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#like you could write down each individual beat at the concept level
felassan · 3 years
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Jon Renish (Foundation Technical Director @ BioWare, working on DA4) recently did a Twitch stream where he played through some DAO. Although he works on DA, this is his first time playing through DAO. He’s playing through it looking at random details from a dev perspective as he’s currently working on DA4 and therefore wants to know more about the previous games.
On the stream he mentioned some tidbits on the development of DA4. There were also some insights and anecdotes about the development of DAO and similar. It’s a 3 hour stream so I collected them here in case that’s of use to anyone (for example not everyone can watch streams which don’t have subtitles/captions). The stream is a fun/interesting watch though, so if you’re curious or able to watch I recc doing so. 😊 The rest of this post is under a cut for length.
Please note that there’s some paraphrasing on my part, this is not a transcript.  There are also some additions from another dev who featured on the stream to give some commentary. The stream also contains more snippets that at times I couldn’t make out (I tried my best!).
(There is a mention of Cullen’s VA in the text below.)
DA4
Jon said he can talk about things about DA4 that aren’t “consumer-facing”, but he can’t say anything about the game that would be consumer-facing but which isn’t already publicly available. There are several reasons for this. One, that’s not his job, there are people whose job this is and they let each other do their respective roles. Two, BW are a publicly-traded company, so if he said something that could affect that that would be insider trading. Three, they’re not done making DA4 yet, so if he said that they have added [x] to the game and people got all excited about that or pre-ordered on that basis, but [x] ended up being cut, people would be like ‘BioWare lied to us’, when it’s just that things changed during the course of development, as is often the case
He’s glad that fans are excited for the game but notes that fan expectations are always double-edged. It can be really tough as some people started ‘playing’ the game in their heads as soon as they heard of it. That’s fine, he loves that, but he hopes that peoples’ expectations don’t turn into requirements. Clearly BW have alluded to certain characters, like Solas, being in the game, but some fans say things like “If [say] Morrigan isn’t in the game, then, rahhh!” Y’know, there’s a lot of talk about how certain characters have to be in the game, and yeah.
On characters which are quantum (i.e. characters which can die or which can have similar end-states as death in previous games): their being quantum makes it really hard for the devs to work with those characters in subsequent games. The devs naturally aren’t going to put as much effort into characters which could have died previously. A character can have had an amazing appearance throughout/role in a previous game, but if there is a risk of something happening to them and of them being removed [effectively] from the plot, it just doesn’t make sense to have them as a major character in a subsequent game. If a character can, say, sacrifice themselves in some glorious ending, the devs have to make sure that if they use them again, in worldstates where the character didn’t do that, the character is kind of ‘muted’, as the devs don’t want to disrespect the players who made a different choice
A comment in chat expressed a wish for Shale in DA4. Jon’s response is that he has no idea on that front
Bugs don’t come out of crunch, they come out of development in general. Crunch does impact on the quality of a game though. In recent years BW are always really trying to reduce crunch, they’re currently working really hard to bring it down. The best way of doing that is by controlling scope. As creatives it’s tough to balance wanting to make great stuff and be industry-leading with the desire to constantly do extra passes over things they’ve created like the audio, art etc. Their biggest enemy is time, other ways of reducing crunch or time spent in general include iterating tools to make often-repeated processes as time-efficient as possible
I think the following was an observation on the industry in general as opposed to a BW-specific/-exclusive comment: he thinks that as a result of this sort of thing [working to reduce crunch], a lot of games are going to have to be smaller and a lot more focused in scope i.e. the devs will have to focus on hitting the key selling points of that particular game/series as hard as they can, and cut down on branching out sideways/wide on a bunch of random other stuff
Jon doesn’t personally engage in character creators in games, but he knows that for some players that expression is worth a lot of time and focus. BW want to be industry-leading in this kind of stuff as it’s something which is interesting/key/integral to their games
In a way BW have made their own nest of problems what with every DA game being so different to the previous one. Still, he notes that each game has a staunch fanbase that says that their particular favorite game is the best one in the series
He doesn’t want people who think that DA4 isn’t what they want to buy it and be upset - there are so many other great games out there! BW are going to make the game they’re going to make - if some people like it, that’s great, and if some people don’t, that’s cool. Sometimes waiting until reviews are out and/or really seeing beforehand if a game is something that you want [has things/features in it that you want] prior to getting it - as opposed to jumping right in or pre-ordering - is a good idea. Fans don’t always know what they want, but they do know what they like - these are 2 different things
He hopes that whatever they ship for DA4, people go “I enjoyed this experience”, and that then, if there’s additional content for it down the road, people can decide, “do I want this further content?”
On hair: BW are using the new hair technology in the latest version of the Frostbite engine, so they’ll see what they can do! This was said in response to a comment about the hair in the latest FIFA games (as EA make FIFA)
A comment in chat asked about a flying mechanic (griffons). Jon’s response is that flying is such a heavy gameplay mechanic that you can’t put it in a game without everything in the game being built about it (see Anthem)
Relating to the above comment, in DA4 mounted combat would be cool but then they’d have to make the game ‘around’ mounted combat and make the mounted combat feature meaningful
On the underwater concept art: it should not be interpreted as a promise of gameplay. BW have amazing artists who sit down for a couple weeks while they’re in early production and just draw loads and loads of all kinds of stuff. Concept art is like a moodboard or Pinterest board. Elsewhere in the stream he advised, take all the concept art together like a mosaic and ask, ‘what is the overall theme[s] here?’, and to zoom out from individual details. [This stuff echoes PW’s word on concept art]
BW don’t generally write things or the choices as bleak as the choices in DAO were anymore. This is a conscious choice on their part, they want their game to be fun [note: this was said when the side quest in Orzammar where the Warden has the option of convincing a dwarven mother to abandon her young baby to die was being played through. It seems to refer to intensively grimdark choices/beats of this kind]
I think this was more of a general comment on games: SSDs (solid state drives) mean that players will see shorter elevator rides (Mass Effect - was this a reference to the remaster?) and fewer switchback corridors (those are actually loading zones). Generally, these are going to change mechanically the time it takes to do stuff in games
The devs have lots of features on their backlog that they’d like to offer players but each will ofc involve implementation and subsequent maintenance, and each one that is chosen to add is being chosen over something else. And sometimes, it’s hard for them to tell if [x] feature or [y] feature would be better to add to the game
They’re about to work on a giant feature (a pure tooling feature, something that isn’t consumer-facing) that is probably going to take ~2 staff years of effort [I think “staff effort” includes multiple staff working concurrently, so 2 years of staff effort doesn’t = 2 years of time chronologically] to get done in the next few months. They’re investing all this effort across the people working on it because they don’t want their artists and designers etc to have to deal with the problem that it’s going to solve anymore. I’m not sure what this feature is but elsewhere in the stream they referred to tooling and automation and gave the example of, the better your tooling is, the fewer times you have to manually set the camera for a human vs elf vs dwarf position, for dynamically-generated [cinematic?] content and for the first pass to be automated (if this is the case, less time is spent/wasted on redoing it and manually touching it up) [see last bullet point in this section]
He doesn’t know how big DA4 is going to be but said “let’s ballpark and say like most games it’ll be somewhere between 70 and 100 GB”
If we kept our Wardens as the PC throughout all 3 games, at the end they would be so powerful that it’d be a bit like “Let’s just do [thing], I’ve killed gods before, whatever”. He thinks it’s good that they have fresh characters each time in DA in order to reset that power level. Some people want more Commander Shepard in the next Mass Effect and he feels like, ‘what else could you possibly want / what else could that character possibly do after 3 games?’
When asked how much freedom he/they have now to focus on next gen, he said that there’s actually almost no difference on that front. The problems never change. They now have better renderers, better ray-tracing, better graphics cards etc, but they have always made DA games for high- and low-spec PCs, so it’s actually about gameplay systems. The freedom isn’t power-based and them getting access to more cores and more RAM generally isn’t going to change how the games are played. The games still have to be made for hard drives on PC. Dev creativity matters more than power here. The challenge of building a BW game is more about/from managing loads of different plotstates, loads of different art pieces, etc
On the title situation (two): names are the last thing they worry about because names have to go through legal before being approved. Every name, including character names, has to be checked in case it’s a famous person, or associated with something bad, or offensive in a different language due to localization etc
They don’t do face scans of people with big beards
There was also a bit about changes/developments to/in the cinematic design process and associated tooling [?] but I found it too hard to follow sorry >< This bit of commentary begins at timestamp ~ 1:52:45 and continues til ~ 2:00:05 [keep listening through the bit where they pause for a cutscene]
General BW
There’s currently ~350 staff in Edmonton, ~200 in Austin and more elsewhere
He notes that DA games sell pretty well, but relative to EA games in general, they’re a drop in the bucket compared to FIFA
DAI
5% of players of DAI never created a character [Q: does this refer to people who just used the default appearances/presets with no editing, or people who only played multiplayer?]
The mounts don’t actually go faster than running, this is an illusion
I think they said it has 55,000 lines of dialogue. [I’m pretty sure I remember devs elsewhere saying it has 80,000 lines of dialogue]
One of the companions had to have their name changed during development because of legal/translation reasons. It sounds like the original name sounded too close to something offensive
DA2
Back when DA2 was internally code-named “Nug Storm”: this was at the beginning when it was pitched to the team on a set of slides. The image on the slide for that pitch had devil horns, a metal hand and no flesh, it was just made out of fire and flames
DAO
The engine DAO is made on is the third engine that they tried for it during development. [David Gaider has gone into the DAO engine stuff some on Summerfall’s series of DAO playthrough streams]
The cracks on the cracked eluvian asset are modelled after the crack on the Tardis in Doctor Who from around that time, as at the time some devs had been talking about Doctor Who a lot. A dev actually added this factoid to DAO’s entry on TV Tropes but someone else (evidently not a DA dev) came by and deleted it saying that it was too much of a stretch x)
Before the game had its name there was an HTML script that randomly generated possible titles for consideration, it adds verbs and nouns together e.g. “Grim Dark”. One of the craziest possibilities that it once generated that the devs always remember is "Bone Wind”
One of the portraits that’s used for decoration around the world in-game (it’s of a bearded human man) is actually of a specific BW staff member
He played through Stone Prisoner, where Wilhelm’s son Matthias gives exposition in the cellar. Matthias is voiced by GE and this had been pointed out to Jon earlier on. Jon: “I don’t think that character’s voice acting was super strong there”
On the in-game area towards the end of Stone Prisoner: Outdoor areas in games are large and one of the things needed for them is streaming, so different chunks can be ‘streamed in’. There’s a tower [?], and technically the top of the tower was made an outdoor level so that sky stuff could be there, though it didn’t really need to be. The person that made it an outdoor level chose the very smallest chunk size for the terrain mesh, which determines how fine of a streaming they do. So when playing, every time you moved like 4 meters, the game would stream out 50-100 chunks behind you and the same in front of you (this is the bubble around the player of what actually exists). Because it was so small, it was constantly thrashing the CPU and disc to do all the loading. The devs were like “this isn’t going to work”, but they barely had any time. The solution: they made a new level that was outdoor and copied all the sunlight and other settings, but with the largest chunk size. They copy-pasted the entire level from one to the other. The problem with that many chunks then is that there was a giant expanse of flat terrain sticking out of the middle of the tower. They didn’t know if the story was going to involve shots of the outside of the tower for this sequence or not, so they took the terrain deformation tool and bundled all the terrain vertices at the bottom of the tower in a giant clump. So to this day there’s a mess of vertices and twisted terrain at the bottom of the final level that probably no-one has ever seen [not sure though if this anecdote is in reference to a place in that DLC or somewhere elsewhere in the game?]
There were also some tidbits on Anthem, however I didn’t note them down (sorry).
If you think I misheard or misunderstood anything from this stream please let me know and I will edit/fix it. :) 
(Thankyou to some of my friends who explained a tech detail from this to me.)
[source]  <-- current rewatch link
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junicai · 3 years
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tackled.
| summary | Mark hasn’t been in a group without Aria before. He doesn’t know how he’s going to manage without her there.
| word count | 2.4k
| warnings | none
| era | circa. December 2018
n/a: to the anon who requested more superm stuff, i hope this is to ur liking~ a little bit of background before i start writing some actual scenarios for the team :)
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Aria wasn’t quite sure how to function; or how to deal with the fact that she was sitting, legs crossed, back ram-rod straight, in one of the smaller conference rooms with Lee Sooman sitting across from her looking a world more comfortable. 
Taeyong on her left and Lucas on her right, Ten a seat down and Mark beyond that. The plastic seats were less than kind to her aching tailbone, but Aria was mildly (read: incredibly) more preoccupied with the thought that she was wearing a faded hoodie and black workout leggings that were old and worn, sitting in a conference room with Taemin, Baekhyun and Kai. 
She was pretty sure the day couldn’t be going much worse. That was until Sooman's voice snapped her from her inner turmoil and she looked up at the CEO, raising a bottle of water to her lips with a lightly quivering hand.
“Aria, you’ll be joining as their eighth and final member.”
Water rushed down the wrong way in her throat, the muscle spasming as Aria choked and banged a closed fist against her chest. Taeyong’s hand flew to rub circles in between her shoulder blades, patting gently as she heaved, trying to re-catch her breath.
She takes it back. It just got worse. 
“Sir?” Aria wheezed out, taking in a stuttered breath as she looked up from the table to meet the CEO’s eyes. 
“SuperM is a concept group designed to take those that excelled in their respective groups and use that as the foundation to create something bigger. You’ve all made a name for yourself; both within the group and individually.” Sooman took a breath, lifting his hands to drum his fingertips across the wooden table. The dark oak was glazed, and Aria belatedly realized that this conference room was so small as it was the CEO’s personal room. His name was imprinted on the front of the door, gold paint enhancing the grooves made. 
He continued talking, focusing his attention on each individual member from his seat, explaining their ‘roles’ so to speak. Aria caught small snippets, chest still rising a beat too quickly for it to be ignorable and her racing mind building up a cascade of thoughts that were rising up in tandem. 
Baekhyun you will be the leader - Taemin as - I think it’s important, no crucial that you remember - this is not a time for - you’ll understand my expectations in time - a common ground for those that - merging the eras -
Aria flinched violently when her name was called, head snapping away from where it was boring holes into the wall just over Taemin’s shoulder. She had yet to make eye contact with a single one of her seniors, having taken a single glance around the room upon arrival and dropped herself into a near 90 degree bow. 
“What with the incredibly - albeit unexpectedly - positive response that came with your inclusion in the various NCT units, myself and my team think it fitting that you’d belong in a group such as this one. Obviously your English speaking skills are a benefit, although I am not so sure that your accent will be as tolerable to the American media as Mark’s here would be. But I’m getting ahead of myself, we can circle back to that in due time.” Sooman leant back in his chair, resting his arms against his sides. 
He looked satisfied with how the meeting had gone - given that all but one member of the newly established team had signed their agreement into another contract, having handed out a thinly spaced document a few minutes prior. 
Aria sat back, pen cradled in her hand as Sooman shuffled through her contract in his hands, as he had refrained from giving hers out with the others. The CEO dismissed the other members, calling for Aria to remain seated for another few minutes. 
As the seven boys stood from their chairs with muffled screeches from the rubber capped legs on the chairs, Taeyong let a hand brush over Aria’s shoulder once. His face was pinched into something, lip caught between his teeth but Aria waved him off with a smile that didn’t lift her eyes. 
Exiting the room, Mark glanced back over his shoulder catching a glimpse of Sooman already leaning forward in his chair and Aria sitting up straight. Attentive. And then the door swung closed, clicking shut with a soft snick and Mark couldn’t see either of them anymore. 
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It had been a week. 
Mark had meant to ask Aria what Sooman had wanted to discuss with her privately, he really had. But between schedules and commuting and a million other things that had appeared on his ‘To-Do’ list overnight; he hadn’t found the time.
Either he crept in to the dorms a few minutes prior to the clock striking twelve with barely enough energy to take a shower, or it was Aria slipping in on light feet, sliding in to her bedroom with a quiet goodnight. 
She had been disappearing more often; despite the fact that Mark was near certain that she didn’t have anymore schedules than the rest of them. Not even Donghyuck had been gone as often as her, and the two of them were prepping for NCT Dream’s next album together.
The thought settled bitterly in Mark’s stomach, so he brushed it aside. A million other thoughts filled the space left; equally as acidic. 
Had she signed in to the group? Had she declined? Was there something else going on that Sooman needed to talk to her about? Was she going solo? Was she leaving them? He knew that she’d been offered the opportunity before - it nearly decimated her and Donghyuck’s friendship - but had she accepted this time? Is that where she was going? Why hadn’t she talked to anyone else about it? Why hadn’t she talked to him? 
His head was full of these thoughts running on a cycle. He tried his best to shake them out. 
The dorms were never full anymore - someone was always gone doing one thing, or practicing another, or discussing something else. 
Mark thinks that this was his least hectic day in the last seven. But it was definitely the most stressful.
His hands were sweating and he rubbed his damp palms against the black material of his joggers, an anxious bounce in his knee. Lucas was leant against the wall beside him, tapping a finger against his thigh. 
Scanning around the room, Mark saw his seniors - his groupmates, as odd as it was to acknowledge - in various degrees of unrest. Taeyong appeared relatively calm, although Mark could recognize the tense set of his jawline and he made a note to remind the leader that he had to stop grinding his teeth unless he wanted to do some damage. 
Ten had his phone in his hand and an earbud in one of his ears, seemingly engrossed in watching a video. Mark could see the dangling headphone jack; unconnected to the phone. The video was paused. 
As for a first practice together, Mark assumed that this was not how it was meant to go. How were they meant to perform together if they couldn’t even start a simple conversation? 
None of the NCT boys had seen the choreography for their first single yet, Mark hadn’t gotten around to asking had his seniors managed to get a sneak peak or not. He didn’t think he ever would, at this rate. 
The practice room was quiet, filled with an unsettled air of anxiousness although that may have just been the younger boys projecting, as Taemin looked entirely unbothered, with Kai leaning over his shoulder. 
Baekhyun’s head snapped up as the door to the practice room was closed, shifting up from his seated position on the floor to greet their choreographer. 
“Ah, hello,” He began, nodding his head in a greeting bow.
“..Hi?” Came a smaller voice than he was expecting. 
“Riri?” Lucas said, pushing himself off the wall. “Hey, you alright?” 
Aria was shifting from her left foot to her right foot, hands twisting the fabric at the end of her hoodie. Taemin tilted his head, and noticed that it was the same hoodie she had been wearing the week previous. 
“What’cha doing here, Ari?” Ten asked, moving to stand closer to the girl. 
“I’m here for - for practice? Right?” Aria turned the questioning on him, glancing at Ten and then turning her gaze on Taeyong. “Right?” 
“For SuperM?” Mark was confused. 
“Yeah?”
Aria had her eyebrows pulled together neatly, staring at Mark, who’s face had crested through about eight emotions in the last second, finally settling on a rather odd mixture of relief and pure, childlike excitement. 
“Mark wha-” She cut herself off with a yelp, hands flying to grip Mark’s shoulders as he tackled her around her middle. “Mark!” 
The boy in question only squeezed her tighter, lifting her off the ground a little. Aria squirmed in his grip, but as soon as Lucas’ arms were added to the equation she went lax, knowing that her chances of escape had just dropped to zero. 
“Dude- oh my god,” Mark was laughing, a light breathy laugh. “Dude I thought you didn’t sign it? What was all the secrecy about?” 
“What... secrecy?” Aria wheezed out. “Mark I can’t breathe-”
“Oh, sorry sorry.” 
Aria was put back down on her feet, but Mark’s arms didn’t leave her middle, choosing instead to tug the girl into a hug. “You kept disappearing, I thought-”
Mark hissed in pain when Aria pinched his hip. “You’re such an idiot.”
“What?”
“You know you can talk to me?” 
His cheeks flushed pink. 
Luckily, Lucas saved him from the conversation, pulling Aria out from Mark’s arms and into his own. This hug was more violent, and Aria was lifted and swung around in a circle once, twice, before demanding to be put back down. 
“We’re in a group together!” Lucas was beaming down at her, and Aria couldn’t help but to grin back. “Yeah we are!”
“Group hug!” Ten yelled, and suddenly Aria found herself in a tangle of Mark and Taeyong and Lucas and Ten’s arms, the four boys hugging her tightly. 
Aria laughed, trying her level best to fit them all in her own hug. They stood there for a minute, arms entangled in a rather terrible mimicry of a knotted ball of yarn. 
“Ah hyung, they’re so cute.”
Taeyong coughed, and the five-person cuddle unraveled quickly. 
Aria spun around to see Taemin, Baekhyun and Kai all standing together on the opposite side of the room. Taemin had a fond look on his face, while Baekhyun had his tongue caught between his teeth to stave off a smile.
“Not to ruin the moment or anything, but does anyone know where our choreographer is?” Jongin peered down at his phone. “It’s been twenty minutes, are we in the right room?”
Aria cleared her throat.
“Uh, about that bit.”
Mark’s head snapped over so quickly he might have given himself whiplash. “Ari?”
“I might? Be your choreographer?” The statement came out more like a question, and Aria spread her hands out in front of her. “Believe me, I’m not quite sure how that one happened either, but if it’s going to be a problem I really have no issue with, like, not doing it? I know I’m the youngest and I don’t want to be rude or anything I-”
Mark tackled her in another hug. Aria was pretty sure her ribs were going to be bruised after this.
“Literally shut up.”
“But!”
“Shut up!” 
“You’ll do a great job, Aria.” Baekhyun smiled over at the younger girl. “Do you have anything prepped, or have you heard the song yet?”
Aria shuffled awkwardly. “I have something? It’s only a rough draft really, and obviously its subject to change because, well you’re all here and whatever suits you best is the best option so,” She took a breath. Taeyong slid over to put a hand on her back, but said nothing, still waiting for one of the older members to take the lead. 
“Can you show us? None of us have seen the demo yet, just Jongin.” Taemin grumbled, poking the boy in question in the stomach. Jongin flicked him back. 
“Uh, yeah? Yeah, I can do that.” 
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“Wait wait, Ari. Is that what you were talking to Sooman about?” Mark caught her wrist to stop her from leaving the practice room. She had lost the hoodie a few hours ago, and her hair was pulled back into a sad looking ponytail. Tired and weary, all she wanted to do was take a hot shower and spend the next three hours with her face buried in her pillow. 
But Mark’s question made her stop. “Uh, yeah. Yeah he just wanted to talk to me about my, responsibilities in the group, so to speak.”
If Mark was a little less exhausted and a little more alert, he would have caught the odd phrasing, but he was a lot more exhausted and a lot less alert than on a regular day, so it flew right over his head. 
“Ari, that’s incredible. I’m so proud of you.” He went to pull her into another hug. 
“No! Ew get off what’s with you today! Why’re you so cuddly, get off get off you’re gross and sweaty.” She knocked her hands against his chest to try and get him to move away.
“I’m just proud of you~” He sang, swaying her back and forth. “Was gonna miss you if you didn’t sign with us. ‘Dunno what to do without you in my team.”
Aria’s protests died down slowly, and her fists stopped to rest on his chest. She snorted once, poking him in the chest. “Don’t lie, you just didn’t want to be the maknae, you can’t fool me.” 
“No~” Mark continued to whine. “Really, was gonna miss you.” 
“Okay, okay, you big baby. I’m not going anywhere - you’re going to have to try harder than that to get rid of me. Now let go, I want a shower.”
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wholesomemendes · 4 years
Text
Your Teddy Bear
Mendes Triplet Au (Peter Mendes)
Summary: No one could’ve guessed you would have ended up with Peter, but the two of you give each other a love neither of you ever thought you’d be lucky enough to experience. 
Author’s Note: This is my first time writing with the Mendes Triplet concept by @thotmendes and I’m honestly so excited about it. Also, shout out to @fallinallincurls for talking concepts with me the other night that inspired me to write this and @princecharmingmendes for telling me too write it along with a ton of other people that got me to finish this (such as @itrocksmysocks​ who sent me a bunch of Peter pictures that were absolutely adorable). So I hope you guys enjoy this! It’s literally 4.6k of just pure fluff and more fluff after that. As always please tell me what you think!
Warnings: Mild Swearing (like literally only one or two words)
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No one knew how Peter Mendes ended up with you. Hell, Peter didn’t even know how he ended up with someone like you, but somehow almost every night he fell asleep with his head on your chest, your hands brushing through his mess of fluffy curls. You commanded the room any time you walked in it, confidence radiating off you in every aspect as you strode past everyone with your shoulders pushed back and chin held high. Known to be the life of the party, you were the one people could rely on to flirt your way past the guy at the liquor store to bring the best booze to all of the frat parties, and your name was well ingrained into the minds of almost every student at your wide campus. 
Peter, on the other hand, was only known by a handful of students and for a completely different set of reasons. Typically when one thought of Peter they first thought of Raul, the oldest of the Mendes triplets that was known for partying and hooking up with girls, or Shawn, the captain of the hockey team that could easily get any girl he wanted just by looking them in the eyes and serenading them with his singing and guitar. If by some miracle they knew Peter for another reason, it’d probably be because he happened to be one of the smartest students in every single one of his classes and often was asked for tutoring or help with homework. When you thought of Peter Mendes you thought of the smart Mendes, which was exactly why it just didn’t seem right that the two of you were together.
It wasn’t like you were unintelligent by any means, you got As and Bs in all of your classes, but you weren’t even close to the level of Peter’s smarts. Most students would say Raul would be your type, you both had dominating, cocky almost personalities on the outside and loved to party, a seemingly perfect fit. Or even Shawn, who had a smooth, laid back persona would be a great match for you if he didn’t already have a girlfriend to love. 
But you knew how you ended up with Peter. It was just 6 months ago when that curly headed boy walked into your life, flipping it completely upside down in the best way possible. You remember it clear as day; you had just gone into the kitchen of the frat house to get another drink when you spotted a cuddly giant leaning against the counter looking completely out of place, swirling his drink inside of his solo cup. You excused yourself, reaching behind him to grab some pop causing him to look at you with wide eyes, apologizing profusely for being in your way. Giggling at his reaction you reassured the startled boy that there was nothing to worry about, before properly introducing yourself.
“I’m Y/n by the way.”
“I know,” he responded, cheeks heating up after realizing what he had said. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t completely infatuated by you, how could he not be? You were absolutely gorgeous and the definition of perfection in his eyes, and something about your mysterious aura left him wanting to know everything about you. Yet here he was, completely embarrassing himself in front of the girl he was secretly crushing on. “I’m sorry that was so weird, um, I’m Peter,” he stuck his hand out for you to shake it, a laugh escaping your lips as you took it firmly in your own. His heart was beating out of his chest at the fact that not only were you engaging in a conversation with him, but you had just shaken his hand, which he was now realizing was not a common thing for teenagers to do and was probably screwing up any chance he had of getting to know you.
“So what’s in the cup?” you asked, motioning to the drink that was pretty much still filled to the brim, a clear sign that its contents were not appealing to him.
“Oh, um, it’s beer, but I’m not really that much of a drinker, especially in large crowds.” His cheeks burned bright red under your stare and he wondered how much deeper of a hole he was going to dig himself into with all of this information he was giving out. Surely someone like you would find him boring soon, it was only a matter of time before you left him to talk to someone hotter and much more interesting. 
But to his surprise you moved closer, leaning against the counter next to him as you brought your cup to your lips. “Want to know a secret?” you whispered, Peter nodding frantically like a little boy about to get a new toy, “I’m not that into drinking either. I only really do it at parties and even then I usually keep it to a minimum. I’ve been here for three hours and all I’ve had is half a white claws I ended up giving to my friend. This is Pepsi.” You took another sip from your cup, watching as his jaw dropped at the information causing a smirk to form on your face, “You know I’ve never actually told anyone that, but I have a feeling you’re not gonna go around telling everyone what I tell you.”
“No, no, I won't, I promise.”
“Good, now what do you say we find somewhere quieter to get away from all of this. I’ve had a long day and I have a feeling you love parties just as much as you love drinking.” Peter thought he had never smiled so wide as you took his hand and pulled him into an empty room, one you just happened to know wouldn’t be used tonight. The two of you talked for hours, about how he was dragged there and then abandoned by his two identical brothers, to the research he was doing for astronomy class. You listened intently to everything he said, even adding some of your own input about topics he never thought you would be interested in, and he truly thought in that moment that he had never felt more seen, more appreciated and thought of as someone other than the unknown Mendes brother. You parted ways when it got too late for the both of you, exchanging numbers with a promise to see the other again soon, Peter’s heart racing at the thought of seeing you once more. You never told him, but he had your heart that first night you met him, finally having someone who wanted to know more about you than how to get in your pants. 
So even though it shocked the entire school to see Peter’s arm wrapped around your shoulders two weeks later, the two of you felt perfectly content and at peace with one another, your personalities balancing each other out, fitting in like the missing pieces to your own individual puzzles. If you ever had a bad day, you knew that the moment you saw your cuddly giant of a boyfriend looking as comfy as ever in his softest sweatshirts, glasses adorning his beautiful face, your mood would instantly be lightened and everything would be alright. And that’s exactly what you needed right now, a cuddly Peter to turn your day around. 
So there you were, headed to the triplets apartment off campus to see your man. Raul, Peter, and Shawn had all bought a four-bedroom apartment only a couple minutes off campus after their sophomore year, and you were around so much that they trusted you with the code and your very own key. You fit right in with the boys easily; you had seen Raul and Shawn at a couple parties before you met Peter, but you never spoke more than a few words to one another. Now that you were dating Peter though, you were practically treated as their sister, blending right into the dynamics of their tight knit family. If there was one thing the Mendes brothers were, it was close and you never quite understood how deep their connections were with one another until you were around them so much. Peter was never known to be a player, always wanting to just be in a serious relationship, so it had been years since he had brought a girl home around his brothers. For that very reason, Shawn and Raul were extremely protective over him, but you easily passed the test they gave you right off the bat. They loved you, not to mention they could tell that Peter was head over heels for you long before he told you 3 months into your relationship. He had been laying on your chest, breathing starting to become heavy as you lured him to sleep with your head massages. 
“I love you,” he mumbled into your shirt almost incoherently, an innocent slip of the tongue in his sleepy state. You froze, hand pausing in his hair for a second as he whined from the lack of your touch, not even processing what he just said. You hadn’t ever told one of your boyfriends that you loved them, the thought always seeming too permanent and constricting. But Peter was different and you knew that from the start. He made you feel things that you worried in the dead of night you might never experience and even though it was early in your relationship, Peter felt emotions so deeply and openly that your heart was completely owned by him.
“I love you too, Pete.” He hummed in confusion at your words, suddenly a lot more awake as he sat up to look you in the eyes.
“What?”
“You told me you loved me and I said I love you too.”
“You do?” he asked, eyes wide, happy tears prickling in the corners of them.
“I don’t know how I couldn’t bubs,” and with that he surged forward, connecting your lips to his with as much passion as he could possibly muster. 
After he woke up, Peter immediately told his brothers about the night’s events, the two of them filled with joy that someone could make their brother as happy as he was. A month later he gave his virginity to you and the praise (and teasing) he got from his brothers was never ending. You weren’t forgotten either for later that day when you showed up, Shawn immediately began wiggling his eyebrows at you as Raul started cracking sexual jokes, Peter looking sheepish in the background. You had rolled your eyes, feigning annoyance, though you could never be truly mad at Peter for sharing your relationship with his brothers. You learned very quickly that there was little to no privacy with the three of them and anything you did was fair game in their conversations. You didn’t mind, you loved how close they were, not to mention how supportive they were of one another, and you definitely didn’t complain when you had two extremely buff guys protecting you from drunk creeps at parties that didn’t seem to grasp the concept that you were in a relationship.
But being close to the brothers also meant they were used to your random appearances when you typically showed up unannounced even to Peter, who never complained about getting to spend more time with you. Which happened to be the case today, when you stormed in, muttering a quick hello to Raul who was spread out on the couch as you headed towards Peter’s room.
“Peter?” you asked, knocking twice before entering at his request, not even greeting him and instead landing face down on his mattress with a huff. 
Your boyfriend closed his laptop, saving his work and sitting up to give you his full attention, running his fingers over your back, “What’s wrong, angel?”
“She’s such a bitch!” you complained, rolling over onto your back to stare at the ceiling.
“Who?” This is how it usually went if you were having a bad day, he’d ask you generic questions, allowing you to let out all of your pent up frustration until you were ready to be cuddled for the rest of the night.
“Marissa! You won’t believe this. This guy comes up to me after class today and tries to give me his number and I’m obviously like no, sorry, I’ve already got the greatest man in the world, I don’t have any interest or need for anyone else. But guess what?!”
It didn’t even phase Peter at this point that a guy tried to get your number, it happened so often that he was partially immune to the doubts and jealousy that came with it. In the beginning it was hard for him, constantly feeling like he wasn’t enough and didn’t deserve you, but you proved to him time after time again that you were completely gone for him and that he was more than you could ever dream of. And he would never, ever question your loyalty to him, if there was one thing you weren’t it was a cheater. “What?”
“Turns out this dude had a girlfriend, Marissa, and so of course she was pissed that he was trying to get my number, which is understandable. But guess who she blames it on?”
“You?”
“Me! Like are you KIDDING me?! I’m not the one with loyalty issues here, sweetie, yet here you are accusing me of trying to get with your man. Why would I even want his number? Even if I was a cheater, which ugh I want to throw up just thinking about it, you’re a hundred times hotter and better than him in every way so it doesn’t make sense. So no, it wasn’t me, sorry your boyfriend’s a manwhore, Marissa.”  A chuckle escaped Peter’s lips, head tilting back against the headboard as he laughed. You turned your head at the beautiful sound, meeting his eyes a few seconds later for the first time that night. And just like that. Mood completely better. The sight of him, hair a fluffy mess basically asking to be played with, adorable glasses being pushed up by the scrunch in his nose, and comfy pink sweatshirt on his frame making him look as soft as ever. 
“Hi bubs.”
 Peter smiled his loving smile he reserved for you, laughing to himself at how quick your mood could change around him, “Hi angel. Feeling better?”
You nodded, crawling up the bed into his open arms, sliding underneath the covers next to him as you rested your head on his chest, “I love you.”
“I love you so much.” He adjusted in the bed to better lay down with you laying on top of him, stroking your hair before placing gentle kisses on the top of your head, “I missed you.”
“I missed you too, bubs,” you snuggled further into his chest, cheek squishing against the fabric of his sweatshirt, “Just wanna cuddle you all night long.”
“I can do that,” Peter whispered, voice soft against your ear, “You doing anything for the rest of the night? I heard Raul saying there’s a huge frat party he’s going to later.”
“Yeah I heard about that,” you admitted, “But I don’t think I’m gonna go. Rather just lay here with you. If you want to, that is.”
Peter’s heart swelled three sizes at your words, nodding his head as he traced I love you onto your back like he always did when he was given the chance. It was true that ever since you started dating Peter you weren’t found at parties as often as you used to be. You still enjoyed going to them, you even managed to bring Peter to a couple of them and he found them much more enjoyable with you by his side, but more often you found yourself just wanting to stay in with your man rather than being surrounded by a bunch of people you hardly knew. “I’d love that,” he spoke against your ear, still leaving butterfly kisses in your hair, “Why don’t we have a movie night? I bought your favorite cookie dough, I could go pop them in the oven if you wanted.”
Your head perked up at his words, a smile gracing your face, “Mrs. Field’s Chocolate Chip?”
“Mhm,” he hummed in response, a squeal leaving your mouth as you jumped off the bed pulling him with you.
“Come on, come on, cookies, Pete!” He laughed, grabbing your hand in his and letting you drag him to the kitchen. He loved how different you were with him, how you were so carefree and loving compared to the confident, I don’t care vibe you gave off to everyone. It was like a secret only he got to see and as long as you kept showing it to him, he was gonna soak in every second of it. 
Upon arriving in the kitchen, you jumped to sit onto the counter while Peter rummaged through the fridge in search of the mouth-watering cookie dough. You leaned over to wash your hands in the sink next to him before rolling the dough into large balls to get the biggest cookies possible. The first time you made cookies with Peter he was shocked at how much dough you were rolling for one cookie, claiming that they weren’t going to turn out well if they weren’t perfectly symmetrical to the suggested sizing on the side of the packaging. But once he tasted the big cookies he had no complaints, and neither did the rest of the triplets. Once the package was finished and you had two sheets of cookies in the oven, you watched as Peter set the timer on the oven, little tongue sticking out in concentration.
“Come here, big guy,” you motioned him closer to you, wrapping your legs around his waist once he stood in the middle of them, hands on your thighs. You placed your hands on his shoulders, one hand making its way to play with the curls on the back of his neck. He stared up at you with doe like eyes, hands frozen on your thighs no matter how much he wanted to move them. Even if you had been dating for over half a year now, Peter was still shy and nervous about touching you, so even having him put his hands there in the first place without you telling him it was ok was a big deal. “You can move your hands if you want,” you whispered, eyes holding his soft gaze, feeling his thumbs start to slowly rub circles against the fabric of your jeans, “You’re so handsome, did you know that?”
He blushed at your words, head ducking down to look at the ground, “‘M not handsome, you just have to say that cause I’m your boyfriend.” You knew Peter always had trouble with having self confidence, years of believing that his brothers were better than him really took a toll on his heart. But even if he was a part of three identical triplets, every time you looked at him all you saw was the cutest, most handsome man alive. Maybe he didn’t have endless tattoos like Raul, or piercings like Shawn, but he was Peter, your Peter, and you would do anything to convince him that he was more than enough for anyone, especially himself. 
“Pete, look at me.” You lifted his chin up with your finger, other hand smoothing along his shoulder, “I would never tell you something that wasn’t true. I don’t tell you you’re handsome because I feel I have some weird requirement as your girlfriend to do so, I do it because every time I look at you I get butterflies in my stomach over how gorgeous you are. No one has ever made me feel like you do, bubs, and I just wish you could see what I see when I look at you.” With that you brought his lips to yours, tasting the sweet vanilla of his chapstick as he moved in sync with you. You squeezed your legs tighter around him, one hand deep in his unruly curls as you pulled him closer to you, his hands moving up to find purchase on your hips. He squeezed your hips lightly three times, a silent I love you as you kissed, causing a smile to form on your face at the soft boy in your arms. 
“You better not be fucking over there!” Raul’s voice tore through the moment, the two of you breaking away from each other in order to turn around towards the couch where he was staring back at you with eyebrows raised. You rolled your eyes at his antics, turning around to find Peter with red stained cheeks and bashful eyes before calling back to the older triplet, “Don’t worry, Raul, we’re not stealing your job!”
A sincere laugh escaped Raul’s lips as you lightly pushed your boyfriend away so you could hop off the counter, earning a small whine from him in response, “Come on, bubs, let’s check on these cookies.” A couple minutes later you had a fresh batch of cookies sitting on top of the oven, the smell filling the entire apartment quick enough to have Raul next to the two of you in minutes with an already burnt tongue because he refused to wait for them to cool down. Just as you and Peter had bit into your first cookie, Shawn had come stumbling into the house with his hockey gear, a wide smile on his face, “Do I smell cookies?”
“Only the best. Want one?” you asked, handing him the plate, while Raul complained from next to you that he was just about to grab another.
“Is that even a question?” he asked, practically moaning when the taste hit his mouth, “And this is why I love having you around.”
“You say that like I’m the one that buys and makes the cookies. Peter’s the one that does all the work.”
“Yeah, but Peter only makes them for you. We only had oven baked cookies once or twice a year before you came.”
“Hey! I make dinner for you guys almost every night,” Peter countered, a slight furrow to his brows, “Not my fault the both of you can’t make your way around the kitchen without burning it.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Raul said, snatching one last cookie before heading off to his room. 
“Come on, bubs,” you ushered your boyfriend forward, grabbing his hand as he picked up the plate of cookies, “Let’s go watch Netflix.”
“But I only got one cookie!” Shawn whined from behind the two of you.
“You can get them once we’re done,” you called out before shutting Peter’s door, “if there’s any left.” Peter laughed from behind you, loving the relationship you had with his brothers. Honestly, he didn’t know what he would do if you didn’t get along with them, his brothers were his world and their opinion mattered to him more than anyone else’s. But now that you were so prominently in his life, he could easily say that your opinion was on that same level, if not higher than that of his brothers. 
“Hey angel?” he asked nervously, playing with the strings on the hood of his sweatshirt.
“Yeah, bubs?”
“Are you doing anything tomorrow morning?”
“I don’t think so, why?”
“Do you maybe want to stay the night?” You had stayed the night a handful of times, probably more than you should for the length of your relationship, and everytime the two of you woke up with the most content smiles on your faces, wanting nothing more than to just stay that way for the rest of the day.
“Of course, Pete, as long as I get to steal one of your sweatshirts to sleep in,” you told him, walking over to him and replacing his hands with yours on his hoodie strings. His hands found their way to your hips, rubbing in gentle circles to calm the racing heart he always had around you. 
“I’ll give you all of my sweatshirts, you look better in them anyways.”
“Shut up,” you mumbled, giving him a soft kiss, “I’ve never met a man that looks more cuddly in a sweatshirt than you do. You’re my teddy bear, bubs.” A wide smile formed on Peter’s face and he leaned in to kiss your lips one more time before he was opening the drawer to his sweatshirts. He handed you the one he knew was always your favorite, grabbing his own set of flannel pants and a shirt to sleep in. He turned around to let you change in privacy while he did the same, even though the two of you had seen each other in much more intimate situations prior to this. No matter how many times you told him he didn’t have to turn around, he always claimed he just wanted to respect you and didn’t want you to feel uncomfortable in any way, shape, or form. 
“All done, bubs, come cuddle.” You opened your arms to him from where you were laying in his bed and a large smile found its way to his face as he launched himself into your arms. Giggling at your adorable boyfriend, you adjusted so he could lay under the covers with his arms wrapped around your body. You turned the tv on, scrolling through random romcoms on Netflix while Peter munched on a cookie beside you. One of the things you loved about Peter was how much he loved romcoms, always falling in love with the romantic content as much as you. 
Halfway through the movie and you swore the two of you had eaten enough cookies to keep you full for a week, while saving one for Shawn of course. Somewhere in the midst of things, Peter’s head found its way to its beloved spot on your chest and your fingers immediately began massaging through the curls on his head. “You smell different, Pete. Did you change shampoo or cologne or something?” You couldn’t put your finger on it, but the more kisses you left on his curls, the more you felt something was different. He dug his head into your (his) sweatshirt, mumbling something incoherent while trying to hide his rosy red cheeks. “What are you trying to say? I can’t hear you while you’re eating my sweatshirt,” you teased, watching as his red face lifted up to meet yours.
“It’s yours,” he mumbled again, shoving his face back into your chest. You leaned down again, taking a sniff of his hair and finding it to resemble your typical scent right away.
“Why are you using my shampoo, bubs?”
He sighed, turning his head so you could hear him better, “Cause you left one of your bottles here last time you used it and I don’t know, just missed you a lot and you always smell so good.”
“Oh yeah, what do I smell like?”
“Home.” He answered with such sincerity that you knew this was something he had thought about for a long time. Your heart burst, love pouring out of you in such ways that you almost felt like crying happy tears right there on the spot.
“I, um, I have a candle that I keep next to my bed because I think it smells like your cologne. And it calms me down when I’ve had a bad day and I can’t come see you,” you confessed, hands coming back to his hair. 
“You can always come see me, angel. Love having you around.”
You smiled to yourself when you heard his speech becoming more slurred, sleep overcoming him, “I love you, Pete.”
“I love you too, angel. My beautiful, beautiful angel.” He left feather-like kisses over your sweatshirt-clad chest, snuggling deeper into your warmth as his breathing began to even out. You reached over to turn off the tv, feeling safer than you’ve ever felt with your big, cuddly teddy bear in your arms.
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cosmosys · 3 years
Text
Unity vs Conformity in the Dream SMP
/rp /dsmp
So a couple of weeks(?) ago I jokingly talked about writing an essay on the true conflict at the heart of the Dream SMP, and it got more interest than I thought it would SO
Guess what fuckers it's not a joke anymore brace yourselves.
"The biggest underlying conflict in the Dream SMP is the ephemeral battle of Unity vs Conformity, how the two are often mistaken for each other, and how this clash of ideologies is represented on a broad level with factions, AND on an individual level in different characters." 
Long post under the cut, head up!
I want to start by giving the token acknowledgement that all the characters I am about to talk about are morally grey, barring Dream, who is just a straight up villain. There's no one tried and true formula on judging whether or not a character is "good," because it is most often entirely subjective, and depends heavily on each character's specific motive. That being said: while motive is our gateway to understanding why a character acts a certain way, it does not therefore also function as an excuse for their behavior, which will be an important thing to remember later on. 
The true conflict at the center of the DSMP's lore, and what I believe to be the closest thing we'll get to a "moral of the story," is the friction between unity and conformity as both conflicting and intertwining ideologies. 
If we take a closer look at each of the individual battles we've seen take place on the SMP, we can actually see the two ideologies interact both on a factional level and on an individual level. Case and point: the L'Manberg revolution, where L'manberg represents the concept of unity, and the Greater Dream SMP represents the concept of conformity, or again with Manberg vs. Pogtopia, and at a character level with Tommy vs Dream, or Tubbo vs Techno.
This is an interesting dynamic because both concepts are at the same time very similar, yet very different, as both of them are essentially about a group of people coming together to form a single unit. But where unity is an organic, social process that rewards both teamwork and individuality and exists primarily to benefit the group, conformity is an unnatural social construct most often enforced by the threat of violence as punishment for defiance, and exists primarily to benefit the enforcer(s).
While these two concepts, at their core, are incredibly different from one another, it is their surface level similarities that often get one mixed up with the other. This is why we end up with characters acting out in extremely malicious ways, while at the same time believing that they are in the right. 
We can see this most recently with Dream and Tommy. 
I don't think there has ever been a more perfect example of unity on the Dream SMP than the Final Disc War. 
For the first time in a long while-- perhaps ever, really-- most everyone on the server stood shoulder to shoulder in order to accomplish an important goal: standing up to the puppetmaster that had been pulling the strings behind the scenes, and making them all suffer for months. Even those who had proven themselves to be Tommy's enemies set aside their bitterness for at least a little while in order to confront Dream. It was an incredibly stunning moment, and to this day I still think that it is the highest point in the entire storyline. I'd never felt so overjoyed.
This coming together of individuals was organic and willing, meaning that it happened naturally, and that everyone who was there wanted to be there. The only person you could argue was there out of obligation was Punz, as he was paid to show up, but everyone else who came with him essentially volunteered. They didn't have to be there, they didn't have to take that risk, they had no idea what they'd be walking into, but they did it anyway, and that is the essence of unity. 
Conversely, you have characters like Dream and Techno, or the Eggpire faction, all of whom confuse a desire for unity with the act of enforcing conformity. 
Dream wants the server to become "one big happy family" again. But his quest to accomplish this has twisted him into a pale imitation of his former self, someone who has no empathy or remorse for what he has done, because he sees his actions as entirely justified. To him, the ends justify the means. Tommy is the villain in his story, and making him suffer is par for the course. We begin to see that Dream is actually very aware of what he is doing. He understands the distinctions between unity and conformity, and has decided that he would rather have the people of the server conform by force than unify by choice. He wants control. He wants power. He wants to be a god.
It's the same principle with Techno and the Syndicate, albeit for different reasons and under different circumstances. 
Unlike Dream, Techno is not really a villain. He is certainly on the darker end of the morally grey spectrum, but he has not reached the same level as that disgusting green teletubby. Yet.
However, this doesn't mean that he also isn't in the wrong with this new Syndicate. The circumstances are just a little different. 
This is one of those instances where motive becomes an important factor in judging a character's actions. While Dream abuses and hurts Tommy out of his innate desire for control, and that pesky god complex, Techno acts in the service of his beliefs, which ultimately boil down to: no one person should have absolute power over any other.
As admirable as that belief is, Techno's enforcement of it is where we hit that slippery slope. 
On a surface level, the Syndicate seems like a good thing; an organization set up and geared towards preventing tyranny on the server, supported by and supporting local anarchists. But what is it really, other than a glorified police force made up mostly of the richest, most powerful people on the server, waltzing about with their maxed armor and weapons, scaring the daylights out of everyday folks. 
The Syndicate exists to put an end to tyrants, but who decides what a tyrant is on the Dream SMP? Who gets to make that distinction? The Syndicate itself? How do they decide what qualifies as tyranny? What prevents them from setting arbitrary standards? What right do they have to be the enforcers? Doesn't that make them the tyrants? Sure, they aren't directly ruling over anyone, and all Syndicate members are there by choice, but no one else on the server will be able to form a government or organization without suffering the innate fear of pissing them off. 
This is a prime example of something meant to be good that could easily be twisted into something very bad. The Syndicate exists to wipe out tyranny, yes, but in doing so they also exist to enforce one very specific way of thinking. That's not unity.
Techno's motives are understandable, even commendable given his backstory, but he doesn't seem to understand that when unity becomes something that you have to force others into, it is no longer unity. The basic tenets have been corrupted, and you are now enforcing a system of conformity that violates the natural freedoms of the people you are trying to bring together, or in this case "set free".
So what does this mean for the story and its conflicts? How do the characters "fix" this? 
It really depends. 
With Dream, I'd say the only real solution is a one way ticket to perma-death. This is a guy that knows full well what he is doing, and he revels in it.
As for the Syndicate, I think it is quite literally a matter of which way the wind blows. Can Techno "the only universal language is violence" blade be reasoned with? Jury is still out. I personally think it's going to take some measure of physical confrontation. You're going to have to beat the Blade to prove anything to him. I am just hoping it all works out
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pynkhues · 3 years
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So i sent a similar ask to megan because i love peoples thoughts on their own fics and i love snippets soooooo👀 I’m curious what your top five moments in the c&c verse are (which have already happened) and top 5 moments you’re looking forward too?!☺️
Ahhh, thank you! This was such a fun one, haha. It got looooong, so I put it behind a cut! [edit: sorry, the cut doesn’t seem to be working on desktop, but it is on phone? tumblr’s being tumblr! Hopefully it fixes soon?].
Top Five Moments in C&C
1. Annie argues with Beth about the security system in I Could Be Your Welcome. 
This was actually one of the first moments I wrote in the C&C ‘verse. I can’t remember the exact context around me writing it, but I remember being interested in Beth’s lack of self-preservation / tendency to ignore danger, and had been thinking a lot about what that would look like in an actual relationship with Rio. It sort of manifested in the thread of Rio buying this expensive security system throughout I Could Be Your Welcome and becomes a bit symbolic of the fact that Beth hasn’t really unpacked any of the realities at that point on what a relationship with a man like Rio means. 
Beth is such a stubborn character at the best of times, haha, that I knew I wanted her to dig her heels in on it, and I wanted it to culminate in a fight, and I just loved the idea of Annie being the unlikely voice of reason, and how that reason fell out of how much she loves and worries about Beth. 
Here’s my favourite part: 
-
“Yeah, and you need to talk to him about that. But he’s not Dean,” Annie interrupts. “Dean lied for Dean. Dean lied to cover up all the ways he shit the bed, and he shit the bed on like, every level. Comforter, sheets, mattress protector, mattress. Bed frame. Floor underneath. I mean, was there a single inch of your marital bed that wasn’t brown by the end of it all?”
Beth gives Annie a look at that, and Annie laughs to herself, waving soapy arms out and letting the suds drift to the floor.
“With Rio, I think he was - -” and her voice cracks then, her bottom lip wobbling, and she looks briefly away, trying to pull herself together. It takes her a minute to collect herself, to figure out what it is that she wants to say, and when she does, her voice is somehow both raw and firm.
“You’re asking me to be mad that he’s trying to keep you safe, and that’s never going to be something that makes me mad.”
It takes Annie a moment to meet her gaze again, and when she does, her jaw is fixed, even as her lip still wobbles, a tear – blackened with mascara – having stolen down her cheek, catching at the curve of her nose, and - -
And just - -
Dammit.
2. Rio realising why Jane’s upset in Two Hands. 
One of the things I find most fun in writing the early days of the C&C ‘verse, is that Beth and Rio flat out do not communicate still, hahaha, and they really just threw themselves into this family without fully knowing what that meant. 
Two Hands was very much about that, and in particular about the fact that Rio, in the early days of their relationship, treated Beth’s kids ultimately as extensions of Beth. Two Hands for me marks this turning point in the timeline where he started to really think of each of them as their own people, and consciously commits to building individual relationships with each of them. 
Also I love writing Jane, haha. Here’s my fave bit: 
“It’s not always like this,” he says, and Jane looks up at him, and there are too many expressions that pass over her round little face – disbelief and childish frustration until it finally settles on somethin’ else, somethin’ softer, less certain, somethin’ he ain’t seen on her face, at least not somethin’ he’s seen directed at him.  
“You didn’t say bye,” she says finally, her voice small, and Rio exhales, annoyed. 
“I did, darlin’,” because he did. Shit, got to fight about it with Elizabeth and leave Marcus red faced and weepy, made sure of that, but then - -  
He looks at Jane and any self-righteousness dies on his tongue.
“Not to you though, huh?” he says softly, and Jane shuffles back into his arm, presses her forehead into his chest, out of sight, the nozzle of the sippy cup sucked into her mouth like a bottle, keeps herself looking away from him, and Rio exhales. He looks down at his bruised hands, then at her feet, where the booties of her onesie hang limply down the side of the couch, her feet lost somewhere in the legs of the thing, the hood of it hangin’ so far down her face it almost covers her eyes, and he reaches up to tug it back, just enough he can see her.  
“’m sorry. Think maybe I’m still gettin’ used to this,” he says, because he hadn’t said goodbye to any of Elizabeth’s kids. Had trusted her to do it for him, had treated them like they were just a part of her, but - -
They ain’t.
They’re - -
Well.
Fuck.
Jane looks up at him, her eyes a little glassy and just - - he ain’t sure what that is, the feelin’ in his gut, hollowing itself out. “Can you be the first one I say hey to instead?”  
She makes a show of turnin’ it over, her squirming against his chest and drinkin’ that goddamn awful drink he’s made her, but then she nods, and Rio tugs on one of her rabbit ears.  
“Hey, Jane,” he says quietly. “You been good for your mama while I been gone?”  
And she grins a little at that, shakes her head into his chest again, giggling before she can stop herself, and Rio smiles too, but rolls his eyes.  
3. Rio’s non-proposal in Stick to the Rivers 
I’m weirdly into the thought of Dean getting married a million times after he and Beth finally divorce. I think Dean’s just affable and charming and goofy enough to trick women into thinking he’s a good guy, and I kind of love the idea that it results in this string of short-term disaster relationships that parallel to the longterm stability and true partnership Beth finds with Rio in C&C. 
It’s something I’m definitely going to be exploring in future chapters, but it was really fun to start to in Stick to the Rivers, where Dean tells the kids he’s engaged and Beth and Rio are left to deal with the fallout. I also love the idea of Beth and Rio floating concepts with each other as jokes, even when they mean them seriously, haha, which is how this moment happened: 
-
“Thought you ain’t sayin’ nothin’,” Beth says, imitating his voice, and Rio exhales sharply, squinting down at her in that irritated way that he does whenever she imitates him.
“I ain’t,” he says, gritting his teeth, and Beth arches an eyebrow up at him. “But that dumbass ex o’ yours - - ”
“Is getting married,” Beth replies, refocusing her gaze on the ceiling, and at least that’s enough to make Rio be quiet. It was a dirty trick, and she thinks they both know it, but still - - she just didn’t have it in her for Rio to tell her what she already knew, to have to justify (again) her inaction when it came to Dean.
Rio sighs above her, and she can feel him trying to catch her gaze, but she keeps it fixed steadily on the ceiling, briefly wishing for cracks or cobwebs or anything beyond the pristine surface there to distract herself, only something must distract her, because she doesn’t realise Rio’s undressed or even moved at all until he’s nudging her forwards and slipping into the bath behind her. He pulls her gently back against his chest.
“You’re surprised,” she tells him softly, letting her head loll back onto Rio’s shoulder, her eyes slip shut, feeling his hands stroke down her arms, one coming back up to cup her breast.
“Surprised he managed to trick another woman into gettin’ saddled with his ass, sure,” he replies easily, and Beth huffs out a laugh, beyond the point of being offended by anything Rio says about her and Dean’s marriage.
“You wanna beat him down the aisle?”
And just - - what?
Beth’s eyes snap back open, and she spins a little in the water to look at him, and it’s unfair, the mirth in his eyes, but also the - - something. She can’t quite read it, god, still can’t quite ever know him fluently, so she just squints at him.  
4. The whole of Louder Now, Help Me Out 
We’re extremely lucky in this fandom to have so many writers who are genuinely SO funny (including you!!), and I am not one of them, hahaha. I always feel like I tend to be a bit clunky when I try to write jokes, but occasionally I think I pull it off, and the installment where Marcus, Jane and Emma ask Beth about sex is one I’m pretty proud of. It still makes me grin when I read it, haha. 
-
“Miss Elizabeth, do you and my daddy have sex?”
Somewhere inside, Beth can hear Kenny and Danny playing video games, can hear lunch gently simmering in the crockpot, can hear the faintest whir of the washing machine working through its cycle. Which is nice, she thinks blankly, her smile not shifting as she tries to process what Marcus has just said to her. She can’t quite look at Ruby, who even out of the corner of her eye she can see has her mouth hanging open, and she definitely can’t look at Annie, even if she does see her drop heavily back down into her chair (doesn’t even have to know for sure to know that she’s grinning).
Beth clears her throat, softening her gaze.
“Who told you that?” she asks, and beside him, Jane shrugs, a suspicious look on her face.
“Lucas Bircher. He said he saw his daddy naked and he put his penis inside his mommy’s butt and then his daddy told him that that was sex and it was how they made babies.”
“Not if it’s in her butt,” Ruby says quietly, taking a sip of her coffee when Beth spins around to glare at her. She drops her mouth open, planning to tell the kids what, she’s not sure, when Jane continues:
“But then we asked Kenny, and Kenny said growed-ups have sex because it’s fun and that you and Mr Rio do it all the time.”
5. Beth finds Rio with Marcus comes home after a bad job in Friar’s Lantern. 
Angst though is something I think I write well, haha, and particularly crime-y angst. Friar’s Lantern is a story I was really excited to write, particularly in exploring the dynamic between Beth and Marcus, and the history of Rio and Laura. I liked the idea that Rio and Laura care about each other deeply, but that she was never in crime, and that she hit a breaking point with it in a way that made her really demand that Rio hide a part of himself from her. 
In a lot of ways, Friar’s Lantern was about Beth doing the opposite, and demanding that he share himself instead. I wanted to parallel the moment a bit with the dubby too – with parenthood being central to both Beth and Rio’s vulnerabilities and something that has often lead to shifts in their dynamic – so Marcus’ teddy bear formed a really fun device in that sense. Also the image of a bloodied and bruised Rio bringing his son his stuffed animal was just the right sort of angst for me that day, hahaha.
-
His eyebrow split open, blood trickling from the skin there, down his temple. It looks like he’s swiped it back, once, twice, maybe three times, the blood smeared and dried, caking in his hair. There’s a deep bruise at his jaw, a deep, wide cut at his lip, like he was punched by somebody wearing a ring, and Beth’s gaze travels down him, only to have to swallow a gasp at the blood soaking through his shirt.
He watches her watch him, then says:
“Not all of its mine,” like it’s supposed to make her feel any better about it, and she hates that it does, because god, it’s selfish. She doesn’t want any of it to be his. It can all be the other guy’s. She wants it to be. She can’t summon the words to say anything – barely knows what to, and Rio suddenly jerks his head away from her, looking back at Marcus, and Beth exhales a breath she didn’t know she was holding to have his wounds out of sight again, however briefly.
“I won’t be long,” he says, eyes still on Marcus. “Just droppin’ Otis off, yeah?”
And - - what? Beth blinks, steps closer before she can help herself.  
“Where are you going?” she asks, and Rio doesn’t pull his eyes away from Marcus, and Beth just - - stops. A foot or so away from him, and here she can see the blood’s thickest at the arm of his shirt, darkening the navy fabric, and it still looks wet, like maybe it’s still bleeding.
“Got a hotel.”
Beth tears her gaze away from his arm at that, looks up at him, watches him watch Marcus, and god, his jaw is already swelling.
“Why?”
And that’s enough to make him look back at her. Beth wets her lips, feels herself tremble, steps forward again, and when she touches his arm he flinches back like he’s been burned.
Top Five Moments I’m Looking Forward to in C&C
1. Finally writing the housewarming in See You in the Light. There will be drama! Beth will try to run away! Rio might break something! (And we all know how that usually ends, hahaha).
2. Beth and Rio getting married. I never, ever thought I’d write them getting married in any ‘verse, but once I realised the plot for it, it’s been stuck in my head. I have a pretty strong outline for the fic overall, so it’s definitely coming!
3. Another thing I never thought I’d write in this particular fandom was a pregnancy scare fic. I got a lot of C&C prompts for it though, and it’s actually teased out a pretty angsty installment in my head where they do have a scare and it makes them actually have to talk about what that looks like. In it, Beth confirms she doesn’t want anymore children, and Rio reveals that he would’ve liked one with Beth, but that he’d figured that it wasn’t on the cards. It ends up being a pretty bittersweet story where they’re both happy with what they have, but wonder what could’ve been, and what a child who was both of theirs might’ve been like. 
4. On a much lighter note, I’ve had a ‘five things’ fic for ages which is actually just a time-jump fic with Beth and Rio teaching each of the five kids to drive, haha. It’s ridiculous, but hopefully pretty fun. 
5. And there are a lot more too, but to bring this full circle, haha, there is an installment coming where Rio’s away for business, and, um. The security system is actually used. Think Panic Room vibes. 
put “top 5” anything in my ask and i will answer ok go
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Text
Need a little help. Some pointers.
So I’m writing a story and I just need you guys to read a part of it. It’s a magical girl story. If you don’t mind just read the down below and tell me if it sounds like the most cliche/troupe filled Magical girl story you ever read (that’s the intention for set up) Like if you read it and it doesn’t even sound like you are reading some rip-off, I want you to tell me and please, give me some pointers.
This is the beginning of a story that will pit a Magical Girl against a Onryu like The Grudge, or Ringu. Ideally I’m using the Typical Mahou Shoujo formula to establish the whole magical girl side before getting into the actual meat of things, like stories like Watchmen/Irredeemable that uses the cliches of Superheroes..
On a familiar day, in a familiar town, in an all too familiar park, reside familiar people that go about their day-to-day familiar lives. Children are out playing enjoying the nice sunny weather. Adults are jogging around the track. The elderly sat on their benches chatting it up as they dote on their children and grandchildren. It was a perfect the perfect scene for such a perfect clear sky.
               Above this picture-esque setting on top of a large tree, was an oddity. Standing with perfect balance was at the tip was someone that could have been mistaken for a young teenager. With fur for flesh and large pointed ears it was clear by the shape of its mouth that it was related to canines.
               “Today’s the day!” The wolf-boy licked his canine teeth, relishing in the moment. “It’s time to begin dance of darkness!” he exclaimed throwing his arms out, allowing his sleeve-less leather jacket to be shown to the world. His eyes were glued to one spot in the open sky. His gray-skin level fur glistened in the sun’s ray. “This time the key is mine!”
               This young canine boy was one of four in a group only known as the “Children of Darkness.” The Children of Darkness was a group of four individuals that served under a dark lord that was only known to a few as Kurodo Noyami.
Kurodo in of itself had no form to speak of, but it’s essence in of itself is what causes fear to those that knew its name. It was the personification of the concept of fear itself. At this time Kurodo no longer existed on this plane of reality, but he does exist in another – behind a locked door. That is where the “Children of Darkness” comes in.
The door was sealed away by five locks and only can be broken by five keys, otherwise known as the four keys of Black and the key to shadows. Each member of the Children of Darkness held a key of black, each one specialty made for each member of the Children of Darkness, but the fifth key was something different.
The “Key of Shadows” could never be created by someone of Darkness. Instead, as the name would suggest, could only be created from one place-
The young wolf-man raise his hand outward, as if he anticipated to be given something, “Elder priest of our lord of darkness, I beseech thee,” he tilted his head, as if he were chanting, “deliver upon me the radiance of black so that I may create the Key of Shadows from the heart of man.”
-The “Key of Shadows” comes from the heart of man. Inside of mankind’s heart exists the unlimited potential of love, life, and light; but also exists the possibility of casting even the blackest of shadows. It is from these shadows only that the fifth key to Dark Lord prison could be forged. And to forge that key-
Shadows lurk and fear reigns. Even in the brightest days there will always be the darkest of places. Even in the presence of the light of day there will always be the presence of the night.
“Great Priest Moon, I ask you for your power this day!”
-one simply needs the blessing of the moon. And with that blessing of the moon-
Despite the sun disappearing over the horizon at night, the moon never followed that same cycle. If one were to look up during the daytime one could easily see the moon, in all its pale and ghostly glory.
The wolf reached his hands towards the daytime moon with his outstretched arm, at first it seemed like it did nothing. But of course, in the light, anything could be deceiving. It’s subtle, but just like a golden drop of ray, the light reflects off from the moon’s body and down to earth like a drop of water from a faucet. It’s faint, but it’s only just a fraction the size of a drop of rain, smaller than even a human eye could detect. From the moon drips just a single drop of black energy.
The wolf reached his hand out grasping the moon’s single drop of darkness. “I thank thee, Great Priest.” He bowed his head in appreciation. He looked at drop of radiated blackness that just hovered over the palm of his hand. And then a sly smile stretched out from ear to ear. “It’s time for a Kureeper.” he tilted his hand.
-monsters can be created.
The single drop of darkness fell from the young wolf’s hand. The single drop of darkness fell from the top of the tree. The single drop of darkness fell through the cracks of leaves and branches, through the slashes of light that broke through. The single drop of darkness fell to the ground below. The single drop of darkness splashed onto a single beautiful red flower.
Then the flower exploded into a swirl of dark energy. Cries of children, their parents, and grandparents could be heard throughout the park as the air pressure erupted, blowing many aback. Then, at the epicenter of the spiraling darkness, a small figure where the small flower once stood started to grow and mutate, it grew at a pace of one’s own beating heart. The flower grew and grew into monstrous proportions. The stem of the flower split and grew into vines as thick as cinderblock cylinder’s, each end growing a massive flower itself just like the main body itself. The main “face” of the flower twisted and cracked until it formed what could be best described somewhat like a mouth.
“HANA-OH” the massive flower, otherwise known as the Flower Beast King, roared into the air like the massive monster towering over the it’s prey. Soon the screams started again as the normal every day people realized what was happening and the panicking started again. The Flower Beast King’s cracked face twisted into a perverted smile.
Up above the beast king in the tall tree the wolfman couldn’t help but grin ear-to-ear. “Go, Kureeper. Go and forge the ‘Key of Shadows.’” The Flower Beast King roared in delight as it began its attack as the screams continued to echo through the park.
With the power of the Beast Kings the “Children of Darkness” would be able to cause enough chaos and destruction that the despair that a human’s heart could fall into despair that their heart would forge the “Key of Shadows.”
Normal humans could never match up against the “Children of Darkness” or their monsters. But there is one group of people that can. Only one group that could drive out the darkness. And what are these heroes called?
“BARWOLF, STOP RIGHT THERE!” the wolfman, known as Barwolf, turned his attention away from his creation and down below to two familiar figures. Standing there were two familiar figures in a determined stance staring back at him with equal grit. Barwolf felt disgust as he looked at the young blonde girl, that couldn’t have been no older than fourteen.
“Well, Well, Well, if it isn’t the little witch girl.” Sucked at his teeth as he made a gesture with his hand. As he flicked his wrist, the Flower Beast King stopped its current attack and turned its attention as well to the little girl and her friend.
The little blonde girl turned her gaze at the wolfman in the tree and towards the Flower Beast King that towered over her, and then back at Barwolf. She was wearing a school uniform that she had on while heading in that morning for class, unique in a way that there was a yellow gem over her left breast. Despite her outburst the young girl was still a timid young teenager facing against two monsters that wanted nothing more than the end of all humans, of course she found herself shaking. But despite herself being overshadowed she did her best to stand her ground despite her instincts telling her to run. In short, her novice was showing.
“Kirara.” A voice came from beside the young girl. “You can do it!” The girl, Kirara, turned to look at the person that was standing next to her, but they weren’t standing no where nor were they human. Floating in the air at eye-level was what could be best described as a little mascot character, a little animal that would make the perfect stuff animal on the toy aisle. It was a tiny little creature that resembled that of a tiny polar bear cub with a cyan colored coat, with little arms and legs you could swear is filled with stuffing.
For a moment, Kirara processed what exactly the little creature said to her. Then she closed her eyes. She took a deep breath. Inhale. Exhale. Her anxiety washed away. Her shaking subsided. Then she opened her eyes, a new glow shined in her sun-colored eyes. “Thank you, Beareezy.” She nodded to the little mascot creature. Then she turned her gaze back at the two shadow creatures, now with a newfound determination. Or perhaps it was always there?
Barwolf snarled under its breath. “That’s enough! GET THE LITTLE WITCH, BEAST KING!!!” He commanded the much larger beast. And as a good servant, The Flower Monster followed its master’s order and lunged itself at the little schoolgirl.
Kirara flicked her waist-length sun-colored hair over her right shoulder with determination and then she threw the same hand outward cupped, bringing her other hand to her right chest. “Come, MAGICA KEY!” she snapped with her cupped hand, and just like magic a flash of light engulfed her hand and now she was holding a yellow key in her hand.
These young heroes were called Magical Girls, young females whose hearts shined the brightest to vanquish any shadows.
“MAGICA ROCK, UNLOCK!” then she brought the key to the yellow gem over her left breast, and as if it melted together, the two slid inside one another. Then with a flick of the wrist, Kirara turned the key with an audible click.
If the flower from earlier had erupted into an explosion of dark energy, than the young girl in front of the massive beast could be described as engulfed inside a ball of pure golden light. Taking place inside of the glowing orb was some form of metamorphosis. The Flower Beast King, even for just a moment, was stunned away.
Kirara’s once blonde hair seemed to not only double in length but somehow in its shade of yellow as it’s one single ponytail split into a pair of twintails with a bounce that seemed to break the known laws of gravity and almost seemed to float in the air. Then despite not wearing any prior, Kirara was beautified by a foundation and a coloring to her face that would please any child’s “adult” fantasy look. And then finally, after her school uniform dematerialized, she was given a beautiful white and yellow accented dress outfit with matching boots and gloves that would look good for any desired brush-able doll on a kid’s aisle. And finally, for one last touch, like a seed, the yellow gem that was over her left breast exploded into a beautiful yellow flower.
From an outsider’s point of view, this type of metamorphosis probably seemed to take a whole minute to witness. But the truth of the matter, as the glowing orb died as instantly as it came, the transformation that Kirara undertook was that merely of .05 seconds.
“Shining bright as the sun! Shining brightest as the flower!” Kirara stepped out of the glowing light and into a pose. “I am Mahou Sunlight!”
Barwolf’s ear twitch in aggravation, “I don’t have time for your little magic show, witch.” The wolfman hissed like a snake. “DESTROY HER!”
“HANA-OH!” the large beast king cried out once more as it threw down it’s arm-like vine to crush the much smaller girl standing in front of him. The ground shattered around the massive vine as the earth was upheaved. But it didn’t seem to connect with its target as Kirara seemed to disappear before it could hit its mark.
The Flower Beast King turned its head left and right, then it looked over its back, but he couldn’t find the little girl. But then he looked upwards towards the sun.
Up above the Beast King, almost hidden by the rays of sunlight, was a small figure. Kirara, or in this form Mahou Sunlight, wasn’t capable of flight but instead had leapt out of the creature’s attack before it could have even noticed that she was gone. And now, as if she had switched places with the monster before, she was towering over the massive beast. Then she started falling back to earth.
“GET HER!!!” Barwolf called out commanding his monster.
“HANA!” The Flower Beast King screeched as, like a viper, threw out it’s other arm at the magical girl to catch her as she fell towards it.
Mahou Sunlight, despite lacking any ability of flight, in midair, twisted her body in mid-air to use the centripetal force to parry the snake-like vine. As she did this it seemed as if she fell faster towards the large beast.
CRACK! Combined with the force of which she fell as well as her own sheer strength, Sunlight’s fist sank into the crooked face of the Beast King. The Flower Beast King’s head was sent rocketing backwards as he was repelled by the young girl’s punch. As the beast fell Sunlight was left free falling, a look on her face that screamed “a victory for justice.”
“HANA!!” The massive beast snapped back with a recoil, like rubber he bounced back with a massive head butt. Sunlight’s body was sent flying as the monster’s massive form connected with her more petite self.
But she was still okay as she had blocked the oncoming attack and landed on the ground with no marks on her body – the magic power that boosted her strength also gave her an almost unrealistic defense.
“HANA!” The massive cried out again, this time looking back up into the sky. It almost seemed as if the air around the monster started to reverberate. Energy, mostly likely the sun’s radiation, seemed to gather at the monster’s mouth in a great big ball. Then he ate it. “HANA!” He screeched like a banshee, unleashing the energy store in its mouth shooting a large all-encompassing laser at the child.
Sunlight clapped her hands together, “Flora Shield!” she called out throwing her hands flat out in front of her. A large, almost arcana-like, sunflower shield appeared before her facing towards the towering beast. As the monster’s laser connected with the sunflower, it began to absorb it with ease until the energy dissipated without causing any hard. Sunlight waved her hand, causing the large flower to disappear as easily as it appeared. Both Sunlight’s and the monster’s eye connected.
“HANA!” The flower Beast-king cried out, this time pissed, as it lunged itself at the little girl. It started to throw itself tentacle-like vines out like whips.
Sunlight started to dodge and block the monster’s attack, almost like a dance. She ducked under the overhead attacks, she flipped under the low hanging strikes, she parried every blow that tried to connect with her smaller frame. There was a certain grace to her movement as she seemed to be moving closer and closer to the monster.
CRACK! one more flip and Sunlight’s foot connected with the lower jaw of the beast, had it been a normal human no doubt the person would have been obliterated, with a force strong enough to send the monster off the ground. The monster cried out in anguish as it was sent flying. But the little magical girl wasn’t done yet.
With unbelievable and precise speed Sunlight leapt into the air positioning herself just above the air-borne monster. With another swift kick she stuck the beast. As her foot connected again, the monster plummeted to the ground with a dust explosion. Then the young girl landed on the ground a few feet away harmlessly. She turned back to look at the monster.
As the dust settled around it the monster gave out another cry. It tried to stand up. But it started to falter. It was clear that it was beaten. It was time for the finale.
“ROSE RAPIER!” Sunlight called forth as she brought her hand to the flower over her left breast. Yellow energy poured from the yellow rose and flowed into the young girl’s right hand. With a flick of her wrist, she threw out her arm to her side and the energy started to take a life of its own. The energy, seemingly going from a liquid to a solid, started to expand itself and rearrange itself in the girl’s hand. Stretching itself into a more befitting corporal form it turned itself into a sword. The sword, as Sunlight referred to it, was like that of a white rapier. It was undamaged, unscratched, unscathed, it was like it was freshly made. Adorned the hilt of the blade was a small yellow rose facing outwards. Sunlight brought the blade to her face, holding it like a knight with a graceful stand.
The beast’s eye twitched, it somehow knew what was coming. Fight or Flight. “HANA” It cried out as it lashed outwards and ran towards the girl.
Sunlight brought her left hand to the hilt of the rose rapier. “It’s over” she spoke softly, almost motherly, to the monster that charged at her. She ran her thumb, index, and middle finger up the side of the blade and as she did the rapier started to gain a glow that ran parallel to her free hand as it pulsed energy. She ran her hand off the tip of her blade.
The beast cried out again, using all its strength it threw one more desperation attack at the little girl. It was like a watching a dying animal fight until it’s last breath.
Almost blind to the monster’s struggle, Sunlight to a deep breath. She closed her eyes and lowered her body into a different pose, like that of a samurai. As she took her stance she waited. The Flower King’s last attack connected with her form.
But it was too late for the massive monster. Sunlight was no longer there in front of him. And he finally lost the strength to fight. It was as if any animosity was cut clean through. It was too late for him to realize that he was already dead.
“It’s okay.” A calming voice came from behind the monster. “I’m here.” he turned to see the young magical girl standing there holding the blade in both hands. But now that he no longer held any negative emotion, he seemed to have been taken back by her. Despite their fighting, she wasn’t looking at him with any hatred towards him. It wasn’t pity either. She looked up at him with kindness and a warmness that could melt any cold heart. He hadn’t been alive for more than fifteen minutes, but he quickly learned just what made this child so special. It was the light inside of her heart.
Sunlight smiled with a warm soft glow like that of a caring mother. “I hope that next time, we can be friends.” She ran her left hand down the side of her Rose rapier, and as she did the energy that flowed down started to disappear. “Goodbye.” She said as she closed out the battle. “Until next time.”
The Flower King’s death finally registered through his massive body. But inside of the clammy wetness of death, he felt a warmth overcome him. In those last few moments, as his life trickled away, he didn’t fear death. He felt happy. I’m glad that I was born, I’m glad I was able to meet this young girl, were possibly the monster’s last thought. “Hana~” the Flower Beast King died with a gentle smile on his face.
Then he exploded.
The resulting explosion caused a dust to erupt into the air, but as quickly as it happened it started to subside. As the dust settled, Sunlight found herself staring at the place where the monster had just perished. There, where the Flower Beast King lost its life, was a patch of red flowers glowing beautifully in the sun’s warm light.
“Useless Beast-king!” Barwolf snarled as he watched another creation of his be destroyed. “I’ll get both you little witches next time.” With his threat out of the way, the young wolfman disappeared into the darkness, no doubt planning his next dastardly deed.
The young Magical Girl Sunlight stood there for a moment, taking in for a moment of what she did. She did well to protect the innocent bystanders of the people that were visiting the park and kept damages to a minimum. And she hoped that she was able to save the flower creature.
“SUNLIGHT!” a voice came from the young girl, she turned around to see her little flying companion. “You did it~ You did it~ Another Good Job~” Beareezy flew over to the young girl’s side with a smile on it’s button-nosed face congratulating her. “I can’t believe,” he said bouncing around in the air, “Second week on the job and you were able to defeat your second Beast-King.” He said excitedly. “You’re a natural!”
Sunlight smiled at the small creature, “Thanks,” she said-
Then she fell to her knees.
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justfinishedreading · 4 years
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The Diary of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain
Spoilers (Sort of)
Before reading this book I had never read anything by Mark Twain, but I had heard that he was a great comedic writer and I was looking forward to my first experience of his writing. The Diary of Adam and Eve is his somewhat comedic and satirical version of the biblical legend, told in diary entry form, alternating between Adam and Eve. It’s important to explain that The Diary of Adam and Eve is not actually a single work of fiction; during his lifetime Mark Twain wrote seven short texts on the theme of Adam and Eve, published in different literary journals. These texts focus on different ideas within the context of the legend and do not always follow the same storyline or describe the same events in a consistent way.
The first text contains ‘Extracts from Adam’s Diary’ and ‘Eve’s Diary’, we’re first introduced to Adam (of course), he talks about the arrival of a curious and chatty creature who calls herself Eve. Adam is a solemn and territorial recluse; his diary entries are brief and mostly talk about how annoyed he is that Eve keeps hanging around him and thwarting his frequent attempts to run away. It is Eve who introduces the word “We” to Adam, before her, the possibility of the concept of a collective never occurred to him.
Eve’s diary entries are much longer and philosophical, in them she questions the existence of the creatures in the garden of Eden, their nature, and her own existence and feelings. She examines lions and tigers and tells Adam she believes their teeth look like they were designed for killing and consuming flesh, yet these animals currently eat grass and flowers. Adam tells her that animals killing each other would bring Death to the garden, which is something that has not yet happened. Eve’s observation is telling us that if animals were already “designed” this way, to inflict death, then it is with the anticipation of an event the creator already knows will happen. According to the Bible, Disease, Pain and Death were released onto the world once Eve and Adam ate the forbidden fruit, however if God’s world was already designed and created in preparation for such an event, was it ever Eve and Adam’s fault for disobeying an order given by a being who already knew the order would be disobeyed? With time recluse Adam warms up to Eve, although he doesn’t seem to have many redeeming qualities, one thing I will say for Adam is that I don’t recall him ever even thinking about blaming Eve for their “downfall”.
There are some amusing scenes in this first set of texts, for example Eve gives birth to Abel while Adam is away travelling, when he comes back Eve explains nothing and Adam is perplexed by the baby and keeps trying to conduct experiments on it. He is also obsessed with trying to capture another one from the wild. Twain gives both Adam and Eve a child-like wonder and amazement at the world and entertains us with stories of Eve trying to fetch stars from the night sky and wondering who stole them when day approaches.
Eve is convinced that she is some sort of experiment. The way the story of Adam and Eve is interpreted is usually that Adam was made in God’s image, God then took a rib from Adam and made Eve, therefore Adam is closer to God, and Eve is somewhat inferior because she is a copy of a copy. But if we think about what happens with anything that is created, the first creation is never the best version, usually with each new creation it is better than the last, it is improved. In this light we can view Eve not inferior to Adam but superior.
Eve tells us that she sometimes acts silly, or she conceals things from Adam in order to save him from feeling embarrassment, she realizes that he lacks some of the abilities she has and she does certain things to dumb herself down in order to not hurt his pride. This is something many women can relate to, myself included: needing to tip-toe around some men who have fragile egos and high tempers, this is one of the amazing things about this text, it was written a century ago, and by a man, and yet it is refreshingly feminist. We’re currently going through another feminist revival, and during a time when a lot of machismo and sexual harassment by celebrates is being exposed on social media, and we are losing faith in men in the public eye, it’s hopeful to read a work like The Diaries of Adam and Eve and find a male voice not blinded by ego, not threatened, but with an understanding nature.
Regarding humour, there are certain jokes that aren’t very funny, that are baffling and which I can only presume are related to some event or common joke specific to the time and place Twain was writing in. However there are other amusing scenes, for example interactions with dinosaurs are always funny, in this text and the others we see that Twain has an interest in science and the scientific method, the existence of dinosaurs is proven and Twain is not about to leave them out of Eden, so we get Eve trying to ride a brontosaurus, he “followed her like a pet mountain. Like the other animals. They all do that.” Eve, bright as she is, is also humble, she notices that several animals, particularly the dog and the elephant seem to understand her, and talk, but she does not understand them, and in this case they must be her superiors. In a later text Adam and Eve find a pterodactyl. They name him Terry.
This first section ends on a bit of a sad note, Eve theorizes why she loves Adam, that it is not a product of reasoning, she naively states that she would still love him even if he abused and beat her, words which made me very sad to read. In the end she says she is “only a girl, and the first that examined this matter, and it may turn out that in my ignorance and inexperience I have not got it right.” It is a true portrayal of First Love, of thinking that it’s noble to love someone even if they hurt you, and yet Eve has the wisdom to perceive that her understanding of this may change with time. In a later text Eve describes meeting Adam for the first times and thinking he must be some sort of reptile based on how emotionless and inactive he was.
From Adam’s analysis of their love we have simply, and touchingly, these few words written on Eve’s grave: “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.”
The above points all relate to the first text in this collection, and it was the one I liked most, the one that gave me what I most expected. I would have loved a full novel written in this style, with themes and events expanded upon, but I can understand how it would have been financially and socially damaging for Twain to write such a book in the early 20th century American south, the novel would have ended up banned and part of book-burnings by religious groups across the country, then and now. It’s a shame, there’s are so many good ideas here, surely somewhere someone has written a novel on Adam and Eve – I should do some research on this.
Now regarding the other six texts, they all have differing tones, they were clearly written with specific different themes in mind, written as one-off literary amusements, imagine the opinions section in a newspaper, with articles bouncing off ideas contemporary to the time. I’m just going to mention a few aspects that I found interesting without really describing each individual article.
Eve writes “For we were children without nurses and without instructors. There was no one to tell us anything.” Throughout all these texts by Twain, God is absent, we hear Adam mention once or twice that he was instructed by God to not eat the fruit, but that’s it. Later when Satan appears, Adam and Eve are full of questions. In this imagining of Eden there is no dialogue between God and Adam and Eve, and before those of you who are more religious rush to protest, why should Twain not write their relationship as it currently is for so many of the Christian faith today? Sure there are some who say they speak to God, have a special relationship with him, but for the vast majority there is no clear two-way conversation going on. As Eves says, they were left alone, they discovered, HAD to discover, things by trial and error.
There’s a moment when just before eating the fruit, Adam and Eve have a discussion about what is Good, what is Evil, what is Pain, Disease and Death. Since they have experienced none of these, since they have seen none of these, they have absolutely no concept of what they could mean. How do you explain colours to someone born blind? So, whilst they were warned that eating the fruit would release a bunch of these (completely unknown) concepts, they decide to go right ahead.
Some other humour to note: Eve writes “the ability to spell correctly is a gift; that it is born in a person, and is a sign of intellectual inferiority. By parity of reasoning, its absence is a sign of great mental power.” As someone with a level of dyslexia myself, I welcome this thought. A good story from Adam is when he and Eve asked Noah what happened to all the dinosaurs? “he coloured and changed the subject.” After some persuasion he blames it on his sons for not carrying out their duties correctly, he then says that the dinosaurs and some other animals were left behind because they knew they would be needed for fossils one day… and also there were some miscalculations regarding the ark…
Amongst the jokes and the theological theories, there’s also commentary on the current state of affairs: Eve muses that the human population is too great in number and will consume the earth to devasting effects. This written by Twain a hundred years ago. Wow, what would he think if he saw us now?
There is a truly gut-wrenching and touching moment when Adam and Eve experience Death for the first time; Cain and Abel fight, Abel is hit, but none of them know what death is, they do not recognize or understand the moment he dies, instead they take him to his bed and wait, and wait, for Abel to wake up. All they comprehend is sleep, and therefore they presume that that’s what’s happening. Eve writes of spending hours by Abel’s side, covering his cold body with wool in a futile attempt to warm his body. There’s another diary entry describing her anguish as Eve begins to suspect that this might be what Death is.  
I’d like to end with a small but significant sentence, Adam writes about Eve: “She was never able to keep her composure when she came upon a relative; she would try to kiss every one of these people, black and white and all.” Apart from the fact that all other people of colour are ignored and humanity is basically divided into just white people and black people, and that nowadays the need to specify black and white people in such a sentence almost has the oppose effect and actually sounds racist, but given the time, and the fact that Mark Twain was born in the south, it is a sentence that has good intentions behind it, it is a sentence that is saying: we are all relatives of Adam and Eve, independent of colour. We are all family.
Review by Book Hamster
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safdsdg · 3 years
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grabbed a handful of the bride’s skirt
WagnerSophie Gomola Wagner, 76, of Gaithersburg, died Jan. But I doubt whether even that will do it; surely you know his character. He grabbed a handful of the bride’s skirt. Usually, the entire sneaker is very light in weight bottines cloutees femme and provide a very specific functioning with each one. Poverty may be coming to you or a person you love sooner than you think. But when the same thing was repeated a third time he flared up and felt it incumbent upon himself to defend his dignity and not to degrade, in the eyes of so gentlemanly a company, the prestige of the fair town of Riga, of which he probably felt himself to be the representative. For $375, you can get the Fujifilm FinePix S9100, which combines a 28 to 300mm optical zoom lens, three shots per second and a very packable size. From the poor negro, exposed to bitterest separation, the law jealously takes away the power of writing. 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retvenkos · 3 years
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ok i was torn between the ships and the song/character one but then I saw you post a ship and it was SO GOOD so I'd love to request a ship for Marvel and Star Wars! (and congrats on the milestone again!) I'd prefer to be shipped with a gal (or platonically with a guy). I'm a Gryffindor, INTJ, a stereotypical Leo, and my hobbies include hacking/cryptography, writing, learning languages, and playing the flute + piano. I'm super energetic until I crash HARD, sometimes funny (1/2)
(2/2) but with the wrong crowd, I definitely just come across as A Lot. I pretend to be an open book but like I never talk about the Real Shit? A flaw FS. Usually the fixer of the friend group, the ideas guy, and I love taking long walks around the city with my friends (no matter the weather!) and then going home and getting cozy in bed and watching a movie. Dislikes include when some talks to me when I have headphones in and people who don't know how to act on public transportation lmao. TY! :D
just so you know, you can ask for more than one thing! if you want to do the songs, send one in!
Marvel:
I ship you with Natasha Romanoff!
okay, but listen to me, here, because i have some thoughts™
first of all, you’re a hacker and that immediately gives me secret agent vibes - you and black widow met doing some work for shield back when it was a thing, and at first it didn’t look like the two of you would get along
i mean, you’re super energetic where she’s more low key, and you’re naturally curious where she doesn’t exactly give information.
but fate kept pushing the two of you together, for better or for worse. and the more you spend time with natasha, the more she opens up, and the more she notices how you never talk about anything too deep. and this.... intrigues her? she wants to know more.
and i do think the two of you would work well together - you are versatile enough to adapt to any situation, you have great ideas, you’re rational and well-informed, so you’d be a great field agent. the worst that could happen is that you talk to much, but natasha actually finds it endearing.
as the certified fixer™ of the group, you and natasha work together to bring your team together. natasha is better with people one of one, meanwhile you are great at solving group troubles, so together you create an environment that is so supportive.
i think that you and natasha would 10/10 have a slow burn relationship - you guys take things slow and that’s probably best since neither of you are very good with romance, being more rational and independent.
but when the two of you are together, i imagine you spend a lot of your downtime together.
you and natasha are actually probably big movie buffs - at first natasha just thought she would indulge you and watch a show, but she actually got really into it?
it’s good to just lose yourself in a life that isn’t your own and watch characters deal with their trauma in varying degrees of efficiency.
and natasha is incredibly intuitive, so i feel like she would love to sneak glances at you while you watch shows or when you are hacking because it’s one of the few times you are still and left to your thoughts.
and she is one of the few people that you talk about Real Shit with. she is able to get you to open up in a way that doesn’t feel like prying.
what’s also great about this ship is that one of you is high energy and the center of attention while the other is low key and in the shadows. SO, you are able to bring natasha out of her shell and she is able to get you to slow down.
and i forgot to mention! you’re artsy side! natasha loves it. she will watch you play the flute or piano and just,,,, adore it.
oh! and sparring with natasha is literally the best thing ever. we all want a girlfriend who could beat us up, and would do so upon request.
Star Wars:
I ship you with Padme Amidala!
this is another one that i need you to hear me out on, because i have a whole scenario in my head
padme is a senator and clearly you are doing some not-so-legal shenanigans, using your more refined skills (like flute playing, language learning, and schmoozing) to get near people with Money so you can embezzle them and take them for all they’re worth.
now padme, has some Money, and so you easily become friends with her by casually being at some party or another and showing off your amazing talents.
but padme is so kind! and once you get to know her you have some second thoughts,,,, do you have to steal from someone so pretty and sweet?
but you are determined and a little dismissive of your emotions - you can power through this.
but then padme does so many kind things for you - she takes you out on walks, she gets dinner with you, she has deep™ conversations with you, and while you are able to hide your more shady dealings, it’s getting increasingly difficult... and do you want to?
little do you know, padme has had an eye on you since the beginning because she has friends everywhere and knows about you and your little games. she waiting for you to make your move so she can catch you red handed, but she, too is having some difficulty with that.
especially when you genuinely seem so cool? and interesting? and let’s be real here, padme is a sweetheart but she has a taste for the troubled™ individual with deep seeded conflicts
and so you are both slowly falling in love with each other and it’s making your lives very difficult. but neither of you want to give up.
eventually, though, you and padme are talking one night, maybe after having watched the star wars equivalent of a movie or having just gone to see a play and you walked back to her place
either way, it’s deep into the night, and you are having hushed conversations despite being alone, and you start to open up about your past.
you’ve been hanging out for many months now, and you know you’ll be kicking yourself in the morning, but you’re telling her anyway. you manage to avoid talking about your latest hacking adventures, but you tell her about how you grew up in the lower levels of coruscant and living down there, how were you expected to be anything else?
and padme is very sweet, and she tells you that who you were then doesn’t need to be who you are now - look at all of the amazing things you can do! everyone comes from somewhere, but it’s where there going that matters.
and you decide to not embezzle her because you see something genuine in her eyes - something that really believes in you. and you’ve never been big on emotions, but you believe in padme.
and ANYWAY, when you two are finally together, just imagine all of the shenanigans you get up to. now that padme has you, she is 80% more likely to do undercover work that stresses out bail but makes you very happy.
honestly you two are a power couple and the world better watch out.
you could have taken down palpatine in like, two days if this were canon, you guys are just that iconic.
uhh,,, this got really long, but you and padme is such a concept.
take part in my 2.5k celebration
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consilium-games · 3 years
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Setting, Genre, and Principles
I talked recently with a friend about Apocalypse World, genre, and Principles. For those unfamiliar, Principles are a design and game-running technique that Apocalypse World did not invent, but did refine and explicate, a bit like how the Greeks knew of static electricity, but it was Galvani who made a battery on purpose, that others could study. Since I haven't died yet, I have a project in mind, in this case one that really explicitly relies on Principles in its basic design, so in this essay I want to work out a basic edge of 'what Principles can cover'. Namely, the edge of 'genre'.
I'll define a couple technical terms here because I intend to use them pretty narrowly:
Diagetic means the usual, "bound within the world of a given story".
Commentative means "outside of any story, things we say about stories-generally".
So a setting counts as diagetic, bound within its own logic and the logic of the single work it appears in. Diagetically we'd ask "why does the author choose to write dragons in this way?"
A genre counts as commentative, not bound within any story. It may or may not codify some stories, an author might consciously bend to or defy a genre as they understand it, but most importantly on the genre level, we don't ask "why did the author write dragons like this?" Instead we ask "why do people-generally like to see dragons?"
In talking with that friend, she said she had difficulty reading AW, which I can't really fault anyone for: I'd consider AW almost as much a polemic manifesto as a procedural manual. And the former undermines the latter. Part of her issue came from her looking for a setting, not realizing that properly speaking, AW doesn't have one. I said as much, and as we talked, I then said a lot more than I should:
After confirming that "Baker does not give AW a setting", in a bit of enthusiasm on the idea of 'genre emulation', I went on to say that "Baker gives his apocalypse". This prompted confusion, for the reasonable question arises, "how can Baker provide his own, particular, post-apocalypse story without giving a setting?" So I should have spoken more carefully, and I wrote most of this essay to over-answer that question for my friend. I've massaged it into its current form, for you non-her readers, in hopes that it helps someone, or if nothing else I can refer back to it as I clarify my own cranky lit-game-dev ideas.
To me, 'a setting' goes like this:
DnD has a kind of proto-setting, it has dragons like-so, it has elves who look pretty and live in the woods, it has dwarves who look TV-ugly and live in the mountains, it has orcs who look ugly-ugly and live in the wastes, it has humans it treats as default and live wherever. It has vague gestures of settler-colonial race-relations but not enough anything to explore, unless you the reader put it there. DnD doesn't really have much of a genre more specific than "uh, generally sword-and-sorcery fantasy".
Shadowrun has basically the same things, and a specific setting: neoliberal dystopia and collapse of the state, but otherwise 'basically our world'.
But more than that, Shadowrun also--for its many faults--has a commentative-sense genre: in Shadowrun, might makes right (or at least right-now); money rules everything, except maybe loyalty; it treats magic as innately cool and natural but technology as evil and you maybe would better die than get an artificial heart. These story-contours don't care at all about where things happen or what institutions exist.
To take another example, Cowboy Bebop tells a solid noir western story set in space. The fact that it takes place in space ultimately matters very little to the 'western' or 'noir', though. Spike knows he lives in space, and he'd agree that--to someone alive in our world today--he lives in a sci-fi story. He doesn't know that he got cast as a western-revenge-fable protagonist (though he might agree if someone asked). He definitely doesn't know that he has a corner of the story that goes more-western, while Jet lives in a corner of the story that goes more-noir.
If you wanted, you could tell Cowboy Bebop beat for beat, almost unedited, as a straight-faced noir western. Instead of Jet's main ship they have a wagon, the individual bounty-hunters have their own horses, Ed does something weird with telegraphs and adding-machines. Instead of vacuum between planets of our solar system, they weather the desert waste between far-flung towns. It would remain a story about revenge, losing oneself, finding oneself, remaking oneself, and the things we have to do for the people we love, and what happens when we don't.
You could not do this and also remove the noir, or the western, those define the kind-of-story. If you left it in space but took out the noir, entire episodes of moral ambiguity would disappear (like Ganymede Elegy). Likewise taking out the western, the premise of bounty-hunters wouldn't fit and couldn't stay. I would even go further, and say that while I don't mind Cowboy Bebop sitting on the 'sci-fi' shelf so that consumers can find it, I wouldn't class Cowboy Bebop as sci-fi. A masterpiece, but not sci-fi. Because I think that as a genre, the core of sci-fi asks "where are we going, and what will we do when we get there?" Cowboy Bebop does not care to ask this question, it cares about the human condition right now, and what people right now will do. It takes place in space because space is cool.
Second hot take: Kafka's The Castle counts as sci-fi, by the above conception. Extremely, disturbingly prescient sci-fi, precisely predicting things from call-centers to Big Data and the professional managerial class, and warning of the ease with which a competent, level-headed, and well-meaning person can confront The Machine, and The Machine will completely hollow out and dehumanize them, rob them of every competence and agency, until The Machine no longer notices them as a foreign object.
No one would put The Castle on the sci-fi shelf, because it has no shiny labcoat SCIENCE![tm], telephones and typewriters show up as cutting-edge in the setting. But just look at the concept of tracking, monitoring, filing, and refiling, and bureaucratic shuffle and managerial maladaption and "not my department" and "oh you have to fill out a form 204B -> well file a form AV-8 to requisition a 204B -> look do I have to do everything for you, I'm a busy cog you know". Look at that concept as a technology, like Kafka did.
The story explicitly refers to this as innovation, as a deliberate thing that the Count and his bureaucrats did, on purpose, with intent and expected effect. The Castle explores social science, political technology. And Kafka rigorously explores its psychic effects on the subjects, more thoroughly than Gibson waxing poetic about VR headsets and the Matrix. The Castle qualifies as fiction about science, where we're going and what we'll (have to) do when we get there. It takes place in a quaint provincial village that might lie somewhere in Bohemia in the very early 20th century.
So I allege that while setting matters for writing a given story, it doesn't matter a lot for kind-of story. And in my conversation with my friend, I should have sensed the kernel I could have dug out, but instead, I wrote the rest of this essay, particular to post-apocalyptic genre fiction, and germane to Apocalypse World.
Bringing this back to apocalypsii:
In the Australian outback in the late-70s, the gas supply all but disappears, causing societal collapse and civil breakdown.
In the American midwest, an unspecified disaster wipes out communications and supply-lines, causing survivors to turn feral and cannibalistic.
In New York in the late 60s, food shortages and overpopulation cause the government to criminalize almost everything so that they can grind people up into food.
These are settings in the sense that I mean: a place, a time, implicit societal structures and institutions, "where is this, what world is this, what is here?" DnD's setting doesn't have much of a 'where' but it more or less assumes "uh, Earth kinda, sorta"; Shadowrun says "literally Earth but N years after magic becomes real and also DnD races". But the above three post-apoc settings have very different everything-else: if you were making a post-apoc section of a library and wanted to break down into sub-genre, you'd want to put the three works above on different aisles.
Mad Max tells a story where holding on to old power structures is complicated, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and it emphatically matters how we go about doing it: when marauding punks kill your family, you may justifiably go and kill them back; but when a power-mad warlord inflicts his brutal regime, you owe him no allegiance.
The Road tells a story where everything we care about can just blow away in the wind, and at best we can only cling to what we cherish, while we can. Power comes and goes, structures don't last, but cruelty and misery endure eternal and will always win--but we try anyway.
Soylent Green tells a story where societal structures can technically endure, but themselves have no moral compass and can inflict as much cruelty as uncaring nature. You may live in an illusion in which civilization appears to function, but in fact you have no more safety than the wilderness, and indeed you didn't realize it, but you're the cannibals, and perhaps soon the meal.
Those considerations all sit at the genre-type, commentative level, and I class them as wholly unconcerned with setting. Each of these stories would tell just as well in space, or an underground complex, or even Bronze-Age Fertile Crescent if you twist a few narrative arms. The where and when and what doesn't define or determine the kind of story, the genre, even if setting can help or hinder genre goals.
Bringing this back to Baker: he doesn't give a place where things happen; he doesn't give an inciting event that brought the apocalypse; he doesn't even describe what happened during the apocalypse, or how long ago it happened, or give a date for "today". I'll list three AW settings I've run or played in or heard about:
Sunlight vanished altogether, though somehow it hasn't gotten any colder. Darkness and shadow can become animate and even sapient, and can claim people, though it doesn't seem exactly malevolent or 'evil'. Rule of law has mostly fallen apart, but out of fear and prudence people mostly avoid wanton violence, because if you see someone you don't like, you could roll up on them and take their stuff--but just as easily they could kill you, and just as easily as either, the Dark might just take both of you; you're safer keeping the Dark at bay and not hassling someone else, unless you've got good reason.
A few years(?) ago, survivors woke up from total amnesia and some kind of fugue: it seems like this fugue lasted at least some years, there's some decay of modern-to-us structures, but the ruins look fully recognizable and often quite well-preserved. But signs abound, literally painted twenty-feet-high on buildings and structures, that something unfathomable happened. The giant wordless pictograms seem to warn to protect tools and structures, to stay together and not go off alone, indicate places that once had lots of food or other important resources, and most alarmingly they show gigantic hands reaching down from above onto some of the pictogram figures. No one can remember anything from before the wakeup though, so the meaning is lost.
Something like twenty years ago, the world broke in some fundamental way: it always rains or at least fog abounds, long-distance communication inexplicably but insurmountably fails to work, and cityscape has sprawled on its own to incorporate seemingly the entire world. As far as anyone knows, the city spans infinitely in every direction, it has no edge, only more city. The city-cancer seems waterlogged and rotting everywhere, some few places fit for use and occupancy, but if you go down any given street and step inside an empty house or shop, it probably won't suit human habitation. People still habitually carry on the forms and outlines of societal norms, mostly, because what else can they do? You can't burn it all down as long as it keeps raining.
I brought these up because Baker's conception of 'post-apoc' does not cover the whole of "all post-apocalyptic literature"--it couldn't, shouldn't, and if it did it would have little or no use to anyone. Baker's narrower conception, the Principles that AW's rules expect a setting to follow, narrow things down and keep the rules crisp, tight, and tractable.
Each of the AW campaigns above has a totally different setting, aiming in totally different directions for different things--but, they all live inside Baker's Principles for a post-apoc that fits within AW: scarcity, weak but present society and norms, a Before, an After, and no going back, and each has a 'Psychic Maelstrom' that excuses a lot of narrative fiat and deus ex machina and having characters just do weirdness not otherwise specified.
That 'Psychic Maelstrom' comes closest to giving what I'd call "a setting" as in "place, time, institutions", because it sits at the diagetic level. A distinct thing bound within a given story--except it only barely counts as 'diagetic'. Because Baker only gives loose guidelines for what a Psychic Maelstrom should be or do. Baker's own at-his-table Psychic Maelstrom will look nothing like mine, or my girlfriend's, or her erstwhile friend's, because in those three AW settings up there, each of us had totally different ideas for what to do with a Psychic Maelstrom in a post-apocalyptic setting.
But: all three of us used our Psychic Maelstroms for the things Baker says to use them for: unleash weirdness, justify unrealistic but narratively satisfying twists, allow and excuse extra awesomeness, maybe use as a metaphor or allegory for "how it got this way", as well as "where it could go", in literary terms. And . . . Baker doesn't really get closer than this, to giving "place, time, institutions, history and people and events". So in the sense I understand 'setting', a diagetic construct within a given story, AW doesn't have one.
But in the commentative genre sense, AW very definitely gives Baker's apocalypse, in that it gives a recipe for the things that Baker considers essential to the post-apoc genre (or at least, the aisle of the post-apoc library he wants to confine his game to). He doesn't try to tell a Soylent Green apocalypse so much--you'd need to twist some arms and ignore some Principles to tell Soylent Green. Nor does he try to tell Children of Men so much--you'd have to leave a lot out to rein AW in to just Children of Men. He instead aims* for something closer to Mad Max, but heavy on Weird West, and a lot less somber and desolate, so more like Fury Road. And he says, "here's how:".
(*) But, of course, he doesn't actually tell these stories. Instead he has the project of telling the reader how to tell this kind-of story. So, while he gives some sample poetic images of skylines on fire and the world torn asunder, he doesn't care to talk about the virus, or the metorite, or the gas-shortage or the food-shortage. He doesn't care about the where or when or what, and even with the Psychic Maelstrom, the one concrete diagetic thing he gives--it sits there as a meta-thing, explicitly unstated whether it resulted from The Apocalypse or its inciting event, or caused it as the inciting event, or something else.
All of which boils down to: commentative, about-stories, genre-level stuff owns bones, and I weigh it heavier than diagetic, in-stories, setting-level stuff. Baker gives excellent tools, within his purple polemic prose, for that first stuff and gives little or nothing for the second.
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vaguely-concerned · 4 years
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Some more mass effect andromeda thinky thoughts as I run around heleus getting some achievements! 
- the murderous angaran ai is genuinely so fucking funny. “How are you feeling here on Aya?” “I hope you die” “Is there anything we could do to make you more comfortable?” “BURY THIS PLANET UNDER FIRE AND ASH” “o.oookay. Goodbye then.” “I HATE you.”
- I hope I never become irresistibly moved to write mass effect andromeda fic b/c there really is no other description for a good 70% of the expressions reyes makes than :> and how could one capture that in words
- as mentioned I’ve been doing a bit of achievement hunting and in the process I’ve been switching up a lot of gameplay stuff from how I handled it the first few times around and let me tell you it’s baller as fuuuuuuuuuck -- it just looks so awesome and is so satisfying between the maneuverability of the jetpack and biotic charge and the effects. special shoutout to what happens if you biotic charge a frozen victim enemy and the biotic pull/push combination. (throwing people around like ragdolls is actually so much fun I’ve kept doing it even after I unlocked the achievement lol)
- lol lol when you get meridian online there’s the montage of every planet coming back to life, right? well the one on kadara is from inside kralla’s song, with umi looking out at everything that’s happening. and all I can imagine is her jaded-ass voice going ‘what the fUCK did that asshole kid do now I only just cleaned up after the bar brawl he started with his krogan grandpa and now he’s rearranging the entire fucking planet right from under us goddess I need a drink’ 
- the implication that reyes ‘cards so close to my chest you won’t even know I’m playing’ vidal just does not shut up about how amazing ryder is to anyone who’ll listen gives me so much life. when you try to be mysterious and laidback but the human pathfinder is so fucking cute tho Y____Y (also go watch his scenes if you’re being standoffish with him the entire time -- he clearly wants ryder to like him so much right from the beginning, he’s doing so much work to no avail and I feel sort of bad for how funny I find it haha. interesting that it really does seem to be an emotional thing as well as y’know the practical/tactical benefits of having the pathfinder on his side. methinks the charlatan might be a bit lonely there behind all his masks lol) 
I think this is why I’m willing to give him some benefit of the doubt too, despite all the cloak and dagger stuff -- he’s so immediately drawn to ryder, who you can never make a bad person, really. something in him must respond to that, if potentially only in the ‘attracted to traits I do not possess myself’ way hahaha
- I love sam. so so much. some of the open world implementation is still grating (yes sam. yes I know I can mine this area for resources through my mining interface. we’ve been doing this for a hundred hours sam. you’ve been right here with me the entire time sam. please sam), but he’s SUCH a good and I’d argue underutilized concept (emotionally at least) and the best boy. the fact that he can get SARCASTIC on you fsdhfjsadh he’s growing and learning! he’s doing so from inside your brain which is kind of unsettling but also SO COOL! there’s something about that level of intimacy, of always knowing there will be someone there with you in your head that is super interesting and deserves to be examined more fully -- both how it could be comforting and how it’s  r e a l l y  not how people or ai are generally designed to work lol. 
he also gives us a unique link with our dad and I wonder if the writers would have explored that in more depth if there’d been more development time -- it practically SCREAMS out an invitation to get to play/see things from alec’s POV in short bursts, like the memories you unlock except you could go through playing it as him since sam is common to both of us. (see my ‘our dad comes back through either kett or remnant nonsense in the sequel and we need to find some way to connect with him’ idea. it would be. amazing. listen alec already looked at the ethical guidelines involved in creating ai and went ‘huh interesting ideas but not for me thanks!’, don’t tell me he wouldn’t have left some loophole in so this could happen)  
- reyes literally says ‘the cavalry’s here’ when we get to meridian and I for one love him more than words can express (he also asks us if we’re okay in sort of a sweet/worried way right before we get to the control room. aw buddy) 
- like we don’t think of them like that because we’re in control of them and see all the stumbles and awkwardness and how young they are all the time, but damn the ryder twins must look like something else to everyone in andromeda haha. they literally stride around like demigods restoring entire planets. on voeld spring non-metaphorically follows in their footsteps. shit dude if we’re talking realpolitik here the angara must feel  p r e t t y nervous about this -- there’s no one saying they can’t turn off the vaults as easily as they turned them on. I hope we get them somehow teaching the angara how to do it too, on a smaller scale at least, as a show of good faith or something in a sequel, because that power imbalance is disconcerting  
- I’m glad sam and I have such similar priorities whenever we’re on kadara. ‘maybe mr vidal would know. perhaps we should ask mr vidal about this. mr vidal said something relating to this pathfinder maybe we should speak to him’ . yeah sam i know the feeling, same (it does undeniably read as sam having a bit of a crush which is. hilarious?) 
- the fact that alec ryder thought ellen responded to his bad boy act in any way when what really charmed her was that he was a great big nerd <3 it’s kind of nice to see a fictional marriage that seems to have just been. nice and stable and chill? just two intellectual equals who like and respect each other very much and not a lot of drama until alec went full alec and started developing rogue ai instead of watching his wife die lol. again I would love for the sequel to involve ellen finally waking up and being like ‘death? trying to claim MY husband? I do not think so, I can die he can’t he’s not leaving me behind’ and helping out and you realize that the reason they were soulmates was that under the relatively rational and unemotional surface they’re both, at heart, batshit crazy mad scientists who are insanely devoted to each other. imagine it tho! the people of andromeda realize alec ryder is back from the dead somehow and doing some Shit out there, they put a ton of resources into curing ellen’s disease because their best shot is something to do with the implants she made, hey presto we’ve got all ryders on the board and in play. 
- just want to make it clear that I’m still sad about avitus rix and hope he’s having a good day
- do you think ryder ever asks sam to read something to him ‘aloud’ in his head if he’s anxious and can’t sleep. or just to talk at him about something boring until he nods off. again the possibilities inherent in the concept!!! he has someone who’s closer to him than any other person could be, what’s that like? 
- *me sticking to my sidewinder pistol the whole playthrough even though it’s laughably inefficient* I just wanna feel like a cowboy bioware please work with me here
- the male ryder voice actor has such amazing comedic timing, there’s a lot of reaction stuff out in the field he absolutely nails. I enjoy the female voice too and I like how much emotion she manages to convey towards the end of the game especially, but there’s a casual comedy in male ryder’s voice that can’t be beat. (well, it’s not hawke levels, but then nothing ever is, that’s too much to ask)
- I love vorn and kesh so much. nerd krogans unite & make out
- I still want to sit peebee down and have a long serious talk with her about emotional abuse, maybe give her a hug :( fuck kalinda 
- this game does not get enough credit for how stunningly beautiful it is, it all got buried under criticism about the animations and it’s a fucking shame. the last few vaults you go through are just mindboggling in scale and visual uh striking-ness. it makes me so sad to think there won’t be any more of it D: 
- I really like this mainly casual + logical dialogue options ryder I’ve found; it makes him sound like a younger and more irreverent version of his father, but also softer and less closed off and much more willing to show affection for his family especially. 
- i wonder if different people’s individual SAMs will take on a certain tone/unique pattern when they’ve coexisted long enough. have I mentioned. how much I want a sequel to this game 
- one last reyes note because don’t look at me okay -- I wonder how much we’re meant to read into ‘being honorable never got me anywhere’. on the one hand I’m fully prepared to believe he’s never even tried doing anything the honorable way in his entire life lol but on the other there’s also some interesting potential in the interplay of that sentence and ‘to be someone’. (there seems to be a deep fear in him both of powerlessness and of being truly seen/recognized -- he equates secrecy with safety pretty explicitly -- which seems... telling? of what I don’t know but telling all the same hahaha) like he might be saying he’s tried doing things the ‘right’ way and it didn’t work and the price was too high, so he just went for this instead with the ends low-key justifying the means. hmmm. :Ia (this is what happens when I get Attached to a character with like an hour of screentime my friends, and I’m already primed to give my entire heart away at the sound of nicholas boulton’s voice)
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ks-caster · 4 years
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It’s Like Watching Fanfiction – An (Un)Necessarily Long Critique of The 100 Seasons 6 and 7
Ah, the familiar cry of the content-starved fan, particularly as our favorite shows descend into the depths of mischaracterization, unexpected ships, hiatus, abrupt cancellation and shock-value death endings. I’ve said it myself about so many of my shows, while wanting to spend some time watching the characters but not wanting to re-hash episodes I’ve nearly memorized: “I wish I could just watch fanfiction!”
But the further into seasons 6 and 7 I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to realize that my dream of having new and exciting possibilities for the characters come miraculously to a screen near me wouldn’t be the pleasant experience I’d imagined.
Now, depending on the type of ending you like – hopeful but with a lot of lose ends left to your imagination, or bittersweet but more definite, you could consider either seasons 1-4 or 1-5 their own complete stories.
Both seasons 4 and 5 ended in a way that suggested an unknown but likely positive future. They could have been considered conclusions for the main characters’ developmental arcs, and while season 5 went a little off the rails in terms of offscreen character development and sudden new characters, they both stayed fairly close to the original concept: survivors living in the ruins of the apocalypse. All four (or five) seasons emphasized the importance of the found family dynamic (although those dynamics shifted radically in season 5 due to the time-skip, they remained an important source of character motivation).
But seasons 6 and 7? Those feel like I’m watching fanfiction. And I don’t love it.
A story told on a whole new planet with a new environment, culture and cast of original characters was always going to feel like an AU – it sort of is, no matter how you swing it. If that was all that had changed, then I think the story would still feel cohesive.
If it weren’t for the timey whimey bullshit.
Now, fun fact: when reading fanfiction, I love time travel stories. I haven’t posted any myself but I’ve sought out and read them voraciously, for every fandom I’m in. I love the idea of characters meeting themselves or their friends at radically different ages, plot points and levels of experience and the way that changes things for both groups. (Yes, I’m also a Whovian if that wasn’t blatantly obvious). I also love a good amnesia arc. And I DID think that the Josephine/Clarke body possession thing was pretty cool.
So why did season 6 and most* of season 7 fall as flat for me as they did?
The simple fact is that some things – and characters’ emotional dynamics are one of those things – are so much easier to get across in writing than on screen. A good actor can make us feel the character’s emotions, but unless the film goes full-on Clarke’s mind space, we can’t really know what they’re thinking in individual moments. For the most part film as a genre has ways around this, but if it’s mishandled, then the emotional beats come off all wrong. (See for reference Tony Stark’s funeral where half the actors didn’t know what was going on due to Disney’s spoiler fears.)
If you’re going to include time skips in which things have happened and character dynamics have changed, you cannot handle it wrong.
Which brings us back to seasons 6 and (so far) 7 of The 100. So far to date we’ve had all of this occur either offscreen or asynchronously enough to be confusing to an audience watching the episodes in real time:
Jordan’s entire life prior to meeting Napkru in the waking world
Octavia’s character development while living on Skyring with the Diyozas
Hope’s first 22 years of life, on Skyring and (I presume) Bardo
Echo, Hope and Gabriel living on Skyring for 5 years with Orlando
Going back a little further, we also have the season 5 timeskip, which brought us Spacekru as found family, Clarke adopting tiny!heda, and Octavia building Wonkru. Now season 5 took care to show us Wonkru flashbacks and dedicate time to show Spacekru and the Griffin family loving on each other, making inside jokes etc. But it was still incredibly jarring for the audience in a lot of ways, because at the end of the day, we’ve spent four years with the character dynamics and development doing one thing, and no amount of telling us that they’ve had 6 years to do another thing while our time with them only lasted about one year in comparison is ever going to undo the importance of “show don’t tell.”
Let’s take Bellarkers’ beef with Becho for example. (Disclaimer: Since I don’t really have a strong opinion either way on the popular Bellamy ships, I hope that I’m representing what I’ve read from other people accurately.)
I understand cognitively that Bellamy and Clarke knew each other for one year (during which they were in a lot of intense situations that really didn’t leave them the emotional space to figure out how they felt about each other outside of “I don’t want to lose this person”) and Bellamy and Echo knew each other for seven years (six of which they had plenty of low-stress time to get to know each other, grow and mature side-by-side, etc.).
But that doesn’t compute on an emotional level when I as a watcher went straight from watching Bellamy and Raven tearfully eulogizing Clarke on the ring, to him turning up with a coffee mug and a plucky attitude to rescue her the second he finds out she’s alive and in trouble. I don’t think that could compute emotionally for me without having spent the last few years watching the dynamics shift and Becho happen. And that was with the writers giving me as a watcher an episode at the end of season 4 where Bellamy stops Echo from killing herself and connects with her on an emotional level, and then one at the beginning of season 5 where we got to see the spacekru dynamics, including them being together.
So we’re watching this show, many of us for the found family character relationships (god knows it’s not for all the positive happy feeling I get from watching *checks notes* ah, yes, characters having to constantly choose who to kill off in a string of increasingly huge and horrible genocides. *Side-eyes my life choices for getting into this fandom in the first place.*) Okay, we’re watching this show for the characters, and between seasons 4 and 5, many of those dynamics radically shift offscreen. Becho is the easiest and probably most talked-about example (well, and the Blake siblings, but the radical change shown in Octavia’s character between 4 and 5 makes that at least a little easier to choke down) but there are plenty of others, take your pick.
Although it makes perfect sense for a lot to change between separated groups of people in a half dozen years, it makes a lot less sense to an audience watching week to week, particularly when the show’s limited amount of screen time was too focused on plot to really delve into those changes and let us see and understand them. That was what made me think that the show was headed into jump the shark territory in season 5, but I really wanted to know what happened to my faves (Octavia, Raven and Memori, to be specific) so I kept watching.
Our fandom’s excellent writers spent the hiatus crafting mid-time-skip vignettes and missing character moments, and I spent the hiatus reading them. And I remember thinking that it would have been great if even a quarter of this content could have been put into the show to ease the audience into the dynamic shifts – but of course they’d never have the screen time to do all of that.
Especially, coming back to the main point, since written fiction allows the audience to see inside the characters’ heads, while television (usually) does not. It’s much easier to write a scene in which, say, two characters who have known each other for 7 years show that they’ve gotten into a relationship some time before the scene, and convince the audience that their relationship is good and healthy and genuine, than it would be to produce one for TV.  
And then we come to seasons 6 and 7 – the 2-part AU longfic, stuffed full of OCs, loosely connected to the “science” of the original show, and heavily reliant on memory-bending time travel as a plot device.
As season 6 airs, the audience hasn’t really had a chance to process all the radical changes from season 5, and already we have a Marper child running around furthering the plot, and Octavia walks into the Green Flash from Pirates of the Caribbean and walks back out with a personality transplant.
Meanwhile, Clarke gets an actual personality transplant, and it takes even the people closest to her a concerningly long time to notice. Now, if I’d read that in a fic, the writer might’ve taken care to remind me as a reader – particularly after a long hiatus between seasons – that with the exception of Madi none of Clarke’s friends have seen her for more than a couple of weeks in 6 years, so them not noticing for a while that she’s behaving strangely isn’t really all that strange. But on TV, I don’t get to see Gaia’s thoughts when Clarke lets Madi go to school despite the danger – Tati Gabrielle’s facial expressions can only do so much to make up the difference. Because the time spent apart was not (and really could not be, based on the structure of the show) properly acknowledged on screen, scenes like that one leave audiences floundering and pointing out bad writing.
Having watched 7x02 The Garden, I think if I went back and watched season 6 after Octavia returns from the Anomaly, her conduct – especially around Bellamy – would make a lot more sense. (That was the plan for this weekend actually – but my damn Wi-Fi conked out…) However at the time it just seemed weird and unnatural. Had it been the only example of off-screen or asynchronous character development, it would have been a lot easier to swallow. However, season 5 happened, meaning both that I was still getting used to all of the new dynamics and that I had a higher standard for Octavia’s off-screen development, because we got enough bunker flashbacks that I felt like I at least understood Blodreina.
What would have made the whole thing make a lot more sense a year ago would have been if the hair and makeup department had made an effort to make her look older, so that we could see time had passed for her. Now, Marie is 33 in real life, and so was the Octavia who figured out that up is down and got Davy Jones Locker to send her back ran out of the Anomaly, so yes, that is what an actual 33-year-old looks like, and the media has distorted my perception of age. But from an audience perspective, I saw an actress playing a 23-year-old go in, and the same actress playing the same 23-year-old come out.
Gabriel pointed out that her hair was longer, but that only accounted for a few months of time. Since she went in looking dirty, wounded and exhausted, and came out clean, healthy and energetic, she could have passed for younger before I would have thought she was older. (In fact, I want to say there was a theory circulating at that time that the Octavia who came out of the Anomaly was actually a younger version of herself, and she was missing memories because she’d never formed them. I don’t remember whose theory this was though. If you know or if it’s your content I’m referencing please feel free to let me know and I’ll edit!)
In addition, the shifting loyalties in Wonkru near the end of season 5 complicated the character situation – in season 6, the majority of Wonkru peeps (lookin’ at you, Miller and Indra) switched over to the commander’s side. While Indra didn’t really have enough screen time to express an opinion about Octavia, Miller was very clear in season 6 that she was anathema now – which although that was probably a semi-reasonable step for his character, it just felt like someone took his Bellamy-and-or-Clarke-following season 1-4 character and popped it into his season 6 costume without taking the time to address the road he took to get there.
Post-lockerAnomaly Octavia had to face and slay her demons. (Grumbles and links the interested reader to this POST from @osleyakomwonkru regarding that horseshit.) Afterwards, she shows a major shift in personality, particularly towards her brother. Because we as the audience wouldn’t see her time on skyring for about year in real time (or learn that she was ten years older and therefore a lot more mature, the chemical changes of which would account for at least some of the difference even if she couldn’t remember anything else) we had no choice but to associate her change with the slaying of Blodreina, which seemed like a ham-fisted way of forcing her a quick and slick redemption arc and prepping The Blake Siblings to go back to being ride-or-die for each other in season 7.
Raven’s season 6 personality was also radically different from her 1-5 development – while I understand her having a remaining beef with Clarke and being emotional due to Shaw’s death (RIP!) the fact that the writing in season 6 reduced her to the nagging shrew trope until they needed her to do a coding deus ex machina just added to the feeling that I was watching someone take the characters around, change them to their own preferences (even if that preference was to push some into the background and make them tools for the B-plot) and toss them into an AU story. Which I could have enjoyed more if I had been reading it and therefore seeing inside the characters’ heads – and if I hadn’t paid for the privilege with ad revenue instead of voluntary clicks of the kudos/like/reblog/comment buttons.
Another issue with time skip relationship is exposition for the lesser known characters’ backstories. Both seasons 6 and 7 have so far had dramatic character mother death reveals that were conveniently not told to their most important people specifically because the appropriate time to tell those stories would have been during the offscreen time skips. I will (grudgingly) accept Echo, an adult making a conscious (and familiar) decision to change up her personality to fit into and survive within her environment, choosing not to tell a traumatic story that reminds her of her past. (She’s my next meta – stay tuned!)
I will not in a million years, however, believe that the Clarke Griffin who I watched for four seasons be set up as the blatantly obvious “compassionate mom-friend protagonist” adopted a traumatized 6-year-old, moved into said child’s village, burned or buried the bodies of everyone who lived there, and never ever brought up the child’s dead birth parents.
No way. The ONLY reason that could have possibly been scripted in that way was because that conversation needed to be there for plot reasons and the appropriate time for it to have been had was during the 6 years they spent off screen. Similarly, while (again) I’ll buy that Echo chose not to talk about her mom’s death with Bellamy before he decided to be a dick about it, I fully believe that the timing of that conversation was only there because if it had occurred on the ring where it would have been more appropriate, the audience would have missed it.
Now, picture this: if the scene with Madi had been in a written fanfic, Clarke could have said “you didn’t lose me,” Madi could have said “I didn’t mean you,” and Clarke could have remembered Madi telling her the story of her birth mom dying in her arms. Then Clarke could have mentally made the decision that she didn’t want Madi to relive that in an attempt to empathize with her, and she makes an effort to convince her that she’s fine. In just 2 or 3 paragraphs a written story could have effectively conveyed both the exposition and the emotional beats of the scene, concluding with Clarke making a (maybe misguided but still sweet) attempt to be a good mom by not dredging that up for Madi (or something – I’m not defending the crappy and inconsistent writing of Clarke’s parenting we’ve on screen so far).
Moving right along, we had a lovely flashback montage of Hope and Dev, which was sufficient to make me (and several of the tumblrs I follow) care about Dev at least enough to be saddened by his death. However, what we didn’t get was a damn crumb of flashback showing Orlando and Anomalykru developing any kind of familial relationship between him agreeing to train them, and whatever dynamic we were supposed to pick up on at the end of that episode. I got a little protective big sister vibe from Echo and Hope but that’s it. They apparently expended their allotment of emotion-inducing flashbacks on the dead guy, and failed entirely to make me give a shit about (as it turned out) the next dead guy.
Now we’re going into an episode with Octavia on (presumably) Bardo in the promo, so I’m guessing we get to see her skyring-self link up with her return-to-Gabriel-with-clean-hair self. As least with Octavia’s jumping storyline it seems like the writers have consistently made some kind of effort to fill in the blanks.
But we’re also looking at the rest of the season where Echo, Gabriel, Hope, oh hi Jordan I forgot about you again, Diyoza, Octavia, and probably Bellamy and Hoth!Kru (AKA team let’s follow Raven onto a strange planet without putting on suits or having an exit strategy, yay!) have all experienced asynchronous development over periods of multiple years. Given the show’s track record from seasons 5 and 6, I strongly suspect that this won’t be handled any better, meaning that the final season of this show is going to try not only to resolve all the plot points, but to toss in a bunch MORE offscreen character development and hope we catch on.
Beyond character development jumps, we also have Raven and Murphy losing their seasons 1-5 development in season 6 only to have to re-learn and re-change back to who they already were in seasons 4 and 5. Murphy learned to value his spacekru family and stop putting himself first 100% of the time, and yet his arc in season 6 happened. Raven has always been involved in the big life-or-death decisions, and had her being-the-bad-guy moment in season 4 with the rationing, but as we saw in 7x03 the writers really wanted to… redo all of that for her? The girl blew up a bridge full of guys and flash-fried a 300-person army when she was 18; blood on her hands may not be fun but what’s with seasons 6 and 7 acting like it’s something new?
While I’m aware that Jason said his seasons are individual movies (don’t admit that you’re bad at continuity buddy ‘cause that’s what it sounds like) seasons 1-5 and 6&7 are clearly telling separate stories (or 1-4, 5, 6-7 if you prefer). The trouble with 6&7 is that unlike seasons 1-4 (and sort-of 5) we no longer know the characters. Every time someone sits still too long, character-development wise, plot comes along and hits the reset button, tosses them into a wormhole for a couple of years and they come back with the same face but no continuity. It was difficult enough to deal with in season 5 – between 6 and 7 I just can’t keep up. (Even writing this meta, I have to keep going back because I remembered another character who fell into this trap.)
Now if a fanfic writer had done the exact same thing – same plot, same time skips, same organization – it would have played out completely different to the readers. We could have gotten to see inside the character’s minds when they arrived back on screen, seeing things with new, older eyes. We could have had minimally invasive flashbacks to show important exposition (like the disaster that was the conversation about Madi’s mom) and verbal descriptions to point out differences like Octavia’s ten-years-older body. Additionally, the plots of seasons 6 and 7 are so different yet full of overdone callbacks to the earlier seasons – if a fan was writing their own AU story but still wanted some of the trappings of the original plot I’d get it, but on a TV show written by the same people it just feels like they ran out of ideas.
Watching seasons 6 and 7 is exactly like watching fanfiction would be – but without the written and fan-made advantages of fanfiction, they fall flat.
*I do like season 7 better than season 6 because the content of the individual episodes containing Murphy/Emori/Raven and Octavia/Diyoza/bbyHope was still enjoyable content, so 2 out of 4 I have liked so far, despite this very very long rant I’ve just written explaining why as a whole I rather hate the season overall.
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higuchimon · 4 years
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[fanfic] Healing Touch
Everyone knew that if you had a soulmate, there was a way to tell. The ways differed all over the world. Some people had timers. Other people had marks. Sometimes soulmates had different methods. Entire movies had been made about people whose marks didn’t align – or so they thought – only to find their soulmate regardless.
Daisuke didn’t have a timer. He didn’t have a mark of any kind on him. So far as he could tell, he either didn’t have a soulmate or his method was one of the far less identifiable ones.
He’d tried for years to tell if Hikari shared his dreams. She never had. Two days after they first started to go to the Digital World, she and Miyako started blushing at one another. On their right hands there displayed Crest marks – Love and Purity on Hikari and Light on Miyako. Whenever the two of them were close enough, the marks glowed.
Oh, joy, Daisuke grumbled, while trying to look as if he were happy for them. He really was, all things considered. But when so many of his friends had managed to find their soulmate – even Jun had, and he was getting pretty tired of hearing about all the fun dreams she and Momoe had together – and he hadn’t yet, it was more than a little irritating.
Taichi’s hand rested on his shoulder and he looked up to his senior. “You’re a little jealous, aren’t you?”
Daisuke ducked his head. “No.” He didn’t think he was. He wasn’t jealous of Miyako, not like that. He’d always sort of hoped something would happen that would prove he and Hikari were soulmates. But now that she was clearly bonded to Miyako, he wasn’t upset.
Taichi chuckled. “Good thing you’re not Yamato. You wouldn’t be able to lie to me then.”
Daisuke blinked a little at that. “Huh?”
“We’re Truth-tellers,” Taichi told him, settling down in one of the computer room chairs. The two of them were the only ones left right now. Hikari and Miyako had gone off to have tea together, while Takeru instructed Iori in the fine arts of being a Chosen. Koushiro had gone off somewhere as well, leaving only the two of them.
“Truth-tellers?” He’d heard about that – those who were Truth-tellers couldn’t lie to their soulmates, no matter how hard they tried.
Taichi nodded, leaning back in his chair. “Real pain, too, especially when we were in the Digital World.” He grinned a wicked little grin. “More for him than me, though. He never wanted to talk about anything back then. Best he could do was just tell me he didn’t want to talk and keep his mouth shut. But that still meant I knew something was up with him.”
Daisuke drummed his fingers on the table. “You guys – you and Hikari-chan – you don’t have the same method?”
“Nope. Our parents aren’t even soulmates. They just fell in love with each other.” Taichi shrugged. “You might have to deal with that. Sometimes you never meet them – or you wish that you hadn’t.” His lips thinned a bit. “I have to feel for Takeru.”
Daisuke’s head jerked up. “You do?” He wasn’t sure if he wanted to “feel” for him or not.
Taichi closed his eyes. “I’d rather not say. It’s really more his story. But Takeru’s a KillLove.”
That said more than anything else could have – that the only person who could kill him would be his soulmate. Daisuke shuddered at that. “I don’t want to know.”
“Neither did he.” Taichi shook his head. “Maybe he’ll tell you one day. Anyway, don’t fret about it. Maybe you just haven’t met your person yet. And there aware so many ways. Have you checked to see if you’re a Skin Writer?”
Daisuke made a face. “When I was five. Nothing happened. I’ve checked every way that I could think of and nothing worked.”
Taichi heaved himself up to his feet. “It’ll work out. Probably when you least expect it.”
Daisuke nodded. What he thought was that he didn’t know how many times he’d been told something like that. He was more than tired of waiting.
At least he had that soccer game against Tamachi to think about instead. Now that was something he didn’t have to worry about. Anticipate gleefully going up against Ichijouji Ken? Oh, yes.
There’s Name-Sayers, too, Daisuke thought on his way home. Those were the ones where one didn’t know one’s soulmate until they said their name. He’d not heard so many people say his name – and Ichijouji Ken was one of those. He tried not to think about that too much, though. He needed to be ready to play, not fret about his soulmate, or lack thereof.
Ken didn’t want to leave the Digital World. He always had so much work to do, especially now that these so-called “Chosen” were there to interfere. In the months before they’d shown up, he’d been able to get a great deal of work done, taking over individual areas and crushing all resistance. Once he deigned the towers and could spread his influence without being there himself, then it had gotten even better.
But now that they’d started to take down his spires wherever they could, he had to come along behind them, find the places they weren’t guarding, and do it all over again. Not what he wanted, not at all.
But he still lived part time in the human world and that meant he had to do human things, such as eat and sleep and take part in certain social events, such as soccer games.
He’d researched his opponents, of course. He always did that, be it in the human or Digital Worlds. So he knew all about Motomiya Daisuke, his opposing captain. The other was good at what he did – for what he was. A pitiful human being who couldn’t compare to Ken in strength, speed, reflexes, co-ordination, tactical prowess, or anything else.
What irritated him more than anything was that Motomiya now challenged him on two fronts, without even realizing it. The same fool he’d fought in the Digital World for weeks now. He’d even been close to him, having the brat unconscious at his feet.
I should have kept him then. The only reason he hadn’t was that he knew the other Chosen would be the types to come hunting for their captive ‘leader’ until they found him. That would interfere even more with his plans.
At any rate, the idea of trouncing Motomiya on the soccer field was more than a little pleasing to him. There wasn’t any way that Motomiya would be able to beat him. All he would have to do would be show up and victory would be his.
So he made his preparations. He set several divisions of his army to move into certain areas of the Digital World during the soccer game, when presumably the Chosen would be too distracted to go and defeat them. The Digimon could at least obey simple orders like that.
Ken gave virtually no thought at all to the concepts of soulmates. He remained aware, of course, of all the varied ways one could detect a soulmate, and once he’d determined that he possessed none of those traits – no marks, no counter, no names written on his body, when he wrote on himself it did not appear on anyone else’s, he seldom dreamed, let alone shared it with another being – then he dismissed the thought completely. There were, of course, ways that he would not be able to test until such a thing happened. But he’d heard enough people saying his name at him that he knew none of them were such an impossible person, and he refused to believe anyone would even want to heal him – let alone that he’d ever be careless enough to be injured in the first place.
He had noticed such signs on his enemies, of course. He’d seen the way that Yagami and Ishida always spoke absolute truth to one another. Recently he’d even seen the marks on the two girls. He’d inspected Motomiya during that time he had him unconscious, assuaging his curiosity about the other. Not a mark on the boy, though. If he had a soulmate, the sign wasn’t on him.
Too bad. If it had been the blond, he might well have kept Motomiya anyway, just to have the pleasure of keeping something that one of his enemies would want back and making sure that he never escaped.
But for himself, it meant nothing. He would never have a soulmate. He could never have one. That would require a certain level of caring about another, and Ken did not doubt that the only person he cared about was himself. Who else mattered?
So he prepared himself for the soccer game, setting his plans in motion and departing somewhat later than he’d had planned. Taking part in human world activities meant that he also had to do other things he disliked, such as photo shoots and autograph sessions.
By the time he got to the soccer field, matters had proceeded as he expected. The opposing team had a bit of a lead. Nothing that he couldn’t deal with, of course.
His eyes narrowed when he spied the little creatures with his enemies. What were Digimon doing here? They should all be in the Digital World.
Something to deal with later. For now, he came down towards his team, not surprised in the slightest to find that Motomiya came over to talk.
In fairness, Ken worried that there might be that odd moment of finding one's soulmate when Motomiya spoke his name. While the other had called out “Kaiser” before – and it sounded quite sweet when he said it – he’d never spoken the name of Ichijouji Ken to him. He’d worried that such might change now. But there was nothing at all. Nothing to worry about.
He found something to worry about after the game – after Motomiya made such a ridiculous play to stop him, tearing a wound in his leg. Not very bad; some iodine and a bandage would take care of it.
But afterwards, Motomiya came back over, staring at the blood on his pants leg. “Sorry about that,” Motomiya said, rubbing the back of his head. “Do you mind if I check it out?”
“Go ahead. It’s nothing, really,” Ken said, keeping his flawless smile plastered on. He settled down, stretched his leg out, and pulled the pants leg up. Motomiya bent over it, then reached out and touched a finger to the slightly puffy flesh.
At the touch, warmth spread all over Ken from that point. His eyes widened in surprise as the puffiness faded away and the tear in his flesh healed up as if it had never been there to begin with. He swallowed, staring at Motomiya, who stared back at him, his own eyes as wide and shocked.
“Did you -” Ken shook his head. He couldn’t deny it. The wound had been there. He could remember the pain, but he couldn’t feel the pain now. It had been healed.
Touch-Heal. A very rare way to find a soulmate, but a known one. He considered for a few seconds, then looked at a scrape he’d seen on Motomiya’s own face.
“May I?”
He didn’t think that Motomiya would deny it. He would want to know as much as Ken himself did. True to his expectations, Motomiya nodded. Ken rested his fingers against the scrape, a wash of warmth going through him as he did, and the scrape healed up under his touch.
Daisuke stared at him, shock fading away to be replaced by awe and wonder. He grinned wider and wider. “You’re my soulmate. I’m your soulmate!” His eyes all but glowed in a deep wonder that Ken hadn’t ever seen anyone associate with him before. Even when his parents praised his high grades or people admired his accomplishments, it wasn’t like this at all.
“You’re going to have to meet my parents! They’re not going to believe this! Can I meet yours? We need to go out sometimes. Oh, I need to introduce you to my friends!” Motomiya threw a glance over his shoulder, then back to Ken.
Ken kept that smile on his lips. “We’ll have to do that,” he agreed quietly. “Unfortunately, not now. I have – things I need to do.” He gestured to the coach, who came over with a paper and pen at his instruction, and wrote down his home number. He’d never given this to anyone. “Here. I’ll call you later.”
Motomiya nodded eagerly, writing his own down on a scrap and handing it over. “I can’t wait!”
Ken smiled his very sweetest smile. “Neither can I.” He really couldn't. He wasn’t a Truth-Teller, but the words were honest regardless. He hadn’t yet made plans, but he would, very soon indeed.
Daisuke didn’t quite check to see if he were walking on air, but he wouldn’t have been surprised in the slightest. He’d found his soulmate! He was a Touch-Heal!
And his soulmate was Ichijouji Ken! He squealed inside just at the thought of it. He’d really done it! It happened!
“Mom and Dad are gonna love this!” He laughed, hands wrapped behind his head. “Jun’s gonna go ballistic!” She’d been bragging for over a year about all the dreams she and Momoe shared. Now he’d have something to brag about too.
Taichi patted him on the shoulder. “Well, this wasn’t what I had in mind but I told you not to worry about it.”
Daisuke grinned even more. “I wasn’t worrying.” At least he hadn’t worried all that much. He almost wished the Digimon Kaiser would appear before him now. He thought he’d be able to take him down without breaking a sweat.
He glanced over his shoulder and spied a figure a distance away. Just looking at that figure made his entire body tingle in pleasure, especially on the side of his face where Ken had touched him. He waved one hand, and smiled to see the other wave back.
Today was the best day that he’d had in his entire life.
“You’re kidding!” Jun stared at him. “Your soulmate is who?”
Daisuke grinned proudly. “You heard me. He’s Ichijouji Ken. We’re Touch-Heals.” He brought up one hand to his cheek. “You should have been there!”
“I’m not going to believe it until I see it,” Jun said, snorting a little, but a grin on her lips. “When is he coming over?”
“Don’t know yet. He’s busy a lot.” Daisuke had known that before the soccer game. He couldn’t stop himself from buzzing mentally in joy, however. He wanted so much to hear Ken’s voice again. He had to admit there’d been a hint of familiarity about it, as if he’d heard him somewhere else before. But he couldn’t place where.
He stared at the phone, wishing he could take it to his room. “He said he’d call later, though.”
“Don’t talk all night,” his mom said with a fond smile. “We might need to use it later.”
“I know, I know,” Daisuke said, waving one hand as he went to settle down next to it. Technically he knew he had homework. It didn’t seem to matter right now.
Especially as the phone rang and he grabbed for it at once. “Hello?”
“Hello, Motomiya.”
Daisuke froze at once. He’d heard that voice before. Only a handful of times, but enough to recognize it. “How ” How had the Kaiser gotten his number? Why did he have it? He paled.
Before he could ask anything else, the Kaiser kept talking. “If you want your questions answered, then come to the Digital World. I’m setting a gate onto your computer. Don’t tell anyone. This is going to be between me and you. Come as soon as possible. You may bring your Digimon.”
Even more words choked in Daisuke’s throat, held back by the simple fact of his parents and sister being there. He swallowed.
“I’ll see you there,” was all he said. He heard a confirming noise from the Kaiser, then a click and a dial tone. He stared at the phone, as empty inside as he’d been full of joy only moments earlier.
Jun leaned closer. “Daisuke? You okay? Everything all right?”
Daisuke nodded slowly. He got to his feet. “It’s nothing. I need to get some rest.” He headed to his room. He’d heard that voice before. How could the Kaiser have his number?
He wanted to tell himself that somehow the Kaiser had gotten it from Ken. But the fact that he’d heard that voice, far too often, rang over and over in his mind. But he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. Not now. Not when the truth would be there so soon.
He locked himself in his room. He could hear his parents and Jun talking about what happened, clearly as confused as he was. Or he bet they thought. No one could be as confused as he was right now.
“Daisuke?” Chibimon stared at him as he came over to his computer. He didn’t use it a lot, but it was there. Now he turned it on, wondering vaguely how the Kaiser would put a gate on it. He’d never heard about that being possible.
But when it loaded up, the gate was there. Chibimon hopped onto his shoulder and stared at it. “Whoa. What’s a gate doing there?”
“I don’t know. Chibimon, we’re going to the Digital World. Probably right to the Kaiser’s place.”
Chibimon stared at him, jaw dropping. “What? Why? How? We don’t need to do that!”
“Yes, I do.” Daisuke shook his head. “Come on. The sooner we get this over with, the better.” He tried very hard not to think about what was going on before he got his D-3 out and entered the Digital World.
He shuddered as he realized where they’d appeared – a place that could only be the Digimon Kaiser’s base. A short distance away were several screens floating in the air and a chair set before them. Seated in the chair was – someone. He swallowed.
“Come here.” Oh. That voice. Too close, too familiar, for all that he’d heard it kindly addressed towards him only earlier that day. But he moved forward. He had to get this over with.
When he could see the figure, it was clearly the Kaiser. His eyes were on the screens before them, only lightly visible behind his visor. Daisuke turned to the screen and flinched to see the encounter with Ichijouji Ken there replaying from multiple angles.
“I never would have suspected it would be you,” the Kaiser spoke. “I can’t imagine why it would be you. What do you have that I could ever want?” His eyes flicked to Daisuke. “Except for your surrender.”
“You’re never getting that!” Daisuke snapped at once. “I don’t care what you say!”
“Don’t you?” Kaiser smiled. “You seemed very interested in what I had to say earlier.”
Daisuke’s heart sank. He’d known from the moment he got the call. There wasn't any way that he couldn’t have known. He just didn’t want to know. He wanted to be wrong.
But Kaiser reached up one hand and removed the visor, staring at him with the unmistakable violet eyes of Ichijouji Ken. “You are my soulmate. And vice versa. Ken’s lip curled, his features cold and haughty. “I am going to relocate to this world effective immediately. I expect you to join me. Also effective immediately.”
Daisuke’s jaw worked. He shook his head rapidly. “Not a chance! I’m trying to save the Digital World from you, not whatever you think you’re doing!” He set his hands on his hips. “You’re going to stop this whole conquering thing, effective immediately!”
Ken – or Kaiser – eyed him thoughtfully, then chuckled a very amused chuckle. “That isn’t how it works, Motomiya. As my soulmate, you belong to me. You will listen to me. That means you do as I tell you. I want you here with me.” He raised one finger. “You may consider yourself lucky. If we weren’t soulmates, I would already be planning your ultimate destruction. I can still do that, if you refuse to accept your place is at my side.”
Daisuke heaved himself forward, hands grabbing for Ken, wanting to shake some sense into him. He’d hardly made a move forward when a light blasted down all around him, keeping him restrained. Kaiser smiled a smile that spoke nothing of anything but triumph.
“I believe that indicates your decision. Therefore, until you come to your senses and accept that your destiny is to be mine, I will keep you right here.” Kaiser regarded him. “You and your Digimon – for now. I have some interesting ideas I wish to use regarding him. But we’ll see how that works.”
Daisuke tried to pound on the column of light that kept him imprisoned. It did nothing. Nor did V-mon pounding. He’d watched all along, confused, until this odd imprisonment. “What are you doing? Let us out of here!”
“Oh, I will. In good time. When I have other ways to keep you obedient. I have some interesting ideas already. I’ve been thinking about them since I first saw you. My decision back then was because I knew your ridiculous friends would do anything to get you back. But now that I know you’re mine regardless – whatever they try will fail to work. You are mine forever. As was clearly mean to be.”
He stood up and gestured. “Come along. You can walk in there. It will follow you. But you can only go where I want you to go. If you attempt to enter restricted space, you won’t be allowed.”
Daisuke clenched his fists. He should have known better. He should have guessed the Kaiser had some horrible plan. He just hadn’t expected it to be like this.
“You can’t keep me like this. My parents – my sister – my friends!”
Kaiser smiled a wicked smile. Daisuke’s heart sunk at the sight of it. This did not feel good in the slightest. “As soon as you entered the gate, it deleted itself off your computer. Everyone saw what happened at our game. I will simply arrange matters so everyone believes we've run away together. We would hardly be the only pair of soulmates to do that, would we? As for your friends - they’ll know where you are. And they won’t be able to do anything at all about it.”
He picked up his visor and stared at Daisuke, that smile not having faded for a single moment, before putting it back on. “After all, you’re my soulmate and they all know it.”
The End
Notes: I may continue this world one day. But not right now. Please see my ffnet profile or my tumblr for a statement about my current wips.
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edgy-ella · 4 years
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Future Smash Memes: An explanation
As I’m sure most of you following this blog are aware, I run a smash bros meme blog called Future Smash Memes. I’ve been updating this blog daily since mid-December, and people seem to like it. As I’m writing this, the blog has over 500 followers. That’s crazy! Never did I think that my stupid little meme blog would get this popular.
However, with that surge of popularity comes a lot of new viewers who may not be in on the joke. I get a lot of questions asking something along the lines of “what is this blog about?” So instead of continuing to answer these questions individually, I’m going to make a long post here that I can redirect to in the future. I’m keeping this off the Future Smash Memes blog so as not to “break character.”
The entire joke behind the blog is that all of these are jokes from the future that we don’t get because they haven’t happened yet, but they could theoretically happen (or it’s fun to think that they could, anyway). I make a lot of memes about scenarios for “Subspace 2” because a lot of people really, really want to see another big story mode in smash again in the same line as Subspace Emissary from Brawl. Fans like to see their favorite characters from different franchises interact with each other, that’s pretty much the main reason that crossovers are popular to begin with. In the context of Smash, we almost always see these characters interact with each other by beating the ever loving shit out of each other. That’s all well and good, it’s a really fun game, and Smash is already brimming with fanservice (no, not THAT kind). But lots of fans crave something a little more; especially so when you compare Smash to other big crossover games and even to itself through SSE. So, I’m happy to deliver. Also, it’s a lot easier for me to make memes about subspace 2 rather than memes about the future competitive scene since I’m not super competitive with Smash to begin with.
With all that said, the most common question I get concerning this blog is this:
“Are your Subspace 2 memes all based off of a fanfiction?”
The short answer is NO, they’re not. The long answer...
While these memes are all technically a big fanfiction in and of themselves, I’ve never produced said fanfiction in any other form, be it literature or a fan game or an animation or whatever. I did think about writing down some little “short stories” surrounding the context of some popular memes, but ultimately decided against it. I think that writing this all would kind of kill the fun because people like to look at these memes and speculate how exactly they would come to pass. Writing it all down as a big fanfic would ruin that (and make the blog just feel like a promo for some shit Smash Bros fanfic, for that matter). It would just make the whole thing feel too fanfic-y something that I’ve tried very hard to avoid. There’s also the fact that I don’t really have a big plot structure for this all in my head, just some certain segments and story beats. For the most part, I’m making it up as I go. I do try to maintain some level of “canon consistency,” but it’s not my priority when making these memes. I apologize if that’s a disappointment to some of you.
That being said, while I still have everyone here, I’d like to take this time to continue to break character and answer some more common questions.
“Did you come up with the idea for ‘future’ memes yourself?”
No. Plenty of people have posted “future smash memes” or “alternate timeline smash memes” in the past on Twitter, Reddit, and even here on Tumblr. It’s even got it’s own KYM entry (though unfortunately, I’m not on there). I think that I am the first person to let out a constant stream of these at a consistent rate, though. I don’t own the concept, if you want to make your own “future meme” blog, you don’t have to ask me.
“What program do you use to make your memes?”
Some of the really early memes were made in Kapwing and Imgflip, but aside from that all of them were made in Photoshop.
“Why so much JoJo?”
JoJo already has a lot of memes to pull from and is known for its strange, out of context moments. It’s a prime target for meme templates. Also, Sakurai himself is a JoJo fan, so there’s some plausibility that a Smash story mode would have some JoJo references. It’s also my current hyperfixation so there’s that too.
“Why don’t you make memes about non-video game characters in Smash?”
I feel like a broken record every time someone asks me this. Sakurai has, at every opportunity, rejected the idea of having non-video game characters in Smash and I 100% agree with his reasoning. Even in the context of this, a future meme blog, I don’t want to see non-video game characters in Smash. For anyone interested in my more in depth thoughts on the matter, please go here.
“Why do you answer some of your asks with a block of glitchy Zalgo text?”
Whenever I do that, it’s because I either think it’s funny or because I don’t want to comment on how real people (like voice actors) are involved in Subspace 2. The block of text says “The information you are looking for is protected by the TTA. For your own safety, this information is being withheld from public knowledge in your timeline as making it accessible to all could put your timeline at risk of a paradox.”
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drjackandmissjo · 4 years
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firewhisky on ice, sunset and vine
you’ve ruined my life by not being mine
chapter 1 --- next chapter 
Harry Potter fic masterlist
Set in the course of his Sixth Year, this story follows Slytherin's finest, Blaise Zabini, as he navigates classes and friendships and Death Eaters and a certain idiot plant-head Gryffindor.
Sixth year had started nicely: Blaise had been asked to join the Slug Club, and his mother had yet to find a new disposable rich husband and was leaving him the space to do whatever he wanted. Despite Draco's father being thrown in Azkaban and the sudden sulkiness of the blonde boy, the atmosphere wasn't much tenser than usual.
Sure, Draco probably was going to kill someone by the glares he gave and might have punched Saint Potter on the train, completely justifiable, and The Dark Lord had officially risen, sending everyone in a constant state of panic; but things were not that erratic, especially for a Slytherin Pureblood like him. The world was his oyster.
Which was why he was about to kick Pansy Parkinson off the Astronomy Tower.
They had agreed upon a seating chart that allowed all of them to maximize their brain capacities in order to gain as many House Points as possible. Since Draco was the Slytherin on top of every class, damned little miss perfect Granger and her habit of beating his friend up on the podium, the settlements revolved around the blonde and each individual strength. Pansy got Charms, her silver tongue finally useful on an academic level and not only on dark corners with older students; Theodore had Potions, his natural talent ready to expose himself in front of Slughorn, who had decided to keep him out of the little impromptu meeting on the train and to whom Theo had sworn vengeance; he would get Transfiguration, being the most skilled at changing various things in different states almost flawlessly and also due to the fact that he was the best behaved Slytherin. Amongst the members of Draco's Inner Circle anyway: Crabble and Goyle were bullies and lost causes, Millicent was as dull as a wall, Theo was too impulse, Draco was, well, Draco and Pansy was, for lack of a better word, a bucchinara. Only Blaise was polite and respectful and tried to keep his personal vendettas hidden and managed to deal with them without a fuzz, and that, plus his innate aptitude for Transfiguration, meant he went along with Professor McGonagall pretty smoothly.
Which meant that Transfiguration was his.
The other classes were not as important and therefore their seatings could be random, but for those they came prepared. Slytherin was going to win the House Cup that year, unless Draco revealed that he was already a marked Death Eater, which would've made them lose a shitton of points but nothing more. After all, no one had ever been expelled from Hogwarts during Dumbledore's Reign and Blaise was positive it would never happen.
But he was about to get his first detention of the year, possibly, if that bitch didn't move. That would have not been a great way to start, but deep down he was sure it would've been worth it. "Pansy, move your white ass off that chair at this instant" he said through gritted teeth, barely moving his lips and avoiding creasing his flawless smile. 'Rule number one' his mother had taught him, 'always appear kind and gentle and then stab them in the back and get them coins.'
"Why would I do that, Zabini? I'm comfortable here" claimed the annoying girl that was very close to getting hexed, leaning back with a lazy smile on her face.
Blaise had many great qualities, but he also had no room in his body for bullshit. 'Rule number two: never hit first but obliterate them after they start. And don't forget, never ruin a manicure.' He mentally counted to ten, trying to calm himself before he did something he might've regretted, "We agreed yesterday on this" he said, slowly losing his patience. He had very little disregard for those who didn't appreciate his careful planning.
Pansy gave him a poisonous smile, her bold red lips giving her extra points in the vicious department. "Change of plans, pretty boy" she said, voice saccharine and melodious that managed to hide perfectly her true nature.
'Rule number three' his mind recalled 'do not have witnesses nor explicit motif in case you do remove someone from this Earth'. That threw a wrench in his immediate future.
Breathing deeply inwards and closing his eyes, he imagined the petite girl being slowly entrapped in a Devil's Snare and painfully dying. It made him feel instantaneously better. When he opened his eyes again, unfortunately, one of his main causes of stress was still there, now joined by Draco, who took the golden medal in the 'giving Blaise headaches' category. His roommate was puzzled by the sight but decided not to complain and chose to poke holes into Saint Potter's head with his consistent stare.
Blaise wondered, not for the first time, what would've happened first, a make-out session in a broom closet between the Saviour of the Wizarding World and his friend, or a murder. Things would be less boring around Hogwarts if either event happened, even if the school was not boring to begin with.
One of the many topics he didn't agree on with Draco, especially this year, revolved around the blonde's complete annoyance to school life, despite maintaining stellar markings. Hogwarts was full of life and joy and unexpectedness.
Which was why Blaise didn't exactly want to start the year with a detention. "Very well" he said eventually, scanning the room for a proper desk to sit at. He would've avoided Gryffindors as if they carried the Plague, of course, but it seemed that the only empty chair was alongside one of them.
"Holy burning hell" he thought to himself, scolding his face into a bored and superior expression as he carefully watched Neville Fucking Longbottom casually reading his textbook with a Muggle pencil behind his ear. Blaise hadn't had all the time in the world back at the Hogwarts Express to see anyone other than his close friends, too much preoccupied to make a good first impression with Professor Slughorn to care about his fellow classmates, let alone someone as insignificant as 'Schlongbottom', as the other Slytherins called him.
"Boy oh boy, have I made a mistake!" his mind screamed.
He used to be lanky and chubby, but he must have definitely worked out during the summer, for he didn't look that way anymore. Under the shirt and vest, it was possible to see the beginning of some seriously well-kept muscles and, despite his slouched position, he an aura of confidence that he was missing the previous year. "Fighting Death Eaters in the Ministry surely left its mark, uh?" he wondered as he watched the Gryffindor move his head to talk to Weasley. There were so many of them that Blaise couldn't be bothered to keep notice of them all, but he recognized the one into his year as a general individual, blending the remaining white boys into a general identity.
He was almost immediately broken from his mind and brought to reality: "I wouldn't wanna be in your shoes" Draco snickered as he also noticed the only empty spot in the classroom, drawing also Pansy's attention to his misery. The witch gave him another vicious smile, before slowly and purposefully turning into her seat as Professor McGonagall entered the classroom. She had won that round, but Blaise was positive the unexpected outcome would see him victorious as well. 'Rule number fifteen, ogling a hot person is a great past time.'
Unbothered on the outside, he moved lazily towards the Gryffindor, noticing the surprise on the boy's face as he moved the chair next to him and took his place silently. Immediately he tensed, waiting for Blaise to attack him as his roommates had done many times, and it almost pained him to see all the confidence disappear under a cautious mask. But he had to give it to him, Longbottom didn't even flinch as he unceremoniously dumped his textbook and notebook on his side of the desk. He would've gotten a lot of dirty looks from his friends if he was somebody else carrying a Muggle object, but since he was Blaise Zabini no one said anything. After all, countless meters of parchment were as impractical as eating soup with a fork.
He also didn't miss the slightest nod of approval to ever been given him, directly from Professor McGonagall herself, before she began her first lecture of the sixth year.
And with that, they started.
***
Two hours later and with six pages of notes and the tiniest smidge of ink from a Muggle pen on his hands, 'I'll be damned if I have to write every day with a messy quill", the lecture was over. Professor McGonagall had done a brilliant job as usual, with her being the most competent, if not the only, teacher in the school, but one thing was absolutely clear as day to Blaise: the recently very attractive Gryffindor boy seated next to him was absolutely useless at Transfiguration. His grandfather would've used the word chiavica with a disapproving look at his way and forced him to sit and eat twelve different dishes, as if that would've made him improve.
The problem wasn't that he lacked the proper concentration and magical talent, but rather that he wasn't as passionate about the subject as Blaise was. The boy had also taken countless notes, writing them at the corners of his book in a minute calligraphy with his Muggle graphite, and he seemed to grasp the general concept, yet failed almost comically at properly producing the magic.
Needless to say, the Slytherin dreaded the day his favourite teacher would give them a project to be done in pairs.
Not a single word had been uttered between the two boys, as it should have been. They had no communal interests nor any shared group of acquaintances, even if they were both Purebloods. Their Houses were rivals, their roommates were arch-nemesis, and yet here they both were, seated in silence next to each other.
But there had been guarded glances from both sides, of that he was sure. He looked at the Gryffindor with fretted disinterest, desperately trying not to get caught staring at the hot guy next to him like a creep, while Longbottom looked occasionally back with something akin of fear and disdain. He wasn't really surprised by the reaction and couldn't really blame him. Blaise wasn't sure if his family had remained neutral or had been hurt at the hands of Death Eaters before Saint Potter saved everyone, but nevertheless, the Slytherin house suffered an image decline due to their notorious works. The House reputation was turbid and getting dirtier by the hour, with all the alumni tarnishing the good name of their former house with their debauchery. Of course, not all Slytherins were evil, but it was the fucking coincidence of the majority of those evildoers being Slytherins that gave way to all the hate.
"You're just giving into the stereotype" he had ranted at Draco on the train, after the blonde told him the news, "and yours is such a bloody shitton of bullshit l cannot tolerate anymore!"
And just like that, the class was over and students packed their bags to migrate into their next lecture. He had now a free period, as the majority of his friends took Divination for reasons unknown to him, and decided to make it count as much as possible by staying in the library before going to 6th year History of Magic.
After signalling a little goodbye to his housemates, he turned around to the pretty useless boy next to him to begrudgingly salute him as well and perhaps ask him to trade place with someone less inept at the subject, only to find said incredibly tall and gorgeous beefcake standing in all his height with a bag draped over his shoulder. Despite the sudden tough exterior, he had a kind and polite smile and a softness in his voice that Blaise would've never guessed. "Apparently we have to seat next to each other now" he said with a shy tone, and then immediately went to nervously bite his lips. Blaise was dumbfounded, unable to form words at the sight hovering over him. He definitely wasn't the lanky boy he remembered.
Unsettled by his lack of response and probably taking his silence as a sign of disgust, Longbottom let out a shaky laugh, trying to ease the tension. Bringing a hand up to scratch his neck. "Look, I get it if you want to switch" he began, looking down at his shoes, "but I don't think Professor McGonagall would let us."
That brought him back on Earth. He had not mistaken the look of approval the Professor had given him and he'd be damned if he ever let down the best teacher Hogwarts had ever seen over something so futile as a seating partner.
Also it didn't hurt that his deskmate was a bloody vision, incompetent maybe, but most definitely his type. And now more than ever he needed to know for which team this asshole beat for.
"Yeah, no. I know, it's fine or whatever" he stuttered nonchalantly, knowing that he sounded dismissal while on the inside he was a bubbling mess. Trying to regain his composure and to remember his reputation, he spat out with as little venom as possible, "I guess there could be worse of you lot to sit next to."
"Wrong. Fucking. Thing. To. Say. Genius" his mind yelled as he internally cringed at his choice of words while maintaining a disinterested exterior. He saw the exact moment Longbottom's face went from kind and polite to pissed off. In all the years they had spent at school together they had never really talked or acknowledged each other's existence, not as much as he had with members of the other two Houses, yet Longbottom would've never stroke him as the type of person that could get angry.
"That's cause you never spoke to him until now. Stop thinking with your dick" his brain fired as he rose from his seat and stood a few centimetres short of the Gryffindor. He had to admit that it was incredibly hard to stop thinking with his dick at the moment, but managed to maintain a neutral expression.
"Yeah, well. I guess so too" replied rather childishly the other boy, folding his arms over his chest and giving him what must've been his best glare.  "I was trying to be polite, but I guess there is no way for a civilized conversation or partnership with you lot" he retorted, raising an eyebrow.
Now it was Blaise's turn to appear pissed and he mustered his worst killing glare, created by years of training,  "Do not generalize me and I won't generalize you."
Longbottom was looking down at him, almost as if he was a puzzle that was not behaving. He supposed that from his perspective it was like that, since generally speaking they were supposed to hate each other's guts and here they were, one clearly trying not to lust for the other and the other apparently disapproving of the one's entire existence.
He eventually conceded, "Very well. See you around, Zabini." And with that Longbottom left, joining Thomas and that Fire Kid from his House.
Blaise was left alone, baffled and shocked, before he shook violently his head and left also the classroom and began walking in solitude towards the library.
This had the potential to become a great or a terrible year, and he supposed that the majority of the chances rested on the unexpected outcome of the Transfiguration class.
GLOSSARY: 
'bucchinara' is a southern Italian word that means 'someone who gives blowjobs'
'chiavica' is a southern Italian word that means 'someone that really really sucks at something'
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theusurpersdog · 5 years
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The Battle of Winterfell
Okay, I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t particularly care for this episode. I came into it so hyped, because Miguel Sapochnik was in charge of the most important episode of the series to date and he has yet to disappoint, but in hindsight I realized this episode was never going to work. Not that I disliked the whole thing, because there were some moments which I absolutely love, but overall this episode was poorly conceptualized and executed even worse. Below the cut I’ll explain why I disliked it, and how I think the show could have done better. . . 
First, I think this episode was poorly executed in the writing room, not by the actors, directors, and behind-the-scenes crew. Watching the Game Revealed for this episode shows just how incredible the crew behind this show is, and its a shame that all that excellent work was largely wasted by D&D. 
Visually speaking though, this episode was stunning. The shots of Drogon and Rhaegal against the sky, lighting wights on fire, is legitimately breathtaking. Arya’s parkour is also stunning. Miguel Sapochnik and everyone else involved really did not disappoint, as far as they could carry the episode.
To me, this episode failed on two fronts: its approach to characters, and its approach to the battle. 
Characters
The biggest problem this episode had, is that it approached its characters through the lens of the action, and not the action through the lens of its characters. While D&D promised many character moments, there was only one - the Hound deciding to toughen up because Arya was in danger. Otherwise, all of the “character beats” were slow motion shots of people reacting to the battle. Those moments, its important to note, do not come from scripting - those scenes were Miguel Sapochnik desperately trying to ground his action within the emotions of his characters. But these scenes fail to carry the emotional burden the episode needed, because they are entirely generic; that’s what I mean when I say D&D did not consider the action through their characters. None of the scenes in these episodes were written from the perspective of “How would Jon, Daenerys, Tyrion, Sansa, et al, react and how does that change our episode?”, they were all written from the perspective of “These are the exact events we are going to have, what room does that leave for character expression?” - and of course, the answer was very little. Arya’s plotline this episode comes the closest to personalized, and even that falls very short. Listening to the Inside the Episode, the idea behind Arya’s story was “what if we took away her characteristics, what is she left with?” which leads to more near death fake outs, but prevents any real character moments. They intentionally took her back to season one Arya, instead of incorporating 7 years of growth into her scenes. 
Compare that approach to a previous episode, Blackwater, written by George Martin. Every single scene in that episode (except the dude bro scene with Bronn that GRRM was forced to write) is designed to show you something about Stannis, Davos, Cersei, Tyrion, or Sansa. It was a battle written specifically to highlight its characters. The perfect scene to highlight this difference is Sansa in the Sept during Blackwater, vs Sansa in the crypts during The Long Night. Sansa was not written to be useless this episode; her line “I will not abandon my people” combined with the unaired scenes of her killing wights, is quite enough evidence that the intent of D&D was to feature her. Yet, in the finished product, its very clear that D&D really didn’t understand how to feature her; the scenes in the crypts are entirely superfluous, because they exist solely to include Tyrion and Sansa. Whereas in Blackwater, GRRM wrote the scenes to highlight Sansa’s leadership, kindness, bravery, loyalty, and compassion. She is not even included in the “battle” portion of the episode, but many of her very best lines are from that episode and its corresponding book chapters - because GRRM worked the battle around his characters, instead of D&D who worked their characters around the battle. D&D genuinely didn’t know how to include scenes in this episode that weren’t action, and The Long Night suffered greatly for it. The best way to fix this problem would have been to re-examine each scene from a character’s perspective based on their specific story arc over 7 1/2 seasons. D&D were too focused on the base concept of fear, on how everyone is just terrified of death personified, that they forgot each character has their own story. Like I previously said, only the Hound has a scene like this, where we understand his specific reaction based on his specific story arc. 
This episode also failed to incorporate its characters even when the action called for it. While my above complaint is that D&D couldn’t look outside the action to make room for characters, this one is similar but slightly different - even when the action would have been greatly improved by individualized character beats, D&D chose to ignore that in favor of straight battle sequences. The obvious example of this is Daenerys, and her complete ambivalence in the face of Viserion. The only time her character was allowed to influence her scenes this episode, is when she as a Khaleesi decided she could not watch her Khalasar slaughtered; and the only reason that was included, was an excuse to get the battle rolling as D&D envisioned it. But wouldn’t dragon vs dragon content in this episode have greatly benefited from an emotionally bereft Daenerys? I am far from her biggest stan, but it is truly a slap in the face to pretend as if one of her dragons dying, and then being brought back to try and kill her, would not almost kill Daenerys. The dragons are her children; she looks at them and sees herself reflected back, both the good and the bad. Her self worth and importance is tied to them. To not only lose one, but to see it turned against her, is a scene literally begging to be about Daenerys’ loss. And yet, her emotional connection to Viserion is completely irrelevant to her battle with the Night King.
The previous complaints I’ve had with this episode were all things I think would have been relatively easy to fix within the episode itself, but the next problem I have has been building since season one, and was probably unfixable by season 6. And that problem is of Bran, Jon, and the Night King. Obviously I don’t know what GRRM’s plans for the Others are, but I am very sure Bran is at the heart of it. Don’t get me wrong, it was amazing to see a Stark defeat the Night King; but, if we are being honest with ourselves, it was the wrong Stark. Since the start of the series, when we see the Night’s Watch deserter executed through Bran’s eyes, he has been the narrator of the Others. Yet for some reason, D&D made the decision in s1 that they weren’t going to include Northern Mysticism, or Bran’s more supernatural elements. They pretty much eliminated Warging from the show completely (which is entirely unthinkable in the books). By cutting Bran off from his plot with the Others, they filled his role with Jon. Now, Jon is very connected to the North and weirwoods and that sort of high fantasy element, but he is not connected to the White Walkers directly. Jon Snow has never even faced a White Walker in the books, compared to his show counterpart who has had run-ins with the Night King since s5. By making Jon a much more stereotypical Action Hero, they’ve already gutted what the White Walkers are in the books. Once they left Bran out of s5, there really was no going back. To me, its obvious that at some point midway through the show, D&D realized from GRRM just how important Bran was to the fight against the AotD, but it was too late to do anything about it. So Bran being in the Godswood, after an extremely vague explanation of why the Night King wants to kill him, was their desperate attempt to pick up the pieces. That left D&D with only one other option for taking out the Night King - shock value. They literally say as much in the Inside the Episode. All of the above doesn’t even mention how big a problem the Night King existing at all is, but it is a huge problem. The Night’s King, from the books, is not some all powerful figure; he is a man, who made a very stupid choice out of love. The Night’s King story is a deeply personal tale, which most likely revolves around a Stark, which ties the story back to our main characters (specifically Bran). By changing the Night’s King story into one centralized White Walker villain, they took away all the personality of the White Walkers while simultaneously pinning the entire narrative onto one character (which can only lead to an unsatisfactory ending). 
The Battle
Now that I’ve explained why I dislike the character element of The Long Night, lets break down why the battle itself falls short. . . 
They played this way too straightforward. If they weren’t going to ground this episode within emotional stakes and payoffs, they had to be way more creative within the battle itself. I know Dan Weiss gave his “reasons” for not including Ice Spiders, but they were stupid (for anyone who hasn’t seen the article, he said they didn’t think they could animate giant spiders well); Lord of the Rings came out more than 15 years ago and Shelob was very well done, and you’re telling me that Game of Thrones couldn’t pull them off?
Ice Spiders isn’t the only thing they could have done though. GRRM’s story is some Cthulu level horror and heavy metal stuff, and D&D should have embraced those elements. The shots of the dragons fighting worked so well because it was a visually new experience, but D&D scripted way too much melee fighting to be the backbone of the episode. Sapochnik did the best he could to make it stimulating throughout, but as an audience this can only be entertaining for so long. And D&D were obviously very attached to making this episode feature length, regardless - what I’m saying is, an editor needed to be more involved in the final cut. 
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