#ive also shot multiple music videos and hosted a tv show for a year as well so like thats a visual/written media as well so its weird

[purge-that-urge-rhackathon]

not judging, i am genuinely curious, if you havent played tftbl, and havent finished bl2, how did you get into rhack? and let me say, for someone who hasnt played the games, your fics are really on point

I am flattered beyond measure, and also couldn’t keep this short because i love the topic, so i put it under a read more AHAH! ilu anon thank you xD

Hands down, the fanartists are to blame xD AHAHAH I vaguely knew who Handsome Jack was from a pop-culture perspective (and I never before liked that iconic style borderlands is known for, so I just played Fallout and Parasite Eve and Left 4 Dead and shit like that instead). Around the time Tales came out, I started seeing fanart of Rhys on my dash (and i was like HELLO who’s this pretty boy??)  and then of course rhack art started crossing my dash, and I got curious about the art I was seeing, and learned little things bit by bit until I was swallowed whole AHAHAH! :)

From the art, I started perusing fic (i’ve always been an avid book-reader so no fore-knowledge necessary for engagement/enjoyment of material; books usually come with even less exposure to the material than fanfic ahaha) and i was learning little things here and there from the way fic-writers wrote the characters and what types of characterizations I personally enjoyed :) I have a photographic memory as well so it just became applying what I learned from my own exposure to the medium to write up fic :) No different from having to write a term paper or graduate dissertation or whatever. I’m very good at taking in information and disseminating only what’s needed. So like, seeing certain concepts/products/in-world terms/etc. crop up in enough fics tells me that is something possibly essentially to look into world-building-wise. From there, it’s a simple googling for the term/item/in-world thing to understand what it is and from context, how to write it :)

I always wondered how people who could write (extensive) fic for stuff they’ve never read/played/watched first-hand could do it, and so well too (there used to be this Harry Potter writer that like… damn they were redonk good having NEVER seen the movies/read the books). It’s simple intake of information and analysis compared with current fandom trends to do the thing xD that’s kind of it hahha. I’m probably downplaying it, and truly i could write like 10k on the subject myself hahah but we can cut it all down to the AWESOME rhack fan-creator community, and the sheer volume of fic I’ve taken in since 2015 xD 

If you want to try to see behind the curtain so to speak as a demonstration of what I mean, go read my very-first rhack fic Bad Habits and consciously-compare it with any of my more recent work (anything from the bottom of the Jack/Rhys section in my fic archive or anything else post-2015; I add works chronologically on tumblr according to pairing; ao3 should have dates) and notice the lack of scenery-descriptions, location-details, or anything else that we might today consider to be ‘standard’ fic details now. My earlier stuff is definitely lacking in depth (also WAY shorter… most shit i write is like 8k now for one ‘chapter’) and you can see that, while not having those details, it does not detract from the story (so me playing the games to do the thing wasn’t actually necessary, especially with all the fanart– fanartists are VERY emotive in their work and that says a LOT about a character). :)

There’s only so much you can do with written-word vs. a visual media to have someone imagine something the way you want, and you have to be able to choose what is important that you want them to focus on. I majored in radio, tv, and film officially, and I’m sure part of the way I work is due to that area of study and expertise (even tho my degree is useless AHAHAH i wish i wouldve majored in linguistics xD). I know how to screen-write in both tv and film format (which are VERY different and require different skill sets), I understand how to tell a story/engage an audience through a visual-media that has to start out in text-format (have to visualize my product and correctly translate that to text for my instructions to be correctly carried out in the way i imagined by a third-party) and also comprehend who my audience for the piece is, and what they can understand from a comprehension level (not calling anyone dumb by any means, but i do have to dumb-down language at work sometimes because no one knows what an ‘epiphany’ is for example, but they all know ‘Aha!-moment’ agh haha) :D But there are a LOT of ways to write characters/stories without ever personally knowing the source material. Basically i take a fuckton of variables into consideration before crapping out a self-indulgent fic BAHAHA XD

OOOH ALSO! i listened to compilations of Jack’s lines on youtube to understand his speech patterns/attitude a bit better, and I saw a few clips here and there from Tales to kind of comprehend the same for Rhys. Voice actors are a goddamn treasure and make writing easier than if the only source material was a book and not a movie/videogame :D So yeah. thats kind of my ‘secret’ idk xD

Anyone who wants to extensively write, I’d suggest reading as many fucking books as you can get your hands on to expose yourself to as many writing styles/backgrounds/settings/storytelling-ability, and basically emulate it, or mush it all into something your own xD I used to judge books by their covers in highschool and just grab whatever, read it overnight, return it and get something else. I’m thirsty for information and knowledge. If i were a dragon, words would be my hoard AHAHAH XD ive had too much caffeine again today and am rambling but thanks anon! :D this shit fun, and it goes to show you DONT need the direct-thing to jump into having fun :D

#poisonjack answers #id say the way i latched onto this fandom when Tales came out too was largely due to depression. I was 3yrs into my gov. contract then #and i really wanted to go home so i was escaping hardcore. And like anything else- practice is key. im at 1million+ words and 160+ fics. #it might just also be my brain too idk. I have a good mind for words and information. Lord willing this administration goes down in flames #and then im gonna apply to the CIA properly. What i do in terms of how i write fic is how our country keeps tabs on other countries #so yeah idk it could be a huge mush of things but i'd credit mostly everything to devouring books. It expanded my mind #ive also shot multiple music videos and hosted a tv show for a year as well so like thats a visual/written media as well so its weird #its not so far a stretch to do is i think what im getting at. I wasnt out of college very long before my job in japan either so idk #it all worked out whatever. we made a dent in the nielsen ratings back when we did the show in 2010 so i must be doing SOMETHING right xD