#i do love to kill this man in stories

[chihirolovebot]

on a real note that bit near the end of the video was genuinely haunting. hearing somerton talk about how gay writers are erased from history was one thing (with all the irony being that he stepped on the backs of numerous underpaid, underprivileged and uncredited queer writers to build his youtube channel) but when h revealed it wasn't even somerton's quote in the first place? the worst, most crushing sort of irony. how do you lament about the erasure of gay people and gay writers in history... whilst erasing a gay writer and taking his words as your own?

[riyo-soka]

Why tf were the dog and Crosshair consistently better at sensing incoming danger than the guy who was literally engineered in a lab to sense incoming danger. You’re telling me that when a brainwashed assassin ordered to capture Omega was literally in the same room as him, Hunter “overprotective father figure” badbatch couldn’t pick up on that but their new dog did?

[konohamaru-sensei]

ah. it hurts

[distantnebula4]

i get not liking thoschei, everyone ships what they ship-- but it’s a bit strange to me when people just completely deny it’s existence. how do you watch any twelve and missy episode and think ‘oh yeah, just enemies. nothing has ever happened there’

[treasureplcnet]

btw i love revenge stories i dont think anyone should ever move on peacefully. a bit obsessed with the way weissman went to the synagogue and rabbi and asks, "my choices killed a child. would god take mercy on someone like me?" and the rabbi says "it's not god's mercy you should look for. its the child's" and like you think that would spur this man into charitable activities and to maybe look out for orphans but instead he goes on a 24 hour revenge bender that ultimately ends in two revenge killings and his own death. what's better than righteous anger and wrath and love twisting someone into the worst but also a truer version of themselves <3

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[spghtrbry]

so i’ve been. THINKING lately.

you can find many similarities in both stories but there are also huge differences…

in cain and abel’s story cain murders his younger brother because of his jealousy and because god preferred abel over him, which is obviously similar to how chuck’s pride made him envious of jimmy because he’s more likeable and made their mom laugh etcetera etcetera..but i’d say abel was a pure guy, he didn’t do anything bad, he was like. basically the purest human being at that time (well it’s not really difficult to be the best person when there’s like 4 people in the whole world and two of them literally got kicked out of heaven but anyway). and cain murdered him. which is clearly not the case with jimmy and chuck because obviously in the legal point of view chuck is a better person than jimmy …

and we’ve got esau and jacob, which is i think a really underrated story. i mean i love cain and abel but i think people often forget about those two. esau, (technically) an older brother, always gets tricked by jacob. jacob buys his birthright and steals his father’s blessing that was meant for esau. and esau rages at him because. i mean. that’s not a nice thing to do. but in the end jacob becomes one of the Main Characters in the genesis… personally i think this story is more… idk, specific? there’s just something about the younger brother constantly tricking the older to get what he wants, even though the reasons not always are completely selfish. BUT! in the end esau and jacob made peace which is (spoiler alert😨) not the case with chuck and jimmy ………..and also jacob didn’t really have a redemption arc and esau just. idk. moved on with his life. got a family and all that. so he basically became a normie. but yeah ANYWAYS!

so yeah. i’d really love to hear ur thoughts and opinions on this one because i am a little bit insane about all this stuff as you probably noticed

(also if i messed something up or if im wrong anywhere please lmk lol it’s been a while since ive read the old testament…….)

[sunsetcurveauto]

Oh, Charles. What has become of you? Where is my best friend? Odds fish, Edwin. You're looking at him. No. No what I see before me is a façade. A shell of the boy I once knew. This is some absurd role you're playing. I don't know why, but I'm sure it is. Perhaps to keep the world at a distance. And now you're shutting me out as well. You once promised me that I shall come to know the person behind the mask, in time. But I know him less now than I did then. Well. Perhaps there's no more to know. I can't believe that. I refuse to believe it.

Dead Boy Detectives x Stories - Charles as Sir Percival Blakeney, The Scarlet Pimpernel

[gingermintpepper]

Happy Thursday! Have a list of some of my favourite underrated Apollo factoids!

Father of the Lapiths (and by extension the Centaurs)! While Chiron wasn't Apollo's by birth, an alternate telling of the genesis of centaurs did place Apollo as their father when his lover Stilbe bore him twin sons - Lapithes and Centaurus. Much like the more popular version of the centaurs' genesis which has them as an analogue for wild and untempered desire, this version also features the centaurs causing chaos - both by choosing to mate with the wild mares of the mountainside which resulted in their half man-half horse appearance and by causing a terrible uproar during a wedding ceremony (which, of course, is an alternate telling of the centauromachy wherein Apollo himself comes to quell the wedding quarrel as opposed to Heracles) There's a whole great deal of psychomachia embedded in the opposing of the centaurs with humanity and I've always loved this version due to the way it highlights that centaurs do have the same capability for good that humans do as they have the parentage, but it's their choices that make them beastly - not the circumstances of their birth.

Eurytus, the original owner of the Apollonian bow Odysseus uses and the one Penelope sets apart for the suitors to string in her challenge, was Apollo's grandson. He was such a skilled archer that Apollo gave him one of his own bows and he was even believed to have taught Heracles archery. Unfortunately, he became rather prideful about the whole thing and declared himself an even better archer than Apollo and proceeded to challenge his grandfather to an archery contest wherein Apollo gave him the honour of shooting first and then promptly shot him dead with his own arrow for his insult. Apollo passed the bow on to his much sweeter great-grandson Iphitus who later gave the bow to his good friend Odysseus.

Despite boars usually being regarded as creatures of wild, raging temperament, there's a particular curiousity about the Erymanthian Boar not being called to be slain by Heracles but instead retrieved alive. According to a couple different versions, the Erymantian Boar was either the boar Artemis summoned to kill Adonis for Aphrodite having killed Hippolytus (and thusly, was named after Erymanthos, the marshy region sacred to the goddess where it wandered) or Apollo himself transformed into a boar to kill Adonis because Aphrodite blinded his son Erymanthus (which, accordingly, would be the reason for the boar's name) who saw the goddess bathing after she'd had sex with Adonis and tattled on her (this, naturally, would've occurred between Persephone and Aphrodite's 'cold war' for Adonis). Either way, the Erymanthian Boar was a sacred animal to the twins and provides a very interesting bit of depth to what is one of the more overlooked labours of Heracles. (There's even a bit about a particular temple of Apollo's claiming that they had the boar's tusks enshrined there)

According to Nonnus' Dionysica, after the whole Hyacinthus affair, Apollo had a bit of a phobia of the wind. In particular, there's a passage that describes "...when Zephyros breathed through the flowery garden, Apollon turned a quick eye upon his young darling, his yearning never satisfied; if he saw the plant beaten by the breezes, he remembered the quoit, and trembled for fear the wind..."

In the early days of the Bohemian Grove (that is, an exclusive American gentleman's club) one of the earliest productions put on at their annual meeting is an original work by early American author Will Irwin. His work, which was played at the 1904 meeting, was called the Hamadryads and features a Greek myth OC called Meladon who kidnapped the titular hamadryads (who were actual spirits in greek myth) and trapped them in trees. The play ends when Apollo descends and slays Meladon with an arrow, freeing the hamadryads. This isn't strictly related to classical greek myth but it is also, by far, one of the wildest things I've ever learned while researching modern theatric adaptations of greek dramas and tragedies because the Bohemian Grove is also the center of many conspiracy theories which involve concepts like the New World Order and other such secret society beliefs. Naturally, I had to share this information.

[triglycercule]

it must get boring as hell doing continuous repetitive genos like dust does. he probably constantly questions how his human can keep on going and like not get bored (me too tho ngl because what type of person is out there that's trying to minmax every single undertale geno route interaction???) so i say he changes things up during his own process for a variety of reasons

sometimes when he's feeling REALLY apathetic he might just view everyone as stats and precoded scripts and lines and he just goes about the geno as if he was a player playing a video game (this is incredibly hypocritical because he's acting like the player but also this is dust sans we're talking about. pinnacle of hypocrisy. he'd deny any sort of human like actions because he's not the human and what he's doing is for the greater good). also its kinda fucked because it just means that there's been so many resets that he doesn't view his friends and family as simply people that he's taking the lives of but more as just npcs and numbers. but yk of course he moves on from that episode (and refuses to acknowledge the fact that he was acting very much so like the human. nope nope nope)

or maybe whenever he feels really really really shitty about himself he just lets the human kill him sometimes. he purposely interacts with other monsters before he kills them so he has to hear them beg for mercy. he just lets himself wallow in as much guilt and pain and misery as possible because its really really addicting to be sad and upset and feel bad. and dust is never like "hey i should stop doing this because its getting in the way of be killing the human" because he knows damn well it ISNT. he's still gonna be on that him vs. human grind no matter what even if he spends a few resets fucking around and being miserable and the humans always gonna reset anyways. ALWAYS

even if he's not at lvl 20 or something but still above the human in lv then maybe he'd kill them. but then that also means that there'd still be some monsters left because he nor the human maxed out their stats. so then that's just more suffering for dust (because i really think he'd like to make himself suffer because he feels so much guilt for what he did. his suffering is self inflicted and he knows that and still does it. good for him) because he has to walk around the underground knowing that there are some people hiding in corner or something watching him and scared that he's gonna kill them because thats what he did to everyone else. some nicer monsters might go up to him and try to talk to him but dust doesn't have the chill welcoming friendly vibe sans does anymore so it's just creepy and awkward. angrier monsters might try and yell or fight him and dust just sits there and takes it because theyr totally right. to them it might just look like he killed monsters just for shits and giggles one day and theres no way for him to explain the resets without people just forgetting it in the first place so theres not much he can do except accept the suffering. what in the mental masochism

[orangechickenpillow]

Roy wanted to die so badly he accidentally became a father

[pyrotechnicdarts]

mhw handler get behind me

[yuri-is-online]

i think one of my big problems with my original stuff is that i get too caught up in world building to actually make progress writing the damn story. so I started writing something with the goal of doing absolutely no research on it and I am quaking in my boots because it shifted away from what i wanted it to be about to the side characters and their weird relationship.

[moeblob]

Deacon loves two things: Ymber and digging himself a grave.

Fulj hates one thing: Deacon.

[moonpaw]

The uranium protagonist did not win the healthy good relationship with parents lottery

THEY DID NOT😭

[clowns0cks]

GODDDDS JUST SAW A POST THAT MADE ME SO ANGRY GODDAMN IT