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ficretus · 1 month

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I am getting kind of annoyed both at takes I see at rwde as well as anon who spammed my posts few weeks ago. Basically, they argue that on top of being awful character, Jaune also completely ruins his literary allusion, Joan of Arc.

Of course, you are free to like or dislike Jaune, however, when people claim they hate Jaune because he is a coward, I get really confused. Jaune is not a coward, he is pretty brave, to the point of it being kind of flaw since he has low regard for his own safety. If he was a coward, he wouldn't have went with Ruby, Nora and Ren to Haven, he wouldn't have challenged Cinder to the fight, he wouldn't have tried to infiltrate Salem's base to save Oscar, etc. They are pretty on the nose with it in Volume 8 when Ren states Jaune feels no fear.

However, meat of my gripes is with people not understanding Joan of Arc and how to translate her character to the story.

No, Jaune not being giga chad isekai self insert protagonist level of strong is not an issue or insult to his primary literary allusion, it's the opposite. I don't know do people get their Joan of Arc knowledge from Fate Grand Order, but Joan herself wasn't skilled fighter. She was never properly trained and never directly fought someone. In pretty much every major battle she fought she was wounded or knocked out (hit by an arrow at Orleans, knocked out by a rock at Jargeau, hit by an arrow at Paris, knocked off from her horse at Compiegne). In fact her knowledge of sword fighting was so lacking she accidentally broke her treasured sword when she struck a prostitute with its side. There is no good reason for Jaune to be some kind of prodigy when he is based on a character that never properly fought anyone.

No, Jaune relying on his team to solve problems doesn't make him pussy and isn't unlike Joan. Once again, Joan of Arc wasn't front line fighter, she was moral support to the army. Her greatest triumph, siege of Orleans, was just her directing armies where to go whenever she got a vision. And Jaune's Semblance makes sense for someone based on Joan of Arc. It is essentially morale boost Semblance considering boosting an Aura buffs both your health, defense and offensive abilities. It matches what Joan did for her comrades. Jaune relying on his team to accomplish things is not a bug, it's a feature.

No, Jaune failing doesn't make him an insult to Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc herself wasn't perfect and suffered handful of failures herself. After her victory at Orleans, she won at Jargeau, but then lost the siege at Paris. After that she was stalemated in Perrinet Gressart campaign, won a battle at Lagny and was then captured at Compiegne. After failed siege of Paris, and especially after stalemate against Perrinet Gressart, Court started doubting her abilities. It is simply different order of wins and losses with Joan peaking in her first battle while Jaune was completely useless during the Fall of Beacon but has upward trajectory after that.

Jaune's Joan of Arc is the one without any special abilities but with the same aspirations. He wants to be the hero and save the world, but he wasn't blessed with divine power that gives him unnatural charisma and allows him to see future events. People's gripes and suggestions how to "fix him" usually boil down to turning Jaune into generic power fantasy protagonist. Which is not only boring and misses the point of the character, it also misses the point of Joan of Arc. If Jaune was some kind of prodigy kicking ass since Volume 1, he wouldn't have been Joan, he would have been Roland, Arthur, Lancelot or whatever famous legendary knight you can find.

#jaune arc #rwby jaune arc #rwby

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bluewithpurplepolkadots · 17 days

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I’ve only watched the Dungeon Meshi anime and even then only the episodes so far available on Netflix (so maybe this changes). But it’s kind of almost paradoxically interesting in an odd way that outside of Kabru himself the rest of his party are just… boring. Like they would probably be the main group dynamic in generic boring fantasy anime in generic western fantasy setting #234. I almost wonder if they’re like a take down or parody of that by the creator who has gotten tired of such boring friendship or group dynamics in other fantasy works.

Like Kabru himself clearly has something else there: which I’m interesting in learning about. There’s clearly something wrong and I’d like to find out why. But his party seem like boring cheerleaders in a sense, with barely any substantial arguments to be had with their party leader at all. Any protests are light, and so far barely anything substantial at all.

Laois and his group: the actual main group, clash in interesting ways. They disagree with Laois and think he’s weird (outside of Senshi) because in a lot of ways he is but his weirdness helps them survive. They have different opinions about matters which means they can have interesting discussions. And interact with each other and outsiders, not just as talking props for their main leader, in interesting ways. (Marcille and Senshi with regards magic, the fact Marcille slowly comes around on eating monsters with the others, Chilchuck calling himself a coward but in the end he can show himself as brave). At most we have Kabru’s party thinking it a bit odd that he remembers the details of other people and that’s… it. It’s barely a topic they seem to want to deeply discuss at all or a deal breaker.

Kabru and his (current) party dynamic is probably what would be happening in a far more boring isekai or self insert story or its rough equivalent. Hell even in said more boring story Kabru himself wouldn’t be interesting at all like he seems to be in current canon. He’d just be generically nice with a cheerleader squad and absolutely nothing simmering barely below the surface.

#dungeon meshi #anyway Kabru and his crew dynamics would be the main crew in a worse anime and Kabru’s nice side would be his only side #or at least there would be no indication that ‘something is wrong’ or anything of interest with him

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metanarrates · 9 months

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hi as someone who's been browsing your utena and ORV meta, please I'd love to hear your thoughts on villainess isekai

my off the cuff answer is that most people are not revolutionary leftists OR revolutionary feminists and therefore don't even think about those ideas, since current oppressive systems are the air they breathe. their concept of wish fulfillment only occurs within those systems, or ones that have a strong resemblance to existing systems (ie feudal european fantasy world where the protag is/becomes landed gentry.) sure, the character is still in the system, but she's at the top of the class system, and she has Special Qualities that render her somehow immune to patriarchal violence. that sort of thing is the only escapism a lot of people can imagine, since existing outside the system is, well, a revolutionary idea!

FURTHER ANALYSIS UNDER THE CUT:

under patriarchy, there exist only a few models of womanhood that are okay for women to relate to and aspire towards. obviously, this is a complex sociological concept and those models are not uniform for every society, or even every person's perception of that society, but those models do have a tendency to shape what women fantasize about. and literally every one of those models has the common feature of being subservient to men in some way. this is, again, because of patriarchy lol.

patriarchy also has this effect of presenting heterosexual love, romance, and reproduction as the ultimate way for a woman to find fulfillment. there are other acceptable avenues of fulfillment, but all of them are supposedly inferior to the fulfillment of having a man who loves you and wishes to protect you. this essentially has the effect of making it so most, if not all, of popular fantasies targeted to women end up also treating heterosexual romance as the ultimate path to fulfillment!

you've identified that power fantasies written for men tend to be about gaining, yknow, power. they get skills and Do Cool Things and also often gain hot chicks as a secondary aspect of wish fulfillment. power fantasies for women are often an inversion of this: the primary wish fulfillment is that of a hot guy who loves them, with any extra powers or skills or Stuff the main character gets acting as a secondary component to that fantasy. this reflects real life gender expectations, where men are meant to be career holders first and husbands second, and vice versa for women. and a Lot of this ties into what I was talking about earlier with both acceptable modeling and patriarchial romance standards.

you see, i have a theory in relation to escapist main characters. in a lot of other genres, it's somewhat acceptable that the main character of a story is not someone you have to 100% identify with. they can do socially unacceptable things and the story can still be very enjoyable to a vast audience. but when it comes to a character who functions more or less as an audience self-insert, the standards change entirely. an audience isn't usually quite as comfortable placing themself fully in the shoes of someone who defies social acceptability too much, just because those are actions that make them feel uncomfortable in real life. they don't like having fantasies that feel wrong by the standards of societal structures.* and so, a LOT of the time, the main character must fit acceptable models of womanhood in order for the fantasy to sell.

(*generally speaking. see above on societal stuff not being uniform. i have a lot to say about how an Actually Evil villainess functions as a fantasy but for now I'm just gonna talk about patriarchy in shoujo fantasies lol)

and what are these acceptable models of womanhood? like i said, they're highly tied to the female character being desired and protected by men. this familiarity is comforting to readers. it's unchallenging. it's even desirable.

and this is what I keep identifying in escapist fiction: the need for comfort/familiarity above all else, even if that comfort is found in opppressive power structures. a key component of the fantasy is the power structure seemingly without the oppression that makes those real-life systems unbearable. sure, the protag is essentially the property of the man who loves her, but maybe he lets her do what she wants, or he won't hurt her in ways she doesn't like in the course of possessing her. it makes gendered structures that are implicitly violent in real life explicitly nonviolent (or not violent to a point where it cannot be tolerated by the protagonist) inside the fantasy. it is, in essence, softening patriarchy to a point where it can be viewed as safe. and to a reader of these fantasies, that feels safer than dealing with the uncertain territory of someone who tries to escape those structures!

#narrates #escapist fiction tag #<- i talk about this so much that I really do need a tag for it now #anyway yippee here's one of many informal essays I want to write abt villainess isekai and its function as escapist fantasy #sorry this took a bit to answer lmao

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bluue-god · 4 months

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✰TWSTSONA SHEET✰

Time has come for me to show here my twisted wonderland Sona!

More down if you're curious!

Let's start by addressing the elephant in the room:

This is my self insert of course. So the story goes as you would've pretty much expected.

Isekai student got into another world and yada yada.

Here I'll make a general rundown of interesting things about 'em!

✶⊶⊷⊶⊷❍ ❍⊶⊷⊶⊷✶

Who is G?

G is definitely human. Got introduced by Crowley as the 'boy' that ran away before the ceremony. G is, of course, not the real name of this "boy", but he doesn't really mind so he rolls with it. He remembers little to nothing about the cause of this random teleportation into Twisted Wonderland, he only remembers that he hit something and blanked out for a while before hearing Grim trying to steal his clothes. He remembers his full name (G is just the initial), remembers where he came from, but he doesn't remember how old he is, almost if he just stopped aging once he got into Twisted Wonderland.

Why the Diasomnia jacket?

He actually always stayed at the Ramshackle and for a while he actually had to wear the (oversized) uniform of that dorm. He didn't like it but hey, he can't do much about it.

After all the events of books 1 and 2, a character started to approach G more and that character was Lilia Vanrouge. G was kinda skeptical about this random dude hanging over him and following him all around the campus, but eventually he just gave up and started to become closer to Lilia.

Between the events of book 3 Lilia confessed that the reason that he was following G was because he believes that it's a "signal from the stars". He said that he dreamed about holding out his hand into the void in front of him and someone grabbed it and he was definitely sure that it was G. (Compared to the opening scene of the game.)

That's when Lilia started to drag G into Diasomnia, introducing him to everyone there and evening lending him the typical green Diasomnia gilet and since at that point G was getting attacked by this strange dude, he just accepted to become a non official member of the dorm.

Facts!🔍

Not really a fact but a statement. G's favourite colour is blue.

He seems to have some correlation with water as an element but he's still magicless so no one really cares.

Love language? Violence. Not the best way to show it but doesn't know how his emotions work.

Like Lilia, he cuts and dyes his own hair.

Actually pretty decent in PE.

After Lilia, Trein is the other father figure he has in school. He never told him that because he would never but one time he called him "dad" in front of the class.

He doesn't actually stay in one class or grade like the others. He decides what lessons to follow based on his level in that subject or based on who there's in that class. (Ex. He follows the 3° grade lessons both because of Lilia and because he's good in history, while he follows lower grades for subjects like alchemy or mathematics because he knows he sucks in those.)

He can play various instruments if you ask him. Mostly the trumpet and the guitar, but he can sing too. The only instrument that cannot play that confidently is the piano.

If you ask him for his age he just zones out and says "I don't know..." Before staring into the void for a couple of seconds.

He's very agile and can dance but never told anyone. The only ones that know are Jamil and Floyd because G dances with them.

G can cook. And clean. Often he would find something to clean to have an excuse to stay at home.

He absolutely HATES if you talk to him if he has his headphones on. NEVER do that. If he wants to talk to you, he will take his headphones off himself.

For a couple of weeks he even worked at the Mostro Lounge.

He can understand Spanish, Italian and English (duh) but can only speak two of those languages. Never going to tell which ones :)

He can and WILL fight if threatened.

He is black cat coded.

He uses nicknames like Floyd and Rook. Only not as often as those two.

Relationships! 🤝🏻

🦇 Lilia Vanrouge 🦇

There is no doubt that Lilia is the person with whom G is most familiar. In no time their relationship grew quickly giving Lilia ANOTHER CHILD.

Their relationship is the purest form of Platonism that you could imagine. Definitely found family.

G already had some issues home with his parents and family at home and now sees everyone in Diasomnia as his new family. Sometimes you can catch him calling Lilia "dad".

Most important, Lilia knows a secret that G always keeps hidden. And sees G being biologically a girl. G always asks Lilia if it's ok for him and Lilia just replies with "I always wanted a daughter!" (Even if G is actually Agender, he uses all pronouns so he doesn't really care if Lilia calls him "his daughter". On the contrary. He BAWLS HIS EYES OUT.)

Also! Lilia dragged G into the Pop music club since he caught him singing to himself or casually tuning in Lilia's bass. Lilia did this without knowing that G actually has 6+ years of music education on his back (he was in a music based highschool before getting isekaied into twisted wonderland.) so that sees that poor dude to deal with the chaotic rehearsals that the band does. He had to basically coordinate and tune everyone there. He's not an official member of the club since he's one of the two founders of a new magicless art club so he's technically already in a club, but hey, if his father wants him there... Who's he to deny it?

Ah yeah. G often cooks for everyone in Diasomnia if Lilia offers himself to make dinner.

Old art of father and son together :3 (G changed hairstyles after three months of his stay in twisted wonderland.)

🍩 Ruggie Bucchi 🍩

Now. Here we enter a very chaotic duo.

Everything started after the events of book 1.

First meeting (just a stare) : after stepping on Leona's tail in book 1.

Ruggie saw G when he was walking away. After stepping on Leona's tail, G just kinda avoids the whole Savanaclaw, he just doesn't like Leona's attitude. That until the events of book 2. They have their first "chat" when Ruggie stole Grim's lunch, but nothing much. Ruggie just saw G as trouble and G at that point hated the whole Pack mentality of the Savanaclaw dorm.

Their first interaction ever was during Leona's overbolt when he threw Ruggie away. G at that point disliked Ruggie but his hatred towards Leona was bigger than that so he helped Ruggie.

Convos:

🌊: HEY THAT'S FUCKING UNFAIR!

🍩: Uh-?

🌊: THIS DUDE MIGHT BE A TOTAL DOUCHEBAG BUT THAT'S TOO MUCH.

🍩: Ah here. It seemed strange.

[G came out very strongly at the start of this adventure. I mean, can you blame him? He got yeeted away from his home to get into a new world full of furries and idk queers. So he was, rightfully so, a bit pissed at everyone.]

[this convo happened during the overbolt too.]

🍩: why are you doing this...? Ur trying too hard.

🌊: I said that you're an asshole, that's true. But you don't deserve this. Just because he's unhappy with his life, he shouldn't put all his anger on you.

🍩: . . . Zaaaamn....

🍩: wa- wait- you're... You're helping me because... Just because-?

🌊: bro stop talking before I make you.

🍩: zaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAaa- *COUGHS HIS LIFE OUT*

🌊: you're literally DYING. STOP THAT. I won't have your lifeless body in my arms!

🍩: g- uh?? Th- then stop that-! It's weird.

🌊: you're lucky that I have a moral that I follow, if not you'll be Cat litter now.

🍩: . . . I'll shut up-

🌊: thank you so much, very much appreciated fella.

🍩: . . . . It's Ruggie

🌊: G.

🍩: G-? Just that? Nothing else??

🌊: YOU'RE FUCKING DYING. DO YOU THINK IT'S THE TIME TO DO NAMESHAMING?!

🍩: Nam- oooh you're the fun one... All the effort was put into your humor and not into your name, I see...

🌊:

🌊: Imma let go now.

🍩: I WAS JOKIN-

Overall, Ruggie started to look after G more and that got worse after G helped Ruggie after he fell of his broom while being an idiot.

The first that realised that something was off was Leona and told Ruggie whom entered a long ass state of denial that eventually got EVEN WORSE that during winter break he kinda fucked up (In his opinion) and just avoided G for a whole month untill G HAD to solve the situation. Then they got close again, just messing around and having fun. Until, on Ruggie's birthday, things got way more serious and now you can say that they're in a queer platonic relationship. Ruggie calls G his boyfriend and G doesn't really mind.

There you go. Gruggie summary ig.

🦈 Floyd Leech 🦈

To make it very easy and short, Floyd basically adopted G. As in, Floyd didn't give any chance to G to escape him. After book 3 he got extremely curious about this random blue haired boy and a specific hyena boy SO he just went for it and started to annoy G.

And after some work, now they're besties :3

Floyd and G now go around the school to literally TERRIFY THE WHOLE SCHOOL. They have fun skipping class, unless it's history of magic, then G will definitely not skip.

🍎 Epel Felmier 🍎

Random, I know, but the way they met is literally G climbing up a window from a room where Epel was singing due to Vil request. And that's how they met!!

Epel was extremely skeptical about G at first because he thought that he was interested in him just for his look, which he hates. But after a while he realised that it wasn't the case and G is just random sometimes.

They started to bond way more after G confessed to Epel that he was a girl in hope to make him realise that there are no "girl activities" or vice versa. Epel started to respect G way more after that. Now they're besties and G has the typical bigger sibling attitude towards Epel, even if against his will. :3

G loves teasing everyone. Friends and not.

♠️ Deuce spade ♠️

They have known each other since the start of the year. Overall, Deuce is like Epel. There's mutual respect and Deuce is one of the few people that G doesn't insult because he could probably believe it. G cares a lot about Deuce and Deuce looks after G a lot.

Sometimes Deuce looks like a puppy to G.

✶⊶⊷⊶⊷❍ ❍⊶⊷⊶⊷✶

If you're reading this, hi!

Lemme know what you think.😺

Bye for now 🌊

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self-loving-vampire · 6 months

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I have complained about it a few times before but...

I really wish people moved on from the whole idea of bland everyman self-insert protagonists who are completely lacking in traits besides "being extremely normal and boring" and "being mildly nice in the most generic way".

I'm not here for these Connecticut Clark/Malfina relationships made to appeal to people with the most uninteresting and superficial concept of romance and character interactions as a whole.

Note: This is not even remotely fixed by also making the protagonist overpowered and endlessly rewarded for just existing like so many power fantasy isekai guys are.

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i-bring-crack · 4 months

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As much as I love edgy Jinwoo or Angst Jinwoo or Eldrich Jinwoo the LN Jinwoo is always just this, normal guy going through shit TM. He isn't that fucked up but he isn't completely sane either, he isn't purely good but not pure evil as well. He is just guy, wants a good life but shit sucks guy. Will just soundly spend his life being completely normal being around normal people but bad shit happens and he just has to get up from his couch and do the job only he can, unfortunately, do.

That normalcy is also something he constantly craves as seen by wanting his family out of Hunter Drama and doing mundane stuff (he even WEARS mundane stuff to WORK) like going out with his friend or thinking of going on a date with Haein. He isn't mortified by the concepts of eldrich magic and old as time beings because he has no real good reason to care about it apart from it surface level. He just accepts it because he needs to, it's part of what he is to protect his family. He only focuses on how to get strong for his family, but he doesn't extent more work to other things like say *waves hands* other side characters or people in general. As long as they aren't threatening his family or life, for the most part he is just GUY and no other flavor attached to it.

But it's also not bland, like if you are to take other isekai protagonists (mainly from Japan but other manhwas suffer it as well) they are 2d cutouts compared to Jinwoo. I feel like at least that's because Jinwoo is able to breathe and not just be active all the time. In the LN he feels natural, he is allowed to be himself playing with knifes and playing with the system, being annoyed over text or even not liking some restaurant coffee and liking canned sugar coffee better. It's the little things that don't stack to much if any in the plot but they make him feel as though he is breathing, as though he likes to do other things or have preferences.

I know his personality isn't that deep because *waves hands at genre* self inserts don't need to be, but it's still nice to perceive him as a bit more human, that past his struggles and the fantasy world he isn't carried over to being tragic or have a lot of internal struggles going on in his mind (as much, but the author didn't wanna address those things unfortunately.) And is just, a guy. A normal person like you and me.

#solo leveling #sung jin woo #solo leveling spoilers #hed be the type to OK #you get me?

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dragonagitator · 2 days

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One of the more interesting time-travel-related wrinkles I've been thinking about a lot for my House MD isekai fanfic is about how both House and the author self-insert OC will be 45 years old, but House is a Boomer and my OC is a time-travelling Xennial / geriatric Millennial. (While most demographers would place me in Gen X, culturally I've always been much closer to Millennials -- being raised by a software engineer meant I've always had a home computer, and have been on the internet since I was 12 -- and I'll be writing my OC like that too.)

So there's going to be a weird dynamic where they'll have all the usual Boomer/Millennial generation gap issues despite being the exact same age. That's going to be a lot of fun to write (my OC will be introducing the phrase "okay boomer" to the team's toolkit for dealing with House's microaggressions), especially when the slow burn starts heating up.

Boomers were the last generation to be raised with the norms "you HAVE to get married" and "it's normal to hate your spouse" and thus they tend have a lot of really awful beliefs about love, romantic relationships, marriage, etc. that younger generations find super weird and sad. You can track this generational attitude change pretty closely in comedy and television. "I hate my wife" jokes used to be a staple for stand-up comedians, but you almost never hear them anymore because modern audiences don't find them relatable or funny. The "spouses who hate each other" trope used to be incredibly common in sitcoms, but now you usually only see it in dramas where everyone is awful anyway. Even cop shows and other murder mysteries are having fewer and fewer "the spouse did it" culprits.

House's cynicism about love and marriage is pretty typical for his generation. For a guy who prides himself on rejecting social programming, he actually absorbed almost all the standard Boomer norms about marriage except the very last one -- he believes, like most Boomers, that marriage is awful, it is normal to hate your spouse, etc., and his only deviation from the norm is deciding "well then I just won't get married."

My OC pointing out that it's possible to simply... marry someone you actually like... might be the first time he really hears and absorbs something like that coming from someone whom he can't just write off as young, naive, inexperienced, etc. I'm happily married IRL and my OC will have been happily married back in her own timeline, too. (One of the reasons the slow burn will be so slow is that she'll be grieving her husband for a while.) So she actually objectively knows more about it than he does and will not hesitate to rub that in his face.

It won't be enough to completely change his views (the Boomer brainwashing is strong), but he'll be slightly less resentful about it when the two of them have to get married to avoid being forced to testify against each other in court.

(House and my OC are going to commit SO MANY CRIMES, you guys. One of the ways I'm working through the "this kinda feels like cheating" discomfort of being happily married IRL but shipping my author self-insert OC with another man is by making my story a bit of a cautionary tale about what I might get up to without my IRL husband's good influence and constant admonishments of "no murder!" My OC is going to commit AT LEAST three murders in her efforts to change the timeline.)

#house #house md #hatecrimes md #hate crimes md #boomers #millennials #generation gap #time travel problems #writing fanfiction

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oifaaa · 1 year

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Tim is like the generic isekai anime boy who’s supposed to be “just an everyday guy” and therefore has literally nothing interesting about him but everyone insists he’s so amazing anyways.

I'm actually gonna disagree with you a bit there bc while yes that is exactly how he started out as the perfect wee self insert for every 12 to 15 year old to feel like they could also be a superhero (which nothing wrong with that) he did grow and develope a personality over time which is more I can say for 90% of generic isekai protagonists

#ask #anon #me looking over at katarina from villainess: not you sweatie i love you you dumbass #but yeah i think ive said this before #but this is why i dont like fanon tim #bc people still treat him like hes a blank slate for them to project what ever they want onto him #but hes not anymore #tho he does still have a lot of those anime isekai traits #like everyone falling for his average ass

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canmom · 1 year

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Worth the Candle, end of 228.

so. I understand it now. this is Baru Cormorant: When They Cry.

i thought this story was going to be stupid fun, in a kind of well-above-average litrpg way - I was (kinda still am) very depressed and the other books I was reading were too heavy. instead, it surprised me be being good, like actually good: a genuinely thoughtful, well structured and even insightful story. this is not something that I ever expected to write about a litrpg isekai webserial, and certainly not a 'ratfic'.

it does, admittedly, take a while to come into its own. what 'its own' turns out to be is, as one commentator deemed it, 'competence porn for therapy'.

at first i thought it was about grief, then i recalibrated to a really scathing self-crit, as the story worked to absolutely dismantle self insert protagonist Juniper interpersonally and ideologically. now, 25 chapters from the end (which is still like an entire novel lol) it seems to be... complex metafiction about learning to work through shit and understand yourself and other people? woven of course in between exploring a variety of off-the-wall magic systems and settings, with an analytic eye to how and why they're made.

it's safe to say it blows Yudkowsky out of the fucking water. if more ratfic is like this, i might have to get into the genre.

it can be quite... dry isn't the right word, but there's a lot of chapters of people having penetrating conversations about their motivations and feelings, or coming up with plans, or the nature of the story they're inhabiting. which isn't to say it can't hit the feelings or evoke a mood... especially if that mood is an oppressive one, but there's plenty of genuine humour. it's often kind of horny but in a really analytic way, where it's about breaking down hangups around sex that largely happens off camera, and sexuality is just part of what comes under the scope. in some ways it feels... anthropological, in the sense of autoethnography - which I suppose is what it is, given how much Wales seems to be putting his own experiences into it, though of course I'm not sure exactly the line between what is directly roman à clef for his own life and what is there for a rhetorical point. some of the constructions and parallels feel too neat to be exactly real, but that doesn't say a lot, bc if you're fictionalising something you'd neaten it up.

it steers determinedly towards just about all the thorniest topics you can think of: grief, depression, suicide, rape (of its protagonist), genocide, eugenics. astonishingly, given its peers, it handles them with - for the most part, I'm not really sure about where they're going with the Tuung - a lot of grace.

it can be a bit cheeky with the metafiction occasionally but generally uses it purposefully, in the same way that a When They Cry VN teaches you how to read it. (promise I'll get back to that). in general it commits to the bit, hard. a brief arc riffs on the one page rpg Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf, in a way that sounds like it would be way too stupid, and yet it somehow makes it work by playing it serious.

it's a curious story to read because you have to take everything on at least four levels: what it means on the base level, how it fits in to the story that is being constructed with the diegetic DM character (the 'narrative' that the characters are aware of), how it reflects back on the inciting incidents on Joon's D&D games and grief spiral on Earth, and the purpose it's being put towards by Wales in the webnovel. (we can go further and take after Eco in distinguishing the author suggested by the text from the actual person Alexander Wales, but that's more @baeddel 's department.)

and now I've finally reached the Fel Seed Incident. cw rape. also spoilers.

the Fel Seed Incident is foreshadowed from early in the story, as the most heinous thing that Joon did while misanthropically turning on everyone after the death of his best friend Arthur. it's pretty much exactly what I thought, given the foreshadowing: Joon created a cheap grimdark body horror scenario to vent his feelings, that scenario centred on a sadistic rapist villain, a new player who Joon held in contempt joined the group, who was a rape survivor, and Joon steamrolled through several attempts to get him to back down, drove her away, flipped his lid and drove her boyfriend away, and made the session miserable for everyone by making Fel Seed invincible. most of this was pretty much spelled out already, but not the rape part.

this is the keystone of the whole story, and the reason it's delivered so late is because basically everything leading up to this point is telling us how to interpret this scene. particularly the arc where Joon gets raped by his sentient house, who then goes away for a long time to be taught a sense of ethics by the girl who eats demons to get therapy insight (I say, very matter of factly). Joon was pathetic and shitty, but it wasn't some grand act of sadism, just a tawdry story of lashing out at someone in the wrong place who he considered an annoyance beneath his notice - a recurring theme we've come to see throughout the rest of the story. it's presented very levelly. we've seen Bethel's efforts to change, we've seen Joon understandably not wanting to have anything to do with her, studiously examined that situation from each side. it all makes depressing sense, just as the scenes of abuse in Umineko do: this is how people act in these circumstances. 'well observed' you say.

yet it's not just going there to rub our faces in how much our protagonist sucks. because the whole point is to take it seriously, not wallow in self loathing. Grak doesn't kill himself and commits to living, Bethel and Valencia take the time to work at learning from their enormous mistakes. beating up on yourself is a sort of perverse defence mechanism. if you suck irredeemably you don't have to try.

the Fel Seed Incident is thus essentially a synecdoche (drink) of Joon's spiral and of the themes it's driving at, and thus a fitting capstone battle. it's almost annoyingly well put together.

but it's also rather self aware about this. Joon has by this point figured out that he's supposed to learn things from his adventures. the protagonists try to figure out what sort of narrative they're in and talk about postmodernism. so it's probably going to be about more than that.

self-improvement is the whole selling point of the rationalist ideology: the idea that if you follow Yudkowsky's teachings you can learn to put things in a mathematical perspective that will helpfully set you straight on matters from epistemology (Bayesianism solves everything) to ethics (utilitarianism is the answer, but you need to take into account a bunch of weird edge cases) to niche causes like cryonics and AI research. in fact, it's simply a cult. with all the shit that comes with, which means yes, rape and dead bodies.

many ideas in the story draw from the rationalist milieu. Joon's plan to 'win forever', usurp the DM and create a heaven that solves suffering, is of course an oblique spin the friendly AI singularity that Yudkowsky hopes to build. the soul magic arc, with its ideas of fiddling with motivations, is also about this. it seeps in in other ways, e.g. the idea raised now and then about keeping promises so other agents will trust you to keep promises is one of the founding elements of Roko's Basilisk. other elements, like the Second Empire, seem like an extrapolation of a society run by rat ideals.

I do not like the 'd' word. reading Eva and Madoka as 'genre deconstructions' obscures much more than it reveals (and also has very little to do with whatever Derrida was getting at). but it is honestly surprising to me that this is a celebrated ratfic reads like a splendid dismantling of rationalism.

the rape angle is relevant here. Yudkowsky's story Three Worlds Collide, a story about metaethics, rather infamously presents a future human society where rape is ubiquitous and considered a mild annoyance. it's like defamiliarising or whatever - don't you see, it's just our cultural assumptions! - and if you think it is going to do anything interesting, of course not, it's just Richard Stallman levels of pigheaded edgy obliviousness.

by contrast, the arc where Bethel rapes Joon... well, it feels almost like it's running down a checklist of how to write a realistic rape. Joon is raped by someone he knows well, he clearly says no, but when this is ignored, goes along with it in part because he's hyperconscious of the possibility of sudden violence; he knows something is up but blames himself because he was physically aroused and thinks it's just arbitrary cultural hangups and because he's a guy; he is reluctant to talk about it with his friends because he doesn't want his rapist to just be killed and she's important to their organisation. his attacker is a rape survivor herself in a complicated way, and she has spun a story where she was in the right that has to be very carefully unpicked by someone close to her and then she must take time to work through and change the whole way she relates to people, and there's some uncertainty in the others whether she's actually changed or just putting up a show of it. you could basically say it's cribbed from a "transformative justice" case study, but without the buzzwords.

and like, in a metafictional story like this one, situated in a milieu founded by Yudkowsky, that seems kind of like a statement. 'pay attention class, here's how to write a rape'. that might be uncharitable - i haven't seen how other rationalist writers handle it. (you can write a web novel without rape? ha, as if.)

Amaryllis in particular is the epitome of an idealised rationalist, effective altruist model. she's not emotionless, but manages her emotions clinically, according to scientific principles. she obsessively prioritises utilitarianism over her own feelings about a situation ('purchase fuzzies and utilons separately' is how it went i think?) and relentlessly builds power in order to remake the world according to her vision. she's hypercompetent as an administrator and has bizarrely mechanical ways of dealing with her own feelings. and it generally pays off and doesn't blow up in her face! (analogy: she's kind of who Baru Cormorant thinks she is, especially at the outset when she's most indoctrinated by Farrier.)

all of this seems to be very deliberate, given how Joon and the other characters react to her, but I'm scratching my head about the endgame here. I suppose, if each companion reflects some quality of Joon, we read Amaryllis and the slow burn romance as some kind of spin on gradually being enticed by the ideal of lesswrongism itself? but this story puts such an emphasis on self-understanding that there is no way it would uncritically present Amaryllis as an ideal. and with the Tuung essentially being put through what is painted as a hyperaccelerated residential school system that's been flagged up as an impending conflict a few times, and this story consistently choosing to steer into conflict rather than take an easy out to the point that the characters notice, it has to be going somewhere with this.

I'm honestly not sure how it's going to end, at this point. obviously Joon will find Arthur and confront the Dungeon Master, maybe he'll get to immanentise his personal eschaton. it would be too cheap for him to just go back to Earth with a bunch of lessons learned, especially with the IC meta discussions signaling hard against that. but it's the kind of excited expectant wait where I think I'll be surprised.

obviously I'm hooked. it's a kind of story it's very hard to share with anyone because it's 1.65 million words long, drawing from two milieus (D&D and LessWrong) that are very familiar to me but not necessarily anyone else I know, the premise on the face of it is kind of a hard sell, and as we've just discussed it kinda goes relentlessly for the hard stuff. all in all it's a Brynbait story. if you're tempted by what's above, I'd give it a shot.

aaand damn I guess I prematurely reviewed. I wasn't going to write until I'd finished the book, but I guess I'm writing now! I'll probably see the end after sleeping so expect a followup then.

also. he really did fuck the goddamn deer (tf was involved). and it wasn't a joke but meant something. fascinating thing, this book.

#worth the candle #novels #fiction

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facultativeactivity · 3 months

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Badly Summarized WIP Poll Tag

Rules: Pick a bunch of your WIPs and summarize them as badly as possible, then ask your followers to vote on which one they’d be most likely to read. Multiple/all/none options are completely optional.

Tagged by @kiraheartilly36

Hm, tagging @vendeavendea @transcendentgodrock @evaldmark @mosonyusz @faramircaptainofgender (if you want to play) and anyone who feels like joining in

#writing #tag game #to be fair most of these are on the back burner or in planning phase #and even the ones i'm actively working on are updated extremely infrequently

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suitov · 1 year

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Pillars of Heaven!

by discipleofhope

Original Fiction, Isekai, M/M

An arrogant, opinionated, sickly, worthless and extremely despicable bookworm with untidy hair is impaled by a huge steel shaft by a freakish chance accident that he deserves. Though he was sure he was dead, he opens his eyes to a blur of heavenly black and red and a lovely voice asking if he's all right!

The trashy human soon realises he has awakened in his favourite book series! And, though utterly undeserving of his good fortune, he finds himself in the presence of the protagonist he so admires... the beautiful, magnificent, talented, lusty demonic warrior-sage in whose broad, masculine, sculpted, immaculately clean breast beats the passion of a poet! *fans self*

But his very presence in this world has disrupted the plot, diverting his most beloved, dazzling, stallion-like hero from his allotted course of suffering, insurmountable despair, glorious shirtless hopeful triumph, and eventual world domination, acquiring a thousand charming and accomplished wives on the way! And the series author herself is not pleased! Now she has inserted herself into the story in the form of an undefeatable bear-god out to wreak revenge on the hope-loving idiot!!

Will the masterful and dominant protagonist return to his senses and resume his wonderful destiny? Or has the arrival of the lowly scumbag he too-generously tolerates shaken the very... Pillars of Heaven?!

#nagito komaeda #kamukoma #izuru kamukura #junko enoshima #monokuma #danganronpa #svsss #Nagito the writer

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neodarkdark · 3 months

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9. Do you write fanfiction, or have you in the past?

Questions for the mun

TECHNICALLY I have written fanfiction in the past, but I didn't even know it was called fanfiction back then. I think I last wrote anything when I was like... 16 maybe?? I never wrote very much of it.

It wasn't very good fanfiction but that's ok. The earliest specific fanfic I can remember writing was exclusively for me + my sister + our bff and featured the Entire pokespe / pokemon adventures main character cast at the time, plus our self inserts and a few of our OCs. And also Ice, who may as well have been my OC. They all got isekai'd to various fantasy locations and had to work together to get back home.

The last specific fanfiction I remember writing was a crossover isekai which was poorly executed for a multitude of reasons, so much that I can't even look back on it with Haha Ancient Cringe Writing (Affectionate) glasses. The concept, however, remains in my mind, and I would like to someday have a go at rewriting it, remove the sucky parts and add stuff to make it fun and interesting and self indulgent but not in a way that aged terribly this time.

I would also like to have a go at writing more, other fanfiction someday. My dream is to eventually write an also very self indulgent Shadows of Almia fanfic of some kind featuring the characters I write here on tumblr, more of my own lore ideas, and involving both more of the series' characters and hopefully more of my own OCs as well.

But so far I'm much better at working on a few specific characters and on general worldbuilding than I am at constructing and executing a plot, so it'll probably be a while before either of those ideas happen.

#who's that knocking at your door? (inbox)#starikune #who opened the box (ooc)#thank u maverick (salute emoji)

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quinloki · 7 months

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(I-uh-I saw the Reverse Self-Ship post you made via a mutual and I noticed you were cool and also an adult One Piece fan so-uh-I'mma leave my lil infodump if you don't mind. Also if you have any pronouns you prefer let me know so I can use the proper ones!)

So as of last week I'm now holding hands with the entire Monster Trio from One Piece. Zoro was an immediate infatuation (and the reason I started watching it aside from just finally having time to invest), meanwhile Sanji and especially Luffy I thought were platonic but I was proven wrong pretty quick.

Uh-I headcanon Sanji as a closeted bisexual and in my little self-insert AU I end up being his kind of "bi-awakening" I guess or at least the first thing that makes him ask the important questions. Uh-I have one self-insert that has a good amount of plotting but I've been primarily using an isekai trope for self-inserting. And since it's already an AU for the isekai and the self-inserting itself-and because I'm really attached to the concept of magic(*cough*andimstillnotoverowlhouseending*cough*)-I made my self insert a descendant of the nearly extinct species of magic users aka witches. So I'd have to figure all that out along with the universe itself and Bi panic.

I think the isekai concept came along as I got a lot more attached to the Straw Hats in general since I'm always a sucker for friendship and found family tropes. And when I got into One Piece life had been taking a bad turn so this is kind of an escape for me.

Back to the self-ship though-I'm still not sure how the relationship would start-but I'd end up being just this 5'4 pink-haired autistic male who ended up being the boyfriend to 3 big strong (but also lovable) pirates. And since I'm shorter and they're also a lot stronger than me, they pick me up a lot out of nowhere just because I was there. I'd take cooking lessons from Sanji, I'd nap with Zoro, and I'd teach Luffy some drawing. But I can't have one without the others now, I love them too much now.

I have little nicknames I'd have them call me, some even pre-relationship. Sanji would call me "Cotton-Candy Head" because of the pink hair (but with a lot more affection than when he started calling Zoro Moss-Head) and then "Little Prince". Zoro would call me "Pinky" for the hair and then after I broke out of my shell a bit he'd call me "Puppy" because once I get comfortable around people I got big ol' golden-retriever energy. Luffy would probably call me "Nugget" and "Squishy" (I have a round face and also I can see Luffy looking at me and having a moment kinda like that one of Dory from Finding Nemo where she goes "I Shall Call Him Squishy And He Shall Be Mine. And He Shall Be My Squishy")

And then I have nicknames for them:

Zoro- Matcha Boy/Man, Teddy Bear (I feel like considering the naps and stuff, he would give good snuggles. I mean-the plush I have of him is nice to snuggle with.)

Sanji- Honey Bun, Sweetums (Because he's the biggest sweetie, his hair is a shade of yellow like honey, and honey buns are good!)

Luffy- Sunshine, Cap' (He's the captain of the thousand SUNNY and he's a bright ray of sunshine in my day and Cap sounds cute to say for him as the Captain of the crew)

And I'mma leave it at that. Uh-thanks for the opportunity to talk about my selfships! Take care of yourself and drink water!

ah! \o/ I love this - my friend has an OC story where the OC is a witch - but not an isekai style. I love isekais. LOVE them, I don't give a heck what anyone else thinks of them, I love them. (I mention this because I love the witch idea, and you both did it very differently too! Similar concepts don't bother me because people always end up with different details and that Delights Me <3 )

I've got notes for my own self-insert via isekai for a few different titles cause my blorbos don't mesh well. It was quite a good idea to fall for the monster trio cause they're all already all there and together XD

The pet names are sending me \o/ they're so cute xD I love little pink-haired masc witch from another world!

Thank you very much for sharing ❤️

#quin answers #self ships

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dragonagitator · 2 months

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Like House MD, time travel, radical canon divergence, and author-self-insert isekai fanfics? Beta readers wanted!

Welp it seems the brainrot I contracted from @acrownforaking is compelling me to write my own House MD isekai fanfic featuring an author-self-insert who unexpectedly reality shifts / time travels from January 2024 in our universe to January 2004 in the Houseverse, then immediately decides to seize this opportunity to unfuck the shitshow that is Greg House's life while simultaneously rewriting 20 years of history with nothing but her shitty memory and her hubris to guide her.

Unfortunately, while I've spent the past 30+ years reading 100+ million words of fanfic in various fandoms, my only previous experience in writing fanfic has consisted of starting and then abandoning a few Dragon Age and Baldur's Gate 3 fics. I wrote thousands of words, but I wrote the scenes out of order as the ideas came to me. I never published even a single chapter of those fics on AO3 because my writing process failed to produce a coherent Chapter 1 before getting hopelessly bogged down in obsessively researching the lore of the games' settings.

I've learned from my mistakes and this time I'm going to force myself to write my story in chronological order so I can begin publishing chapters while it's still a WIP. I've heard that those sweet sweet dopamine hits from AO3's email notifications can be a great incentive to keep writing. Plus the Houseverse being nearly identical to our own universe means there's very little setting-specific lore for me to research.

I'm seeking beta readers both for the usual reasons (motivation, accountability, and general writing feedback) and to help me untangle the messes I'll be making every time my OC uses her foreknowledge to force a radical deviation from show canon and/or IRL recent history. So, if you're the sort of person who enjoys pointing out a plan's fatal flaws or rooting out logical inconsistencies, then oh boy would I love for you to rip my drafts apart. Make both my OC and me cry. Please.

Warning: This fic will be dark. The source material is already pretty fucking dark -- House MD canon includes all four of the major archive warnings -- and my story will likely include even more potential triggers than in canon because one of the major themes will be how quickly things can spiral horribly out of control when you think you can predict the future.

So, if you have any triggers that you avoid reading about for the sake of your mental health, you probably shouldn't volunteer to beta read my fic because I won't be working on the trigger warnings until the final polishing for publication. It would be safer to wait until I've posted on AO3 to read it because I plan to break the chapters up so that triggering content is quarantined in its own separate chapters that can be briefly summarized and skipped.

Please let me know if you're interested in beta reading chapters before they're published on AO3. Any level of involvement welcome -- I am fully aware that most people don't have the time or interest to volunteer as a copyeditor or developmental editor! Quick feedback like "he would not fucking say that" or "yo there's a giant plot hole over here" would be super helpful to me too. Thanks in advance!

#house fanfiction #house md fanfiction #house #house md #hate crimes md #hatecrimes md #greg house #gregory house #beta readers #beta wanted #beta reader #beta request #beta reader wanted #beta readers wanted #beta reader request #beta readers request #time travel problems

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