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utilitycaster · 3 years

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Actual Play: How it works

This is a collection of how I think of actual play as a medium, because TTRPG actual play is a unique one - a combination of improvisation, a rule set, and randomizing elements. This isn’t fully comprehensive, and I may add to it in the future as I come up with more ideas. I’m also thinking of providing some examples/more in-depth stuff for the items in separate posts, so please let me know if that’s something you would want.

Most of the observations here heavily skew towards D&D and Pathfinder actual play, as they are what I know best. Other systems I’ve listened to (PbtA, Cortex, Savage Worlds) fit in here as well, but this may not apply to all actual play, particularly GM-less games or games that are primarily played as one-shots.

Finally, and I say this only because it is a recurring problem on the social media that I happen to find incredibly irritating: you are also welcome and encouraged to have other opinions, disagree with me, dislike all of this, etc. If you have things to say, my inbox is the best place; this is too long for multiple reblogs and this is a sideblog so replies are tricky. However, if you are the kind of person who is inclined to say things like “Actually, there was an exception to this rule! It’s in the backmasked audio at 06:59:32 in the outtakes of episode 192c of Dungeons and Discotheques! :)” I would like to provide you with this actual play line quote from Adaine Abernant in Fantasy High: I think that you feel like you have a lot to offer, and please take this the right way... you don't.

Onto the thoughts, below the jump!

On narrative devices and rules and the random element:

Foreshadowing is possible, but limited to specific circumstances. A GM can (and should) foreshadow! The point of foreshadowing is to set expectations, and GMs should have hints that indicate things about the world that the party may encounter later, provide potential plot hooks, or otherwise provide the party with information. Similarly, players can do things that nod towards as of yet unrevealed elements of their backstories. However, it is impossible to deliberately foreshadow plot resolutions, because it is unknown what they will be. That doesn’t mean that in retrospect things may happen that echo back to earlier events, but the intent to foreshadow was not there - it’s a happy accident.

I don’t want to say normal narrative rules don’t apply because what are the normal narrative rules, really? However, I think an important thing to emphasize is that narrative satisfaction is not guaranteed. This is especially true if the cast has agreed character death is an option, but even beyond that, an unlucky or lucky roll can seemingly cut an arc short or take things in a weird and unforeseen direction. Because there is an element of randomness, randomness will occur. This, along with the character agency I discuss later, is one of my favorite things about actual play. It strips out the need for a moral or message or specific beats - not that those can’t arise, but they can’t be forced - and as such it can make for unusual, creative, and very true-to-life stories even in a fantasy setting.

On character role, viewpoint and agency:

Actual play stories have an ensemble of viewpoint characters (the PCs). This is perhaps the clearest restriction that exists, at least in all of the game systems I’ve mentioned. There is no good way to depict NPCs acting on their own unless the PCs have a way to observe them, unseen (magical or mundane). It is extremely difficult to have one player play multiple PCs, and if a player leaves there is not a good way to recast their PC. This doesn’t mean NPCs can’t do things with each other offscreen that have implications for the story, nor that PCs can’t come and go or become NPCs, but it does mean a good GM is very careful about NPC interactions because it gets very boring and non-collaborative very quickly to watch someone talk with themselves.

The PCs hold a level of agency that characters in other media do not. Statements about how the characters have a mind of their own in original fiction aside (sidebar: I am team ‘they don’t, you just didn’t realize that the way you wrote their personality and the way you wrote your plot conflicted until you actually started writing it out, which is very understandable’) PCs do in fact have a mind of their own separate from the GM and from each other.

Something I like about this is that unless you are coming up with conspiracy theories regarding the interpersonal dynamics of the players themselves (in which case I think you’re both a creep and a weirdo (derogatory)) or if the GM is not respecting player agency (which I feel is usually very easy to see; see below for more on that) you do not get cases of “these characters are together simply because the author felt like pairing them off” as can happen in scripted media. Any romantic relationship is, inherently, a mutually agreed choice between the originators of these characters, and more generally any plot or relationship necessarily needs to have something that appeals to all characters involved. It may be as simple as “these are my friends and I want to keep hanging out”, but, despite this being improv, it’s a medium where saying “no” is always an option.

With that said there is still room for players to be uncooperative or selfish. It’s rare, but it does exist, and I’m personally of the opinion that it’s in part the GM’s responsibility to have a conversation with that player and to not play into their attention grabbing. That said, with one notable exception, all the accusations I’ve seen about this have seemed to me to be more “I don’t like this player/character/ship/arc and I am going to claim they are stealing focus, despite it being justified,” and not genuinely about a player being obnoxious.

Agency separate from the person who creates the world is perhaps the most unique element of actual play and at this point I’m going to talk a little about how a good GM fosters that.

I’ve said before that when a GM has things happen that are not at least mostly a direct response to character actions, they are typically either world-building or a hook, and can be both. I think of this sort of as a variant on Chekhov’s gun, actually; the gun doesn’t have to go off, ultimately, in actual play, but it is saying the following:

This is a world where there are guns hung on the wall sometimes.

Someone else might do something with this gun.

You can attempt to do something with this gun before they do.

And then the players decide how they want to interpret it and what they want to do, and the dice indicate the level of success in doing so.

A good GM should encourage the players to explore and be creative, and more than anything, reward agency. This doesn’t mean rewarding it with success; rather, it means if someone explicitly indicates they want to interact with an element of the world, you should give them the tools such that eventually, they can try to do so. You can also give them reasons in-game why they should change their mind, or make it so that it’s almost certain to fail if that is reasonable, but if you are trying to flat-out shut it down without providing an in-world reason why, the cracks will almost certainly show.

One important thing to remember about GM-ing: GMs will probably come into the game with some ideas of what’s going on in the world, and some level of understanding of what the world looks like. That will be influenced by the players, both in terms of the consequences of their actions and choices, and also by what the players are interested in. Which is to say: even if there is a session zero, and the GM states a specific premise, that can change! Characters develop, player interests change, dice rolls do weird things, and so a good GM absolutely must if not kill their darlings at least remove, recycle, and adapt them based on the direction of the game and motivations of the characters. Even in a plot-driven campaign, the players and GM and what makes them happy needs to drive the story, because fundamentally, this is a game that should be fun. Which brings us to...

On the Watsonian and the Doylist in actual play:

Stepping back for a second: the context in which people are creating fiction influences them. End of sentence. It’s ridiculous to think it doesn’t. This means everything from political events and worldwide trends, to the media the creator is consuming or has consumed, to personal life events. There are always going to be in- and out-of-universe explanations for choices in fiction.

In actual play, the players and GM know the underlying rules of the world, and it’s difficult to truly split the party and have everyone not involved leave in a way that feels fun, so everyone always has information that they can’t really use in-game. Also it’s a fully improvised medium that is primarily theater of the mind, so unconscious choices, misunderstandings, and accidents are frequently not edited out, and people are human. Which is to say I think it’s important to take this into consideration in one’s analysis; it’s not that you can’t incorporate a Watsonian reason for something that happened, but Doylist reasons are given a weight that they may not have in an edited work.

Three of the Doylist reasons beyond the misunderstandings and accidents I wanted to cover are metagaming, awareness that this is for an audience, and character knowledge.

Metagaming exists in many TTRPGs, and it’s not actually inherently bad. When a DM in D&D says “that just hits” you get an idea of the AC of the creature, and you know your own attack rolls, and you can make decisions based on that, when, in a ‘real’ fantasy battle scenario, you probably wouldn’t gain all that insight from a single hit. The rules of the TTRPG are considered part of normal acceptable metagaming. There’s also the more general one; if you start the first session in a tavern, there is an unspoken expectation that the PCs will interact and form an impromptu group and not just quietly drink their ale and leave - basically, the rules of improv still apply. This is a good thing. And finally, there’s the acknowledgement that you are people with feelings and this is a game and so if someone is upset you stop, or you have discussions about consent between sessions that inform actions in-game. Metagaming just gets obnoxious when someone rolls a nat 1 and then argues that this is obvious information and they should know, or looks up every monster in the manual when you encounter it instead of playing true to the character’s knowledge.

In actual play, the ‘hey fellow tavern-goers, would you like to be a group’ form of metagaming, the “oh right this is a story and we should move the story forward,” is even more important than in home D&D games. This is where I recommend listening or reading some Q&As or watching some after shows, because you’ll hear players talk about this. A 5-hour shopping episode or extensive foraging can get boring to watch or listen to (and unlike accidentally boring or frustrating things, are pretty easy to predict and avoid). On the flip side, a risky choice might seem more appealing when you know there’s an audience who would love the payoff.

I am personally, perhaps unsurprisingly given what I said about player dynamic conspiracy theories and randomness (or, outside of this post, my strong dislike of certain popular fan theories), not a big fan of creators catering to audiences’ every whim...but it’s unavoidable that they will take the audience experience in mind.

Finally, character knowledge, which is the opposite of metagaming - when a character knows something the player doesn’t. This is sometimes covered with, for example, GM statements like “you would know, as a person with history proficiency, that this country is actually in a regency period.” If the character had, in improv, before the GM had a chance to say that, mentioned the king, that’s just because the player did not know that and had made an assumption.

Personally I find going deep down the rabbit hole with things like this - “why doesn’t this character, who CLAIMS to be from this country, not know this?”, or clearly OOC statements - tends not to actually spark any interesting theories, but that is, ultimately, an opinion.

A few final thoughts on different formats of actual play

True livestream/live-to-tape (Critical Role, Into the Motherlands, and the second season of Fantasy High): the main thing to keep in mind is Doylist explanations are even more important because there is quite literally no editing. Also, there will possibly be some of those more boring stretches or even a little OOC metagaming discussions within the structure of the game, because there’s no way around it.

Editing, but primarily just to remove long explanations/math and doing soundscaping (NADDPod, Rusty Quill Gaming): Pretty similar; a lot of them even make the choice to leave in OOC metagaming discussions, so it’s mostly that there are fewer cases of people slowly adding numbers.

More extensive editing and possibly some predefined other elements (TAZ, most Dimension 20 shows): this may fall into a more traditional story structure. It’s not to say that there won’t be surprises, because the players do still have agency, but the ‘rails’ might be a little more apparent; there might be some DM monologuing done after the fact (beyond just cleaning up the audio) or choices that were not scripted per se, but not exactly improvised either (think how D20 tends to have pre-set battle maps and earlier seasons had a pretty strict RP/Battle structure.

Somewhat relatedly there are broad story structures, which is more of a spectrum, ranging from sandbox (Critical Role) to very clearly GM-driven missions (TAZ Balance and, to an extent, Amnesty); nearly all of the other shows here fall into a structure of “here is your overall goal, how precisely you get there is up to you although, like any GM, I will provide in-story information on where it may make sense to go that will often funnel you towards specific places.”

I do have a theory that since TAZ Balance in particular was an entry point for so many people, it takes them time to adjust to the more sprawling, unpredictable, and difficult-to-organize stories other actual play can have, but ultimately it is a matter of personal preference and all of these still fall into the category of actual play.

#long post #today in: unsure if anyone wants to read this but that has also never stopped me not even once #and writing this was fun

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bunsblr · 3 years

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Tu... torial? Pt. 3

Welcome back to part 3 of my tutorial for anon. In this I will go over perhaps my favourite part - the face. Did you used doodle eyes in your notebook when you were in school? This has the same energy.

This is where things get a little harder to explain because it involves a lot of drawing. I hope you get the general idea though.

Open this in dashboard for best view of the screenshots.

Disclaimer: I have no formal training for any kind of graphics stuff, I work in an office as a receptionist - I serve coffee for a living. I am absolutely self taught and while I consider myself pretty comfortable with photoshop, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t about a gazillion of other things that can be done that I have no idea about. There are people far superior than me in the Sims community. This is just how I do it, with techniques I have picked up through the years. Some things I go over in these will be pretty basic, some things a little more unorthodox. Disclaimer 2: My edits take time. This is what I do to relax, one edit takes several hours for me. Sometimes days :))) Disclaimer 3: My photoshop is in Swedish, which is my first language. I tried my best to find the English translations for every step that I do.

Tools used: The Sims 4, Adobe Photoshop 2020, One by Wacom Pen Tablet (very basic and unfancy).

I start by adding a new empty layer in my Sim layer group, above my base Sim layer.

I use the smudge tool (I always keep my smudge tool on Strength around 30%) on the Sim layer to smudge and soften the eye whites a bit. I only redraw my sim's eyes if I'm changing the direction that they´re lookin, otherwise I just refine the existing eyes. In this case I didn't want her eyes quite as far left as they were. On my Details layer, I use the brush tool, hard small brush with opacity around 70-80%, and start drawing the eyes a little bit further to the right.

I realized I wanted the eye whites to be even whiter, so I added a new layer inbetween the Sim layer and the Details layer. Using a soft brush with lower opacity (29%) I go over the eye whites. The lower opacity allows me to build up the color by going over multiple times, creating a better blend. I then merge this new layer with the Details layer because there’s no reason for having these on separate layers going forward.

I turn the opacity of the brush tool back up and continue to draw the eyes. At this point they're looking rather creepy...

But looking much better after some added dots of “shine” with a white color (not full on white, slightly muddier)

I turn down the opacity of the brush again, take a soft brush and a dark grey color and go around the whole eye to add some shadow.

Turn up the opacity of the brush again (I know it’s a lot of back and forth with this, it’s just how I work) and work around the eyes. I clean up the make up and add some lashes. I also add some dept to the eyebrows using a slightly darker color than the existing strands and draw in some new ones here and there.

Time to clean up the nose (eeeew). I start with the Smudge tool on the sim layer, strength around 15-20%, and smudge the pixels a little.

On the details layer, I clean up the nose further by drawing in the nostrils a bit, and even out the colors around and on the nose, picking up color with the eyedrop tool and going over with a low opacity brush wherever I think the color is a little uneven.

With the lips I sharpen the shape, add some highlights on the top of the lipline, clean up the corners of the mouth, redraw the teeth and add those squiggly circles on the top and bottom lip. They look a bit weird up close but zoomed out it will look glosssssy :) I pick up existing colors on the lip with the eyedrop tool and work with both lower opacity soft brushes and higher opacity hard brushes here.

Now I feel happy with the face details. Here is a comparison of the face before and after. A little bit cleaner and smoother now!

Time to throw some shade. I always start under the chin (because for some reason that's the most fun). I create a new layer in the Sim group, name it shadows, and I use the pen tool again and make a path along the jawline, sectioning off the neck from the face. I went over the basics of using the pen tool in pt 1. This is.…may be an unortodox way to do it. I'm sure a lot of people would see this as an unecessary tricky step. It is however my favorite way of doing it.

I made two paths for this first work area. Meaning I first made a full path on the neck above the necklace, closed that path and then started a new one below the necklace to include the chest area where the skin is showing (separating it from the clothes). When both my paths were closed I pressed ctrl + Enter to turn them both into selections at the same time. As you can see I didn’t bother following the “edge” of the sim, you will see why later.

I eyedrop a color from a darker area of her skin, then I choose a darker, more saturated color in the palette that comes up.

I use a big soft brush with opacity around 30%. I start to build up the shadow under the chin, with more color right under the jawline and less further out. This is where my pen tool selection comes to good use, it keeps the jawline nice and sharp even though I'm using a soft brush to get the fading effect on other parts of the shadow. As we already decided, the light comes from the left in this picture, thus the chin shadow ends up to the right. I use a smaller brush to go around the clothing line, and under the necklace. The tighter the clothes, the smaller the shadow.

I noticed the neck was lighter on the very side of the neck, and that interferes with my shadow. Now of course I could go over with the shadow color a couple of more times in that spot, but I prefer to correct the color on the base Sim layer instead for a more even result. So I hide the shadow layer, eyedrop the slightly darker area on the neck (and keep it this time).

It's important to keep the selection while I do this, so I don't paint over something else. You could put this on another layer and just erase if you accidentally go over something you're not supposed to, but since I already have the selection I can just put it on the base Sim layer. I brush over the area a couple of times until the color is how I want it.

While I am at it I also thought the chest area is a little too white and colorless. This often happens on my sim pictures if I’m using a sim with lighter skin. Again I eyedrop a darker color of the skin, but this time I choose a more vibrant version of the color to avoid muckyness when I go over the white.

I set the opacity of the brush to super low and then very carefully go over the whiter areas of the chest a couple of times, avoiding the areas where there are details such as collarbones or cleavage.

I make the Shadow layer visible again and deselect. Now you see how I have painted a little outside the skin area on the neck, because I didn’t follow the edge of the sim with my selection? I quickly fix that by holding Alt and grabbing the layer mask from the base Sim layer, and dropping it onto the Shadow layer.

Now these two layers have the same layer mask! And it's time to bring out the pen tool again, and make a path around the face.

With the face selected I start painting my face shadows. I put shadow on the side of the face that´s away from our imaginary light source.

I paint shadows under any hair that covers the face, and add a shadow on the side of the nose that´s facing away from the light. This usually takes me a couple of tries to get right, like this here wasn’t it...

I use a 30something % opacity on my brush and then 30something % opacity on a soft eraser brush and go back and forth with these until I get a nice blend.

Got the nose shadow looking decent, and add a little shadow in the eye… socket?… closest to the nose. I make sure that this doesn´t go over the eye itself and interferes with any colors there. I want to keep the eyes clear.

I deselect. Now we´ve got some little flaws here and there because my selection didn’t line up perfectly. I blend these with the smudge tool.

Better!

Looking fine gurl!

As I mentioned it’s a little hard to explain some steps, like the eyes and the lips, because it is just drawing until I like the result. I hope you find this useful though, and please send me an ask if you’re wondering about anything!

#ts4 edit #the sims 4 #tutorial

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icarus-suraki · 2 years

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Film asks: 1, 2, 4, 8, 12 *chinhands*

Film Ask Game! Ask me stuff!

1. What’s the most depressing movie you’ve ever watched?

Hands down, Grave of the Fireflies. Oh. My God. I ached. I honestly don't think I could watch it again.

Close second, The Illusionist (L'Illusionniste) from 2010 made me actually cry real, giant, Ghibli-style tears in front of my parents as the magician and all the other "old-fashioned" performers slowly slip away into unimportance, anonymity, despair... Too close to the bone, Jacques Tati. Too close to the bone.

The ending of The Triplets of Belleville fucked me up too. What the fuck, Sylvain Chomet?

2. What’s the most disturbing movie you’ve ever watched?

I watch some disturbing stuff on the regular (or so I'm told) so I may have to dig for this one. "Disturbing" is sometimes a tricky thing when you like horror movies.

I mean, a lot of people consider A Serbian Film to be the pinnacle of Fucked Up Movies, but I've only ever seen clips and commentary, not the whole film. So I'd say that one, but that would be dishonest.

Saw and Hostel kind of fucked me up when they first came out, but that was when that kind of "goreporn" was relatively new in the US. (The DVD cover for Saw II had the grossest special-edition cover lmao.)

The Nightingale and Come and See are both really intense and involve some heavy subject matter, but I didn't feels disturbed per se.

I guess...how are we defining "disturbing" here? It's easy to turn immediately to horror, Asian Extreme, New French Extremity, goreporn, Eraserhead, even experimental art films like Begotten, and all of that. When, in actual fact, there are some very commonplace genres that can be disturbing in other ways when you start to look at them a little closer (maybe too close?).

Like certain comedies, especially RomComs and romances, where the male love interest is framed as handsome and charming but he's really quite creepy when you start to look at what he's doing. For example: 50 Shades of Gray (Is it gray or grey? I don't feel like checking). Yes, we all know about some of the issues, but there's a pretty good breakdown video on YouTube that identifies techniques that Christian uses on Anastasia to win her over that are identical to techniques used by cults to attract new members. It's not seduction, it's indoctrination. And that makes an already problematic movie downright freakier.

Beyond that, The Brave Little Toaster fucked me up when I saw it at age...7, I think. High-octane nightmare fuel for children. Nice. And I feel like it triggered some vague hoarding tendencies in me or something...

4. A film you could watch on repeat for the rest of your life?

Geeze, seriously? Okay, I'll think of this kind of as "what movie could someone suggest to you that you'd always be down to watch?" And that would probably be Kiki's Delivery Service. It's like...I kind of want that to be my life. I want to live in that city, but in the suburbs, near the bakery. Second place might be Muppets from Space, The Muppets Take Manhattan, or The Dark Crystal. Gotta get the Muppets in there. Coming up close behind is The Crow, but I'm really only down to watch that in October (especially on Tic-Tac Night/Devil's Night because you gotta).

8. Which book would you like to see adapted into a film?

I'd love to see someone try to adapt some really weird, postmodern, experimental books into movies. Infinite Jest: The Movie. That'd be amazing. Someone tried to make a movie version of Ulysses c. 2004 called Bl.,m and it didn't quite work. But making just the Circe chapter into a movie would be fun (but not at all profitable). Make a Finnegans Wake movie: it's 8 hours of a guy sleeping. That's it. That's the movie.

I don't know... I'm generally so protective of books that I get somewhat upset when I hear there's a movie adaptation coming. That's why I didn't see Dune, for example. Or the new miniseries of The Stand. Or the (somewhat disappointing) Dark Tower movie. The fact that the LotR movies were as good as they were seems somewhat miraculous. Kiki's Delivery Service was only adapted as well as it was because Hayao Miyazaki is amazing.

I'm rather grateful that some cannot be made into movies--like Catcher in the Rye. Salinger had a lot of stipulations about it becoming a movie and that shut it all down pretty quick.

I guess some fairly straightforward YA could work. The Hero and the Crown would probably work, but I shudder to think of how much they'd fuck over Aerin as the main character. Same thing with Black Unicorn and the sequels: Tanaquil would be done so wrong.

I don't know, I get too attached to The Book Version to really want any kind of adaptation of any book. I'm always Skeptical of movie adaptations.

(Sidebar: as a Pynchon fan, I felt obligated to see Inherent Vice, but I was kind of disappointed because the book felt more colorful, more madcap, than the movie, which was sort of a sorrowful recollection of the loss of innocence from 1969 to 1970, all filmed in dusty colors and weirdly depressing. I mean, good call having Sortilege acting as a narrator but, man that needed some color, Paul Thomas.)

12. A movie that holds a special place in your heart?

There's so many, though! The Gisnep version of Robin Hood, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, any Muppet and/or Jim Henson movie (even Labyrinth, begrudgingly), Akira, Amelie, The King of Hearts, The Crow, The Village, The Wicker Man, Voices from a Distant Star, Interview with the Vampire, kids' movies I saw back in the 1980s like the original My Little Pony movie, movies my folks introduced me to like My Fair Lady and Mary Poppins and The Great Escape and Flight of the Phoenix, Close Encounters of the Third King, 2001: a Space Odyssey, Star Wars... Even really low-budget MST3k stuff like Soultaker and Space Mutiny have special hidey-holes in my auricles. I keep thinking of more and more to add to this list. Why do you want me to pick just one?

Okay. If I have to pick one, it's gotta be the Gisnep version of Robin Hood. Baby's first fandom cosplay: my mom made me a little Robin Hood hat and a fox tail and everything and I romped around the house either reenacting the movie or making up new stories. Yeah, that one fits into all the categories.

#ask game #ask me things #i herd teal deer #anon is on

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comfy-whumpee · 4 years

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Whumping Safely 101

Many people in this community have mental health problems, face various types of discrimination, and have complicated relationships with some parts or types of whump. In particular, I aim this at people who care about the experience of survivors and others with triggers – partially because I am an abuse survivor who often flirts with triggering content as part of my love of whump.

Keeping your blog safe is difficult, takes effort, and is never a perfect process. But as the community grows and grows, it’s really important that we hold ourselves to a high standard. I would argue that this is a responsibility of all content creators, but especially those of us in the messy playground of whump.

I’ve got three sections in here: content warnings, writing with care, and community interaction. I’ve tried to make it navigable. It’s about 1.8k words. Shorter than a lot of drabbles! I welcome good-faith criticism on this topic and further questions on my own views.

Content Warnings

The biggest responsibility, in my opinion, is empowering your reader to make their own decision on whether they want to expose themselves to your writing. This also happens to be by far the easiest way to help people whump safely.

What to warn

This is a big and ever-changing topic. Some things you should warn for as a rule of thumb are anything NSFW, pet whump and box boy whump, drugs and alcohol, medical and hospital content, graphic gore, intimate partner violence, and animal harm. It can be tricky to draw the line of what counts – what needs a warning? If you’re in doubt, just warn it anyway. It doesn’t hurt.

If someone requests a trigger be warned for, even if it’s something that feels obscure or tame, show compassion and agree to the request. This is someone who cares enough about being able to read your writing that they wrote in! They want to be able to read it and enjoy it. You’re being complimented.

Otherwise, look at what other blogs tag for. You’ll see some variation in styles and levels of detail, but it’s a good way to gauge what people think is warn-worthy, when we’re often writing stuff that would already be R-rated in mainstream media.

The easiest way to make sure people don’t see your triggering content is to use a cut. Tumblr is not a very functional website and likes to delete cuts, but a cursory check of your posted content will usually tell you whether it’s worked. With asks, cuts are very spotty, so don’t be afraid to post an ask response separately with a screengrab of the original question. People often then respond to the ask itself with a link to the post, especially if it’s a whole drabble. Tumblr is weird and bad so just do your best.

Content notices

I.e., a quick summary before the drabble, usually in bold, to state what will be coming. I like to distinguish between using content notes (CN) and trigger warnings (TW) to indicate severity. Others might use the old phrase ‘dead dove do not eat’ to indicate this is a heavy piece, and often you will see qualifiers like ‘intense’, ‘mild’, ‘mention’, ‘referenced’ (i.e. it is discussed but not actively happening), and ‘implied’ (as the opposite of ‘explicit’). I’ve also seen a couple of people use ‘vibes’, which is a really nice way of demonstrating that it’s there, but not the focus. A quick paragraph like this, or just a line, lets people make a quick risk assessment on their reading.

This is also important if you’re sending in asks or requests to people. If you want to ask about something triggering, send an inquiry first about whether the blog is okay to hear it.

Tagging

Tagging is a chore, but it’s your primary way of warning people about your content. The main benefit of tagging is that you can be as detailed as you want, because can be tagging for content in general, not just triggers.

In a best case scenario, you’d tag the kind of whump you’re doing, tag triggers, tag characters, and even your ‘verses, because tagging is your index for your blog. If you tag reliably, you help your future self and your readers find stuff, and you also make your blog really dang safe. People who have unusual triggers can blacklist tags, and will pick up on your content tags to help them.

Don’t just tag your own writing. Tag your reblogs, tag your prompts, tag your asks. Yes, edit your asks to add the tags. Tag your images and gifs. Tag your images as images and your gifs as gifs.

If you aren’t up for detailed tagging for whatever reason, just tag for triggering content, and add stuff to that list if you’re asked to. My usual technique is to make a mental note of tags while I’m formatting and editing before posting.

Be aware that your first five tags will be used in search results. If you’re using tags that are associated with kink too, such as ‘shibari’, you might want to rethink your tag order if you don’t want interaction from those blogs. Also think about what tags might come up in non-whump contexts, such as ‘collar’ or ‘PTSD’. Some tactics for getting around this I’ve seen are adding ‘whump’ after the content or writing the tags in past tense (i.e., ‘collared’).

It is also a good idea to watch out for when you might be reblogging something whumpy that is intended as kink / porn / fetish, especially in images. Tagging these as spicy / nsfw / kink is a sensible move.

Writing with Care

Okay, now for the harder stuff.

I mean here to lay out some guidelines for how to write in a way that helps your reader build good faith. This is a much more nuanced topic, and it’s different for everyone. There will always be differing opinions on what should and shouldn’t be written about, what a good depiction of a sensitive topic is, and how to discuss that topic. I tried to strip this back into absolute basics that I hope we can all agree on.

Maybe your whump involves abuse. Maybe it’s gaslighting. Maybe it’s severe mental health problems, or addiction, or slavery, or you write about or analogise real-world issues. Whump deals with the dark stuff, and that’s a big part of its appeal. But don’t ever forget you’re writing the dark stuff.

(Try to) Know what you’re doing

Some of us play fast and loose with plots, medical accuracy, worldbuilding, and other things that get in the way of the pain we crave. This is all well and good, but when we start using whump that speaks true to people’s lived experiences, we shouldn’t be careless with it. I’m particularly talking about things that get represented poorly in mainstream media, such as abusive relationships, issues around marginalisation, mental illness and disability.

Be critical of media that you’ve consumed. Think about how its depicted things that you want to depict in turn. Look for opinions on fictional representations of those issues. Be aware that you might be more ignorant of things than you realise.

Look at how others are writing these issues, particularly if they’re writing from a perspective different to yours. If you haven’t personally experienced what you’re writing about, e.g., if you don’t have PTSD and you want to depict a character who does, seek out stuff written from or with experience. Listen to the experts.

If you’re looking for stuff about representation specifically, I recommend this collection of posts about ‘Braving Diversity’ cultivated by Writing With Colour, who are in themselves a fantastic resource for this topic, and have recommendations for other blogs that deal with intersecting issues.

Listen to others

Missteps are inevitable. Nobody is perfect. If constructive criticism is offered, that’s also a compliment to your writing. Someone read your work and thought about it, and thought you’d care about improving it. They’re offering themselves as a resource for helping you see your work in a new light.

Criticism is hard and sometimes hurtful, but even if we don’t think it’s accurate, there’s often a grain of truth in it. If someone tells you that your writing is harmful, think about why they’ve said that, not whether or not they’re correct. This is an opinion! Opinions are subjective! But what drove someone to send that in?

You don’t have to respond to all your criticism and definitely don’t respond straight away. Being respectful to those who are trying to help you means taking the time to consider it properly. Sometimes, they don’t need a response. Others, you might want to learn more about what they think before deciding. You might have already discussed the topic, in which case, you might just want to reblog your previous posts.

If it’s sent in bad faith or is outright hateful, you’re well within your rights to just delete it and move on. You might get the same criticism over and over again, and that’s exhausting, and you don’t have to retrace your steps for everyone.

But if it’s new, even if it puts your hackles up, you can always stop and wonder why someone felt that strongly about your work.

Take a step back

One of my better-known characters is a pet whumper who conditioned his victim to adore and depend on him. It’s not always easy to represent how deeply messed up that is within the text – though I think that’s part of the challenge – but in meta-commentary, I am always describing him as a creeptastic bastard lacking compassion and self-reflection. I hope to always give the reader the confidence that I know just how wrong it is.

This is a really simple thing you can do just to give readers good faith in you. Show that you know what you’re writing is dark and messed up. Show your understanding for the issues you’re handling and that they’re complicated. It might seem self-evident, but when you’re writing the really dark stuff, or unhealthy relationships, or institutionalised whump, you can inadvertently create the impression that you just think it’s fun. The fact that it’s fiction does not automatically absolve you. Show that you care about doing it right.

Community Interaction

I’m going to keep this one short and sweet because I will almost entirely be preaching to the choir here.

Be polite to others. Imagine saying what you’re saying to their face.

Don’t send anon hate. Just don’t. If you can send criticism off anon, do so.

Nobody is obligated to interact with you.

Nobody is obligated to monitor their own reader base.

If someone says do not interact, do not interact.

If someone says do not interact, why they’ve said that is none of your business.

You don’t need to spread the word about someone’s bad politics.

Ask yourself if your input is needed, or if what you’ve said has already been said.

You don’t have to take a side.

Take care of yourself. Take breaks. Remind yourself that whump is a small part of the world.

That’s all from me, folks. Stay safe.

#discourse...adjacent?#whump community #whump etiquette

463 notes · View notes

btschooseafic · 3 years

Text

Hey you, what’s your dream?

Pairing: platonic!oc x ot7

Details: manager!oc, predebut/idolverse, partial BTS World!verse

Summary: The boys start filming vlogs.

Warnings: This is a fictional story based on real events. The characters presented here are not the same as their real life counterparts. [Masterlist]

Track 15: First log

Video Phone- Beyoncé ft. Lady Gaga, William Burke

“On your video phone (Make a cameo)

Tape me on your video phone (I can handle you)”

December 2012

“Okay, well, that takes care of the budget section of our meeting,” Aviva said, looking up from her papers. Jimin and Taehyung were playing some kind of hand game. Jin was watching something on his phone. Yoongi and Jungkook were napping on Jin’s shoulders. Namjoon was slumped over a bit and wearing sunglasses indoors, so she was pretty sure he was sleeping as well. Hoseok had been in the bathroom for over ten minutes now, but she was going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say he was really constipated or something. She let out a long breath. “Seriously, guys?”

“Hmmm?” Jin looked up at her, smiling innocently. “I’ll wash the dishes in the morning.” Aviva rubbed her temples.

“Yeah, you said that already. We already finished the cleaning schedule.”

“Oh.” He blinked at her. “Then… what were we talking about?” He looked at Taehyung and Jimin, who shrugged.

“The budget,” she said. “Which you might’ve known if you had actually been paying attention to me instead of playing on your phone.” Jin’s smile turned a little sheepish. “Ah, but you three get credit for staying awake at least.”

“I’m awake,” Yoongi said. Jin jolted.

“Aish.” He rubbed his chest. “Min Yoongi-yah, don’t scare me like that!”

“Boo,” Yoongi muttered, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. He looked at Aviva, his gaze suddenly so alert it made her blush. He smirked. “I’ll work on a grocery budget with hyung so you don’t have to.”

“Thanks, Yoongi-yah.” She let out a breath of relief. “That would be a big help. Now, let’s wake the others up, cause they actually really need to hear this next part.”

“Hmm.” He kicked Namjoon’s shoulder. “Joon, wake up.”

“Wh-what?” Namjoon sat up straight and looked around. “Why’s it so dark in here?”

The others snickered.

“Maybe these?” Tae suggested, stealing his sunglasses and putting them on his face instead. “Wow, yeah, these are dark. How do you see in these things?”

“I’ll wake Jungkookie up,” Jimin offered, springing up and shoving the youngest boy. “Kookie, time to wake up!” Jungkook just groaned.

“He’s so cute,” Jin cooed, cradling him under his arm.

“JK, if you don’t wake up right now, I’m going to take a picture of Jin-oppa cradling you like a baby and send it to Jen,” Aviva threatened.

Jungkook sat up abruptly, nearly knocking his head into Jin’s.

“I’m awake! Don’t do it!”

“Blackmail?” Yoongi raised an eyebrow at her.

“The tricky part is, she’d probably think it was really cute,” Aviva admitted.

“Yeah, but cute in what way?” Jungkook thought aloud. “Probably not the right way…”

“What’d I miss?” Hoseok asked, walking back into the room.

“Doesn’t matter,” Aviva said. “Everybody else missed it as well…” She paused as Yoongi caught her eye. “…With the exception of Yoongi-oppa who gets a gold star.” Yoongi smiled smugly.

“Kinky,” Hoseok said appreciatively. Aviva blinked at him.

“…How?”

“I don’t want to know,” Yoongi said, waving his hand as Hoseok opened his mouth again. Hoseok shrugged.

“Anyway,” Aviva said loudly. “Special announcement—Youtube finally gave us permission for an official channel, so I’d like for you all to start posting vlogs.” They blinked at her. “Video logs.”

“Logs…” Jungkook stared at her uncertainly.

“Just talk to the camera,” Aviva said. “About what you did today, or what your hopes for the future are.” Namjoon grimaced, shaking his head. “Joon, I know you like to write silly raps just for fun sometimes, maybe you could record one of those? I could edit them in sort of a meme format, and that should attract some viewership.” Understanding passed over Jungkook’s face. Aviva pointed at Jimin and Hoseok. “And you two can post routines that wouldn’t be spoiling any original content.”

“Ah, like, coming soon, Bangtan boys,” Hoseok said the last part in a surprisingly deep voice. Aviva blinked.

“Hobi, you ever considered voice acting?”

“Eh?”

She shook her head. “But I’m getting sidetracked… anyway, I’d like you each to get me a video by the end of the week.”

“The end of the week!” Jungkook repeated worriedly.

“It doesn’t have to be anything special,” she told him. “Just be sure to record it in the studio, there’s the best soundproofing in there.”

“Beep—Wrong,” Taehyung said. “It’s the Bangtan Room, not the studio!”

“I’ll call it the Bangtan Room if you actually pay attention during next week’s meeting,” Aviva offered. Taehyung rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

“You drive a hard bargain, manager-noona.”

She sighed.

“But, who would want to know what we do all day?” Jimin wondered.

“Come to think of it, I’m not comfortable in front of the camera… I’m not sure I can do it,” Jungkook thought.

“I could be in the background out of the shot to keep you company,” Aviva offered. He frowned at her.

“Yeah, I think that would only make it worse.”

“Jungkook-ah, you’re going to be an idol, get used to it,” Yoongi said bluntly. Jungkook grimaced. “Unless you want to be treated like a baby forever?”

“No.” Jungkook’s brow furrowed.

“Don’t worry,” Jin said. “I’ll show you how to do it. Watch and learn!”

“…What, now?” Jungkook wondered, as no one moved.

“Ah… maybe tomorrow,” Jin thought.

“Okay.” Aviva gave him a thumb’s up. “Let’s meet at the studio around this time tomorrow and see how it’s going.” Jin smiled nervously. “Yoongi-oppa, text me some kind of treat you want and I’ll bring it for you.”

“Hmm, now I kind of want to know what Hobi thought a gold star meant,” Yoongi said thoughtfully. Hoseok opened his mouth again.

“Nope.” Aviva made an X with her arms.

‘Have you decided what you want?’ Aviva texted Yoongi first thing in the morning before she even got out of bed.

‘…I wanna eat meat.’

‘You always do! But remember the budget…’

‘right. ㅠ.ㅠ ok. Can I be exempt from logs for the next couple of weeks? I can do a product review of the new soundboard that I’m getting, but it hasn’t come yet.’

‘Ok. The viewers will miss out on your cute face, though,’ she texted before she thought too much about it. She froze. Shit.

‘Shut up >//<, u r the cute one.’

She laughed. ‘No, it definitely you. Just look at that emoji usage!’

‘u text like my grandma.’

‘u live like a grandpa.’

‘I see, so we match well together~’

She laughed again. It wouldn’t be too bad if not everyone got a log out this week. As long as two of three members posted something, that would be good. But was that really enough of a treat for Yoongi? She hadn’t done any baking in a while, and if she did something with ingredients she already had, it wouldn’t break the budget.

‘Do you like sweet things?’ She texted, and then got up to get dressed and start the day. Her phone buzzed. She finished getting dressed and looked at it.

‘d(^_^)b Duh. ♡.♡ Check the name.’

‘I thought it had something to do with basketball?’

‘…It does. I was just… guess I’ve spent too much time with hyung. ^^; ’

Aviva snorted.

That morning, Hoseok had somehow convinced Yoongi to join him at a nearby basketball court. They were shooting hoops, and Hoseok was frustrated, because Yoongi was winning, even though he kept taking breaks to look at his phone. He kept smiling at it, and at one point Hoseok even thought he blushed, although that might’ve been from the exercise.

“Who are you texting with?” He wanted to know.

“Your mom,” Yoongi said, without looking at him. Hoseok whipped at his ass with his sweat towel. Yoongi attempted to fight back, but Hoseok caught the towel, holding it as he smirked.

“Ah. I bet it’s Avi-yah.” He leaned over closer, trying to get a look at Yoongi’s phone screen. “What did she say that made you blush like that? Or was it a naughty photo?”

“That would be sexual harassment, technically, I think,” he said, twisting away from Hoseok, trying to keep his phone hidden. “Since she’s our manager.”

“Not if it’s totally consensual,” Hoseok thought, grabbing at the phone. Yoongi finally just shoved his phone in his bag.

“Let’s go back to the dorm and shower before she gets there,” he said.

“You don’t want her to see you all sweaty and messy?” Hoseok teased. Yoongi shot him a weird look.

“She’s seen me after dance practice plenty of times.”

“Ah, right.”

They walked out of the court, continuing down the street towards the dorm.

“Anyway, she doesn’t seem like the type,” Yoongi said, so quietly Hoseok almost didn’t hear him.

“To want to see you sweaty?” He wondered, confused. Yoongi rolled his eyes.

“To take pictures like that.”

Hoseok blinked. “Eh? You were still thinking about that?” Hoseok grinned. Yoongi was definitely blushing this time. “It’s always the quiet ones. Like, I bet you’re pretty kinky.”

“Depends who I’m with,” he said honestly.

“Ah.” Hoseok nodded. “You’re a switch.” Yoongi stared at him.

“…Can I consensually murder you?”

“What? No! How would that even…” Hoseok stopped suddenly as a familiar car pulled up alongside them.

The window rolled down and Aviva waved at them.

“Morning, boys. Need a lift?”

“Sure!” Hoseok said, going to open the passenger seat door.

“Ah, no, I have stuff on the seat,” she told him. “Sit in the back.”

“Okay, okay.” They got in the back. “What’s on the seat?” He wondered, trying to lean forward to see.

“Buckle your seatbelt, Hobi,” she ordered.

“I got it.” Yoongi buckled him in.

“…They’re cookies I made for Yoongi-oppa,” she said quietly. Yoongi blinked, and then a smile spread over his face.

“What? Hyung doesn’t deserve cookies,” Hoseok protested. “He threatened to murder me!”

“Yeah, cause he was saying dirty stuff about you again, Siljangnim,” Yoongi told her, without even hesitating. Hoseok gasped.

“Aish, you tattletale! Seriously?”

“While I appreciate you trying to defend my honor, or whatever, oppa, don’t murder him, that would be too much paperwork. Anyway, that stuff doesn’t bother me,” Aviva said. Yoongi and Hoseok looked at each other, and then her.

“Wait, really?” Yoongi said. “Why?”

“I grew up with Soonyoung, so I’ve been kind of… desensitized to that stuff?”

“Ah.” Both boys nodded. “That’s why your reactions are so amusing,” Hoseok figured. Aviva made a face.

“You know, both her and Taehyungie have said that before, I don’t get what I’m doing that’s so amusing.”

“Hmmm. Well, it’s similar to the satisfaction I feel when get Yoongi-yah or Tae Tae to react to things,” Hoseok told her. “They’ve got good poker faces, but they’re marshmallows on the inside.”

“Yeah,” Aviva agreed. “Cause he’s Suga.” Hoseok laughed as Yoongi groaned, a hint of a smile on his lips.

Later in the Bangtan Room, Jin was dressed oddly formal, in a suit.

“Seokjin-oppa,” Aviva started, but Hoseok interrupted her, pressing his finger to her lips.

“Shush. Just let enjoy the view for a moment.” He paused, tilting his head. “Eh, the moment has passed—why such a plain suit? That cut and color? So boring…”

“More importantly,” Aviva said. “Jin-oppa, you don’t have to do this in front of us, if it’s stressing you out too much.”

“Ha ha, of course not! I’m not stressed at all,” Jin said. “Why would you think that?”

“You’re standing as stiff as a board!” Aviva said.

“So…” Jin brushed his hair away from his face, ignoring her. “I’m going to do a three-line poem using my name.”

Aviva stared at him as he recited. “I don’t get it... did I lose something in translation?”

“No,” Hoseok told her. “It’s just not funny.”

“Yah!” Jin said, finally breaking from his robotic stance. “What do you mean?”

“It wasn’t fun at all,” Jungkook agreed, his nose wrinkling as he smiled slightly.

“It was hilarious,” Jimin disagreed. “But maybe not for the right reasons.”

“I’ve been thinking about the concept for these logs, but… do you think three-line poems are the right direction?” Namjoon wondered, tapping his chin.

“Not to mention the suit…” Yoongi added.

“Right?” Hoseok agreed.

“Is it too much?” Jin touched his lapel nervously. “I thought it would show I’m taking it seriously.”

“Aw, Jin-oppa, I really do appreciate the thought…” Aviva smiled at him gently. He smiled back at her. “But you should change.” He pouted.

“What about Tae?” Jin wondered as she started shepherding him out of the room. “He’s just been whispering into the mic!”

Aviva shrugged.

“Eh, some people like that kind of thing.”

That night, Aviva had just gotten home when her phone rang. It was Jin.

She answered. “Yes?”

“Ah, Aviva-yah? I was wondering, well, I think I need to get more used to being in front of a camera, so, I thought… maybe you could take some pictures of me?”

“…Like a photo shoot?”

“Did somebody say photo shoot?” Soonyoung wondered, popping up from the couch.

“Ah, it’s Jin-oppa,” Aviva told her.

“Oh? That oppa? Can you put him on speaker?”

“Um, oppa, do you mind if I put you on speaker?” Aviva asked him. “Soonyoung-ah wants to be included.”

“S-Soonyoung-ah?” He repeated. “Um… okay, sure.”

“Alright.” Aviva hit a button. “You’re on speaker. I think I know where she’s going with this, by the way. Soonie’s always liked dressing people up and taking pictures of them.”

“Well, yeah,” Soonyoung said. “It’s fun. But you never played with me!”

“I don’t like having my picture taken, and I don’t really like dressing up either, you know that,” Aviva said.

“Anyway, it would be fun to have such a handsome model,” Soonyoung thought.

“H-Handsome?” Jin said. “You’re too kind.” Aviva squinted at her phone, wondering at Jin’s sudden change in personality.

“You don’t mind people dressing you up, do you, Jin-oppa?” Soonyoung purred. “Since you’re gonna be an idol soon, hmmm?”

“Ah, no, I don’t mind,” Jin said, sounding like he wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

“Great!” Soonyoung said. “I’ve got some free time on my hands, so why don’t you meet me in the morning, that’s when the light will be best—ooh, ask Hobi to pick out a few outfits for you to bring, he’s good at that.”

“Okay, the ladies have arrived!” Soonyoung sang loudly, as they entered the dorm the next morning. She looked around. “Where is my model?”

“Ah, Soonyoung-noona,” Jimin smiled at her sleepily. He was still in his pajamas, sitting on the couch and playing a game on his phone, by the looks of it. “I heard there’s a photoshoot happening? Jin-hyung is in the kitchen, as usual.” Jimin pointed in the correct direction.

“Thanks, cutie.” Soonyoung leaned over and kissed his cheek before continuing on to the kitchen. Jimin’s face turned red.

“W-what?”

“…You haven’t really interacted with her much, have you?” Aviva realized.

“Ah, no, I’ve only met her a few times.”

Aviva nodded. “You get used to it,” she told him. Jimin looked doubtful. “Is Namjoon-ah in there too? He said he needed something.” Jimin nodded.

In the kitchen, Namjoon’s spoonful of cereal was frozen halfway to his mouth.

“What the hell are you doing here?” He said, eyes wide as he looked at Soonyoung.

“Joonie, I don’t remember saying you could address me so informally,” Soonyoung said, raising an eyebrow at him.

“Soonyoung-ssi,” Namjoon amended, putting his spoon down like he’d lost his appetite. “Could you please tell me... what the hell are you doing here?”

“Didn’t you hear me yesterday?” Hoseok wondered. “Jin-hyung’s having a photo shoot.” Namjoon’s eyebrows went up.

“With her?” He pointed at Soonyoung. Hoseok nodded. Namjoon patted the frozen stiff Jin on the shoulder. “Good luck, hyung. You’re gonna need it.”

Soon Soonyoung had left with Jin, somehow conscripting Jimin to help her, with Hoseok volunteering to go along.

“Do you think Jin-oppa has a crush on Soonie?” Aviva wondered as she sat with Namjoon, Jungkook, and Yoongi in the studio room. Jungkook and Yoongi were looking through a free-use video library for good meme clips to add Namjoon’s more serious than expected rap encouraging voting.

“What?” Namjoon stared at Aviva.

“She is hot,” Yoongi said, blunt as ever.

“Well…” Namjoon looked hesitantly at Aviva.

“She’s hot. She knows it, I know it, we all know it,” Aviva said, unconcerned.

“I guess,” Namjoon agreed reluctantly. “But I didn’t think Jin-hyung was the type to go for just looks.” He looked worriedly at Aviva again.

“It’s fine. I love her, including her personality, but I know she scares a lot of people,” Aviva said. Jungkook grimaced.

“She is a little scary.”

“Some people are into that,” Yoongi pointed out.

Jungkook’s eyes widened. “Jin-hyung is like that? Really?”

“We don’t know that,” Namjoon said, waving his hand. “And I never said I was scared of her.” Everyone looked at him in disbelief. “Okay, maybe I am a little scared of her…” Yoongi patted him on the shoulder.

“It takes a brave man to admit his fear,” he said. Namjoon smiled at him. “Which means Kookie is braver than you.” Namjoon frowned. Jungkook laughed. “Anyway, can we stop talking about this and get back to your video? I’m bored.”

As far as any of them could tell, Jin had survived the photo shoot. He was very quiet when he got back, but definitely more relaxed.

“These are actually great,” Namjoon admitted reluctantly, clicking through the photos of Jin on the studio desktop.

“Right?” Tae agreed. “The lighting and composition are gorgeous.”

“And the way she directs your eye to all these little details you’d normally miss is so cool,” Jungkook commented.

“…Did you both take photography in school?” Namjoon wondered.

“A bit!” Tae said.

“No.” Jungkook shook his head. “Just a personal interest.”

“Ah, you guys are constantly impressing me,” Namjoon said, patting both their heads at the same time. Tae smiled. Jungkook blushed.

“Okay,” Aviva said, walking into the room. “I got Jin-oppa to eat something and then sent him to bed.”

“Eat what?” Tae wondered.

“I picked fried chicken up as a treat,” Avi told them. “It’s in my office.”

“What?” Jungkook’s eyes widened. “Why didn’t you tell us earlier? It’s all gonna be gone.” He and Taehyung sped out of the room, though Namjoon stayed in his seat, frowning. Aviva sat next to him in Jungkook’s abandoned chair.

“Are you sure he’s alright?” Namjoon asked her.

Aviva nodded. “It’s just the Soonyoung after affect. I have seen it in many of her… um, objects of affections, over the years, even suffered it myself a couple of times.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hmm. She pays so much attention to you, it gets overwhelming,” Aviva explained. “It feels like she’s breaking you down and building you back up again stronger. She probably would’ve been a good manager… but she’s always been more interested in the technical side of things. She picked a broken old PS3 up off the street the other day and fixed it.” Namjoon made an impressed noise. “Don’t tell the boys, I don’t want them showing up at my apartment to play it at weird hours.”

“Got it,” he said.

That night, Aviva stayed in the studio to watch the vlogs on the desktop. Guilt stabbed at her chest when she saw Tae’s video in the queue. She should’ve told him what was said in that marketing meeting as soon as she saw him, but she knew it would hurt him. She was hoping to fight it somehow. Maybe if he’d made a really cute video it would convince the marketing team to retract their decision?

She clicked play, watching Tae excitedly brag about all the business cards various talent agencies had given him. There were some big names in there. Aviva leaned back in the chair, trying to untangle her feelings—the ones that came to the top were pride and possessiveness. She was proud that others saw how brightly Tae could shine, but she wanted to be the one to show everyone that light. But wasn’t that selfish? If she really wanted him to reach his dreams, shouldn’t she encourage him to strive forward, even if that meant alongside someone else...?

She sat back up, watching the video as Tae happily told the camera that he was already taken, and started making the cards into paper cranes. She smiled slightly.

“Manager-noona!”

She jumped as she felt someone’s hands on her shoulders.

“Kim Taehyung-ssi, are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

“Nope.” He was grinning. “But the guys don’t fall for that anymore, so you’re my best target!” She glared at him. He poked her cheek and cooed. “Even your glare is adorable!” She sighed, running her hand through her hair. She stared up at him, wondering how to break the news. He bit his lip, his playful expression turning into something she couldn’t read. “Ah, manager, why are you looking at me like that? That’s no fair!”

“Did you get taller?” She wondered absentmindedly, thinking she was having to crane her neck more than usual to look at him.

“Did I?” He wondered. “Stand up.” He took her hands in his, pulling her to her feet. Then he measured the distance from his head to hers and nodded thoughtfully. “The height gap has changed. It appears you’re correct, I am taller.” He smiled. “You’re so tiny, manager!”

“I’m really not...” Aviva automatically hugged her arms over her stomach.

“Well, maybe not all parts of you are small...” Tae glanced briefly at her chest and then blushed, moving his gaze to the ceiling. “But they are parts of you, and together they make up someone beautiful.” He booped her on the nose. “And cute.”

“I don’t agree, but thank you for the compliment,” she said stiffly.

Taehyung frowned. “I don’t do empty compliments.”

“I know. I have told you I admire your sincerity, Taehyungie.”

“Hmmm. You know, Jiminie doesn’t think he’s cute sometimes too, which is ridiculous, because he always is!” He tilted his head. “And I know I’m good looking, but sometimes people call me beautiful, like a few of those agents giving me business cards...” He pointed to himself on the screen. “And I’m not so sure how I feel about that.”

“Do you not want to be called beautiful?” Aviva wondered.

“I don’t know. Do you think I am?”

“Yes,” she said honestly.

He smiled. “Well, that makes me feel good, even if I’m not sure that’s exactly how I see myself... because you don’t give empty compliments either. Isn’t it amazing, noona, that no one sees things the same? You see me differently than I see myself when I look in the mirror. It’s like a painting, or a poem—we’re all art up to each other’s interpretation. I want to know more about how you see me, and I want to tell you more about how I see you.”

Aviva stared at him for a moment and then shook her head. “Tae, you are special, I’m sorry I can’t put it into such pretty, cheesy words as you do. There’s something else I have to tell you, and I don’t know where to start…”

“Would this help?” He held a crane out to her, which was made out of one of the biggest entertainment companies in the country. She swallowed. “I want to make a set of one hundred, but I want you to have the first one.”

“Are you planning on getting a hundred more offers?” Aviva wondered.

“Eh, maybe, if people keep calling me pretty,” he joked. He pointed at the video. “Will you post my video first?”

“I... I can’t,” she told him apologetically.

His brow furrowed. “Why not?”

She took a deep breath. “There was a marketing meeting earlier and they said, well, they want you to be a secret member.”

“Secret member?” He repeated.

“They don’t want to announce you until later. They know you’ll do well with the intended demographic and they’re hoping you’ll have even more of an impact if you come as a surprise,” she explained.

“I see...” He said slowly.

“So I’m not allowed to post any images of you online, but... I can fight it, if you want me to, Tae.”

He blinked at her. “Why would you do that?”

“Because you’re just as important a member of this group as any of the others, and I don’t want you to feel left out,” she said.

He smiled, a little sadly. “Thank you for offering, but I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble with your sunbaenims.” He wrapped his arms around her. “I’ll make it through.”

Instead of Tae’s video, Aviva launched the official Bangtan Youtube account with Namjoon’s ‘get out there and vote!’ rap as the first post.

The next day she launched their twitter page after talking to them about what kind of message they wanted to open with:

'What’s up! This is BTS. We’re finally officially opening our BTS Twitter~ *Clap Clap Clap* We will upload more weird and fun things that one could have only imagined about before our debut…’

Next was Soundcloud, which she opened with a solo song adaptations by Rap Monster and Suga.

To wrap up the year, all of the boys recorded a Christmas diss track together (except for Hoseok who was visiting family for the holidays). They called out themselves, Big Hit, Bang-PD, even Aviva.

“When do I ever sleep?” She wondered, glancing over the lyrics as they gathered in the studio.

“Well, we told you it was a diss track,” Namjoon said slowly.

“Besides, blame Jungkookie,” Jimin said. “He wrote that part.” Jungkook and Aviva squinted at each other.

“You need to sleep more,” he told her pointedly.

“That’s not what you make it sound like!” She argued. “You make it sound like I’m at home sleeping while you work to death!”

“Aish, just post the video already before we all grow old and die,” Yoongi groaned.

Although only Jin and Rap Monster were featured in the Youtube video Aviva and Yoongi did the editing for, Tae was still excited to hear his voice in the background. Aviva returned his warm hug and tried not to think too much about the glow of pride for the first posts wearing off and leaving them only with the strain of hard work.

#bts #fanfiction #kim taehyung #min yoongi #jung hoseok #bts x oc #bts world #idolverse #manager!oc #bts predebut #ot7

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andotherbiases · 4 years

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tips for new writers

Someone recently asked me if I had any writing advice for someone starting out and I thought I would share that here too, for anyone interested. As a note, I don’t know that I am the best person to ask, since I have no formal writing training and I’m also still learning. But here are some things I’ve picked up over the years that have been helpful:

1) get a beta reader. This was single-handedly the most important thing for me in growing as a writer. If you’re unfamiliar, there can be several people involved in the drafting/revising of your work. You are the writer, and then you have an alpha reader (you don’t always need one/can also be the alpha reader if you feel confident) - the alpha reader just looks at the draft and combs through for typos, grammar, weird sentence structure, etc. they DONT touch the story. That’s the job of the beta reader. The beta reader will look at the story and figure out if it “works” — they are great at pointing out plot holes or even just bouncing ideas off of.

I don’t use either an alpha or beta reader regularly now, but at the time having a beta reader really pushed me to think broadly and deeper about my writing. When I was working with my beta, I feel like that was where my writing had the most growth & made me feel confident in my writing.

The tricky part is getting a beta that you feel you can trust and whose abilities you can trust. Sometimes people just want to read your stuff and won’t give you good feedback, so you have to shop around.

2) even if you do use an alpha reader— proofread, proofread, proofread! I personally feel that if a story has so many typos then it distracts from the story because then readers focus on the words rather than what you’re trying to ~say. (I personally hate proofreading so I’ve had to train myself to do it)

3) nothing will be perfect the first time you write it. Your first draft can just be to get the story out of you. You can go back and edit and revise and make it better later, so don’t get discouraged if, in your first attempt, the story doesn’t sound “right.” First drafts are meant to be shit.

4) that being said, write many many drafts. Each draft will be better than the last! Personally, I tend to try and write the full thing first, sometimes focusing on passages that are clearer to me than others, but if I can get the story out first, then I can see if/how it all works together. Then I go back and focus on making cuts/edits for flow and clarification and combing through to fix grammar and language and making it feel polished and pretty(?) lol.

5) be kind to yourself. Writing is really hard and difficult, and I don’t know anyone who says otherwise—even published authors and the best fic authors. You’re on your own journey with it, so try not to compare your work with anyone else. As much as writing is difficult, it is also very personal. Your writing is your own, and your relationship with writing is your own. Be kind to yourself.

#on writing #fic writing

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sinceileftyoublog · 3 years

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Gretchen Lieberum Interview: Eerie Nostalgia

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Singer-songwriter Gretchen Lieberum wanted to make an album of standards while totally subverting your preconception of what that sounded like. With This May Only Be A Dream, which came out Friday, she succeeds, in both capturing the magic of old recordings and performance styles while talking full advantage of the time-bending quality of modern production. In BAFTA-winning composer Keefus Ciancia, Lieberum picked the perfect partner. After singing over piano, she sent what were basically demos to Ciancia, who removed the piano, deconstructing and reconstructing the songs to then be rerecorded with session musicians. The result shares the ambition of something like Julia Holter’s version of “Hello Stranger” but over a whole album. Album opener “Come Rain or Come Shine”, which has been recorded by Ray Charles, Billie Holliday, and Chet Baker, combines lurking, fluttering woodwinds with reverb-laden vocals and chaotic orchestration. On “Blue Skies”, a song that you expect to build up with drums, strings, and chorus, like in a climax scene in a Hollywood epic, the strings cut in and out, toying with your perception. While there are some songs that sound familiar, like the Fiona Apple-esque percussive clatter of “Angel Eyes” or the solemn, quiet closer “While We’re Young”, the back-and-forth between subtlety and Technicolor orchestration keeps you on your toes.

A couple months ago, I spoke with Lieberum from her home in L.A. and Ciancia from his in France about how the album was constructed, their approach to recording, and how they would describe the music. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: So this seriously just started with you singing over piano, Gretchen?

Gretchen Lieberum: I have a friend who has a studio in his house. I wanted to do an album of standards for years and years. It’s just an idea I’ve had I couldn’t let go of. I wanted to do an album of these songs but interpreted in an unusual way, not acoustic bass, drums, piano, and that’s it. I’ve known Keefus for years, and he was the only guy I wanted for the job. So I waited years and years, and finally, the timing was right to start working on it. I’d just record vocals with my friend Peter at his studio playing piano, which is great because I do much better in low pressure situations. If I’m in a big fancy studio, I’m like, “Oh god, how much is this costing?” It’s hard for me to be emotional and in the moment. I was just able to go to my friend’s house and record any song that popped into my head or I was feeling. I would send them to Keefus, and he would pick his faves. I think I recorded maybe 25 songs in all, and we ended up with 10.

Keefus Ciancia: The most important part is what Gretchen said--the comfort zone that Gretchen was in where she could get to the feel and heart of the song, comfortably with Peter. He’s an amazing piano player, and they had such a good rhythm that everything I was getting made it so that it was just real. It felt right. That was always fun to be able to open these and also have total separation, pick out Peter’s stuff and start reimagining things, erasing the chords. Gretchen was on fire! She was knocking them out. A lot of great pieces I’ve never heard, too, which I really enjoyed. Maybe that was good for me, too, to not know those standards as well so I wasn’t trapped in the chords. Maybe my lameness of being a hack--I wanted to be a jazz player but I couldn’t do it! [laughs]

GL: That’s what’s so great. I didn’t want a jazz guy to produce it. That’s what ended up happening--he would choose his own chords underneath the melodies that were really interesting and cool.

SILY: Did you know he was gonna remove the piano?

GL: Oh yeah. I know Keefus’s aesthetic and how he works, so I was like, “I’m gonna send you this, have fun, go to town.” I sent him literally zero notes and never knew what I was gonna get back. There’d be a song that’s a stark ballad that would come back with a full orchestra, some of the tempo sped up, some of it slowed down. Different lines chopped up into different places. Quite a few times, I’d take the song and rerecord the vocal to go with what Keefus did, to emotionally match what he created. Sometimes not--the song “Come Rain or Come Shine” was one take I did at Peter’s house and didn’t change at all.

SILY: How did you whittle down from the initial list of 25 songs for this record?

GL: This project was so much about emotion and love and love of these songs. What songs I loved singing and what was inspiring me. I grew up in a house where jazz was constantly playing. My father wasn’t a musician but a huge fan. It was a big part of my life growing up. I was in the jazz band as a singer in high school. These are songs I’ve known my whole life. There were some that I tried that I didn’t feel that I didn’t send to Keefus.

There are a few that aren’t jazz standards, too. We do a Beach Boys song, which is also a song that I love.

SILY: They’re standards nonetheless, independent of genre.

GL: Yes.

SILY: What made you want to release “Come Rain or Come Shine” as the first single and open with it?

GL: It’s just one of my favorites. One of the ones I’m most proud of. It’s indicative of the project as a whole. It’s a standard I approach traditionally from how I’m singing it, but there are these surreal flourishes around it. Also, I mean, what an intro, that [screams] “Ahhh!”

KC: I agree.

SILY: What was the process of getting the session musicians in after Keefus worked on the songs?

KC: Basically, it was kind of known all the way through that once we got these bodies we’d get some more breath and air on it to get more of the quality Gretchen and I love from old 50′s recordings but also taking it somewhere new. That studio is now closed--Vox Studios--such an amazing place that was perfect for that record. It was the first commercial studio in Hollywood through Paramount.

GL: It was the longest continuously running studio in the world, I read.

KC: Someone will move in, I’m sure. Woody [Jackson], who owns it, there was no rebuilding the rooms because they sounded so good from how they were built in the 40′s. The room is amazing, and his engineer Michael Harris is incredible. He was the first one to get his ears on this stuff besides Gretchen and I. To be able to put it in a room, listen through a different system, warm things up for his outboard gear. We had some of our favorite musicians. It wasn’t a ton of folks, but the dream scenario where we had 5 days and a rolling, “Get moving”. The next day, Gretchen sings, then some more people come in.

GL: Jay Bellerose is so damn good. So tasty. He just goes in and does his thing.

KC: His heart breathes all the old jazz but he’s also someone who likes to keep pushing things. I think that was the trick with us--we always want to hear something new. Of course, there are some things that sound great that you should do again, but we all listen to music so much you just want something new. Sometimes, you have to make it yourself.

SILY: The album does sound new even though it has older reference points, both the songs themselves and aesthetically. A lot of older jazz tunes with woodwinds and fluttery strings have something eerie and disorienting about them. Thinking about a track like “Blue Skies”, when the sound cuts in and out. That’s not something you hear on traditional “standards” records. To what extent were you trying to achieve that eerie nostalgia?

GL: I think “eerie nostalgia”’s just our M.O., you know? [laughs]

KC: I like that, eerie nostalgia.

GL: I don’t even think we try.

SILY: “For All We Know” starts out with quiet plucks of string but ends up a swinging jazz tune, the moment on here that’s the most “traditional.”

GL: Even on that one, it’s funny because our friend David Ralicke, who plays the horns on everything--he’s incredible and has such great taste. But this one, I was like “Keefus, I don’t know.” Keefus was like, “It’s gotta get big. It’s gotta be a party at the end, an explosion!” Ralicke, he sent a bunch of horns. When he sent them in, they were very bright and intense, and I was like, “Oh god, this is a little weird!” Keefus was like, “Don’t worry, I’m gonna make it weird and demented.” It is traditional, but something about the way it’s mixed or the added affects give it that eeriness, which I love.

One thing Keefus often did that was really surprising to me was there were songs I sent as straight ballads, like this one. If you listen to the lyrics, the first half is like, “Who knows what’s gonna happen? Life is so uncertain.” But then it’s like, “Who cares? Tomorrow may never come.” And it’s a celebration. It’s one of my favorite songs now after being most uncertain about it at first. Keefus, you sent me Frank Sinatra, Jr. singing “Black Knight” [as a reference]. It starts as a ballad and explodes, an emotional outburst.

SILY: Is there any other specific track on here you think is a standout?

KC: Each one is such a little episode, that even that was tricky to put in order for the record. It almost would have been interesting to go old school and release 45s, make each one of them a single and B-side. When you hear “Wild Is The Wind”, on my radio, I would make that a single. It’s totally different than the others. It’s not this powerhouse. But if I bought it as a single, I would think it’s a really beautiful single. Same with “Who Knows Where The Time Goes”. That’s on Keefus & Gretchen radio. [laughs]

GL: “Who Knows Where The Time Goes” was the very first song Keefus did. It was the only vocal recorded at my house, with a different friend in my dining room, with a little laptop mic set up. We used that vocal. It’s a pretty special one, and genre-defying. “Wild Is The Wind” fits comfortably in the jazz section. Or not--I don’t know. It’s a weird question. One of the things I hate more than anything is when I’m uploading my music and it asks you to pick a category. I don’t know. I hate picking a category. Nothing feels quite right, and it feels like a mixture of all of these things.

KC: Gretchen is a huge jazz fan listening for a long time, but jazz records strayed from her and my tastes as it went along. Jazz records went on a different road and started getting not such a punk rock vibe. It was a classy thing, not so underground. That was one thing we were talking about when finishing the record. We think it should be heard by all age groups and invite them to learn these pieces because they might not have the chance to learn them as often. To pick a genre can really be dangerous for all artists because there are a ton of artists that like a ton of different music and can make a ton of different music and change their records as they go. That was big, too: approaching this apart from being a jazz record and bringing in new listeners. Gretchen and I don’t know exaxctly how this works with the tagging on Spotify, but if you put “jazz” on it, does that mean other people will never listen to it?

GL: I don’t think it is a jazz album. It’s an album of standards, but I wouldn’t call it a jazz album.

KC: I like to call it torched songs instead of torch songs.

SILY: What was the overall approach to the sequencing?

GL: I really pulled my hair out. I was crying myself to sleep at night. It was hard. One thing we ended up doing, which was Keefus’s idea, was he felt like the A-side of the record leaned themselves more to samples and surreal electronic elements. Keefus was like, “Once you get sucked into the album, the vibe is very complementary, and you can take people anywhere.” So after the first 4-5 songs, “Wild is the Wind” comes, which is a stripped down ballad. From then, you’re just on the ride.

SILY: What was the inspiration behind the album title?

GL: I had this idea of taking a line from one of the songs as the album title. I went through all the songs and went through some of my favorite lines. At one point, I thought I was gonna call it “How Blue The Sky” which is from the last song, “While We’re Young.” But then I thought “This May Only Be A Dream” felt really good with the dreaminess of this music and the somewhat surreal journey it takes you on. One thing I’m really proud of about the record is it takes you on an emotional journey from start to finish. I know the kids don’t listen to albums anymore. Peter was one of the people I sent it to, and he said, “I feel like I watched a film listening to this album.” That felt right.

SILY: What’s the story behind the cover art?

GL: Keefus’s daughter Raven [Violet Ciancia-Vincent] is a really talented visual video artist. She’s the one that directed the video for “Come Rain or Come Shine.” We made a video for the song “Don’t Explain”, and that’s just a still from the video. She layers things like a collage, so there’s a video of me with fireworks on top of it. When I was trying to come up with something to make the cover, I took a bunch of stills from the video, and that one jumped out at me, especially with the title, This May Only Be A Dream. I just thought it really worked beautifully together. The font, to me, is a throwback to the Blue Note covers. I know a lot of people do Blue Note covers, so I wanted to do a little nod to it without fully going there.

SILY: Are you planning on doing any shows?

GL: When we do end up playing live again--Keefus, I should probably talk to you about what the hell you think I should do--but some of it would be laptop-tracked songs with live bass or drums on top of it. That’s possible, right, Keefus?

KC: I would dream of a full-on 10-to-12 piece orchestra. For a special show in Los Angeles, and when everything explodes, a special show in New York and Paris. I think you could get the right band, and it’s all completely playable.

GL: Maybe a keyboard player adding samples.

KC: Do you play, Jordan? Gretchen’s looking for band members.

SILY: I don’t.

GL: Show me ya stuff, kid! [laughs]

SILY: What else is next for you?

GL: My husband [filmmaker Jacob Aaron Estes] ended up doing an alternate video for “Don’t Explain” that we’re gonna release that I’m pretty excited about. The other thing that I do--which is a totally other universe--is my Prince cover band with Maya Rudolph. I hope we start playing again. That would be great. I am glad, though, that I had so much time to focus on my own music. As much as I love doing Princess, it’s not totally me. I want to really focus on this for a while.

KC: I’m doing Pringles commericals. [laughs] I’ve been working on a bunch of shows and some records and a new soundtrack for a show [Made For Love]. I’ve made a lot of music during the last year and a half. There’s some fun stuff coming up. I’ll start a new Unloved record when our band is allowed to fly over here.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading that’s caught your attention?

GL: My mind just went utterly blank. [laughs] Utterly. I’ve been reading a lot of weird dystopian future stuff to distract my anxiety about the dystopian future stuff we’re dealing with in real life. Reading it calms my nerves.

KC: I watched the Bee Gees documentary [How Can You Mend a Broken Heart] the other night on HBO. I thought it was beautiful. They just touch those places, when you hear those voices.

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theres-no-protocol-for-this · 3 years

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Kitties Afoot

At some point, this started a discussion about Murderbot in the present as a cat. It has since become something else entirely, and I don’t regret a thing. So, I guess, stary kitty meets almost-stray human.

There’s more written, but I haven’t edited the rest and I’m not sure I trust Tumblr with anything longer.

I came home to find a giant, scrawny feline curled up on my front porch. The black and gray creature lay on top of the welcome mat with its paws tucked under its shivering body. It looked huge for a cat but not big enough for a mountain lion, and it didn’t look like a kitten. The strange animal was malnourished; as I approached, I could count the poor baby’s ribs with each shuddering breath it took.

“Shit,” I whispered and checked my phone.

It was well into the evening and getting colder outside with each passing moment. The kitty looked up when I got to my front steps. Bright blue eyes stared at me as the creature scrunched up, making itself as small as possible.

“Hey, it’s all right,” I said as soothingly as I could. “I won’t hurt you. Let me get you inside before the weather turns nasty.”

Not that I thought the cat would understand me, but I was used to talking to animals. Before Tasha had passed away earlier that year, I had always had pets at home. I’d spoken to the family dog as a child and to my ex-boyfriend’s two ferrets. And, of course, Tasha the Princess never shut up. Most days, I still woke up expecting to find her dozing on my head.

I set my backpack on the ground, slipped out of my sweater, and wrapped the warm clothing around the shivering kitty. It tried to claw me through the thick fabric but didn’t get very far, though I caught a good look at its sharp talons. I held it in my arms and did my best to navigate the front door. The cat must’ve weighed twenty pounds, but it was probably all muscle and grump.

Inside, I set it down on a folded blanket on the couch and went looking for a heating pad. September was a little early to be getting out the winter stuff. Still, the kitty wouldn’t stop shivering, and I wanted to warm it up as quickly as possible.

The furball stayed put and watched me from its new comfortable perch. Its sleek fur was pitch black, the color of raven wings, but its paws were gray, as was its stomach. I couldn’t tell if the cat was male or female, and I wasn’t going to peek between its legs to find out.

Once I had the heating pad in place, I put a couple of Tasha’s bowls on the coffee table and scooted the table right up to the couch. From here, the kitty had to only shift its weight to reach the water and wet cat food. Everything about the situation was weird, from the cat’s knowing glances to the constant reminders that Tasha was gone.

I scrolled through my contacts and found the phone number of a family veterinarian. It was too late to call Dr. Hopkins now, but I sent him a quick message and asked for an urgent appointment. If the kitty survived the night, and I had a sneaking suspicion the grumpy monster wasn’t going down without a fight, it would need medical attention.

The cat shifted restlessly on its pile of blankets, so I turned on the television. Tasha had loved those stupidly endless videos on YouTube where the camera was trained on a tree stump where birds came to feed. This cast couldn’t care less. It didn’t even notice the TV until I turned on a food documentary episode on Netflix.

I went to make myself a snack in the kitchen and noticed the cat half watching me and half paying attention to whatever it saw on the television. Like I said, weird cat.

My home is tiny, a two-story townhome with an unfinished basement that occasionally floods. I’d gotten lucky with the place; I’d been sharing it with a roommate who suddenly had to move cross-country, and she paid for her share of the mortgage for three months. And then I’d found a decent manager job at a local cafe that let me keep the place.

I hummed while puttering around the kitchen. It was too late for a proper dinner, and I wasn’t hungry anyway. And I couldn’t drink coffee that late in the evening, not if I planned to get any sleep. The kitty drank some water from the closest bowl and then closed its eyes.

Asleep, it could almost pass for a house cat.

Up close, though, there was no mistaking that it was a wild creature. Its ears followed my motions even while it dozed. I turned up the heater for the night and then sat on the other side of the couch, giving the strange feline plenty of space. To my surprise, it stretched out a bit once I was sitting down like it didn’t mind the company so long as said company kept a respectable distance.

***

I don’t remember falling asleep on the couch, but that’s where I woke up the following morning. I sat pressed against one of the couch’s plush arms, legs tucked under me. There was a blanket draped over me that I didn’t remember grabbing. The strange cat lay curled up a few inches from my left foot; I could swear it was purring slightly.

As soon as I moved, uncurling my stiff legs, it got up and jumped off the couch. Standing next to the coffee table, it was apparent just how big it was for a feline. It trotted over to the front door like it owned the place. Standing on its back paws, the cat had no trouble reaching the handle, though it didn’t have the thumbs needed to operate it.

I stood up, followed it, and opened the door for it. “You’re pretty smart for a kitty,” I said as it jumped out onto the front porch. “You gonna be OK, little guy?”

“Meow,” said the cat and vanished into the bushes next to the porch steps.

“Bye, kitty!”

I went back inside but didn’t close the front door. It seemed stupid in retrospect. What kind of person leaves the door open for anyone to stroll inside? But it was Friday and my one day off, so I made coffee in the kitchen and texted with my mother. And maybe hoped that my feline companion might return.

My mother lives halfway across the country in a memory care facility. I can’t say I love my mother — that would be a bald faced lie — but we still text occasionally. I know that my stepfather is taking good care of her, and I love him dearly.

That morning, she was showing off a watercolor painting that she’d created that week. She told me she’d never been to the beach before, and I had to put the phone down for ten minutes before I could answer. Mom and I had vacationed at the beach every year while Dad was still alive. She’d painted a sunset over those turbulent waters.

Sniffling, I cradled my mug and tried not to let the tears fall. I should’ve known better by then, but it still stung every time.

I was still struggling to keep my composure when I heard the sound of claws on the linoleum. Tasha had loathed coming into the kitchen because it wasn’t carpeted, and the drama queen just hadn’t liked the feel of it under her little kitty feet.

Giant Cat had no such compunctions. It stood a few feet out of reach, watching me with those soulful eyes until I had to look away. Sniffling, I rubbed at my face and forced myself to smile.

“Hey there, furball. Back for more food?”

“Meow.”

I opened a can of wet food — if I was going to feed this beast, I would need to get more immediately — and poured the contents into a bowl. After setting the bowl on the floor, I stepped away from it and perched on a counter, watching the cat.

I walked over to the bowl, sniffed at it a few times, and then devoured the food like it was starving. When it was done, it licked its lips and, in one mighty leap, jumped onto the counter. Where it sat down and nuzzled the toaster.

Tasha had never mastered the art of climbing on the furniture. Anything taller than a couch had warranted a loud, obnoxious mew until I came over and picked her up. Not this cat. It seemed perfectly capable of getting up to wherever the fuck it wanted.

“How about a trip to the vet?” I asked. “Just to make you’re not all scratched up inside.”

“Hiss,” said the cat.

I rolled my eyes and giggled. “Not a fan of vets, huh?”

“Hiss.”

“Right.” I finished my coffee in three big gulps. “Of course not. Though, to be honest, I’m not a huge fan of doctors, either.” Mom had seen so many doctors after she’d first gotten sick that I loathed the smell of disinfectant now.

Kitty jumped off the counter after sniffing at the coffee maker and my box of tea samples and went exploring. Like it owned the place, it wandered into the laundry room and then up the stairs into my bedroom. I rinsed out my coffee mug and followed it, curious to see what it might do next.

About half an hour later, the cat decided that it had sniffed at those things it deemed essential and returned to the living room. Hopping onto the couch, it settled on top of the blanket pile and stared between me and the television.

“Seriously?” I asked, choking back laughter.

I’d never heard of a cat that liked watching Netflix. Tasha had mostly enjoyed shows with bird noises or where things moved. Sometimes, the princess would randomly attack the TV like she hoped to catch whatever she was looking at. Meanwhile, this cat meowed at me unhappily when I turned on a bird video and didn’t stop until it saw the Netflix logo. Then, it focused on whatever action flick began playing and snuggled further into the warm blankets.

“Seriously,” I muttered again, quietly, and stood there by the banister, shaking my head.

My weird companion spent the next few hours chilling in front of the TV. Its ears would occasionally perk up when a truck passed by, but mostly it watched the show. Have you ever seen a cat watch television? Because, up until this point, I hadn’t. And I wasn’t sure what to think.

Doing chores proved somewhat tricky when I kept casting furtive glances toward the strange creature. It paid me no heed, but somehow, it seemed to know when I watched it with blatant curiosity. Like, my previous pets had been… pets. This hissy weirdo, meanwhile, was something else entirely.

Eventually, I decided that I needed to get groceries and more cat food, and generally get out of the house for a little while. During a nice, long shower, I convinced myself that I was crazy, and there was nothing weird about the kitty in my living room. Then, I came back downstairs and found the kitty nuzzling the TV remote and decided that I didn’t care.

“Wanna watch something else?” I asked.

The cat looked up at me. “Meow.”

It took me a moment to actually look at the TV and realize that the action movie had ended while I was upstairs. Kitty apparently just wanted something else to start playing. Right. Totally normal right there.

“I need to go out for a while,” I said while scrolling through the Netflix menus. The rest came out before I could think too hard about speaking to a wild animal. “I need to pick up groceries. And cat food. And honestly, I’ve worked twelve-hour shifts for the last week and a half, and I’m ready to see something other than more walls.

“So, let’s get something nice and long started, OK? So you don’t get bored while I’m out. I’m not too keen on leaving the front door open, but the back door’s not locked — I know, I know, bad habit — and you can probably just reach the handle. It’s the pull-down kind.”

“Meow.”

I turned on some kind of drama that promised at least fifteen hours of episodes. “Well, anyway. I’ll be back in a while. Tuna or chicken?”

“Meow meow.”

“Chicken it is.” I was still talking to a cat. Maybe I missed Tasha more than I’d thought. “See you later, kitty.”

#fanfic #of what i don't know #kitties afoot

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lingthusiasm · 4 years

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Transcript Episode 41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 41 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about tense and how different languages talk about time. But first, we are very excited to announce the launch of the Lingthusiasm LingComm Grant.

Gretchen: Yes. When we started this podcast, we were fortunate to be in a position where we could put some of our own money into the project to get us off the ground until our lovely patrons started coming in.

Lauren: Now we’re in a position where we want to pay it forward, and we want to help the next generation of awesome pop linguistics projects find their feet. We’re giving out a $500 US grant to a project that helps communicate linguistics to a new audience.

Gretchen: With your help, if we reach 800 patrons by May 1st, we can give out three of these grants. We’re really looking forward to seeing the applications come in. Applications are due June 1st. You can see more details about the LingComm grant and how to apply on our website. We’ll link to it from the show notes. It’s lingcomm.org – two Ms in “comm.”

Lauren: We know that some of you may be really passionate about the idea of there being more linguistics communication projects out in the world but don’t have the time or the expertise. If you really want to help support us in the LingComm grants, we’ve created a new tier at the Patreon called “Phil-ling-thropist.” For every person who supports us at $50.00 or more at that level, we’ll drop the number of patrons that we need to meet the three-grant goal down by 10. You will be as effective at 10 other patrons.

Gretchen: Don’t feel like you need to do this, but if you’re somebody who has a real job and this isn’t a lot of money to you, then this is an interesting thing to do with it. We’ll also send you a Lingthusiast mug after three months at this tier, so you can share your lingthusiasm that way.

Lauren: Of course, patrons at any level will help us meet the 800-patron goal to give out three grants.

Gretchen: If you’re also excited about showing off that you’re a lingthusiast, we also have a new sticker that says, “Lingthusiast, a person that’s enthusiastic about linguistics,” which we’ve added to the $15.00 level on Patreon. Go check out the Patreon. We have new stuff there!

Lauren: Speaking of the stuff at the Patreon, we now have a Discord server for all our Ling-thusiast and above tiers, which is the first Discord server I’ve ever been on. I’m learning a lot.

Gretchen: It’s been really fun to see people join so quickly because there’re actually a lot of people who are already joined and are chatting about things like interesting linguistics links that you come across, conlanging, learning languages, linguistics memes – we even have a channel where you can talk to each other in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which was a fun challenge – and other interesting linguistics things that you come across around the internet.

Lauren: Lots of different channels. All very lingthusiastic – typing, chat. I feel like it definitely has an old-days-of-the-internet-user-group vibe that makes me really happy.

Gretchen: It’s been really fun to start hanging out there. I think people are really enjoying that. Join us in the Discord!

Lauren: Our current bonus for patrons is bonus content from our interview with Janelle Shane in which we walk through creating a Lingthusiasm bot that generates Lingthusiasm transcripts. We walked through that in detail, and then we read some of our favourites.

Gretchen: If you would like to hear what Lingthusiasm would sound like if it were written by a neural net who is very enthusiastic but doesn’t really know that much about actual linguistics but finds some keywords sometimes, you can check that out. Definitely stay tuned for the part towards the end where we prompt the neural net with both Lingthusiasm and Harry Potter fan fiction. You get the most magical Lingthusiasm episode ever.

Lauren: This and 35 other bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Okay, Gretchen, I’m gonna do some real-life sentence elicitation so we can look at some examples of how tense works with time. Are you ready if I give you a bit of a prompt?

Gretchen: Sure. Let’s go.

Lauren: Tell me about something that happened yesterday in the past.

Gretchen: I’m walking down the street yesterday, and I see this bird, right? This bird starts coming towards me.

Lauren: Okay. I am definitely gonna ask you about the rest of that story later, but for now, can I have an example of something that’s happening or could be happening right now in the present?

Gretchen: Well, let’s pretend that I’m not just literally recording this podcast with you because that’s a little bit too meta. Let’s say I’m just sitting at home right now, and I’m eating a delicious cake, and you’re drinking a cup of tea.

Lauren: Mmm. Right. I might need to go get a cup of tea. Before I do that, let’s have an example of something that is going to happen later in the future.

Gretchen: I’m going to the airport tomorrow, fly out to Rome at 10:00. We arrive the next morning, and then –

Lauren: Are you going to Rome tomorrow?

Gretchen: No. No, I’m not. It’s just the first place that I thought of. I’m not going anywhere.

Lauren: But, man, now I want a cup of tea and pizza.

Gretchen: One of the things that I think is really interesting about these examples is that because I’m a bit of your confederate in this experiment, shall I say.

Lauren: Yeah. This is not naturalistic data at all.

Gretchen: Because I’ve been briefed. One of the things that I was able to do is I was able to talk about something that happened yesterday and something that’s happening right now and something that is gonna happen tomorrow, but I was actually able to use the same forms of the verb for all of them. Let’s do a little rewind.

Lauren: Right. In the past, you used the verb –

Gretchen: “I’m walking down the street. I see this bird.”

Lauren: Present.

Gretchen: “I’m sitting at home. I’m eating a delicious cake.”

Lauren: Future.

Gretchen: “I’m going to the airport. We fly out to Rome.”

Lauren: I think the answer is that the relationship between tense and time is not as straightforward as we might think it is. We don’t have a past tense that is always used with past events.

Gretchen: Right. Normally, if you’re in a Ling 101 class and we’re talking about tense – or you’re in a language class and you’re talking about tense – and the definition that everyone gives about tense is, “Well, it means time.” It kind of does, but it also kind of doesn’t. This is the complexity that we’re gonna be trying to unravel for the rest of this episode.

Lauren: We have something that’s happening with grammar. We’re gonna call that tense. We have something that is happening with the flow of time that’s in the real world – where there is language being spoken or not – time is still ticking on. I mean, we’ve talked about how to conceptualise time in an earlier episode, but just thinking about the flow of time and then tense as a grammatical construct that relates to it but doesn’t perfectly map onto it.

Gretchen: What I was able to do in this experiment is I was able to use the English present tense to talk about actions in the past, and in the present, and in the future. What’s interesting is that – so English has another tense, which is the past tense, and I can’t quite do all three of these things with the past tense.

Lauren: Give me an example of the future with the past tense.

Gretchen: “I sat at home right now” is problematic. That has some tension there. It gets really tricky if I wanna say, “I went to the airport tomorrow.” That – hmm, no.

Lauren: I definitely don’t have that as a valid utterance in this real world, no time travelling sense of how language works.

Gretchen: Putting time travel aside, this is not how English works. Many linguists talk about English as having two tenses – past and non-past. What this means is that the non-past tense is the one that I can use to talk about any time space and the past tense I can only use to talk about the past. That’s why I’m able to say, “I walked down the street yesterday,” but not, “I sat at home right now” or “I went to the airport tomorrow” because the past tense is really restricted but the non-past tense can be in any of these times.

Lauren: It also speaks to something that I think sometimes people find a bit confronting about studying linguistics, which is that the way that they’re taught the idea of grammar in English language classes or in grammar classes is that we have a past, present, and future. But from a linguistic analysis, English is treated as a language with a past and non-past distinction. The non-past includes present and future constructions.

Gretchen: And sometimes this weird version of the past that’s used for storytelling purposes. Many kinds of past in English you do actually wanna use the past tense, but there’s this one very specific storytelling thing where you can use the present – or more accurately, the non-past – even in something that happened in the past to make it seem more vivid and more relevant to a particular current time. You’d have a harder time saying something like, “The Norman conquest of English happens in 1066.” That would be a harder sell for English. You’d really wanna say, “happened,” there. You could say, I guess, “William the Conqueror comes across the English Channel, right? And he’s got this big ship.” There, you’re using the present to make it very vivid.

Lauren: I feel so much more compelled when you use that present in past.

Gretchen: That makes it seem very vernacular, very storytelling-y. I’m doing this casual thing where you’re not gonna see that in a traditional history textbook, but you might see it in a fun, vivid history podcast type thing.

Lauren: I was kind of surprised when I took an English grammar linguistics subject just how many different grammatical constructions around tense there are in the English because I had this very simple idea that there was a past, present, future – done, done, done – and it’s like, “Ah, this is why the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is such a massive book” because I hadn’t really thought about the fact that the tense that you use in that narrative past using the present form is – the time is in the past but the tense is not just using a past tense.

Gretchen: This is why it’s useful to have – why not just call it “time” if tense just means “time”? Why not just say “time”? Well, it’s because there’s actually this difference in that the tense refers to specifically a thing that is done in the shape of a language can be somewhat independent from what’s actually going on in the world that you’re referring to, as in the case where you use the present to talk about the past. It doesn’t somehow make it the past. What about the future? Because, Lauren, it seems like English, we can definitely talk about the future.

Lauren: There are forms that I can talk about like, “I will go” – well, I won’t go to Rome – but “I will go to Rome tomorrow” or “I’m going to go to Rome tomorrow.” I can do that for “tomorrow” in a way that I can’t do it for “yesterday.” There’s something happening there.

Gretchen: The analysis of this in English is that “will” and “gonna” are treated like other types of things where you can add these sort of semi-verbs. If I wanted to say, “I can go to Rome,” “I might go to Rome,” “I wanna go to Rome,” “I have to go to Rome,” “I will go to Rome,” “I’m gonna go to Rome” – all of these are the category of “modals,” but we’re not gonna get into the terminology here – all of this category of, “Here’s this additional word that you can add that adds this additional information.” Sometimes, that’s a time-related piece of information. But sometimes that has to do with desires or possibilities or other types of additional meaning. That’s not how English talks about tense. English tense generally is something that’s part of the verb itself, whereas this is this additional word that gets added. It’s less obligatory in the future because it’s a lot more legit to say, “I fly to Rome tomorrow,” and “I will fly to Rome tomorrow,” and “I’m gonna fly to Rome tomorrow.” All of these are pretty good. Whereas, this case of “I’m walking down the street yesterday” is really this very one limited context. With “I fly to Rome tomorrow,” there’s a lot more places where you can use that. You don’t have to do this thing with “will.” You have these other options like “gonna” or just using the non-past form of the verb.

Lauren: There’s something about obligatoriness when it comes to tense.

Gretchen: It kind of reminds me of – remember the episode where we talked about evidentiality and how some languages you have to indicate the source of evidence that you have for something and other languages you can indicate the source of evidence, but you don’t have to?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: There’s this similar thing going on with tense where, in some contexts, you have to indicate this piece of time information – or in some languages – and in other contexts you don’t have to indicate this time information.

Lauren: For English, it’s a language where evidentiality is completely optional. You can add some words to express a phenomenon. Then tense, especially with the past/present distinction, is obligatory.

Gretchen: Mostly obligatory. I think everything is a continuum, right?

Lauren: Yeah. I definitely am always wary of anyone who has discrete and absolute categories for things because every time you’re like, “It’s obligatory,” you’ll find a context in English like that narrative present where you’re like, “Oh, no! It’s broken my brain.” Whereas, if you take a “Let’s just look at what the language is doing and build up our analysis,” it causes a lot less existential anxiety.

Gretchen: That’s the other thing about looking at what a language is doing is that it’s often useful to look at it internally based on whatever this language does in really unambiguous cases where it’s tense. That’s what we can use as our diagnostic for these more ambiguous cases. If English didn’t have past tense either, then maybe we would say that “will” was a future tense. But because English does this thing with suffixes generally or irregular forms of the verb to be past, then we can say, “Well, ‘will’ is clearly doing that’s different from that and it seems like it makes more sense if we group ‘will’ in with ‘can’ and ‘might’ and ‘should,’ rather than grouping ‘will’ in with the past ‘-ed’ ending.

Lauren: I think that’s fair enough to start with the examples of what we have that are people are very strongly expressing their reliable feelings about the grammar – and work up from there. There’s a quote that says this really pithily, which is, “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey,” which is from Roman Jakobson in a 1959 book.

Gretchen: That’s really pithy because it lets us say, “Well, languages can all talk about time or they can all talk about sources of evidence but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they all have tense or they all have evidentiality because those are the grammatical reflexes of those things in the real world.”

Lauren: Just as we talked about English not having grammatical evidentiality, we have languages that don’t have grammatical marking of tense. The thing I find interesting about these examples is when we don’t have something – English speakers are like, “Well, of course we can get by without evidentiality,” and then it’s a bit more of a leap for someone who’s used to speaking a language with grammatical tense imagining speaking a language without one. But if a language must convey something with tense, that’s gonna be very different to being able to talk about time more generally – without it being part of the grammar.

Gretchen: Because even if a language doesn’t have specific things that only do tense stuff, they’re gonna have words like “yesterday” or “tomorrow” or “in the future” or “in the past” or something like that. That’s still gonna let you convey that. It’s similar, again, to doing number on words. We have “dog” and “dogs” in English but we could also just have “one dog” and “two dog” and “many dog” and we would still be able to convey that information even though we wouldn’t have the specific, additional grammatical thing that’s conveying that information.

Lauren: Languages like Vietnamese and Thai and Mandarin and Burmese all don’t have these grammatically obligatory markers. People will, if they need to in context, use words in much the same way in English we talk about tomorrow or later or whatever. They don’t have that same obligatory verb marking.

Gretchen: I think that there’s a Latin-based prejudice that a lot of – especially the European tradition of approaching language which is like, “Well, if it’s not a prefix or a suffix, it’s not grammar.” That’s not what we’re saying because you could have a short little word – Mandarin, for example, has a question particle that you just put in sentences to make them a question. That’s a grammatical feature. English doesn’t have an obligatory extra word to add to questions just to make them questions. That’s a case where you do have something that’s obligatorily grammatical. So, it’s not saying that there aren’t other obligatory grammatical features that you can do even if your language is a bunch of short words rather than fewer, longer words, but it’s, “Is this obligatory?” “Is this something that you have to add to something?”

Lauren: If we had to say “now” in English any time we talked about the present, then that’s as much a choice of grammar because of its obligatoriness not just because it’s something that sticks on the end of a verb.

Gretchen: One interesting example that came up for me recently when it came to languages having tense is Scottish Gaelic, which is a language that I studied briefly when I was in middle school and then I’ve been returning to because they added Scottish Gaelic to Duolingo and, you know, it’s a language. Something that’s interesting about Scottish Gaelic is that it kind of doesn’t really for the most part have a present tense.

Lauren: Ah, interesting. So, you can obviously, once you start thinking about each language has a different way of approaching segmenting time up into grammatical tenses, it can be interesting to look across languages as to how they segment them. Vietnamese doesn’t segment time up into any specific grammatical tenses. And then a language like Scottish Gaelic has – it has a future and a past? Is that what happens?

Gretchen: Well, the thing that makes me hedge it a lot and say, “kind of doesn’t really,” is because the only verb that has a present tense form is “to be.”

Lauren: Okay. That’s a big one.

Gretchen: Right. It’s a really important verb and it does a whole lot of stuff. Then, all of the other verbs have future forms and past forms, and then they also have – and this is where you get a little bit tricky – they also have forms like the sort of de-verbal noun form. If you have a verb like “see,” there’s no just “I see.” That’s not a thing you can say in Scottish Gaelic. Irish, I think, works differently. So, I’m not talking about Irish. I don’t know how Irish works.

Lauren: I’m trying really hard to not respond with “Hm, I see.”

Gretchen: You can say things like, “I am,” in Gaelic but you can’t just say, “I see.” What you want to say instead if you’re talking about the present is “I am seeing.”

Lauren: Because you are using the “be” verb to do the present heavy lifting.

Gretchen: Exactly. You can say, “I am seeing,” “I was seeing,” “I will be seeing,” and this all uses the same form of “seeing,” which is the noun-y form – the same one that you could use for something like “Seeing is great.” Then, you also have separate forms of the verb “to see,” which mean “will see” and “saw.” In the future, you can say, “I will be seeing” or “I will see.” And in the past, you can say, “I saw,” or “I was seeing.” But in the present, all you have is “I’m seeing.” There’s no just “I see.”

Lauren: It’s a bit like the English future in terms of obligatoriness being a slightly squishy concept.

Gretchen: Right. Obligatoriness is slightly different, and this is why. It kind of has a present because “to be” conjugates everywhere in all of the different forms. It’s also weird because “have,” which you might think is also a pretty basic verb, is expressed in Gaelic by saying something is “at” someone. If I say, “I have a cat,” I would say something like, “A cat is at me.” That’s how I say “have.” Again, you can just use “be” to convey “have” because it’s got this idiomatic construction. This was something that confused me when I was first learning Gaelic in middle school because they only taught us the verb “to be.” They taught it to us in a whole bunch of tenses and stuff, and they taught us these forms like “will be seeing” and “was seeing” and “am seeing” – all with the same one form. It was like, “Guys, I just – are you gonna teach us any other verbs at some point rather than just this one ‘seeing’ form? Surely there are more verbs in this language.”

Lauren: You were going into it with your English speaker category expectations.

Gretchen: Right. On the one hand, being an English speaker gave me an advantage because English also does this in a lot of contexts, right? English often says something like, “I am seeing” or “I am eating” or “I am walking down the street,” rather than “I walk down the street” or “I eat” or “I see.” English does this more than a lot of European languages. Some people have proposed that English does this thing because of influence from Scottish Gaelic, and this link has not been proven, so it is probably not actually true. It would be a fun hypothesis if it was true, but it’s not. English does do something similar just not quite as robustly. It was really confusing to me because I was coming from having learned French, where I was given all of these verb forms, and then they were trying to keep it easy for the Gaelic learners and just give us the minimum stuff you need because you really can get very far with only “to be.”

Lauren: We’ve seen some languages with a couple of tense distinctions like English or Scots Gaelic. We’ve seen languages with no tense distinctions. If we go the other way, we can look at languages that have multiple tense distinctions beyond what we see in languages like English. They segment that passage of time up into much smaller categories.

Gretchen: Yes! I love more tenses.

Lauren: Once you see this, you’re like, “We are really underperforming in the tense category department.”

Gretchen: It’s always really exciting to see something you don’t have and you’re like, “Ooo!”

Lauren: The examples I’ve always heard of have come from the area of Papua New Guinea, which just has wonderful levels of language diversity.

Gretchen: Papua New Guinea has, like, a sixth of the languages in the world, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Like, 1000 languages.

Lauren: Islands and mountains all do great things for linguistic diversity. Tifal is a language of Papua New Guinea in the Ok family. It has at least six tense distinctions. There is a present tense. Then, there is a “yesterday” past, a distant past, and a very remote past. Then, going the other way, there is a near future and a distant future.

Gretchen: Very nice. I like it.

Lauren: These are all distinct suffixes that are added to the verb to indicate the time relative to now of something that you’re talking about.

Gretchen: Again, it’s one of those things where there are ways of saying this in English but they’re not as obligatory or as directly encoded in some sort of obligatory thing. You can always say, “A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Or sometimes people make this distinction between “will” and “gonna.” But you don’t have this robust way of distinguishing between these different – you know, remote past and just simple past.

Lauren: If I talk about when I was in school, I’m probably using the distant past rather than the “yesterday” past. Context does a lot of heavy lifting and we often don’t give it enough credit when it comes to things like marking time.

Gretchen: Well, yeah, because you might, in some contexts, talk about when I was in school as the recent past because you’re contrasting that with something that happened 1000 years ago. Then, in other contexts, you might talk about it as the remote past if you’re talking with somebody who graduated last year.

Lauren: A language may have particular grammatical categories but sometimes, when you look at how they’re used, there’re particular conventions. I don’t know specifically for Tifal, but it may be that the very remote past is only used for origins and legends and myths and those kind of things. They’re not for the time that humanity has been living like they are now. There’s multiple things happening here. There’s the tense marking – it’s how it fits with actual time. Then, there are also genre conventions like we talked about with the English narrative past that uses the present.

Gretchen: Right. Again, even if you have a language where there’s a tense that indicates this myth and legend type past, it’s like how in English you use “once upon a time” to signal that something’s a fairy tale, but you can also use “once upon a time” to signal that you’re talking about something as if it’s a fairy tale. When you say, “Once upon a time, these two linguists got together and started a podcast,” this doesn’t mean that it’s a myth, but it’s we’re talking about Lingthusiasm’s origin story as if it were a myth using the myth frame even though, yes, very clearly this happened in a fathomable past where we were actually there and it’s not like Cinderella where it’s a fairy tale story.

Lauren: Context and genre are really important when we’re thinking about how language is used as well as the abstracted structure of it.

Gretchen: I think it’s neat to emphasise how these different types of tenses can be subverted so that there’s a canonical use and then there’s a playful use where you could put something as if it’s in that space as well. We talk about tense as “It’s time,” but it’s not always, strictly speaking, “time.” Another thing that comes up a lot when you talk about tense is other relationships that people could have to time. Sometimes, you talk about something as being an ongoing thing, or you talk about something as happening at one discrete point, or you talk about certain attitudes that you have towards whether something is happening or not. Those are generally lumped into different categories like mood and aspect, which can relate to tense but aren’t exactly the same thing as tense. I think we have to save those for another episode.

Lauren: We’ve already talked about evidentiality, which is often lumped into those categories. We’re talking about tense now. We’ve still got aspect and modality to look forward to.

Gretchen: Stay tuned for more things about how we think about time. But this one is just about where it is with respect to the personal timeline.

Lauren: Once you start looking at the variation, and you’re like, “Oh, I would like three past tense distinctions.” Another thing that would be very nifty is a grammatical tense that is specifically for the current day. If we want to give it a Latinate category, the hodiernal tense, from Latin for “today.” It’s always so much fancier when you say it in Latin, for real.

Gretchen: I know! It’s really fun. I always try to not get too bugged down on the terminology, but then sometimes learning that there’s actually a fancy terminological word for something is the most delightful part. You can have a hodiernal tense.

Lauren: Hodiernal tense is in Mwera, which is a Bantu language of Tanzania. And apparently, Gretchen, the passé composé in French in the 17th Century was possibly used as hodiernal.

Gretchen: Oh, that’s neat. So, passé composé in French, if you were to literally translate into English, it’s like putting “have” before all of your past verbs. Things like, “I have written,” “I have gone,” “I have seen,” “I have walked,” except it’s used in French as a general past. You would say something like, “I have walked,” when in English you would say, “I walked.” There is this other form in French that’s equivalent to “I walked” which is only used in literature now. It’s not used in ordinary conversations or even in casual writing. It’s one of those cases where something starts out as this restricted, casual, only “today” or something tense, and then it gets gradually expanded into being used as a default, unmarked past tense. Then, the other one becomes literary.

Lauren: Also a good reminder that the role of tenses aren’t fixed and static forever. Language is always changing, and evolving, and maybe one day English will have something we can call a definite grammatical future just in the way that French, for a brief period in the 17th Century, may have had hodiernal tense for a while.

Gretchen: That is neat. Certain words that start out as being very concrete can achieve this level of grammaticalisation. This is a thing that I really enjoy about grammaticalisation because when words become used grammatically, they often also get shorter. The original form, the concrete one, can’t necessarily shorten the same way as the grammatical one. Here’s an example – you can’t say, “I’m gonna the airport.”

Lauren: No. That does not sit with me.

Gretchen: You can say, “I’m gonna go to the airport.”

Lauren: Yes. That’s fine.

Gretchen: You think of “going to” and “gonna” as being equivalent to each other. They kind of are, but not in the literal sense. If I’m like, “I’m gonna the airport,” uhhhh... something’s broken – doesn’t work. Whereas, you can say, “I’m gonna go to the airport,” “I’m gonna fly to Rome,” or something like this, but you can’t do it in that bit. The same with “will,” which starts out meaning something like “want” or “wish” before it went to future.

Lauren: As in, like, a legal will?

Gretchen: Yeah. Exactly.

Lauren: Like, a thing that you write. Yeah.

Gretchen: But when it refers to the future, it can get shorted into “-ll,” as in “I’ll” or “you’ll” or something like this. But you can’t have “my last’ll and testament.”

Lauren: I think my brain got broken by trying to think of – that does not work, no.

Gretchen: No. It just doesn’t work. Even though “will” starts out as meaning “want” or “wish,” this “-ll” bit, that can only be used in a tense sort of way. Maybe that’s where – if we develop a future tense in English – that’s where it will develop. That would be interesting because that would be putting future tense on “I” and “you” and other pronouns rather than putting it on the verb like we currently do.

Lauren: There is definitely cases where we have tense being on things other than the verb in other languages. English wouldn’t be the first language to do this. But when you’re used to thinking about tense as being a feature of the verb and being marked somewhere very close to the verb, it is definitely – English wouldn’t be the first language to do this. One example of a language that can do this is Kaiadilt, which is an Australian language. If you wanted to have a difference between the sentence, “I will go to the beach” and “I went to the beach,” you mark it with a suffix on the noun “beach.”

Gretchen: So, “I go to the present beach,” “I go to the future beach,” “I go to the former beach”?

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: I mean, I guess you can do this in some restricted contexts in English. You can say, “My former teacher” or “the late Mr. So-and-So,” or “This is an ex-parrot,” and that can refer to something that is no longer whatever the thing is.

Lauren: These are suffixes that go onto the noun in the way that we think of tense suffixes going onto a verb.

Gretchen: Right. But these are specifically talking about – it’s not that it’s not a beach anymore.

Lauren: No. It is still very much an existing, ongoingly, beach.

Gretchen: That’s interesting. It’s just that I’m not there anymore. Okay. Sometimes, we talk about language being constrained by the biological laws of human anatomy. There’re certain sounds we can make, there’re certain sounds we can’t make. There’re certain ways we can configure our hands. There’re certain ways we can’t configure our hands. Sometimes, we talk about language as being constrained by the fact basically all of its speakers of human languages are on this pale blue dot that’s revolving around the sun, and we have words for days and years because we all share this as part of the human experience. I think maybe another element of this is talking about languages being constrained by physics. We don’t have any natural human languages that have words for the tenses involved in time travel because time travel, so far, is not a thing, so none of the languages have had to develop them. But, in theory, this could happen.

Lauren: This would be very difficult to approach as an English speaker because, as we’ve demonstrated in this episode, one of the ways we test the obligatoriness and the grammaticality of tense as opposed to talking about time is to check people’s intuitions because if something’s obligatory, then removing it or changing it should change people’s intuitions. If you’re talking about using past tense, we expect that events that are bounded by the past can’t be interacted with in the same way as events that will happen in the future. We use that as part of our intuition building. Can you imagine, Gretchen, how much linguistic theory would be broken if suddenly a whole bunch of sentences could be valid because people could time travel?

Gretchen: Right. So, saying something like, “I was there tomorrow” or “I will be there yesterday” – suddenly, maybe you need to be able to do this because you’ve time travelled.

Lauren: The Cambridge Grammar of English is already big enough, and this is my main argument against time travel.

Gretchen: It’s already, like, 2000 pages, and if it’s time travel, we’d need to double the size of the tense chapter.

Lauren: It’s gonna be a lot of work. It could be fun though.

Gretchen: I think it could keep linguists employed for a long time figuring out how to do this.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. To listen to bonus episodes, join our Discord chatroom, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include a special neural net generated episode of Lingthusiasm – where we read out the results of the neural net – the future of English, and onomatopoeia. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is Ancient City by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #episode 41 #transcripts #podcast #time #tense #grammar #time travel

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deltaengineering · 5 years

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Fall Anime 2019 Part 4: also, he has a gun for a head

Beastars

So here’s the CG anime that everyone for some reason decided way in advance would be the best show of the season, more or less by default. I was very skeptical of this for a multitude of reasons. First of all, that is a bad name for a show and you can’t convince me otherwise. It’s actually even worse because you’re supposed to write it in all caps, but I refuse. Second, it has a terribly on the nose conceit in which all sorts of animals live together in a high school setting and it’s all metaphorical ‘n shit. The main character is a wolf but get this, he’s actually all sensitive and quiet! Yeah, this is definitely rated D for Deep. And finally it’s by Orange, the CG studio that got an inordinate amount of acclaim for making Houseki no Kuni, the show that everyone thinks looks great and finally made CG anime worthwhile (actual real fact: HnK does not look great most of the time and CG anime was worthwhile well before it).

But enough about my preconceptions since Beastars is... pretty good, actually. If you ignore the setting, which is indeed terribly on the nose. And there’s not much else to say about the story so far besides it. However, it looks significantly better than Houseki no Kuni because it actually has really good character animation throughout instead of a one-minute action scene with flashy spinny camera tricks every other episode. The directing’s strong too, even if the show conspicuously mainly consists of obvious manga panels. I’m still not too hot on the animal stuff but the general writing seems to be sufficiently competent it would work simply on a character level. So I don’t love it, but it seems solid enough to see if it goes somewhere with its “Zootopia but also Beverly Hills 90210 but also they eat each other sometimes″ plot.

Rifle is Beautiful

Remember the whole “anime about some assorted anime girls joining a club doing an oddly specific activity” thing? This is another one of those, and now it’s about air rifle sports shooting. Except it’s not about air rifle sports shooting because that’s apparently way too violent, so they use rifles that look like exactly like air rifles but are actually based on lasers or really bright flashlights (they can’t keep their bullshit straight between scenes, sorry) instead. I just don’t think “girls doing activities” anime should blatantly misrepresent their subject matter like that, you know? With the possible exception of idol anime that is, ain’t nobody who wants to hear about that shit. Apart from that it’s nothing special, so if you are really into air rifles and wish to watch an anime that’s not about those, knock yourself out. It goes through a whole “club needs 5 members” arc in the first half of the first episode, so I really can’t say where it goes next. Nowhere much, I would guess.

Oh right, there’s one more thing: They frequently render the bodies in CG and the heads in traditional drawings, and they do it every time when they’d actually have to draw a rifle otherwise. It’s a weird effect that I think I haven’t seen anywhere else before, and it’s not great but also not terrible. And it’s the most interesting thing about the entire show.

Kabukicho Sherlock

“Let’s take a bunch of public domain characters and put them into a hip modern setting” seems to be its own genre at the moment, and not only because the BBC did that with S. Holmes, Esq. already. Obviously this show is influenced by that (besides other public domain namedroppers like Bungou Stray Dogs), mostly in Watson and his relationship with Sherlock, but Sherlock-san is rather different here; he’s neither the classic Victorian bohemian nor the abrasive sociopath of the BBC version, and tends more towards a bumbling 90s pop culture version of autism and/or general wackiness here. These two are surrounded by a bunch of campy transvestites for some reason, and I’m not quite sure whether I’m supposed to find this particular stereotype offensive or empowering this week, but it sure is annoying. And it has the same character designer as Joker Game, so if you like chiseled, angular anime men, you’re in for a treat here - even if they tend to wear a lot of makeup and dresses sometimes. I don’t know man, it seems sort of okay-ish for the most part but it’s neither as funny as they think, nor as weird as they think, nor is the murder of the week intriguing at all. Oh yeah, he’s hunting noted public domain character Jack the Ripper. Because of course he is.

Shin Chuuka Ichiban!

I am told this is the sequel to episode 19 of a 52-episode anime TV show from 1997. Okay. I am also told to not dare watch this without the important setup therein, which makes me think I should pay less attention to what I’m told because understanding Shin Chuuka Ichiban and its backstory is not hard at all. Kid is superawesome cooking champion in ancient China and goes around clowning on lesser cooks, got it. It’s not a complicated setup and it’s not a complicated genre either: This seems to be mostly about sick shounen cooking duels. Besides the setting, the main difference between this and Shokugeki no Soma seems to be that SnS goes for ridiculous and Chuuka Ichiban goes for epic - which is to say that it fancies itself emotional as well. Apart from that it’s what you’d expect from a cooking shounen, big moves, big reactions, huge twists and so on. One notable thing is that this show looks really, really nice. Production I.G seems to be establishing a sideline in taking stuff from the 90s and updating it with smoother animation and shinier lighting, while keeping the overall look intact; They did it for Mahoujin Guru Guru, and this looks much the same. Still, I’m just fundamentally not really interested in what appears to be a very straightforward cooking shounen from the 90s.

Assassins Pride

Straight from the Department of Chuuni, we have this light novel masterpiece about a cool as fuck teenage assassin who teleports behind u and nothin personells fools all day. He then meets a princess he’s supposed to off but just kinda decides not to, probably because she seems to be smitten by his m’lady act. Now he has to use his sick skillz to keep them both alive. It’s awful and terrible and no good and also kind of adorable. This truly is the most 13 AND A HALF MOM years old anime in a while, and it’s not even isekai! The writing’s just so amateurish and corny you can’t help but smile when princesses exposit their backstory for no reason while being accosted by pumpkin monsters (without knowing that Awessassin McCooldude happens to be listening in, which is certainly convenient). Or when the episode ends with the man just reading the synopsis of the show out again, in case you were too fascinated by this plot to pay attention to what it’s about. Yeah I’m not going to watch this in a thousand years, but it sure made me chuckle. Your mileage may vary.

Mugen no Juunin - Immortal

Speaking of 𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔱 𝔫𝔦𝔫𝔢𝔱𝔦𝔢𝔰 𝔢𝔡𝔤𝔢, another anime adaptation of Blade of the Immortal appeared! You know, the manga for the cultured and historically minded guro fan. The first episode of Blade of the Immortal runs with this and is an arthouse production that someone most definitely directed the shit out of. I don’t think I’ve seen this much directing since, well, Sarazanmai, but “Ikuhara amounts of directing” is pretty much the idea here. And most of the time it even works! The quickly edited, disorienting style gives episode 1 a feeling closer to horror than to a cool swordmen action show, and that really brings out the best in the material, which is grotesque splatter bordering on the comical - It’s somehow a better Junji Ito anime than the actual Junji Ito anime. I think it tries too hard in a few places, but at least it does try.

But then I watched the second episode and that one’s a fairly conventional splatter-comedy swordin’ anime. I am not at all pleased with this development. The third episode was better again and seemed to split the difference between 1 and 2, even if it mostly uses the tricky editing to save on effort in the action – I would much prefer actually readable fights and the wacky mannerisms in the more psychological stuff, thank you very much. Based on episode 1 I thought we might have something special here, but as of episode 3 I’d already merely call it pretty decent. I guess I’ll still stick with it but man, that’s a real bummer.

No Guns Life

No Guns Life is a neo-noir thriller about a guy who has a gun for a head. That’s fuckin rad and exactly the kind of silliness I am totally down for. He also has a gun for a hand, and there’s also some battle nun’s who carry revolvers with two cylinders, so in short I think the title is false advertising. This sounds very wacky (and it is), but it also takes its noir very seriously, down to details more wannabe neo-noirs tend to neglect (like being set right after a big war). The look and feel is pretty excellent, with sharp design and high-contrast artwork, and the music goes all in on the moody saxophone as you’d expect. And there’s some really adorable “look mom, I’m writing” stuff about how Man With Gun For A Head really “needs someone to pull his trigger” and so on (which is, as the astute reader might remember, at the back of his head). It feels like a throwback but then I can’t really think of many 80s/90s shows like this, so it’s actually more like the sort of faux-retro idea Trigger/Imaishi would come up with on a lark. Trigger/Imaishi would, of course, make a far worse anime out of it, so it’s all good. Well, it has some pacing problems and as always it’s a fine line between amusingly camp and not so amusingly camp anymore, but No Guns Life seems to have enough real qualities that it can probably stand on its own even when its conceptual gimmick eventually doesn’t suffice anymore. I give it a two gun’s up.

Hoshiai no Sora / Stars Align

And finally, here’s an anime about middle schooler softboys playing a tennis just as soft as themselves, while being henpecked by the elites on the girl’s team. This is not an “actual” sports anime though: for starters, it’s not based on some shounen manga and is an anime original with quite some staff pedigree instead. It’s also more of a character drama that already goes to some surprisingly real places by the end of episode 1, reminiscent of the recent and quite good Run with the Wind. Furthermore, it looks delicious, with minimalist but distinctive and varied character designs and animation that’s both extremely detailed for a TV anime and also not trying to shove that fact into your face with flashy stunt cuts. In short, this show seems very simple at first glance but every aspect of it just oozes quality. If nothing else, it’s already worth watching just for the excellent ending sequence where the characters show off their “best” dance moves and the chunky student council president dunks on everyone. This one caught me by surprise and it’s an easy pick for most promising show of the season.

#anime #impressions #Beastars #Rifle is Beautiful #Kabukicho Sherlock #Shin Chuuka Ichiban!#Assassins Pride #Mugen no Juunin - Immortal #No Guns Life #Hoshiai no Sora #stars align

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nazario-sayeed · 5 years

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Bare body, bare soul (Nik x F!MC; N*FW)

Author's note: Some of you are probably thinking "what? you already tagged me on this fic, are you going crazy?" or whatever. Here's the thing: I was stupid using my tags and tumblr took down my previous post as a punishment for me being a whore. Anyway, I noticed it yesterday and now I'm posting it again because I'm stubborn. How I always change some stuff when I edit on tumblr for the last time, this isn't exactly the same as my last one, but there aren't any major differences. English is not my first language so I apologize for any mistakes. I'm shitty at naming my fics, ignore that. Also I don't remember which gif I used last time, which is irrelevant so I don't know why I'm saying this.

Summary: In case there's someone new here, I wrote this fic after chapter 9 when we were cockblocked. It left me wanting more, so I decided to write what should've happened. The initial dialogue is basically the same. My mc's name is Brie.

WC: around 5,100 (sorry)

Rating: definitely +18 for explicit sexual content. Do not keep reading if you're not comfortable with this kind of writing.

I don't have the tag list for that fic so I'm basically using my Jaime one, I'm sorry if I got anyone wrong (please let me know if you don't wanna be tagged): @nazariortega @duchess-ash-flame @lahelalove @poeticscolt @donutsgirl36 @queenkaneko @msjpuddleduck @quinnskelly @flyawayboo @brightpinkpeppercorn @choicesarehard @jlpplays1 @desiree-0816 @sibella-plays-choices

When Nik starts stripping down to his underwear, Brie can't look away. She observes in awe the healed scars on his ripped torso, his muscular body under the soft candlelight... She feels her stomach do a funny flip inside of her, and a heat slowly spreads through her body despite of the cold air of the mansion.

"Uh... Nik? Explain?" she says, trying really hard not to bite her lip at the sight of him exposed like that.

"Vulnerability magic, rook. Some of the most powerful kind there is. You want to see The Fate, you've gotta bare your soul" he explains.

"By stripping down to your skivvies? You sure this is lore and not wishful thinking?" Katherine questions him, raising an eyebrow.

"Summoning is all about symbolic gestures, Katy. Get with the program"

"I've got nothing to hide" Brie chipper says, already reaching behind her back to unzip her dress. "One ceremonial nudity, coming right up!" she lets her dress drop to the floor.

"That's the spirit!" Nik encourages her, trying not to stare as she undresses. Brie blushes a little under his gaze as they smile at each other.

They small talk as the group follows Nik's lead and strips down to their underwear. Brie catches a glimpse of everyone else, almost naked, and feels her face heating up. They form an incredibly attractive group, she can't deny it. She lets her eyes find Nik's frame, and can't help but notices the way the candlelight dances on his skin, lighting up every inch of his sculptured body. He catches her eyes before she can look away, and smirks.

"Like what you see, rook?" he teases her; she feels her whole body flushes with his commentary and the way his eyes are watching her right now, but she tries to play it cool.

"Hm? I don't know what you're talking about" she looks him up and down once again, letting her gaze drop on the only piece of clothing on his body, noticing the nice volume there. She licks her lips, imagining what's inside...

"Sure you don't" he smirks, before slowly scanning her body from head to toes, letting his gaze lingers a little longer on her breasts before turning away. Brie looks away, face red, and her gaze lands on Cal's bare form. She has seen him like that before, but she can't help but observe his large, strong body under the flattering light. He catches her eye and smiles, before hungrily scanning her body in a way that makes her feel like she is his next prey- and right now she kind of wishes she was.

Next to them, Nik notices the way they are looking at each other and his pulse quickens, a unsettling feeling cursing through his veins as he scowls and clenches his fists. He clears his throat to catch everyone's attention to the ritual, but mostly to stop whatever was going on between Cal and Brie.

After exposing themselves in more than one way in order to get help from The Fate, each of them goes to their own guest bedroom in the mansion, trying to escape the thoughts and emotions that their confession brought up. Every one of them is feeling overwhelmed and more vulnerable than they can remember, and the creepy air of the mansion doesn't help at all.

Brie feels terrified even before closing the door. Even though Nik reassured her this is the safest place they could be in right now, she can't shake off the weird feeling. The shivers on her body are not from the insistent, loud wind, but from something that creeps her from the inside, and she knows she won't fall asleep. She is feeling too lonely, exposed and guilty to sleep.

Brie tries to think about anything other than the sounds that echo in her room, or that feeling on her spine that there's someone- or something- watching her even when she's alone. Absently, she lets her mind go back to the moment before they met The Fate.

She thinks about how that was the first time Nik ever looked vulnerable next to her, when he was talking about Elijah's death. How even though he is her bodyguard, in that moment she knew she would do anything to protect him. Her mind goes back to that brief moment when their eyes met after he had told the group about Elijah, and they both knew they were here for each other; one simple look could let her know- could let her feel- how deeply he cares about her- and she hoped he knew and felt it too.

Then, she reminisces about how his eyes went wild when she admitted she was in love with someone there. She didn't even know what she was going to say until the very moment when the words left her lips, and for the first time, she knew they were true. In so little time, she knew he had found a way into her heart- not easily entered after so many heartbreaks.

Tired of wishful thinking, Brie gets up in one movement and exits the room, letting her feet carry her to knock on Nik's door before she can think twice about what she's doing.

"Brie? Thought you were hitting the sack?" he seems surprised as he opens the door, but also amused; his lips curving up in a tiny smirk.

"Couldn't sleep. Looks like it's going around, huh?" she teases and he laughs, rubbing the back of his neck. He can't help but think about the restless things he wants to do right now, and it doesn't help that she came to his door in the middle of the night.

"Sure does. Wanna come in for a nightcap? These digs are pretty swanky, I'll give the fate that" he invites her in, trying- and failing- to ignore all the inappropriate thoughts crossing his mind.

"I'd love that..." she says, and he can swear there are at least fifteen intentions on her tone.

Nik swings the door open, welcoming her in, and she slips by him, letting their arms brush lightly against each other, feeling her skin on fire with the brief touch.

"Home sweet home… for the moment, anyway. Can i get you a drink?" Nik asks.

"Yes, please! I'm dying to unwind a little"

"You can say that again. What a night, huh?" as he pours bourbon, he thinks about all the ways he wishes he could use to help her unwind right now. All of them involve her screaming his name.

He hands her the bourbon and electricity sparks where her fingers brush against his for a second. They clink their glasses, smiling, and they both take a sip, enjoying the warm feeling settling on their bellies.

Nik walks over to the window frame, leaning against it. He lets his gaze find Brie for a long moment and she feels her whole body warming up; she tells herself it's the drink, but she knows it's not. He notices the light blush on her cheeks, and interrupts her thoughts with a question.

"So what do you think, about all this? That was a lot to take in..."

"Honestly? I don't know. I'm glad we have a name, that's huge, but now… It just…" she trails off.

"Feels more real, right? Even more unnerving than before, somehow?" he finishes her thought.

"Yes! That's it exactly" she admits. "I know it sounds weird but when The Fate said 'Cassiopeia', all I could think was, hey, that's a pretty name." Niks snorts at her comment, looking amused, but she continues with a sigh "Too pretty for someone who makes bloodwraiths and zombies. Ridiculous, right?" she asks him, feeling a bit embarrassed but also glad to be sharing this with someone, especially him.

"Nah. I get it. The mind's a tricky beast, alright" he says, as Brie moves to his side by the window and leans on her forearms, taking another sip and letting the wind smooth over her face. Their bodies are close now, too close. She can feel his heat next to her as the wind swipes over them.

"What about you? That thrice-cursed son stuff… What do you think she meant?" she asks, trying to distract her own mind. He shakes his head, his face transforming into a scowl.

"I can't be sure- I mean, who knows what all goes on in her head- but I think it means that the three people who loves me most in the world are dead" he bitterly admits, finishing his drink.

Her first instinct is to think "But you have me". She manages to hold it back, bitting her lips shut.

"That's a terrible thing to call you" she thinks out loud.

"Not wrong though. I always make it out by the skin of my teeth, lucky me. The people who love me? Not so much" he furrows his brow and clenches his fist at the side of his body, letting the anger get to him.

"You make it sound like you're the curse…" she says, softly.

When he doesn't answer, she turns to Nik and cautiously wraps her arms around him. He stiffens for a moment, before pulling her closer.

"Sometimes... I feel like I'm as bad as the Reimonenq touch. And…" he admits, but she cuts him off.

"Don't say that, Nik. You've lost so much, and it's not your fault" she tells him, with a firm but gentle voice.

Nik sighs deeply, stirring Brie's hair, before he presses a warm kiss to the top of her head. She can feel her heart pounding inside her chest, and his too where her head lays on his chest.

She pulls back and looks at him, and he gives her a wry smile.

"...You promise?" he asks, his voice softer than she has ever heard him.

"Of course I do. I wouldn't even be standing here if it wasn't for you! And I bet I'm not the only one who owes you my life. You risk yourself every day, to keep other people safe. That's not a curse… That's a gift" Brie reassures him, trying to make him understand just how grateful she is and how deeply she cares about him.

The atmosphere between them becomes charged, electric with tension. Hesitantly, Nik reaches out and trails his knuckles gently down her cheek. She feels her breathing stop.

"I don't know what it is about you, Brie, I swear I don't, but you make me feel…" he trails off.

"What? What do I make you feel?" she insists. After gazing down at her for a few seconds, he continues:

"You make me feel like a real person"

She feels her chest bursting with affection and an indescribable need to protect him. In that moment, she doesn't care about anyone else. She's unable to look away from him, his face just inches from hers, the air between them charged with intensity.

Brie leans forward, her breath quickening. The time seems to stop while their lips come closer slowly, until the gravity is just too much and they crash against each other.

Nik sighs wordlessly against her lips, seeming overwhelmed at first, then he pulls Brie hard against him, one hand clutching the back of her neck.

"Nik..." she moans against him, feeling the desire taking over her body and pooling by her stomach.

"You taste so good, Brie" he breathes into her mouth, and she gasps.

He trails searing kisses down her neck, all the way to the hollow of her throat, and she shudders as he runs his tongue over the sensitive skin.

"I've been thinking about this for so long..." he admits.

"Me too… Please don't stop..." Brie begs him, as she remembers the kisses they've shared before this one. Neither of them came even close to the way their mouths fervidly explore each other now. Neither of them made her longing for more like this. The kiss, which began slow and soft, quickly heats up and they don't seem to be able to get enough of each other.

Nik tugs her clothes over her head, then pulls off his own. Brie runs her palms down his sculpted chest, now face to face with the scars she was admiring earlier. She wants to kiss each one of them, learn their stories, protect him from getting any new ones. He draws a ragged breath under her light touch and pulls back to look at her.

"You're gorgeous, Brie. So damn perfect" he breathes, before guiding her onto the huge bed and pulling her next to him. He captures her mouth in another long, lingering kiss as she drags her fingers through his hair...

"Nik… I-" she moans, but a furious, icy gale from the window washes over both of them, interrupting her.

"Oh, that is chilly" Brie says, a shiver running down her body. Nik quickly gets up from the bed and closes the window with more strength than necessary, making sure it won't open again. When he turns back to her, his expression is changed and it sends a tingle down her spine, almost like a warning.

“I don’t care what happens. Wind, rain… This whole goddamn place could go up in flames and I wouldn’t give a fuck. I need you, Brie. Ever since I saw you in your underwear earlier, I couldn’t stop thinking about ripping it off your body”. Her breath catches in her throat at his bold statement, and she can already feel her arousal pooling between her legs. She watches as he walks over to where she is laying on the bed, while he looks at her like he's about to devour her. She hopes he is.

He lays on top of her and pins her hands on each side of her face, looking down, his eyes darkened with hunger.

“Nik… I have wanted you since the moment I saw you. Take me. I’m yours.” she breathes, and he smirks almost wickedly. His faces lights up a fire inside of her, one that she hasn’t felt in a long time. Nik has never seemed so protective of her, and so ready to deliciously destroy her.

“You’re mine, rook? Then why the hell you kept looking at the wolfman today? Or do you think I didn’t see it?” he lets go of her wrists and sits up next to her, flipping her onto her stomach with one easy, swift movement, making her gasp. "You think I didn't notice the way he was practically eating you with his eyes? Like you were his next prey..." She doesn’t even have time time to answer as he pulls her to sit up on her knees in front of him, standing behind her, his chest to her back "You think I didn't notice that you were enjoying it?".

Nik runs one calloused hand up the front of her body, over her stomach, chest, stopping at her chin, as he strains her arms between them with the other. He lets go of her chin and grabs her hair, pulling her head back roughly. She lets out a moan while his mouth moves next to her ear.

“Tell me, rook. Are you thinking about the wolfman now?” he presses himself against her back, letting her feel how hard his desire for her is. She moans with need again and closes her eyes, incapable of thinking clearly, intoxicated by the feeling of him. She never thought Nik could be so animalistic, and she's loving it; her whole body needs him.

“I- I… Oh, Nik”

“That’s right, Brie. It’s my name you’ll be moaning- no, screaming tonight. When I’m done with you, you won’t even remember who the werewolf is” he says, and brutally pushes her on all fours on the bed, making her gasp with pleasure and surprise.

Nik runs his hand down her back, earning shivers from her body. She can feel the heat from his body behind her, and the thought of him taking control like that is driving her absolutely mad with lust.

He reaches her soaked panties and pushes them to the side, running his fingers along her sex. Brie is already grasping at the sheets, trying to get some kind of control over her own body. He plunges two fingers inside without warning, and she yelps. Nik lower his body so his mouth is against her ear.

"The way you're soaked right now… Whenever you're starring at shirtless Cal, I hope you remember I am the one who made you feel like that, rook." he bites her earlobe and increases his speed, hitting that spot with every plunge.

Brie is incapable of forming coherent words right now. She is so high on the pleasure he is giving her, and she prays she'll never feel low again. Brie can feel her legs shaking, getting closer and closer with every movement of his hands. When she is almost there, her whole body writhing with desire, he removes his fingers and she immediately misses them, letting out a groan of frustration that amuses Nik.

"Not yet, Brie. Be patient. I'm nowhere near done with you" he says, and flips her onto her back, hovering over her body. He leans in to kiss her passionately, his hands exploring the sides of her body as she pulls him impossibly close by the neck. Brie wraps her legs around his waist grinding on him, trying to feel any kind of friction between her legs, desperate for relieve.

Nik begins to descend his mouth on her body, sucking at her neck in a way they both know will leave a mark. That's what he wants: to let everyone else know she is his, that she spent the night giving herself to him and him only. Nik wants to wake up tomorrow and let the wolfman smell him all over Brie's body.

His mouth founds her chest and she arches her back as he reaches out behind her to unclasp her bra. He quickly takes it off her body and tosses it across the room, pulling back to admire her curves.

"God, Brie… You're breathtaking. No fucking wonder everyone else in that room couldn't take their eyes off you." her cheeks blush a little at the way he is devouring her with his eyes, and she can feel every inch of her body responding to him: her heart is pounding, her breath is quickened, and it feels like her skin is on fire.

"But I am here, Nik. I came to your room." Brie reaches out to touch his cheek gently and he once more crashes his lips into hers. He quickly moves his mouth to her neck and collarbone, nipping and not-so-gently biting his way down, until he is licking the valley between her breasts, while his hands run up her sides, stopping at the curve of her chest. He takes one nipple in his mouth, while works on the other with his fingers. His mouth and hand work together, licking, flicking, pinching until she is crying out, grasping his hair. He moves one hand inside her panties and she feels like she is going to pass out with pleasure as he nips the flesh of her sensitive nub with his teeth.

Nik lets go of her breasts and moves his head lower, trailing a path of kisses down her stomach, until he finally reaches the waistband of her underwear. Before taking it off, he kisses her above the damp fabric.

"God, Nik. Please, stop teasing… I need you" she moans, craving release. He smirks at her and pulls her underwear down her legs, leaving her completely naked on his bed.

"You have no idea of how long I've wanted to have you like that, Brie. No clothes, in my bed, at my mercy." he says, running his fingers through her body. His eyes are dark, full of yearning, lust at its most natural state.

"And now that you have me, what will you do?" she asks, almost daring him to answer.

He responds by lowering his mouth into her sex, making her moan instantly. She throws her head back and grabs his hair with one hand and the sheets with the other.

He's been teasing her for a while now, so when his mouth connects with her body, she's already close. He devours her expertly, like he has been starving and she is the most delicious meal in the world. At that moment, he can't think of anything that tastes better than her.

Nik works his mouth and tongue on her, and with every flick of his tongue he can sense the pleasure building inside her. He inserts a finger, then two into her core, making her moans grow louder. She bucks her hips against his mouth and fingers, trying to feel him closer as possible. He pulls back and she almost screams in irritation.

"You want more, rook?" he asks, still working his fingers, but slowly, barely enough to keep her on the edge.

"Yes, Nik. I want more- I need more" she whimpers, eyes closed with need.

"I wanna see you beg" his voice is a low growl, and it turns her on even more.

"Please, please, please… Nik, oh god, I need you..." the beg leaving her sinful lips is like music to his ears. He dives back in.

His mouth once again finds her center, and he wastes no time sucking her clit into his mouth, thrusting his fingers harder and faster. She cries out, arching her back, and it only takes one more flick of his tongue for her to fall apart around him in pure bliss, the feeling so strong she is sure she has reached heaven. She doesn't even notice she is screaming his name. He doesn't let go until every single drop of ecstasy has left her body, until she's ridden every wave of her orgasm. Her legs are shaking and she's covered in sweat, panting, trying to pull herself together, but never again wanting to come back down from the high.

His mouth finds its way back to her lips, capturing them in a passionate kiss while she recovers.

"Can you taste how delicious you are, rook?" he asks, pulling back with a smirk to admire her flushed face.

"Right now, I would rather taste you" she admits, and he growls. Nik captures her lips again, wrapping his arms around her and flipping their position, getting her to straddle his hips. His hands find her ass quickly, and he gives it a small slap before squeezing it. Brie begins to run her hands down his muscular torso, enjoying the feeling of his ripped abs underneath her fingertips. She reaches the waistband of his underwear, still kissing his mouth, and lets her hand drop lower, caressing him over the fabric. He bites her lower lip and digs his nails on the flesh of her hips as she squeezes him, making him moan into her mouth.

Brie lets go of his lips to kiss his stubble jaw, then his neck and the spot right below his ear. Nik reaches her hair and wraps it around his hand, applying a bit of pressure on his hold. She begins to trail kisses down his chest and abs, taking her time kissing his strong frame, covering every scar on his torso with her lips. Unlike him, she takes no time teasing him when she reaches his waistband, quickly rolling his underwear down his legs and off his body. She runs her fingers through his strong thighs, kissing it, licking it all the way up to his groin.

When she finally reaches his shaft, she gives it a few slow strokes and runs her thumb in circles on its tip, as Nik's breath quickens. She gives it a tiny kiss, still running her fingers up and down, before taking him into her mouth.

"Christ, Brie..." he moans, holding her hair while she expertly uses her mouth and tongue on him; kissing, sucking and licking the exact spots she knows will drive him mad. As she swirls her tongue around his head, he grips her hair tighter and pulls her up "Are you trying to make me lose my mind, rook?".

She smirks at him, but it quickly fades as he roughly pulls her by the hair to his mouth, kissing her hard. He moves his head to her neck and sucks it before releasing her.

"Get on all fours" he commands, and she is too turned on to deny him anything. She gets on her knees and forearms, facing away from him, and she looks over her shoulder to see him going through his pants and reaching its pocket for his wallet, pulling out a condom.

While he fumbles with his pants and catches her looking over her shoulder at him, Nik thinks about how lucky he is. Brie could knock on anyone's room today and they would happily let her in; they all wished to be in his place right now, and there she was: on all fours on his bed, her glistening core waiting and wanting him.

He positions himself behind her, between her legs after rolling down the condom, and guides himself until his tip is touching her folds. He gives her ass a playful smack, and the sound she lets out makes him even more turned on, so he does it again, harder this time, earning a louder moan from her lips. She holds her breath with anticipation while he runs his tip up and down her entrance, teasing her. She lets out a frustrated groan after a few seconds.

"God, Nik, aren't you tired of teasing me? Just fuck me alr- ohh!" her complain is interrupted by a moan as he enters her with one hasty movement.

"You were saying?" he teases, as he grabs her hips and thrusts hard into her, quickly creating a rhythm.

He doesn't hold back. He uses one hand to hold her hip as the other wraps around the hair on her neck and pulls her head back, making her moan loudly. He swears that the feeling of her walls around him is the most exquisite thing he has ever experienced.

Nik isn't one for second dates, he has never been jealous before, but Brie managed to wake feelings and sensations he never knew existed. He feels so protective of her, and it shows in his movements, as he tries to claim her as only his. He pulls her hip impossibly closer, hitting even deeper inside her, making an animalistic grunt leave her mouth.

"That's it, Brie. Louder. I wanna hear you scream my name so loud this whole damn fancy house knows I am the one making you lose control like that." he says, giving her all of him, driving deeper and harder with every slam of his hips, and she does exactly as he tells. The sensation of Nik filling her up is so overwhelming that she has no choice but to scream, trying to let out some of these feelings.

"Nik, oh god, harder!" she begs, not even realising what she is asking for, not even sure she can take more. Right now, he hits the perfect balance between pain and pleasure with every thrust. She has never felt so filled before, she has never been fucked like that before and she knows that now she has tried it, there’s no going back. He delivers harder, his nails so deep inside the flesh of her hips they are breaking the skin, but neither of them seem to notice or care. Tears of pleasure mixed with pain glisten in the corner of her eyes, and she is holding onto the sheets like it’s life itself. "Nik, I'm so close!" she moans, trying to breathe.

Hearing his name being screamed by her lustful lips makes Nik bucks his hips forward in a way that hits her most sensitive spot, and she comes apart around him, screaming his name so loud that he is sure she’s heard all across The Fate's mansion. Her walls clench around his length but he doesn't slow down, feeling his own release coming close. Brie is too worn out to react, so she just stays in front of him, moaning and crying out his name as he fucks her senseless. She squeezes him inside of her, and he feels the electricity beginning to rise in his body. "Brie, I'm close" he cries out, never stopping neither slowing down.

Catching him by surprise, Brie removes herself from his hold and quickly turns around, facing him. Nik is too surprised to react before she kneels in front of him, pulling the condom off him and taking him into her mouth once more. At the moment when she wraps her mouth around him, Nik’s head falls back and he lets out a groan. More gentle then he has been the whole night, he holds her hair back as she works on him. As he feels his ecstasy approaching, he tries to pull her head back, but she doesn't let him, working even harder. He has no other option but to spill inside her mouth as pleasure washes over him, and he moans her name for only her to hear.

Brie licks him clean and moves up, they both kneeling on the bed, facing each other. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and he thinks it's the sexiest thing he's ever seen. They lock eyes and smile before he pulls her by the waist for a delicate kiss.

Her body is covered in bruises, her hair is a mess, and they both are covered in sweat, but they also have that unique face of someone who has just reached the peak of pleasure and satisfaction.

“Do you think The Fate will me mad at us?” Brie teases, as they crawl under the covers. He snorts and pulls her close, wrapping his arms around her and letting she rest her head on his shoulder.

“I dunno, rook. And I don’t care” Nik says, pressing a gentle kiss to her forehead.

“Me neither. Even if she does, it was worth it. Sooooo worth it” she says with a wide smile, kissing his chest. He absently runs his hand through her hair, smiling.

The way he’s feeling right now, not only completely satisfied but also safe, tells him he is in trouble. A lot of trouble. Looking down at Brie, comfortably snuggled with him, he feels his heart skips a beat and he can’t help but smile, but it quickly fades as he thinks about what usually happens to those who get close to him.

“Yeah, it was. Sleep tight, Brie”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure I will…” she teases again, her eyes already closing as she drifts off to a peaceful sleep, and follows her, never wanting to let her go again.

What has she done to him?

#nightbound #nightbound fanfic #nb choices #choices fanfiction #fanfiction #ff #fanfic #nik x mc #nik ryder #nik x f!mc #n*fw #nik ryder fanfic

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slowlymadeart · 5 years

Photo

After a month of making adjustments to the script and editing things out I’ve kind of lost perspective on how this can been seen from a stranger’s point of view.

(And may have over explained in areas just to make sure communication was clear).

All images are cropped to instagram size. (except the first one with the “critique” message).

Tried my best to jam everything into 10 panels.

Oh, and what’s happening in that last panel is me being arrested for spoon debt.

Annnd to answer your question, yes. I do imagine a world in which “spoon court” and a “spoon bank” is being run by utensils.

I know it’s weird. It’s the whole “Goofy is a dog with a dog (Pluto) as a pet!

but.. I think it’s kinda funny….or could be if I ever draw more. Just doing research on obscure and various utensil to make into characters? I don’t think I could pass on that.

Anyhow, here’s some thoughts and explanations you are free to ignore. Seriously. They might cloud whatever you thought of the comic before reading a backlog of thoughts…But if you wanna follow the thought train, hop aboard.

1. Is “Well, You could just google it” too condescending or will the internet be okay with this? When it’s written in a post it’s fine, but in a comic? I just don’t want to push people away. Especially first thing. (After a month of rewrites and redraws is when I changed up that speech bubble and put that line in there, lol).

2. “Spoonie” comes with many associations with chronically ill/disabled communities. I tried to acknowledge as many points of view as simply as I could. Hinting at a bunch of perspectives from both the people who love it and reasons why people hate it.

3. Also nodding towards the idea that “Spoonie” is easier to say than “Disabled”, and for some, the internalized “Disabled is a dirty word” has them opting to say “spoonie” instead. Often unintentionally. So I then tried to blur the distinction between the two a bit. Out of a desire to mae “Disabled” a more approachable word.

4. Alright, so the idea ”Spoonies are just one part of the disabled community.” I feel like I may have been able to communicate this, but when I drew the group image of various spoonies connecting from their beds, it might feel too “Any person with a disability can be a spoonie to some degree.” …..which makes me worried healthy people may eventually start projecting it onto people they meet with disabilities. Sort of a “I can help you somehow, here’s this info a about spoons! Did you know it exist yet? it could change your life!!” all while still disregarding the person their talking to.

5. The facial expression on my character for “My body is disabled and day to day living sometimes breaks my brain” -I could not figure it. For me, there’s a mixture of “slight embarrassment but I gotta say it” and “LET’S PRETEND YOUR ELSA IN “LET IT GO” AND YOU HAVE NO MORE FUCKS TO GIVE!”

or “calm. with no more fucks to give. A ‘deal with it’ sunglasses or vacant eyes and a slight smile situation”

then I’d go back to “Embarrassment, both crying and laughing from brain breaking, wants to have no more fucks to give but that’s just not true”

and I was worried that gave the wrong impression about being disabled. Yes, there’s absolutely truth to it. but after reading articles by some extremely well educated disabled advocate types, and a critique on the show “Special.” I wanted to try and set a good example- pretending I’m further along with coming to terms with what my life is than how I can be at times.

We’re allowed to feel like this is a mindfuck. It absolutely can be. But I don’t want to be seen as too whiny…

…. and I need to clean up my language so my 11 and 12 year old sisters can read. (Will be changing a couple words for the finished version that goes on instagram and webtoons).

6. Christina Miserandino seems to use to be very into tanning. When collecting photos, her shade of skin changed all the time. But it’s not “arianna grande” type stuff, just more so her genetic predisposition and past beauty habits conflicting with going through a lot in recent years and hasn’t been getting out as much, or caring about looks. I tried to capture a sense of her advocacy prime, with the purple, when she put a lot of work into her hair, her love of girlishness but with a slight edge to show maturity. Just going with a skin tone she’s had consistently in the past couple years- just because going darker would have been a lot more strange to those who looked into her now. (This one’s less of a concern and more of a…disclosure? Just felt weird to deal with).

7. I don’t know if any of you have ever looked through spoonie selfies, or disabled selfies. but we seem to LOVE DYING OUR HAIR. (It’s one thing we can change). Hair dye is having a moment in the world. So I hope the change of hair colors here and in the future is not taken the wrong way. It’s just really fun to use unique hair colors on characters. I will say, the reason the woman on the left side of the “Today a spoonie is” has blue hair, is because she’s Trans, it’s a wig. her hair isn’t where she wants it to be yet, she uses the hat because she couldn’t afford a lace-front wig. Yes, it’s hot on her head. but it’s easier than using energy to secure everything and make the top look nice. and it feels too fake looking when the top is not covered up……. And…yes, I realize this is all in my head and not conveyed or relevant at all- but that’s the backstory, lol. I gave her shirt the trans flag colors, but she didn’t seem like a pastel person and so I kept them darker, feeling like that’s what this character would like.

8. I included cutting scars on two characters because a few years back I had a friend who pointed out to me I always omitted drawing her scars. I wasn’t doing it on purpose, I just kept forgetting. But I felt bad. It seemed like including the scars was more empowering to her at that point in her life. That’s why they were included here.

9. I know some think “Spoonie” is just for those with Chronic illness. It can feel that way- it’s a large majority of Spoonies. But Christine herself said in an interview Spoon Theory can be used those with disabilities and Mental health conditions. Basically, whoever has a condition that causes fatigue.

When put that way- well, the panel that reads “Perhaps detached enough for misguided normies to think” -could happen.

(All the more reason to blur distinction between “disability” and “spoonie”?…maybe. but, that could alienate neurodivergents. And the blurred distinction between “Neurodivergence” and “disability” is…exploding as a topic currently. And I don’t want to contribute to more people thinking neurodivergence means “disabled” and therefore “broken”- that’s the opposite of what I want to do).

((Thus why there’s info supporting the idea throughout the rest of the comic “Don’t fix it. work with it. My situation’s just different.”))

Maybe the panel isn’t needed, but that’s how/why it came to be.

10. If there’s unhealthy mentalities portrayed in the comic that don’t serve a greater purpose, let me know. Unhealthy mentalities are great for humor, and getting to let someone else who’s going through the same type of thinking at times have comfort- but what I’m worried about is anything that is problematic.

11. If any of the terms I used are incorrect- such as places I use “conditions” to sum up- everyone who can be a spoonie. Let me know! It get’s really tricky at times when you have to make the statement as simple as possible to refer to a very diverse group with very diverse bodies.

12. I’m starting to put “mean stranger” type characters in colors without skin tones so that they can be applicable to more people, as being sick/disabled/neurodivergent is somehow in open invitation for the opinions of jerks. Drawing them all as Donkeys or “Asses” would be cool and clever, but too much work.

13. Because of Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia sitting with my legs down in a wheelchair is extremely draining, so I want to stop drawing that.

#critique #please #halp #so tired #brain gone ploop #what are words

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laufire · 4 years

Text

Roswell NM 2x05

My thoughts of this episode could basically be summed up on “Extremely Mixed Feelings” lmfao.

Let’s start with Rosa, obviously. Gosh, I adore her. ADORE her. She feels so lively and real and colourful among... well, everything and everyone else xD. She did even in death. She makes this show better by being the point of contention in the narrative. The mixed feelings come when she interacts with anyone else, because though she remains her incredible self, (almost) everyone else isn’t and I keep chaffing against the dominant narrative :P. She’s also hilarious lmao. I love every one of her zings xD. The “bitch-ass aliens” was obviously the winner, but her calling Max & Isobel’s nonsense “psychic twincest weirdness” was close LOL.

Like, I don’t know how I feel about the show even JOKING about Rosa possibly forgiving Max & Co. The scene itself with Rosa DEMANDING her own room was perfect, but. Yeah. Don’t even joke about that xD. To add that, I actually really love her scenes with Max, both in previous episodes and this one, when he briefly convinced her of stopping his resurrection (I kind of love that the episode was so close to Easter, btw, it’s so on the nose xDD). The energy between the actors works REALLY well and I find myself suddenly paying attention to Max, which hadn’t happened so far xDD. However, I’d enjoy those scenes even more if I could be reasurred that Rosa is always going to have mixed feelings at best about him, and will never be reduced to prop him or Liz/Max (like in the moment where Rosa almost has to comfort Liz about Max loving her. Leave my kid out of this pls). But. Yeah. I also have some guesses as to where the Rosa vs. Max storyline will go now that a.) she has more control of her new powers, and b.) his resurrection is the one that’ll follow the Came Back Wrong pattern, but they’re half-formed/half-wishful thinking so far lol.

I love love love the physicality of Rosa’s scenes with Liz too, even if sometimes I’m bothered by other elements. I’m just amazed by how the actresses manage to make it come across that despite the obvious visuals, despite how ~youthful and reckless Rosa feels... she’s the older sister, still. That’s how she feels, and Liz gets ~swayed by this. Like how she bundles herself agaisnt Rosa’s chest for comfort (and in the second one, the transition to that after Liz holds Rosa’s face in her hands), or how Rosa talks about her “sweet little sister”, etc. It also helps making the relationship feel less proppy than it would otherwise --younger sisters doing something for their older ones feels different than the reverse, idk. I have Thoughts about this but they’re all tangled up with myself projecting stuff on them, so idk what I’m trying to convey here xDD

I’m less conflicted about Rosa/Isobel. STAY AWAY FROM HER ISOBEL. Seriously, I full on despise her now. Fuck her. At the beginning of the season it looked like I might start finding her interesting, but nah. That’s over. And in particular I want her as far away as possible from Rosa. I’m even surprised by the strength of my reaction lol, but I wanted to yell at her to take her dirty paws off Rosa xD (seriously, the scene where she puts her hand on Rosa’s chest felt so so creepy? Was that just me? Add that in Isobel’s comment about having a “threeway” and deugh. GO AWAY ISOBEL). And frankly, it’s hard to miss how Isobel is always at her worst with women of color (I’m wary of her attitude to men of color, after the blatant sexualization/mind control thing with Kyle or all her bullshit with Arturo, too). Her comments on Rosa’s addiction (let alone assaulting her or locking her body in a closet ofc) didn’t help her case. I really, really wish Rosa had chocked a bitch xD. BTW, I’ve seen people attribute Isobel’s shittiness to her connection to Max and his darkness when a.) we saw NO SIGNS of this, and b.) she’s been terrible from day one, okay xD. If the show goes there to absolve her of responsibility like it did in s1... ugh.

My connection was crappy af last week and I somehow missed Michael’s “help me move a body” scene until I saw the parallel done with the one this week and... did this bitch really joke about desecrating Rosa’s body in front of Liz’s face?? (who said nothing because she’s now completely on pod-people’s POV land, ofc. I had flashbacks to Delena joking about Caroline’s rape right there, too). Seriously, the pod-people, ALL of them, have an enourmous debt with Rosa (EVEN MORE NOW), and I really, really wish she collected.

I wish we’d seen Arturo & Arturo-Rosa stuff this episode. It’ll still be tainted by the circumstances (*hates Isobel even more*), but I’m very curious about them. And about how Rosa’s bio-father ties to this stuff --that side of Rosa’s family is being left out of things so far and I don’t like it, tbh. It seems to be simply because it’s too far from the pod-siblings circle of influence ¬¬. Or about how Arturo is processing all this (he still thinks Rosa drove and killed the two other girls and that Max is A Very Nice Boy *barfs*. I seriously resent the very real posibility that Rosa’s story will never be untangled, to her father and to the town).

Not-Rosa-centric stuff under the cut, I guess, because this is getting long xD

I also have mixed feelings about Maria’s scenes with Alex (and Maria’s scenes in general). OTOH, she looked amazing (this is important, js. It’s such a shame we didn’t see Michael’s reaction to that last outfit of hers *-*); I love the actor’s easy chemistry, too; and I think it’s very, very interesting, that Alex basically nudged Maria towards Michael and Miluca. OTOH, I dislike how the conversation immediately turned to supporting him, and especially the false equivalences between Maria falling for Michael and Alex contributing to the lies to her (though I don’t find him as responsibly for that as Michael and especially Liz --since it was Michael’s secret and he planned and struggled to tell her, while Liz was pretty comfortable keeping her in the dark except for her own emotional needs, and knew too well why those secrets could cost), or between looking at your mother’s search history and forgiving someone for keeping you in the dark and endangering your life, js. That he guilted her into forgiving Liz (and so fullfilling Maria’s prophecy about how Liz only struggled to tell her because she wanted support, and my own about how little her anger was allowed to last) made it worse.

I feel terrible for Kyle. You could feel the toll he’s taken smh. My heart broke a little when he told Liz “you called, I broke the speed limit”, too :/. His relationship with his mother is hanging on the balance after all his lies too, which doesn’t bode to well for him either. I liked the scene between him and Alex, at least, though I still don’t think I could ever ship them, given Kyle’s romantic history with someone that ALSO was hung up on another person, js.

Other people have talked about how Alex’s scenes with Michael often highlight his classism and how little it’s talked about in this fandom, but yeah. His comments about Michael’s “wasting” his life... I Felt that.

Related to that, Max’s comment about how someone “has to clean up [Michael’s] messes” is part of why the pod-siblinghood thing is never ever ever going to work for me, sns xDD. Sure, it’s mostly because I don’t like Max or Isobel at all, or Michael 40-50% of the time, but yeah, things like that, or Isobel assuring him of the BLATANT lie that Michael means as much to her and Max as each other... they make it harder to get into the ~spirit lol. Another issue is how TERRIBLE the editing to make them appear younger looks xDD

I had to, HAD TO, roll my eyes at Max’s martyrdom. Ooooh, he’s not doing this for HIMSELF, he would NEVER care about being in PAIN, he’s doing this for US. And the narrative conveniently doesn’t take him at his word and saves him, ofc, because’s he’s a lead and that’s what’s up. It was interesting seeing the other characters coming to acceptance at first, however --I hope it’s a Sign. There are other Signs (of Max’s narrative maaaaaaybe weak spots) that really *pop* in this episode. Like the fact that there’s doubt over who is more important to him, Liz or Isobel. In a show with a really strong male lead, the answer would unquestionably be Liz: she’d know it, Isobel would know it, we’d all know it. And sure, I know a lot of people would say that it’s “better” (?) for a show to acknowledge the ~importance of familial and platonic bonds~ and what not, but c’mon. I don’t doubt that if Liz had been white things would be different. But that’s not the case here. And there are strong arguments for Isobel being number one... like the fact that this amnesia plot in the promo seems to ONLY involve Liz? I mean, he seems to remember Isobel just fine. A male lead forgetting the love of his life is very, very tricky. OTOH this is good in the sense that I’m all for anything that makes Max take a fall... but his & Liz’s stories are too tangled up and I’d fear she’d surely go down with him :/

#roswell: new mexico #rosa ortecho #maria deluca #ortecho sisters #roswell thoughts #roswell spoilers #my thoughts #talking to the void #antimaxevans for ts #antimalex for ts #except not but i Say Something Negative so *sighs*#antiisobelevans for ts #kyle valenti #liz ortecho #antilizmax for ts #antimichaelguerin for ts #antipodsiblings for ts #bitter lau tag #favourites: soul siblings

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