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roobylavender · 11 months

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ok so since @arkham asked (ily) i'm gna go into more detail about my issues with atsv but disclaimer beforehand that most of this will not be as coherent as i want it to be bc frankly i found the messaging of the movie to be very contradictory itself and when trying to reason through the logic of it often found myself musing in circles lmao..

let's start with the multiverse aspect. this plot point frustrates me bc it presents us with the illusion of choice. what i mean by this is that there is no other logical way for miles to respond to the multiversal dilemma bc logically and emotionally it only makes sense to rebel against predestination. i mentioned the illusion of choice in my book review for bloodmarked by tracy deonn, and my complaint there was that the mc was written to look like it was up to her final choice and say to cut herself off from her ancestors bc their line had been poisonous to her all along, as one of her ancestors had contracted with a demon. but what the audience was presented with was merely the illusion of choice. there was no other logical option presented but for the mc to cut herself off otherwise she would always be at risk from the demon that had cursed her bloodline. abandoning her ancestors for the sake of her new white friends was posited as logical when it was a choice the mc was driven into at all costs bc there was no other way the story could move forward without it. and to bring it back to atsv, i feel the same way here, bc when presented with that "choice," of either relenting to the algorithm or rebelling against it, what other option is there? the way the multiverse is framed as this fabric of complete and total prediction to which all spider-men are bound leaves little room for anything else to be explored. and it's odd bc there's a brief moment where peter reinterprets it all in a way explicitly distinct of the way miguel does—life happens, sometimes people die and the circumstances are completely out of our control, but that does not holistically control our life moving forward, beautiful things still happen, we still possess hands capable of saving others, we are not frozen in time by the death of someone we love and we carry them with us as much as we move on from them—but it's fleeting and never brought up again bc obv peter has to side with miles. so the movie even presents an opportunity for nuance but quickly waves it off and proceeds forward with its two polarizing views embodied by miguel and miles

and idk.. i can't really wrap myself around the ideology of any of it. obv cape comics are used to explore things that do not make sense happening in the real world but multiversal stuff is where it tends to lose me bc in real life there is no way to predict what happens in the future. you cannot realistically operate by knowing what happens in the future or in a parallel universe. you have to operate on instinct and principle and faith and sometimes that has to be enough bc you're mortal. you will die, people you love will die, there is no escaping it and there is no immortality and there is no possible way for you to save every person ever in danger. learning to accept that is key to being a hero bc despite knowing all of that you still try. you still do what you can for the people you can reach. and for the movie to make it into this thing where you are made beholden to the future and presented with the option of either accepting it or fighting against it feels so restrictive to me bc it turns heroism into something reactionary rather than principled. like we talk a lot about how it's not healthy for batman to move through life merely trying to prevent his parents' deaths in the form of other people bc it restricts the scope of what he is actually capable of doing. and in a loose sort of way i think the same thing applies here. which is funny bc the way the argument is framed in the movie it looks like it agrees with that, it looks like it's trying to say you can't mark yourself by the tragedies of your life and have to be principled and save people no matter what, but again, it's the illusion of choice. what miles is being presented with is no longer a tragedy that already happened, but now one that it is in his hands to either let happen or prevent bc it is fated to happen either way. what's past is postured as what's future and now you are restricted to moving about the world like you only have two options of how to move through it. so yes, miguel is wrong, but i think it's convenient for him to be so wrong bc it's the only way miles can actually be right. if that makes sense

the copaganda obv ties into all of this and makes it even more insidious but one moment in particular that really infuriates me is when miles asks gwen about her dad and how she can be okay with all of this and it's so.. clearly this kind of sly gotcha wherein she's shamed for not feeling as strongly opposed to her father's death—a feeling which very likely ties strongly into the way he nearly arrested and shot her at the start of the movie—compared to miles bc in that moment her dad is the "bad" cop and his dad is the "good" cop who is obv worth saving. like i've perused a lot of arguments pushing back against designating the film as copaganda and all of them seem to boil down to "well miles's dad is a good person!" and it's like yeah.. obv.. that's what the good cop trope is. it prevents you from holistically critiquing the system bc the hope of at least one person within it being good gives credence to the idea that more people within it can also be good. so on the surface the movie's ideology is simply about saving "good" people, but when you make "good" cops the face of "good" people, you're very facetiously propping up an entire institution and failing to even holding it accountable for its very serious crimes. and that's something further hammered in when miles's dad toasts to a rest in power mural of his dead brother while celebrating being made into police captain, and when gwen says the mask is her badge bc this is the only way she can think of how to convince her father that she's not bad, by posturing herself as adjacent to the law despite the fact that vigilantes are specifically operatives outside of the law who at their best are capable of doing things and extending empathy that law enforcement are not

and then i have a minor issue with every character outside of gwen and miles and peter b feeling really generic but like. that's not on my mind as much comparatively lmao

#to be deleted

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vasiktomis · 3 years

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Blue, brown and clear for the writing asks?

HELLO THANK YOU I HOPE YOU’RE READY FOR MORE DUMPS <3

Blue: What’s more important to you: characters or plot?

- Characters, but I’m not sure if have the same relationship with them as other prose writers. To me, characters ARE the plot. The plot is a result of character decision-making, and no plot will work the same way if you dropped any character into the same initial scenario. Everyone will (or should, imo) take a different path based on their particular formula. I find that dragging a character through scenes is a sure-fire way to get sick of them We don’t learn nearly as much about a character if they just go through the motions. It’s much more interesting when a scene occurs as a direct result of a character’s actions and choices. Idk, an example might be like: 1) Character A gets in their car to go to work in the morning. Their car’s broken down. They have to walk through bad weather, which will make them late, and mess up their appearance for a big meeting later. 2) Character A goes to get in their car to go to work in the morning, but a neighbour who annoys them is retrieving their mail and there’s no way to get to Character A’s car without having to engage with said neighbour. Character A decides to walk through bad weather to work to avoid the interaction. They will be late and their appearance will be messed up, but will lie and claim that their car broke down.

Scenario 1 tells us that Character A might be unlucky or that they’re having a bad day, and their car doesn’t work. Scenario 2 tells us that Character A is perhaps peevish or has a reason to avoid this neighbour, is willing to take an objectively harder route to avoid the scenario, and is willing to lie about it. Being late and looking like shit are a direct result of their own decisions. Both of these scenes put the character on a similar path, but one of them gives us a TON of information about who this character is just by how they navigate and what they prioritise, rather than having scenarios they can’t control take them from place to place.

Brown: Do you have a set writing space? Or do you write everywhere?

- I like to switch it up. Looking at the same environment is an easy way to get me super distracted! If I’m not feeling it at the PC, or if I’m getting tempted to start drawing/playing games, then I’ll get my laptop and find somewhere else in the apartment to write. I usually plot while I exercise, bc the dopamine I get from that is perfect for getting my work brain ready.

Clear: Do your characters control where the story goes or do you maintain control?

- I think I like to give some illusion of character control, but I plot everything ahead. This way, I always have a framework that I can return to. - Usually, I have a want/so/but/therefore system for plotting; Character A wants something, so they do X to get it, but Y is in the way, therefore Character A does Z. - Sometimes I’ll be writing a scene that I’ll have had planned for a while, though, and re-think an action. One character than I might not have planned on feels stronger in the moment despite my plans, so there might be the occasional deviation here and there! - This happened with my Sharky POV scenes, tbh. Sometimes an unexpected character will just have a stronger voice in the moment, and that’s always really fun!

#long post #amistrio #ask tag

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disslve · 4 years

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𝐲𝐞𝐞𝐡𝐚𝐰 & 𝐡𝐨𝐰𝐝𝐲 ! this is nai and my cowboy ass is here to throw roxy @ u and also tell u bad jokes and cry over life is strange 2 because i’m still not over this game and I NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT. just a heads up, i came up with roxy on a whim because this rp just looked so good, so if it seems like i don’t know what i’m talking about ... it’s most likely the case whoops . ( this is an excuse for me bringing shitty muses ). anyway, my fake cowboy ass loves to ramble so if you’re interested in plotting feel free to LIKE this post or hmu. i forgot to mention that i’m also a fake grandma so idk anything about discord at all and i still need to set it up which will happen in the next few days dsdnsdsdn.

ps: wanted connections/plots can be find in my wanted tag ( a link is on my blog ) and i’ll also list some below !

EDIT: discord name is nai #7158

* [ kristine froseth + cis-female + she/her ] —— have you met roxanne ‘roxy’ bailey ? they are a twenty-two year old junior currently studying romance languages and literatures. they live on decker house and word around campus is that this scorpio is compassionate + dedicated, as well as impatient + dishonest. i wonder if they’ll make it out alive.

basics.

full name: roxanne elise bailey

nicknames: roxy, rox

sexual orientation: bisexual

birth place: valencia, spain ( but only lived there for five years )

history.

one could say that roxy had lived an easy life, though her parents weren’t distinguished by their social status, it didn’t mean they lacked money which was enough to support their daughter in whatever she wanted to do.

truth to be told, roxy was indeed a little spoiled, the type of kids who would try all kind of things on the expenses of their parents only to quit a new ‘hobby’ again. she could barely stick to anything. she was some twisted kind of golden child, good at many things but never had the patience to continue something for long enough to cultivate it.

skipping over the part where she almost tried everything from arts, music etc. she finally found her passion ( and even roxy herself was surprised ). figure skating. she didn’t know what drew her in, she couldn’t explain it, she tried it and it felt right. roxy always describes the feeling as finding a soulmate if she feels extra dramatic that day.

unsurprisingly, she was good at it. not that kind of good at something she was at all the other things she tried before, but that being good at which stemmed from genuine interest. maybe, that is why she managed to get so far. and it didn’t take too long that people even started to call her a figure skating prodigy.

at this point at her life, she had it all, spinning the stars on her fingertips ( or warning bad pun ahead: spinning on the ice ). until, well, her parents company was in some crisis and they had to cut corners in the meantime. also oh so ‘conveniently’ roxy lived at the arse end of nowhere and getting to her practices was now even more difficult because as mentioned before they had to save their money for more necessary things. of course, there were more things , small and big, which totally threw her off ( which i am too lazy to list rn).

roxy tried to work part time, but a) the money wasn’t enough b) she didn’t want to cut more hours of training she managed to get. AND well, here comes the turning point and roxy thinking she was oh-so-smart without realizing that it would cost her career. oh-so-smart roxy came up with the idea to , well, just steal some stuff. after all, she trained with many other wealthy peers and she could just sell off their stuff or something.

at the beginning she only did it to afford certain things she needed, but soon it somehow became an addiction. she felt in control when everyone else in her life was an utter mess. however, the more she took things away from others the more she felt comfortable, doing it more often and sometimes taking things which weren’t even worth that much. it was only a matter of time until she was caught. and as if she was lucky for too long, the person who caught her pressured her into either giving them a hefty sum of money (which she didn’t have) or to quit figure skating. she decided for the latter.

well, here she was and her sudden departure was quite a shock. but she had no choice and stated it was for personal reasons.

skipping over her being devastated over it, etc. her parents managed to save their company (whatever this company is) but at this point it was already too late and roxy was accepted into holloway.

right now she actually wants to pick up her figure skating career again, however, she’s too afraid that the blackmailer is going to expose her and also she doesn’t really know who they are (lets pretend they wrote her letters, txt messages >??) and also she’s kind of afraid due to the lack of practice she had .

personality.

okay i’ll keep this short bcs i wrote way too much for her background story. but to sum it up, roxy kind of has that perfect girl facade. considering how many friends roxy has and how social she appears to be it is odd that no one seems to be able to describe her. roxy doesn’t want people to know who she truly is, and she keeps her distance as she actively avoids conflicts that might cause her to say something wrong and exposes herself.

she shields her feelings by only presenting polished version of herself, the facade of the perfect girl: kind, hard-working and polite. someone whose life is easy and someone who looks like she doesn’t have any worries. it doesn’t mean she isn’t anything of that, but it’s not as if her kindness has no bounds or that she doesn’t need to put effort into the things she does. nevertheless, she believes that she must be perfect in order to make people like her. and while, she is pretty good at masking her emotions and smile along, as soon as someone threatens to see past the illusion, she will become defensive and won’t hesitate to lie in order to preserve it.

plots.

best friends: although roxy pretty much keeps her distance from everyone else, this person had always stood by her side. maybe they knew about roxy’s sudden wannabe-thief phase ( which she is still in ) and well tried to talk her out of it ( which obviously didn’t work ). also adding some drama here and maybe they had a big argument over it and distanced from each othr because of it. however, my angst ass doesn’t want to ruin it and they’ll rekindle their friendship. they might meet again at holloway and it’s awkward at first, maybe they even have some arguments but they’ll get over it because everyone loves a good rekindled friendship story.

annoyance: someone who gets under roxy’s skin.seeing past the perfect girl face and constantly calling her out on it. maybe they just have fun annoying her and want to see what she really likes or they just don’t like roxy , thinking that beneath all of this act, she is a really unpleasant person. perhaps, they’re even doing it with good intentions and want to show her that she doesn’t need to hide who she is. whatever it is, they’re determined to expose to the world who she really is.

pen pal ??: muse a and roxy had been friends for a very long time, yet the funny thing is that they’ve never met each other nor do they know what the other look like. all they know is their name ( or maybe they only know each other by their usernames ) and their deepest secrets. maybe they already have crossed paths many times and perhaps even know each other but don’t like each other irl. or they never had noticed the other.

blackmailer: BECAUSE WHY NOT??? the person who forced roxy to give up on figure skating. maybe, they were a rival or just didn’t like her, or any other reason. they might as well, have noticed that roxy is secretly training again and might be back at their shit again.

exes: GIVE ME THE ANGST, maybe muse a and roxy used to be in a serious relationship and as naive they were back then both of them thought this love would last forever. however, at some point roxy started to distance herself from muse a, constantly cancelling their dates because of their busy schedule. at first muse a tried to be understanding towards her, but as time passed things only got worse. roxy hating any kind of conflict just decided to ignore the problem instead about talking about it and eventually stopped replying to muse a messages. muse a never really got to know the real reason behind their break up and was left with unanswered questions. but anything works

unrequited love: (this is just me throwing in my favourite way to make myself suffer) It doesn’t matter who is the one with the the one sided love because i just want some good angst.a) muse a has a crush on roxy, yet they never told her about it. yet, muse a can’t hide it and it doesn’t take too long until roxy notices it. but instead of trying to talk to muse a about it, roxy just ignores it acting as she usually does and perhaps even give them false hope that she might like them back. maybe muse a even confessed to her and because roxy didn’t want to hurt them she told muse a she’d think about it.

b) roxy has a crush on muse a but doesn’t admit it. she doesn’t want to show their vunerable side and just plays it down. maybe they’re friends and roxy doesn’t want to lose another friend. but one day she confesses to muse a on accident, making everything awkward between them.

someone she stole from: idk i thought this would be fun ? maybe she confessed to them about it or maybe they caught her but decided to not confront her about it.

fan: someone who used to watch her perfomances on their tv and is still not over the fact that she quit.

i also have a connection page on my blog if these are too specific or none of these work

i’m too tired to come up with more dsdsdnjsd but gimme everything !! THE ANGST, FLUFF, DRAMA PLS!!!

#did i use a special font just to highlight the yeehaw ?? yes #holloway.intro #this got so long djssdsdn

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cosmicmoved · 4 years

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HEADCANON for SUMI

actually, this is a headcanon for karam too but this specific post is more sumi-centric so maybe i’ll talk about the karam end of things later. for now, though, it’s sumi’s turn bc i don’t talk about her enough (:

Okay, so I’ve decided to drag Sumi into Karam’s plotline for no reason besides that...I Wanted To but it also helps his plotline make more sense if he has a sort-of go-between character like Sumi in there somewhere. This post will explain what that means and why I’ve come to this decision! Until now, Sumi was kind of just her own character and she wasn’t really tied to any plot besides her own but I didn’t really know what to do with her beyond her backstory. I think this was definitely limiting her as a character so I’d like to use this chance to give her more direction! So, from hereon out, she’s going to be part of the Karam plotline! She’s still her own character but I like making my muses know each other bc,,,idk,...it feels like a more complete universe in my head. Anyway, with that out of the way, I’ll get on to explaining the story behind this connection! Full disclosure though, I’m sticking it under a Read More because it got kind of lengthy. I did TRY to be more succinct but maybe it’s about time I just accept that I’m not capable of that /:

First off, a lot of stuff might be setting or verse-dependent. I guess I’ve written stuff where these muses aren’t strictly based in one country and there’s always the chance of one of them moving somewhere else for the sake of a certain plotline? But the fun thing about rp is its fluidity so I’m going to try and stop getting overly concerned about details that don’t really matter too much. Sumi travels a lot. Maybe Karam tags along sometimes. Shit gets vague. It’s fine. ASDFGHGFDS......

To keep things simple, Sumi is the one who first found Karam when he wound up in the city after his forest was destroyed -- or, rather, she was the first person to try and help him. Other people had likely found/seen him but ignored him one reason or other (he would’ve been pretty dishevelled and tbh,,,probably naked bc what the fuck is he gonna wear clothes in the forest for). As I’ve said before, Sumi can tell when people aren’t human. Her senses aren’t especially strong so she can’t always place what somebody actually is, only if they’re a human or a ghost; she doesn’t have an inherently ability to sense what somebody is but, because she’s spent so much time learning to separate living humans from the spirits of the dead, she’s developed the ability to tell when somebody is neither, even if she can’t say for certain What they are. Because it’s a feat of applied knowledge and not a natural ability, mistakes happen. Now, Karam is a spirit. Not remotely human, despite his appearance. Still, long story short, Sumi mistook him for a ghost and, despite her charging humans for help with their ghostly issues, she’s often willing to help a ghost in need free of charge (because um...ghosts don’t have money). When she found Karam, he was in a state of obvious distress so she assumed he must have been a pretty new ghost, the sort who haven’t at all come to terms with the fact that they are, y’know, dead. Much to her shock, he wasn’t dead and was instead very much alive and tangible but still very much in need of help. More in need of help than she’d expected, in fact.

Sumi has always been the sisterly type so it felt natural to reach out a hand to somebody in need, mostly out of the goodness for heart and because she felt bad for him but also partly because Karam reminds her a little bit of Chulsoo, her late brother (despite being much much older, Karam looks about the age Chulsoo would be if he were still alive) with whom she is in no longer contact despite his being a ghost because he decided to use the afterlife to See The World until he was ready for Sumi to exorcise him. Yikes. That’s another story for another post. She was able to offer Karam a place to stay, a spare room in her apartment (where he’d start this new experience by staying in his room for a fortnight straight, only leaving to slink his way in and out of the bathroom), and help him make sense of a new and confusing world. First, she would offer him her brother’s old clothes to wear and then she would eventually resign herself to the reality of the situation and agree to buy Karam his own clothes, letting him pick out what he liked but also giving him tips wherever possible (financially speaking, this wasn’t her smartest move but she has a guilty pleasure in clothes shopping and the knowledge that she was doing it to help somebody else made her feel better about the whole thing).

In fact, she helped him get tidied up in general. Let him pick out a hairstyle from a pile of magazine and used her experience with hairdressing to replicate it for him. Maybe it’s because Sumi’s rather vain herself (and proud of it, mind you) but she’d fully believed a good start for Karam was to help him discover his own image and use that to regain confidence. Well...that, and the fact he’d looked an absolute state when she found him and she was of the firm belief that it was a shame for him to be wasting his pretty face on dishevelled hair and ill-fitting clothes that hung off him. But, really, Sumi sees her image as the ultimate form of self-expression. The way she styles herself is her way of telling the world who she is --- and, for someone who spends so much time with ghosts, looking as bright and lively as possible means a lot to her --- so she believed that helping Karam with that sort of thing might help him with this strange transition into a new world and come into his own. Yes, she was aware that this plan might fail and Karam might have been distinctly uninterested in his own looks but it ended up working out well. Karam is slow to warm to most very human things but he picked up on this quite quickly and was very willing to engage with it. For Karam, it was a matter of everything changing too fast and those changes being so overwhelming that making these dramatic changes over which he had full control, changes that he made himself and that weren’t forced on him, helped him to process the situation --- but I’ll talk about that in more detail another time, this is Sumi’s post.

Karam is very distrustful of humans and, although he trusts Sumi more than most on account of her having helped him so much, there’s a part of him that is paranoid it’s some kind of trick. Because of this, he tends to keep Sumi at an emotional distance. After all, despite her abilities, she’s still essentially just human and he’s been forced to regretting humans in the past (that is also another story for another time because, again, this is not Karam’s post so I won’t be going into details here). Although it’s frustrating, Sumi understands this and lets Karam keep his distance. She understands that he’s grateful regardless and she doesn’t want to cause any unnecessary discomfort. But, even besides that, their relationship is a little odd simply because they butt heads a lot. She kind of just lets him away with shit because she finds him endearing. Often, Karam won’t even stick around at her place. He’ll just disappear for days on end and resurface when he feels like it but it’s more about the choice to have somewhere he can return. Y’know, the illusion of home.

Perhaps it’s because of that initial comparison she made between him and Chulsoo or perhaps it’s because he has such a young appearance but, despite the large age gap (wherein Karam is just under 240 years older than her), Karam brings out the big sister in Sumi. Maybe this is also why Karam doesn’t like her that much LMAO...............actually, he kinds of HATES it but asdfghgfd. In the time since she’s met him, she’s seen him struggle with things; she’s seen that he does have good moments and that he’s not intentionally rude in any way so much as he just has a hard time with certain social rules. She’s grown fond of him and feels that she has to try and help him out. Again, it’s hard to say if this is because of the time she spends helping ghosts or if it’s because he ignites the part of her that feels guilty for not being able to protect Chulsoo. It could just be that she’s sincerely worried about Karam. Maybe it’s a combination of them all, Sumi can’t quite tell for herself.

#« 𝐇𝐔𝐌𝐌𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐁𝐈𝐑𝐃 (sᴜᴍɪ) » / 「 headcanon. 」#« 𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐀𝐑𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐃 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐒𝐋𝐎𝐖 𝐃𝐄𝐂𝐀𝐘 (ᴋᴀʀᴀᴍ) » / 「 headcanon. 」#like this if u read it i guess!! but no pressure ofc ASDFGH #the actual hc part of this is like 1.2k words long and i was gonna try and revise it but i can't be bothered #i UNDERSTAND if it's too long for anybody to bother reading it but i just wanted to get it out there #im gonna write a drabble abt when she finds him i think and idc if nobody reads it ASDFGHGFDS #i wanna write abt karam from another person's perspective bc writing him just from his OWN perspective doesn't really #let anybody know what kind of vibe he has ?? bc he keeps everything to himself #but also bc i love writing sumi's perspective on ppl bc she's just...she has strong feelings abt things ASDFGFDSA #anyway i just felt it was time i fleshed stuff out for sumi and i feel bad making her a supporting character in another muse's plot but #since she didn't even really have a concrete plotline on her own this is actually BETTER for her #im actually respecting sumi MORE by doing this #bc now she's actually part of smth instead of being that oc i vaguely ignore #also i like making my ocs know each other who cares #i can't be bothered rereading this to make sure it's not dumb sorry

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