#and then the reason i have to explain this literary world stuff is so that you can see the themes that resonate to kdj because of his own | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

your--isgayrights · 1 year

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Wow I love writing romance <3

(^only wrote about a dozen pages of world building info dumps about literature and a metatextual scene of a character reading an excerpt of a novel that doesn't exist in order to realize someone is his friend. Romantic Interest hasn't appeared in 20 pages)

#i used to get bummed out when commenters complained that i spent too much time making up an orv videogame #and explaining the backstories of kdj's friends but like now that i take believe in myself pills i realize that like they dont get #that literally everything is /about/ the main relationship bc the main relationship is informing kdj's behavior in /every/ scene hes in #and so like literally any interaction or conversation can also be about that while also being about things i think are interesting #like the reason i had to explain the videogame i made up was so that you get kdj rigging it so yjh wins big #and then the reason i have to explain this literary world stuff is so that you can see the themes that resonate to kdj because of his own #experiences (one of which is the main relationship)#and then the fake novel excerpt i wrote is FORESHADOWING for the end of the chapter so there...#ROMANCE IS NOT THEM KISSING OR THINKING WOW HES CUTE ITS HIS ENTIRE VIEW ON THE NOTION OF ROMANCE AND LOVE BEING WARPED BY THE FACT THAT HE #FIRST DENIED HIMSELF ACCESS TO IT WITH HIM #personal

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ao3cassandraic · 7 months

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Angels, demons, language, and culture part 4: Literalism and metaphor

Part 1 (angels are never children, and that matters), Part 2 (written language is mostly coded human rather than ethereal/occult in Good Omens), Part 3 (human writings contain useful social rules, which is partly why Aziraphale values them)

It may be time to restate @thundercrackfic's original questions?

How good is Aziraphale’s reading comprehension? How much does he understand subtext and metaphor? Because his behavior this season struck me with the impression that he didn’t really understand the books he collects. He’s clever at puzzle solving, and contains vast knowledge; but he always seems to take things at face value (when he’s not willfully misunderstanding), and refuses to give up black-and-white thinking, which would make it very difficult to analyze texts.

I think there are definite reasons to believe that reading comprehension of human literature (as defined in the question) is difficult for Aziraphale. One of them, as stated in part 1, is that Aziraphale doesn't get the tremendous advantage of childhood and its brain plasticity, which (among other things) is known to help with learning language. I'm not surprised his French is pretty bad. Learning another language from the ground up as an adult can be a cast-iron PITA (yes, experience speaking).

Another is simply that Aziraphale is not human. He's an outsider to humanity. He's fairly empathetic, and he does learn (unlike almost all his fellow angels!), but that leaves him without much of a yardstick to gauge when human literature is being literal and when it's not. There also seems to be a general angelic tendency to believe what they're told? Muriel definitely has it, Michael seems to as well, and even s1!Gabriel can only (and barely) muster skepticism on one occasion that I recall (the photo incident). I can see this making Aziraphale's reading, especially early in his existence on Earth, a good bit harder for him than reading is for, say, me. I'm used to unreliable narrators and figurative language and other sorts of clever fun productive lying. Aziraphale's acquaintance with lying is -- well -- his lies don't usually involve much metaphor? I suppose one could argue that "big sharp cutty thing" is a kenning, but not really in the human way of kennings because he only uses it the once.

Moreover, it appears (based on the s1e3 cold open, mostly) that he bops around the world quite a bit until finally settling in London (with the occasional jaunt elsewhere when he gets peckish). Nothing at his creation other than the auto-polyglottism She bestows on Her angels seems to give him any tools for navigating the bewildering variety of human cultures and customs... and literary metaphor (along with lots of other literary things) is commonly culturally-bound, culturally-specific.

I mean, if you read something (maybe in high school (or analogue) or college) that was written A Long Time Ago and/or Very Far Away, didn't it probably have a ton of what lit-critters call "apparatus" in it? Explanatory introductions, bibliography, and above all footnotes/endnotes/margin notes, many of which explain figures of speech that otherwise wouldn't make sense? Not to mention stuff like (just as an example) which local then-current political morass Dante threw this particular historical person in this particular circle of Hell for. Stuff that if you're not there, not embedded in the culture and the time, you're just plain gonna whiff. Hell, even Shakespeare editions have a ton of apparatus, and Shakespeare's in Early Modern English for pity's sake!

(Which is not to say that something has to be ancient or not-from-here to benefit from some apparatus. What is The Annotated Pratchett File if not apparatus for Discworld?)

So our peripatetic angel reading literature of whatever time he's actually in (which mostly won't have apparatus he can rely on for help) will often find himself not clued-in enough to a given human culture to completely understand its literary figures, metaphors included. And sure, that's going to lead to some misreadings and misunderstandings and overliteral takes! I can't read Dante's Inferno and understand everything in it! It takes Italianists years, if not decades, to do that!

And to make the problem even more difficult, literature feeds on itself, and on other arts as well. (Hi hi hello, comparative literature major, I totally studied various flows of literary and artistic influence in college and wouldn't trade that major for anything ever, it was the best major.) Think about all the time and effort GO meta-ists have spent of late teasing out callbacks and allusions and references in GO s2. That kind of work is also part of what Aziraphale has to do to understand fully what he reads... and it's a lot of work, even for a reader as voracious and possibly sleepless as our angel.

So yeah, in sum, I don't think Aziraphale has a perfect -- or even good -- track record on understanding what he reads. I adore him because he reads anyway! He never gives up on trying to understand! That's absolutely praiseworthy! (Crowley has something of an analogue to this in his love for human inventions. He doesn't understand how anything actually works, for the most part, but he loves it all the same.)

I think there's also an outstanding question about what Aziraphale gains from reading, a sense of social rules (Part 3) aside? Well, it's known that reading (especially fiction, especially fiction about characters who are Not Like The Reader) increases empathy. I don't know if Aziraphale reads specifically for that reason, but I'm absolutely willing to believe that fiction works on him that way, just as it does on us, even if he doesn't fully understand everything he reads. Did you fully understand everything you read as a child? Or even as an adult? I would never claim that of myself. Yet I certainly will claim that I picked up a lot of what I suppose I will call my character -- it runs deeper than personality -- and my general understanding of life (insofar as I have one) from reading.

If I had to answer why Aziraphale reads, though? I'd think back to my own childhood, as a bullied child with somewhat neglectful parents who held outsized expectations of me. Reading for me was peace, was escape, was enjoyment, was something to think about that wasn't my own unhappiness, was -- now and then, honestly not often enough -- seeing myself reflected in a book and feeling less alone. I hope and believe that human literature and music served similar purposes for our poor angel.

#good omens #good omens meta #aziraphale #language and culture

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sweetiereads · 1 year

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dreamlike letters / 2023

ㅤㅤㅤㅤ ㅤㅤ⁘ january bts fic recs ⁘

𝐋 𝐄 𝐆 𝐄 𝐍 𝐃

[ f ] 𝖿𝗅𝗎𝖿𝖿 ; [ a ] 𝖺𝗇𝗀𝗌𝗍 ; [ s ] 𝗌𝗆𝗎𝗍 ; [ 𝖼 ] 𝖼𝗋𝖺𝖼𝗄

𝐝𝐚𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐞𝐬 & 𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐨𝐬𝐚𝐮𝐫𝐬 ; 𝐤𝐧𝐣 @dark-muse-iris ❥ series, { f + a + s }

A tragic brain aneurysm stole the life of your best friend and no one took it harder than her husband, Namjoon. After locking himself away to mourn for two years, he walks back into your life with his precocious daughter in tow, ready to prepare her for kindergarten. As you offer to help him acclimate to his new normal, the opportunity to grow closer than friends kindles healing in both of your hearts. + highlights: this story is everything! despite the angsty premise and subject matter, you have managed to have a perfect balance of hurt/comfort, as well as fluff and a bit of sexual tension brewing between the pair. it's so bittersweet to see how they navigate life after a life changing event. however, little jaeah is truly the sunshine amongst the storm. she's the cutest bean!! i definitley left with cavities!!

❥ full review

𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐮𝐧𝐚 ; 𝐤𝐧𝐣 @eoieopda ❥ oneshot, { a + s }

In his twenty-eight years, Kim Namjoon had made countless mistakes. Most of them were insignificant and could be shoved easily enough into the back corner of his mind. The worst of them were all tied for first place, keeping him up at night.

Loving you, losing you, and now – picking up the phone. + highlights: gorgeous themes and metaphors. there's an overall sense of melancholy and dread of how things were and how they are now between the pair. the juxtaposition, the text painting in particular really conveyed those feelings. the use of repetition is one of my favourite literary devices, it was never phrased the same way but the word: 'small' was used continously throughout the fic which emphasized that idea. small in the the elevator, small with namjoon, and finding herself to shrinking beneath his gaze even after they were intimate with each other. it ties in with that feeling of uncertainty as you go on with day to day life with a part of yourself missing or incomplete. a love that is undirected with no place to go-- grief.

❥ full review

𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐜𝐡𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐦𝐚𝐬 ; 𝐣𝐣𝐤 @whatifyoulivelikethat ❥ oneshot, { f + a + s }

Last Christmas, she gave you her heart, wrapped up with a note saying, I love you. She meant it. This Christmas, you give her back the stuff she left at your place and run into her next-door neighbor that knew all about your love. Somehow, you end up explaining why it went wrong. + highlights: i loved this a lot. what a perfect read for the holidays. it was different to others i've read before... but the feelings and thoughts it evoked will be something i remember for a long time. there's a sense of melancholy, and longing.

this line in particular is my favourite: " what happens, happens."

❥ full review

𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 : 𝐤𝐧𝐣 @kpopfanfictrash ❥ oneshot, { f + a + s }

You, a perpetually alone (and utterly cynical) movie director, are sent to the town of Snow Falls, Middle-of-Nowhere for your latest film assignment. Stuck in holiday hell until the new year, you’re determined to get in and get out with minimal damage to your Grinch reputation. That is, until a ridiculously gorgeous (and young?!) town historian is assigned to help with your film. Suddenly, you find yourself the heroine of one of those corny romances you direct – and are discovering they might not be so corny after all. + highlights: This was such a wonderful wonderful holiday fic. This time of year can be difficult for many people for various reasons, and this story has brought me lots of comfort.

I read this over the course of a few days and each word brought this world. Each and every character interactions were vibrant and enagaging that they felt so real. You've captured the small town feeling excellently, I felt like I was right there with them. It was so so wholesome and I loved seeing the main pair grow to embrance who they were and to not let others... even themselves, dim their light for other people or because of the risk of getting hurt.

Something I really admire and appreciate in your stories are the themes you explore and the messages you send.

❥ full review

𝐪𝐮𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤 ; 𝐣𝐣𝐤 & 𝐦𝐲𝐠 @whatifyoulivelikethat ❥ series, { a + s } part of the punctuation au

For Min Yoongi, there are no wasted words. He knows what he wants to say and he know what he says will give him what he wants. But, then again, sometimes you don't have to say anything to orchestrate everything. Jeon Jungkook? He won't submit to that. He's the one in charge here. Right? + highlights: seriously no words. i am just amazed by the way you characterized the three of them. how they each have a role in their D/s relationship. the reasons they seek each other and fall into their respective roles. all in an attempt for a semblance of creating a safe environment where they can all be who they truly are.

what really resonated with me was near the end when reader mentions that what she experiences with the boys is a chosen pain. it's about exercising agency and reclaiming one's (bodily) autonomy. it's about being in control.

the scene was intense, but it was simultaneously freeing.

❥ full review

+ misc // non - bts // k-pop

𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝 ; 𝐛𝐢 @yoonia ❥ oneshot, { f + s }

You have no idea how you ended up here. It all started with an innocent date, which escalates into something more. Something that is not quite so innocent. But he gladly follows your lead, always ready to give you everything that he could offer, knowing that—deep down—this is exactly what you wanted all along. + highlights: i absolutley loved every single word of this fic! there's just someting so heartwarming about soft love making smut. like please, where can i find a lover like this!

hanbin was so attentive. i thought it was so cute that he was just as nervous and excited as reader but made sure she felt comfortable every step of the way. i found that incredibly attractive! it has been a while since i’ve felt hot and bothered with a smut piece. and idk just the thought of being tended to and cared for in this way makes me so soft.

but really your writing is what brought things to life, your descriptions are so...visceral, yet gentle?

and with the way you described readers lust? like me too, reader. me too.

❥ full review

be sure to show these lovely authors some love 🤍☺️

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barbwritesstuff · 1 year

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i loooove blood moon and cant wait for your future ifs. i know you mentioned that you were planning on a mermaid/siren if (pls correct me if im wrong) but i was wondering if you plan on a sequel for blood moon?

Okay. I'm glad you asked this anon, because it's all a bit messy, and I think it would be good for me to explain this. Bear with me, as my brain is a bit disordered right now, so this may or may not make sense.

Will there be a sequel to Blood Moon?

I dunno. Maybe. I want there to be. But I don't know, which is frustrating (for me, as well as you).

See, it's not that I don't have ideas or anything.

I have this idea for a Blood Moon sequel that I really like. It's titled 'Thicker Than' and focuses on the vampires of the city, rather than werewolves. The MC would be a new vampire with a mission from the Night King: solve a series of murders targeting members of the Night Court.

Here's the problem:

I haven't been paid or seen any sales data from Blood Moon, in part because the Australian Tax Office is taking months to organise a document that they said would only take two weeks.

So... without any data, and with everything in life just getting more and more expensive, I literally just can't financially commit to another large project set in this world. I don't mean to be dramatic, but that's the honest truth.

I need to know how many people bought Blood Moon before I can consider writing a sequel (because a sequel is probably not going to sell better than an original). And I just don't have those numbers. I don't know when I'll get them either.

I'm really sorry about that.

Will there be a dark mermaid thing?

Again. I don't know.

I have this really cool idea for a dark mermaid thing that I think people would really enjoy. It involves pirates and ancient sea gods and cannibalism.

It'd also be another full length thing. Eg, around the same size as Blood Moon.

However, I'm holding off on using Choicescript for the reasons above (I need to have sales data).

I've been experimenting with some shorter Renpy games, the first of which I'll release next month on itch.io. If people like the style of those, I'll consider using Renpy as a tool to make the dark mermaid game... if no one buys the short games, then I'll reconfigure and try to come up with a new plan.

*

I'm sorry if all that was a bit blunt. I'm really trying to be forthright and honest about all this. I want people who read my stuff to know what's going on, and I wish there was more to say, but everything has a lot of 'hurry up and wait' energy, which is all a bit stressful.

I'm also querying a prose novel right now (asking literary agents if they want to help me sell it) which also has a lot of 'hurry up and wait' energy, which isn't helping. 😅

Despite all this admin-y stuff, I am still drafting and writing, but it might not be stuff that you get to see for a little while.

I really hope that all makes sense.

#update #my writing #writeblr #interactive fiction

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compacflt · 8 months

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I have to ask because I'm just too curious! How is your writing so good? Like, holy hell, your prose, the flow from one sentence to another, how you tell Ice and Mav's thoughts and the yearning and pining and angst and everything. You made me cry so many times reading their perspectives, and it's such a unique take and so relatable and sad at the same time.

I'm just wondering if you've taken any courses, what you do to improve your writing, or maybe any references and ideas for when you get stuck on a scene. I'm not much of a reader of western media, so maybe you have some recommendations?

Thanks in advance! You're one of the best writers I've ever had the pleasure of reading!

See here for my regular writing advice :)

yes, i am a double major in journalism & english so I’m taking basically all writing classes at school. but as i said in my previous advice post, i haven’t learned anything in any of my classes that you couldn’t learn just by reading attentively and writing on your own. the benefit of a structured program is Having Deadlines and that’s about it imo

I don’t have a ton of recommendations for precisely this reason—my recommendation is to literally read everything you can get your hands on, AND to treat Everything you read/watch/experience like high literature. Advertisements in the subway have a theme & a message & employ certain literary tactics to deliver that message to you. They’re worth learning from. So are the nature documentaries on tv—which stories are prioritized and why? What story techniques do documentarians, for instance, use to make us, the viewer, relate to animals and experiences that are otherwise unrelatable? Can you find examples of foreshadowing & symbolism in your own real life? Fiction is just a reflection of the dynamics of our own world—if you can find the rhythm of an overheard conversation on the street, you can find the rhythm of fictional dialogue

(Which is why i continue to stress, keep a journal or a diary. one of the most instructive exercises i ever did was when I was in a creative writing class at like 14 and they had us just follow strangers around and write down exactly what they said. So you get a lot of “so he told me, like, he was, like, like, um, ‘I’m not cheating on you,’ or whatever, and I was like, bitch, what?” —But that’s how people talk! It’s a good exercise lol.)

my one actual craft recommendation is basically mandatory assigned reading in many western english/writing classes—for good reason: Thomas c foster’s “how to read literature like a professor.” He summarizes about a hundred classic western texts and explains how they use various english-canonical symbols (“if characters eat together they’re taking communion,” “if a character gets wet and doesn’t drown it’s a metaphorical baptism,” “literally everything you read is somehow related to sex… except sex which is usually about something else”) and it’s written really well for both readers and writers. Basically my bible. a great primer if you don’t know where to start with western literature/if you don’t know where to start with writing symbols and stuff

anyway to summarize, life is literature, living is reading, we all still have so much time to learn, read “how to read literature like a professor,” and keep a diary

I also forgot to mention this in my last advice post but don’t use epithets please 😭 idk if you use epithets or not but this is just general advice, it’s my most snotty literary opinion and it’s very common in fanfic for some reason (it’s like so specific to the fanfic genre it’s insane) but i am extremely convicted about it i feel very strongly so im telling you. epithets make your writing sound very obviously fanficky. “the blond man” “the taller man” etc… just don’t use them it’s so unspecific!! WHICH blond man???? WHICH tall man? why can’t we be specific here?? have we been suddenly struck with amnesia?? just use his name!!

Also you say you don’t read a lot of western literature—I am not sure where you’re from but don’t feel like you HAVE to read/write only western literature to be successful. That’s only true if you want to succeed in the gatekept western lit market—and even then, the gatekept western lit market is literally currently foaming at the mouth to hear other perspectives right now. Who you are & where you come from invariably affects how you see the world & write about it, so lean into that if you can!

unfortunately my advice for getting stuck on a scene is “just write it.” Just sit down and get SOMETHING on the page. Spoiler alert, those tend to be the scenes i (and most of the writers i know) dislike the most, when coming back to reread my/our own writing. like there are many scenes in my fics that i have published where i think the lack of passion is unfortunately pretty obvious. But that’s kind of the way it goes. Some scenes you will like/want to write better than others. Shrug. at least they’re there on the page. as they say: don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough.”

#not to be snooty or anything but i personally value specificity sooo much when reading #cadence & flow is all poetry #read poetry; follow the rhythm #but like advertisements can be poetry too #does that make sense #like there is so much literature all around us the real advice is to be purposeful in how you’re engaging with it #there is something to be learned from every experience and every little moment #sorry i know you asked this like three months ago. I’m clearing through my drafts in advance of leaving this blog 😎#writing tips #❤️❤️❤️

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intermundia · 11 months

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heyy i was wondering if you have an opinion on the role the jedi order plays in the republic? on a political level I mean :D

so, my thoughts on the jedi order are largely shaped by george lucas, and that means my answer to this question may not be as politically nuanced as you may hope (aka the political things i write about in my fanfics are genre-bent reinterpretations of the core lore of the saga). the nature of the jedi's participation in politics is pretty simple, in the way that myths are simple.

it would probably be easier for me to share and explain some of my notes i took while reading the sw prequels archives and comment of them. i transcribed a lot of the book in the process of trying to understand it, so the following are quotes from george unless otherwise noted. this is the book i mean:

oh sw archives my beloved. anyway.

first, and most importantly, the jedi are not a real political organization that exists in the world, but rather their design is to further george's narrative. he is not writing a political thriller, but rather an emotional and philosophical one. they're more like symbols for moral quandaries than a real organization.

the jedi are space wizards, and also the most moral agents possible. this is not realism, but rather they are agents in a spiritual morality play, where they are an explicitly defined white-hat good guys, who are in combat with black-hat selfish bad guys. he's telling a mythic story, so you have to reframe the jedi out of history and into myth.

he wants to tell a story about how it is not enough to rule by fear. fear is not a sufficient mechanism to keep society civil. you need something else, something 'supernatural' in his words in order to encourage mutual flourishing, some way to overcome our tribal limitations and fears and live in a unified and diverse world.

the jedi are his idea of how to show that force of compassion in a narrative, the idea of people with power motivated by the right reasons, working for the good of everyone. the jedi are the embodiment of the archetype of the true public servant, the ones we want to have ruling over us. this is not a class of people that actually exist in reality, but also nobody here has space magic either.

so his design is that the jedi order are warrior-monks who keep the peace, ambassadors more than cops, the most moral people in the galaxy, because they are monks.

they've chosen to serve, and been given both duty and oversight from the galactic senate. they do not create the world order, but they do their best to encourage peace and civilization whenever and wherever they can. there aren't that many of them, but they are extremely powerful people, who are by narrative design the most moral people in the galaxy (just.. not anakin at the end there).

ultimately, they exist to be trapped into a bind, the morality of always doing the right thing vs the morality of always seeking the best outcome. there is no clean answer to that, it's a perennial tension in the history of philosophy, so the jedi are emblematic of that, you know? in the end, they're literary figures more than real world political ones, and exist so that we can interrogate our own values.

i realize this is a take that might be unpopular with segments of the fanbase who really enjoy analyzing star wars through the lens of realpolitik and making it gritty and adult and complex. my answer is that star wars is heartbreakingly simple. they're an embodiment of our better natures, locked in a fight against our worst. the politics stuff is all pretty superficial storytelling on top of that.

#could i play historian and try to pretend there's enough there to #write about it like history?#absolutely. i do that in fanfic #but i think it's really important to keep in mind #the genre and the message of the stories #which is moral and emotional. they're heroes in a bind #sw #long post

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hussyknee · 1 month

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Does reading a lot of books "count" if they're all only popular light-read novels? As opposed to classics and literary fiction and whatever 600-page in-betweens are called. I can tear through all of Cat Sebastian (who's either hit or very, very miss for me) before I can pick up, like, Sharon Kay Penman, even though they're both popular historical novellists, because SKP's are about real historical figures and wars where a lot of horrible things happen to people. So of course my brain is convinced that SKP's novels "count" more than CS's, because it only counts if you have to struggle through an emotional morrass that makes you feel glad to live in climate collapse because at least nobody is sticking people's heads on spikes anymore.

This is also why I can only stand well back from literary fiction and poke it with a stick like I'm waiting for rats and snakes to jump out because, afaik, most of them are about people being sad and ruminating on the Human Condition. I don't get why I have to read about that, given I'm a sad person who's trapped in the Human Condition.

(I sometimes think the people that write these things are either so removed from the unwashed masses that they can look at them like a science experiment or five inches from offing themselves at all times. Presumably some of them are those mythical Normal People who have somehow emerged from the existential soup without any mental illnesses. Idk. How tf do you write fiction about real human pain that isn't even self-indulgent whump fic? I'm still trying to recover from having read Ninety-One Whiskey four years ago.)

You'd think the solution would be to just read some escapist fantasy, except the serious non-YA adjacent stuff that get submitted for Hugo awards (or Netflix and HBO adapations that shit all over the source material) are also about Bad Things Happening To People. I suppose this is better than white Christian manifest destiny bullshit like Lord of the Rings* where Bad Things Only Happened to Boromir, whose fans are the kind of people who think Gone With The Wind is a literary classic instead of Ku Klux Klan propaganda or people like me who are pathologically obsessed with conservative white bullshit**. And yet have I ever picked up NK Jemisin, who seems to be for all intents and purposes the queen of decolonial high fantasy? Of course not. Better to bear that media where Bad Things Only Happen To Imbibers Of This Racist Bullshit, than fly to others Where Bad Things Happen To The Characters that we know not of***.

It's really fucking hard to be extremely mentally ill and have OCD that won't let you DNF stuff that bores and distresses you and makes you think anything that lets you have safe, happy fun is just easy mode riffraff of no nutritional value.

***Still trying to figure out where Guy Gavriel Kay fits in. Without, you know, just reading the damn books.

**Tbh the reason conservative white bs is so appealing is because conservatives genuinely believe in the Just World theory. They rationalize the chaos of reality by assuming that the world used to make sense and work the way it should until Bad People happened to it, and it can be restored to its rightful glory if we can just root out all the shit that upended the old order. That's fascism in a nutshell and why its so deeply seductive even to people suffering under it.

*No, I'm not going to explain why LoTR is smuggling white supremacy. Y'all care more about defending the intentions of white men living in the fading era of the British empire than understanding how they could possibly have internalised white Christian supremacy that informs their writings about Fair, Enlightened Folk of the West yearning for a mythical past where they reigned supreme. Figure it out.

#actually ocd #hyperempathy #reading #books #high fantasy #fantasy #historical fiction #decolonization #knee of huss

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natalieironside · 1 year

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Introducing the Writer Tag Game

Ty @iloveyou-writers for making this and to @thewriteflame for tagging me <3

Rules: fill in the blanks with as much or little detail as you would like and tag some writer friends to play too. (blank version)

Hello, there. My name is award-winning speculative fiction author Natalie H. Ironside and I won a writing contest in high school one time that I'm gonna milk harder than Pabst milks their one blue ribbon. I'm a writer of the dark sci-fi and dark fantasy genre(s) and I love to write about sad gay ppl in horrible situations. Also, hope. The hope is very important, and my stories can get pretty dark but they always have happy endings.

I cover a broad enough range that I think I can just reject the dichotomy of SFW/NSFW (everything is adequately tagged and described so the rest is in God's hands). I write about some pretty dark themes and a lot of my work deals with the aftermath of stuff like sexual violence and child abuse, so just be aware of that, as well as the "entrails, lovingly described" throughout. Tropes you will never find in my writing include any salacious depictions of sexual violence (the word "aftermath" in the above is an important one) or...Well, I'm not sure how to put this. Most of my protags are racial, religious, sexual, or some other sort of minority, and obviously there's some darkness in the world et cetera, but there's a certain way of framing bigotry in fiction as though it's cinematic action violence which I find uniquely distasteful and I will not be doing any of that. I'm not sure if I'm explaining this in a way that makes any sense at all but I promise to never try to be the Kojima of sexism.

In my humble opinion, my best work I've posted is The Scruggsdale Organizer #4: Local Woman About Tired of All This Mess because I think it's very funny. Maybe I'm just being precious, but comedy is really really hard and I very rarely even bother trying at it but I'm pretty proud of The Scruggsdale Organizer and this installment in particular. For y'all who don't know, which I'm sure is a lot of y'all since I haven't posted about it in forever, The Scruggsdale Organizer is an epistolary horror-comedy serial about a little town in rural Mississippi where strange supernatural things happen, but instead of blog posts or letters the story is being told through articles in a weekly anarchist zine. Yeah, I guess I've written some "novels" and some "short stories" and some "poetry" or whatever, but I look at Scruggsdale Organizer #4 as a time I set out to do a specific thing and just really nailed it; it's the literary equivalent of parking the car in the spot just right.

My all-time favorite character I've made is Freydis Gothi Thorkilsdottir, daughter of Thorkil Gothi Swordbreaker, Matron of War Witches, Matron of War Matrons, High Field Marshal, Eater of Cities, Mother of Abominations, and Chief Royal Consort. She's a recurring protagonist in my Nameless Queen dark fantasy universe and I am love her very much. Freydis is an enormous ginger transsexual, a sword-and-board fighter who can cast wicked spells, and a rough-and-tumble freebooting adventurer type who suddenly found herself part of the royal court and fast-tracked into becoming a monstrous demigod. It's super weird for her and she's dealing with a whole "to become a god is to lose everything that made life worth living" situation but she's also having a rip-roaring good time while she does it.

Something I'd love for you to know about my writing that isn't listed in this game is, well, I feel like we got kinda dark in the middle there, so I wanted to end back where we began and talk about hope. What really does it for me when it comes to the dark stuff is recovery; I like telling stories about recovery. My characters sometimes have very very bad days, but tomorrow can always be better than yesterday and there's always a reason to keep trying.

Thank you for reading and now I challenge the following people to fill this out: I seem to have misplaced my list of people who said they liked participating in tag games so I'm leaving this one open. I tag each and every one of you.

#tag games

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blujaishah · 3 months

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hi! How’s it going?

This is a good opportunity to explain why I haven't been posting art dont read any of it if u dont want to it's more for me

Aside from normal academic stuff it's mostly because my school's literary magazine is allowing submissions and I really want to get my art in it (you're a published artist/author if you get in it)

Thing is last year I didn't get my art in it (I made a self portrait titled 'hearts' that I stupidly never took a picture of because I never got it back) but they had too many art submissions and not enough literary submissions so most of the art got cut from the magazine

So I think you can tell that I was pissy bc I really need to get my art in this thing

So now I have been focusing a lot on my submission because I'm writing something with it, it's gonna look like a children's picture book with multiple drawings and a story

I might post it here if it doesn't end up being too personal but prob not

It's taking me a while because one i want it to look good and two i want it to look painted and that isn't my normal style and three because I am not a writer

Another reason as to why I'm not posting is because I'm looking for jobs because ur girl does not have money and that's something I wanna prioritize

And the last reason is less fun and something that I genuinely need to type out and admit in writing is that my parents are absolute batshit crazy and I want nothing more than to complete my high school credits and leave my home town

My sister didn't mind leaving like I want to in fact she wanted to get as far away from us (specifically my dad) as possible but she has no problem having me with her and husband because they've somewhat settled down

She's traveled the world and she's pretty cool, she's at a very prestigious university, she went to Thailand in high school, she's been to Jordan, Lebanon, and a couple years ago she went to Palestine for a year and became a high school teacher there she's awesome

It would be amazing to go to college where she is (i'm in a position financially and academically where going out of state for college is very possible ESPECIALLY where she is) and also to get to know her husband more would be great cause we barely got to know each other when he was here

My brother on the other hand didn't want to leave our mom but really needed to get out of the house because of our dad so now he's in this really awkward position where he lives in an apartment literally a 15 minutes walk from our house and by extension his very comfortable bedroom, and also he comes home every night to see our mom

It absolutely sucks and I very much want to leave my home even though I say what my parents want me to say I'll do after high school when I'm around them

My dad is demented and I have no problem admitting that he's never abused me physically but he has verbally quite a few times and hinted at physical abuse and it gets to me a lot

mostly it's about academics which he is quite literally insane for thinking I don't do well academically

There's a lot of stuff with him that's god awful and i wont get into it because that's what I do in a therapeutic environment which I cant get without being gaslit by my family so yeah

I can't draw anything except what I have to with all this it's a lot to be thinking about because I'm still just a kid and idk i can't handle it maturely so I have to write about it on tumblr lmao

#personal #thx for asking and sorry i used this as an excuse to rant

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alphashley14 · 1 year

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May I ask about your lore for the trifecta that Arthur, Ricky, and Shaggy make? I'm confused. Arthur isn't quite the same if only because Mystery was never "his" dedicated animal companion? Or is it something else?

I don’t blame you for being confused.

And in fact, a major driving force of this fic is that the Mystery Skulls don’t fit the pattern as closely as the other groups. There's a lot of stuff in your question that I can't explain without spoiling future reveals in this fic, but there is some stuff I can clear up in regards to the "pattern". Particularly regarding Arthur not being paired with Mystery the way Shaggy is paired with Scooby and Ricky was paired with Pericles.

If you watch SDMI and more closely examine the preceding groups, the pattern isn’t as concrete as it seems.

Take the Benevolent Lodge of Mystery for instance:

In the episode “Night Terrors”, it’s stated that in that group, the mascot/animal, Mr. Peaches, was actually paired with the group’s “Fred”, Oswald P. Burlington. I don’t know enough about the rest of the groups to say that they were the only ones, but this alone establishes canon that the “Scooby” of the group isn’t always paired with the group’s “Shaggy”. In fact, according to Scoobypedia, (Link here) the Benevolent Lodge of Mystery is one of the groups that DIDN’T have a terrible fate befall them. In fact, they have probably the most complete history on the wiki apart from of course Mystery Incorporated and the Original Mystery Incorporated. They were supposedly active for decades, may or may not have contributed to the start of World War One (not kidding - check the wiki), and they split up amicably after Mr. Peaches passed away due to complications of old age.

And the Benevolent Lodge of Mystery isn't the only group that diverges from "the pattern".

Take the Darrow family, aka the Mystery Fellowship into consideration. They hardly resemble the other groups at all because they’re made up of an older husband, wife, their teenage daughter, and young son. And all that’s known about their animal, Whiskers, is that he was the family cat. So he may not have been paired with any singular member.

Also take the Mystery Gang into consideration. They hardly resemble Mystery Inc., and they were all girls!

Or the Fraternitas Mysterium, who also hardly resemble Mystery Inc, and were all guys.

My point is that the pattern is definitely there, but even in the canon material, every group has diverging traits that make them unique.

The Original Mystery Incorporated and the new Mystery Incorporated likely only resemble each other so closely because that was the best storytelling decision by the writers: their close similarities and stark differences establish them as literary foils to each other. (If you don't know what a foil characters are in storytelling or otherwise want to clarify your knowledge, here's a link) And even then, they aren't cookie cutter, copy/paste mirror images of each other. If they were, then Professor Pericles would be an adorable goofball like Scooby, and Cassidy (who is Velma's equivalent) would be the genius (aka: "big fat insecure know-it all", as Danny Darrow put it) of the group who went nuts and turned on everyone.

So taking all of that into consideration, "the pattern" isn't as clear-cut as it appears. Though I admit, it is a bit of a stretch that the Mystery Skulls fit into it. But how they do and how their story connects to Crystal Cove and its curse is going to be revealed and explained in the next few chapters of 'One of Us'. Just hang on and bear with me!

As for the "trifecta", the reason why Arthur's is the one that's intact is because he is really the member of the Mystery Skulls who "conforms" to "the pattern" the most. He's the reluctant paranormal investigator - the skinny "scaredy cat" whose courage comes out when it counts. Just looking at him you can see his clear Shaggy inspiration, just like how Ricky was obviously based on Shaggy for the purpose of SDMI. Also like Shaggy, Arthur may not be paired with Mystery but he does love animals, as evidenced by his pet hamster, Galahad.

As to how Lewis, Vivi, and Mystery don't conform to the pattern and therefore their trifecta is "broken", those who are familiar with Mystery Skulls lore may be able to figure out why, but I'm not going to spell it out explicitly here because that would be a major spoiler.

Sorry if this was a lot, but the lore of SDMI is kind of complicated, so there was a lot of explaining to do. I hope I answered your question and that this clears things up for others who may be enjoying 'One of Us' as well.

Chapter 14 is getting closer and closer to completion, so stay tuned! I can't wait to share it with you all!

#sdmi #character analysis #show analysis #fanfiction #mystery skulls animated #mystery skulls #mystery skulls arthur #one of us #archive of our own #mystery incorporated #The Benevolent Lodge of Mystery #The Mystery Fellowship #The Mystery Gang #The Fraternitas Mysterium #shaggy rogers #mr. e #ricky owens

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theminecraftbee · 2 years

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I’m so interested in the persona au but SO confused,, if you haven’t already, would you mind doing a quick little summary of what persona even is??? is it a game???

i think if you go through the tag i have also already answered some terminology questions, but yes, i can explain on a higher level what persona is! (this post is now under a cut because i use way too many words here, whoops.)

persona, the game series, is a spinoff of SMT. it uses the same demon designs, general affinity/element system, and "one-more" turn-based combat system as the SMT games. SMT isn't that important in this conversation other than that they're known for being relatively difficult RPGs that like talking about philosophical ideas of order and chaos and humanity and also jack frost is there, hee ho.

(note to self: this is my reminder to actually beat SMT V, i was having so much fun with it then i did the thing that's always a risk when i play long RPGs, which is that i got distracted and the fact it was no longer the cart that was in my switch meant that it no longer existed to my poor ADHD brain. i was only like, two bosses in i think, and only like one MAIN boss, i need to. pick that back up. anyway if you want vague thoughts on "designs that inspire my monster designs", SMT demons, actually. like some of them ARE just fairly standard but some of them are really weird. also when i was writing stuffed bird i was playing SMT III on and off so. there you have it.)

anyway, persona is a spinoff of SMT, so like SMT, it has a battle system that heavily focuses on knowing your opponent's elemental weaknesses, using buffs and debuffs to take down bosses, and of course, as mentioned, jack frost is there, hee ho. however, it is set apart from SMT both by the fact you have a defined party (as opposed to recruiting demons to be your party members, sort of except for the protagonist we'll get to that) and by various plot aspects. in addition, "modern" persona games (so persona 3 though 5) have a social simulator aspect along with the RPG that sets those games apart from other RPGs and is one of the most interesting parts of the game.

generally, this au is based on 3 through 5, not persona 1 or 2. i need to... actually play or watch those at some point but stuff about 3-5 is more accessible and more of the vibes i'm going for. (this au is like, ESPECIALLY persona 4 influenced, because i really love persona 4 golden, even given all of its flaws. probably less inane anime bullshit than takes place in persona 4 but listen it's about the VIBES.)

so, what typically happens in a persona game? well, your protagonist, for some reason or another, is moving to a new town, where a supernatural phenomenon is happening. in three its the dark hour, in four its mysterious unsolved serial murders, and in five its the mental shutdowns. there, relatively quickly, your protagonist gets roped into the supernatural phenomena by discovering the other world that shadows live in, and forms a team to fight those shadows and eventually prevent Bad Things from happening. also at the end you fight god. it's been a different god each time! but like. you know. this is an SMT game at the end you fight god,

(persona 5 being my first SMT game left an impression given that it's a game that ends with your persona evolving into literal satan, it giving you a giant gun, and then you SHOOT GOD IN THE HEAD. say what you will about persona 5 the style points here are off the charts.)

the party members in persona games have a "persona". this, like any SMT demon, is a mythological or literary figure. this "persona" gives the party member wielding it magic powers while they're in the other world they do their fighting in. to fight, a persona user summons their persona to use its powers. all of the party members but the protagonist have a single persona that can learn up to eight moves. the protagonist, however, has a special ability - the protagonist can get new personas by recruiting shadows. in 3 and 4, this is done via a minigame involving tarot cards, and in 5, they use SMT's demon negotiation system. the protagonist can switch between these personas on the fly, gaining that persona's skills, strengths, and weaknesses.

in addition, there is the velvet room - a mysterious place only the protagonist can enter, manned by a guy called igor and an attendant. with this, the protagonist can "fuse" two personas to get a new, stronger persona, which inherits skills from its predecessors. the fusion system is complicated and there are many spreadsheets about it online! for our purposes the important thing here is "the velvet room exists".

however, this rpg half is not the only part of persona gameplay. persona, at its heart, is actually a time management game. see, each persona game takes place over a single year. every day that isn't a day you do some plot event, you're given the ability to choose what to do with your day. while "go to the dungeon and fight things" is an option, it shouldn't be what you do most days. most days, you are doing the protagonist's high school life. this is because, to become strong in a persona game, you must form bonds with the people around you by spending time with them. this is known as the social links (or confidants in p5).

each "social link" has its own story with ten ranks, during which the protagonist gets to know them and their deal better. in order to do this, however, the protagonist needs to have high enough "social stats" to do this, which are also raised through activities in the game. (for example, a particular confidant rank may require your character to have high enough "guts", so you go to do activities that raise your "guts".) getting fully ranked-up with a social link gives you benefits in the actual rpg part of the game, but is also important to get the full story out of the game!

all of these activities take time, and you can normally only do like, two activities that pass time during a day. plus, there are additional time-passing activities in the real world that do things like create healing items, raise your stats, or get things that will give you good gear. so one of the key game mechanics of persona is normally "there are a lot of things you want to be doing, and you need to manage your time well to get as many of them as possible done". certain confidants or activities are only available at certain days, but on rainy days you study better, so which do you do?

persona as a story is normally both about the supernatural phenomenon and the demons you fight and about the protagonist and their friends growing up in the real world as well. both the real world and the supernatural world affect the story and the "vibes" of a persona game, to me, have a lot to do with the real-world setting - almost more than the supernatural setting that you do most of the RPG gameplay in, honestly!

(part of why i love persona 4 so much is very directly "inaba feels like a real, specific place to me, and i care for it".)

anyway, if any of this sounds appealing to you, persona 5 royal is now out on PC and basically every console, and persona 4 golden is now out on PC! additionally, persona 4 golden and persona 3 portable have been announced to be out for console and PC this january, if i remember the date right. honestly do highly recommend persona 5 - you'll see a lot of arguments over it being "overrated", but it has so much style and is very, very good at being highly playable even if you don't normally like its style of turn-based RPG gameplay. there's a reason it became so immediately popular. also, as stated, i love persona 4, but that one's a bit less flashy/polished if you don't already like long RPGs. if you DO already like them however... i highly recommend it it's a fun game.

so yeah hopefully this helps!

#answered #theoretical persona au

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fruityyamenrunner · 4 months

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Speaking of people whose real sehnsucht is for 70s television, but who dress it up as something else, consider Iain Banks.

His dates are 1953 -- 2013. The crucial date of publication for this poat is 1987: that of Consider Phlebas, a reworking of a story from the early 80s.

The Culture is a sort of ultra-ultra-liberal, bigger, "later" Federation of Planets, which in contrast is merely ultra-liberal. Now, Star Trek, certainly in Britain, is a 70s phenomenon, premiering in 1969 -- that is, when Banks was 16.

Banks was an SF fan so it is a little simplified to reduce it to this -- this is the era of the New Wave after all -- but the 20th century really was a boring time. It is easy to retroject Internet-era ferment back too much, and besides, the Culture itself is the Federation++, and not all his stories are Culture stories. Even his Culture stories aren't Culture stories. They're mostly about awful reactionary aliens.

Take the Idiran War. As well as being a standin for the Second World War, Vietnam, and the fundamentalist revolutions of 1979, the Idiran War serves this purpose: we are told that at various points in the past, Culture citizens exercised all the ultra-ultra-ultra-liberal transhumanist fantasies of what we would now call something like "total morphological freedom" -- people turning themselves into giant penises or gas clouds, living forever etc. The Culture we encounter in the books is however quite reactionary -- people appear as "humanoids" with about as much diversity as in Star Trek, have little ambition, expect to die after a few centuries and join Starfleet Contact if they are aggrandisers.

It's strongly implied, if not stated, that the thrice-ultra-liberals, who were interested in "total morphological freedom" peeled off from the Culture before the War, explaining why the Culture appears merely ultra-liberal, and that this has led to a sort of lasting cultural stagnation, lifted by the appearance of a particularly Tory kind of alien, or a geometric impossibility -- that is, like Star Trek with a wild backstory you never see.

By the standards of actually existing liberalism, especially in the 20th century, it remains an exhilarating place to imagine oneself in, but by the standards of the "worldbuilding" - which for a certain kind of mind takes up far too much importance - it is a remarkably reactionary setting.

In particular, it is interesting that there is no strong iconography attaching to the Culture -- Banks had no interest in attaching one to his writings, and seems to have taken a purely literary view of it, but fans have felt no desire to develop one around it, and the Culture is one of those SF properties that visual media developers founder upon. I claim that one reason for this is that, once you pull away the thrice-ultra liberal "worldbuilding" stuff, the iconography, insofar as Banks had any, would be essentially that of Star Trek, perhaps inflected through British SF television in general -- which is to say, Doctor Who, Blakes 7 and so on. Rather sparse sets, painted backdrops, *that* kind of costuming, blocky robots whose emotions are all glowing auras... Distinctly ""hauntological"", which is why nobody dare develop it.

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haveyoureadthisfantasybook · 6 months

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Do you draw a line between :

- fantasy and horror

- fantasy and gothic

- fantasy and magical realism

- fantasy and fairytale retellings

(All with supernatural elements, obviously)

Asking because the distinction isn't often made in my own language

the answer for all of these is yes and no. putting this under a read more because it’s pretty long.

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fantasy and horror are a Venn diagram: there is fantasy that does not include horror, and there is realist horror and sci-fi horror that involves no fantastic elements — something like Caitlin Starling’s The Luminous Dead, for example, or (in a different medium) a slasher like the Scream films is horror but not fantasy. something like Cassandra Khaw’s Nothing but Blackened Teeth, meanwhile, is both horror and fantasy (to give an example of something currently queued). there are several other texts in the horror-fantasy overlap queued, so if you have something in this area you’re all set!

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the gothic is perhaps more difficult because even when it has fantastic elements it generally relies on those elements being concealed (that is, it’s what Farah Mendlesohn would call “liminal fantasy” or what Rosemary Jackson called “paraxial” fantasy). in this case I would ask the following questions:

does the text contain an unequivocally fantastic element (something that, as Samuel Delany puts it, “could not happen” — some sign of magic or the supernatural)? a text like William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, for example, is clearly Southern gothic but does not involve any speculative elements.

was the text composed as fantasy or as literary fiction? while Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung / The Metamorphosis (not strictly gothic but bear with me) obviously centers on a speculative element, I hesitate to identify it as fantasy because it’s clearly not engaged with either the genre conventions “fantasy” as such that coalesced in the late 1960s or with the fields of pulp and popular fiction that preceded the construction of fantasy as an independent genre. this doesn’t absolutely exclude it (or other texts like it), though — Haïlji’s The Republic of Užupis falls into this category, and I felt comfortable including that here.

for fiction published in the English-speaking world or other areas where there exists a separate fantasy market, is the text published and marketed as fantasy or as literary fiction? if I went to a bookstore specializing in fantasy, would I be able to find this book on the shelves there? genre often resides at least as much in location on bookstore and library shelves as it does in any inherent quality of a given text.

if you’re on the fence about something, feel free to submit it, and if I reject it I can explain my reasoning.

there’s also a lot of stuff published these days that’s described as “gothic” but doesn’t actually conform to the conventions of the gothic (having open fantastic elements, e.g.). stuff in this category is likely to be actively marketed as fantasy, circumventing the problem, but I thought I’d flag it here, too.

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this will perhaps be a controversial stance, but as a rule I don’t consider magic(al) realism to be fantasy. a text like Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo / The Kingdom of This World — in conjunction with which Carpentier developed the idea of lo real maravilloso — is using apparently “fantastic” elements clearly within a “literary” and, ultimately, fundamentally realist framework: Carpentier’s contention, explored by later Boom writers, is that aspects of life in Latin America as experienced by Latin Americans cannot be adequately accounted for or expressed within the bounds of traditional European realism.

this opens a much bigger can of worms re the social construction of “reality” in and by Western literary realism — Daniel Heath Justice, for example, has critiqued the reduction of work by Indigenous writers to the realm of “mere” allegory or simply to unreality. I’m not satisfied with Justice’s solution to the problem (the concept of “wonderworks”), because I think it cedes too much ground to Western literary realism’s claim to a monopoly on the real, but his underlying point stands. I have increasingly found that “magic(al) realism” is used, in popular contexts, less as a serious engagement with the theoretical problems that the authors of the Boom were grappling with and more as

a way to bracket off as “unreal” work by Indigenous, African, and other authors who are writing from within a different baseline realism than Western literary realism presupposes, without seriously engaging with the ways this work interrogates the hegemonic constructed “real” that Western states use to justify, for example, the destruction of Indigenous sacred sites for resource extraction purposes;

alternately, a kind of “fantasy lite” that wants to stay within the realm of “literary fiction” rather than risk being tarred with the genre label “fantasy”; or

a label for things that are simply fantasy, not engaged with any of the theoretical problems that define magic(al) realism as a genre, but are either liminal fantasy or more realism-adjacent than secondary-world fantasy or urban fantasy.

things in categories 1 and 2 I would generally exclude from the category of fantasy (if you don’t want to be here, I don’t want you here either!); things in category 3 I would probably consider fantasy (and not consider magic(al) realism).

my second and third questions / points about the gothic are also relevant here, and help clarify some fringe cases. Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier were clearly working in the realm of literary fiction and not the “popular” literature that has come to be grouped under the label “fantasy”; conversely, Jorge Luis Borges was heavily influenced by anglophone pulp writers, including H.P. Lovecraft — I am comfortable identifying texts like “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” as “fantasy” (for all that they predate the genre).

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my questions about the gothic also more or less apply to fairytale retellings; if it includes clear fantastic elements and is published / marketed as fantasy, it’s definitely fantasy. if it includes clear fantastic elements but isn’t clearly written or marketed as fantasy, I’d decide on a case by case basis.

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another question I think about in relation to all of these categories is: if someone came to me and said they liked N.K. Jemisin, Patricia McKillip, and Charles de Lint, do I feel I could recommend this book to them and expect them to enjoy it on the basis of some similarity to these other authors?

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ALL OF THIS SAID, genre conventions are fake and there are no inherent characteristics of a text that absolutely determine whether it belongs to one genre or another. when in doubt, feel free to submit something, and if I have questions about a submission or am inclined to reject it on genre grounds, I’ll either ask for clarification or explain my reasoning. thus far the only thing I’ve rejected on genre grounds has been a science fiction novel with no fantasy elements.

#faq

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eliza1911o1 · 2 years

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Rant about Heroes of Olympus because as a sequel series to Percy Jackson it pains me pt. 1

So I just reread the PJO (one of my all time favorite series) and HoO series and I’m just struck by how unfulfilled I feel after finally finishing BoO for the first time…

I didn’t read it when I was younger because it came out just as I got really busy in school and was growing out of my “reading phase” and before I knew I had ADHD/attention struggles

I know I’m older and they’re aimed at young audiences and a bit outdated in general now but the original Percy Jackson and the Olympians series is still amazing. No contest. It may have plot holes, it may be lacking in some areas like representation, but everything has flaws and all of those are just so easy to get over with such heartwarming characters and carefully crafted quests. Not to mention the high stakes and actually pretty realistic struggles??? I’m probably biased, but I just really love them and am not above fighting others if they put it down

But even after realizing both series are kids books, the plot valleys (not just pothole level inconsistencies), OOC moments, anticlimactic ending, general lack of dynamic characters and lasting themes, and lacking world building all prove HoO to be underwhelming compared to PJO. Like it’s not bad, but it’s not close to perfect either. It’s even hard to argue how most of the events and characters in HoO add and further the stories of PJO, let alone why to consider all of it as sacred canon. Especially by the end of BoO, the lackluster vibe overall was really disheartening

They aren’t bad books. I just don’t think they lived up to the heart of PJO. I didn’t feel like I was reading more about characters I love or learning about great new characters and settings or invested in why this battle against Gaia will be the greatest of all time. Instead, I my brain was caught trying to convince myself why all of that was true and I was blatantly put off by some of the story directions, which made me feel incredibly sad

Again, it’s a fun read. Not considering any sort of literary analysis or strong personal opinion and taking into account the intended audience, it meets expectations. I just feel like the original series did so much more than be average and I’m just grasping at straws here because HoO had potential to do the same

Anyway, here are some of my strongest complaints with brief explanation and in no particular order:

- where were the old characters??? Grover?? WHERE WAS GROVER??????

- Percy was very underplayed in BoO for no reason; even if you consider his time in Tartarus, he was very weak compared to SoN and it wasn’t really explained, which felt lazy. They should’ve let him rest if he wasn’t up to fighting

- mental health issues were brought up but skirted by (Nico’s coming out was awful, Percy’s suicidal thoughts weren’t really addressed seriously (that’s a whole nother post), Hazel’s literally having died once)

- Too. Much. Romance. Why did everyone need to be a couple?????

- same structure as PJO, but without any reinvention (TLT and TLH had almost the same beginning)

- povs past SoN had weird distribution; I don’t think it made sense HoH had all seven povs but the final book, BoO, didn’t

- what made Jason, Piper, and Leo more special than any of the other seven? The explanation that they began everything felt lazy and discredited Frank and Hazel….

- Reyna and Nico and even Coach Hedge held a lot of importance in the plot and it felt weird since they weren’t even part of the seven. Distribution of responsibility and the idea of seven great heroes saving stuff (even if it was ironic) was downplayed

- the seven never really felt like a team or had a moment where it seemed like all of them were vital to make things work. The splitting up into smaller groups all the time definitely worsened this

- why was New Rome a whole mini country when CHB is a literal camp… the world building was quite slapdash and felt unreastic

- no developed Roman side characters really; wish Dakota, Lou Ellen, and others had more importance and interest

- Percy came back to NYC (to CHB) and no one said anything? No Sally-Percy reunion? No Grover-Percy reunion? No campers cheering for Percy to be back?

- last minute Solangelo; they should’ve had some sort of interest to sudden love/slow burn/opposites attract relationship with proper time to develop

- issue of Greeks vs. Roman felt sort of weak and their sudden cohesion at the end felt too forced (how is one statue gonna fix eeeeeeverything)

- final battle was awful. No words. Giants easily killed, Greeks and Romans united in a minute, Gaia contained in a little storm immediately after waking and killed like no biggie

- minimal lasting damage or deaths (Leo’s death…. Don’t even get me started)

- BoO and later books ruined Leo’s character and made him seem selfish, unaware, and rude

- Annabeth and Percy being captured immediately by the giant princess in BoO; you think they escaped Tartarus for the ending to be THAT

- Frank’s whole situation; firewood and the whole idea of life being fragile felt pretty useless by the end when nothing could touch him

- weak usage of prophecy — I feel like the oracle being dead at the end was a sign for everyone to live without forced guidance, which was a big deal in PJO, but the point wasn’t really made and it felt like he just didn’t want to come up with more. Also, it felt like lines were added randomly to the prophecy of seven but we never hear everything together??? The prophecy felt cheap and forced with how everything played out

- no issues with Percy and Annabeth going to New Rome for college, but they’d be that quick to abandon their home in NYC? I get the trauma associated with it, but there was nothing that made it seem right for them to think the trauma was enough to leave everything… lowkey wanted Annabeth to go to Columbia or Barnard or NYU and be fixing up CHB to house adults or have a veteran demigod network

- cutting off character development and interactions. A lot of the characters were used to further others (Jason furthering Nico’s in BoO) or never even talked to each other (Percy and Piper). There wasn’t much growth in the last couple books even though it was very clear in the beginning ones (Frank is an obvious example) and more importantly, there was a supreme lack of resolution in their stories. Especially Percy and Annabeth, who went to hell and back, we never feel like they suffered for a reason or needed to be the ones to suffer or the suffering changed them for better or worse or any other real indication I should accept the ending

- no backlash on the gods. At all. Percy, like many others throughout PJO and HoO, is struggling to respect the gods, let alone continue being used by them. And in HoO, the gods are USELESS. They do literally n.o.t.h.i.n.g. They have one fight scene and when we have Jason’s equivalent to the asking for childcare scene of TLO, Zeus responds and his backbone breaks. The only consequence was Apollo being demoted but that honestly felt like a marketing scheme knowing ToA

- lots more but I’ll stop myself here

(Btw I did not read it because of the show lol though I am glad I did so I’m ready for it)

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distort-opia · 2 years

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Self aware comic book character J is such a fun alternative explanation of his character. He eventually realises all these things are bound to happen- ex. his helplessness on that bad day in TKJ is simply because of his character arc. Him taking on the clown mold is him being aware he has a character trope to play. It can explain why he keeps expanding beyond that mold and becoming more dark and cruel- he is sick, bored, of the mold and the absurdity. Him seeing Batman as a God figure makes sense when this whole universe is centred around Batman( not even Bruce) and Batman keeps him alive in that sense. Them being the only real people there could be because of many reasons in his mind: coping with the absurdity, wanting any meaning in that world, this is Batman's world and since he is the only one aware of it he must be special, them being parallels to eo insures their mutual literary existence( can be why J insists on it that much). The Dance... J being pissy when B doesn't play his part... even panics about it... Also why he seems to struggle with his philosophical thoughts, he knows there is no meaning but deep inside he wants it... and he wants Batman to understand it too. Explains why doctors can't pinpoint what his state is, or why he deems his non Joker self unimportant. Why he feels the need to perform, to push the game on and on and knows they can't stop, why he knows he can't be helped, why he gets they are doomed, why he will save Batman's CHARACTER( not letting him kill, not letting him reveal himself)... Imagine added layers to the happenings of Endgame( and the outcome), or existential pain of Bruce not getting why their relationship matters the most, if J is THIS aware of everything and the true passage of time.

100% agree, this reading of the character adds so many extra layers, and explains like half of the existing ones. I also love it because Bruce clearly doesn't sense any of this, while Joker's character is driven by it so much -- by his knowledge of their roles to play in the story. Joker partially knows he needs to serve the narrative and never let Batman stop being Batman, but to Bruce it's just Joker constantly hurting him for himself. For the game, for his own sadistic, selfish reasons.

Ngl, the stuff with Flashpoint Batman and Joker really got me thinking about this aspect again, because the implication of that Universe is that a Batman and Joker have to exist. It doesn't always have to be Bruce, or whoever Joker was before the fall into the vat. Hell, the fall into the vat doesn't even seem to be that important. It's the trauma that comes before it, like in the case of Earth Prime's Joker when his family died, and Martha's case when Bruce died in Flashpoint... Hell, now that DC gave Joker a name (Jack Oswald White) and pretty much canonized his TKJ backstory, I got reminded that in Tales of the Dark Multiverse: Batman -- Hush, the character who's clearly meant to be Joker is directly named Jack Napier. So is he someone different from Jack White, in that world? Does the role of Joker just possess the people around a Wayne who's befallen by tragedy and turned into a Bat?

If that's the case, Joker sensing the nature of the world they live in, knowing that they have parts to play and are doomed to carry the story, is even more tragic. Jack Napier, Jack White, William Distal, even Alby (all of these being names attributed to Joker-before-the-fall in different comics), and now Martha Wayne... maybe they're all different people, who became Joker because their Universe willed it. Because it was needed for someone to become Batman's archnemesis.

Anyway, sorry, got carried away, Anon. Love your interpretation on this aspect of Joker's character, you pretty much covered all the bases. Thank you for the ask!

#asks #batman #batman meta #joker #joker meta

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bthearst · 1 year

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The Gentleman's Club - a series.

Some time ago I flirted with the idea of creating a long-form play set in 19th century London that revolved around an exclusive society consisting only of queer men. It was to be a dark comedy, something that played with societal expectations and gender norms, but I eventually scrapped it because it did not feel like the proper venue for such a story.

Fast forward to a few days ago, while whining about rewrites and revisions and them being no fun. The idea popped back into my head but in a much different form. Cue two entire days of feverish typing, sketching, info dumping, and outlining. Plots were formed (both literary and personal), game plans rudimentarily established, and eggs were sorted into neat little whicker baskets.

The Gentleman's Club, as it currently stands on paper, will be an anthology series comprised of five (so far!) novellas, each one following a narrator's frankly nightmarish encounter with each of The Bacchant Five -- the top ranking members of the aforementioned Gentleman's Club. The catch? Not only is each member The World's Worst Human Being tm, but they're also the love interest. Meaning that this series is a series for villainfuckers. It's gothic, it's horrific, it's romantic, it's queer.

Do not be fooled by the title. The Gentleman's Club is named as such because it was initially meant to be strictly for men, but in the brave new world of 1898, women and individuals who do not quite fit within that binary are also esteemed members.

Of the five planned novellas, three features men, one a woman, and another a nonbinary love interest. Each also has their unique take on sexuality as well, because asexual friends deserve some villain shenanigans too.

It is my intention to selfpub this series for a variety of reasons that I will explain beneath the cut, but I want to point out that chapters will be available over on my Patre0n! As well as a detailed account of the whole process for anyone interested.

I've been exceptionally focused on my high-stakes projects for quite some time out of some fear that I need to censor myself or else no agent will take me seriously. It's genuinely sucked a lot of the fun out of writing, and this series really taps into my writing roots in such a way that I am genuinely excited to take it on. I've been writing erotic literature for almost 17 years and I was always of the mindset that to make it in any way in the traditional industry I'd have to change my tune.

This is me saying screw it, we ball. Given the questionable state of "spicy lit" going around on the internet, especially the queer kind, I decided to square up and write what feels needed. Is it fucked up shit? Genuinely dark romances? Messy people navigating messy situations? Absolutely! And I am not in the mood to have the industry try and water any of it down, so we're going selfpub, baby.

I'm unsure as to what venue will be the best because, honestly, selfpub requires a lot of legwork. Amaz*n does a lot of the work but takes an obscene amount of royalties and a 90 day exclusivity period, and well, they're evil, obviously. I would love to be able to afford actual physical copies with properly paid-for covers by actual artists, so stats are pretty complicated given where I'm currently at.

I do intend to share each chapter on Patre0n, making the first book entirely free to read! People who sub at the lowest tier will get chapters a month in advance, but with some patience you'll able to indulge on all 9 chapters without spending cent.

Every day I walk the line of wanting all of my work to be accessible to everyone at the press of a button and being reminded that I, unfortunately, need to pay for the power that keeps the computer on.

I'll make a more detailed post on Patre0n because I don't want tumblr to just straight up nuke this, although I'm sure it's already on the shitlist for even referencing adult stuff.

#updates from yours truly.#the gentleman's club series #writeblr #writing community #indie author #lgbt #queer writers #queer reads #gothic horror #horror #idk what all to tag this as

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