#i think i've given up on editing in a consistent way

[friendofcars]

Hello! Here is data on point of view distribution across characters in The Dreamer Trilogy (which I will abbreviate as TD3) as a follow up to my TRC data from last year (viewable here). A rather long-winded discussion of the data, methods notes, and some supplemental figures and tables are under the cut. As it was not possible to include all values and stats in this post (nor in the alt text for image IDs), my spreadsheet can be viewed by clicking here,

This project quantifies and visualizes the distribution of chapters and pages in the books of TD3 across characters from whose POVs the story is told. I didn’t have much of a hypothesis going into data collection/analysis, especially not like I did for the TRC data, but I did expect to see Ronan’s POV having the most chapters and pages for the entire series, given the fact that he is the most central of the protagonists. I don’t think page time is the be-all-end-all for a character’s importance, of course, but it is still interesting to consider how spending more time from certain perspectives affects the perceived narrative. I won’t get much into that aspect of analysis in this post, but if anybody would actually like to discuss that, I’d love to!

Results (and Interpretation):

TD3 consists of 173 chapters and 1184 pages (using the U.S. hardcover editions), making the average chapter 6.84 pages. The longest chapter is 16 pages, and the shortest is 1 page.

Figure 1A: The average chapter in Mister Impossible (MI) is considerably longer (9.26 pages) than the average chapter in Call Down the Hawk (CDTH) (6.00 pages) and in Greywaren (GW) (6.40 pages), which makes sense as MI has just 38 chapters while CDTH has 80 and GW has 55 (see Fig. 2). To me, the effect of the longer chapters (and therefore extended time with the current POV character) makes the various POVs feel more temporally distant from one another- not in a narratively incoherent way, but in a way that echoes the sense of isolation experienced by dreamers and weaponized by Bryde as he tries to convince Ronan and Hennessy to abandon their loved ones.

Figure 1B: Chapter length is fairly consistent amongst POVs across the series. Matthew has the longest average chapter length (8.40 page) over a small set of chapters (5 total)- his character development (as told from his own POV) is limited to a small number of instances, which may have stretched his chapters a bit longer. The 'Other' category has the shortest average chapter length (5.13 pages) (Fig. 1B); it includes the typically short chapters from witnesses of Visionary explosions/aftermath (Mags, Dabney) as well as Nathan's manifesto excerpts. (As a side note, I've described the chapters depicting memories from the Barns as 'Mór and Niall.' These chapters do not collectively portray an equal balance of their POVs, but this was the simplest way to categorize them.)

Figure 2A-B: These graphs are representations of chapter distribution across POVs in TD3 in terms of chapter count (2A) and proportion of total chapters (2B). Some observed trends include Declan's proportion of total chapters remaining quite constant throughout the series, Ronan's decreasing, Hennessy's proportion of chapters nearly doubling from CDTH to MI (and staying at a similar proportion to MI in GW), and Jordan's proportion following an opposite trend (consistent proportion in CDTH and MI, followed by a more than 50% drop in GW). Carmen's proportion of chapters also declines after CDTH.

Figure 2C: This graph compares total chapters per character POV over the entire series. We can see that the largest proportion of the series is told from Ronan's POV (53 chapters, or 0.306 of all chapters). To put that in perspective, Hennessy has the next highest number of chapters (26, or 0.150 of all chapters), which is just under half the number of Ronan's. If all characters had an equal number of chapters from their POV (including the miscellaneous POVs as one category labeled Other), they would each have 21.6 chapters, represented by the horizontal dashed line; Declan, Jordan, Carmen, and Hennessy all have chapter counts relatively close to this number.

Figure 2D-E: These are representations of page distribution across POVs in TD3 in terms of page count (2D) and proportion of total pages (2E). Trends are similar to those depicted in 2A-B, but 2E does make Declan's increased proportion of page time in GW salient.

Figure 2F: This graph compares total pages per character POV over the entire series. The dashed line shows that if each character (plus the Other category) had equal page time in the series, readers would spend 148 pages with each POV. Again, page data is similar to chapter data, but comparing graphs 2C and 2F gives a clear visual indicator that Jordan's chapters (on average, 8.11 pages) are longer than Carmen's (on average, 6.08 pages), since Carmen has visibly more chapters in 2C yet nearly the same number of pages as Jordan in 2F.

Figure 3: Figure 3 shows distribution of chapters (3A-B) and pages (3C-D) in CDTH, as well as average chapter length for each character POV (3E). An equal distribution of chapters would have been 13.3 per character, and an equal distribution of pages would have been 80.0 per character. The 'Other' category included chapters from the perspectives of Lock, Breck Myrtle, Shawna Wells, Jason Morgenthaler (and Lin Draper, briefly, in the same chapter), Mags Harmonhouse, and Dabney Pitts. Carmen's average chapter length in CDTH (4.67 pages) is the lowest single-book average for character POVs appearing throughout the entire series. (Nathan's average chapter length is just 1.00 [Supplemental Figure 2], yet his POV only appears in GW via his manifesto excerpts, and while I have attributed these chapters to his POV, I interpret the POV as actually ambiguous. As with Kavinsky's text in TDT, it's not absolutely certain if we are reading from the writer or the reader's perspective [although in TDT, due to the lack of Kavinsky POV elsewhere, it's probably the latter]).

Figure 4: Figure 4 shows distribution of chapters (4A-B) and pages (4C-D) in MI, as well as average chapter length for each character POV (4E). An equal distribution of chapters would have been 5.43 per character, and an equal distribution of pages would have been 50.3 per character. The 'Other' category included two chapters, both with what I deemed omniscient narration. Declan had the shortest chapters in MI (8.20 pages), and Jordan had the longest (11.4 pages, the longest average for a character for a single book in this series).

Figure 5: Figure 5 shows distribution of chapters (4A-B) and pages (4C-D) in GW, as well as average chapter length for each character POV (4E). An equal distribution of chapters would have been 6.88 per character, and an equal distribution of pages would have been 44.0 per character. The 'Other' category included Nathan's manifesto excerpts (3 chapters), 1 chapter from Liliana's POV, and 3 other chapters with omniscient narration. While Ronan never has the longest chapters, his chapters are shorter relative to other POVs in Greywaren, perhaps as a result of the way his chapters are written during his time asleep/in the sweetmetal sea. I have not yet investigated whether chapters tend to be longer while characters are awake vs asleep or dreaming, but that's something that could be measured from the existing data in the spreadsheet! There is also a dramatic drop in Jordan's POV time in GW compared to the previous two books, perhaps because of her increased divergence from Hennessy and desire to establish a life that follows her own narrative.

Other findings: A major difference I noted between TRC and TD3 was the lack of split chapters in TD3. In TRC, the data analysis was made slightly complicated by having to account for the fact that a non-negligible number of chapters would make a distinct and discrete switch between POVs partway through. While I did not observe this in TD3, I did encounter more ambiguous/nebulous POVs as I previously mentioned. The increased presence of omniscience in the trilogy, for me, contributed to the increased sense of scale and stakes compared to TRC. This increased continuity amongst POV (not amongst core/recurring POV characters, but amongst groups of characters/communities depicted in the omnisciently narrated chapters) also contributed to a sense of dissolution of barriers and identities, perhaps thematically in line with Ronan's character development and increasingly holistic perspective of both his humanity and otherworldliness (although Ronan is not necessarily featured in these 'boundary-breaking' chapters). I also briefly looked at occurrences of back-to-back chapters from the same POV; this happens most frequently for Ronan in all three books, mainly in CDTH, and sometimes featuring a dreaming chapter directly before an awake chapter (or vice versa) in immediate succession. Declan (MI), Carmen (CDTH), and Jordan (CDTH) all have a pair of back-to-back chapters at some point in the series; Hennessy has 2 (MI, GW).

Conclusions: In all honesty, despite this project being quite fun and fulfilling and of course, worth doing, I do not think I have any particularly insightful conclusions about the data beyond what I've already discussed. Ronan took up the largest share of the chapters and pages as expected, although I am not sure I expected this to be true by such a large margin. I also was surprised that Declan did not have more chapter/page time, but it is possible that his notable inclusion in chapters from other characters' POVs increases his prominence in the series (and I suppose this is probably true for all characters who frequently appear in chapters outside their perspective). As with TRC, the number of POVs expands as the series develops, often with the effect of increasing the scope of the story's implications, and perhaps, more importantly, showing the story from additional angles that contextualize and/or distort narrative established by other characters' perspectives. I hope you've enjoyed exploring the data as I have, and those interested in my methodology may continue reading below!

Methods:

Data collection was straightforward in the sense that I simply counted the pages in each chapter and then assigned each chapter to a character based on the POV represented. The POV character assignment was more difficult than it was for TRC, as TD3 has more omnisciently narrated chapters, which in itself is easy to categorize, but they often zoom in on or are 'biased' towards the experience of a particular character, so I had to make some decisions as to what, for me, constituted sufficient focus on a character’s internal narration and expression vs. omniscience. In the spreadsheet, I took notes on these more subjectively driven decisions. Again, you can view it here! It also contains data on whether the chapter is from an awake or dreaming POV, and has the first lines of each chapter, among which are some fun repeating patterns. 

For bar graphs with dots, each dot represents a single chapter. You may also notice that the graphs are missing p-values from statistical tests this time around! This is because, since completing the TRC data, I’ve realized that such measures of uncertainty re: significant differences are not appropriate for my dataset, which is not a sample representing a population, but rather a complete group of chapters (so parametric tests are not necessarily helpful or valid). However, I still like to run the tests for my own amusement and to see what the results would be if this were a dataset for which ANOVA and contingency tests were appropriate, so I have standard deviation bars on the graphs where calculable (but no standard deviations in the text of the results section for legibility) as well as the p-values in tables at the end of this post for anyone also curious. I did still calculate the numbers of chapters and pages that would represent an equal distribution across POV characters, which are represented by the dashed lines on the relevant figures. I think this is helpful to visually gauge 'over-representation' and 'under-representation' of character POVs.

Below are the supplemental figures showing all character POVs rather than lumping some together in an 'other' category. The MI data in figure 4 is not expanded below because the chapters designated as 'other' were omniscient and thus would have remained in the same category.

And finally, here are the omitted p-values, if you'd like to pretend along with me that all the chapters in TD3 are not a complete set but rather a representative sample of a greater population of chapters that's out there in the universe. :) When I give a p-value below the 0.05 threshold but still write 'no significant differences amongst any combination of characters, I mean that the p-values generated for the comparisons between each possible pair of characters were all above 0.05, which are distinct from the overall p-value generated from the ANOVA.

#the dreamer trilogy #call down the hawk #mister impossible #greywaren #ronan lynch #declan lynch #jordan hennessy #carmen farooq-lane #long post #rchl #now onto more qualitative/linguistic things! xoxo

[canmom]

canmom's notes on fixing the colours

ok so if you've been following along on this blog for the last week or two i've been banging on about colour calibration. and i feel like it would be good to sum up what i've learned in a poast!

quick rundown on colour spaces

So. When you represent colour on a computer, you just have some numbers. Those numbers are passed to the monitor to tell it to turn some tiny lights up and down. The human visual system is capable of seeing a lot of colours, but your monitor can only display some of them. That's determined by its primaries, basically the exact colour* of its red, green and blue lights.

(*if you're wondering, the primaries are specified in terms of something called the CIELAB colour space, which is a model of all the different colours that humans can possibly see, devised by experiments in the early-mid 20th century where the subjects would turn lights at different frequencies up and down until they appeared visually the same. Through this, we mapped out how eyes respond to light, enabling basically everything that follows. Most human eyes tend to respond in pretty close to identical ways - of course, some people are colourblind, which adds an extra complication!)

Now, the problem we face is that every display is different. In particular, different displays have different primaries. The space in between the primaries is the gamut - the set of all colours that a display can represent. You can learn more about this concept on this excellent interactive page by Bartosz Ciechanowski.

The gamut is combined with other things like a white point and a gamma function to map numbers nonlinearly to amounts of light. All these bits of info in combination declare exactly what colour your computer should display for any given triplet of numbers. We call this a colour space.

There are various standard sets of primaries, the most famous being the ITU-R Rec.709 primaries used in sRGB, first defined in 1993, often just called the sRGB primaries - this is a fairly restricted colour space, intended to be an easy target for monitor manufacturers and to achieve some degree of colour consistency on the web (lol).

Since then, a much wider gamut called Rec.2020 has recently been defined for 'HDR' video. This is a very wide gamut, and no existing displays can actually show it in full. Besides that, there are various other colour spaces such as AdobeRGB and P3, which are used in art and design and video editing.

What you see above is something called a 'chromaticity diagram'. the coordinate system is CIE xyY with fixed Y. The curved upper edge to the shape is the line of monochromatic colours (colours created by a single frequency of light); everything other colour must be created by combining multiple frequencies of light. (Note that the colours inside the shape are not the actual colours of those points in CIE XY, they're mapped into sRGB.)

In this case, the red, green and blue dots are the primaries of my display. Since they are outside the green triangle marked sRGB, it qualifies as a 'wide gamut' display which can display more vivid colours.

Sidebar: you might ask why we didn't define the widest possible gamut we could think of at the start of all this. Well, besides consistency, the problem is that you only have so many bits per channel. For a given bit depth (e.g. 8 bits per channel per pixel), you have a finite number of possible colours you can display. Any colours in between get snapped to the nearest rung of the ladder. The upshot is that if you use a higher gamut, you need to increase the bit depth in order to avoid ugly colour banding, which means your images take up more space and take more time to process. But this is why HDR videos in Rec.2020 should always be using at least 10 bits per colour channel.

in order to display consistent colours between different computers, you need a profile of how your monitor displays colour. Yhis is something that has to be measured empirically, because even two monitors of the same model will be slightly different. You get this information by essentially taking a little gadget which has a lens and a sensitive, factory-calibrated colour meter, and holding it against your screen, then making the screen display various colours to measure what light actually comes out of it. This information is packed into a file called an ICC profile.

(Above is the one I got, the Spyder X2. I didn't put a lot of thought into this, and unfortunately it turns out that the Spyder X2 is not yet supported by programs like DisplayCal. The Spyder software did a pretty good job though.)

Wonderfully, if you have two different ICC profiles, and you want to display the same colour in each space, you can do some maths to map one into the other. So, to make sure that a picture created on one computer looks the same on another computer, you need two things: the colour space (ICC profile) of the image and the colour space (ICC profile) of the screen.

Now different operating systems handle colour differently, but basically for all three major operating systems there is somewhere you can set 'here is the icc profile for this screen'. You might think that's the whole battle: calibrate screen, get ICC profile, you're done! Welcome to the world of consistent colour.

Unfortunately we're not done.

the devil in the details

The problem is the way applications tell the operating system about colour is... spotty, inconsistent, unreliable. Applications can either present their colours in a standard space called sRGB, and let the OS handle the rest - or they can bypass that entirely and just send their numbers straight to the monitor without regard for what space it's in.

Then we have some applications that are 'colour managed', meaning you can tell the application about an ICC profile (or some other colour space representation), and it will handle converting colours into that space. This allows applications to deal with wider colour gamuts than sRGB/Rec.709, which is very restricted, without sacrificing consistency between different screens.

So to sum up, we have three types of program:

programs which only speak sRGB and let the OS correct the colours

programs which aren't colour aware and talk straight to the monitor without any correction (usually games)

programs which do colour correction themselves and talk straight to the monitor.

That last category is the fiddly one. It's a domain that typically includes art programs, video editors and web browsers. Some of them will read your ICC profile from the operating system, some have to be explicitly told which one to use.

Historically, most monitors besides the very high end were designed to support sRGB colours and not much more. However, recently it's become easier to get your hands on a wide gamut screen. This is theoretically great because it means we can use more vivid colours, but... as always the devil is in the details. What we want is that sRGB colours stay the same, but we have the option to reach for the wider gamut deliberately.

Conversely, when converting between colour spaces, you have to make a decision of what to do with colours that are 'out of gamut' - colours that one space can represent and another space can't. There's no 'correct' way to do this, but there are four standard approaches, which make different tradeoffs of what is preserved and what is sacrificed. So if you look at an image defined in a wide colour space such as Rec.2020, you need to use one of these to put it into your screen's colour space. This is handled automatically in colour managed applications, but it's good to understand what's going on!

(*You may notice a difference in games even if they're not colour managed. This is because one of the things the calibration does is update the 'gamma table' on your graphics card, which maps from numeric colour values to brightness. Since the human eye is more sensitive to differences between dark colours, this uses a nonlinear function - a power law whose exponent is called gamma. That nonlinear function also differs between screens, and your graphics card can be adjusted to compensate and make sure everyone stays on the standard gamma 2.2. Many games offer you a slider to adjust the gamma, as a stopgap measure to deal with the fact that your computer's screen probably isn't calibrated.)

For what follows, any time you need the ICC profile, Windows users should look in C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\color. MacOS and Linux users, see this page for places it might be. Some applications can automatically detect the OS's ICC profile, but if not, that's where you should look.

on the web

Theoretically, on the web, colours are supposed to be specified in sRGB if not specified otherwise. But when you put an image on the web, you can include an ICC profile along with it to say exactly what colours to use. Both Firefox and Chrome are colour-managed browsers, and able to read your ICC profile right from the operating system. So an image with a profile should be handled correctly in both (with certain caveats in Chrome).

However, Firefox by default for some reason doesn't do any correction on any colours that don't have a profile, instead passing them through without correction. This can be fixed by changing a setting in about:config: gfx.color_management.mode. If you set this to 1 instead of the default 2, Firefox will assume colours are in sRGB unless it's told otherwise, and correct them.

Here is a great test page to see if your browser is handling colour correctly.

Chrome has fewer options to configure. by default it's almost correctly colour-managed but not quite. So just set the ICC on your OS and you're as good as it's gonna get. The same applies to Electron apps, such as Discord.

To embed a colour profile in an image, hopefully your art program has the ability to do this when saving, but if not, you can use ImageMagick on the command line (see below). Some websites will strip metadata including ICC profile - Tumblr, fortunately, does not.

For the rest of this post I'm going to talk about how to set up colour management in certain programs I use regularly (Krita, Blender, mpv, and games).

in Krita

Krita makes it pretty easy: you go into the settings and give it the ICC profile of your monitor. You can create images in a huge variety of spaces and bit depths and gamma profiles. When copying and pasting between images inside Krita, it will convert it for you.

The tricky thing to consider is pasting into Krita from outside. By default, your copy-paste buffer does not have colour space metadata. Krita gives you the option to interpret it with your monitor's profile, or as sRGB. I believe the correct use is: if you're copying and pasting an image from the web, then sRGB is right; if you're pasting a screenshot, it has already been colour corrected, you should use 'as on monitor' so Krita will convert it back into the image's colour space.

in Blender

Blender does not use ICC profiles, but a more complicated system called OpenColorIO. Blender supports various models of mapping between colour spaces, including Filmic and ACES, to go from its internal scene-referred HDR floating-point working space (basically, a space that measures how much light there is in absolute terms) to other spaces such as sRGB. By default, Blender assumes it can output to sRGB, P3, etc. without any further correction.

So. What we need to do is add another layer after that which takes the sRGB data and corrects it for our screen. This requires something called a Lookup Table (LUT), which is basically just a 3D texture that maps colours to other colours. You can generate a LUT using a program called DisplayCal, which can also be used for display calibration - note that you don't use the main DisplayCal program for this, but instead a tool called 3DLUT Maker that's packaged along with it. see this Stack Overflow thread for details.

Then, you describe in the OpenColorIO file how to use that LUT, defining a colour space.

The procedure described in the thread recommends you set up colour calibration as an additional view transform targeting sRGB. This works, but strictly speaking it's not a correct use of the OpenColorIO model. We should also set up our calibrated screen as an additional display definition, and attach our new colour spaces to that display. Also, if you want to use the 'Filmic' View Transform with corrected colours (or indeed any other), you need to define that in the OpenColorIO file too. Basically, copy whatever transform you want, and insert an extra line with the 3D LUT.

Here's how it looks for me:

in games (using ReShade)

So I mentioned above that games do not generally speaking do any colour correction beyond the option to manually adjust a gamma slider. However, by using a post-processing injection framework such as ReShade, you can correct colours in games.

If you want to get the game looking as close to the original artistic intent as possible, you can use the LUT generator to generate a PNG lookup table, save it in the Reshade textures folder, then you load it into the LUT shader that comes packaged with Reshade. Make sure to set the width, height and number of tiles correctly or you'll get janked up results.

However... that might not be what you want. Especially with older games, there is often a heavy green filter or some other weird choice in the colour design. Or maybe you don't want to follow the 'original artistic intent' and would rather enjoy the full vividness your screen is capable of displaying. (I certainly like FFXIV a lot better with a colour grade applied to it using the full monitor gamut.)

A 3D Lookup Table can actually be used for more than simply calibrating colour to match a monitor - it is in general a very powerful tool for colour correction. A good workflow is to open a screenshot in an image editor along with a base lookup table, adjust the colours in certain ways, and save the edited lookup table as an image texture; you can then use it to apply colour correction throughout the game. This procedure is described here.

Whatever approach you take, when you save screenshots with Reshade, it will not include any colour information. If you want screenshots to look like they do in-game when displayed in a properly colour managed application, you need to attach your monitor's ICC profile to the image. You can do this with an ImageMagick command:

magick convert "{path to screenshot}" -strip -profile "{path to ICC profile}" "{output file name}.webp"

This also works with TIFF and JPEG; for some reason I couldn't get it to work with PNG (you generate a PNG but no colour profile is attached.)

It's possible to write a post-save command in ReShade which could be used to attach this colour space info. If I get round to doing that, I'll edit into this post.

video

In MPV, you can get a colour-corrected video player by setting an appropriate line in mpv.conf, assuming you're using vo=gpu or vo=gpu-next (recommended). icc-profile-auto=yes should automatically load the monitor ICC profile from the operating system, or you can specify a specific one with icc-profile={path to ICC profile}.

For watching online videos, it seems that neither Firefox nor Chrome applies colour correction, even though the rest of the browser is colour-managed. If you don't want to put up with this, you can open Youtube videos in MPV, which internally downloads them using Youtube-DL or yt-dlp. This is inconvenient! Still haven't found a way to make it colour-corrected in-browser.

For other players like VLC or MPC-HC, I'm not so familiar with the procedure, you'll need to research this on your own.

what about HDR?

HDR is a marketing term, and a set of standards for monitor features (the VESA DisplayHDR series), but it does also refer to a new set of protocols around displaying colour, known as Rec. 2100. This defines the use of a 'perceptual quantiser' function in lieu of the old gamma function. HDR screens are able to support extreme ranges of brightness using techniques like local dimming and typically have a wider colour gamut.

If your screen supports it, Windows has a HDR mode which (I believe) switches the output to use Rec.2100. The problem is deciding what to do with SDR content on your screen (which is to say most things) - you have very little control over anything besides brightness, and for some reason Windows screws up the gamma. Turning on HDR introduced truly severe colour banding all over the shop for me.

My colorimeter claims to be able to profile high brightness/hdr screens, but I haven't tested the effect of profiling in HDR mode yet. There is also a Windows HDR calibration tool, but this is only available on the Microsoft store, which makes it a real pain to set up if you've deleted that from your operating system in a fit of pique. (Ameliorated Edition is great until it isn't.)

Anyway, if I get around to profiling my monitor in HDR mode, I will report back. However, for accurate SDR colour, the general recommendation seems to be to simply turn it off. Only turn it on if you want to watch content specifically authored for HDR (some recent games, and HDR videos are available on some platforms like Youtube). It's a pain.

is this all really worth the effort?

Obviously I've really nerded out about all this, and I know the likely feeling you get looking at this wall of text is 'fuck this, I'll just put up with it'. But my monitor's gamma was pretty severely off, and when I was trying to make a video recently I had no idea that my screen was making the red way more saturated and deep than I would see on most monitors.

If you're a digital artist or photographer, I think it's pretty essential to get accurate colour. Of course the pros will spend thousands on a high end screen which may have built in colour correction, but even with a screen at the level I'm looking at (costing a few hundred quid), you can do a lot to improve how it looks 'out of the box'.

So that's the long and short of it. I hope this is useful to someone to have all of this in one place!

I don't know if we'll ever reach a stage where most monitors in use are calibrated, so on some level it's a bit of a fool's errand, but at least with calibration I have some more hope that what I put in is at least on average close to what comes out the other end.

#colour #color #color management #blender #krita #firefox #chrome #mpv #3dcg

[fireflysummers]

Final Thoughts on GO S2

I'm probably gonna pull back on discussing S2, at least publicly, after this. I did actually like a lot of the season, but it's triggering some of my religious trauma and also the fandom is already stressing me out. So here, let's have some final thoughts.

First and foremost: I am not a Gaiman simp. I've read a decent amount of his work: comics, short stories, essays, and novels. Aside from Good Omens, I've liked Coraline and The Graveyard Book the best by far, whereas American Gods just. Did Not Connect with me, even though it's should have, given the stuff I tend to enjoy.

However. Regardless of whether I like a given work (or even like how he adapted it, a la parts of The Sandman TV series), he is a veteran writer who has proven that he does, actually, know how to write a story with consistent characters.

Beyond that, I do actually believe that he's trying to do right by Pratchett, and loves and respects the story and characters they created together. He's generally shown up as an ally to a variety of social causes, and directly and respectfully responds to fans on Tumblr. While no saint, I feel that there is cause to give the benefit of the doubt that things will resolve satisfyingly in S3, and that there is Intention about some of the things in S2.

This, of course, does not absolve it of being "bad," but even here I think we need to articulate better the different types of "bad" that people are reacting to. There seems to roughly be three camps here: 1) People who thought it was "bad" because of how it ended, with the breakup and a lot of unresolved plot threads; 2) People who thought it was "bad" because it struggled on a technical level with its set, lighting, directorial choices, editing, etc; 3) People who thought it was "bad" because they felt the characterization was significantly off and that the internal logic of the series had been violated.

With regards to Point One, the only solution is to Wait and See. Judgement should be reserved until the story is properly finished--easier said than done, especially considering the current media landscape, and the number of series or franchises that fail to live up to their promises.

Point Two isn't something I understand well enough to contribute meaningfully, except that I suspect the pandemic affected this aspect the most and am willing to give it a bit more mercy. That aside, I for the most part I don't find it bad so much as not as good as S1. Except for the parts with epilepsy warnings, surely there could've been a better way to do that.

Point Three... that's the stumbling block for me, and I find it interesting that most of the folks who struggle with this point in particular are long time fans of the book.

I trust that instinct.

There are two different directions to go from here. The first is the assumption that these problems are a result of ego, carelessness, or lack of skill from the showrunners/writers/director. It's cynical but not unjustified. The second is the belief that the breaks in lore or characterization were intentional, building towards a much grander conspiracy. Of course, even in this case I don't think it forgives the lack of signposting that would indicate that this is a choice rather than an accident. It just makes it feel clumsy and poorly constructed, a major risk on a show that hasn't had its third season confirmed.*

However, regardless, it still feels salvageable. I've enjoyed reading a lot of meta on all this, and I've pulled some things from others (particularly That Theory by @ariaste), but I don't really want to put forth a single, defined theory myself. Instead, here's some questions I've got, why those questions are important (to me, at least). Actual theorizing comes after, and anybody who snidely mentions Sherlock in the comments or tags is going to get auto-blocked. Like seriously, I'm aware that some stuff is a stretch, but it's fun??? To theorize????? And I'm here for me and my peace of mind rather than trying to argue a point.

*I have some suspicions here, particularly with Gaiman stating that the decision from Amazon would come much faster than The Sandman's second season (which was four months). I don't know enough though to say if that's actually significant.

Questions

Who the fuck is telling this story?

This is the most important piece, in my opinion. There's this assumption when reading books (or research papers, newspapers, etc...) that the narrator who is writing the words is a non-presence, Neutral and objective. That's not the case, and an important part of literature critique is figuring out who the narrator is, and what their goals are. Oftentimes, the narrator and the author are the same person, but with Pratchett's work, particularly on Good Omens and Discworld, the Narrator was its own unique character.

This is why people struggle adapting Discworld to live action--that medium requires a Reason for having a Narrator, and especially in the age of method acting that's often considered immersion-breaking. Good Omens worked so well because they not only kept the Narrator, but they made Her God.

This added some really interesting new dimensions, such as the scene where Crowley speaks to God about his fall and the destruction of humanity. He doesn't receive an answer, but we're watching from God's perspective, so we as the audience know that She's listening.

Another advantage of making God the Narrator is that it justifies all the goofy little asides we get into the lives of minor characters (i.e. Leslie the Mailman), without losing focus. It helps the world feel like it’s full of people, rather than characters and plot contrivances, and the theme that individual people and their choices are important. The Narrator is such a central character of Good Omens that without it, the story struggles to stay focused.

It also highlights a key difference in the writing styles of the two authors. Pratchett’s work tends to introduce four or five totally unique plot threads that feel completely disjointed until the last act (if not even later), when it turns into a Chekhov’s Firing Squad. Plot twists around secret identities and backstabbing and schemes are relatively rare, as the omniscient Narrator doesn’t lie about the intentions of people or their actions.

Gaiman’s writing is typically not like that, to my knowledge. He buries characters in misdirection and hints, and you never know the true identity or motives until all the chips are down. It’s a perfectly valid way to approach storytelling, but it makes it jarring to see it in S2. The lack of a Narrator is a huge reason why S2 doesn’t feel like Good Omens to some folks.

My gut feeling is that the decision to shift from the original Narrator was highly intentional. It helps to obscure the thoughts and intentions of people, and it also muddles the insights that we’re supposed to take away. (I would have loved hearing God monologue about what’s going on in Jim’s head. I think it’d do a lot to make him seem less.... obnoxiously stupid.)

More than that, it brings up a reasonable potential plot point of: Where did God go? Why isn’t She present in the story? Even in her early appearance in the Job flashback, she doesn’t sound like the narrator for last season. After the first part of her speech (which Gabriel later quotes), her tone turns casual and condescending, which might line up with her being a bit of an asshole, it doesn’t line up with the whole “dealer of a mysterious card game who is always smiling”).

Also, I don’t think it’s safe to assume that nobody is telling the story either. Just because they’re not making their presence known doesn’t mean they aren’t there, and in a story like Good Omens, that’s concerning.

Wait, where's Satan?

Another person I saw while scrolling the tags pointed out that Satan is nowhere to be seen this season. He's really only mentioned in reference to a bet God made in Job, but then Crowley is the one on the ground causing mischief. There's no Hail Satan among demons (like Hastur and Ligur did at the start of S1).

That's might be because the writers didn't want us to think it was important (a la Hastur), but that feels off. Given that Satan speaks directly through the radio to Crowley in S1, complimenting him on his work, it's safe to say that he was at least aware of and involved in the goings-on in Hell. The fact that he wasn't even an worry for Beelzebub in abandoning their post? Feels weird.

(Also if you know where that post is, I'll happy credit + link)

What is Maggie?

Look, I love cute lesbians in love as much as the next queer, but I don't like Maggie. I don’t think she’s a person. Contextually, she’s a plot device, but I agree with That Essay that she might be an actual Plot Device.

Her characterization is simple and relatively shallow—a bit of an airhead, ray of sunshine that’s supposed to remind you of Aziraphale. When she describes her past to Nina, it’s almost robotic (also, her story implies it was Mr. Fell who first rented to her ancestor, not Mr. Fell’s great-grandfather like Nina implied). Her emotions are over-dramatic and seem to be turned on and off at random (scenes with her crying to Aziraphale about her woes had my “manipulator” senses going off for some reason).

When asked about a song, she not only IDs the song, its singer, and its year, but how and on what it was distributed. (Honestly thought this would’ve been something interesting, because she’s been pretty ditzy so far, it’d be interesting if she had like... an insane memory for music history.) And then she’s the one that sets Aziraphale on his little investigation by giving him the transformed records, while also planting the seed about her love troubles with Nina. Later, her advice to Crowley is... not awful, but feels insincere and a bit too forward, given her own self-proclaimed lack of relationship experience.

I don’t know what she is (a demon, hastur with amnesia in disguise, a literal plot device inserted by the current storyteller, etc...), but there’s something not right with her.

(Also the joke of “who listens to records anymore, it’s so old fashioned” just doesn’t land, lots of people buy records, and I’m saying this as somebody who has worked at a record store before.)

What's going on with Aziraphale?

There’s something Off about Aziraphale, and it’s not his choices at the end of the season. That makes total sense if you read him as somebody with severe religious trauma getting dragged back into the abusive system because other people need him and he’s been promised the ability to change things.

But I do think something is happening to his memory. Nearly all the flashbacks are from Aziraphale’s point of view and retelling, which means that they’re less reliable than God’s version of events in the previous season. Many of them don’t make logistical sense (post-church scene in 1941), depict Crowley as meaner or more sinister than we know he is, or frame events... weirdly. The scene with him trying food for the first time feels Really Bad, especially when the series has previously established that he’s a) prim and proper and b) his interest in food is one of the beautiful things that connect him to humanity, not some kind of gluttonous sin. Also he turns down alcohol.

Their meet-cute at the  start of the universe also doesn’t line up with their reactions to each other in Eden, or the fact that knowing each other Before has never come up or been hinted at anywhere ever. I don’t know what’s causing this to happen, only that Aziraphale repeatedly looks pensive when coming out of flashbacks, and Crowley is never there afterwards to corroborate said memories.

His actions also seem pretty inconsistent with what we know of him—i.e. I refuse to believe he would ever mistreat his books, even if they’re just old encyclopedias. Also, he feels a bit too...forceful in trying to get Nina and Maggie to fall in love? I mean, he didn’t exert that much direct influence on even Warlock, when he was actively hoping that the boy would turn out angelic rather than neutral.

I don’t think this removes his agency in that last decision, so much as explains how he was in such a vulnerable place at all. He still needs to apologize and fix things, because he messed up, and even if he hadn’t he still seriously hurt Crowley.

What's going on with Crowley?

There’s something Off about Crowley. The most obvious thing, of course, is his memories. At multiple points in the present day, characters state that they remember him or have met him before, only to be met with confusion. This is especially concerning given that he has a nigh photographic memory for faces (something mentioned in the book when he immediately IDs Mary Loquacious, 11 years after a 30 second conversation).

Overall, he seems to be better known by other supernatural entities this season, in ways that often tie him back to his angelic identity (i.e. saying they fought together in the war, Aziraphale stating he knew the angel he used to be, etc...). This doesn’t feel right, because S1 we see that Hell is largely apathetic towards his schemes, and definitely does not defer to him at any point in any capacity.

Then there’s the issue of his power level. It’s always been speculated that Crowley was a powerful angel prior to falling, when he mentions in S1 his involvement with star making, his seemingly unique ability to freeze time, and creating a pocket universe for Adam before the confrontation with Satan. He also has a tendency of breathing life into inanimate objects, like his plants or car. He also has the regular demonic skillset: miracles that can adjust physical appearance; the ability to change inanimate objects (like paintball guns into real guns); the ability to manifest clothing and similar items; and summon hellfire to his fingertips. This, plus the way he monologues to God with a degree of familiarity rather than reverence seems to indicate that he was Somebody Powerful and Important Before.

But in S2, his skills are significantly expanded upon. The miracle he and Aziraphale summon sets off alarms in heaven and hell, and it’s powerful enough to mask Gabriel from the Archangels. He summons a miniature sun to rain fire on Job, which is way bigger and flashier than anything we’ve seen him summon in S1. (If he needs fire, he alters the course of a dropping bomb, without creating one himself.)

Yet he’s able to cloak his presence so well he goes wholly unnoticed in heaven, or in front of heavenly agents on earth (i.e. the Job flashback). Muriel can’t clock him as a demon, or even as another supernatural being, despite their auras usually being pretty significant, such Aziraphale immediately sensing the archangels when they arrive.  He’s able to interfere with files that Muriel claimed required clearance (although I feel like that might just be a snark about Obeying Without Thinking? I would really need a Narrator to know.)

I might be misremembering, but I don’t think we’ve seen angels or demons transmogrify living beings before either. In the book, Crowley brings Aziraphale’s dove back to life after the failed magic show, and occasionally sinks ducks, but he doesn’t alter them? Not even Adam demonstrates that skill in S1. But he has no trouble turning Job’s children into lizards, however temporarily. Boy that would’ve been convenient during the flood. Or when the guard stopped then from getting to the air strip.

I might be misremembering, but I don’t think we’ve seen angels or demons transmogrify living beings before either. In the book, Crowley brings Aziraphale’s dove back to life after the failed magic show, and occasionally sinks ducks, but he doesn’t alter them? Not even Adam demonstrates that skill in S1. But he has no trouble turning Job’s children into lizards, however temporarily. Boy that would’ve been convenient during the flood. Or when the guard stopped then from getting to the air strip.

I don’t have any real issues with his characterization in the present day parts of S2, but there’s something weird happening with Crowley.

Where's all the people?

I really like a lot of the new characters, but how were there only like, 2.5 new humans named in the present day? Flashbacks don’t count bc the humans are all dead and can’t affect the story.

As much as I like Nina, she and Maggie don’t drive the story beyond being an occasional and awkwardly inserted plot contrivance? Both are actively robbed of their agency at several points, forced into situations that they could not have avoided or escaped. I’m not really sure what growth they’re expected to experience other than deciding not to date each other after everything. I literally can’t tell you anything about Nina other than that she remembers her regular’s orders, runs a coffee shop, and has a textbook abusive partner we never see. The only meaningful interactions they have are between those two, or in conversation with Aziraphale and Crowley.

Compare that to S1, where Anathema gets hit by Aziraphale and Crowley, but her primary relationships are with Newt, Adam, and Agnes Nutter (I think that counts as a relationship). We know that she’s got a wealthy family back in Puerto Rico, and that she was literally raised to save the world, and that she isn’t happy under all that pressure. Newt on the other hand is connected to not just Anathema, but Shadwell and Madame Tracy. He never even directly interacts with Aziraphale and Crowley. We know about his hobbies, his struggle to hold down a job, and his almost supernatural ability to destroy any electronics he touches. I don’t necessarily like how their relationship came together, but they were both very, very well fleshed out characters with unique backstories and goals. They weren’t just... waiting around to give Aziraphale and Crowley a new questline.

And while there’s no requirement to include a large cast of human characters that are exerting influence over the story, the lack of it is another aspect that makes this season feel not like Good Omens.

Also, it's just. Really weird to me that the events of S1 aren't really referenced at all? Like, Adam isn't mentioned, nor is Warlock. I don't expect them to keep track of the humans they met on the airfield for 20 minutes, but none of it is ever specifically referenced as far as I can tell, beyond Crowley threatening Gabriel. Like, I get that it's been a few years, but the pair caused a big enough disturbance that you'd expect some kind of ripples in their supernatural communities.

Promised by the Narrative (Obvious Chekhov's guns that I will be legitimately upset over if they do not go off)

A sincere apology from Aziraphale to Crowley that doesn't come with the expectation that Crowley will come back to him, but because he deserves an apology, even if the choices Aziraphale made were done with good intentions. Aziraphale does not expect forgiveness, and is shocked when Crowley grants it without hesitation.

A clear declaration of love from Aziraphale, which can't be rationalized away by either of them.

An "I'm Sorry" dance between Aziraphale and Crowley, but with greater sincerity and gravity. The most important piece is that they end up dancing together, which signifies a mutual apology and dedication to come together.

Since kissing is on the table, I expect an actual joyful, mutual kiss between these two assholes.

A shared cottage in South Downs.

Predictions/Theories (just some fun thoughts I've had)

When Adam declared that Satan was not his father, he didn't make himself not the antichrist, but accidentally crowned his human dad the King of Hell. Nobody knows this, because Adam doesn't have a good measure for "normal" supernatural situations, and Mr. Young because he's so "normal" that he explains away all the magical bullshit that's started going down.

When Adam declared that Satan was not his father, he erased Satan altogether. However, this left a vacuum in both power and reality. The defection of both Gabriel and Beelzebub only widens that crack. In an attempt to Fix things, reality is warping the story. Crowley has become leagues more powerful between S1 and S2, as the narrative is trying to force him into the role of his previous boss. Aziraphale is unknowingly being pulled into a similar version on the Other Side, perhaps to replace Gabriel or perhaps to replace God herself, who has been fairly absent in all this. The alterations to their memories or past have come about to keep the narrative running smoothly.

When the Metatron asks Nina whether anybody has ever asked for death, he was actually referring to Death, the sole remaining rider of the apocalypse.

If Maggie is indeed a Plot Device, it would be a fascinating exploration of Free Will to see her become aware of this (cue existential crisis), and then fall in love with Nina on her own terms, rather than because she was written that way.

Hastur will be back. Somehow.

The reason why S2 focuses so much on the supernatural characters is because S3 will be about how the events in S1 have changed the political landscape of heaven and hell. Angels are questioning their roles, demons are yearning for something more. It's scaring upper administration, and then the two most reliable folks in employment run away to alpha centauri. Recruiting Aziraphale and getting him back in line prevents him from becoming a martyr, control the range of his influence. The series reasserts its theme of choice and agency by highlighting that Aziraphale and Crowley aren't that special, they've just had the chance to live and grow, and that the others have free will too, if they want it.

The reason why they wanted to separate Aziraphale and Crowley, is not to get Aziraphale on his own, but to get Crowley on his own. He literally stopped time and made a pocket universe in front of Satan last season. He's powerful and dangerous and somebody wants to see that reigned in.

Wishlist (stuff I desperately want to see)

Crowley getting an audience with God and an opportunity to ask his questions, only to refuse to do so because he's found his own Answers and he no longer needs hers

Aziraphale and Crowley growing more into their book incarnations. Aziraphale becomes confident in his sense of morality, which he developed the hard way through millennia on earth besides humanity. He slowly learns what it means to be loved, unconditionally, but also is better at asserting and maintaining his boundaries. Crowley, still anxious and unwinding, works through his fear of abandonment, providing him opportunities to be kind and gentle and nurturing--all traits that he's aggressively hid since being a demon.

Hand holding. I know that Gaiman was referring to Ineffable Bureaucracy, but I still feel like we'd benefit from meaningful hand holding, especially since that got cut from the adaptation of the book.

Shifted focus away from the supernatural shenanigans, and back onto the humans that actually drive the story.

Cameos from S1 characters (if not a more substantial appearance).

The Four Other Riders of the Apocalypse.

Cursed Thoughts (why I shouldn't be allowed a social platform)

Ineffable Bureaucracy turns up in season 3 because Beelzebub got Gabriel pregnant somehow.

#good omens #good omens spoilers #good omens season 2 #good omens s2 #good omens meta #good omens 2 spoilers #good omens 2 theory #good omens 2 analysis #long post #text

[erazonpo3]

Erazon's Characterisation Essay (Part 1 - Cynthia Edition)

General preface; This is me snowballing on a thought I had earlier about canon v fanon trends given that it's a pretty evergreen topic. Without getting too much into the subject itself, I made the point that you can use the source material as a starting point for analysing characterisation, but in a lot of cases it's highly interpretive; using Pokemon as an example, most of the non-player characters exist to enable the player's autonomy throughout the game's storyline, and only a small handful have their own detailed arcs and backstories.

Therefore if you want to build on characterisation for them for transformative fanworks, you only have a handful of dialogue lines and some environmental storytelling that borders on olympic levels of mental gymnastics. Things like backstory and character motivation needs to be invented, to which end the concept of 'canon' characterisation becomes pretty insignificant in comparison to the story you are trying to tell, and whether or not that characterisation is thematically appropriate and compelling. Everyone is going to have a subjective opinion about the 'essence' of a character, the core traits that make them who they are, and how integral those traits are for it to be a 'canon' or 'fanon' interpretation.

And yet there's still ways to analyse the games to draw some conclusions that aren't always obvious straight away.

I'm going to go into how I draw characterisation for Cynthia for Way Out, but keep in mind that I don't consider my characterisation perfect or the One True Depiction To End All Others etc and so on and so forth. There's things I need to discard in favour of the story– adults in the Pokemon games, including Cynthia, have a pretty laissez-faire attitude when it comes to kids handling crises so that the target audience (kids) can feel acutalised as they play through the story, but it's not always what I consider a core character trait so much as a function of the medium.

I play up a sense of responsibility and duty that isn't really depicted in the games but is nevertheless an easy takeaway in order to give her character a bit more depth and relateability. And when other people take her character in a different direction, I try to keep an open mind about what they're saying about her character in their story, because their story is not a video game for children nor a webcomic, and they will need to do different things depending on her narrative role.

(I don't have to like it, but I'm no less a subjective soul than anyone else).

I also pull here and there from other sources of inspiration, one I've mentioned before is a meta-analysis of how she's treated by the fandom in general, assuming she'd be treated a similar way as a public figure in-universe. A lot of my character work is about peeling back that legendary status and asking who the person underneath is and how she might deal with the pressures of being expected to consistently meet other people's high standards, and how to balance a healthy competitive streak without it becoming toxic.

But more to the point– here's some material exclusively from Platinum that I think collates to a pretty consistent depiction of her character, to keep in mind and interpret any which way, arranged into some key traits.

She is the granddaughter of a village elder in a traditional rural town.

"My grandma has this sort of bossy atmosphere about her. I think you'll recognize her right away. Yes, I'm sure you will. She's the elder of Celestic Town"

An overlooked aspect of her character that I think holds some of the ripest potential for her character is that we know a fair deal about where her family is from, potentially where she was raised. My personal conclusions are:

It is likely she has an ingrained sense of cultural values of humility, respect, duty, and tradition. While she may not be ruled by these traits, they would influence the way she interacts with the world.

Her interest in mythology is likely inspired the mural in Celestic town, and reflects a value of heritage and history.

It's a common 'fanon' that her grandmother was her primary guardian through much of her childhood, which isn't substantiated anywhere (just because we don't meet her parents as NPCs doesn't mean they don't exist) but this idea strengthens the connection she has to Celestic town and emphasises her position as the elder's heir.

Cynthia introducing herself as a trainer and not a Champion suggests humility; she positions herself as an equal to the player as opposed to a superior.

2. She is earnest and sincere

"...The places we are born. The time we spend living... The languages we speak... We are all different. But the presence of Pokémon unites us. We share our lives with our Pokémon and our happiness grows as we all become greater than we were alone. That is why we can battle and trade with anyone we choose..."

This is a reflection of her position as a narrative foil to Cyrus; where he dismisses the importance of emotion and 'spirit', she holds it in high regard. Thus;

She sees strong emotions as the source of her bond to her Pokemon and therefore the source of her success. While it's not to say she's an overly empathetic person, I think it follows easily that is generally emotionally intelligent (generally).

I think she's self-aware about how emotional she can be too, which is to say it's something she consciously embraces despite knowing she comes across a little overly earnest (and cheesy) sometimes.

"I love the sound a piano makes. I savor every note with my entire being. It's not only my ears; my spirit hears the music it makes... Ehehe, I made myself cringe saying that."

3. She is intelligent

"I think I let myself get carried away and talked for far too long. I'm sorry, and thank you"

This feels like a no brainer (ha) but it's also easy to take someone who comes across as emotional and write them off as being illogical or not having the depth for complex thought. To me, her emotional intelligence goes hand in hand with her analytical intelligence.

Her fascination with mythology is one of her defining traits, and her dialogue is the source of much of the lore surrounding the Sinnoh legendary Pokemon.

Her pursuit of knowledge is one of her defining traits; her interest in mythology and the distant past is referenced more frequently by herself and other NPCs than the fact of her being Champion. "My big sister is studying the myths of Sinnoh. She wants to know how people and Pokemon interacted in the days of myths."

As a Champion, I consider that she's very calculating and analytical. Even without the strategic held items given to her in BDSP, her Pokemon have perfect stats and have solid type coverage. It's not something she would accidentally stumble onto.

"When you are facing a Trainer in battle, you can learn everything about them. What Pokemon they have. What moves they've taught. What items they make Pokemon hold."

4. She is kind

"I want you to keep traveling to many far-off places. I want you to keep meeting all kinds of people and Pokémon. I came all the way here just so I could say that to you!"

A Champion in this game being kind isn't really a revolutionary idea, but it's still something I consider very integral, particularly in conjunction with the prior traits; there is diplomacy and there is compassion, and to me Cynthia balances both.

She is something of a mentor figure to the player, giving them the solution to obstacles on multiple occasissions (HM Cut, the Secret Medicine), and imparts a lot of lore to them. Notably she gives them an egg which hatches into a Togepi; while this event doesn't happen in BDSP and Platinum doesn't have the Fairy type, it's still retroactively made more interesting for the fact that Togekiss' modern Fairy/Flying type grants perfect immunity to her Garchomp's Dragon/Ground typing.

Some of the few interactions the player will have with her is giving medicine to the Psyduck blocking the route to Celestic town, and then delivering a charm to her grandmother– it gives an impression that she is regularly invested in small acts of kindness.

5. Other tidbits

Every time she interacts with you as the player, it is always through the lens of an adult with a public position speaking to a child; I take it as a given that all her interactions have a slight amount of professional distance, and a formality she wouldn't have if speaking to an adult friend.

She reveals that she went on a similar journey as the player character after being given a Pokedex by Professor Rowan, which could imply she experienced similar experiences to the established protagonist journey formula.

There's a slight goofiness to some of her dialogue that suggests she doesn't always take herself too seriously. "You've seen that group of Psyduck huddled with their heads in their, uh, hands...?"

It's a pretty common 'fanon' for Cynthia to have known Cyrus in her childhood, but this isn't really substantiated in text; her dialogue towards him would be a lot colder with that context as opposed to a stranger. It's a common headcanon because giving them a history together strengthens their position as foils, but in my opinion it's equally as interesting that Cyrus succeeds as far as he does because he exists in Cynthia's blind spot- she admits she didn't pay enough attention to what Team Galactic was up to, and can only stand in opposition to him ideologically, unwilling to entertain (or empathise with) his perspective. It hints at a certain stubbornness she has when she believes she's right and someone else is wrong.

This is just what I personally glean from the text; it's possible I've missed something that somebody else considers ultimately integral. But I hope that my writing in Way Out speaks for itself in how I apply all this to her character in the story, and why I feel it's important to do so. Cynthia is the character I second-guess the most in her characterisation because she should always be recognisable, even while going through different arcs. Her values, her intelligence, her sincerity, and her kindness are all things that need to be balanced with the needs of the story; how strong she is is just a relative thing to what any particular scene demands.

There's a lot I could still elaborate on but for the sake of at least attempting to keep this (relatively) concise, I wrote all this to highlight how I try to stay on track with consistent characterisation, which may not be the perfect ideal for this character but nevertheless is the best version for my story. There's nobody I hold to a higher writing standard than myself, and I try to constantly ask myself if I'm really writing what's best for the narrative or if I can do something better. I'm not interested in the most canon depiction that exists for another story, I'm interested in what's right for my story.

And uhhhh peace ✌️

#long post #like long long #it's a whole read #but if you like reading do i have good news for you #pokemon #cynthia #characterisation #tangential enough to way out that i can tag it #way out #im also open to discussions about this because it's just my ~opinion~ and again i like to keep an open mind

[painted-bees]

Hey, I've been obsessing over Hi-Note for the past two days, and I was reading meet cute part two and I noticed your tag. "I'm not a very good writer I don't paint very well with words."

I want to establish credibility for the praise I am about to heap on you: I've written a fair more than most people. There's over a million words in my Ao3, and yet more hundreds of thousands that never saw the light of day. I've friends in the editing trade who tell me I write at a publishable level. I like to think I know the craft very well.

So here's the praise: while you do have some of the marks of inexperienced writers I will absolutely contradict your self-deprecation. You are a good writer, and you have the makings of a great one.

Telling compelling stories are about so much more than mere mastery of prose. Your characters and your stories have real heart. Refined prose is far easier to learn than verisimilitude (there's a ten dollar word) in portraying the human condition.

I adore what I've read so far of Raf and Magritte, they are a charmingly tragic little duo, partially because I relate to them and partially because I am the biggest sap about that kind of dynamic of broken people initially hiding their cracks, gradually turning one another into kintsugi through affection, devotion, (and optionally, hot sex.)

If at any point you want some pointers, gently given, about how to improve your prose quality, absolutely hit me up, I am on this hellsite way too much.

Thanks for drawing and writing. You've given me much joy.

this is a lot to process haha thank you so much Q vQ♡♡♡

With all the kindness I have received about my writing, I will take care not to pre-empt future prose-y posts with apologetic sentiments regarding the quality. Self-deprecation doesn't contribute to anyone's enjoyment of the writing--and with all compliments I have received thus far, I feel it would be an insult to you guys if I were to continue insisting that the quality of my work requires tempering reader expectations upfront in order for it to be well received. I feel wholly encouraged and unstoppabley emboldened, haha!

That said, yes! I am very shiny and new to the whole writing thing! I would be very pleased to get an occasional DM or private message with any observations or tips regarding consistent/recourring mistakes or apparent gaps in knowledge that my work would benefit from having pointed out. I'll probably never revist old works to edit them, but I am keen on absorbing your wisdoms and applying the new things I learn to my future writing doodles!

Thank you so much for your kindly enthusiasm!! and for enjoying Hi-Note with me while I wallow gleefully in my self-dug little obsession pit haha♡♡♡!! Genuinely, it means a ton to me!!

#this is such a nice ask to cap my day with♡♡♡ aaa I feel so fortunate

[da12thkind]

Tumblr and The Old Internet Re-Awakens, An Opinion Essay

This is going to be a super long post about my thoughts on the current state of the internet, with a chunk of what I'm about to say having been stuff I've already said elsewhere on other sites. To save your dash, I'll be putting a READ MORE break.

The fact that Twitter and Reddit have basically been destroyed by their own hubris is both hilarious and sad. It's funny because "ha ha rich man's hubris" but also sad because this is very emblematic of the current direction many social media companies that have been at the top for too long are going.

Ever since the muskrat purchased Twitter, it was clear from the beginning that something seriously wrong had happened, with worse decisions to follow. Something I hadn't realized was just how extensive the ripple effects of this would be. Reddit is now being destroyed by their leader's desire for more and more money, as if they needed any more.

I've been having this conversation with my friends via Discord and with strangers on the Starmen dot net forums. The writing is on the walls. The internet is moving towards a future that caters to advertisers more than its users. If there's even the slightest hint of getting more money by screwing over users, the higher ups of a given site will be chomping at the bit.

Where does that leave us?

Well, with Reddit and Twitter both now in a state of complete and total self-destruction, albeit rather slowly, we have seen an influx of new and returning users. Fantastic! I love when an old place gets new life breathed into it.

That being said, I don't believe that Tumblr is the bastion of The Old Internet, far from it, and many of you would agree.

Instead, I think that the resurgence in Tumblr's popularity could be just the first step towards the return of The Old Internet. We have the power to go back to the days of making our own websites. Information on web design and web programming are available online for free, in addition to many places offering free hosting services for a basic website or blog that don't need many bells or whistles (just don't go to GoDaddy).

Tumblr, in my opinion, once you know how to use the advanced editing tools, can make for a great "Baby's First Web Blog." There are some users on here that have made GORGEOUS blogs that will absolutely blow you away.

What about peer-to-peer communications?

We've seen that Discord has been another victim to the plague that is internet gentrification. They've removed the discriminators for usernames, had a store put in, and so many other little changes that have consistently annoyed the end users.

That being said... Discord is not going to be falling apart anytime soon. It's still a fantastic way to connect with many people at once and have quick access to all your different communities.

However, you could make the case, and I certainly try to, that internet forums fulfill the same thing. It is true that forums for many topics have drifted into the void of internet history, but is that not simply the nature of the internet? Communities sprout up, thrive, have an internal way, break apart, and start anew. We've seen that with many Discord servers, albeit rather small ones.

I will still hold my ground that forums should be revitalized if we truly want to go back to the days of old.

What does the future hold?

I... don't know. Despite my vast horde of opinions, research, and second-hand accounts of what The Old Internet was like and how The Current Internet is becoming, I cannot say for absolute certainty that we will see a total collapse of these tech empires. At the very least, however, I do believe that they will become hollowed shells of their former selves.

I have yet to talk about YouTube and its history, and, to be quite frank with you all, I simply must avoid that topic for now. All I will say is that I implore my fellow content creators, specifically those that create Video On-Demand content for YouTube and TikTok, to look into creating your own websites to host your content in the event that something happens to these empires, too. If you don't have offline copies of your videos, do so when you can.

That will be it for now. Thank you for reading this essay. I love your faces. Stay safe.

#da12thkind text post #opinion essay #opinion #essay #the old internet #internet #twitter #reddit #tumblr #twitpocalypse #elongated muskrat #reddit refugee

[just-prime]

I don’t want you to feel pressured or anything of the sort; I understand that fics are written by real people with real lives beyond what I read on the screen. (As someone who is notorious for never doing anything on time, I don’t want to make you feel pressured in that way.)

I am very grateful that, despite this full life I assume you already lead, you, and other writers, have chosen to not only create, but also share your work with the greater community! Thank you!

however

I have literally been on the edge of my seat waiting to read the Horror of Dream House

I assume this is how other people feel when they are waiting for a cake to finish baking, although, as a terrible baker and voracious eater of cake batter, I have rarely, if ever, felt this excitement in the literal sense

so

Are we cooking? Cooling? Burning?

Boiling? Pickling? Fermenting?

Popping? Locking? Polka-dotting?

Inquiring minds (and bad bakers) want to know :)

So I was in class when I received this ask, which is the only reason it didn't get answered immediately.

This ask absolutely made my day!!!

It's incredible to know that there are people out there who are interested in my work, and nothing gets the creative juices flowing like people expressing said interest.

That being said, baking-wise, I apologize in advance because it is probably going to be a long wait. I am very much the sort of person who likes a chunk of fic done, and given that this will be my first longfic, I want it to have a consistant posting schedule.

I took a pretty big writing break over March, so April is where I am easing myself back into the process. However the fic is still nowhere near done. Currently, I'm shaping up to *hopefully* hit 100K words by the end of the month, but again, this is going to end up massive, since the full end is not in sight.

My current plan is to try and finish up Part 1 and then start posting (I am putting it in writing here so I can't back out of it later), because that will give me a lot of leeway to work on what will probably end up being a shorter Part 2. The epilogue and a short connecter story are already written, and there are tentative plans for at least a sequel and threquel fic...however I'm not letting myself think about those all too much lest I become distracted from the task at hand.

It's been a slow but steady process and I am learning when I need to take breaks so I don't burn myself out too often, but honestly I've very much kept the spark of the idea, and it is definitely still in the works.

If we want to continue the cake metaphor, for this fic, you'll be getting two cakes, Part 1 and Part 2. Currently, there are some cooling tiers across the board, some that still need the batter mixed, and some that are cooking. However, Part 1 is definitely getting closer and closer to being finished, and I certainly am able to roughly count how many tiers it will be before it's done.

All in all, keep an eye out here, I will definitely let you all know when Part 1 has hit the editing stage. I am so deeply excited to share it with you.

#my writing #rambles #fanfic writing #fanfic woes #fanfic #the horror of dream house #dream house #dream of the endless #hob gadling #dreamling #prime responds

[olderthannetfic]

I've found in my own writing, when checking for SPAG issues without a beta that's good at that kind of thing, TTS tends to catch a lot more than grammar/spellcheck. It doesn't just catch the mispelled words, which aren't really as much of an issue for me (though they do still occur), but it also catches a lot of the stuff that gets mistranslated from brain to fingers as I'm typing. I have a brainweirdness that can cause odd speech patterns, and one of the things that sometimes happens is I'll type (or speak) a word that my brain thinks is the right one, but isn't, for example:

Killed -> killing/killer/kills (brain mistranslates one version of a word into a different one with the same root.)

Sing -> sink/singe/sin (brain mistranslates one word to another that looks similar at a glance, but isn't what I was trying to say.)

No -> know (brain gets mixed up with two words that sound the same in the inner monologue since they're homophones and sends the signal to type the wrong one [this example in particular is one I have done multiple times!].)

TTS isn't really helpful for the last one, but I have certainly avoided a number of embarrassing mistakes using it that, for some reason, didn't get caught by the checker? Even though I don't think that's an unreasonable addition to make to your average grammar/spellcheck?

However. I have still definitely had to use my best judgement with it, because if a character has a name that is even slightly less than recognizably English it WILL butcher it. Without fail. And if you're intentionally doing something grammatically incorrect, like doing thiiiiiiiiis in character dialogue, obviously it's not going to pronounce that right. And some words, like fang, it just pronounces incorrectly, at least with mine it consistently mispronounces that word.

Still though! I've also noticed that it helped in an area I wasn't even expecting, which has to do with how it pronounces punctuation. I was apparently using the wrong dash, which was causing the TTS function in my writing program to fuck up with one of my favorite ways of writing dialogue (characters getting interrupted/interrupting themselves with an action in the middle of a sentence, my beloved). (I don't use that specific one super often, but I do love putting actions between two parts of the same character's dialogue.)

I've also found that it helps when editing for other stuff too, areas where my eyes kinda glossed over and missed a bunch of repititions of the same word get caught by TTS, areas where the phrasing feels awkward or clunky but sounded nice in my head also get caught by it, and just in general, when I've been staring at a piece for too long it catches a lot of stuff I missed, which makes sense given that common editing advice is to read your writing out loud.

Anyway. I don't know if this would be helpful to anyone else since I've been using this tool mostly as a disability aid (if in a different way than it was probably intended for...), but if your program has a TTS function, it can't hurt to try it out. Bye!

--

[generationlosscorkboard]

So! Matpat has finally rejoined us!

Welcome back to the theorist crew, Matty. We've been busy in your absence.

Now the council will decide whether your theories are truly what we've been waiting for. ('The council' being, well, uh, just me, I guess.)

(At the time of writing this, Ranboo has not reacted to this video. If at any point he does, I will follow up on this post.)

If you have not already seen it, here's the link to his video:

Anyways.

(long post you know the drill)

The first section the video is Matt just recapping his past theory, about the two factions which he has now labelled as being Showfall and Generation Loss. These two factions have been fighting over who gets to say what in the media we're shown, with the Gen Loss crew overwriting Showfall's content with cutaways, red writing (origin of my Red Writing tag), and other such edits.

Note: I can understand Matpat's reasoning for calling that group Showfall. I wouldn't, I'd probably associate these guys with who I've been calling GIC's, but for the sake of clarity and consistency, I will be using Matpat's naming conventions. If I need to make a distinction between Matpat's names and Showfall the company or Generation Loss the show, the latter two will be highlighted in red and/or otherwise clarified.

Matpat states that he's done exactly what we've been tasked to do, and found The Founder. I will admit that I was very interested and dubious in this, given we have barely touched on that here. The most we have is that the Video taper showcased at the end could potentially be our guy, but that hasn't been set in stone as The Theory.

Matpat goes back to discussing the videos, specifically going back to T_2: The Inauguration, which he clarifies is about inaugurating us, the viewer, into the Generation Loss group.

Here's a link to a previous post about this particular video by @ozzybutweirdthistime

OP of that post had interpreted it as a way for picking out the cast members for Showfall, whereas Matt has taken it as being a sort of recruitment for Generation Loss. I find this difference of opinion so entertaining, because in that case, both parties what you willing to kill another human being for the cause. Sounds about right! As for which one I think is true, well.... I kinda side more with Mat Pat on this one. The video, for one, is a Gen Zero video and Showfall (the company, not the GIC's) isn't part of this generation according to Ranboo (last I checked).

Still, it could apply to either group, and I really like that ambiguity.

The next thing Matpat discusses is The Social Experiments, giving a quick recap on what it was, that Hetch was supposedly helping him only to turn out to be Showfall, that we killed Ranboo live, (live). Only he thinks Ranboo didn't die, and that Ranboo is actually The Founder.

His reasoning and evidence for this is the following:

Ranboo, whilst trusting Hetch, didn't take Hetch's advice to do as the audience says, rather picking the wrong code so the alarm would be activated and the show could continue how Showfall planned it.

Ranboo purposely doesn't take the first exit sign post button push, rather he heads for Hetch door.

We were asked to kill the Founder, and who did we vote to kill in the end? RANBOO!

Ranboo purposely picked the wrong exit in the Closet, leading to Ethan's death.

Ranboo knows that Sneeg has been there for Six years, and accidentally slips this when they free him.

The Puzzler is scared of Ranboo and was scared that he killed Ranboo too early, which wasn't what was meant to happen, and he apologized for that. Also, the line "Well that's for you to know and me to find out".

Ranboo wants the audience to kill him, in a mix of " hey look at me I'm so christ-like!" and dying for your sins/getting us to do what we need to do to survive.

The Cutaways require Ranboo to be alive post-production in order for them to happen.

Ranboo is reorganising the footage for release as the founder's cut, making it sadder (MANIPULATION), and to change and add certain details to make it better (REWRITING THE TRUTH/CANON). also Ranboo may quietly delete the original VODs so they no longer can speak their truth (GASLIGHTING)

Now. Here's why I disagree with Matpat on this.

The reason Ranboo didn't take Hetch's advice was not because they wanted the show to go on and knew that "theorists" would hinder that by choosing the correct option. Rather, he didn't want to take advice from a faceless audience who have been the one's controlling his life for a long as he remembers. He isn't even aware that the audience is actively trying to save him the best they can, he just thinks they want him for entertainment. Hence, he makes the decision for himself with a 75% chance of failure and ends up setting off the alarm.

As for why Ranboo ignored the first exit sign, my own mask theory gives the reason for this: Ranboo was almost always being controlled or at the very least, having their perception altered so that the story would go as it was supposed to.

We've killed and/or seen the deaths of seven people over the course of this series (some even twice, or three times over!), and sure, Ranboo's death was a very big focal point, I don't think that meant they were the FOUNDER. if he was, I'm pretty sure that would of meant Gen Loss was over, done, we did the thing we were supposed to do and now can go on with our lives. But no, the show goes on. Ranboo was just the focal point of this particular story. (it's been mentioned by Hetch that this cast selection normally happens off-camera, but because of the novelty of this version, their gets to be live)

Ranboo picking the wrong door. Simple, he was being mind controlled then, which we know because of the lights and also the NPC voice going on then. I find it really interesting that Matt hasn't once mentioned the mind control aspects of the show, in any form it came up as. During those moments, yes they were continuing the story in a story way, but not because they were the one in control.

The Sneeg thing- I'm like 90% sure this was just Ranboo improv-ing, plus he said it in a questioning tone and followed it up with "I don't- I don't know..?" Idk, it sounds just a little to me that he doesn't know.

Now for the Puzzler. Dude's just incompetent at being a Saw guy, man. He did actually kill Ranboo in that moment, according to Ranboo (source: Going through my favourite bits!), so the "nearly killed his boss" is a bit of a iffy thing (even if the filter doesn't let him realise that he did actually kill Ranboo). he's just genuinely sorry about it as is. (again, he's just a goofy guy, who is heavily filtered like everyone else). Although I will admit that the "that's for you to know" line is definitely something. Personally, I'd like to think it was Showfall speaking through the Puzzler to the audience, without the puzzler realising the deeper meanings.

The reasoning for Ranboo dying. Matpat calls it as Ranboo making himself out to be Jesus like (and while, yeah CC Ranboo is basically doing that cause hell yeah), I think of it as Showfall showing off how in control they are, mimicking religious imagery (almost mockingly) and their apparent control over life and death. How God-like they are. So, we have similar ideas around this particular one, only we just differ on the one sending the message.

Matpat then compare's The Social Experiments to those of Stanley Milgram (who, coincidentally, A friend told me about the day this video was uploaded). And I agree! There are definitely a lot of similarities. The subjects are forced into a situation by an authority figure (the experimenter) of deciding the fate of another subject, to the point of inflicting pain that could cause death (only for the pain to be fake, and the whole situation fabricated).

Matpat and I agree, that Ranboo's death was faked. Well, sorta. But for veryyyy different reasons. Matt says it's because he's the Founder and needs to stay alive, while I say it's because Showfall like to reuse everything, so why waste a perfectly good body? (Clarification: Ranboo the person is dead. But their body is reused, either like Frank or as one of the Employees.)

With the cutaways? I think they were filmed before. Ranboo is completely under their control, so it's easy enough to make pre-prepared cutaways and then make their actors do certain things that make the cutaway make sense/relate to the show. especially with how meticulously planned this particular show is. Especially since this show is completely Live apart from the obviously cinematic stuff, but again, pre-recorded (either in-universe or because of IRL health and safety laws requiring that actors don't actually get smashed by anvils).

His whole founder's Cut idea is certainly something. However, the main reason for the founder's cut is to remove a lot of the livestream-y stuff, add in some of the things that got missed out the first time around because it just got skipped over in the live performance, and just tweaking a few things here and there so that we get the experience of Gen Loss we were always supposed to get. (yeah yeah it's rewriting the current Canon but not in THAT WAY). I actually have a couple of friends waiting on the founder's cut release purely because I suggested they do due to just how long and sometimes a little stuck in places the og is (as much as the first episode was great, they were in the kitchen for a LONG time, hell even the YouTube VOD skips out the Create a Creature bit). Also i would like to see Ranboo even TRY gaslighting us. Have you SEEN the amount of edits, scene packs, small detail discussions (my own Masterpost of small details for one.)

Final Notes

Now I don't know why Matpat didn't mention the whole mind control aspect, or why he wasn't apparently aware of certain details that Ranboo himself has confirmed, but honestly, even I'm not caught up on everything going on. I've got a private playlist on YouTube called "gen loss to watch" and wow I have not watched half of those. I also have the benefit of being focused on Gen loss, and not managing four channels each with a wide range of things to cover. That and the fact I'm constantly in the loop with all of you, and seeing what you all think.

AHFG anyways. No theory is a bad theory, and it was really nice to hear Matpat's thoughts on this, no matter how differing. Don't spread hate to him, and don't interpret this post as me hating on him. We're all just trying to solve this thing, and by god are we going to do it.

But hey. It's just a theory. A GAM- wait.

#Youtube #Generation Loss #Gen Loss #Generation Loss Theory #zero talks #game theory #Matpat #zero thoughts #did you like my Ranboolive live joke #but yeah anyways #it was certainly a different perspective to listen to #gave me a few ideas #I do have the benifit of being very community led #whereas Matpat is mostly on his own (likely to prevent ripping off other peoples ideas) #And while I do make my own theories #I also look at and reblog other people's theories and thoughts and just give credit where credits due #I would like to shout out MatPat's Editor for basically being a Squiggles reference in this video #regardless of whether that was intentional or no #Lil guys in the corner of your video are the height of entertainment value #We need more lil guys

[everlastiingiimmortals]

(belatedly editing for vague 1.5 spoilers, so sorry!! ><;;)

No because it actually is something that I have found interesting and even a little confusing about Jing Yuan. He is someone consistently portrayed as gentle, kind, loving; someone who only stoops to violence as a last resort and prefers safer means of resolving issues.

And yet we know of his past with the High Cloud Quintet. We know of his feats even after their time. We hear him straight up say (jokingly) that he'd have been interested in learning from Apyra himself, he sincerely says he's envious of the generals that will succeed him, of the future they will have facing Cirrus as -- perhaps -- a properly worthy opponent. He lists the reasons for mastering the sword as follows: the pleasure of swordplay, the saving of lives, and the dispatchment of enemies.

So why is this the case? Doesn't that last point seem a little odd for Jing Yuan?

Personally, I like to think the closer you are to an Aeon on their path, or rather the more the Aeon gives you power, the more you end up reflecting them, their ideals, their desires. There is no doubt in my mind that for Jing Yuan, the first two points for learning the sword are true. He initially had no intention of joining the Cloud Knights in my eyes; his desires were to learn for the sake of learning, and to have the ability to save people. He wanted to be a Galaxy Ranger, after all. But that last point is such an odd shift in tone for him, and the word he uses is odd. Dispatch. It's... so surgical. Like enemies are a matter to be dealt with quickly and efficiently, like paperwork. And really, that makes sense given what I've already said about him.

He speaks so coldly about cutting down enemies, so distantly, because it is a duty to him, nothing more. Yet he mentions it because in the Xianzhou way of life, it's not just a reason for learning swordplay, but almost a necessity. And yet he seems to relish the idea of a proper fight, too. I don't think Jing Yuan would be the type to fight if he didn't enjoy the adrenaline that comes with it. He wouldn't have committed all those feats of war or stayed as a Cloud Knight if he didn't enjoy it to some extent (his situation as a general is different).

I wonder if his closeness to Lan inadvertently provides not a bloodlust, but rather a heightened sense of adrenaline, fuel that drives the instinct of the Hunt. His role as an Emanator of Lan strengthens that instinct further, and it's one that directly comes into conflict with his philosophies. He cannot ignore the thrill of the pursuit himself, and he's... keenly aware of this sensation. He's also very keenly aware that a weaker man might lose himself to this thrill and fall into bloodlust, and consequently mara.

This is why he speaks of eliminating enemies in such a detached manner. The cognitive dissonance that occurs between his inherently gentle nature and the heat of battle leaves him almost dissociating, in a sense, removing himself from the battle at hand to just get the job done and get it done quickly. This reflects, too, in how quickly he's able to switch from his usual demeanor to his "general mode," in which he's cold and authoritative. It is a mask, and one that is unnerving to see him switch so seamlessly between.

#hsr spoilers #//about; (DIVINE FORESIGHT) #does this make sense it sounds disjointed to me #i was babbling on the subway to the museum and these are my thoughts

[nozomijoestar]

Another thing that you touched on at the end there was Asuka's protectiveness of Lili, I really want to see more of that. I feel like there is this vulnerability to Lili that we haven't really seen much of but of the brief glimpses we have seen have Asuka suddenly concerned about her, even in SFxT when she and Cammy exchanged blows and sent Lili down, in fact is that the only time we ever here Asuka say Lili's name, as opposed to idiot or ojousama?

I had to go back and check this but LOL YES IT IS. It makes sense for them because it's only been about a year in their time by now but that's crazy. Since it hasn't happened in canon yet the moment she does call Lili by her name there will be the end of an era.

EDIT 2/9/2024: I just realized... in canon they've never introduced themselves to each other... on camera anyway- HOWEVER, I think they would still know each other's names because of fighting each other in Iron Fist Five, so Asuka should know Lili's name but is choosing not to use it since the ring announcer would've had to call them to the stage in 5 lol, otherwise Lili wouldn't know Asuka's name in 6 either

She also often addresses her with Anta or a very casual form of saying You that's rude in itself depending on who you ask. Some Japanese say never use Anta or Anata unless it's with your lover or specific situations because you should be respectful calling people by their name or title, others use it more regularly or don't care. I've seen it discussed both ways. In this context I think it started out rude given Lili's annoying behavior but over time it gets spoken with more softness or only when Asuka is shocked by something Lili's done or said. Examples include Shaheen's ending or in story mode when Asuka is bewildered as to how Lili found a pic of the Kazama family registry.

If we're getting the sense of closeness we're getting from them now and Asuka is even stepping up to saying Ojou-sama, then I can't understate how important saying Lili's name next would be. It's finally recognizing Lili as a proper person to Asuka worthy of saying back her name, which is something Lili at the very least does for Asuka already. Even if Lili isn't entirely understanding in other areas.

When we get that name drop it would signal an open acknowledgement of the end of any need Asuka feels to be rude and standoffish back towards Lili, even more so than her expression in the 8 ending.

This exchange gave me something I didn't know I needed

EXACTLY THOUGH LILI ONLY PRETENDS TO LOOK IN CONTROL TOO, she was sensitive when Sebastian calls her out in the TT2 ending, she was trying to not be concerned when Kaz said everyone who fails to win in the 8th tournament will have their homes burned, she says crowds and speeches make her nervous in her 8 ending, she puts on a front of superiority around Azucena but Azucena doesn't buy into it which actually visibly frustrates Lili until the alpaca gets her to finally smile and be warm, she worries about her father enough to also act on his behalf during 5 & 6 and praises herself with relief thinking she fixed his problems in her 5 ending, she explicitly said she's useless without Asuka there (presumably to help and protect her) in SF X T, theres many hints across canon and non canon where Lili consistently lets the facade slip or digs harder into it when called out. And she's done it so well people have reduced her to YASS QUEEN MOTHERRR UNTOUCHABLEEE GIRLBOSS!! when that's her act. Specifically it's her act when she wants to look strong hiding her fear or lack of ability.

Asuka cares about Lili's safety, otherwise she wouldn't fight together with not against her multiple times nor would she have praised Shaheen for protecting Lili when Asuka couldn't. They also wouldn't have given her that characterization in SF X T if they didn't think it was fitting. She very much cares even though Lili would annoy her, and that says a lot more about Asuka than anything else or anyone saying she doesn't. Just the fact that they did skip the explanation and gave us the end point of Asuka being friendly and working with Lili not against her, as a writing choice I think it's clear the intent is building on the fact that Asuka would care and has always cared.

#tekken #asulili

[elvenbeard]

Self-promotion fic-update-tag-post for "Love is Stored in the Olive Jar (working title)"

Okay, so, I am currently writing this post-Sun-ending fic that I think some of you started reading (currently the first 5 chapters are published, 6th is being edited as we speak).

I got a lot of very positive feedback on chapters 1-3, but not much/ nothing anymore on 4 and 5, and my perpetual self-doubt has been creeping in about my ideas and writing actually really sucking and people losing interest because I'm too long-winded, something about the content was extremely off-putting (or just downright boring), or I'm mischaracterizing Kerry, along with many other potential reasons and doubts.

But of course there's a million other possible reasons, like, people just not seeing it because text (especially long text) tends to get buried, they're too busy to keep up, or they're waiting til it's finished before reading. But yeah I'm in this thought-spiral now where I'm like "do I even wanna continue posting it, do people even care?" and I've come to the conclusion... there's a solution to my concerns the writeblr community taught me (that you should def also adapt for your fics!!)

REPLY to this post here (with anything, an emoji, a short "hi" or "here!" ) if you want to be tagged by me whenever I post a new chapter so you don't miss out (if you want to be tagged with a specific url that's different from the one you reply with, maybe put it there, too).

I have been kinda consistently posting a chapter each week now, usually Tuesdays, and I might not be able to keep that up forever, but would like to stay on my roll. And, knowing that there's maybe at least one person here who is actively reading this and wants to be notified, will maybe help me not lose steam like I did on so many other projects in the past that just got lost in the void somewhere along the way.

First chapter of the fic in question if you'd like a reminder - following chapters, if they exist already, are always linked at the end of the chapter. It is a rather angsty fic, given that it mostly follows CP2077 canon events, but I can promise that there will be a happy ending.

Feel free to like this post if you wanna, but I will only tag people in future fic updates that leave a reply. Reblogging is also appreciated, obviously, to help spread the word xD

#cyberpunk 2077 #cyberpunk 2077 fanfic #kerry eurodyne x v #*fingers crossed this shuts up my inner critic* #and there's at least one person still reading this XD #cause I love writing it a lot at the moment and know where I need to go with it #and i hope I can finish writing it for myself even if it's not as interesting for most otheres #*others #even though I'd love love love to discuss the stuff I'm writing about #especially my theories concerning Mr. B and ways to save V's life etc etc that we'll likely never see in canon but which are hinted at #my writing #love is stored in the olive jar

[mittensmorgul]

idle musings on the spngeorg podcast under the cut, mostly just me muttering so i can get some thoughts out of my own head... but also there's a poll at the end, because I honestly don't know what to do with all this paperwork :'D

i was just looking through my notes on past episodes. When i first started this, I didn't script anything, just noted a few key points for my reference while I talked. I quickly realized I needed to impose some sort of structure on episodes because they were... wildly out of control and meandering, and far too long. I know, I can and will talk forever if given the chance. So by the end of season 1, I was writing far more detailed notes. But I didn't start saving those documents until 3.13 Ghostfacers. All my notes before that episode are just... gone.

(well, they're probably in previous versions of that document, but there's no way I'm going back to try and recover them now lol)

It wasn't until episode 138 - 7.12 Time After Time-- that I started writing out what amounts to a full script. If you'll notice, episode lengths have become more manageable and consistent since then, and I probably forget to mention fewer things too. It's also far easier for me to actually record episodes and I save about four hours every week on editing. So it's a system that works very well for me, personally.

But this means that I do have the full text of my scripts for episodes beginning with 7.12. I don't follow them exactly, but for the most part, they're fairly accurate as a transcript.

And I was wondering if, despite the fact I only have rough notes and a full script of the intro section of episodes between 3.13 and 7.11, would anyone actually like me to like... post those notes and scripts online? either here or on tumblr?

I hadn't up to this point, because they are just messy little notes to myself for the most part, but I realized my archived episode post is now approaching 100k words, and was thinking I should probably post them all somewhere, you know? For reference, the document stats where I've been stashing notes since 3.13:

That's a screenshot of the doc, showing it's 214 pages long, and almost 93k words. And this is only for episodes that have already posted (including 7.17, which hasn't posted but has been uploaded and scheduled to post later this week).

There's two more completed episodes in another document totaling 21 pages and over 11k words. The next episode I'll record is 7.20! wheee!

So... what to do with all these things? Just post the complete scripts? Post all the notes, even though I don't have anything for the first 56 episodes of the series? Jump in with episode 57 and then just keep going? or only start with 7.12 with the complete scripts?

Does anyone have any interest in any of that at all? Or is it a good idea to stash these on ao3 at least? I mean, yeah, probably on that last question, but that means a lot of work. So I'd like the thoughts of listeners and other random folks who might be interested in my notes for whatever reason. Help a mitten out:

#now let's see if i remember i actually stuck a poll on here #because i'll probably just end up posting everything in an idle bored moment anyway :'D #my life as a sad sad fangirl #spiders georg of the tnt loop

[vellaphoria]

Hi! For the writer's ask game: 25, 27, and 29 :) Also, I reread Midnight Elegy recently and it's even better then I remembered!

Hello!! :D as;lkdjfa;skldjls I'm glad you enjoyed it enough to reread it! I had such a good time writing that one. Thank you for the incredibly kind words! <3

Answers below the cut:

25. What fic do you wish you got more of a response on? Gethsemane in Winter, probably For context, at one point I wrote a DickTim Earth-3 series because there was a very specific interpretation of the concept that I desperately wanted to read but that didn't exist. So I set out to write it myself, knowing that it probably wouldn't get too much attention, given the number of (accurate) warning tags I slapped on it. I worked hard on it and am proud of the result, but there's still a bit of wistfulness about it because of the nature of incredibly niche things.

Though if anyone is curious enough to look at the part of the map labeled here be dragons, then the series is A Fact or a Weapon, which comes from a wonderfully haunting (and apt, for the fic) line from the poem "We are Hard" by Margaret Atwood:

A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?

27. What is your most and least favorite part of writing?

My most favorite part is writing descriptions! I tend to be a visual thinker, so I spend a fair amount of time thinking about where things are in a scene, how they would look, and how to describe things in a way that builds the sort of atmosphere I'm going for.

My least favorite part is writing transitions between scenes. I tend to over-write them and draw things out that aren't important to the plot (one reason why everything I write spirals out of control lol). Sometimes it's hard for me to know when it's best to put a scene break in vs. when to do an actual transition via text.

29. What’s your revision or editing process like?

I tend to go chapter by chapter for multi-chapter fics. My first goal is to get the thing written, so I try not to commit to serious revisions unless there's some sort of overarching problem with what I've got.

Revisions start once I have a mostly finished rough draft of a chapter. At that point, I read through it to make sure that I'm not missing anything and then send it to my beta reader so that they can give me a general vibe check (i.e. does it make sense, does it flow right, is the tone consistent/does it work for the fic, spelling and grammar, etc.). They also do a lot of cheerleading which really gets me through a lot of the tougher parts of writing <3 After I have the beta-approved version, I do another pass through for spelling and grammar and probably tweak some things. If it's a chapter, then it probably sits for a bit while I work on other parts of the fic. If it's a oneshot, then I format it for Ao3 and finalize the title and tags that I'm using before posting.

There's also a secret step where sometimes I don't like what I have, so I tear it up and recycle the parts into other things lol (questions are from this list)

#jagn answers #captain-ursula #ask games

[mizziix]

thoughts on this for mage distribution for mage the awakening in the US? Plus bonus order percentages on the side! :D https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LVdqhsMk0QPYuIGWfP3X8oqQVuPFhz0AcvxhWxSlfuA/edit?usp=sharing

Interesting! This is gonna be a long post, mostly cuz I added my own rambles on top of this, I hope you don't mind lol.

All of the math you've done makes sense and it's definitely an interesting way to calculate general size. I'm curious how you calculated your global population number. Originally I thought the seer percentage was high, but then I remembered that that's all seers compared to the Pentacle orders individually. I actually really like these numbers, especially for leaning on a small theme in Awakening I don't think gets brought up enough, isolation.

For fun, if I were going to calculate percentages I'd go by two things. One, the only concrete metric I've found for how often Awakenings occur is in the Guardian of the Veil book, where it mentions that the Guardian Labyrinths might go months if not years monitoring people without an Awakening occurring.

(Guardians of the Veil, pg 89)

This give us the metric of 17/20 recruits failing, so about 3/20 do manage to awaken. That's 15%. However, keep in mind that this is 15% of the most specifically selected, most likely to awaken sleepers over a matter of years. 3 Awakenings over 5 years is a fucking minuscule volume.

Something that corroborates this is the Consilium. In this regard Awakening is surprisingly consistent in both the size and scope of most Consilium, with two important factors. First a consilium more often than not has at least a few representative members from each order, most often at least one full Cabal, sometimes an order isn't fully represented or represented at all, but usually it's one full cabal. Second, a Consilium usually covers a rather large area, often the size of a large city's greater reach. There's one LA Consilium, and one Consilium for all of greater New York City as seen in Tome of the Pentacle.

From both of these, when you consider that a cabal is typically four or five mages, the quote unquote minimum functional size for a consilia is 20-25 mages. Now, you could probably do some math and track how many major cities a specific state has, extrapolate that out, etc etc etc but that's a lot of work I don't feel like doing, and also doesn't incorporate a lot of other factors like apostates and seers, both of which are notably less common. In general, if we assume that there are an equal number of Pentacle and Seer mages in a city, we get roughly 1 in 100,000 people are mages, giving a rough estimate of a global population of about 80,000. That's fucking tiny. That's the population of Germany. There are more

----

As a fun aside, in Ascension using similar statistics, the bare minimum functional population for a single tradition is about 20 to 30. Given that there are nine Traditions and the Technocratic Union at least matches them, that's HUNDREDS of mages per city, not to mention their retinues of Sleepwalkers (which are even rarer than mages in Awakening!), Cult members, and other participants, it's no surprise that Ascension mages have global conspiracies controlling governments and whole quests for reality, and it's REALLY no surprise that the Tremere lost the second Massassa war of the 90's badly.

#World of Darkness #Chronicles of Darkness #Mage the Awakening #thank you for asking and thank you for sharing and thank you for indulging me on this #I hope this is fun I've actually thought a lot about this if it wasn't obvious enough already

[the-owl-tree]

This is a very weird question but like, in a fandom that is generally pretty forgiving towards any given crime a male character commits, why do you think Tigerheart of all cats is the one instance where people want his head on a stick. Is it because he’s dovewing adjacent or something? I think he’s generally a neat character, tho they fumbled his characterization past his súper edition, seeing that he interacted so much with other cat cultures I always imagined he’d turned more open minded outsiders wise instead of cajoling him into the obligatory strict shadowclan leader role

he/him lesbian swag is too powerful

I think in the early AVOS days it would be accurate to say that it was Dovewing hate that had people hating Tigerheart (because. that was pretty much the attitude in OOTS lol) but I don't think it's entirely fair to say now. I think there's quite a bit of reasons why people may not like him: the age gap (while it doesn't necessarily bother me as they got together later, not gonna pretend i don't get why it would bug others), the off and on relationship drama with Dovewing (which. once again i liked but other people might not), the way that he's used as a main aggressor when he's named leader for different conflicts (onestar's dead! need a new leader to be the primary antagonist ringleader. i can imagine a lot of people read squilf's hope and came out of it not liking tigerheart), and now in ASC where he has taken over another Clan (once again. he's correct for doing this because it has made the plot very fun and also he's doing stand up for riverclan so i don't know why they're being so ungrateful???)

I agree with the last part BIG TIME, his super edition sets him up to be the antithesis to his grandfather! I like that he's doing it his way though. But otherwise, I think he's got an interesting and somewhat consistent character, with his most enduring trait throughout the series being that he becomes emotionally charged when it's a matter of his family: choosing Dovewing over his Clan, becoming ready to fight the Sisters when they attacked his nephew so badly that he lost hearing in one ear, going after RiverClan when his son died, and so on and so on. It's super duper interesting and it's a trait I've always really liked about him.

But that's me lol I think the dude is neat but I can get why people do not vibe with this dude

#asc spoilers #deer rambles #i just think he's neat!