#might need to edit this later or expand it in a different post

[shining-gem34]

Dan Feng/Dan Heng and the Aeons (1)

Note: This is all HC of what I think their opinions regarding the Aeons of Long, Lan, and Yaoshi until otherwise revealed.

"The Vidydhara, as a whole, do not forget our origins. The hatchlings of the present are not as devout as their seniors, but we cannot forget. Long existence is like a code etched deeply into our souls- A cycle we cannot escape from. Their gift...is both a blessing and a curse." -Dan Feng.

In general, Dan Feng respects Long and understands their importance to the Vidyadhara as a whole. As High Elder, he is required to partake in committees discussing his clan celebrations and give the final word where the planning is directed. In any important rituals, the leading role naturally falls to the High Elder to make sure it goes off without a hitch. Otherwise, in private, Dan Feng very little practices his faith. He holds Long, their Creator close to his heart. But, not so close he considers himself a devout worshipper compared to the other Vidyadhara. However, with the ongoing problem of the Vidyadhara species in slow decline and his personal issues- Dan Feng can't help resent Long just a little bit. After all, their blessing is starting to become more of a curse at this point. But how can he, a mortal, judge an Aeon? Not just any Aeon, but the Aeon of Permanence who given birth to the Vidyadhara. To reject Long, even deceased, is considered blasphemy.

"I do not share the Vidyadhara faith in Long. The reason...Well, I'm sure you understand why by now. Unfortunately, I am that man reincarnation. As long as I hold this power, my encounters with the Vidyadhara will not end here." -Dan Heng

Dan Heng has no love or hate towards Long. He acknowledges their existence, their importance to the Vidyadhara, and their relevance to him. He does not love Long, because he does not worship them- respect them, yes. He does not hate Long, because the ones who hurt him are their children. Besides, what reason does he have to hate an Aeon who ihas long passed away? Despite the Preceptors best efforts to educate him, Dan Heng obviously does not practice their faith in Long. If he must, it will be after the events in Xianzhou Luofu where he's learning more about their culture including the Vidyadhara. Something he never got to do during his imprisonment. Everything he learns and research will go into the databank. But also, it's helping Dan Heng understand more about a place he never saw as a home. Slowly, it may also help him gain a deeper understanding of his past incarnations knowledge and Long.

"The Reignbow Arbiter, unless summoned, has no reason to appear before us. We are their warriors, raising our weapons, and vowed to eliminate every last one of Yaoshi abominations. Yet, what honor can be gained for losing your life in this eternal war?" -Dan Feng

While Dan Feng is closer to Long than Lan, he respects them no less. The Reignbow Arbiter eternal pursuit against Yaoshi inspired the Xianzhou to take arms and follow them. Their beliefs aligned with Lan determination to eliminate the Abominations of Yaoshi and that hasn't changed even in the present.

Dan Feng is the High Elder of the Vidyadhara. Naturally, his first priority are his clan and the Xianzhou natives second. There are times when it is difficult to make a decision: to find a compromise. Because he is not only Vidyadhara, but he is also a soldier who spoke his vows to the Hunt as many others had done. The war he joins and fight is for the sake of his people AND the Xianzhou.

Is it conflicting when he follows Long and Lan? The simple answer is no, because there is no point in trying to understand what the Aeons are thinking (especially since Long has long passed.)

Dan Feng knows his priorities. It's in the present where his people rely on him for safety and guidance. It's where his friends/families, and his lovers (or fiances/spouse) matter the most to him.

He is the High Elder of the Vidyadhara Luofu, a member of the HCQ, a friend to a selected few, and...a lover to the most amazing people (Yingxing and Jing Yuan) in his life.

Dan Feng is never described as a person with feelings. But his heart, his human bleeds, seeing the loss in the endless war against the Abundance.

That's why he can never understand why so many see it as an honor to die fightning for their homeland. Not when they still have people waiting for them to return home.

And a part of him that he kept locked away resents Lan [Aeons] for this.

But again, Aeons are beyond mortal understanding. What does his opinion matter?

"Before I met Himeko, I was a wanderer. I followed the Hunt, because I felt like I was required to in order to redeem myself. Wherever I went, battles follow and I had to fight to survive. If an abomination of Abundance appeared...I felt compelled to fight and eliminate them. " -Dan Heng

Initially, Dan Heng believed if he followed the path of the The Hunt, then it would distance himself further away from Dan Feng. Not only that, but it would enforce his identity as "Dan Heng". The crimes of his past self had committed should've been absolved after he reincarnated. Yet, it didn't matter in the end as Dan Heng is punished for his past incarnation crimes. As for his opinion of Lan, Dan Heng will admit he is biased. He knows the consequences for seeking immortality; a monster. He agrees with Lan end goal- to kill Yaoshi. By extension, he also agrees with the Xianzhou cause as well. Dan Heng respects Lan and their ideals, but he does not walk the same path as their followers do. Because Dan Heng is an exile, marked as a criminal for a sin his past incarnation had done. But that's alright, because Dan Heng found his place in the universe as a Nameless on the Astral Express.

"Do not heed the words of Yaoshi worshippers. The Plague Authors mercy is a curse in disguise of a blessing. Their "love" is sweet on the tongue, but they're vile. A disease festering in your core. A parasite slowly eating away your life and sanity as your body rots." -Dan Feng

Dan Feng absolutely abhors Yaoshi, but more than that he hates himself for resorting to use a flesh of an Emanator of Abundance. But he believed at the time he was doing the right thing for the right cause. In the aftermath, within his prison, he feels only regrets and defeat...

"I do not agree with the Disciples of Sanctus Medicus. There's a reason why Yaoshi existence does more harm than good. They bring life, but they also sow discord and suffering. Dan Feng knew that, so why did he...?" -Dan Heng

Dan Heng is absolutely confused why his past incarnation committed one of the Unpardonable Sins. He abhors Yaoshi, any of their children are dead on sight.

[patchworkprince]

I need to revamp this blog

[ganondoodle]

totk rewrite- botw2 edition

been thinking about the other totk rewrite again (the one only based on botw in which the sonau stay a mystery while being expanded upon)

i talked about it before but heres a lil breakdown (im reusing alot of mechanics from the villain rauru rewrite bc they work too well to be discarded for this one)-

(edit, about five hours later .. its not a little breakdown, its a pretty complete summarized breakdown of the entire new rewrite that i didnt intend to spend the last hours of my sunday on but here we are .. long post, but with pics bc theres lots of concepts im reusing or reviving)

okay START:

zelda and link explore the caverns below hyrule castle bc the shiekah tech has been losing power and their research as to why lead them here

they discover ganondorf and through zeldas curiosity break the, already weak, seal on him (no enigma stone here, the seal was done by an ancient queen of hyrule)- he wakes up attacks them, breaks the mastersword and miasmas/malices links arm off (also idea is that you have to fight him but meant to lose horribly lol) and then have to play an escape sequence (or watch a cutscene of it) in which zelda drags link after herself running from gan

(remember this old first idea drawing i made when i started to think about a rewrite? yeah im reviving that, except theres no totk sonau in this anywhere)

they get out and immediately afterwards a heavy earthquake runs through the land, completely, and actually, changing the map (also using the idea of devastating the regions climates- gerudo desert is flooded, death mountain collapsed inwards, the zoras realm is dried up, rito village has completely frozen over - ACTUALLY frozen over, everything encased in thick ice, the temperature has a special new low point, the winds too strong to glide anywhere-, mountains and rivers shifted, caves are revealed- oh and most of the main villages have tried to flee somewhere saver so theres no literal 1 to 1 repeat of points of interest from botw; also no uh .. miasmas holes that are literally jsut like drilled out bc what?? i want the access to the underground be few and hidden to make it more special to discover)

links arm gets amputated and replaced with a shiekah tech one (maybe using the botw shiekah stone/slate since they still dont know how to make them and its the best self sufficient piece of tech left that doesnt rely on the breaking fuel structure) (reusing this concept from the villain rauru one, with the difference beign that theres no corruption of link -or maybe it does have an effect to have shiekah tech literally hooked up to yourself *thinking emoji*- the abilities remainign the same)

when link wakes up some time has passed (so its more logical that the other regions have tried to cope with everything happening) you get a tutorial by purah and other shiekah (bc with zelda in charge theres more shiekah doing tech stuff again! cool!) and now have a magic meter (functions like in the previous pic, recharges over time depending on environment! bc i find that idea so cool for interstign puzzles and storytelling- like i said in an older post, a place where lots of people died might be richer in spirit energy recharging your magic faster- others have been hollowed out of luminous stone which slows down the recharge) and you are left to decide where to go

both zelda and you have a shiekah stone/slate replica but its incomplete since as mentioned the knowledge on how to make it is still lost so it only has the basic functions, such as the map, journal, camera and teleport

zelda is your companion from the start, in the years since botw she trained in basic self defense and can use her sealing powers as a shield to protect herself (though reluctantly since she doesnt want to rely on them) so you dont need to babysit her- you can tell her to be aggressive in encounters, supporting you (occasionally shields you or heals you a little?) or stay out of it/only self defend if an enemy targets her (in case you dont want any help) - she also copies your movement in a way, when you glide around she will too etc- in cases where you go very fast to one thing, like the hookshot, she will grab onto you

zelda also acts as your mobile crafting station, to put it bluntly, as she can craft and repair weapons, which is at first limited but can be expanded upon by doing quests (like the options of spear crafting being hugely expanded by a zora quest- fitting their fight style), when she does it you need the material needed for it though it costs no money- theres new little smith shops around the world that can repair and craft as well in which you can spend money instead for material you are lacking (and a little fee for the work you know)

(one of the first rough concepts for a pair of smiths, one is at the shop (green lady, the scars on her arms are her missing fins bc she burned them or lost them in battle), the other walks around it like terry (beedle) does and from whom you can buy already crafted simple things, like arrow types-

oh yeah, arrow types return and get more options bc theres no way in hell id make anyone scroll through that awful menu just to fuse one arrow at a time (the old types return, but theres new ones and all are craftable in bulk, here and old rough sketch)

(also theres no new 'in the same location jsut a few steps to the left' towers that shoot you into the air bc it just destroys the entire world design- even if there is no sonau tech in this one so no gliders- i want the sky to feel as dangerous and mystical as the underground)

the sky has to be reached via the hookshot, its got big islands mostly with old shiekah ruins, including that broken titan prototype i drew before, and the bird mechanic (you can tame birds and register them at a location there, idk if im keeping the idea of a lone shiekah there, but the birds will stay)-which is if you tamed a bird you can call it when gliding to gain a little boost in height, enabling you to reach islands further away (since no building, yeah that mechanic is better used in a game actually built around it, which totk just isnt- do not argue with me about that- to really let it shine instead of just being a tiktok viral funney build simulator that adds nothing meaningful to the game and actively makes it worse due to its implementation just not fitting there) or save you from falling if you barely missed the edge of one - theres few points of teleportation up there so the world map isnt made skippable, theres no shrines there (and in general, there are no shrines, just minidungeons- ACTUAL minidungeons- integrated into the world, like really big caves that are each unique and filled with challenges- and much fewer of them) (the islands being mostly made nigh invisible from the surface bc clouds gather on their underside)

perhaps different glider types?! and you can switch their design via zelda too

the old botw shrines are non fucntional due to loss of power, either overgrown or broken into pieces due to the ground breaking open, some might be infested with malice/miasma and comes alive like a weird mix between guardian and miasma crab (which also goes for guardian wrecks that hadnt been taken apart for research yet), some are fallen into caves that got revealed or got swallowed by the ground with only the tip remaining- the titans (divine beasts) are all repurposed (like in the other rewrite ideas i had)- the rito tried to flee the blizzard using medoh but sicne no one has piloted it and unstable connection to them causes them to crash in the hebra mountains, unable to leave it due to the storm and thus on limited time; vah rudania was perhaps made into a temple, or training ground but fell into the underground when death mountain collapsed (imagine ... malice/miasma infested rudania being an actual boss itself, chasing after you in the underground); vah ruta was absolutely made into a place of worship and after their domain dried out a few remained there praying to it convinced their faith would save them- its not able to move but manages to produce a little water still; vah naboris might have been used as a stronghold/lookout but due to the desert flooding (which is in fact, bad) its one of the 'islands' people now reside in

new weather types, including storm and darkness caused by mushroom spores that are invasife to the surface

theres at least six dungeons, one for each region (but not in the exact place as in botw bc that is literally just plain stupid though i might use the zora sewer/water system idea for an actual dungeon instead of .. a single button- bc how cool would that have been?? no no lets put the fish people in the sky and put a single button in the coolest part of it that only activates a waterfalll .... coming out of a tiny island in the sky- all just by of the visual neatness of swimming up??- anyway) plus a yiga one that is in and below the akalla citadel- also might put hyrule castle into the underground and inaccessible for a good portion of the game- and one in the forest of the krogs that was corrupted (which i thought was the reaso nfor the backpack krogs, but no, they literally have no goal and serve no purpose than to make funney videos with em, and then even the forest is nothing more but a reused lame fight agaisnt phantom gan- im starting to rant, sorry)

the abilties of the champions will be similar but there are changes, as in tulins (who i might just change to teba bc lets be real he was the one you interacted with in botw really..) isnt a gust of wind, since its both contrary to revalis whole deal of how difficult it was for him to create the updraft and then tulin can just do an almost exactly the same thing as like, a 12 year old- also its little usefullness after me adding in the birds for the sky and different glider types- maybe ill make it a strong windcut forward like in the other rewrite, like the yiga officer windattack but on steriods id also consider most of them not having the innate ability for it anyway, except for yuno maybe since he literally inherited daruks shield and as my idea was could make a variation of it adding the roll an fire to it but still having the shield, bc it kinda makes them like a boring copy of the botw champions and also lessens both their impact in a way (perhaps bringing dungeon items back?? idk,so still working on that)

each dungeon has a unique boss, at least on of which being a corrupted friend (PROPERLY DONE not like poor yuno in totk >:I ) bc each being just some monster tm is kinda boring (like twilight princess was so cool for how it mixed its bosses tbh)- also want satori to have a dark (also nice) counterpart that you might have to fight first bc you are trespassing into its domain (an old sketch gonna revisit it at some point)

new armor sets of course, and you still own YOUR house in hateno, zelda either has her own one in the spot where landa (the funky building lad that you bought your house from in botw) had the 'example' houses or yours got an additional building added onto it for zelda (and you can customize like, trees around it and have a lil farm spot too!!) and in your house theres a chest you can store armor sets in so you dont have to sell them to avoid inventory clutter

POUCHES return!! you can find some but most are locked behind quests (since logically people likely would have pouches) making them a really good reward and dont force you to engange with krogs if you are tired of them, it also avoids making you go back to them over and over just to expand inventory (you can choose for which part you want to use the pouch for, weapon or shield slot etc)- krog seeds are now its own currency for a lil shop you unlock in the forest, one of the highest rewards being the eponator zero (the motorcycle from botw)

also BOTTLES return! the main way to store healing, which also has to be consumed in real time (like in skyward sword, select in on a wheel so link takes it in his hands and 'a' to use it) avoiding the pause and spam apples into your mouth problem-

now cooking is NOT removed, it has even better effects than potions BUT it cant be stored and has to be consumed where you cook it (hear me out-); the cookbook in totk i find pretty annoyingly useless so, the cookbook is now a proper book you can fill out and when you want to cook a recipe you select it there and cook it with what you have (it shows if you dont have it all and also if you wanna swap an ingredient that would end with a similar effect) AND since you cant store it, theres special NPCs that reappear throughout hyrule (like a group of chefs that have one in each region at least) that let you just cook whatever you want without it wasting your materials, and if you hit a recipe it unlocks and is saved in your cookbook (you have to have the materials you want to cook with but it wont consume them, so you cant jsut spam it and fill the entire book out in one go- maybe the chef can give you subtle hints with expressions if something might be good or not before you try it out so you dont waste ages just cooking the same shit over and over xD)

(also possible idea for an item or big quest reward, a portable pot you can set up to cook with -with wood and fire- on the go without having to rely on finding them in the wild, and zelda can act as you chef giving you hints ... honestly i love this idea, remember all the cute botw art of them travelling and cooking together?? make that real you idiots!)

to upgrade your health or stamina you have to get spirit orbs still, but this time you get big ones that each can be traded, since thers fewer minidungeons but they are 4 times bigger than shrines they also give you 4 times the reward- but still one where you can choose which one you want bc i find that an important bit of freedom (idea still is that you free trapped souls and they give you the orb as a reward, majority of which are in caves in the underground or in the surface caves) which encourages you to vary your gameplay and not focus just on one area bc you probably want all those things, go for quests for puches and bottles, for minidungeons for health/stamina etc

oh yeah, the underground houses several dungeons, the weird gravity effect is in either the entire underground or in parts of it- it does not span the entirety of the map, isntead its smaller and often enclosed areas that each are more detailed and 'finished', theres different bioms and enemies you dont find anywhere else, and some enemies on the surface (like the miasma hands but like .. less easy and no phantom ganon bc that got boring rly fast) that sport those hands can grab you and drag you underground- which can either mean doom for you or .. discovering a new area down there hmmmm a risk to take isnt it :3 (also wanted there to be a mount there but idk if i will use this old concept of the dongos or if i want it to be a crab like thing bc of the underwater theme i want to go for)

LORE/STORY

so as you explore you may discover caves and areas in the underground containing sonau architecture (the type from botw, not totk) most of which heavily damaged, but theres few that are in 'better' shape bc they have been in selaed off caverns that werent yet discovered-

you find out the sonau, which you only vaguely knew from ruins in the overworld, were in fact real (but no you dont suddendly know they fucked with hylians and even their names of untold thosuands of years ago that you just so happen to have read in a book all of the sudden like it was an always known fact and not at all a myste- .. rant alarm .. ), and given the ruins underground they must have originated from there, but there are no scriptures that survived and all sculptures are in very bad shape, alot of which seems intentionally destroyed- slowly you and zelda piece together through vague clues (VAGUE game VAGUE, let people THINK) that they had knowledge of the past and the nature of the ever repeating return of disaster to hyrule; the biggest reveal beign that they knew the cycle wasnt natural at all and that it keeps being repeated only through the structure of how this land operates, the beliefs of the people that rule it, altered history etc.

the ancient shiekah under the rule of hyrules royalty found out what the sonau had discovered/knew and persecuted them (parelells to what the king would do to them later on, anyone??) since the divinity of the kingdom must be upheld by all means necessary- which is why the sonau had disappeared so entirely, with little of their culture left and none of them, and by doing so the ancient shiekah also discovered the previously lost knowledge of the gerudo king having turned into the biggest threat to the kingdom in the past (which the sonau had kept secret, knowing what consequences it could have if not handled carefully), which starts up a whole other betrayal plot of the kingdom planning to imprison gan before he can become a true threat (im gonna guess the relations between the gerudo and hyrule havent been that great even before since hyrule was still the main empire)

gan finds out before the plan goes through and assasinates the king of hyrule, the ancient queen declares war (yes, the queen for once) and in the end sacrifices herself to seal him away, more for revenge than any prophecy, but it nevertheless leads to the cycle doing its thing yet again

calamity ganon is a product of ganondorf trying to break free of his seal- and perhaps in an attempt to weaken his unbreakable will the shiekah discover they can use his spirit as a powerful source to their newly invented tech- which previously ran with processed luminous stones (yes battery theory will never let me go idc) and essentially use his own power against him by beating the calamity with their tech

(this knowledge is also how you get the yiga to work with you, using your knowledge of the past as leverage and zeldas ability to negotiate - and bc i thinks it would be cool to see her develop that way, and no i dont mean it as they all gonan fix it uwu either, its hard to go into more nuance here, its already way longer than i wanted- and yes this also ties into the koga is one of the ancient monks that made himself basically immortal through malice experiments HC of mine)

he attacks the regions bc they too sided with hyrule, he drags you to the underground bc its where he has spent thousands of years in agony, hes only out for revenge, an understable one and one you can sympathize with, but one you cannot negotiate with, its been too long, too much, no amount of apology could sate the desire for payback (which keeps the whole link and zelda defeat ganon formular alive BUT gives it nuance, right?? more tragic really, i hope that comes across)

he attacks link and zelda, breaks the masterword bc he has seen it all before, the original calamity, through the eyes of malice, he knows what you will do, inevitably so, you too will come for him, again

at the midpoint of the game you will reach hyrule castle (underground? perhaps it depends on how much health you have, getting grabbed and dragged into its depths losing hearts and if you have enough you survive until you are inside the castle and let go, you cant teleport outside - oh and zelda is either absent for the fight bc you got separated or she held onto you and protected herself with her power- honeslty kinda like the seperation idea bc after having her around all the time its gotta be super creepy to be suddendly alone) and will have a fight with him, that you kinda lose but are saved by the rest of the crew that zelda had banded together and brought here after being seperated from you- maybe without koga yet bc he would be locked to late game i think

there will be a quest to reforge the mastersword, which if you havent already gone to the forest will now lead you there (oh also some of the krogs you find outside the forest now will tell you that they had to flee, but maybe warn you not to go there yet if you are still in early game, others might not know bc they left to plant new forests, windwaker style, maybe a quest there too! to give them purpose beyond being your plaything and then just disappearing- ahem .. )

(old concept for the krog forest/dekutree boss)

the dekutree will tell you to restore it it will need the blessings of the three dragons (who might not have appeared yet, or slowly disappeared one by one, they might need to be rescued bc gan probably knows you are gonna try and repair the sword) (oh look more old concepts still relevant!)

in the end it will .. end with you defeating ganon, just like always (unsure of the place where it will will be but OH LOOK old concepts- here it was still with hyrule castle in mind but that might be jsut for the midpoint fight now- maybe id put the end fight on the forgotten plateau, to round it up nicely, ending where botw began ... ;3

i really like this one .. even more than the villain rauru one, though that one is fun bc a twist like that is pretty neat and fighting with ganondorf is also rly cool- but sicne i just dont like the totk sonau and much prefer them remaining mostly a mystery im very fond of this (also .. im so sick of ancient people with high tech bs now..)

the aim with this is to .. make a botw2 that actually feels like a botw 2 (for me), shiekah tech is still there but little functions still, logically bc its main powersource is breaking off of it, the sonau are a mystery and kinda negatively talked about bc the shiekah persecuted them just like they would later be - also explains why there are shiekah things in every sonau building, of course they would overtake their places and try to erase a much as possible of them (the thunder plateau might have been a place of worship to farodra or for research- now look its a puzzle for a shrine to strengthen our hero to defeat the thing we caused :)) ), the sonau are expanded upon WITHOUT destroying their mystery (none of them are shown, there are NO memories in this game, everything happens in real time and what you can learn about the past is mostly vague clues pieced together by nerd zelda!)

it gives more depth to the shiekah as well as add an important ounce of nuance to the yiga and shiekah, to ganondorf as well while adressing and fixing the things that needed work in botw in ways i would find enjoyable (instead of making it WORSE)

i also dont want to go too hard on 'zelda is totally agaisnt the monarchy bc monarchy BAD', its not meant to come across like that, i just wanted to do sth interesting that does question everything and bc i like to think she could be lead to a different way of thinking, especially if so through her own research and discovery of previously buried history, being confronted with her own biased views by her passion for her interests

anyway, if you read through all of this, i probably forgot stuff, buts its very late and i spent alot of time writing this (bc i cant stop once i started i guess) and theres lots of things repeated that i already talked about BUT if yo actually read through it all, i cannot even begon to express just how much that means to me, and id i dare request, do tell if you like it!!! and thank you so much!!! it might not seem like much but this is also very important to me, i still dream of gamedev after all and i see this as a sort of practice, are my mechanics and stuff actually better os does it just seem like it to me etc -

(though keep in mind, this is in part self indulfent bc hey, its not real and is never gonna be so i might just do what i want- and yes i do believe it is doable, even if this all sounds alot, the magic lies in making it less but make that 'less' more dense and detailed, hence the underground being like at least cut in half in size and the building mechanic being removed (to give to a game where its better used than totk) alone should free alot of time and space for the things i described here)

-thanks again for reading, posts like these rarely get much attention so uh ... its pretty much never worth the time i spent typing designing and writing it (even if theres still lots missing here, like the dungeons and details to the champions ..) so every bit of commentary weighs alot more <3

[dont-offend-the-bees]

WIP Wednesday

I was tagged by @justafandomfollower - cheers, m'dears!

Posting a lil sneak peek of my fic for day one of Painland Week! It's gonna undergo some re-writing/editing before the whole thing's ready to post but this is 600 rough words of a uhhhhh 4k-ish fic. No idea if I'm gonna manage fics for every day since I'm having a big pain flare-up right now but I can at least polish up the three drafts I have so far! So here you go, some sweet nonsexual dom/sub therapy for Charles for day one, love languages💛

I'm gonna tag @kieren-fucking-walker, @firstaudrina, @coloursflyaway and @theflirtmeister, plus anyone else who feels like sharing some WIP sneak peeks, consider yourself tagged!

~~

“Charles,” said Edwin again, softer this time. It was important not to go on the offensive; in his current condition, Charles was liable to take any careless word as keenly as a knife in the back. “Please tell me what’s on your mind.” After a moment’s consideration, he added: “I promise I won’t be angry.”

It felt like utter nonsense to say out loud, a patronising placation as one might give to a child. But Charles, in Edwin’s experience, responded well to directness. His panic thrived in the mires of ambiguity. 

Releasing a ragged breath, Charles rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand. “Just… dunno what to do sometimes. When you two go off at each other.” He peered at Edwin with his uncovered eye, and tried for a smirk. It fell decidedly short of the carefree, playful expression it was aiming for. “Dunno what side to pick, do I?”

He voiced it like a joke, but Edwin was listening carefully and he knew an incomplete sentence when he heard it. He stepped closer and, slowly, giving him time to step back, took Charles’ free hand and squeezed the fingers. 

Charles closed his eyes, dragging his hand down his face. “Can’t keep you both happy,” he admitted on a low mumble, like it was a shameful secret. 

Guilt sank sour and heavy in Edwin’s stomach, but he carefully kept it from his face. Any indication that Charles had made him feel bad was liable to make him shut down further. “It should not be your duty to keep the peace,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “I will speak to Crystal later, clear the air.”

Charles nodded, but he still stood propped against the desk and hunched unhappily in on himself. Edwin could see his brain turning itself over and over in miserable little spirals — wondering if he should have stepped in earlier, said something else, wondering what he could have done differently to make everything better. To make everyone happy. 

Edwin swallowed tightly, and placed his hand upon Charles’ shoulder. “Charles. Look at me, please.”

He did so, without question or hesitation. Responding as easily to the polite command as if it had come from his own consciousness. 

Edwin, with great care, hooked a finger through the gold chain aroudn Charles' neck, and tugged.

The effect was instantaneous. Charles’ wide, hunted eyes softened, slackened, his lined eyelids drooping. His lips parted around a quiet sigh, smoother than his last ragged exhalation, and his shoulders slumped as if a great weight had been dropped from them.

Charles was an ever-unfolding and expanding area of study; but to Edwin’s expert eye, on occasion, his needs were remarkably simple to interpret.

Meeting his now somewhat unfocused gaze, Edwin leaned in. “Put Crystal out of your mind for now,” he said, quietly commanding. “In fact, put everything out of your mind.”

“She’s upset,” Charles mumbled in protest.

“Yes — and she will continue to be so for a while longer, regardless of what you or I could say.” Edwin smoothed the collar of Charles’ polo. “When the dust has settled I will find her and smooth things over. I promise. For the time being, you’ll do none of us any good with your overthinking.”

Charles snorted. “Overthinking? Me?” he joked.

With another gentle, recriminating tug of the chain, Charles gasped and quieted.

Edwin sighed and leaned close, ‘til his nose grazed across Charles’ cheekbone. “Granted, your tendency to underthink before making dangerous choices borders on the pathological,” he teased. “But I strongly suspect you're thinking a lot of very unkind thoughts about yourself right now, and I'd like for you to stop. Please.”

Breath shuddering, Charles’ hands lifted, fisting in the front of Edwin's shirt. 

“That what you want?” He asked, his voice a small and broken thing. For all his strength of body and character, he felt as vulnerable in Edwin's hands as a baby bird.

“How about I tell you exactly what I want for a while,” Edwin offered, breathing it across the shell of Charles’ ear. “And then all you have to do is listen." He delivered a swift, dry kiss to Charles' cheekbone. "No detective work required."

~~

Full fic coming to a blog near you on August 5th! Go check out the Painland Week blog and also lmk if you wanna collab on anything, assuming I get pain flareups under control I'm hoping to write lots and lots! Already got a little collab lined up for day 2 which I'm soooo excited about 💛

[reflections-in-a-critical-eye]

I've asked myself many times over the course of three years about how would I react to information that comes to contradict a specific image I have about people. And the answer would differ, more or less, depending on a myriad of factors, such as my mental wellbeing, my attitude toward the fandom, the group, the members, etc. The truth is, I only knew how I would respond the moment it happens and I was pleasantly surprised in a way. I see it as a sign that I'm doing better or at least I'm on the path of doing better.

These are things that I didn't want to allow to come to surface in the way I used to handle the BTM blog. Perhaps because the point was to create a platform in which I could offer the rational, researched perspective which I considered to be the correct one. I'm not retracting any of that. I still believe that it is possible to offer a more complex perspective if I can back it up with knowledge from various fields, but it was also one of my defense mechanisms.

Without expanding on the personal reasons, it has become very easy for me to separate my rational and emotional side. So much, that even when I should be staying in the moment and let my emotions take space, I can't really do it, I need to come up with a rational explanation so it can make sense. I then applied this to BTS as well. I couldn't just say I like this group when someone would ask, I would have to tell them about all the studies I read and how my fascination is mostly intelectual, when in truth it was both. I used to talk about jikook only in the context of analysis, be it GCF through semiotics or various types of interpretations when it came to their performances or fandom reception in terms of their dynamics. It had to be in the context of rational fascination and curiosity because I was merely trying to justify myself on why I care that much about two strangers that I look at on my phone. Again, my intellectual curiosity is real, but that has always been only one side if the coin, but it was one that I pushed.

It's about shame actually. I can't actually accept that I have such an interest. It doesn't fit with the idea I have of myself. And sometimes I don't like it because it makes me question my intellect, my critical thinking. How can I be so good academically and at the same time I fear that I've fallen into a fandom trap? I'm smart, right? Right?

I'm sure a lot of people have dealt with or ar going through this process of cognitive dissonance. How does one deal with the mere idea that something they believe in based on their understanding of the world, their ability of decoding (not in a conspiracy sense, but in a Saussurean way) can turn out to be wrong? We see something that resembles a specific behavior that we are surrounded with our entire lives, sometimes we ourselves engage with, but we've identified it wrong on others? Of course, it's through the visual medium, one that is edited. It's a puzzle with large chunks missing, but we're getting a general idea of it. But we can be wrong. So how do we deal with that? Well, I don't have a correct answer.

Me in 2020/2021 would have been more affected because my mental health was not good. I was functionally depressed and I clinged so much onto BTS, Jikook and the small community that I found myself in at that time, that I would have felt a lot more torn than I am now.

A couple of years later and having to actually go through a situation in which my understanding of people's relationship might not be accurate, I realized I'm fine. And I think it's because it made me really register just now that I finally learned how to have fun with it. It took me three years. By having fun, I mean genuinely being able to simply enjoy the little things. I'm still on the path of not being ashamed for liking kpop or spending time talking about the dynamic/relationship of two people.

What prompted this post was reading what is currently being written in the jikook tag. Yes, I had this big introductory chunk that perhaps people won't bother reading, but I'm doing it for myself. If I can't be honest while writing stuff into the void for strangers to read, then what is the point?

I get frustrated very easily. I like debates and contradictory points of view, but not always. And that's because I like to be right. Almost all the time. So when I see something that I believe it lacks logic or I find it absurd, then my fingers are itching. I don't comment or DM people, I can control myself. I'd rather get out of the app and do something else.

What I want to say is I was surprised at how much fanfiction is being written. More that usual. Shipping contains a big deal of fanfiction by its nature. Gestures and events taking place at different times are interpreted and having information added that fills the gaps. People do that because they have to make sense of what they see.

They like to make relationship timelines. They speculate on first kisses and first sexual experiences. That's their imagination. None of us has any way of knowing. The element of fiction is heighted when people feel like they are losing control of the narrative. When they are unsure of what they are seeing. Which is what usually happens in the shipping community on a yearly basis. Anons flooding the bloggers' inboxes because they need confirmation or they didn't get any ship content in a month or two which means something is wrong.

There's this understanding that the shipper/supporter is delusional while the one who stops shipping is the rational one. From what I've observed throughout time and mostly now, that is a false distinction. The so-called rational fan makes use of fiction just as the shipper. The difference is in purpose. One talks about why the supposed romantic relationship is real and the other tries to refute that. But both categories seem to need fiction in order to build their arguments. That is because none of them have access to someone's private life and relationship, so the gaps need to be filled with speculation. There is no right or wrong version here, despite how much the idea is being pushed. And me writing about this won't make a difference. It's simply how the fandom works. The one who position themselves on the side of anti-delulu will always be seen as the less crazy one. The similarities will fade for the collective consciousness of the fandom.

I think it's difficult for a lot of people, regardless on which side they find themselves on, to accept that the option of simply not knowing is enough as well. Or knowing, but without getting anal about it. But it's hard and they write posts after posts, anons are sending asks over asks because there has to be a firm answer. Only a few allow themselves to be in between lines.

I'll bring back something that I always used to say. Shipping and involvement in the fandom is a lot more about us and less about the people we're talking about. It's about fullfiling some needs, of needing a community, of focusing on the idea of love. Those things can still be done in a way that still makes the experience enjoyable. But not everyone can and I'm not blaming it.

There's a way to just like how people behave with each other and imagine things without adding so much weight to it. Regardless of the true nature. It's our imagination, there's no need for a moral inquisition to tell anyone how to think or that they should stop thinking a certain way. Touching some grass is a cliche and an expression I ended up hating, but I do believe that being connected to discourse on a daily basis can really alter our sense of reality and what we consider to be real issues. We really should pay more attention to that and take some distance if necessary.

[auroral-melody]

I've been thinking of something for a while and I'd like your opinion on it... what if instead of the universe expanding from a single point with the big bang, the speed of light was infinite until the big bang at which point it became a finite number and has been decreasing since.

So this ask is fully from May 2018. I wrote up a whole thing about it, and then ended up never posting it because I wasn’t very confident in my answer.

4 years later I had done a research project in particle cosmology and more or less concluded that no one actually knows anything ever, physicists should be taught more group theory, and that spinors are evil.

Anyway, 2 years after that, here we are. I doubt you even remember sending this. This ask is honestly still out of my area of expertise. Yes, I’m an astrophysicist, but I focus on stars which means my problems are so different 😂 If any cosmologists follow me then I welcome corrections.

Anyway, I skimmed my answer I wrote 6 years ago and edited it. Shoutout to younger me to doing their research alright – I mostly hit the main points lmao.

Firstly, to clarify, the Big Bang is difficult to discuss in terms of space because it’s fundamentally the expansion of space. We don’t have any other reference point, so as far as we’re concerned, there’s no single point that the universe expanded from, because it expanded everywhere.

Anyway, in general, we consider the speed of light to be constant because that’s been our base assumption for the Entirety Of Physics Really.

But if we dismiss all of modern physics and reinvent it, there is some interesting speculation to be had regarding the speed of light.

Essentially, when we look at all our maps of the universe, we see quite a bit of “isotropy” – that is, generally, it’s about even in density. (I’m talking on a scale much bigger than galaxies – think galaxy clouds, local groups, etc.) In order for this to happen, light/energy has to have traveled to all these places. But with the current speed of light, that’s simply not really possible given the age of the universe!

So there’s two theories to explain this:

1) Inflation. This is the most common one. The theory is that the universe kinda evened out when it was little, and then expanded.

2) Variable Light Speed. This is closer to your suggestion, and also something posited by João Magueijo, of Imperial College London, and Niayesh Afshordi, of the University of Waterloo in Canada, as well as Jean-Pierre Petit and John Moffat. In this theory, the speed of light was infinite, or at least much higher, at the Big Bang, so that light could propagate fast enough to get everywhere in the universe.

In general, VLS (or Variable Light Speed, or VSL Variable Speed of Light) isn’t widely accepted in physics. It’s not like it’s been disproven or anything; we just don’t have evidence for it.

If we do find evidence for VSL, we need to totally rework physics. G.Ellis, according to Wikipedia, explained that in order for VSL to work, we

must redefine distance measurements (the meter is the distance light travels in 1/299792458 seconds, by definition)

must provide an alternative expression for the metric tensor in general relativity (i.e., “we have to try to redefine what space is”)

might contradict Lorentz invariance (the laws of physics are the same no matter where in the universe you are. it’s a fundamental assumption, and changing it will break pretty much everything in physics)

must modify Maxwell’s equations (explain why electromagnetism is a thing. which is hard. light is by definition an electromagnetic (EM) wave, so if we mess with light is screws things up)

must consistently explain other physical theories too. (gravity still has to exist and make sense with your math)

The theory proposed by João Magueijo and Niayesh Afshordi is, tldr, really complicated, and poorly understood. If it is right, we’d kind of have to try again with the whole physics thing and redefine a bunch of stuff and do some serious math.

People who like VSL as an idea are waiting to see what super sensitive experiments (about the ~spectral index~ of the universe) have to say about their predictions.

Thanks for the ask!

[hirukochan]

Hi I'm wondering how to improve my writing

Hi there!

Oof, idk if I'm the right person to ask there. Writing has always come natural to me. I started creating my own stories when I was a child. Storytelling just has always been a part of my life, but I will try!

Practice.

Writing is a skill. It may come easier to some people just like art, dance, crafts - any creative activity really - but it is still a skill and a skill can only be improved by doing it over and over and over.

Don’t be afraid to try.

I’ve seen countless posts of people being stuck on their worldbuilding for years without ever writing a single word. World building is great, collecting resources to improve your writing is all good and well but they will be of no help to you if you don’t ever actually start to write.

Don’t be scared to suck.

I’ve written plenty of stuff that’s bad. I’ve deleted entire chapters and started over because it was just not working. It can be frustrating and it’s fine to take a step back for a moment and come back with fresh ideas. Not everything you write has to be shared with the public. Scribble down brainfarts on a napkin you never look at again. Fill notebooks with story shreds you’ll never expand on. Just write. Get comfortable with writing. Try out new things even if those aren’t what you want to write. Every creative writing class will tell you to not write fiction and while I disagree with the notion that fiction is somehow less, it is not bad advice to step out of your comfort zone and challenge your skills. I wrote a few short stories that were set in the ‘real’ world and while it was hard, I think it really helped me improve.

It’s worth experimenting with different mediums as well. Some people prefer to write on the computer, some do their best work on paper. I like to switch between the two when I notice myself getting stuck. I have one story I write almost exclusively on paper. It’s annoying to type it all into my computer after but it’s worth the extra effort.

Read a lot. Artists look at other artists’ work and study every detail of their work. Every author has a different style. By reading other peoples’ works in different genres you broaden your own horizon.

For years I got stuck on all these rules some people have made up for writing and while some of them are sound advice, most published authors break those rules too. Unless you want to get traditionally published, writing is a hobby and hobbies are supposed to be fun. Don’t get hung up on trying to be perfect. Just write. You can come back later and edit or don’t. I don’t. I do some haphazard spell checking and that is it. I don’t enjoy editing. I don’t like rereading my chapter over and over to try and get it perfect. Perfection is a myth anyway. Some people will not like what you write and that is fine. Your audience is out there, even if it might take a moment to find it.

It’s easy to get discouraged when you don’t get the response to your work you crave. No amount of telling yourself you write for yourself will change that. In the end, we know our stories. We don’t need to write them down to know them, nor publish them on the internet. We do that because we want to share our little world with other people and in a time were kudos and comments are at an all time low it is easy to feel like you are shouting into a forest and your words get lost between the branches.

I’ve let myself get discouraged by this too. It’s the reason A Servant of Death hasn’t been updated in forever. I recently published two oneshots I’m pretty proud of but because they are both rare pairs, I got barely any responses.

I can’t tell you how to deal with disappointment. It’s something I struggle with. I just have to believe that my stories reach people. That someone is glad they were written even if they are too shy or busy to tell me.

Find fandom friends. I find it is much easier to deal with my disappointment when a story doesn’t do as well as I think it might deserve (and I’ve been spoilt rotten with the responses to ‘Your tears are of no relevance to me’, going back to my rare pairs and less popular ships after that was and is a hard transition). Join a discord, be active on tumblr, find your people that share the same brain rot as you. I’ve made so many great friends over at the Snarriet Discord, it’s a wonderful community - you just need to find it.

Now I know that even if no one else will read it, @snapesmorningcoffee and @loneamaryllis are always among the first to read my sick and twisted stories. I can’t tell you how much of a difference that makes!

So…yeah. My biggest advice is to just write. Forget all else. Set a timer for five minutes and write as much as you possibly can in that time even if you just end up writing ‘idk what to write’ over and over. You’ll automatically get better at it the more you do it, the longer you do it.

[thisapplepielife]

Monthly Word Count Wrap-Up

August 2024

This was a rough month. It's been straight out of the AO3 author's note curse handbook over here. It was just an in the snow, uphill both ways, trek, lol.

I think I might need to just take a step back from participating in so many events, although I love them, and just focus on editing up the final part of All Across the Universe, and then go from there.

That's the one obligation I need to fulfill. I'm so sorry it's later than expected. I didn't want to work on it when my head wasn't in it.

This month, I wrote the least of any month this year so far:

But I still somehow worked on 13 different projects this month, for a total of 22,500 words. My 500 words a day streak is still alive. Barely. You can see on a lot of days, that I just pushed through writing until I hit my 500 words. Often, late at night, and on a new document that if it was nothing, it was nothing. I'll be interested to go back later and see if anything was worth expanding.

The last few days were finally better. I edited some on AATU. I wrote some on a couple different WIPs because I wanted to, not because I had a word count to hit. So, maybe this was just a fluke of a month and I'll be totally fine and back to normal moving forward. Or I'll need to just cut back. Time will tell, I suppose.

Either way, in August I averaged 725.81 words a day.

And the yearly average, sits at 1070.35 words per day.

What I Posted This Month:

Never Not Mine (For Steddie Angsty August, E, 3240 Words)

Just the Facts (For A Stranger Summer Week #14, T, 813 Words)

Different Lessons (For Steddie Angsty August, T, 3300 Words)

Tip Your Driver (For A Stranger Summer Week #15, T, 4115 Words)

I'm An Island, But You're An Ocean (For Steddie Angsty August, T, 2191 Words)

Firing on All Cylinders (For A Stranger Summer Week #16, T, 3000 Words)

Clean Sheets Night (For Steddie Angsty August, T, 1374 Words)

Of All the Gin Joints (For A Stranger Summer Week #17, T, 1938 Words)

Heat Waves (For Steddie Song Fics, T, 1500 Words)

Embarrassing For You (Late Entry For Steddie Micro, T, 437 Words)

She Still Wants More (For A Stranger Summer Week #18, T, 448 Words)

[horizon-verizon]

Daeron I & Baelor I

*EDITED/EXPANDED POST* (11/28/23)

HERE, I answered an ask about Daenaera's fate and family, where this post stems from a question that came up as I went to edit that post.

After the loss of dragons, the House Targaryen struggled with defining themselves without the existence of dragons and being able to ride them. Aegon III hated dragons after seeing his mother die between Sunfyre's jaws and yet later tried, his Viserys (II) to revive some eggs with 9 Essosi mages means and failed. His reluctance to battle with his need to subdue enemies or use them as a deterrent against other possible reluctance might have not helped and even hindered his relationship with his own heritage and relationship with his brother and older sisters, which is hinted at in Rhaena's offense at Aegon not allowing Morning into the castle walls. Even he and Viserys's relationship took a serious dip after Aegon removed all eggs from the Keep to Dragonstone after Baela's daughter Laena's mutated and deformed dragon took a chunk out of the newly-born girl. It would have also made some of the mental alienation he had in his depression, further exacerbating the alienation from those closest to him (though I can't blame him for the egg-transport one, Laena, like Rhaenyra, was eaten by a dragon!). This would have been felt and observed/passed down to his children, who all had different responses, but I want to talk only about his sons here.

The very meaning of what a Targaryen is came into question.

🎨: Amok

Daeron

Daeron--in trying to subjugate Dorne and pull it into Targ-Andal domination while probably looking back at the Dance's consequences (no dragons and lords' resentment towards his father's "coldness")--developed an interest in displaying his and Targ power. He seemed to wish to say to his subjects, esp the nobles, that he/the Targs still had the quality of supremacy or "strength" from the first of their line, Aegon I, without having to have actual dragons and sort of redeifng what a "dragon" was. It's like he was saying, yes, we won bc of dragons but there is something within us-me that allows me-us to accomplish our duties and more.

It could have reflected the already present Andal-Targ blood consciousness and relied on that element running in the back of everyone's collective social consciousness and means to politically define themselves apart from other nobles as well as smallfolk. As this is a militaristic, patriarchal society that prizes military achievements above almost all else, Dorne remained independent and already practiced equal primogeniture since Nymeria, not long ago the throne was fought over a woman ruling or not and the "precedent" against women leading became stronger then ever, Dorne may have gotten more attention. As a state, it was out of monarchial control and its people were equivocally ambiguous as to their relations to other parts of the Targs' realm, perceived as an "Other", and thus became the first part of Daeron's mission, his target. It also explains why and how Daeron even bothered to begin a racialization of Dornish folk: "salty" vs "stony" vs "sandy".

He tries to suppress the Targness-is-being-only-a-dragonrider while still using the heritage of dragon-riding to define his/Targ supremacy. Thus an internal conflict with his own masculinity, heritage, etc.

Baelor

Baelor's problem came from him trying to use only & purely Andal core principles to justify his Valyrian-descent house's right to rule with a very specific principle of socio-religious "devotion" that is actually extreme mortification ("denial of the flesh", the Christian terms), or self-denial.

By claiming he was cleansing his house of sin through his own interpretations of Faith or Andal principles of anti-carnal devotion and martyrdom through denying the body's (his own and others') expressions or movements, he was also:

blinding himself to others' feelings or motives aside from what he felt they were/could be -> one way paranoia and abuse get encouraged

ensuring carnal/sexual rebellion from those he oppressed/repressed and tried to make look evil through his shows of extreme religious mortification

exposing himself to actual physical danger

stoking the urges to perform "sinful" behavior bc the lack of nuanced thought prevented him from thinking rationally about his own motives and urges to begin with

Before going on, it's crucial to understand that Baelor sincerely believed in the Faith religion's principles. Religion whoever, does not escape political history and can never be claimed to be completely non-affective in how people organize their societies and behaviors...

His Sisters

*(11/28/23)* As I already alluded to later in this post, one of the "sins" the house Targaryen performed, in Baelor's public and private policies, was also the house/dynasty's central principle & means to self-affirm or separate itself from Andals to justify its own right to rule: incestuous marriage between siblings. Thus him imprisoned his own sisters. Check out the previously known Brideoffires' Twitter thread about how Baelor works against himself specifically in how he treats his sisters:

In this thread, OP makes it very clear that there WAS a threat of rape against these women: "by claiming his actions were to purify the sin of incest, baelor inadvertently revealed his own sin of incest, by seeing all of his sisters as temptations of the flesh, beyond just the one he married dissolving the marriage only to imprison Daena and her sisters because he was so possessive over them. he wanted to keep them to himself." Others have added that he could have sent them or just Daena to other regions like Essos and a theory that he eventually believed and justified their imprisonment from a fear that they'd usurp him. Perhaps his spiritual/Seven advisors/hallucinations guided him toward this. Then OP points out how Baelor, if he was serious about them remaining faithful and spiritually "pure", could have forced them to become septas. Rhaena was already one.

If dragons had continued to exist as they were before and during the Danc, the man also would have tried to at least stay away from dragons and see them as a curse or imprison them just as he did his sisters and either refuse to let dragonkeepers properly take care of or organize their eggs later in his life if he were still king OR reject any attempt to let others inform him of them. It would be a mistake to think Baelor was, in his heart of hearts, totally against violence or didn't use violence to affirm himself and the dynasty.

The act of jailing someone or forcibly separating them into an isolated space is itself still an act of violence and a show of force. Again, add this to how he had many options on keeping them "pure" or removing the "threat" of incest and temptation he instead keeps them all together and relatively close to him where he can keep an eye out for their movements WHILE if he ever felt he couldn't stop said temptations...oh lookie there, a fresh sister to make "sin" with and blame his own actions on....

Chilvary, Religion and Masculinity in Real Medieval History & Westeros

The thematic inspiration behind Baelor's fervent faith in the Faith and how he imprisoned his sisters stems from the same things that inspired Daeron in his conqueror mission: the Dance's effects (personal and political regarding gender) and the loss of the dragons while having to marry Targs to the dominant religion of the subjects for the dynasty to maintain its own hegemony (not that kind, the racial one. just the kind where he has authority over other states that you see in any period of hierarchical human history).

A knight is described in Andal-Westeros as a "devoted" protector of the weak, women, children, and of God/the Faith. They are supposed to be morally positive forces of good who uphold the feudal order through violence. Baelor could have felt this internal struggle between the Andal militaristic masculinity, the image of a king being "generous" but also "strong", and the memories of Rhaenyra, his father and now his brother, and after Daeron's death he might and probably have felt that House Targaryen had to prove its importance and position by the mode of self-sacrifice serve its subjects through the Faith/the dominant religion AND the house brought it's own tragedies to itself, having had multiple "punishments" from the gods after his brother's and grandmother's heretical "arrogance".

Instead of forcing rule to display strength of arms, he felt he had to express first remorse towards the previous aggression (especially with the small of Dorne rising up after their lords lost) and then show leadership through something inspired by what Catholic-Christian medieval societies of real-life described as "martyr" strength of doing extreme, sacrificial actions facing intense persecution for that faith and doing anything to protect God's word and presence on Earth against "infidels" and "pagan" disbelievers. It is why several saints have stories of great suffering and violent deaths in the Catholic canon. It was and still is to many, a means to display a uniquely Christian sort of bravery, especially as Christianity is/was not an ethno-religion but a religion dependent on converting people. Thus, martyrdom is absolutely needed/needs violence wasn't ever far away from Christian identity. With the Andals and lords' already present history of "promised land"ness justifying their migration to Westeros thousands of years ago, the Faith of the Seven mincing Catholism's own principles and role in society, and how knighthood and chivalry themselves come to be defined from their Andal roots, that importance about self-sacrifice in "trials" of great danger would have been a huge factor in how Baelor felt he must appeal to even those in Dorne but especially to lords at home. (We know that the Warrior's Sons were a group of nobles' sons who claimed to protect the Faith through violence and we know that the Andals desperately fought against the First Men for resources, presumably with their ASoIaF "chosen people's" justification--or at least enough of them used that excuse.)

Now while Dornish people do worship the Seven and it is the dominant religion, being the target of violence for months from one of the same family and wanting their political independence would have been part of why--if not all--Lord Wyl was so unimpressed with Baelor's Boneway walk and his request to release his captured uncle Aemon the Dragonknight. Instead, he decides to play with him, and we, the readers and maybe some of Yandel's readers, see through Lord Wyl's action straight at the folly of zealotry disguised as perfect devoted bravery.

What is interesting is that the Christian mode of bravery made bravery and strength themselves more accessible to people who were not men--many women were canonized as saints for their great personal and public humiliation and violent acts for not converting away from Christianity, converting to the religion, or--less often told in narratives--putting themselves into direct harm's way for their fellow Christians through housing them or helping them escape from authorities or even leading banned services. We see that Baelor eschews the Andal notion of masculinity (facing your enemies with a sword and intention to violently push off and kill) in his self-subordination rituals of the walk, his attempts to abase and put himself in danger for the sake of his uncle, and his later fasting to death as if he made sin (but really expressing his ability to inflict on himself his own determined punishment). Because part of sainthood and the martyr's bravery is to submit yourself totally to God's will and mercy while you "advocate" for his rule on Earth, which decidedly crosses over with the Andal idea of femininity.

All may explain why Baelor was so adamant about locking his sisters up for, what he planned, for the entirety of their lives not shortly after he became king (besides the info in the linked Twitter post by former brideoffires). It's already been noted and discussed how dragons and female Targs are narratively and phenomenonologically linked together. In the Faith and maesters'/Citadel's perspective, dragons by themselves were anathema by being "impossible" creatures of fire that most people cannot dominate. And since Targ women can and have bonded/claimed dragons and their Valyrian heritage was less restrictive against female authority and autonomy (Alysanne, Rhaenys, Rhaenyra, and Visenya), the Targs just were too seen as "Other" and always have been, will continue to be so. Both Valyrian and Andal/FM lords drew their house identity from patrilineality and patriarchal customs, but out of the Andals and the Vlayrinas (who also had women go out to those conquered Essosi outposts to rule in the name of Old Valyria), which had women actually practice leadership and real autonomy? The Faith and the Targs have always had contention over the supremacy of Westerosi society after the Conquest, enough that there is a running theory that they and maesters are responsible for several mysterious tragedies the Targs suffered (multiple miscarriages for certain periods, Syrax going off, the Shepherd, etc.). There are multiple instances of Targ women's autonomy being linked to the decline of Targ power and political integrity, and the consequences of its suppression:

the last female Targ's death and personal loss spelling the end of dragons

(but) the last dragon rider before Daenerys was Rhaena, Daemon and Laena's child, bc she independently successfully hatched Morning and got to bond/ride with her

Daenerys Stormborn reviving dragons towards her own rise, it is pretty clear that

Daena is described as a typical "dragon" out of all her siblings except Daeron maybe and retaining pride from Daemon (even if not her own father Aegon) to her son Daemon -- her daring to have a bastard in her own way of claiming back some of her autonomy --> from that event of her imprisonment, she births a "superstar" player in the next Targ conflict and probably instills in him his right to a place in the Targ lineage despite his bastardry

Queen Dowager Rhaena giving her siblings Alysanne and Jaehaerys their dragons (by legend) out of sisterly love and her dragon Dreamfyre being the one who probably birthed Dany's dragons / her conflict with her daughter

Aerea, who claimed Balerion and found both freedom and danger with him after her great uncle/new stepfather held her and her mother hostage -> leads to her mother's trauma and bad handling \/emotional imprisonment of her, thus her flight on Balerion -> against

Saera trying to get a dragon to run away from the imprisonment and abuse Jaehaerys put her in after her sex debacle -> making the first of two rifts b/t the Golden Couple (Alysanne & Jaehaerys)

Alysanne, while faithful to the Seven, also has a dragon and supplies most of the most well-known policies protecting women and a few protecting KL infrastructure with the help of Septon Barth's support (right of the first night, the Gift, improved North-Targ relations, KL's sewage and water system; unfortunately, no girls in the Citadel, but again that theory...)

Visenya and Rhaenys have their own dragons and not only participate in warfare but out of warfare making laws in the absence of their brother and thus making several laws and an institution for the better of Westeros and the beginning of the entire dynasty: the Kingsuard, the rule of thumb and the rule of seven, Rhaenys' masterful manipulation of the court, and Visenya's conquest of the Eyerie // Visenya's instrumental role in making Maegor king and supporting his reign and her better advice to Aenys before then, before Aenys allowed Targ-Faith relations to worsen so bad open rebellions came and Maegor's firmer hand was needed

Anyway, thematically, Targ dragons and Targ prosperity need its women free and competent, which cannot come from patriarchal oppression of women's bodily autonomy and authority. Thematically, Baelor proved to be the antithesis of the conventional image of Targness to better and fulfill that long and steady attempt at full Targ-Andal assimilation I talk about HERE. Part of Andal masculinity itself is to have and show control over female sexual partners, which translated into having control over who they marry and have children with (competition or allies). By isolating and reserving his sisters' bodies away from his physical presence but just close enough where they are still more limited and controllable, he assures the less chance of his own temptations for their bodies (as traditions of incest would and could encourage genuine attraction but again, he himself obviously was just attracted to them all or thought that he'd become so...it's not as if he couldn't have self-control), debilitates their access to accruing power amongst the court for themselves, and outwardly expresses his devotion to Faith anti-sibling marriages (he canceled his betrothal to Daena).

Therefore, it is a means of self-repression as well as his way of reassuring his masculinity, focusing on the aspect of being obedient to the religion above all and acting as a "godly" king who may "protect" the gods' dominion on Earth. That displays his generosity-openhandedness-ability to provide sustenance (another expected kingly trait) for the smallfolk: "he emptied the treasury regularly to fund his charitable acts, including the year when he donated a loaf of bread daily to every man and woman in the city" (AWoIaF; The Targaryen Kings -- Baelor I). However he also eventually took septon's vows after cancelling his betrothal and thus prevented himself from producing any direct heirs completely--which is another knock against his claim to conventional masculinity as well as his kingship.

Ironically, because he put away his sisters in a very accessible way, Baelor basically created/encouraged his own temptations and thus his continued devolution into worse and worse zealous narcissism that stuck him in various self-contradictory phases that only a scandal or another internal act of rebellion--Daena's escape and her sex with their cousin Aegon--could change immediately. He even tried to use tax exemptions to encourage others to prevent their daughters from "losing their 'sacred' virginities" in marriage with chastity belts. And the zealous narcissism grew worse in some way like Cersei's narcissist preoccupancy with gaining destructive power over men to become like a man.

He was not actually acting self-sacrificing for the sake of Dorne's real well-regard but for the sake of fulfilling his role as the gods' king, using Andal principles of martyrdom. He was fueled by his own performance of martyrdom, but maybe like Cersei, never really got complete satisfaction both because his arduous emotions cyclically kept getting in his own way and he could not seem to accept that he could never quite be the perfect Faith-Andal king, which I think breeds his own need to prove his uniqueness amongst his family.

[mare-sanguis]

Notes on "Lady Justice" here

Notes on the flowers in ep. 8 here

Notes on the colors in ep.10 here

Notes on the numbers on the car plates of No. 3 and KMC here

It seems like I cant reblog this post by @onomatopagu-et-cie it seems like i have to do it manually 🥲

Anyway, we left off at the symbolism of hands- or more who uses what hand and how it, right now, seems like KMC is ambidextrous.

I gathered some information (during class break, so it might be rushed but i'll read over it again as soon as I got enough time) about the "ambidextrous angel" i mentioned.

All highlighted texts are important to the statement I made earlier.

The paper I'm citating is "The Ambidextrous Angel (Daniel 12:7 and Deuteronomy 32:40): Inner-Biblical Exegesis and Textual Criticism in Counterpoint)" by Eugene P. McGarry (the whole of Deuteronomy 32 is pretty interesting and fitting to the whole topic of the drama- I will come back to this at the end of the post, where I dissect the different things I find the most interesting and important)

Eugene starts his paper with this paragraph where he introduces the angel

He later continues by expanding on what the angel does as soon as they set feet on earth. Tho, here its mentioned the angel only uses one hand to swear an oath, yet in the following paragraphs highlighted it shows it varies and its sometimes rather ambiguous and mysterious if one hand is used or two. Something nobody know of its true or not. There also is a man in "linen clothes" mentioned.

The author elaborates on what the man (presumable also the angel) taunts his people

I will just add all the following paragraphs I found interesting one after another, so its easier to read.

And at last we end with a painting description of Albrecht Dürers woodcut "Johannes, das Buch verschlingend/ Der »Starke Engel" (Saint John, swallowing the book/ The mighty Angel), 1498

-> Sheet 8 from the collection: The Apocalypse.

Excellent, deep black and even impression of the Latin text edition from 1511. With fine margins all around, trimmed only at the bottom right edge and at the top edge in the middle up to the border line.

This eighth paper marks the turning point of the end-time events. The criminal judgment against humanity hereby ended. The “Strong Angel” appears to John on the rocky island of Patmos, pointing to the saved souls in the altar at the top left with his hand raised as if in oath. “And I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven; "He was clothed with a cloud, and had a rainbow on his head, and a face like the sun, and feet like pillars of fire" (Revelation, X, 1). The shapeless angel gives John a book, which he, excited by the words, takes in in order to learn new prophecies. The individual words seem to detach themselves from the pages and flow into Johannes’ mouth. In this way, Dürer symbolizes the divine inspiration that puts the words of his “revelation” into John’s mouth and ultimately moves him to write them down"

-> Now about the Deuteronomy 32

Thats it :,)

I hope i was able to contribute at least a bit to all those hidden symbolisms.

And who ever comes across reading it, I'd love to have a little chat with you to brainrot about it all a little more because so far I have only interacted with two people in this fandom but I really really need more

(oh and this got nothing to do with theories and all but I'd like to mention I published 2 tkv fics to far (KSJ/KMC centered) in tag on ao3, the other 2 should drop in the next few hours...just for anyone whos interested ofc)

[elizmanderson]

Hi again. You made a few posts about first drafts being ridiculous and cleaning them up later. And I desperately need more writers talking about the writing process as they are writing it (like 'making of' posts/ videos, any creator who does those gets me obsessed with them)

Anywho, I was wondering how your revision process looks? How different is your first draft from your last and how did you make the decisions of what to cut vs what to expand on?

I know for myself, my MC is a constant-overthinker and all of faer POV is stream-of-consciousness, and fae goes on a LOT of unnecessary but characterizing tangents that I don't know how to work with, given the corner I wrote myself into.

TLDR - Any info about your revision process would be much appreciated.

Thanks :)

hello and thanks for asking!

first of all, in case anyone is curious about the original post, it's here. also, there are many ridiculous things in this draft of NettieWIP, but that post was brought to you specifically by this line that I wrote even though it's completely tonally wrong for both this book and this character lmao

okay, revisions. this is gonna get long, but I'm breaking it up into sections that will hopefully be helpful.

general process

so the first thing is, my revision process and how much I cut or add is different for every project. but here are some general principles I follow. keep in mind that ymmv with any and all of these! you have to find what works for you. this is just what works for me.

1. finish the draft first

I will never finish a draft if I'm focused on editing while I go. I've been hardcore resisting with NettieWIP because I keep having ideas about how to make it better mid-draft. but I know if I don't finish the draft as-is, it's not going to get done.

2. let it breathe before diving in

sometimes I have the urge to rush right into revisions after finishing a draft, but I do force myself to wait at least a month or two before returning to it. it gives me the emotional distance I need to be able to make decisions about what to cut, no matter how much I like things that don't serve the story.

(again going to have to fight this urge hard with NettieWIP in particular lol)

3. read it before diving in

the one thing that stays consistent from project to project is that I always do a full readthrough before I start revising. highly, highly recommend this regardless of what else works for you! reading through my entire manuscript gives me a big-picture view of the whole story and how all the parts work together (or not), as well as what the problems are.

note: when I do my readthrough, while I do make general notes of my thoughts, I do NOT focus on line-level details or edits. which brings us to...

4. fix big things first

okay jk actually this stays consistent from project to project, too. when approaching revisions, I always start with the biggest changes and work my way down. line edits are the last thing I do, because I figure it wastes my time and energy otherwise. what if I put all this energy into line edits or scene-level changes only to cut half those lines or scenes later when I make structural changes?

5. this is the time to plan!

I'm a plantser, which is somewhere halfway between a plotter and a pantser. while the amount of planning I do before a first draft varies, I always dedicate time to planning before revising. the exact process varies, but it's kinda like this.

read the entire manuscript, making note of plot holes and problem areas

brainstorm potential fixes and where they might fit in

write an outline, synopsis, chapter map, whatever (for me it's usually either a synopsis or chapter map because I simply cannot with outlines)

6. start rewriting

...and as discussed in a different post earlier, I always start the new draft in a new document! you never know when something from an earlier draft could come in handy.

7. use beta readers

I typically do a second draft on my own, because I typically have at least some idea of what needs fixing when I'm done with a first draft. I bring beta readers in once I hit the point where the story's cohesive but I know more work needs to be done, but I'm not sure what that work is.

you specifically asked how I decide what to cut vs. what to expand on, and beta readers are one important way—especially for what to expand on. while I have a habit of overexplaining in many areas, things in my head frequently fail to make it onto the page.

(I think this is because things are obvious to me bc I thought them up. but readers cannot see inside my head, so they may be confused or think a character or plot point is underdeveloped even though I have a lot more information about it mapped out internally.)

if readers feel like information is unnecessary or overexplained or like I'm patronizing them, that's a potential area for cutting. if readers are confused, lack insight, or feel like a reveal came out of nowhere, that's a potential area for expanding. that said...

parsing beta feedback

while outside feedback is important, it's at least equally important to be able to decide what feedback to listen to and what feedback to ignore! not all feedback is good feedback. and even feedback that's technically good may not be good feedback for your story.

for example, I had feedback on the manuscript that's now on sub that was drastically different than the rest of the feedback I received on that same manuscript. I love the beta who gave it to me and I respect their opinion a lot, so I took this feedback seriously. but I couldn't make it work, felt deeply frustrated, and spiraled a bit over my ability to write a book even though it was far from my first.

then I got into Author Mentor Match which I applied to mostly because I need some guidance re: this feedback. my mentor basically said, "I think this is good feedback, but I think it would change this book into a pacier, more action-packed book. and I don't think that's the kind of story you're trying to tell."

and my mentor was right! I think this friend and I are simply interested in different kinds of stories. so as much as they love my stories and as great as they are at giving feedback, their feedback may not be a good fit for me.

usually, I like to look at patterns of feedback.* the more readers agree that a plot point is weak or a reveal doesn't have enough build-up, the more likely it is that I really do need to worry about that.

BUT if a single reader's feedback makes me go oh and I really vibe with it, that's also good feedback to listen to! as long as you know what the heart of your story is, you can follow feedback that helps your story do more of what you want it to do and do it more effectively.

*in my experience, patterns are most helpful when your readers share aspects of your identity. for example, I'm neurodivergent and queer. when most of my readers were neurotypical and straight, I'd get told "this doesn't make sense" "no one thinks/feels like that" "this is unrealistic." and I'd be told that by multiple readers, so I'd decide that meant I had to change the story, even though something deep down told me I was wrong about that, that my betas were wrong about that.

now, most of my readers are neurodivergent and/or queer, so they understand when my characters do or think or feel certain things. and at the very least, they never tell me a character is being "unrealistic" or assume that characters' feelings aren't based on things I have really felt. so particularly for marginalized creators, patterns of feedback may NOT be helpful if your readers do not share your marginalization.

examples of changes to my drafts

cutting and combining

The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher was drafted over a year and a half as part of a last man standing-style writing challenge, so the first draft was 160,000 words. it was pretty obvious I'd have to cut SOMETHING, since I was planning on querying agents.

(recommended for adult fantasy if you're seeking trad pub as a debut author: 120k max word count. better to be lower if you're writing contemporary fantasy, while you can be on the high end if you're writing epic fantasy. other subgenres may fall in between.)

I cut...a lot, in some cases through actually cutting while in other cases combining things. for example, there's a scene now where a dragon attacks Detroit while Our Heroes are delayed there. It used to be separate scenes: Edna & Co. delayed in Detroit, with not much happening except the reason for the delay, and a later scene where they came across a random dragon attack elsewhere. additionally, the secondary antagonist runs around with an old friend who used to be two separate characters: the character he is now, and another old friend of theirs who was just sort of a generic asshole who didn't serve much purpose in the story.

thanks to cutting and combining scenes and characters this way, the story moves along faster, the stakes involved in those scenes and characters are higher, and everything is more tightly tied together. when I finally queried, Remarkable Retirement was down to just 98,000 words (published at 99,000 words).

similarly, in the book now on sub (Buried Things aka GroundskeeperWIP), I cut most of a short chapter from the antagonist's POV. I tried it as a prologue but didn't like that I don't do prologues in general although I know some folks love them, then tried moving it later but didn't like that either, and finally ended up just using bits of it that I felt were particularly useful in a chapter focused on a different character. I also cut a chapter from the POV of a friendly ghost/wingman from beyond the grave (but have it saved in case a future editor's like "you know what we need—")

worth noting that Buried Things wasn't massively overwritten. I think the longest draft was 104k or 106k, while it's on sub at about 90k (and the entirety of the last 4,000 words I cut from it was through line edits, not plot changes). however, both chapters stalled the story without adding much. what they did add, I was able to incorporate into other chapters instead.

expanding

while Remarkable Retirement's need for cuts was more obvious, some things were also expanded upon, especially with my publisher! my editor felt that the romantic subplot needed a little more build-up—not in terms of what happens or how it happens, but in terms of making it clearer why these two people start to have those feelings. similarly, a friend who read Buried Things thought it was great overall but that a particular character wasn't fleshed out enough.

in both cases, I think it was that instance of "things in my head do not always make it onto the page." when my friend had questions about the character in Buried Things, I had answers; those answers just weren't on the page. same thing with the romantic subplot in Remarkable Retirement. so it was a matter of taking what was in my head and making sure it actually came across on the page, although in other cases I may realize I don't already know that stuff and need to brainstorm to develop it more.

both together

in the case of NettieWIP, even though I'm not done drafting yet, I already know some stuff I'll need to cut and expand on! I find I'm repeating myself a lot in this draft, plus it's very dialogue heavy. so I'll need to cut back on some themes and emotions I keep bringing up, as well as trim down the dialogue and let the murder investigation not be entirely conversation.

conversely, there's virtually no setting description or atmosphere, so those are things I'll want to expand on in revisions.

tl;dr: in conclusion

okay this got really long because if you get me talking about writing it is impossible to shut me up, but here are the major takeaways for everyone playing along at home:

my general process: (1) finish the draft; (2) let the draft breathe; (3) read the entire draft; (4) focus on big-picture changes first; (5) plan your revision/rewrite; (6) rewrite/revise; (7) use beta readers

knowing the heart of your story helps you figure out what to cut, what to keep, and what to expand on

knowing the heart of your story helps you figure out what feedback might be useful and what feedback might not be right for this book

it can also helpful to look for patterns of feedback, but this is mostly helpful when your beta readers share your identity, particularly if you are a marginalized creator

thanks so much for giving me an excuse to drone on and on about writing your question!

[rallamajoop]

Hi !! I've followed your fics across multiple fandoms, and I've always been really impressed by how quickly and consistently you're able to put out works. How are you able to write seemingly so quickly?! Do you use betas? Do you spend a lot of time planning, or are you more of a chapter by chapter writer? I'm always really fascinated by people's process. Thank you if you answer this, and have a good day!! :D

Well, thank you first of all ‒ it's always such an ego-boost to know anyone's following me across fandoms! But as for 'how I write so fast', I think 'seemingly' may be most of your answer. I do like to have some fic to post every week or so, but my consistency on that comes and goes. I've done okay so far this year, but only if you ignore the part where I posted nothing during the whole month of February, or in the entire last quarter of 2023 ‒ and there was a solid 6 month gap where I posted nothing back in 2022 as well.

Back before I hit my current stride in Witcher fandom a few years back, months or longer between fics was even more the norm for me. Productivity on the fic-writing front comes and goes in bursts for me for all sorts of reasons. But it's not unusual for several bits and pieces I've had not-quite-finished for months to end up getting posted close together though, even after I've been quiet for a while, which might help with the illusion I'm better at keeping up that schedule than is really accurate.

Even when I am actually managing to keep that weekly schedule, a lot of what I post is short (2K or less), and gets lumped together into anthology-fics like Spare Parts, Viscera or The Beast of Castle Heisenberg (and other stories) (which also saves on the minor hassle of thinking up proper titles for them all). Coming up with short concepts like that is something I've always enjoyed doing (going all the way back to my time in xxxHolic fandom over a decade ago). Occasionally, I'll come back later and expand them into something longer (another habit that started way back in Holic fandom, actually), but posting them as shorts means that at least I've posted something, even if the longer version never happens. Whenever a fic works as shorter chapters, I'll post it that way ‒ it's just easier to edit in smaller chunks (and I can't really overstate how big of a motivator positive feedback is for me, if it does go down well with people).

Obviously, not everything I post lends itself to being broken down ‒ smut particularly tends to require much longer scenes, but stories like that have often been in progress for months before they actually get posted. At 15K in a single chapter, Quarantine stands out as the longest thing I've posted in years that I couldn't find any way to break down into shorter pieces ‒ and I'd been working on that one on-and-off since around, oh, August last year? Having multiple different things in progress at once works for me, because if I'm not in the mood to work on one, maybe I'm more in the mood to work on another. I'll often bash out rough drafts of various parts of a few different ideas in one spell if I'm in a good mood to just sit down and write, then come back to finish and polish them later. A lot of my ideas build themselves around dialogue ‒ having a good sense of the characters' voices is really central to how I think about writing for them ‒ so a lot of scenes might start as just dialogue, and then I'll come back and flesh out the rest later.

Planning… really depends on the length of the fic? Sometimes you need to know exactly where a story is going just to figure out how to start it, other times you don't realise half of what's really going on in a scene until you're in the middle of actually writing it down. For example, I currently have about three more (very rough) chapters of Follow Me Home sitting in a word document, which is as much of that story as I had planned out in real detail ‒ the rest consists of scattered scenes I know I'm aiming for later on. But in the process of writing them, I realised more or less exactly what needs to happen in chapter 4, so that's encouraging ‒ we'll see where it goes from there.

For years now, I've done most of my writing on laptops ‒ before that, first drafts were mostly scribbled down by hand in notebooks. I own a desktop computer too, but that gets used for so much else (work, gaming, watching videos, etc etc) that I find it's useful to have a separate platform that's 'for' writing, that's portable, something I can curl up with in a beanbag with, and (crucially) presents less distractions. A notebook or a low-spec laptop (my current one is a tiny tablet computer) is also something I can get out on the bus on the way to work or in a cafe while waiting for a meal. I wouldn't say I do most of my writing out of the home like that, but it's definitely a long-established habit.

It does help that I've been writing long enough to be reasonably confident with the general process of sitting down to make a story happen. I'm reasonably lucky just having the time and energy to dedicate to all this fannish nonsense, and to have an enthusiastic beta-reader/BFF who's always encouraging about my work ‒ she's seriously a huge help (and probably too kind with her critiques, if anything). It has taken many years of doing this to get to the point where I can do something like (for a recent example) realise there's a week or two left before the a challenge deadline and go, "oh, sure, I can bash out a few thousand words worth of smut in that time to fill a treat for that prompt I liked." But as a rule, a posting rate of maybe a couple thousand words a week, not every week, isn't that much of an output (it's probably a lot more if you count all the fannish meta I churn out too, but I mostly don't think about that too much). But writing means a lot to me, even if it's mostly fannish nonsense that makes no money, so it's something I'll make time for.

If I've got any advice that might be useful to someone else, it's to suggest that getting yourself to write something is usually better than sitting on something you're blocked on, even if that does mean perpetually getting distracted by the shiny new idea instead of staying bogged down on the huge WIP you promised yourself you'd finish (and maybe you will come back to that WIP later, fresher for having given your brain a change of scene ‒ or maybe not, that's not the end of the world either). Short fic is fine, more words do not automatically make a story better, and unfinished WIPs are just a fact of fandom (or even original writing). Part of the joy of fanfic is that you can jump straight to the novel bits, trusting your readers already know who these people are and how the base story goes (seriously, the number of fics out there that spend chapter after chapter just retelling canon in prose form boggles my brain).

But like all writing advice, if that doesn't sound like it'd be useful advice to you, it probably isn't ‒ what works for people can be terribly individual. No-one's obligated to aim for a couple of thousand words per week (let alone per day, to hit NaNoWriMo or Stephen King levels of productivity) if they're just writing as a hobby.

And I hope you're having a good day too. *g*

[blocksruinedme]

Actual fic deadlines/priorities

Now till September 2 - My three hermitshipping bang fics are due, in a complete "can post if you got hit by a bus" version. Last possible extensions till September 8. I don't know if I'll get all three done. If I don't, I can't predict whether I'll put it down for awhile or try to get through it. If I want to wait to post, I can still possibly get the "doodle tier" of art and can add it to the collection, which is just so chill and cool of them, everything is chill and cool

September 3-18 - The burning man fics, god, I really want to post them during my (partial) top surgery and recovery. The current plan is to post chapter of three stories a day, that line up with time periods. (Like the first posting day covers approximately noon-2pm, etc). The current plan is for the final story to be posted on the final day. This means for anyone who pops in at the beginning, they can have three kinds of cliffhangers! I personally think it's super cool

September 19-late September - Recovering from surgery! If anyone has any tips, please let me know! I'm very excited! And I've had a "6 days inpatient three months recovery" surgery, so it's really about the detail of a different surgery recovery.

Late september-deceber: God, first my wips, my poor beautiful wips, along with the larper au (which might top out at three fics, we'll see... and immediately on writing that i got possessed with a flower husbands idea, very well! NO PROMISES). I'll also be editing my hermitshipping bang fics, which are allowed to be totally expanded on, including adding B plots, so... I might go off the rails there.

Onwards: If life goes to plan, sometime in 2024, probably late spring or later, I will have WAY less free time, and while I am very excited about the reason, it might stop fic entirely for awhile. @that-tall-queer-bassist has offered to help me (including up to cleaning up my speech to text into something like real notes or maybe prose). Part of why I push so hard to write is because my time having this much time is limited.

Crucial note about how I write: Sometimes what I need to work on fic is to go work on a different fic, and sometimes even publish it. I had a huge drought after limited life when i told myself I couldn't publish anything else, until i let myself do Driving After Dark and, well, I've published about 44k in 2.5 months. Sometimes I get stuck and all I can do is take a break. I now refuse to push myself hard enough on a fic that I burn out.

I genuinely have 20 wips that I want to publish. I acknowledge this is unlikely but they are all my weird little children. Things may appear in wip wednesday and never make it.

What does that note mean for you: Do not EVER pressure me to finish a fic. You may ALWAYS express enthusiasm for specific fic, and it may get it higher up the queue. Asking about timing is tricky. "i was wondering if you know when you might be publishing this one" - in practice has not upset me. "(affectionately) what happened to posting the next chapter in november?" - ruined my fucking day. Had to stop myself from a mean spirited essay about all the reasons it hadn't happened. I can not tell you how to ask this correctly. You now have this schedule here, and you can ask about how it's going (perhaps in an ask) if it's in a chill manner! I'll totally answer, including if any of the bang fics have been officially dropped from the bang (and thus i can tell you my neat ideas! all i'll say is there's some very me things and at least on surprise that might keep people from guessing it's me!)

Anyway follow @burningmanau for fun burning man pictures and fic stuff!

[somuchcoffeeandwine]

Fuck it, I'm in a mood, I'm showing off the designs of my story's characters.

We'll start with the main characters. More about them here. Beware some of these guys are older, so my drawings are a bit inconsistent. I most recently redesigned Mayju and Arina, although I'm not sure on patterns for her skirt. Mind you, this is going to turn into a horror story. Image ID's will be updated later.

This is Sitaare's design. Both of them. They change at a time through the story, but it's spoilers. Important note is that she is short. The picture doesn't show it off well, but she's 4' 11" (150 cm for non-freedom unit users)

Next up, we have Mayju's design. I'm not showing the secondary one, as it's not very different to this one, just some major changes for story reasons. You get to see Thaddeus' though. That one's pretty sweet.

Then we have Thaddeus, both of them. He's a little involved with the story, but is mostly there as a convenient form of transportation.

Next up, Jo and Agate. Yet again their later designs are spoilers. Like major, major ones.

Echo time! Both of her designs aren't spoilers thank god. You could also convince me to post her dads, because I spend too much time making minor characters. Spent like three hours designing the named characters for Sitaare's section yesterday.

Briar Nei! I actually prefer her second design, might make that her first design. But who knows! I would like opinions. I can always make other designs.

Zoe and Arki don't change much. They might have a kid at some point. That's what happen to the Sims version of them. I was playing with someone else and they decided to adopt. Or actually had one. I have no idea. Yes I made them all in the Sims. It's great.

Cade is pretty sweet and all of her (foster) kids have designs now. I will not be showing them, but I can show you the sweet Cade design. She doesn't change. It looks a little weird, she was holding her shovel, but then I decided to put a tattoo on her, so I had to move it so I could reference it

Queenie Beanie! This is more two different outfits, but one's a different era (LIKE TAYLOR SWIFT) I was told to include that by my sibling. I hate her by the way. Anyways, she's Sad.

Toma Toma Toma (To the tune of Ghetis' battle theme) Debating if his second design is a spoiler, but who cares! I'm proud of it, I'm posting it. Keep in mind these two are like 16 in their first designs.

Then we have Arina. Not very happy with the skirt, so I will be tweaking that (She needs more patterns, in accordance to her inspirations) You don't get Yuki. She's a spoiler. Major one. And don't worry, the skirt comes off when she's hunting. She's not that irresponsible. Now bringing a child into the field, yeah, she'd do that.

Anyways, should I post various more artworks and or the first kinda revised chapter? It features Sitaare and her intro. That's what the first 10 chapters are. Introductions. Mind you, this is the second edition of the story. The first was over 350 pages, and not even close to done. The rewrite is currently 60 pages. I do need to expand a couple of chapters, so it will be longer.

Here's my writing/drawing music, if you need it.

[autobot-scout-riella]

1, 2, 7, 9 and 15 for Shatterpoint? uwu

ask me about my fics | accepting

1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?

It's been a WIP for eight years, so there was a lot of inspiration along the way. The core ideas - someone getting trapped in her own head in the process of protecting herself, needing someone else's help to undo it even after she was physically safe, and not being able to get someone else out with her - came out of the two years I spent at a residential boarding school (no, mine wasn't on the level of the kinds of places that make the news, but I still can't recommend the experience).

Everything else was built out of things I was interested in exploring - telepathy without the required secondary powers to make it useful, the kinds of things that might have happened during the war before Cybertron died, elements of Bayverse that I liked in theory but not in execution. Also, girl robots. Basically Shatterpoint is the super-long plotty fic that I really wanted to read and couldn't find.

As for why I went with the "write the whole damn thing and then post it one chapter at a time" approach, I wanted it to be done because I have a bad habit of not finishing WIPs if I post too early, but I also wanted the fun of watching people yell about my carefully chosen cliffhangers.

2: What scene did you first put down?

The very first scene I ever wrote for it was a very early version of the Ion Storm fight that ended up in Chapter 14. It was a lot more of a fight at the time; the posted version is pretty one-sided, because all the characters involved went through drastic changes in the edits. Riella is the only character who stayed involved all the way through the edits - I don't think the Decepticon antagonist originally had a name at all, and Red Alert's role rotated through half a dozen people.

7: Where did the title come from?

The title just popped into my head back when I was working on the cortical psychic patch scene for the first time - at the time, I didn't know where it came from, but it was so perfect for both that scene and the broader fic themes that I didn't question it. It's been Shatterpoint basically since I started working on it.

I later realized I'd stolen it from a 2003 Star Wars Expanded Universe novel. Thankfully it's pretty good, so I don't have to feel weird about the association.

9: Were there any alternate versions of this fic?

It went through a lot of alternate versions over the years! Originally it was just three scenes in my head (the Ion Storm fight, the cortical psychic patch, and the one I just posted today). Basically everything not in those scenes has changed at least twice.

-Riella wasn't originally an Autobot spy. That got adjusted for "it's too convoluted" reasons. The specific Autobots that rescued her also changed up a few times - I went through and cut out a bunch of characters at one point because there were "too many", only to add back an equal number in the final draft.

-Project Trypticon went through a bunch of different types of mad science, with the antagonist in the chapter 28 scene not always being related to it. Shockwave really was trying to make his own custom outliers at one point, like First Aid speculates in the early chapters. I think I also bounced around Predacons and combiners, though neither of those made it out of the plot notes stage.

-The character death in the Ion Storm fight was a relatively late addition. The plot was in desperate need of some actual stakes, First Aid wasn't doing what I needed him to do, and near-death injuries weren't cutting it.

-Soundwave showed up at one point. I cut him out almost immediately, because he made the Decepticon side of the plot impossible unless I made every single character deeply unintelligent and also a terrible person. Relatedly, Prowl was originally a lot less likable (not that he really is now, but he was a real piece of work in the early drafts). Had that characterization stayed, Riella would have punched him at one point.

-That Thing That Just Happened In Chapter 28 was always planned to happen, but after I started posting the fic and saw which characters people responded to, I started bouncing around an AU in my head where it didn't happen. It was never an option for the actual fic, but somewhere there's a parallel universe where the war ended super early in a few spectacular explosions.

15: What did you learn from writing this fic?

On a purely technical level, I learned a lot about writing and editing and what worked and what didn't through the process of writing it. I didn't have a beta reader (aside from a friend who very kindly read over the early Electron sections to make sure I wasn't doing anything weird), but I went to college and got an English degree right in the middle of working on it; I went through my drafts pretty regularly to apply the stuff I was learning in class and could literally watch the fic get better right in front of me. It's one reason I'm glad I was determined to finish it before posting, because it is so much better now than it was eight years ago. (Not perfect! There's a couple chapters I still want to edit chapter 20-21, looking at you. But a whole lot better.) I also figured out about halfway through the writing process that some of the themes were IMAX-level projection, which both gave me some things to chat about in therapy and some places where I needed to adjust the writing to be less me and more character.

On a less-serious note, I learned that fight scenes work a lot better if I stand up and wave a sword around for a while to get a feel for what motions the characters are making, that I ship Lancer/Greenlight/Arcee, and that no matter how hard I try to finish the fic in advance, I will be editing right up until the second I hit post.

[armoricaroyalty]

hi! do you have any tips for a new/just starting out royal simblr? anything you can tell me is greatly appreciated.

also, one more thing: any tips for how to place/adjust tiaras using the hat slider? i’m seriously losing my actual mind over here trying to position tiaras and i don’t even know if i’m doing it right 🤣 ty!

You know, a while ago I actually started writing a guide for new royal simblr but it ended up in my enormous pile of "projects I'll return to when my free time returns from the war!" Here's some of the highlights.

Know what you want to get out of your story... Are you telling a story because you're excited about the community aspect, meeting new people, participating in community events, and making friends? Are you looking to challenge yourself and grow your skills as a story-teller, pose-maker, or editor? Do you want to dress your sims up in pretty clothes and make them smooch? Figure out what you want to accomplish with your story, and prioritize the parts of it that enable you to do that thing.

...but don't do it for notes. There's a big difference between joining a community to make friends and enjoy your shared hobby and joining a community with the intention of building a following and getting a lot of likes, comments, and asks. We all like it when the numbers go up, but focusing exclusively (or almost exclusively) on the numbers is a great way to kill your passion for your story. Comparison is the thief of joy. Write for yourself, not the audience you think another simmer has.

Start small, start simple. Your story will naturally develop in complexity as you revise your outlines and edit posts. The stories you follow might be packed with intricate drama and lots of moving parts, but they (probably) didn't start out that way. Don't feel like you need to roll out a complicated story with a cast of dozens and extensive family trees...you'll have a hard time keeping track of it, and so will your readers. Some of the best story-telling advice I ever got came from a tabletop roleplaying game manual via an actual play podcast: draw maps, leave blank spaces. Know the shape of your story but leave yourself space to improvise and embroider later on.

Pick a good entry point. Expanding on the point above, (imo) the best way to get started is to have a small core cast with clearly-defined relationships reacting to some kind of status-quo altering event, and then building the plot and world out from there. For example: what happens when the elderly king's only living child dies? Does he divorce his also-elderly wife and marry his 20-year-old sidepiece in the hopes of producing a new heir, or does he reconcile with his estranged brother and declare him heir? That's a cast of four (five if you count the dead son) with a lot of baked-in drama and intrigue. Readers are going to want to know what happens next. I want to know what happens next. Someone write this story and send it to me.

A lot of the rest of the guide I have drafted is just me tiredly making a case for making sims who don't look exactly identical, so I'll save that for another day.

ETA: no tips for the hat slider, sorry. i’m constantly fucking that one up, too.