#so????????? what metric to measure by?

[made-nondescript]

not to put the cart before the horse but there is a substantial chance that in the next few days we will see a techno vs. goodtimeswithscar poll. what is your statement regarding this eventuality (holding up a microphone)

we have GOT to make scar work for his victory ok because we all know technoblade is not winning that match up no matter his merits (which are significant; have you guys seen sexy anime techno) SO! i am throwing my vote in techno's direction. for the drama. that's my official stance

[bedtimegiraffe]

Headcanon Height Chart

Here's my head canon line up for the characters along with my reasoning. I'd love to hear how other people picture them!

Actual Data

"The average orc stands six and a half feet tall." (Lore Tablet 1)

"Female orcs are stronger than males." (Lore Tablet 1)

"Elves are taller than humans, standing an average of just over six feet fall." (Lore Tablet 1)

"[Humans are] smaller than orcs and shorter than elves." (Lore Tablet 1)

Assumptions

In the real word, the average person is about 5'4" (5'2' for assigned female at birth, 5'6" for assigned male at birth). I picked 5'6" as the average human height across sexes for conceptual symmetry (about 6 inches between the average height for each race).

In the real world, males tend to be taller than females. I am applying this to humans and elves, but not to orcs, as orc females tend to be stronger (which I'm somewhat spuriously correlating with height).

For the chart itself, it's a general art rule to have a person's crotch/wrists at about half of their height. That put the 'floor' for everyone's full body sprites at about 2 feet. I did not stretch or squish anyone. It looks kind of whack to me, but I have no solution for that.

Character Specific Lines

"You bump into a tall man [Mal] heading out of the village!" (Book 1, Chapter 1) Mal is taller than the average human man.

"An exceptionally bulky cocoon thrashes and bursts apart. Prince Baldur tumbles out." (Book 1, Chapter 9) Baldur is unusually large.

"[Nia] You were puny and insignificant before." and "Leave me alone, tiny man [Mal]." (Book 2, Chapter 12) Valax may just be trying to insult everyone, but I'm taking this as she's taller than both of them.

"The bed's too small." (Book 2, Chapter 17) This could be Imtura just wanting an excuse to go at it on the desk, but I'm choosing to believe she's taller than her mother. I cannot imagine Queen Ventra putting up with a suboptimal bed for herself.

Just Vibes

Nia just gives me short girl energy.

I could have sworn that somewhere Aerin is described as the smaller prince, but I couldn't find it. We know Baldur is stronger than Aerin, so I guess I just assumed he's also taller?

I picture Aerin as shorter than average, contributing to his whole *gestures vaguely at him* complex.

For Mal, I feel like it's easier to do rogue-ing if you're not super tall.

I just think it's neat if Valax is big.

Bonus Imtura next to Aerin to drive home how terrifying I imagine her 'lifting him off his feet by the scruff of his shirt' would be-

[renaerys]

Hi, Jo. So, in your latest post, you wrote about canon Sakura and how people write her in their stories. I know you also write Ino, so, how do you think canon Ino was compared to the way people write her?

The people who write Ino as main tend to write her pretty true to character from what I’ve seen, but there are not very many of us writing her as main to begin with. The problem is often when Ino appears as the BFF in multi-Sakura fics. She tends to get flattened down to just the sassy/horny best friend like what you often see in romcoms. She is reduced to a one dimensional caricature who exists solely to further and support the main character’s (usually Sakura) story. This isn’t bad or anything, but it’s trite and boring. I especially hate it when people get Ino “out of the way” for Sakura to have like multiple hot male lovers in a fic. That’s so annoying and a great way to make me back out of a fic and never look back.

But for the most part, from what I personally have read, if someone loves Ino enough to main her, the results tend to be better more often than not. Better in the sense that they are truer to canon and you can recognize that character in the fan work. Not everything is great, obviously, but I think the people who are drawn to Ino like her for very different reasons than why people like Sakura.

Ino is much more difficult of a character than Sakura and therefore cannot easily be flattened into a self-insert, cardboard, YA heroine like Sakura usually is. She is more abrasive, less afraid of being unlikeable, less “relatable” to the average girl. Ino fans like Ino because she has a more uncompromising personality, and she doesn’t fit into a personality-stripping box that is massively appealing to the lowest common denominator of fans so that they can self insert. (To be fair, I personally don’t think Sakura fits into that box either if you’re talking about the actual canon character rather than the bland BAMF yass queen her multi-Sakura fans have distorted her into, but you just don’t see that kind of treatment so much with Ino as you do with Sakura.)

The same logic applies to other less popular female characters with more difficult personalities, like Karin or Temari or Tsunade, for example. When you find an author who loves these characters enough to main them, I think you are just statistically more likely to get something that resembles canon personalities more than not, because it is precisely those divisive traits that make those people love them (while the same traits make others hate them). It’s a matter of preference, and while I think everyone has the right to have their preferences, I do wish more people would try expanding their horizons and try something other than plain oatmeal for a change.

[potted-cilantro]

god who invented this 'friends can't be affectionate' shit and 'romance is a necessity and the default so we're treating every single relationship as a binary' and 'the words in your language only support this binary it is impossible to describe a relationship outside it' bullshit can we get rid of it please

[dearlittlefandom-stalker]

There is nothing in this world as inconsistent as the sizes of women’s clothing

[divinekangaroo]

During my ~12 yr fandom hiatus I nearly posted a Sylvie (Loki) fanfic on how a child with an extended childhood and adolescence (assuming Asgard years) repeatedly selected families/groups with which to ‘grow up with’ knowing they would all die in apocalypse…falling in love, first sexual experience, best friends forever, sibling connections, loving mth & fth, going back and living w the same family again in a bittersweet remembrance and trying harder (maybe she fought w them last time around), a pseudo-selfishly driven, grief stricken ‘stuck in a time loop’ by design because she can never see them otherwise

Doing it again and again w different families, seeing different fathers and brothers and putting Odin and Thor into a perspective and context that Loki-Loki never could

this constant temptation to save them, being Loki (ragnarok) after all, this ability to do something about apocalypse

and not doing it. Letting them be destroyed because to do anything wouldn’t save them and it’d only destroy herself too and she can always go back again and grow up with them again, if she misses them

And having to take this pragmatic route again and again and again until the mind and heart really fractures

[sashannarcy]

the thing is I could also just rant on and on about the brilliance of Amphibia's finale and how it couldn't have ended any other way without it being narratively confusing and unsatisfying. I don't even agree w the people who say it has problems bc the thing is it set out to do one thing and that is demonstrate that change is ever-present. and it literally did exactly that. what more could you EXPECT

[10-dutchies-12-bicycles]

having a terrible time bc the past few months i accidentally kinda maybe 90% cured my adhd...? no im not making this up im srs

i need a support group for ex adhd peeps but unfortunately. yanno. thats not a thing. or at the very least a "how to focus as a neurotypical" article or sth 😭😭😭😭

[bepisconsumer]

With every passing day I become more and more convinced that by far the most controversial opinion I hold is that Fahrenheit is a perfectly fine measurement system for temperature actually

[birdmenmanga]

I think I just give up on the queer metaphor for 3 days and just draw pictures. I think this is what I do

[marypsue]

not to be a horrible shipper all over your plotfic but what would the ships look like in your ageswap au?

The sample I posted does rather invite the question!

I should put out there, as a general rule, I'm not all that interested in Mike/Will and I don't have plans to write it anywhere. I don't really vibe with it, generally, and I believe I've mentioned previously (but maybe only in tags) that I really hate the way the Duffers conceived of and have been handling the possibility that Will might be gay. And many of the ways parts of the fandom have acted in response. I get that it's important to some people, and I don't want to rain on anybody's parade, but I've seen so much bad behaviour from the showrunners all the way down that it's pretty firmly put me off.

With that said, though. This fic was undertaken before I'd had much exposure to the fandom, and also, the roleswap plays...well, a role. I'm a sucker for a good triad relationship, especially the Monster Hunting Trio, and in this version of things, that's Mike and El and Will. So this is probably the only time you're ever going to see me writing reciprocated romantic feelings between Mike and Will. It's just that El is also there. And the entire context of their previous relationships with each other has changed. It feels different. I don't know. I'm operating on vibes, here.

Also because of the roleswap, this is one of those rare places where I'm not mashing Steve and Nancy and Jonathan's faces all together. Nancy and Jonathan are the Hopper and Joyce of this fic, and Steve is the Karen Wheeler. He'll be fine in his loveless marriage while the other two are off having fantastic post-saving-the-world sex. Maybe he'll have an ill-advised affair in the future. Who can say.

(Also Nancy and Barb had a brief on-again-off-again fling post-Nancy's-divorce, which has been over for some time as of the action taking place. Long enough for Barb to find a more stable relationship with the other local lesbian...)

I'm pretty sure that's it, as far as romance goes. Apart from the teen squad, it's pretty secondary to the plot in season 1, and I'm sticking with that. (Also, I need lots of time and space to fully mine the hilarity of Steve being Mike's literal actual father.)

[waterberry-strawmelon]

I am FULLY on my “Spotify Wrapped is not even accurate wtf are you on” train today

[coffee-without-anesthetics]

if i manage 600 words a day it is Good Enough.

[redskyinthemxrning]

listen i didn’t really plan on using van richten much in my cos game bc honestly i don’t find him very interesting on his own but then one of my players made a crotchety old man monster hunter with questionable morals and a dead nephew so. guess it’s van richten narrative foil time?

[abyssaldyke]

Not to beat this dead horse but as I am fighting my way through the last hundred-odd pages of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, I keep thinking about the usage of character perspective in science fiction. At the start of the book, we're with Rosemary all the time. She's easily the least interesting character, but she's our little pinhole into this world and I like that.

When her plot line is resolved halfway through (with like, stunningly little resistance, as is customary for this limp stained glass window of a novel), we're suddenly adrift, tossed between Sissix and Kizzy and Ashby and whomever else happens to be around. This might work all right in lit fiction, but in a world meant to be disorienting and unfamiliar, using the protagonist as a root stops being optional. I'm reminded of Genly Ai of The Left Hand of Darkness fame, how we spend hundreds of pages learning with him, how even when we switch to Estraven's perspective, it only gives context to Genly's experience and only after the world has been thoroughly established. Even then, LHOD takes place on a single planet to mitigate potential loss of interest and only swaps between those two characters. It's masterfully done by one of the if not THEE greatest sci-fi writer of her generation and even le Guin knows when to draw the line and pull us back.

Conversely, Chambers—enamored with this rich and interesting world and every rich and interesting character living within it—leaves us adrift in a sea of information with no root to show us why it's important. You know those posts that are like "lol why is every planet in sci-fi just one kind of people when every world is infinitely rich and diverse?" This reads as a direct response, a novel trying to be both road trip and road map. The reason why Star Trek and so forth focus solely on one type of people per episode is because trying to fit in everything or even multiple things about every single world is—crucially—disorienting and boring. An entirely unique science fiction or fantasy world is nothing without a character and a conflict to ground it. Without that, the best it can be is vaguely interesting background noise.

[overheaven]

if you’re like me and have had a top artist streak going for years do NOT make OCs who has specific music influences because you’ll have an identity crisis.