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spandexinspace · 2 years

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13 18 19 40 47

13. What’s the worst character assassination you’ve seen happen?

I'm kinda blanking here, so I'm going to go with the most recent issue of The Human Target turning Guy into a controlling, abusive asshole. Guy is intense, loud and somewhat crass, but he's not that and he treats Tora better than that.

Actually, one more but it's not super specific. Comics that basically ignore Booster's character development (and it's still one of the best character arcs in big two comics). It seems to still be canon post-Flashpoint, but writers love to turn him into an idiot who knows fuck all about time travel.

18. Which character got fucked over by the reboot the most?

I'm not one to get off my Legion horse, so the Legion. Seriously, they rebooted one singular year before Flashpoint. And then Flashpoint happened and they were not rebooted again (except some parts were still rebooted but only a little), but they got disconnected from reality and everything just went down the drain from there. I blame most of our current issues on that. I don't think we'd be stuck with the shitty Bendisboot if DC hadn't done that to them.

It's also somewhat likely that Flashpoint is what killed the other projects that were supposed to spin out of L3W, like the reboot team as the new Wanderers. Which could have been an amazing title.

19. Rant about a change they made to a character of your choice.

Vril on No Justice. Vril takes every opportunity to talk about how much he hates his dad, it's the most obvious part of his entire character and if you've read more than one issue of any comic he's been in you'd know that.

So why is this new Vril suddenly some kind of basic bitch who sucks up to his dad? How does that make any sense with his character?

And that's just the most basic part, everything else he does in that comic is also just a lot less calculated than his normal behaviour, even outright juvenile at times. Vril is emotionally fucked up and all that, but he knows how to lie and manipulate and that is his first line of defence, especially when up against an enemy that's stronger than him (i.e. the entire League+villains team up coalition). Also, he has no reason to want to follow through with that plan.

There was no reason to change all that, but I'm 100% sure the creative team saw Vril, realised he was Brainiac's son and decided to just give zero fucks about his actual traits because he's a minor character and they knew few people would notice.

40. What’s your most detested plot point?

Is "Darkseid is revealed as the man behind the man" a plot point? Because I hate it and will start to resent any book that does it. He's so, so boring and I never want to see him again. You have other villains, use them.

Also, I hate storylines where Querl "goes insane". I'm not against writers exploring his mental health because that's very obviously something that is pertinent to his characters, but simplifying it down to "goes insane" is such a lazy take and I can't remember a time when it's actually been developed beyond that.

47. What’s the worst blatantly untrue fanon take you thought was canon?

I can't actually remember any specific instance where I've had that problem. There's probably some batstuff I'm totally wrong about because I don't read anything from that part of the universe yet see a lot of fandom content.

I guess the cartoon fandom convinced me that comic Beast Boy was just like the cartoon version back when I was like twelve? Which turned out to be very false once I actually got into comics, much to my disappointment.

#ask meme #I swear I read Marvel comics too #just not right now because the four thousand x-books threw off my groove #and i'm overly invested in losh #anyway thank you for the asks squirrel hope you enjoy my long-winded rants

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oneweekoneband · 3 years

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In the first cold hours of a new December morning, Taylor Swift once again revealed herself to be the primary antagonist in my hero’s journey. Weary and woebegone as I am, I will not waste strength on any attempt to deny that this latest attack has knocked me off balance, but I believe it is important that I—we, really, the lot of us who have been bloodied pitiably beneath this most brutal show of force—rebound immediately into a defensive posture so that there might be any hope at all for survival. Taylor’s second pandemic album will be released at midnight tonight, so I guess Shakespeare and his little “play” about elder abuse can get fucked after all. The album is called evermore. It was hubris, I can see in retrospect, which led me to tempt my enemy by writing all these words about her on this, the week of her birthday, knowing as I do that Taylor is one of those especially dangerous adults who make a big deal about both birthdays and lucky numbers. Icarus is my name now, covered in melted wax and tumbling to the sea. So as to steel ourselves for these horrors yet to come, I offer now, with not arrogance but the faith of the foolhardy, my best conjecture as to the content of each detestable track.

willow - Could be about a tree. Could be about a girl. More likely it is both somehow, which is extremely pervy, and not just because that’s part of the plot of the unspeakably cursed The Raven Cycle novels, which I, a full blown adult with, generally speaking, normal brain function, voluntarily read for the first time this summer because some of us, ma’am, used the pandemic for activities that hurt only ourselves, not others. Well, happy holidays, tree fuckers.

champagne problems - Whatever this is, know that I will be considering it a work after Fall Out Boy’s “Champagne for My Real Friends, Real Pain for My Sham Friends” and I’ll be right to do so and many people will say as much admiringly and they’ll smile at me with pride and doff their caps as I go.

gold rush - If this song is anything but a loving, comprehensive summation of the children’s novel DEAR AMERICA Seeds of Hope: The Gold Rush Diary of Susanna Fairchild then I’m going to walk directly out of my home and, deadly virus be damned, keep walking until I’ve entered Taylor Swift’s instead, at which point I will begin to scream out a litany of complaints at the very top of my voice, ceasing only when her security team kills me or we fall in love.

tis the damn season - Worst case scenario this is a sad Christmas song (the best kind of Christmas song) and it devastates me in the most degrading way possible. Best case scenario it’s really bad and dumb and I can live without pain.

tolerate it - Many possibilities here. Could be about white-knuckling it through a period of depression, or a breakup. Most obviously, it could be about COVID-19 lockdowns keeping us trapped in our homes, disconnected from loved ones, going slow-brained and strange, bowls piling up, and suddenly so desperate for human interaction that even memories of having drinks with somebody from Hinge who quoted Friends twice in an hour are tantalizing in comparison to the touch-starved dreamstate of staying indoors... But I kinda feel like this is Taylor replying “COPE” from on high to my tweets about how I would rather be boiled alive than have to face the existence of this record.

no body, no crime (feat. Haim) - What would be very good is if this is a homosexual romp about Taylor Swift and the one hot Haim guitar girl with the really gay energy doing a murder together a la “Somethin’ Bad” by Miranda Lambert with Carrie Underwood, but honestly, it is probably another song about Gone Girl.

happiness - Impossible to speak on this since, thanks to Taylor Swift, happiness is something with which I have no familiarity.

dorothea - Have seen chirping on the odious bird application about how perhaps this song title suggests that Taylor has written a song about Middlemarch, titling it for Dorothea Brooke, but I reject this because it implies that Taylor has read Middlemarch, which is a premise I cannot accept. Whether this refusal is out of self-preservation, being unwilling and in fact unable to face a world where Taylor Swift read and was moved to creation by the novel which was my most essential friend the summer I got dumped by a guy who I still had to work feet away from in a candle factory for another month, and about which Emily Dickinson (Emily Dickinson whose birthday it happens to be today, which isn’t to say that this means anything about anything. I am simply trying to batten down all hatches literally and spiritually in light of having been had once again by this numerology obsessed demon) once wrote "What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory.” or because I just at my core do not believe that Taylor has read a single book since Gone Girl I couldn’t possibly say.

coney island (feat. The National) : Some ungodly americana ass bullshit that is going to ruin my life. The thought of holy terror shaped like a horse girl Taylor Swift and trickster nymph in the body of a tax accountant Matt Berninger, two individuals I have allowed, separately, to cause me grievous psychic harm, having even the barest amount of one to one contact, even digitally, has made me want to peel all my skin off and put it back on flipped inside out so that I might, when I look in the mirror, see a version of myself which approximates how I feel.

ivy - Another song for the plant lesbians. That’s fine, and I’m happy for that community, but what I want to know, looking at this growing pile of songs named after women, is where, Taylor, is the song about loudmouth queen Inez, legendary gossip and, for my money, the star of folklore?

cowboy like me - Putting it as mildly as humanly possible, to slit my throat would be less cruel. I am drawing a straight line from me writing illegible sequels to perfect film An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (itself a sequel) in crayon as a toddler, to Paula Cole’s “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” on the radio in my mom’s two door Honda, to me everyday after school in third grade changing into the cowboy costume my godmother bought, to me at fourteen internalizing a sense of righteous indignation that would take years to even begin to outgrow when Crash beat Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture, to the winter I dropped half my classes out of fear and sickness and read paperback westerns on the twenty third floor of the college library for tens of hours at a go, to the profoundly gay episode of Supernatural called “Tombstone” which is, yes, named for the profoundly gay cowboy film Tombstone, to the inspired and revitalizing pause in “Space Cowboy” by Kacey Musgraves where she’s like, “You can have your space........ cowboy”, to Mitski’s Be the Cowboy, to the perfect boygenius cover of certified classic “Cowboy Take Me Away”, to whatever the hell this is going to be.That line is not to make a point at all. It’s just that there is a line and beside it there is me, incapacitated.

long story short - Just like all the other times anyone has ever invoked this phrase in the entire history of human beings expressing themselves with language, it is going to be a huge lie, because this woman never shuts up.

marjorie - After all that Taylor has put me through over the years, she should have at least named one of these wretched things “ellen” after my dead Sagittarian grandmother, whose birthday is tomorrow, December 11th, which is again, the release date of Taylor Swift’s second album in sixth months, but it’s probably for the best that she didn’t because you simpletons would immediately think it was an homage to George Bush’s friend Dory the fish, and therefore gay, regardless of the actual text of the song, and it’d be the “betty” massacre all over again. That being said, this is almost assuredly another horny song about some mid-century white lady. Only days ago Taylor was telling Entertainment Weekly that she’s been watching a lot of movies in quarantine, and while she didn’t name 1958’s Marjorie Morningstar starring Natalie Wood, I wouldn’t put it past her.

closure - God, I hope this one is another Kaylor classic so we can all act like complete raving lunatics online from the confines of our own plague quarters for a few days. It’s been a hard year.

evermore (feat. Bon Iver) - I’ll be catatonic by this point. Who cares?

right where you left me - Yes, in hell.

it’s time to go - Yes, TO HELL.

#taylor swift #folklore

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xsecretblastsx · 4 years

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1x15 - Desperately Seeking Serena

Here we are with a new recap this week. Believe it or not I’m still aiming to do at least two of these per week. So far I’m not there yet, but oh I wish, I’m going way too slow. Anyway here we go, as usual recap’s under the cut.

Thoughts I had while watching the episode:

A rare ocassion when we see these kids actually worried about school.

I love that Blair’s revising with Dorota.

Chuck being Chuck so he will outsource, I’m pretty sure if he actually tried he wouldn’t be half bad with these kind of stuff, but why would he bother.

Aww Dan cried whenever his dad didn’t walked him too school. He had a nice a dad, and yet...

These one of those times I wish I was american just to get the real scope of the SATS, also was that little thing Blair’s using?

Honestly it never made sense to me why there was only once spot in Yale for Constance, like isn’t this suposed to be the kind of school that like to promote that their students are really likely to get entrance to an Ivy?

Blair is right somehow one must always say her name in full: Nelly Yuki

Perfomance anxiety? You ain’t wrong, and sadly that’s something you’ll get to know eventually about Dan Humphrey

I normally like when Chuck and Blair’s outfits matched but the colours of these coats are really obnoxious.

Those glares, there’s a short road from hate to love, just saying. Also if only Serena knew that figuring their issues out is going to take quite some time. About 5 years.

We hava name: Georgina Sparks.

I wonder which part? No Serena, i don’t want any visual, not even momentary in my head of Chuck and Georgina. UGH.

Sorry Jenny, but Blair’s SAT session do sounds so much better.

Hello Georgina.

What is the one thing no one in our group has? Compassion? that was funny.

Funny that Elise points out to Jenny about Queen Elizabeth didn’t had a King, and a year later Blair’s going to tell her the same. Nice bit.

Vanessa, always hating the rich kids as if it was a full time job, even when Nate’s being nice.

Sorry Blair, but I hate your outfit, too many dots.

Of course Nelly Yuki has to be asian.

So this was the way Serena was pre boarding school, as much as Georgina is obviously a bad infuence I’m glad we god a snipet of it.

I wonder if Chuck was always Serena’s choice when she needed help with Georgina, because it seems in some ways like this isn’t the first time, and he gets it.

This is the part of S1 when Dan really starts to get on my nerves, because sure Serena is lying to him but he has a way of questioning her that sounds a tad desperate in not a good way. And it’s all so centered around him, he leaves her there like... I can’t deal with this right now?

Getting dumped at a Flor Rida concert, I guess I would have reacted the same as Nelly Yuki.

Not gonna lie, I’m not a fan of this plot that has Jenny wanting to date a dude just for his money, she’s like 15 and it’s just sad.

Nate and Vanessa, a couple I actually didn’t mind, and I always felt Vanessa was at her less judgmental self when she dated Nate.

Not the right choice Serena. And yet in a weird way it’s make sense. It ain’t easy to let the past go.

The sound of your own voice distracting you? thanks Jenny for pointing it out, I swear that Dan’s in love with the sound of his own voice.

“Like I want to believe in myself” having Serena say this about the way Dan’s look at her, says a lot about their relationship.

So Serena thinks Georgina knew the old her better than anyone.. mmm interesting.

As much as I like Rufus and think he really tried his best, and overall was a good Dad, he never had any idea of how to handle Jenny. Half the time he only makes it worst.

How nice it was for Nate to convince Vanessa to take the SAT.

Those batteries are not from that calculater, I think I actually had that calculator at one point in my life.

Even though i feel her relationship with Nate was doomed, is never easy to see your ex-moving on.

What’s going on with Chuck’s outfit? Yellow pants, purple sweater, multicolor shirt, it’s so bad and yet I don’t hate it.

For some reason, there’s something about the way Dan’s holding Serena’s face and the way he talks to her, that creeps me out for no good reason.

So Georgina has something on Serena, and even Chuck’s curious. The good old days when everything was a mistery.

This is the point were Dan’s double identy gets really disturbing. Hi Sarah, meet Dan, we don’t know it yet but he’s as messed up as you.

So this episode, is not a fave in the general sense, because it’s basically just the introduction to Georgina’s character but on that front these is just setting up the stage for the big climax, and all the other subplots here are pretty meh, with Blair’s and Jenny’s battle from the throne in a very dull point. The real interesting part in this episode is that we get more insight into Serena.

it’s been established since the pilot that Serena has a wild passed, an so far her story centers about being this bad girl turned good girl. She has this change of heart because when she ran away after a particularly bad night, her absence is one of the reasons her little brother ends up atempting suicide, she’s also really guilty that her drunken antincs led her to betray her best friend and she doesn’t want to be that way, as much as the show likes to make it seem Serena changed her wild ways when she started dating Dan, that’s not the case. I think the biggest wake up call for her was what happened with Eric.

Dan is a positive influence, and he gives her the respect and positive attention that sadly was lacking in pretty much every interaction she had withe the opposite sex, as I mentioned in a previous recap Serena believes that thinks of her as real human being, he likes her for real reasons, not only because she’s hot or an “It girl”; she believes this because he meets her when she comes back and was not the same girl as before, so in a way he fell for the “good Serena” and so it’s one of the reasons she keeps up trying her best.

As we see this episode Dan falling in love with this version of Serena is a double edged sword, because it leaves little room for her to be anything else; he’s make it no secret that he detests her world, and he walked away in anger on their second date when he discovered something of her past he didn’t like, he’s constantly judging her almost all the time, sometimes in a lowkey way, but other’s he’s very straight forward about it. By this point in the series Serena feels really in love with him, and as she says to Georgina the way he feels about her makes her want to believe in herself, so she can’t lose Dan’s love, and she knows how’s he’s going to react if she tells him about her past with Georgina, and therefore she must lie to him.

This makes me feel really bad for Serena for so many reasons, because how shitty things must have been in the past for her to believe this is the kind of love she deserves, sure it’s her first love and she’s sixteen and sees him in rose tinted glassses, but when one stops to think about is a relationship where she can’t be honest, like if lying is your best option to keep your relationship on good terms that’s a sign that’s something no good, and it’s not like the true would be something like “Hey Dan guess what, I’ve been doing this “bad” thing behind your back all the time we’ve been dating”, no she’s afraid of letting him know her past, something that’s not her anymore... imagine if people couldn’t change, or have a past that they wished were different. It’s just wrong, but she can’t see it because his love is something she never had and it’s precious and she hasn’t experienced anything better.

There’s also a very interesting line in the middle of the episode related to this, she tells Georgina that no one knew her old self as Georgina did, and this interesting because Serena’s not only trying to hide Georgina from Dan, she’s also hiding her from Lily and Blair, because to Serena Georgina represents the worst side of her, and that’s something she can’t let them see, because I guess she’s really afraid they may changed her mind about her, or even worse love her. This is why I also feel she turns to Chuck in this episode, in part because I feel in her wild days they somewhat tend to hang out with the same type of crowd, I image they often found themselves in the same parties doing drugs and wild stuff,so he already knows more about her worst side, but mostly I feel she calls him because she doesn’t care about what Chuck thinks of her, she knows he cares somewhat, but she’s not as important to him, not in the way Serena and Blair care about each other, and so Serena deep inside of her fears that if they knew, really knew they would love her less. This is somewhat a paralell to the way Chuck’s sees himself, so having him helping her with this, only reinforces this for me.

Georgina’s presence this episode beside the fact that’s she’s a really messed up person (like honestly how awful it is she evens drugs Serena this episode) and letting us know that she has something on Serena, what I really find interesting is that she brings to light that there’s a part of Serena that’s missing. She’s been stiffling some part of her personality, their first outing sure they’re drunk but for the most part is harmless, they’re just joking around and fooling clueless idiots dudes, Serena only gets mad when drugs are involved. Serena likes to party, to be a bit wild, to be free, and it’s something that’s been lacking, and instead of learning healthier ways to let this part of her shine, to figure out that one can party and be free as long as it doesn’t get’s out of control, she totally shuts down that part of her, and that’s why it takes Georgina so little effort to convince of spending some time together. Even if she doesn’t want to realize it, she misses it.

Finally, I would like to say hi one more time to Nelly Yuki

#gossip girl #gossip girl recap #gossip girl rewatch #1x15 #desperately seeking serena

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fipindustries · 7 years

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THERE IS A CRACK IN THE WORLD: afterthought.

So there we go, my first, full novel, entirely written in English. I did it.

There is a crack in the world originated from three or four very basic seeds, eventually many others were incorporated, so many so granular that I wouldn’t be able to keep track of them all, but the basic ideas and characters have easy to track roots.

The three sisters were the first thing I came up with, way, way back in 2012/2013 and from the sisters the first one I came up with was Telescopica. Yes, that’s right, Telescopica was the first character from this story I invented and she was based on the design of the main character from the tv show Fringe, if you want to know how she would look IRL, she is basically a hardcore version of Anna Torv. Later came Harmonica and she was based on Martha Wayne in the short batman story made for the flashpoint event where Martha was the joker. The common thread between both of them (and what ultimately decided they would be together in the same story) was the fact that they both were female characters I didn’t often see back then and that I thus wanted to tackle. One, the stoic professional hero, the badass, not in the rough and tough Michelle Rodriguez kind of way, but more of the slick professional John Wick kind, I basically wanted to write r63!agent-47. The other was female joker, which is a far different beast than Harley Quinn, I didn’t want the cutesy, quirky, lol I’m so evil that can be redeemed by the right dick, or worse, misconstrued as an anti-hero. I wanted a truly detestable and threatening maniac, I wanted someone off-putting, someone people could truly hate. I’m not entirely sure I succeeded in this last regard.

I had these designs and ideas for characters yet nothing concrete at the time, but then I read one book: the gunslinger, the first book in the dark tower saga, and boom. I had my idea for a premise. One chases the other on a dystopian world, simple, effective powerful. They are batman and the joker, they are Javert and Valjean, they are Tom and Jerry, but more than all of that, they were sisters. I think this vision I had of them (and of the world they inhabited) really solidified itself when I saw for the first time the trailer for Bioshock infinite, the one with the “Beast” song from Nico Vega. The thing about that song is that it came in two versions, an acoustic one and an electric one, and the relation between both versions reflects pretty well the relation between both sisters. One is calm and introspective, the other is chaotic and loud, yet they are both the same degree of fucked up. They are about the beast of America and how we are not going down like this. Give them a listen and pretend they are both sung by their respective characters.

But that was not enough; I had a layout for the basic premise, right? One chases the other in a dystopian world, but what happens during the chase? Why is one chasing the other? How did the chase start, and more importantly, how will it end? I didn’t have answers for this, all I had was a shitty, unfinished comic (that would later be cannibalized and turned into chapter one of this story) that I couldn’t finish because back then I hadn’t figured out yet what kind of paper to use for proper inking. Hell, I didn’t even have names for them! And then, as always, math was the answer.

I was doing Calculus II in college (and failing at it pretty hard) and we were studying numerical series, about their formulas and about how to tell when they diverged and when they converged. And so I came across a few really cool words: the telescopic series, the harmonic series and the geometric series. OBVIOUSLY I had to use them as names. But see, these are three words, and I only had two characters, so the next logical step was to come up with a third one. And this character was going to be even cooler than the other two because this one was going to be the mysterious one, this was going to be the white ranger, as it where, this was going to be Jacob from LOST, this was going to be that one character that was constantly going to be alluded to but always kept in the shadows until the very end, and once revealed the character was going to remain aloof and strange. And her name was going to be Geometrica, the oldest sister.

Originally Geometrica was supposed to be “good”, in as much as she wasn’t going to be a psychopathic manipulator. She was supposed to be the Zen one, not evil like Harmonica, nor as obsessed as Telescopica. She was the middle ground. The calm one, the one who was supposed to be above it all. But then I started watching Hannibal.

Now my big problem with Hannibal is that season two, and SPECIALLY any scene with Gillian Anderson, is a fucking slog, they are slow and dull and boring, so much so that whenever her scenes came I would have to create my own gore since the show wasn’t giving me none at the time and so I drew, because of course. This is a thing I’m not sure if other artist do, that is drawing while watching tv because what is on the screen is just so goddamn boring (I would do this as well with doctor who, daredevil and true detective) but the thing is that while watching Hannibal I would draw, and particularly I drew Geometrica. First she was cutting her own arm, and then using it to beat someone to death. Once I finished this particular drawing I asked myself who could she be beating and the answer came instantly: Harmonica, because obviously the most Zen character in reality turned out to be the most fucked up one! That’s just a no brainer. And then my imagination fired up and chapter 17 was created. And that was when I knew for sure that someday, somehow, I would have to write the whole story.

To this day, chapter 17, and particularly it’s final scene, is my favourite thing I have ever came up with, as a scene, as a concept, as a story beat and a reveal and the only reason I made it this far was because of how desperate I was to make that scene real. I came up with it in 2014 and three years later here we are, the dream came true.

Now this is all fine and good, but none of this is what actually made me sit down and put the actual words on the paper, I had chapter one and chapter seventeen, but what about everything that was supposed to happen in the middle? All of this was simmering in my head but it wasn’t actually boiling. The steam pressure, as it were, was not moving any locomotives as of yet. And I could tell you a thousand more stories about how The Foremost was originally supposed to be a female version of the nazi guy in inglorious bastards, or how his and Karachay’s current design came from the character Shades in Luke Cage, or about how once I came up with the names Chernobyl, Karachay and Tzar I realized they were a perfect reflection of Harmonica, Telescopica and Geometrica and thus they had to exist in the same universe, or how I’m not sure where the character of the emperor came from but I’m convinced Warhammer 40K and Twig had something to do with it. I could tell you all this and more but instead I’m going to tell you about the story that finally made me take stock of my life, of my choices, and decide it was time, that the ideas had been stewing in my head for long enough and it was time for execution. Weirdly enough, the story that did that was The Northern Caves. Even more weird was that it was the second read of the northern caves what did it.

I’ll say it right here, There is a crack in the world was me reacting to the psychological horror that TNC, and indeed many other stories like it such as cordyceps or the hell sections in Unsong, caused in me. A horror intensified by the mental problems I had been dealing with during most of 2016. But the thing was that ever since I moved to a new city and started looking for a job most of that horror had been replaced with much more grounded concerns. Instead of having the shakes because of existential, metaphysical uncertainty, I was getting the shakes due to economic and housing struggles. I realized that normal, everyday problems were the perfect antidote to counteract existentialism, and so those were the problems I decided to plague my story with. Lack of food, poor shelter, contaminated water, rampant crime, earthly, lower class concerns, those are the horrors within There is a crack in the world, as opposed to a children’s book writer making some book that apparently made people go insane. And then I decided not to stop there, another common thread in many of these stories was that there would be this mystery to the world, this unfathomable puzzle, filled with complicated plots, intricate lore and abstruse complexities which were begging for a plucky protagonist to be smart enough to solve it all. So I decided to make the lore in my story absurdly simple and yet completely impossible to solve no matter how clever or intelligent or rational you were: There is a crack in the world. That’s it, nothing can be done about it.

And then came the final touch, the characters. The final thing that I saw in a lot of what for lack of a better word I’m going to call “rational fiction”, an umbrella term under which I liberally group works such as HPMOR, Worm, After the hero, Unsong, The northern caves, etc was that in every instance the protagonist would be some form of bleeding heart. Someone who would be painfully hyperaware of the pain and suffering that happened all around the world and would desperately try to find the way to fix it all, to understand it, to make sense of it all. So my story would have none of that. I made Telescopica and Chernobyl to be as indifferent and callous as I could and as the story advances they slowly start to consider that maybe they can do something to help, that maybe they can try and make the world a better place, and then I prove how incredibly foolish they were for ever thinking that.

Not gonna lie, the story is filled with self indulgent bitterness and misery, and a lot of it is me getting carried away and probably venting some of the negative emotions I had accumulated all throughout 2016. If I want to be uncharitable with myself I would say that some of that bitterness came from me reading those stories I just mentioned and feeling inadequate knowing that I would never be smart enough to write anything like it (I’m a deeply insecure person, in case you haven’t noticed). But also, for whatever reason, halfway through the story I decided “fuck it, I’m just going to write some misery porn”, I started challenging myself to see how horrid I could go, what horrors I could concoct if I well and truly tried. Yet the thing is that I feel I never really went all out on it. I like to think that, as dreadful as the story could get at times, it was never truly absurd, never profane, I could be wrong though. There is an essay talking about this in way better detail than I ever could so just go read it.

I published there is a crack in the world as I wrote it, which means I challenged myself not to go back and edit something in the previous chapter for the sake of convenience or to establish something I might need for later chapters. I forced my self to compromise and work only with what I had previously established in the story. This fostered an interesting practice where I would start to throw foreshadowing and small meaningless data all over the place which could be easily ignored or forgotten but that I could also go back to and expand into something more on the long run if I needed to pull something out of thin air for the plot. That is the way characters like Hector or Maurice or things like commando living on an abandoned military base ended up becoming a thing in the story, grown from just throwaway characters and trivia that I thought nothing of when I first put them in the page. The biggest example would be the kosmonavt, I had no idea what I was going to do with him by the end of the story but I knew an astronaut was a useful thing to have so I put him there in his own chapter, just in case.

Another consequence of this was that, as the story progressed and I got a better grasp of the world, of the actual real consequences of having a crack in the world, of the actual sociopolitical organization the empire would have I realized I fucked up. A lot of the lore doesn’t really add up, there are details which are poorly thought out or scientifically incorrect. And if I decided to start introducing all of that it wouldn’t just interfere with what had been previously established in the chapters that I had already published but it would also interfere with where I wanted the story to go, with what I wanted to do with the characters and with my dear, precious chapter 17. All of this meant I had to foregone a lot of neat realism and worldbuilding that could have made it into the story if I had taken some time to think things through before starting putting chapters online, but the thing is that if I hadn’t put those chapters online then chances are I would have never been motivated to write the rest of the story. Hopefully I’ll allow myself to develop whatever new story I come up with next in more organic ways, not being afraid to kill my darlings in order to let it grow naturally. We’ll see.

Final thoughts: I’m actually really proud of this story, whatever its origins or the emotional fuel was behind it, whatever gross scientific mistakes I made in there, whatever edits I would like to perform to make it a stronger, more coherent whole, I truly believe is the best story I have written thus far and that is achievement enough for me, I know people had been reading it and even enjoying it according to AO3, not sure how many but more than zero is enough, I hope you guys enjoyed it and I hope you have thoughts and comments about it that you might want to share with me.

Whatever the case might be, it’s been three months and a little more that I worked on this and it’s been a great learning experience. See you in my next work.

#there is a crack in the world #and the world is over #writing

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blackhatclubblog · 7 years

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A new year, a whole new set of Asian dramas to look forward to! Welcome to the first WWW of 2017! We have some good kdramas; some weird cdramas mixed with good cdramas; half the time I don't even know with twdramas because sometimes I think, "Oooh, this sounds cool," and the rest of the time I think, "WHO WOULD WATCH THAT IT SOUNDS DEADLY DULL," but we have a couple for you to check out; aaaand no HKdramas. KOREAN: ~ Fireman AKA 'Naked Fireman' Empress: I'm dying...I just cannot understand...I...what...*cracks up again* Ambassador: City Hunter's gloriously tragic prosecutor LEE JOON HYUK, and since it's SK the modeling storyline can't be TOO BAD and I can look past the title- I'm interested enough to watch it... but I'm still cackling. Unni: -- ~ Chief Kim Empress: ....Nam Goong Min makes me a little curious...but not curious enough to watch it at the moment. Ambassador: Nam Goong Min and Nam Sang Mi sounds like an interesting combo. The writer wrote Blood and God's Quiz- which I liked but wasn't terribly compelling- so given that + what this plot is so far, naaaah. Far too many 2016 dramas for me to catch up on first. The director did Page Turner, Empress. Unni: -- ~ Missing 9 Empress: Kang Ha Neul had me curious....Jung Kyung Ho Had me also curious but in a totally different way because he didn't seem like he'd fit the original story...then I found out the writer of Bad Guys was involved and it had possibly switched from comedy to thriller - I am absolutely going to check it out, and see if anything good manages to come from the mess that was this drama's making. Ambassador: Nooooot really. I was interested when it was called Picnic and was going to be a kpop band on a desert island- because I adore Swiss Family Robinson stories. Then when it was renamed Gaia but the same plot and also KANG HA NEUL, I was definitely intrigued but I'm not any longer. I'll check it out if the buzz is good but otherwise I'll focus on finishing my backlogged 2016 dramas. Unni: -- ~ Rebel: Thief Who Stole the People AKA Rebel Hong Gil Dong Empress: I have been forever meaning to watch one of the many Hong Gil Dong stories...this might be finally the one I watch. I was actually less interested in it when Ji Sung was considering it, but now that he's safely in Defendent where I wanted him, I can be excited for this one again. XD Ambassador: YESSSSS. I'VE BEEN KEEPING A CLOSE EYE ON THIS DRAMA AND CAN'T WAIT. YOON KYUN SANG AS HONG GIL DONG AND KIM SANG JOONG AS HIS FATHER. Unni: -- ~ Defendant Empress: hahahahah YES. I haven't managed to get through Entertainment yet...Ji Sung was horrendously miscast in that...but I am still in awe of him from Kill Me, Heal Me. Ambassador: Ji Sung, Yuri, and Kim Min Suk in a prison break thriller. ABSOLUTELY WATCHING IT. Ji Sung is going to kill this role, I can already feel it. Unni: -- ~ Saimdang, Light's Diary Empress: I'm curious...time travel dramas either seem to be REALLY GOOD or really NOT (Queen In Hyun's Man is one of my favorite romances; Signal one of my favorite dramas...Moon Lovers...well...) so I might check it out if I can. Ambassador: After I get done fuming that this drama apparently gets 30 episodes and SCARLET HEART RYEO ONLY GOT 20 then yes, I'll probably check it out at some point, but it's not at the top of my list. Kim Mi Kyung is in it, and she tends to pick great roles (Ahjumma or Lady Kim, anyone?). Unni: -- ~ Voice Empress: I have been liking the teaser trailers, and enjoyed a lot of the OCN dramas I've seen. AUGH, I'm still overwhelmed with 2016 dramas, and wanting to watch all of these does not bode well for my 2017 list... Ambassador: It looks pretty intriguing, OCN usually has good dramas and this is Jang Hyuk + Yesung and Baek Sung Hyun as secondary/minor characters so it's definitely going on my list. The idea of tracking a person by voice alone is fascinating. Multiple times I've recognized an actor in a drama by their voice more than their face so I'm really interested in this one. Unni: -- ~ Introvert Boss Empress: This is an odd drama that I've somehow managed to see mentioned in so many places I felt like it was already airing. Ambassador: Introvert vs Extrovert in a work place sounds hilarious but it's not something I immediately jump for. Maybe at some point. Unni: -- ~ Strong Woman Do Bong-Soon Empress: ...I am literally watching Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo, which is adorable and has me howling but which I can't picture being repeated with Park Bo Young. WHY do dramas come in groups like this? I like Weightlifting Fairy just fine, and don't feel like watching another version. Ambassador: This one comes out at the end of the month or early next month and as a result there is little info on it yet but it sounds...odd? *scratches it off list* Unni: -- ~ Justice Team Empress: Not much there, but 4 episode minidramas are nice to have around. (MINUS NUDE FIREMAN MODELS MAKES THEM EVEN NICER.) Ambassador: Messed up synopsis but enough to persuade me to try 4 episodes and Lee Joon Hyuk again apparently. I'm glad he finished his weekend makjang drama so he is taking on other projects now. HUZZAH. Unni: -- CHINESE: ~ Pretty Li Hui Zhen Empress: *CRINGES* AHem. We're gonna finish SWP. But no way am I touching a Chinese version with a ten foot pole. Siwon was the only redeeming feature. XD Ambassador: HEH, China's She Was Pretty. Well, since the Empress and I still have to finish watching SWP together and since we spend most of our time watching it yelling annoyance at everyone except for Siwon's character, NO. I'm not sitting through the Chinese version. There is only so much stupidity the human brain can handle before going insane or shutting down. At least I now know how to torture some certain kinds of people... 'sit down and watch all 16 hours of this right now'. (Obviously this does not apply to those who would like the drama.) Unni: -- ~ The General and I Empress: XD It could be describing any number of cdramas. I am intrigued by it (and the other any number)...but I am also buried under a mountain of kdrama... Ambassador: The plot sounds pretty cdrama typical but I have a weakness for this kind of plot- especially when one is a prince-general and another is a strategist. There are a lot of names I know in this one: Angelababy, Madina Memet, Sun Yi Zhou, Wallace Chung. There's been a lot of buzz around it online. *adds it to list* Unni: -- ~ Magic Star Empress: This sounds like a video game...did I mention my impending suffocation by kdramas? Ambassador: The plot sounds pretty standard wuxia. I'd be more likely to check it out for the actors than the plot: the detestable villain and fun third lead from Tornado Girl/Whirlwind Girl 2... but still, it's not very likely you'll find me watching this one. Unni: -- ~ Love, Life, & Lie Empress: Whatever happened to Live, Love, Laugh...I am not intrigued. Ambassador: Ehhhh, too much standard rom com fare for me. Unni: -- ~ Xun Zhao Qian Shi Zhi Lu Empress: Okay, more intriguing..though I think I'd like to repeat what I said earlier about Time Travel...and maybe wait and see if the Ambassador ever gets around to it and what she thinks. XD Ambassador: This though, makes my ears perk up. Time travel mixed with a backstory mystery? *adds it to end of list* Unni: -- ~ Three Lives Three Worlds, Ten Miles of Peach Blossom Empress: Okay, based on a novel...a weird title that I actually completely love, unlike most "different" titles...it feels a bit melodrama, but sometimes I'm very much in the mood for that. Ambassador: I've been planning to watch this one for a long time. The title is beautiful, I've heard good things about the novel and now the drama plot, plus it stars Yang Mi, Mark Chao and Dilireba Dimurat. Count me in! Unni: -- ~ The Chronicles of a Town Called Jian Empress: This reminds me of The Devi/Mawang, which is a drama I am positive I will like, once I get through the first 2 episodes. (Right up there with Heartless City and My Beautiful Bride and Bad Guys.) If this is a Chinese version of that, I am intrigued. If it's tarot cards and supernatural happenings...nope. Ambassador: Hmmm, it depends. Generally I avoid anything with the use of tarot cards, but Asia tends to do that kind of thing differently, and the plot is just interesting enough that I might check it out. Victoria, Yang Yang and Jiang Jin Fu star, and all three are good actors. Unni: -- TAIWAN ~ Close Your Eyes Before It's Dark Empress: I...haven't actually ever watched anything Taiwanese not a rom-com...well, I guess MARS was a little more on the dramatic/suspense side - and it creeped me right out a few times...so, while this is 7 episodes long and sounds exactly up my alley as far as dark, suspenseful, psychologically intriguing dramas go...I'm going to start it warily. XD Ambassador: Sounds like a mix of one episode of Vampire Detective and White Christmas. *sticks it firmly on list* Unni: -- ~ The X Family 2 Empress: As is...nope. Ambassador: *squints at it* Whatever a Fenglongtie is, I think I want one to put on my brothers. That said, I didn't see any of the other 6-8 dramas in the series and I won't be watching this one. Empress: *dying* yeah, maybe if we could get a few Fenglongties, I'd watch it. Unni: -- Empress: Cheers to wherever BHB goes in the next year! Ambassador: Hear hear, and we look forward to bringing you more reviews, WWWs, and other posts about the wonderful world of Asian drama! HAPPY 2017!!

#www #the empress #the ambassador

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