#not me making vaguely poetic titles for the first two chapters

[kira-the-whump-enthusiast]

A Really, Really, Really Sharp Knife - Diamonds to Dust Ch3

Synopsis: Take some proper Storm whump- they’re on the run with a knife in their abdomen :)

Content: Villain whump, stabbing, pursuit, anxious caretaker

Taglist: @whump-queen @ghostsinthecloset

---

Storm practically falls against the brick wall of the alleyway, taking ragged, heavy breaths. They clutch at the dagger skewered in their torso and try not to give in to the overwhelming nausea. Everything hurts; it feels like they’re drowning in pain, and they’re so tempted to give up and collapse to the ground.

But they can’t, not now, not when they’re being pursued. Storm isn’t completely sure they can still move very much, but they have to. The alternative is getting caught by the hero who knifed them in the first place. They’ve already been here too long anyways. Droplets of red are scattered on the ground, forming a trail leading right to them. If they linger, they risk letting their pursuer catch up to them.

So Storm forces themself to stagger away from the alleyway. Running is utterly beyond them now. They stumble down a quiet street lined with townhouses. Most of them seem empty.

Storm starts to feel dizzy, and they’re not sure if it’s from the blood loss or if it’s from the panic. They don't know where to go, they barely recognize this neighborhood, and their home is so far away from here.

If they could just get to a landline or a payphone—they could call Xavier for help. Except, there’s nothing of the sort on this street.

Their head is pounding, and they want to scream. I’m going to die here, aren’t I? If that hero doesn’t kill me, then losing all this blood definitely will.

They can’t. They can’t die like this, not to a stupid hero, and not because of a stupid bank robbery.

Still holding onto hopes of getting away, Storm takes a few shaky steps forward. Then they notice something and abruptly stop.

It’s the house they’re standing in front of. They recognize it. One of their classmates lives here, Zuri Msuya. They’d stopped by a couple of times a while ago, to work on a project with her.

Storm hasn’t talked to her much since, but this is their last hope. They stuff their mask in the pocket of their shorts, lower their hood, and make their way up her front steps with excruciating effort.

They knock on the door as hard as they can. Storm feels close to collapsing, but they try to stand on their own anyways.

After a few moments that seem like an agonizing eternity, the door opens, and Zuri is standing in the doorway. She’s home, thank the stars for that. Her face is a picture of plain shock, and she opens her mouth, but no words come out.

Storm wants to offer some sort of explanation or greeting, but they feel so disoriented. They sway on their feet, and their legs give out under them. They almost fall to the ground, but Zuri catches them at the last moment. She holds them steady in her arms.

She shakes her head in disbelief. “Oh my—oh my god…” she stutters out in horror. “What the hell happened to you?”

Storm tries to say something, but their throat is too dry and they can’t muster up the energy to speak.

“I’ll call an—I’ll call an ambulance right away. You need to get to the hospital right now,” Zuri tells them with a shaky voice.

Their eyes widen and their heart skips a beat. That makes Storm terrified. There's no doubt that the heroes have notified the hospitals about a villain with their description. If they walk inside an emergency room, they’ll definitely be arrested.

“D-d-don’t…” they manage to stammer out. “D-don't, please… I just need…” They stop to catch their breath, already too strained by just saying a few words. “I need to use your phone…”

They pray to no god in particular that Zuri will let them.

She bites her lip and tersely replies, “Okay,” and starts to lower them onto the front step.

“W-wait, please, please take me inside…” Storm pleads desperately. They’re so scared that the hero hunting them down will dart down the street at any moment.

Zuri doesn’t seem sure if that’s a good idea at first, but she switches gears and gingerly carries them inside.

Her house is small and cluttered, so she’s forced to lay them on the wooden floor. She quickly grabs a pillow for Storm’s head with an apologetic look on her face. Zuri looks like she wants to say something, but she doesn’t know what. After a few moments of worriedly scanning over Storm’s injuries, she gets up and walks into another room.

She returns with a cordless phone in her hand, which she passes over to Storm. They mouth a thank you.

“I’ll—I’m going—I’m going to get some bandages for you,” Zuri proclaims. She leaves the room again, but she looks nervous about doing so.

While she’s gone, Storm goes to dial Xavier’s number with shaking hands. It takes them a couple of tries to enter it right, and they frown in slight frustration.

Xavier picks up after just a few rings.

“Storm?” They’re aware that they’re the only one with this number, so Storm isn’t surprised that Xavier knows it’s them.

“Yeah, it’s me...”

“My god, where are you? Are you okay? You’ve been the focus of the afternoon news, all they’re talking about is how you’re at large! Don’t tell me you got caught.” Xavier is talking a mile a minute, but he pauses just long enough for Storm to say something.

“I’m fine… okay, well, I guess—I guess I’m not actually fine. But no one’s arrested me or—or anything… I’m at the house of someone I know…” they mutter into the speaker. “Here, lemme give you the address… can you get someone to… to pick me up?”

They recite it to Xavier, and he responds, “I’m sending Claire to pick you up right now. In the meantime, I’ll sort this whole thing out. Stay there, got it?”

“Mhm…”

“I need to go now, but call me if you get into any trouble, okay?”

“As always,” Storm mutters.

“...I love you, you know that?”

“Hehe… of course I do.” Storm can’t help but smile.

“Good, good.” Storm hears a hint of relief in Xavier’s voice. “Alright, bye for now.” Then Xavier hangs up, and the call ends.

Storm lays the phone on the floor at about the same time that Zuri walks in with a first aid kit in her hands. She sits next to them and hastily opens the kit.

“I can’t—I can’t just let you die of blood loss or something.” The words tumble out of her mouth as she prepares some bandages, “So here—lemme get you patched up.”

---

AN: This is actually the first third chapter I’ve ever finished! I’m officially making this into a series now :D

It’s gonna be called Diamonds to Dust! The chapters will be however long I feel like making them, and they aren’t always gonna be released in chronological order.

[writtenbyevie]

Hihi I’m nosy!! For the fic writer questions thing you reblogged: number 4 (about earth and moon), number 10, number 17, and number 27!!

Feel free to ignore any if you want to, I’m just very curious hehe big love you!!

jules!!! big love back to you and i’m booping your nose!! 💖💖💖

4.

For the little details in earth and moon, my favorite is that Atsumu’s introduced in a mini chapter titled apollo (since he’s the sun to Osamu’s moon) and Kiyoomi is later described as having hyacinth curls.

In Greek mythology, Hyacinth and Apollo are lovers. So, that’s a little inside joke for me :)

Other little details include:

Rin comes home late in the final mini chapter because he got lost in the grocery store just like Osamu dreamed about. They then talk about hanging jerseys on his wall and slow dance to the song stuck in his head just like they fantasized about

Rui wears Star Wars pajamas when we first meet her. When she meets Motoya he is too

Osamu is constantly compared to the moon, “borrowing light and regifting it without the burn,” only to receive a bad burn at work

The (b)romance between Sato and Underwood

The first mini chapter in earth and moon is called afternoon eclipse (rin finds a moon at midday) the first chapter in sakuatsu’s story is called midnight dawn (because kiyoomi finds the sun in the middle of the night)

There are a ton more but those are the ones I thought of off the top of my head :)

10.

So I tend to create stories by taking a series of related images, lines, and ideas that I’ve had in my head and seeing what connects them. From there, I’ll take I’ll take those major concepts and try to fill in the gaps to create a story that I feel best expresses them if that makes sense? So I’ll draft out a basic outline, with room for revision, as well as select some major motifs and themes and go from there.

With earth and moon, I had several monologues and descriptions I had written at random that I felt fit sunaosa, as well as a series of images/scenes in my head. I took these things and combined them with my desire to write a sunaosa story that not only explored their relationship but it’s impact on their senses of self from when they met all the way through adulthood. I also thought about what I felt was missing from the existing canon (pun semi intended) of sunaosa stories and sought out to put it in my fic!

17.

So iwaoi will always be my first and forever loves. I have an idea for an AU that involves exploring oikawa’s origins as the demon king (there’s a twist I want to spoil but won’t unless I ever do write this), as well iwaizumi’s history as holy knight (in this universe he’d be a nephilium). It also involves shiratorizawa as demon hunters. I’ve always wanted to write it and daydream about it a lot. I love biblical imagery and metaphor so maybe one day!

27.

I don’t super know how to describe my writing process other than that I write almost every day. I don’t necessarily write A LOT every day (a good deal of the time I get caught up editing), but I try to sit in front of my computer at least once a day.

I have two notes on my phone. One for lyrics (I just started writing music!) and one for lines (both for scripts and fics). I try to write down ideas as they come to me. Sometimes they’re fully fleshed out. Other times they’re a vague idea of something and I’ll put in parentheses (develop this later)

I’m also someone who likes to write long form, so I’ll dump all of my ideas for one (mini) chapter and then go back and tighten it up later. I have a second doc for all my fics where I put all the lines I cut in case I want to use them for something later.

I’m also a fan of writing out all of the dialogue for a scene and then going back and adding action and description, just because I can over write both of those if I do them as I go. I love to wax poetic like the nerdy little lass I am, but ya gotta keep it in check.

I like writing to ambient sounds? Sometimes I write to music but I like using atmosphere instrumental music to set the vibes for whatever piece I’m writing.

I tend to write chronologically too. I really struggle to leave a section unfinished and move onto the next. So I’ll just stare at same paragraph for four hours until I get it Right™️.

The only other thing I can think of is that I like to write very rhythmically/musically. I tend to accidentally rhyme a lot. I find the pace of a piece very important and I feel like I have a fairly distinct style that relies on that. That and imagery. I love imagery and metaphor. I thoroughly enjoy creating visual throughlines, like in earth and moon I used different silver/gray imagery to represent Osamu and how Rin sees him. The gray, the storm, the moon. All introduced in the first chapter and used throughout.

anywho, that’s a bit of looksie into how I write! I hope that makes sense?

also thank you for all the queries jules I adore you and am kissing your forehead 💖

[thephantomessoftheopera]

Notes on Gaston Leroux‘s „The Phantom of the Opera“ - Epilogue

<< Previous chapter “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known”

-Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities”

As we are coming to the end of the story, Leroux ties up a few more loose ends in the epilogue.

As for Raoul and Christine, their possible happy ending is only implied by what Erik told the Persian - that they had “taken a northbound train” and were planning to get married in secret. They have disappeared from the world, and Christine never appeared again on stage anywhere. According to Leroux, they might have finally settled in Norway together with Mama Valerius. At first, I thought Leroux might have been confusing Sweden and Norway, but when I did a little research on the name „Daae“, it turns out that the name is actually most prevalent in Norway, with almost no occurrences in Sweden. It is also implied that even if they took that “northbound” train before, Christine took a train back to Paris a few weeks later to return to Erik, because she had the wedding ring on her when she left, and it was finally found on Erik‘s finger.

As Philippe‘s death was deemed to be the consequence of the fight between the two brothers over Raoul’s supposed engagement to Christine, Raoul was a murder suspect - but as his previous testimony had already made him appear a lunatic in the eyes of the Commissary, Philippe‘s death was ultimately pronounced accidental. However, as Parisian society had taken less than kindly to the news of the engagement, I think that the couple would have had a very difficult standing if they had officially married and assumed the now vacant titles of the Count and Countess de Chagny. It is therefore likely that Raoul, having officially disappeared, never claimed his titles and inheritance, and chose the more simple lifestyle that Christine was accustomed to. Leroux concludes the story of Raoul and Christine with the statement that one day, he too might „hear the solitary echoes of the Northland repeat the singing of the woman who knew the Angel of Music''. In the epilogue, the boundaries between the „false“ and the „real“ Angel of Music become blurred, as Leroux repeatedly speaks of Erik as the “Angel of Music” - indicating that maybe, just maybe, Erik truly was the Angel of Music.

After following up on Raoul and Christine, Leroux relates how he obtained proof of Erik‘s existence from the Persian, mostly through the letters written by Christine that Erik had sent to him, but also through the testimonies of Meg Giry and La Sorelli. He supposedly placed all the proof he had gathered in the archives of the Paris Opera.

He also obtained the testimony of M. Poligny, the previous manager of the Opera. The „Opera Ghost“ affair was the final straw that made him resign his post, which again indicates that Erik‘s reign as „O.G.“ was rather short and caused by Erik falling in love (since he had been living in the Opera House presumably since the early 1870s). He also quotes from the fictional „Memoirs of a Manager“ by Armand Moncharmin, where Moncharmin relates that a few days after Christine‘s abduction, Erik returned all of the forty thousand francs he had extracted to the managers, no longer having any need for the money as he had given up his plan to marry Christine. The mystery of the safety-pin is also finally resolved, as Leroux was supposedly able to locate a small trapdoor in the floor of the managers’ office, through which a dexterous magician like Erik could easily have reached up and retrieved the envelope from Richard‘s coattail pocket as it was hanging down from his chair.

Leroux also notes that the marble pillar next to Box 5 sounds hollow and would offer ample space for Erik to hide inside it. According to Gérard Fontaine’s research, the pillars being hollow applies to all the pillars in the auditorium of the Palais Garnier. Whether that proves or disproves anything is up to you... Leroux’s plan of having the lake drained in order to obtain the ultimate proof of Erik‘s existence - finding the entrance to the house by the lake - did not go through, but Leroux still sustains his hope of one day finding the score of „Don Juan Triumphant“ there (that is, if Christine had not taken it with her when she came to bury him).

Leroux then gives a summary of Erik’s life according to the Persian. Erik was born near Rouen in France and ran away from his parents as a young boy, as they were afraid and horrified by how he looked. After being exhibited as a “living corpse” at fairs, he became a singing sensation and garnered a reputation that reached as far as Persia. The daroga of Mazenderan was sent to bring Erik to Persia as entertainment for the “little sultana”. Erik, who also worked there as an assassin, is described here as amoral, “not knowing the difference between right and wrong”. Even though he does not have an evil heart, his life up until this point has left him completely without a moral compass of any kind.

After building an ingenious palace for the shah, Erik’s execution was ordered so that he could not divulge its secrets to anyone. The daroga was supposed to carry it out, but as he owed Erik favours (and was the one who brough Erik to Persia in the first place), he helped him escape instead. He was punished for this and went into exile to Paris. Erik took a detour to Asia Minor and Constantinople before he ended up in Paris as well. It is also mentioned that Erik could make lifelike automata, which is reflected in the musical in the form of the monkey music box and also the “mirror bride”, a physical representation of Erik’s dream of a loving wife.

Once in Paris, Erik decided that he finally wanted to live a normal life, and placed a successful bid to work as a contractor on the Opera House. Wishing to hide his face from the world forever, he built his comfortable home into the foundations of the Opera. Erik’s plan to live out the rest of his life in peaceful tranquillity went well - until he crossed paths with Christine Daae and lost his heart to her completely. And the rest is history…

Leroux here gives his own view of Erik: “He had a heart great enough to hold the empire of the world, and in the end he had to be content with a cellar.” With a normal face, Erik, with his brilliant mind and extraordinary talents, could have had the world at his feet. And even though no one had ever loved him, he still had a heart capable of feeling deep, pure love, which is pretty remarkable. His beautiful voice is a reflection of the beauty he carries inside his soul - which was sadly eclipsed by his ugliness, which did not allow him to live “like everyone else”. The great tragedy of his life was his face, which kept others from treating him as a human being and recognizing his full potential. He is therefore clearly worthy of pity, instead of being cursed and condemned as evil.

Leroux had already mentioned in the Prologue that he believed the skeleton found in the cellars of the Opera was Erik’s. Now he finally reveals why he was so certain of that: because Erik’s skeleton wore the gold wedding ring on his finger, which Leroux believes Christine had placed there. Even though Erik had set her free and given her the ring, she later came back to him, and this time it was certainly not out of terror. With Erik dead, none of his threats would hold any more sway over her - and yet, she still returned to him to keep her promise. She not only buried him with the wedding ring, but she slipped it onto his finger, ultimately fulfilling her promise to accept him as her husband. In a sense, she buried him with her love, and that is truly a bittersweet and beautiful ending. After everything he had to endure, Erik’s life ends with a kiss and a ring on his finger, put there by the woman he loved more than his own life, and with Leroux praying for his salvation. That may not be a traditional happy ending, but it‘s very powerful. And it’s definitely not a villain’s ending.

As „Faust“ is the most strongly referenced work in „Phantom“, it is also worth comparing how the endings are different. In the final act of Gounod‘s opera, Faust and Marguerite first swear their love to each other, but when Marguerite sees Mephistopheles and realizes who Faust really is, she turns away from him and chooses death instead, while Faust is dragged into the fires of hell. Her famous last words to him are „You horrify me!“ In „Phantom“, the progression is almost the other way round - Christine is horrified at first, but then accepts Erik and chooses life instead of death.

It should also be noted that the ending in the novel is so vague that it also allows a lot of room for the reader’s imagination. Was Erik really dead when Christine returned? He himself was announcing his death, so it would not even be so very unlikely. But as this is Leroux’s story, the official reading would of course be how he himself imagined the ending: Erik dying and Christine coming back to bury him. This might be my favourite line from the novel:

“The skeleton lay near the little fountain, where the Angel of Music first held the unconscious Christine Daae in his trembling arms after taking her into the cellars of the Opera.”

As if the return of the ring was not enough poetic closure, he also asked to be buried in the very spot where he held the love of his life for the first time...

Symbolism and Metaphors

Now that we have concluded the epilogue, I would like to add a few more notes on the general themes which are present throughout the novel and still influence how we feel about it today.

To understand the extent of symbolism employed in  „The Phantom of the Opera“, it is necessary to understand the cultural mindset and environment in which it was written. At the turn of the century, the arts (and sciences, as evidenced by the slowly emerging works of Sigmund Freud) were rather obsessed with the fateful connection between Eros and Thanatos - love as the life-bringing force, and death as the destructive force. Both were often seen as intertwined and mirrored in the other.

Erik is the personification of Eros and Thanatos. He unites both forces in him to a degree unparalleled by any other character in the story. The death symbolism that is also clearly reflected in how he is described, would be both perceived as horrifying - and yet not without a strangely seductive fascination inherent in it. Death is intricately tied to darker feelings of passion and desire.The “Eros” and the “Thanatos” part of his character are intertwined, but his character also oscillates between the two sides in the course of the story.

Music in „Phantom“ also serves as a metaphor for romantic love, not only in the spiritual but also in the physical sense, as it is connotated with “passion”, “fire”, “ecstasy” and “rapture” throughout the story. Erik’s teaching awakens “an ardent, voracious and sublime life” in Christine, symbolizing the burgeoning romantic feelings in the young woman. She is terrified with the changes going on in her, which is also in line with how „Eros“ was originally viewed: as a frightening loss of control. Erik says in “Apollo’s Lyre” that “some music is so formidable that it consumes everyone who approaches it”, and Christine states that “Music has the power to abolish everything in the outside world except its sounds, which go straight to the heart”. In both sentences, the word “music” can easily be replaced with “love” - especially in Christine’s example, it would be the musical equivalent of “love is blind”.

Like in other (gothic) romances - “Wuthering Heights” being perhaps the prime example - the two rivals in the principal love triangle represent two very different types of love: one is intense and passionate, but also consuming, terrifying and potentially destructive, and the other is safer, but also somewhat chaste and lifeless. Erik and Raoul each represent one of the two extremes. This contrast is exemplified in the scene at the Masked Ball: Raoul wears white, the colour of innocence, while Erik wears red, the colour of passion, but also of danger and blood.

It is suggested in the novel that Erik and Christine were chained together by fate (“La destinée m’enchaîne à toi sans retour”), and I believe they were destined to save each other. Erik saved Christine from her grief in the wake of her father’s death and brought her back to life, and Christine saved his soul by being the first person in his life to accept him and grant him true happiness. „Phantom“ may be a tragic love story, but it is also a hopeful one, as love proves stronger than death. Christine’s choice, Erik‘s sacrifice and the skeleton’s wedding ring are all symbols of love triumphing over death.

[shihalyfie]

02′s influence on Adventure

You’re probably reading the title and going “...what? Isn’t 02 the sequel to Adventure? How would a series be influenced by its own future sequel?”

The thing is, assuming that Adventure was written in a vacuum and everything in 02 a retrofit runs very contrary to how both series were produced, and how this kind of anime is produced in general -- Adventure and 02 share almost identical staff members, and were separated only by a real-life single week in airing time. 02′s existence was not a sudden last-minute decision that was tacked on at the end! In fact, Adventure being extended to a second series was decided seven months into its production, right around the end of the Tokyo arc (sometime around the third cour). Despite it being a rather tonally different series, 02 is really just Adventure’s staff...writing more.

This means that by the time production had moved to Adventure’s final arc, the staff was very aware that they would be on for another year writing a sequel to this anime -- which thus likely became the fuel behind many of its creative decisions, made specifically to pave the way for 02.

The ending

Yeah, so, this ending. You know this really famous ending? The one that’s had such an impact on franchise history that a lot of later things have even tried to imitate it in some form? The one that everyone cites as one of Adventure’s most famous scenes (for good reason)? This ending only exists because of 02. You know what actually would have been Adventure’s ending if 02 hadn’t existed?

The 02 epilogue.

The ending that we now know as the “02 epilogue” was actually decided on before recording for Adventure had even started. (They weren’t even sure about finalizing the character personalities yet!) All of the most substantial details about that epilogue -- the series actually being the adult Takeru’s novel, everyone in the world having a Digimon partner, and, as it seems, even Yamato and Sora getting married -- were decided on before 02 was even in the picture.  Most likely, the only material difference would have been that the four characters introduced in 02 (Daisuke, Miyako, Iori, and Ken) and their partners wouldn’t have been involved, but everything else would have roughly been the same as the “epilogue” we know now. (This especially makes sense when you consider that one of Adventure’s major influences was the movie Stand By Me, which is extremely culturally influential in Japan as a “childhood summer adventure story”, and involves a similar timeskip epilogue with one character growing up to chronicle the story as a writer.) All of this was basically intended to tie into Adventure as a narrative of “a story of humanity’s evolution”, so this ending was envisioned as the “natural conclusion” of the story of Adventure as a whole. If anything from the original Adventure ending would have been retained in this hypothetical scenario of only Adventure existing, perhaps the sentiment of “parting” at the end -- but then it would still be followed by a timeskip epilogue 28 years later and everyone in the world having a partner.

But then it was decided that a second series would be made, and at some point they decided it would be a series set three years after the first, resulting in: this.

What this means is that Adventure’s ending was only ever intended as an ending for a single chapter in the overall Adventure series narrative. A lot of people like to pose 02′s existence or epilogue as something that “undid” Adventure’s ending, as if it was supposed to be some “ambiguous bittersweet” ending about whether they ever met their partners again, but...that ignores the real-life context of Adventure and 02′s production, where Our War Game! (which depicted an easy reunion with their partners, went out of its way to cameo Miyako in advance, and, for all intents and purposes, practically spoiled Adventure’s ending by depicting them as separated at all) screened before Adventure’s last episode aired, and there’s also the Adventure mini dramas that depicted more incidental meetings (and despite the constant fourth wall breaking and absurd crack content in them, yes, they’re intended to be taken as canon).

Again: in real life, the first episode of 02 aired one week after the last episode of Adventure. Even the real-life audience was likely well aware that this wasn’t going to be the end (and if they weren’t, they certainly would be when the promotional trailers for 02 started airing right after Adventure’s last -- and that’s assuming you missed all of the promotion appearing in real life beforehand, including at the end of Our War Game!’s screenings). The production staff all knew, because they’d already been working on 02 for months now -- they postponed their originally intended ending just to make this new one, after all!

So yeah, this line isn’t supposed to be just a vague “oh, maybe they’ll meet again” in an abstract poetic sense -- it’s completely literal, because it’s hinting at said gate opening again one real-life week later.

From both a story perspective and a real-life audience perspective, this ending was never meant to be seen as ambiguous.

Takeru and Hikari’s character arcs

02 often gets an accusation of being lacking in the character development department (one that I seriously disagree with and have been working very hard to counter), but this accusation especially gets levied often at Takeru and Hikari, who are often said to be “flat” or “kind of just there” in 02 (which, again, I object to; more on this below). This is often rationalized as a theory that the writers didn’t know what to do with them because they’d already been in Adventure, but...this, again, assumes too much that Adventure was written in a self-contained vacuum and anything in 02 was just an addition done after the fact.

There’s actually quite a bit of evidence that the last cour (or at least a significant amount of it) was written with the idea that Takeru and Hikari were going to be starring in the next series in mind.

This is especially pretty apparent when you get to the last episode, where Takeru and Hikari are conspicuously the ones to leave off on the most confident “we’ll meet again” notes, compared to the other six. Of course, they do it in their own respective ways (Takeru and Patamon resolve to make it happen, while Hikari cryptically acts like it’s already bound to happen, borderline prophetically), and maybe you could chalk it up to the fact that they’re the youngest and therefore most naive of this group...but, again, remember: 02′s first episode aired one week after this one, where we would immediately be treated to Takeru and Hikari following up on this. Given that, you can basically see this as a wink and a nod: “yeah, these two have a story that’s not over yet.”

And as much as I may sound like a heathen to the fanbase by claiming this, I would actually say that it’s the opposite of the above claim: Takeru and Hikari both have pretty unresolved arcs by the end of Adventure compared to the rest of the other kids, and in fact are fleshed out more in 02. It’s honestly kind of a stretch to say that they “already got development” in Adventure -- Takeru still has a ton of unresolved issues with his family and trauma and emotional behavior that aren’t properly addressed to nearly the same degree as how the older kids have their core issues brought to the forefront, while Hikari really was only around for less than half the series, and not only is her main problem of emotional suppression told purely from Taichi’s mouth and not her own, we also get no real follow-up on how she intends to work past that.

Those are some pretty huge things to leave unresolved at the end of a series that’s known for its focus on individual character development, and considering that the premise of 02 involving an older Takeru and Hikari was likely finalized around the middle of the last arc of Adventure, it’s easy to believe that they decided to deliberately hold off on resolving Takeru and Hikari’s issues in full so that their story could be told in the next series. And, indeed, while their characters being built on “being difficult to read” makes their development not quite as visible as some of the more eccentric personalities in the 02 cast, their respective Jogress partners (Iori and Miyako) more openly discuss and get to the bottom of their issues that had been lightly displayed or hinted in Adventure but never truly been addressed.

A lot of things that were not in Adventure

Adventure was admittedly kind of written as they went along (they didn’t even originally plan to have Hikari as the eighth child at first), so it’s hard to tell exactly what was planned and what was a later addition (and at what point things were added), but considering that the 02 epilogue was one of the first things planned in the entire series, as part of “a story of humanity’s evolution” and tying into a really long theory about partners doubling every year, it’s probably at least safe to say that a lot of the worldbuilding and lore was determined very early.

02 added a lot of lore dumps about Digital World mechanics and things related to the overall state of Chosen Children, which have been said by many to be retrofits to justify a buildup to the 02 epilogue, but, again -- the 02 epilogue was supposed to be for Adventure, so it’s very likely that these lore aspects were intended for Adventure as well! This is especially because it’s been outright confirmed that there were at least certain things originally intended for Adventure that ended up in 02, or at least were in 02 because they felt Adventure didn’t sufficiently cover it:

The kids’ home lives. As famous as the Tokyo arc of Adventure is, it only covered about a quarter of it -- the rest of it was the kids stranded in another world, separated from home! It’s specifically 02 that went into all of the things like school life, family life, daily life in Odaiba, and everything closer to the real world -- basically, everything related to family backgrounds that was very likely to have been in the planning documents for Adventure but never made it.

The (in)famous 02 episode 13 (or, at least, something like it) was intended for Adventure. As much as there’s common speculation that this episode was intended to be some giant subplot that got canned, from what we’ve heard from the staff, the truth actually seems to be a lot more mundane -- Adventure was a series very big on “oddities about the Digital World that have no real explanation” (see: phone booths), and when you reframe it in Adventure’s context, it’s likely that Dagomon and the Dark Ocean were intended to be yet another of those as part of its wider lore about the multiverse, to make you think “the heck was that?” but never get any real answer to. (And while it’s unclear whether the original theoretical Adventure version of this episode would have still involved Takeru and Hikari, if you want to put a tinfoil hat on and entertain that theory, it lends even further credence to the idea that their respective character arcs were deliberately held off for 02...)

Given that, and thinking about the 02 epilogue as the eventual goal for the series, you can also easily imagine a lot of 02-introduced things leading up to it as probably also having been baked into Adventure’s lore:

You know how 02 had a subplot about Chosen Children proliferating all over the world, as a lead-up to everyone in the world eventually having a partner? This was part of a “doubling every year” formula that’s been referred to a few times in background staff testimony. If you inspect this formula, this means that there were eight other Chosen Children besides Taichi and his friends, chosen between 1995 and 1999. Now, remember how Adventure episode 52 briefly touched on the bombshell of Chosen Children existing before Taichi and co., before never addressing it again? Considering all of the above facts, it’s very likely that’s intended to tie into that formula -- and, perhaps, had 02 had not existed to continue the subplot about “more Chosen Children”, Adventure would have taken more initiative about explaining the concept of Taichi and his friends not being the only humans with partners, and led it into their originally intended epilogue.

02 episode 33 involves Miyako visiting Kyoto and learning that there may be certain similarities between Digimon and Japanese youkai, to the point where they might be related somehow, despite predating digital technology. (The concept is revisited in Mimi’s track in Two-and-a-Half Year Break and the Adventure BD drama CD, both of them having been written after 02.) The thing is, the idea that Digimon and other similar entities actually existed prior to digital technology, and that said technology only allowed it to manifest physically in the real world, also is heavily tied to the original concept of Digimon partners being a manifestation of a part of the human’s soul, and therefore having a partner being a part of human evolution -- which is, again, heavily tied to the original intent behind the epilogue. So it’s very likely that this, at the very least, was one of the original lore points behind Adventure -- and if 02 had not existed, it’s possible that Adventure might have tried to cover it as part of a lead-up to that epilogue, rather than ultimately deferring it to 02.

This is, of course, speculation -- I’m not a member of staff, so I can’t speak for them -- but I do think it’s important to consider that while 02 was a tonally different series, it wasn’t just a sequel tacked on at the last minute, and rather just (mostly) the same staff learning three-quarters of the way through that they would have more time to continue this narrative, and reorganizing things to figure out what they wanted to do now and what they wanted to touch on if they had more time. Really, this whole narrative of “02 being a bunch of random additions they came up with and retrofit” seems to almost be the opposite of what actually happened -- while some of the ideas behind 02 were certainly created later, it’s less that Adventure was some ideal perfectly crafted story and 02 an addendum, and more that they had so many things they wanted to do in Adventure that couldn’t fit and used 02 to vent more of those out:

One of the concepts behind the prior series was for us to pack in as many interesting things that we’d seen, heard about, or read about as we could into it, so for 02, we thought, what else could we put in beyond even that?, and so we looked over what we needed to have, and put in all the things we could so that they wouldn’t be left out, and the story became a multi-layered one, overlapping and accelerating. It was to the point that, after we’d gone through 02‘s story, the scriptwriters told me that they’d worn everything they had out to the ground. In any case, we put everything we had into it back then.

Which means that understanding 02 is actually very retroactively important to understanding Adventure -- Adventure’s own writing was influenced by the knowledge that 02 would be part of its story, and 02 itself carries a lot of vital facts and story points from Adventure’s narrative that didn’t fit in the first 54 episodes, and, in real life, they were both written continuously as one story over the course of over two years. It’s also because of this that I seriously warn against seeing either series in a vacuum too much -- because both series are very deeply tied to each other, perhaps more so than a lot of people want to admit.

[writteninsunshine]

Cut From The Same Cloth - Michael/Firkle Smith - SFWish

Title: Cut From The Same Cloth

Author: Keith

Fandom: South Park

Setting: Unspecified Fashion Show

Pairing: Michael/Firkle Smith

Characters: Michael, Firkle Smith

Genre: Romance

Rating: T

Chapters: 1/1

Word Count: 828

Type Of Work: One-Shot, Part Four of the Writer’s Month 2022 Collection

Status: Complete

Warnings: Gay, Slash, Yaoi, MLM, Age Gaps, 10 Year Age Gap, Michael is 29, Firkle is 19

Disclaimer: I don’t own anything!

Summary: Michael's business was taking off, and he owed it all to his perfect muse.

AN: Hey guys, it’s me again! I just thought I ought to say, if you want vague updates and to talk to me more, I have a writing Tumblr, too! Twitter is Sunshinecackle, and Tumblr is Writteninsunshine! I also have a writing Discord that is currently pretty dead. xD If you want it, please contact me on Tumblr/Twitter!

I’m trying to do Writer’s Month this month and to keep myself working on these to get all of them done hopefully, I’m going to aim for 500 words or less. 

This particular fic is heavily based off of my husband’s (punkocalypse) portrayal of Michael! I really wanted to play with this, though I’m not super confident in my ability to describe clothes very well. Hopefully I can bang something out that makes sense.

Smaller warnings for: CGL Mention, and various dark, poetic expressions of love. They’re both afraid to say the ‘L’ word but they still love each other very much.

Writer’s Month Fic Masterlist

Cut From The Same Cloth

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Firkle sat in silence as his hair was styled for him, he sat in silence through the makeup process, even if he was unsure of the vast coverage of his eyeshadow. When the black and purple spiderweb was added to the corners of his eyes and trailed down his cheeks, he couldn’t help but harken back to his emo phase. But Michael knew what he liked and looked good in, even if he’d never done it before, so he trusted his lover’s artistic vision.

The black hooded cropped jacket barely covered his pierced collarbones, and the half-sleeves were attached to it by a thin belt in the back. They were belted down the sides with shiny purple rivets and D-rings, matching the halo made on the hood and down the shoulders. Two thick, dark purple chains glinting in the light swooped down his stomach and hooked around his hips to connect again in the back. They bared the harness beneath the jacket and over the white spiderwebbed fishnet shirt beneath it, over the shimmering purple skeletal hands made of silk grasping his chest. 

The straps of the harness zigzagged tight on his sides, connecting with the two O-rings in the middle. Another belt just above his navel dripped four more leather bands down his thighs, front and back, attached to rings of lace and leather around his thighs. They disappeared beneath the purple peek-a-boo lace skirt dragging halfway down his thighs in yet another spiderweb pattern, over the crushed velvet hotpants he wore for his modesty. 

Boots crawled up his thin legs, the heels behind the platforms carved to perfection in the shape of a spinal cord. Skulls missing the mandible adorned the counter above them, and the whole shoe faded from a dingy white to a stained, dark brown at the base of the platform.

Each piece had been designed with Firkle in mind, from his head to his toes, his makeup to his black to purple faded nail polish, and Michael had spared no expense. Firkle was his perfect muse, the creature he could return to for inspiration if his creativity was stopped up, and this entire collection was made with him sitting in the forefront of Michael’s brain. Granted, he couldn’t model all of them, and Firkle had protested being a model in the first place. Michael had eventually gotten him to agree, showing him the pinnacle of the collection that caught his eye, much like he’d thought it would.

It blended them both together, spiders, human remains, bones, and Firkle’s unique style, his color palette, even. Michael always knew what Firkle needed, what he wanted, and it was intensely important to him to make it happen. Firkle was his other half, the extra limbs that made them a two-headed arachnid, the large, unblinking oceanic eyes that brought the world into the darkness. Their connection was too strong, too deep; A successful removal of either from the other would probably kill them both.

As Firkle started his easy walk towards the stage, a familiar, large, spidery hand gripped his wrist and tugged him to a stop. Instead of pulling his younger lover in harshly, as he was prone to do, Michael was careful with his movements, like trying to preserve dragonfly wings. His hold was gentle, and he was conscientious of every crease in his clothes, and watchful of his makeup when he kissed those purple-stained lips.

“You look radiant…” Michael whispered against his mouth, “I knew you would, but I didn’t expect to be so breathless.”

“Will I snatch your breath like a cat, then? Preferably while you sleep, a benign asphyxiation?” Firkle smirked for but a second before it disappeared again and he closed his eyes, “I’ve never done this before. Modeling. I still don’t know why you wanted me to star in this.”

There were certainly models that had been doing this longer than he had, that would know what they were doing.

“Because, baby, Daddy made this for you.” Michael’s thumb grazed over Firkle’s cheek gently, only smearing a few of the darker threads just a smidgen. He always did love when Firkle was a bit of a mess, “And I did a damn good job.”

“I’ve never met a spider that spun a better, more beautiful web.” Firkle’s captive smile returned for a second before he turned to look over his shoulder when the music started, “I…” He sighed, slumping forward just slightly, “That’s my cue, I guess.”

Michael took hold of his hand once more, pressed his lips to Firkle’s cheek, and turned him in a slow half pirouette. Smacking Firkle’s ass playfully as he let go of his hand and the younger began to saunter away, Michael offered a lopsided smirk as Firkle turned to look at him with an amused snort.

“Break a leg, preferably someone else’s.” Michael cooed, watching him go before exiting the back rooms to take his seat up front to watch the show.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

AN: I have been having so much fun with these little prompts, I’m hardly getting anything else done. Expect a big influx in writing from me, though, I’m hoping to at least do ten if not the whole thing. I hope you all enjoyed it!

Prompt: setting: fashion world

[baoshan-sanren]

Chapter 35

of the wwx emperor au I’m thinking of calling – you know what? I suck at titles. let’s just accept the fact that I’ll slap something vaguely poetic on this thing when it’s finished, and that it will probably have no relation to the actual fic

Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 Part 1 | Chapter 8 Part 2 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 Part 1 | Chapter 15 Part 2 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 Part 1 | Chapter 22 Part 2 | Chapter 23 | Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26 | Chapter 27 | Chapter 28 | Chapter 29 | Chapter 30 | Chapter 31 | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34

Wei Ying rises while the sky is still dark.

The servants show no surprise, despite the fact that he had gone to sleep mere two hours before. His sleepless nights and early risings are nothing to be remarked upon. There is some bewilderment when he insists on immediately dressing for an audience, but it is well hidden. It is no ordinary audience he is dressing for, that much is immediately clear. The black dragon robe, stiff and severe, is hardly an appropriate morning outfit. It is a robe for trials and executions, and Wei Ying enhances its effect by passing over the intricate hair ornaments for the Dragon Crown, its delicate pearls reflecting the candlelight.

This causes more than one startled gaze, most exchanged behind the hard line of his back. Wei Ying knows that behind the curtain of pearls, his face is partially concealed, giving no hints to his mood, or his state of mind. Today, Nie HuaiSang will rise early as well, and begin to work on the Council, one vulnerable Sect Leader at a time. But before he can even begin, Wei Ying must do his part in bringing the Council to his heel.

The sky has only began to lighten when he finally leaves his chambers. The Jade Sword Palace is hushed, as if holding its breath. He sends two servants to summon the High Councilor to the Emperor’s public study, and admonishes that he will tolerate no delays. Two servants instead of one can be seen as an honor, but Wei Ying already knows that shocked whispers will spread like wildfire in the seemingly empty hallways. The Emperor has dressed for an execution, and demanded the High Councilor’s presence. Speculation will reach a fever pitch long before uncle Jiang manages to slip on his shoes.

Wei Ying sends another servant to the Imperial guest chambers, assuming that the Lan Sect must have risen already, regardless of how late Lan Zhan had lingered on the rooftop the night before. The servant does not carry an order, but a politely worded request, that the Second Young Master of the Lan Sect join the Emperor for noonday tea. It is unlikely that any tea will actually be served, and despite all the unpleasant tasks Wei Ying has before him, it is the meeting with Lan Zhan he frets about the most.

They had not said more than a dozen words to each other before parting. Still, Wei Ying is tentatively hopeful. He cannot help but feel that some type of understanding had been reached, despite the silence. It is possible that he is entirely wrong, and that the day will end in heartbreak and anguish. However, this is a worry for later, one he cannot allow to distract him from now.

The public study is as cold and cavernous as it had been the night before. It has never been a room where one welcomes a friend or an ally. The gilded desk sits on an elevated platform, the chair a monstrosity only slightly less elaborate than the throne in the main banquet hall. Sitting down, he keeps his posture stiff and straight, sleeves draped over the arms. The dragon carved into the back of the seat arches above him, twisting sinuously to gaze out over his right shoulder, a subtle reminder that the Emperor is power personified, his sheer existence a divine blessing on the ordinary mortals.  

Wei Ying resists the urge to wipe his sweaty palms on the robe.

The servants hurry to place a mat at the foot of the desk, and Wei Ying allows them to do so before ordering it removed. He dismisses them immediately after, knowing they will mutter and speculate amongst themselves. In less than two hours, the entire court will believe that the High Councilor’s moments on this plane of existence are numbered.

A part of Wei Ying feels pity for uncle Jiang. The man is no longer young; it is nearly time for him to retire in comfort, after having spent his life performing an invaluable service to the Empire. Another part of Wei Ying believes that uncle Jiang could use a little stress in his life, a little uncertainty, and perhaps even a little bit of fear. The man had grown comfortable in his role. Too comfortable, as Nie HuaiSang has admonished more than once in the past two years. It is time to shake up the ground underneath him, and find out how, exactly, he plans to keep his footing.

Wei Ying had declared that he will tolerate no delays, and uncle Jiang takes him at his word. He arrives not long after the servants have departed, nothing about his appearance giving away the early hour. The man is dressed as if he had spent the night standing perfectly still in his robes, simply waiting for the Emperor’s summons. But Wei Ying knows uncle Jiang well, easily recognizing the caution in the man’s posture.

A single glance tells Jiang FengMian everything he needs to know. The Emperor seated stiffly, as if facing an unpleasant task. The presence of the dragon robes and the Dragon Crown. The lack of a mat for him to kneel comfortably, and pay his respects in the usual way. A lesser man would drop to the marble floors and admit his crime, even if he did not know what crime he had committed. Uncle Jiang does not.

He lowers himself gracefully, murmuring a greeting. Wei Ying knows that the cold marble floors are hard on his knees. It is an effort, to look on cooly, to delay the necessary permission uncle Jiang needs in order to rise to his feet. Wei Ying counts to thirty, slowly, feeling sweat gather on his temples. The black dragon robe is intimidating and necessary, but it is also suffocating, the glistening layers of silk much heavier than they appear to be.

“Rise, High Councilor,” Wei Ying says, his voice hard.

Uncle Jiang gets to his feet.

He will not speak first; Wei Ying knows this. Nie HuaiSang’s court maneuverings and tactics are entirely self-taught; some have come from observation, but a great deal come from an inborn talent that Wei Ying has never had. Over the years, Wei Ying has learned much from his Companion. But this does not change the fact that majority of the lessons on ruling effectively had come from Uncle Jiang himself, and that there are very few tactics Wei Ying can employ that the man will not find transparent.

Uncle Jiang is clearly expecting some reprimand when it comes to the Lan Sect and their treatment. He is also likely to have considered the influence of Xiao XingChen’s presence, the possible reasons for his arrival, and the backlash of any events in the Empire that Wei Ying had not been aware of before, which could reasonably be considered the High Councilor’s fault and responsibility. He may even anticipate Wei Ying’s marriage plans. Wei Ying would not put it past the man to have a list of very sensible reasons why the Second Young Master of the Lan Sect would not make a proper Emperor Consort.

Wei Ying does not give him an opportunity.

“The Jin Sect has overreached one too many times,” Wei Ying says, “Jiang YanLi’s betrothal to the Young Master Jin is no longer pleasing to the Emperor. You will dissolve this arrangement today.”

It is rare to see uncle Jiang visibly reel. Wei Ying does not give him time to think.

“The High Councilor has served me well. The Empire is grateful for your perseverance and devotion. However, it is time for the High Councilor to yield his seat to a more youthful perspective. I am sure you will find that retirement has its own charms. Lotus Pier must be quite lovely this time of the year.”

Wei Ying smiles, a movement of the lips utterly disconnected from the rest of his features, all partially concealed by a curtain of shimmering pearls.

Uncle Jiang opens his mouth, then closes it, his expression no longer calm and collected, his skin color taking on an unhealthy, sallow hue.

“The Emperor has come of age, High Councilor,” Wei Ying says gently, “the Jiang Sect presence at court is no longer necessary.”

In the back of his mind, a steady mantra of do not qi deviate is repeating itself in increasingly alarmed tone, accumulating in a loud exclamation of fuck as uncle Jiang drops to his knees again.

“This subject begs to know how he has offended,” the man exclaims.

Wei Ying fights a relieved breath, and leans back in his seat.

He counts again, slower this time, watching the light of the rising sun move across the marble floors.

Finally, when he is quite certain that uncle Jiang’s knees must be starting to ache, he taps his finger on the arm of the chair.

“Rise, High Councilor. Let us speak of invitations, shall we?”

[meikuree]

fic writer interview

tagged by @lightdescending -- tysm, this was really fun and i enjoy elaborating on things about writing/the writing process!

putting this under a read more because of my trademark verbosity (AGAIN)

name: meikuree

fandoms: actively writing for snk, tempted to write for the locked tomb

two-shot: oh i've not intentionally done these! twenty years of snow accidentally fits the bill, but only because it's on an indefinite hiatus

most popular multi-chapter: of aubades, my pieck-centric ficlet series, by some metrics

actual worst part of writing: when I get stuck in a loop of perfectionism and excessive self-scrutiny and rewrite… and rewrite… and rewrite again. my solution to this is to send it to a friend and ask for them to tell me just one (1) nice thing about it and put me out of my misery, or do freewriting where the point is to write whatever immediately pops into my head. usually then I’ll bump into an epiphany in the middle about how to Make It Work.

alternatively: fic writing is at times such a solitary, obsessively recursive activity and that’s one tension I dislike/have to negotiate with, because part of why I like art is to share it with people or at the very least engage in some kind of reciprocal conversation about it. community in art is very important to me in general, and I try to cultivate it in my online presence in small ways!

how you choose your titles: i'm a fan of grabbing titles from poems and songs/song lyrics (like you!) -- and drawing them from regina spektor songs in particular, bc she’s by some metrics my all-time favourite musician and i’m very familiar with her discography

do you outline: usually, yes. i don’t confine myself to it, but at minimum I outline pivotal moments and turning points. my process tends to start with a compelling scene or character interaction popping into my head and then goes on with me thinking about how i can use it as a vehicle for communicating a certain concept/philosophical idea/insight about XYZ characters' relationships somehow. that becomes the core idea/endpoint I want to reach by the end in a fic, so then i'll outline the main emotional or introspective beats i want to carry across in service of that

ideas I probably won’t get around to but wouldn’t it be nice: wow, um... /gestures vaguely at my unending list of wips/ that said, one idea i'm tickled by is an obnoxious, utterly random M-rated pieck/lady tybur fic involving painplay and knifeplay, the plot for which is literally just… lara tybur stabs pieck with a knife, but make it sexy somehow… with a dash of political intrigue and a complicated ambiguous relationship where two women use each other in a decidedly callous but also self-aware and self-indulgent way. the idea for this just came from me going "ah yes... the inherent homoeroticism of being stabbed by another woman..." and wondering about ~scenarios enabled by being a titan shifter, when you can regenerate your wounds and such! (partial inspiration also came, I will admit, from the locked tomb fandom and its lesbian body horror influences)

callouts @ me: sensory details are one of my biggest weak points. i've been ironing it out through concerted practice, but when i first started out writing fic i tended to be more comfortable dealing with metaphor, introspection, and mental states than... writing about actual, corporeal things happening in corporeal textspace. it can create the impression while reading, I suspect, that the characters are stuck a lot in their own heads. one of my earliest and favourite ao3 comments i've gotten said in passing that i used "very little dialogue and description" and i'm still tickled by... how true it is as an MO. it also amuses me because it seems to parallel the same issue i had with essays i wrote at university, i think (!) -- my professors would tell me, “you have a great grasp on the theory but you need to include more concrete examples." and i'd go "what? i was supposed to use examples?? ?__? isn’t the point self-evident from the theory?” for me, shifts in relationship dynamics and the negotiation of one's worldview underlying an event ARE the plot! -- and everything else tends to become subservient to that when i write

the other thing, which is somewhat related to the above, is just... self-confidence! i can be very insecure about my writing style, as my partner and poor friends I’ve whinged to can attest. mainly because i always fear that reading it feels like wading through a thick, unappealing swampy bog of someone's thoughts. but i think the solution is to just take a grounded, balanced view, like: there are some things i do well, and some things i do not-as-well in writing, and that's fine! that's normal! and in the moment i can be very hard on myself, and wring my hands thinking OH MY GOD THE UTTER CRINGE OF ME WRITING ANY OF THIS but i find that somehow, i always end up enjoying rereading what i write.

best writing traits: the most consistent comment i get, i think, is that my writing is beautiful and poetic (and one time: "this is one of the most poetic things i've ever read." which -- ?!?!). I’ve also been told that i characterise people well or with nuance, and write about them sensitively and with depth. i'm grateful, always, to hear these bc these things constitute the one niche i CAN do, imo!

spicy tangential opinion: hm… from what I’ve observed, many fandoms have a tendency to flatten character motives and complexities into easy, tidy and dare i say, sometimes bizarre, labels and categories. it’s not surprising it happens, but sometimes there’s space for people (a big, vague, nonspecific ‘people’) to go beyond simplistic assumptions about characters and one-dimensional portrayals (and to give writers who achieve it their due! I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an incredibly well-written fic that was relatively undernoticed and gone, “why, fandom???”) sometimes you write to fix canon, and sometimes you write because it’s fanon that needs fixing instead.

tagging (no pressure): @ebbet @noxcounterspell @leksaa90 @minoan-ophidian @frumpkinspocketdimension @acerinky @rose-gardens @chocochipbiscuit @whiteasy @ochen @kallistoi  anyone else who wants to join in!

[gladiators-intoxication]

In Search of Justice, Concerning Family

Part three of three: The artistry of found family, the science of deserve.

Warnings: Spoilers for Kaeya’s companionship stories, alcohol mention

[1], [2], [3]

Kaeya ignored the sound of his doorknob turning. “Why’d you put a rug in here?” Kaeya jumped at the sound of Diluc’s voice.

“I wanted to,” he said, recovering quickly. “Why? Did you want your old office back?” They stared at each other for a long minute. “I didn’t mean that,” Kaeya said suddenly.

“Of course not,” Diluc replied, stiff, awkward.

“Why are you here?”

Diluc’s eyes drifted to the bookshelf Kaeya had been staring at when he’d entered. “I…” he faltered. “I wanted to ask you something.”

Kaeya waved vaguely to the room. “Couch or the desk, whichever.” It took a long moment for Diluc to find the couch, which was buried under a small mountain of pillows and blankets. He remained standing.  “What do you need?”

“Whose temple was that?”

Kaeya’s smile was wry. “Our time god,” he said. “She fell centuries ago with the rest of her kingdom. I have the story in here somewhere.” He gestured at the bookshelf. “I’ll… I guess I’ll translate it or something for you.”

Diluc swallowed the demand to tell him now. “You said...” he coughed to cover the hesitation. “You said, rather, you called it your last service to, you know.”

Kaeya paused, and for once, Diluc could see the gears turning in his head, the fiddly little mechanics clicking into place behind his clear blue eyes. “Do you know about Liyue’s exorcists?”

Diluc frowned. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Never mind. Khaenri’ah was a city of people that died a long time ago.”

“What, you think you’re some kind of exorcist?” slipped out before Diluc could stop it.

Kaeya laughed good-naturedly, the way he did over a drink at The Angel’s Share, practiced to perfection. “Not at all. I’m just what’s left of the ghosts.”

Diluc forced his “sorry” past the stubborn set of his jaw. “And Dainsleif?”

Kaeya shrugged with one shoulder. “He’ll figure something out. I doubt he’s going far.”

“Who is he?”

Kaeya’s eyes went distant as he considered that. “That’s up to him,” he said finally. “I only know who he was.”

“You’ve become awfully poetic from your stint in jail.”

Diluc didn’t expect the genuine smile that turned up Kaeya’s eyes. “You were always such a good boy,” he teased, “I wouldn’t expect you to know the first thing about jail.”

Diluc didn’t know what to say to that. “I’ll see you this evening?” he asked instead.

Kaeya shrugged, still smiling. “I’m out of solitary at sundown,” he agreed.

~

It was a strange day, the day that Diluc found Kaeya, Klee, and Albedo on the floor of Kaeya’s office surrounded by the blankets and pillows off Kaeya’s couch, and books in a foreign language lying half-read, scattered across the carpet. Klee was curled up in Albedo’s lap, wide eyes devouring the pages of the book in Kaeya’s hands. Kaeya was reading in a language Diluc didn’t understand, softly, in a voice Diluc almost didn’t recognize.

The conversation from a few days ago was still tender, sore. It felt like a bruise on Diluc’s pride. He stepped away from the door, but Kaeya called out to him. “Join us. It’s not like Klee knows what I’m reading either.”

Diluc sighed inwardly, but now that they knew he was there, he supposed there was no harm. “Nothing you wouldn’t read in our language I hope?”

Kaeya laughed. His voice was a bit dry from reading, but he didn’t seem to mind. “Of course not. These are just our old legends. Come sit with us.”

From her place in Albedo’s arms, Klee gave Diluc a baleful stare as he carefully picked his way over to the three of them. Albedo offered Diluc the faintest smile, before returning his attention to the book. “Do you want me to read the next chapter?”

“What’s the next chapter again?” Kaeya flipped a few pages. Diluc only caught a flash of something dark in Kaeya’s eyes. “Ah. Would you kindly?”

Diluc pushed the two or three blankets that remained folded on the couch aside and at beside Kaeya, who leaned to the side a little to rest his head against the side of Diluc’s knee as Albedo began to read. Diluc stiffened a little, but didn’t push him away. “Are those for me?” Kaeya asked quietly, mouth pulling up into a teasing smile, his visible eye cutting to the tall, slim, glass bottles Diluc set on the floor beside the couch.

Diluc scoffed a little. “Who else?”

“Just making sure you’re not teasing me.”

Diluc didn’t look down at him. “Between the two of us, who does more teasing?”

“Of course,” Kaeya said, eyes sliding shut.

They sat in mostly-comfortable silence while Albedo continued to read. Softly, slowly, Diluc lifted a hand and placed it on Kaeya’s head. Kaeya stiffed with a flash of blue, but allowed it.

Klee’s eyes felt like fireplace tongs fresh from turning logs, burning straight into the side of Diluc’s head.

Albedo’s reading faltered, breaking off into a sentence that ended in Klee. “Is something the matter, Klee?” he tried again after an awkward cough. “Is the Young Master bothering you?”

“No,” Klee replied, still glaring at Diluc.

Albedo’s eyes crinkled, turning up ever so slightly as he smiled. “Good. Because if he was-” his sentence broke off back into the foreign language. Diluc couldn’t understand the words, but he knew a threat when he heard one, and while no one would believe him, Albedo was much scarier than he let on.

~

Diluc couldn’t help but feel like an intruder on Kaeya’s life anymore.

Today, it seemed that Kaeya and Albedo had both shirked their duties to spend the day with Klee. Kaeya had an arm around Albedo’s shoulders, and Klee dangled between the two of them, laughing brightly. She had windwheel asters tucked into her hair, poking out from under her hat, drifting to the ground behind her.

Kaeya and Albedo were talking over her head, but Diluc couldn’t hear the words from this distance. Kaeya tilted his head, but Diluc didn’t need to see his face to know that was a signal that he’d been detected. With a sigh, Diluc approached them. “How do you always know?” he asked.

Kaeya only smiled.

Albedo took Klee, tucked her into his side, not bothering the hide their accusatory stares. “What do you want?” he asked.

Kaeya patted his shoulder. “There’s no need to be hostile.” For a moment, Diluc could only see the playful, coy smile Kaeya wore over a drink in the company of enemies. Albedo backed off, muttering under his breath. “Though I am curious,” Kaeya said. “You’re not in town often. Especially at this time of day. It’s a bit too early for the bar.”

Diluc scoffed a little. “The only reason you’re not in there yourself is because you’re taking care of a child.” The jab came out a bit more aggressive than he’d intended, but Kaeya didn’t seem to mind.

“What can I say? It’d be terribly irresponsible of me to be drinking in the company of children.”

Albedo beat Diluc to the response. “Do you really want to start an argument about irresponsible, Kaeya?”

Kaeya laughed, unrestrained, unconcerned. Naturally. “So mean,” he said. “As if I would do anything but help our precious Klee. I’d almost be hurt if I didn’t like the two of you getting along.”

“You’re not calling him ‘your Highness,’” Diluc observed, perhaps a bit late.

Albedo gave Diluc a threatening smile. “His kingdom is no longer, and he is no prince here.”

“Be nice,” Kaeya scolded, affectionate. “Really, both of you need to lighten up.”

“You need to be more reliable,” slipped out before Diluc could bite it back. Klee scowled.

Kaeya only made a face. “Why, you wound me. I’m much more reliable than I look.”

Albedo snorted. “Sure, when it suits your agenda.”

Kaeya only laughed again. “I’ll see you around, Diluc. Keep an eye out for a package.”

“I thought we were keeping that a secret.”

Kaeya smiled at Albedo. “Well, yes, but I made him a promise.”

 ~

A brown paper-wrapped package appeared on Diluc’s desk one morning. Heavy and square. Upon opening it, it was a book, exotic and foreign-looking, bound in dark leather and gold. Tales from a Long-Forgotten Time: Memories from the Corrupted Kingdom read the title in a looping script that seemed distantly familiar. Translated by Remnant, illustrated by Khemia.

Diluc flipped open the cover, where a translator’s note was printed.

“To our readers,

We had fallen long before we had died. Our goddess was corrupted long before our savior’s birth. Our Kingdom had died long before our last Prince destroyed it. Feel for us no pity, for our home has been among the stars for far longer than we have been there, our time on earth long past. All that remains, all that we would leave behind are our legends. Who we were matters not. All that’s left of us are stories.

-  The Remnants”

Scrawled on the inside of the front cover, another handwritten note.

“My heart of the Abyss was always here.”

[kkrazy256]

Fic Writer Interview Meme 

Thanks for the tag @parkotedarasuum​ !

Name: Terra

Fandoms: Currently Star Wars, but I’ve dabbled in Legends of Tomorrow recently. Used to be a DCMK main. 

Two-Shot: If this is about my opinion on two-shots, I don’t tend to do them  because at that point, might as well shove it all into a one-shot. But if it’s about any I’ve written...WELL, it’s a two shot THEORETICALLY if I finish it akhfkajl but my In Lieu of Flowers is a two-shot. It’s a Fox and Wolffe centric one during the aftermath of the Malevolence Arc. Just two bros being sad about how the Republic treats them :Sadge: Currently it still works as a one-shot but I do have something planned for the second/last chapter. 

Most popular multi-chapter fic: There’s an old DCMK one floating around that was super super popular (but really badly written because I was in middle school). But my current one, by far most popular, is definitely Ascent. The amount of love and feedback I’ve gotten on it is incredibly insane and wonderful. You are all the best and I’m sorry it hasn’t been updated in half a year. I’m just...really into tcw and fox right now LOL but every single part of it is outlined so it WILL be finished eventually. Just..stick around ;’) 

It got long because I apparently had thoughts. So under the cut to not bother people :’)

Actual worst part of writing: uh...the writing part? XD I don’t mind editing at all. It gives me the chance to read my fic in full for the first time and it’s the closest feeling to being the reader before I get absolutely tired of it LOL. The worst for me is finally finishing the part that I’ve been itching to write and then being hit with this feeling of ‘I’m done I don’t want to do anymore’ even though there are so many scenes to write. That’s why I put off writing the scene I really want to write until the right time. 

How you choose your titles: Perceive me, you will not. All my titles are usually super cryptic and make sense to only me. Like, ‘Double-Edged Sparrow’? If you figured it out, I would be very VERY impressed. I’m not super creative with titles most of the time, so many of them are just one word titles that vaguely have to do with the fic. Recently, I’ve been trying to get more creative, hence the really weird titles. Some are just lines from songs or poetry that inspired the fic too!

Do you outline: Always. I start with a bullet point list of major points I want to hit. Then a more thorough one that is basically almost every scene but in world salad format. Which means, any thoughts that come to mind, super casual writing, and sometimes even memes. Anything to help workshop the plot and transitions. This is a bit of the outline from DES, which was more to the point:

And then there’s this one from a future chapter of The Way His Soul Shall Go so uh, spoilers 👀 which is just straight up half-assed dialogue kahfkjsa

Ideas you probably won’t get around to, but would be nice: Something something fix-it fic. The Way His Soul Shall Go technically is one, but the direction it will go won’t be 100% what I want in a fix-it. Definitely would like to do a Fox helps Boba out of prison fic but I really don’t think I’ll actually manage to write it. I’ll just think about it. I’ve had some ambitious Mando ones under wraps but they might just stay shelved for now due to Fox brainrot. 

Callouts @ me: Please PLEASE finish ONE multi-chapter fic in ur life. PLEASE. I am going to, slap ur hands off the keyboard if you open another WIP. I have a third chapter curse. I hit chapter 3 of any multi-fic and it just starts to stall. Whaddahell.

Best writing traits: Uhh hmm...my style is very straight forward/to the point and not really flowery with poetic lines. And I’m really self-conscious about it OTL. So my best trait would probably be the plots. It’s usually something different but ideas that people are 👀 about so I’m glad there are others to enjoy what I share. 

Spicy tangential opinion: uhhh uhhh I liked a lot of Leo’s shdfkjha. In terms of writing, it’s not something new and groundbreaking to say. But I think a lot of the culture has shifted to where a headcanon gets super popular that if someone doesn’t adhere to it in their fic, it is seen as ‘wrong’ when it’s...just a headcanon. Or vice versa a headcanon gets super popular but it’s fucking awful and I have to suffer through seeing it everywhere LMAOO

Tagging: Brain too fucked right now to think of ppl to tag. But if you want to do this or don’t get tagged in these often, by all means!!! Please please say I tagged, I want to read all about your process, writer friends <3 

[firesign23]

Fic Writer Meme

Can this be? Did Tumblr actually notify me of a tag? The HORROR! Apparently @sdwolfpup is magic, because this is the first notif I got in months.

Name: I’m some variation of firesign23 most places, and my Game of Throne fics are on ao3 under Roccolinde.

Fandoms: Going just off active fandoms: Game of Thrones, somehow? And I pluck on and off at MFMM fics I don’t think I’ll ever finish. And I wrote a Queen’s Thief fic for Yuletide this year, and somewhere in my drafts there lingers the Queen of Attolia AU I started where Helen/Irene basically hatefuck their complicated dynamic out so there might be more of that fandom eventually.

Where you post: AO3. Some truly terrible teenaged fics still exist on fanfiction.net, and I think I crossposted on MFMM there because of the audience. Maybe I only thought about it. 😂

Most popular one-shot: (every single one of us) still left in want of mercy by hits and kudos, and by comments it’s last year’s holiday fic Eyes Like Starlight.

Most Popular Multi-chapter: in the wild blue yonder, by any measure. I started posting it at the height of fandom activity and it’s been going on for over a year and a half, so that makes sense.

Fic You Were Nervous to Post:  Weirdly, I am always nervous when I post but less so in this fandom than others? Knowing that I’m pretty consistently middling in terms of quality and that I’m writing to a niche a lot of people are actively not into means that I’m far more emotionally invested in my own feelings about the work than the reception. Which would be great if I wasn’t my own worst critic. 

How Do You Choose Your Titles?: I flail until I choose something at random so I can just fucking post already. Lots of song lyrics and poety for GoT--I don’t think I’d ever done the very long poetical title (with brackets) thing before this fandom, but half my fics do it. Makes them feel less real. 😂

Do You Outline?: Most of the time, to a very vague standard of outline. It’s mostly just notes to my future self in roughly chronological order

Complete: Oh fuck knows. ~175 or so on ao3, between two accounts, and dozens of very old fics that exist somewhere.

Do You Take Prompts?: I do, but I also write slowly so... I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a prompt outside of prompt memes (though I’d love to!), and I usually get 2-3 prompts and get like one of them done in a timely manner. Terrible.

In progress: I’m working on my final Festive Chillfest stocking stuffer; I’m perpetually picking at yonder and be my anchor, be my moor and the Brienne/Addam marriage universe ficlets; I have about 26k of a fic I started writing for NaNo that I think is dead in the water but my heart will not let it go quite yet. There is definitely a doc in my Gdrive titled Political Pegging, which I might manage to write for @jbmonthlymadness

Coming soon: Oh god, people are posting things? Sounds fake. I suppose I will be doing the Smut Swap fic fairly soon, if I can come up with something. I had a great idea, and then I started pacing it out in my head and realised this was more like a 12K oneshot than a 5k one and now I’m back at square one. And I should finish that stocking stuffer soon, it’s three chapters to go but the chapters are like 1k each. 

Given my aforementioned tagging notificaiton issue, I’ll just throw this out to anybody who wants to!

[typewriterghcst]

Title: In the TV Light Rating: G-ish tbh Characters: The Cat King, Natori, Haru, and a bit of Natoru at the end Pairings: None except for mentions of Lune and Yuki, but I hope you’re prepared for a tender heart-to-heart where one of the participants is the Cat King. Summary: Not one to be appeased by flimsy substitutions when he really wants something, the Cat King drags a protesting Natori into the human world sometime after midnight in the hopes of obtaining a midnight snack worth getting out of bed for.  Notes: Written for the TCR 2020 Birthday Bash. I mean. Mostly. It actually first began life as a response to being given the one-word prompt “Glow.” Which at the time I had intended to be a reference to the glow of the convenience store lights on pavement or something pretentiously poetic like that lmao  i’ve also decided to go ahead and split this enormous rambling fic into pieces in the interest of making it more. uh. Accessible. however, there may be erratically. Long periods of time in between updates, aha rip

  Chapter 1: In Which Haru Makes A Questionable Decision

Natori’s face is pressed against one of his paws. Rather uncomfortably, he should add, as it’s a gesture that anyone who wears glasses will tell you is difficult to pull off without some vexing little issues, feline or not. After a moment or two of this private mourning for the nap he’d been at least absently looking forward to, he finally lifts his head again so that he can look his Issue in the grinning, odd-eyed face. The king is waiting for his answer. No doubt he’s already convinced himself it will be a favorable one, despite Natori’s show of exasperation. If not immediately, then… eventually.

Frustrated with the swell of helplessness that washes over him at this prospect, Natori turns his attention instead to the window, inadvertently looking out over the mess of still-crumbled tower, stone and rubble. He supposes it might count as a grounding, a ruined emblem to remind him why Claudius must have this voice of reason.

When he does reply, it’s with the long-suffering tone of an overworked schoolmarm.

"...You want me to organize another official procession into the human world— and at such alarmingly short notice, I might add— just so you can, if I have this right..." Here Natori's deadpan gaze falls directly on his royal employer's (ex? royal employer's?) hopeful, oblivious face, and he prays he looks just as judgmental as he's about to sound, "...pick up a bag of chips or two..?"

To both his relief and everlasting resignation, the Cat King only snorts at this prospect, or perhaps its ridiculous (but no less accurate) wording, but he does at least step back a bit, wobbling heavily on one foot and waving one paw in overconfidence at the same time. "Nah, babe— forget all that frilly procession baloney. This cat ain't the king anymore, is he? Not on paper, anyway. I say we just ollie on out there, grab what we want, come back, and eat like—” he snorts again, "—kings."

And, then, before Natori can protest again, unimpressed by the other cat's... joke, he continues, head canted, one eye squinted just so that he looks playfully critical of his ex-advisor's apparent poor memory. "And you know me, Natty— I ain't about that bag of chips life. Heh."

The Cat King snorts again, gaze drawn to his paw as he does. "...For all the walking I'm about to endure for it, you know it's gonna be oden or bust."

"Your Majesty, please, to— for you to travel in such a way—! It's—! I-It's.." Natori's objections fade when his old friend looks him in the eye, expression molded into what one would be forgiven for reading as wholly blank were it not for the underpinning of steel mixed in with the ennui. He sees it then— how nothing he says is going to hold any weight, how there is no way for him to make the king understand just how remarkably—! Immature! Unseemly! The Cat King is an old man, a retired one, at that, who is in the process of passing on his crown and livelihood to his more capable son, but he's certainly not supposed to ostensibly sneak out of his own lavish home like a delinquent teenager now that the pressure is off him! ...Is he?

The king is smiling widely at him again— the same smile he's always sported whenever he's gotten his way, or known he was about to get his way, and Natori— steels himself! He huffs; his eyes narrow. He's not defeated just yet!

"...But it must be after midnight in the human world right now." Ah. That came out fainter than he intended. Shoot.

More frustrating still, the king adds a peace sign to his goofy smile.

"Don't worry about it, babe. I had a plan for that all along."

                                                              &&&

"...This is your plan..."

"This is the plan, babe."

They are lingering outside a familiar home in the human world, perched solidly atop the fence surrounding it. A street lamp down the way they came flickers. Natori turns from that omen and instead regards the modest house with no small amount of dubious chagrin. Yet his companion only chuckles at his overt lack of confidence.

"Your Majesty, I— what on Earth makes you think Miss Haru is going to be willing to assist you in this venture?" Natori doesn't say as such, but her indignant disdain toward the Cat King after his, er, less-than-eloquent proposal had seemed quite clear to him.

"Because I'm the king."

"I quite clearly recall you saying you're not the king anymore, Si—"

"I'm the king," the Cat King repeats, more firmly this time, "And if she pulls a favor for me, that means she has me in her debt, right? Who could say no to that, uhh?"

Ah. That feels like a trap. Natori bites his tongue, but he's far from placated. This is not going to go the way his employer has envisioned it to in his head. Haru, he imagines, cares little for playing nice with the king and his... eccentricities, and an eventual confrontation between the two seems obvious to the bespectacled cat. Acting as the battered neutral party between two stubborn forces of nature is a far cry from how Natori would prefer to spend his late night, but he supposes there are few other cats as practiced as he is at the balancing act.

"Come on, time's a-wastin’—"

Without any other warning, his employer suddenly hops off the fence, disappearing within the cattails that are still growing in the yard (much to Natori's utter bafflement, at least, so Haru surely can't blame them for that), and takes off.

"Wait—!"

"Well, hurry up!"

By the time Natori catches up to his king, he's already practically glued to what Natori guesses is Haru's bedroom window. Her lights are off, which is to be expected, given the time. He catches only the smallest glimpse of the lump snuggled under the comforter before he's distracted by the king's less than courteous attempt at waking the poor girl— an open-palmed smack on the glass of her window, muted only slightly by his plush fur. To Natori's horror, the king raises his paw to try again, but he somehow manages to stop him before he gets the chance.

"Your Majesty, plea—"

"It worked!"

Indeed, it has. A quick glance back to the window before the two of them reveals that Haru (her face at least, the rest of her still cocooned within her duvet like a caterpillar) has emerged from under the covers and caught sight of the pair of cats currently sitting on her window sill as though they own the thing (...and at least one of them most certainly is the type to think so). And, Natori notes, she's regarding them in much the same way one might a forgotten four-month-old bento at the back of the fridge. That's about all the information he has time to absorb before cold, hard glass collides with his glasses and nose (vaguely, he's aware also of the surprised feline yowl that erupts from the king somewhere beside him).

He comes to seconds later on all fours, once again buried in the sea of cattails that at the moment constitutes Haru's family's yard. Haru herself is leaning nearly halfway out the now open window, pointing out at the two of them accusingly.

"What are you doing here?!" She hisses.

The Cat King pops up from out of his unintentional hiding spot among the tall brush, arms outstretched as if he has any right to be indignant, or perhaps is trying to placate an affronted ex. 

"C'mon, babe, what'd I do to deserve that kinda greeting..?"

Natori, still crouched somewhere to the side of his king, can only stare up at Haru's form in the window. She seems to be reluctant to raise her voice, which he supposes is reasonable enough. Meanwhile, an inner voice of his own sees fit to mention to him that he must look like something of a helpless bystander, if not a pitifully frightened kitten, and it's that realization which ultimately tugs him to his full height.

"Don't go acting like you don't know! I almost died because of you!"

"But you didn't!"

"That's not the point!"

Natori distracts the king with a soft tap to the arm.

"...Sire, perhaps it might help defuse the situation if you politely tell her why you've come to... er, visit her..? Politely," he adds again for good measure.

The Cat King is silent for a good moment or two, purring to himself, but finally he nods in approval.

"Good idea, Natty. There's no telling how long we'll be here otherwise."

"...politely..." Natori echoes faintly as he moves away, almost certain his advice will prove too demanding for the king to follow.

Haru, for her part, has at least receded from hanging halfway out the window and instead stands with her arms tightly crossed, looking back and forth between the two with an expression that promises great adversity should they try anything shifty, and for just a brief moment, Natori finds himself struck by a difference he can't quite put a time-frame to. She's quite an image removed from the shrinking violet he'd first spied hiding behind her front drive's stone pillar.

It’s a wonder the change hadn’t registered as a more permanent shift in confidence to him before now.

As if she hadn’t just impulsively knocked the two of them off the very same ledge upon merely spying them sitting there, the Cat King clambers up the side of Haru’s house, depositing himself right onto her window sill like a particularly large and unkempt robin and making himself at home all over again. Haru herself looks less than pleased with this development, but the fact she hasn’t shut her window and gone back to bed seems a good sign to Natori. After a moment of hesitation, he eventually follows his old friend.

"'Kay, here's the thing, babe—"

Natori opens his mouth to nervously correct the king's… vernacular as he arrives, but in the end merely closes it again, thinking better of it. By this point it's just a nervous tic, not a true term of romantic endearment. Otherwise, he'd refrain from referring to Natori himself in such a way. (...wouldn't he? Well, he doesn’t have time to puzzle that one out.)

"—human food is delish, right? But some of us don't have the right, ehhh, savoir-faire to get it for ourselves. Get it? We hafta ask for help. And that's where you come in, babe."

And then, silence. Haru’s previously crossed arms have loosened, and she seems to be trapped somewhere between quizzical and skeptical. 

“...that’s really all you want?”

“Would I lie? A king’s word is gold, babe.”

Haru looks from him to Natori, and the old cat struggles valiantly to keep a straight face and not allow even a shred of doubt in the king’s honesty show. Finally, some of the hard suspicion in her expression starts to fade, though a softer relative is still left behind in the form of uncertainty. When her gaze moves back to the king, it seems she has but one question left.

“Why do you need any help? Lune managed to get a gift for Yuki all by himself.”

To Natori’s surprise, the king then copies Haru’s gesture from just seconds before and looks to him, though in his case it’s with rather striking naivete (striking in its apparent authenticity, if nothing else), as if he’s waiting for an explanation on that mystery himself. Somewhere, an old, exasperated resignation creeps over Natori… Mm. Claudius has always been only too eager to leave the truly arduous questions to him, hasn’t he? Still, he answers readily enough, shoving that unexpected rise of resentment down into the depths from whence it came.

“I’m afraid Prince Lune is something of a— ah, special case. He’s quite well-known in the Cat Kingdom for spending a surprising amount of time in the human world.” Something he now realizes was likely Yuki’s influence. “It’s not at all a difficult stretch of the imagination to presume he must have cultivated a number of hospitable bonds here in the process.”

“Lune’s a networker,” the Cat King adds proudly.

“Unfortunately, well, we haven’t quite had that same opportunity,” Natori finishes. Were he more truthful, he might add that he and the king perhaps have relied a little too heavily on Natoru’s ingrained street smarts in the case of traversing the human world in the past. Haru at least appears amused by this explanation.

“...so, what you’re saying is you’re a couple of clueless, old tourists, is that it?” She eventually deadpans.

“Ha! That’s not a bad way to look at it, babe.” And yet, in a faint pout, the king eventually also adds, “I’m not that old.”

Haru’s brow rises. “No?”

“Natty’s older than I am.”

“Sire—”

“Well, that I’m not surprised by.”

The Cat King turns to survey him before Natori can get another word out. “I thought he was carrying his age pretty good myself.”

That actually gets a small laugh out of Haru, though it’s quickly stifled. Natori, meanwhile, can’t help but feel at least a little like the two are ganging up on him.

“No, King, that’s not what I meant.”

This friendly banter seems to be the last of the encouragement necessary to get through her defenses. Shifting her weight to her other foot, gaze drawn to the night sky in thought, she concedes. At least. Slightly.

“Alright… if it’s just a matter of some snacks…” She murmurs first to herself. “But that’s all! I’m not letting you rope me into some harebrained marriage scheme again, understand?”

The Cat King is already rubbing his paws together in anticipation of his beloved convenience store oden, but he at least remembers to nod in agreement.

“Sure, sure, babe. No funny business. Cross my heart.”

“And stop calling me babe.”

[readandwritesilver]

Writer Tag Game

tagged by @1mechanicalalligator

author name: rustyanklebraclet

fandom(s) you write for: right now mostly juts community, but im thinking about picking my shameless series back up

where you post: Ao3, occasionally tumblr

most popular one-shot: Heavy humid night, corner of Park and Main, which i have mixed feelings about (both the fics popularity and the fic itself).

most popular multi-chapter: ive never written a multichap, lol. i have two series, though, and the most popular of those is my Community episode rewrites

favorite story you wrote: long-term impacts of oceanic travel, i think. it was an idea i had for a while, this collection of different smaller stories that were all connected, but i was never sure how to do it. it went through alot before it got to what it is now, and it’s one of the few fics that i feel like the work i put into it is proportionate to the payoff, if that makes sense.

story you were nervous to post: probably  intro to unrequited love and dramatic irony. it was my first time writing anything even remotely like that (as in not about getting together/a established relationship) and i was just out of my comfort zone. i know i said long-term impacts is my favourite fic that i wrote, and it is, but this is the one that i’m proudest of.

how do you choose your titles? god uh. with the exception of community, where i just run words related to the story through my mental thesaurus (or thesaurus.com if i cant think of any) and mash them together with like an “advanced” or an “intro to” or something in there, either i think of a song that reminds me of the fic and look through the lyrics, or i literally just come up with vaguely poetic nonsense on the spot thats sounds pretty but is actually just horseshit.

how many of your stories are complete? uh, technically all of them? but neither of my series are.

in progress: none of my works, but my episode rewrites series is. not sure i can say the same for my shameless one.

coming soon: i’m working on a trobed fic thats basically a fake dating au? actually its a fake marriage. there are other circumstances, though. but i’m not going to give them away. shoot for the moon it’ll end up being like 15-20k spread over 3-5 chapters, realistically it won’t break 6k. also i have couple rewrites that i’m playing with in my head, but nothing on paper for any of them, as well as some ideas for a jabed fic or two. not sure about that last one yet, though.

upcoming story you’re most excited to write: the fake dating one !! i actually got the idea in the most ridiculous way, but i really like how it’s turning out so far.

do you accept prompts? always! it takes me a bit to write them (sometimes more than that) but i will get to them all eventually. how fast i can get them done depends on different things, but as long as theyre relatively sfw, i’ll do them.

top five favorite authors: just five?? god ok

@1mechanicalalligator

@figbian

@no-sweat-boba-fett

@abedkin

@jabedalien

tag six people: can i juts say them ^ ?

[rederiswrites]

 Author Interview

Thanks to @dafan7711 for the tag although uh I think I’ve been tagged multiple times now? It’s been a weird week.

Name: Red

Fandoms: Dragon Age, Witcher, and apparently now Star Wars/The Mandalorian, with deep fondness and some writing in Horizon: Zero Dawn, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Lucifer (the show), and odds and ends.

Where You Post: I usually crosspost on tumblr and AO3, but only put the full version of long fics on AO3

Most Popular One-Shot: Errrr, let’s keep it easy to figure and just say kudos. All the top one-shots are either porn or porn-adjacent, shock and amazement!. Hunting the Wolf, which is actually a clipped-out section of Little Fox, comes in at 184 kudos.

Most Popular Multi-Chapter Story: By kudos, it’s still Complications (Female mage Trevelyan and Cullen and an accidental pregnancy), my first multi-chapter! 739 kudos. BUT Little Fox (Male mage Lavellan with Solas AND Cullen and lots of action and angst) has  689 kudos with wildly less popular pairings, and an absolutely terrifying 263 subscriptions. Kinda wish I hadn’t noticed that. Now I got The Agita.

Favorite Story You Wrote: TBH I’m an arrogant bastard and I love them all. Little Fox is definitely most important to me in the grand scheme, though.

Story You Were Nervous to Post: I get nervous to post chapters that I’ve been looking forward to for ages, because I’m so invested in them that I really want the audience to have a huge reaction. I remember being really wrought up to post the chapter of Little Fox where Samhal faces Corypheus in Haven and well you know *spoilers* makes a deal with a demon by accident. I don’t get nervous about smut, that’s more me behind the computer rubbing my hands gleefully.

How You Choose Your Titles: I dunno man how do I write at all? I make shit up. I think of what the central theme of the work is and then try to be all poetic and shit--but you know, quickly.

Complete: Errrrrr. Lots of oneshots, including a couple longish ones, and Complications.

Incomplete: Little Fox, Mark My Skin (Alistair/Zevran), an assortment of things I’ve not published at all, and Give Me A Week (f!Amell/Alistair porn with some plot), which is ancient but which I’d still love to come back to and still feel really bad about because I never actually got to the pegging. Mark My Skin has a chapter or two to go and said chapter is in progress. Little Fox also has a chapter mostly done, but by contrast is at best only halfway done, at 57 chapters. 

Do You Outline? Yes, for longer stuff, but it’s usually pretty sloppy. Have to outline for something like Little Fox, otherwise I don’t see how I could possibly get where I was going.

Coming Soon/Not Yet Started: Look I don’t need encouragement. But yeah there’s stuff in the files. A couple of Mandalorian ideas are pressing me.

Do You Accept Prompts? Apparently

Upcoming Story You Are Most Excited to Write: Wow I’d be really fucking excited to actually finish this chapter of Little Fox.

I’ll tag hm hm hm @greetingsfromrivain, @mysdrym, @minionripley, @vaguely-concerned, @mevima, @heraldofwho

[dirigibleplumbing]

Author meme

Tagged by: @bill-longbow, thank you ❤️

Author Name: dirigibleplumbing

Fandoms You Write For: Functionally only Marvel, though I’m working on a ton of Hannibal stuff right now. I also did a Bojack Horseman story for Yuletide, and have done a few crossovers. 

Where You Post: AO3

Most Popular One-Shot: By kudos it’s Every True Thing.

Most Popular Multi-Chapter Story: Ashes to Ashes, my 50K Infinity War fix-it with Steve/Tony and Civil War feels.

Favorite Story You Wrote: A lot of them have special places in my heart, but for now I’m going to go with Edges, which is a smutty angsty post-Endgame-everyone-lived-AU Steve/Tony story with armor porn and a happy ending. 

Story You Were Nervous to Post: Probably I Am With You. It was my first time writing anything as a gift for someone. I’d also just put a tremendous amount of research and planning into it. 

How Do You Choose Your Titles: Very rarely a title will come to me as I’m working on plotting or themes. The rest pretty much happen by browsing thesauruses, vaguely related Wikipedia articles, song titles, and tearing out my hair and using it to cast arcane spells. 

Do You Outline: Yes, especially for multi-chaptered pieces and longer one-shots. Even for short stuff I will usually start with some notes about the plot and then separate that out to make sure there is a distinct conflict (however minor) and resolution. 

Complete: 22 (this is my worklist minus fanart) 

In-Progress: I recently made two overly detailed posts about what I’m working on (Steve/Tony, Will/Hannibal). Here’s the stories I’ve been working on the very most: 

A multi-chapter sequel to Personal Use tentatively called “Shared Use” 

an MCU Steve/Tony story comprised entirely of smut, angst, and bad BDSM etiquette. Tentatively called “Lost On You.” 

A poetic/surreal/purple prose/YMMV multi-chapter Hannibal story that takes place after “Wrath of the Lamb.” Hannibal POV with eventual Will/Hannibal. It’s tentatively called “River of the World.” Featuring: they’re on a boat; discussion of alternate realities; dogs; murder; and of course cannibalism. 

An utterly untitled post-“Wrath of the Lamb” Will/Hannibal story. Featuring: Will POV; fleeing by car; stopovers in expensive, ostentatious places that still aren’t quite Hannibal’s style; medium burn friends to murder bros; and slow burn romance. 

Coming Soon/Not Yet Started:

an AvAc hurt/comfort arc reactor story 

a Star Wars x MCU crossover

a Hannibal crossover with the Magicians TV show (featuring Marina, the Magicians character played by Kacey Rohl, the actress who played Abigail) 

a crackfic wherein, unbeknownst to anyone, Hannibal is transformed into a dog. You can 100% guess who adopts that dog, and pretty much everything that happens afterward, but I’m writing it anyway. 

Do You Accept Prompts: I haven’t ever, like, announced it, and I make no promises about filling prompts in a timely manner, but I do love hearing ideas that readers think I might do a good job with or made them think of me. I will at the very least read your prompt and think about it and let it germinate! 

Upcoming Story You Are Most Excited to Write: For Steve/Tony, it’s “Lost On You.” There are parts of it that were the first thing I ever wrote for this fandom but it only recently coalesced into a full story. 

For Will/Hannibal it’s the two multi-chapter post-”Wrath of the Lamb” stories I’m working on. 

Tagging:

I LOVE reading about people’s ideas and WIPs so if you are at all interested in doing this and I neglected to tag you, PLEASE do this anyway! 

@elcorhamletlive @arukou-arukou @ishipallthings @suitofhumour

[fae-fucker]

Review: The Murder Complex

by Lindsay Cummings

An action-packed, blood-soaked, futuristic debut thriller set in a world where the murder rate is higher than the birthrate. For fans of Moira Young’s Dust Lands series, La Femme Nikita, and the movie Hanna.

Meadow Woodson, a fifteen-year-old girl who has been trained by her father to fight, to kill, and to survive in any situation, lives with her family on a houseboat in Florida. The state is controlled by The Murder Complex, an organization that tracks the population with precision.

The plot starts to thicken when Meadow meets Zephyr James, who is—although he doesn’t know it—one of the MC’s programmed assassins. Is their meeting a coincidence? Destiny? Or part of a terrifying strategy? And will Zephyr keep Meadow from discovering the haunting truth about her family?

Action-packed, blood-soaked, and chilling, this is a dark and compelling debut novel by Lindsay Cummings.

There’s a video on YouTube where Sasha Alsberg and Lindsay Cummings try to promote Zenith and their favorite books by speculating about what sort of books Andi would enjoy reading.

Lindsay, being the humble creature that she is, says that Andi would enjoy this book. Why? Because Andi would recognize Meadow’s methods as similar to her own? Because Andi would enjoy reading an edgy “thriller” because she too is edgy? Or even because both Andi and Meadow are beautiful waifish white girls with silver hair who don’t particularly mind killing people?

Actually, no, you absolute fool. Sasha speculates on why Andi would enjoy this book (because of the title and how both Meadow and Andi have … uh … something … in common) and tries and fails to give Lindsay a way out. Lindsay admits to not listening, occupied with her book, which she lovingly strokes while staring into the camera.

I think this says a lot about Lindsay herself, Andi’s personality (or rather, lack thereof), and most importantly, the content of this here book.

This review contains spoilers and discussions of potentially triggering topics.

The Writing

I don’t have much to say here. Zenith was far, far worse when you just compare the prose. It’s simple, bare-bones, and straight to the point. Perfectly mediocre and not memorable at all. It flows well enough, and if it weren’t for uuuh everything else in this book, I’d say it’s a quick and easy read.

It does get very melodramatic and edgy at times, but that is to be expected, and since the melodrama mostly avoids getting too purple or lasting too long, I will officially give Cummings the “I could read your book mostly without cringing at the words” award.

The story is told from Meadow and Zephyr’s POVs, and I’d have to disagree with other reviewers who said that their narration was too similar. I mean, it wasn’t spectacular and they definitely had some overlap in expressions, but I could tell that Cummings was making a conscious effort to make them distinct and for me, it worked (mostly past the first half of the book where both of them just mope around and sound very similar), so I commend that.

The Characters

Now, while Andi OH SHIT FUCK I DIDN’T MEAN TO DO THAT THAT WASN’T A BIT I LITERALLY JUST TYPED ANDI INSTEAD OF MEADOW

Now, while Meadow and Zephyr are distinct, that doesn’t really mean they’re good characters, yea? Honestly, they’re pretty much the only ones who get any type of development and the only ones who can, paradoxically, turn off their edge and just be normal people every now and then.

Meadow is supposedly this Strong Femail Charactor who does Bad Things for Good Reasons. And … I mean, yeah? Like, I don’t remember ever feeling like she obsessed over a man, and her motivations were always either keeping her little sister safe or surviving or figuring out the mystery around their society and how it ties into her own family. As far as YA heroines go, Meadow isn’t terrible. But she’s not exactly interesting, either. She’s always collected and rarely loses her cool, she displays few emotions outside of anger, and is generally cold and downplayed to the point of having barely any personality traits. I guess it’s sort of on purpose? But there are ways of making a character subtle and still interesting, and Meadow just feels like somebody packaged a Strong Femail Charactor right out of the factory without slapping some paint on her first. Idk, I guess if this is what Lindsay was going for then she did a good job, but personally I prefer my protags to be a bit more … more.

I will apologize to Meadow for calling her Andi, though. Andi is a lot more smug and obnoxious and has fewer reasons to be.

Zephyr is a harder to define because I’m pretty sure he’s intended to be more colorful than Meadow, but he comes off as even more generic than her. He’s a convincing enough teenage boy at times, because he lusts after Meadow like a puppy and thinks in super dramatic and poetic prose about how perfect and beautiful she is. But outside of that, he just sort of exists and the plot happens to him? He has no consistent personality traits and no flaws that he has control over. He’s partially brainwashed to murder on command and he’s like, sad about it, for a second, but accepts it pretty quickly and swears to help Meadow out for … reasons? Idk I guess he’s in love with her or whatever. The blurb implies he wants to keep her from discovering the truth but he pretty much helps her from the start.

He’s perfectly non-threatening — a boy next door type if next door was a war zone. Most of the time I wonder how many hands he needs to count all his braincells. One? Or mayhaps two? Whatever happens he just sort of rolls with after a chapter or two of angst and he ends up feeling like he’s a crutch for Meadow, a non-character there to fill the role of the snarky sidekick whose personal conflict is a minor subplot, which is admittedly fairly unusual in YA, but for a co-protagonist isn’t ideal, as one might imagine.

Koi is Meadow’s overprotective older brother who wants to beat up Zephyr for reasons and refuses to chill. And yes, that’s his name.

Periwinkle/Peri is Meadow’s younger sister and Meadow’s Moality Pet. And yes, that’s her name.

Meadow’s dad is an abusive asshole dad who is Too Hard On His Children but whose lessons Turn Out To Be Helpful in the end. No, it’s not his name but I can’t remember what it is and can’t be assed to look it up because he’s just Meadow’s dad. Oh and he likes torture? While Meadow acknowledges her dad is fucked up he’s still treated as this wise authority figure who gives good advice and is only a result of his environment. Society is evil, so that’s why he treats his children like shit and teaches them how to murder good. It’s to protect them, see?

Talan is Zephyr’s best friend and teenage sex worker who lost her child and now is vaguely suicidal but it’s supposed to be charming and quirky??? Talan is the only major character to die brutally for shock value and she seems to welcome it. Tbh she was the only interesting character in the whole book so I actually felt bad when she was killed off like that.

And then there’s a bunch of other characters but what’s the point of me telling you about them since they’re all generic as hell and only exist to spout exposition at Meadow and her boy toy.

There was another character I liked well enough, but only because she was the only PoC and her name was Sketch, which is a pretty neat name, but she didn’t have much of a personality except “snarky hardass” and was basically a Deluxe Edition of an existing “snarky hardass” character. She appears only in the late chapters of the book and is there to get brutalized for the sake of our two white protags. She didn’t die though, so there’s that?

The Plot

Alright, alright, I guess I have to write something.

I honestly have no fucking idea what the plot was. The blurb pretty much tells it all: Meadow meets Zephyr, they fall in love (?), Zephyr goes all Terminator on her ass and she’s like ??? and then uh … turns out Meadow’s family/dead mom are involved in the Murder Complex, which is the thing that’s making Zephyr and other random people kill others when remotely “activated” and so now they gotta find out what the heckity heck is going on, I guess?

It’s a clear enough plot but the motivations are a little weak, especially on Zephyr’s side. One would think he’d like to get rid of the whole “murder on command” thing in his brain but he seems to be able to fight it off easily once he meets Meadow and he’s more focused on helping her for reasons.

Yeah, I’m … I’ve already forgotten large chunks of the story so that should tell you something.

The “Worldbuilding”

O SHIT HERE COMES THE JUICY PART OF THE REVIEW.

*clears throat* Here we go:

The Shallows, Night Siren, the Initiative, Catalogue Number, Commandments of the Shallows, Creds, the Perimeter, the Silent Hour, Before, Rations Department, Pirates, the Dark Time, the Pulse, the Pin, the Red train, the Blue train, Wards, the Leeches, the Graveyard, the Survivors, Rations Hall, Initiative Headquarters, Wards of the State, the Gravers, NoteScreen, Evaluator, the Catalogue Dome, the Pit, Cred Orb, the Furnace Room, the Library, Sellout, the Hospital, the Believers …

Holy shit I don’t think I’ve gotten all of the Important Names yet and I’m already tired.

Y’all. This is the worst case of worldbuilding laziness I’ve seen in a while, and I’m someone who absolutely hates worldbuilding and will let authors get away with minimal effort. This? This is awful. And the thing is? I get it. I might’ve forgiven this because coming up with names is HARD and we humans usually go for the obvious anyway so this makes some amount of sense.

The problem is the fact that there are some words and concepts that are PERFECTLY REGULAR (i.e. the Hospital is literally just a fucking hospital) but still capitalized for no goddamn reason other than it being an attempt at sounding all sci-fi and dystopian without any actual effort. Everything blends together and the concepts are so generic and so MANY that it just becomes noise and you’re forced to simply roll with it and stop trying to actually imagine what anything looks like or where it’s located or how it works.

*takes deeep breath*

Speaking of how it works, let me tell you about the main premise. Basically, there was a war, a big war that tore the US apart like Lisa tears apart Johnny. Those who survived the war were infected with a plague, creatively named the Plague, that threatened to wipe out the population. One 20-year-old scientist cured the Plague, along with literally everything else, including death. Thanks to “nanites”, humans can no longer die of natural causes. This leads to overpopulation, and to stop this, the person who invented this all-cure comes up with another absolutely brilliant idea: let’s make MORE humans, but these humans have brains that are programmed to kill on command. Who gets murdered is chosen at random each and every night in a lottery, and survivors have to clean up dozens of new corpses every morning. (Meadow mentions the death rate is now 300 people per month.)

Yeah. I know. The same brilliant scientist who CURED DEATH not only fails to reverse the effects of their own invention, but decides that factory printing brainwashed humans who are then released into the world to also consume resources along with their victims is the best course of action?

Also, there are old people in this book. How are they still aging? How do you cure death but keep the aging? Why do you kill random people for shits and giggles instead of offing the semi-sentient sacks of flesh that the old people are bound to become as their bodies grow and decline but refuse to die? Surely you need young people to work in your factories? If resources are scarce, why keep old people alive past the point where they can contribute to society? If you have the technology to make remote controlled brains, why can’t you yank those bad boys out and just put them into robot bodies?

Why did nobody consider sterilization? I know this is a dangerous and sensitive topic that a white author probably shouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, but if you’re ok with writing indiscriminate murder and pretend that shit wouldn’t become very racist very fast, then you could do the same with sterilization. You can’t tell me that the nanites are so good they could grow you a new uterus. Evidently they’re not good enough to heal bullet wounds or stab wounds or else your little “murder complex” wouldn’t fucking work, would it?

I’m not saying these are “better” options than murder lottery, because these are all terrible things, but I am saying that they’re definitely more logical and profitable if you’re an evil government. Compared to making new people from scratch to kill your already existing people, anyway.

There are also implications of this all being a lie to control the population so that the “Initiative” can remain in control, along with the usual shitty YA dystopia thing where it’s implied that Earth is fucked and we’re out of resources.

This whole thing is a mess of half-assed concepts that are never explored but just sort of jammed together into an incoherent mess. There’s a big war, there’s a big plague, there’s senseless murder, there’s an evil government, there’s child soldiers, there’s brainwashing, there’s a rebel Resistance, there’s climate change … There’s even an Aptitude Test or whatever that never comes back despite being very angsted and exposited about in the opening chapters. It’s like Lindsay read all the YA dystopias that came before and couldn’t pick a gimmick and just went for all of them.

Oh I haven’t even mentioned the funniest part of all this: the swearing. As with Zenith, Lindsay has no problem describing gory murder and calling female characters “sluts”, but actual human curse words like shit and fuck? Don’t be silly. This is CHILD AND PUBLISHER FRIENDLY. Shit is now “skitz”, “fuck” is now “flux”. Can you imagine reading this fluxing bullskitz? WE NEVER EVEN FIND OUT WHAT THESE WORDS MEAN OR WHY THEY WERE REPLACED, SINCE THIS TAKES PLACE RECENT ENOUGH THAT MEADOW REMEMBERS GOING TO BASEBALL GAMES.

Oh and there’s also ChumHead, which, you guessed it, is never explained.

I guess now we know who to blame for “fike” and “starshined”. Oh and there are swears related to the stars in this book as well. I think Lindsay needs to get off that SJM juice.

The Edgy

Allow me to feed quotes into your gaping brain mouths. Not a lot of them because most of my notes are just me going WHAT at the concepts and the names more than the phrasing.

Every night, I stay awake for as long as I can to keep my nightmares at bay.

Scars are trophies in the Shallows. They show we know how to cheat death.

In a paragraph before this one, Meadow mentions that nanites heal everything but leave scars behind for reasons, and it happens to everyone. So why would they be a status symbol?

It’s the moon. The moon that reminds me of the moonlit girl.

My moonlit girl. She’s the cure to my nightmares, the one thing that helps me feel safe when I can’t even trust my own dreams to harbor me.

Spoken like a real teenage boy, Zeph. Would you like some tissues with that spunk?

I hold the door open for [Talan], but she shrugs past me and opens the other one. Always independent. Never taking help from anyone.

Hi is this a Feminism?

I find two leather thigh sheathes and strap them to my legs. I slide two knives into them and stand, slinging the bow over my shoulder. […] Feeling angry. But feeling strong.

Convenient sexy makeover includes leather knife pockets and a cool but completely-impractical-due-to-the-existence-of-enemy-guns crossbow. I also want to mention that the book calls crossbow ammo “arrows”, when they’re usually referred to as bolts, but go off.

The Conclusion

The Murder Complex is a book that straddles the line between mediocre and bad. Its biggest flaw is how boring and shallow its ideas and characters are. Which basically means its biggest flaw is everything about it. I can’t say it was so bad it’s good, but I can’t exactly call it terrible because I’ve read far, far worse. It’s mediocre writing about bland characters angsting and murdering their way through a convoluted plot that’s based on worldbuilding as solid as half-eaten ham standwich found in a rainy alleyway. It’s not fun or entertaining to read and there’s nothing to get outrageously mad about.

In the end, I don’t think you should pick this up unless you’ve somehow read every other book in the world and this is the only one left. Don’t waste your time on this, not even as a joke. Don’t make my sacrifice be in vain.

[ngame989]

Earning the Happily Ever After: Star’s Season 4 Arc Prediction (with a primer analysis for Seasons 1-3)

Time to break in my blog with my very own speculation post. This is going to be a very general but also very far-reaching take on the final arc of the show for Star, based on what I know about the show thus far and the tiny bit of detail we got at SDCC. I’ll be doing overviews on Star’s arcs and how the show always ties in the personal growth she’s undergoing to her relationship with the kingdom and her relationship with Marco. Finally I’ll try to piece together how things, on a broader level, might go down for our rebel princess and karate boy in what is almost certainly the last 21 episodes of the show.

The bulk of this post breaks down the past 3 seasons. There will almost certainly be redundancy with other posts people have written for Tumblr or elsewhere, and I don’t claim any of it is brand new information. I still do hope you give it a chance as it ties everything together in a way geared towards providing context for my Season 4 assertions, but if you are so inclined to skip ahead, simply search for “Season 4” and jump to the next instance after this paragraph (or even “TL;DR” for the fully abbreviated experience). There will be a recap of the critical context included.

Long post after the break!

So let’s begin breaking down Star’s primary arc season by season. Obviously character growth is fluid and you can’t pin down individual moments as the moment a character flaw was “fixed,” but there’s still some discernible changes to extract here. Each season’s title is her major obstacle during the season and the aspect of maturity she gains as a result of her growth.

Season 1 – Innocence/Awareness

Star’s defining trait of season 1 was being carefree to a fault. She uses her magic for whimsy and doesn’t really heed the consequences. It was the reason she was sent to Earth, after all!

Similarly, her initial crush on Earth is based entirely on literal flights of fancy.

As the season goes on, Star gets her first tastes of the seriousness of the real world and culminates in her first major confrontation with it. It’s almost poetic that Blood Moon Ball, where Star and Marco’s relationship gets the first real hit of emotional depth, is paired with the segment which introduces us to the first serious threat in Star’s life.

(see this is why I need new copies of the episodes smh goshdang subtitle typos)

She’s still not the most mature about it and is still scared to death or outright ignorant of the complexities in the world for a while,

but still makes some initial steps forward in her character.

The season concludes with Storm the Castle, a turning point where she has to tackle a major decision with serious consequences head-on. Is it any surprise that this involves both her relationship to the kingdom and Marco? By this point I should hope it isn’t.

Season 2 – Avoidance/Determination

So after Storm the Castle, Star had passed a point of no return. She was officially aware that the world is a complex place, that it’s not always going to be fun and games and rainbows and unicorns. Most of this season is about Star realizing that she can’t just sweep them under the rug and hope everything gets better on its own.

The season opens with both the results of plot seriousness and relationship seriousness affecting Star’s life, because of course it does.

Fetch, an episode most notable for appearing in lists of reasons why people don’t like season 2A, actually delivers one of the most direct character arc expositions in the show.

Let’s throw in By the Book, a segment entirely focused on her desire to just brush off magic training, just for fun.

And Sleepover is where it first becomes painfully obvious that she has romantic feelings for Marco,

but it’s clear from her diary in My New Wand (and especially now that the SDCC panel blessed us with the full “My Thoughts on Marco” chapter) that she’s been lingering on them and trying to avoid them since the beginning of the season, just like her other problems.

Star’s denial ran deeper than the actual Nile. Moving on.

Then we have Bonbon. Hey, what do you know? A pivotal episode in Star’s character growth which includes and connects both her relationship to plot and her relationship with Marco!

“I lost everything.” …mere minutes after feeling like she was losing Marco. Hell, even seconds if you count the moment he and Jackie had right after the green vortex closed.  Clearly the line is consciously about her book and mentor, which are very important to her, but obvious subtext is obvious.

There aren’t really any major turning points during season 2B until the finale. In Face the Music, Star uses Song Day to open up to the world because she knows hiding things for too long isn’t right, which (with a bit of “help” from Fallout Boy) spurs her to apply that to her love life in Starcrushed. Star exposing her bottled-up princess secrets to the world and her bottled-up feelings to Marco both happening in a finale? Egad, I dare say this seems to be a pattern! Let’s pretend like this is surprising.

Battle for Mewni is a bit of an edge case, as it is sort of separate from the Season 2 arcs while also being the resolution to them. Suffice to say that while the “official” character arc in Season 2 of hiding or running from her problems was “solved” within the official boundaries of Season 2, it took BFM to have her actually tackle the immediate danger posed by it.

And she’s fully owning up to her feelings for Marco to boot.

Season 3 – Idealistic Hastiness/Wisdom

I struggled more coming up with a single term to best address my take on this season’s arc, especially because it seems (to me, at least) that Star’s plot arc this season is split a bit more heavily by midseason than in Season 2. To elaborate on my choice of “Idealistic Hastiness”, I’m referring to her finding problems that she needs to solve and taking what seems like an easy solution – unlike in Season 2, when she may have tried to apply bandaids to cover up the problems, in Season 3 she is genuinely interested in solving them but jumps the gun and struggles with what seems like the “easy/obvious/right thing to do” not actually working.

I may abbreviate some details here, since I already helped Seddm construct the post to end all posts about this particular season, so please consult that for any further examples and supporting evidence about the meanings of Star’s words and actions especially in the relationship arc.

(It seems my subtitles are broken for most of Season 3 so I’m adding manual captions sorry if they look different or bad)

As the main part of Season 3 opens, we have Star identifying problems in her life and wanting solutions to them. In the case of Marco, it’s her unrequited feelings driving her insane.

In the case of the plot, it’s initially a vague desire to “be a better princess” which later takes a few coherent forms.

And Star isn’t totally clueless about her relationships, she knows she needs support and that her life is too chaotic to throw herself into a committed romance.

But the heart is a tricky thing, and a genuine emotional connection with someone she has some attraction to (plus a lingering heartache from Marco) leads to a romantic relationship with Tom. Suffice to say, that turns out to have the exact problem Star herself prophesied! She largely ignores Tom and isn’t willing to commit to their relationship (for a host of reasons, most of which involve Marco). And Tom isn’t a stellar supportive boyfriend either, but this post isn’t about that. Simply put, the emotional connection between them over their mutual struggles to improve is real, but it’s gone about in a very suboptimal way that they think is the correct one – Idealistic Hastiness at work.

For Marco, a similar dissonance between what she says and what happens are two different things. Lint Catcher has the wedding squire vows, in which Star basically outlines the importance Marco has in her life in a flashy ceremonial manner

followed by a nearly immediate 180 in Trial by Squire.

She did, to some degree, believe that the current situation was ideal, with Tom as her boyfriend going through a similar phase of self-improvement while Marco was still her very close friend to hang out with and help her. As everyone knows, Star ends up turning to Marco for virtually anything except for handholding and smooches from now until the end of the season, because of that dang ole’ rushed solution to her problems that didn’t really match what she wanted or needed.

Star knows she wants to help Mewni, but decides that the best way to go about it is throwing herself into a “princess” mold. Star knows she wants Marco by her side, but decides the best way to go about it is throwing him into a “squire” box. 

Interesting.

Now on to the plot side of things: we’ve got a lot going on here, so I’ll be briefer with each section, since none of them are all that subtle. Her encounter with Eclipsa in Stranger Danger is the first attempt at “being a better princess,” when she seeks to right the kingdom’s unfair treatment of Eclipsa. Her approach is respectably even-handed too, since she maintains a healthy skepticism of Eclipsa’s motives and isn’t jumping the gun too much.

There’s also the curious case of the sleeping portals. Once again, Star confronts the problem, but taking Eclipsa’s advice to just let herself go and see what happens almost gets her hunted down by Hekapoo. It takes Marco’s secret assistance in Night Life and their final expedition in Deep Dive to stop the portaling. The Realm of Magic is a whole separate issue, one which the show hasn’t fully covered, so I can’t clearly say she “solved” that. But the immediate problem at hand was actually more or less solved for real, so this is sort of a sped-up microcosm of Star’s character arc.

You all deserve a breather, so have a wholesome bug hug.

And finally, we have the issue of monster rights. This kickstarts in Starfari where Star explores the injustices against monsterkind on Mewni: Moon is unhelpful, Jelly Goodwell is a nutjob, and Star’s takeaway from it is to appoint Buff Frog to an ambassador role of sorts. A noble and well-intentioned idea with some actual thought put into it, but one which doesn’t really address the roots of the issue (as we’ll see when it eventually fails in Is Another Mystery).

Monster Bash (and the treaty in Death Peck) are similar cases where Star thinks that channeling her passion and drive will make everything work, but it doesn’t – hard work and idealism aren’t always enough to get the job done, and can’t quite combat centuries of ingrained prejudices.

This is sort of a turning point where all her rushjobs start to collapse on her head. If you somehow don’t believe me that this is the crux of all of her problems now, let the show itself tell you even more directly than in Fetch.

She finds out the injustice against Eclipsa is so much bigger than she could have imagined, Buff Frog leaves Mewni, Booth Buddies floors her with the revelation that their friendship/princess-squire relationship isn’t perfect like she thought it was, and she even finds out her birthright to the throne isn’t even legitimate! And in each and every case her next step is to say, essentially, “Well clearly my initial, rushed approach didn’t work. What now?” And that question doesn’t get thoroughly answered within season 3 in every case, but we can identify some key progress made.

Monster rights is one where not much happens, but we get a hint in Is Another Mystery about it becoming more relevant in the future. She’s learned her lesson with rushing in this specific case already, so Star should have a better head on her shoulders to try and make things right in the future.

Marco makes his return in Divide after being mildly absent to make way for the 20 billion other things crammed into 3B. Although stuff like Moon going missing has kept Star from dwelling on her feelings for Marco or Tom, she’s wearing her heart on her cheeks (in a different way than usual)

…and again in Conquer, where those feelings manifest as soul-crushing despair with his balloonifying (much like that which Star was feeling with monster rights, with her mom being gone, and with Meteora) and sheer joy when he returns.

It’s clear that her feelings for Marco are back in full, without any trepidation, and the only thing she needs is a moment to think about it when her or her loved ones’ lives aren’t in imminent danger.

At the tail end of Conquer, the whole issue with Eclipsa and her lineage comes to a head when she gives up the wand. Star sees herself as finally righting the wrong of how Eclipsa was treated – while it’s not entirely certain, however, it seems like she only really thinks she’s giving up the wand.

Eclipsa getting her daughter back and going to find her husband came as a surprise with potentially ominous consequences. And that’s where Star ends the season.

I’ll save the recap for those who opted to skip this whole shebang. So with that, let’s jump into the final section.

Season 4 – Inexperience/Efficacy and Stability

Hello everyone just joining us from your app or browser’s “find in page” option, welcome to this post. You missed a bug hug, shame on you. I’m opening this with a recap of Star’s character at the end of season 3:

She has failed at bringing monster equality to Mewni, but understands the flaws in her efforts before and should have a much better mindset to bring about the proper change. Her feelings for Marco are 100% back and stronger than ever, simply awaiting a calm moment to reflect on them, and she rectified the injustice of the throne by giving up the wand to Eclipsa (with foreboding implications).

This was all the info we had until a certain SDCC clip from season 4 was revealed just a few days ago. I’ll be truly brazen for the first time in this post and unshackle myself from the hilariously short chain binding my analysis to already-aired canon. I believe this two minute clip gives us most of the information we need to predict Star’s broad character arc for the rest of the show, and this is my explanation and attempt at justification for my theory. 

Clearly there’s a ton of context we don’t have yet, but there is some concrete information present in the clip. Moon is still missing, which is expected and obviously a very important plot point but not directly tied in to Star’s individual character arc (that we know of). Eclipsa being queen, on the other hand, is massive. We don’t exactly know the details, but one way or another, this prison torturer and his prisoner both accept that their ruler is Eclipsa right now. Star is still called a princess by the torturer, so it doesn’t necessarily seem like she’s been disowned, but she’s not actively in charge. And while many people thought Star would be queen for a large part of the season (myself included), it potentially makes a lot more sense for her own personal growth that she isn’t.

All three past seasons, and her three arcs have essentially been Star maturing on her path to being ready for the throne. Star’s far from perfect, but the fundamental flaws in her attitude about her role have mostly been covered. She knows what the problems are, is genuinely dedicated to fixing them, and has (or is prepared to have) a healthier and more patient mindset in tackling them now. If she became Queen… what exactly would there be left? SVTFOE is a heavily character-driven show, where plot doesn’t just drop from the sky and push the characters around and arbitrarily force character growth. The wand cleaving, Toffee/Ludo taking power in BFM, and Eclipsa getting the wand (and likely the throne) are all consequences, in large part, of Star’s actions.

If even a wandless Star was put in power, there’s nothing that stands out about her mindset that would lend itself to a season’s worth of impeding monster equality. If Star had the awareness, determination, wisdom, and efficacy to achieve her goals, the only things stopping her from “ruling Mewni her way” would be the passage of time, bureaucratic red tape, or enemies appearing out of thin air - none of which fit the show’s focus on character-driven plot. Even when she was the recognized legitimate princess trying to change the system from inside, it wasn’t all that effective, so one could argue she never really had the power to enact lasting change anyway.

(As a slight aside, Eclipsa being in power presents a lot of cool opportunities for Star and for the show – Eclipsa spent most of the season as a sketchy character, but one who was consistently pitted against the obviously unfair “system”. Neither the audience nor Star has actually gotten to see her in a vacuum, and a lot of neat plotlines could happen off of that.)

Technically we haven’t seen it in action yet in season 4, but even when Eclipsa officially gets the throne, I should hope it’s fairly obvious that Star is still going to want to act for the betterment of Mewni. Is Another Mystery and Conquer had strong moments of Star asserting her desire to protect monster rights and the people of Mewni in general, despite her already knowing she wasn’t a blood relative of the original Butterflies. So essentially, when the labels defining Star’s role on Mewni are broken down, she still takes all of this on as a personal choice, because it’s what her heart is telling her is right. Remember that last sentence.

I can’t call anything about specifics, but my conclusion here is that Star’s character arc for the final season is essentially using all of the growth she’s had thus far to rise up to the challenge and truly earn her destiny (figuratively and now quite literally). Plot would be much less driven by Star consistently screwing up on a fundamental level, and more about tackling the remaining consequences of her past screwups and learning through experience how to truly “rule Mewni her own way”. Just because I say she has largely matured doesn’t mean she’s perfect - simply having the maturity required for a good ruler doesn’t automatically qualify Star as a “finished” character, because her endgame as Queen must have some authority and permanence to it. Even if Star was in power now, we’d need to see her maturity actually take effect to confirm when the curtains close on this show forever that a “happily ever after” is in place (and having her not in power, at least temporarily, gives way more weight to the consequences of Star’s past actions and allows for more conflict). And if she’s constantly making things worse via her own personal flaws until episode 18, there’s no way she can actually achieve that happy ending.

If you know anything about me by now, you should know what topic is coming next. As I hopefully have established about 66.7 times throughout this piece, Star’s character arc always applies across all of her relationships and interactions in sync, so how does Marco fit in? Star has essentially gained all the internal maturity needed to start the process of becoming an effective ruler. At the same time, she’s essentially gained all the understanding of her own feelings, gone through ups and downs and knows in her heart that Marco is the one she wants as a partner in life and in love. I said above that all she needs is a moment to contemplate it to become fully conscious of her feelings (which would then result very quickly in the Tomstar breakup and a Starco talk). And guess what?

It’s already almost certain that the clip is from very early in the season (otherwise it’d spoil too much context) but there’s even some possible evidence it’s from the first episode of the season. Couple that with the previous importance of the Beach Day photo and you have a recipe for Star’s full realization happening very early on.(Additionally – and this is just my own pure speculation, so take it with a grain of salt – while we can’t say for sure the SDCC clip is from the beginning of a segment, we can also almost guarantee it’s not at the end of it from the general context of the clip. And it would be highly uncharacteristic for the show to linger on an important moment/symbol earlier on in a segment without having that be relevant to the segment itself, which gives me strong impressions that this segment may actually be where something important happens for Starco.)

Need more evidence stacked up for the immediate future of Starco? Like I said earlier, Star’s attachment to the “princess” label as a genuine attempt to help Mewni mirrors her attachment to Marco’s “squire” label as a genuine attempt to have him as a life partner. And that princess label got broken down, but she still did - and will almost certainly continue to - fight for bettering the kingdom. Is it so wrong to guess that, since the “squire” label (and even, to an extent, the entire concept of their relationship as purely platonic) clearly were nuked immediately following the kiss, Star will similarly open the season accepting Marco fully as her life partner without restraint? I don’t think it is, and therefore will claim that Star and Marco will start the season accepting their romantic feelings for each other (and the change in their relationship as a result) just as Star is doing for her role in the kingdom. Maybe they don’t call it “dating” until a handful of episodes later, but any hesitancy in figuring out and tackling the fact that she loves Marco for more than an individual segment focused on it would betray all the growth she’s gone through, just like being hesitant to continue striving to help Mewni would betray her growth. When the labels defining Star’s role on Mewni relationship with Marco are broken down, she still takes all of this on as a personal choice, because it’s what her heart is telling her is right.

Jumping to the endgame now - just like that maturity isn’t enough for Star’s queenly endgame, this isn’t enough for Starco’s endgame either. Star’s almost certain future as Queen of Mewni is a serious thing, and a serious commitment for Marco to make even if they have feelings for each other/are dating. Once again, a mirror to her princess arc can be found – if they keep screwing stuff up in the fundamental nature of relationship with their own flaws and doubts, there’s no way to dig out of that hole cleanly for that happy ending, so it’s gotta start sooner rather than later. Plus we already know that Marco’s arc is essentially coming out of his shell and finding his place in life (read the Seddm masterpost for way more in-depth info on that), so it’s apparent that a rock-solid endgame for Starco requires clarity that the two of them are prepared for everything a permanent romantic relationship means. In essence, we need to see the growth that lead to their mutual feelings applied practically, just like we need to see that for Star’s role within Mewni.

TL;DR Star’s season 4 arc will focus on applying her awareness, determination, and wisdom gained from the past 3 seasons to tackle the consequences of her past decisions, starting from a point of making the personal choice to embrace both her desire to help Mewni and her love for Marco, and through this she will both earn her place as permanent and effective ruler of Mewni, and develop her relationship with Marco into one that will confidently last forever. She’s gonna damn well earn that happily ever after.

There’s certainly a level of speculation to all of this, of course, but I have confidence in the requirements for endgame, so the general path seems clear enough to me. Naysayers on any side of the shipping war make claims that Star and Marco won’t get together for a long time, that the feelings are still uncertain, maybe that they’re not even endgame at all. If you’re a Starco fan that thinks this, then it’s likely that the whiplash of 3A was like a bad breakup that makes you never want to date again. I feel you, I really do, but it had its purpose. Don’t get yourself down that Starco is all a bait just because it didn’t happen one particular time that Star said Marco looked cute. As for anyone else, first off, thanks for sticking around this far! I honestly didn’t expect that! This post doesn’t attempt to shoulder the ambitious burden of convincing you why Starco is good on a philosophical level (my brutally honest response is “fix your eyeballs and earholes and watch the fucking show”), but at the very least I hoped I’ve made a strong claim for all of the connections in the past three seasons and how it will tie together in the fourth and final season of this show.