#your dictator's works

[fonulyn]

since I've seen it talked about in several places recently:

if you are going to do a whump- or kink- or ANY-tober or other similar challenges please please please don't post them as one fic with 31 chapters unless it actually is one coherent fic. if they're 31 completely separate fics or ficlets then please just make a collection for them or just post them as separate fics. it doesn't matter if they're only 100 words or if you think they're too small or insignificant to post alone, they're not.

and why this?

because if you post all 31 of them in one fic the tagging is absolutely useless. if I look for things to read on ao3 I'm gonna look at the tags, and if the tags include something that's a dealbreaker for me, i won't even click on the fic. I might not even SEE the fic because I've filtered out the nope-tag! so I'm gonna lose out on reading 30 perfectly nice fics because of one fic that my nope-tag applied to.

ao3 is about archiving. it's about clear tagging and being informative. there is nothing informative about it if the tags in the fic apply to random chapters while others have nothing to do with it. it makes so much more sense to have each work as an individual fic with its own individual tags and warnings, so readers can make informed choices.

of course, you do you. I can't police what other people decide to do. but personally, I find it incredibly frustrating to weed through 31 chapters to find the ones I actually want to read. so I don't. I automatically scroll past all works posted like that. and I know some others do, too.

there is absolutely no shame in posting short things on ao3. there is no minimum word count. no one is going to look at you funny if you post a small ficlet on its own, I promise. it's just going to make some readers very happy when they can actually find the things they want to read.

so, please. at least consider the upsides of posting each work as their own fic.

signed, one very frustrated fandom grandma.

[dlamp-dictator]

Your Dictator’s Works: Ciervo

Been awhile since I’ve done one of these, but I’ve got it on my goal list this week to finish some essays. Plus, I’ve wanted to ramble a little about my OCs for a long while now after drawing and redesigning some of them.

For those new Your Dictator’s Works is an essay series where I talk about my characters, art, stories, and the general process on how I make the things I do while prattling on about my characters for far longer than I should. And to kick things off I’m gonna’ talk about one of the latest characters I’ve been drawing, Ciervo.

Summary, Origins, and Inspirations

So, Ciervo wasn’t inspired by anything big or had a lot deep thought involved in her character, but I before I actually talk about the gal in question I have to talk about her big sister Mucaro first.

To keep things brief, Mucaro was an OC I made after playing the martial arts video game Absolver. Inspired by the idea of kung fu monks fist-fighting in a Dark Souls-esque location I had the idea of making a masked martial artist that wore an owl-themed mask and beat people up to test the limits of her abilities in the name of some martial religion. A sort of Akuma-esque lawful evil character.

Then I played 3 hours of Absolver and kinda’ despised it, but that’s a story for another day.

Still, I like the draft I had of Mucaro, so I tweaked it up a little bit, made her a little less of an Absolver OC and more of a forest/tribal ninja/martial artist, and then made some more characters that followed her theme. One of those characters was Ciervo, who was to be Mucaro’s little sister.

And unlike her stoic, lawful-evil, pious big sister, Ciervo was going to be the neutral-good, happy-go-lucky, party girl to show the different types of people and personalities in Mucaro’s tribe. Where Mucaro was a dedicated martial artist, Ciervo was a partying dancer. While Mucaro was deeply religious and faithful for the tribe’s goddess, Ciervo was more free-thinking and secular. The list goes on, but the two essentially balanced each other out with Mucaro being the stern and mature older sister and Ciervo being the outgoing and free-thinking little sister.

In terms of inspiration, it was ballet of all things. Whenever I looked up some decent dynamic poses I was always led to pictures of ballerinas, so I took some inspiration from them when forming her identity as a dancer. The original drafts had Mucaro in a more serious and stern expression, but it didn’t feel right so I made a completely different character to fight the poses I referenced. That character just happened to turn out to be a partying ballerina from a tribe of forest ninja.

Design

The general idea for Ciervo was for her to look something akin to a tribal dancer, and to have her balance off Mucaro. Mucaro dressed a bit more conservatively due to her religious background, a martial artist that wore only basic clothing that covered a good portion of her body save for the parts she needed free to move properly, as well as wearing mostly green to show that she was all about that nature. To contrast that, Ciervo dressed more provocatively. A short top, a skirt, bright reds and yellows to pop off her dark skin, and some shorts for modesty.

The freckles... I have no idea where I got them from. Maybe I was looking at deer pictures and saw the spots of lighter fur or something and wanted her to mimic that? I also have no clue where the one glove came from, it was apparently a consistent design of hers until I did the redesign. Maybe I just wanted some asymmetry for some reason? I honestly couldn’t tell you.

Anyway, that’s the general gist of her design. A showy dancer that knows she’s pretty hot and isn’t afraid to show it off.

Her current redesign still has elements of this. Ciervo still has clothes showing off her body, but in a bit more tasteful way. Her skirt is longer, but brings more attention to her legs. She’s wearing arm sleeves now because I just think they’re cool and give her a bit more tasteful coverage while still letting her express her sexuality and body, and she’s wearing two gloves now with little antler insignias on them. I’m still debating the little antler in her hair though. I wanted her to have something to match her namesake, but a lot of the ideas I had feel kind of tacked on. Maybe I’ll have her tattoos mimic antlers instead of having the piece on her head in future drawings, or made have her mask on the her body somewhere.

Story Background

Since I plan on reworking a lot of Ciervo and her tribe’s lore in the future I’ll just give you folks the quick and dirty version of Ciervo’s character. Keep in mind I’m holding back on a lot of the worldbuilding for the sake of brevity, so it might sound a little confusing here and there.

So, with that said...

Ciervo is a part of the Fauna (Temp.) Tribe, a tribe of people that live in a supernatural forest. Said supernatural forest houses a goddess of nature who can’t control her powers that well, and said goddess sometimes accidentally creates things like three-headed hyenas and giant hydra snakes within the forest due to the excess magical energies within it, along with other oddities that can threaten both the forest and the wider world around it. To this end, the Fauna (Temp.) Tribe then have formed both a religious sect to protect the goddess and militant peacekeepers to slay the creature and protect the forest from itself.

Ciervo herself originally was training to become a martial artist and warrior. Being the adventurous type, she wanted to help defend the forest she loved and the people she cared about while her deeply religious and conservative older sister Mucaro trained to be a dancer and religious scholar. However, her sister injured her leg during practice and could no longer dance anymore, at least not properly. Ciervo, seeing how crushed her sister was at the loss of her dream due to a mistake, decided to become a dancer herself instead, taking to dancing even better than she did combat and was known as a prodigy. And for the sake of Ciervo’s dream of protect her home not dying, Mucaro decided to become a warrior and mastered an unarmed martial art style that an elder taught just as fast as Ciervo took to dance. This switch, however, created a small rift between the sisters, Mucaro jealous of Ciervo’s dancing ability and Ciervo jealous of Mucaro’s martial prowess. The two still love each other, still care for each other, but the jealousy is something that has never really faded and the two constantly pick at each other with various jabs (verbal and physical), pranks, and generally being assholes to each other for petty reasons. But since they’ve always picked at each other no one really sees the cracks in their relationship save for a few elders and their closest friends.

As serious as that sounds, it really is more a case of Ciervo and Mucaro having a career change in their adolescence and both being petty assholes to each other when behind closed doors because they’re sisters and can get away with petty assholery so long as its within reason. The only real issue these two have with each other is that Mucaro purposefully eats Ciervo’s favorite snacks right in front of her and Ciervo responds by dropkicking her out of the kitchen and starting a five-minute civil war of kickboxing vs. juijitsu.

Ciervo’s also, like, four to five inches taller than Mucaro’s five-foot hide and absolutely is an asshole about it by placing all of Mucaro’s favorite snacks in places just high enough that Mucaro needs a chair or boost to grab it, leading to Mucaro eating the aforementioned favorite snacks as revenge. So there’s that.

Conclusion

And that’s Ciervo, a happy-go-lucky dancer with loves adventure, getting into trouble, and giving her big sister headaches. I’ll try and do some more of the Fauna (Temp.) Tribe when I finalize some of their designs. Here’s hoping that’s soon.

[uncanny-tranny]

Periodic reminder that unless a person specifically and clearly tells you it is okay to tell others they are trans or queer, you should err on the side of caution and assume they do not want you to tell people (especially random people!) about their transness or queerness.

You have no idea, generally, why somebody doesn't talk openly about their trans or queer status, and you have no idea, truly, how somebody might react to that information. The most progressive person out there is still capable of harbouring incredibly negative thoughts about somebody's queer status.

[redysetdare]

Soulmates are inherently amatonormative and it's so wild how many people refuse to acknowledge that and instead go around trying to "make it more inclusive" which mostly just leads to then forcing aspec characters into a amatonormative narrative.

[puppyeared]

i feel like im not making any sense but does anyone else feel like there are stories that let u run with them and ones that spell everything out for you

[autisticlancemcclain]

Could you explain your position on Shallura? Since Allura was established as a teenager when she started dating Lance and Shiro was very clearly an adult. I can understand the bi shiro headcannon but the shallura thing worries me

i am going to remind yall that i have been in this fandom since 2016. and in the early seasons, allura was not established as a teenager. in fact she was coded as older, as closer to shiro's age -- there was a specific divide between her and the younger paladins that she did not have with shiro. they made her younger (both explicitly and in mannerisms) as the show went on. and i do not give a fuck about voltron like...post s4 and i didn't even watch s7-8. so like. especially with older fics, im going to enjoy shallura.

[perilegs]

i know astrology is fake but i'm not too keen on how a lot of people on this website seem to be clowning on it as a hobby a bit too hard. i swear the woman who thinks it's neat how she and her friends with the same sun sign are all similar isn't trying to say that you are who you are born as and there is nothing you can do to change it. it's a hobby. an interest. what happened to finding meaning and joy in the small things. does it affect you if someone enjoys tarot reading or crystals. does it make you upset someone has interests that they enjoy.

[ducktracy]

i've been in a very "nostalgic for SpongeBob" mood lately and that's warranted a lot of reflecting on Baby Me being a Sponge fanatic and thinking of what she'd think of now. and i have to say that one of my favorite parts of doing what i do--and also the most stupidly niche--is that one of my first online hyperfixations i recall having was SpongeBob production music. i remember animating magical girl transformations in Flipnote to SPONGEBOB MUSIC. i remember feeling so smart researching all the songs and getting to hear them without any dialogue on top. very gratifying to 11 year old me. i was and am still very fixated on production music, and so i always get very excited when seeing uploads of these songs and spotting a screenshot of a scene i worked on among them. one of my favorite aspects of watching episodes premiere is seeing what music they added on top of scenes i touched. it's just neat how many facets my thankfulness for Doing What I'm Doing gets to reach. i'm never not thinking of how grateful i am to be doing what i'm doing

[willosword]

:(

[llitchilitchi]

I get hating certain political systems and trying to abolish totalitarian regimes but at the same time many of them are so interwoven with our history and society they have become tropes and when I consume media with a setting where the monarchy is absolute and revered then I am playing my part and sucking that princeling off

[memorizingthedigitsofpi]

it's okay to unfollow

I just want to put this out there for anyone who might be feeling like I have been.

I've been noticing recently that scrolling tumblr was making me unhappy. Not all the time, but often enough that it was something that I actually noticed. So I started paying attention to when I felt unhappy and then why. For me, it was when I saw statements related to killing or harming oneself or others. For you, it might be seeing a ship you don't like or other content that makes you uncomfortable.

I know that a lot of the posts I saw were hyperbolic in nature, but that didn't make them less shocking or distressing for me when I encountered them. So I did an experiment. For a period of about a week, every time I saw one, I closed the app.

Let me tell you, I've never used tumblr less in my life.

That told me that I was spending a lot of time seeing content that was actively upsetting me. No wonder I wasn't happy. So what do I do? Stop using tumblr? I seriously considered it. But tumblr makes me happy a lot of the time too, so instead I needed to do something harder: I had to start unfollowing people.

Some of these are people I've followed for years. All of them are people I like. I feel guilty doing it, but at the same time I know that it's either keep following them and be exposed to things that upset me on a regular basis or unfollow them and spend more of my free time in an enjoyable way.

I'll miss them, of course. It's not like this is all they ever post! They put lots of great stuff on my dash. But they also share things that make me feel bad, and I need to draw that boundary for myself. I don't want to follow people who share posts that upset me, and that's okay.

It's also totally okay that they post and share the things that they like, no matter what my opinion of that stuff is. It's their blog! They should put whatever they want on it.

The way to control what I do and don't see on my dash is to control who I follow and who I don't. Unfollowing (and even blocking, if that's what you need) isn't a moral condemnation. It's an acknowledgement that our tastes differ.

If you find yourself unhappy while you're scrolling whatever social media you choose, take the time to figure out what it is that's making you unhappy and do what you can to reduce it. The world is hard enough already.

[mars-ipan]

hey folks did you know i love super dangan ronpa 2

[july-19th-club]

favorite type of villanous characters are the ones whose motivations boil down to

like they dont even have to have any stakes in the broader situation. they just have take pleasure in destruction

[unamazing-sheep21]

Got back from rainforest holiday. Conclusion is that colonialism is the cause of all modern world problems. It is the cause the world is heating up. Wish those mfs minded their own business fr. wtf.

[randomnameless]

Thinking about muhritocracy again or as our Supreme Leader puts it, "rising and falling by your own merit" -

Isn't Cyril basically the poster child of this ideal sucking?

Both in Almyra and during his spiritual retreat in House Goneril, Cyril mentions that he had to "work hard", it's implied he had to work hard to earn whatever keep he could have (food, but even then that was not common).

Cyril embracing muhritocracy also wants to work "real hard" to repay Rhea, otherwise he feels like he cannot remain in Garreg Mach.

We know the Nabs would never kick him out for this reason (hell Hilda was enrolled and Manu is still a teacher) and both Seteth and Rhea (the latter only did so off-screen and it's basically mentionned in his S support with Billy bcs Rhea can't have screentime I guess) tell him that while repaying a debt is admirable, he needs to start on living now.

Aka, Cyril is allowed to "exist" and "live" even without overworking himself to the bone to have the "right to exist".

Now, FE Fodlan being what it is, the angle of GM being a safehaven/place where old people, children and basically people who cannot "rise due to their own merits" live is completely ignored bar that off-handed comment in Cyril's support with Claude that Rhea basically wants to make a place for people without status/who are vulnerable.

And that place is Garreg Mach.

CS introduces the Abyss that is basically GM+Asylum for people seeking it, even if Aelfric paints it with a Rhea BaD veneer, it's here to offer a shelter to those who are "persecuted" on the "surface" like Dagdans and Almyrans, the poor, the sick, etc etc - basically a "place for those who have nowhere to go".

Constance's family was demoted to nothing by Ionius because they failed to defend Adrestia against Dagda? Her house "fell" by its own "lack of muhrit"... so GM offers her a place to be, even if she (her house, but Adrestia always deals with Houses and not with people!) failed once.

Tldr : GM is the place that completely pissed on Muhritocracy, and where people who have no "muhrit"/status are supported/receive help by the Church.

Cyril works very hard to "earn" the right to remain in GM, but he has yet to understand (only with his supports with the Nabateans!) that he doesn't need to "earn" any right to be and live in Garreg Mach, it's just that kind of place.

[blackbirdffxiv]

Not to bring negativity on the feed, but because I feel the need to say something, I will; unless someone has done extremely heinous shit (or said; I'm talking homophobic/transphobic, racist, etc, things like that but not limited to just those), please do not come to me to "warn" me about someone I've interacted with.

I've dealt with this so much on twitter, and 9 times out of 10, these "warnings" are based off petty beef someone has with another over things that are not my concern. I'm too tired for the petty "they said this, they did that" back and forth.

Please just don't do this, because it's honestly the quickest method to get me to never want any interaction with you at all.

Also I literally have maybe two friends on this website and they're inactive so everyone else is a complete stranger, like one interaction a friendship doesn't make bruh.