#my coworkers are invested in my progress they don't know what series i'm reading (i think i mentioned the name but no one recognized it) but

[markantonys]

time for my end-of-tfoh post!! this one is LONG but i just had so many thoughts on the last few chapters

i LOVE nynaeve nerding out over healing and elayne over making angreal. they are so cute and powerful!! it’s nice especially to see elayne develop her Thing™ the way nynaeve has healing and egwene dreaming

min and elayne reunion! interesting to finally see 2 of rand’s gfs acknowledge to each other that they both like him. and good for them for not wanting it to affect their friendship and for trying to make the best of it, though elayne is understandably less than thrilled at the prospect of sharing rand (when as far as she knows she’s still the only one of the 3 who’s had any sort of actual relationship with him)

“i saw that you’d fall in love with him, i don’t know what he feels for you” wow min no need to make elayne feel more insecure than she already does. min is just not buttering my bread this book i have to say.

“who was the third woman? aviendha had better be keeping a close eye on him” that’s some delicious dramatic irony and my first reaction was to laugh, but also, it really hits home how scummy it was that aviendha and rand slept together. like, elayne has put so much trust in her! at least aviendha is very aware of the wrong done and plans to make amends for it, from her mention of having toh to elayne now. and elayne’s conflicting letters give rand juuuuust enough plausible deniability regarding her feelings and intentions towards him that it MAYBE doesn’t count as cheating. still, doesn’t sit right with me and my elayne-loving heart.

back to cairhien. poor rand, he’s got so many problems, and to top it all off everyone in cairhien (still) wants to fuck him. the show better have some cairhienin lords as well as ladies thirsting over rand or else it’s a coward

“moiraine smiled. ‘you learn quickly. you will do well.’ for a moment she looked almost fond.” MOMRAINE 😭

“[mat’s] green coat hung open, and his shirt was half unlaced, exposing the silver foxhead dangling on his sweaty chest” someone get rand a glass of water, he’s thirsty

rand intentionally letting mat be scared by the 3 aes sedai (well 2+aviendha) to make him more susceptible to what rand needs to order him to do 🗡️💔 1x06 rand “pulls a sword on moiraine to protect mat from her” al’thor would be horrified. oh it hurts to see who my sunshine boy is being forced to become

mat insulting elayne and in the same breath saying he’s glad she’s not here to hear the news of morgase’s death. matlayne rights!

i never believed even for a moment that she was really dead, but rand’s guilt over it hurts!!

mat straightaway advocating for finding elayne and putting her on the throne. matlayne rights!

“i will see you tonight or i will see you dead” rand you can’t just summon asmodean for a bootycall right in front of your girlfriend and your boyfriend and your ex-girlfriend and your mom

“you will never choose what risks i take, rand al’thor. never. know it now.” obsessed with this line, i want it tattooed on my brain

“‘i said, shut up!’ rand drove the foxhead against mat’s chest with a hard finger.” mat internally: [chanting] top me top me top me

“the stormy meeting with rand had gone on till the sun set” i wonder what happened in mat and rand’s fade-to-black stormy meeting that lasted until sunset 👀

melindhra is evil [pretends to be shocked] (i’d already been spoiled on it but i’m certain i would’ve been able to guess even if i hadn’t) poor mat is so traumatized from having to kill her :((((

“i am the car’a’carn, remember.” “you have shaving lather on your ear, rand al’thor.” they are so married

aviendha defending her brother-husband when asmodean suggests that mat killing melindhra is the reason the maidens are mad 🥰

“amazingly, [moiraine] gave mat a warm smile” MOMRAINE

“you have changed from the boy i first saw outside the winespring inn” MOMRAINE

lanfear really said If I Can’t Have Him No One Can

“he could end it. only, he could not. he was going to die, perhaps the world would die, but he could not make himself kill another woman.” interrupting my bullet list because only a picture can express my feelings about this:

thank god moiraine has a braincell and yeets lanfear through the ter’angreal

i’m 100% confident that moiraine is fine. no body no death! and i’ve heard about things she does that have not happened yet therefore she’s still alive

lan and rand’s reactions though 😭😭 but please lan, i know you’re Going Through It but please don’t give rand your terrible “you and i bring nothing but pain to the people we love, you should push everyone away” relationship advice as your parting words, the boy is emotionally fucked up enough already

moiraine’s letter to rand 😭😭😭 MOMRAINE!! and rand crying 😭😭😭😭

sulin’s verbal ear-boxing to rand over his dumb hangups over women in battle was much needed, but sadly it didn’t really change his opinion, only convinced him there was no point arguing with the maidens. rand’s concern for the maidens and valuing their safety over the other societies’ would be so touching if it came from a place of them being his Family and the aiel he’s closest to instead of just being because they’re women

“i thought maybe they were going to go in one at a time and kiss you out of your miseries” mat you’re projecting, i know you’re the one who wanted to go in and kiss rand out of his miseries

mat saying “i like canoodling as much as the next man but don’t you think there are a few too many people watching” when rand and aviendha are having a Moment jdkfjg he really said “are you serious? right in front of my salad?” and this from mat of all people who you would think wouldn’t give a shit about other people’s pda. he’s totally jealous

there are some sort of matrandlayne rights here in the fact that mat and rand are breaking into elayne’s palace together the same way they both did separately in the past

“now i find i truly like the sight of you on your knees” moghedien that’s gay

“nynaeve took hold of the silvery leash where it joined the collar and pulled the forsaken’s face close to hers” nynaeve that’s gay

fat little man angreal my beloved. if rand ever loses that little guy i’ll be devastated.

so rand can enter tel’aran’rhiod without a ter’angreal? and i believe mat will eventually reunite with elayne and nynaeve who have ter’angreals that can be used even by someone who can’t channel. are you thinking long-distance cauthor because i’m thinking long-distance cauthor! no i don’t care if nynaeve says rand loses part of himself by entering tel’aran’rhiod this way, how else is he supposed to call his boyfriend, nynaeve?

i was so convinced rand was gaslighting me when he kept insisting he’d entered tel’aran’rhiod back in tear because i had 0 memory of any such thing, but as i was typing out my complaint i remembered that must’ve been what he did in his final battle with ishamael lmao fuck man too much Stuff happens in these books, my memory cannot possibly retain it all. also that battle with ishamael was confusing as hell to me and i don’t think i realized that entering tel’aran’rhiod was what had happened, i was just kinda like “all right rand left this plane of existence somehow, cool, moving on”

nynaeve and rand’s reunion healed and hurt me at the same time. they’ve both changed so much since they last saw each other 😭😭

i already made a post weeping over rand reuniting with not-dead aviendha and mat but i simply must reiterate how much it made my heart swell!!!!!

also, certain book readers were seriously complaining about nynaeve’s “fakeout death” at the end of 1x08 when the entire ending of tfoh is the way that it is LMAOOOO possibly the best example yet of “turns out things book readers criticized the show for were already present in the books but so much worse” (not that i’m bothered by fakeout deaths personally, if i had it my way no characters i like would die ever) (the other biggest example is certain readers saying that the relationship drama in the show was petty and immature. how someone could say that with a straight face after reading the way LITERALLY EVERY RELATIONSHIP IN THE WHOLE BOOK SERIES is written is beyond me)

rand protectively watching over mat and aviendha chatting by the fountain together ❤️❤️❤️ randwich rights!

rand granting amnesty to male channelers and deciding to start a lil school! this is going to be a fun plotline

ASMODEAN!!!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

oh asmodean we barely knew ye. gone far too soon. rip king. i’m genuinely so pissed off about this actually, there is so much wasted potential!! he had the potential to be SUCH a fascinating character with SUCH a fascinating relationship with rand, but it was barely explored. URGH!!! curious to know who killed him tho, you would assume it was another forsaken but that almost seems too obvious............

#wot #wot book spoilers #i have next week off work so i am perfectly timed to start the longest book in the series! #my coworkers are invested in my progress they don't know what series i'm reading (i think i mentioned the name but no one recognized it) but #at our weekly team meeting we have to say our personal and professional best of the week #and every time i finish a wot book that is my personal best of that week #they were asking if i had plans for my week off and they were like 'are you gonna crank out another of those books?' lmao

[mittensmorgul]

OMG. California scenes. I'm a SoCal girl and I just realized that this... is true. I think of myself as guarded, but wow. I think I've actually sat down and opened up to a relative stranger over lunch and then coffee. But I don't do it to seem centered! Anyway, gotta go back and look over my unpublished fics and make sure that I don't accidentally put too much of myself into them...

hi there! I swear I’m gonna write a bit about your message, but for reference, for others reading this, I think I need to provide a bit of context first. :) This is regarding this post about writing exposition:

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/190756281185/cthonical-gallifrey-feels-fanfic-authors

Disclaimer time! I reblogged it specifically for that highlighted bit at the top:

And my specific intent in reblogging this was every complaint I ever read about why Dean and Cas don’t just ~talk to each other~ and deal with their issues. Every single “but they could’ve dealt with this years ago and been together!” I will counter “No, they really couldn’t! Because that’s not the story they’ve ever been telling!” 

But, I’ve heard argued, if they really wanted to, they could change the story they’re telling. They could so easily make it obvious, explicit, textual between them. And of course they could! If they had zero authorial integrity, they could do whatever they wanted.

The way they have set up this story for the last decade and a half has established-- through the slow unfolding of more and more important facts, of gradually uncovering details, as above in purple, that become necessary for comprehension of the characters and their progression through this story-- that Dean’s relationship with Cas has been established in an ever tighter orbit around their mutual most deeply buried and tightly guarded secrets.

For reference, I’m not pulling this line of thinking out of nowhere. This is literally a rephrasing of something Davy Perez said in an interview when he first started with SPN back in s12. I never finished transcribing that podcast, but the relevant bit of the two hour conversation is included in this post:

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/160988290690/12-while-i-do-not-ask-this-to-be-negative-at

but the tl;dr of the handful of paragraphs of full context from that post:

Television is about a character that you become invested in, and that you fall in love with. That character grows in incremental ways. Not only do they grow in tiny little increments, and sometimes don’t even grow, they go backwards. You don’t close the loop. You keep the loop open, so that hopefully when you know that okay, this is our final season, this is our final run of episodes, that’s when you can find those landing points, and that’s when you can sort of say this is the end of this journey.

And Supernatural has been narratively riding around on that loop, on that spiral, for 15 years. And this is now the final season, and they’re gliding toward those landing points now. They’re homing in on those “painful truths the characters don’t want known,” those huge personal issues they’ve all been grinding down over the last 15 years and inching ever closer to unveiling. Because that’s how stories work when authors are writing to the narrative rather than writing instant gratification for a fickle audience. If one thing has been consistent over the years, it has been this progression of character. And Dabb era has chosen to lampshade all of this in text, through Chuck the Original Author.

And that is effectively the exact writing advice from this random post about how to write a believable and engaging story that has been all over my dash over the last few days. Like... the irony, right?

So now that I’ve explained my vagueing with this post, I’d be happy to address your actual question, from the rest of that page of writing advice. Thank you for bearing with me... :’D

I’d venture to say that the description of that sort of “identity info dump” that the article described as “California scenes,” where characters just spill their deepest secrets, isn’t always a negative thing. And it’s not a phenomenon exclusive to California, or borne of a need to prove someone’s authenticity, or angst cred, or whatever. Because it’s something we see happening on the internet, too.

And it’s absolutely something you can USE in your writing. I find it hilarious because it’s actually a major theme of my pinefest fic this year, which will be posting in April. Sorry I can’t point everyone to it yet, or really give too many spoilers... other than trying to explain this phenomenon.

Social media creates a weird sort of culture of identity. There was a post on tumblr years ago that explained it rather well. It said something to the effect of “in real life you meet people and slowly feel them out and reveal your deepest secrets only to a select few people after they already know your whole life story, but on the internet you’re just a screen name and an avatar and you might reveal your deepest secrets without any of the people who read them even knowing your NAME or what you look like or anything else about you.”

Because it’s not about complete open honesty, you know? It’s about understanding what carefully selected bits of information you present in a given circumstance. It’s social engineering.

Revealing your deepest desires or darkest secrets is an entirely different prospect when, say, sitting with a new acquaintance over a cup of coffee face to face or with a coworker in the break room than it is in an anonymous internet chat room. And it can be fascinating to understand what we’re willing to reveal about ourselves in these very different circumstances.

And once you sort through that sort of character analysis, you can write a truly believable and entirely in-character info dump like that without it feeling like an info dump. Because what the character chooses to reveal about themselves in a given situation can be as informative of the character and their relationship to the other characters as the details of what they say.

So, I guess the takeaway here is the reminder that you should still take all writing advice with a grain of salt, and remember that it’s not a blanket rule and all these “California scenes” should be excised in order for your story to be good, you know? If you know your characters well enough, they can be strategic moments of character insight, or even a complete misdirect. The key is to be aware you’re writing one, and then use it to illustrate a character’s weakness, or strength, or the dynamic of the relationship being exposed, rather than being a strict infodump of facts. Because infodumps are always boring if that’s actually the scene you’re writing and there isn’t a deeper layer of understanding going on or a deeper insight for the reader to gain.

Lol, this reminds me of another quote about writing that’s perfectly related:

“If the story you’re telling, is the story you’re telling, you’re in deep shit.” Robert McKee

If the only thing the reader takes from a scene is the words coming out of the characters’ mouths, you done screwed up... That’s why so many of these California scenes are just bad writing. They serve no other purpose than telling the reader a series of details about the characters’ backstories and fail to provide any deeper insight. The key to writing a GOOD scene is make it less a backstory catch-up bit of filler text, and more about what the characters aren’t revealing, or why they’re revealing any of this information in the first place. Because “to inform the reader of these facts” is never a good enough reason for a character to spill their guts like that.

#writing is hard #spn meta meta #lol because i can't control myself sometimes :'D #this is how stories work #Anonymous