#narrative distance

[mysterycitrus]

their relationship is complex and not entirely definable but if u look me in the eyes and tell me that dick grayson isn’t bruce waynes first kid im not gonna take u super seriously. sowwy

[barrel-crow-n]

Kaz's petnames for his crows:

Inej: Darling Inej treasure of my heart

Jesper: Jes

Nina: Dear/Love/Darling etc.

Wylan: Merchling

Matthias: Big Fjerdan

[essektheylyss]

I am absolutely agonizing over pov and narrators for this draft that I am literally nearly done with, and it did make me wonder how much importance other writers give these things. So I am running a poll.

To preface, the following notes and elaborations on the options:

"Crucial" would mean that it has a significant impact on your writing process up to and including impacting your ability to progress.

"Important but not crucial" would mean that you consider it, and it does have an impact on the story you're telling, but it does not significantly hinder your process.

"Inconsequential" would be something like, you kinda just pick something and go with it, and do not find yourself rethinking that later.

I ran out of room with the options regarding one or both being important at the start, but that can be either crucial or merely important. If you mess around with your pov or narrators within, say, the first 10% of a draft, but don't really worry about it once you feel like you've settled on something, these are the options for you.

If you feel so inclined, elaborate in the tags on what kinds of things you weigh when you think about one or both of these! I'm curious!

[seriouslycalamitous]

Madagio said “don’t make attachments” at the same time as the cinematic was hovering over a field of roses so HAH HIDEDUO

SUCK IT FACELESS ENTITY, I WILL ALWAYS FIND A WAY TO WIN.

[definitelynotshouting]

My favorite flavour of desert duo/scarian fan work is like. Both scar and Grian are hopelessly in love but Grian just Doesn’t Let Them. Because he’s insane. But then scar is scar and. well. no one’s immune to the good times. does that makes sense

Literally my favorite flavour of scarian truly. Grian cannot be Normal EVER and Scar isnt Normal either he's just Not Normal in slightly different but complimentary directions. And then ofc, the good times<3 sorry Grian but you are Not immune and you WILL be kissing him<3

[north-blue-hearts]

Could Law deal with a someone who als has a bad trauma? Would he comfort him/her or keep a distance because it reminds him of his own sad fate? 🙄🤔

I think his personal experiences and compassion would make him capable of dealing with an s/o that also has trauma. It's definitely a "lean against each other" situation in that case.

That said, I think he tends to keep people at arms' length, and he'll remind you he's a surgeon, not a therapist, but someone who probably wants to be accepted despite his own trauma, I'm sure he's not going to distance someone else for it.

[hajihiko]

I don’t use the word kin, but I do say I relate to characters. I believe it’s technically the same thing but idk kin just… bothers me? Fine for other people but not my cup of tea

oh yeah idc if other people use that I just don't

[drfrankensteinvsthequeerborgs]

honestly for me one of the scariest things about Supernatural is the seeming inevitability of the cycle of violence, John knows this is an appalling way to raise a child but he does it anyway, Sam gets away for a few years only to return loving the job, Dean does to Jack the same things John did to him. and a sizable chunk of that is Chuck forcing them to become the worst versions of themselves but it’s terrifying how they can end up being the very thing they swore never to become

[tbcanary]

Black Canary miniseries by Tom King confirmed. Excited? Thoughts?

i am struggling with this so much tbh because it’s like. t*m k*ng wrote one of my favorite runs of all time with supergirl: woman of tomorrow, but those feelings are not consistent across his career. i find the current ww run to be. um. weird, at minimum, and bad at best, and that’s with a character i don’t have nearly as many feelings about. (no disrespect to diana, obviously, i just deeply love dinah.)

esp considering the series is going to involve dinah and lady shiva, i would say i am less “excited” and more “tom if you fuck this up i will hunt you down.” for all that i love lady shiva and the ways she and dinah CAN play off one another, the fact is oftentimes dinah is used to make asian women look inferior or to extend the problematic tropes they’re already forced into in comics constantly. i fear a “dinah and lady shiva battle it out to see who is the best fighter” premise is just… full of problems, for me, and they’d have to tell one hell of a story to win me back.

(lest we forget, we already know someone who beat lady shiva in hand to hand combat and proved herself to be a superior fighter. her name is cassandra cain, and she has also trained dinah in the past. i find her exclusion in the summaries i’ve been able to find to be pretty telling as to how carefully and thoughtfully this all will be approached, which is to say, not very.)

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

Just finished reading Pez Dispenser Debris (I don’t even go there but I am fueled by Wiki articles and a love for your storytelling) and first of all—amazing!!! 10/10, I think I need to watch this series now. 

Second, I  noticed that (while very much distinct) Yuuta & Izuku have a lot of similarities in the voice you gave them—maybe it’s the constant panic attacks or perhaps both of  them placing blame for everything squarely on their own shoulders, but ough it makes for the perfect blend of gut-punching angst. I’d love to hear any ramblings you currently have about either of them. I am currently obsessed with both of them now and am placing the blame on you <3

I’m gonna pretty heavily discuss some spoilers for my hero academia in this. I figured that was okay since you’d already read my fanfic and the wiki so the cat is out of the metaphorical bag. That being said, maybe wait to read this answer if you want to not be spoiled for more details in my hero.

Yuuta and Izuku absolutely have the most similar voices out of all of my narrators and it is 90% because they are both completely insane and in violent need of a Xanax and a nice soothing cup of chamomile tea. God I love them both so much. They should each be heavily medicated.

My hero academia is a pretty great watch through the Shie Hassaikai arc. The concept is entertaining, the characters are GREAT, and the world building is really cool.

Then the story sort of. Went to shit.

I tried for a while after that, but eventually had to stop watching. My friends and I have a group chat named “horikoshi just call us” because we got so despondent at the writing decisions after that arc.

Horikoshi. If you’re out there. If you’re reading this. Just call us. We just want to help.

That being said, my love for the characters maintains its death grip on me. I simply adore them. They’re delights.

Yuuta and Izuku, on their face, have a lot of similarities as protagonists. The aforementioned insanity and need of Xanax, of course, but the skeleton of the stories has a lot of common touchstones and themes, like:

Both characters have some kind of history with suicidal ideation or tendencies. In the second scene of JJK0, it’s established that Yuuta canonically tried to kill himself. In the first episode of BNHA, Izuku is told to kill himself by his bullies, in an act which appears to be common to izuku’s life, and the only reason Izuku comes up with to not do it is “then you’d get in trouble for telling me to do it.”

Both characters have severe self worth issues. Yuuta’s looking for a reason to be alive at the start of JJK0. He’s looking for a right to be alive. In a way, Izuku is too at the start of BNHA. At the open of action, he is told by everyone in his life that he is useless. His nickname is “Deku,” which uses some of the same kanji as “Dekunobo,” meaning blockhead. The most direct translation were given is that this is a way of calling him useless. He’s the powerless member of a society choked with superpower, and he’s been told his entire life that he can do nothing, that his dreams are pointless, and that he’s a burden who would be better off dead.

They’re both saddled with power they can’t fully control. Yuuta with Rika, and Izuku with One for All, a transferable power that’s too strong to be contained in his body.

They both have a close relationship with an impossibly strong mentor that they are implied to be the successor of. Yuuta with Gojo, as he’s second only to Gojo in the modern age, and Izuku with All Might (aka Toshinori Yaga), who he is more literally taking on the mantle of One for All from.

They both are chugging that Loving Their Friends Juice and have tried to kill grown men with their bare hands as a result

That all being said, they could not be more different characters and honestly aren’t all that similar.

I have this sort of lasting grievance with literary analysis when people take a list of common plot points or events and use them to make the argument that characters are similar or parallel one another. Like, that’s all facial. The real question is how do they substantively handle those events. How do their story arcs treat those things? How does their character react to them?

Yuuta and Izuku’s actual substantive characters don’t really react to those events in the same way at all. The analysis could go on all day in this respect, really, but the biggest difference is how their respective story arcs treat the cornerstone of their original conflicts.

Yuuta opens action with Rika as the cornerstone of his conflict. She’s who he wants to free, she’s who he’s chained to, and it’s her protection of him that makes him think he deserves to die. Izuku’s cornerstone, meanwhile, is his own Quirklessness. He desperately wants to be a hero, and everyone in his life tells him he can’t be because he is Quirkless. He’s useless because he’s Quirkless. He should kill himself because he’s Quirkless. He’s a burden and always will be because he’s Quirkless.

And while Yuuta’s arc reconciles him with his cornerstone, Izuku’s forgoes it entirely.

The story just. Forgets. That he’s Quirkless. They stop talking about it. It never comes up again. It doesn’t make any real big impact on his character or decisions. It’s one of my biggest axes to grind with how the story developed, and it’s actually one of the biggest reasons why I wrote pez dispenser debris.

Pez dispenser debris was actually inspired by this one piece of my hero academia art where Izuku is hugging his younger self. I don’t know if it was official art or fan art, and I have no idea where it is or where to find it because by god have I tried so I can find it and link it for credit/to boost it. I saw it literally years ago, thought “oh that’s cool,” wrote the original first scene of the fic (where Midoriya stops the bus and is hit by the Quirk), wasn’t feeling it, got distracted by other projects, went to law school, graduated law school, signed up to take the bar exam, and was suddenly electrified in the last fucking month of studying with this fugue state of feverish artistic inspiration. I have never written so easily or so compulsively in my life. I’d write for eight unbroken hours and it would be fucking magic every time. It was like an addiction. I was writhing with a need to create and had so much fucking anxiety about the test I was not studying for instead. The words could not be restrained.

Anyway I taught myself three subjects on the plane ride to the state I was taking it in and passed anyway so it’s fine we’re fine

The moral of the story is that this story has been cooking long enough for me to get two more diplomas than I had when I started it and I have no idea where to find that fucking piece of art that inspired it, but if I find it, I’ll reblog it so y’all can see it too.

The thing is, the narrative sort of forcibly excluding Izuku’s past as Quirkless would make total sense to me if it was used as something Izuku himself was doing.

Izuku necessarily had to hide the truth of his former Quirkless status at the start of action—he needed to keep the secret of One for All. Like, he could not let people find out that a Quirk was transferrable, but you know, just the most powerful one, and also he had it, please come torture it out of him.

But as the narrative goes on, that rationale becomes less important. He has people he can trust with it. And yeah, eventually One for All becomes more known, but the discussion is all about him being all might’s successor. Him being Quirkless and how that affected him and still affects him isn’t really discussed or treated as important. And Izuku doesn’t act like it’s important to him either. He never really thinks about it.

And I just hated that. Like. He spent almost his entire life as a member of society who was spit on. He’s had a Quirk for less than a year. How are his experiences with Quirklessness not important to how he interacts with the world?

The other point of contention I had was Mirio.

Mirio is this superstar of a senpai who takes Izuku under his wing. He has an extremely powerful quirk that’s only as effective as it is because he put in the work and learned how to handle it. He’s a perfect, eternally smiling paragon of heroism. He’s flagged early as the one out of everyone, including heroes with established careers, who is most likely to replace All Might.

He’s also the one who was supposed to get One for All.

His mentor had found him and trained him to be All Might’s successor. Before All Might could meet him, however, he found this feral raccoon child in a sewer and said “oh my god I can’t not offer him incomprehensible power within the first three hours of meeting him” and tripped face first into fatherhood.

During a rescue mission, Mirio loses his Quirk in a way that’s borderline irreversible. There’s no known cure, and the only possible one is dependent on a little girl learning how to control an extremely volatile and dangerous quirk and using it in a way she never has before.

So surely, they’re going to commit to that writing decision, right? He’s Quirkless. We’re bringing back having Quirkless characters. It’s going to be this sick as hell juxtaposition between Izuku and Mirio. We are at least going to force Izuku to reflect on his own times as Quirkless or have some kind of discussion about how Mirio is treated differently now that he is Quirkless.

But no. He gets his Quirk back by the next season. We don’t talk about it much. It’s more of a minor inconvenience than anything.

It’s almost as if the show accepted as an actual rule that you couldn’t be a hero without a Quirk. And then just. Forgot. Everything it had to do with its literal protagonist.

Anyway, I hated it.

In contrast, I fucking loved how yuuta’s storyline with Rika ends. That scene where Yuuta’s turning back to Rika, thanking her for loving him, telling him they can die together? I’m obsessed with it. I recently moved across the country and listened to that theme song on loop during the drive.

Yuuta and Rika’s love was unhealthy. They hurt each other. But it wasn’t malicious.

They just didn’t know how to love each other in a way that didn’t hurt.

They were in shit circumstances. But the love was there.

Yuuta felt guilty for Rika’s love for him and his for her almost the entire narrative. He thought he cursed her with his love. He wanted to kill himself because of how she hurt people out of love for him. It’s why I have moments in sea glass gardens where Yuuta talks about begging Rika to stop loving him—he didn’t know why love had to hurt so goddamn bad, and he’s sorry for that, he really is. He wishes he was better at it than he was.

At the end of JJK0, Yuuta truly is the last person who remembers Rika as she was and still loves her for who she is. He’s faced with Geto, who wants to use her as a weapon. Everyone treats her as a threat or a tool, except for Yuuta.

Like. Just that moment. Of loving someone so genuinely, and being the last one who does, and knowing that everyone else will just use them. I’m obsessed with it.

Yuuta reconciles with his love for Rika and her love for him, and they’re both finally freed. It’s this perfect moment of acceptance that I adore. He comes to terms with his past. It doesn’t hurt him so much anymore.

I wrote pez dispenser debris to sort of force Izuku to have that kind of reconciliation. As it is, he hasn’t reconciled with his own Quirklessness and how that affected him. I wanted to give him something he couldn’t physically escape and had to face.

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

btw someone remind me to write out my thoughts on how Love From the Other Side is a conversation between two people but sung by one

[quillkiller]

Lily would never be a feminist she doesn’t support women at all

REAL AND TRUE !!!!!

she only becomes a feminist if she gets to become an adult.. 🤍

[poebrey]

still a bit annoyed that disco’s final season unintentionally focused on someone else’s return to the captains chair after taking three whole seasons to make Michael captain, an entire season after Saru, and only after he stepped down

[splickedylit]

excerpting

Domestic Diplomacy II is turning out to be even more "splickedy gratuitously gets caught in the weeds of xenosociology and alien language barriers, the fic sequel" and tbh I'm not mad about it

--

“Oh, your moirail!” says Jade, and bounces upright, ignoring John’s wary little soft human cautionary hiss.  To your vague surprise, she’s apparently learned enough not to do the human holding-out-a-hand gesture they usually do when they’re introduced; she clasps her hands in front of her, nonexistent claws politely folded in, and ducks her head briefly forward and to one side, careful not to jab at him with her nonexistent horns. 

It's a pretty passable greeting—for a social equal, which is its own bizarre issue, considering he’s a highblood.  But relatively non-offensive, for a human, and fortunately for her she’s picked a highblood who isn’t likely to give a shit.  Gamzee laughs out loud and gives his own lazy-ass version of a greeting back, a vague twist of his wrists and dip of his head, condescending to use an equal’s greeting back at her.   When he says “Gamzee Makara,” there’s a hint of a threatening buzz to it, a testing you should know to respect me warning—you could have told him she’d show absolutely no sign of hearing it, which is exactly what happens.

“I’m Jade Harley!  I meet you,” Jade says, a carefully neutral statement-of-fact greeting—not fawning or hostile.  You don’t know if humans are out here just learning neutral address no matter what, or if this human particularly just doesn’t give a shit that your moirail’s a fuck-off mutant-huge highblood with horns that scrape the ceiling of the block—by the expectant way she looks up at Gamzee afterward, she wouldn’t give much of a shit either way.  Out of all of the humans, Jade Harley might actually win the prize for giving the least shits, no matter what Rose and Dave like to pretend.

“Yeah, I meet you too, motherfucker,” says Gamzee, looking incredibly amused, and glances down at you.  “She’s a rude-ass little motherfuckin’ toothful, huh?  I like her.”

“Of course you do,” you say, pained.  “Don’t take it personally, alright?  You’re not a highblood here, they don’t get highbloods.”

“Oh, best friend,” says Gamzee, and kisses your nugbone again, embarrassingly.  “I’m a highblood wherever the fuck I go.  It’s cool though.  Squishy-ass little motherfuckers won’t get any grief from me.”

“<Motherfucker>,” Jade repeats behind you, and switches back to English, in the bright, wide verbal tone you’re starting to learn means ‘smiling and happy’, weird interstitial ‘vowel’ breath-sounds further back in the throat through pulled-back mouth-corners.  “Hmm, <motherfucker>…  Oh, neat!  Is that dialect?  It sounds like, ahh, what’s that other word.  Kk—kkkht—  Uh, dammit.  You guys need to learn how to use vowels—  It sounds like <;brother>.”

“It is like,” you say, surprised despite yourself.  “&lt;Brother> is a troll, and <motherfucker> you put it all spots you want.  It’s a thing, it’s a troll, it’s a, tss, a doing-things word, it’s a name.  It’s bad, it’s good.  Any spot you want.  And he does want, for all those, all the time.”

[compacflt]

i'm so curious: what's your favorite thing you've written? something that makes you nod and go, "yeah, that's it right there. i did that." just the best combination of words you've ever churned out in your personal opinion. it makes you proud just Thinking about it. could be a sentence, a paragraph, etc.

very cute ask anon, thank you. im going to assume for your benefit that you mean specifically my icemav writing—obviously I write outside of top gun and am very proud of that stuff but it wouldn’t make sense out of context.

There’s a lot of more recent stuff that I’m extremely extremely proud of on a technical level, but I’m prouder of this paragraph below on a deeper more existential level.

This paragraph was one of the first parts of WWGATTAI i ever wrote—august 12, i think, well before I had fully realized the characters’ voices or their attitudes towards life/each other; I only had about 5k written of what is now a 300k+ project (at the time of writing this paragraph i wanted it to be 10k max) and had no real outline, didn’t know who or what I was dealing with, hadnt seen TGM in two months, had done no research (so it’s not at all politically/militarily accurate or anything, why the FUCK is ice going to fucking GUAM)—and STILL this wound up being my favorite paragraph in the entire fucking series. not to suck my own dick or anything. I’m STILL so proud of this paragraph, 9 months and 275k+ words later, even though i Absolutely Would Not write it this way now.

[sneakydraws]

Would you guys get mad at me if I repurposed Natasha & Anatole lyrics for my andretole au because I'm a hack who can't write dialogue? Be honest

In other words I spent the better half of a day fleshing out the andretole flirting sesh #1 at the opera that I've been bringing up non stop for ages and now I gotta go to sleep because I took half of a coworker's shift tomorrow like a sucker. Goodnight