#they were so full of personality; full of commentary made by the writers and their personal tips and tidbits that were very interesting

[pandaemoanium]

thank you old gamefaqs walkthroughs i love you old gamefaqs walkthroughs

[goodluckclove]

An Open Letter to a Professional Author

I came across a writer here who I imagine will probably never see this, but their presence was enough to make me pretty mad for two days now. I've decided to pen a little statement to this Long-Term, Professional, Full-Time, Published Author who makes a habit out of being deeply unpleasant in a way that apparently has only attracted an audience of other deeply unpleasant people.

People here seem to like it when I get mad. So, uh, enjoy?

Dear Professional Author,

I came across a post of yours on some feed here the other day and enjoyed your commentary. It was one of those writing memes that sort of called attention to actually writing as opposed to just thinking about your project - the kind that people usually respond to with some sort of joke expressing their repulsion at the concept.

You responded with distaste and I generally agreed. The tone was a little aggressive for me, but that kind of humor also leaves me generally confused. I personally ended up concluding that the self-deprecating humor was a coping mechanism for a larger issue that keeps these people from writing - intimidation, lack of confidence, physical or mental pain, things like that. You seemed to think it was a matter of will, which I found to be an approach that at the very least was well-intentioned.

Turns out it wasn't.

First off, I should say that this isn't about your political beliefs. Your political beliefs that are really more like general human beliefs. I don't want to get into that. Instead, I just want to talk about your writing. You are a full-time, published author, as you say in nearly post where you talk about writing. A major point of pride to you seems to be the fact that you are traditionally published. Any other method doesn't seem to be as legitimate to you. That's interesting to me.

You also don't seem to have much of an audience outside of people who mainly come to agree with your politics. I didn't really see a single positive interaction between you and another writer on here for as much as I was willing to scroll through your blog. That's also interesting to me.

I didn't spent too much time on your blog once I realized that you were definitely not the kind of person I would ever want any interaction with. What I did want to do is use your presence indirectly to prove a point that I've been wanting to get into for some time now.

To put it simply, I'll say this: a career in professional writing is not actually as cool or important as you might think it is.

Now I'll be direct and say that I've never been traditionally published for anything longer than a short story or long-term, unpaid column. You don't give any details on any of your writing, as far as I've seen (Once again - interesting!), so there's a chance you've made more in contracts and royalties than I have. But I'm a working writer. I've had a career in ghostwriting and technical writing. I've written and produced plays that have been featured in festivals in multiple states. I'm not speaking from a place of no experience, is what I mean to say.

What I also mean to say is that - while I view writing in many ways as a spiritual and healing act that I couldn't live without - it's also a job. It's not always exciting, and even when it is exciting it's only exciting to me. I consider the best date night to be when my wife works on video game development while I write my draft. I leave the house on a regular basis, but it's mainly to go to different places to write.

In short - I love to write, but I don't think it makes me cool. Or interesting. Or valuable. Or intelligent. Or just generally fun to be around and talk to. These are things I strive to cultivate in other aspects of the way I live and grow as a human being on this planet.

Being a Professional Author in one particular genre doesn't give you authority over the craft as a whole. You can't just throw yourself into conversations and start with I'm a published writer and assume that means you have the final say on any discussion. Believe it or not, in many cases it does not matter.

Lots of people are published traditionally, and it does prove some level of validity in their line of work. But there are a huge variety of people in the world of trad pub. There are people who write books in genres that don't apply to writers here. There are people who write books that aren't very good. There are even people who write trad pub books that are very good, but their careers are sullied by the fact that the authors themselves are not good people.

Being a successful writer does not mean you're a good person. Being a writer at all does not mean you are a good person. I believe in Death of the Author to an extent, but when that author insists on making a presence on a public website and doling out advice and opinions to other writers the lines start to blur considerably.

Writing is a job. You work it over a period of time and learn skills and strategies that work for you. The same applies to virtually every other job, including ones that society views as less romantic as something in the arts. Can you imagine me breaking into your home while you're making lunch and telling you how to arrange your cheese slices based on what I know as a full-time, professional sandwich artist at Subway? You might be interested based on leaning something you didn't know about a place you might've eaten at before. But that does not entitle me to your respect on its own.

I am not entitled to your respect based on how well I learned how to make a sandwich based on my hypothetical career at Subway. Just as I don't deserve it solely because I know two card tricks, can get out a variety of stains, read most of the works of the major beatniks, can make a really good carbonara, or any other specific about my life that ultimately does not play a huge part in who I am as a person.

When I am on my death bed, I hope to god the core of my character was not the fact that I typed stories from my brain until I got carpal tunnel. If my obituary begins and ends at "writer", no matter how positive the qualifier is before that, it will be the greatest failure of my life.

Because I am a writer. But that does not matter. It does not matter if you're a writer. It can be fun and enjoyable if you are, even better if you make a living at it, but it doesn't mean you'll be happy. It doesn't mean people will like you or perceive you to be the leader and teacher you might think you are. It certainly doesn't give you a free pass to throw cruelty at strangers for truly no real reason.

Professional Author, you had a chance to raise up the next generation of an industry I assume you must value. You're choosing not to, and that's fine. You don't have the obligation to. You do have the choice to not get involved and pretend to give advice that ranges from vague to untrue. You seem to be taking that responsibility very seriously.

It's like some twist on crab mentality, where instead of dragging crabs trying to escape the bucket you're swiping at anyone who tries to crawl in with you. Then, as they struggle, you're looking down at them and making comments on how easy it is to get in the bucket, if you only just do it and maybe read some books.

To all of us, I say this: question authority, even in the arts. Especially in the arts. Nobody knows as much as they say. That includes me, but I do know this - any branch of publishing feels really good. It's scary but it's fun. If you're traditional published or indie published or self published, it says nothing about how good your book is or how good you are as a writer or how valuable you are as a human being.

Don't be this lonely bucket crab. They seem mean and I'm tired of talking about them.

Best Regards,

Clove

[callipraxia]

The Interview: A Running 'Live' Commentary

Well, you asked, kinda, @the-orion-scribe...

Disclaimer: One of my…things is that where there is a transcript, I'm gonna read the transcript first and then may or may not tackle the audio version later. As such, I'm inevitably going to get some of the subtler bits indicated by gesture and tone of voice wrong. I hope it won't be anything that significantly changes the meaning, but we shall see. I'm doing this live, (redact) it! And partially on my work breaks at that, so apologies if anything gets repetitive or disjointed as a result of different bits being read several hours apart. Full transcript is available here from, I believe, @fordtato, who seems like awesome cool folks.

That all said, let's begin.

[On the SAG-AFTRA strikes]

Alex's grandmother was an actress? Interesting. Also, generally approve of the sentiments stated there, very good, no actual notes.

[On the pilot and the 'Next On' reel]

When I was a much, much younger Callipraxia, I also had an interest in TV work - we had this class at my middle school call Careers, and we had to do a research project on, well, a career every year, and one year I did mine on being a soap opera writer (early nineties soap operas were my first literary influences, and I suspect it still shows). I therefore find this glimpse into the industry fascinating, even though I don't have much to say about it beyond giggling at the image of executives having such reptilian, limited-intelligence brains that they could be tricked into thinking something already exists and therefore just approving it so they don't have to think about why they're being asked to approve something that already exists because it would make their heads hurt.

"I was working...on a cartoon called 'Flapjack.'"

I'm 99% sure I've never seen a single frame of this show, but also 99% sure I've heard of it somehow. Not sure why. No idea what 'Fish Hooks' is, though.

"Then, when we did the Cipher Hunt, I was running out of rewards and treasures to give the audience because I'd already bled Gravity Falls dry of every drop of content that was inside it..."

See, this is what I find fascinating about Proper Creators, and this one in particular. Their creations can seem so much fuller to us than they do to them. This baffles me, because even when I don't do things on purpose, I generally do realize that I did them sometime, you know? (Edit: ha, Hirsch actually talks a bit about this at the end)

"I remember asking him, 'Hey, Mike, you read the bible, right? What do you think about this Jesús character? Do you think it's working? Do you think people will get it?'"

Even though I clearly read the words 'series bible' right above this, my first thought was that Alex was asking Mike if he'd read The Bible - y'know, the religious one. And I was so confused. And then I stopped being confused and I facepalmed in real life.

"Instead of embracing that this is part of lore that fans love...in his mind, he, as a serious videogame programmer, made a mistake, and is ashamed of the mistake, and doesn't want to acknowledge it, doesn't want to encourage other people to corrupt their own game, and so he said 'there's no such thing as MissingNo.'"

This is another "I just don't get Proper Creators" moment. I'd have embraced it so thoroughly I'd have written a sequel just about it and only revealed that it was actually serendipitous (not 'a mistake' - word choice, people!) years later!

Sometimes no answer is better than a boring answer.

This is why I love that thing Robert Jordan used to say - "read and find out!" and the fandom shortened it to "RAFO," and now that's a one-word response to questions you don't want to answer, at least if everyone in the room is familiar with The Wheel of Time books and fandom history...so many times I've wanted to just reply "RAFO!" in a review, but then realized the odds were excellent that the other person would have no clue what I was talking about.

"I know that we did cut like 12 pages from the journal, just due to length."

I've been told that I can make people feel cussed out without ever uttering a single swearword, when I'm annoyed enough with them. I would like to try to do that to whoever it was who decided on this length restriction. Give me lore! All the lore! More! More lore!

[On the walls of genre cards and character beat cards and how this led to rejected episode ideas]

I'm gonna try this writing method out, it sounds interesting. Thanks, Alex! And also thanks to everyone involved who's mentioned any of these rejected ideas over the years, as this allows us to play with them instead! (one day, y'all will know the tale of Wendy as a weather witch. I've got a whole arc planned for her with that one).

"When [Rob Renzetti] and I are together, we're very much like Grunkle Stan and Ford, and he is Ford and I am Stan."

I wish so much that someone had asked if there were ever any RL fistfights during the production of the book. It's barely even funny and would have wasted time, but I wish they had anyway.

"I still recall when Ford had a long beard and was a hippie."

...No.

"We were thinking it'd be kind of more like a zen kind of guy"

I mean, technically I suppose he still is. Apparently quite big on meditation back in the day, and the Journal strongly implies he's a firm believer in divination now. He could have been a sort of hippie lite, had he gone for drugs other than brain demons and/or Truck Stop Coffee I Initially Assumed Was A Euphemism For Significantly Stronger Stimulants.

"I remember talking about, maybe, J.K. Simmons and then thinking, 'Gosh, you know, he's got a very familiar voice, is he gonna feel too overexposed.'"

Ford was actually the first character I ever heard Simmons voice, because I have acquired what passes for my pop culture literacy mostly completely backward. My mother was watching reruns of whatever that cop drama he was on was (was it The Closer?) one day, though, and I did a double take at the TV because why is Ford here on one of Mama’s shows? Did he get arrested again or something? Why are they acting like he's one of the...ohhhh.

Which yes, means I found my way to Portal 2 via Gravity Falls instead of the other way around. That isn't so surprising, though, because video games are another of my...things. I absolutely love a lot of the stories and will happily read about them and watch cutscenes and video essays about them and player-keeps-quiet playthroughs all day, but I've never actually played video games because I have poor hand-eye coordination and rather low frustration tolerance when it comes to entertainment. The puzzles would drive me mad. I adore complex things, but I hate having to figure them out before I can move on with the story if I don't want to stop. Let me figure stuff out at my own pace, dangit -

Er, that got off-topic, sorry. The point was, I've watched a ton of clips of Portal 2 now, and it's kind of fascinating to me that it possibly wasn't a conscious influence, because Cave Johnson is...not really that dissimilar to a thing that Ford could have become, in a lot of ways. Or what he and/or Fiddleford might have actually become in the "Better World," for all we know. He's probably closer to what Fiddleford did become in canon, though, at least for a while/in my possibly somewhat weird interpretation of Fiddleford.

"So we're putting this character together, we're putting blocks together, we're moving blocks and putting them up, and it's only at the last second that a Ford is revealed that we're like 'I guess we did it?'"

This is how I construct plots basically, more than characters, but - oh, gosh, I wanna do a lore dump so bad but this isn't the time or place. Never mind, I'll ramble about character development another time.

Also, I am amused by the visual of, like, Stan or someone performing a dramatic flourish and being like "Behold: A Ford!"

"What to you comes across as 'oh, Rob understands Ford's ridiculous recklessness' to me comes across as 'Rob IS Ford and Ford does rationalize.' That's what he does. One of Ford's greatest powers is rationalizing. So you're seeing Rob as Ford rationalizing Ford's bad decisions. In that moment, I think what's being revealed is less Ford's recklessness, and more Ford's ability to justify anything."

Why not both? But yeah, fair, I've observed this about the character myself. He censors himself when he doubts. It's a defensive mechanism I think - it keeps him alive and functional to a degree, because, well...we've seen what happens when Ford admits he was wrong, twice. In the Journal, he nearly lost his mind, and in the finale, he basically went from thinking of himself as He Who Shall Save The World to He Who Is About To, However Reluctantly, Become Death, The Destroyer of Worlds in an alarmingly short period of time. Extreme black and white thinking with him a lot of the time. Not a psychologist, just a nerd, but the longer I think about the character, the more probable a personality disorder seems. Which is one reason I worry about him and Stan both after the series ends. They're both going to be confused as all get-out when it dawns on them that "...wait, we're not suddenly better after all? We're both still really, really screwed up?"

"When you do a clone story, the point of a clone story, in my mind, is a character seeing themselves in a different light, right?"

Depends on which side you're looking at it from, really ;)

"They're all wonderful, wonderful dumbasses, all of them."

Accurate.

"They know that I am a detail-oriented bastard."

...Less accurate, in a way. I've spun whole worlds out of details that the writers have admitted were unintentional or screwups, not to mention the later discourse on Alex as the "emotional" story one while Rob was the "make it a story" guy, or the specific detail that was actually under discussion here. As for that one....

"When you're editing, when you're writing, and then you reread your writing and you edit it, and then you reread your writing and you edit it, there's a very subconscious process of streamlining, literally making paragraphs look nice - it's entirely possible that me or Rob made that change out of one in a million changes specifically because we knew that psychologically Ford is not traveling this path alone, he's traveling it with his muse who he has a very complex and fucked-up relationship with, and even in Ford's private thoughts, he would not say 'I'm alone,' he would say, 'Oh, I have a very important relationship in my life with Bill, but I don't have a friend, that is a difference!'"

...except he canonically referred to Bill as his friend, too, so, uh...yeah, there's that.*

Interesting to hear someone else's perspective on rewriting and editing; I'm pretty sure that there's very little sub-conscious going on with me when I'm editing. If anything, I'm double and triple checking to excise anything that even hints of subconsciousness out of the manuscript, and I am very, very conscious of times when I go out of my way to make paragraphs physically neat and pretty, because I always feel really stupid about doing it. So I suppose I'm glad to hear other people do that, too.

I also found it interesting to see the description of the relationship with Bill as "very complex and fucked-up." Ford, at least, wrote and spoke as though he was under the impression that his relationship with Bill was very straightforward pre-betrayal, but here's the Guy, on the record saying it was in fact "very complex." This doesn't confirm that Ford was on some level aware of this, but it does make me feel more confident about my theory that Ford invited Fiddleford up not so much because he really needed the technical expertise as because his subconscious was throwing up enough red flags to cover every square inch of land in the U.S.S.R. and he just couldn't admit it to himself consciously because admitting that he is not in control of a situation tends to render him non-functional.

*Full disclosure since nobody's read this far anyway, but hi if you have, have a full disclosure: I would not say I ship it, because in context - Fiddleford married, Ford on the brink of sanity, Ford as Fiddleford's employer, Fiddleford mind-wiping both himself and Ford behind Ford's back after a certain point, and that's all before we consider that on occasion, it's entirely possible Fiddleford was interacting with someone who mostly looked like Ford but, uh, wasn't - it would be incredibly dark and messed up and suitable for nothing but a full-blown adult psychological horror story, but I do consider "Ford was in love with Fiddleford, regardless of whether it was reciprocated or not" as a perfectly valid reading of the Journal. I also consider it perfectly valid to read it as Ford just being prone to really intense attachments, regardless of what kind they are - he either adores you or he hates you, whether you're his brother, his muse, his friend, his romantic or sexual interest, or what-have-you, which is kind of what I was saying earlier about the potential for personality disorders there. Ford writes in a style more like he's from the mid-nineteenth century than from the mid-twentieth, or at least like he's trying to imitate that style, so that could make things sound gay that aren't gay, but by the same token, much of Ford's rhetorical style seems to exist to allow him to not-quite-lie to himself while using his superpower of Justify Anything, so ultimately that means nothing, too. I went through the Journal line by line once and determined that you could make roughly equally strong cases for Ford being some form of straight, some form of gay, some form of bi, and some form of ace, and that it also wouldn't be unreasonable to come away with the view that he's not into humans so much but might very well be into one or more types of alien. I don't know and so will potentially read any variant of these things, as long as it's a decent story.

"You know the thing about working with a big company, it's like working with a friend who swaps their head with a different head every couple of years."

Huh, Alex has met Olm, has he?

[Hana] "By the way, I know there's a lot of fake blood on this page, that's for one of my YouTube videos, ignore that."

Why is this the moment I laughed out loud?

"That's the trouble of a puzzle box, is it's like, there's two flavors of it, there's a question with a satisfying answer, and then there's a question that is sort of an open-ended invitation to a kind of, uh, you know, group improvisational session. We've created a prompt for fans to 'yes and' their own story out of it, and the sense that there might be something in there creates a sense of excitement along with it."

Pretty sure this is sums up my general thoughts on the Interview/is the part of it I regard as Important so far. Also, I wish I could write something like that. If I leave a loose end hanging, it's very blatantly a loose end. I can improvise a 10,000-word essay about Ford's anger issues on the fly, doing that out of someone else's work is incredibly easy and natural for me, but I can't do the same in my own work. It's a frustrating thing.

"The Mystery Shack is a bucket full of misshapen, lost, odd oddities, and these character are a bucket of full of misshapen lost odd oddities, and like the idea of them all having a place where they fit in, and - and loving each other as a family, was very important to me."

...Ok, this is another Important bit, but for completely different reasons. Basically sums up why I'm here, really.

"That means that Dipper and Mabel's parents may have had children at a concerningly young age, and is this show's intent to say that it's okay for those relationships to exist?"

Here's a thing that I think is just...me not quite getting how a lot of people work, I guess? To me, there's a world of difference between "that could be what happened" and "and that means I approve of it." The Pineses are a really screwed up family. They should have called that pawn shop Dysfunction Junction, that’s how messed up they are. Apparently it was Filbrick who knocked someone up at a drive-in movie once (one of my 4.5 Shermies is actually a much older half-brother who only gets to know Stan at all after they meet at Filbrick's funeral, though I never decided if his mom was the shotgun wedding or if that was with Caryn. Either way, though, he was vaguely aware that "yeah, Dad and his second wife had those twins" but he'd had very limited contact with them and bought that he'd mixed up which one was supposed to be weird and have six fingers without too much trouble), and Mabel's level of proto-sexual aggressiveness is...occasionally disconcerting, to me at least. One or more generations of teenage parenthood seems perfectly in character for them to me, without it meaning anyone approves or disapproves of that. It's fairly realistic, however depressing, that a much younger son in a family as dysfunctional as theirs might well have started acting out, resulting in Indiscretions - my second fic was based on the premise that the "you gotta raise a kid, your life falls apart..." was Stan talking about Shermie's lot in life rather than his own, as I hadn't yet heard the remark about it being a Filbrick quote (the whole events of that story were constructed with the idea of keeping Stan's line about how he lied to everyone, including "my family" and "your parents", literally true, so every event was created to explain how Stan got away with it for a little longer without anyone noticing, basically). Mabel also seems impractical enough, even post-character development, to get waaaaaay too into a high school relationship with unfortunate results. That's not approval of such relationships, that's just...reality? Goodness, people don't think I morally approve of everything (or even very much at all) in my stories, do they? That's an unsettling thought.

"I think we say 'damn.' I think we say 'hell' maybe, um, yeah."

Ford specifically says "I'll be damned" in the Journal (though, in context, it seems less like swearing than like he possibly means it some form of literally; there's several hints in the Journal that suggest Ford believes in...Something, though he's almost certainly not a member of any organized religion and almost definitely not a member of any organized religion we'd recognize). Stan, for his part, says "hell" in "Lost Legends," referring to a part of the carnival that he thinks would be a good hiding place.

Since Disney allowed people to refer to going to literal, capital-H Hell in at least two properties long preceding Gravity Falls, though (specifically, David Xanatos infamously says "pay a man enough and he'll walk barefoot into Hell" in the pilot of the animated show Gargoyles, and Claude Frollo sings a whole song where he repeatedly yells the words "Hell" and "Hellfire" without a care in the world in The Hunchback of Notre Dame), I am still more shocked that they let Ford say the word "suicide" on the show proper, on Disney channel. And...okay, Frollo is significantly less child-friendly than Bill, even given the torture scene. Frollo does things that are just as violent as that scene, plus Frollo is quite blatantly driven by a perverse sexual obsession with a woman, so that he attempts to coerce her into sex with everything but the word 'sex' on screen before setting her on fire. There's distinctly perverse undertones in Bill's every interaction with Ford in the Weirdmageddon Trilogy, but Bill's been an energy being without physical form since before the birth of the Milky Way, which takes the edge off...a bit, anyway. Bill in the Journal flings down and dances upon the line between "this is a metaphor" and "...okay, so, the way this is being written about is so on the nose that I'm not sure this counts as a metaphor for any practical purposes anymore," but Bill having "extract information" as a motive in the most blatantly unsettling scenes of the show proper means he's still less overt about it on screen than Frollo.

...What was I talking about, again? Oh, right. Disney Channel: A lot less squeaky-clean in general than it wants you to think, Parents! They've been letting animated people say "Hell" occasionally since I was four!

"We talked about 'is there a way for this government agent who knows about Trembley to be connected to the government agents who picked up this disturbance?' We weren't really able to find a way to make them connect in a satisfying way, so, I wish we had done more with it."

Welp, there's another one for the "Projects to Eventually Do" List. Y'know, I'd never even thought of associating Powers and Co with the guy in "National Treasure"? It's one of those episodes I kinda mostly forget about tbh, the S1 filler episodes - I remember facts from it because they're useful when constructing my "Nathaniel Northwest was a warlock who made deals with Bill and here's how that could play out" theories, but I never think about the plot. Kind of like how I forget that Dipper's infatuation with Wendy is why the Paper Twins exist, even though they're now major characters in a lot of what I've written and are even bigger players in the vast majority of what I plan to write in future....I can tell you way, way too much about "Double Dipper," but I'm always slightly surprised that "oh, the Wendy obsession is why all this other stuff even happened!"

[On a very long section of text about McGucket and the memory gun]

OMG OMG OMG I WAS RIGHT! I WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE ALCOHOLISM METAPHOR, IT'S CANON, I FEEL SO SMART RIGHT NOW, WHEEE!

Ahem...sorry about that. Got a bit carried away there. So, Alex also compared McGucket's relationship with the memory gun to alcoholism. And to taking anxiety pills, but...well, there is a reason you don't mix those, I suppose. I want to dig into this so much more, and I'm probably gonna end up printing this section and tacking it to the wall next to my writing table, but right now I have gotta do my mother's taxes, she refused to admit they hadn't been done yet until a few hours ago, arrgh, I don't have time - yeah, that bit's probably gonna get its own analysis post eventually.

"It's like he has to always have a mission in front of him, because if he doesn't have a mission in front of him, he's thinking 'how have I treated the people in my life?'"

Hey, I think I said that...like...three times in this insanely long post, and I know I've said it before. My character interpretations are being validated. It makes me faintly grumpy that I'm as pleased by this as I am. I have a...complicated relationship with validation, let's leave it at that.

"The same way you know a black hole is there by the light warped around it, it's like, you know the damage someone's family has done to them by all of their weird tics and behaviors. So who is the character who would result in Stan being this hurt and needy and mad and also longing?"

I'd argue that it was the whole family dynamic, really - Stan clearly had a ton of daddy issues on the boil even before he got disowned, and while Caryn seems to have been more openly affectionate toward him, I can't imagine it did his psychology any good to grow up with a mother he calls a "pathological liar" without missing a beat. There'd always be that uncertainty (much like there later is with Stan himself) about what was real and what was a lie, what was a performance, because Caryn, like Stan, was an entertainer - it's the thing they were good at. Meanwhile, Filbrick is a fifties and sixties father of the most rigid sort, someone who is clearly uncomfortable expressing any positive emotion of any kind, or really anything except anger. He's either indifferent or he's shouting, and he apparently calls his sons by the same name to the point that they can say "he means you" when he's bellowing for "Stan Pines," because Stan's unimportance in life has been so thoroughly underlined for him by his parents, long before Ford personally was in any position to inflict much childhood trauma, that he struggles to have any form of identity separate from "Ford's twin" by a very young age, and never really grows past this until maybe the final moments of the show - I really wish we'd had a moment of Stan claiming his own name properly, but at least it made the news. Until that point, he'd literally failed at everything he ever did as Stanley, as himself, because he had no direction without Ford - even the Mystery Shack, as built around his specific talents as it is, was created because the mission in front of him had Ford as a focus point. That's a crucial thing, too, about his bond with Dipper and Mabel, and Soos, and even kinda Wendy - he's built a life for himself outside of just being Ford's brother. It's implied none of them even knew he was a twin, that the Other had ever existed. He still defines himself in relation to other people to a large extent, but that's still less restrictive than defining himself (and being defined by others) solely in terms of one other person. Fairer to Ford, too. But I digress.

"And it's like 'oh! I think he's also aloof and distant from himself.' I think he is, uh, deeply, deeply hiding from his real feelings about things, because at some point early on, he decided that he could run from hurt by achievement and by creation, and has dug that hole so deep that he has no relationships."

Accurate, at least at times.

"The shows I was watching growing up were, like, Doug and Rugrats, and there were no holy wars about whether Chucky Finster, uh, should be interpreted this way or that way. We had no idea the world that was coming into consciousness as we were making this thing."

I found this kinda interesting, because I remember those shows, too - but by the time I was old enough to be aware of very much, Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer had already created the core of modern fandom culture as we know it, so I at the same time have the concepts of "there is no Rugrats fandom" and "that did not make fandom a surprise to me, because it was falling into place right about the point where my memory starts/I became dimly aware of the world outside of [Microscopically small town I'm from]." I don't know if this is something where he maybe remembers early childhood more than I do, since I have very, very few distinct memories from before I was 10-11 - a few, but they're like isolated snapshots with limited context, except what I know happened because people have told me it happened. I know Hirsch is older than me, but also not *that* much older than me, so I wonder if it's down to those few years (like he said about how gay marriage had just been legalized as the show was wrapping, and it's disconcerting now to think how different so many things were back then) or if it's a difference in personalities or what.

Well! That was more enjoyable than I expected! Thanks for prodding me to finally read this thing, @the-orion-scribe. It's eaten much of my day and seems set to eat a fair bit of it tomorrow, too, since I had to cut myself short at a couple of interesting points, but it was fun.

[ashlingiswriting]

I know It’s 500 or less but your ‘he is not dead.’ piece awakened something in me. the prose was so striking and the last bit of ‘write a fucking will’ was chilling to the bone. tell me everything all the little details you could possibly spare I cannot watch carrillo’s last episode without thinking about that fic honestly

Thank you! 🥰 and sorry it took so long for me to respond.

fic commentary below!

He is not dead, and so you laugh. Sudden and ugly, like someone ripped it out of you, all teeth no relief, God, and in public too—in public too. A closed door to this room of half a dozen, but anywhere your President is, that’s in public. You can feel his eyes on your now, all their eyes, their concern, and for a moment, you can feel that you have slipped on the curb, but you’ve not yet smashed your nose into the concrete.

For this person and in this world, their first reaction to monumental good news—good news both personally and professionally—sounds like joy but doesn't feel like it. Honestly, I have way more thoughts on this reader character than made it explicitly onto the page. I feel like this introduction to them characterizes them as someone not accustomed to good news and not accustomed to showing emotion. Aaaaand of course I wanna tip my hat to the Carrillo/Reader dynamic, which ends up being ambiguous in some ways (in terms of what it actually is—is it a full on affair? is it one sided?) but completely unambiguous in terms of Reader's attachment to him.

For a moment, all you can think is, he is not dead, and in the crackle of the radio you can hear the bright savage clarion ring of a trumpet call. We are here, we are hunting. The dogs have been set loose and their slavering jaws hang half-open as they skim the wet cold ground.

This reader has a lot to do with the political class of Colombia at the time, the elite who all sort of married each other and went to the same schools and became politicians/journalists/policymakers/writers and idk, obviously I'm making this observation as an outsider, but it seemed to me in reading about many of these figures that on one hand, shit was very real in the sense that many of them died due to their involvement in politics. On the other hand, they were just doing what their families had been doing for years previously, which is try to increase their power and exert their influence over the country. In that sense I wanted Reader to parallel Carrillo in the sense that they were very ambitious and had a vision of what they were doing, but also I as a person don't....idk. Reader is probably involved in some fucked up stuff, or at least providing cover for it.

HOW DID I GET HERE.

Oh yeah! The vibes on Reader. That's why I chose the trumpets and hunting as a metaphor, it feels simultaneously like a class signifier and also visceral and ruthless, with a note of vicious glee.

Laid out in neat photocopies, one for each person, is an obituary for Horacio Carrillo, written out by one of Escobar’s more eloquent lackeys, possibly even Vélez. It’s like her, the language. Nasty and undeniably elegant, a letter written in cursive to come here and have your teeth knocked out one by one with a little hammer. It has all the details, the time and the place, even the name of the sniper who killed Carrillo—who was meant to kill him.

The obituary thing I took from history, although I jazzed it up a little. Escobar really did send an obituary to one (or more than one?) of the people he was trying to intimidate. It's been a hot second since I revisited the research so idk which person it was but I think it was a journalist from El Tiempo???

Anyway I just found it chilling.

Sniper shots are a tricky business. God bless a sudden lift of wind. God bless the widow of the man who had been standing beside him, the woman who has taken that bullet that was meant for you. It makes you lightheaded, all the things she has taken from you, the things she will have to do that you will not. The funeral arrangements, the thank you cards, the handshakes with his living friends, trying not to resent them for living. The low crushing sensation behind the breastbone when she has to break the news to his mother, fearful that if her grief cries out unchecked, it might break forth something worse in you—this is not your burden. Your shoulders are as empty as they have ever been.

I feel like Reader's seen a lot of this up close and personal with some colleagues and friends, which is why their vision of the future they just escaped is so detailed.

But then, wait. You are not his wife, either.

The others are staring at you. None of them are fools. Distantly, some part of you is cataloguing this, as it catalogues all threats. President, Vice Minister of Justice, hell, even a General—especially the General, come to think of it, for he once commanded Carrillo in direct operations—all of them have seen you laugh, and they will not misunderstand it, and they will not forget it. But they are all pragmatists, and what’s one minor outburst of unacceptable emotion compared to your day-to-day utility as right hand to the Minister of National Defense? Perhaps if you shrink in apology, they will accept it as a slip and investigate no further.

You do not shrink. You bare your teeth, still weightless, the joy of it blinding every other consideration, as if you’ve just stared at the sun.

Reader has absolutely no call to be this personally emotionally invested in Carrillo's survival, and their reaction is so notably bizarre that it indicates inappropriate emotions to the extent that if they don't steer themselves back onto course, it might even impact their job, because the last thing these guys need is two key players in the drug war having an affair. But...skskskskssksk Reader's actually feeling the relief now, and the weird vicious joy, and it's a high they're not used to handling either. So we're entering big Fuck It territory.

“They wrote an obituary,” you say, remnants of laughter running through it. “When will they learn?” The President exchanges a glance with Eduardo, and you know, you know, you will hear about this before the end of the day. But even with the joy subsiding, you cannot bring yourself to care. “Before you come for Carrillo,” you say, “write a fucking will.”

I can't even lie, the whole fic was written and the whole Reader character's personality was reverse engineered so I could have Reader say that line and mean it.

Random last thought: I left the nature of Reader's relationship ambiguous on purpose. I think what matters most is that Reader and Carrillo are so similar in their drive and their emotion and the utter commitment of their enmity to their enemies and loyalty to their friends that even though Carrillo doesn't literally show up in the fic, I hope the small-r reader, the person reading, understands that Carrillo and Reader have a sort of unspoken sympathy and understanding with each other whenever they work together, and that that's the basis of Reader's attachment, and.

And they'd be absolutely terrifying people if they were real and I probably wouldn't like them, honestly a;lsdkfjajsdkfj but because they're my characters, I love those vicious bastards very, very much. <3333

[rappaccini]

arachnophobia ch 8/epilogue fic notes

chapter title

from 'antagonist' by nova twins

fic title

from 'athena', also by nova twins

yes, nova twins songs were used for every title in this fic. once more, i love this band, their songs just fit the vibe, and i think their sound is accurate to what the spiderverse mary janes ought to sound like.

this one specifically reinterprets the arachne myth as one of pyrrhic empowerment. sure, she was turned into an insect, but athena's going to be afraid of her forever and arachne can spend the rest of her life tormenting her in revenge. she gets the last laugh.

initial quote

from the myth of arachne from ovid's metamorphosis.

aside from it being the literal origin myth of the spider in greek mythology, in context arachne's myth can be interpreted one of two ways: arachne was a spoiled mortal girl who insulted the gods and was punished by being made into a spider....... or arachne was the only mortal with enough balls to tell the gods they were tyrannical, specifically towards women, and her punishment is a sign that the gods are unjust.

tying this into the fic title: this is a fic about a girl who calls out the misogyny inherent in her placement in the story, which may or may not be considered divine, who is alienated for it and dismissed as a villain and nuisance, but uses that power to get back at the powerful people who disenfranchised her and become a constant thorn in their side. unlike in the myth, there's a happy ending to this one.

guin and stacy

'various aliases' -- didn't plan for this to have eight chapters so i ran out of codename theming. hopefully this slaps a band-aid over it.

it's a world with looney tunes logic. therefore, funky physics, architecture and tweety concussion birds.

i don't know if 65-venom is omnivorous, but symbiotes are often carnivorous. and since carnage is the more bloodthirsty of the 65-symbiotes, i figure it would make sense for that to translate to it needing meat.

guin and stacy were a riot to write. i figured they'd have a vibe kind of like ham and noir's.

spider-guin is real, and a minor member of peter porker's world. her personality is basically invented for this fic.

and detective stacy, spider-woman of earth 617 is a composite of:

what if? dark's spider-gwen, from an unnamed universe where peter dies on the bridge instead of gwen, and she takes up his mask and her dad's gun and goes to get justice, and along the way decides to keep heroing. i'm taking that backstory and powerlessness, and combining it with

gwen-617 (for which her world is named), the middle-aged detective who's mutualistically bonded with her venom, albeit fic-617 doesn't have a symbiote.

[hence the shoutout to getting a symbiote in stacy asking gwen for her firstborn]

(however gwen-617's canon personality's been distributed to a and b in terms of the dead dad angst, inspiration to change her fate after meeting another spider-gwen, and being a cosw mastermind.)

617 in particular is real fascinating from a meta perspective. in the comics, she appears at the very end of gwen's original run, in an extremely meta storyline where the watcher that forced the siat gwiles kiss is observing earth-65, and complaining that it's unoriginal and full of uncompelling characters, and that they ought to get rid of it. [... which feels like commentary on the members of the audience and possibly editorial staff who wanted to strip gwen of her world and just shove her into a relationship with miles already]

then gwen-617 literally crashes in to tell him to fuck off.

gwen-8 is very much what the spider-man writers want gwen to be: the ultimate prize. a spider-gwen who marries spider-man, has his superbabies, has no symbiote, and never says a word about how she feels about having to abandon everyone and everything she loves in order to have a life she wouldn't be interested in. and naturally they park her at age 38, so she's still fuckable. a palatable spider-gwen well within the male gaze.

gwen-617 feels like the spider-gwen creator's take on what he wanted gwen 65's future to look like: a woman well into middle age who's showing signs of aging, no longer in a leotard, still bonded to and deeply connected to her symbiote, single and childless, and a cunning, snarky detective who gets her hands dirty to protect her and other gwens' autonomy. a spider-gwen who gets to defy the gaze and exist on her own terms.

(also, she and gwen-8 are brunch buddies and the 8-kids love her. wholesome! the opposing visions of gwen's future get along!)

at any rate i hope gwen65's future does turn out like gwen617's. my big fear is her getting gwen8... which i'm like 60% sure is what'll happen to movie gwen. gross!

back to the fic.

8311's physics are brought up in web warriors iirc, where it's discussed that you can literally vaporize people if you punch them too hard. and weblines connect to midair! fun!

the booze is looney tunes booze. it works like it would in an old tom and jerry cartoon. stacy's been hitting it hard.

gwen617's world collapses in the comics too. i hope she survived it.

full fucking salt here: of course the world where spider-gwen gets to hit middle age, stay powerful, and not have to answer to a man about it is the world that gets canned. thanks marvel!

included here because it was a way to incorporate the spot, give gwen a moment of pity for miguel, and set up how far the society's fallen.

unnecessary detail that's nowhere in this fic but i believe strongly: guin's an adelie penguin, because they have strong fuck-with-me attitudes.

i figured a cartoon animal world wouldn't let its characters swear. guin would resent this strongly.

spider-guin writes dadcop fanfic in canon. since she's hanging out with a detective, i figure stacy would peer review it.

guin's place

shellsea= pun on chelsea.

spider-guin plays the drums for the mary cranes in the comics.

spider-guin is peter porker's crimefighting partner as well.

the pork her joke derives from me misreading 'partner' on the wiki as romantic and not hero related, and having a split second of pure panic at the thought of.... peter porking her.

very interesting that spider-ham doesn't seem to be a society member in the movies. in this fic at least, him sharing a world comfortably with a spider-gwen is one of the reasons why.

they accidentally kidnapped peter-73. oops.

peter and gwen-e's blocking is meant to resemble gwen and hobie's in chapter 5.

gwen's watching another reciprocal partnership between a gwen and a spider-man develop. this peter's like hobie and miles-8. he's giving her what she needs to save herself (a web shooter, a portal watch, a radioactive spider) and trusting her to use it.

and from a meta perspective: can this kind of relationship between a gwen stacy and a spider-man exist in canon? or only off-page, in imagination and fanwork, without writers and audiences to demand it take on the usual conventions?

gwen8's touching her hand because it's where the spider bit her. she's thinking the same thing as gwen b. they're the only two who've had this kind of relationship but have come to opposite conclusions about it.

gwen8 ultimately accepted the constraints of her narrative and only subverts in the margins. now that the cat's out of the bag, she's backpedaling.

gwen8 and gwen617 aren't quite friends in the fic, since they only just met and stacy's furious about the death of her world. and gwen8 is only interested in her self. she made no effort to stop the collapse, only to grab stacy and run. and she's guilty about it.

gwen457 is from the ultimate spider-man cartoon. in this world, she's another powerless girl who chooses to be a hero, even when miles is already spider-man. she builds herself a tech-heavy suit to compensate, and doesn't bother teaming up with miles. very iconic of her. hence, she doesn't do invitations.

i figured since she's building it from robocop parts and doesn't have a healing factor, it'd need to be armored. and since her wallcrawling is reliant on magnetic gloves and boots, they'd need to be pretty big to hold her weight.

457's lair is in a sewer. and she's a girly girl. thus, the perfume.

she also seems to be very young in the cartoon. adapted here.

in the ultimate cartoon, peter encounters an alternate world where he died and miles (and gwen) is spider-man. referenced here. i imagine ultimate cartoon pete was recruited, gwen noticed his tech, and since she's a whiz, reverse-engineered it. and she went exploring simply because she felt like it.

457 gwen uses homemade cookies to win over her father. i thought it'd be fun to nod at that here.

as the only daughter of a single cop dad, gwen probably took on a lot of household responsibilites at a young age. 457, given how insanely strong her willpower is to become a superhero with no powers, probably got a bit of that unusual maturity from that.

this scene's a full-circle moment: gwen at the very start of this fic meets a dead gwen-with-an-e and processes the implications in an icy graveyard. now she's found a living one, and they can unpack it all together. also in a location made of stone and ice, that's basically a big symbolic fridge.

gwen keeps getting killed in purple and green. big 👀 at the atsv concept crew only considering gayatri and gwen in those colors.

spider-girl was the original idea for spider-gwen's name. bad idea! thank god they didn't use it!

the argument

gwendolyne's only chill about this because she hasn't processed that this isn't a temporary adventure. she's getting it now.

earth-8311's mary jane is mary crane. and look i HAD to have a gwenjay pairing here somewhere. it was almost stacy, but her being single was too important (also, didn't love the implication of the one gwenjay getting lexa'd).

spider-guin is a creature of great violence. i feel this deeply.

what if? dark's gwen stacy isn't a killer. i feel like 617 gwen would though. and fic-617 gwen's just had the worst week of her life, so i think it's on the table.

and really: the original gwen stacy from 616 HATED spider-man for his involvement in her father's death. she went to her grave resenting him. she has the exact same motive harry osborn did when he went villain. it's wild that no one's thought of resurrecting gwen as a villain.

gwen8's only plan all along was to hide the displaced gwens. which isn't enough for gwen b.

she's also in panic mode because taking peter means that the society's going to keep looking for them. peter parker's too valuable to them. she wants him sent back fast, and the others scattered.

peter-73 is not down with this situation.

comics-gwen-65a is a social butterfly. she loves meeting and bonding with alternate gwens.

she also loves dumb puns. hence porker and gwenergy.

recluse is a very obscure spider-hero. it's also a pun on the spider species, and the word literally means 'hermit'

ham's babysitting the kids, like he does in the comics.

and technically gwen8 hasn't been made, since she's covered for by her reputation and her miles.

gwen73 is very much in the vein of gwen616 in terms of characterization. confident, spirited, a little annoying about it, but very endearing.

look using death imagery with the gwens is so much fun.

gwen8 is still ultimately... gwen8. she is the palatable, male-gaze spider-gwen. she's the one who survives by going along with what they ask of her. in a sociocultural sense, she's the woman who plays ball with the patriarchy and sneaks what privileges she can out of it. yeah, you'll survive, but you won't be happy. and you won't be able to protect anyone else from it, including your kids.

gwen8 is so focused on survival that she can't imagine never having to do that.

the entire conflict over whether to hide or disband is a bit of salt about the council of spider-women in the comics.

the council of spider-women: an all-spider-gwen secret society devoted to protecting their own... who don't lift a finger to help anyone else. they sit back and hide out during the inheritor wars, and they haven't been seen since the end of the latour run.

out of universe: the writers forgot about it.

in-universe: they know the other spider-heroes won't do shit to help them, and that cynicism is ingrained deep in the organization.

hey girl i get it. but this fanfic's trying to imagine a happier ending, so we have to defy that.

more salt! about the other meta gwen plots from the comics. currently she's had two back-to-back event miniseries about meeting a group of alternate gwens, where they just repeat the same shit about deserving better, then go right back to the status quo.

look there are a ton of great gwen puns.

>introducing the term 'rotten' to build up to its use in a few pages.

why's the death of gwen stacy the thing that holds the concept of canon together? it takes the most understandable human impulses: longing to be special to someone, to love them, to keep them safe, and it poisons them. it takes that someone, and dehumanizes them. once you accept that someone you love is just a martyr to make your suffering special, all the rest follows.

which means that if you disprove that idea, everything else comes down with it.

and as seen with hobie, peter b, miles, miles 8, ham, peter, on and on it goes-- it is possible to change. you just need to believe it's possible.

(which, meta again: it is possible for spider-gwen to be her own protagonist without having to wall herself off away from the spider-men. she can even fall in love with them without losing her agency. the only reason why she keeps getting shoved in the girlfriend box is because the writers and audience don't realize the girlfriend box doesn't have to exist at all.)

the cosw in canon are absolutely reclusive. here, they aren't. because they can never enact any change unless they let outsiders in.

jess's absence: refusing to go along with miguel's gwendetta is the first indication that the treatment of her can make the society fall apart.

but gwen isn't a wrecking ball. gwen stacy ultimately is not the character that can shatter people's expectations of canon.

what she is, though, is rot. there's something rotten about the way she's treated by canon, and by the people who consume it uncritically. and if enough of it collects, everything falls apart.

callback to earth-138, and the 'i'm not the only one' mantra from atsv. gwen's spent the entire fic learning everything she needs to create an antidote to the society-- she's studied the organization while shadowing miguel, and how to unravel them while spending time with hobie. she's gathered all the motivation, and now she has people to help her do it.

'because they don't see us as people, they won't see this coming'-- callback to chapter 4, when gwen decides to yeet miguel.

'no need to get spider-man involved...' -- callback to chapter 1, and gwen's very first impulse when entering the multiverse.

but they will let him in the room. the goal isn't just to secure their individual survival, it's to make it possible for them to coexist with spider-men as equals.

having to try, and getting back up after they fall, and trying again. bringing that back too.

gwendolyn's expression: callback to the end of 1, and the look hobie gets when he decides to help her.

starting a band

peter73's too much of a spider-man to stay away from his world forever. i figured he'd have to return.

the implication in him handing gwendolyne's hw in is that they're regularly in contact.

and she's a take on gwen616. that girl doesn't miss an assignment.

gwen in chapter 2 desperately wants a gwen to mentor. now she gets one.

in the movie, inside gwen's bass drum, beside her spider-woman gear and that polaroid, is a birthday present from her mother. it's where she keeps her most important possessions, the things that remind her of the people she loves.

gwendolyne was always going to go home, just like gwen does. she stays away to gain the skills she'll need to be able to protect herself if the society shows up again (i think they probably do). and as soon as she's got the hang of it, she's coming back.

anyway in earth-73, an invention for this fic, spider-man and spider-woman are a team. and it's possible for peter and gwendolyne to have a happy ending, or at least to fall apart on their own terms. whether they end up together or not doesn't matter as much as whether they get to exist in the same world. they do.

with the appearance of man-wolf, gwen b's continuity is starting to shift into the mcguire era.

harry woke up offpage after the mcguire run ended. he does here in gwen a's world.

starting a band-- from the bottom of my heart: there's nothing canon-busting or story-redefining about gwen stacy leaping into action for her male love interest. it's far more subversive for her to choose to save herself instead.

also movie gwen being unable to connect to her all-female band and trading them in for a group of mostly-dudes (and two girls who are only there for miles), who she only assembles for the male protagonist she's the love interest of? gag. no. don't like that.

so here, her band is made up of girls, and she assembles it for them.

comics-gwen loves and recognizes the value in all gwens. clones, alternate spider-gwens, ordinary gwen stacys, even villainous versions of her. small nod to that here.

but this fic needed to limit the cast, and keep the scope on spider-gwen specifically. justified in-story as them not wanting to pull civilians into a dangerous situation (and in a broader sense, canon being so trimmed and strict that gwens that aren't the girlfriend at all don't get to exist-- like gwen goblin).

the gwens:

13122: lego gwen! supposedly from an alternate version of legoworld.

17628/marvel spider-man 2017 cartoon: from a cartoon that's disliked by the fandom, this is a gwen who also gets spider-powers, is a geneticist and science nerd who works as a team with peter, miles and anya.

people really hate this cartoon. idk why, it's cute! lampshaded here as gwen8 and the society turning up their noses at it.

spider-witch: there's basically no info on her other than that she exists, is vaguely scarlet witch-adjacent, and is affiliated with evil; she's from a fighting videogame, that's really the best you can hope for with those. but the idea of a gwen-as-reality-witch is cool, extending the olive branch to every single version of themselves no matter how evil is important, and it was funny to me about there being a spider-gwen who's only lurking in the council discord, so to speak. just because she's a gwen doesn't mean she'll play ball with the others.

"we all have a little bit of villain in us" is a quote from the shadow-clones gwen mini.

TRN684/marvel rising cartoon: from a far more low stakes world, being that it's a children's cartoon, but still important. (fun fact: she's why all the new spider-gwens have pink dip-dye; the animators mixed her and gwenpool up and so the design alteration was made) also the second i saw those gliders on her suit i knew i wanted a line about teaching them how to fly.

18157/marvel action: these comics are aimed at a younger readerbase, so i figured making her the most inexperienced (pre-gwendolyne) gwen worked. this gwen's still got a punk/counterculture style, but is primarily a reporter. and this one's friends with her miles and peter. which is what gwen needs to see to finally restart her friendship with miles.

all were chosen for the fic because they have distinct enough personalities or looks (not too many alt-spider gwens do; there's mostly just an indication that she exists), and have something the team could benefit from.

and msm and action gwen were specifically included because i know they're looked down on in the fandom. no elitism about which gwen is better; all of them matter and all of them deserve consideration.

council

the council of spider-women were named before ghost-spider was made her new codename. i'll recontextualize that here as a tactical move: conceal who the council actually are behind the assumption that it could be a bunch of spider-women.

i'm thinking the council structure is in opposition to the society: invite everyone, no matter how 'lame' people find them, everyone votes on action and there's no true leader, no set hq either.

that being said, it's gwen's band. she's the protagonist, she's the one who spearheads the council's creation. if there's an informal leader, it's her.

hq: the suite is gwen8's. the garage is gwen684's. the warehouse is gwen a's. the bullpen is gwen 18157's. the biotech startup is 17628's. the sewer is 457's.

at any rate they're declaring war on the spider-society. they don't want to ensure the survival of all gwens, just a fighting chance. and with canon being shaped the way it is, that can't happen.

the gwens selected for this fic were also chosen for their skillsets. all the most fleshed-out spider-gwens that currently exist just so happen to have the right skillset to form a strike team. whaddya know.

instead of isolating themselves, they enlist allies.

the first is hobie, who loans his place for a meeting and offers genuinely useful advice, (... and stays after to do some non-pg13-rated stuff with gwen b,)--- a callback to 5's distraction conversation.

others include:

gwen's dad, who at this point is the dad of all of them.

gwen a's mary janes, who already know her identity and have helped her with heroing before

peter porker. (the hot dog discourse is hilarious. look it up)

miles, margo (after seeing gwen457 my first thought was 'these two would be great friends') and miles g.

miles-8 and peter-73. two more partners.

aunt may 457 is gwen's crimefighting partner in the cartoon. she's her 'guy in the chair' so to speak.

peter and miles 18157, teenage boys who are gwen's friends and competitors at the bugle.

peter, miles and anya 17628. peter and miles, who are friends and coworkers. anya, who is gwen's girlfriend, because the gwenya vibe in msm17 was off the damn wall.

=all people who care about their gwens and see them as people.

so many people care, they just need to know how to.

they won't win a fight head-on, so making the society so inconvenient thatit starts to implode is their strategy.

miguel's hair going gray: ref to chapter 3, where gwen wonders if her death will amount to a white streak in his hair someday. not quite death, but a ton of mayhem from a ton of gwens will do the job just fine.

weird fact about earth65 technology: all the phones have minesweeper installed. i like to think gwen8's bonding with her son via beating each other's high scores.

peter b can definitely tell something's going on, but he is keeping it to himself.

gummy spider surveillance finally pays off. also it's my way of trying to justify the more omniscient pov-- technically, if you squint, gwen's observing the society goings-on through her gummies.

the brunch club joke is from the comics. not shitty at all there, for what it's worth.

i simply think that detective stacy and spider-guin deserve to kill. that is all.

so. shit's rotting.

the society as an institution is irredeemable, but it's full of good people who are misguided and confused. and realizing how misguided they've been, and how harmful their actions are (so harmful that the ghosts of their dead first loves are trying to destroy them), is triggering an internal breakdown.

web imagery: miguel's portals look like an orb weaver's, so i figure that's his approach to canon-- neat lines that are easy to arrange in a pattern. so he wants the web/multiverse to eventually resemble that concept.

in reality, it's supposed to be messy and chaotic, and being manipulated so heavily is going to yield a violent counterreaction.

gwen doesn't trigger it. she's a gwen. canon can rot because of her, but it won't break open.

she's not the wrecking ball. miles is. he's the one whose creation blew open the doors on the idea that anyone can be spider-man and his story doesn't have to follow peter's.

(... but fwiw, the 'not the only one' section also refers to the spot.)

miles and gwen, together but not together, are what's necessary to break things open.

miles tangent

as stated repeatedly before, one of my goals for this fic was making sure miles still gets his canon arc. i think it's exactly what his character needs, and i don't want to flatten him or assassinate his character and throw him away after shooting gwiles dead. so he's still getting all his atsv development, just at a much slower rate and offpage.

it goes as follows:

may: he joins the society on a trial basis for a month (excused as 'well gwen's obviously an anomaly and yet she got to join, so miguel's clearly persuadable'). his first mission's still mumbattan, but it's really just gwen showing him the ropes; the spot just fell off the face of the earth or some shit, he doesn't show up here. miles spends a month reconnecting with gwen, peni and peter b, befriending pav, hobie, margo as well.

he still learns about the captain death event, but jeff doesn't get his promotion until august, so miles just thinks that his father's death is possible if he becomes captain. thus, he doesn't panic and try to get home to protect him; the threat is distant and it isn't even clear if it'll happen at all.

june: he shoots his shot with gwen and shoots himself in the foot. he avoids the hell out of gwen and hobie, doubles down on his friendships with peni and margo, and starts getting mentored by peter b. he also starts asking about the other mileses because his existential crisis is just beginning, and triggered by gwen: he fully assumes her rejection of him is a rejection of him and not a relationship with him. miles wants to be a great spider-man, and a great spider-man should be able to save his gwen, so he thinks she thinks he's bad at it (cue the dead dad angst). that combined with miguel's reluctance to let him in has him trying to figure out what about him is 'wrong.'

(... which leads to him learning about his anomaly status, and the prowler)

august: dad gets promoted. mumbattan happens-- but it's miles interfering with singh's death just because of dad angst and with zero spot involvement.

then he's suspended. something similar to the hq confrontation, but less severe, because the spot (a nuclear threat to the multiverse) isn't involved. i imagine miguel lays into him in front of everybody, and prepares to fire him, but peter b pulls rank to get it down to an indefinite suspension.

~during his suspension he, margo and peni head to earth 42 to meet his shadow self. as in canon, miles gets his ass kicked by g. and the girl who likes him has to call in friends to help. difference is, now the girl is margo and he went to 42 with her and peni. anyway he and g work it out. and miguel decides not to let him back in over this.

also he and margo get together romantically during this time. i love flowerbyte! good ship! it's what they need and deserve!

in january, he reunites with gwen on earth-73, formally quits the society and has enough closure to fully move on.

may: the spot turns up on his doorstep at the end of the school year as miles weighs how to break some coming-of-age revelations to his parents ('i want to be an artist, not a physicist', 'i have a girlfriend from another dimension now', 'i'm spider-man').

back to the plot

so. the spot turns up after a year of blasting holes in the multiverse, finally ready to get his revenge, and the society wants to stop it. they're spider-people; they want to help.

and they receive concrete proof that they aren't when miguel refuses.

peter b. seems like he was one of miguel's first recruits. and they were, at one point, friends. i figure that's why he keeps sticking around. he has trouble letting go.

jess, in contrast, is here for the mission. she cares about keeping the multiverse safe, and has finally had enough with the society's incompetence.

everyone gathers to protect miles's world, including his mentor, his friends, and gwen, who rallies a band of her own together to do so.

differences being: peter's the one who says 'fuck the society, we need to help him' because i'm salty about him being so hands-off towards this kid he mentored so well in itsv.

and gwen does not start her band for a spider-man; she does it for herself.

but using them to help him is important. it's gwen wanting to save her friend, but it's also all the spider-gwens acting to save a fellow anomaly and affirm his existence and status as the protagonist of his own story. it's that arc of self-definition miles had that their organization now has too: 'you should have the ability to choose your own destiny and not be punished for it too'.

plus stacy's got beef with the spot so it's personal.

the one-two punch of miles and gwen breaks the society: acknowledging that miles and his world matter and deserve to exist, and seeing with their own eyes that turning gwen stacy into an object was unbelievably wrong.

whiplash!

pavitr

this was supposed to be an epilogue, but it got tacked on. forgive me the pov shift.

so. final timeline update: it's been another month. it's june now.

jess is still at it. there is something valuable about the society intervening to send people back to their dimensions before they glitch. only now, the philosophy is more search-and-rescue than policing.

most people don't have portal watches anymore, so transdimensional travel has died down, but it's still around in some capacity.

pav's still hanging out with miles and hobie, albeit not together at the same time.

rotten foundation.

aside from showing the passage of time, it's moody as hell, and it's appropriate theme-wise for pav to be in the society ruins. he needs to humble himself, and to calm down a safe distance away from everything so he can come to the right conclusion.

i like to think hobie drops by the ruins sometimes too. hence the graffiti.

hobie's beheaded his pm and taken a step into his public era as spider-punk, but remains cognizent of the work still to do.

hobie's great at keeping secrets, but dude needs to work on communicating. it's one of his most compelling flaws. if the guy just told miles 'don't join the society, they're gonna hurt you' instead of dancing around it, so much shit could've been avoided. same goes for telling gwen he's working on a bootleg portal watch for her. i figure he keeps things from pav too.

so pav's been out of the loop re: gwen since august. given how things went with him and gwen and all the shit that happened afterwards, i think they were too uncomfortable to approach each other, then things got too busy with the council on gwen's end.

and ultimately, he had to come to her. he wasn't ready to do that until now.

he wants to be friends with her again, and to get that old friend group together and see if they still work, but something else has to come first.

(sidebar: pav came to the spot fight with peter and the society defectors, not gwen. she turned up later.)

he's mad about the mumbattan incident, but he also misses her, and understands why she did what she did. time's given him the perspective he didn't have earlier.

pav's innocence and naivete are some of his most winning qualities. they are also a serious problem, because yes, you shouldn't have to be traumatized to be considered legitimate or mature, but if you never have a hard time, you're not going to be able to empathize with people who are.

ergo, during the past year, pav's screwed up big with gwen (and miles, for that matter). he fundamentally could not understand where they were coming from, and couldn't give them the advice they needed.

he gets that now.

spider-man is a coming-of-age story, and part of growing up is making mistakes, suffering losses, having a hard time. and pav has to grow up at some point, so it's going to start getting harder for him. because he doesn't know what that's like, it's gonna hit especially hard for him.

starting with gayatri. the same old story's playing out, right down to the goblin and the bridge, and pav knows how this goes. and because he spent months convinced he'd be the exception, he did nothing to prevent this from happening.

but now that canon's in pieces, he's able to reevaluate, and let go of all those impulses that cause spider-man to fuck this up: he accepts that he might not be different after all, he might make a mistake, he might not be the right person to help.

in short, he woke up from the 'spider-man gets the girl' dream.

this section is meant to show a spider-man having that revelation.

gwen's appearance: time's marched on, and she's grown up.

(hair tangent: it's longer because time passed and the undercut's complete because she's fully through the door miles first opened. the dye's purple specifically because 1) gwen's original costume wasn't pink. it was purple. as she became more popular, they changed the accent to the Girl Color, which 2)... is the girl color. little girls are socialized to assume they should like pink most. usually, they switch to favoring purple first as they get older and start to question all the trappings of girlhood. gwen, not a girl anymore but not quite an adult, who's done the same. 3) the other spider-gwens who dye their hair all do it in shades of pink. gwen's taking another step towards being something unique. 4) it's the color of carnage's tongue.)

gwen's a step ahead of spider-man. pav's grown enough to be comfortable with that. he's okay with not being as mature as her, because he knows he'll get there at his own pace. and he doesn't want trauma to be what sends him there.

you know shit's bad when pav's hair isn't perfect.

callback to chapter 3: pav doesn't know if things will be different.

he's spider-man. he has to try-- but now he knows that he needs to try something new.

so: he's here to ask gwen to help him save gayatri. closure for him, and closure for her.

gwen hugs him because she does miss him and want that reconciliation.

spider-man catches gwen stacy one last time. then he lets her go, and defers to her judgment. and doing that works.

(i like to think that pav and gayatri will work out. he's bringing her what she needs to save herself, and he's going to let her do it.)

end quote

from jason latour's radioactive spider-gwen. spoken in context by gwen 617, as she (on behalf of the council of spider-women) encourages the watchers (in-universe, and you, the reader) to let gwen 65 develop as her own person, rather than repeating someone else's arc. or existing as someone's girlfriend.

[internetgremlin-writes]

wow wow wow, i read redemption and tbh I was never a fan of the "dom" part of smut but you completely changed my mind omg. I literally love the backstory you gave on Carlos, it added so much to the tension for me and I also absolutely love it when authors make the reader part of the social media team. Idk, maybe that's my new career goal but it literally sounds like so much fun. But I just also wanted to type that before you posted the first chapter of flat spin, I was literally craving any Carlos content bc I had seen it all LMAO. I'm so grateful that you spend your own personal time to writing anything at all, like damn, I wish I could pay you for this omg. Sorry for ranting, I'm just glad that an author loves Carlos too and I'm also in my feelings lol. I wanted to ask, what made you start writing for f1 drivers?? Sending lots of love <3

Okay I'm sorry for making you wait a bit for this I wanted to be able to sit down and give you a proper answer so (also never apologise for ranting at me a long ask/comment is worth EVERYTHING)

Firstly thank you so so SO MUCH for this ask, hearing things like this make me feel so appreciated and valued as a writer it honestly makes me so emotional it's hard to express haha

Also I'm so glad you liked the backstory I went with, the idea hit me when I was in the middle of baking and I was like idk how people will feel but it was so fun to write and yes omg social media team is a very fun role to write. I think because theres a lot of freedom as we don't fully know what goes on behind the scenes??

Okay and then the last bit: what made me start writing for F1?

This is such an interesting question and it comes down to a couple things so I'm gonna try and break it down so it's not a rambling essay lol

So I've always been the kind of person who has a lot going on in my head. I have the "running commentary" voice in my head and paired with an over active imagination it goes a bit nuts sometimes. I often find myself inserting people or characters into my daily life that I find familiar or comforting and just like imagining they're with me or chatting to me etc and I also find myself daydreaming a lot and imagining myself in their universes and how I'd interact/where I'd fit in so most of my fic ideas spring from those moments where I'll be stewing on this one scenario for a while or repeatedly and then I find once I start writing it down it's really easy to start fleshing it out

When I got into F1 it was actually right in the middle of the revision period for my exams and I wasn't initially that interested but I kept getting F1 tiktoks and my dad has followed it since before I was born so it's always been a sort of background constant and I've always known the main names/championship fighters so it kind of came quite naturally. Especially when I started getting the funnier videos of like the radios and interview clips.

And then because I'm me and I'm out of control I started thinking this guy who kept singing Smooth Operator on the radio and making jokes about owning a Golf was kind of funny and because I'm quite good at putting 2+2 together and spiralling with the answer I quickly worked out he was called carlos and he was cute af

So I started reading a couple of carlos/reader fics and slowly getting my head around who the other drivers were and the sport side of it

Anyway that's all background, I started writing Flat Spin during my exams because I was getting really stressed and needed some comfort. The initial idea for it came from hanging out in bed alone and feeling a bit sorry for myself, which turned into "how would carlos comfort someone after a bad race?" And as you can see it spiralled from there. And then because I have an overactive imagination and poor self control by the time I'd done with exams and had a week off I'd accidentally knocked up a plan for a full fic scenario and I was really excited about it

I'm also not gonna lie and say I'm not inspired by other peoples works, I quite often read a fic and then am like wow I love this idea I love this universe and my own takes and ideas kind of blossom and bounce off those

And then Flat Spin blew up and I started getting a flood of new followers/comments/asks/notes etc which was hugely lovely and motivating

Couple that with me becoming fully invested in F1 and realising I'm fond of most of the drivers and also that the setting of the sport and the paddock is so diverse and interesting that there are so many different ways you can explore characters interacting, different jobs and relationships, places all over the world gives SO MUCH versatility and that's really exciting when you have the room to write and explore within a "universe" without things feeling repetitive, boring and recycled it was just a perfect outlet to branch my fanfiction into

I also just love RPF and real world based works over true fantasy. I'm actually in several other fandoms that I don't write for just because I feel they're too complex and I couldn't do it justice

I am aware that was huge so

Tldr; creating comfort content for myself, realising there was a very positive and active audience, the environment and aesthetic of F1 lends itself to so many different opportunities it's so much fun

[topplefromthesky]

Almost Famous review/analysis

NOT professional, just enthusiastic

Almost Famous - 2000 - Cameron Crowe

I find it hilarious how a 15 year old and a 30- something can both fall for a 16 year old and both have a chance or actual involvement with her, like sex, the 30 something had sex for a year with a now 16 year old then 15 year old, this is a problem, it truly is, 1973 or 2000 or 2023 its a problem, al though the movie is set 1973 where this is very likely to had happened, you know drugs, alcohol, rock an roll baby, (with minors all around……. Girl minors(chicks)….fully grown men…. Married!) so anyway I wouldn’t want the movie to sugarcoat the reality that this was(is?,ew), but also not romanticize illegal activities with minors! And grown men!. So… getting that out of the way, I loved the film, the mother was a little too much to be honest, but really loved it. Obviously Penny Lane was the most interesting person there, none of the band were interesting nor appealing, even the kids… even VIC was more interesting, VIC! Honestly I was very surprised how William managed to keep his cool during some of the scenes, you know if you literal dream about being a rock writer and meeting all these musicians and suddenly you got the gig and you’re there, in the same hotel as fucking David Bowie, and you’re just there.. standing there, with a fucking poker face, HOW?! Seriously howwwwww?! Since the whole point of William is that he isn’t cool like they made sure you know that, with that scene where he’s talking on the phone with Lester bangs, he’s definitely not supposed to be cool but the poker face, that was cool, every single time. My favorite besides penny lane, (we’ll get to penny lane I promise).. definitely was the constant battle of everyone deciding to either be who they think they are or who others think they should be, it was funny and relatable, we’ve all been there, and everyone wants the same thing (at least in this movie) to be cool, ….oh to be cool…., more than an actual personality it's just an essence a way in which you move or talk or blink… only if you are cool… which you’re kinda born with, there’s no way to achieve it, that’s why everyone wants it. 

Penny Lane, i don’t know why they just couldn’t have said she was 23 or something, why the fuck would they say she’s 16, and she goes to morroco by herself! At fucking sixteen when everyone else is in school, getting pimples and a job at seven eleven, you can’t even leave the county alone at sixteen. For the sake of my sanity I’m just going to pretend Penny Lane is the same age as Kate Hudson when she played her, which is twenty one. So, anyway, penny lane…. Where to start… honestly you have probably seen a million characters like her, you know, the girl, the girl everyone is fighting so desperately not to fall in love with, oh so hopeless, she’s got it all, the beauty, the brains, the witty commentary with the references you have to google, and of course! Also the abandonment issues, daddy issues, mommy issues, she’s like a miracle you just can’t believe she’s this amazing and this damaged… what's not to love! But honestly she’s sweet and kind and considerate, you know, in the way you wished you were, the kind of way no person that attractive should be, and we all see how amazing she is…… but her, that’s the thing! The thing every writer HAS TO put in…. She is blissfully unaware of her “unique” perfection, she is just so perfectly imperfect, but not in a Disney princess kind of way, ugh no, I mean, we are still talking rock an roll here, obviously she sleeps around, she kisses and flirts, but you know in a cute way, in a “I don’t care” way, in a “you wish” way, either you wish you were her… living your life to its full potential or you wish she was yours. I think it's funny the kinds of names they always and I mean ALWAYS put to these types of characters, penny lane…. That’s easily one of the worst full of charm and personality names I’ve heard, let's go over the list, I mean, Clementine… really… Now there’s actual people naming their daughters clementine and it's all thanks to Michel Gondry, who else.. lets see Ramona flowers, eh kinda normal, there’s like 10 quirky girls named summer, cause it’s just the best, I mean, THE BEST season (hair flip), honestly every Zooey deschanel character deserves a spot, oh i just remembered her actual real name is Lady…. She actually chose to be Penny Lane, Ha! I wonder if lady bird got the inspo, I mean, LADY BIRD, that’s it….I’m done, anyway, loved the film, it literally talked nothing about music and that to me is golden. 

[bri-does-art]

I’ve been wanting to leave a comment on ao3 for Call of the Abyss for awhile now but I am a huuuuuge coward. So I’ll just say it here instead with the safety of anon :P

But this fic is genuinely amazing. I’ve never really liked reading but your story has me hooked. Things don’t feel rushed at all, everything is properly fleshed out and never dragged on. It’s a wonderful combination of comedy and dread as well! I enjoy the writing style and how detailed it is. I adore the banter MC has with Helpy. I love the funny little moments they have with sun as well. And I really appreciate how you give little tibits of info on crewmates even though we probably will never will get to see some of them. Hearing that Jeremy played American Pie (one of my favorite songs) and cherished their guitar just made him seem all the more real. I’m not sure if what I’m saying is making sense. Moving on now, you had me on the edge of my seat when Sun and MC encountered the sickly bunny looking fish dude. I’m guessing they’re supposed to be the glitchtrap of this au? Apologies if I’m wrong. Ether way I was spooked but couldn’t stop reading, I just had to know if the thing would attack them (thank god it didn’t though lol). And noice moons finally made an appearance >:D Though I am pretty curious to know if the whole ship crashing thing now was just part of some big scheme. Usually most fnaf fics will just sum it up to Fazbears just being a crappy company but you went all out with giving the ship crash more depth. Honestly I can’t wait to see more, you’re the reason why I refresh my email on the daily lmao. Keep up the good work

Oh, lovely nonny, I don't understand why you're so scared! Am I that intimidating? :'DD

But, I appreciate you reaching out in a way that fits your comfort level, or else I would have never gotten your wonderful comment! <3 Gosh, I don't even know where to begin, all of it had me staring at my screen with a big ol' smile and/or wiggling happily.

Don't worry, you've made perfect sense! No matter how minor a character is, I like giving them little things that help make them feel a little more alive you know? (Or, well, that they were once alive in the case of most characters in CotA, haha...) Not just a two dimensional caricature, but someone who you could run into in the street, you feel?

Hey, don't apologize, it's fine! I did leave it a little ambiguous and vague (as I do a lot of things in this fic), so don't feel bad for guessing wrong sometimes, it's part of the fun of writing/reading a mystery ;) I love reading all the guesses and speculations my readers make based on the trail of crumbs I'm peppering in the text, it's honestly one of the best parts of writing this fic. The sickly bunny fish person is actually meant to be a Withered Bonnie! But, to be fair to you, there are so many bunnies in FNAF, lmao. Only outnumbered by all the bears 😂 I used to get them all mixed up. I suppose with the description I used, it could easily work as well as a messed up version of Burntrap! But, in the plans I made, it is officially Withered Bonnie!

Oh, we are only beginning to scratch the surface when it comes to the crash... All I can say is, hold on to your hat, nonny. :))

"you’re the reason why I refresh my email on the daily" Oh. Oh no. Listen, I am flattered, truly! But please don't do this to yourself x'D I'm an adult with a full time job, a very slow writer, and I write massive 10k chapters on average, there is always going to be several weeks in between each updates! You're only setting yourself up for repeated disappointment!

Again, thank you so much for your amazing commentary, it made me smile all day while at work, and I think it'll keep making me smile as I work on the next chapter with renewed motivation :D Please, don't be afraid to leave a comment on AO3, you can only make an author's day better~ If not, then my inbox is always open to you, lovely nonny!

[kithtaehyung]

RYEN!!!!!! omg idk what to say i literally tried to take notes because there was so much i wanted to point out but it honestly made no sense at the end so just a few things from off the top of my head;

i cant believe you're starting the break from the main story line IWTH THIISSSSSSSSSSS and leaving us frozen in the hallway with y/n and Jungkook 🧍‍♀️ like bruh 😭

2. omg the way i was being jerked back and forth with emotions and tears and frustration in this chapter lol oh they were soooo frustrating with the push and pull and doubting! Oh the dang doubuting! Like just speak your heart already! However!! it's just so them! Like it's so consistent and well-written with the personality of each character I couldn't stay mad because you were just that good at keeping up with the character traits. Istg you always continue to impress me 💖

3. "When your offer isn’t taken nor refused, you lift your eyes to regard the one person holding your soul in his hands. And give him full reign to destroy it." oh man i held my breath here for a really long time

Anyways, I gotta reread it again for my bedtime story tonight, good night! Thank you for the update! 💕

Omg baby wait it’s totally okay to take notes and throw them at me even if they’re a jumbled mess LMAO I love notes of any kind?? Like that’s so awesome to receive as a writer.

AHHHH the cliffhanger I know🥺 but like people are saying: it’s like a season finale!! Then the writers take a break before heading to work again except the writers room is literally just me hunched over my keyboard in an oversized hoodie🤣

They’re both clearly dealing with past stuff still. It’s hard to really speak what’s on their minds, especially since reader is literally off-limits. Honestly, I’m proud of them for doing what they did because all that shit took so much courage. Very very proud of the level of maturity shown here.

The whole kitchen scene destroys me!! Every time I worked on it my brain was hella burned out so quick because of all the emotions involved. Navigating knowing both sides of the story but only writing from reader’s perspective is tough, let me tell you😮‍💨 but thank you so much for this commentary!! Have fun on the reread and have a good night’s sleep🥺🍊

[casadefreewill]

Daily Fics

(I’d figure I’d just post this even if I didn’t have much commentary for these fics besides mmmm, good, fic make happy brain juices go brrrrrrr. These are still just fics I read throughout the day yesterday and enjoyed)

ATLA

Blue by blacklipscurse (bealeciphers)

Iroh insists they create a new life and identity in Ba Sing Se. Zuko wants nothing more than to bide his time until his next opportunity to return home, until he realizes ‘Lee’ can get away with things Zuko never could.

Zuko dons the mantle of the Blue Spirit again only to lose his focus when the Avatar comes to the city. This time, however, his attention is drawn to the annoying Southern Tribe warrior.

☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★

☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★

ML

Shadow of The Chat by Pearl484

Chat Noir discovers that he has a living Shadow. Unfortunately for him, it is not fond of Ladybug.

Inspired by the prompt: 5 times Character A and B thought they didn’t have anything in common and 1 time they realized how similar they are.

I am absolutely vibing with shadow in this fic. Hell yeah, give Adrien someone who’s 1000% in his corner, who he can’t hide his problems from, and will force it to be everyone else’s problem.

☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★

One Does Not Love Shadows by Keyseeker ( @flightfoot )

One of the nearby statues clattered to the ground. Absently, Adrien catalogued it as one of the things his father had broken in order to sell his akumatization into the Collector, all those years ago.

“Who’s there?!” Father barked, swivelling his head from side-to-side, desperately looking for whatever made the sound. “You are trespassing, and I will personally ensure that the police prosecute you to the full extent—”

“Set him free.”

The hairs on the back of Adrien’s neck prickled. It was quiet, but the emotion in it… it stirred something deep in his chest, something long repressed, kept under wraps lest indulging too much broke him.

-----

Adrien's been kept captive, a prisoner of his amok for the past year.

The arrival of his shadow from another world disrupts his father's hold.

Based off of Pearl484's "Shadow of the Chat" and wackus-bonkus's "one does not love breathing".

☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★

The Clark Kent Effect by deinde_prandium ( @deinde-prandium )

In which Marinette is an oblivious idiot. And may need an eye exam. Pre-reveal, post relationship.

Based on a discussion in the ML Writers Guild discord on the topic: what if Adrien got glasses, and Marinette didn’t recognize him?

Mayhaps there is no magical masking and Marinette is just face blind.

☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★���★☆★

The Five Times They Predicted They Were Going to Get Married and the One Time They (FINALLY) Got Engaged by @sariahsue

Adrinette/ladynoir post reveal. Pretty much what it says on the tin plus an engagement scene that made me tear up.

☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★

Let It Be Enough To Reach The Truth That Lies by Keyseeker ( @flightfoot )

It- it probably wasn’t a secret underground death cult.

There’d be more people around, right? Hooded figures in dark cloaks?

Just his father (and maybe Nathalie?) wouldn’t make for much of a cult.

Yeah! So… so there must be a perfectly normal, reasonable explanation for all of this. He didn’t have the slightest idea what that could be, but he was sure it existed!

They came to a stop in front of the pod.

...it looked entirely too much like a coffin.

He’s not using me as a human sacrifice, he’s not using me as a human sacrifice, HE’S NOT USING ME AS A HUMAN SACRIFICE-

-----------

Fu accidentally drops the Black Cat Miraculous while performing his "test" in front of Collège Françoise Dupont, having arrived too early to run into Adrien, but too late to run into any of the students there.

This changes things.

I’m just vibing enemy/not-enemy au’s lately. Gabriel is just awful in this one.

☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★

The Son of my Enemy by Saccha ( @sacchariwrites )

Cat Noir never wanted to be a villain, but he doesn't have a choice. Ladybug wishes she could save him.

A reverse love square, villain!Cat Noir AU.

HGGGFDSGHDAGFH FAKE ENEMIES BUT SOFT ;v;

[essskel]

I think my point was not as 'fare' to Roche and Ves's character, since they were created in the second game. I was trying to make an argument on how Cdpr's writing is dogshit, so I should show the other example, but in the game where they make their original appearance. Sorry for disturbing you again, english isn't my native language, so it's really hard for me to articulate my thoughts properly. I put more brainpower into sounding smart. But anyways, back to the point.

In tw2, there's one thing that absolutely fucking destroyed my brain with how stupid it is. And that thing - is the genocide of vrans. The devs really said: "The elves are oppressed and all, but we kinda made them too good, we need to make the situation more grey. Hm...UH YES, let's make them guilty of genocide!! They're actually as bad as humans! See, player!! Don't feel too bad for them!"....why, Cdpr, WHY?! Sapkowski shouldn't have sold his books to these morons...

So yeah, I really-really doubt, that Cdpr wanted us to perceive Roche and Ves as some kind of metaphor.

Okay, I hear you, and I'm never going to come on here and defend CDPR's writing as a whole. They treat women like hell, they've tried to equate genocidal military forces with minority freedom fighters (your example with the elves), they've been explicitly racist with the way they framed the Ofieri people in hearts of stone, there's antisemitic tropes used in the added vampire lore from blood and wine, and on and on, sometimes stuff just literally doesn't make sense, I could go on forever.

They're a corporation, they selling a pop culture franchise product, of course it's a mess when it comes to social commentary sometimes.

But there is still a team of professional writers behind it. They're aware of concepts like archetypal characters, mirroring between two story lines or people, theme, metaphor, tone, and social commentary.

continued with sources below:

You mentioned the Bloody Baron in an earlier ask, I agreed with you, I also can't stand his quest. I think it's badly written, it reads way too much as a centrist stance on domestic abuse and that's useless, he'll never be a sympathetic character to me. And yet here's an interview with Paweł Sasko who wrote the quest:

The roots of Family Matters can be traced back to Sasko’s childhood, growing up in a poor village in the Polish mountains. “I saw families destroyed by alcoholism and violence,” he says. “I saw parents fighting with each other and beating their kids, but they were also in love and loyal to their family.”

“The Baron was created as a parallel to Geralt,” says Sasko. “They’re two fathers who have lost their loved ones; two men with blood on their hands; they both have personality issues; they’d do anything for their families.” (Link to full article)

The whole interview is really interesting, I still think it's a bad quest, I think Sasko failed to write the nuanced story that he set out to tell, but regardless, he was trying to tell a story. He considered real life examples, he attempted to created a character parallels, he approached social issues, cultural links, he DID want us to view this character as a metaphor for something, something from his own community and childhood - and I really doubt that he was the only writer at the studio who at least tried for similar depth, or that the Baron was the only side character who was written with similar considerations in mind.

Here's story director Marcin Blacha on the writing choices in the witcher games:

“We want to talk about serious problems, about complex situations, about things that, sometimes, make the player uncomfortable. Choices must then be crafted in such a way that they do not simplify the world, but instead, have the player think and interpret it.” (Source)

Again with this emphasis on more complex levels of storytelling and the inclusion of heavy themes. When they write a character who does something super racist like a militarized hate crime, it's safe to assume that yeah, they're probably trying to address or at least touch on racism here, or misogyny, or nationalism, or something kinder like the difficulties of fatherhood. Maybe you disagree with the way I interpret a certain character or story line - good! normal! - but the writers still intend for us to interpret, to discover our own real word links, to challenge our own views.

Here's a link to a (way too long) presentation by two quest and level designers from CDPR about how they approach narrative and tone in a video game -> If you jump to minute 32, they discuss how even something as benign as choosing where to place food items was done with a narrative in mind, with the intention of enhancing setting, atmosphere, relatability, ect.

There's also a great interview with CDPR writer Karolina Stachyra who talks about how she got hired, why she loves the witcher, how some scenes (specifically in hearts of stone) pay homage to classic polish literature, and she also says: "We make sure to establish [the characters in TW3] as real people, so they are not just there to advance the plot." (source)

I'll stop cause this is getting long, but there's also this interesting interview with writers from TW2.

What I'm trying to say here is, yes, CDPR has a lot of bad writing going on, I'll never defend that, but there is a still a clear attempt at genuine storytelling - a process of narrative, framing, metaphor, ect. I fully expect you or anyone else to disagree with my personal opinions of what a character may stand for, but do you really believe that these characters therefore were meant to stand for nothing? I'm sorry that there's a language barrier here, I hope I'm addressing the core of your ask, but this the best response I can give you right now.

disclaimer: really don't want to excuse any of CDPR's failings either. I'm not saying: aw, but at least they tried, that's better than nothing! And actually, in a lot of cases, the intent makes things worse. When they do something like approach the harsh realities of misogyny in military settings through Ves' character but then just write more misogynistic shit by having her enthusiastically jump into a sexy cutscene with geralt.....yeah now you guys made it WORSE???

[domsaysstuff]

BL Tag Game

Thank you @kpdeek for tagging me!!

Oh god fair warning not only have I not watched a lot of bls, my mind is full of Kinnporsche so it might show up a lot ssksnsk

All time favorite BL character and why:

So it's definitely a tie between Porsche and Kinn, because both of them have a special place in my heart but in so many different ways? Like I once said it before that loving Porsche came naturally like I saw him in the first scene and said "this is my emotional support disaster bisexual and i will love him till i die" but Kinn? The way the show made me fall in love with Kinn alongside Porsche was just ahh, like I love what they did with his character and how soft and caring and goofy he also gets to be with people he cares abt. So yeah it's def between them two.

What's your one character from a BL you wanted to punt into the stratosphere?

That bitch Khai from "Theory of Love" and also Gene from "Lovely Writer"

Like Khai is just walking red flag on its own and through the first half i screamed how i hated him and through the second half of the show i just screamed "YEAH AND THAT'S ON CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR OWN ACTIONS" so like even if there were moments i felt bad for him, like truly he doesn't deserve my sympathy

And Gene oh god I was just so irritated with his character? And idk he just seemed so useless to everything and he was the main character, I don't know he just annoyed me because sometimes the potential was there and then suddenly he was just?? So stripped of his own agency by the plot that it frustrated me

Best music moment from a BL:

Definitely the beach episode one from Bad Buddy, I cried when Pran was singing that song to Pat and it was just overall lovely and bittersweet and everything I needed

A popular het text you'd like to see adapted into a BL:

Ohhh, that's a nice question. I feel like to All the Boys I've loved before would be actually a fun mindless watch bl

A scene from a BL that always makes you laugh:

Definitely the one where Pete, Arm and Pol are gossiping and Arm says that Kinn and Porsche are definitely a thing and Pete gets that look™ on his face, my poor boi

Biggest disappointment:

Lovely Writer. I think the potential was there and it wanted to bring up so many interesting discussions but idk the romance felt kinda flat most of the time for me (except the piano scene at the end, god that piano scene was so lovely and nice??) And some issues that were brought in lacked nuance in how they were represented?? At least I felt like that

What 2 random BL characters would make hilarious exes?

I'm honestly blank at that

Who would be the funniest person to watch a BL in its entirety and which one would you make them watch?

Okay so I can't really settle on like one definite person bc I think it depends on like funny as watch their reaction (bad) vs hear their commentary

Bc if the second then it must be my sister and I would have her sit with me through the whole of "Cutie Pie" because I think the amount of rich people bullshit that is happening there would throw us in laughing fits by itself but even more so when we will add our jokes

Best wardrobe moment or character wardrobe from a BL:

Okay listen I love Tankhun and his outfits, I love the red suit Kinn, I love them, I adore them

But

Vegas and his fucking red velvet shirt own me, LIKE WHERE DID HE FUCKING GET IT, SPILL THE WARDROBE GOSS PLEASE

Like look at him

I don't care abt the rest, like that shirt with that chain keeps me up at night. I want it.

I'm tagging @layvendar @yilingbee and @i-am-church-the-cat

Have fun xx

[davekat-sucks]

Wait but wasn't it stated in the comic that only adults trolls engaged in sexual intercourse to contribute their genetic material to the drones? Wouldn't that make having quadrants younger more akin to saying that you were "dating" your elementary school sweetheart and the only thing you two did was hold hands and kiss sometimes? Were the PQ writers implying otherwise? Just asking for some clarification on the worldbuilding here since i'm a little bit lost btw, I agree with you that they are hypocrites and only made the fandom worse with their "content".

I don't think it is implied that the person would have to be adults to be able to fill the pails. It is not shown here or in book commentaries. All it states is that an Imperial Drone will one day come knocking on your door and ask you to pour the bodily fluids after sexual intercourse with your respective partner. We don't know how frequent these drones do this. Maybe they have a scanner or radar that detects high hormones in trolls and it is a sign that a flushed or pitch romance will go deeper into full body intimacy. Thus, they would target the couple. All trolls know the Imperial Drone exists and they have to be ready to fuck if they don't want to be killed on sight. If they have to wait to be adults, then why is the knowledge of the Imperial Drone known to all trolls of various ages? To instill fear? Then that just gives a push for younger trolls to desperately find a partner quicker and hope that once the intercourse comes and they give their fluids to the drone, they will be spared. There is nothing like marriage in this world, so a troll could have different partners of either quadrants in their lifetime. It just so happens that somewhere in that line, an Imperial Drone will come and the two will have to be close together to not get killed. If there is some problems in the relationship by the time the Drone appears, then they are both dead. That's something most trolls want to avoid. So like two trolls of same age of your imagination could already have started a redrom, but then a drone comes by 3 days later and says to get busy to fill these buckets. They have no choice but to do so, whether they had wanted to do it or not. Maybe the writers were only imply the dating thing and waiting to be adults to fill the pails, as we don't know how frequent the drones would go around. Not even in the base Homestuck webcomic explains this in detail. At best, it would give a bit of reason for Eridan to be fearful of being alone, not being able to fill the quadrants, if that meant not even his high status could save his ass from being killed by a drone one day. Either way, knowing you have to fuck someone to not die is still a terrifying thing and that's what Alternia is all about. I love the fucked up customs and cultures of that alien planet. Now if only the fandom itself learns to embrace that sort of dark side or explore deeper into it. Rebellion is nice and all, but why make it Earth but with grey people when they are already unique with their tyrannical ruling by the Heiress?

[sandsandtheirfanboys]

DID Movies #1: Split

My system and I wanted to watch and react to movies “about DID,” and I thought I would start with the most obvious choice.

Because there was apparently a petition a while back to remove this movie from all major streaming services, I had to rent it on Youtube and thusly pay money for it. Kids, bad examples exist for a reason, and if everyone genuinely thought it was bad enough to banish it from existence, then there’s your good reason for keeping it there as a bad example for people to point to and to use in discussion

Anyway, I know this is a painfully controvertial take, but I didn’t think it was that bad. I could tell the movie was at least trying to work off the new information about DID and to portray it as a relateable struggle. The alters were relateable and were all there for a reason. I desperately wanted Neat Freak Guy (I’m bad at names) to make the leap to get better because he kept going back to the therapist and trying to reach out for help but never made the first step, and it hurt me to watch. I know I’m too nice and tend to see the good in people, but I genuinely wanted Kevin’s system to embrace change.

But yeah it also had some issues to it. Mostly just in the story and presentation.

The movie didn’t feel like a horror/thriller at most times with the drama atmosphere and the bright lighting. It would go from a heartfelt scene in the literary therapy office to the kidnapped girls in a gritty basement screaming, and it felt so jarring at times. And yes though the main character and his system were relateable, they were also very obviously the antagonists of the movie, and no amount of heartfelt scenes was going to change that. I feel like it should have been more of a drama/documentary-type movie to play off those scenes with the therapist and everyone. If it stayed horror, maybe have Casey be a foil to Kevin’s system with her having DID as well. It would make sense considering she rolled very easily with the alters and got close to Hedwig, the child part. It would round out the whole thing and show there are good and bad people with systems

The therapist was a little wacky at times. She was advocating for people with DID and the new information about the conditon, but she had this odd hyper-fixation about the physical aspects (Which are a thing but not to that degree portrayed in the movie) and seeing it as a new form of human evolution. Kevin’s antagonistic alters played off this idea and tried to induce multiplicity in kidnapped teens to give them these “powers” or thusly some kind of cosmic revenge. This was an odd aspect of the plot since, in reality, the kidnapped subjects would have to be toddler age in reality, but that’s too dark to have on film (but not in my personal life lol). It would have made more sense if the therapist was the one who became unhinged and had some people doing these tests on the side or something, and Casey would have been one of them but she already had the condition. But then again, changing the story so the therapist is the antagonist would be harroingly similar to the theories that DID was a made-up disorder brought on by therapists forcing their clients to make up self states. Maybe there’s room for commentary, though?

The Beast is absolutely ridiculous. That’s all I have to say about that. I get it was supposed to represent his father and maybe there were supernatural elements naturally at play in this universe, but the Beast and his sudden appearance and everything was so out of left field.

Random closing notes

The part where Kevin responds to his full name because it was what his mom called him when she was angry was painfully relateable. Also the fact he casually comes back and is like oh isn’t it 2016 now and then has an existential crisis was really relateable to my twin alter who had the same thing happen

It felt like it was at least trying to come from a good place, but having sympatetic character be the antagonist is not how you do it. Even the best writers in the world can’t pull that kind of feat off successfully.

The sequel is superhero trash and is the real mockery of everything, in my opinion. It REALLY plays off the superhero aspect and trust me, I get it. I feel like a superhero with DID. But I also feel like the most unfortunate child alive so

Stay tuned for next time

[theographos]

@vodkafolie

I just saw your reblog passing by, and I feel the need to give you more infos because my edit of my original reblog is not showing on the post you previously reblogged.

My edit is that, I misunderstood the OG post, I thought they were talking about writing in general, not just fictional stories. Because you see, if we take writing in general, we have cases like the french author Gabriel Matzneff who wrote about pedophilia in his books. The problem is that he was openly affirming that his books were auto biographies, he was openly affirming that he did those kind of abuse towards little girls and at not point he was showing any kind of regret for it.

He was never arrested, you can still buy his books, he was even prized for his books even if everyone knew that the pedophilia parts were true. He even did interview on TV admitting that he commited them.

And some of his readers defended him, saying that "love is love" and all sorts of shit like that. And at first this is what I was criticizing. I was like "you cannot tell me that a writer openly talking about his crimes without any remorse is valid". But then the author of the post clearly told me it was only about fiction.

So I edited my original statement, saying that "In terms of fiction with no tangible proof and/or clear statements from the author, you cannot 'not allow' anyone from writing anything. Like the author said in another post, the author doesn't have to be your moral compass."

Now that this is cleared, I still want to address the comment you made about cartoons. Cartoons are not entirely made for children, it is a big misconception that people tend to have as they grow up. Shows like American Dad are cartoons, and personally I wouldn't let any kid watch it without any form of supervising.

Besides that cartoons are sometimes able to make big and good commentaries about relationships, personal issues, traumas and much more (Like Steven Universe, in which the fusions between two gems is a metaphor for sex, or the creation of a relationship between two characters. The metaphor depends of the context and the characters.)

But for the cartoons that are made and advertised towards children, it would be wrong to not take them seriously. Cartoons and TV in general is one of the major influences in a child's life. If that influence is not good, or not thought about enough, it just means that it is not a good influence towards the child.

And if indeed my brain has turned into mush because I interacted too much with "child's content" then can you really blame me ?

I mean I'm not the one who produced and put this show on TV, how was I supposed to guess that this specific program would alter my brain when it has been approved safe for children to watch ?

I'm not personally blaming you for thinking that way, I am more blaming a general thought that "everything that is for children is dumb and lacks of interest". I even thought like that during a time, it was until I discovered Steven Universe and changed my opinion about it.

Thank you for reading my post, I hope you will not feel offended by this post because this is not my intent at all. I'm merely trying to rectify a quiproquo, and since I know a bit about cartoons, I thought I could kill two birds with one stone and rectify the cartoon quiproquo thing.

I invite you to go through my account to see my full discussion with the orignal author of the post (if that interest you of course) like that you will have the whole context.

[bernieanderson]

Year End Book List: 6 Books You Should Read Before January 1st

There are 7 weeks left in 2022.

I know, right?

I’m mildly behind on my reading goal for this year, with 11 more books to go before January 1st to hit my target of 60 books. It shouldn’t be a problem. I have a stack of partially read books on my desk. It will be a matter of getting through them. 

A reading habit is something every person should establish, especially if you’re in a leadership. Even more so if you aspire to leadership.

Of the 49 books I’ve read this year, here are six I commend to you.

If you haven’t read them already, read these six books before year end. It shouldn’t be tough with these particular options. Several are very short. Two are graphic nonfiction (i.e., a comic book that’s not about superheroes). 

You got this.

4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals Author: Oliver Burkeman

I love it when a book about productivity book is suspect of itself. This was an early 2022 read for me and has definitely shaped my year. I did some FeetNotes for this one back in March, if you want a refresher. We have 4000 weeks, give or take. Recognizing this limitation is not bondage. It’s freedom. If I were to tattoo something to my body, it would be the words: Memento mori.  

4000 weeks is a great way to start a new year.  

It could be an excellent way to end one.

Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now Author: Walter Brueggemann

This gives theological underpinnings to Burkeman, which this student of theology finds appealing. The systems of the world are in image-bearers of the corruption it carries. I found Brueggemann’s theology of Sabbath, along with his underlying theology of restoration, to be a glass of cold water. The world says hustle, hustle, and don’t stop the hustle. God says resist. Rest. The way of capitalism is not necessarily the way of God. 

Nothing to See Here Author: Kevin Wilson

This is not my typical fiction genre. But the premise of the book caught my attention: An old school friend calls for help to take care of her two stepchildren, who have the capacity for spontaneous combust. This quirky story is set in my old hometown of Franklin, TN, a fact which also drew me into the story. This story is hysterical, poignant, and a little weird. Which is why I loved it. I give it an R rating for language, if that is an issue for you.

Billionaires: The Lives of the Rich and Powerful Author (and Illustrator): Darryl Cunningham

Quick and easy, and a little disturbing. This is a graphic nonfiction book that documents how Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, and the Koch brothers rose to wealth and power. Spoiler alert: none of them followed the popular narrative of self-made, hard-working, pull-up-by-the-bootstraps rich people. The author does a good job telling the story without a lot of extra commentary. In the end, it affirms my stance: billionaires should not exist.

Steal Like an Artist (10 Anniversary Edition) Author: Austin Kleon

Not gonna lie. I’m an Austin Kleon fanboy. Like Cunningham, he is also a writer/Illustrator. Steal Like an Artist is the first of three books in a series on creativity. I’ve read all of them multiple times. I purchased a hard copy of the 10th Anniversary edition. It’s ten times a better experience than the digital version. My plan is to grab the 10th Anniversary Editions of Show Your Work and Keep Going, as well. I wrote a FeetNote on Steal Like an Artist back in March, as well.

Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control Author: Ryan Holiday

I just finished this one this weekend — and commend it to you for a year-end read. Holiday is a philosopher at heart. This is the second book in an ongoing series on the four Stoic virtues (courage, wisdom, justice, and discipline). This is a quick read, but dense in value. There are good stories and anecdotes. It’s clear that Holiday is a collector of such things. The chapters are short and full of one-liner nuggets. The Stoic stuff may be heavy-handed for some — but I see a lot of Stoic philosophy naturally connected to my own Christian faith. A reminder of the importance of discipline is a fantastic way to finish out a year.

What’s on your reading list for the rest of the year?

You’re doing better than you think. You have more potential than you know.

A good reading list is a solid start. But if you want to up your leadership game this year, you need a person in your life who will challenge your thinking and hold you accountable. A coach can make a significant difference. Look into hiring a Growability® Coach for 2023. I have several coaching slots available. Let me know if you’re interested.

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