#the darkness of the …”piece” is i guess useful in a storytelling context but it’s also just bc a bright white background will kill my eyes

[djservo]

jumpscare february is almost over. cas djservo, how was your february reading what's on the horizon for march? public must know

what a blur the last half of february was! I read three books, the last two being less than 100 pages I all but slogged through.. something in the air! however - and likely incidentally - I caught up with/watched more TV than I've watched in months (including The Bear finally! will discuss at the end) so you win some you lose some in this cycle of #Conscious/deliberate content consumption 🌀

Junky by William S. Burroughs

I've tried and failed so many times to get into beat literature for the sake of #Context and #Understanding as an #AmericanReader and particularly as someone who enjoys media grappling with the disillusionment with the American Dream, but I fear the few read I've tried have all been too obtuse, boring, and/or one-note to me. I also doubt my reading explorations will ever measure up to the high expectations teen-me held after watching Kill Your Darlings (2013) for the first time -- though I think the chaotic-sensual aura I was so drawn to in the first place aligns more with dark academia (before it was even named dark academia) rather than the (supposed) gritty introspection of the beat era. Additionally, a quick wikipedia peruse of some of the more prominent names feature an uncomfortable paragraph or two exposing questionable ethics + political/social alignments, so most of my curiosity has been marred if not killed completely. I definitely wouldn't say Burroughs is the lesser of however-many evils in that sense, but I feel like Junky specifically has been referenced a lot in memoirs/essay collections/discussions of queer subcultures I've enjoyed so FINE! CURIOSITY KILLS THE CAT! I can recognize its groundbreaking impact contextually, but maaaaaan Go Ask Alice was a more titillating read. meandering in a repetitive way with no real juicy syntax to make up for it - it was so Whatever. I guess it wasn't long enough to be a waste of time, but I don't feel as if I've missed anything life-changing all these years. at least I can say I tried!

Crazy For Vincent by Hervé Guibert

speaking of questionable ethics 🫢 troubling, but at least short enough to digest in a night or two. I love when I find out a film I enjoy's screenplay was written by an author (or vice versa) bc it's like gaining access to another angle of their storytelling, and back in January I watched The Wounded Man ('83) which really stuck in my head for weeks. Manic urgency practically radiating off the screen, that kind of burning desire that makes you hold your breath -- like of Course I had to see how that translated in Guibert's written texts (though now thinking about it, I think it was moreso about all that was unsaid + the performances themselves rather than the dialogue specifically, but I DIGRESS.) one of the reviews I liked for The Wounded Man includes a quote by Clarice Lispector (another author I want to explore): "Having passions does not mean living beautifully but suffering pointlessly." So fitting for the resonant desperation throughout this short piece, so much pathetic longing you're all but limping with relief once it's over. shadowboxer or daredevil by fiona apple, that sort of hopeless growling croon. I think I'll check out Guibert's journals eventually when I'm feeling particularly self-loathing 💭

The New Testament by Jericho Brown

Note to self: no poetry while traveling!!! My head and heart were simply not in it as they ought to have been which is a shame because with the few pockets of fully-devoted attention I had to spare, the glimpses I got were beautiful. I used to think poetry was kind of the perfect non-committal yet complementary companion for any occasion, but being as deep as I am into this June Jordan collection, I've definitely evolved my way of thinking (more on that at the end of this month/when I finish the collection). Still very graceful and angry and hard-hitting, though I want to revisit this eventually in a more cohesive way rather than picking up and putting down in disjointed fragments

After I finish the two books I'm currently in the thick of, I think it's in my best interest to take up something lighter/more straightforward. I picked up a bite-sized Jean Cocteau at a used bookstore and I forgot I'd placed a hold on The Stranger by Albert Camus so those will likely follow, then maybe a memoir/something food-related because, finally, THE BEAR!

I didn't intend to watch the whole thing so soon, but I was with a friend who'd already seen it and I mentioned it was on my radar so we watched the first episode which of course turned into a two-day binge (huge for me!!) The performances were all so amazing, I found myself frustrated that everyone wasn't getting an equal amount of screen time/backstory bc I was so invested in each character LOL which is a strong start to a series I'd think! I loved the evolution of everyone's dynamics, the varying degrees of respect/trust and modes of communication, the vein-popping chaos and claustrophobic passion of it all. I totally get why Kitchen Confidential has been referenced so much in discussion - I'd think Bourdain would approve! I've also had a soft spot for Jeremy Allen White since Shameless so I'm thrilled that he's getting his time to shine - this role suits him so well! HOWEVER . the soundtrack and editing felt inconsistent and sloppy at times which really took me out of it, and I was soooo disappointed with the general (lack of) stylistic distinction/direction. story and performances aside, it kinda felt indistinguishable from any other Hulu Original Show™ - granted I barely watch TV (let alone Hulu Originals) nowadays so what do I know, but it just felt Too devoid of the cinematic gumption I was expecting given the setting/subject matter - which of course were supplementary to the broader scope of dealing with trauma/grief while running a business in the hellscape of late-stage capitalism, but still..... what was with those Food Network ass montages plsss this isn't Giada At Home!! what's the point of setting this at a deli if I end up craving a chocolate cake more than a sandwich?? where were the sensual meat cuts? the delicate intricacy of razor-thin garlic slices a la Goodfellas? the crackling of fresh bread ASMR? but I'll Acknowledge again that it has been a minute since I've watched/finished a new tv show - I'm mostly a film gal so in that sense I'm probably being more critical than necessary or fair when it comes to a literal 20-30 minute-per-episode tv show so FINE it's literally FINE 🧘‍♀️ though there's also The Crux of being so late to a popular piece of media that's been gif'd and screen cap'd to death and generally seems to have already had its wave of Cultural Discussions so the Meat and Intrigue of it all had kinda been diluted/dumbed down for me upon starting. maybe if I'd watched it when it was initially released it'd hit harder and I'd be as blown away as everyone else, but for the most part I just had a fun time and haven't really thought about it since (though I'll likely rewatch before s2 whenever it comes out)

#asks #bobby book club #cheesehair

[novemberthesuperstar]

DISCLAIMER as of the making of this post Tiger Rock is the most recent tales book (thanks to leaks) and Security Breach RUIN has not released yet, so any lore reveals from Ruin or future Tales From the Pizzaplex books may invalidate some of this timeline or confirm it. We're piecing together an unfinished puzzle, so not everything is gonna be 100% accurate. I also have not read through Tales from the Pizzaplex myself. My knowledge comes from a fan wiki.

Hello everyone! I've spent the past few days working on a timeline that incorporates the tales from the pizzaplex books (up to Tiger Rock) into the game timeline! Now, some of these placements are just my best estimates or guesses. Some stories don't have a lot to go off of for a specific year or even range.

Before we get into this, I'm gonna explain a few things

The stuff in brackets is where the event is from. The message bags from Security Breach don't have brackets

Anything with a * by it is something I'm not 100% sure on. All placements in the timeline are based on what I could find on the wiki pages for the Tales stories and are based on dates and attractions plus some context clues.

????

Frailty (Lally's Game)

The Mimic (Nexie)

B-7 (HAPPS)

Five Nights at Freddy's 3

Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator

Ultimate Custom Night

Help Wanted (HAPPS)

Silver Parasol Tapes (Fnaf VR Help Wanted)

Five Nights at Freddy's VR Help Wanted

Curse of Dreadbear DLC

Mimic Epilogues (All)

ULTIMATE PARTY HOST

Submechanophobia (Submechanophobia)

Cleithrophobia (Somniphobia)

Under Construction (Lally's Game)

HAPPS (HAPPS)

Pressure (Somniphobia)

The Storyteller (The Bobbiedots Conclusion)

TORN PAPER "It is there, but you can't see. Alone in the dark. I found the key"

Tiger Rock (Tiger Rock)

Nexie (Nexie)

*Bleeding Heart (Tiger Rock)

Five Nights at Freddy's AR Special Delivery

Retro CDS start (Fnaf Security Breach)

*The Monty Within (Tiger Rock)

*Animatronic Apocalypse (Submechanophobia)

Vanessa messages

(MARKED FOR DELETION

NO QUESTIONS ASKED

False Alarm

IT IS HAPPENING AGAIN)

GGY (The Bobbiedots Conclusion)

Retro CDs end (Fnaf Security Breach)

*Drowning (Nexie)

Night Terrors

Somniphobia (Somniphobia)

Bobbiedots, Part 1 (Submechanophobia)

Bobbidots, Part 2 (The Bobbiedots Conclusion)

Bonnie messages

(MISSING

MONTY UPGRADE

Understudy

Re-Theme)

CHICA UPGRADE

ROXY UPGRADE

Arcade Conspiracy Messages

(BBW MAINT LOG

CFF MAINT LOG

AR-CADE MAINT LOG

PQ1 MAINT LOG

PQ2 MAINT LOG

OUT OF ORDER

RED FLAG

ARCADE CONSPIRACY )

Staff messages

(NIGHT SHIFT

QUESTION

Job Security

All Staff Meeting

PINK SLIP)

Mini Music Man messages

(Stolen property

AC inspection

BEHIND THE MAZE)

Monty Mischief

THE ANSWER

HI DAVE

RECYCLED PIZZA

BETTER EMPLOYEES

COMPACTOR INSTRUCTIONS

Food Storage

SAFETY CHECK

Easy Money

No Flash Photography

CHICA REPORT

Hide the mix

Drink Fizzy Faz!!!!

SORE WINNER

TEST DRIVERS WANTED

Sinkhole messages

(Chasing Cars

SINKHOLE

POWER DRAIN

OLD ELEVATOR)

Party Foul

Hello Gregory

Fnaf: Security Breach

Lally's Game (Lally's Game)

Now, a little elaboration.

From Fnaf 3-Bleeding Heart is all 2023, we know this because the pizzaplex opens in 2023 according to the Storyteller. (There's an error in the book stating 1983 was 30 years ago, but the wiki has this corrected to be 40 years ago, leaving us in 2023. The pizzaplex can't open any sooner as Help Wanted takes place during its construction, and fnaf 6 is located under the pizzaplex, meaning it has to be after the events of fnaf 6.) Bleeding Heart takes place at an unspecified Christmas at the Pizzaplex, and I feel it's most likely the end of year one as there isn't any sign of anything from the game.

The Mimic Epilogues all take place during the construction of the Pizzaplex, possibly alongside Fnaf VR Help Wanted. (Depending on if the Mimic1 program works as a huge hivemind, with Glitchtrap being able to split off from the body before the epilogues) During the epilogues the fnaf 6 Pizzeria is covered by cement due to the Mimic going rogue and ripping the construction workers apart after ripping apart and piling up the remains of the scrap animatronics and any other junk (possibly linked to The Blob?), only leaving one vent as a possible entrance. This explains why Vanny later needed Freddy to clear the path to get down there and possibly either repair the body with Bonnie's parts, put Glitchtrap in it to reunite him with his body, or both. Interestingly, the Glamrocks were originally delivered here, and the Mimic already had a new rabbit head. Could the new head be the original Bonnie's, and its old head be in the parts used to create Glitchtrap? Whatever the case, it's likely these abandoned original Glamrocks later became the endos guarding the fnaf 6 pizzeria in Security Breach.

GGY takes place 3 years after the Pizzaplex opens as a therapist who is mentioned in the story was hired when it opened, and it's been 3 years since she started. GGY has clear links to Patient 46 and the Retro CDs, meaning that they, and by extension, Fnaf AR have to take place over the first 3 years of the Pizzaplex being open, ending in 2025.

As odd as it is for Tiger Rock to take place after The Storyteller, it IS the case. Tiger Rock and Nexie both happen simultaneously, 3 weeks after the Storyteller. We know this as the Storyteller is being taken down during Tiger Rock and Nexie. The Storyteller take-over also causes these two stories to happen.

Fnaf VR Help Wanted and the Storyteller both have to take place before Fnaf AR as in the Fnaf AR emails it's mentioned that Fazbear Entertainment are calling off all contracts with outside companies, especially ones involving vintage parts after the Glitchtrap virus spreads through the Fazbear Funtime Service (fnaf AR) systems. (Mimic1 circuit boards and the Mimic1 program as a whole)

The message TORN PAPER is found outside of the Michael Afton room in the Utility Tunnels, I placed it after The Storyteller as in that room there is a wall code very similar in description to the one Edwin wrote in his final moments. It's possible (since according to cut fnaf ar emails Michael is alive) that Michael Afton replaced Edwin or Mr Burrows on the board and is now running things, and ordered the creation of that room so he could attempt to stop the Mimic. It's also possible he was already around and just stepped up afterwards. Either way, at the very least, the code was likely written in that room after the Storyteller. I believe "the key" is either referring to the Retro CDs, the code, or something in Freddy and Friends on Tour. After all, the cartoon is playing in the room.

Despite Bonnie being absent in even the earliest Tales From the Pizzaplex books according to the wiki, I placed his death close to Security Breach as there are no Tales attractions mentioned in the note MISSING, which tells us the route Bonnie took before his dissappearance. The Glamrock's upgrades all likely come after Bonnie's disappearance. I think the most likely possibility is that Monty REQUIRED an upgrade to play the bass, and then the other bots got upgrades afterwards, inspired by Monty, ending with Chica as hers was a catastrophic failure.

The Arcade Conspiracy likely takes place between Vanessa being hired and the All Staff Meeting, as the person writing the messages may be Luis Carbera from the Fnaf AR emails. Even without that connection, it has to be here as they're attempting to "free the princess," and she should supposedly recognise them.

At the very least, the Wind Up Music Man prototypes have to have broken out after Vanessa was hired as she's the one who wrote one of their messages. The same goes for the missing kids.

The final message about the missing kids mentions a re opening, meaning the Pizzaplex temporarily closed. I think it's most likely this happened between the Storyteller and GGY as we don't have much information about the second year the Pizzaplex was open.

The All Staff Meeting has a few hints towards something sinister going on, from a trashed room with a message from this set in it, to cake, mentioned in this set, bring in the endo basement and on a hidden endo. It's likely the employees were set up by Vanessa or Gregory to get disposed of by the Glamrock Endos. This has to be after any nighttime employees as they were all fired and potentially killed in this set of messages. The daytime staff remain.

The sinkhole messages set has to take place right before Security Breach, as the final message mentions plans to dig down underneath Roxy Raceway the next morning, which would uncover the old Pizzeria. Security Breach likely takes place the night after this message.

Sources:

https://triple-a-fazbear.fandom.com/wiki/Dufflebag_Messages]

https://freddy-fazbears-pizza.fandom.com/wiki/Tales_from_the_Pizzaplex_(Series)]

https://freddy-fazbears-pizza.fandom.com/wiki/The_Storyteller_(Story)]

https://triple-a-fazbear.fandom.com/wiki/E-Mails]

Big Thanks to http://aminoapps.com/p/b0bg5s] for discussing this timeline with me, helping me refine it, and suggesting alternative possibilities I may not have thought of myself.

#five nights at freddy's #fnaf theory #fnaf security breach #tales from the pizzaplex

[cant-think-of-anything]

I think part of the reason that there’s such a dissonance between what kind of character Matthew is ~supposed~ to have and what kind of poor traits shine through, especially in his treatment of Alastair, is not just because of CC’s poor handling of alcoholism (and, in my opinion, mental health issues and depression) but also because: Our first introduction to these characters happened a long ways before some major changes to TLH.

Namely… Alastair and Cordelia were basically white in CC’s original planning. There’s just no way around that. Their flower cards, where they’re not just whitewashed but purely white, prove that (and they STILL haven’t been updated, by the way.)

Also, Alastair’s hair: in CoG it was dyed blond, and CC wrote it off implicitly as a racism thing when she decided he was Persian (which I guess happened after the short story where we met Alastair and before TLH) , which would have been fine it if it was an arc written better. Except, I don’t think she realized that it would make Matthew’s comments about Alastair inherently and obviously racist, being a white author. And I doubt that it will be dealt with and named or even acknowledged outright in the final TLH installment.

Kind of the same thing with Cordelia. I’m not saying POC can’t have like red hair because obviously POC don’t come in a prepackaged set of five or six traits that are all configured randomly, but something has always rubbed me the wrong way about the way that CC writes the majority of her POC and especially WOC as exotic. I mean, Kamala as a character is to me a special favorite (even though CC did her dirty and didn’t do a good job portraying her character or intersectional identity) but I rolled my eyes so hard when she had lighter brown or “amber” eyes in canon or officially commissioned art. With Cordelia, I know CC once said she uses henna to redden her hair which is great for her, and I guess I have less of a bone to pick with that because it’s semi(?) realistic, but still. Also the fact that so much of her description as a beautiful person comes from her hair. Again that’s cool, and women of color should be loved wholly including being loved for the parts of them that they freely change (such as Cordelia’s hair) but… the proportion of the fixation on her hair as what makes her lovely rubs me the wrong way sometimes. I feel like it’s sometimes an out from CC making the ~scandalous~ decision that a woman of color can be beautiful because of the traits she is born with. Idk it’s just for me I had this long standing repulsion towards my colorings and my facial structure and white girls would tell me I was whiny about it and then I finally began to piece together things like “Eurocentric beauty standards.”

Going on a tangent slightly, but something else that bothered me was when Anna insulted Cordelia after buying her those dresses and everyone kinda treating it as a compliment? And just cause Cordelia, a fictional teenager, didn’t get mad about it doesn’t mean readers of color can’t see the underlying racism behind “Cordelia looks MUCH better in these dresses which are SUITED for her skin tone.”

I think that narrative could have been handled much better: if it was Cordelia picking out her own clothes as an act of maturity and self-realization and ownership, if Cordelia herself said (in a different way lol) “Damn right I can wear lavender ruffles if I want to and crimp my hair but I’m not going to let white fashion prevent me from outshining everyone because dark skinned women INVENTED jewel tones.” And I think some people will argue that Cordelia’s context makes this too self aware of a development but I would say that it would have been a powerful part of her development outside of her relationships, especially considering that she’s supposed to be a main protagonist. Full arcs for the win baby!

But even aside from all that what bothered me about Anna’s dresses was the fact that it was a white woman showing the “truth” or the “right way” or “saving” a woman of color, a trope which I don’t think CC intended but committed nonetheless. I think from a white author POV the thinking was “Anna is such a free bohemian who lives true to herself and she’s going to help Cordelia become that way too,” which irks me because I feel like that just worked against CC in terms of POC rep and also because that same ideology is used in an attempt to make Anna’s treatment of Kamala justified even though Anna as an out person, with racial and economic privilege and the support of an extensive and powerful family network, pressured and tormented Kamala into coming out.

I have a lot of thoughts on that relationship, mainly: it shouldn’t have been dragged out this long because from the beginning, Every Exquisite Thing, it was clear they were looking for different things. And if CC had left it at that and let them go on their separate ways after a week of knowing each other that would have been fine: Kamala can’t do an out and proud relationship and Anna doesn’t want secrecy, so they’ll develop on their own. And then later Kamala’s pursuit of Anna in the actual TLH books was I think meant to be a thing about “the lengths you’ll go for true love” but it felt forced. Honestly… It just feels icky. like this woman of color is just so hung up on this white woman who abuses her repeatedly and can’t handle her own misogyny and internalizations. And I hate that because both had such awesome potential! To me it’s less that I dislike Anna ( I’d need a whole other post to explain that) and more that I dislike CC for wanting so bad to claim sapphic rep but not wanting to put in the effort to portray it effectively- and pretty much all that entails is writing the relationship without acting like it exists in a pseudo-vacuum where the history and realities of interracial relationships and queerphobia don’t exist in the way we obviously recognize and experience.

And characters like Cordelia and Alastair are amazing and have so much potential; I think the true origin of the problems with their portrayal is that they weren’t really intended as POC or even queer representation in the first place. I don’t know if Cassie would have taken a different approach to her characterization had she known Alastair would be a brown gay man when she first introduced him, but I hope it would have at least made her more conscientious of the inherent application of colonialism and racism in her storytelling from that point onward.

I want to finally add that I’m not saying any portrayal of racism is bad. I’m saying that the racism in the story is not part of a conscious framework that critiques racism appropriately. I think CC wrote the beginnings of the narrative, decided she was going to develop the diversity point content, and then either didn’t look back at the older content to analyze it and the other (white characters) through a new lens of race and outsiderness and queer personhood, or she looked at it and didn’t know what to do with it, or looked at it and didn’t care.

Sorry this got so long! Thanks for listening.

- A.

I feel like CC handled everything poorly in regards to characters who had a lot of potential.

The fact that Cordelia and Alastair are both originally white and it's so obvious in the way every bit of racism is handled by the characters. Matthew's comments in CLS are very important and they should've been handled with the same severity that Alastair's words were. CC changing the characters to POC was a big decision and when she did so she should've went back and actually read her own material. I can assure you that it will not be handled in CHOT, my expectations for CC recognizing the importance and gravity in the words she writes regarding racism or any of her "implied racism" bullshit have gone to the ground.

Because while golden eyes are obviously so easy to write when discussing discrimination obviously racism is out of the question /j

THAT'S EXACTLY IT, women of color in these books are so pathetically rare that on the rare occurrence that she does write them they should all be given these features that aren't as common in POC and written as more beautiful because of those features. I read CHOG after I became more appreciative of my ethnic features but if I had read this a year or so ago? Or even if I had read it after just feeling insecure in general? It would've been awful. The implication is that the lighter features in POC are the most beautiful, with Cordelia's red hair being put on a higher pedestal than her dark eyes and Kamala's eyes being focused on more than her hair (because I literally went back and counted the numbers to prove it and it's exactly what happens.)

I'm sure Cordelia's hair is stunning, but it's the way that when she's described (or more accurately being sexualized) it is just her hair and body that is shown, not the color of her skin or the color of her eyes.

God the pastel thing pisses me off so much. It's not even that Anna tells Cordelia that she would look better in darker colors it's that she says it suits her skin tone. Implying that anyone with brown skin should be barred from wearing pastels. And Kamala? In the few times she is described, she's wearing dark colors or champagne gold, never light blue or purple or pink WHICH HONESTLY SUITS HER PERSONALITY. It's also the way that the dresses Anna sent her are described to be more revealing- it's weird. Anna barely knew her when she started dictating everything that Cordelia could put on her body.

“Damn right I can wear lavender ruffles if I want to and crimp my hair but I’m not going to let white fashion prevent me from outshining everyone because dark skinned women INVENTED jewel tones.”

I literally would have loved that. It recognizes that she doesn't need to follow these "rules" on what to wear but still shows her choosing what she wants to wear without making all the darker skinned readers feel like they can't wear a certain color.

I think what some people fail to realize is that these books are also aimed at upper elementary and middle school and a middle schooler with dark skin reading something like that? In a book with characters they love? It's going to be so harmful

Someone else mentioned that CC said Kamanna's relationship was complicated because Kamala didn't defend Anna: Defend her FROM WHAT? Literally what is there to threaten Anna?

These books are filled with tokenism and then praised for it. The idea of Kamala X Anna has so much potential but they're portrayed in such a toxic way. Throughout the last through books Kamala puts herself through so much guilt and regret and turmoil just for Anna to literally use her, blame her, and cast her aside. And it's so fucking annoying because it pushes this idea that this woman of color who was terrified and in an extremely vulnerable position is in the wrong for choosing her safety and presents them as guilty and shameful for doing such a thing.

I would disagree, the portrayal of racism is bad, because it is used at random points in the story and never brought up again, if you interduce racism take it seriously it's not the kind of thing you're meant to half-ass in a book thousands of people will read

I agree on everything else though, so much of these books are incredibly harmful and they are presented to a young audience so it's overall just a gross situation

Thank you for the ask though! I loved answering this, if you ever have anything else you're more than welcome to come back <3

#kamala joshi #alastair carstairs #cordelia carstairs #tw racism #tw sexualization of minors #tw sexualization #anti anna lightwood #anon #asks #tw swearing #long post #tlh #anti cc #the last hours #let me know if i missed a tag #also let me know if i got anything wrong

[blackjack-15]

No, the Creature’s name is Fraulein’s Monster — Thoughts on: The Captive Curse (CAP)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN, SSH, DOG, CAR, DDI, SHA, CUR, CLK, TRN, DAN, CRE, ICE, CRY, VEN, HAU, RAN, WAC, TOT, SAW

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraphs above, along with my list of previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: CAP, mentions of SAW, mentions of ASH.

The Intro:

The obvious Frankenstein reference in the title of this meta is the only one I make in the whole meta, I swear. It was a mistake to make the monster look like Frankenstein’s Monster, but I’m not gonna drag you guys or the meta down with that.

We’re professionals here.

This is a game with rather big shoes to fill, to be honest — it’s our first game in Germany, comes right after a very well-received “haunting” game and has shades of being a “haunting” game itself, its (small bit of) marketing played off Grimm’s Tales, and Savannah’s comment about staying in a castle where she discovered that the real monster was human cruelty is directly pointing towards it. CAP and its story could have crumpled under the weight of high expectations like MED, MID, and (in a slightly more controversial opinion) SEA did, but instead it did the opposite: in nearly every way, it improved on the Faerietale Formula that SAW inspired, and added to it.

Rather than a spooky haunted faerietale with a Hidden Villain, we have instead a monster — out in the open, even — as our main villain. The difference between ghosts and monsters isn’t really important in, say, a “Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark” or “Goosebumps” book, but it’s fairly important in a mystery, and even more in a Nancy Drew mystery.

As I’ve said a few dozen times in this series — and if you’re not tired of it yet, you will be soon — ghosts are a Reality in the Nancy Drew universe; they exist, they cause trouble, and they sometimes even help the living (or at least coexist with the living).

Monsters, on the other hand, never really exist — not banshees, not werewolves, not malicious wolves with opposable thumbs and the ability to cook poisoned foods, and certainly not monsters that in no way resemble the main villain from a Universal classic horror flick. Monster in the Nancy Drew universe is a Title, not a type of creature. Whenever there’s a monster on the loose, it’s a sure sign that there’s a bitter individual somewhere looking to hurt someone — usually for a personal grudge.

Which, as it happens, is exactly what happened here.

We’re still firmly in a Faerietale game — the ‘Nancy’ games start with ASH — but I do think it’s important to note here that the girls in this game (the victims of the monster, Renate, Anja) are all shadows of Nancy. The previous victims, sharing the designation of the Girl in the Dress with Nancy, are shadows of what could happen to Nancy if she doesn’t change the fate that’s been designated for her — down to the red hair of the original Girl.

Renate is a type of detective, trying to solve the mystery of the tragedies that strike the castle through the actions of the past. And Anja — well, let’s just say that Anja and Nancy have a lot more between then than the first glance might show.

The two women are foiled, especially with their love lives. Nancy’s dating a good man — despite the obvious, glaring problems in the relationship — and so their argument (and her own selfish behavior) isn’t the end of the world, nor the end of the relationship. They stop, they assess, and — with a little help from Anja — Nancy’s determined to try a little harder, leading us straight into ASH. The big thesis statement of the game is delivered, like last game, by our villain — “There’s nothing like love to bring order to a scattered world”. Anja gives Nancy good advice: communicate, and work for what you want.

Anja, however, was not dating a good man; she encouraged him, much like Ned does with Nancy, to be better, to try harder, to really reach for what he could be — only to be cast aside as soon as all the hard work that she had put in to supporting him led to good results. Her world was not scattered before — but after Markus, there was nothing that could put it back together again.

There’s nothing like love, indeed, but when it’s the wrong kind of person…well, the message that Anja took out of it was that somebody, somewhere, should care about her. And if they weren’t going to…well, a tragedy necessitates the force of Fate, and we know what Renate says about fate:

“Fate has a habit of digging in its claws when tempted.”

The last thing I want to touch on in this introduction — which I realize is a bit heavy on themes, but so is the game — is the importance of Titles within this game. The Bürgermeister, The Castellan, The Monster, The Girl in the Dress — this game operates a lot on character tropes, like any self-respecting faerietale, and the titles go a long way to showing who each character is. Karl feels dwarfed and inadequate next to his title; Anja wanted hers so badly that she was willing to lie; the title of Monster strikes fear into the heart of the vast majority of our cast.

And the Girl? The Girl in the Dress is a symbol of helpless fate, a sacrifice to propel the narrative forward. Remember what Renate tells Nancy? “The monster, he is here for you.”

Tellingly, it’s Nancy’s changing of what exactly it means to be The Girl in the Dress that allows our faerietale to meet with a happy ending, rather than a tragedy (the ending normally brought about by Fate, in Renate’s words). In keeping the title but changing the scope of the title, Nancy figuratively beats the Monster, and saves the memory all the Girls that came before.

The Title:

The Captive Curse is, as far as titles go, a masterclass. Nearly all the titles of the 20+ numbers are fabulous, but CAP’s title is a shining star even among them. Let’s talk about the important word in the title — “Captive”.

There are a lot of things that are “captive” in this game. We have the captives of the monster, to start off with, but there’s a lot more where that came from. The residents of the Castle and the castle’s town are also captive — they’re held captive by fear, as evidenced by the doors that refuse to open even when Nancy begs them to.

Shrugging off the idea of keeping this meta even a little bit spoiler-free, I’d also add that Markus is a sort of captive of Anja — there under false pretenses, drawing a web around him to finish him off — and equally that Anja is a captive of Markus’ — the shadow of her dick ex-boyfriend hanging over her dream job, watching him profit off of being a truly terrible person.

Renate and Nancy get in on the action, too. Renate is a captive of guilt, returning to the castle to try to prevent further deaths, haunted by her sister’s early death. She’s also a storyteller — a profession famed for having a “captive audience”. Lastly, Nancy is forced into the costume rather than her own clothes — a captive of the tale that’s being spun by our major players.

The Faerietale

In SAW’s faerietale, Nancy was the visiting prince, the Knight in Shining Armor to look after and save the kingdom. In CAP’s faerietale, however, her role gets changed around — not the least of which because we discover what an actual Knight in Shining Armor really is, courtesy of Renate:

“A knight in shining armor never did nothing for nobody. He never fought. A knight in dented, scraped armor - now that’s what you want.”

This isn’t the cynical take that some might spin it into — the Nancy Drew universe is not and has never been a Nolan-style grimdark-fest, skeptical of any good deed or honest inclination — but instead a declaration that it’s what people do that makes them heroes, that makes them good, that makes them who they are, not what they are (or what they seem to be).

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, in a game exploring what good a Knight in Shining Armor might be, that the series’ resident Knight appears within the context of his fight with Nancy.

Ned in the video games series is the closest to a Knight that we really get; he doesn’t make mistakes, he’s always patient and kind and understanding, and helps out the best he can without being actually on the scene. In other words, his armor has no dents, nor scrapes, not so much by his choice (excepting possibly CRY), but by Nancy’s. By constantly leaving him behind, she’s cast in him his role as Knight in Shining Armor — but, as Renate points out, that’s not necessarily a good thing. Ned has the potential to be and do more — as ASH will show us.

And yes, there’s someone in the series that fits the knight in dented, scraped armor, but this is not the time for a Francy meta. If ever there is a time for Francy meta.

The biggest thing that changes from SAW to CAP is that Nancy’s learned from last time, and starts trying to figure out the faerietale she’s in the minute it starts in earnest. When she hears Renate’s tale, she’s sure she’s figured it out — guessing it was about Renate’s sister — but we’re shown that her perception is a little off (as the girl was Renate, not her sister). This shifting up of the roles is crucial thematically to our ending, where Nancy gleefully assumes the role of the Girl in the Dress as the hero of the piece, rather than the victim that the Girl had always been.

What Nancy happens upon here I’ll cheerfully call the Power of the Storyteller. All faerietales shift and change depending on who’s telling the story — look at the thousands of versions of Cinderella had all over the world, all too old to just be a knockoff of their geographical neighbor’s story or (yes, I’ve heard this) based off the Disney property.

With Anja telling the story for the majority of the game, it’s a tale about how sometimes the “monster” (and her version of a monster, specifically) wins — and how sometimes they deserve to win, to perpetuate the faerietale as it always has been; as Renate reminds us, “when death goes to take a ride, he follows the road that serves him best.” In Anja’s mind, there must always be a Monster, and there must always be a Girl in the Dress. With Nancy taking over the story, however, it’s about how the victim doesn’t have to be the victim, and that they have the power to assume their own destiny.

In other words, they’re playing out the central conflict that Renate outlines in her first discussion with Nancy: “If our time together is a comedy, then I was brought here by coincidence. If our time is a tragedy, then it must be fate.”

Coincidence and fate are also, coincidentally (heh) the driving forces in a faerietale — except that fate is also a driving force for romance. And because romance is our Chief Concern in CAP’s story, a lot of the story is about fighting against fate. In the end, it’s a coincidence that Nancy arrives, but Anja tries to spin it into fate by making her the Girl in the Dress. It’s only when Nancy takes charge, not letting fate have its say, that she arrives at the ending and is able to best Anja.

One of the great questions that this faerietale presents is about the Monster is whether or not it ever existed. In a Faerietale, the Monster nearly always exists in some form or another, needing to be drawn out and killed by our hero(es) before the day can be saved.

Indeed, in Anja’s modern-day retelling of the faerietale, the monster doesn’t exist — at least, not in its Monstrous form. In her story, Markus is the monster, and she must put on the guise of a monster in order to defeat him — in other words, if a monster is going to win, it’s going to be her.

To quote Ned’s astute observation, “[Castle Finster] has too many monsters.”

But it’s Savannah’s words that we should look to, as she’s a Storyteller just as much as Renate is. Savannah, heavily implied to be speaking of Castle Finster, says that the monster she found wasn’t a ghost — it was human cruelty that made the castle and its history so terrifying.

So we’re faced with the question: did the monster ever exist, or was it solely bad people, stealing cattle and sheep and young girls away for their own wicked purposes? Was there truly an amorphous being roaming the countryside, or was it just a clever way to shift blame from those who would do evil unto others? Remember what Renate tells us about monsters:

“The worst monsters are self-made. They are people like you and me, but they have taken a terrible turn. They let everything awful, everything sad, take up all the breathing room in their hearts, until all they know is revenge.”

The answer I would give is that, for this faerietale, it doesn’t matter if the Monster is real or not. The concern is not the nature of the monster, it’s the people’s reaction to the idea of a monster, real or imagined, that sets off our faerietale and provides the stakes. The fear is real and palpable, and the ends of our villain, while understandable and perhaps even praiseworthy, require some downright dastardly means.

The Mystery:

We open first on a look back at a young girl in an Era Past being captured by an unseen monster in the woods near a castle…only to have Nancy drive up on the Castle Finster itself in the modern day. Nancy’s been called in by the owner of the castle, Markus, who wants any troubles with the legendary monster cleaned up before he and his Rich Investor Friends arrive.

Rather than a welcoming piece of history, Nancy is greeted with a scared, unwelcoming town, the fear of the monster looming large and cutting deep — and that’s before the Curse itself turns its eyes on Nancy, forcing her to play along as the Girl in the Red Dress, the favored victim of the monster. Those in the castle are kinder than those outside of it, but there’s still the sneaking suspicion that someone is up to no good, using the guise of the monster to wreak a little havoc of their own invention — and time is running out before the monster claims yet another victim…

As far as the mystery goes…I don’t like to use words like “spectacular” because let’s face it, every game has its holes, but honestly CAP’s mystery is pretty spectacular. Attention-catching, a bit sad, a bit horrific, and loaded with faerietale tropes, subversions, and themes — there’s honestly just not much wrong here, especially given the limitations of, well, making a Nancy Drew game in the first place. The writing does a masterful job at hinting at horrors that, given the rating, they can’t say out loud, while still telling a fully cohesive story that even the young players will be able to grab at and understand (if not to quite the same extent)

The Suspects:

The game begins with Lukas Mittelmeier, so perhaps we should too. Lukas is the rather precocious son of the head of security of Castle Finster, as well as being Anja’s nephew. Bright, mischievous, and a huge fan of games and pranks, Lukas makes the castle a little more interesting — as well as making Karl’s life a bit more hellish.

Unlike another youth living in a castle (coughJanecough), Lukas is bright enough to be a competent culprit…he just isn’t malicious enough. Sure, he’ll play dress-up, spook Karl a bit, and stall Nancy outside the gates of the castle, but that’s really as far as he goes. He would have been an especially poor culprit, thematically speaking, and so it’s a good thing that the game never really attempts to lead you there. Even his dressing up as the monster is more meant to lull the player (and Nancy) into letting down their guard so that the real monster is a bit scarier.

Next up is the Bürgermeister and bad-luck-magnet himself, Karl Weschler. Having encountered his doppelganger as a small child, Karl has expected — and received — bad luck for the rest of his life, and lives in fear of being the cause of unhappiness to those around him. He’s also a board game enthusiast, having developed the (incredibly fun, it should be noted) board game Raid! and enlists Nancy to help him polish it while she solves the “huge monster problem” that Markus hired her for.

As a culprit, Karl would have been interesting, but thematically a little off. It would have had to be a situation where enough bad things happened around him at the castle to make him want to shift the blame, dressing up as the monster in order to throw the punishment off of himself and onto a nebulous force. An interesting plot to be sure, but not one that fits the more sinister nature of the game.

Our charming castellan and cunning culprit, Anja Mittelmeier is next on the docket. Incredibly good at her job, polished, polite, and fiendishly dedicated, Anja keeps the castle in good running order, gives Nancy advice, and is a doting aunt — all while secretly sabotaging Markus by acting as the monster.

I have a lot to say about how good a character Anja is — which I’ll cover more in the next section — but she’s also the perfect villain. All the information you need to figure out who she is happens to be presented to Nancy pretty quickly, but none of it is in the proper context to make it obvious.  Even her line — “there’s nothing like love to bring order to a scattered world” — is sweet and romantic at the time, and rather chilling and menacing when you have the whole context of exactly what Anja is doing to ‘bring order to a scattered world’.

It seems only fitting that after Anja should come Markus Boehm, the owner of the castle and the ex-boyfriend that Anja is working for revenge against. Markus is snappish, short-tempered, obnoxious about his money, and rather boorish — though he has some of the funniest lines in any Nancy Drew game — and is guilty of a lot, though not of haunting his own castle.

Casting Markus as the villain would have made this game an entirely different faerietale, one that would have necessitated Anja becoming The Girl in the Dress rather than Nancy. It might have been a more stereotypical Nancy Drew story, but it also would have been weaker – after all, a lot of the horror in this faerietale comes from the curse having its eyes firmly on Nancy, rather than on her watching it unfold.

Finally, our most divisive character is probably Renate Stoller, a cake-loving storyteller bound to Castle Finster by a mixture of fate and history. Personally speaking, I’m a total fan of Renate; she has a lot of freedom to liken the situation to stories and to spell out the fact that all stories are ambiguous without being morally relativist or faux-deep.

As a villain, Renate would have been interesting — set to haunt the castle that has haunted her for so long and caused her pain — but it would have removed the Storyteller archetype from the game, causing the player (and Nancy) to doubt everything she’s said, which would have been a shame.

The Favorite:

There’s a lot to love in CAP, both big and small, so I’ll try to tackle this section with some sort of organization, rather than just gushing from point to random point.

My favorite moment in the game is (in a stunning change from 90% of Nancy Drew Games) tied between the beginning and the final confrontation. The old-time film style beginning (a great example of a “cold open” of a type of horror totally distinct from SAW’s brand of horror) through Nancy’s first discussion with Karl is tightly paced and incredibly well done, introducing our main problems, a few characters, and how Nancy is stepping into this faerietale that’s been all but prepared for her. Special shout out to Karl’s “huge monster problem” dialogue, and Lukas’ getting caught at the castle’s gates — just some really great, distinct character writing that we normally don’t get this soon into a game.

The confrontation, which is normally somewhat cheesy, sometimes awful, and nearly always ill-supported (HAU being the best/worst example of this) in a Nancy Drew game, here instead shows off Nancy’s quick thinking and almost triumphant, smug nature when she figures it all out and traps the villain. The games coming up, as I’ve mentioned above, I refer to as “the Nancy games”, as they give us a lot of insight into who Nancy Drew actually is, aside from an amateur/burgeoning professional detective, but SAW and (to a larger extent) CAP really start giving us peeks at Nancy’s character — not as an infallible main character, but as a girl with an actual personality.

My favorite puzzle in the game — and I realize that it barely counts — is quite honestly Raid. Normally, the games that HER comes up with as minigames within their games are lackluster at best and criminally annoying at worst, but Raid (along with the games in ASH which are particularly enjoyable) is fabulous; it gives us more of that faerietale vibe that the game runs on, brings in Germany’s well-deserved reputation of being the King of Board Games, and actually contains a few moments of good characterization for Karl as well.

And I’m a sucker for getting to create your own card for the game. That’s just stupid cool.

One of the things that CAP does particularly well is its characters, so let’s talk a bit about them here.

Renate, a common favorite, mostly lives up to her hype, due to her storyteller’s dialogue, status as a Sage (slightly different from the usual Sage in a Nancy Drew game, due to her backstory), and intense relatability with falling asleep after eating cake.

Lukas is one of the few child characters in the ND games that actually feels like a child, so he gets points there automatically, even without noting how charming he is. Having Nancy talk to him under the table is also gold, even with the sense that she’s just humoring him, and having him dress up as a monster in a fake out that fools nobody (and even better, is not meant from a writing standpoint to fool anyone) feels perfectly in character for a relatively unsupervised rapscallion like Lukas.

Last on the favorite character list is Anja, a character done To Perfection. It breaks my heart sometimes that she’s the villain, but her character also wouldn’t be complete without being the villain — nor would I love her so much. Anja is patient, loving, a great aunt, friendly, gregarious — and a villain. Her line when she’s talking to Nancy about how she was honest and worked hard every day, and no one cared hits me every time. Anja’s a perfect example of a character who is intensely sympathetic and quite relatable without ever having the thought that her scheme involving Nancy was even a little bit okay. She’s a villain that I’d love to have come back, whether as a villain again or as a begrudging helper.

Finally, let’s get down to the miscellany.

The dialogue in CAP is pitch-perfect, from the distinct way of talking that each suspect has, to Markus’ insults, to the one-off phone call with the pamphlet company. The game in part is so fun because the dialogue is so fun, walking the line between faerietale-style narration (Anja, Renate) and almost Buffy-speak modernity (Karl, Lukas, Markus).

The last thing I want to touch on it — yes, you knew it was coming — the fight between Ned and Nancy. Yes, I’m a Francy shipper, and I do love that Frank is the one Nancy turns to for help with the fight, but that’s not what this part is about.

First off, I love that problems that would /necessarily/ come up in a relationship like Ned and Nancy’s are brought up here; Nancy’s constant jet-setting, while a common side effect of the job she does, is also something that would cause tension — especially considering that Nancy doesn’t really tell him when she sets off for another state/country at a moment’s notice.

A thing that has become Increasingly obvious over the entire series is that Nancy is, let’s face it, not gonna win any awards for Girlfriend of the Year, and in fact might win the opposite award. Ned is constantly giving her attention, validation, helping out when she calls him, and is understanding when she cancels; for her to not give the same amount of care to him (in different ways, as everyone needs different things, of course) becomes more and more glaring as time goes on.

My firm stance on being a bit anti-Nedcy comes from the belief that Ned deserves to get as much out of a relationship as he puts in, and Nancy, as the person she is and even as the best person that she can be, just can’t provide that. Their needs as people are just too different for a relationship to be fair for either person – and, as this game demonstrates, though Ned has the shorter end of the stick, it’s not fair for either one of them.

The Un-Favorite:

There’s not a lot that goes into this section, to be perfectly honest.

The forest is probably my least favorite section of the game — the part that I consider before starting a new game over — but besides tweaking it slightly to help navigation not be quite so frustrating (see below), even the forest is a pretty good puzzle.

The bag puzzle — especially if you, like me, forget every time that you can rotate the objects in Renate’s purse — is the only other annoyance in the game, and ranks as my least favorite puzzle over the forest simply for the fact that you can use a walkthrough to navigate the forest, while you can’t use a walkthrough to do the bag puzzle for you.

Other than that, CAP is just a wholly solid game — no least favorite dialogue, no awkward moment, no point where I turn down my brightness to make it seem like This Isn’t Happening.

The Fix:

So how would I fix The Captive Curse?

Honestly, the first and only change I would make is to fix the forest just slightly. I get that it’s a puzzle, but it’s not quite visually distinct enough to make it feasible for a lot of players to learn how to navigate. To fix this, I wouldn’t take out the forest, I would just make each piece of it a little more visually distinct, with more markers so that players couldn’t lose their place as easily.

There’s nothing other than that worth fixing. Even my dislike of the bag puzzle isn’t strong enough to suggest scrapping it, and it’s a type of puzzle that many people like and are quite good at — not to mention the fact that it’s not at all gamebreaking in its difficulty.

The Captive Curse is often sort of a “top middle” or just “middle” ranking for a lot of players due to the fact that it’s not quite as showy as a lot of “favorite” games, and thus can get lost in the fandom shuffle. But looking at it as both pieces and as a whole proves that this game is one of the most solid in the series sporting a great mystery, fantastic characters, and more than a little faerietale wisdom to carry to the next story.

#nancy drew #nancy drew games #clue crew #CAP #the captive curse #nancy drew meta #my meta #video games #long post

[pyrrhiccomedy]

hi! hope this isn't a bother, but i've followed you for a while and i have to say i'm just in love with your dnd discussions and what i've seen of your dm style. i recently started dming myself, and i was wondering if you had any advice about tackling a longer campaign? yours seem so fun and well put-together!

So, IN MY CAMPAIGNS I’M NOT SAYING IN EVERY CAMPAIGN, the core loop looks like this:

Problem -> Lead -> Mystery -> Context -> Decision

For example, let’s say the problem is that the party is broke. They get a lead: take this job, you’ll make some money. Taking the job gives them access to a mystery. What is this really about? Why did our employer want us to do this? What is the actual outcome of what we’ve been sent to do? By seeking out the answers to those questions, they learn the context for their actions. (Their employer is actually a rebel, and your attack on this merchant is going to be used to frame the prince for murder!) Knowing the context, they now need to make a decision: side with the rebels who lied to them? Warn the prince for a reward? Rescue the merchant and make a run for it?

Whatever they decide creates a new problem: now you’ve betrayed the rebels, or the Prince suspects you were involved in his disgrace and is coming after you in order to clear his name, or you’re fugitives now with a merchant in tow.

In trying to solve their new problem, they will encounter a new lead. Sometimes they generate their own leads. Either way, the gameplay loop continues.

If you just chain these together, PLMCD->PLMCD->PLMCD, you have a functional campaign that can theoretically run indefinitely. I mean, eventually your characters will level cap, but story-wise, nothing is stopping you from keeping this up forever. 

But to make a campaign that feels big and interconnected and meaningful, you have to connect those loops in more interesting ways. I think of it as nesting them inside each other, and exploding them outwards.

The simplest example of ‘nesting’ loops is the Bioware model of storytelling. Problem: the darkspawn are invading. Leads: 4 dots on the map, each of which contain several other problems you have to solve, with their own leads. While you follow your leads, always in the back of your mind, there is the Mystery: how do you stop the archdemon? Once you are done with all the Leads you have been provided, you are provided with the final piece of Context: the Grey Warden who kills the Archdemon dies, but Morrigan can do a dark sex ritual that will let you get around that. Your Decision, then, is who will kill the Archdemon, and if you’ll take Morrigan’s offer.

It’s not complex, but it works! And it illustrates the importance of having one, overarching PLMCD that encompasses everything else in the story. Everything is tied together by its relationship to the central Problem in the campaign, and adds texture and emotional heft to the final Decision you will be asked to make. You should have one of these.

To make a longer campaign, though, you don’t just want to nest these loops inside each other; you want to have them explode out. That means that your players don’t know what the big Problem is, at the start of the campaign. They lack the context to even realize it exists.

I ran a short Seven Seas campaign where the players, on beginning the campaign, understood the overarching problem of the game to be: the undead are invading Eisen.

They were swiftly presented with a Lead: if one of you masquerades as the last Imperator’s secret child, you can claim the throne, unite Eisen, and repel the undead invasion.

The Mystery following that Lead is: how do we convince the various Eisenfursts to vote for us? What are their real agendas? How do we deal with our political rivals?  Great, the players think. That’s what the campaign must be about. Let’s get started.

But they were also presented with a few other Mysteries, that didn’t seem connected to their quest to become Imperator. Like: what’s with this mysterious pale young man, who seems to draw the undead to him like moths to a flame? And: was the last Imperator somehow responsible for the undead invasion? How, exactly, did he die?

And they were also very quickly presented with a completely different Problem, that seemed to have no connection to the Problem of the undead invasion: Dragons were returning to Eisen.

In pursuing all of these things in tandem, they eventually gained enough Context to realize that actually, it didn’t matter who became Imperator, and the dragons returning was just a side-effect: the real Problem was that the great sage Mirabeau was breaking the banks of the rivers of Hell in an attempt to flood the gates of Heaven. Her action had set all of those other Problems the players had been dealing with into motion: they just never had the context until now to realize what tied all of these things together.

Having identified the actual, campaign-encompassing Problem, they were left with the ultimate Decision: work with Mirabeau and take Heaven by force, no matter the cost? Or stop her, and protect the people of Eisen from a terrible war - but remain imprisoned in a world without magic or potential for transcendence?

That was a PLMCD loop exploding outward.

I knew this would be a pretty short campaign, because actually, identifying the Real Actual Overarching Problem was not that hard, and once identified, it did not create any new problems. It was designed to be a 6 month campaign, and it was pretty much on track before I decided to end it early because playing online wasn’t working out for our group.

Our VtM campaign was 2 years long, and involved several instances of stories exploding outward, which then often led to whole new nested loops going inward, where realizing what the Real Problem was just created new problems, and investigating those problems sometimes led them to realize that the Real Problem wasn’t even the Real Problem, this all led into something even bigger.

I don’t know if any of this is helpful to read.

My point, I guess, is that the deeper you bury the Real Problem behind mysteries, other problems, and most importantly, a need for greater context, the longer your campaign will be. The more complexity you weave into these loops, the more time your players will need to actually gain a full, holistic understanding of the core challenge in front of them: by which time, they hopefully will have levelled up enough to deal with it.

#dice matters #dm stuff #Anonymous

[allsassnoclass]

astronomy in reverse

Pairing: Roy English/Calum Hood Rating: T for language Word Count: 2016 Read on AO3

Summary: Roy and Calum go stargazing

Calum has learned more about the night sky in the past year than he has in his entire life leading up to that point.  He attributes nearly all of his new knowledge to increased time with Roy.  When the world stopped turning, Calum was suddenly confined to the house rather than a tour bus, for better or for worse.  To an extent he’s glad: Roy and Duke are home, which is a pretty big silver lining.  While he’s missed making music with the band and hearing venues erupt with fans screaming their lyrics and even the constant feeling of miles and miles of road disappearing under his feet, long walks with Duke and long nights spent wrapped up in his boyfriend have more than made up for it.

His favorite nights involve gazing at the sky while Roy talks about astrology or astronomy or cosmology or philosophy or spirituality or anything he fancies.  One thing that Calum loves about Roy is that he’s always coming up with new, interesting ideas about the world.  The first night they spent alone together in Bali was an exploration in thought that he could never have anticipated but was enraptured by nonetheless.  He doesn’t remember the specifics of what they talked about, but he remembers that he fell in love a little, and even though both of them have different thoughts now, that initial spark has never gone away.

“It’s going to be a clear night,” Roy says while they’re eating leftovers for dinner on the couch, Calum keeping a careful eye on Duke so he doesn’t lunge for his plate.

“Yeah?” he asks.  Roy clicks his tongue at Duke and offers him a potato chip, allowing Calum to relax and take a bite of his own food.

“Mars should be visible,” Roy says.  Calum watches fondly as he scratches Duke behind the ears.  The sun hasn’t set yet, and the natural light highlights his face in a warm glow.  Roy is always sunny, even in the dead of winter or in the middle of a rainstorm, like he’s somehow able to trap rays within his skin so he can shine in every context.  Looking at him grinning down at Duke now, Calum feels lucky that the universe aligned to bring them all together.

“Do you want to go out for it?” he asks.  Their backyard is far enough from the heart of the city that they can see the North Star most nights, but Roy has found a place a reasonable drive away that lets them put together more constellations.

Roy smiles at him in response, giving Duke an opening to lunge for more chips.  Dinner dissolves into a battle to corral an unruly dog acting more like a puppy than an old man for once in his life, but Calum doesn’t mind as long as he can hear Roy’s loud laugh and keep seeing him shine.

-/-

They head out once they clean up the mess in the living room.  The sun is beginning to set, painting the sky in pastels and lengthening all of the shadows in corners of the city.  Their destination is a hill in the middle of a park, a frequently visited little haven, but Calum is happy to see that they’re the only people there tonight.  They park the car and Calum grabs a blanket kept in back.  It’s a nice evening: cool but not cold, skies clear with an occasional gentle breeze.  Crickets and the rare bird call tickle his ears as Roy grabs his hand as they walk, tilting his head up to look at the moon, a bright spot half-full even while the last of the sun’s rays illuminate the sky.  He doesn’t let go when they reach the peak of the hill, leaving Calum to try to spread the blanket on the grass one-handed.  It doesn’t work, and Roy laughs at him before taking pity and helping.

“It’ll be more helpful if you’d let go,” Calum says as they tug on different corners and try to lay the blanket down in sync.

“It’s important to challenge yourself.”

“Fuck off,” Calum laughs as Roy pulls him down onto the blanket next to him, holding their hands safely in his lap.  Calum turns his gaze to the sky, quickly landing on the moon again.  He lays down and settles in, pulling Roy down with him by their joined hands so he can talk to him easier while they wait for all of the stars to come out.

“Do you think aliens exist?” Roy asks after they’ve laid in quiet for a few minutes tracing the craters of the moon with their eyes.

“Yes,” Calum says automatically.  He glances at Roy, harder to see now that the sun has fully set, but the upward angle of his lips is still visible.

“Why?”

“The universe is fucking huge,” Calum says.  “There’s no way that there isn’t other life out there.  It might not be recognizable to us, but I don’t think our little world is that unique.  We just haven’t expanded our search enough.”

“If it’s not recognizable to us, is it still life, or is it something else?” Roy asks.  Calum hums.

“I guess it depends.  If we can’t recognize it as life then we probably wouldn’t consider it alive as a society, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t.”

Roy smiles wider, the way he does when Calum has a thought he particularly likes.

“Scientists talk about life-cycles of stars from birth to death despite not considering them living organisms like us, but I think that’s because subconsciously we know that we’re all the same.  We’re all connected.  Just because stars don’t breathe doesn’t mean they can’t be alive.”

“So the stars are aliens?” Calum asks, finding Polaris above them.

“Maybe none of us are aliens,” Roy says.  “‘Alien’ implies ‘other,’ and there is no other.  All of our differences are arbitrary, but at the core everything comes from the same place.  Scientists said we’re made of the same things as stars.  We’re part of the same universe and the same collective unconscious.  Why shouldn’t that extend to the other creations we share the universe with?”

Calum hums.  He gazes at the stars and tries to imagine them as alive.

“What about our phones and guitars and stuff?” he asks.  “There are non-living things in the world.  Where do you draw the line?”

Calum can feel Roy shrug next to him.

“Somewhere between stars and guitars,” he says.  “Maybe stars are part of a bigger life.  The Creator’s synapses.”

“And us?”

“His favorite creations.  You are, at least.  He definitely should be proud of what he did there.”

Calum glances at him.

“Are you trying to use God to flirt with me?”

Roy smiles, still bright in the dark.

“Just telling the truth.  Well, as much of the truth as we can be certain of.”

“It’s called the truth because we’re certain of it.  Everything else is called a mystery.”

Roy shakes his head.  “You can figure out mysteries without having a definite truth.  What I thought was a definite truth before could be something different now.”

Calum considers.

“And if I said that grass is green?”

“Fuck off,” Roy laughs.  “I’m talking about bigger things.  Truths of the universe in philosophy or religion.  Things where truth is dependent on belief rather than something provable.”

“Alright, alright,” Calum concedes.  “I get what you’re saying.”  Roy squeezes his hand.  Calum squeezes back, a silent transaction that makes him smile.

“Look,” Roy says after a moment, pointing with their joined hands up at the sky.  “Boötes.  Did you know that ancient cultures had different names for this constellation, but lots of stories for it call him a herdsman of some sort?  More evidence of the collective consciousness and human unity.”

Calum hums, because he has heard that before.  Boötes is Roy’s favorite constellation because he likes saying the name. Calum’s favorite is one that they made up when they were out in the desert celebrating Ashton’s album release. It’s hard to see this close to the city, and it’s probably only really visible in the fall anyway, but it making it was one of his favorite memories from the fall, both of them sitting in the same lounge chair and gazing up at a sky more luminous than this one, picking out different shapes and forming outrageous stories behind them.

They do a lot of storytelling in their house.  Songwriting is its own form of storytelling, of course, but they also do more traditional sorts, recounting things from their day or sitting together entertaining each other with their imaginations.  It’s an exercise in creativity, stretching different muscles that songwriting doesn’t always hit or that Calum doesn’t think to use in everyday life, and he feels like he’s better for it.  If nothing else, it’s saved him from boredom in quarantine and has kept him from traveling in circles in his head.

“Hey,” Roy says, “what do you think happens when we die?”

Calum could never be bored with Roy around.

They spend more time discussing various questions and secrets in hushed voices under the cover of the sky, staring at the specks of stars far above them.  Roy points out which speck should be Mars once he’s fairly certain he doesn’t have it wrong, raising their joined hands to the sky for Calum to follow, and Calum uses sightlines as an excuse to shift closer.

Roy knows that it’s bullshit, but Calum gets a kiss for his troubles.

They trade a few more words back and forth before fading into silence.  Calum stares at the sky and listens to Roy’s gentle breathing next to him and the crickets hidden somewhere in the grass.  He takes his own deep breath of the crisp night air, as fresh and clear as it gets near LA, and feels any lingering tension from the day leave his body.  Out here, cuddled up to the man he loves and watching glittering pieces of celestial gas that might have burnt out already, it’s hard to feel like any of the things that typically bother him matter.  There’s something to be said about contextualizing his problems against the entire universe, and there’s something to be said about doing that while trying to unwrap the universe with Roy.

When they delve into these sorts of talks, Calum always walks away with a worse understanding of the universe and a much better understanding of Roy.

Maybe that’s the point.  Maybe humans aren’t meant to reveal the secrets of the universe, but rather to reveal their own secrets to each other.  Calum knows the way that Roy thinks now.  He knows why he loves the stories he does and how he views himself in relation to the rest of humanity.  He understands Roy’s compassion and his love for the world they’re in.  He knows who Roy is, and he knows a little more every time Roy asks him about things that Calum can only guess at.

He’s never felt like he knows anyone quite like he knows Roy.  It’s more than the fact that they’re roommates and Calum knows what brand of toothpaste he uses and how he takes his coffee.  It’s like Roy is a distant star, and Calum keeps twisting his telescope further into focus, and he knows that it goes the same way.  Roy knows how he likes his eggs and which bass is his favorite, but he also knows the inner workings of Calum’s thoughts.  He knows the way their hands fit perfectly together and when they have to let go to avoid them getting uncomfortably sweaty.

He glances at him, profile barely discernible in the dark.

“Hey,” he says quietly.  Roy’s head tips towards him, breaking his staring contest with the sky.  “I love you.  I’m glad the universe let me know you.”

Roy doesn’t say anything, just brings Calum’s hand to his lips and kisses it, and they go back to watching the sky together, existing in a tiny pocket of space carved just for them and the stars.

#my writing #roylum #5sos fic #don't really have anything to add to this one #shout out to megs for asking if there was a screenshot when i got grumpy about the insta post this is based on being deleted

[bonniebennettkingdom]

I just seen ur klonnie recommendations and i'm going through them as we speak! (well typing if you want to be specific lol) but those specific authors, I seen u post them quite a lot of their fics in other posts. What makes them stand out to you? Not as a random, but as writers. what made u want to keep going back to their stories. Are their other authors u enjoy other than them? If so, could u recommend them??? I trust ur taste 😉 Luv ur blog by the way ♥️

Across the board, they are very different authors with a very different style. However, they all have in common the beauty of their prose. If you read any of their fic, it is first of all very poetic. In addition, their stories are very unique in their tone, the characterisation is perfect. The emotions are felt through each word.

If you ever read as a sacrificial lamb you are by the irishcookie, who it is mainly smut ( not really but fandom wise people would say it .) It is steal a beautiful poetic read. The character have a voice, and even the plot who is not the strong suit of most "smut fic" shines by how it fits the character.

When you read In nomine frater by Elsac2, It is so well crafted together. There is a palatable conflict, and when it culminates to the end, you don't know what to do of yourself. It also read like classic literature.

Or Kiss by fire by the hedgerider is a trip into regency world and the mythology is so precise. The world building of that fic is amazing. The characterisation is flawless. The prose is beautiful.

The devil's companion by Six2VII is a work of art. The dystopian nature of the premise is original and well executed. Nothing is rushed in that fic. You understand the character motivation.

At the edge of a golden world by writendelete is another fic with amazing world building. It also has a realism of the period. Many like to write fic into an historical period with very modern thought on social behaviours. In that fic klonnie fits the historical context.

Hell with you by the fudge is grumpy is a sensory experience. It is a very visual fic. It is a good take on klonnie dark fic, and it does not fall into the tvd cliché of dark fic ( insert Bonnie goes dark and try BDSM. Powerful Bonnie turns coat and side with the bad vampire. Bonnie tells Elena off. )

Now Mrs Mikaelson by cheleonrage712 is a piece of art when it comes to pacing and each line leads to knowing what is going with Bonnie. It goes back and forth between present future and past without losing itself or the reader along the way. Again the prose is work of a fairy.

A case of you by Anastasia G, take the most over used trope in every single fandom aka the accidental marriage then it switches it in a unique piece. It is melancholic at time, and sometime it is hopeful. The characters exist in each words.

So to summarise it is how unique their stories are in a sea of repetitive trope and plots. The good characterisation, the beautiful writing, the right emotional tone, and the artistry make them very good writers.

Now, other authors who also have that unique mixtures. I have four favorites right now.

fireismyelement97

She builds amazing words through her fics, and she might be the only one who does not use Kennett as a prop for klaroline.

Sweet-Tahira

Everyone who reads bamon fic can point out a pattern. Storytelling is often sacrificed for sensationalism and some version of Bonnie being a snow flake deserving more than Elena. Sometimes, it feels more like an Anti-elena fic than a Bamon fic, but it never happens in her fic. Bonnie's growth is the focus. Bamon is forth and centered. Plus amazing prose.

TalulaJones

Her fics would speak for themselves. Resurrection is one of the best klonnie fic, which I read. Her bamon fics are the best in all bamon fandom. She writes beautifully. The characterisation is top notch.

Make A Shadow

She is my favorite bonkai writer ( actually the favorite of all three admins. We don't post more of her fic because they are T rated and this is a blog for Mature content) the emotional depth of her fic is amazing. Her story are gripping. She captures the perfect tone for Bonkai.

Admin M ( I answered the previous ask, and so I guess this one was for me.)

#klonnie #kennett #bonkai #bamon #tvd fic

[munchies-for-thought]

The reason your favorite character is flawed and how it changed how I saw my life

Jun 18, 2020

Context: I’m a huge fan of the anime “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure”. (Reading Part 6 pls don’t spoil kthx bai). Don’t worry. You don’t even have to know about anime to get my message. It’s just the example closest to me.

The revelation behind each flaw

Rohan Kishibe is a character that is incredibly talented as a manga artist. He is so obsessed in his craft that he goes to terrifying and ethically questionable extents to get inspiration for his stories. Sometimes a villain, sometimes a hero. His art is everything for him. Well worth risking his or someone else’s life. He is generally a good guy, and wishes good upon the world. He just won’t go out of his way to make it happen. He is also defeated almost immediately after we meet him.

Rohan Kishibe is indeed one of my favorite characters of all times for a multitude of reasons, yet when describing him, he clearly is a flawed character. Yet this is NOT about him. While you read this blog, please think on the coolest fictional character you can think of. Do you have one in mind? Can you answer the following about your favorite character?

Has your favorite character failed?

Has he been hurt badly?

Are some things out of his control?

Do most people in his world generally understand the struggle they go through?

You’ll see when comparing with friends that we mostly agree on these answers even when thinking on different characters. The interesting truth lies in the common factor behind these answers, and learning a bit from the power of good storytelling.

One of the most precious things that I have gained from playing videogames, watching anime and playing Dungeons & Dragons all my life, is the first-hand knowledge of the power of a good story. Although it is in the HOW you make a good story, where I found this revelation that helped me so much.

What I am trying to say might be simple and even obvious when read, but not truly understood. If you bear with me a bit longer, I will attempt not to say, but to explain. I’ll show you the building blocks of how I learned so you truly understand as I did.

Dungeon and Dragons’ Character Backgrounds

The first time I made a new character in Dungeons and Dragons (Drow Elf Bard btw) I was blown away when I found out that whereas you get to pick from options that greatly impact your likelihood of winning, you also had to pick background and personality options that held no significant impact on your success.

You could choose to be a triumphant noble, a devote acolyte, a successful guild merchant or even a lying charlatan. Hell, if you wanted to you could even pick an orphan who had lost it all in the edgiest way known to man!

The book was also quite good at giving you specific quirks that brought that character to life. All of this happened because D&D is focused on group storytelling. Everyone wants your character to be interesting so their adventure gets 10x cooler when their complex characters interact with yours in intriguing and unexpected ways.

For example:

The secret beauty behind flaws

I was just a tad... confused. I had to chose a flaw? Why would I want to do this? All of these options look just like ugly parts of your character’s personality and could easily affect them negatively within the story.

Was this a balancing feature? A rule simply put there to make you less awesome, so no one is too overpowered? I just could NOT wrap my head around it. I couldn’t understand how this could make things fun. They were ruining my character.

It was until I started maturing as an individual and learned more about game design and storytelling that I started to appreciate how genius that was. No one cares for the story of perfect, bland, basic individuals who always succeed and have never made mistakes before. Because that is not real, it doesn’t work for an interesting story if there’s no sadness. If there’s no pain, you can just simply look away.

It was to be expected of the game designers of the best roleplaying game in the world to know that having flaws, failures, challenges, weaknesses, mistakes, all of them are ESSENTIAL for a great story to be told!

Was there a moment in your favorite character’s story where his failures and his pain made you love them on a whole new level? Aren’t those failures what drives your characters to become who they are? Would it be a better story if they had always succeeded?

So who is this Rohan Kishibe and, as an artist, what is his take on good storytelling?

Rohan’s Philosophy

Not only is Rohan a good example of a flawed character, but he also has a very interesting philosophy. He is a famous and wealthy manga artist. You’ve got to understand that, to Rohan, his craft is EVERYTHING. It is the thing he does best and what defines him.

Let me just show you one quote of his, so you understand his artistic philosophy:

“Reality is the energy that breathes life into a piece of work, and reality itself is entertainment. People often think that manga are drawn from imagination and fantasy, but that’s not actually true! For me, drawing something that i’ve experienced, or something that has moved me, is what makes it interesting!”

His pursuit for inspiration is so great, that he constantly goes to insane lengths to gain inspiration. This unrelenting desire is why he was originally a villain. Yet even when the protagonist defeated him, all Rohan could think of was of how this set of unfortunate and unlucky events was within itself a hell of a REAL story to use as inspiration. He saw value even in his misfortune as long as it was honest, untapped, unadulterated and pure reality.  That’s his trade secret as a famous and successful storyteller.

Understanding reality, storytelling and our identity

Warning: We’re about to get metaphysical. You might wanna take that bong hit right now. You’ve been warned.

Talking about reality is like opening Pandora’s box. It is such a massively complex topic that before we can even get to the nitty-gritty of it, let’s just agree on the following for the sake of this conversation:

Depending on how skeptic you are, reality could be mostly subjective or arbitrarily objective. So just follow my lead on this one and match your understanding with mine at least while you read this blog.

NO ALTERNATIVE UNIVERSES OR REALITIES

Fate is merely the belief that there is a predestined way things will happen no matter what. Since its only requirement is also its only consequence, (which is also impossible to prove) then even thinking on fate is pointless or even harmful to an individual as it removes agency from himself and turns him into a bystander in his own life.

Facts are limited to the provable physical world. If you can’t prove it, you don’t KNOW it is real, but you could still believe it to be real.

Our understanding of ourselves, comes partly from how others perceive us and their own subjective view of reality.

As mere humans we don’t completely control reality, but we control how it affects us.

Your own experiences and passions have a gargantuan influence on your interpretation of reality.

Storytelling could be simplified as “the way in which reality is described”.

Changing how you tell a story doesn’t change the facts.

That last one sounds a bit anticlimactic doesn’t it? Specially since we’ve talked so much about storytelling just to find out it can’t change reality. You might even wonder if its uses are only limited to art?

Fret not! This is where it all starts coming together.

My story

Before you disregard storytelling as just an art form, or an overglorified logbook, let’s think outside of the box and take a few leaps with me. Let me show you when was it that it clicked for me:

“Just when the COVID-19 lockdown was about to begin, I was at one of my lowest. I’ve always been someone very adamant on living life as he sees best. Even when friends or family wouldn’t understand my decision, I would still pursue my own path. I was proud of this and felt it made me immune to what other people thought. Yet, years of failed relationships were starting to make me doubt myself.

After an emotional breakdown at Denny’s after being stood-up (Great story for another day) I started worrying that the problem might be me. I’ve always been open to feedback as long as it makes sense to me in a logical way, but I had built so much thought behind who I was, that I didn’t even consider that maybe, I was more flawed than what I had originally assessed.

Maybe if all these bad things kept happening to me, there was a constant behind it all. Judging by the fact that these happened throughout the span of years and with different people, it was only reasonable to assume I was the only constant. Maybe my relationships, both in love and in friendship, were failing not because of individual and complex reasons, but because I was involved in all of them.

Maybe I just won’t build close friends or a family, but I guess I can still find a way to enjoy life. It’s just a lonely life, a very lonely life, but it’s best to face reality head on. That’s what I have always taught myself, right? It would be foolish not to do so when the answer is an inconvenient one. It’s still reality. Better get used to it I guess.”

Wow, that went to a very dark place didn’t it? It’s crazy looking at it in retrospective, but while it happened, it really felt like that was just the facts. I sucked at friends and love. That was just the cold hard reality to me. I mused:

“It’s like if I was a D&D character with low charisma doomed to suck at social encounters... “

and then a sudden realization froze me to the core...

Even if by mere accident, I ended up thinking of myself as a D&D character. Remember all that talk about flawed characters? Well, what if I would see myself as a flawed character? We already agreed that the best characters fail, struggle, suffer, cry, rage, and they make mistakes!

It’s like I had opened a whole new dimension that brought new light into who I was. Those weren’t horrible memories of things that broke me down and I wish no one would ever find out anymore. Those were just wild chapters on the bizarre adventure that is my life. These are badges of honor of what my very own story is!

Storytellers are already influencing your reality

I won’t stand here and tell you that everything bad happens for a good reason. Please be careful not to take the wrong message out of this. That wasn’t what I realized at that moment. I finally was able to see that there were two storytellers that had been affecting me all my life, and I hadn’t really seen their influence before!

Let me unmask these two powerful beings that through their storytelling, had changed my reality.

Powerful Storyteller #1 - Those close to you

Did you notice how the story that I was listening from my friends and love interests was sounding aggressively negative towards my self-value? I thought I didn’t care but I was indeed interpreting my life through their stories.

Since we already understand that we each have our own interpretation of life, good and wrong, then it’s not that hard for us to understand that we will never fully agree on what’s cool. Some of us love things that most people don’t even understand. So when they talk to you, they are inadvertently telling you a story about how you’re weird, instead of fascinating.

If only you could have friends or people who DID understand you, then maybe the stories about you would be seen in a much more positive light. It’s not your friends fault for not understanding, you were just asking something unreasonable from them.

Get yourself surrounded by those who are weird like you. You’ll notice that for the right crowd, you’re just the coolest person just for being who you are. That feeling is just invigorating in every sense.

Powerful Storyteller #2 - Yourself

Back in my story, you can see how I took a lot of my own “interpretations” as “facts” or even “reality” when I told myself my own story. You could have just as well told my same story but in a different way with a much more positive light:

“My relationships did fail, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect on my self-worth. I can continuously fail but love the fact that I’m the type of character that is still hopeful and positive even after repeatedly failing and suffering pain each time.”

It’s important you understand what makes you cool as a character. Because it is your job to tell yourself the story of who you are, what you’ve done, and who you will be. You have already been doing so for as long as you can remember, so you don’t even notice it anymore. You are STILL, to this day, re-telling yourself your story and changing how you feel about some parts of it.

What can we do about it?

So if you already are in charge of such a crucial and delicate task, why don’t you apply what we’ve learned so far? Can’t you see how you as the audience (from your own storytelling) would feel when seeing your main character in emotional pain? Don’t you feel empathy and love towards it because of all it has struggled?

You have the power to choose whether or not you will tell your story as the sad log of things you suck at, or as the crazy adventures of someone who’s just trying to do their best. Someone who is AWESOME because you do understand why he gets so excited when talking about that thing, and why he is so disappointed that that other thing didn’t work out again.

Those dark painful memories are beautiful crystallizations of true art! You already have what Rohan Kishibe is willing to kill to get. You already have an amazing REAL story, you now just have to use your storytelling skills to make yourself some justice, and talk about yourself like the amazing character you are when you tell that story to yourself next time you go to sleep.

At least when it comes to my story, well, the only reason why I would ever even think of writing a blog this long, is because I’ve changed the way I tell my story. I firmly believe that most people will never even have the opportunity to read this, but I have also seen value in these thoughts even if there’s no one besides myself who will listen to my story. If anything, at least I hope my story helps you love your character a bit more, just how I have learned to truly appreciate mine.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening to my story. I would always love to hear yours.

#metaphysical #storytelling #i am flawed #rohan kishibe #self esteem #d&d #story #manga #anime #mine #jojo #jojo part four #dungeons and dragons #dnd #anonymous blog #character design #Weed Smokescreen #third world country #metaphysics #flaw #mistakes #pain #suffering #failiure #past #society #mental health #life advice #wisdom #psychology

[reylorabbittrail]

Long, Barely Coherent Thoughts about The Rise of Skywalker

Since some of you wanted to hear my thoughts about “The Rise of Skywalker”, I’ve taken some time to write them up and provide context for why I responded the way I did.

A small preamble: I didn’t hate it. Hate is a strong word. And there were moments that I liked. Some that I even loved. However, the aggregate feeling for the movie overall was disappointment. For certain elements, it went beyond that into something genuinely painful and I don’t think that will make sense unless I also go into why I loved the previous two installments of this trilogy.

Also, if you loved this movie, I’m very happy for you. This is about my personal response to a piece of media and I make no judgements on those who enjoyed what you saw. I wish I could join you.

Finally, I will be talking about some sensitive subjects, including child loss and abuse. Please be aware of that before reading further.

Okay, so what was my overall impression of The Rise of Skywalker?

Soulless. Cowardly. Incoherent. Badly paced.

I spent large portions of the movie unable to get into the action because the pacing was so breakneck. There was no time to breathe. Consequently, there was never enough time to recover from one rush before another started. If everything is exciting, nothing is.

I think that this was a deliberate choice to cover up the lack of sense behind the exposition. Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron looks dead inside as he temporarily takes up the mantle of Basil Exposition to explain that somehow or other, Emperor Palpatine has returned and there’s a hard time limit on destroying his fleet.

This is a fine example of a running problem throughout the movie. Whereas both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi used visual storytelling to move the story forward, things in TROS were explained through dialogue time and again. And the dialogue was incredibly clunky.

But back to the story. We are given a paper thin explanation of the Emperor’s return, and immediately are thrown into a fetch quest to find the Big Bad. I’m sure it will make an exciting video game adaptation.

The thing though is that the fetch quest makes no sense. One of the wayfinders is found in the first two minutes of the movie. Yes, it’s in the hands of the bad guys. But does the audience not remember that our heroine is bound to the villain? Why couldn’t she try to use that bond to get at the directions? Why does the Resistance not try to use that bond? Has she hidden from them her connection to Kylo Ren? Either she’s built up a wall of mistrust between her found family and herself by keeping the bond a secret, or she’s revealed all and no one thinks to try to use that bond to their advantage. It’s just conveniently overlooked.

Oh, a sidenote. Wayfinder. Why? There is an in-universe word for such objects already. It’s a holocron. Why not use holocron? We throw Star Wars-isms at the audience all the time. It would be an Easter Egg to the diehards while not bothering the general audience one iota.

Back to our fetch quest. We head to the desert planet of Pasaana. There’s a festival going on. A festival about family. Rey looks longingly at children and infants. A child gives her a fertility necklace. And then suddenly she’s connected by her bondmate through the force.

Now it’s no secret that the Rey and Kylo dynamic is one of the reasons I loved the first two movies in the trilogy. The actors have great chemistry. More importantly, the characters have interesting conflict. And yet that conflict seems off in this movie. TLJ left them complicated enemies. But they feel out of character. I don’t understand what each is trying to get out of their encounters. I have to do massive amounts of work to understand their actions and the dialogue doesn’t help. Because it doesn’t ring true.

Setting such details aside, Kylo rips off the necklace in a moment worthy of the Phantom of the Opera and for once it’s an action that makes sense, having both the subtext of obsessive love and jealousy, and the text of offering a clue for analysis to Rey’s location. Bravo. The writers did something right.

Meanwhile, we get a clunky reintroduction of Lando Calrissian. Has he been stuck on this desert for over 7 years? Longer? We just don’t know and he doesn’t tell us. Our heroes hitch a ride and then we get a fun speeder chase.

Okay, a couple more questions. There’s some good stuff here. The omnipresence of the First Order helps convey how thorough their control is. But why doesn’t Rey hotwire the speeder? It was established two movies ago that she’s a good mechanic. And on Jakku that kind of skill makes sense. Why hand that off to Poe? And why this Trio stuff. It’s fanon. We have just been assuming that Finn’s best friends would form the new Han, Luke, and Leia. Because reasons. None of them textual. It was a failure of TFA to not establish this dynamic if this was an essential element of Star Wars that had to be there from the start.

Which gets to the heart the problem in fandom which is that Star Wars is different  for every fan. What is essential to the series is subjective. For me, Star Wars is light sabers, hyperspace, the Force, epic battles, strange world with one biome only per world. So I’ve never felt like something was missing. But if an essential element was a very particular character dynamic (like a good guy Trio), then I can see why some fans felt let down. As if all the pieces were there but never got put together.

Back to Pasaana. We have a brief descent into the underworld in which Rey has a moment of true Jedi compassion and is rewarded when her compassion for the monster leads to an exit from said underworld. Nice. Mythically coherent. And hey, we also get one of the MacGuffins we’ve been searching for, so, bonus.

 Now we get the arrival of Kylo and his backup band. What was the point of these dudes? I mean, they look cool and I can’t wait to edit videos of them to classic NKOTB. But narratively, why are they there? Why did Kylo reforge the mask? Why all these questions in the third act when we should be in the process of tying up loose ends.

Rey, in a moment reminiscent of bull leaping from Crete, goes out to stall them? I guess? And then ends up in a battle of wills with Kylo that leads to her inadvertent use of Force Lightning.

Okay, another side trip. Are they trying to make out that Dark Side Powers are genetic? Because that’s all I can figure. Really, it’s kind of gross because it suggests that darkness isn’t a human trait that we all carry and must confront, but rather that Rey’s specific problem is a dark legacy. Which, that’s Kylo’s story. He’s the one grappling with the legacy of Vader and how that led his family to fear his darkness rather than aid him in confronting it.

Anyway, we have Rey briefly thinking she’s killed Chewie and that sets our heroes off to our next quest location and another set of problems: Why did we make the Latino man a drug runner and car thief? No, this isn’t just putting an unneeded real world spin on the universe. This is about narrative consistency. Because in a bid to make Poe Dameron an ersatz Han Solo, they broke his actual in-universe back story that had been established in comics and novels. That Poe Dameron was a pilot in the New Republic Navy, the child of war heroes Kes Dameron and Shara Bey. He grew up on Yavin IV. When did he have time to be a smuggler? He’s only a few years older that Ben Solo.

See Lucasfilm has a Story Group that is supposed to help keep narrative consistency between the various media released. And I can’t help shake the feeling that the Story Group was ignored or stonewalled. To please who? The fans? Which fans? Because I would be under the impression that the fans who read the novels and the comics, who dig the trivia aspects of the universe, would be the first to desire the universe to remain coherent.

The Kijimi stuff is fun. Babu Frik is adorable. C3PO is touching. There’s good moments. There really are.

We now go to the infiltration of the Star Destroyer (Does it have a name? Nerds, help me out here. Usually I know this sort of thing.) Again, good moments. I like the implication that Rey’s Force Powers disturb Poe, but it’s never brought up again. One of dozens of Chekhov’s guns left unfired. This is incredibly sloppy in the plotting. Hux is the mole!?! Fun. Yet, again, wasted. And out of character, but I’m sure that’s not going to bother the general audience. Rey gets caught sneaking around in Kylo’s bedroom? Priceless, and some good imagery (smashing the altar to Vader) combined with incredibly clunky dialogue and some more serious questions that never get answered.

The whole time Kylo thought Vader was talking to him it was Palpatine? Why the hell does he still have that mask on a pedestal? He just couldn’t bear to get rid of a collectible? He hadn’t had time to konmari yet? And just what does smashing the pedestal symbolize? Is this the start of Kylo breaking free? We’ll probably never know.

Rey escapes on the Falcon. After getting the worst character reveal in the Saga. I’m sorry. Rey Palapatine is just dumb. I liked that she was a nobody. It allowed her to be the Forces solution to the manipulation and abuse heaped upon the Skywalkers. She was brought into the story and bound to the last scion of House Skywalker as a corrective. She wasn’t overpowered. (No really. She executed a few very basic Jedi skills in the first two movies, none of them exceptional.) And her skill level makes sense the moment you understand that she is bound to Ben Solo. She is literally downloading his training. She can do what he can do. Even her fighting style mirrors his. Fun fact: if you watch the scene in The Last Jedi where she’s practicing sword forms on Ach-to, and compare them to Kylo in his duel with Luke, they’re identical. To a move. Rey is powerful because the Force chooses its vessels. No one was asking who Mace Windu’s parents were. Or Ki-Adi Mundi’s. But Rey is skilled because a very clear in universe device means she has access to Ben Solo’s mind and that included every skill he ever learned.

Alrighty, so now our team is on to the next step in the quest, the ocean moon of Kef Bir, one of the many moons in the Endor system. (No, it’s not the Forest or Sanctuary Moon with the Ewoks.) We meet Jannah, another wasted character. She is pretty and could have been cool. But she exists for us to realize that Finn is probably Force Sensitive and that he broke conditioning not due to innate morality but because he’s not a Muggle.

Which brings me to my gripe with how Finn’s character was treated. He spent the whole movie running around shouting Rey. That’s it. That’s his arc. I don’t mind that he can feel the Force. But I feel like his development was regressed. He had a clear character arc in the first two movies. From a man running away from responsibility to one willing to fight for a friend, to a man willing to commit to cause. This movie should have had him building on that, and perhaps like Moses returning to free the rest of the Stormtroopers who are canonically child soldiers brainwashed into fighting for the bad guys.

Back to the plot. Rey takes off for the Death Star, searches the haunted house and yet again has her moment in the cave, this time confronting a dark vision of herself. Dang that was cool. Would have liked to see more of that. Anyway, she confronts Kylo and he smashes the holocron. Emphasizing for us how pointless this fetch quest has been. Girl could have hopped a ride in his TIE at any point and dealt with the fallout after they dealt with the emperor.

They fight. It wasn’t a bad fight. Just not my favorite. It did emphasize though that Kylo is never ever fighting on the offensive with her. Never in three movies has he ever taken an advantage of an opening for a killing blow, and never was it more obvious than in this fight. Kylo gets distracted, Rey stabs him mortally, and this act seems to wake her up from whatever possessed her in the throne room. She heals him and runs away.

This brings up another thing that bothers me. I know the filmmakers were working with some severe challenges with their footage of Carrie. I don’t think it was badly used for the most part. But I was left baffled at what exactly was going on here.

I was not baffled at Kylo/Ben’s confrontation with Han. This was the high point of the movie for me. It was pitch perfect in tone, and touched on the one an only sin Ben ever committed that wasn’t connected to a war objective, the murder of his father. And it made clear that the prodigal was loved and wanted and it wasn’t too late to come home. The heart of Ben’s problem has been the conviction that he has done too much wrong to come home, and while it is only a memory, it is a true memory of the man who loved Ben enough to walk straight into Hell though he knew it would probably be the death of him. I can forgive this scene for throwing the lightsaber  into the ocean. I realize that most of the audience doesn’t know that you can heal kyber crystals. Yes, the saber was a metaphor for Ben’s damaged and unstable soul, and yes, it would have been poetic (and badass) for him to show up later with a healed lightsaber, stable and blue and looking like something an angel would fight with. But I’ll forgive that for the poetry of what happens on Exegol.

And then we go to my low point. I’ll set my costumer’s beef with Luke Skywalker’s wig aside. It looked cheap and that’s all I’ll say. It was more the deliberate middle finger to TLJ in the lines while ignoring that Luke’s most iconic and Jedi-like moment in the original trilogy was casting aside his lightsaber in an act of compassion. Yes, Rey was burning her ship and throwing away her weapon for the wrong reason.  And it was a deliberate echo of Luke who also was appalled when his fear was twisted by the Dark into an attack on his nephew. She is overcome with the same shame and fear of self. Luke can speak to this in a real way. With better dialogue, it might have worked for me. Alas, it didn’t. Instead we got more exposition to provide us with an extra lightsaber. And more questions about why everyone in this family gave up on Ben Solo.

Here’s the thing. If Leia remains untrained, lots of things make sense: her instinctive but infrequent use of the Force; her fear for her son and sense of inadequacy in dealing with he struggles with darkness, her unresolved issues with her father which lead her to hide her parentage not only from the galaxy but also from her own son. All of this is undone by the training reveal and makes us wonder why everyone was willing to help a descendent of Palpatine but not their own flesh and blood. And in a movie that used dialogue to explain nearly everything, these lacunae stand out more than they would in a film that trusted the audience more. See you could have had Luke say “We messed up. We gave in to fear. And we didn’t want to make the same mistake with you. Rey. I’m the son of Darth Vader. I know more than any man that we are more than our bloodline. And forgetting that with Ben was the worst mistake of my life.” But  he didn’t. Which in a movie which tells as much as or more than it shows seems like a deliberate choice.

Have you noticed that I’m ignoring the space battles? That’s because they’re forgettable. I just didn’t care about them. Especially since the galactic conflict remained essentially unresolved. Back to the Force Plot, the only plot that matters.

Rey confronts Palpatine. Yawn. At this point I just don’t care. For most of the movie, she hasn’t seemed like my Rey. I couldn’t relate and by this point I’ve lost interest so I’m more wondering where did all these people come from. Are there concessions? How much does a hot dog and Coke cost on Exegol? Does this stadium have bathrooms? Nice to see that it’s built like the AT&T one down the street with the sliding roof panels. And then my boy Ben Solo arrives and the film is good again. Without a word of dialogue (besides “ow”) Adam Driver delivers the best performance of the movie, showing that the Han Solo of the trilogy was there the whole time in his son. Was there ever a more Han Solo thing than running into a Dark Side temple in your pajamas, armed only with a blaster? And then Rey passes him Anakin’s saber. OMG. Brilliance. The best part of the movie. For a moment I thought that they would at least wrap it up well. And for a moment they’re side by side and all is right in the world. And then Palpatine throws Ben in a pit.

I hate this. I don’t hate this movie but I hate this moment. For three movies we’ve set up that Rey and Ben (He’s Ben now; don’t’ @ me.) are equals in the Force. They have a Yin/Yang dynamic that made this work. The natural conclusion here should have been that they take out Palpatine together. Because both have a beef with him. This is the man responsible for ruining the lives of four generations of Skywalkers. And while Ben is at the bottom of a pit, Rey stands alone, calling on the Jedi to help her.

The Jedi that are ignoring the Skywalker at the bottom of the pit.

Including Ben’s grandfather that he’s been begging for years to help him.

Including his uncle who promised to always be with him. (We were robbed of Ghost Luke trolling Kylo. Robbed I tell you. Mark Hamill would have nailed that.)

Ben is at the bottom of a pit being ignored while the Jedi transform Rey into their sacrificial lamb for Girl Power points.

So, yeah, I hated how Rey defeated Palpatine. It was wrong. It wasn’t in union with her bondmate. It wasn’t through the power of love and compassion. It was Space Wonder Woman meets Harry Potter. And then she dies. Because the Jedi only ever viewed people as tools in their grand battle with the Sith.

But Ben. Oh, Ben loves Rey for who she is. And he climbs out of the pit without a lick of help from anyone and cradles her lifeless form in the most heartbreaking Pieta, and you can see on his face the moment he make his decision and gives everything of himself to bring her back. It was beautiful, and they share the most pure, the most perfect kiss.

And then he dies.

And that’s where the movie breaks me. Because he didn’t have to die. It doesn’t make sense. Why does Leia hold on until this moment? Why does Maz seem satisfied? Where did Ben go? Why does he go unmourned? Where is his Force ghost? This movie just leaves us with more questions.

And the very end kills me. Rey is on Tatooine. A dead world that holds no importance to her (or Leia, I might add). She buries the Skywalker sabers. A funeral. She sees the ghosts of Luke and Leia bless her as she takes on the Skywalker name. A name that she could have taken in a life-affirming way through marriage, but that appears as scavenged from the dead that she has surrounded herself with as she ends the movie an eternal child, side by side with a stolen droid.

It makes no sense.

But whence my nerd rage? Why do I care? Why have I devoted over 3K words to this?

Because the first two movies in this trilogy made me care about these characters.

When I first saw The Force Awakens, I connected immediately with her loneliness. Loneliness is something I get viscerally. I have always been socially awkward and had difficulty making friends. I rarely felt known or understood and I understood that deep longing to belong. When Rey was being interrogated by Kylo Ren, that was what struck me. He notices her loneliness.

And you realize that Kylo is projecting. That he is seeing in her a kindred spirit. He too is lonely, and trapped by fear into being stuck in a place that he knows in his heart of hearts is a dead world. He too is trapped by relics of the past.

So, you see, Rey and Kylo were both me. I had lived that loneliness. I had experienced profound isolation and the sense that no one truly understood me. I desperately wanted them to find their belonging and heal their wounds. And that’s certainly the story that TLJ picked up on and continued.

But there was more. I became fascinated with the question of how the son of Han and Leia fell, and I could see the possibilities in the pattern of their characters: Leia, the woman driven by duty, trying to build the New Republic to make a better galaxy for her son, and leaving her son vulnerable to predation in the process; Han, a man who had only just stopped running from responsibility, and who’s own lack of father figures left him feeling inadequate as a father. Throw in a villain who can groom and psychically abuse their son and you have the ingredients for a tragedy.

And because I identified with Leia, Ben became, in a way, an additional child. A parent’s greatest fear is that in trying to do the right thing for your child you inadvertently make things worse. Poor Leia. She needed a mother to tell her child mattered more than a bill in the Senate. That the galaxy could wait. But Palpatine killed her mother. Both her mothers, because he was as complicit in the death of Breha Organa as he was in the death of Padme Amidala Naberrie.

So when Ben Solo died, it was like losing a child. And anyone who knows me personally knows that I do not choose that phrasing lightly. And being a mother, there is always a sense of survivor’s guilt. The sense that if you had done the right thing, it wouldn’t have happened. It doesn’t matter if that isn’t the truth. It’s how it feels.

I have met so many people online who identify with Ben Solo because they were abused as children. Who like him processed their trauma in unhealthy ways. It’s not where I come from, but I have the capacity to empathize and hear the message they’re inadvertently being told: that if you do bad things because you’ve been groomed and manipulated and brainwashed, you can’t come back. Even if you turn your life around, it won’t matter. You’ll only find peace in death and you will die unremembered as punishment for your sins. And your family will replace you with someone nicer and easier to live with.

But I can hear you saying: It’s not that deep. It’s fake and in space. It’s just a story.

Well, here’s the problem:

1)    The brain does not distinguish real people from fictional characters. The part of the brain that produces serotonin and dopamine can’t distinguish fact from fiction. This is actually why art has the power to heal. The catharsis experienced in a work of art can help us process trauma because we relate to the characters in the story. But the flip side is that stories can cause genuine trauma. If we related to characters in a story and they are treated unjustly, we feel that injustice and it hurts as badly as if it were real.

2)    Ben Solo was written to be sympathetic. He is the child of beloved characters. His backstory is one filled with pain. He was failed by every family member who should have protected him. He was abused physically and mentally for years. Recently published materials exonerate him from the destruction of the Jedi temple. It was all part of a plot to push him to the Dark. All Ben ever wanted was to be loved for who he was. And that was snatched away from him.

3)    I can’t turn off my brain. I can’t stop asking questions and trying to make sense of things. I can help but see the Chekhov’s guns and the symbols and the messages, however inadvertent.

4)    It is a grand failure of a movie if it only works on a surface level and not when you start digging deeper. Every other Star Wars movie, including The Phantom Menace, rewards the person who can’t turn off their brain. This was the first one that falls apart so completely the second you start asking questions.

I wish I could like this movie. I was prepared to like it if not love it. And while I got Ben’s redemption and the Rey and Kylo romance that I wanted, I feel like I got nothing. Like they don’t matter at all.

I am planning to start new hobbies in the new year. I got some war gaming miniatures painting sets for Christmas and I’m glad I have a new special interest to pour myself into. I have enjoyed sharing my love of Star Wars trivia with my kids but it just hurts too much at the moment to spend time thinking about a franchise that has been so  badly mangled. I’m probably in the bargaining stage of grief at the moment. I wholly buy the theory that there was happy ending filmed and someone blinked in the game of chicken, leaving us the mess that we were handed.

I’m also planning to get back to writing. If even Disney can’t tell a fairy tale properly anymore, it’s time for a new batch of writers to get out there and tell the stories I want to hear. I am sick of grimdark fantasies and cynicism masquerading as sophistication. I may write a fanfic or two to fix the story in my mind, but I think that ultimately I need to be creating original works. I know that there are children eager to believe in happy endings, plenty of women who believe that Byronic heroes can be redeemed, and not a few men who will buy both if the story is well told.

#tros spoilers #negativity #cw:child loss #cw: abuse

[thesmallworldofsamizayn]

How not to feel like there are ants under your skin when you realise you’re in the presence of someone more talented than you will ever be: a beginner’s guide

I know I’m very late to the party but I just played (watched?) The Beginner’s Guide and I need to set this down.

I went into the game with no idea that it was a mockumentary, and really only twigged that Coda wasn’t real in the final act, which might make me incredibly thick or it might make Wreden a very talented storyteller, I don’t know, but either way the effect was that this story-thing got in me in a personal way that I haven’t really felt from media in a while. I felt, oh, what’s the word, seen by it, or something, I guess. 

this is long. I don’t want to waste people’s valuable scrolling time, so

Davey in the Beginner’s Guide cannot imagine living his life unmotivated by validation, which is why he doesn't understand Cody and why he makes the narrative in the first place. He sees a friend creating fantastic, inventive and - to his mind - meaningful art, none of which is shown to the public, and this drives him insane. He never says as much in the narration, and seeing as this is the guy who made the Stanley Parable I don’t know if it’s quite the emotion he’s reaching for, but at least for me, I completely associate this feeling with my intense competitiveness and insecurity about writing. Specifically how that translates into a feeling of agonising pins and needles all over me, the moment I’m confronted by something good written by someone young, especially when that person is creating for themselves only. When they say something like, I never show my writing to anyone, or, I’ve filled hundreds of notebooks with words no one will ever see, it’s like a stake being driven slowly through my chest. Something about it, though it has nothing to do with me, makes me feel like a complete fraud, like I’ve missed the boat somewhere, and that’s the whole emotion behind this game. It changes into a need to make Coda into a project, a problem for Davey to solve, so that Davey can be the one in control, so that he can have something to be proud of: I figured out my friend. I fixed my friend. And of course, that makes it so much worse. 

The way I see it, Davey has two essential beliefs, which are challenged by Coda at the end of the story, the first of which takes precedence in the narrative, but the second of which is just as important, I think. 1. Coda is broken, and it’s Davey’s job to fix him. 2. Coda’s art, despite (or probably because of) its incomprehensibility, is better than Davey’s. 

The latter of these beliefs is not stated directly in the game, but it makes sense of everything to me. These two beliefs get tangled together so that a familiar fallacy is reached, that of the suffering artist - Coda’s art is great because he is depressive, and the fact that he never shows his art to anyone is a mind-boggling tragedy. But such a beautiful tragedy. Davey can be the deus ex machina. That’s how Davey can reconcile his own inadequacy, by inserting himself into the story, because once he faces himself, once Coda cuts himself off and removes his source of Davey’s validation, he finds nothing, no creativity, nothing to give. And he now has the additional terrible guilt of taking Coda away from the world too, leaving them both in the dark. It’s like Amadeus, if Salieri only intended to help Mozart, instead of destroying him. (Salieri being another figure I’ve expressed an uncomfortable affinity for, if only for the fact that he describes the sensation of hearing Mozart for the first time, without a trace of metaphor as pure bodily pain. Looking at his hands and seeing how useless they are, how incapable, dull blocks of flesh too blunt to produce the aural poetry that comes so effortlessly from his rival. We’ve all been there, pal.)

So the Beginner’s Guide called me out for my obsessive competitive streak, but it went further than that, and called me out for the thing I’ve always kind of used as a justification for all that bitterness, for the privileged life I never earned, for my own inadequacy as a creator, which is my need to help others.

I used to do the stupidest things sometimes. I think I was eight, this one time. I don’t remember what the context was, not even the country it happened in, but I remember that when I did it, I thought - or I was told - that this was a recurring pattern of behaviour I needed to stop. And I thought, why do I always do this? The thing was this: there was some kind of party, and there was a girl, younger than me. I must have taken a liking to her. I have zero memory of what she looked like, what we talked about, and why she meant so much to me, but I do remember that at some point in the evening she lost a plush bunny. We were outside for most of the function, a large garden wreathed with shrubbery and trees. And for at least half an hour, I circled this garden, frantically searching for this god damned bunny. The sense memories stay with you the most, and more than anything visual or factual I remember being out of breath from running round the place so many times, the wet leaves crunching underfoot and in my hands as I scoured every crevice. I was certain that it was for some reason up to me to find this toy, and feeling both indignant at the world that no one else seemed to care, and perversely gleeful that I cared enough to do it. 

I never found the toy, because it turned out to be in her father’s pocket. She’d given it to him and forgotten. I was so wrapped up in my idea of this person’s problem, the idea that I could solve their problem, the idea that only I could do it, that I wasted everyone’s time, not least my own. I don’t run round gardens anymore, but I think this drive is still in me. I’ve shaped it into simply being a good friend and listener and giver of pep talks or whatever, and I have pretty much made peace with the idea that I’m doing it for the validation, but this game threw me in for a loop, getting me scared of what it all means, making me second guess my actions and my tendency to do what the narrator does, to make people projects when I cannot finish my own. To know that I fixed someone, and to feel like I can carry the mantle of the therapist friend. 

When it got to the final level and Coda’s message, I was still under the impression that the whole thing was real and seeing it knocked the wind out of me. The idea of trying something like this, realising how utterly and devastatingly wrong you got it, and having to live with a broken friendship as a result, though it’s something I haven’t specifically had to go through, felt so viscerally plausible and close to home. All this selfishness bites you in the rear some day. And for it not only to be the consequence of selfishness, but the consequence of selfishness believed to be selflessness, that’s even more terrifying. Because lord knows I second guess myself enough as it is, whatever I’m doing. 

We all do, right? This story is going to be really good. Oh, wait, what if it’s terrible. I just had a good and productive conversation with someone I care about. Except, hang on, what if what I said was actually extremely insensitive and they’re just trying to forget it now? I’m sure Catbells isn’t anywhere near Coniston, but that person just said it was, and actually, you know what, they’re probably right. That vertigo, that swooping stomach-turned over sensation when you can just feel the foundations of something you believed in shudder beneath your feet, I’m sick of it. I’d like to be certain of what I’m doing for once. If I had any certainty at all, I could get on with my work. I could write and write until I was finally good enough to feel happy with myself, instead of sitting in fear of my documents. I would probably do a better job of being the therapist friend too, not having this overhanging fear that I’m somehow doing the wrong thing.

I don’t even know what I wrote this for, to be honest. Most of it doesn’t make sense, and I was hoping it would add up to something, that these disjointed thoughts would come together. As I have so often done, I leapt in with great vague ideas, and have ground to a halt as the picture became clearer. And if I were forced to admit the true reason for writing it, it would be that I thought it made for a good written piece, something that someone could read and think “wow. this person just wrote something good.” because god forbid, right? god forbid I ever do anything in life and have it not be for the validation

#the beginner's guide #davey wreden

[whnvr]

Brain Drain

Ah yes, hello. It is once again time to drain these brains of mine. A couple of more thoughts on this ‘Morning Pages’ process. Firstly, I’ve decided to take the Artist’s Way wording to heart and think of this as a non-negotiable exercise and, at least for the time being, I am going to do the full 1500 words as a block before I move onto anything else in my day. I’m still going to take the approach of retroactively editing them before I sleep in order to be more formatted, but the main body of text will be done first as, based on yesterday, I think this will focus me far more than spreading the writing out. Secondly, the more I think about it the more experimental I realise this entire process is for me. It’s probably best thought of as a heavily modified and specified version of the ‘Artist’s Way’ approach, as one of the stipulations offered up by Julia Cameron is that these are to be for your eyes and your eyes alone - even then going so far as to suggest that these should be sealed away in an envelope so that even the practitioner does not read them. So in that sense I am both taking a more documentative, methodical approach to the process and I am altering the formula by hosting these in a public forum. I understand that privacy helps to remove any filtering one may do but I also believe that the potential for these to be read comes with its own benefits. To that end this feels like an experiment of being creatively candid in public which is simulatenously exciting and daunting given that it runs so counter to the common approach of creating behind closed doors. I’d love to explore these ideas further as this journal progresses and see how my relationship with creativity changes due to these factors. So, I guess I’ll start by taking the measure of my day, as I am very much enjoying the ‘touching base’ element of these Morning Pages. I definitely feel a lot more blocked than I did yesterday, and it seems as though there’s somewhat of a hump to get over when I do these within the first 500 words or so before I get into a state of flow with it - this was true of yesterday also. Maybe that is one of the possible benefits of this exercise, that 'ramping-up-to-flow’ stage is one I likely experience whenever I sit down to create and the Brain Drain may be a way of me overcoming that before I come to do any of the actual creative work of my day. It seems as though forcing myself to do all 1500 words yesterday put me into the same sort of flow-state I gain from working on a really successful piece of music, and then today I am once again reset back into that familiar place of being 'blocked’, which even now I am slowly working through and unpicking purely by writing these words. Looking back on previous creative work this would seem to make an awful lot of sense. How much more demotivating it is to have to wake up and untease the same blocked feeling each morning on projects that I care deeply about and am heavily invested in than it is to instead get that part of the process out of the way on an off the cuff exercise like Brain Drain each morning. Maybe attempting to ease such a block through the work we care about is where all feelings of 'I’ve lost it’ and 'this project is hard now. Therefore how much better it must be to work through those blocks in a format that we’re not quite so invested in. Even right now there is a part of me that is very much resisting this process. It is an anxiety that masks itself as restlessness and tells me to 'go and watch a film, Aaron. Why put yourself through something so hard?’. As it is the creative enemy I have decided to call this my personal Antagonizer. Other thoughts of the Antagonizer, or the 'me’ that feels uncomfortable and uncreative: - 'Go and make a milkshake Aaron. Don’t do this. It’s 30 degrees outside today. You really need to just cool down.’ - 'Get up and walk around. You really need to release some of this tension that you’re feeling.’ - 'Go and talk to a family member. Telling them about what you want to write would be much easier than simply writing it’. That’s right Antagonizer, I WILL use your criticism in order to help me hit this wordcount. Checkmate. Yesterday has taught me that past this feeling is where enjoyment and flow lie if I can only push through it. I imagine some days will be significantly harder than others, and I imagine that I will even have days where 1500 words won’t begin to scratch the surface of this block, but I would so much rather try to push through this block writing whatever comes to mind over-and-above pushing through this block attempting to create whatever passes for a masterpiece in my world. On to next steps then. I would like to select a new artist to listen to today as I get on with other work. This would also be a good opportunity to show off a little of how I organise my inspiration, despite how embarrassingly over-elaborate it is.

On Spotify I keep a folder of artists who I’m either interest in, inspired by, are important pieces of musical history, examples of current artists who are doing what they do incredibly successfully, or artists that I feel would be generally useful to experience. For each artist, I will create a playlist, and in each playlist, I will save that artist’s entire discography chronologically. I will then slowly work my way through each of the artist’s discographies, deleting what I’ve listened to and categorising songs that jump out to me either in terms of whether I love, like, or dislike them, the emotional qualities that I want to emulate in my own music, or the technical qualities that stand out as exemplary within each song. This allows me to simultaneously build a picture of what my musical tastes are, keep an accurate record of my listening history, and create song palettes for different emotional qualities that I wish to put into my own work.

(Above: the technical qualities of music that I have categorised. This forms up a reference library that I can use to further refine these qualities when I’m working on my own music)Here are the criteria I use to define each of these categories. Idea: the concept behind a piece. Narrative: the story told. Lyrics: how ideas are expressed through words. Mood: the emotionality of a piece. Expression: how ideas are framed and delivered through the articulation of the music. Musicality: the use of harmony, rhythm, and theory to communicate those ideas. Rhythm: the measure, speed, flow, and cadence of a piece. Timbre: the overall texture, tone, and sonic palette of a piece. Structure: the flow of a piece over time. Mix: how the timbre has been arranged as an ensemble. Master: how the piece has been polished. Delivery: the title, artwork, context, presentation, and moving image that contain the piece.

(Above: the emotional qualities of music that I have categorised as a reference library for how artists that I look up to achieve specific emotional qualities in their work). These are decidedly more abstract and are generally more subject to the songs themselves that are being added. For reference, here’s the current list of artists who’s work I want to study, all at various stages of listened to, completed, or not listened to at all: - Labelle - Car Seat Headrest - Snail Mail - Japanese Breakfast - Let’s Eat Grandma - Soccer Mommy - LCD Soundsystem - Big Thief - Have a Nice Life - Beebadoobee - Animanaguchi - 100gecs - Courtney Barnett - Chromonicci - Owsey - Dark Cat - Valentine - SOPHIE - Kamasi Washington - Prince - Aurora - Massive Attack - Haywyre - Maths Time Joy - Counting Crows - Jack Strauber - Blossom Calderone - Goldfrapp - Janelle Monae - Meteorologist - Easyfun - Saint Lewis - Julian Gray - Jade Cicada - Blake Skowron - 92Elm - Maxime - Stereo Cube - Chuck Sutton - Gemi - Queen - Laxcity - Duumu - Oh Wonder - Galamatias - Umru - Underscores - Brockhampton - Fleece - i Monster - Deaton Chris Anthony - Amy Winehouse - The Beatles - Sumthin Sumthin - Radiohead - Flume - Knapsack - Dodie Here are the artists who’s discographies I have completed via this approach: - Sidney Gish - M.I.A - In Love With a Ghost - Bowie - Pink Floyd - Baird - Rudimental - Iglooghost - Madeon - Porter Robinson - 100gecs I use a similar system alongside this over on Pinterest for visual work in order to better inform my visual style and aesthetic sensibilities. Here is how I define my visual observation: Interior & Exterior, the space of dwelling.

Colour, of which idiosyncrasy and primary colours are a main focus.

Tone, subtler than colour. An intangible quality communicated by shifting hues and gradiated layers.

Mood, the way an image feels.

Looks, clothes, & apparel: personal artistic image and identity.

Desolation, a quality not currently present in my own work, but one that I often observe and love within other work, as well as in storytelling and other environments.

Layout, the way things are arranged in relation to one another within a space.

Idea, the concept behind a thing.

Texture, the tactile quality of visual elements.

Form, the shape and bounds of a thing.

Presentation, the context a thing is placed within.

Render, the quality imparted by computer generated imagery.

Type, how words are displayed.

Pattern, the use of repetition.

As you can see, how I define sound and visual art share a fairly common language between them. Anyway, I divert. I’m going to select SOPHIE as the next discography to tear through and I am also going to continue working through the UE4 Beginner learning path, though before either of these I have some university paperwork/admin stuff to finish so I’d best crack on with that. Toodles!

#25.6.2020

[thefudge]

i'm sure you *loved* this episode lol amirite

oh you know it lol

i’ve seen two very dumb takes so far:

1. “guess you haven’t been paying attention sweatie ;) ;) dany’s *evilness* was set up all the way in season 1…but some of yall stan a white lady too hard” 

i would like to disabuse some folks of the notion that the rest of us were blind to dany’s evolution. we weren’t. the problem with this evolution was that it was handled poorly. very poorly. dany always “failed up” on the show, meaning that the show runners never let her dip her toe too much in being unlikable during her adventures in Essos. that moment when she comes out of a burning dothraki hut like some ethereal goddess? i remember rolling my eyes hard at the imagery back then but in the context of the show it was framed as absolutely awe-inspiring and heroic, while the dothraki men in question were portrayed as backward hicks who couldn’t appreciate Female Power™. was there a frisson of “uh-oh” in it? sure, but always back-pedaled by dany’s overall “good intentions”.

this has been the show’s agenda with dany since day one: little accountability, big wins, sweeping mythology. instead of letting this grandeur really get to dany’s head (as it kind of does in the books), they’ve always made her hyperaware of her power and have emphasized her “mercy” and “good heart”. hell, back in S7 this is one of the reasons jon “falls” for her. she seems much more than another conqueror. and she is. but the internal conflict between “targaryen and yet not like my ancestors” is/was never properly addressed. remember those couple of scenes in S5 where barristan tries to talk to her about her family? yeah…me too. 

SO. let’s recap. in order to get to 8x05, the writers needed WAY more build-up than “she burns the tarlys”. as late as 8x03 dany was charging into battle trying to save people. remember their initial plan was to wait for the NK. jon wants to “stop” her from going to save the fighters. let me repeat that: dany is the one who decides enough is enough, she is going to try and save the northerners even if the NK never shows up. jon is content to watch ppl die.  to go from this to what we saw in 8x05 is deeply flawed, amateurish writing. these putzes (d&d) were offered 10 episodes by HBO, at the very least, but they are clearly so fed up with this project they decided to streamline it. 

again, the problem was never dark!dany but d&d not being comfortable or competent enough to explore it believably. earlier seasons indulge in her triumphalism and bank on her unquestioned “humanity” to the detriment of her nosedive in season 8. in other words, d&d wanted to stretch her heroic status for as long as possible. the folks who are claiming “women can be villains too! uwu! this is feminism!” ignore the fact that d&d couldnt be arsed to build dany’s descent because they never really thought about her as a true female villain/antihero to be reckoned with. ALSO they really put their foot in it with missandei and rhaegal, because it painted dany as a woman who is lashing out out of pain, and the audience responded to that. like, they made it easy to root for her when we are supposed to see her hubris. she is supposed to tragically echo her father and viserys, but instead she resembles rhaegar fighting for the woman he loves (in this case missandei, and by extension all the ppl dany lost). i do think they’re still sticking with “dany’s story is a tragedy” from grrm’s outline but it’s just….a mess. i wouldn’t have minded an episode like this with proper build-up and with more interesting stakes. that moment where dany tells tyrion that the ppl of KL are to blame for “standing with cersei” does not gel with her attitude in the north. there should’ve been more time between her arc in the north and the one in KL. they should’ve cared more about this character. and i am a person who was never terribly invested in dany, though i followed her journey with interest, but am going to be no. 1 stan out of spite lol 

second take that’s very VERY dumb

2. “this isn’t misogyny. other female characters on the show had a tough life too! and didn’t lose their mind! look at sansa!”

have yall really forgotten that in 8x04 sansa literally told sandor that rape made her strong and that welp, i guess women need that shit in their life, otherwise they’ll never grow? Hardened Woman! Sansa Stark has managed to fool ppl into thinking she has been given dimension when in fact, a lot of her attitudes and goals from season 6 onward make little sense. 

other ppl gave yara as an example. yara who is so emotionally stunted on the show she has to treat theon with disgust and contempt because he doesn’t have the “balls”. yara/asha in the books is a tough cookie, sure, but she is allowed to show emotion and be a human being instead of a walking stereotype. 

other ppl gave lyanna mormont as an example. the “cute” no nonsense little girl who is tough as balls! what a badass! died like a bamf! what did we know about her? every single one of her scenes was her spouting some watered down version of “Grrrl Power” straight from d&d’s unread copy of “the female eunuch”. i distinctly recall her being part of a discussion where she scoffs at knitting socks as a war effort. she wants to fight! making sure ppl are clothed in winter is a joke!! girlie girls have cooties and any kind of “feminine” pursuit must be discredited. yes, what a feminist hero. 

let’s not even talk about arya-bot-9000. or brienne of tarth telling jaime he complains “like a woman” and on and on. 

all these women are Strong because they are basically Robots. 

the minor female characters who shine on this show do so because d&d haven’t bothered to give them any Cool Dudebro Lines. basically, they have been ignored, which was their saving grace. 

what i’m trying to say is ppl have to stop drinking the kool aid. 

you enjoyed the episode? fine. it’s a visual feast (although i think that so many panoramic set pieces drain the show and cheapen it, and also hide a lot of bad writing because hey, pretty spectacle!). you want to convince others this was masterful storytelling? or worse, you want to condescend and tell us we did not watch this show “right” and you know better? 

(also, istg i saw a “hot” take on quora about how viewers who don’t accept this piss-poor writing for dany are like “season 1!sansa” clinging naively to joffrey, unable to see the cracks below the surface. whew chille, people are really unleashing their inner dumbass.)

#daenerys targaryen #anti got #anti d&d #got meta #got spoilers #replies #8x05 #sorry lol i went on a rant but i was gonna anyway

[renardtrickster]

I am going to kill you and ask you to do every number on that ask post

You devious yet cute bastard, I’m in.

1. What is you middle name?

Personal information so I’m not divulging it, but it abbreviates to X.

2. How old are you?

Legal.

3. When is your birthday?

September 26.

4. What is your zodiac sign?

Libra/The Scales/The Dragon/Terepy

5. What is your favorite color?

Dark Green. #127712 specifically.

6. What’s your lucky number?

I think 2? I do like 12 though.

7. Do you have any pets?

Not anymore. I used to have two dogs though.

8. Where are you from?

Florida. I came out of the swamps.

9. How tall are you?

5′10″

10. What shoe size are you?

28cm, Women’s 11.5, Men’s 9.5, that’s what my sneakers say.

11. How many pairs of shoes do you own?

Two. A pair of loafers so broken down I avoid wearing them whenever possible, and a pair of fine sneakers.

12. What was your last dream about?

All I remember is that Duff McWhalen’s theme song was playing throughout it and it was really annoying after a while.

13. What talents do you have?

I would say my talents are acute memory of obscure topics, vivid storytelling, and I’m pretty good at video games.

14. Are you psychic in any way?

It doesn’t happen with much frequency nowadays, but when I was younger and it happened a bit more often, I could always tell when I was being observed with no other clues. I could feel the eyes on my back. I can also bend spoons and set fires with my mind but that’s less interesting.

15. Favorite song?

More like favorite song right now, but probably Rocket Surgeon.

16. Favorite movie?

The Persona 3 movies currently.

17. Who would be your ideal partner?

Off of the top of my head, I’m imagining someone who’s heart-throbbing to look at (pretty women or cute boys), pretty sharp, tough to boot, has a lot in common with me, and is understanding too. I’ve got a few quirks, and it’d be nice to know that I’m not condemned to dying alone because of them.

18. Do you want children?

Not in the slightest.

19. Do you want a church wedding?

I don’t even want a wedding wedding. If we’re partners, isn’t being together enough? From what I know, weddings just add unnecessary stress and complication.

20. Are you religious?

I’m definitely spiritual, and Religion connected to that, even if I don’t devote myself to a specific doctrine. It’s less pantheism and more “they’re probably all true to an extent and also SMT is real”. In any case I just try to be a good person.

21. Have you ever been to the hospital?

As a patient, none that I could remember but I know I went because of various injuries. As a visitor, quite a few times.

22. Have you ever got in trouble with the law?

I’ve done things that would get me in trouble with the law, but have not run afoul of them yet. The closest would be that one time I was staying at a hotel, and the police knocked on my door and asked if I knew where someone was living. I didn’t, but I guessed anyway, and that’s how half the hotel had the police knocking on their door.

23. Have you ever met any celebrities?

No.

24. Baths or showers?

Showers.

25. What color socks are you wearing?

White with grey soles.

26. Have you ever been famous?

I have a lot of followers on this tumblr blog, would that count?

27. Would you like to be a big celebrity?

I want to be a famous author, so kind of. But I want to still retain my anonymity and not have my real name and face attached to stuff. Yoko Taro gives me hope in that regard, because he’s rather famous but any information we know about him, we know on his terms. That’s how I want to live.

28. What type of music do you like?

I usually listen to video game OSTs, and most of the ones I listen to are so genre-blending so it’s hard to pin down. Most of it is instrumental, but I’m not opposed to music with vocals. Genres aren’t cohesive, so I’d say “music that makes you want to punch robots to” and “music that makes you want to talk to friends to”. J-rap is pretty good though.

29. Have you ever been skinny dipping?

Hell no!

30. How many pillows do you sleep with?

One.

31. What position do you usually sleep in?

I toss and turn before going to sleep and while asleep, but my back seems to be consistent.

32. How big is your house?

It’s pretty decent. 2 room 1 bath, and the living room is rectangular.

33. What do you typically have for breakfast?

Milk & cereal, or pop-tarts.

34. Have you ever fired a gun?

No, but I want to.

35. Have you ever tried archery?

I think once in grade school. I wish I could try again though.

36. Favorite clean word?

Cerebral just off the top of my head.

37. Favorite swear word?

Bastard or Shit. The former is innately funny and all-purpose to refer to someone. The latter is so versatile it can be used in any context.

38. What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sleep?

I think a day, although the standard is around 18.

39. Do you have any scars?

I don’t think so.

40. Have you ever had a secret admirer?

I think there was one person in school who had a thing for me but they were gay and at the time I thought I was straight, so I paid them no mind. There was also someone who said “X likes you”, but I didn’t know who X was so I said “cool” and went on my way. I was also propositioned once in middle school, but that’s less “secret admirer” and more “sexual harasser”.

41. Are you a good liar?

I think so.

42. Are you a good judge of character?

For good people, yes. For bad people, no.

43. Can you do any other accents other than your own?

Yeah. I remember playing Undertale and my little sister was nearby, and I decided to voice all the characters. I had a lot of fun!

44. Do you have a strong accent?

I’m actually the only member of my family that doesn’t have a Boston accent.

45. What is your favorite accent?

Russian, hands-down.

46. What is your personality type?

According the the Myers-Briggs test I just took, ISFP-T/Adventurer. Which is bizarre considering I’m pretty sure I got a different result a year or so ago. According to “what word would you use”, droll.

47. What is your most expensive piece of clothing?

I have no idea. Either those sneakers, or the heavy winter jacket I got when I was in Colorado. Both were gifts, so I never saw the pricetag, but my Dad said they were pretty nice-looking.

48. Can you curl your tongue?

Yeth.

49. Are you an innie or an outie?

Inside.

50. Left or right handed?

Left.

51. Are you scared of spiders?

My knowledge of spiders is well enough that I know at least 2 types of spiders who can kill you horribly in one bite, and know little enough that I can’t tell any of them apart from common house spiders. I’m more afraid of dying stupidly because the boner spider snuck up on me than the idea of spiders themselves.

52. Favorite food?

Either Macaroni & Cheese or Cheeseburgers.

53. Favorite foreign food?

Burritos probably, even though I usually only eat meat and cheese on them. Are you detecting a theme because I am.

54. Are you a clean or messy person?

I try to be clean, but I’m usually a bit scattered.

55. Most used phrased?

“says something about”, “despite that” are some. Although I know I tend to use a few stock phrases When I Post Long.

56. Most used word?

I wouldn’t even know where to begin finding that out.

57. How long does it take for you to get ready?

Maybe a few minutes, although I’m usually working on a set routine.

58. Do you have much of an ego?

I don’t think I do. If I do, I tend to exaggerate it or turn it to a positive end.

59. Do you suck or bite lollipops?

No matter how hard I want to keep it at sucking, I usually bite at some point. Don’t screencap this.

60. Do you talk to yourself?

Yes.

61. Do you sing to yourself?

No.

62. Are you a good singer?

Also no.

63. Biggest Fear?

Most if not all of my friends, and the people I admire as well, all either start hating me or end up hating me and I lose every social connection I have or want to have. The reason varies, whether it be my fault or someone slandering me, but being hated by people I like freaks me out. As does the idea of not being able to tell my stories.

64. Are you a gossip?

I’d like to say no but considering I rather frequently discuss discourse in my Discord chats, I guess I am.

65. Best dramatic movie you’ve seen?

I do not watch drama films.

66. Do you like long or short hair?

On myself, long-to-middle length. On others, any length really.

67. Can you name all 50 states of America?

Probably not.

68. Favorite school subject?

Social studies was a strong suit of mine.

69. Extrovert or Introvert?

Introvert.

70. Have you ever been scuba diving?

No.

71. What makes you nervous?

Time passing and things not getting done.

72. Are you scared of the dark?

No. The things in the dark can eat it too.

73. Do you correct people when they make mistakes?

Yes, but I try to be kind about it. Or funny.

74. Are you ticklish?

I haven’t been tickled recently, so I wouldn’t know.

75. Have you ever started a rumor?

No. At worst, I’ve spread information I don’t think is 100% accurate, but I ALWAYS disclaim that it shouldn’t be trusted without further research.

76. Have you ever been in a position of authority?

I’m an older sibling, so yes.

77. Have you ever drank underage?

No.

78. Have you ever done drugs?

No, but I was offered twice. Once by an irresponsible (and awful) authority figure, once by some kids in the bathroom. Both times I said “no thanks”, and funny enough the former tried to change my mind, and the latter just said “ok cool”.

79. Who was your first real crush?

Oh god here come the bad memories. I’m heavily abbreviating and redacting information to protect the identities of me and all involved, but in Colorado I met someone in middle school who more or less fit all my parameters for “ideal partner”. But I was terminally nervous and I didn’t want to ruin our friendship, so I left it at that. Eventually I had to abruptly leave the state for reasons I don’t want to get into, and all a week or so later I made a Facebook account and found all my friends. My contact with my crush was the most constant. Eventually, I was talking with a different buddy, and they mentioned romantic problems. I mentioned I had some too, and they eventually ferreted it out of me. They told me I should confess, and I said no, both because I want to remain friends, and because I can’t do a long-distance relationship. They told me they’d go behind my back if I didn’t, and I warned them not to. Five minutes later, I get messaged by my crush. To put it short, it wouldn’t work out. I stopped talking to both, and was pretty depressed afterwards, to the point where I couldn’t feel any romance, sexuality, or companionship towards anybody. I got over it sometime later, and I think I realized I was bi around the same time. I kind of wish I could smooth things over, but it’s been so long I don’t think it’s an option anymore. Plus Facebook has a horrible interface and is terrible so I really don’t want to.

80. How many piercings do you have?

Zero.

81. Can you roll your Rs?“

No.

82. How fast can you type?

VERY.

83. How fast can you run?

Also VERY.

84. What color is your hair?

Dark.

85. What color is your eyes?

I looked in a mirror for a minute. I think it’s either grey, green, or brown?

86. What are you allergic to?

Pollen and bullets.

87. Do you keep a journal?

No.

88. What do your parents do?

My Dad makes food at the mall.

89. Do you like your age?

I wish I had all the benefits of adulthood but was still 17.

90. What makes you angry?

People acting stupid when they should know better, things not working when they should, and things going wrong when they shouldn’t. While not my intention in answering this question, this site has all three :^)

91. Do you like your own name?

My given name is pretty okay. I really like Renardie though.

92. Have you already thought of baby names, and if so what are they?

I am not having children.

93. Do you want a boy a girl for a child?

Three times I have said I’m not having children.

94. What are you strengths?

Imagination, expression, intellect, and pluck.

95. What are your weaknesses?

Procrastination, anxiety, and obsession.

96. How did you get your name?

For my given name, I’ll keep it brief for privacy’s sake, but my parents are comic book nerds. For Renardie, I’m simply a fan of Reynard the Fox.

97. Were your ancestors royalty?

My Dad’s a King in the figurative sense, does that count?

98. Do you have any scars?

This is a repeat question. Someone get OP’s ass.

99. Color of your bedspread?

Off-color baby blue.

100. Color of your room?

White.

#renardie taking questions #oh no renardie is posting

[ettadunham]

A Buffy rewatch 7x16 Storyteller

aka the lies we tell ourselves

We did it, guys! We made it to the last season! Also, hello if you’re new, and stumbled upon this without context. As usual, these impromptu text posts are the product of my fevered mind as I rant about the episode I just watched for an hour (okay, sometimes perhaps two). Anything goes!

And in today’s episode, it’s Andrew time. So I guess we’ll need to talk about him, huh?

I’ll just get this out of the way right away: I’m not big on Andrew. I know that he’s well-loved by a lot of folks, and also, that I’m not alone in having a bit more resistance towards him… (So, he’s basically like each and every Buffyverse character ever? Except Warren – we all hate Warren.) And I get it. Both of those sides, I guess.

It’s not that I hate Andrew though. It’s just that there’s a reason why he was part of the Trio, and while I think there’s a lot of interesting narrative fuel there, I have a hard time forming a deeper connection to those characters. Including Jonathan.

But much like Superstar was an interesting, highly enjoyable Jonathan-focused episode despite any future misgiving I might’ve had of the character, Storyteller does the same for Andrew. There’s a lot to like here, and we build on Andrew’s character massively.

Andrew, in this episode in particular, is presented as an audience surrogate - one of his character’s biggest appeal imo. He understands and appreciates that he’s in a story, surrounded by all these larger than life characters. Buffy is the hero. Xander is the unappreciated sidekick that Andrew stans, and has a crush on. Dawn is a cutie with a weird backstory. Willow and Anya have these rich, ambiguous, dark patches in their past. Spike has… abs, I guess?

The way Andrew integrates himself into these stories is where things get interesting though.

He mostly sees himself as an outsider, a storyteller, and therefore detached from the actual canon world of the show. And when he does integrate himself, it’s just another story, another character. And as Andrew tells the tale of this person, who looks like him, and sounds like him, the story changes with the narrative.

You see, Andrew didn’t want to kill Jonathan. That’s not what happened. It was an accident! He was possessed! It was what the story wanted him to do! He had no agency whatsoever.

Which… is pretty meta. But in the world of the show, it’s Andrew lying to himself about what he’s done and why. About who he is.

So, maybe it’s part of the gay subtext, too? Except... is it subtext? Is it, really?

Is Andrew relentlessly gay-coded, or is he just gay on the show? How is that a taboo, when we already have main queer characters in the cast? Are they not textually acknowledging it because it’s so clearly the case, or are they playing coy for shits and giggles? Is it supposed to be funny?

It’s all a bit murky with the intent. But I do think that there’s a more favorable perspective here somewhere. The scene where Andrew is re-playing Xander and Anya’s exchange is a bit weird and obtrusive, but there’s no actual joke here about how Andrew’s clearly using it to fantasize about Xander. It is weird and obtrusive because he recorded them having this intimate conversation, yes (which, again, is more meta than anything else…), but not because he has a crush on Xander.

So, that’s something.

Staying on topic here, did we seriously break up Willow and Kennedy for 1 whole minute of overall runtime? Are the writers intentionally making Kennedy’s character to be as thin as tissue paper? After the end of the previous episode, were they immediately like ‘oh, shit, now we have to build her character to explore this and get them back together, quick, let’s have them make up offscreen at the beginning of the next one’.

And I guess I kinda appreciate the background storytelling element of it all. To just have them reunite as one of those side stories we don’t see, because we’re so locked to Andrew’s perspective. Kinda? Maybe?

Mostly though, it’s just cheap and lazy.

Seriously, I don’t even care about Kennedy, truth be told. Or this relationship. I’m okay with it because I like Willow and I want her to have nice things, and not be miserable. And I guess the writers are aware of this, but still. They’re not even trying at this point.

This is also the episode where Xander and Anya don’t get back together. But they do have sex. Now, this is a relationship where I am actually invested in both characters – just not necessarily in them, as an item. It’s all… *shrug emoji* The whole having sex to get over each other is a nice callback to how their relationship started out in the first place though.

Speaking of callbacks, the high school going all Hellmouth-y had some nice moments of that too. Like Buffy stopping a shy girl from going invisible. The scene with the nervous guy apparently actually exploding into bits and pieces was a bit extreme for the comedic tone of it all, but that only made it even more of a S1 homage.

And then there’s the scene with Andrew and Buffy over the Hellmouth seal.

There are things about Storyteller we could dissect, and I could sit here talking about my own ambiguous feelings on Andrew all day, but this scene? This scene is one of the best of the season and no, I’m not taking any constructive criticism.

It’s a great character building moment for Andrew, but we’re also adding to Buffy’s character too.

The episode earlier already lampshaded the Season 7 Buffy Speeches counter that I talked about earlier, but here, Buffy also acknowledges it.

ANDREW:  “You said we could all get through this.” BUFFY:  “I made it up. I’m making it all up. What kind of hero does that make me?” ANDREW:  “No, you’re doing great. Really. Kudos.” BUFFY:  “Yeah? Well, I don’t like having to give a bunch of speeches about how we’re all gonna live, because we won’t. This isn’t some story where good triumphs because good triumphs. Good people are going to die! Girls. Maybe me. Probably you. Probably right now.”

And I said at the beginning of this post, that I’m not big on Andrew, but the truth is? This episode gets to me. This scene gets to me. And every time I watch it, I like Andrew a whole lot better.

…That is until I rewatch season 6 again, and he plummets back into his starting point. It’s a vicious cycle.

But maybe I’m looking at it in the wrong way. This isn’t a cycle after all. This is part of the show’s themes about change and hope, and giving people the chance to grow.

It is, after all, Andrew’s tears that close the Hellmouth. His tears of regret. He admits to and acknowledges what he’s done, and it breaks the cycle of evil for the time being. It doesn’t change what happened, but it does change him. By taking responsibility, he takes charge of his own life instead of playing a character in a story.

Andrew may have stopped following the First’s instruction a while ago, but by not taking action, by being a spectator, he was still an agent of the First. No wonder then, that him breaking out of that state weakens the First as well.

Huh. Maybe I’m just underestimating my own attachment to Andrew after all.

We can all do better if we’re allowed to change. But we also need to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge our missteps in order to do that. Otherwise, we really are just in a vicious cycle, doomed to repeat our worst mistakes.

So... be more like Andrew, and break that cycle, I guess?

#buffy rewatch 2k19 #btvs talk #btvs

[thegodskeeper]

Roll Initiative and Draw Your Cards

This post began life as a Patreon exclusive post! To see posts like this at least thirty days before the rest of the world, please consider supporting me on Patreon! 🎲🏹🤺💔🧩

Roll initiative! As some of you may know, when I’m not looking at my runes and figuring out my life, I like to play a couple of roleplay games. I have a weekly Pathfinder game, and in fact one of my main characters is also a diviner. And a storyteller. Perhaps they’re looking over my shoulder while I make this post… They say to write what you know, so I guess that applies to roleplaying too; which is where this little idea sprung up from! Ever have trouble thinking up what character you want to play for a new campaign? Then perhaps this six-card “spread” can help you learn a little more about your deck and build a character at the same time. Let the cards be your GM!

Since this is an entirely new idea (to me) I actually took this concept to a couple of people on the Diviner’s Anonymous server and asked them to help me test run it and give me their thoughts! Big thanks to beamagical​, centerpointwitch​ and the-odd-aardvadillo​, especially for unraveling some of the kinks in the first draft. In this tutorial, we will be creating three characters - one for each of my beta-diviners - and explaining how they built the characters that they did.

Fun bonus fact: some aspects of how you signify “you” in this method are a little sneak-peek at the Wandering Oracle system that I am hoping to debut on mu Patreon.

What you need:

A tarot deck - physical is best. If you happen to have to use an online deck or an app, then you’re going to need a piece of paper or some other way to keep track of all cards already drawn.

A character concept (optional) - we don’t want the key details, that’s what this system is for, but if you happen to have a real inkling to play a Chaotic Evil half-elf called Daisy Dukes, roll with it!

A roleplay system - I had Pathfinder in mind when writing this up, but it should be adaptable to Dungeons and Dragons, Dark Heresy, Changelings… it’s designed to be open-ended. If you’re going entirely from scratch, I would heavily recommend looking up the d20PFSRD.

Start by shuffling your deck and drawing cards until you find a face card (ie. any of the suit cards beginning with Page, Knight, Queen or King). That is your character’s class.

Analyze the key traits of the card, and decide what role would suit someone with that sort of personality, or those kinds of personal skills.

Keep drawing cards until you find a Major Arcana card (ie. the ones without suits, such as Temperance and The Lovers). This is what motivates your character in their chosen class.

Note: Whether or not you choose to use reversals in your character is entirely up to you. Some may have an obvious meaning, while others may seem irrelevant. Trust your gut, or honestly, go with whichever sounds more exciting for you to play!

Example 1: Cas drew ‘The Page of Cups’ and ‘The Heirophant’, and settled on “an idealistic Bard who aims to learn every heroic epic they can”.

Example 2: Bea drew ‘The King of Wands’ and ‘The Magician’, and decided that their “character is  a Paladin, and their motivation is personal power”.

Example 3: Alene (also) drew ‘The Daughter/Page of Cups’ and ‘The Emperor’, and thought of “a Rogue from a noble house who ran away from home to be in control of their own life”.

Next, draw another three cards; any cards. These are the cards that tell you about different parts of your character’s backstory. At this point, hold on to any jumpers - they may be extra information you might not otherwise have thought about, perhaps a plot hook to save until a special moment in the game.

Family and Childhood

Career and Evolution

Beliefs and Influences

You can analyze these cards the same way you did your class, as well as considering what they might mean in the context of what we learned in the first two cards. What are the key traits of the card? What might this mean for your character, knowing your class and goals? Think of it like a three-card tarot spread, and build your backstory based on how each card relates to the next.

Example 1: Cas drew ‘The Knight of Swords’, ‘Temperance’ and ‘The Two of Pentacles’. In their words, “basically [my bard] studied anything they could as a youth, and their studies of heroic songs showed them how few and far between heroes really are. So they became a paladin, a knight of goodness to help any they can.”

Example 2: Bea drew ‘The Eight of Pentacles’, ‘The Hermit’ and ‘The Five of Wands’. In their words, “my character came from a family of craftspeople. They made shoes, but my character really didn't like the social aspect of being a salesperson, so they wandered off. While they were out wandering, they realized that the world is not a safe place and that they needed to learn to protect themselves, so they learned how to fight and became a warrior.”

Example 3: Alene drew ‘The Father/King of Wands’, ‘The Two of Wands’ and ‘The Three of Wands’. In their words, “my rogue decided on their path after leaving their Noble background and their father behind. They were joined by two loyal companions and are boldly going in their new direction but probably still have some internal conflict to resolve due to their upbringing and relationship with their father.”

Finally, draw cards from your remaining deck until you find a Minor Arcana card (anything with Wands, Cups, Pentacles or Swords in the name). This final card helps determine your character’s reasons for joining up with an adventuring party.

Yet again, it’s time to analyze your card. What key traits do you have? Did your character have ties to members of the party beforehand, or are they a true newcomer? Are they simply traveling with people for security? Did they even want to be in a group? Do they have a score to settle?

If your GM has given you a little bit of story to work with already, then you can align your results from this step with the overall plot, as well. Who says the GM needs to know everything...

Example 1: Cas drew ‘The Six of Pentacles’, and is thinking their character met the party ‘on order of their god… to join a group’.

Example 2: Bea drew ‘The Nine of Swords’, and tragically their “character was about to jump off a bridge, and someone saved them”.

Example 3: Alene drew ‘The Son/Knight of Wands’, so their character ‘charmed their way in’.

Bonus Rounds!

Still want to add some spice to your mix? Keep on piling on those cards:

Does your character have a secret? Draw a Major Arcana card from the remaining cards, but keep it hidden from the rest of your party. Analyze the key traits of this card, and how they relate to the “main spread”. Perhaps you have a secret alignment (oooh) or you used to work for the bad guy (aaah).

Is there an important NPC(s) in your character’s life? Draw face cards from the remaining cards - as many as you want there to be characters - to learn a little about their personalities and roles. If you can’t find any left, then maybe your character has no ties (oh no!).

Not settled on an alignment, yet? Draw another card, any card, and see what it says. All together now… “time to analyze the key traits”.

So, what building blocks do you have to create your character? Has this method been helpful, or has it left you even more confused than before? If you don’t think you have enough to work on to build a detailed personality or backstory, why not do a reading for your new character! A good ol’ Past / Present / Future reading may give you some more hints.

If you think you have enough to work with without that, then now it’s time to go hogwild! Name your character, figure out their age, figure out their race (if you haven’t done all this already). And then take that character out into the wide world over yonder and throw some monsters at them. Happy adventuring.

#tarot #roleplay #lee talks

[eddycurrents]

Abe Sapien: The Devil Does Not Jest & Other Stories - “The Devil Does Not Jest”

Words: Mike Mignola & John Arcudi | Art: Peter Snejbjerg | Colours: Dave Stewart | Letters: Clem Robins

Originally published by Dark Horse in Abe Sapien: The Devil Does Not Jest #1-2 | September-October 2011

Collected in Abe Sapien - Volume 2: The Devil Does Not Jest and Other Stories | Abe Sapien: The Drowning & Other Stories

Plot Summary:

In 1985, Abe travels to Maine to talk to the son of a demonologist who disappeared fifty years earlier, and gets a bit more than he bargained for.

Reading Notes:

(Note: Pagination is solely in reference to the chapter itself and is not indicative of anything within the issue or collections.)

pg. 1 - I think this is an interesting way to start out the story. A splash of Abe being feasted upon by something we know nothing about. It certainly doesn’t look good for him and those toothy maggot things sure are creepy. 

pg. 2 - Made more interesting because we’re given no context for it. We’re left unsure if it’s a flash forward, a flashback, a random daydream...it’s just there and then we’re into business as usual at BPRD HQ in Connecticut.

pg. 3 - I like set up of a missing author of demonology and how mundane his rediscovery happens to be. It makes everything feel normal and unassuming as we dive in to find out more.

pg. 5 - This just feels like the set up for something to go horribly, horribly wrong.

pg. 8 - That didn’t take long. The gore from Harren and Stewart is impressive.

pg. 9 - I love the inexplicable over the top violence here. There’s seemingly no reason for it, and seeing Abe and the Sheriff perplexed by it is hilarious, but normal.

pg. 10 - Why is there pretty much never any interoffice cooperation between levels of law enforcement in fiction? I mean, it may or may not be true in real life with separate jurisdictions, but it always just feels like a sad pissing contest. Less people would probably wind up dead if branches just trusted one another.

pg. 14 - These demon dog things are damn neat.

pg. 15-18 - Just great action of Abe versus these creature things.

pg. 20/21 - Amazing double-page spread. That’s certainly something different to find in someone’s basement. Who keeps a demon corpse? (Obviously you break it down, use parts for other rituals, and sell off some of the pieces to occult collectors for a. money and b. the joy of being the originating point of an eventual series of cursed artifact situations with face-replacing cults and taxi chases).

pg. 22 - Ouch. Also, another great design.

pg. 23 - I like that Harren seems to be using the same overall design and clothing for Liz as what we saw from Jason Pearson building off of Mignola’s original in Seed of Destruction.

pg. 25 - This is funny as hell. Also, I didn’t mention it before, but it’s good to see Sal Tasso again, even if he is still a bit of a lunkhead. Adds a nice bit of consistency and variety.

pg. 26 - We seem to have finally come around to the opening page of the story. Interesting, that. I wonder if Abe’s just been bleeding out, recollecting what brought him to this point all this time. Definitely an interesting structural choice for the narrative.

Also, transposing the “About the Author” photo and blurb atop the ghost/hallucination version of Garver Van Laer is neat. Nice way to convey who he is without spelling it out.

pg. 27 - This is funny. Also, I love how trippy the art is becoming down in the basement.

pg. 29 - The madness comes across incredibly well on Van Laer’s face. Also, let it be a lesson to everyone. If you don’t know what you’re doing with the occult, don’t start dabbling at the deep end. Work with banishing rituals and cleansing rituals first. Baby steps to build up your acumen and experience. Don’t just read it in a book and assume you can do it.

pg. 32 - It’s kind of neat that it’s a traditional demon form, though. Out of all of the strange stuff we have running around in this story, this is the most normal out of all of it.

pg. 33 - This is great. A wonderful twist in the tale to change it from a simple demon tale spinning out of a long lost missing persons case to a family-based body horror yarn. That third panel above is just chilling.

pg. 34 - I think maybe we just got an answer for why Garver’s son went nuts and slaughtered his nephew in the first bit. Also, it’s amazing as to how mundane Garver’s end was. 

pg. 35 - It’s an odd bit that the Sheriff is still alive.

pg. 36 - I’m surprised Abe doesn’t remember her from before, but I guess he didn’t see who knocked him out. We now know, though, that this is Garver’s wife, still alive, and even more hideously transformed. I love how creepy Harren and Stewart make this look.

pg. 37-39 - More amazing action. It’s the kind that makes you slow down and just savour what’s going on.

pg. 40 - To the bitter end. Great composition here.

pg. 41 - The set up making us think that anything horrible happened to Abe is cute. 

pg. 42-43 - Another amazing double-page spread. Killing Garver’s wife sure is tough work.

pg. 44 - And the humour of Hellboy and Tasso walking in on the tail end of that, right after Abe is finished is gold.

Final Thoughts:

I’m always amazed by the sheer depth and breadth of the talent pool that has worked on the Hellboy universe. Though this was still early in James Harren’s comics career, and his first for the Hellboy universe, this art is fantastic. Great storytelling, some of the best creature designs, the range of emotion on characters’ faces, the kinetic action sequences, and a highly unique style. Sure, there’s hints of Adam Pollina, Troy Nixey, Guy Davis, Eric Powell, The Pander Bros., Ted McKeever, John McCrea, even some Mignola himself, and more in there, but James Harren has always seemed to transcend his influences to create something visually stunning.

d. emerson eddy is not a brick. Nor is he drowning slowly.

#Give 'em Hellboy #Hellboy #Abe Sapien #The Devil Does Not Jest and Other Stories #Mike Mignola #James Harren #RaisingHellboy #173