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thewertsearch · 1 year

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Asks Compilation 11/12

I never considered that Aradia could be feeling sincere gratitude towards Equius - that's a good point, and might partially explain her flushed feelings for him. Similarly, I never thought about how difficult and impractical a relationship would be for Equius, given he has this kind of strength paired with this kind of dexterity.

Anyway, I half-agree with your thesis. I can imagine a hypothetical kismesissitude between an older, more mature Equius and Aradia, and I think that relationship could potentially be healthy, for the reasons you describe.

But the one we're getting is doomed from the start - Equius's mind-control shenanigans have pretty much torpedoed the whole thing. I don't think he can have a healthy relationship until he figures out why that was wrong.

I'll give you a freebie right now - most of the Jojo villains would fit right in with the Felt!

Yeah, it's not like romantic rivalry is a new idea. Really, the more I think about it, the more I think Hussie's riffing on real relationship tropes with all the quadrants.

Hell, I could probably list some fictional characters that work pretty well as Moirails - and I'm not just talking about The Locked Tomb!

[ sent when you posted your troll ranking! - C ]

She's the best, she's the worst, and she's destined for great terrible things.

Sorry Eridan - someone had to nab last place!

He does have a great design. The cape and scarf work well together - I can see how he'd be easy and fun to cosplay.

We have two opposing views here, and they both make good arguments. Aristocrats do tend to be egotistical by nature - but Alternia would expect him to act that way, even if it wasn't his natural tendency.

I personally don't think Eridan ever intended to exterminate the land-dwellers, but I'm not sure he ever realized that himself.

Don't forget Insane Clown Hussie, which is when your webcomic author keeps putting more harlequins in their story.

Toby, what are you doing back in my ask box? Get outta here, you scamp!

Ayy!

It's funny, I never considered that many people are reading through the liveblog/chrono/ tag. I'm almost never on my blog's page; I see it through the dashboard!

Happy belated birthdays, Jade, Dave, and, Rose!

Odd. It really looks like John's birthday should be December 2nd. Maybe something went wrong with his meteor.

The Newtonverse is a corruption of Homestuck, but Homestuck is already a parody of a million other things. It's one layer too deep, and feels 'wrong' as a result.

Unless Cool and New Webcomic is a similar style of parody, in which case, who knows? Maybe the Newtonverse is simply real, and trying to break into our reality.

Yeah, that makes sense. She certainly looks like a classic eldritch monster.

I can't see the commentary - I assume because some of it contains spoilers. For comments that don't spoil anything, feel free to send them along.

It's always very tempting to check out other livebloggers so I can compare and contrast. I won't, though - quite aside from any worries about spoilers, I just don't want to influence my own opinions!

This has always been a blind spot with me, and it always will be. Try as I might, I will never recognize the difference between Rouge and Rouge.

I knew the comic had about 8000 pages, but it's good to know it clocks in at 8128.

It annoys me more than it should that it's not 2^13, or 8192. It would have been a nice round number to finish on!

Thank you, and welcome!

Eridan's beliefs don't really make sense - but it makes sense that they don't. It's bigotry, after all.

He knows trolls like Kanaya, and can clearly see that there's nothing inferior about her - but he can't let go of what he's been taught, so he just doesn't address it, and continues on as normal.

This comic is damn long, so it's a fun reference to make.

I'd probably pick one. No special reason - I just sort of vibe with the number, and it's the closest to something kooky like zero, or a negative number.

I would have picked the cueball, but I don't think I want Scratch as a rival...

Ok, that's fair, actually.

I love how she's trying to 'cull' them.

It's a good bit. I wonder if this means Hussie's trollsona is a green-blood, like Kanaya?

Read it!

It's not intended to! The others all link to the post where the work was recommended to me, but Con Air wasn't recommended - it's just a movie slightly relevant to Homestuck. I have it up there for completeness, and it's underlined for consistency.

#asks #full liveblog #act 5

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davepetea · 2 months

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((just ranting abt writing fanfics you can ignore me lmao. I'm just in a weird place atm but I'm feeling kinda passionate abt writing rn so I'm gonna vent

originally I wrote a lil of this in the tags but then decided to just chuck it under a readmore so people aren't subjected to it against their will. then it got really long.

I'm not actually expecting anyone to read this im just sorta venting to myself. it helps me get my thoughts sorted if I write them down. I can also look back through my #.vat file tag in a few years from now and hopefully be like "wow I'm doing so much better than THAT now", so if that's the case, hi future Vatta! I hope you're having a good day. and if you're not future me, then I still hope you're having a good day, I love you, and this is your chance to turn back bc my rants are boring and LONG

(not turning back yet? ok. your funeral)

so, I haven't been online much bc I've just been in a weird limbo lately and I'm really busy when I'm at home either sorting stuff out or, with my PDA, doing anything I can to avoid my responsibilities lmao

I've been rereading my Tokyo ghoul light novels (I only have Void and Days ? I think they're called), rewatching Zankyou no Terror, and Bungou Stray Dogs (plus the live action Beast film which was? hilarious but I don't think it was supposed to be), and just suffering lmao

(you're still here? wow. you need a hobby. jk. ily)

I've been locked out of the systems at work for a bit, but I still need to be there and wait for the IT ticket to be sorted, so I've gotta be at my desk, cant have my phone or anything, so instead of sitting there doing nothing, I've either been reading, doing codeword puzzles, or I've been writing up 'drafts' for potential fanfics.

in this year of our sufferer 2024. I've been writing up some self indulgent homestuck college AU lmao. I've written over 60 sides of a5, (not inc the inbetween sections where I wrote some stuff on the chromebook at home) some notes, some accidental first draft, bc I wanted something to take up the time. but my handwriting is terrible, I don't write fast enough for my brain, I have a lil dyslexia so the letters and words get jumbled sometimes, and I have this weird thing where I don't do spaces right. but I've been trying to upload it to Google docs with Bixby's photo text extraction. it's pretty good considering how bad my writing is, then I just need to go through and touch it up, the main issues are things like names, there's some letters I do weird like my v turns into an r, or every p it thinks is a capital, but overall. amazing how technology do that.

(see my long ass rambling isn't just confined to venting. I also pretend to write actual things. you can still leave you know. I'm not holding you hostage until you read all this. you have free will)

can't remember how I ended up back in fanfic hell but I read back through like all my old published fics (aside from the cringe ones I orphaned) and the writing isn't terrible. I don't think I actually finished any of them though, which really shows my true nature lmao,,, but I've picked up a few things on my writing style now. and I've got a few things I see other people do that I wanna avoid bc I personally don't like it, and it's mostly about balance, like using names too often/not enough, being too descriptive like All The Time and making the writing really nice, but not much happens in the story so you take like an hour to read each scene, vs not enough description so everything is happening but you don't really get a visual or a breather to appreciate what's happened so far. I've been working on finding my right balance, which is imo easier if you're writing fanfic bc first up you hardly ever have to describe the characters. if someone's reading it they already know who they are. and for scenes you can take some inspo from the source material. does the original work put alot of effort into setting a cool scene? if not, then you don't have to either! if it's 90% scenery then you've gotta do it too I don't make the rules

I'm losing steam now I'm so sleepy and I've gotta go to work in a bit ugh.

(bet you're sleepy reading this too huh. told you it'd be boring)

I've been thinking about trying out writing some BSD fics but on an anonym not linked to my main Ao3, bc the themes are doozys and I kinda just wanna have the freedom of anonymity. also I'm a baby and if someone publicly criticises my stuff without it being a requested critique then it makes me bleh (I've had a few comments in the past of just general negatives, not even constructive feedback, not that I asked for any anyway...), but the abilities are tricky to write for, so it's effort lol

anyway I'm gonna stop now ive gotta get ready for work

(if you actually read this then thanks for going on this emotion deep dive with me. tune in next week when we'll get back to my usual mental breakdown)

#ooc post.#.vat file #genuinely I haven't been online on any blogs lately bc I'm doing. v bad. mental wise.#/rant off

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murdereraisuha · 3 years

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Classpecting TWST: Savanaclaw

Time to classpect the dorm that deserved better writing-wise. I’m gonna start tagging these “twst analysis” now too cause I am basically using the classpect stuff as a vehicle for getting a better understanding of the characters

Spoilers for chapter 2 and some of the trio’s personal stories. No knowledge of Homestuck required to read.

[Image description: A banner containing a picture of Leona, the symbol for the hope aspect, and the words “Leona Kingscholar: Prince of Hope”]

Before we get to the reasoning, I just want to say, Leona I am so sorry you have to share a classpect with Eridan. Okay now I’ll hand the mic to past me.

Throughout his personal stories, we see that Leona is fine with resorting to underhanded tactics, but he specifically values cleverness and creative use of resources. Leona looks down on those who don’t exhibit those things (ex. the Savanaclaw students in Leona’s dorm uniform story who tried to beat up Jack using sheer numbers).

Leona tends to only expend effort on things that benefit him in some way.

Leona is a powerful and intelligent magic user; he could have easily graduated already if he wanted to, but it seems he doesn’t want to.

Despite Leona’s strengths, those around him criticized him and constantly compared him to his brother due to Leona being the 2nd born prince. No matter what he did, he could not sway those opinions. He could never become number 1.

Because of this, he developed the belief that life isn’t fair and he gives up on things rather easily.

Based on this, I have 3 aspects in mind: rage, hope, and doom.

Rage and hope go hand in hand as opposites: rage is negative emotions, rejection, and doubt, while hope is positive emotions, acceptance, and ideals. For Leona, his story seems to be about him having given up on his hope and dreams of ever succeeding. In its place he has become quick to deem efforts worthless. He acts antagonistic to people like Vil and Malleus, and he seems to disapprove of some of Jack’s honorable ideals. All of these things connect to the parts of rage/hope.

Doom is also a possibility, as it represents negativity, decay, and limits. It is the opposite to life, the aspect that I picked for Kalim. Therefore, I think doom is plausible since Leona shows the opposite side to the luxuries enjoyed by Kalim and Farena as first borns.

Now for classes. I don’t think Leona does much stealing, he doesn’t suffer from indecision, he doesn’t put up any masks, and he’s not a very healing focused person. I think that narrows it down to witch, heir, mage, prince, and bard.

If it’s prince or bard it would have to be hope, in which case prince of hope fits Leona best due to his destruction of hope being focused more than just happening naturally. Though Leona has suffered, it seems to have more hampered his potential than gave him useful knowledge so now I’m kicking out mage. Heir seems to fit best if it’s as a heir of rage. Finally, I’m also kicking out witch since he he doesn’t do much manipulation of any of the 3 aspects.

Between prince of hope and heir of rage... it’s prince of hope. Since Leona says that nothing he did could sway people’s negative opinion of him, we can assume that Leona had hope earlier in his life that he could change those opinions. He did stuff like studying and improving his magic until he finally realized that that wasn’t changing his image at all. Rather than preserve his hope, he choose to destroy it, making his class the active destroyer class, prince.

In chapter 2, he rallies Ruggie the rest of his dorm against Diasomnia, using their hopes as a tool for destroying the other teams. In 2-24 Leona then tries to destroy their hopes once he deems their plan useless. At one point he says 「じゃあ本当のことを教えてやるよ」, translated by Shel_BB on youtube as “Let me give you a dose of reality.” This and the other things he says this episode really connect to the hope/rage themes of reality vs fantasy and stop vs go. Therefore, quite ironically since he is an actual prince, Leona's classpect seems to be a prince of hope.

[Image description: A banner containing a picture of Ruggie, the symbol for the Life aspect, and the words “Ruggie Bucchi: Rogue of Life”]

Ruggie grew up in a poor environment with food insecurity. Many of his clothes are hand-me-downs, he’s fine with eating odd things like dandelions, and before holiday break he raids the cafeteria for food to bring back for the others in his town.

Ruggie’s official hobby is part-time jobs. From working at Mostro Lounge to selling mandrakes, he’s really focused on earning money however he can.

His skillset, which includes pickpocketing and haggling, lets Ruggie pull off plenty of clever and underhanded tricks.

However, like Leona, Ruggie still has standards: in one of his ceremony robe voice lines, he says that he prefers his lot in life over that of a spoiled, rich person without any problems.

His dorm uniform personal story, where he teams up with Trein’s cat to get magic history help and catch rats, is about using the power of others instead of relying solely on himself.

There were 3 paragraphs of stuff here that I deleted because I was getting absolutely nowhere. I didn’t expect Ruggie to be this hard.

Like, Ruggie's problems kinda seem to stem from just poverty and Leona being an asshole. Well, hm, actually if we combine the moral of his dorm uniform story and Ruggie acting like Leona’s maid, perhaps Ruggie’s problem is something like he keeps taking on burdens? Out of everyone who lives in his slums, he’s likely the only one going to a prestigious school like NRC. He’s likely well-known there because of that and him bringing back food a lot. Are Ruggie’s ambitions for a good job not only his own ambitions, but that of the whole community? I’ve always been a bit confused about why Ruggie helps Leona out outside of the magift tournament stuff. Is he... so used to having to help others and constantly take on jobs that his standards for what’s reasonable work are gone? I just went through the chats and in Jack’s one with Ruggie, Jack is telling him about having to find something to draw for a homework assignment and Ruggie immediately offers to go get his warthog piggy bank. Bruh?? Doesn’t that have your money? Why are you just lending it out like that????

Alright, because Ruggie is a guy who needs to chill and have some me-time, I’m narrowing his class down to rogue, maid, or knight. For aspects, I’m thinking life (energy & luxury), time (action & death), or blood (community & responsibility).

On second thought, I’m kicking out maid and blood. Rogue & knight and life & time seem to fit Ruggie better. And now my best guess is rogue of life. First, he obviously fits the stealing aspect of the class through his skill at stealing. Like how a rogue redistributes things, Ruggie obtains money/food to redistribute to the others in the slums. He also injured the people in chapter 2, basically taking life from them, which resulted in Savanaclaw's chances of winning the tournament getting stronger. For the tendency of rogues to have a hard time coping with having their aspect, Ruggie has a hard time accepting luxury/relaxation time. He funnels all his resources into efficient causes and his community. Also, in Jack’s dorm outfit personal story where Jack tries to help him out with stuff, Ruggie is distrustful of him and goes out of his way to avoid him.

I didn’t have any sort of eureka moment with this one like I had with the twins, so I’m still unsure about it. However, considering that TWST characters obviously weren’t meant to get crammed into the classpect system, it makes sense that some might not fit perfectly. So, with what I do have, I think that Ruggie is a rogue of life.

[Image description: A banner containing a picture of Jack Howl, the symbol for the mind aspect, and the words “Jack Howl: Page of Mind”]

Jack values honor, strength, and hard work. He believes that people should accomplish things through their own efforts rather than lowly tricks.

Therefore, Jack disapproves of Leona and Ruggie's method of doing things.

In contrast to how Leona and Ruggie use others, Jack sometimes refuses help, like in chapter 2 when he claims he can handle his dorm by himself.

Jack is quite intelligent and insightful, as shown by his comments throughout chapter 3 and his scary outfit personal story.

Jack respects social/group hierarchies and takes care not to disturb order, as shown in his dorm outfit personal story.

Also in his dorm outfit personal story, Jack says that he wants to become someone with a single true purpose.

So, I'm already kind of stumped. He doesn't have any big moments in the spotlight during the main story, so there's not much to go off of there.

We have to start somewhere though. So, first off, I’ll eliminate the destruction classes and theft since he doesn’t do much of either. I’ll also eliminate the knowledge classes since I don’t think he holds any special knowledge of anything.

For potential aspects, after eliminating the ones that seem mostly irrelevant to him, I’m left with mind, heart, hope, rage, or blood. The 2 that particularly stick out to me are mind and heart.

Mind is the aspect of logic, unbiasedness, morality, and blending in. For Jack, his strong focus on justice even when it means going against someone he once admired seems very mind-like. His care in not stepping out of line in social situations also relates to blending in. Of course, we should still keep mind’s opposite, heart, in consideration.

Now that I’m pretty confident his aspect is mind or heart, we’re left with 12 possible classpects. I still can’t narrow it down well, let’s go back to Jack’s traits.

What challenges does he face or have to overcome? In the main story, the problem he faces is trying to correct the injustice in his dorm by himself. In his dorm outfit story, the problem he faces is being over zealous about helping Ruggie. Wait, actually, that’s not right. Though that is a problem, it seems like the main growth/realization for Jack is about his motivation for helping Ruggie. When questioned by Ruggie in part 1, he mainly cites the group hierarchy as the reasons for his actions. However, later on, Deuce deduces (haha) that Jack looks up to Ruggie like a big brother. Though Jack denies it, at the end of the story he asks if Ruggie would let him call him big bro.

It’s like he is concerned about justice and social harmony (mind stuff), but in reality he does stuff according to his impulses and emotions (heart stuff). This doesn’t feel like a prince/bard situation though, it isn’t dysfunctional or destructive enough for that. I thought that the pages of the cast might be Epel and/or Sebek, but it seems that Jack may be a page.

Pages, the passive exploitation class, are characterized by a deficit in their aspect that they try to hide and overcome. Like how Jack takes his service of Ruggie too far, pages often overshoot in their efforts to correct their weakness. However, as they grow and learn from their mistakes, pages become masters of their aspect, like in Jack’s scary outfit story where he starts out with a bad idea then at the end develops it into a sound plan to scare the tourists. That also fits well with mind, since smoke and mirrors is another big part of that aspect.

Therefore, with how well this class seems to fit with Jack’s actions and motivations, I think that he is probably a page of mind.

#twst #twisted wonderland #classpect #savanaclaw #leona kingscholar #ruggie bucchi #jack howl #homestuck #twst analysis

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jenivi7 · 3 years

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writing tag game!

Thank you @clyde-side and @bdeblueyes for the tag!!

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

22 plus a small handful on ff.net that I still intend to move over to AO3.

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

30,445! I’m surprised it’s that much considering how short most of those stories are. (And it’s a little deceptive since it doesn’t include the 80k monstrosity that is Ryou and the Thief. That one’s probably going to stay on ff.net though.)

3. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Those Things He Keeps for Himself (Total agreement. Personally I think this is the best thing I’ve written so far.)

Human (Was at #1 until very recently! I attribute this entirely to the story being on @shinayashipper’s Rivalshipping Rec List. Thank you Red! <3 )

Black (From when I wandered into Homestuck fanfic for a brief time! I’m still stupid proud of this one though.)

Ghosts, Goths and Other Anxieties (original short story) (I swear I’ll get back to posting the big bang version soon)

Finality (This one’s so old but I guess people still like their tendershipping! I mean, same~)

4. Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I do try to respond to everything! I so appreciate when other authors respond to me and do my best to return that good good energy. Also I genuinely like chatting with people (especially about something I wrote lol) even if I get overwhelmed sometimes and can be slow ^^;

5. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

This is a tough one cause when I start a story, it’s usually with the goal of giving the characters a happy end but it’s probably Coffee and Cigarettes. It was for a pairings competition where the random pairing was Mana/TK Bakura and I gave them a weird little break in the middle of canon where they both know what’s about to happen and it just came out sad. NO WAIT I’M WRONG. Lol I just gave my story list another look and it’s definitely Crazy for You! That was an insane asylum AU that’s ABOUT everything going straight to shit.

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Oh goodness, almost all of them! I love a happy ending. Like, the story doesn’t have to be all fluff, it can have an impossible looking problem or be about two people who just don’t go well together but I love a good, satisfying resolution. Most recent happy ending is No Betting, just a bit of adorable, domestic, peachshipping fluff. Favorite happy end is probably A Million Missed Chances, Mai/Valon. I feel like Mai is a challenging character to give a happy ending to. She’s just stubborn like that <3

7. Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

So, I haven’t written a crossover yet by myself but @miss-moberg and I will often throw around ideas for ones where we will use YGO characters or parts of the world building or magic system to fix things we don’t like in other canons. Right now we have a RP that’s a BNHA/YGO crossover where… oh, spoilers for BNHA: instead of going crazy and faking his own death, Toya grabs both his brothers and just fucking leaves. They run away to Domino, get picked up by Ryou and Akeifa (TK Bakura) and it quickly becomes the found family story I didn’t know I needed. We do some wild things blending the two canons. Domino is this little pocket where shadow magic keeps the hero and villain nonsense out and the citizens are pretty ok with it. Yugi and Atem are the city’s guardians. Ryou and Akeifa are not allowed to use shadow magic though they have access to it. I think Ryou and Yugi had proper quirks that they sacrificed to the shadows at some point, each for something different thing that they wanted or needed. Oh! We have quirks being derived from shadow magic at some point in the distant past and the shadows are always happy to take a quirk back to fulfill a wish or desire. They’re tricky though and usually corrupting. Very classic fairytale where it’s a thing you don’t want to make a deal with. Seto is quirkless and basically runs the city behind the scenes. He can’t deny the existence of heroes and villains but still refuses to believe in magic. This always gives Atem a headache when they have to coordinate to protect the city. Which is often.

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

A couple criticisms but no outright hate I don’t think. Or if I have it was so long ago I don’t remember. I was on ff.net at the worst times too and somehow all the hate just passed me by.

9. Do you write smut? If so what kind?

I love smut so much but I rarely write it. For stories I just usually end up with one or two erotic sentences. RPs are the exceptions to that though and are where all the good stuff happens. >.>

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Nope. Haven’t had one stolen, haven’t had one taken down. I’ve stayed small enough to fly under the radar for both things luckily enough!

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

I wish! Man that would be amazing <3

12. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Yes! Ryou and the Thief is a cleaned up version of @miss-moberg and my very first RP. (And the only RP of ours to ever hit an actual ending.)

13. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

Puzzle with Gemshipping very close behind though I ship many, many things.

14. What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Phoenix. It was one of my very first fanfics started almost 15 years ago and while I’d love to finish everything, that one’s just not going to happen. It’s been too long and I’ve grown way too much as a writer to go back to it now.

15. What are your writing strengths?

I think it’s dialogue. And maybe the ability to be amusing. Not funny-funny but like, lightly humorous when setting scenes or winding up to something.

16. What are your writing weaknesses?

RUN ON SENTENCES. Sometimes they get away from me a bit XD

17. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

Haaaa, actually when I first started writing fanfic I would throw in Japanese phrases and honorifics and looking back, it’s pretty cringe. BUT I can appreciate it as it was originally intended: learning and practicing a new language. If it makes sense for the character or situation though it’s really cute, like in Allargando by Slaycinder where Atem uses Arabic endearments for Seto. (Have I gushed about that fic on my blog yet? It’s so good.) Ancient Egyptian is the exception to everything I just said. I absolutely LOVE when someone takes a stab at putting ancient Egyptian in their fic. I go a little feral for it and it was the hardest but the most fulfilling thing about writing Ryou and the Thief was doing all the research write actual AE dialogue for Akeifa early in the fic.

18. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Yu-Gi-Oh. I’ve done a handful of things for other fandoms but Ygo is the one I keep coming back to and definitely the one I’ve written the vast majority for.

19. What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

Oh no this is hard! They’re all my babies and I love them! Probably my favorites have been listed in previous questions already. Ryou and the Thief because of the sheer amount of work that went into it and the fact that we ran the boys through a whole ass adventure, Coffee and Cigarettes because it’s such a fun, quirky little thing with a great atmosphere and Those Things He Keeps For Himself because I feel like I was able to really capture the idea in my head effectively and there’s some great imagery in it.

TAGGING: Oh my god this took me so long to finally sit down and complete that probably everyone I would tag has done it already! So not tagging anyone this time but please do it if it seems fun!

#tag game #writing #putting this in jenific because it has so many links in it #jenific #ygo

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burningdarkfire · 3 years

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tagged by @saturdaysky, thank you! always very happy to talk about writing 🤠

1) How many works do you have on AO3?

36 on ao3, with many others left in the past on livejournal or ffnet

2) What’s your total AO3 word count?

162k. it’s kind of a shame it doesn’t have the majority of my pre-2011 output as i never ported over my top four or five longest fics. i would’ve loved to see some genuine lifetime totals!

3) How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

9 on ao3 (critrole, nier, hetalia, overwatch, trc, voltron, no. 6, star wars, tiger & bunny). if you expand trc to include anything clamp and throw in code geass then that covers everything i’ve ever published, though homestuck is by far the fandom i have the most WIPs for despite never finishing a single one and deserves a shoutout

4) What are your top five fics by kudos?

take my hand / take my whole life too: critrole, 9k, how essek and caleb’s relationship evolves through touch

blue sky, warm sun: critrole, 3.5k, six mornings caleb wakes with essek

dark night, bright stars: critrole, 3k, six nights caleb spends with essek

kitty love: star wars, 1.5k, kylo ren forms a bond with hux’s cat millicent

the walls kept tumbling down: critrole, 2k, caleb spontaneously visits essek after a hard day

commentary and further answers are below the cut!

spots 1-3 on the list are gladly accepted, given that i also think they’re some of my best and most broadly-appealing shadowgast. kitty love gets its spot despite being pure, pointless crack because it’s for a huge fandom, which is fine and fun but i don’t have a lot of personal attachment to it

the walls kept tumbling down is a surprise! it was a self-indulgent “i want a fic exactly like this to fix my mood and instead of digging through the internet for one i’ll just make one up” that i only worked on for a couple of days. i’m glad it clicked for other people!

5) Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

i always try to respond to comments, although sometimes a week or two pass by before i can find the energy to sit down and do it

admittedly comments have gone unanswered during months or years when i’m not writing fic and then it feels too awkward to a) go back and respond, and b) respond to any further comments on the fic even if they come in when i’m active. so instead those comments haunt my ao3 inbox forever (oops)

i do appreciate every single one though, and there are some comments that i go back to read if i need a pick-me-up just because they were so nice 😊

6) What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

i’ll link my no. 6 fic forgive me because it still dominates my top fics in terms of hits despite being 387 words long. i wrote it in 2011 in less than half an hour, if i’m remembering correctly, and there are a few clever bits in it that i’m still quite proud of

7) Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

i don’t usually write or read “pure” crossovers but i do like fusion AUs where characters from one work are imported into the setting of another work

but it’s fandom-dependent. critrole has been an outlier in that i can count on one hand the number of AU fics i’ve read and liked enough to remember. some of my favourite canon-adjacent fics veer off wildly, but they’ve still got their roots in the universe

i’ve published 17 critrole fics myself and they’re all canon-adjacent. i’m only now working on my first fusion-type AU 🤷‍♂️

8) Have you ever received hate on a fic?

i have one distinct memory of receiving criticism on a fic. in hindsight, it was constructive and pretty fair, but i was a young teen and so it still haunts me

9) Do you write smut? If so what kind?

i do!! and i’m excited about it because it’s fairly new to me!

i write to the characters, and what kind of relationship i think they’d have, but it’s probably true that my interests tend towards certain relationship dynamics

10) Have you ever had a fic stolen?

not that i’m aware of!

11) Have you ever had a fic translated?

yes, actually! this was about about a decade ago so sadly the details have been lost in the haziness of memory and the inaccessibility of ffnet. i tried to dig it up last night but couldn’t find it again 😔

12) Have you ever co-written a fic before?

i don’t ... think so? my current roommate and i tried co-writing when we were teenagers but none of that got published. it’s possible i’m forgetting something from my livejournal/early tumblr days because i remember doing a lot of ask games and challenges with other writers and fandom friends

now i’m just an introvert who avoids invites to discords because i feel like i simply Do Not Have Time so 🤡 not sure it’s anywhere on the horizon

13) What’s your all time favourite ship?

i used to have shipping walls and pairing lists until 2015 or so but i have since accepted that i am changeable like the wind. my interests come and go!

i am a multi-shipper though as a general rule. i’ve never had such a loyalty to a pairing that it would bother me to pair one half with someone else, and i also don’t care at all whether or not a ship is canon. it’s just about what’s interesting!

14) What’s a WIP you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

i’ve had remarkably sequential focus for my critrole fics and finished nearly every idea i’ve had so far. however, this ACME AU is testing me lol and i’ve spent so much time on it that my list of other ideas to write is only getting longer and longer. nothing is abandoned yet, because not much else has even been started, but i am starting to sweat a little

15) What are your writing strengths?

i love my writing style! i value simplicity and clarity: no flowery descriptions, easy words, few similes, little variance in sentence structures, etc. it can vary, based on my mood or the characters i’m writing, but i like doing more with less

i’ve spent years working at my own style and it is so satisfying to read something i wrote in 2011 and feel how familiar it still is while being able to pick out what i would change

16) What are your writing weaknesses?

recently, it’s been plot. if it can’t be conveyed by 2-4 characters talking to each other then i don’t know how to do it anymore 😭 i’m most invested in emotional resolutions, but it’s probably a good idea to have things happen sometimes!

17) What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

i really do not enjoy this when it’s used as a “character quirk”. this includes nicknames, common phrases even if they are spoken that way in canon, and .. everything, really, that’s in a different language

i’ve spent a lot of time in spaces where it seemed widely agreed that doing so was not welcome, and i’ve had considerable fandom “culture shock” reading critrole fics. there are plenty of reasons to have caleb speaking “zemnian” or to emphasize his accent, and those reasons don’t need to be lofty or deep, but i do think there should be a reason beyond “haha this guy says ja instead of yeah”

i promise, absolutely pinky swear, that i don’t judge anyone on an individual basis for doing this. it seems to be a deep-seated fandom trend in this case and i just wish it wasn’t

18) What was the first fandom you wrote for?

tsubasa reservoir chronicle (trc) all the way back in 2010. tsubasa, my beloved, how you changed my life 💕

19) What’s your favourite fic you’ve written?

i like different ones for different reasons, but the top contender might be such is the endlessness for nier automata. it’s a vampire/werewolf enemies-to-lovers fusion AU where i put 2b and 9s in an original universe of mine that i wrote about a lot when i was a teenager

i feel like i did a spectacular job of adapting the universe for nier and i thought i conveyed a lot about the world in a relatively short number of words (the entire fic is just under 5k). i’ve considered more than once that i should use this version of the universe going forward because i enjoy it so much!

thanks again for the tag, sky, and i’ll leave this open to anyone else who wants to try as i think most of my mutuals have already been included. don’t be shy about tagging me in your answer if you take my open invite as i love reading these! 💖

#my posts #writing blogging #replies

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homestuckexamination · 4 years

Note

The format of that description looks to 100% like the real thing :O Did you spend a lot of time making it look as similar as possible, or is it part of a fan adventure or something like that? (Because I would totally want to read it if it was real)

I kinda wrote it on the spot back when I made it! She’s actually repurposed from an older OC of mine that I’m using for other things, so I had a solid idea about how she was already, and simply adapted it to an Alternian setting.

I HAVE considered making a Fanadventure in the past, but noooo way, I don’t have a team of people and it’d be way too much work for a side project X3. I would love to get involved in something big and Homestuck-y, but as a hobby, running four different blogs and doing art keeps me busy enough as is. Most of my OCs are either for Fun, or for planned Fan-Session RPs I’ve had with my friends, so there’s nothing really public around!

Also, I found my documents, so I now remember their Classpects and have all of their descriptions here!

Rhoxym - Seer of Doom

Jamita - Thief of Rage

Your name is JAMITASELKEE.

You think everyoneshould TAKE A STEP BACK and CHILL THE FUCK DOWN. Born as one of the rare JADECASTE, you have no shame in admitting your status as a RUNAWAY, and in fact,REVEL IN IT. You hold a PROFOUND BELIEF that everyone was put on this world fora purpose, and you are OUT TO FIND YOURS. Everything in nature, everything inlife, has a CONNECTION, a MEANING, and the more time you spend searching forthe MISSING PIECES IN YOUR LIFE, the more you have come to notice how ABSURDYOUR ENTIRE SOCIETY IS.

Everything from theCASTE SYSTEM to your SOCIETAL CONVENTIONS make absolutely no sense to you,which is why you’re lucky to be part of the ONLY CASTE IN YOUR SPECIES able towithstand the SEARING HEAT OF THE DAY, allowing to wander when NO ONE IS OUT TOFIND YOU. Furthermore, ever since your awakening as a RAINBOWDRINKER, you havehad no problems scaring away PROSECUTORS and even occasionally IMPERIAL DRONESthat wandered too close. You like trying to make others SEE THE WAY YOU DO,preferring REASON over VIOLENCE. However your INTENSE, OCCASIONAL THIRST FORBLOOD makes it hard to keep encounters CIVIL all the time. But that’s okay,your LUSUS helps you trap unsuspecting Trolls and Lusii for you to FEED ON. HerQUICK SANDS were the first thing that taught you patience and calm in diresituations, and for that you are EXTREMELY GRATEFUL TO HER, allowing her todevour the CARCASSES OF THE DECEASED, DRAINED BODIES YOU LEAVE BEHIND. LususCarcasses. Not Troll Carcasses, God dammit, you TRY TO NOT DRAIN THOSE OF YOURSPECIES COMPLETELY.

You are as much of aROOKIE PHILOSOPHER as you are a CONNOSIER OF FINE BLOODS, and without manymaterial possessions, some of your favorite past times involve HEATEDPOLITICAL, RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL DEBATES. These are the only times youtend to get CARRIED AWAY with more long winded messages and stronger emotionalresponses. You believe any ARGUMENT or GRUDGE can be solved with aHEART-TO-HEART, and often AUSPISTICE BETWEEN YOUR FRIENDS, even when they don’task for your help. SPECIALLY when they don’t ask for your help. You tend toKNOW BETTER than they do after all.

Your search for newENLIGHTENED HEIGHTS and your PURPOSE IN LIFE has led you to the occasionalconsumption of PSYCHOSOMATIC STIMULANTS, but with your lifestyle, it has becomeincreasingly difficult to find any of the GOOD STUFF around. You’re so closethough. You have been tracking your BLOODLINE for SWEEPS, and have spent DAYSIN DEEP MEDITATION over the plan PARADOX SPACE has for you, and you just FEELlike something is just about to UNLOCK YOUR CHAKRAS AT ANY MOMENT. But untilthen, you will just KICK BACK, RELAX and LET THE ECHOES OF NATURE FLOW THROUGHYOU.

Your username is transcendentMediator,and you kind of. don’t care about small talk. until you find something you careabout™.

Shikra - Bard of Doom

Your name is SHIKRAOMYINE and you have been VERY, VERY BAD.

Those of your blood,at the bottom of the HEMOSPECTRUM, are often treated with disrespect, and madeto face all sorts of ABUSE AND HUMILIATIONS, but out of all rustbloods you’repossibly the one with the MOST ROTTEN LUCK out there. You must have really donesomething extremely wrong in a past life, because KARMA is always a BITCH whenit comes to you.

As such, you’ve oftentried to SEEK REPENTANCE in order to sate the FORCES OF FATE ATTEMPTING TO DICKWITH YOU. And somehow, every single time, it BACKFIRES TREMENDOUSLY. But it’sokay. You’ve gotten USED TO IT with time. You have learned well that fate issomething you can’t stop. That NO ONE CAN STOP. Karmic destinies,predestination, they’re shackles tying civilization down, leading it down thepath of inevitability, and you’re pretty much just ALONG FOR THE RIDE ASEVERYTHING BURNS AROUND YOU.

You have NOCONVICTION when it comes to fighting fate, but if you believe it to be yourdestiny to do something, or see someone resisting their own fate, you will GOFUCKING NUTS and PUSH THEM THE WAY THEY ARE MEANT TO GO, no matter what thatfate of theirs may be.

Your room is aCOMPLETE AND UTTER MESS, you don’t remember the LAST TIME YOU CLEANED IT UP,but then again you also barely remember the LAST TIME YOU TOOK A SHOWER. Whybother after all? Everything is going to end up the same way in the end.

While some may callyour outlook on life FATALISTIC and OUTRIGHT WRONG, you have been using thisdemeanor of yours to HELP OTHER LOWBLOODS, specially other rusties, to ACCEPTTHEIR ULTIMATE FATE. You have held several congregations in your hive for thosewho have given up, and HELPED SPEED UP THEIR DEMISE. It feels good relievingsomeone of their SUFFERING.

…

Yeah.

You may be a bit of aFUCKING PSYCHOPATH.

Your username isominousEntropy, and you come across… as somewhat manipulative at times… haha…?;)

Tiamat - Page of Breath

Your name is TIAMAT SAAVAN, and you can’t remember the last time you TOOK AN ABLUTION.

Not that there’s anyone around to MAKE YOU DO IT- And even if they were, what COULD they do about it? You’re probably one of the BIGGEST TROLLS YOUR AGE in just about every way, from the IMMENSE MANE that rivals that of HER IMPERIOUS CONDESCENSION’S, to your POWERFUL LEGS, which you have cracked QUITE A FEW LUSUS SKULLS with. You like HUNTING PREY, but if there’s anything better than that, it has to be MESSING WITH IT FIRST. OTHER TROLLS make particularly fun targets, when they find a SEEMINGLY LOST GIRL, alone in the JUNGLE. You get FREEBIES by TAGGING ALONG with them, but occasionally, you have also DRAGGED THEM BACK TO YOUR HIVE or ATTACKED THEM depending on the circumstances.

The area you live in is YOUR TERRITORY, which you inherited from your CHOLERBEAR LUSUS when you BESTED HER IN WILD, FERAL COMBAT. She was an overbearing burden either way, but taking your ONLY PARENTAL FIGURE so early in life, and in such an isolated location, had… CONSEQUENCES. DRONES don’t patrol this far into the Jungle, which also means you’ve spent a good chunk of your life ISOLATED FROM CIVILIZATION. Your Hive isn’t even in Imperial Records, having been CARVED through the years from a FALLEN, ANCIENT TREE, first by your Lusus and then by you. You have NO EXPERIENCE with social interactions, and yet, ironically, because of this, you possess a MATERNAL, NURTURING INSTINCT practically UNSEEN in most of Trollkind.

It was only last sweep that you got your hands on a PALMHUSK from one of the Trolls wandering too far into the woods. TURNING A NEW PAGE in your life, realizing that there’s more to the world than you thought it was, you’ve been… Trying to make friends. But sometimes you just need to STEP BACK and CATCH YOUR BREATH before you burn yourself out.

Your trolltag is untamedPersuasion, and you. not really good. with big words yet. :( but you. try. :3

Lilith - Lord of Void

Your name is.

Your name-

…

You have some PROBLEMS.

Your name is LILITH MIRREA and you’re a completely AVERAGE TEALBLOOD.

You cannot exactly RECALL how most of your LAST WEEK has gone, or your ENTIRE LIFE for that matter. Everything BLURS together when you spend most of your waking hours in AUTOPILOT.

Your peers know you as an EXEMPLARY LEGISLACERATOR IN TRAINING. You have been STUDYING ALTERNIAN LAW from a young age, got yourself a NICE HIVE for you and your BLIND ANACONDA MOM, and proceeded to… Wait.

And wait.

Night after night, you READ ALTERNIAN LAW. You TALK TO YOUR PEERS. You present yourself as the PERFECT ALTERNIAN CITIZEN, PERFECTLY RUTHLESS when needed, PERFECTLY COMPLIANT when required, PERFECTLY AVERAGE, PERFECTLY FINE.

PERFECTLY DEAD INSIDE.

You swear hardly a SINGLE ACTION you’ve done in your life has been your own. You STRUGGLE ENORMOUSLY with concepts regarding IDENTIY and WORTH, in a world that has proven to encourage keeping this SOUL-CRUSHING DAY-TO-DAY of yours. You have NOTHING you care about. You have NO ONE you trust enough to TALK ABOUT THESE THINGS, and you lack any semblance of WILL or DRIVE to accomplish anything in your life.

So you just keep going. The PERFECT ALTERNIAN ROLE MODEL. You KEEP WAITING. So that maybe something will eventually FILL THIS VOID inside of you. But… GOOD LORD.

You don’t know how long you can keep this up.

Your trolltag is listlessConduit, And you really talk in a sort of disinterested manner because like I dont know I guess some conversations are okay from time to time maybe

#homestuck #fantrolls #wakraya #hse

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albapuella · 4 years

Text

How to Lose a Lover in 10 Days or Less: A Comprehensive Guide to Becoming a Future Romantic Failure (Chapter One)

AO3

Fandom: Homestuck

Summary: How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days AU Dave needs to win a bet; Karkat needs to write an article. Shenanigans ensue.

Tags: Humanstuck, alternate universe - no sburb session, POV switches galore, implied/referenced child abuse Author’s note: This story is the result of a jam session I did with aceAdoxography on the davekat thirst federation discord server. This one's a little out of my usual wheelhouse, but I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I've enjoyed writing it. New chapters every Saturday/Sunday.

I also tried to be fancy with the html, but it didn't come out right (you will see what I mean). However, I'm leaving it as is for now.

Chapter 1: Inciting Incidents

Day 0:

“I'm smooth as peanut butter,” Dave protested, his coffee sloshing in its cup as he swung his arm out. “Choosy moms might choose Jiff, but I ain't in the market for an older woman at the moment. Just call me Skippy, because that's how smooth I am.”

Rose looked both unimpressed and unconvinced. “Really?” She took a small, dignified sip of her tea.

“Yes!” Dave frowned. “I'm like super suave. Fucking James Bond over here.”

She squinted at him for a moment. “You do realize that James Bond is characterized by his inability to keep any woman with him longer than the length of one of his movies.”

“That's only because he's too much man to be tied down,” Dave said. “And that's not even the point: the point is that the fucker's suave. He can have any girl he wants.”

“And I suppose you can get any boy you want?” It sounded dismissive. “It would be wonderful if you managed that feat before my wedding. You know how mother worries about you, and I would rather not spend the first day wedded to my wife listening to mother wailing about how her poor little Davey's going to be all alone in the world.”

Dave felt the flush creeping up his cheeks, and he wasn't sure if he was experiencing his future humiliation already or if he was getting mad. Just because he couldn't keep a relationship going for long, that didn't mean he wasn't smooth. It wasn't his fault that up until very recently he'd only pursued girls because he hadn't wanted to admit he was gay... Okay, yes, that actually was his fault. The point was of course those relationships had failed. His relationship prowess had never been given a fighting chance. “Yeah, I could. In fact, I could make any of the guys here fall for me.”

“Very well, brother of mine,” Rose said, smiling that particular smile which tended to portend bad things for the person it was directed at, “how about that one?” She pointed to a man sitting alone at a table on the other end of the cafe.

Dave looked over at him without making it obvious he was doing so. Damn, Rose. The guy was a snack, obviously, but his expression indicated that the whole world had pissed in his cornflakes one at a time and had made him miss the bus to his job at the blow job factory. Still, it was too late to back out now. “Fine,” he said, setting down his cup just a little too hard. “I'll see you in two weeks, Rose, and I'll have him on my arm in a matching tux. We're going to be the hottest, gayest penguins you've ever fucking seen.”

She laughed at him. Which was fine: he was going to have the last laugh here. And there was no time like the present. He stood and strode over to the other table, curving his mouth in his smoothest, suavest fucking smile.

The man had noticed Dave's approach and looked up from his coffee, the ire on his face now joined by confusion. “Can I help you?” His voice was rough but not unpleasant. His tone was less pleasant, but Dave had expected that from his expression.

“I sure hope so,” Dave said. He put one hand on his hip and held the other out to the man. “I've just lost my name: can I have yours?”

The man blinked. Then he laughed—less amused and more disbelieving. “Seriously? You're seriously going to open up with that? That has to be the cheesiest fucking pick up line I've heard in my life. And I've heard a lot of them.”

Dave only grinned. Breaking the ice was just one of Dave's many talents. “What can I say, dude, I'm a connoisseur of fine cheese. Premium, aged in wooden crocks or whatever.” He waggled his hand. “Don't leave me hanging.”

The man looked from Dave's hand to his face and back again before heaving a sigh. He shook Dave's hand, his grip solid but not crushing. “Karkat.” Then he frowned. “What do you want?”

“Thought that was obvious, Karkat,” Dave said, trying the name out. He liked it. “I want to ask you out. On a date. I'm Dave, by the way,” he added quickly. It probably would have been smarter to open up with that. It also occurred to Dave that there were a lot of other variables he hadn't considered until this moment. “If you're single. God, I hope you're single. And into guys. Otherwise, I'm going to feel pretty stupid.”

Karkat opened his mouth but didn't speak as something too quick for Dave to pick up flashed across his face. Then he grinned, perhaps a little too widely. “You're in luck,” he said. “I am in the market for a date.”

Oh. “Cool. Cool, that's—” Dave broke off with a fake cough into his fist. “Yeah, uh. So, are you free tomorrow? Night?”

A slow nod. “Yeah. Sure. Sounds great.” He dug through his bag and took out a small notepad. “Do you use Pesterchum?” he asked as he scribbled something down.

“I think everyone and their grandmother uses Pesterchum,” Dave said, still kind of surprised that this was going as well as it was. “Not my grandmother, I don't have one, but you know, grandmothers. Or the tech savvy ones anyway. I think your average grandmother might have some trouble—the text is kind of tiny, isn't it?”

Karkat looked up from his writing. “Right.” He ripped the page out and held it out to Dave. “Message me, and we can set up that date.”

Dave took the paper. “Thanks, I'll, uh, message you soon!” Without waiting for a response, he turned on his heel and made his way back to Rose. He knew his face was burning, but he decided to believe it was the flush of victory rather than anything else. She was still smiling at him, and he held the paper out in front of her face. “See? I've already got his chumhandle. You're going to eat your words, Rose. I hope you like the taste of humble pie.”

Rose laughed behind her hand. “Nice work, Dave,” she said once she'd recovered. “Try not to break his heart, won’t you?”

“What?” Dave shook his head. “His heart is going to be wrapped in three layers of bubble wrap and under ten pounds of packing peanuts.” He shoved the paper into his pocket. “I got this thing on lock.”

---

Karkat tore his eyes away from the retreating Dave to jot down some notes on his notepad. Looked like he'd be able to write this article sooner rather than later. Unless Dave had been dared to come over and get his phone number. That had happened before. He scowled into his coffee. Well, if Dave never got in touch with him, then he'd just use his last disaster of a relationship to base his article on. That was what he'd planned to do originally anyway.

It wasn't a secret around the office that Karkat Vantas, despite being a font of romance wisdom, was dead in the water when it came to dating and keeping a boyfriend. He attributed this mostly to his abhorrent personality and lack of self-control. Whenever the opportunity came up for him to stick his foot in his mouth, you could find him there, furiously chewing on his toes. He'd lost count of how many times a date had ended because he'd said something he shouldn't have. Or rather, screamed something he shouldn't have at the top of his lungs with more profanity than was warranted in retrospect.

So, of course, the boss knew about Karkat's lackluster love life, too. The assignment had been one of her little jokes. One of her little mind games. “Oh, Mr. Vantas, please write an article about how to fuck up a relationship in less than two weeks—it should be easy for you seeing as you're such an expert at being so noxious that no one but your handful of friends can even stand to be anywhere around you, never mind a stranger who doesn't know your history or has any reason to want to stick around and deal with your bullshit.” Paraphrased, of course. Her version had been much less honest.

He re-read his notes.

* Dave, no last name given. Terrible pick up line. Rambles. Idiot or awkward. Or both. Dresses like a color-blind douche bag. Obnoxious sunglasses. Vision impaired? Hot. Attractive. Moderately attractive.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he set down his notepad to fish it out. He frowned down at the screen. A notification from Pesterchum? His heart rose a little despite himself until he saw the name. Kanaya. He sighed. While he was happy she was happy, he couldn't handle being gushed at right now. He put the phone on the table and finished his coffee.

---

Dave dithered for hours before he finally decided on the perfect message to open communications with.

TG: this is dave from the cafe TG: wanted to say hey TG: and ask what you want to do Saturday

Okay, so it wasn't the best rap ever, but he was stretched for material here. Also, it probably wasn't a good idea to blow up this guy's phone before Dave got some confirmation that this was even Karkat's chumhandle. It wouldn't be the first time someone had given him a dud. At least the messages were going through: that was a good sign.

CG: ARE YOU RHYMING ON PURPOSE? TG: hell yea dog TG: mc strider here by popular demand to lay down the jams TG: ive got all my adoring fans just waiting for me to shower them with stanz- TG: -as like youve never seen its a dream come true straight to you

That was enough; he had to give Karkat some time to respond. Assuming this was Karkat.

TG: this is karkat right? CG: OH I CAN TALK NOW? CG: YES THIS IS KARKAT. CG: AS CHARMING AS THIS IS (AND I AM SO UTTERLY CHARMED RIGHT NOW), DO YOU ACTUALLY WANT TO GO ON A DATE WITH ME? TG: totally i totally do i knew as soon as i saw you yea im taking this total snack on a date

Which was not a lie, technically. Yes, Dave liked how Karkat looked, but he probably wouldn't have gone over to his table without Rose egging him on.

TG: where do you want to go skys the limit TG: but not really TG: cause no offense but i just met you TG: and i dont think were at the stage where id be willing to sell one my kidneys TG: to make your dreams of jumping out of an airplane onto the back of a narwhal or some shit like that come true TG: thats like after at least date number 5 and id expect some kind of thanks TG: at least a tongue kiss or something TG: not that i think you need to pay for dates physically TG: thats all kinds of gross TG: forget i said any of that please CG: … CG: HOW ABOUT DINNER AND A MOVIE. LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE. CAN WE DO THAT?

Dave grinned with relief. He'd thought for sure he'd just blown this.

TG: sounds great nothing beats the classics

With that sorted out, the rest had been easy. Dave closed his phone, feeling accomplished. He was really doing this. He was really making this happen. But first, he had some clothes to throw in the shower!

---

Karkat slid his phone back into his pocket with a sigh. Well, now he had a date for tomorrow. He looked down at the new set of notes he'd written during that 'conversation'.

* Last name Strider? Raps without provocation. Definitely visually impaired. Goes off on wild tangents. I'm going to be murdered. What the hell am I doing?

It had been difficult not to react in his normal way to the frankly bizarre things Dave had said, and he knew that was only going to be more difficult to manage in person. Still, he had to 'hook' this man as best as he was able before he could fuck it up like always. After all, he couldn't 'lose' a guy he never 'had', right? He idly entertained the thought of what 'having' Dave might be like. He was clearly crazy, but there was something endearing in his total inability to communicate like a regular person. The way he'd been so obviously nervous and out of his depth when he'd come over to ask Karkat out. The way his cheeks had flushed when Karkat had accepted. The way his body had moved when he'd walked away.

Shaking his head, Karkat tucked the notepad into his bag. No point in even thinking about it. Even if he weren't getting into this just to ruin the relationship for his article, the end would have been the same anyway. Honestly, he was doing Dave a favor: at least this way, Dave would only be wasting ten days worth of his time rather than torturous months of dealing with Karkat's bullshit before finding an excuse to cut him loose.

#homestuck #fan fic #humanstuck #my fic #wip #the html looks fine on my end #don't know why it's messed up when it goes live #*shrugs*

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faintwalker · 4 years

Text

On Fic and Triggers:

(Always feel free to skip posts you don’t want to read. Just a reminder.)

I wanted to put down some thoughts on fic, tags, triggers, and our choices as individuals. I’m breaking this into three sections. They are as follows:

1. Squick vs. trigger, a quick look at terminology.

2. Tag advantage and the power of viewer discretion.

3. It’s an imperfect system (but that’s okay).

(Under a readmore because it’s over 1k.)

---

Part one: Squick vs. Trigger:

A squick is like a personal gross-out; something which disgusts or unsettles a person can be said to be a squick of theirs. Most people would be upset to find rotten meat in their fridge, right? For many people such a thing may be considered a squick.

A trigger is more severe than a squick, and is usually tied to a person’s trauma. Sometimes it’s something like a loud noise, but for the purpose of this post going forwards, I will be discussing written content and triggers that may be found there. When something triggers a person, it shakes them up and threatens to (or manages to) throw them into a bad mental state.

A squick might make someone go “ew” and consider clicking out of a fic. A trigger will need some recovering from.

Sometimes the line between the two is difficult to find. Triggers happen to different extents and may set someone off more or less on certain days or have diminished impacts as time goes by, but all that stuff varies by individual.

---

Part two: Fics Have Tags (on ao3) and You Can See Them:

Browsing on ao3 is cool because of the tags. If something says it has something in it, I can avoid it or brace for it (or even seek it out, if it’s something I’m looking for). It actually gives a lot of power to the reader. I have taken advantage of the warnings to explore things difficult for me at my own pace, and honestly I’ve felt very safe overall while doing so. Nobody is pressuring me into it, and I can quit reading anything at any time. Overall, it’s safer to browse than random published books tend to be.

(Nothing against published books. I don’t think we need tags everywhere.)

Properly tagged fics are nice, even if I don’t like the tags. If I don’t like the tags, it means I can give the fic a skip instead of receiving an unpleasant surprise. That’s always a good thing.

---

Part three: Don’t Expect Perfection:

Improperly tagged fics? Not so nice. I don’t enjoy sudden explicit sex scenes popping up in the middle of a teen-rated fic, but I can’t say it never happens. The thing about the tagging and rating system is that it’s up to the authors to provide those things. Sometimes mislabels are an honest mistake, but I have a theory that some of them stem from certain attitudes towards certain content types held by some ideologies in fandom spaces. Fear makes people hide, but hiding warnings where they would be expected can lead to people suffering a bit.

This section isn’t about that, though.

This is about triggers, right? And I’m writing it. So let me just say:

Most of my triggers aren’t things I will find warnings for in a fic’s tags.

It’s a tricky field, and I’m pretty difficult to set off, but the closest I get on the real risks for me are vague guesses. Some tags do cover possible triggers for me, but the content won’t actually be what gets to me in, uh, let’s say at least 95% of the cases. It means I let my guard down sometimes when I’ve technically been warned, and then I end up sitting there thinking, “Oh, you actually did mean it like that this time…”

It’s a thing that happens.

What happens even more often is that there is no warning whatsoever. With many things, I’m running the same risk as if the fic was untagged altogether. I’ll be enjoying a nice story, then bam! Right in the trauma.

But that’s okay.

Getting set off is never fun, and it can leave me messed up for days, sometimes. I’ve been through some stuff. Other things, things that aren’t fictional, can set me off too. That’s also okay. It’s life.

It’s life, and fiction is still fiction. I don’t always get set off by the same things, and some things that are fine some days… really aren’t fine on others. My mental state is influenced by many factors, after all. Some of the fics that have set me off the worst are fics I have come to love. Others are ones I would never willingly look at again.

This post is also about tags. So. Do I get angry? Do I think those things should be tagged?

The answer to the first is almost never, unless I feel there was a specific negligence/attempt to harm at play. The second is no; not if it’s in that “usually untagged” camp of content.

People are triggered by all kinds of things. To give a personal example, I have a history of being triggered by swear words.

I can’t swear, not really. In recent years, I gained the ability to say damn, and that’s about the extent of it. I can’t even write the words without… trouble, let’s say.

I used to flinch whenever anyone cursed, even when it was a “mild” word like cr#p. I would jolt straight back into the hypervigilance from the times that left me with this issue. It was pretty bad.

Swear words aren’t really something that can be avoided in real life, though. Think about it for a moment. Swearing is everywhere. Can you go a day without reading a swear on tumblr? Most of it is pretty harmless, really, but not inside your brain when it says you’re in immediate danger because of the words.

Recovery takes a long time. Like I said, I can’t swear, but I can read the words and not panic, or really even react at all, mostly. I can talk to people and not get freaked out the second they curse. I can’t handle any aggressive yelling of the words, but I read Homestuck and loved it, something which would have been impossible for me at age seventeen. Heck, the other day I edited the “#”s into “u”s in the f#cks in my Homestuck fic. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to do that, not when typing that censored word right there still just made me feel funny.

Back to the point.

It would be ridiculous to expect fics to tag for swearing in almost all cases. I think we can all agree on that. And what about things that are hard to put into specifically labeled words? Or what about the fact that someone out there can’t handle spaghetti because of something or other? We’re not going to tag all mentions of spaghetti.

Sometimes it’s a very specific phrase. Sometimes something just hits a little too close to home. Not everything can be effectively avoided.

And it really is okay.

I don’t want a world where content producers are plagued by constant guilt. We’re all out here doing our best to catch the major warnings, and I think that’s great. It still leaves one question:

What should someone do when they’ve been triggered?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer here. The first step is caring for one’s mental health. Getting back into a better state takes priority, but I can only care for me there.

For some people, processing why they were set off might be part of it. Some will already know. That all varies.

What people shouldn’t do is harass others or make it the problem of the content for existing. Like I said, I didn’t used to be able to handle swears. But would the world really be better if all swears were completely removed from everything?

I don’t think so.

For the most part, people are trying to warn for what they can. Be kind to them, be kind to yourself, and enjoy fiction to your heart’s desire.

#fandom stuff #trigger discussion #a bit heavy #I am passionate about some topics and this is one of them #fanfic discourse

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bladekindeyewear · 4 years

Text

HS^2 bloggin’ Patreon Commentary Catchup 2020-03-29

I know I’ve been sitting on half-a-dozen asks, but I’m gonna sit on those a little longer because after I’m done catching up on ALL the commentary I’ve missed I’ll probably be a little exhausted.

First the commentary on Chapter 5: YOUR 3Y3S H4V3 B33N CLOS3D. I skimmed this before, just so I could leave a comment about what I’d been told about the suicide feeling / Jaspers funeral when she was “eight” being way too late on the timeline. They still haven’t made any corrections to that HS^2 page. Hm. Are they just feeling the general vibe and tags to help the fandom guide things? I’m wondering if anyone came to any of them specifically with that, since Patreon commentary doesn’t seem to cut it. (Which I might be grateful for, from another point of view, because why would they favor paid methods.)

Sketches and Commentary: Chapter 5, "YOUR 3Y3S H4V3 B33N CLOS3D"

Starting commentary on why they played with the medium by opting for a Longpage with that update. Unsurprising and understandable~

Ooh, they included the commission/sketch instructions for the image they asked from Xam.

I don't know what we did to deserve Xamag.

Yeah few people dispute Xamag’s awesomeness.~

Much of this conversation was written before they launched HS^2′s first chapter, huh?

With the "primary" version of its original protagonist dead in a wallet,

Did... did Terezi or someone else put John’s body in his wallet after he died? I forget. *checks back*

(Meat 35) That’s definitely a fair question. But I have one that’s much more important for her to answer. Terezi, are you seriously just going to leave the body here? “TEREZI: HUH?” Of course not. Terezi’s a practical girl, after all. She digs the wallet out of her blood-stained pants, and captchas the corpse. She holds it close to her heart, like a secret. Like John’s stupid last words: a confession whispered for her and no one else.And then she starts walking home.

(Meat 36) Terezi’s jaw tightens. She’s not ready to hear any words that remind her of those few hours with John. Her hand goes to her pocket, where she’s keeping the wallet. She traces the contours of it with her thumb and forces a smile.

[...] Here we both are. It’s a beautiful day. You’ve got your dead boyfriend in your wallet. And we’ve already managed to strike such a nice metatextual rapport. So hear me out. [...] I ease the throttle back a bit, just enough so that I’m not whispering directly into her ear when she slips the wallet out of her pocket. She clutches it so hard in her palm that she’s digging dents into the leather, and bites her lip.

God damnit, that was an important fucking thing for me to forget. I hope she preserved his corpse in a better way than just “wallet”. And why the FUCK did Dirk think it was so important to bring him???? That’s not good, is it.

Back to the commentary, going to how the Dirk crew’s conversations especially cover the meta question of why continue the story at all...

This is actually a similar question to one explored by a series that shares a lot of Homestuck's creative DNA, Steven Universe.

Oh god damnit, what timing, huh? And then they go on about what constitutes a happy ending and what’s supposed to happen after, how work might not be done, et cetera. Hopefully these authors take a page from how SU:F finished, because Steven Universe managed to pull it back to uplifting pretty well.

These are two dangerous women, confined together long enough to learn all of each others' weaknesses, and sharp-edged enough to exploit them.

True enough.

Dirk, unfortunately, cucks the audience from seeing the scene's "true resolution." What an asshole. I've never been madder at this guy than I am right now. I bet he didn't even provide a warranty.

Pff.

On to the next commentary:

Sketches and Commentary: Catnapped, Part Three

Catnapped is some of the most fun I’ve had while writing, because Jasprose is just so goddamn fun. Cats don’t plan, they live in the moment. She’s always existing in that moment of pushing a glass off the table.

We can all agree with that I think.

Plenty they talk about here, but I’ll just quote part of anything about characterization...

First, I actually really appreciate getting a lot at Jane's genuine sympathy for Dirk here. There was quite a bit of mutual fondness and care between the two of them – but, at the same time, they enabled each others' worst tendencies.

Hm!

Swifer remains the closest thing to a "straight man" this story has. (Not in the sexuality way. In the comedy way.)

Yep.

There was no universe where we left this story without Jasprose saying "owo what's this". You know it, I know it.

Jesus Christ, I didn’t catch that.

God, Problem Sleuth just has the worst commuting luck. He should put some of his rug money into a permanent locksmith. Checking back in with these scenes is always a delight. It probably took PS like two hundred off-screen panels to get to this point. Miserable.

Wait, that’s right, Catnapped 28 is shown before DDD 12, but AFTER Dad is shown marching up handcuffed in Catnapped 26. And yet in DDD 12, Dad and DD come fetch PS from out of his office, when the handcuffed thing hasn’t happened yet in DDD. You can’t DO that, authors! It only makes RELEASE ORDER sense, not any sort of OTHER sense? What about when people come to catch up or read this later! Come on, that’s sloppy. Unless they’re going to leave PS behind to stay trapped in his office MORE, which I wouldn’t put past them. (But, wouldn’t make sense since the bullethole from C28 is already there in DDD12.) Andrew knew more of how to be responsible telling an out-of-time-sync story, believe it or not.

Commentary ends with a few sketches, like Jasprose doing a The Mask impression, appropriately.

Sketches and Commentary: Chapter 6, "A Conversation Regarding Relevance"

Oh, it’s Jade time.

On alt!Callie’s starting Space rant:

I wanted to impress on everyone just how vast it is, and also to remind the audience that alt!callie has them at the same mercy that Dirk does. She can force us to listen to her pontificate endlessly if she so chooses. She’s slightly less insufferable than Dirk, if only perhaps because her text isn’t orange.

Yep, mostly.

So here she is. Jade. We find out that not only is she conscious inside her own head, she is also incredibly chatty. And not too thrilled with her current situation. I know most of the audience isn’t either, considering the fact that Jade having no agency has basically become a meme at this point.

NEVER. AGAIN. PLZ.

As Callie told us in the beginning of the chapter, it isn’t natural for people to behave like narrative devices. Even within her own thematic framework, Callie has a habit of defaulting to behaving like a person after all.

Even alt!Callie still became a story nerd, not just original Callie -- she just became a different, more insufferable type of story nerd.

Plenty more discussion I don’t need to touch on... keep in mind I’m omitting large parts of this in most cases, again, to respect the paywall.

A remark on Dave and Karkat being two emotionally-constipated early-twenties Bernie Bros, which... I mean. Fair.

She definitely does love them, and she wanted to be with them, but also...Jade has a lot of other prospects. She’s actually the one character who seems to be enjoying her time on Earth c. Hitting up interspecies raves and getting around. We just haven’t seen any of that because none of those other people she boned are main characters.

Maybe that’s why alt!Callie was so blind and dismissive of it? Offscreen experience being less in the Light, therefore less relevant to her, even though that’s the exact attitude she’s ostensibly at war with?

Anyway Jade’s consciousness is huge.

Yep.

It’s been a while since we’ve had any sort of serious meta talk about classpects. Mostly because there’s really no use for classpects outside of the game, unless, for instance, you go around referring to everyone as the Prince or the Witch because you are a dramatic alien in a hood. It does make sense that a Witch’s powers would be more useful than a Sylph’s to a Muse.

Aaaand that’s all the classpect mention we’re gonna get isn’t it? ;P

(Yes I know, the author told us to dial it back. They ARE going ahead and prepping to answer some outstanding questions, though.)

Honestly, the Jade Situation is a tough one. To be sure, she has been sacrificed to the plot again and again, something that probably began as a coincidence and then later grew into a theme. Space players are destined to be huge, cosmic forces in the universe. Big movers. [...] But usually when we hear the story of big, god-like beings, we don’t think about the personalities behind them. What was it like for god to create the universe? Was he lonely? Did he regret it? Did he wish he could live in it instead?

And Jade WAS too powerful not to sideline, by a certain point in the plot. And before that, maybe trapped in a bit of a character arc where she had to get over some notions to step into the action.

I actually think Jade could have been okay with this. With being A Force For The Narrative. [...] But then Callie makes it personal.

Agreed. If alt!Callie hadn’t been so shitty about it in general, they could have worked things out more meaningfully; but the immense resolve and effort it took to dominate Caliborn in her origin timeline has tainted her perception ALMOST as bad as Dirk’s. Much of HS^2 is probably going to involve her gradually learning how to get over that in the background, the balance she needs to take ala the Ultimate Riddle’s lesson.

(Tangentially... it was said that it would have been nearly impossible to make alt!Callie dominate, even across ALL timelines. What if alt!Callie had her timeline’s origin explained in HS^2 by a Third Scratch at this late date with the likes of Davebot running around to do it??? That would probably make me fucking mad.)

Back to the commentary.

Admittedly these last few chapters have definitely been “girls beating the crap out of each other” heavy, and I hope that’s okay.

PFFFFF

Callie and Jade aren’t really sure who makes a decision on what is considered “just” or “heroic”. Plot twist, it’s us. We do. But also the alpha timeline does.

Hmm.

More gorgeous Xam art. Initially we were going to make it more ambiguous whether or not she actually ate the peanut butter, but we decided to have it be a decisive moment of triumph.

Really? Well, you could have made it visually clearer that the candy dropped. A lot of people visually missed that. This is a consequence of the back-and-forth artist-isnt-the-author art-commissioning going on, in part... Andrew was MUCH better at conveying what he wanted to convey BETWEEN panels than this crew, like comic book panels and their composition together; you can see that when comparing Homestuck proper’s sprite animation to that of fan adventures that used sprites, for instance. These guys are at something of a disadvantage due to their disconnect.

Commentary on the Commentary

This commentary uses "she/her" to talk about the alternate Calliope possessing Jade, while the "other" Callie (remember them?) uses they/them. This other Calliope, presumably, has a much different relationship with her gender – and her brother – than the Callie we saw discussing the subject with Roxy and John. One of my favorite things about this update (I can say that, because I'm a second person who didn't write it) was that subtle hint about how different her Caliborn must have been to allow her to predominate in the first place. I'd be really interested in fan works exploring more about her (and his) past.

Hhhhmmmmmmm.

Not sure what else to say to that, but it does make me hmmm.

Sketches and Commentary: Diamonds, Dames, and Dads, Part 1

Probably not much plot-relevant here...

Oh pff.

They had full drawings of them going in for the kiss on standby. They couldn’t resist making them.

Real talk, I have been looking forward to writing this story the most out of any other part of HS^2. Finally I get to combine my passions. Cheesy noir bullshit and old men making eyes at each other.

Pfffffff. Yes.

...the next three or four pages of this writing go on to describe how sexy this is and these characters and setting are. I can’t fault a word of any of it.

The dream team is assembled. Nothing can possibly go wrong.

Wow, I caught up on all this commentary quick. See you next time.

#Homestuck #hs2 #Homestuck Liveblog #upd8 #Homestuck^2 #bladekindeyewear #blastyoboots #Homestuck Commentary #spoiler #spoilers

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rhythmic-idealist · 4 years

Text

Hey! Want a oneshot from yours truly?

Fandoms!:

Homestuck (but not very comfortable writing for Hiveswap/Friendsim characters)

particularly, but not exclusively, the:

dancestors

& ancestors!

Harry Potter

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu (if you can abide me being behind several seasons)

I am definitely willing to try my hand at writing for The Raven Cycle but am in the middle of The Dream Thieves currently, so. I think I have a really good grasp on most of the major cast who has appeared, for where I AM so far.

I can include OCs, just gimme a little time to learn them! Self-shipping very okay.

I’m gonna reserve the right to refuse any request, so if you don’t want to change it after your donation/will feel robbed if you need to change it but have already made a donation, hit me up to ask about it first? My ask box and messages are both open.

The Deal:

I haven’t opened up requests for a decent while, but I will for a donation. [TW: unsanitary conditions, serious illness, pet death, cancer mention.] My friend and his mother are trying desperately to escape their current home before it kills them and any more of their pets, and to escape a landlord who will do nothing for them.

Donation link again : https://www.gofundme.com/f/1uhtqxx5g0

[Mind the TWs above again if you’re going to read the full story through the link, but you don’t have to read it to donate. The only that applies if you don’t read through is the unsanitary tw, there’s a photo of a moldy ceiling.]

I’m gonna say $5 minimum before you land a oneshot.

Word counts for these commissions will probably fall around 800 word minimums, though they can get a lot longer if I really pick up steam on something! Here’s an 1800ish prompted thing I wrote (starting at “Hey. Heyyy, friend. You don’t need this.”) (major character death warning!) as an example of a past request! There are more writing samples down below.

Okay So Rules

I will only write SFW material.

There are writing samples below, go ahead and check those out if you wanna.

I reserve the right to refuse or request to modify any commission request, and a request to modify (that’s what’s likely to happen if I have a problem) isn’t me turning you away! That said, if you’re going to want to make sure you feel secure paying, you can chat story details with me before making the donation.

Show me your emailed GoFundMe receipt, or if you prefer, I can give you some identifying thing to put in the comments of the fundraiser for proof that you’ve made your donation!

$5 minimum, no maximum.

5 donations of $5 made by the same person would for right now get counted as one $25 donation, and one oneshot. I appreciate that endlessly, and would probably try extra hard on your piece.

Once we start getting past 30, every additional $10 can be another commission, to a point. I’ll limit it to 3 slots per person for now I think? I need to see what my workload is. So $5-$39 is one story, $40-49 is two stories, $50+ is three. Thank you so much if you’re even considering that, by the way. I really, really need my friend to be safe and it means the world to me. I will work hard on it/them.

If you send me any kind of explicitly sexual content in your request, even if you have already made your donation, I will refuse service. If you are a white supremacist (I cannot believe I need to say this), I will refuse service.

Want something bigger, multichapter, etc? Let’s talk. I make no promises, but definitely let’s see.

I am willing to offer beta reading, proofreading, or even feedback on school essays, instead!

SFW and all other conditions still apply.

Here are the writing samples! (Want a sample for another character? Just ask!)

[Signless + OC; Major character death warning.]

“Hey. Heyyy, friend. You don’t need this.”

[The Signless’s] bloodpusher was pounding in his ears. It’s a miracle he heard them.

And that, that realization, is enough to entirely off-balance him, to snap him out of it enough with the sheer what-the-fuckery of this situation because this does not happen, to him.

So the picture in front of him forms in vague images and blurs, features popping out one at a time from a general, bleeding-together backdrop he’d stopped reading as a landscape, hyperfocused in on something else he’d already forgotten. Porrim is on the ground, bleeding. This has happened before, and she always gets up, he’s not sure what the problem is.

[More Signless! TWs in the tags on AO3.]

I cannot ask you for your life, because neither of us owns it.

I can ask you to recognize the conscious choice you make to live, knowing trolls like you are not given that option. I can ask you to stop pretending, here and now, to deserve any more safety and wellbeing than any other troll on or off Alternia. I am asking you to make a conscious decision whose life yours will lift up, because whether you like it or not you will hurt and you will lift up someone. Choose someone who did not use you. Choose someone with less safety and less freedom if you can find them and if you cannot, try anyway, they’re out there.

Choose to refuse to be useful, and to instead be kind.

[Some Hermione Granger - you all are lucky! I haven’t published this ANYWHERE yet!]

[In part because I got halfway through and realized there were canon obstacles to it happening, but it’s an AU, now.]

So she does what Hermione always does. If you're going to play their game, you need to learn their rules.

Hermione is good at rules.

The hair stays. It's the first thing Ron asks, once he sees her in battle mode. First-first, he says anyone would be stupid not to take her, that the Ministry should be groveling on their knees for Hermione Jean Granger, "what did you get on your N.E.W.T.s again?" Not because Hermione doesn't know this is true, but because it's good for her to hear anyway, and mostly because Ron wouldn't think for a second to let her start to doubt it.

But he doesn't need to ask if she's going back. Just if the hair stays. She's already done so much, she's got to be good enough for them already, it's the Ministry, Hermione, not Victor Bleeding Krum.

#harry potter #hermione granger #signless #alpha trolls #homestuck ancestors #homestuck #kankri

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ardenttheories · 5 years

Note

Thoughts on the epilogue so far?

So glad you asked, anon. I’ve spend a while thinking over it, and I’ve got a few thoughts in mind. Mostly ramblings and potentials, at the moment.

Prefacing that with a warning, and some information:

All of the CW tags on the Epilogue are relevant. I’ve seen a lot of people assuming it’s a joke, or Hussie mocking people - but it’s genuinely not. The tags have apparently been checked by a lot of people (including trans folk and cis women) to ensure they’re relevant and suitable for the content. However, a lot of it is apparently just going to be talked about, not actually brought up in graphic detail during the events of the Epilogue - so please take caution as we continue on. I’m sure people will eventually write up a page-by-page of content warnings so that we know exactly where each potential trigger comes in, and someone, somewhere, will do a writeup of what happens to avoid the warnings altogether.

Additionally, the entire Epilogue has already been written up, which means we’re back to upd8 schedules. We’ll just have to see how they plan on working the upd8s, since, as far as I can tell, there’s currently no specific plan in place, or at least not one that we know of.

And now, into my ramblings.

First of all, the hints towards relationships? Very cool. It’s nice that we confirmed Dave, Karkat, and Jade have that weird dynamic going on that none of them even really understand, and that Roxy and Calliope remain a sapphic mystery to pretty much everyone. Hopefully a lot of this gets confirmed later on in the Epilogue - or at least that we get something more solid to hold onto than John’s non-understanding of relationships.

John’s lamentations on his potential relationship with Roxy also seemed incredibly sad, and actually furthers my theory on John as a True Heir of Breath. As does just about everything he mentions, honestly.

Since he still has his Retcon powers, he’s still technically “Free”; Free from Canon, yes, but also free from the potential destruction of their Canonicity. He’s also, once again, the person who has to Free everyone from that fate. He’s Freedom incarnate, but also, it seems, Apathy incarnate. The fact that he’s apparently barely been speaking to any of his friends, feels disconnect between who they were and who they are now, still seems to be struggling to find his place in Earth C, and (so far, at least) seems unable to fully connect with Rose and Roxy implies that his inheritance of Breath is slowly reaching its peak.

On the other hand, the talk of Canon is wildly interesting. I never 100% completed the comic - lost my place somewhere before the Tricksters, but kept roughly up to date on stuff that happened afterwards and have since managed to catch back up to Jane’s introduction, though I’ve yet to continue reading again - so I know she’s likely referencing things I don’t fully understand yet.

Having said that, there is something pretty disturbing about the ideas that Rose is presenting.

The way she puts it, there’s three categories of existence defined by the amount of three different factors within them:

Relevance, Truth, and Essentiality.

Canon has varying levels of Relevance and Essentiality, I’m assuming based on the fact that past events can be changed through something like a Retcon and thus nothing that happens is entirely Essential and nor is everything in Canon wholly Relevant. All things in Canon, however, are True - the full events of the story 100% unquestionable.

Non-Canon has no Truth behind it, and thus renders whatever Relevance or Essentiality it has meaningless. It doesn’t matter that the events happening in these Non-Canon scenes are Relevant or Essential to a subjective degree - that to us, or to the characters, they’re Relevant to development or the story, or Essential to moving the plot on in the direction the author wants, or in presenting an idea or foundation for a character’s development - because they’re not Canon, and they can never be canon unless brought into Canon by the Canonical author or characters.

Out-of-Canon has almost no Relevance or Essentiality and holds no baring on Canon events or plots at all, but remains Truth in the sense that it’s still part of Canonicity. These events don’t matter to the main Canon, the real Canon, but they aren’t exactly Untrue. They’re as real as whatever’s happening in Canon, but can be easily looked over, forgotten, or overall viewed as insignificant.

This is, essentially, what Rose is implying is happening to Earth C. It’s becoming forgotten and insignificant, it’s shifting too far away from Canon, and something very bad will happen if it does - not physically, but metaphysically. I think she essentially means they’ll either become Non-Canon, or they’ll lose their place as the Alpha Timeline.

That’s a lot to think about, so let me use an example I gave a friend who has never read Homestuck:

The Star Wars movies are considered to be Canon. These are what you go to when you want to watch the actual events of the Star Wars series - the main plot, the main storylines, the main characters.

The comics and the animated TV shows are Out-of-Canon. These events do not follow the main Canonical events of the Canon movies, but still happen within the same world at roughly the same time, or set up/explain events that happen in the movies. Sometimes they don’t even include main characters, and characters mentioned in the comics/TV shows may not ever appear in the movies, or even be referenced. These are True events, but hold little Relevance towards the watching of the Canon movies - and can hold varying degrees of Essentiality based on what the comics and TV shows are showing.

Fanfiction is Non-Canon. These are events that hold absolutely no Truth towards either the Out-of-Canon or Canon plot and storylines of Star Wars. Reading a piece of Fanfiction will never give you any additional, Canonical information about Star Wars unless it’s made Canon by a writer. Princess Leia might absolutely deck a Storm Trooper and single-handedly raid a Sith hideout and slaughter the bad guys with one hand tied behind her back to save Han Solo in a fanfic, but none of those events have ever actually happened in Canon. They might hold some sort of Relevance or Essentiality - either because they develop the characters better, or plug up plot holes, or spread some Canonicity of events, or even just help to keep the actual Canon alive by ensuring fans are still consuming anything about it so it stays firm in their minds - but they are never True.

So what Earth C has done is placed itself in a position where they no longer align with the Canon events of Homestuck. Homestuck finished as soon as they stepped through that door, but they are still very much Canonical. They no longer contribute to the progression of canon, but they are still a product of Canonical events and are 100% the Canonical players of Homestuck.

But the longer they stay Out-of-Canon, they lose their Relevance and Essentiality - their Importance. That’s what Light is all about, after all. Rose is essentially realising that the longer they stay living in Earth C, in a world that Hussie can’t ever fully write out, no matter how hard he tries, they’re going to become less and less important.

Rose’s marriage to Kanaya is Out-of-Canon. Wholly Canonical, and it definitely happened, but her marriage is in no way Essential to the progression of Homestuck. It’s losing its meaning and importance because it didn’t happen in Canon. The more they do Out-of-Canon, the more unimportant it gets - until eventually some drastic event occurs that means it’s completely lost its Truth.

So, John has to go back and defeat Lord English to ensure they stay Canonical. If he doesn’t, their timeline will go on - but they’ll no longer be the Alpha timeline, and they’ll no longer be Canonical. They’ll become Non-Canon. They’ll lose all Truth completely.

I have the feeling the Apophis thing that kept popping up in the 413 event on FFBF will also become relevant here. I mean, it’s literally a snake that’s meant to eat the sun, and we get told that the Green Sun has to be consumed by a supermassive blackhole - one that John’s been dreaming about “in anime”, which I think probably means something to do with Lord English. At the very least, Caliborn.

I’m incredibly interested by the idea of John going back into canon, nabbing their younger selves, and doing… something. He can’t attack LE head on, and they’re going after his younger self - so Caliborn, probably? - but I’m genuinely curious where in the timeline John will end up, and who he’ll need to take. Definitely Dave, at least, since Rose mentioned some sort of weapon he has, and I’m assuming by proxy that means the other kids - but which trolls, and does that also include Calliope? Is this the event we’ve been waiting for, where John goes back and saves everyone?

John’s dream also worries me. A supermassive blackhole devouring the entirety of Paradox Space, permakilling billions upon billions of ghosts as it spans the width of the universe. This makes me wonder if we’re going to get the final ending to Homestuck - the True ending. One where everything is wrapped up so neatly that every other timeline is devoured by this blackhole. There will be no more offshoots, no reason for doomed timelines or successful-but-not-Canon sessions. I get the feeling that’s where it might be going, or at least that’s what John’s dream is implying.

So what that concerns me with, then, is Rose’s hesitance when John says he’ll come back. There’s the implication there that, no, John won’t be coming back. Or at least that Rose won’t be seeing him again. Roxy’s concern, too - and Calliope’s ensuring that this is a choice John gets to make rather than something he has to do - holds some sort of worrying note I’m not fully sure of yet.

Talking to a few people, I get the feeling it might be something along the lines of these:

- John has to die to complete this mission.

John’s death is at the hands of LE, or in his attempts to defeat LE, and becomes a vital part to his defeat

John’s the “powerful being” who attempts the suicide strike to destroy the Green Sun, and that’s why he’s having dreams about it now

- John will be creating a new timeline, and will end up getting Canon-locked into it, meaning that he won’t be able to return to the current Alpha-timeline Earth C

- Something will happen to Rose? Her condition might be worse than she initially thought, or she might be downplaying it for John’s sake, and rather then being concerned about his safety, she’s actually concerned about hers

- John will create a timeline that has no End State, or will create a new Alpha timeline. Either way, he’ll be dooming the current Alpha-timeline Earth C.

In any case, I am incredibly excited to see what happens with this. I feel like it’s going to be a very long, very interesting Epilogue - one that, hopefully, plugs up a lot of the plotholes we’ve been complaining about over the past three years.

#long post//#ardenttheories #anonymous #homestuck epilogues

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lettersofsky · 5 years

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DistantPastZine - The Summoner - Names Die While Legends Linger

So I was given the amazing opportunity to write on the recently released @distantpastzine and now I get to post the pieces I wrote for it here ^_^

Rating:Teen And Up Audiences Archive Warning:Major Character Death Fandom:Homestuck Characters:The Summoner (Homestuck) | Darkleer (Homestuck) | Grand Highblood (Homestuck) | Spinneret Mindfang Additional Tags:A Dash of Depersonalization | Implied Pale Summleer Language:English

` A bit of an introspection into what it becomes to stop truly being someone and become something before the end. `

You are The Summoner.

That’s the only name that really matters anymore.

Your true name, your first name, the name you chose for yourself upon your first pupation trying to make sense of what your lusus called you, and carried with you for most of your life, it’s lost to you now. Far too long since you’ve used it for yourself, since anyone else’s used it in reference to you. Mindfang had preferred your title, most everyone preferred the name you fashioned for yourself at the beginning of your rebellion. Except for… but he’d left long before the end of things, running when it had all started to take a turn for the worst for all of you; the number of trolls that returned from missions grew lesser and lesser, supplies started to dry up, allies disappeared and turned against you. You hadn’t blamed him, couldn’t blame him for it because maybe… maybe Rufioh Nitram would have done the same thing, at one point in time.

But that didn’t really matter did it? It didn’t matter that ‘Summoner’ wasn’t your true name. Rufioh Nitram wasn’t important in this story, he’d already departed this world, had left when Mindfang had urged him to drive his lance clean through her torso, words honeyed sweet and comforting in his skull even as her breath grew wet and horrid with the blood in her lungs, urging him forward, onwards, you can do it I want you too…

Rufioh Nitram had perished then, with his matesprits body cradled in his arms, bleeding out from the merciful blow of his lance.

It was The Summoner’s turn today.

The Summoner’s battle was lost. Your war, your rebellion, over and the Highbloods all the more enraged for your part in it, for the lives of their that you brought to a sudden and abrupt end with all of the care they had ever shown you and yours. They were demanding your execution now and the most care you could give that notion was relief in that it wouldn’t be… wouldn’t be Darkleer firing the arrow at you, you’d had enough of quadmates culling each other for the perigee. You would consider it a small kindness from the cruel world you existed in, but one you were glad for all the same.

Currently, you were awaiting your escorts, alone in your dark cell, no window to allow in light or fresh air, leaving you cut off from the world but for the barest hint of light that crept under the door that allowed you to just barely be able to see the details of the room around you with your warm-blooded eyes. It’s nothing impressive, the only thing of interest around you the markings left by prior occupants; claw marks of varying lengths and desperation, some steady and deliberate in the walls as trolls attempted to guess at the passing of time and others messy and frantic on the floor, marking the final desperate struggle to deny, to escape the fate that was awaiting them at the hands of the Highbloods dragging them from the safety of the cut off isolated room. You swear you could smell where terror and hopeless resignation had sunken so deep into the walls it’s permanently stained the still, stale air around you.

You have nothing to do in here, nothing to keep your hands or thoughts busy so you can allow yourself to think, to think and dwell on things for longer than you’d ever let yourself at any other time. You don’t know when the Highbloods will come to drag you out of your room before the infestation your army hadn’t culled from the face of Alternia.

So you have the time to do it, you have the time, the opportunity, to think.

…

You can’t recall a time Mindfang ever used your true name, at least not before she’d been guiding you through the motions that would finally release her from her mortal coil, which is more the pity because you would have liked to hear it in her voice, in her actual voice and not the echoing, all-consuming facsimile of it in your skull. It would have sent you spiralling, free-falling into the reddest pity for her, her finally seeing you as more than The Summoner, more than the image of a general, more than the matesprit that would take her life from her.

You think, you would have liked if she saw Rufioh. Maybe you could have come to know her underneath Mindfang’s smooth talking and weaving web of influence.

… But maybe that was just the fantasy of a wriggler that still wanted so much to be wholly seen and not found lacking despite his… abnormalities.

It didn’t matter, the past was dead and gone and Mindfang had only cared for Summoner, Rufioh hadn’t even been a blip on her radar.

But Darkleer… he’d given a damn about Rufioh. He’d taken your name and kept it close to his pumper, breathed it from his lip like it was something important, something deserving to be spoken into the air and allowed to hold attention and regard in their lives. Darkleer… he’d ensured that you knew that there would always be time to just be Rufioh when the expectations of The Summoner grew too much from your ill-prepared shoulders to handle, he gave you time and a place where you could put aside the clown’s movements, the mounting body count of your army, the looming knowledge that this was useless, futile, doomed, and you could just be Rufioh for a few minutes. Rufioh who loved the lusus that taught him to fly, Rufioh who had hid his mutation even though his shoulder’s and wing stubs ached from being bound so tightly and so long, Rufioh who’d worked endlessly, tirelessly just to make things the tiniest bit easier for whoever came in after he left.

He’d let you be a troll when you’d started to forget what that was like, you were so grateful for that. So very grateful to have had that for the brief period of time he’d stopped being terrified of stepping out of place and earning your culling ire and you’d let yourself trust the turncoat’s traitorous heart long enough to relax into his regard. Darkleer had liked your name, had liked speaking it, saying it when nobody else did and keeping it like it was something precious that was wholly his and wasn’t that such a pitiful thing? To hold so much pride in being given something so small, so minute and insignificant?

But then you’d… you’d felt the same at being given his name in return. A name kept by monsters and stripped away from him so that he’d be nothing more than another cog into the Empire’s spiralling machinery.

Which was a shame because Horuss was such a good name.

You’d used it when he’d left, just like he’d used Rufioh when he’d requested forgiveness, soft and quiet directed towards the earth with a difference that turned your stomach and made you all too aware of where you both started out. But you’d already forgiven him, forgiven him when his brows refused to unfurrow and he started to walk like a hunted creature at the edges of camp again, forgiven when you’d found his makeshift hive dark and abandoned like he’d only been a ghost you’d been imaging to help you deal with everything and…

Horuss had tried, had tried to make you understand, stuttering and stammering, losing his words amongst sharp clicks and noises of panic and distress you hadn’t been able to ease, you hadn’t wanted to… to touch him, to shush and calm him and reassure him that he could get out the words that would tear apart your trust in him would only shatter you both and you had wanted… You’d wanted to protect that bit of you that was still Rufioh and not The Summoner so you didn’t, you held yourself still and waited as he petered off, Horuss’ voice dying in the space between you both as you did your best to hold both Rufioh and Summoner in your head at once.

The Summoner’s decision should have been to put an end to the turncoat, to stop him from leaving and potentially leading the Highbloods back to them in order to garter favour or forgiveness or any other logical reason that would have made him well-justified in his actions. But Rufioh…

You’d let him go, you couldn’t ask him to stay with you, couldn’t ask him to potentially watch you die even if it would have soothed something in you to have him there to watch your back and potentially die for you but… but he deserved more than that.

You wanted more for him than that, he deserved to have his ending separated from the Highbloods that had controlled his life and while The Summoner should have brought the Expatriate to heel and finished him for his desertion, Rufioh couldn’t do that to Horuss.

You hadn’t asked him to stay. You hadn’t impaled him for daring to leave.

No.

Instead you’d reached out and up, not too much he was still directing his whole form towards the dirt beneath your feet in a futile hope to disappear into it you knew, to touch him, to bring his forehead to yours and in the light of moons not yet risen you’d wished him the best of luck and a kind death when it eventually came for him. You’d thought yourself strong, you’d believed that you’d be able to bare this with all of The Summoner’s fortitude but then he’d slumped against you with a noise that sounded so much like physical pain that Rufioh was brought low by it. You had a stray, wild thought that perhaps he’d falter, that Horuss’ resolve would shatter like the windows of cathedrals but he hadn’t, far stronger, far weaker, than that and oh how you had pitied him then.

He’d left you standing there, alone and overlooking an army preparing for what was more than likely gearing up to be their final few nights of existing and you… you hadn’t been able to watch him go, you couldn’t bring yourself to do that to yourself. You’d tucked Rufioh away then, he wasn’t needed with the Highbloods drawing closer and an army looking to him for guidance. Rufioh may have been the one to scale the hill to confront Horuss for his decision to leave, but it was The Summoner and Expatriate that took their separate ways down.

The Highbloods had descended upon the camp within the few nights, meeting an army prepared for them and with nothing to lose but the very breath in their lungs and the very rights to existence they were all fighting so desperately for, freedom and equality and right that should have been theirs as much as it was the Highbloods despite how much warmer they were than the others. The Highbloods may have been the ones to emerge victorious from the battle, but there was no denying the blood it had cost them, a small victory hollow and spiteful amidst a tremendous loss, but one you were going to keep close and warm in your pumper up until they stole the life from you. It was nothing and it was petty but it was wholly yours in this story, an achievement you would be proud to carry to your grave.

The Summoner – Rebel Scum and Culler of Clowns

You’d been captured at that battle, captured instead of killed there as a warrior amongst your comrades and companions, brought hundreds of miles in order to be made an example of like The Sufferer before you. A warning to the rest of your kin on the lowest, warmest, most fragile and cruelly treated side of the hemospectrum so that they would not attempt to fight against the ways of The Empire again.

There was no place for Rufioh Nitram amongst that.

You were The Summoner now and you were about to be executed for daring to want something more for, not even for yourself really (it was hard to want anything for yourself when you could barely settle on a ‘yourself’ to want for) but for those of yours that weren’t in any place to want or hope for better themselves, for those who’d been told from the moment they could comprehend it that they’d never be anything more than tools to be used and thrown away once they were deemed ‘broken’ by those who thought themselves so much better than them simply because of the colder, bluer blood than ran through them.

The door to your cell opens and it is a sudden burst of agony to your senses.

The slow grinding of moving rusted metal pierces ears adjusted to silence and you vainly attempt to cast your eyes away from the dramatic increase of light as it’s finally allowed inside, it’s too different, too sudden a change after spending however long you had in the dark, it takes you longer than you want it to for your ears to stop ringing in the renewed quiet, still echoing with the sounds of metal slowly grinding against metal and for your eyes to clear of the igure shaped-shadow amongst a door way of burning light imprinted upon them.

You hate that you have to wait to see the faces of whoever it is that’ll be escorting you to your ending, it’s a good tactic you’ll admit but you hate it all the same. You blink as things click back into processing the world around you as they’re supposed to and you feel your pumper free in your chest at the image being fed into your brain.

Where you’d expected to see faceless nobodies, unimportant and uncaring there to complete their task and nothing more, instead you lock gazes with the Grand Highblood himself, leader of the Clown Church, main authority of the land and all around complete and utter bastard.

The very same troll who’s orders you’d defied all that time ago at the start of this whole endeavour.

You can… barely even recall back to that point in time, it feels like so, so long ago, like a whole other life and maybe it was because it had been before you were The Summoner, something a lot of trolls just liked to gloss over and pretend never existed.

But you think… you think he might have been ordering you and your squad off on some mission, run of the mill what with the Alternian Military all falling under the Clown’s orders at some point or another with the Empress spreading her Tyranny through the stars. But it’d been different because, because it’d been impossible, you’d known it was an impossible endeavour he had been trying to sent you all off you but he hadn’t cared to listen to you, hadn’t given a single solitary fuck that he’d wanted you and yours to just throw your lives away for nothing when there was a hundred other, better, solutions if he had just let go of his pride long enough to just listen, admit to the fact he didn’t know everything about everything.

And you’d just… you’d had enough.

You hadn’t walked into his throne room with the intention of revealing your mutation, not even in your most horrific sleeping-terrors had the thought even crossed your mind, and you certainly hadn’t expected to be able to just escape him and his mirthful pack of rabid attack dogs. The dragon had been a neat bonus though, even if more than a handful of trolls insisted she was very haunted by the recently deceased Neophyte, you would allow that is was a neat haunted bonus.

And from there? It had only escalated and you’d never even had the tiniest want to consider stopping any of it.

You hadn’t even been expecting to see the Grand Highblood again, or at least you’d hoped you wouldn’t ever see him again, not in this life or whatever counted as the next one, but there he was in all his… questionable glory.

You lift your chin and bare your blunt, Lowblood teeth at him, wings flaring out as much as they’re able with how they were restrained and you make it clear to him that as much as you’d bound and at every possible disadvantage you will not go down easy if he’s planning to just kill you here and now. You’re not going to fight the fate you’ve been handed in life, you’re not that stupid and there’s nothing left for you anymore, but there’s no way on Alternia that you’re just going to let him put an end to you where no one could see without so much as a fight.

A name’s breathed into the tense air of the tiny room and you feel yourself freeze; breath stolen your lungs being squeezed tight in your chest.

The Grand Highblood just said your true name.

You don’t… don’t know how he knows that name, you don’t get it there’s just no possible way he could have remembered it after all this time, you’d been a nobody then there’s no reason for him to have known it in the first place let alone remember it up to now.

Rufioh hadn’t been worth remembering, not until after he’d become The Summoner.

Your pumper’s frozen, still and aching in the hollow of your chest, throat tight and a chill stiffening your spine that you know has nothing to do with whatever chucklevoodoos he may be using to put the fear of him into you. You’re left just staring up at the giant, hulking form of the Highblood as he steps further into the room, taking up all the free space of it and not even bothering to give you the dignity of pretending he has to worry about you attacking him or, even more unlikely, escaping, which is more than enough to make you snap back into focus because fuck that.

You snarl at him, lips pulling back over your teeth even as your wings attempt to spread further in a display made ineffective by heavy, piercing chains. He doesn’t react at all to your threat, he just rolls his eyes and scoffs at you like you’re some wriggler trying to stand up to a troll fresh from their second adult moult and continues to draw closer and closer still until you have nowhere else to go, nowhere to retreat to with how tightly you’re pressing your back against the wall. He kneels in front of you, giving no thought to the fact that he’s putting himself so close to your teeth and fangs, like you’ve never been a threat to him, reaching out to grasp your chin in a single, blood-stained giant, clawed hand and holding you in place despite your struggles to free yourself of the grip.

You’re trapped now, the wall’s at your back pressing your wings uncomfortably close to your body and his hand is a freezing iron vice holding you in place and you hate it. You try to snap your teeth, growl as much as you’re able to in your position, well aware that it holds absolutely nothing to the noises Highbloods are able to create but unwilling to be caught not trying to all the same. You will not let him look down upon you more than he already is, you won’t.

He opens his mouth and his words are low, slow and coiling in your think pan and it makes you flinch back as much as you can.

He wants you to repent, to beg and plead his forgiveness, the Empire’s forgiveness, for going against the Empire in the way you had, to the extent you had. He wants you to play into his sick amusements by turning traitorous and turncoat yourself to all you’ve worked and strode towards to get to this point in time at your inevitable end, to cast aside The Sufferer and his teachings from your pan and pumper so that you may be spared and allowed to continue to draw breath into your lungs.

Save your own filthy, mutant hide.

Escape the execution block and the mass hollering for your blood to paint the walls of the very church he disgraced so long ago.

Become nothing more than a doll he can claim to have re-attached the strings to and become Rufioh Nitram again, loyal worker, subordinate, his play-thing in all the ways someone like you should be.

It’d be so easy, he promises you, soft and quiet and so very persuasive. So easy to just fall into place like you should.

But…

Rufioh Nitram had been the one who started all of this.

You were Rufioh Nitram when you cast aside your position and told him that you were not going to throw away your life or the life of any of your squad for something so incredibly stupid as a troll who wouldn’t listen to reason and you were the same troll now. The same troll and more besides, no matter what this clown thought of you.

You are no doll, no clown’s play thing.

You are Rufioh Nitram.

You are The Summoner and yours is not a story that continues past tonight. Yours is not one of great importance or regard, not meant to continue past it’s point, not meant to linger and over-stay the welcome you were so graciously given.

No.

No, yours is nothing but a steppingstone, a secondary chapter to what was already started by The Sufferer, The Signless, before you. A precursor to what the generations to come will continue with pride in their pumpers and fire in their eyes and you are not going to let this clown ruin any of that. It is not his place any more than it is yours.

You are The Summoner and you spit in the face of the Grand Highblood for his offer, proud and defiant as you ever were in life, yours might be nothing more than part of a bigger story but you decide how your life draws to its close.

And when you are taken to meet your ending point, bruise blossoming large and bronze on your face, you have eyes only for the highest of purples trained upon you. You don’t look to the crowd of ravenous, cull-thirsty faithful around you, only him.

Your story ends here, but with your death the Signless’ message lives on.

You are just the first of the rebellions he will influence and nowhere near the last.

You go to meet the Handmaid with the certainty of that seared into the very core of you.

#distantpastzine #Homestuck #Summoner #The Summoner #Fanfic

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blaperile · 5 years

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Homestuck Epilogues - Meat - Page 5

#Homestuck #The Homestuck Epilogues #Meat #reaction #Dave #Dirk #Jake

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shinssoliloquy · 3 years

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WHO? WHAT? WHERE? WHY? HOW?

5 Questions you should ask anyone when they’re starting off a project made from the basis of ego and tenacity. I’m really not a particularly smart person, But I’m smart enough to know how dumb I really am.

I’ve always been itching to do this. Twitter was never a great way to display my thoughts and writing on grounds that by limiting characters your characters by tweet you’d either get into long threads of diatribes that likely no one will even read or you’d have to space out your thoughts and mince words in order to fit to these said limitations. Obviously it’s not a bad way per say to fully flesh out your thoughts but there’s obviously some downsides and you won’t be fully capable of fulfilling those quandaries, much so espousing on your thoughts and opinions to the fullest extent. I could write a book but I’m not knowledgeable enough feel like my thoughts are worth putting into a non-fiction book. I could join discord servers but I don’t know a wreath of people who even care. I could still talk off into the Twitter void but that’s only for short bursts at a time, any ideas or subjects I’d like to elucidate or spell out would just get lost, all my themes would shoot off into the negative space that is a twitter timeline regardless of if they’re worth revisiting or not.

But of course, would it even matter if people do care or they don’t. People live off making Youtube videos and content based on themselves because they assume people actually care about whatever benign thought or creative pursuit they’d have in their head. It’s not up to me to judge if my thoughts are worth putting out there but I guess the reason people use social media is to give a voice to the voiceless, have anyone out there a chance of their own success, But how does that affect content input though, How does impact your very own mental psyche. This is a conversation for another post and it’s far from a topic I’ll have any meaningful outlook on, just from my own experiences as an outsider looking in.

WHO?

I always fancied myself a writer more than an illustrator. The whole crux of my need to learn how to draw was from the idea that “hey no one wants to draw my webcomic ideas on something awful or whatever internet messaging board I was using at the time that’ll date this post when I look back on it when I’m 40, I’ll learn how to draw then and show everyone I can STILL MAKE IT” Then I started drawing and never really looked back. Within the few years or so since I’ve made that discovery I never really focused on my writing, much less my creative writing. I’ve had few instances where I’d try to light up my spark by blog posting was making other short lived wordpresses and blogspots where I can peruse and write for a short while until I get bored and go back to drawing everyday. Of course two particular things happened in which I’ve gotten that spark back, to an extent. 1. The corona virus quarantine happened and I was stuck with nothing to do, I dropped out of school to go to a new college out of country that hasn’t really happened yet and aside from my retail job I haven’t had a good outlet for where to put my creativity too. So I ended up just drawing more but also, reading off some books off my backlog. I’ve always been interested in philosophy and non-fiction since reading Kant and Hume at age 12 and Now rediscovered it because of quarantine. Really I’ve always been a better writer or story teller than anything else but efforts to light up that energy in me has been fruitful and I’ve relegated to being another artist in the pile of artists who’s only personality is that they “like art”. Which made me realized how much of a better self sufficient and self respecting the writer can be rather then the animator. Illustrations are fleeting, words stick with you. Of course greats work of art exist and will always exist. Beautiful paintings can grip me just as much as a good work of philosophy can, But lately beautiful paintings have been disgruntled and disavowed from public schema. If you want to provide good art for people to see, use hashtags and make fast fleeting content for people to consume easily and forget about. Such is the way of social media and how they grip you to keep using their products, It’s not a revolutionary idea but it’s a concept that ends up working. In a way I’d like to counteract this by making fast fleeting content but also putting in forth ideas and writings which I can consider good but we’ll see how that ends up panning out. My goals as an artist is for another topic entirely but really I need a way to practice my non-fiction writing skills and having a blog where I can just go on and on about pointless shit is good exercise. 2. I’ve stopped communicating to people that would point me to a direction in life I didn’t really need to go through and because of that I took a detour in my mental stability and mental development, really it wasn’t good for me. but because of that I was able to keep track of where I need to go and have removed all elements in my life that can allow me to find different paths and know where I’ll truly be. I could also just talk to people about these kinds of stuff but it’s hard to really find people who I can talk about the stuff I want to talk about with and nothing really beats writing a whole diatribe about whatever comes to your mind at the time. Why do I have a lot on my mind? You’ll hear that story in another time but it’s MOST likely an autism thing.

WHAT?

Look at section: Who again but to summarize and clarify what I mean. Content is fast fleeting and non-self actualizing, people don’t want ideas they want content, They need personalities to leech off and see themselves in instead of being creatives themselves. As someone who makes art and wants to make more art It’s hard to really judge if my art is worth it for the algorithm or if it’s worth it to bring in audience retention. Not to mention most people who use social media are kids, and the only way to grab kids attention is to play to their interests, play into their already corroded brains by playing onto their synapses, Not to imply I dislike it per say but more so that I feel that certain audience can somewhat affect your creative output.

WHERE?

I made a Medium account last month after reading an article on Luxury Communism. It was a fine article but what I got out of it was how good it seems to use Medium to communicate and write articles like these, Until I realized that really it can only be used for more academic pieces and while sure I’d like to do that one day something more lowkey and personal was what I really needed. Hence a tumblr, originally a blogging website before being used to oxidize internet discourse and internet creativity in general, was a perfect outlet for these kinds of posts. I’m actually used to using tumblr for one and can edit and know my way around doing these sorts of posts and the archive feature is good if I ever want to look back on old posts as opposed to Twitter. I can use the ask feauture to take requests or have feedback on my posts in a more concise manner. Unlike Medium or Wordpress I can easily hide certain posts or even the entire account if I wanted too and I won’t be seen or be recommended by the algorithm because I won’t even put tags on these posts. If you know where to find me you know where to find me. Although I do think I’ll make this public at some point I atleast need to know if I’ll even use this or if I’ll even keep making the same kinds of posts as I’d want too.

WHY?

I’ve already explained why you knucklehead, but I guess here were some of my inspirations to make a writing blog. I could list actual writers or twitter personalities or internet reviewers with blogs I can talk about, for example Yahtzee Crosshaw, Film Crit Hulk, Or even the elusive Andrew Hussie when he had a wordposts and while those people were instrumental to my development as a writer and artist I can’t say they were my full inspiration for making this.

Back in 2016, I was introduced to the Procrastinators’ Podcast by consuming Digibro content and having her podcast be linked at the end of one of her videos. I’ve since started concurrently watching her podcast and while I’ve always sucked into Digi’s cult of personality I’ve started appreciated her other friends in the podcast too, everyone except Nate. One of those members I gravitated too was MunchyWearsTinyHats. He was only one year older than me but I could still see myself in him and in effect appreciated him more than anyone in the podcast. We both seemingly grew up watching and reading the same shit, Homestuck, TF2, He introduced me to Nuclear Throne which because one of my favorite games and we both had the same appreciation for Hussie, Sam Hyde (sadly) Performance art, weird abstract art bullshit and of course My Little Pony. If I actually joined RFCK who knows what would’ve happened but that’s just my take. Of course a surface level description of Munchy aside, as someone who consumed everything he was in, I Lived my life vicariously through him and to all the members of the Procrastinators’ Podcast to an extent even though we both became completely different people as we reached our 20s. Currently he’s 20 and I’m less than a year away to being 20. But I feel as if our paths have drifted far enough that I can properly say I became a whole new different person to who I was in 2016. I still have appreciation for MLP, Homestuck and Minecraft and all the weird media shit me and him consumed. Back then I even modeled my art and persona to look like his too, It was a whole thing. Of course all of these posts and videos and personalities are very very out of date and they don’t reflect the content I consume or even the type of person I am now. I had a friend who also liked the PCP, well it was more like a love-hate relationship I feel but it was nice having someone who I could talk about the PCP with since at this time they were the only people or content creators I was consuming, what’s less said about current pcp the better. She’s always told me, I feel sorry for people who model their lives around these content creators and take advice from them since they clearly don’t know what they’re doing. And while I agree with her to an extent, I wouldn’t go as far as to discredit these artists accomplishments since they seem fulfilled with what they’ve made of themselves, not like we’re doing anything different or are any different to them. It’s about trying to live in a world with your own meaning in it and you can’t do that but disparaging the careers of grown men you don’t even know. Again topic for another day but I guess with this blog I’m always copying and ripping off some of their ideas for myself. In 2019, Munchy made a Tumblr where he’d detail and do the same thing and post blogs or writings he’s made or opinions he’s had, It hasn’t been updated in a year and a half but if it isn’t broke, don’t call the gas company asking for a refund. I even stole his alliteration with Shinsuke’s Soliloquy and Munchy’s Manuscripts, Shinsuke being my real God-given name. Of course the posts on his tumblr are really incredibly out of date and downright stupid and I’ll talk about them on their own on a seperate post since I feel like he really just didn’t know what he talked about and they’re baseline at best and wrong at worst. Regardless he still planted the seed of me as a person to make my own blog and talk about random bullshit.

HOW?

Obviously I will still tweet out stuff on my private twitter, Obviously I will still make art. Right now I’m making my own comics and writing a few short stories that maybe? I’ll put here I’m not really sure. Just depends on if they’re worthy on being posted since I’ll make a short story collection with them instead. Maybe I’ll continue the favorite character writing, maybe I’ll make my own picrew. We’ll see and no doubt these promises will become out of date in a week or two. Rather than the right of the moment malaise of tweeting around bullshit and sending it quickly I’ll use this for more concise text, something that I can sink my teeth in and tap away for what like 5 hours or so? Beats the essays i’d be doing but it doesn’t help that I am typing this in total silence, and I guess those essays will just be posted here. Do people post their school essays like they post their poems or their artwork for school? If you want to use my ask blog then it’s right there if you want a topic for me to talk about or just ask me a regular question. I’m bringing back tumblr asks to it’s real purpose. And of course, the only thing sure about me, is that nothings for sure.

#shinsscripts

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golbatgender · 6 years

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@thegreatjackal replied to your post

“By anti standards, any ship involving a vampire is necrophilia”

and it's likely pedophilia too

Vampires (and immortal/near-immortal characters) do raise some interesting (and almost entirely hypothetical) questions about establishing consent, but all those issues have to do with relative aging, which humans will never actually have to deal with in the real world unless we make contact with a sentient species with a vastly different lifespan/life stages cycle than ours, or if our own longevity technology advances to the point where some humans (or humanoid AIs with sexual capabilities and/or desires) end up living many times longer than their apparent age, but not others (because, you know, capitalism is like economic MRSA). If we ever do end up in such a situation, which will likely be a fairly sudden development if it does happen), it is probably best if we do already have several different fictional archetypes exploring these situations!

Eternal growth. The “vampire” (I’m just going to use this word as short for “immortal”) keeps developing normally after becoming immortal, and can be considered experientially and developmentally equivalent to a human of the same age, though at some point they stop (or dramatically slow) somatic aging. (In general. Otherwise you get the Struldbrugs.) This works just like any other human/mortal until the vampire outlives humans, or dramatically outlives apparent age. Two possible consent issues: Deception, where it might be considered dishonest (if mitigated by self-preservation, sometimes drastically) not to mention to one’s partner that one is actually several decades or centuries older than one appears; or Experience Gap, where the vampire’s long life (or species nature) essentially makes them into an ascended being that a mortal’s mind/experience can’t really compare to. I personally would say that as long as the mortal is an adult, such a relationship could work if the mortal is fully apprised of what’s going on, although it is higher risk. Adults can legally consent to risk. This is the basis of several entertainment and medical industries. Examples of ships with this type of vampire or immortal: The Doctor/Any human, Zeus/numerous mortal women, Henry/Abigail (Forever, 2014).

Subtype: Ancient child. An eternal-growth type vampire who is either permanently somatically “fixed” as a child, or whose somatic childhood has been dramatically extended while mostly or completely allowing adult faculties to develop (neoteny; might have fictional use in, for example, training a super-translator by extending the best language-learning period). An example of the first would be Claudia from Interview with the Vampire, and an example of the second would be the octospiders from Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama series (most of whom take puberty blockers in perpetuity, but still function as adults in their society). Any relationship with such a character would have to be evaluated based on context: whether the character is considered an adult or late adolescent in their society (as opposed to a child; i.e., whether such neoteny is common), whether their potential partner is from the same or a similarly neotenic culture or not, and, if the first two questions are “no,” whether the potential partner is attracted to them because they think they are a child or because they know the person and became attracted to them based on pre-established friendship or rivalry. (This one does, in fact, have some real-word implications currently, with regards to some trans people--as puberty blockers become more common--and to some kinds of disabilities.) If it’s a “ truly adult mind, child body, attraction is mostly based on interpersonal stuff,” you still might want to tag a fic as underage to be safe, but I’m pretty sure that’s at least almost in the “fine in real life” territory. IDK. I’m 99.99% likely never to be in that situation--I’m old enough that even if I were dating a trans person who’d been on puberty blockers, they’d almost certainly have switched to HRT before I ever met them, since the main use for puberty blockers is to delay onset of puberty until the age of majority when HRT is easier to get (and they don’t stop all growth, just puberty, anyway). It’s a fraught trope--and that’s why we should explore it in literature, because how else are we going to figure it out?

Eternal youth. The “vampire” remains mentally the same age as when they were turned, never maturing psychologically much beyond that (though experience may compensate to a degree). In fact, the “vampire” may even forget memories from before a certain amount of time (such as in the case of Ashildr|”Me,” Doctor Who Series 9), as part of this psychological growth limitation. Consent values in relationships depend on the age at turning; difficulties arise as the mortal partner ages past the immortal one. (For example, if such a vampire was turned at 15, and you were also 15, it wouldn’t be an issue, but then as you grew up, it would be, particularly if the vampire doesn’t legally, as opposed to physically, age. Less serious legally, but almost as much emotionally, if you got together at 30 and apparently-actually-30, and then you aged but your vampire partner stayed 30.) Examples not already given include Edward/Bella (before she’s turned as well), or human/android ships (such as Hari Seldon/Dors Venabili from the Foundation prequels).

Lifespan gap. Exactly what it sounds like, either due to species differences or technology (growth deceleration or acceleration), where either one character’s normal lifespan is much shorter (but with a similar distribution of life stages) than the other, or (often regardless of total lifespan) one character spends a much greater proportion of their life in a specific phase of development than the other. This is a very common sci-fi scenario; it doesn’t actually usually apply to vampires, except where vampires are actually a mortal, humanoid species with a much longer lifespan. Humans are actually pretty likely to be “causing the problem” in many of these scenarios, since we take such a large percentage of our average lifespan to grow up. (And, to complicate things, particularly with aliens who aren’t used to humans, we tend to develop secondary sexual characteristics while we’re still psychologically children. Considering how many problems that causes among humans who know what the fuck is going on, imagine how awkward it’s going to be with aliens who won’t.) Meanwhile, another sentient species might (hypothetically) take only five years to reach maturity and live for several hundred thereafter, or some similar ratio (such as Mass Effect’s Asari), or be born fully physically and psychologically mature (like tribbles, but sentient). Conversely, a sentient species might in equal probability have a lifespan of only a few years, but some of these years would be a fully adult stage (such as replicants, or Mass Effect’s Salarians). Or, particularly in dystopic settings, some members of one species may have vastly longer lifespans than other members of the same species (whether genetically or artificially), which may be proportional (as if, say, being born on February 29th actually did mean you would stay the same age for four years), or be the same in early life and diverge later (such as Homestuck’s Alternian Trolls). Basically, while the differences could have some emotional and logistic issues for long-term relationships, if both parties are capable of consent by their own species’ or sub-species’ metrics, it probably doesn’t deserve a major content warning for that alone. A short-term thing is certainly fine.

As a footnote, cryostasis or similar states aren’t generally considered aging. Possibly there’d be some issues with legal age (indeed, with being considered legally dead, in many such scenarios), but if such technologies were to become common or even extant, legal precedent for time spent is stasis not “counting” beyond what little aging might occur despite the tech would be established pretty quickly--if only so that no one could hop in a cryopod in a non-extradition country or secret location (because in the US, statutes of limitations get put “on hold” for any time outside the country, but if they can’t find the cryopod...) until a statute of limitations ran out.

This was not the thousand-plus words I meant to write tonight, I’ll tell you that. (I’d planned to work on a commission. I’ll still get to it.) But these are situations that come up a lot in fantasy and science fiction scenarios, and might come up someday in the real world if we ever encounter sentient aliens (or build fully sentient AI). And yes, it’s a controversial topic. That’s why we should explore the moral issues of sex with vampires and aliens with non-human aging stuff in fiction, so we have some idea of what to go on if it ever becomes an issue in real life. And that includes the “bad” stuff, and the “possibly-bad” stuff, because fiction is a simulation of a non-real event, where you can test what happens without anybody actually getting hurt. Which is at the very least a lot better than (should it ever be possible) testing it on real people (and real aliens/AIs) in real life!

(And as for the original hypothetical question the reply was in response to, attraction to vampires is not necrophilia. Particularly not modern vampires--Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer have pretty much seen to that. But even if you prefer your vampires to be corpselike? Well, the reasons real necrophilia is bad is because corpses/their original owners can’t consent, and secondarily because it’s unhygienic (the main basis of general corpse taboos)--though like, I’m not going to aggressively stop someone from sticking raw ground beef up their everything, which is comparably unhygienic, so long as they’re aware of why it’s a bad idea and I don’t have to pay for or deal with the aftermath. So, in the hypothetical where vampires are real and can consent, go for it, just...research the risks first. Or have your characters do the same.)

#thegreatjackal #reply #text #orig post #long post

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