#i'm still playing around with characterization and stuff but i hope this fits???

[honeyhotteoks]

i love your answer to the the ask about seonghwa and hongjoong. i sometimes find myself thrown off reading fics in which the members are into such kinky things bc it sometimes doesnt match their personalities. for me when reading fics, for the sake of the fantasy i try to view them moreso as characters and remove them from their irl personalities in order to enjoy it if that makes sense?

absolutely this makes perfect sense! i think ultimately we only ever know them as characters since there's no way for us to truly know them behind closed doors / they have such carefully made public personas.... but i think i'm good with that. it's not my business at all what the actual park seonghwa does in the bedroom lol

for me personally in fic... i think aurora is an exercise in really trying to get them right? so with the exception of the premise that they're all dating one person, i am trying to get my characterizations of them as close to "real" as i can. i'm sure i'm missing the mark in a lot of places, but specifically with the smut i reign it in. i hope this doesn't disappoint people.... but i'm never going to put harder kinks like pet play or real sadomasochism into aurora. reader isn't going to suddenly start calling everyone sir and daddy. i just don't think this is realistic for them, especially in this scenario at this age. hwa and reader are playing around a bit with bdsm dynamics, but so far it's all fairly tame and will probably remain so. and poly dynamics are definitely going to be a huge part of book 2, but i'm not planning on suddenly amping everyone up into kinky versions of ateez.

in one shots i feel way more comfortable exploring kink using ateez as an entry point. i'm still cognizant of who i think they are as a character, but there's room for playing around.... hence the hard dom seonghwa agenda or yunhwa husbands bdsm arc. for me.... i always think about this - what if ateez were all actors? what roles would they be best suited to / what types of characters could they play? and that's how i fit them into the more AU work in my head.

recently i've been reading some fantasy ateez work, and this is interesting to me because i had SUCH a hard time getting into stuff like that when i started off in the fandom. now i'm interested to read things like yandere, high fantasy, angel / soulmate AUs etc., because i think i've gotten more clear at separating person from idol from character.

#answered anon

[likeshipsonthesea]

Pls !!

Pls post the ayuan and lan zhan ficlet u wrote 🥺 !!! We would love to read it !!

sorry for the late response, i didn’t have a chance to edit until last night and i thought your ask would be the perfect way to avoid having to title this lmao. here is the yuan and lan zhan ficlet!! it takes place ~somewhat early~ in lan zhan’s seclusion following wei wuxian’s death and yuan is about idk five??

anyway, enjoy :))

Yuan lays awake in a large, quiet room. He can’t be sure, but it feels as if it’s been hours since the caretaker put him to bed, and still he has yet to fall asleep. Instead, he listens to the emptiness around him and tries to blink away the monsters his mind conjures from the murky darkness around him. It doesn’t work.

He doesn’t remember exactly why, but he thinks that this is wrong. Lying alone in a room full of empty beds. Beds should be full, of people snoring and talking in their sleep, of people who sing Yuan lullabies before bed and hold him when he wakes from nightmares. He doesn’t know why he thinks this – it isn’t as if these things have happened in Cloud Recesses. All he knows is that the quiet and the dark and the loneliness is worse than anything else in the world.

Knowing it’s against the rules, Yuan gets out of bed. He crosses to the window, where he can look out at the courtyard beyond his room, moonlit and bright. No one is out this late, but the light makes it better anyway. It’s cool in the mountains at night, even in summer. A breeze drifts in and Yuan shivers, missing the warmth of his blankets, but he can’t return to the darkness, not without –

The courtyard is full of what seems to be millions of white pebbles, glittering like tiny moons as far as he can see. Yuan likes the moon. The moon is bright and smiling and always watching, always stays awake when the world gets quiet.

“Don’t worry, A-Yuan,” a voice said to him, once. “I’ll keep watch while you sleep and make sure the nightmares can’t find you.” He doesn’t remember who said it, but he remembers the safety he’d felt. The moon – the moon feels like that.

Another breeze sends Yuan shivering. Maybe – maybe if he could bring the moon back to bed with him, the nightmares and the loneliness and the darkness wouldn’t be able to find him. Mind suddenly made up, he crawls out of the window, taking careful, barefoot steps across the warm, wooden boardwalk to the courtyard full of little moons. He grabs a handful and peruses them.

One has dirt smudged over it, so he tosses it back, and one is missing a chunk like someone got so hungry they just couldn’t help themselves and, with a giggle at the thought, he puts that one back, too. He goes through the pebbles, weighing each one’s advantages until he comes to the final pair.

Hands flat to the sky, one moon perched in the center of each palm, he brings the pebbles to his face for a better look. They are both seemingly perfect. Smooth, unblemished little circles, each one shimmering, smiling, equal in every way. Yuan frowns.

How can he pick just one? Both pebbles are perfect and if he chooses one over the other, he will surely hurt that one’s feelings. But he can’t take both! Two moons for one boy! How greedy can he be?

So troubled is he by this conundrum that he almost doesn’t hear the soft music breaking the dark silence of the night. 

But with another gust of mountain air comes low, drawn-out notes, unlike anything Yuan has ever heard. He’s heard music before – his uncle plays his xiao for Yuan sometimes at their weekly dinners and, before that, he thinks someone who loved him played him lullabies on a dizi – but never has Yuan heard something like the song the wind carries now.

It makes him feel sad, a little, without really knowing why, but he’s used to that. More than that, though, it sounds like magic. The stories the caretakers read him sometimes have music. Young maidens singing songs of longing for their cultivators to rescue them, clever heroes distracting ghouls with witty tunes. Yuan has long thought up his own stories in these veins, though his tend more towards – towards a song that drifts in from the woods, that only Yuan can hear. It guides Yuan to a secret house where his parents have been waiting for him. Here, they hug him and smile, tell him they love him, tell him they never meant to leave him, tell him they’ll never do it again.

Yuan knows the rules. The caretakers read the rules for him more than they read him the stories. He knows he shouldn’t go off into the woods at night. He shouldn’t have climbed out the window either, though. Yuan thinks about it really hard for a moment and then decides that, if he’s already done something wrong, he might as well do this, too.

Yuan hasn’t a clue where such a thought comes from – Heaven knows he didn’t learn it in Cloud Recesses – but it seems logically sound to him. So, a moon clutched in either hand, he follows the music out of the courtyard, off of the porch, and into the trees beyond.

With bare feet and little legs, it feels like ages that he walks. He steps over pointy things that hurt his toes and hurries across cold stones that send chills up his legs. Once, the music stops, and Yuan holds his breath and his two moons tightly and almost begins to cry before another song appears, different than the one before. Where the last one was sad, this one is light, soaring and settling and sighing with fond notes, so loud in the darkened forest.

Not long after that song begins, Yuan comes to a clearing. Sprouting from the center of it is an understated home with a lantern flickering in its window. Yuan breaks into a sprint, heedless of the twigs that catch on his soles, doesn’t even wait to knock before tearing open the doors and stumbling inside.

At a low table sits a man dressed in all white, fingers poised but paused over the strings of a guqin. He looks at Yuan with a nearly passive expression, excepting the too-wideness of his eyes. He looks – familiar. Yuan doesn’t remember his parents, but this must be – he has to be –

“Baba?”

The man startles. “A-Yuan,” he says, and Yuan’s small heart goes shooting around in his chest. He knows Yuan’s name. He knows Yuan’s name.

“Baba.”

Yuan rushes to his father’s side, collapses next to him and buries his face in the fabric of his baba’s robes. With the stones still in his hands, he can’t tangle his fingers in the robes the way he wants to, he can only press his fists as tight to his father’s chest as he can.

He only realizes that he’s crying when Baba’s hand settles on his shaking back. He doesn’t know why he’s crying – he’s anything but sad – but Baba doesn’t tell him to stop or to meditate like the caregivers do, he just lets Yuan cry into his chest until he can take a breath without it shivering in his throat.

“A-Yuan,” Baba says again, in a soft, low voice Yuan wishes he could remember, “how did you come here?”

Yuan sniffles. “The music.” Did Baba not mean to call him? Did he not want to see Yuan?

“No one stopped you?”

“Everyone’s asleep,” Yuan says. He pulls away far enough to crane his neck back and peer at Baba’s face. “I climbed out the window.”

Baba doesn’t smile, but something in the way his mouth moves makes Yuan think that he wants to.

“Going out alone is not safe,” Baba says, but it doesn’t sound like the scolding the caregivers give. It sounds softer.

“I���m safe,” Yuan says, still defensive, at least a little. He hates punishments, especially the ones where they leave him alone to copy rules. He hates being alone.

Baba hums mildly and looks at Yuan’s feet. Kneeling as he is, the soles of his feet face the room, and the stings and scrapes he suffered on the trip over are visible. Yuan notices, then, the small spot of blood he’s made on the rug and begins to cry again.

He turns and buries his face in Baba’s side again, rushing through the words like all the breath from his lungs has disappeared. “I’m sorry, Baba, please don’t leave again, I’ll be good, I promise, I won’t do it again, please don’t go, please.”

Baba stiffens and Yuan cries harder. He doesn’t want Baba to leave, he doesn’t want the silence and the darkness and the caregivers who leave and let the nightmares find him, he wants Baba to hug him and tell him he’ll keep him safe and hold him when he wakes up in the middle of the night feeling like he’s been left alone in the world.

“A-Yuan,” Baba says softly, “let us clean you up.”

Baba picks Yuan up and he clings harder. Baba has to untangle Yuan’s arms around his neck when he kneels to place Yuan on the bed. He says, “I will be right back,” and crosses the room to take out a box before returning just as he said. Yuan’s tears slow as Baba kneels in front of him.

Baba takes a piece of cloth from the box at his side and wets it before bringing it gently to the soles of Yuan’s feet. He wipes away the blood and dirt and lifts Yuan’s foot to examine the cuts. He takes out a funny smelling jar and puts the stuff in it on Yuan’s foot. It tickles. Yuan laughs.

Baba looks up when he laughs. His mouth does the not-smile thing but his eyes look sad. “Dont be sad, Baba,” Yuan says. Baba hums and looks back at Yuan’s feet.

When he’s done, he returns the items to the box and returns the box to its place before he comes back to kneel in front of Yuan again. Yuan thinks that Baba isn’t mad – he wouldn’t be so nice if he were mad, right? – but he isn’t sure, so he says nothing, just watches Baba watching him.

“A-Yuan,” he says, after a very long time, “I didn’t want to leave you.”

Yuan’s heart beats too fast in his chest. It’s what he’s wondered about, ever since he asked Uncle where his parents were and Uncle didn’t tell him. If they were dead, Uncle could’ve just said, but he didn’t, which meant, maybe, that they’d just left. Left Yuan. Didn’t want Yuan.

Baba reaches out and Yuan holds his breath. Baba’s hand stops a few breaths away and Yuan squeezes his moons so tight it hurts. After another moment, Baba’s fingers brush away some stray hairs from Yuan’s forehead, thumb smoothing over his hairline.

“Can I stay with you?” Yuan whispers, afraid that, if he’s too loud, someone will hear him and come and take him back.

Baba shakes his head, a short gesture. “You must stay with the Sect.”

Yuan hates that the tears come again, hates how they make Baba’s eyes go tight. “Why?”

“They can take care of you,” Baba says quietly. “I cannot.”

“Forever?”

“No.” Baba’s thumb brushes against his skin again. “Just for now.”

“Can I visit?”

Baba frowns. He seems to think about it for a moment. “We will see,” he says. “You cannot walk here in the dark again. It is not safe.”

Yuan nods. He doesn’t want to upset Baba. But, he has to ask – “Do you want me to visit?”

Baba nods without hesitation. “Very much.”

Yuan smiles and, careful of his sore feet, throws himself forward into Baba’s arms. Baba huffs in surprise but holds Yuan close, his big hands warm on Yuan’s back.

He holds Yuan for quite some time – not enough, though – before he says, “You must return.”

Yuan holds on tighter but nods. Baba stands, Yuan still in his arms, and carries him out of the house. Yuan thinks he’s going to be put down, once they’re outside, but Baba carries him through the woods the whole way. Yuan presses his cheek to Baba’s chest and listens to his heart beating. He thinks this is what parents are for, to hold you in the dark, to keep you safe. He doesn’t know if Baba is the voice in his memories – he sounds too different – but he knows that Baba must love him the same, love him enough to stay up all night and keep the nightmares away, if he could.

When they get back to Yuan’s big room with all the empty beds, Baba very quietly and gracefully steps through the window. Yuan giggles. Baba says nothing, but his mouth does the not-smile, and he lays Yuan in his bed and pulls the blankets up to his chin.

“Will you stay?” Yuan asks, suddenly so tired, in the comfort of his bed, Baba watching over him.

“I cannot,” Baba says, eyes sad again. Yuan swallows hard. Baba can’t stay. Yuan will be alone, with the dark and the empty beds, alone with no one to watch over him again—

Yuan remembers the moons and gasps, opening both of his palms. Baba’s eyebrows raise a little. Yuan turns and places one moon on the table next to his bed. It shines and shimmers and smiles. It will keep the nightmares away, while Baba cannot. Yuan looks to the other moon, warm in his hand, and looks back to Baba.

Baba must return, now, to his own empty room. He will have to blow out the lantern and lie down to sleep in silence and darkness, just like Yuan.

Yuan holds out the pair to his perfect moon. Baba stares at it. Yuan explains, “To keep the nightmares away.”

Baba stares at the pebble some more. After quite a long time, he reaches out with careful fingers and takes the moon. “Thank you, A-Yuan,” he says, quiet, the not-smile on his lips.

Yuan beams sleepily. His eyelids drag heavy, leaving him blinking slowly as he tries to stay awake as long as he can, take in as much of Baba as he can, while he can. But Baba smooths his free hand over Yuan’s blankets, brushes warm fingers against his hair. It feels—it just feels so nice. Yuan can’t fight the sleep that embraces him.

“Goodnight, A-Yuan,” he hears, soft and low, when his eyes shut and refuse to open again.

“G’night, Baba,” Yuan says around a yawn.

He doesn’t remember Baba leaving. In the morning, he wakes up alone in the room full of empty beds, the sunlight still cold and thin, early as it is. Yuan shivers with it, wondering if it had all been a dream, one of his dearest dreams, a dream where his parents, his baba, loves him and wants him and never wanted to leave him. It’s like the made-up stories the caretakers tell him. It can’t be true.

But then Yuan turns, sees the perfect round moon sitting on his bedside table, and he knows. He knows Baba loves him.

#the untamed #lan zhan #lan sizhui #a-yuan #fic #ficlet #sort of fic #my writing #lan wangji #lan yuan #wen yuan #how does one tag for the untamed fandom #anyway #i love them like a whole bunch #i wish i had time to writeeee #i'm still playing around with characterization and stuff but i hope this fits??? #writing kids is also so hard lol

[stimmypaw]

stimmypaw reads the apprentice’s quest, a blog post

A big one, just a bunch of thoughts as I’m reading it, of course, lots of spoilers for the first book in the Warrior Cats series A Vision of Shadows. This will be covering just the first book tho, it’s all in the Read More, let’s gooooooo!!!!

Vision Of Shadows time

Lots of new cats!!! I don't remember these guys as kits or anything wrow!!! I like their names but itll take a while to get used to them

Also cant believe they printed stormcloud's dead name

Omg there's a cat named beepaw

I love these cats all of them so much im going 2 cry

All new names are perfect

I FORGOT HOW GORGEOUS THE CAT VIEW IN THE RECENT BOOKS WAS, LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT

I'm glad leafpool smokes weed

I love reading from Jayfeather's point of view, his grumpiness hasn't grown on me ever but thats just me, I still enjoy it lots he's great and its fun

Firestar and Leopardstar's characterizations are On Point i love it

OOF i feel so bad when jayfeather is mean to others, poor kestrelflight, I love those two

Lovely Jayfeather moments now its time for the first chapter

I like this duo! Also I didn't think I'd ever say this but shut up squirrelflight one can have fun AND learn with their mentors

Sparkkit sounds nice she makes jingling bell noises when she walks around

Alderkit is chadphobic /j

I can see Alderkit taking deep breaths to relax its rotating in my mind its beautiful

God this first chapter feels so good and comfortable, like eating noodles and chicken nuggets. I am so so deeply in love with it, its gorgeous!

Sparkkit is so perfect too, and Graystripe remembering Firestar aaaaaa

DUSTPELT SAID WHAT? PHDHAHAHHA OH NOOOO I don't remember their relationship much, must have been fun, I love young little creature squirrelflight I MISSED HER SO BAD WOW

I started reading the second chapter and died, I think ill take a break now 2 sleep heehhee

I love them describing twoleg stuff its always so fun and alien, like watching an animal planet show about funny sea creatures.

Also I have determined sparkpaw is my favorite, might be my favorite cat ever next to hollyleaf??? I really identify with her and also she's autistic i have decided that

Alderpaw baby noooo hhhh their mentor at least is trying to show its okay, he seems very emotionally distant so far and alderheart feels very emotionally needy, actually both of them do, did I mention I love Sparkpaw??? I might be imprinting myself 2 much on her

I love how like, its clear both of them are absolutely anxious and worried about others opinions on them, which is clearly something they got from being Firestar's grandkids, deputy kids and leader kids. And bramblestar too, I recall him being quite the anxious lad ahhah. Sparkpaw will be showing confidence and being loud but the second anyone isn't approving of her or she does something "wrong" she gets small and quiet, and she ended up setting a high bar for herself by being good at hunting and fighting so I'm curious to see how that will go. Also there's nothing wrong with being guided through a crowded place to meet others Sparkpaw!!! I bet the two of them would be stuck without not knowing how to talk to others had Needlepaw not shown up. I love them, my gf is mocking me saying I'm a Sparkpaw kinnie.

Apprentices will like learn about a thing and tell everyone about it all the time and assume its always true in every situation and thats valid I love kids like that. Also in my head Needlepaw kinda looks like a porcupine. Oh boo she's fatphobic >:(

I love apprentices they are so fun and silly, just making fun of the leaders like its nothing. The way they are clearly learning and absorving everything their warriors say and do like sponges its just ***chefs kiss***

Omg shadowclan is just full of 12 year olds help

And then the old person said "it sure is hard being old!" And everyone clapped

Shout-out to pretty Riverclan apprentice #481977 I love her

Leafpool: 👁👁

Alderpaw: I knew it im cursed and awful and terrible and I will never amount to anything

I wish the cats didn't seem to be giving up on him so easily though

Ah yes the classic thunderclan move "you suck, into the medicine hole you go"

The way sparkpaw changes the things she says and how she does when it isn't the status quo around her oooooooooooooyeaaaaaaa I love 1 autistic cat

Alderpaw considering your problems lesser than other cats won't help you deal with them better bro

I love Needlepaw's excitement about Alderpaw being a medicine cat apprentice, and her sarcasm, she feels like a preppy teenager

Ahhh this is so good, I am so thirsty for family moments like this, just Alderpaw bonding with grandma, I’ll definitely want to draw this one it’s so sweet.

Oh to be young and silly.

I really am enjoying like, Alderpaw’s struggles to seeing how he fits in the clan, how he fits in himself, how he wants to be seen and what he wants to be, it’s really good. I Am Engaged(tm) With This Plot.

SPARKPAW NOOOOOOO but also Yes I want her to be shown vulnerable and weak please 

POP, god watching this stuff always awful, the cats must have thought he broke her ahahah

Also, really great that they learned from Dovewing and now like leave choices and discussions about prophecies between adults

And plus Brambles seemed to take the time to explain stuff to him, seems he wont be going alone either the 1 thing is that he will be the only one knowing what the journey is really about, why though??? I didnt read Firestar's Quest or whatever why does Skyclan need to be secret??? Seems quite silly really!

YESSSS SANDSTORM GET HIS ASS FIGHT FIGHT LOVE THIS LOVE SANDSTORM

I could feel squirrelflight nearing explosion here, this was very fun, i wish they werent hiding this though!!!

The secret thing is showing to be a plot point so I am once again Very Engaged

Also, wonderful dialogue bit, someone asked Bramblestar why an Elder is going and:

Lovely perfect perfect

I miss you dovewing

SQUIRRELFLIGHT LOVE YOU

Oh boy this is it

Traveling book moment

Graystripe: Soooo you're excited to go on the journey to the old territories and Skyclan?

Sandstorm: Yes! It's been ages and-

Graystripe: I'm sure the tribe will love the visit too

Sandstorm, groaning: Oh noooo I forgot about how the tribe is in the way of every journeyyyyy noooooo they're such a racist caricature, please tell me you have a plan

Graystripe: Yes don't worry about it the writers forgot about the tribe in my comic book so you can just use the excuses i did to actively avoid it

Sandstorm: Oh thank Starclan

Sparkpaw's desperation to prove herself oof, her anxiety with understanding the prophecy, oh boy, and Alderpaw feeling too overwhelmed by the questions and not managing to talk!!!! I am so glad they are both autistic

Hoping "Being Leader" wont mean theyre putting nonsense responsibility on the apprentice again

Ah good Sandstorm is on the lead again, as she should, she should have been leader she would have been great

I can't believe Alderpaw thinks I look stupid and diseased :( /j

Everything about this twoleg scene was scandalous I loved it, Sparkpaw just toppled over a trash bag and they are eating from it, iconic, also did those twolegs throw out a whole turkey? Damn

Its not that Sparkpaw is freakishly good at hunting she is very hungry and constantly on the watch for things to eat

BRO Ive never been in a road where the drivers are this wild, throwing bottles out of the car????? Ive seen Fruit being thrown like once or twice, what the fuck!!! I'm glad they are going to wait until the morning to continue

Okay I was not expecting Needlepaw to show up this girl is chaotic I love her

ACTUALLY YEAH WHY DIDNT THEY TELL THE OTHER CLANS ABOUT THIS SINCE THE PROPHECY IS ABOUT ALL THE CLANS???

Needlepaw is like Rono from Bambi 2 if he wasnt a mean bully and thats very epic

Very curious character though, how come her mentor isnt teaching her the warrior code properly? Is that an issue with all apprentices?? Is the clan overwhelmed by 12 year olds and they won?

Having lots of fun trying to play the game "what animal are they describing this time" the erins made here, im glad they're in a farm. Worried about Sandstorm though :c

Fuck im worried about sandstorm a lot, her wound hurt on Me

Yeah water is good youre right sandstorm

Aw man I hope she's okay let her at least survive to meet skyclan please

NOOOOOOOO SANDSTORMA A AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Sandtteooonrjrbbbmmnnnnnnnnnn

I am so sad

Alderpaw denying it, Starclan shining upon their vigil, everything crushed me i cried

Alderpaw considers Nihilism

Haven't seen a cat thank starclan for prey in a while its

Oh look they time skipped a journey! They don't tend to do that thats nice

I'm so excited to be meeting The Skyclan that everyone in the fandom knows now

So far they seem kinda mean but thats most clans at first glance really

Okay somethings up

I uh have heard of Darktail pretty sure he's a bad guy so yeah something really bad happened to Skyclan

Am worried

Darktail sounds like an evil himbo* i may be enjoying him actually

*himbos are usually nice by default so he's just evil and stupid and strong

Does needletail know these cats already?????

Ah

Shit

Oh okay fuck

I've been quietly reading the rest because I am just concerned and I want them to be okay as quickly as possible

Waterfalls are a classic nice

Oh boy time for our unlikely duo of Alderpaw and Needlepaw to get out of a Mess!

I did not expect this to end up with the two of them journeying into parenthood, but I'm happy it did

Well actually I'm very unhappy theyre so lost and there's no sign of Skyclan I am very worried for everyone involved Sparkpaw must be feeling awful!

Twigkit is a great name

Yeah this ended terribly

Overall! Frigging loved it this book was GOOD and a great start for the series I am very excited to read the rest, SO WORRIED ABOUT SKYCLAN THO AAAA the characterizations were great the characters were great the pacing was fun and I didn't get bored once!

I think o only wish I had read this sooner really so I could look up others thoughts without getting heavily spoiled about the last books, I can watch a few videos already though thats a start ahhaha. But yeah it was great and it felt very good to read, haven't swallowed up a book so quickly in a very long time!!! Very happy I finally got my hands on this 💕💖💕💖💕💖 cant wait 2 start the next one

If you read all this, hope you had fun hahaha, ill be making more of these cus theyre fun and I like talking about warrior cats thats just my thing

Til next time

#wc #the apprentice's quest #warrior cats #a vision of shadows #avos #warrior cats avos #avos wc #wc avos #avos warrior cats #warrior cats a vision of shadows #alderpaw #needlepaw #sparkpaw #violetkit #twigkit

[fireinmywoods]

I'm really curious how pit-monster-verse is going to compare to p-verse. Since you have such an internal head cannon of how the characters in p-verse became who they are and formed relationships, did you just tweak that for a different story? Like, same characters and basic history with just a few details/events changed, or did you go complete blank page with different core motivations, etc.?

Did...did I get drunk and send this to myself? Because this is kind of EXACTLY what I want to be talking about right now.

Warning: spoilers for palimpsest below the cut.

Here’s the thing: two years ago, when I had like -3 followers and had just gotten into Trek fandom, I started writing palimpsest and monster fic pretty much simultaneously. At the time, I thought of palimpsest as the goofy comedy version of McKirk and monster fic as the serious and tender [GENRE REDACTED] that would provide a more complete picture of their relationship.

At some point I ended up turning my attention almost entirely to monster fic and got it to a point where it felt nearly complete with the exception of a few gaping holes...annnnnd then I realized that palimpsest HAD to be the first story I posted for McKirk, because the whole premise hinges on a particular understanding of Jim and Leonard’s characterizations and relationship dynamic, and anyone who had read monster fic first would almost immediately be like, “...hold up.” So I went back to palimpsest, thinking I’d finish it up and then return to monster fic in short order.

What I didn’t foresee is that some people really LIKED palimpsest. And the more y’all liked it, the more I liked it. You cared about this particular iteration of Leonard and Jim, and you asked questions that tricked me into writing more about them, and along the way I fleshed out their history and examined the soft inner workings of their relationship in ways that no longer fit so neatly into the “goofy comedy” box.

All this means that today I see pverse Jim and Leonard as the default, the archetype. When I tag or answer asks or daydream about silly adventures I’ll never get around to writing, it’s them that I’m thinking about.

So it was a weird experience going back through monster fic last week. It had been so long - almost two years! - that I was a little worried that I would hate it, that I’d ventured so far along pverse McKirk’s path that I wouldn’t like or even recognize who they were in monster fic, but fortunately that wasn’t the case. The fic itself still needs some work, but I care deeply about this version of Leonard and Jim, and I think you will too.

So now, at long last, to answer your damn question.

In many ways, monster fic’s Jim and Leonard are much like their pverse counterparts. They have a very similar history up to a point (more on this in a moment), and their dynamic will feel familiar to you. There is banter and grumbling and reluctant adventure and hair stroking and grossly enmeshed inner lives, and there is never any question that these two fools are STUPID crazy for each other. In terms of tone as far as their relationship is concerned, I think it’s closest to anagnorisis and perhaps stellae fixae: emotional, soft, devoted, inevitable.

However.

Monster fic begins some time before palimpsest, when Jim and Leonard are in an earlier phase of their relationship, and events unfold differently from there. And also - you know those mock trailers that reimagine a movie as if it were a different genre, like re-cutting The Shining as a romcom or whatever? This is kind of like that. Monster fic isn’t just a new story; it’s a new KIND of story. Who Leonard and Jim are at their cores, how they feel about each other, the role they’ve played in each other’s lives up until the point our story begins - all this remains more or less the same, but the nature of the plot is going to focus the spotlight on different facets of all those things and highlight different qualities.

Also - weirdly, considering that palimpsest was supposed to be the comedy - monster fic gives less attention to our heroes’ preexisting damage and baggage. That’s not to say it’s not there; it just doesn’t really come up as much. Trust me, you won’t miss it. They’ll be busy with...other stuff.

Anyhow. This is much more than you asked for, but I hope you don’t mind my blathering. Writing this out helped me unpack some of the dissonance I’ve been having myself as I delve back through monster fic with two years of pverse canon rattling around in my brain.

Oh, and one last teaser, just to be a real pain in the ass: palimpsest is two love stories told simultaneously. Monster fic is one love story told on two axes.

#did i mention i have the best anons? because i have the BEST fucking anons. #thank you anon!! this was such a wonderful set of questions #and i know you exist b/c i don't drink and therefore could not actually have blackout-anoned myself #ilu very much whoever you are #fic related #otp: bedside manner #ask #anon

[fairymascot]

Ugh. I really wanna see more of Rachel Amber, but I'm also not sure about buying Before the Storm? Please Advise?? (Also I'm replaying Life Is Strange and just got to Ep. 4 and I'm not sure I'm ready for what's gonna go down; it's been years. T__T)

oh boy, you’ve found JUST the person to ask because i have So Many Opinions on before the storm. lemme just list ‘em out for you.

CONS

*characterization: there’s a lot of questionable choices there. the worst offenders in this regard are the supporting characters, specifically nathan, frank, and david. they’ve all been woobified into troubled men-boys with their hearts in the right place who just needed a hug all along. it’s bad. since they’re minor, at least, that stuff can be overlooked with greater ease, but then there’s the matter of rachel amber.

if you have a concrete image of rachel in your mind from playing lis1 and interacting with the older fandom, then i can tell you right now bts rachel is going to have very little to do with it. deck9 unabashedly threw out some of the basic aspects of her character to make her more appealing to the hipster audience – like wanting to be a model, being a party girl, sleeping around with men. because that’s sooo shallow and icky and nobody wants that, right?

chloe’s writing suffers some issues as well. there’s a certain extent of defanging and idealization of her character to make her simultaneously more pitiful and more noble and heroic. while it’s a decision i understand, to make her more palatable as a protagonist, it leads to some odd and dodgy writing in places.

*episode 3 personally broke into my house, beat up my grandma and pissed on my floor. i literally do not have the words to describe how much i hate that goddamn episode, and how it absolutely marred the entire game experience for me.

*consistency: this ties into the characterization issues mentioned above, but basically, it’s near impossible to fully compromise bts’ characters and story with lis. there’s so many inconsistencies that they’re just incompatible, which is a pretty big point against bts considering it’s meant to be a prequel.

PROS

*rachel is not rachel, but i’m in love with her anyway. i mean, it’s a shame she’s got so little to do with what we know of rachel in lis, but she’s still a fantastic character that i would personally die for. she’s built up really well while and carries a powerful air of intrigue while still having a lot of vulnerability, and you completely understand why chloe is so in love with her. also, marvelous voice acting.

*chloe. despite my above criticisms, deck9 also did a fantastic job of fleshing out her character. they captured her voice very well, added a lot of depth and nuance and little quirks to make her feel like a real person. getting to play as her is awesome, and a very different experience to playing as max while still feeling distinctively life is strange-y.

*amberprice. if you liked the romantic storyline between max and chloe in lis, then HOO BOY have i got some great news for you, as it only gets gayer from here. it does fall under the inconsistency problem, because deck9 makes rachel and chloe’s relationship so intense, so romantic, and so ride-or-die from the get go that rachel’s actions in lis become unfathomable, but also, like… i’m gay and it’s real good. while the romance in lis1 feels like it was incorporated because it would be, like, nice and cute (which is not a bad reason whatsoever!), chloe and rachel’s love story feels like deck9′s actual magnum opus. you can really tell they put in the time and dedication to make an authentic lesbian coming of age story for chloe, something that their gay players could really see themselves in – and for the most part, they did an absolutely wonderful job.

*the technical aspects are all top notch. soundtrack, art, animation, atmosphere – it takes everything that was good about lis and improves on it. daughter’s music is delightful, but what i also really like is how the soundtrack has a few blaring, kickass tracks of the kind chloe would be absolutely into, that wouldn’t really fit into the lis1 soundtrack at all. it sets it apart more, which is neat. the character models look a lot better, and oh my god, the ACTING and FACIAL ANIMATION is lightyears ahead of lis1 (and of lis2, from the looks of it. shame on dontnod). getting to see those characters actually EMOTE is like… mindblowing, i’m not kidding. 

*even with their flaws, playing the first two eps for the first time was an amazing experience for me! and the bonus episode, farewell, is one of my favorite parts of the entire franchise.

IN SUMMARY: i would say yes, play it, but only get 20 minutes into episode 3 before skipping ahead to farewell because episode 3 is that bad. overall, deck9 are big life is strange fans, and that much is easy to see – there’s a lot of love poured into this game, which is delightful to experience as a fan, but there’s also the kind of skewed and idealized characterization that you often find in fanfiction. sometimes it’s skewing i enjoy, like making amberprice mutually romantic, and sometimes it’s skewing i want to throw out the window, like softboy nathan prescott. all in all, it really is just best to view it as officially-funded fanfiction: take everything with a grain of salt, incorporate the parts you enjoy into your personal headcanon (and there is a lot of good stuff there), and throw out the rest.

(also, good luck surviving the last two eps of lis! hope you’ve got your tissues ready.)

#askbox #text #meta #life is strange #before the storm #my rambles #valvaliant

[ganymedesclock]

Your meta is singlehandedly responsible for all my opinions and characterization of Shiro tbh and I kinda just realized something. Tell me if I'm wrong but I get the feeling what you're trying to say about after-s2 Shiro is just: This is Shiro, except now all his stressors are Worse.

I mean, Shiro’s not the same person he was in the first two seasons just as much as none of the other paladins are the same person they were in the first two seasons, but, I definitely think Shiro since then has built on what was established as his essential character that’s growing and changing.

Part of it is he’s under a lot more pressure. Part of it is, when Shiro first came to the position in s1 he basically took all of his trauma and survivalism and tried to stuff it back into the mold of the Garrison’s Golden Boy. And ironically, I think it’s s1 Shiro who’s a lot more callous- look through the early episodes and see how many times Shiro interrupts, corrects, shoves or silences Lance in particular.

He’s determined to make a good impression early on, and, frankly, Shiro’s first impression of Lance is not favorable- he seems to regard him as just fooling around when the paladins need to be serious, they need to commit to this. 

He’s also the one to chew out Keith for demanding Pidge can’t leave and was about to make, frankly, a very bad decision by letting Pidge wander off alone into the universe without even questioning how even a very resourceful and clever fifteen year old intends to survive in a hostile spacefaring empire they know almost nothing about. And it’s pretty clear, I think, rather than fair judgment, Shiro’s letting his personal sense of guilt, believing he failed the Holts, rule in this context. 

Yes, people shouldn’t be shackled to paladin duty, but given Pidge’s custom jet booster had a good chance of making the pod explode (and by good, seemingly as high as 50% since it was used twice and the second time it detonated) on top of everything else, it’s clear if she’d gone off alone the way she meant to, she would have died.

Shiro in s1 is trying to be a perfect leader for everyone and frankly, who he’s become since then is better. It stands that he’s come a long way that Hunk, Lance, and Shiro himself all agree it’s unlike him to snap at people and bark orders.

At a glance, Shiro might seem as if he’s doing worse, but to me, I think it’s an incredibly heartening sign that Shiro’s character development appears to be an exercise in learning to ask for help.

Because while Shiro’s not a tyrant of a leader the way Zarkon leaned alarmingly close to in s3e7 on multiple occasions- it stands that Shiro, too, especially early on, suffered from that disconnect. He kept his own problems incredibly close to his chest. It’s obvious that he desperately latched onto being Black Paladin as a way to cope- as a way to redefine himself by something other than what had just happened to him.

Shiro in s1 is a tight-coiled spring. He’s uptight, he argues with Lance over the littlest things, in s1e1 on two separate occasions he breaks up arguments just by yelling for them to stop or “Stow it, cadets!”

Shiro’s growth as a character involves climbing off the pedestal he was sitting on at the beginning of the show. And he’s not the only one who was enforcing it, either- Lance flat-out says Shiro was his personal hero. 

In the comics, Pidge can’t conceive the idea of defeating Shiro at all even though he’s really not that much a better fighter than the other paladins- before she gets her head in gear and is able to knock him out, she just reflexively looks to him as an invincible paragon which is a pretty big cognitive slip in an issue all about Pidge’s ability to gather and keep data.

In s3e1, none of the team can really see themselves conceptualizing Shiro and a lot of their overtures seem to suggest, more than none of them are suited to the Black Lion like Shiro is (fair!) that... not a lot of them really understand what Shiro was doing. Even Keith, the closest to Shiro, leads as a Red Paladin. He says he can’t do this like Shiro can but he never seems to clarify what that entails.

What I personally think began in earnest in s3, though there were small things building towards it all along, is the systematic demystification of Shiro as the perfect leader, as the team’s paragon.

There’s kind of a point that, as Zarkon’s specific counterpart, enemy, and successor, Shiro is going to be called upon to succeed where Zarkon failed.

And Zarkon’s failure, what led to his death and downfall as a paladin, was twofold: he failed to listen to his team when they had valid points, and he kept all of his personal suffering privately away from them.

Zarkon gambles everything to rescue Honerva in s3e7, and it goes disastrously because he lies to his team the entire way leaving them completely unprepared- so when he ends up outside of his Lion and faced with a devastatingly powerful opponent, he’s surrounded and killed while the rest of the team is not in a position to do anything to help him.

Shiro in s1e11 leads the team in an equally desperate gamble to rescue Allura, and it works out. It works out because Shiro has the team’s consent beforehand, and even people who disagree (Keith) still consent to go. So when Shiro ends up outside his Lion and faced with a devastatingly powerful opponent on two fronts, it’s not his personal skill as a fighter that keeps him alive.

It’s Keith going toe to toe with Zarkon to buy Shiro time to get back to the Black Lion.

It’s Lance, Pidge, and Coran holding off the majority of the empire’s forces.

It’s Hunk smashing in to break Allura out, and it’s her and him together that come to save Shiro’s bacon from Haggar who had already seriously injured him and could easily have killed him in that moment.

It’s pretty obvious that Shiro being honest and transparent with his team is what’s keeping him from getting killed. They’re his saving grace, time and time again, Keith especially- which is a big deal, when Keith is Alfor’s successor, and while Zarkon broke with the entire team, it was his refusal to listen to Alfor that was the nail in his coffin.

And in s5e3 and s5e6, what’s steadily moving into position to save his bacon from Kuron? It’s not just Lance being the team’s interpersonal Heart as usual- but rather, that Shiro is finally, decisively, opening up and connecting to the person he’s been at odds with from the start. 

And while a lot of people take that as a “boo hoo, poor Lance”... it’s really more to Shiro’s detriment than Lance’s. After Shiro and Lance argue, Lance is the one who has multiple people verbally taking his side (Hunk, twice, and Allura personally talking to him about it with her concerns, and Shiro himself apologizing)- while Shiro clearly is falling back on bad habits and withdrawing from the team about his issues.

Because Shiro, in a very catlike manner, starts avoiding people when he’s feeling awful. Which is why I think it’s such an unsung glorious moment when in s5e6, when Lance hasn’t even brought it up again or prompted it- Shiro is the one to bring it up and basically tell Lance to keep looking into this because something’s really wrong.

S5e6 is a glorious day for Shiro’s character because, some time before the car has set on fire, Shiro’s actually rolling down the window and telling someone “hey, the door’s locked and I don’t know where this thing is going, and this is kind of a problem. Can you... get help, please, I’m terrified”

So in that sense, much as I purport to be take it or leave it about clone theory, that’s why I really hope this is the original Shiro at hand... because everything he’s learning here is incredibly good and important for his long term emotional health and I’m pretty sure what we’re gonna get out of Kuron is a strong positive emotional arc for Shiro and Lance. 

Shiro’s moving away from being the team’s perfect leader, but that’s nothing to mourn, because instead of a perfect leader he’s becoming an honest, emotionally healthy person who knows he can actually trust his team. And my multiple posts talking about how Shiro really wasn’t that perfect once you take the rose-tinted glasses off isn’t dunking on him or calling him lame-

it’s pointing out that he really wasn’t doing anybody a favor by pretending to be ideal leader. In s1e9 he had a full-tilt panic attack and immediately jumped into realizing Allura was still in danger and they had to act fast to prevent them all from being destroyed- which is fine, except the part where... he didn’t unpack or process any of that afterwards.

Sendak dug up a huge volume of Shiro’s insecurities, trauma, and frankly fear of himself, of the idea of being irreconcilably changed by what the empire did to him. This is a big problem. The implication is on some level Shiro is genuinely not comfortable in his own skin and that... wasn’t the only allusion to it. 

S4e4 is basically a whole exercise in the paladins and how they relate to image (and how they really don’t) and with Shiro, the main thing Worm!Coran focuses on is Shiro’s body.

Shiro’s body, that, seemingly, he prefers to keep covered as much as possible given even though he prefers pretty close-fitting attire, he’s also pretty consistently one of the most modestly dressed of the paladins. That, as mentioned, Sendak was able to maliciously play on the fact that Shiro has some lingering anxieties of what was done to it, and that pervades his flashbacks and reactions to his missing year- the repeated implications of medical torture emphasized less by pain (sedatives are frequently shown) and more that things were done to him, that he doesn’t know the extent of, and he was powerless to stop.

And Shiro- perfectionist, anxious about how people see him (s1e6 for example), with these very serious insecurities about bodily autonomy and the aftermath that he’s been living with...

(he has a large facial scar, lost color in part of his hair, and is missing an arm, to say nothing of any other scars he might have that we as an audience haven’t seen, and, personally, his body type to me suggests that he lost weight in prison and his super-defined musculature is less about athletics and more a lack of proper subcutaneous fat)

...has Worm Coran repeatedly telling him to show off his body. The relatively innocuous (before Coran gets brain-wormed) start of it all even has the script make a joke about how Shiro only has one hand, that he gives a “really?” aside look at.

I can’t help but feel like the implication there, when all of the other prompts poke at existing insecurities- 

Allura feeling like she’s just an ineffective replacement for the person no longer with the team when she was one of the loudest unhappy voices about him drifting away, Hunk being relegated to his gastrointestinal problems and his genuine quick wit and keen sense of humor ignored, Pidge being ignored because “nobody cares what you’re saying anyway!”, and Lance the actor basically spending the entire time indulging the fake, flashy casanova persona he uses to cover all of his own insecurities

-that there’s something significant that, again, all of s4e4 for Shiro is talking about his body, especially his muscles, which is seemingly another change after the missing year- he doesn’t seem nearly that built in the Garrison pictures, though it could be that he’s just wearing more modest clothing, it’s still very suspicious especially when Haggar’s endeavor was to turn Shiro into her personal fighting machine.

Shiro’s got a huge amount of things that have been quietly eating him from the start, and the good news is, they’re actually starting to bubble to the surface- he’s actually breaking down and talking about them with less and less impetus, which is important, because back in s2e7, Shiro made it clear that his connection with Black, that any ideal connection, needs to be rooted in trust. And while he’s heavily spun that as, he needs to be trustworthy to others...

If Shiro never talks to the team about his problems, no matter how he might spin that as not wanting to burden them or that he’s able to deal with it on his own, he’s not trusting them.

And again, that Lance is seemingly the catalyst for this is amazing to me, because Lance?

Lance is the trust guy. Lance is the feelings guy. Lance is the uncrowned king of literally every thing Shiro has been struggling with the absence of here.

Lance is both the guy who genuinely gets in Shiro’s face when he feels like Shiro isn’t listening to him, but he’s also the guy talking about how Keith needs to trust the Black Lion because Black wouldn’t ask him to do this for no reason (when Black is Shiro’s Lion, and Keith draws many obvious explicit parallels between Shiro’s requesting him to fly Black and Black taking Keith as their replacement paladin).

Lance is the one who tells Allura that Shiro is ultimately not their enemy, that they’re on the same side, and who’s vindicated when Shiro is now clearly working with Lance against Haggar, telling him that something’s wrong and that he doesn’t feel right, hasn’t felt right for a while, which is the last thing Haggar wants Shiro to do.

Lance trusts Shiro, but not blindly. He’s compassionate, but not to the point of self-neglect. He is exactly the head that Shiro needs on his team right now. And that experience is gonna mean a hell of a lot to Lance, as well.

#voltron legendary defender #vld #Shiro #Lance #readmore #guess who's pumped for Shiro and Lance in season 6 #this guyyyyyy #Anonymous

[droo216]

Hey Drew, do you think you could go into detail and explain your feelings on the recent Harry Potter debacles (The Cursed Child and also what Pottermore has become)? Your opinions usually mirror mine but I'm having a hard time putting it all together. Cheers! Hope you're doing alright (I think you live in Florida?) watch out for that nasty, nasty weather.

Hey there! Let me see here. I’ll try to express my feelings, I’ll be eager to hear from you to see if you agree!

So basically the current expansion of J. K. Rowling’s wizarding world breaks down into three categories: Pottermore, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and the Fantastic Beasts series. I’ll take them one at a time.

Pottermore started out as this amazing addition to the Potter fandom. We were all so excited to be officially Sorted into our houses, learn what kind of wands we might receive, and delve deeper into the world of Harry Potter. Pottermore was excellent at the start when we were learning more about Jo’s writing process and fun facts. Why were Hufflepuff’s colors yellow and black, for example. Even the character biographies we got at the start were thoughtful and creative and felt like an extension of the universe that was already there. Pottermore has deteriorated as we’ve moved further and further away from what Jo already had written down and we’ve gone deeper and deeper into material invented for Pottermore. Ilvermorny is obviously the biggest example here. The American copy-and-paste version of Hogwarts is so clearly an afterthought developed for a quick name-drop in the Fantastic Beasts movie. It truly makes no sense as an actual American school for reasons that plenty of people smarter than me have expanded on – the trivialization of Native American culture, the absurdity that one school would suffice for the entire United States, the dismissal of the canonically established Salem Institute. The inclusion of “houses” is particularly frustrating for me. I’m sure we have private schools in the States that have houses but in general it’s an extremely British concept that doesn’t translate here. More importantly, the Hogwarts house system is so incredible. The house mascots and colors, the association with the four elements, and the values prescribed to each category all come together in a truly beautiful way. Our generation in particular has come to adopt the Hogwarts houses as core elements to our personality. It’s our way of discussing our values – the morality of ambition, the importance of loyalty, the discussion of mind versus heart or knowledge versus instinct. The Ilvermorny houses belittle the brilliance of the Hogwarts houses and it honestly infuriates me.

As a tangent to this, I think Jo also insults her own system by continuing to sort the “good guys” into Gryffindor and the “bad guys” into Slytherin. Celestina Warbeck would have been a great good-Slytherin but Jo says she’s a Gryffindor. Dolores Umbridge would have been a fascinating bad-Hufflepuff but Jo says she’s a Slytherin. Remember that meta about how Hagrid’s house is never identified in the books and how it makes way more sense for him to be a Slytherin than a Gryffindor? The houses have so much depth to them, Jo even talks about how Hufflepuff is her favorite house, but she treats them in such a superficial way.

My frustration with the Fantastic Beasts series is not dissimilar to my frustration with Pottermore. Mostly my feeling with Fantastic Beasts so far is a lot like my feelings for Pandora – The World of Avatar at Disney’s Animal Kingdom: it’s beautiful, it’s amazing, but who cares? I don’t care about Newt Scamander and I don’t care about Gellert Grindelwald, especially if we’re going to continue to avoid Albus Dumbledore’s sexuality in telling this story. I wouldn’t mind all of this extra history if I had the history I want. I want Marauders! I want Founders! We know more about the founding of Ilvermorny than the founding of the school we actually care about! If we already had the stories that we’re all deeply fascinated by, I think we’d be more invested in these additional stories. Instead, the Fantastic Beasts series feels like a distraction so that Jo doesn’t have to tell the Marauders and Founders stories. Plus, including the abuser Johnny Depp in the cast is disgusting and infuriating.

Now we come to the ultimate insult to the Potter fandom: Cursed Child. I almost don’t know where to begin with this one. It is unfathomable to me that Jo, who cares so much about her characters, signed off on this and said it can be considered canon. There is just so much wrong here. The characterization of our existing characters, particular the Golden Trio, is so off. Hermione is a shadow of her former self; Ron seems to be based on the film interpretation rather than the book; and while portraying Harry as a misguided father is certainly an interesting choice and could be argued as a plausibility given the fact that he grew up without James and with Vernon, it is certainly the sadder choice, especially considering the wonderful father figures he’s had in Lupin, Sirius, Hagrid, Arthur, and even Dumbledore. It seems like this character choice is only there to serve up drama with Albus.

Next up, perhaps the most absurd piece of the Cursed Child puzzle, is Delphini Diggory. She might as well be named Ebony Darkness Dementia Raven Way. Delphi is the worst part of the entire Harry Potter universe. Her very existence makes no sense - not only would Voldemort have absolutely no need or want for a child and no need or want to have sex with Bellatrix, it also doesn’t fit into the timeline as far as I know. On top of that, she is so illogical as a character, underdeveloped in every way and uncompelling as a villain.

The story itself is aggravating because it seems to be entirely manufactured as fan service while simultaneously letting the fans down. The time turner storyline is clearly all about allowing the play to show us scenes and characters from the original books, yet the scenes we go to are the Triwizard challenges where very little actually happens to advance the Potter story. It’s such an odd choice. And so much centers around the Diggory family, who we hardly know anything about and it’s not like we really learn any new information about them except that apparently if Cedric hadn’t died he would have become a Death Eater, which is so absolutely ridiculous. They clearly just wanted to show us some of the old characters and that’s where this story came from. Even in the present story we see how fan service affected the writing - Jo has said the McGonagall wouldn’t be headmistress by the time Albus got there, and yet here she is. I haven’t even touched on the concept of returning to the night James and Lily died and forcing Harry to watch this trauma or the various stupidities of the alternate timelines like Ron and Hermione’s loveless fates if they aren’t married to one another. 

Also, I have to mention that Jo establishes some very clear laws of magic that this story just decides do not apply. If we all just believe hard enough, we can make Harry look like Voldemort! I know there were other cases of this, but it’s been a while since I’ve read the play so I can’t quite remember them off the top of my head. I could say though that this is probably the aspect that makes the whole thing feel so much like fanfiction (along with Delphi). The Potter world has rules and Jo sticks to them very carefully. The play’s disregard for these rules is sloppy.

The final issue I have to discuss regarding Cursed Child is, obviously, the relationship between Scorpius and Albus. It's been discussed to death, I know, but any criticism of the play is incomplete without mentioning it. These two boys are great characters on their own. Albus living in his father's shadow is compelling. Scorpius in particular is a wonderful character. I also have to applaud the choice to sort these two protagonists into Slytherin, finally breaking the mold I talked about earlier. But the queer baiting in this play is blatant and painful. Honestly, it wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't forced Scorpius into asking out Rose at the end of the play. I get it, fourteen-year-olds don't always understand their sexuality, and maybe you could even say attaching Rose to Scorpius is part of that, but the play certainly doesn't imply it that way at all. It's particularly hurtful because Jo is amazingly progressive in her politics and actively talks about LGBT rights, feminism, Black Lives Matter, and so on, but she does not demonstrate all of these powerful values in her books, especially when it comes to LGBT characters. The only character she has identified as anything other than straight is Dumbledore, and even that is never mentioned in the literature, and if you know it's there it's still  only implied as a tragic barely-there subplot. The wizarding world struggles with diversity across the board. Jo's made steps. Casting black actresses as Hermione and Rose is absolutely incredible. We're starting to see characters of color appear in the Fantastic Beasts series, although way too slowly in my opinion. But despite all of her politics, Jo is dragging her feet when it comes to LGBT representation, and denying us even an implied future relationship between Albus and Scorpius is just... frustrating. I could go on and on about the details of their relationship throughout the play and how the writing clearly indicates feelings between them, but others who know the text more thoroughly have already been there and done that.

Basically it all boils down to this: Jo is giving us an overload of information that we either don’t want or don’t care about and denying us the stuff that we do. Maybe she should have quit while she was ahead. Goodness knows the Potter fans have enough creativity to fill in their own blanks. I can only hope that as Pottermore and the Fantastic Beasts series continue to grow, maybe she can do better. 

#drew talks hp #anonymous #drew answers

[phantastus]

Hi Kit!! I was thinking about Shattered Memories for the first time in a little while and so I decided to search your blog about your opinion on it and you said it frustrates you, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it if you're interested? :)

Oh man, what a coincidence. I was just talking about this with @dunglizard.

Hmm… to condense my thoughts on it, my basic opinion is that while I did enjoy playing the game, there was a lot ABOUT it that was frustrating. Most of my issues with it have to do with wasted potential and the disrespectful attitude of the people making it, and then also there were gameplay aspects that were frustrating too. Of the two, the gameplay aspects are more forgivable imo, because like, no game is perfect and they really were trying to do something new, which is risky and doesn’t always succeed even with the best of intentions.

But to be clear– I had fun playing it! The story was compelling, the character writing was great, and the entire visual makeup of the game was haunting and beautiful. There was a LOT about it that I find really commendable!

And, really, what made it so frustrating to me was the fact that those aspects of it… deserved better, and were sorely let down by the things that WEREN’T good about the game.

I’ll put my negativity under a readmore because it got really long.

(disclaimer: I’m an angry old Silent Hill fogey and while I think I’m generally more reasonable than a LOT of fans, I’m still exactly the kind of person that Tomm Hulett likes to chortle about never being able to please, so like… keep that in mind.)

So uh, we’ll start with the gameplay I guess!

I love the idea of a no-combat Silent Hill game, and I remember when the game had only just been announced, I spent so much time chatting with friends about how a Silent Hill game featuring a protagonist who had a valid reason not to be able to fight the monsters (such as a small child, or an elderly or disabled person) would be really, REALLY cool. But even with Harry 2.0 as the playable character, I was still looking forward to what I thought was probably going to be a stealth-based Silent Hill game, which was SO exciting for me because the most scared I’ve ever been while playing games as a kid were ones where you had to sneak, with no option for combat (guess who nearly had a fucking heart attack every single time I had to sneak out of the Slytherin Common Room in the Harry Potter + the Chamber of Secrets PC game? spoilers it was teenage me). If you were caught, that was it. And the trailers for the game seemed to indicate that this would be the case, with mechanics for hiding from the monsters so that they wouldn’t find you. You know, like what would make sense for a no-combat horror game. This is a common mechanic for horror games both indie and mainstream NOW, but at the time, the only major one I remember knowing about was Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which blew everybody’s MINDS with how pants-shittingly scary it was, and the thought of an SH game trying the same thing was like:

But then when the game came out, that mechanic wound up being… kind of broken. Maybe the AI for the monsters was just ramped way up or something, but hiding essentially felt useless, since there was basically never a time when the monsters WEREN’T chasing you. No matter how far ahead of them you got, they still seemed to know exactly where you were and would catch up to you within a few seconds. If you DID manage to hide, most of the time they seemed to telepathically know you were there anyway and would drag you out. Not to mention, since you pretty much had to run the entire time without slowing down or stopping, there was no time to check the map and, as the courses got more and more difficult, they basically stopped being scary. 

There was no time to actually breathe and build up that apprehension of “Will it find me? Did I lose them? Is it safe to pull out my map and figure out where to go?”– instead it just became an obstacle course race where all the other participants were not only more in-shape than you but also knew the course by heart and wanted to eat you. What should have been heart-stoppingly terrifying and dread-inducing just turned into “oh FUCK now I have to run around at breakneck speed for twenty minutes and hope that I’m going in the right direction”, and that just got… really aggravating after awhile. It could have been really good, and it just… wasn’t. 

Pictured above: me thinking I’ve taken a new path for the 20th time only to emerge directly into a Raw Shock army who already  knew I was coming.

At best, watching Harry get repeatedly dogpiled by Raw Shocks every time my thumb faltered was pretty funny. But they were going for adrenaline rush and instead wound up with yackety-sax. Not a good move for a game boasting about how damn scary it was. The non-chase portions of the game definitely had a lovely, dread-filled atmosphere, but the fact that you were never in any kind of danger until the scripted events where the Obstacle Course Race From Hell happened kind of dampened their effectiveness, too. 

ANYWAY, onto the other stuff, which I concede is more personal than objective. But I do feel really strongly about it, so here goes.

Originally, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories was going to be an entirely new entry in the series, not only featuring a new story and characters but also the first female protagonist since Heather Mason. Between THAT and the unique atmosphere that SHSM had, I really, REALLY think that it would have been an awesome entry to the continuity, and GOD does Silent Hill need more female protagonists!

But somewhere down the line, that idea was scrapped in favor of the “re-imagining” idea, so instead of a new entry to the series, instead we got… a new entry where the characters had the same names as the ones from SH1, despite resembling them only in the most superficial of ways, and also you’re playing as a dude instead of a girl because of course you are. The honest truth is that if those familiar names were filed off and only a few minor tweaks made to the story, it would STILL be a completely original entry, which makes the re-imagining aspect feel jarring and cheap– the game really felt like it was banking on the shock value of Harry Mason Actually™ being an alcoholic womanizer and Dahlia Gillespie Actually™ being a hot sexy twenty-something, etc more than anything else– when the truth is, if they had just trusted in the story they were telling and the genuine emotional impact of the characters’ problems, they would have had an equally (if not MORE, imo) impactful and memorable game.

Instead, the SH1 aspects felt forced and ugly, and when you factor in Kaufmann 2.0’s smug soliloquey at the finale about accepting that your [Cheryl’s AND the player’s] perfect image of Harry Mason was wrong~ and unrealistic~, the entire story felt like a smirking hamfisted dickpunch aimed at people who enjoyed the original Silent Hill story about a diminutive and flawed (yes, even in the original canon, he WAS flawed) but determined man who rescued his child from a nightmarishly abusive home situation. 

Reading Tomm Hulett’s opinion (pictured above: me reading almost anything Tomm Hulett says) on the game only reinforced that impression– I honestly don’t feel like going and looking up the interview because it pissed me off but it mostly consisted of insisting that SHSM was “as canon as any of the other games” and was supposed to be considered a viable in-universe ending to SH1 (despite… literally being an alternate universe BY DEFINITION and not being continuity-compatible with the other games). Given Hulett+Co’s consistent obsession with “fixing” the original games (see the HD collection debacle, during which the original voice actors/actresses were mocked rudely and key dialogue changed to be “more believable” despite the new dialogue being totally deaf to narrative, characterization, and tone), it’s really hard not to take the “We fixed Harry Mason to be more realistic and the entire message of the game is about how silly and fantastical the original character of Harry Mason was, hohoho” attitude as being deliberately condescending and self-masturbatory.

Not to mention, while I have NO PROBLEM WHATSOEVER with the characters of SHSM entirely on their own (hence why I’d honestly be all for filing the names off and treating them as entirely-unique characters in their own story, which I feel they absolutely deserved), I personally find the whole concept of… ‘fixing’ an everyman hero by ‘revealing’ him to be an unfaithful, child-abusing alcoholic, and a delightfully sinister and brilliant villain to be a Sad Mom ™, AND a troubled and traumatized but ultimately heroic young woman to be a Daddy Issues Stereotype who was also Crazy The Whole Time ™ to be…. just repugnant, in the same way that I find overly-grimdark versions of superheroes repugnant.

Pictured above: me when people take pre-established characters and make them edgier for shock value and not much else.

For me, that was what took an otherwise interesting and poignant story and cheapened it for the sake of beating a dead horse (because they’d rather SHATTER our MEMORIES of those silly OLD games, lol cry moar babies!!! than take the plunge and try doing something that could stand on its own).

The characters of SHSM deserved so much more than to just be a “fuck you” to SH1, and the characters of SH1+3 deserve more credit than to be considered flimsy and unrealistic just because they didn’t fit into someone’s approved level of Grimdark. Given that, after all the smirking and hullabaloo and Problematic Decisions ™, the game’s connection to SH1 was still so, so superficial, it went from being just a questionable storytelling choice to actively making the game worse than what it could have been, for virtually no good reason.

And final footnote: These are my opinions, and obviously there are ample reasons for people to like and enjoy SHSM! I also in no way think that writing characters with the issues presented in SHSM is bad or “edgy” by itself, it’s purely the reasons behind doing it and the fact that it denied me a bona fide in-universe canon Silent Hill game with a new female protagonist that puts it in that territory for me. Nobody has to agree with me if they feel differently. Thank you for reading.

#Silent Hill #SHSM #kit rambles about silent hill #this is a largely negative post #so folks in the tag for regular SHSM content might want to scroll! #asks 4 me #Anonymous