#oh shit this is fic prose material i should write this down

[kacchanrawr]

I once read something about the concept of two people being parallel lines, wherein the angst was that they could never meet. However, it also means that they’ll never grow further apart after intersecting. They will always be side by side, they’re a constant in each other’s lives.

I was reminded of that concept in Kaveh’s hangout, particularly the part about his mother’s past and the whole thing about understanding vs companionship. The parallels between Kaveh’s parents and Haikaveh are pretty obvious.

Faranak, like Kaveh, was a genius with ideals and visions no one could understand. Faranak loved Kaveh’s father not because he understood her, but because he stayed by her side, sharing her joys and sorrows.

With Haikaveh, they’ve both made it clear that they’ll never truly understand each other’s ideologies and see the world in the way the other does. Haitham will never become an idealist like Kaveh, but he knows Kaveh’s ideals, and he knows how they’ve affected him, he knows Kaveh.

This also ties in to how I interpret their whole mirror thing. They’re not trying to make each other understand, yet they keep debating over their ideologies. It’s because that’s how they try to understand each other’s visions (which they can’t see with their own eyes). They see it through each other, their mirror.

#i feel like i didnt rlly get anywhere with this #in conclusion #my point is #im not actually sure #just mirrors and parallel lines and being lifelong partners and familiar figures in each others lives? #thats gay #oh shit this is fic prose material i should write this down #genshin impact #kaveh #alhaitham #kaveh x alhaitham #alhaitham x kaveh #haikaveh #kavetham

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

yuletide 2k19 recs

what does the zombie apocalypse mean for the democratic primary? (538 politics podcast)

Micah: Okay, they're not zombies.

Nate: They are too!

Micah: They're not dead! You can't be a zombie if you're not dead.

Nate: Let's not get bogged down in semantics. Anyway, the only good thing about it has been the twitter jokes. If you stop calling them zombies it's not funny.

Galen: Let's get through the intros before you guys start fighting about whether they're zombies or not. Also here with me in the studio, Managing Editor Micah Cohen. How are you?

reader, i SCREAMED. a series of transcripts of the 538 politics podcast, the absolute only thing keeping me sane for three years and counting, in the event of a zombie apocalypse, this fic is hilarious, sharp, and like, shockingly well-characterized, from clare telling micah not to worry that she's stuck in the midwest to nate silver reminding us all that the president's approval rating has been pretty steady his whole term to galen shutting down a spat about whether it's stupid to talk about how carpet-bombing the south is going to affect the democratic primary by butting in with a ziprecruiter ad. i... feel like the audience for this is small enough that if it's for you you've found your way there, but on the off-chance that's not true or you are just feeling very adventurous, run don't walk!

273 moments of silence (4'33")

He used to smile with his eyes more than his mouth.

Why the actual fuck would you use that font in work correspondence?

Pillows seem to hold lost scents longer than physics should allow.

i am wildly in love with the fact that "4'33" - John Cage (Song)" was a requested fandom and that MULTIPLE people wrote fics for it, several of which were pretty good! this one was my favorite - a weird prose poem with some truly lovely images and turns of phrase and a great control of tone that made it beautiful without veering into preciousness.

speak truth to knowledge by equivalence relation (tswift MV)

TAS04: Visual: Both sisters are sitting in chairs. The color variation on their garments is complex and appears planned. Cinderilla is standing. Her garments are far simpler and the color variation is haphazard: compare code patches?

TAS07: cannot independently compare visual to anything without visual itself.

TAS07: visual is embedded in file 29021-h?

TAS07: Sarah is unwilling to provide that or any other storybook to any unit currently without, for unspecified reasons related to Lucy.

this is... technically... fic for the taylor swift "ready for it" music video? but also it is just a marvelously weird, slightly creepy, linguistically intelligent, formally inventive science-fiction story about cyborgs learning with an assist from fairy tales, used to great contrasting effect.

til tomorrow's show (american vandal)

“If we had died in there,” he says, “your last words to me would have been ‘Oh fuck, ghosts are real. Ghosts are fucking real.’ You good with that?”

“It’s… not ideal.”

truly a holiday miracle: a PITCH-PERFECT story for AMERICAN VANDAL, the greatest television show of this or any decade, in which peter & sam deal with the post-cancellation blues by getting stoned with dylan maxwell and catching a tip to go hunt some ghosts. the voices are peeeerfect, with several notes that just killed me and at least one that legit made me scream out loud with delight. funny & sharp & sweet please go read this if you have watched this the most perfect art of all time.

how you celebrate (the goldfinch)

Theo clears his throat. “So... you flew three thousand miles for me to make you a cake?”

Boris laughs, big and unrestrained. It echoes down the hallway, a reverberation of Borises. “Yes. Yes! I flew three thousand miles so you would make me another cake that tastes like shit. No, you idiot. Fourteen was my best birthday because I spent it with you. I thought, this birthday? What do I want to do? What would make it good?” He points squarely at Theo, pokes him a few times in the ribcage. “Here I am."

basically everything you would want out of a goldfinch yuletide fic: solid, clean writing; great characterization & dialogue, with just enough moments of subtly devastating observation dropped in; sunnier than the source material but not by much. left me equal parts sad and smiling, which feels right!

talk of the town (into the spider-verse)

Okay, look — Miles and him have had their differences lately, especially since Miles started at Visions, but he knows his kid. There’s something about the jerky, excited way Miles moves that Jefferson will always recognize.

hugely sweet but never cloying bite-sized fic about jefferson figuring miles out. their relationship feels familiar and lived-in here, complete with A+ correct bodega ordering, and it managed to carry a real sense of completeness in a very short word count.

my portion of fire (the iliad)

She smiled up at him, his favorite sister Cassandra once more, and told him that his wife had sent her fine wool to help her practice her weaving. “Better to learn now,” she said, “than someday alone in a courtyard in Achaea.”

Because it was one of her good days, she stopped when he flinched. “Not while I live,” he promised.

“Yes,” she said.

i mean, aren't we all just crying about hektor of troy, the one good man with the one loving relationship in the iliad, every day of our lives? this fic brings the hector-appropriate pathos, along with nicely channeling what i think is the right amount of homeric rhythmic weirdness for a setting like this.

#i didn't do this on purpose but #the fandoms represented here taken together feel... very revealing of me as a person/media consumer #fic i like #american vandal #what the fuck was my spiderverse tag #spider mans #mcu #altho is that movie mcu? i feel like it's not... whatever #the goldfinch

[advernia]

i’m amazed that i’ve been active for at least a couple days straight??? is it the effect of lesser fe3h playtimes + the silly coworker writing challenge at the workplace??? oh well ∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿

since i remembered i was trying to make work commentary a thing here, more rambling / author’s notes under the cut!

jul 6th // ikerev

push your way through the cracks is the first edgar/mc i’ve written here and while i’ve mentioned there that edgar is my fav out of the cast, i fear that i’ll probably take me a very long time to write another one bc... he’s my favorite. i noticed i have the tendency not to write much (or have finished works) about ships i really, really like despite... you know, liking them. hopefully not - shipping aside, i like exploring the characterizations of enigmatic types like edgar.

about the fic, i pretty much like it save for the second part bc i think i could’ve done something more with it - not exactly change the setting, but expounded a little further on it. i don’t know, it feels lacking somehow in comparison to the first two.

there are a lot of flower-related descriptions tossed here and there, but i think i succeeded in not being so purple prose-y? hopefully! this was pretty descriptive, i guess.

with this edgar fic present, that means i have 2 more red army doods to write about, namely zero & jonah. i was really aiming to make edgar the last one tho haha.

jul 12th // ikerev

weave me into your web is canon based, specifically pt. 24 of sirius’ route where they say ‘goodbye’. note those quotation marks.

i think i wrote this after a discussion i had with a friend about sirius & his route - she read some posts commenting on the route and she wanted a nearby opinion. we got into an agreement: while we do find sirius to be indeed husbando material, his route would’ve risked nothing if they gave him more / emphasized his flaws. his flaws, not mc’s, gosh. 

no, seriously. in my opinion, mc fretting so much about being immature sort of blinds her from the little things that prove sirius is not so composed as he appears to be. it gets even worse when she realizes she’s fallen in love with him, and while i enjoy the black army going kira-kira rabu support team + seth being hopeless suitor, i’m going 50/50 on mc. she’s written to be indeed very single-minded come the war phase and while that’s not necessarily bad since she gets to broaden her perspective as she always does, i think i would’ve appreciated it if she came to most of the realizations on her own by reflecting on them based on how the events around her are progressing; and not simply by sirius / someone else pointing it out for her. no wonder she’d think she’s immature in comparison - it also irks me a bit that she keeps on fretting about her feelings for sirius. this is what i’d be sad to see again in other routes: the romance overthrowing the potential / present character development. 

side note: i understand that in relationships with a notable age gap, maturity / perceived maturity can be a problem - i just wished that the route downplayed on this bc honestly, there are other things more interesting to explore than that angle, like, say; isn’t she from another culture or world or something????????? will those differences affect our potential relationship??????????????

on sirius himself, i recall reading on reddit that one person didn’t pick up ikerev for the reason that the cast is too perfect. that’s a fair opinion. i think i can relate this to sirius himself: while throughout the route you do see some flaws in him, he’s still overall the dude you’d write home about + that dude you’d dream introducing to your parents complete with that suave voice (thank u junichi suwabe). no, i’m not saying that he has to have some unlikable or quirky trait / wangsty backstory, it’s just that in my opinion he’s desirable but not exactly relatable. let him struggle, let me see him rise up from it. show me his humanity. there’s the scene with him and lancelot, but i want more. tho him being afraid of being alone is what i find extremely relatable and endearing about him, very nice. otherwise... well, maybe i have to reread the route again or smth.

anyway. the fic emphasizes actually on his character trait of self-control / restraint. did u know too much is bad for u??? it can reflect that since you hold yourself back too much, it could mean that you’re masking your true feelings, for example. there are various psychological studies on that. *stares at sirius* hMMM.

i took care to be quite descriptive on that kiss scene and at the same time, not to be so emotional on it bc it’s still sirius lol - i believe he’s not one to lose himself completely to his emotions, but he’s not that afraid to succumb to some of it - especially if he actually wants to feel them.

... this turned out to be a rant portion rather than a fic commentary now didn’t it

aug 24 // ikerev (i’m seeing a pattern here)

a beginner’s guide to waltz was seriously just some formatting experiment, then it blew up to something larger. i actually like it tho, it’s cute.

writing oliver is actually fun, not bc of the reason that i can be rude. he is rude, but he’s not like that for just the sake of being so. as seen with blanc, it’s probably a result of habit. why exactly he chose to be verbally aggressive is something i’d like to know in his route.

i have no idea how the relationship shift is portrayed either, but i do hope it’s a mortifying revelation on mc’s part lol. like, lookie here, that little kid with his wee shorts and pretty hat that you hang out with all the time and don’t care about acting so ladylike around was that hot hunk who saved you before! oliver’s so amused and never letting her live it down.

for the line ‘i’m not interested in asking you about a decision you’ve made since you arrived here’: the decision mentioned is mc’s promise not to fall in love & to go home. i think oliver would be one of those routes where he falls for her but wants her to go home anyway, but the difference in his route is that he’s very adamant to make her leave. maybe thinking along the lines of ‘i don’t want you to end up like me’ or something. idk. idk what i’m trying to type at this point, lol.

just some random thought, but i do hope ikerev artist tcg someday draws mc in the game outfits / hairstyles bc she’s actually rly pretty. the description of mc’s outfits / fashion of part 4 of the fic was out of me just staring at the my closet portion of the game. don’t ask - i like the hc of oliver & mc having elegant wardrobes / fashion sense, and since i’m too lazy to check up 19th century london fashion trends...

sep 28 // collar x malice

haunted by something still alive was the result of me thinking about guns. don’t ask me either. maybe it’s also a result of me wanting to write something else that isn’t from my horrendous drafts folder lol.

these were actually nice drabble practices, and the first one i clearly had i mind was shiraishi’s. i honestly think it would be fitting, probably around the start of the route where they haven’t got to know each other so well.

from there on i tried to do the drabbles in the route order i did when i played the game, which was mineo - sasazuka - okazaki - shiraishi - yanagi. but tbh when i was writing it became shiraishi - mineo - yanagi - sasazuka - yanagi again - okazaki, lol. i rewrote yanagi’s and okazaki’s three times.

subtitles have their respective mathematical operations on it - i find it kind of cool and funny that those are their symbols (amnesia had the card suits), but when you do think of it properly, it does relate to their characters.

... never forget that hoshino ichika is canonically good with guns.

sep 28 // ikerev

in absence of glass slippers as stated was a part of one of my first ikerev drafts. still a draft until now, but the portion i posted is one of the ‘finished’ sections of the fic.

i don’t headcanon mc as a respectable lady from a equally respectable house or her being a well-off girl, but i like the concept of her being a self-taught lady of society aka she learned stuff like manners, dancing, and etc. out of curiosity or for more practical reasons like fitting in. 19th century london is still the victorian era, so social class and propriety was still a thing.

her taking off her shoes to practice dancing with ray is a sort of a challenge, actually... his measure of improvement will be based on the times that he steps on her feet / how many blisters her feet would gain by the end of the session, lolol - that’s why she says that stepping on a rock is the least of her problems. pretty hardcore, isn’t she?

thus the title actually - glass slippers (mary janes actually) are pretty delicate, but don’t you think a lady’s foot is much more delicate?

with ray’s fic up, i’ve officially written a piece for all of the black army men! nice.

sep 29 // ikerev

neither heaven or hell is holy shit, an mc-centered fic! hella rad - i was half thinking to classify it as a drabble, but since i decided that drabbles are pieces that i may get back on, i kept it as a full fic instead since i’m happy with how it turned out.

all of my screamings are in the tags, so i don’t have much to add besides that lol. however, the writing here is pretty different, and that’s because i was trying to do a three sentence fic challenge kind of thing. buuuuut it became three paragraphs with three lengthy sentences instead lol.

also, there’s some stuff highlighting mc’s london-er/english-ness. washing powder is the british term for laundry soap. 19th century roofs for royals were usually panels, and wooden beams for commoners. different as chalk and cheese is a british expression. i’m certainly not british but i just like emphasizing the fact that mc is of another culture/world, thus there should be differences in how she perceives things / her mannerisms & actions / her way of speech. i’ve been conscious of that in all of my fics involving her.

actually, i do make it a point to watch her way of speaking. i really like the polite way of speaking of 19th century britain (and also of today), so i try to integrate that despite the fact that i’m not british myself lol. it’s hard to fully convey it, but i try with hoping that it doesn’t seem too off. i should probably look for more references to practice it.

this was a very spontaneous piece with actually minor editing involved, and i’m pretty proud of how it turned out.

#rundown.txt #oh this is certainly longer than i intended it to be #oh well thank you to those who reads these ramblings of mine tho!