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postgamecontent · 9 days

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Nintendo Switch Weekly Round-Up for the Week Ending September 14, 2024

Hello gentle readers, and welcome to the Nintendo Switch Weekly Round-Up for the week ending September 14, 2024. I've decided to carry this on in some fashion even though I'm not at TouchArcade anymore. It's going to be weekly, it's mainly going to be focused on new and notable releases, and I'm definitely not going to be doing the lists of sales. I might call out some specific ones here and there when I consider them juicy enough, though. With that said, let's see what this week brought us.

Select New Releases

Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics ($49.99)

The wildest retro collection you have never dreamt! Capcom tosses all of its arcade-based Marvel games into a package very similar in terms of interface and features to 2022's Capcom Fighting Collection. You get X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, and The Punisher. All really good games, and don't ignore The Punisher if you pick this up. It's quietly one of Capcom's better beat 'em ups. A great set, and it's nice to see these games in circulation again.

The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case: The Okhotsk Disappearance ~Memories in Ice, Tearful Figurine~ ($44.99)

G-Mode presents a remake of Yuji Horii's classic mystery adventure game, The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case. It's very faithful gameplay-wise, so you can expect some very vintage Japanese adventure gaming from it. Talk to people, examine scenes for evidence, and try to figure out who was responsible for these grisly murders. This is the first official English release of the game, which is pretty nifty.

Grapple Dogs: Cosmic Canines ($17.99)

Grappling pupper Pablo returns for more platforming fun, this time joined by the gun-wielding Luna. Are two dogs better than one? I haven't played enough to say for sure yet, but if you liked Grapple Dog you'll almost certain have a great time with this sequel.

Yars Rising ($29.99)

WayForward does its best to make a sassy Metroidvania out of a property almost as old as ol' Shaun, and the result is about what you would expect from this developer. It's fine. If you want a new Metroidvania, a new WayForward game, or want your Atari fan itch scratched, this will serve you well enough.

Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland ($24.99)

A surprisingly solid platformer in the vein of Super Mario Bros. 2/USA starring the most popular babies of the 1990s. You can play in classy NES style or go with the very well-done modern presentation. Either way, some enjoyable hop-and-toss fun.

Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP ($44.99)

Lollipop Chainsaw was a really fun game back in the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 era, with a style positively dripping with James Gunn/Suda51 energy. So what happens if you take that game, drain a massive amount of the style from it, and port it badly to Switch? This. This happens. It doesn't even play Mickey when you go super. What the heck is the point?

Arcade Archives VS. Battle City ($7.99)

A Famicom pirate cart/handheld staple, Battle City is already on the Switch via one of Namco's 8-bit collections. But this is VS. Battle City, which… removes the stage editor and adds pretty much nothing! One for the completionists, I suppose.

EGGCONSOLE Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes PC-8801mkIISR ($6.49)

The sixth game in the Dragon Slayer series is also the first game in The Legend of Heroes, which is technically the same franchise as Falcom's recent bread-and-butter Trails games. A pretty good turn-based RPG for its era, but one look at the screenshot will tell you what the problem is for most people reading this. Japanese only, and very text heavy. Oh well.

Crossy Road Castle ($19.99)

Another Apple Arcade game escapes the zoo, this time the platformer based on the hit Crossy Road franchise. Up to four players on this one, online or local. Plenty of hats and characters to unlock. The levels are procedurally generated, so you can keep playing it infinitely! Whether you will want to or not is a different matter, though.

Wild Bastards ($34.99)

The follow-up to Void Bastards, and one I'm sure will find just as many fans. It's pretty different from Void, incorporating turn-based strategy, roguelite, arena shooter, and a few other bits and bobs into something quite distinctive. That uniqueness might turn off some players, but I suspect it will win over more than it pushes away.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Reckoning of New York ($19.99)

Here's the third installment in the Vampire: The Masquerade series of visual novels for the Switch. If you're new to these, play the other two first. If you're not, then I'm sure you can figure out if this is for you or not.

Elsie ($24.99)

Played the wheels of 20XX and 30XX but need more roguelite Mega Man X mash-up action? Perhaps Elsie is what you're after today. Procedural generation! It's a popular choice in the modern age. Still, if the bar napkin concept doesn't put you off, this is a rather enjoyable game.

Eden Genesis ($24.99)

A cyberpunk-themed precision platformer with an emphasis on speedy moves. It's decent enough, but not so good that I'd recommend it with any real vigor. It's stylish and functional, and that might be enough for some.

Beneath Oresa ($24.99)

Here's another game inspired by the likes of Slay the Spire, this one aiming to be a bit more lively with its roguelite deckbuilding turn-based gameplay. It's extremely demanding, the kind of game where exactly one wrong move can end your run. So don't make any mistakes, okay? Glad we cleared that up.

Celestia: Chain of Fate ($29.99)

In this otome visual novel, you play as a young woman who finds out she's half angel and half demon. She's been invited to attend the Academy of Celestia, where she will find among other things three hunky dudes to potentially smooch. But which one will she smooch? That depends on your choices, my friend.

Metro Quester | Osaka ($19.99)

Just like the original Metro Quester, this is a game that is very much tuned towards a particular kind of taste. If you're into what it's laying down, you'll likely be absorbed for a while. Everyone else is going to be repelled with the force of an angry pantsless Magneto. Dungeon crawling, turn-based battling, chunky character building… ah, I love it.

Doomsday Paradise ($14.99)

This might seem like another Slay the Spire-style deckbuilding roguelite from that screenshot, but it's also an off-the-wall dating sim and features multiplayer for up to four players via online, local, or local wireless. Quite well-liked on other platforms, and I think this particular combination will go over nicely with the Switch audience too.

Fabledom ($24.99)

A deliberately relaxed fantasy-themed city builder. As near as I can tell, it more or less does what it sets out to do. Not the fanciest of cat pajamas, but if it's the kind of jam you're after today I don't think it will let you down.

Jackbox Naughty Pack ($21.69)

Those Jackbox Party Packs sure are neat, but if you've got a room full of adults and want to dig into something a little more saucy, here's the Naughty Pack. The games in this one go a little more dirty, as you can tell by the publisher cleverly ending the price with a 69 instead of a 99. I can definitely see this one going over well at the right kind of parties.

NanoApostle ($19.99)

Nanotechnology? How nostalgic. Remember when that was the buzzword in video games? Here's another one of those top-down boss-rush action games where you have to dash and dodge around while attacking a far more powerful foe. A fairly good one, I'd say. It works the way this kind of thing usually does, with skill trees, multistage bosses, and so on. Solid execution makes it.

Caravan SandWitch ($24.99)

A game about traversing a small but fairly dense open world in your cool van, helping people out. There's no combat, and you can't die. So it's just you, the citizens you'll be assisting, the sci-fi world itself, and a mystery about your missing sister to serve as an overall goal. It's been getting relatively good reviews so far. Provided the Switch port has come out smoothly, this might be worth the pick-up.

Edge of Sanity ($19.99)

The core game here is decent enough. It's a The Thing-inspired survival game with a lot of interesting systems to deal with and fairly satisfying strategic combat. The big problem is that this game is really buggy at the moment, at least in this Nintendo Switch form. I wouldn't pick it up on Switch until it gets some patching up, but I'm not the mayor of Yourwalletonshire.

Deep Beyond ($9.99)

Today is a day for missing family members, it seems. The main character of this one is a sea explorer looking for her father, and her journey will see her taking deep-sea dives, solving puzzles, and hanging out with her dog. Not a terribly long game by any means, but I think it punches well enough for the asking price.

Selfloss ($29.99)

This Slavic-inspired action-adventure game ended up being more engrossing than I expected. Rough edges aplenty, but it feels good to play more often than it doesn't. Solid boss battles, a good story, and really satisfying puzzles to solve. I was really caught off-guard by this, in a good way.

Pixel Game Maker Series The Willow Man ($6.99)

A modest little survival-horror game where you're trying to survive long enough to escape a house that plays host to an unspeakable evil known only as The Willow Man. There are multiple endings to arrive at based on your actions.

Downfall ($5.99)

I'm sure at this price you're not expecting fancy dining, and you shouldn't. Pretty much just a mindless little grinder. The art is decent and it's not the worst time-waster for a short while, but it gets dull fast.

Line Time ($5.99)

Regular readers know I'm a bit of a sucker for puzzle games, and this one isn't too shabby at all. You have to push the ball or balls to the goal on each stage, and you're given a set number of moves to do it in. Plan things out move by move and if there are multiple balls in play keep in mind that they will interact. Over two hundred stages to play, which is probably more than you'll need but appreciated nonetheless.

Samurai Kento ($4.99)

An small Metroidvania-ish game with RPG elements that casts you in the role of a samurai trying to save Japan from evil yokai run amuck. Not a bad time for the price, if you're in the mood for one of these.

Nimbusfall ($5.99)

Ah, haven't seen one of these in a while. You're a tiny character and you need to square off against twenty-five big bosses. You've got a good array of moves at your disposal, so all you have to do is learn the patterns and land your blows. Seems fine.

That's all for this week, friends. We'll be back next Saturday with another Round-Up, this time featuring a review or two! If you enjoyed this and feel like tossing me a tip, I have a Ko-Fi where you can make that happen. I hope you have a super Saturday, and as always, thanks for reading!

#nintendo switch #switch round-up #marvel vs capcom

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northstories · 1 year

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Chaos Controlled:

For all my fics find me on Archive of Our Own

Twt: @ northsstories (no minors)

My message inbox is always open for drabble requests bc I love chaos 🤟

🐿️Jilix 🐥

Reverent

Rated: E

One-shot University AU

Jisung thinks Felix is very, very pretty and can't stop looking at him. Felix might be into that.

Words: 16,713

Completed: ✅

Naturally

Rated: E

Multi Chapter Canon Compliant

They're in love your honor, they're just being idiots about it

Words: 32,692

Completed: ✅

Status Quo

Rated: T

Social Media University AU

Jisung is truly hopeless, hope you're into that

(because Felix sure is)

Completed: ❌

Praying At Your Altar

(if you know what I mean)

Rated: E

Sweet, Christian, innocent Jisung vs. filthy minded Felix hunting him like prey

Part 1 of Be Gay - Do Crimes (works as standalone)

Words: 17,579

Completed: ✅

I Dare You (To Be Mine)

Rated: E

University AU

Jilix vs. Alcohol and Party Games, this can only go well, right? Right?

Words: 32,805

Completed: ✅

🐰Minchan🐺

Cheesy

Rated: E

University AU: Bang Chan using the cheesiest lines to whittle away at Minho's sanity and resolve. We all know Chan is a total dad, he deserves a proper dad-joke fic.

Words: 37,826

Completed: ✅

Little Birdie Flies So Far

Rated: E

Dead dove: do not eat. Victorian era, Murder mansion, serial killers AU.

The manor stands proudly within the vast expanse of its estates. Well-kept gardens, neatly kept grounds, lavish furnishings, exquisite architecture. The gem of the town.

But behind its walls, an evil lurks. Invisible to the eyes of the people, hidden away.

Completed: ❌

🐺Chanlix🐥

Freesia

Rated: M

Police AU, Hybrid AU

Chan is a detective with an impossible case. In a desperate attempt to crack it, he ends up taking in the hybrid Felix in the hopes that he can provide any leads.

Part 1 of The Language of Flowers

Words: 49, 204

Completed: ✅

🐰Minsung🐿️

Dandelions

Rated: E

Set in Freesia Universe

Minho is a cop and a control freak

Jisung is a hermit producer with anxiety

Part 2 of The Language of Flowers

Completed: ❌

blushes, butterflies and heart flutters and shit...

Rated: T

One-shot University AU

Just dumb best friends doing best friend stuff... Platonically, I think?

Words: 14, 076

Completed: ✅

🦊Jeongsung🐿️

Sweet & Spicy

Rated: E

Omegaverse AU, Strangers to Lovers

Jeongin is generally good at minding his own business. But when he sees a scared omega pushed up against the wall of a nightclub, facing three looming alphas, his moral compass decides that he should do something. The problem is that said omega turns out be the cutest fucking thing Jeongin has ever seen in his life. Even if he is drunk off his ass.

Words: 42,983

Completed: ✅

It's Only Fair

Rated: E

University AU, Practice fic.

POV: You hate the education program you're in, but your parents pressured you to apply for it when all you wanna do is skateboard. Then, when you get in, you get stuck with a hardass prof who makes you do stupid weekly tests, meaning you actually have to read the course material. This one nerd in your class is always sitting alone so he should be fairly easy to manipulate into helping you though. What you didn't account for was the fact that he wants to do a knowledge for knowledge kinda deal.

Yeah, Jeongin is fucked.

Completed: ❌

🦊JeongSungLix🐿️🐥

Domming 101

Domming 102

Rated: E

Canon compliant. M/M/M. Polyamory. Practice fic.

Words: 21,725 + 9,091

Completed: ✅

🦊JeongLix🐥

Tell Me I'm Pretty (Sweet Words On Your Tongue)

Rated: E

Canon Compliant, first times, queer platonic relationship.

“Step out! Hello, we are Stay Kids, and we are here today with Teen Vogue! And today we're gonna try out the Compliment Battle.” This is Jeongin's worst nightmare.

Words: 9,401

Completed: ✅

🐰Minhyang 🦊

Moved By You

Rated: E

Alternate Universe - Non-Famous.

Jeongin is shy and clumsy — this he knows. Which begs the question; Why the heck does he think signing up for a dance class is a good idea? Well, aside from the fact that Hyunjin's gorgeous dance teacher Minho said he should. And the fact that he's drunk off his ass while staring at the sign-up sheet. Perhaps he should? Hell, he can do this, right? He can impress Minho. Right?

Words: 14,587

Completed: ✅

🐺 Chansung🐿️

Under Your Skin

Rated: E

Alternate Universe - Non-Famous. Childhood friends to lovers.

Jisung lets himself be touched. Kissed. Girls, guys, doesn’t matter. He feels like he knows everything about the world. It doesn’t mean shit. Because they’re not him. They’re not Bang Chan. How pathetic, to fall in love after a single smile. Jisung doesn’t even try to get over it.

Words: 34,284

Completed: ✅

🐶 Seungyang🦊

Et Ensomt Tjern (A Lonely Pond)

Rated: E

Viking AU. Mythical Beings & Creatures. Norwegian Mythology & Folklore.

Seungmin has never held much stock in wanderer’s tales or myths, but when he constantly finds himself feeling watched after moving to a cottage in the deep forest, it’s hard not to at least consider it. Especially when he swears he keeps seeing the shadowed silhouette of what looks like a man with a fox tail swinging behind him.

Perhaps he's just gone mad?

Completed: ❌

🐶Seungsung🐿️

Objectively, Of Course.

with @anautumncarol

Rated: T

Alternate Universe - Non-Famous. Strangers to lovers.

In which Seungmin is willing to admit that his dorm-mate isn't super bad-looking, and not not kinda cute, even if he is annoying as hell. Objectively, of course, because Seungmin is nothing if not a level-headed scholar.

Words: 7,851

Completed: ✅

🐷🐰 3RACHA 🐺🐿️

What Makes It So Special

Rated: E

Inspired by art.

Canon Compliant. Established poly relationship.

Jisung is staring. These late night working sessions are prone to get the best of him. It's late, he hasn't slept for a while, hasn't left this room in hours, it's hot… Hot enough that Chan at one point forgoes his shirt. Hot enough that Changbin's thigh feels like a space heater pressed against Jisung’s own where they're slumped on Chan’s bed, leaning against the headboard. He doesn't stand a chance, really.

Words: 7,043

Completed: ✅

Between Us

Rated: E

Alternate Universe - Non-Famous. Hybrids. Omegaverse.

Chan's tail keeps wagging and wagging, looking at Jisung with wide, astonished eyes. Changbin nudges him with his elbow. "Dude, control that thing, would you?" "I dunno what’s happening." "Hi Bin! So, this is the boyfriend Chan, huh?"

Words: 18,618

Completed: ✅

🐶🐰 2minjeongchan 🦊🐺

Right Under My Nose

with @amiandthechaos. Inspired by art.

Rated: E

Alternate Universe - Non-Famous. Hybrids. Omegaverse.

Dog-hybrids are weird, Minho has always thought so, but somehow he has ended up living with three of them. Three omegas to boot. Maybe it's because he's a cat-hybrid himself that he doesn’t really get their deal; The tail-wagging, and the sniffing, and the sleeping in a big pile, but he’s somehow made his peace with it. That is until all three of them collectively decide to start sniffing him, like he is the most interesting thing on the planet despite the fact that he is most likely just an unpresented beta.

Words: 34,103

Completed: ✅

🐺🐰🐷🐰🥟 Drabbles 🐿️🐥🐶🦊

Six Minutes 'till Midnight

🐿️/

Rated: T

Canon compliant, fluff, birthday traditions, soulmate au

Words: 1,153

Would You Be So Kind, As To Fall In Love With Me?

🐰/🐺

There's something so oddly juxtaposing about Minho patting his head, Chan thinks. Minho makes him feel so many things.

Words: 849

Yeah, Kinda.

🦊/🐿️

Jisung purses his lips, leans in with his eyebrows raised, eyes gleaming mischief. "Kiss me."

God, he's so relentless. He just won't quit, will he? Has no respect for the fact that if Jeongin kisses him once, he might never be able to stop. Stupid. Jeongin kisses his own fingers, then presses them to the back of Jisung's hand, mutters "There," then raises his phone back up to keep scrolling.

Words: 2,136

Taking Turns

🦊x everyone

Rated: T

bebepieuvre once said that "if Jeongin's hyungs aren't taking turns kissing him then 😡 😤 😠"

I agree. Big-time.

Words: 2,254

#skz fanfic #jilix fanfic #minchan fanfic #minsung fanfic #chanlix fanfic #northwrites #jeongsung fanfic #jeongsunglix fanfic #chansung fanfic #seungsung fanfic #jeonglix fanfic #skz ot8 fanfic #3racha fanfic

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homemadegirlbossbattle · 1 year

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ROUND 1 / SIDE A / POLL 11

Natasha Sidney (@icecreampizzer, art by @slimespecter) vs. Xavier Beaumont (@vampitz)

Natasha Sidney info:

Description:

Doctor Natasha Sidney is the main antagonist for one of my current projects in progress, where she's a very diligent and skilled psychiatrist with very, very high ambitions for herself. She knows how to keep her cool when she's intimidating someone to bend to her will and she's very quick on evaluating a person's emotional weak spots. Her magic mind powers help her with her work and it's her source of pride and joy. She's a force to be reckoned with, she fits the evil scientist aesthetic but in psychology now, she has that half-lidded eyes-and-ominous smirk combo, her magic scars look like BLOOD on her hands! What more can you ask for!

Also btw she had a very major role in starting the whole plot in the first place, in which there are two separate cases related to someone dying. Truly a #girlboss

Crimes: Unethical Experimentation, Emotional Manipulation, Perjury, Forging Medical Documents, Awful Opinions about Mental Health in General, Physical Assault

Other notes from the submitter: ERM here's her toyhouse profile if people want to read MORE about her: https://toyhou.se/14655164.natasha-sidney

Xavier Beaumont info:

Description: shes a fan character for the magnus archives! xavier is an avatar of the lonely (fancy way of saying she serves the fear god of loneliness), and hes loud, a bit annoying, flirty, but friendly! the way she serves the lonely is by making people fall in love with them, and then completely leaving them alone and isolating them.

Crimes: manipulation, malicious seduction, murder, marrying a serial killer (is that a crime?)

Other notes from the submitter: xavier is transfem & genderfluid, and although she isnt always a woman he does prefer feminine terms no matter the gender so i believe that counts:3

#poll #oc poll #hmgbb

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alicefromwhichplanet · 7 months

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Finally I’ve updated Heroic Nonsense. Now we’ve entered Part II: Cynic vs. Dreamer. You could guess in this part I will focus more on the relationship between OP and Megs. You can expect them finding common ground amid their differences, which is partly what made them so beautifully complementary at the same time.

In this chapter we come back to an analysis of Blackarachnia/ Elita One’s character. I have quite some opinions on tfa author(s)'s portrayal of women characters, especially this classic example of bitch/babe dichotomy . But I'm gonna save it for later. This chapter, including Heroic Nonsense in general, will mainly talk about her story and her personality from Optimus's point of view, which is far from objective. For those interested in my perspective, you may refer to SIX--the serial side story collection I've published as a complement of Heroic Nonsense. But you can also save it for now, it might be more fun to read in the future.

Chapter Summary: (more like an excerpt)

(We come back to an analysis of Blackarchnia's character, as well as Optimus' past trauma again. I'm doing this not only to analyze the original story from my own thoughtful perspective, but also because it's a way to know Optimus better in all his complexity.)

He thinks hard to remember all those days, because memories were escaping him ever since guilt started to eat him up. In his many years of repent and regrets, Elita One’s image slowly shrank into a small ink stain, and all the memories related to her were capitulated in a frozen slow motion of the brilliant beautiful bot moving away from him, falling into the deadly pit. For many years on, that was the only impression he had of her, replaying again and again in his mind’s eye, forcefully and blocking out everything else. Now it feels like he is finally opening the cover of this memory book and peeking inside. What’s inside of it?

#tfa #fic: heroic nonsense #optimus prime #megop #sari sumdac #blackarachnia #elita one #scrapper #mixmaster #maccadam

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tutchando74 · 8 months

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A story of @ask-serial-designation-s

Most characters belong to @the-simple-creature

Shadeless belongs to @shadelessanon

Carleen belong to Carleenchoco (Got out of the interent)

Tut and O.Tut belongs to me

#murder drones #murder drones au #ao3 #wattpad #ffn #fanfic.net

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ardurinn · 8 months

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［Preview］Soulwalker: Benzoin

"The Soulwalker" is a series of space operas, the main character is Bhu'ja, it is a collection of different short stories, there is no reading order, and there is no ending problem, so I can happily stop serializing whenever I want. The sequel of "HUNT: The Final Rest" is one of the short stories, "Benzoin". But the "HUNT" is not in "The Soulwalker".

#AVP #alien vs predator #fiction #yautja #predator franchise #yautja oc #predator

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constarellations · 2 months

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𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐋𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒. independent, semi-selective, mutuals-only roleplay blog for various characters of Genshin Impact. AU & Crossover friendly. Condensed rules under the cut, full rules available on blog. Penned by Kosmic, 28, they/he.

𝐀 𝐒𝐓𝐔𝐃𝐘 𝐈𝐍. Connections and the bonds we forged through life, the curse of both mortality and immortality, and the secrets we keep close to our hearts.

𝐑𝐎𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑. Aether ( top priority ), Xiao, Wanderer, Layla, Freminet, Lyney, Lynette.

𝐈𝐌𝐏𝐎𝐑𝐓𝐀𝐍𝐓 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒. Memes | Starter Calls | Interest Checker

All rules under the cut!

✦ Basic rules apply here, such as

✶ no godmodding✶ no infomodding✶ multiverse✶ multiship✶ mutual-only

✦ Despite having Aether as a my main muse here, I do not RP him with Paimon in mind. As such, there are parts of my portrayal that differ from canon due to her lack of presence. This also means that she should never be referred to in our threads!

✦ I’m not a meme archive, so don’t treat me as one. Unless you send in a meme, try to reblog from the source when possible. If the source is unavailable, I probably already know this and don’t mind if you reblog from me.

✦ While I don’t have a rules password because hardly anyone sends one these days, I always send in rules passwords when I see them. If I follow and haven’t sent one in, it’s because I haven’t read your rules but I won’t interact at all until I do read the rules.

✦ Some of my headcanons on this blog are gathered from canon and fanon, while others are more personal. I’m not going to go after another RPer who has similar headcanons, but if I find evidence of direct stealing, I will not let that slide.

✦ Unless I ask first, don’t get me involved with drama. Unless there is a serious issue, don’t come to me with accusations about my RP partners either. I’m here to write and have fun. That being said, if I am doing something that is upsetting you, please let me know. I’m not a mindreader, and I value the safety and happiness of my writing partners.

✦ I don’t participate in callout culture, nor do I tolerate it. If I see untagged callouts or drama on my dashboard, I will block the person who put it on my dash.

✦ Serial vague-bloggers will also not be tolerated.

✦ My preferred writing length is a paragraph minimum, but averaging with three to four paragraphs per reply. While I don’t expect to be matched in length, do give some effort and something for me to reply to. Larger word counts take more time for me to reply to, so don’t feel discouraged if I don’t reply to those threads as often.

✦ Don’t rush me for replies unless I’ve explicitly given you permission to do so, or if it’s been two weeks since my last reply to you.

✦ I don’t care if you format your replies, and you don’t have to match my formatting or icon usage. If you need me to not use small text for replies to our threads, just let me know.

✦ Heavier topics like violence, negative mental states, etc., can all be found on this blog. Common triggering topics will be tagged as “cw TOPIC”.

✦ I may be multiship, but I’m also selective in it. I don’t seek to write romance all the time, I also want to write familial, platonic, and even rivalries with my muse.

✦ I might write sexual content on this blog, but it’s not the focus of this blog. I won’t be talking about sexual content of any sort with any mun under the age of 18 at all. Granted I won’t talk about that stuff with just anyone, but I’ll never do it around minors.

✦ I don’t do Mains or Exclusives, but I will have an Associates page where all the people I regularly write with will be listed!

✦ I also like duplicates, so I will be following blogs that might contain ‘duplicates’ of my muses! However, I won’t be approaching for duplicate vs duplicate interactions unless it’s brought up by the other party.

✦ While I would like to interact with everyone I choose to follow, I’m usually okay with lurking and watching those on my dash roleplay! So never feel pressured into having to follow back or whatnot! I like my dash to have content I wanna read, so I follow those that interest me in some manner. ✦ If someone posts a lot of drama, vagues, etc, I will softblock/hardblock that person. I came here to relax and unwind, not deal with more stress. ✦ When it comes to sideblogs, your main blog must be following me, and I follow your sideblog. For multimuses, I will probably be following just Genshin Impact multimuses. Exceptions may be made for blogs who contain other fandoms, which if I follow a blog like that, it means I want to write with you!

✦ I am open to Genshin Impact OCs and crossovers from franchises I’m interested in!

✦ Hi, I’m Eryn. 28, they/he pronouns. I’m just here to chill and RP. My Discord ID is available for mutuals when privately requested. ✦ Besides Genshin, my other interests are Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokemon, Persona 4&5, The World Ends With You and its amazing sequel, and other things that I always forget to think about unless prompted. ✦ My Genshin and Wuthering Waves UIDs are available for mutuals when requested! I do not play Honkai Impact 3rd or Honkai Star Rail however, so there is no UIDs for those games. ✦ I’m not here for internet drama or discourse, so don’t bring it around me. I abide by ‘ship and let ship’ and ‘don’t like don’t watch’ rules, regardless of my own preferences.

#.PINNED POST | DNI.

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betweengenesisfrogs · 7 years

Text

Toward a Critical Re-Evaluation of Homestuck, or: A Prayer for Andrew Hussie

(aka Off-the-Cuff Homestuck Thoughts #7)

This might be a manifesto.

Since the ending sequence of Homestuck in April 2017, and even well after the establishment of a canon aftermath for its main characters and the confirmation that there will be a further Epilogue, I've seen a sentiment among Homestuck bloggers and the Homestuck fandom that I find very frustrating, one that persists well into 2018.

The sentiment goes something like this:

"Homestuck is a meaningless work by a flippant, irreverent prankster (Andrew Hussie) who dropped his commitment to the story at the last second, and made fun of his fans for expecting there to be a meaningful ending. Furthermore, he continues to harm and belittle his fandom in the creation of Hiveswap, and only continues his work on Homestuck-related projects to exploit his audience."

Not only is this idea wrong, I find it disingenuous at best, malicious at worst, and actively detrimental to an understanding of Homestuck as a work. While it comes from an understandable frame of mind - the feeling of disappointment many of us felt at the end of Homestuck's pretty short and to-the-point Act 7 - it actively ignores the main reason *why* that ending came across as disappointing at first glance. Namely, it ignores the role serial storytelling - a necessity at that point in Homestuck's existence - played in creating misleading impressions of where the story was going among fans. Furthermore, it completely ignores how well the story arc of Act 6 Homestuck generally works when taken as a whole.

It demonstrates a very shallow understanding of Andrew Hussie as a storyteller, conflating his in-story persona with the actuality of a creator who demonstrates nothing but work ethic and commitment to his creation.

It ignores what actually happened with Hiveswap, which is that despite a frankly horrific set of circumstances that nearly prevented it from being made, Hussie was nonetheless able to gather a small team to create a game studio that delivered on every promise it ever made to Kickstarter backers and created a pretty solid, fun, and novel adventure game, with more installments and a rich evolving mystery on the way.

Finally, this interpretation completely misunderstands the way the idea of narrative is being used in the ending of Homestuck, not as a cudgel to beat off fan desire for thematic completion, but as a tool for delivering a thematically powerful narrative that draws parallels between the specter of Lord English and the way stories themselves are used as tools of oppression.

Homestuck isn't perfect, and neither is Andrew Hussie. But by and large, this popular perception of him is flat-out wrong, an exaggeration of whatever flaws he brought to the creation of Homestuck, and contributes to a misunderstanding of its ending. Indeed, I'd argue it is, in some ways, part of why Homestuck has rarely been acknowledged as a significant work of art. To understand why Homestuck is important, first we need to be able to acknowledge what it achieved.

Here's a daring notion: overall, Homestuck was and is pretty damn good.

Here are some reasons.

1) Being Forced To Tell the Story Serially Over a Slow Drip Messed With the Experience for the Reader

I can hear the bristling now. "I hated the ending," I can hear some of you saying. "It left me cold and unsatisfied, and damn it, that's an objective fact. Who are you to take that away from me?"

Actually, I'm not trying to take that away from you. Like, you're allowed to have been disappointed. I just want to point out that it might be a better ending than you gave it credit for, and explain why it came off the way it did. If you're interested in hearing me out, read on. You should know that initially, I was disappointed, too.

But after rereading Act 6 and the whole narrative leading up to that ending? I changed my mind. Rereading, I found it pretty satisfying, making a great deal of sense, capitalizing on major themes, and delivering a meaningful ending for most, if not all characters

I'll talk more about *what* I think the narrative is doing in a bit, but here's why I think it was misread, by me among many others.

Serial reading fucks with the quality of a story experience. I feel like this is a pretty uncontroversial statement. The problem with serial storytelling is that stories build on themselves, drawing on themes and ideas from earlier on to make a powerful build-up to moments of catharsis. This is the nature of story and character development. However if you're getting a story as little bits and pieces, it is much more difficult for this to happen. You lose track of these threads.

More dangerously, it's very easy to develop a set of expectations around a narrative while it's in pause mode. Little moments - intended to be part of a larger flow of ideas - completely dominate one's thinking for as long as they hold the stage. This is a common thing in fandom, especially webcomic fandoms, who deal with the slowest-drip narratives. Again and again I've seen expectations generated during webcomics' hiatuses lead fans to disappointment with the results, simply because those results have nothing to do with what was expected during one of those moments of downtime. El Goonish Shive, Sluggy Freelance, Gunnerkrigg Court - I've seen it in webcomic fandoms again and again, that the dashing of narrative expectations seemed like a betrayal of the story when read at a drip pace, but made perfect sense when viewed as a whole story.

This is not a problem Hussie was ever unaware of. Here’s an excellent discussion (among many) from one of his early Q&As that takes on the problem in detail:

The longer I do this the more I'm struck by how radical the difference is between the experiences of reading something archivally vs. serially, both for the reader, and the author if he's prone to sampling reactions frequently as I do. For the reader especially, I think the experience of day to day reading is so dramatically different, they might as well be reading a different story altogether.

The main difference is the amount of space between events the reader has, which can be filled with massive amounts of speculation, analysis, predictions, and something I guess you could call "opinion building", which can have both positive and negative effects. On the positive side, these readers become more closely engaged with the material than archival readers can be, zeroing in on details and insights which might be overlooked otherwise. On the negative side, I think that excess mental noise the space between pages allows can potentially be a bit suffocating, and put a strain on the experience the material was intended to deliver.

The archival reader always has the luxury of moving on to the next page, regardless of how he reacts to certain events, and thus can be more impassive about it. That internal cacophony isn't given time to build, and if there are reservations about a string of events, whether due to shocking revelations, or questions over the narrative merit of something, or really any form of dissatisfaction, all he has to do is keep clicking to see how it all fits together, and can make a more complete judgment with hindsight.

He goes on to discuss a specific example of how this played out for the readers:

The recent pages [the start of Horrorstuck] had me particularly conscious of the nature of serial delivery. [Eridan's betrayal] was rolled out over the course of a weekend, first with Feferi, then Kanaya. When Fereri dies, this registers as one extremely dramatic event. Cue the waiting, speculating, worrying and all that. When Kanaya dies a day or so later, it registers as a second dramatic event! Again the scrutiny begins which the space allows. Is this all too much? How do I feel about this narrative turn? Is this setting a trend for a bloodbath? Does that serve any purpose? The reader projects into the future, does a little unwitting fanfiction writing in his head, and may not like what he sees! All this activity becomes the basis for opinion building, which is sort of the emergence of an official position on matters, good or bad, which is only able to flourish in the slow-motion intake of the story. That official position can be a very stubborn thing, especially when it's negative, and seriously textures the way additional developments are regarded. It's really hard to shake a reader off an entrenched position on a matter, even when it was formed with an incomplete picture.

Reading the same events in the archive is quite different. Very little of that inner monologue takes shape. And while the events are still shocking, and the reader may raise his eyebrows a mile high, he then simply lowers them and keeps reading. In fact, because of the reading pace, I would suggest these two deaths actually register as only ONE DRAMATIC EVENT! One guy snaps and kills two characters. In the flow of straight-through reading especially, it is quite startling, tension-building, and can only serve to propel the reader into further pages, at a pace which suspends the experience-compromising (augmenting??) play-by-play.

Hussie would return to this topic again and again, including here and here and here and h8re.

This is in incredibly valuable insight for anyone who creates stories over the long term, especially webcomics. You may or may not agree that Homestuck's finale is well-executed, but I think it's hard to escape the fact that the response to Homestuck's ending, indeed, to most of Act 6, was hugely influenced by these factors. Why? Because the experience of Act 6 and 7 was more affected by hiatuses and the speculation problems they create than any other part of Homestuck.

It's hard to remember these days, but one thing that Homestuck was known for from about 2010-2013 was its absolutely preposterous rate of updates. I'm pretty sure that *was* the initial fuel for the fire that made Homestuck a huge fandom. What other website could you go to see a huge chunk of a story drop on you so regularly? No other webcomic had people using Update Checkers, programs designed to check the RSS feed of Homestuck and tell you within the minute that it had updated so you could check it out before your friends spoiled everything to you. What other webcomic ever needed such a thing? But the first era of Homestuck fandom was predicated on the idea that the comic would update every couple of days, sometimes once a day, sometimes *multiple times in the same day*. No wonder it got so huge so fast. It was an experience unlike almost anything else out there.

Around 2013 this began to change. Homestuck began having large hiatuses, the famous "pauses," and though Hussie indicated the story was working its way towards the finale, it ultimately took until the 2016 anniversary to complete.

Interestingly, it's around 2013 or so that we started seeing frustration with Homestuck break out into a large phenomenon, with many people arguing that the comic had stopped being good, and it's after the largest of these pauses, the Omegapause before the end of Act 6 and Act 7 updates, that we had the famous ending backlash.

The fact that very few people seem to have considered this in their analysis of whether Homestuck is good or not is absolutely staggering to me.

Given these factors, we would expect to see some of the enthusiasm taken out of the Homestuck fandoms during these periods, and strong opinions on where the story should go next, and, lo and behold, that's exactly what we see. The common sentiment is that Homestuck "stopped being fun during Act 6." Well, yeah, it's a lot less fun to have a comic that updates rarely than a comic that updates with loads of content very, very often. That doesn't necessarily mean the content got worse. And yet I see no one asking if this altered our perception of the story.

2) Serial Reading Problems Are Worsened In an Experimental, Twisty Story

This hiatus problem was exacerbated by the nature of Hussie's storytelling. I'd describe his writing style as "affectionate teasing": testing and pushing readers' boundaries, aiming for strong emotional reactions, constantly working to defy and mess with expectations, but ultimately working towards a rich character-based story. Hussie's work whiplashes between humor, horror, worldbuilding, action - it's intense and disconcerting at first, but once you get familiar with it, you see these that all these elements build toward a coherent whole.

I'd argue that this storytelling style is *uniquely* well-suited to long-form reading and endangered by drip-feed reading.

Because when you read piece by piece, you experience whiplash slowly, and that’s not everybody’s kink. Pieces that are meant to work together take on a different tone when read on their own. As discussed above, continuous events seem like separate events when read on their own, and this creates a *false* expectation of where the narrative is going. Furthermore, it's not as much fun to be teased or messed with in slow motion. The expectation that there will be satisfaction and resolution disappears when the current update is all you can think about. This, not a deficit in storytelling, is what created the feeling of "Homestuck’s not fun anymore." But it was the same affectionate, gently teasing storytelling as ever. But this only comes out when the work is re-read.

This is exactly what happened in Act 6 Homestuck. Events seemed like they would go on forever, when in real story terms, they went on for moments. Take the notorious Trickster "arc" (I can't even call it an arc - it’s more of a sequence if anything). Today it's remembered as an unendurable gauntlet of Hussie pushing buttons. The reality of it is, though, if you read through it, it's like Hussie pushing buttons for all of five minutes, like half a chapter from a novel. Literally all it is is: The Gang Gets High on Magic Candy > They Do Stupid Things > Blackout. Mostly it's an excuse for some serious character development *afterward* as the Alphas discuss the bad decisions that led them to this place. It may or not be perfect, but it's definitely a lot more reasonable when you see it's a quick tangent.

Act 6 is full of things like this: events remembered as horrible slogs that are really quite brief in retrospect.

This is brought home when you consider that events in Act 5 – hell, even Acts 3 and 4 – also brought on strong negative responses from the fandom - it's just that they were quickly buried under a story that was quickly moving on to other things. Here are some strong fan outrages from those days I can name off the top of my head:

--This interlude with the trolls is too long, nobody cares about the trolls, Hussie has abandoned the human kids --Nobody cares about troll romance, switch back to the kids --Jade hasn’t been seen onscreen for ages --Vriska’s creation of Bec Noir shows that she is too powerful a character, she will never face comeuppance --John is dead again and Vriska killed him??? --Killing Feferi, Tavros and Kanaya? That’s too many deaths --I thought Feferi was supposed to unite the troll races! You’re telling me that’s not going to happen? --Kanaya is dead??? Fuck that --Scratching the timeline? What, Hussie, you’re going to reset everything and ruin the story? --Equius should have gone out with more dignity, this is a betrayal of his fans --Nepeta shouldn’t have been murdered, this is a betrayal of her fans --Gamzee used to be cute, now he’s a murder machine, this is a betrayal of his fans --We never found out what happened between Gamzee and Karkat? Why won’t the narrative switch back and tell us? --Nobody cares about Doc Scratch --Nobody cares about these stupid Ancestors, switch back to the trolls --Vriska is DEAD? This is a betrayal of her fans

And so on. Reading Hussie’s old Formspring archives is a graduate class in this era of Homestuck fan frustration.

And yet today Act 5 is universally remembered as brilliant, thought of by many as “the time when Homestuck was great.” In my book, while Act 6 does take on different themes than Act 5 (focusing more on the protagonists’ psychology and failures), and thus may not be to everyone’s taste, the biggest difference between the two is that during Act 5, the twists and turns of the story were thought of as part of a unified whole, because the story was barreling along too fast for these complaints to stick around for long.

Given that Hussie has always been aware of the challenges of serial vs archival storytelling, I feel like the relentless output of the first five acts was in part an attempt to mitigate those problems. As if by shoveling content into the mouth of the behemoth, he could propitiate the ravenous fandom horrorterror and thereby stave off the descent of the Infernal Internet Speculation-Expectation Monster that was prophesized to devour all.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t stave it off forever, and lo, in 2013 did the IISEM descend with its glistening tentacle teeth, IA, IA, IA! CHOMP CHOMP.

It astonishes me that in some quarters folks talk about the 2013-2016 pauses as if they were something Hussie wanted, when by all evidence he tried desperately to avoid them up until that point. I don’t need to explain that these hiatuses had to do with restarting the whole process of creating Hiveswap and building a game studio from scratch, right? I don’t need to explain that he got screwed over and these were circumstances outside his control, right? Let’s assume we’re on the same page there. If not, I suggest you look into the matter before assuming these hiatuses had anything to do with creator apathy.

After a certain point, Hussie faced a difficult choice. Unable to keep up the rapid-pace storytelling, he could change the storytelling to make it suit a serial reader, or he could focus on making the story the best it could be for an archive reader.

I think he went for the better option: aiming for the archive reader. If you’re going to argue that he should have put the emphasis on the serial reader: which serial reader are we talking about here? The one who started following in Homestuck in 2010, like me? The one who started after Horrorstuck, and viewed it, but not the end of Act 5, as a complete whole? The one who joined during late Act 6? How the hell would you decide that? Whose experience is the one to privilege?

The only option that really makes sense is to aim for the version of the story that will be around the longest and experienced by the most people: the archive that is the complete story of Homestuck.

Ultimately, I don’t think he could have changed his style of storytelling anyway, and to do so would have been to lose the combination of humor, madness, and surprises that brought us all to Homestuck in the first place. Forced to reckon with a difficult situation, he focused on making his kind of story the best that it could be, and I think Homestuck is better for it.

Given his awareness of the problem as expressed above, I’m sure Hussie knew proceeding over the long term would stoke a lot of resentment in the fandom. But he went ahead and did it anyway, because his goal was not to live up to a certain set of expectations. His goal was to tell what he saw as the best possible version of the story. I have an immense respect for him for that.

3) The Last Pause is the Deepest (or: Omegapause Killed the Character Development Star)

The final hiatus problem I want to point to is that in terms of the narrative arc of Homestuck, the final pause, the Omegapause, came at the most inopportune time for readers to get a sense of the conclusion of that narrative.

Basically, many character arcs in Homestuck were concluded *before* Collide and Act 7. Before the Omegapause. Indeed, Hussie brought many long-running arcs to an end in a very satisfying way during the “conversation” sequence before the final fight, from Dave’s long-needed conversation with Dirk about Bro to Rose’s finally getting to meet and befriend Roxy, to Game Over!Terezi and (Vriska’s) reunion. In narrative terms, Collide was not the climax, even if it might have been perceived to be. The climax was the Retcon sequence preceding the conversations – the desolation of Game Over, our surviving protagonists’ despair, then victory in the form of negotiating with the Denizens, representatives of Skaia, to create a timeline in which victory may take place, both in game terms and emotional terms. The conversation before the final battle showed us an emotional victory – victory in game terms was really just icing on the cake, or an echo of that emotional victory.

The trouble is, having a long pause before the final battle sequences created the false perception that the conversation was merely the prelude to the climax: that, in fact, the climax had not yet taken place. For us serial readers, it was easy to conclude that there was further character development to come.

Well, in some ways there was, and in some ways there wasn’t. Dirk and Dave got to have another big moment in Collide that drove their themes home, while Rose and Roxy had basically already done their thing earlier and just got to fight alongside each other. Meanwhile Vriska and Caliborn’s arcs really culminated in Act 7, and some, like John’s and Ret-Terezi’s, were complicated and continued by the Credits aftermath and probably won’t be brought to a final end until the Epilogue. There’s a degree of variation, which I enjoy. Collide does serve some functions: characters who were at an emotional distance from each other (for instance Jane and Jake), got to fight alongside each other and start building back their friendships. Overall, though, the bulk of emotional entanglements got resolved in that conversation, making the Retcon the load-bearing piece of Homestuck’s climax.

This is why the Omegapause was the most dangerous pause: because it built up an expectation that things would further develop from there with new entanglements and complications, instead of aiming towards a tying-off of plot elements into a conclusion.

I remember what *I thought* the post-Omegapause sequence was going to be: a showdown between the kids and Lord English as he entered the game session through Bec Noir, Spades Slick and Lord Jack. I expected there would be a twist, and I expected one or more of our protagonists would die. I was thrown for a loop when I realized the story had basically been almost over, with no last twist, no “secret final battle” of kids vs LE in sight.

But as I reread the ending of Act 6, I realized: that would have been so much stupider than what actually happened. The fact that the kids don’t directly face LE and Vriska does is one of the most brilliant parts of the ending, and on the reread I rapidly fell in love with the Homestuck’s conclusion. What had thrown me off was the fact that I developed my expectations during a period where it looked like we were further from the end.

But in retrospect, Hussie had been saying all along that we were very close to the conclusion – it was just, at that moment, very easy to get the wrong impression.

Rarely do I see anyone taking anything like this into account.

I do think we could have benefited from more character development after the pause, if for no other reason than to overcome these problems and make the victory feel a little more grounded, and I do feel like certain characters (Jane comes to mind) got more limited and abbreviated endings. But these are minor points for me in the overall arc of Homestuck’s narrative, which in my experience establishes its conclusion very, very well.

4) Homestuck’s Ending Is a Glorious Queer Gnostic Account of Escaping from Narrative Oppression (and Yes, Virginia, it Has Character Arcs)

Okay, so I’ve written a lot about *what* I love about the ending of Homestuck elsewhere, going on for pages and pages, which you can read here and here. For now, let me just attempt (as absurd as it is) a quick summary.

Homestuck in Act 6 parallels many different motifs to drive home the idea that escaping from Lord English’s domain is an escape from a cosmic oppression, and serves as a metaphor for escaping and defying real-life oppressions and hegemonies. These motifs include Gnosticsm, queer identity, pluralism, and a metafictional examination of the controlling role of the narrative that is Homestuck itself.

Gnosticism is an ancient early alternate version of Christianity that posits a false reality created by a false creator, the Demiurge Yaldabaoth, who rules over human beings but whose domain it is the Gnostic’s quest to escape. The Demiurge styles himself a Lord God (often the very same one from Judaism and more mainstream Christianity) and an artist but is in fact incompetent and limited in comparison with the true harmonious reality. That he was able to create such a false world was a cosmic accident caused by angel-like beings known as Aeons, who existed perfect symmetrical pairs until an asymmetry caused Yaldabaoth’s creation. Sophia, the asymmetrical Aeon is our path back to that perfection. Furthermore, the false world is the world of flesh and matter and material things, while the true world is the world of ideas, symbols and archetypes, a place of divine Platonic form. By knowledge (gnosis) we become our true selves and are set free. Gnosticism is anti-authoritarian, anti-patriarchal, and devoted to each human being’s quest to connect to the divine on their own terms.

Gnostic motifs proliferate everywhere in Homestuck, especially Act 6, from such chat handles as GardenGnostic, TimaeusTestified, and TipsyGnostalgic to basically everything about Calliope and Caliborn, including and especially their role in the finale. Act 7 depicts Caliborn as trapped within the realm he is created, destined for power but ultimately doomed to it, destroyed in the perfect moment where Calliope, his counterpart, brings his domain to an end.

Caliborn’s realm is the sequence of time loops and set of worlds that brought Lord English into being, but it’s also the narrative Homestuck that depicts those events and worlds. He complains about the narrative Homestuck, argues with its author, and tries to make his own version, just as a demiurge would. (Secretly, because of his cosmic influence, he’s more of an influence than he realizes. He places limits and boundaries on these worlds in the form of the narratives he perpetuates, and is obsessed with sexist ideas, exploitation, and themes of masculinity, importance and power. That the heroes escape this realm in which he has control is also them escaping these narratives that have been placed upon them.

This is the sense in which Dave says “we don’t have arcs.” As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s not Hussie rejecting the idea of giving his characters meaningful stories (this is largely a false impression generated by the Omegapause weirdness), as shown by the fact that Dave himself has one of the best, strongest arcs in the whole story. What Dave means, and what Dave’s arc is about, is that he had to let go of the false ideas, false narratives placed on him by the world (Lord English’s world, the Demiurge’s world) in which he lived. He did this by understanding the abuse he suffered from Bro (a Caliborn-esque figure) was wrong, and by overcoming his internalized homophobia to realize the value of the relationship he’d found with Karkat.

This is a frequent motif in the final pages of Homestuck. Queerness is represented as a way of escaping the patriarchal, conservative God of the Demiurge, and that these revelations about Dave appear in parallel with the final departure from the domain Caliborn controls is no coincidence. Queer relationships and identities build in the ending of Homestuck into what Hussie tongue-in-cheek called “the gay singularity.” This growth in queerness is represented as growth toward meaning, and further queer figures like the non-binary Davepeta appear as idealistic mentors to teach our heroes to understand their cosmic circumstances.

At the same time, the growth from a material world to a world of ideas is represented as the heroes taking on God Tier identities that embody aspects—ideas that are literally the building blocks of the universe. To know yourself as an aspect is to know who you are, and by knowing who you are, you become an idea that is divine. This all takes place at the same time characters grow towards queerness. To know your own queer identity is also to become divine.

And, at the same time, the characters leave the narrative. Everything that was Caliborn’s – his worlds, his time loops and influence— is left behind by the characters as they move into the realm where they are heroes, leaders, and gods. They pass through a door that resembles the weapon that he used, that is his narrative, the weapon shaped like the symbol of Homestuck, the weapon that *is* the narrative Homestuck. It is a weapon against him because he stays behind, on the other side of the door. Lord English can never leave. He’s in the dark pocket of the black hole forever. Caliborn enters a realm that appears to give him power—but he never comes out. He’s trapped by his own limited idea of who he is and what the world should be.

This is a fantastic, culturally resonant, and very Gnostic ending.

And as to Vriska—I’ve seen many people say that Vriska’s retconned revival gives her too much power and agency, but I actually think it strikes the perfect balance. The story understands what she wants. But it’s not on her side. I have a lot more to say about her (perhaps l8r), but here’s the most important thing: Vriska can’t leave, either. She gets what she wants: the ultimate fulfilment of her identity as The Hero. She gets to Kill the Bad Guy. But at a cost she is incapable of recognizing. Like Caliborn, she never gets to go on to be a fulfilled, happy patron of the new universe. She is always on the inside of the door, stuck inside Homestuck. And the fact that we’re asked to observe her breaking off her relationship with Terezi to go out in a blaze of glory? The fact that we’re asked to compare her to another version of herself who’s let go of her ego, whose bond with Terezi is the most important thing in her life? The fact, that in her eyes, she comes up better, but in ours, she comes up short? How incredible is that?

Neither the Hero or the Villain, trapped in their own ideas, trapped by their own ideas, can ever be free.

It’s a pretty good ending, is what I’m saying.

5) Against Apathetic Lazy Troll Hussie

So, back to that perception of Hussie I discussed earlier. The idea that he’s a flippant, irreverent prankster who never cared about bringing his story to a good conclusion.

By now it should be clear why I don’t really buy that line of thinking. The sheer effort put into Homestuck after the pauses began, the level of thematic complexity Homestuck was going for at the end—these belie the idea that he was apathetic or lazy or wanted to piss off his fans. What seems obvious to me was that he was committed. He devoted himself to driving towards an end he was personally satisfied with, whatever anyone else thought of it, and chose to accept the consequences of having to tell it over the long term.

I could see how it might be easy to get the impression that Hussie’s a very frivolous, thoughtless guy, when his in-story self is a ridiculous, flighty orange goofball. But come on. That’s mistaking the persona he uses for comedy with his actual self as a writer. Reading any interview, Q&A session, or discussion with him reveals how much thought he put into every moment of Homestuck, and above all, that he was committed to putting an incredible amount of effort into it from the very beginning.

He was also committed to challenging himself and bettering his work, whether that meant trying new experiments (flash games, new animation styles, splitting panels and dialogue, messing with formatting, letting the villains take over the website, etc., etc., etc…) or rethinking his work to take account of a larger, more diverse perspective, as we saw with the developing queerness and introspection of characters like Dave.

Yet he knew that not all experiments would be received well. He chose to accept that, to not wallow in the familiar but to take on new things regardless of in-the-moment reader reactions. As he put it:

I guess I just believe in sticking to your guns as a creator. It doesn't mean you completely ignore what people have to say or fail to take it under advisement, but pandering and caving into critics for fear of diminished appreciation is the wrong way to go. Staying the course with your vision doesn't mean you'll do everything right, but if included in that vision is serious, concerted exploration, you can only benefit as an artist. Adversaries to this cause should be regarded as villains.

There are two ways to do the "obstinate douche bag" thing as an artist.

One is in vehement defense of stagnation. Some artists I've encountered do this, and it's completely indefensible. It's as low as you can get, creatively speaking.

The other is in vehement defense of exploration. This is just the opposite. This is a posture everyone should strive for, and these artists are the ones people should be most inclined to offer their attention and support.

That's just how I feel about it, and I come from a zero-BS standpoint on it all. This isn't a job for me, and I'll never modify my approach to protect a bottom line. If it was just a job, I guarantee I wouldn't spend every waking hour doing it. It's kind of a strange personal mission I'm on, which I happen to make money from, and that's cool. People are welcome to come along for the ride.

There’s a deep, deep irony to me in the fact that some talk about Act 6 Homestuck like it was a stagnant period in Homestuck’s development, when in fact, it was one of its most creative and experimental periods. This is true both of its structural and visual experiments, where messing with form finally revealed itself to be central to Homestuck’s major themes, and of its storytelling experiments. It’s understandable that diving into the kids’ psychological problems was a shift, and not everyone was down with it, but the very fact it was a shift shows that Hussie was trying new things. It would have been easy for him to stay in a comfortable place doing the same things he did in Act 4 and 5, but instead, he began to ask different questions and take the story someplace new. And honestly? Act 6 took a long time to pay its full dividends, but I loved where we ended up in the end.

(What kept us from enjoying it in the moment? The pauses. Once again the pauses.)

But for me, the thing that most puts the lie to the idea of Lazy Hussie is the sheer fact of Act 6’s existence itself.

Consider how easy it would have been to drop Homestuck completely when things got rough in the middle years. Consider how many webcomic authors would have done just that. I can name many webcomic hiatuses where the webcomic never came back.

But Homestuck did. Not only did it return, it returned spectacularly, scorchingly, with the shocking and dynamic Game Over, with Caliborn’s claymations, with two spectacular, full-length animations, one of them lovingly-hand drawn. It returned with metafictional shenanigans and glorious queer Gnostic themes. Hussie kept going, and kept experimenting all along the way.

This is the furthest thing in the world from laziness.

And the same is true for Hiveswap. It astonishes me how much I’ve heard Hiveswap talked about as a debacle or a betrayal of its fans. Despite having horrible problems dropped on him, the sort that would ruin any other Kickstarter, Hussie spent the next few years working to make sure he met the promises he’d made to his fans. He did.

My dudes, Hiveswap is real. It exists. It delivers on every promise that was made about what it might be: it’s a fun, pretty, point-and-click adventure game telling a new story in the world of Homestuck. It’s creative and clever and updates an old style of gameplay by letting you put things on things to your heart’s content. It’s certainly more accessible than Homestuck, and not yet as structurally complex, but given future installments, there’s plenty of time for it to grow into something rich and thorny. And rather than see this idea go under, from basically nowhere Hussie worked to bring together a small, diverse team of queer artists and creators to make this thing happen.

Again, not exactly laziness.

That’s why it angers me when I see people calling Hiveswap (somehow?) a betrayal of Homestuck fans, or advocating pirating Hiveswap or demanding their money back because it doesn’t live up to some weird set of expectations they placed on it. Maybe during the periods of drought and ambiguous release dates, both for Homestuck and Hiveswap, it made a little sense to be skeptical of Hussie making promises, but now?

It’s basically spitting in the face of a creator who kept working in the most difficult circumstances, and the small, insanely hard-working team who made it possible, over something that they’ve handed to you exactly as you specified right on your doorstep in a gift-wrapped box.

I’m not saying you can’t critique Hussie or his storytelling. He’s definitely a weird dude with a lot of quirks (Which is perhaps the only kind of dude who could have made something as quirky as Homestuck.) I think it’s fair to say he hasn’t always communicated well with the fandom. But the reaction to him these days is totally, ludicrously, out of proportion, beyond anything that would be a useful critique.

A related question is whether Andrew Hussie is burnt out on Homestuck.

Well, maybe?

It’s certainly true that since 2013ish he’s stepped away somewhat from communicating directly with his fans. But 2013 is also the time when Homestuck fandom was at its most massive, its most full of infighting and meaningless arguments, and its most overwhelming to keep up with. I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to hear more of his insights, but it’s pretty understandable that he wanted to step back a bit under the circumstances. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s burnt out. I mean, he seems to be living his best life, posing glamorously with his fidget spinners and Minion t-shirts. Not exactly hiding in a cave. Rock on, dude.

If he is burnt out on Homestuck, though, that makes what he’s done with Homestuck and Hiveswap all the more impressive. That he brought them this far, and wants to see them keep going and keep doing well, when he could have let them drop unceremoniously a long time ago. If he’s delegating some of the work to others, all the better. I can think of nothing better for an artist who’s burnt out and ready to move on than to find people he can trust to keep the things he started going into the future, and that, I think is exactly what we have in What Pumpkin, Viz, and Homestuck’s artistic team.

But even to assume that he’s burnt out is to presume a lot about his mental state from some very scant data. By many other indications, he wants to keep engaging with Homestuck. There’s an Epilogue to come—a capstone for those last few ambiguities surrounding the timeline, John and Terezi. And he’s getting the Homestuck books re-published with new commentary through Viz—so maybe that’s where he wants to have his conversations with his audience. And he’s still the creative director of Hiveswap itself. It’s very possible he’s not burned out—if anything, wants to keep building the world he created in Homestuck and seeing where he can take it next.

Ultimately, I think people’s ideas about Andrew Hussie say a lot more about their lingering feelings about the ending of Homestuck—a backlash brought on by the pauses he had to work with—than anything about Hussie himself.

6) The Conversation Around Homestuck

Homestuck is a goddamn triumph.

There are certainly critiques I could make of it. But they pale in light of what Homestuck is: is one of the most rich, genre-bending, experimental, character-driven, hilarious, innovative, metafictional, transcendent, optimistic works on the Internet—to say nothing of how it dwarfs much of the rest of literature.

Ultimately, I think Hussie was right: as an archive, as the story it is from beginning to end, Homestuck stands. It’s a rich, meaningful work with a meaningful finale, and it’s right there to be read by anyone who wants to read it. In that sense, Homestuck was and Homestuck is. It doesn’t really need me to defend it. Nor does Andrew Hussie.

So why did I write all this? Why did I write everything I’ve written here on this blog?

Well, mostly for Homestuck’s readers. For fans like myself.

Because I still see people who came away from Homestuck feeling totally burned and abandoned by its creator, when that was anything but the truth. Because I still see people who feel like they can’t escape an awful negativity about this comic, about the ending of something they passionately loved. I want them to see that it doesn’t have to feel that way.

And because I want Homestuck criticism to be better. Because I see prominent bloggers, some of whom I really respect, taking so little of this stuff into account. I want to see people talk about Homestuck’s place in literature, in internet culture, without discounting how circumstances shaped how it was perceived. I want to get away from a lazy cynicism—that cynicism everywhere online—about whether stories can be meaningful at all. A cynicism that Homestuck is the very antithesis of through its themes of transcendence and hope.

I think for some people, Homestuck is that weird old obsession they cringe at. The ghost of teenage fandoms past. Which is fine. It’s reasonable to want to move on. But it frustrates me when I see the same cynical, cringing attitude affecting how people feel—or feel like they’re allowed to feel without social stigma—about the work Homestuck itself. I’m not interested in cringe culture.

I frankly don’t have time for it when Homestuck’s as good as it is.

Don’t get me wrong, I want Homestuck to be criticized, too. I want to hear what its flaws are. I think that’s also an important part of the conversation. But don’t tell me it’s a pointless, apathetic work, that it’s just the product of laziness. Because we know better than that by now. Because we need a better conversation than that. Don’t tell me that Homestuck doesn’t have Gnostic themes. Tell me how it uses them, and how it could use them better. Don’t tell me Homestuck’s meaningless. Tell me how it strives to be meaningful—because it does, in every aspect of its storytelling—and tell me where it succeeds, and where it fails.

That’s the kind of conversation I want to have about Homestuck.

You may not agree with the things I’ve pointed to here—you may think that Homestuck’s ending is much more flawed than I do. But that’s totally fair. All I want to say is this:

If you were holding off from letting yourself enjoy Homestuck, or if you once enjoyed it and wish you could enjoy it again, or if the experience of the ending left you feeling disappointed and frustrated and burned out…

Give it another read, especially Act 6 and 7.

You might be surprised how much you like what you find.

#homestuck #homestuck ending #homestuck analysis #homestuck criticism #andrew hussie #off-the-cuff homestuck thoughts extravaganza 2017 #now in 2018 #in defense of homestuck #homestuck fandom #understanding homestuck #ending themes #understanding the ending #serial vs archival reading #homestuck is good actually #against lazy cynicsm #towards a better conversation #keep rising

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theyanderespecialist · 3 years

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True Master List, Fandom List, And Rules

Hello my sexy readers! You all know Marie my stunning co author. She made her own archives of her own account with her oc which is basically her (aka Marie) she has a very good story for hazbin hotel when Alastor was alive check it out!

https://archiveofourown.org/users/MamaMaries/pseuds/MamaMaries

This idea and writing is all her own and man is it really good new concept even I did not think about! So excited for more!

[Hello My Sexy Readers, this has the master reading list which is a work in progress and the fandoms I will do list and the rules for requests and so on. Enjoy!]

Now there is no way with My Anxiety and such I be able to create a master list the normal way. but I can send links to wattpad and Quotev where you can read ALL The one shots which are organized in different ones. I hope you all enjoy that.

https://www.wattpad.com/story/206301464-yandere-anime-headcanons-scenarios-oneshots

https://www.quotev.com/story/12293375/Yandere-Anime-HeadcanonsScenariosOneshots

https://www.wattpad.com/story/183947183-borderlands-yandere-headcanons-oneshots-scenarios

https://www.quotev.com/story/11815392/Borderlands-Yandere-HeadcanonsOneshotsScenarios

https://www.wattpad.com/story/197426891-yandere-creepypastas-one-shots-head-canons

https://www.quotev.com/story/12108537/Yandere-Creepypastas-One-ShotsHead-CanonsScenarios

https://www.quotev.com/story/13032330/Death-Is-Not-An-Escape-Yandere-Dead-By-Daylight-HeadcanonsOne-shotsScenarios

https://www.wattpad.com/story/239181858-death-is-not-an-escape-yandere-dead-by-daylight

https://www.wattpad.com/story/214294875-yandere-disney-pixar-various-yandere-disney-pixar

https://www.quotev.com/story/12470273/Yandere-DisneyPixar-Various-Yandere-Disney-Pixar-HeadcanonsScenarios

Yandere DC And Yandere Marvel

https://www.quotev.com/story/12007517/Yandere-DC-And-Yandere-Marvel

https://www.wattpad.com/story/220808385-various-fandoms-yandere-one-shots-headcanons

https://www.quotev.com/story/12619156/Various-Fandoms-Yandere-One-ShotsHeadcanonsScenarios

https://www.wattpad.com/story/200350402-ancient-greek-yandere-yandere-greek-mythology

https://www.quotev.com/story/12165737/Ancient-Greek-Yandere-Yandere-Greek-Mythology-HeadcanonsScenariosOneshots

https://www.quotev.com/story/12167034/Yandere-HetaliaNyotalia2p-HeadcanonsScenariosOne-Shots

https://www.wattpad.com/story/200396558-yandere-hetalia-nyotalia-2p-headcanons-scenarios

https://www.quotev.com/story/13778065/Yandere-Hazbin-HotelHelluva-Boss-HeadcanonsOneshotsScenarios

https://www.wattpad.com/story/266870624-yandere-hazbin-hotel-helluva-boss-headcanons

https://www.wattpad.com/story/242852617-yandere-star-wars-headcanons-scenarios-one-shots

https://www.quotev.com/story/13119151/Yandere-Star-Wars-HeadcanonsScenariosOne-Shots

https://www.wattpad.com/story/234962746-yandere-degree-of-lewdity-headcanons-one-shots

https://www.quotev.com/story/13384826/Yandere-Degree-Of-Lewdity-HeadcanonsOne-ShotsScenarios

https://www.wattpad.com/story/169172649-merry-yandere-x-mas-various-yandere-one-shots

https://www.quotev.com/story/11498513/Merry-Yandere-X-MAS-Various-Yandere-One-Shots-Christmas-and-Holiday-Edition

https://www.wattpad.com/story/215192593-yandere-outlast-headcanons-scenarios-possible

https://www.quotev.com/story/12490990/Yandere-Outlast-HeadcanonsScenariosPossible-Oneshots

https://www.wattpad.com/story/193344576-yandere-overwatch-one-shots-headcanons-scenarios

https://www.quotev.com/story/12023937/Yandere-Overwatch-One-ShotsHeadcanonsScenarios

https://www.wattpad.com/story/200388610-yandere-slasher-horror-everything-halloween-themed

https://www.quotev.com/story/12166876/Yandere-SlasherHorror-EverythingHalloween-Themed-HeadcanonsScenariosOneshot

https://www.wattpad.com/story/212576147-yandere-team-fortress-2-various-yandere-team

https://www.quotev.com/story/12432485/Yandere-Team-Fortress-2-Various-Yandere-Team-Fortress-2-HeadcanonsScenarios

now here is a bonus the lists on wattpad of almost every single story I have ever made over 750 stories

https://www.wattpad.com/list/922283303-epicnessqueenco-author-reader-stories

https://www.wattpad.com/list/922283957-epicnessqueenco-author-oc-stories-for-the-oc-mark-or-marie

https://www.wattpad.com/list/922284812-epicnessqueenco-author-ocs-story

EPICNESSQUEEN/Co Author: Oneshots, Headcanons, Scenarios series

https://www.wattpad.com/list/922334325-epicness-queenco-author-reader-stories-2

https://www.wattpad.com/list/969841721-epicnessqueenco-author-oc-stories

And lastly the completed list of stories on wattpad

https://www.wattpad.com/list/922294661-complete-stories-by-epicnessqueenco-author

.No Sex Scene with any characters 16 or younger

.No World Leaders or Real People such as youtubers or Celebrities

.Keep It At Least DUB CON or less

-What You Can Request Supporting Hints-

1: Genders and Genderbents

.You may have the reader be, (Male, Female, No Binary Or Transgender) (If Transgender say born as (Fill in birth gender) Identifies (Fill in Gender they identify as)

.Genderbents you make take a character from the list of fandoms bellow and ask if you want them to be the rule 63 aka genderbent version of themselves (Like with Superman Clark Kent being genderbent to Superwoman Claire Kent and anything else)

2: Sexuality

.You can Have Reader be Any sexuality there is (Straight, Bisexual, Pansexual, Gay, Lesbian, Asexual, and so on)

.Same with Characters from Fandoms. Since they are fiction you may make them any sexuality you want (Kinda obvious a yandere is yandere for whatever gender)

3: Roles and AU's

.You can make reader be anything (From Superhero to royalty, from homeless to Villain anything really may it be headcanons or scenarios I even had one story I made reader a chess champion so anything and everything (Except racist and pedo and rapist Obviously)

.Same with the characters from fandoms (Like I have Made priest characters, Dad characters, professors, serial killers and more, anything excpet those three things is good to go)

.You can do au request of like a fandom in a fantasy world or au's with soulmates and so on.

4: OCS

.Yes yes there is OCS and we do better me and my co author writing smut for them here they are

.Marie (My co author as her oc based off of her)

.Mark (My co author with Rule 63 genderbent of her based of her if she was a man)

.Michelle (My Oc based off of me EpicnessQueen)

5: Poly Relationships AKA Sharing

.Yes you can be in a poly relationship where two or more yanderes are dating each other and have the same darling

.Sharing where to yandere decide to share the same darling

-Headcanons-

.You all know how this goes by now but for anyone new. You can ask for headcanons in many different ways with the rules above and also how they deal with any type of reader like even suicidal or yandere from sharing to single it all works.

-Scenarios-

.You can ask for a scenario like (Darling finds out (List of yanderes you want) is yandere for them or anything really.

-Questions aka Q AND A-

.How would (Insert yandere or yanderes) Be like as yandere, propose what pet names they have for darling and any other questions you have in mind for the yanderes

NOW ONTO THE MASTER LIST OF 2021

-Animes Cartoons-

Hazbin Hotel

Helluva Boss

Bleach (Seen all the anime almost)

Naruto (Seen all the anime)

Naruto Shippudin (Seen a good amount of it)

Tokyo Ghoul (Only in season 1 right now)

Black Butler (Seen most of it)

Ouran High School Host Club (Seen all the anime and manga)

Attack On Titan (Seen First two seasons)

Death Note (Seen Most Of The Anime)

One Piece (Seen a LOT OF IT)

One Punch-Man (Got The Gist Of It)

Fruit Basket (Read all the manga got to watch the new anime)

Rosario Vampire (Seen season 1)

Vampire Knight (Seen all the anime)

Cells at Work (Watching Season 1 now)

Fullmetal Alchemist (Know The Gist of it)

Future Diary (Seen most of it)

Kamigami No Asobi (Seen all of it)

-Horror Themed Ones-

Movies (TV Series will be after)

A Nightmare On Elm Street (Seen Most Of these movies)

Alien (Seen All Of Them)

Alien VS Predator

The Boy

Candyman

Carrie (Only the Original )

Child's Play (Seen the original one in 1988 not the sequels and will now do the remake)

Children Of The Corn

Deep Blue Sea (both)

Dracula

Evil Dead (2013 Remake)

The Exorcist

Final Detestation (Only The Third One)

Frankenstein

Freddy VS Jason (GO JASON!!!!)

Friday The 13th (All of Them)

Get Out

The Grudge

Halloween (Seen Them All)

Hannibal

Hannibal Rising

Harry Potter (All Eight movies)

Hellraiser (All of them but cannot remember most of them)

I know What You Did Last Summer (Seen it once)

IT (Original 2 parts and part 1 of the 2017 remake)

Jaws

Jeepers Creepers (1 and 2)

Meat Train

Orphan (Seen once)

Pet Sematary

The Phantom Of The Opera

Predator (All Of Them)

Prom Night

Psycho (The first and second one)

The Purge (first one)

The Ring (2002)

Saw (All Of Them)

Scream (Just first one)

The Shining

The Silence Of The Lambs

Silent Hill (First One)

Silent Hill (1999)

Split (Yes it is under Horror)

Sweeney Todd: The Demon On Fleet Street (Can't remember which one)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (All Of Them)

Village of The Damned

When A stranger Calls

The Wolf Man

Wrong Turn (Some of them I cannot remember )

Zombieland

---------

Next the tv shows which is shorter for reasons (Dont question me)

Bates Motel

Buffy The Vampire Slayer

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Hannibal

The Walking Dead

------

Horror Games as I now a lot of you will want that :D

Alice The Madness Returns

Baldi's Basics

Bendy and The Ink Machine (Half of it so far)

Corpse Party (The First One)

Danganropa (all of 1 and some of 2 and 3)

Doki Doki Literature Club

Emily Wants To Play

Five Nights at Freddy (ALL OF THEM)

Hello Neighbor

Little Nightmares

Lucius (The First One)

Mad Father

Misao

Resident Evil 2 (The Remake)

Resident Evil 7

Resident Evil 8 (Currently watching it)

Ride With Strangers

Silent Hill (A Couple of Them)

Unforgiving The Northern Hymen

Until Dawn

We Happy Few

Welcome To The Game (1 and 2)

-Various Other Fandoms-

(Games)

Dream Daddy

Bully

(TV Shows)

Avatar The Last Air Bender (Not The Legend Or Korra)

Grey's Anatomy

Law and Order SVU

Prodigal Son

The Blacklist

Breaking Bad

Criminal Minds

Bones

Sherlock

A Series Of Unfortunate Events

DR. Who

Good Omens

Once Upon A Time

South Park

(Movies)

How To Train Your Dragon (Both Movies and TV and Netflix series)

Rise Of The Guardians

-Dead By Daylight-

all killers most survivors

-Outlast, Outlast Whistlerblower Outlast 2-

all characters

-Overwatch-

all characters playable or not

-Disney/Pixar-

all characters will not do the live action remakes

-Star Wars-

Most characters so far

-Degrees Of Lewdity-

All important non playable characters

-Borderlands-

all

-Greek Gods, Tales and Mythology-

everything even fucking Greek monsters as long as age is met

-hetalia-

all 1ps all 2ps and all their nyotalia and cattalia

-creepypastas-

most of them

-DC And Marvel-

Most of the characters

-Team Fortress 2-

All characters.

Well I think that is it for this year master list I may add to it but this is it right now. Please Enjoy and stay sexy!]

#yandere #yandere various #yandere anime #yandere horror #yandere video games #yandere tv shows #yandere movies #everything yandere #masterlist #yandere masterlist #epicnessqueen #my masterlist #over 700 stories

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theji · 3 years

Text

Things Yizhan Made Me Do

It's BXG Day today! 🐢💛

To commemorate the occasion, I thought of making a list of 13 out-of-character things that I've done since falling into the fandom. (OK I'm a bit late I meant to do this sooner, the day is ending soon in a couple of hours).

1. Start a blog

And a public one, no less. I had a blog when I was in my teens but that was private, like a personal diary. My day job already involves writing so off-work I would usually like to indulge in mindless activities. Now, here I am, maintaining a Yizhan blog. I have not even used Tumblr prior to this but I'm enjoying it now, rambling about our fav boys. Writing is not a chore if it's about them.

2. Join a fandom

I joined a boy band fan club once upon a time, some 15 years ago, but I was never as invested in it as I am now with Yizhan. Back then it was just buying some merch, attending their concert/autograph sessions, listening to their songs. Apart from work, dog mum duties, personal relationships, other hobbies like kombucha brewing, most of my free time is now spent on the fandom. My Netflix account is crying. There is just so much to do and catch up on (I'm not complaining). I also enjoy interacting with and learning from other bloggers here. Antis are no fun and some industry news/developments/hate messages are upsetting but ultimately, you curate your own fandom experience. And I choose positivity and rationality.

3. Indulge in RPS

I don't ever 'ship'. What is 'ship'? 😆 I was always a dutiful audience, just enjoying whatever drama series and moving on after that. I started with CQL like most people and I didn't even notice/like GGDD until much later. Didn't even set out to 'ship' anyone but now I'm a self-professed turtle. SZD is SZD, and anyone can see something special between them if you keep an open mind. I wrote about my SZD reasons here previously. That said, GG & DD are individuals, each with their own successful careers. They come first, the ship comes second. That I'm very clear of.

4. Use Chinese apps

Gosh, my phone and tablet are now full of Chinese apps. I used to have only WeChat cos I needed it for work but now I have Weibo, Oasis, Douyin, WeTV, MangoTV, Youku, etc. Some of them are not even available in the app store so I had to find alternative sources to download them. haha..I even have paid membership for some of these apps. And now, browsing Weibo daily becomes a routine. If you wish, you can just get stuck browsing Weibo for a long long time. It's entertaining.

5. Read fan fic

I only started about 6 months ago but now I'm hooked and fics are largely the only thing I read these days, apart from news. But I only read Yizhan or WangXian fics (p.s. calling for fic recs of other pairings!) I know some might have different feelings about fan fics but to me, I really just see them as fiction, with characters (and sometimes traits) bearing similarities to GGDD. Similarly, I separate the platform from the incident so I have no problems going to A03 despite GG's incident. I just enjoy seeing the characters named XZ/WYB having happy endings in many different timelines and universes. While most of the fics I read are explicit (by design), I don't use them as tools to play out certain fantasies or to think of GGDD in a sexual manner. In fact, I really hate fics that have little substance and just go into the explicit parts without plot development. I like those with interesting premises too, like one I read recently where XZ is a serial killer and WYB is a police officer investigating the case but also in love with him. I do have plans to share my list of fav fan fics some time down the road so keep an eye out for it!

6. Willingly read Chinese

Yes, Chinese may be my mother tongue but I don't use it much in daily living unless I have to. I also find it tedious to read Chinese cos the characters are just so squashed together. If I have a choice, I will always pick English. But now, I read so much Chinese from my daily weibo browsing. I even read fan fics in Chinese! Who am I? On the plus side, I think my Chinese comprehension and translation skills improved. I also picked up some internet lingo used by Chinese netizens, which are pretty interesting like doi, 🐮🍺, 🖍. My all-time fav is yyds.

7. Act like a cougar

In real life, I have always maintained that younger men are childish. At least those I have encountered. But look at me now, fangirling over two younger men (I am closer in age to GG, but still..). I even jokingly call them my 'China Boyfriends'. I look at them very respectfully most of the time.

8. Buy merch

Seriously, once you start, you can't stop. At least that was what happened to me, although I'm still quite selective when it comes to supporting their endorsements. I usually go for consumables like food, cosmetics vs collectibles cos I'm more practical. Also, GG says to support their merch within reasonable means so that's what I'm doing. Just buying things that I'm interested to try and not because it has their faces or names slapped on it. In a way, this suits me cos I like trying new brands and stuff anyway.

9. Keeping a Yizhan archive

Photos, weblinks, videos, songs, fan fics list..my phone is full of these things now. I think my Yizhan photo gallery is only second to the folder with my dogs' pictures. But how can you resist when we are blessed with new pics of them almost every week?

10. Camp for livestreams

I'm lucky I live in the same time zone as the boys so I don't have to wake up in the wee hours of the morning just to watch something. But that's the thing, being in the same time zone sometimes make me feel like I HAVE to watch that thing live because, why not? Why wait? Not shy to admit that I once watched a live programme in the middle of work but I made sure I finished what needed to be done. I think so long as we don't let these livestream schedules run our lives, there's no harm in camping for them.

11. Watch c entertainment

I am one of those who used to pass over Chinese productions, simply because it's a Chinese production. Not in a scoffing manner but I'm just genuinely not interested in them nor the celebs. I was more of a US/UK production kind of person, occasionally Korean/Japanese. Now, I'm learning to enjoy them although I just watch those with GGDD in them. No energy to follow other Chinese celebs anyway. The other programme I'm contemplating watching even if it doesn't have them in it is Who's the Murderer (GG was only in one of the cases) cos I like the premise. On the flip side, now my sis and partner keep making fun of me cos to them, all I do now is "watch China shows". That is so not true. Or is it?

12. Write fan mail

I wrote a letter to GG once. A long-ass letter. I hope he read it. That's all I'm gonna say. 🙈 hahahahaha

13. Desire to visit China

China was never on my list of to-visit places. Just wasn't interested. I have been to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou a few times in the past for work but even then, I never felt the urge to revisit for leisure. Now, I wanna visit GG and DD's home town, visit Chongqing to see the graffiti wall with Bobii Zanbii on it, eat mala hotpot and try out their sauce recipe, attend BXG events, dine at the CQL restaurant... Watching TTXS also made me realise that there are many beautiful places in China with natural landscapes and all that. I used to be clouded by my disdain for the regime and some behaviour of its citizens but now, I recognise that the country is separate from the regime or a smaller group of poorly behaved citizens. China is a beautiful country and I would love to visit some day. I will fly over immediately on my own if someone gives me tix to ADLAD!!

Well, I hope some of these things resonate with you. Feel free to share the OOC things that Yizhan made you do.

Once again, Happy BXG Day! 🐢💛🐆🐇🐷🌶🦁🍑🐶🍍🛹🎋

#yizhan #bjyx #things yizhan made me do

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klarolinelibrary · 3 years

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Hi KC Readers,

After a long break, we are back with our weekly releases! We apologize for the delay but we have reached the end of the week which means we have new weekly releases for you! The stories below were updated during the week of May 22nd - May 28th.

Happy Reading!

FanFiction.Net

Something Like Love (Chapter 8)

Author: Recklessnesspersonified

Rating: M

Length: 20,346

Summary: Klaus Mikaelson was a bad boy, the quintessential jock or so Caroline Forbes had thought until one night their paths cross in the school hallways. He was different, intense and she was falling for him, but soon she finds out it was all a sham. Will she forgive him or would they break up before they confess their true love? AU/AH

Date of update: May 23 2021

Klaus POV - The Trouble with Spells (Chapter 26)

Author: ilovetf

Rating: M

Length: 105,863

Summary: I think the title is self explanatory. The Trouble with Spells as seen through Klaus's eyes and his POV. Over the years, people kept liking this story and some even asked for Klaus POV, so I decided to give it a try. Hope you enjoy it. All feedback is more than welcome. Good or bad.

Date of update: May 23 2021

High Stakes

Author: stardancer10

Rating: M

Length: 4,105

Summary: When Klaus died something in Caroline broke. She could not take anymore of Mystic Falls and she left. In her travels she finds herself doing things that she knew others wouldn't agree with, but she did what she felt was right. It was a gamble she was willing to take, something she felt that she owed him.

Date of update: May 23 2021

Purgatory (Chapter 22)

Author: Scarletborn

Rating: M

Length: 333,312

Summary: Caroline Forbes always thought that evil creatures and demons belonged to Hell. What she did not know was that vampires belonged to Purgatory. A place worse than hell where the only thing that mattered was survival. A place where enemies turned into allies and foes into friends. [Klaus/Caroline AU story set mostly in New Orleans]

Date of update: May 24 2021

The Wolf II (Chapter 11)

Author: yokan87

Rating: T

Length: 4,718

Summary: The Guerreras' threat still looms over the Mikaelson house as Caroline tries to adapt to life as a vampire, away from her daughter. But an unexpected family reunion makes everything worse, taking away the little peace Klaus, Caroline and Elijah managed to find after the war that nearly broke them. [It's TO S2, but Caroline was a witch, had Klaus' baby and now she's a vampire]

Date of update: May 26 2021

Vampires suck (Chapter 4)

Author: Miss.Mystic.Falls

Rating: T

Length: 5,583

Summary: What would happen if Caroline knew about vampires way before the Salvatore brothers come to Mystic Falls.

Date of update: May 28 2021

Archive of Our Own

No Reservations (Chapter 3)

Author: PumpkinDoodles

Rating: M

Length: 6,890

Summary: Caroline Forbes is having a tiny crisis: her restaurant partner and co-chef has disappeared again and isn't returning her calls. Caroline cannot function without Stefan. Her kitchen staff starts making jokes about getting her meds for irritability and she takes out her issues on helpless chicken breasts. It's not fun on a good day. But when tragedy strikes, Caroline's forced to work with a new chef. She doesn't remember meeting him in New Orleans--but Klaus Mikaelson remembers her.

Date of update: May 22 2021

Sibling Rivalry Redux - Adventures in Polyamory (Chapter 3)

Author: kcatdino

Rating: M

Length: 4,105

Summary: In which Klaus and Rebekah are both bi, their taste in men and women overlaps infuriatingly often, and they argue over their newest shared interest. In which Caroline feels like she might be a sugar baby, but no one’s dating her and she hasn’t gotten any in so long. Like, basically since meeting her new best friends, Klaus and Rebekah. Weird, right?

Date of update: May 22 2021

Darkness Becomes Thee (Chapter 6)

Author: BelleMorte180

Rating: E

Length: 32,424

Summary: Austria 1300s When Klaus met a young girl on a riverbank, he knew that he would one day come back for her. When he looked into her bright blue eyes, he could see a reflection of his own soul, a darkness that lingered inside both of them. When the young girl turned into a beautiful woman with a thirst for blood, his fascination with her turns into obsession. He wants not only her loyalty but her eternity, a possessiveness that is equally returned. or my "Caroline is the serial killer Elizabeth Bathory" au.

Date of update: May 23 2021

The Big Bad Wolf (Chapter 9)

Author: MorningStarGirl666

Rating: M

Length: 66,087

Summary: He was the Big, Bad Wolf of this story, there was no doubt about that. But Caroline? She was the light to his darkness, the moon that shone brighter than even the stars in a sky of endless void. Like every wolf, he fell in love with the moon, and every month, he was destined to cry for a love he would never touch.

Date of update: May 23 2021

Klaus vs the Soulmate Goose

Author: kcatdino

Rating: T

Length: 2,129

Summary: Klaus has met his match in the form of a goose as immortal and obstinate as he is: The Soulmate Goose of Enforcement. Will he succeed in killing the magical creature or will it force him to accept what’s in his heart?

Date of update: May 23 2021

Louder Than Thunder (Chapter 28)

Author: khaleesiofthewolves

Rating: M

Length: 179,641

Summary: All Hell was about to break loose. After dying while protecting a grieving Klaus, Caroline finds herself sent back in time, and she's not who she once was. She's more. Back in Mystic Falls, something else is stirring. After the arrival of a mysterious figure from Klaus' past, it all comes to a head. It really is louder than thunder.

Date of update: May 24 2021

We are young (Chapter 17)

Author: kcatdino

Rating: T

Length: 20,572

Summary: Basically, Klaroline flirt in front of their kids who they are barely older than, and Landon is appropriately confused. Edit: Now a series of one-shots! Edit 2: Oh my god, this has plot now!

Date of update: May 24 2021

Our Time Now (Chapter 4)

Author: perfectpro

Rating: M

Length: 52,838

Summary: Caroline is going to spend her senior year getting into the law school of her choice, leading the cheerleading squad to a nationals title, and passing her sorority presidency to someone who will continue a legacy of excellence. She doesn't have time to figure out what's happening with her relationship with Klaus - not that it's much of a relationship to begin with.

Date of update: May 24 2021

I See Dead Cheerleaders (Chapter 4)

Author: PumpkinDoodles

Rating: M

Length: 7,865

Summary: When Caroline saves Jenna from Klaus's sacrifice ritual and is killed instead, she vows to haunt Klaus Mikaelson forever. Never underestimate the determination of Miss Mystic Falls.

Date of update: May 25 2021

Finding Out the Truth in a Year or Even in a Century

Author: klarolineshipperxoxo

Rating: G

Length: 1,348

Summary: Caroline goes with Stefan to New Orleans in search of Klaus 18 years after the events of TVD 5x22 and TO 1x22 but things don't go as planned and buried feelings are unearthed.

Date of update: May 25 2021

Klaroline Returns (Chapter 2)

Author: kcatdino

Rating: T

Length: 8,010

Summary: The savior of Gotham, Catwoman, is Caroline Forbes, flighty heiress by day. But what happens when her worlds collide in the form of reporter Klaus Mikaelson and her worst supervillain, The Hybrid?

Date of update: May 25 2021

witchy business (Chapter 4)

Author: MaddestMaid3n

Rating: M

Length: 13,783

Summary: "A little birdie told me you might have a book or two that might pique my interest,” “Well, that depends on your interests," Caroline's just trying to survive Marcel's New Orleans. Colluding with an Original was so not on her to-do list.

Date of update: May 25 2021

Klaus’ Thousand Year Plan to be Her Last (Chapter 3)

Author: anncatherine

Rating: T

Length: 4,022

Summary: So these are some missing Klaroline scenes from my Elena/Elijah soulmate fic that I couldn’t include because they either didn’t fit or needed to be form Klaus or Caroline’s pov. I think it would be helpful to read at least the first couple chapters of that for background, but basically at twelve people’s soulmate’s birthday shows up on their wrist.

Date of update: May 26 2021

what a wave you have made

Author: sekretny

Rating: T

Length: 3,413

Summary: “Do you really hate me this much?” She shouts in frustration. Klaus looks her in the eye, their gazes locked in a battle of fiery tempers. “Hate you…” He repeats with every ounce of venom he can muster. After ransacking the contents of his backpack, he removes a sketchbook Caroline has never seen before. He starts to flip furiously through the pages, “You have given me more than enough reasons to hate you, sweetheart,” he spits while he looks for a specific page. He finds it and turns the sketchbook around to show her. Klaus makes his feelings for Caroline visibly clear.

Date of update: May 26 2021

The Concept of Time (Chapter 3)

Author: BelleMorte180

Rating: E

Length: 19,640

Summary: Pairs, France 1864 After learning some distressing news, Klaus seeks out the advice of a friend in the middle of the night and meets a mysterious woman who leaves him with more questions than answers. She hands him a journal filled with the mad ramblings about time by a man named Lorenzo St. John and sees a curious date tattooed on her shoulder. Klaus can think of little else after their first meeting and tracks her down at a burlesque club in the wrong part of the city. Klaus begins to wonder if he can solve the mystery of Caroline Forbes or simply be lost in what has deemed to be impossible.

Date of update: May 26 2021

Revenge of the Fifth - TVD Edition (Chapter 3)

Author: kcatdino

Rating: M

Length: 6,168

Summary: A star wars AU for vampire dairies for May the Fourth Be with You! Caroline, Bonnie, and Elena are padawan learners at Luke Skywalker’s new Jedi training academy, desperate to prove themselves by taking down some of the new Sith Lords that have popped up. The problem is, those Sith Lords are the Mikaelsons, and each girl has a Mikaelson brother obsessed with them, unwilling to let them come to harm. Will that make it harder or easier for them to triumph over the Dark Side?

Date of update: May 26 2021

Smoke Signals

Author: misssophiachase

Rating: T

Length: 3,017

Summary: "You, you must have been looking for me...sending smoke signals" Professional photographer Caroline Forbes and firefighter Klaus Mikaelson keep running into each other. It’s either the universe playing a joke on them or Katherine’s ‘accidental’ matchmaking. Or maybe it's a bit of both?

Date of update: May 27 2021

Reasons Not to Date a Mikaelson (Chapter 8)

Author: kcatdino

Rating: T

Length: 15,851

Summary: Bonnie and Caroline gain a new roommate for their freshman dorm when a vision leads them to tracking down a pregnant Hayley in the Rockies. Also, Bonnie may or may not have raised a certain dead Original instead of Jeremy and Klaus takes a job at Whitmore teaching, to be annoying. He’s very good at it. This is a season 5 rewrite where the Originals never leave for New Orleans. But you know, with comedy. And increasing angst with every chapter.

Date of update: May 27 2021

if you want me to fall (Chapter 2)

Author: FeyresUnbecoming

Rating: T

Length: 1,807

Summary: Caroline and Klaus scramble out of bed before Rebekah can find the two of them, lest she find out they've been sleeping together.

Date of update: May 27 2021

Good to you - Side Stories and Prompts

Author: originalhybridlover

Rating: T

Length: 801

Summary: So this is going to be a set a side stories or prompts related to my Klaroline story, Good to You

Date of update: May 28 2021

Genuine Beauty: Klaroline Canon-ish Drabble Collection

Author: Klauscarolove

Rating: M

Length: 30,884

Summary: Klaroline Drabble Collection: Close Canon, Canon Compliant, Canon-ish, Canon Universe....... basically if they are vampires in the drabble, it will go here.

Date of update: May 27 2021

Klaroline Storybook (Chapter 44)

Author: misssophiachase

Rating: T

Length: 63,904

Summary: A new selection of Klaroline drabbles

Date of update: May 28 2021

Lost Through Time (Chapter 7)

Author: Life_is_a_fantasy

Rating: Unavailable

Length: 4,173

Summary: What will happen when Hope, Landon, Lizzie and Josie fall through a time portal? Will they change things, even if they don't mean to? How will Klaus react to knowing his daughter has a boyfriend?

Date of update: May 28 2021

When your family is too nosy.... (Chapter 3)

Author: kcatdino

Rating: Unavailable

Length: 4,349

Summary: Klaus’s plan to get back at Rebekah by staying friends with Stefan backfires spectacularly when Stefan and Stefan’s ex-girlfriend Caroline convince him to fake a relationship at his family’s get-together at the beach. Sure, Rebekah will probably assume Caroline’s a prostitute and the rest of his family are too nosy for his own good, but what could go wrong? (I will add a rating later when I decide how explicit the smut will be)

Date of update: May 28 2021

LITTLE TENSE (Chapter 4)

Author: wincefish16

Rating: T

Length: 4,462

Summary: Klaroline's life together as they work in Mikaelson and co. Different snippets of their life. HUMAN, FULL OF FLUFF AND LITTLE BIT OF ANGST.

Date of update: May 28 2021

Like snow we melt, like rain we fall, like the sun we burn, in love. (Chapter 3)

Author: BlackRaven475932

Rating: M

Length: 4,088

Summary: after episode 5x11, Klaroline sex scene. Klaus and Caroline have a secret relationship. Teasing in public, a lot of smut, no one knows. WARNING, this story contains a blood kink in later chapters. If you don't like this then I advise you not to read it. It will occur in later chapters and I will give a warning before the chapter.

Date of update: May 28 2021

The Allure of Darkness (Chapter 2)

Author: Loveyou3000Klaroline

Rating: M

Length: 5,127

Summary: “Anything that’s worth anything is dangerous.” Or... Klaus Mikaelson is the big bad hybrid, but he is the only one who can make Caroline’s world stable. Especially after the lie of her life gets unraveled.

Date of update: May 28 2021

That Pesky Phone

Author: timetravelercat

Rating: T

Length: 1,029

Summary: "What was that?" he asked her curiously. She looked at him, embarrassed— —Wait, Caroline Forbes? Embarrassed?" Just Klaus," she answered simply, not giving him anymore details and averting her eyes. Huh, suspicious.

Date of update: May 28 2021

Ok, Cupids

Author: timetravelercat

Rating: T

Length: 795

Summary: Klaus and Caroline sign Stefan into an online dating site.

Date of update: May 28 2021

Available On Both Websites

FFN: The Traitor and the Coward (Chapter 6)

AO3: The Traitor and the Coward (Chapter 6)

Author: Uppity Bitch

Rating: M

Length: 10,677

Summary: Klaroline AU supernatural multi-chap - Original!Caroline has spent lifetimes running from her lover and his family. Despite the centuries of loneliness, she regrets nothing. Soon, she'll bring an end to this madness. Or bring the madness full circle.

Date of update: May 23 2021

FFN: What You Always Wanted

AO3: What You Always Wanted

Author: Eliliyah

Rating: M

Length: 2,646

Summary: After waiting a thousand years for her husband to break his hybrid curse, Caroline realizes Klaus neglected to mention that his next step was to build an army. Furious, she leaves him alone in Mystic Falls. Knowing there's only one way to make it up to her, Klaus shows up on her doorstep with the one person who can get him back in her good graces: their old friend, Stefan.

Date of update: May 26 2021

#klaroline library #KCL weekly releases #klaroline fanfiction #klaroline

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cctinsleybaxter · 4 years

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So one thing this made me realize is that completely separating the source material from the fandom is no easy feat. The showrunners are tuned into what the fandom writ large is discussing and popularizing; regularly interacting with fans on twitter/twitch and (for a while at least) checking the tumblr tag. Even if you’re somehow out of the loop and are only experiencing the podcast as a podcast they’ve addressed fan concerns directly, run Q&A episodes that add important paratext, contracted fans to design merch, ect.

But I like this question and I do want to talk about it just as a horror story rather than making a 20-page-google-doc-callout for all of the problems with the fanbase and creators. What it comes down to is that The Magnus Archives is indecisive about what genre it needs to be in order to tell the story it’s trying to.

Here is a barebones synopsis of each season (spoilers for basic plot):

Series one- A man named Jon works as an archivist reading scary stories (witness statements) into a tape recorder. He snarkily doubts their veracity, and is otherwise only built up as a character through snippets of interaction with his coworkers and boss. It briefly changes format to more of a radio serial when a villain from one of the statements shows up for the finale, they beat the big bad, and there’s a hint of a ‘to be continued’ title card, but the bulk of the season is just his reading other people’s stories.

Series two- Jon no longer doubts the veracity of the statements and is suspicious of the archives themselves, so begins to look into the connections between them and recurring themes and characters. The show is now formatted more like a police procedural than a horror anthology, as we’re bringing more characters into the cast and there’s almost always dialogue in addition to the statements.

Series three- Jon learns that the statements he’s been reading ARE connected, and can be grouped into fourteen distinct categories/entities of fear (these range from ‘the vast,’ which encompasses the fear of open spaces so statements revolve around things like the ocean or heights, to ‘the slaughter,’ which encompasses the fear of mass bodily harm so statements revolve around war and genocide.) We also learn that the fears may bind to certain people as conduits called avatars (so like, the pyrokenesis guy from s1 of X-files would have been ‘an avatar of the fear of desolation’).. and the avatars.. may participate in intricate rituals to elevate the fear they serve above the other fears and end the world? The season ends with a huge fight and explosions and major character deaths.

Series four- Jon is in a coma for most of the season completing his transmogrification into an avatar, and then mid-season wakes up from the coma but now his maybe-boyfriend and only confidant is being lured in by another one of the fourteen fears as a different avatar. A bunch more world-building stuff happens including speculation about a fifteenth fear and the now-huge ensemble cast sorting itself into teams and taking drastic actions. Jon is tricked into causing the literal apocalypse.

Series five- Jon and his boyfriend wander through an apocalyptic wasteland ‘meeting’ each of the fourteen fears at its most extreme as they make their way to the epicenter to try and fix things. The tape recorder framing device has been changed entirely, so when Jon does read statements they’re in an almost poetry-like format describing complicated social issues and analyzing anything from the fear of oblivion to capitalism. It’s a fully-produced audio drama of them in literal hell meeting up with different characters from past seasons.

On paper I think this format made sense, it simply builds around the stories in season one and adds stakes, but in practice it’s extremely frustrating and dare I say bad? (especially having taken several years and 200 episodes to get from A to B.) The biggest turning point is in s3 when we get all that overworked world-building that changes the stakes, and the show transitions from a low-budget horror anthology to a fully-produced ensemble cast drama. Series five feels like Lord of the Rings (derogatory) it’s insane.

TL;DR- imagine if after s2 every single episode of the x-files was one of those clunky 3-parter ‘mulder vs the government’ or ‘scully vs aliens’ ones

#long post #whoops i wrote an essay #i've touched on these things in other more disjointed posts but i hope this is an okay rundown for non-fans #i use xfiles as an example only because i'm most familiar with that as a monster of the week show #(could probably just as easily use s*pernatural or something)#and you can see what i mean by their not being equipped to handle social issues just by the two examples of fears i used #marchives

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novelnerdqueers · 4 years

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Tell me to stay - Chapter 1

It’s been a while but we’re finally ready to start uploading this story. We’re planning on uploading a chapter twice a week (most likely one during the week and one during the weekend but don’t quote me on that).

You can read it here (next chapter) or you can also follow it on AO3 (where we also have other stuff already there if you want to check that out) at this link : chapter 1

Chapter 1 : Logan's new job

Roman had been working in the investigative police department for a long time. He liked to think he knew what he was doing. After all, he was the lead investigator in the CSI, he loved his job. As much as some decisions were the worst choices he'd ever made, he loved doing good to help people. Even if it meant bending the rules a little to find the real guilty people.

Logan was glad to finally get to work in the field. He had been working a few years for the CSI but had always been stuck behind a desk doing mainly paperwork, not that he minded the paperwork really. He would have stayed there if not that he wished he would be taken more seriously within the team.

He wanted to be able to offer valid input for cases without being brushed off as simply being a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast. So when a job opened up for the investigation department, Logan decided to take a chance and applied for it. Now he finally had his chance to make a difference, to set things right, the right way.

…...............................

Logan was always a punctual person. He was even more so on this first day working in his new position. He arrived early to scope out the place. The office was simple enough, but had everything that they needed. Logan was directed to his desk and he started setting up his things. He organized the little he had for the moment and started mentally preparing for the day. As he surveyed the office, he couldn't help but notice the desk adjacent to his. Cluttered would have been an understatement. Logan knew that he could be a bit of a neat freak, but this desk was ridiculous. He was still staring at the desk in disbelief when the person whom it belonged to strode in and sat down. Oh no, Logan thought, what have I done...

Roman couldn't help but notice the neatly set up desk opposite his, but he knew better than to inspect the new in such an obvious way, so he ignored him. After a while, he started getting looks, peeks at what type of person he was, what his mannerisms were. He looked the man up and down every so often being very discreet, as he flipped through the case files, inspecting each one and scanning over it with trained eyes. He wasn't going to speak first, and he didn't intend to. Roman only made friends when he wanted to, he had to know the person first. Warm welcomes were not how you keep yourself safe, you had to be closed off.

Logan had heard of this investigator. Despite not being remotely interested in gossip, news travelled fast in the precinct. He felt like he was back in school in the nerd vs jock dynamic, and he was not pleased with that. Logan wondered if he should speak first, being the new guy and all. Then again shouldn't he be the one receiving the welcome? Despite his best efforts, Logan was not a people person, and he definitely wasn’t this type of people person. He looked around wondering what in the world he should do now. He had just gotten there so he didn't have anything to attempt to look busy.

Roman smirked, this guy was really doing this. He was sitting at his desk and occasionally he would make a face of distaste or sigh. He picked himself from the chair and walked out into the main office to get some more information on the case that piqued his interest the most. As he did this he casually glanced back and caught the confused half-glare on his new partner’s face. This was going to be great.

Logan hated that he probably looked like he didn't know what he was doing, even though it was completely true. Seeing the other guy get up and leave, Logan got even more nervous. Should he follow him? That would look weird. Then again he couldn't wait around all day for something to happen. So he also walked out into the main office. The captain was there to greet them. "Officer Logan, all settled in I presume," the captain said. "And I see you've just met Officer Roman."

"Um well not exactly..." Logan started.

"Great," continued the captain." You two will be working together now, so Roman get settled on your case and get started, chop-chop."

Roman smiled at the captain. "I'm getting right to it, Jim, don't worry yourself too much." Roman then sauntered out, sitting back at his desk with a triumphant smirk. His boss didn't seem to like Logan too much, and to him, this was hilarious. It had taken Roman a while to settle, but he loved this department and intended to stay here. He had picked up a case file on a homicide case with next to no leads, it had everyone else stumped. The types of cases he loved were the ones no one else could figure out. He smirked lightly as Logan wandered back in, looking lost.

"Okay, so, could we properly introduce ourselves or are you going to stand there smirking at me all day?" Logan asked, feeling irked. He missed his old job already. He had known it would take a while to adapt, but he hadn't thought he was going to feel so miserable this early on. It really didn't help that he was paired with the all too well known, cocky and impulsive investigator. Logan wasn't the best at reading people, but he really didn't like the vibe he was getting from this guy.

Roman looked up and for the first time got a proper, full look at him. He would be lying to say he wasn't attractive, but that aside, he seemed just as tidy, as his desk suggested. He also had calculating, green eyes. He didn't think this was of interest, it was just an observation, nothing else.

"Sure, I'm Roman, and you're Logan right?" Roman was being witty and overconfident because he was terrified. He didn't like to work with people in general, especially ones he didn't know, he missed his old partner so much right now. "I hope you like to work hard, I don't appreciate it when I have to pick up people’s slack. Also, just a word of advice, be nice to me. It'll work in your favour." He handed Logan a case file and turned back to his computer. "Read this over for me, tell me what you think."

Logan took the case file from his hand with a frown. He didn't like arrogant people, and Roman definitely had the air of someone who thought way too highly of themself. He tried to clear his mind, putting aside his disdain for his new coworker and sat down, attempting to focus on the file he'd been given. There really wasn't much to go on, but Logan had a feeling this Roman personage already knew that and expected him to come up with something.

"So?" Roman asked with a hint of a smile, he was curious to see Logan's thought process, his way of thinking. "Any ideas?" Roman asked, angling his head to the left slightly as his eyes flitted from the casefile to Logan's face. This case was interesting, he already had three theories to look into. A girl had been found dead and Roman thought her case could be related to multiple other murder-homicides, as it fit with a potential serial killer Roman had yet to pin down. He thought it could possibly have been her brother and his friends as they had no appropriate alibi so he immediately looked into it. It could have also been a suicide, likely assisted or staged. He was buzzing, would Logan come to the same conclusions?

Logan looked up, unsure whether this was a test or not. "Um..." Logan started. "Well there is something I don't get here." He was afraid to offer much input for the moment, he didn't want to look too stupid on his first day. Especially since something in this case just didn't add up. "It looks like the victim's clothes were changed, but I don't see any mention of that in these records."

Roman’s eyes widened at this, despite his initial skepticism of Logan he had to hand it to him that he’d made some decent observations.

"I'm surprised you picked up on that. I think it has something to do with a cover-up, someone here, covering for-...well what's your input? Who did it, at first glance?" Roman quirked an eyebrow, his face still holding a certain judging look, but he at least seemed open to listen to Logan’s ideas.

Logan started feeling a tiny bit better, he hadn't made a complete fool of himself yet so he continued. "I.. I'm not sure... I mean a first of the obvious potential explanations is that she committed suicide, or was made to look like that. The brother and his friends sound pretty suspicious, that's for sure, but I'm guessing you already knew that." Logan scrunched his eyebrows trying to put his ideas into order, to connect any dots that hadn't been linked.

"Huh, interesting idea Logan, not bad. I'm thinking we should talk to her brother, bring him in and interview him, it would give us some great possible leads, maybe we should interview his friends too. It might give us a more clear idea of what happened." Roman commented at Logan rather than to him.

"I think that would be the smartest and most logical place to start at least." Logan couldn't believe that Roman could be even remotely impressed with anything he had said up until now, even despite the dismissive tone. "I see here in his friends, a certain Thomas, that I remember seeing recently in the archives at least 3 other times."

Roman smiled at him and walked out of the room, his hips swaying confidently as he walked. He could then be heard picking up the phone and speaking into it before having a quiet word with the captain. He then trailed his hands along one of the desks, leaning over and quickly saying something into one of their co-worker's ears before heading back to Logan. "The captain said he'll get someone on it."

"Okay, sounds good". Logan had to keep himself from staring. Roman exuded this charm that was irresistible to everyone, though Logan tried to convince himself he didn’t find himself even slightly impressed by it. "So what now?” Logan asked. “Should we be making a list of questions or..?" He pulled out a notepad and a pen to keep his hands busy.

Roman stared into space for a second, making no sign to show he had heard him. Then, still staring off into space, he started speaking. "The interview should have structure, though if we over plan it, it'll be uncomfortable, obvious of what we're trying to do. We need to know, but make sure they don't know what we're doing, the balance is important." He sighed and turned to his computer, typing out something. "You can suggest some questions, maybe I’ll use them."

Logan stared down at the notepad he had put down on his desk. He was a little miffed at this point. The whole reason he left his other job was because he was tired of the condescending attitude he kept getting from everyone. If Roman wanted structure he was going to give him structure. He would leave the spontaneous aspect to Roman since he clearly knew more about it than Logan did. He started jotting down some potential questions and then tore another page away to write some notes of his own. He made a summary of the case details so that he could keep all the information in order.

..........................…..

About an hour passed and their captain walked in, announcing that they had to interview three of the friends. However, the other two and the girl’s brother had yet to be found. Roman waved for Logan to follow him as he walked out of the quiet room into the bustling larger section of the office. They headed towards the interrogation rooms, which were just past the holding cells where three teenage boys were standing at varying degrees of anger.

Roman rolled his eyes before he turned to them, eyeing each one, scanning their clothing, posture, body language. He needed something to go off. He then whispered to the officer on guard. "Bring me the one in the red hoodie, he looks a little unnerved." He then moved forward and waited as the boy was taken into the quiet interrogation room. He then followed in after and sat on the chair opposite the teenager, who was shrinking in on himself.

Logan was in the room opposite to the interrogation room watching Roman through the two-way glass, the captain standing next to him. "Take notes Logan," he said to the rookie. "Roman is one of our best guys." Logan rolled his eyes and watched as Roman questioned the young man. He had a way of alternating between bad cop and good cop, manipulating the situation to get the information he wanted. Logan noted down the answers they were getting, not much of which wasn't information they already knew, but he decided to write it all down nonetheless.

Roman was done and soon the second teenager walked in. He got similar, but different stories from all of them and through body language, he could tell where the lies were. Once he was done with his questioning, he would have to look through Logan's notes and decipher a story. He walked out and into the room where Logan sat scribbling and finalizing his notes. Roman barely said anything after that, leaving as soon as he was off the clock without so much as a goodbye.

#logince #sanders sides #sanders sides fic #thomas sanders #fanfic #fanfiction #gay fic #fluff #roman sanders #logan sanders #Long Reads #multiple chapters #ao3 #tell me to stay #chapter 1

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