#imo one of the first steps i take to writing a story of first figuring out my goal and then like...

[isekyaaa]

The coolest thing about fanfiction is that you can make anything work. Nothing is too dumb or stupid or unrealistic because as long as you plot the story well enough, you have the power to make anything possible.

#rambles #analysis #wanna make Thoma snap at someone? you can do it! #wanna make ayato cry? that's possible as well! #wanna make tighnari recite a love poem to you? go for it! #even if at face value it is ooc with enough effort anything can become ic #you are god #don't forget that #you can do whatever the hell you like #also on an off topic changing notification settings dropped my anxiety from a 7 to a 2 in an instant #it's amazing how big of a difference little things can do #no but seriously like character x reader writers are so powerful #why? #bc they have full control over reader #by making reader whoever they want reader to be they can put the character in any situation possible #you can force reactions using reader #you can away the story however you like #isn't that cool? #tho some feel faceless readers are the best ppl will always get attached to a reader with personality #imo one of the first steps i take to writing a story of first figuring out my goal and then like... #figuring out the best reader personality that will achieve that goal

[deliciousdefendorinternet]

a few little things I'd change in TBT for the third act in order to improve the story imo.

this image isn't actually related to the current topic I just included it cause its cute lol Branch's mopey face and his big feet sticking out 😭😭😭😭

anyway I really feel like following the big argument and Poppy and Branch going off separate from Bro zone Branch should also get captured I'd have him go down first by himself into the room where Floyd is only to get taken by V and V before Poppy has to chance to come down from the air duct.

so afterwards she runs away after Branch tells her to realising she wouldn't be able to take V and V on by herself.

so she catches back up with Rhonda where the brothers were all going to go back to their homes since they figured Poppy and Branch would just save Floyd on their own and that they didn't want them involved anymore.

but after telling them that Branch was also captured obviously they all agree to put their petty crap to one side to go save the two youngest ( I'm not gonna write Bro zone as complete psychopaths 😂😂😂😂)

really its pretty simple this way the next handful of scenes can actually focus on the older Brothers aka the ones who frankly need the attention more than Poppy and Branch did.

since Poppy's arc was over after the scene directly following the argument so she and Branch didn't actually need any more screen time after that.

this way we can get a few more scenes of the older Brothers still struggling to work together despite their mutual goal of saving Floyd and Branch.

I'd have JD be the one to have the eureka moment of realising their family doesn't need to be perfect after overhearing Poppy since ya know he was the one who actually had that problem making Branch have that realisation is kinda arsed backwards tbh.

I'd have one scene of Branch and Floyd being reunited only this time its while their both in separate prisons it can be nice and sweet but also have Branch nervously question him on why he never came back.

and maybe Floyd somewhat ashamed says that he went out on his own and tried to start his solo career but he failed very badly.

he wanted to prove he could maybe be his own person outside of his older brothers but he couldn't hack it and he was too embarrassed to face Branch and Grandma.

so he held off on coming back for a few years but when he did finally decide to by then the Trolls had already left so it was the same deal with JD Floyd saw the empty tree and their Grandma's empty pod.

and either thought that they were both dead or that they both had escaped together but either way he didn't think he'd ever see them again.

I'm not saying this is the perfect explanation for Floyd I'm just putting it fourth as one possible idea anyway back to Bro zone.

just before the climax I'd have one last scene briefly between JD Bruce and Clay where JD actually owns up to his wrongdoings and for causing the family to split apart.

and while they do say they appreciate JD finally acknowledging his behaviour they do also admit it isn't entirely on him as obviously they were just as quick to Break their family up.

anyway we head on to the climax this time while trapped Branch and Floyd actually get to witness their older bros all standing together to confront V and V.

and the climax can almost basically play out the same only this time after retrieving Branch's Diamond prison JD is the one who huddles everyone together to say the thing about them not needing to be perfect.

and him saying he'll step back and let someone else lead to which one of the other Bros reaction could be "" who are you? "" lol.

anyway the Harmony goes as normal Floyd is saved as normal and after Floyd is back on his feet and Branch and Poppy have had their little moment.

then the Bro zone members have their moment with Branch and JD is the first to apologise given he feels the whole thing is his fault and he was the first one to walk away.

but Bruce and Clay do step up to acknowledge their wrongdoings as well leaving the family altogether simply because they were angry with JD.

and also being so quick to want to walk away again in present day simply because it was easier than actually trying to deal with any of their problems and not actually taking his feelings into account.

anyway most of the ending scene with Kismet's introduction and what not can stay the same tho I would like to add in a small detail of Bro zone maybe doing something.

like they all excitedly try to go in for a big group hug beginning to playfully pull Branch in against his will only for him to look visibly uncomfortable before the bros kinda realise their mistake and backtrack.

saying sorry and that they forgot showing a bit of growth from their earlier interactions in the film and showing that they are actually trying to take things at a slower pace as per Branch's wishes.

anyway yeah that's just a few changes I'd make to the films third act to try and make it feel a little more complete as honestly having Bro zone getting captured for the third act literally does nothing.

in terms of character arcs the film continued focusing on Poppy and Branch following the argument scene even tho their arcs were done Bro zone were the ones who needed that screen time.

so having them be captured and literally forced to do the Harmony in a life or death situation does nothing for their arcs nor the story overall.

it'd literally be better if they never showed up in the movie again as opposed to showing up only to be captured and then forced to compromise in order to save their own lives.

and then playing happy families acting like they had a complete arc when they didn't.

#trolls #trolls branch #trolls brozone #dreamworks trolls #trolls band together #branch #branch trolls #trolls dreamworks #brozone #trolls 3 #trolls 3 alternative ideas #Trolls #Trolls Branch #Trolls Bro zone #Trolls Band Together #Trolls Brozone

[spiderdreamer-blog]

Tarzan (1999)

It's hard to define sometimes where the end of the Disney Renaissance period from the late 80s through the 90s is. After the release of The Lion King, the 2D animated features steadily made less money and critical acclaim became more mixed. There was a sea change occurring thanks to more competition from companies like DreamWorks and Warner Bros., as well as the advent of the computer. For me, the dividing line is 1999's Tarzan, mostly because it's after this point that we get to what I and others call the 2000-2004 "experimental" age with films like The Emperor's New Groove, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Lilo & Stitch, and Treasure Planet. But Tarzan has much in common with those films, representing a step away from the Broadway musical traditions and into a new, intriguing arena of animation storytelling. It's genuinely one of my favorite Disney films to revisit, and I hope this review helps explain why.

The story takes Edgar Rice Burroughs' initial novel Tarzan of the Apes as a guideline more than an actual adaptation, namely ditching concerns about nobility wealth inheritance and unflattering black African caricatures (the spinoff TV series would deal with the latter in trying to be, uh, less problematic about such). We pick up with Ye Olde Dramatically Convenient Boat Wreckage in a truly commanding opening sequence set to Phil Collins' anthemic Two Worlds. Tarzan's unnamed parents land in Africa and are put in parallel to gorillas Kala (Glenn Close, at the time coming off a very different performance for Disney as live action Cruella De Vil) and Kerchak (Lance Henriksen). Tragedy strikes for both families, and where one loses his parents, another gains a son. But Tarzan (Alex D. Linz as a child, Tony Goldwyn as an adult) grows up knowing he is "different", desperate to prove himself as an ape and belong. He seems to find an equilibrium, becoming best friends with Terk (Rosie O'Donnell) and Tantor (Wayne Knight at his most nebbishy), and even managing to vanquish Sabor, but then strangers arrive. Strangers who look like him, in the form of British scientist Archimedes Porter (Nigel Hawthorne), his daughter Jane (Minnie Driver), and their guide Clayton (BRIAN BLESSED). Now things steadily grow more complicated as Tarzan wishes to learn all he can about these outsiders and himself, but what might it cost?

One of the first, most notable things about the film to me is its complexity in the writing and characterization. Looking back, the Renaissance can have a problem in terms of male leads being love interests who don't get as much focus or slightly bland focus-tested "likable". This isn't true for ALL of them; the Beast has many layers to his personality, while Simba and Quasimodo are great, imo, because they have more baggage tying them down and thus more to rise above for true heroism. Nor does it make most of them bad characters. But it was notable enough, as was the tendency for them to be overshadowed by the villains or sidekicks, for co-directors Kevin Lima/Chris Buck and writers Tab Murphy/Bob Tzudiker/Noni White to slightly...course-correct.

Ergo, Tarzan himself is very much the main focus here. There's only one major sequence that he's not really involved with, and even when he's not onscreen, the other characters are as intrigued by his contradictions as the audience. (Insert your own Poochie jokes here, though obviously it doesn't come CLOSE to that) We truly feel his anxiety about fitting in, and the lengths he goes to are intensely relatable even at their most self-damning.

The other characters, too, feel richer and more lived-in than many of the standard types. Kala is a mother figure, one who tries to make Tarzan feel like he belongs, but is deeply scared of losing him. Kerchak is possibly my favorite character in the film because of how much you have to read into his actions because he holds so much back emotionally until the very end. Even then, he comes off as a more realistic harsh father figure than a caricature, and we can always understand where he's coming from. Jane is one of the best Disney love interests, meanwhile, feeling like a modern romantic comedy heroine with a lot of drive and initiative, as well as being just genuinely nerdy, which you don't often see even today. Clayton manages a nice two-step of seeming like an obvious bad guy but playing things down the middle until he gets what he wants. Even the comic relief gets good moments, such as Professor Porter gently supporting the romance or Tantor standing up for himself at a critical juncture.

Of course, what helps here is that said characters have some of the most beautiful environments and animation backing them up in Disney history. The African jungle is depicting as a kind of painterly, hyper-real fantasy, with impossible tree shapes and vines that bloom in the sunlight. And the then-revolutionary Deep Canvas CGI process allows Tarzan to soar through them, the camera spinning and rotating with each movement. The design sensibility is "classical" Disney to a large degree, but with slightly longer faces or larger eyes to add expressiveness. The California, Parisian, and Florida animation teams all clearly busted their asses to make this come to life. And Glen Keane's work with the Paris studio on Tarzan might be the best of his legendary career in terms of the variety of movements and subtleties in expressions. So too goes the rest of the supervising animators: Ken Duncan makes Jane truly lovable and wholly distinct from the likes of his Meg or Amelia; Randy Haycock gives Clayton a macho swagger that feels entirely his own rather than feeling like a Gaston ripoff; Bruce Smith combines remarkable anatomy work and microexpressions with Kerchak; Russ Edmonds' Kala is warm and motherly while never letting you entirely forget she's a gorilla; Dave Burgess makes Porter funny with his slightly squat, short shapes; and Mike Surrey and Sergio Pablos make for an excellent duo on Terk and Tantor in terms of contrasting their size, as well as the latter giving nervous-nelly body language to such a huge character. That's harder than it looks.

The aural end is just as good. Much hay and memery has been made of Phil Collins going ridiculously hard on the storytelling songs, which I fully support. But it really is true that they add so much here and take the burden off the characters in terms of singing save for the improvisational scat number "Trashin' The Camp". I'm partial to "Strangers Like Me" in terms of the earnest yearning and connections that Tarzan makes over the course of it. And of course the various versions of "Two Worlds" are essentially the mission statement of the film, complete with absolutely bitchin' percussion. Mark Mancina's accompanying score is also excellent, sounding like a fusion between The Lion King (which he produced/arranged for both the film and Broadway show) and his action movie work on projects like Speed or Bad Boys. Particularly great is the cue that plays when Tarzan defeats Sabor and builds up to his classic yell, which milks the heroic triumph for all its worth.

The voice cast is also excellent top to bottom. Goldwyn has a deeper timbre than many Disney male leads, less of an ingenue, and this adds to the stormier emotions; we truly feel his pain on lines like "Why didn't you tell me there were creatures that look like me?" But he's not TOO grim, thankfully, and gets some good subtly funny moments such as sounding out monkey noises in a conversation that Jane only hears one half of. Close is properly maternal, of course, getting her best showings in emotional one-on-ones with both Linz and Goldwyn as they hash out their relationship. Henriksen, like the animation, wisely underplays Kerchak and lets the emotion come out through his gruff, gravel-pit voice rather than obviously signaling things. Driver is hilarious and winning as Jane, getting some of the best laughs and most sweetly tender bits of the proceedings. It's all the more impressive when you consider she played Lady Eboshi in the Princess Mononoke dub the same year, which is the utter opposite of this performance. BRIAN BLESSED doesn't do a lot of his patented BRIAN BLESSED yelling outside of some choice bits at the end, but he makes a meal of Clayton regardless as a charismatic asshole, and I like how he plays a climactic bit of manipulation in particular. Hawthorne gets a much better showing here than his previous Disney voice role as Fflewddur Flam in The Black Cauldron, daffily sweet and humorous in equal measure, while O'Donnell and Knight are familiar vocally but use that to inform their characterizations rather than distract.

I think what I like most about this movie is that it feels incredibly well-rounded. Some Disney movies from this period might have a great villain or sidekicks but a weaker protagonist in Hercules or strong protagonists/villains but a weaker supporting cast as in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. (Then you have Pocahontas, which sucks on ALL ends!) In Tarzan, everything feels of a piece, and nobody jars against the tone or mood. Combine that with the dizzying highs of the animation and truly excellent emotional beats, and you've got a real winner that stands the test of time in my eyes.

#disney animated canon #tarzan #disney's tarzan #reviews #analysis

[headspace-hotel]

Oh man, I have some THOUGHTS (as in, I agree with you and I have another side to contribute from a similar opinion) and a STORY-

I started an AI art project recently, mostly about playing with absurdist concepts, shitposts taken to their logical extreme, the weirdness that really only comes from asking for an absurd concept from an inhuman mathematical model that doesn't understand what makes it absurd and tries to take it as seriously as anything, using the freedom to rework from the ground up almost instantly as an expression of what ADHD is like, and all kinds of other stuff like that, with the aim of recreating or modifying them in physical media.

Yesterday I decided to do something pretty serious from step 1 with it and write down my thoughts about how it's used for...pretty shallow, anti-artistic, and even outright malicious ends, put it in flowery poetic language, and feed THAT to the AI as a prompt.

First attempt gave me some pieces I'm going to be working into physical pieces as planned today!

Second attempt got weird. I was working with a model that is notoriously bad at making human faces in any style. It gave me MULTIPLE good, coherent human faces in MULTIPLE styles. Some had some AI wonk, but were still significantly more lifelike than what you'd usually get if you asked it for a face, even a single known one. Some...looked human-drawn at first glance. The level of detail and coherence was actually terrifying. I even reverse image searched them to make sure it wasn't just recreating one specific thing by accident and that absolutely wasn't the case! One of them clearly took inspiration from the Mona Lisa (likely because that's the portrait that will show up the most if you ask around about the nature of art itself) but the face was 1) exaggerated in the kind of way that usually confuses this model and makes it create just a creepy swirling void instead and 2) more coherent than you usually get asking for a differently styled variant of the Mona Lisa!

It is haunting me. It almost feels like the computer itself saying something about not wanting to be used for some shallow and greedy bastardization of art - I know that's silly to presume as a literal interpretation, of course, but it sure did stir one hell of an emotion.

Like art is supposed to.

This is why I find it...absolutely unbearable how people use this technology just to make shallow pieces with a nice immediate visual impact for quick viewing and treat the uncanniness that appears when you look deeper as a non-element, because imo if you want to treat it as actual art, that weirdness - and what words reduce it unexpectedly - should be some of THE defining elements that set it apart from any other tool you could use!

And if I had the space to complete the project I would totally generate my OWN uncanny flowery cathedral, invite people to look at it until the weirdness sets in, and then unveil a physical model of it in all of its bizarre and unreal glory.

Yes absolutely

I have a sideblog that I post to occasionally, @ai-generated-xenobiology , that plays with the weirdness of the medium a lot. The images there are mainly generated using a combination of several keywords.

I thought, why not interpret uncanny AI generated landscapes as alien worlds, which WOULD be uncanny to us, and figure out how to optimize that?

I've also messed with inputting images to influence the final result and with editing results and using them as inputs again. Which is a lot more "human influence" than otherwise would be included.

See, I think this is thought provoking art because the uncanny nature of it is a feature, not a bug—it invites you to keep trying to figure out "What am I LOOKING at?" and I think the "otherness" is great. Cool inspiration.

I think the unreal flower cathedral would be great. Imagine an art piece that really messes with the perceptual boundary between "natural" and "man made" space. Impossible geometry but in a "natural" setting. Lots of possibilities.

#ai generated #unreality

[swordsmans]

Writing Patterns Tag Game

Rules: list the first line of your last 10 (posted) fics and see if there’s a pattern!

Tagged by: @acewithapaintbrush and @lesbiansanemi !!! thanks guys!! :D <3

1. poly philtatos (the most loved by far): Zoro's been on the island for three days when he finally feels their approach tickling against his senses.

2. ocean theology: uhhhhhh uhhhh i won't post this one because the opening sentence is three paragraphs long. intentionally. but admittedly that also says a lot about me and it still technically follows my rule!!!!!

3. feed your plants a little sunlight: Two hours in the afternoon sun, cool ocean spray at his back—dozing to Sunny’s rhythm.

4. alleluia: In the wake of it all, of Wano, they watch—and they wait.

5. bury your albatross in a shallow grave: He’s halfway through swinging himself on deck when he hears Nami wail, “Luffy—Luffy, you need to—Luffy, get back here—Zoro—Zoro, stop—grab him! What are you—Zoro!” just as Luffy zips past him, splattering mud and blood and who-know-what-else across Sunny’s grass.

6. how to talk without speaking: It only takes a day or two for Zoro to notice—which he’s almost proud of, really, given his own observational track record.

7. the sea makes bones of bodies: “ACE!” he screams, raw and bloody and broken—drawn out in a cry that reaches across the roiling waves like claws.

8. bone-breaker ospreys mate for life: It starts when Luffy swings his arm, winding back slow in a way he rarely does, feeling out the motion of a new punch (or the same punch practiced a thousand times to lethal perfection) right in the middle of Sunny’s deck.

9. wood is a living creature: They keep her—history’s forgotten hero, the first great ship of the second Pirate King.

10. step 1: die: He knows, logically, that the journal makes some kind of sound when it hits the galley wall.

Conclusion: my openers always include the story's setting + movement... or at least something that orients the reader with mention of either time or place and an action. imo the best way to grab a reader's attention is to give them a mental picture as soon as possible. even if there are other details to figure out, theyve at least got a partial visual or something to latch onto by the end of the first sentence, even if its just a single word. shrug. i just usually like to put place before character in my intro sections. #6 is an exception because it's technically the not the opener, it's meant to be read after the fic summary (so the "true" opener is In the beginning, Luffy does not know how to read. which functions as the setting hook, smth you could literally only do on ao3), and #9 is particularly fun because the character and the setting are the same thing. do i think about the technical aspects of my fanfic too much? probably.

Tagging: @thychesters, @starshipcaptainjojo, @majormiles, @ghostlandtoo, and @sciencemyfiction >;3c

#answers #gyro.txt

[aihoshiino]

different anon! but i 100% upvote other anon's comment of you being the professor of hoshino-aiology 😎👍 your posts about her give me a newfound appreciation for her and imo you should be the one writing 15 year lie frfr 🤧👏✨️

and if you haven't written anything abt it, could you share your thoughts abt the spica ai chapter? i liked ai and saitou in it but i was shocked at how intense the b-komachi bullying was :0 poor ai 😢

THANK YOU ANON…….. god can you imagine what this manga would be like if i had been given that kind of creative control. you're going to read my 15 volume hoshino ai backstory flashback and you're going to love every single chapter of it!!!

When it comes to Spica, I have pretty mixed feelings on that first chapter. For transparency's sake, I broadly dislike the novel overall and I think it takes away from the relationships it depicts more than it adds. Like I mentioned in a previous ask, my issue with Spica (and its depiction of OnK's world and characters) is its tendency to flatten and simplify many of the interesting interpersonal wrinkles that characterize these central dynamics in the main story. This is much more evident in the GRSR chapters (as outlined in that post) but you can absolutely see it in Ai's chapter as well.

POST-WRITING CLAIRE EDIT: So while this post initially started as me broadly skimming some of the issues I had with chapter 1, it has ballooned into a much, MUCH longer essay about what it is about Spica that I disliked and why, broadly, I think it fails to work both as a standalone piece and as an addition to OnK as a canon. I'm pretty negative about the book in this post and very critical of the writing so if you really liked Spica and it would bum you out to see me take it apart, feel free to skip this post.

On the surface, Ai and Saitou's dynamic is pretty true to the main story and I will admit that I do enjoy their rapport in this chapter and just that we got a chapter focusing on this relationship full stop. Ai and Saitou's relationship is one I've always been particularly soft for and getting a whole chapter that was basically just exploring its early days was really nice. But it's also a very rose tinted view of that relationship in a way I think does it a bit of a disservice. I discussed this in my OnK anime rewatch but Spica's take on Saitou (and thus on his relationship with Ai) frames him as a wholly positive and supportive figure whose desires for money and success in the entertainment industry are explicitly, textually said to be secondary and unimportant to his uncomplicated kind desire to support them as they succeed. There's almost this sense of "wow, isn't it so noble and cool that saitou is kindly allowing these tweenage girls to work themselves ragged making money for his company!!!" that's a bit icky to read.

This is in line with the bizarre ways Spica portrays idol culture, in particular the 'oshi'/fan dynamic. This is another thing I've discussed before, so I'll borrow my previous words on the topic:

The Japanese text of [chapter 137] takes this dehumanization a step further: Rather than the wasei-eigo term アイドル (aidoru), when calling [Ai] an idol, Gotanda uses the word 偶像 (guzou) - an idol by its original definition. It goes beyond just reducing her to an animal - it’s objectification in the very literal sense. Ai is an idol, a ceremonial object of worship, an inanimate vessel for the dirty desires of the people around her. [...] Spica [...] depicts the moment that Ai starts down this road, committing herself to being an idol who will love and support everyone, even people who hate and scorn her. This is framed by the novel as being something of a breakthrough for her and being liberating for it but I came out of it feeling deeply unsettled in a way I don’t think the novel wanted me to be. [...] Spica depicts the moment that Ai goes from アイドル to 偶像 without seeming to realise that’s what it’s doing and thus does so in a way that is not just uncritical but wholly celebratory. In a lot of ways, this makes sense - Spica, broadly speaking, is about the “oshi” part of Oshi no Ko: the emotional fulfillment of not just receiving support but in the act of giving support yourself, in cheering someone on and seeing them succeed. Spica depicts these sorts of relationships in a straightforwardly and uncritically positive light, even in cases of parasocial relationships between fans and celebrities.

There was a lot on that topic that I left out just because that chapter review was already getting so fucking long and unhinged but Spica's entirely uncritical and celebratory view of idol culture in general always leaves me feeling deeply uncomfortable every time I engage with the text. There's a degree to which this can be excused, because Spica takes place in the POV of characters who have drunk the industry kool-aid and thus would not necessarily interpret some of this stuff with the same critical lens as a reader. A charitable interpretation of the material is that, like Viewpoint B and 45510, the story is choosing to refrain from commenting on these troubling elements for the purposes of allowing the reader to have their own take on it.

This would be nice… except it's just not how Spica handles emotional beats at all!

When talking about Spica in the past I have jokingly referred to it as being written like 'the emotional equivalent of the Superdictionary' and by that I mean that it has absolutely no restraint or subtlety when it wants you to Feel Something. When Spica has an emotional beat, it hammers it in until any organically resulting resonance with the material has been reduced to a fine paste. When it has Thoughts and Opinions about a topic, it will explain them to the reader in excruciating detail so there is no risk of the reader taking away anything that wasn't intended by the author.

My point is that there is every indication that Spica's straightforwardly celebratory portrayal of idol culture and the way fans respond to idols is something intended to be taken at face value with no further interrogation. Spica is, by and large, entirely uninterested in acknowledging the ugly underbelly of exploitation, dehumanization and misogyny that drives idol culture and idol fandom.

I think the best way to illustrate this is to look at the scene near the end of the chapter where Ai finally sits and reads her fan letters. The first two are genuinely warm and sweet but the third always jumps out at me in a way I don't think was intended by the author;

“Hello, Ai-chan. I'm a devoted listener to your streams. B-Komachi's songs and talk shows have honestly become my sanctuary. I'm currently stuck working to the bone at a terrible company. They hardly pay me anything, and every day I just want to die. But what keeps me going is knowing I have your streams to look forward to every week. I’m not even kidding. Ai-chan, you're my reason to live!"

The story does not for a second pause to linger on this letter but I want you to stop and really take it in. While we know nothing about this letter's author outside of what's written here, but given that they have a job they can be presumed to be an adult. In addition, the final line of the letter in Japanese is 『アイちゃんは俺の生きる希望！』, using the masculine first person pronoun 俺 (ore), implicitly gendering the writer as a man.

An adult man writes to Ai to traumadump on her uninvited about his suicidal ideation and telling her in no uncertain terms that she is the sole, singular reason he is alive. Ai is a twelve year old girl.

Spica frames this as an entirely good, wholesome and affirming moment for her. It's one of many similar moments where Spica's celebration of idol culture clashes so strongly with the main story's that trying to make them tonally cohere is almost impossible. In fact, mild tangent, but I was working with the Spica TL team on chapter 1 right around the time chapter 137 dropped, and reading the ending of this chapter back to back with 137's tearing down of Ai's exploitation at the hands of the idol industry was some real injury-worse-than-whiplash inducing shit.

To be clear, I don't need Oshi no Ko to have a huge UM ACKSHULLY THIS IS WHY THIS IS BAD!!!! digression every time characters have positive interactions with the concept of idols. It is fundamentally dishonest and lacking in nuance to portray idolhood as something entirely and unrelentingly negative or to act like idols hate every single second they spend as idols. Sarina and Gorou's POV chapters do a very good job of highlighting what I talked about earlier - Spica's ruminations on the 'oshi' part of Oshi no Ko and how a relationship of support can be emotionally fulfilling both for the person being supported and the person unreservedly providing it. But that's purely from a fan perspective and I think it would be really interesting to Spica to take the opportunity afforded to it by being in Ai's POV to properly interrogate what Ai enjoys about being an idol.

But the way it chooses to do so just feels atonal both with Ai's arc and relationship to idolhood as portrayed in the main story and ways the manga has talked about 'oshi' culture in chapters published before and after Spica's release. It clashes with Oshi no Ko in ways I find difficult to satisfyingly reconcile.

This sense of clashing with and contradicting Oshi no Ko is an issue Spica has more broadly, in big and small ways. Some of this is just small, incidental details but other issues are larger and added all together, it results in a sense that Spica was not written by a person fully keyed into Oshi no Ko's world and characters. Like, just off the top of my head, here's some things that stuck out to me just from chapter 1:

Ai notes that she was separated from her mother a long time prior to the story's timeframe but given the ages give for her in 131 and here in Spica, it cannot be more than three years max since she was removed from Ayumi's care.

B-Komachi's formation and Ai's joining the group are both said to have happened 'three months ago' as of chapter 1's timeframe and thus to have happened more or less at the same time. This contradicts the Akasaka written material that consistently frames Ai as being one of the senior members, yes, but as having joined the group after Nino, Takamine and Watanabe.

The portrayal of Ai's bullying by the other B-Komachi members in no way matches Nino's account of it in 45510. This isn't even in a way you can put to Nino being an unreliable narrator. The details are so different that the only way to reconcile them is to assume these are two separate instances of bullying and that Nino just. Didn't mention the first time it happened for no reason.

On the subject of the bullies, the two girls targeting Ai are implied by their physical descriptions to be Takamine and Mei. While we don't really know anything about Mei yet, the vicious and unapologetic hostility Takamine displays clashes with her 'tough love' roughness that we are shown in the main story. In addition, this contradicts 45510's very explicit statement that Ai's bully was IMMEDIATELY fired from B-Komachi, no questions asked, the instant Saitou knew who she was. There is no indication in Spica that Ai's bullies so much as get a slap on the wrist for their behaviour.

Spica attributes B-Komachi's current success almost entirely to Ai and portrays her as working very hard on set and communicating with every other member of staff almost excessively to the point of annoyance. Not only does this contradict the early manga's portrayal of Ai as being antisocial and uncommunicative on set prior to her being sent to Lala Lie, it also contradicts chapters that were released following Spica that explicitly credit Nino as the key figure for B-Komachi's initial boom of success and states that Ai joined the group after Nino had cemented their popularity.

There are absolutely ways that you can handwave these contradictions and sew up the internal logic but to me, the nature of these contradictions matter to me less than the fact that they exist in the first place. This implies, especially given that some of these are in material written by Akasaka after Spica was published that he and Tanaka were, to some degree, not on the same page about the book's material.

There's some other things scattered about that aren't necessarily direct textual contradictions but nevertheless feel really out of step with OnK's takes on these characters. And like… I have tried to be relatively measured and good faith in my critiques so far but there is a part of chapter one that makes me so just bees buzzing around in my brain flames on the side of my face blood boiling in my veins insane that you must allow me to just uncharitably tear into it.

[Ai:] “Ah, now I get it. Are you buying a gift for your girlfriend, President? You like them young, after all…“ Finally, it clicked. The president, being considerably older than his girlfriend, needed the insights of a girl closer to her age in order to pick out the perfect gift. If that was the case, that explained why Ai had been roped into this. [Ai:] “Well, not that I should be getting into your business or anything, but…President, be careful when you mess with underage girls, okay? Nowadays, you’ll seriously end up in jail.”

I'M SORRY. WHAT THE FUCK AM I READING RIGHT NOW. SHE WOULD NOT FUCKING SAY THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This moment actually makes me so angry that it is difficult for me to clearly and calmly articulate what I find objectionable about it. I understand that it sounds very dramatic, but this is the first in a very consistent line of Spica bringing up the idea of adult men engaging in romance and/or sex with underage girls with this blithe, jokey and dismissive tone that entirely undermines everything Oshi no Ko itself says about CSA. The fact that it starts off this trend by putting these words in the mouth of Ai, WHO IS HERSELF A FUCKING CSA VICTIM, and treats the entire exchange as a throwaway joke honestly makes me feel a little bit sick.

This is part of a much broader and more troubling trend in Spica of Hajime Tanaka simply not being able to write young women in a naturalistic and human way. It's difficult for me to express exactly what it is that feels so off other than to say that it's Covered In The Fucking Ooze in a way typical of Men Who Can't Write Women. Ai's bullies in chapter 1 are so cartoonishly and stereotypically catty and mean that they barely feel human and they are written with all the distinct individuality as Thing 1 and Thing 2. The more complicated, two-sided conflict between two flawed people as seen in Ai and Nino's relationship is totally absent here. It's just the most vapid, stereotypical depiction of Teenage Girl Bullying you can imagine.

On top of that, there is a consistency with which Tanaka puts the topic of sex into the mouths and minds of these young women that fees… icky and offputting to me in a way I find difficult to articulate. In general, the voices of these young girls feel off and inauthentic in a way the main series never struggles with. For all I've criticized Oshi no Ko for in the past, something I think Akasaka is consistently and surprisingly good at is writing female characters who feel just as distinctly well realized and fleshed out as his male characters and that he does so in a way that does not rely on completely degendering them - their experiences as women are important to and inform that their characterization but does not entirely rule it. Despite overwhelmingly centering girls as the heart of its narrative, Spica barely feels capable of writing them as people.

All this together gives Spica this really strong sense - to me - of not really fitting in with the spirit of Oshi no Ko as a story. It's not just that the narrative voice is different but that there is an underlying flavour to Spica's takes on this world and its characters that clashes with the original. The cast as a whole just feels off, not blatantly OOC in a way you can directly point to but just enough to feel uncanny and give me a THEY WOULD NOT FUCKING SAY THAT!!!!! moment for almost every single person with a speaking line. It feels, as I put it on the Oshi no Brainrot server, like a thing that exists not because there was a part of the OnK narrative that worked best as a light novel but because somebody, somewhere thought a Oshi no Ko light novel would make some money and decided to have one churned out.

oh my god anon I'm so sorry lmfao you did not ask for this GIGANTIC ODYSSEY OF A POST!! This was just one of those asks that tapped into a topic I had already been having extensive conversations with myself about in my brain (I have a very boring job with a lot of time spent alone lol) and the more I typed, the more of those thoughts spilled out. I think a big part of why I am so compelled (derogatory) by Spica's missteps and mishandling of its material is that there is so much potential here and so many points where the material really comes close to just being flat out good.

A moment in chapter 1 that I think about a lot is Ai thinking about why she hasn't been reading any of her fan letters - because the last letter she got was her mom's lawyer telling her that Ayumi had gone missing after her release from custody, thus confirming for Ai that she had been abandoned to the system by her. Because of her association between those emotions and the act of reading a letter, she simply can't bring herself to open any of her fan letters because of the lingering anxiety.

Not only is this an entirely human and believable traumabrained anxiety kid fear for her to have but it's totally in line with Ai's flaw of avoidance and unwillingness to engage with or confront things that make her anxious or uncomfortable. It's also paid off wonderfully and in spades when she does finally confront that fear and is rewarded for it by an avalanche of love and support from her fans. It's one of the few moments in Ai's chapter where I think Spica really does well in conveying what a person like Ai gets out of being the 'oshi' in the oshi/fan relationship.

But this otherwise great moment is ruined by like… all that shit I said up there lmao. Spica is just laced through with this issue where moments that come so, so close to working and being really good are just marred by other issues in the text around it or trip themselves up in other ways. It's frustrating both because it comes so close to doing fresh and interesting things with the characters and because… I didn't want to dislike Spica! I was so, SO excited for it to come out and so willing to give it the BOTD even as summaries leaked and I was put off by the plot beats. But the more time I give to it in my brain and the more I try to engage with it in good faith, the more I come away frustrated and feeling like my time has been wasted.

#oshi no ko #oshi no posting #onk asks #meta essays #onk spica #onk spoilers

[littleladymab]

Fic Authors Self-Rec!

Ahhhh thank you @fourteenfifteen for the tag! (You can find Hen's post over here!)

Rules: When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Let's spread the self-love

Also I'm totally going to CHEAT, because I absolutely LOVE my two big series that are NOT popular at all LMAO

the scars that we're made of series! This is my "Star Wars Rebels S5" fic. This is my "did you hate the ahsoka show for yes girl giving us nothing??" this is my "do you also want to know what happens after rebels but don't want it to be EXCLUSIVELY thranto?" THIS IS MY FAVORITE SERIES I'VE WRITTEN like the whole thing top to bottom bangers imo It's not yet finished, I still have to write my Eli prequel but honestly, if you love Rebels, read this! Here's the tumblr post for main fic, far from the world that i made.

inside every open eye series! This is a fantasy Magnus Archives fic, in which Sasha steps in to take over the role of the Archivist after Jon goes missing during a ritual for the Beholding. I love a lot of the visuals from this, and I loved writing for Sasha -- plus there's a lot of fun side-stories. This one is complete! Here's tumblr post for the main fic, tiny cracks of light.

my place to land. What is UP SIGNET/ECHO NATION, ALL FIVE OF YOU! I wrote a novel for my rare pair because i am actually three bodyguard AUs in a trench coat captaining the good ship I made up. Twilight Mirage is still my favorite fatt season, because it is exactly my aesthetic and also, Signet is there. This is still one of my favorite fics, even though I can think of many things that i would change upon a rewrite. I got a lot of amazing gift art from friends when I was updating it, too, and I treasure everyone who came to read it!! It is currently still the longest fic in the fatt tag, but not for long it does look like there is someone rapidly catching up with 74k on a 6/14 chapter fic. It was fun while it lasted! Unfortunately, twitter moments went kaput so I will have to figure out some other way to put all the wonderful fanart everyone made for me!

'til my lungs burn bright. Affectionately called my "regency magic spies AU" for Ace Attorney, specifically this is for AA4/Klapollo!! This is a sequel to a fic I haven't finished yet! (Someone encourage me to finish the main fic! it's what i'm supposed to be working on this month!!) I love this setting SO much and I loved making all the little references to in-game moments. Here's the tumblr link to the fic ;) I had a hard time picking between this and my sleeping beauty klapollo au.... Also shout-outs to Joanie for doing the WONDERFUL art for it!!! (I should actually go put it in-line with the fic text too oops)

Theseus' Ship. The Anders Defender has LOGGED THE FUCK ON. That's it that's the post. No okay, it's an Anders character study and i think it absolutely slaps. Here's the tumblr link to the fic!

Bonus very short fic that I still enjoy, which you can also read even if you're not in the fandom, but Five Steps To Ensure Your Soulmate Becomes a Ghost from Rusty Quill Gaming.

Honestly I love everything I write because I am an audience of me first. The current version of my masterpost has links out to a lot of my fics from different fandoms -- like some of my other friends at the table content and my jgm labyrinth au and my lockwood fic! That's my best piece of advice: love what you write, and write for yourself first! And then the two little freaks in your group chat second 💞 I wouldn't have been able to do most of these fics without the besties, so thank you to everyone who has read my novel-length fics.

Tags: Scrambling to think of any of my fic writing friends let's goooo @luukeskywalker, @mariusperkins, @lesbianahsokatano, @redtailedhawk90, @bardicspiration, @krisseycrystal , @strangeharpy and there's so many of you i love you all, please go flaunt your writing and talk about your five favorite fics!! and tag me!!

#a lil miss fic #just generally a huge shoutout to kaite for being my number 1 hype man i couldn't do this without u bestie!!! #argh does anyone know why tumblr will untag people but still pretend like they're tagged

[papaue00]

confession but i have an inkling arthur and abigail were exes, bbuuut please bear with me as i explain (and honestly feel free to fact-check anything i say here)

but first of all, let me be clear that i hate the whole “who’s jack’s father?” discourse. imo it’s pointless and frankly a boring topic, considering many characters have already affirmingly said john is jacks father. so i’m not here to make a case that arthur is jack’s father actually.

what i wanna draw attention to is the period where john left the gang for a year (which is after jack had already been born), because something roger clark said in this panel (the question starts at 41:43 and roger answers a bit later) caught my interest. basically he said there were cut dialogue that alluded to arthur and abigail’s romance, and by rhetorically asking “who knows what happened [during the 1 year john left]?” it’s hard for me not to think it’s his way of suggesting that’s when the relationship happened.

granted, roger also explicitly said those lines/content were cut, but he seemed to also say rockstar conveyed to the two actors that they (rockstar themselves) weren’t doing away with the “attraction undertone”. and that is very much felt, given how they never actually walk back on the things they let arthur write in his journal when it comes to abigail: conflicted thoughts of wanting to marry her, thinking how she’s “the finest woman” he’s known, saving john from prison “for abigail, of course”.

there’s just this really strangely intimate and possessive undercurrent in many things he’s written about her, in a way that would feel very creepy and ooc if she weren’t his at some point.

and it makes me think perhaps when rockstar decided to cut their content, they only did so out of a desire to avoid being overt and unbecoming (probably bc they figured it could be off-putting for fans and subtlety/ambiguity can be more palatable here?), but this shared past about arthur and abigail wasn’t meant to be erased. basically rockstar themselves actually never fully committed to ditching the idea, just decided to be coy about it, handling it in a way so that there’s room for deniability.

and from a story stand point, i think it does make sense? as a bereaved dad (and let’s face it, somewhat of a deadbeat one, too), arthur would definitely take pity on abigail and jack’s situation. if anything, i think arthur’s attempt (be it a conscious or unwitting one) to integrate with them was initially driven by guilt, then probably morphed into actual appreciation/attraction for abigail. for abigail’s side, well, she was abandoned by her true love who (iirc?) denied paternity to their son, that’s gotta enrage her to no end, but also hurt a whole lot. she would definitely appreciate arthur for stepping up and come to care deeply for him in return, but i don’t think she quite shares his level of appreciation.

though by stating this, i’m not in any way trying to frame her as an “ungrateful bitch” who didn’t properly return arthur’s favor— she doesn’t owe arthur love, and i don’t think arthur showed kindness to her with the expectation of winning her over anyway— it’s fair to say arthur did all this simply because he is, well, a good man. so once john eventually returned to the gang and abigail parted ways with arthur, she would be well within her rights to do so, and imo arthur would never in any way berate him or her about this, bc he would know what he had signed up for. that being said, i also don’t think arthur and abigail’s situation was all or nothing. they might never have progressed into true love, but it’s also not unrealistic to think they started being intimate at some point, if only to cope with their problems or try to move on from their pasts (this is assuming abigail gave up hope of john coming back.)

as a bottom line, i guess i wanna say i wrote all of this to sort out my cognitive dissonance. the idea of arthur/abigail is alienating to me and i used to try to pretend it didn’t exist, but the intent is so undeniably there that i kind of started getting frustrated whenever i see people tiptoe around it, coming up with multiple unsatisfactory explanations and never getting into the meat of it, to the point i think it’s just more sincere and liberating? to just confront it lmao. now i’ve come to regard it as an interesting aspect about arthur.

#arthur morgan #abigail roberts #rdr2 #red dead redemption 2 #meta #controversial

[davyjoneslockr]

uhhh how about Abbacchio for the ask game? (sorry I won’t stop hyping them up they are so cool)

(For this ask game)

First impression: Tbh I actually really really liked him from the beginning. Grumpy Old Man who is actually 21 is such a funny character concept, and when they revealed his backstory and stand? Immediately in love. Adore characters who can’t escape the past and, in his case, are quite literally doomed to eternally repeat it.

Impression now: Still love him!! I wish he had more of a fleshed-out character arc in some respects, but I like that his final moments are framed by him doing a simple, mundane act of kindness, and leaving a final message that only Giorno can interpret, implying that he’s finally come to trust him. He’s one of the better-written characters in Vento Aureo imo, and I just find him really interesting. The little snippets we get of him in Purple Haze Feedback really add to his character, too :]

Favorite moment: Is it too basic to say “the only time I’m at ease is when I’m with you, Bucciarati” boat scene. Because Bruabba Brain aside, like. What an awesome monologue and insight into his character, especially when you think back to another favorite scene of mine during the Man in the Mirror fight, where he basically outlines his desire to serve something greater than himself. Which you would normally take as him being sort of subservient to the most powerful force at play, but by getting on the boat, he shows that he still has agency, and, even if it’s a losing battle, he’s more interested in defending what’s right rather than what’s most comfortable. Great stuff.

Idea for a story: PRE-CANON STUFF I LOVE YOU PRE-CANON STUFF. I need to write more about the fucked up weird little group dynamic between him, Bucciarati, and Fugo in the early days of the gang. Especially when he first joins, and they’re all getting slowly adjusted to one another like a bunch of skittish cats.

Unpopular opinion: Hate it when people say he’s the dad of the group. He’s not a dad just by virtue of being with Bucciarati (whose role as a “parental figure” I do buy but in a tragic fucked up way but that’s another rant). He’s the grizzled old grandfather who sits on his porch and throws peanut shells at kids who step on his lawn, but if you sit down next to him for a while he’ll tell you stories that’ll change your life, and he’ll pretend to be annoyed by you but he’ll let you have a sip of beer and call you “kid.” Do you understand me.

Favorite relationship: Him and Bucciarati obviously. Near-religious devotion and regarding him as your savior but still calling him a freak every now and again so awesome. But I also really love his relationship with Fugo that’s touched on in Purple Haze Feedback, and I like how, despite unreliable narrator Fugo thinking they weren’t close, so much of the person Fugo becomes is a reflection of Abbacchio. You became the very thing you sought to destroy etc etc.

Favorite headcanon: He knits and crochets. No reason behind this really, I just think it’d be nice and therapeutic for him. He likes to knit scarves, blankets, etc for the rest of the gang, leave them in their rooms, and pretend they weren’t from him. Everyone catches on, but they know he’ll deny it, so they don’t say anything.

#jjba #jjba headcanons #leone abbacchio

[herrscherofmagic]

IMO, the current story arc in HI3rd might just be my favorite one so far. i've got a lot of thoughts to share on it, so I present to you this post! But first, a preamble :)

This is a really long post, I think I used the right tags for this? idk

I'm basically just copying over a post that I made for Reddit, so idk if this is way too long for tumblr or what. I've got a habit of writing pointlessly-long things on Reddit and idk if the Tumblr folks appreciate this or not x-x

but without further ado! my thoughts on the whole "city of salt and sand" story we've got going on right now.

P.S., this is mostly spoiler-free; I don't make any specific references to events in the story, except for Susannah's feelings but even that is really vague so it shouldn't reveal any plot twists or anything like that.

I remember how confusing and awkward it was when I first started playing HI3rd.

I didn't have a clue who any of these characters were, some parts of the story seemed weird, or convoluted, or had no explanation. Over time I caught up through reading the manga and catching up with the story; I looked through past events to figure out the story of the Captainverse; and I've been thinking plenty about the story of HI3rd and the other Hoyo games, trying to piece together different ideas and themes.

With all that in mind, I feel like this story arc has been probably one of the strongest pieces of storytelling in all of HI3rd, and maybe even across all the Hoyo games (that I've played, at least).

I'll make the obligatory disclaimer that yes, sometimes the technobabble gets a bit confusing. Thankfully I can understand a fair bit of it because of some exposure I've had to math and science, but I can't pretend to be at Schrodinger's level.

But I think this chapter did a great job at presenting some of these ideas in a way that felt natural to the progression of the story, while also making it understandable. We might get a statement that makes 0 sense, but you can usually figure out what's going on through context clues, as well as the analogies that some characters have been making.

I think the cast chosen for this arc has also been a huge help. This is probably the single most diverse cast we've had, in terms of personality, behavior, and mindset. Whether it's Kira repressing her "dislike" of Misteln, or the banter between Senti and Seele, there's been a lot of fun moments where these characters aren't all thinking on the same wavelength. Instead they need to find ways to understand each other. It really feels like there's an effort being made by these people to understand the situation they're in, and every step forward or misstep backwards feels meaningful. It's that variety in beliefs and personality that really spices things up and makes it feel so much more lively to me!

Building on that, I've also really enjoyed some of the themes being presented here.

Especially Susannah... oh boy do I have a lot to say here!

I think Susannah's development has been phenomenal (though it's absolutely criminal that a lot of it is limited-time events... THREE events now). In fact, while this isn't quite as serious of a situation, I'd go so far as to say that it's vaguely comparable to Kiana's experience in Arc City.

Yes, the severity is different.

But the thing that made me love Honkai was how we saw Kiana grow very slowly. It was an imperfect journey and it took tremendous effort on her part, but she was able to keep moving forward. Sometimes it felt like Kiana made progress (such as her training with Fu Hua), but this progress masked deeper problems that she couldn't run from (her sacrificial nature). This led to that emotional back-and-forth, where Kiana had real victories and real defeats over time. It wasn't just "The power of friendship!" saving the day in one fell swoop, but instead it felt like a much more realistic take on how difficult it can be to recover from trauma.

Susannah doesn't have to deal with the freakin' Herrscher of the Void inside of her, but her own mind puts up a big fight nonetheless. The more I see Susannah move forward and stumble back time and again, the more I feel a stronger connection with her as a character. For crying out loud, just in the last week or two I've lost count of how many times I've felt like I've been making great strides in my art one day while being a complete emotional train-wreck the next day.

Seeing Susannah breaking down but picking herself back up and moving forward nonetheless... That is why I put so much of my energy towards the idea of storytelling. It's why I play games and obsess over stories and analyze characters and dissect settings and come up with theories and headcanons and fanon and more. Being able to see these characters go through these struggles and seeing how that can relate to my own experience in life is something that has genuinely made me a better person over the years, and might have even saved my life in a way. I want nothing more than to be able to tell stories just like this someday, so that perhaps others might be able to learn and grow from my own stories that I conjure up.

While Susannah is the one I personally relate to the most, I've still been able to appreciate the rest of the cast, too. It's enjoyable to see the way they interact with each other, but I also feel invested in every single person here. There's even a particular someone I've especially grown to love here, but there's leaks and spoilers a-plenty out here in the internet right now so I don't really want to push that subject.

For the sake of keeping this spoiler-free I've been avoiding specifics, but honestly there's just too much for me to talk about even if I wanted to dive right into it. From the setting and stage design, to the character interactions, the development of the plot, the conflicts and resolutions we've had so far, it all just feels so satisfying to me.

I guarantee that there are some objective flaws somewhere in this story arc, and I wouldn't be surprised if others were to start pointing out those flaws. But I'm still enjoying the story, so even if I can't say "This is an objectively great story", I can still say "This is a story I love", and that's good enough for me~ ^_^

#honkai impact 3rd #long post #really long post #text heavy #i hope these tags are enough to make it clear that this is a really long post at least by tumblr standards i think?

[lesbianyosano]

what do you think bsd is trying to say about war? do you have any other thoughts about political themes present in the story?

oh i have,,, thoughts,, for sure. also these are more loose threads that have been floating around in my head more than a concrete thesis so sorry if they dont make much sense as a whole

one thing i think is crucial to discussing bsd as a political story is to look at which countries' authors asagiri choses to include in the story.

obviously the main cast is japanese, but the other prominent characters come from usa and russia, and if you also take in characters from the light novels or ones, who have been foreshadowed to be important (like agatha), france and the uk come to mind. those are all states with imperialist past/present, and while there are none morally pure countries this specific selection is still pretty intense all things considered. many of the authors included in bsd were also involved politically one way or another (most had been active during the first half of the 20th century, and wrote about war one way or another)

the imperialism isnt really touched upon, unfortunately so, but ( and maybe this is just me being hopeful) i like to think its less about asagiri not seeing it and more about him not wanting to open another sensitive topic in an already complicated work of fiction.

ultimately i'd say bsd is anti-war. that's the most prevailing political theme, and one that has been slowly revealing itself and becoming more prominent the further we go into the story. worth noting is how elements that could've (and maybe should have) been shown as explicitly political avoided this framing in earlier parts of the story (fukuzawa's old profession, kunikida's ideals), but ig there's still time for that. the anti-war sentiment ties back to a lot of the works that the abilities are named after, esp in the agency. no longer human, thou shalt not die, the makioka sisters (tanizaki's light snow) are all prime examples (and kunikida's ability could technically be put under this too depending on how you look at it, since his war journalism is what made him a prominent literary figure). even if some of the authors had some questionable opinion's irl, the parts that asagiri choses to include always come back to the horrors of war.

decay of angels is another thing, given it's named after mishima's last novel, one that he left to his publisher on the same day he started a coup trying to restore the emperor of japan and commited seppuku. there was a theory i saw a while back that said bram wasnt actually a doa member, and the 5th person is yet to be revealed, and it'd be really interesting if we got mishima in bsd but he's still to this day a pretty polarizing figure (understandably so) and im not sure if asagiri would want to take that step, since it'd be a point of no return in terms of explicit politics in the story. and he's been pretty timid with that i mean look at the way he handles police brutality (cops in yokohama being portrayed as incompetent yet ultimately good people, jouno going from prime example of someone knowingly abusing their power to apparently caring abt the innocents, and this is obv a different, more complicated topic so uhh idk maybe ill talk abt it some other time adgsfgagd). idk it just seems like he's afraid to really push the ideas forwards, keeps them palatable to the general public although idk if this is a concious choice or not. im willing to give asagiri the benefit of the doubt bc of how he handles fukuchi though. people hate him bc??? idk he's not a twink and he killed someone ig but personally i adore him, goofy aah guy imo. it'd be easy to write him off as just an autoritarian crazy guy who wants to take control of the world for unspecified "greater good" but the arguments he makes are generally pretty compelling! and not just to readers, we see atsushi questioning the way world works and government's role after listening to fukuchi explain himself. its fukuchi's methods that are questionable not the ultimate goal of state abolition. and we still dont really know what his ultimate reason for doing all this is, just that he claims it's not revenge on fukuzawa, so im curious how this is going to get handled.

and the last thing is the brief anticapitalism theme in the guild arc but again, its like asagiri gave up on it before it became too prominent. fitzgerald is the ultimate capitalist and we see this esp in relation to steinbeck, whose dislikes list finansists in the enligh translation and capitalists in the polish one (no idea what is listed in japanese exactly). but fitzgerald is ultimately sort of redemed, with his (and poe's) wealth treated as a gag rather than a human rights violation

those are all the things that have been ping ponging around in my head and i hope this is in any way at least a little bit understandable. there are some things here that deserve a post of their own but id have to reread at least the last few arcs to talk about them in depth.

#also sorry this took so long i need to get better at answering things #theres still one more thing in my ask box thats been there for so so long god #ask #i should. try to reread stuff abt fitzgerald and jouno...

[bropunzeling]

7, 15, 21

7. How do you choose which POV to write from?

the pov basically always comes with the concept to me? like, once i start thinking through a concept and get into the details of the plot and emotional arc it basically is like, well, this is a leon pov, or this is a jamie pov. part of that is certain povs are easier for me to write from (brady tkachuk what is the interior of your brain like inquiring minds want to know) but part of it just comes with the concept - the narratively interesting pov is always pretty clear to me from the get-go, and once i know it's impossible to do it from the other side.

15. How do you write smut scenes? Do you get very visual or detailed? How important is it to be realistic?

ok so this is like, a multi-step process lmao:

first, outlining/figuring out the goal of the scene. this happens before any actual writing; when i outline i always know where i'm going to have a full-blown sex scene, and a rough sense of what it needs to do for the plot. imo sex scenes should always have a purpose -- the purpose can be sexy! but should not be shoehorned in because it's expected or whatever.

next: we are about to write the sex scene. this is when i look at my outline and really nail down what the scene needs to do: what happened before? what will happen next? where are we - arena? hotel? somewhere else? this is often when i figure out roughly which sex acts are going to happen. if it's at an arena or somewhere else where time/privacy is limited, probably blow jobs or hand jobs. if at a hotel or someone's house, can take more time/do more involved things. setting also helps me determine the level of intimacy of the relationship - new location means new dimension to the relationship, a step up in vulnerability

then, set-up. i love building up to a sex scene. did they play a game beforehand; is one of them pissed off about that? are they having a conversation. were they with a group or alone together. how will we get to the physical location. are they touching? where? will they kiss before they get there? i honestly spend a ton of time on this part because i think it might matter more than the sex? without the sense of tension there's no sense of narrative release

then: the sex! this is the part where the outline comes back in. how did they feel about each other going in? how will they feel coming out? what physical acts or sensations or words could act as a turning point? i rely a lot on physicality, noise, texture to indicate feelings. i pick phrases because they sound hot and then come back to worry about the logistics during editing lol. what is the non-pov character thinking? this is so important because often i'm writing two characters approaching sex from opposite places, so i need it to be clear to me (and the reader) who is feeling what, and what aspects might be noticed by my pov character vs not. then i put on heat waves and listen to it 30 times in a row and hope for the best

21. Would you ever collaborate with another writer for a story?

yes!!!! i haven't ever published a collab before but i think it would be really fun and a neat challenge

#ask meme

[mimbotomy]

7, 24, 56?

Prompts found here!

7. How do you choose which POV to write from?

It’s a bit of a process IMO so I’m just going to go through it! Starting with my process for a multi chapter long fic with multiple POVs bc that’s mostly what I write lol.

My first step when starting a new chapter is to flesh out/rewrite my outline according to the previous chapters, changing any continuity errors, changing the tone if needed, etc, etc. Then I make of list of all the potential POVs and think about what notes I’d want each one to hit - their feelings, thoughts, how they would react to the action - and I’ll often write a couple short little snippets to see how their voice and internal dialogue works with the action of the chapter. Since I only really write Odyssey fic, a lot of this step focuses on our girl Kassandra and debating whether or not I want her POV or someone reacting to her, and then what kind of reaction I want! Then I start writing! And honestly, I go back and rework things or completely rewrite things to a different POV in the middle of this step more often than I would like to admit RIP.

My process for single POV fics, of which I only have two bc I like seeing different people’s view points, is mostly the same, but I spend a lot more time debating between Kassandra’s POV and reactions to Kassandra. Deciding on the POV for There is No Escape. . . was a lot easier bc after I decided I wanted this fic to take place after Hades’ canon storyline, the story became less “Kassandra and Zagreus fight Underworld baddies” and more “Zagreus’ decision to help Kassandra and the bond they form over their journey down and out of the Underworld.” And having it from Zagreus' POV, in a world and story format he knows and understands gave me the space to focus on relationships and characters rather than Kassandra reacting to the Underworld. And I had already down a Kassandra POV for A Miscalculation, which had a similar storyline of Kassandra saving Phoibe from the Underworld, so I wasn't necessarily chomping at the bit to completely rehash that.

But I went back and forth for a much long time between having the Children of Kephallonia be entirely from Kassandra’s POV or alternating between her and Phoibe’s before deciding on the former, bc I realized my plan for the story gave me the opportunity to have Kassandra reacting to herself and her own skill and power that I don’t really give myself to do in my other fics. One of the scenes that I thinks best explains this is in Chapter 6, The Interloper, where Kassandra is surprised that Brasidas doesn’t seem to believe that she can scale a three story wall in armor without being spotted bc she lowkey thought everyone could do that, and Ikaros says, “Maybe it’s just easy for you.”

This ended up being a little longer than expected but that’s my process!

24. Worst writing advice anyone ever gave you?

Writing in past tense! Not trying to shit on anyone who writes in past tense, bc I have read some truly amazing books and fics written in past tense, but I feel like my work became a lot more fluid when I started writing in present tense. It helps brings me into the moment and I think my work is now more detailed and easier to read bc of it. Easier to write too - flows better IMO.

56. What’s something about your writing that you pride yourself on?

Characters! Or more specifically, I think I’m pretty good at getting inside a character’s head and capturing their unique voice and I think I also do a decent job at exploring and fleshing out character relationships from canon. Honestly, I think a lot of my skill there has to do with the fact that I write a lot of crossovers (3 on AO3 and at least 5 rattling around in my head or on google docs please pray for me 🙏) bc it forces me to really think about Kassandra and the other characters, whether from Odyssey or Marvel or Harry Potter or Hades, to figure out how they would act and react in situations so far beyond the comfortable confines of canon.

For example, I personally saw a huge shift in my writing after I started my Odyssey x Marvel crossover: my Kassandra and Ikaros became even more tightly connected, she became more devout to the gods and both a little more and a little less arrogant at the same time, and her relationship with Phoibe solidly shifted over to the mother-daughter category, all of which ended up becoming big parts of my next fic The Children of Kephallonia and every fic since.

Also, I think I’ve gotten pretty good at writing fight scenes and giving Kassandra a unique fighting style, but those scenes are usually a lot shorter 😂

#for lack of a better tag #ask game

[superflatpsyche]

How to Make Comics

Hello! I definitely meant to answer this question earlier, but I knew it’d end up being a really long post, so I wanted to be able to sit down and answer this properly.

First off, I’d decide what kind of comic I want to create. Will it be a huge epic? A gag-a-day comedy? Will it ever be printed?

With digital comics, you could give each page a different-sized layout or even animations if you wanted to! These are all things that are hard to translate into a physical book. You also wouldn’t need to worry about things like page bleed. Or color choices - in my experience, digital art prints way darker than you’d expect.

The stories I have planned and am currently working on are graphic novels, so I don’t have much advice when it comes to newspaper-styled weeklies. But, if this is the kind of stuff you want to make, then my tips might help!

My starting point for making comics was having some character designs lying around that I wanted to use for something. Some people come up with the story first, but for me, it was the characters. If that’s your style, then concept art is a good way to plan out the “feel” of your comic:

IMO it’s very easy to fall into the trap of drawing concept sketches forever, so at some point, you will need to move on to outlining the plot of your comic and writing your first draft. All first drafts suck, so once you’ve reached the end, you’ll immediately have to go back and edit things as needed.

Some resources I used to figure out how writing works are Wired For Story by Lisa Cron, as well as Jim Butcher’s Livejournal posts.

Comics invariably take a long time to make unless you choose a super-simple art style, so I included things like camera angles and other details in my script, to remind myself how to draw a particular scene when I finally reached it. Here’s the script version of a page I finished and posted a while back:

Scripting your entire comic this early on means that you won’t be investing huge amounts of time into making any changes to the story. Rewriting is much faster than redrawing.

The next big step is sketching thumbnails of how your comic pages will look. Ideally, you’ll want to have finalized sketches of every single page before going any further, but you could do one chapter at a time, depending on your workflow. Here’s what that looks like:

At this stage, I’m mostly focusing on page layout, panel shapes, and speech bubble placement. It’s also a helpful tool to see where your double-page spreads can go (this is when two pages of a physical book are used to create a single, double-wide comic page).

And now comes the fun stuff: deciding what size your comic should be. I didn’t want to think about this at all, so I just grabbed this template from online:

And also this template for double-page spreads:

And these are the sizes I draw Control Freak at, with a resolution of 350 DPI (the minimum recommended resolution for printing is 300 DPI).

Thanks to these templates and the groundwork laid down in the last steps, I can now actually start making the comic! Here’s how I use the template - note that all of the speech bubbles are placed in the “live area”, where they won’t be cut off during printing.

And here’s the finished page:

Now repeat for as long as it takes to finish your comic!

I personally recommend picking a very manageable art style, as comics take ridiculously large amounts of time to make (I have learned Many Things about this from working on Control Freak), but you do you!

Hope this helps you make whatever comics your heart desires ^^

#tutorial #comic #webcomic #control freak #superflat speaks #ask #paintedpig

[gooseclaws]

im gonna start working on my game for real very soon (just need to finish playing some video games cause i cant focus on more than one thing at a time) and i would rather post about it here than the bird site. i want to post about it because im pretty much starting from scratch here and if anyone has any advice i would like it. and also it just seems fun to me to post about when i have cool ideas or make dumb mistakes. i dont always know how to be properly interactively social but i want to just do things? and if you want to stop and watch and ask me questions, i will be pleased as punch

i dont know if ill ever finish this project and i especially dont know if ill ever publish anything or try to make money from it. i loved writing fic and i loved getting to share it and there was no money involved there. i want to keep that vibe going. soooo unfollow me now if you dont want to basically read the development diary of someone who doesnt know how to be a developer

as far as where i am now with it, ive been ~thinking~ about it a lot and if i know anything from writing fic its that thinking about your project constantly but not doing anything about it definitely counts as working on it. i did take a hefty chunk of time to learn C# and how to use unity but i havent touched either in a while so we'll see how much like riding a bike those are.

anyway. i have no idea how to design a game from scratch by myself, but i do know how to project manage because thats basically my day job. if i break it down into its parts, i can work backward from the end goal and figure out what i need to do to get there. sometimes those steps mean making stuff and sometimes theyll just mean learning how to do shit. this is going to take a long fucking time and learning how to do shit is never a waste of time imo

when i break it all down, the very first thing i think i need to do is get a decent outline of the story and its main branches. the visuals, audio, and gameplay will all stem from the narrative. the good thing is developing the story is the part of this im most confident about. i think im going to play around with using yarn spinner to build the story because branching narratives/player choice is going to be critical and i dont think my usual tools for writing a linear narrative are going to work.

hopefully i have something to share again soon

#if it doesnt work out at least ill have the skeleton of a short story #but also who cares if it doesnt work out #the point is just to try

[re-coding]

I make a stupid decision to decide to make a (fic) writing app, cheers

Well now, I know there's like tons of them out there in the market. A lot of them are good! And even free (or have pretty good free versions)! A reddit thread I found have a few very good ones, you guys can check it out! (I'll add my own two cents later :3)

But look, the only thing I want to do, is to have a place when I can throw my ideas into a list (like what I'm did in my notes app) then auto convert it to a document when I feel like I want to write it. None of them (or at least, what I saw/found) have it!

To do that, I set up a Google Form-Google Sheets system so I can just fill in the form when I get some thoughts™. Then when I feel like I want to add another WIP to my ever-growing list of WIPs, I'll just open the associated sheet, see what idea I would like to write, then create a Google Docs and copy/paste the idea there.

Easy, right? Problem solved?

No, not really. For me, there're a few problems with this.

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The Problem(s)™

The process of opening Google Forms takes forever to load (depending on my Internet) and I have a goldfish memory. What are the odds that I forget my ideas by then.

(Just use phone notes app then) But I'm in the mood to type my fic in a computer 😔😔 I don't wanna copy my prompt there to a doc via phone, or worse, retype it out. There's like 4 steps there at least! I'll lose my motivation by then!

Google Sheets has this problem where the text refuses to wrap properly if you add a long text (my ideas are sometimes a few hundred words of rambling y'know). So whenever I decided to grace the sheet with my presence, I'll need to reformat the wrap if I wanna read what I wrote. That's 1 whole extra step.

I'll need to open at least two tabs here, 1. my sheet file, 2. open a new docs file

Look, they're all pretty minor inconveniences imo, but I'm 1. a lazy mf and 2. a tired mf

So, I made a decision any sane person with a job and 0-energy would do - I thought "Hey, why don't I make my own?".

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And thus begin the brain-storming

Ok, look I'm not that good at UX/UI designing. I figure that should be the first step so I went and watch a few video and stumbled upon Juxtopposed's world's shortest UI/UX design course (it's pretty great, do check it out!). Simple, quick, concise - perfect.

First, I started with designing the user flow. I planned out a general idea of what I want my app to do and how it would flow from there starting from the landing all the way to when users save their work and exit the app.

Boy, I sure hope I did that correctly.

This generally is made up of user actions (except for landing). You may notice how it's mostly AO3 focused because yes, I'm using this just for AO3 - as in I stopped using fanfiction.net, Wattpad and Quotev a long time ago.

I did get some inspirations for some of the features from other existing apps. Like:

Scriever - it's paid, but most people say it's a godsend but personally, I've never tried it. I think it pioneered the scenes idea tho.

Manuskript - Free open-sourced version of Scriever basically! They also have words and phrase frequency analyser and I think that's pretty neat!

MyStory.today - I like the idea that you can edit and view multiple scenes at once but the writing UI itself feels kinda clunky? It feels bothersome to add a new scene below my current one. But free version is enough and that's pretty nice. Oh yeah, not sure if it's just me, or it's kinda laggy

Wavemaker - ok this actually a great one! Everyone should give it a chance! But again, too complicated to just add one simple idea when I just wake up for instance.

Story Plotter - This one is nice. It actually have a idea to story button but, why are there... so many things... to choose before I can start writing the story. Granted, all of them are optional and you can just spam skip... a whole 7 times (unless it's a freeform, in that case, 4 times). But this provides a nice idea to combine more than 1 ideas into one plot tho. Also, not my style

Campfire - Is nice, there's so much things you can customize! But well, the free version can be quite limiting, like what if I need more than 25k words :(

Notion - Ok, here me out, it's not a great idea to write multi-chapters long fics here exactly without some amount of setting up too. BUT I love the markdown system here and I wanted to include it.

Do try some of them out, maybe you'll find your new writing app soulmate, who knows?

So... about the user flow diagram

I'm making this app because of two main features, ok maybe three, that I want to make my life easier and make me happier.

The ideas being converted and directly stored in my writing doc.

Being able to use markdowns to type unlike google docs *squint eyes*

Copying the whole chapter in HTML so I can just throw it in AO3 and click update without worrying about forgetting the formatting OR having to go to those docs to HTML converters.

And a secret fourth thing to maaaaaybe include things like chats, boxes, and other workskin related things

Oh, yes and how could I forgot, syncing progress across multiple devices

So I want to implement auto-save features (well, at least when you're connected to the internet, else it'll save locally first). The database I'm thinking to store these should be the user's own google drive (but that would required the user to sign in to their drive first).

Inversely, I'm thinking if the user did edit the doc in the drive, it should reflect in the app too, so I'll need to think about that. But the idea is that one chapter should be stored in one doc, and then separated by a scene separator symbol (I'll figure this out) to break it into scenes in the actual app. That may be a bit messy to edit in docs though so maybe a traditional folder + docs might suffice but then, there's also a space constraint, where there is too much scenes. That's probably where the web services come in.

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

And, oh! another diagram!

Ok look, the user flow made perfect sense to me while I was making it. After looking at it again while writing this... In hindsight, I should also make a screen/page flow diagram, or sitemap, so here it is! So- ta-da~!

So this should be the whole flow of screens for the app. There may be more screens in the future but for now I think this should be it!

The app mainly just consist of -

The home page - which displays ALL your works/books

The ideas page - which is basically my notes app for, well, ideas, word vomit, random shower thoughts about how much you want a fictional character to be xxx

The writing page - which will be the main working space, the rest of the pages like references, characters, places, timeline, chapters and individual scenes can be accessed easily from this page too

The profile page - well, it's your profile! Access your profile settings, change themes, work space settings or what you want to copy in your html here - maybe add friends for collabs and betas in the future? We'll see

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And that's it! ...For now

Oh my god, I'll admit, this post went on longer than I expected haha. That's all that I have to share for now! Next up, I'll get started on the wireframing process (moodboards? hunting down apps? reddit???? ok nevermind, reddit sounds like a bad idea). I know I kept calling it app, but I think I want it to have an app, windows, (macs?) and web version.

Thanks for making it this far and reading it all!

#writing app #app planning #app development #fic writing #writing tools #brainstorming #userexperience #user interface #app ideas #this is me procrastinating #on actually doing my wips