus]

1. Your First OC ever? Oh gosh, I'm fairly sure it was a robot/cyborg girl (I think because I really liked the Androids from Dragonball Z) I annot remember her name I do remember, she had some love interest who was blond, and didn't discover what she really was for a while. Her maker was evil, I think I wrote it when I was like 8-ish ugh how embarrassing.         2. Do you have a personal favourite among your OC's? Oh gee probably Riea just because she is the oldest long term one who I've written for, and recreated and built upon many times, but it's hard to pick favourites out of them all. 3. Have you ever adopted a character or gotten a character from somebody? I genuinely don't remember ever taking on another persons character, I have made suggestions on how a person could characterise their OC better so I used the, temporarily to demonstrate but never took one on long term to keep. I would though if I thought they were salvageable, or if I felt they possessed a story inside of them waiting to be told. 4. A character you rarely talk about? Does Cyborg girl count ^^' if not, I don't really discuss the Knight Commander with people, even though he's an antagonist. Other than him, there is a blonde female who my succubus character (also female) seduced who I haven't discuss much, mainly because I haven't determined how she's going to be reintroduced yet. I might make her a witch and thus aware of her soul having been stolen. 5. If you could only make only one of your OC's popular/known, who would it be? Viseran ( my deaf/mute character) a scouting party member, from a post apocalyptic future story. 6. Two OC's of yours that look alike despite not being related? That I made similar intentionally? Or I only realised were similar later on? None spring to mind who weren't related. 7. Are your OC's part of any story, or stories? Yes, that's what my entire list of OC's consist of. 8. Do you RP as any of your OC's? No I have never RP'd before. I sort of just work through everything in my head. 9.  Would you ever be willing to give any of your OC's to someone else? I have no idea, perhaps some old, or abandoned ones. It feels weird saying I'd give one to someone else though. 10. Introduce an OC with a complicated design? Complicated how? Like their character and personality, their story and purpose, or their actual design and appearance? A) Little Empress, B) Riea, C) God knows but probably Aymia Crewe. Little empress is a succubus, on the side of evil, she is a literal empress despite others having turned it into a sort of pet name, much to her distaste, and the story follows her and she sort of ends up working for the other side. 11. Is there any OC of yours you could describe as a 'sunshine'? Zeriste/Rabbit is the only one who springs immediately to mind. 12. Name an OC who isn't yours but you like a lot? Some of the Dragon Age OC's that people have made are super interesting. I saw a thunder god one on deviant art that was pretty cool too. 13. Do you have any troublemaker OC's? Oh yeah I've created a few. Else witch, Blade, Peydion, immediately come to mind 14. Introduce an OC with a tragic background? Aymia Crewe applies due to having become permanently stuck in a child's body of ten, even though she is like nineteen years old. A number of her childhood years were spent as a child soldier, of which she was only one, another character of mine is also a child of warfare, however refocusing on Aymia due to her being highly skilled, and being one of the longest surviving children, as well as children being more compatible than adults, with the experiments to enhance soldiers on the battlefield. Due to being one of the subjects experimented on, a side effect of that was her body ceasing to age, she also has successfully enhanced battle skills, but she kind of feels trapped in a never ending nightmare. 15. Do you like to talk about your OC's with others? I rarely talk about my writing projects unless they are finished and I am content to discuss them. 16. Which one of your OC's would be the best at Biology (school subject)? Uissade, he is driven to seek achievement and learning above all else.  17. Any OC OTP's? Of my own characters - Riea and Blade though they probably will not end up together given the significant trauma in her past, Novice Witch and the Main Character, Aleksis and Vio, Riel and Lief though sometimes it changes, in other words I have several 18. Any OC crackships? Mine or from other media because I have a lot that belong to others. Sometimes I enjoy one-shots of various interactions between my characters, even cross overs from different stories 19. Introduce an OC that means a lot to you (and explain why) - Riea purely because she was my first OC that I designed as an adult, with a complete story and background and she has morphed and gone through many changes over the time since I created her, so I feel that I know her best and where she is coming from during the story. 20. Do any of your OC's sing? None actually, I have yet to make a musical OC. 21. Your most artistic OC? Out the ones I've created thus far Acera fits this best of all, she's artistic, creative, addicted to bright colours, popular, and collects shiny knick-knacks. 22. Is there any OC of yours who people tend to mischaracterise? No, I don't really mind how people view or characterise my OC’s, as the only one who knows what I had in mind when I created them is myself. I am always intrigued to see how another person might view different characters.  23. Introduce OC who has changed from your first idea concerning what the character would be like? Riea, she's changed several times as mentioned above. 24. If you could meet one OC of yours, who would it be, and why? My former slave turned free traveller and fighter for justice, he's kind, sees the best in people and has never become bitter or angry over the hand life dealt him, I admire that. 25. The OC who resembles you the most? Auli, she has some differences from me namely her ethnicity, but she has dark hair and eyes like me, is kind but passionate and fiery whenever defending those she cares about. Also loves her family, culture, good food, and isn't afraid of expressing herself.  Therefore yeah definitely Auli. 26. Have you ever had to change your OC's design, or something else about them against your will? No, I am stubborn when it comes to who I perceive a character to be, or how they firm as a complete person in my head. I take constructive criticism, and allow others to suggest things whether a flaw or a positive trait, but I know who they are overall, and I know the story they are telling, so if they need to be rebuilt, I sift through trying to identify what I need to change for it to feel right. 27. Any OCs that were inspired by a certain song? None that I remember ever creating. 28. Your most dangerous OC? Gees, many are quite dangerous in truth, however the most dangerous character I have who isn't a straight up villain/antagonist is probably Aymia, she looks like a small child physically, but is an experienced, capable, killer, seeking a cure to her current condition, or punish those responsible, so definitely Aymia. 29. Which of your OCs would go investigate an abandoned house at night without telling anyone they're going? Serafien out of sheer stubbornness, Aymia, possibly Riea too seeing she can be very impulsive and isn't used to involving others in her plans or business. 30. Which of your OC's would most likely have a secret stuffed animal collection? Sayah because she's always acting tougher and more aloof than she really is. Possibly also Jarei. 31. Pick one OC of yours and explain what their Tumblr blog would be like? Peydion would reblog the latest fashion trends, she would always be posting hair and makeup tips for others as naturally she has immaculate taste. She would post skincare products, the only other types of things she would reblog would be fundraisers, and anything for a good cause as Peydion despite being vain will always champion the causes of the underdog, she will defend the picked on, indifferent to status. Acera's Tumblr would be a crafty, artsy collage of style and colour, I feel like she would make her own fashion accessories, upload her paintings and drawings, and make eclectic music playlists and suggestions for people, I also feel like she would have sections of her page dedicated to black and white photographs to break up all of the colour every now and then, I feel she would be a sweets and caffine addict to. 32. Which of your OC's would be the most suitable horror game protagonist and why?  I feel like Jarei, would be a matter of fact and rational protagonist, however she might be far too sensible to end up there in the first place. Therefore...I'm going to say, Iris would be unique in that type of situation. She's extremely different, spends the majority of her time amongst nature, and her powers as an empath would make the entire journey extremely interesting. 33. Your shyest OC? I can't really think of a shy character that I've written, I have expressed pain and distant characters, cautious and uncertain, bold and fiery, I've written introverts and extroverts, good and bad, jealous and vindictive, cruel even but I haven't written shy oddly. I will make that my next OC goal. Out of my characters who exist right now, I guess I would have to pick Iris or Briayla, because they are more introverted, Riea is also. 34. Do you have any twin characters? Yes three sets. Paige and Kat, another set of girl twins who are thus far unnamed still, and then there's Alex and Cole 35. Do yo have any sibling characters? Apart from the sets of twins ^^, not that I can recall. 36. Do you have OC pairs where the other part belongs to someone else (siblings, lovers, friends, etc)? Belongs to someone else? Like another writer with their OC? Or who the character belongs to in the story? I wouldn't say any characters belong to, or with anyone in any of my stories, they are each, their own person. But if you mean as in another writer's OC, no. 37. Introduce an OC who is not quite human? Riel and Lief both count in this case, essentially both are members of a group of beings who possess roles and responsibilities on the earth, they manage a particular job in everyday like that makes society function. A civil war breaks out, Riel is attacked and almost killed, she manages to escape, but at the same time falls into the mortal realm with a tear in her spiritual essence. Each being has an emergency, corporeal body which they inhabit within the human realm, Riel ends up being trapped within hers, and they are only supposed to be used minutely therefore the reliance upon it weakens her, so she's stuck, and during the initial aftermath she doesn't remember until Lief shows up and restores her memories of this, as they were sealed along with her powers within her. They are a part of her spiritual essence, it's intended to both protect the mortal realm as well as ensure mortals never discover their existence. Other stuff happens, war is being waged by both sides, that's all I'll say. 38. Which of your OC's would be the best dancer? Serafien, Else Witch I assume given the time period both women are from. 39. Introduce any character you want. Nine has white-blonde hair in a styled ponytail, with a messy braid running through it, and red eyes due to being albino. She is scrawny, and badly scarred along her right side and hip. Nine has the ability to kill, but she needs to picture how your organs work, in order to cause your lungs to seize up, she has to know how the respiratory system works, and picture it's inner workings in her mind, only then can she disrupt or shit down how it functions. She also has the ability to increase or decrease the potency of medicinal plants, herbs poisons, and all alchemical draughts she makes, making her both a brilliant healer, or killer depending on the necessity. 40. Any fond memories linked to your characters? Other than writing for them, being complimented on one or two. One time I made my sisters laugh with one of my OC's. A ghost and secretary working for a organisation of guardians, and although she is incredibly good at her job, she's of course incorporeal. Which means she cannot answer the phone, get the door, sign for packages that sort of thing, so at times she gets frustrated over it and her ghostly abilities act up, so office supplies randomly end up scattered about the lobby and that sort of thing. Also her partner as a receptionist who does answer the phones etc is a male mummy, who roller blades to work because he really enjoys human inventions, of course concerns that he might unravel means that he often puts tape on his bandages to keep them together. That sort of thing tends to make people laugh. 41. Has anyone drawn fan art of your OC's? No. 42. Which one of your OC's would be the most interested in the Greek Gods? Gaia considering her name comes directly from them, I also think she would be interested in her namesake and others among them. 43. Do you have any certain type when you create OC's? Do you tend to favour some certain traits or looks? It's time to confess. I lean mostly toward fantasy settings, I confess to liking troubled OC's, and the only physical features that I can say I lean towards is dark hair colours and bronze or tan skin colours. I try to represent as many ethnicities in my writing as possible, therefore I've made, French, English, Greek and Italian, Middle eastern mixed, Asian mixed OC's, a Hawaiian and Samoan OC, Native American, African American, Jamaican, as many as I can because I think everybody deserves representation, in stories and adventures, so it really depends on the setting I'm building, if it's a future society then I use our world ethnicities and say countries and nations have mixed and shifted etc, if it's a fantasy setting then I create and build my OC's and their ethnicities or cultures from scratch, likewise if I make a sci fi story which deals with alien races. 44. Something you like about your OC's in general? I like that they are all uniquely different, I try to explore new personalities and mindsets. 45. A character you no longer use? Well I haven't thought about cyborg girl in well over a decade but I might recreate and build her anew in a future story because I'm feeling some real nostalgia right now. 46. Has anybody ever told you that you treat your OC's badly? I would readily confess to doing so, you have to push characters to their limits, to determine what they are made of, that's how you work out who they are deep down. So yes I do think I act quite sadistically, and I'll kick them when they are down at times. 47. Has anybody ever (friendly) claimed any of your OC's as their child? No, no one has. 48. OC who is a perfect cinnamon roll, too good for this world, too pure. Mayyyybe Zeriste, she's the only character I can think of who falls into the sees the best in everybody, innocent type. Every other character I've made, ever, has been more complicated and more flawed than that. Zeriste isn't an old creation though she's a relatively new OC. 49. Which one of your OC's would most likely enjoy memes? I feel like roller blading mummy would be down ^^ he likes human creations. 50. Give me the good ol' OC talk here, talk about anything you want. If you want tag your answers as #yetanotherOCmeme so I can check them out too. I don't really know what OC talk is being referred to here. All I shall say is make them as varied, flawed, and three dimensional as possible. Be brave when challenging them with a difficult situation, and never hand OC's an easy way out. They can only build character in the face of adversity.