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piosplayhouse · 10 months

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honestly wrt the queer poll sometimes i do feel like the reason scum villain gets the "dirty trashfire" treatment is because binghe is so agressively bisexual and that's disgusting to the ~our pure sexless yaoi hualian~ crowds who want their ships to be one The Man Gender and one The Uke Gender and for nobody to need enemas

Hmmm interesting ideas 🤔 even though biphobia is pretty bad in fandom still though I don't really think that plays a super huge role considering I don't think that many people actually know Binghe is canonically bisexual weirdly enough (obviously if you headcanon him otherwise it's fine but I do personally think it says something that Shen Qingqiu, famous for such hits as "he must be asexual since he hasn't married any women at age 20" does directly say he's bisexual).

I'm thinking the purity culture plays a big role though, even if people don't think about it that way. As in, I don't think everyone saying it's a dirty trash fire is saying it because they hate gay sex (though that is a substantial crowd of opinion) but because instead because it's a comedic commentary on sex, over sexualization in media, and objectively poor-quality literature/erotica. Because it jokes so much about objectification and fetishization through narrators who somewhat embody those traits, people that think that has no place in media in general automatically discount it as a bad representation, and because it's a comedy, people don't feel the need to look under the hood and read deeply for the actual meta commentary. I also mentioned this briefly before, but in terms of when SV gets friendly fire from other danmei fandoms, I think the comedy sometimes goes over a lot of western readers' heads even if they're somewhat familiar with how translated Chinese text reads. Like they can forgive somewhat awkward phrasing in the face of the grand, sweeping narratives of mdzs and tgcf and whatnot, but in the more character-focused sv, it becomes more difficult to parse and more likely to come off as "bad" because translated text can come off as weird sounding to native speakers just by nature! This isn't really anyone's fault, but since sv is much more clear and frank with its language and literary devices (though still pretty sophisticated imo, just not to the point of being a great epic or whatnot), this becomes more inexcusable to people.

#svsss #svsss meta #long post #long posts

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liriostigre · 3 months

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Hiiii ty for such a great uquiz!! Would it be possible to see the description of all the books you could get matched to? I’m curious what the vibes are for the rest!!

hi 🌷 here you go:

White Teeth by Zadie Smith: Excessive, maximalist and very ambitious multigenerational and multicultural epic novel that starts with the unlikely friendship between Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. It explores themes of race, identity and the intersections of culture, heritage, and modernity. Clever and hilarious dialogue, very creative when it comes to language and style, unique and bold when it comes to narrative. Perhaps a flawed novel due to its ambition, but excellent nonetheless.

Despair by Vladimir Nabokov: Excellent writing; very ambitious and stylish. It is somewhat a twisted novel but you will find a lot of humor despite. The narrator speaks directly to the reader as he writes what he regards as his perfect crime. This novel is one of Nabokov's earliest works in which one can easily identify themes and literary devices that the author explored later in his most known works.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño: Brilliant and stunning novel about poets and poetry! Very dense and challenging; it requires patience from the reader. This novel is so infinitely dear to me that i can't even explain its brilliance, but i have to give you at least an idea of the plot so: The story is arranged in three parts and told from multiple points of view. It starts in Mexico City, in the 70s, and continues across decades and continents. It follows the adventures and misadventures of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima—poets, drug dealers, wanderes, criminals. Now, about the themes, the writing, the style, the narration? Just absolutely perfect even at its most tedious, difficult and anticlimactic parts.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington: Unconventional, absurd, imaginative and exuberantly surreal apocalyptic fairytale quest. It follows 92 year old Marian who is sent off to a peculiar old-age home. If you aren't familiar with Leanora Carrington's art you should look at some of her paintings because this wonderful novel feels just like her surrealist paintings!

Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls: This novella tells the story of a love affair between a depressed suburban housewife and an amphibian creature who escaped a scientific research center. It might sound like a quirky fiction story but it actually deals with the most mundane and banal aspects of life and human relationships. Brilliantly written; neat and precise prose, wonderful storytelling. The author knew what she was doing and not a single word she wrote was wasted.

The Borrowers by Mary Norton: Delicately written little adventure about tiny people who live in the secret places of houses. I am enamored (obsessed!!) with miniatures—dollhouses, dioramas, fairies—so imagine how dear this book is to me.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn: The murders of two girls bring reporter Camille Preaker back to her hometown. As she works to uncover the truth about those crimes, Camille finds herself forced to unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past. Very entertaining read. It has best seller written all over it (which might not be the biggest compliment lol but i mean for this genre so it is a compliment).

Rage by Sergio Bizzio: Claustrophobic, anxiety inducing, fast-paced psychological thriller that made me think of Bong Joon-ho's Parasite the whole 4 hours it took me to read it. I read it in it's original language, Spanish, and i particularly loved the dialogue; its idiosyncrasies and authenticity (tqm Argentina!)

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby: Rob, an obsessive music fan, reminisces his top five worst break ups to understand his most recent heartbreak. He is a very arrogant and cynical guy who defines his entire life through records, and because he is constantly interacting with music that almost exclusively deals with love—and a very idealistic version of it—he finds himself unsatisfied with the way his life has turned out.

#so sorry it took me so long to reply!!#idk if you meant of ALL the quizzes... 👀 anyone these are 2023's only 🫣#💌#anyway* lol not anyone

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frownyalfred · 3 days

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How do you do your writing? Start writing the story and figure out world building aspects after? Or deep dive into world building than write the story? Personally I write the story then take breaks to write down world building as it comes

Was curious, cause your abo au is very thought out with world building

I think it definitely comes easier with the a/b/o AU since there's a lot of pre-established options within the trope, so I'm usually just mixing and matching the ones I like most, or subverting the ones I don't.

My biggest goal when worldbuilding is to avoid the "this is the world I live in and here are the rules" monologue that sometimes pops up in published novels. I only want stuff to come up that's actually being discussed and thought about by the characters in the scene -- and unless it's being used as a device, they're not usually narrating the rules of the world they live in to themselves at any point. (Again, it depends on the book and if it's being used as a literary device)

So Bruce, in a given scene, wouldn't necessarily be thinking about the fact that omegas use scent blockers to conceal their scents, and wouldn't be thinking about how that works (such as application preference, etc) but he would, theoretically, be thinking about how the new scent blocker he just bought isn't working right, and that he might need to use more than normal. So we get some slightly more subtle worldbuilding within the vein of the scene.

People go back and forth on the "show don't tell" advice in writing, and I know it's contentious. But I'm a proponent of showing worldbuilding whenever possible, instead of outright telling. Whenever I find myself writing a thought/piece of dialogue that seems like it would benefit the reader more than the characters, I take a second to check if I'm telling instead of showing.

Sometimes that means not explaining something until it pops up in the story. An example of this would be in my Mandalorian/Star Wars batfamily AU, where we really don't learn a lot about the batkids' positions or the hierarchy of the Wayne compound until Clark has a chance to talk with various family members and learn.

I think there is definitely an instinct to overexplain off the bat, and it's not always wrong. But if our first scene with Bruce was spent with him thinking over the hierarchy of his own compound, that wouldn't make a lot of sense -- he already knows what it is. He's got other things to focus on in that scene.

If it's helpful, I also put together lists sometimes of worldbuilding ideas that don't necessarily make it into the work itself, but help add context while I'm writing. I did this a lot with Borderline, when I was trying to write the Court/LoA into the fic. A lot of those details didn't make it in for the reader to see, but they affected what I wrote.

That's just my take on it, and like I said, there's a lot of conflicting ideas about this. And exceptions, of course.

#asks #anon #writing #writing things #fic #fanfic #fanfiction #myfic #theresurrectionist #a/b/o mention #a/b/o tw

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lansplaining · 1 year

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u kno on the topic of interview answers/authors notes with mxtx, I tend to take it with a huge grain of salt. Considering how I keep hearing that she once said that wangxian were the only gay characters in mdzs, yet everyone I seem to come across agrees there was nothing heterosexual about LXC and his interactions with JGY. Like which is it.

well, right. I hold the perhaps controversial opinion that authors... can be kinda wrong about their own works. and I swear I don't mean it like that post about losing custody of your characters in court-- I actually think the wangxian/xiyao thing is a really good example of what I mean.

however you feel about xiyao as a ship or the two of them as characters, there is no denying that they are set up to parallel wangxian in a lot of really key narrative ways. just taking a few broad examples:

both are pairings of a Lan brother and someone who was born in a marginal social position but has entered a place of relative outward security and respect

this position of security and respect is rapidly dismantled due to a combination of WWX/JGY's own actions and snowballing rumors and anger based in part of social prejudice, ultimately driven by an individual (JGS and NHS) who wants to see them ruined

both Lans, in defiance of social expectation, try to trust that there is a reason their partner has made the choices they made and to understand where they are coming from (LWJ over a longer span, LXC in a very compressed period in the temple)

there is a divergence, as LWJ decides he will fight and die for WWX no matter what he's done, and LXC has a moment of doubt and stabs JGY

but then they converge again, as both are pulled into a violent final confrontation/climax and make the decision to die for/with their partner, only to be prevented

both are finally left with feelings of regret and a lack of resolution, as LWJ feels like he didn't stand by WWX early enough or fight hard enough, and LXC feels he wasn't given the opportunity to really understand who JGY was or why he acted as he did

to be completely obvious about it, narrative parallels convey meaning. it tells the reader "something about these two events/sets of characters is fundamentally the same." narrative parallels have also been a very common way historically to subvert censorship when it comes to queer content: you parallel a queer person or couple and a straight couple, and let the viewer draw the lines. i'll be perfectly honest, i don't know as much about the history of this trope in China, but you can certainly see it in CQL itself, and the ways wangxian is paralleled to Yanli and Zixuan to draw attention to the fact that they are both, in fact, romantic couples.

MXTX has said this is not what she was trying to indicate! but she did put in these parallels, and a reader cannot be blamed for interpreting them as indicating something-- or for interpreting them as indicating that the fundamental sameness that the parallel points to is that both wangxian and xiyao are and were in love. maybe it was an accident, but it's a very specific, and very specifically crafted literary device that is inescapably present in the story.

#ask answered #happy valentine's day xiyao is canon

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explodingsilver · 5 months

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Book review: Nightbane by Alex Aster

Lightlark…2!

I’ve already made my thoughts on the first book quite clear (read that review first if you haven’t already; I don’t feel like rehashing all the context), and were I a bit more sensible, I would have stayed away from its sequel. I am, however, somewhat of a literary masochist, so of course I borrowed this from Hoopla the day it was released (November 7th, not too long ago). Very pleased that I was able to write this review much faster than the first one, though this review is shorter, at only 2,100 words long. Was the experience worth it? I don’t know, you tell me.

(There are spoilers ahead, on the off chance that you care)

The plot and style

After the events of the first book, Isla is trying to learn her several powers as well as get a hold of this “leading two different realms” thing while trying to move on from getting betrayed by four different people she used to love. At a celebration for a Wildling holiday (in which no Wildlings other than herself are in attendance), Grim magically crashes the party from afar and announces that the Nightshade army will destroy Lightlark in thirty days. The other realms start preparing for the invasion, and Isla tries to recover all her lost memories of being with Grim in hope that they will reveal what his goal is and how to stop him, especially after receiving a prophetic vision of him standing in the ruins of a village he destroyed with his powers.

Put simply, if the plot of the first book is split between “Isla and Celeste search for a MacGuffin” and “Isla and Oro search for a different MacGuffin”, this book is split between “Isla and Oro do basic defense building stuff” and “Isla remembers the time she and Grim searched for a third MacGuffin”. There’s also a subplot about a rebel group trying to capture Isla, but this is inconsequential and could’ve been dropped entirely.

It feels like there was an attempt to address some of the criticism of the first book, but not nearly enough of an attempt. On the one hand, metaphor usage has improved to the point where it actually feels like it was written by a human being and not a neural network (no throbbing and raw glaciers this time around), the book acknowledges that no longer having a power no one else had in the first place is less bad than having a maximum lifespan of 25, and Isla realizes that Grim let her win the duel in the first book and that she did not win against a 500+ year old army general on the strength of her own skill. On the other hand, it does not address questions like “how does Starling society even function if none of them ever live to 26?” or “if Oro always knows when someone is lying, why didn’t he call bullshit the moment Celeste said ‘Hi, my name is Celeste’?”

Speaking of that last thing: I didn’t mention it in my review of the first book because it didn’t really feel relevant to anything, but each ruler has a ‘flair’, a special power that is unique to them. Oro’s is that he can always tell when someone is lying. Grim’s is that he can teleport. This book reveals that Isla’s is that she is immune to curses. Glad to finally have an answer to one of my biggest questions of the first book (checks notes) 75% of the way through the second one, when this explanation should’ve been given the moment we learned the original stated reason does not apply.

Wildling elixir and its (lack of) consequences

Much of this book centers around the presence of the Wildling elixir from the first book, a potion that is super effective at healing wounds. As you might imagine, this kills a lot of the tension. Used in conjunction with Isla’s magical teleportation device, “teleport away, use Wildling elixir, teleport back” becomes an easy way to recover when the characters get their flesh ripped apart. And indeed, they do this all the time! The book tries to nerf this strategy by stating that the elixir is rare due to the flower used to make it being rare, but 1) this is at odds with Isla’s very liberal use of it, and 2) aren’t the Wildlings the “make flowers grow instantly” people? Why can’t they just use those powers on it like they do for every other plant?

There was a bit of potential for an interesting theme with these flowers: Isla eventually learns that while the Wildlings use them to make the healing elixir, the Nightshades use those exact same flowers to make the titular nightbane, which is basically fantasy heroin. I was intrigued by this motif (I like it when things have a dual nature like that), but unfortunately this doesn’t really go anywhere, other than some vague gesturing at “wow, just like Isla”. Speaking of Isla…

Isla

This time around, Isla is clearly traumatized by the events of the last book, trusts very few people, and is aware that she is in over her head with leading two realms full of subjects she barely knows while also being the king’s unofficial consort. Not a bad start for a character arc, but in effect, she has gone from naive and impulsive to naive, impulsive, and guilty about those things while making little effort to amend them. It feels like her attitude towards leadership is basically “I’m allowed to call myself a bad leader but nobody is allowed to agree with me on that.”

Much of Isla’s internal conflict in this book is based around her Nightshade heritage on her father's side. She is convinced that there is an inherently evil part of her because her father was from the Inherently Evil Realm. This may not come as a surprise, but I do not like when stories have such a thing as an Inherently Evil Realm. Not only does Nightshade fill this role, but the book never even gestures at pushing back against Isla’s conviction that her heritage taints her, and in fact ends up affirming it.

This book really told me to my face that Isla is the first person in millennia to have both Wildling and Nightshade powers. I do not buy that even for a moment. Maybe my disbelief is because the series discarded the “only one realm’s power set per person, even if their parents are from different realms” thing in the same book it was introduced, and I would expect there to be Wildling/Nightshade couples way more often than once per few millennia. But no, that highly plausible thing can’t happen because then Isla won’t be the most special person currently alive!

The other characters

Sadly, the rest of the cast did not improve, and in some instances, got worse.

Oro going from "world weary, distant king" to "official love interest" has unfortunately sanded down all his interesting aspects, and everything I liked about his character in the first book now takes a backseat to being overly protective of Isla and making stock Love Interests threats to kill anyone who hurts her. I swear, he turned so generic that some of his lines were indistinguishable from something Grim would say. But hey, if nothing else, he at least didn’t get character assassinated like I was sure he would!

While Grim actually does stuff in this book, he still has no personality traits other than what's included in the Sexy Villain Starter Pack. Like, it actually upsets me that he's such an absolute nothing of a character. Everything about him begins and ends with “what if the villain…was sexy?”, and there are about a morbillion stories out there that provide more interesting answers to this question. You’d think focusing on him this much would be the perfect opportunity to give him any unique traits at all, but Aster certainly did not take that opportunity, nor did she ever answer the question of why he likes Isla, despite the sheer number of pages dedicated to their relationship.

As for everyone else? Azul, our beloved token gay black man who runs his realm like a democracy, still receives woefully little page time. Cleo, the bitchy ruler who hates Isla for no reason, receives even less, but at least we get to hear about her dead son, I guess. Ella, Isla's Starling assistant, is mentioned so rarely I wonder if Aster forgot she exists. There are also several new average citizen characters introduced, but none of them are remotely interesting. They're all defined solely by whether or not they're on Isla's side. It says something when the best new character is Isla's new animal companion (a panther named Lynx, who rules because he does not give a shit about Isla).

The chili pepper emoji, as the TikTokers call it

Because I must do as the book did and address the topic of sex before I get to the final important bits.

This book is much hornier than the first one, but in a way that makes large parts of it feel like one of those dreams where you're trying to have sex with someone but your attempts keep getting interrupted. I regret that I did not count the number of times Isla was about to fuck someone and then got denied for some reason or another.

There are three times she actually succeeds, and luckily these scenes do not read like they were written by Sarah J. Maas, despite her obvious influence on everything else. This doesn't seem like much of a compliment, but this series needs all the W’s it can get. That's not to say everything is fine, though. There's one scene that's obviously using all the "first time" stuff for characterization, and I can't help but feel this would be more effective had they not already slept together a few short chapters beforehand? Like c’mon, all you had to do was switch the order of those two scenes.

The ending

Shortly before the Nightshade army is set to storm the island and destroy it, Isla learns Grim’s (and Cleo’s) real motivation for doing so: there’s a portal on the island leading to another world, one in which the original founders of Lightlark came from before making Lightlark in the image of the world they left. Grim and Cleo want to open that portal and reach the other world, which will just so happen to destroy the island. They’re not actually trying to kill everyone for the evulz. Isla, in her naivety, accidentally opens it for them before they even arrive.

During the final battle, while trying to steal Grim's powers so she can kill him and save Lightlark, Isla finally remembers the last two important memories: 1) she and Grim actually got married right before he memory-wiped her, and 2) what she thought was a prophetic vision of him killing an entire village was actually a memory of her doing so. Convinced that she'll accidentally kill Oro if she stays with him, she agrees to go with Grim, whom she just realized she is still in love with, in exchange for a promise that he'll withdraw the attack.

I cannot remember the last time I had this strong of an "are you fucking kidding me" reaction to the end of a book. But after some thinking, I decided that it actually makes for some great tragedy material. “Traumatized woman with a supportive partner becomes convinced that she’s too horrible to be with him and goes back to her terrible husband” would make for a good story if this was a more grounded book written by anyone else. Alas, this concept just had to be tackled here.

I also naively thought that because the deal was for two books, that means this would be a duology. But it feels like there will be a third book, and I'm hoping there is, not out of any desire for more (unsure how much more I can take), but because it would be straight-up authorial malpractice to end the series on that note.

Conclusion

This honestly wasn’t quite as bad as the first book, but the problems that persisted outweighed the ones that got fixed, and the severe case of Middle Book Syndrome certainly did not help its case. It’s a very small improvement stylistically, but when the nicest things I can say about it are “there were some concepts that could’ve made for an interesting story in the hands of a better author” and “the sex scenes aren’t atrocious” and “the cat is kinda cool”, then I feel justified in calling it terrible overall. It’s a good thing that Lightlark…3! is presumably a long ways away, because I will need all that time to recover from having read this.

#nightbane #lightlark #alex aster #ya fantasy #book review #book discussion #original content do not steal

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fandom-flight · 9 months

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I'm about halfway through Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint,and I'm really impressed with how it practically bleeds with themes of storytelling and our relationship with stories as humans. There's the obvious stuff, like how the main character's whole shtick is being a reader with "bookmark" and "fourth wall" abilities, but as of about chapter like 240, I've never stopped tangibly feeling how much ORV seems to want to explore the concept of stories (and not just in the sense of the novel's world where stories are like a kind of power, though that is kind of part of it). I ended up having a lot of roving thoughts, so more under the cut

Specifically what I mean by this is that almost every aspect of the world building and the plot has some kind of commentary on how people relate to stories. The constellations, for example, are very clearly kind of meant to be audience stand ins, especially in the beginning. They're watching the stories of our main characters on stream much the same way that we the readers are watching the story of ORV on our devices in the real world, and oftentimes their reactions to the events mimic our reactions from the outside– they cringe when characters do embarrassing things, they ship characters with chemistry, they hold their breath when things gets tense, and feel genuinely sad and heartbroken when bad things happen to the characters in their show. It's through their financial support that some of these stories can continue to be told, kind of the same way that fans' monetary contributions to artists enables their art to continue being made. Kim Dokja even calls out how the tables have turned early on in the series, that he used to be the one watching them through a screen, and now the situation is totally reversed. The constellations also kind of mimic the negative effect that the audience can have on art– sometimes artists have to bend to the will of their supporters even when it goes against their desired direction for their own art because that's what pulls in the money, and the way that incarnations and dokkaebi have to listen to the will of their sponsors feels like a very on the nose parallel for this. ORV sets up both the constellations and Kim Dokja as content consumers who have a love of stories in common in order to make a statement about how loving stories is universal, while simultaneously laying groundwork to make statements about the line between reader and narrative. Another thing that Kim Dokja has in common with the constellations is that both he and they are increasingly brought to the boundary of the fourth wall as the series progresses. In the same way Kim Dokja starts to realize that he IS part of the story now, and that the people he previously just saw as characters are actually real human beings that he has emotional attachments to, the constellations also start becoming characters who appear in the story and impact it directly, rather than being detached observers. This process of becoming a part of the story after being emotionally invested in it is naturally not something that literally happens to people in real life, but readers wanting to insert themselves into a narrative they love is something very human. I mean, fanfiction is incredibly popular because a lot of us humans can't just leave media that we love alone, we keep thinking about it, we want to expand on it, change it, and sometimes even insert ourselves into it. Historically, myths have had many different versions circulate over time, with some cultures borrowing figures from others and literary giants creating characters of their own (or even versions of themselves *cough Dante cough*) to insert into these legends.

In addition to the very human desire to become a part of the stories we love, ORV also calls out how humans are are kind of enamored with certain themes, and that we show this by having these themes appear in various legends the world over. Realms of death, myths of resurrection, tales of slaying supernatural evils, all of these things are shown to be so universal that constellations sometimes have copyright disputes over them. The fact that the constellations that appear in ORV are so varied is another place where ORV proves to be a love letter to storytelling. The author has such a diverse collection of gods and historical figures that I can't help but see their love for stories as something so strong that it transcended culture and nationality. Furthermore, the fact that constellations obtain their status from how widespread their stories are feeds into the theme of people being stories, which is another interesting angle to look at the relationship between people and stories. ORV has characters literally say "people are stories" out loud, and Han Sooyoung references the philosophy that people only truly die when they've been forgotten, but there isn't a single second where I really stop feeling like this holds true for everyone in the book (and not just because souls being stories and people needing stories to live ends up being part of the worldbuilding). The idea is that our stories give us value, both intrisinsically and extrinsically. ORV represents this literally, as the notoriety of a story actually makes people stronger, and also stories can be used as currency or food to some people. Even on a scale lower than the constellations, the reputations of characters and the rumors of their incredible deeds can increase their value to outsiders, the same way that a person's reputation in the real world can affect their job prospects and social connections (this is a little more obvious and would happen in any story, but I think that the mythologizing of the ORV characters in their own universe is meant to exemplify the effect of a person's stories on their perceived value).

The theme of people being stories also extends to a related but still separate (I think) theme of everyone being the protagonist of their own story. Kim Dokja begins ORV by talking about how much Yoo Sangah feels like a protagonist. She has all the qualities that a main character should have, and Kim Dokja feels like he could never match that, despite the fact that he clearly wants to be a protagonist really badly. He wants to be cool, special, and confident, but it's not until the scenarios start and he starts being able to use skills in a way unique to him that he starts realizing that maybe he can be a protagonist too. And again, this is a theme that ORV just constantly exudes– Kim Dokja often explicitly talks about how everyone is living their own life and being their own person. When he sees Yoo Sangah and Lee Hyunsung for the first time after the intermediate dokkaebi Paul separates them following the golden thrones destruction, he's impressed by their growth while he wasn't looking, and we the audience are reminded that these people learn and progress as the center of their own world. When Kim Dokja is separated from his friends after the Dark Castle arc and hears what they've been up to, he muses about how, even without him, the world continues to turn, scenarios continue to run, and people continue to live. It very much helps that the author of ORV gives every side character a vibrant and memorable personality so that we can better empathize with them as their own people with their own lives, even though they might not get as much screentime. Characters who we do not think to care much about are shown to have significant development while the main character isn't with them. Kim Namwoon matures into a calmer, happier person in the Underworld long after I forgot he existed. Han Myungoh went from bring an insufferable nepotism baby to being a determined and loving father who is willing to be an ally. The author constantly reminds us that Kim Dokja isn't the only one in this world who is a protagonist with a story worth telling, and in a way, it kind of feels like they're also telling the readers that, not only are we the main characters of our lives, but we also can never forget that the people around us are protagonists of their stories as well.

In short, ORV uses just about every character and storyline to convey that humans may love to consume the stories of others, but we can't forget that we're also writing our own stories by living them. Humans are made up of the stories they love, the ones they write themselves, and the ones they put a part of themselves into, and I just get the sense that the author has a lot of feelings about stories and how important they are to us as a species in every sentence they write. I'm definitely curious to see how the story ends because I can't imagine how the author will conclude the series when making a statement about this theme seems so important, but anything that would be a satisfying conclusion to the story would really be counterproductive to making that statement. As a reader, I want a definitive "and they lived happily ever after after solving the story's problems," but since the author actually has Kim Dokja muse on how "he never felt satisfied by 'and they lived happily ever after'," I kind of can't imagine that that's how this series will end? Because it doesn't sound like the author was ever completely satisfied with those endings either. But I also don't think ORV is meant to be a tragedy, so I'm excited to see where things go!

#orv #omniscient reader's viewpoint #orv spoilers

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slexenskee · 10 months

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hello!! i was rereading mdnsy and started wondering why you always use 'gojo' instead of satoru while naming him in his own pov. is there a reason for it?

sorry I'm not answering this privately but I do get asked this a lot so I figured it's better to just keep it out there 😅

A bunch of reasons swinging from random preference, literary/readability, and plot/characterization. Preference - idk for whatever reason A LOT of jjk fics refer to him exclusively as Gojo. I think that's bc a lot of them have him as a mc but its not from his POV, or its someone else's (usually Yuuji). I got into the habit of referring to him as Gojo in my head after reading it so much lol.

Which kinda leads me into Plot - that kinda stuck with me and in the end I ended up characterizing Gojo in my head as someone who has outrageously uncontrolled and untreated identity issues lmao. He was literally born as some fated sorcerer and his entire personal identity was intrinsically tied to being the Six Eyes holder. No one in his life looked at him as 'Satoru', he was always the Gojo heir and the Six Eyes holder. From a young age that's how he saw himself - reinforced by the fact I imagine he was probably almost always referred to as 'young master Gojo' by everyone in his life. He doesn't seem to have any kind of relationship with his parents in canon, so idk honestly who in his life would have been close enough to call him Satoru, at least not until high school. So Gojo himself doesn't even see himself as Satoru. Frankly if he had to pick a 'persona' that he truly identifies with, it would be his title 'The Honored One', but the weight of using just 'Gojo' with all its history and legacy (six eyes, clan, etc) is a close second.

This is also why he has no issue going from Touya, Dabi, Six Eyes, Satoru, and Ru-kun interchangeably in the story. They're all both aspects of his identity and also not really titles he identifies with at all, so he doesn't really care what people call him.

!!! ok somewhat spoiler-ish, but this is an intentional plot device that is meant to change as he grows in the story and starts to come to terms with himself as a human and not just the Gojo clan's lauded Six Eyes holder.

There's a part in one of (?) the next few chapters where he's asked directly what name he prefers, and he says 'You can call me Touya if you like, but I prefer Satoru'. A very different and more intentional response than the one he had in the last chapter where Nighteye asked what to call him and he was just like 'uhhh Six Eyes I guess since I'm here as a hero? idk lol'

Eventually he'll finally get to the point where he stops seeing himself as just the living avatar of the 'Honored One/current Six Eyes holder' and actually as Satoru, the person. Buuttttt idk if I'll ever stop calling him Gojo in his POV though, for the reason below ~

As for readability and a literary device - there are so many POVs in this fic and all of them call Gojo something different: Dabi for most, Touya for Fuyumi/Natsuo, Ru-kun for Katsuki, Satoru for Yui/the band, Six Eyes thrown in every once in a while. And all those POVs will change what they refer to him as depending on context, like sometimes Hawks thinks of him as Satoru, other times as Dabi. I wanted Gojo's POV to be very obviously removed from all his various names. Gojo's POV is the only POV where he's referred to by one name only.

#fic may death never stop you #ask #mdnsy asks #mdnsy faq

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luxlightly · 10 months

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Here's a serious answer to a question I see thrown around a lot: "why do stories use metaphor and allegory? Why not be direct?"

And while there are many factors that can influence that, the main one is the fact that it circumvents the natural way the human mind accepts things as normal.

Humans are extremely adaptive. It doesn't take long, after even a major change, for us to fall back into a rhythm of normalcy. It makes us incredibly resilient. But it also often makes it hard to recognize issues with what we've accepted as "normal". Metaphor and allegory allow us to step back and look at certain things through the eyes of someone not already familiar with it to the point it no longer registers as odd.

For example, we accept that we work a number of hours and get paid, then spend that money on things and we understand, in the abstract, that that means we're paying for items with time taken out of our lives. But it's normal to us. It's hard to conceptualize exactly what that means.

A movie that has people in a dystopian future where they literally use minutes of their life as currency shows that same concept in a way we have not accepted as normal. It's immediately shocking and upsetting. But the metaphor exists to remind us that this is already the world we exist in, we've just accepted it and therefore no longer see it as bizarre or upsetting in the same way.

These literary devices force us to step back and look at "normal" things from an outside perspective. And that can greatly help the ability to observe and analyze these things in the real world.

Which is why I'm constantly reiterating the point that dystopian media, in particular, is NOT meant as a prediction or a warning or a "stop now or it will be this later" or in any way actually a reference to the future in any of the ways that people leave in the tags of that post I made about this before. It's a way of observing and criticizing the present. When you read metaphor as literal, you are no longer using it to look at the current world from another point of view and therefore actively missing and even contradicting the point.

#I'm not saying nothing has ever actually been set in a speculative future #but if you're taking a metaphor for the present #and interpreting it as speculation #you completely miss the metaphor #and it fails to do its job

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youcouldmakealife · 11 months

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wait, sorry, more questions! thinking about jared "my perspective is soooo objective and not at all biased or limited ever why are you guys laughing?" matheson has me wondering about unreliable narrators in the ycmal-verse in general (mostly because it's a particular favourite literary device of mine and i think you use it so well in basically all of your writing)

i'm curious how you would rank your protags in terms of like, least to most unreliable in their own narration; are there sub-categories of 'unreliable' you would apply to different characters? also wondering who you would say is the most subtle in their unreliability/if you've noticed readers accepting certain perspectives more readily or without question?

They're all fucking liars. Every last one of 'em. Even if they're only lying to themselves.

Except Gabe. Gabe has blind spots, but he continues to be my most reliable son. (Dan also tries to be honest, but he misses more than Gabe does, and knows himself less.)

I don't have a scale, per se, but there's definitely an interesting thing where some characters are believed more than others when they're all blinkered narratives in their way. Everyone knows say, Mike and David are not being honest -- they'll both straight up lie in their narratives -- but others get taken at face value more, even though they're no more reliable.

Jared gets believed a lot, actually, far more than someone who basically goes 'unless this matters to me personally I'm throwing it right out of my narrative'. What are your teammates' names, Jared Matheson. Would you even remember the name of your sister's boyfriend if he wasn't one of your best friends.

Roman got believed more than Harry but I think people trusted Harry more, oddly. (Maybe not oddly: Harry acknowledges his own faults up front so you don't have to! But this is a dude who not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES got smacked in the face with 'I find this person really annoying I guess I hate them? ...aw fuck wait I wanna kiss them'). Joey straight up doesn't use quotation marks at points because he hasn't acknowledged that his internal monologue's left his head. He's so untrustworthy even the punctuation is a lie. Georgie, like Jared, is very precise in what he includes, but unlike Jared, that's less 'I noticed nothing else' and more 'I am omitting this'. It's not any more or less reliable, really -- the difference is that with Georgie, there's a narrative being crafted in his own head. (Robbie does the same thing, though I'd say he's a less reliable narrator than Georgie is, particularly pre-Saul, due to him shoving everything into a drawer to compartmentalize and then slamming it shut.)

And it's fun writing James and Holden because every time Holden talks people waver, and then every time James talks they waver right back. Both of them are honest in their way! Neither of them would give you a proper narrative on their own, though -- cards on the table is intimately tied up in how imprecise and flawed communication can be, and the way their perspectives bounce off one another as much as they connect is a big part of that.

#writing talk

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