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flanaganfilm · 2 years

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Good day Mr Flanagan. please what does "the rest is confetti" mean to you and in the context it was used in hill house??

Okay, here we go. Buckle up for a long read.

To answer this, I've got to explain a little bit about what was happening and where I was when I sat down to write episode 10 of The Haunting of Hill House.

Hill House was not a fun shoot. The picture above is from very early in production, when I was still chubby and happy.

It was my first foray into television. I was absolutely terrified that I'd mess it up. So I'd opted to direct all of the episodes myself, figuring that - if nothing else - I'd have no one else to blame if it went south.

It was the most grueling professional experience of my career. The shoot was by no means a smooth one, every day was an uphill battle from a budgetary perspective, and between the three giant production entities involved with the production, I spent a lot of time fighting over the creative and logistical elements of the series.

I began losing weight. I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

By the end of the shoot, I had dropped almost 40 lbs.

I was very depressed. Every day was a battle, and for the first time in my career, I wasn't excited to go to work in the morning. We were fighting for basic resources, fighting for the show we wanted, and even fighting amongst ourselves by the end. It was grueling.

We hadn't written all of the scripts when we started production. I believe we had finished through episode 7, but the rest of the scripts had to be finished while we were already shooting.

We'd mapped everything out in the writers room, and I had great support on the other episodes, but I was writing the finale solo. I'd thought I'd be able to juggle it with everything else. I quickly fell behind.

I finally got to the script about halfway through production. I'd work on it between takes at the monitor, and then get home to our tiny rental house in Atlanta, where Kate was waiting with our baby son. (One of the rare bright spots of this shoot came when Kate found out she was pregnant about halfway through production. We even named our daughter Theodora, in honor of her origins.)

I'd typically fall down from exhaustion when I got home, but I had to push through it and work on the script. My weekends were spent shotlisting and prepping for upcoming episodes. We didn't have enough time to stay ahead of prep, so every available day was used for that... I went three months without a single day off at one point.

I'd sit up late staring at the script. I was in a dark, dark place. Overwhelmed, exhausted, and feeling like I lived in an eternal present. Each day bled into the next and it didn't feel like there was an end in sight. That feeling of unreality was heightened because we kept returning to the same sets, same locations, and even the same scenes throughout the 100 shooting-day production. Stepping back into the exact room we had shot in days or weeks or even months ago made the whole thing feel absolutely surreal. Making movies is always an non-linear experience, but this one felt particularly so... it was like the days of our lives were happening to us all out of order.

I remember feeling something like despair creeping into my daily experience on the show. And I remember dwelling on that when I got into the scene work of episode 10.

As I worked through the draft, I recall that despair coloring a lot of what was on the page. My filter was breaking down. There's a monologue at the beginning of the episode where Steven's wife Leigh (played by my dear friend Samantha Sloyan) spews out a torrent of eviscerating insults about Steve's value as a writer. That is just me vomiting onto myself. She was voicing all of my deepest insecurities about myself at the time, and of what I was doing with this series.

She says "Is anything real before you write it, Steve? The things you write about, they're real. Those people are real, their feelings are real, their pain is real - but not to you, is it. Not until you chew it up, digest it, and shit it out onto a piece of paper and even then, it's a pale imitation at best."

This was the mindset I was in for a lot of the shoot. The writing became a reflection of a lot of that turmoil, and I knew who I was referring to in that monologue - I was talking about my family. I was talking about how much of their lives I'd used as building material for this show. I was talking about the fact that I'd lost two loved ones to suicide, and seen what it had done to my mother in particular. And I knew I was using - possibly even exploiting - those people for this series.

There's a lot of despair in this episode. The Red Room, as we conceived it, was a place that would feed upon those emotions. Grief, sadness, loss... those were the real ghosts of our series, and where our characters find themselves at the start of the finale. They're being slowly digested - eaten alive - by those feelings.

So finally, it came time to write Nell's final scene with her siblings. I knew from the outline we'd constructed in the writers room what this was supposed to accomplish - she was supposed to be their salvation. She was supposed to take all of these feelings that we'd been wrestling with and finally provide catharsis... finally say something that would free everyone.

I remember sitting with a blinking cursor for a long time. The Crain siblings had just turned and seen Nellie standing by the door, and suddenly were able to hear her speak. But what should she say? What would I say? What would I want someone to say to me?

What she ultimately says lays bare a lot of what I was thinking about when it comes to grief. It exists outside of linear time, much as I felt I existed at the time. That sense of eternal present, that sense of a nonlinear eternity of moments and memories - it all came out in her speech to her brothers and sisters.

I remember feeling, looking at my insane present and looking back at my past, how strangely overwhelmed I was by memories. That I wasn't experiencing time in a straight line, and hadn't been for a while - for the better part of a year, I'd felt more like I was standing in a whirlwind of moments. "Our moments fall around us like..." Nell said, and I recall sitting back and trying to find the words.

"Rain," for certain, but there was something too uniform about that. The moments of life as I experienced them weren't that orderly, they weren't that small. They didn't fall the same way. Some sailed by, fast and unremarkable, while others lingered in front of me, twisting and stretching. So it was a good word, but not the right word. I left it on the page though.

"Snow" was my next attempt. Better, in that I imagined the snow blowing in the wind, swirling and dancing and feeling more organic. More chaotic. More like life. But for some reason, the word that stuck with me, the word I felt Nell Crain would connect with was...

"Confetti."

And that was because I was thinking not of Victoria Pedretti at this point, but of Violet McGraw.

Violet played Young Nell, and I wondered what she might have said if she experienced time this way. As an adult, Nell was despairing. Nell was overwhelmed. But as a child... there was an innocence to the word. There was a joy to the word.

I imagined moments falling around her, this little girl with the big smile and the wide eyes. Her moments would be colorful. They would be of different shapes and sizes, some falling fast and some falling slow, flipping and turning and dancing in the air, independent of the others. Sparkling, whirling, doing lazy summersaults as they sauntered down to Earth.

I thought of myself, and of the members of my family. I thought of those we'd lost. I realized what I hoped for them, and for us all, in the end... was to look upon that mosaic of experience, that avalanche of days and minutes and moments... and to smile with some of the joy we had as children.

And this, I thought, was something that gave me hope. This gave me a glimpse of some kind of salvation for them. This was also how I hoped my life might seem if I was a ghost - a cascade of color and light and shape and movement, something I could dance in.

So Nell smiled and said... "or confetti."

It stuck with me. The rest of her monologue gets heavy again, and gets to the real point of the show - the point of the whole series, if I'm honest - and that's forgiveness.

I figured the only thing that would let the Crain children out of the Red Room was to be forgiven. I thought of the losses in my own family, and I thought of what I wished for my mother and for my aunts and uncles and cousins and I tried to pour that into her final words.

"I loved you completely, and you loved me the same," she said, "that's all." And this was the point I wanted the most to make. That at the end of our life, if we can say this about each other, the rest doesn't matter. The rest is that rainstorm, or that blizzard, that fell around this one central truth, and maybe built itself in piles around it, to the point we lost sight of it along the way.

And I thought again of that little girl, and almost as an afterthought, wrote "The rest is confetti."

I liked the way it sounded, but I was insecure about the line. I almost took it out, in fact. I remember asking Kate to read the scene and talking about that last line with her. "Is it too cute?" I wondered. She was on the fence. "Depends on how it's acted," she said, and I figured she was right. We could always take it out if it didn't work. The scene could end with "I loved you completely, and you loved me the same. That's all."

Why not shoot it and see what happened.

I turned in the script, we published it quickly so that we could start breaking it down and prepping it. And the next morning I was back on set. I'd deal with episode 10 when it came down the pipe again, sometime in the coming months. We had a lot of shooting to get through before I had to worry about it.

I recall Netflix asking me to cut a lot of that monologue, and I remember them also having questions about the "confetti" line. I pointed out that it didn't cost us any extra to shoot it all, it was only words, and fought to keep the script intact.

Ultimately, they insisted I make a series of cuts on the page. I begrudgingly agreed, but left Nell's speech alone. I made superficial cuts around it, throughout the draft, and even considered changing the font size to fool them into thinking it had gotten shorter (I ultimately was told I wouldn't fool anyone and not to risk starting a war). But Nellie's final goodbye stayed intact.

It must be said - Victoria Pedretti SLAUGHTERED this scene.

By the time we got around to filming it, things had never been worse for the production. There was almost nothing left for a lot of us. Tensions were sky-high, resources had been exhausted completely, and we were all ready to give up.

Filming in the mold-ridden Red Room was depressing, morose, and led to a lot of arguments and unpleasantness. The room itself just felt gross, always, and we were in there for days at a time. The last thing we had to shoot in there was Nellie's goodbye.

Victoria came to set having to push through pages of monologue, and she did so with captivating bravado. I recall being teary-eyed at the monitor watching her work. And when we finally made it to the last line, I watched her deliver it with... a smile. A sincere, innocent, longing, joyful smile. A smile informed by the sadness, grief, and loss of her own situation, of her own life... but a smile that finds forgiveness and grace after all. Pedretti knew how to say the line, and how that word would work.

And as she said it, I knew it would stay in the show.

Over the years, that sentence has become something of a tagline for The Haunting of Hill House. I'm always a bit mystified and touched when I see people approach me with the line on T-shirts, or even tattooed on their bodies.

I started signing it with autographs back in 2020 after enough fans asked me to. Now it's my go-to when I sign anything related to Hill House.

The line, for me, represents a lot of things.

It's about the insane, chaotic, non-linear experience of making that show. It's about trying to find and hold onto joy, even in the grips of despair.

It's about the way the moments of our lives aren't linear, not really, and how we may be unable to understand them as we exist in their flurry. It's about finding hope, innocence and forgiveness in the final reckoning.

And it's about how, outside of our love for each other, the rest is just... well, it's fleeting. It's colorful. It's overwhelming. It's blinding. It's dancing. And, if we look at it right, it's beautiful. But it's also light. It's tinsel. It flits and dances and falls and fades, it's as light as air.

The rest is the stuff that falls around us, and flits away into nothing.

It's the love that stays.

#haunting of hill house #the rest is confetti #that was a very long story #man I was not okay while we were shooting that #forgiveness #heal

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literallysatanofficial · 2 years

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Alright, I'm going to attempt to hopefully clear up a few misconceptions and assuage some worries about this Disco Elysium sequel and the general situation at za/um right now.

I see the shitshow that is unfolding on social media, and as someone who has known about this whole disaster for over half a year now I'd like to weigh in on it and provide some context for everyone who may not know the full story.

First off, Robert Kurvitz was fired at the end of last year. December 2021. As is strongly implied on Martin Luiga's twitter, the reason for this is greed (calling them "money men" and "crooks" and other similar statements for like, months now), and the executive producers, Tõnis Haavel (who has previously been tried for fraud) and Kaur Kender (who has previously been tried for... other things.) screwed everyone over. Kender provided funding for the game, as the majority of the original za/um cultural association did not have the financial means to.

The original za/um cultural association consisted of Robert Kurvitz, Jüri Saks, Martin Luiga, and Aleksander Rostov, originally founded in in 2009. The group, along with Argo Tuulik, played many different ttrpg campaigns over the years, several of them set in Revachol (centred around Precinct 41), and slowly built the world up from there. Kurvitz released the book The Sacred and Terrible Air, set 20 years after Disco Elysium, back in 2013* but the novel flopped, and it was decided that they would make a video game. Rostov has always been more than just an artist for Disco Elysium, as you can see from the dev threads he frequently updated promoting the game, as well as on his personal instagram, tumblr sketch blog, and several other accounts he used while the game was first gaining traction.

*The most notable credits for TSaTA are as follows:

Author: Robert Kurvitz, Editor: Martin Luiga, Cover Design: Aleksander Rostov, Worldbuilding: Robert Kurvitz, Martin Luiga, Kaspar Kalvet, Argo Tuulik. Helen Hindpere and Kaur Kender also appear in the credits.

I say this because some of the staff at za/um are now accusing fans of being unable to overcome the "auteur theory" of it all (ie. seeing Kurvitz as the singular creative mind behind it all) but the fact is that they have now lost not only the original ttrpg campaign's game master, The Sacred and Terrible Air's author, and Disco Elysium's lead writer/director (Kurvitz) but also their lead writer for the Final Cut's political vision quests (Hindpere) as well as their "co-founder" and art director/designer (Rostov). They are all CREATIVE LEADS, and not just well known only for their reputations/titles.

Luiga himself (who originally broke the news) was an Elysium world builder and provided much of the pale and innocence-related lore. He was also a part of the original tabletop campaigns (Chester McLaine is his player character!), but left midway through Disco Elysium's development due to creative differences (or as he says, "bad vibes" at the company). He is credited as an editor, but claims to have written a good chunk of the text in the game, including much of Joyce's dialogue about the pale. I have seen people discredit him due to his early departure, but Rostov also tweeted out confirming that he, along with Hindpere and Kurvitz were no longer at the company, with no additional comments. Rostov also posted a drawing on his twitter several months back depicting a man jerking off over an NDA, so take that as you will.

So what does this mean for the future?

Luiga has said that he has hope for the sequel, which could either mean that the script was finished or nearing completion before Kurvitz was fired (likely, and fits a pattern in the industry) and it's just a matter of finishing the actual game development aspect, or it may be that he has hope for the original za/um creatives to be able to re-acquire the IP.

I think it's worth pointing out that the original pitch for "Disco Elysium" was actually "The Return", and Disco Elysium was meant to be the smaller-scale prequel to introduce players to the world. Considering that the team was planning on this sequel all along, I think it's possible that a large amount of the "original" game was written years ago, so it's not all that far fetched to believe that the basic outline may be finished, or even that a large portion of the script already exists. Keep in mind that there are a large number of writers for both Disco Elysium and The Final Cut, and it may still be possible to work with a base that the others provided. We have no idea how far into development the sequel may be. Of course, proceeding without three key members of the original team is kind of a kick in the balls, and imo really quite disgusting, especially with how long the company has been keeping their departures secret (dishonesty is not a good look lmao), but it may still be canon, true to the authors' vision, and genuinely a good game in the end.

Argo Tuulik, original Elysium world builder and part of the old ttrpg campaigns, as well as a main writer on Disco Elysium, is still working at za/um. Justin Keenan, former writer on The Final Cut who wrote the political vision quests alongside Helen Hindpere, still works at za/um (and has been promoted to lead writer, according to his LinkedIn), as does Kaspar Tamsalu, who painted several character portraits, (René and Gaston) and worked as a concept artist on the original game. Plenty of the original creatives still remain. The sequel could very well still be in good hands at the development level, even if the higher ups are "crooked".

So, in conclusion... If this game comes out and they still haven't worked things out with Kurvitz, Rostov and Hindpere? Honestly... fuckin' pirate it. But it is very likely it could still be a great game that plays out as it was meant to! All that being said, FUCK za/um as a company, don't support them through Atelier or their merch store. I wish everyone luck if they do attempt to get the IP back, and I sincerely hope this fan pressure will help get things moving for them.

#disco elysium #ada speaks #if anyone would like sources i can supply them #i just didnt want to bog down the post with links just in case it doesnt show in the tag #im leaving out a lot of shit for Reasons but i hate to see people upset because i do genuinely have hope for the future of elysium #but i will vouch for the quality of the sequel myself.#some minor updates as i accidentally stated argo was part of og za/um

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thewarmblanket · 3 months

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How do na’vi feed their babies?

I’ve been writing a WIP that revolves around a pregnancy since june and I still have no idea. I’ve heard and seen so many answers from they can’t breastfeed bc of their low body fat to actually they do breastfeed to actually they use their kurus

That is a good question! Actually whole fandom now struggles to answer that since we've got some new info about na'vi birthing process in the script for ATWOW.

WARNING! So everything I'm going to tell is yet not been proven to be canon!!!! But since before that we didn't have almost any information at all... It's up to you to use it or not. (and sorry it took me so long to get to the point 😅😅)

Firstly a little about na'vi gestation period and birth. It is not stated how long it takes, but we know that it is split into trimesters and na'vi actually "give birth" in the end of the second trimester! They give birth to a translucent chrysalis called "tsalnu".

And for the third trimester mother nourishes her baby with kuru. And when times comes for the baby to "hatch" that is when the na'vi are born.

Neytiri, Jake and baby Neteyam

(there's supposed to be my thoughts on chrysalis thing but then I thought it wasn't important for the topic so, if you wanna hear it then ask me)

Kuru nourishing

I saw people hating on this concept since kuru is supposed to be an extention of the neutral system, how can it transport nutrients and vitamins through it? These questions started even earlier, when we discovered that reef na'vi can extend their time being underwater by connecting to the sea creatures and plants that can transport oxygen through tsaheylu. But how? Well, apparently it has veins.

Avatar the way of water: the visual dictionary

I'm gonna talk more about possible similarities between na'vi and other animals especially tulkun in the way how they reproduce but later in other questions.

So, when tsaheylu is made, it not only connects two creatures neural systems but circulatory too. I have a headcanon explanation of how it works but it's weird lol. So, do you remember this sticky wet sound kuru sometimes made when connecting/disconnecting? Well, what if, when connected, kuru produces some kind of liquid that is similar to something like blood plasma? And that's when nutrient transportation starts? (and now I'm thinking that it can also keep this fragile organ clean and protected from harsh disconnecting that could rip off poor tendrils). I have some questions on how circulatory system works in that case, like maybe Pandoran animals only have one blood type or it somehow separates inside, but we just don't know. That is a question for the speculative biologists out there!

Now, for the everything I said above, I need some proves on can you consider it canon or not. Your word, Mr. Cameron.

So, he never said anything about chrysalis, but kuru nourishing is pretty much a real thing I suppose. But what happens when the baby is out of it's tsalnu?

Breastfeeding

I haven't heard anything about them not being able to breastfeed due to their low body fat, but my immediate thought was... Why do they have breasts then? 😅 Alright, maybe it has a different purpose, but NIPPLES? For what reason? So I'd rather think that maybe their bodies produce hormones somehow differently than assumed that they have breasts but are not able to feed with them.

We even know that they "nurse their infants for up to four months"! So the answer is clear.

Avatar wiki fandom: na'vi species

Summing this all up!

So the answer for your question is:

- na'vi women give birth at the end of the second trimester and nourish their baby (inside a pod) with their kuru until it's ready to born.

- after birth they breastfeed a newborn for up to four months. ☺️

Thank you for reading!

Btw if you'll finish your WIP please let me know!

#Waiting for more questions!#Ask me about avatar series #avatar #avatar the way of water #avatar frontiers of pandora #afop #Atwow

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ravenstargames · 2 months

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✦ Lost in Limbo Devlog #10 | 04.01.24

And just like that, March is over! We are heading into a very busy April, but as nervous as we are about it, we are also pretty excited. This month has been full of newly accomplished goals, new challenges, and wonderful milestones! Let's jump into it, shall we?

<<There’s not much information about the figure that greets you in a mysterious occult shop. The only known thing is that they were the beginning of everything…and also the ending.>>

This month we finished the rework and the sprite of the first character you'll meet in the demo! They're as mysterious as they're charming, which makes them specially dangerous...

Also, we finished March with a boom! We opened a casting call to add some voiced lines and soundbites to the demo. We have received a lot of wonderful auditions, more than we expected! It has been overwhelming (in a good way) and so exciting to finally get to this stage of the demo's production! ; v ; Also, as always, Raquel has outdone herself with the artwork—just look at these two! 💜

Another background finished by our wonderful Airyn! 💜 This is one of my favorite ones (I'm afraid I'll say this about every background Airyn works on, but oh well), so now the only step left is to animate it! There's three backgrounds left (all of them in progress), so we hope this month we can make good progress on them!

Coding-wise, the script is almost fully coded. Almost. Ten pages left. Then, I'll start polishing everything—transitions, animations, sprites, some finishing touches on some screens...But honestly, seeing everything finally come together is quite moving. Being super positive, we'll start looking for beta testers at the end of the month for windows and mac. Sadly, I'm not sure if we'll be able to test mobile at the same time, but we'll see! I'm going to work so hard to achieve it!

We are soon starting the legal process to make Ravenstar Games official. We have been looking for information and professional advice these past months to make sure we do the whole process right, as it's a huge (and scary) leap for all of us. As you may or not remember, we started this as a passion project to be able to work the job of our dreams. Everything we have is either made by ourselves or paid with our personal savings, as only one of us has a steady job. It's terrifying to think we are going to do this, to invest what little we have in something we are passionate about but that could sadly not bear any fruit. Of course, we are staying positive and will work as hard as we have been working to make it happen, but doubts and fears arise every now and then! 💜

Also, our masterpost has been updated! Now it matches our itch.io page. There's more info I'd like to tweak here and there, but the important stuff (the premise, duh) has successfully been updated!

We have also started to think about the Kickstarter, as we are getting very very close to the demo release and we want to take as much advantage as possible of the momentum the release may give us. I don't dare to give a date yet, but we are very, very close ; v ;!!!

What a wonderful month! I'll never get tired of saying that. Everything is going great for us and the success of the casting call has given us the little confidence boost we were lacking. Well, at least when it comes to me—blame it on the OCD! As the director and the one who manages all social medias, I'm always worried of my performance, but the team has been there for me whenever I have doubted my abilities. I can only hope April proves to be as fantastic as March has!

Thank you as always for reading, for supporting us, for being there. It means the world to us. Take care, stay hydrated and healthy, and let's see each other next month! 💜

#visual novel #lost in limbo #otome #indiedev #devlog #otome game

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wehaveimagineshere · 7 months

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Request for Admin Ren! Could I request a scenario for Gale to react to his gender neutral crush accidentally saw him half naked because he was changing out of his dirty clothes? Their immediate reaction is to cover their eyes to look at the floor, apologise profusely, and leave! They're still embarrassed even when he finishes changing clothes but promised him that they would be more careful & tell them if there's anything he would like them to do to make it up to him! Please make it implied/suggested!

So I had to watch some romanced Gale scenes and I can't tell you how much I giggled and rewatched his little bop at the very end when you ask "Are you asking me to marry you?" His little wiggle is so funny. I sent it to Frost with tears in my eyes.

Okay so while I was editing, I realized I went off script just a liiiiiiittle bit. And typically I'd go and fix it but it was something that I kept referring to the rest of the prompt so I just kept it, cause otherwise I would've had to completely rewrite a good portion and I'd already been working on this for a while. Hopefully that's okay!

~*~*~

A blessed stream.

A strip of running water you could dunk your aching feet into but, more importantly, a strip of running water you could finally clean your dirty clothes in.

"I can get it started," you'd offered, shouldering off your pack in the middle of the camp. "Pile up your clothes and I'll take them to the stream."

"No, you shouldn't do it alone," comes Karlach, stabbing a pole into the ground to start pitching her tent.

"Then set up their tent," responds Shadowheart, already ruffling through her belongings and making a pile of dirty laundry. "The sooner we all set up, the sooner we can help them."

Dumping out your pack to make room, you start making the rounds. Shadowheart gives you explicit instruction to not mix her clothing with the others, a small pack pushed into your hands. Wyll also has his own separate pack, but with the promise that he'll do his own clothing. Astarion gives a playful little thank you and something about his underwear you tune out.

As you head for Gale, you're situating the different packs in your arms and on your shoulders, not paying attention to what's in front of you as you pause by his belongings. "My pack has room if you need." Wiggling that off your arm, you sling Wyll's pack onto your back. With your arms a bit more free, you finally glance up.

And your eyes snag on what you see.

Bare skin, muscles shifting as Gale tosses his shirt into a pile of clothes. Your eyes linger on his shoulders before dipping down to his waist, and when he notices your stunned presence and turns to face you, your gaze catches on his stomach.

"Give me just a moment, please," you hear him speak. "I'm almost done sorting."

Your lips press together as you watch his muscles dip, the way they ripple when he moves, the way they stretch when he reaches for something.

Oh gods. Stop staring stop staring stop staring--

"Okay. All ready." Tying a pack, he holds it out to you. "I'll make sure to settle quickly so I can help." When you don't move, you can practically hear the smirk when he says, "I believe my face is up here."

Face threatening to melt off your skull, you spin on your heel, palm pressing against your eyes as you turn your back to him. "I'm so sorry, I--"

"Not that I don't like being ogled at."

"That's so rude, I didn't--"

"I assumed my physicality wasn't as it was, what with sequestering myself in a room for a year. I suppose I had nothing to worry about."

If someone were to touch your face, they'd be singed. "I'm so sorry!"

He chuckles. "It's alright."

"It's not! I was staring and that's rude and there's a whole consent thing and--" oh gods you're rambling "--I shouldn't--I'm leaving."

Quick as a rabbit you dart off into the trees, head ducked to hide your molten face, hoping no one else in camp watched your absolute trash fire of a bluster. Reaching the isolated stream, you set all the packs onto the floor, crouch down, hide your face against your knees, and breathe.

In. Out. In. Out. It's not the first time you've seen a shirtless Gale, but that had been with his consent, a moment shared between the two of you. Not in the middle of camp. Sure, it wasn't your fault he'd foregone a shirt, but you didn't have to stare.

Gods. Why couldn't you just be normal? You're an adult, for crying out loud, not some bumbling teenager. The butterflies in your stomach around the wizard was one thing, but you just always became so self conscious--

Scrubbing your face, you inhale deeply and rise back to your full height. Stepping out of your shoes and rolling up your pants, you grab the first pack and get to work, hoping you can work off the embarrassment.

It works. You start feeling your heart calm and thoughts settle, finding a rhythm and ignoring your cold hands and feet.

"How can I help?"

Heart stuttering, your bottom lip gets trapped between your teeth as you turn. "Hi."

Gale smiles. "Hi." He's fully clothed this time, though he does kick off his shoes to join you in the stream after setting down more packs. A finger is held up as you open your mouth. "No apologies. You did nothing wrong."

You frown. "Ogling is wrong, Gale. At least in public." A tilt of the head. "Ish. Public-ish. That doesn't matter." You huff, feeling the creeping embarrassment return. "I feel bad. I feel like I did something I shouldn't have and the only way for me to feel better is to try to make it up to you somehow." Rubbing your forehead, you give a helpless shrug. "What can I do? Aside from, you know, making sure I don't do it again?"

Brown eyes study your face, a smile growing only to turn into a smirk as he steps closer, hands coming to rest on your hips. "I have many different ideas." He leans in, breath tickling your lips, voice dropping. "So many different ideas."

A different kind of heat floods your body as you swallow. Settling your own hands on his chest, you mutter, "Any I should know about?"

His lips catch your own, hungry but controlled. "Shall I show you?"

#baldurs gate 3 #bg3 #bg3 gale #gale/reader #gale x reader #bg3 gale/reader #bg3 gale x reader #reader insert #gender neutral reader #gn reader #x reader

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ponett · 5 months

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First New Years Eve anon here! I finished SLARPG after playing it any chance I could get. Literally everything I said held true or got better as the game went on. What a solid game, I felt the love in every moment.

Partway through, I got to wondering what it's like to finish a years-long project. I'm in the process of something like that, and I can't imagine life after The End, so your anniversary reflections post caught my eye. It felt like a future me had written it in a startling amount of ways. (Marketing is so hard ;_;)

A part that really stuck with me is how you described the story growing along with you. There were a few parts toward the beginning that felt distinctly mid-2010s (not in a bad way), but the narrative felt so cohesive that I would've assumed it was planned to the letter. As someone in a similar position, it's comforting to know there was some wiggle room. There's so much more I could say, but maybe not right now.

Wishing you your version of success!

thank you!

making sure the story felt cohesive was definitely tricky since the game was in development for so long. i mean, i knew the broad strokes of the story from the start, including the fact that it would get more serious as it progressed. That Sequence at the end of act ii was planned as a pivotal moment in the game since, like, 2015. but a lot of the back half of the game was only written after the demo was released in 2018, and my creative priorities shifted a lot in that time. so it took some work to make everything line up

i was still tweaking individual lines of dialogue in the script like, days before launch - particularly stuff earlier in the game that i was no longer quite as happy with, just to make sure everything fit together well enough and that things didn't come off as too dated. there are still a few jokes in act i where i'm like "ehh, that isn't as funny as i thought it was in 2016." but what can you do? that's just the linear progression of time for you

actually, if anything, before release i was worried that people would be put off by the darker and more dramatic elements of the game after i'd originally pitched it as being so goofy and lighthearted and cute. i had to fight the urge to insert more jokes into act iv out of a fear that people would get bored if the game stopped being funny, and i worried that people who had already grown attached to the characters through the demo and other preview material would get mad at me if i put melody and friends through the wringer. but thankfully people have responded really well to the more dramatic stuff, and the arc of the game as a whole, like i hoped they would

i'm extremely happy with how slarpg turned out overall, but if i was to write the story today, at age 30, i'm sure a lot of the writing would have turned out different. which is why the new thing i've been kicking around ideas for will probably be more mature and dramatic from the start. but we'll see

#anon #ask #slarpg asks

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kawaoneechan · 1 month

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I can't decide 🎵

Okay, let's have a good think about scripting languages that I might use in Project Special K. I wrote about this before, but really I'm just trolling for comments and suggestions.

Option 1 - Lua

Relatively easy to implement, especially with something like Sol on top.

Well known, often used for game scripts.

I have no earthly clue how to handle multiple objects running their own scripts simultaneously, let alone the whole "wait for some other object to signal back" that I described before.

Option 2 - JavaScript

Could be a nice challenge to implement, maybe with something like Duktape?

Well known, but not as often used for game scripts as Lua.

The third point is exactly the same as for Lua.

Option 3 - bespoke Lisp-like

Tricky to implement, but I've done it a bunch of times now to varying degrees.

Not as well known nowadays, I suppose, compared to JS and Lua.

I already know how to allow for cooperative multi-threading and waiting for other objects to finish, as described before. Just gotta implement the whole thing.

Option 4 - Event Flow

The script engine used in Animal Crossing New Horizons, Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, and probably many other Switch games.

This option is a joke to make the list longer.

Obviously supports waiting for outside things.

Option 5 - Something else

Who knows, maybe one of you reading this has a better idea?

As a reminder of what I kept referring to, there would be several things running simultaneously like villagers, gift balloons, bugs, the hourly weather and chime thing, the player, and the UI. When you talk to a villager, they stop what they're doing and run a script. That script can then cause a dialogue box to appear by spawning in a new game object. The script should then sit and wait until the dialogue box is dismissed, all while the villager sits and waits until the script signals it's done, while the dialogue box and script can trigger animations to play on the villager and player alike... all while all these other objects still process in the background, and may themselves run scripts.

I'd rather not start on implementing something as in-depth as a script system, let alone with a feature such as that, without being certain it's not a very bad idea.

Doesn't need to be the best idea. Just not a very bad one.

#project special k #scripting languages #open poll #animal crossing #javascript #lua #lisp

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noosayog · 1 year

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wc: 1k

content/warnings: angst, fluff

final part, directory here.

noos's notes: thank you for enjoying this series! I'm the worst at writing making up scenes, so I hope this isn't too abrupt but I really never thought I'd actually finish writing this series if not for all of you who reblogged with comments and tags! xoxo

When Sakusa asks if he can come in to talk, you decline and offer to go to a nearby park. It’s summer and the weather is permitting, but he feels a cold chill despite your tentative smile. It’s not lost on him that you don’t want him in your safe space; you’ll only allow him an audience on neutral ground.

It’s not like he wasn’t expecting this. He’s grateful that you’re even willing to speak to him.

“I-”

“What-”

You both speak at the same time. Sakusa clams up and awkwardly gestures for you to speak. You sigh. “What did you want to talk about, Kiyoomi?”

Now, he had planned out what he would say at this moment. He had a whole script, as well thought out as could be in the span of time he ran from the locker room to your place. He was even going to take Atsumu’s lines and incorporate them into his speech.

But he’s not used to the cold front and polite smile. His mind blanks out and he’s on autopilot.

“How can I show you that I care about you?”

You frown. Not the reaction he was looking for but at least he got the stranger-danger smile off your face. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t think… I’ve been doing a good job of showing you how much I care about you.”

“Kiyoomi…” you trail off.

You pause for a moment, your facial expression resigned. Sakusa fears he might’ve said the wrong thing again. Where was Miya when you actually needed him?

“I’ve never thought that you don’t care for me. Honestly, this is all on me. You’ve made it clear from the start that you don’t feel for me the way I do for you and that’s not your fault-”

Kiyoomi is desperate to open his mouth, call himself an idiot and set the record straight, but you hold up a hand to finish.

“Not your fault and I think it’s time I really put some effort in to let go of these feelings and stop hoping for things and crying at bad times and,”

You’re babbling nonsense at this point, voice getting softer and wobblier by the second and it’s terrible but all Sakusa can think about is how happy he is that you still seem to be in love with him.

Silly, stupid, absolutely knuckleheaded Sakusa. Him.

He says your name, resolutely, with promise.

You shut up and raise your face to him.

“I’m sorry. I should’ve been more clear. When I say care for you, I don’t mean it was a friend.”

You blink. The tears have stopped. Something’s working.

“I mean it as… well, the way you meant it when you told me you liked me.”

He’s on a roll now.

“It took me a really long time to realize this and even after I did, I needed Miya to knock it into me. I’m sorry I didn’t know I was in love with you from that very first night, I’m sorry that I’ve been a coward and selfish, and I’m sorry that I’ve made you cry by yourself. So let me rephrase. What can I do to make you know, without any doubt, that I like you so much and I want to care for you in a way that you’ll let only me do?”

Sakusa heaves out a big breath and he kind of expects you to just kiss him like they do in novels and movies but you just stare at him with big, uncomprehending eyes.

You’re quiet for a moment and when you speak, you say something Sakusa isn’t expecting.

“I want to, but you need to give me a reason to. All you've given me since we slept together are signs that you don’t want us to be together.”

He did consider the possibility that you had already fallen out of love with him, but you still seemed to be very much emotional over all this. He hadn’t considered the possibility that he had made so many mistakes that even the weight of your love was overshadowed by hurt and distrust.

He wants to let his flight instinct kick in again, but he didn’t steel his resolve and selfishly demand that you meet with him for nothing.

And as a minor afterthought, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to handle reporting back to Miya that he ran from you again.

“So let me ask you again, then. What can I do to show you how much I mean everything I just said? Make you breakfast and take you out for dinner? Clean your apartment? Tell you I love you everyday?” The list goes on.

It makes you giggle and Kiyoomi counts it as a point won.

“Are you sure this time, Omi?”

Kiyoomi almost swoons at the nickname. “Yes.”

“Then, while all those things sound good, I just need you to promise that you’ll try harder to talk to me when things get uncomfortable. ‘Cause all I ever wanted was for you to stay.”

“I will,” and he means it.

“It would be nice to hear you tell me you love me everyday, though.

“I’ll put a calendar reminder so I don’t forget.” He’s a hundred percent serious.

You laugh and he leans closer, desperate to hear - no, feel - that familiar sound better.

“That’s cheating!”

“I’ll remember. I’ll never forget anything about us ever again.”

“Omi,” you’re gentle as you pat his cheek. “It’s not possible to never forget anything. Just don’t forget to tell me how you feel.”

“I can do that,” he promises.

You laugh again. It's the kind of laugh like you don’t believe him, but he supposes that’s alright. He knows he can’t erase the months of loneliness and pain he caused you with just a few pretty words. But he does plan on spending the next few years, maybe the next few eternities, doing exactly that.

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bellysoupset · 4 days

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Hi Soup! For a shorter fic, I'd love to see Leo sick at work or because of something stressful at work! We've seen him sick from something that happens at work (damn cake!), but not actually not feeling well at the office - maybe because he ate too much at lunch and it's just not sitting well. Does he hide it because he's got something that needs to get finished? Does he need to go puke quickly so he can keep working? Do people realize and make him leave? Your choice. Only request is that there isn't actually any publicly embarassing throwing up - no puking in court or in the middle of a meeting. Thank you so much!

Leo was over the moon about being a Real Lawyer, as he childishly called himself. It was no secret to his loved ones just how excited he was to be able to defend cases himself, instead of running after another lawyer with all their research and watching them recite a defense thesis that Leo was pretty sure had been partially written by him.

His boss put a lot of trust in him. Sure, Mrs. Mitchell only gave him small cases so far, but she was slowly handing him more and not only were they more frequent, but the difficulty was increasing.

Thus, Leo had easily blamed the uncomfortable churning in his stomach on nerves when it started. Today he had a big court day and no matter how many times he had gone over his notes - and ranted about the case enough that Jonah was probably a liability - he still felt jittery all over.

He was the defense today, to a woman who was being accused of plagiarism by a relatively well established script writer. Normally the Hollywood cases would stay in California and Mitchell's claws, but this one was small and unimportant enough to make it to Maine. The script writer was from the state and probably thought he could play on the local's sympathies, after all he had gone out and made it.

Leo wasn't feeling very sympathetic.

He was feeling almost queasy as he looked at the smug face of the script writer, who was accusing an ex-girlfriend of almost ten years ago of "stealing" his intellectual property.

Had no one learned a thing for Fitzgerald? Or Tolstoy?

Apparently not.

"You know," Dean leaned his way, "we're in court, you might wanna brighten up a little and stop glaring bloody murder to the opposition."

"Sorry," Leo shook his head, trying to physically shake off his frown, "I wasn't glaring at him, I was just frowning, he happened to be in the way."

"Brilliant save," Dean grinned, "they're gonna call break in five."

Leo was aware of that, he was the main defense lawyer and he was actually listening to the prosecutor's flimsy claims that Gwen was a plagiarist only because she happened to use the same first name in one of her published short stories.

Leo almost wished the opposition had a decent defense of their points, so he didn't have so much time to focus on the burbling going inside his belly. The lunch he had forced down wasn't sitting well at all and little sickly belches kept bubbling up his chest and fizzling out in his throat.

He felt like his whole body smelt like the greasy burger he had eaten and like everyone could tell... His mouth was watering.

Forty minutes recess.

"They're fumbling by the seam of their pants," Dean started to tell their client, in a low, collected voice, "they have nothing, you don't need to worry."

Right, Leo thought bitterly. She was a librarian, who published exactly one book with short stories just for fun, being prosecuted by a Hollywood script writer. Sure, the man was far from being a big shot of anything, but compared to the woman's position...

"Ms. Peters, you have a solid defense, please trust us," Leo promised her calmly, "take the recess, get some coffee, it'll be a long day."

His own words were mockery to him. Normally he existed on coffee and today just the thought of drinking a drop of anything made his stomach flip on itself and he hastily got up, muffling a little burp on his fist and excusing himself. No one had heard, although Sandra did throw him a puzzled look.

"Ms. Peters," Sandy stepped in, "let's take a small walk."

Sandra, like Leo, normally was one of the lawyers with the softest touch. Usually Leo didn't have all his coworkers with him, but he had his boss sitting right behind their desk, judging his every move. It was a huge tell of respect and trust that Mrs. Mitchell had only sent his peers today, instead of coming herself. Almost as if saying go and show them how its done.

He couldn't mess this up.

"The man is a misogynistic bully," Dean continued to speak, following Leo into the public bathroom. His coworker could talk with a tree if left to his own devices, "I'm excited for your part, the evid-"

"Shut it," Leo glared at him, handing Dean his suitcase and removing his suit jacket, "hold this, please."

"No one's listening to us."

"Dean," Leo scoffed, "no. Last thing I want is for you to blow the case by lack of decorum or by giving the prosecution a ti-URP-Fuck," the larger belch that slipped into his last word caused Dean to raise his eyebrows. The other man opened his mouth, about to ask about Leo's wellbeing when the blonde turned around and entered a stall, quickly pushing the lid up and planting a hand on his chest to keep his tie in place as a chunky stream of vomit hit the water.

"WhOA! Wagner, what the fuck-"

Leo hung his head in shame, bracing his free arm against the tiled wall in front of him and panting, trying to get his stomach in check. The queasiness had been on the backburner all day, but the face-prickling, hand sweaty, mouth watery nausea had hit him like a brick and out of nowhere.

"Fuck..." He breathed out through his mouth and swallowed some air, forcing up another burp and then coughing when that brought up some more chunks- He gagged and a much more watery, acidic mouthful of vomit fell in the toilet.

"Wagner, oh my-" Dean was fretting behind him, frozen in place and stunned, "shit, are you sick? We can call for a recess-"

"No," Leo's voice was hoarse and he cleared his throat, spitting a mouthful of thick saliva and flushing, as his sudden nausea went back to the mild queasiness, "No, I'm fine."

"Fine?!" Dean was still holding his suitcase and jacket, seemingly unaware Leo had passed the items to him, "You don't seem fine, you look white as a corpse-"

"I'm fine," Leo stumbled to the sink to wash his face and gargle with water, "lunch just wasn't sitting well-"

"Oh... Are you sure...?" Dean was older than Leo by at least five years and yet he sounded like a scared teenager. Leo nodded, meeting his coworker's eyes on the mirror and patting his own pale cheeks until they were a little rosy instead of spoiled milk white.

"Yeah," he cleared his throat, then fixed his tie and reached for his jacket, "I can't go home, I have a case to win."

#mywriting #sickfic #leo wagner #emetophilia #emeto

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dduane · 11 months

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I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way, given the previous thing about different ways people write, but I just wanted to tell you because I'm so excited: I finished the first draft of that script! I actually finished a writing thing for the first time in over a decade! I've never attempted to write a script before, and now I've finished my first first draft. My friend said that's a big deal, and it makes writing other scripts much easier when you finish your first. Is that what you've found?

Oh apparently I have a few more questions, sorry: The first time you finished a project, and you knew you were on literally the last few paragraphs or scene, or what have you, how did that feel for you? And when you were done, did you initially love writing, or did you debate ever writing again? Did you start working on something right away, or did you break for a little bit?

Sorry, I'm just so excited and proud of myself right now, and wondering what feelings might come next. I haven't been this proud of myself in I don't know how long. I mean, I know I have to finalize it, and even still, I know I'll never be able to get it made. However, for right now, I'm proud of myself! I'll probably go back to being sad I'll never get it made tomorrow though, which sucks, but it's a good night right now!

I hope you're doing well today! Sorry for the bombardment of questions.

First of all: congratulations! You've got every right to be excited. Screenwriting isn't easy or simple even at the best of times. Doing it well requires that you write in ways that can seem really counterintuitive when compared to working in prose. And it's always, ALWAYS a big deal when by completing something you break a long creative dry spell. So GOOD ON YOU! You got the job done. :)

(And now, of course, comes rewrite. The brain—yours, or someone else's—always has notes. But I'm sure you knew that.)

While I know how it is to be relieved on finishing a first script, my weird work history makes me kind of an outlier when it comes to discussing this. I went with unexpected speed from "I'm Just A First-Time Novelist, What Do I Know?" to "I'm Just A First-Time Screenwriter, What Do—WAIT WHAT??". Because the man who was soon to be my story editor on Scooby and Scrappy-Doo walked in the door one evening, having just read The Door Into Fire, and said, "Would you be interested in writing cartoons?"

It was kind of a surprising career development, but I quickly learned at that point in my life that when the Universe turns up on your doorstep with the Moon on a silver platter, you don't tell it to try next door: you say "Wait right there and I'll get a knife and fork." In the space of a given month of being walked around Hanna-Barbera for the first time, I turned in my first animation script... and then sagged in my chair on getting the phone call when my story editors told me, "That's a strong start. Now we have some notes." And all I could do was collapse with relief that I had not fucked it up.

However, this situation also left me in no position where I'd be able to debate ever writing a screenplay again... because suddenly there were a couple of very intent guys telling me "Okay, new story premise coming over to you, we need the outline by next Thursday and the script the Thursday after, you okay with that?"

(Are you kidding me? I thought. Let me get the knife and fork!)

So as I said, I'm really an outlier in this regard. The next three years of my life pretty much went as above, as Tom Swale and Duane Poole (great Thoth rest both their gentle souls) took me with them from one show to another, and kept me busy. (Thereby financing the writing of So You Want To Be A Wizard and The Wounded Sky and assorted other work.) But there's no question that each time you finish a script, each time you type FADE TO BLACK, you feel better about the whole enterprise. It doesn't precisely get easier. But it gets more familiar. And that helps. (If I have to be locked in a haunted house, I'd sooner it was one I'd played in when I was a kid than one I'd never been inside before...)

Anyway, again: congratulations. But also: Do not be too sure you'll never have it made. ...Granting you that "made" can look a lot of different ways in different times and places, and can shift under your feet without warning. But the world that depends on scripts can do very, very weird and unusual things without warning. Best to do your homework and be ready for them... and know where the knife and fork are.

Also, a side note: As you do more of this work you may well find that finishing a script leaves you with more energy, not less. I think this may be a lot more normal than we routinely allow ourselves to believe. It makes sense to me, from the psych-nurse end of things, that successful completion of a project allows the release of a lot of energy that you've been holding in reserve to help you cope if something went horribly wrong with the piece of work you just finished. Me, when I've felt that rush, I do a thing that C. J. Cherryh taught me: immediately roll another sheet of paper into the typewriter. ...Though these days, it'd be "open a new file." You don't necessarily have to do anything with that blank page or screen if you don't want to. But it's wise to be ready.

In any case: all the good luck to you (because sheer blind luck plays its part in this business, no matter how much we wish all our hard work counted for more)! ...And let us know how you get on.

#writing #process

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zombeebunnie · 24 days

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Trembling Essence:💙Script progress + Updates💙

Hello and welcome new followers, long time no see! I was very busy most of this month, but I am back and ready to continue from where I left off on the game! This game development post might be a bit long but I tried to condense everything! :]

"How are things going so far?":

It's going slow and steady! I haven't been able to do too much these past few weeks, however, I wrote a few parts out before I got too busy and couldn't do anything else.

I want to be very careful when it comes to spoilers but, based on your choices, some of these areas will give off immersive cozy/homelike vibes that really express Noah and the player(Y/N)'s view towards each other. In the old 2023 script I was very new to writing so the small semi-hints of romance weren't the entire focus compared to the horror aspect but there's a better balance between both genres now and I'm still aiming for a meaningful slow burn versus it just being all over the place. :] I liked writing them a whole bunch which lead to a lot of these taking place in the mid/end of Day 4+, they just need to be placed in specific areas that call for it. With that being said, it felt really comfy adding key details about Noah and creating meaningful sections in the game. I was even going to draw out some of the unseen script/scenes but I believe the best thing to do is give deeper lore from the [Extended Demo] first. Even though my writing style has improved I still have to fix the multiple pacing issues I wrote last year.

"Playtester's advice":

I wanted to continue working through Noah's backstory but I kept having moments where I'd get sidetracked into wanting to fix up the start of the game again. Eventually, I talked to my play testers about it and they gave me a few encouraging pointers.

To help keep my process at ease, I will fix the beginning of the game when I take breaks from writing up Noah's backstory. :]

I talked about this during early 2024 but the start of the game that leads up to the cabin is still getting reworked. I was able to get some of it fixed for the [Extended Demo] but I wasn't done. Things are still up in the air but, I will say that I have a better view of everything than I did before. :] Another priority that needs fixing are the backgrounds! I've improved a lot on drawing and they need to be optimized. When you first start up the game, you wake up in a holed out tree in the swamp with the choice to leave this area and possibly end up in the forest. I was going for a very immersive form of symbolism that only a few noticed but, I believe I can do a better job about this. Unfortunately I don't have any new backgrounds to show right now but maybe next week I'll have some finished up! :]

"Art process/Noah's sprite sheets":

As far as Noah sprite sheet goes, it's still in sketch mode.

I didn't draw anything since I was gone so I need to do a few warm ups before I get to them. There are some old drawing prompts I wrote down and old sketches that I never got a chance to doodle so hopefully I can get to them at some point with some attached lore. :,]

My Q&A / Ask box has been reset!

Thank you to those who have sent in asks in the past, unfortunately they all disappeared except for 1 while I was gone. I have no idea what happened but I can only guess it just got reset.

If you have any questions about Trembling Essence/Noah feel free to ask or resend them in here please. This makes it easier for me to see and answer accordingly! I would really like to hear from you guys!

This is all I have to share so far, Thank you to everyone for the continued support and patience while I was gone! I was ready to accept the interest for this game to fade out and coming back to see that it didn't happen makes me happy, I really appreciate it. :,]

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sgiandubh · 2 months

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Gooooodnight! Did you manage to finish watching the movie after all? What do you think?

Dear Ford v. Ferrari Anon,

Just finished it, after four failed attempts to get into the right mood - local time, 1:45 AM, Thursday morning. As you might know, Cancer people are very stubborn (even pertinacious) people and I am no exception to the rule.

I now totally understand why so many people wondered if I was really watching it, or confessed they could be remotely interested in doing so for about ten minutes, tops. The start is horrifically lackadaisical and I hit stop four times in a row, increasingly frustrated and feeling like a brain scattered idiot. But if you persist, this little movie, eons away from my world, could actually surprise you for the better.

Three tiny things redeemed it from the scrapheap for me: a) the Sixties, b) that Mad Men aesthetics and c) Lee Iacocca. Once this very familiar guy hit the screen, I knew I would be glued to whatever shite happened on it for the duration. Mind you, not the actor (entirely forgettable), but the business honcho whose Autobiography I read by complete accident at around 16. My brain could finally relate to something and start to make sense out of a completely alien, bloody mess. Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, things began to emerge: the script is so fucked up, I couldn't help but wonder what possessed someone as discerning as C to go for it. Other than a ferocious will to be there (anywhere, really), for further consideration, of course.

This is an underdog story through and through, and with a little bit of luck it could have been Oscar material. The reason it isn't so relies entirely on the writer's frail shoulders: I can't be arsed to check whodunit, but that person clearly bit more than they could ever chew. No Christian Bale and no Matt Damon could have dragged that script to Premier League, no matter how hard the effort. And the same person who wrote that Bale presented himself at the TIFF as a sociopathic boor has always deeply appreciated his past stellar performances (Empire of the Sun immediately comes to mind, of course). Seriously, I did and this movie is no exception: he is way better than I would have expected, especially when compared to a disappointing Damon.

What about C, then? In this very Anglo-Saxon sports stew, let's say she is an indispensable condiment, despite the absolute lack of chemistry with Bale and the sometimes formulaic presence, allowing for simplistic and expected dramatic solutions to complex situations. As in S's case, she sometimes drags along her Claire Fraser mannerisms, although less conspicuously than in Belfast elsewhere (or was it because we really don't get to see her a lot?). This particular script left me hungry for more, and not in a good way. She was very much there, she clearly worked very hard for it and yet, it feels as if she were obliterated, for some reason. That film didn't do her justice and scenes like the car tantrum could only give you a sort of nostalgic 'what if' idea:

youtube

Easily my favorite C scene of the whole movie (spoiler: there aren't many at all). But let's be blunt, here: if you have no idea about who C is, no OL mystique to boot and you just watch that movie leisurely, you'd blink twice and miss her. And not remember her at all, perhaps.

Would I recommend it? I am not sure, despite Bale's Golden Globe nomination and two rather technical Oscars (for Film and Sound Editing). It could be me, after all and sports movies have never been my jam. It's a decent way to fill in two hours and a half of emptiness, but not nearly good enough for a re-watch. I'd be merciful and give it ⭐⭐/5. For the Sixties, my Paradise Lost.

Happy, Anon?

#anon #fandom #shitshow

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yahoodarling · 3 months

Text

Yandere Thoma/Ayato X Isekaied GN Reader

Warnings: Posted in comments to avoid spoilers, please read them if you wish to avoid potential triggers.

Chapter 2: 6k+- words, Chapter 3

Full Fic option: 20k words

The words Ayato left with you clung to your mind, in all this time interacting with ‘characters’ you haven't once seen anything alter the course of the world yet. Perhaps it's a twisted Butterfly effect and your actions have changed something you cannot see but Teyvat was still intact and no news of a newly declared war has come about (for whatever reasons your actions may potentially had started a war in the first place). Perhaps the time of paranoia can finally come to an end and you can ‘live' a little, truly live here if it means spending the rest of your life in this world. You also owe it to Thoma. You've done everything in your power to avoid him when he's done nothing less but show genuine interest in getting closer to you and with Ayato's words you can confirm that you've hurt him. In your time knowing him, truly knowing him, not as a character reading lines of script, not as a collection of pixels on a screen but as a real person with flesh and feelings, it's really made you appreciate him more than anything one could feel for a fictional character. Thoma is not fictional in this world and in this world he looked to you for a friendship, you lead him on in your weakness and now he has to face the loss because of your choices. Ayato was right, you truly don't have the right to make this decision but the least you can do is make up for your mistakes and keep your promises. Teyvat isn't going to fall apart just because you want a friend, what led you to think you could change the fate of the universe in the first place? Fate is a strong thing, it will not break so easily just because you exist. The rest of the ‘plot’ will go on as normal, the ‘hero’ is most likely still in Sumeru sorting out their issues and that ‘hero’ can go on and change Teyvats fate, you can sit still, live a normal life and they can keep the story going.

You decide the best way to apologise is to show Thoma you genuinely care and the best way to do that, (other than actually talking to him) is to do what he's already established means a lot to him, make something. Thoma loves to see the effort people put into something much more than the actual execution of it. You are hardly a master baker yet he savours what you bake like it's been done by a professional, so play to your strengths. You finish your work day, inform your boss you will no longer be taking the overtime and rest for the day. Not wanting to rush into things too quickly you wait a few days and in your spare time make a batch of miso butter cookies and a simple fresh loaf of shokupan on the day you decide to meet him. It being a weekend you were off work but that also meant Thoma wouldn't be in the city, he does his trips here only during the week when he needs specific supplies for his upkeep of the clans residence. Taking a walk to the Kamisato Clan is quite the walk but you owe it to him to get this done, he can't be the one to keep chasing after you, you need to show you want to be close as well.

You arrive midday, the walls of the clan still so daunting, and walk to the entrance where the clans guards await, noticing your presence long before you could actually stand before them.

“Good day, I am here to deliver something to Thoma.”

The guard eyes you but responds, “He's out. If you have any deliveries you can leave them here where they will be checked before entering the clan.”

Thoma isn't here? Shit. That makes this whole thing a bust.

“Do you know where he's gone or when he'll come back? I'd prefer to see him in person.”

“No. Please leave any packages here and-” the guard was cut off as the man of the house walked up to the entrance, Ayato offered a slight smile, perhaps to ease your nerves at the guard's menacing stance though that is his job, before turning to said guard.

“They are a guest and are welcome to the clan. Thank you for serving your duties but they are free to enter.”

The guard bowed and uttered a small, “Yes my lord.”

Ayato then stood to the side to allow you in, his arm outstretching the direction in welcoming.

“Ayaka and I were just having tea in the break of our schedules. Please do join us.”

Well it seems you will be meeting Ayaka (for the second time), not expected, not something you were prepared for but if you are to truly let go of your worries then meeting Ayaka should not be a problem.

You follow suit and see Ayaka sitting at the table on the outside courtyard , she smiled in greeting as you and Ayato approached.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, I am Ayaka Kamisato.” she nodded in greeting. It's a little difficult to respond to people such as Ayaka and Ayato whom are so versed in proper Inazumaian etiquette but you've been in Inazuma for long enough to have picked up some things. You bow slightly in turn, “A pleasure as well Lady Ayaka, thank you for welcoming me to your home.” You responded in a similar way when first meeting Ayato though you imagine conversing with him from now on would be a lot more relaxed after your previous meetings. Said man indicated for you to sit beside his sister which you did, form a lot less refined compared to the pair of siblings.

“Ayaka, this is the person Thoma has been talking about as of late. A new friend to the Kamisato Clan.”

“Oh! It's truly wonderful to put a face to a name. Thoma has spoken only positives about you. What brings you here?”

You look down to the wooden box in your hand, your apology gift.

“I need to speak with Thoma and give him something.”

You don't even need to look at Ayato to know that he's fully aware of what your meeting with Thoma is all about.

“I see. He's gone out for a walk at the moment but should be back soon. Anyway,” it felt like ice drawn at the blunt way she changed the topic. She quickly turned back to Ayato, more specifically the paper in her hands, with a look of true delight on her face.

“The travellers' tales of Sumeru are incredible! Such a different place but the stories they are embarking on are memorising.” her eyes had a sheen to them, not the gloss of tears but of something you couldn't exactly tell what it embodied.

“Their letter details so much, the food, the culture, the people as well as all the situations they've ended up in.” she giggles, lifting her hand to cover her joy but not truly caring about it since she was in such comfortable company which is… odd considering you just met.

Ayato looks at you with a quick strained smile, almost to say, ‘sorry she's overlooking you’ but quickly returned to paying his attention to Ayaka.

“I am not surprised they often find themself in trouble haha though it is good to know they are enjoying their time there. Do they mention when they may return to Inazuma?”

Ayaka looks slightly dejected at that, “No. They say they need to stay in Sumeru for now but will come to the next major festival if they can.” she takes a deep breath in and releases it. “I hope it's soon. I want to hear all these stories from their mouth rather than just as words on a page.”

So Ayaka also has that ‘crush’ on the traveller which was very heavily implied in the game. That must be the reason she is so relaxed and open with her emotions here.

She looked back down at the letter, a soft smile developing. “I hear Yoimiya is planning on taking a trip to Sumeru in the future, perhaps I can ask her to deliver a token from me to the traveller while she is there.”

Ayato's smile remained as always listening to his sister but the small crinkle of the wrinkles by his eyes increased slightly for but a moment before relaxing. His wrinkles… a pity the game models of the characters didn't implement small details such as those. It would have been interesting to see what small features the characters had ‘realistically’ that weren't shown. Would Jean have bags around her eyes? Would Albedos skin have a slight difference of texture than normal? Perhaps Cyno has a more defined tan or Xiangling having slight burn blisters on her hands from cooking and her vision? You've only had a closer look at Thoma and he was so much more ‘real’ than just a 2D image which was slightly unsettling at first but normal now. What interesting things to think about…

“How about you join her?”

Your fascination died instantly. What? No, Ayaka will NOT be joining Yoimiya, that's not how it goes. Ayaka will deny or something will stop her.

“Really? But what of my responsibilities? I don't even know if she'd accept me joining.”

Exactly.

“Do not fret, I will have your duties covered and Yoiymiya is your friend, I think she'd appreciate getting to share the trip with you. You deserve a break as well and I see no better opportunity than this.”

No, no, no, no you won't because she's not going.

Ayaka stood up, elation beaming off of her while she clutched the letter closer to her.

“Thank you brother! Oh I must ask Yoimiya right away!”

She bowed and made haste out the residence not even sparing you a glance, to her you were a nobody. Her mind was solely on making this trip.

You sat in shock, in the past her forgetting about you would be amazing, proof of your ‘npcness’ but you only felt stunned. Ayaka doesn't go to Sumeru, only Yoiymiya does for her second story quest, Ayaka is not involved, Ayaka does not show up, Ayaka is not part of that plot!

“I'm glad she can have a chance to experience the world outside the residence though having to cover for her duties will prove tedious.” Ayato shook his head, then chuckled. “But I'm not opposed to it for this.”

Just how- how has your involvement changed this?! It must be your fault, it can only be your fault, the story has gone on exactly as it was shown in the game so why is this different? What could you have done to make Ayaka go?

“Hmm?” Ayato noticed your silence, “Is something the matter?”

You swallow the spit that had accumulated in your mouth and regained as much composure as possible. “Yes yes I am fine I just- I just need to go have a quick walk by myself. I will be back soon.” It's all you could say. Your mind switched to autodrive in shock and walked you away, neither mind nor eyes truly focusing on anything but your legs walking you a path you've taken many times before yet never once stepped on, into the forests behind the clan house.

Walking in the tanuki filled forest may not have been the best idea, you recall ingame how Hilichurls and Fatui mages are ‘spawned’ here yet your walk was nothing but peaceful. The sound of the stream was somewhat calming, it helped you to think logically. Just because Ayaka says she's going to go on this trip doesn't mean she actually will, something will happen that will prohibit her from going to Sumeru. She is a very important character, her absence in Inazuma may cause something terrible to happen that didn't ingame. Maybe she helps a person in need ‘canonically’ but because in this existence she leaves for Sumeru she isn't there to save said person, that person dies or many people die which could upset their families which could cause them to lose faith in the (police) which could lead to disrupt in the city which could… which could… leave blood spilt?

You stopped your rambling thoughts, eyes zoning in on the pools of blood on the moss covered stones. Whatever caused this is nothing you should get involved in, until a sound of a strangled hiss, electro energy popping and fizzing in the air, a shriek of vengeance and then… nothing. The sound came from further ahead to the right behind a large mound, you watch to see the source, feet ready to run away as the slightest threat. Footsteps sounded and around the bend came a semi dirt covered Thoma, looking ahead with a solemn expression, seemingly dazed. His chest huffed out periodic breaths of air to regain himself and latestly wiped off his brow and took out a cloth and dabbed at the specks of blood on his clothes and arms, while doing so he turned and saw you standing motionless, eyes awide and still in semi shock. Almost instantly devastation fell upon his face, his eyes sunk in immediate sadness, he just looked at you for a second, whatever his thoughts were were his own, before quickly putting the cloth away and rushed to step towards you.

“Please just- i'm just doing my duty, I don't mean-, i'm not…” the more he tried to justify himself the more he seemed to sink into his own hole.

“I know this looks bad, you are the last person I'd want to see me like this but-” he took a deep breath in, steeled himself to elaborate properly, “it's to protect the clan. Fatui spies, rogue samurai, rival clans, a lot of them come here to spy on the clan or put us at risk, i'm just doing my duty and protecting the people who protect me.” he looked at you earnestly, hoping for your understanding, hoping you don't see him as a murderer, hoping to retrain the image of an amicable person but his soft smile of a plea also held the acceptance that you may not acknowledge his reasonings, that you'd turn your back and leave.

You do understand, you do know Thoma isn't a harmless friendly face, that he can and will do what must be done for the people he cares about, it's just that… it's a little hard to easily be calmed even with that notion when the very real blood and remains of that dedication is shown spewed across the forests floor, it's not something any ‘average’ person would not react to but still, this is Thoma, he has his reasons, it was done in the name of goodwill and he's trying to explain it to you.

You take a few steps towards him and offer a hesitant smile, “I get it, I don't see you as any less than before.”

Before you even regain your senses properly you feel his arms around you, tight and secure, his hand cupping the back of your head and hiding his face in your shoulder, so desperate to have the reassurance that it's okay but still hesitant to look at you, like you may change your mind.

“Thank you… archons above I was worried I've scared you. My word, that's the last thing I'd want…” she shook his head slightly, took one last deep breath and moved back up, his hands grasping your shoulders lightly, you could see his face up close now and he finally allowed himself to look at you, his face held a smile. “I am so happy to see you!” the heavy atmosphere diminished as Thomas usual radiance shone, “Haha, what are you doing here? It's been ages, the last place I thought I'd see you was all the way here.”

“Oh yeah, I actually came to apologise about that, about being distant. It wasn't right of me to just cut you off, I'm sorry.”

He stayed silent, only looking at you, his eyes softened and nose wrinkled in his genuine expression of embrace. “Dont worry about it, I was clingy, I'm just glad to know you are here now. I'm really happy about that.” he chuckled and shifted his weight to point you back up the path to the Kamisato residence.

“Let's go catch up shall we?”

On the walk back up you explained to Thoma your ‘reason’ for avoiding him (your half lie, half truth reason), the same one you told Ayato. You are shy and get intimidated by how social he is. Thoma nodded at your explanation, expressed his apologies for not noticing your discomfort and promised from now on he'll be more aware when you are together and not encourage meeting with others you aren't comfortable with. The walk was nice, a bit strained because of the topic but after all the knots had been loosened it felt good to be relaxed with him again.

You two entered the Yashiro court again, Ayato still sat at the table reading through some papers. Thoma turned to you, “Oh sorry, meeting with Ayato was one of the things that made you uncomfortable right? We could go somewhere else to catch up?”

“No it's alright, I met with him earlier when I arrived. I told him I'd return so it would be rude not to haha.”

The noise must have alerted said man, Ayato peaked his head up and greeted the both of you with a smile as you walked towards him and sat down.

“The both of you have returned safely from your walks then, it's good to see. How was it?”

Thoma hesitantly chuckled, “Haha, came across some trouble but nothing I can't iron out. Otherwise we just had a little talk.”

Ayato nodded and hummed.

You remember your carrier box filled with the apology gifts for Thoma and opened it.

“Thoma, I made some more biscuits and bread and wanted to give them to you, to further state my apology.”

“oh? Perfect then, we can have them with tea.” Ayato must have had someone refill the teapot while you were away as Thoma poured you both cups of steamed golden liquid and refilled Ayatos. Thoma took a biscuit and devoured it in delight, did he always over exaggerate when eating the things you baked or was his reaction authentic?

“Ayato, would you like one? They really are divine.”

“No thank you. It would be wrong of me to strip you of your joy haha.”

It was odd but so welcoming to be able to have a casual conversation with the two. It seemed easy to get lost in Thomas stories, he seemed fully invested in everything he spoke of and when listening he truly captured every word. Ayato, though not as vocal as Thoma when he did speak his words were like a maze you'd have to do a small mental puzzle to understand if they were a wise response or a guileful remark coming from his teasing nature. Though harder to understand, Ayato's words were still a welcoming part of the conversation as the three of you went on to drink and share.

Ayato shuffled his papers, putting them to the side, even on his supposed break he was reading through documents, Thoma hummed, took a quick look around then returned his gaze on Ayato.

“Where is Lady Ayaka? I thought you two were having this tea break to discuss something.”

Oh wait… Ayaka…

“Yes, she received a letter from the traveller today and was eager to share it, haha she truly is fascinated with that adventurer. She's not here at the moment however, she's gone to speak with Yoimiya. She says Yoimiya will be taking a trip to Sumeru in the future and has gone to ask if she may join.”

“Oh that's wonderful!-” Thoma hesitated, “Oh but doesn't she have some important meetings lined up these coming months with the shrine? There were those exchanges that need to be made, some deliberations about the upcoming festivals… as supportive as I am about her going on a trip, it doesn't seem doable with just how much is installed for these next 3 or 4 months.”

Oh Thoma you are truly a blessing, not only are you a true friend but you reestablished that the ‘plot’ wont change. You mouth a soundless thanks to him.

Ayato hummed and tapped his quill* rhythmically on the table. “That is true but I want Ayaka to enjoy her years and not only focus herself on clan affairs, this trip is a good first opportunity to see the world outside Inazuma and with Yoiymiya as her travel partner I do not doubt they will have a good time. As for the workload-” Ayato reached over to the paper stack and shifted through them, “I was busying myself with planning and rearranging the meetings and visits she had in the time I expect her departure will be. It is more work but it will be rewarding, you'll see.”

Thoma seemed confused, it seemed from the look on his face he was doing the same as you when it comes to Ayato's words, figuring out the puzzle but if there was an underlying meaning to his words you didn't detect them, Ayato was simply stating facts and expectations yet Thomas silence ment he was looking for more than just that. Whatever mental games Thoma was tackling he must have failed, he chuckled and melted back into his relaxed self.

“I'm glad then, it will be good for her.”

No… no this isn't right. There will be something, something will stop her from going, there must be.

“mhm, I only await to hear back from her and her meet with Yoiymiya, I don't see any reason why she would decline.”

Yoiymiya will decline, she will, she must.

“oh? Are you okay?” Ayato looks at you in concern, he puts his quill* down and gives you his full attention.

“Is something the matter? Whatever it is, I am sure we can address it.”

“No, no its okay I just realised- I had some serious stuff to do for work which i've forgotten.”

Ayato's face turns to mock surprise, you know he didn't believe you but he doesn't comment on it, Thoma does the same but you can detect the small quiver of his smile in disappointment that you are leaving so soon.

“Oh dear! Do you need help getting back home?”

“no no, i'll be fine thank you” you rush to stand up and then smile down to the two. “Thank you for today but I must go. Enjoy your afternoon.” you rush pleasantries and are out the gate before the two could press you further on your actions.

You've done it again, you came here to try to fix things but you've just made a mess. You can try to fix it tomorrow, for now the more pressing thoughts of the potential Sumeru trip Ayaka will go on drowned out any other thoughts. You walk home rushed, the long walk not helping much to ease your nerves, you can only hope fate will prevail and Ayaka will stay in Inazuma.

Ayato and Thoma sat in silence as you left, mutual understanding of the odd nature of your departure yet not wanting to address it.

“So… your ‘walk’ was fruitful then?”

“Just a few stray Hilichurls and a Fatui mage but it's been sorted.”

“Thoma, you know securing the perimeter is not part of your duties, you needn't lie about the reasoning for going out.”

Thoma did not respond.

Ayato breathed in deeply, “I am not opposed to you going out to release your emotions but I worry you may get caught up in them only to further feed into your obsessions.”

“I'm not obsessed! I'm just-” he grit his teeth in his own turmoil, “I don't want to label these feelings as ‘obsession’, that wouldn't be right to them. I don't know, I still don't know. When they stopped talking to me it felt like I'd lose them forever, that everyday I don’t see them with my own eyes is a day that they may disappear and I know that sounds obsessive but… but I don't want to call it that. I just don't…”

Ayato soaked up his friend's words like a sponge and as always his responses were either clear or muddled with undertone, this time Thoma could tell instantly Ayato's words were transparent.

“You need not worry yourself about labelling your feelings then, you two are back in contact and there is still a future for you to explore what the emotions you are holding mean. Just do not lose sight of your health and those around you, even obsession can be tamed. “

The next few months were both easier and harder than the times you were avoiding Thoma. Sure, you lessened your workload and your health improved, you stayed in contact with Thoma, not as much as before but still enough to bond over. It was good to have a friend again and the feeling was mutual, every time you did meet he seemed eager to enjoy it to its fullest. You had even met with Ayato a few more times, never to the extent of Thoma but at least it became comfortable to sit and have tea with the both of them in a relaxed manner but that was the positives, the looming threat of Ayaka changing the plot was a heavy cloud always looming. The few occasions she saw you she was cordial and respectful but her interest glossed right over like you didn't even exist. She and Yoimiya made plans, fulfilled the work she could and now here you stand on the beach you woke up on exactly 2 years ago, 2 years since you randomly came to be here in Teyvat, the same day fate was changed and both Yoimiya and Ayaka were set sail for Sumeru.

In blunt terms, youve fucked up. This was pure proof of your paranoia, this was proof your existence can cause the plot to change and the realisation of just how helpless you are in this situation dawned on you. The very act of your existence, whether you interact with those deemed ‘special’ or not, can and will change the story and you can only wonder if it will end well or if you've led something to doom.

It's not fair, it's not fair at all. Even though you've been friendly with Thoma recently it's not like you can truly confide in him and he's just a painful reminder of your mistakes. The burden of wearing this responsibility, one you didn't even know how to fulfil, one you failed to fulfil, it's unfair. You are only human, you have needs to fulfil and ‘dying’ isn't one of them…

But

But is it moral to be so selfish as to care about your own being when putting the risk of others on the line? Ayaka is gone from Inazuma, just how many people was she meant to interact with if she stayed? How will her presence in Sumeru affect the story? If you guess right the ‘hero' should be done with the main quest of Sumeru if it means Yoimiyas story quest can start but what if something happens that prohibits the plot for future stories? What of Ayakas presence delays the ‘hero’, even for a minute, in which that minute was originally meant for something in the greater scheme of things?

This is awful… this isn't right. Not only has living become so difficult because of the constant nagging of anxieties and worries but you also have the potential to be responsible for disaster simply by existing.

It isn't right… it isn't right you afflict this world with your existence and the threat it brings.

Two years ago when you awoke on this beach you hoped to retain a normal life, perhaps find a way back home but at the very least, set up a life for yourself, an npc life but at least something. It's only fitting that you felt you had to come here, to kneel in the sand and watch how its granules slip through your fingers, it's because you exist that this sand is moving… it's only fitting that you finally come to the conclusion that you must die while being here. This is the place of your ‘birth’ into this world, perhaps it can be the place of your death as well. Not ‘death’, not some convoluted meaning of ‘dying' and becoming a new person, no you need to die. You need to die to ensure the people of Teyvat can remain on course. You are the virus here, you are the disease you need… you need to die.

Tears ran down your cheeks at such a resolute statement, sure youve thought about it all but now and truly you've decided that this is it, that you must do this. It's not like you want to die, not on a personal scale, but on a mental and emotional scale all this is too much, too much to bear and too much to live through.

It's not fair to leave the people you've so selfishly afflicted with your presence without giving them a reason but you are too much of a coward to tell it to their face. It wouldnt go well if you were to stand infront of Thoma and tell him you were going to kill yourself, thats for sure but at the very least he could get some form of an explanation.

You decide tonight is not the night you die, that would be tomorrow, you stand up from the ground and walk home, the weight of your choice still as raw as the moment you decide it, death is no light matter after all.

You get home, a small space a person like yourself could afford, only the basics of furniture and 2 rooms. There under your door lay a letter, you pick it up and sit at your table where unblemished paper sat to become future suicide notes. Taking a look at the letter it was sealed in wax, the crest of the Kamisato Clan dug into its mass.

You open it,

‘Dearist XXXX

May this letter find you well. Both Thoma and myself wish to invite you for a stay at the Kamisato Clan as both a guest and a friend. The changing season brings a beautiful opportunity to witness it first hand as the trees take on their new hues and the oceans change their tides, you are welcomed to join us. Thoma sends his best wishes but asks for them to properly be said in person rather than in post. We eagerly await your response.

Signed

Ayato’

Haha… how casual for a man like him… haha… haha here you are preparing to write letters announcing your death to them and yet they think only of including you in their lives. Haha… how horrible, how utterly vile it is to be able to experience emotions such as these. These feelings only prove your point more. You put the letter to the side and stared blankly at the response you are going to reply with, oh of only it were as optimistic and welcoming as theirs was.

You tried to make it easy for both yourself and those intended to read it. You state that the mistakes of your past have lay heavy on you and that death is the only relief, that you are sorry you cannot return the sentiment of friendship and must lay your mistakes to rest.

To Thoma you leave a more personal note, telling him that he made your life here in Inazuma so much better, that it was only in the moments with him you forgot your ‘mistakes’ for even a moment and for that you are grateful. It's true, it's only Thoma who made you forget the fact you don't belong here when you spend time with him. Sending this letter to him is assured to rip his heart, he sees you as a friend and he's going to beat himself at the thought that he did not help you enough to make you feel you'd want to stay, that he wasn't a good friend, which is not true at all but you know there is little you can do to convince him otherwise. In a moment of distressed induced vulnerability, with tears in your eyes you state something so cliche as that perhaps in another life you two may be able to have the friendship you both craved in this life, if only there is a case of reincarnation and you may be born in the same universe as him and live that life with no burdens or guilt of your existence.

To Ayato you are more cordial, less emotional or descriptive but you tell him that he was right on that day in the rain, that there is a deeper problem than you just being ‘introverted’, otherwise you keep it professional.

After the hardest two were done it was rather simple, it's not like you have any friends or family to write to and sending a letter to the street vendor you buy from doesnt make sense. You do write a letter and tell your boss that you simply will not be returning to work, you don't say why, and that you thank him for all the opportunities and help he has given you.

For once it was easy to fall asleep, for the first time in 2 years the moment you lay your head on your pillow you were unconscious. For once you've felt the release of the burden you feel and the comfort that will come when your plague on this world is done. You are so tired and finally you can rest.

The next day went on simply, it was a weekday and you went to work, in the afternoon you submitted your letters to the post and walked back home, taking in the scenery of Inazuma. This will be the last time you walk these streets. You wait at home quietly, have a decent meal and enjoy the sounds from outside of leaves and people. You felt in an odd state all the way through the day, like your senses were hypersensitive noticing the slightest thing around you which was lovely. You got to focus on the squirrles you passed on your way to work, the smell of baked bread smelled heavenly once again like it had the first day you were in the bakery, the pink and purple blossoms of the trees were so vibrant on your way home. You had given the shop vendor a smile and a wave as you passed her, that day you felt no burden, no grief. You only had one more step to take, the hard part was already over with.

In the late evening you stood by that beach again, the view was incredible. You sat down in the sand and got comfortable leaning against a rock and letting the tide touch the tips of your toes. You were naughty today, you bought enough substances from clinics or herb stands to be sure you felt good in your last moments. You took them quickly and then rested your head back against the rock, letting the sound of waves softly crashing, leaves rustling and the odd animal chirp lull your mind. It took some effort not to fall asleep just yet, you blinked your eyes harshly and woke yourself up a bit. This part was slightly uncomfortable, the beach you woke up on had a slight cliff, nothing you'd die by jumping off of, it was just a little steep incline but it was enough. You took a large rock from nearby and rolled it closer to the edge, tying a rope around and around your ankle. Drowning didn't seem like a peaceful death but at least like this your body can be washed into the sea where it can decay in peace without traumatising a random person strolling the beach. You relaxed and took out the large knife you had brought with you. Bleeding out decreases the time by knocking yourself out and not having enough energy to wake up in the water and struggle. You should be numb enough now. You closed your eyes and cut lengthwise, both arms, a leg… you tried your neck but even drugged up that was beyond doable. You didn't even register when you had stopped, you didn't see the blood flowing or feel the pain as it pooled, slowly your will died out as everything became hazed. It was a feeling, not a good or bad one, you couldn't even think. You felt the weight on your ankle tug, your consciousness dropping and allowing the gravity to pull you away. Black.

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swampgallows · 3 days

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(fyi you are under no obligation to answer this at all. thought i'd ask bc youre THE garrosh person (iconic!) and i dont recall seeing anything related to this? or mobile is being dumb) me + a friend on twitter were talking about garrosh and the stonetalon mountains questline and how blizz came out and said that apparently that whole questline was a mistake, yadda yadda. i was wondering if you did have any thoughts on that, even in general or like specifically @ blizzard or about garrosh's characterization during that zone.

hi, thank you so much for the question! I always like talking and answering questions about he. as such, this will be quite long...

here is the interview where alex afrasiabi declares stonetalon's creation as "miscommunication". personally, it's very hard to believe that among all the different teams necessary in a zone's completion—quest designers, quest writers, environment designers, prop designers, voice actors, QA, and so on—absolutely no one stopped at any point and went "hey, uh, what exactly is this that we're building here?" unless it's Marvel-levels of secretive where they filmed fake scenes or prohibited actors from reading the full script to allegedly prevent spoilers, or Oblivion-levels of convoluted where they compiled voice lines in alphabetical order, i figure that eventually someone somewhere down the line MUST have pieced together that all the blind mice had discovered an elephant.

that elephant in the room however, now in 2024, is afrasiabi himself. in the wake of all that had been revealed in the activision-blizzard lawsuit of which afrasiabi is a main offender, i think we now have more context for why cataclysm might have been a "pretty crazy time". i don't have any concrete evidence for this of course, but considering afrasiabi's track record a la sylvanas torching teldrassil, one has to assume that he simply took the reins on what he, personally, wanted for garrosh—"Garrosh was my guy"—and brute-forced it to make it happen. just as entire teams were beholden to sylvanas burning the tree—engineering quests, designing gear, animating and storyboarding and scripting and voice acting the Warbringers cinematic, not to mention the entirety of the following 2 expansions that hinged on that action—the labor for a throwaway zone like stonetalon is a drop in the bucket in comparison. stonetalon was probably finished in a handful of weeks. recording garrosh's voice lines probably happened in an afternoon.

i don't have any text-based evidence for this either as it occurred in an open Q&A session over discord, but ex-wow dev john staats also remarked that in the early days of wow's development, individual teams were kind of left to their own devices. it was really easy for devs to simply publish whatever they wanted into the game (innocuous things like the happy face under karazhan intended to be seen only by map designers, or the karazhan crypts with the infamous upside-down sinners). for instance, one employee was adamant about ogres becoming the fourth playable race for the horde until they decided on trolls, hence why ogres have several unique animations as well as a dance, all animated by the same one guy who was passionate about it. sometimes events and items were completed in single weekends; staats said a couple of dungeons (iirc stockades and rfc) were implemented this way. these topics might be touched on in staats' book The WoW Diary, but i dont have it.

i think cataclysm as a whole is a monument to blizzard's growing pains and to afrasiabi in particular bucking against the corporate restraints of wow's astronomical success. cataclysm is tonally abhorrent in a number of different ways and it's not always easy to point fingers at who is responsible for what, but it's undeniable the amount of leverage afrasiabi had. even if it wasn't him specifically, it's evidenced by both the details of the lawsuit and the game itself that certain elements of what was prominent in 00s gamer culture and the general "boy's club" wolf of wall street atmosphere at blizzard heavily influenced cataclysm's execution. the boys were resting on their laurels from the skyrocketing popularity and success of wrath, getting tv spots, mtn dew collabs, and so on, and felt empowered to infuse even more of their indulgences into their unstoppable juggernaut. wow had enough power in the industry to dictate what made a successful mmo and and who these games were "For", leading to a circuitous perpetuation of toxic masculinity by creating a game that catered to that kind of audience and thus propagating that mindset within it. no one could challenge WoW nor the people at its helm, be they industry competitors or blizz employees themselves.

at the same time, however, bobby kotick had just recently become CEO, simultaneously tightening the ship and imposing new structure as decorum slipped and hedonism flourished. the old guard lost some freedom to the demand for an overall throughline and schedule of what content to expect and commit to and when to release rather than the loose "jam sessions" of previous patches. as such, afrasiabi couldn't just drag and drop his blorbo wherever he wanted into their digital playground. he says others didn't get the memo, but he is probably the one who got the memo of "our fanbase of millions of players hates your idiot character and we would like to phase him out please" and disregarded it. he admits to wanting to turn garrosh around, and in his mind might view stonetalon as a last stand to prove the worth of his character, but it was in opposition of what was most likely decided upon at an executive level, a cog in a number of different turning cranks to get cataclysm done on time and off of shelves.

afrasiabi says "there was a little bit of miscommunication on my part that kind of led to Garrosh going down another, darker path. So there's an interesting tidbit for you." i imagine this "miscommunication" to be along the lines of 'fine, people can hate him, but he stays'. i feel this is also why the team instantly leapt at the chance to permanently eradicate garrosh—along with anything else tainted by afrasiabi—after he was quietly fired in 2020. i would not be surprised if the team was essentially forced by contract or social pressure or otherwise to keep garrosh in the game as long as afrasiabi held the whip. again, this is all conjecture. i don't actually know what went on behind the scenes at blizzard.

unfortunately the end result is that, yes, thanks to stonetalon we DID end up seeing a garrosh that could have changed for the better, just as afrasiabi wanted, but ultimately would have been—"from a story character development perspective" (well said, alex. lol)—banal and redundant for wow. i assume afrasiabi just wanted his self-insert alongside metzen's (thrall), which is a level of meta that i do not feel like unpacking tonight. so while it does add a little more glimmer to the theory of garrosh as "the horde's arthas", stonetalon's impact mostly serves as fodder to stoke endless Garrosh Did Nothing Wrong ragebait on twitter.

much like arthas, what makes garrosh so compelling to the majority of (non-fascist) people who like him is his fall from grace. despite his efforts to free himself from the shackles of his lineage, garrosh steps in it over and over to a point where he is instead encouraged to deliberately emulate the legacy he had spurned and embrace his rage. knowing that a character has the capacity to be honorable and good and instead chooses with full conscience to be evil makes for a much more interesting character than a clueless crying fawn that clumsily ambles its way into becoming prince of gumdrop forest. of course it's more satisfying for afrasiabi to have his self-insert get both a rags-to-riches story AND 2.5 expansions' worth of gary stu headpats; for everyone else, gristle mcthornbody uncritically absolving the sins of the father and dunking on the cursed prophecy while flexing and spouting edgy one-liners as he overpowers and outsmarts everyone is downright cartoonish. it's the lecherous tiefling bard who wants to remain in the tavern to hit on npcs instead of engaging with the campaign your dungeonmaster created: fun for him, and an interminable bore to everyone else deprived of the adventure.

in afrasiabi's hands, there is no greater narrative to garrosh hellscream. he's a big buff warrior because afrasiabi wishes he were a big buff warrior. garrosh is a racist, sexist scumbag because afrasiabi is a racist, sexist scumbag. garrosh has tattoos of no specific shape or meaning because afrasiabi only has a superficial appreciation for tattoos as something badass and cool. he kills people and blows stuff up because that's alpha sigma tiropita and badass and cool. the history of the orcs and fel was retconned so that garrosh could be a Shiny. grom and thrall had a special bond all throughout warcraft 3, but here comes grom's secret son to usurp the title of #1 favorite orc!! and he's just like grom but actually he's even MORE cool and badass??? this is 'playing power rangers at recess'-tier character development. it is transparently afrasiabi's wish fulfillment independent of the ongoing storyline, which at minimum is not befitting of a multi-million dollar AAA gaming franchise.

the inverse to garrosh's story being a fall from grace is that it is a story of unmet potential which is, both in a doylist and watsonian sense, exactly the oedipal kind of destiny afrasiabi ushered in for his doomed character. garrosh was doomed from the start to be a lackluster simulacrum of grom, both in azeroth and at blizzard, grasping for nostalgia for the RTS days while actively refusing to engage with the culture and landscape of modern day WoW. the more afrasiabi meddled, the more it illuminated just how hollow his vision of this character was and the failure to reach the potential of the kind of character garrosh could be. afrasiabi says "Garrosh was my guy" but his own ego will forever prevent him from understanding all of the dimensionality to his character that he threw away. and this, too, in true afrasiabi fashion, is reflected in garrosh's character. his ego overshadows his ability to listen to the people around him and results in his inevitable, shameless downfall... because that's exactly what afrasiabi would do. did.

so, no, alex. garrosh is not your guy. he's mine. he's all of ours. because world of warcraft belongs to all of us. and because i engage with the character of garrosh hellscream within his narrative, i can look at the beginning and end of his story and say that stonetalon is canon. because despite the years of frustration and confusion, there is so much closure for me in knowing that the reason he sucks so bad is because his creator—grom, afrasiabi—abandoned him, his story, his soul. trying to pare him down and sand his edges and curdle him into something he was never meant to be. he was never meant to exist, and he shouldn't exist, and that's what makes him so irresistibly, infuriatingly compelling, and why i love him so. garrosh hellscream is the only character in the entire story, both within the narrative and without, from beginning to end, in any timeline or on any planet, who is acutely aware that he is not meant to exist.

#maybe not the answer youre looking for but it's the one you're getting #thank you for the question! this was cathartic haha #ask #divinewretched #metacraft #yamyell #long post

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