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illuminatedcomics · 2 years

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Today I remembered Mad Magic, and I made a LONG post about it. MM ran from November 2017 to May 2020 for a total of nearly 200 pages, my longest comic yet, not only in terms of actual continuous posting, but in development, as I have sketches and art dating back from 2011. Almost ten years of planning and drawing resulted in me having a big burnout that lasted a year and a half. It wasn’t MM fault that happened, and this post is sort of me coming to terms with what went wrong.

While the details and the higher concept shifted and changed multiple times, the heart of this comic always remained the same: there’re two girls, they’re roommates, and they live through a series of comedic horror adventures.

Around early 2017, I combined this first draft with many newer ideas about high concept parody/deconstructions of Harry Potter: “What if a teenage Chosen one enters their adulthood and realizes they can’t top all the stuff they did as a kid?” and “What if one of those wallpaper background bullies that work as henchman for the main rival was the center of the narrative?” To be honest I was never a huge fan of Harry Potter, but still, I was in the right age group to see the movies as a kid, and read a few of the early books, so these concepts intrigued me.

Enter Mad Magic, the story of Joy Kaplan, former Demon Goat (that’s your house Slytherin), who after getting kicked out of school, ends up living a life of expedients, together with sassy Alix Peck, a punk girl that appears normal but has actually a mysterious past.

You know how they tell you “don’t make your first comic your big end all epic magnum opus”? Well, Mad Magic wasn’t technically my first attempt at a webcomic, but it nailed the too big for its own good part. When I finished planning it, it was going to be 17 chapters long (40 to 80 pgs each), with dozens of characters, twists, turns, action scenes, magic, time travel, vampires, elves, doppelgangers, lovecraftian gods, crossovers with other stories of mine, long haul plans a la Once Piece where that one character introduced in one panel in page 4 of chapter 1 was supposed to become the main villain of the story arc of chapter 12…

Considering the series ended after 4 chapters and a quarter, we know something broke down along the way. But what? Well first off MM was a ton of work. I structured the pages in a large euro-comic style, with four rows of panels, that fluctuated between 10 to 20 each, all full color. With a day job, completing a full page could take a couple of days or even a full weekend. So that was tiring, maintaining the schedule ate up a lot of free time, and whenever I missed an update or decided to take a brief hiatus I always regretted it and felt like crap about it.

But the biggest problem was a lack of general fulfillment and this absence was caused by my perceived inability to “find an audience”. There’re plenty of articles online explaining the causes of burnout, and one of the big ones is the problem with “reward”, when you don’t feel like the effort you put into something is worth what you’re getting in return.

There were people reading Mad Magic, there were people that seemed to love Mad Magic, but in my eyes, they were never enough… but what would’ve been “enough” anyway? What magic number would've made it worth it??? Ultimately, this junction between my inability to gather a larger interest, and the presence of this foggy, undescribed “number” of people that would’ve satisfied me caused the wheels to break down. I was letting things like subscriber counts, likes per page, pageviews and reblogs dictate how I perceived my own creation. If a page got fewer likes than average, I started wondering, obsessing what was wrong with it.

The point is, after nearly three years of working on Mad Magic, doing my damnest to put out pages weekly, I was seeing absolutely no growth in reach or audience and I didn’t really know what I was doing wrong or if I was doing anything right in the first place. This stagnation led to stress, which led to losing pleasure in doing the comic in the first place, so that I was forcing myself to make pages, eventually leading to burnout and the complete loss in my desire to draw again. It took me a year and a half to get back into things, a period so nasty and bleak that even the idea of reading a comic made me queasy. The fact that this coincided with the global covid pandemic exacerbated the problems, but I think that even without that, it would’ve simply taken a bit longer to reach the same point of no return. I realize now this mentality was unfair towards the few readers I had, and to myself too. I try not to worry about the idea of “finding an audience” anymore. I make the stuff I make because I want to, if I catch myself thinking “people won’t care about this” I nip it in the bud. I’m lucky enough that I don’t need to draw for a living, and considering artist’s spaces on the web seem to be constantly shrinking, the whole endeavor of finding a following online seems just a headache. I also try not to be bothered by the concept of schedules and updates. I only draw when I want, when I feel like it, and it works. I look at stuff like Toxic Park, one of my current projects: in 2022, I produced around 80 pgs of story in two blocks, when the will and inspiration to do so hit me. That’s roughly the same amount of pages of Mad Magic I made in a similar period 2017/2018, by forcing myself to have at least one page ready every single week. So, the change in schedule or lack thereof, didn’t result in a change in output. Not to mention, that in both cases, I tried to develop other ideas simultaneously, and while with MM coming out that felt like crunching, at my leisure carefree pace I also made a 20 pages historical comic, Theo the Lucky, and nine more shorter comics, which are all around two to three pages worth of story (and you’ve seen posted on this blog). Simply put, I feel like I draw so much more now that I don’t cage myself in a mentality where “I must get this done before this completely imaginary deadline hits”.

I still hold the Mad Magic’s cast dear to my heart, they’re part of a ten year journey. I often try to think of ways of bringing it back, but continuing from the point where I left it off, where things were just starting to get interesting, doesn’t feel right. I may follow Osamu Tezuka’s Star System, where the same characters in personality and design are recontextualized in completely different stories. We’ll see.

Mad Magic is still up on tumblr where it was originally posted! And looking back at it, I think it still holds up relatively well. I lost all passwords and emails relative to that account so I can’t access it, but the entirety of the comic in its uncompleted state (I think some pages might’ve been weirdly flagged during the tumblr porn ban?) can still be read here:

@madmagic-comic

#my comics #webcomics #tldr #wall of text #illuminatedcomics #mad magic #web comics

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citrusella-flugpucker · 11 months

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20 Questions For Fic Writers

Tagged by @novantinuum! Nearly forgot to make the post because I cleared my Firefox session around when I finally updated my install. XP Which is sad because I love a good tag. XD

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

105, though three are tests. The remaining 102 are spread across 7-8 fandoms (depending on how you count spinoffs, though the fic that falls under that purview is one fic tagged with the original and the spinoff so maybe safer to say 7? XD).

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

465,512, though it should be noted I'm listed as an author for Connie Swap's omake collection (which is a standard fic with chapters) in which I wrote 2 of the currently 82 chapters/oneshots present in it. That fic has a total current word count of 223,825, so my personal word count is around/a little more than 241,687.

3. What fandoms do you write for?

(In order of fic count, excluding Testing)

Steven Universe (91 works)

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom (7 works)

Habitica (3 works) -- Feel like noting 2 of these are hard vent fics (current pinned Tumblr post is a good summation of why) and the other is a draft fic that crosses over with (and is also counted in) Steven Universe)

Wreck-It Ralph (1 work)

Infinity Train (1 work)

Holes (book and movie are listed but it's the same fic) (1 work)

Suite Life on Deck (and Suite Life of Zack and Cody since it's the same fic) (1 work)

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

All Steven Universe, and excluding Connie Swap's collection which has more than any listed here

He's Gone (544 kudos)

The President Kisses Babies, and Other White House Briefs (447 kudos)

I Can't Say with Confidence (373 kudos)

Eternity in a Moment (343 kudos)

Change (339 kudos)

Interestingly, three of these are based in the SU Future "worm theory" popularized by (but not originating from) the person who tagged me. XD

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

I want to and make a concerted effort right after a publish, but my likelihood to reply to a comment lowers exponentially the further from publish an update gets. XP I read them all! It's just that unless I find the specific comment really interesting and have a reply to it, after a certain point I just kind of... don't recognize I can do more than read the comment that comes in. Like the idea of replying to it does not cross my mind for reasons I don't fully get? Might be an executive function thing... or maybe I'm just lazy. DX XD

6. What’s the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

He's Gone, without a doubt. It's tagged the way it is for a reason. Technically the extra chapters serve as a little bit of angst ointment but it's originally and intentionally a oneshot (so the extra things are more like deleted scenes, epilogue, sequel vibes). And this oneshot ends in the saddest way possible for all involved. It earned its archive warning.

Branching out of AO3 and over to FFnet for a second, an old Suite Life fic I wrote, Not Worth It (which I'm not linking purely because I'd have a hard time explaining the sort of warnings I'd want to attach if it were on AO3), also ends pretty awful but that's mainly because it was for a "make a strong emotional impact in as few words as possible" contest, and the fastest way to do that is angst, specifically the kind where someone dies and their closest companion feels/sees it coming but is powerless to stop it. (I won the contest by less than one point. ._.)

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

I... don't know???? I have a lot of oneshots that are pretty happy all the way through (or end happily after a pretty mundane conflict). I'm having a really hard time bringing up any specific one that ends especially happily (other than joking my fake fluff fic, "Steven x A Nice Calm Life Please and Thank You™: A Case for the Realization of a Bold New Ship", ends the "happiest" XD).

I would like to say that out of my current incomplete fics (the ones I still consider myself to have a high likelihood of finishing, that being Intelligent, Educated, and Capable of Earning the Children's Trust (Tears of the Kingdom), You Get Proud By Practicing (Steven Universe), and Realism (SU)), I'm imagining endings that feel happier than prior multichapter endings I've written.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

Not really. A long time ago, I got one (1) flame on an FFnet story from someone who was clearly a kid, who was mad I'd written angst (I think this was on Not Worth It, but it could have been on a different Suite Life fic shortly after I discovered how to write angst), but I've been delightfully hate-free.

Closest I've gotten on AO3 has been that one time someone actually complimented He's Gone for its archive warning being relevant to a character they hated. It was clear this person was doing this because I was connected to Discord servers and people who they hated--they had tried to troll a specific Discord server I happened to be in, and they'd by happenstance targeted several people I knew in a different closed-invite Discord server who had posted explicit content to AO3 (leaving them flames for daring to write smut at all, that kind of thing).

Oh, and now that I've typed that, I did forget a handful of commenters came to flame one of my Habitica vent fics back in January/February, but that was because some kid on Roblox Twitter or something decided to spread a falsehood about me abusing disabled children because I told them on a different website (Habitica) that something they were doing could come across as ableist. (AKA I was trying to do the opposite of what they were accusing me of. Also it was a little funny after the initial terror because they were all accusing me of being a nondisabled person (no) who was being awful and unknowledgeable about the disability that I have. XD) Guess I didn't initially think about this one because it had almost nothing to do with the fic itself--they were just trying to find a place away from Habitica's site where they could attack me. XP They probably just searched my name and Habitica and happened to either find AO3 first or for some reason think it was better than coming to my Tumblr or something to do the same thing. XP

This is getting long, but for that last one I'd like to shout out the person who initially came and commented on one of my SU fics for that reason (the only comment from that debacle still up) and then after a confused reply from me, they actually chilled out and explained what they knew about the situation and we parted ways amicably, which is why I have a good idea of where that kid posted about me at all. o.o

TL;DR: Not very much, but that means the few notable instances are REALLY vivid and/or complex. XD

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

...I am a sex-repulsed asexual who is not entirely sure whether or not she's heteroromantic because she's not sure she understands romantic attraction at all, doesn't actively ship very much, and needs help from other people to type out curse words. What do you think? (No. The answer is no. XD)

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

I have three works on AO3 considered to be crossovers: Changes (Suite Life/Wreck-It Ralph), Your No-Good, Dirty-Rotten, Gem-Shattering, Rebellion-Leading Mother (Steven Universe/Holes), and The Forgotten Quests (Steven Universe/Habitica, which is the draft document I mentioned in #3).

From a meta standpoint, the craziest is probably The Forgotten Quests, which is a draft document that was going to be a series of challenges in Habitica's Crystal Gems guild which would have seen Steven visiting Habitica and traveling its lands, visiting each region and either accomplishing something or neutralizing a bad event (i.e. a monster attack or weather event or something)--at some point Lars or Lion was gonna show up, all sorts of fun stuff. But the story as these challenges progressed wasn't particularly zany; rather, what makes this one strange from a meta standpoint was that I was going to try to figure out the logistics of running a script or bot that made the challenges run more like a party quest rather than a traditional challenge structure. The logistics were so hard I didn't figure them out before I lost motivation, stopped coding for Habitica, and then got banned for publicly criticizing staff behavior, so I just... posted the planning doc to AO3.

From a story standpoint, it's absolutely the Holes one--Steven gets sent to a prison camp for delinquent youth because he accidentally shoplifted from a store Kevin's mom owned (something fell in his bag), and then some police officers not from Beach City noticed he was connected to Lars' disappearance (while Lars was still in space) so they decided to try him for it. The events of the SU movie were due to start happening while Steven was in jail.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not on AO3 but someone stole the first chapter of a fic I now no longer have up on FFnet. Got that shut down real quick.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Not to my knowledge.

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

Not truly. I've provided input (I was one of the people the Connie Swap crew consulted with for their episode 16 story, Loud and Clear) and have been credited/listed as a co-author for someone's fic where I suggested exactly one line of the fic but they wrote the rest.

Unless... I guess you could say I co-wrote the exquisite corpse fic(s) I've been part of--that is, I wrote a section in them with little input from another user, and then someone else wrote a following section with little input from me. The only live on AO3 one is The Cluster Halloween Exquisite Corpse 2019, though.

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

I don't... really ship? But I can vibe with Connverse (Connie/Steven, SU), Zelink (Zelda/Link, TOTK), and Jeff/Peedee (SU)? I guess?

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

Probably Rose to the Occasion (I just can't figure out where I want the fic to go), Auto-Injector (I can't get myself to write the ideas I know I have), Lost and Found (I don't know who to focus on), or the Holes one (how do I make the movie happen while Steven's in jail???).

16. What are your writing strengths?

I like to think I'm good at painting a descriptive picture... except when I'm not. XD

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

Microsoft Word 2007 says I regularly write "long sentences". I have since found out Word considers a long sentence anything more than 60 words. So that's fun!

Also I struggle with figuring out endings, especially in multi-chapter plots.

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

I'm not fluent enough in any language with a commonly used written form other than English! So I don't!

I have been known to write in ASL gloss in some drafts, though I don't publish in gloss, because the gloss helps me know how the sentence would be signed by that character if I'd like to describe it in the surrounding prose (I'm reasonably fluent in ASL, though my lack of recent interaction with the deaf community means I'm a bit rusty in practice--but you don't literally live inside a deaf school for a year and complete all your deaf ed classes for your deaf ed + mild intervention major without becoming reasonably fluent).

When I don't do this, it's often because it's less likely that the character in question is signing something mutually intelligible with ASL--for instance, I don't do it in Intelligent, Educated, and Capable of Earning the Children's Trust mostly because while I don't know that I'm comfortable imagining a whole signed conlang from a linguistic standpoint, I know enough in my head about its imaginary origins to be sure it doesn't really look as much like ASL as some other passages of characters signing I've written in the past.

One thing I definitely don't do in any sign language writing I ever do is describe a character's name sign. This isn't because the character in question wouldn't have one or wouldn't assign one to someone else but is instead purely because under US ASL deaf culture rules, it is taboo for me (as a hearing person) to give people name signs. My obedience/observance of this cultural more extends to me writing a character, even if assigning the same rules to that character means that they would be able to assign name signs in-universe. I just can't make myself describe a name sign (either that a character already has or that a character assigns someone else) because it feels like me, the author, creating and assigning a name sign in opposition with that cultural more that says I shouldn't/can't. I feel weird doing it, so I simply don't.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

The Suite Life of Zack and Cody! Way back in 2007 or so! Fic isn't even still up! (It was a crossover with Full House but was more firmly grounded in the TSL side of things, i.e. taking place at the Tipton, focusing on Suite Life characters often, etc.)

20. Favorite fic you’ve ever written?

Hmm... I've really enjoyed the work I've put in on Rose to the Occasion and Intelligent, Educated, and Capable of Earning the Children's Trust. Honorable Mentions to You Get Proud By Practicing (and its soft companion, The Candle Burns Low But Still It Burns), Beach City Zombie Club, Just a Little Something Else Instead, and I'm Supposed to Be Able to Tell.

Tags:

I find I tag people who aren't so interested in doing these things half the time, so I'm including no specific mentions here. Interested in answering these questions? Then do it!

#long post #really long post #SUPER long post

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soukoku-rivals · 3 years

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Author's Note

There are so many things I would love to tell you! But, I decided to keep it short and simple. After all, Rivals is a comic, you're not here to read blocks of text.

I will address what are, in my opinion, most important issues.

1. Why is Fyodor actually alive after chapter 9?

Well, we had an 'in comic' explanation - Chuuya wants to believe Fyodor has some feelings for him after Fyodor intentionally missed all of his vital organs when stabbing him. Dazai tries to be a better person so he cannot simply kill someone who is already tied and defenseless, no matter how much he hates him.

Real life explanation - it was the best choice for the continuity. Rivals is very much an AU when it comes to Chuuya's past and quite possibly Dazai's past [I honestly know nothing about Dazai's past before 15. There might be something mentioned in Stormbringer but I avoid spoilers until we get official English translation]. However, it still takes place after season 2 of the anime and the Dead Apple movie. Which means season 3 comes after.

Basically, if you ignore the 15 episodes, you can imagine season 3 continues after Rivals and Dazai and Chuuya are somewhat dating at that point, which is also why Ranpo found it so easy to outsmart Chuuya. And then, all the events in the anime/canon slowly lead to them finding the Book and the Epilogue.

I know, you have to stretch your imagination a little to make that work, but honestly, it's fun to imagine Soukoku dating while all that stuff is going on.

Obviously, none of that could happen if Fyodor dies, so here you go!

2. Does Chuuya actually have feelings for Fyodor?

Short answer - yes. And it's not only because the author ships Fyoya. [I ship almost all Chuuya/X pairings, most notably Chuuya/Sigma, deal with it.]

As explained in the comic, Fyodor was there when Chuuya had nobody and nothing after he lost his memories. He told Chuuya they were partners and lovers, and Chuuya was his most loyal man. Obviously, that would influence Chuuya's opinion.

We, as readers, outside observers, didn't realle get to see much of their interactions [I couldn't make the chapters that long] but we did see that Fyodor is a manipulative bastard. But it wouldn't fully work if he wasn't gentle at times. As manipulative as Fyodor was, he has also shown compassion and care towards Chuuya in his state. That purposefully missed stabbing at the end only confirmed to Chuuya that Fyodor doesn't actually want him dead. Maybe he wants to hurt him to push him away, like Dazai did all those years ago? To protect him. To make sure the Mafia and Dazai know they aren't working together.

How can Chuuya not appreciate that? After all there was only one person before who hurt him not to actually hurt him but for his protection.

So yeah, Chuuya believes Fyodor has some feelings for him, he believes there might be a good person hiding in the rat, just like there was a good person hiding in Dazai. Dazai and Fyodor were too similar at one point for Chuuya not to develop any feelings for him.

I'm not saying it's healthy or logical. I'm saying this is how it happened.

3. Does Fyodor have feelings for Chuuya?

Short answer - also, surprisingly, yes! I mean, how can you not love Chuuya?

I couldn't really show it clearly in the comic. We already had so many characters and Fyodor/Fyoya weren't the focal point so I couldn't dive to deep. However, here is what I can say now.

At the start, obviously, Fyodor saw Chuuya only as a tool. Chuuya was a powerful weapon, with a powerful ability and most importantly, he served as a great distraction for Dazai.

Fyodor, however, made a mistake when he convinced Chuuya they were lovers. Because that meant he had to spend more time with him than originally planned. And as much as Fyodor hates abilities and believes they are a sin, he could not not notice all Chuuya's good qualities. Even rushing that mission to destroy some building, when he knew it was possible Chuuya wouldn't survive, was mostly because Fyodor wanted to push him away. And to push his feelings away. He knew he was growing fond of Chuuya and if he didn't stop that soon, he might grow some conscience.

Unfortunately for him, it was too late. And thus, we go back again to the train station stabbing. For all intents and purposes, the most beneficial thing for Fyodor to do was to kill Chuuya right there and there. With Chuuya dead he would have been able to leave with Atsushi, find the Book and leave Dazai broken after his love's death and Mafia without its most powerful weapon.

Fyodor just couldn't bring himself to do that.

4. Extra - unused sequel idea.

This has nothing to do with any unexplained plot points but, yeah, there was a sequel idea. A few actually. But let's go with the one that has most sense.

At the train station, after Soukoku leave, only Atsushi stays there to keep an eye on Fyodor while Loki searcher through his memories for the Book.

Unbeknownst to Atsushi, while Locke goes through Fyodor's memories, he finds something very interesting. A memory of Fyodor who looks like he's talking to his mirror reflection but his words are directed at Loki. And with a smile on his face, Fyodor informs Loki that the Book can change reality, he can destroy people and give them life. There is already a person created by the Book. From nothing! So, it is not entirely unbelievable to assume that it could bring somebody to life. Like, let's say, a certain red headed girl.

If Loki helps Fyodor escape, he will be able to bring Hela back to life.

Locke loves his daughter very much, so obviously, he agrees. And instead of lead to season 3 when Fyodor escapes, he get an Agency/Mafia vs Fyodor/Locke story.

This is not happening but it was a nice idea.

And this time, this is really it! There is nothing more left for me to say, Rivals is done!

Thank you so much for reading it, some of you were here for years, some joined only a few month ago, some will find this story in the future, but I thank you all the same! I would have never gotten this far without you. You are all very precious to me. I hope to see you soon, when @kkfil-soukoku starts updating.

And now, for a couple of unrelated announcements:

Merch design is going great. I have all die cut stickers and the second charm already finished, and most of them is already published on Kofi for supporters. Also, the Rivals sticker page is all drafted. Support me on Kofi to view them all and to get an extra sticker with your order: https://ko-fi.com/hayatepl

After Kiss Kiss Fall in <Love3 comic is done, I will be working on an original idea, to be published on Webtoons/Tapas. It's going to be a supernatural adventure story featuring a witch, a warrior and a dragon, set in modern times. For more info when that happens, follow me on @hayateart and @sylvankaart

I also started using twitter again: https://twitter.com/SylvankaArt

And instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sylvankaart/ [Yes, it's all SylvankaArt, I thought it would make it easier to remember. As for tumblr HayateArt blog will remain my fanblog for fanart but all original posts will be published on SylvankaArt.]

#bsd #rivals #soukoku #update #chuuya #dazai

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melodyalanaroster · 3 years

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To answer some Fanfic Questions...

So, this is my response to @broxklynn‘s post... I decided to make this its own post... So that It can be properly answered.

1. How and why did you start to write? Is there some kind of story behind it?

I started writing in general when I was in elementary school... Back when I just had a Platform 9 3/4 journal, not many friends, recess, and a desire to immerse myself in the world of Harry Potter. I enjoyed writing, and even joined the Writer’s Club in High School (but I eventually left to join Anime Club and Divergent Thinking Society). As for writing MCL fanfiction, I began writing Sam’s and Alana’s stories as early as when I first got into the fandom, back in 2013. Alana’s story started out as “A Fresh Start”, had a one shot called “When I Wake”, then turned into “Let The Dawn Be Broken”, and is now “The Melancholy Of Melody Alana Roster”. The final product barely has any hints of the first 3... In fact, Sam’s story, “Fighting Darkness”, has been completely debunked due to what I’ve decided to canonize in “The Melancholy Of Melody Alana Roster”. Writing MCL fanfiction has been a major help in distracting me from the depression that was caused by family issues, severe abuse, Stockholm Syndrome, my mom’s disease and her death, as well as working at several shitty jobs. Writing has helped me escape reality and keep myself sane enough to not be a black hole of hate, anger, and sadness to my friends and boyfriend.

2. What do you struggle the most with your writing?

There are 2 major things I struggle with... 1 is Timing. I often set deadlines for myself that I never meet and it makes me so frustrated that I miss them... There are currently things in my drafts that were meant to be “Holiday Specials” for Valentine’s Day and Halloween 2020 that are still unfinished... It makes me feel like I’m letting my readers down, when its more of me letting myself down... The other thing is Inspiration. Because I hate my job, I often think about Alana’s story in an effort to not be completely consumed by the fact that I do hate my work... Due to that, I often come up with ideas for my story that I think are FANTASTIC for my story... But, by the time I get home, I’m either in too much pain or too tired to write, or I’ve forgotten the ideas...

3. What is your favorite genre to write?

I love writing Romance with a bit of Slice of Life and a hint of Action/Adventure...

4. Slowburn or “Flame”/PWP?

Slow burn any day.

5. How do you overcome writer’s block?

If I absolutely can’t write... I work on other stuff I need to do... Typically, something around the house, or something online I need to do... I also look for cool stuff to add to wish lists... I’ll occasionally play videogames or read comic books... In an effort to subvert writer’s block, I like having multiple chapters in my drafts at once. If I’m not in the mood to work on one chapter, I can work on a different one.

6. What kind of thing you dislike the most, when reading a fanfiction? (for example: particular plot, grammar mistakes)

One thing that makes me upset (and it makes me madder when I do this) is misspelling... Especially when it looks like its almost blatant... You have autocorrect, USE IT! Or when a fanfic is so awful, yet the author acts like their work is a gift from god... I don’t mind a “bad” fanfiction... Hell, the concept of “My Immortal” is so bad that its hilarious... But Fifty Shades did a lot of damage and E.L. James acts like she’s bigger than Jesus... Seriously, she wrote Twilight fanfiction, changed some minor details and names, people who have no knowledge of BDSM ate it up, and she acts like she’s a “Sex and Relationship Guru”...

7. What’s the biggest issue for you, when writing a Beemoov fanfiction?

The biggest issue for me is finding out when to allow for Beemoov’s writing and placement to take place in my story. I don’t like a lot of the events of UL and LL, so I’m often finding myself in a position where I have to watch video playthroughs and go “Okay, how can I omit this character, but keep this scene?”. I’ve had to do that A LOT with Alexy and Rosalaya.... Although, to a certain extent, I’ll often cut their scenes out altogether. I really hate what Beemoov did to them. They were great characters in HSL, but became utter shit in UL and stayed shit in LL. To make up for Beemoov’s writing style, I’ve created my own characters, added in old characters (like Kentin and Armin), added in bits from the manga (like Viktor, Severina and their fathers), and gone off on my own storyline. The Melancholy Of Melody Alana Roster is close to MCL at times, but often veers off onto its own road.

8. Have you ever created a character based on person in real life? (celebrity, someone that you know, etc)

YES!!! A LOT of characters in my story are based on real people! Alana’s step-father, Nate Films, is closely based on Nathan Fillion. A lot of her family members are based on members of my own family, just changed a bit to fit the story. Lynne Roster, Alana’s mom, is what I had always dreamed my own mom would be... Hell, Alana’s cat, Sylvester, is based on my own childhood cat, Luna.

9. How do you feel about your own characters? Do you think of them as your babies or have rather love-hate relationship with them? (And, do you have favorite one?)

I love most of my characters. I do hate 3 in particular... But, you’re supposed to hate, or at least not respect, them... That’s why I poured my hatred into them... Those 3 are Carol, Kai and Azrael. Carol has aspects of my abuser in her. You’ll see more of her when I finally post the HSL related chapters... And understand what I mean... Kai is based on one of my real life cousins that I’ve not been happy with for years (the one who my bf has deemed “the family failure”). You mainly see him in the Cousin Mels chapters, and in the Christmas Special... Azrael is the one who is seen the most in the UL chapters, and she is a main adversary for Alana. She is the one who broke her the most, the one who ended Alana’s relationship with Nathaniel, the one who truly traumatized her. As for ones I love... The one I love the most is Alana... I know, she’s a reflection of me, so that’s kind of vain... But, she’s a part of me. When I do finish her story and am at the point where I need to say “Goodbye”, it will hurt....

10. Enemies-to-lovers or friends/bestfriends-to lovers?

Definitely friends/best friends to lovers. I also like toying with what happens when best friends turn to lovers, but circumstance parts them and one moves on...

11. Is it easy for you to get inside your character’s head? Can you empathize with them? Is there’s some similarities between you and your main character?

It is VERY easy for me to get into Alana’s head... Like I said in #9, she is a reflection of me. She looks and acts like how I’d like to in a lot of situations... Her life is more interesting, traumatized, and more well off than mine... But, she is still me in major ways...

12. Who has been the biggest supporter of your writing?

Definitely my boyfriend. He doesn’t really understand the game itself... But, he likes how happy it makes me and he respects how much of my heart, soul, blood, sweat and tears that I’ve poured into writing my story. He loves listening to me read passages from it to him while I’m working. He gives me advice and his opinion is highly valued... My family knows I’m writing a large story, and have seen some of the images that I’ve gotten commissioned, but they don’t really know or care about the game. They do respect the fact that I am writing. They love the fact that I’m slightly following in my mom’s footsteps in that regard (she wrote 3 books and several poems). My online friends have been very supportive as well! I’m constantly updating them on what I’ve worked on each day in my Discord Server and the words of encouragement always help.

13. How do you handle criticism?

Not well. Due to the abuse and family issues mentioned in #1, for a good amount of my life, I’ve gotten nothing but harsh criticism... So, now that I’m away from all that, at 26 years old, I’m just now getting to a point where I’m starting to take it better... But, I’ve got a long way to go.

14. Do you like giving your characters trauma? Why/why not?

I hate sounding like a sadist... But, I’m going to anyway, so fuck it... Yes. I have done awful things to Alana over the years. In A Fresh Start, she got sexually assaulted and ostracized. In When I Wake, she gets into a car crash, put into a coma, and in her dream state murdered by Francis in front of Nathaniel. In Let The Dawn Be Broken, the plan was for her to end a war. In “The Melancholy of Melody Alana Roster”, her childhood cat dies, her mom gets sick, she gets abused by Carol, her best friends get ripped away from her for a bit, she gets sent to a country halfway around the world alone, she gets assaulted and ultimately turned into a weapon of mass destruction.... I’ve even thought of killing her mom off at one point... But decided against it...

Now, granted, A Fresh Start and Let The Dawn Be Broken never saw completion, but happy endings were planned for them...

I do this, all while giving Alana happy endings in each story because “If Alana can go through utter hell and make it through, then so can I.”... I know, I’m “god” in that regard and I can control how Alana’s life is.... But, the fact that in my writing, she ends up standing tall, happy, with everything she wants, after everything she goes through does make me feel better....

15. Are you proud of yourself? When you look at first piece you wrote and compare it to the latest one?

Yes. If you look at A Fresh Start, you can tell it was written by someone fresh out of High School. There’s no real depth to it. Let The Dawn Be Broken isn’t much better... But, The Melancholy of Melody Alana Roster has become my magnum opus. It is the largest piece I have EVER written, and will probably remain the largest piece I write. I am very proud of what I have created... And when its last word is written, and I am ready to get it made for it’s place on my shelf, I will feel very bittersweet about it... That being said, my original plan for a sequel involving Nathaniel’s and Alana’s daughter, Aurora, has been discarded. I don’t believe Aurora could ever have as much of my heart that her parents do...

And there you have it! Some insight into my world, writing, and history!

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kyndaris · 4 years

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A Single Step and Then Another

Writing is no small feat. Ever since I was bitten by the writing bug, I’ve struggled with keeping projects afloat and maintaining interest in blog management. Before Tumblr, I tried to start a blog twice on Blogspot (now known as Blogger). Much of that came from my desire to track my days. Like keeping a diary or journal. But interesting things were far and few between. The days of my youth largely blurred together and I could hardly find the time to sit down and jot down my thoughts on school or university.

During primary school, when computers were still churlish machines that chugged along at a snail’s pace, I tried my first attempts at writing fanfiction. I didn’t know what it was called at the time, but my curiosity led me to tease out what happened after the Happily Ever After’s that were promised in certain Disney films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As ever, I proved an astute business woman, selling my perfectly printed books that were stapled on one side on the market for $2 a pop.

Alas, the only person that bought my works of genius was my mother.

High school was when I rediscovered my hobby. I was already an avid reader. Writing, while a more difficult challenge, once more sunk its claws into me. As always, I wrote to entertain - imagining daring mercenaries in a fantasy world or anthropomorphic animals clinging to a dying kingdom. Most were inspired by the stories I read and the video games I played. Many of the characters were named after my friends or were poor caricatures.

There were times, however, when I was writing that I wondered if perhaps I was stealing too many tropes from such classics as Eragon and the Fire Emblem franchise. As such, I often hewed and hawed over many of my works. By the end of high school, I deleted the one major story that I had sitting on my FictionPress. Mostly because I had no proper idea of where I wanted the narrative to go. And I was just filling it up with utter nonsense.

Yet the idea of a mercenary and a hidden princess persisted. I tried to use it again in my next writing project. Still, the land of Thlandaris never quite reached my lofty expectations. Changing everyday animals into weird fantasy creatures with fantastical names also didn’t help.

And so my writing stalled once again.

It was not until I began working, however, that I found my way back again to the world of writing. Though I hadn’t opened up a blank Word page in a while (at least for anything other than a university assignment or a job application), ideas aplenty danced and tossed around in my head. That, of course, was when I decided to restart my attempts at keeping a blog. Yes, I knew it would never really transpire into something majorly popular (though the hope remained that one of my many articles would become viral and a newspaper would decide to feature it), but I thought it would assist with my attempts at writing.

The going, however, was slow when I began work on Divided We Fall. The story itself went through three drafts. With the last one being the most complete. And while I would have sorely liked to have edited it, it had taken a good four years to arrive at what I had been hoping for. Even during those gruelling years of crafting the characters of Feryden, Elisander, Kiralt and Lathin (who were based on many of my earlier characters), I was also tempted by starting up a new project. Like many before me, it was easy to simply toss away an idea that was taking too long and do something different.

Despite that, I decided to keep a record of my many ideas for future stories. After all, if I could just finish one, then surely I had accomplished something.

Back to Divided We Fall, I went. And gosh darn it, I finished it in 2018. Along the way, of course, I had written several short stories. And, I had also managed to be consistent with my blog updates. Yes, many were just impressions and reviews of the games I played - but churning out one a week was also nothing to scoff at.

But I still had ideas aplenty filling my head. While I was quite taken with the idea of writing a reinterpretation of Snow White, my dear friend Hayatedragoon convinced me to stick with my first idea. The one that I hoped would be published as a short series of books. The Adventures of Lacet and Idana.

Throughout the writing of my stories, there were many times when I wanted to give up or delete everything that I had written. As with most creative types with a hint of perfectionism, I was my own worst critic. No-one would like my characters, I said! My dialogue is atrocious! The singular starting sentence was not enough to capture the attention of readers!

With time, however, I managed to silence those thoughts (mostly). There are times, still, when I have wondered if it has all been worth the blood and sweat. It isn’t as if I have publishers and agents beating down my door. Nor do I have a thousand followers on FictionPress leaving me with positive reviews of the things I have written.

I will be honest, a part of me yearns for the praise. And my genius to be recognised. But to do so, however, would go against the very reason why I began writing. The reason why I wanted to write was to weave my own tales. To explore the stories of characters that do not usually get the spotlight. While Lacet and Idana follow many tropes that are stereotypical to the fantasy genre, I like to think I’ve subverted a few expectations. Lacet is no wise wizard. Nor is he young (and incredibly hot) upstart mage. He is middle-aged. His hair is balding and he has a bit of a stomach.

Of course, as more chapters of Wild Child are uploaded to my FictionPress, I cannot help but worry if my writing will fall into the trap that so many others have done. Will I have ruined the characters by putting too much of myself into them? Will they all become Mary Sues by the end of it all? Will I overcompensate and so they all become terribly unlikeable?

In other news, I finished editing Monsters Beneath My Bed a couple of months ago as well. Yet I’ve delayed uploading it until I’ve the entirety of Wild Child is up. And before I could even think to rest on my laurels, I began another short story (which is still in progress at time of writing up the blog post) and committed myself to another novel length story. This time, however, the genre is a departure from my usual stomping grounds. Forget fantasy. Let’s try and commit to a modern adventure/ thriller!

Already I am regretting my decision. Nothing seems factually accurate and I fear that my attempt might just be deleted given another month or two.

But I will persist. The key to forging ahead, at least for myself, is to worry not about how perfect the quality of the writing is. That is what the editing process is about. Of course, even after editing, slip-ups can still occur. But by carving out the crude gem can one polish it. Such is the process of writing. And if you think I’m talking out of my arse, well, the first few seconds of Neil Gaiman’s ad for his masterclass in writing also provided the perfect analogy of driving with one headlamp and hoping the editing will make people THINK you knew where the plot was going from the very start.

Getting caught up in the nitty gritty of the perfect prologue (for almost two years) did not allow me to craft the entirety of the story. Nor did it allow me much exploration of the characters and other important facets of the world.

So, for those that are thinking of trying to write their own masterpiece, all I can say is start it as soon as the idea comes. And never waver. Sure, it might not be as good as you hoped, but all of that can be fixed later on. Also, never be afraid to look up synonyms on Google (or a thesaurus).

But what I found helpful as well was to learn by reading widely. I mean, authors were published for a reason, right? Let them inspire you on your own writing journey. And question what you can make better.

#personal blog #writing process

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justfandomwritings · 5 years

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Heroes Get Remembered (Part One - Bucky Barnes)

Pairing: Bucky X Reader (This story is also being published on ff.net with minor edits to be a Bucky X OC fic if you prefer that).

Word Count: 2.7k

Summary: "Heroes get remembered, but legends never die." Bucky read the words, but he couldn't process them. Hero? Legend? Bucky wasn't either of those things. Those words were reserved for generals, warriors, doctors... a little punk from Brooklyn in stripey tights who didn't know when to give up... and a young nurse who threw herself in a warzone to save the ones she loved.

Notes: So a few years ago, I wrote a rough draft of an introduction to a story that I was calling Heroes Get Remembered. I posted that introduction on fanfiction.net.

Only, I decided rather quickly that I didn’t like the writing style I had used on the story, and I rapidly lost interest after that when I couldn’t think of what to do.

Last week, I revisited the idea (last week for obvious reasons), and I decided to give it another go. I’ve updated the original story I posted on fanfiction.net, but since that doesn’t alert people when a chapter’s been replaced or edited, I thought I would post part one here because I want some honest feedback on whether this was an idea worth revisiting and whether it works this time.

November 2014

Steve Rogers had only cried four times in his life. The first time had been when his mother died. For as long as Steve could remember, she had worked in a nursing ward treating tuberculosis patients. Helping those who couldn't help themselves, she used to say. Even after she contracted the disease, she tried to help those who stood a better chance than herself. It was Bucky who'd been the one to give him the news when she died, and he cried. How long, he couldn't remember; but he remembered picking himself up and putting on a brave face. He remembered walking to the funeral and smiling pleasantly as he shook hands with those who wished him well. He remembered pretending to be fine until eventually he was.

The second time was worse. When Bucky died, or when he thought he'd died. Unlike his mother, Steve had watched Bucky go. He'd been so close. A second more and he could have saved him. An inch longer reach and Bucky would have been fine. His mother died of disease, but Bucky died under His command, in His unit, on His mission, before His very eyes. Steve blamed himself for a very long time. Part of him still did. His crying over Bucky hadn't truly stopped until he plunged into the ice. There was no pretending to be fine when you watched your best friend die, when you were constantly thinking of all the things you could have done to save him.

The third time he'd cried was when they pulled him out of the ice. When they'd thawed him out and introduced him to this new world, this new future, and he realized just how much more he had to lose. He thought he'd lost everything the day he'd lost Bucky, but clearly he'd been wrong. Nick Fury had given him a brief rundown of the last seventy years that lasted all of thirty minutes before dropping him off in an apartment across town. The moment the door closed and he found himself alone, Steve collapsed into sobs. Everyone he'd ever known was dead; everything he'd ever known was gone. He was truly, truly alone. He had nothing and no one.

At least, that's what he'd thought. The fourth time Steve cried was when he realized that was wrong. The night after he'd ripped off the Winter Soldier's mask and seen his old friend. The night after the Winter Soldier had asked him, "Who's Bucky?". It was like losing him all over again. It was like losing everything all over again.

No, it was worse. Before that moment, Steve had no one, nothing. He had no hope, and he was forced to move on. Now, there was something. He was clinging to it like it was his lifeline, and though it may never float he would sink or swim with this one idea. Some part of his past, some part of Bucky, was alive, and he was going to find it or die trying.

"Cap," Sam interrupted the soldier's train of thought, joining the soldier in the living room. His tone was hesitant, probing. "You okay?"

Steve chuckled, still a little dazed. "Do I look okay?"

"No," Sam dropped down into a plush armchair across from Steve and leaned forward on his knees. "You look like hell, which is still probably twice as good as you're feeling."

Steve's gaze fell to the floor. Sam was right; he felt awful. He didn't sleep; he didn't eat. Most days, Steve felt like he didn't really breath either. It wasn't just the physical exhaustion. It was the sheer emotional desperation. Steve was feeling utterly useless, yet he wouldn't stop. He couldn't stop. Even if all hope was lost, Steve had to keep searching. They could have laid Bucky's dead body at his feet, and Steve would have stepped over it with a simple "I thought he was dead once" and kept looking. Bucky never gave up on Steve, and Steve would never give up on Bucky. If he gave up on Bucky, he might as well give up on everything.

"Hey," Sam leaned forward and clapped the Captain firmly on the shoulder. "We knew this wasn't going to be easy. We just have to keep trying."

Sam definitely understood, more than most. He knew the lengths he himself would go to if he found out Riley was still alive. They hadn't even reached that point yet. Let alone what Sam imagined if he added in childhood best friends and his only tie to his real home. A guy like Steve, Sam wouldn't blame him for moving the world to bring his friend home.

"I just…" Steve looked up, eyes so bleary from lack of sleep that he couldn't quite see straight. "I just want to understand. He remembered. I saw it in his eyes. He remembered me. So why is he running from me? Why is he going to…" Steve waved his hand at the map. The map sat on the table in the corner, a permanent fixture of the room since SHIELD had fallen. "To these places. It doesn't make any sense."

They'd both been wondering that. Sam eyed the offending paper suspiciously. It was massive, covering the entire length of the dining table in the Avengers' apartment. Even from the other side of the room, Sam could see every detail, not that he needed the reminder. Steve and Sam had spent hours upon hours pouring over the damn thing trying to find some rhyme or reason to it but getting absolutely nowhere. The map was peppered in tiny little x's: a few each in America, Russia, Europe, one each in Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Egypt. They knew exactly where he'd been, but they had no idea why and no idea where he was going.

"I don't know Steve," Sam sighed and slumped back. "Maybe he's… going back to what he remembers, or maybe looking for something." Neither was a new idea; Sam was really only trying to fill the air. They'd discussed both possibilities before. They discussed every possibility before, and none seemed to fit.

The Hydra files Natasha had leaked gave a detailed timeline of the Winter Soldier's activities, even though they weren't always documented by name. The Soldier had been making and changing history since Steve had gone under the ice. Assassinations, saves, fires, rebellions. He seemed to have a hand in everything that had led up to this moment, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. He had shaped the decades Steve had missed and made the world he saw today.

The x's on the map weren't his missions. There were seemingly too many of those to count. Stark had made a list and tried to show it to Steve, tried to make him see the soldier he was hunting rather than the old friend he wanted to find. Steve was having none of it. Every time someone brought up what the Winter Soldier had done, Steve had walked away. His friend wouldn't do those things, and when he first laid eyes on the Winter Soldier he hadn't seen his friend. He did eventually though. As the Helicarrier fell, he finally saw Bucky, and he was determined to see him again. He only wanted to find him, his last piece of home. He had no interest in the Winter Soldier, no interest in Hydra's ultimate weapon. He had no interest in what the Winter Soldier had done, and he wasn't going to subject himself to thinking about it.

The x's were sightings. All around the world people claimed to see the Winter Soldier, and Steve exhausted himself investigating every last one. A week after the collapse of SHIELD there had been nearly fifty, and eventually he'd managed to confirm four.

He hadn't been sure at first, but when he saw the fifth one he knew what was happening. Four empty Hydra bases, abandoned sometime before SHIELD but Steve couldn't be sure when, and each of them had been trashed. The first was a storage facility, hard copies of documents that were too sensitive to be committed to digital memory. Every drawer had been opened, every file torn apart, every desk ransacked. The second was a recruiting office in a similar state followed by two armories, but the fifth was the worst.

The fifth sighting was what led Steve to confirm the previous four. It had taken him deep into the mountains in Russia. A fully active Hydra lab. Its location was buried deep in the lists Nat had published, but no government had gotten around to checking it out until Steve heard whispers the Soldier had been there. Steve and Sam hopped on one of Tony's jets that night, but by the time they got there he was gone. Everything was gone.

For some reason, the place was entirely destroyed. The site was still smoldering when they arrived; anything that hadn't been personally destroyed had been engulfed in flames. There weren't even remnants of a clue as to what was going on in that building. The charred desks stood ajar. File cabinets were all empty. Every liquid, compound, and vile in the facility had been smashed on the floor and evaporated in the heat. What few computers remained had all had their memory stolen. All the lab's complex machinery was broken down to its most basic parts; nuts and bolts and bits of metal that even Tony Stark couldn't piece together as anything worth destroying.

All that was left to remember it were four bodies scattered outside. They were presumed to be the scientists manning the facility, but there was nothing to identify them by. Their prints were all scared or removed. Their teeth knocked in. Their bodies left to the elements, the snow and wind and animals, so long that their faces were unrecognizable. DNA had been the only hope, and nothing had come close to a match. Whoever they were, they were ghosts, and someone wanted to make sure they stayed that way.

It was then that Steve had realized it was Bucky, or at least the Winter Soldier with whatever was left of his friend. While Steve was on a mission to find him, he was on a mission of his own. To do what? For who? Why? Steve didn't know, but Bucky wasn't just hitting random Hydra facilities. He was up to something, and he didn't want anyone, Shield or Hydra or the Avengers, to know what it was.

Six more sightings followed mirroring the first four, and Steve and Sam were forced to resign themselves to collecting whatever was salvageable to bring back to New York for analysis. Stark had helped, but even then they'd found nothing. Whatever his mission was, Bucky had done a good job of hiding it. Sam and Steve had no idea what to do or where to go.

"Well, well, well, my fine feathered friend," Steve and Sam jolted up as Tony Stark came sauntering into the Avengers' apartments. He was flanked by Natasha and Bruce, who both looked just as unamused as Steve felt. "Close but no cigar."

"You have something?" Sam said it in a tone he only hoped would convey how much he really was not in the mood for the billionaire's usual attitude. He'd just spent the last 36 hours helping Steve loot through an abandoned science lab in the Czech Republic, and all they'd turned up were paper copies of drug inventories and a broken computer. Sam wanted a nap… a twelve-hour nap… and some food.

"Not something," Tony pointed out, whipping out the folder behind his back and waving it like he'd won some kind of prize, "Someone."

"Pardon?" Steve half-heartedly prompted.

The three newcomers wandered over to join them, and Tony dropped the folder in Sam's lap as he passed. "He's not looking for something. He's looking for someone."

"How do you know this?" That finally got the Captain sitting up a little straighter in his seat.

"Never," Tony poked at him, "tell me I can't fix something."

Sam flipped open the folder in his lap and started scanning the title page. "You got this off that old piece of junk we brought in today?"

"Yep," Tony responded smugly. "Just took a little digging. It wasn't actually in that bad of shape. Your best buddy took great care to wipe it of all the important things, but it just made it pretty obvious what I needed to be looking for when I opened it up."

"So he's after someone then," Steve mused and concentrated thinking. "An old Hydra agent? One of their scientists?"

Sam blanched as he turned the page in the file. "Oh, he's not after just anyone…" He set the file down and slid it across to Steve. "And she's definitely not a Hydra agent."

Steve bent down to pick up the file, but before his fingers could even scoop it up his eyes caught the picture in the corner.

Why did the room suddenly get so hot? Was it just him? His hand hung limp an inch above the paper, and it was shaking uncontrollably fast. There was a burning feeling in his chest, and he could practically feel his body rushing with sudden adrenaline.

In the distance, barely registering at the back of Steve's consciousness, he heard Tony asking Sam. "You know her?"

No, he wanted to say, but he couldn't form the word. Sam didn't know her. Steve had thought he never would. She was a world away, a lifetime away.

With trembling fingers, Steve reached into the pocket of his jacket for the picture he carried with him at all times. It was black and white and 70 years old, but Steve remembered every colorful detail like it was yesterday. It was the happiest day of Steve's life.

In the left of the frame was Bucky, the old Bucky. Before the Winter Soldier, before the metal arm, before Hydra, before the war. He was the Bucky girls would throw themselves on their knees in front of begging for a dance. He was the Bucky guys looked on with envy as he raised his fist and bounced around the boxing ring in triumph. Everyone loved Bucky; everyone wanted to be Bucky. Even in the photo, he was cracking everyone up with another joke. The smile on his face back then could light up any room he walked into. He looked happy, healthy. He was the Bucky Steve remembered.

To the right was Steve, pre-serum Steve. He looked like a different person; he'd felt like a different person. He was short and very thin. He looked sickly and pale, but he was laughing, Bucky's doing. Girls didn't fawn over him back then the way they had with Bucky, or Steve after. Guys didn't give him a second glance except to try to beat him into submission. That Steve only had one friend, and yet it was as content as Steve ever remembered being. He had everything he'd ever wanted and needed. He was happy.

There, in the middle, between Bucky and Steve was a girl. She was about the same height as Steve. Her hair fell loose around her face in long curls that he remembered to be blonde. Her arms were thrown haphazardly around both boys, and the photo was taken with her mouth smiling wide at Bucky's joke. Her eyes squinted with humor, but Steve could still see the bright twinkle behind her lashes. She was beautiful, more beautiful than the girls who fell at Bucky's feet or threw a cold shoulder Steve's direction. She was a true diamond in the rough. People flocked to her like moths to a flame. It was as much her heart and her spirit as her looks. She was the purest, kindest soul Steve had met in any generation. When she walked into a room, people turned. Her presence demanded attention, respect. People often questioned if even Bucky, with all his looks and charm and talents, was worthy of a girl like her.

"Who is she then?" Tony asked Sam.

Steve dropped the picture from his hand down next to the one in the file and slid it back to Stark. "He's looking for my sister."

That night was the fifth time Steve Rogers cried.

#bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes imagine #bucky barnes x reader #winter soldier fanfiction #winter soldier imagine #the winter soldier imagine #winter soldier x reader #the winter soldier fanfiction #avengers imagines #avengers imagine #avenger imagine #avengers fanfiction #captain america imagine #captain america fanfiction #bucky #bucky barnes #marvel fanfiction #marvel imagine

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mintgator · 5 years

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MDZS fic ideas

Things I’d love to see in Mo Doa Zu Shi fanfiction. These are my notes for things I have told myself I am not allowed to write. I’ve read...so many fics for this fandom, like most of the archive, and I’m sad that I’m pretty much at the point of rereading/waiting for updates. These ideas have been swimming around in my head that I have no time to write, so PLEASE someone take them and gimme some new words to read, I beg you. Of course, end goal should be wangxian in some way, because otherwise WHAT IS THE POINT, but I don’t have time to write these, so...here you go. Please let me know if you use them. I wanna read these, but I don’t have time to write them, so maybe someone else will want to.

*Time Travel AU in which WWX goes back and for some reason tells Madame Yu all the bullshit that’s gonna happen, so they team up and fix all the things. I just...really want Mama Yu to like WWX thanks. And dear god, LET JC BE HAPPY! I need so much more resolution on that front. Even the book did not satisfy me. I WANT MY BOYS TO GET ALONG! And I want Mama Yu to not be awful and abusive to WWX! I mean she had reasons for being salty but uh that is NOT good justification for the shit she pulled with WWX. Also, hell, let Jiang Fengmian get his core melted and have Madame Yu run the sect. WE NEED FEMALE REP.

*Cangse Sanren and Wei Changze live so WWX gets to grow up with his parents. He meets LWJ as a rogue cultivator or something idk. This would make a fun oneshot.

*LWJ’s mother lives! Honestly, I just want happy Lan-fam. Can I get that please? Just how much would it change the dynamic of the story if LWJ’s father led the sect properly and his mother wasn’t locked away in a goddamn building and actually got to spend more time with her kids? I am forever salty that we’ll never know why Mama Lan killed her hubby’s teacher or w/e. Somebody GIVE ME SOME REASONING.

*WWX gets taken in and claimed as heir by Wen Ruohan...and WWX doesn’t learn that their ways are wrong until he’s at least a teen (perhaps when sent to train at the Cloud Recesses?) and realizes how the other Sects really feel about them. Give him some convoluted morals that he has to unlearn. Make Wen Xu and Wen Chao hate him for being chosen over them. Change Wei Wuxian/Wei Ying into Wen Ying/Wen Wuxian and have it be a secret that he’s not actually a Wen. Have WWX actually not want the Wen Sect destroyed because despite how messed up its people are, not all of them are bad--mostly just those in power (it still baffles me that the other clans just DESTROYED an entire sect, like I know the Wens burned Lotus Pier but DAMN that’s cold!) Even some kind of variation where WWX influences Wen Ruohan and his children’s evil mindset would be really interesting. Otherwise, can you imagine WWX with Chenqing on the Wen side? Ouch. Also, this sticks WWX with Wen Ning and Wen Qing early on and I LOVE THEM, so there’s that.

*WWX doesn’t come back after his first death, and LWJ achieves immortality because he’s stubbornly still looking/waiting for WWX. Two centuries pass (we’re going to ignore any technological advancements and replace them with cultivation advancements or something) and LWJ ends up befriending a nice lady cultivator who falls for him, and even though he only considers her a friend, he agrees to marry her. They have 1 very stubborn gay daughter (only from consummation sex which brings up a boatload of other problems) who somehow stumbles across a reborn!WWX with all his memories--daughter is hella bitter that her father clearly does not return her mother’s affections and that he is apparently pining for someone who is so long dead that people don’t actually remember his name (ie - people remember Yiling Laozu but not that his name was Wei Wuxian). But without knowing who he is, the daughter ends up liking WWX until she finds out the truth about who he is and drama ensues. Can you tell I’ve wanted to write this one so badly? I mean I could just about draft an outline, but I HAVE TO FOCUS ON MY ORIGINAL NOVEL I’M SORRY.

*Time Travel AU in which Yanli alone gets a do-over with all the future knowledge and fixes everything just by being her amazing self. I feel like she’d be a really keen manipulator.

*The story from NHS’s pov. I wanna read all his manipulations and him putting them into place. Is there anything like this out there? Because oh my GOD I wanna know what’s going through his head sometimes. I really, really do!

*Jiang Cheng/Wen Ning - AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO THINKS THIS WOULD BE AN ENTERTAINING SHIP? Just...I sort of tolerate the JC/LXC and JC/NHS pairings because they’re commonly used, but honestly, I’m not crazy about either one. However, WN is such a sweetheart and JC is such a hothead and there is so much opportunity for drama there. Also, in some cases depending on timeline...WN is, yunno, a corpse--a fixable thing if you weave in WWX’s involvement and make him and JC get along again. GIVE ME THAT. Like I don’t read much other than wangxian focused fic, but I would read the hell out of this (also you could easily balance those two pairings).

*Somewhere in the waiting gap, LWJ is given three tasks by a deity of some sort who promises to bring WWX back if he completes him...but these tasks have to UTTERLY go against LWJ’s character and completely destroy his reputation as Hanguang Jun. Honestly, this could go cracky or painfully dark.

*No idea how, but Mo Xuanyu manages to bring WWX back fully in-tact and they both get to live. WWX of course takes MXY under his wing, and together they avoid the notice of even LWJ for a lot longer than WWX did in canon. I would love to see them figuring out the whole JGY plot in the background and LWJ tailing them around just a little too late to the party each time a major event goes down until finding out in some kind of dramatic finale that WWX has been back for a while. I have yet to see characterization for MXY that I really like. Most people make him either ridiculously whiny or so much like WWX that they may as well be the same character. :/ So, uh, maybe a different approach? I mean MXY is allowed some complaints, he’s had a rough time of things, but come ON.

*Lan Wanji never finds Wen Yuan and poor widdle Shizui manages to survive into adolescence living on his own in the burial mounds...accompanied by the fragmented ghost of his Xian-gege who very slowly is pieced back together by A-Yuan, who has sort of naturally started using demonic cultivation and somehow develops a heroic reputation as a rogue cultivator. Why? Because he’s Shizui, and Shizui is SO PURE OK? Maybe he has a fascination with LWJ, even though his memories of Rich Gege are kind of fuzzy. Shizui matchmakes his two ridiculous dads. Oh and inquiry doesn’t work on WWX cuz his soul is shrouded by the resentful energy in the burial mounds.

*The Wen clan burns the Cloud Recesses to the ground around the same time WWX has lost his parents, but LWJ somehow escapes. Reportedly, everyone in GusuLan is now dead, but he somehow ends up in the same town as WWX. They meet and bond immediately. Maybe LWJ saves WWX from the dogs. Anyway, JFM never finds WWX, so he and LWJ grow up together in poverty, eventually teaching themselves cultivation and night hunting, until their fame grows so much that they catch the attention of the Wen clan (or something). Have them ridiculously dedicated to each other, already in love and thinking of themselves as cultivation partners. I want their bond to straight-up shock people. LET THEM BE SHAMELESS. LWJ would have to have a fake name and wear something other than white.

*LWJ and WWX figure out their relationship stuff a lot sooner and end up building a proper sect in the burial mounds. I want LWJ wearing WWX’s colors. I want demonic cultivation to work hand-in-hand with regular cultivation. I want them to find artifacts or books or something in the burial mounds indicating a civilization used to be there that also studied demonic cultivation, or maybe they actually find some long forgotten god/dess of demonic cultivation who empowers them in exchange for worship.

*LWJ was not whipped for protecting WWX, he was imprisoned for life, not in GusuLan, but in some godforsaken prison that is so intense no one in the clans really likes to talk about it. I want him flung into some hellprison with ghosts and demons, where only his cultivation keeps him alive (and relatively sane) for that decade-ish gap until WWX’s fragmented ghost somehow finds him. Of course, WWX realizes LWJ loves him, which triggers in WWX a want to finally come back to life. He finds a way back to the living world and rains hell upon the people who decided it was a good idea to imprison LWJ until someone finally tells him how to get to the prison. He frees LWJ and helps him recover while all the JGY stuff is going on the background. Wangxian returns to the cultivation world in time to stop that catastrophe. (Before LWJ is imprisoned, he makes LXC promise to take care of A-Yuan of course!)

*WWX gets flung into the burial mounds and embraces demonic cultivation, but realizes he has somehow bound himself to the awful place and can’t leave. Over time, he lures stragglers and refugees to the mounds, where he welcomes them to stay and live safely. Outside, the Sunshot Campaign is a failure and what remains of the sects bow in subservience to the Wen clan. Inflicted with some permanent disabilities from the war and left to run GusuLan now that his brother and uncle are dead (sorry Xichen), Lan Wanji never gets the chance to go looking for WWX. Thirteen years pass and WWX has absorbed so much resentful energy from the burial mounds that he is practically a part of it. Finally, he is able to leave, but the world he finds is much different from the one he remembers, and his health fades fast when he is outside of the mounds. Somehow, WWX figures out that demonic cultivation doesn’t damage the body/soul/temperament if somehow counterbalanced properly with a golden core--and since he doesn’t have one, he and LWJ do a soulbond thing so that their cores (WWX: demonic and LWJ: golden) balance each other. Then he can take on the Wens.

I could literally whip out ideas nonstop, but these are the big ones that have been just...beating on the walls of skull trying to get out. Of course, they don’t always account for everything, so more thought is needed. Anyway, if you write any of these, please let me know so I can read them, and of course a shoutout would be nice. c: My username on ao3 is the same as here. Enjoy~!

#mdzs #mo dao zu shi #the untamed #wangxian #fic #fanfic #ideas

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theguardianangel-fanfiction · 4 years

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Current Progress/Life Update

Maybe I should do one of these each week for those of you who are here for my writing (I’m sure one or two of you are just here for the memes and I think one person is here for my personality).

So for OBTD’s rewrite, my current plan is to split it into three separate fics that will be tied together with a series. The series is going to be called No Shepherd To Guide You. The first fic, which I’m currently working on putting into place, rewriting (like, legit, typing up and changing a lot of) the early chapters and setting up some plot points that I really wanted to explore, like the whole Mike-Ralph thing and “What happened to Christa?” and some other stuff. I’m wading through a lot of confirmed deleted content and plot points, trying to get OCs straight (obviously, I’ve gotten criticism before, but I’ve tagged everything now and at this point, maybe don’t read if you just don’t like OCs in the background or even in supporting roles once or twice?), and trying to figure out a good way to tie everything together with a pretty bow. This fic is not nor has it ever been my intention to be compliant with seasons 3 and 4; not because I don’t like them (I love the season 3 characters, just not the plot) but because I started writing this fic in 2016 when neither of those seasons were out.

The first fic in the series is Lambs To The Slaughter; this is the one I’m currently writing, and it will take us until the end of my arc with Howe’s. The sequel will be called Elysian Fields, and number 3, if I get there, will be Burning Daylight.

You can scroll down if you don’t care about my personal life, but here’s a life update for anyone curious. I just finished my semester in college about a week ago and I’ve been having some issues related to that; it’s difficult to get out of the “oh my God I have to this this and this” headspace and I’ve developed some nervous tics that I don’t think are going to go away any time soon (restless legs, constant twitching, the works). My panic attacks have kind of increased since about October, but I’ve been keeping a diary of them and I plan to get help when I can.

I’m still furloughed from the pet store and I’m debating quiting once my furlough is lifted (if it indeed is) and trying to find a second vet hospital to work at (now that I have my foot in the door) as I finish off at community college. I only have four classes left before I graduate with my associate’s degree, but it’s two chemistry’s, a math, and physics, so pray for my ass lmao.

Now for the story progress:

Once Bitten, Twice Dead - planned chapter 32 and I have several thousand words written for it, but I think I’m probably going to be waiting for the publishing of Lambs To The Slaughter and we’ll how we go from there.

Lambs To The Slaughter - written chapters 1-3 and vastly changed what once was the beginning of OBTD to include Christa’s fate, the whole Mike-Ralph thing, and some other stuff related to that. - chapter 4 is not finished but it’s getting there. Chapters will be a lot longer than my early OBTD chapters were (which they really only were because when I was 15 and writing them, I wanted to do a weekly release, which is no longer feasible due to me at 19 working the equivalent of a full-time job, being a full time student, and being burned out due to fibromyalgia and my mental issues). - I’ve waded through a lot of deleted content to find things that I thought would be interesting to write, not just Mike-Ralph. I’m still piecing them together in some places, but the general flow of the story is still there and I know what’s going to happen.

alone, myself, i stand - a huge thank you to cadeparade on AO3, because they gave me a massive compliment and a few ideas for the final chapter, chapter 4, titled “the night will be over soon”. - I currently have dug out my old first draft of a few scenes I planned on writing for chapter 4 before my involuntary hiatus, so I have a rough idea of what the chapter is going to be about, what’s going to happen, and how’s it’s going to end. My only fear this is that I know that this chapter is probably going to double the size of AMIS, if I’m judging by the size of OBTD’s equivalent chapter. - any mentions of assault, eating disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anything else of the sort are still tagged and will be getting a warning, as is usual. This fic isn’t supposed to be about assault in and of itself; it’s about trauma, recovery, and relapse. The ending isn’t happy, but it isn’t and will never be sexually graphic; it may not even be violently graphic, depending on how things go. Hotlines and references will be available in the notes for anyone that needs them. - again, I’ve been through some shit myself. I know how it affects mental health.

tainted blood series - Nothing confirmed, but I do have an idea for a fic that could take place in season 3′s setting. We may get an appearance of the Garcias and insight into surviving t1d further into the outbreak. - yeah, how do you keep insulin cold? Where the fuck do you get 31 gauge needles (the ones most people use for insulin) from? I work for a veterinarian now and yeah, I’ve learned a lot about insulin dependent diabetes even just from taking care of insulin dependent dogs. I’m even looking into becoming a veterinary endocrinologist. Edit: 31 gauge needles, 1 cc syringe is what I meant; in my experience working with animals, they use the same type of needles and syringes that people do, depending on the person of course. My dad’s medication (not insulin) is given intramuscular through a 3ml syringe with a 20G needle. All depends on the person. - Again, nothing confirmed, but there is an attempt. I’m not 100% guaranteeing that there will be a part 4, but there is a possibility. Similarly to AMIS, the reception that I received for tainted blood is something I never could have imagined, not for even a moment, that I would ever reach. I love you all.

Upcoming Fics/Fic Ideas Yes, I need to stop starting shit when I already have too many fics to finish.

Kindly Stop For Me: Edith’s POV and a little bit further on during the Wellington ending, exploring Wellington and its functions, and how Edith ended being the person who took care of Clem and AJ.

16 Months Later: A short multichapt fic exploring an AU where Christa and Omid’s baby (a daughter) survived. After Christa is killed by scavengers in All That Remains, Clem takes the 16 month old and ends up squatting in (underneath) the cabin and in the shed, relying only on herself to steal food and keep the baby fed and alive.

Awakening: A Detroit: Become Human fic that I’ve been writing on and off for the past year, but it isn’t published. It’s a reverse AU featuring human Connor (and RK800-60 and RK900) and android Hank, Luther and Kara switching spots and a human Alice, and human Markus and android Carl. Ships are: SiMarkus, Luthara, Reed900 (shut up, I like it), and maybe even ConNorth (again, shut up, I like it)? Who knows.

So there you have it. This is my life now.

Come check out my fictionpress, Always Good for a Smile, for original poems, short stories, and longer that I write.

#update #obtd updates #obtd announcements #fanfic

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wardencommanderrodimiss · 5 years

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@sundayswiththeilluminati replied to your photoset

“Accidentally came up with two separate Good Omens fanfic concepts...”

Here's the real question though: does anyone ever try to sell/buy magical books at Aziraphale's bookshop, and what does he do with them if they do? Are magical books Not Allowed as per heaven, or does he end up running a sideline in magical texts since all of them are hilariously basic to him and he can part with them without guilt?

Your answer is provided in the form of a fanfic in which only the latter half relates to the question, but all of which I had far, far too much fun writing.

There is a disagreement between Heaven and Hell, as there are wont to be, about which side is responsible for unleashing magic among humanity. The suggestion that it was part of God’s design from the start - that it was in fact of neither angelic nor demonic origins - has been made exactly once, by Aziraphale, who only made this suggestion as a counter to Crowley’s suggestion that magic came about in humans for a reason to do with that flaming sword which Adam and Eve spent so much time about. Crowley then mockingly dismissed Aziraphale’s suggestion by hissing “ineffable” a few dozen times, as they were both a few bottles deep at that point and actually more concerned with heckling each other (and, more simply, with each other) than they were with unlocking the great secrets of Godly intent and Her design.

This is not to say that Heaven and Hell, and of course more specifically Aziraphale and Crowley, have not meddled prolifically in the affairs of wizardry. It would be easy to blame Crowley for the existence of the Chamber of Secrets, for instance; and he may have taken credit for it but it pressed might confess that a basilisk is quite a bit too nasty for his tastes, that castle is full of children, and he just thought it would be nice for one of the Founders to appreciate snakes - they get such a bad rap, snakes, so undeservedly, and wouldn’t it be nice if they got to be the mascot of one of these Houses too? A bit of appreciation for snakes, really, is all he swayed Salazar Slytherin toward. How was he to know that the bastard would take it so far? And it ended with snakes getting a worse rap because of Slytherin himself, too. This last matter is how you are assured that Crowley had any hand in it at all, because the undercutting of his own intent is a typical Crowley design feature.

(Crowley would also like to make the assurance that he had nothing in any way to do with Gilderoy Lockhart, even though Gilderoy Lockhart’s habit of claiming credit for things he did not do is also typical Crowley. Gilderoy Lockhart did not have Hell breathing down his neck demanding temptations be done, and frankly it is Hell itself who ascribes credit to Crowley for human inventions and he who simply nods and agrees and then goes to see what humanity has done to itself this time. Gilderoy Lockhart is no demon; he is, by Crowley’s standard of demonic, which is a very mild standard of demonic, much worse.)

Hogwarts’ moving staircases are to Crowley’s actual credit, however. That the sweets shop Honeydukes is built atop a direct secret passage to Hogwarts, allowing discerning students to eat their fill any time, is to Aziraphale’s.

To back up for a moment to the broadest scale - setting aside, for a moment, a particular angel and demon - neither Heaven nor Hell sees magic as an affront to themselves. Both know what they do is miracles, not magic, a subtle distinction in that magic has many more limitations than miracles. And even then, Heaven and Hell often conflate the two terms anyway. No one ever accused either of them of holding to strict logical consistency.

Heaven is unsure whether magic was meant to end up in human hands, given the difficulty they often have over wielding it and the way it spills out of magical children like their bodies cannot contain the power they hold, but God’s intelligent design also includes both wisdom teeth and the intricate and delicate bones of the shoulder, so by that reasoning magic cannot be refuted as something that was part of Her original drafts. Hell does not care, because humans are easily tempted in their most basic forms, and the ones who carry small wooden sticks that assist them in thinking they can channel the full power of magic can even more easily be swayed to catastrophic choices, by virtue of how they are almost never found without those sticks upon them, ready and willing to attempt something that will likely go wrong. Demons are very fond of wizardry.

Most of the wizarding side of British society is thus of demonic (read: Crowley’s) influence. This includes the rates of magical currency (29 knuts to a sickle, 17 sickles to a galleon) while Hogwarts does not teach any kind of maths courses (Arithmancy is absolutely not maths); rats becoming a popular pet in a society that to function is required to be full of owls; the practice of storing sole copies of prophecies in glass orbs on unstable shelves (Agnes Nutter was an innovator simply by writing hers down on paper); the given name of Harry Potter’s middle child; the entire sport of Quidditch; and some pervasive erroneous beliefs about unicorns.

(Crowley very much likes unicorns, ever since he watched one, survival and God’s plan be damned, book it as far from Noah’s boat as it could. He was thrilled to find that more than the one left on the boat had survived the flood, because they are beautiful and stupid and that is a combination that Crowley holds certain affection for. They are also quite soft and drool a little less than horses and have the added capacity to gore someone with a headbutt. The value of their hair, horns, and blood - though not drool, which is a shame, because Crowley could do a bustling business trading in unicorn drool - means that wizards seek them out, and that means that Crowley seeks to vex them. It is very wily and evil of him to keep the humans from those powerful magic healing properties, of course.)

(One of his methods of diverting the casual unicorn-seeker was through the creation and spread of falsehoods about the kind of people whose presence unicorns tolerate. A few stray remarks, some influence applied to make sure it is believed, about “purity” being required to approach unicorns, and the wizards did the rest, deciding it seemed like girls were more able to approach unicorns. Thus already roughly half of the populace is discouraged from attempting, and the rest given weird hang-ups about it. Of course, this is all ridiculous, because Crowley, as a demon, ascribes to gender only when he wants to, and would be described by no one as “pure” in any way. Crowley did once attempt to describe himself as “pure evil, and unicorns only sense purity, so that counts” but he was promptly called a bitch by Newt Scamander and banned from the Leaky Cauldron again. He did not care, because drinking is only really fun with Aziraphale, and the fact of the matter remained that he still gets to cuddle unicorns when no one else does.)

There is a mild, subtle war fought between Heaven and Hell over most instructive books on magic. That is if “mild” and “subtle” could be taken to mean that there is one generally book-loving angel who very much disdains these particular books, and one generally book-agnostic demon who very much loves them.

Wizarding Britain does not have a robust publishing industry. Wizarding Britain does not have robust anything, excepting their robustly ineffectual and expansive bureaucracy, but Aziraphale finds their literature particularly shameful. Surely some of this is owing to the limits of the courses offered at Hogwarts, where language and spelling is whatever of the form of your homework essays, as opposed to the much more valued content of said essays, that a professor chooses to comment on. (In a certain era, much of the spelling tutelage for a generation of Hogwarts students came from their Potions essays, because Severus Snape took a certain glee in marking up as much as he possibly could and watching the faces of students as they found their parchment returned to them covered in red ink even though the substance of their essays was sound.)

This may also be a consequence of the way British wizarding society has a certain cultural stagnancy. The way things are done is the way things are done. (In this manner it reminds of Heaven and Hell and their inability to keep with the times on Earth. This is also another reason that demons like wizards, because they don’t have to keep up with new technology like “personal phones” and “computers”.) Hogwarts curriculum does not update with any regularity and looks much the same as it did 400 years ago, variation arriving mostly with the competency of the professors.

And magic is what is valued, so magic is what books are written on. And while wizarding Britain has its innovators - it has humans, so inevitably it has innovators creating new spells, potions, and devices - they are not so encouraged and valued. And often they do not bother to write books.

As a result, the bulk of the book movement through wizarding Britain is Hogwarts textbooks, which are rarely updated. The edition numbers occasionally change, as do a sentence or two of the interior, but Aziraphale lacks interest in any of it. He lacks an interest in all of this sort of magic. He cannot perform it - as a celestial being he can do far more anyway - and it cannot be learned - unlike coin tricks and sleights-of-hand and rabbits - and there is nothing exceptional in the writing or rarity of any of it. The wizarding books that Aziraphale has interest in are settled firmly in the great library of Hogwarts, and not for sale, though Aziraphale has made offers. He had then considered theft but decided that theft from a school was a certain step too far.

(The one wizarding book that Aziraphale both cares about and possesses is a first-edition The Tales of Beedle the Bard, who is not Aziraphale’s favorite bard. However, Aziraphale does find “The Tale of the Three Brothers” to be an interesting look at the wizarding perspective on death. It is an inaccurate one, of course; Death does not grant boons, not even ones that will become curses to sooner send their holders into his hands. That is the parlance of demonic temptations, and Crowley will freely admit, though he has gotten numerous commendations for the Elder Wand over the centuries, that like Slytherin’s basilisk, the humans took the whole thing a bit too far.)

At any rate, Aziraphale’s bookshop was prominently placed on the map of wizarding London when he offered to purchase some certain unique volumes from Hogwarts, and this has been a curse of his own making, as more usually happens to Crowley. The wizarding population of London had, since the opening of A.Z. Fell and Co., admittedly always considered it one of theirs, in the same way that the Muggle population eventually came to consider it a front for the mafia, but the uptick of attempts to sell wizarding books back to the shop, or wizarding books just being left amidst the stacks, definitely corresponded with the one time Aziraphale made official contact with wizarding Britain. These magical books are a blight upon his bookshop and he would have miracled himself into being forgotten by Britain’s wizardry some time in 1847 were it not for the Arrangement.

That being, Crowley likes the books dropped at Aziraphale’s shop, often books on Hogwarts’ reading list, which are the most often sold, because it is very easy to accomplish simultaneously temptations and miracles with them.

Since the mid 1800s, it is known, amongst the poorer population of wizarding Britain, that there is a particular drop point in Diagon Alley where, if you are in need enough, you can find almost any relatively-common book that you were not able to afford but was necessary for your education. “In need enough” and “necessary” are miracles with much wiggle room. For instance, in 1992, the Weasley twins did not strictly need NEWT-level Charms and Transfiguration textbooks for their courses at Hogwarts, but they needed them to properly innovate on their pranks.

Providing magical knowledge for free is, of course, very demonic, given the capacity for destruction by the untrained wizard, especially if that knowledge is far above their years. It is in fact incredibly necessary that it be for free, else parents or guardians would stop them.

Truly, another genius ploy from the wily serpent.

Almost as good as the bit with the unicorns.

#sundayswiththeilluminati #replies #this was a mistake that i started writing at 6 am this morning because i have NO goddamn self restraint #actually i lied it's not a mistake it's fucking HILARIOUS if i do say so myself #............................................do i tag this tho. does tumblr still only count the first five tags. who ever knows #good omens #for blog purposes and if it ends up in the main tag then that's the Plan and i have to live with it #roddy fanfics #i didn't proofread this you get what you get

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fire-emblem-drabbles · 5 years

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Shrouded in Shadows

Pairing: Aflonse x reader, Lif x reader

Summary: Have you ever thought about who you were in a past life? Have you always been the same person, born again to fulfill the same role over and over, or is there more to it than that? Being Summoner to Askr is one thing, but finding out you weren’t the first one here is something else. There are secrets you still don’t know, about Askr, about yourself, and about its history as a whole. Hel and her army threaten the short-lived peace you’ve known and only add to the growing confusion in your mind. Who are you, Summoner? Or rather, who were you before?

Rating: sfw (i have no clue if that will change or not!)

Word count: 2244

Notes: This has been in my drafts for a while, figured I would finish it and post it. Obviously, there’s more to this story than this just piece, but I’m not sure if I want to make it an actual series. Still, I like this piece how it is now and want to share it with you all! If there’s interest in it, I’ll consider updating it with book 3. Oh, also, this is a working title and I would love to hear any suggestions you have!

The halls were quiet, and you kept to your thoughts as Alfonse walked to where he was to meet his father. You wanted to provide support in any way you could but knew you weren’t allowed in the with him. You were pulled from your thoughts, though by a sudden tug you felt in front of a door.

“Alfonse, I don’t think I’ve ever been in this room.” You paused to frown and study the door. You could swear you knew every nook and cranny of the Order of Heroes by now but this place… gave a sense of deja vu.

“Oh, I don’t think anyone’s been in there for a long time.” Alfonse stopped in his stride, studying the door with you a moment. “If I recall correctly, that was the study room of Askr’s first Summoner; they and King Lif would spend countless hours there together.”

“There was a Summoner before me?” The thought struck you as strange as you stared down at the glowing gun in your hand. Someone other than you could wield Breidablik?

“Well, you’re the second Summoner, yes. I’ve done my own research on this….” He paused a moment, taking the chance to look you up and down. “But I have a feeling you and that first Summoner are one and the same, you know?”

“Like… how? You know I had never been to Askr before Anna managed to summon me here.” You gave him half a frown, looking back to the door again. It was faint, but you could feel something… drawing you in. You decided to ignore it in favor of Alfonse speaking again.

“The first Summoner… they were the one to create Breidablik, and only they could use it. _____, you must be a reincarnation of our first Summoner-- at least, that’s my conclusion.” He smiled at you, a hint of a blush on his cheeks. Suddenly you got a feeling of what he meant; Summoner and Prince, once again, fighting for the safety of Askr. Alfonse may or may not be Lif, the first King of Askr, reborn but perhaps he was right when he said you were the first Summoner reincarnated. Alfonse spoke again, pulling you from your thoughts. “It’s said King Lif married his Summoner, and their descendants went on to create the Askr Royal Family.”

“Oh, um, Married?” You turned your gaze back to the door, thankful for him being oblivious at this point. “You hurry on to speak with your Father, Alfonse. I’m gonna see if I can’t find a way in here… If this really is the first Summoner’s room, I’m sure there’s invaluable information in there for me as a Tactician, and for the Order as a whole.” He nodded, though his look fell a bit.

“Father...” He sighed a little, but before he turned and left you took hold of both his hands in your own, drawing his gaze to your face.

“Hey, you’ve got this. There’s nothing to fear. Face him with the strength I know you have.” He smiled softly, eyes shining. You gave his hands another squeeze.

“Thank you _____, I only wish I could have you by my side when I faced him. Then I would certainly have the strength needed to stay strong.” You flushed but tried to remain calm in his charming mien.

“A good luck charm, just in case?” You didn’t give his questioning look a proper answer, instead leaning in a giving his cheek a sweet kiss. He froze under your sweet touch and was frozen still as you pulled back. “Now, off with you! You don’t need to face his wrath for being late!” With a clumsy nod, he took his hands from yours and began to jog off, a goofy smile stuck on his face.

You took a deep breath yourself, resting your back against the old door and held your hand against your beating heart. You really just did that, huh? It seemed to do the trick, though, hopefully, Alfonse would be okay in there. Now, you had problems of your own; you stepped back from the door to study it once again. Now, you found the wood had no doorknob on it, at least not on the outside. Cautiously, you pushed against the door, but it made no budge in its place, nor did it care to move left or right. You frowned and stepped back to stare at it again. Yes, this room was certainly calling out to you, just like the familiar pull of Breidablik.

“Breidablik!” Surely the strange weapon had something to do with this! You quickly pulled it out of his holster, fumbling with it a bit before holding it properly. You hadn’t noticed before, but it was glowing brighter than usual as if you were about to summon a hero. You stared at it a moment, and then looked to the door. Shockingly, strange runes had appeared, their glow faint. Slowly, you held Breidablik up per usual; now the grow was brighter, basking the hallway in its light. Your finger rested on the trigger. Your hesitation was silly, you knew you couldn’t summon a hero in this place, but for some reason pulling the trigger just felt… off. Still, you did so, closing your eyes not wanting to see the result.

A moment later, you peered at the door with one eye. The interior of the runes had, in fact, moved away. There was a hole just large enough to resemble a door, and you could vaguely see into a dark room, lit only by the otherworldly blue light of the runes. Taking one last look of the hallway around you, you gave a small shrug and made way into the dark room. Once inside, the room immediately lit to life with more runes. Blue light reminded you of the ungodly florescent of your time; next, you came in here, you ought to bring in a candelabra.

The dust of ages settled around you, and you coughed having stirred up some of the dust. The room was… larger than you thought it would be, and you were surprised to find a bed in the room as well, probably a full from what you could see. There were two desks, and a large dresser as well. You found this may as well been a shared room for a couple rather than study for a legendary summoner… Then again, your own room was just as casual. There were bookshelves, too, three of them. Two held old titles, some you could decipher, others far too old for you to understand. The third seemed to be handwritten. You noticed, however, one book out of place sitting on the bed.

It was a dark blue, and the leather worn; it had seen much love in its life. You sat on the old bed, it creaked under your weight but was overall fine. You picked up the book, it had nothing on it that would hint at a title or name, and slowly opened to the first page. There, in careful cursive, sat words that made you stare in confusion.

For _____, the Summoner I lost too soon.

You were _____. You weren’t sure how old the Askr kingdom was but surely this book had been here a least a century, maybe more. Alfonse said Lif and his summoner had shared this room once… Did you even share a name with this Summoner of old too? You wondered, perhaps, if you had their face too, but shook your head. Perhaps it was all coincidence; you didn’t think your name would be all that common in this world, but who knows. Casting it from your mind, you decided instead to continue reading. Maybe, this was meant for you after all. Someone from the past, reaching out to you in the future? A long shot, perhaps, but it quashed any guilt you might have about reading it.

Do you remember me, my love? My face, my name… the way we use to tangle together on this bed, enveloped in each other's embrace, willing the world to go away? It took you away from me far too soon, but I remember your words, your promise. You’re back now, aren’t you? When you find me, I won’t look the same, I may even act differently. But I swear, my love for you will always remain.

“Um… what?” You read the words again, trying to process them. If… this book was made for you (or the late summoner) and if what Alfonse said was true, this could only have been written by one person… You didn’t want to admit it to yourself quite yet, though, and continued reading.

We’ll find each other again, in a future where nothing is certain. I fear then we may be on opposing sides… I can promise nothing, but if I can ever help it, my blade will never be raised against you and our kin.

“Oh my gosh.” You couldn’t help but to whisper the words aloud. Your thoughts were swirling, and if anything, your stomach was coiled just as tight as when you spoke with Alfonse minutes prior. You didn’t know if you had it in you to read more, but it seemed your curiosity was beating out your embarrassment.

To meet again is a blessing, but on the battlefield, it is one most dark. Will you remember me when our eyes meet? Or am I from a past you’ve forgotten? Whatever may happen, if I get to see you again, no matter how fleeting the moment, I’ll cherish it. No matter the twisted form I take, or the atrocities I’m forced to commit, it will be the thought of you that keeps me going.

“I feel like I shouldn’t be reading this...” You felt as if you were watching in on someones personal life, peeking in on the parts of them that they would only share with a lover. But this person, this man… he was no lover of yours, not now at least. Some weird, foreign emotion was taking ahold of you, now, and you weren’t certain what to do. You couldn’t read any more of this volume, not now. You turned then, to the ones sitting on the shelf undisturbed, covered in dust with a single missing space. How much did he write…?

Moving over to them, you realized, only two more of these books had been written by Lif himself. The others were written by another author. Gingerly, you picked up one as if the pages would turn to dust beneath your fingers. In cursive writing, written in plain ink before you were the words “Askr needs your knowledge once again, Summoner. Will you remember what you’ve forgotten?” You closed the book, heart beating fast. There was a lot happening in this room, too much in fact. It made your heart pound and head spin in ways you didn’t quite understand.

“_____, where are you? We need to march!” You looked to the door, Anna’s muffled cry was somewhere beyond the door. You wanted to stay here longer, but your army needed you now. Looking to the shelf, to the book in your hands, and the one of the bed, you decided to take the one you held, and the one on the bed with you. Luckily, the door seemed to have grown a doorknob between now and when you entered the room. So, you took the books and opened the door.

“Anna, I’m here!” You called to her, and she turned sharply to you, seeing you poke your head out to the room.

“You know, I’m not even going to question how you got in there.” She shook her head. “We need to move fast, the order is needed to protect the castle.” Anna moved to you and began speed walking the other way, you were quick to follow her and close the door behind you.

“Wait, wait whose attacking us directly? We just took care of Muspell not even a few weeks ago, and I thought Embla was still recovering as well?” Anna was walking really fast but you were having a bit of a problem keeping up with her brisk pace.

“The scout's reports are in but… I don’t know if I want to believe this.” Her voice held a hint of a growl as she spoke.

“What? Who is it?” You pressed her for more info, wanting to know who you would be up against.

“We’re… going to be fighting the army of Hel; the dead.” Finally, the two of you had made it to where you could lead your main force of heroes.

“The dead…?” You looked to the books held in your arms but quickly shoved them in your pack. “I don’t like the sound of that at all.” You sighed, knowing the fight was once again, only beginning.

“I promise, the sight of it is worse.” Anna grimaced and shook her head. “We need to move out, Hel’s forces are nearly upon us.” You were already ordering your heroes, ready to fight them with what little info you had.

“Is there anything else you can tell me?” You were hoping for any good news, actually. Something to help you out here.

“Yeah, actually. The Kings army will be backing us up as well. Hopefully, we can keep casualties to a minimum.

“The King...” You half frowned, but nodded. “Let’s move out.”

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thegreatpikminzx789 · 6 years

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In the Deepest Darkness - Chapter 3: With Morning Regrets, Comes A Future To A New Hand

Wattpad|Archive of Our Own|Fanfiction.Net (Will update when it becomes available)

Before we begin, I've been wanting to start the battle with Ur-Devil on this part, but I decided against swapping back between two different perspectives in the same chapter for this one in particular. The way I had the draft was gonna end up in a cliffhanger if I had left it as is, so instead, this happened. We'll get to Ur-Devil's fight soon.

Also, I probably SHOULD’VE been done with this story sooner than later, but once again, life has been a pain in the time I’ve had to update this. Slow and steady wins the race, so I’ll get around to finishing the next few chapters soon. It’s also probably one of the longest chapters I’ve written, which was a nice change of pace.

Shen, Lynus, Macerio, Magnus, Axel, Hamza, and Tobyn belong to @theshatteredrose. It’s been some time since I written anything with these characters, so I hope I still did well.

The sunrise slowly crept in like a wild animal upon Lagaard. While some members of the Gungnir Guild were getting ready to head out, Korey glanced at the ring that was on his ring finger, looking at a rare gem from the world he came from, still polished and radiating it's shine as the sun gleamed onto it. But even as he was looking at it, Korey had to question why he was still worried?

Was it fear, or a natural sense that this might be a dangerous quest second to only the one back on his world? If only his beloved was by his side to keep him company, he wouldn't be this worried.

"No... bidding my time in wait isn't going to do any good. I must remain vigilant of the task ahead of us." The Highlander uttered to himself, as he grabbed his equipment and trusty spear, before catching up with the others in the inn's main lobby. As they were walking towards Yggdrasil, a familiar voice called out to the guild, as Korey shifted his attention to the blue haired Ronin he and Fafnir ran into a few days ago.

"My apologies for the short preparation, everyone. The wait to get my revenge against the Ur-Devil was getting on my nerves." He admitted, being rather quick with an apology this soon. Bertrand simply dismissed the apology.

"Don't mention it. We've been kinda busy training ourselves, so the sooner we face this thing, the less of a problem it will be for Lagaard." Bertrand said as he flexed his arm to make sure it was well ready for the upcoming battle.

"Indeed. By the way, did you get enough Apple Matcha Shaved Ice?"

"Yep. Plenty enough for all of us." Ricky confirmed, showing the Ronin a basket containing the Shaved Ice in question.

"Though, why did you ask us to bring food?" Chloe couldn't help but inquire, seeing as out of the entirety of their trips to Yggdrasil or Ginnungagap, they really hadn't used the cafe to it's fullest, other than being a secondary place to eat on occasion. Shen placed a hand on his hip, motioning the guild to follow him as he explained himself.

"There's a reason I have for asked that specific food. During my solo attempt, I threw some blinding gas at it, and its attacks have been missing me to the point I was able to escape the battle with the injuries I have. From what I read yesterday from visiting that cafe, these Shaved Ices will make it even harder for the enemy to hit us, much like the blinding gas. This Ur-Devil really seems to be weak to being blind, despite not being able to see."

"Oh, that's rather interesting, Mr. Shen!" Arianna commented, surprised to know the Ronin they're working with did some research.

"But I still ponder why you ask us to come early in the morning?" Korey questioned, looking over at the sky and noticing that the sun was still rising. As they arrived to the stairs next to Yggdrasil, Shen turned to face the Highlander.

"I didn't want to rush everyone to eat the Shaved Ice before we enter the labyrinth. It's also to give us some time for the effect to take place. Plus, I kinda do need to explain why I found out about this floor in particular-"

"Oh, no need to concern yourself with that, Shen." A female voice intervened the conversation, causing the guild and Shen to face the origin of the voice; seeing Lady Gradriel approaching them.

"Ah, Lady Gradriel! N-Nice morning, isn't it?" Flavio stumbled, getting a quick glance from Fafnir, before looking back to Gradriel. "It is indeed, Flavio." She replied, as she and Arianna greeted each other, the later of which, turned to Shen.

"Gradriel requested us to come to her yesterday, and she filled us in on the details."

"...I see. Why don't you go ahead and tell them why I'm wrapped up in this particular quest?" Shen hummed to himself, letting Gradriel take the wheel on Shen's explanation.

"You see, when Shen showed up to talk about the request at first, I was skeptical about him going in alone. I told him that you guys would be better at taking my request, but it seemed he was just that determined." She began, scratching the back of her head as if she was confused about a solo mission for the quest she set out in particular.

"Though thanks to Shen's findings, we now know the dangers this Ur-Child possesses. I still want you all to be careful and to come back alive. I don't want to risk losing you all just to face this thing, but who knows what it can do otherwise... Lagaard cannot survive against something like this." She continued, expressing great concern for the explorers before her that were tasked to defeat the Ur-Devil.

"We will do our best, Lady Gradriel." Shen acknowledged, as Arianna soon added her own two cents on Gradriel's concern, "And we'll be victorious!"

"Just don't go worrying on us all day..." The small War Magus commented, leaving Gradriel to chuckcle to herself. "I'll try not to. Anyways, I got business to attend to. I wish you good luck, members of the Gungnir and Guardian Guilds."

Much like her sudden appearance, Gradriel leaves without hesitation, leaving the Guild and Ronin mere steps away from the Geo Magnetic Pole that will lead them to the thirty-first floor. "So, are we gonna get started or not?" Bertrand sighed, wanting to get this over with. Other explorers would think of him to be an impatient type, but that wasn't his concern for the time being.

"Yes... The Shaved Ices, if you please." Shen politely asked to Ricky, as the blonde haired girl places down the basket and starts passing out the Shaved Ices to everyone, making sure to get one for herself as well, wasting no time but to dig into the food that's brought to them.

"...Wow, who knew ice can be flavored to be sweet?" Fafnir commented, as Flavio chimed in shortly afterward. "Doesn't help when it becomes rather bitter as it goes on- Aaaaagh!"

Flavio felt like his tongue was on fire, trying to jab the cold parts of the Shaved Ice on his tongue in an attempt to cool it down. "That means the bitter sauce is doing its job." Chloe sighed, before taking another bite into her Shaved Ice.

Korey, however, had to take it a bit slow because the change between cold and bitter felt too sudden to him. "I don't usually enjoy eating bitter stuff, but if it'll help us in the long run, then I'll have to eat it all!" He declared, as Bertrand gulped down the food he had in his mouth.

"Well, this could potentially be our last meal together, but I don't want to get sentimental on you all. Not when we got a job to do." Although Bertrand didn't notice it himself, Korey felt like he was kind of was being sentimental, despite the tone of voice he had.

"Right. We came this far, so giving up isn't an option anymore." Arianna declared, as Ricky nodded in agreement. "I'll protect the world I've been sent to look over, no matter what the cost is." She added, remembering her duty and reason why she was here.

"And we'll make sure that Lagaard doesn't suffer from the Ur-Devil's presence." Shen concluded, clenching his free hand as he glanced at the Geo Magnetic Pole. Once they step through there, there is no return...

But regardless of how Shen felt, someone out there was questioning his motives for sneaking out in the morning...

---------------------------------------------------------

"What do you mean Shen snuck out when nobody was around?!"

Axel wasn't in a great mood, hearing that Shen snuck out in the morning. Magnus and Hamza where there, with him, as Magnus was the first to bring attention to the missing guild-member to Axel and their guild leader.

"He clearly told Lynus that all of us would take down the Ur-Devil, but I didn't expect him to just up and disappear in the morning! What the hell is up with him?!" The Alchemist retorted, pacing back and forth as he did so.

"Must have been taking lessons from Rahas." The black haired War Magus suggested, scratching his the back of his head. "What, through the window?" Magnus replied in confusion.

"I mean, that's a possibility. What'd you expect, other than for him to sneakily hope none of us were down here in order for him to escape?" Hamza responded, as the blonde Alchemist took a few seconds to consider the possibility.

"Well, that's true... Ugh, never mind, we got to go after him! I refuse to have him die on me again!" Shaking aside his concerns, Magnus focused on what they needed to do- chase down Shen, and help him before it was too late.

"We will, Magnus. We just need to finish our trip for preparations. Lynus just came back after a bit of shopping, so once we're stocked on Medica's and Amrita's, we'll head out. I know how protective you can be of Shen, but if he's with this Gungnir Guild, they should be fine until we get there..." Axel reassured the Alchemist to the best of his ability. He's not Lynus, but he's still his friend, anything to keep him calm will help in the long run.

"For how long would depend on their strategy... Cause while we don't have a clear idea of what we're up against, Shen does." Hamza added, which was the main reason why preparation took longer to begin with.

"We still must be careful of the floor itself, too. We're not sure what kind of FOE's could linger there." The red haired landsknecht continued, reminding Magnus and Hamza to keep up their guard. Magnus looks toward Yggdrasil, placing his right hand on his chest, and letting out a deep sigh.

"I hope we're not too late..."

"I'll go help Lynus with preparations. We'll head to the Yggdrasil when we're ready." Axel concluded, as he heads out of the room, with Hamza following behind him before turning to Magnus and calling out to him.

"You coming, Magnus?"

Magnus turns his head to face Hamza in silence, before giving a nod to him. "...Yeah. I'm coming." With a confirmation out of the way, Hamza continued to follow Axel, as Magnus grabbed his things and headed towards the door, before looking back at the room behind him one more time.

Was this battle worth the risk to save someone he cared for? Definitely. After all, if it was coming from Shen's own mouth, that Ur-Devil shouldn't be taken lightly. Shen needs him by his side as much as Magnus needed to be by him.

He lets out a deep sigh, grabbing the door handle and closing the door, steeling himself for the toughest battle of his- no, perhaps the toughest the Guardian Guild will come face-to-face with in the entirety of their journey through Yggdrasil. He was regretting not being able to stop Shen earlier, but his focus on saving him was more than enough to keep his regret off his mind.

"Some blind gas never hurts in case Tobyn's Blind Arrows aren't enough..." Macerio's voice brought Magnus' attention to the table, where Macerio and Axel are helping Lynus with his preparations. Tobyn was currently flexing his bow string to make sure it was still usable.

"Trust me, if this Ur-Devil thing is capable of seeing anything, I'll make sure a thousand blinding arrows will keep it distracted." Tobyn attempted to assure everyone, feeling his arrows will be more than sufficient than using a dark gas contained in a bottle. Although Magnus surveyed the room hundreds of times, there wasn't a sign of Hamza anywhere.

"Hey, Tobyn, do you know where Hamza went?" He couldn't help but ask the Survivalist, who looked away from his weapon to the Alchemist and sat up. "He said he wanted us to eat something that he found on one of Shen's notes, so we're just waiting for him to get back with it." The blonde man replied, scratching his cheek as he continued his inspection of his bow.

"Something...? Like what?"

"Something called Apple Mocha Shaved Ice. I don't get why he would want us to have something that sounds like it'd be for a desert, but he said that eating it can help me pull off blinds more often." Tobyn explained, as Magnus took a seat beside him.

"Then, once we eat it, the effect would take place?"

Sheesh, even when Tobyn was trying to prepare himself, Magnus sure was talkative today, especially when his love interest is putting himself in danger. But, seeing as he was wanting to talk, it would be a shame to leave him hanging with a question like that.

"I assume so. That cafe has some strange recipes that give off effects to explorers. To others, it's merely food. It's not my place to assume the cook behind the recipe if it's going to give us a benefit." Tobyn assured him, placing his weapon beside him when he was finished, adjusting his scarf whenever needed.

"That does it for preparations." Lynus declared, closing his bag and placing it over his head onto his shoulders. Macerio sighed, as he looked towards the inn's door, hoping Hamza would show up.

"Even if we manage to take this thing down, who knows if it will be back like the other monsters?" The gunner couldn't help but ask, getting Lynus' attention unintentionally. "We won't know until we face it ourselves. That's the best we can do, right Axel?"

"Yeah. We'll show it just how strong the Guardian Guild really is." Axel concurred, smiling and giving Lynus a pat on the shoulder, followed by a kiss on the cheek. "And I'll be there to protect you should it even get a thought about hurting you." He added, as the orange haired medic couldn't help but chuckle as his face grew as red as a tomato.

As if one last note played on a song at the last second, the door finally opened, and Hamza came in holding two Shaved Ice Tobyn mentioned to Magnus earlier. Though following behind him was a rather unusual guest they had not seen before- a girl with green hair, mixed with red end streaks, red eyes and white skin, along with a grass-like dress of a female Sovereign and brown boots. She was holding the rest of the Shaved Ice that Hamza was unable to carry himself.

"Uhh, Hamza, what's with the girl following behind you?" Axel questioned as Hamza placed the Shaved Ices on the table. "She's very different from all the other explorers we've seen..." Lynus added, as the girl in question followed Hamza in placing the food on the table before looking to the medic.

"Thou hasn't seen a Forest Folk before, human?" She inquired, turning to face him, grabbing her dress and bowing before him. "Thou may call me Hibiki, princess of the Forest Folk." She began, seeming to act very formal to Lynus, despite the two having not met each other before.

Lynus thought it was a strange way to introduce themselves, but he sensed that she was a pure heart, and gave his traditional heart warming smile. "Nice to meet you, Hibiki. I'm Lynus, the Guardian Guild's medic." He responded with an introduction of his own, as she stood up afterwards to greet the others, who were short but brief with their introductions.

"So uh, Hibiki, why did you help our guild leader just now?" Magnus asked, as Hibiki turned to face the Alchemist. "Thy leader simply needed assistance, is all." Hibiki began, as she started walking towards the door.

"As for thy friend, he has reached the thirty-first floor with the Gungnir Guild. I suggest thou should hurry before the deepest darkness swallows not only the blue-haired Ronin and the Gungnir Guild, but the world we all live in." She added, as her hand touched the door handle before she was stopped by Lynus.

"Hey... If you're so inclined to tell us this, why won't you help us?" She turned to face the orange haired medic that approached her. Her hand clenched tightly on the door handle.

"...I'm afraid."

"Afraid of what?" Lynus politely asked, sensing that the Forest Sovereign was tearing up a little inside. Nosy as it might be, if he can quench her fear, she might have a better outlook for her life.

"...Afraid of being betrayed. Betrayed, punished and abused by thy kind for the simple reason for existing." A silent gasp came from Lynus' mouth.

"So... is that why you're attempting to leave? To remain hidden?" Lynus inquired, getting the girl to finally turn to face him, silently giving a nod as her answer.

"I hate to be a burden to thy guild, or to anyone. To become a burden, thy must leave thou future to the winds. That's what those stubborn parents of mine constantly reminded me, regardless of what I did." Hibiki continued, feeling her grasp on the door lessen as she felt tears stream down her face, trying to hold them back, but she felt Lynus' hand stop her from wiping it away as her eyes came face-to-face with his.

"I know it may be hard for me to fully understand, Hibiki, but you're no burden. I know you're someone who is capable of doing more than hiding from their past. You just need to step out of your past- forget those abusive memories and forge new memories." Lynus began, bringing her back inside to the lobby.

"He's gone full parental mode, now." Magnus commented, as Axel simply scratched the back his head, chuckling to himself. "Lynus is a very caring person, so I can't say we didn't see this coming." The red haired landskecht remarked, looking onward at the scene before him as he took a bite of the Shaved Ice beside him, urging Magnus, Tobyn, and Macerio to eat up before they head out.

"Does thou think Korey will understand? I have not spoken with him about my own past, but-" Hibiki was interrupted by the caring medic standing before her. "I'm sure he'll understand as much as I will. You have a bright future just waiting for you, Hibiki. It's not too late."

Something about Lynus' words rung true. Although she was able to fend off one attack from an angry Sovereign once before, she barely had the need to fight within the labyrinth, cause she blended in well on the first stratum... Such calm and soothing words he spoke.

"If I can have a happy life being with the ones I care and love for, wouldn't you do the same?"

Hibiki blinked and looked at the other guild members that were in the lobby, noticing Axel's warm, smiling face as he overlooks Lynus before turning his attention to Hamza and discussing a strategy. Hearing the conversations of Magnus' care for Shen, and the reassurance from Macerio and Tobyn were simple enough for the Forest Sovereign to understand. "I suppose... thou art correct." She sighed, wiping away her tears as her attention turned back to Lynus.

"Lynus... Please, allow me to assist thy guild for the upcoming battle. I cannot hide myself anymore, and wish to ask for thy assistance to become an explorer." She confessed, closing her eyes as if in shame of the future she did not attain before.

Lynus patted her shoulder in reassurance. "We'll come across that bridge some other time, Hibiki. But thank you for letting me hear you out." He sighed, as he started making his way over to the table, before turning to Hibiki.

"Are you coming? We'll be leaving soon after we eat." He asked, as Hibiki stood up from where she knelt and looked at Lynus, as he saw her scarlet eyes, ablaze with hope and determination. "...Coming." She finally replied, a smile now forming on her face as she followed Lynus to the table.

The hour of battle comes nearer... In the highest reach of Yggdrasil.

#Etrian Odyssey #Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold #Writing #EO2U

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hallelujuh · 6 years

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shay’s favorite tv shows from 2017

this has been in my drafts for.... nine months.... fuck.

Written in December 2017, updates are from September 2018.

Considering how many new, innovative shows are around these days, I didn’t get too adventurous this year, but I’m satisfied with the ones I did watch. I discovered new shows, I was impressed by the shows I’ve been following for years, and I learned to appreciate the work that goes into television more. Here’s my top ten TV shows..

10. Thirteen Reasons Why - In all honestly, this is only here because I haven’t been able to watch Peaky Blinders yet, and it’s probably too late. (UPDATE: Watched it in Jan and it was amazing.) This show received a lot of backlash, and for good reason, although it had its moments. The characters were well-written, the relationships were given depth that is often lacking in other high school-set narratives, and the tone was great. I’ve always loved watching things that make me profoundly sad, and this show did just that. (UPDATE: Season 2 was fucking garbage lmao.)

Standout episode: Tape 1, Side B. It’s a cripplingly depressing show, but this episode stood out as a moment of light in Hannah’s dark reality. Her friendship with Jessica and Alex was nice in the beginning - their banter, them having a spot in the coffee shop. I remember assuming Alex was gay (I believe his actor is, so I wasn’t too off) and thinking that’d be good for Hannah, to have a guy friend who wasn’t interested in her and wouldn’t add relationship drama to her life. Boy, was I wrong. Still, having seen the show at the beginning of the year, this episode is the only one I remember as enjoying, so it gets this spot.

9. A Series of Unfortunate Events - I read the books in elementary school, and they’re one of my favorite series of all time. I’m also a huge fan of the film, though I know most aren’t. So I was very excited for this series, and it didn’t completely disappoint. While I found myself longing for the actors from the 2004 motion picture, and some of the directing decisions weren’t choice, it was cool to see The Miserable Mill finally come to life, and I loved the Baudelaires just as much here as anyone else. I’ll be tuning in to next season, since I’ve very, very excited to see how they handle the next three books. I can’t wait to meet the Quagmire triplets, and Esme, and Jacques! It’ll be awesome. I hope they portray it well, but there’s no film to compare it to from here on out, so maybe it’ll be different.

Standout episode: The Reptile Room: Part One/Two. Like I said, I wasn’t a huge fan of how most of the characters were portrayed in this adaption, but I did love Uncle Monty. He was just as wonderful as he was in the film and books. Watching his interactions with the kids was really nice, and as always, made me wish they could’ve remained with him. Stephano wasn’t as menacing here as he is in the film (that knife scene is the point in the film where you go, “woah, this dude’s for real. he’s scary”), which was a bummer because I still thought Olaf was a laughably bad and incompetent villain by the finale, but I did like Poe’s hysteria, and I really loved the movie theatre scene.

8. Riverdale - Oops I never wrote this dfdsbfjdbfjds.

7. South Park - While we all can agree the last season was a mess, and this one was only a slight improvement, it did have it’s moments. I’ve been a fan for five years now, so at this point, they’ll never disappoint me, tbfh.

Standout episode: Doubling Down. While Put it Down was wonderful, both satirically and because of Craig and Tweek’s adorable relationship, the eighth episode of the season was my personal favorite (UPDATE: Not sure why ‘cause I didn’t specify then and I’m not sure now.)

6. Dear White People - I didn’t do this one either damn.

Standout Episode: Chapter V. While the show is a comedic take on racial relations, this episode is an emotional, serious change. The Barry Jenkins-directed episode shows us that the subject is no laughing matter, and it very clearly deserves this spot.

5. Rick and Morty - Yet another show I discovered this year, during the summer. I’d been meaning to watch it for ages, and I finally got around to it. While the fanbase is pretty much poison, the show is pretty damn good. Maybe not what it’s hyped up to be, but great none-the-less. I’m a big fan of adult cartoons, and RaM isn’t entirely satirical like South Park, and it’s not self-aware like BoJack, but it holds up. It’s probably so popular because of how unique it is.

Standout episode: The Ricklantis Mixup. While my personal favorite of Season 3 was The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy, because I adore Jerry, I think we can all agree that the was the best episode of the season, if not the series. Like, really. Holy shit.

4. Gotham - I began watching this show last year, and caught up to season three around halfway through it. It began to drag a bit, admittedly, like it couldn’t carry it’s own weight - but now the show’s on season four, and it gets a little wild sometimes, but it’s holding quite a bit better, I’d say. I was pretty fucking impressed, especially with the Nygmobblepot stuff.

Standout episode: A Dark Knight: Queen Takes Knight. Although Mad City: The Gentle Art of Making Enemies from Season 3 is a close runner-up, for all the loose ends it ties up, and so cleanly, too - the winter finale gets this spot. It had me on the edge of my metaphorical seat (since I was actually curled up in bed) the entire time. While Sophia’s character and her motivations had remained muddy since her introduction, her badassery finally came to the forefront, and it was awesome. The way she tore down Penguin from his throne? Incredible. We know he’ll return, as he has so many times, but really, that was so incredible. Considering he’s my favorite character, I should feel worse. However, Sophia executed her plan so well, I was too awed to hate her. Also, Jerome’s back! I’m extremely excited to see Jerome’s role in the upcoming episodes. (Update: Oh, honey, you got a big storm coming...)

3. BoJack Horseman - I binged the hell out of this show just before season four came out, because it was so creative and thought-provoking and hilariously depressing. The fourth season was notably wonderful in a lot of ways, particularly because of Todd’s sexuality arc (the first out asexual character in a TV show!) and how well it was handled, but also because of the mature themes they took on. Princess Carolyn’s miscarriages, Diane and Mr. PB’s failing marriage, BoJack’s struggle to forgive his mother, Beatrice’s own troubled upbringing, Hollyhock’s eating disorder. I watched the whole season in three days when it was first released, four months ago, and I’m currently considering re-watching it after rereading the summaries of each episode to refresh my memory. I’d forgotten how phenomenal it was. It’s on another level - it really is.

Standout episode: Time’s Arrow. Though there wasn’t a single weak episode this season, this one definitely stood out. Following the tradition of uniquely depressing eleventh episodes, Time’s Arrow focuses on BoJack’s mother and how her turbulent childhood affected her. Gorgeously executed, it makes us pity the woman who made our favorite alcoholic horse the way he is, and it concludes with BoJack making peace with his mother, who he had spent so long resenting. It’s just a gorgeous episode. I think I’m going to rewatch it right now, haha.

2. Mr. Robot - I’ve wanted to watch this show since it came out, but I finally began and finished the first two seasons just weeks before Season 3 came out. Since I’m discussing my favorites of 2017, I won’t be talking about those first two seasons here. I’ll be focusing on Season 3, which has been, in my opinion, incredible. What began as a modern, nerdy take on Fight Club has become so much more; a masterfully dark and suspenseful fictionalized look at the looming political state of our world. We’ve gotten new characters (Irving, who’s a gem), we’ve learned more about older but mysterious characters (poor repressed Dom), we’ve had to say goodbye to old characters (I’m still mad about ******), and best of all, this season has been Tyrell heavy, and we even got to see Elliot make peace with Mr. Robot.

Standout episode: S3/EP8, eps3.7_dont-delete-me.ko - The previous episode had already established a gorgeously melancholy setting through the use of Mac Quayle's gorgeous production 2.0_6-madame3xecutioner.oga, which, as a huge fan of film scores, I instantly fell in love with. The song is featured during a scene I watched several times - the scene when Angela repeatedly rewinds the explosion, unable to cope with the reality of it. It left me feeling similar to the way I had after watching American Beauty for the first time - like the world was a different shade. I thought this would be the only moment the show could invoke that response from me, but then the next episode came out. Unlike Ep. 7, Ep. 8 didn’t have a single moment. The whole episode brimmed with pain and sadness. The show’s already sad, but the lonely, isolated feeling is often overwhelmed by the suspense, drama, and excitement. This episode let the characters hurt without interruption, and it was wonderfully emotional.

1. The Get Down - I was so thrilled when I discovered this show in April, literally a few days after Part 2 had aired. I downloaded all the episodes for a road trip, and literally could not put it down the entire tme. It blended all my favorite things - the art of rap, the origin and evolution of hip hop, how battle rapping/deejaying came to be. The music was stellar, the cinematography was breathtaking, the acting was (for the most part) wonderful, and the cast was fantastic. I’ve seen some criticizing it, because of its occasionally choppy narrative and the fact that Baz Luhrmann added his usual whimsical take on something that was historically fairly dark, but I thought it was flawless. It was definitely groundbreaking in its amount of representation, and it was fun and colorful and emotional and, overall, just absolutely wonderful. Like many others, I was pretty devastated when they cancelled it. I understand why, but I wish it could get the Sense 8 treatment and receive a movie. There’s too many loose ends - it’s a real bummer. Still, I’m grateful we were blessed with this gem of a show at all.

Standout episode: S1/EP11, Only from Exile Can We Come Home - The final episode gets this spot for a single scene; the one where it alternates between Mylene singing “I’m my #1″ in the hotel room with Jackie and all the drag queens, and the scene where an unreleased Miguel song is playing while Dizzy & Thor paint on each other, and then Shao calls Dizzy his “alien brother.” That scene was easily one of my favorites I’ve ever seen in any show, in my entire life. If that episode was a film, that scene alone would guarantee it a spot on my favorite films list. It was that good.

#mine #txt #2017

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theonyxpath · 6 years

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With tails wagging and tongue’s lolling, we are racing towards the last days of the Fetch Quest Kickstarter campaign! If you haven’t yet checked it out, please take a look at this easy to learn, cooperative, deck-building card game for all ages. The KS page has reviews and how to play links, and as a backer you can download a print’n’play version of your own and start having fun right now! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/fetch-quest-a-deck-building-game-in-the-realms-of/description

And once you do, let us know what you think! Card games aren’t our usual thing, so the more feedback we get on the game or the way the Fetch Quest Kickstarter is set up, the better we can do the next ones!

Changeling: The Lost 2nd art by Ken Meyer, Jr

Here are a few more bite-sized treats selected from what we talked about in the Monday Meeting today:

Our sales partners at IPR‘s sale on prestige edition Chronicles of Darkness books (Demon: The Descent, Mummy: The Curse, Dark Eras, Beast: The Primordial) and their Screens ends June 24th. These are the remaining books from their respective Kickstarters, and are traditional printed and bound, with bookmarks and embossed and varnished covers printed over metallic paper. They’re gorgeous and on sale. http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

Fantasy Grounds has added Shelzar: City of Sins from Scarred Lands to their online store, so that their Virtual Tabletop community can now explore the most wicked city in the Scarred Lands. We’re very happy that our SL presence in VTT is starting to build with our friends at Fantasy Grounds!

Our plans for Gen Con 2018 are rolling forward – just check out the projects Mirthful Mike is working on right now – and we’re going to be waving at Paizo again on our front, and across the aisle sideways at White Wolf this year. So we’ll have a ring-side seat at the explosion of gamers coming for V5 this year. Meanwhile, we’ll have our good friends from the Wrecking Crew demoing again this year outside the exhibit hall in their own room, and at least one demo table at our booth going at all times. Expect us to announce some pretty wild projects this year!

Lots of folks working on lots of exciting books – just peruse the First Draft part of the Progress Report below! We still have some very important core books to deliver, and then a smorgasbord of different projects of all game lines and sizes are on their way.

Last Friday’s Onyx Pathcast that featured an overview and behind-the-scenes of Vampire: The Requiem 2nd has garnered a ton of fantastic comments all over the place, and rightfully so considering the Terribly Terrific Trio (or the Terrifically Terrible Trio) were really firing on all cylinders with this one. If you want to hear more of these project or game-line oriented Pathcasts, then join the crowd and let us know! This Friday, at least two thirds of the gang will be interviewing the amazing up-and-coming writer and developer, Steffie de Vaan.

Changeling: The Lost 2nd art by Brian LeBlanc

And now, as a change of pace, and as sort of an illustration equivalent to the Developer/Writer viewpoints in last Friday’s Onyx Pathcast, I thought I’d do a bit of a walk-through showing the steps Mirthful Mike and I go through as an art director when one of us commissions an artist to create an illustration for one of our books.

The developer should have provided the art notes for the pieces they know they need. Some devs will write out very detailed, multi-page, descriptions that specify every aspect of what the piece should contain, others will give very brief descriptions and leave the decisions as to what looks good to the artist.

As an art director, I’m looking for a bit of a middle zone where the developer includes descriptions or reference links for accuracy – character appearance, the location, etc – and very specifically what they need to see happen in the illustration. If the point is to show a power being used, we do need to know what that power does. If the point is to show our cool protagonist in a run-down bar, then a brief description of what sort of attitude is being expressed is important.

In the end, we prefer to give the artist just enough info so that they can run with a piece and show off their abilities while still holding to the subject matter we hired them to illustrate. We also like to have a good idea of which pieces are going to which illustrator so that we can fine tune the notes based on how they are most comfortable working.

Some artists like having as much info as possible in addition to the art notes, like the whole text or at least their chapter, while others find all that reading too much to deal with while trying to get to grips with their specific assignments. No wrong answer there, and we try and work with them to allow them to make their best work.

For example, here’s a link to the art notes for the full page pieces for Wraith 20th that we sent to Ken Meyer, Jr. For this project, Ken was illustrating all the full-page pieces and they needed to contain the various player-character types. Since we’ve been hiring Ken for longer than any of us care to be reminded about, RichD was able to keep the info pretty minimal for the actual fulls, while stressing the overall specific feel of Wr20 (as opposed to any of our many other game lines Ken has done his beautiful illustrations for). Here’s a link to those art notes: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B57iDF62OjtPaV9ySDZ3QlZtbEJqdW8yb2V4ZFVRZDdjRGVZ

Here’s the specific full-page description (in case you don’t want to read the PDF of the full art notes):

Chapter Nine – Drama Chanteur – Petite wraith with an electric violin and a headset mike, playing the violin like it’s a weapon. Because it is.

As per our illustration process, Ken then sent in a sketch worked up in pencil and based on a series of emails with Mirthful Mike that went over any questions that Ken might have:

Depending on the project, Mike may loop in the developer, me, or a licensing partner like White Wolf, for commentary and to see if the subject matter is being handled as needed. Most of the time, Mike handles this stage himself – particularly when you consider that different artists sketch with different kinds of completeness. Some artists like to create very tight sketches and then use the final stages to take that tight sketch into the finished medium. Others like to have less detailed sketches and work out the details in their finish.

So an art director gets to know how to “read” the sketches of their different artists and respond appropriately.

In this particular case, the communication worked the way we like it to, because here’s the fantastic final piece:

Now figure that we go through those steps, and often have redos or tweaks at each stage, for every piece of art you see in every book and project we make. An art director’s job is never done, especially when they are keeping an eye on all the styles and subject matters we have in all our projects which span:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

KICKSTARTER:

Fetch Quest, the adventure card game set in the Realms of Pugmire is down to its last days and we’d love to have you join us!

And if you’ve already pledged, this is definitely a game that needs to be spread by word of mouth, so please let your friends and family know about this game of good dogs (and cats!) out to fetch what Man has left behind!

Next up, Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition Kickstarter…starting sooner than you might expect…

ELECTRONIC GAMING:

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is both rolling and rocking!

Here are the links for the Apple and Android versions:

http://theappstore.site/app/1296692067/onyx-dice

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onyxpathpublishing.onyxdice&hl=en

Three different screenshots, above.

ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue you bought it from. Reviews really, really help us with getting folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

Vampire: The Masquerade: The Endless Ages Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Rites of Renown: When Will You Rage II (Kindle, Nook)

Mage: The Ascension: Truth Beyond Paradox (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: The God-Machine Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Mummy: The Curse: Curse of the Blue Nile (Kindle, Nook)

Beast: The Primordial: The Primordial Feast Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Masquerade: Of Predators and Prey: The Hunters Hunted II Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: The Poison Tree (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Songs of the Sun and Moon: Tales of the Changing Breeds (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Requiem: The Strix Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Forsaken: The Idigam Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Mage: The Awakening: The Fallen World Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Masquerade: The Beast Within Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: W20 Cookbook (Kindle, Nook)

Exalted: Tales from the Age of Sorrows (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: Tales of the Dark Eras (Kindle, Nook)

Promethean: The Created: The Firestorm Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Demon: The Descent: Demon: Interface (Kindle, Nook)

Scarred Lands: Death in the Walled Warren (Kindle, Nook)

V20 Dark Ages: Cainite Conspiracies (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: Strangeness in the Proportion (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Requiem: Silent Knife (Kindle, Nook)

Mummy: The Curse: Dawn of Heresies (Kindle, Nook)

OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the Screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there!

https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

Here’s the link to the press release we put out about how Onyx Path is now selling through Indie Press Revolution: http://theonyxpath.com/press-release-onyx-path-limited-editions-now-available-through-indie-press-revolution/

And you can now order Pugmire: the book, the screen, and the dice! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=296

IPR is holding a 40% sale on the Chronicles of Darkness prestige edition core books that we have remaining until June 24th!

DRIVETHRURPG.COM:

This Wednesday the PDF and physical book PoD versions of C20 Kithbook: Boggans go on sale on DTRPG.com!

Sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest differences in life, and nowhere is this more evident than the boggan kith. Although they have preferred to let others glory in the spotlight, this industrious kith has worked its own subtle and patient magic over the centuries, drawing power from dreams of hearth and comfort and becoming no less than the bedrock of Kithain society. Even heroes need homes to return to, after all.

For the first time ever, the secrets and gossip of the boggan kith are being shared with outsiders. So pull your chair closer to the fire, take up a fresh cup of tea, and listen carefully, because the real truth about these unsung heroes is finally coming to light.

Kithbook: Boggans features:

• A history of this unassuming yet vital kith, and how they’ve subtly shaped the Dreaming.

• Insight into boggan nature combined with advice for bringing boggan characters to life.

• Ready-made characters for quick play, and profiles of famous boggans past and present.

• New Treasures, Merits, and Flaws for boggan characters.

CONVENTIONS!

Prep is seriously underway for Gen Con 2018 in the first week of August, which takes place in Indianapolis. In addition to our booth presence, be sure to check out the games and panels in the Gen Con Event Schedule.

From Fast Eddy Webb, we have these:

Eddy will be speaking at Broadleaf Writers Conference (September 22-23) in Decatur, GA. He’ll be there to talk about writing for interactive fiction, and hanging out with other writers who have far more illustrious careers. http://broadleafwriters.com/3rd-annual-broadleaf-writers-conference/3rd-annual-broadleaf-writers-conference-speakers/

Eddy will also be a featured guest at Save Against Fear (October 12-14) in Harrisburg, PA. He’ll be running some Pugmire games, be available for autographs, and will sometimes accept free drinks. http://www.thebodhanagroup.org/about-the-convention

If you are going and want to meet up, let us know!

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM FAST EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

C20 Novel (Jackie Cassada) (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

CofD Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Tales of Excellent Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

Adventures for Curious Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

Changeling: The Lost 2nd Jumpstart (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Witch-Queen of the Shadowed Citadel (Cavaliers of Mars)

Redlines

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon (Werewolf: The Forsaken 2nd Edition)

In Media Res (Trinity Continuum: Core)

Wr20 Book of Oblivion (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

C20 Players’ Guide (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

Dog and Cat Ready Made Characters (Monarchies of Mau)

Aeon Aexpansion (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Second Draft

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

Development

Signs of Sorcery (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Hunter: the Vigil 2e core (Hunter: the Vigil 2nd Edition)

Fetch Quest (Pugmire)

They Came From Beneath the Sea! Rulebook (TCFBtS!)

CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Manuscript Approval:

Dystopia Rising: Evolution (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

Editing:

Guide to the Night (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

Post-Editing Development:

Scion: Hero (Scion 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum Core Rulebook (The Trinity Continuum)

Trinity Continuum: Aeon Rulebook (The Trinity Continuum)

Ex Novel 2 (Aaron Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Exalted 3rd Novel by Matt Forbeck (Exalted 3rd Edition)

GtS Geist 2e core (Geist: the Sin-Eaters Second Edition)

M20 Gods and Monsters (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Night Horrors: The Tormented (Promethean: The Created 2nd Edition)

Indexing:

Wraith 20

Cavaliers of Mars

Monarchies of Mau (Monarchies of Mau)

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE:

In Art Direction

Ex3 Monthly Stuff

Scion Hero – Stuff is progressing…

Trinity Continuum

Geist 2e – KS artwork continues.

The Realm

M20 Gods and Monsters

Ex3 Dragon Blooded – More sketches coming in.

Promethean Night Horrors: The Tormented

Marketing Stuff

Posters and Displays

Gen Con Cards

In Layout

Fetch Quest – Prepping new playtest decks for Gen Con.

Proofing

Scion Origin – Onyx review.

Changeling: the Lost 2 – Corrections to Josh.

Wraith 20 Screen – At WW.

Storyteller System Brochure

GenCon Brochure

At Press

V20 Beckett’s Jyhad Diary & Beckett Screen & V20 Dice – At fulfillment shipper, prepping for KS ship-out.

Scion Dice – At fulfillment shipper.

Boggans – PDF and PoDs on sale this Wednesday.

Monarchies of Mau – In Indexing.

Monarchies of Mau Screen – Getting ready to send to press.

Cavaliers of Mars Screen – Getting ready to send to press.

Wr20 Guide for Newly Departed – Creating PoD files.

Gen Con Buttons – At press.

WoD and CofD reroll cards – At press.

FQ and PG Gen Con cards – At press.

TODAY’S REASON TO CELEBRATE: Today is the birthday of J. Michael Straczynski, 1954 – celebrated writer of comics and TV, specifically of Babylon 5. Fun fact: B5 was a real pioneer in structure for television with free-standing episodes that were part of story-arcs that worked as seasons that had specific season-long stories and finishes, and so it was a huge influence on the limited-series concept for our games. Specifically in pitching Orpheus back in the day, I referenced B5‘s use of structure.

#Onyx Path Publishing

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xtremedespair3d · 4 years

Text

HajiKo Anime: Summer 2020

Previously I made a post where I talked about my first impressions of the Summer anime I’ve watched, now that the Fall season is getting closer, now it’s finally the time to give my final impressions of everything I watched this season.

(I wanted to make a custom thumbnail for this post like I did with the previous one but I gave up with the idea afterwards)

(Also, I had some of this post in draft for a while but on September 29th, I spent HOURS and I WROTE a lot of good shit before and for some god forsaken reason Firefox decided to crash. Everything I had written before is gone and I have not even saved at all since, I’m so god damn salty. Now you will never experience what have I written before and all I wrote now are just bare remains from what I last remember writing, I was so god damn salty but in the end the rewrite worked out well, I did the best I could to rewrite some of the same things I said before and I did some little changes and added new things so I was satisfied, I hope you can still enjoy the post.)

As usual, here’s the tier of everything I watched this season:

(Higher resolution)

By the way, as of 2021 I think I might make only ONE tier for every anime I’m gonna watch that entire year, as I publish my first tier of the Winter season, I’ll be adding more visuals of the Spring anime and so on, even if I might get lost in finding the visuals as I edit my template, this is because I’ve been constantly making way too many standalone tiers for a single season FOR A YEAR, I bet I’ve must have been taking a lot of the website’s space for something very small and irrelevant.

TierMaker should have better options on whether the tiers your making are public or not, and I read the terms of services conditions, I’m kind of scared on what to do next with using TierMaker for doing these kinds of tiers, I can’t just find a random blank template and use GIMP.

Uzaki-chan: Aside from simply saying “This was a very good show, I had plenty of laughs” or something, the main thing I want to talk about isn’t so much in the show itself, but rather how Uzaki-chan herself, Hana Uzaki, has become a target of SJWs in one of the worst anime controversies ever, even worse than Goblin Slayer.

As for the series itself, I really liked it, I had plenty of good laughs and it was just fun to watch, and I’m really happy that season 2 is happening now too.

Fire Force: There is something about the feel of the show, these awkward long slow moments and stuff and everything else kinda drives me insane, but until the second half of the first season with the Adolla Burst and stuff, that’s where now I’m getting very intrigued in the plot, the worldbuilding, everything, and this season continues to expand the story and it gets even more interesting, and the animation can be really nice too.

Re:Zero season 2: Echidna is best girl, that’s it, that’s the review.

All jokes aside, I’m liking this season so far, it gets somewhat confusing but I’ll figure that out, and it’s strange that we’re only having the first half of the season this Summer and we will have to wait all the way to Winter 2021 for the series to continue, it’s a very Ufotable thing to do and hell, even Magia Record is still in production as of now.

Oregairu season 3: Let me give you a little bit of a retrospect: I honestly vaguely remember what even happened in the first two seasons, as I started watching this season, I started to remember at least one key moment from season 2 and even the characters, which I kinda feel like I like most characters, except Irohas is my least favorite, maybe Komachi too when she constantly says “kimochiwarui” but she’s not extremely annoying like Irohas. I still think how these last two seasons are visually impressive in contrast to the first season, that one’s painful to watch, the voice acting is particularly interesting too.

Now that the series is over, let me give my overall thoughts on the Oregairu series as a whole. The series overall isn’t a series I wouldn’t consider be a huge part of my life, I’m not hugely impressed with it but there are things I liked and I would still talk that I had seen the series, it’s kinda something.

Donkyuu Hentai HxEROS: This one’s the most conflicting ecchi series I’ve ever watched in my life. On the first episode, I was into it at first, but then I started to feel lukewarm about it, but then episode 5 was the one episode I got genuinely the most impressed, and the next few episodes have started to degrade on me, it was a complete 50/50 of a series to watch.

My biggest problem of the series is Kirara, her writing and just her overal existence, she’s the most painfully unlikeable main ecchi heroines I’ve ever seen in my entire life. On one hand, she looks cute, but boy, I fucking hate her so much, I can’t stand for how she is at all, I absolutely prefer her young lowkey pervert self from the flashbacks, she might even be the worst girl ever. If there’s any best girl in this series, it’d probably be the other HxERO girls like the Saitama branch teammates, the girls from the Toyko branch and even Chacha (And the shota (?) from the Toyko branch is best boy). The flashbacks are especially sad, it really hurts me how Enjo and Kirara’s happiness got taken away so god damn bad.

As someone who’s completely spoiled with full blown hentai instead of ecchi nowadays, I usually prefer girls written as perverts or something, someone who can be okay with what the MC does and what not, anyway, the other HxERO girls seem to be absolutely fine with doing the H-Energy and stuff, but Kirara is so intolerable to watch. Even Chacha and Dark Kirara (A hallucination reflecting Kirara’s young self dressed in a iliy outfit) encourage Kirara to be more honest with her feelings about Retto and try to bring her to her old self.

(I really hope this doesn’t sound sexist)

The animation was decent, the visuals looked nice but there are times the animation can be a little off, especially episode 11 which was awful, then there’s also the annoying censorship even the AT-X broadcast didn’t help, and by the way, the “H-Energy” version that comes out a week after the original episode premiere was not worth it at all, it only decensors some irrelevant parts, the steam and such, it doesn’t even decensor the boobs, thankfully the Blu-Rays are here to save the day.

I judge Kirara a lot which is my deal breaker with the series, but what about the story or the concept even? The concept of the story, the themes and everything seems okay, nothing really special about it that kinda makes up for the series being decent.

This isn’t the worst ecchi series I’ve seen in my life, but certainly the most mediocre, one that I felt it was truly frustrating to watch and I’m not even sure if I should make rank this as C or even D which I ended up on the former for the pros being the visuals and the concept being okay. Take me back to Winter 2020 with Ishuzoku Reviewers. Maybe I should have watched Peter Grill this season instead.

Honorable mentions:

BanG Dream Garupa Pico Ohmori: I gotta be real about the Garupa Pico series overall now, not just with Ohmori but with the first season as well.

To be brutally honest, I don’t really find humor in this series as much, though in some cases there are episodes that did make me laugh, I mean, the series is still entertaining to watch as it is but at the same time I’m not really impressed, it isn’t much of a constant laughing stock series as I wanted it to be, and never has been even with the first season to begin with.

Before the series came out, I had an argument with someone who hates the main Bandori anime series because of the “forced drama” and they called the Garupa Pico series “the good series,” it seriously frustrated me because the third season from this Winter was so good, it’s probably the best Bandori season yet because of the character interactions and it made me become a fan of RAS. I don’t hate the Garupa Pico series, it still has its charm, I like the visuals (I’m surprised that the Garupa Pico series are animated by Sanzigen as well) and I admire how the series is watchable on YouTube via the official Bandori channels, but in my opinion, this is probably like a 7/10 B rank series at best, it isn’t something that’s gonna stick and be a huge part of my life like the main series.

With that being said, I would probably like to go back to the Spring 2020 tier I made and would put Garupa Pico Ohmori on B in retrospect, but I’m still gonna keep it as it is because at the time I was really surprised for its sudden existence.

General overview and critiques of the overall Garupa Pico series aside, let’s talk about Ohmori for once, if there’s one thing I have to give huge thumbs up for is introducing RAISE A SUILEN and Morfonica and the series continuing to last for two-cours, one-cour for a short series can be such a waste, even better comedies like Girls’ Frontline Healing Chapter (I have something special to tell you about it below), I really like that the series is very long so I can watch all the misadventures for every band, but at the same time, even if RAS and Morfonica have finally been introduced, they’re still somewhat irrelevant and underused which makes me sad since Bandori 3 really made me a huge fan of RAS and I want to see more of them, and oddly enough, they probably can’t even bother trying to update the ending theme by including RAS and Morfonica, both in the visual and the song itself, if there’s gonna be a new Garupa Pico season in the next two years, hopefully RAS and Morfonica will become regular cast members. As for Morfonica, I have no idea and I don’t really know them much, I seriously need Bandori 4 to happen so it can introduce Morfonica and make me understand them.

As Joaquin Phoenix Joker said: “Comedy is subjective, Murray.”

Welcome to the Japari Park season 2: If there’s some things I have to complain about this second season is that I wish the series would continue to do these secret mystery Kako recordings during the credits like the first season had, and I wish they would stop doing these Friend trivia segments with non-existent Friends, the first season always did these segments with Friends who are actually featured in one episode or something, now that the series has been doing these segments with Friends that don’t even appear in the series, it makes these segments absolutely pointless.

Speaking of Kemono Friends, after the Welcome to the Japari Park series, who knows if the franchise’s anime future will live on given on how widely panned Kemono Friends 2 was. SEGA’s Chocotto Anime Kemono Friends 3 shorts have pretty much ended, I was actually eager on watching these shorts but they haven’t made any new short for a long time. What about 2021? Should we expect a Kemono Friends 3 anime? Probably not, and with the existence of the game with the same name, it’s gonna be extremely confusing whether this Kemono Friends 3 anime should be the third season of the main series or might be an adaptation of the game, whatever it turns out, I’d still watch it anyways because I want to continue to observe the Kemono Friends anime adaptations unfold, and I’d still be confident it would still be nowhere near as good as the first season with Tatsuki.

By the way, since September 16th, SEGA finally released not one, but FOUR new Chocotto Anime Kemono Friends 3 shorts after so long! (1, 2, 3, 4), I just happened to find that out as of the (re)writing of this, September 29th. My question is, what did it even take so long to make new shorts? One would assume is most likely COVID because that affected quite a lot of anime, but at least we finally got not one but four new videos of the Kemono Friends 3 shorts.

My Hero Academia: Make It! Do-or-Die Survival. Pretty strange for a new My Hero Academia OVA to come out this time.

Aggretsuko season 3. If there’s one thing I’d like to say about this season, or at least the last few episodes, it’s that this season has quite the darkest season finales for Aggretsuko I’ve ever seen.

Plans for Fall:

This was the weakest season of the year despite Uzaki-chan and Fire Force (Fruits Basket, Garupa Pico and Japari Park too but I don’t count leftovers), it’s a shame considering how this decade had started strong with quite some good shows and Summer has always been my favorite anime season, but the line-up isn’t as great as before, if Akudama Drive and Danmachi season 3 wouldn’t have been delayed if it weren’t for COVID, they would have made this season slightly better, but now that I think about it, it was for the best for them to get delayed because this Fall line-up is looking a million times better, hell, it’s looking to be the best season of the year!

Now, whenever I talk about the Fall anime season, we can’t forget the most important thing ever: My birthday! If you have no idea, I’ll probably remind you a billion times my birthday is coming soon, October 4th, and one of the things I always look forward the most is watching day 1 anime that come out in my birthday, but alas, I started to feel like I’m not looking forward to my birthday this year AT ALL, mainly because Venom Let There Be Carnage got delayed until June of 2021, and that really sucks so bad because THAT WAS MY ONLY CHANCE TO SEE A VENOM MOVIE IN MY BIRTHDAY, SOMETHING THE FIRST FILM SHOULD HAVE BEEN BECAUSE IT CAME OUT A DAY LATE! IT WOULD HAVE ABSOLUTELY TOPPED JOKER AS MY #1 BEST BIRTHDAY FILM EVER! My birthday gets even more depressing when there’s literally not a single anime that remotely interests me coming out in my birthday and most of the anime I’m the most excited for are coming out before and long after my birthday, the only choice I have is Talentless Nana, or Munou na Nana if you’d like to call the series but I like using the former, I watched the trailer of it and it was okay, not really impressed but might as well give it a shot in my birthday, if I didn’t like it, might as well rewatch the anime that came before it.

Anyways, enough talk about my birthday, let’s talk about my most anticipated Fall shows:

Akudama Drive - October 8th: Since the foundation of Tookyo Games, a new studio by Kazutaka Kodaka,and Kotaro Uchikoshi with artists like Rui Komatsuzaki and Shimadoriru, this anime by Pierrot was the #1 thing that got my most attention, and I can’t believe that we’re so close to the release! Though I SERIOUSLY wish this would come out on my birthday.

Danganronpa may be over but as long as there’s new projects with Kodaka and Komatsuzaki onboard, such as Akudama Drive and the upcoming Tribe Nine. Oh, and speaking of Danganronpa, guess what?... THERE’S GONNA BE AN AKUDAMA DRIVE AND DANGANRONPA COLLABORATION!!! (News provided by the official Akudama Drive Twitter account) Not only there’s gonna be illustrations by Rui Komatsuzaki but if the translations are correct, there’s gonna be more projects along the way! A Danganronpa and Akudama Drive collab is something I just never knew I needed in my life!

I’m absolutely calling it, this is definitely gonna be my AOTY, it may be based due to the fact that I love the Danganronpa franchise to death, but I’ve always had my eyes on this and I want to see it now!

By the way, I just realized something, there’s this project with visuals by Rui Komatsuzaki and Shimadoriru that I have yet to see some news of!

It’s not Tribe Nine, that game looks like a completely different beast on its own and it’s in collaboration with another project.

Then there’s also this other game that’s, quote:

Collaboration of the development team of Danganronpa and Spike Chunsoft. Kodaka actually started this project before his retirement of Spike Chunsoft. We imagine a kind of cyberpunk world from this art. Komatsuzaki designs the characters, Shimadoriru designs background, and Takada directs the sounds.

Okay, that sounds really cool, but I’m more interested in the one project with the Rui Komatsuzaki and Shimadoriru visuals, I want to know more about them!

Sure, the concept art may not represent what the final product might end up looking, but World’s End Club (Originally called Death March Club) and Akudama Drive live up to their concept art, so that’s something!

Speaking of Danganronpa, the 10th anniversary stuff was ABSOLUTELY LACKLUSTER, I legit expected there might have been surprise announcements or anything that said there’s a new Danganronpa installment, but nothing absolutely relevant came from it, the Danganronpa x Akudama Drive collab was the only good thing from it. This is what I get for setting my expectations way too high, well, maybe not too high, but still, come on.

(But at the same time, do I REALLY want a new Danganronpa without the staple creators on board?)

Girls’ Frontline Healing Chapter season 2 - October 7th: Girls’ Frontline isn’t my most played gacha game, a black sheep, probably the most blackest sheep since Granblue Fantasy, one I don’t heavily get invested to play like Fate/Grand Order, Azur Lane and even Arknights, though while I started playing Arknights at launch, I stopped around March because the game was very difficult and I lacked the resources, but I returned to the game in May after seeing my older sister starting to play Arknights. I returned to Girls’ Frontline because my Filipino friend started playing Girls’ Frontline around early May and he’s made quite a lot of insane progress in just 5 months, even I wouldn’t ever do that, but since September 28th, I uninstalled the game because I wanted to have some space to install Genshin Impact but at the same time I ended up giving on it too because it ran pretty slow for my phone even on the lowest settings and I almost had no storage left, I even tried installing the game on PC and I don’t know why but the game gave me last minute errors for some reason, so sacrifices had to be made for both Girls’ Frontline and Genshin Impact.

Anyway, enough talk with the gacha game side of things because I made quite a long un-spaced (?) paragraph, let’s talk about the GFL short anime series itself, even as a non-GFL player, I LOVED this series to death, hell, I was even lowkey sad when Healing Chapter ended, Madness Chapter, however... Not so much, we don’t talk about Madness Chapter. The biggest surprise I had when the series came out was that it came out in BiliBili with Chinese dub, hearing anime in Chinese dub is unheard of, I thought the series would be automatically in Japanese because the first trailer had an all-Japanese voice-over, but the Chinese dub was quite good, but then the Japanese dub finally came out--ON MY BIRTHDAY! on Japanese television (and BiliBili too). Well, that’s quite a lovely surprise, I managed to watch the JP dubbed premiere of Healing Chapter long before I went out with my family to have lunch and then go see Joker, it was the second 神映画 (Kami eiga - God film, I made that up) of the year, and my #1 was of course Avengers: Endgame. The JP dub of both Healing and Madness Chapter were very good too overall, it did some things better than CN and vice versa, even casting Persica’s JP voice which I really hope her seiyuu can be used again at some point, the JP broadcast of Healing Chapter also had these weird live-action segments of some dudes’ hands playing with the main character plushies doing random things... I don’t even know what they are or why they are, all I can say that they’re just pretty much fillers to fit the Japanese TV broadcast time limit.

I’m wasting quite a lot of time writing nonsense history of my experience with the Girls’ Frontline short anime series and let me get straight to the point of season 2, when the interview video was released, one of the animators said that they were working on season 2 and then the designs for AK-12 and AN-94 were shown, I’m of course hyped as hell for season 2! (Poggers) and, I don’t want to say this but because of COVID-19, I thought season 2 wouldn’t ever happen now, but it’s still alive and kicking and ready to be released! But there’s one MAJOR problem, apparently BiliBili is going to region lock the series! At first I wasn’t concerned about it for some reason, I had some misguided optimism that someone’s gotta have a VPN or do anything to try to upload the series on more accessible websites, but now the concern is growing bigger and bigger, but still let’s hope someone can still upload season 2 somewhere, I don’t want to see spoilers going around, even if I don’t follow a lot of Girls’ Frontline accounts which I should because sometimes I wouldn’t have ever found out about season 2.

Now I’m just seeing mostly stuff about Healing Chapter season 2, there’s one major question, should I expect Madness Chapter season 2 as well? As far as I know, there really hasn’t been any trailer for a potential season 2 or if it’s actually getting one at all, doesn’t seem like the series did well and I didn’t even care about it sometimes, which is great because Healing Chapter is far superior. But now that Madness Chapter may not get a second season, there’s also the question of what does M16′s Chinese VA mean by making the series “longer,” longer as in be a couple of minutes longer? Although 3-4 minutes is already a decent runtime, it’s not insanely short but I’m down if they’d make it at least a couple of minutes longer. Maybe making the series longer means that we can have a two-cour second season worth of Girls’ Frontline: Healing Chapter only? I would love for that to happen, but we’ll have to find out and see.

There are somethings I forgot to mention about Girls’ Frontline season 2, it’s aimed to be released on October 7th, which is surprisingly earlier than the first season’s release where it was late July. And October 7th being on Wednesday and I wish Girls’ Frontline season 2 would come out on my birthday, but oh well. I wonder if it’ll take about the same timeframe for the Japanese dub’s release, it came out on my birthday last year when the original Chinese dub came out in late July, so I might expect the Japanese dub of season 2 to come out in probably like Winter 2021 at best, we’ll see about that.

Even if I don’t religiously play Girls’ Frontline like I wanted to because I’m a big fan of guns, I wouldn’t mind playing Code Name Bakery, though. I may not fully understand the story in order but my Filipino friend would occasionally tell me spoilers and I don’t really mind that.

By the way, last year I made a shitpost video of Girls’ Frontline Healing Chapter but with Team Fortress 2 audio, now I finally made a new audio parody video but with a twist(ed metal)!

Osomatsu-san season 3 - October 12th: Just when I thought the future of the Osomatsu-san series would be over with the movie, but I’m glad my boys are still up and running! This is definitely gonna top Uzaki-chan as the better comedy of the year because Osomatsu-san has consitently given me a lot of laughs and delivers some really hilarious and bizarre moments.

Knowing that this is Osomatsu-san, wil it dare to even touch upon the topic of COVID-19 or something? There might be some scenes where the cast are doing a Zoom meeting, but they probably wouldn’t flat out say the name of the virus out loud, it’s very unlikely as I kinda find COVID-19 a somewhat sensitive topic and other media hasn’t or probably wouldn’t even try doing something about it.

Burn the Witch - October 2nd: I never really grew up nor care about Bleach, but I read the one-shot of Burn the Witch and I was intrigued by it, when the serialization was announced, I was excited because this series has potential, but there was a catch, this would be a short limited series for 4 chapters, so when I read the last chapter of the manga series, I was sad because the series has potential and it got wasted, but wait, it’s not entirely over yet, as this was only the “first season” and the manga series is getting a “second season.” Yeah, I have no idea how a manga having seasons even works, that doesn’t make sense.

Now here comes the film (or three-part episode series) and upon seeing the first trailer, I thought it would adapt the one-shot because that came out first, but as later trailers came out... It’s adapting the serialized series?! How long was this in the making?! How did the animators even get to read the four chapters of the serialized manga series before they were even released yet?!

Speaking of Bleach, there’s an upcoming new anime that’s adapting an arc, but like I said, I never grew up nor I care about Bleach, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Golden Kamuy season 3 - October 5th: Information on season 3 has been quite scarce for a while and hell, I have barely even watched the trailers, but at last it’s finally coming. As of the (re)writing of this post, September 29th, I finally managed to watch the OVAs and I forgot how hilarious and weird it can be and I love it.

Danmachi season 3 - October 2nd: Like Akudama Drive, this one was also originally gonna be released on Summer but was delayed because of COVID, I haven’t really talked about it more than I have with Akudama Drive because I’m the most excited for it.

Like Golden Kamuy, I happened to watch the recent OVA when season 2 ended and I haven’t seen the trailers at all. Man, I rarely watch OVAs nowadays. Also, speaking of the OVA, what did I just watch?!

D4DJ First Mix - October 30th: That’s right, this is ANOTHER Sanzigen produced anime of the year, Sanzigen has done it again, they’re absolutely killing this year. Anyways, I wanted to watch this for obvious reasons, but apparently I found out that this D4DJ franchise is a new property by Bushiroad, the publisher of the BanG Dream series, seems like Bushiroad has a soft spot for Sanzigen and I really can’t blame them.

Higurashi remake - October 1st: Starting the month off with a remake adaptation of Higurashi, lovely. I never grew up watching the original Higurashi anime, however, I do remember certain moments from the series... For the absolute worse. (1, 2). Yeah, that’s all I can remember. I really wish I could have binged the original series months ago, at least the first season because upon checking the Wikipedia, there’s a lot of other series and they’re just as long as the first one, there’s no way I would have survived all that binge-watching considering I have other things I’m heavily compromised such as my gacha gaming addiction, and yeah that was silly but I have nothing else to do in my spare time, with that being said about the binge-watching and consuming a lot of material, it would have been the time I binged all of Ikki Tousen for a week all over again.

I don’t know anything about the Higurashi visual novel, I don’t know if the original anime series was a good adaptation or not, I’ll probably let some VN royaltists tell me on this one, the 2000s were probably the time where VN adaptations were absolutely mediocre (which I can’t really say for sure because I don’t play VNs to even care to agree that the Tsukihime and Umineko anime are garbage), but I digress. If you couldn’t tell, the original Higurashi anime is that old, which I don’t understand why the need for an anime remake like at this time and what will it even do as an adaptation.

Watching the series is gonna be totally new to me, this isn’t like a Fruits Basket situation where I refused to watch the original anime series in favor of the remake, and by seeing some comparison videos, the remake is a million times far superior than the remake.

Guraburu! - October 8th: I don’t want to consider my older sister as my personal go-to Granblue Fantasy/Shadowverse/Bahamut source since whatever she says are her opinions and whatever which I wouldn’t always end up agreeing, even if she ends up saying that she hates the main Granblue Fantasy anime series. As for me, I found the first season decent, I liked the animation, but then the second season came and the animation is totally different and that gave me a huge sour taste in my mouth, just the visuals were enough to make me sick from the painful animation and I couldn’t care any single bit of it, and the fact that season 2 came out around the same time where other gacha game-based anime like Fate/Grand Order Babylonia and Azur Lane The Animation came out didn’t do any favors.

I don’t know if Girls’ Frontline or Granblue Fantasy are my blackest gacha game sheeps, I did have some decent experience with the game, I played the Christmas, the Persona 5 and the Detective Conan events (Though I didn’t finish the Conan event), I mostly opened the game for log ins but I occasionally went to do free rolls whenever those happened, lastly I played the campaign for a little bit but I stopped because the one chapter where I last played, I forgot what it was, but it required having a party with higher level and I couldn’t even beat a map once, so I gave up. I haven’t opened the game for a long time and I feel like I have pretty much retired from Granblue Fantasy. I wouldn’t like to try to follow my older sister in the shadows when it comes to Granblue Fantasy, Shadowverse or Rage of Bahamut any longer, so they’re totally out of my league.

My older sister seems rather optimistic about this series as it’s an adaptation of the game’s 4koma, going so far to say this would be “a million times better than the main anime series.”

Honestly I’m not feeling quite fond of these Cygames adaptations as a whole, they can be very hit or miss but the most important thing is whether they resonate with me or not, so I still end up watching everything anyways.

Also, we do not talk about the current Shadowverse anime because that is NOT the Shadowverse I know at all and I can’t believe it’s still going.

Attack on Titan: The Final Season - December 7th: Okay, I definitely did not expect quite a release date for the final season of Attack on Titan at all, it’s so weird that I even thought about whether or not I would classify this as a “Fall” anime and more like closer to the “Winter” season. I haven’t been following the news but my biggest question is, has the manga already ended? This wouldn’t be the final season if it wouldn’t adapt the entirety of the series finale as soon as the source material ended, kind of like Tokyo Ghoul:re.

Talentless Nana - October 4th: I already mentioned above that this is my only decent choice of day 1 anime to watch on my birthday, I’m just putting it here again for the sake of having the list complete.

Toji no Miko - Tomoshibi - October 25th, November 29th: Back when I first watched Toji no Miko back in 2018 (Wow, I already feel old), I found the series okay, they also released a mobile game at the time which I was like “Okay.” But for some reason as time went on I kind of grow to develop a negative aftertaste for the series, like it’s not very appealing or whatever. Then the Mini Toji series came out last year and it added fuel to the fire on my uninterest on the Toji no Miko franchise as a whole with Mini Toji leaving me a huge sour taste in my mouth, it wasn’t even funny, sometimes it was but most of it wasn’t.

I don’t want to associate Yoshinori Shizuma’s art heavily with Kancolle, but I even went so far thinking that Toji no Miko would be the Kancolle of swords or even a female Touken Ranbu of sorts but not exactly like Touken Ranbu, but it does nothing to help to gain interest.

I don’t know why I kind of feel that way towards the franchise, and after the mobile game’s release, I later thought Toji no Miko would become a failed franchise, so where we at now? Well, Toji no Miko is getting an OVA, but it’s not just a single OVA, it’s actually a two-part OVA, lovely. There’s just something about the series that makes me think it’s bland, it’s nothing special and whatever. I do think Yoshinori Shizuma’s character designs are nice, not great or rule 34 worthy but they’re okay at best, and that’s about it.

Mini Toji introduced the characters from the mobile game into the anime scene, and now the new OVAs are heavily based on the mobile game, but honestly, I prefer the characters from the anime series a million times better than the ones from the game, they’re rather forgettable.

You probably want to tell me that if I feel somewhat pessimistic about Toji no Miko, I should boycott the OVA, I’d like to but part of me tells me that maybe I shouldn’t blindly be a dick about it, so I guess I should give Toji no Miko one last chance. I wrote the release date just in case, I’ll probably forget about it anyways except there will be something that’ll make me remind the Toji no Miko OVA parts 1 and 2 will come out soon or have come out depending on the time.

(Speaking of Touken Ranbu, when the hell are we gonna get the new Touken Ranbu Hanamaru project? I recently read the news of the new Hanamaru project being in the works again to refresh my memory the last time I saw the news and it was from THIS JANUARY?! Holy crap, that was a really long time ago! I really hope this would resurface in 2021 and it might bring some interest in Touken Ranbu again, although this is Touken Ranbu and the fanbase are hardcore fujos so they’re still keeping the game alive in some way. I always thought the Touken Ranbu anime would now become dormant for some reason, especially when Ufotable is never gonna release the Katsugeki Touken Ranbu movie, they definitely must have ditched it in favor of more Fate and even Kimetsu no Yaiba. The Katsugeki Touken Ranbu film now is sitting next to Girls’ Work as Ufotable’s most infamous vaporware works.)

I guess that’s it for this post, I talked way too much about some of my most anticipated shows than others but it’s clear I do give a lot of thought into some of these things.

Anyways, I’ll see you later and don’t forget about my birthday!

Hajime Komaeda/XtremeDespair3D - Carrd.

If you want to do birthday donations: Here.

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evanvanness · 4 years

Text

Annotated edition for the May 24, 2020, Week in Ethereum News

Several people this week have told me they want a “drama” section in the newsletter and have asked me to annotate the Aragon and Autark Ado this week.

Perhaps that’s why the Aragon drama leads the most clicked list:

So why is Aragon suing its grantee? Aragon held a vote where the community approved these grants. Aragon now does not want to pay, claiming breach of contract - presumably that they did not believe Autark was not delivering fast enough or that products that were up to snuff. It’s a bit hard to follow the play-by-play but at some point Aragon decided that after spending 600k of the 1.6m awarded grant, they did not want to pay any longer, so Autark threatened to sue. Aragon offered to settle for $250k of the remaining million in grant payments, but it appears Autark rejected because Aragon would cut off the ANT incentive payments. So Aragon sued Autark, to make sure that the case happens on its home turf in Switzerland which benefits their deep pockets versus Autark’s (now unfunded) startup budget.

For what it’s worth, I believe I voted against Autark’s first request and while I thought I voted against the second one, it turns out I didn’t vote. There were a lot of votes in that round, and it was obviously going to pass (it passed “unanimously” with only 1 ANT voting against), so i must have decided not to spend the gas.

This all seems pretty boring, it’s just back and forth arguing over a contract, why are other people commenting on it?

1. Aragon has a reputation for not paying people.

It has long been an open secret in the industry that Aragon routinely doesn’t pay people in full or on time.

Grants are hard! I can empathize with both Aragon (presumably feeling like it wasn’t getting enough ROI) and Autark (presumably thinking that a community approved grant couldn’t be secretly overturned by Jorge and Luis).

2. Aragon sold a token for tens of millions of dollars, but after 3 years the only use for the token was a tokenholder vote. Now, the results of those votes are unilaterally and privately discarded.

It’s been over 3 years since Aragon raised a crazy amount of money selling a token. In that time frame, the only use for the token has been these votes.

If Jorge and Luis could decide by themselves to countermand the results of any of those votes without even telling the tokenholders anything, then what was the point of these votes? Why did I waste my ETH paying gas to vote in these things?

[Digression: They also recently released an ANJ token that you can exchange ANT for, but I don’t count being able to exchange a token for another token as utility. After more than 3 years, I cannot think of any other possible utility for ANT. Note: i’m very bearish on “dispute resolution by tokenholder vote”]

3. Aragon marketing hasn’t matched Aragon actions

The Aragon Manifesto was a clarion call. In black and white terms it paints the picture of transparency and technology as a solution for society’s problems of centralization, censorship and oppression.

Yet the rhetoric hasn’t matched the reality. They’ve declared that Aragon is the world’s court, yet go running to Swiss courts to claim jurisdiction rather than even attempt to use Aragon Court in parallel (since they can’t possibly lose in either venue).

They’re the rich ones with deep pockets, yet they’ve repeatedly chosen not to pay grantees who have very little leverage in negotiation (with the exception of Prysmatic after they complained).

None of it has been transparent (though of course there are often good reasons).

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The Aragon team so far has responded to all these concerns by saying things like “you’re questioning our good intentions” or “the courts will decide”.

It is obvious that Aragon will win in the courts. They have the deep pockets; Autark doesn’t. They drafted the contract, and any decent lawyer will have drafted it so Aragon can’t possibly lose. Even if the contract somehow wasn’t one-sided, Aragon chose to run to the home field courts. It would be shocking if they lost.

Aragon’s intentions aren’t bad; that’s not really in question. I’m 100% sure that Jorge and Luis’s intentions are good and that any individual decision is defensible.

What is in question is their decision making overall. When you stake your brand on “transparency” and anti-oppression, then people will feel disappointed when your brand promises do not match your actions.

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Enough with the drama. As with last week, a few things I think I’d read if i were an Eth holder interested in high level things.

Carl Beekhuizen’s Eth2 keys explainer

5 things crypto can learn from Visa’s struggle for adoption in the 1970s

Brave’s anti-fingerprinting v2, available in the beta releases but coming soon in the main releases

Working in reverse order, it’s always surprising to me how little people understand how much info your browser is leaking. Fingerprinting basically lets people figure out who you are even if you switch IP addresses, clear your browsing history, etc. I used to work in anti-fraud, and I was surprised how often you could figure stuff out from the fingerprints. Good for anti-fraud, but bad for privacy. Brave is changing the game on fighting fingerprinting!

I’m old enough to remember when Visa and especially Amex were not the ubiquitous things that they are today in America. There were some interesting parallels around their ads “think of it as money.” The more things change, the more things stay the same.

A good Eth2 keys explainer, definitely worth reading if you’re interesting in staking.

On to the annotations. The stuff that I think might deserve extra comment, not necessarily the stuff I think is most important.

Eth1

Péter Szilágyi’s snap sync, and some benchmarking of snap vs fast sync

Discovery peer advertisement efficiency analysis, also applicable to eth2

Sync improvements are a big deal, as the initial sync time is one of the things that most people find daunting around running a full node.

Depending on who you are, this may not be considered sexy, but it’s an important thing for eth1 usability.

Eth2

phase 0 spec v0.12 – added latest IETF standard. This is THE spec for the eth2 launch, barring any updates for bugs

Lighthouse client update – BLS key implementation, under Trail of Bits audit, 300mb RAM to run 2000 validators

Lodestar client update – syncing to both Schlesi and Topaz testnets

Prysmatic client update – Schlesi fork post-mortem, slashing client and protection

Fizzy v0.1 – WASM interpreter written in C++

Carl Beekhuizen’s Eth2 keys explainer

There’s been plenty of talk around “this is the spec” before, so I sorta can’t blame someone who says “but you’ve already said that before!”

Basically, they were all true, but with specific exceptions. And that’s still true - there will likely be some kind of bug or clarification found so that that this isn’t THE spec that launches the eth2 chain in a few months. But unless something crazy happens, this spec for the eth2 chain isn’t going to change except to fix bugs.

Layer2

Fuel does a demo of Reddit’s community points in an optimistic rollup that reduces transaction fees by 60x

Loopring to pass 1 million trades on its zk rollup in just 3 months of being live

Gazelle (formerly Plasma Chamber) alpha release with an API for deposit, transfer and exit

Fuel’s demo is pretty cool. It’s obviously just a demo - they don’t have a way to withdraw back to the testnet where Reddit’s community points are house.

Dexes continue to improve! Using their zk rollup, Loopring has a trading experience that is just as good as a centralized exchange, but with much cheaper fees and no risk of centralized exchanges getting hacked and losing your crypto.

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0x is excited to sponsor Week in Ethereum News and invite readers to try out our new DEX!

Stuff for developers

web3js v1.2.8 with Ethers v5 ABI coder integration, ENS’s contenthash, and EIP-1193’s AbstractProvider

Mocking Solidity code with Waffle

A writeup of Solhint v3’s features

How to get randomness onchain using Chainlink’s VRF

Offchain voting for personal tokens, tutorial from Austin Griffith

Gas and circuit constraint benchmarks of binary and quinary incremental Merkle trees using Poseidon

Loopring’s new approach to generating frontend keys to sign offchain requests

Hegic had to shut down again because of an exploit that Sam Sun reported weeks beforehand

tBTC found a bug during their rollout; launch delayed

Matic’s mainnet is in the process of going live

I’ve seen some games migrate over to Matic.

Matic is “in the process” of going live. I note the “in the process” because I see a bunch of new blockchain projects saying that they are live, but....they aren’t really by any definition I would use.

But as I said previously in an annotated edition, it’s a process. It’s not exactly some binary “we’re live now.” Even Ethereum went live in July 2015 with less than full features.

Ecosystem

Tornado.cash non-custodial mixer is now trustless, with the admin function burned and the frontend available at https://tornadocash.eth.link

Ethereum Foundation q1 update, including how EF thinks about funding

Intro to dwebsites. dweb = ENS + IPFS (and equivalents)

Network usage is at an all time high. With similar use of the Eth2 chain, Ethereum will have negative issuance of ETH because part of every transaction fee is burned

I was surprised that gas usage is so high that we’d be in negative issuance if Eth2 was live.

I’ve said before that I’m not sure how I feel about negative issuance. On the one hand, the worry is that negative issuance means that no one has any incentive to use their ETH. On the other hand, that’s already the reality today - hardly anyone wants to pay for anything in ETH at $200, because basically every ETH holder I know has obscenely high expectations for what the price is likely to do in the near to medium term.

Some interesting thoughts in the EF update about how EF thinks about funding.

Meanwhile it’s great to see Tornado continue to improve the trustlessness of their product. Incredible work from the Roman S team. (if you missed the joke, it’s because both of them are named Roman and have last names that begin with S)

Enterprise

Using Eth mainnet, Baseline Protocol privately and securely synchronizes data and business logic across SAP and Microsoft Dynamics

Hyperledger Fabric founder John Wolpert’s common sense statement on using blockchain and Ethereum mainnet

The Baseline Protocol as lean strategy

Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation’s Project Whitney using Ethereum mainnet to “support private market securities, from issuance through secondary markets”

I’m surprised by how quickly the use mainnet approach has taken hold. If you rewind back to the last hype cycle, relatively few even considered the idea, even as enterprises were buying private chains that didn’t make much sense. (hat tip to GridPlus CEO Mark D’Agostino’s seminal No Country for Private Blockchains article)

DAOs and Standards

Aragon sues to avoid paying grantee a community-voted grant

Exploring DAOs as a new kind of institution

MetaCartel is becoming a DAO incubator

ERC2665: ERC721 transfer fee extension

EIP2666: Repricing of precompiles and Keccak256 function

Application layer

Uniswap v2 launched, with more features – direct token pairs, price oracles, flash swaps, etc

UMA launches the ETHBTC synthetic token, so you can bet on The Flippening

idle v3 – stablecoin yield rebalancer adds dydx, USDT, and a risk-adjusted strategy

Maker changes USDC stability fee to .75% and WBTC to 1%. Also, how Dai became a favorite in Latin America

Argent launches v1 of smart contract wallet with one touch access to TokenSets, PoolTogether, Aave, Uniswap V2, Compound, Maker and Kyber.

5/5 DeFi in the app layer section. Of course what I put in the app layer section vs what I put elsewhere is certainly arbitrary.

And hey, why isn’t Tornado Cash on DeFiPulse? It’s got a decent amount of value locked up.

Tokens/Business/Regulation

5 things crypto can learn from Visa’s struggle for adoption in the 1970s

WBTC mints another 1500 BTC on May 21. There’s now 5200 BTC on Ethereum compared to less than 3000 BTC on Lightning and Liquid combined

Blockchain code as antitrust, Schrepel and Buterin paper

ETH to soon surpass BTC on Bitcoiners’ preferred stock-to-flow metric

Staking will turn Ethereum into a functional store of value

What’s interesting about that 3000 BTC is that Liquid is just a trusted sidechain, and it has 2200 of the 3000 BTC. Now to be fair, WBTC definitely has some trust assumptions as well.

Still isn’t it interesting to see BTC migrate to Ethereum, where it can be used relatively trustlessly, rather than go to Blockstream’s products?

General

KYC puts lives at risk: BlockFi hack leaks client name, address, and crypto addresses. Similarly, a hacker claims to have exploited Shopify for Trezor and Ledger databases, though Ledger says the databases don’t match

Using zero knowledge proofs for vulnerability disclosure

World Economic Forum’s principles for a decentralized future (transparency, self-sovereign data, privacy and accountability)

JK Rowling jokes about trolling BTC because of her significant ETH holdings

The Winklevosses say they own a similar amount of ETH and BTC

Brave’s anti-fingerprinting v2, available in the beta releases but coming soon in the main releases

Using zero knowledge proofs for vulnerability disclosures is very cool. It’s a pretty classic problem if you’re a whitehat hacker - how do you disclose the vulnerability and then trust that you get anywhere near the value back that you deserve from someone’s bug bounty program? There are examples - even in the Ethereum space, where people should understand the value - of responsible disclosure not getting paid anything commensurate to what they deserved.

I’ll be interested to see if BlockFi suffers as a result of the hack. They’ve certainly put at risk any whales which used their service and didn’t give a PO Box/false address/whatever. Yet the history of database hacks even in our space is that most people just eventually return as if no hack ever happened.

Soon this annotated edition will be going paid, more details coming soon.

That’s all for this week!

Housekeeping

Follow me on Twitter @evan_van_ness to get the annotated edition of this newsletter, usually forthcoming in a day or so, as well as a real-time source of Eth news.

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Permalink: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-may-24-2020/

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):

May 26 – last day to apply for Ethereum India fellowship

May 28 – EIP1559 implementation call

May 29 – core devs call

May 29-June 16 – SOSHackathon

June 16 – deadline to apply for Gitcoin’s Kernel incubator

[Post updated at night for accuracy.]

0 notes