#idk if i'll ever write like a full narrative story for it

[zmediaoutlet]

this follows 'a vessel'

Sam cleans up. The wasted, half-used spell components go into the burn box. The turned-over chair picked up, and the shattered glass swept. The angel banishment sigil comes off the wall in the library pretty easily with borax and he drops the sponge in the bucket of swirled-red dirty water and could vomit. One last sweep and he finds two red drops, drying dark in the center of his research table. He takes a deep breath, chemical and stinging-clean. The spot comes off easily, too. There are a lot of good tricks they’ve learned for cleaning up blood.

The shower room’s empty. He strips the stolen sailor uniform and leaves it in a pile in the corner. The water comes down hot and he gives himself the space of twenty even breaths, in and out, to stand there and think nothing at all. Steam in his lungs. The pressure like needles at the back of his neck, only safe because it’s just water. When that’s done he washes his hair and soaps his body and gets the red rime out from under his fingernails, and when that’s done, when he’s toweling off in the bright quiet, it’s not—better isn’t the word. But the base he’s operating from isn’t as awful. That counts for something.

When he opens his bedroom door Deanna’s sitting on the edge of his mattress. “Thought you’d decided to run off to the navy,” she says.

She’s in what counts for her as full pajamas: those washed-to-death blue flannel pants, a black shirt of Sam’s she stole years ago. She has to roll the sleeves back over her wrists. There’s a glass of whiskey in her hand but it isn’t empty, and she didn’t bring the bottle for refills. She runs one thumb over the rim of the crystal and smiles very briefly at Sam’s face and then looks down at her hands.

Sam wishes he’d brought something with him to the shower. If it were another day she’d be making a crack about his towel. He sits beside her, carefully, and for lack of a glass he folds his hands between his knees. The bunker air cool on his shoulders.

A sigh. She stretches her legs out, toes pointed. Mostly unpainted these days, small and neat. Her hand turns over on her thigh and she seems to be looking at her palm, and then she sets her curled fist on Sam’s thigh instead. The smallest weight through the terrycloth.

“The sub went down?” she says. Sam nods and she nods, too, slower. “You try to save it?”

Delphine’s hands reaching into the case for the Hand of God. Red lights strobing all around and her eyes steady on Sam’s, sure, while a wildfire of grace roared through the dark ocean. “I think it didn’t make a difference whether I was there or not,” Sam says. He turns his head and Deanna’s biting her lip. The pressure in his chest feels like it’ll put him on the floor. “I wish I’d been here.”

Her eyes close. “I don’t know if that would’ve made a difference, either.”

Not said cruelly and it’s probably true. Some dumb male instinct claws at the underside of his heart, anyway.

The lump of wood is inert, now. He’ll wrap it in cloth and put it in a spelled cedar case in the archives and mark it down in the ledgers. Even if it ended up being pointless, except inasmuch as it made a mask fall to the floor.

He takes a deep breath, lets it out. Says, “Can I ask?”

Her toes scrunch against the concrete, then relax. Her fist still on his thigh, her eyes still closed. Face smooth and serene except for the bruise coming up on her cheek. From what exactly Sam doesn’t know; he’s been imagining it for the past two hours.

“Are you hurt?” he says, in the quiet. “More than…” Her head tips down and he licks his lips even though his mouth feels dry. “I just—I know he—when he—”

Her hand grips his thigh through the towel. “Sammy,” she says, interrupting, and he cuts off the stupid stumbling, his face hot. “Hey.”

“Sorry,” he says, and she shakes her head, and then shakes his leg gently, too. A weird deep pulse of what he’s got plenty of experience to recognize as shame goes through him as a wave, from the pit of his stomach to his chest to the hair on the back of his neck, and then he breathes it out and just feels cold. He takes her hand in one of his and she lets him, their fingers lacing together on top of his leg. Her fingers are cold, too.

“It’s not like it’s the first time,” she says, after a few seconds.

Almost like she’s trying to make him feel better. There are a lot of things he thinks to say but he’s got a lot of practice not saying things, especially when they’re all jostling for first place. She’s walking around and talking and not dead. There have been worse times. He knows there are others he doesn’t know about and probably never will. But this—he knows this one. His first and only. Not the worst thing that’s ever happened to him, not even the worst by those particular hands, but nothing he’d ever wanted to share with his sister. Thought they’d been spared this one thing.

“If it helps,” she says, when he’s been quiet too long, “it wasn’t—about me. He was screwing with Cas and he wanted to hurt you. Just collateral damage.”

“How would that help,” Sam says, before he can stop himself, and Deanna sighs and says, “I don’t know, Sam,” and pulls at their linked hands but Sam doesn’t let her go, instinct making his fingers tighten. He feels like an ass immediately but Deanna doesn’t tug away. Instead her body turns in, toward his. Her weight tipping and her temple coming down to his bare shoulder. She’s warm, her knee bumping his. Their hands vaguely sweaty now, together. He tucks her hair back behind her ear, thick and barely-damp from her own shower, and her face turns in toward his chest, her lips against his skin although she doesn’t kiss.

All the things he wishes hadn’t happened in their lives make a list that’d be near uncountable. This is pretty near the top. If wishes were horses—but they never have been, and never will. He runs his thumb over hers, careful where the nail tore. “What do you want me to do?” he says.

“Nothing,” she says. Then she takes a deep quick breath, almost like she got hit, and pulls her hand out of his and sits up and drags her fingers over her eyes, pressing hard into the sockets like it hurts. Then drops her hands, and looks out into the dim of the room, and presses her lips together very tightly in a white severe line, and then—blows out, slow, her shoulders sinking as she does, and then turns her head and looks at him in this way that’s just—tired, but only like at the end of a long day, when they’ve been through the wringer and a lot’s gone wrong but they’re still here, together, and despite everything the sun’s going to come up anyway.

“Put on some boxers,” Deanna says. One corner of her mouth turns up. “Exhibitionist. Then I want to sleep. I want you here. And you’re not allowed to bitch about cold toes.”

Sam truly doesn’t know how she does it. “Wouldn’t have to if you’d just wear socks,” he manages.

Her nose wrinkles. “Just accept your role as the human radiator, okay,” she says, and then drains her whiskey in one swallow and puts the empty glass on the bedside table. She turns back the blankets and climbs in while Sam obediently goes to his chest of drawers, and finds clean boxer-briefs, and Deanna watches him with her head propped on her fist while he drops the towel, tugs on underwear, goes to the sink and drinks a cupful of cold water and then refills the cup and brings it to her. She drinks it down, and he puts the empty next to the whiskey tumbler, and then he climbs in and pulls up the blankets and she folds herself in against his chest, her head under his chin and her arm around his waist and her toes freezing, always, against his skin. Reliable as gravity.

He presses his lips against the top of her head. Her breath shudders, once, and then she squirms in closer and lays still. His back’s to the door and he knows he won’t sleep but that doesn’t matter. It’s like that night, all those years ago, before they went to Detroit. His arm around his sister and his mind full of the devil. Knowing that he’d do anything to stop him from hurting her; knowing that to stop that was almost impossible; knowing that even if it were impossible, with the last ounce of strength he had he’d still try. What else is there to do.

[geoffrard]

please tell me more about this geoff/gerard proof 👀

anon how much time do u have

thought about being jokingly tinhatting with my response to this but i dont actually think they full fucked or whatever. so instead i'm just gonna dump several thousand words of an earnest attempt to outline why geoff and gerard deserve the same treatment received by other legendary canonical friendships like bert & gerard, mikey & pete, etc etc

also i caught the riot fest covid so idk how comprensible i will be. and idk how much sense some of this will make if you don't already have, like, rudimentary knowledge about geoff rickly's start in the hardcore scene in new brunswick, nj, so obligatory plug of the thursday primer that me and nic @raytorosaurus put out a while ago.

but tl;dr, geoff rickly and gerard way were drawn to each other literally from the beginning. since then, neither have left the other's orbit. they are legit cosmically connected narrative foils who could have been each other's closest confidant but never have been more than incredibly meaningful people to the other due to instance after instance of wrong place, wrong time.

i'll do my best to sum up some of the most poignant moments in their over twenty-year-long friendship, but nic and i are drafting several other posts that more diligently delineate the connections between thursday and mcr in their overlapping, mirrored careers and similarities/divergences in their goals/approaches as musicians.

so anyway despite what you might have assumed from the story that goes around where geoff heard gerard and mikey (badly) playing vampires at the eyeball house and wasn't impressed, i believe that at that point they'd already been friends for a while.

this is how gerard recalls the moment he met geoff:

Way: I remember it super vividly. Do you remember? I was walking out of the record shop that Alex [Saavedra, Eyeball Records] worked at on Kearny Avenue and you were standing against a wall wearing a black t-shirt. You were rail skinny and you looked like you were dying and you were so pale with this jet black hair. Rickly: My vegan lifestyle was not agreeing with me. Way: It looked like the sun was killing him. [long pause] And I thought he was super cool. (from their interview with vice in 2015)

long pause and i thought he was super cool.....like....

this is what geoff looked like back then btw. im guessing it was around 2000/early 2001 that they met since thats the outer limits of geoff's black hair goth days

(source)

gerard designed shirts for bands in the scene, including this one for thursday, probably done around 2001 when the dove became the main symbol associated with thursday. at this point mikey was a regular at the eyeball house but gerard was still hiding away in his house, but would always talk about his brother.

Geoff: "I knew Mikey from parties at the eyeball house. I liked Mikey a lot, and he was like, 'you're gonna love my brother Gee (he called him Gee all the time), Gerard, he's the best comic book artist, he's always at home, just working on comic books.' So I was like yeah, I wanna meet this kid, you know, I wanna make comic books with him, you know, that sounds awesome!" (source)

after that geoff kept asking mikey when his brother would come down to the eyeball house, because he'd loved comics since he was a kid, but he was too shy to verbalize that, and his love of comics wasn't something he'd ever actually shared with anyone other than his grandmother, who had just passed away, but he heard that this quiet guy who'd sometimes hang out with the scene's resident kid brother was this amazing comic book artist, and geoff decided that gerard was a person he wanted to know.

So like they were literally talking about writing a comic book together: geoff would write and gerard would draw. but they never were able to spend that much time together. thursday found massive and unanticipated success in late 2001 when understanding in a car crash started playing on mtv nonstop and gerard was still a hermit for the most part but had started to piece together the band that would become my chemical romance.

so then blah blah blah the story where gerard and mikey introduced the idea of their band to geoff we've all heard it. i linked it above but you can read the excerpt from dan ozzi's sellout here if you aren't familiar with the details already.

and that story ends with geoff listening to their demo and realizing that this little band actually had something. but i firmly believe that geoff loved the scene and was so compelled by gerard's art and wanted to collaborate creatively with him that he would have been willing to do it regardless of if he came around to their music or not.

geoff said this in a podcast in 2018:

"Gerard is sort of like... when he's not sort of hiding out in his house somewhere, he's actually so charming and personable. There's a reason why I was so drawn to him, and that he's, like, a superstar."

obviously we'll never know, because geoff was so compelled by the music that he played their demo to death in the tour van and then took the only two weeks that thursday had off in one of the busiest years of their career while in the midst of a super contentious legal affair with their record label to produce bullets.

okay now that i am looking at what i have written so far i look like an insane person and that is okay but i think that i will save the rest for another longer post about the fated careers of mcr and thursday. but i feel that i have done my job by just giving you this taste. more to come but their friendship literally so expansive and detailed (in ways that I don't usually see articulated here) that a single tumblr post is never going to do it justice. as i said, stay tuned, we're working on something more.

tl;dr (another one) gerard and geoff are perennially obsessed with each other & have been since literally the first time that they laid eyes on each other and it comes out the second that either of them have to be even a little reflective on the other's career thanks for reading my manifesto bye.

[leonardoeatscarrots]

So i don't really know much about your fandoms or interests so... idk, would you mind giving me the rundown maybe? Like a little description about the games you like, or some info about your different comics? I want to chat more with you but I'm not sure where to start since I'm not familiar with your fandoms

Haha, that makes sense, my Fandoms can be considered a little niche.

First off, I'm super glad to finally meet you, lol. I've sorta been watching you and Pringles from afar, and you two seem like good friends.

But yeah, I'll happily give you a rundown, thanks for asking ^^

Pathologic/Мор: Утопия is a Russian videogame developed by Icepick Lodge. You play as one of three healers in a bo-hum steppe town, and your goal is to try and save the population from the outbreaking plague. The game has a lot of heavy theatrical influences and is well known for being extremely difficult and cruel. Which means the writing is perfectly catered to my tragedy-loving gay-theater-kid ass.

Karamora/Карамора is a show I got into a while ago. Basically, it's a fictional retelling of the Russian revolution (one of my special interests, lmao), except all the nobles are vampires. It's dumb but it's unironically so well made. Plus it has that twinky ginger guy, Evgeny Schwartz, in it. This show is also what got me on the Russian media pipeline to begin with XD

Lost Splendor was a memoir written by Felix Yusupov (aka the guy who killed rasputin, aka an important figure in the Russian revolution), and it's just incredibly funny for no reason. Man killed Rasputin, but all he could think to write about was how gay and ADHD he was.

Comics. I'm just very normal about them. I have a collection of around 80 different comics, single issues and graphic novels included. My favorites are queer and indie graphic novels, but im also a huge sucker for some of the classics like V for Vendetta. I have yet to purchase The Sandman comics, but they're on my list.

As for webcomics, I'm addicted to those too. I'm probably the biggest fan 5-ever of The Peculiar Compendium of Victor Van Wolfe on webtoons, and I've written a few fanfics and made fanart aplenty, as well as made custom stuffies of the characters. But I have a wide list of recommendations across a lot if genres XD

As for comics that IVE written, I currently have two open to the public on webtoons and tapas.

The first is Spaceships and Vodka, which is my primary comic. It's an anachronistic sci-fi surrounding a band of space pirates. It's a monster of the week style story with a lot of extra narrative told through backstories. It's currently still in the exposition stage and on hiatus.

The other is Gentle Hands, which is technically an AU of S&V. It's a gay romance following a disabled WWI soldier in a shellshock home and one of the nurses he has a crush on. This one is, alas, also still in the exposition stage, but is currently updating one page every other week.

As for like individual OCs, I mostly obsess over my comic characters. I don't typically make Fandom OCs.

My absolute pride and joy is Craig. He's also the fan favorite thus far.

I don't even know where to begin with him.

I have a bio for him and some other OCs I think, but I have yet to actually fill out any more >>_>> executive dysfunction my beloathed.

The full main cast list includes

Craig

Mirium

Derick

Terric

Carl

As well as Erasmus, Rusty, Cipher, Jadyn, and Jesper as some other extras.

So long as I'm here I may as well finish all the bios and make a master post lol...

[abyssalzones]

For the character ask game: fidds!! :]

3. Least favorite canon thing about this character?

PARAGRAPH INCOMING. You activated my storytelling analysis trap card

Everyone who has ever talked about gravity falls and its failings in depth has brought this up already but if I had to name anything I Dislike about him it's not a trait or anything he's done but definitely just.... how the narrative presents him.

I feel like, pulling an example from another animated series I like, simon petrikov is a great example of what gravity falls failed to do with fiddleford's arc. simon's story is well known even to surface level fans of adventure time as an exercise in what I'm going to call hindsight horror (because I can't think of a better term right now), where the narrative switching from "look at this weird pathetic old man! Isn't that hilarious?" to the entirety of I Remember You makes it impossible not to look back on everything initially established about this character with a twinge of horror. I think it's one of many ways AT uniquely grows and evolves with its audience... which is something gravity falls obviously never aspires to, largely because it doesn't need to as a two-season show compared to the cultural monolith of AT, but I make this comparison mostly because I think while both characters have a drastic narrative turnaround (related to tragic memory loss no less) one is done very well and the other is executed pretty poorly.

I'll try and move away from the comparison for now because this is supposed to be about a specific character but the writing in gravity falls tends to give characters a conclusion and then fully ditch them (pacifica is another good example of this). fiddleford is instrumental to the conclusion of this show (I could write More paragraphs about how full-circle the memory gun is as a plot device but I'll spare you) and his arc with ford is... mostly satisfied, including journal 3, but we never really get to see him change tangibly or, even more importantly, see the writing reflect that change. To put it simply it's like they were too content joking about him in the same way since season 1 than they were interested in his character growth or the way he benefits the larger story.

Idk though I mean it's not like I have invested way too much time in thinking about this weird old man in a scarecrow hat's writing

^ this wall of text is funnier if you read it thinking about this picture the whole time

[boydcrowdr]

Twenty Questions for Fic Writers

Thank you @acorrespondence, my lovely mutual and writting buddy, for tagging me <3

How many works do you have on ao3?

6, under beezleebub (more under a secret abandoned account)

What's your total ao3 word count?

131,144 for my current account

What fandoms do you write for?

justified, primarily. with one deadwood fic, and a mcu wip in the works.

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

"stay with me" is my most kudoed fic <3

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

i try to! i never know what to say cus i'm always so blown away that anyone's reading my shit at all.

What is a fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

i try not to end on a sour note, but i feel like everything i write carries a general blanket of angst through it's narrative

What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

probably "stay with me" just cus i was feeling nice that day

Do you get hate on fics?

not these days. i feel like ao3 users have a generally laid back approach to fanfic these days. don't like? exit the tab, easy peasy.

Do you write smut?

no? i have included not overly explicit sex scenes in fics bcus they can be a great tool for emotionally charged moments, good character moments, etc. but nothing crazy.

Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?

never ever. they're not really my thing.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

no lol

Have you ever had a fic translated?

nah

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

no, i'm a control freak

What's your all-time favorite ship?

charles xavier/erik lehnsherr. easy. full stop. don't even have to think about it. there's something about them. something about the 60s/70s. something about two sides of the same coin. something about wanting the same thing but having morally conflicting approaches. i think about magneto every single day of my life since i was 11 years old. next question.

What's a wip you want to finish, but doubt you ever will?

"keep it near" had such a choke hold on me. it was born of an offhanded discussion in the justified discord so long ago and a love of southern gothics and detective stories. i still love it sm but idk if i'll ever have the steam to revisit it. maybe when i rewatched true detective s1 it'll just pour outta me tho, who knows.

What are your writing strengths?

dialogue. i think i'm pretty good at back and forths between two characters that are saying something other than what they mean. i enjoy writing dialogue that is more revealing in what isn't being said. p.g. wodehouse also taught me a lot about tone in dialogue and witty back and forths that i really enjoy and think i have a pretty good grasp on writing those sorts of exchanges.

i also like to think i'm pretty good at carrying a tone through a story. giving something a general vibe. usually a haunted angsty vibe but still, it's an energy.

What are your writing weaknesses?

probably so many things. i don't like most of my fics that are up currently (with the exception of "keep it near" and probably "stay with me"), but we're all our worst critics. I feel that i struggle with writing action, motion, etc. i never want a scene that lacks dialogue to come across as "and then," "and then," etc, you know what i mean?

Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

iffy. i feel like it can come across as jarring to a reader if they have no idea what they're even looking at. i've included snippets of russian in a wip, which i have been studying for quite a while, but i still fear it might come across as clunky.

First fandom you wrote for?

uhhh... probably batman? or marvel? unless we're counting the self insert assassin's creed fanfic i wrote in 6th grade before i knew what fanfic was.

Favorite fic you've written?

oh probably "keep it near" but by far my unpublished fic i'm working on currently.

don't know who's been tagged yet, but @praycambrian @raylangivins @norgbelulah @eff41 and anyone else who hasn't been tagged yet <3

[defensivelee]

ok... i just blocked anon at this point but heres what they said bc apparently i didn't read what i wrote myself(?!)

i would just leave it at that, but honestly? i do wanna address some things here not bc i feel the need to defend myself to anon, but bc i wanna make it clear to you ppl WHY all this stuff was written.... like im not gonna sugarcoat it, i DO enjoy writing this bc hi. huge whump lover here. making pretty people suffer is my favorite thing. but it's also so important to say that this is FICTION (this is historical rpf which is kinda funny but still, none of this actually happened). there is no real abuse going on so there is no need for any of this performative bullshit. anon is just wasting time bc it goes without saying but i would never ever condone or do this shit irl. idk how it works for other ppl but for me fiction does not affect reality, the only way it does is that it makes me happy precisely because i can do whatever i want and nobody gets hurt. and these mfs dont care, they're dead im sure they have better things to do. anyway i just wanna say:

all the details anon is giving me abt my story makes it sound like they read the whole story, both Dona Dona and the main chapters. that's almost 100k words. when they could have clicked off at any time. when the tags are so clearly right there. like... you did this for what 😭

i assume the gang rape anon is talking about is in the Tenth Hot Spring when Bentinck serviced a bunch of dudes to seal a deal for William. i would find it kind of difficult to describe it as that... but tbh, yeah, it would have been incredibly hard for him to say no. in any case, so sorry to tell you this anon but there are no perfect victims in this AU! he never sees it as rape because he thinks he deserves it, and because he does enjoy it at times. his whole image as an Ally under an Overlifer kind of relies on that. and while i'll tag it properly, i'm not going to sanitize or sugarcoat it as it's a huge part of his character arc. he doesn't think he's allowed to say no or have boundaries, so he won't! in this society i think it would be hard to find a "perfect victim." Bentinck doesn't cry about this because he thinks he's fulfilling his purpose.

Bentinck being described as a shotacon..... im so sorry that was so fucking funny to me LMFAO

i wouldn't say he enjoyed kissing William's father as a boy, he just thinks he did. obv we don't get to see much of it in Dona Dona bc it's from William's POV. but even then, as an adult, he stills sees it as an honor. AGAIN, part of his whole arc of how he views himself, the religion, and his role in it. that event is kind of the starting point of that, it was put there for a reason and not bc i actually think kids can consent/enjoy assault! in my experience, they can think they did. here again, the perfect victim narrative does not always reflect reality.

you're right, kids can't initiate that! like i said in my disclaimer, it's a result of grooming and how they've been raised. they think they are, but it's just making them easier to abuse. i never once believed they could consent.

im not a rapist period full stop. just not

yeah i romanticize abusive relationships. in FICTION. they're fun to write. jamesborough is a delightful ship and the succubus au has been so fun to work on. real life abusers can choke and i would encourage anyone in a relationship like the ones i write about to seek help immediately.

Anne called Marly a slut bc SHE is victim blaming. EVERYONE victim blames Marly in this story. it's part of HIS arc. i would not blame any victim of this sort of shit irl. and even then, in this universe "slut" doesn't have such a negative connotation as in our world. yes, it is still victim blaming, but how can you read the story and still have it completely fly by your head like that

im aromantic, which i dont know how you wouldnt have just picked up from idk... SCROLLING THRU MY BLOG LIKE ANON SO CLEARLY DID?? LOOKING AT MY ICON?? so no need to pray for those hypothetical partners, it's never happening.

[rappaccini]

ain't no love in the heart of the city? 👀👀

(from this)

oooohkay. how do i describe this... i'm gonna have to ramble to make it make sense. and whip out these screenshots i've had sitting around for ages. but i've been meaning to talk about this for ages so thank you!

so first of all, you know how miles's uncle aaron is the prowler? that's a reference to hobie brown, who was the first black character to wear the spider-man costume in canon back in 1971 (issue asm-87).

in context: he was wearing it temporarily as a favor to peter to help throw the cops off his scent, but that was still the first time this ever happened.

aside from that, 616 hobie is also paralleled to peter parker often in his early appearances.

they're both genius tech whizzes with chips on their shoulder about injustice, who are ignored and mistreated by the people around them

they both make costumes with wrist-mounted tools.

they both start out using their secret identities to attract attention and for selfish gain.

they're both in on-again-off-again relationships with a girl who supports them but won't take their bullshit lying down, who doesn't know about their secret identity and wouldn't approve of it.

they both angst like fuck about their secret identities, wish they could quit them but keep coming back for more, and grow out of using them selfishly. (... though in hobie's case he keeps quitting being the prowler altogether, then backsliding, then trying to redeem himself again)

hobie even has his own uncle ben moment when a kid he's mentoring, manuel lopez, is killed and he suits up to avenge him.

like. it's so fucking interesting. this parallel keeps getting built between peter and hobie, and then it gets dropped and never comes back.

it's also fucking interesting that of all the characters miles morales is so personally linked to, it's the prowler. it's not a coincidence. miles definitely owes his creation in part to hobie brown, and aaron davis being the prowler is an acknowledgment that hobie came first, and that miles is going to pick up the torch hobie lit and run with it.

(also worth noting: because miles is so popular, aaron davis is now the default prowler. which means it's now possible for hobie's redemption as an antihero to stick. idk i think it's compelling that it came full circle, with hobie and miles each creating opportunities for each other to become something new to the narrative.)

anyway! the fic! it happened because i thought a lot about how the spiderverse writers went the route of 'miles was supposed to be the prowler, but he became spider-man by mistake,' when... to be honest, that's more of a hobie story than a miles one.

i'll never get around to writing the fic bc it's more a big list of ideas and worldbuilding extrapolations instead of a plot, and i don't have time to put in the research it would need, but basically it's an au where peter dies and hobie brown becomes the default second spider-man instead of miles morales.

like, how does his approach differ? what tech is unique to him? who does he fight and what motivates him? how does it affect his personal life? how does an adult who's spent years struggling to use his secret identity for good-- and being perceived as a supervillain by everyone-- change into a hero? and since the fic was meant to be a 70s period piece, how does nyc's perception of spider-man change?

[sukehiroselei]

For the fanfic ask game, 1, 14, and 16 please E 🥰? Thank you and I hope you have a good day~!

Hi Lyra!! Thanks for the ask! 🩷

1: Do you prefer writing one-shots or multi-chaptered fics?

Hmmm, this is tough. I often start out writing and intending my fics to be one-shots, but they typically evolve into multi-chaptered fics. 😂

14: How do you write emotional scenes? Do you ever feel what the characters feel? Do you draw from personal experiences?

Ooh, great question! Most of my fics so far have been romance-based, so the big emotional moments are often confessions and/or realizations that one of the characters is In Love™.

These scenes typically have a "purpose" (often to advance the plot or spur character growth), so I try to think of the story in its entirety—how we got here + what will happen from then on. I find that this is one of my short-comings as a writer, so I'm trying to remedy it with my current Black Bulls-centric fic to have these emotional tableaus without necessarily having a "purpose" for them other than to create depth in the preexisting characters.

There are times when I try to put myself in the position of the characters I write about, although I wouldn't say I can feel what they feel. For me personally, it's a slippery-slope if I think of myself as the character; I find it difficult to separate *my* feelings from how the character would *actually* react, resulting in a characterization I don't like. (Heavy Disclaimer that this is just my personal preference for my own fics, but I love reading everyone else's interpretations of the characters!!)

I think it's inevitable to draw from personal experiences. I don't think I'm a good enough writer to pull emotions out that I've never experienced myself lol

tl;dr: I revisit the canon and extrapolate from there

16: How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Share one of them?

Oh my god, there are so so so many. My Google Drive and Fanfiction account is full of unpublished/unfinished WIPs hahaha. I have a notes app document with brief outlines for Black Clover fics and that alone has 30+ items so far. 💀

I'll share a few here because why not hehe:

A) Current working title is In Another Life (although that could still change) — Mereo x Princia fic

Follows the events of the movie, where Mereo scours the ends of the earth for a way to contact Princia in the past. It's a little angsty and a whole lotta doomed by the narrative. An excerpt I really like:

Your soul is molten down by her fire and you hope that maybe she could smith you into something useful. Perhaps a shield in the next lifetime instead of a spear.

B) Memento Mori — Speculative fiction from Julius's POV

Idk if I'll continue this fic, mostly because it strays a lot from the canon and I'm always scared of wandering too far haha. It's basically a fic of how Julius was conscious of Lucius's existence all this time & actually took steps in countering The End to the best of his ability. A little excerpt:

It is a wonder how one could look ahead to the threads of time being woven into an ever-changing tapestry without going mad. Born into a body with two souls, Julius knew that the Other lay dormant, waiting for the opportune moment to take over this mortal shell they shared, and burn the tapestry into ashes.


A lesser man would have gone insane, but Julius willed himself to be strong. So much so that he earned the only coverless grimoire in existence, learning whatever magics he could to keep the End at bay somehow. [...] He could see how each decision could alter the future weaving in front of him. Every word spoken, every action, is a seed being planted to defeat the inevitable End. So this is how Julius lived his life: always steps ahead to ensure that the foundation he builds would be strong enough to keep standing, even when the time that the Other soul fully takes over his body comes.

Thank you so much for playing!! And apologies for the big block of text omg I didn't think my answers were going to be this long hahaha 🙈🩵

[revasserium]

Also saw that your favorite tropes are retellings. What specific ones are your favorite? I feel like a lot of tropes work well with sports anime etc. They're already so emotional.

Is haikyuu the only one you watch?

Also, do you ever feel like you write one trope too much? Do you worry about it feeling repetitive?

so it depends! i think in my mind "retellings" is like a myth or a fairy-tale or even a folktale retelling -- so song of achilles is a retelling of part of the iliad. becoming jane is a movie that tries to reimagine jane austen's life and her relationships with the people in it in an attempt to contextualize her inspiration for the novels she wrote.

i like fairy-tale/myth retellings specifically because chances are, the reader already knows how the story goes. right so -- cinderella retelling -- you know off the bat, main character's probably gonna have a shite lot in life, there will be at least one step parent involved and step siblings. a shoe or shoe-adjacent thing will be lost at some point in time.

so you have the advantage of writing a story knowing what your readers already know about the original fairy tale. and then. the fun is the actual details -- how does your retelling differ? does it attempt to turn some of the stereotypes on it's head? do the stepsisters actually rock? perhaps prince charming suCKS and is super vain and cinderella kicks off her shoe to throw him off her scent as she tries desperately to flee the palace?

i think the fun of retellings is the same kind of fun the poets of old had with traditional poetry forms -- you have a set of rules (rhyme schemes, meter, etc) but within those rules? the world is ur fucking oyster and the sky is ur clam.

in terms of TROPES in animes though -- i think found family is my cincher. like. fuck bro.

idk romance makes me flail but like. FRIENDSHIPS?!?!?!??! sad lonely people finding other people who undersatnd them or taKE THE TIME TO TRY????? fINDING A PLACE TO BELONG??? to call UR OWN????

TEAMWORIK?!?!?!??! FUck me the fuck up.

i think that's what i love about sports animes SO MUCH (and no, it's not just haikyuu -- free!!, kurobas, most recenlty TSURUNE!!!) because it's BUILT on teamwork right. like U GOTTA. it's like THE ONETHING THAT MATTERS IN IRL SPORTS. PRINCE OF TENNIS??? bro. BRO.

yeah so that gets me the most. the TRUST. UGH dont even get me STARTED i will SCREAM.

(when i tell you my bf thought i was FUCKING DERANGED when i re-watched haikyuu and the ep where asahi comes back to the team came on and he screams "sUGAA!!!!!!" and suga is like "ah -- the ace is calling" and i was FULL BODY-HEAVE SOBBING MY EYES OUT)

like i joking say #PowerOfFriendship is like all shounen anime but like i am truly the biggest simp for this trope. the last ep of naruto shippuden when naruto asks iruka to COME TO THE WEDDING AS HIS FATHER?? BAWLING.

yeah. that. sry -- LMAO i got emotional there for a sec.

as to if i feel like i write one trope too much -- not really? my bf tells me that my "style" is pretty ubiquitous and he wants to see me try new styles, and i agree. i've settled into my writing style p comfortably and i like it the way it is.

but for tropes... i guess if there was one "trope" i say i write a lot if it's a nonlinear narrative? idk if you've noticed but i like to play with timelines A LOT. and i like to jump around.

i also like things coming back at the end bc that's #TheCircleOfLife y'know. and do i think i use it too much??? mmm maybe occasionally i'll be like damn i did that a lot. but i like it enough where i'm just gonna keep doing it cause it makes me happy :)

i guess i don't worry about feeling repetitive because in the grand scheme of things (and i REALLY like to think big picture cause it rly just gives u the perspective to not give a single fuck), every single story has already been written.

the hero's journey has been documented since time intinium. the anti-hero's journey almost as well documented (judas, anyone?). every romance, every friendship, every heartbreak, every war that's ever been fought -- has been fought before and will be fought again.

in the words of sarah kay "the universe has already written the poem you were planning on writing" and nothing under the sun is new.

so. if nothing is new anyway -- why worry yourself over it？

all you can do -- all any of us can do, is try to tell the same story in a way that's true to ourselves. in a way that speaks to us on a particular day, in a particular mood, under a particular climate.

and if you did that? then fuck. u did a good job! and im very very proud of you <3

[cinnamon-bunni]

for the a-z ocs: g, m, s!

G- Grimm :) (idk if he counts since their referred to as Mr. Grimm but oh well) They are death incarnate, and just basically oversees the whole business(?) of Death. He acts like a CEO of a corporation, really; doing no work and taking all the credit for it. He is the antagonist of Daniel's story; a Reaper who is determined to take his heart back, which had been taken by Grimm when he first started his job. Grimm is a being that is work-orientated, and sees no reason to toy with anything else; they exist solely to have living beings move on from the Life, and that is it. Though, they do play along with Daniel and his story, because they think it's funny how badly the Reaper wishes for people to see him in a positive light, even if it means twisting the narrative to do so :) they're just a horrible and yet very fun character to think and (never) write about <3 (god only knows when i'll write about my ocs;;;)

M- Matthias Silva! He is one of my TF2 OCs, and is the new Engineer <3 He deals with chronic leg pains because he had juvenile arthritis when he was a kid, which led him interested in the technology for body enhancements--since there weren't many doctors who could help him (he did grow up in the 50s, so obviously not as many medical advances back then), he decided to take it into his own hands (did you know the first knee brace was made in 1967? because i didnt and he def just made his own to wear). Of course he needs a lot of work, especially research for so I can understand his chronic pain and his arthritis, but he's just a spunky kid full of creativity and a need to prove himself--which often leads to problems because of how confident he is in his work. He often ignores others in favor of doing his own thing, and is very determined not to ask for help, as he believes he doesn't need it; he hates that everyone sees him as just a pair of broken legs, which has manifested into a need to prove that he is better than everyone around him. Like I said, I still need to work on him, but he's neat imo and is just happy to create and do some metalwork and advance technology in ways no one has ever seen before

S- I don't think I have any OCs that start with S! A lot of them have names that start with the beginning of the alphabet, surprisingly

[skateamini]

I'm rereading Villa di Bestiarii and you write original characters so well, I loved Sean, I was sad about his death. that kiss he asks Hoseok… what were his feelings towards Hobi?

I'm surprised I haven't received many questions about Sean ever since I wrote VdB! I didn't even necessarily intend for it to be so intense and heartfelt, but it flew naturally as the story progressed.

The first couple of paragraphs in Chapter 1 of VdB were my first written sentences for the story and my aim was just to focus on the "vibes". Sean was just supposed to be a placeholder travel companion until I thought of something smarter, but he took on a life of his own and it felt wrong to undo him. The more I thought about his background and his knowledge of various languages made him very interesting. I was finding it hard to come up with other substitute character that could perform like he could. Sean is very special as he holds the narrative together in the fragile, borderline historically anachronistic stew I was trying to slap together in order to write the story.

Regarding Sean's feelings for Hoseok: even though I am the writer, I am going to be very annoying and say that I don't particularly know for sure. My thoughts on the subject change day to day, at the time I knew I was taking a risk having them kiss, but it just felt right to everything they went through.

Here are my thoughts about it, today: Sean deeply cares for Hoseok and protects him from the get go. Hoseok notes that Sean acts like a bodyguard for him, despite that not being part of the agreement, only that he's his translator. So, Sean is willingly running around after Hoseok and making sure he eats and get warm by the fire. I think Sean always felt a certain kinship towards him and their trauma-bonding certainly helped transition it into a deep loyalty! So, I do think he loves Hoseok, but I don't he understood the extent of it until he was "dead". At the same time, I do not see this as a romantic love per se, as I perceive Sean as a more asexual character. He has formed a bond with Hoseok, being "different" to other men, but he didn't grasp at the time that it was because Hoseok is gay while Sean is just not interested in sex full stop. In the first chapter, when Sean notes the local woman and makes a sexual innuendo, it's more so to see Hoseok's reaction than any genuine experience or interest in romance. Also, his somewhat negative reaction to learning Hoseok is gay is a largely due to the knowledge that Hoseok is actually sexual, while Sean is not. Despite this, he cares for Hoseok and wants him to be happy. Hoseok loves Sean, but platonically. He's his first (male) friend and due to that has some sexual tension being friendly to another man like this for the first time. If Taehyung didn't come into the picture, Hoseok could have built feelings for him, like he did for a lot of his male peers. While Sean loves him too, it could never become something in return that would be romantically or sexually compatible.

Anyways, end of essay. I could say a lot more about the characters of this story, but that's probably a good place to underline my incoherent answer to your simple question. I'll just say that despite writing multiple fanfics with different variations of vhope/hopekook falling in love, it is for some reason THIS kiss between Hoseok and an original character that is for some reason my favourite kiss scene that I have ever written. Go figure. Idk, but something about kissing your friend on the lips while he is dying just gives me chills?

[completelyordinarycat]

Compiling my TFTR end notes so they clog up the fic less but tbh it's mostly for sentimental reasons. Fun Facts:

Chapter 3:

Harry rambling about the Pale as a way to talk about wanting to disappear is based on a real conversation I've had.

Chapter 4:

I used Korean as a Seol language because it's the Asian language I'm most familiar with. I speak neither Korean nor French fluently (I don't speak French at all) so please correct me.

For reference, I switch between sounding out, anglicised, and characters to indicate the way characters are hearing language and tonal differences.

I am a white person, so I'm not in any way the person to be talking about experiencing racism but it felt wrong to ignore the place that has in DE and Kim's story especially and it's role in cop work especially. I work a lot with people who speak English as an Additional language, so I've tried to respect the bravery it takes to speak a language like English when you aren't fluent, and base that conversation on actual ones I've had. While I've tried to be actively anti-racist from a narrative standpoint, I won't do that perfectly.

The fire, and its cause, is based on one where I've lived that I won't go into for obvious reasons.

Eomma is based on my Italian great-grandmothers.

Chapter 5:

if you see me misspelling characters names: no you don't. I learned via this fic that they aren't columbinimus clouds, which is the best spelling I can offer for what I spent my life reading and pronouncing. Plus side: every spell check I'd laugh because I'd get to remind myself it's spelled with CUM not COL.

I find it really, really hard to keep real life geography straight let alone in-game stuff. I'm taking Messina to be an Italy stand in because it's literally a city in Sicily, which is where my family is from, so when I saw it in the game I was like bwuh??? If that's wrong let me know and I'll change it.

The reference to culturally insensitive ads is a reference to a real pizza place where I live, as well as various chain Asian food places with actually completely racist ads.

Chapter 6:

Had Harry been not caught up in his own stuff, Katya's song choice would have been more illuminating to him than any other piece of information thus far. But there was a reason Judit said that sometimes we get caught up in the little internal things that drive us (b/c its foreshadowing) which is what Harry and Katya do. Idk if you’ve ever had a fight with someone that, while it has valid points, you think back on later and are like oh. That wasn’t really about that at all, was it? They’re both still learning about how to do healthy relationships.

Having a character whose entire character trait up until this point is being secretive meant I had to do so much exposition I would have rather included earlier ughhhh.

The entirety of the case discussed is plotted out in full despite being only mentioned briefly.

I never name male perpetrators because in reality they always get the headlines when their victims don't and it pisses me right off.

I am ACAB and continue to be (and yes, ACAB includes all these characters and the RCM) but what Katya and Liza are implied to be doing is a form of the PEACE method including focusing on establishing known factual events.

Some of the city's reflections of love are inspired by me re-reading this answer at the time of writing. I think "If you found love right now, you would run it straight into the ground in seconds," applies to Harry though he's not at a place where he's ready to understand what that would mean in this fic, imo.

I had to remind myself how to do medical notes for this and they may or may not be accurate, idk. They're meant to obscure information, though, so non-accuracy works in this regard. I'm a suicide attempt survivor so I tried to be sensitive about this. For a disclaimer, I’m not a medical professional and my work lies in health advocacy, hence how I know a lot of this. You can tell, because I abbreviated a medication which is one of the first things they tell you not to do but hey, it was on purpose. Here is a translation:

TW for domestic violence, attempted suicide (with potential context as to a method), abortion and miscarriage:

“02:00 5mg/h AC bolus pushed via NGT. 10ml/h IV saline bag replaced.

03:40 PT semi-conscious but non-responsive, pulling at NGT. IV sedative admin.

5:30 RR 27, HR 114, BP 160/110, other VS normal. ECG shows sinus pause reduced but bradyarrhythmia remains.”

This is basically not that important really lmao. I could have skipped it, in retrospect, but I think it gives some nice context to say that Katya is okay, health wise, in that moment. In summary: she’s being given activated charcoal via a naso-gastric tube which is a common treatment for some kinds of overdoses (and why you shouldn’t use activated charcoal tablets/toothpaste if you’re on prescription medicine!). She’s sick and her heart is being a bit funky, but she’s okay. You can say this is why Katya refers to this as a “heart attack” rather than what it is.

“Emergency Department (ED) admission 23:39 by neighbour for suspected overdose (OD), no known next of kin. Blood alcohol level .32, suspected drug use. Became physically aggressive when asked if deliberate OD, requiring intramuscular sedative. Transferred mental health ward 00:48. History: childhood Pale Related Acquired Brain Injury. 3xED presentation for gun shot wounds and stab wounds relating to RCM work. 2x presentation for injury relating to suspected assault and battery, patient denied intimate partner violence and left against medical advice both times. 3 pregnancies and 0 live births: ED presentation following miscarriage after fall; ED presentation for miscarriage after suspected assault and battery; ED presentation relating to suspected termination of pregnancy haemorrhage requiring blood transfusion and overnight observation.”

Again, I’m hoping no one is learning how to take case notes from this. I re-wrote this a million times, no lie, and if I saw this on someone’s records I would probably be like UM WTF. But for storytelling purposes, it got the job done lmao. I hope the original gets across what I wanted to get across: that something really significantly bad happened in Katya’s past that explains her motives and behaviour. I wrote it with the intention that Harry has just gotten enough information to want to push, but not to know that he shouldn’t. Having said that, you could make the argument that he should have known at the very least what the abbreviation for Assault and Battery is, so if he knew, would he have pushed anyway? Canonically, I think the answer is yes because even a high-empathy Harry can be remarkably tactless on a fail. Which is why I think this interaction is fun(? Oh wow I’m a freak) because it’s pushing (fanfic) Harry’s assumptions of himself and his goals. His stated goal is to do good, but he actively doesn’t do that in this scenario (though, neither was Katya, tbf).

In his defence, he’s right but he’s also kind of wrong. Yes, Katya’s background makes her empathise with this case a lot more, but the other implication that Harry misses is that she was actually involved with the case to some capacity while it was ongoing, and therefore she feels responsible

If you care about the OCs at all: Katya, as a mirror to Harry, has been going through a parallel to Harry's plot and she's really going through it. At the end of this chapter she is off-screen having her own "I don't want to be this kind of animal anymore" moment. We only just get to glimpse it.

Chapter 7:

Mee's Kitchen is a reference to a beloved take out place where I live, and again I'm sticking with Korean stuff because I'm most familiar with it.

Harry feeling like he has no control and slapping himself and being terrified of that is based off of my entire life lmao but particularly a few years ago when I started to slap myself without consciously deciding to do it. Then I 1. started dealing with some of my mental health stuff, and 2. started being treated for ADHD, and, surprise, it happens less now and when it does I don't freak out about it. Harry is very flippant about it, which I was too for a long time. I have a lot of body-focused repetitive behaviours and repetitive behaviours in general and no one has ever formally told me if that counted as one of those or not. I don't like to call out specific things as me obviously projecting but I also wanted to be clear that if you also have those kinds of behaviours, there's nothing wrong with you and don't listen to a guy in a fanfic. Talk to someone about it if you're worried. <3 I tagged it as self-harm because it seemed to cover all bases.

Chapter 8:

This was a hard chapter to walk the line on and if I wasn't doing the poetry chapter title thing, it would be titled "What if Rigorous Self-Critique Was More Helpful and Less An Opportunity to Hate Yourself into Self-Destruction, and Therefore Allowing Your Shitty Behaviour to Continue." And I never want to demonise addiction or mental health struggles and I hope I don’t. In my own experience to do better you do need to face up to things you've done that you’re not proud of. No joke, a lot of this fic is me exploring the idea of restorative justice and how and when we can forgive someone, especially when that person is a victim too. But I also don't want to woobify Harry and I recognise that I could have gone harder on this and that's a flaw in this work. Very few things destroyed me in DE like Rigorous Self-Critique. My reaction to reading it was physical horror and I still remember how it felt. And I just couldn't play that out to its extreme in this. It would be too much of a tone shift, for one. And for personal reasons, I just couldn't. Also, In editing this chapter, I removed a bit of context I didn’t fix. Specifically, there is no doubt in my mind that Harry is abusive towards Dora and I realise I may have presented it as if to imply he wasn’t. Harry was specifically asking about sexual violence, and that is what Jean investigated. I may fix this in the future, when I’m in a better headspace.

I love to write bi-Jean being no-homo, I don't know why. Jean constructs intricate rituals to allow himself to hear that he is loved.

Other fun facts, grabbed from my notes:

MoralIntern/Coalition politicians declaring that homo-sexuality no longer existed in Revachol is based on a comment from a politician where I live who said that there were no gay people in his state. It’s also very inspired by real life anti-homosexuality laws stemming from racism and colonialism and eugenics.

This fic works from the assumption that Dora ended that cycle of untreated mental illness and abuse by leaving as soon as she realised what was happening, by virtue of having a better education and resource access through being middle class. She is my idealised version of myself here haha. So the question becomes less, is Harry a bad guy? But what can Harry do to make sure he doesn’t continue a cycle of violence that probably pre-dates him by centuries?

I also can-opened myself writing this fic because I was like, why do I write stories about people being at their worst and still being loved? And my brain was like, because it’s the kind of story you needed to hear when you were at your worst, that it’s still possible to be loved, and never heard. And then I had a little cry :)

 If you think that Harry is a bad and an irredeemable man, you’re totally valid! Maybe I will write a fic about that at some point.

I love Jean now :)

I was like haha what if I make the chapter titles a poem from the city to Harry and immediately regretted it because I'm bad at poetry :)

[ryssabrin]

the thing that's so frustrating to me about the way the writing for the female characters has gone downhill in jjk ever since perfect preparation is that it would take very little effort and time for gege to expand on the women to make them so much more multi-dimensional and satisfying.

with yuki, he could have expanded on how she chose to not merge with tengen (if that is how that played out), and how her actions are partially driven by guilt because if she had merged, kenjaku wouldn't be able to enact their plans. it would play into her telling choso to live "as a human" because that's the choice that she herself made. it would give her death more meaning because even though she refused to sacrifice herself to tengen, she will still defend humanity and the world she believes in with her life. i don't know if that's what gege was going for with her and maybe we'll still see more of yuki who knows, but that wouldn't have taken all that much panel space esp when so much was devoted to choso's feelings towards kenjaku.

with hana, there is ever so slightly something there about her growing up in an analogue for an abusive, neglectful home. i find it interesting that gege wrote her as fixating specifically on shiro's tail as the thing that led her away. it immediately drew to my mind the story about a sinner climbing their way out of hell on a spider's thread, idk why. the metaphor doesn't really fit (it's more about people believing the only way to salvation is to deny others the same path) but the imagery is similar. and there's potentially a point about how when people are only shown hatred and abuse, they will fixate on a single shred of kindness shown to them (often from the same person who is abusing them even), and so it's not unreasonable for hana to fixate on megumi despite his very minimal involvement in her life. but all of this is inferred! i have no way of knowing that's what gege was going for. he seems interested in narratives about how different people deal with abuse, esp children, but her character was barely elaborated on. would have been more tragic if that was her whole deal and that it ended up being her downfall because sukuna used it against her, but as it stands it seems like it was just a crush.

and then tsumiki. the entire pay off of her character is to reveal she's been possessed the whole time so megumi can have a breakdown and sukuna can make his move. that's it. does she get to have agency? nope! i was in such denial over it because i was fully expecting the tsumiki twist and there were so many reasons why tsumiki might turn out to be not what megumi thought as an awakened sorcerer and how that would shake his entire world. the sleeping beauty damsel in distress waking up and informing the noble hero, "no thanks actually, i wanna be a powerful sorcerer and fuck up a death game" is a much better subversion than what we got. again, maybe gege will do something interesting with yorozu but i don't know what he could do to paper over the botched tsumiki reveal. at this point i'm going full tin foil and i think that's actually what he originally intended but it would have taken a couple of extra chapters to get right and he wants to finish the series faster so he cut it and replaced her with an incarnated sorcerer. i feel like there's enough set up where it would have worked and made sense but he just. didn't do it.

and even though i love perfect preparation and maki, gege still could have spent more time on mai and their mother. i know he was even more rushed and in ill health at the time so i'll give him some grace, but that arc would have been just that much stronger if we got a little time from mai's perspective and how she's given up on the zen'in clan and understands maki's position more or from their mom's perspective and how she failed her daughters but chooses to make it up to them in her final act and supports maki's actions because she always understood how wrong the clan was even though she participated in it. all of that is just under the surface in the arc and wouldn't have taken that much more time to pull out.

i don't even know what to say about nobara. i keep thinking she has to come back in some way at this point because why be so coy about it for so long? but again was she just a casualty of gege wanting to finish the story faster? she was originally going to play a bigger role but got cut for time? was maki just always gege's female lead and he was never attached to nobara anyways? who knows!

like there's so much i love about jjk as a story and its themes that i have to step back and realize that a lot of it is projected. but it doesn't have to be! it's just a shame that gege wants to get the story done quickly so badly that these little elements get tossed aside.

anyways. just had to rant a lil bit. i do still love jjk and i think what gege does with the rest of the story is still very good and i have high hopes for how he will end it. it's still very fun to read along every week and i would still very much recommend it. (and honestly tbh maki's arc alone for a shounen series is pretty fucking great and it even deals explicitly with misogyny and patriarchy in a quite frankly radical way and that's really fucking cool!) just kinda sucks that there's this one little aspect of it that falls short you know?

[jettiebettie]

confession: i think i have read that one erasermic fic you made like 3 years ago about 50 times and i’m 90% sure i could recite at least three scenes from memory alone. you just write them so Good and i am so tempted to get into the fandom you currently are in purely to enjoy more of your writing bc it is so. just. Nice. the dialogue is so fun and the characters feel so Genuine idk how else to explain it but i have been obsessed with it ever since. no other fic will live up to it, from plot to premise, its my favorite thing ever. tyvm for writing it. also this is a tumblr ask so i think i ought to? actually ask a question? ive never used tumblr before haha Okay question: are you still keeping up with mha? thoughts? if not uhhh whaatts your wriiitting process?

This is so incredibly sweet! I'm thrilled that something I've written is something you enjoy and remember fondly. This really made my day to hear, thank you so much!

I have not been keeping up with MHA, but not for any reason against it. I simply had a shift in hyperfixation and haven't rounded back just yet. I do intend to continue it at some point, maybe after the manga has finished. I have heard some interesting, nail-biting things about Aizawa, my beloved, that went down and I am Deeply Intrigued. I'll hop back in one day!

My writing process for the past few years has been something like this: I have one or more scenes in particular that I really want to write about. Unfortunately, it's difficult for me to write only those scenes on their own and present them as is, so I build a narrative around them in order to bridge the gap and form a full story. I call this the "connective tissue," it's all the stuff between the bits I really want to write.

Now, sometimes this works really well; Heroism and Other Infectious Diseases is actually mostly comprised of this connective tissue, but it still ended up being a pretty coherent and cohesive piece that I'm really proud of. Sometimes this doesn't work very well at all and the story can feel like it's a bit disjointed or leave some scenes feeling out of place or unnatural.

I'm a very hit or miss writer, I'm afraid! And the truth is, sometimes I just get so sick of looking at a piece that I tend to force a stopping point if I get tired of a project. And since I don't like leaving something in a wip folder for too long (since I'm worried it will be doomed to die there and all the work I put into it will go to waste), I'll post it even if I'm not very happy with it or confident in its current state. This has become a terrible habit that I need to stop doing lol!

But I hope that answered your questions! And thank you again for reaching out! <3 It was a wonderful birthday present~

[anathemafiction]

anna i love youu dont you worry your pretty brilliant little head the hype hasn't died at all❤️❤️I'm practicing restraint by not reading the extended demo so i can read all of it when the full game gets released haha but its difficult🤧idk if you've been asked this before but what are your favorite books? like real books.

It's very hard for me to pick a list of favorite books, I love so many of them! My interests and obsessions tend to shift over time, but looking back, some titles have always stayed with me. For different reasons and with different depths but these books, no matter how fresh they are in my mind, left an impression so I suppose these are my top 5.

I'll put them under a read me more because, by God, it got extremely long! 😄

In no particular order:

1984 

I love dystopian books, and out of the ones I've read, this is the one that I always come back to. It's not a feel good book - it's the very opposite. There are scenes in it that made me physically uncomfortable, scenes where I wanted to stop reading, and characters that deeply disturbed me. 

But that's exactly the point. It's a dark, harrowing tale where the main character isn't a hero, and it's a tale that perfectly encaptures what George Orwell lived through and witnessed. You can feel the claustrophobia, the control that Big Brother has on every single thought of his subjects, and the narrative is so well written that I felt afraid whenever Winston did something that he wasn't supposed to. I felt as paranoid as he did. 

Just a masterpiece of dystopia, and I can see why it's considered a classic. It's not a horror in the traditional sense, but what could be more terrifying than the totalitarian empire of Oceania?

One Hundred Years of Solitude

I'll admit: I've tried reading other works of Gabriel Márquez, but I didn't enjoy them very much. This one though... this one, I have a hard time putting into words why it marked me as it did. But damned, it really did. 

The story follows not a character but a family. We accompany the Buendía family from the first generation when they settle in Macondo, to the very last descendent. And we feel the years and time move forward while eerily, oddly, staying exactly the same. Time is not a line but a circle that is bound to repeat itself - fate acts on the grandpa in the same way it does on the grandson. And each person, each generation has its struggles and victories, but they're always connected to the ones who came before. It's so hard to put into words the fatalism of this tale and how it makes you feel - and think of your own history, your own family, your own culture. 

It's been a while since I last read it, and many details of the story are blurry in my mind, but I will never forget the ending. I remember I couldn't see the words, for tears were spilling out of my eyes and I could barely breathe because everything leading to that last page is a masterclass on how to write. I don't know how Márquez did it, but he wrote one of the best, maybe the best, endings I've ever read. 

The book is also a window into life in Latin America, for the town might be fictional but it's obviously influenced by Latin countries. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (another book that I love, but doesn't make the top 5 by a tiny margin) or, to be fair, any book by Allende, is the only other piece of media I can think of that gives such a raw and clear account of Latin America.

Memorial do Convento

José Saramago is my favorite author, I think I've read all his books, and let me tell you, it was very hard not to fill this list with his works. But if I must choose only one, then it's a no-brainer: it's this one.

The story follows the making of the Mafra monastery, a construction only made possible by the gold and diamonds the Portuguese crowd imported from our colonies in Brazil. It has both a macro scope - the monastery's construction - and a micro one; the love story of Baltazar and Blimunda, the novel's "protagonists".

Like pretty much all of Saramago's books, it deconstructs and critiques the rich's exploitation of the poor, the sacrifices and importance of free speech and freedom of thinking, and, especially, the corruption of the Church. All written in his unique style that always has me reading with a smirk on my face and endlessly in awe of the masterfulness Saramago has of the Portuguese language - there's no one like him. The man makes the Portuguese dictionary his personal toy. 

There's a chapter I particularly love. It's called The Epic of the Stone, on which a group of 600 men and 400 oxen carry an enormous stone from the quarry to Mafra - a journey that took 8 days and cost the lives of several men. This was done because the king wanted a beautiful balcony, and they didn't want to cut the stone into several, smaller parts - it had to be one big, magnificent piece. 

There's not a better metaphor for how the rich are built on the back of workers. For how, despite History saying that it was King João V who build the monastery, it was actually the hundreds of unnamed men who did it. 

I could go on and on about this book. It's beautiful and tragic and perfectly satirizes the darker side of not only my nation's history and government, but Europe at large.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy

I know, it's cheating, but I really can't separate the books! It's LOTR, on its whole, and I'd go as far as to throw in the Hobbit too because I adore it almost as much. 

To be honest... what can I say about them? I love, love, love fantasy - I've spent so many hours in my childhood devouring fantasy books - and of all the ones that I love, none can quite reach Middle Earth. It's magical. I have a hard time explaining it, Tolkien's work feels like home to me. 

I love the theme of perseverance, of believing even when you're in the darkest of nightmares. Of having hope that the sun will always rise, and if it doesn't, then you'll face death not without fear but refusing to lose yourself to desperation. 

An army of merciless, grotesque orcs is coming, and there's so little hope, but you still pick up the sword. It's a lesson that I try to take with me - maybe not apply it in such a dramatic way, of course, but in my own daily struggles and my fears. A little hobbit made it to Mordor, despite all the odds, despite all the pain - and he saved the world. 

Maybe there's some hope for me too?

The Graveyard Book

I... adore this book. If One Hundred Years of Solitude has the best ending I've read, then this book has the absolute best beginning. 

"There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife."

I'm getting chills from it. The book is a treasure, both in the way it's written and the story itself. It's whimsical and light, even as it touches subjects as heavy as mortality and what it means to be alive. The main character and all of the characters, even the villains, are so well written. I am a massive fan of Neil Gaiman, and I think this is one of his best works. 

This book is deceitfully simple, but it's one that I think about from time to time. Maybe because it's about themes that have always fascinated me - and I've always feared too. Life and death, seizing the moment, and, most importantly, the importance of moving on. I don't know, it's a story that I carry with me. 

[class1akids]

the thing with the series right now, is that im getting major mixed signals.

personally i get the people who are saying this is going a bit too smoothly and deku will hit a roadblock soon. because that's the way i feel too. deku's general appearance rn feels unsettling and unnatural to me at least, so im waiting for the moment where something is gonna give and everyone else will be re-introduced. im down for that.

but at the same time, it feels kind of disingenuous, because deku's not really doing it alone is he? he's got his ghost buddies that are at no real risk of injury and pretty much all think positively of him. they're all good people helping him grow and helping him do the right thing. on top of that he's got the top 3 heroes AND all might shadowing him. can that really be called doing it alone? it's not like deku ran away and is homeless, it's not like the vestiges are some shady figures tempting him to do questionable shit. nope, he's just training "solo" while still relying on teamwork albeit indirectly (shindou's attack against muscular). deku hasn't gone dark or edgy or lost his mind. he seems a bit sadder and more serious, definitely traumatized from everything in the war, but he is still smiling, and his mindset seems fine, if a little heavy leaning into the chosen one role.

we hope the narrative will eventually frame deku ditching his friends as wrong, but it's at most a shitty friend move, not a life altering mistake, not when he does still have support. we hope his focus on doing things solo will be framed as a flaw, but it would feel disingenuous since he's not doing things solo. he's just ditched his old support system for a new one, and the reason it feels so frustrating for me is that you've got this huge cast of already developed characters i care about being seemingly "replaced" (even if temporarily) by a new cast of characters (half of whom introduced in what we assume is near-endgame) with in comparison paper thin personalities that all fall into a slightly different brand of good boy.

maybe horikoshi will somehow get me to care about banjou and whoever four was beyond a surface level "oh im cool with him being on screen" but i'll still feel bad because it would mean splitting up the panel time between even more characters in an already huge cast, and eating up everyone else's moments.

maybe this could have worked if the other users had some more spice in their personalities, provided more conflict for izuku. but they don't. they're all nice and they're all love him. which isn't bad. it's just a bit boring. it's like those harry potter fanfics i used to write as a 12 year old where voldemort never existed and everyone was just happy.

and it's very telling that number 2 created such a big buzz in the fandom specifically because he reminds us of a certain someone down to the way he kicks down doors. it's almost like the moment a character with a certain personality shows up we all get excited because we see the potential for conflict and intriguing storyline. and it's not bakugou's appearance that facilitates this (i guarantee reactions would be similar even if 2 kept his personality while looking nothing like baku. the appearance is just the bonus) but rather his character. i know he's gonna provide more narrative struggle and therefore growth for deku than someone like banjou is. disagreement drives a story forward.

and that circles back to my main problem with the current arc. it's not that i hate deku or think he's boring. i just prefer his interactions with other characters and want to see him around people that will actually challenge him. the reason i like having bakugou around deku is that he provides important balance. that's why i found him entertaining in the ofa tea times. the moment he joined he started pushing them. deku and all might had been pussyfooting around each other a lot and bakugou comes in and instantly challenges them, brings a worldview to the table that's uniquely his and that contradicts both deku and all might. he brings conflict. bootleg not bakugou does that too, but even this in a subdued manner (apparently yoichi just had to flirt with him a little and he was down). whereas everyone else is just the happy circle of good person trademarked flowerchildren who can all respect each other's opinions. WHERE IS THE SPICE?

perhaps if i was more invested in deku's character or the fight level up aspect of the story i'd be more down for this. but as we are now i just read every chapter and think "... ok". i was discussing it with my brother yesterday aswell, and he agreed that there's gotta be some more spice to the ofa plot than this. it was such an interesting power at first with so much potential for mystery and intrigue. i liked it even after sixquirks popped up because i liked deku unlocking backwhip. horikoshi did a fantastic job with that scene and i could feel for izuku's frustration at being seemingly put back to square one with a volatile power after watching him struggle so much with getting it under control the first time.

but then the charm was lost because everything started going way too smoothly and all the windows for possible conflict were being rapidly shut, from the possibility of evil/unwilling users to the dilemma of giving that type of power to a kid in the first place.

just idk. sorry this got so long i just have a lot of feelings lmao 😭 i hope ill end up eating my words and that hori actually has something great planned that ive missed the clues for but well, i don't have high hopes.

I fully agree. This covers all my frustration points that I have voiced before. 

And exactly the fact that he’s teamed up with ghost friends and top 3 is what makes this so frustrating. He REPLACED his friends. In order to protect them, he just ditched them, and I wouldn’t care if we would get the UA scenes in parallel, but we are not getting anything. 

They just POOF disappeared from the story, and with the MC being seemingly on track, we have no clue when we would see them next. And what’s worse, it feels like they don’t matter in this post-war world. Not to the story, not to Deku, not to All Might, not to anyone. 

And yeah, maybe it will lead to something, but that doesn’t change the fact that the pacing is horrible, the OFA development is insultingly dumb and there is just no sense of accomplishment. 

Deku gets like candy powers and abilities that other characters GRIND years for. Bakugou’s first updrade in hundreds of chapters was this new explosion speed boost that he earned by sacrificing his life and before we even get to see it in a fight, it already looks like a rusty old car compared to Deku’s full-extra flying batmobile. 

Even if we cut back to the students, their abilities will just feel too pedestrian and overshadowed by Deku. Which is why I’m losing hope that we’d see them fight ever again or get any role or development other than whatever group battle is planned for them in the end. And of course a few extra panels for the main kids.