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#mostly because this is an edited version of the one I wrote in a notebook
incorrectguardians · 10 months
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On Otulissa, and her similarities to the villains.
I don’t have to go into why she’s such a loved character, I could gush so much about Otulissa just in general, any day of the week, but there’s something curious about her growth and development throughout the series. 
Otulissa is a very fun character, because she very much, more often than not, acts as a foil to the major and sometimes minor villains. Most notably to The Striga and Gemma, yet surprisingly, also to Nyra.
While I wouldn’t go so far as to call Otulissa and Nyra foils, they are connected and quite similar, Otulissa is the one who gave Nyra her scar, after all.
Here, so:
Nyra’s a very vengeful and vindictive owl, she’s named after an ancient tradition of Nyrolian Owls, and takes pride in it, reminding everyone of it when she can. 
She believes that violence is the only way to achieve what she wants. Violence and conquering, to achieve full and total control of the owl kingdoms. 
She loved Kludd cause he was the only one who could match her, they could create a powerful union together, and bring the Pure Ones to a new era. They were perfect for each other, complimented each other. 
That sounds a little familiar, doesn’t it? At its core at least.
While I would not call Otulissa a vengeful owl as in that she believes in an “eye for an eye,” but she is vindictive as in, how to put it…
It’s partly due to the fact that Otulissa and the rest were only just ‘grown’ when the first whispers of the Pure Ones arose, they still had so much left to learn. The scar she gave Nyra was during the first official battle she ever fought, and it was out of revenge. Nyra had just killed her beloved mentor, Strix Struma. 
Otulissa has a very strong sense of what is right, and what is wrong. When she feels she has been wronged, she’ll do whatever she can to make it right. This does lead to spats, disagreements, this can lead to violence. She's demonstrated moments of rage and anger when she has been wronged, but it’s not because she believes in an eye for an eye. 
Otulissa is a very traditional name for a female spotted owl in the Northern Kingdoms, a mark of very distinguished heritage, and she takes a lot of pride in that fact. 
But Otulissa is not from the Northern Kingdoms, she knew that her ancestors came from there to the south at some point (evidenced by the discovery of her beloved Strix Emerilla), but she’d barely have an idea of how many generations separate her from that era. Otulissa was born and grew up in the Southern Kingdoms. She was also orphaned very young, like the rest, it’s likely she only knew the tip of the iceberg regarding her family (added to what Audrey may have told her). Everything she knows about them is from her own research. She wanted to be just like her distinguished predecessors. 
Nyra, however, is from the Northern Kingdoms, and she’s similarly named after an ancient tradition that spans back centuries, maybe even before the time of the legends. She carries the name of that first, ancient, Nyra. She also takes a lot of pride in that fact, naming her son after the same tradition. Nyra is just like her predecessors, born on the night of an eclipse, but she uses that power for evil. In comparison to Otulissa, she knows her heritage, grew up at her roots. She also describes herself as a very practical owl, much like Otulissa.
Regardless, Nyra thought she was better than everyone else. 
But in Otulissa’s case, if her peers only thought that Otulissa thought that she was better than everyone else, it didn’t matter. Because whether or not she, at some point, actually believed so, very soon her and everyone else were going to get a shock that made them stop believing that. You can thank the Pure Ones. 
There’s a dangerous slope there, between what is simply just pride in one’s heritage, and the great evil that Nyra was threatening. 
Everyone is going through their own struggles, everyone is just like everyone else. Otulissa just needed to learn how to live with it. 
Even so, Otulissa puts quite a bit of emphasis on this heritage of hers, something that I cannot accurately claim is unique to her, but is definitely brought to attention more through her than anyone else. 
This gives her a contrast to other characters we meet, who are often instead proof that it is not someone’s origin that matters, it’s their actions that count. While Otulissa still knows this, she struggles with it at times, and is shown to be close minded, calling Soren treasonous when he had refused to train Skench and Sproon in The Burning. 
When she met Cleve, she grew interested, they were much alike, he was perfect, such a distinguished gentleman, in her eyes. Like Nyra, It certainly felt like another match made in Glaumora (well, Hagsmire for Kludd and Nyra). 
Otulissa was shocked to find out that he was a pacifist. Because he was a prince with such an illustrious history! From a long line of warriors! From the same hollow Strix Emerilla came from! For Glaux’s sake! 
If Nyra were here, she would have spat at something and called him a coward, yeepish, etc etc. 
Otulissa? Otulissa did not say any of those things out loud.
She’s instead just, extremely confused. Because why wouldn’t she be. For one, she’s from The Great Tree, she’s been growing up and learning how to fight. At the moment she met Cleve in The Burning, she’s coming into her own, preparing for a war strategy that she came up with, that she knows is vital to stopping the Pure Ones and vanquishing the evil. She knows that there would be no simply talking to them, that there would be no ‘negotiating for peace’ with the Pure Ones, that war is the only option. 
And for another, Cleve is from an aristocratic family that is drenched in a history of warfare. Otulissa herself is very proud of the weathertrixes in her own family. She doesn’t understand why he would still choose to be a pacifist, isn’t he proud?
On the other hand, a Nyrolian owl is always destined for great things. To Nyra’s credit, conquering the owl kingdoms believing it is their Glaux-given right as Barn Owls, is a ‘great’ thing indeed (Even if horrific). In fact, in her eyes, the only great thing worth striving for. As a Nyrolian Owl, shouldn’t her own son agree? Be striving for it as well?
But… back to Otulissa, if there’s one thing she’s been learning to do so far, it’s how to open her mind. So she and Cleve begin to understand one another, even if their differences are vast.
And then when Coryn, the son of Nyra, came to the Beyond and met Otulissa. It was part of a continuous lesson she’s been learning, that heritage doesn’t have to mean anything to you if you don’t want it to, and it dictates nothing.
It’s what you do with it, whether it’s in spite of, or with respect to, or in defiance of it, that matters from start to finish. 
Gemma was the creator of the Guardians of the Guardians of the Ember, so otherwise, she’s not a major villain. There’s a bit of foreshadowing at the beginning of The Golden Tree, where she constantly mentioned Ezylryb and how she shares a kinship with him because they were both Whiskered Screeches. Trying to claim things about him that were completely incorrect, of course everyone in the moment who knew him personally had something to say about it. But again, it sounds familiar. 
You could say that Gemma started out the same way as Otulissa, not knowing who she was, relying on how others similar to her, who came before her, were like. Gemma never knew her heritage face to face, neither did Otulissa, she likely read about it, just like Otulissa. 
Like Otulissa, Gemma has a strong sense of what is right in her eyes, and what is wrong. But Gemma didn’t care whether or not what she was saying was factually correct or not, she was okay with lying as a means to getting her way. Because, according to Gemma, if she’s just like her ancestors, then clearly her ancestors were just like her and believed the same things she did. Otulissa however, all she did was read, read, read, and read, searching for what was fact and separating it from what was false. Otulissa leaves very little to assumptions, and further still has very little patience for what’s fictional. 
However, I’m not sure if anyone tried to help Gemma or not, because it’s clear that she’s younger than Otulissa, or at the very least hasn’t been at the Great Tree for as long. But not young in general, because she’s in parliament. 
Yet she remained as she did, and the events of The Golden Tree happened as they did. Gemma did not develop an open mind and instead let herself get consumed by her own fear and ignorance, and Otulissa didn’t. 
Mostly because Otulissa was sitting in jail the entire time.
In general, Otulissa always hated anything and everything that could be considered flashy, vulgar, and completely unnecessary. Always has and won’t budge. No owl would need to wear clothes, that’s an Others thing. Her hollow only needs what is beneficial to her work, and of course, a perch and nest to sleep on. She’ll pursue her own comfort, evidenced by her keeping a coal grate in her hollow in The Hatchling. But she wouldn’t keep anything solely for its aesthetic value, and, when she was younger, actively scorned others when she saw that they did. 
Of course, as an adult, she now mostly begrudges it, accepting that it’s just not for her, and would not deny an owl the right to have them. Even going as far as agreeing to hide Madame Plonk’s teacup for her during The Golden Tree.
Similarly, Otulissa despised joke books because she found them completely vulgar and they taught nothing. She didn’t mind, but could not find herself interested in fiction. She wanted to know what was real and true. But she loved poems and music, because they often reflected things like the writer’s personal life, the state of the world, and the feelings in one's gizzard, and that was real to her. 
Once again, despite her reservations, she would never prevent another owl from reading any sort of book. 
She couldn’t stand it when others would mess around and make unprofessional what an important outing with the chaw was going to be, especially when it’s her own teacher perpetuating and encouraging it. It’s very undignified, nothing like her. 
So when The Striga was welcomed to the Great Tree and began talking about ‘vanity,’ Otulissa, now grown, found that she could agree, to an extent. But what The Striga was suggesting bordered on dangerous. 
At a glance, The Striga assumed that he and Otulissa were very much alike, two birds of a feather, but the feeling was absolutely not mutual. 
When he met Otulissa in the library, The Striga claimed that only the practical studies were free of vanity, that anything else was “anti-glaux,” and that he approved of Otulissa’s choice of book at the moment (a book on atmospheric pressure, by Strix Emerilla, of course). But added on that one should never be too prideful, that pride was another vanity. 
Otulissa was very proud of her ancestors, but was never one who did something for the approval of someone else. Everyone is different, going through their own struggles, just like everyone else. Due to previous events in her life, Otulissa was also instinctually wary of any owl that attempted to preach an ideal Owl World based on quantities of “purity.” Even if The Striga had tried to call it “true owlness.” 
The Striga then attempted to use this encounter to get Otulissa out of the Great Tree, along with the band, but he clearly underestimated her, since she elected to stay behind. The encounter also later gave Otulissa what she needed to make the decision to smuggle books out of the Great Tree, the ones she felt were at risk of disappearing thanks to The Striga. 
Then later, when she lost her eye, she went one step further to separate herself just a little bit more from The Striga’s ideals. With Trader Mags’ help, someone who she historically never got along with, she picked out a rather “jaunty” bandana for herself to wear over the injury. Saying that there was nothing wrong with a bit of vanity. 
I don’t believe that were Otulissa left to her own devices, she’d grow up to be something evil. Likely only just bitter, snooty, stuck-up, and snobbish and a ryb who was a horrible teacher that everyone hated and would celebrate when she died. Much like Dewlap, who I omitted from this analysis because …. I forgot, my bad, because this is long enough as it is.
But she had friends and rybs who taught her as much as she taught them, and instead she grew up to be a, still a bit snooty, ryb whose a great teacher… despite the mixed opinions of her students. 
I just think it’s very interesting that she’s had so many similarities to the villains that seem purposeful. 
Because Otulissa was never something to be fixed, there was never anything wrong with her, she didn’t have to get a new personality. Everything she grew into was something she did herself, she just needed someone to see who she truly was, what she could do.
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22, 41, and 70!
22. describe your writing process from scratch to finish.
step one: putting on the right background music (usually a movie soundtrack or lindsey stirling, it needs to be mostly instrumental for me to focus).
step two: most of the time, i start with an "idea dump" in one of my journals, where i'll literally just record any ideas that come to mind re the fic i want to write. afterwards, i try to take those ideas and put them into an outline. for shorter fics, that's usually just the basic order of events. for longer oneshots or multichaps, i tend to write out what i expect to happen in each event/section of the fic.
step three version A: once i have an outline, i like to handwrite my fics in nice notebooks with colorful pens 🥰 if im able to do so, i eventually type up the fic, wait at least one day to do a read-through edit for major issues, and then wait at least one more day to use NaturalReaders to read my story aloud to me so i can catch smaller typos (a common one: and vs an).
step three version B: if i can't handwrite the fic for whatever reason, such as if im on a tighter deadline or the story is longer (or both), i'll type the fic straight into a google doc. if time allows it, i'll retype the entire fic after a few days in another google doc. if time does not allow that, i do the same read-through and NaturalReaders editing pattern that i do with handwritten fics (although sometimes with two read-throughs).
step four: after that, i'll post the fic!
41. what is the weirdest story idea you’ve ever had.
well, The Wrong Note is weird by virtue of the fact that it very well may be the only monk x medium crossover on the internet 😂 that said, the plot is a pretty straightforward murder mystery that's fitting for both shows, so i wouldn't necessarily consider it the weirdest story idea i've ever had. hmm...
Sigh No More, my maiko much ado au, is kind of weird ngl, since it's such a... unique au to apply to atla and maiko 😂 WAIT WAIT, i've got it: in Exposition, a fic i wrote for the kataang valentine's bash last year, one of the aus i explore involves aang as a kind-of-but-not-quite-ghost. i think that's the weirdest story idea i've had just because all the other aus in the fic are way more traditional (college au, superhero au, mermaid au), but not the ghost-ish concept lmao. i cannot for the life of me remember what inspired it or how i would have taken it further, but yeah. ghost-ish aang. maybe human, maybe once human, maybe never again human, perpetually toeing the line between life and death. definitely one of the weirder fic ideas i've had
(in terms of non-posted weird story ideas, i tend to forget anything my brain comes up with if i don't write it down, so regretfully im not sure 💀 atla heathers au?? kincoy sort-of-kind-of striptease?? ladybug dies fic?? are those weird?? i feel like i have no standard to measure against lmaooo)
70. are you very critical of your own writing? how much do you find yourself editing (either during the writing or after the fact)?
yes and no? fanfic is a hobby and i try to treat it as such, but i am also not immune to getting frustrated when a scene doesn't come out in words the way i see it in my head. i've already talked about my writing process in 22, including how i edit, but i'll add here that i have a pretty hard rule that i don't allow myself to go back and edit until i've finished the entire story. if i want to change something later, i'll make a note in the margins/leave a comment in my doc to remind myself about it, but i won't actually revise anything until the story is complete.
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blocksruinedme · 9 months
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22. describe your writing process from scratch to finish.
28. handwritten notes or typed notes?
44. any writing advice you want to share?
22) my writing process!
be living my life, possibly babysitting or driving (maybe talking about blorbos)
think "hey what if...."
become possessed
from there it splits Version A - the fastest, and rarest, one
A1. get to my couch (or a different laptop place, or a notebook if desperate)
A2. Frantically let words spill out of me, often wishing my fingers could keep up with my brain. It's sometimes almost painful, needing to get the words out
A3. edit for a variable amount of time an post
My first published mcyt was like this - watched ranchers in the crossover at 11am, ideas marinated all day, came up with "what if tango's the key to fix fwhimmy" walking to my car at 5pm, started writing like 5:15 and published at maybe 1am. almost 5k long. Insane. that was MY EX STOLE MY SOULMATE.. | Empires SMP S2 1.19 (rated T) and I'm told also With Their Knife to His Throat (rated M) but I legit have next to no memories of writing that one, I think it was 48 hours from idea to published (4k).
B - normal version. Note: all of this is interspersed with working on a lot of other stories
B1: Have an idea, probably frantically but maybe it builds
B2: Think about it a lot, maybe ideas in a little notebook if they are coming at the wrong times. 
B3: write down bits of prose as they come, do a lot of outline in gdocs. 
B4: start writing from the beginning based on outline but also what feels right - in any given moment, i know more about the story than i did when i wrote the outline
B5: if i’m lucky write chronologically and work through the outline and add things. Often a section isn’t coming and i skip ahead. If it’s not happening, it’s not time for it to happen. To write the way I really want to, I need to know how it ends, so I can have the story build. 
B6: probably fuss a lot
B7: beg people for help and to tell me it’s okay to publish
B8: stress a lot about if it’s good enough and about minor changes i could make
Optional: B9: put it down for 1-7 months (i just published a fic from january, and two of my bang fics are from september and november)
B10: publish it pretty much the same as it was in B8
(I deleted C by adding B9 but already wrote D)
D: Probably just the once
D1: See a prompt for driving after dark and get unexpectedly interested
D2: write 2k of notes while trying to get another story done
D3: Give myself 6 days to write those 2k of notes and then it’s 20k and my longest fic ever and oops needs a lot of typo fixes: The Key to His Problem (rated E)
The editing etc process:
 During every version of this I have a gdoc shared with people and am begging for advice. If i can’t decide on a word when i’m writing and have some flow going, i say “they were all [very] surprised” and leave a comment (or just the brackets) to come back later and fix it. THIS IS MUCH OF HOW I WRITE FAST. The first draft is to get out it out of my head, the second draft is to get it into the reader’s head. SOMETIMES the flow is perfect and i don’t need to do this, but like, idk, 10% of the time? 
A lot of the words in [brackets] will wind up staying as is, but it gives me permission to move on without feeling like i’ve settled. 
Editing sometimes involves a lot of of editing passes, sometimes just because i want to work on it and don’t want to write. This can mean the early parts get soooo much more love. 
Sometimes I print out a fic that has gone through a set of editing and do more on paper. It can be great. I just see the story differently, and it mostly keeps me from adding huge amounts, and i catch errors i didn’t otherwise. 
Usually i put up the ao3 draft a few days earlier and start adding tags and putting in my text (which i do in html) to look at it. The title often comes the day i publish, cause i wait till the end.
28. handwritten notes or typed notes?
typed unless i don't have my laptop. I started carrying around a pocket sized notebook in march and i'm onto my second one. I got it in a Japanese stationery store and got hooked, i have this line in many sizes, here's my pocket notebook -https://www.jetpens.com/Maruman-Mnemosyne-N184A-Twin-Ring-Memo-Pad-A7-Graph/pd/7379 I've written in this baby in the corner of a club cause i had ideas waiting at the bar for a drink.
44. any writing advice you want to share?
You have to get the words out. You have to get the words out. You have to get the words out.
Good words can be, often are, born of less good words.
Don't be afraid of editing! Great fiction generally comes from editing! Put down some fucking words even if you hate them and get to the next part. I do this, I am not preaching advice I don't take. I'll leave a comment sometimes to tell my future self I didn't think they were good words, I just needed them out. It's fine, I survive every single time.
If you don't need to edit, swell! But if you're stuck, just keep writing something -- or if that won't work, or you feel shitty, take a break. Work on another story, do something else, but if you're miserable and slamming your head against the wall, STOP! Don't hurt yourself! Because you shouldn't hurt, and because you'll associate writing more and more with hurt.
Get other people involved. Share snippets with your friends (if you've got an appropriate discord, make a channel for it!) Trade off reading with your writer friends. If you like my writing, know that not a single word I've ever published hasn't been read by multiple other people. My pre-fic writing was generally group works, so that's what feels normal. The idea of publishing with not even anyone to say "Hey Vee, this makes sense in your brain but not mine" is terrifying. You don't need to Have Serious Beta, it can just be cheerleading or really general "point out if anything is a big problem". I found out this week i am a "phenomenal cheerleader" -- your friends, or some kind soul on a discord, don't need to give you literary analysis to say "this part is cool, your fic is good, i hope you publish!"
Fandom is shared joy. Share your joy in every way - cheerleading others, getting other to share joy with you on your works, leave comments, leave kudos, reblog, make happy posts, keep the negativity to smaller spaces, SHARE THE JOY. I've been in fandom legit longer than some of you have been alive and it's always the joy, that's what it always comes back to. Hold onto the joy, that's what will last in your hearts. <3 <3 <3
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gunterfan1992 · 3 years
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Interview with Half Shy (the songwriter of “Monster”)
For the last few months, I’ve been collecting information for a second edition of Exploring the Land of Ooo that will also cover the production of Distant Lands. This means that I’ve started to look into the new songs that we have been graced with this year, and this of course includes “Monster,” the beautiful track from the masterpiece that is “Obsidian”. And so I reached out to the song’s writer, Half Shy, who was kind enough to chat with me via email about the songwriting process!
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(Photo courtesy of Half Shy)
In many ways, Half Shy is living the creative Adventure Time fan’s dream: She got asked by Adam Muto himself to write a song for “Obsidian” after he heard her music through Bandcamp! (I’ve dabbled in fan music before, and the fact that someone from the show might listen to it just blows my mind.) What an opportunity; I am so excited for her!
Since a second edition of my book won’t be coming out until after all the Distant Lands episodes air, I thought it would be best to share my Half Shy interview now. Read on for the fascinating behind the scenes story of how Half Shy and “Monster” came to be..
GunterFan: What is your origin story? How did you get involved in music, and how did the Half Shy project come to be?
Half Shy: I’ve been making music pretty quietly since I was in high school with a keyboard and guitar. I played one or two shows a year after college when I could find a friend or my brother to get up on stage with me, but I don’t really have that performer gene in me naturally. I get too much in my head and forget what the lyrics are to the song I wrote, or what the next chord is. Total brain freeze. So that whole experience is a bit of a mental drain. It’s something I think I’d like to dig into and figure out, but right now I’m really enjoying the time writing.
Even playing a song for my friends I still get pretty nervous. That’s where the name Half Shy comes from. I’ve always been interested in making things that by their nature draw a bit of a spotlight, but at the same time, I am just really quite nervous about the attention.
I recorded my first songs under my old name Hey V Kay in my bedroom and started putting them up online one at a time. When I got enough I thought about packaging it up into an album, but then got really distracted by learning how to fix up motorcycles and going to automotive tech school. When I eventually got back around to it I named the album Gut Wrenching.
After a few years I realized that I didn’t want the day-in-day-out life of a mechanic, I just wanted to know how to fix cars for myself and to have that knowledge in my back pocket. I got back into making music but grew frustrated at the process of writing and recording songs. I felt like I wasn’t able to capture the ideas I had in my head. Like trying to draw on your computer with a mouse. Doable, but it’s not going to come out like you’d hoped.
So these last couple of years I’ve focused more on learning the technical aspect of it, from the initial ideas and lyrics, to the recording and mixing. During that process I put out Bedroom Visionaries, and while writing I happened upon the name Half Shy in an old Thesaurus which felt instantly right. Learning all of that has been fun, I even went as far as to create my own book to solidify a daily writing routine (lyricworkbook.com). All that has been a bit of a tangent from actually making much music though. I should be getting my books in December from the press so I’m really looking forward to getting back into making more music instead of dealing with printing presses, setting up websites, and sourcing ribbon suppliers.
GF: What is the story behind "Monster"? How did the show get in contact with you?
HS: I keep a log of “Song Starters” with neat things I’ve heard in the world, and I would look through it every now and then and notice just how many came from Adventure Time. Eventually I thought well, I have to make a song about this show that just keeps breaking my heart. It was around the time I was nearly done with the first [Adventure Time-inspired] song “In My Element” that I got an email from Bandcamp saying “someone bought your album (Bedroom Visionaries).”
I get maybe one or two of these a month at most so I love to go in and say hi to the person and say thanks, be curious about who they are, [and] what they’re all about. Turns out it was Adam Muto, the executive producer of the show. (I asked and he has no idea how he happened upon my stuff. He guessed that I must have tagged something #adventuretime and he just happened to see it.) So I sent him an email saying, “Hey wow thanks for checking out my tunes. Also... holy crap you’ve made the best show I have ever seen in my life.” [I] played it real cool like. After finishing up writing my second [Adventure Time-inspired] song “Betty” I couldn’t help but fangirl real hard [and I sent him another message saying], “I’m sorry this is probably awkward, but I really love your show and I wrote these songs about it.” He was incredibly kind and shared them with his Twitter Universe, and a while after that I got a random email from him saying basically, “Hey, I’m working on this thing I can’t talk about, would you be interested?” I was like… well you know I’m pretty busy working at a sign shop so I’m gonna have to pass on this once in a lifetime opportunity (J/K. Obviously I fan-girl squealed and said yes immediately).
We chatted a bit about what the project was going to be and the direction. He mentioned there [would be] two Marceline songs in the special, [and he asked if I] would I be interested in giving the love song a try? Trying real hard to suppress my instant imposter syndrome I was like, “Yea, totally I’d be into giving that a shot!” So I read through the story and loved the idea of the dragon mirrored in Marceline, thinking through how they’ve both built up a protective shell, how she grew tough for a reason, but now she can open up and be vulnerable with PB.
From there I wrote the initial demo with the first two verses mostly intact and we went back and forth a few times editing it down into the final version. I recorded the final parts for the show in my little home studio in Seattle.
GS: When you were writing the song, what emotions, thoughts, or ideas were you channeling? Was there any sort of memory of event that you were trying to artistically "catch" or "recreate" with the lyrics or music?
HS: As far as channeling an emotion, generally I’d say just the experience of existing as a human. It can be so hard to open up and be vulnerable. I can remember that feeling even as a young kid—getting really excited about something and having someone completely trash it or look at you like, “Why are you so interested in that? It’s dumb.” [It causes us to grow] a little more weary to share ourselves because we know that hurt and embarrassment. The pain of being misunderstood is something I think a lot of us can relate to. Then having to decide whether to keep sharing those vulnerable parts of yourself or think, “They’re just not going to get it, I’m going to get hurt, so why bother?” and then stop putting yourself out there. You lose a lot with that thick armor though. You might feel protected, but you’re not feeling a whole lot of anything else other than the weight and chafing of it (I had a whole lot of armor-related metaphors that I didn't end up using.).
I struggle with this in songwriting too. I’m not the bolt-of-lightning type. There are pages and pages of cliches, total garbage, bad jokes, and cheesy lines that I have to get through in order to get to something that I am excited to put out there into the world: “Here I did this thing, I know it’s a little (this or that), but I made it... What do you think?” It’s hard to open yourself up to hearing the other end of that question.
I filled about 5 little pocket notebooks just thinking through the story, ideas, and trying to get this song right. I wanted it to feel familiar and honor the past songs of the show ([e.g.,] using the ukulele and referencing a few of the familiar chords from “I’m Just Your Problem”) but also be pretty open and vulnerable and different for [Marceline]. [I wanted to] show that she’s going through some tough emotions but also figuring herself out and growing.
GF: I feel like “Monster” is, at its core, an ode to the “Bubbline” ship. How do you feel about your song being intimately connected to one of the most famous LGBTQ+ relationships in animation? Do you have any general thoughts on Marcy and PB, Bubbline, etc.?
HS: Oh, I’m a total fan girl of Bubbline. The whole story of how Rebecca Sugar and Muto slowly morphed it into this deeper relationship is just great. As a part of the LGBTQ community myself it really means so much to see the representation of characters like yourself portrayed in an intelligent way. Growing up I was too young to fully understand what was going on but I saw Ellen getting cancelled, and [I] heard people around me saying they’d never watch her show again after she came out. That stuff sinks in as a kid and so to have these characters who are not only intelligent, but funny, complex, and unapologetically strong who also happen to be queer is really great. I love that the story here isn’t about their orientation, but that they’re people struggling with how to be open and vulnerable in a relationship.
It feels like something sci-fi and animated shows do so well—to show that ridiculousness of limiting who a person should and shouldn’t love. Marceline is a 1000+ year old half-demon/vampire and PB was born from the Mothergum of an apocalyptic radioactive world, but you’re going to get hung up on them loving each other? It sort of brings it into perspective in a really interesting way.
GF: Do you have any other thoughts about the experience that you'd like to share?
HS: Just how lucky, thankful, and honored I feel to be a part of my favorite show, writing a song for one of my favorite characters. It’s also incredibly cool how the people on the show are so willing to connect and collaborate with their fandom. Everyone [on the production crew] was very open and a real joy to work with.
I’d like to give a huge “Thank you!” to Half Shy for agreeing to participate in this interview; she really was quite amiable! If you’d like to hear more of her music, check out her website and her Bandcamp. You can also follow her on Instragram here and on Twitter here. And of course, here is Half Shy’s awesome video of “Monster”.
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violexides · 3 years
Text
The DreamSMP Explained (By Someone Who Has Never Watched Any DreamSMP Stream)
cracks knuckles. okay, fucking FINALLY doing this. ahem. 
Couple things to preface with, will keep this brief. 
This isn’t entirely blind. One of my best friends has helped out in places, just because I wanted to hit on everything (accurate or not), and I know mutuals/friends who post and write about DreamSMP (though how much of that is AU or canon-typical, I can’t say. I can’t tell). I’ve never seen a single stream, but I’ve seen a few clips. So, my understanding is a bit more than the title may imply, but still not a lot. Sorry.
Also, this will be very, very long (near 2k words). All under the cut, will TW this with themes of abuse, death, manipulation, unreality, hallucinations, and me having an abrasive sense of humor where I revel in the glee of calling these guys European twinks. Though, speaking of. This is ALL about the actual characters, not the people. I don’t know anything about most of these actual streamers, so, no hate to them. In fact, I think they’re pretty cool for having come up with a… somewhat coherent… narrative, all through using Minecraft as a medium. Anyway.
Sigh. Without further ado, 
So. There’s this place. Made by Philza, AKA God, AKA one of like six different gods. Philza, born from the womb acting like someone’s 43 year old uncle, has three kids. Wilbur, Tommy, and Tubbo. There are other people here, with some scattered ancestry that raises some questions, but I don’t really care who fucked an Enderman and had an 8’0 tall kid (Ranboo DNI).
There are also places! Sometimes! On a good day, there are actual, intact locations. We’ve got hits like “The Badlands”, which I think was taken from about three different dystopian novels I read in third grade, “El Rapids” (Quackity, Subpoena (autocorrect wins this round), and Karl made this one), “Pogtopia”, no comment on this one, and “L’Manberg”, which Wilbur made. 
Only one of these is going to be important.
So, might be a good time to say this: I don’t know what the inciting incident of DreamSMP is? I don’t know what was the catalyst for all this shit, but I’m going to take a guess and say Wilbur blowing up L’Manberg had something to do with it.
… That’s going to be a pattern, by the way. Just. Stick with me here. 
So, Wilbur is an older child who read the Hamlet parts in literature class and can only cope by ripping down the very creations he has and taking the entire world down with him to hell. Which is to say, he throws a pity party after Jschlatt (some bitch who abused Quackity, that’s another trend, yippee) wins an election and decides to blow up the fucking kingdom and kill Jschlatt.
Little does Wilbur know, the devil may work fast, but Jschlatt getting a fucking stroke and dying out of nowhere works faster. 
I’m not kidding. He gets a stroke, he dies, and Tubbo takes over. I’ve tried to puzzle out the government structure of DreamSMP for a while and have drawn zero conclusions. In any case, Wilbur also tells Philza, his… father…, to kill him. And Philza fucking does? For some reason, like, holy shit.
Anyway. Wilbur is now a ghost. So is Jschlatt. The… life system, on this server, is really strange and I don’t know how to fully explain it. Just know that nothing has permanence here. 
I’m going to throw this out here because I don’t know when it’s relevant, but I wrote down something about Karl being in a place called the In Between. I don’t know how the hell he got there or what the hell he’s doing. This might be where the discs are? I can’t explain the discs. I… think they are fighting over the discs? Don’t know why, Wilbur makes music himself, I feel like you have enough to go around.
(Stream Saline Solution it reminds me of my best friend only if you want okay thx)
L’Manberg gets blown up again. This time, Techno did it. He did it just after giving this speech about Theseus, which, jokes aside-- the writing of DreamSMP is actually really good. That was all done on improv, and I did watch an animatic with some of the audio from it, and damn. I’m a whore for metaphor and I love this for him.
This happens, and Ranboo and Tommy decide to do a little hehe and burn down George’s house. Who is George? Good question: a king. Of what? Good question: call me the antithesis of a Ranboo kinnie and get me some discs because I hear no answers.
Dream gets pissed off by this (who gave him authority, I don’t know) and builds a wall. He for some reason decides that if Tommy, and only Tommy, breaks some rules, the wall will stay up forever. So, naturally, Tommy immediately yells at him, and Tubbo gets pissed (what happened to the whole, who are you without me, yourself, thing?). Dream exiles him, which is bad enough, but then Dream burns down his house, so now he’s double exiled.
Dream kins Julius Caesar but Julius Caesar does not kin Dream and I think that’s important. 
(It had to be important enough for me to literally go back and edit this in, for no reason, because I think I’m really fucking hilarious.) 
Techno takes in Tommy and shows him his super secret cave of evil, which Tommy promptly screams at. Philza and Ranboo visit sometimes, but mostly Tommy just sits there. Dream says “fuck you” to Techno, but Techno decides to wage war on L’Manberg, so Quackity and co. come over to try and kill Techno, but Techno kills Quackity with a pickaxe, but Quackity has three lives for some reason, and then Dream blames Ranboo for blowing something up for literally zero reason, and can you tell how tired I am.
Ranboo sees a smiley face in his notebook and zones the fuck out while Dream tries to kill… Tommy? No, Tubbo. No, fuck, no it was Tommy. I don’t know why people suddenly care about it n- NO, NO IT WAS TUBBO, he is TRYING to kill TUBBO. 
I hate Europeans. 
Ahem. Dream goes to jail, but he has books in jail, which is a horrible idea. Everyone knows that if you give a war criminal some novels he’ll accidentally haunt someone else’s dreams and launch psychological warfare with the prison guard, Sam, who has zero idea what he’s doing because he probably didn’t sign up for this.
Also, I’m gonna say this here because I don’t know when it will fit in. There’s this place. Called… the Egg. Now, I don’t know what goes on in the Egg. I don’t know what the Egg is. I don’t know who decided to name all these fucking things, because I think the Egg is just a box made of bedrock. I think Ranboo hallucinates about it, but Ranboo hallucinates about everything so I’m not really sure. I’m going to call it here and say that this is probably a bad sign.
People are trying to talk to Dream. First BadBoyHalo, who gives Ranboo this little note from Dream with a smiley face. Or maybe that was SapNap. Either way, Ranboo hallucinates seeing Dream, and then actually sees Dream but he thinks he’s hallucinating? I don’t know. 
Then we get Tommy. Basically he kind of comes in here and Sam, being a good prison guard, allows Dream to beat Tommy to death and then revive him (don’t ask about the revivals just pretend it makes sense please). He tells Tommy he’s also going to revive Wilbur which Tommy isn’t a big fan of, considering that Wilbur, uh. Vague hand gestures. You get the schtick. Hopefully. I don’t know.
Anyway. Uh. Quackity loses his shit, also.
As in he talks to Jschlatt, the ghost of his abusive husband. Makes a deal-- if Quackity here loses, he revives Jschlatt. I don’t know what the winning conditions are, but, thankfully, they don’t matter because Quackity loses damn near instantly. 
So he goes to Dream and Sam gives him really powerful gear for no reason. Dream is a bit terrified by this situation, and Quackity is like “give me the fucking book”, and then we never find out what happens because Quackity ends up covered in blood about to blow up El Rapids. I hadn’t expected to mark Quackity off on the demolitionist bingo, but hey, all’s fair I guess. My next bets are on Tubbo or whichever bitch became god of the sea. 
(I also made a joke to my friend about me kinning Quackity (the character not the streamer could you fucking imagine), to which they said “you’d torture someone for information”? So. I guess Dream, uh. Hm. That explains why Quackity was bloodied. Uh. Oops. Don’t know why he’s playing Poker, though.)
So, for my sanity, as we come to a close, I’m going to start listing lore details that I don’t know nearly enough about but are probably important. Just… bullet point them. Might be a bit tacky of me but I have shit to do, dammit. By that I mean, I don’t have shit to do, but I’ve had this doc open for literally 1-2 weeks and I just want to be freed.
List Of Other Shit That Happened:
Ranboo started an arg, so there’s a character named Z now. Can’t believe the kid I knew in middle school who didn’t know where the Middle East  was made it into the dreamSMP omg! 
Tubbo did something immoral, and we still don’t know who his dad is. By we, I mean me. 
Eret exists. That’s all I’ve got for this one. They’re important. Probably.
Karl hallucinated six versions of himself and left the In Between to go to hell. (Lil Nas X girlboss gaslight gatekeep in this motherfucker!!!)
Ranboo and Tubbo got married because taxes exist </3
More on this last point: they opened a hotel, despite Tubbo being a king, and Tommy got mad at them for getting engaged without his permission. But Tommy was literally dead when they had the wedding so I’m not exactly sure what he was expecting. Either way, he’s fine with it now.
Kids getting adopted oh shit oh fuck. Also, mpreg is canotical. Make this what you will. 
DreamXD is a god now. I don’t know who DreamXD is. I don’t think anybody else does either.
I’m like 60% sure George is dead. 
I’m like 60% sure Philza is immortal.
Going through my ‘notes’ to make sure I didn’t miss anything and I’m just getting more confused, so I think I’m going to call it here. Props to everyone in the dreamSMP for creating kickass lore, I would not summarize any of it ever again if you held me at fucking gunpoint, and thanks to my mutuals/friends for letting me ask a lot of really stupid questions as I try to puzzle this out. And also, another thanks to you all for reading this. I hope to God this was funny. 
I really, really, really fucking hope that Tumblr doesn’t cut this off for a long character count. This is longer than some of my fucking oneshots. My God. This was so fun, don’t get me wrong, but I also want a hit of a candy cigarette. Make it two, actually. Or three. All at once. 
Anyway. Drink some water, stay safe, and remember that statistically speaking, 100% of people with a name starting with “T” need to put down the Greek mythology books and learn about the ethics behind pyromania. Goodbye, Theseus. 
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reaperlight · 3 years
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Venom - Ryuk / Eddie - Light?
I guess its the same as the previous ask, huh? *facepalm*
Well I wrote for it a few months ago but never got around to posting it but always meant to go back and edit but, ahhhh I'm sorry!
Here is the mostly unedited brain vomit from November 2020:
I'm sorry, I guess I don't understand the ask.
Were you asking me to compare the characters, compare the ships or shipping them all together?
I guess I'll just ramble for a bit about my two main hyperfixations...
I've long seen parallels between Light Yagami and Eddie Brock, especially comics!Eddie in terms of the flavor of their characters, their moral codes and character flaws (arrogance, conniving, opportunistic), power from monster partner, and (for comics!eddie) their relations to their narrative foils.
Also I see parallels between comics Eddie and Mello but I feel that's more terms of aesthetic/superficial. Blonde, catholic, like leather, motorcycles, chocolate and revenge. But I digress...
Comics Eddie and Venom initially during the original villain run I believe was meant to be a kind of narrative foil for Peter Parker, a kind of what if Peter went evil, Spiderman with murder.
And Light's character also reminds me a lot of Peter Parker, especially in the beginning of the series--both in character design and the lying, sneaking, hacking, and ha-ha I'm so clever... but instead of like leaping off buildings his secret is murder.
Light and comics!Eddie are both obsessed with their narrative foils/nemesis/equal and-opposite but for different reasons and with different outcomes.
L-Embarrassed Light and threatened to have him caught and killed him.
Develop a "friendship" to try and murder each other. Kills L and later regrets it, or at the very least seems sad he's no longer around.
Spiderman-embarrassed Eddie while he was already having the worst day of his life, getting him fired AND he hurt Venom. Tries to kill Spiderman but doesn't succeed but they think they did for a while and are happy about it. There's no angst because from their perspective they had rid the world of an evil, the man that hurt them both.
When they think they succeed at killing Spiderman, the man who hurt them, that everyone lauds as a hero is dead.. Eddie and Venom are  just happily living on an island together, deciding to stay together even though the revenge that brought them together was over and just living, free of burden of hating Spiderman knowing he got his revenge... then spidey shows up alive and that's the end if that.
Later after Spiderman saves Anne, Eddie realizes he wasn't the evil he thought he was. So they move away, and tries to let it go of their obsession, even though Spiderman hurt them (and continues to do so), focusing on themselves instead and protecting a homeless community.
Of course its easier to try to seek redemption when you're bulletproof.
Venom's character has changed and grown since the initial villain days, (well depending on the writer) and the Venom symbiote has become a character with autonomy and not just a costume/plot device/metaphor for drug addiction--again Venom stories can be very different depending on the writer. Being a long-time fan my perceptions of Venom are shaped by comic canon but for the most part we'll focus here on Eddie and Venom as a loving couple.
In a way Movie!Venom feels like a fanfic version, a soft boy!Eddie, but in a good way--it's fun. Eddie gets to learn and grow from his mistakes and the movie ends with Eddie and Venom as a hero...
A hero who eats people--a situation that cannot be sustained. Much like wanting to solve all the world's problems with a murder notebook--barring some comic book miracle this can only end badly.
First impulse upon encountering a problem is kill it.
But this manifests in different ways.
If you've pissed off...
Light- he will find your name and your death will be carefully planned down to the minute.
Venom-Your death will be immediate, swift, and messy.
---
Even though I use the venom movie as a basis for headcanons here. I feel we can pick and choose from the often contradictory comic canon (the way these characters are written varies wildly depending on the author) which canon parts we like.
Comic!Eddie is more like Light than movie!Eddie in their character flaws.
Conniving, opportunistic...
They have a similar moral code.
Black and white morality
In the comics they have another thing in common-a nemesis to obsess over.
In philosophy...
Kill the guilty, save the innocent.
Comic!Eddie develops a God/messiah complex at one point though it's a temporary thing.
Movie!eddie is just he starting on his venom journey but has notably less compunction than comic!eddie about eating people.
---
Eddie and Light
I'm not shipping them romantically in my current found family au Stray. But I could see the potential there to ship--Venom has scores of different canons to pick and choose from, not just the movie. So you could have an au with College!Eddie meeting college!Light so they are closer in age.
How Light and Eddie would interact depends entirely on how they meet. For instance in the comics Venom is ride or die with friends who are also "protectors of the innocent" like Morbius the living vampire. But has animosity with the Punisher who also has a very similar outlook on life. It all depends on how they meet whether they are allies or they might try to destroy each other.
Kira
In canon Kira sees himself as a God beyond reproach and anyone else doing what he does as a murderer deserving of death. He might be allies for a time with other killers like Misa and Mikami but ultimately sees them as scum and will kill them the moment they are no longer useful.
Of course this is fanfiction and canon has no power here.
Canon was dark enough, so if I want Light to grow as a person, make friends and be happy, he will--canon be damned, lol.
Eddie = writing nerd
Peter = science nerd
Light and L = total nerds
Ryuk likes soap operas, sitcoms
Venom likes medical dramas
Ryuk and Venom = soft goth monsterboys or NBs who love snacks, tv, and one (1) justice-driven human.
---
Tropes VenomxEddie Symbrock/veddie and Ryght/Terraito/Deathgods have in common
Beauty and the beast-- "but I would never call you beast." You've got you're ruthless human and cinnamon roll monster that just wants snacks and cuddles
Living in close proximity
Secret boyfriend/partner
Vigilante justice
Deep voice
Sharp teeth
Long tongue
Alien biology
Optional body alteration
Optional--tension with rival/Narrative foil
Angst tropes-- the threat of being imprisoned, institutionalized, or subjected to unethical experiments
Daddy issues
Praise kink
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syilcawrites · 4 years
Text
flickering
Series: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Type: One-shot Main pairing: Zelink (Zelda and Link) Rated: T Tags/Genre: post calamity, pre botw2, what’s the tag for his adventuring in between?? just botw?, then that’s it LOL, angst Summary: Link scouts out Hyrule Castle to see how he should prepare to fight Ganon, and stumbles upon Zelda's bedroom and her diary after he believes he sees her there. Snippet: “It was a silent vow that always lingered around in his thoughts—from when he spoke to the remainder of the Hylians to listening to the sweet melodies of a past long gone, sung by Kass.” A/N: I am terrible at summaries and was never good at them LOL. Anyway, this is just a little something for linktober Day 19: phantom/ghost! This is also loosely based off of my other fic archived memories chapter 6 :~) (which will be out tomorrow on Oct 20 haha). Hope you enjoy!! I like to spend a week editing whatever I write 'cause I tend to change it a lot but didn't have the luxury of doing it for this piece since I wrote it last night afouhgkjds.  You can also read it on ao3!
The first time Link stepped into Castletown, he was barraged with an incessant amount of echoing whispers.
Chaotic, haunting, loud and quiet, begging, pleading, bargaining. It felt like they were whispering about him, but he couldn’t decipher one word drifting into his ears.
He was by no means ready to take on Calamity Ganon—he had simply wanted to scope out the area, to see what he should expect—and he was hit with a wave of nostalgia that he didn’t understand.
Then came the nausea, and the painful throb against his head whenever he gazed upon the castle. It was different up close—the pain was worse, the stench that rifted off the malice was almost unbearable, and his eyes watered by being within ten feet of it.
But he marched onward—past the rubble and decay of a once grandiose town—or at least that’s what he assumed. It was hard to decipher what it used to look like amongst the ruins.
Link strolled up to one of the glowing eyeballs, staring into it for just a moment, before he stabbed it. It sputtered, shrinking, shriveling, before it withered away. He tightened his grip on the handle of his sword as he scanned the rest of the area.
More, his mind chanted. He wanted to see more of them crumble up into dust.
An unbearable anger always overcame him when he encountered anything inflicted by the malice—he wanted to tear at it with his own hands, rip and shred it into pieces until there was not even a speck left.
The overwhelming sense of hatred and revenge that dwelled deep within him feared him—because he couldn’t pinpoint why. He understood why, knew why, from an outside perspective. It took all of his dear friends and family one hundred years ago, but how the anger simmered within him like it ran through his veins felt unfamiliar to him.
His body remembered but his mind didn’t.
Link traversed the ruins of Castletown speedily, taking out the glowing eyeballs one by one and watching with satisfaction as they faded away—it felt like he was reclaiming the town back from the Calamity—whatever was left of it, at least. It was all he could do now.
“Okay,” he huffed out, peering at the large iron doors that stood between him and the castle. “One quick look inside, then you come right back out.” He whispered, gulping. He more frequently than not spoke to himself whenever he was alone—it grounded him, reminded him to stay focused.
“Free Zelda and all will be well,” he said quietly, his eyes trained on the various Guardians loitering the front. He would chant this before he fell asleep and it was the first thought that passed his mind when he woke up. It was a silent vow that always lingered around in his thoughts—from when he spoke to the remainder of the Hylians to listening to the sweet melodies of a past long gone, sung by Kass.
Link pulled out his shield and sprinted forward—holding his breath as he struck his sword at a stationary Guardian before it could respond to his presence.
Again—that bloodthirsty anger laughed in joy as he watched it implode, and he pushed down the desire to tear apart the ones that had long stopped working, and forged ahead.
The heavy metal doors of the entrance slammed open as Link used magnesis, echoing. His nose scrunched up as the putrid stench of the malice slammed against him at full force—causing him to double over. Link his behind a crumbling wall to hide from the wandering eyes of the Guardians as he gathered his bearings.
“Do not encounter Calamity Ganon, not yet.” He whispered, warning. He wasn’t going to go in until he was absolutely prepared—he had already failed once. Link gritted his teeth as his grasped at the small, vague memories that he’s so far recovered. They were so fragmented and confusing, full of questions and questions and questions that lingering on them for too long caused his head to split open while his mind desperately tried to remember. But he never did, and in the end it only left him feeling like a hollow and fractured version of himself.
All he knew was that he had to stay alive—stay alive long enough to seal Calamity Ganon and to free Zelda.
Zelda.
His blood ran cold at he thought of her.
“Will she fade away, too?” Link whispered to the castle, glancing up at it.
It did not respond.
He forced his way through the entrance, using the wreckage to avoid needless confrontation. He needed to be quick, no matter how much he wanted to slaughter the rest of the Guardians and the malice. Once Link was inside, he found the orange glow enveloped around the castle unsettling, as if the air around here had stayed stagnant for the past century. It felt it was holding its breath, waiting. Or maybe it was slumbering.
Zelda. She was here, waiting.
Then, he thought of Mipha—and the way his heart dropped when he saw that cursed blueish glow around her, just like with the late King. She smiled at him with so much familiarity, but he could only stare blankly at her, mostly just confused. Her eyes gazed upon him with such love and comfort, but he could not return the same affection, even if he wanted to. He found it easier to—to detach himself a little bit. Untangle himself from the Champions when he encountered their spirits. He had one left—Urbosa—but he had to mentally steel himself to confront her, like he had to for Revali and Daruk. When he confronted the both of them after Mipha, he forced himself to reflect upon those past memories—his own past memories—as a mere spectator, and it helped.
Link shook his head, drawing himself back from the depths of his plagued mind. He circled around the ransacked interior—taking note of the blocked passages, the crumbles in the walls that acted as a makeshift pathway to another part of the castle, and attacked slumbering monsters who blocked his path with an all too personal rage.
And then he saw a tower outside from one of the windows, set a little apart from the main building. He would have to paraglide to it and climb up if he wanted to get in.
His eyes trailed up the tower, to the caved in wall and blinked—eyes widening when he saw something shift—blonde hair, green eyes, flickering.
He rubbed his eyes, shaking his head and peered again, but it was still there—she’s there—looking at him.
Link, without a second thought, jumped through broken glass window, his paraglider wide open as he headed toward the isolated tower, heart racing.
He latched onto the broken tower and glanced up—he saw her peering down at him, smiling. She was familiar and warm, and... and so close. So, so close.
Link desperately climbed up—almost slipping toward the end—but reached up just far enough to latch onto the edge of the opening, and threw himself over. He fell onto the ground of the room with a heavy thud, and found himself face to face with an alarmed moblin.
Link quickly rolled off to the side, narrowly missing getting slammed head first with its stolen weapon, and was up in a heartbeat, his own weapon drawn. He mindlessly went through the quick, precise motion of eliminating it—simply allowing his body to move on its own, because if he dwelled too much on it, he became rigid.
He hated being out of sync within his own body.
Link exhaled with the final blow, and watched the moblin scatter into thin air, leaving him alone in the room.
With no one in sight, to his dismay. He wasn’t sure how long he searched every nook and cranny for those familiar green eyes and golden hair, but there was not even a hint of her ever being there in the first place.
With a heavy heart, Link walked toward the rotten desk, observing the scattered, torn books that lay in its wake. There was a flimsy notebook—leather ripped and torn, pages missing, but some of the writing was still legible.
Link flipped to the first page, reading the barely legible text at the front.
Zelda’s Diary.
He flipped through the carefully, as to not tear the pages, and found various scribbles and sketches—then a pressed cherry blossom flower in one of the pages, now brittle and brown. When he brushed a gentle finger over it, it crumbled immediately. His eyes scanned the next pages—various face portraits of Hylians. His lips tilted up a little when he passed by some sketches of food, of pastries and breads, or at least that’s what he assumed they were. It was hard to tell since many of them had faded away into the obscurity of time.
Then he found a familiar face, a face that he knew all too well.
It was messily sketched, but it was him—smiling, laughing, sometimes stoic, and it peered back at him like a stranger. It was him, but not really him. Link wished he could talk to the person he used to be, to ask him all of the questions that had piled up, but it was a futile desire.
He sighed as he peeled his eyes away from the sketches and flipped through the pages once more.
“Bit by bit, I’ve gotten Link to open up to me…”
He paused, lifting the journal up closer than ever to his face. His eyes drank in the words—words about him, who he was, how she saw him. He stopped at the end of the paragraph and closed the journal, staring down at it with confliction.
He took out the Sheikah Slate and slipped it into his inventory, and along with it, a little hope.
“I’ll keep this journal safe for you,” he whispered into the quiet room, his eyes roving around the falling, rotting objects that Zelda once owned, “so when you return, you’ll still have something.”
He waited for a couple moments, listening to the still air around him, as particles of malice floated peacefully by. He found it foolish that he even considered the possibility of her responding back and slapped his cheeks.
“Get ahold of yourself,” he muttered tiredly. He knew coming here would prove difficult—in terms of physicality, at least. He thought with time, settling into this new world would prove easier, but the distant reminders of the past associated with the wreckage of a world he once knew seemed to nail in how... alone he was.
Even without all of his memories, his heart ached with a heavy loneliness amidst a vast and broken land, because when it mattered most, he couldn’t save a single one of them. And then he left her, he left Zelda, to suffer by herself for one hundred years.
But he could do something now, even if it couldn’t bring back the lives lost. Even if she was going to simply drift away into the sky with the others, he could at least free her from the century of pain and torment she had endured waiting for him.
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husbandomail · 4 years
Text
“Beautiful Times”
➝ Jaden/fem reader
➝ wc: 1725
you may’ve seen this around before bc I wrote it in 2018 + posted it on my backup blog awhile ago, but I’ve made some very minor edits and am considering this the “final” version lmao
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The pen's cartridge burst in his grip, splattering all over the page, his hand, the front of his shirt— he lets out a strangled groan in frustration, standing up off the bench and shaking his hand, sending more ink flying. He looked back to the page he'd just been writing on; stained deep, unfortunately. Flipping a few pages forward proved that, the ink leaking further.
From over his shoulder, a voice echoes— not entirely there, but loud enough for him to hear. "Jaden. You've been distracted lately."
Wiping his stained hand down the front of his equally-stained shirt, Jaden turns to face Yubel. Her arms are crossed over her chest, and she barely floats above the bench, her dual-colored gaze narrowing at him. He smiles sadly, almost automatically reaching up to run his fingers through his hair, barely stopping himself in time. "I just— I dunno, I'm fine."
Jaden sits back down, absently examining his surroundings as he lets the ink-stained pages dry so he can keep writing.
This place felt nothing like home.
A bustling city, with the buildings towering much higher than anything on the Duel Academy's campus, filled with people who barely cared about dueling and just preferred going about boring, everyday lives. He couldn't tell the differences between the office buildings and the penthouses, because every time he looked up, there was a professional-looking somebody on every balcony or in every window, getting into arguments on the phone, chugging what seemed to be their fifth coffees of the hour.
On one of the balconies above him now, a young woman leans over the railing, waving a piece of paper at a man who didn't seem to hear her as he joins the jostling crowd of people on the sidewalk. The woman pouts, and her eyes wander. Jaden waves.
The ink has mostly dried. Next to the worst of the splatter, he scrawls a note about clumsiness and turns the page.
"What will happen when you reach the end of this book? What will you do?" Yubel tilts her head curiously, watching Jaden fill several pages with his messy handwriting before he responds.
"I'll just get another one. That's what you do with notebooks."
"That. . . isn't what I meant."
He refuses to look at her.
Jaden's fingers tap in patterns on the leather cover and the cluttered pages as he flips back and forth. Yubel goes silent, not asking anymore questions, but instead trying to tune into her human partner's thoughts. Unfortunately, Jaden has much more control of himself than one would expect; there's practically a wall around his own spirit, and try as she might, she can't peer into his heart.
It seems he's closed it to her. It's for someone else now.
Maybe it always has been.
☆☆☆
Barely a week later, Jaden hunkers down under a heaping, twisting steel structure, hoping that a place like this doesn't have any guards to notice the small fire he's lit. He admires the roller coaster looming above him; the light of his pitifully small fire only goes so far, and a vast majority of the ride stretches off into the darkness.
Smiling to himself, he digs through his unorganized bag until he finally finds the camera he'd saved for. It was instant, and had no phone or internet connectivity, and most would consider it old-fashioned, but as he rocks back on his heels to take a picture, Jaden is perfectly happy with it. The camera whirs and clicks for a moment before spitting out a blank image, and he's careful to hold it away from the fire as the picture fades in.
As the image develops, Jaden sinks down into the grass, resting his back against one of the large metal supports. His fishes out the notebook— ugh, there's a myriad of new scratches across the leather— and starts writing. 
She likes to hear stories. So he tells one to the page, reminiscing about amusement park visits as a child, with his family or for birthdays, recounting all the times he'd ridden coasters until he was sick. He carefully sticks the picture onto the page and smiles. Maybe they can go to one together someday.
The chain link fence clatters off in the distance. He kicks dust over the fire to put it out.
☆☆☆
"I've decided!" He says aloud, to both Yubel and the store clerk. She floats closer. The man behind the counter steps over, holding the case keys. Jaden points to the small charm, and the clerk smiles as he removes it, holding it up to the light for them both to admire.
"A rather feminine choice; for anyone in particular?" He has a knowing smile on his face.
Jaden’s face turns red as he smiles back, but he doesn't give any particular answer.
He fumbles with the small bag as he leaves the store, pulling the tiny charm from its fancy little packaging and clipping it to the thread closure on the notebook. It suits the thing well; a small bronze heart, decorated sparsely with twinkling red rhinestones, looking like an absolute treasure as it rests on the deep brown leather.
He senses Yubel's gaze boring into him.
"You've decided?"
"Yep!" Jaden forces himself to keep walking. "As soon as it's full, I'll. . ." his voice trails off, and he smiles at the Duel Spirit. "I'll do it, I really will."
☆☆☆
Shipping is expensive.
The young man frowns at the prices listed up on the board. It all varies by weight and distance— he tucks the box under his arm and holds his fingers up in front of his face, muttering and trying to do the math. Yeah, way too expensive for something only that far.
He turns to leave the post office, pushing past the line of people.
One old woman, holding a stack of what looks like bills. A teenage boy, waving an envelope and holding it to the light; it's sealed with a heart-shaped sticker, and he seems nervous. A young mother, guiding her small children to the counter, each of them holding a small package and grinning at each other.
What would she look like when she got it? Would she smile? Would she cry? He hoped it wouldn't be sad tears.
Jaden steps into the cold. The freezing air hits his lungs and rejuvenates him. Shifting the box to one hand, he pulls out another notepad, one he's had for awhile— the one she'd scrawled her address on at graduation, before he'd left. The last time they'd seen each other.
He hoped she hadn't moved since then.
He starts walking, looking up at the street signs as he passes. He slowed for a moment to check a map on one of the street corners; it'd be a long walk, but that's fine.
The cluttered city streets meld into suburbs, and then to cute neighborhoods, and the sidewalks go from well-maintained to cracked and broken and crumbling and well-used. He trots along, running a cold hand along a rough stone wall as he passes, stopping to pet a cat.
He's not nervous.
Graduation really wasn't that long ago— she couldn't have forgotten him already. And she'd said. . . she'd said she would wait for him as long as needed—
There it is.
Jaden stops outside the fence surrounding the cute house. The gate is more for decoration than anything; it swings open easily as he rests his hand on it. Not even locked.
His eyes nervously search each window as he approaches the home. He doesn't think he can face her yet, so he's praying she isn't watching from somewhere he can't see.
Finally reaching the porch, Jaden brings his hand up to knock on the door, but he hesitates; behind him, he feels a whisper of air, and when he turns, Yubel is motioning him onward with her wings.
He inhales deeply and knocks.
☆☆☆
You'd almost missed it.
There had been nobody at the door when you opened it, so you'd assumed it was some neighborhood kids fooling around— but then you'd noticed the small brown box on your welcome mat, with your name etched in very familiar handwriting. All of the air rushed out of your lungs.
Now, seated at your kitchen table, the sloppy packaging having fallen to the floor long ago, you're completely absorbed in the small leather notebook.
'I'm in Paris now! Man, I thought Slifer had some funky food—' A picture of plate after plate of cuisine.
'This reminded me of that story you told me about your parents!' An old movie theater, lit up at night.
'Today, in the middle of Italy, I met someone who needed me.' You smile at that, remembering how lonely he'd seemed when he'd told you that was his plan.
Page after page after page of Jaden's messy handwriting. Stamps and stickers. Spilled ink. He'd pressed your favorite flowers in between a few pages, and included copies of your favorite card whenever he found them in another country.
On the very first page, he'd written your name. On the very last pages, a note.
'I'm sorry I've been gone so long. Believe me, I miss you more and more as the days go by— but now, no matter how things were, I don't know if you'd want to see me again. Are you still waiting for me? I promise I'll be home soon. I hope you’ll wait until then.'
You blink back a few tears, wondering how he could ever think you'd be unhappy to see him.
Maybe he hadn't gotten too far yet. Wiping your eyes, you climb out of your chair and head back to the front door, hoping to find another memory of the boy you feel so strongly for—
When you open the door, he freezes like a deer in headlights. His hand is in the air like he's going to knock again. You stare at each other for a long silent moment.
"I've missed you so much—!" The words feel like they're bursting out of him. You step forward, wrapping your arms around him, not quite believing he's real yet.
"Please don't leave me again." It's barely a whisper as you bury your face in his chest.
He wraps his arms around you in return, nuzzling into your hair and holding you close. "I'm home, [Y/N]."
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1000-directions · 4 years
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rbb because it gave me a heart attack #trauma and also ughhHhhHhhhh bc mood
lolllllll people in marvel fandom do NOT understand how some of us suffer when they abbreviate their reverse big bang as rbb!!!
this was the original draft of my winterhawk reverse big bang where clint is a musician and bucky is a trust fund kid who ends up joining the army or something and they’re boyfriends and then they break up and eventually get back together and it’s told partly in flashbacks and it was just getting TOO complicated to write and felt joyless and was making me completely miserable, so i threw it out after 2500 words and wrote winterhawk punks in love instead, which was the correct choice.
i will never finish it, but here is what i’ve got in case anyone is interested:
There are a lot of different things Clint could have done with his life.
Well, no. That’s a bit of an exaggeration.
But there are several things Clint could have done with his life. Multiple things. More than one thing.
But he doesn’t think any of those other things would have ever made him as happy and crazy and pissed-off and satisfied as singing does.
Whenever anyone asks, he’s very careful to call himself a writer. A composer. A creator. A musician. Like the making of the thing is the part that motivates him. Like performing is just an afterthought. Like singing is just something he has to do so the music makes sense. Because he knows he’s not a great singer. He’s passable. He can keep a beat and hit all the notes in his limited range, and he gets just enough inflection and passion into the words to make people feel a thing, sometimes.
He’s good at the writing. He’s good at the deceptively simple arrangements. His voice is the least he has to offer, and he knows it, and it feels kind of foolish and indulgent to especially savor the part that he’s objectively the worst at. But Christ, he loves doing it, and he wouldn’t trade it for anything.
*
The two of them had ditched work early, saving up all their smoke breaks until it was suddenly 2:40, and the manager had no choice but to cut them loose. And even though they had permission, it felt like getting away with something, and Clint twisted his fingers into Bucky’s grasp as they ran down the sidewalk together. Clint darted recklessly into the intersection, and Bucky jerked him back at the last second as a truck came barrelling past, honking furiously at the two of them. And it was so close to being bad, but it was fine, fine, fine, and Clint laughed as Bucky shook his head, and Clint linked his arms around Bucky’s neck and kissed him right there in the middle of the street.
They were twenty, and they were in love. And nothing was serious but that.
It was a hot summer at the shore, and they were living in a shitty beach house with three other friends. They spent their mornings and afternoons scooping ice cream at a popular local shop that was more famous than good. And then at night, they’d go drinking at the scummier bars that were a little more lax on carding, or they’d build a bonfire on the beach and drink Yuenglings purchased with Clint’s really good fake ID. And inevitably, someone would have an acoustic guitar, and someone would start shouting out requests, and they’d get drunker and noisier as the night went on.
And then Clint would grab Bucky’s hand with a mischievous glint in his eyes, and they’d strip down to nothing and run into the ocean in the dark, screaming down the moon. And then they’d huddle together in one towel, letting the fire dry their hair until it was curly and crispy. And then they’d all stomp out the fire and gather up the red Solo cups, and Bucky and Clint would push their two futons together into one rickety big bed, and they would fall asleep in each others’ arms, salty and sandy and worn out.
Bucky woke up early most days to go for a run. He was in the Army Reserves, and he had to stay in shape, and Clint certainly wasn’t complaining about what the workouts did for his boyfriend’s physique. Clint was starting at technical school in the fall, studying to be an audio mixer. Things would be changing soon, but not just then.
That summer, time was lazy and endless. Bucky would come back from his run and lay his sweaty body down on top of Clint’s, kissing him awake, and they’d rub off against each other until they both came. Or they’d dart away from their friends in the middle of dinner, running up to their room and barely getting the door locked before Clint was shoving down Bucky’s pants to get his mouth on his cock.
And some nights, they were painstakingly tender, just kissing for what felt like hours before they even took their clothes off. Bucky liked things a little rough, and Clint liked things a little sweet, and they’d found something in the middle that was perfect for both of them.
“Just fucking hold me down and make me feel it, Clint,” Bucky would say sometimes, and Clint would kiss his jaw and tug his hair a little and fuck into him harder until Bucky was crying out beneath him.
It was their first summer, and everything was perfect.
*
At thirty, Clint is starting to fall into the sorts of routines that a younger version of himself would have detested.
Even worse...he kinda likes it.
But there’s just something soothing and comforting about knowing what’s ahead. Sure, it’s romantic to think about being a starving artist, but the reality of it wasn’t so sexy. Turns out that if you don’t work, you don’t get paid. And sometimes in the music industry, you don’t get paid even when you do work. So Clint works his ass off. All the time. He’s still riding a bubble, and he’s gonna ride the hell out of it until it breaks.
He wakes up, and he makes coffee. He fills his travel mug, and he and Lucky take a lazy walk through the park. Clint listens to the birds chirp, and he slurps his coffee, and he hides behind his sunglasses and doesn’t make eye contact with any of his well-meaning neighbors. Too early for that shit.
He goes back home, and Lucky inevitably fucks off somewhere to nap while Clint stretches. He’d tried meditation, but he can’t bear being quite that alone with his own thoughts. He can be alone with his body, though. He runs through his muscle groups, mindfully and thoughtfully working out the best way to stretch his sternocleidomastoid or his serratus anterior. He likes how he feels afterwards, all loose and wiggly, and it puts him in a good frame of mind for a morning listening session.
He has a second cup of coffee in his sunroom while he listens to the playback from the previous day. He combs through voicenotes and reads old journals, idly recalling stories about himself. He doesn’t create anything just yet. He listens with an open mind. And then he listens a second time, and he absorbs, and he makes notes about what he likes or how something could be different.
And then he sets a timer for forty minutes while he has lunch in front of the TV, and he fucks around on his email for a bit, and sometimes if he eats real fast he jerks off. And sometimes if he’s been seeing someone, he texts them, catches up, makes plans for later. Sometimes he plays video games. Sometimes he remembers to water his plants.
(Mostly, he jerks off.)
And then it’s back to work in the afternoon. More coffee. More listening, but this time with editing, rerecording, rewriting. He creates new voicenotes. He jots down new lyrics. He thinks about things he wants to talk about someday that he’s not ready to talk about now.
And then in the late afternoon, he ventures out of the house again. He goes to a cafe, or he grabs some more coffee, or he goes to the bank or the grocery store or the mall. And he exists among people, the way his therapist told him to. And he smiles at three strangers, and he overhears people’s conversations, and he reminds himself that there is an entire universe outside his head, just like there’s an entire universe inside of it.
And then he goes home, makes dinner, jerks off, swaps his coffee for whiskey, waits until he gets really, really tired, and then…
Then he fucking sings.
*
They got the band name from one of the weird, macabre love poems that Clint was always painstakingly copying down into his notebooks, trying to record the bits of weird beauty he saw in the world that mirrored the strangeness he sensed inside of himself. He felt less alone to see strangeness in others.
My darling, I will love you until the winter hawk cleans my bones And in her desperation, she will discover that my flesh only tastes of you
“It’s so gross,” Bucky had said with a curious sort of awe, and Clint felt so vulnerable in the silence that followed, because it was gross, but it was important to him.
Clint wanted to be so fucking in love that it chewed him up. He wanted love to shred him with her talons. And he could imagine himself getting there with Bucky. He thought they could be epic. He was still holding back some secret parts of himself, but if he let those go, he thought he could love Bucky so hard that it consumed him and he finally, finally lost himself.
And Bucky kept staring at the words scrawled in Clint’s notebook, traced his fingertip over the blue ink, following the same pattern Clint’s pen had taken as he’d lovingly copied down the words. And there was a furrow in his brow as he read and reread, and just as Clint thought he might explode from the anticipation, Bucky looked up at him with a small smile.
“I get it, I think,” he said slowly. “The desperation, I mean.”
“Yeah?” Clint wasn’t sure he was even breathing anymore, he was so close to losing it.
“The way a predator becomes a scavenger,” Bucky said thoughtfully, and there it was, that nerdy side of Bucky that Clint loved so fiercely. “Taking the scraps if that’s the only choice you have. Being just...so hungry.” He ran his thumb over Clint’s wrist, and Clint shivered.
“Hungry how?” he managed to croak out.
“Feel like I could just eat you up sometimes,” Bucky murmured. “When I first met you, I didn’t think you even liked me at all.”
“I did, though,” Clint protested weakly. “I was crazy about you from that first time I saw you.”
“I didn’t know it,” Bucky said. “Didn’t even know if I really liked boys or not, but I wanted you, and it felt like….” He frowned and looked at his thumb slowing arcing over Clint’s skin. “Felt like it didn’t even matter if you liked me back. Just me liking you was so much. And I would have eaten any scrap of anything you gave me, baby.”
“And now?” Clint asked, and his heart was an out-of-control metronome.
“Same thing now,” Bucky said, chewing on his lip. “Any bit of you I could have. I’d eat up all you gave me and I’d starve for more before I wanted a single damn bite of anyone else.”
“I love you,” Clint had whispered then, the first time he’d said those words out loud to anyone.
“I love you, too,” Bucky had replied, a hopeful smile breaking across his face and scrunching up his eyes, and Clint was so terrified and relieved and happy that he could barely stand it.
They pushed their mouths together and tried to kiss, but neither of them could stop grinning long enough to make it work.
*
Clint goes to therapy once a month. He takes his Lexapro every night. He has a notebook full of therapy homework, and he makes lists of his accomplishments and his failures, and when he goes to therapy, he shows up with an agenda. He is working to fix multiple parts of his life. He makes progress in different areas, a step on one path, a leap on another, a little stumble here. He’s an amoeba, and his pseudopods creep towards his goals, engulfing and consuming one after the other, slow and steady.
Get a dog? Check.
Learn how to cook healthy(ish) meals? Check.
Spend more time outside? Check.
Stop being so hateful towards myself? Check(ish).
Learn how to have sex with someone without falling in love with him? Check.
Learn how to have sex with someone without immediately thinking of Bucky afterwards?
Well.
It’s a work in progress.
*
Something flashbacky about being deaf
*
Clint’s newest album is called Mono Songs for a Stereo World, and all he’s finished so far is the title and the concept.
He connected with Tony Stark at SxSW last year and drunkenly talked his ear off about his idea to create songs for people with hearing conditions, mixed specifically to accommodate their abilities. He’d woken up the next morning with a raging hangover and a three minute voicemail from Tony describing the prototype software he’d slapped together. And now they’re...not exactly partners, but Clint comes up with ideas, and Tony turns them into reality.
And now Clint has all the technology he needs to create a fully customizable digital album. Fans will be directed to a website that tests their hearing, determines what wavelengths they can detect at which volumes, and then Tony’s tech will generate a downloadable version of Clint’s album that sits perfectly within their range of hearing. It works flawlessly. They’re probably not going to make much money off of it, but Clint’s been working his whole life towards something like this, and he can’t believe how close he finally is.
So all he needs to do is, like. Find some inspiration somewhere and write ten to twelve songs and then record all of them and mix them once and then feed them into Tony’s algorithm and re-mix the songs and then do maybe 40 test mixes on each one.
Simple, really.
*
It was easy for the two of them to form a band. Clint was always writing his weird poetry, and Bucky loved it. Loved the sound of his voice wrapping around the shapes of his words. And Bucky was good enough with a guitar, and it was just one more way for them to be together. It just made sense.
They called the band Winterhawk, and sure, Clint probably always took it a little more seriously than Bucky did, but that was Clint. He threw himself into everything like that back then, reckless and headstrong and passionate and unafraid. He loved Bucky so much, and he loved the band so much, and Bucky loved him and the band, too. Maybe just a little less, but still plenty enough for Clint.
Summer ended, and they found a reasonably priced studio apartment in the city. Bucky paid most of the rent, but he had a trust fund he was still working his way through before his parents disinherited him, plus he made great tips bartending.
wip title game
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sleepyowlwrites · 3 years
Text
young sleepy vs old sleepy (I’m 27 haha)
how I used to write when I was a little baby owl:
had to perfect the first chapter because a story can’t go anywhere if the opening scenes aren’t perfect! this story means the world to me! it must exist only the most perfectest state at all stages of its being, just like a regular human life!
hella snobby about my writing skills. I was much more under the assumption back then that I was pretty much good at nothing but I had some fiction writing talent. that clearly meant that I was genius at this one thing since I sucked at everything else.
for the longest time my poetry didn’t rhyme and read much more like spoken word than un?spoken words. *eyes* then I taught myself to rhyme and it much bad for long time.
I did a lot of text-based RP’s! exclusively on hexrpg.com, wherein I did like, anything other than a HP roleplay. I even wrote about *gasp* kissing? bro.
so. much. worldbuilding. every. single. wip. had. intense. worldbuilding. some of them even had stories! a few of them had characters that were not a set of repeat personality traits. woah.
I drew so many maps. maps maps maps. I still love maps but they are far less essential to my process. I also write genres other than fantasy now.
fantasy! from magically medieval to fairies to faeries to vaguely dystopian magicpunk. big moss fantasy thoughts.
are we counting five years ago me who starting publishing kpop fanfics and gaining some recognition for it? she had a little bit of a big head about it. not that big because there was like no one to tell about it even though I wasn’t embarrassed and actually what I really cared about were the compliments on “you write anxiety very well” which, well. yes. do I still have a big head about it? *thinks* no.
perspective. like, long-range perspective. wasn’t really a thing. big picture? yes, but the wrong lens. 
also came up with stories left and right. but wrote more of them? I’m remembering my oneNote and the many, many notebooks and many, many sections and many, many tabs. color-coded. 
wrote so many more fandoms of fic. never published any of them. except that young wizards one. is that still up on fanfiction.net? I think it is. I don’t ever really go there anymore.
baby sleepy did want to BE a writer, knew writing was her THING, but still planned to go to college for graphic design or something else artsy. maybe creative writing. on the side. really glad I did not do that.
and now that I’m an adult, mama owl:
I barely even write first chapters? anxiety story has one but that’s ‘cause I literally wrote it as a fic with chapters so there had to be a first one. space story is still ruminating around like it’s a 30K oneshot that you kind wish was divided into chapters even if it “disrupts the flow.” rain story has no first chapter or chapters of any kind. P:BR is just S C E N E S. and also I’m writing R’s episodic version now.
rather than being snobby about my skills I just recognize them as SKILLS. I practiced them and they are leagues ahead of what they were. I can still write crappy stuff first time. and other times I pinpoint a specific emotions that rings so true I wonder how I’ll edit it later. I’ve got stuff to learn and room to grow AND I am pretty good as is. I have leveled up. the ladder keeps going.
my poetry mostly rhymes now. I don’t even think about it. it’s not hard. people think it’s really cool? that it rhymes? which I do not understand. all you have to do is write tons of terrible rhyming poetry. (I think I’m getting a little too sarcastic but semi-deep dives into my own ((writer)) psyche will do that.)
I don’t text-rp or any rp anymore. I just can’t bear to give up part of the writing to someone else. I try periodically and it fizzles out pretty quick. wish I could. it was fun.
still with the worldbuilding, but much more chill. sometimes I do much of it on purpose TO chill. I never wanna worldbuild so much that I start to lose the story, so nowadays I write more plot and character beats than world stuff until I have moments where world stuff needs to exist.
there’s a map of the capital city of rain story world that needs to be renamed drawn on the cardboard leftover from someone opening a dress shirt at work. 
I have one fantasy wip. a contemporary. a contemporary with superpowers. and a scifi. and that ghost story and the other ghost story. ONE FANTASY WIP.
still write fanfic. not kpop anymore. I write a lot of fanfic that is just a writing exercise for me and will never see the light of website.
perspective just dawns on you one day and you’re like “I coulda used you at 19 bro!” but it’s fine. it’s fine. fine. practice.
yes stories left and right, left and right, left and right, rip it, rip it. but I’m okay to not write them all if I don’t feel like it. they can just exist in the nether spaces for a while.
I wrote and published 4 fandoms fic this year. (what?) but I wrote like, 10 fandoms in total.
older sleepy IS a writer. she wants very much more to be an AUTHOR. still glad I didn’t go for artsy things in college. (still will probably go back to college for other stuffs in the future.) sleepy writes and shares with you guys! 
speaking of, I’m trying to write Project: Black Rose as a choose your own adventure type of thingy, but very very much very so prototype and the first go round will be short and have not so much choices but I’m figuring this out. if you wanna be a guinea owl, send me a message and we’ll go from there. it’ll be a little while before anything is ready. but. yeah.
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sothischickshe · 4 years
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tossing + turning + lumpy pillow???
Tossing and Turning: What parts of the writing process are you most comfortable with? Least?
Ok as far as I’m concerned there are at most 5 parts of the writing process, and even that’s pushing it. to wit: i. staring into space thinking ii. maybe writing notes but really that’s for nerds iii. writing it all down in preferably one go but maybe a few more if one must concede that ‘time’ exists iv. editing v. letting go/posting.
so i-iv, with the exception of ii depending on what kind of story it is, are the ones i’m most comfortable with. i do spend a lot of time editing and i generally really enjoy it, but it wouldn’t be much of a process without the preceding parts. i really enjoy the writing process, and it feels very free because it’s by hand/on paper, and one flow. but also the staring into space working it out part is great.
thus, the letting go/posting part is definitely the least comfortable! i mean i think letting go is hard partly bc the editing process is so lengthy so i’m stuck in the groove, but also posting is nerve wracking! 
Lumpy pillow: What is the editing process like for you?
um completely normal, it’s everyone else who’s weird hahahah
ummm i don’t tend to do huge amounts of editing on the paper version, but how much’ll depend on the (length of the) story. if i’ve written it down in one single go, i might read through it once or twice before typing it up, and make some small edits. if i’ve had to split up writing it down, when i pick it back up i might read through what’s there already and make small edits, and i’m more likely to read over the whole before typing it up cos i’m worried it’s not cohesive.
i might edit a little as a type it up, but often i’ll undo that cos it’ll turn out that i wrote it like that for a reason, duh.
then once i’ve typed it all up, the first couple edit passes will mostly be for fixing typos. and then i guess it’s just....rereading through it a lottttt and identifying problems and fixing them?! i don’t really identify what the different rereads are addressing, but i think they naturally do focus on different things.
whenever i read through the first typed draft i fucking hate it. i think i’m subconsciously taking stock of all the things i want to fix but don’t yet know how to fix? i don’t make any notes in the doc, which i’m realising you people are probably going to think is odd ha ha.
i guess i often start with low hanging fruit? like fixing word choices, and punctuation. i’m quite free with how i write the paper draft, so i’ll do a lot of pruning down mad run-on sentences, as well as cutting repetition (if it’s basically the same sentiment just differently worded it’ll probably go, if there’s a pair of adjectives that mean the same thing one of those is probably getting trimmed etc).
often i’ll realise things are missing - scenes or sentiments or sentences. sometimes i find that quite hard to insert into a typed document though, so i might make paper notes and add them in from there. i normally find it easier to work out what’s missing and where it needs to go when i’m not looking at the doc?
i found my extra notes for (a) time to kill, which are in 2 different notebooks cos apparently i’m too lazy to carry one from the computer to the bedroom and back again (?). a few of which are small statements like: ‘feet?’ or ‘she didn’t drive there’, but there’s also several whole paragraphs which were subsequently added in to different sections.
also! i got really annoyed with my tendency to start stories in the present tense, then flip to the past to explain how we got there, then flipping back to the present to carry on the narrative, and that’s how time to kill was written too. i ended up ripping that second scene apart entirely, so instead it was like blah blah action and then rio being like blah blah blah and remembering what had happened, while blah blah blahing around in the present. which was, like, a challenge to edit! cos it was already written as a scene in the past followed by a scene in the present!
so there’s a few noted down transition sentences too. i think i was finding it hard to edit when LOOKING at it - cos I was like, well this doesn’t work...but i can’t work out how to fix it? and then when I was THINKING it through away from it, i was like ah oh ah ok - put this in there, and that here, yeah yeah yeah (this was in the bedroom notebook, maybe there’s a point to having two??)
anyway, sorry that got long! the point is: editing is fun but computers are bad
insomniasks
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the-cookie-of-doom · 4 years
Note
Hi! Can I be nosey? I saw your post on outlining Liar, Liar, Foxfire, could you explain your process a little more? Especially the EVEN DUMBER VERSION? Please and thank you and love your blog! Especially the little snippets of what you're working on!
Dear nonny you can always be nosy, I love it <3 
I usually put the Title: DUMBEST VERSION at the top of my docs to remind myself that it’s the first draft and it doesn’t have to be perfect. It started out as a joke with Estranged back in the end of 2018 I think, when I started the fic. Then it kind of became a thing between myself and my then beta (she thought it was cute lol) I don’t really use it for its intended purpose, since I heavily edit as I write. You’re not technically supposed to do that, but I can’t write any other way if my work is unsatisfactory; it seriously kills my motivation when I know I can do better. 
Which is where the EVEN DUMBER VERSION comes in! I’ve never used that one  before this, I was just frustrated because I couldn’t get my plot to work in a way that I liked lol, so I decided to go through and outline literally every scene in season 3b. (Essentially: 3b for Dummies.) 
In the case of this fic, I didn’t actually use an outlining method, really, and I usually don’t. I’m notoriously bad at outlines, and any time I’ve had to do them for school, I would write the project first, then write the outline based on that. The few times I do use an outline, I typically end up veering very far off track. 
So what I initially ended up doing here was sitting down with a notebook and rewatching 3b, writing down the general ideas of each scene. Mostly I intended to use it just to jog my memory while I wrote the fic. It... did not work out that way. 
After struggling for a few days, I decided to type everything up into a document, splitting each section by episode. I didn’t have every scene detailed, since it wasn’t an outline for the show itself, just for the main context I needed for my fic.
 Then I used the blue text for the changes I intended to make/scenes I wanted to add. That way I had a visual representation of what was my original work, and what was the canon framework, which is what I was struggling with the most. It’s difficult for me to work within the constraints of canon like that, which I why I don’t write “missing scene” fics. (RIP) 
At that point, it was a matter of adding in the scenes I knew I wanted, and then fleshing out some more where I felt like I needed more original content to balance out the canon. My goal is to have only as much canon context as necessary, because I didn’t want to write out episodes we’ve all already scene. 
... And that still didn’t really help. I mean it was super useful in giving me somewhere to start but it wasn’t quite what I needed yet. So I started searching around for the scripts. (Fun fact: i used to be a film major, and I still have a thing for collecting scripts). I found the scripts only up to the end of 3a so that was a bust T_T But then I found the Teenwolfwiki which has scene-by-scene synopsis and it’s amazing. Way more effective than my outline in terms of laying everything out clearly for me. 
So now I’ve got my outline as a sort of guide for where my missing scenes fit in, but then I’m going through the wiki to work my way through each episode, and decide which scenes I do/don’t want to keep. Since the fic is about Mitch and Stiles, I’m focusing on scenes with a heavy focus on Stiles and Mitch (who’s Allison’s cousin here, and thus follows the Argent’s storyline). I was also unsure how mush of Malia’s storyline to include, since the person who commissioned the fic didn’t want her in, but also there was some important context she gives to the plot... but then I realized I could just... not write her scenes. That leaves it up to the reader whether that part of canon still happened or not xD (For the record, I like to think it did, but her arc ends after they get her back to her dad, He never sends her to Eichen and that’s the end of her involvement.) 
Like I said, I don’t outline very often, if at all, and I tend to get off track when I do (LLF has already changed drastically from the original ideas and outline, and a lot of scenes have been cut), the way I prefer to do it is to write essentially a very long summary. I like to jokingly call them “not-fics” because they can easily end up several thousand words long. It lays out the fic in a shorter retelling, but it’s less structured and leaves me more room for deviation. I usually don’t end up with an actual bullet-pointed outline until I’m pretty far into the fic and need to organize the remaining scenes. Estranged didn’t get an outline until I was...40k into it, maybe? It was a long time. 
But if you want an ACTUAL outline method, one I’ve found and liked is the 3 ACT, 9 BLOCK, 27 CHAPTER Method, which somewhat follows the Hero’s Journey, but more in depth:: 
Act 1
Block 1: Introductions/Inciting Incident/Immediate Fallout (Exposition) 
Block 2: Reaction/Action/Consequences
Block 3: Plot Twist/Break into Second Act 
Act 2
Block 4: New World/Fun & Games/Old World Juxtaposition (Time for worldbuilding, everything is still fun; Harry Potter comes to Hogwarts)
Block 5: Build Up/Midpoint/Reversal (Growing paints. The character is changing for the better, lots of character development, etc. Pivotal moment)
Block 6: Reaction/Trials/Dedication (Character has potential, but still has work to do. Yennefer during the lightning in a bottle scene.) 
Act 3
Block 7: Calm Before the Storm/Plot Twist/Darkest Moment (The whump chapter; Character reaches their breaking point.) 
Block 8: Power Within/Action/Converge (Stiles in Ch. 16, to plug my own fic xD) 
Block 9: Final Battle/Climax/Resolution 
This is a super condensed version, but if you look it up, you’ll be able to see the full explanation on byomentor.com. I found it through Kate Cavanaugh on YouTube in one of her outlining methods videos. 
I’m thinking of using this outlining method for this year’s NaNo when I finally, finally write Neverland, but we’ll see. It’s pretty flexible since you don’t have to exactly follow all 27 chapters; you can follow the general vibe and idea of each blog and still have a really sound story, which I like. 
Another method I used forever ago for my fic Tree of Life (and I can’t remember the name of the method, but it’s pretty basic) was to have 5 points per chapter: 
Inciting Incident
Progressive Complication 
Crisis
Climax
Resolution 
Now it didn’t work exactly that way because ToL is a pretty drawn out fic, even despite the action, but it’s a good thing to consider. If you have an action heavy or fast-paced chapter (or if a chapter feels slow to you but you don’t know why), it’s a good thing to keep in mind to help speed things up. 
But yeah, despite my research in many different outline methods, my favorite is still to write my not-fics and then outline later, if I do at all xD 
I hope this was informative! Please feel free to come back if you have any thoughts or questions : 3
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seancekitsch · 4 years
Text
Making up for Lost Time: The Epilogue
Requested by: eh, a few of you wanted this when i mentioned it and i can’t let Stanley the Manley go
Just to be safe....Warnings for the series include: canon issues including self harm, attempted suicide, emotional trauma, mentioned disordered eating, the clown, anxiety, adult Bill Denbrough’s personality, book and movie canon being merged together because I like to play god, a twin peaks reference?? light smut and my terrible vocabulary, canon events.
But this is lighter and fluffier this is basically just being together forever and gross cute
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-You open up your apartment to Stan right away, but relationship wise other than living together you move very slowly at first. There is no fear of death or shape shifting clown making you tear each other apart.
-He finds a job rather easily. Being an accountant, his role is necessary anywhere in the country. He could move out within a few weeks, but it would be pointless knowing he would move right back in eventually. He also doesn’t think he could sleep in Seattle without you in his arms.
-Your first date is at a roadhouse dive bar ten days after he arrives. There’s loud live music, which Stan never really cared for, but the way your face lights up when the band plays an updated version of an old Roy Orbison tune... he couldnt picture anywhere else he would rather be.
-Between the French fries and the beers and you gently singing along to him, it’s a sad kind of happy that he realizes this is what he’s wanted his whole life and that he’s missed so much. He vows from then on to start making up for lost time.
-Stanley Uris truly lays on the charm for the entire six months the two of you can last before a poorly planned last minute marriage that only the losers attended. Taking it slowly is short lived.
-You wore the first white dress you could find. It was vintage and it wasn’t formal, but Stan thought you looked like royalty. He wore a suit he would wear to work on any given day.
-Richie officiated; you had joked with him on the phone about becoming a minister beforehand not realizing he would actually get his minister credentials. Bev was maid of honor, Mike was best man. Ben wrote a beautiful short poem and read it in lieu of vows, and Bill gave the beautiful wedding gift of employment in editing his next book turned tv series scripts.
-The two of you settle into married life like it was meant for the two of you. Maybe it was. You pack each other little lunches for work and give each other back rubs after long days. Weekend mornings running errands and having sex after putting away the groceries. It’s all grossly domestic but it feels like instinct.
-Stan is riskier sex wise than he had ever been in his adult life with you. Sure there’s love making, but neither of you feel pressure when enjoying each other’s bodies. You’re not trying for kids, you’re not trying to prove your attraction to each other. There’s just messy hands and lips all over your bodies and exploring.
-You have car sex for the first time since Stan first got his drivers license in high school. You have sex in mall bathrooms. You’ve done some out on your balcony that you’re sure your neighbors did not appreciate. It’s like you can’t get enough of each other anywhere. And you LOVE IT.
-Some nights there are nightmares for the two of you to get through. You dream of him finishing what he started in the bathtub, and he dreams of that moment in the kitchen when his own corpse attacked you and you let it. You wake up crying into each other’s skin and hold one another close, soothing the pain and sealing it back into the past.
-As glad as you are to remember each other and the losers, the two of you have a pretty strict “the past stays in the past” rule besides them. There’s a lot of trauma and bad feelings that don’t even involve the clown that you both wish you still didn’t remember. But that being said, you’re more than supportive to each other when you can’t block it out.
-You see Richie and Bill most often due to work and proximity. It is a quick flight for the two of you to spend the weekend in Beverly Hills with Richie at his house or to Northern California to the set of Bill’s new tv series.
-Richie ends up coming out as bi and ends up with a man who looks surprisingly like dear late Eddie. His ex wives have a lot to say to the press about this relationship. You and Stan really like his new partner and invite them up to Seattle for holidays from now on. When they adopt a little girl, you become the godparents.
-You and Stan go on a lot of vacations together. You like to travel and experience new things and go to museums together. His favorite place you’ve ever taken him is the bird hall in the natural sciences museum in London. He spent three whole hours in there with his notebook sketching and taking notes on rare birds he had never seen besides in paintings. He couldn’t thank you enough for surprising him with that little detail of the trip.
-It works out well because he handles all of the budgeting and logistics like hotels, and you handle the day to day activities. You fill in all of the details that his logistics lay the groundwork for.
-About a year in, you get matching tattoos. Stan never wanted one or saw himself having one, but the scar on his wrist wouldn’t disappear like the one on his hand did and he hated to look at it. You help him design it. It’s a simple black-capped chickadee taking flight. The state bird of Maine and flight promising future and change. Yours goes onto the opposite wrist than his.
-Stan also starts to take Judaism seriously again after all of this. Mostly when things are hard to cope with, he turns to his faith. You always go to the synagogue with him if he wants you to, but sometimes it’s somewhere he has to go to alone. He always comes back a little clearer headed, the logical level headed Stan you know.
-About five years after your return to Derry, Patty Uris actually sends Stan an email inviting them two of you to her wedding. You go, and just like he hoped, he and his ex wife can stay friends. She understood what they both needed, and he couldn’t thank her enough for being the great person she was. And you couldn’t thank her enough for being there for Stanley when he needed her.
-He loves the fall in Seattle with you, it’s rainy and so much colder than his old home in Atlanta and there’s so much time to sit cuddled up in front of your big window and watching the birds fly and the leaves fall.
-There are moments when the two of you have forgotten how much time has past, and you still see each other as the nervous teens you were when you first fell for each other. You never lose that spark of young love, no matter how comfortable you get around one another.
-And when 27 more years roll by, the two of you don’t even notice. You’re looking forward to your 26th wedding anniversary soon, and there’s a party with all of your childhood friends and their kids and grandkids and you have to get ready.
And that’s a wrap i love Stanley Uris 🧡🧡🧡
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universal-joke · 5 years
Text
The Way Your Mother Warned You
Summary: Roman and Logan both have a deep love of poetry. What happens when Roman uncovers a poem that was meant to be forgotten?
TW: mention of fighting
Paring: Logince (Logan x Roman)
# of Words: 1,222
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A/N: This is my first fic on tumblr, I have more on my Ao3 account- Siesiewrites
Logan and Roman belong to @thatsthat24 and @thejoanglebook
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Logan had a deep appreciation for poetry. There was something about the rhythm of a rhyming poem that calmed and soothed him. The simplicity of a haiku was wonderful. Poetry gave him a way to vent to the world without making a sound. His favorite to write were Odes. A poem of thanks, thanks that he could never say aloud. He would often write one for his boyfriend, Roman.
Roman also had a love for poetry, though of a different kind. He did share Logan's love of haiku and rhyming schemes (though his were mostly the 'roses are red/violets are blue' type). Roman loved the Greeks epic poems and the fantasies they conjured. His love of non-traditional poetry knew no bounds. The way the words seemed chaotic in rhythm but fit together perfectly. These were the ones he mostly wrote for Logan.
Each had their own way of giving them to the other.
Roman, of course, was usually random and out of nowhere but on a rare occasion they were planned down to the last detail. Once he recited a poem he had wrote after their first date on the morning of their two year anniversary (their friends would argue it was their four year anniversary because of how long they acted like an old married couple). Another time he had called Logan in the middle of a board meeting to recite a poem he had finished just moments ago.
Logan's poems were rarer and he was more quiet about it. Slipping a folded piece of paper into Romans back pocket while kissing him goodbye as he headed work. Under Romans plate, while he was in the bathroom at restaurants. Roman had quickly learned to check his pockets and under most things, he left unattended for any period of time. Because most of the time his search came up empty, Roman sure was excited when he did find one.
Though most of the poems where exchanged, some were better off being forgotten.
Roman found one of Logan's while putting new sheets on the bed. It was tucked between the mattress and bed frame. From the indentation the plain spiral-bound notebook left in the mattress, Roman guessed it had been there a while. As he flipped through he noticed it was blank. Just as he had decided to use it for a doodle book Roman came to the last page. On the top right-hand corner was a date.
4/26
Roman knew that date all too well. He and Logan had been officially dating for almost five months. He and Logan had been living together for almost two months. It was also the date of their first major fight. They had the occasional argument, sure. But those were minuscule compared this one.
Roman had stormed out and Logan had shut himself in the bedroom. When Roman had come back in he found the bedroom door locked and soft crying coming from the other side. When he knocked he was ignored. So Roman sat outside the door and waited. He had made Logan cry, a hard feet indeed, so he figured he deserved it. He ended up falling asleep as he sat, back against the door. When he woke he was in bed, Logan curled tightly around him. Logan looked as if he was afraid that if he let go Roman would disappear.
The morning was filled with apologies and kisses. That night they had talked it over and found a better solution. Though Roman still felt extremely guilty for making the stoic Logan cry.
As Roman read through the poem he could feel his heart sink.
Spots of the page were slightly yellow and curved as if stained by tears. Roman had no doubt that they were. The poem was non-traditional and mistakes were scribbled over as if the writer couldn't be bothered to erase them. It read:
I love you like a knife loves a heart Like a bomb loves a crowd The way your mother warned you about, essentially. But I can't help it I want to scream for you to leave For you to be anywhere that isn't near me But you stay Through the good and the bad You stay When I push you through the door You turn and wrap your arms around my neck You refuse to cross the threshold And you stay You stay through it all When I hurt you, You patch yourself up and hug me tighter If I had one wish Oh a wish it would be I would wish for you to leave Find someone who could treat you better Someone who could give you the life you deserve You tell me, 'it's fine' That, 'I'm just a diamond in the rough' But I'm the dull knife The feral stray I'm the thing everyone warns you about But you think, 'it couldn't hurt me!' But I do After all, I love you like a knife loves a heart Like a bomb loves a crowd The way your mother warned you about, essentially.
Roman felt the tears run down his face as he read the poem again, then again. Old feelings of guilt and sadness hit him like a truck. He knew that Logan blamed himself after the fight. No matter how many times Roman assured him it wasn't.
Just then Roman heard Logan as he walked in the door. The 'I'm home!' that rang out was sharp but was underlined with relief. Relief as responsibility slid off Logan's shoulders as he crossed the threshold.
Roman dropped the notebook and ran out of the room, straight into his boyfriend's arms. Roman seemed to wrap himself around Logan, tucking the smaller man into his chest.
Logan laughed, the purest of sounds in Roman book. "What have I done to deserve this marvelous affection?" His voice then changed to one of concern as he looked at the tear tracks that ran down Romans face, "Have you been crying?! Why?"
Roman said nothing but instead started to hum. He swung Logan around to the made-up tune. Logan decided to wait to press the subject and allowed himself to melt into Romans embrace. When a poem entered Romans mind he stopped humming but continued to swing Logan.
The poem was hardly original. Just an edited version of a poem from one of Romans favorite childhood books. In fact, only one word had been changed. But that didn't bother Roman. Even though the poem was for the world.
His world.
His Logan.
So Roman whispered it into Logan's ear.
I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, As long as I'm living My Logan you'll be.
They separated after a while of swaying to the sound of nothingness. Logan would go into the room to change. He would find the notebook laying open to the poem. He would understand why Roman was crying.
That night would be again filled with kisses and apologies. But this time the apologies would come in the form of a head laying on a shoulder as they watched a movie. It would also come in the form of an arm wrapped around the other as they slept side by side.
No words would be spoken. None had to be. Poetry, after all, is not always something that can be put into words.
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makeste · 5 years
Text
BnHA Smash!! 01 and 02: Smash!!Might is a Fucking Menace
okay, so. I have about a million other things I should be doing instead, including (1) responding to asks and/or finishing in-progress metas, (2) reading Vigilantes, and last but not least, (3) actually making a dent in the ever-increasing backlog of Actual Work That I Really Should Be Doing Instead.
so naturally I’m procrastinating by taking my first stab at reading BnHA’s cute 4-panel omake spinoff series, BnHA Smash!! IT JUST MAKES SENSE. look, I have exactly one thing I felt like actually doing and not procrastinating today, so I might as well do the thing. basically it’s my attention span’s world and I’m just living in it.
anyway! so apparently this series was scanlated by good ol’ Fallen Angels. that’s right; prepare yourselves for some very creative cursing, fellas. other background info for anyone who, like me, is unfamiliar with this spin-off: this series debuted on November 9, 2015, a little over a year after the original series. said original series was currently at chapter 66, meaning the Final Exam arc was just wrapping up.
so now that we’re all properly oriented, let me go over a few disclaimers real quick and then we’ll get started!
all comments are my unspoiled reactions from my initial readthrough of the chapter. I did a quick edit for grammar and clarity afterward, and added a few ETAs in the process, but aside from that there are no changes.
I’m aware that not everyone may be familiar with Smash!! even if they’ve read/watched the original series, so I’ve tried to make this recap comprehensible even if you haven’t read the spin-off. that being said, it’s probably more enjoyable if you have, so you can either purchase the first volume from Viz here, or read the chapter online (I don’t want to link directly, but the spin-off is available on most of the usual sites. literally just google “read mha” and you’ll find some good options).
this readthrough contains a handful of sorta-kinda spoilers for the BnHA manga, although there are no direct spoilers. just an indirect reference to a joke in chapter 242, as well as a reference to a theory which as of now is in no way canon. but just to be on the safe side I’m posting a heads-up.
and I think that’s it! so here we go.
so we’re opening with a brief summary of the series. people have superpowers and shit’s nuts. you know the drill
there’s also a brief description of the way that the superhero economy works, complete with Mt. Lady’s employees unionizing and demanding better pay
...what
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guys I keep staring at this and thinking that surely, SURELY it doesn’t say what I think it says. sidekick... what... manager??
you know what? Viz unfortunately doesn’t include this series as part of their subscription package (WHAT AM I PAYING YOU FOR, VIZ), but it does at least include a free preview of Smash, and I bet you that this, the first fucking page of the series, is a part of that preview. so... let’s see...
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okay, see, this actually makes sense! so did the FA scanlating team collectively all have a fucking stroke?! just, what??
this is one of the reasons why I had difficulty reading Vigilantes too, tbh. those early chapter scans were, uh. but at least Vigilantes has a Viz scanlation too. I don’t want to spend 10 bucks just to read one volume of this, but we’ll see. anyways
so now there’s a strip about baby!Izuku watching his favorite clip of All Might saving one hundred people from a bus accident or whatever
lol Inko you should not have left your shrewdly calculating four-year-old son unattended omg
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TWELVE MONTHS’ WORTH OF TEXTBOOKS HOW CAN THIS EAGER YOUNG MIND RESIST
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and this is why you don’t leave your credit card info saved on the computer when you have kids. life lessons learned today
this is the first indicator we have ever had that baby!Izuku wasn’t perfect and was, in fact, capable of being a little shit and giving his mom plenty of gray hairs in his own special way. ngl, I fucking love it
also 12,800 yen is about $118 USD, which is honestly a really good deal for a year’s worth of textbooks. he got three boxes of books! I just googled the average cost of college textbooks, and the google article said the average student spends about $1200 a year. so this is a fucking steal tbh
OH MY GOD INKO HOW MANY TIMES MUST HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF BEFORE YOU LEARN
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at least install a fucking adblocker ffs. you’re lucky quirk supplement ads are the worst of the ads he’s getting! PARENTAL CONTROLS
now we are cutting to a comic about baby!Izuku defending another boy from my problematic fave, as seen in page one of the original series!
lmaooo
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I’m not clear on how much of this spin-off can actually be considered canon. my understanding is that it is Horikoshi-reviewed and approved, even though he doesn’t actually write it. but it’s obviously a humor series, so a lot of it is just going to be jokes. that being said, I think my approach is going to be “if it’s not completely ridiculous and doesn’t contradict the actual manga, go ahead and consider it canon”
(ETA: I might change this up after reading the first two chapters. most of these strips would have terrifying implications if they were actually canon sob.)
anyhoo, this actually does contradict the manga in that we saw this encounter play out very differently. but I kind of wish it was canon regardless because looool. these cocky preschoolers and their fucking Battle Tears
the next comic is Mt. Lady accidentally stepping on a guy’s face and the guy being way too fucking happy about it (read: having a fucking nosebleed and taking an upskirt shot). we’re just going to skip this entirely. this is another problem I was having with Vigilantes too. you know, for all my complaints about Mineta and such, BnHA as a whole is so much tamer than it could be, and I need to give Horikoshi credit for that. he mostly knows where to draw the line, and to his credit he’s also much, much better about this kind of thing than he was when he first started. maybe Mineta’s standings in the character poll results are helping to clue him in
anyway, I’ll mostly just skip past the iffy stuff because I don’t have patience for it and there’s still plenty of other stuff to cover. so on to the next strip
which features a bunch of reporters fawning over Mt. Lady’s flashy quirk while Kamui Woods laments in the shadows
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and yet we know this kid will have a prominent rise within the next six months. it’s so strange to revisit the start of the series and see how much things have changed in such a short time
oh my god
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no one who dresses up as a giant mushroom could possibly have good intentions. I. just
and look at the fucking disappointment in Deku’s eyes. KAMUI WOODS HE BELIEVED IN YOU!
now some strange man is coming up to Deku and is all HEY YOU, YOU’RE A HERO OTAKU, TELL ME WHAT TO BUY MY SEVEN-YEAR-OLD SON FOR HIS BIRTHDAY. better not ask him unless you’re prepared to shell out $120 bucks for some fucking textbooks
hey, what!!
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WE DIDN’T EVEN GET TO SEE WHAT HE BOUGHT HIM? unless it’s the action figure the kid appears to be holding? but I’m just going to go ahead and assume Izuku recommended the number one best gift that any seven-year-old child would love, i.e. a giant sword
now it’s a sludge monster omake!
so Izuku is trudging home all depressed after CERTAIN INCIDENTS, and Sludgey is glooping his way out of a sewer towards him
oh no All Might
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my biggest takeaway from this is the fact that the entire second half of chapter one takes place after All Might has emerged from a fucking sewer. I forgot all about that somehow. or maybe it never fully processed until just now. but omg. this entire chapter must have smelled so fucking bad. these poor kids
wow All Might
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sure called that one wrong. ah well nobody’s perfect
looooool
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lmao, Smash!!All Might appears to be quite a bit more vain than the original. wow dude
btw, friendly reminder (and I think this is something that was actually pointed out to me after one of the recaps; that’s one of my favorite things about doing these) that All Might, after saving Deku, actually read his notebook before signing it. super-fast, I guess, because he’s the best. but yeah, so he knew exactly how smart and observant Deku was, and how much he wanted to be a hero. his decision to pick him as his successor didn’t just come out of the blue; even before the “my body moved on its own” thing, there was a lot Deku had going in his favor. this is one of those little details of which BnHA has so many, and which I love
lmao what the fuck
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ngl this version of the series would have been amazing in its own way. but yeah. so this is why we clearly can’t assume everything in Smash!! is canon lol. but I can already tell I am going to enjoy the shit out of this series
now we’re cutting to Deku running at Sludgey in order to save Kacchan, oh shit. the most dramatic part of chapter one. clearly no moment is sacred
sob what
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I don’t understand this strip at all. is this supposed to be a serious moment inserted unexpectedly among this multitude of joke strips? or did I miss the punchline? heeeeelp
(ETA: okay so. my best guess is that All Might wrote all over Deku’s life-saving advice, and so the joke is that Deku no longer knows what to do when assaulting sludge men because HIS NOTES ARE RUINED. idk. what does 25 P mean??)
now All Might has Done The Thing and saved my boys, and now Mt. Lady is helping with the cleanup. scooping up all the bits of sludge and putting it in trash bags
oh my god
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nope nevermind. nope. nope
-- shit. okay, you know what? this first chapter has been a real in-your-face reminder of the fact that the sludge monster was not made of cute sparkly 2018-trending-fad slime, but was in fact composed of RAW FUCKING SEWAGE. (ETA: to be clear, I’m pretty sure the joke in this strip is that she accidentally picked up dog-doo during her clean-up. but still, the fact that it was indistinguishable from the rest of the gunk speaks for itself.) I think I forced myself to gloss over this fact originally due to the nope factor. but just. Izuku and Katsuki were both choking to death on this shit?? and just, how the fuck did they make it out of this not traumatized
and also, like. All Might was straight up going to leave Izuku alone afterwards, just, “well enjoy your autograph, fine citizen” and blasting off out of there. and everyone fucking saw Katsuki almost suffocate to death later on, and after giving him a pat on the back they fucking let him go off on his own too? and you can’t even make the argument that this was Just Another Day In Quirk Society either, because more than a year later, Katsuki is still a bona fide fucking celebrity from the media coverage of his attack. it clearly was not something that happens every day. in conclusion, these kids are resilient as fuck, and thank god for that because people apparently just do not give a shit, holy christ
anyway. at least Mt. Lady had gloves
OH MY GOD
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I FUCKING KNEW IT OH MY GOD. THE ROIDS. MUSCLES LIKE THAT DON’T JUST GROW ON TREES, I DON’T CARE HOW MANY LBS OF GARBAGE THIS KID HAULED OFF THE BEACH. THIS BOY BEEN HITTIN THE JUICE
Smash!!Might is so fucking shady omfg. probably sells cheap counterfeit electronics on Amazon
oh shit and that’s the end of the fucking chapter lol. that’s it?? that was only eight pages. fuck it, let’s read another. but first here’s Horikoshi’s note on the spin-off
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so he really feels that Neda gets the spirit of the series and understands him. that’s very encouraging. the best spoofs and parodies are done out of love. I really think I’m going to enjoy this series
so! onward to chapter two
so here’s All Might dressed as Mr. 2 Bon Clay from One Piece, I guess??
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“you know what’s funny? dressing a man in girl’s clothes LOL.” guys can we grow the fuck up. and also acknowledge that All Might can look good in anything, so this questionable gag wouldn’t have even landed anyway. you work that tutu All Might
lmao check out the past users of OFA here
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All for One for All theory fucking confirmed lol. just look. that’s him in the back of the conga line. clearly
so Deku is all “hell yes why would I possibly say no??” but then
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HIS LIMBS. lmao. sign here
in all seriousness, given the shit this kid has been through since the part of the series, All Might probably should have gotten him to sign a liability waiver of some sort. not that it would have stood, since Deku is underage! anyways Deku you totally have grounds to sue the shit out of the Symbol of Peace should you ever choose to do so. and the trend of Smash!!Might being shady af continues yes please give me more I love it
so now All Might is giving Deku his fitness plan which has a really elaborate name
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given that this is Smash!!Might, I can’t help but wonder if this plan is in actuality some sort of MLM scheme. All Might are you trying to get Deku to do Herbalife
lol what in the fuck
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the original series skipped right over a hell of a lot, it would seem. like the time Deku traveled to Arizona and fought coyotes in a poncho
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I’m starting to suspect that Neda-sensei might be on some sort of substance. “let’s see what jokes can I make about chapter 2 of BnHA. I know, I’ll send the protagonist to a fictionalized version of the American Southwest in a sombrero, and then turn him into a 65-year-old oil tycoon.” naturally
lmao that’s really it, that’s the strip. moving right along. okay??
now Izuku is staring at the intimidating piles of Beach Trash and is all “I HAVE TO PICK ALL THIS SHIT UP?”
omg Deku no
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somebody call Marie Kondo. Deku none of this is salvageable. not even to reuse in a color page photoshoot spread four years from now
OH SHIT
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PROVED ME WRONG OH SNAP. SHOWED ME RIGHT WHERE I COULD PUT THOSE SASSY TAKES. MY BAD DEKU I’M SORRY
anyways I don’t know what Smash!!Might is so upset about. he probably wove some kind of clause into the contract Deku signed that allows him a percentage of the profits. unless Deku already spent it all on textbooks
what the fuck is this fucking series lmao
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time for a round of “what is All Might casually crushing in this panel?” is it (a) a cardboard box, or (b) like, a mini-fridge or some fucking shit. IT COULD BE EITHER. IT MAKES EQUALLY AS MUCH SENSE EITHER WAY. “HEROES THESE DAYS ARE [FLEEEEEEX] OBSESSED WITH BEING FLASHY” 
holy shit no wonder he ran away to the Sierra Nevada. it’s only a matter of time before this freak fucking kills someone
NOW WE’RE CUTTING AWAY TO KAMUI WOODS DRESSED LIKE A DAFFODIL, IN THE SAME FUCKING COMIC STRIP, BECAUSE REASONS
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my jokes about the mangaka being high as a fucking kite when he wrote this are gradually becoming less jokes and more serious inquiries??
lol so he coincidentally just stumbled across All Might and Deku at this exact moment
AND IT WAS A FUCKING REFRIGERATOR OH MY FUCKING GOD
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do you guys remember during the final exam when All Might beat the everloving shit out of Deku and Kacchan, and everyone was all “JESUS CHRIST WOULD YOU LEARN TO FUCKING HOLD BACK A LITTLE THEY ARE CHILDREN YOU MANIAC.” but now we can see plain as day that he was, in fact, holding back. anyways Smash!!Might is terrifying as shit and if this had been the main series I would have already pegged him as the final villain by this point
here he is now wearing an old-timey bathing suit but looking more like an escaped convict than anything else
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this panel is actually canon. I’ve decided. this 100% definitely happened at some point. especially the swimsuit
now two bikini babes are walking up and they’re all “IS THAT ALL MIGHT??” with excited sparkly eyes because they don’t know that he’s actually a deranged con artist who crushes refrigerators like empty soda cans. this spin-off has truly opened my eyes
LOOK AT THIS SKEEVY FUCK. JUST LOOK
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AND NOW HE’S RUNNING OFF AND LEAVING DEKU TO DROWN IN EXHAUSTION, SON OF A
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“SUDDEN BUSINESS” KSJLDKF SMASH!!MIGHT IS A FUCKING MENACE TO SOCIETY AND ALSO DOES NOT GIVE ONE SINGLE FUCK. NOT ONE!! HE’S OUT THERE FUCKLESS, AND NO ONE IS SAFE
now Deku is approaching his mom all serious and says he wants to change up his diet
and she’s looking at the menu he prepared all impressed and thinking that she might join him. as long as it’s for your health, Inko. if this manga starts making jokes about your weight, I will beat it over the head with Deku’s textbooks
OMFG
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THIS WENT IN THE EXACT OPPOSITE DIRECTION I WAS EXPECTING, AND THIS IS THE MOST AMAZING THING I’VE EVER READ WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. the whole fucking family is on the juice. and the fucking mangaka is on some special juice of his own oh my stars
now we’re cutting to Mt. Lady stomping on a car
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thank fuck no one was actually in there. also does she not wear shoes
and also, it only just occurred to me that she must be another person with a special quirk costume, because her suit shrinks and expands along with her. Hagakure and Momo are really getting shafted by the costume design team here. they need to fire some people
anyway so Mt. Lady slipped on this carelessly placed vehicle and fell down and crushed an entire building whoops
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bruh, you think you’re “ow.” let’s hope that building was empty too
and now she’s toppling another building just fucking because, I guess. and saying she can’t do urban areas
lmao and now the sidekick [CENSORED] manager from chapter one is back to guilt-trip her omg
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I need this man to show up in every freaking chapter. please. respect my wishes
and now Izuku is standing on top of his collected pile of garbage screaming in victory
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I only just realized that there’s still a big old Pile O’ Trash on this beach, though. someone needs to haul all of this junk away. or else get All Might and Mt. Lady to crush it all with a combined effort
oh shit here it comes y’all, the famous “eat my hair” scene. potential comedy gold right here omg
lol what the fuck
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this man is a fucking billionaire and he’s out here clipping coupons and deleting pictures of his son in order to make room for them smdh
okay now we’re doing the hair scene
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oh. oh no. I know where this is going sob please keep this comic rated PG for the children Neda
motherfucker they really --
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Smash!!Might is a straight-up felon. this man has no fucking scruples. that’s okay Midoriya-shounen, if you don’t want to eat my hair we could just try some REDACTED, jesus christ I am going to need some bleach for my eyes after this
OR LET’S JUST STRAIGHT UP GO THERE WHY NOT
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lmao sob. well, two chapters in and we’ve established that no territory is off-limits here. it’s a brave new world. wow
 so that’s it! our introduction to BnHA Smash!! I enjoyed it a lot and I will definitely be reading more! I’m not sure what kind of schedule I’ll keep, but this is a really good procrastination manga thus far, so knowing me I might actually work my way through this relatively quickly. especially since the Manga At Large is on break this week. anyways my deepest apologies to the many people who have been requesting for me to start Vigilantes instead. I just need something lighter right now, and this is a good fit. one of these days I’ll get my shit together with the other two spinoffs as well.
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apocalyvse · 5 years
Text
11/11/11
I was tagged by @water-writings <3
1. Do you write fanfictions or original stories and did you ever write fanfiction?
I write (and always have written) both; I actually started writing fanfiction when I was like 10 years old, before I even knew what fanfiction was, and then later discovered that it was a whole thing. For quite a few years now fanfic has been my main thing, but I’ve got a few original things that I’m knuckling down on this year and really enjoying, so we’ll see.
2. Did you ever write your stories in the middle of class instead of paying attention?
Not in the middle of class really, but I did write like half a harry potter au fic sort of thing based off of some rp characters at the end of my year 11/12 exams. The exams were like 3 hours long each, and like, I’m not smart but I am pretty quick at theory stuff so I’d have 1.5-2 hours per exam to fill, and I would never use the note paper for notes. So I’d fold my note paper into 8ths and write reeeeeally really small and fill it all up during my extra exam time. (I still have the sheets of paper if anyone wants to see xD)
3. How many notebooks do you have filled with your writing?
Since somewhere in 2015, I have filled 25 notebooks; not including anything I wrote straight out on a computer, on my phone, on random pieces of paper, or in other notebooks that aren’t included in my numbering system, which I have lmao.
4. What’s your favorite way to write? Notebook, Word Doc, Google Docs?
By hand in notebooks. I used to write in a word doc, and I still use word to type up into and edit it, but I find writing by hand really pushes my word counts up, and forces me to do an initial edit when I type it up, especially with fanfic because I don’t draft fanfic.
5. Do you write by yourself or do you need people writing with you?
I’ve always written alone - most of my friends don’t even know that I write, or don’t write anymore themselves, so it’s just me and myself over here. I was in a writing club at school for a while, and we tried to do a couple projects together, but the group got off course way too easily and nothing really got done, so I prefer to be alone with something I’m really passionate about finishing.
6. Have you ever cowritten with someone?
When I was liiiiiike 12, my friend and I co-wrote a lot of Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfic lmao, which to this day is one of my favourite writing memories. And I co-wrote an entire 50k ‘novel’ with my friend during middle school, which was actually pretty good fun - we traded off chapters and worked together on plot and worldbuilding and actually finished the whole thing. It was horrible (I can’t look at it anymore it’s so cringey), but a good experience to have. I’ve co-written with a few friends online too, with mixed results - nothing that’s ever really gone anywhere though.
7. Who do you bounce ideas off of?
No one lmao. I just throw them into the story and see if they work.
8. Have you ever taken an experience from your life and written it into a story?
Definitely! The most obvious example would probably be the series of short stories I’ve written and posted on this horse racing game I play, Flying For Home, which are sometimes drawn directly from stuff that happens around my workplace in real life, seeing as I work with racehorses in a big stable (the premise of the short stories lmao). 
Another example I can think of is, funnily enough, my other horse-related project; a novel called Vertigo, for which I have drawn on a lot of my own personal history and people that I’ve met in my life and thrown it into the mixing pot. It’s a bit of a personal daydream tbh xD Other than those, there’s a little bit of myself in everything I write, I think, though it’s hard to pick out sometimes.
9. Favorite type of music to listen to while you write.
I usually don’t let myself listen to music when I write, but if I do, it’ll be the playlist I inevitably have for the story, turned down very quiet so that it fades into the background - usually just pop and alternative/indie sort of stuff.
10. Have you ever had anyone give you “advice” that hurt you and prevented you from writing for a while?
I don’t think I’ve ever had anything that stopped me from writing, and I’ve certainly never had criticism from outsiders/strangers or whatever (generally people just ignore me). But I do keep my mum at a distance from my writing, as she tends to just push and push me to ‘publish something already’ and gives off the mentality of ‘it’s not worth wasting your time on if it won’t make you money’. She uh...doesn’t know that I have published over 100k of fanfic this year. Lol. She’s only trying to be supportive, in her own way, and I appreciate it, but I just don’t mention it to her very often, because she’s never really ready to listen to my point of view on it.
11. Have you ever had fans of your writing pester to write a certain way?
I don’t have fans xD
And from @starsandstormyseas because you asked good questions and I Want To...
1. Have you ever had an idea that sounded really great in your head, but when you started writing it, came out terrible for whatever reason?
Yesssss, Flicker has gone through 9 versions in 2 years because every time I start it, it just goes very quickly in directions that I don’t want it to and it never feels right. This version I’m working on now is the first time I’ve really liked all the ways I could go with it so hopefully we’re past book 2 blues and back on track.
2. What’s your favorite part in writing a story? The relationships (or shipping), the plot, the worldbuilding, something else?
The like, ‘main’ scenes, the big hitters. The culmination of all the middle bits into that one main plot point. And relationships too, though not romantic persay - I just really enjoy the scenes where two characters will bounce off of each other for like 7 pages of dialogue, whether its enemies, or friends, or romantic.
3. And weird habits you do when writing, or to keep yourself writing?
I write by hand mostly, and I have my own system to mark as I’m going sentences I don’t like, or words that don’t really fit but I couldn’t think of the right one, or facts I’ve made up on the fly that need to be googled. If I just mark down stuff that I want to change later as I go, I find that I set myself free in a way, and I can just move on without getting stuck on a google spiral (also I don’t forget to fix my plot holes later).
4. Do you keep the internet on or off when you write?
On, though it’s very distracting when I’m trying to write straight on my laptop lmao
5. What books, authors, fics, or any media, have heavily influenced your writing style?
I spent a lot of my childhood reading Enid Blyton and authors like her; older books, mostly my mum’s books from when she was a child, and things from my hometown’s very, very outdated library. So they had a huge impact on the way I learnt to write (they also had an impact on the way I talk too, but that’s another story). More recently, the whole tone and way that fanfic in general is written has really influenced me, and I’d like to think I’ve adopted it and made it my own in a good way.
6. What time is the best time to write? Day, night? Morning, evening?
Evening/night; some days, I cannot focus until like 8pm when I go to bed. And then I lose sleep because I’m writing but y’know. For editing/typing up, that’s a late afternoon kind of job.
7. Is there anyone IRL that you let read your work? 
I have a group of friends that I’ve known for 8 years now that are allowed to read my work. We used to rp together and all used to write and so we all know how bad we were back in the day xD. One girl from that group has been my friend since kindergarten, so she has always had me shoving handfuls of words in her face. There’s been a few other friends that have read some of my stuff, but not all of it, and the older I get, the less I share.
8. How do you handle negative or unhelpful reviews or critique? Does it impact the way you write?
I’ve never had any negative response, so I don’t know. The silence when you’re 4 chapters deep and no one has reviewed is deafening though.
9. Do you respond to every comment/reply you get? If not, which ones get your attention and why?
I only respond to the long/sincere ones, because I feel like they deserve some encouragement in return for taking the time to really let me know what they thought.
10. Ever gotten weird, unsolicited messages asking to join an RP group or some such because this person apparently read your writing (but probably didn’t)?
Hah. Once or twice.
11. What is your favorite platform to post your writing, talk about writing, or anything like that? 
My favourite place to post and to read by far is AO3 - but I find the best platform to get feedback on is FF.net. My favourite place to talk about writing is over here on tumblr.
MY QUESTIONS
How do you get yourself to focus on writing?
What’s your favourite thing you’ve ever written?
Tell me about your current WIP.
Do you write for yourself or for an audience?
Do you share your writing with anyone you know in real life?
What’s the nicest comment/review you’ve ever gotten?
What platform do you prefer to post your work on?
Do you plot or pants?
What have you learnt while writing your stories?
Do you remember the first story you ever wrote?
Can you give a spoiler for your WIP?
Tagging (from writer peeps) @converginglives, @pen-in-hand (if you want another one I think mel got you xD), @aethryos, @paper-shield-and-wooden-sword, @siriusguided, @insertpenname-here, @indecentpause, @writing-at-dusk @sillyliterature @anoddconstellationofthoughts @writingtomorrow
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