i have two whole tv shows, two ebooks, two video games, and my gdocs writing projects for this ten-hour flight. if i'm bored, that's on me

Evening Dress

Jacques Doucet

c.1918

Tessier & Sarrou

Sir Philip Sasson (Phillip Albert Gustave David Sasson), 1923, John Singer Sargent

Medium: oil,canvas

the gallery that sells my art will be closing in the next month or so, last chance to buy a piece for a while.

frye adrienne tall button boot

Everyday Dark Chocolate Cake

what’s your ‘thing’ as a friend. i don’t mean like ‘oh im the mom friend’ i mean like what’s the Thing where if one of your friends was looking for a specific interaction they’d message you first. personally i can always be relied upon to get hyped about bugs, literature, and cursed internet images.

Arianne Martell - Dsquared2 Pre-fall 2013

Painted rolling waves by Daniel Abel.

Philippe Wolfers  Art Nouveau peacock pendant

writing a romantic subplot into a canon with almost no onscreen romance is wild because you have nothing to go on. ffxiv is all about the power of emotion and we meet a bunch of characters with strongly-implied feelings, but it's a chaste story. the characters bond through beating up baddies and hanging out and exploring worlds and saving each other. there aren't, like, kissing scenes. if you want to experiment with adding A Capital-L Love Story in a way that matches the canon tone, you're fighting with one hand tied behind your back. you can look at how they handled love stories elsewhere in the series, like squall and rinoa or yuna and tidus, but you're still shooting in the dark.

"but AK, why would you worry about matching the source material's tone? fanfic is transformative! you should do whatever you want!" well, you see, i like a challenge, and also giving myself headaches, and i had time on my hands. i've made my bed, and now i'm lying in it. do as i say, not as i do

favorite character from any media BUT it has to be a woman. in the tags now go (pls talk to me about your favorite fictional women pls pls pls pls)

sometimes when work is busy or you have a lot going on in your life, your brain goes to weird places in search of a way to relax. you find some niche book genre and have to read everything in it, or you throw yourself into a hobby you haven't thought about for years. me, i tend to reminisce about the story concepts i came up with when i was much younger, like middle and high school. they're not good. the characters are personality sketches and art designs, and there's never much plot meat. they're beat sheets, or a few thousand words and vibes. the adults behave in confusing, edgy, melodramatic ways that make perfect sense when you're thirteen and think you're being deep. but they're nostalgic, and some of them have potential if i squint, so it's easy to go, "hmm. is there anything i could do with this now?"

and some of these concepts are fanfic, which has a particular allure, because you're tired, and it saves you sooo much worldbuilding legwork. remember that show or game you loved? you could reconnect with it! you could rotate blorbos you haven't rotated in twenty years! you could resurrect old ships! give OCs a new coat of paint and realize a story you couldn't do justice decades ago!

which is beguiling until the minute you go to ao3 and find the source material's fan presence is a barren wasteland. i'm no stranger to small fandoms, and i'll be the first to say you shouldn't make art for engagement alone, but i'm talking dozens of fics. ancient harry potter crossovers. hit counts in the low three digits. fics that share a word with the title, so they turn up in the search results. with stats like those, you wonder whether, if you posted about it, most of your followers would even know what you were talking about.

this is the point where i take myself by the shoulders and go, "AK, this is your gremlin brain talking. don't feed your gremlin brain." of course, at this point in my career, i should probably ask myself whether all fanfic is the gremlin brain talking, which is kind of a shame. time spent writing fanfic is lost opportunity cost that i should be using to build a body of original work. so i eat my vegetables and i work on the original outlines. but i wash the dishes, and i still think, wouldn't that be cool? man. man!!

there are characters for whom “poor little meow meow” doesn’t quite cut it. To me he’s like a traumatized pit bull mix with a bite history and I’m the white girl with a savior complex trying to stop them from putting him down

I love R. Dorothy Wayneright so much it’s unreal.

phew! finally a weekend where i can set aside enough time to type up The Promised Endwalker Stream-of-Consciousness Post. i finished the base story... a month ago? but work has been busy, and i think tumblr benefits from me being quiet sometimes. anyway, what a ride. when you've been building up to the end of your arc for a decade, you want to hit it like an earthquake, and that's exactly what they did.

i think people love endwalker because it fires on all cylinders. it returns - in both story and vision - to the eorzea we love, and the dev team gets to show off everything they've learned. the dungeons and boss fights are dynamic and imaginative and colorful and bring the game's epic sense of scope to bear. the story callbacks are juicy. the music is orchestral again. we're back home, and we're saving the galaxy. what's better than this?

i love that we go to garlemald. i don't - i mean, you know, i don't like garlemald. i shouldn't have to qualify that. but it's hugely narratively satisfying to see the face of the enemy we've been fighting since the first few hours of ARR. you don't think about them when you're beating them up in castrum centri or ala mhigo. they're star wars bad guys. then you meet them on their own turf. you observe firsthand how they starve and cannibalize their own people to feed their obsession with state power and military strength. the wintry environment makes it seem all the more barren and desperate. my favorite part by far. i wish we'd spent more time there.

actually, on that note:

there is an argument that endwalker should've been two expacs. i've heard similar about stormblood - ala mhigo should've been the whole thing, and doma should've been either patch content or an expac of its own. the prevailing theory is that, after ARR, the devs are afraid of letting arcs run long. i can't speak to that, but i wouldn't have minded, that's for sure!

i won't pretend not to be biased. i've noted in many xiv posts that it hurries through its political plots to get to the magic stuff. i felt more conscious of it in heavensward and especially in stormblood. i made peace with it in endwalker. with dessert this good, who am i to complain? i can do small character drama on my own time. for now, the game wants royce to be a big damn shonen hero, and that can be fun, too.

speaking of characters, urianger and estinien have grown on me. this is the arc where, for me at least, the scions have congealed. they're all good, but with any large cast and custom player character, you tend to form the meatiest bonds with a few specific ones. i think royce appreciates urianger's cooler, more mature head. they're both so formal. he realizes she's someone he can confide in. i think she sees estinien as a gifted, but hotheaded whelp, which i find very funny. patience, child. stop sulking. do your breathing drills.

i love thancred's MGS sequence and in from the cold too. they're stressful, but i love that the team tried, you know what i mean? the fact that you can fight enemies in a pinch makes those duties way more bearable than some other games that experiment with stealth.

in from the cold as a whole, honestly. If You Know, You Know

all right, i can't avoid referencing spoilers anymore, sorry. there's a sense of classical tragedy to the whole elpis sequence. it's like watching macbeth or hamlet. you know how it's going to end, and you know you're powerless to stop it, but if they'd just made that different choice! but we had to leave eden. the warrior of light had to end up where they are to finish what elpis started. i don't do fate/destiny plots, but this? i'll take it.

i also knew what would happen going into ultima thule and still came away from it moved. it's strong writing. that's all there is to it. sure, the visuals are haunting, but the dialogue has to sell a gauntlet of difficult character moments, and it pulls it off. on the design side, there's some interesting intentional friction that forces you to linger in the zone and sit with its sense of despair. that part where you have to search the empty park for signs of life? oof

with the majority of the MSQ under my belt, i started sniffing around for what else there is to do ingame. i tried ninja. did terribly. i tried sage. did terribly too, but at least that gave me access to the healer role quests, which, ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°). the nier raids are gorgeous. i even did the controversial werlyt quests, and terncliff is so cute. i kind of wish we could have another story there!

what's next? i dunno! right now i'm burning through the hildibrand quests before i continue on with endwalker's patch story. the field operation stuff seems interesting to do after the MSQ, in a "hey, you saved the world, but we have more missions for you" way. i've also contracted Triple Triad Collector Disease, so that'll keep me busy for a long time.

all right. one last thing. Real Gamer Moments: i was in a mount-farming party recently, and i said that i sort of collected mounts, but only used the ishgardian chocobo. it's a roleplay thing - it's the chocobo royce took when she ran away from ishgard. one of the party members said "haurchefant would be proud of you." AUGH