#They're perhaps the first instance of me making two characters and before even writing them going 'hey I think they should be romantic'
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The patient was lying on the operating table when the door slid open.
They didn’t have to be there - the room had more in it than it did a week ago, a comfortable enough chair, a plush little love seat to relax in, a desk to work at. Their wrists weren’t strapped down anymore, nothing new pumping into their veins. They were free to roam around the room and let the oncoming process take place. And yet still, they chose to lay on the table and stare at the ceiling blankly.
At least they glanced over when she entered, attention caught by the sound of her footsteps, not the door opening and closing. They had stopped trying to escape months ago. Thank fucking god for that.
“Unscheduled,” they told her. They had become more monosyllabic as the weeks had gone on. Sometimes, it was a struggle to know what they were trying to say.
This time is easy enough. “I don’t follow the schedule that strictly,” she said briskly. “I can visit whenever I want.”
Their eyebrows rose at the first comment, noting the blatant lie, but they let it pass, eyes drifting back to the ceiling again. Even their arms were spread out, wrists resting exactly where the leather straps would usually be. “Why?”
“I work here, sweetie. I thought you knew that by now.” It would be a concern if not. Some of the others had deteriorating memories at this point in the process, and she was so sick of failed tests.
A head shake. “Why here?” The second word seems to strain them. “Why me?”
Ah. At least their mind was still somewhat present. Brushing down the front of her off-white lab coat, she gave herself a moment to think. The facility had tried to keep each patient isolated, although a lot of them had figured out there were others on account of the screams. This patient was amongst them, having asked her a few months ago how many others there were. Fifty, she had told them, and they had nodded, taken her word as the truth and shut their eyes to listen, trance-like, to the screams down the hall.
The number was much, much lower than fifty now, having dropped lower still a few minutes ago. She was on the brink of failure, bankruptcy, months of agony and wasted resources for nothing. Maybe she was somewhat desperate to keep the final few functioning, progressing. Alive. More willing to spend time around them and their misery, pity, refusal to acknowledge the common good she was working towards.
She couldn’t tell them that, though. With how frail they looked, they may well die on the spot at the news, half from shock, half to spite her. “Figured you could use some company,” she said instead. “How are you feeling?“
They gave her a blank look, the kind that perfectly said, how the bloody hell do you think I’m doing? Then returned their attention to the ceiling. Silence lingered. The overhead lights hummed. Someone hurried past their room. “Tired,” they eventually murmured. “I’m tired.”
“That’s to be expected. You’ve been through a lot.” She gave them her best smile, her politicians smile, and smoothed a clump of brown hair off their forehead. It was something she had done to a lot of foreheads when hands had been strapped down, resistance impossible. Why was she doing it now? Because they were on the table, laid out as if expecting the chemicals to start flowing, the screams to start ripping their throat?
She withdrew before either of them could comprehend it, and their eyes watched her carefully for a uncharacteristically long ten seconds, before their attention drifted again. Their skin felt feverish, dry. It was not a good sign. Keep them lucid, keep them alert. “Is there anything I can get you?”
What may have once been a smile drifted across their face. “Out.”
It was a joke for both of them at this point, so she laughed, and their almost-smile nearly became a full smile, before the effort became too much to maintain. “I’ll ask the boss,” she promised, a joke for her to privately enjoy. “Anything else?”
“News,” they said vaguely.
“On what?”
“Kit.”
Always the same. Maybe that was why she liked them more than most. Their interactions were predictable, repetitive. If they did die, she might not even notice, repeating her half of the script to their unresponsive corpse. “Not much,” she said sombrely, as if she’d checked. “Rumour has it he’s got a new orange now.”
Their eyes shut, brows drawing together, mouth pressed thin. This wasn’t part of their routine. It took her a moment to recognise grief. What was the problem? What had she said? Why was news of another orange so significant?
Right. Of course. They had been an orange once, his orange, trusted sidekick and adoring supporter. This tidbit of nothing went a lot deeper than she expected, and she hesitated, unsure if she should keep digging. On one hand, she thought they had given up on their brother weeks ago, when their patience had run out, when they had accepted he wasn’t going to save them, when their magic and use to him had been stripped from their veins. It was annoying that there had still been a part of them clinging to hope, expecting something from Kit.
On the other hand, she could plainly see that part of them wither and die with this news. She gave them a moment, hands clasped behind her back, then continued. “He’s declared you dead,” she said, her voice soft, delicate. “Says he held you in his arms as you bled out.”
“Course,” they said. She was glad to hear bitterness in their voice, hoarse as it was.
“Rumour has it he’s one of the most powerful on the streets now,” she added, watching their face carefully. This was a lot more than she had planned to tell them, much more truthful than her reports usually were, but it was having some kind of effect, a reaction. Better than most other discussions she had with patients, weepy and aching affairs that left her heavy and frustrated. “He keeps targeting other turfs. He’s gained a lot of ground, I hear.”
It was easy to see how they interpreted the news by how their eyes screwed tighter, brows knitting closer together, going from grief to agitation. Petty in-fighting, domination of the city - it was a slap in the face for someone who had been waiting for rescue. Now they knew their master plan, the thing they had bet their life on, had half worked. Kit was stuffed with potential, a frighteningly powerful mage. He just hadn’t bothered coming back for them.
She expected tears, pleading, defeat. Their words were delightfully measured when they asked, “Orange?”
“Someone from out of town,” she reported. Jaque was the exact town, but they didn’t need to know that. They didn’t need to know a lot of things. “Goes by Clem. Most people say they’re just a source of the colour, that Kit does most of the controlling.”
They hummed an acknowledgement, opened their eyes again, stared at the ceiling. “Lots,” they eventually said.
Although it was as dull as usual, it sounded sarcastic to her ears, like they were mocking her. Nothing infuriated her more than being mocked. She hoped the flush across her cheeks wasn’t obvious. “I don’t know lots about them, no. They’re new to the scene. I have other things to do than gather news on your brother, you know.”
Eyes glanced across her face. “No,” they said. “News.”
“No news,” she echoed.
“Lots,” they insisted. “You.”
“You’re not making any sense, my darling.”
They almost snarled, nose wrinkled, a spark of anger in their eyes. Slowly, carefully, visually, they gathered energy, going pale with the effort, eventually managing to croak, “You have lots of news today.”
A full sentence was impressive at this stage. Hell, single words were impressive - a significant portion of participants had gone entirely mute a week ago. Maybe she was right to put more energy into her remaining patients. “A special treat.”
Another hum. They didn’t seem to care. Their eyes were still open, brown still fixed on the ceiling, but they had started to lose focus, drift from active attention to a freakish half-sleep. Clearly the full sentence had drained them of what little energy they were using to stay awake. She almost felt guilty for it.
More than the guilt was the alarm. The half-sleep that too many participants had adopted was too similar to the stiff clutches of death. Too often, she had held a hand, tried to coax someone into fighting a little longer, felt the exact second their fingers went limp and the odds of her failure went up. A few times, during her scheduled rounds, she had noticed still bodies curled up somewhere, glazed over and perfectly static, and struggled to tell if they were sleeping or dead. More and more often, it was the latter.
This participant was just like any other. Nothing special, beyond the circumstances around how they had arrived. She still didn’t want to watch them die. “Is there anything else I can get you?”
Glazed eyes flicked to focus on her. This was not part of their script either. At this point, she’d wish them well, promise to be back later, and leave them be. Still, they considered the question. “Chair,” they finally said.
“You want to go to the chair?” At the tiny nod, she sucked at her teeth, considered the distance. “I’ll get some guards to -“
“No.”
“No? How do you expect to get to the chair?“
“Walk.”
She laughed at that. She couldn’t help herself. “Love, you’re not going to be able to walk to the chair. It’s five meters away. Be sensible, now.”
“Walk,” they insisted. “I can.”
“You think I’ll let you try? Have you killed, too?”
A pause. Consideration. Then, quietly, “Too?”
Shit. Their eyes were fixed on her, watching her reaction, reading the truth in the millisecond of hesitation. Where had that unfocused glaze gone? She licked her lips with the very tip of her tongue, careful to only gloss over her lipstick, arranged an excuse. “Only a few. It’s to be expected, this isn’t -“
“How many?”
It would have been so easy to lie. Maybe they were sharper than the average participant, but she still controlled the flow of information they received. She could make them believe anything if she put proper work into it, including the mortality rate of this trial.
Looking down at them, positioned as if ready to receive further torture, attention fixed on her and hungry for a tidbit of truth, she couldn’t find it in herself to deceive them. “There’s five left,” she said quietly. “Including you.”
They breathed out at that, an audible exhale. “Start?”
“We started with ninety.”
“Fifty?” She shrugged in way of explanation, and they nodded, as if they expected it, understood it. So practical, so uniform. God, she did like them. ��Me?”
Another hesitation. They noticed it. “We’re doing everything we can to keep you alive,” she eventually said, words careful and picked over. “All of you. So, with luck, you should have nothing to worry about.”
“Luck,” they sneered. She could understand their bitterness, given their situation. She also admired their bitterness. So many of the others simply became empty, exhausted. Their anger was a breath of fresh air sometimes.
Other times, it expressed itself in stubborn tendencies. “Chair.”
“I’m not going to let you kill yourself,” she said tiredly.
“Chair.”
“It’s not just your life you’d be wasting. I’m sure you’re used to that, but I can’t afford to allow -“
They barked a laugh, surprisingly loud.“Bitch,” they spat, with great amusement. “I want…”
The rest of their sentence trailed off as they panted for breath, exhausted, determined. She glared venom down at them. They glared venom right back, triumphant and proud. Did she even like them? It seemed to change day-by-day, word-by-word. “Go on, then,” she said, sickly sweet. “Walk to your crummy chair. See how that goes for you.”
To their credit, they hesitated. Maybe they’d buckle, realise she was right, do as she said. It wasn’t too late to forgive them, find the guards, get them to their chair like they wanted. If they apologised, perhaps. Grovelled, definitely. The relationship between them was entirely up to them to decide.
They decided, and strained to move, and she sighed inwardly and settled in to watch them die. The effort of sitting up would be enough to knock them out. Actually walking to the chair would absolutely kill them. If they were lucky, maybe their corpse would land on the plump cushion. The detached part of her that she listened to quite frequently these days was interested in how long it would take for them to give up.
Because they were laying on their back, the process was agonisingly slow. Lacking the immediate strength to simply pull themselves upright, they instead opted to use their arms to hoist up, inch by inch, leaning heavily on their elbows as they gasped for breath. Teeth gritted, limbs shaking, strain intense. She wondered if they’d burn the body today, or leave it for dissection. She wondered if she should send the remains to Kit.
She wondered how in any possible hell her patient had managed to actually get themselves upright.
Conscious and panting, they didn’t have the energy to act smug. They barely had the energy to stay sitting, skin bone white and fingers holding so tightly to the edge of the table that she could see the outline of every single one of their knuckles. As she watched, their head tilted down, chin almost touching their chest, as if the weight of holding it up was too much… before it jerked, jolting up too far, having to settle in place. A visual demonstration of their bodies demands verses their willpower.
It was fascinating to watch. “Well, aren’t you just full of surprises?”
Their eyes latched onto her. Glassy, unfocused, dull. Their chest was heaving with the effort of breathing. Even single words would be near impossible now.
“You’re not going to make it to the chair,” she said, lecture-like. “I’m impressed you got this far, but you need to recognise your limits. You won’t be useful to me if you can’t.”
Something flickered in their eyes, a spark of life in an otherwise empty void. Their jaw tightened.
“I can have you carried to the chair still,” she offered, hands spread in front of her. “You only need to ask. I’ll even take a nod. Just let me know.”
Their head had dipped, exhaustion getting the best of them. She tried not to be disappointed.
“Let’s get you settled down again,” she said gently, moving closer. “Come on, now. You’re tired. Let’s just -“
They lurched suddenly, tipping forwards, and her words cut off as she darted forwards to catch them. At first, she assumed they had reached their limit, passed out. If they hit the floor, the hard tiles would easily shatter their fragile skull. God knows she couldn’t lose someone with the energy to sit up, the fight to resist her better judgement.
It was only when she was holding them up that she realised they were still awake. The lurch hadn’t been the body’s success - they had pushed themselves forwards, the intent to stand, to walk, spurring them onwards.
They seemed surprised to find her in front of them. Most of their weight pressed on her shoulders. They may have been frail, thinned down by the agonies they had endured, but she wasn’t very big herself, and she nearly crumpled under the burden. “Fucking hell,” she snarled. “Are you trying to get yourself killed? Or just trying to piss me off?”
A hand rose, slow and gradual. There was no way they were still lucid after all this. She’d be lucky if they woke again after she finally settled them down. Given how feverish their skin felt, it was only a matter of time before this test failed too. Really, she’d wasted too much time in here.
“Maybe your brother was right to leave you,” she spat at them, as they focused their energy on raising their hand up, up, up. “Knew what sort of a fucking problem you are. Be glad I don’t have you put down, you useless piece of…”
Her words trailed off as their hand finally stopped, gently caressing her face. With careful deliberation, they traced a finger down her temple, down her cheek, down her jaw, letting their thumb rest against her chin, and tilting that up. Given how they had fallen, how they had been caught, the two of them were very close, nearly pressed together; their chest against her shoulders, her eyes level with their chin. Her eyes raised up to meet theirs.
They pressed their lips to hers. Slow and gentle, although not by choice, they kissed her, and she stood there, holding them upright. In the shock of the moment, she let the cold, mechanical part of her head take over, figure this out.
More than anything, it was wondering how she could use this. With five participants left, she had the room to be more personal with each of them, and if this was how they wanted to go about it, well. A quiet romance could be nice, and could keep them obedient, loyal. On the increasingly unlikely chance they survived this, maybe she could keep them around for a bit, if they chained their own heart for her. Until she got bored of them. Until they had ran out of use.
The kiss ended, and they drew back shyly; a school child pecking their crushes cheek for the first time. With as much desperation as they could muster, they searched her gaze, looking for permission or allowance or reciprocation. Apparently not finding it, they started to sag against the table, swallowed, parted their dry lips. “Sorry,” they whispered.
For a millisecond, she considered her options. Leave them to this obvious mistake and add the burden of embarrassment to their situation. Allow what had happened to be a one-off, let them both move past this and forget it had happened. Or reciprocate - give them a reason to fight on, to survive, a reason to stay at her side even after the matter.
They were speaking, for fucks sake. Standing on their own feet after forcing themselves upright and speaking in full sentences. If anyone was going to survive this, it was going to be Elan fucking Soot.
She threaded her fingers through their hair, pulled them closer and pressed her lips to theirs. Much faster. Much more forceful. By the time she was satisfied, they were breathing hard, and her lipstick was pressed over their mouth.
Without her saying anything, they went to wipe it off, dazed. Not the blank-eyed dazed expression she was so used to. Something bright, alive. Something that shouldn’t be in this facility.
A red stain transferred to the back of their hand, and they wrinkled their nose at it, an unimpressed grunt making its way up their throat. “Bright,” they said, irked. “Ugh.”
“If you don’t like it, you don’t have to kiss me,” she said, halfway between flirting and icy.
They smiled, let their arm swing to their side, tilted back, much more weight against their bed. “Thank you.”
“You owe me, lovie.” She let a finger trace along their jawline, let the mechanical voice consider it. There were definitely worse faces to kiss. This could end up being incredibly beneficial to her.
A softer part of her, the part that had made her heart flutter and her face flush, pointed out it could also be beneficial for them. That maybe they had their own mechanical voice, weighing up their options and choosing the best route. That maybe, just maybe, she should be a little bit careful.
Then, they swayed on their feet, let out a long sigh, and nodded. “Guards,” they suggested, a voice like a leafs skeleton. “Now.”
She complied, calling loudly and apparently a little frantically - the guards rushed in with their hands on their batons, ready for trouble, finding instead their employer with a participant collapsed on her shoulder. To their credit, they wasted very little time in sorting the situation out, easing her patient back onto the surgery table, limp limbs arranged as kindly as possible, and ushering her out of the room.
If the guards noticed her lipstick on their lips, neither of them mentioned it.
#colour wip#writing#my writing#original writing#spilled ink#writerblr#writblr#writingblr#fiction#short story#god I really don't know tags#uh hi! Hello! I'm back again! I was gone for about a month and a half. Offline. Trekking the globe seeing more of Europe and all that#alas now I am at my desk again#the allure of being online is Less. I'll probably come back. But for now. Enjoy this?#it's. A lil short story for a lil idea I have that I want to pursue at some point#who knows when#(it's in the running for nano this year)#these are! The two antagonists! They both have names now which is great because when I wrote this piece they didn't#the woman is Bernadette and the other fella is Elan. Elan is named. Good for them#They're perhaps the first instance of me making two characters and before even writing them going 'hey I think they should be romantic'#'but also like. REALLY fucked up romantics'#gestures at this#it's also! The first kiss I've written since I was like. 16! And the first one I've been !!!!! over writing so that's coo#l#ok that's all from me I'm gonna go. Hang out on my bed I think#thanks for reading love you!#trade-marked
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Any tips for writing great angst?
had 2 think abt this for a bit bc as i've said before my writing process is largely intuitive but!! here's what i've come up with:
1 - read angst <3
this might seem like basic advice but! i would be remiss if i did not mention that part of the way i learned how to come up with angsty situations was simply by reading a lot of angsty stories. now when i write if i'm trying to come up with angst i'll often find myself thinking about what stories have stuck with me in the past and what made them so heart-wrenching.
2 - muddy the waters
i find that when i'm trying to write a heartbreaking story, including a clear Wrong and Right character often diminishes the angst. for example--if two characters are fighting, but one is clearly framed as The Bad Guy and the other is clearly framed as The Victim, the story can of course be sad, but it sort of falls into an easy emotional logic to follow of sympathy for the victim and anger at the bad guy. the stories that i find stick with me much more are ones that include conflict with no clear right and wrong side, where you can understand where both characters are coming from and sympathize with both while also understanding that they are hurting each other. i also prefer these types of stories because i think they tend to be in conversation with the reader more, whereas stories with a clear Good versus Bad setup are kind of just feeding you a script of what you're supposed to feel much of the time. so even if you do have a clear antagonist in your story, i find it more compelling if there is more to the antagonization than just some Inherent Evil.
3 - make it unfair
when something bad happens, most people's first instinct is to look for a clear reason or for someone to blame. additionally, i think a lot of people will instinctively try to find ways to sort of "lessen the blow"--to make the Bad Thing that happened hold some greater meaning, or to say things like "they're in a better place now," etc. that is all perfectly understandable when seeking comfort in the wake of a tragedy--but if you're trying to write angst, take that comfort away! if you want to kill a character, make it abundantly clear to the reader that that character does not want to die, that they have so much to live for, etc etc. make bad things happen randomly, for no reason. make bad things happen to people who don't deserve it. make bad things happen that don't lead to any greater good, that perhaps even make things worse. make bad things happen that were so easily avoidable, but for whatever reason just could not be avoided in this instance. if you really want to twist the knife, a good way to do it is by leaving the reader going, "it's just so unfair!"
4 - leave problems unresolved
this ties into the last point, because again, what is goes back to is taking away the comfort that we seek when something bad happens. if your goal is to write really intense angst, then one of the best ways to do that is to leave whatever problem is causing strife unresolved, or at least to avoid giving a clear resolution/happily-ever-after.
anyway! hope that's helpful :) i'm happy to give like. more concrete examples of any of these points if anything wasn't clear or to try and elaborate more, but...yeah. i feel like these are just some overarching things to consider when you're trying to decide how angsty you wanna make something!
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Can we talk about about how Colin looked in ep 1 when he first saw Marina compared to how he looked when he saw Pen in ep 8. Almost the exact same look! Of course his look to Penelope is probably more about his guilt because he brushed her off when she tried to warn him but still..progress! Lol and then when he's getting ready to leave for Greece, he glanced towards Penelope's home. I think they're having Colin's feelings for her grow gradually in the show instead of all of a sudden like in the books.
Hey! Thank you for this insightful ask of yours :) Sorry for the late answer, I took a long time to write this— without further ado, here we go!
Indeed, Polin is first and foremost a story of gazes, those gazes being of many natures. Whether they are love ones, friendly ones, admirative ones or lustful ones, looking imposes itself to be a huge parameter in Penelope and Colin’s love story.
In order to understand that on screen, film-making has at its disposal a very rich and smart langage of its own. Sometimes, comparision helps to underlines the differences between one character’s relationship with person A mirorring person B. I feel like Shondaland and Chris Van Dussen wanted to introduce the audience to the evolution of our Bridgerton men’s perception of Love. For instance, while Anthony views attachement— to Siena— as a way to escape his responsibilities before becoming his villain (...until our queen ma’am Kate Sheffield comes to the picture), Benedict doesn’t comprehend this universal concept and prefers to enjoy the many physical pleasures life can offer. In other words, the older brothers already explored their sexuality here and there, making them the infamous rakes that they are. As for Colin, it’s a complete other thing.
Colin is young. Very young. At 21, he’s just left Eton College and barely knows anything of the world nor women. Like Anthony said in 1x06, Colin hasn’t been taken to brothels which is a very important step in the building of young men’s sentimental and sexual education during that time period. Since he missed this essential step, our sweet/immature boy has no clue about how to deal sagaciously with his feelings and his “foolish” impulses, baring his naivety. At this point of the story, we can easily come to the conclusion that Colin is a virgin who can’t drive XD. He’s just a child overcame by his passions, a hopelessly romantic who rushes things without taking the time to properly court or know his significant other. And his off-screen flirtation with those supposed numerous girls in London isn’t of any help to justify his (oh so little) experience. So when he sees Marina, he’s so struck by her... mainly by her alluring appearance. And he doesn’t seem to let his eyes nor mind go beyond her exquisite beauty.
In this perspective, the whole Colin/Marina storyline can be perceived as a parallelism to the Pen/Colin’s one. In 1x01, he is immediatley smitten with a dancing Miss Thompson, which happens to be ironically the same case with a 17 year-old Pen but with him. We got to see her, a few moments ago, dreamily looking at him from the back of the dancefloor (echoeing the episode where she fell madly in love with him after he fell off his horse at Hyde Park). She’s charmed by his dashing look and his kindness, yet she doesn’t seem to know anything else about him considering the rare conversations they share. Her burning gaze fits the original story from Julia Quinn’s books because in Romancing Mister Bridgerton, the 28 year-old spinster Penelope do realize later on that Colin is more than a good looking man : he’s a human who possesses a temper and flaws.
Either way, both of our boos are portrayed as hopelessly young people in love who childishly idealize the objects of their affection.
In 1x08, it’s the other way around. It’s Colin who sees Pen first, her who appears to wear the yellow dress’ lookalike from the pilot—what an interesting call back ^^. With his mouth slightly agape and his eyes wide open, we can catch sight of the timid spark of a change in his gaze : Colin Bridgerton notices Penelope Featherington. He‘s touched by the realization that she cares about him. It would be rather inappropriate of me to say that Colin is already in love with her. However, in the finale, I do believe that he’s more struck by her high level of deep care for him than her beauty.
We are thus able to spot two big differences in Colin’s relationship with women in this season : when his attraction to Marina was purely physical and rushed, his attraction with Penelope is more emotional and slow. And for now, he comes to cherish his special bond with her, especially after she tried to warn him of the dangerous trap he was about to fall into. Even if he just sees her as his younger sister’s best friend right now, Pen matters in his life. And it’s still a little yet important progress for sure.
Speaking of which, I agree with you that this look of awe as well as realization is mostly mixed up with guilt. Since he didn’t take into account her words, he felt the strong need to apologize. But bear in mind that guilt formulates a considerable part in Colin’s feelings for Pen... and it’s only the very beginning. In the future, he’ll blame himself for not seeing her as the beautiful goddess and siren that she is in the first place. He’ll blame himself for not reciprocating the feelings for her.... Though at the moment, due to his lack of experience with women, Colin is oblivious to Pen’s obvious signs of sorrow when he told her he’s leaving for Greece/Cyprus. Next time, he’ll detect her sadness and won’t let her go, I’m sure of it (if he doesn’t I’ll riot).
Furthermore, I’m so glad you brought up the scene where Colin glances at the Featherington house. I had the same thought as well. When you put this still and the one where Pen is crying while looking at her window side by side, it even seems like they’re looking at each other. In a way, it implicitly confirms Pen’s key role in his final decision... After all, she’s the one who inadvertently inspired him right ?
The act of traveling has always been seen as cathartic since leaving home to discover yourself allows you to heal your broken heart and soul. It’s natural for Colin to do this. To make his first real steps into the world. His choice is quite relatable more than it is essential for his arc in the series. I can’t wait for him to come back all changed, hot ^^ and mature. I think, like you said, they are planning on making him progressively falling in love with her. Colin’s feelings will gradually leave the platonic zone to explore and officially stay in the intimate zone throughout the seasons.
Overall, the Colin/Marina and Colin/Penelope parallel in s1 mostly helps viewers to compare the way Colin evolves from being a stubborn naive boy to a heartbroken young man who’s aware of his crutial need for Experience. His coming of age, just like Pen’s, has just begun. And they will surely lead to our boy changing himself into the true charming rake that he’s meant to be and our girl into a more confident woman. Consequently, I think their story won’t take 10 years but rather at the very least 5 years perhaps to fit the TV timeline. Once Polin will finally be able to discuss, we’ll hopefully get to see more interesting nuances and shades added to the portrait they painted of one another over the years. They’re indispensable to the slow build up of their emotions/attraction as well as the shattering of their childish idealization/perception of each other.
All in all, I’m so loving the fact that season 1 beautifully sets up the importance of the gaze in Polin’s love story. This first installment is like an expository scene of a play. It leaves a trail of clues and pieces of information here and there at the reach every viewers who can pick them up and analyze what can be the main themes which will determine one character’s story arc/romance. With Polin we have : admiration, wit, love and friendship, desillusionment. (I know they are more but it’s all I can think of rn lol).
If we’re already emotional messes just with the mere power of them looking at each other, imagine when they’ll actually talk and share real conversations. It’s going to be a long way to canon but luv me some good fluffy angsty steamy slow burn :) ✨ I hope this long of mine answers your ask ahah, even if I talked about many things other than just Polin’s looks. Also, sorry if you spot some grammatical mistakes, English is not my first language.
#bleulone answers#anon#ask#meta and gush#polin#polin meta#colin x penelope#colin bridgerton#penelope featherington#julia quinn#romancing mister bridgerton#bridgerton#shondaland#chris van dusen
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what is your reasoning for having some characters have dual name/text colors? is this just another stylistic choice to try and even further branch out from homestuck or what
there are a lot of unstated style rules in godfeels that have just kinda emerged. there's a logic to, for instance, who gets third person narration vs first person, & how they show themselves in that narration. June's narration is always her text color because she isn't really capable of intense subterfuge. Terezi, meanwhile, is very good at hiding herself in narration up until she gets flustered or mad. i never really set out to make an expressive narratorial matrix for these characters, right, but it's there.
going back to 2.1, i actually originally wanted to make June's name be Vriska-blue and her text be Egbert-blue... but i had yet to discover the magic of find & replace, and the thought of having to manually replace "June:" with "<span class="vriska">June:</span><span class="john">" forever after seemed like WAY too much of a hassle. i think giving her a bespoke text color was by far the better choice, because it literally being a blend of Vriska and Egbert was a very very early metaphysical indication to me that there was a much more complex psychological phenomenon occurring under the surface. it took me until writing 3.1 before i realized that the name for that phenomenon is plurality (thanks to the commentary made by a number of plural readers).
in homestuck proper, having a name that's a different color from your text is generally relegated to the sprite^2s. i always read this as a simple way of visually communicating that they're fusions. i always liked the EFFECT of reading their lines because the dual text colors help them feel ascended in some abstract sense.
so, when it came time to introduce Silverbark, i wanted a way to indicate that something big had changed with her beyond the obvious stuff like her appearance. because what makes Silverbark interesting imo isn't just that she's gotten older. if she'd just gotten older while living more or less the same life she was living on earth c, i don't think her hair would have greyed, and i don't think her name color would have changed. it has to do with experience and perspective somehow. to my mind Silverbark's silver is the ultimate tell that her initial impression as the same silly girl that everyone remembered was a front she was putting on. something has changed in her deep, deep down, and in a way the whole space opera side of things emerged out of my own desire to understand what changed. perhaps one could make some inferences there given Padua's color conventions.
in the case of Risk and Dare, i take sort of an opposite approach-- and here i'm now realizing this actually pretty closely mirrors my philosophy about who gets first person narration. imo there's two primary ways one takes control of their own narration. one side, the Dirk side, is brute force. the other side, June's side, is self-realization. so you have two poles, one associated with external power and the control of others, the other associated with internal clarity and a desire to live one's own life more genuinely. i know this particular verbalization makes it sound like one is good and one is bad, but i think you can look at the events of godfeels and say pretty definitively that both camps are just as capable of doing both really good shit and really terrible shit. how you got power certainly informs how you use that power, but it's hard not to think of obama running on hope and change only to turn around and become just as bad as the last guy, dismantling every apparatus of party organization that got him in power and made sure the dnc would never ever run a campaign that effective again. it's complicated, baby. there's no easy answers in life, and there's no easy answers in godfeels.
so anyway in Davepeta's case, you've got a name color change due to a cosmic fusion, the result essentially of a basic math problem. in Silverbark's case, you've got a name color change due to some level of personal/political ascension, a crossing of some kind of rubicon that came with great benefits at what looks to have been a pretty heavy cost.
with Risk and Dare, you've got name color changes as a result of literal self-actualization. it is with Dare's insistence that their name is Dare and they do exist that they finally push through the veil between internal self and external self, forcing June to acknowledge that they are in fact Real and Whole and Independent from her in some key way while also being equally part of her, inextricable from her. it's the final expression of Dare's arc-- throughout chapter 8 they keep trying to find reasons to live, trying to find gods to believe in. they plead to June, they plead to the universe, they even plead to us as readers, and still they get no answer. it's only when they take their life into their own hands and embrace the name that X gives them that they reach the point of being In Control that allows them to fight back in the way that they do. you'll remember that when Epigone is making everyone sing happy birthday, Dare-as-J is the only one who seems to be able to put up any kind of resistance to the words being pushed out of their mouth.
in Risk's case, the motivation for the color change is similar but distinct. for her it's a matter of realizing that "Vriska" as an archetype just doesn't fit anymore. it's still self-actualization, but where Dare's was about fully knowing and embracing their right to exist as an individual, Risk's is about knowing and embracing her right to be someone who doesn't already exist. what exactly that means in the longterm remains to be seen, but you can be sure that it's gonna come up again eventually
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SWTOR: New player help: Contending with bugs
It's not a bug, it's a feature! It's working as intended! As you play SWTOR, you will notice that...things don't always go as expected. Here are some helpful tips for new players (and more long term players too) to try to help handle some of the most common bugs you will find in the game.
First thing: report the bugs you encounter. If nobody knows something's going wrong, it can't be fixed.
Everyone including free to play players can now use the in-game bug reporting system. How?
1. Go into your chat box (usually at the upper left of your screen and type /bug)
2. This should open a window that will allow you to type a short description of the bug you are seeing. Describe the bug. Make sure you mention 1) exactly what you were doing and 2) what was not working. For example:
"During the introduction scene for the flashpoint "This is Way Too Long," the character "I Don't Like You" does not have a head."
3. Press ' submit.'
Keep in mind that you will not get a response or any direct help from a bug report. This is to let the developers know what is not working in the game, so they can hopefully fix it.
2. Wait a little while after there's a new patch or game update
When there's a new game update or patch (you will know because you have new files that will automatically download when you launch the game), don't jump right into the new content with your favorite best character. Wait. It's hard, I know, but wait. The general trend over the past few years has been that new patches and updates always have bugs, and sometimes they're doozies.
It helps to have a "me first" character or two - perhaps a clone of your main - to wade into new content on the first day or week if you really want to see it. That way you can see the new content without being completely angry that it's messed something up for your characters or isn't running quite right.
3. Keep an eye on the Bug Reports section of SWTOR.com and the SWTOR Twitter account.
Even if you are not a subscriber you can still read the Bug Reports forum (I would not recommend the rest of the forums, though). There's usually a running list of known bugs for each patch listed at the top of the page. Also keep an eye on the SWTOR Twitter account. You can read it without being a registered Twitter user, and it will let you know when the game is going down for maintenance or an update.
4. If you are facing a bug that is making it impossible to complete a quest you need for story progression, you can reach out to SWTOR customer service for assistance. If you are a subscriber, press the little gears icon at the top of your screen, choose "customer service" and then "request help." If you are not subscriber, you can reach support at [email protected].
SPECIFIC STRATEGIES FOR COMMON BUGS
1. Help! My abilities bar got unlocked and I cannot get it to lock again!
When this happens, all your abilities will 'float' or move from their placements, which understandably makes it hard to fight. How to get around this:
1. When you are NOT IN COMBAT, press CTRL+U. All of your abilities bars/maps/etc. will vanish. Don't panic. This is the way.
2. Press CTRL+U again. Everything should come back. It may take a moment. Wait.
2. Oh no! My character's stuck in a rock!
Or on a cliff, or under a box, or up a tree. We've all been there. Go to your chat box (upper left, usually).
1. Write /stuck in the chat. This will either move your character to a place where they aren't stuck, or it will kill them and put them back at the nearest medical base.
2. What's that? Stuck isn't working, or you just used it and it needs to cool down? You can try using Quick Travel to travel to a nearby medical base.
3. Still nothing? Try porting to a stronghold, your ship or the Fleet.
4. Try logging out and logging back in.
3. What? I can't click the blue thing.
This bug has shown up all over the place, where an objective will be lit blue, but unclickable. I've found a few places where nothing I do makes this work.
1. Try changing instances.
2. Try logging out and back in.
4. This is a great cut scene...why is it freezing?!
Several years ago this bug was so severe in the Sith Warrior and Imperial Agent stories that only customer service could resolve it. It seems better now, but here are some ideas.
1. ESC out of the scene. Now try to start the scene again by clicking on the NPC /objective/whatever is the scene starter.
2. Can you guess? Log out and back in.
3. Close the game and try re-launching.
4. Try lowering your graphics settings in the game. Don't know why this works, but it did sometimes.
5. My character is frozen in a weird pose.
Just laugh at it, take a screenshot and share it with your friends so they can laugh. Typically this will not affect actual combat and will go away on its own eventually.
6. I want to romance Lana Beniko, Koth Vortena or Theron Shan in KOTFE...but I've heard things about the romance vanishing.
There are two general ways the romances in KOTFE get borked:
1. A patch happens before the romance is locked in (chapter 9) and all the player's flirts from chapters 3-8 are reset. The game thus forgets you were trying to romance Lana and you don't get the romance dialogue option in chapter 9. I've also heard of Koth and Theron romances vanishing, but not as often. The solution is to NOT play through chapters 3-9 of KOTFE when there's a patch happening. My general tactic is to play those chapters straight through, and not stop until I get to chapter 10, to make sure the romance is locked and won't be interrupted by a patch.
2. The player misunderstands the really poorly framed dialogue wheel in chapter 9. There's a moment, pictured below, where the camera faces Theron Shan, and there are choices that say "I need to see one of you" and "I need to see one of you" [flirt]. IT IS NOT JUST REFERRING TO THERON. If you are flirting with Lana or Koth and want to lock in their romance, DO NOT CLICK ON THE FIRST CHOICE (which is helpfully lit up here for your reference). YOU NEED TO CHOOSE THE [FLIRT] HERE, as well as the [flirt] in the conversation when you are alone with your companion of choice.
When your actions or conversation choice will start or end a romance, from KOTFE onward, you will receive a pop up warning that looks something like this.
Caption:
This choice will begin a romance with Lana Beniko. Are you sure you wish to proceed?
CONTINUE - CANCEL
Once you have this scene, MAKE SURE you finish chapter 9 entirely so your choices don't get wiped out in a future patch!
7. My companion is stuck in place and won't move.
There you go, charging into the fray...there's your companion, lingering awkwardly at the threshold and not participating. Oops. You can usually wake them up by sending them away and then bringing them back. Easy ways to do this include:
1) Send them to sell junk (press N. Go to your companion who is with you. Press the little icon near their name to get them to sell the junk. Depending on the legacy perks you have purchased they will be gone for between 5 and 30 seconds)
2) Summon another companion, any of them, and then summon back the one you want.
3) It didn't work? Sometimes companions do seem to go on strike and you will probably just want to summon another to continue playing. This is a good reason to remember to have more than one companion at high influence, if you can, so you can switch as needed.
8. My companion keeps falling over.
Sternly tell your companion it's not time for a nap. Kidding. They really don't care. Any time is nap time. The steps in #7 should work to wake them up again.
9. I'm trying to loot something and it's telling me "out of range."
First, are you sure it's your loot and not some other player's? If it's yours, you can sometimes pick it up by walking away and then returning. Other times, look for someone else nearby to loot. I've on occasion found things unlootable, which is frustrating.
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Programs and Games
In my childhood, before I ever owned a game console, before I barely knew anything about videogames... my first encounter with the medium came in two forms:
Board Games (Checkers, Chess, CandyLand, etc)
PC Programs
I personally did not own a PC in my youth, I was too poor, and the rare times I encountered a PC, it was a green screen filled with random letters and numbers that I could barely understand.
But in those rare instances, the kind people who knew I was only a bored child waiting for his mother to return from where she left me... they "executed" a program called a "game".
In that moment, all the random green numbers and letters coalesced in to something resembling a sequence of animated images, beeps, and sounds.
The first two PC games I ever played were "Digger" (a spinoff of Dig-Dug), and "Asteroids" (based on the Arcade game).
I remember being confused, because instead of a joystick or buttons, I had to rely on the computer's keyboard.
Sometimes these games had guides on the screen that explained the controls, other times, it was guesswork.
Despite the rather crude graphics, and the sounds that only a computer's limited sound-board could make (random beeps, clicks, and other sounds I couldn't describe), I was at least able to make sense and temporarily enjoy the experience I was given.
Other PC games I encountered included a Fischer Price Bowling game, Typing Games, and a Text Based Role-Playing game (this game was not as popular as Zork, but on the same level). I even encountered a PC version of Pac-Man.
But... because these "games" were "Programs", they were inaccessible to me on a regular basis... and I hardly considered them a regular form of entertainment. Merely a distraction to pass the time at best.
But... this exposure to the PC medium left me with a lingering thought:
"Perhaps ALL games, are programs?"
And so, in my mind, ever since, no matter what game it was, no matter how pretty the graphics were, no matter how deep the depth of gameplay, the elegance of the soundtrack... in MY MIND
IT WAS A PROGRAM.
Someone coded that program. Someone wrote that program.
Someone debugged that program. Someone updated and patched that program.
ALL. VIDEOGAMES. ARE. PROGRAMS.
Let that thought sink in for a moment.
You could hack a program, change the rules, customize and modify the gameplay, the graphics, the sounds, to just about anything you want nowadays.
Peeling back the curtain of games as entertainment... it was as if someone told me that Santa Claus wasn't real at an early age.
But, instead of being disillusioned... it fascinated me.
"How do GAMES work?"
What's the premise behind writing a game? What goals do you have to make, what characters, what writing, what music has to be established.
A ton of questions regarding game development flooded my mind in my youth. And those questions still concern me to this very day.
Other gamers... they don't think about the perspective of developers. They don't think about the effort... they're just absorbed in the magic, the end result.
The first board game I ever played was Candyland.
I was about 4 years old... and sitting in a hospital all by my lonesome... with no other kids to play with.
All I could do was stare at the colorful game board and pieces, along with the cards and rules of the game, reading the game's backstory behind Candyland on the box.
I did get to play Candyland with other people later on, but they were mostly adults, so it lessened the fun of the game in the end.
And yes, I played checkers, chess, connect four, and I am still interested in trying games like Hanafuda, Shogi, and also Mahjong.
But, such complex games feel more like a puzzle than anything "engaging" like I found fighting games, RPGs, action games, and sandbox adventure games to be.
But, to this very day, it was because of my experiences with board games, looking at the rules, looking at how the game works... looking at the inner "structure" of games, the mechanics, the functions, etc (like a complex machine)...
That I began to want to understand Games a little more.
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My thoughts on... Scripting Your Destiny
Release date: March 16, 2021
Episodes: 10
Available on: Viki
Summary: Every human is born with a book that records each moment of their life and that we call destiny. Shin Ho Yoon is one of the many deities in charge of writing those books, known among the gods for his meticulous approach to his work. For his latest project, the destiny of the mortal Jeong Ba Reum, he intends to write a masterpiece, a perfect destiny, pairing him with his first love, Go Che Gyeong, a scriptwriter for successful, if over-the-top, makjangs like Marriage Pact and Sky Cash. However, when Che Gyeong doesn't fall for the fateful encounter that he wrote, he decides to take matters into his own hands and bluntly approaches her to find out how to get her to fall in love. As the two begin to develop feelings for each other, the perfect destiny envisioned for Ba Reum threatens to disappear and a new destiny between a god and a mortal begins to emerge. But can a god of destiny write his own fate?
Rewatch meter: Medium
WARNING: Spoilers beyond this point.
Characters
From left to right: Park Sang Nam as Shin Myeong; Ki Do Hoon as Shin Ho Yoon; Jeon So Nee as Go Che Gyeong; Kim Woo Seok as Jeong Ba Reum; and Gal So Won as Samshin.
Overall, I liked the leads and most of the supporting characters. As far as the leads are concerned, I think Ki Do Hoon was able to deliver a good performance of what a god of destiny might, or perhaps should, be like: standoffish, emotionless, uninterested in the mortal realm beyond the scope of his duties. As such, Shin Ho Yoon feels the more godly of the different deities in the show, what is curious considering he's probably one of the youngest gods of destiny, what is explained through his cycle of rebirth. I wish the writer and the actor had made full use of this cycle by having the character of Shin Ho Yoon grow more emotionless as a result, what would explain why he's different from other gods. Perhaps this was intended, but if so, the results are mixed. You can see he was more impulsive in the beginning of his cycle as a god of destiny than he was, say, at the beginning of the show. However, the last incarnation we're shown of Ho Yoon, in Episode 10, appears to be more upbeat than any of his previous ones, a fact that could've been used to feed into the notion that something has changed (more on that later) and that's why he's having fun at the expense of the "newbies."
Jeon So Nee as Go Che Gyeong was very good throughout, standing out from her male counterpart, perhaps due to the nature of her character that allowed her to show more range. I never found her to be over-the-top, and she was able to pull off the comedic and emotional scenes very well. She also passed off as a high-schooler better than Ki Do Hoon, despite the fact that she's five years his senior, but I guess that's the power of female hairstyles! My only complaint about her character is that I wish she had been a little more creative writing her own fate. I mean, she is a talented scriptwriter that even a god stole from.
Park Sang Nam's Shin Myeong had good chemistry with Ki Do Hoon's Shin Ho Yoon, echoing the Goblin-Reaper duo from Goblin, what should come as no surprise as writer Kim Eun Sook is a producer for this show. They even paid homage to that iconic walking scene in the first episode. Unlike Ho Yoon, Myeong comes across as less devoted to his duties and more lazy. He himself admits to a disapproving Samshin that he copy-pastes destinies, but also makes an interesting point about only writing main events so that humans can fill in the gaps themselves. I'll let you decide whether this is really his intention or just an attempt to placate Samshin's anger. Consequently, his transition from a somewhat lazy god to a more serious one towards the end of the show was unexpected, but I guess it stands to reason given his worries about Ho Yoon, plus one shouldn't forget he's actually the older god. I do believe the show wasted an incredible opportunity to have Shin Myeong be the linchpin of our story.
Ho Yoon shields precious Samshin from Myeong's words on how to passionately express love.
As for the characters of Jeong Ba Reum and Samshin, I can say the former was functional to the plot and gets immediately sidelined once that function is completed, while the latter definitely stole every scene she was in (and she's 14!). I would've loved to have seen more of her, even though I feel her arc was a little disconnected from the overall storyline and could've been tied better if the last episode had gone in a different direction.
Execution
What if that something are meteorites?
The show has a lot of fun making fun of kdrama tropes, either through Che Gyeong's job as a scriptwriter or through the gods of destiny themselves, who take turns between being writers and viewers when coming up with the destinies of mortals. When Ho Yoon is having trouble understanding "the depth within humans which is beyond divine comprehension" (aka love), Myeong steps in to give him some advice on how "For love to happen you need to isolate them," stranding the pair in an island somewhere and having them stay in an inn with only one room available. Other gems from Shin Myeong include, "They got rained on, they're cold, their clothes are soaked. If they start a fire, we're 90% there." and "A woman always falls for a man who takes care of her when she's sick. Under one condition. He has to be good-looking." If you ask me, I think Myeong has been watching too many kdramas. Unfortunately for him, so has Che Gyeong, who makes her living writing them.
Are they gods or kdrama fans?
As you can see, there's a lot of comedy to be found in the gods' numerous, and failed, attempts to get Ba Reum and Che Gyeong together. However, as I mentioned before, the character of Ba Reum is mostly functional. We learn little to nothing of who he is, how his life has been, what his dreams are, what is a bit off considering he's supposed to be Ho Yoon's "masterpiece." With Ho Yoon and Che Gyeong slowly starting to get closer, as the former tries his best to understand the nebulous concept of love, Ba Reum falls into the background, what isn't really much of a shame as he doesn't contribute a whole lot in the second half of the show, to the point he could've been taken out completely with slight rewrites here and there.
The writing is similarly flimsy when it comes to the rules of the universe. For instance, early on it is stated that whatever gets written on a fate book cannot be erased, and yet when a character accidentally spills coffee on his fate book the ink on the page vanishes as if it were Voldemort's diary (there is also another instance of writing mysteriously vanishing that isn't explained). In another case, it is stated that anyone who knew a certain character got their memories of that character erased, yet one (very secondary) character still seems to be able to recall everything. These sort of plot contrivances are odd in that they are unnecessary and could've been worked around with relative ease.
It means we have a problem, that's what it means.
Another, more important, mystery that doesn't get explained is how Ho Yoon is able to "resurrect" multiple times. One of the rules of the universe states that any god who interferes with mortals, beyond the scope of their duties, and develops feelings for them, gets the Thanos treatment. However, it is eventually revealed that Shin Ho Yoon got the boot several times for this and yet was able to return every single time, with his memories erased. No explanation is provided for this and, instead, the show suggests, in the last scene of the last episode, that this is the case for all gods, as we see a couple of them return from extinction.
Personally, I feel there was a lot of potential left untapped here and this relates directly to my comment on how Shin Myeong should've been the linchpin of the entire story. If you'll recall the web drama One More Time, the reason why the male lead was stuck in a time loop was because of a contradiction that arose in the terms of the contract made between the female lead and the Grim Reaper. In a similar vein, I think the show could've suggested that Myeong first met Ho Yoon as a human kid and maybe wrote for him a fate that implied him falling in love or something similar. However, the human Ho Yoon died before that fate could occur and so became the god of destiny Shin Ho Yoon, destined to continuously "resurrect" until he could embrace his fate. A loophole such as this one could've neatly explained Ho Yoon's rebirth cycle.
youtube
The ending itself was a little underwhelming and it's easy to understand why, as it it suggested that Ho Yoon and Che Gyeong are stuck in an endless loop of the former falling in love with the latter and vanishing, with Che Gyeong being the only one able to remember all of their interactions. As fates go, it's rather depressing so it doesn't really jibe well when the show's upbeat main theme starts playing at the end. When I did my episode recaps for the show I suggested that, with some rewrites, we could've made Episode 9 the series finale and the show would've been better for it. How?
Imagine at some point in the show both characters remember everything, perhaps at that wind/lamb farm where Che Gyeong desperately calls out for Ho Yoon who, instead of running to her, walks away out of fear of vanishing for good this time. I would've planted seeds throughout the show suggesting Ho Yoon is developing emotions yet isn't vanishing from some inexplicable reason, and there are already some seeds of this in place. Perhaps he has a talk with Myeong about how strange that is and decides to see how far he can take it. The show would end as Episode 9 did, with Ho Yoon returning to Che Gyeong and asking for a caramel macchiato, the most expensive item. They both smile at the reference to their past encounter and we cut to credits with the main theme playing in the background. Ho Yoon's actions could serve to inspire other gods of destiny to try and write their own fates, like how Samshin (even though she's not a god of destiny) follows in his footsteps and decides to attend school.
Music
If you've read any of my reviews, you know that, usually, all of my recommended shows are accompanied by a soundtrack that not only has good music in it but that is used at the right time. This show has some very good tracks that stand out from their more atmospheric counterparts, such as Lee So Jung's "Skyline" (the show's main theme), Jeong Sewoon's "Time Machine," and Yongmin Ryu's "Chaotic." As far as instrumentals tracks are concerned, the obvious standout bar none is "The Deity of Fate." Other instrumental tracks aren't bad but they just can't hold a candle to this magical piece by Yongmin Ryu that has traces of Hotel del Luna's excellent soundtrack.
youtube
A couple of examples that prove how these tracks are expertly used include the end of Episode 7, that shows us how Ho Yoon and Che Gyeong first met through a flashback, with "The Deity of Fate" followed by "Skyline," and another scene in Episode 9, where Ho Yoon recalls his past and we see a quick transition between different days at Che Gyeong's coffee shop as she serves him a caramel macchiato, with "Time Machine" playing in the background. However, in the same way Ho Yoon conjures up a magenta pink moon to distract Che Gyeong, I do believe the show sometimes relies on such scenes to divert your attention from some of its plot holes or inconsistencies, hoping their beauty and poetic nature will thwart any deeper analysis that it might not withstand. It's up to you to decide whether you can let it slide or not.
Conclusions
In short, Scripting your Destiny is a fun show that doesn't take itself too seriously and that successfully creates a universe and characters I'd love to see more of, while trying to convey a timeless love story that has elements of One More Time, Goblin, and Angel's Last Mission: Love. I don't believe it succeeds in this respect, certainly nowhere close to the OTPs in any of those shows, in no small part because Shin Ho Yoon never makes that transition from deity to boyfriend that is present in shows like Goblin and Angel's Last Mission: Love. The romance between Shin Ho Yoon and Go Che Gyeong is one that looks good on paper and should've translated better to the screen. Having said that, their interactions are quite fun to watch and one could certainly envision a future where the two become a couple, provided Ho Yoon somehow manages to stop getting lobotomized. It's a shame but the series finale makes it lose several points as it doesn't make the most of the show's premise or message.
Would I recommend it? If you've watched and enjoyed the other shows I mentioned, yes, absolutely. Despite its flaws, which can be considered relatively minor to an extent (this is a web drama after all), Scripting your Destiny is still a much better investment than many kdramas and at a fraction of their time, and the comedy value of seeing how it makes fun of kdrama tropes again and again cannot be discounted. You're bound to have a good laugh for sure. Additionally, it features some gorgeous and creative (look at that last picture!) VFX-enhanced sets that rival fantasy dramas like Tale of the Nine-Tailed, which definitely had a larger budget and tried to recapture some of that Goblin magic but couldn't. And if you haven't watched the shows I mentioned watch this one anyway so we can have more good web or mini dramas (Handmade Love is an excellent one that runs the length of a movie) that give kdramas a run for their money. Until the next one!
#kdrama#scripting your destiny#kim eun sook#ki do hoon#jeon so nee#eun sun soo#park sang nam#gal so won#kim woo seok#review#kdramas
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Fanfiction review : Unexpected
Disclaimer: Do not send hate to anyone mentioned in this post. If you plan to respond in anyway to this post, I ask that you remain civil to everyone. Also, this review is an opinion post. Do not take what I say here as fact. Thank you.
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I like sorbet. I do! I prefer it to ice cream, and I would gladly eat half a tub without hesitation. But if I were to eat it every day? I'd get sick of it. It's always bothersome when something like that happens. Especially in literature. Sometimes, a short story is more enjoyable than a lengthy saga. Good things can come in small packages....
... what was I talking about again? Ah, whatever.
Anyway, let's talk about zoophobia fanfiction.
*****
Those who have had the misfortune of reading my last fic review may recall that I went through each and every chapter of TDL's story. This time, however, this will be structured in a sort of ramble. I will be discussing things in sections, and I will give my overall thoughts at the end. This is a review of "Unexpected " by a "Kalum16" , who, if my memory serves me correctly, goes by @kartoonluv on Tumblr. Now, this review was not requested by anyone, so if Kalum (who I'll refer to as KL for brevity's sake) wishes this review to be deleted, I will comply with his wishes. Also, I suggest that you read this on fanfiction.net before continuing with this post.
******
Something I would like to get out of the way are my views on romance and the story's pairing. I'd like to bring these up now as I will be mentioning them later on.
Firstly, I have never been in a romantic relationship. However, I have been in love before, and I know people who are or who have been in relationships. That being said, I have considered that perhaps my lack of experience will mean that with certain things... I might not get it. The importance of certain events may be lost on me, and I may not be able to connect with things couples do.
I would also like to confess that Kayla x Damian is one of my least favorite ZP ships. The idea that after Damian basically harasses Kayla, manipulates her and Zill, and basically makes their lives miserable for his own gain, that he can be rewarded by getting the girl? Not exactly something I jive with. Also, (and this is my interpretation) I do not think that Damian's feelings towards Kayla are genuine. By that, I think (due to how little they know about each other) Dame is more in love with his idea of who Kayla is. Or, if we weren't going to look to deep into it and say that it's because he has a thing for Christians, it would make Dame's attraction pretty materialistic. Neither idea really screams "good ship!" to me.
********
That being said, let's discuss how the pairing is handled here. I'm actually on board with this depiction of the relationship. For one thing, it seems that Kay and Dame have become friends. They clearly care about one another before starting a relationship, and the story makes it so that they can relate to each other. This takes away my issue of these characters not acting knowing each other well, and thus the feelings they have towards one another come off as genuine.
I think that the story makes them out to the a cute couple. However, I still have a major issue with it, and the story as a whole.
Basically, (after a while) I think it's boring.
To best explain why, I would first like detour and discuss Damian and Kayla individually.
*******
Ladies first. I have mentioned in previous posts that I enjoyed the first chapter of this story. Back then, I had not read beyond chapter 1, as I hadn't realized that the story had been updated. And you know what? I still stand by that. In chapter 1, Kayla feels a lot more interesting than she is in the comic. It's interesting to see Kay in a situation where she basically gets what she wants, but she ends up hating it. She struggles with writers block, self doubt and regret. It's sad to see how apathetic she's become, and how she no longer holds the ambition she once did.
I also liked that she still had some internalized prejudice against demons. It made sense, and it made what was going on more interesting as it created inner conflict. Now, if the story was just the one chapter, I would have bought that her falling in love with Dame would have made all her prejudice go away. I mean, you would need to wrap it up by the end.
But we got more than 1 chapter, and thus the evaporated prejudice feels kind of contrived and like lost potential. Hell, it would have been interesting if an ongoing subplot involved Kayla conquering her prejudice by learning about demons and debunking the stories that I heard as a kid. Her just yeeting away her prejudice because she falls for one guy feels kind of lame, and going forward, Kayla feels less interesting in the fic.
Originally, she had all this regret and self doubt. While it's great to see her doing good, her issues feel like they've almost all been resolved by a makeout session. Throughout the story, Kay doesn't grow or develop in any way. Her only real issue is "I'm in love with Dame and ppl don't like it, woe is me"
There's this chapter where Dame meets Kay's parents, and I feel like I should be invested, but I'm more confused than anything. The story points out that Kay's parents were ok with Zill (who's part demon, part whatever the fuck), but they're not ok with Dame. I mean, yes, he's the antichrist, but have they not figured out that their daughter is into some weird dudes? Like, they're perspective is painted as "oh, Kay was such a good girl, and yadda yadda", but, again, they were ok with Zill. You'd think that that relationship would at least make them question that idea? Also, why are Kay's parents deer? Am I missing something?
Kay serves really only one role here. She's Dame's gf, she'll defend the relationship to the grave, and she cares about him. She doesn't become much more than that, and every chapter feels like it's redundant in reinforcing that idea. Like...ok, we get it, let's move on.
*******
Does Damian do much here? Not really. He's mainly the inverse of Kayla for the most part, being "I will defend this love, no matter fucking what". The issue being constantly brought up about how he's the antichrist, so "oh no, that makes things difficult ", is always resolved in about a chapter.
The story feels like it's trying to give Damian some development. I mean, I guess he stands up for himself against Kay's parents, and defends her from his? Oh, and there's that moment where he's like "Yo, I have no control over my life, I don't wanna be a prince, you make me happy ", etc. But not even this really does anything. The meeting with his parents feels like a repeat of meeting Kay's parents. We even get the one parent approval, one on one talk, and it's the mom, just like before. Oh, and Dame's emotional "I will reject prince-y ness to be with you " speech? All that leads to is them having sex.
Ok, well, that last one I might give a pass. I don't find sex to be that big a deal, but I know some people view it as this super important thing, so maybe through that lense, I could see sex as being an emotional payoff.
*******
One thing I won't give a pass is chapter 2, which really didn't need to be here. Jack never shows up again, Kayla can be subtracted from this chapter entirely, and the only build up to this was a couple lines in the previous chapter. The chapter itself is alright, but it feels like it should have been it's own separate story. My only idea as to why this chapter should stay is that, apart from Kayla in chapter 1, this is the only chapter with development. Damian owning up for being a shit is great, and it shows some of only god damn growth for anyone here.
Another chapter that didn't need to be here was whichever was the chapter when Zill showed up again. Admittedly, I skipped this chapter almost entirely. Look, he and Kay broke up, and they're dating different people. That's it. That's all we need. I read the first few paragraphs and the last few. I feel like I don't need to read the entire chapter to know that it's just reinforcing the idea of how great a couple Kayla and Damian are. You know, like basically every chapter in here.
*****
My biggest issue overall with this story is the relationship. As much as I've been ragging on this fic, KL is very gifted at writing. There were some instances where a reread or two could fix some wonky sentences (sounds like me reviewing my posts), but overall he does have a good grasp on it.
That being said, the relationship, the core of this story, is not interesting enough to warrant all six chapters. The only issue Kayla and Damian face are the opinions of others. They never have any reason to question the relationship, question themselves as people, or think about how to handle things. It would have been a lot more interesting if we saw them develop the close relationship the story portrays them as having. It would be interesting if we saw them learn more about each other, or discover ways to deal with each other if one of them is being a dumb bitch. We get it. They love and care about each other. The world around them think it's weird. Every chapter just reinforces the same idea again and again.
I think KL could easily make this better. There's a bunch of plot points that are never brought up more than once that could be interesting. For instance, Kayla struggling to write new songs. We could see more of how she and Dame deal with that instead of having them mention "oh yeah, the problem is fixed now ". Does Damian ever earn Jack's forgiveness? Does Kayla learn anything new about demons?
KL, I believe you when you say these two care a lot about each other. And yeah, seeing how they make their relationship work in spite of what others think is an interesting idea on paper. But the characters don't become closer to each other or anything. Why would I be concerned about the issues presented in the story when I know that they're just going to be resolved in the same way?
You know it's kind of like sorbet...
I would still nonetheless recommend this story tho. Again, as much as I've ragged on it, I still think that the story is good. As mentioned before, I don't have much experience with romantic relationships, so perhaps something here could be lost on me. I'm curious to know anyone else's thoughts.
I apologize for wasting your time
- Spooky S Skeletons
Ps. Yes, quarantine is messing with my head :) just bear with me
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man, i don't understand their insistence on shading lena so much(not her grey moral side, that's pretty cool and shows a yin/yang balance with kara), presenting her like a bomb ready to go off anytime. If they're so intent on making her evil why not actually have Lex show up, make her choose between her beloved brother and Kara so she can choose Kara and let supercorp be endgame like... i'm p sure the writers realize where it leads if they make Lena choose, so they just shade her "evilness"
They’re playing with the morality and darkness of the character because that’s who the character is.
Not who the person is—I’m not trying to say if you pop this person into reality that it’s inevitable that she’ll turn evil or even struggle in the same ways. I’m saying that when you take a character with her history and her issues and her fears you have to explore them for the story to work.
Who the character is defines what their story is about, and vice versa.
Let’s say you’ve started with an interesting premise and an awesome world, and all you need are some characters before you can get to the story. So you take your protagonist and begin throwing some of your favorite traits (and some other traits to play off of them in interesting ways) into a blender to see what sticks.
Perhaps they’re awkward, but funny. Insecure yet ambitious. Smart, but struggle with getting certain things. And then you go a little deeper. Where does the character’s insecurity stem from? Being socially awkward? Perhaps not. Perhaps you don’t feel you have a take on that idea that isn’t cliché.
Maybe the gaps in their intelligence, then. But why? It’s not interesting if it doesn’t go deeper. Absent parents who must be impressed for attention? Critical parents who are disappointed with anything less than brilliance? A formative experience in which the gaps in their intelligence resulted in something truly terrible?
You settle on something, and then you… write a story with nothing to do with their insecurity? I think not. The story is about your character, and your character is about this. (If you want your story to be about something else, instead create characters which are About that journey.)
Lena Luthor is about a deep ache, a need to be good.
Kara Zor-El Danvers is about finding home.
Alex Danvers is about being true to oneself.
We know this because of how they were built, the events which shaped them. Because of the setup before the real story begins:
Kara lost her entire world. Her home, parents, culture. Everyone and everything she knew. How could her story be about anything other than finding a home after that?
Alex had difficulty carving a space for herself as a kid because doing so would often result in Bad Things happening, and a heavy dose of perfectionism left her with very little room to be anything other than what she Had To Be. Do we not now want to watch her learn how to be healthy and to be assertive of her needs and to be imperfect and to just be?
And Lena. Lena Luthor, the emotionally abused kid in a family of terrorists, whose mother made her feel like she was never good enough, and who the world now never sees as good, full stop. Who fears becoming the monsters which hurt her above all else. Isn’t her story meant to be about recognizing and cultivating her own goodness to feel safe in her own skin?
Each of these characters strive to find happiness, but they all have different journeys to go on to get there. And these journeys examine the foundation of those needs to say something about them.
Lena can be good. Kara can feel at home. Alex can be true to herself. But, like in an essay, one must set up and address the counterarguments. This is where the story comes in. The story is the act of addressing the theme of the character’s counterargument.
If you have two characters in a fanfiction who do cute things with each other with no conflict internally, between each other, or otherwise externally, then you don’t have a story. You have a piece of a story (which people do love to consume anyway, because they’ve experienced the set up in canon that makes it feel satisfying).
But trust me, a 50 chapter fanfic of just this is not satisfying. Fluff only goes so far. It’s like eating only candy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The characters must struggle and then surpass these struggles in order for the story to say, with confidence… anything. If you want to say that the intelligence of your character doesn’t matter as much as their heart, you have to prove it. Give them an obstacle they try to solve using their head and show them failing miserably. And then show them getting back up and using their empathy or their will to win the day, instead. Without that first failure, winning in that way falls flat.
And then with each success, offer a different counterargument. Another obstacle.
Your character who lost her world—who you wish to prove that one can overcome great loss through—is happy? In a relationship with a guy from a sister planet to her lost world who makes her feel pretty normal and at home? Rip it apart. Don’t just take it away, but make her feel worse than she was before he came into her life. And then have her build her life back up from scratch, with another angle to the argument.
“What if you tear away that answer? Can she still find a home? If the Romantic Love is destroyed, what is left?” the villain inside all of our brains asks.
Answer the question. Answer it a hundred ways.
Tell us the wrong thing: Supergirl. Just Supergirl.
Tear it down. Offer another: “And if I don’t have Supergirl, what do I have?” “You got me.”
The villain asks another question: “What if her home becomes sick at its heart? What if it becomes foreign to her through its hatred?”
It asks more: “What if her relationships became strained?” “What if someone she loves dies?” “What if she feels she doesn’t deserve her new home?” “What if this physical planet were destroyed?”
Answer them. Answer all of these questions with your story until your audience believes, “Yes, of course. She’s home. She’s home.”
Because once the character wins, really wins forever, the game is over.
If Lena Luthor is good, believes she’s good, is impervious to temptation or moral tests and doubts and the whole world believes in her goodness (or she finally feels free from needing that), her story is over.
Until then, this is the character playground we’re living in. Lena’s issues are about trying to defeat the monsters she fears within and have been since day one. The story can take breaks from tackling this theme so directly (slow burn, baby) but it’s always, always going to come back to this.
But it’s not always going to look the same! And it doesn’t mean she’s Secretly Evil or a time bomb.
The question is, “Can Lena rise above her emotionally abusive and ideologically toxic upbringing and be Good, or is she destined to be evil?”
Sometimes it’ll be about Lena wondering if being intelligent and cunning means she’s like her mother in other, nefarious ways. Or if she is responsible for what her intelligence results in down the line. Or it’ll be about proving to the outside world that she isn’t what they think.
Sometimes it’ll be about making mistakes which hurt people and how she can still be good even if she’s imperfect. Sometimes it’ll be about learning to recognize the parts of herself which need work—emotionally, relationally, and morally—and addressing those without self destructing because of her fears. Sometimes it’ll be about the nature of goodness. Maybe one day, it’ll be about helping someone with similar struggles while staying true to the lessons she’s learned.
Often, it’s about how healthy love can help her be good, and how refusing that kind of love can set her astray.
So, to address what you’ve said, of course the writers know what Lena would choose, in the end.
(Though the question isn’t really about two people, or choosing who she loves more. Even if Supercorp were canon, Lena would still be dealing with this until the story was over. Supercorp itself would be a tool to answer Lena’s goodness question.
And even without the shippy angle, Lena choosing Kara is a no brainer. Their relationship is clearly valued by the show and by Lena, and she has addressed how wrong her brother is already. That’s not her current struggle, nor the hardest one she’d face at this moment in time. Now, throw the perception of betrayal into it via Kara’s secret identity, and you’ve got something a little more interesting.)
It’s just that Lena has to keep making these types of choices until the show is over. Otherwise, she’s just furniture. A setting. Her real story is over.
If you’re not interested in various angles of Goodness™, or if you just love the character so much you can’t stand to see her morality under scrutiny all the time, I feel for you.
Personally, I think certain beats are a bit overdone (and that some of the undertones—like Lena fearing her own intelligence, for instance—could have been highlighted more to make it more dynamic) and that what we’ve seen so far could have been drawn out over more time while other, less obviously core issue-related things are happening.
But generally, I like it. This question of goodness is what drew me to the character to begin with.
Not just because of the Lex comparison—although it is connected to it.
It’s because it’s a story about emotional abuse and how it can get into your head and nurture qualities you abhor but fear you can’t escape emulating. It’s about feeling all twisted up because of what you’ve been through, and the struggle to keep those demons from hurting others while they whisper in your ear that it’s all useless anyway. That you’re just bad.
That’s something I’m interested in seeing, and one I haven’t really seen told this way before?
But it’s not enough to have her fear being evil and then just be good anyway. That doesn’t represent the insidious nature of emotional abuse nor the real work one has to do to overcome it. It’s complicated, and I want to see it be complicated, because when she overcomes all of that it will mean something.
Because the villain in our brains are already asking these questions (doubly so if you relate to Lena).
“What if she does do something bad? Really bad? Does that mean she’s evil? That she was evil all along and can’t escape it?”
I want the show to say, “No. She can come back from this. Goodness is a choice.”
Because I fully believe that their intent isn’t to make Lena evil, it’s to prove that she isn’t. To subvert our expectations set up by what happened between Clark and Lex.
To say “No, this time friendship wins. Hope wins.” To refute that dread of inevitability caused by the familiarity of the story and, for Lena herself, that dread of inevitability because of who her family is and how she was raised.
It’s a hopeful show by design, and so it often has their main character try to get through to people, to change them for the better. Logically, this is the sort of story they’re going to tell, and personally, I’m here for it.
But it’s not going to go away.
#supergirl#lena luthor#long post#analysis: you're gonna suffer but you're gonna be happy about it#Anonymous
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My Bloody Valentine, what the hell
Okay. I know I'm probably not writing a hot take with this one, but I just needed to get all my tangled up thoughts out in the form of coherent strings of words ("coherent" is debatable as you'll probably find out if you read this entire thing).
So here I was, watching a random commentary video, and this scene from 5x14 My Bloody Valentine was included in it:
Now that. That's a bi flag. We know how much care set designers put into the details of the scenes we see. This is an episode centered around love. The cupid here talks about "Love", as in, the broad term. The "all-encompassing" term, if you will. He also says he "loves love", which I personally interpret as "in all its shapes and forms", and I don't believe that interpretation of what the cupid is saying is that far-fetched, after all, he kind of is Love (with a capital L). So what does that scene mean?
Let's find out.
First of all, I just feel like I should mention that I think pansexuality would be a better way to "represent" that sort of sentiment around what Love is, but if I'm not mistaken, the pansexual flag was created after this episode aired, and even if the word "pansexual" has existed for a pretty long time in various studies and areas (usually in psychology, if I understand correctly?), and has been used in LGBTQ+ spaces for a while too, it's still not as "commonly known" in the day-to-day life of cishet people, at least not in the same way that being bi is.
That being said, here's one more little nugget before I do a quick analysis of the scene. The idea of being bi is probably the closest thing that any not-very-informed-but-supportive-ish cishet person could think of if they wanted to relate the concept of "love for the sheer sake of love, having love for anyone, love of the masses" to actual characters and how they're able to love their peers (or more accurately, which peers). It's not so surprising to me that this would be the flag chosen by set designers when trying to pass on the message of "this interaction is about love as a general concept, this cupid is love, this cupid loves everyone, and will bless any couple, and yeah in that scene two out of the three characters (other than the cupid himself) stand in front of that light, no reason haha". It makes sense.
Now, onto the actual substance of this.
First of all, because it's funny, Dean why are you literally staring at this cupid's dick, honestly, what the fuck, Sam is averting his eyes (good call), Cas looks like he's only interested in analyzing the cupid's face (more on that later) and nothing else, why are you staring downwards why why why and why (hello, jacting choices). Second of all, because it's funny too, why do you look slightly flustered, in an oh-god-this-is-not-a-drill-shit-oh-god-fuck-embarrassed way? I mean Sam looks like he's been to hell and back, but not flustered.
It's also specifically interesting to see both Cas and Dean being the ones standing together in front of that light. It happens just a little while before, right here:
They're. Staring at a cupid, whose job it is to bless couples, who's Love incarnate, he hugged these two idiots first before getting to Sam, which means something and I'm not exactly sure what but, if you still have braincells (unlike me) please tell me what you conclude of those facts compiled together.
In this particular scene, I don't think the flag is actually a pointer to specific characters being bi, I think it's more of a broad "yeah these guys love a little different" kind of thing. For example, we see Cas in front of that light a lot.
This is season 5, he's barely starting to understand what emotions are, but he's already faithful to Dean and his cause, he's beginning to get what liking things, what caring means. He doesn't figure it all out until way later (in my personal opinion, that is. And I mean... 15x18 anyone?) no, at that point he's driven by things like want, need, yeah, I'll say it, lust, or simple candid curiosity. But that ties into the idea that right now, in that episode, Cas' understanding of "Love" is very broad. He doesn't understand details yet, the only detail he knows is Dean vs the World, and all he gets about that is "the world matters to Dean, there's probably a reason for that, if I follow him around enough I'll probably discover it, and I trust him enough to lead me there". He's still an angel, fairly through and through. He's curious, though.
Refer back to that previous gif, Cas is watching with acute interest what that cupid is doing. Prior to this scene, he's known the "mission" that cupids uphold for thousands of years, but I doubt he's ever really looked at it with the help of the lens of actual humans (read: Dean). He's interested, this cupid's job is to create love, and that seems to be something inherently tied to what makes his charge... himself. That much he knows. Again, probably not in detail, probably not that precisely, but he's got a sense that this cupid represents something he doesn't know and hasn't felt before, yet something Dean and Sam are accustomed to, and driven by. So yeah, he's curious.
Now here's the thing. We see Dean standing in front of that light, both alone, with the cupid, and with Cas. On several occasions.
(something something something bi flag in the background something something something character centered around love something something something the word "dick" something something something what the fuck CW)
We see the cupid standing in front of the light (scroll back up), and we see Cas in front of the light, with the cupid, alone, and with Dean. What about Sam?
...Yeah, no. I replayed that scene several times and I didn't find one instance where we see Sam even remotely lighted by that flag. And when I say remotely, I mean like this:
The light being somewhat noticeable in the background. Even when we see Sam after he moves a bit, like so:
The light is nowhere to be seen. That's after the cupid's left too, so it makes sense the flag wouldn't be relevant anymore: the entity that it represents isn't there to give it meaning anymore. I mean, during that entire scene Sam's a bit (gross understatement, I know) of a background character, but that's simply because he's not the main focus of what the cupid and the flag mean.
Dean though. Dean's a focus alright. No one can ever convince me otherwise, he's bi. That's just a fact at this point. But that's not all the flag and the cupid mean when relating to him here. He's beginning to form a type of bond with Cas, albeit small. He's starting to open up a door that he's never really noticed before: the one that lets people other than blood relatives (or close runner-ups like Bobby) in. And he's facing that head on, like how he's facing the cupid. Both he and Cas do that actually, in their own way. They're looking straight into the eyes of the unknown (Cas literally looks into the eyes of the cupid): for Cas it's this strange foreign thing called emotion, and for Dean it's letting a known emotion be directed at someone new. They're the ones that talk to the cupid, not Sam, because they have things to be curious or apprehensive about, in the context of love (or different love).
They stand in the highlight of that flag, because they're the ones discovering new things (hello, 10x16 speech, yes I'm relating a random scene with a funny light to a speech 5 seasons later, leave me be, I'm insane) and not Sam, who's for one: human, so he already knows what love is, and two: way more in touch with his feelings than his brother. Basically, the concept of Love being something strange, unknown, new, different, scary, worth punching it in the face for, deserving of focused study, take your pick, doesn't really apply to him.
How could I relate this to destiel you ask? Very easily, I say. This, theydies and gentlethems, is a representation of the first step both Cas and Dean take towards each other. A toe in the waters of a frightening and captivating new thing. And again, they face it in a really direct manner.
That is... Right up until the cupid mentions John and Mary. That's when it goes downhill and we understand that whatever Dean and Cas have going on is about to take years of work and a million steps still need to be taken.
Exhibit a:
Look at Cas' face, when the cupid mentions the Big Plan. He starts by studying the cupid (again, curiosity), then looks at Dean, then Dean briefly looks back (perhaps back at Cas but that's debatable), and that's when Cas looks down, embarrassed. I read that as: "Ah yes, as interesting of a concept this cupid is, as fascinating as these two humans' perspective on his mission is, it's still dictated by Heaven, and they're not going to like that. I'm still dictated by Heaven (as I should (???)) and... He's not going to like that. (???)".
Annnnd then Dean punches the cupid in the face, which... Good point, Cas, he indeed doesn't "like that".
So what are those steps highlighted by the ending of that scene? Well, Cas is an angel. Dean is clueless about so many things. He doesn't have faith. Cas isn't exactly free. It's just always about the plan and the mission, whatever comes up in their tumultuous adventures together, it always brings them right back to the core of why there's still such a long way to go: who they are.
All in all, that scene is just. Imagery there, imagery here, reference after reference, big red arrows (yes, I'm using "arrows" in the context of a cupid episode, I fully intend this sentence to have a double meaning) pointing at Dean and at Cas and at them both together. It's not necessarily a direct reference at either of them being bi, although for obvious reasons that's not exactly off the table either, it's sort of a piece of foreshadowing for what's to come, both in that season itself, and the rest of their relationship (here I use "relationship" as a term meaning something like "friendship-that-evolves-into-something-more-later-on").
In short, I'd like to conclude (you can use that as a TL;DR) by quoting my brain when I first saw that flag and connected a couple dots:
"lol bi".
#well damn that was long.#if you've read it all holy shit! you're just as insane as i am for writing it! haha!#if not more!#this isn't a personal attack though! it's ok to be insane!#join me in my destiel related meta bubble!#anyways.#i do think that there's a bunch of double meanings to both the lighting and the cupid#it's a big mess to untangle#and again i fully realize im probably not the first to notice this#as i said i just wanted to put my thoughts into sentences so i could go back to lying on the floor thinking about Them#and then go back to writing my damn fic#destiel#deancas#dean#cas#sam#endverse#spn#supernatural#spn meta#meta
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Hello! I don't know if you've discussed this before, but you mentioned your first language was Spanish, I was wondering how Shakespeare's writings translates into other languages? Like if they're able to keep the rhyme and meter and such? Thank you!
Hello dear! Oh my, I’m majoring in translation studies, you know, so I have a lot of feelings about this—I actually wish to become a Shakespeare translator in the future.
My knowledge is limited to the languages I understand, of course (so Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, French, and Italian), but in my experience, a translation is ultimately a metamorphosis. Each language has a different vibrancy, a sort of uniqueness that defines it; they embody reality in their own peculiar way, and the speaker’s thoughts flow differently through the shape of its words. What distinguishes a language is its own rarity and its personal beauty.
The act of translation must be conceived within these differences; it is about changing a text, furnishing the words with new colors. That is, you have to cheat on Shakespeare in order to do him justice: in your translation, Mercutio and Romeo might not play with the word ‘goose’ in 2.4, but they shall play with another animal or thing which is related to race, folly, and women in your language. Ultimately, what we must do is alter the flesh of the text, its words, and hopefully keep its true essence intact: we must learn to discern that wordless beauty which lies beneath the language of the play and let it flow it in our own text with new words. It’s a constant paraphrase. To quote Juliet, we need to drink from the utterance of the characters’s tongues. To translate a Shakespeare play is to delve into all its complexity—a translator must be a reader, an editor, a critic, a writer all at once. One must bare the play entirely, and then dress it again.
The problem is, of course, that since all languages possess their own distinct beauty, it is simply quite impossible to translate a text word by word. It doesn’t work, the language will not let you do so. This is especially frustrating when it comes to poetry, as in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. The very pulse of the English language is palpable in the Bard’s work: he plays with its rhythms, defies its limits, embraces all the meanings of a single word, completely immersing the reader in the force of his verses. I find English to be a very lyrical language, as if poetry flowed naturally from its bones: indeed, iambic pentameter is meant to echo the normal rhythm of the English language. But it would be a very arduous task to keep the iambic pentameter in Spanish. The soul of the language complicates it. Our words are generally a lot longer, and we need more words than English to express exactly the same thing. (A good Spanish translation should always be longer than the original English text.) Iambic pentameter ultimately impoverishes the language because there are so many words you would be forced to avoid. The energy of both languages is therefore divergent.
So that’s one thing translators usually change. The vitality of the iambic pentameter fades away… and is unfortunately replaced by dull monotony very frequently. Many translators simply translate the plays into unrhymed verse. It’s true that Romeo and Juliet is particularly a difficult play to translate in this regard, given that it’s so rich in rhythms. Each character has their own particular color, the fabric of each voice is unique in the play. Juliet’s succinct speech is different from Friar Lawrence’s repetitive redundancy and Romeo’s boring, stylized Petrarchan verses collide with the new voice he achieves as his love for Juliet develops. The way they express themselves is an incarnation of their emotional extremes, of their own particular mindsets. (It’s fascinating how Shakespeare can reveal so much about a character through the beat of their words.) These are all things which should be mirrored in a translation, otherwise the characters will lose their own musculature—where does their uniqueness go if they all speak in the same way?
My Spanish edition, which happens to be the first version of the play I read back when my English was not good enough to understand Shakespeare, does not cherish the lyrical complexity of the original text at all. There is not a single rhyme in the play. Romeo and Juliet never compose a sonnet together, Capulet’s rhythm does not become erratic when he is mad. There is no sibilance in Romeo’s lines, ‘It is my soul that calls upon my name! / How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night, / Like softest music to attending ears!’. The message he wishes to convey is more or less the same in the translated text, but the translator withered the freshness of his poetry. What’s more important—the content of the verses or their beauty? Both are, since poetry should be delightful to the ears. In this translation, there is also no t alliteration in Juliet’s plea for the night to ’Take him and cut him out in little stars’. Her wish to have Romeo cut out in stars is conveyed anyway, but there is no sound of scissors in her voice.
But translation is an act of seduction. You must woo the text. You are going to deprive the play of part of its complexity, so you should try to compensate, fill in the blanks with the uniqueness of your target language. I’ll give you an example: in Spanish, the word romero means both ‘pilgrim’ and ‘rosemary’ and is of course extremely similar to Romeo’s name. Now, how does Romeo introduce himself to Juliet? As a blushing pilgrim (his very name means ‘pilgrim to Rome’). It can be interesting to have Juliet playfully call him romero, pilgrim, unaware that she is echoing his very name and that one scene later she will be struggling with the word Romeo at her window. What does the Nurse tell Romeo in 2.4? That Juliet has been making puns with his name and rosemary; in Spanish, she has been playing with Romeo and romero. There is a kind of symbolism there linking the three words, Romeo, pilgrim, and rosemary, which is more obscure in English. That’s something gained in translation, in spite of all the other puns which were inevitably lost in the process.
For me, the beauty of translation is that there is not a single way to do it right. The possible strategies are rather infinite. Each translation has its own value, because each translation is written by a different mind. This leads me to another major issue: subjectivity. A translator is, after all, a reader, and a reader is an interpreter (can you read a text and not interpret it?). It therefore follows that a translation is an interpretation: the translator’s own understanding of the play is tangible in the text. Something I find particularly irritating, for instance, is that many of them decide to change the last lines of the play unnecessarily: ‘For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.’ The European Spanish dubbing of Zeffirelli’s movie says something like: ‘For there is no sadder story than that of Romeo and Juliet’s love.’ Romeo and Juliet. My bilingual edition of the play did only a little better: it reads ‘Juliet and Romeo’. But why not Juliet and her Romeo? It’s something the translator was free to write, but perhaps the subversive nature of those lines made him uncomfortable. Romeo is a man, Juliet is a woman, so Romeo’s name should always go first. Of course, do not even suggest that Romeo might be remembered, in the very last line of the story, as being hers.
Sometimes translators love to stray from the text too much. They are, after all, writers creating their own text, but their creativity may have serious consequences in the characters. In the European Spanish version of Zeffirelli’s movie, when Romeo asks Juliet to express her love and thus ‘sweeten with thy breath this neighbour air’, he says: ‘Make this neighbour air die of jealousy’. Now, I cannot imagine Romeo saying such thing! He always rejoices in Juliet’s ability to regenerate the world. Juliet’s love does not kill, it enlivens Verona. If anything, the only thing she would kill is the envious moon. So translations can sometimes contradict the text unnecessarily. This is something we should always bear in mind—a translation is never completely the same text as the original, as it is subject to hermeneutics. You are reading, after all, someone’s interpretation of a literary work. It is a secondhand possession of the text.
A careless translator may fill the text with small incongruences: in the American Spanish translation of Zeffirelli’s movie, Juliet asks: ‘O Romeo, Romeo, where are you Romeo?’. Literally, I’m not lying. Most translators decide to translate ‘two households’ as ‘two families’, but a household is not just a family. Then there are other things which are simply beyond our control. Sadly, a huge amount of Shakespeare’s puns, his ambiguity, his complexity, slip through our fingers like sand. Languages can be cruel. When Shakespeare uses a word which has more than one meaning, it is sometimes impossible to find an equivalent which covers all of the meanings. Is there a verb like ‘to die’ which may mean both to lose one’s life and to reach sexual fulfillment? Many languages lack such verb, so what do we do with Juliet’s lines, ‘When I shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars…’? Here she combines death and love, the Liebestod trope, anticipating what she will see behind her eyelids when she closes her eyes in ecstasy during her lovemaking with Romeo. If there is not an equivalent, a translator will probably be forced to choose just one meaning. She will either talk about death or sex. (My solution is to make her speak of the climax of death, the deathly zenith, or something equally suggestive of sexual fulfillment.)
Shakespeare is of course a master at making puns—his way of bending words is delicious. When translators cannot keep all the possible readings of a word, they weaken the text, making it bland, easy, unshakespearean in many ways. It can be heartbreaking to be a translator then, because you must bury many of Shakespeare’s puns. The battle of wits between Romeo and Mercutio in 2.4, for instance, is removed entirely from many translations because it is so hard to translate. Unfortunately translators are forced to make choices they don’t want to make. They have to minimize the play. ‘Her eye discourses’, says Romeo. That’s her eye and her I. In translation, it is just the eyes. Sometimes it’s the only thing you can do: kill the beauty of the play.
Lastly, the act of translation not only implies the words of the text. It also encompasses the culture, the life of the language, the people behind it, its quintessence. Shakespeare was writing with an English audience in mind. Who are you writing to? What happens when you translate Henry V into French? How will a French audience react to the treatment of France in the play? How will you solve the problematics posed by the bilingual scenes? The last scene, for instance, relies on Henry and Katherine’s inability to speak each other’s languages fluently. How will you translate that solely into French? Don Adriano de Armado is continually mocked at in Love’s Labour’s Lost because of his flowery speech. How will you keep the different registers of the characters’s speeches in a Spanish translation? How will a Spanish reader feel about Don Armado’s situation? What happens if you translate Macbeth into Scots? Also, Peter sings Heart’s Ease after Juliet’s faked death. It’s a popular song of Shakespeare’s era—but Peter is supposed to be Italian. If you translate the play into Italian, will you keep the English song (which will convey nothing to an Italian audience) or will you replace it with a popular Italian song (which they will be able to identify as part of their culture)? It’s complicated. I recommend that you read Shakespeare and the Language of Translation because it covers these and many other issues.
And while nowadays translators do promise to tell the same story as the original author, it’s not always been like that. The concept of copyright is relatively new. One of my professors was quite obsessed with Shakespeare, and he always told us about translators who used his work to denounce the situation of their countries, i.e. a Polish translation of Hamlet in which Claudius was a German kaiser, a French Claudius who resembled Napoleon, a Spanish Hamlet which criticized the Enlightenment, etc. These translators purposely hid behind Shakespeare’s name to tell their own stories. These may not be faithful translations of Shakespeare’s work per se, but they are extremely valuable nonetheless.
So to answer your question, the blood of the characters, their heartbeat, their powerful da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM doesn’t usually survive in translation. But a good translator must find other patterns, provoke the text and make it burn—or to quote Romeo, to suck the honey of its breath. It can be chaotic or it can be fascinating; either way, it will always be daring, risky, a violent delight which may have a violent end or not. It is important to consider that a translated text belongs not only to the original writer but to the translator as well. The translator is to unstitch the texture of the play, only to weave it in a new fashion. (It can never be entirely loyal to the play—if a translation is a mutation of the text, how could it ever be 100% loyal? The concept of loyalty here is inherently a flawed one.) But it might be worth the risk, because a new kind of beauty may bloom thanks to the translator’s skills.
When I started translating excerpts of Romeo and Juliet for fun I was terrified. I venerate Shakespeare’s work so blindly, I did not even dare remove a comma. But my professors keep telling me that a translator must be brave, a warrior, a strategist. To translate Shakespeare is to possess him. Sometimes you have to destroy his beauty, only to generate a new kind of majesty out of all the broken pieces. That’s when translation becomes valuable: when you dare merge your own voice with that of the Bard—a trespass sweetly urged.
#answered#thoughts#Shakespeare#Romeo and Juliet#Hamlet#Macbeth#Henry V#Love's Labour's Lost#thank you for your ask!#I have a lot of feelings about this#this is what I want to do with my life#I'd love to write about Romeo and Juliet and translation for my BA research project
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Zp character stuff for other people
Hey kids! I decided since I haven't poked this fandom with a stick in a while, I decided to get back into the swing of things with another series (I'm sure you're all excited *cue sarcasm sign*). This series actually goes out to the fanfic writers out there. This series is basically a dump where I discuss some misconceptions about the characters of zp, and some fun little tidbits that you can toy with. You don't need to use this. Consider this just a bunch of suggestions.
Be sure to tell me what you think! Now onto the.... post, I guess. And big surprise, guess who I'm doing first?
Ok, hear me on. Somebody would request this guy anyway, he's an easy character for me to talk about, and it can help me show people what kind of series this is. So, strap in, because we're talking about this little shit again.
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He ain't Billie Eilish
Get it? Because Billie sung a song called "(I'm the) Bad Guy" and Dame's not the bad guy? Get it? Ok, I'm sorry....
But anyway, I've mentioned this before, but I find that people write Damian differently, and it mostly depends on how they feel about him. In some cases, Dame is written as this completely unlikable dick with little to no redeeming qualities. This is usually done by people who don't like him, and to those people, I ask "Why would you make this character worse? He's a little shit already, we don't need to crank it up to eleven."
I think the best way to sum up Damian is like this: he is a good person at heart, and when he cares about someone, he downright loves them. But when it comes to people he doesn't so much care for, well... that, and he's a massive brat. He doesn't deal well as problems, and he will basically do anything short of having a temper tantrum. He'll get angry, he'll give attitude, he'll cheat, anything to make something turn out the way he wants it to. Then he'll probably forget about it because he has the attention span of a goldfish. And then he'll go do something along the lines of singing songs about rainbows or something.
He's not a downright despicable person, but to people other than his friends and family, he can be a real piece of work.
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Prince of darkness = Angsty pretty-boy?
Ok, so I have said that I like Dame's male human design. I think that he looks like he just walked out of a hot topic, and I just find that funny. Like, in a strange way, it just fits the character? But not because I think Dame's an angsty emo.
Remember how I said that people write this character very differently depending on how they feel about him? Another reoccurring thing I see is people writing Dame as someone who is broken inside and who holds all his pain inside himself, which he'll only share with.... whoever the writer is shipping him with.
While I suppose that's one way to interpret the character, let me just put something out there. Yeah, Dame clearly has problems canonically which he may not like talking about, but it's pretty obvious to everyone that he has them. Damian isn't a character who really hides his emotions, and he often makes it quite clear to everyone how he's feeling. True, he doesn't usually like to discuss his issues, but this is mainly due to him wanting to keep up a cool exterior. Examples of this can be found in the comic and in other artworks involving Dame.
The only times that I've seen this character discuss his issues is with specific characters, such as Addi and Autumn. The reason for this could perhaps be because he trusts those characters enough to be fully honest with them.
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He a player or nah?
Something I see a lot of people not include, oddly enough, is how flirty Dame is. This is a little surprising, because it's a fairly large part of his character. Due to being influenced by Tentadora, Dame is the guy spouting the cheesy pick up lines and doing this such as dramatically leaning against people. And this isn't just with Kayla. He's actually flirtatious with almost everybody. Flirtation appears to be worked into how he interacts with others on a regular basis. He hits on his friends so they all can be like "lol, we hitting on each other, funny joke." and he'll even hit on people he doesn't like, such as Rusty, just to unnerve them. Strangely enough, Vivz has once said that Dame actually gets nervous around people he is romantically interested in and only flirts with people he isn't interested in. While we haven't gotten a chance to see this with, say, Kayla, we might see this in scenes with the two of them alone.
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There's more than just a banjo...
So, a lot of people know about this hell spawn and his beloved banjo. But have you ever asked yourself why this guy is in drama, and not in, say, the music class? Damian is apparently skilled at more than just the banjo. He can play the guitar and the ukelele. There was also a sketch of him walking beside his mum, singing from a thing of sheet music, so it's possible that he may have some vocal training as well. Overall, he is said to be "musically gifted". But it seems as though he doesn't just enjoy playing music. He enjoys preforming. He enjoys getting up in front of people and entertaining them. Which is probably why he's in drama.
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Beware the minions!
Damian actually has what are arguably three little side kicks that I rarely see be mentioned in any fan works. Remember those three little hell spawns, Verin, Vespa and Vetis? While it's not clear what purpose they serve in the palace, they apparently follow Damian around and are quite fond of him. They're based off the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil concept (Vespa, for instance, is mute). To put it simply, there is much chaotic energy when these three are present.
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Creepy dudes be creepy
Another character heavily involved with Damian that rarely gets utilized is Bozzwick. Bozz pretends to be bffs with Damian, but he has more sinister motives. To put it simply, he wants to have sex with Damian. But not only that, Bozz also finds Dame's dark side smexy and tries to bring it out whenever he can. In the few drawings I could find of the two together, Bozz enjoys taunting Damian about his insecurities, Damian is somewhat creeped out by Bozzwick, and Bozz will fo things like, y'know, stretch out his tongue to lick the back of Dame's neck or something.
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That's all for now! If you want to request another character, go ahead. Or, if you think I missed some stuff with Damian, you can request a part 2. Yes, if I miss some stuff on a character, or you just want more info, you can request a character I've already done.
I apologize for wasting your time
- ATOUN
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