#i wrote 90 fucking pages with actual content

[vermillioncrown]

notable quotes during this entire process of Suffering

"you need to be a little delusional to have a thesis. at least a bit."

"oo she's starting to believe"

"barring setting your hair on fire and sitting between you and the monitor, i don't think you can be stopped"

"if you could, you'd have a beard at this point. and be balding"

"is it drugs or do you feel Things inside?"

"doesn't have to be coherent. or logical. just needs to Be"

"just write 'let's be frfr, you're skipping this chapter my esteemed committee members' in the middle"

#academic jerky #i hate myself so much lmao #it's almost a universal experience that no matter how early you start #no matter how much time you allot #the amount of writing you do is 'wpm_adj = wpm_base * exp(1/(time left))' #took me nearly 1.5 years (which can be tracked through my author's notes and general bitching on the blog) to get ~20 pages #which had to be rewritten anyways #within these last 10 days in which 5 of those days i was in public at a conference or sharing a hotel or on an airplane #i wrote 90 fucking pages with actual content #and two of those chapters are 'lol i have works sighted and will give you a more comprehensive lit review for my defense bye' #'anyhoo this is what that lit should suggest and here's my logic let's move on bc yall usually skip these chapters' #if i could materialize my brain as a separate entity i would throttle the little bitch for being so infuriating #anyways. proposal document done. now i gotta bust out a 45 min ppt presentation and practice getting btfo'd by next friday 🤪(😭) #and then it's phd candidacy babey

[cursedwithgloriouspurpose]

Just to put it out there, this is the post that set this off though I've been seeing shit like this for weeks. I'm not reblogging it because I don't want to directly spread this.

Can't believe I have to say this, but: AO3 is not an inherently community properties. It is a Non-Profit Organization that was begun and organized by people with certain ethos in mind; in a very condensed nutshell, the freedom to write and share any and every kind of fic, no matter what subject matter it contains. Period. They wrote the charter to suite their ideals, funded it alongside like-minded individuals, and manned it for many years. People who believe in the dream that they set up are the ones largely running the show now (a few founding members may still be around, though I'm not sure about that,) but so far that ethos has remained in tact.

While AO3 was always meant to serve the community (and they do,) it was never meant to be run by anyone who does not share their ethos. That's why actively contributing to the organization itself--ie, through volunteering, and/or donating--is a requirement for having a say in what the archive does. You do not get to vote on board elections if you are not involved. You do not get to be on the board if you do not do these things. That is how all non-profits work. A non profit is not a union (and outside of possibly the original vote to organize, no union I've ever heard of allows non-union members to vote on union procedure, policy, or in elections.)

One of the reasons why this is true is that anyone who doesn't agree with the founding tenants of absolute free speech, no matter how vile that speech may be, will not stick with the organization long enough to change things internally--that is a feature, not a bug.

Why? In this case, because of that ethos. Because of the fic bans and the purges that the idea for AO3 was born out of, which always stemmed from "concerned individuals" and calls for "morality." Completely unironically, because of all the shit that's happening to regular libraries across the US right now. Essentially, because of all the things AO3 was always meant to stand against.

God fucking damn but am I tired of this latest round of anti nonsense disguising itself as "Proship" and "Anti-racist" and "Anti-harassment" in order to try and drive a wedge between AO3 and its donors. I've seen this song and dance before. We all have. It used to be "child porn" and "think of the children," and now its "harassment," and "abuse!" Ie, the exact things that the modern lefty is hard programmed to fall into line behind without actually considering the evidence.

People please read through this shit critically before just assuming its valid. Note the lack of actual, clearly displayed and easily legible proof*. How all the "I've complied everything in one page!!!" posts seem to just be paragraphs after paragraphs of conjecture and vague statements without, again, any goddamn proof (except, maybe, a list of links entirely removed from context, appended to the bottom.) Be critical of authoritative statements about how things "should" be run without any sense of where that authority is coming from, and the lack of solid answers (or even suggestions) as to how the problems should be fixed in any way that isn't "Fire everyone I've decided is responsible for this (again, without proof,) and replace them with people who want to completely rewrite the ethos of the site to allow bans on content that everyone (and by 'everyone,' I mean me, the speaker) agrees is objectionable."

There is an alarming number of parallels I've been seeing lately re: how people are currently attacking AO3 and how bad actors in various states are forcing through book bans. Please be mindful.

*"easily legible" is kind of a weird phrasing, but i can't think of a better one. What I mean, specifically, is a good 90% of the "proof" links I've found are all links to mid-page comment streams on anonymous wank boards which mostly start mid-conversation, effectively removing them from their original context, and never site any sources of their own. Literally everything is He Said/She Said levels of bullshit with some corporate buzz words tossed in to make it sound more valid than it is.

#call out culture nonsense #i thought we left this behind in 2016 #ffs #i really wish people would stop couching things in the language of 'abuse' #suspending someone you think is involved in an attack is not abuse #it is LITERALLY responding to the problem you say you want them to respond to #also the Legal team IS the team that should be interpreting the TOS #that is literally their thing #The TOS is a legal document #someone without a legal background should not be interpreting it

[tabbyphobos]

So I started A Court of Thorns and Roses the other day, and actually made some progress before bed last night (Stardew Valley 1.6 is out, I dunno what you want from me). I am 90 pages in and I have something to tell fans of this series.

Acotar is Strictly Worse Black Jewels series.

I read Throne of Glass years ago and in the back it had an interview with Maas. One of the questions was about her favorite authors and she mentioned Anne Bishop. I could see some of the inspirations she took from it: the salt mines being a prison, a badass assassin girl, stuff like that.

But ho-lee shit.

Lucien is, so far, Lucivar--he even uses the phrase "old son." I dunno who Tamlin is supposed to be, but the Fae are clearly the Blood. High Fae are likely Warlord Princes and Queens. Having different fae that are different species is LITERALLY the Kindred. I'm just waiting to see where Kaelas and Ladvarian are. And Andras the wolf? It's that Arcerian cat coat Karla sees someone wearing, and finds herself horrified to find that that cat was a witch and they slaughtered her for her skin.

"But Tabby," you ask, "why do you say strictly worse?"

I Capital H HATE keeping things from the reader by not telling the main character. I get it; Feyre is our conduit into this new world she's in. It's a writing technique as old as time. But nobody tells her anything, so we're just frustrated waiting for the story to start.

Black Jewels gives us a prologue that introduces the main plot and a character we will never have the pleasure of reading from the perspective of again, and why. After that, the book assumes you are in the world and doesn't hold back. It shows Lucivar and Daemon in their slave conditions. It shows Saetan growing tired of his vigil waiting for Witch. And it doesn't wait; Lucivar meets Jaenelle in the first chapter, first scene. And his last line in that scene? "Witch now walked the realms." It's the plot in action.

A Court of Thorns and Roses keeps threatening violence. So far these have been so empty I don't believe them. Black Jewels shows the torture the slaves undergo, and the responses Lucivar and Daemon inflict on their captors. Daemon is not called the Sadist for no reason. In Heir, Jaenelle literally splatters a man around the room. And the Kindred aren't safe either; the end of Heir shows how a unicorn kills a man, and it is pretty fucked up.

So why is Acotar popular and Black Jewels is not? So far, it looks like it's because Acotar doesn't come with the triggering content Black Jewels does.

Black Jewels has genital mutilation, pedophilia, child abuse, sexual slavery, rape, literal actual gaslighting, animal cruelty, and probably more but it's been a few years since I read this, my favorite series.

Again, I am 90 pages into A Court of Thorns and Roses, so I may be wrong. Maybe it gets better. Maybe they stop hiding information from the main character for no damn reason. Maybe they do stop talking about ripping someone into ribbons and actually do the deed.

But Acotar fans, I am BEGGING you. Give Black Jewels a try. A major criticism is that it's very gendered, and you know what? They're right. But you will be so surprised at the similarities, it will be as if Maas wrote another 11-12 books in the Acotar series.

#acotar #black jewels series #tabby talks about books #dark fantasy #a court of thorns and roses #daughter of the blood #heir to the shadows

[yellowocaballero]

What Is A Character?

This is not writing advice. This is a highly truncated version of a manifesto. I am correct. I have solved the mystery of a hundred Tumblr fights, thousand comic book forum threads lasting for three hundred pages. I'm just right.          

A while back somebody mentioned that I had a pretty unique take on Tim Drake, a comic book character with a thousand characterizations. I ended up talking a little bit about ‘how to write a comic book character’, and how amorphous the definition of a character really is. Or, really, how ill-defined the ontology of a 'characterization' is. After rereading a lot of Batman comics in preparation for The Batman movie, and this deeply unfortunate Moon Knight thing, I’d like to revisit it. I am speaking predominantly in terms of comic books, since they’re definitely the easiest example for this, but you could apply this whole bag to a lot of different situations (Star Wars is almost as bad as comics) and maybe characterization as a whole. Nobody asked for this, but this is my blog and opinions were made to be heard (this is 90% of my problem). I swear I will try to make this as short as possible while still arguing my point, but my point will need to be argued.

The central question is this: what is a true, real character? The conclusion I eventually reach in this essay is will sound like bullshit but you will understand that I am correct. Rest under the cut.

The absolute inherent nature of any media that lasts for a stupid long time, has a stupid amount of different creators and creative teams, and passes between different owners and mediums like hot potatoes, is that it will be contradictory. Even without the insane continuity issues of Star Wars, comic book writer Michael will outright retcon Henry’s backstory for Wonder Girl because Michael fucking hates Henry. James fucked Henry’s wife so Henry will write in a character that James created and then murder them gruesomely. Geoff Johns is there. All of this means that everybody, from the execs to the creators to the fan content creators to the fanbase, ultimately do have decide who Batman/Obi-Wan/Sherlock Holmes ‘really is’. This is important – it decides the future of a character.

 It’s not the origin story of the character. It’s not decided by who created the character (Otherwise everybody here would love Miles Morales for who Bendis wrote him as, instead of himself in ITSV – and they really don’t). I think the answer to this question is determined by consensus from every group I just listed. It’s what people, basically, agree on. Which means that a character’s true character is the character that everybody thinks they are.

Point One: The Power of the Disney

The first way this can be determined is, basically, by their most popular incarnation. I say Hawkeye and you think of Fraction/Aja Hawkeye. I say Tony Stark and you think MCU. I say Sherlock Holmes and you think of the book Holmes if you’re embittered by the BBC version and you live spitefully and you think the BBC version if you aren’t. I say Vic Sage as the Question and you think of the JLU version, which comes from the Denny O’Neil 1980s version, which has nothing to do with the character’s origins as a shitty objectivist mouthpiece. The Question, as a character, just is not a Randian, even if he was created that way. He’s a quirky conspiracy theorist. That’s who he is, because that’s the guy who pops into your head. You’d argue with me if I said he was a Randist. The people reading this who actually know the Question is are probably shocked by the Randist thing.

This can apply by transitive property too – I say Teen Titans and you think of the baller 2005 cartoon, right? That was based off the Wolfman/Perez 1980s TT. I wouldn’t call 2005 TT the ‘real’ TT, I’d call Wolfman/Perez the real TT – because it created the 2005 one, and was also hugely influential in creating a soapy teen drama comic book scene. It’s marked by influence. Nobody gave a shit about Thor before MCU Thor, so he’s Thor now – how influential was 1970s Journey into Mystery?

So the first idea is that the ‘real character’ of a comic character can change through runs or mass media becoming very prominent and making that characterization the most prominent in people’s minds. The second idea is that this change can happen more gradually through a cultural or reception-based shift.

Point Two: Drift Compatibility

Harley Quinn has changed a lot as a character from Batman: The Animated Series. She had a few interesting quirks, but she was really 100% a bad guy. I can put maybe the genesis of her more modern understanding in the Injustice comic, which presented basically a more interesting and intelligent and well-rounded feminist Harley. The fan reception was positive, the creators wrote that kind of Harley more and more, the fanbase reacted positively, the fanbase reacted negatively to Suicide Squad until she was rewritten into the BOP version, and through fan reception and gradual shift we get the #feminist we have today.

You can also say very much the same about Deadpool. I grew up on the 90s Deadpool and Deadpool & Cable, and the drift into the modern guy has actually been pretty insane for reasons too long to list here (he tortured Blind Al?). Reception to the Deadpool you’re thinking of was just better, and the Deadpool movie basically cemented that idea of Deadpool in popular consciousness.

Sometimes this change happens very suddenly, like with Fraction/Aja's Hawkeye, but sometimes it is a result of trial and error decided by fan reception and the zeitgeist of the times and the comic book tone. 90s Deadpool does not fit in '20s comics. BTAS Harley Quinn would receive some boos for being defined by her abusive boyfriend. These things change with culture, comic book fads & zeitgeists, and fans liking a character so much in one way that the creators wire them more and more that way.

So that’s the second idea: that the drift can happen within books through fan reception, and is eventually reflected in mass media and cements the personality until we cycle back into the first idea.

Point Three: The Inmates Run The Asylum

The third idea is a really logical extension of this: that the fandom and fanon version of the characters can grow to eclipse any characterization from 1) or 2), and that when this fan interpretation of a character becomes so rampant it becomes the new ‘consensus’ of the character. Batman can defeat anyone with enough prep time. Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy are unproblematic girlbosses. Spider-Gwen became so popular and such a big character solely through her pretty dope design that got super popular and went viral on the internet. If you cut out the middle man of the mass media and canon comics, then you have the fandom creations.

This drift is making its way into the mainstream. I won't talk here about fandomization of media, but the fanon characterizations and tropes are starting to enter Point #2 territory: that is, creators are realizing that the fandom plots and tropes are what people want, and they're creeping into the mainstream. The Webtoon Wayne Family Adventures is the greatest example of this, anywhere. That Webtoon is a million fanfics brought to life, and it's helping cement those fanfic dynamics and characterizations into 'the real Batfam' - to the point where the traditional comics Batfam is being dismissed as 'not real'.

Memes are intensely powerful, here! Every comic fan from around ten years ago knew the Squirrel Girl can defeat everybody meme. Now she has a comic and she’s pretty famous, through sheer memery. Sometimes a ‘true character’ can be derived solely from their meme status, if there is truly nothing better or nothing else to the character. Sometimes meme status can give them a book, which fleshes them out and makes a real character out of it. Virality is a huge force, and when a character goes viral then businesses jump on it and recreate what people liked about it as quickly as possible - and, sometimes, as influentially as possible.

Part Five: If You Agreed With My Other Points You Have To Admit That I Am Correct

 So, logically. When you ask the question ‘what’s Moon Knight’s real characterization before the MCU show, which is pretty clearly a huge deviation from the comics and his comic self?’...and if you are a Moon Knight fan I'm very sorry about this...you're valid, alla youse are valid...

You see that nobody really gives a shit about Moon Knight. He has never had an influential run. Barely anybody had heard of him before the show. Nobody can list a single thing about the guy. Nobody’s read a single Moon Knight comic. The only panel from Moon Knight that I’m willing to bet the vast majority of this website has seen, that everybody thinks is real, that is 100% of what they know about Moon Knight, is this joke meme panel. That is Photoshopped. (If you didn’t know it’s Photoshopped, now you do – the other joke Moon Knight Panels you’ve seen are also photoshopped). This is not a real image from the comics. However, taking into account everything else I've said...

This meme Photoshop one panel image of Moon Knight is the definitive, true, actual comics Moon Knight goodbye everybody I’m right and nobody can change my mind.

#there you go I solved comic books and Star Wars for you #deadpool #harley quinn #moon knight #comic book meta #comic books #fandom meta #media meta #I know how long-winded I get so I really did keep this as short as possible #I could go more in depth into almost any sentence in this post #so if I seem like I'm generalizing it's because I am #also obviously no shade at anybody or anything etc #the only things or people i hate are michael henry and james #the final secret finale note I do want to end on is: #there's no real ANYTHING #real doesn't EXIST #stop saying 'so and so is real' #whatever you're thinking of it probably isn't! #unless it's a meme photoshop panel of moon knight #which in this case is very real! #my writing #my asks

[armoredsuperheavy]

A Thousand Cakes and Yours Among Them

I’m flattered by recent attention on Tumblr for my bookbinding posts, and I’m glad the practice of binding fic has resonated with folks!

I periodically get questions about being able to buy these books. I thought I’d address that publicly.

The Gift Economy of Fandom

The vast majority of my bookbinding projects (over 90 and counting so far) have been strictly volunteer - that is, I’ve read the fic, or been recommended it by a trusted friend, and chosen to bind it, based on my own arbitrary evaluations.

Binding means two copies. One goes to the author, as a gift. The other I keep in a slowly growing archive. They are not for sale at any price. Nobody is paid for their labor, and I am not running a business. I am spending out of my own pocket for every piece of paper, every tool, all shipping costs. I accept small tips from authors if they wish, but they are under no pressure to send me money, and a tip doesn’t come remotely close to the value of my labor hours. But why should they pay me? They wrote the entire goddamn book for free.

I approach fandom in the old-school way, as a community-focused practice and a “gift economy” - something a lot of newer participants of fan culture are drifting away from as the incentive to monetize fan works grows. The reasons for it are understandable. But I think this shift in fundamental approach is going to cost us a lot, as a subculture and as a community, in the long run. 

Do we really just wanna be customers/consumers and “content producers” in fandom? Fuck that, I want an actual community. I’m not a content producer. I’m a person making connections to other people and slowly growing a modern day online queer found family.

Because I seek community in fandom, and see fanwork as contributions to the “potluck”, I see this as just bringing my dish to the party here. I brought a cake - and it seems popular. If anyone else brought another cake, we’d have MORE of it and nobody would complain. Two cakes, and so forth.

What I’m getting at is, these are not PRODUCTS for you to BUY. These are artifacts of a community and a demonstration of community activism.  In order to GET one, you must get involved. You must either write a brilliant longform fic that I’m into,OR you can become a Guerrilla publisher in your own right!

Commissions

I’m uncomfortable with taking commissions and have only done it I think three times. Every time, I had to be convinced to do it. And I spent every penny of it on supplies and shipping and whatnot.

There are two main reasons I’m not open for commissions:

1 It immediately shifts the calculus of whose work gets printed. People with spending money get to see their chosen work in print. People without, not so much.

2. I’m less able to self-direct which work gets printed. I like the power to choose what to bind. I say what gets printed at my house. No outside money is steering that decision. The decision is not driven by money whatsoever. 

Without the money, I don’t have to give a fuck about the optics of which book I chose. I don’t have to worry about follower count. I print a lot of work that got “canceled”, authors beset by purity police for being “problematic”, etc. If I were trying to run a profitable business, these works are the last ones I’d choose to print. And that’s exactly why I’m printing them here.

OK but I want a Book, Sell Me One

Well, don’t wave money in my face. I’m sorry, that’s not why I’m here. See above.

If you’d like to actually take up bookbinding similar to what I am doing, I can provide you with information to get started. There are no secrets about my process, just trial and error and a shit ton of work. Just drop me a line. 

I realize that not everybody has the resource of time, money, or patience to figure out how to make books like mine from scratch. But that doesn’t mean you’re completely out of options.

Preservation of fic doesn’t have to look like a completely bespoke handmade book with sewn signatures and hand marbled papers.

It also doesn’t have to be a professional-grade 200 page glossy hardcover kickstarted mega-project with 100 contributors.

I’d really like to see the practice of print zines come back. Print your fic in a booklet and sew it up with a piece of thread. Mail it to your fandom friends. Go guerrilla publisher yourself. And if you didn’t write it, don’t forget to give a copy to the author: it’s the only ethical way to make use of their work.

I don’t want to be the only bookbinder to ever touch a fanfic. I want lots of people binding. Two cakes - nay, a thousand cakes, and the feast of cake was legendary and not soon forgotten, and slices of the cake were passed down to our children and grandchildren, and the cake survives even after we are gone. Let’s get baking.

- May 2020.

#bookbinding #fuck the purity police #fandom

[astoldbygingersnaps]

Harper’s 2020 Fic Wrap-Up

my very good friend and incredibly talented felow writer @sagemoderocklee came up with the idea of doing an end of the year fic wrapup in an attempt to polish the turd known as 2020, and since i actually managed to get some writing done this year i figured, why not jump on the bandwagon? 

a lot of super duper fucking shitty things happened in 2020, but i will always be proud that in this incredibly chaotic, stressful, and challenging year i managed to produce almost 180k of content (and that’s not even counting the writing i started in 2020 but haven’t published yet). so, to celebrate what’s been a pretty big achievement for me, i wanted to go through the various projects i’ve spent the last twelve months working on and give a preview of my plans for 2021.

let’s jump in!

projects i worked on/completed in 2020:

first off, let’s start with the beast to end all beasts, my personal baby, and honestly probably the reason most people follow me -- star trek au:

something bigger than the sky (shiita; 44,163 words; completed): 

i’ve said this before, but the whole idea for star trek au was literally just a joke between me and my-then girlfriend, now-fiancee, and eternal shiita enabler alexa aka @durintrash (by the way, if you follow me for my fics and you DON’T follow alexa for her corresponding art WHAT, exactly, are you doing with your life????) where i sat in a space-themed diner and said ‘haha imagine itachi as a vulcan.’ but then i blinked and suddenly somehow i’d written the prologue and the first chapter of SBTTS in the span of a week. it’s like i was possessed by a fanfic demon.

it sounds super cheesy but i honestly can’t say enough how important this fic has been to me and how much it’s pushed me to be a more productive and more dedicated writer. previously i spent a lot of time Thinking about writing and occasionally i’d put a few words on the page and then i’d go... do... something... else. but star trek au was the first idea i loved enough that it actually pushed me to write and keep writing and not give up even when i was confronted with things like writer’s block and worry over the quality of my writing. so thank you, star trek au, for being the light in a very dark year for me. 

by the end of SBTTS, i felt like i accomplished everything i wanted to do with the story’s beginning installment: i introduced all the characters and set the groundwork for their development; i showed what life on the corvus was like and how starfleet, the federation, and the universe functioned; and, more than anything, i was able to sketch out both the main protagonists -- itachi and shisui -- with all their strengths and flaws, show their relationship to one another, and hint at how that relationship would progress. 

all the stars are closer (shiita; 75,195 words; completed)

considering how slow i used to be at writing, i thought it would be, like, twelve years before i managed to get to the second part in the series. BUT then covid happened and i half-lost, half-quit my job, and like a lot of people this year i ended up with a lot of free time on my hands. and so, like a fucking demon, i finished this part in two and a half months. 

when i originally planned this part out, i really thought it would be a lot shorter and a lot lighter atmosphere-wise than it turned out. instead, this second section of the story ended up being pretty meaty in terms of length and in subject.

that said, overall, i’m really happy with how ATSAC turned out. i loved the way the characters progressed, how the relationships deepened, and how we were able to see this universe grow bigger and more complicated. and i’m very satisifed with how it set the stage for part three, which takes us to...

lovers alone wear sunlight (shiita; 41,518 words; in progress)

there’s... a lot about this part that i just can’t talk about yet, a) because it isn’t finished and b) because it contains some of the biggest plot points in the entire series thus far. if you’ve been keeping up with the stardates thus far (which i encourage you to do!) you know what part three is leading up to: itachi leaving the corvus and the dissolution of shisui and itachi’s growing relationship. 

with that in mind, i’m... more than a little terrified about writing part three, which is why the third chapter has been languishing in my google drive for months now. (and also why i started not one, but TWO new fics to cope with my writer’s block. whoops.) chapter three is where all the parts come together and shit hits the fan, and i can only hope that everyone will be as excited to read it as i am to publish it. 

next up, the two other projects i began this year:

salvation comes only in our dreams (shiita; canon divergence; 16,835 words; in progress)

for a long time, i’ve wanted to write something that’s actually set in the naruto universe and works to correct a lot of the flaws that i see in the series. there are a lot of things that bother me about naruto, but i think one of the things that frustrates me the most is the really messy and in some ways offensive resolution to the uchiha coup plot thread, and i wanted to write a story that dealt with the complicated themes of the series--imperialism, oppression, genocide, child soldiers--but, like, didn’t suck and completely drop the ball. thus, the massacre au was born. 

my main goal was to tell a story that showed a lot of these characters in ways we’ve never seen them before, specifically itachi. i didn’t want to write itachi as just an idealist who suffers and Suffers AND SUFFERS for konoha yet still remains loyal to the village for some unfathomable reason like he is in the series. i wanted to write an itachi that was sharper, more jaded, and more suspicious of the world around him, but overall was still a good person with a kind heart. and for shisui, well... obviously there’s a lot going on there, too. 

this is easily the darkest story i’ve ever written, and as the plot thickens it will certainly get darker with relationship dynamics that are complicated and unhealthy At Best. i hope that as the story goes on it’s a ride people continue to enjoy, as i was super pleasantly surprised at how popular this fic became (compared to my usual stats, at least) 

oceans between us (shiita; alternate universe; 15,039 words; in progress)

it’s good to know that i continue to be the most ridiculously niche version of myself as yes, i wrote a fucking shiita atonement au. 

with each fic i write i try to have a very specific voice that suits the particular piece and distinguishes it from other stories that include the same characters. for example, star trek au chapters tend to be more fun and light-hearted (especially shisui POV chapters) and lean more into the action movie and sci-fi adventure feel of the star trek universe, while the massacre au is written in a way that’s much heavier and guided by itachi’s emotions and experiences. my main goal with this story was to give it the same romantic, operatic, almost hazy quality that the movie has, which reflects the period setting and also the nature of this grand tragic love story. 

i knew from the beginning that there were going to be a lot of things that i cut from the film in my retelling, like the lola subplot and obviously the setting of pre-wwii england. i also knew i wanted to explore some of the aspects of the film that were implied more than outright stated, like the themes of classism and upper-class privileges. and more than anything i wanted to structure this piece around this idea of tension building and building until it finally snaps and there’s just a world of mess and hurt and loss that affects these two characters in two very different ways. 

also, the sex scene. i haven’t written a sex scene for anything in, like, a decade, so that was a lot of pressure. but i’m happy with how it came out and i think it ended up being an aspect of the story that felt like both a natural progression and necessary to show the affection these two people have for one another.

originally i was just going to end the story with shisui going to jail, but when i told alexa this i genuinely thought she was going to kill me. so, that didn’t happen lmao. but the more i tried to imagine what a second chapter would look like, the more i realized she was right, and it would have been a terrible idea to end the fic there. as for whether or not the final chapter will keep That Ending... who can say?

goals i have for 2021:

finishing lovers alone wear sunlight and, if i’m very lucky, beginning the fourth and second to last part of star trek au (yes, as it currently stands this 160k+ word series is only halfway finished. sorry not sorry)

publishing the next chapter of salvation comes only in our dreams (i don’t know when it will drop. i don’t know anything about this fic. please do not @ me) 

completing oceans between us (the second and final chapter is currently sitting at about 4k words and will probably end up at about 15k in total)

completing and publishing a new fic i’ve started at the very end of 2020, which is the shiita jurassic world au nobody but me and alexa knew they wanted. it’s essentially a 90s romcom with dinosaurs and i cannot Wait to share it. (it’s at about 9k right now and will probably end up being around 20k to 23k in total... maybe...)

FINALLY starting my dream project: the shiita olympics au i’ve been planning for years, where itachi is a figure skater and shisui is a hockey player (i’d like to keep this under 150k but at this point trying to keep my stories at a managable word count is a losing battle)

anyway, that’s it! if you managed to get this far in this very self-indulgent and shameless bit of self promotion, congrats! also, a very big thank you to everyone who’s read my fics, left me kudos and comments, and spent their time on my work, because it really does mean the world to me. 

here’s hoping 2021 is a much healthier and happier year for us all! 

#my fic #shiita #this was so much fun to write so kudos to eeri for coming up with this idea

[mojo120]

Three Jokers.

Soooo... that all felt pretty pointless.... Basically all just to go “the Joker likes the Fuck with Batman, also the REAL Joker is one.... we’ve basically almost exclusively been using since the 90s!” Which is frankly unfortunate because i think “The Comedian” is the worst Joker. He’s just too much of a goddamn edgelord that he forgets he’s supposed to actually be funny as well as scary most of the time. The Bronze Age version of the Clown will forever be the best Joker IMO. 

Like there were some interesting things in there, the stuff between Bruce and Joe Chill was good, the idea that Bruce figured out the Joker’s true identity within just a week of meeting him but it HAS to be kept a secret from everyone to prevent his old family from being hounded by the press, maybe the Joker himself basically everyone was interesting though as a reader I can’t deny it’s somewhat frustrating we weren’t let in on the secret

The Jason/Babs stuff was I mean it felt mostly better written than last issue.. but still bad. Also Jason Todd is apparently the dumbest man in existence, seriously your like “I need to tell Babs this super important thing but I guess I can’t bring myself to say it outloud, so I wrote a letter” and he.... tries just taping it to her door with shitty scotch tape... like Jason boy you know Mail exist right? Or if you HAD to do it personally like that slipping it under the door, or emailing her it. Basically ANYTHING would of been smarter and more reliable than fucking tape on a door.  Bruce is a dick for basically attacking Jason over killing one of the Jokers. Seriously you have a no Kill rule Bruce and I think that’s an important part of Batman but.... that doesn’t mean other people HAVE to follow it and let the crazy super uber mass murderer live.  Really it’s just to me more proof and unlike a lot of people here I quite like most of Geoff Johns work. Johns just doesn’t really GET Batman the way he gets Green Lantern, the JSA, The Flash and Superman. There’s just a natural disconnect when he tries to write Batman stories. He CAN tell good ones when he’s playing entirely in his own playground like Batman Earth One but in the main universe his Batman stories almost always fall pretty flat. You saw this a lot in his Justice League run too (though to his credit the pages where Batman talks down Jessica when she’s going full Power Ring are incredibly good Batman content)

#Three Jokers #DC Comics #Batman #Comic spoilers #The Joker

[bthump]

now listen. i LOVE berserk and when i watched the 90s anime i binged the whole thing in two days because ive got no self control. but i feel like the eclipse has taken a harsh toll on me and i coudlnt handle it. ive tried to read further on from the manga and i dont think i can bear with how violent it seems to get from there on out- but i find myself obsessing over griffiths character and i feel like i have to know what happens next. how do i cope with this pain ???

oof that’s a tough one.

Honestly if it’s the violence in general, yk sword swinging and blood and guts and whatnot then I think you’re kind of out of luck unfortunately. There’s the 2016/17 anime which covers some of the post-eclipse stuff, which might be easier to watch in terms of violence because... it sucks lmao, the animation is awful so the violence might be harder to take seriously. but hey afaik it does tell a chunk of the rest of the story, so maybe it’s an option.

But otherwise it’s just impossible to skip the violence because it’s so constant in the story, and many important things happen during violent scenes.

On the other hand, if it’s specifically the sexual violence that’s hard for you to take, I might actually be able to help: I already have a big list of content warnings with manga page numbers written up that I made for someone else.

I’ll copypaste it here under a cut on the offchance that it helps. And if there’s anything specific other than sexual violence you want warned for, like suicide or self-harm or non-sexual parental abuse, just send me another ask and I’ll try my best. But yeah, gore in general is just too prevalent.

Also I wrote this for someone unfamiliar with the whole story so you can probably skip the golden age stuff if you’re not reading it.

Just so you know going in, this mainly just focuses on visual depictions of sexual assault. I don't think I could write a guide that covers every rape threat or mention or insinuation, in part because I'd have to re-read the story front to back, and also because like, significant plot points revolve around threats and discussions of rape so it's not really possible to skip a lot of it.

Chapter and page numbers are taken from the scans on mangasee and probably won't match the physical volumes. (They changed some of the formatting on the site recently, hopefully that doesn’t affect the page numbers but apologies if it does)

Black Swordsman arc:

nothing that i can remember. the story opens with Guts fucking a monster before killing her but the sex is consensual lol.

Golden Age arc:

Guts is raped as a child by Donovan, who tells Guts that Gambino sold him to him. ch 9, pg 44 - ch 10, pg 15

Guts has a nightmare about it ch 13, pg 2 - 9 If you skip this, it's worth knowing that guilt for killing Gambino features heavily in this nightmare, and that as he wakes up the monstrous representation of Donovan shifts into Casca who is lying on top of him. Guts is close to panicking as he wakes up before realizing that Casca is a woman. She's gone when he fully wakes up on page 10.

brace yourself for rape threats towards casca in ch 15

A nobleman attempts to rape Casca in a flashback to her childhood, Griffith interrupts the attempt by slicing off his ear ch 16, pg 13 - 14 If you skip this it's worth noting that Casca's reaction is helpless acceptance and believing it's natural.

ch 17 as a whole is p heavy with discussions of pedophilia and graphic self harm, but the csa isn't graphic and it's not really skippable anyway, just something worth bracing for.

more rape threats towards casca in ch 18

Casca's pursuers catch her and attempt to rape her ch 20, pg 18 - 21 Casca fights off her attacker on pg 21

brace yourself for Gennon's return at the end of chapter 23

rapey implications at the beginning of chapter 24 w/ Gennon thinking about Griffith

more rape threats in chapter 26+27 as Casca fights Adon

end of chapter 37 - halfway through ch 38 This whole sex scene with Charlotte is really fucked up, it's treated like consensual sex by the narrative but Charlotte says "no" early on before getting into it. I wouldn't skip it, there's some important emotional stuff here that's hard for me to convey, but I'd be aware going in that Miura is leaning heavily on v misogynist tropes in this scene.

discussion of incest ch 39, pg 7

incestuous rape attempt ch 39, pg 15 - 19 and ch 40, pg 2 - 7 (I wouldn't recommend skipping the 2 pages in between which return to Griffith in the torture chamber) And if you do skip this the things worth knowing are that Charlotte fights off the king and screams for Griffith to help her, upon which the king abandons the attempt and flees.

ch 46, pg 15 - ch 47, pg 5 Guts has a graphic flashback to his rape during sex with Casca and strangles her.

might want to brace yourself for the torturer being v suggestively creepy to Griffith in his scenes, particularly in chapter 54, but there's nothing explicit there

Wyald begins to choke a woman he was seemingly having consensual sex with ch 58 pg 20 the entire sex scene is ch 58 pg 18-20 if you skip it the only mildly important part is that Wyald mentions he already has business with Griffith to take care of, suggesting many or all apostles are aware he has the crimson behelit

ch 59, pg 16 graphic rape in the last panel. i'd recommend reading the rest of the page and just not scrolling down, last panel just describes how the black dog knights would rape women and murder children etc.

ch 59, pg 25-26 graphic rape

ch 60, pg 1-2, and pg 9-10 dismembered bodies skewered on swords, the imagery is p sexually violent if you skip it, guts thinks to himself that wyald's troops are being driven by fear. wyald attacks him with a body on his sword, which guts notices and which informs his outrage

implied rape threat ch 63, pg 18 - 19

rape attempt ch 64 pg 9 - 17, though Casca's torn clothes unfortunately remain throughout the rest of the Wyald fight, and Guts' response to her is terrible If you skip, Griffith sees Wyald grab Casca and tries to get to her despite not being able to walk, Guts eventually wakes up and saves her, nothing else of note

ch 68, from pg 15 to end of scene Wyald strips and humiliates Griffith, it's not overtly sexual and it's not skippable but it might be something you want to be prepared for

ch 71, pg 4 - 7 Griffith makes a sexual advance on Casca. It's not a rape attempt, he stops when she says stop, but it's wordless and might be another thing worth being warned for going in

ch 72 pg 10 - 13 Another one that's not really overt and not skippable but is just kind of vaguely sexual in a disturbing way. Griffith's nightmare sequence of a life with Casca suggests they have a kid together while Griffith is pretty far removed from reality, can't talk, and can barely move

ch 81, pg 21 - 22 The monster rape begins, nothing of value is lost if you skip these pages.

ch 85, pg 8 - 16 More monster rape

ch 86, pg 11 - ch 87, pg 16 Femto rapes Casca in a horrifically grautitous and eroticized rape scene in which the focus is entirely on Guts' feelings as he's forced to watch, with nothing from Casca's point of view. it's bad.

ch 93, pg 14 - 17 Guts tears Casca's dress after hot soup spills on it, then nearly kisses her before she shoves him away and runs, screaming.

Now I have to apologize because I can only warn for major rape scenes here on out. My memory of the post-golden age story isn't the best and there's some random background assault and rape for tone setting, sudden eclipse flashbacks featuring monsters holding up Casca, etc and I don't remember every instance.

Lost Children arc

general tw for abuse, implied csa, implied incest, this is a really dark arc tbh

assault attempt ch 95, pg 3

I believe there's a scene where Jill is sexually harassed by one of her father's friends in a tavern, but I can't find it.

violent rape, potential csa triggers ch 109, pg 14

Conviction Arc

general tw for a few full page spreads full of torture, including sexual torture, but I can't find specific pages

rape attempt, eclipse flashbacks ch 124, pg 6 - 9 + pg 12

possessed farnese tries to fuck guts' sword, idk ch 125, pg 8 - 12

eclipse flashback ch 130, pg 8 - 9

a monster sexually assaults casca ch 147, pg 21 - 22, ch 148 pg 3 - 5

Millenium Falcon Arc

the beast of darkness implies that guts should rape and kill casca in a nightmare. the imagery isn't graphic but it's fairly disturbing. I wouldn't recommend skipping this part but it's worth bracing yourself for. ch 187, pg 21-22

this is the scene where guts assaults casca ch 189 pg 11 - ch 190, pg 9 if you skip it, what happens is that casca is assaulted by bandits, which become monsters from the eclipse from her point of view, but she grabs one of their swords and kills them. guts finds her as she's holding the sword, naked and bloody, and pushes her down and forcibly kisses her. there's some gory beast of darkness imagery in guts' mind. guts bites her breast and then seems to come to his senses and stops. the scene ends abruptly.

single panel flashback to casca right after guts has assaulted her, not very graphic but just in case ch 199 pg 2

trolls rape a village woman ch 204 pg 5-7

a lot of graphic troll rape and gore featuring naked women ch 216 bottom of page 12 - end of chapter, easily skippable (tho top of page 12 is good)

somewhat sexualized image of a naked eviscerated woman ch 217 pg 10

another panel of trolls raping women ch 217, pg 13 hopefully that’s all of it, but apologies if I missed some, these troll chapters suck

slan getting sexually menacing with guts ch 219, pg 13 through ch 221, pg 3 this isn't really skippable, but fair warning going in. it's stuff like slan pressing him against her tits, tearing off his shirt, making a lot of suggestive comments, and kissing him on the last page

I can't find this, there are so many potential chapters it could be in, but at some point Raksas and Silat end up spying on Ganishka together and they see that he creates his demon army by immersing kidnapped pregnant women in a vat full of... apostle essence idk, and it corrupts the fetuses and turns them into demons. it's graphic and fucked up so brace yourself when you get to a scene where Raksas is leading Silat around Ganishka’s palace. ETA it's chapter 233, thank you @satanswolfcut

Fantasia Arc

eclipse flashback ch 354, pg 5

#ask #a #b #Anonymous #reference #general info

[vinkumakkara]

🎞💥💭

hey i already did two of those... well im gonna do em hardmode

🎞️ - top 3 movies/specials 

i have seen so many of them... gonna go w/ current moods:

1. Prison of the Past that i’m extremely insistent on calling Prisoner of the Past because im projecting. i want the good ol rupans back. anyways this is still rly good and i like it

2. Alcatraz Connection. an ultra rare Good Zenigata, for at least a lil bit

3. ahh shit fuck uhhh i guess im gonna go with the Lupin III & Meitantei Conan crossover special (NOT movie) because it was just so refreshing overall. visually absolutely hilarious, Aoyama’s snout people combined with the regular modern animes was delectable

either that or Nusumareta Lupin which shocked me by how entertaining it was, basically the biggest issue is that they used the red jacket designs, the writing and pacing emulated the comic shockingly well but i feel like the designs kinda held back the way they wrote the actual characters if that makes sense?

special mention: Another Page’s Zenigata. i can’t list it as one of my faves because i think it’s so miserably boring beyond Z, even he can’t save it

💥 - do you prefer the serious or more light-hearted content?

it’s Lupin so it has to be a mix of both. i’d say i still prefer the more “serious” stuff, but having recently suffered through the 90s specials that were more straightforward action anime, god i definitely don’t want that shit at least like Lupin as a “cool” generic action anime hero is a fuckin cursed concept

i guess i could say i’d prefer something genuinely more aimed at mature audiences like Secret of Mamo rather than the juvenile straight dudebro wankfests of the 90s

💭 - have any character headcanons? 

no actually im all out i cant think rn

#Anonymous

[chainsawwrites]

@dailyrpc​ question 68: what would make you decline an application ?

So as someone who ran a full app RP that got up to 90 characters for a stretch of time, I think I’m in a pretty good position to answer this. To be quite honest we accepted almost every app we got (and I think most people do) but we did go through every app and I ended up with a bit of a process.

TL;DR: It’s mostly about red flags.

1: Had we heard of you before?

First of all, we didn’t accept anyone we knew to cause trouble (and if you RP in the same fandom for a while, you know the names + other admins will warn you about particularly disastrous writers). We did this both through your alias + ooc info, but also through the blog you submitted your app from. Red flags included signs that you’d recently left an RP and immediately trash talked it, or had pages and pages of drama clearly visible.

Example: I’m talking to a friend from another RP about a girl named Heather who wrote a Greengrass OC that blatantly ignored other people’s limits when talking about sexual content, and then I see an app from someone named Heather for a Greengrass OC. 

Example: I click on the blog you applied from out of curiosity, and the first three pages are you fighting with anons who are calling you racist.

Example: I click on the blog you applied from, and it’s the blog for a character from your last RP. There’s a big monologue at the top asking people to message you to find out ‘what really happened’ when you got kicked out.

Second of all, we didn’t evaluate apps from our own friends not currently part of the RP-- those got passed onto other admins who weren’t friends w the person, or in some cases w close competition got identifying information stripped from them and sent to a friend who wasn’t in the RP who would tell us their thoughts.

2: Did you follow directions?

Artistic liberties are one thing, but if someone didn’t fill out the entire app or did so very incorrectly I took it as a red flag they’d likely argue over things like activity check. We’d of course reach out to the applicant to give them a chance to fix things, and if they weren’t jerks about it then it became no big deal. 

Example: You didn’t write down your time zone, wrote ‘male’ where you should have written your character’s pronouns, and are missing a para sample.

3: Is your writing coherent?

I work with nonnative speakers every day. I’m not and never have been a huge stickler for grammar and technically correct writing, but in a long-form literate RP we did need to make sure applicants’ writing was coherent. By that I mean-- if you wrote a paragraph, can I clearly understand what you mean or do your errors overwhelm the meaning?

Stronger writing skills often won out over weaker writing skills, but in our experience enthusiasm was a better predictor of who would stick around and make interesting/meaningful connections. If there wasn’t a massive difference in writing skill, I’d rather have an enthusiastic group member than someone with flawless purple prose.

Example: There is not a single punctuation mark or line break in a 300-word para sample.

4: Did reading this make me want to jump off a cliff? (TW: death, mental health)

People liked to do a few things in Harry Potter RP that ended up as massive red flags after reading a few hundred apps:

- Blonde Hufflepuff girl with no personality (except loving animals, gardening, and being incredibly pro-Order despite being from a super-rich pureblood family)

- Snape with mental health issues (these were uniformly gross; perhaps the peak of them was the ‘Snape had dissociative identity disorder and nothing was his fault’ app)

- Incredibly excessive trauma porn (and considering the RP took place in a literal war zone, the bar here was so fucking low. Dead parents? Cool. PTSD? Expected. Parents locked you in a cellar for fourteen years to drink your unicorn-animagus blood? That’s a bit far.)

- Marlene McKinnon with no personality except wanting to bang Sirius (invariably white blonde FC, except Mary Sue Badass this time)

5: Is it plagiarised?

We had a lot of problems with this, probably a lot more than you would expect. There’s just too much HP writing on the internet and it’s impossible to track down where a specific interpretation of Greyback came from, but it’s not that hard to trace back a para sample.

A few tips: don’t ask for an in-character paragraph sample, and encourage links to past RP blogs or copy-pasted self paras and the like. The blogs will give you a good idea of what the applicant will actually write, and the copy-pasted stuff is really easy to run through a plagiarism to see where else it’s been posted. 

Example: if you look here, you can see an online plagiarism checker linking something I wrote about seeing if something is plagiarised back to that post. 

6: Does your character interpretation clash with established stuff in the group?

Say you’re applying as Alecto Carrow, and half your bio revolves around Amycus. Except we already have an Amycus and it’s clear you haven’t talked to them about any of the assumptions you’ve made. That’s probably not gonna work out.

This works the other way around too-- I loved seeing bios that took group-specific lore into account and tied a character into past events and the like. It’s also awesome to see an application that creates an area of lore we didn’t have. One of our writers basically created a whole side plot of what was going on in Belarus that a lot of other characters ended up using too.

7: Is your character interpretation good?

Honestly, if it’s gotten to this point it’d have to be pretty damn bad for me to say no. A pretty standard character is fine and still can be very fun to write against, so this only really came up if there was competition in an app.

What I personally looked for here wasn’t uniqueness so much as a very well thought out character. Seeing headcanons that were fully explained or mini-stories about the character, requests for changes with reasoning behind them, or explanations of why a character did certain things were great. A really unique character acting at random is not. 

When it really came down to it, what really would break a tie would be the feeling of which person you’d be more excited to write with. If I had to give one piece of advice on how to write a good application, it would be to convey that you know your character and you’re excited to be there.

#tutorial #tag later #i wrote this in 15 minutes but later i'll go back and clean it up and make it part of my setting up an rp 101 series

[tonyglowheart]

@imaginaryelle replied to your post:*me sipping tea* (x)

I would really enjoy seeing more of your thoughts on this, if you ever want to share them.

:’) a lot of my thoughts are salty rants and I’m TGCF on main right now so uhhh not at the moment but if you wanna hmu on like a chat thing of some sort I probably will eventually rant about my dislike of The MXTX Antis and the Problematic Culture people and the purity culture wank :’)

actually you know what, since I’m a parody of myself and I’m like always mood of "and another thing,” I’m just going to. go for it ig

so my biggest thing, is with the MXTX antis/MDZS wank/MXTX wank. is like....god it FRUSTRATES me so fckn much lmfao in so many ways and on so many levels.  like listen. I’m not saying there isn’t stuff to critique in MDZS. But there’s people who are first off: critiquing the writing quality, when I’m like “there’s like a 90% chance you’re reading the EN translation, and probably from ExR, and honestly I know it’s not fandom etiquette to critique fan content bc we’re all doing this for free out of passion, BUT I do, in fact, have some major issues with ExR’s translation quality, and also I lowkey feel like they have a strong traditional yaoi bias and sometimes it leaks through in how they handle certain things.” Big mood of this twitter thread about how when you’re reading in TL you can’t be criticizing the writing bc you’re already reading it filtered and like. you gotta consider things like the TL’s own personal biases or takes, etc. Which I feel like some people don’t in their critique, or at least they don’t take the time to acknowledge it and instead start spinning off into more and more impassioned reactions to perceived slights or faults.

The other thing is like. I admit when I first read MDZS - which I did while simultaneously watching bc I was kind of using CQL as a vehicle to get into MDZS, I had the HARDEST time trying to read ExR’s translation when I was going into it cold many many many moods ago rip - I was also squicked out by the explicit scenes shown. It did remind me a lot of traditional yaoi tropes, and I wasn’t into it. HOWEVER I was also a psych major, and I want to point out that the T/N’s do read to me as having a strong yaoi bias, and also before ExR redid their site they had large “SERVING YAOI AND BL” banners on EVERY page lol. And I think that also primes people to see things a certain way. (I just. am :/ about ExR also bc like... their whole vibe as a “yaoi scanlator” and also I. can’t be sure the TL wasn’t 17 when they were tl’ing it lmfao,,  and they did the whole rant - which fine they apologized for, but I think sort of reflects on a general attitude still w/ the team - about how some other TL had bad quality or something, but their existing TL has a lot of clunky English phrasing and actually a lot of editing issues, too, I was creating myself a back-up copy from their site and like google docs was already catching a bunch of typos and tense issues and such :’) and that’s beyond clunky EN translation phrasing. I just am like. they have a patreon lol, so I can’t say ExR is doing it wholly not-for-profit/dollars, and also like... it’s not like they’re licensed? I get that within scanlation circles, there’s an etiquette of “first come first serve,” but with translation, I think fans are only served with more translations? but I also care about the original work lol, I mean I get the vanity of “I want MINE to be the AUTHORITATIVE tl” bc I feel that mood too, but also I’m like. fam you didn’t bid for a license lmao.)

But yeah like. My petty gripes with ExR aside lmfao, I think when you look at WangXian, the whole “it’s yaoi tropes” gets really strawman. Like from a Watsonian perspective, I mean like... both WWX and LWJ really ARE useless virgins, lol, WWX’s first kiss was stolen by LWJ and his whole idea of sex comes from porn; LWJ is GusuLan and like. yeah. Who is teaching them about lube? certainly not porn. (but this also gets into the whole. like people saying explicit material is “problematic” because it doesn’t show “realistic” sex and I’m like. fam it’s smut, not a sex manual.) And like... they’re both kinky and WWX has a pregnancy kink, and like... good for them I guess?

From a more Doylist perspective..... I think for me, I’m like. well why not? gay media doesn’t have to be uwu to be “Valid,” and like, the people who start attacking mxtx personally because of the way she chose to write WangXian, or saying she’s homophobic because of WangXian or she doesn’t have the range... I already Know they didn’t read TGCF or SV lol. (and yeah SV is more “problematic” but I also think it’s VERY genre aware and both satirizes and also plays with and subverts some of the typical genre “problematic” things. not everything, but like. again the whole idea that non-mainstream media needs to be held to a higher standard to not be cancelled? I don’t hold by that). [But more on the Doylist thing: it’s dumb to me that people react like it’s a moral failing of non-straight works if they don’t fit EXACTLY their personal idea of what a thing should be. And this comes up EVERY time there’s some new thing. hell it’s not even just lgbt-related stuff; Hamilton, Crazy Rich Asians, etc all had nitpicking. Which again, isn’t invalid! but also like. :/ because we DON’T have enough representation right now to pick, and my take is always: the solution is to get to the point where we can pick and choose and can afford to have bad media just like the straights/whites do :’)]

The thing about WWX and LWJ is neither of them, as they’re written in canon, fit within “traditional yaoi” seme/uke stereotypes. The kiss I see people rail against as “dubcon” and also their sex scenes but I’m like. yeah I think it’s fine to say it’s not your cup of tea but to say that that makes them traditional yaoi rapey tropes I’m like. Fam that’s not it lol. LWJ is shown as being SO incredibly responsive and attentive to WWX’s wishes and desires. I mean that’s examples of his passion exploding out, but we consistently see LWJ being respectful of WWX’s wishes and autonomy even when it like. fucks him/them over :’) like when WWX was so hell-bent on hurtling down the mo’dao route :’)

plus also WWX literally fantasizes about them retiring as farmers and he’s the one out working the fields and LWJ is staying at home weaving lol, like c’mon, ya wanna talk gender roles, let’s talk about this.

the other thing is the whole mxtx anti stuff about “she’s homophobic” and “she’s a filthy fujo” and I think there’s issues that people aren’t considering, which I don’t know as much about but I feel like it informs my consideration of mxtx - such as like... not everyone’s internet is as wide open as, like, the West. I don’t know so much about Chinese censorship other than it exists, but I’m like. I think this would affect people’s access to resources which would inform them about how things work/where people are with LGBT thought? It reminds me of when young tumblr kids trash talk older queer people for using terms they see as “problematic” now, and I’m like “you really gotta pause a moment of (1) have some empathy (2) consider the person’s individual personal and cultural context.” MDZS wasn’t made for a Western audience in mind lol, it’s not going to reflect Western values! And China has a different history with its LGBT progression and it’s m/m media, which I don’t know enough about to comment specifically, but I think it’s incredibly disingenuous to judge it based on Western standards. A lot of people probably don’t realize they are! in that it doesn’t even occur to them, which is why they feel so free with their judgment! But also I’m like. lowkey THAT’s a problem for me bc of like. cultural imperialism lmfao. and also reflective of EN-language imperialism, when people are judging EN tl’s they’re seeing on face value without realizing or considering that they’re...reading... a translation... and that translations are NOT in fact direct one-for-one and that there’s a LOT of considerations that go into both translating and reading a translation of a work.

I think the points antis pull up against MXTX is like... stuff she’s said before in interviews - and I don’t know from when, but I imagine years ago at this point - where she was asked about shipping the other characters in MDZS, and she said something I think about how to her, she wants to write in a way that “preserves realism” or maybe she believes in (I only read a TL of it, so I hold the exact phrasing with a grain of salt), and for her, not everyone is gay so she doesn’t write all of her named characters gay. and I’m like. whatever that’s her prerogative as the author. And I think there’s also something that I don’t know if it’s an official “rules”/”guidelines” she wrote bc again I’ve only seen secondhand/thirdhand sources, but it’s something mxtx-antis also quote, where she said to not break up the main couples and also don’t “reverse” them. but again when we’re getting into the shou/gong dynamics, that’s where I don’t feel comfortable commenting because I don’t know enough about the sociopolitical implications of these terms and how they interact within that fandom/community subset. But I do think people need to be taking the stuff they read - ESPECIALLY if they’re only reading it in EN - with a grain of salt. or like a big ol pinch of it. 

edit: I know more about this now lmao and I know exactly which question people use piecemeal of vilify her. Here’s a recent-ish translation someone did. Read it through - the WHOLE thing, and think about the wider context.

But also in general I just don’t think anyone is valid when we start getting into ad hominems lol. Especially when I feel like they’re not really taking a moment to consider what wider contexts and influences might be at play and instead are playing Tumblr telephone with outrage and virtue signalling

sidebar: I also fucking HATE CQL purists lmfao. I don’t feel like I’ve seen or encountered anyone saying CQL fans are less valid than novel fans except in the sense of CQL fans getting defensive about their dislike of the novel - which, whatever, people have opinions - or decision not to read the novel and saying anyone saying they HAVE to read the novel is gatekeeping - which I hold to less but mostly bc I think it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of fan language, some of us say you HAVE to read it not in a neckbeard way but in a I’m so desperately passionate and I want more people to know about this way, kind of like how the “I hate you” in fan language GENERALLY means “I love it so much and I can’t stand it”? - but I HAVE seen people say the novel “ruined” wangxian, or CQL people who seem to be like... purity-wanking, like idk if you were around but god after Infinity War and the number. of fckn ironstranges. posting in the tags. about “love how healthy our ship is” and I’m like. this is still anti culture/purity wank but the other side of the coin 8). I encounter sometimes this lowkey attitude of CQL (or other adaptations) “redeeming” MDZS from the author, and I’m like. y’all are wack lmfao. There’s people wiht MDZS or even TGCF main, and they hate mxtx? and they say shit like “mdzs was only good on accident”? and I’m like. can you just leave lmfao. if you hate her then why are you here. (bc they’ve mental gymnastics this into a virtue ethics thing about “o the work is good and therefore morally fine but the parts I don’t like are because mxtx is morally bad and unworthy and tainted it, and CQL with its Purity has Redeemed it” but I’m like. this is because of censorship lmao. The team did a FANTASTIC job working the character dynamics and story, but like it also is directly because of censorship.)  

like I... have more thoughts than this lmfao bc ofc I do, but anyway, here’s... some of them lol

#imaginaryelle #replies #living la vida salty #*

[thespiralgrimoire]

Charlotte & Nozel!!

Hey this is like, the first one of these I’ve ever gotten!!

Charlotte: What's something not a lot of people know about you? 

This one is really funny because I will tell you just about anything you want to know about me if you ask but nobody ever asks LOL

But, to be more relevant, I don’t think anyone here knows that I drew a 114-page pokemon comic that I started in middle school and finished in my second year of college, and still produce content for every now and then! It’s the single most successful thing I’ve ever drawn, but faaaaaar from the longest or most expansive. (That would be the 550+ page fantrol comic my sister and I started, but didn’t finish, because we both went off to college.)

Anyway it spanned almost the entirety of my formative years and is extremely close to my heart (naruto comics spanned the rest), and I think that given the fact that I had no idea what the plot even was until page 90, it still holds up pretty well! Far from a masterpiece, but I still consider it a moving piece of art, and certainly a very important reflection of my soul at those ages. The main character was the outlet for a lot of the difficult feelings I was dealing with in middle school and giving her a happy ending was an extremely therapeutic experience for me-- even though I didn’t know it when I was giving her one.

Nozel: What's your greatest accomplishment?

Well, uh.

I GOT FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY PAGES INTO A HOMESTUCK FANTROLL COMIC,

and gosh I can’t imagine a single person on this blog wants to hear me talk about Homestuck, but anyone who draws knows just how many fucking pages that is.

That’s not to mention that that’s just the MAIN comic, it doesn’t even touch on the children’s book we (my sister and I) wrote and bound for it, or the mermaid au we also drew and bound, the character sheets, the side comics, the literature, the wiki we started for the extensive world (we created another planet for them and set it up to be semi-canon-compliant), their ancestors, whose stories are all easily as extensive as the main characters and tie into the main plot... Those account for hundreds more pages than the main comic itself.

The story is so incredibly extensive that while we have not worked on the main comic in over three years, we still use pieces of the world or characters daily. It’s become kind of a foundational piece for any other kind of fiction we create. It’s gotten to the point-- and I’m not exaggerating even a little bit here --that every single piece of media I create will inevitably (if it does not initially start out this way) come back to reference or draw from The Fantroll Comic.

I’d actually love to finish it someday, now that we’re both coming out of college and living together again, but there were some issues with the plot that called for some rewriting, and also it’s hard to keep up that type of fervor when there is no larger audience for it than the two people slaving over it side by side.

But aside from the shear magnitude of content we created for it, it also was one of the most useful tools for learning things about stories, comics, collaborative works, and writing. I did a lot of studying of media to make it something I wouldn’t cringe to look at down the line, and guess what? I don’t! It’s still good! It’s a hot mess, but at its core, it’s a good story with good characters and I love it!

I have a feeling this isn’t how you’re supposed to answer these questions.

#welcome to my black clover blog where I scream about pokemon and homestuck #jk if you thought this was an exclusive bc blog you aren't paying attention #man doing this got me really hyped for these projects again #quarantine is giving me the sort of frantic depressed energy that spurned both of these projects in the first place #but I have NEW projects to pour my frantic creativity into #anyway #pokemon #spinda tea

[d00dt00nz]

Obligatory promo stuff at the top because it sucks and I hate it and let’s get it out of the way! follow me on twitter where I’m active, check me out on spotify for music, or like my facebook for sparse updates on music stuff. Thank you. The Cover art is by Ellie Tison

Okay!! Last song!!

Well, I say last song, but it's more like “last song”. There is one more song that I used as an epilogue, but I'm not going to get into that, and honestly if you've listened to 13 tracks without being sold (why would you do that?) one more track isn't going to sell you on it.

And would you look at that, the last song is a reprise of the first song. Wow, it's like Sgt Pepper... that's so cool. Now it makes sense why I didn't bother talking about that first song right? Not planned btw.

This song was one of the first songs I wrote for this album. I said this for a few. Truthfully I did four or so around the same time and they were all great. I had a few more tracks in the oven as well. Everything was going great. I was like “wow this album's gonna be done in no time!” Anyway that was like three or four years ago. I guess that's how these things tend to go.

This is back when I was trying to make a bit more of a straight ahead rock/indie rock sounding album. I'm pretty sure I wrote this song on guitar, lyrics and all, which is honestly (and sadly) pretty rare for me these days. I had this idea for repeated backing vocals and a call/response sort of song structure. I'm pretty sure this more energetic version of the song came first. I originally wanted a sort of Lou Reed feel to it, but once I wrote that groovy dancy bass riff it immediately lost that feel. Once I started recording electric guitars I accidentally did a grungy “brrroww” at the end of the phrase and really liked it. I replicated it throughout the track and in turn lost even more of that Lou Reed feel.

In my original recording process I had a damaged patchcord. I didn't realize it at first because I was trying out some new equipment. I just thought it was really quiet. That being the case, I had to turn it up way loud to get a good volume and that's actually where some of the guitar tone you can hear (mainly in the one playing a melody-line during the chorus) comes from. I actually really liked it, I thought it sounded like Pavement. Actually, my Tiff did too and that's probably the nicest thing she's ever said about any of my music.

At some point I added more guitar tracks to the track to make it sound fuller, and also replace some of the ones recorded with a broken patchcord. I honestly kinda liked the original tracks, which still had a little bit of that 70s glam grittiness to them, but I'm far too neurotic about this stuff to really sit with that. In the end it sounded less 70s and more mid 90s. It had a sound that I've actually been trying to get for a while, though not on this track – the sort of fuzzy swirling guitars with a groovy beat and bassline to it. Tiff described it as being “Like those music videos where everything is blue and everyone's got really baggy pants”, which, again, big compliment. I don't know if that one was actually a compliment, but I'll take what I can get.

The song had its genesis at that same party I mentioned last time. There's nothing specific really. We had my album on and it's got a pretty fun cool first half. The people there were enjoying it, but then it gets to the second half and it's a little bit more mopey. It's also completely sexless and uncool throughout. That being the case, one of the guys there was like

“Sorry Con-dog, the vibes are just not working with this right now,”

and I was like,

“Oh don't worry about it, I understand dude,”

And then he was like, “Right on man. I’m getting fucked vibes from those guys over there. Here, hit this for me.”

And then I did some coke off a Pulp Fiction VHS tape.

I thought to myself, “man it'd be nice to have music that you could put on at a party”. Which basically was the whole idea behind this album, conscious or not. I don't really know if it succeeded, but there's definitely a certain kind of party where this would play, and honestly I don't think I'd mind being at it.

The album was originally going to be more centered around the idea of the character described in this track. I mean, obviously he's me, but I'm trying to detach myself and make things a little more universal. I wanted to explore all the different traits and behaviors that this one person has. Some of them being mine, and some of them being not. Honestly, it didn't really pull through to the end. There's a little bit of that in here, but it's mostly just songs. I'm okay with that. They have some thematic cohesion. It's got this song bookending the album. Wow, it's like Sgt. Pepper.....

The ending is a little bit embarrassing for me because I do a bit of a scream voice, which, honestly I don't think there's anything actively wrong with it, I just cringe when I hear myself doing it because it's like “ah oh god I'm doing that”. I don't know. There's also the fact that, well, one of the things I yell is the word “Wasteman”, which is a little bit of an outdated slang right now, but when I actually recorded the song it wasn't. Whatever, this is an insanely white album from a white kid. I figure a lot of people who enjoy this type of music haven't actually heard that word. I wouldn't have, but I hang out with Tiff's cool friends sometimes. Honestly I think it's a cool term. I think the most embarrassing part though is I copy-pasted it so it repeats twice because I felt like I wanted more intensity. I don't think it's super noticeable, but the idea makes it a little disingenuous. During the outro I wanted to add a little more of that “90s blue and baggy” feel, so I plugged in a keyboard and freaked out on the organ setting. I think it really adds a lot.

The slower version of the song was written afterwards and I actually cheat because it uses some of the same midi tracks. I was super torn between the more exciting sound that I had and my original “vision” for the song, which was a bit more downtempo Lou-Reed inspired. I figured, why not do both?

There's not a whole lot to cover here that I haven't already covered. Mostly the backing vocals, but only because I think I did a worse job with them than the other version. There's nothing outwardly wrong with them per-se, but I think the blend is not good and that's gonna immediately stick out to some people. The middle section just kinda came about because the other version doesn't really have a proper chorus. It just has some guitar noodling. I played around with the chord progression of the middle chorus in the fast version and made something that was a bit more structured, then adapted a melody around it. Harmonies grew out of the melody. I felt like something was missing, so I took that same call and response idea from earlier and applied it here too. I really liked the interplay between the two vocal lines. The “Purify me” line was originally supposed to come up again and again throughout the album. One of the tracks that ALMOST made it would have been the song it was from, and then there would be callbacks to the melody throughout the album. It was kind of like a motif. That was unfortunately completely scrapped and this is the last trace of it. Maybe I'll work the idea into something I do in the future.

I like this song. I realized way too late that it massively rips off The Velvet Underground's Sweet Jane. I guess that “Lou Reed inspired” idea was a little bit too literal. Fortunately I would say the middle section saves it from being too much of a copy. I think it's a good way to start and finish the album. I also like the thematic notions of this album starting with the same track it ends on. Like these things work in cycles and you're never truly free of your own quicksand. Like an Ouroboros eating its own tail, like Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. When one cycle ends, a new begins. The same, but slightly different – until it is completely undermined by the epilogue track that says “no this is actually the end”.

Hey congrats on making it through all of these entries! You may have only read this one, or even skipped to the end. If you did that, disregard that previous sentence and go back to read them. This album was the culmination of a lot of work and thought. 13 of these writeups was nothing compared to probably hundreds of hours spent working on this album, and probably thousands of hours thinking about it. I'm aware few people are reading these writeups, but it's honestly mostly my own indulgence. I gotta decompress this stuff and be free of this album. I can finally get rid of all this useless crap in my brain. I'll probably enjoy being able to go back and read this stuff once I've forgotten most of this, and once I've become a more mature person. I'll probably go “wow this shit is cringe. I can't believe he posted like 22 pages of cringe” but that's okay. The album's okay. I made for certain it was not, in fact, cringe before releasing it. And honestly I enjoyed writing these.

A part of me wants to get back to the freakish pace I had in like 2011 where this blog was nonstop content. I don't think it'd work so well in 2020 Tumblr because who even uses this site anymore? I think it's a little sad because it's pretty much the death of long form posting. Twitter is great because people pay attention to you, but sometimes I just want to write like two thousand words and have some psycho actually read them and respond to it. I think we've lost that on the internet. Sometimes I think of making youtube videos, but I'm no good in front of a camera. Sometimes I wonder, couldn't I just read something like this TO the camera? The answer is no, I can't. That'd be boring. I'm completely convinced nobody would watch that. I sometimes think that if I could add some editing and some visual component though, it'd work out. Some sort of... video essay. Some kind of... man with facial hair and left leaning politics who enjoys media and talks about both... Wow I wonder if that niche has been filled at all?

#music #songwriting #rant #music production #lou reed #pavement #indie rock #the fact that there's an epilogue that ruins the concept is also like sgt pepper

[asknightqueendany]

Disneywhatsherface has consistently waded in on topics/posts by people to erroneously hate on Daenerys. Ex: a post was going around criticizing how mental health/illness was depicted horribly in Season 8. Many people sharing the post wrote about their struggles with mental health/illness, why they looked up to Dany, and how Dany's last minute turn to Mad Queen really negatively affected them. (1/2)

They were sharing pretty personal and emotional stories about what Dany meant to them, and why having the Mad Queen storyline was such a let down and super damaging to them. Disneywhatsherface decided this was the post to weigh in on and be like "hey, I have mental illness, the show handled it badly ... but Daenerys is still going mad in the books and it didn't come out of nowhere haha" Like wtf? Why do that? How insensitive. (2/2)

LOL I went to scroll through her page after I got that ask (90% sure from her from a diff account) and I saw that!

Yeah, shit like this. People are talking openly and honestly and pouring their fucking hearts out on the internet and she had to come in with “No, actually, you’re wrong, here’s why.” Totally unnecessary.

I’m guessing she’s like 15 and hasn’t yet learned how not to butt in when things don’t concern her and hasn’t yet learned how to take deal with the word “No.” Like, no, I don’t want to engage with you, that’s why I fucking blocked you.

Also, seeing her response on that post, I’m now pretty much 100% sure she was the one who sent me those couple of asks a few days ago about the Meereenese Blot/Knot essays whatevertheyrecalled. 

And she was probably the one who sent me that taunting ask a few hours ago about what I would do “when” Dany died in the books...

Wow. Hmm. 

Sorry anon, the rest of this is directed to Buffy:

Like, seriously, please, for your own mental health Princess, get a life and get off my blog. You are not going to convince me to stop liking Dany...No one is. She helped me deal with one of the most terrible experiences of my life - when my best friend was raped our freshman year of high school. 

You can’t take that away from me. You can’t take Dany away from me. You can’t take away the strength and hope she gave me. You can’t ruin her for me. So leave me alone. I love her. If she goes mad in the books, then fuck George RR Martin too, I will still love her. 

If you love Sansa as much, I’m glad for you. If you take strength from her stellar character and whatnot, I’m glad for you. But do not push that on me. We all have our preferences, I prefer Dany. 

I will never not be mad at how the show treated her and I will never not love her character. I’m sorry the show didn’t go the way you wished either, but it’s done. I’m done interacting with you. Leave me alone. Stop sending me asks from your alternate account. Don’t steal my icons. Don’t copy and paste my posts (uh hello plagiarism). Don’t reblog posts that are not directed at you, don’t go looking for trouble, keep your nose clean. Just stop stirring the pot. We’re all staying in our lane. Stay in yours. Stop looking for content that upsets you. Stop seeking out drama. 

Did you ever consider, you’re contributing to other people’s mental health issues? That when people are pouring their heart out online, your snide, rude, and/or tactless/thoughtless comments have the power to be damaging? Did you think about that? Just stop please. 

Delete your second account so you are not tempted to use it anymore. Just try to do more of what makes you happy and stop trying to make other people miserable and/or force your beliefs and opinions on them. It’s not going to work. 

......

Sorry anon, that went on a tangent. My apologies. 

[kaibacorpintern]

@emblematik requested “yuugi + datebook” and i was like “hm interesting” and then a few minutes later i was like “oh shit... IDEA.” 

no joke: i wrote 90% of this on my phone. i just checked the word count and it’s 2000 words. lol. casual rivalshipping, but it’s not about that. post-DM. enjoy the feels x

MONDAY, 8:26 AM

Yuugi sat cross-legged in the soft, shallow cradle of his bed, half-asleep, phone in his hands. Anzu was on the other end of the video call, wandering through the New York apartment she shared with four other girls.

“ -- so they come bursting out of the egg, and that's just how the show starts. It gets loonier from there. But it means every week, she has to make another big-ass papier-mâché egg for her guest performer, and this week, that’s me. Hey Tiff, love the space buns,” Anzu said, turning to someone out-of-sight, and Yuugi heard a voice call back, in a cheerful sing-song, thaaank youuu!

“So you're helping her make the egg?” Yuugi said.

“Yeah, she calls it 'laying the egg.’ Performance artists are so weird,” she said, as Yuugi grinned with delight. “Anyway, gotta run. Can you do next Sunday?”

“Let me see,” Yuugi said, leaning over to swipe his weathered datebook off his night stand, the pages dogeared with almost a year's worth of use. A blank datebook he'd filled out from June to June with every notable hour of his life, using a pen he kept tucked in the binding. He'd spilled water on it a few months ago and the pages had crinkled as they dried. Now it refused to sit flat, with gaps that rippled between the pages.

He held the phone in one hand and flipped clumsily through the datebook with the other, spreading it open on his thigh. After that Sunday, there was one blank week left in the datebook. “Nope, I'm booked. Let's just do Monday again.”

“Works for me,” Anzu said. “Love ya! Bye!”

“Love you too, have fun laying your egg,” Yuugi said, and she flashed him an exasperated grin. The screen went black, and a dreamy silence descended on Yuugi’s bedroom once more. Yuugi flopped back down into bed with a contented sigh, tossing the phone onto the nightstand. He held the datebook over his head, his week carefully penned in. Class, his shifts at the game shop, and on Tuesday, he was seeing…

TUESDAY, 6:37 PM

“Fuck,” Jounouchi said, staring in bafflement at the cards lying face up on the playmat between them. They sat at a long, wooden table on the airy patio of a cafe, with vines flowing thick along the walls, the cards illuminated in the soft, inviting light of the lanterns strung across the space. “How did you win? When did you win?”

“A few turns ago,” Yuugi confessed, idly churning the ice of his Italian soda with his straw. “But you had me on the ropes for a while there. If you played your Time Wizard combo a turn earlier, I would've lost.”

“Damnit! I knew it,” Jounouchi said, thumping his fist firmly on the table. “I keep forcing myself to wait. I just don't wanna blow it again, like Nationals.”

“I think your nerves are making you doubt yourself,” Yuugi said. “Your instincts are strong. Just listen to them, and you'll do fine.”

Jounouchi, gathering up his cards from the playmat, glanced up at him, the lantern light giving his faint blush a rosy glow.

“See, how the heck am I supposed to attack you when you say things like that?” he said. “Maybe I should get a practice duel with someone who actually pisses me off. Hey, ask your pal if he'll duel me.”

“My pal? Is that what he is?” Yuugi said, lifting an eyebrow as he reached for his phone; then he changed course, tucking his hand into the messenger bag at his feet and ferreting out his datebook. He checked the date. “I'm seeing him tomorrow, actually. I'll just ask.”

“Perfect. How's your Sunday looking? Honda said he’ll have my Duel Disk fixed by then.”

“I have plans already,” Yuugi said, dropping the datebook back into his bag and leaning back in his chair.

“Oh, okay, Mr. Popular. Don't forget I leave for the tournament Friday after next. That's in your book, right?” Jou said, and Yuugi hummed in reply. Mm-hmm. Then Jou leaned forward, resting both elbows on the table and his chin atop his hands, fixing Yuugi with a roguish look. “Who is Kaiba, if not your pal?”

Now Yuugi couldn't help but blush, his skin warmer than the summer air. “Uh, he's…”

WEDNESDAY, 9:57 PM

Sitting next to Yuugi on the couch, one bent leg tucked underneath him and one arm slung over the back. Studying the screen of Yuugi's laptop as Yuugi scrolled through the lines of code he'd abandoned, several days earlier, at dawn, surrendering to the frustration of a long and fruitless all-nighter. Lucky for him, Kaiba liked nothing so much as telling people they were wrong, why they were wrong, and how to stop being wrong.

Kaiba leaned closer, frowning intently, his force of presence buffeting Yuugi like a wave. A good wave, dense and heady, fragrant with his cologne. He had many, many things to say about object-oriented programming, all of which Yuugi had listened to very carefully, and none of which he'd actually heard.

“I found your problem,” Kaiba declared.

“Thank God, this assignment is driving me nuts,” Yuugi said, sighing with relief. “What is it?”

In response, Kaiba reached out and shut the laptop with a firm whap. “You’re distracted.”

“I am not,” Yuugi said.

“Tell me what I just said about using global variables.”

Yuugi bit his lip, scrambling through the last five, ten, fifteen minutes for whatever Kaiba had said about global variables, and found… nothing, except a keen awareness of the way Kaiba was staring at him now, leaning his cheek against his loosely curled hand, a wry smile tugging on his lips. 

“Uh,” Yuugi said after a moment, realizing he’d fallen neatly into the usual trap. “Don't?”

Kaiba snorted. “When is this due?”

Yuugi leaned forward, momentarily escaping the weightless swell of feeling in his chest, and plucked his datebook off the coffee table from where it lay beside his textbooks. “In a week.”

“Alright. I have a few hours on Sunday or Tuesday. When would you like to waste my time next?” Kaiba said, with a sort of laid-back disdain.

“I think I’ll squander your Tuesday,” Yuugi said, tugging the pen free, scribbling a note. He set both laptop and datebook on the coffee table and settled back, deeply, breathlessly aware of Kaiba's gaze on him, tracing lines of fire up and down his body.

“So,” Kaiba said, a low, teasing growl, his mouth inches from Yuugi's ear. “What is so distracting to you?”

“Nothing,” Yuugi said, smiling, about to vibrate out of himself with impatience. “You have my full attention.”

“Good,” Kaiba said, and the next thing Yuugi knew he was swept up in a dark rush of warmth, Kaiba pressing a kiss like a hot, wet star to the curve of his neck. He fumbled blindly with one arm, catching Kaiba by the back of his head, pulling him down as he twisted and fell backwards along the couch.

He huffed, a wordless plea for mercy, as Kaiba mouthed along the shell of his ear, making scandalous suggestions with his tongue, clearly enjoying himself.

“Problem solved,” he said smugly, and Yuugi groaned, laughing.

FRIDAY, 4:13 PM

A gentle chime broke through the cool, quiet air of the game shop. Yuugi, wandering the shelves with his scanner, conducting inventory, pulled his phone out of his back pocket.

RYOU: finished writing my new campaign!! want in?

YUUGI: duh

what days are u thinking?

RYOU: sundays? that's when everyone else is free

YUUGI: i can do sundays, but not this sunday

RYOU: not a problem. we can start next week. any plans?

The question turned over in his chest like a stone, a tremendous weight, heavy and slow and dull. Yuugi stood motionless, staring down at his phone, the scanner dangling in his limp hand and the silence of the store falling over him like a shroud.

But he shook it off. Ryou had given him the idea.

YUUGI: I’m going to the park with my datebook, you know the one

RYOU: oh

please send him my best

YUUGI: i will!

is this the space campaign you were telling me about?

Pulling out of the subject like pulling a boot out of the mud, with staggering release. Yuugi resumed his task of taking inventory, stopping every so often to answer Ryou's excited texts about Eldritch horrors and homebrew campaigns.

That night, he lay in bed and discovered the stone was still there, cradled in his straining ribs. So he opened the skylight in his bedroom, inviting the summer night to flow in. It sprawled open above him, hot and dark and flecked with stars, vibrating with the hum of cicadas hidden in the trees. The summer spinning its promise into a refrain. Every new day, each blank page of his datebook, beckoning him forward.

SUNDAY, 11:00 AM

Yuugi awoke to a bright, beautiful June morning, sliding his feet into the secret pockets of cool still tucked away between the sheets. The skylight in his room revealed a clear, hot sky.

He flew through the rest of the morning, as light and taut as a kite, unburdened by exhaustion or idleness. On a whim, he opened his laptop, giving a quick eye to his assignment; Kaiba wouldn't bring up global variables for no reason… and the solution presented itself, like a closed fist turning over to reveal the prize in its palm.

He didn’t cancel on Kaiba. They’d waste time some other way.

Buoyant, he left the house, with his datebook and a lighter in his bag. There were two stops to make before the park: first, a cafe, for an iced coffee, and second, the neighborhood bookstore, where he bought a brand-new blank datebook.

Then he began the long, pleasant walk down to the park, his phone on silent. The whole of Domino was cast in a drowsy summer light so smooth and liquid he wanted to cup it in his hands and drink it, to feel it run sweet and pure through his veins. Neither his mind nor his route wandered from their destination: the plank bridge in the park.

It sat in an isolated corner of the park, a leafy, overgrown grotto dappled with sunlight. The long pond slowed to a mirrored stillness here, cooled by the shade of the trees. Insects hummed in the foliage. As Yuugi stepped onto the plank bridge, the hollow thunk of his foot sent some small, shy creature plunging for safety into the water, leaving only ripples behind.

He knelt on the plank bridge and opened the old datebook, taking a moment to transfer the last remains of his schedule into the first week of the new datebook. His class schedule, his work schedule, his weekly call with Anzu, Joe's tournament dates, the new campaign. All of it carefully penned in.

Then he leaned over the edge of the plank bridge, seeing his reflection on the surface of the water. It was harder with mirrors: they were too crisp, too defined. They showed him nothing but his own face. But if he unfocused his eyes a bit, if he took a deep breath and snapped the last piece into place and made a wish, the face on the water wavered. Just enough to believe.

“I miss you,” he said, to the water. “I miss you every day. I still feel you… gone, here.”

He made a fist, motioning to the center of his chest. An absence with weight; a nothing and a something all at the same time. The kind of puzzle Atem would love.

There was nothing else to add. He’d said most of it already, last year and the year before. They would see each other again, some day, and he had long since understood that he was not meant to wait and he was not meant to run. He was meant to stay right here, in the heart of his own life, and feel it beating.

Yuugi readjusted, sitting cross-legged on the bridge. He flipped through the datebook, going backwards to the beginning. The memories burst open inside him, as raw and fresh as a ripe fruit, swollen with color and feeling. Deadlines for that art history class. Flying out for Anzu’s solo show in December. His first date with Kaiba, sometime in March, although neither of them realized it was a date until the morning after. CHAMPIONSHIP!!, on a weekend in September, when Jou had swept the Pan-Pacific. The pages were as crisp and dry as autumn leaves; they'd burn well.

He turned to the first page.

“Here’s what you missed,” Yuugi said, and began to read.

#intern memo #emblematik #/ #// #/// #fanfiction #can you tell i'm desperate for summer to arrive

[dirtreally]

top 5 manga/doujins

okay i spent a lot of time thinking about this and i don’t think i can really rank them in any significant way other than the order that they popped into my head after reading this and hopefully that will speak for itself

1. Fukaboku

its fuckiiiiiiiiin fukaboku babeyyyyyyyy!!!! the first chapter of this dropped a couple of months after i began understanding myself as nb and it just continued to kill it for like 8-ish chapters afterwards, during which i ended up finding the courage to actually think of myself as an nb person rather than [assigned gender]. i feel really weird about putting this as #1 cuz as the months go on, it’s becoming increasingly clear that what i want from fukaboku and what it wants to do with its premise are gonna become harder and harder to resolve with each other, but it’ll always have a special hold over me cuz it was the #1 thing i was looking forward to reading every day for like 6-ish months www

2. My story of being loved

yeah this kinda sucks. i reread it just now and one of the dramatic plot twists actually made me burst out laughing. but there’s something really sincere and sweet about it?? i don’t like reading into works in this way but it really does feel like the author just wrote this to communicate something to a specific type of person in the most blunt way possible aka a thinly-veiled author insert character who spends most of the oneshot reacting to the other girl. i think a lot of why i like this one so much is cuz even all of its’ weird writing decisions feel like the manga tripping over its own balls because it’s so excited to sell you this specific story

3. Her Pet

this one’s a little rough because while it’s not overtly horny about its high school-aged cast there’s definitely a lot of horny undertones to it and i dont want to eat my own ass for her pet because its absolutely written and marketed with that in mind but it’s also the only story about bullying that i’ve ever actually connected to specifically because of this, because of how it shows how bullying fucks up your ideas of romance, intimacy, and sexuality, because of how it showed a character who got abused for so long that she was unable to create an intimate relationship with an entirely different person without recreating aspects of that abuse, because of how even the happy ending where she gets over all of this has her relapse into this sort of thinking (its played off as kind of a joke but it still sticks out in my mind a lot because MAN). it’s genuinely a really dense piece of work, narratively, but it’s really worth it and imo it’s one of the best manga/comic/manhwa out there about abuse because even though it’s steeped in melodrama all of the neat narrative choices about the aftereffects of gayoon’s shitty school life bleed into the text in a bunch of really subtle ways? there’s definitely some narrative tension into Wanting To Do A Melodrama With A Whacky Slightly Horny Marketable Hook and Wanting To Be Tasteful And Frank About It(which, to its credit, is the one that wins out most of the time) but it gets resolved really well by the time the whole thing ends off.

4. Girl’s last tour

If girl’s last tour didn’t exist i absolutely wouldn’t be doing art right now. I spent 2 years feeling extremely exhausted with contemporary pop art (both in anime/manga and broader pop culture) and images in general because i felt like i was looking at the same images repeated ad infinitum reduced into the barest of shapes like some night in the woods type thing. artistically, girl’s last tour felt like the one thing that actually understood what i was going through. reading the manga, yuuri and chiito are both drawn as these vague shapes that are definitely meant to be people but feel like they are animated by the wind rather than by like, muscles, or something. their shapes bleed into each other, and into their surroundings, and it feels like if you poked a spoon into any page of the manga you could stir it around and see these shapes swirl into each other before slowly becoming even more indecipherable. even the architecture feels vague, meant to give off the IMPRESSION of a building/monolith in such a way that it sometimes feels like the drawings are barely holding themselves together. like if you looked at a road too hard it would break in half. this is a really hard thing to communicate but i hope that you get what i am saying. the art of GLT felt like it embodied the same feeling i had for years at that point, where i felt like my lineart was barely holding myself together, and if i let my guard down for a second i would spill into the floors and drains of the buildings around me and only be able to exist by being acted upon. with that in mind, it was absolutely lifechanging that the actual narrative content of glt is about two people who are alienated from their environment in every meaningful way and no doubt have the same variety of brain shit i do, but are still able to find happiness even just by being alive. There’s a longer version of this part where i go on to talk about what the narrative actually does and the larger tkmiz mythos surrounding it, and how THAT became it’s own obsession that used to be an extension of my love for glt but now exists as the main thing and w glt as an extension of THAT. but this is maybe getting too long and i think you probably get the idea now. i know this is a lot coming from someone who only does one okay art thing every other month but like even though it makes me feel like shit 90% of the time drawing stuff is the one part of my life i feel like i actually have some Ws in, and without glt and without tkmiz’s larger work in general, i wouldn’t even have that much going on

5. vector spectacle

to be honest, vector spectacle isn’t nearly my favourite touhou doujin(at chirei no contest), but it feels so special just because of how unlike anything else i’ve read it is. There’s so much energy in the pages, it’s basically a pop-up book. i can feel the almost nauseating, manic, energy bouncing from page to page, that itself feels directed at nothing and everything all at once; at whatever point in time this was drawn, wherever in the world it was drawn, the person who drew this felt this exact emotion

#wickedhermit