#purely fictional | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nonasuch · 1 year

Text

here is a concept: time travel cop, fish & wildlife division

most of their job is dealing with the kinds of assholes who think black market tiger cubs are a great idea right up until someone gets mauled, except these are even bigger assholes with black market Smilodon cubs that they are even less equipped to care for

this is the most straightforward and therefore relatively headache-free part of their job, because it’s the same “put that thing back where it came from or so help me” song and dance every time

it’s also significantly less depressing than the trophy hunters who don’t even want an alive extinct animal. those are extra annoying because you have to undo the time travel that let them kill that poor Megatherium or thylacine or anklyosaur or whatever, and it’s always so much extra paperwork.

and those people suck, definitely, and have fully earned a stint in Time Jail. no question. but they still do not create anywhere near as much work as the obsessive hobbyists with their exhaustively careful best practices and worryingly good track-covering. also, weirdly, it’s almost always birds with them?

like. the guys who will flagrantly abuse Time Law to bird-nap breeding pairs just long enough to raise one clutch of eggs apiece, and return them seamlessly to their spots on the timeline. who are so determined to keep their pet (ha) projects going that no one even realizes what they’re doing until they have an entire stable breeding population of passenger pigeons up and running. who are now the reason that reps from six different zoos are about to start throwing hands right in front of you over who gets dibs.

those guys cause the most paperwork. and half the time they’re snapped up by the same zoo or wildlife preserve that gets their colony of ivory-billed woodpeckers or Carolina parakeets or — once, very memorably — giant fucking South Island moa, and they never even spend a day in Time Jail.

#purely notional fiction #time travel #actually the tropical fish guys are probably even worse than the bird guys #but they keep a lower profile so they’re harder to catch #time cops: fish & wildlife

14K notes · View notes

chekhovs-tantrum · 1 year

Text

Horror short story but the big bad is I Ate Ice Cream In February And Now I Shall Freeze

#writing prompt #writeblr #creative writing #purely fictional #unrelated but helados la neta is delicious

0 notes

coffeebanana · 1 year

Text

Sorry if some of these overlap a little/if I left out something obvious kajbdsjkd I tried my best haha. And that's why there's an "other" option!

#coffeebanana polls #personally i think i'm good at writing emotions!#and that's funny to me because growing up i was very much not an emotional person #i had to sort of learn to value emotional intelligence as opposed to pure logic. and i probably repressed some things kjabdfskj #so i'm proud that emotions come through in my writing!#fiction has always been something i can use to connect emotionally even when i struggled doing that irl #and i think that's really cool #anyways i'm looking forwards to seeing what you all love about your writing!!!

9K notes · View notes

cemeterything · 5 months

Text

anyone who's read house of leaves will understand this and probably laugh at me for only just reaching this realisation but i'm so impressed by the literal real labyrinth this books constructs out of footnotes and formatting. it's incredible. i am so fucking lost.

#🐉#like. its a labyrinth. made of words! a very literal and real maze formed out of pure fiction!

2K notes · View notes

beanghostprincess · 7 months

Text

i'm aware that due to luffy's more cheerful personality and looks, a lot of people might find it weird to picture him in sexual situations. especially since most of us see him as aroace (as if aroace people couldn't have sex or be in love but, y'know, that's for another time) and it's completely understandable to not feel comfortable around sexual stuff if you don't like it with this specific character. however, being uncomfortable around that type of content and infantilizing luffy's character to the point that you consider it problematic or wrong to put him in romantic/sexual situations is too much and you should let people enjoy characters however the fuck they want. if you don't like something just scroll and ignore it, but don't try to make everyone follow your own moral compass and likes because we're all different and luffy is just a fictional character.

people often forget he's the captain of a pirate crew. he's mature and has critical thinking and if seeing a cheerful/cute character instantly makes you assume he deserves to be "protected" from sex/romance, you are: infantilizing his personality (that may or may not be neurodivergent coded, but that's another story), villainizing sex and romance instead of just seeing those as something you don't personally enjoy but should let other people consume, and using being aroace as a shield from the real world and a stereotype instead of actually being inclusive and truly seeing him as aroaspec. friendly reminder that aroaspec people can have sex and be in romantic relationships because it's a spectrum. that's the whole thing about it. it's understandable to not be comfortable around sexual situations with a character you don't perceive as sexually active, but that doesn't mean it's wrong to write him that way. let people do whatever they want with their idea of luffy and have fun!

#sorry i'm a bit tired of people around here #this was written by an aroaspec person by the way #like y'all be treating luffy like a KID when he's literally 19 #stop infantilizing the aroace spectrum stop infantilizing neurodivergent people stop infantilizing luffy's personality and looks bc he's 19 #also stop using being aroaspec as something that keeps you away from sex and romance completely #if you do this you don't respect or understand aroace people and you're just using us to make yourself feel more comfortable #stop villainizing sex and romance too btw it doesn't make you less pure or worthy of being a good character #that being said please see luffy however you like bc he's a fictional character #one piece #monkey d luffy #zolu #lawlu #<- using these tags bc i saw discourse abt this with these two ships and i find it appropriate

554 notes · View notes

spirk-trek · 2 months

Text

S3E18: The Lights of Zetar ⋆.˚ ✧ · ˚⊹ ·

232 notes · View notes

degenerateshinji · 3 months

Text

a moment of solitude

#xingyun #chongqiu #xingqiu #chongyun #genshin impact #genshin #xingqiu genshin impact #chongyun genshin impact #genshin fanart #genshin impact fanart #fanart #my art #hes been explaining the lore of this book he likes for the past 4 hours chongyun doesn't have it in him to tell him to stop tho #not inspired by true events btw^^#this artwork is fictional any mentions of current events names people locations etc is purely coincidental #cough cough

319 notes · View notes

darlingshade · 6 months

Text

Oh to have a little sister grinding up against my bulge. Desperately calling out for my attention while I just ignore her.

#yuricest #sister x sister #purely fictional

296 notes · View notes

muzzlemouths · 19 days

Text

alright gamers let's mer some mays 🐟🐠

written list under rm 👇

1. morning

2. basking

3. beachcombing

4. hunger

5. glow

6. shipwreck

7. hook

8. bait

9. capture

10. leviathan

11. taboo

12. lost at sea

13. drowning

14. storm

15. message in a bottle

16. song

17. home

18. disability

19. mine

20. metamorphoses

21. camouflage

22. stranded

23. curiosity

24. purr/growl

25. hunt

26. secret

27. promise

28. magic

29. thingamabobs

30. aquarium

31. night

#these prompts are all purely self indulgent #but you're free to use them for yourself too!#YES there is a disability prompt. i am disabled and i want to see more of that shit in fiction #mermay 2024 #mermay prompts #not going to tag this with DCA since it's not strictly For that #even though it's what I'll be writing with these lmao

131 notes · View notes

boombox-fuckboy · 2 years

Text

Whenever I see someone (rightfully) complain about mainstream media I want alert them to fiction podcasts.

Want weekly/monthly episode releases to speculate about? Tired of feeling like you have to binge a whole season to tell the streaming service you want more? Over your lesbian rep being cancelled after one season, if it's even worth counting as rep to begin with? Want to know what original ideas could look like without corporate interference? Want original ideas? Where are all the stories with trans/nb characters that aren't about the woes of being trans/nb? Feel like there aren't enough passion projects being created? Where's all the aspec rep? Hate paying but feel lost trying to pirate media? How come disabled characters never feel like they've been written by someone who actually gets it? Like spooky stories but hate jumpscares or sexual horror? Miss shows that encourage theorising instead of just trying to surprise? Why can't any money you give support the creator directly and not the corporation?

Have you perhaps considered the noble/humble audio drama?

#i know there's barriers. not everyone can focus on pure audio. transcripts are becoming a default but it's still in the becoming stage.#but also. do they know?#audio drama #█████ posts #fiction podcast

2K notes · View notes

not-those-kids · 8 months

Text

“isn’t garrus a cop”

ye and he’s also a giant lizard man capable of splitting me like a log and not real

#:O #< y’all when fiction person does bad thing #garrus vakarian #mass effect #THE POLL IS MOST DATEABLE NOT MOST MORALLY PURE GO BACK TO TWITTER

232 notes · View notes

denaliwrites · 7 months

Text

Dance on a Tightrope of Weird

Crowley x GN!Reader

Summary: Crowley was not expecting you to lose your shit when he asked what you were reading.

Soundtrack: Crazy = Genius by Panic! at the Disco

Requests: Open!

Warnings: The ravings of a madwoman. (It's me, I'm the madwoman.)

It wasn't unusual for Crowley to find you tucked away somewhere in the bookshop reading one of the countless old books Aziraphale kept around. You liked classic literature, and history, and philosophy, and who knew whatever other subjects you happened to find lying around the place.

What was unusual, however, was finding you sat in his usual armchair, reading what was decidedly not a two-hundred-year-old first-edition copy of the random novel you'd decided to bury yourself in that day.

He paused in front of you, carefully tilting the book you held up so that he could look at the cover.

"Dead Mountain?" he asked, an eyebrow cocked so high you could see it over the rim of his sunglasses.

"No, no," you said, a fire immediately lighting in your eyes. "No. Don't even get me started. This is fucking insane."

Crowley never was one to listen to your advice. "Oh?" he prompted casually, and suddenly a chair appeared behind him that he, without looking, flopped down into and sprawled across.

"No, because--"

He loved watching you read. The quiet intent, the way your face moved in tandem with whatever emotions the text wanted you to feel. He'd once walked in on you sobbing along with some tearjerking novel (as a side note, that was the first time Crowley had found himself wanting to kill a book?), and another time he'd walked in on you cheering over something... triumphant, he assumed, or at least something like that.

This was different. New.

He loved it too. The fevered look in your eyes, the frustrated set of your jaw. The way your hand, shaped like a predator's claws, gripped his knee tightly in excitement.

"This is--" you were saying, and Crowley startled back into the moment, eyes on you, attention now unwaveringly on your blazing gaze. "This is so fucking insane. I can't get over this."

"Over what, darling?" he asked, and your gaze sharpened on him, as if only just realizing he was there.

"Do you know about the Dyatlov Pass Incident?"

It sounded familiar. "Tell me all about it, darling."

"Oh, you're gonna regret that."

He wouldn't. Not ever.

"Okay, so -- Soviet Russia. 1959. Middle of winter. These nine hikers -- actually, it was originally ten. These ten experienced hikers go into the Ural Mountains to, like. Upgrade themselves? 'Cause I guess there are levels to being a hiker, and you have to go on increasingly more difficult hikes to level up. So all ten were level two or whatever, and they were going on a level three hike to upgrade to level three."

He nodded, even though all the information was secondary in his attention. He just liked listening to you.

"Okay. So they get to this little town, and while they're there, all the locals are telling them shit like, 'Don't go up that mountain,' or 'you'll die up there!' Like, horror movie type shit. The kind of stuff that makes you yell at the TV."

He was familiar with that. You did that a lot -- but so did he.

"Oh, and the mountain they were hiking on? In the local language it's called Kholat Syakhl. Do you know what that means?"

He... he did. He knew what everything in every language meant. But he let you have this, because you were clearly excited. Seeing the way you motioned with the book, he waved toward it and asked, "Dead mountain?"

"Fucking -- dead mountain!"

He chuckled, but otherwise stayed silent.

"So they're getting all these crazy warnings and the mountain is literally called Dead Mountain in the local language, but they decide to go anyway! So they go off, but before they get very far, one of them is like, 'I'm so sick, I can't go on!' and so he tells them he's gonna go back to the town, and they leave without him."

"I take it he's the only survivor?"

You nodded. "Yeah. The other nine kept going. Oh, and another crazy thing -- one of the girls on the trip was keeping a journal? That's how we know about, like... 90% of the things that happened after they left the town."

He nodded. "Makes sense."

"So, because of this girl's journal, right? We know that one of the hikers just, like, fully went off his fucking rocker about a day into the trip."

"What?" Crowley asked, leaning forward with interest.

"Yeah! He started getting really antsy, and he kept shouting stuff at seemingly nothing? He yelled, like, 'Stop following us!' and stuff like that. At nothing!"

Crowley, for effect, took his sunglasses off so that you could see his surprised look.

"Anyway. So they keep going, even though literally everything that could ever say 'turn back' is saying 'turn the fuck back!' They got off course --"

"As you do."

"As you fucking do. They got off course and decided to hunker down for the night and retrace their steps in the morning. They set up camp, went to bed, and then they all fucking died."

"Oh, I imagine there's more to it than that," Crowley said.

The grin on your face was bordering on manic. "Oh, of course. First of all, according to the girl's journal, two of the hikers went batshit, started laughing hysterically for no reason, and then took off into the night, never to be seen again -- well, not alive, anyway."

"Ominous," Crowley observed thoughtfully.

"Right? And the other weird thing about that -- well, pre them all dying. There was, according to the girl, a big, glowing orange ball of light in the sky that night. They have a picture of it," you said, turning the book so that he could see. "Of course, it's in black and white, but still. And -- the craziest part of that, is that there were hikers on the other side of the mountain on the same night who confirmed the big glowing orange ball of light!"

Crowley's mouth dropped open.

"I KNOW! And then -- their deaths are even more bizarre! First of all, they cut their way out of their tent? Like, they didn't just -- open it and leave. They cut. Their way out. And then they ran down the side of the mountain into the trees. No one's really sure how anything else happened, but what we know for sure is that three of them were found a little up the mountain, like they'd been trying to make their way back up."

"Mhm."

"And two were found naked -- right at the edge of the trees, under one of the bigger ones. Some branches in the tree were broken in a way that seems to indicate that they were trying to climb up and get a view of the camp. There were also remains of a fire beside the bodies. We don't know for sure why they were naked, but the theory is paradoxical stripping."

"And what's that?" Crowley asked, even though he knew.

"It's when you're so cold that you start to feel hot, and so you take off all your clothes."

Demonic work, he was sure.

"So that's five of them. They were found shortly after they died. The other four weren't found until a few months later, after the spring thawed a lot of the snow."

"Why weren't they found right away?"

"Because they were found in a ravine about a mile past the treeline! Three of them were found in a stream in this ravine. One of them had a piece of her skull missing? And all of them had major trauma to their chests -- like, high-speed impact by a delivery truck kind of major impact. To this day, no one's sure what the fuck caused that kind of damage."

Crowley clicked his tongue in thought.

"And the last one -- she was found sitting up against a big boulder? The official report describes her like that. Sitting up against a boulder. She had, like, chunks of her face missing? And her tongue was missing. Like, the whole thing."

"You specified the official report," Crowley observed. "Is that important?"

"Oh! Yes! Because the pictures of the area? They show her as laying face down in the stream with the others!"

"That's suspicious."

"Right? On top of all that, their bodies had traces of radiation! Not their clothes, though, or their belongings. Just the bodies."

Crowley hummed.

"Oh! And their tent -- when authorities found the tent, it looked like it had been put up by amateurs. Like, level zero hikers. But these were level two hikers doing their level three hike. There's no reason their tent would've been put up like that. Even if they were in a rush or scared or whatever, it would've been put up at least sort of better."

He nodded in understanding.

"It's just -- it's all so crazy!"

"I can tell," he mused aloud, lips quirking into a smirk at your perplexed and frustrated expression.

"The thing with the girl's face is really weird," you said after a moment of thought. "The theory is scavengers, but reports of the incident specify there were no animals in the area. Like, I feel like if there were scavengers, you'd write down 'no predators,' or even 'no wolves or bears.' But no, they wrote, very specifically, 'no animals.' Like, I dunno, it just feels like that's a weird distinction to make. But then, if there weren't any animals, how did her face end up with bits missing?"

"I couldn't tell you."

"And why lie about her, too? Why move her and put her in the stream when the report literally says she was up against the boulder?"

He shrugged, before shifting forward to grip your knee.

"I just -- it's all so crazy, and weird, and -- and --"

"Oh," Crowley interjected, looking thoughtful. "Now I know why that all sounds familiar."

"Huh?"

"Yeah, that was demonic work," he continued, blissfully unaware of your increasingly maddening expression. "I'm pretty sure that was my side."

"So you -- you know what happened?"

He finally caught your expression, the set of your jaw and slight twitch in your eye. "Oh -- yeah. Of course," he said, sounding rather unsure, actually. If anything, that just seemed to aggravate you more. "Space yetis."

"... SPACE YETIS!?"

#crowley x reader #crowley x you #good omens x reader #good omens fic #good omens fan fiction #david tennant #this fic is purely self indulgent nonsense #reader is me #literally #the dyatlov pass incident haunts me to this day #fun fact I did not use google wikipedia or any other source for this fic #i just have basically every detail memorized #like a crazy person

190 notes · View notes

nonasuch · 1 year

Note

Can I, in fact, get you started on Yesterday? That's the movie premised on everyone just forgetting everything about the Beatles one day right?

Yes, and it drove me nuts because that’s a great premise! But it was totally wasted in a way that I found extra frustrating, because they only needed to slightly reshuffle the existing pieces and give the love interest some kind of coherent characterization, and they just. did not do that.

So like. The premise of the movie is that Jack, the main character, is a struggling musician who gets hit by a car and knocked unconscious at the exact moment of a mysterious global blackout. When he wakes up in the hospital, he discovers that he is the only person on Earth who remembers the existence of the Beatles.

It takes him a bit to realize this: he quotes When I’m Sixty-Four to his best friend Ellie at the hospital and she just gives him a weird look. When he plays a bit of Yesterday while hanging out with friends, they all freak out about how good his new song is, and he realizes that something is Weird.

There’s a fun scene where he frantically googles Beatles-related terms and comes up empty. “Beatles” turns up bugs and cars. Ringo Starr? Never heard of him. We find out that the band Oasis never existed either, and over the course of the movie there are a few more disappearances thrown in as jokes: Coca-Cola, cigarettes, and Harry Potter have also ceased to exist, or never were.

So Jack, who knows most of the Beatles catalogue by heart, and is a decent musician, decides to re-record them. And they’re instant hits, and he starts getting money and fame and record deals thrown at him, and hanging out with Ed Sheeran (played by Ed Sheeran), and going on talk shows and so on. The movie rapidly turns into a parable about the cost of fame, not letting success change you, remembering what’s more important than money and power, etc etc.

It’s just like. kind of lazy about it? and the romance plot feels both incoherent and slapdash, because Ellie has no personality and no comprehensible motivations.

Like, she’s been Jack’s music manager since they were teenagers, and she’s been convinced he was destined for greatness since she saw him play Wonderwall at a school talent show, but she also is weirdly convinced that she’s not good enough for him even before he becomes super famous. But Jack never actually stops being into her, even at the Peak Hubris part of the plot, and he eventually gives it all up and tells the world he didn’t write any of the songs as part of a big dramatic love confession. Except it’s never really clear what was holding either of them back in the first place, or why a dramatic love confession was even necessary.

So, here is how I would fix the movie.

First, the romance plot feels super tacked on anyway so let’s just resolve it earlier and give the poor girl an actual job in the plot. I’d have Jack sit Ellie down fairly early, after he’s released the first few songs and they’ve blown up but before the Fame Spiral starts, and say:

okay. look. I know this sounds nuts but either that accident caused the most specific brain damage in the history of the world, or I remember a different version of reality than everyone else, because I did not write these songs. I just remember them, and no one else does.

And the movie did actually set up a way for him to prove this, but they never used it! for some fucking reason! Because Wonderwall is the song that convinced Ellie that Jack was destined for musical greatness, and Wonderwall has also been erased. Which creates an opportunity, which the movie did not take, for a really effective scene where Jack asks Ellie what song he sang at the talent show. And she can’t answer him, which freaks her out because that’s a core memory! Thats the reason she’s so devoted to Jack in the first place!

So he starts playing her the song. And she knows she’s never heard it before, but she also knows that on some level, she recognizes it.

So from that point onwards, Ellie and Jack can be in cahoots, sharing the secret, which allows the romance to develop a lot more effectively and convincingly, and puts Ellie in a better position to talk Jack down from Fame Hubris, and allows Jack to remind Ellie that he’s not actually too good or too famous for her, because she knows he’s actually just the beneficiary of a deeply weird cosmic accident.

Also, there’s a better way to resolve the romance plot. Ellie has bafflingly low self-esteem, for reasons that are never explained, so like. please explain that, movie. But since half the romance plot is just Ellie going “I’m not good enough for you!” I do have a better resolution than what the movie did.

The only Big Dramatic Gesture Jack does comes at the very end of the movie, and it’s boring and doesn’t actually have anything much to do with Ellie — he already hates being famous by then, he wants out regardless. He needs a gesture that’s actually about Ellie, and allows them to be together and in cahoots again for the rest of the Price of Fame plot.

Which, again, the movie laid the groundwork for at the beginning, and never used.

I’d have Jack tell Ellie that he knows — is baffled by? but knows — that she thinks she ought to leave him for his own good, and that she thinks his music career is more important than her. To prove it’s not, he’s going to give her a song. A Beatles song he’s never going to record, never going to play, for anyone but her. A song that used to be one of the most famous songs in the world, but is only ever going to be theirs, hers and his, from now on.

He plays her When I’m Sixty-Four.

That does the trick: they’re together through the rest of the movie, and decide how to get Jack out of the Fame Trap together, and retire into happy obscurity together.

There is one other optional change, but it would require buy-in from Paul McCartney.

There’s already a scene in the movie — one of the best bits of the whole thing, honestly — where Jack meets an elderly John Lennon, who has never been famous and is perfectly content with his life. I think a nice epilogue would have Jack track down Paul, and find him in his back garden, planting flowers and beatifically happy.

After a short conversation in which Paul appears to have no memory of ever ever having been a Beatle, Jack leaves Paul to enjoy his retirement.

After he’s gone, as the camera pulls away and the movie ends, Paul starts to whistle When I’m Sixty-Four to himself.

#asked and answered #yesterday (2019)#purely notional fiction

706 notes · View notes