#dvd commentary meme

[wrenaspun]

HELLO user wrenaspun big time fan here 🥺 for the dvd commentary game i'd like to hear your thoughts on this awesome bit from your legendary role playing fic!

“Were you sleeping?” asked Laurent, and the corners of his eyes creased sweetly, so that Damen could see the smile even when his mouth was covered. “I don’t think so,” said Damen. “Dozing, maybe.” “Jord told me about the men from Arras,” said Laurent, coming nearer. Damen felt the familiar warm glow of his attention, his approval. “They told him they had never seen a fighter like you.” “No?” “Jord thinks half of them want to fuck you and the other half want to be you,” said Laurent. “In any case none of them want to meet you as an enemy.”

much love in advance!! 💞

Thank you!!! and much love back to you for indulging me 💞

This one is an interesting pick!! It feels like a relatively less dramatic and more quiet moment in the context of the fic, but i feel like all the chapters needed that as a sort of grounding force before you get into the actual roleplaying bits… I think I said to a few commenters that it felt important for the roleplaying not to be a needed escape from their day-to-day lives but more of a delightful and fun little treat, so that sense of the happy mundane is what I was going for. Laurent and Damen knowing each other and being comfortable in their lives! Damen noticing the corners of Laurent's eyes moving and just knowing that he's smiling under the mask -- 'could see the smile even when his mouth was covered' -- was a fave moment for me, because I felt it really built that mood of casual intimacy, the idea that Laurent has smiled enough (and widely enough!) that Damen is now accustomed to it and knows the way the rest of his face looks while he does it. Same with putting 'familiar' in before 'warm glow' (which is a gentle callback to canon where Damen is constantly equating Laurent's Gaze to a physical touch) -- Laurent's attention and approval is now common enough that Damen is well acquainted with it!

Also, I was making a concerted effort in this fic to have postcanon worldbuilding creep in around the edges of the sexy stuff -- think Damen remembering their reunion in ch2 and their proposal in ch3 -- so this functioned as another little nod to the ongoing unification, the idea that the Akielon king was training Veretian soldiers in his free time (and impressing them wildly with his martial abilities, as is his wont....)

ALSO also, it was definitely you that said in your comment that Laurent would have been hunting down the names of the soldiers who wanted to fuck Damen, and you're 100% right. If Damen's not careful he's going to be entrapped into starting something in the training room just so that these soldiers can walk in on them, because Laurent is insane like that :')))

(dvd commentary meme)

#dvd commentary meme #my writing #thank you again!!! i love nothing more than to talk about writing 💞 #wrenaspeaks

[lambergeier]

from thirty years and change, for the dvd commentary ask meme :D I loved this bit so much it stuck with me for years

“This is where he’s been going, Iwa-chan! He’s been running around getting some! You were right! How dare you!”

Hajime thinks he’s wrong. He thinks this is the first time Hinata and Kageyama have ever kissed. They look scared, and like they’ve achieved something. Hinata is talking now, or maybe laughing something into Kageyama’s chest. Hajime doesn’t want to see this. His mouth feels dry, too small for his tongue.

“Ohhh, he’s going to hate me,” Oikawa grins, and Hajime snaps back to attention.

“You piece of shit,” Hajime starts, latching a hand to the back of Oikawa’s shirt, “I swear to god if you—”

“Tooooooobio-chaaaaaaaan, how could youuuuuuu—oh my god he’s so mad. Iwa-chan, he’s so mad.”

“Fucker, run,” Hajime hisses, dragging Oikawa into the crowd as Kageyama and Hinata’s shocked, reddening faces vanish behind a gaggle of Indonesians and Oikawa’s delighted laughter carries them up and into the Village. The crowd swallows them happily, Oikawa grabbing up Hajime’s hand to tow them around a knot of drunken basketball players and Hajime lets him, holding tight to Oikawa’s palm, breathing shakily through his mouth.

OKAY ANSWERING THIS LIKE TEN DAYS LATER!! THANK U FOR PARTICIPATING IN THE MEME VERY SORRY.

okay i'm going to be so real. i am do not have SO much to say about this sequence bc this sequence serves a very simple purpose, which is to hit iwaizumi with a bat called "u can just be in love with ur best friend you stupid motherfucker." like if hinata and kageyama can simply understand that they have feelings for each other and then act upon those feelings, then wtf are you doing my guy!! they're dumber than sand!! and because iwaizumi is sadly forced to acknowledge that the Sand Guys are able to just get it out of their systems, perhaps he must also......? [rest of fic happens]

very simple mirroring, but mirroring is literally just always good, so no need to make it overly complex! okay, some line by line stuff:

“This is where he’s been going, Iwa-chan! He’s been running around getting some! You were right! How dare you!”

Oikawa is able to just make normal jokes about this because he already knows he's in love with his best friend, and can literally just know he's pathetic and get on with his life (aggravating kageyama)

Hajime thinks he’s wrong. He thinks this is the first time Hinata and Kageyama have ever kissed. They look scared, and like they’ve achieved something. Hinata is talking now, or maybe laughing something into Kageyama’s chest. Hajime doesn’t want to see this. His mouth feels dry, too small for his tongue.

project harder bitch

“Ohhh, he’s going to hate me,” Oikawa grins, and Hajime snaps back to attention.

“You piece of shit,” Hajime starts, latching a hand to the back of Oikawa’s shirt, “I swear to god if you—”

“Tooooooobio-chaaaaaaaan, how could youuuuuuu—oh my god he’s so mad. Iwa-chan, he’s so mad.”

what's that one post about establishing dominance over your cat by picking him up and just putting him places. no reason, no explanation, you're just in the living room now little brother. deal with it. oikawa is at all times, spiritually and emotionally, trying to do this to kageyama

“Fucker, run,” Hajime hisses, dragging Oikawa into the crowd as Kageyama and Hinata’s shocked, reddening faces vanish behind a gaggle of Indonesians and Oikawa’s delighted laughter carries them up and into the Village. The crowd swallows them happily, Oikawa grabbing up Hajime’s hand to tow them around a knot of drunken basketball players and Hajime lets him, holding tight to Oikawa’s palm, breathing shakily through his mouth.

first kiss was always going to be in the olympic village bc everyone fucks nasty in the olympic village!!

i'll do more of these if anyone's got them, sorry in advance about what may happen with response times!!

#dvd commentary meme

[todderwodders]

For the Commentary! This from Fire Walk:

“It is beautiful,” Korilla says, one big hand, ending in delicately filed to points nails tracing over the wooden wedge meant to be its head. It is less a proper dog and more a dog’s skeleton. His hours in Will’s kennels pulling and retracting his uncle’s dogs legs, prying their mouths open to peek inside, smoothing their cropped ears back and watching them pop back up as they dozed in the afternoon sun had paid off on his guess at the mechanism of movement, but things to make it look like a dog were harder to come by than the materials to make it move in the first place. He sets it on the floor and slides his fingers into the wire framed slot between its shoulders. The string is thick and taunt, he has to go slow, but it acts as catalyst to make the four dumpy, thick legs move. It is clunky and unnatural compared to a dog’s prancing gait, but no less pretty in its metallic clicking and clacking for the ten or so paces it takes before he runs out of string and thus, momentum.

When he turns, Korilla is sitting in the stairwell step, looking amused and amazed with her chin propped in her hand. Her eyes seem to glitter with something like new found appreciation, although why and for what, he does not fully understand. “And you made it all by yourself?”

He feels something warm, like sinking into shallow water in the summer, filling him up - he tries and fails to keep a smile off his face. “I did. I got all the parts myself, too.” 

“It must’ve taken a lot of butcher’s string and trash wire. They must think they’ve made less trash than usual.” A statement hiding a question that adults say to lead one directly into giving away more than they intend. He does not mind it - his smile widens.

She points one finger at him. The color of her nails match her dress, which Enver finds a bit tacky. “I can see why my master might like you.”

FIC COMMENTARY TIME

Absolutely losing my mind because god, this was one of my favorite parts to write in NINE BALL and one of the scenes I worried about for a multitude of reasons. One, plausibility, two, I worried about all the details that I kept adding in, and three, I kept asking myself if it was truly necessary.

My primary concern was could a small child, even a genius one, be able to build something like that? With what materials? With what time? Then I decided that this is a fantasy setting, and ultimately Ilios is emblematic of Enver’s best traits - his tenacity, his ability to outsource, his ingenuity, and his capacity for the pursuit of perfection. The dog isn’t just a dog, it’s a direct product of his life Baldur’s Gate and the wider life of his extended family.

Also, it was incredibly fun to come up with the potential things he would need to collect to even build the thing in the first place, and how he would go about figuring out how to make it in the first place. Trading with other kids, stealing scrap equipment from the blacksmith, string from the butcher, even using some of the material his parents use for shoe making, despite the risk. I imagine a visit to the High House of Wonders put the general idea in his head. Many more visits and his own good, but imperfect memory lead to the creation of the dog’s internal working.

Korilla I think, is one of the rare few to ever praise Enver on his work, so he eats it up with some, but not much, hesitation.

Moving on a little, but I intend to write more on Enver’s family throughout the fic because to me, the before of his life and the people in it are just as, if not more important, than the House of Hope itself. These people, the good and bad things he’s experienced, they’re deeply important to who he becomes as a person. They help him survive through the awful behavior he’s witnessed and through the common sense and ingenuity they’ve impressed upon him. Raphael expects nothing from a trade family, doesn’t suspect that these insane people could ever be smarter or more clever or more able than him, he thinks Enver is a blank slate for him to paint and not a person, which is his downfall.

I really, really wanted it to feel like he had a whole life with a bunch of people who know him and who miss him. His uncle runs a kennel in Rivington and he spends enough time with him to get to play with and then obsess over his dogs. He desperately wants one of his own, because much like with many a lonely, misunderstood child, dogs don’t judge, they are always happy to see him and he can never do something bad that will get him into trouble around them. Can’t have dogs in the Gate. So, improvise.

Three, it was a pet and not a darling so I kept it :)

Also, in the judgmental way of eight year olds, he can’t stand Korilla being so matchy-matchy. My statement.

#bg3 #dvd commentary meme #fire walk with me #enver gortash

[frangipani-wanderlust]

I didn’t do a word count on this but I assume it’s under 500 😆 for the commentary meme.

—

Suddenly, Mayreni's mind was ripped from her body. Or perhaps it only seemed that way. Or perhaps she had only seemed to be in her body in the first place and what she was experiencing now had always been her true self. She saw. So much.

The core of the world, rotating within its many layers. The layers themselves, hardening through the mantle of the planet to the surface. The great volcanoes, bursting with energy, the shifting plates and faults bringing up mountains or hollowing out canyons. Rivers, splashing down from the mountains, chasing themselves out towards the seas.

And the many, many, many, many lives here. Plants and creatures beyond counting. All of it known intimately by the voice in her mind, and yet all of it distinct from it? The creature against whose leg she still rested, and one on the far side of the world, limbs attaching strangely to misshapen body and too many eyes that all seemed to fix on her somehow, though she was far too far away.

One human. Alone. An invader. Small and fragile and easy to kill.

—

From New Creation (loved it by the way!)

Oh, wow, geez, this scene.

I actually really loved it, and it was one of the kind of...formative scenes around which I built the story. This is the moment where the main character meets God and really understands who she just met. And I went into it trying to describe four mutually exclusive things all at once.

All the tiny, minute details of the planet.

The whole, overall picture of the planet.

That Mayreni is absolutely expendable in the grand scheme.

That Mayreni is important and totally safe within the grand scheme.

So...that's absolutely bananas. I wanted this to be the eldritch revelation moment, but not so that it makes the character to whom it is revealed go mad. So I was kind of setting myself an impossible task going in.

So I got to the scene and kind of pondered over it a bit. We don't even have a full, absolutely certain description of the totality of our own planet, so how am I gonna do that for an alien one? On the other hand, the alien one doesn't actually exist, so a certain amount of winging it is okay...

I decided to start with the planetary building blocks. Structure. Moving out from the inside to the actual...architecture of the thing, I guess. And while I'm "pulling the camera back," so to speak (imagine a big ol' majestic but slightly unsettling orchestra score), I want to be describing motion, motion, motion. The reader's imagination is going to do most of the heavy lifting for bringing the word pictures to life, but by adding motion to them I was hoping to embiggen the pictures in everyone's mind. So things are "rotating, hardening, bursting, bringing up, hollowing out, splashing, chasing" moving moving moving to make the word picture more vivid and dynamic.

Then you move into living organisms, and you've already got the motion in your head, so the idea of plants moving in the wind, bugs eating dirt, herbivores grazing around, this all (I hope) naturally springs into people's heads because of the set up a moment ago. Movement, life, vibrancy, everywhere all over the place.

And it all zooms in to some strange beast on the far end of the planet that looks directly at Mayreni and it's at that moment that the wonder of "oh my gosh cool planet" gets turned on its head to "holy heck a creature that I do not have line of sight with is impossibly looking at me oh crap oh crap oh crap."

The goal there was to have all the amazing come slamming into an utter, mind breaking impossibility where the only logical conclusion is to freak all the way out.

I don't know if I fully hit that note. To be honest, I'm not absolutely sure that note is hittable. But that was the idea that I was hoping to convey here and, reading it back over, I think I did manage to land in the ballpark, actually, so pretty proud of this scene as a whole, honestly.

Meme in question is here.

#dvd commentary meme #writing #new creation #my writing #ask memes #ask me

[cabezadeperro]

Hello! I was just talking about your insane ability to describe scenery and used this as an example:

The shuttle keeps on moving, on and on and on, slow but inexorable. There are no windows in the small cabin, but Cody doesn’t need them; he can picture the landscape outside just fine. Mountains, rough and bare; overgrown fields; the ruins of what once must have been thriving towns and farmsteads, now left to rot and fade away. Grey skies, heavy with clouds, with flashes of white, blinding light; air so cold it cuts. He can hear the noise of the radio through the closed and locked door to the main compartment. Cody tunes in and out, his attention snagged by random, disconnected words.

(From dead men walking, for the author commentary ask meme)

hi!!!!! it makes me so happy when you tell me it works lmao i really love describing scenery

the fic.

and i loved writing that description! it's been a while, and i think i've blasted most of this year off my memory (iykyk why), but i think i wrote that section back when i still wasn't sick of that fic, and i had a lot of fun picturing the setting and then finding a way to translate what i "saw" into words

i'm a very visual writer (i need to "see" stuff to write it), and i remember being able to picture everything about that scene very clearly in my head. the sounds, the view, even the smells. iirc it's a mishmash of every early morning winter train and bus trip i've ever had to take lmao

it was also fun to decide what parts of it cody would focus on--he's our POV character in that chapter, and i think that's super important when it comes to describing the setting + making it not boring. it's not just backdrop: the setting is happening to cody, and the other way around, cody is happening to it, and that means we get to experience it through him. it also means that it can tell us A LOT about cody, about who he is as a person, about the kind of stuff he notices.

in this case: not much, and he doesn't think he needs to. he's not exactly comfortable or at ease in that scene, but he thinks he knows what to expect from the world and the people around him, and that means we don't actually "see" the scenery: we just "see" what he thinks it looks like.

#dvd commentary meme #maríadont #ah yes. the fic that made me swear off events until at the very least next year lmao

[mkstrigidae]

Hi, I was wondering if you could do the DVD commentary ask meme with APWH (Ch 12 - Sansa finds out Baelish has been spying on the Starks the entire time/scheduled a vacation when Robb was in Braavos). Thank you!

asdjfkhasl I'm so sorry I'm responding to this so LATE- it got lost in the second page of my inbox and I apparently lack object permanence. Like a baby.

This scene was one of those lucky surprises, honestly! I typically plan out what i generally want to happen in a chapter, and sometimes when i'm thinking 'okay, what's the logical next step here- or, if x, then y-' and the revelation that Baelish would have been purposefully keeping Sansa away from the Starks hit me like a freight train and became my favorite part of the chapter. More below the cut! :)

I had planned for Sansa and Robb to spend this scene kind of awkwardly dancing around each other- it's an emotionally fraught situation in about fifty ways. Both are trying to get to know the other while each of them has this massive emotional baggage they're trying not to bring into the conversation. Robb is, without a doubt, the Stark child who took Sansa's disappearance the hardest. He was the eldest child, and the only one old enough to actually remember Sansa before she was kidnapped. So he's just terrified and doing his best not to overwhelm her because he knows and remembers her, but she doesn't know anything about him. One of the things that Sansa happens to be good at in this story, though, is making people feel comfortable enough to talk about themselves (subtly redirecting them so that she doesn't have to talk and doesn't accidentally make a mistake- I don't think she even realizes she's doing it, tbh), so she manages to engage Robb in talking about his work. Sansa's perceptive enough that she's subconsciously realized that something about meeting Robb is different than meeting the rest of the Starks- like she's picking up on their Robb-related anxieties- but she becomes comfortable around him pretty quickly once the spotlight is off of her.

At this point, I realized that, with the amount of travel Robb does for work, there's no way he hasn't been in Braavos at some point- even if just to visit Arya at school. And with that realization came the sudden understanding that Baelish wouldn't have risked Sansa running into the Starks, and Sansa's realization that he wasn't just keeping her from the Starks because of where they lived- he was doing it deliberately. And this, to Sansa, is sort of sickening because she still hasn't entirely accepted that Baelish was responsible for this whole thing- her disappearance, etc. Logically, she knows that he was, but emotionally she's not there. This particular realization kind of forces her to confront the fact that, for Baelish to have done this, he had to be acting deliberately to keep her from her biological family. As of chapter 15, Sansa still hasn't entirely accepted that Baelish is responsible- she loves him and still wants to find an excuse for him- but this revelation definitely shakes her confidence in him.

So she runs at the first opportunity, and is just a panicking mess of emotions like 'did i ruin everything- oh god i just made things worse- is petyr actually a bad guy here???' and, of course, the best person to go after her is Ned, who manages to say the right things and gets Sansa to come back out and eat with everyone. It's probably an awkward meal in some ways, though, because everyone knows what just happened and is considering the implications, but they're all trying to pretend like everything is cool.

It's a horrible realization for the Starks that Sansa was being deliberately hidden from them and manipulated in this way, and it's a horrible realization for Sansa, who's being forced- once again- to confront the fact that the man she thought of as her father has been lying to her for her entire life. It's one of the many things she's going to learn that will really fully destroy any trust she has in Baelish- even if right now she wants to still believe it was all some sort of horrible misunderstanding. Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, y'all. Thanks so much for the ask, friend!!! :)

Pick any passage of 500 words or less from any fanfic I’ve written, and stick that selection in my ask/fan mail. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: What I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, whats going on in the character’s heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track. :)

#just apwh things #ask answers #DVD commentary meme

[yamameta-inc]

grieving a family member lately and I’m ok but would appreciate having fun things to think and talk about so AMA about my gintama essays

#I wanted to reblog the dvd commentary meme but I still haven’t fixed the images in the ao3 vers

[boleynqueenes]

For the dvd commentary meme…the first five hundred words of Nowe Thus 👀

Hm...well, that's really more the intro/prologue than anything else (honestly, why didn't I start just in the midst of the action?). I guess I was trying to establish Anne as a player with a keen political intelligence that was also personally invested (which she acknowledges...'I am rather partial') in the outcome of the GM. And I was also trying to establish how her opinions of these people she's never met (such as HVII) have been formed by her experiences and insights of him from other figures (Princess Mary, his daughter, although uhm...it seems she didn't actually attend her in France which I didn't find out until later...whoops...might have to retcon that into conversations Anne's merely overheard in KOA's household, as Mary was a frequent feature and visitor, Henry Percy, not as explicitly but by and about HVIII as well obviously, Wolsey, et al). I do this with other figures later in the fic as well, both hers and her parents' opinions of Elizabeth Wydeville, and Wolsey, what she's heard about Perkin Warbeck from various quarters ('some uncourageous man of puckish pretense', i heart alliteration), etc...

Also just an acknowledgement of potential AUs to break the fourth wall in what is about to be a literal AU, I'm quirky like that:

"If you were not here, what would you think?" "Where else would I be?" she asks archly. Still smarting at Hever, traipsing through the fens of Ireland, freezing in Northumberland— "Lille, Guisnes, Mechelen," he lists, high tone glittering with playfulness, "Château Amboise—" "Oh, if I were still there?"

#giadesstrin #dvd commentary ask meme #tyyyy so much

[daswarschonkaputt]

“Chay’s face twists with anger. “It’s not,” he says. “It’s not okay. If they were here, and they were disappointed in you, I’d be—I’d be so mad at them. You did—you did the best you could. You always did the best you could. And they weren’t here. They weren’t here, so they don’t get to be—disappointed in you, or mad at you, because all you’ve ever done is the best you can.”

I love the whole convo but this is my fave part

ah the chay-porsche convo!! i love this bit, too! this was actually one of the first things i had conceptualised about chay and porsche -- that chay would get mad at their parents if they were disappointed in porsche. because chay knows more than anyone exactly what porsche has sacrificed for him. (i think part of why chay is such a Good Kid is that he feels very keenly this pressure to not make porsche's sacrifices be in vain.)

some extracts from the discord conversation about this moment:

(i am not joking when i say i outline the fic into @carryonmysociallyawkwardson's discord messages. this is where the memes come from.)

plus, the follow up, from when she asked me where chay got the gun:

this one didn't make it into the a/n.

also while i was scrolling through my discord messages looking for the tay messages, i found this gem, which is a deleted scene from the chay and tankhun sleepover that occurs whilst porsche is fucking up vegas:

porsche to tankhun: okay, look after my brother, don't tell him anything about me and kinn fighting, i'll be back tomorrow tankhun: okay! tankhun: proceeds to fail at step two almost immediately.

#fic: between the sheets #asked and answered #sheets dvd commentary #sorry this one isn't super introspective but the MEMES guys #chris and i find each other hilarious and that's all that matters #fun fact: before i decided to post between the sheets (bc i was encourage) #i just copy-pasted the entire first chapter into chris's dms #yeah #all 5000 words of it #i think she was delighted when she found out i was going to publish bc it meant she would no longer wake up to find literal essays #in her inbox in the morning #we have an inside joke abt chan wanting chay for the bodyguards bc if that's what he can do with a wok imagine what he can do with a gun

[nostalgia-tblr]

hey remember that old livejournal meme where you were to write a "commentary" for one of your own fics and someone would inevitably request one for something you wrote a few years previously and when you read it over again you're like "I have literally no memory of writing any of this" and you were like oh no do I just make shit up that sounds good or do I turn in many italicised lines of "I don't know what this bit means. Or this bit. That joke's quite good but I have no idea how I thought of it"?

#fanfic stuff #ye olde livejournal days of yore #it was a good meme in *theory* just it assumes the author knew WTF they were doing in the first place #which i generally don't tbh #now i am wondering about the things pro writers have said about their works - did they make it up after the fact?! #see also - old skool Dr Who DVD commentaries when it was 50 years ago and nobody remembers anything about the production #(we're just here for the weird shit they say like when tom said he should have married mary instead) #perhaps the curtains ARE blue for a reason but i think it's a bit much to expect the author to remember that fact even a week later

[thelastspeecher]

I bought the Brother Bear soundtrack on CD but since my laptop doesn't have a disk drive I only just now was able to put it on my iPod

I'm listening to it and it's honestly making me the happiest I've been all day, the most relaxed and comfortable I've been in a few days

nostalgia man

#Brother Bear is like THE (non-Barbie) movie of my childhood #my family watched it NONSTOP #I recently bought the DVD of it even tho it's on Disney+ #(I could have borrowed my parents' copy but I wanted my own) #so that I can watch the commentary from the moose characters #the commentary is so fucking GOOD holy shit #oh also I guess reminder that the ''sometimes I still hear their voice'' ''QUIT TELLING EVERYONE I'M DEAD'' meme #is from Brother Bear! #when I saw that meme first pick up I was like ''why is no one crediting Brother Bear'' #uhhhhhh idk go watch Brother Bear it's such a good movie and the soundtrack is BANGER #PHIL COLLINS DID THE SOUNDTRACK so there's your motivation #today was....really rough. really rough. but I ordered dinner instead of cooking and am using my electric blanket #and I'm listening to these songs that make me happy <3 #and the pit in my stomach that formed yesterday and has been going on since is fading #speecher speaks

[wrenaspun]

“He was right,” said Laurent. “When I fell in love, I did hand it over.”

“He was wrong,” said Damen. “It’s not something you can give, not to anyone.”

Laurent shrugged with one shoulder. “It’s not something you would accept. That’s not the same.”

“No,” said Damen, a little helplessly.

“I want,” Laurent had to take a breath to swallow the bitter humiliation of being forced to say it, “to give this to you.”

“I’d never ask it of you,” said Damen. “Never.”

“That’s —” Another breath. The rising hot pressure behind his eyes.

Unexpectedly: “I know,” said Damen. Now he looked contrite, his gaze pleading. “That’s not the point. I know. I’m sorry.”

Thank you for writing in!! 💕 This section was so vital to the selkie fic because it was the first real revelation, I think, of what Laurent and Damen were conflicted about, and where exactly they were disagreeing. To Laurent, the sacrifice of giving up his skin is an act of love, but to Damen accepting it could only be selfish; his act of love is refusing the sacrifice. I love conflicts like this, where both parties are genuinely trying to help or enrich each other, but get tripped up by their differing beliefs of how to go about it.

Meanwhile Laurent is struggling with having to express this at all! In his ideal version of this scenario (as he might imagine it at this time) Damen just takes the skin and hides it away and they never talk about it ever. Having to vocalise your desires can be so personal, and someone as intensely closed-up as Laurent would find it super challenging. Even just saying 'i want you to take it' is unbearably intimate, for him -- having that refused is salt in the wound.

And I think Damen understands that well enough to apologise for it: for making Laurent say it, and for having to turn him down. Contemplating the final line of that snippet is making me think about how I could have turned this into a full-on Misunderstandings Fight, but I never really considered that! We know that Damen knows & can read Laurent extremely accurately, that he has his own principles which he lives by, and that he's very straightforward and honest about what he thinks -- and, maybe most importantly, that in the context of the fic they've been together and committed to each other for a while, so this felt like a natural step for him. And it's because he's this gentle that Laurent's hackles go down, and they can try (however awkwardly) to move forward together <3

(dvd commentary meme)

#mwah mwah thank you for indulging me #dvd commentary meme #captive prince #my writing #wrenaspeaks

[tinknevertalks]

9 for the WIP ask meme

Oh look, it's me, taking five-ever to answer things again, lol.

What is your favorite dialogue you’ve written so far? This is between Helen and Henry in the roommates AU.

"She works in mysterious ways," Helen replied, handing back the letter. "Will you accept?"

"Do I look like someone who sings at fancy dress up parties?”

She blinked. “You dress up for Comic Con?”

“That’s cosplay and it’s different,” he whined. Sighing, he rubbed his face with his hands. “What do I do?”

#ask meme answered #ask meme answer #wip asks #zebsfloppyears #i made this #the dvd commentary will be sometime in the next few *mumbles* #thanks for the ask lovely! XD

[johnbly]

i may or may not have bought the first three potc movies and the 3ds lego game

#it is chillyphobic that the dmc dvd doesn't have deleted scenes tho like ??? why #why only blu-ray esp when the cotbp and awe dvds have the deleted scenes #but some of the other bonuses look really cool like the hans zimmer one #like at least they're all on youtube but i wanted to Own them since they're all the 2-disc editions #and i am interested to see the reportedly legendary commentary by knightley n davenport #and bts stuff is always fun #i kept seeing memes for the lego game and just didn't process that it was a thing i could get until a few days ago jdfhkl #chilly chats

[ecoterrorist-katara]

Zutara, romance novels, and the female gaze

Okay so I’ve been thinking about the female gaze a LOT so I checked out a subreddit about romance novels, despite never having read one. I came across this meme (which was initially a Tumblr post and then got posted to Instagram and then to Reddit and I’m now bringing back to Tumblr — Internet telephone, pls never change):

And…what is The Southern Raiders, if not a platonic grovel? Katara’s pain is central to the episode. It’s central to Zuko. Zuko asks Katara what he can do to make up for his betrayal; she demands the impossible. He reads between the lines, cockblocks her brother to get the necessary information, and then waits outside her door overnight (which he also did for Iroh, the one person we know for sure he loves). He basically makes himself a receptacle for her rage, and he holds space for her by coming with her on her revenge quest and carrying their bags and not saying a damn thing about what she should and should not do beyond like…asking her to rest. And obviously the grovel works! She forgives him and then they’re thick as thieves, bantering and fighting and saving each other’s lives, etc.

On a different note, I’ve been told that enemies to lovers is one of the biggest tropes in romance novels, similar to YA lit and fanfic. Here’s something else I found in the romance novel discourse:

And…yeah. In TSR, Katara really does show Zuko her worst self, because she doesn’t feel the need to perform for him. She doesn’t feel the need to perform moral perfection OR cold blooded vengeance. She bloodbends in front of him and he just goes with it. She doesn’t kill Yon Rha and he just goes with it. He doesn’t treat her any differently afterwards. Maybe they talk about it off screen, but I kind of like the idea that they don’t, because Katara doesn’t need to explain anything. And it’s so interesting, because some people in the ATLA fandom have a totally different read on TSR. They think Zuko was encouraging Katara to get revenge (by what, keeping his mouth shut?), and that Aang is the one who acts as her moral compass. I believe that either Bryan or Mike said in the DVD commentary that Aang is the angel on her shoulder the entire time. And this interpretation does make sense if you see it from the male gaze, where Katara as an object of affection is acting in an angry, irrational, threatening way. But if you see it from the female gaze, you recognize that actually it’s probably the most emotionally taxing experience Katara has to go through, and she doesn’t owe it to be nice or perfect to anybody. Katara’s formative trauma literally comes to a head, and she has to make a decision — no, a discovery — about who she is in relation to the tragedy that defines her life and even her identity (as a waterbender, as a parentified child who becomes the mom friend, as a genocide victim), and she’s accompanied by someone who trusts her judgement and validates her feelings.

I’m not saying TSR is explicitly romantically coded, but when it conforms so well to romance novel tropes…is it any wonder that so many people thought “yes this is her man?” And then he takes lightning in the heart for her and reaches for her when he’s literally dying, I will never be normal about that either

#Zutara #Katara #Zuko #the southern raiders #Pro zutara #anti Bryke #I guess #I swear I’m not a Bryke anti but I feel like they just don’t get #The female gaze #and the fact that Zutara is so female gaze is kind of an accident and I find that fascinating #atla fandom critical #The southern raiders turned me into a Zutara shipper #one ep away from the finale #Zutara meta #My meta

[cabezadeperro]

Hey!!

For the DVD commentary, how about a section from "five times cody and rex shared a bed and one time they wished they could". From "Cody’s awake and staring a hole through the thick transparisteel viewport of the medbay." to "He’s tired of fighting, of war and death and grief and loss."

hi elth!!

the fic.

there are a few things i really like about this fragment--i think some lines are very visual and very snappy, like the first paragraph of this section, and i really like the path i took re: rex's character and his choices right after the war, because i think most people usually do other stuff.

HOWEVER: one of my obsessions is streamlining narration as much as i can. that means finding ways to do as much stuff as i can do in as little words possible, because i don't like bloat. and unfortunately i think i didn't completely pull it off here: i'm talking about the part where Rex reflects on his role with the rebels and the way they see the clone troopers. i think like 1/3 of that isn't actually necessary and what's worse, most of the sentences aren't even interesting, they're obvious and common place

i really really enjoy The Cody in it, though. and even if i don't love how i portrayed rex's headspace, i like it: he's still fighting, because he doesn't know what else to do and it's the right thing, but you can tell his heart is not in it even before the narration tells you lmao

#ask meme #dvd commentary meme #maríadont