#others in this fandom are much more qualified in the subject.

[caelyne]

i feel like discourse regarding rain world downpour's canon status comes up every half second. i hate the topic and i dont think it should be a subject of discussion as often as it seems to come up. but if i can be constructive about my opinion on it, what I find frustrating is the claim from people that the existence of downpour supposedly replaces the perception of the original work.

Downpour was created by modders and does qualify as a fanwork. the devs themselves have stated that downpour can be considered to be in its own continuity. Sure. I just don't see how it matters. from an artist who's work i admire and deeply enjoy, their claim is that the people who wish to note the separation don't enjoy having their feelings dismissed regarding the topic because 'something they care about has been effectively replaced by an additional work which changes the perception of the original'. i could not disagree more.

the nature of rain world's story is split into campaigns which have almost no overlap. everything is segmented into its own story and pretty much have no bearing on one another, with the exception of Monk, i suppose.

but the original story of rain world wasn't really anything was it? the details you can find or discover about the world around you were extra goodies that most players probably won't notice or look into. It's hard to see that stuff when you have lizards or vultures chasing after you! but its still there, if you care. from an accessibility standpoint, i think the more upfront style of storytelling that downpour had only helps to draw players in, imo. I completely disagree that it would alter the perception of original rain world. and to be honest, I really don't even know what that means. Original rain world is still there. everything is still there. except now, instead of the pink robot simply telling you to go jump into the earth and krill yourself, now he gets an arc and (imo) a satisfactory ending to the long struggle that his doomed race faces. i want him and Moon to be happy. i want a resolution to their story. having them sit there for eternity while the world wastes away isn't something i want for them. you can say that downpour has different themes than original rain world and I would mostly agree. but hunter's story shows a thin veil of hope is possible. why would No Significant Harassment send a dying Hunter out to simply just revive Moon? he believes better things are possible. and hunter gives their life to accomplish that because of the bond that they and NSH share. the world is harsh and cruel, but despite all of that, the people in it are doing what they can to help each other. i think downpour does nothing but expand on that sentiment.

imo, i think all of this would only encourage players to learn more about the world that they're spending time in! to find the stuff that videocult peppered into the backdrop of their game about silly slugs.

Much like how the ancients built their world above the structures of long forgotten civilizations, downpour is doing the same. everything from before is still there, albeit hidden. Just as always.

one final thought though, i've talked before about a lot of people in the rain world fandom having a weird complex regarding their preference for the Pre-DP fandom. To me, this is another extension of that and I think it would be nice if people stopped having this idea that everything was better back before more people knew about the game. Nobody is more special or more of a fan simply because they were there first.

and all of this is just silly to me because everything from before DP is still there!! its just silly to me.

[bloomeng]

“Genshin character designs are bad.”

You really can’t navigate through the Genshin fandom without hearing this take. It’s stale at this point, but it’s…. also true. Except that’s usually not what people are actually saying. The true question up for debate: Are Genshin character designs ugly?

It irks me because there is validity to the original statement, and yet the conversation immediately moves into the territory of strictly opinion, leaving the true discussion never to be had.

So I’m having it… with myself…. in the form of a long post, because actually I find Genshin an interesting character design case study.

Before I really get into it I must address the elephant in the room; are Genshin’s character designs colorist?

Yes. Moving on.

Okay, okay, I’ll address it a little, Genshin has a problem with colorism. It’s a fiercely debated topic and honestly it’s one of the only real valid discussions I see around Genshin’s designs. That being said, I have nothing new to add to the conversation. If you don’t know why, sorry I’m not qualified to answer that, but you’re in luck because tons of qualified people have explained it across all platforms.

What I am partially equipped to talk about is character design. I’m no expert but I have taken a few formal classes on the subject, so I do have some insight to share. Character design at its core is usually quantified by how much of a character’s personality can be clearly determined from sight alone and how recognizable their silhouette is (though I’m not gonna touch on that today). Now there’s a lot of factors that go into both, but the fundamental thing that contributes to both is something known as shape language.

Shape has meaning. What that meaning is often depends on culture factors that determine your associations, but the Western simplification of shape is that circles are good-natured, rectangles/ squares are reliable, and triangles are energized. (these are my own personal words for them, there are countless ways to go about describing these associations) Shapes are then combined with each other to create more complex associations, and so on and so forth. It’s impossible to create a character without evoking some form of shape language, because art at its core is just shapes. The classic example are the round shapes seen in Mickey Mouse, though often times it’s far more subtle, like how Barbie has soft, round lines in her hair and face, but her hourglass figure is comprised of triangles to tell you she’s sexy, but the soft curves say she’s sweet not sexual— and it quickly gets very complicated. Basically character designs are rarely comprised of one shape alone, and when combined the “vibes” they evoke become complex.

So what does this have to do with Genshin? Genshin has poor shape language. The most obvious example of this are the faces. Genshin has same face syndrome, which I partially contribute to budget constraints with the models seeing as they reuse them over and over. Though it also has a lot to do with Genshin’s need for their characters to be conventionally attractive. Everyone must be beautiful and, as the current trend in anime artstyles dictates, not look a day over 12. The only thing that changes is the eye shape, but even then, it really doesn’t. There’s diversity between the male and female models, but calling it diversity seems generous, because they are practically the same. All the viewer has to go on to differentiate between faces are the expressions (and color but we’ll get there), which are also limited by the models.

The poor quality of the shape language continues into the bodies, seeing as the only thing that really changes is the height, not a lot of room for show casing contrast. (Also body diversity is just a good thing to have for the sake of having body diversity.) Visual contrast is one of the key things good shape language should deliver. It’s within this contrast that the viewer will have the opportunity to compare and thus make these associations. One character design may tell you things based on previous knowledge but it’s like an experiment without a control group.

Then we get to the character’s outfits and hairstyles. While it’s true there is a fair amount of diversity in clothing, the shape language continues to falter. Genshin characters have so much going on constantly in their designs that it seems like that should provide plenty of opportunities to showcase personality. Unfortunately what ultimately happens is that the details compete amongst themselves so much that they overshadow any sort of unified message they might have had about who this character is. Basically there’s too many different shapes. They don’t create a pattern and therefore don’t form any strong associations. You can have a good design with a lot of details but they should communicate a pattern together. A design is not good simply because it has a lot of detail. I will say there are definitely times where the clothing and hair do actually come through to tell me stuff about the character, but overall this over designing tends to be a detriment.

Genshin’s hair while in different styles usually relies on the same type of pointy strands and blunt edges.

(these characters were randomly selected to prove my point that you can quite literally pick any character in genshin and they will have at least one of these two components)

On their own pointy strands might tell us something, but considering every character has them, the pattern within a single character is rendered moot. “If everyone’s super, no one is.” Of course how they choose to wear their hair does speak to the character but its effect is limited when the structure of the hair is fundamentally the same. And then when you consider that the styling of many of these hairstyles doesn’t actually say a whole lot, it becomes obvious that Genshin is more concerned with creating hair that stands out. The problem is that details, asymmetry for example, normally tell us about the character, but considering so many hairstyles utilize asymmetry, it looses its meaning. Overall I will say I think Genshin is more of a 50/50 toss up on whether or not the hair suits the character.

I want to take a moment to point out a couple hair style designs in Genshin I think are really lovely and work very well.

And now I would like to do the same with some outfits.

(honorable mention to Bennett for being over accessorized in a way that actually tells you about his personality (goggles, a scar, bandaids, work gloves, utility belt), to Barbara for somehow mashing the concept of a nun and an idol together, to Klee for her childish whimsy and finally to Scaramoche for the sheer amount of subtle character growth motifs fit into all three of his outfits (the cultural stuff is really cool too))

Genshin I will say does a great job of creating and repeatedly using the elemental imagery as well as Khaneira’ah’s star. I also appreciate that every Archon has that ombre hair shift that glows during their burst. Makes them feel unique.

I think Genshin shines the brightest when they successfully incorporate cultural elements into their designs however, the only nation that does this with any sort of consistency is Inazuma. Inazuma’s aesthetic is so instantly recognizable. No one dresses exactly the same, but there are common through lines in the shoes, the style of the armor, and patterns in the clothes. (The design aesthetic is so strong that even after Scara got a Sumeru makeover he managed to keep elements that were clearly identifiable as Inazuman) Every other nation falls short in this department. I will give credit to the knights as there is some level of consistency in their designs, mostly in the metallic detailing; not quite a uniform but there is some commonality. Liyue does have cultural influence that definitely shows but it suffers from an overall lack of consistency in aesthetic, and doesn’t lean into its Chinese inspiration the same way Inazuma does. Mondstadt on the other hand is just vaguely European, but also half the time not even.

And then there’s Sumeru. I distinctly remember looking at the full Sumeru cast the first time and thinking that none of the them looked like they came from the same place. (It’s almost as if Sumeru is based on a bunch of separate countries that are culturally very different.) Pretty much no character has any real ties to any any real culture, but instead they just sorta grab vague elements. And at its worse just leans into orientalism (Nilou and Dori). I think personality wise the designs do a fairly stable job of saying at least something about their characters (Dehya and Kaveh). The designs do well individually but between the vague references and inconsistencies they falter. (I will say Cyno’s whole design being a reference to Yu-Gi-Oh is both hilarious, charming, and also mildly appropriative.)

On the topic of appropriation I think it’s important to note that Inazuma suffers from this too. While I absolutely love the way a lot of Japanese elements were integrated, outfits like Yae Miko’s shrine maiden garb bring forth this sexualization of cultural dress that I’m not particularly fond of. But then again you can also critique Rosaria’s sexy nun design for the same thing.

I also want to touch on something briefly because it’s important to note, but it’s a separate, much bigger conversation; Genshin, like anime, falls into a trap of catering their style to lolicon and shotacon enjoyers. It’s the reason all the characters look so young, why all the age discourse exists, why they refuse to confirm ages, and why all the children with the toddler model have some weird age work around. I don’t like it. It’s gross.

Another brief mention because it’s its own conversation; the female characters in Genshin are often over sexualized. Their clothes are skin tight, they almost always have weird random cut-outs, their skirts and dresses are designed to show off their breasts and asses, and all of their designs are high fem regardless of their personality. Give a female character baggy pants Genshin I dare you. Dori doesn’t count, she’s a toddler model in just a bra. I don’t have a problem with a female character being hot, but when that’s the only requirement…. it’s tiring. The classic female character design video game debate…. yah.

I think my overarching issue with Genshin’s clothing design is it says nothing about whose these people are. What jobs do they do? What do these accessories say about them personally? Take Yanfei. She’s a lawyer, yet nothing about her outfit speaks to that in the slightest. I remember the first time I sat down and looked at all the playable characters with a friend of mine. I didn’t play at the time and we thought it would be fun to see if I could guess their personalities. As you can imagine I did pretty poorly, and that’s because these designs just don’t suggest a whole lot.

And then we get to color.

Color is probably the most complicated part of art let alone character design. I feel as though we all have some familiarity with the concept of color coding in character design. The classic red/blue character foils. Color often suggests specific traits similar to the way shape language does, except unlike shape language color coding doesn’t always apply. You can’t just assign a character a color and call it coding, the character has to physically have that color on them in some significant manner. For example Naruto is clearly an orange coded character. He appears in the color throughout the series, but I couldn’t classify Eren Yeager as a green coded character even if it suited his personality (which it doesn’t) because it’s a uniform everyone wears. Attack on Titan does not evoke color coding the way Naruto does, so it’s not applicable.

With Genshin color is complicated. Genshin does have an established color pattern for all the elements, but not every character wears the color of their element. Now normally I would say just having a color pattern for the elements wouldn’t be enough to justify character color coding (since it would fall back into the uniform category), but in Genshin their visions connect to their personalities, so therefore the color of the elements is connected to them. For some the color coding is very obvious (Kaeya & Diluc) and for others it’s practically nonexistent (Yun Jin & Heizou). In all honestly I don’t know what to make of this other than Genshin is inconsistent in their elemental color coding but always consistent in their high saturation. Because color is complicated and a weaker area of mine it is equally likely that I’m missing something or that Genshin isn’t coding anything and it’s all pure aesthetics.

Which brings me to my final point; aesthetics. Hoyo as a company cares that you spend money. That is the number one goal at the end of the day. That’s why all their characters are conventionally attractive, why their art style is the way it is, why their shape language suffers, and why their outfits are overly detailed. It’s all about aesthetics. As a brand Genshin cares less about their story and more about how pretty their characters look, because if their characters are pretty then you’ll spend money. It’s not like Hoyo designed characters with bad shape language because they were ignorant. They knew exactly what they were doing when they sculpted every last visually pleasing strand of pointy hair.

Which brings me back to the real question that people were actually arguing over in the first place; are Genshin characters ugly?

I can’t answer that question. I mean they weren’t designed to be ugly, but if they don’t appeal to your taste, then to you they are ugly. But it’s more important to understand that “bad” and “ugly” are not the same. Genshin character designs are bad by professional standards but that doesn’t mean you can’t like them. Genshin designs can be both bad and likable, bad and pretty, bad and cute. Those are two vastly different things. It’s the same way people adore cult classic movies. They’re not good in the eyes of a critic, otherwise they wouldn’t be niche. They’re cult classics because people like them. Personal taste is just that. Personal.

But the most important question of all; do I like the Genshin Impact character designs?

I didn’t use to but I gotta say, they’ve grown on me.

[illegiblewords]

Serious talk about meta under the cut.

I don't know who might need to hear it, but fwiw mental flexibility is a huge part of analysis (and interacting with other humans lol). You need to be able to account for multiple possibilities when examining a work, or understanding a social exchange. You need to be able to separate what is objective fact from your own subjective interpretation and judgment. The most negative interpretation is not automatically the most worthwhile or true. Someone throwing accusations around in-line with their own worst interpretations does not guarantee those accusations are warranted. You are not a bad or stupid person for disagreeing. Shit needs to withstand scrutiny. I don't always strike the right balance myself. I do the best I can but I'm definitely not perfect. Tbh I'm not beyond pettiness either--although I try to keep that out of actual analysis lol. There have been times I've griped to friends privately or blogged about how I felt (sans tags, with spoiler blocks so people can opt out). I've griped recently. I'm bound to gripe again in the future. Some level of griping is inevitable imo and I figure no one is 100% immune.

All that said, even if someone’s take isn't canon AND even if it's something I really dislike--I'd personally rather people follow their passions anyway. Hands down. I could be in the middle of a rant and my answer would still be that the subject of my frustration gets to exist. I'm not the boss and odds are we're going with different versions in our own heads. Discouraging another fan from creating due to my preferences or narrative approach would horrify me. I've seen fandoms where gatekeeping like that killed the creative community and it was fucking awful.

Not everyone is confident in their own judgment. Not everyone faced with a pissed off person trying to use lore and accusations like clubs will feel okay continuing with their own vision. Elitism and manipulation (especially through rhetoric) can be present within analysis. People are not being taught how to recognize those things properly. Analysts aren't always aware or invested enough to even be careful. It’s legit easy to get caught up in ideas or feelings to the point of forgetting about other people’s, and adjusting to account for alternate approaches takes some work. For me at least, I think having a 'no insults' policy and being super careful when it comes to absolute claims (assertions not qualified by 'I think' or 'it could be argued') helps.

Anyway. Just because a person calls something ‘meaningless’ doesn't make it meaningless. Someone pooh-poohing an observation you made doesn't make your observation less true or important. Employing a literary term doesn't mean that individual actually understands the term, how it works, or how to apply it. Which is to say nothing of romantic chemistry or whatever. I encourage readers to extrapolate on this. ‘Shallow’ could apply as much as ‘meaningless’. Denying parallels exist by itself doesn’t actually negate those parallels. Your version of a character may not be the same as the fan next to you’s and that difference doesn't have to detract. There's more I could say on the subject (I've edited out a lot) but basically--just because another fan isn't into what you're doing doesn't automatically make what you're doing wrong, immoral, shoddy, or otherwise less.

Seriously, vet shit. Question the entire premise an analyst tries to establish then decide for yourself if it holds water. Turn over word choices and assertions in your head before deciding if they're appropriate. Do it to me too. I don't care if someone is the holy goddamn emperor of analysts. Just because a person says something is good or bad, true or false, whatever the hell doesn't make it so. Just because a person uses a technical term doesn't mean they're discussing it effectively. Quality of argument matters beyond the packaging it’s wrapped in. It's important to protect yourself from people whose priority is enforcing their own preferences, including dismissing things they aren't partial to.

I just don't want anyone shamed silent man. Not even people whose takes drive me up the fucking wall. Neither I nor any other analyst is an authority here. And there are people who are absolutely ready to take advantage of other people’s insecurities to assert themselves. Might not even be malicious, just indifferent.

For me, analysis feels kind of like uncovering a dinosaur skeleton. I want to share the cool and exciting things I find with other people. Sometimes I might be sorting out what my own thoughts and feelings are. It's also possible to examine why you're uncomfortable with something, or why you love something another person hates, while making very clear what is YOUR READING and not THE READING. Offering a variety of possibilities is very different from presenting yourself as the only correct one. One note at the end when everything else was insulting and intolerant is like a band-aid over a wound.

EDIT: As a last point, that I'm throwing in just-in-case. If anyone reading this thinks they may have overreached and done stuff I've mentioned + feels shitty about it… that's still not the end of the world. It’s okay. This is hard stuff to learn and I really don't think anyone's perfect at it. Worth the effort though. Just gotta take a deep breath, acknowledge you're a fallible human same as everyone else, and do the best you can going forward. Life goes on.

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

Can I ask a question about AO3 because I feel like I just got hit by a truck called "culture shock?" Recently, there are many posts on r/AO3 discussing "Is it OK to leave any constructive criticism when the authors do not for it." And I am the only one thinking "It's absolutely fine to do so, duh" so when I realized I am the minority, I panicked, I felt like I would forever be deemed as a jerk on the site, when I all want to do is to share my own thoughts with the writers without any ill intentions.

Ok, I did not grow up in America/Europe. So we have some fics platform in my nation. Beta readers are not a thing on the said platform, instead, we have guilds and the guilds have a few "senior critics" who you can submit your works to senior critiques for more constructive criticism feedback. Also, members (even if you're not one of senior critics) of the same guilds are encouraged to learn how to give constructive criticism of others' works, and it's usually done in public comment sessions. You might say "Oh, dear Anon, what you said it's just beta readers here," but I think on AO3, beta readers are usually done in private? I don't know why people are so against constructive criticism even if they come with good faith--I really want to know why. At worst, you could just agree to disagree them. The most mind-blowing comment in the discussion posts on r/AO3 is the one that said "For criticism to be constructive, you have to know the author's intentions, something you don't know as a casual reader." It's just...huh??? Then what does my own reading experience mean if I HAVE TO know the author's intentions in great detail in order to BE QUALIFIED to have my own opinions? Also, as a writer, I thought it was on the writers' end to make sure they convey what they intended. And if I really don't like the work, I could just leave. If I leave constructive criticism as my comment, for me, it at least means: 1. I love this work to some extent. 2. It's done with feedback sandwiches. Thank you once again, I am just too shocked. I really don't want to be seen as a jerk on AO3, so I am curious about what you think about the subject of constructive criticism.

When did I become the subject matter expert on Ao3 and fandom?

But how to summarize...

Essentially, yes, it would be considered a grave faux pas to start dropping constructive criticism on a fic without prompting. Some writers are fine with it (and if they desire it, will denote as much in notes), most are not.

This is because many, arguably most, people writing on Ao3 are here because they want escapism and wish fulfilment. They're here to enjoy themselves, and may be very emotionally attached to their writing, so when some internet stranger comes along criticizing what they've made they see it as that stranger ruining their fun or telling them they lack the craftsmanship to build the world they want.

[suspendingtime]

20 Questions for Fic Writers!

I've been tagged by @stars-of-kyber and @andthebubbles. 😁 So although I feel barely qualified, I guess I best do this...

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

7. 🤗

I started about 2 months ago, so... and yes, they're all Kanthony. Initially just started as a way of contributing to Anthony Week 2023, and I didn't even expect that I'd actually do all 7 days.

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

13,370.

Currently ranging at 661 to 3,779 per fic. Rookie numbers!

3. What fandoms do you write for?

So far, just my beloved Bridgerton.

But there have been a couple other shows that have tempted me...

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Astride  - 166

Nursery  - 118

Hunt - 105

Yours - 94

Temptation - 88

Having published a handful with various ratings, it's quite interesting to see the kudos, bookmarks (private vs public), and subs ratios! Much to think about.

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

Yes.

Why... I sort of have a need? Idk, when I see a comment it's hard to just leave it hanging there and not to reply. Like irl if someone looked at something I made and verbally commented on it... and I just stared back blankly not saying anything. 😐 This is how it feels to me on the receiving end at least haha. And my replies saying various forms of 'Thank you!' is probably quite repetitive, but hey ho.

Plus comments give you that lil hit of dopamine; from both povs as a writer or reader. Being on the reader side for most of my Ao3 activities I tend to comment on most of fics I read, I can't help it - I must tell you what I loved about it and why, and there's a pleasure in reciprocating that back too. Look, now I've written half an essay on the subject, gaaah. (I've not been on Ao3 as much as I'd like to recently, and because I opened it to scoop out the stats for some of the questions above I can now see that I have some unreads... and the need is happening.)

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Hmmm *thinking really hard*, I don't think any of them have an ending that is all that angsty. If I had to choose, maybe Temptation?

The pattern I've shown so far in my posted works is that it's gonna be 90% fluff. Though that is liable to change. 😆

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Probably Nursery?

I'm not sure, cause they've all ended on a pretty optimistic note so far. But that one has Kate and Anthony with a few of their kids, so it's the furthest on the Kanthony HEA timeline.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

Not yet...

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Ummm 👀 I may have dabbled in some smut.

What kind... hm, the kind where both people are panting for each other, and end up caving because they literally can't hold their horniness in anymore (this totally explains why I went feral for Bridgerton S2, ha). Another pattern I seem to have is making Anthony a submissive man puddle.

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written?

Not yet, but I do have some crack ideas I may explore.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of, I very much doubt it.

How often does this happen to people?

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

No. I'd certainly be all for it if anyone ever wanted to translate any works of mine. 😊

If I was proficient enough to write in other languages, then I would probably try publishing the different versions from the get go.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Kinda?

Nothing formal, but there was a lengthy comment thread on Reddit some months ago where myself and another user went back and forth re-writing the script for that stormy library scene 😅 (not so much re-writing what was already there, bar the last few lines, more of a continuation in a universe where Kate hadn't fled).

14. What’s your all-time favourite ship?

Must I even answer this? Kanthony, c'mon now.

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

There's only 1 work that I have, where I've actually started a chapter 2. And I have all the faith that I will finish it. ✍️🤓

Other potential WIPs, that are currently just posted as one shots, only exist in my head... who knows if they will see the light of day.

16. What are your writing strengths?

This question feels illegal to be asked.

I have no idea, I'm very new to this whole writing thing. At least in terms of fiction, so I'm not sure what I'd consider my strengths to be. I feel like I need some more practice before I can get a real sense of this?

I would say that dialogue usually comes very quickly to me, and it's having to fill in the bits around it that takes more brain muscles. So that might indicate something.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

Everything apart from the answer to the question above.

But really I think it's remembering that there is a world outside of the main couple happening, and trying to describe the details there. Also other general 'setting the scene' stuff like clothing, weather etc etc. I usually just want to jump straight in with some random dialogue.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

On writing it... no thoughts; not done it yet!

If I needed to for some unknown fic reason in the future, I'm sure I'll be apologising profusely in the author notes for trusting Google translate and probably butchering whatever language it is.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Still just the one so far, Bridgerton. 😌

20. Favourite fic you’ve written?

Hunt 🥺🥹 I was a lot of feels, and just very indulgent tbh.

I also really enjoyed my shortest one, Obedient, which was in 2nd person (hadn't done that before). The writing of that one was just really fun and I idky but I've reread it quite a bit!

__________________________________________________

I'm woefully looking at my Ao3 bookmarks (which has grown exponentially since joining Tumblr), full of things that I've not got round to reading yet. So I'm tagging partly based on stuff hanging out on top of that pile: @islemeadow, @ladykettlechips, @hydriotaphia, @eleanor-bradstreet, and the smut aunties @colettebronte & @fayes-fics 😋 (if y'all wanna do it, ofc. I tried to find those who hadn't been tagged/done it yet, sorry if you've actually already done this and I've just not found it).

[sejrart]

Commissions

Hi all! I'm opening commissions. I focus a lot on characters in my art and as such, that's what I'm going to be most proficient at.

I'll do original characters, paintings for fanfic or webnovel covers, fanart, NSFW and pretty much any other work I feel qualified to do (i.e. I will not draw, say, machines, a subject I have barely any experience with).

In terms of fanart, I'll do art for any fandom, but I'll put a list of those fandoms I'm particularly familiar with under the cut if you want someone who already knows the world and characters of a given story.

Types of Commissions

Coloured Sketch (25€, around $27 or 21£)

A full body sketch of a character, coloured in.

Simple Illustration (50€, around $54 or 43£)

An illustration with thick line art and mostly flat colours. Full body or more detailed close up.

Character Illustration (100€, around $109 or 85£)

An illustration with line art and shaded colours. For couple or group poses, each extra character is 30€.

Full Illustration (150€, around $163 or 128£)

A composition centering on a character within an environment. Shaded line art and colours, many details. For couple or group poses, each extra character is 30€.

Character Painting (150€, around $163 or 128£)

A painted character on a simple, painted background. For couple or group poses, each extra character is 30€.

Full Painting (400€, around $435 or 342£)

A painted composition. Can involve characters in an enviroment, a landscape, a portrait, etc.

If you're interested, you can message me here on Tumblr or write to me at sejrart@gmail.com

Payment will be through PayPal.

Process

Once you've contacted me about buying a commission, I will ask you a series of questions about the piece to clarify if I am the right artist for what you want and to make sure I have all the information I need to make it what you want.

I will then give you an estimate of how long the work will take me to do. This depends to a large degree on the complexity of the piece, ranging from a few days to several weeks.

If we both agree on going forward with it, I will send you a PayPal request for payment. Once paid, I will start working on your commission.

For pieces above "simple illustration" in complexity, I will send you a few process images as I work on the commission where you can clarify anything you might want changed.

For all commissions, I will send you a preview when I'm close to done where you can request any final changes (within a reasonable degree of complexity).

Finally, you will receive a full-size image file of the piece in question in as a PNG and/or in any other file format you might want. If wanted, I can send versions cropped to fit icon, banner, etc sizes, as well as (if applicable) both transparent and non-transparent versions.

Terms

Upon receiving a commissioned piece from me, you have the rights to post it anywhere you like, as well as adapt it as you see fit. By default, these commissions are for non-commercial use only. If you want a commission for commercial purposes, we can discuss the specifics and come to an agreement.

I will retain the right to use the piece in a portfolio context as well as for developing other work.

Should you want a refund, said refund will be based on how much work I have done on the commission at that time. I.e. you will receive an almost full refund if you request one early in the process.

If you request large changes to the piece, particularly late in the process, that may cost extra.

Fandoms

In the past, I have made fanart for:

Dragon Age

Star Wars

Harry Potter

Les Misérables

Black Sails

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Dungeons & Dragons

I am further familiar with:

Disco Elysium

Mass Effect

Baldur's Gate (all three)

Doctor Who (NuWho)

Merlin

Our Flag Means Death

Steven Universe

DC animated shows

MCU

A lot of smaller video games and ttrpgs

[shihalyfie]

This is potentially a very loaded question so feel free to not answer if you don't feel like it, but how do you as a woman feel about the handling of female characters in Digimon (anime of course, but also games, manga and even the Digimon themselves)? I've seen takes of all kinds from women over the years so I'm curious how you feel. But again, no pressure to answer if you feel uncomfortable with the subject or too daunted by all the material on the table.

Oh man, I don't mind talking about the subject in itself, but what makes it hard for me is just that the Digimon franchise just has so many things at once with so many different writers and different writing philosophies that I can't really treat the entire thing like a monolith. Especially when you have things running the spectrum from Cyber Sleuth (where female characters arguably drive the narrative far more than the male characters) to Next (which has gotten me angrily ranting about the absolutely awful way it treats its girls, a rant which I would prefer to not subject my followers to).

So before I go ahead, I do want to make sure anyone reading this understands that I'm just talking about my own personal experience and feelings regarding the situation, and I'm very sure that other people will feel differently. I definitely don't feel qualified to comment on what's the ideal way to write female charaters in media or whatever (as if there's even one right answer to that!); I can only truly comment on myself and my own stances on it. (And of course, the OP graciously asked specifically about that, but I just want to make sure nobody reading this post misunderstands!)

Well, I will say that if there's one thing that does seem to be consistent (and I say consistent, because Next absolutely violates this one and Frontier does kind of dangerously toe the line), it's that I haven't really seen Digimon fall victim to the problem of what I call making its female characters the Designated Girl Characters™. Explaining what that is is kind of tricky, but a lot of shounen series will have this very strong "consciousness" of its female characters like they're there to fill a quota, and thus treat them in a way that's kind of alienating. Or in other words, "they section off this character very weirdly in a way they would never do for the male characters." (Note that while Ruki's character arc is made with strong consciousness of her being a girl, the whole point is about condemning the idea she should be treated like some novelty just because she's a girl, so I don't count it as this.)

It was really refreshing to see a 1999 anime portray the girls as mingling with the boys like it was no big deal, and I do wonder if Adventure setting this precedent is a big reason later series have followed in this regard. Adventure through Frontier were made with heavy female creator influence, something that the fandom really tends to downplay (especially because a lot of people suspiciously avoid acknowledging their importance, like how everyone will talk about Hosoda but nobody will talk about the fact Yoshida Reiko wrote the scripts for everything he did, or how people virtually ignored Seki's existence compared to Kakudou until very recently). I think a lot of that shows in its writing; of course, that's not to say there aren't things that really could have used improvement (I think Izumi's treatment in Frontier is the one pretty much everyone universally agrees really left much to be desired, and Tomita even outright admitted he's not very good at writing girls, although that frankly kind of surprises me given how much of his other work has involved writing girls really well), but at the very least it does show a bit more conscientiousness about its female characters than you would see in other shows where female creators were either nonexistent or clearly had no influence in the staff room.

On the flip side, there's also things that were more tasteful in execution than may have even been intended; Sora's character arc isn't that much about her femininity in practice, and Juri does come off as better than your average damsel in distress character, but that doesn't change the fact that the nuance is still there (and that in the latter case a certain writer has outright indulged in that), so all I can do is just be grateful that it didn't get worse.

I guess in the end, my stance is "give or take". I like a lot of other kids' shows (including shounen) that have been better or worse than Digimon's average level, and Digimon itself is so varied that I think it just kind of mingles in there. There are things I like, things I don't like, but at the very least there haven't been too many things that crossed my personal boundary of "absolutely not" (there are, there just aren't many). I think Adventure and 02 in particular are often accused of being more malicious towards its female characters and "screwing them over" than they were intended to be, since a lot of it seems to be a combination of wanting to portray its characters a little too realistically and simply just accidental bad circumstances of how it presented (the fact Hikari's two most famous episodes are by two non-regulars on the series who seemed to be huge fans of portraying her with a brother complex really did not help here), and things like "the same things that feel personally relatable to me are also things that read badly to others, so I understand why people don't like it but I also feel kind of weird when they imply that this kind of concept is inherently Bad" (a lot of things related to Sora and Miyako fall into this category for me). And I mean, part of the reason Miyako became my central character back when I wrote fanfic more often was that I just found her to be an incredibly complex character for the kind you'd usually see in shounen works; I honestly don't know of many other things that would portray someone like her sympathetically instead of cramming her into a "hysterical woman" trope box.

There's also the fact that there's a lot more adult-oriented Digimon media coming up nowadays, so there's that awkward situation where "female character representation" starts having a blurred boundary with "waifu character". Which is not to say that I mind the idea of male fans also liking the female characters I like, but more so that when you get into this territory, I start getting conscious about whether the female characters are more obviously being written in a way to "please the male fans and make them into fanservice material" than it respects them as characters. And I mean, I say it's a blurred boundary for good reason; the aforementioned Cyber Sleuth characters do kind of have that (especially in their character designs), but they are actually written as good characters with agency, whereas you have things like the Adventure girls in tri. who are ostensibly written to follow up on their Adventure character arcs but came off to me as being uncomfortably shoved into the Waifu Character Fanservice troping boxes, especially Mimi and Hikari. (Hooters outfit Mimi and brother complex Hikari are among the few things that I would say have crossed a serious line with me.) So again...give or take.

I will say that the American English dub had a somewhat more misogynistic nuance in the way it treated Mimi, Miyako, and Hikari (it had a lot more condescending tone in the way it portrayed Mimi's airheadedness/materialism and Yolei's penchant for fangirling while also expecting Kari to just put up with Davis harassing her, and it exacerbated the already-kind-of-uncomfortable feelings I had about the unsympathetic way Sora is portrayed in Our War Game!), but it's not to the extent I felt it derailed the entire narrative.

As for the Digimon themselves, the feminine Digimon design sexualization didn't bother me much when I was younger (I remember I really wasn't bothered by Angewomon's design at all), but it does bother me a little more now, especially since you have more designs like Venusmon these days (really? really?). But then there are also really good designs like LovelyAngemon and Mastemon that are just plain cool! And then even designs aside, there's a difference in the way each work portrays them; for instance, you can tell certain anime had more fun with the chest jiggles on the same Digimon that other series were not weird about at all. Maybe the fact Adventure and 02 weren't really weird about Angewomon's design was exactly why I didn't notice it very much back then?

Well, that got long and very rambling, but I hope that answered your question to some extent!

[syscourse-confessions]

💙- Vent. TW suicide baiting mention, lots of cussing. Replies of any kind OK, idc just need to put this out there

We're a DID system, professionally diagnosed. And we just need to get this off our chest - The DID/OSDD is the single most toxic, hateful, exclusionary, and controlling community we've ever interacted with. That includes communities for every other demographic we occupy (queer, autistic, personality disorder, etc) and every single subculture / fandom we've been apart of as well. .

First of all, the anti-endo shit. Despite being [partially] traumagenic and heavily disordered, we're passionately supportive of endos. And oh boy you better believe that means we get excluded and harassed right away. We've been told to kill ourselves, been told we're lying about our diagnosis and trauma, been told we deserved our trauma, that they hope it happens again, etc. All for the crime of *checks notes* believing that people can determine their own subjective, internal experiences :|

Pretty much all other forms of syscourse are awful too. The fact that there's been entire blogs on here dedicated to trying to spot fakers. The fact that having too many alters or fictives, or not having enough, or not being able to afford a diagnosis, or having weird system experiences, can all get your fakeclaimed. The fact that now people are debating over whether or not OSDD-1a "counts" as a system.

The entire community is absolutely obsessed with controlling how others identify and what qualifies as being a system. They attempt to put boundaries around how severe your trauma has to be, or what age the trauma happens at. They're genuinely willing to look a trauma survivor in the face and say, "Well actually, since your trauma happened when you were 10 years old its impossible for you to be a system, teehee sorry, your own internal experiences don't matter <3".

They think that psychiatrists are the be-all-end-all of every neurodivergent experience Ever, despite how psychiatry has historically been wildly racist, sexist, queerphobic, and just generally suppresses people who don't fit into the norm.

They also try to dictate what recovery looks like for literally everyone, that you should want final fusion. Or if they're ok with functional multiplicity, that you should want to have as few alters as possible, and that they all have to be as normal as possible. Introjects are told that being close to their source is inherently anti-recovery. Every kind of system experience is treated as inherently pathological and something that should be fixed.

And yeah, I know that this obviously not applicable to everyone in the community. Some of these statements are relatively niche arguments, but they're all real ones I've actually seen people debating over. And more importantly, the community fosters these kinds of shitty awful takes because the entire community is built around control and exclusion. It keeps getting taken further and further entire more and more systems are being squeezed out, and only the few Acceptable systems remain.

Thank god we have the plural community, which obviously has it problems too, but the DID/OSDD community is so vitriolic, so vicious towards the "wrong kind" of trauma survivors, and so exclusionary that it is entirely antithetical to recovery and healing as a system. Its so fucking awful, and I hate it more than anything.

💙 - Vent

[marietheran]

Coming in late, but how about Finnick, Jonathan Harker, Halt from Ranger's Apprentice, and Galadriel for the Character Bingo, please?

Thanks a lot for the ask! It's not late at all, in fact it's still open, haha. At your service:

Finnick:

Hmm... so, I like him, but while I know he's the Blorbo Ultimate for a lot of people, I don't think I would call him mine. I get why people adore him so much; he does share some characteristics with my favourite blorbos of all time.. maybe it's just that while I'm interested in the Hunger Games, I don't love this franchise as much as people seem to.

And, maybe I'm wrong, but I do feel like the fandom kind of reduces him to a pure sunshine boy™, and though there's nothing wrong with this kind of character, I don't think it's plausible to portray Finnick like that. He's had to win the Hunger Games somehow. He's killed people - at fourteen! - he's been forced to participate in this horror as a mentor - if he's got strong principles, his conscience must torment him. And then, of course, the prostitution thing. He's not 100% good cheer.

(I've heard about someone headcanoning him as Catholic - Irish name, etc - and I love this idea, but that would make him even more conflicted)

Of course, I have to add an obligatory expression of annoyance at the way he was killed. It made no sense and somehow the surrounding characters had zero emotional reaction to it.

If I'm allowed to have another quibble with the text I hate the way he was introduced. I get that the author wanted his actual good character to come as a surprise, but it was gross.

Jonathan:

I don't really have much to say except *general positive feelings*. (I feel like he might even qualify as a Blorbo!)

He's excellent husband material and he's never done anything wrong in his life - except, this applies to both those things - when he said he could become a vampire for Mina. Jonathan, no! I'm sure Mina would prefer you to have a strong moral backbone regardless of her own state.

Halt:

It feels very much a disservice to consider Halt (or anyone in these books) apart from the other characters. They're very much the most interesting together, especially when you consider the humour of the banter.

However, I will say I find his backstory incredibly cool actually. It seems like it got invented pretty late into the series, but actually I think his character fits someone who was raised as nobility (into the "noble" kind of noble, and not the "pampered" kind), but hasn't been leading this life for a while, and has experienced assassination attempts from close family members. I do wonder what his relationship with his sister was like.

I must admit I'm partial to the common headcanon of him as autistic, although, as always with this sort of thing, I'm a bit bothered by the fact that a character may have some autistic traits, but never the less "aesthetic" ones, so

Galadriel:

Tolkien characters, my beloveds! (with the very strong exception of the darksiders, of course)

Anyway, Galadriel/Artanis!

She's not my favourite out of all Legendarium figures (mostly because all of my blorbos come from there), but I like her a lot, especially when you take into account all the Silm stuff, and look at her role in LotR through that lens. It's tragic, to be honest. She's the only one left. Out of 15 grandchildren of Finwë. And she lives in this delightful (to consider - not to experience) state of being caught between homesickness and pride, ambition and regret.

I strongly dislike Tolkien's later attempts to smoothen her out, to make her so perfect - she never really struck me as a Marian figure; there are Marian figures in the legendarium, but Galadriel isn't one. Her Silm backstory is everything it should be.

I also dislike the theory that she was specifically banned from returning to Valinor. It's way more interesting when it's a "no" said in pride, in the wish to be a queen and not a subject, to be one of the most powerful and not one of the less - a "no" that she may come to halfway regret but believes is an irrevocable choice - or is hesitant to take back.

I find an interpretation that takes into account her more complicated characteristics like the fact that she is willing to cover for murderers really worthwhile. The fact that she starts off as the very skilled youngest child of a youngest child of a king, with ambitions and little way to be taken seriously until disaster strikes... chef's kiss.

I eternally loathe the movies' interpretation of her (and of the other elves, though it's most visible in her). Cate Blanchett seems so cold, even when she's trying to seem warm. They went for "otherworldly" and forgot elves are at the same time just as, if not more, grounded as men are.

Sorry if you expected a more LotR-centered take though, I'm afraid the Silm is firmly holding my mind hostage.

[diamondcitydarlin]

I was in the critical tag just because I'm genuinely curious/fascinated by the way these people are processing the text and I know I've said this before but I'm gonna do it again; like, I get that in a lot of fandoms and subject materials we can easily pick out villains and heroes, the morally-pure (bc their actions are always justified by the narrative regardless) from the morally reprehensible and we can conclude from these themes that the villains/morally-bankrupt ones deserve nothing while the 'good ones' (arguable, in a lot of cases, but they're usually conventionally hot and/or digestible so they can't really be bad lmao) deserve everything and while that is to be debated in other places, OFMD esp in this latest season is showing itself to not be one of those narratives. OFMD is a story where flawed, sympathetic people do fucked up things, act rashly, hurt each other, destroy things, etc, and then we watch them have to work their way back from that. I know we have had some one-off villains that don't qualify for this, but for everyone within the main cast that seems to be the concept. If you're trying to figure out why one member of the main cast is just too icky to be entitled to the acceptance of the rest you're already missing the entire point. If you're also trying to figure out why your fave is too precious to be held accountable for the things they chose to do, you're missing the entire point. If you think just one character is having a redemption arc here, YOU'RE MISSING THE ENTIRE POINT (they ALL are actually). And more to the point, if you're looking for any of this to actually happen in this particular story then I think you're watching the wrong show. I really, really do. And I'm also going to go so far as to say I think a lot of people are intentionally misreading these themes, projecting their own hopes on to it, saying Izzy's story 'doesn't feel good' or 'doesn't make sense' because the idea that people can be flawed, make mistakes, hurt each other and still be deserving of love and acceptance throws too much of a curveball at their already very limited world view, one in which there are only 'good guys' and 'bad guys', one in which they are indisputably 'good guys' themselves who have never done anything bad ever (even though you definitely have, we ALL have, YOU HAVE HURT PEOPLE, I HAVE HURT PEOPLE, GROW UP AND REALIZE YOU CAN'T LIVE AN ENTIRE LIFE WITHOUT DOING IT AT SOME POINT).

This is a story of acceptance and forgiveness and the moral greyness in us all, not exclusion and punishment, not the hopelessly simplistic idea that the world is just made up of good people who should never be questioned and always get good things and bad people who have no more nuance than just being bad and getting punished for it. Like, can we please try to wrap our minds around more complex themes than that maybe? Can it possibly be true that Izzy and Ed (the two most often compared) are both deserving of love, acceptance and forgiveness? Can it possibly be true that there's more to these characters than just good vs evil? Must we deny these characters the nuance and complexity that's been given to them just because 'it doesn't feel good'? Like idk babe maybe sometimes stories aren't meant to make you 'feel good' all the time, maybe sometimes they're meant to take you out of your comfort zone and examine your own worldview once and awhile IDK IT'S A FUCKING THOUGHT

[macksting]

Murderbot: System Collapse (and Susan Pompoms)

This is not exactly spoiler territory but I'm still putting it below a cut. (It might qualify as spoilers for El Goonish Shive, but I kinda feel the same about that in this case too.)

Bharadwaj says even good change is stressful.

A relatively recent page of El Goonish Shive has a character facing this head-on. Unfortunately for Susan, she wants to be rational about things, even though she knows she sometimes isn't, and seems to consider it a bit of a weakness. She's harder on herself than she is on others. Big Mood. We have to deal with our own bullshit 24/7; at least when we sleep or are alone we aren't around someone else's that often, and even then it's a different angle on the subject and, in my experiences, compassion is easier.

[ID: El Goonish Shive page. Susan and Sarah are standing talking on the roof of the high school. Susan is facing away, distraught and trying to hide her expression as she has lost her composure. Sarah suggests, pursuant to a page omitted, "It, um. Maybe you're upset by change?" Susan, still facing away, incredulously asks, "By good change? Not the store closing, but... quitting a job I don't want? Being done with this school? Not having to deal with that terrible locker anymore?" Sarah, concerned but calm, continues her supposition: "Well, I mean... You've worked there for years, and you've been here for years. It's what's normal for you, and... there is stuff you like about both places, right? Like, you started your movie review show with Elliot because of your job, and... you have friends here. You met Catalina here. Got to know Elliot and Tedd here." Susan half-smiles, her expression still bearing the strain of the strong emotions she's navigating, and asks, "And what's there to like about a locker with a sticky door?" Sarah smiles and replies, "You share it with me?" Susan, the sardonic half-smile gone, turns to face her more fully, and with a haunting expression as she comes to terms with it, pauses and says, "I want to hang out more." /end ID] So, y'know, right now I'm a mess. One little line messes me up so much. okay from here on I'm just fangirling to clarify shit. If you don't wanna hear me ramble about these fandoms in the abstract, adios. If you're a Murderbot fan wondering what this is about, El Goonish Shive is a webcomic that's been going since 2002, is unapologetically queer, has both accidentally and deliberately given earnest and deeply compassionate portrayals of queerness and neurodivergence, and also is just interesting, clever, and has a really big cry button moment as early as 2003. Susan in particular doesn't use the label asexual; Dan Shive considers her sexuality representative of his own, and is personally uncomfortable committing to restrictive labels such as that, though he knows how important they can be as well. She is beloved by asexual fans, okay frankly she's beloved by all fans because she's a complex, fascinating character whose political and philosophical views are her own, and excuse me I'm a mess again. She's not even my favorite fucking character. If you're an El Goonish Shive fan, I am crying over a construct made of cloned human tissues and robotic parts who is bitter, sardonic, and spent the first few books in a deep depression it was not aware of, has developed into a badass punk, and has an unsophisticated but very personal perspective on oppression, slavery, and artificial consciousness under a corporate dystopian rule. It calls itself "Murderbot" because of an incident it cannot remember that led to it hacking its governor module so that it might never be forced to kill again. It will kill, it's occasionally even Plan A, but it's a choice, not an order. ("As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure." - Book 1: All Systems Red.) It is asexual ("Things. :p"), prolly aromantic, prolly agender, and wonderful.

Then she added, “You know, you can stay here in the crew area if you want. Would you like that?” They all looked at me, most of them smiling. One disadvantage in wearing the armor is that I get used to opaquing the faceplate. I’m out of practice at controlling my expression. Right now I’m pretty sure it was somewhere in the region of stunned horror, or maybe appalled horror.

My favorite installment takes place after the fourth novella, but the first novella is absolutely sufficient as a standalone work of fiction, with a satisfying beginning, middle and end, comes in a glorious audiobook format narrated by Kevin R. Free, and makes me cry a lot. The early "humor me" level cry button for me is when everyone confronts it, and it turns to face a corner to avoid their deeply stressful eye contact. I have heard that fan responses to All Systems Red led the author Martha Wells to seek out an autism diagnosis; compare Dan Shive's "It would explain a lot."

[90shaladriel]

writer asks

thanks so much @pursuitseternal and @myfavouritelunatic for tagging me!

I am not sure I really qualify as a writer 😂 , this is something I started within the last 12 months as a response to diving into Rings of Power / Haladriel shipping and fanfiction.

How many works do you have on AO3? 3

What's your total AO3 words count? 61,841 !

What fandoms do you write for? The Rings of Power, Silmarillion. I have some wip drafts for something from the Halo universe (my ao3 account name “NobleOne_Carter” was one of the Spartans from the game Halo: Reach)

What are your top five fics by kudos? - I only have 3 😭… 1) A Lord and his Builder 2) First Fire in the Void 3) Strays at Sea

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not? Absolutely, it drives me to keep writing almost more than anything else and I sometimes like expanding on the backstory or my approach when people ask good questions about my fics.

What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? I haven’t finished it yet but I am pretty sure First Fire in the Void will be the one 😉

What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? Again it hasn’t been written yet but I think A Lord and his Builder will have an upbeat but open ending.

Do you get hate on fics? Not any really

Do you write smut? If so, what kind? I have mostly been afraid to because I feel my writing is so inadequate for it, and or I kind of embarrassed about what cringe I imagine a sexy scene to be. I am trying to get over this anxiety and get out of my comfort zone. In my last chapter of First Fire in the Void I wrote a detailed make-out kind of scene between Melkor and Mairon. Which was a challenging one in many ways for me. I am thinking of going full smut later in that fic (I think that is obligatory for Angbang? 🍆)

Do you write crossovers? If so, what's the craziest one you've written? I haven’t. However I always have an overactive imagination. One crossover I would love to write is Darth Vader (Star Wars) on a space freighter full of Xenomorphs (Aliens) 🤣

Have you ever had a fic stolen? No I don’t think so. I have actually come across similar scenes to mine in a few fics which has given me of deja vu once or twice. I mostly think it’s because we all are working from the same set of tropes and plot lines from the media we all consume.

Have you ever had a fic translated? Not yet!

Have you ever co-written a fic before? No, that could be fun

What's your all time favourite ship? Haladriel. I can’t even think of another ship that comes close. Honestly, the other onscreen relationship I spent a lot of time thinking about was Inuyasha x Kagome from the Inuyasha anime which came out when I was in university 20 years ago. I downloaded and watched over a hundred subbed episodes of that show and I don’t think they ever once kissed? Talk about slow burn!

What's a WIP you want to finish, but doubt you ever will? I have two main WIPs that I hope I can finish. I am basically able to write 1 chapter per month with work and life stuff, I hope I can finish these and then I might take a break or focus on one-shots rather than long multi chapter fics.

What are your writing strengths? I’m not sure, I think I do a pretty good job describing how characters subjectively experience a situation or thought. I dunno if that’s what others think though. My writing style is heavily influenced by imagining the words as if Frank Herbert (Dune) had written it. I like to think my plot ideas are pretty creative, I am always trying to find a way to be different or unconventional in terms of plot.

What are your writing weaknesses? Run on sentences, trying to write banter, trying to write something romantic 💀

Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic? It’s probably more work than I would want to do. There were times I wanted to use some Black Speech for the Orcs or Sauron in A Lord and his Builder, but actually Tolkien never really completely described this language so there’s not like a Google translate for English to Black Speech unfortunately.

First fandom you wrote for? Rings of Power / Haladriel!

Favourite fic you've ever written? I only have 3 but I guess I would say the one that started it all was A Lord and his Builder. My first ever fic that I wrote and published anywhere, and the fact that people seemed so positive in the comments. I was really excited to bring this different sort of story to the Haladriel / RoP fandom which was heavy on the Sauron x Galadriel romance that I love, but I felt the Orc stuff was a niche that could be explored in an interesting way. Since I started writing this fic I have read a lot of other great fanfics which incorporate the Orc culture into this fandom and I love it, though maybe my ideas are not niche anymore? Everyone’s take on the Orc culture is a bit different because again Tolkien left a lot of blank spaces on the canvas when it came to the lives of the Orcs.

[bestworstcase]

I really enjoyed the Watts post! He is an underrated favorite of mine and in particular the rooftop scene is one of my favorite character moments, for both him and Cinder, and you articulated something that always sat poorly with me when I read fandom interpretations of his speech and character in general. He's a far more interesting character than the one-note stooge that most seem to peg him for. As a sidebar, in that post you mention the possibility that someone could pour years into manifesting their semblance, only to find that they never had one. I'm curious about this. Are there any truly semblance-less characters? Besides Mercury, who was robbed, I thought anyone without an ostensible semblance had just never unlocked it, but had the potential inside, just waiting to be realized.

after cinder he’s easily the member of the cabal i find most interesting because there’s just… all these little details to add up. none of his character development is flashy or obvious but he’s also so integral to salem’s machinations and has this web of histories and grievances with so many other characters that he ends up feeling like one of the most fleshed-out secondary characters in the whole show. idk why people collectively decided to treat him like a cardboard cutout.

as for semblances! kind of? i would consider never realizing a latent semblance to be functionally the same as not having a semblance at all, and my read on semblances generally is that it’s not so much “unlocking your unique superpower” as it is ��learning how to press your aura outward and whatever form it takes under the pressure of your identity and your desires and your needs will stick for the rest of your life,” i.e. the ability doesn’t meaningfully exist until the first time it happens creates the pattern for every subsequent use.

(i figure this is part of why traumatic semblances are so common. you react to intense acute stress so strongly that your aura imprints on it and then that follows you forever, for better or worse.) (the other part is that hyperarousal gives you a huge burst of energy by shutting down your digestive system, redirecting blood flow to your muscles, rapidly burning short-term energy reserves like fat, and dialing down non-essential processes like neurological hearing; within the world of rwby all of this would logically have the effect of boosting aura.)

the kids [pyrrha, nora, ruby] have actually stated a couple times that everybody does have a semblance—BUT, there are some important qualifiers attached:

1 - in after the fall, a semblance is defined as a “special ability unique to every warrior on remnant”

2 - in roman holiday, roman thinks of semblances as “one of those special abilities some people had that often seemed like magic”

3 - during the semblance conversation in volume five, ren indicates that the semblance is the most advanced kind of aura manipulation, the sort of thing you don’t begin to focus on until you’ve mastered everything else.

4 - neither jaune nor oscar had any idea what a semblance was until they entered the social circles of huntsmen, and jaune had never even heard of *aura.*

5 - “everybody has a semblance!” is also just… unverifiable, because anyone who doesn’t have a semblance is presumed to just not have found theirs yet, even if it’s taking an unusually long time.

so it seems to me like “everybody” actually means “every huntsman and huntress” and it’s fairly rare for people outside of these circles to have one. (as always, it bears repeating that rwby’s core cast is 100% huntsmen and military personnel, and the only noteworthy civilians characters are people who work for salem. expanded materials offer a lot more glimpses into what life is like for normal folks in this world, but our perspective is largely through the eyes of an elite warrior class.)

anyways, in the WOR episode on the subject, salem defines aura as a “life force” that flows through all living things. huntsmen are distinguished by their ability to “amplify and control their aura,” and semblances are merely a “projection of aura into a more tangible form.” this tracks pretty well with the mechanics shown in the story proper: it requires “intense concentration” to generate defensive aura, aura is exhausting to use at first but builds up like a muscle with regular exercise, and regeneration of depleted aura is not an automatic or natural process but rather an active technique (we see jaune practicing in volume seven, and ren remarks that he’s getting better at it). ergo, aura manipulation is not simply a matter of channeling the spiritual energy you naturally possess—you have to do something to charge it up first, and then you have to actively sustain that for as long as you intend to use aura.

[sidebar: this is a big part of why the narrative use of aura-breaking as a dramatic device works. it’s not a health meter. you don’t break a person’s aura by whittling down them down to zero, you do it by pushing them beyond the brink of their trained instincts and then breaking their concentration. the easiest method of doing so is by attrition, but a single blow they’re not expecting or not ready for works too.]

sooo taking all of these bits and pieces together:

1 - the existence of aura is common but not universal knowledge.

2 - aura cannot be manipulated in its natural, dormant state—it needs to be ‘released’ first, which can be done deliberately by an experienced practitioner (e.g. pyrrha) or by training (e.g. ruby) or during periods of acute trauma or stress (e.g. ren, nora).

3 - once a person’s aura has been released it requires serious effort and dedication to become worthwhile

4 - semblances are the highest level of aura manipulation; anyone who possesses a fully-realized semblance has mastered the discipline.

5 - spontaneous (usually traumatic) manifestation of a semblance seems to be fairly common but do not correlate to skill; e.g. ruby petal bursts once during training before even coming to beacon but it takes months, perhaps years before she’s able to do so consciously and consistently.

6 - aura itself is shown to be subject to normal human diversity of capability—if it’s possible to have an unusually large quantity of aura (jaune) then it must also be possible to have an unusually small amount.

7 - it’s also shown that a person’s aura can be permanently damaged: pietro’s aura never healed from removing pieces of it to make and remake penny.

8 - a person’s semblance can also be stolen or destroyed forever (mercury).

9 - it follows that aura disabilities must exist, both congenital and resulting from irreparable damage due to injury or illness. (i think this is probably why nora ended up with scars aura can’t heal; she overclocked herself so hard she injured her aura.)

so all in all i think it’s probably more common than not for people to just… not have a semblance. to have a dormant aura or a weak or erratic aura that can’t be amplified to the level required for aura manipulation or sustained at that level for prolonged periods of time. to have had a traumatic experience as a child that manifested your semblance and also burnt so much of your aura to keep you alive that your aura is all but nonexistent now. or even to be trained to the level of mastery in aura manipulation and never develop a semblance at all because you never ended up in the right moment to figure it out. like in principle everyone has the potential to manifest a semblance because it’s just a projection of aura shaped by your identity, but in practice aura manipulation is difficult and semblances are such a specialized and individual form of that discipline that it feels sort of like saying everyone has the potential to be an olympic gold medalist.

like, the cast of rwby comprises almost entirely professional warriors who are explicitly the best in the world at what they do. it makes zero sense to me to look at their proficiency in the magical discipline central to their profession and generalize that to the entire global population, imo, and far more sense to conclude that the kids are just kind of sheltered from what’s normal outside of their very restricted social circles.

[rainbowsky]

Hello Rainbowsky!!

You get many asks every day. Antis will tell BJYX is not real while sometimes turtles who are confused may give you different reasons why they think BJYX may not be real. And sometimes turtles who leave the fandom give you reasons why they are leaving the fandom. Still, you have 100% faith that BJYX is real. And by your answers I can see that whatever may happen in the fandom you never loose your confidence on BJYX. For this I want to salute you.

I am a person who easily believes in other people’s words. And on top of that I am a pessimist. Thus, this quality of yours really amazes me.

I want to ask how do you keep your confidence so strong?

Hi Anon! 😊

Fake, fan fiction, CPN.

I have to salute you, Anon, because you seem to have picked up on something that maybe not a lot of my readers would necessarily be very conscious of: I'm constantly buried under a pile of other people's doubts, worries and disdain.

I get an extreme volume of nay-saying, questioning, picking apart, attempts to dismantle and debunk, anti messages, hate messages, panic about doubts, grief over theorized breakups, attempted gotcha messages about other CP material that 'proves' they are with someone else, entire lists and catalogs of why people don't believe, etc etc etc. You name it, I see it.

It's funny because I don't think there are many turtles who could read the things that I read every day and still be turtles 😅.

You said of yourself that, "I am a person who easily believes in other people's words." Are you sure it's not, "I am a person who easily believes in other people's negative, cynical words"? Because there are a lot of turtles out there saying positive things, and talking about GG and DD as being in love, etc. and I'm not getting the sense you're deeply attached to their words.

But I can answer your question (and the answer is relevant to that statement of yours) - how do I keep my confidence? Easy:

Everything I believe comes from me, not from other people.

Everything I take in goes through my own internal process of critical thinking, questioning, evaluating, examining, investigation, etc. etc. etc. I think for myself. I make up my own mind based on the evidence I am able to find. I make a genuine, dedicated effort to learn everything I can about a topic and then draw my own conclusions.

This is true of how I decide what is the best brand of pasta, which documentary I want to watch tonight and which mattress will give me the best sleep, every bit as much as how I decide how I feel about capital punishment, who I think will be the best political candidate, and what my spiritual beliefs are.

When you think for yourself, you'll never fall prey to other people's thoughts. You will know where you stand because you arrived at that point through a thorough, rigorous, good-faith process.

I don't know how other people arrive at their ideas, but I get the sense that a LOT of people arrive at their ideas not through the available evidence or a rigorous querying of the subject, but rather through a quick impression of the tone and perceived status of the person speaking to them - and also based on some weird psychosocial calculus about which option it would be more embarrassing to be wrong about.

The thinking seems to go like, "If the person seems really certain of what they're saying, and if I feel socially intimidated by the person and my perception of how authoritative they seem to be (they seem to know more than me), and if I don't want to be seen as someone who would foolishly believe _____ if it turns out to be false, then..." and that's just 5,000 flavors of wrong.

Do your own thinking. No one out there is more qualified than you to evaluate what's best for you to believe and participate in.

Question everyone and everything - including me. Dig into critical thinking, logical fallacies and intellectual self-defense. Learn how to be an independent mind. It will serve you well throughout your life.

As for GG and DD and the fandom (apologies to those who've heard me say this a thousand times): SZD or not shouldn't matter. Just enjoy GG and DD, enjoy their projects, enjoy being a fan and learning more about them, and if SZD comes to you someday that's fine. If it never does, that's fine too.

There is no obligation to believe SZD in order to be a turtle or to enjoy being a fan. In fact, those who get overly invested in whether GG and DD are a real couple only make themselves miserable.

[aestheticdriven]

Under Matthew's facade - part 1

Matthew puts on an air of being breezy and fun and unbothered all the time, but the truth is that he has suffered from anxiety, abandonment issues and poor self-esteem/self-worth since he was a child, that have only grown with the years and became paired with depression as well, specially after the events of Cast Long Shadows. Since he fakes so well even the fandom forgets what lies underneath, I have compiled all the excerpts from the short stories and books that blatantly show on page all the mental health issues he has had since young, and some basic explanations from health and psychology websites about how they came to be, their impact and how the lack of support from his family initiated/aggravated them.

Since there are a lot, I have divided them in 3 parts:

1 - The first trauma: Child abandonment, neglect and parentification (below)

2 - Childhood issues: Cracked self-image and mental health (here)

3 - The sin: descent into depression and alcoholism (here)

Part 1 - The first trauma: Child abandonment, neglect and parentification

Listen, I love Henry and Charlotte as people and as a couple in TID, but they were terrible parents. What they did to Matthew can literally be qualified as child abandonment, neglect and parentification.

I am in no way an expert in these subjects, but I put a great deal of research into this and know people irl with these experiences that can relate to Matthew and see the signs in his story. Just for context, this is a basic explanation of the terms (sources are linked in the words above or throughout the text), and later I’ll put the canon excerpts that show and relate to them.  

Child abandonment is:

“While abandoning a child typically involves physical abandonment -- such as leaving a child at a stranger's doorstep when no one is home -- it may also include extreme cases of emotional abandonment -- such as when a "work-a-holic" parent offers little or no physical contact or emotional support over long periods of time.”

It includes, among other things:

Making only minimal efforts to support and communicate with a child;

Being absent from the home for a period of time that created a substantial risk of serious harm to a child left in the home;

Being unwilling to provide care, support, or supervision for the child.

It is a subcategory of child neglect, which is:

The Federal Child Abuse Prevention Treatment Act (CAPTA) legally defines neglect as "any recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker that presents an imminent risk of serious harm to the child."

State laws often define neglect as the failure of a parent or caregiver to provide needed food, shelter, clothing, medical care, or supervision to the degree that a child’s health, safety, and well-being are threatened with harm.

More specifically, it falls on these two types of neglect:

Emotional neglect: Exposing a child to domestic violence or substance use, or not providing affection or emotional support

Inadequate supervision: Leaving a child who can’t care for themselves home alone, not protecting a child from safety hazards, or leaving the child with inadequate caregivers

Charlotte was barely home, and Henry - while home - was completely unfit to be a parent (or at least to be Matthew’s parent since we don’t have many insights on Charles), focused on his work at all times as he was. A dangerous work at that, that exposed Matthew to safety hazards such as fire, poison and explosions, and that he wouldn’t be pried from even to take care of his sons. With no other close family and with a much older brother that ignored and disdained him, Matthew had little to no support from his family at key developmental stages in his life.

Not only that, but the burden he took on with his parents - more noticeably with Henry, but also with Charlotte - is what is called parentification, which is:

Parentification occurs when parents look to their children for emotional and/or practical support, rather than providing it. Hence, the child becomes the caregiver. As a result, parentified children are forced to assume adult responsibilities and behaviors before they are ready to do so. In addition, they do not receive acknowledgment or support for taking on these responsibilities. (...)  The word describes what happens when the roles of parent and child are reversed. Consequently, this role reversal disrupts the natural process of child development. In most cases, it has far-reaching negative effects on the child’s mental and physical health.

Examples from all of these can be clearly seen in Nothing but Shadows and Cast Long Shadows:

Even if it wasn’t what Charlotte meant, parentifying Matthew was exactly what she did in this moment. A six-year-old child shouldn’t take care of their father, and they definitely shouldn’t be made to feel like taking care of their father is their responsibility, it should be the other way around, always. A parent shouldn’t be so incompetent at parenting and at reassuring their children they are safe that a six-year-old is left with the lasting impression that if they aren���t around at all times, their parent just can’t get by. Both Charlotte and Henry neglected and abandoned Matthew emotionally so badly, his only close connection to them was him taking care of them.

It is so absurd, and terrible, and damaging, that it is even acknowledged in the text in Nothing But Shadows:

As James says so himself: "I don't take care of my father, my father takes care of me". Even James, as a child, can see there’s something terribly wrong there, that the parent should take care of the child, and even James remarks it would be cruel to point that out to Matthew when he has never had that security in his life, opposite to the security James and Lucie received from Will and Tessa their whole lives.

I also explains why he was so desperate to go back home he came up with that whole “worst shadowhunter ever” plan. When you think you are the only thing keeping your father from getting himself killed, you will do anything to get back to him, even go against your own nature by picking fights and causing problems for others.

Growing up without that security and comfort, and having this inversion of roles, really affected Matthew hard in the worst way. He didn’t even think he could go visit the institute for a day without something horrible happening to Henry and it being his fault. It affected him so deeply it made him think it was his responsibility to take care of (=be the parent of) everyone, even his friends, even in spite of himself. He thinks that’s the only thing he is good for:

He says he likes it but... Does he, really? Or is that only the only thing he has ever known when interacting with others - even his own parents - and that he now projects to his friends? This is the only way he knows how to collect to people, and to make himself “useful” to others so they won’t leave him.

Not even in his older brother can he find support. As Matthew said in the excerpt above “My mother is always busy and Charles is always running after her and acting superior”. Rather than supporting him, Charles goes to the complete opposite and is particularly awful to him. For him, anything Matthew does is stupid, childish and wrong (even when Matthew is literally a child). Throughout all Cast Long Shadows he attacks Matthew every chance he gets:

*******

Even when Charlotte falls sick, the first thing he does is to blame Matthew for it even without any basis whatsoever, like wtf?

Not only that, but it’s clear no one in his family trusts him. They didn’t even bother telling him his mother was pregnant. For months. For ????? reason??? Even that Matthew excuses and puts the blame on himself, saying they were protecting him, but protecting him from what? From knowing his mother was... pregnant? From having an open conversation? They think he can’t handle knowing there’s a baby coming as if he was a toddler, is that it?, Whatever the reason, it still doesn’t negate the fact they simply all chose to hide the pregnancy from him for months. And not only they didn’t tell him, but they were treating him badly during this period due to the stress of it all and never even bothered telling him why. It’s no wonder he fell so easily for Alastair’s vile words and continued to believe them even at this time when he had never had and still doesn’t have any trust or support from his family when it comes to anything remotely important or any openings to talk about his feelings with them. In the end, all he wanted was to know the truth:

*********

 *******

Growing up in this environment is bound to make a number on anyone’s mental health, but Matthew himself has no conscience of anything wrong being done to him. The grasp on mental health at the time was feeble at best, and no one would have considered the parents in the wrong for doing things like they did, but more than that, this is all Matthew has ever known, so how can he have the conscience it isn’t right, like James figured out in a second in Nothing But Shadows? His parents were never evil or malicious, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t harm him in all the ways put here, but Matthew doesn’t see it like that. He even says his parents are so great he never had the chance to be neglected, in spite of having actually been neglected and parentified his whole childhood:

**********

He loves his parents and he thinks they are the best parents in the world as well as the best on anything they do, and because he has always thought and still thinks his parents are amazing and flawless, any time anything goes against that, he blinds himself to it, and any wrongs from them or others he is bound to see as some flaw in himself instead, not them. This is the topic of part 2 right here. 

[utilitycaster]

one thing that confuses me about c3 is that if matt didn't give them clues about the subject of the campaign, is imogen just a lucky coincidence to him? because if she was a literally any other sorcerer there wouldn't be this connection. would the carrying of the plot then fall to orym? because I assume matt likely knew liam would be playing orym again quite early in c3 development? I feel like in other campaigns he managed to lead his players to his world-altering intrigues in more organic ways. managed to make enough personal connections that vm went after chroma, that the nein went after the nonagon and cognouza. (however that does make me wonder how the nonagon plot would feel if molly lived and if it would similarly feel that molly was the one dragging everyone into the plot)

(that also makes me salty how people say liam hogged the spotlight bc vax made a spontaneous decision that carried huge weight but wasn't something anyone could predict. I don't see nearly enough similar sentiment towards imogen who really feels favoured by the plot)

Hi anon! Again, this is all speculative (though we do know from 4SD that Laura didn't know the nature of the storm) but I suspect that either the party wouldn't have the same internal connection to Ruidusborn but would still be pushed towards this plot; for what it's worth, the Imogen connections very specifically start driving things in Bassuras; Orym's connections are sufficient to get to Heartmoor Hamlet, Fearne's are what drive the Calloway/Ira connections, and Chetney's issues with Ruidus would have added an extra dimension. Perhaps Fearne would have had some dreams; perhaps the nature of Ruidusborn would have been changed. I think he could have still woven many of their plots into Ruidus in some way and given the others sufficient reason to be interested; it's specifically that one person is so much more tied to it that unbalances it because the other connections are so strong, and it's also worth noting that the conclave and Cognouza came much later in their respective campaigns, after character motivations were much more solidified. This feels more railroaded because it's so early and there isn't the wandering about that the pre-stream of VM or the earlier parts of the Nein had. It's not that you can't do main character/skewed stuff in D&D; but it's really something you need to agree upon in advance (D20 does it all the time, but they workshop the characters beforehand) so that the player is prepared.

I will admit I've had similar questions about the nonagon plot had Molly lived; it might be that his death wiping out that plot, and the fact that the Nein categorically rejected the Empire early on, is why that plot is so strongly character-driven and gets so much room to breathe. I don't know if we'll ever know for sure! I do hope that these questions about Imogen come up at some point, even if it might not be until after the campaign.

I will say: I am frustrated by how much the plot hinges on Imogen, but there's also been a significant amount of hate and criticism towards her even before that was the case. People were livid at the 4 Sided Dive comment about Imogen being the protagonist among NPCs even though it was fully out of character and just discussing archetype; I received a lot of backlash for pointing out that Imogen was justified in being angry at Laudna when Laudna broke the gnarlrock even if Delilah was behind it; and I have serious trepidations about how she might be treated if ships don't go the way people like, even if Laudna is the one who initiates something else. In general, while I do think it can be helpful to compare the fandom responses to cast members (and uh, just did so) because they are wildly disparate, I also think most cast members receive hate from some quarter, especially if their character is in focus and someone is Big Mad that their favorite isn't in focus, and that is a whole other extensive discussion I am not qualified nor inclined to lead.