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#but like it's so well crafted that the tangents are actually... important... to the story... like i can't describe it
tryslora · 14 days
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On Writing Combat and Sex Scenes
Today I want to talk about writing sex and combat (and no, I do not mean combative sex). This post is inspired by a few recent events:
Once, a long time ago, I read a blog post that said “if you can write a combat scene, you can write a sex scene” and that was mind-blowing for me because while I was well-versed in writing erotica, I couldn’t write combat to save my life.
More recently, at Boskone, I participated on a panel about writing combat, and the research involved there-in.
Even more recently, I had someone look at me say, “You’re not a gay guy. How do you write gay sex scenes?”
So. Let’s begin.
I get it—sex and combat aren’t interchangeable. But at their core, they have some strong similarities which can be leveraged while writing. Both are intense, high drama, and can involve a lot of anxiety and quick thought. Both tend to narrow focus down to the moment and the current feeling and action. Both are heightened emotion and physical reaction. Both can involve actions that lie outside the author’s personal experience.
I started writing erotica when I was a freshman in college. I posted it online (does anyone remember rec.arts.erotica?) and was surprised (and pleased) by the compliments I received. Turned out my readers were not expecting the idea of emotion being entangled in their erotica. They were invested emotionally in how the stories went, and how my characters felt. Since I was writing from the point of view that made sense to me at the time, they were het stories from a female perspective, and they were very focused on the emotional connections and how the physical events heightened those emotions.
Male readers were surprised by the intensity of the feelings that these stories gave them (as opposed to pure arousal). It got me thinking about how I wrote, and why I wrote, and I tried to talk about it some at the time. I was eighteen. I was still a new writer. The internet itself was new. I wasn’t entirely certain how to frame it, but I remember getting one comment where a guy was surprised at how struck he’d been by the moment in the scene where everything shuddered to a halt due to an event in the story that interrupted the action, and I replied that that was because I wasn’t writing about the sex. I was writing about the character’s reaction to the sex.
Which has always been how I write. At the time, that was my only tool: put myself in the character’s mind, and write what they feel. If that’s affection and attraction and physical reaction, write that. Tangle it up, and hope the reader feels that entanglement.
Now, fast forward several years, and take a little side trip onto a tangent wherein I learned something very important about writing craft.
I was reading Syne Mitchell’s End in Fire, I think it was, and I kept having panic attacks. Now, I did most of my reading late, often when I woke in the middle of the night due to stress, or just because my brain refused to rest. I was in a rough place in life in general, with a lot of external work stuff going on and very small children. I wasn’t sleeping well. And it took me some time to figure out why I was struggling to read a book which I actually loved (and when I read it later in life, I enjoyed it greatly).
It was the sentence structure.
In order to induce the emotion of the scene, the sentences were short. Sharp. Quick. There was no time for the reader to breathe, much like there was no time for the heroine to do anything but act. The reader was caught up in the rising tension, to the point where my anxious, sleep-deprived brain, caught a panic attack from it.
The technique was brilliant.
Now back to our original timeline, wherein I read a post about how if you can write combat, you can write sex scenes. This post assumed that more people felt comfortable writing violence than sex. I was the reverse. I’d been writing about sex for over a decade when I saw this post, and it made a light bulb go off in my brain.
If writing sex was like writing combat… was the reverse also true? Could I improve my skills at writing battles by analyzing what worked when I wrote erotica?
So I tried doing just that. Back then, I found combat overwhelming. There was so much going on, and I was trying so hard to write good description that I lost all of the intensity. I was focusing on everything that was going on at the same time.
Thinking about how sex scenes were all intense emotion and narrowed focus, I applied that to my combat scenes. I wrote only what the point of view character experienced, and tied everything to their actions and reactions. I thought about how they breathed, how they moved, how they thought. I used those short, sharp sentences as they processed the scene. 
That doesn’t mean I forgot about everything else going on in the scene. That’s impossible. After all, in any story the things the character doesn’t pay attention to might be as important as the things they do focus on. Stuff still happens, and there is still fallout. I needed to know what else was happening so that if the character moved from one place to another, or did something that put them in the path of a different part of the action, I could have them start processing it.
But it also meant that on the page, out of sight was out of mind. Everything narrowed down to the now. The immediacy. Suddenly my combat scenes snapped into focus.
During the panel at Boskone, all of the panelists had experience with different fighting styles (fencing, street combat, and of course, me with taekwondo). I spoke about how for me, that narrow focus is very real when I spar. I know there are some people who naturally see a move or two ahead while fighting; I don’t. I am stuck in act and react mode. Can I kick them now? Can I attempt a head shot? Oh, no, circle back and away or they’re going to hit me… that’s how my brain works during a sparring match.
It’s not like a total blackout—there should be a vague awareness of things around the character. Sounds in particular, or sometimes flashes of movement. Something distracting can catch the attention of the fighter, but the personal fight will always pull the character back.
Combat feels easy when I’m writing like that.
Of course, there’s still the question of writing about something if I’ve never experienced it. As someone did point out to me: I am not a gay man, so how does that affect writing sex scenes? I’ve also never fought with a sword. Brawled. Fought from horseback. I have, however, held a blade, shot a gun, shot an arrow, rode a horse. I have a vague idea of how these things work, much like I have a working knowledge of sex in general.
So yes, research gets involved. Sometimes research is observational, sometimes it’s reading (there’s so much good stuff out there). I highly recommend video for combat scenes—find things that have the feel that you’re going for, then put yourself in the place of the character you want to write about. Practice. Work through the ideas of how things fit together, and what your character will (and will not!) know during the fight.
If you need to, stand up and block the scene by thinking about how you would experience it. What can you see, and what is out of sight? If someone is coming at you with a blade, what are your options? How do height differences affect you? Yes, I have asked friends and husband to help me block scenes. 
“Stand right there and show me what it looks like if you punch me. Okay, so if I do this then…” Yeah. It’s a thing. But it works.
When doing your research, remember that movie fighting (and hell, movie sex scenes) isn’t realistic. It’s meant to look good. For combat, if you can find re-enactments, or sparring videos, I highly recommend taking a look at those. 
Anyway, the point is: I don’t have to have shot someone, and I don’t have to have had gay sex in order to write about them. What I do need to know is how it feels emotionally to do those things, and I can extrapolate that from what I do know. I need to know enough about the details so I can get it right, and that’s where research will help me. Also, use language to create emotion. Because emotions are where we grab the reader, and how we pull them into the scene.
Combat and sex aren’t so different when it comes to writing, and the personal experience. Now, go forth and write!
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acacia-may · 2 days
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*sheepishly pokes my head in*
If oc x cc ships are okay, then can I ask for Lyra's ships of Yuno x Neva and William x Zera, and mine Fuegoleon x Solara 🥺👉👈
Hi Laura! No need to be sheepish. 💖 Thank you so much for the ask and for indulging my ramblings. I think it's incredibly sweet that you've asked about @lyranova's pairings. They're lovely! I'm honestly a little feral about Zerilliam, and I rambled about that and about the pairings in general in this response to Lyra's ask. ^^
I would be thrilled to share my Fuelara thoughts with you here, especially since, at this point, I am so invested in this pairing that I have to constantly, consciously remind myself that Solara is not a canon character. She just exists in the world of Black Clover in my mind now, and whenever I imagine or think of Fue, she is right there by his side.
I have to be honest that before I found your blog and we became friends, I really didn't think that much about Fuegoleon. I always liked him and had a lot of respect for him, but he wasn't really a character I just sat around and thought about too much. (His brotherly relationship with Leopold is just too functional. Let's blame that lol😂 I promise I'm only joking, and I adore them! Vermillion Bros for the win!!) But you write him with such depth and such nuance that it really gave me a new appreciation for his character. That one shot you wrote about his feelings of inadequacy after his injury has stuck with me to this day and remains one of my favorite fics I've ever read about anything in any fandom. You and your incredibly powerful writing made me love Fue, and as I was coming to really love him and becoming so much more invested in his character and his story, I found your absolutely incredible Solara who is truly (and this is probably intentional on your part but needs to be said) perfect for him.
Fuelara is everything a canon character x oc relationship should be in my opinion. I hope it goes without saying that Solara is such an incredibly strong and compelling character in her own right and I love that you've given her her own story beyond just being Fue's love interest, but even beyond that, she fits so seamlessly into the world of Black Clover (and I know you shared with me in the past that that was something that was really important to you while creating her, and I think you have succeeded in that in every possible way). Like I said in the beginning of this post, I really do genuinely have to remind myself she isn't canon. She just feels like she belongs there. I can't tell you how much the way you've meticulously crafted Fuelara and weaved them into the world of BC has been a personal inspiration for me. (Apologies in advance for the tangent but) my big passion project right now is a very ambitious multi-chapter fic for another fandom which I'm co-creating with a friend of mine, and it involves an OC x CC relationship (that I'm mostly in charge of 😅) so I actually find myself thinking about and talking about Fuelara as kind of this blueprint and inspiration for everything I can only hope my own ship will ultimately be. Even though the world of that story (late 90s/early 2000s suburban America) and the world of Black Clover couldn't possibly be more different, I'm sure Sprinkles could tell you that I have specifically mentioned Fuelara (specifically their relationship's seamless integration into the existing world and story) and what an inspiration it is for me personally, so many times while working on this project. It is truly so impressive, and I want to write like that. (Side note, I have definitely been using your tips and suggestions for OC integration throughout this process, so thank you again for that!)
Beyond just how well Solara perfectly fits into the world (which I've rambled about a lot), she also perfectly fits with Fuegoleon to the point that it's actually difficult for me to imagine him with anyone else at this point. I'm honestly really surprised I have made it through these ramblings without any random, unsolicited music references, but you're about to get one. There's a song called "We Go Well Together" by Goldheart (Spotify; YouTube) and here's a few lines, "We're just like kids up on a swing/Finger and a wedding ring/We go perfectly/It's so easy." That's just Fuelara to me: It's so easy. That's not to say that it's easy for them--they've certainly had their struggles and been through so much together, but their relationship dynamic, their love for each other, and their interactions are just so effortless. Of course Embers is fantastic, but I think I love your cozy little one shots about them most of all because I just adore how they interact with each other. They're so comfortable with each other, and it feels so real and so genuine. There's really no need for me to suspend belief or to try to create some buy in into their relationship. They just talk to each other and I'm immediately convinced they're deeply in love and just perfect for each other. One of my favorite things about them is how they are both such strong people, but they can be vulnerable together, and I love these really tender moments where they encourage each other that they don't have to carry the weight of the world alone. I just can't get over how supportive they are of each other, and I just adore that.
Gah, this ship is just so good. It's canon. It's honestly better than canon in a lot of cases, and I really can't get enough of it. I think I've said this before, but I'll say this again. Thank you for this pairing! I love it. ❤️‍🔥
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It’s been a week since I saw Nish Kumar perform Your Power, Your Control live. I haven’t written much about the actual show, aside from to say it was awesome, which it was. I haven’t been able to come up with a coherent way to explain it, that feels like it does it justice or adds anything worth adding.
If you want to know what the show itself is about, there are lots of reviews that explain that, and the content did line up with what I’d read in those reviews. A story about the bread roll situation of 2019, and how that led to a media firestorm, and that led to death threats, and that led to mental health issues that he tried to ignore for a long time before finally treating them with therapy, and now he’s sharing that with all of us. There were a lot of other topics covered and everything, but that was the basic story that ran throughout most of the show, sometimes going off topic to talk about something else, but then coming back to that. He took the time he had to tell the story in detail, properly, in his own words, which is something he can’t do in a moment on a chat show or even a long-form interview.
I watched the new Ricky Gervais special the other day, just to see what everyone was (rightly) talking shit about, and I feel like that gives me a contrast that makes it a little easier to explain what made Nish’s show so great. When watching Gervais’ show Supernature, I kept thinking… this is pointless. Some of these jokes are okay, a couple are even rather funny, but it’s not enough to justify a whole special. He doesn’t seem to have anything to say.
I don’t think every good stand-up show needs to have some deep political or personal message. Lots of shows I like do have messages like that, and Nish’s show had both a political and personal message, making it different from some of his previous ones (the other two full stand-up shows I’ve heard Nish do, from 2016 and 2019, were very political but not very personal, and the added personal elements of his 2022 made it even better). But lots of great shows haven’t had either.
One of my favourite stand-up shows ever is Rhod Gilbert’s The Award-Winning Mince Pie. That show is a collection of stories on various topics, loosely tied together by all being tangents on the story that ran through the whole thing, which was about a time Rhod Gilbert got into an argument with some service station employees in the middle of the night. That one didn’t have any particular message, it had stories from his life but not deeply personal ones. It was just amazingly funny, and well crafted, and he clearly had things to say. He really wanted to tell us about the arguments he has with service station employees and people who sell furniture. He wanted us all to understand and appreciate that all these things had happened, and how funny they were. He had thought of really funny things to say about all these events, and he really wanted us to all know those things.
That’s what I think makes for great stand-up comedy. Someone who has thought of a lot of stories and jokes that are so funny, so interesting, such particular perspectives on the world, that it’s worth writing a whole hour or more of material to tie them all together. Watching Ricky Gervais’ show helped me articulate the importance of that, because I saw how starkly lacking that was there. I kept asking… why has he done this? As he keeps reminding us, he’s already rich and famous. He doesn’t need to be here? Why is he telling us all these lukewarm stories that are not that entertaining?
Well, the Nish Kumar show from last weekend was the opposite of that. It was so clear, all the way through, that every word he said was there for a reason and was worth saying. He’d had thoughts that mattered, thoughts that he’d honed until they could be expressed in a way that was clear and funny and just right, and he couldn’t wait to share them. That was obvious right from the beginning. He barely got out a quick “Hello New York City!” before he launched straight into his material. No crowd work, no stories about the plane ride over, no comments about the venue or the city or anything. Nish had shit to tell us and he couldn’t wait to start saying it.
Every bit of it felt worth hearing. The political stuff, the personal stuff, the tangents and the jokes. It was insightful and well organized and by the end I felt like I understood what he’d spent all that time trying to tell me, because he’d explained it so well. I laughed so much during the show that I barely noticed the time go by, I was shocked when he walked off stage and I looked at my phone and saw it was 90 minutes after he’d started.
Some of it played to the fact that I already know who Nish Kumar is, so I have an interest in hearing the behind-the-scenes of some of the stuff that’s happened to him, of hearing his perspective on the news stories. I hadn’t known beforehand that Tim Key had been there for the bread roll incident, for one thing. Nish kept talking about stuff his friend “Tim” had said and done before he went on stage, and I kept wondering if he meant Key, and that wasn’t the point of the story or anything, I was just curious. Clearly I wasn’t the only curious person, and Nish knew that, because after a whole story of identifying his friend only by the fairly common name “Tim”, one time, as a treat, he mentioned the guy by his full name, “Tim Key”. I say Nish knew that the audience was wondering that, because I think he intentionally put the last name after a fairly light bit of the story, about how much he and his friend Tim drank at the pub after Nish ran away from the bread rolls and the boos. The audience cheered at the mention of Tim Key, which was fun, but it would have been a little awkward if that cheering had occurred while Nish was in the middle of telling parts of the story that involved the actual racists who threw the actual bread roll.
I already knew Miles Jupp was there at the incident, because he’s in the video. I wrote a while ago about how the video of this stuff happening is on YouTube; it doesn’t capture the throw itself, and I suspect what happened is someone in the crowd saw the bread get thrown, realized shit was going down, and took out their phone to start filming. The video does show the rich white people in the crowd try to boo Nish off the stage while Nish argues with the audience for a while, until finally a guy who worked there walked onto stage to usher Nish away by saying it’s time to do the raffle. And the person doing the raffle is... Miles Jupp. Miles comes onto the stage at the very end of the video, and it’s the weirdest fucking thing to see a crowd that was so hostile to Nish Kumar be fine when Miles came up, even though Miles’ politics are pretty much the same as Nish’s. I also wrote before about how I don’t think Miles could have done anything to help or should have done anything differently there, but it still feels fucking wrong to see him just get up and draw a raffle for people who’d been so awful.
Nish talked during the story about things that occurred after that video ended, like how he latched onto Miles and uses his posh whiteness as basically a human shield to get out of there and get the fuck to the pub. He also described Miles as a good friend who helped him get out of there and the commiserated in the pub with him, and that means I definitely can’t judge Miles for not having done anything differently, because I have also been that white person who sits in a pub with my non-white friends after some racism and says “Shit man, that’s bad. Fuck. I wish I could make racism not happen. I can’t though, I mean I can try to say things when it’s helpful but much of the time if I actually yelled at shitty people it would just make things worse for everyone but especially for you, so would you like me to buy you a beer with my white guilt?”
So hearing that behind-the-scenes stuff, about the involvement of Tim and Miles, was interesting as someone who knew the basics of that story beforehand. But even someone who’d only just heard the story for the first time would find it interesting to hear about the larger picture, about why and how it happened. I’ve also written before about I trust almost nothing in the world these days to be an example of genuine moral courage, because everything has some sort of angle and some way to get positive and/or negative attention from various sides of cultural and political divides. But as far as he knew at the time, Nish stood to gain fuck all by standing up in front of that crowd in that venue and telling his Brexit jokes. He didn’t know that if he got yelled at, it would turn into a tabloid story that would give him something to write a special about. He probably gets yelled at all the time, and it doesn’t become a tabloid story. He thought he’d just piss off a bunch of rich white people for no reason and then move on.
But he did it anyway, because sometime way back under all the layers of bullshit, there was this genuine idea that comedy is supposed to be challenging. Now, when we say things like that, I think of James Acaster yelling “Too challenging for you?” in an accurate impression of assholes who say bigoted things on stage and then claim to be paragons of challenge to the status quo. But it doesn’t have to be like that. I wrote before that I know Nish has enough non-political material to string together a set that wouldn’t piss of that crowd, so if he chose to do his Brexit stuff, without knowing he’d get wider attention either way, he did it entirely because he thought it was worth doing. And that might be just a small example of that elusive moral courage.
That was what I’d thought before, but I’d never heard Nish actually explain it until I saw that show. During the show, he said pretty much what I’d thought. He used the word “gutless”, which stuck in my mind because it’s a good and evocative word that you don’t hear often. He said he knew people might be confused as to why the hell he took that gig in the first place, and then why he started doing Brexit jokes instead of just sticking the cricket jokes they liked so much. He said he’d had a few reasons, including the fact that he honestly had no idea it would blow up so much, and sort of had the thought that it’s a charity Christmas gig, and even if they do get mad, “How bad can it be?” But then he said part of his motivation was that he constantly tells his political jokes to his usual Guardian-reading crowds that love them, and it would be morally “gutless” to refuse to say the same things to another crowd just because they might respond differently.
I believe him, and I genuinely find it impressive. There are many jobs out there that are more difficult than being a comedian, even a comedian telling a lot of old rich white British people that colonialism has an ever-present legacy and the foundations of the Brexit movement are racist and you personally did not survive WWII. But the fact that other things are harder doesn’t mean I can’t be impressed by a little moral courage when I see it.
It was a complicated story, an interesting story, and deeply personal and political and introspective story with wider implications, a story that connects with all kinds of other things (so perfect as the thread to run through a whole comedy show, since he can go off on tangents about those other things when they connect, and find his way back to the main story when he’s done). It isn’t inherently a funny story, but he made it funny. Sometimes with very dark humour when he poked fun at the arrogance in his own genuine fear that he was important enough to be assisinated, after some particularly intense death threats gave him PTSD. Sometimes with lighter humour that poked fun at the absurd aspects of the situation. And sometimes he threw in just straight-up jokes, because it is a comedy show, after all.
Basically, every bit of that story felt like it was worth telling. Everything Nish had to say, about the main story and about everything else, felt like it was worth saying. Like Nish cared so much about saying it that it spilled out of him, he kept up an amazingly intense pace throughout the whole show. He spent an hour and a half talking almost non-stop, shouting quite a bit of it, beginning and ending so quickly that it felt the way I do when I’m writing a paper and have more to say than the word count maximum allows, so I’m shaving bits off from the introduction and conclusion to try to get it all in. At one point, near the end, he stopped himself and sort of said, “Oh yeah, I haven’t said this yet really, so I just want to say... thanks for coming. Good to see you all here. I appreciate you all.” And then he we back to his stories. He barely said hello at the beginning or goodbye at the end - he had so much actual shit to say that there wasn’t time.
It is genuinely one of the best pieces of live entertainment I’ve ever seen. Worth the 17-hour round trip in the car. I did not like New York City but I’d do that trip all over again. Nish Kumar and the shit he has to say are worth it.
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reapersman · 3 years
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I JUST WANNA SAY, I know I tend to write a lot for my starters, but nobody is ever obligated to match the length! I just really, really love writing Death. So like, me writing multiple paragraphs? That’s pure self indulgence. You absolutely don’t have to follow suit.
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iwa1zumis · 3 years
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“i love you and i like you”: passion and burnout in Haikyuu!! 
tw: discussions of self harm, anxiety, burnout and breakdowns. 
spoilers for the whole manga!! 
okay this is probably gnna be jflkafjdklfj all over the place, but i’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between loving and liking something, and how haikyuu emphasises the importance of both those feelings being present when pursuing a passion. 
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a quick look at google (and i KNOW my college professors are cringing away in horror victor frankenstein-style @ my use of google definitions but jflajfsdk bear with me!!) demonstrates how often the concepts of love and like are conflated, with love her being framed as a sort of deeper or more intense like: “to like or enjoy very much” to be specific. but personally i’ve always thought there’s something a bit misleading about that kind of definition, since its absolutely possible to love something or someone without necessarily liking them. to take a personal example: i love debate. i debated through middle and high school, made captain of the debate team, and was constantly travelling to and fro for different tournaments. even before i started to debate formally i’d jump at the chance to do mini-debates in class, argue with and rebut parents and friends over meals and causal conversation.... you get the idea. i loved debate, and still love it dearly, but i honestly don’t think i particularly liked it much. tournaments would always fill me with the most INSANE kind of stress, i’d barely eat or sleep in the days leading up to a meet, and i’ve had more muffled bathroom breakdowns in between rebuttals than i can count. after my final year of high school, i decided against joining the debate at university. i knew that if i were to retain ANY love for the activity going into the future, i had to force myself to take a break. 
so what does this solipsistic tangent have to do with haikyuu, you ask? well i have no doubt that a vast majority of the players in the series love volleyball. they’re dedicated and passionate about it. they hunger for the chance to be put on the court. but do they like to play? 
1. oikawa: “i forgot that volleyball can be fun” 
ofc i wouldn’t be an oikawa stan worth my salt if i didn’t start this off with the (grand) king himself!! imo one of the reasons why oikawa is such a popular and well-loved character is his constant determination to keep moving forward and playing, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable opponents and adversities (”never forget my worthless pride”, anyone?). inevitably, all the hard work and practise he put into his craft has left him with a very carefully constructed, put together playstyle-- he’s the kind of player who knows how to bring the best out of each and every teammate on the court because of the amount of time he spends observing them and playing with them. it’s an outlook and playstyle best encapsulated in his now iconic line during the second karasuno v seijoh match: 
“Talent is something you make bloom, instinct is something you polish!” 
in my opinion the word “polish” it super significant here-- it explicitly singles out the years and years of hard work that set a foundation for his talent and instinct to shine. 
but what happens when they don’t shine? there’s no denying that oikawa is an incredibly skilled and intuitive player (something that hinata’s acknowledgment of him as the “great king” to kageyama’s “king” immediately sets out) but oikawa himself is acutely aware of the fact that he can never quite measure up to his long-time rival ushijima or his immensely talented protege kageyama. oikawa’s self described strategy to deal with opponents is to: 
“Hit it until it breaks” 
but what happens when hitting something again and again with your carefully honed, “polished” skills yields no results? imo there’s a very clear binary mentality drawn here-- either you hit it and it breaks, asserting your superiority; or you hit it and it doesn’t break, enforcing your inferiority. with each perceived loss against ushijima and kageyama, oikawa’s internalized logic holds his own weakness up to his own face, shaking his faith in himself as a player. if you’ll pardon the on-the-nose-metaphor: the whole “hitting it till it breaks” strategy is a two-way street, and oikawa has been hitting himself, metaphorically speaking, for a very long time. i have no doubt that he loved volleyball, passionately, through middle and high school. but with his inferiority complex growing in the face of constantly refuted results, i think he slowly began to like it less and less. 
so how does oikawa get his groove back? to answer that, we’ll have to turn to the post-timeskip chapters, particularly the two chapters that deal with oikawa and hinata’s unexpected meeting in Rio (372 and 373 for anyone curious!). while reminiscing with hinata over dinner, oikawa finally reveals the event that made him want to play volleyball (as a setter, to be exact)-- as a child, he watched veteran setter jose blanco step into a game and
“... inconspicuously help[ed] the ace get his bearings again... and then simply left the court.” 
oikawa’s reaction to blanco’s playstyle might just be one of my favourite panels in the chapter for how it conveys so much with such little space: 
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the stammer of “i-i--”, which suggests a sense of resolve and determination forming in real time, finally coalesces into the determined declaration of “i wanna be a setter too!” what i took from this is that oikawa’s admiration for-- and liking of-- blanco expresses itself in the agency with which he makes his choice, in this case, actively deciding to be a setter so that he can support players on the court like blanco did. the liking that oikawa has here is therefore inherently linked to the agency and freedom he feels here-- freedom to choose his position, and how he wants his volleyball career to develop. 
this recollection of his childhood memories, and the subsequent game of beach volleyball that oikawa and hinata play afterwards, essentially push oikawa back into the mental and physical space of a child or beginner, as the manga demonstrates with panels of oikawa being forced to ditch his usual carefully developed, polished playstyle to learn the ropes of beach volleyball: 
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ultimately concluding with the beautiful panel transition of oikawa, as a child AND adult, celebrating after a successful play: 
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“It reminds me that-- I forgot that-- volleyball is fun.”
in a different country, playing a familiar game by slightly different rules and led back into the mentality and freedom of a novice after years of careful development, oikawa rediscovers his liking for the game. 
2. kageyama: “when you get strong, someone stronger will rise to meet you” 
moving on to the king of the court himself!! i’d argue that kageyama’s childhood memories and experiences of volleyball function almost oppositely to oikawa’s-- while oikawa has to re-access the sensation of being a beginner again to like the game along with loving it, kageyama’s process of coming to like and love volleyball come from moving away from his early experiences and into a new phase of playing-- specifically, his partnership with hinata. 
one of kageyama’s defining features is his individualism-- he’s both skilled and solitary enough to prefer to, as he puts it, “play every single position on the court”. notably, he wants to become a setter because: 
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“[it’s] the one that touches the ball the most.”
in fact, i’d argue that kageyama’s “king of the court” attitude that he was known for in middle school is an extension of this individualistic mindset: he holds himself to extremely high standards, and expects his team-mates (as extensions of himself) to meet those very same standards. the similarities between his internal monologue and his commands to kindaichi in these two panels, for example, are strikingly, visibly similar: 
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there’s that near-identical intonation of “move faster, jump higher!” that implies that the way he treats his teammates is just an extension of how he treats himself-- a deeply self-critical, miserable way, as it turns out. it’s telling that for the first few chapters of a manga in which characters’ eyes literally light up when they’re happy, passionate or excited, kageyama’s eyes are drawn as pitch black, even while he’s playing. 
imo the reason why hinata’s appearance, and their later partnership, is so significant for kageyama’s personal development is because he can’t treat hinata like an extension of himself. hinata challenges him and his preconcieved notions of the sport at every turn: first with his lightning-fast reflexes and raw intuition, and then with his determination to hit kageyama’s toss no matter what. in fact, the first time that kageyama’s eyes light up in the manga is, you guessed it, when he and hinata first pull off a successful “freak quick”: 
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during the post-timeskip chapters we’re introduced to kageyama’s backstory in much greater detail: the way in which his grandfather fostered his passion for volleyball and the timing with which his grandfather’s illness and later death left kageyama increasingly alienated, thus further enforcing his individualist mentality. but what the chapter also gave us was an explicit confirmation of a theme that had been built up from the very beginning of the story, when kageyama’s grandfather tells him: 
“when you get really strong, i promise someone stronger will rise to meet you”
i’ve seen translations of the line that use both “meet” and “challenge”, and personally i’d have to say that i prefer “challenge” for what it implies-- even before hinata got strong enough to actually meet kageyama halfway he challenged him to move away from his pre-established mindset of doing everything himself, and into one where he actually comes to enjoy-- and like-- volleyball. 
3. hirugami: “maybe you’ve just had your fill”
hirugami’s case is kind of a strange one-- unlike oikawa and kageyama he’s not a major character, and his relationship with volleyball only gets a single backstory chapter as opposed to a series-long arc. but i personally ADORE his mini-arc for the things it has to say about burnout, passion and moving on. 
hirugami is introduced as the youngest member of a volleyball family-- his parents, older brother and older sister all play the sport. when explaining how he began to play himself, hirugami says: 
“... naturally, i started to play too. because i was good at it, and it was fun.” 
imo there are a lot of really interesting things to pick apart with this phrasing: the “naturally” implies a foregone conclusion but also a degree of passivity, like he himself recognises that he was swept up in his family’s influence. the “it was fun” coming AFTER “because i was good for it” also implies a degree of correlation, as though if he didn’t have the aptitude, he wouldn’t enjoy the game (a mindset markedly different to both oikawa and kageyama). as hirugami gets older, this correlation of being good ----> having fun ----> being able to play begins to reverse, and therefore manifest in increasingly self destructive ways: 
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the main impetus for hirugami has now become not wanting to lose, which therefore requires a degree of heightened practise and self discipline in order to achieve. notably, having fun has been reduced to an afterthought, a state that might be achieved if he wins. 
the correlation of “winning” and “being good” is a slipperly slope to go down, though, something that becomes especially apparent after hirugami’s team lose a game. the frustration of being unable to reach his goal of winning manifests itself as not being “good enough”-- acting on this, hirugami seeks to punish himself for “messing up”: 
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the close up panel of hirugami’s “confession” after hoshiumi confronts him hits particularly hard because it taps into a feeling that i’m sure almost all of us have felt at one point or another-- the realisation that something you once both loved AND liked is now only bringing you misery: 
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ironically, it’s actually this acknowledgement of “not really liking volleyball that much” that acts as a catalyst for hirugami’s recovery from burnout. hoshiumi’s acknowledgement of, and reply to, hirugami’s state is seemingly simple but deeply freeing: 
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and honestly, why not just quit? there’s nothing tethering hirugami to volleyball, certainly nothing as serious as life or death. personally my favourite part of this panel is hoshiumi’s description of volleyball as food from which hoshiumi has “eaten his fill”-- a lovely metaphor that re-contextualizes what could be seen as “time wasted” into something productive and indeed nourishing. 
when we check up on hirugami post time-skip, we find out that he has indeed quit playing volleyball in favour of going to veterinary school, but he’s seen watching the game between the jackals and adlers on his phone with an eager, fond smile on his face, implying that it was the act of moving away from the table (so to speak) after eating his fill that let him still hold on to a love and passion for the game, even though he is now interacting with it as a spectator instead of a player. and indeed that might just be why i love hirugami’s arc so much-- with it, haikyuu tells us that sometimes passion’s don’t need to be re-ignited in the same way. while oikawa and kageyama rediscover their love for, and liking of, the game through a return to childhood and the arrival of a new partner respectively, hirugami’s journey away from burnout comes from recognizing that he can step away from the volleyball court, and that the love and like will still remain. 
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beggingwolf · 3 years
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hi so I've just eaten too much ice cream, feel vaguely ill, and I'm here to tell you All About How I Failed At Outlining for SGKF this year!
that's partially just a fun tagline, but it's also a bit true. I told my friends I'd be trying to use several different outlining methods to try and knock out a plotty piece for the fest, and things did not go to plan!
important to begin with: I am what is referred to as a "pantser." I tend to just start writing. this is strangely contradictory to my personality, which deeply loves plans. unfortunately, what often happens is plans and outlines ruin my excitement and drive while working on a project (it tricks me into thinking I've done all the work and resolved the plot), leading me to abandon it.
and though I can throw together pretty words and made a decent fic, my fics never turned out as good as they could have been. I kept telling myself that if I planned in advanced and worked out what I was doing BEFORE I did it, I'd be able to craft a fic with such care and attention as to make it really SHINE.
so, uh, kinkfest rolls around, and since I was a mod I could see all the prompts before they even got released to the public, so I basically had a WHOLE EXTRA two-ish weeks to start planning and writing.
did I? NO.
so, despite the fact that I collect writing advice like a magpie , I'm not the greatest at implementing it. if you go into my SGKF google folder, you'll find a few instances of me TRYING to implement writing advice like metawriting:
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(and you'll see some fics that didn't get finished/make it into the fest!)
my issue was (and still is) that I think I value every little word too much. this is a bad thing: I'm an overwriter by nature. when I get words down, I want to keep them because I feel like I worked hard for them, even if they're not great or don't actually serve the story in the way they should. that's not to say all my metawriting was bad; it wasn't. I tried it out for A Drowning in California as well [which will henceforth just be referred to as "California").
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I had a whole subfolder for California. what kind of amazed me is how different my initial notes for the prompt are from what the story actually ended up being. here, take a look:
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literally almost none of this is in california. the WWE and UFC stuff made it in, and so did sid wrestling with horny, but that was it. I was going to start this fic in the locker room, with sid wrestling someone, and it was seriously going to be a story about sex—about sid wanting to hold geno down in bed. that was the premise.
and instead, we got a really emotional story about familial rejection and the isolation it can make people feel. SO! something happened along the way, right?
when I started getting into the plot that would support this supposed sexfest, this is where I went at first:
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geno wants the relationship to get serious, sid is like mentally still a 12 year old who just wants to wrestle people and doesn't want to talk about his emotions, and prefers to use physicality to communicate. this doesn't work for geno, who wants ... more
we can start to see the actual emotions come through, the things I was interested in: sid using touch to talk, and geno desperately wanting more
what did the most good for me, in the end, was "doing" the metawriting by talking with my friends.
I told them what i thought this story was about ("I'm thinking about making this a story about relationship-defining, maybe? and the communication needed for a lasting adult relationship? I think I'm going to set it in california/LA, where Sid has invited Geno along for the first time for his California Summer Fun/Training/Escape, whatever, and Geno's going to be emotionally preoccupied with Defining The Relationship—maybe they've been on-again-off-again? maybe they're just new to this, like almost a year deep, and they're not getting younger—and thinking this trip is about that [or hoping this trip is about that, and realizing it isn't, and being disappointed].") and they told me what jumped out at them.
Jes told me what would ramp up the tension would be a deadline of some sort; "Geno’s going to break up with Sid or make some decision or something, or there’s something approaching where they have to make a will they or won’t they decision of some kind related to the core ‘defining the relationship’ issue. Geno’s going back to russia and in previous summers they’ve always slept with other people while apart? or Sid has a wedding coming up and he’s offhandedly mentioned taking someone else as his plus one?"
I liked her thoughts. it made sense to add an external pressure to all this, and that wedding idea stuck out to me the most.
Lis said I should add a jealousy angle, so you can largely credit her for the club scene: "one thing i like to sort of headcanon/imply about sid's california trips is he uses them to hook up anonymously. so you could have, like, sid and geno seeing sid's friends, but also accidentally running into some of sid's friends. and geno's like oh, great, so here i am doing this horrible summertime training that i hate because i don't need to train in the offseason actually, and i'm learning what exactly sid gets up to when we're apart."
My magical solution these days is GOING FOR WALKS. do it if you're able. it clears out your brain. so on my walks I ended up deciding that I wanted a taylor crosby wedding. I like taylor as a character, and as a person with sisters I just like writing her in. best of all, she and sid are close and I like writing "I'd do anything for my family" sid.
and then I was like. oh. what if it's not that sid is afraid/nervous to bring geno, it's that he can't.
I... wasn't as conflicted as I thought I'd be about writing sid's parents as homophobic. I prefer to write them as supportive; I think troy crosby's been eviscerated more than he should have been in older fanworks, and though I respect their right to make fictional!troy whatever they want, I've been a little skeptical of outlandish takes on him ("he doesn't say I love you to his son because a camera caught them mid-interaction once!") ever since I read how the media has found him a convenient narrative villain while he tried to keep his underage son safe from the media as a child and while they needed to cook up Spicy Stories about squeaky-clean sid.
uh, tangent aside, I always thought I'd never write a "parents are the villains" story, but I did here. it felt right. it was easier, too, because they're not PRESENT in the story. I didn't have to write trina actually being horrible to her son. I just had to skirt the edges of the wound.
which works well on two fronts: I don't have to actively write the crosbys being horrible to sid, and I also leave more to the imagination of the reader, and that almost never fails to make the work better. whatever the reader imagines them saying to sid, it's going to be 10x more hurtful than anything I'd write.
I dug really deep on some personal emotions and fears I experience as a gay person for a lot of sid's arc here. sid is deeply imperfect in this story, and he's internalizing his pain and the horrible thing that's happened to him, which is making him pull away from his partner, and sid is not responding how geno wants, nor is he responding well, period, though he's trying in his own wounded, stilted way.
and beloved geno, whose tender heart is so hidden away for fear of someone hurting it. I really like writing geno; he's huffy and emotional and sometimes bitchy and feels things SO deeply.
once I had more of an idea, I was already working on a more detailed outline. this is where I seriously took Jes's advice and WROTE EVERYTHING OUT! it made it so much less daunting, because I didn't have to be figuring out my next steps AND crafting sentences at the same time. also this is where I tell you that the title of this post is mostly a lie, it was metawriting I failed at.
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This outline also meant I avoided writing large swaths of things that should've been cut. Another beta told me I should delete three scenes and condense a bunch of emotions into the club scene, and she was SO right. Cutting events out of an outline is WAY easier than cutting out pages of text.
Ironically my outline kind of deteriorated after the club scene, but that's alright: after I wrote the club scene, I actually had a clear vision of what I wanted the end to be. I just had to trust myself. I CAN do this, I CAN still just write intuitively sometimes!
I think California did what I wanted it to do. I'd love to try something out that's longer and has more story arcs in it (jes has a post for that too!) but I think that's best saved for another, longer project, though 18k isn't short.
next up is maggie stief's writing seminar that I bought a month back. I'm going to start working on that this month and see how I like it. I have a few halloween fic ideas, plus spookfest, so these next two months we should be cooking in the kitchen!
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sou-ver-2-0 · 3 years
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What do you think would be Shin's partnership ability? I mean, I doubt he would be willing to team up with Sara, but still...
This is such a delightful question aahh!!
I appreciate that you asked such a straightforward question, but you touched on a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot, so if I can make a tangent:
Tangent begins
Even though Keiji and Gin’s partnership abilities were super fun in Chapter 2-2, I’m not expecting to see partnership abilities again? I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Sara’s alliances during 2-2, and… I feel like those two partnerships serve a strong artistic purpose in the 2-2 narrative. The short version is this: when Sara has the Keymaster Card and she’s strong, her partner is Keiji; but when Sara has the Sacrifice Card and she’s weak, her partner is Gin. Notably, Keiji sees the world with cool, dark colors, while Gin sees the warm with warm, bright colors. Meanwhile, when Sara is partnered with Keiji, she also interacts with other “strong” characters, like Q-Taro and the Yabusames, when they view the laptop together. But when Sara is partnered with Gin, she allies with other “weak” characters like Nao and Shin himself. Ironically, Shin actually grows closest to Sara when she has the Sacrifice Card and she’s at her weakest point, and they’re both close to death. Isn’t that fascinating?!
In other words, as much as I love Keiji and Gin’s partnership abilities, I don’t expect them to resurface in the story unless Nankidai finds a compelling way to craft them into the narrative again. Because they served a symbolic purpose too!
Also, Shin has teamed up with Sara several times now! He’s the first character to team up with her at the start of the Death Game! I also just mentioned how Shin and Sara hack the computer system together in Chapter 2-2. Not to mention all the mini-games you can play with him, haha. So it’s not unthinkable to me that Sara could team up with Shin again in Chapter 3! Even though he really wants her dead. But he also wants to kill Midori, so. I can picture Shin being logical about this.
Tangent ends
Anyway, obviously Shin’s most useful skill is his ability to work with computers. Shin doesn’t have acute “detective sight” like Keiji, or a heightened sense of smell like Gin, but he can understand machinery. So if we want to make the most of Shin’s skills, then Sara should team up with him when they’re investigating a place full of complicated software or hardware. Perhaps when Sara looks at the machinery, it’s blurry and confusing, but when Shin looks at it, it becomes a solvable problem. That could be fun!
But if I can indulge myself a little further. An important part of Shin’s personality is that he’s paranoid. What if, when we see the world through Shin’s eyes, we see shadows where there are none? What if we see people a little uglier and more exaggerated than they really are? What if people sound louder and more grating? What if Shin’s useful partnership ability comes with the cost that Sara begins to see the world as an uglier, scarier place?
And what if this paralleled Kanna’s partnership ability in the Emotion Route! Where she would view the world with more hopeful eyes, and see the best in people! And then Kanna’s optimistic worldview begins to rub off on Sara as well!
There’s some food for thought for you, Anon. Thanks for the fantastic question.
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emersonfreepress · 3 years
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okay so is there content that you had planned for the ROs and story in general but then scrapped cause there wasn’t a good place in the story to stick it in? and if so, can you share what it was? 👀 👀 👀
yes, definitely. *rubs hands together* oh man, you done asked THE question today xD I can't wait to get into this 😁
Academics. I almost decided to have classes and grades be a minor part of gameplay, but the more time I spent designing it the more I realized I wanted nothing to do with it 😂 I haven’t really enjoyed academic gameplay in other interactive fiction because I 1) hate having to choose between studying and interacting with awesome characters, 2) have terrible short term memory, and 3) hate school in general!! So instead I just opted to have the MC be really good at school, point blank period so I could focus on social drama and relationships instead! 😆
Physical skills. I spent literal months crafting the catering scene around setting up stats for stamina/endurance, dexterity, and strength instead of just magnetism, confidence, and persuasion. They had their own backstories with the MC’s parents being overly invested sports parents instead and I think the background choices were like... martial arts, gymnastics, and track? But yeah, I ended up scrapping it all because I was spending hours on research about those individual sports so I could integrate them into the MC’s narrative organically but like... when I tried to think of what use they would be in the actual story, I came up blank. Best decision yet, esp since it means a lot less coding!
Skin tone customization. For one, I noticed that a lot of my favorite IFs don’t offer that customization and it hasn’t impacted my experience at all. For two, I originally realized I might as well not implement it since I am striving real hard not to introduce any customization that won’t actually be mentioned in interesting or meaningful ways in-story. I don’t think it’s really all that common for real life friends (esp in high school?) to comment or compliment each other’s skin and like... when it comes from someone who doesn’t share a similar complexion or ethnic background, that type of commentary gets... d i c e y. So then I wanted to be sensitive to that but what’s the pay-off? An RO mentioning how they love your skin tone once? Awkward sentences with the MC referring to their own skin color? Idk, just wasn’t vibing with it. I’m open to revisiting it in beta or something but for now it’s scrapped.
Singing, Rapping, and Gaming as Hobbies/Talents. I feel bad about scrapping these, honestly 😂 They’re great and I really wanted to incorporate them but it just came down to already having a lot of stuff to code. Plus, I know I can write the Hobbies/Talents I stuck with far better. And for Book 2 purposes, as well!
Leo. as @sourandflightypeaches ​​ asked me about a long while ago, I had to scrap an entire RO 😢 His name is Leo, he was the nephew of wealthy west African diplomats residing in Emerson, and I love him dearly! His backstory was largely based on my mother’s childhood and the circumstances she lived through after immigrating to America. and... ok, i’m about to go on one hell of a tangent so buckle up and bear with me if you can 😅
my intention with this story, aside from writing things that I personally enjoy (graphic violence, spooky woods, social drama, romance, conspiracies 😚), is to explore greed, wealth, and how the ways people and families interact with those two things influence young people and who they grow up to be. here i go sounding pretentious af 😝 and here’s where I apply a cut for those who want to preserve a little mystery to the main characters!
With Gabe, we’ve got someone who grew up with very little stability or financial security but who has found unscrupulous methods to gain status and money, with both noble and selfish motivations.
Kile has some of that childhood experience in common with Gabe, having been in the foster care system since infancy, but they lucked out when they were adopted into massive wealth by a caring, loving couple—a couple that uses their wealth and privilege to be far more lenient and protective of Kile than is actually reasonable or responsible.
Jack comes from a prestigious wealthy family on his dad’s side who he loves dearly but there’s no getting around the fact that they love him back as much as they despise his working class mom.
Jessie is a spoiled sweet heiress (being the baby of her family and the only girl) and while she lives blissfully ignorant of the harmful source and impact of her father's income and career, she bears the weight of the expectation to fulfill very traditional gender roles, including her behavior and appearance, but also extending to her career and life plans.
Rain's wealth led to them growing up sheltered and isolated but also extremely accommodated, giving them maximum freedom and opportunity to discover and develop their personal talents and interests. However, they have almost no positive relationship with their parents who have essentially decided to give up on a kid that couldn't be exactly the accessory they tried to mold them to be—both in terms of their identity and personality.
Rupan/Rohan, at their very core, rejects everything about conformity, self-importance, and excessive luxury—which means they have never, ever truly fit in with their peers. Going full non-conformist, however, has resulted in them becoming alienated from much of their family, as well, despite them all loving each other very much. Their history with false friends and betrayals has led them to over-indulge in their vices and reckless behavior to compensate for that isolation. Sometimes, they just get in over their head and many times, they know better. Every time, it's just that the feeling of finally belonging is utterly intoxicating.
Vivian/Vincent has two extremely successful parents who didn't inherit but instead built up their wealth and they aspire to be just like them, to a degree that is well and truly unhealthy. Their mother specifically is an over-achiever and applies mountainous pressure for them to follow in her footsteps, especially academically. Vi is completely capable of achieving what their mom expects of them, but they were already an extremely sensitive perfectionist so this has made them intensely critical of themself. This is a large part of why they are such a rigid, no-nonsense person and that in turn has made them one of the most disliked people among their peers—which is a huge personal failure to them since their father is a very well-liked and socially successful person in town.
And the Emersons are peak privilege: inherent high social status, brains, looks, charisma, athleticism, and massive wealth. They could never have been anything less than extremely popular, just by virtue of their last name and the nature of the town's social dynamics and politics. And they do enjoy that privilege (esp Curt lol). However, it should go without saying that being so high profile, even (or maybe especially) just in the isolated scope of your hometown, isn't always a boon. Their family's and their own perceived failings are widely discussed and privately mocked and/or celebrated. Real friends are scarce while fake ones and snakes are plentiful. Plus their dad is a gigantic dickhead who sees his kids as extensions of his own status and reputation and not much else. Public shortcomings make for an unbearable time at home and the world outside the estate is at once overly accommodating, full of assumptions, and even subtly hostile at times—all unrelated to their own actions or character.
And with the MC, I think the narrative will make it clear there are several ways that story can go. You start off with irresponsible parents that have lost their wealth due to their own mismanagement and material ambitions—how that affects any individual MC should differ based on choices and consequences!
So why bring any of that up when I was supposed to be talking about my cut OC? 😂😂
Leo was going to be the unwelcome recent addition to his uncle’s household, the son of a brother his aunt hates for (petty af) Reasons, and she took that resentment out on him directly by restricting his access to nearly every aspect of the family's wealth. Especially material goods and living conditions. He was basically treated like the help, tasked with playing nanny for his many younger cousins and burdened with doing the homework and providing academic cover for his dumb as rocks cousin in the same grade as you all. To sum it up, he was basically a victim of trafficking at the hands of his own family with his uncle out of town enough to feign ignorance to how bad his wife was treating his nephew and his aunt going out of her way to keep him busy, at home, and isolated. This is sadly a super common form of trafficking in Francophone African cultures (although I don't think most people view it as trafficking. and I’m sure the same is true of other cultures but I don’t want to speak outside of my purview). And like I mentioned above, it’s how my own mom's (and idek how many cousins') child/teenhood went.
It’s a perspective on modern wealth, privilege and greed that I really, really wanted to tell. I am confident in saying it hasn't been explored in interactive fiction yet (though correct me—and direct me 👀—if I'm wrong) and out of all the wealth/greed explorations I came up with, it's the one I have the closest personal ties to and the strongest feelings about. The characters and plans I had for it were detailed and I'm proud of them but at the end of the day... I just couldn't find a place for Leo in the story at large.
Leo was, in fact, the last main character I came up with, when I had already designed and fleshed out the larger story and started crafting the timeline of major events. I think the worst thing I could have done for a story and perspective that I care about this much is shove it into a plot that didn't have room for it at the very base level, regardless of how well the character or his story is written. Shoe-horned characters always stick out. I didn’t want to disservice Leo by having him be the character that did nothing or could be removed from the main plot without affecting it at all, y’know? That’s so much worse than just forgoing the indulgence, imo :((
ugh.... Leooooo 😭 I'm so sorry bb, I failed youuu 😥
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bluecoloreddreams · 4 years
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(Disclaimer: this contains spoilers for the Fruits Basket and Fruits Basket: Another manga, as well as taking into consideration tidbits from Takaya’s twitter.) 
So, okay, first of all we have to address the YMMV aspect: Some people don’t like this ship. As long as they’re respectful, I have no beef with that. I’m well aware that some people cannot/choose not to make the distinction between “real life” and “fiction”— I have the luxury of this choice, so some of the “problematic” ships/character aspects within Furuba don’t bother me (for the most part). It’s fiction, and I’m aware of this.  
Again, some people cannot/do not make this distinction, and that’s none of my business because that’s their personal life. I’m aware that people dislike aspects of Akigure, and that’s fine. 
Personally? I’ve been reading Furuba since like, basically the dawn of time. I was reading scans on, like,  MSN groups. I remember a friend at church (of all places) telling me about the Akito reveal because I was behind on updates. It’s literally engrained upon my shipping heart at this point. 
(Headcanons ahoy! Like literally, this is all headcanon/my perspective on the series as a whole. YMMV/YKINMK/Dead Dove, the whole works, if you know you know
YES I wrote it like it’s an actual research paper because I have No Chill At All, please forgive me. It’s long and pretty rambling.) 
Addressing the first elephant in the room: Given my limited interactions with the fandom, my impression of Akigure from a generalized fan POV is that it’s pretty divisive. Every episode she comes up there are “I hate this kid” comments and I cry
Akito is a favorite of mine, and it’s impossible for anime-only’s to make a deep, informed call on her character. On the other hand, a lot of manga-readers dislike her too. 
So, why am I talking about whether or not people like Akito as a character? 
I’m of the opinion that it impacts people’s ability to view her character arc as one that deserves a happy ending. That she doesn’t deserve to have love, happiness, or forgiveness, all of which are given to her when she and Shigure finally end up together on equal footing. (Do I think the way it’s rushed in the original Furuba ending? Yeah, but hey. Sensei had like a huge ensemble cast to wrap ends on. Now there’s Furubana to look to and it’s just chef’s kiss.)
There’s a mental aspect in this, involving the dichotomy between “reality” and “fiction”. 
There is absolutely zero argument that are a lot of things that Akito does that uh, listen, if it was IRL she’d be in jail! Jail for terror baby! Jail for life! 
Fortunately, Fruits Basket is a work of fiction. These characters aren’t real, they’re idealized brushstrokes of human nature created to move a plot and a message along. 
That’s why Akito and Shigure work as a couple and as characters: 
They’re both incredibly deep characters that get passed off as one-dimensional by a lot of people (and the original anime, woof). Some of it is again, because anime-only fans just don’t have the whole story, since Akito’s arc is one that builds gradually until it hits a point where all hell breaks loose, which we are a ways away from. 
So what’s the message that their relationship and characters are supposed to pass on? 
Well, it breaks down into two categories: world building and thematic arcs. The latter is more important and what I’ll be focusing on, while the former is just a little spice that I, personally enjoy, and won’t really talk about in depth. (It’s that the magical realism in Furuba sets up the idea of soulmates, it’s just…. Something I enjoy and it’s really heacanony, so I can’t really justify spending more words on it!) 
When discussing Fruits Baskets in any capacity, I feel like we must first keep in mind the thematic “lessons” of the series: 
There is an inherent loneliness in living as a human being, since loss, grief, and hurt are indelible parts of the human experience, and learning to cope with these feelings in a compassionate manner is a life-long lesson 
People react differently to the loneliness of existence, and their reactions are based upon their personalities, their upbringings, and their own choices 
Everyone is capable of change and learning, if they choose to do so, however: 
Personal agency is taught, but in the vacuum of positive reinforcement, the ability of a person to choose to be compassionate is stifled or outright inaccessible
Therefore, if you are not taught to deal with your grief and existence outside of others, your ability to connect may become warped, manipulative, or abusive, and this is not the fault of the child but instead the parental figure 
Eventually, you will be aware of your actions, and then it is your burden to choose—some people do not take this choice (the head maid, Ren, Kyo’s bio dad, Rin’s parents, Sawa’s mother in Furubana)  
Abuse has long lasting effects on the psyche and can be physical, emotional, and/or mental in nature and must be dealt with in order to grow as a person
“Dealt with” does not mean that it goes away, but that it is acknowledged and given a positive outlet (Yuki’s garden, Aaya’s shop, Rin’s art, Momiji’s violin playing)
Forgiveness is not linear
Forgiving yourself is a long and arduous process, and happens independent of other people’s forgiveness
This is really brought to the forefront in Fruits Basket: Another, when Shiki talks about how his mother interacts with the rest of the Sohma family. It’s shown she’s done what she can to make amends, but recognizes that while she can individually hold relationships with certain family members, as a whole, it's best if she allows them to be away from her. 
This is a whole tangent on its own, but there’s a certain blanket of casual forgiveness given to Akito by the entirety of the shown Zodiac in Furubana, in that they trust that she’s raised a kind and thoughtful son and allow him the grace of his own family. 
Again, in Takaya’s tweets post-series that acknowledges that Akito’s friends with Uo-chan, despite her relationship with Kureno (and it shows a depth of awareness on Kureno’s part that he stays away
People flourish in environments where love and positive reinforcement is given freely, even when people are in the wrong
This doesn’t mean that no one is ever scolded: see Komaki and Kakeru, Kisa and Hiro, Hatori chews out Shigure all the time, but never ceases being his confidant 
So okay, that’s A Lot. But every single character in Furuba follows these themes in their own manner, because the series is about healing and learning how to heal from abuse, neglect, and isolation. Someone’s gonna have to be doing it. Point blank, the end, to tell a story there must be conflict, and boy howdy, there’s a lot of conflict in Furuba. Every personal thematic arc in the series ends up tying into a romantic one, because Furuba is a romcom drama. 
There’s a loop that goes “personal betterment”->”crush”/”friendship”->”conflict”->”personal growth”/”relationship growth” in the series for every character. That’s the bread and butter of Furuba. 
But anyway. To the question: 
I love them because they work, they’re both their own people with their own narrative focuses, motivations, conflicts, and flaws. Both Shigure and Akito are believable in their own right in the context of Furuba, and I think Takaya did wonderfully in crafting a story where their personalities mesh well and give each other reasons to better themselves.
To talk about them together, you have to talk about them separately. 
I’m gonna start with Shigure because, truthfully? 
I just want to lament about how often he’s simply passed off as either comic relief or absolute trash. He’s so underestimated! 
“He’s a joke of a grown man… He is reliable and I trust him.” (Another, v. 3)
He’s incredibly intelligent when it comes to interpersonal relationships, which is why he’s able to do what he does. He’s also incredibly kind—no one made him take in Yuki or Kyo or Tohru. He could have just went “ah, I’d prefer not to” and moved on. But he didn’t, made up some bullshit so Haru would feel like taking in Yuki was a transaction, and let me just tell you, I am the same age as Shigure and if you gave ME three teenagers to be the guardian of?! It would be a full on disaster.
He’s actually incredibly trustworthy (if he wants to be), insightful, and a genuinely good guardian despite his jokes and wisecracking. 
He forced Kyo to go back to school, knowing full well it would be good for him. He lets a whole host of children run rampant through his home. Kids who actually enjoy his presence. He’s shown as having a good familial relationship with Rin (who tries to warp that for her own means), Kisa, Haru, and Momiji. His advice to Tohru is genuine, insightful, and ridiculously helpful. 
Shigure is good with people. He gets up at the crack of dawn to drive Shiki to see Sawa in Furubana. He’s who Mutsuki and Hajime immediately go “holy shit you need to do something about this” to when they find out Shiki’s getting nasty notes about Akito. He’s who Shiki goes to when Sawa fell down the stairs as a child. As much as Shiki and the others make fun of Shigure, he’s obviously someone who’s trustworthy. And that’s not some new development, he’s always been trustworthy in regards to those he loves. No one asked him to show up to Tohru’s teacher conference, he volunteered. Like this dude loves people, he’s the dog spirit after all, and rightly so. 
Does he have his own motivations? Of course! But so does everyone else in Furuba. He’s a complex character, man! 
He laughs and jokes a lot because he’s projecting this image of a laid back, doofus. When you think about who he’s friends with, the whole middling goofball act makes a lot of sense. Just like some of Ayame’s over the top behavior is a defense mechanism, I believe that Shigure casts himself as a generally unappealing man to keep himself safe from advances when he was in school, but also to temper the wildly unequal personalities of his other two friends. He’s the sort of person who would just go “eh, whatever makes it easy”, and that’s just how he is. 
He doesn’t mean the creepy school girl thing, it’s a bit and I think the only people who don’t realize he’s running a bit are Yuki, Kyo, and Tohru who are absolutely too stupid to realize he’s playing them for reactions. He thinks it’s funny. 
Anyway:
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When the older Zodiac had the dream of Shigure, Shigure is the only one who made the active choice to seek out that feeling. His soul was touched, and he decided that he wanted that and only that. This doesn’t necessarily mean he went full Jacob from Breaking Dawn, but it does mean he acknowledged there was a bond, and he wanted it. 
When you get into the technicalities of the curse, it’s mentioned that their Zodiac spirits influence how they interact with Akito, and that going against her can cause physical and emotional pain. Yuki cries when meeting her, and it’s mentioned that that’s just the normal reaction for the Zodiacs. 
It’s hard to say how much of their early interactions are influenced by the curse, but it’s obvious that Shigure has genuine fondness for her. She wasn’t always absolutely broken, as shown in Yuki’s backstory, and was a precocious child, one who sought affection openly. 
Shigure has an indulgent personality, and is shown to love being adored. Guess who loves him! Akito! Guess who wants lots and lots of affection! Akito! 
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Their personalities are very well matched as they get older: They’re both intelligent and coy. They both have fairly sharp tongues when needed, and have no qualms about doing whatever it takes to get what they want. 
Shigure wants Akito to be independent from the curse. He’s made it clear to her he doesn’t want to be her father, he doesn’t want to be her friend, he wants to be her lover. Those are boundaries that Akito’s never been given before, and his frankness with her and his jealousy with Kureno is something she agonizes over, simply because she’s never been given any sort of serious interpersonal boundaries, or repercussions for her actions. He’s always kept himself separate from her, because of those boundaries, even when they were children. 
That’s important. It opens the door to the idea that her actions have consequences, and is a persistent nagging in the back of her mind. 
“Even though you hadn’t realized it, I was waiting for that day.” (ch 101)
For the bulk of the series, the only person who sees Akito as a person separate from the curse, and sees a future where she can grow is Akito. He has an extraordinary amount of patience for her, and forgives her for a lot. 
There are only two incidents that Shigure cannot forgive: Her sleeping with Kureno, and at the very end of the series, I’m of the full opinion that if Akito had pushed Tohru off the cliff, Shigure would have been done with her. Look at that expression, that is the look of someone who is toeing the line of throwing away all his hopes and dreams. If she really had pushed Tohru, I just...... The series would have taken a much darker tone. 
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OKAY that’s enough about our favorite terrible author! (Okay, an aside, Shigure, please share your work ethic, you goof off so much but you’ve published so many things…how…)  
ONTO AKITO! 
“I’ve  finally realized… she hated her own shallowness all this time, from the very start.” // “It’s frightening because you have no choices.” (ch 121) 
A lot of people dislike Akito because she, for the bulk of the manga, is violent, manipulative and just downright unpleasant. And that’s fine, but it’s not the point of her arc or the themes of the manga.  (It is, however, the point of Rin’s: you don’t have to forgive everyone.) 
She’s not the only violent person in the series. If we as readers can forgive Uo-chan and Kyoko, or even Hana-chan for her moment of violence, why can we not extend the same grace to Akito? 
Violence is often shown as a knee-jerk reaction to fear and sadness: Kyoko, Uo, Hana, Kyo, Rin, and Akito all react violently to negative situations and feelings. Even Kisa reacts violently when she’s at her worst, biting both Haru and Tohru when she’s in her tiger form, which is shown to actually cause pain like a real tiger would. (It’s played for laughs, but has anyone been bitten for realsies by a house cat? That hurts! How much more would a house-cat sized tiger hurt!!!) 
Out of all of them, Hanajima and Kisa are the only characters to show immediate remorse, because they have what the others don’t: A positive support system. Once positive role models and support systems are in place, all of the others begin to learn how to react differently and ease out of the knee-jerk reactions that were ingrained in them. 
It’s made explicit in the manga that you have to be taught how to react positively, you have to learn and choose to be good, to be friendly, to love yourself outside of others’ perceptions of yourself. Look at Yuki’s arc. Look at Uo-chan’s. Kyoko’s. 
Yuki sums it up nicely in the last chapter of the manga, where he tells Tohru that she taught the Zodiac how to become human. She allows them to grow into people who can make the choice to be loving, compassionate individuals. 
Just because Akito doesn’t interact positively with Tohru for the bulk of the manga, it doesn’t make it any less true: 
Akito is kept in a juvenile state of being: No one teaches her to suck it up, that the world exists outside of herself, that other people are people and not things. In fact, she’s actively encouraged to act the way she does. She’s incredibly broken, between the maids of the Sohma estate just… allowing her to do whatever the fuck she wants and her absolutely jacked up relationship with Ren and Akira. She has no moral compass at all. No one bothers to teach her that her actions have serious consequences. 
She knows, in a roundabout way that hey, these people don’t like me. There’s a serious mental dissonance between what she latently knows—these are all people with no connection to her other than the bond of the curse. This is why Tohru is able to break through to her at the climax of the manga: 
She knows she’s wrong, but no one has ever told her she’s wrong but understood why she’s doing it. Akito just didn’t have the words to explain herself. What do children do when they cannot communicate? They lash out. Kids will bite, scratch, yell, kick, fall to the floor and have screaming tantrums out of frustration. Eventually, most kids learn that there are other ways to express frustration, and move along. (Not all, though, but most.)
Akito was taught that this is acceptable, allowable, and is her right as god. She is actively broken and kept that way through the neglect of the Sohma family maids, Ren’s abuse, and how Akira framed her role in the Zodiac. 
I can go on and on and on and on why the way Akito was treated for her role in the Zodiac by her parents and the rest of the Sohma estate was just awful. I hate it, it’s terrible, she never had a chance to learn and grow and be the genuinely thoughtful woman we know she grows into. 
She doesn’t force her path of forgiveness onto others and is fully cognizant of what she did, the repercussions of her actions, and lives her entire life after the curse breaks trying to right what she did wrong. 
“Even if she gets hurt, she says she deserves it. She tells me not to let it bother me, but… I’ve always, always loved her so much.” (Another, ch. 13) 
Tohru opens the door for Akito. She extends her hand, offers her friendship despite having seen the absolute worst of Akito. She tells Akito that everyone is lonely, everyone wants bonds, and acknowledges Akito’s worst fears, that Akito herself is selfish and dirty for wanting something assured and unending because she, Tohru, herself is dirty and selfish. Tohru knows what Akito has done, knows she’s injured some of her beloved friends, had plans to lock up Kyo, hurt Hatori. 
Tohru still forgives her. One of Tohru’s striking traits in the manga is that she is suffering, every day, she struggles with the grief of losing her mother and the fear of being alone in the world. Through nothing but her own empathy and realization that loneliness is universal, she’s able to forgive people. She forgives Akito and cares for her, and through Tohru, Akito is introduced to the realization that she’s been wrong and that maybe, she shouldn’t be forgiven. 
Shigure also forgives her, and this is the crux of their ship. 
To me, that itself is wildly important. 
They’ve always circled around each other, and Shigure has always been waiting for Akito to be able to come to him again, in full control of her life and choices. He wants Akito the woman, not Akito the god. 
He’s been waiting for the day Akito can meet him as an equal. Akito wants it too, and has wanted him to turn and see her for a very very long time. But she’s been terrified, the entire time, that when he does see her as herself, Shigure won’t like what he sees, and will leave. She’s aware of what she’s done post-curse, she’s aware of the impacts it will have on the former Zodiac members, and she’s aware that once the “bonds” of god and the animals is gone, there may not be anyone left for her.
Neither of them are under any illusions at the end of the series: Akito knows she has to atone for what she did, Shigure knows she has to learn to grow into a person who can function alone. They both know that there are people who are against them changing the oppressive structure of the Sohma family. 
Neither of them care. There are things that they want, together, and it’s enough. There’s a whole new world for them to explore and learn about. And in Furubana, this is shown to be a lifelong effort on their parts: 
“She said after meeting me, she learned so many things for the first time. She smiled happily as she said it.” (Another, #13) 
To close, I’d like to take a moment to talk about the curse and Shigure, and how he set things in motion. 
Without Shigure, the curse would have devolved on its own, yes, but the circumstances would not have allowed for the freedom the Zodiac had at the end of the manga. It would not have ended with Akito being able to learn and live freely. Allowing Tohru into the Sohma family cracked open a door to compassion and kindness none of them had ever experienced before, because the Sohma family seems to exist in a vacuum of stability and love. 
It wasn’t that Shigure knew instantly that Tohru was kind and loving and thoughtful, if anything, his read on her was “completely normal, albeit strange, teenage girl who obviously has a rough life”. But she was normal, she was from outside the Sohmas, and he knew that was enough. No one in the family was stepping up to change the status quo and how stifling and abusive it was, so he did it himself. 
He did it because he loved Akito. 
Not because he felt bad for himself, or Hatori, or any of the others, but merely because he loved her to the point of manipulation. It backfired in his face, because he got a big ol’ dose of “loving and respecting” juice from Tohru, but he still got the end he wanted. 
What I mean to say is best summarized in  chapter 123: 
“It would be nice to live in a kind world, without any troubles, without any fear, without hurting anybody, without ever being hurt, only doing the right thing. I wish I could reach this kind world by the shortest path possible. … “That’s wrong”, or “that’s stupid”: If it’s someone else’s life it’s so easy to make such irresponsible comments. ...It would be great, but it doesn’t exist. … Little by little, walking one step at a time, is all you can do.” 
We get to experience the roughest part of the path with Akito and Shigure, we got to watch them be terrible people who were lonely and in want of love struggle and learn how to get up and move on. 
They tease each other, Shigure is thoughtful of the distinction between “the person Akito was raised to be” and “the person who Akito is”. He’s seen her at her messiest, and she’s seen him at his most jealous. They still chose each other, despite the hurt they caused each other, and others. They make up for it, reflect, and live a life that demonstrates that they have learned. They have friends who are thoughtful and loving and would not hesitate to drop everything and help them, lend an ear when they’re frustrated, help them not to make the same mistakes. 
And then we get to see them be wonderful, kind, thoughtful, loving parents in Furubana. 
We got to see their adorable, kind, compassionate child be friends with the children of the people Akito hurt, because everyone in the former Zodiac’s family collectively decided “never again, no”. 
Their child adores them. Shiki in Furubana #13 radiates love for Akito and Shigure the same way Mutsuki and Hajime do. 
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They are genuinely good parents, even when they tease Shiki, and I think that is testament for how good they are for each other and how much they’ve changed as adults. 
I think that’s enough of a reason to ship them, don’t you?
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twdmusicboxmystery · 4 years
Text
More Suspicious Details Surrounding This Week’s Big News
Hey Everyone! Just want to show you two little things today. Remember how I said there were a bunch more details I wanted to put in my thoughts that I posted on Thursday? Well, these are some of them.
By way of what’s coming next, I listened to the latest “emergency episode” (because of the TWD news) of the Talk Dead to Me podcast and I actually learned a lot of things worth posting. And there was also some super-suspicious Beth stuff.
But…I’m going to wait until Monday to post that. (How’s that for a tease. ;D) Mostly because it’s going to be kind of a long post, and I actually want to go back and relisten to portions of it so I’m sure I’m getting the details 100% right.
***If you want to listen to it, let me warn you that they do go on a bit of TD bashing tangent near the end. They don’t mention us by name or anything, but they start being sarcastic about how there are some people who still believe Beth is alive. And I know that’s upsetting to many in our fandom. So just consider yourselves warned.***
But the reason I even mention that today is because one of the things I’ll illustrate in that post on Monday is pretty definitive proof that tptb carefully craft EVERYTHING that goes out on social media. It’s something we’ve suspected for a long time, and we’ve had several small confirmations of it. But one thing they mention in that podcast is that everything that goes out on SM (and that includes the clickbait sites). Again, I’ll explain more on Monday how I know this, but suffice it to say, everything is written, carefully worded, even what images are used, not just by AMC or the network’s social media managers, but by Gimple and Kang themselves.
And why is that important?
Because of what I’m going to show you today. They’re suspicious lines from two clickbait articles that, among dozens of others reported the news of TWD’s end date and the spin off series. One of them, I noticed, but forgot to include. The other, I completely missed, but @wdway​ pointed it out to me.
The first is this one:
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Just the fact that that they used this picture tells me that the spin off will have to do with the New Mexico symbolism. But that’s not even my biggest takeaway.
Look at the bottom line. “…And another that could bring characters back from the grave.”
Now, 1) we’ve seen lines like this before and TD always pounces on them. But it’s especially interesting to me that this is being said in conjunction with these spinoffs. 2) They’re talking about the second spin off here. Not the Carol/Daryl one, but the “Tales from The Walking Dead” one that they’ve already said will tell back stories they couldn’t get around to in the main series. Even those of deceased characters. I highly suspect this is where we’ll finally see some Abraham/Eugene backstory. But could this include Beth? Definitely.
Next article. This one:
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Look at what’s underlined here. It says, “only after production of 30 more episodes spread between the previously announced 6-episode coda to season 10.”
Um…they’re calling the 6 bonus episodes a coda? Remember that this wording is not only approved but apparently distributed by tptb. Even if these 6 bonus episodes aren’t exactly what I suspect (flashbacks to the missing 17 days in S5) is there really any chance that they won’t be connected to Beth in some way?
Something to think about. Have a great weekend, everyone!
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muffinlance · 4 years
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what would you say is the most important thing about writing, and are there any tips you'd be willing to share?
In the order I thought of them, which might or might not reflect their significance to me or you:
Write a fuck ton. And do it as close to daily as possible. You get better at this by doing it more, just like every other skill. Writing isn't any more magical than carpentry: show up, do it a lot, and you'll improve.
Writer's block is either you being lazy/scared to write and Ruin Everything or your subconscious telling you there's an Actual Problem with your story. Learn to differentiate the two. Writer's block in the form of "oh I haven't written forever because my ethereal muse won't inspire me" is generally the former; stop being an ass to yourself and sit down. BIC = Butt In Chair = one of the most common acronyms you'll find on writer's forums.
Critique Circle (no fanfic allowed, sorry)
The Absolute Write Water Cooler (no fanfic, and STAY THE HELL AWAY if you're not ready for serious publishing, these people talk real talk and that broke me for a bit as a newb who Wasn't Ready For This Level of Publishing Reality.)
Setting a timer to write was super useful for me when I was still trying to establish good habits. 45 minutes BIC, and no going off on that 30 minute research tangent doesn't count, no internet no research no distractions just WRITE.
I really really suck at the "no distractions, just write". System that works well for me when I need to kiddie lock myself to the chair: use phone for typing. Set it up just out of reach and use a Bluetooth keyboard. At this point I've typed like two novels using this method. Requires a good phone that doesn't crash when your Google doc gets too big though, RIP my last phone.
Google docs are your friend. Autosave and available everywhere.
I'm going to find and murder the person who decided Google docs should use some kind of neural network predictive shit for its spell check instead of comparing to an actual dictionary file. Beware REALLY BIZARRE typos slipping through. Turning on grammar check catches most of these. I will not murder the person who added that.
Backup copies of your stories. Regularly. For Serious Face writing, I typically have the main doc on GDrive, and download a .rft copy to my local hard drive any day I make sizable progress/edits. Title the file with the date (year-month-day, ie 2019-11-08, so that the files sort nicely by name), and a brief recap of what you changed. Ie: 2019-11-08 Story Title Here added ch 3 deleted wererabbits". Then if you are looking for the wererabbits scene because why did you delete that it was AWESOME, you know you just need to load up the doc before. Version control bitches, it's not just for Com Sci. I also backup my backups monthly to two different flash drives, because you can NEVER BE PARANOID ENOUGH.
Pay attention to what you like/dislike in other stories, especially things that grab you and make you want to read through the night (or make you go 'eh, this was fun to read, but not great'). Suss out WHY. Incorporate into your style appropriately.
Critique other people's stories, especially finished ones in your genre and word count. Pre-published works are a treasure trove of almost-there-but-not-quite that really helps you practice #10. Figure out how YOU would fix things, if it were your novel. Figure out three to four ways you could fix it. One suggestion can come off as imposing your opinion on the person you're betaing for, and is a no-no. A bulleted list is helping them brainstorm and they will love you and want to wed into your family. Critiquing helps the other writer a little, and helps you a fuck ton more. Crit. Lots. (As time allows, and generally when you have a work that needs critting back, because crit partners can and will disappear on you.)
Fuck fear, get your writing out there. At the very least you'll learn what not to do next time. This especially applies to the fun that is the querying process. Related note: that short story I just got published in a major mag? I sat on that for like year before I tried sending it anywhere because I had a nebulous fear of Not Being Good Enough. Fuck that shit, shove your terrible writing at people and let THEM decide if there's anything to love in it. Especially in fanfiction, where the stakes are so low, and it's generally not the well-written stories but the most compelling that get attention.
You'll probably never grow out of the "my writing is terrible" thing. I have literally never heard of an author who has. You just learn to deal with it better as you get more and more positive feedback (and the feedback WILL get more positive if you're conscientiously writing lots with the improvement of your craft in mind.) I know on an intellectual level that I'm writing at a pro level 'cause people have literally paid me pro-level monies for it, but I'm still Super Nervous anytime I start a new plot arc because What If This One Sucks.
Corollary: Sometimes you will inexplicably want to take your latest story to the bathtub and drown it even though there's nothing objectively wrong with it. Take a big step back and work on something else for awhile. You are going to do nothing but mangle your story until you are out of that mood.
Having multiple projects helps you to have a different Favorite Child so you can avoid murdering your other children and still be productive.
Find something outside of writing that is good stress relief + healthy, because This Is Stressful. If you're being serious about it, you're probably treating it like a part-time job. Jobs are stressful. Writing is no exception. Walking/jogging pairs well with general Think Time, I've found.
Think Time is real. Think Time is that thing where you aren't actively thinking of the story and then three days later you suddenly have the solution to that plot problem. As long as you're actively engaging with your craft, there is a part of your brain that will be working on things in the background for you. Thank you, semi-automated brain subprocesses!
Don't use Think Time as an excuse not to write, you lazy ass. Put a GERBIL in your outline and come back to it, go write the next scene.
My outlines include addressing myself directly, swearing at myself, and using the word GERBIL as a marker for things that need fixing. These are optional but enjoyable. (And also the reason none of my characters will ever have a GERBIL as a pet, because then I couldn't use it as an easy Ctrl+F keyword.)
My dinner is cold so this list is done.
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bbq-hawks-wings · 4 years
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I want to express an unpopular opinion. I hope for your understanding, because such things don't like to listen. Why does everyone think that Hawks is a bird? I couldn' fit my logical arguments into the askbox :( (about how he sits on a pole "like a bird", supposedly likes jewelry and so on). Even his quirk is called Fierce Wings, not a Hawk, not a Red Bird. Do you remember the names of the quirks of Hound Dog and Tsuyu-chan? We haven't evidence to believe that Hawks is behaves like a bird.
I do believe very much he’s a bird, and if you would let me friend, I would love to try and prove it to you because I think the evidence is overwhelming. I’ll make a TL;DR at the end but I’d really like to take the opportunity to perhaps teach others at least one method for literary analysis since it can be a really dry and boring subject to learn in school but is SO useful not only for getting good grades but getting into colleges as well as interpreting both entertainment and genuinely important information like the news, history, laws, and scientific papers. Using fiction - especially such a rich, engaging one like HeroAca - is a great way to try it out without the pressure of a grade. I don’t have the qualifications to teach in any formal capacity, but as a “peer” tutor I hope I can be helpful.
I’m going to put everything under the cut from here because this is going to get LONG, but I promise the TL;DR at the end will be very easy to read. If you liked this sort of unofficial tutorial please let me know. I’d love to help make “academic” skills like this more accessible for those who might benefit from it and enjoy it, but it doesn’t make sense to put in all that effort moving forward if I’m garbage at it.
Before we get too into things, I want to lay out a few notes to keep in mind as we go.
I will only be using the official translations from Viz’s Shonen Jump website when available. Fan translations are more than close enough to casually enjoy and follow the story, but professional translators are paid to know and get various nuances correct and some of the trickier cultural background behind certain phrases (for example, the phrase “where the rubber meets the road” might make zero sense in a foreign language if translated literally, so an equal cultural phrase should be used instead) that give more exact information. Rarely is this too important, but sometimes it helps, plus it supports the source material.
If you’ve followed my blog for a while you might know I’m very fond of doing this kind of thing in my spare time and that I’m a huge fan of YouTube channels like Game/Film Theory, Overly Sarcastic Productions, Extra Credits, and Wisecrack that do this kind of thing with popular media as well. If you like this sort of content, may I encourage you to check them out after this to see how else you can apply these kinds of analytical skills to things that aren’t homework.
My writing style tends to meander, but I do my best to cut out the fat and only include relevant information so even though there’s a lot of information here, please know that I’m trying to be thorough and explain things to the best of my ability. If I seem to go off on a tangent, I’m trying to set up or contextualize information to explain why it’s relevant and then come back to the point. In other words, please be patient and bear with me as I go.
Now, to start, I want to explain at least my method for analyzing a text/piece of media. There is a set order and number of steps to take, and it’s as follows:
Read the material all the way through.
Come up with a hypothesis about something you’ve noticed when reading it. (In this case, it’s “Is Hawks actually supposed to be a bird?”)
Collect as much relevant information as possible and test the evidence to see if it supports the hypothesis we’ve made.
Step back and look at everything again with those points in mind.
Determine if we were right or wrong with the evidence we have.
If we were wrong, go back to step 3 to figure out what fell apart and see if we need to go back to step 2.
If that sequence sounds familiar it’s because it’s the scientific method! Aha, didn’t think we’d be pulling science into all this, did you? Don’t worry, we won’t be putting numbers or formulas anywhere near this discussion - the scientific method is just a way we can observe something and test if what we thought about it is actually true; and it applies to almost everything we as humans can observe - from the laws of the universe, to arts and crafts, to philosophy and religion, and so on! When you think about it that way, whole new possibilities can open up for you when it comes to understanding how the world works.
So with that set let’s (finally) begin!
Steps 1 and 2 are already done. We’ve read the manga and want to prove that Hawks is a bird. (We’re going to try and prove he IS a bird because in the context of the series there’s a lot that *isn’t* a bird and less stuff that *is* which will make our job easier.) So now, we’re onto: 
Step 3 - collect data and see what conclusions we can get just from our evidence.
Now, to pause again (I know, bear with me!) there’s a few different kinds of information and considerations we have to keep in mind as we collect. There are four kinds of information that are important to know about in order to determine if it’s good data that will help us with the testing phase in Step 4. The kinds of information to keep in mind are:
Explicit information - this is information that is directly spelled out for us. For example, Hawks says, “I like my coffee sweet.” and his character sheet says “Hawk’s favorite food is chicken.” That’s all there is to it, and it’s pretty hard to argue with. This is the easiest type of info to find.
Implicit information - this is info that isn’t directly spelled out but is noticeable either in the background or as actions, patterns, or behaviors that can be observed. For example, Hawks has mentioned in at least three very different places his concerns over people getting hurt while he tries to get in with the League:
Chapter 191 when confronting Dabi about the Nomu he says, “You said you’d release it in the factory on the coast, not in the middle of the damn city!”
Chapter 191 again in a flashback with the Hero Commission he asks, “What about the people who might be hurt while I’m infiltrating the League?”
Chapter 240 when discovering how much influence and power the League has gained, “If someone had taken down the League sooner, all those good citizens wouldn’t have had to die!”
Hawks never says in so many words, “I never want innocent people to get hurt under any circumstances!” but the pattern of behavior and concern is consistent enough to form a pattern and clue us in that this is a key part of his character to keep in mind.
Peripheral information - this is information that isn’t directly to do with Hawks or maybe even the series as a whole but is still relevant to keep in mind for his character and the questions we’re asking. This may include extra content that isn’t the “series” proper, but is still an official source like interviews with Horikoshi, etc. but it can go even further. For example, while we try to prove that he’s a bird, we should have some knowledge about what makes a bird a bird, some specific and notable birdlike habits/behaviors/features, etc. This is just to show how wide-ranging we need to cast our informational net.
Contextual information - this will be important when we get to Step 4, but it’s good to keep in mind now. This is when we compare evidence against the broader scope of the series and consider the circumstances under which we find the information. For example, if I told you, “Harry kicked a dog.” you might think “What a jerk! What decent person kicks a dog?”; but if I said, “Harry kicked a dog while trying to keep it from biting his kid.” suddenly it re-frames the story. “Is the kid ok? Why was that dog attacking? Harry put himself in danger to keep his kid safe - what a great dad!”
I’ll go chronologically to make it easier to follow my evidence as I gather and give references as to where I found that information. I’ll go through the manga first, and then any peripheral sources that are either direct informational companions to the series (like character books or bonus character information sheets) and interviews with Horikoshi. Please note the categories these details fall into may vary based on opinion/interpretation, but I did my best to list them out for reference.
Chapter 185 - Explicit Type: Feathered wings - regardless of the specifics of his quirk it’s undeniable his wings are made up of feathers which is a distinctly birdlike quality. There are many mythical creatures and even dinosaurs that also have feathered wings, but this is our first big piece of evidence.
Chapter 186 - Peripheral Type: Large appetite - birds have an incredibly fast metabolism because flying takes so much energy. They’re constantly eating. Plenty of young men are big eaters, but it was specifically pointed out and works towards our hypothesis so we’ll keep it in our back pocket for now.
Chapter 186 - Implicit/Peripheral Type: Fantastic vision - Hawks senses the Nomu coming before the audience even is able to make out what’s headed their way. It could be implied his wings caught it first, which might be the case, but he looks directly at the Nomu and brings Endeavor’s attention to it. Birds have fantastic long-range vision, especially birds of prey that mainly swoop in from high in the air to ambush highly perceptive prey. Also good to add to the pile.
Chapter 192 + Volume 20 Cover - Implicit/Peripheral type: Wears jewelry and bright colors - birds are well documented to be drawn to bright colors and are known for decorating their nests with trinkets. Scientists actually have to be careful when tagging birds with tracking bracelets because they can accidentally make him VASTLY more popular with the ladies by giving him a brightly colored band to the point they can’t resist him! Male birds are also known for having bright, colorful displays for attracting and wooing mates. While Hawks isn’t the only male character to wear jewelry in the series, he’s the only one (to my recollection) that wears as MUCH jewelry so often both during and outside of work. It may not be obvious, but the illustration on Volume 20 is actually an advertisement for his line of (presumably) luxury jewelry. In other words, Hawks on some level is synonymous with style and flair to the point he can make money by selling jewelry with his name on it.
Chapter 20 Volume Cover - Explicit Type: Hawk emblem on the watch face - If the name “Hawks” didn’t give it away, he’s very clearly trying to align himself with more avian qualities if his merch has bird motifs. In other words Hawk = “Hero Hawks” and “Hero Hawks” = bird.
Chapter 192, 244, clear file illustration - Peripheral Type: birdlike posture. Chapter 244 isn’t quite released yet on the official site as of writing this, but when Hawks swoops in and beats the kids to the punch apprehending the criminals trying to subdue Endeavor, his hands are clenched in a very talon-like manner similar to a swooping eagle. When walking with Endeavor in 192, he holds his resting hand in a similar fashion. On the clear file illustration he’s not only perched on his tippy toes in a pose that has been famously called “owling” (remember that trend/meme, y’all?) but his wings are slightly outstretched to catch the breeze to keep from falling over which a lot of birds can be seen doing when they don’t have great purchase on a surface in a place that’s a little windy. The fact that he seems to gravitate to high places like birds are often seen doing might also be a noteworthy indication.
Extra sources:
Hawks Shifuku: Horikoshi describes Hawks as a “bird person” and says that his initial design was based off of Takahiro from his old manga. 
Takahiro’s design:
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Current character design: The banner image on my blog was commissioned from a friend of mine who doesn’t follow the series. When I showed her reference images of Hawks, you know what she said? “Oh! His hair is feathers!” Even his eyebrows have that fluffy/scruffy texture to them that his hair has. The markings on his eyes can also be seen on him as a young child in Chapter 191 which means it isn’t makeup meant to tie in a theme or look. He has those dark, pointed eye markings like many birds do. So on some genetic level he resembles a bird.
Step 4: Testing our hypothesis with the gathered evidence.
There’s already a lot of compelling evidence that already closely aligns him to birds which is promising. However, to really prove our point we should try to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt he is a bird. To do that this time around I’m going to see how the series treats people with animal-based quirks and see if it’s consistent with the way Hawks is portrayed.
You bring up Hound Dog and Tsuyu, and they’re fantastic examples. Let’s start with Hound.
He’s pretty straight forward - he’s like a dog. He has a dog face, has dog-like tendencies, and dog-like abilities. Superpower: dog.
And in Tsuyu’s case - quirk: frog, just frog. She’s stated explicitly to have frog-like features, frog-like tendencies, have frog-like abilities, and even comes from a “froggy family.”
So with these two very explicitly animal-like characters the common theme seems to be “If they’re considered to be like a specific animal, they have to physically resemble that animal, act like that animal at times, and have abilities like that animal.” Let’s see if another animal-quirk character matches up and then put Hawks to the test.
Spinner’s quirk is Gecko. Based on our criteria, is he a gecko?
Does he look like a gecko, even vaguely? 
Yes, he’s covered head to toe in scales, and his face is very lizard-like.
Does he occasionally act like a gecko? 
Unclear. We haven’t really seen any evidence of this, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t. For the sake of our argument, we’ll just say no and move on.
Does he have gecko-like abilities?
 Yes! Though most of his abilities are limited to things like being able to stick to walls, it’s still gecko-like in origin and qualifies.
Spinner hits clearly hits ⅔ criteria and our standards seem pretty consistent, so let’s see how Hawks stands up.
Does he look like a bird? 
Not all of his features may explicitly scream “avian” at first, but upon closer observation and with his clear previous inspiration this is a resounding yes.
Does he act like a bird? 
Many of the mannerisms and behaviors he displays can just be chalked up to him being a little eccentric, but with the sheer number of them that also parallel birds in some way this is also a pretty convincing yes.
Does he have bird-like abilities? 
While most of the emphasis is on his wings and what they can do, it does seem that he not only possesses things like heightened senses which could be attributed to avian abilities but he also very much possess high intelligence and incredibly fast reaction times which birds are also known for.
Even if we only gave Hawks a “maybe/half a point” for those last two, he still meets the 2⁄3 that Spinner did. So we have another question to ask: Does a character have to have an explicitly named “animal” quirk to be considered to be/resemble a specific animal? Let’s look at Ojirou and Tokoyami for reference.
Ojirou’s quirk is just “tail,” but he’s been described by his peers and classmates as a monkey and does seem to share some more monkey-like features. It isn’t lumped in with his quirk because the only notable monkey-like quality he possesses is a tail. He doesn’t have fangs or an opposable toe - he just has a tail. For quirk classification as far as hero work goes, that’s the only important thing to note.
Tokoyami, on the other hand has an entire literal bird head, but nothing else. He has a beak, feathers, and even in illustrations of him as a baby he had fluffier feathers on his head. Even with only those details, he just screams “bird!” However, his quirk is classified as “Dark Shadow” because that’s what sets him apart for hero work.
Back at Hawks we see his quirk classified as “fierce wings” but like Ojirou and especially like Tokoyami, the emphasis on his wings is what sets his abilities as a hero apart. Otherwise, he’s just a guy who looks and acts a LOT like a bird.
But astute observers may have noticed I’ve left out a detail that’s more or less a nail in the coffin on the whole matter, so let me ask a question: Tsuyu in particular has something else of note that solidifies in our minds that she is, indeed, a frog - she explicitly calls herself a frog. Could we say the same about Hawks?
Chapter 199 - Explicit Type
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Bingo. Hawks has known himself for as long as he’s been alive. He knows his habits, his impulses, his family/genes, and so on. If he calls himself a bird, are we going to call him a liar? In fact, he calls himself a bird not once, but twice!
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That’s pretty much it. With the evidence stacked to that degree, I’d be hard pressed to NOT believe he’s a bird.
That was a long amount of text to get through, so if you’re here at the end thank you for sticking out with me to this point. I really appreciate it. This is more or less the process I use when analyzing anything and everything whether it be HeroAca related or not. Maybe it’ll help you if you’ve struggled with literary analysis, or at the very least I hope you got some enjoyment out of it.
TL;DR If Hawks looks like a bird, walks (acts) like a bird, is based on a bird (character), and calls himself a bird, he’s probably a bird.
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jeremy-ken-anderson · 3 years
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Star Guardian Jinx
Every now and then you get a situation where there isn’t actually a More Accurate way to think about something, or where being More Accurate doesn’t really do anything - 
The Totally Boned Principle is something I learned from playing strategic social games, and it goes, “If there is a scenario on your list of possibilities where you are completely screwed no matter what you try to do, you can reasonably ignore that possibility.” The reasoning isn’t that the scenario where you’re helplessly facing your doom is impossible, but rather that lying down and giving up in the face of your destruction doesn’t yield outcomes any better than fighting for your life, so you might as well act like it’s not totally hopeless.
- and in such situations you generally get to pick how you want to think about things.
Jinx is a nihilistic explosives-happy thrill-seeker in League of Legends, and her character’s level of cruelty or evil is very up-in-the-air because it kind of depends on how much story you consider League of Legends to have.
She’s shooting explosives all over Piltover; One assumes those are sometimes hitting people.
(Another related side-note: There’s this scene in the Justice League cartoon where Superman complains about having to hold back to avoid killing someone, and is pleased that Darkseid can really take a hit - It’s almost a Saitama kind of moment - and then he punches Darkseid through a couple buildings and I’m like... That probably killed like 20 people, which kind of drives home what Superman was just saying about the importance of holding back)
But there’s a sense of people respawning, but there’s also a sense of most people not respawning most of the time; So Many People in LoL lore have tragic backstories or rivalries based on people who killed convenient other people who then never came back, so...?
Anyway this is three tangents in at this point.
Star Guardian Jinx is a kind of archetypal Bad Girl w/Heart of Gold as a member of the Star Guardians, which is essentially a set of LoL skins based on Riot staff writing magical girl fanfiction about their own properties. She’s the rebellious one who goes and does her own thing for a while and shows up just in time for the power of friendship and love to save the universe.
She is, in other words, nothing like Jinx.
And this is where the loosey-goosey canon of LoL really shines, because you can kind of just...decide how you want to resolve that, if at all. Most answers are valid. Maybe it’s a comic book style “what if” universe kind of thing. Maybe it’s an alternate timeline. Maybe Star Guardian Jinx - and indeed, the Star Guardians at large - are another of Jinx’s ridiculous over-the-top daydreams that she cooks up to keep herself entertained between bouts of extreme violence.
Like Battle Royale games, there’s not really a story to MOBA-genre games. That’s not the point. But Riot has in the course of promoting their MOBA crafted the signifiers of an ongoing narrative and asked people to fill in some for themselves to make the MOBA a richer experience, and by and large this works. It makes me wish I liked the company or game better than I do, when I see fan works and their occasional hero trailer.
One of the recent more generalized LoL ads - “You Really Got Me” - presents Jinx as a lot more similar to Star Guardian Jinx. In this one she shows up to drag player-surrogate Lux out of her boring ol’ studies (you see what they did there?) and into a match of League of Legends. So she’s presented as “the wild friend,” and it makes me wonder whether the decision was marketing-based, or story-based, or whether her initial presentation just got misinterpreted by the community at large and the designers were trying to course-correct, or whether they think it doesn’t matter much and they’re making most of this up as they go.
I haven’t actually played LoL in a VERY long time. But I have a huge folder of wallpapers that my computer swaps in for my desktop every 20 minutes or so, so every now and then I have a trip down memory lane.
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theshinsun · 4 years
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brace urself, this is for the writing meta ask: 2, 6, 7, 14, 17, 19, 20 (if you need a direction for this... I always wanted to hear more about Bring Me Roses), 21, 22, and 24 bc i'm nosy and still very into your craft. thank you buddy!!
2. Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project
I'm so excited/terrified to finally start my knb college AU. I've been sitting on this idea for almost two years I'm so ready but at the same time I'm so not ready.
The gist is it's every single self-indulgent, chaotic, projection-ridden idea I've ever wanted for these boys all rolled in a big ball of shenanigans and character growth. It's a beautiful mess and I can't wait to make it happen as soon as ANR is done.
6. What character do you have the most fun writing?
This is gonna come right the fuck out of left field, but I love writing Himuro. I have so much fun writing just... snark, and that boy is the perfect outlet, there's no bottom to that salt mine. I remember getting a similar kick out of writing Tsukishima in the past, I just live for sassy dialogue. It ain't much but it's honest work.
7. What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? Would others agree?
My style is very present, I think (which is funny bc there was a time I never would have considered writing present tense) focusing on what's happening and how it makes the character feel in the moment. I like to write specific, detailed imagery, but I try to keep it short and relevant to the scene, so I can move along and focus on what's important. I wouldn't call it fast-paced, exactly, but it is pretty to-the-point. And I think, based on the feedback I've received, that people who read my fics might agree with that. I've heard that my writing is very personal and character-driven, and I think that might be a byproduct of the time I spent writing in first person. Now I write almost exclusively third person limited, but I still like to get in the character's head and tell the story from their "point of view", I guess. 
14. At what point in writing do you come up with a title?
It depends almost entirely on how quick I'm able to come up with a pun lol. Sometimes a fic has a title before I've even written the first sentence, sometimes I have to scramble for something, anything in the last few seconds before I publish it. A lot of the time I'll have a working title like "that one really fucked up aokaga oneshot" for pretty much the duration of writing a new fic… and a lot of the time I'll end up using song titles, even though we're past the days of writing songfics. 
17. Do you think readers perceive your work - or you - differently to you? What do you think would surprise your readers about your writing or your motivations?
I think, to a degree, people get different things from my writing than I intended -- which is good! The way a piece of writing can be interpreted completely differently depending on who's reading it is one of the best things about being a writer tbh. I think people might be surprised, though, how different my fics often turn out from how I set out to make them. These days I've usually got a pretty detailed outline for what's going to happen, but even with all the preparation in the world, sometimes a fic will take a sudden detour I didn't expect, or something I wrote before will take on new meaning and change the direction I meant to go in. This definitely happens more with my longer fics, but there are times even with oneshots where I look back at what I set out to write, and what I ended up writing, and they're completely different.
19. Is there something you always find yourself repeating in your writing? (favourite verb, something you describe ‘too often’, trope you can’t get enough of?)
I tend to write a lot of scenes with characters talking while in the car (cars are an intentional motif in ANR, but in something like GWGE there's not actually a lot of narrative purpose to this) I don't know why, maybe because it's a convenient way to have characters talk one-on-one, or maybe it's because I've had a lot of meaningful conversations while riding passenger, couldn't tell you, but it's cropped up more than once in my current fics and will probably feature in some of my upcoming ones (the college AU strikes me as a likely candidate), and I think it's worth taking note of.
20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)
SINCE you mentioned Bring Me Roses, and I never really get to talk about it, pls allow me to go on a lengthy tangent about my most underrated fic of all time. (Like 90% of the reason it's still incomplete almost two years later is because the response when I posted it was so underwhelming, but I still stand by it. Someday I'll finish it, hopefully, if just for myself.) 
I'm so fucking proud of the language in this one. It's not perfect, by any means, but the imagery in my opinion is very strong, and almost every line of dialogue is saying something without really saying it. There are frequent allusions that something happened to Aomine's mother, relatively recently, and that Momoi is worried about him overworking out of grief or guilt, but none of those things are ever actually stated. There's also some pretty heavy implicit flirting between Aomine and Kuroko, even if it's a bit unusual and they're both playing it coy at this stage, the chemistry is there and the interest is mutual. And of course, because it's a florist AU, the flower symbolism… I spent so long researching bouquets, plant husbandry, how to prep and preserve cut flowers, and of course… flower meanings. The main ones that keep getting brought up are dahlias, which have just as many negative connotations as positive ones, including betrayal and instability, but also dignity, creativity and change, and come in a variety of colors shapes and even sizes (Islander or "dinnerplate" dahlias were definitely going to feature in part 2… as well as the connection between them and Aomine's mother). I know a lot of these things might not hit as hard because there's no actual payoff (yet), but still, in terms of "show don't tell" and setting up things to come, I don't think I have a single better example in my fic repertoire, I really went all out with this.
It's a shame I never got to follow through, but I got the impression that there just wasn't a lot of interest, and even if that alone is kind of a dumb reason not to continue, after I worked so hard to pull off what I did, the lack of response really killed my motivation. (I wonder sometimes if it would've been better received if it was an AoKaga fic… actually, I don't need to wonder, I'm sure it would have been, but that's not the story I set out to tell and I'm not going to change it.)
21. What other medium do you think your story would work well as? (film, webcomic, animated series?)
Oh, I'd love to do some of my fics as comics. I even tried it at one point; GWGE was going to be a comic originally, before I decided a multichapter fic would probably be less exhausting (the first couple pages are still floating around in my art tag somewhere, though this was back in high school so the quality is… heh).
22. Do you reread your old works? How do you feel about them?
Yeah… I reread a lot. Usually while I'm working on a new chapter, I'll go over the ones that lead up to it to make sure I don't repeat the same phrases too much and that the continuity lines up, and I'll also admit to going back and just reading my own fics for fun. Sometimes the only one who's written exactly what I want to see is me. 
How I feel about them depends on the fic… some of my older ones are a mix of nostalgia and cringe tbh, but there are some I still genuinely enjoy revisiting from time to time. 
24. Would you say your writing has changed over time?
Oh hell yeah. For… better and worse, honestly. I feel like I've lost some fluidity and confidence in my writing, and it sometimes turns kind of stilted, so I try to overcompensate which results in pretty jarring changes of tone, but at the same time, I've gotten much better with rhythm and syntax, my grammar skills are always improving, and I'm able to incorporate a lot more intentional meaning and subtext without always stating things outright.
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makeste · 4 years
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some Monday morning follow-up thoughts on BnHA 245
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mystery of the 4+ hour translation time: solved lmao.
you know, for all that I’ve complained about various Viz translation issues over the years, I have to give credit where it’s due. this really wasn’t necessary in order to understand the chapter, but he went and did it anyway. that’s some dedication to your craft. and apparently Horikoshi actually went and wrote way more of this book than he strictly needed to as well, because of course he did.
also, in Viz’s version, Hawks’s “secret message” is so overt that there was like zero chance of Endeavor not putting two and two together. “that’s my SECOND!!! recommendation, in so many WORDS!!!!! MAKE SURE YOU READ WHAT I HIGHLIGHTED WELL ANYWAYS BYE.” for all I know the original Japanese may have been much more subtle, but this is nonetheless my new favorite translation on account of its implication that Hawks really didn’t have any faith in Endeavor’s intellectual capabilities at all lmao.
other follow-up thoughts on 245! well really just two thoughts, but one of them is a list of things and the other is a long tangent!
so, (1) the following is an incomplete list of events which are coming up in canon roughly at or around the four-months-from-now time period, which in canon will be the end of April:
the start of the new school year, and Shinsou’s transfer to the hero course
the next U.A. sports festival
Bakugou’s seventeenth birthday (420 blaze it)
Golden Week (starts April 29th)
possibly the next Hero Billboard Chart event. the previous one was at the end of November, and it’s stated that the rankings are updated twice a year. normally one would then assume the previous rankings came out at the end of May, i.e. six months earlier, but it was implied that the event in ch 184 was delayed due to the events at Kamino, so it’s possible that the Spring rankings actually came out earlier
and last but not least,
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[Marge Simpson noises] [worried glances toward Horikoshi's frustrating poker face] ...
and (2) where does Endeavor go from here?? what’s his next move? he now knows (a) that the League of Villains has taken over the Liberation Army and now numbers 100,000 strong, and (b) that they have something big planned that’s going down in four months. but he also knows that Hawks went to great lengths to tell him all of this secretly. “there was something he couldn’t say outright.”
he knows there is some shady shit going down, for sure. the media’s version of the Deika City incident isn’t telling the full story. Hawks is out here shilling Re-Destro’s book and praising the Liberation ideology despite knowing they’re secretly a front for the League of Villains. but clearly the most glaring signal of all, the hint that even Endeavor should be sharp enough to catch despite being a few Bradys short of a bunch, is the fact that for whatever reason, Hawks wasn’t able to just tell Endeavor all of this outright. not even in private. that is big. what that should tell Endeavor, if he has any detective instincts at all, is that Hawks has been compromised in some way. it’s not just that he doesn’t trust anyone. it’s that he can’t communicate at all without risking something.
and once he puts all that together, it’s not that much of a stretch from there to puzzle out that maybe, just maybe, there might be some secret agent stuff going on. because where else could Hawks have gotten this information? and maybe, if he decides to put his conspiracy goggles on, he might even get to thinking about the incredibly suspicious timing of that High End Noumu attack back in November. anyways, the important thing is that he has enough information now to make the correct leap here. and assuming that BnHA continues its trend of letting characters actually be smart about this sort of thing, I’m going to assume that he will do just that as soon as the next chapter.
so then, the question is, what does he do with that knowledge? your little bird buddy is working undercover and spying on the League of Liberators and is probably in terrible danger! well, then! that’s not ideal!! so he has a few options here, I think. one is that he can check with the HPSC whether they have anyone working undercover. buuuuut, that’s risky though. because the thing is, he doesn’t know for sure whether he can trust them. so even though they actually are clean as far as we know, I'm not sure Endeavor will go this route, because he doesn’t know that, and the last thing he wants is to accidentally get Hawks exposed and killed.
option two is that he can keep it on the dl but tell a few other heroes, ones he actually trusts. this in practice would probably be a pretty short list, though. the other U.A. alumni, possibly, if he makes the judgement call that they can be trusted since they’ve all fought against the League before. or if not, then he can at least tell All Might. I do think him going to All Might for advice is a very strong possibility regardless of whatever else he decides, because he’s clearly in over his head here, and he needs to tell someone.
and the third option is that he keeps it even more on the dl, and decides to put his agency to work quietly investigating the leads that Hawks has given him, starting with the Deika incident. this should hopefully lead to him figuring out the connection between Detnerat and the villains, and they might even manage to learn the actual details of what really happened if they can manage to talk to someone from Deika who wasn’t on the Liberation Army’s side. back in chapter 224, Hanabata said that 90% of the population were secretly MLA soldiers. but that still leaves 10% who weren’t, so there’s a chance that some of them might have a very different tale to tell if Endeavor can manage to track them down.
anyways, my guess is that in the course of their investigating, someone on Endeavor's team, which could be anyone but will absolutely be Deku, will stumble across something big which will subsequently land our heroes in Big Trouble, and provide a focus for the rest of this arc. and while I almost feel like it’s jinxing it to hazard a guess, I will say that the traitor plot could very well finally play a big role here, particularly if the Terrible Trio gets involved in this whole thing, which, again, they 100% will. needless to say, I hope the kids are as tight-lipped about what’s going on in their internships as they were during the Basement arc, or else we might really be in for some trouble. 
and the other possibility is that the traitor doesn’t come up again in this arc (lol see how I covered my bases there. "the traitor will definitely play a role in this arc, unless of course they don't"), and we wind up focusing on the Noumu instead. either way, hopefully Hawks will focus on unraveling more of the League’s plan, because it would really come in handy to know just what kind of “power” Tomura is going to be acquiring in four months’ time. is it Noumu-related? are they planning a prison break? or is it something else entirely? there are just too many possibilities right now, which yet again serves as a reminder of just how many cards the villains currently hold up their sleeves. the heroes really need to get their hands on a few cards of their own. godspeed.
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helisol · 4 years
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ye s, well
it basically came to me like a prophet receiving a vision from an angry god. you know. like brian david gilberts video ideas but with more slow burn.
no really i wrote all this down in my phone’s note app because some nearly coherent things popped up in my head every time i was on the train or bus these last few days.
(after-actually-writing-this disclaimer/note: this is 2000 words of slightly edited rambling about Bagginshield in the Afterlife. i had to put it in a read more.)
so the gist of it
the botfa goes just as in the movie with minor details altered. like bilbo kissing thorin just before he dies which inadvertently causes a ripple in time and space that makes the valar curious of them both. you know. minor stuff.
so bilbo goes back to the shire, the war of the ring goes down, and the hobbit/elf gang sails to valinor at the end. classic stuff, not much alternating of universes here.
but here’s where things turn into the “my city now” meme because DUDE DO I HAVE A LOT OF THOUGHTS ABOUT VALINOR AND HOW THE AFTERLIFE WORKS
like, I’m sorry mister jolkien rolkien tolkien, but just putting people into a hall to await being judged like a hospital waiting room? snooze, that’s boring!
so first of all, and you can fight me on this, Yavanna Made The Hobbits And You Can’t Change My Mind.
it just makes sense for her to have been very saddened by the destruction of literally all her work on arda through melkor’s poison, so she made living, growing things that could protect themselves from harm. as opposed to the ents, by the way, which were made by Eru to protect all the other living, growing things. it was a nice gesture of Eru to make those, but not quite what Yavanna wanted or had in mind, i imagine.
as with the dwarves, Eru wasn’t all happy about the existence of another race he didn’t make but you know, whatever, ‘I’ll just let this married couple have their own kids aside from mine, it’s okay’.
so he hands both the dwarves and the hobbits independent thought and free will, but under the condition (and here is where the afterlife stuff comes into play) that Aule and Yavanna be responsible for their mortal creations after their death. meaning that both races have seperate afterlives from the halls of mandos, MEANING THAT ITS COMPLETELY FINE FOR AULE AND YAVANNA TO BE LIKE “oh look honey, these two are so very in love and remind me of us, shan’t we do something about that?”
so. they do something about that. more precisely, they rearrange their afterlife-realms so they’re next to each other and someone with enough willpower could cross through the barrier. because listen, they’re valar, they can do whatever they want just for kicks.
okay so after that tangent lets get back to the meat of the matter: gay dwarves. I know not everyone has read Sansukh, a 500k word mammoth of a fic, and I don’t really intend to copy any of det’s canon, but their version of The Halls of Mahal really inspired me. basically the dwarven afterlife is one big hunk of a mountain/underground city where they’re free to live their days until dagor dagorath doing what they do best in the company of their families and friends; like smithing, crafting, building and other JustDwarrowThings.
meanwhile the hobbit afterlife is Basically The Shire and instead of being given the materials to build things, all the hobbits who go there get to grow plants and do their gardening. they don’t have to- just like none of the dwarves have to craft stuff- since there’s always enough food for everyone, but they are just allowed to do what they do best if they so desire.
now when Bilbo arrived in the undying lands he was still Old As Hell and im sorry to put it this way, he definitely kicked the can after like, a week of living there. not really so undying, them lands, huh. anyway Bilbo bites the dust and LOOK AT THAT he’s suddenly young again, and another LOOK AT THAT he’s standing in a very comfy, but Not Quite Bag End hobbit hole that has a note hung up on the front door. you wouldn’t think gods could have handwriting but hey, again, they’re gods they can do whatever. the note just tells him that yavannah made this place special and just for Bilbo but that there’s another home waiting for him. very cryptic there, lady. he doesn’t leave at first because hey, his family is here. there’s a lot of reunions and celebrating and food because its the fucking hobbit afterlife, what else would you expect
it takes him a few days of Regular Hobbit Life in his new home to realise ‘holy shit, this is so boring’ so what does a Fool of a Took do when things get boring and there’s a note urging him to do something?
HE’S GOING ON AN ADVENTURE
so Bilbo runs through the whole not-shire, meeting all sorts of people he outlived on the way (looking at you, Lobelia), as well as some elves. because elves can definitely just waltz through all the afterlives. they can walk on top of snow, you think they wouldn’t walk around wherever they please in valinor? rip to mankind, but they’re different.
he gets to the furthest reaches of it eventually, and lo and behold, what awaits him but the view of a tall mountain, an invisible barrier and a very flustered Thorin who is at his wits end as to how Bilbo even got here.
now for thorin’s part of the story we’ll have to start after the botfa again. he basically woke up in the darkness like an episode of naked and afraid, and started talking to Aule. his maker, who loves him to bits by the way since he made thorin, just tells him he’s free to go wherever his heart takes him. again with the cryptic messages from the gods.
so thorin, still very self-loathing and bitter because of his actions right before his death, sees this as Mahal’s way of saying ‘please don’t step foot in my halls u disgusting litle creacher’, when really he just meant ‘please do some well deserved self reflecting and then come inside to be with your family, they all miss you terribly’.
after his chat with the maker thorin just spawns in right at the front gate of the mountain and he has a choice to make. go inside or stay outside. and we all know Thorin’s proclivity for drama so he basically spends LITERAL YEARS just living in self imposed solitary confinement.
oh also tiny hc here, thorin was said to have taken “any work offered to him in the towns of men”, and they showed him in a smithy, but personally I believe they meant it when they said “any kind of work”. so basically thorin is a jack of all trades, master of some. he definitely has master-level skills in certain areas though, enough to build a vaguely hobbit-hole shaped house. why is it hobbit hole shaped?
oh right, the part where Thorin is absolutely enamoured with Bilbo.
"Go back to your books and your armchair, plant your trees, watch them grow. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”- HELLO? GAY POLICE? I’D LIKE TO REPORT A CASE OF ‘DWARF KING REALISING THAT THE HOBBIT WAY OF LIVING IS A REALLY GREAT ONE IN CONCEPT / WISHING HE COULD HAVE HAD THAT KIND OF LIFE WITH BILBO’
anyway it’s a long 80 years until Thorin does get to meet Bilbo again, and in the meantime we have one of my favorite additions to any Hobbit fanfic ever: Frerin
For the uninitiated, Frerin is Thorin’s brother. They also have a sister, Dís, but Tolkien never specified when she died and she was a bit younger than Thorin and Frerin so I reckon she’d still be alive as an old dwarf lady somewhere?
Anyway, Frerin. Oh boy. Sansukh, again, does an excellent job at turning Frerin into a character with a level of authenticity that gets real fucking close to Genuine Tolkien™, so most of my own characterisation of Frerin is based on that in Sansukh. With the important omission of the dwarves not being able to see the present/their still alive loved ones in middle earth through a magic mirror pool.
so Frerin takes it upon himself to leave the mountain in search of his brother because he really does want him back. but also because Mahal has had it with Thorin’s antics and suggests Frerin fetch him so he can finally reunite with his family. Mahal doesn’t talk to the dwarves a lot because he’s like an awkward and distant dad, but he does actually speak to them.
so Thorin is supposed to go see his family, which he does, but not immediately. it takes like, a solid year of just brotherly (and sister-sonly) companionship for him to open up about all his anxieties and regrets and THEN he goes into the mountain to cry in his mother’s lap. as you do.
however Thorin still feels like he doesn’t 100% belong with the other dwarves in there, so he frequently spends long stretches of time outside, building away at his house, thinking about Bilbo. the company goes out to visit him sometimes.
more details on the house tho, cuz it’s Important; it’s built halfway into a hill near the mountain, like a proper hobbit hole would be, but the lower levels are built into stone. look, he’s had 80 years to work on constructing this. it’s near perfect in every way for both hobbit and dwarf standards and could definitely fit the entire company and more inside.
now about the barrier. elves can pass through without a second thought because they’re shiny little bastards who just get to do all the cool stuff, but the other races can’t just hop between realms like that; they really have to muster up the willpower. which usually means they can’t do it because a drawback for both dwarves and hobbits is that they favor isolation from other races even in death, and as such don’t want to mingle with each other.
unless you’re Bilbo Badass Baggins though, who simply runs through the barrier to yell at Thorin for leaving him sad and alone for 80 years. he is that bitch.
there’s gonna be some legolas and gimli shenanigans if i can fit them in (cuz i dont know when exactly they sailed west together), possibly a mention of tauriel because bruh peter jackson did us dirty by not giving her any closure besides ‘lol i guess she’s banished from mirkwood??’ and Mairon. because. I also have some thoughts about him.
also Fili and Kili as pseudo matchmakers because every fic needs that
and did I mention there’s gonna be hozier lyrics for chapter titles
i said this was the gist of it but i somehow ended up at ~1900 words. well, more power to me.
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