#and defensive im sure

[priestessamy]

genuine question, how do you have an official publisher, but not a single person took more than 5 minutes and 2$ worth of stock images to design the cover?

On the one hand, I appreciate you specifying this is a genuine question. On the other hand, that means you realize this was asked in kind of a shitty way, on anon. So you probably get that while we're not off on the wrong foot, we're not off on the right foot either. But I'm gonna take this in good faith regardless because I think it's worth being transparent.

Cool? Cool.

Bella Books doesn't have any artists on staff presently. That's the short answer.

The long answer is, predictably, longer. I had a whole concept for a cover that I wanted, with the two main characters standing back to back, hand in hand, each examining the instrument of destruction they can't seem to shake. It was poetic and cool. And Bella informed me it wasn't viable.

The best they can do on their mid-sized budget is manipulate stock photos.

[It should be noted at this point that I believe but have not confirmed that they will allow you to use art produced by an outsider artist. But! I didn't have anyone on speed dial nor any idea of who I could go with, I didn't have the money to commission, nor the confidence that after all our work would meet with approval.]

So I came up with a concept and cobbled together a selection of images that I felt would best convey the subject/tone of the book. You can still see that version in some places where the new cover hasn't been posted. Harper's knife, Esther's cross, some suggestive blood in the background. It was simple but good enough. I refused to use images of humans because no one really fit the bill and sometimes that can look even sloppier.

A few weeks before publication, the publisher came to me and said they had spoken with some store reps and gotten strong feedback that my original idea was a little too niche and wouldn't attract the broadest audience.

We were down to the wire and the new version they came up with was that dawn forest scene with the cross dangling off the title. I worries it looked a little too...A Walk to Remember-esque, and scoured the stock library for an appropriate wolf, one with black fur that looked relatively at ease, to give the reader the idea that "this werewolf isn't like other big scary werewolves".

So yes, they were rushed on their end, I was rushed on my end, and the cover ended up being uninspired. In a different universe, I would have just taken the hit and commissioned someone from the start.

But I'll say this much, and I know it's a massive cliche, but the old addage is true. Get past the cover, and I think the text speaks for itself. It's really really really good fucking text that I'm unbelievably proud of. I hope you read it. I hope you love it and tell other people to read it. Or maybe it won't be your thing. That's okay too.

Just, like... Be a little cooler about it next time? For me? Now that we're buddies and all?

[short-wooloo]

"None of the Jedi recognize that darkness exists in them"

Incorrect, recognizing one's own darkness and rejecting that darkness is a basic and fundamental aspect of Jedi teachings

[imonthatgayshit]

'he befriended lily to use her for x horrible thing' he was a child. he wanted a friend.

'he should've never been mean to james and sirius on the train' he was a child. defending his beliefs just as those two did

'he should have never enjoyed dark arts' he was a child. a curious child.

'he was friends and sided with the slytherins' he was a child. a lonely poor halfblood child in a house filled with snobs with everything he couldnt even wish for. obviously he was easily influenced/ overpowered/possibly groomed?

'how dare he obsessively stalk lily after swm? (he was begging for forgiveness) how could he join the death eaters?(it was his only choice) how could he hold a grudge against the marauders after that many years? ( the only escape he had from his home and they made it hell for him)'

he was a child he was a child he was a child. a stupid hopeful child who was always at the edge of escaping yet always being yanked back into those pits of hell again.

he was a child who could never fully be childlike because his life was literally from the pot to the kettle to the fucking fire.

just say you like victims nice and unresentful and get over with it.

[science-lings]

I love that the most popular ace attorney mlm ships are all just some guy (Phoenix, Apollo, Ryunosuke) who is as close as these games get to normal (limit of one unique accessory) and the total heartthrob (Edgeworth, Klavier, Kazuma) who is absolutely head over heels smitten with him

[quotidianish]

I’m shadowbanned who cares what I post. CRINGEPOSTING SPREE!!!!!! og survive the horrors under cut ‼️

[eros-cestlavie]

[sickfreaksirkay]

actually it does annoy me a bit how awful kay is made out to be in 90% of texts like whenever he’s introduced it’s always with a paragraph about how he’s mean to everyone and hateful and how it ruins any good aspects of him as a knight. i would like one text where kay is an actual character and not just The Rude Guy Who Everyone Hates. i don’t mind if it’s like kay being a dick or making a fool of himself or other characters making fun of him because that’s fair enough and funny but when it’s his whole character :/ how did we get here from the welsh cei

[dreams-cynicism]

I know Sunjae’s necklace to Sol is ugly but will y’all let the man live!!! (The narrative sure doesn’t)

So on brand for him to not have the slightest hint of taste but still be excited that Sol is gonna wear something he picked out.

I love him and his ugly necklace. I’m gonna defend him and his ugly necklace till my last breath.

[charlotte-family-apologist]

Suchin's Backstory In My AU

Warning: Non-Graphic Addiction and Suicide

Suchin was the only child of a civilian mother and a former criminal father. When she was eight, her mother died in a car accident, causing her father to fall into a depression and relapse into his gambling addiction, taking out several loans from his old employer in the Red Dragon to support it. He lost his job within the year and started drinking, leaving Suchin to take care of him more often than not. He also fell back into old paranoid habits and took to training Suchin in case they went after her first.

Struggling with money, Suchin got a job at a local restaurant at fourteen, where she flourished socially. She even got a boyfriend at seventeen. Due to her always being away from home, she failed to notice her father spiraling further until he raided her savings when she was eighteen. She started to take more hours to build them back up, neglecting her relationships to do so. Because of this, her boyfriend broke up with her.

At nineteen, she came home to find her dad committed suicide. Upon reading the note, she learned all the debts had come to a head, and the Red Dragon was pursuing payment. The trauma of it finally breaking the barrier in her mind to fully activate her “radar” (see notes for explanation) that had been on and off her entire childhood.

Inheriting her father’s debt, Suchin fled and became a traveling vigilante known as Blackbird on a personal mission to destroy the Red Dragon and return to civilian life. She quickly became a notorious figure in Asia’s underworld for her efficiency and only took paid jobs to support her survival.

She swore off personal relationships and dedicated her life to completing her goal, investigating any lead on the Red Dragon she found. One of these investigations led her to Japan, where she met Kenshi for the first time.

And nearly killed him.

Notes:

Suchin’s radar is a danger sense ability she feels, not sees or hears. Despite it being a form of precognition, she can’t tell what is and isn’t a danger and has to identify them herself. She can’t turn it off and it works best when she’s calm and collected. The only time it doesn’t work is when she’s panicking, as it becomes hard to read and quickly overloads her senses and rational thoughts. It can also blank out when she doesn’t know how to process something, often freezing her in place. Because of it, she lives in a constant state of flight or fight and suffers from severe anxiety and paranoia, which is only made worse by her lifestyle.

Suchin’s father wasn’t physically abusive, only laying hands on her during training, even helping her patch any injuries before his addictions fully tanked his psyche. The majority of the trauma Suchin has from her father is from neglect, parentification, and the fallout of his suicide.

The timeline of these events are: 1957: Suchin is born 1965: Suchin’s mother dies in a car accident and her father relapses, taking out loans from the Red Dragon 1976: Suchin’s Father commits suicide, transferring his debt to Suchin (19); Suchin flees from the Red Dragon and eventually becomes Blackbird 1987: Kenshi (28) and Suchin (30) meet

[burnt-cookii]

Anon that requested a shadow milk drawing: I didn't release you already drew him OOPS- In that case, if you want to, could you draw your favorite cookie when you first starting playing CRK?

decided to draw them both insteaadd :'> its alright to ask for the same character

[cryptar]

yknow i say im a huge multishipper but i wouldnt actually consider myself much of a shipper at all. just open to the idea of trying everything once. the term has typically romantic connotations and follows the assumption that i think, and want, these characters to be good for eachother.

I'm, personally, less interested in the prexisting chemistry than i am in the puzzle of figuring out what differing circumstances could potentially cause two characters who have seemingly nothing in common to become eachothers everything.

This could explain my favorism towards rarepairs and more convoluted dynamics, and my aversion to popular, fluffy pairings that have already been explored a thousand times over, there's no work for me to do there.

Not to mention that when a ship becomes too popular it starts cannibalising itself, and lots of good, interesting characterisations are lost in the sea of people bending characters into pre-orchestrated, saccharine dynamics. alot of which are usually downright fetishy in nature, particularly in mlm pairings.

I mean i would say being able to get ooc and self indulgent is downright mandatory for making a good fic, but there's only so many times i have to read a fic about a big, overprotective, manly-man top who does all the work and the shy, small, swoony, softhearted femme-wifey-bottom before it starts to just be lazy.

I actively have to go out of my way to search 'switch' tags if i want true-to-the-character, mutual emotional reciprocation. which i really, really shouldn't have to do as an ace person who actively skips through nsfw.

And it's not that popular wlw pairings aren't guilty of these problems aswell, but those tend to lean more into the 'soft lesbians who can do no wrong' stereotype, which always completely (butch)ers all nuisance that makes the ship worth shipping in the first place.

As well as that's if they're even the focus of the story at all and aren't just shoved to the side by the main mlm couple. mlw pairings can be culpable of both these things, with the added risk that you find out the author made a twitter post with the characters in front of the 'super straight' flag.

Though i also wonder if me being aspec plays any part as again; im not as interested in the romantic aspects as i am in the possible hurdles they may face throughout the potential relationship.

Anyone else feel like this?

[medicalunprofessional]

[haunted-xander]

You ever think about how Ryne probably got a more honest yet closed-off Thancred while Minfilia got a more disingenuine yet open Thancred?

Like, the Thancred Minfilia knew and grew up with was the one we saw in arr, the flirty, teasing and sassy but friendly man who was clearly not very honest seeing as no one- not even Minfilia- noticed how worn out he was from his constant work. Even just by hw he's noticably more prickly and. not quite rude but. more outwardly cynical? He's always been kinda cynical, but in arr his teasing and banter hides it well, which never disappears but is more. natural? genuine? now. Krile directly points out that he's much more brusque than she expected of him based on how Minfilia described him.

And sure, you could attribute that behaviour to his grief and stress (which is certainly a part of it) but considering he acts much the same in ew, when he's finally moved on and come to terms with everything (and is also post-shb character development), I think it's safe to say that this is the most honest we've seen Thancred be.

But this is all Ryne has known him to be. She's never seen Thancred be flirtatious or as social and friendly as he is in arr, she's only seen him be brusque and cynical but still teasing and kind. But he's also far more closed off from her (and others) bc of That Whole Deal going on. Urianger has told her more about Thancred's true feelings than Thancred himself has. and even that's not a lot, for Urianger is not only not a mind reader and doesn't know everything that goes on on Thancred's head, but also is reluctant to share more than is necessary since it's not his place to divulge these things (and also he himself is not free from the folly of emotional self-isolation).

With Minfilia though, he's open enough that she's never doubted that he cared for and loved her even when he couldn't spend much time with her, and she felt comfortable enough to admonish him when he did his usual self-destructive behaviour (you know, becoming an alchoholic at 17 and All That Entails)

Just. food for thought

[aroacewxs]

hey everyone do you ever think about how much of rui's love for nene is stored inside nenerobo

[grizzgotmilk]

kafka must be releasing some kaiju pheromones bc he legit be winning the hearts of everyone around him to some extent or the other

[plantwriting]

Okay if. The bitb guys were teens/young adults during modern times. Here is what social media they would use

Kian has /everything/. He’d be so chronically online it wouldn’t even be funny, dude couldn’t spend even five minutes away from his phone. Massive fomo about everything and also terrified of not being properly informed about every bad thing happening on the planet to the point where rolan and rand just have to fucking confiscate his phone because he starts getting way too stressed about world politics. He’d try to get like a proper following and make a career out of social media but it just wouldnt work out :/

Rolan would have like. Facebook to keep in contact with relatives, twitter to keep up with the news, and instagram where he posts exclusively photos of cool bugs he finds. His bug account has like 10x more followers than kian has anywhere despite kian actually trying to make it big on social media and even if he refuses to admit it it annoys kian so much. Meanwhile rolan is just happy to share his bug photos with the world

Rand would have a youtube channel for his insane conspiracies and nothing else. His videos are the ones you end up on at like 4 am while losing all sense of reality and just letting the youtube play next thing do its thing. He refuses to get any other social media because hes sure the government would use it to spy on him. Except. Hed also have an ao3 account. That he’d post to /regularly/. (Kian is one of his like. Regular readers. Always commenting on new chapters and stuff. Neither of them know that theyre also friends irl)