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narcissasdaffodil · 3 years

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Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 8 (ish) favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought into the world in 2020. Tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome work!

Thanks for the tag @kiki-the-creator ! I’m likely going to ramble, so bear with me! There’s multiple creations I haven’t put in the wild as of yet, so I’m just doing stuff I’ve posted on either here or A03.

1: Love Can Be Chosen

Before I started LCBC, unless you count the fic collab I’m part of, I hadn’t written any fanfic in 5 years. I started LCBC at the end of July, and teaching myself how to write properly again was difficult, along with writing in my natural style without being judged for that. I stopped writing entirely due to a high amount of people being very critical of my work to the point I lost the love for writing. I never thought I’d ever get back into it either, so this is a considerable surprise.

Just as I was going to post my first chapter of LCBC, someone I’d asked to read it for me was critical of it to the point that it seriously hurt, and it went past general consecutive criticism. Telling someone that their grammar is dreadful and there’s major errors without pointing to said errors is hardly useful! For 2 days, I toyed with whether to post it or not, or if they were actually right, and I should stop writing again. I pushed through that, as I refuse to let just one person have such an impact on me. Besides, it’s only an issue one person has, and I have multiple beta readers anyway. The fact I pushed through that makes me proud in general, as I proved both myself and that person wrong.

LCBC means the world to me as it helped me gain back my love of writing. I’ve come on a lot in nearly 5 months, and I’ve found myself writing more personal stuff to me. The fact it’s so big will always wow me, my doc for it currently stands at 166k, I affectionately nickname it my fic monster. I originally called it What’s a Soulmate?, then needed a better title. It was completely unplanned, I put my Spotify on shuffle, then Love Can Be Chosen played and I had a serious brainwave. People aren’t likely to know the song itself, but it’s by Avia Butler if you’re interested! I’ll ramble about it for ages if I let myself, so I’ll cut this here.

2: this Lottie edit

I hated this style of edit for a while, as people kept asking for these edits on my Instagram for other fandoms and literally nothing else, so I was a little fed up of doing the same thing. But it was different when I wanted to make an edit like that one myself, not having people be overly pushy rocks! I absolutely adore having control of what I edit.

3: Another Lottie edit

This one is a new style, but I really, really love it! My best stuff gets made when it’s me who wants it, I went through a period of creating just to get validation, and that was majorly shitty. My other favourite edit in this style hasn’t been posted yet, but for something made on a whim, it’s pretty good! I took a small break from editing and gave myself a talking to, basically told myself that it’s okay to make stuff you want, and not constantly concede to others, especially when the end product makes you feel worse about yourself. In addition, I no longer depend on creative pursuits for happiness, sure I enjoy it, but I don’t base everything about myself on my creative abilities.

4: this oneshot!

I was nervous to write this one, never having written hurt/comfort before. But I fell head over heels in love with the thing. Deciding to do Flufftober was an awesome decision, great job October me! I’ve tried out multiple types of fics I wouldn’t have otherwise, and found a new love for writing fluff.

5: Could You Be my Friend?

This oneshot took two goes. The first go was seriously dreadful, to the point that I was so angry at myself for 2 days straight, which isn’t healthy in the slightest! Anything that causes that much rage in me of all people isn’t a good thing. I stay far away from stuff that provoke my anxiety or anger in general. This one is a HP/LITG crossover, Harry Potter used to majorly be my thing years ago. It’s not as much now, for a multitude of reasons. Because of that also, the LITG/HP fic collab isn’t my thing as much anymore. But I had an itch to scratch regarding Marilecto and a HP au, so I took the prompt competition as the perfect excuse to just chuck it out there. Writing this one was so hard, but once I’d got halfway through my second oneshot, I was good.

6: Cold Coffee

This one was my first ever Marilecto oneshot, and my first oneshot in general, so it’s special for those reasons. I’ve likely written better stuff since, but that one was pretty special to me, as writing it proved to me I could write more than just chunky fics.

7: It Would’ve Been You

This one was part of my uni AU series. My flatmates have alternated between great and challenging, and a good way to not let it get me down was writing about bits and pieces of it!

8: Leftover Sweets

This one was super unexpected to say the least, but I actually love it. I wrote it in 2 hours between 1-3am one night and woke up confused as there was a random oneshot hanging out in my docs, and I didn’t remember writing it! It did scare me a little, but once I reread the thing, I realised I was actually pretty proud of it.

Okay, I’m tagging @lucas-koh @americangrunge, @venueska and @bubblybabynailpolish I have absolutely no clue who’s already done this, so if you want to, feel free to tag me! And if you’ve done it already, oops!

#tag games #Fave works of 2020

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duhragonball · 7 years

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I feel like I haven't as active lately, although I guess that's a matter of perspective. Work's had me busier than normal, and my sleep schedule's all fouled up from that. Right now my goal is to spend all day writing, and since there's no new episode of Dragon Ball Super to talk about, I'm gonna discuss the four Star Wars novels I re-read.

I'm a big fan of the Sith. My favorite characters in the Star Wars movies are all Sith Lords, followed by Luke, Chewbacca, Lobot, and Wat Tambor. None of that Dark Jedi crap, or whatever Kylo Ren is supposed to be. I get genuinely irritated whenever I see Sith fanart that includes Asajj Ventress, because even though I like Ventress, but she's no Sith and she never will be.

Consequently, I never had any use for the "Star Wars Expanded Universe" unless it delved into Sith lore. This didn't happen a lot, since the Sith were key players in the movies, and there were stricter editorial controls on how they could be used in the books, comics, cartoons, edible underwear, etc. The Sith would appear in a lot of other media works, but generally they didn't introduce a lot of backstory like the Prequel Trilogy did.

Fortunately, they did publish some novels in the late 2000's that scratched my itch. The Darth Bane trilogy expanded on the life of a Sith Lord mentioned very briefly in the novelization of "The Phantom Menace". In the movie, the Jedi Council initially believe "the Sith have been extinct for a millennium". When they learn otherwise, Yoda notes that there are always two Sith at a time, "no more, no less". The novelization connects these two ideas by establishing that there were once many Sith Lords in the galaxy, until a visionary named Darth Bane reformed the order by establishing the "Rule of Two". While the rest of the Sith were driven to "extinction", Bane and his apprentice, Darth Zannah, continued their order in secret, and the Sith in the movies are the inheritors of their efforts.

For a lot of years, this was all anyone really knew about Darth Bane. In 2001, there was a short story entitled "Bane of the Sith", and Dark Horse Comics published a miniseries entitled "Jedi vs. Sith", which depicted the climactic battle that saw the destruction of the old Sith order. Darth Bane was a minor player in the story. He stayed out of the fighting mostly because he had no respect for the Sith leaders, and so while they were all getting killed in the final act, he was recruiting a child to join his new order. Mostly, though, these stories simply illustrated the same basic points made in the Phantom Menace novel.

Published in 2006, Darth Bane: Path of Destruction went further than that by assembling these stories into a Bane-centric story. The author, Drew Karpyshyn, detailed the entire early life of the character, from his early adulthood as a miner, to a brief career as a sergeant in the Sith's army, to his training in the Sith Academy on Korriban, to his disillusionment with the Sith status quo. While the events of "Jedi vs. Sith" are used in the novel, Karpyshyn added the twist that Bane was secretly engineering the Sith defeat.

It's a really good read, because it does a great job establishing an anti-hero as a protagonist. Bane is one evil dude, but he also has a refreshing sincerity and pragmatism about him. He's grateful for the opportunity to learn at the Sith Academy, but when he realizes the Order's shortcomings, he refuses to compromise. His colleagues think he's wasting his time consulting old scrolls written by the ancient Sith Masters, but if you've watched the movies, you know Bane's way works, at least for a thousand years longer than the system he replaced. As cruel and malicious as Bane is, you can still root for him as a man with a vision. His opponents can't see past the ends of their noses, and that makes them more frustrating than the atrocities they commit on the battlefield.

The two sequels, Rule of Two and Dynasty of Evil, mostly focus on Bane as he pioneers his new order. He trains Zannah to be his apprentice, works to accumulate as many old Sith records as possible, and tries to become as powerful as he can while Zannah tries to decide when and how to kill him and take over. Re-reading these, I realized they weren't quite as good as they were the first time, mainly because Darth Zannah doesn't have a whole lot going on. She basically agrees with all of Bane's teachings, so there's not as much conflict between them as there was between Bane and his teachers. When I finished the last book, I really wanted a sequel about Darth Zannah or her eventual successor, Darth Cognus, but now I'm not so sure it would have been worth the trouble. Bane had a messianic quality about him because he altered the course of history. He changed the game, while Zannah and Cognus were just following the trail he had already blazed for them.

This sort of brings me to the fouth book I read, Darth Plagueis by James Luceno. Published in 2012, Plagueis was sort of a spiritual successor to the Bane trilogy, as it also attempts to expand lore introduced in the Prequel Trilogy. This time, the story focuses on the "Sith legend" Palpatine shared with Anakin in Episode III. In the movie, Plagueis was used as a way to suggest that the Sith possessed the means for Anakin to save his wife from dying, and Palpatine deliberately crafts the tale to imply that Plagueis was a somewhat decent fellow who only used his dark side power to protect "the ones he cared about".

The book exposes that idea as a distortion of the truth. The only things Darth Plagueis "cares about" in the novel is himself, and his menagerie of test subjects used for his bizarre experiments. This doesn't come as much of a surprise, since Palpatine always twists the truth to suit his purposes. Besides, Darth Plagueis wouldn't be much of a Sith Lord if he didn't put himself ahead of the rest of the universe. The problem is that it's not enough to build a novel around. The key aspect of Darth Vader, for example, is that he really was a tragic, conflicted villain. He really did get into the Sith game because he had loved ones he wanted to protect, and he was brought down by this noble quality. It's that extra complexity that allows Vader to star in six whole movies.

Plagueis--at least the version provided by Luceno--has no such redeeming quality. He's just an asshole who doesn't want to die, which isn't particularly innovative as motivations go. Several other Sith Lords in the Expanded Universe pursued the same goal. The only hook to Plagueis is that he might have actually succeeded, except we already know he didn't succeed because Palpatine told Anakin that he was killed by his apprentice. So most of the book feels like an exercise in futility. Plagueis spends the entire book working on plans and projects which will be abandoned or perfected by his more charismatic sucessors. In the end, he manages to survive all the way into the events of "The Phantom Menace", which is a pretty brazen retcon, but it serves to demonstrate how he's outlived his usefulness. Even if he can cheat death, he no longer has a place among the living. He's reduced to a bit player in his own story, but Plagueis himself never really catches on to this, and it's kind of dull watching him meander through the second half of the book without a clue.

I struggled with this book the first time I read it, because Luceno seemed determined to namedrop every fictional name, place, species, or event that he could cram into the story. It sort of suits the concept of the Sith as clandestine power brokers with a hand in everything that happens, but the Sith in the movies never had to go to such lengths to get that idea across. The second read-through just confirmed my original complaint. Much of the book is an extended callback to other, unrelated EU stories. If Darth Maul hurts his arm in a comic book, you better believe Luceno mentions it in the Darth Plagueis novel, even though it has nothing to do with the plot.

The reason I'm discussing all of this on a Dragon Ball blog is because when I re-read these books, it reminded me just how much of an influence they had over the fanfic I've been writing for the past couple of years. Like the Bane and Plagueis novels, I'm trying to expand a handful of lines from one episode of DBZ into a fully realized character. In particular, I always took some cues from the way Darth Bane was a forgotten figure from a thousand years ago, but he still managed to leave a lasting legacy. And I liked how Bane was a transformative figure to the Sith, but his peers rejected him as a heretic and a fool. It nicely mirrors the way the Jedi of the prequel era failed to recognize what they were dealing with in Anakin Skywalker.

Both orders sort of adopted this mediocratic system. The Sith of Bane's early years were basically warlords, fixated on glory and honor more than the underlying principle of the dark side of the Force. They thought having lots of Sith Lords working together made them stronger, but it only encouraged individual weakness. They embraced passions, but without any overriding sense of purpose. So they'd kill and conquer and make love but they weren't really fufilling their true goals. The Jedi of Anakin Skywalker's career were obsessed with micromanaging the Force. They'd take custody of Force-sensitive beings at birth, forbid any and all attachment to the physical world, and basically do whatever they could to suppress emotionalism. This was all meant to prevent any resurgence of dark side practitioners, except this only exacerbated the problem. The Jedi never wiped out the Sith to begin with, so trying to prevent a revival of their kind was pointless. The sterile, unfeeling nature of their order probably did more harm than good.

In the same vein, I've been trying to establish the Ancient Super Saiyans as similarly transformative figures, since Goku was clearly a repudiation of all the Saiyan culture Raditz boasted about when the Saiyan race was first introduced. Like the Jedi, the Saiyans tested their people's potential from birth, and showed little tolerance for dissent or new ideas. Like the ancient Sith, the Saiyans were constantly undermining their own efforts with their infighting. A strong leader could force them to work together, but only up to a certain point. More critically, that strong leader couldn't risk letting anyone else rising to his level, which means that his political survival would necessarily be at odds with the natural evolution of his people.

I haven't really delved into this in my story yet, but I'm getting closer to it, which I guess is why I'm trying to get the idea sorted out in my head. What I've been driving at this whole time is to establish a Super Saiyan who's clearly beyond her people, but they're too stuck in their ways to appreciate it. Lord Kaan was skeptical and somewhat afraid of Darth Bane, but he couldn't really get rid of him either. Mace Windu didn't trust Anakin Skywalker, but he couldn't really do anything about it.

And that may be what's been holding me back with Luffa's conflict with the Saiyans. I need them to be able to do something about her, but that flies in the face of the analogy I've just drawn. Unlike Darth Bane, Luffa has to fizzle out, and get lost in the dustbin of history. Whatever she's trying to sell to the Saiyan people, it won't get accepted until Goku brings it back a thousand years later.

On second thought, that isn't so unlike Darth Bane after all. Something that stuck with me on my second reading was the opening scene of the Path of Destruction. Before Bane joined the Sith, he was a cortosis miner basically living out the lyrics to "Sixteen Tons". To offset his enormous debt, he would try to hustle people at card games, using his nascent Force powers to manipulate their emotions. In the book, this backfires, because he manages to win a large pot one night, but he inadvertently drives one of his opponents into a murderous rage. Bane has to kill him in self-defense, and since the dead man was in the Republic Navy, he's forced to leave the planet and join the Sith military to avoid arrest.

So while Bane had the skill and patience to win the game, he never got to collect his prize. Even if he had collected, the money would have just gone to his creditors, so it would have made no difference. At first, it seems like his joining the Sith is a sign of success and greatness, but it really isn't, at least not for him personally. Bane founded a Sith Order that went on to take over the galaxy, but Bane himself never lived to see it. For all the work he put into it, he still ended up dying on some backwater planet, which would have been his fate if he had stayed in the mines. Similarly, Darth Plagueis was trying to bend fate to his will, only for fate to bend back in turn. Even if he had accepted his obsolesence, he would have been no better off.

I suppose this is the point to being an idealist. None of these characters were planning to enjoy a peaceful retirement. They weren't even trying to accomplish great things in their lifetime. They were just following their beliefs as far as they could possibly go with them. The final outcome was irrelevant.

#/#//#///#////#/////#writing #luffa #star wars #this feels like something i should be posting to livejournal but i ain't goin' back #i figure if you stuck with the blog for six months of jojo you can handle a little star wars eu commentary #join us next week as i discuss the intracacies of early 1980's happy meal ads #no i'm kidding #or am i?#you never can tell

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