#just posted the linked gifset because I couldn't stop thinking about this

[bitchofdarkness]

Thoughts on Kim Yeong-hu and Tak In-hwan

Something that I noticed pretty early on was that Kim Yeong-hu was not a fan of Tak In-hwan. He probably couldn't stand him on a personal level long before the monsterization started, but since the guy was his superior he didn't make it as obvious as he would've probably liked to. He did speak his mind though, so that tells us enough about how much respect he has for Tak. *cough* none *cough*

In episode one we see how betrayed he looked at Master Sergeant Tak's actions, aka letting one of the monsters go.

Now we also know from later episodes that Yeong-hu is one of those guys that aces tests (he beat Sergeant Min in every competition) and most likely climbed the ranks due to being a dutiful, obedient little soldier that listened and acted on the orders given.

That's why he was so pissed off when MS Tak suddenly changed tune, because Yeong-hu recited the order they'd been given from the start and had been acting on the whole fucking time and Tak had the audacity to act like that was never the case.

Imagine you're Yeong-hu, doing what you're told, because clearly those higher ups had to have some sort of clue in this batshit crazy apocalypse that was going on. (And they did, they just kept it all to themselves) And since enough monsters had been hostile and killed civillians or fellow soldiers, killing them didn't seem like the wrong thing to do.

What pissed me off was how MS Tak kind of painted Yeong-hu as a bad person for following orders (in that first episode you can see how he silently judged him). He himself shot the mother-monster and instructed to burn her. And yet he acted like Yeong-hu was super cruel for doing what he was told.

And then he changed directions by telling Yeong-hu their order had always been to only kill the monsters that were attacking them, not all monsters.

Then, pray tell, why the fuck did he shoot the mother of that baby monster he let go? She did NOT attack him at all. She didn't even hurt any of the soldiers when she frantically tried to get to her baby (and technically she could've done that). And still, he wanted her dead, but then does a 180° and spares the baby monster.

Make it make sense. If you want your soldiers to all act the same and follow your orders, you fucking give them the right order instead of judging them for doing what they were instructed to do. Idk if some people don't get this (when I recall some posts about the second season), but when you go through as much training as these Navy Seals did, you're one cohesive group and you do what you are told and not start getting creative yourself, because that would mean death for your unit or yourself in a dangerous situation/combat. You have to be able to predict what your comrades would do and quickly, i.e. in case you're not able to communicate via comms.

I doubt Yeong-hu or any of the other soldiers actually want to kill the monsters that are docile. In the later episodes they clearly figured out a system to mark the harmless monsters with paint and refrain from killing them.

That could've been a possible way to react to this situation from the start, but Tak seriously decided on a whim what they were supposed to do. And I hate him for that. I can't stand him. Sure he let the baby go, but he still helped kill; ordered to have her killed and watched the mother die. He is the worst, since his word would've stopped it all right away, but he decides not to say anything until his actions were questioned by Yeong-hu.

And we know Yeong-hu took it to heart, because I doubt Tak was the one coming up with the idea to mark the harmless monsters so none of the soldiers would kill them and only focus on the dangerous ones.

Anyways, I think that moment with the mother and baby monster in episode one was the start of Yeong-hu questioning everything Tak told them to do. And even though he tells him later on that he trusted him to take care of the troops, I doubt that he did. And Yeong-hu had every right to doubt that guy, since they lost half of their people within a fricking year.

And you know what's sad? Yeong-hu's personal decision was to go and find Yong-seok on his own, because he didn't want to risk the life of any of his soldiers. But then Tak decided the crazy doctor should go with them and obviously he would need more protection, aka more men. Who obviously died.

I know it must've been Seok-chan who told the Master Sergeant about Yeong-hu's plan to go on his own, but Seok-chan's intention was to keep Yeong-hu safe, while Tak's intention was for the crazy doc to get to his lab- not to save Yong-seok.

Idk where I'm going with that, but I think a lot of people assume he's a bad person because he's military, but Yeong-hu actually just suffers from resting bitchface and has a big heart (granted, most of the space in his heart is taken up by Seok-chan, but still) ...he cares so much for his fellow humans and you can basically watch him grow throughout the whole season.

#sweet home #sweet home 2 #meta #rambles #just posted the linked gifset because I couldn't stop thinking about this #it probably went unseen by a lot of people due to the gruesome death scene of the mother monster

[nataliescatorccio]

🎊 NEW YEARS CLEAN-UP 🎊

rules: unburden yourself from the abandoned WIPS collecting dust in your folder and share 5 gifs, then tag five people.

thank you so much riya (@thebookluvrr1816) for tagging me!

so what's maybe different about my giffing process is that i actually rarely abandon gifsets. like if i start making it, i'm locked in, i have to finish and get the idea out my brain. on the rare occasion i don't finish a set, then i'll readapt any gifs i made for another set (but i could actually only find one instance of a set that i had abandoned this year, and i'd adapted it for another set instead). so this is a selection of gifs that i either cut from a set as i had to narrow down choices, or an 'original' look at a gif before i changed it. because of that, i'm going to link the set it was made alongside or was adapted into for comparison!

this gif became altered for this kanej week + book to screen gifset. it originally started off as just a quote gifset. i started making this just after s2 dropped, but i think a mutual posted a set of kanej + this quote around the same time and i didn't want to be copying it so i ended up never finishing the set. when kanej week rolled around i ended up reusing the two gifs i made (this one + the one that became 'never stop fighting'), but damn, i did love this blue, and looking at it now i actually think this one came out better

2. an early version of my kanej week quotes set. i did several for this set with a gif inside the font, but i just really hated the way it looked overall, and at the last minute changed it. i still reused all the gifs i'd made though - you can see the two here in the second panel!

3. the original take on the third gif in this inej eps set. i ultimately changed it because i didn't like the blend, particularly that you couldn't see the knife being played with which is a moment i really wanted to include. but i do adore the yellow light shining on her as she's praying, there's something almost saintly about it, and wish i'd been able to incorporate it as i wanted to (please ignore the line it's just there because i gave up and never fixed it!)

4. a gif from this 'la vie en rose' ed and stede gifset. i thought the way they looked at each other with stede tilting his head was so cute, but ultimately i found blending the scenes a little messy and it didn't really match the other gifs/the lyrics so i cut it.

5. cut from this choni set, i basically cut this because there was a lot of movement in the scene and i wasn't happy with the colouring - they lean in to kiss and that meant there were a lot of issues with colouring layers overlapping skin and at that point i'd done a lot of frame-by-frame colouring and was feeling too lazy to do this one too.

there we go! this gives a bit of an insight into my giffing process too, it's always interesting how gifsets change as you continue to work on them to find what works, so hopefully this also provides a bit of before and after!

tagging some talented mutuals (but no pressure as always!): @ughmerlin, @crowley-anthony, @seance, @saws2004, @taiturner, @natscatorrcio, @morgana-pendragon, @singularities, @khaotunqs

#tag game #is it weird that i always make sure to finish sets idk asdfgh #anyway this was really fun to look back on actually cos it's interesting to see how my giffing process goes #i often go into sets with a plan (like i want these exact scenes and each gif like this) and stick quite well to it #but when i go in more freestyle a gifset can morph quite a lot

[coquelicoq]

I haven't come to your inbox in a while but I wanted to tell someone about this - idk if you've watched any Star Trek but last night I watched Star Trek Into Darkness for the first time, and I couldn't stop comparing LWJ to Spock in my brain and WWX to Kirk. Very much the same energy and dynamic.

oh hello, good to see you again! i haven't watched very much TOS and i only watched the 2009 movie (the first chris pine/zachary quinto one) once twelve years ago and that was it, but every single star trek au i've seen in this fandom has made lan wangji a vulcan, so that checks out. the consistency! love that for us.

i just went through my star trek tag looking for something that i could not find, but i did find lots of other stuff that i can pretend is relevant and now i will link you to all of it because i am a link fiend.

i can totally see lwj using the handshake emoji to be sultry and wei wuxian completely misinterpreting omg

okay who's gonna write the fic where the universal translator gets recalibrated and all of lwj's "mn"s start coming out as "fucking nuts, dude"?

lan jingyi is, obviously, the vulcan emotion translator. i like to think this means that he is vulcan's premier diplomat. ambassador to the stars.

is this not the most wei wuxian thing you've ever seen? is this not exactly how lwj would feel on a visit to lotus pier??

you did not mention bones, and i know the characterization is pretty different between TOS and the new star trek movies, but arguing with lwj! spock and "boldly no" are both VERY bones!jc and can i just say: EXTREMELY YES PLEASE

this bones content could be either jc or wen qing really. they have so much in common

also please look at these text posts which could almost all to a post be mapped directly onto cql characters

what i was trying to find was a post about how often kirk gets his shirt torn. i did not find it, but i did find this fabulous titty-out look. i have never seen the donghua, but i have seen many tumblr gifsets, and i am very confident that donghua!wei wuxian would rock this little ensemble. nip slip!

#every day i thank my lucky stars that the live action did not see fit to put xiao zhan in donghua!wwx's outfits #i would have perished #this is also reminding me of my bayonetta anons. remember that? when people were coming to my inbox to say 'what if bayonetta!wwx' #and i had to look up bayonetta bc i didn't know who/what that was and as soon as i saw her outfit i just bluescreened #imagining wwx with his back out #sexy sexy delts! he would be unstoppable! and he's already pretty unstoppable even in a modest outfit #thanks for dropping by i hope you're doing well <3 #the untamed #star trek #asks #not anon #links

[theintentioncraft]

To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.

RULES - When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag up to 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours.

I've been tagged by @lordbelacqua (thank you Dea! <3) to talk about Backlead aka: that one Masriel fic I wrote where I got massively carried away...

Rambling/essay under the cut - fair warning, it's a long one!

Okay so first of all just a little disclaimer that Backlead did not follow my usual writing process - the idea was 110% borne out of self-indulgence and it was also both my first foray into HDM fanfic and my return to fanfic as a whole after a long hiatus from writing, so for me this was really a chance to just get back into the swing of things. Everything from Heavenly Guard through to Swansong and all of my current WIPs follow a more structured process and I'm happy to discuss any of them in a separate post!

PLANNING: I tend to find with my fics that I either have a nice little timeline of events planned out pre-writing or I have a very specific event in my head and I just take that and see how things unravel from there and Backlead was 100% the latter.

All I had in my head initially was the ballroom dance scene and so a lot of my admittedly-minimal planning was around the technicalities of that particular section, as well as some of the more general details e.g Marisa's outfit, the setting of the ball, etc. Planning the dance was the most fun part because it was a chance for me to put a lot of my dance knowledge to good use and think up something that fits the back-and-forth way in which Marisa and Asriel frequently navigate their encounters. In a way though I'm actually very glad that a lot of this fic Just Happened instead of being planned out, sometimes it's nice to just run away with an idea!

MUSIC: This gets its own section because this is one of the most important things in my process. Every single fic I write is written to various pieces of music that just help me to put myself in the right headspace for whatever I'm writing at the time - sometimes its just a single piece of music (I wrote Swansong in one hour with just one track from the Unforgotten - a TV show in the UK for those of you not familiar with it - soundtrack on repeat) and sometimes its entire playlists. I do love geeking out about my music choices for fic writing so happy to talk more in a separate post about music for some of my other fics if anyone's curious!

For Backlead I found a couple of playlist-vids from the lovely raviolae on youtube that really worked wonders for my writing. This comes with a disclaimer that I did not necessarily attribute any of these specific songs to either dance scene and I wanted to leave that open for people's imagination - but it's still brilliant vibes for thinking about two once-lovers-now-enemies trying to one-up each other whilst ignoring how much they still find each other attractive.

The two playlist-vids in question are here: you're stuck on the dance floor with your rival and find out they're an annoyingly good dancer and you're dancing with your rival and both of you want to lead

WRITING: First step every time is to figure out who's POV I'm going to cover because that makes a major difference in the way I'm going to write. Characterisation is the big thing for me and there's nothing I love more than to really get inside a character's head and basically think like them, and figure out what makes them tick and how they'll react to the story I'm putting them in. With my initial idea for Backlead being basically about the subtle power dynamics of a ballroom dance, Marisa felt like the natural go-to for this one and I found it much easier in this instance to write in her headspace than in Asriel's.

I wrote this fic in a very out-of-order fashion. The first dance (the slower, waltz-style dance) was the first part I finished, then I did as hinted at above get very carried away and move onto the section in the hallway, then I went right to the start and covered the entire section leading up to that first dance. Then I revisited the hallway scene because I wanted to rework it (the initial version was planned to be more explicit and involved less dialogue - but I wasn't comfortable with writing out the former at that time and the latter got changed by way of me having a sudden burst of dialogue-themed inspiration). The second, more set piece style dance came last in terms of the 'major events' that I wrote purely because I spent a lot of time racking with my dance knowledge to try and make it work in a way that didn't feel forced.

My final major writing stage is to write the 'transitions' between each major part - small pieces where nothing particularly noteworthy happens but it helps the fic to flow from one conversation/event to the next and also sometimes allows me to sneak in a bit of characterisation that I couldn't fit in elsewhere.

Along the way I often leave sentences half-finished with a bracket indicator so I know to go back to it later or I make little notes if I've added something in that needs explaining earlier in the fic, and I make sure to sort those parts out before I jump to the self review/beta reader stage. A couple of examples are below:

Although sometimes this method does also annoy future me too 😂:

SELF REVIEW/BETA REVIEW: Whenever I finish a fic, it gets put away for a day or two and I stop thinking about it completely - if I'm using a beta reader (usually @thatlavanderbard but I sometimes enlist help from friends on discord), I'll send them a copy of my draft at this point so they can start going through and leaving comments for me to work on, but the idea is that when I go back to my work a few days later I'm looking at it with semi-fresh eyes and can properly sift through each sentence to make sure things make sense.

When I'm self-reviewing I generally tend to follow this order of operations: spelling/grammar check (via docs') -> flow check (making sure any deliberate time skips/POV changes/etc in my fic flow smoothly from one part to the next) -> address beta reader comments (because they almost always pick up on things I myself would've picked up on anyway) -> general detailed final read through to make sure I'm happy with every single line and it all makes sense.

Backlead didn't get a full beta read because I had hit a point with it where I just wanted it up ASAP and my impatience got the better of me, but the rest of the above self-review stages still happened and I still spent a fair few evenings going through it properly and also running the occasional sentence or two by some helpful discord friends if I didn't like the way it flowed but couldn't quite figure out how to remedy it!

POSTING: First step was to reset my AO3 password because I forgot it yet again whoops

On a more serious note this part is pretty straightforward - once I'm ready to post a new fic I generally just go on autopilot for this part of the process (other than when I get to 'additional tags' and immediately get brain freeze...). As soon as it's up on AO3 I swing by here to make a post about it, then swing by discord to drop the link to friends who may be interested in reading it and then I normally nervously scuttle away from my notifications for a while out of fear that people hate it lmao.

That last part was especially true for Backlead because of it being my first trip into HDM fanfic and I always get extra nervous when posting my first fanfic for a new show/game/etc. Thankfully I got quite a few nice comments both on here and on discord that provided good motivation to stick around and post a few more things!

I always panic when asked to tag people lmao but I'll tag @fortheloveofwii for any part of the Onward, Onward series, @lyracordelia for any chapter in Hiraeth or the fic as a whole, and @glassrunner for this absolutely gorgeous gifset of beautiful game soundtracks. Please don't feel like you have to do this if you don't want to though!

#stel talks #showyourprocess #y'all thought i rambled in my fics just look at me rambling here #i'm hoping this makes sense! #it was nice to dive into how my brain works when i try to write things #my writing