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akampana · 3 years

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im the anon who asked for obscure artoria ships - tysm for answering! i knew you liked kojiro/artoria from early tpof, but ozymandias/artoria was unexpected! ozytoria sounds interesting from the way you describe it - ive always sort of seen it as an almost-giltoria dynamic minus the hostility and antagonism. i think that modern au idea sounds incredibly sweet 😭 honestly i like the idea of them but there is virtually no fancontent OR canon content of them (besides that one lartoria comment in ozy's interlude?) so its a half-built ship for me as of now. and yes, please talk about kojiro/artoria for the ship game! i'd love to see more of your thoughts on them. on nobu/artoria - YES nobu is incredibly beautiful its crazyyy. i got into shipping them because of mastoria/nobu in koha-ace, interactions in fgo and a user's thoughts on them here on tumblr (you can find them if you search up nobutoria).

Hi, @glowingarchive! good to see you in the inbox. :)

Oh, no way, really? Thought I was being subtle with Kojirou apparently not XD. And your thoughts on Ozy and Arturia, I totally agree. If you want, I made art for them a while ago, but didn't end up posting it.

*cracks knuckles* Alright, let's go.

Kojirou Sasaki X Arturia Pendragon - SHIP IT

What made you ship it?

This is gonna sound strange, but do hear me out.

My love for this ship evolved from the first time it caught my attention, but to be completely honest it all started with another ship: Diarturia.

After re-watching and re-reading FZ, FSN, and UBW, something kept coming up for me. We all know FZ is an incredible prequel sequel, created with stunning precision to fit the already existing narrative, which is why, even when consuming the series as a whole based on the timeline of events, Arturia's character still makes sense.

Their expert craftmanship made the fact that the 5th HGW is Saber's second attempt a lot clearer. Why? because it brings to the table a theme that was already there and yet not too fleshed out:

Deja vu. Or, in Saber's case, a double deja vu.

For example, this line:

Before Zero, it only means 'oh cool so she's fought spearmen before.' but after Zero, you finally know exactly who she's talking about.

But why do I say it's a double deja vu for her?

Let's begin with the obvious one. The parallels between Cú and Diarmuid are pretty clear. Like you just know Zero Lancer's character was patterned after the existing Lancer, but given another purpose. There are gifsets all over Tumblr that illustrate their similarity too.

BUT Cú and Arturia (ooh it kills me to say this) only just fall short of the borderline flirtatious "I wanna have a glorious fight to the death with you because you're worthy" energy. Furthermore, they meet only briefly.

So where did they get that?

Kojirou bloody Sasaki

More below the cut.

It's parallel time. (there are a few more but hnggg tumblr limits)

THEY PROTECC. THEY ATTAC. BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY THEY WANNA FIGHT HER BACK.

No, but seriously. I don't think this is a coincidence. Diarmuid must have been some sort of amalgamation of Kojirou and Cú, the best of both. And that is also why the previous deja vu point hits harder.

Honestly, when that realization came, I was totally not expecting it. I was supposed to be looking for Diarturia crumbs and instead I found myself another whole-ass cookie. And one that unjustly has barely anything in the fandom, even if we have more straightforward lines like this:

Which is, by the way, one of the answers to the next question.

What are your favorite things about the ship?

So, now that you know how I got into shipping this, unorthodox as it seems, I think it's time to move past the parallels and into more solid ground.

Unlike other relationships that are more ambiguous and rely on potential, Kojirou's attraction to her is so in your face, it's refreshing.

Their banter is *chef's kiss*

It's only overshadowed because he so quickly became a gag servant, and ofc because the focus of the anime was Shirou. (Why did they do him like that though, he's actually so cool??? I mean, did Saber truly even beat him?? like???)

Saber comments on his skill with the sword, going so far as to say he outclasses him in swordsmanship. bruh, you can't take that lightly

They both see each other as worthy opponents. She literally tells him he's worthy of her full attention.

Kojirou sees her as the fulfillment of his wish, and Saber bloody actually gets to grant him the fight of his 'life' (FSN and UBW, not HF ;n;) when she couldn't do the same for a certain former rival. She even promises their fight's resolution because it is so important to her to see it through (UBW).

Kojirou really wants that fight, and fairly, without interruption. Which is why in FSN he goes as far as to stop the fight before Rider can spy on Saber's sword. And then later on, literally tells Shirou and Rin he doesn't give a shit about them, he just wants to fight Saber.

When he calls her out on holding back, especially since they're both running out of time, she apologizes and reveals Excalibur so they can fully face each other at full strength. UGH THE CHEMISTRY HGNGNGNGNGN. Also, since he knows this is their last fight, he's giving off "look at me, focus on me, don't think about anything else" vibes.

Also, man, Kojirou Sasaki really be out here serving up blatant eye smex every time they share the screen I swear to god.

Like let me give you a line from UBW 23, 19:08, right after Assassin notices she's damaged his katana

Arturia: Our positions...Assassin...are you... (that's what the subs say but Saber says "kisama" so I read it as "you bastard")

Kojirou, smirking: Is it wise to pull your blows? In this position, I could send you flying.

*Kojirou steps forward pressuring their locked swords and causing her to shuffle back a bit*

Arturia: Is that why you deliberately entered my range?

Look, Sasaki, we all see what you're doing, ya ain't slick.

Taken out of context and heck even *in* context that's sexual tension right there.

You better bet if he had the chance he'd be sticking that long-ass sword in-

Is there an unpopular opinion you have about your ship?

It's...baffling how unknown this ship is like...look at all that material. I mean of course it's going to be trounced in popularity by Shirou x Saber, GilArt, and Diarturia , but it should at least have accumulated enough of a following like Cuturia, for example.

Thank you for the ask! Hope you enjoyed the read as much as I enjoyed constructing this. :) feel free to share to gain more fans mwahahahahah join the dark side we have cookiessss

#akampana asks #seriously tho like #so underrated #kojirou sasaki #kojiro sasaki #assassin #saber #arturia pendragon #artoria pendragon #arturia #artoria #kojiro #slightly diarturia tho #yeah also tagging #diarturia #since it seems pretty relevant #even if not the focus

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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 2 years

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I decided I’d elaborate on the Ten Most Wanted supernatural criminals! Some of them are slated to appear later in the series, some might not (or might, depending on how well they’re responded to), but mostly this is just a little bit of extra stuff to flesh out the world, y’know?

The Most Wanted are presented here from least dangerous to most dangerous along with explanations of who they are, what they do, what their crimes are etc. and sort of how a hunter getting briefed would be presented this info.

10. Fucking Jerry

Self-described “World’s most obnoxious wizard.”

Lives to inconvenience others; he’s the kind of guy to go on an elevator and either hit every button before getting off or ripping a huge fart when it’s crowded.

He hexed his name so that he can only ever be referred to as “Fucking Jerry.”

Constantly dresses in the most tacky clothing imaginable. Yes, he wears socks with his sandals.

Seems to be able to alter probability at least slightly. This is how he has managed to constantly avoid capture, usually because his pursuers slipped on “conveniently” placed banana peels.

Is not actually malicious, he’s just an asshole.

His threat level is extremely low; everyone just wants to arrest him because he has managed to piss off the heads of every major hunter organization on Earth.

Fucking Jerry.

9. Horatio Blackmore

A gentleman thief who specializes in stealing magical items and rare artifacts.

His right eye was shot out when he was fifteen, and so he wears an eyepatch over it. To make up for his missing depth perception, he wears a magically powered lens over his left eye that gives him better focus, aim, and allows him to see through solid objects like an X-ray.

Is soulbonded with an incubus named Appolyon. Said incubus is his lover and his partner in crime.

Threat level is low; he’s never done any sort of fatal harm, much preferring to confound and outwit his opponents. However, he has his hands on several powerful magical artifacts.

8. Takashi Takahashi

A magical scientist and necromancer, nicknamed “The Reanimator” after the Lovecraft story/Jeffery Combs movie.

Is extremely flamboyant and hammy. Think your stereotypical mad scientist.

Is mainly wanted for graverobbing and for the theft of documents belonging to the Shelleys (and other notable figures in the necromantic arts).

Is rumored to be a necrophile. This is, however, unconfirmed.

Is incredibly skilled at making undead creations, though they lack the intelligence and sentience of creations like Adam Shelley. He is ultimately simply very good at creating powerful zombies stitched together from various sources.

Threat level is moderate; he mostly keeps to himself, and has never killed for parts, but his creations have caused problems and killed before.

7. The Black Wake

Apparently one of the Loch-Born, the group of Scottish therianthropes that can take the shape of sea monsters. This one is, unsurprisingly, mainly black in color.

Its human form is unknown.

It is wanted for destroying ships and stealing valuables.

Threat level is moderate; while it is extremely dangerous at sea, it doesn’t actively attack survivors in the water and seems to try and minimize loss of life if possible. However, as little else is known about it, it’s hard to say either way how dangerous it truly is.

6. Koschei the Deathless

A very old and powerful Russian lich.

While very powerful, he has been outwitted and defeated many times. However, most tricks used against him work only once due to the fact he is able to bounce back from just about anything.

His phylactery has never been found, and the only hints to its existence are that it is in some obscure nested objects, the location of which have never been found.

His threat level is moderately severe; while it is certainly possible to subdue him, the fact he can’t be put down permanently makes it very difficult to contain him for any great length.

5. Eve

AKA Samael, the Venom of the Gods.

One of the very few angels known to live on Earth.

She is the inventor of vampirism.

Was not always an enemy to hunters, but her part in the death of Dracula as well as her harboring Jack Fairchild (see below) have made her a target.

She has also harbored and attempted to rehabilitate many other supernatural criminals over the course of history, notably Gordon Ruthven, Elizabeth Bathory, Bartholomew Comstock, and of course Jack “The Ripper” Fairchild.

Is an extremely powerful chronomancer.

Currently trapped in the form of a snake (NOTE: They haven’t read the first book yet).

Her threat level is moderately severe; she is often content to stick to her own devices and will only fight if confronted, but trapped as a snake or not this is still an angel, and extreme caution should be taken when near her.

4. The Ringmaster

The ringleader (get it?) of the supernatural trafficking organization known as the Circus Obscura,

Is not one person; there have been several Ringmasters dating back to the late 18th century.

Is known for his ten magical rings, each of which has a different property: Mind control, portal generation, invisibility, super strength, health regeneration, flight, and command over the four main elements,

The Circus Obscura is known for performing horrific shows in which they torture, maim, mutilate, and otherwise abuse captives for twisted audiences. They also sell recordings of these acts, making them a producer of supernatural snuff films. At best, one can hope to be utilized in a freak show to be gawked at by wealthy patrons.

Threat level is severe. Ringmaster is not to be taken lightly. Aside from his rings there is also the matter of the members of his circus, who tend to be equally dangerous and fanatically deranged. Extreme caution and lots of backup is recommended when raiding the Circus Obscura.

3. Black Annis

A hag who is known to have a witch coven that worships the fabled Unseelie faerie, Yorick the Faceless King.

As part of the worship of Yorick, she is known to kidnap children to offer to the Unseelie fae (not Yorick; if he ever existed at all, he is surely long dead).

She has played a role in many mass child disappearances, most notably the infamous incident in Hamelin during the middle ages. She is said to have crafted the Piper’s flute herself (reports it is made from the bones of her victims are likely exaggerated).

While it is unknown if the children she kidnaps are killed or not, the sheer amount of children she has managed to capture over the centuries has made her one of the most reviled enemies of the supernatural community.

Her threat level is severe. She is an incredibly powerful spellcaster, and even if she doesn’t devour children as some legends claim she is most certainly not a force to be trifled with lightly.

2. Jack Fairchild

AKA Jack the Ripper

Known for his massacre of Dracula’s school, the murders of Whitechapel, and several other supposed cold cases.

Has the ability to enter and travel through shadows.

Has incredible skill and precision with knives due to his father training him as a surgeon.

If there is a crime, he has probably committed it. At any rate, murder, torture, assault, cannibalism, public indecency, and jaywalking are his most well-known pastimes.

Seems to have an Oedipus complex.

Views himself as untouchable, a claim that isn’t entirely unfounded.

Despite being in Eve’s coven, he has been known to inflict violence upon the other members. For some reason Eve has not terminated him for this.

Threat level is extreme. He’s wild, unpredictable, and if he catches you in the dark you’re screwed. Do not attempt to apprehend him without significant numbers, and even then don’t hope for anything more than driving him off.

1. Sebastian Darke

The single most evil sorcerer in history.

He was born in 666 A.D. and tried to acquire the True Necronomicon soon after it was written. He has spent centuries seeking out and collecting the pages after they were scattered to the wind in an attempt to stop him. He apparently wishes to use it to bring about an apocalypse.

Is the head of a cult that has had its hand in many cults across the centuries ge has been active. His agents are everywhere, subtly influencing things to suit his agenda.

He is able to possess and overtake people’s bodies when killed, transforming them into himself and gaining their powers and knowledge. He famously did this to Gilles de Rais to destroy the man’s reputation after a defeat.

Has had hundreds of children with various parents over the centuries. Some he has swayed to his side, others he has destroyed.

Is skilled at creating flesh golems of various sizes and forms. It is believed the “corpse scorpion” that assaulted the wizard college in Scotland was his work. It is believed that his hand in many cult’s mass suicides (such as Jonestown) is simply him gathering materials.

Is very good at cutting losses and doesn’t seek revenge unless he knows he can attain it decisively.

Has had a hand in many historical tragedies, including the death of Joan of Arc and the fall of the Aztecs.

He is known to be unnervingly calm, his tone always even. Elements of him like this and his red eyes combined with his array of powers have caused some to theorize he isn’t entirely human; autopsies on his corpses has revealed nothing out of the ordinary, however.

Threat level is impossibly extreme. Taking on one of his agents? Varies, but is manageable. Taking on one of his children? Extremely dangerous but with skill and numbers it is possible. Taking on Darke himself? Disengage immediately unless you have incredible power of numbers on your side. He can be killed (temporarily at least) but it is much easier said than done.

#the vampirino story

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eusjason · 4 years

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ʷᵉ ᵃʳᵉ ⁿᵒᵗ ˢᵘʳᵉ ᵒᶠ 𝓼𝓸𝓻𝓻𝓸𝔀, & 𝕛𝕠𝕪 ʷᵃˢ ⁿᵉᵛᵉʳ ˢᵘʳᵉ ;

› 𝟎𝟎𝟏: 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘰𝘥, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘵?

in the northern reaches of canada, playful outdoor hockey on frozen lakes known as shinny is as sure of a past time as huddling up by the fireplace. never one to be bothered by the cold, jason spent most of the young childhood skating out on some lake or another, usually with friends or teammates until they eventually called it quits when the sun started to sink lower and the even colder night chill began to roll in. he should’ve left with them, really, his mother was going to worry as she always did — though never as much as the other mothers, not out of any less concern, but perhaps she knew that water would not harm jason. all the times he’d gotten picked out of the frigid saguenay fjord and didn’t get so much as a cold were probably a dead giveaway.

so he’s alone when it happens, probably for the best : it means the mist doesn’t have to work overtime to alter the memories of his friends. winter is just starting to break into the warmer season of spring, the worst time of year if you ask jason. it just signals the end of outdoor hockey, soon to be moved to the confines of a temperature controlled rink. he’s stubborn, intent on getting every hour out of the frozen ice on the lake that he possibly can, even if that means avoiding certain spots of the lake. but he must miscalculate because he hears the telltale cracking of ice beneath his skates — and not the comforting deep cracking sounds that accompanies a freezing lake. this is the bad kind of cracking, the one that proceeds plunging into freezing water and possibly dying of hypothermia. tyler’s mother had showed them all a video of someone falling through thin ice when they were all old enough to want to skate on the lake, probably to shake fear and caution into them ( it’s worked, for the most part ). for the first time out on the lake, jason is terrified.

it’s probably this terror that unlocks what will become his specialty in the years to come. he never plunges into the icy depths of the lake ( even though if he had, he would’ve remained dry and unaffected ), because he freezes the whole thing solid. he then passes out because of it, the volume of water he just changed something he won’t have the stamina to repeat for quite a while. his mother and the father of one of his friends find him on the lake much later, burning up from fever, his eleven year old body trying to cope with the excess energy it just absorbed.

it’s a mystery what happened exactly, to everyone but his mother had known eventually the godly part of his blood would demand to manifest as more than an ease on ice or the way beluga whales always seemed to come to whatever boat he was on. it’s on a boat in the middle of the saint lawrence that she tells him the truth. jason takes it pretty well, for someone just told his father is the lord of the sea. if anything, he knows it to be true the moment his mother tells him, the final piece of a puzzle falling into place.

not long after his twelfth birthday that summer, instead of staying in saguenay, he’s shipped off to camp voreios even further north in canada.

› 𝟎𝟎𝟐: 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘦’𝘴 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘧𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘭𝘺 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘰𝘥?

leila goldhirsch never had any doubts of the child she carried for nine months and then loved from the moment he was born. she always knew it was a bit of inevitability that his godly side would present itself, much like the ocean never deigns to be ignored. there was always more to that man she had a brief but momentous relationship with, more than just the kinda captain of the ship she used for that whole summer studying beluga whales in the saint lawrence. she didn’t know whether or not to believe him when he said he was the lord of the sea, but like the ocean, the truth is undeniable. and so she did her best to raise jason normally, worried like any good mother though his father had promised to keep him safe.

( he still doesn’t know this — but one of those fisherman who picked him out of the fjord had been him ).

— and she worried after the attack, wanting to protect her son but having no way of protecting him from the monsters that were inside his head. she’ll always worry, probably, though she’s happy that he seems to have found himself again at eonia.

jason’s stepfather is a whole other story, just for the simple fact that he doesn’t know about poseidon, still believing jason’s biological father was simply the boat captain of a ship many, many years ago. jason and his mother never figured out a way to too tell him and well... it feels a little too late for that now.

› 𝟎𝟎𝟑: 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘨𝘰𝘥𝘭𝘺 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵?

he’s just arrived at camp voreios, age twelve and fitting in even more easily than most despite his young age — sparking the rumor that he must be a son of hermes. he’d been aware of his godly parentage even for a few months now in an unofficial sense, though still officially “unclaimed,” not that it made a whole lot of difference at camp voreios who roomed attendees by age instead of godly parentage. he remains quiet to the fact though, appreciating the suspense of it all even at a young age.

it’s a few days later after the first campwide game that things get official. jason’s fresh off scoring a game-winning goal when the glowing sea-green trident appears over his head effectively hushing the previously rowdy arena.

camp voreios had never had a child of poseidon before : he was the first.

› 𝟎𝟎𝟒: 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘮𝘱?

camp voreios, the northern camp ( grammatically i think it should actually be voreios camp but to stick with pjo naming conventions... ), sits in some of the most remote reaches of quebec, far by pretty much all terms, and it is here that some of the most elite demigods are trained. obscured from mortal eyes as a longterm and extremely competitive program for only the most elite youth hockey players, there’s a bit of truth to that. most who attend that camp are between the ages of twelve and eighteen, the graduates commonly accepted into colleges with impressive hockey programs and a very select few like jason into the canadian hockey league. though almost all in attendance could easily fit in talentwise in the chl, most opt to not go through the additional testing and training into order to determine if they’re fit to go the professional route. their “recruitment” is a smattering of satyr scouts and coaches who scour youth hockey programs for demigods.

the camp sits on the edge of a lake, something jason found incredibly satisfying and it was on this lake this he truly honed his abilities of phase manipulation of water and water sensitivity. he did dabble in the other aspects of hydrokinesis ( specifically, the manipulation of actual water ) at least enough to be respectable at it, but he found it more dull and less useful, preferring to explore control of water in its ice state. you’d never see him try to create a tsunami wave or something.

a hockey centric demigod camp was as exciting as it came. though they would play against mortal teams to learn to exercise control over their abilities in the heat of a game ( and as a result, learn to control themselves in high emotion situations ), there were plenty of demigod hockey games that were almost a free for all. the only thing they didn’t allow jason to do was manipulate the actual ice of the rink, citing that was a bit of an unfair advantage even for them. camp voreios was also the home to the art of swordplay on ice, more for pure fun than any true necessity — though it was argued that the heightened speed of a fight on ice was good for developing reflexes and training the mind to analyze an opponent more quickly. there’s probably some truth to that.

camp voreios, unlike many demigod camps, was not a summer camp. instead it ran around the hockey season, meaning it took students for the duration of the school year and released them to do as they pleased in the summer though many stayed the duration. occupants are schooled with a mixture of online and at local schools. jason was in attendance at camp voreios from ages twelve to sixteen almost year round, save for the month of july when he returned home to saguenay. the intent of camp voreios was to rigorously train their attendees for the real world — practically the epitome of tough love.

at sixteen, jason knew he wanted to try to peruse hockey professionally if he could, the fourth of camp voreios attendees who expressed this intention. the camp only allowed the most elite on the ice and more apt at protecting themselves to enter professional leagues where there was a much higher profile and higher risk. jason passed their aptitude tests and so at sixteen, he was drafted to the rouyn-noranda huskies and left camp voreios, though he’d return in the summer occasionally as well as encounter and maybe help a little bit some on their yearly scavenger hunt.

› 𝟎𝟎𝟓: 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘴?

camp voreios didn’t get sent on an awful lot of quests compared to much bigger camps, though the directors of the camp often sent campers out on their own in an unofficial capacity in order to gain “real world experience” tussling with real monsters and getting a taste of real danger — call it that tough love. most common was a massive scavenger hunt that took up nearly three weeks every spring after hockey season ended where the entire camp was split into groups of two or three and sent out across north america to retrieve increasingly rare items.

however, jason was sent on one official god-sanctioned quest at the tender age of thirteen. he’d been at camp for about a year and a half at that point and participated in one scavenger hunt and thus deemed ready. gotta start them young, right ?? besides, it was a quest for one of the missing prongs on the trident of poseidon, and as the only child of poseidon at camp voreios who else was supposed to go ?? he was dispatched with a daughter of aphrodite ( 15 ) and son of hermes ( 16 ), though jason’s leadership skills soon became evident even as young as he was. the quest took them two weeks to complete, and took them everywhere from the stiffling grand canyon ( not jason’s favorite place ) to niagara falls ( marginally better ), culminating with them on the coast of nova scotia, the first time jason had seen the real ocean. he’ll claim he jumped, witnesses claim he fell, but either way, he ended up deep in the atlantic ocean where he finally met his godly father for the first time.

› 𝟎𝟎𝟔: 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵’𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘨𝘰𝘥𝘭𝘺 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵?

jason met poseidon when he was thirteen and he was nothing like he expected. he wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but much like the sea he supposes it depends. poseidon has never felt different than the sea on a calm day. he’d say his relationship with him is more the positive side of neutral then negative, despite the fact they’ve only spoken face to face a handful of times.

jason never was someone who needed words to know he was cared for and he recognizes the ways poseidon cares for him as his son in ways other than words : in the safe passages he grants him every fall and spring as he sails over the atlantic, the way he feels at home in the ocean, and the way he’d been soothed and in some ways healed by the ocean after the attack. he just takes their contact it as it is, seeing no reason to wish for things to be different than they are.

› 𝟎𝟎𝟕: 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘦’𝘴 𝘧𝘢𝘷𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘰𝘥?

the day jason learned about his water sensitivity was one of the best in his life. though it’s hardly as flashy as his hydrokinesis, the additional perspective is one his cherishes quite closely. there’s something to be said for feeling like you connect to the world, even in the oddest of ways. he can’t deny he loves freezing water though — there’s nothing like skating under and open sky and with a bit of work, his hydrokinesis ability made that possible.

there is, of course, his prowess on the ice, though he’s not sure if he wants to contribute that to being a demigod. he’d like to believe that even without godly blood in his veins that he still would’ve been good enough to be drafted into the chl.

› 𝟎𝟎𝟖: 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘦’𝘴 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘧𝘢𝘷𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘰𝘥?

power comes with a cost, and sometimes jason thinks that price is too high. as much as he knows he can’t wring the godly blood out of him, there are days he wishes he could is only to save what he’d been building in rouyn-noranda. evan had been young, beautiful, talented, and very much mortal. there’s no reason he or any of the others of his team should have had to die because a pack of monsters were intent on slaying the son of poseidon. it’s an endless battle in jason’s head between what he knows to be true and the endless guilt he still feels constricted around his heart. because what’s the point of having power if it still wasn’t enough to protect the people he cared about ??

› 𝟎𝟎𝟗: 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵’𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘦’𝘴 𝘸𝘦𝘢𝘱𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘺?

it’s rare to see jason without osisko, his celestial bronze sword that also takes the convenient forms of a hockey stick or a bronze bracelet on his left wrist. it was a gift to him when he was drafted into the chl at sixteen ( visuals and more detailed information on osisko HERE ). it is without a doubt his main weapon, and the one he’s most trained at, though if he had to he could fight with a trident pretty well ( thanks dad ). given osisko’s ability to return to him even if lost in battle, he rarely has to default to other weapons, though at even closer hand-to-hand combat with daggers or knives, he’s proficient as well since the concept is quite similar. where he severely lacks is in any long range weapons like archery or spears — sadly his accuracy with a puck does not seem to translate to arrows or anything of the type.

jason isn’t absolute top tier elite at swordplay, though he holds his own quite respectively and probably comes in the top ten percent, aided in part by his sheer athleticism due to the strong, active life he’s lived since he was quite young, training both to be a demigod and a good hockey player. factor in his hydrokinesis when available, and you can probably get him to the top five percent. he can get quite competitive in matchups, which also informs his ability to hold his own out of sheer will. there’s also something to be said that he attended a demigod camp practically year round for four years, allowing him a much longer length of training in his formative years than just the typical three month summer camp.

he has extremely good endurance ( endurance and like... endurance 😉, y’know ?? alsdkfjlsks ) and often fights smarter, not harder, using his opponent’s weaknesses and the environment to his advantage. as a defenseman, he’s quick to analyze offensive players of the fastest paced sport in the world to hinder their plan by the time they get to the blueline — this ability transfers beautifully to battle proficiency and fights. he has to work quite hard to get as good as he has, the observing part he was always quite good at, it was getting his fighting ability up to the level where he could actually do something to hinder the offense he knew was coming. he obviously most easily gains the upper hand when on the beach, a boat, or if someone foolishly decides they do want to face him in one of camp voreios’ created past times : swordplay on ice.

#;; headcanon #euquestionnaire #( ayyy folks #we finally made it alsdkfj )#( there are probably typos in this bc i can't be bothered to read it over )#( questionnaire is such a weird word #why does it have two n's? )

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laughingpinecone · 4 years

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Yuletide letter

I am laughingpineapple on AO3

Hello dear author! I hope you’ll have fun with our match. Feel free to draw from general or fandom-specific likes, past letters, and/or follow your heart.

Likes: worldbuilding, slice of life (especially if the event the fic focuses on is made up but canon-specific), missing moments, 5+1 and similar formats, bonding and emotional support/intimacy, physical intimacy, lingering touches, loyalty, casefic, surrealism, magical realism, established relationships, future fic (when in doubt, tell me what’s happening to them five, ten, twenty years in the future!), hurt/comfort, throwing characters into non-canon environments, banter, functional relationships between dysfunctional individuals, unexplained mysteries, bittersweet moods, journal/epistolary fic, dreams and memories and identities, tropey plots that are already close enough to characters/canon, outsider POV, UST, resolved UST, exploring the ~deep lore, leaning on the uniqueness of the canon setting/mood, found families, characters reuniting after a long and/or harrowing time, friends-to-lovers, road trips, maps, mutual pining, cuddling, wintry moods, the feeling of flannel and other fabrics, ridiculous concepts played entirely straight, sensory details, places being haunted, people being haunted, the mystery of the woods, small hopes in bleak worlds, electricity, places that don’t quite add up, mismatched memories, caves and deep places, distant city lights at night, emphasis on non-human traits of non-human characters (gen-wise, but also a hearty yes xeno for applicable ships), emphasis on inhuman traits of characters who were human once and have sort of shed it all behind

Cool with: any tense, any pov, any rating, plotty, not plotty, IF, unrequested characters popping up.

DNW: non-canonical rape, non-canonical children, focus on children, unrequested ships (background established canon couples are okay, mentions of parents are okay!), canon retellings, consent issues, actual covid (fantasy plagues are okay)

Les Cités Obscures: any

This is a very general “please, anything in the style of canon, just maybe with less thoughtless sexism” request. I want to lose myself in these cities again, and in the strange lands that connect them. I’d be happy to follow any of the known characters and/or OCs, or eschew characters altogether and write about the cities themselves. What caught your imagination in Brüsel, Xhystos, Taxandria, Alaxis...? The history of some cool building that was only marginally featured in one of the stories? Or an OC city! If you’ve got a favourite European city that doesn’t already have its obscure counterpart, please tell me all about it! Go big, go wild! What strange and classically surrealist happenings take place within its walls? Or even... outside Europe... Nerding out about architecture is of course very welcome. I would also love to read a story based on any Schuiten illustration, contextualizing it as if it were part of this ‘verse. Here’s a bunch of them, for example!

Ghost Trick: Cabanela

You know.. him. Dazzlingly OTT, untiring, rock-solid self-esteem, loyal to a fault, following a rhythm of his own, flawless intuition until it fails and it all burns down… him. I just want to see more of him doing stuff! The way he’s chill and open toward new people (like Sissel and Missile in ch15) makes him perfect to throw at most other characters and see how they react to the sparkles… I’d love some focus on how ridiculous his aesthetic is, half Saturday Night Fever half hardboiled detective half bubbly preteen (for a total of 150%) and yet he makes it work. Or how ruthless he can be, possibly for the sake of the people he cares for. The quote “The intimacy of big parties”. Him and Alma in the new timeline bonding over knowing (once Jowd has spilled the beans) but not remembering that terrible timeline. Some tropey scenario on the job. Snark-offs with Pigeon Man, by which I mean PM snarks and it bounces off him like water off a spotless white goose’s back.

Ship-wise it’s only Cabanela/Jowd whenever it’s not infidelity, Cabanela/Alma in what-ifs also if it’s not infidelity and Cabanela/Alma/Jowd for me (and Lynne/Memry and Yomiel/fianSissel on the side). There are a bunch of shippy prompts in all my past letters - I would however reiterate here that Jowd. is. the worst tease. always. Like, just saying, but assume he’s pining big time and Jowd and Alma figure it out - they’d make a national sport out of excruciatingly protracted teasing.

Conversely, Cabanela/Lynne and Cabanela/Yomiel are NOTPs especially from Cabanela’s side. So while I appreciate the thick tension of a good Yomiel VS Cabanela confrontation like everyone and their cat, and also really appreciate a roughed-up Cabanela, and I do love Yomiel in his own right… I don’t want Cabanela being into it. Adrenaline junkie he may be but this hurts and his coat’s a mess and there’s no perfect winning scenario so he hates every second of it. (JOWD being super into Cabanela being roughed up is another matter altogether and he should probably mind his own business. ...incompatible kinks, truly tragic. they’ll have to find some other common ground. they’re smart, resourceful, playful fellows, I’m sure they’ll manage)

Kentucky Route Zero: Donald kentuckyroutezero

I love everyone in the cast, all acts and interludes, and I am extremely into all the themes this incredible work of art ended up exploring. Agreeing with the overall doom and gloom up to Act IV, I was blown away by Act V’s strong affirmation of the importance of the arts and of the bonds we make and of carving up spaces for ourselves in capitalism’s wake. Donald was, indeed, not a part of any of that. Even the final interlude updates us on Lula and mentions Joseph, but the big guy is nowhere to be seen. So, you know, there’s fanfiction! He’s so static, defeated. I am fascinated by the chain of metaphysical spaces that goes surface -> Zero -> Echo -> Dogwood and even within that framework, the hall of the mountain king is like a hopeless dead end. Dude’s terminally stuck. So - once again, in the spirit of transformative works, how could he get... you know... unstuck? Did Lula’s momentous appearance in Act III shake him? Having a functioning Xanadu again, perhaps? How could he interrogate that oracle, what recursive wonders would it show him? If he decides to leave, what does it feel to be on the surface again after so long, or on the river perhaps? Maybe he is forced to leave by the flood, if not this one, the next... Having him meet any other character would be amazing. Past or future time spent with Weaver... seeing Conway again, changed... programmer guy chatting up musician androids... did he know Carrington from his college days or was Carrington only a friend of Lula’s?

As for Lula herself and Joseph too: “Flipping through the pages, Conway is able to gather that it’s a story about three characters: Joseph, Donald, and Lula. It’s something like a tragic love triangle, but much more complex. Some kind of tangled, painfully concave love polygon.” 😔 I ship them as a full triad, if you can nudge them in that direction, good. But I’m very open to non-romantic resolutions as well, going past their messy feelings to find each other as friends after so many years maybe. Or... a start. idk.

I’d be interested in fic that leans on the game’s adjacent genres: wanna go full-on American Gothic? Dip into surrealism? Take a leaf from Twin Peaks with tulpa / split narratives to explore the characters’ issues? I’m also open to AUs, real or through Xanadu. This also feels like a good place to stress that I really, really like caves.

And now for something completely different: FAQ: The “Snake Fight” Portion of Your Thesis Defense is in the tagset this year. I’d say that the crossover with the snake portion of Here and there along the Echo writes itself, but it would not be correct, as in fact I would like you to write it for me. Feel free to not feature Donald if you focus on this crossover instead!

Uru would be a fun crossover too, for Donald specifically. He’s very DRC-shaped in how he tilts at doomed projects which just so happen to be deep underground.

Pyre: Volfred Sandalwood

This is a Volfred solo, Volfred&literally anyone or Volfred/Tariq, /Oralech or /Tariq/Oralech request. I adore everyone in that Blackwagon+Dalbert+Celeste, so if you want to add a Nightwing or two to any prompt, please do! I also love all the Scribes and find Erisa a compelling tragic figure, while out of the other triumvirates, I’m “love to hate them” for Manley, Brighton, Udmildhe and Deluge and would not like to see them featured in sympathetic roles. fwiw I also enjoy Jodi/Celeste and Bertrude/Pamitha a lot!

I feel deeply for all of Pyre’s main themes - literacy, degrees of freedom, the fragile time that is the end of a historical cycle, nobodies rising up to the occasion, building a better society, and of course found family, “distance cannot separate our spirits” and all that jazz, and Volfred is squarely rooted at the center of all of them. I really really love everything he stands for, even if he’s overbearingly smug in standing for it. Just please tell me things about my fave. His relationship to the Scribes (as a historian, a some kind of vision, via *ae or once he’s a star himself)? A ‘forced vacay’ Downside ending where he looks at the Union from afar and keeps living in this strange transformational place? Life in a cramped Blackwagon that was meant for like 5 people tops and is currently eight Nightwings, a herald and an orb? Since he picked him for the job to begin with, does he respect and cherish Hedwyn as he dang well should? What does it feel like to try and Read a herald? Was he ever in danger, in the Commonwealth or in the Downside? What daring act of resistance did he and Bertrude pull off at some point in their past? It’d be cool if one of his old pamphlets came up at some point. Does he puff up as prime minister because he’s nervous, and who can see past his hyper-professionalism and lend a hand? Please roast him big time about the votes he assigns to the various Nightwings in his planner? What’s his attitude toward the flame’s purification (what with being a tree but mostly like, as a general concept. He did nothing wrong!) (well he definitely said some things wrong and sometimes oftentimes the ego jumps out, but his intentions did nothing wrong)? When did his calculating approach fail him? Something with Pamitha along the lines of that edit that goes “Can we talk, one ten to another?“/"I am an eleven, my girl, but continue”? Dude could easily be voted sexiest voice in the Downside - how much is he aware of it? Does he sing? I love how he bears his ‘reader’ brand proudly. And speaking of scars, I have to wonder, looking at Manley for comparison, if the shape of his head, with that massive crack, isn’t also due to injuries.

As a refrain from my general likes: emphatically yes xeno to both shippy interactions at all ratings and to gen explorations of what a Sap is like… I’d love to read all your headcanons.

Ship-wise, I enjoy him with Tariq as this kind of esoteric connection of minds, guarded words full of secret meanings, long contemplative walks together (is any external pov watching...?), Volfred’s Reader powers brushing against Tariq’s mind and getting weak in the knees at the starlit expanse he finds there, so unlike mortal thoughts. Tariq finds his individuality learning from him; Volfred presumably gets a transcendent glimpse of the Scribes. And I enjoy him with Oralech as pretty much the opposite of that, Oralech is so very mortal compared to him, such a precious, fleeting, burning life especially after his fall. Oralech’s idealism is very dear to me, it was their plan, their shared revolutionary spirit, I find it deeply moving. And I am very interested in seeing them rebuild their connection now that Oralech is back, changed, and in some ways he can learn to let go of his misconceptions and slowly open himself to Volfred’s love again, but in other ways that’s who he is now, with this deep-set anger, and what does it even feel to realize that you’re the symbol of the end of an era (the end of the Rites, the fading of the Scribes). I’m interested in both topside and downside endings for all of them, as long as they end up on the same side, the revolution was peaceful and they don’t angst too much about the side they ended in. Tariq can ‘find his way home’ in the near post-canon somehow or even be summoned again, as a different aspect of the same ‘moonlit vision’ that once inspired Soliam Murr.

Strandbeest: any

https://www.strandbeest.com/

I would just like words to go with these, please and thank you so very much. Worldbuild to your heart’s content! Specifically: I’m fascinated by the premise that the strandbeest are living creatures that evolve and adapt to their ecosystem. A world where life is just wind stomachs and sandy joints, and the tide that can catch you unaware. I would like a story that feels distinctly inorganic. The wonder that is the existence of these creatures. Their unique struggles. Weird and experimental if you like. With a mechanical focus, maybe?

I nominated four critters as a selection of the different cool things they can do - Percipiere Excelsus is huge and has the hammer mechanism, Suspendisse’s tail senses the hardness of the sand, Uminami is my fave caterpillar and the caterpillars overall feel like a new paradigm after a mass extinction event, Ader straight-up flies... but they’re all wonderful. If you want to focus on different strandbeest, please do!

Twin Peaks: Lucy Moran

Case fic but they don’t find out jack shit, someone disappears, David Bowie was there, it’s complicated. Fragmented, shifted, mirrored identities. New Lodge spaces. The risks of staring into the void for too long. Gentle illusions. Transcendence. The moon. Static buzzing. Any title from the s3 ethereal whooshing compilation used as a prompt, actually. Whatever goes on on Blue Pine mountain or the even more mysterious things that go on on White Tail mountain where exactly zero canon locations are found. Twin Peaks is all about the mystery to me, the awe of mystery and unknowability and the human drive to look beyond and the risks of getting a peek, and about shared consciousness and trauma taking physical form in an uncaring world. Go wild with the ethereal whooshing! But I also love the human warmth at the heart of it all, and sometimes it’s enough to anchor these characters and let them have a nice day. A fic entirely focused on some instance of coziness against the cold chaotic background of canon would be great too.

For Lucy specifically, a big draw for me is how canon (...s2 need not apply) empathizes with her way of processing the world. Not just Peaks, but On the Air’s protag who is basically a Lucy expy also gets the narrative completely on her side and that’s great. And I love how in s3, her focus on the small things around her is always echoed by bigger, climactic events beyond her horizon (bunnies / Jack Rabbit’s palace, chair order / Garland’s chair, her first scene talking about the two sheriffs / doubles everywhere...). It feels to me like some kind of off-kilter mindfulness and I love it. She’s also got a loving husband and an amazing son, which, in this economy and also this canon? Damn. The one functional family, imagine that. I am not interested in focus on family dynamics, but singularly, either Lucy/Andy or Lucy&Wally are great - in particular, I’m interested in how strange they are and yet they make it work. With the ruthless critique of traditional family structure that’s all over canon, maybe they make it work specifically because they’re not doing any of that. A bit like the Addams family... but... not goth...? Anyway. I’d love to see Lucy interact with and maybe strike a friendship with any character she’s never shared a scene with in canon! In the tagset, there’s Diane for some secretaries bonding, Audrey because??? why not?, Albert because it’d be an epic enemies to friends slowburn, some version of Laura in the future, if we’re feeling really daring maybe even some version of Coop in the future, still fragmented... or anyone you want! Outside the tagset I’d be curious about Hawk, Margaret and maybe Doris in particular, I think, and Phil, and Nadine and the Invitation to Love fandom in general (Frost says it still airs - did it get as weird as TP s3 did?), but if you have an idea with someone else, absolutely go for it!

Canon-specific DNWs: any singular Dreamer being the ‘source’ of canon, BOB (let alone Judy) being forever defeated in the finale, Judy being an active malevolent presence in the characters’ lives, clear explanations for canonical ambiguities, ‘Odessaverse’ being the reality layer, the Fireman’s House by the Sea being the White Lodge, whatever Twin Perfect’s on about, Cooper/Audrey, Cooper/Laura

#letter

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voiceofghilannain · 4 years

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The Voice of Ghilan’nain: Introduction to my Blog

My beloved subjects: This is my first post on this blog so I will take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Gerasimos (though Jerry is what I usually introduce myself as out of courtesy, as both my name and surname sound like gibberish to most people). I’m a 23-year-old male biology student currently studying in Greece, and an aspiring entrepreneur with quite a long way ahead until I make that dream come true.

Before I introduce you to this blog, I would like to say a few more words about myself. I am a firm believer in education (scientific, technological, and financial) and I do enjoy learning new things, especially if they can be used to solve problems. I am interested in astronomy, biology with emphasis on plant biology, game design, and video game art. I also enjoy walking outdoors, cooking, relaxing at a beach while stargazing, talking about politics and money, teasing the cat (my friend, not the feline pet) and playing video games.

In regards to the latest subject, Bioware’s Mass Effect was the first RPG game I ever played. Though it took me a year to appreciate it due to its lackluster gameplay and limited weapon options, I eventually managed to see it for what it was rather than what I wanted it to be. I played through the trilogy with a dictionary next to me as my English skills were laughable back then. It was through Mass Effect and later Halo that I built my English skills, with the later giving me the opportunity to be part of a great community filled with incredible members such as Haruspis, Covenant Canon, HiddenXperia, LateNightGaming, and Halo Canon. I also had my ride as part of the Halo Archive community, with wonderful discussions and theories throughout the years, and I was fortunate enough to watch the community grow from 40 to over 2000 members and survive several crises until its eventual collapse. During the three or so years that I was part of the Halo Archive (known there as Faber of Will and Might), I got to see video games as far more than just games and develop a passion for delving deep into the lore of video game franchises and their extended media. It is for this reason, that I would like to take a moment and thank every member of the Halo Archive for the incredible conversations and debates we had during that time and particularly Haruspis, whose incredible analyses partially inspired me to start this endeavour (You can visit his blog by clicking here: https://haruspis.blog).

It was during the end of my first year at University that I got into tabletop gaming, but it took several years for me to discover the existence of Dragon Age. Eventually, both the release of disappointing games, like Halo 5: Guardians and Mass Effect Andromeda, and toxic fans caused my interest in these franchises to wane and the Halo Archive to fade. This caused me to search for new franchisees to fall in love with and this is how I got into the world of Dragon Age, starting with Inquisition. THE Dragon Age Setting is currently my favourite fantasy setting and the reason I started making “my own” tabletop RPG for it in order to play Inquisition with my friends. I used the quotation marks in the previous sentence because I started by homebrewing for the Official Tabletop DA RPG with each update and homebrew rule making it more and more distinct from the RPG it derived from and pushing it closer to the feel of the games, with mechanics like Barrier, Guard, Status Effects, Critical Hits, the addition of several dozen warrior, rogue and mage abilities and spells, the removal of the stunt mechanic, the introduction of sustained abilities and many more features.

I have always found Medieval English themed settings and happy worlds boring and dull. I don’t see fiction as escapism from problems but as an opportunity to do things I would normally be unable to do, such as setting foot on alien worlds, standing against the Covenant as they kill billions in their genocidal campaign or simply playing as an elf that throws fireballs at sleeping targets in the midsts of a death cloud and then paralyzing them or scaring them to death by casting Horror. Due to my bias against the classic medieval fantasy setting, Ferelden is the least interesting part of the Dragon Age setting for me. I do enjoy the extravagant gold and blue themes of Orlais, the Necropolis of Nevarra, the villainous city of Kirkwall, the Blighted Anderfels, the decadent Rome/Byzantium inspired Tevinter cities, the war-torn Seheron, the pirate heaven of Estwatch, the exotic Rivain and Par Vollen, the assassin filled Antiva and the mystery of the tainted Black City far more than the mostly bland Ferelden. It is thanks to these locations and their stories that, for me, Thedas trumps any setting with a million races each worth half a page of text or settings made for adventurers that go on a killing spree to get rich within a fixed world that refuses to change.

Thedas is a continent that never stops changing. Old feuds are resolved and new conflicts emerge. Racism, blood magic, squandering nobles, the blight and other horrors make the life of most people in the setting a challenge at best and a nightmare at worst. Within the span of three games, the setting has changed dramatically and the world has moved forward. Thedas is thus very different from what it used to be when Dragon Age Origins released. Being dynamic and reacting to player choice is a very important aspect of the setting, which is both a testament to Bioware’s own talent and the setting’s innate simplicity.

Thedas’ richness doesn’t derive from an army of races or from endless classes and deities, but from its smaller scale, with fewer races and emphasis on the dynamics between their societies and the struggles that various groups, societies, scholars, nations and individuals face. With fewer things in the setting, there is more room for them to be fleshed out and explored in depth. Furthermore, Thedas has a rich history, exposed to players mostly via codex entries written from an in-universe perspective. This allows events to be portrayed differently depending on whose perspective they have been witnessed by, encourages fan discussions and theories, turns new contradicting information into a quest for the truth that often results in revisiting old passages and finding new meanings after certain revelations. Unlike most fictional universes, Dragon Age’s lore takes effort to extract and while this might not be for everyone it has kept the community far more engaged and alive throughout the years.

Thedas is a land full of mysteries filled with danger. The Horror of Hormak, the Black City and the Blights, the Old Gods, Arlathan, the curse of Nahar, the Pyramids of Par Vollen, the Kossith, the ships from beyond the Volca Sea, the Executors, the history of the Dwarves, the Second Sin, the Cekorax and many more are all shrouded by the element of the unknown, which drives the curiosity, fear, dread, nostalgia and most feelings associated with them. It is elements like these that make me want to write about and share with others stories set in this world, whether official or my own.

Thus, after several months of thinking about it, I decided to create my own blog about Dragon Age. The Voice of Ghilan’nain is a blog named after my favourite Elven Goddess, Ghilan’nain, with me acting as an echo of her guiding voice through the world of Thedas. Just like She focused on creation, so will this blog focus on the things that can be, the transformation of what exists and the discussion of content that many people don’t talk about, navigating through the darkest, deepest and most obscure parts of the lore in search of stories, characters, creatures and their potential, expressing it either through my analyses or through attempts at poetry and short story writing. I will also make some posts that serve as feedback for Bioware on issues regarding gameplay mechanics, UI and story and if people are willing I can provide a few builds or ideas for DMs who want to introduce their friends to the world of Thedas through tabletop gaming. With that said, I hope you enjoy reading my future posts and I am looking forward to your feedback, suggestions and comments.

And now the melody begins, calling you to the depths of darkness:

Na melana sah’lin, La mala suledin nadas. Vir’enfenim ghilana Sulevin’an. Ma garas mir renan La ir las mir enansal.

#ghilannain #thedas #thevoiceofghilannain #bioware #dragonage

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sapphires-and-gold-fics · 5 years

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Fictober 2019 Day 5: “I might just kiss you.”

Fandom: Game of Thrones / ASOIAF

Characters: Jaime Lannister / Brienne of Tarth

Read on AO3

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Note: College AU. Why yes, this does take place in a library... Professor Tully of the Medieval History Department at Stormland University (Go Stags!) doesn’t like tests. The mysteries of the past had always been her specialty, and she loved giving her students a challenge that would not only force them to work with someone else to reach a goal, but give them some access to the restricted section of the library where the oldest and most valuable volumes were kept, encouraging both teamwork and responsibility.

Stormland University was home to the most extensive epistle and journal collection in Westeros, though budgets being what they were, the upkeep wasn’t as up to par as it should have been. They were still losing a volume or two every year to poor climate control or misuse. So this term, Catelyn only offered access to the restricted books in one of her classes - MH302 - UNSOLVED HISTORIES - as a way to control the use of the texts but also recognizing that this group of students could help perpetuate the historical knowledge kept there in the basement.

Brienne Tarth was a brilliant student, except in maths; she was actually good at maths, but begrudgingly so. And as a history major she was hoping to not need maths so much. Her compatriots in Professor Tully’s class were for the most part very bright as well, but there was only one other history student - everyone else was an art, political science or anthropology major, all trying either to meet the course requirements, or trying to gain some knowledge adjacent to their course of study. The only other History major was Jaime Lannister, a senior working on his 10th term because he’d messed around too much in his second term, and he’d missed his 9th term due to some personal thing. Catelyn had had him in classes before and had almost not accepted him for this one, but she wanted him out of him out of her hair sooner rather than later, and if granting him access to this course would speed up his exit, then that worked for her.

Brienne had been in classes with Jaime before, too. And it had never gone terribly well. He was always poking at her for being too tall to sit in the front of the class (could she help it that shorter people always arrived early and took up the back seats?), or he would ask to borrow a pen and then never give it back - little things that all added up to a headache. In her second year, they’d been in a class on medieval languages together - that’s where he picked up her nickname. She’d hoped he’d have dropped it by now but not Jaime. Jaime with “wench” was like a direwolf with a bone.

The pairs for the midterm project were picked at random in week 3 of the course. When Catelyn had said Brienne’s name immediately following Jaime’s, he’d poked her shoulder with one of her pilfered pens and said “Hey wench, that’s us!” She’d rolled her eyes and ignored him.

In week 4, Catelyn assigned subjects to the pairs, also at random, giving them four weeks to do the research and pull their project together. One pair was assigned a project on the fabled fashion of dragon-age armor. Another got assigned a project on the missing mythical weapons of Westeros - Excalibur and Oathkeeper, and the like. Still another got assigned a project on the mysterious death of King Renly Baratheon.

Brienne would have loved any of these, especially the latter. But it wasn’t to be.

Instead, Brienne and Jaime had been assigned the unknown fate of the lost maidens - following the trails of Sansa and Arya Stark.

Jaime had rolled his eyes, but Brienne being an excellent student had already marked out the necessary research periods on her calendar, and had reserved time in the restricted section of the library for her and Jaime. He dragged his heels and she had to pull him to the basement by the wrist, but they finally sat down and divvied up the project, taking over a large table at the far end. The library assistant for the restricted section was a bear of a man who glared at Jaime until he took his feet off of the table, but otherwise he was innocuous.

They’d been on the trail for two weeks (or rather, Brienne had) when they found a record of a person clearly matching Arya’s description disembarking a ship in Braavos. The harbormaster had even noted the presence of her narrow shortsword--

“Needle,” whispered Jaime, seemingly half-engaged.

Brienne looked up at him in surprise. She didn’t think he paid attention in class at all, but unless he’d been doing some independent reading, he couldn’t have known the name of Arya’s sword otherwise.

They had established from journals of the maester for the Night’s Watch that Arya had been secreted from the capital after her father the Hand’s execution, by a member of the Night’s Watch. He’d sent a raven ahead saying as much in code, yet neither Yoren nor Arya had made it. But the existence of those missives alone indicated that the Boltons had never possessed the real Arya, a fact that had long been argued in historical circles. Furthermore, there was slight evidence that she might have spent time in a prisoner camp at Harrenhall with some Braavosi, and it was that information that led them to examine the harbormaster’s ledger. She had most certainly not been present when her family was slaughtered at the Twins, else the Freys would have claimed it. The next logical step for her had been to go east.

Sansa had been a very different story - in some ways, she’d been easier to track. Unlike Arya, she would have been more inclined to trust the people around her, and that included people who were close to her family. The records from the Eyrie were incredibly brittle and Brienne didn’t like trusting them in Jaime’s hands, but he’d sworn to her and the library assistant that he would wear gloves and be gentle with the tomes. He kept this promise for three days by not touching them at all and instead playing a game on his phone. But then slowly he picked up the work.

In the middle of their second week working on the project, he met her outside the library with two coffees - one in hand which he gave her, and one clutched in his elbow which he shifted into his hand once it was free. She’d seen him fumble with books and such in his right hand before, but she’d also seen him playing the phone game with his right hand.

She didn’t think on it too hard, instead she thanked and then immediately admonished him for bringing coffee when he knew there was no food and drink allowed in the restricted section. He offered her a lopsided smile in return and just said “Sure, but isn’t it nice to catch up out here in the cold with something to warm you up before we go back to the basement?” She’d nodded reluctantly and thanked him again before swallowing a few gulps and then depositing the half-full cup in the trash by the door.

From that point on, he and Brienne pored over their separate books side by side, translating for one another when the words were too faded or obscure or, for Jaime, simply moving around on the page too much.

They had confirmation that Sansa had arrived in the Vale, but from there the trail seemed to go cold. There was mention of a girl about the same age, but the description was wrong. Brienne thought it unlikely that a maester would lie, but Jaime had never trusted maesters, so he kept digging. When the trail went cold, he wrote down a handful of words on a bright pink post-it and told Brienne he was going to go “look for something else.” She assumed that meant that he was going to go hide in the stacks and play his game again. It was no matter, really. They’d tracked Arya, and that was more than they’d expected - it would be enough to focus the project on her.

Jaime had been gone for 10 minutes before Brienne realized that his phone was still sitting on the table - wherever he’d gone, he’d apparently gone in earnest. She got up and stretched her legs and decided to go in search of him.

After another 10 minutes she found him on the floor in one of the dustier corners amid some familiar volumes from the Night’s Watch, his knees bent, with what looked like a very heavy thick text propped up on them. The light here was dim, and he was squinting to read the words on the page. He heard her approach and looked up at her only briefly before patting the linoleum next to him. She walked over and sat down, bringing her knees up as well.

“How can you read back here, it’s so dark!”

He hushed her. “I think I found something.”

“Jaime I thought we agreed that Arya went to Braavos. We don’t know that she ever made it north.”

He looked at her wide-eyed with mischief, “We did. I’m not trailing Arya. I’m trailing Sansa. And I think she made it. I matched up the approximate time frames, and it’s all here. The girl that’s mentioned being at the Eyrie after Sansa - I would swear that it’s the same girl that’s described arriving at Castle Black.”

“Jaime, brown hair and blue eyes - that could be anyone. Gods, it could even be any one of Robert Baratheon’s bastards - it could be a literal white walker.”

“And there’s nothing about her chewing on anyone - pretty sure this was a living girl. And not brown, chestnut. The maesters at both the Eyrie and Castle Black use that exact word. Chestnut - it’s practically auburn. Sansa stark had red hair… they could have used some kind of dye to dim it but the red would have continued to show through.”

“Wasn’t the maester at the wall blind?”

“Yes!”

There was a loud shhing sound from a few stacks over.

“Yes,” Jaime whispered, moving closer to her, “This is what I’m talking about. Someone must have given the maester that description with purpose. Perhaps it was Sansa herself. Perhaps she used the same words that Petyr Baelish used in order to protect herself.”

Brienne wasn’t convinced. “It’s a stretch…”

“Wench, she was escorted by a knight.”

Brienne’s breath caught. “Well that’s unusual. A woman at the wall on its own is not unheard of especially during that time, but a knight for an escort?”

“A very tall knight. No other description. I thought - and you’ll probably think this is a stretch for sure - but I thought maybe it was that knight who’d shielded her in the capital. The dog one - the Hound.”

Brienne shook her head. “That is a stretch...but not impossible. There was another person looking for her at the time as well. Also quite tall. Fashioned themselves a knight but they weren’t one… I always wondered what happened...”

“If it were the Hound they might have mentioned his face.”

“If it were the heir to the Evenstar they might have mentioned she was a woman.”

Jaime’s lips curled up into a sly grin, and he swallowed. “You’re right… and I think they did. Later on - in the texts we looked at before - there’s mention of a woman sparring with the men. If it was her, that makes--”

“--a lot of sense, yeah. Holy shit, Jaime.”

He gave her a rueful smile and looked back down at the book.

“All that time we were looking at the Night’s Watch stuff I thought you were playing Candy Crush or something.”

He tilted his head like a dog and peered at her, the realization of what she meant coming startlingly across his face. “Oh, the phone!”

He brushed at his pockets.

“You left it on the table - that’s why I came back here, I figured maybe you were actually onto something.”

“Ah… I’m sorry, Brienne. I promise I wasn’t distracted, it’s not actually a game - not really.”

His use of her actual name should not have thrilled her as much as it did. “It doesn’t matter--”

“--no, no. It does to me - I want you to understand, I’ve been paying attention the whole time, but I have to keep at it. My physical therapist says that my grip might not improve but if I can work on my dexterity in my fingers then I should actually be able to get back to typing okay.”

“Your… what happened?”

“My sister. She… well there’s no nice way to say it, she had her giant boyfriend beat me up and then while I was on the ground, she ran over my hand with her car.”

“Oh my god!”

“Shhhhh,” said the faraway stacks.

“Oh my god, Jaime.”

“Yeah...she kinda sucks.”

He was easing the heavy book off his knees but she saw his right hand struggling, so she reached over and helped him lower the tome to the ground. Their faces were very close while she reached across him and he caught her start to blush bright strawberry in the dim fluorescent light before yanking her hand back to her side.

“So… does that mean… I don’t mind - being the one to type up the report and stuff.”

He grinned. “Actually the practice might be nice. Can we just do it together?”

“Yeah of course.”

“Cool.”

They sat staring at each other’s hands. Suddenly Brienne started, and grabbed his arm.

“Wait, Jaime - you found her! You found Sansa Stark. And maybe someone else, too. Someone really important. Oh my gods, Jaime - this is… this is very good.”

“Well we did it together, right?”

“I mean yeah but if you hadn’t… gods, Jaime I might just kiss you! I can’t believe you found her!” She froze then, and the strawberry blush was back. So was his sly grin.

He forced himself to look at her eyes and not her lips, and then he brought his right hand over and slipped his weaker fingers under hers on his arm, using the slightest pressure, like he was trying to squeeze it. “Maybe we can save the kissing for somewhere where we’re less likely to get asbestos poisoning.”

“Jaime, I--”

“We have a week to finish this project. Let’s get through it. If we haven’t killed each other by the time we turn it in, have coffee with me - finally - and then I might just kiss you first.”

His eyes were wild watching the tides churn in hers, but she pursed her lips and grinned, nodding.

He exhaled, coughing at the dust that had settled around them. “Let’s get out of here, wench. I’d really like to live to see next week.”

They made note of the tome number and headed back to the table, his right hand in her left.

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relishredshoes · 5 years

Photo

Interview given to The Severus Snape and Hermione Granger Shipping Fan Group. (sharing here Admin approved)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/199718373383293/

Hello Aurette and welcome to Behind the Quill, thank-you for letting us get to know you a little better.

I'm deeply honoured to be asked.

A true titan in the world of SS/HG fic, many of our readers will have broken their hearts over your story The Tattered Man.

Okay, let’s jump right in.

What's the story behind your pen name?

Honestly, it was a whim. Long before I thought of writing, I needed a login name to read fanfic. It was a play on Auror. I had no idea it was an actual name.

Which Harry Potter character do you identify with the most?

Hands down, Snape. I know that might sound strange, but he was the one that clicked. My niece introduced me to the books. Being in my 30s at the time, I already had kids of my own, so I didn't identify as one of the students. I loved Harry from the start but he had this uncanny ability to keep being wrong about nearly everything. The character who best expressed adult annoyance with that was Snape. And I do love a good jerk. Snape was a jerk.

Do you have a favourite genre to read?

I'm a sucker for fantasy and science fiction. I hated reading as a child. All there was available when I was a kid was Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys and it was insipid. I glommed on to mythology early but once I'd read all the books in my library on the subject, I gave up reading at all. That was about 4th grade. Children's books in the 70s were total garbage and YA books only had one author: Judy Bloom.

Ironically, my first job was working in a bookstore. It was a college bookstore, so it was all textbooks. I wasn't even a student, so I had no interest in any of them. One semester. A Lit prof assigned Fahrenheit 451. The cover art caught my eye and I read the blurb. Then started reading the book. I finished it in about 5hrs. It blew my mind. I had no idea writing like that existed. And the book was about someone discovering the value of books. It was intellectual Inception waaaaay before that was a thing.

After that, it was like a switch flipped in my head. I sucked up books air. I was never without a book or two. Or three...

Do you have a favourite "classic" novel?

Obviously Fahrenheit 451. I'm going to go ahead and say Les Miserables as well. I was in my 30s when I finally read it and sobbed like a baby at the ending. The care and tenderness Hugo showed when portraying these disposable lives were so unique for that age. Sadly, even today. A lot of our culture is wrapped around the belief that only the wealthy have value and beauty is a pathway to wealth. The poor and ugly are a constant plague to be shunned or dealt with, not humans with crushed dreams that deserve to be valued in their own right. Look at how often fanfic recreatesSnape as handsome or Hermione as gorgeous. Those are always the least interesting stories. (hops off soapbox)

At what age did you start writing?

Whatever age I was when I wrote Safe House. Probably 40ish? That terrible little fanfic is literally the first thing I ever wrote beyond shopping lists and emails. It's an ugly child, but my first, so I love its pointy head. I intentionally leave it up so new writers can see my learning curve. No one starts out good. Read my stories in reverse chronological order and you'll see they get a little worse each time. That's how much I grew as I learned the craft.

How did you get into writing fanfiction?

Reading tons of it. I was at a total loss after the book Deathly Hallows came out and it was all over. Reading it had become an event in my house. My husband and I would snatch the book out of each other's hands "You've had it long enough. My turn." And then there were no more...

I couldn't even tell you how I found fanfic, but it kept me sane. I keyed in on SS/HG because at the time there was a noticeable difference in the talent level in that ship. I must have read SS/HG fanfic for a solid 2 yrs before I took a leap and wrote my own. I was inspired by the amazing stories, but also by the crappy ones. "Heck, I could do better" became its own form of allowance. So I had a small 'what if' and just went for it. Of course, it was crap, everyone's first is. But taking the leap and writing it was a huge thing for me to have done.

What's the best theme you've ever come across in a fic? Is it a theme represented in your own works?

I'm a sucker for a story where characters overcome emotional adversity, both external and internal. If you squint. You'll see that theme repeated throughout my fics.

What fandoms are you involved in other than Harry Potter?

None. Nothing else ever grabbed me as a sandbox I wanted to play in before or after HP.

If you could make one change to canon, what would it be? Do you have a favourite piece of fanon?

Gosh, I don't think I would change a thing about JK Rowling's work. Things I would change would only be me forcing her story to fit my preferred ideal. However, if you think about it, her world, the good and the bad, challenged all of us to churn out 100,000+ what ifs. Some out of anger. Heh.

As for fav piece of fanon, probably that Malfoy jr was Snape's godson. He's totally not, but whoever started that created a great layering of the dynamic between them that you can share in so many tones.

Do you listen to music when you write or do you prefer quiet?

I was a stay-at-home mom when I was writing most of my fanfics, so I wrote in a chaotic and very noisy environment. I didn't listen to music when I wrote, but music was often the inspiration. When I would get stuck in writing, I would leave it and go listen to music that was emotionally similar to where I wanted the story to be while I thrashed out plot points. Colossus by Afro Celt Sound System is amazing for plotting a prelude to a battle.

What are your favourite fanfictions of all time?

Gosh, there are so many. Sadly, many of the authors who first inspired me are gone and pulled their fics off the web, like my fanfic bestie Dressagegrrrl. I would have to call out Pet Project by Caeria as the one I found most inspiring. Anything by ApolloniaV is pretty high up there in my book. There are dozens I'm forgetting. There was one called Resurrection Man about Snape accidentally creating a hilarious Zombie apocalypse. Best. Fic. Ever. It disappeared from the web when the author moved on. An incredible loss.

Are you a plotter or a pantser? How does that affect your writing process?

Total pantser. The obvious effect is to drive the story right off a cliff and be unable to salvage it. It's why I vowed to never start posting until I had a rough draft ending. Too many dead stories waiting for an ending that never came. But an outline for me is a killer in disguise. I lose interest in telling the tale because I already did in the outline. The fun part is over. Sitting at a keyboard typing your fingers off, while muttering, "What the hell are these people doing? Who's writing this stuff?!" is an amazing experience.

What is your writing genre of choice?

In fanfic, I ran with every genre there was. Mostly I wanted to see if there was one I couldn't tackle. Most of my o-fic is a hard-to-define mishmash of fantasy and sci-fi. I want to write romance, but it always turns into something complicated and angsty that no longer fits the box.

Which of your stories are you most proud of? Why?

The Tattered Man.

Did it unfold as you imagined it or did you find the unexpected cropped up as you wrote?

It came off exactly as I'd planned in my head. A rare occurrence for me.

What did you learn from writing it?

I could make people cry with my words. Up to that point, I'd made readers laugh and yell and blush, but to get a reader to the point of actually weeping? That's not easy. JK Rowling did it with ease. It was a challenge.

How personal is the story to you, and do you think that made it harder or easier to write?

It's very personal. My father had just died. He'd had cancer, and it might have got him in the end, but what actually killed him was being sent home with a feeding tube and the wrong instructions. None of the homecare nurses realized the mistake until his kidneys shut down. It was devastating. When I next took up writing, I was still hurting so I tried to make others feel what I felt at a death that didn't have to be. It was crazy easy to write. I wrote it all in one day. Based on the reviews, I achieved my goal. It helped me work through my loss. Pretty sure I gave a few readers PTSD. My bad.

What books or authors have influenced you?

My all-time favourite book is Iain M. Banks' Use of Weapons. Definitely a classic among the eighteen people in the United States that read it. The man was a shockingly gifted author and I was devastated when he passed away. His ability to just drop you into the action from the first page and not bother to explain what's going on is sadistic genius.

How do you think that shows in your writing?

It led to my belief that a writer is always better when they assume their readers are smart. Grab their interest and just run. They'll catch on and even pass you with their theories of what's going to happen next. I've no patience with stories that spell out everything in minute detail. They're tedious and insulting. Less really is more. On the other hand, writing over your reader's head is just as annoying. Intentionally using obscure SAT words in your story just makes you a pretentious twat. Unless your character is a pretentious twat and it's part of the dialogue. In that case, twat away. *gigglesnort*

Do people in your everyday life know you write fanfiction?

My family all knew. They were tremendously supportive. Especially Mr. Aurette, my personal Snape. Outside of my family, I was less forthcoming. Mostly because it was so crazy hard to explain. I think it's a lot less weird now, but back then? It was far more stigmatized.

How true for you is the notion of "writing for yourself"?

That's a hard one. For someone who'd never tried to write a story before, it was an amazing journey to realise what I could do. That changed me forever. Having the instant feedback of reviews was intrinsic to that experience. The downside is you can get sucked into writing for reviewers, and they will tell you clearly what they want and expect. That can stifle. I knew no one wanted The Tattered Man to end the way it did. I was pretty terrified of the reaction. But it's what I wanted. It was the entire point. I wrote that ending for myself, but I cowered after posting.

How important is it for you to interact with your audience? How do you engage with them? Just at the point of publishing? Through social media?

I absolutely loved interacting with my readers. I made some real-life friends and some really great fic buddies all over the world. I watched them become friends in reviews too. It was a really great experience. Spam-posting a fic would often take on a festival atmosphere. Unfortunately, when my review count started to really take off, I couldn't cope with the sheer numbers the same way. There weren't enough hours on the day to reply to everyone. Trying to personalize my response to a review grew overwhelming. I actually grew quite depressed over it. Connecting on a more removed, professional level seemed cold. I connected the most on Livejournal when that was a thing. But I had to back off. "Aurette" became far more witty and wonderful than I was in real life. Everyone wanted a piece of her. I couldn't keep up with the bitch. Lol. I faded away from most interactions on social media out of self-preservation. Even tiny fame can make you whacko.

What is the best advice you've received about writing?

There's a few that come to mind.

1-If you want to be a better writer, kill every adverb you come across.

2-Read your words out loud to yourself. If you run out of breath, your reader will run out of patience at that exact point.

3-Dressagegrrrl was the one that finally made me see how playing POV ping pong within a scene was something that marked my writing as an amateur.

4-Stop trying to be clever. Be clever, if you are clever, but don't try. It comes off hamfisted every time. Readers hate that.

5-Never, ever, ever post something you wrote that day. You've left half of it in your head and you can't tell. It's awful.

6-If you're not even a little embarrassed by something you wrote 6 months ago, you're no longer growing as a writer.

What do you do when you hit writer's block?

That's a bit of a sticking point. Stress is a muse-killer. Anything you can do to rid yourself of stress will help. Writer's block is usually the result of something going on elsewhere in your life. Fix that and the creativity will come back.

That said, my life has turned into constant stress with the result being I no longer write at all.

Has anything in real life trickled down into your writing?

Everything has. 'Write what you know' is true for fantasy too. Whether it's heartbreak, or a drunken hookup that turned into love (Hello, Mr. Aurette) or a moment when you were a child and ignored or teased, or maybe the bully, all of it makes it's way into the emotional truth of a scene or character, no matter how outlandish the setting.

Do you have any stories in the works? Can you give us a teaser?

I have a Dropbox full of stories I've run into the wall or had to leave half finished, both fanfic and o-fic. No teasers, because at this point I don't think they will ever see the light of day. Never say never, but the light of hope is dim.

Any words of encouragement to other writers?

Anyone can write and everyone has something to say. Be open to the process. Part of that process involves having a stranger tell you that your shiny new love is really shit. Being defensive only prolongs your shittiness. Embrace criticism. Sometimes, the process of justifying something can actually buttress your choice, so you double down with better results. Other times, you'll see your idea wasn't working after all. Be ruthless in your editing, but don't delete. That scene you cut because it caused everything to go off the rails could be a different story trying to get out. Take that leap, you fail at everything you don't try, so why not try something you really want?

Thanks so much for giving us your time.

It's been my pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity. *waves to my readers*

#fanfiction #fanfic #writing #severus snape #snape #pro snape #pro snape community #snamione #hermione granger

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bettsfic · 6 years

Text

a third stance on the moral dichotomy of fandom

i have one more thing to say, or i guess reiterate, on the topic of moral purity policing in fanfiction as perpetuated by minors, in a more rebloggable format than my previous asks. what i have to say is an incredibly unpopular opinion because it takes neither side of this dichotomized issue, and addresses, not the minors perpetuating the purity rhetoric, but the adults fighting against it.

first i’ll offer a run-down of the overall issue at hand:

side 1, or what i call “think of the CHILDREN”: there is a large sect of people in fandom right now, mostly teens and young adults as far as i can tell, who believe that taboo works (noncon and underage) should not be allowed to exist. if they are written, they should be flagged and subsequently taken down. these people seem to hold these beliefs for several reasons, the prevailing ones being “fiction affects reality” and “children might read it!!” this stance is the active one, the (literal) minority, the side trying to enact change upon an established and (legally) supported status quo. these people do not separate the art from the artist.

in practice, these beliefs are aggressive and toxic. we see them in rude or cruel anonymous asks urging writers to kill themselves. we see them in “only follow if” and “do not interact if” pages with lengthy bullet point lists of traits and behaviors that are Not Okay. we see them in yfip. we see them in anti tags. we see them in long, poorly researched and contextualized responses to well-meaning pro-”ship and let ship” posts. we see them in accusations of pedophilia for fics and ships that are not in fact pedophilic. we see them in phrases like “abuse apologists” and “problematic” and “romanticize” and “fetishize.”

despite the seeming growth of what i’ve been calling the Gen Z Puritanical Movement, what we see on tumblr is only a narrow view of a much wider issue spanning outside fandom and into the world of art itself. it stems from problems of decades past, McCarthyism, the Hays Code, the nuclear family, for example, and the subsequent counterculture movements against them. right now Gen X has all the power and prestige in the enormous world art, and being the children of Baby Boomers, they simultaneously believe you must always separate the art from the artist, while also widely disbelieving (or having had to learn) that inequality and disenfranchisement have any bearing in the success of art.

“the discourse” as we call it has its roots in every creative field and we are in midst of a revolution in the way we understand and interact with art. i believe, with any revolution, the answer is not in stalling it but negotiating with it, learning from it, interrogating it, and adapting.

side 2, which i’ll unpack below, is comprised mostly of what i would venture are Millennials, and fall somewhere between Gen Z purity and Gen X freedom. and as much as i want to discuss this gaping chasm of beliefs further, i’m specifically talking about the way transformative art is presently policed by side 1.

which brings us to the other side.

side 2, or what i call “i do what i WANT”: these people believe that a fan writer/artist should be able to write, post, and share with the public any creative work the mind can devise as long as it is warned/tagged properly, and all people who do not want to view their art should walk away and not interact. key phrases include “ship and let ship” and “don’t like, don’t read.” the prevailing root of this belief is that all art is valid and important, all art belongs, even when that art is devised entirely by the id. additionally, they believe they do not have to justify, defend, or explain their art in order for it to exist, and most importantly, it is every reader/viewer’s responsibility to understand the difference between fiction and reality. these people separate art from the artist.

in practice, these beliefs are poised to defend of the attacks from side 1. this is a reaction to a movement, an assertion of maintaining the status quo. we see posts speaking to an audience of side 1, pleading or at times demanding for them to learn not only the fraught history of fanworks but also the greater context of art and censorship. these posts are then reblogged by people with similar beliefs, attacked by side 1, and no one seems to really learn anything at all. the dichotomy is maintained. battles end as posts fall into obscurity, but the war rages on.

side 2 holds the status quo, the most common sense. it is the most educated perspective, upheld by the wiser and older parties of fandom, the transformative artists who have lived through strikethrough and boldthrough and have experienced the damaging consequences of the censorship and ideology of side 1. moreover, it is upheld by the actual people who built and run the archive on which our art rests. in this dichotomy, side 2 has all the power. side 2 is the majority.

here’s where i get to my incredibly unpopular opinion:

people in positions of power have no reason to meet aggression with more aggression except to re-establish and assert that power over the minority opinion. aggression does not sway the minority opinion; it only fuels it.

in other, more practical words, we are ADULTS sharing a public community space with CHILDREN, and some of those children have made it clear that they are angry.

why do we meet that anger with anger when we are older and wiser and have all the authority? if a child is having a violent tantrum, do you punch them in the face? no, you hold their wrists. you calm them down. you ask them what’s wrong. you try to parse out what happened and work together to make sure it doesn’t happen again. you can’t expect them to articulate that anger; you have to ask questions. you have to listen to them.

side 1 says that taboo works are wrong and bad and shameful. i personally disagree with that belief, but my curiosity lies in the extreme emotional reaction and value judgments behind it. and when enough people are angry about something, if a movement becomes wide enough, it means there is something else going on, some seed of truth happening somewhere -- a needle in a haystack, an invisible shard of glass on the kitchen floor -- that needs to be found. i’m not saying side 1 is right, but i am saying that there is something in that anger which might ring true, even if the toxic rhetoric they are spouting is not. i don’t know what that truth is, and the point of this post is not to find it, but to encourage us to seek bigger answers about this very big problem.

side 2, you might be saying, they’re not children, they’re teenagers and young adults. you might be saying, when i was their age, i knew to obey the etiquette of fandom. you might be saying, we are not equals, they should be learning from us. you might be saying, it’s their responsibility to know fiction from reality. you might be saying, none of this is my responsibility. you might be saying, this movement is getting bigger and scarier and it may become an actual threat to our art.

and you might be feeling: i have no interest in logically or morally defending the taboo nature my aesthetic interests. i know that they appeal to me, and i know i should not be tasked with or required to publicly explain myself. i should not have to assert that art is separate from the artist. i should not have to endure aggressive mobs of anons in my inbox. i should not be chased away by pitchforks held by my own community. i should not be accused of being a predator, rapist, abuse apologist, or pedophile.

and maybe you know that you are not any of those things, and to be accused of them is ridiculous and appalling, but maybe it still hurts to be called all of that which makes life so dangerous and cruel. maybe it always hurts to have your art misunderstood.

this brings me back to anger. all anger is devised of pain and fear. we get angry when we’re hurt and scared. when i see two angry sides of a wide divide, all i see is that fear and pain, and all i want is to lessen it.

on side 1, we have a group of young people whose only context is the present and whose only fear is the future. i put myself in the shoes of what it must be like to be a teenager in america in 2018, how different it is from when i was a teenager. teen stars on red carpet events in 2005 dressed in ugly cargo pants and sweatshirts. millie bobby brown at 13 was dressed like a supermodel at last year’s emmy’s. young people today have more and easier access to information pertaining to violence and sex, consume media steeped in those things, than they ever have. and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for parents to keep them from that interaction. side 2′s rhetoric around this is to wipe their hands free of it -- “your parents should monitor what you’re doing on the internet.” and they should, they absolutely should, but while technology has changed, teenage curiosity hasn’t. i clicked past every 18+ warning i’ve ever seen in my life, and that was my choice, and i handled the consequences.

but just for a second imagine being 14 again, and curiosity getting the best of you, and clicking on something in which your physical equivalent is being hurt and abused and eroticized. can you imagine not having any understanding of the greater context of what you’ve just read, in art or in life? wouldn’t you be scared too, to know those things exist? wouldn’t you be reluctant to listen to the explanation of them when you are young and afraid and suddenly aware that you can be hurt?

i am not encouraging writers to stop creating taboo fanworks. i think they have an important artistic purpose and function and place, and i value any mind that can conceive and face such darkness. but as someone who aims to understand as much as i possibly can about what it is to be human, to be alive today, i am inclined to consider the various interpretations of taboo art and its potential repercussions.

teenagers today are more aware and attuned to -- and have constant access to -- current events than any other generation before, but that does not mean they have learned or educated themselves on the historical context of these events in order to understand them fully. they don’t have a wide perspective, but they do have their moral compasses guided by the abhorrence of the constant human rights violations that occur on macro and micro scales every single day, and it’s those compasses that place value judgments on the content they consume in fandom, the place where they feel, i speculate, the most valued. the place they have the most power and sway. the only place, maybe, that their voice and fear and anger is ever heard, witnessed, responded to, taken seriously.

being a teenager today is a completely new and terrifying machine made of old parts. we, the adults in fandom, understand the parts but not the machine. how can all the same parts make something so different from us? who built this monster, and how to we destroy it? why is it attacking us when there are bigger and more important battles to fight? why doesn’t it go read a fucking book for once?

that brings us to side 2. if side 1 has the future, side 2 has the past. we see the toxic rhetoric of side 1 and we know what consequences can come of it because we’ve lived the worst of it. we have both the pain of the past and the fear of the future to handle, and neither are easy to cope with.

so what do we do? we either get angry and fight back, or disengage. sometimes i think the latter is the most toxic of all, because i believe it’s every artist’s responsibility to understand the work they’re doing and the greater context of that work, how it fits in their given lexicon of art. they should not be required to defend it or speak for it, but they should know it. inside and out, they should know their art and why they make it.

i also believe, if you know your art and why you make it, if you can separate yourself the artist from the art, why disengage from those who are repulsed but reaching out? it’s definitely my gut instinct to meet cruelty with anger and upsetness, but cruelty also piques my curiosity -- i want to know where the repulsion comes from. i want to ask questions. why are you offended by this art? how have you interpreted it? why are you afraid of it? how has its existence hurt you? if nothing else, it always gives me a broader understanding of my work and how it can be seen, which is invaluable feedback for any artist.

if there is any bridge at all to be built between this divide, i think it is in our ability to ask questions, listen to the answers, and use those answers, not to argue with or defend ourselves or to become upset by, but to ask more questions.

here are two ways this mentality has helped me --

in my old job (commercial finance real estate), i worked with upperclass middle-aged white men who got paid six figures a year to golf and cheat on their wives while i did all their paperwork. eventually i made a hobby of sitting in their offices and asking them questions, knowing they had authority over me, knowing our opinions differed. knowing i had no place to argue with them or leverage in telling them all the ways i felt they were wrong about politics and society at large. i pretended they were teaching me things, showing me the way of the world. i let them believe that, and i continued asking questions, forcing them to articulate aloud why they believed what they believed, hours and hours, slowly boxing them into corners from which they would eventually change their own minds.

in my current job (i’m a college instructor) i do something similar. i sit down with every single student one on one and i ask them questions about their political and social beliefs. often my students are 19, white, straight, affluent, conservative young adults who hold many of the same puritanical ideas as that of side 1 with less of the toxic rhetoric. at first, i was terrified to do this. it was different than my old job because suddenly i was the one with authority. i thought, what if i encounter racism? prejudice? sexism? what if they are fundamentally wrong on every level, and won’t listen to me, someone who knows the greater context of their opinions? what if i end up arguing with them? what if they don’t respect me? what if i can’t change their minds? and most importantly -- is it my responsibility to change their minds at all?

after the first semester, i realized how young they were, how much they still had left to grow, and learn, and live, and that my class would not be able to teach them everything they needed to know in order to strip away the prejudices and narrow-mindedness of their upbringings. i learned that all i could do was be a person in a position of authority listening to their beliefs and asking them tough questions no one has ever asked them. forcing them on the spot to articulate the beliefs they have not before had the opportunity to interrogate. i find i rarely agree with what they say, but i validate their right and ability to say it. to have a voice and space and responsibility in and to society. to think, itself. and most importantly to think through their ideals, which they cannot do if they are never given a chance to be heard, if they are never asked the questions whose answers will lead them to deeper and more meaningful insights.

i have never changed the mind of a single person by arguing, but i have changed several minds by asking.

we have an entire generation of terrified young people who are lashing out, and i do not want to hate them. i do not want to meet their rage and toxicity with fear, defensiveness, and dismissal. i want to sympathize and listen. i want to know more about why they feel how they feel, what the real root of it is, the seeds of truth behind the rhetoric. i want to understand. and mostly, i want to help fix all the broken and awful things in the greater sociopolitical sphere that have built this terrifying machine and dug our moral divide.

#tsatp #discourse #moral purity #ao3 #fanfiction

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liberalcom-blog · 6 years

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Mystery Babalon: The Bhaktic and Ecstatic Rites of Babalon

https://liber-al.com/?p=19195 Thelemic Productions, USA, 2016. Paperback. 474 pages. Brand new print on demand. Ships from USA. At last, a book about Babalon that is actually a book of Magick! Mystery Babalon: the Bhaktic and Ecstatic Rites of Babalon is an incredibly ambitious book designed for both the life-long devotee and occasional practitioner. People of all types, preferences and persuasions will find useful tools here to help them in their quest for union with Babalon and Her energy. You may pursue a Bhaktic Path which is devotional and ritualistic in its nature, or you may pursue the Ecstatic Path which is sensual and carnal in its Rites. And of course many people pursue both paths, as the choice is yours according to your own Will. Within these pages you will find sound information and practical guidance from a Priestess of Babalon who has practiced the Orphetic Mysteries for almost three decades. Learn how to set up your Shrine, how to prepare yourself for the Rites, and how to perform them. There are Rites for solo devotees, lovers or small and large groups. Everything has been put at your fingertips to get you started with the ways of Babalon, like no other book before it! Hagia Aureavia has adapted these Rites for the general public from some of those used in her private Temple over the years. Designed for a broader uninitiated audience, these Rites have been made as non-denominational as possible so as to be appealing to people from all backgrounds and inclinations. Within the pages of this large tome you will find five sections. Part 1 is Philosophy & Cosmology which focuses on expounding the ontology and teleology of Babalon and Her Allies, as well as the new (yet in actuality very ancient) philosophy which they divulge to mankind. Part 2 is Preparations for the Shrine and for the Rites. Part 3 are the Invocations, Hymns, Adorations and Prayers which are used throughout the Rites within the book. Part 4 is the Bhaktic Rites of Babalon, which forms the beginning of the heart of the book. Here you will find a bevy of devotional Rites to perform within your Shrine. This includes the Daily and Periodic Rites, Rite of Devotion, the Rite of Convocation, and the Bhaktic Rites of Babalon. Given along with these Devotional Rites to Babalon are the optional Rites to Ra Hoor Khuit. These rites are for those who also feel a calling to the Brother of Babalon, who is the Lord of the Aeon. This includes the daily Adorations of Ra Hoor Khuit are given along with the many Mudras given by the Brotherhood of the Midnight Sun, the Devotional Rites of Ra Hoor Khuit, which are powerful rites utilizing both the Cakes of Light and the Cakes of Life, and for those few brave women who aspire to be concubines to Ra Hoor Khuit as delineated in the third chapter of Liber Legis, there are the Blood Rites of Ra Hoor Khuit. Part 5 is the Ecstatic Rites of Babalon, which forms the complimentary rites to the Bhaktic practices of the previous section. Here, the Balanced Ecstatic Path is explained. Here one is prepared for the incredible bliss of worshiping Babalon through the senses, with details given on how to avoid common pitfalls in the Persona under the influence of such powerful and life-altering energies. This includes the Rite of Sappho, the Rite of Pan, the Rite of the Twin Flame, the Rites of the Holy Whore, the Ecstatic Rites of Babalon and the Hieros Gamos to Babalon. As if this wasn’t enough, the book is rounded out with the Appendices, which cover the world-wide Shrine System initiative, Ophidian Thelema and the Temple of Babalon, the Gematria of the Ophidian Kabbalah, as well as a large Glossary of Concepts which defines many of the obscure terms and concepts used within the text. Mystery Babalon: the Bhaktic and Ecstatic Rites of Babalon is an ambitious book, distilling decades of knowledge and experience down to practical rites which anyone can use. Finally there is a reliable book which gives everything anyone could need to help them on their path of being a Devotee of the Goddess Babalon. Hagia Aureavia founded the Temple of Babalon in the year 2000 as a Mystery School dedicated to the devotion and worship of the incarnation of the Great Liberating Mother who is currently known as Babalon. The Temple is an Ophidian organization and practices Ophidian Thelema. She trains her students in the lost art of the Orphetic Mysteries, Heka and Natura, the Liminal Gateway to the Underworld, and the Rites of Sex and Death. The Hagia is a Priestess of Babalon and a Scarlet Woman, an author, an artist, multiple business owner, a student of naturopathic medicine, a homesteader and a survivalist. She lives off-grid at her home in Ophidia where she runs her Temple and trains her students from around the world. Please note for Print on demand please allow several working days prior to shipping for production, the carriers used for these titles will not accept PO. box delivery addresses, once placed orders cannot be cancelled. ORDER MULTIPLE BOOKS IN THIS CATEGORY FOR SHIPPING FROM AS LOW AS LESS THAN ONE DOLLAR PER BOOK! #AleisterCrowley #Thelema #Womenintheoccult

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ninja-bears-being-ninjas · 6 years

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Gill

It was quiet that night. The airship hovered over the mountains, just above the trees that blanketed the peaks. I sat out on the deck, taking my shift in giving the ship the power to stay airborne. It was easy when we stayed suspended in the air like this. The great red balloon tethered to the ship did most of the work; all I needed to do was give it that extra push to keep us afloat. I thought of buoyancy, felt it lifting in my chest, and then let it seep out into the ship. It was easy to let my mind wander.

My eyes trailed the patterns of clouds and stars in the sky. The characters that lived in the constellations provided endless stories to my imagination, like the ones Fox used to tell me when we watched the stars in the city. There were fewer stars there, always obscured by the smog of one factory or another, but we made do.

Now that I’d seen how beautiful the sky could look out here, far from any cities, I didn’t understand how Fox could have stayed. I had spent most of my childhood dreaming of escape, and I thought Fox had, too.

The wind brushed through the trees, the pine needles singing almost like chimes. It was a pleasant release from the summer heat that clung to my skin even at night. It could be cold on the airship when we sailed. Then, the wind would seem to go right through you, frost building up on your bones. But here, closer to the earth and with the sun’s warmth still churning through the air, my clothing wasn’t light enough to enjoy the heat.

Before I had started sailing, that had always been the problem: clothes too heavy for summer and too light for winter, every year on the brink of freezing to death or collapsing from heatstroke. Fox and I had done our best to keep ourselves comfortable. We swam in the river during the summer despite the dark brown of the water, and sought shade from the trees in a small park. We spent all day at the library in the winter, and when they closed down for the night, we’d take refuge in whichever bar would take us. Usually they would only tolerate us kids for a night or two, and then we’d have to find a new haven or sneak into one of the back rooms and hide there. We never slept much on those days.

Fox had always talked a lot about his parents, about how they’d been sent off to war and about the bravery of their deaths. I couldn’t remember my parents, but I used to spin stories about them too. My mother was a florist, a teacher, the first female pilot to ever join the top ranks. My father was a mechanic, a fireman, a dancer. The stories changed every time, but Fox still let me tell them.

The truth was probably that my parents had caught me using magic and thrown me out into the street. It had been decades since the uprising of magic-users that had threatened to topple the government of my home nation of Kyrus, but magic remained forbidden. Harboring me could’ve gotten my parents arrested or worse, but that was no excuse. I had been only five. I no longer tried to tell myself that they were good people.

Below, through the net of branches and needles, an orange light flashed once, twice, and then flared up into a flickering flame. I was immediately on my feet, running to look over the railing on the side of the ship. Either there was someone nearby making camp, or we needed to get the hell out of there. It was hard to tell from up here whether the fire was growing like a forest fire would; I would need to investigate.

The magic I fed the ship usually came in a slow, steady stream, but now I opened the tap and sent a surge of magic into its gears, enough to sustain the ship while I dropped the long rope ladder over the edge and descended into the trees. I stayed hidden among the branches and did my best not to draw attention to myself. The Kyrus Guard occasionally sent patrols out to these mountains, and if they were camping beneath our ship we were in big trouble.

The fire turned out to be small and harmless, contained within a circle of stones that would help keep the flames from jumping to the grass or bushes nearby. The three people milling about the camp seemed to be ordinary travelers; the only weapon they had was a hatchet and their gear was unmarked by any insignia.

I could have just left it at that and returned to the ship, but for some reason I lingered, watching the flames dance upon the logs. The fire crackled, sending sparks into the darkness like shooting stars. The travelers were illuminated in flickering light that cast strange shadows across their faces, and suddenly, vividly, I was reminded of the night I first met Fox.

It was the first thing I could remember with any clarity. Before that day, my life was vague images of floral-patterned couches and my chubby little hand enclosed in someone else’s.

It must have happened shortly after I was abandoned, for how could I have survived without him? He’d had the luck to grow up a little before his parents died and he had to learn to fend for himself. Fox was clever, and caught on quickly that the only way to survive life as a homeless orphan was to fly under the radar.

I had been stupid and winter was beginning to set in, so I tried to use my magic to create a fire.

I remembered huddling in an alleyway to shelter myself from the wind. My hands were cupped in front of my face as I tried to coax some fire out of them, but I had not yet learned to control the magic, so I got nothing but a few sputtering sparks.

Frustration and desperation smoldered inside me, but I was a stubborn child, so I furrowed my brow and put all of that tension into one more try.

The flames leapt from my palms, igniting all at once into one big plume. I had been holding my hands too close to my face. The fire scorched my chin, my neck, my cheeks, and I shrieked in pain and surprise. The tears that streamed down my face only made my skin sting worse.

Fox saw the flash of light and heard the startled scream and came into the alleyway with his penknife drawn. When he found me, his arm dropped to his side, his lips forming a small, unsettled “oh.”

He was only a few years older than me, but it was enough for him to have learned the art of lock picking, and so he broke into an apothecary’s shop and stole some burn salve. He dabbed it onto my face, sloppy like he was finger painting, and it soothed away most of the pain and kept my skin from scarring too heavily.

According to Fox, the scars looked like gills, and so that would be my name. Gill.

I learned everything I could from him, how to steal, how to beg. The places in town that would be friendliest to us and the kinds of people to avoid. None of it was easy, but we had each other, which made us lucky. Fox warned me that most magic-users like me were either killed or captured and handed over to the authorities to be imprisoned for life. He told me horror stories about the street kid he’d known who had been caught using earth magic to build a shelter on a rainy day, and urged me never to use my powers again.

So instead of practicing magic, I read about it. My nose was stuck in a book every hour that we spent at the public library. I became fascinated with the fantastical worlds that the authors spun, but best of all were the stories from our own world, from other lands where magic wasn’t outlawed. These made excitement bubble up in my chest.

“When I grow up, I’m going to live there,” I said with a grin.

“Ushela’s all the way on the other side of the world. You’ll never get there!”

He said it with a laugh, but it stung.

Even when we weren’t at the library, Fox and I would be telling each other stories. Fox had the most incredible legends of pirates who roamed the seas and skies in search of adventure and gold. The pirates used magic to make their ships fly, and so they were faster than all the other ships. My eyes would go wide with fascination every time he told me of the engineers who used their magic to sail through the clouds, exploring distant lands in search of treasure.

Fox and I dreamed of becoming pirates like the ones from the stories, and we could talk for hours about the adventures we’d go on. At some point we’d talked about it so much that it became a promise. But as we grew older, the stories were fewer. Fox would go quiet when others came into earshot.

“What happened next?” I urged when they had gone.

“Maybe I should tell a different story,” he brushed me off. “We shouldn’t talk about magic here.”

Eventually all talk of magic and pirates faded, but the stories lived on in my imagination. When I couldn’t sleep at night or when Fox was off picking up shifts at the factory, I practiced my magic. At first I could hardly muster a flame or move the smallest rock. There was a disconnect between the outside world and the magic pulsing around my heart. I would tell the magic to do something and it did not listen. But I learned to let that feeling of power flow out to the tips of my fingers, where it brushed against the energies of the elements around me and could bend them to my will. I created little whirlpools in the river and halted the wind in its tracks. I practiced moving fire from one finger to the next. I pulled earth from the ground and threw it across the water without ever touching it.

Each new thing I mastered excited me, and I swore to myself that I would get out of this city and go somewhere I was free to use my powers.

I was sixteen when I met Captain Harrington at a bar I was finally old enough to drink at. It was a seedy place, so he could boast freely of the loot his crew had just scored. Without thinking, I sat down at his table, my beer sloshing over the sides of the mug as I thumped it down.

“Are you looking for new crew members?” I demanded, to which he raised an eyebrow, somewhere between skeptical and impressed.

“That depends. What can you bring to the table?”

For a brief moment, I was terrified of confessing that I could use magic, and that I’d actually gotten pretty good, but then I was just blurting it out, and the captain’s lips spread into a grin.

Fox was meant to meet me at the bar, and when he showed up I was bouncing with excitement. I told him he’d just been hired, that we were finally doing it, we were going to be pirates, and he only snorted with laughter.

“Yes, and I’ll wear dresses and sing songs for the crew,” he said sarcastically, as if he was going along with a joke. I rolled my eyes, amused.

“No, I’m serious. There’s a pirate captain here who’s going to hire us,” I said, and Fox’s expression turned wary.

“Come on, that’s not funny,” he said under his breath. “Those guys are criminals.”

Confusion twisted my face. “But you always said--” I was at a loss for words. “We’ve been dreaming about becoming pirates for ages.”

“Those were just stories. Stupid stories. It was never going to actually happen.”

“But it can!” I protested, gesturing to Harrington. “He’ll hire us. We can leave this place. I’ll be able to use my magic.”

Fox was stunned. We hadn’t talked about magic in years. “No. You need to forget about your powers. It’s the only way you’ll be safe. I mean, look at how much magic has hurt you already.”

My hands moved to touch my scars involuntarily, but then my fingers slipped away as they curled into fists.

“No! I’m not going to keep hiding my entire life! I’m going to learn how to control my powers, and Captain Harrington’s engineers are going to teach me how,” I told him. My throat was tight with the betrayal, but I forced myself to speak clearly.

Fox and I didn’t part on good terms. He tried to convince me to stay, but I wouldn’t hear it. Our shouts made even the rowdiest bar patrons turn their heads to see what was going on. We were supposed to be best friends, but that night he saw me as a child clinging to fantasies. So I left with the Captain to start a new life, and Fox stayed in the city to work in the factories.

Over the years, Harrington’s crew became my family, but it was hard sometimes not to feel like something was missing. When I had dreamed up wild tales of my pirating feats, Fox was always supposed to be there.

#story time #short story #long post #for some reason the keep reading thing isn't working on mobile??

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gunnerpalace · 7 years

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Welcome to Bleach Rarepair Hell

To paraphrase:

Quark: ... I want you to try something for me. Take a read of this. Garak: What is it? Quark: A literary concept. It's called a rarepair. Garak: I don't know— Quark: Come on. Aren't you just a little bit curious? Garak: Hnhh... ugh... Quark: What do you think? Garak: It's vile! Quark: I know. It's so bubbly, and cloying, and happy. Garak: ... Just like my OTP. Quark: But you know what's really frightening? If you read enough of it, you begin to like it. Garak: ... It's insidious. Quark: Just like your OTP.

So, I’ve recently approached several people individually about Rarepair Hell’s collection of materials. (Yes, Rarepair Hell is also a place; there’s a chat.) But, I figure I’ve gotten a fair number of new followers lately who don’t have the time to go trawling back through old material, and that means it’s time to go on yet another advertising drive! Now if you’re new, you might be wondering what this is all about.

Put simply, below is everything publicly released that I know of that I or someone in the chat with has put out for one of our rarepairs. These tend to be obscure or heavily underrepresented ships that, in general, we’ve fallen for.

Why not have a look? You might be surprised. Italics denote actual fics, whereas their lack denotes fan art or other documents

Kūkaku-Byakuya - KuuKuya / ”Sakura Fireworks”

KuuKuya is one of the rarest of rarepairs. Between FFN and AO3 there’s something like two fanfics and one drabble for them—the fics are almost a decade old, and the drabble involves teen Byakuya. Google reports exactly four pieces of fan art of them from some age long past, of which I’d show you one. When I took over the ship, I decided KuuKuya sounded better than ByaKuu or ByaKaku or whatever, and here we are. Most of these fics (mine, at least) take place in the canon-divergent continuity of Demons of the Sun and Moon, which is why certain details are the way they are (for example: Kūkaku has both arms again).

The KuuKuya Prototype - The small collection of paragraphs that started it all (that is to say, both KuuKuya and Rarepair Hell itself). This was originally a proof of concept, and like the post explains, doesn’t really fit into anything that came after.

KuuKuya Headcanons - A set of headcanons I put together after writing the three fics below, as well as some other material. This lays out just a few of the reasons I think the pair work so well together, as well as some cute scenarios.

Ratio Decidendi - The first proper KuuKuya fic. It’s rather short and to the point. (Original, unedited version here. Bless you, Anon, whoever you were.) @sequencefairy shortly summed it up with: “Byakuya takes Kuukaku to a function. It goes about as well as you would expect. This fic is funny and sweet and a great example of someone who gets character.”

Terra Nullius (NSFW) - The first proper piece of KuuKuya smut, following after the above. (Original, unedited version here.) This is where everything went to hell. @sequencefairy summed this up with “This one… hooooo, this one is not safe for work. I mean, I read it at work, but I would not recommend that other people do that. Again with the spot-on characterization, and I just really always love how clear and immediate the writing is in any of Dux’s fic, and this is no exception.” This fic has caused no end of wild happenings.

Para Bellum (NSFW) - A follow-up to the above. (Original, unedited version here.) @sequencefairy summed this up with “Now, I am super biased about this fic, because I got to watch it come together over the course of a few days, because Dux leaves me presents in our skype chat (it’s really the best thing ever - always leave your friends porn for them to find when they get home from work) and well, I mean, he’s absolutely nailed their dynamic, and I am stinking jealous of how well he captures Byakuya - I can literally hear the man speaking as I’m reading this fic. Also it’s a sparring session that is foreplay that leads to really excellent smut and that’s really all you need to know about it before reading.”

Interstice Gray - An intimate, hazy piece of fluff set some indeterminate time after the above.

Next to Every Great Man is... - Written as a birthday present, much in the mold of the above, highlighting their familiarity with and understanding of one another.

Cozy (@sequencefairy) - A lovely piece of winter-themed fluff, I actually received a hardcopy of this along with a Christmas card!

Untitled KuuKuya Piece (@sequencefairy) - Kūkaku and Byakuya don’t always see eye-to-eye and enjoy a charmed existence, but even when they disagree, you can sense the crackling heat!

Pinterest Board (@sequencefairy, NSFW) - If you ever wanted a mood board for these two, there’s already a pretty great one.

Discussion Chatlog (with @sequencefairy, NSFW) - A rare exception to not posting chatlogs, this is mostly theorycrafting about KuuKuya, although IchiRuki, UraYoru, and TatsuIshi (see below) also appear.

Yoruichi-Ichigo-Rukia - YoruIchiRuki / ”Neapolitan Ice Cream”

YIR is an AU OT3 that happened purely by accident. The core component, Grounded!, was originally intended to be something of a one-shot sex-comedy whereby Ichigo and Rukia meet not (supposedly) because of the machinations of Kisuke and Aizen, but rather the whimsy of Yoruichi. It then turned out that everyone reading it fell for their interactions. Ichigo and Rukia have always had this cosmic air about them, but we discovered that Rukia and Yoruichi are oceanic, and Ichigo and Yoruichi are tectonic; together, they’re everything from incredibly sweet, to hilarious, to ridiculously sexy.

Grounded! - A Bleach AU Idea Revised - The latest and greatest revision of the concept for Grounded!, this is both a design document and also contains significant portions of the actual fic, which is still being written. It’ll orient you to the setting and happenings of the AU, and hopefully interest you in the interplay that gets spun out as a result!

Planet-Side Spin (@sequencefairy) - Written as a companion-piece and sort-of-prequel to the below, this largely focuses upon Ichigo some six or so months after the events of the above. (Original here.) The tagline sums it up well: “Ichigo misses them like breathing.”

Up All Night to the Sun - Occurring at the end of Ichigo’s trip, Yoruichi and Rukia miss him quite a lot too. (Original here.) Purely fluff.

We’re Dancin’ All Alone (YoruIchi, NSFW) - Yoruichi, Ichigo, and Rukia don’t always wind up together at the same time, but they manage as best they can in other settings. One of the odd things about adding a third partner is you more than quadruple the work (you go from one pair to three pairs and the triad!); one of the joys is finding that all of those combinations have their own interesting and interrelated ways of working.

Heaven in Hiding (@sequencefairy, NSFW) - A very recent entry, with a delightfully sultry atmosphere.

Fan Art for Grounded! (@gabecebro) A wonderful birthday gift that really sums up the premise of Grounded! as a whole.

Tatsuki-Uryū - TatsuIshi / ”Double Dragon”

TatsuIshi began (for me) as a mashup of TatsuHime and IshiHime into TatsuHimeIshi, and then became its own thought experiment. The least explored of the three rarepairs, it nonetheless has its own particular charms.

Untitled TatsuIshi Piece (Semi-NSFW) - Originally put together to briefly postulate a reason they could even occur, this also shows off some of the fireworks the fly when you put the two of them together.

TatsuIshi Headcanons - Made after the above to further illustrate the point. Much like the KuuKuya Headcanons, this is meant to lay out an idea of how they might behave and interact, along with a few scenarios.

Untitled TatsuIshi Piece (@sequencefairy, NSFW) - I told you about the fireworks? This is like a really great New Year’s bash.

Fan Art for TatsuIshi Headcanons (@mags-duranb) - This was the first piece of fan art I ever received for a piece of fic, and it illustrates one of the standout ideas of the headcanons post wonderfully!

General Fan Art (@mags-duranb) - We were by no means the first people to think of TatsuIshi, of course, and there’s some more lovely art for them here!

There’s much more material that isn’t on this list because it either doesn’t exist in an easily presentable form yet (which is to say, it’s mostly just chatlogs) or is unfinished. This includes everything from one-shots to companion-pieces, and even an AU of an AU featuring YoruIchiRuki in place of the cast of Samurai Champloo (with Yoruichi as Jin, Ichigo as Mugen, and Rukia as Fuu):

Yoruichi: How ironic that Ichigo is symbolized by a cock. Ichigo: I could say the same about you being a fish. Yoruichi: Are you insulting my hygiene, you bastard? I don't recall you complaining about it last night when you had your head down there for an hour. Rukia: Shut up, both of you! How could I possibly be expected to eat all that food? It's ridiculous!

Anyway, there you have it. I hope that you found something on this list that piqued your interest. If you did, I and others are around to chat with about it! Don’t be afraid to join the conversation. Or, to put it another way:

youtube

#Bleach #KuuKuya #YoruIchiRuki #TatsuIshi #Fic Rec

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noah-gallagher-blog1 · 7 years

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Remembering Avatar: The Last Airbender

For some reason, I feel like I can comfortably voice thoughts on the universally popular stories like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings and things like that, even years after they've ended, and people won't necessarily think I'm nuts for not getting over it already. I suppose that's due to their massive and enduring popularity. But this certainly doesn't apply to every story that I feel compelled to talk about...the prime example being the Nickelodeon TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender. It WAS pretty huge in its time, there's no denying that. It had a big, devoted fan base and was critically praised. But it was still just an animated series on a children's network that aired for three seasons in the 00's, which was followed up by a failed film adaptation in 2010, and then a sequel series in 2012. Now it's an old cartoon that isn't relevant anymore. But...I'm just not over it! I've been thinking about why that is. Ever since I first saw it over a decade ago, I've been an enormous fan. And I never stopped. Why is that? Why is this not a story that I could have simply appreciated when I first experienced it and now be happy to shelve and move on from? Why do I feel compelled to talk about it? To the outsider I have no doubt A:tLA looks like just another silly anime-styled cartoon with action and slapstick. But it's plenty more than that, to me anyway. I should know...I have literally lost count of how many times I've seen the series all the way through. That kind of mania doesn't happen without learning a few things. And what have I learned? This show WAS and still IS utterly fantastic. Recently, for some unexplained reason, I find myself thinking more and more about how badly I wish A:tLA were as big as the great fantasy franchises like Harry Potter and Middle-earth. I honestly believe it deserves to be that big. But I understand why it isn't...it's a TV-budget cartoon, after all. It teeters just barely on the edge of being slightly "kiddie" in the first season. And isn't a TOTALLY flawless story, either, though it remains superb, for many reasons. The characters were what made the show. Every main cast member is a joy to watch. They're relatable, flawed, funny, and heroic. They're the definition of lovable. Each one goes through a series-long, wonderfully-written character arc, the best of which are simply incredible. Aang, Katara, Sokka, Zuko, Iroh, Toph, and so many others are THE reason to watch this show. The world it takes place in is unique, mystical, and enchanting. Each new episode deepens the lore and sucks you in to its Asiatic fantasy world of empires and four bending arts. While it can only go so far to impress you when compared to the million-dollar fantasy worlds found on the big screen, it is still unforgettable. The plots followed a "hero's journey" archetype, yes, but they were exciting and surprising and well-developed. The pacing was pitch-perfect. It was great! So how come this series didn't kickstart a larger franchise and become the next big fantasy universe? Well, the film adaptation's failure made sure it didn't. It absolutely COULD have jumpstarted the exact boom I wanted for this show. It could have remade Avatar as a film series with the exact same charm and quality, only this time with a big budget so that more people could experience and love it. Being free from network TV would allow it to more consistently reach the sophisticated heights of great all fantasy stories and not shy away from appropriate levels of violence. A remake also could have improved the few problems that the original series had. It could have been so awesome, but that ship sadly sailed a long time ago, because the movie was incredibly bad. It's now been over two years since Avatar's sequel series, "The Legend of Korra" ended and the Avatar universe went dormant. So how come LoK didn't scratch that Avatar itch? Well, it did and didn't. After holding a "wait-and-see" approach throughout the entirety of its run, I look back on LoK with much disappointment. While it had its fair share of ups, there's no denying it was a less consistent series than A:tLA. Opinions seem to vary greatly besides that, however. As for me, looking back now, I have little interest in it, especially when compared to the original series. NONE of the new main cast characters ever come close to matching the greatness of the main characters of A:tLA. The plots were disjointed and often faltered. The romances were abysmal. The character arcs were erratic and sometimes just not there at all. Three out of its four finales underwhelmed me. I can appreciate the story it tried to tell, and look back fondly on the times it succeeded, but when it comes down to it I just don't like what it was nearly as much as I love Avatar. Hearing people talk about LoK as if it's significantly more sophisticated than Avatar (simply because of its subject matter) just--PAINS me. LoK made attempts to add to universe lore (sometimes contradicting old information), but nine times out of ten I just preferred the original series' setting and canon. Even twelve years after it first aired, I'm still going back and watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, and having a blast each time. It was a triumph. A simple, humble triumph, and it saddens me that such a wonderful story with so rich a universe may, one day soon, fade away into obscurity. #avatar #legendofkorra #avatarthelastairbender

#avatar #korra #legend of korra #avatar the last airbender #the last airbender #aang #katara #sokka #toph #zuko #iroh

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