(a)sync rotating
so in attempts to not have this drag on forever, i think i'll have minato fall for tori relatively quickly. after she nearly kills him, i have part of a scene written where he tracks her down and
tori obviously noticed his body disappeared. she is HOPING he just teleported away to die of his injuries, but she does quickly realize she may have just pissed off THE most lethal ninja in history. and she no longer has the "i'm just an innocent, harmless civilian :)" disguise
she's like: oooooh no. oh fuck. and she goes into Seal Development Turbo Mode
when minato DOES show back up, they end up at a stale mate where she traps herself in a barrier
minato is like "well that HAS to have a time limit" and then he goes through all her stuff
she's in seal development Turbo Mode so she has a bunch of her notes out, which is both like phylogenies she copied because she's trying to figure out if chakras are more similar in more related taxa, but then also like "results f attempting to flash-fry a rat in project Flash Fry the Yellow Flash"
minato: wtf why do you keep trying to COOK me?
he ends up just leaving her because 1. he doesn't have clear orders from Konoha on this; it's mainly a personal research project, so he'll do what he wants (he is..... very bad about this). 2. he thinks she's interesting. 3. he gets her to explain wtf she's doing and she actually DOES have motives and logic he finds sympathetic: she's trying to get away from war, and even if she's selfish, she doesn't like ninja harassing civilians and she'll intervene when given the opportunity. 4. plus she's like
and this logic speaks to him. minato is "a good guy" in that he's a loyal friend and he largely respects the rules of society (harassing people bad! etc), but he's also basically never once been like "oh, murder of an enemy is too harsh a punishment!!" like yeah, if someone is threatening you or your comrade, you just kill them? duh???
so minato leaves her and has upgraded her in his brain from "interesting potential enemy" to "person i just think is neat." and he's not like I AM NOW IN LOVE but he IS like "i am bored all the time now, and i think having her attention would be fun and interesting and we could get along, so i'm going to try flirting" except she just GETS MAD AT HIM???? and jiraiya has a bunch of very bad suggestions
so minato goes and does his monthly Track Tori Down field trip (tori is always like HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS??? and will switch up her behavior to be weirder and less predictable, it's SO cute) and she's at a bar chatting up some other ninja. minato will NOT admit he is jealous but also, if she wanted to talk to a ninja, he's more famous, superior at every single ninja skill, nicer, smarter, more charming, AND better looking?!
@waffliesinyoface suggested Plasticity lore character Batta of Grass, so that's who Tori's target is. minato reflects on jiraiya's advice and is like FINE I WILL MAKE HER JEALOUS and saunters over and hits on Batta HIMSELF. obviously batta is more interested in talking to him than to tori and abandons her. except now.... now minato is talking to this random unimpressive ninja he doesn't care about and NOT the person who WANTED to see?
batta: (bragging about killing TWO ninja in one fight)
minato: (internal screaming) that's SO impressive (best most resilient fake smile)
and tori looks scandalized for like five minutes but now she's just smirking at him from across the bar. minato is silently begging her to bail him out.
not sure how the batta part of this ends (with him dying in some comical way, maybe?) but i want the fallout to be
tori is like "you are so fucking stupid, i was trying to get him to go kill some road bandits for me bc they're making travel basically impossible"
minato is like "whyyyyy didn't you just ask meeeeee i have been dropping SO MANY HINTS THAT I LIKE YOU"
tori is like "no, you treat EVERYONE like that. you just sat around for two hours treating batta like that even though you don't give a shit about him"
debating if she tells him he's met her TWICE before the boiling incident here, or if it's better to have another mirrored conversation later where instead of "minato why are being dumb" it's "tori why are you acting insane." kind of leaning toward the latter option maybe with them confronting the fact that tori WILL kill minato's allies and he doesn't want her to do that?
minato: ......you could
minato: you could ask ME to clear out the bandits
he wants to show off so he takes her down the ENTIRE trade road and clears out every bandit, plus some ninja sitting around
tori IS incredibly blushy and flustered by this!! flirting successful :)
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Is there a reason why you didn't make triangles be near the bottom of the society hierarchy? Is it bc you didn't want Bill to have some basis for seeing himself as a "liberator"? Bc you wanted to focus on the child celebrity/cult leader angle? Something else?
Flatland was, when it was published, a commentary on the society the author lived in.
The setting Flatland is meant to be a distorted, exaggerated mirror of (what was) modern society. Bill is a mirror of the Pines' worst character traits and reflects ideas (conspiratorial, political, existential) found in their modern society.
You fail to honor both what Flatland is intended to represent and what Bill represents if you decide that Bill and his homeland mirror a society that ceased to exist over a hundred years ago.
To me, there's an absurd irrelevancy in giving Bill a rigidly Victorian backstory. It optimizes him to serve as commentary on facets of society that SIMPLY DON'T EXIST in the era of Gravity Falls. That's not to say that there aren't still remnants of Victorian-era problems in the current day, like yeah we still have inequality, we still have sexism, etc.; but we've reached a point where the majority public opinion has decided that institutionalizing or euthanizing anybody with a disability because they're allegedly inherently less law-abiding is, in fact, an extremely stupid and morally heinous idea. The entire section on banning colors is absurd if you don't know that it used to be illegal for poor people to wear certain fancy garments so they couldn't impersonate the rich. Our issues are different.
Unless it's intended PURELY to be a piece of speculative fiction worldbuilding with NO INTENT AT ALL to satirize real human society, a Flatland-derivative work ought to reflect the modern society in which it's being written—not a dead society. A fanfic about Bill Cipher interacting with humans is UNABLE to be pure speculative fiction worldbuilding because he's already tied into a work about a modern human society. Make him Victorian and you flub a billion opportunities to enhance his ties to the main cast and his ability to serve as their foils.
Just for a couple examples—you can't build strong parallels between his life and Ford and Stan's "get rich & famous or die trying" young adulthoods if he's BIOLOGICALLY FORBIDDEN from accruing wealth or socially advancing. You lose opportunities to explore the mingled specialness/ostracism of being born a "freak" if his society has NO CONCEPTION of odd physical mutations even POSSIBLY being "special."
It's very easy to look at Flatland as it is and go "oh, yes, that's a very bad place." There's no nuance to that, there's not much fresh to say about it, Flatland is a reflection of a society we moved away from BECAUSE we decided those beliefs were bad. We can't relate it to our own society except in loose senses like "well... sexism is still a thing." (Sure, but not sexism like THAT.) To maximize how much Bill's culture meaningfully interacts with Gravity Falls' culture, you have to maximize how much Bill's culture mirrors Gravity Falls' culture.
The Victorian era was 120 years ago to us. So Flatland was 120 years ago to Bill.
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I love your unhealthy clingy famous MC you don't understand how feral I'm over him
THANK YOU I LOVE HIM SO DEARLY TOO!!!!! the backstory with absent parents and just. everything about seven... i think makes a lot of infamous ocs potentially lean into this?? or at least there are a ton of choices that just made me go "oh yeah. that's him" . idk there is an element to how infamous is written that really helps with characterising him, including how customisable it is, and i do love that about this IF!!!!! crying about him below the cut <3
aki kind of navigates the world worried his loved ones will leave him and is a little too clingy because of it. he also has been playing those worries off by being charming, flirty and funny. like he can somehow project this hyper-extrovered version of himself and try to make people love that !!! he drops that more around his bandmates/friends, but not in front of people he's just met (please guess who accidentally escalated the bed fight on the tour bus)
aki also hooks up with people a lot, just cause he likes sex but also because he enjoys the no-strings-attached. because of those attachment issues, when he gets something that feels black and white to him, something one-and-done and he leaves in the morning, he can just. take feelings out the equation. he knows its not meant to last so he can just walk out (leave! hit da bricks!!! walk out!!!!!)
committing to a romantic relationship . you can imagine. is a little complicated due to all this LMFAO he just overthinks and worries before even getting into it, regardless of if it's reciprocated or not. between the one time he's actually into someone (seven) and how that ended (...badly) + the fact that deliriously avoiding commiting to anything except hookups = very little (none at all) actual dating experience. aki has no idea to deal with it and will balk. yeah this is immature of him but i have plans to make this guy character develop so hard throughout the course of infamous that he may implode
i love the genre of character where they're just going "i know i have a few issues, who doesn't, but honestly i think i'm well adjusted!!" <- they are not well adjusted. in fact they're worse than they think
also no one asked for the orionmance essay i sent my friend but here it is <3
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