#i'm exaggerating a smidgen

[blackjackkent]

Today is about brainstorming new one-shot ideas and finally getting my ass in gear on the next chapter of "Open Your Eyes". And more Rakha later.

(distant shouting) a n d w o r k ? ? ?

Did y'all hear something?

[galactic-mermaid]

you've doomed yourself to an enternity of listening to oc infodumping because you showed a smidgen of interest (that's an exaggeration because this is the only extra bit I really want to tell you rn but nevertheless tell me when it gets annoying and I'll stop 👍)

so you know how I mentioned Catalina's friend Agape? I'm gonna talk about him

concept art by my lovely wonderful sibling whom I adore✨✨

she's a fairy specialist as I mentioned before

team ↓

some fun facts about the names is as follows

Areia is derived from Aphrodite Areia (the version of Aphrodite that is a war goddess along with being a goddess of love)

Button is named after buzz buttons (some aliases of buzz buttons include toothache plant, electric daisy, jambu, and tingflowers, and that's not even all of them! buzz buttons are super interesting plants! :])

and Meringue is named after lemon meringue pie

and now for facts about Agape

he has four parents, not in a polyamory way but in a both his mom and dad are amab and their close friend offered to help them conceive through surrogacy and Agape's surrogate mom and her wife are very present in his life, and even though they're not his parents in the eyes of the law, to him they're mom 2 and mom 3 way.

she's the long lost friend that Mona (@sparkling-prism) mentions in her intro post

people on the internet have mistaken his name for agape (uh-gayp) (the word that means wide open instead of agape (uh-ga-pay) which means transcendent unconditional love) so much that he started clarifying the phonetic pronunciation of his name whenever he introduces himself (just like me fr, complicated name that almost nobody pronounces right 😔😔😔)

Bede hates her guts, she makes his blood boil by existing (and also for story reasons from an arc I'm brewing up and will release who knows when)

and he's in a friend group with Arrow (@aeroblast-radius) Delphina (no blog yet but it'll probably be called something like twist-of-fate) and Titania (@titanfae)

once again I really hope this doesn't bother you, I'm really excited because these characters and the region they live in have been in the works for a really long time and I've been itching to share it all with friends.

and if this doesn't bother you and you're actually interested in hearing more do tell me, I'm horribly anxious and I need to be coaxed into unabashedly sharing things I like with treats (reassurance) like I'm a feral cat.

Nah, you're not bothering me at all! I love hearing others talk about their OCs and favorite characters c: /gen

Also, her character design looks super cute! It looks like she wears leg warmers, maybe? I bet she'd be fun to draw hehe.

So is the region a fanmade one? What's its name, whats it like?

[frutiylaris]

Tumblr sisters and brothers, those in between and trapped within the tetrahedron for bad behaviour. In specific: 30K crowd, hello, hi! I'm gonna dirty this place a lil bit with my thoughts on the fucking GUY- THE MAN- SNAKE THING- Fulgrim. Going into both, Fulgrim: Palatine Phoenix and then Fulgrim: Visions of Treachery was my next deep delve into the funny fellas of 30K and the space marines. I set out with TWO goals and those were learning about the emperor's children and their primarch. And to some extent I did learn and educate myself, and I was pretty fond of the traitor legion afterwards. Now palatine phoenix? Good short novel that really honed in on what perfection means and the downsides, both visible and not visible until disaster strikes. A nice nod to the Phoenix schtick fulgrim has going on and is overall enjoyable, even if one of the space marines is named ABDEMON. Very silly. The Graham McNeil novel? No, just no. Perhaps I spoiled myself by thinking that "Ah yes, the primarch novel first makes sense," and that tainted my view on things, but even then, I have one major issue with the novel itself. The corruption of fulgrim and the emperor's children. Now I don't know if I'm missing something here or misread anything anywhere, but the corruption itself just happens. And by that, I mean there is no "Hmm, this is strange" and noticing that something is off or gradual build up, its just kind of, instantaneous? Fulgrim picks up the daemon sword and its just a fucking trainwreck from that point onwards like its the type of corruption you'd see in some hentai or anime or SOMETHING! He doesn't even fight back! Not a smidgen! And it pisses me off because- The fuck is the point of the corruption then??? Theirs nothing to corrupt from the outset was fulgrim always just a strange ass sexpest??? Like hello??? I liked pretty much everything in the book except him. The novel has his GOD DAMN NAME ON IT! AND HE DOESN'T EVEN GET A DECENT FALL TO CHAOS?! No abusing the perfection and slowly twisting the idea overtime to fall more and more in line with the excess of slaneesh. No its just- fucking god DAMN "Hm, I'm hearing my inner voice all of a sudden must be normal. Ah yes inner voice, I should sniff prometheium fumes and plot the death of my sons whom I'm proud of. Good idea me!"" I'm exaggerating obviously, but this was my takeaway and its made the book poor in my mind. Very weak in my opinion but at least I learnt where the noisemarines got their name from? Positive? Alright, I'll piss off now. See you in a few months when I inevitably write something fulgrim related in my Alternate horus heresy, bye bye!

[ectonurites]

counterargument to https://junkoandthediamonds.tumblr.com/post/672487288545148928/dc-draws-damian-a-little-smidgen-bit-taller-than

tim should be eternally baby faced, not having grown since the 90s

LMAO no but see the thing is, Tim can have his baby face but DC can also acknowledge he's aged. Those things do not have to be mutually exclusive at all.

Like... I'm 23 and get mistaken for 16/17 irl frequently. Tim should just look way younger than he is. In fact that's my ideal for him, and that's how he has been before in canon.

When he was 17 pre-reboot he felt like he got mistaken for 12 (i mean I think he's light-heartedly exaggerating here, but he's got a baby face and he knows it)

(Robin (1993) #163)

If they aged him up in a way that consistently made sense with other characters around him, then him looking super young totally wouldn't need to change.

[bloodredrose-archive]

what should we expect from your novel? i'm very excited to read it ngl

Plot-wise, since the focus is on serial murder, you can expect quite an abundance of carnage and brutality to degrees you couldn't have even managed to conceptualize prior to reading it. Without revealing anything too significant about the book — my pro(an)tagonist, as well as my deuteragonist and supporting characters in the story will be exceptionally vicious. The antiheroine is a dramatized and loosely exaggerated rendition of myself, which means she will possess a fair amount of my own attributes & idiosyncrasies and a smidgen of my own backstory but she will exceed me in terms of sheer brutality, cruelty, tyranny, flippancy, and unrestraint. Some of the things that I've written my protagonist as having done, I would rather die than even think of enacting myself. The purpose for me doing this is that I want to typify real female rage, one that goes beyond the likes of Gone Girl and Jennifer's Body (not to demean these works, of course) and even real-life villainesses like Jodi Arias and Aileen Wuornos; I want to exemplify that women can be just as barbaric as men in a manner that's not one-dimensional, not due to some lazy cop-out like abuse at the hands of men (as was the case with Arias and Wuornos, despite the fact that female serial murderers are a direct result of the patriarchy in many ways) and especially not in a manner that's culminant in the woman suddenly harboring magical empathy and remorse for her actions at the very end because that kind of arc is rife with virtually every fictional villainess and has its roots in the misogynistic stereotype that women are/should be inherently more compassionate than and therefore demure & submissive to men, that strips us of any agency, accountability, or a general individual personality.

Setting-wise, since the novel is set in the sixties & seventies — expect period-typical bigotry of all calibers but especially homophobia and anti-Blackness since my antiheroine is bisexual and Black like myself.

Literary and brevity-wise, expect my lengthy, drawn-out descriptiveness of every last note of importance (environmental setting, frame of mind, etc.) under the sun, down to the last speck of dust, which all of you following me are already accustomed to, seeing as you've read & consumed my Tumblr blog and my posts for over a decade now.

[hashtagartistlife]

First thanks for answering my ask, I'm not sure why that anon went off on me, they didn't read what I said, I did not say 精神崩坏 itself means "flustered" I was talking about the context it's used in here, in the novel that's what the author was trying to say hence why the Chinese RR fans were fangirling about Rukia being flustered on Baidu Tieba and Japanese on 2chan, and the Korean fans you mentioned. I'm Chinese too, I have no reason to twist the meaning, I don't agree with the latter part of

Anon’s explanation either. “irregardless of the context” but this exactly where context matters. The author is using 精神崩坏 as an exaggeration/ hyperbole. Are we honestly going to sit around here and pretend the author had purposely took a dump on Rukia’s wedding which she herself wanted to write about? The rest of the novel is all fluff for the opposing ships, it just odd to think she’d shit on them all of a sudden mid- novel. I hope you don’t mind this counter-view.

You’re welcome! Regardless of my annoyance for all things ih+rr if things are genuinely a translation issue then i want to know about it! 

Now, I know you didn’t directly say ‘it means flustered’, but I think the way you phrased it made it sound like you were claiming that phrase changes meaning depending on context, almost like a homonym. So maybe that’s why anon assumed that. Ngl, from your phrasing I, too, thought 精神崩坏 as a phrase just means something completely different to what it is in Korean. 

I understand that you’re saying the author used it as hyperbole, and I don’t doubt she did! I won’t comment further on the Chinese use of this phrase, since I’m not Chinese. But as far as Korean goes, imo, 정신붕괴 is too serious a phrase to be used as hyperbole for something like this. I meant it when I said this is a phrase used to describe mental status after long periods of torture or abuse. It’s too heavy to be used as hyperbole for something cute in a Korean context. CAN it be used? Yeah, ok, sure, they can physically type the words out and by virtue of it being in an RR novel it has to be assumed they were using it in a cute way. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a bad choice for a word if what they were going for was ‘cute’. 

I also understand why you say context matters. Yes of COURSE I know, taken in the grand scheme of the whole novel, this is supposed to be cute. Like, there IS an actual wedding after this, I know, the whole novel is supposed to be renr/uki, i KNOW. Given that context, of COURSE everything in this novel is supposed to be taken as being positive and cute for renr/uki. Do I actually think there’s a massive conspiracy theory going on behind the scenes where matsubara and kubo are conspiring together to throw thinly-veiled shade on the endships? no! they probably don’t give a shit! I know this! 

All I’m saying is, this is a badly written scene. If writing doesn’t achieve its goals, it’s bad writing. Nothing in the Korean translation of this scene sells me that renr/uki is cute and happy and in love, and this scene is, in fact, downright chilling in Korean. (ofc, disclaimer - this is all my opinion. But for what it’s worth, I’m pretty good at Korean. Even for a native speaker.) And I know it’s one scene out of many, but it’s not an inconsequential scene – they actually got married in this scene!!! ink on paper, stamped signed sealed delivered! There should be something– ANYTHING– to indicate even a SMIDGEN of positive emotion! But there isn’t, at least not in Korean. 

(I know the whole scene is meant to be cute. But if I write a murder scene and bookend it with happy, cute scenes of people going on picnics, and then say this is a happy, cute book about going on picnics, the genre that I slapped on the book doesn’t change the fact that that one scene reads like… hm. a murder scene. Obviously this is exaggeration but all I’m trying to say is this scene is not written in a cute or affectionate way.) 

I’ll give you that my initial post was probably a bit over the top emotional, since I was going off my knee-jerk reaction to seeing the pages, but it just threw me that something that was supposed to be a cute romance novel had a scene in it that read like it was straight from some sort of psychological crime thriller. Like I said, can’t comment on the Chinese translation, and can’t comment on the rest of the novel, but this one scene? Weird. Not Cute. Makes me want to strangle Renji. 

But thank you for your opinion, I don’t mind counter-opinions at all. I do appreciate that you’re being so civil about this. I value debate about translation and interpretations of text! 

[leam1983]

On Bilingual Frustrations

Rewind the clock five years back, and you find me at the end of my Bachelor's, stuck with the most boring part of the whole ordeal: picking my last two electives.

I have one single, measly semester to go. I technically have my degree, I even put in my application for my Master's just before leaving class three months prior - but I can't have that goddamn slip of paper and fix in on a wall somewhere until the sacrosanct System says I have all the Funbucks required. In simpler terms, I'm still short two credits. So, I spend the summer putzing around, looking for bullshit seminars I could attend wherein I could swallow flies and still earn a glowing commendation. Eventually, I pick Canadian English Pronounciation and Essay Structure 103. The second one's easy pickings; I ace it while skipping on the seminars. The first one, though?

Now, I'm French Canadian by birth. I grew up on a mixture of TV Ontario, YTV, the Vermont pickups for Fox and ABC stations and the occasional smidgen of Canal Famille. The end result is I sound like a French Canadian Montrealer when I speak French, but like an undetermined quasi-Texan from somewhere North of the State, when I speak English. I blend in with Americans almost flawlessly, except if you plunk me in corners with extremely specific dialects, like remote Louisiana parrishes or tiny little islands off the East Coast where the Scots brogue never faded off of local tongues.

It also means I can't speak Canadian English to save my life.

About, out, spout, count - I saw these with the O in the back of my mouth, in typical American openness. The proper Canadian pronunciation places the O at the front of the mouth and gives it a slight Celtic lilt. It's not "about", it's "abaoüt", to exaggerate things.

I spent six months trying to Federalize my English, my teacher took to me like a case of terminal bad posture for a chiropractor and vowed to "fix" me. In the end, I started asking myself if undoing almost three decades of Americanized mental conditioning was worth it for the sake of fitting in with my study buds from Kelowna or Sault-Ste-Marie. In the end, I realized it wasn't worth the hassle.

Besides, I pass for a local as soon as I slip into Burlington, once or twice a year. People stop me like I'm supposed to know my way around, ask for who it is I'm planning to vote on the primaries - I could build an entire American persona that nobody could catch me lying.

Guess I don't have to worry about not passing for Canadian.

[blackjackkent]

Come morning, Lae'zel has That Conversation up and ready, rofl.

"Is it me, or have you been looking at me differently?"

Rakha asks the question calmly as they begin to pack up camp for the morning. She can already guess at plenty of reasons why Lae'zel's attitude towards her as changed. The gith disapproved of what happened to Alfira after all. And it's likely she dislikes Rakha's comfort with Astarion, also.

It's a surprisingly troubling thought. More than anyone else really in the camp, except perhaps Wyll, she has found she wants Lae'zel's good opinion. It has impacted her behavior, her perception of the darker urges that threaten to overwhelm her. It has made her want to be more in control and not succumb to that darkness.

But, no doubt, Lae'zel nevertheless disapproves of her, she thinks, and that bothers her.

She is, however, in fact incorrect.

"I have a confession to make," Lae'zel says, her matter-of-fact tone matching Rakha's. "I was too hasty to judge you. I thought you witless. Gutless. Unimpressively bland."

Rakha blinks slowly. "And what about now?" she asks cautiously. These feel like they should be insults, except for the use of the past tense, which implies something has changed.

A muscle twitches in Lae'zel's jaw and her eyes narrow in sudden attentiveness. "Now, well. You've earned my respect. And more still - you've proven your wits. You are efficient and dominant, in and out of battle. You've proven your courage; I swear, you would tear the horns off one dragon to plunge into another."

Her voice has taken on a deeper, throatier note that is unlike her. "And you're hardly bland. Your scent alone is enough to make my neck sweat and my hairs stand on end."

(A/N: Interesting! This is NOT exactly the dialogue for this scene that she got from Hector! This is not even the dialogue that we got on my stream playthrough with Jayce where we're romancing her intentionally. I'm assuming that this is because Rakha's approval with her is higher, which is actually wild. It's a slightly less blunt approach than Hector and Jayce got, just by a smidgen. Fascinating. I love Lae'zel so much.)

Rakha cocks her head slowly to one side. Hmm.

She cannot recall having a conversation like this before, but the words Lae'zel chooses are, as always, deliberate and easy enough to parse.

Just as Rakha automatically remembered how to position herself for battle, how to see the Weave and call its power into her fingers, so she also has an instinctive understanding of what Lae'zel is talking about. Sex. Desire. Physical hunger, of a sort different from that which the beast calls up. Her body remembers these things, even if her mind does not.

"Hold on," she says slowly. "Are you coming on to me?"

Lae'zel gives an exaggerated sigh. "Isn't it obvious?"

Well, it is now.

Lae'zel fixes her with an attentive glare. "I want to taste you," she says, as crisply as if giving a military order. "Perhaps tonight. Perhaps later. But I want it all the same." Her eyes narrow sharply. "Do you?"

Rakha has to sit and think about this for a moment. In truth, she's intrigued. Lae'zel doesn't seem to be offering this out of any particular sentimentality, and Rakha wouldn't really know how to answer if she was. But physically... hm.

Lae'zel is fierce, almost as violent as Rakha herself, and that shared violence is at the root of any attraction between them. Rakha recalls Lae'zel describing a knife twisting in an enemy's belly with a note of relish in her voice, and perhaps the heat it stoked in her own gut was not only the dark urge in her mind, but something warmer. Her pulse thuds a little harder at the memory.

And Lae'zel is one of the few people she trusts in this strange world, one of the few who has given her advice that has shaped her limited worldview. It bothered her to think that she might have broken that bond; she wishes to cultivate it, nurture it, if it is not already lost. And given the damage Rakha has already wrought, Lae'zel is offering trust in her own right - sex requires vulnerability on both sides.

And most of all, she is curious, as always - hungry for experience to provide new pieces of the puzzle that is the world around her and how she fits into it. For new understanding of herself.

"Yes," she says calmly. "I want to share my body with you."

Unlike Astarion's surprise when Rakha opened her throat to him, Lae'zel seems as if she expected this all along - and she's pleased. "Yes," she says with a slight smirk, folding her arms. "Perhaps one night soon, I will come to your bunk and take what is mine. Until that night comes, I shall keep enjoying your scent."

She turns and walks away without another word. Rakha feels a sort of shiver run up her back that, for once, has nothing to do with the beast in her head - and that, too, is intriguing.

-----

On the road, later, she watches Lae'zel with some curiosity; as she has not in the past, she focuses now on taking in the woman's stance, bearing, physical form. Notes, for later use.

"You said I've earned your respect," she comments out of nowhere as they stop for a midday meal. "So why are you so rude all the time?" It's not a complaint, not even really a demand, just an acknowledgment of confusion.

Lae'zel looks almost embarrassed, eyeing the apple in her hand as if it wronged her somehow. "If you must know," she says, "Vlaakith requires everything of her children. I can't count how many bruises I've inflicted, can't measure how much blood I've drawn in the Undying Queen's name. I know only blood-red and death-black. My mind is silver and my body steel. I am what I must be, say what I must be, to survive every beast I face and every wound I bear."

Rakha nods slowly. Yes, she understands that. It is why the two of them connected, right from the beginning. They say what they mean.

It is, if she is honest, why she felt safe in saying yes.

-----

The night is, in the end, a strange and fumbling business. Lae'zel begins in the dominant mode that Rakha expected - but Rakha has no intention of submitting. It is no more in her nature than Lae'zel's. So it is combat, in its way - the same violence that comes as naturally as breathing to them both.

Lae'zel is quicker and lither than Rakha, more experienced; she knows how to turn the tide with a touch in the right place - or a stinging blow at the right moment. Rakha, meanwhile, has the advantage of sheer weight and bulk, an exhilarating dominance of force rather than cunning. It's yet another struggle for control - but for once that struggle is pleasurable. For once the beast is quiet.

It is not romance - whatever Rakha requires for that, she hasn't found it yet. But it is a strange moment of calm. Almost of peace.

For another night, and for yet another reason, she sleeps soundly.

-----

Narrator: You awake in pain. Your back, your hands, even your tongue ache.

The morning has an icy chill to it; she wakes with the prickle of goosebumps on her flesh. Lae'zel is already up and dressed, standing in the doorway of the small ruin where they hid themselves away.

"It's time to rise," she says crisply. "Dawn is upon us."

Rakha considers trying to articulate any of the chaotic thoughts rolling through her mind. That this was an expression of trust, that she is grateful. That she was curious and the curiosity has now been sated. That they were matched in their violence and it invigorated her. That she enjoyed herself, in an odd way she did not expect. That she is cold in the wake of the night's heat.

But there is no sentimentality here - not from her and not from Lae'zel. Their needs have been met. And now it is over.

"Yes, of course," she says gruffly. "We will leave at first light."