#and apologies for long winded and possibly off tangent answers

[jlf23tumble]

I sent the anon about a lack of gay rumors about Harry. I don't think you read all I said because I never said he was straight and I never said there weren't any gay rumors. I even said that I didn't think he was straight. I was asking is it possible that all these women who said they've hooked up with him, and there are tons, all lying and were put up to it by Jeff? Like the bachelor contestant? Love island contestant. Influencers, models. Is it all lies or is it more likely that he is bi?

My apologies, I had a lot of similar asks come in all at once that were a) long-winded, b) didn't clarify what they were asking, and c) went off on tangents that kept me stuck on the first bit, and in this case, yeah, I got stuck on your ask's "there aren't any gay rumors" about him because, uh, there are?? Like, a lot?? To answer your question, I don't think Jeff has the ability to encourage random women to make that kind of claim (or the interest: it seems like a lot of work, and he reads as a shirker), and as a rule, I don't think women are liars. That said, are there really "tons" of women saying they've hooked up with Harry Styles, like, truly? I can think of one or two one-off anecdotes, but it gets muddied by media speculation, randos "connecting" "dots," or people linked to him officially. And all of THAT said, I have no clue as to Harry Styleseseses' real-life sex life, but since you ask, sure, he could be bi! Annnnd I think he could also be exploring his own sexuality in a much deeper and layered way than a lot of people in today's tumblr.biz fandom space are ready to consider because, frankly, a) they can't handle too many levels of nuance and b) don't understand that the deepest, most private real-life facets of someone else's sexuality are none of their biz. And that pulls in another part of this ask that kind of raises my hackles, and it's the "is it all lies" bit because none of us are owed the truth from someone we don't know. We see *maybe* 5% of any person's actual lived life! Anyone telling you they have it all locked in w/r/t a stranger is full of shit!

ETA: check out the replies for stuff I should have included but was too sleepy to really get to because YEAH, NAILED IT FURTHER

#i'll jump off my high horse for a hot sec to say that i often think about the vibes from the fine line album #and the way a LOT of people jumped in and seemingly correctly guessed a lot of signals being dropped #but maybe the whole 'being perceived' by strangers thing was a wee bit scary? #I can imagine him working out his own complicated identity to cis women in real time (my theory still works w/that album too) #you can dm me if you want me to spell it out in a spoon-feedy way but it's fairly obvious if you open your mind even a wee bit #there's a real ao3-influenced 'this script has been written and so it shall be 4 ever' vibe to a lot of fandom perception #and it just LOCKS IN to whatever was said a decade or more ago as if it's carved in stone #and guess what? it ain't #it ain't for him or for them or even for you #and that's actually wonderful and amazing and should be embraced tbh

[herorps]

Hey flo do you have a guide to naming Chinese characters?? So I can be ethnically correct !

i apologize for how late this is. i’ve had a very busy work day and i’m only now getting some downtime to sit down and answer this the way i want to answer this. i want to start off by saying that i am chinese-american and that what i say and how i name my chinese characters is based on my personal experiences in my community growing up and what i’ve gathered through long-sought out research and diaspora twitter. 

i also want to say that of course your ethnically chinese character can have an western name, it’s very common that we do, especially in modern times and in immigrant spaces, however i think we should be able to normalize using ethnic names. also unless you are adopted ( see: leah lewis ), in my experience you 100% have a chinese name on top of having a ‘western’ name, so if you want to give your character a western name it’d be accurate to give them a chinese name as well ( see: natasha liu bordizzo/liu chengyu ).

if you find this guide helpful, please like and reblog the post, validate me and if you have any questions/corrections/add ons please let me know! 

i would have you start off by reading this really helpful guide. it’s a little long winded and you don’t have to read all of it but they do a great job with describing the different romanizations of names and how they’re different across different dialects/regions. you need to first decide what context your character exists in, whether they’re from beijing or taipei or hong kong, their full name is going to be spelled differently based on what background you want to give them.

my mother’s surname is actually a great example of this. her surname is 湯 which in mandarin chinese is pronounced “tang” but because my mother’s family is originally taishanese, her last name is romanized “hong” everywhere that uses an english spelling. alternatively, if my mother’s family changed their romanization when they moved to hong kong, where they speak cantonese, her last name would have been romanized as “tong”. 

another example of this is chou tzuyu. because she from taiwan, the romanization of her name is chou tzu yu but if her family was from, like, shanghai her name would be romanized zhou zi yu. same chinese characters ( 周子瑜 ), but because they are pronounced differently across different languages and because she is taiwanese, the romanizations are different. 

so after you’ve decided what romanization you want to give them, the next step is to actually choose a name. i personally begin with the given name with all of my characters because i like attaching a meaning to the given name over the surname. and also surnames are pretty easy to find/figure out.

here is a guide that discusses a little bit about naming conventions in china, particularly about gendered names. i really like what tangelotime had to say about the fact that gender doesn’t really matter when it comes to naming because, in my opinion and experience, it doesn’t. i would say that what would be “gendered” is possibly the way a name sounds. idk how to explain this but there are some names that sound “girly” but more in the sense that it’s like girly vs. butch. and i can’t think of a good example of this so you’re just gonna have to ... idk go with your gut. but for the most part, chinese names are gender neutral. 

what tangelotime also said about how giving a chinese name is intense is absolutely true because there are so many things that parents may consider including chinese zodiac and fengshui and radicals in a certain character and what it means---it’s a sport that i do not have the effort for nor the intelligence to properly explain. however, i think the guides that i’ve linked so far do a good job in explaining that in a way that i cannot. here is another extensive guide, but this one discusses historical contexts ( for all u historical rpers heh ) and more importantly imo, the list of themes that a parent might take in creating a name. 

8/6/21 edit: i came across these pictographs of characters from mdzs that analyze the etymology by the radical that gives you a lot of insight to possible name meanings and to the written chinese language. 

additionally, here is a video by avenue x, an amazing creator on youtube who reviews c dramas and gives a lot of in depth cultural context for some of the shows she watches, that explains the names of characters from word of honor and gives the poetry references that the writers may have used. 

so if you’ve taken a look all the guides i’ve given you, good on you, i really appreciate you putting in all the work. now let me give you some examples of how different things may be taken into consideration when giving a chinese name. 

my given name is 安儀, romanized “on yee” because my family speaks cantonese. the first character means “safe” while the second character means “appearance,” so together my name means “safe appearance”. but, my mom also took into consideration the radicals of the characters as well. the first character looks like it has a hat or a roof on it right? that is intentional. the character underneath the hat is the character/radical for girl, so my mom wanted to make sure that her daughter had something over her that would protect her. hence why she chose the character 安. the second character in my given name consists of primarily two other words/radicals, 亻+ 義. the first radical is a variation of ⼈, the chinese word for “person,” and the second radical can roughly translate to “righteous” which means when put together, 儀 can mean “righteous person.” however 儀 can also come to mean “the appearance of a righteous person” if you consider all of the meanings i’ve given so far. my parents thought heavily about what my name means, not only on a translation level but also on a structural level. 

if you’re writing a family with multiple children, consider having a generational name. in short, generational names usually have a shared character among a single generation of family members. both of my parents and their siblings are named in this manner. my mom and her siblings all have the 華 ( wah ) character in their names. my dad and his brother have the 少 ( siu ) character and his sisters have the 美 ( mei ) character in their names. my grandparents ( both sets ) thought to give their kids a generational link in their names. 

now let’s look at jackson wang’s given name, 嘉尔, which he explained was homophonic in meaning. this is a tangent but chinese people love homophones and it’s why we don’t trust the number 4 but love the number 8. his given name, romanized “gaa yee”/”jia er”  is essentially a homophone for “plus 2″. he said ( in a video that i cannot find anymore ) that his grandfather named him because he wanted the meaning to be “a king with two guards to protect him”. jackson’s last name 王 (wong/wang) means “king” so “king” “plus 2″ is the intention his grandfather had in naming him. 

but if you’re really not versed in things like fengshui or poetry or you don’t have someone with chinese literacy available to you, the next best thing is to honestly ... take a look at media. whether that’s celebrities or film/tv/book characters ( written by actual chinese people pls ) and see what their names are ( or at least the romanizations are ). this will help you figure out what sounds appropriate and what sounds like you’re just mashing sounds together ( see: cho chang is she korean... is she chinese?? who the fuck knows ). and then finding characters that give off a meaning ( like my name meaning “safe appearance” ) is just fine imo. 

and honestly sometimes giving a name doesn’t have to be so deep. like fan bingbing’s name literally translates to “ice ice” and i don’t even know what her brother, chengcheng’s name is supposed to mean, i think their parents just think having the duplicated character is fun and cute. so don’t stress yourself out. 

also a lot of what i’ve gone over has pertained to the common 3-character name ( 1 character surname, 2 character given name ) but you can also consider a 2 character name ( 1 character surname, 1 character given name ) ( see: xiao zhan ) or even a 2 character surname ( see: ouyang nana ). 

so finally, to get you started, here is a short list of characters and their romanizations that you can take a look at.

thank you so much for bearing with me, i know this is a lot of information to take in but it is great that you are seeking this information out in the first place. i also know that this may seem very daunting, and even for me it’s daunting sometimes, but if you have any more questions, please let me know and if you have anything you’d like to add, please let me know. 

#writing guide #writing help #naming guide #character resource #naming resource #writing resource #rph #rpc #rpha #rpcw #rpt #mine #Anonymous

[nureyevsbf]

Peter, how did you meet Eli? And what's your favorite thing about him? Have you stolen anything from him?

I'll answer your second question first, as it's far less long winded, but Elisha... all of him is delightful, but it's the fire in him that I love the most. He has a very specific sort of charisma - hot-headed, loud, fun, warm to be around. There's something about the sort of man that flirts with you as you have a knife buried in his chest that's hard to resist, I'm afraid!

For your first and your third questions, however, it's funny you should ask, because the answer to them is actually the same story. It's a bit of a funny one, I think - right place at the right time, I suppose! You'll have to forgive the tangent I'm about to go on, it's a favorite story of mine to tell on the rare occasion I get the chance to.

I had been hired by an employer who wanted a valuable old artifact from an Outer Rim planet named Suminides; a collector of sorts, the kind that doesn't mind picking up their pieces illegitimately, and luckily for them, that's precisely the business I'm in. The museum housing it at the time was planning on sending the exhibit back to Suminides to be displayed for a little while, and all I had to do was find a way to grab it in transit, and I could be off the planet before anyone realized it was gone. In retrospect, it was foolish hindsight on my part that neither my employer nor I planned for someone else to have the same idea.

The setup was simple: the exhibit split up between five transports, each with a driver and two highly trained guards - minimal personnel to avoid drawing attention - all taking different routes to the spaceport, and each with a tracker that would immediately alert the local authorities on standby if they diverged from their route or stopped unexpectedly. All I had to do was forge the right correspondences, make sure the right people knew about the trainee joining the protection detail last-minute, and act like I belonged there when the day of rolled around. Then it was merely a matter of dispatching my fellow guards discreetly, slipping off with the artifact at a particular spot in the route where the tuck-and-roll wouldn't be quite so bad, and making off in a car I'd stashed nearby to get to the ship my employer had prepared for me to get off planet. I'd done much more dangerous jobs before - two guards in close quarters should have been childs' play, even if they were highly trained.

It was easier said than done by the time I got there. The team I was with was fidgety around me - at first I was certain I'd been already been caught, but what could I do? My only hope was to carry on with the job like I wasn't aware anything was amiss, and merely pray I could still get the jump on them.

Our driver was a waspish woman with a sharp sort of face who seemed to be the de facto leader of sorts; of the guards, the one I thought I needed to worry the most about was the snake-eyed one, who used a dialect of sign I'd never seen before and who I just couldn't get a read on. And then there was the man. Soft face, dark eyes, a little bit shorter than me. He seemed to have a sturdy frame, but the uniform covered from the neck down - even his hands, with the gloves he wore - and I know now I underestimated him. It didn't help that he was the most personable of the three; kept making warm conversation with me, seemingly trying to make me feel welcome there. He was actually the reason I let my guard down - he seemed to be trying to get me to ease up about the job, sooth over any nerves about being a trainee around his otherwise... unsociable team.

The transport had to travel at a fixed speed, so all I had to do was watch my time and count our stops to know where we were. At thirty minutes in I would have dispatched the other two guards as discreetly as I could - preferably with some sort of distraction - and at thirty-five minutes, I would exit the vehicle with the artifact, hopefully before the drive realized something was amiss behind the partition. (If I played my cards right, I could have probably even exited the vehicle earlier if need be - I made sure I knew those city streets, it wouldn't have been difficult to find my way to my escape vehicle unseen.)

At roughly twenty-four and a half minutes, the transport stopped. And not the stuck-in-traffic sort of stop. I know the details of it now - the team had cracked the tracker, had it sending off falsified data to make it look like everything was alright, and had pulled into a discreet side street where they'd stored a getaway car of their own and were about to do roughly the same as I had planned to. They'd planned ahead impressively, inserting themselves into the security company weeks ahead of time with falsified backgrounds, and had set up the cleanest possible escape. Of course they'd been fidgety when a complete stranger - presumably an actual employee of the security company - was thrown into their heist before they had time to resolve it.

At the time, though, lacking these details? It was a bit hard to appreciate the artistry behind it, when I was stuck in the back of an armored transport, two-against-one - presumably about to be three-against-one - with no idea where we were or how far I was from my original escape point. Nor with any idea how fast the authorities might be arriving and how little time I had, for that matter.

The other two stood, and the man began to apologize for something - probably assuming I was a real trainee who'd simply been caught up in the wrong mess - but I didn't give him a chance to finish. As soon as I saw the snake-eyed one reaching for something, I sprung forward and stuck my knife in their throat.At least I had the element of surprise with them - even if I couldn't get the jump on the man, from the looks of it, I was faster. And I think I'd gotten used to that being enough - so it was my turn to be taken off guard when he caught my knife in his hand.

He was a rough fight. Like I said, I was used to being faster being enough, but it doesn't do much when ever punch makes you feel like you're going to black out. When I said earlier that I'd underestimated him? I should be perfectly clear that it wasn't entirely my fault - there's no way to predict when someone's strength is going to surpass human. Even without the bionic arm. He'd broken five of my ribs before I finally found an opening, managing to drive my knife through the right side of his chest. If I'd been thinking straight, I'd have gone for the left - though I'm thankful now that I didn't.

It was enough to stop him. With anyone else, it should have been enough to kill them, but... well. The entire "superhuman" thing is a story for another time.

"At least take a man out for dinner first," he'd strained to jest, like there wasn't a knife sticking out of his chest - I'd left it in my haste to grab the case with the artifact and scramble out of there, kicking the back doors open and practically throwing myself out into the alleyway.

I was lucky the driver was waiting in their own transport; she must have thought the other two were busy taking care of me, because by the time she realized something was wrong, I had already disappeared into the city, gathering my sense of direction and making my way to my own escape car.

I'm thankful to say that Elisha did make a full recovery - I owe very much to the wonders of modern medicine. And he got the artifact back in the end, too - I can't say my former employer didn't deserve to die the way he did, all his greed and swindling finally catching up to him one last time. But by the time Elisha had caught up with him, I myself was long gone, in the wind and off to the next planet without so much as a trace to lead him by.

Imagine my surprise when, almost a year later - months after he'd stopped trying to find me anymore - our paths managed to cross again when we were hired by the same employer! I'm thankful to say our second meeting didn't end on such a sour note as the first, but it's yet another story for another time, I think.

#answered #takeover #nureyev answers #shakespeareonmain #im so fuckign. s o r r y this is as long as it is #1.5k words that could have been summed up as ''oh we were trying to steal the same thing and i stabbed him'' #but what is peter if not theatric

[shslblushingbride]

Diary #5 (Chapter 1)

Time: n/a

Date: n/a

Location: Lower Bunker # 5

Ever since the fact about our loved ones became even more clear to us I’ve been trying to toughen it up and keep pushing forward. It’s incredibly hard but doing chores helps me out a lot by keeping my mind off of it. What helped me regain a lot of my hope though was Kai. He’s so sweet and amazing. It makes a lot of sense when you find out he’s a miracle of God! At first, I thought he was the second of Jesus Christ. He assured me that wasn’t the case but that he was possibly a miracle by him, Kai had apparently died and brought back to life. Amazing, right?! I had gotten a second wind, I felt that there was hope again. Seeing Kai and hearing his story made me regain my faith that God was looking out for us. Especially now in our most dire time of need.

After our chat in the dining room, Kai had asked me to follow him somewhere else. It sounded important so I did, we went back to our bunker. (I think I forgot to mention this earlier. I’m sharing a bunker with Kai and Takeshi, although I haven’t spoken much to the latter.) It turns out that he just wanted to ask me about my height and what I did to get so tall. I wasn’t sure what to say other than the truth, everyone in my family is tall. I mean I’m still taller than anyone else but only by an inch or two. He looked unsatisfied with my answer, but what else was I supposed to say? If there was a magic spell for height than I would have used it to stop growing so much. 

I wanted to apologize but he asked something immediately after. He wanted to hug me. It was a little odd and I’m slightly ashamed to say that I didn’t say no. He was just so small and cute that saying no to that request would have been impossible for anyone. It was like a small moment of peace, it was warm and nice. 

Sadly that moment didn’t last very long didn’t last much longer because we heard yelling coming from outside the room. Many of us went to the dining room to see what was happening. I got there a bit late and saw that there was a game starting amongst us. It seems that Mister Akomi wanted to have us play as to entertain and distract him from his bad mood. The game he had us participate in was called ‘Never have I ever’, I was excited and sat down with the others there and have some fun. It was going well at first, but things started getting more heated and personal and the lightheartedness of it all went away. And we learned some wild things about each other.

After the game, a few of us tried to talk to Mister Akomi to try and figure out his problem with Miss Torimi and see if we can mend it in any way ( or I think that’s what we were doing). Akomi wanted to fight, which is never a good idea, and as I tried to convince him to try and talk to her about his feelings Leonhard would counter it by saying that fighting was a good way to settle things. And that’s where things got worse. Akomi had left while Leonhard and I had an argument over the matter.

What Petra said to me seems more prominent now, I did live a ‘sheltered’ life. I didn’t have similar problems like the rest of them but that doesn’t mean I didn’t struggle in life. My home is small, nuzzled between a few hills, you can easily pass by it and not even know it was there. It was like one big happy family. So yes, I guess it’s true, I don’t know life outside of my home. I can’t imagine what they’ve seen or heard or felt. They all know so much about the world and I’m just a farm girl who was decent at throwing a party...

But what I do know is that working together is what we need. He can’t let his anger and annoyance be what clouds his judgment om people. I’ll do my best to get them to see that Manobu, Petra and everyone else is more than meets the eye. No one is mean in and out, right? There has to be some nice person hidden within them and I can’t wait to meet them. I’m not really comfortable with rude people, I never knew how to deal with them but I’m not going to hide this time. Like mom always says, “respecto al geno es la paz”.

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I think I went on a tangent but hopefully it makes sense.

@royal-despair