#bare bones of a plot

[mothtral]

to you, the rain had not stopped rising since geshu lin disappeared. most would tell you at this point, to try and move on. that you'd planted a flower--the first flower--in the field jiyan made, so didn't that mean you'd accepted it, at least a little bit?

you hadn't. you won't accept he's gone until some trace of him was found. his necklace, the one you made for him before he left you behind the first time to head for the front lines. scraps of the armor that covered his arm.

jiyan used to approach you, in the beginning. though well-versed enough in consoling people in grief to not push you until you were ready. jiyan never told you, but it wasn't hard to figure you weren't the only one who would see geshu lin whenever it rained.

(though, you have a feeling what he sees is a different geshu lin to yours.)

you weren't part of the midnight rangers, or work for the magistrate. you meeting geshu lin was by chance, or fate, as yangyang used to say. you were a small seller, taking up crafting jewelry or fashioning clothing from scraps of fabric and yarn. it was during a large market that the midnight rangers returned home to, years ago.

that was the night you met geshu lin. you didn't know who he was at first, apart from clearly being a member of the military. it was something geshu lin would tease you about, unaware that the big bad general was haunting your doorstep. he was heavily bandaged, with scars covering the slips of skin you could see.

you crafted him a set of earrings after urging him to choose the beads he liked best, and sent him on his way, refusing to take his money. you said it was thanks for protecting the city. the next day there was a welcoming ceremony, and you nearly fainted once you discovered just who you met the night before.

and somehow, it carried on from there. little meetings and small gifts between you two. one late night you showed geshu lin how you made your jewelry, and woke up the next day to him sliding a ring onto your finger, something he spent the entire night on. the crown jewel was from the original earrings you made him.

you hadn't taken it off. the only change was that you wear it on a chain now, scared it might slip off your finger when you weren't paying attention one day and it's lost forever. just like--

today was the anniversary of geshu lin disappearing, and no one has done anything. you knew popular opinion these days is that he got what he deserved, refusing to fall back. as if these people knew what the midnight rangers went through everyday, with the limited knowledge on retroact rain back then.

the celebrations today are for the other rangers that fell that day, and it planted a bitter root in your heart. you hid in your home that day, waiting until the flower field was deserted to visit. you won't pay your respects, as everyone else did. instead, you will sit with the flower you planted and watch the stars, something you did every time geshu lin came home.

(something else jiyan never said, biy you knew once a certain time hit, he would usher people away from the field to give you a moment alone. whatever you did to gain a friend like that, you'd never know.)

there's a watering can set to the side, and you take it to gently trickle water onto geshu lin's flower. you were about to start with your ramblings of the day, when soft footsteps crept toward you.

"come to finally join me?" you asked over your shoulder, assuming it was jiyan making his way to you.

"yes," an achingly familiar voice said, low and rough, like it hasn't been used in years, like it's been torn apart from screaming.

your head snaps up as your body twisted around, almost falling over into the grass. there, standing at the edge of the field, was the man that stole your heart and disappeared into the rain with it. but... something is wrong.

maybe it was the strange light in his eyes, or the heavy air that surrounded him like a second skin. his clothes traded from the standard black with accents to gain red and white, and his arm almost tucked behind him, like he was a child trying to hide the vase he broke. this was not the same man that left for battle and never returned. "i'm sorry it took so long for me to come home," geshu lin said. he took a step closer, and it was then that you saw what became of his arm. it had turned to blacken scales, glimmering in the starlight. purple glowed from the cracks, like his ability couldn't turn off. "i never meant to leave you alone. i'm home."

[spacedace]

Been doing a plot overhaul of Ghosts of Gotham and the time line is getting wild but at least I have the general vibes of each of the four big plot lines figured out:

(shoutout to Brennan Lee Mulligan's portrayl of Tula on Burrow's End for making me realize what Dan's story was gonna be lol)

[paradife-loft]

I think my favorite thing about Katya/Sofia is the way that, in their final scenes, they end up thematically switching places with one another in how they're set up as foils to one another through the rest of the film

Sofia, who starts off beholden to no one in terms of loyalty, family connections, patronage, etc; who to Katya represents a (very idealized) notion of freedom that she envies but can't access - ends up leaving with the collection of her mother's belongings that she was finally able to buy back (which does incidentally include a watch, where she hadn't been associated with that motif much up until then!). It's a better ending than most (since she, y'know, lives), but even then she's still fundamentally unfulfilled, because the ties she developed to Katya, the ones she wanted to maybe start building a life around, have been irreparably severed.

Meanwhile, Katya has been the nexus of so many personal ties of obligation through most of the film, even as she resents what they've contorted her life into. But she makes her ultimate decision to betray Goncharov and the goals she'd been helping him toward up until then, as a selfish one for nobody else's benefit, giving up the life of prestige she had/was close to having so that she wouldn't be emotionally tied down by the relationship they once had, the system of connections and favors and debts she came from. (Incidentally, this is why I think her plan was to fake her death, even if it's left ambiguous in the actual scene; what else could be a more complete severing of connections that would allow you to become a new, unburdened person entirely?) The fact that she's not thinking of Sofia as affected by her decision, because she's not thinking of her as a part of that same web of connections, is what makes that unintentional second betrayal so tragic! But even so, it means she ends in a place similar to what we first see as Sofia's position - independent and able to make her own way in the world, but having sacrificed something she didn't realize she'd miss for it, until after the deed was already done.

[bishoptheboy]

SNS DOODLE

Look. I present to you the OG for OTP dynamics. They will always be famous 🥲👏✨❤️❤️

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<did this on the bus and did a quick doodle before my stop. Small squishy SNS 🤲>

[theminecraftbee]

related ramble: genuinely if the part of decked out that appeals to you is "incremental progress in which the players must learn the map bit by little bit and also understand when to turn around and bail to learn more of the map later in another run", you don't mind games that are hard, and you like rpgs. please play etrian odyssey. please they're such good games and no one ever talks about them. please,

[lautakwah]

Could you reocmend me some chinese gangster or crime movies to watch? Please?

BOY COULD I!!! so a few of my absolute faves are: casino raiders 2 (1991) (unrelated to 1 or no risk no gain), god of gamblers (1989), the inspector wears skirts (1988), infernal affairs (2002), a moment of romance (1990), rich and famous (1987), spl: killzone (2005), once a thief (1991), chasing the dragon (2017), and let the bullets fly (2010) (<- only mainland film in this list LOL but also. one of theeeeee best movies ever made. cannot stress that enough.)

and then i can always just recommend john woo, ringo lam, and johnnie to (& wai ka-fai, they tend to collab a lot) since their heroic bloodsheds and crime films are just god tier. a lot of them are also very much genre-(re)defining and it's a delight seeing where the rest got it from 🥰

[oofouchstovehot]

THE DRACULA AU

Geno makes the perfect Harker cause he already has the perfect lawyer personality.

Reaper makes a perfect Dracula because Social Skills? What's a social? What's a skill?

While Dust is getting his ass beat by creatures of the night, the rest of the Gang are living out the ultimate gay cowboy au

Oh no.... X Gaster.. he's old and crusty and dying.... how awful....

Maybe Fell getting turned into a vampire is a hidden blessing in a universe where he's forced to spend several months living with Fresh

Error in the asylum where he belongs

Who made Ink a doctor

Fell and Fresh have the normal white eyelights until they get vampirized as a way to change their appearance besides making the teeth sharper. Cross and Dust kept their eyes +scar, but only for the sake of helping them stand out

Geno has a lot of scarring after a serious, unnamed, completely made up illness he experienced in childhood. Particular in his mouth and on his chest, and they reopen if he's not careful. It also completely took out his right socket. Theoretically, he should be staying at home and not traveling 3 days to spend a month with a reclusive stranger in a castle, but Error is hospitalized and Fresh is a child, so he literally cannot let it stop him.

Originally I was straight ripping every story beat and scene from the original, but of course, that got boring quick so if I do take another shot at writing it, it'll definitely be at least a little different. I'm also not sure if I'll keep the Crell or switch em around a bit. For flavor. Cross has enough on his plate he doesn't need to get married.

[imabiscuitinthousandworlds]

A friend of mine kickstarted a short film project and it's really cool but why am i the only one in the storyboard group who seems to have a grasp on actually writing. like, not just writing the words but the technical stuff around that. fellas 80s/90s musical is still not a genre exactly. a crossover is complicated as fuck especially regarding pacing. we have three protagonists currently who are introduced on their own but we can't just go out and write them! we need to coordinate how long those parts are so it's even! with pacing there's gonna be several scenes per introduction so we can piece them together and not have three blocks that is confusing and weird! pacing! coordination! length! and for the love of god we can't have a single perspn write the main crossover plot if they don't even know the characters

[kiwisandpearls]

genuine question to anyone who wanted bai he to be a more prominent character after season 3:

what would she even do?

and im talking pre season 5 (iykyk). What would she do for the plot and the characters. She doesn’t seem to have any sort of relationships with the other characters other than being slight acquaintances (no, not even macaque, asides from her getting carried by him once she literally never interacts with him.), she doesn’t seem to be a reincarnation of a past self, she didn’t seem to have any powers, she’s just some person.

I think people have really gotta accept that bai he’s only purpose in the plot was to be the person the lady bone demon has possessed. Again, it’d be nice to see a scene of her coping with that but really that’s it.

[doritofalls]

the pacing of hazbin is ODD but... i REALLY feel like the two songs per episode format really fucks over the flow. it is hard enough - though completely doable - to build one song into a 25 minute runtime organically, but two is just... a lot, and only about half of the songs are good and plot-relevant enough to really justify being featured. it really does feel like they're just flexing the broadway people, which would be fine if it didn't feel like such a jarring cut from the plot most of the time.

[florallylly]

at the request of absolutely nobody, i present my vaguely fleshed out steddie mummy au 

sources: i still own the mummy on vhs 

there’s a possibility that the whole story of hamunaptra could be tweaked a bit to fit the story of henry creel/vecna/one into imhotep’s story, but the actual nitty gritty doesn’t matter as much as the actual dynamics and relationships between stobin and eddie. the important part is that a man is cursed to be buried alive, immortal but destined to awaken only to take vengeance. 

fast forward and eddie munson ends up drafted into the military. (rick is apart of the french foreign legion stationed in egypt, and i’m not entirely sure how he manages it but eddie munson is apparently a colonel). things happen and eddie finds himself running away from the battlefield, only to stumble upon the ruins of hamunaptra. except they aren’t really ruins and hamunaptra is a myth. so he runs, but when he gets back to the city, alone and half dead, eddie finds that in his rush to leave, he’s grabbed some sort of puzzle box. 

at the same time, one robin buckley has dedicated her life to learning more about ancient egypt. her passion for languages led her down a rabbit hole, and she drags her brother steve to egypt with her for further study. 

robin is set up with a job at a small museum, working as an archivist. unfortunately, it’s a lot more tedious than she anticipated. it would be a lot better if she could work with steve, but forgetting his glasses at home nearly everyday isn’t super helpful when it comes to trying to sort books. 

so what is steve doing in egypt, you may ask? evie’s brother jonathan in the movie literally schlepped around egypt fucking around with his sister and figuring out his next get rich scheme. steve isn’t really the type to open up his own nightclub in shanghai (a la the mummy: tomb of the dragon emperor), but just like jonathan, steve happens to stumble across a cryptex containing a map of the lost city of hamunaptra. 

as an aside: i see steve doing the same minimum wage jobs he did in hawkins, just in egypt. i think it would be funny and makes so much more sense to me than him kind of skulking around for news of possible treasure. (bonus: the party in egypt, and dustin coming up to steve with a “brand new discovery” and it’s eddie’s puzzle box that he’s swiped. (THOUGH NOTE: evie and jonathan’s family is Rich. Rich Loaded. Rich Loaded British. So honestly, he doesn’t even have to work)

either way, when robin opens the cryptex and finds the map, she’s astonished. this is what she’s dreamed of her whole life—being an explorer and discovering lost civilizations. so she gets steve to find out where the puzzle box came from. his search leads them to the prison, where eddie munson is destined for execution. 

the two of them talk to eddie, and eddie tells robin he’s seen hamunaptra in person. he’s been there. he’s walked the same sand that pharaohs had and seen the ruins that no other have laid their hands on. but eddie refuses to tell them the location, but steve convinces (bribes) the warden to let him go. 

so the three of them set off to the city of the dead. 

the details of the trip would make this post way too long, but i’m thinking about dynamics rn… 

eddie is a little standoffish at first, sure that these rich kids won’t be able to handle themselves, and he’ll be stuck carting around two spoiled brats. and robin and steve don’t necessarily trust him. robin is wide eyed and blinded by eddie’s knowledge of hamunaptra, but steve keeps trying to keep her in check. 

at first, eddie thinks steve is cold to him because of some upstairs/downstairs prejudice or big brother protectiveness. and eddie flirts even harder with robin, delighted every time he sees a scowl on steve’s face. even if robin keeps rolling her eyes and ignoring him, he isn’t looking at her anyways. he’s too busy searching steve’s eyes for some spark of disapproval. he doesn’t see that though. he sees worry and concern and fear. and that’s when eddie starts warming up to them. 

[sealrock]

realizing I'm creating a bunch of mini AUs/'what-if' scenarios the more I write out these plot bunnies in my head. an AUception going on here

[daybreakrising]

teeny lil inbox call - b.ooth.ill flavoured

i would like to use my cowboy more & i don't have a lot of things for him already - so if we don't have something going already and you wanna invite in some chaos, drop a like & i'll fire this cyborg into your inbox !

if you're a multi, pls have at least one muse suggestion for me. and if you have a specific idea in mind, pls come yell at me about it! tbh any kind of context would be helpful as i'd like to do more personalised asks as opposed to raiding a meme tag!

[benevolenterrancy]

I lied about posting art next, my bad. Someone on AO3 was asking me about how I plotted out my MASH/Torchwood crossover, so I said I'd drop a look at my planning doc, for anyone that wants to see what it looks like when I'm going full wall-of-red-string about a fic

I'm very visual, so I used colour-coded tables to help me keep track of things. I basically wanted to ensure I knew the BIG MAIN GOAL for both MASH and Torchwood, followed by the B and C plots that were happening at the same time. Once I knew what was the Main End Goal for everything, I then broke the plotlines down into the plot points that needed to happen to arrive at the End Goals without it feeling random. Then I just assembled those plot points together to ensure that pacing made sense and felt good. Obviously things changed a lot from a planning document and the ultimate end, but that's the gist of it.

[theboarsbride]

Accidentally listened to "hellfire" so now it's time to do some sister sorina and father giese sketches on my phone whilst waiting for melatonin to kick in😍

[oof-ow-my-bone]

absolutely cooked i fear. finished rings of power season 1 last night and then dreamt that i was watching season 2 and they killed off elrond and brought him back now played by hugo weaving again… the scene was so vivid too i still see it in my mind