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asoiaf-source · 1 year

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I was interested in seeing visually, just how much of the series has been dedicated to each House and Character story lines.

First I just did a basic pie chart of all the POV characters, including the Prologue / Epilogue chapters. These are all in order from their words on the page in the story so far. I greyed out deceased characters, but the other colors used are random. I combine the characters with 4 or less chapters just to make it more readable, so the top 14 characters and Others. The Others are listed in the side chart in black.

Now I broke up the POVs into their Houses to get a sense of how much of the story is being dedicated to each House, at least by members of that House and those associated with them.

First off, I put Jon into the Nights Watch, otherwise the Stark category would be too dominate (if you add it to the Starks it is nearly half the pie), and of course since his storyline is unique to him and his potential ‘parentage’ revel later, I thought it best to separate to clearly define his and the Others storyline. Also put the Targaryen block next to him (for those who like to think of him as a Targaryen) as you can visually see the two combine nearly equal the Starks and Lannister Houses, clearly the three dominate families whom ASOIAF is revolving around.

Also The Starks and Greyjoy are connecting more, and Baratheon and Lannisters have associations (Brienne might join Jaime), and Martell and Targaryens might team up.

This is the House break downs.

Clearly House Stark is dominate with so many POVs. I added Merrett Frey here as that chapter is most about Lady Stoneheart (Catelyn). I pull out the wedge to differentiate the weaker connection to the whole.

Obviously Jon dominates the Nights Watch storyline, with Sam as main support. Most of the prologues / epilogues are also set around the wall. I added Pate here, he was the only ‘loose’ POV, but since his character will most likely be interreacting with Sam, I added it here. I don’t think it throws off the numbers too much, I just couldn’t justify putting him in the Martell house as Oldtown is technically in The Reach, and the Tyrells have no POVs so no real House representation to speak of, perhaps once we get more info I’ll move him to another block later. Besides, Pate is probably an FM agent, so yeah, he is a wildcard.

Clearly Daenerys is the main Targayen representation in the story, I added Connington here too, pulled out at bit as his story line is so far separated, but he is still representing Targaryen interests through Aegon.

House Lannister is mostly Tyrion, but he had a POV from the beginning, GRRM did a lot of catching up with Cersei and Jaime in the latter books, they are about equal, interesting that combine they nearly match Tyrion, the most written about character in the series.

House Greyjoy is a nice representation of family, mostly Theon, but his sister and Uncles are given a good portion and sure to have more impact in the final books.

House Baratheon might seem a little bigger as I decided to add Brienne to this group. She doesn’t spend as much time with Renly, but she did start off there, and even though she is working to fulfill her oath to Catelyn and Jaime, I just couldn’t put he into the Stark camp firmly just yet. Perhaps once she actually meets with and joins one of the Starks (most likely one of the girls), but her journey since has been more neutral / free agent and she could end up with another group entirely (Jaime) if her encounter with Lady Stoneheart goes badly.

House Martell, last family on the board. They were late additions to the story with only 4-2 chapters each, but this will surely increase as their plans start to upset the balance in the South. Two of their initial character POVs were also killed off early, so I don’t expect an easy survival rate for those from Dorne.

Well, I had fun looking at the House breakdowns, would you have made a different choice? Drawing any conclusions? Any other breakdown ideas?

I thought about adding the released chapters info, but wasn’t sure if it should be included as it is not ‘official’ material.

#ASOIAF #ASOIAF References #ASOIAF Charts

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soartfullydone · 5 months

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I absolutely want to hear some stuff about Celeste for the character fact list.

send me a character ask:

Favorite thing about them

Celeste has experienced so much in her life that she is relatively unflappable. She has a firm grip on her emotions and what she displays to other people. Not that she doesn't lose that grip from time to time. The Worst Vacation Ever has certainly been testing her, and I like that she can still be tested while having enough grit to stay classy about it.

Least favorite thing about them

She won't let me improv more silly stuff :( So on a character level, probably her rigidity. It runs counter-intuitive to how adaptable and flexible I am and often have to be, so I always have to watch myself in order to do her proper justice.

Favorite line

Ooh, probably when she "let slip" her inclination in viewing Ledo as a pirate, the rough sort. She was genuinely surprised that Ledo reacted as vehemently as she did, and that was illuminating and led to a very interesting conversation. There's also "Now, dear, it'll be fine. You held yourself very well with the horse man," which happened because the player (me) forgot the word "stablehand" midway through the sentence.

BROTP

Using all these next terms loosely, so far I've been having fun with the Old Person Solidarity between Celeste and Foaly and the No-Nonsense Professionalism between her and Char.

OTP

That possibility is dead, I think.

NOTP

This possibility is not dead, methinks.

Random headcanon

Despite living in Twalan the majority of her life, she never set foot on a ship until she traveled to Orianth. She'd be dismissive about the experience if asked, but secretly, she enjoyed sailing. It wasn't as daunting being out in open water as she'd expected.

Unpopular opinion

I don't fully know the scope of opinions about Celeste from the rest of you lovely people, so I guess I'll say... I don't know if I want her to get better. Or whether that's even in the cards for her. Whether that needle moves in one direction or the other is solely at the whims of what we discover in the campaign, if there comes a reckoning. But if she winds up being universally hated by the party, I don't think that would shock me or phase her—and it's the not phasing her bit that makes me sad for her.

Song I associate with them

"Eat Your Young" by Hozier

Favorite picture of them

I genuinely love how menacing this screenshot came out. Celeste in cold calculation mode.

#ask meme #oc: celeste #campaign: the worst vacation ever

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nya-vivi · 10 months

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in the end im replying to the oc ask in. another ask lol because 1. replying in comments is a pain 2. tumblr dms don't have the option to reply to a particular message and an ask will probably look more organized and better for you to read/reply because i got carried away and it's LONG (also i feel like we're gonna ping pong those long ass answers back and forth nehdhdhs not that i complain) but anyway,,

okokok im finally making a proper reply.

and im connecting in academical pain 🤝

about fandoms i'm interested in, my main ones at the moment are orv and honkai and afaik you're in neither so genshin is a perfect choice BUT im also kinda interested in the non fandom ones 👀 so if you'd like to talk about these ones too im all ears

for Lore:

ok so i had to point this out:

i suppose lore's lore really needs to be as correct as possible jdhdhd (i already love her name it's perfect for a travelersona 11/10)

anyway. so the whole idea is that what if there was another pair of siblings from which one was lost and another searching for them, yes? that's actually really cool, common goal, common adventure, like a better travel companion (sorry paimon). also aether mains unite and pretty boys so true

she honestly sounds like such a fun and positive person, i mean,, running around the teyvat, swinging the claymore back and forth, climbing to random places only to suddenly jump from them giving a heart attack the companions who only a second later notice that shes already gliding and laughing. like a chaotic moving source of serotonin a rey of sunshine etc etc, i think she would get along with amber!

OMG GOLD LORE TIED TO HER i love you for that this is literally my favorite piece of genshin lore. artifical heart is an interesting one i don't think ive seen this one that often actually, so more lifespan in exchange for altered body hmm does it affect her daily life in a way? or does it work the exact same way like a regular one but only works for a longer time?

omg omg so. lore and aether traveling together and at the same time lumi and lorena's sis ended up in the same place AND together together? now that's an interesting coincidence i wonder what lore and aether's reaction would be to finding out

the recent quest. did give us a lot of info about khaenri'ah indeed jdhdhd but that's good! you have now more insight into it

for Qinxi:

ok so this one thing is making me curious, how difficult was it to get a name for her? you listed the symbols that are part of it and was it that you first thought about words/meanings you want to include and then constructed a name, or firstly came up with a name and the symbols alongside it?

oOOoooooOo make up maker, i know absolutely nothing about make up HOWEVER it doesn't stop me from thinking that it's cool! and expensive one? so she's probably on her way to start a very lucrative business

it's nice she managed to combine the two without giving up on one another (if she had to then i hope she'd decide to follow the artist dream) and getting the best outcome. so: effective work ✔️ doing something she likes ✔️ man i wish that was me

omg so even the tianquan of the liyue qixing orders her products? damnnn so she's basically set for life jdhdhd im really curious how you're going to develop her further!!

for Vivi:

she's named like you!! i guess the reason is being self insert right? FAVONIUS LIBRARIAN OMG shes living the best life fr

owow the story has angsty parts im now really curious jdjdjd also a self insert not being involved in the plot has a vibe like when a player does everything in the game - all side quests missions etc EXCEPT the main story (like my friend tends to lol) ndhdhd. also #2: reincarnated villainess in a way she was one but died and now is just a girl or she reincarnated into a villainess character or something? because i read one (technically two if we count a guy version or three if we also count an anime) comic about the latter and that's what my brain associates with that trope jdhdh

geo catalyst so like ningguang, that's really cool of her

jshdhdhs you're also studying languages, right? im starting to see the self insert-ness.

oOOoO irminsul thingies, i must admit i really like the magic time/memory tree stuff in all hoyo games. also ok so this kinda answers my previous question, she was a villainess in a past life but now she's someone else yes? AND got enlightened about all the stuff from previous life when she touched the tree?

ah damn you student debt, but graduating also has its merits so ig it's not the worst scenario's especially that she managed to transfer to mond (truly ms worldwide, from fontaine to sumeru to mond)

honestly being afraid of celestia doesn't surprise me the slightest, everything regarding it is sus as hell. also getting a vision despite not wanting it is in a way suffering from success, she could bond with keqing over that ndhdhd

and mannn, living under celestia's watch sure must be stressful, especially considering all the irminsul and past life things. springvale in this situation you described made me think about the shire from middle-earth jshdhd a peaceful piece of land in a huge fantasy word and its schemes and secrets

please tell me when you come up with next events of her story because this does indeed sound intriguing! i wonder if nahida knows about vivi's past, now that you mentioned her

also #number idk which, we'll be getting fontaine soon, will you be adding more details to vivi's backstory now that we'll have more insight to how exactly life there looks like? or will you just focus on her in the current place and time meaning sumeru - > mond with celestia kiiinda involved?

and ok that's all thank you so much for sharing these with me!! you weren't bothering me at all i asked about that myself after all and to be fair im actually pretty interested in the creation process, because when i have an oc it's really chaotic and random but yours seem so well thought!

also, you know what. reading about your ocs and especially vivi since she's like your own special genshinsona made me think about what would mine be and. now im flooded with thoughts but. here it's not a place for that ksjdjd

also also, if you dont mind could i make a doodle of one of them for you maybe 👉👈 they seem cool and recently i got a sudden boost of motivation and have been practicing digital art so. yeah

Len my beloved I was smiling kicking and giggling silly at the ask fr ♡♡♡

Thank you for the sweet words! I'm not used to sharing original characters, since they tend to be personal and, well, I understand it's not everyone's cup of tea hearing about a random OC that doesn't have even a proper story yet hahah (not me tho, I'm not sane when ocs are involved,,, I love how creative everyone gets about them ♡) so it really made my day!!

I will be answering your questions (and some corrections because I did not express myself correctly ajbsiask English my beloathed) below the read more as last time, not to clog the dash ♡

Uhm, spoilers from Caribert & Act IV of Sumeru's archon quest??

So! Part by part:

About my other non-fandom ocs » so I once (a lot of years ago) made a story (a teeny beety dark) about a girl who could see ghosts and supernatural creatures and she could see her dead friend. In the end I made her friend, Anna, pass away, and I don't like killing my ocs ngl.

So I revived Anna and made her part of a blog idea I had, which was kinda restaurant-like thematic, so there would be a few ocs who worked as servers and the owner was a cat... That was before I found I was not meant to get into the spotlight LOL, but I still keep her in my head as part of the staff and occasionally play with her HAHA I quite like her, she's nice and I learned better of plot devices (so I try to kill my darlings the least I can).

About Lore, the idea at first was that both Lore and her sis were from another city but ended up in Khaenri'ah for one thing or another. Since Lore was the eldest of the two, she was the one to 'get to work' for both of them, but she was sick with a rare heart problem and it was difficult to work.

That's when Gold enters and makes the deal with Lore: Gold gets to experiment on her about artificial hearts (since it is before Albedo and, in my own supposition, she was perfectioning the art of artificial life) and she gets a good heart and money for her and her sister. In the end, the heart is perfectioned just before whatever happened in Khaenri'ah and Lore is sealed away to avoid her heart to be damaged.

That's when the timeline in my own story gets fuzzy, but roughly her sis ends up meeting Lumine and since she's alone (for Lore is asleep and secure), she leaves with Lumine and Dain.

The thing is, that in the Caribert quest they said everyone residing in Khaenri'ah that wasn't part of the nobles ended up turned into hilichurls, so I had to discard that idea </3

Most of the story is adaptable, but I have to get the most important thing very well thought before anything (I kinda need a bit more lore, ah the irony).

Her heart works like a motor: it works like a normal heart but it doesn't beat. It can stop if it is not properly maintained (and after 500 years, it needs revision) so as she's going to look for her sis, she's also looking for Gold (and Albedo) so they can revise her.

In an AU ending, Aether and Lore end up as in-laws LMAO they are friends but the surprise is there.

About Qinxi, the name was hard, because I don't know Chinese Hanzi (the logograms), but I usually use one website where you can see Hanzi combinations for actual names (I cannot quite find the website rn, but I will send it to you if you are interested) and found first the Qin logogram and then the Xi logogram with other combinations. Then, I copied the two and pasted them in yabla and liked how they sounded together. The name was primarily phonetic, then the meaning went along well and left it at that.

My main inspiration for her is the Song Dynasty, specially the make up (you can find there pretty designs of huadian) and also they seem to have pants? Pretty cool imho. But make up making is difficult to find ajdgajdja so I'm still searching for that 👀 (Edit 1: I did in fact find a bit on how chinese people used to do make up, so I have that more covered than before).

About Vivi, okay this is a bit difficult to explain: what I meant with the 'villainess' part was that Vivienne existed as a person before my self-insert inhibited her body.

Basically she died and was transmigrated to a body whose soul died at the same time (that's the mechanic, but it will not be explained tbh). So Vivienne (original) became Vivi. She is not a villainess nor was the previous host a villainess but that is what I informally call a 'villainess reincarnation' lol she still has her memories but they are fuzzy.

I'm thinking of making her transmigrate when Vivienne (og) was already into the Akademiya, simply because I'm not masochistic enough to go through college again HAHAH

I thought about making her catalyst because I detest combat aksboad but at some point I thought about making her ability/ultimate another weapon (since it has been increasing with more charas) but I'm debating, because it was when originally I thought of making her go through adolescence again. As I didn't like the idea of that, I think I might just scratch that out.

The geo part was because I got both geo/dendro elements/characteristics, but I really don't want to go through the academic system again (and honestly, I would be both curious but terribly afraid of finding something I weren't supposed to so a big nono) kavdoadb

To go through the last part of your ask: I didn't remember Celestia has in fact not appeared in 500 years, but because she ends up in the same timeline as the Traveler, she's still afraid xd I was thinking of making her a descendant, as she isn't quite of this world, and her information doesn't really appear in the Irminsul until she actually gets into the body (and thinking over a 'corrupted file' in the Irminsul 👀🤭), so Nahida knows something is up with her but Vivi really doesn't want to say anything important enough to change the plot, so in the end they get into a deal.

We will have to see what is cooking in Fontaine, but I already have a bit of a subplot (Vivi is going to become a wanted woman at some point HAHAH) the only thing left is to see if it isn't discordant with the world quest 👀 I also plan to include some info about her family! She has a brother and a father in-game, so both of them will appear, as she has a good relationship with them.

My goal is make her life difficult but not a disaster jagskadh my poor baby.

I would be SUPER excited if you decide to make art of Vivi 🤭🤭🤭 I have Vivi's info in my pinned post, but I have changed her design a bit 🤡 let me present the bust of her that I changed:

I changed a bit her hair and made her skin complexion darker, because the idea is that her mother was from Sumeru and her body got all the melatonin and I didn't quite knew what ✨color theory✨ was at the time because her base skin color is way lighter than it seems aksbaoxb

I want to change her outfit too, the idea of a sash tied around her waist as corsette type but not as rigid as one is still in my mind. I want her have something flowy (and ribbon-y) to match with both Sumeru's and Fontaine's clothing designs, but at the same time comfortable enough to be in the library or taking a stroll or fishing (because I haven't forgot about it. I have been making rounds and getting the fishing rods and I want her to have it as a hobby lolol). I'm looking for historical references (since it is theorized Fontaine is around the 1700/1800s France) but nothing concrete yet.

The reality of the well thought character (even if I feel she's still way underdeveloped for what I want) is my hyperfixation qjsnsoxb idk if that's good or not, but writing about her makes me think of her more solidly if it makes sense? More tangible than only a concept. Do you want to get mentioned if I ever decide her clothes?? (It's ok to say not don't worry fufu 🤭)

I am very excited for Fontaine (next month??) the only thing I know rn is what the npcs have told us but I'm super excited to see it (and the level of mechanical advancement, which I am obsessed with in genshin) to see what I can work with 👀

Oh! Don't forget to tell me if you ever think more things about your genshinsona 👀 you know I am very interested 👀👀 I feel like mr engineer and Vivi would get along as she's kinda of a mechanic and kind of a nerd about it too <3

#lovemail #len🎆#oc: vivienne #oc: qinxi #oc: lorena #i did not proofread this enough so if there's something i haven't explained well #pls tell me akxboaxj #i think i will make it in time!

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sweet-as-writing · 2 years

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When it comes to outlining, I think what should be focused on the most is not plot, setting or theme (though those do serve a role in outlining), but characters. Characters are the foundation of your story, and they will drive the events throughout your plot, influence the setting, and form the theme.

You don’t need to map out whole character arcs—in fact, I encourage you not to do that because you can probably create a more natural, satisfying, and consistent arc while writing your first draft that by planning it out beforehand. You can create a point A and a point B, but I would leave the rest of the specifics up to plot planning and then write out how the character develops alongside the plot in the first draft.

Instead, I encourage writers, especially those who need to outline in order to create a successful story (like myself), to write character essays.

Essays?!?! Like.... English class? That might appeal some of you and disgust others. I know myself that writing a bunch of essays in 12pt Times New Roman, 5 paragraphs with MLA citations would not be fun and not get me anywhere.

What I mean by character essays is not the traditional English essay. I mean, if that’s how you want to do it, then power to you. But you should write these in the manner you feel will be most effective and comfortable down the line because you’ll hopefully be referencing these character essays while working on your first draft and maybe even while editing. That means they can be five paragraphs or they can be two sentences. They can include any relevant information: backstory, motivations, physical traits, relationships, etc. A character essay is not a biography. Don’t try to fit a character’s whole life into the essay. Only focus on what should be relevant to the story.

I recommend doing this for as many characters as you can. Obviously the main character, as well as prominent side characters, antagonists, love interests, mentors, etc. But try writing them for those random side characters too! Often, you’ll never directly use that information, but coming up with lives of those random people can add to world building and make your character live in a more 3D world. In real life, everybody sees themselves as the main character of their own story. Reflect that in your writing.

Writing character essays are beneficial for all the obvious reasons. You can get a better idea of what a character is like, leading to a more consistent first draft. You can develop a character while writing it, and fix character holes before they arise. But they also can lead to a bunch of good side effects. As aforementioned, they can help increase world building. For example, asking about a character’s hometown can flesh out the setting of the world as a whole.

They can also get you hyped! A lot of times, both writing and reading over these character essays can remind you why you fell in love with them and why their story deserves to be told.

With that being said, character essays are a tool, not a chore. You shouldn’t have to worry about editing them because they will never see the light of publication, and they are for yourself only. If they feel like an inconvenience, they can be done for some characters and not for others, or be in list format, or maybe just consist of a bunch of words associated with that character.

You can also try doing this essay technique with the story’s setting, plot, and theme. You’re a writer—you should write it out and use both the process and result to further develop your story.

Hope this helps!

#writing #writing advice #writing tips #wtwcommunity #writblr #writing inspiration

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writingwithcolor · 3 years

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I'm writing an AU of a movie that takes place in the 1880s USA, where a travelling white character and a Jewish character are waylaid by Native Americans, who they befriend. Probably because it was written by and about PoC (Jews) the scene actually avoids the stuff on your Native American Masterpost, but I'd still like to do better than a movie made in the 1980's, and I feel weird cutting them from the plot entirely. I have a Jewish woman reading it for that, but are there any things you (1/1)

2/2 1880s western movie ask--are there things you'd LIKE to see in a movie where a white man and a Jewish man run into Native Americans in the 1880s? I do plan to base them on a real tribe (Ute, probably) and have proper housing/clothes and so forth, but right now I'm just trying to avoid or subvert awful cowboy movie tropes. Any ideas?

White and Jewish Men, Native American interactions in 1880s

I am vaguely concerned with how you only cite one of our posts about Native Americans, that was not written by a Native person, and do not cite any of the posts relating to this time period, or any posts relating to representation in media.

Sidenote: if you want us to give accurate reflections of the media you’re discussing, please tell us the NAME. I cannot go look up this movie based off this description to give you an idea of what my issues are with this scene, and must instead trust that the representation is good based off your judgement. I cannot make my own judgement. This is a problem. Especially since your whole question boils down to “this scene is good but not great and I want it to be great. How can I do that?”

Your baseline for “good” could very well be my baseline for “terrible hack job”. I can’t give you the proper education required for you to be able to accurately evaluate the media you’re watching for racist stereotypes if you don’t tell me what you’re even working with.

When you’re writing fanfic where the media is directly relevant to the question, please tell us the name of the media. We will not judge your tastes. We need this information in order to properly help you.

Moving on.

I bring up my concern for you citing that one—exceptionally old—post because it is lacking in many of the tropes that don’t exist in the media critique field but exist in the real world. This is an issue I have run into countless times on WWC (hence further concern you did not cite any other posts) and have spoken about at length.

People look at the media critique world exclusively, assume it is a complete evaluation of how Native Americans are seen in society, and as a result end up ignoring some really toxic stereotypes and then come to the inbox with “these characters aren’t abc trope, so they’re fine, but I want to rubber stamp them anyway. Anything wrong here?”. The answer is pretty much always yes.

Issue one: “Waylaid” by Native Americans

This wording is extremely loaded for one reason: Native American people are seen as tricksters, liars, and predators. This is the #1 trope that shows up in the real world that does not show up in media critique. It’s also the trope I have talked about the most when it comes to media representation, so you not knowing the trope is a sign you haven’t read the entirety of the Native tag—which is in the FAQ as something we would really prefer you did before coming at us to answer questions. It avoids us having to re-explain ourselves.

Now, hostility is honestly to be expected for the time period the movie is set in. This is in the beginnings (or ramping up) of residential schools in America* and Canada, we have generations upon generations of stolen or killed children, reserves being allocated perhaps hundreds of miles from sacred sites, and various wars with Plains and Southwest peoples are in full force (Wounded Knee would have happened in 1890, in December, and the Dakoa’s mass execution would have been in 1862. Those are just the big-name wars. There absolutely were others).

*America covers up its residential schools abuse extremely thoroughly, so if you try to research them in the American context you will come up empty. Please research Canada’s schools and apply the same abuse to America, as Canada has had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission about residential schools and therefore is more (but not completely) transparent about the abuse that happened. Please note that America’s history with residential schools is longer than Canada’s history. There is an extremely large trigger warning for mass child death when you do this research.

But just because the hostility is expected does not mean that this hostility would be treated well in the movie. Especially when you consider the sheer amount of tension between any Native actors and white actors, for how Sacheen Littlefeather had just been nearly beaten up by white actors at the 1973 Academy Awards for mentioning Wounded Knee, and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act had only been passed two years prior in 1978.

These Native actors would not have had the ability to truly consent to how they were shown, and this power dynamic has to be in your mind when you watch this scene over. I don’t care that the writers were from a discriminated-against background. This does not always result in being respectful, and I’ve also spoken about this power imbalance at length (primarily in the cowboy tag).

Documentaries and history specials made in the 2010s (with some degree of academic muster) will still fall into wording that harkens Indigenous people to wolves and settlers as frightened prey animals getting picked off by the mean animalistic Natives. This is not neutral, or good. This is perpetuating the myth that the settlers were helpless, just doing their own thing completely unobtrusively, and then the evil territorial Native Americans didn’t want to share.

To paraphrase Batman: if I had a week I couldn’t explain all the reasons that’s wrong.

How were these characters waylaid by the Native population? Because that answer—which I cannot get because you did not name the media—will determine how good the framing is. But based on the time period this movie was made alone, I do not trust it was done respectfully.

Issue 2: “Befriending”

I mentioned this was in an intense period of residential schools and land wars all in that area. The Ute themselves had just been massacred by Mormons in the Grass Valley Massacre in 1865, with ten men and an unknown number of women and children killed thanks to a case of assumed association with a war chief (Antonga Black Hawk) currently at war with Utah. The Paiute had been massacred in 1866. Over 100 Timpanogo men had been killed, with an unknown number of women and children enslaved by Brigham Young in Salt Lake City in 1850, with many of the enslaved people dying in captivity (those numbers were not tracked, but I would assume at least two hundred were enslaved— that’s simply assuming one woman/wife and one child for every man, and the numbers could have very well been higher if any war-widows and their children were in the group, not to mention families with multiple children). This is after an unknown group of Indigenous people had been killed by Governor Brigham Young the year prior, to “permanently stop cattle theft” from settlers.

The number of Native Americans killed in Utah in the 1800s—just the number of dead counted (since women and children weren’t counted)—in massacres not tied to war (because there was at least one war) is over 130. The actual number of random murders is much higher; between the uncounted deaths and how the Governor had issued orders to “deal with” the problem of cattle theft permanently. I doubt you would have been tried or convicted if you murdered Indigenous peoples on “your” land. This is why it’s called state sanctioned genocide.

This is not counting the Black Hawk War in Utah (1865-1872), which the Ute were absolutely a part of (the wiki articles I read were contradictory if Antonga Black Hawk was Ute or Timpanogo, but the Ute were part of it). The first official massacre tied to the war—the Bear River Massacre, ordered by the US Military—places the death count of just that singular massacre at over five hundred Shoshone, including elders, women, and children. It would not be unreasonable to assume that the number of Indigenous people killed in Utah from 1850, onward, is over a thousand, perhaps two or three.

Pardon me for not reading beyond that point to list more massacres and simply ballparking a number; the source will be linked for you to get an accurate number of dead.

So how did they befriend the Native population? Let alone see them as fully human considering the racism of the time period? Natives were absolutely not seen as fully human so long as they were tied to their culture, and assimilation equalling some sliver of respect was already a stick being waved around as a threat. This lack of humanity continues to the present day.

I’m not saying friendship is impossible. I am saying the sheer levels of mistrust that would exist between random wandering groups of white/pale men and Indigenous communities wouldn’t exactly make that friendship easy. Having the scene end be a genuine friendship feels ignorant and hollow and flattening of ongoing genocide, because settlers lied about their intentions and then lined you up for slauther (that’s how the Timpanogo were killed and enslaved).

Utah had already done most of its mass killing by this point. The era of trusting them was over. There was an active open hunting season, and the acceptable targets were the Indigenous populations of Utah.

(sources for the numbers:

List of Indian Massacres in North America Black Hawk War (1865-1872))

Issue 3: “Proper housing/clothes and so forth”

Do you mean Western style settlements and jeans? If yes, congratulations you have written a reservation which means the land-ripped-away wounds are going to be fresh, painful, and sore.

You do not codify what you mean by “proper”, and proper is another one of those deeply loaded colonial words that can mean “like a white man” or “appropriate for their tribe.” For the time period, it would be the former. Without specifying which direction you’re going for, I have no idea what you’re imagining. And without the name of the media, I don’t know what the basis of this is.

The reservation history of this time period seems to maybe have some wiggle room; there were two reservations allocated for the Ute at this time, one made in 1861 and another made in 1882 (they were combined into the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation in 1886). This is all at the surface level of a google and wikipedia search, so I have no idea how many lived in the bush and how many lived on the reserve.

There were certainly land defenders trying to tell Utah the land did not belong to them, so holdouts that avoided getting rounded up were certainly possible. But these holdouts would be far, far more hostile to anyone non-Native.

The Ute seemed to be some degree of lucky in that the reserve is on some of their ancestral territory, but any loss of land that large is going to leave huge scars.

It should be noted that reserves would mean the traditional clothing and housing would likely be forbidden, because assimilation logic was in full force and absolutely vicious at this time.

It’s a large reserve, so the possibility exists they could have accidentally ended up within the borders of it. I’m not sure how hostile the state government was for rounding up all the Ute, so I don’t know if there would have been pockets of them hiding out. In present day, half of the Ute tribe lives on the reserve, but this wasn’t necessarily true historically—it could have been a much higher percentage in either direction.

It’s up to you if you want to make them be reservation-bound or not. Regardless, the above mentioned genocide would have been pretty fresh, the land theft in negotiations or already having happened, and generally, the Ute would be well on their way to every assimilation attempt made from either residential schools, missionaries, and/or the forced settlement and pre-fab homes.

To Answer Your Question

I don’t want another flattened, sanitized portrayal of genocide.

Look at the number of dead above, the amount of land lost above, the amount of executive orders above. And try to tell me that these people would be anything less than completely and totally devastated. Beyond traumatized. Beyond broken hearted. Absolutely grief stricken with almost no soul left.

Their religion would have been illegal. Their children would have been stolen. Their land was taken away. A saying about post-apocalyptic fiction is how settler-based it is, because Indigenous people have already lived through their own apocalypse.

It would have all just happened at the time period this story is set in. All of the grief you feel now at the environment changing so drastically that you aren’t sure how you’ll survive? Take that, magnify it by an exponential amount because it happened, and you have the mindset of these Native characters.

This is not a topic to tread lightly. This is not a topic to read one masterpost and treat it as a golden rule when there is too much history buried in unmarked, overfull graves of school grounds and cities and battlefields. I doubt the movie you’re using is good representation if it doesn’t even hint at the amount of trauma these Native characters would have been through in thirty years.

A single generation, and the life that they had spent millennia living was gone. Despite massive losses of life trying to fight to preserve their culture and land.

Learn some history. That’s all I can tell you. Learn it, process it, and look outside of checklists. Look outside of media.

And let us have our grief.

~ Mod Lesya

On Question Framing

Please allow me the opportunity to comment on “are there things you'd LIKE to see in a movie where a white man and a Jewish man run into Native Americans in the 1880s?” That strikes me as the same type of question as asking what color food I’d like for lunch. I don’t see how the cultural backgrounds of characters I have literally no other information about is supposed to make me want anything in particular about them. I don’t know anything about their personalities or if they have anything in common.

Compare the following questions:

“Are there things you’d like to see in a movie where two American women, one from a Nordic background and one Jewish, are interacting?” I struggle to see how our backgrounds are going to yield any further inspiration. It certainly doesn’t tell you that we’re both queer and cling to each other’s support in a scary world; it doesn’t tell you that we uplift each other through mental illness; it doesn’t go into our 30 years of endless bizarre inside jokes related to everything from mustelids to bad subtitles.

Because: “white”, “Jewish”, and “Native American” aren’t personality words. You can ask me what kind of interaction I’d like to see from a high-strung overachieving woman and a happy-go-lucky Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and I’ll tell you I’d want fluffy f/f romance. Someone else might want conflict ultimately resolving in friendship. A third person might want them slowly getting on each other’s nerves more and more until one becomes a supervillain and the other must thwart her. But the same question about a cultural demographic? That told me nothing about the people involved.

Also, the first time I meet a new person from a very different culture, it might take weeks before discussion of our specific cultural differences comes up. As a consequence, my first deep conversations with a Costa Rican American gentile friend were not about Costa Rica or my Jewishness but about things we had in common: classical music and coping with breakups--which are obviously conversations I could have had if we were both Jewish, both Costa Rican gentiles, or both something else. So in other words, I’m having trouble seeing how knowing so little about these characters is supposed to give me something to want to see on the page.

Thank you for understanding.

(And yes, I agree with Lesya, what’s with this trend of people trying to explain their fandom in a roundabout way instead of mentioning it by name? It makes it harder to give meaningful help….)

--Shira

#platypan #genocide #native american #North America #america #history #american history #media #representation #asks

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souvenirsofsurgery · 3 years

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monty’s horror movie list

no one follows me for this but i’m back in my horror movie obsession era so here we go. some of them are good, some of them are bad (but I love them), and some of them are kind of unacceptable, like, morally tbh, I’m sorry

anyway, in no particular order:

mother!: I just watched this one today so it’s on my mind. get ready to be stressed out by deeply uncomfortable social situations for like, the first hour and a half and then genuinely disturbed for the last twenty minutes. i finished this and then sat in my room mouthing “what the fuck, what the fuck”. v good, 10/10

Orphan: What if you adopted a kid but they sucked?

Absentia: I was really impressed, cause this was like a low-budget, crowd funded movie but it’s so so good. This one is about a woman whose husband went missing years ago, a creepy tunnel, and family relationships. V quiet and sad

Possum: Not very much happens in this movie for a long time but the atmosphere is so good, and it’s genuinely creepy. The ending also made me so uncomfortable I almost couldn’t watch it, so there’s that

The Wolf House: Incredible unsettling stop-motion animation, and I’m a sucker for good animation. Makes more sense if you know a little Chilean history, but it’s interesting even without that context

Amityville: It’s About Time: Jumping right from that foreign arthouse film into cheesy schlock, what if a clock made people evil and fucked up?

Hell House LLC: More! Schlock! This is a fake documentary/found footage movie about people trying to make a haunted house in an old hotel... but what if it was haunted for real??

Host (the 2020 shudder original): Unfriended if it was good

Hereditary: Made me sad :( This was one of the first movies to genuinely scare me in a while, and my sister-in-law won’t even let anyone talk to her about it. The story about a family dealing with grief and complicated relationships is also just so interesting to me, this one’s in my top 10

Anything for Jackson: Reverse possession movie: they try to put a spirit IN someone! Hell yeah. So many good, weird ghosts in here, I love some good, weird ghosts

13 Ghosts: (the early 2000s remake) Speaking of good weird ghosts. What if your estranged uncle died and left you a house but there was a ghost jail in the basement? I just rewatched this movie with my little brother and remembered how much I love it. Very schlocky, Matthew Lillard’s acting is off the fucking walls and I love it, why does he act like that??

Kindred: One of the only “is it in her head, or is it real?” movies where I actually really wasn’t sure. It’s about a woman whose husband dies right before she’s about to give birth, so she ends up staying with his family and slowly starts to question their motives

Parents: What if you were just a little kid and you started to suspect your parents were eating people?

Basket Case: I’m not crying over a B movie, I’m not crying over a B movie. In this one, two conjoined twins are surgically separated against their wills, with one of them getting thrown in the trash. As adults, they start hunting down the doctors who did it to them

The Poughkeepsie Tapes: Very depressing fake documentary about a serial killer. Just fucked up and sad

The Taking of Deborah Logan: One of the few found footage movies that I think is actually good. A small documentary crew goes to film a woman and her aging mother who’s suffering from dementia, but they start to think that... huh, maybe this is something a little worse than dementia...

Ju-On: The Grudge (the original Japanese one): this movie just freaks me out, I don’t like how Kayako moves around, I don’t like the sounds she makes, and I don’t like her weird little son

The Ring (the American remake): I saw this movie when I was like 8 bc someone recorded it over the Willy Wonka VHS I’d gotten from the thrift store, and I’ve been fucked up ever since. In it, a woman sees a cursed tape that will make you die in seven days, and has to try and figure out how to save herself before then. GREAT atmosphere, very creepy

Sadako Vs Kayako: What if the girl from the Grudge and the girl from the Ring fought each other? Hell yeah. Plus, love that a ghost hunter comes to help with the situation and he’s got a random mean little girl with him. People are like “why is she here?” and he’s just like “she’s my associate” okay?? Where did she come from??? I’m obsessed with this movie

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A classic. Rancid, nasty atmosphere, just feels gross, 10/10

Society: Rich people suck so so bad and are very fucked up

House of 1000 Corpses: I love this movie and I’m sorry, its just some disgusting, campy fun. Like, what if your car broke down the night before halloween and ended up in a house with some terrible (but very entertaining) people?

Oculus: The idea of being a little kid, stuck in the house while your parents are slowly losing it, or potentially being possessed by something evil, is really scary to me. This movie does it so well. It moves back and forth from the main characters going through that in their childhoods, to them as adults, back in the house where it happened, and it’s so so good

Hellraiser: You tell me it’s about the blurry line between pleasure and pain and I watch it. The designs for the cenobites are so good. I like this first one a lot, but I also really enjoy the second one bc the torture dimension looks like MC Escher designed it and it’s sick as hell

The Others: This is one of my favorite, like, classic haunted house kind of movie. A mother keeps her kids inside an old mansion, with all the curtains drawn, because they have an illness that means they can’t go in the sunlight. Very, very creepy

The Blair Witch Project: This one just feels so real, I’ve never seen another found footage movie that reached this level. The actors knocked it out of the park, how am I so freaked out just by a couple of people wandering around the woods? It’s the blueprint, honestly

A Nightmare on Elm Street: You guys know this one, he gets you in your dreams! Probably my favorite of the classic slashers, I love some good old practical effects. my brother actually just bought me the WHOLE box set for my birthday so I’m gonna start working though the ones I haven’t seen yet

Jennifer’s Body: What if your best friend, who you have a very homoerotic relationship with, started eating dudes? Iconic. No, but seriously, this movie has a lot more going on than you might think

House of Wax (the 2000s remake): Bad, but so good. It’s really got that uncanny valley thing going on, love that fucked up wax museum

Ichi the Killer: Pretty unacceptable, I can’t in good conscience tell you to watch this movie, but it’s definitely an experience. Very very very violent, like super violent, but in the wildest fucking ways. Basically, what if you were a masochistic Yakuza member with a weird joker mouth and you just wanted a sadistic vigilante to beat the absolute shit out of you? Anyway, I think there’s something wrong with Takashi Miike and probably also me

Black Christmas: This is one of the og og slashers. It’s about girls getting killed in a sorority house, but surprisingly it’s like, not really an exploitation film, and I really like the characters. Good, unsettling killer, too

The Baby: WEIRD. Weird and uncomfortable. I’m not trying to kink shame anyone when I say this, but it’s probably definitely a fetish thing. In it, a social worker takes on the case of a family with an adult son who they’re claiming has the mind of a baby. This one’s probably kind of unacceptable too, to be honest with you

#horror #horror movies #horror movie recs

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weaverofthreads · 3 years

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On the process of writing a novel...

Ok, so this began as a DM to a very dear friend who had said they were super excited to work on a novel of theirs that they'd abandoned for years, but they felt a bit lost when looking at the project again. They had "too many characters, too many intrigues" and they didn't "know how to create order" for all their ideas. They didn't know "what to keep, what to remove, what to change" and wanted to know if I had any tips.

I began to reply in messages and then realised I needed to make a whole post out of it, so here it is! All 3k words of it. This is for you, darling! I hope it helps.

Things I found extremely helpful when planning my novel for NaNoWriMo this year, after also taking some time off from it.

Most of this comes from Alicia Lidwina’s Four-Part article on her NaNoWriMo prep process, and setting up a writer’s notebook, for 2018. You can find the link to the first part here and I highly recommend you check out the whole series of articles for a more in-depth read.

Content of this ‘essay’:

Preparation, Groundwork, and Materials

Project 'Stats' & Overview

Mood, Moodboards, and Key Imagery

Things to Consider, and Important Bullet Points

Get to Know Your Characters

Chronological Order

Tangential and Preceding Events

Basic Premise, Plot Definition, Sub Plot Ideas

List of Locations

Scenes

Chapter Outline

NaNo Plan

Additional Notes and Tips for Writing

Ok. Let's begin.

First of all, I'm not saying that this is the only way to write or organise a novel. It can be tackled in as many ways as there are writers in the universe. This is just the method I used to get my ideas crystallised and organised.

Preparation, Groundwork, and Materials.

Take your preparation seriously. I bought a cheap but still nice A4 sketchbook with blank paper for maybe £2 at the local hobby store, and used it solely for the purposes of being my Novel Notebook. It doesn’t have to be a pretty, perfect, Aesthetic(TM) journal at all. Its function is to act as a route-guide through the process.

I bought a cute sticker from Etsy and used it as the front cover design so that I liked the book and that it felt a little bit special, without being too intimidating to put a mark in. Then I left the very first page blank, and opened it to the first double page. On the left, I wrote ‘Contents’ and then moved on to the right and wrote ‘Project Stats and Overview’.

I used a pen that was comfortable to write with, which for me was important. I’m a very tactile person, and having nice paper and pens (not necessarily fancy), made the process feel good.

Project Stats and Overview

This is the bare bones of the book, and includes details such as:

Project Working Title: (in my case it’s Weaver of Threads)

Targeted Wordcount: (to give yourself an idea of the scope, but it’s not necessary. For me it’s 50-100k)

Genre: (for me, fantasy)

Series: (will it be one book or more? For me, probably more than one, and at least two).

Inspiration: (here you can jot down all sorts of things which inspire your world and your writing, and it can be anything. In my case, I began with “density and lore, and feeling of being grounded in a real world from LOTR and Tolkien.” And I went on to include other writers and novels in the fantasy genre, as well as elements from our own world, such as Mongolian herding communities and way of life, the history of the Persian Empire, and Renaissance Florence!).

Project Timeline: Give yourself a structure, and be realistic. If you know you’re a slow writer who’s prone to distractions, be generous, but if you’re someone who responds well to short deadlines, tighten the time frame up a bit. I said “November 2020 - November 2021 for the whole manuscript” because I know I’m a procrastinator who gets dejected if they shoot past intense deadlines….

Editing Deadline: December 2021-January 2022. I know I can edit fairly quickly, so I made this one much shorter.

Main Requirements Prior to Starting: What do you need to get sorted before you can get going? It could be purchasing a laptop or figuring out a magic system. In my case, it was the latter.

What Happens in your novel?: This is not ‘what do your characters do?’, but what, in one sentence, actually happens in the book. For Fellowship of the Ring, you could say ‘a diverse group of people assemble and set off together with the goal of destroying the Ring’. LOADS more stuff actually takes place, obviously, but that’s probably the key thing that happens in that book. So, write the same thing for yours. I’m not going to tell you what happens in mine, because that would spoil it :).

That took up the first A4 page of my writer’s notebook, and after that, I moved on to Mood and Key Imagery.

Mood, Moodboards, and Key Imagery

On the left hand side of the page, I wrote down the words and concepts that sprang to mind when I thought of the novel itself. These were in no particular order or placement — just a random cloud of ideas in a rough column on the left hand side of the page — and they included: history, mystery, love, friendship, betrayal, nostalgic, homesick, sense of belonging, sense of place, searching, closeness, secrets… etc. etc.

Then on the right hand side, I wrote down five key words that I wanted to associate with the novel. These would form the ‘visual aesthetic’ in the background of my mind, and could be very easily expressed with a moodboard.

This same process (writing down words and creating a moodboard) could be achieved on a website like Pinterest. Take your time with it, find the right visual clues that really match the essence of your story, and create a final mood board with a limited number of panels that will be your novel’s ‘true north’ when it comes to feelings. If you're artistically inclined too, you could draw sketches of things relevant to your world too.

While this stage is really important for solidifying the feeling and mood of the novel, don’t get stuck here and spend forever procrastinating on Pinterest or whatever. Once you’ve crystallised that ambiance, it’s time to move on. It’s also perfectly fine to come back to this at a later stage if you find yourself running out of inspiration or drifting a bit. Daydreaming, drawing, mood-board-ing are all great ways to work on your novel on days when you don’t feel like writing.

Things to Consider:

Alicia Lidwina asked herself some questions which helped me get past the ‘block’ that I’d created when thinking about the novel, and those were:

What scares me about this story? (in my case it was the scope of it - it was easy for me to get lost in over-thinking tiny details and get too overwhelmed to handle the big picture)

What will readers take away from it? (in my case, I hoped that it was a sense of friendship, people from desperate cultures finding common ground, and a sense of being grounded in a real, tangible world.

What is its selling point? (essentially, why would an agent/publisher choose yours over the next one in the pile?). Don’t be bashful about this. This is your notebook, so if you’re proud of a feature or aspect of the story, write it down. In my case, there is no ‘Big Bad come to destroy the world’, no Chosen One who is the only one who can stop it. There is an antagonist, but it’s on a personal scale, and that’s the selling point. It’s about two people going on a personal journey to uncover a lost piece of knowledge that’s arguably not all that world-changing on its own, but which means the world to them.

What will be the three biggest issues in writing the first draft? Identify the three biggest roadblocks, and then take a bulldozer to them. For me, it was time management, getting mentally stuck, and the sheer darned effort of it becoming overwhelming!

Important Bullet Points

These are five key facts about your novel, distilled from the sections above. They include: What’s at the heart of the story? How long is the story? What’s the narrative focus of the story? What are the maximum number of main characters? And the maximum number of supporting characters (this obviously doesn’t mean you can’t have other, less important characters too!)?

Relationship between the two main characters is forefront

50-100k words

The novel’s focus is on the characters’ main goal (had to be more vague here so I didn't give it away)

2 main characters

3 supporting characters

If you find you’ve got too many main characters (not necessarily a bad thing to have a lot of characters - look at A Song of Ice and Fire after all!), then figure out whose story you want to tell here. You can always write another story with other characters in a connected novel, or a sequel. You don’t have to tell everything all at the same time.

Speaking of characters…

…Get to Know Your Main Characters:

Here you can write character sheets for each of your main characters and cast. There are hundreds of these templates available on the internet, asking questions like ‘how would your character react to [insert event]?’ etc. to get to know your character. If this isn’t your thing (it isn’t mine) then at least write down some useful information about them. Rough height and weight, hair, eye and skin colour, general temperament, and any other defining physical or mental traits.

Next came the Chronological Order

This does not have to represent the final order of the novel’s structure, nor the order in which you write the manuscript, but you need to know what happened within the timeline, and when, in order to be really clear when you’re telling the story. You can write the manuscript out of order, and you can tell the story with flashbacks or in a different order, but you need to have the underlying chronology securely in place so that your writing makes sense and so that you don’t confuse yourself or the readers in the process.

Preceding and Tangential Events

These don’t need to be in the novel itself, but it may be important to define the sequence of events that also led up to the moment where we pick up your story, and what is happening elsewhere so that you can be sure of these too. In my case, I defined the events that concerned one of the supporting characters’ lives so that I knew how and why they were at the point they are in the story. It relates directly to - and heavily influences - the events of the novel, so I needed to have this person’s history nailed down as well, even though I don't tell it all explicitly in the book (because that would be unnecessary and a bit dull).

Basic Premise, Plot Definition, and Sub-Plot Ideas (plus writing a synopsis)

Alicia Lidwina defined the story premise helpfully with the following formula:

Story Premise = Main Character + Desire + Obstacle

Pick a different colour for each of these components, and write a short paragraph to explain them in the context of the novel. Alicia Lidwina used the following:

[Main Character] “Harry, an orphan who didn’t know that he’s a wizard, [Desire] got invited into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and wanted to live his school life to its fullest, [Obstacle] but a certain Dark Lord who killed his parents is trying to rise into powers again and kill him in revenge.

Do this for your novel, and keep it really short.

Plot Definition: This is even shorter than that! It’s a single sentence!! It’s most closely tied to the desire of the character, and lies at the heart of the story. It’s most likely a distilled version of the ‘what happens in the story’ from the Project Stats page, so check that to see what you wrote there.

Sub Plot Ideas

Five bullet points (no more) for things that are happening concurrently and which are related in some way to the main story. For me, Kae and Tomas are doing their research, so that’s the main theme, but beneath that there are a few other related incidents.

Writing a Synopsis - developed out of the points in this section, and includes:

Who the main character is

What the stakes are (the story premise is your guideline)

What the main plot line is

How the MC resolves the problem in the main plot line

How the book ends.

List of Locations

Start with the main ones and add to it as you go on. Write a little bit of information about them so that you have something to refer back to. I also drew a big old map which I found very helpful and also really fun to do.

List of Scenes

It’s very important to map out every single scene that happens in the novel. Use your timeline to help with this, but remember a scene is not necessarily a chapter. You can have more than one scene within a chapter, but try not to have too many.

I used small post-it notes (sticky notes) and wrote down things like “M joins K’s clan at the fire and K learns about magic” and “K studies at Citadel, intro to Citadel, magic, and characters” as separate scenes. Once you’ve written down everything that is going to happen (this will take some time! Get a drink and some snacks ready, and go slow), you can stick them into your notebook in the order you’d like to tell the story. Some chapters may have just one scene, while others may have two or three. I didn’t have more than two in any of my chapters, and actually ended up splitting some scenes that I’d made too vague in this section into more chapters. It doesn’t have to be set in stone, but it will form a road map.

Additions and Notes:

I left a section of the Scene Outline bit of the notebook blank for things to add in as I went along. I haven’t used it yet, but I might.

Chapter Outline

I arranged the scenes into the chapters already by sticking them in order, but you could do a chapter outline separately after this. It’s up to you.

NaNoWriMo plan:

I did this back in October, and wrote down the main goal for nanoprep, which was to finish the background info. Breaking that down further, I listed - magic (how does it work exactly), geography, and politics.

After that, it was just a case of writing the 1667 words a day. *spoilers, I got distracted and didn’t do NaNo this year* . What I should have done, was break it up into chunks and write down my goals so that I had something tangible to use as a road map, and I will be doing that now for the novel as I take it up again outside of NaNo. Having check boxes and manageable goals really works for me. Find what will work for you, and if it turns out not to, adapt!

Some final pointers and tips:

Set regular goals for yourself. Whether you work by saying ‘I’ll write 1000 words a day’ or ‘I’ll write something every day’, make a structure for yourself. If you slip and miss a day, week, or month (I didn’t meet NaNo this year because I chose to work on another project instead *slaps forehead*), don’t beat yourself up. Writing is a craft and it takes a long time and a lot of discipline to master a craft.

Your first draft does not have to be good. At all. Your first draft is just words on paper. A first draft is the block of marble taken from the quarry, and subsequent edits and reworking is the process of carving the sculpture itself. The editing that is done by the publisher or the professional you employ to edit it for you later, is the final polishing. Don’t be demoralised if the block of marble seems very rough when it first lands in your studio. That’s ok!

Take regular breaks. Writing is hard work, and most people can’t concentrate on something successfully for longer than 55 min's, and if you’re doing that, you’re already doing really well. Personally, I’m at 15-20 on a good day. Write in little sprints of ten minutes or so, and then get up and stretch, look out the window, maybe leave the room, come back in with a fresh approach.

Stretch your hands, and wear wrist braces when you work. Seriously. I gave myself tendinitis on my first major project, and couldn’t use either hand properly for weeks. The ones I have are these, and they allow me to work safely for much longer.

Keep hydrated. Have a bottle of water on the desk in front of you between your arms as you type and sip it, otherwise you’ll forget. 2 litres a day is usually recommended, but know your body and drink accordingly.

Treat yourself. Whether that’s something as simple as a decadent hot chocolate after your first chapter/chunk/sprint is done, or a new notebook or a pen or that sticker set you wanted on Etsy or literally anything nice, reward yourself for the hard work you’ve put in, with tangible things you can look at or experience and say ‘I have that because I did the work’. It’ll help with your sense of achievement, especially if the project is a long one.

Join a local writer’s group for feedback. With the current Covid-19 chaos, this is probably not possible right now, but getting constructive feedback on your work from someone who hasn’t been cocooned in the project in the way you are, but who respects you as a writer and wants to help you grow, will be invaluable. It’s too easy to exist in a little isolated bubble and think you’re doing ok, when in reality you could be creating bad habits which will be difficult to break later. By these, I mean things like ‘filler words’ you don’t realise you use, or other pit-falls it’s easy to tumble into when you can’t see the wood for the trees…It’s intimidating, and it might take some courage to work up and do, but I promise it’ll help you grow. You don’t have to do what the people suggest, but it’s great to get outside opinions all the same.

Submit work to writing competitions. This will help with showing agents and publishers later down the line that you’re not only committed, but hopefully talented, and will help you to push yourself. Use the world of your novel for the setting, and get to know it by writing short stories on the competition’s theme set there.

Read. Read the writers you admire, and read them ‘actively’ - figure out exactly what it is about ‘that’ sentence that made you shiver, and use the same techniques in your own work (don’t plagiarise, obviously, but if it was alliteration that made the sentence work so well, use it yourself! Perhaps it was the metre of the line? Great, now you know a rhythm that will drive a sentence forward or slow it down etc.)

Enjoy it. If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, it’ll show in the work. Take a step back if you start floundering, and ‘interview’ yourself about why it’s not fun any more. Refer back to the sections in the notebook that helped to clarify the plot/process, and see if you’ve wandered away from them. Make yourself answer questions like: ‘What is the main reason I don’t want to do this?’ ‘What is the character’s motivation?’ ‘Should I scrap this section?’ (don’t delete it, but cut and paste it into another ‘scraps’ document, and then start afresh from the last place you were happy with. Nothing is wasted - it all goes into building the world and getting to know the characters, even if it doesn’t get explicitly told in the finished product, so don’t be afraid to do that last bit).

Good luck!

I hope you found this helpful, and if you have any questions or things you’d like to add to this, please feel free to send me an ask here on Tumblr.

If you’re a new writer hoping to get an agent or publisher, you might also find this post on ‘talking to a published author’ helpful or interesting.

If you would like to keep up to date with my own novel’s progress, you can follow me here on Tumblr, as well as on my writing Instagram @rnpeacock

#writing #writeblr #writing process #how to write a novel #novel writing #nanowrimo #national novel writing month #writing a book #writing advice #author #authors on tumblr #how to structure a book #long post

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mercurysowntwenty-two · 3 years

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tell me more about lancer!! (I’ve heard of it but never played)

“It is 5016u, and the galaxy is home to trillions. At the core of humanity’s territory there is a golden age, but outside of this newly won utopia the revolutionary project continues... Your character in the world of Lancer is a mechanized cavalry pilot of particular note – a lancer. Whatever the mission, whatever the terrain, whatever the enemy, your character is the one who is called in to break the siege or hold the line. When the drop klaxons sound, it’s up to them to save the day. “ - Introduction, Lancer core rules (pp 10-11)

Lancer is a very good role-playing game about piloting giant robots and using them to make Utopia happen. I’m going to organize this into mechanical things that are Very Good about Lancer and lore things that are Very Good. Here are 12 things I like Very Much about Lancer.

MECHANICAL

1. COMPCON

2. In addition to a primary system of regular old weapons n attacks n hitpoints, there is an entire other system of technological attacks and “heat” hitpoints to represent hacking enemy robots to increasingly bizarre effect. Making regular physical attacks is tied to physical weapon “mounts” on your mech, and these mounts may be destroyed over the course of a fight, so the technology attack system gives players who might otherwise be neutralized something to do the whole time.

3. So much player choice: There are 29 mechs in the core rulebook, another 5 in the first rules supplement, another 3 freely available on the publisher itch.io, then various others in the nooks and crannies of the Lancer discord. Do not be daunted, however! i. In a source like COMPCON above, all the mechs are organized by manufacturer and role. Each in-universe manufacturer matches one of the 4 fundamental mech stats so if you know you’re aiming for a mech that especially interacts with a particular part of the mechanics you’ve already selected out 75% of the choices. a. The matches go like this: Harrison Armory matches to the “Engineering” stat and so their mechs deal with the Heat mechanics in interesting ways, HORUS matches to the “Systems” stat and so they specialize in hacking other mechs and other technological attacks, Interplanetary Shipping-Northstar matches to “Hull” and so builds tanks and tough guys, and Smith-Shimano matches to “Agility” and so builds the sexy ones the ones that have interesting ways of avoiding getting hit. b. Roles are relatively straightforward too! Striker mechs are the close-quarters fighters, artillery are... artillery- long range fighters, controllers do big Areas of Effect or impose conditions or alter character movement, defenders have big shields or are mobile bunkers or are just so darn big they protect those behind them, and support is... support- they share bonuses like repairs with their allies. ii. Take this all together and finding the mech that best suits you is actually real easy despite the long long lists. And if you ever get locked into a build you grow to dislike? At every level up, you can completely replace and overhaul the mech licenses (which represent your ability to use the relevant equipment and frame associated with a given robot) you have so you can try other robots.

4. The NPC system: There are 33 NPC statblocks, organized by the kind of role they have in a potential fight. In addition, there are 12 templates you could potentially apply to an NPC. Both statblocks and templates are defined by “systems”- just little traits and qualities and there are often many optional systems you can slap on for an extra level of customization. Therefore, you can tailor hundreds if not thousands of NPCs out of a seemingly-limited stock. i. The template system means any potential moveset or archetype can be made into a miniboss or boss ii. The template system means you can flavorfully telegraph how an encounter can go- telling the players they are fighting a group of pirates prepares them for coreworm rockets and grapple leashes (hallmarks of the pirate template) regardless of the actual statblock in use. iii. Each statblock is effectively 3 statblocks in one, set to different tiers to match and scale to the level of the players throughout the game (so oops I guess there are 99 NPCs by default) iv. Monstrosity- it’s for Kaiju! it’s also one of the most modular statblocks for all the little tweaks you need for Big Monster v. Squad- for footsoldiers!

5. There is no class system (mechanically speaking, in the lore Union is working on it). Character creation functions through selecting Skill Triggers for situations outside your mech and Talents for situations inside your mech, and mech licenses themselves. Even Backgrounds are mostly just lists of questions in order to prompt character introspection.

6. I put this last down here because it’s kind of at the intersection of the mechanics and the lore, but Lancer has some good random tables for generating things like planets, space stations, people on space stations, Pirate crews, and big Enterprise companies. It’s just good clean fun.

LORE

I also created this google doc for totally unrelated reasons

1. The naming convention of the rings of Union and the Blinkgates- Blinkgates are Lancer’s mechanism of faster-than-light travel. They are Big installations and passing through one can take you to any other instantly. They’re organized into “rings” of the stations that are physically closest to one another, emanating out from Earth. Each ring is named after a mountain range on Earth (now called Cradle because of course) and each gate is named after a peak in that range. This is a real small detail in the grand scheme of things but I adore it because this naming convention is a clear reflection of the priorities and values of the people who did the naming. Every gate by definition is situated in places that humans have already settled, but they’re not named according to local convention. Just so, every gate is situated somewhere in Cradle’s night sky, but they’re not named for things like constellations. Each blinkgate is named after a feature on Cradle because the blinkgates were named by the Second Committee of Union, who had a driving philosophy of Anthrochauvinism (a manifest destiny attitude towards humanity on the galactic stage, with a heavy bias towards humanity as it is on Cradle) and so of course blinkgates are named as a projection of life on Earth onto space without regard for the actual space they occupy.

2. On a related note, according to the starship-battle spinoff Battlegroup, Union names its largest starships- its battleships- after environmentalists. That just warmed my little Environmental Scientist heart, and also is a clear reflection of the Third Committee’s values and priorities (Union rose from the ashes of an environmental disaster on Earth, and the Union Navy under the Third Committee has a general mandate of acting protectively and defensively, so Union has effectively named one set of their people’s protectors after another set of protectors).

3. The fact that every faction is simultaneously in a state of escalating tension. "The Good War" is this inevitable conflict that everyone constantly expects, but it is constantly not here, which just increases the tension further. This makes for good adventure fodder. i. KTB and HA are about to have the Second Interest War in the Dawnline Shore, ii. Union and the Aun are about to have the Second Distal War in Boundary Garden, and SSC is gonna wade into it because geneticists gotta get their samples I guess, iii. IPS-N is about to fall apart from infighting, iv. In the Long Rim HORUS is closing in on Horizon, finding the Fourth Metavault is around the corner

4. Utopia is a verb. Corollary: Union are the enemy you want. Or: Life is good, but it can be better. All this to say, Union is presented as an unambiguous force for good, but the game and the creators make no bones about how Union can be made better (and thus directly put improving the world in the players’ court!).

5. Many Factions are defined by a fundamental expectation-subverting "What If?" i. Union- what if the big bad hegemony that rules over everything was (at least trying to be) the good guys? ii. The Aun- what if the mysterious and mystical theocracy explicitly and literally had the support of a god and thus could back up their claims of manifest destiny? iii. The Corpros- what if all of these awful organizations actually did materially improve people’s lives, instead of that just being a propaganda line they throw out to justify themselves?

6. NHPs- Explaining what’s up with NHPs in full would be a whole Thing, so for now I’ll just share my favorite thing about them: they’re like droids in Star Wars, except the creators actually acknowledge the immorality of the situation and thus generate and encourage discussion about it in the playerbase, rather than just let it be taken for granted (and thus directly put improving the world in the players’ court!).

#Lancer #Lancer rpg

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yomiurinikei · 3 years

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shobai for the ask meme! i forget about him a lot

HIIII u guys look it's my platonic spousea here in my inbox!!! the only one spared from my lectures on why it's "syobai". sorrel recognize ur pretty privilege 🙄🙄

anyways!! under the cut for length + tws: . huh. actually, nothing this time

favorite thing about them: ooo he's just fun!! just a fun man! my beloved little plot device i find it so funny linuj is just like "hmmmm information needs to be revealed/a plot point must be mentioned but i've already done a weird nightmare with akane this chapter what do i do now hmmmmmmmm" and then we get syobai time. ALSO i rlly like analyzing the way he interacts with others. as will be seen later on except not well worded bc i did not plan to get that in-depth. anywayssss. he's also fun to play around with in writing/fan portrayal tee hee

least favorite thing about them: ah... victim to linujs inconsistent writing i think...... linuj seems to shift some in how he portrays syobai. it's not sooo bad but if ur actively looking for it then it's there and it bugs me. it feels like linuj can't choose how to portray syobai, the role he should have in the game, and how he wants the viewer to feel abt syobai. and it's rough

favorite line: okay. but this ask meme expects sooooo much of my memory :/// his vv kind and loving and so sweet nicknames r good. he rlly is just the worlds nicest lad isn't he.

brotp: (note: this is considering both non despair/hpa verse, and like. in kg/despair without age twist bc that makes it hard to judge things, i just kinda switch between settings without saying much, aaaand is written w/o talking abt the exception that is romantic relationships) i just think he and the voids r nice.

like i don't have many feelings on him and non void cast bc i feel like he'd just never rlly have natural interactions with them and would always be viewing things as business/smthn he has to stay detached from and which doesn't interest him bc it's simply. not his world. fundamentally different. he's not interested in changing his way of being and the class doesn't care to try and "save" him

then. u have the voids. who, in kg-verse, are doing the exact same as syobai: in order to live and avoid horrible fates, they're doing illegal, immoral shit. it's sympathetic, but we (referring to linuj and the light he writes these characters in) constantly switch up how we perceive and feel about the actions of the voids and syobai. it's okay to acknowledge they're in a gray sort of area, and i think it's esp interesting with syobai knowing what's going on with them, and how he interacts with them knowing that

soooo back to main thing. i think syobai would, even in non despair (as yk... the CoU (i've been saying voids but y'all know which three ive been talking abt) are still implied to be doing morally interesting things to handle utsuros absence) view them. not as equals, but would definitely recognize the similarities in their circumstance and that which they do. so idk maybe he'd chill with them more. even if not (at least originally) as friends, him being less cold, and less detached from them

shit that got long;; i had to cut myself off sm and i thought i was doing well being quiet

otp: i don't rlly do syobai ships?? idk why????? tbh i just don't think i'm huge on shipping in general. hashimaeyomirin and it's variations for @/dirtykagarinkinnie tho <3

notp: mmmmmm don't have them!!! ships listed above r all that i'm rlly interested in/see tho

random headcanon: can actually clean up really well. he just Does Not care abt looking good for the kisa foundation/is cocky abt things with them, cue the. appearance 😭😭

song i associate with them: cigarette ahegao (penelope scott) is the hashimuri song ty and gn. anyways tho! cant find anything very fitting??? maybe mean (penny roox)???? who knows. who knows.

#sdra2 #syobai hashimoto #is that rlly all the tags???? hm #uhhhh #shoutout to tumblr user rantaroeffigy!!!#hi mr colin here's a post abt one of ur guys (/pos)

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diamondjackdaw · 3 years

Note

How about Logan?

Buckle up, friends, this one got a little long. (Thank you @impossiblysporadiccreation for the ask! Always happy for an excuse to talk about Logan, lol.)

+ FIRST IMPRESSION: Gosh, it’s been so long since I started watching the series; I honestly don’t remember my first impression? Probably something to the tune of “This man is very smart and he wears a necktie; good for him.”

+ IMPRESSION NOW: The one John Mulaney gif that’s just “I’ll keep all my emotions right here, and then one day, I’ll die.”

If you keep up with my blog, it’s probably no shock that Logan is my favorite character in Sanders Sides. I relate to his difficulty with feelings, as well as his high expectations for himself and his fear of not being taken seriously. I love how flawed and human he is as a character; I love the glimpses of vulnerability underneath all the self-assured confidence and (sometimes) arrogance about his own abilities.

tl;dr I love Logan very much, both for his strengths and his flaws, and I’m very excited to see him grow as a character in future episodes. (I have a meta piece that discusses this in more depth if anyone is interested; I wrote it a while ago but I’m still proud of it.)

+ FAVORITE MOMENT: Too many to choose from, but I’ll always love his “That! Is! Why! I! Say! It!” in Dealing with Intrusive Thoughts; he sounds so vindicated and I’m so proud of him.

In the angst category, I’m a sucker for the look of absolute horror on his face after he lashes out at Roman in Learning New Things About Ourselves. It’s one of the few times in the show where we’ve seen him genuinely frightened, and he’s frightened of himself, and I’m not okay.

+ IDEA FOR A STORY: *stares at my mountain of in-progress Google Docs* Okay, so I may need you to be a bit more specific...? /hj

*reaches into the stack and pulls one out at random* Can I interest you in uhhhhhhh a canonverse fic where Janus and Remus invite Logan and Patton over after the events of Putting Others First, but everyone has wildly different motives for being there? Patton wants to prove he can be nice to the “dark sides” (particularly Remus), Logan wants to clear the figurative air and get Thomas’s mental health back on track, Remus just wants chaos, and Janus... well, he’s got an ethically dubious strategy for getting everyone’s issues out in the open. Step One? A friendly icebreaker, with a not-quite-so-friendly twist:

“Janus made his own snakey truth serum!” Remus exclaimed, grin stretching (very literally and very uncomfortably) from ear to ear.

“Thank you, Remus. I definitely wasn’t building toward my own dramatic reveal, so I appreciate you blurting it out with your usual lack of self-restraint.”

“You’re welcome!”

“Actually, ‘truth serum,’ at least as it is commonly represented in fictional media, does not exist,” Logan said. “While there are psychoactive drugs which can lower inhibitions and interfere with cognitive functions, none of them have been demonstrated to consistently produce accurate and honest responses in an interrogation setting.”

“That may be true,” Janus said, “but fortunately for us, we are not constrained by silly little things like scientific accuracy, as evidenced by the fact that Logan is unkillable, I’m part snake, and Remus has a moustache even though Thomas has never in his life been able to successfully grow facial hair.”

“Oh, this?” Remus tugged at the tip of his moustache. “I actually super-glued this to my face when Thomas was in middle school. It’s made of my own —”

“Regardlessss,” Janus hissed, “here in the world of Thomas’s Hollywood-inundated imagination, the synthesis of a so-called ‘truth serum’ is hardly beyond my abilities. So can we stop debating the plausibility of my very elegantly styled plot device, and —”

Abruptly, Remus snatched the fancy cup out of Janus’s hand. “Jan’s right! Enough chit-chat; it’s time for some enhanced interrogation techniques in the name of...” He giggled, high-pitched and screechy in a way that made Patton’s skin crawl. “...friendship.”

+ UNPOPULAR OPINION: Hot take, Logan’s biggest obstacle right now isn’t that the others don’t listen to him, or that they don’t take him seriously; it’s that he’s staked his sense of self on being The One Who Has The Answers and Never Makes Mistakes.

Logan needs people to take him seriously, yes, but he also needs to know that he can be taken seriously without always needing to be serious. He needs to be listened to, but he also needs to know that he’s still loved and valued even when he’s not fixing problems and providing crucial information. Just like Roman, Logan needs the security of unconditional positive regard, so he doesn’t feel like he always has to perform to a certain standard in order to earn appreciation and respect.

(Disclaimer, all of this is my personal opinion, and certainly not the only valid interpretation! This is just my take based on what we’ve seen of his character throughout the series.)

+ FAVORITE RELATIONSHIP: I don’t think I have a favorite, per se, so I’m just gonna do a list of the main Logan ships/dynamics and what I enjoy about them.

Logince: The sheer romance of enemies to lovers. Two incredibly intelligent, passionate people who know exactly how to tear each other apart, but ultimately come to a place where they choose to be gentle, because they understand each other’s fears and insecurities on a fundamental level.

Logicality: Lifelong best friend energy. Like, the epitome of an old married couple, but in a platonic way. (I’m not opposed to shipping them, by any means, but platonic Logicality is my figurative bread and butter.)

Analogical: Introverts who are just? Really comfortable with each other? Not necessarily a super emotive relationship, but it doesn’t have to be, because the cornerstone of their friendship is an unspoken bedrock of trust.

Loceit: Rivals to friends to (maybe?) lovers. Long, heated arguments about philosophy; there’s a lot of posturing and taunting but privately they both love having someone smart enough to debate them in an area of shared interest. Everything about their dynamic screams “my esteemed rival” and I love it.

Intrulogical: Mad science power couple. Enough said.

+ FAVORITE HEADCANON: With regard to memory, Logan seems to be responsible for Thomas’s factual recall, while Patton (as we see in Moving On) handles emotional connections to memories. I like the idea that Logan doesn’t experience those same emotional associations when looking back on the past, which is part of why the whole concept of nostalgia is so foreign to him, and why he struggles with identifying and naming his feelings.

Original Ask Game Here (Send Me A Character!)

#ts logan #logan sanders #ts meta #sanders sides #headcanons #doodle thoughts #long post #ask game #box of asks #thank you for the ask!#in other news #doodle writes #sometimes #but you wouldn't know it because i never post anything #friend imp

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pagesofcursive · 3 years

Text

board game night: clue edition

nyx and juni throw a game night monthly. it was juni’s idea, of course. they make dinner for everyone, and sometimes they watch movies after the board game! nyx is the one who picks clue because she Loves clue. they invite everyone, even dawn

this takes place in what I imagine is a modern day college au, as they wouldn’t know what clue was in canon. in this, nyx and juni have a little apartment together, and violetta and aster have been dating for a few months. for the purpose of this scenario, nyx and dawn have reached a peace, but aren’t extremely close (I did this because I wanted to include dawn, so don’t read into anything-)

tora is So Pumped although she’s never played the game or watched the movie; she just loves board game night despite rarely winning.

lynn hasn’t seen the movie but clue was one of the few board games at her orphanage and she played it often, so she’s very good.

dawn agrees with nyx on one thing and one thing only- clue is both the best movie and the best board game to ever exist. she doesn’t always show up to game night, but she’s determined to Beat nyx this time (and she also is there to have fun, but that’s lower on the list of priorities)

they start the game before dinner and the movie

only six people can play the game, so lynn suggests that one of the couples can team up. she doesn’t even finish her sentence before violetta and aster immediately stop holding hands, and they both say “not it!” at the same time

nyx and juni are obviously happy to be a team because it gives them more time together, but vi and aster are just too competitive. they love the playful rivalry that breaks out during games (“how can one of us win if we’re on the same team?” “exactly, aster!”)

lynn has to explain the rules for close to fifteen minutes because nyx and dawn keep jumping in to elaborate about the game and to say random trivia. lynn is explaining Directly to tora since she’s the only one who’s never played, but she keeps getting distracted and zoning out

lynn: okay, tora, do you understand now?

tora, snapping back from thinking about how much chocolate she could eat in thirty seconds: understand what

and then they all have to pick what game pieces to be, which is an ordeal, of course,

miss scarlet: aster chooses this one because of the color and because miss scarlet is the only part of the movie she remembers (aster watched half of it when she was five and then got kicked out of the movie theatre)

mrs white: nyx and dawn almost Fight to the Death over this one. sorry to anyone who believes otherwise, but mrs white is the absolute best character, and nyx and dawn agree with me on this. the crisis is averted because juni suggests that she and nyx can be the yellow piece

mrs peacock: lynn likes the color blue (“female peacocks are actually called peahens, and they camouflage with nature so they are mostly brown- none of this bright blue color-”)

mr green: tora likes the color :D she also really didn’t want to be the colonel because of military associations (I haven’t discussed this part of her past yet)

colonel mustard: juni and nyx take this piece (see above)

professor plum: violetta’s never seen the movie and loves purple, so she chooses this guy (“can I name her lady lavender instead?” “no”)

once the game finally starts, they quickly find out who’s a good player and who is... terrible.

tora is absolutely awful, but she is having a lot of fun! she’s horrible at hiding the truth, so everyone knows all of her cards almost immediately. she also forgot that she had to take notes in order to find out the details of the murder. tora eventually realizes that she hasn’t been playing the game right when dawn mentions something about how she has a superior way of organizing her notes. (“...organizing what?” *collective sigh*) oh well, she’s not going to win, but she absolutely loves the game.

nyx and juni are sitting close to each other. nyx is taking notes while juni is in charge of the cards. they decide on their moves by whispering to each other. nyx has a very good system for taking notes, but she only shares the system with juni, who is almost drops the cards a few times because she’s excited during the entire game.

violetta and aster sit at opposite ends of the table, but they end up bantering so much that nyx and dawn put aside their differences to rearrange the seating so that the Rivals can sit next to each other. this results in cuddling as they play the game- but, make no mistake, they are still Locked in Combat.

dawn is good at the game. she and nyx are just about evenly matched, since clue used to be the only game they could agree on, so they played often. she’s very proud of a new technique she’s using to take notes, and so dawn boasts about it for a bit. (not too much though; she knows that she’s on Slightly Shaky ground with the group because of her past, so she doesn’t want to push it)

lynn is also a very good player. she takes diligent notes and watches both the board and people’s facial expressions like a hawk.

aster and violetta became too distracted by flirting with each other, so they fall behind in the actual game. so it comes down to nyx/juni, dawn, or lynn.

nyx can see in her cousin’s eyes that she figured out the answer, but she and juni have their turn before dawn. they have the weapon and the room figured out and narrowed it down to two options for the person. nyx tells juni to pick randomly, so they go with mr green. mr green with the candlestick in the library is their final answer, and it is correct!

nyx and juni triumphantly kiss and then hug each other

dawn comes very close to flipping the board

tora, confused: I was mr green, but I didn’t murder anyone, I swear!

dawn, deadpans a quote from the movie: you didn’t do it

violetta and aster are somehow disappointed that neither of them won and at the same time relived. they just want to cuddle for the rest of the night. and, luckily for them, they can do that while watching the movie!

the movie is a hit with the group. juni makes popcorn while nyx sets up the movie, and then they all just crowd into the little living room to watch. nyx and dawn keep quoting the movie while the movie is playing, juni cries for almost every single death, and tora gets distracted halfway through and starts to take pictures of the game pieces doing different things (and she also takes pictures of everyone watching the movie). at the end of the movie, everyone agrees that it was one of the best movies ever made. <3

~~~

taglist: @apocalypsewriters, @jstrjk, @pretend-im-normal, @augustwrites49, @morsmordre-is-writing, @helen-the-bear, @vivian-is-writing

contact me (through reblogs, asks, messages, or anything) if you want to be added or taken off of the taglist! <3

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rintheyordle · 3 years

Text

Writing/RP Prompts!

Here’s one to start! Linked to me by a friend, so I copy pasta’d from reddit! (THANK YOU JACKALOPPY!):

Pick a number between 1 and 100, and I’ll write either a snippet or response to it as my OC! (BONUS: Ask it as your own OC and I’ll make a little dialog :D)

This is a pretty big list of 100 prompts, so PLEASE CHECK UNDER THE READ-MORE TO SEE IT ALL! Or you can just ask a random question and I’ll go find it. Oooooo RNG!!!

01: If your character wasn’t an adventurer, what livelihood would they lead?

02: Who in the party would your character trust the most with their life?

03: What are your character’s core moral beliefs?

04: What relationship does your character have with their parents and siblings?

05: Does your character have any biases for or against certain races?

06: What is your character’s opinion on nobility? On authority?

07: Describe your character’s current appearance: clothes, armor, scars they’ve picked up along the journey, etc.

08: What location encountered in the campaign has your character felt the most “at home” in, or just generally liked the most?

09: What deity, if any, does your character worship? What’s their opinion on other people’s worship?

10: If your character had time to pick up any artisan’s tools, game set, instrument, etc., what would it be?

11: Describe your character’s current relationship with the player character sitting to your right.

12: What is your character’s current goal, summed up in one sentence?

13: Does your character ever want to “settle down” with a spouse, children, house, etc.?

14: Has your character ever been in love?

15: What battle in the campaign has been most memorable to your character?

16: If your character wasn’t whatever class they are, what would they be instead?

17: What is your character’s favorite season?

18: What would your character’s Zodiac sign be, following stereotypical astrology?

19: Where in the world does your character most want to visit?

20: What is the biggest mistake your character has ever made?

21: Does your character have any noticeable scars? If so, what are their stories?

22: What animal best represents your character?

23: If your character could go back in time and change one thing about their life, what would it be?

24: Which other player character does your character find themselves having the most in common with?

25: Does your character regret any particular choice the party has made?

26: What would your character say their best trait would be?

27: What is your character’s greatest fear? Deep, irrational?

28: What is currently motivating your character to stay with the party?

29: What are your character’s hobbies and interests outside of their class?

30: What would most people think when they first see your character?

31: What stereotypical group role does your character play in the party? (The Mom, the Mess, the Comic Relief, etc. Optionally: What role would your character play in the “Five Man Band” structure?)

32: What is your character the most insecure about?

33: What person does your character admire most?

34: What does your character admire and dislike the most about the player character sitting to your left?

35: Why is your character’s lowest stat their lowest (the in-character reason, not “because there’s no reason for a wizard to have 16 strength, duh”)?

36: What would be your character’s theme song/favorite band/favorite genre of music?

37: What stereotypical role would your character play in a high school AU/if they attended a normal high school? (Nerd, jock, bully, goth, etc.)

38: What treasure/item/artifact that your character has collected during the adventure is the most important to them?

39: Is there any particular weapon, item, etc. that your character longs to find?

40: Where does your character feel the most at home?

41: Does your character care about how they’re perceived by others? How do they change themselves to fit in with other people?

42: What does your character think is the true meaning of life?

43: What is your character’s scent? (Bonus points for a description that sounds like it could be from a bad [or awesome] fanfic.)

44: Does your character think more with their heart or their brain?

45: What is your character’s most recent or frequent nightmare?

46: What opinion does your character have on [CERTAIN ESTABLISHED GROUPS/AUTHORITIES IN THE GAME WORLD]? (Dragonmarked Houses, royal crown, etc.)

47: How did your character spend their childhood? Where did they grow up/who were their childhood friends?

48: What aspect of your character’s future are they most curious about? (If they could know one thing about the future, what would it be?)

49: What colors are associated with your character?

50: Who in the party would your character prioritize rescuing, in dire circumstances?

51: Is your character the most swayed by ethos, pathos, or logos?

52: If your character was granted a single use of Wish, what would they use it for?

53: What is your character’s favorite spell? If they don’t use spells: what is their favorite personal weapon/combat maneuver/skill/etc.?

54: How does your character feel about keeping secrets from the rest of the party?

55: What type of creature in the world is your character the most intrigued by?

56: When they were a child, what did your character want to be, or think they were going to be, when they grew up?

57: The player character to your left admits that they’re passionately in love with your character. How would your character respond?

58: If somebody (an NPC, someone from their backstory, etc.) your character trusts/loves asked your character to do something against the party’s best interest, who would they side with?

59: Does your character value their own best interest more than the party’s?

60: What decision would the party have to make in order for your character to consider splitting off from the group?

61: How does your character imagine the way they will die?

62: What is your character’s greatest achievement?

63: Is your character willing to risk the well-being of others in order to achieve their goal?

64: What is your character’s opinion on killing others?

65: What is your character’s favorite food? Beverage?

66: How generous is your character? Especially to those they don’t know?

67: What is your character the most envious about, regarding anyone in the party?

68: The player character to your left and the player character to your right are both telling your character two different versions of the truth. Who does your character believe?

69: What is your character’s sexuality/relationship with sex?

70: What is your character’s biggest pet peeve?

71: Describe how your character feels about the party’s current situation/objective/etc.

72: Who in the party would your character trust the most to keep an important secret?

73: If your character knew that they were going to die in a month, how would they spend the rest of their life?

74: What makes your character feel safe?

75: If your character had the chance to rename the party/give the party a name, no questions asked, what would it be?

76: What memory does your character want to forget the most?

77: If your character had to multiclass into a class they currently aren’t the next time they level up, what would it be and what reason would they have for doing so?

78: What television/book/video game/etc. character would your character be best friends with? (Or: what media character is your character the most influenced by/similar to?

79: What unusual talents does your character possess?

80: How does your character feel about receiving/giving orders? Are they more of a leader, or a follower?

81: What does your character’s name represent to them? (Or: why as a player did you choose your character’s name?)

82: Is your character more of an introvert, or an extrovert?

83: How far is your character willing to go to pursue the “greater good”? Do they believe in a greater good at all?

84: What does your character want to be remembered by?

85: What would be your character’s major in college?

86: Does your character consider themselves a hero, villain, or something else?

87: What major arcana tarot card best represents your character?

88: Where does your character see themselves in 20 years?

89: What is your character’s relationship with magic? Are they scared of it, wish to know more about it, indifferent to it?

90: Who is your character’s biggest rival?

91: What is your character’s guiltiest pleasure?

92: What does your character hope for the afterlife?

93: Who in the party does your character trust the least?

94: What is your character’s biggest flaw?

95: How did your character learn the languages that they speak?

96: What is your character’s favorite school of magic/type of weaponry?

97: What is most important to your character: health, wealth, or happiness?

98: What advice would your character give to a younger version of themselves?

99: Are there any social or political issues your character feels strongly about?

100: What, currently, is your character the most curious about?

#prompts #rp prompts #for my yuke #so I can explore how I want to make her more #come onnnn #just ask #send me anything #this is for my FFCC characters for now #but I'll use it later #okay to cross games/time/space whatever #since I know most of ya'll know me for league stuff

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nyadversary · 3 years

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asking since your harry potter post was really interesting and made me wonder - are there any magic systems you really like or think are well-constructed and consistent? what are the traits of a good magic system?

oh i definitely don’t feel qualified to make any broad statements about what makes a magic system Good, it depends so heavily on what kind of story you’re trying to tell. i do want to say more about why i think the magic system in HP is ultimately bad though, and i have at least one example of a system i like to compare it with. under cut

very very early on in the HP series — i’m talking about the first few chapters of book 1 — we get the impression that magical ability does symbolize something? like think about how the series opens. the first chapter of the first book follows vernon dursley, a man who lives an extremely mundane life, likes it that way, and is highly perturbed by anything unusual happening or by anyone who seems out of the ordinary. he’s, what, CEO of a drill company or something? some comically boring but well-paying job. petunia is a housewife who passes the time spying on the neighbors. their infant son is already being spoiled and treated more like a prized possession than a human being. and these people hate anything they think is weird, which of course includes anything to do with magic. the dursleys know for a fact magic is real and it pisses them off and they hate it.

when harry is left at their doorstep, mcgonagall protests and says the dursleys could not possibly have less in common with magical people like them. either she or hagrid says something to the effect that the dursleys are the biggest muggles around, which stuck with me because it implies that magical ability lies on a spectrum and the dursleys, who are outright opposed to anything the slightest bit unusual, are the furthest from magical anybody can be. this implies all sorts of things about what magic could represent for the series going forward — creativity, rejection of social norms, etc. — and, since these people are harry’s only living blood relatives but he winds up finding community for the first time once meeting other witches and wizards, it appears to be setting up a found family theme. which all sounds perfectly good, and people will still cite this as being a theme of the books. the main problem with that is it isn’t the intended theme going forward at all.

JKR’s weird obsession with blood lineage honestly needs to be unpacked in a whole other post and i don’t think i’m the guy to do it but... obviously as the series goes on, the importance of blood family gets underlined again and again. it turns out harry is being protected by some sort of sacred maternal blood magic (which is never explained) and this is why he has to live with the dursleys, people he hates and has nothing in common with. the fact that they’re his blood relatives trumps anything else. magical ability generally is passed down within families, and in the later books much time is spent going over various magical lineages (voldemort’s family, dumbledore’s family, sirius’ family, the malfoy family, the hogwarts founders and their descendants, etc...). any notions of magic symbolizing creativity is undermined by the lack of actual creativity in how the magic is presented going forward (like i said in the other post, it winds up serving mainly utilitarian functions in the story) and as for rejecting the status quo, the series embraces the status quo. the happy ending the characters work 7 books to achieve just has everything “returning to normal” — voldemort is killed and the remaining death eaters dealt with, the ministry gets a new PM, hogwarts gets a new headmaster, and things continue on as they were before. issues of systemic injustice are left unaddressed, the subplots about magical beings fighting for full personhood status (centaurs, merpeople, house elves, etc) are left unresolved, slytherin house is allowed to continue on as an institution and presumably many wizards are still just as bigoted towards muggle-borns as they always were, and — oh yeah — the idea that muggles are innately inferior somehow? never explained or addressed. the takeway is just that if you can’t do magic, you suck. it’s so disappointing. all the pieces are there for a way better story (hey guys i think there might be some systemic problems with your magic school and your magic government do you wanna try fixing that maybe?) but JKR was never gonna write that story because it’s one she doesn’t believe in.

to summarize how magic works in harry potter just so i can really make it clear how boring it is:

magic ability is innate and the vast majority of people lack it. with relatively few exceptions, the ability runs in families — it’s rare for someone without magical ancestry to have the ability and it’s also rare for someone with magical ancestry to not have the ability

with only a few exceptions, all wizards are able to learn all spells. some wizards are stated to be unusually powerful but how much of this is due to raw magical potential and how much comes down to other factors like education, general intelligence and ability/willingness to learn, desire to cause harm in the case of the unforgivables, etc is unclear. some magical abilities, like being able to speak parseltongue or being a metamorphmagus (or whatever the fuck shapeshifters are called in this series) or being a seer, are innate and can’t be learned by most wizards. like magic itself, whether or not you have any extra ability seems to be genetic (these are all traits we know run in families)

in order to perform magic, devices like wands, cauldrons, etc are used as instruments or vessels to direct the user’s innate powers. there is no summoning, channeling, or ritual use involved and spells typically only go wrong if the wizard in question is inexperienced or something is wrong with their wand. with very few exceptions (the main one i can think of is divination, which is handled very ambiguously and most of what trelawney teaches is implied to be complete crap), magic works in very predictable and straightforward ways

so it all boils down to “you’re either a wizard or you aren’t, and you almost certainly aren’t unless you come from a magic family, but if you are — good news! you have basically the same abilities as any other wizard. don’t worry there’s nothing even vaguely pagan involved.”

which, like. how utterly dull. there are so many other ways one can approach these issues and nearly all of them that i can think of / have seen done are more interesting than this:

you could have a magic system where magical ability is much more specialized. instead of all magic users being all capable of more or less the same stuff, let’s say person A, B, and C are all magic users but each has a unique magical ability (say A can fly, B can talk to animals, C can become invisible) and, while they might be able to develop their individual talents and become stronger, they can’t learn each other’s skills. charlie bone, which is a crap series overall but which i do think has a more interesting magic system, falls into this category, as does a lot of superhero stuff although it’s generally not called “magic” in those stories.

another, similar, approach would be to have more specialized branches of magic that characters train under — say pyromancy, necromancy, etc. — and so, while it might be possible for a water mage to learn a fire spell or two, characters have much more individualized skillsets. RPG magic tends to be this, obviously. harry potter kind of vaguely gestures in the direction of this trope in that the professors obviously specialize in their particular subjects, but it’s not as if snape doesn’t know charms or whatever — it doesn’t amount to much of anything in practice as all the adult characters are capable of performing a diverse range of spells.

how does one wind up with the ability to do magic in the first place? is it innate, and, if so, is it random or does it run in families? is it associated with any other traits? are there drawbacks to being a magic user? can non-magical people acquire the ability to do magic through some other means, and, if so, does this represent an irreversible change? are magic users really “human” or are they something more? are non-magic users lesser? is there any loss of humanity associated with magical ability? do magic users channel their own innate power or are they channeling something else — if so, is it a godlike entity, demonic, or does it defy moral classification? is there “good” magic and “bad” magic, and, if so, is the delineation clear? if these are different branches of magic, are they wholly distinct in how they work or is there overlap? etc, etc, etc.

ultimately i don’t think anyone should be worried about finding the most unique combination of these tropes, because they’ve literally all been done 10 billion times — if i started off listing popular examples of how these tropes are handled in other media pandemic will have ended before i’m done. what’s important is how writers choose to handle these questions when telling their story. like, what does magic mean to the characters? what does their use of magic say about them? what does magic symbolize? etc... these are opportunities for the story to have Themes and Meaning and impart something to its audience! tbh i think it really says something that the magic in harry potter is so ultimately unimportant to the story that people didn’t bother asking the usual questions about what magic itself / the magic system might symbolize... if you look at what rowling might actually be trying to say with any of that, well, it’s not good.

i guess to end off with an example i like. in the bartimaeus trilogy, which is an extremely good YA series and i highly recommend, magic ability isn’t innate at all. magic in this universe is all done via summoning “demons” (energy beings from another plane of existence basically) and binding them to one’s will, which as you might expect is very dangerous if you fuck it up and summoning is on such extreme levels of academic bullshit that you basically have to study your entire life to do it safely (learning dead languages, being able to draw elaborate pentacles with perfect accuracy, etc etc). in practice, this means magic is something only the ruling class does / can afford to do. anyone in any significant position of power is a wizard, while everyone else — the “commoners” — is a second-class citizen under the thumb of what are essentially superpowered politicians. while the fact that magic exists isn’t a secret, the majority of commoners have no idea how it actually works, that it’s really just summoning and anyone can learn it. they’re being encouraged to think of wizards as innately superior/gifted and to defer to them as their betters. yknow, Or Else. there’s much more i could say about this but it’d wind up being its own post and i’d probably have to just break down the entire plot of the trilogy, but i think from what i’ve said you get a sense of the themes / commentary here.

this has run long but point being, magic systems Can be used to say something about the story and the characters and to make some sort of thematic point or provide social commentary perhaps, and i think it’s cool when they do. harry potter tries its best to avoid having the magic mean anything and when you do try and analyze what it means, you just get a story about how some people are just way better and cooler than others because of. uh. their blood. so rather than further unpacking that suitcase i say you could just throw it away and, as they say, read another book

#LONG poast under cut. sorry except i'm not #anon #inbox #many thoughts on the subject as it turns out i do apologize that it's messy #i have english major disease

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lady-griffin · 4 years

Text

Things Got Crazy at a Slumber Party...

I would just like to say the title of this episode is so misleading…nothing crazy happened. False Advertising!

Eat the Rich

Seeing Anne’s room made me want to talk to her and urge her to revolt against the rich and distribute their wealth.

Spare Katarina, but rise up and revolt.

When I first saw her room, I legit thought Katarina was going to be surprised by Anne’s room and maybe (somehow by the end of the episode) was going to redecorate it and upgrade it for Anne…but nope. That idea quickly faded the second it went into my head.

Revolt against the aristocrats, Anne.

Spare Katarina, but rise up and fight.

Eat the rich!

No, but in all seriousness, sometimes I have problems with anime (stories in general) where the affluent and opulent wealth of characters is just the background and it’s never going to be address in all seriousness. Particularly when they show that not everyone is as wealthy…

Why show Anne’s room to be like, if you’re never going to actually talk about it nor resolve the wealth gap. Why show her room to be depressing looking? Why not just give her a nice room? It doesn’t have to be Katarina’s room’s level of finery, but something.

That aside, let’s continue onward to the rest of the episode.

Katarina running off to tell everyone (and to thank them) for her making it to the second year, was adorable. Katarina throughout this episode was so goddamn precious.

LOOK AT HER!

JUST LOOK AT HER!

I just…Katarina must be protected at all costs. She is the best girl that ever existed.

I love this beautiful, bisexual-mess of an idiot. She’s perfection.

I’m still mad at Anne for denying Katarina’s original PJ choices. How dare you Anne! How dare you deprive me of that. How dare you!

I’m going to discuss the episode in more detail further down, so we’re going to get into some spoiler territory (I guess?). So, you’ve been warned.

Potential Spoilers Below

Anne’s view on each of the character’s feelings for Katarina was fantastic.

Geordo’s Feelings

While we didn’t actually get to see it, which was disappointing, Anne being scared of Geordo for initially telling Katarina that her scar was gone was hilarious. I am disappointed we haven’t seen Geordo at his true level of horrifying, but still…

Just his eyes narrowing may have cut a few years off of Anne’s life alone.

Keith’s Feelings

Poor Keith. Again, I don’t ship them, but still you still gotta feel bad for him.

What is the purpose of others thinking you’re good-looking, if the one person you want doesn’t?

I love Keith and his mother. They’re hilarious.

Alan’s Feelings

OMG Alan, how have you not figured it out, yet. You’re playing the violin for vegetation at the request of Katarina…I just.

Alan sweetheart, you are in love with this woman.

I do like how he actually did it for Katarina. That’s so fucking funny.

But also, just look at this face, how could he not.

It’s a good thing Katarina doesn’t want any actual political power or anything like that, she would be unstoppable.

Mary’s Feelings

Mary is several levels above everyone else. No comparison.

She is subtly convincing Katarina that Katarina won’t do well as a Princess-Consort and has already figured out a way for them to leave and probably already has a manor set up by the sea, with a field already to go for the two of them (and Anne).

Mary is a bit scary in all honesty.

Nicol’s Feelings

Nicol’s cute smile was just adorable. Nicol x Katarina aren’t really one of my main ships, but I do love the contrast between these two.

Katarina this bright and bubbly ball of energy and sunshine and Nicol, a stoic statue who has trouble expressing himself, but can’t help but smile when he’s in Katarina’s presence.

Sophia’s Feelings

Sophia wanting Katarina to get with Nicol, even though she also loves Katarina is everything. Her listing off her brother’s good qualities (at random times) is hilarious to me. Always has been.

Sophia is just so damn cute.

Maria’s Feelings

Maria is giving Katarina all the treats. Smart Lady! She may have come late into the race for Katarina’s heart, but she’s playing to win.

In general, I like how we got quick snippets of everyone’s feelings for Katarina. I also love how the anime, legit just says the girls are in love with Katarina. I’ll always appreciate that.

Anne and Katarina

Anne’s POV in this episode was just everything. I’m so glad the anime adapted it from the Light Novel, seeing as the Manga just ignored it. I’m so very happy.

When she lifted up her sleeve to reveal the burn marks, I gasped.

I wasn’t sure if the Anime was going to actually include that part (the Manga did skip over it), so I’m very happy the anime chose to include Anne’s full backstory.

It makes me sad, but it’s good angst.

It’s not the same as the Light Novel, but Anne’s backstory and her relationship with Katarina was everything. That little montage of Anne and Katarina… my heart can’t handle such cuteness.

Also, I genuinely really love how when Katarina asked Anne’s father to not take Anne away, she had a bit of a bratty vibe to her. Very similar to Katarina before she regained her memories.

Even though she has her memories, Katarina is still a kid. And I just love that.

Anne refusing her father’s order. Mwah!

I really appreciate how the anime changed that scene from the Light Novel to Anne standing up for herself and actually speaking up.

Well Done! Good Choice!

Also, Luigi Claes stepping in to talk to the Baron himself was just nice to see.

It was great seeing him being intimidating and such. While Katarina sees him as her dopey, doting father, there is more to him.

In the LN, it’s made clear that he learned about the man Anne’s father wanted to marry her off to and was not happy with that and came to Anne’s defense.

But I also just like how a part of it, is probably because Katarina wanted Anne to stay with her (and Anne wanted the same thing) and Luigi can’t deny his daughter anything.

Luigi Claes doing the right thing (because it’s the right thing) but also, because he’s the kind of father, who will give his daughter anything. There’s a reason why OG Katarina was so spoiled.

The fact that Katarina knew Anne would come into her room in the middle of the night to put her covers back on her, was just so sweet.

Because Anne probably thought Katarina never knew she even did that, but of course Katarina knew.

Katarina giving gifts to Anne and being the first person to ever give her a birthday present…I swear I’m not crying, you’re crying.

I LOVE THESE TWO!

I guess while it’s never stated, I presume all the other stuff in the box were gifts from Katarina or objects related to a fond memory Anne has of Katarina.

Which gives me a headcanon.

Headcanon – Everyone has kept all the gifts they’ve ever received from Katarina as well as certain items they associate with a specific time or event they shared with Katarina.

We know from the Light Novels, that Keith has kept all the birthday presents he’s ever received from Katarina. And I thought it was said he kept the remnants of the door Katarina broke down, but I couldn’t confirm that. But now that’s a headcanon of mine as well.

More specifically, I now have the headcanon that either Geordo or Alan kept the snake toy that Katarina first threw at Geordo all those years ago.

Probably Alan, as that memory is 100% positive one for him. While for Geordo, that memory probably mixed at best.

There is something cute about Geordo being scared of that toy, telling on Katarina and getting her in trouble, but nonetheless keeping that dreaded fake snake.

Anne and Katarina and their whole relationship was just everything. They were truly and absolutely the highlight of this episode. My heart was ready to burst.

Sleepover

Overall, it was very cute. It was nice seeing the girl’s hang out and be in their pajamas.

Katarina saving Anne from the girls’ question about marriage, was just very nice and does show Katarina is not as dense as we may think. She’s aware.

I will say, though, it was a bit lacking in comparison to the bonus Manga chapter in Vol. 5 (LN).

Particularly in regards to Mary. I mean just look at Mary in the Light Novel for comparison. It almost feels like a different scene.

Also, while I did realize this last week.

Sophia’s wish in romance and how over-the-top, pure fantasy, based on romance novels her ideas actually are, really makes her fantasy in last week’s episode (I became Engulfed by Desire) feel way more off.

And just not accurate to Sophia’s character.

You’re telling me that Nicol in his amplified fantasy is basically Tuxedo Mask jumping around Venice with Katarina, but Sophia’s amplified fantasy is just her being in her family’s library with Katarina.

I call bullshit.

Sophia’s desire book fantasy, should’ve been the most crazy and over top thing ever. 100%. And this episode confirms that.

Both Maria and Katarina wanting to cook for their partner is very lovely and shows their compatibility.

I am a bit disappointed that we didn’t get to see the boys’ sleepover, but Nicol’s eyes sparkling when he heard that the sleepover would include boy’s talk was just too precious.

His thoughts are definitely much more innocent in comparison to what Sophia was thinking when she heard about Boy’s Talk…I love Sophia.

Geordo and Katarina

I was really looking forward to seeing Ch.17.5 be adapted to the anime, but unfortunately, I was thoroughly disappointed by it.

It was much less sweet, cute and funny then it was in the Manga. Seeing the scene in the anime just made me want to read the Manga chapter again.

Seriously, you don’t have to read the whole Manga (you should though), but do yourself a favor and read Ch. 17.5. It’s amazing!

Just look at this dork

This was a golden opportunity for the anime, to really show Geordo’s feelings and relationship with Katarina from his perspective. And just endear the audience to him.

They completely dropped the ball.

I feel like the anime doesn’t understand or even like Geordo’s character. He seems less dynamic, engaging and interesting in the anime. And the aspects that make very endearing and heartfelt, are basically taken out.

He hardly comes across as the leading male…which is disappointing for me, since I really love Geordo and Geordo x Katarina.

I am very disappointed with the treatment of Geordo. The anime is doing a disservice to him, in my opinion. Especially in comparison to Alan who the anime has added extra moments for.

I do appreciate those extra Alan moments, but I would appreciate them a lot more if it didn’t feel like Geordo was being left out.

Nonetheless, Geordo’s face when he saw everyone else and when saw that they all got Katarina gardening shears as well was fantastic!

Katarina Speaks Two Languages Headcanon

I mean this episode basically confirmed that. With Katarina writing the letter to Geordo, but writing everyone’s name in Kanji (?) on their gardening uniforms.

While we do have Keith’s and Duchess Claes’ signs not being written in the country’s language, that’s more for comedy sake as those signs don’t exist in reality.

But did anyone in the Harem wonder, why Katarina wrote their names in an entirely different language? I just love the idea of everyone being shocked to learn that Katarina can speak and write fluently in two languages.

Conclusion

I overall enjoyed this episode.

Some scenes I found a bit lacking (or more than a bit) in comparison to what they were based off of from the Manga or Light Novel. I will say I liked how this episode did take its material from the Light Novels and the bonus chapter in the Manga, as well as adding their own bits and pieces.

It was well done.

I’m definitely salty over how wrong they got Ch. 17.5. I just…at times it feels like the anime gets the core of certain scenes and characters (without doing the exact same thing from the LN or Manga or adding their own scenes) just right, but for Geordo they just seem to miss the mark.

Also, the material from Ch. 17.5 just felt like it was added onto the end, it didn’t really go with the rest of the episode…

And in relation to that, Mary being subdued in the sleepover scene was disappointing as well.

I understand there are budgets and restrictions, so I’m hoping they’re saving it for the last three episodes.

Anne and Katarina were the clear highlight of this episode. Without them being the focus of the episode, I would’ve found it less enjoyable, even with all the cute and precious moments we got to see.

But overall, a lovely episode with so many precious moments and it gave me so many feels in regards to Anne and her relationship with Katarina. So many!

#Katarina Claes #Anne Shelley #Hamefura #Bakarina #Otome game no hametsu flag #destruction flag otome #my next life as a villainess #Geordo Stuart #Mary Hunt #Maria Campbell #Alan Stuart #Sophia Ascart #Keith Claes

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notalittlebutalottie · 4 years

Note

hiiii its me poppin in to ask q's <3 : c, d ( pk ), i, r, u, x

🥰🥰 For you, Kait, I will answer anything (except spoilers for PK)

C: What character do you identify with most?

On TVD, probably Caroline but I think she is (ignoring post season 4/5) the most relatable to most women. She and I have a shared neuroticism, love of organisation and control. However, according to a google search, I have the same personality type as Bonnie (INFJ - though I’m more Ambivert than either I or E) which makes a lot of sense to me but they really never brought out her full potential so I think it would be hard for anyone to fully identify. In the broader world of fiction, though, I’m Lisa Simpson. My mum says it all the time and even that one test puts me as highest correlated with her.

D: Is there a song or a playlist to associate with Psychedelic Kicks?

It’s called To The Beautiful You (아름다운 그대에게) and it’s by Wonder Girls. It’s the reason this fic even exists and the last official release of my first ever K-Pop artist (I’m fine, everything is fine 😫). I made a fake playlist for it though here ✨

I: Do you have a guilty pleasure in fic (reading or writing)?

I really enjoy just the almost moments and there’s plenty of them in PK but it’s so fun to write it like I know all the readers will be suffering but it’s just...the d r a m a

R: Are there any writers (fanfic or otherwise) you consider an influence?

@she-walked-away (Unexpected Exposure + Dirty Little Secret) @galvanizedfriend (We’ll Always Have New Orleans) @supernutellastuff (Picturesque) are definitely the most influential simply because a year ago almost to the very day, I had been considering deleting this account but reading and re-reading (in the case of she-walked-away’s stories) their fics really inspired me to return to writing. It’s crazy to think that if not for them, would I be writing right now? I went through a hiatus that was almost 2 years and I just kinda disappeared and I didn’t write more than a couple thousand words and now this year alone, I’ve written near 200,000 words. So a big thank you is in order for them ❤️

U: Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.

I’m just going to gush more about the three already mentioned:

she-walked-away: This writer is just a master at making drama come to life. It never feels forced or over the top and the dialogue revolving conflict feels so natural and realistic. I have read Dirty Little Secret...too many times just because it is such an easy, enjoyable read. I can read it in one day and be like well, ok let’s go back to the beginning and start again! Unexpected Exposure, is my favourite, however. I don’t read it often but it’s because when I do, I really like to savour every single scene. I always bring it up, but there’s this scene where they’re in a club dancing with each other and the sexual chemistry is just through the freaking roof! This could be a non-KC story and I would still regard it as a favourite.

galvanizedfriend: I found this story in the tumblr tags last year. I had finished classes a month before I was set to go home so I had a lot of free time and just ended up re-reading a bunch of fics. When I finished all my usual favourites, I looked in the tumblr tags and stumbled upon We’ll Always Have New Orleans. I am such a picky reader ESPECIALLY when it comes to dialogue and tended to prefer human AUs over canon-divergent stories but this story just blew me away (and now here I am, writing a canon-divergent story). Yokan writes so beautifully and I am in awe of how much she can write in such little time with such quality. The story isn’t available any longer and I will always respect her decision to make it so but from all that I can recall, the characterisation was just wonderful. (spoilers) It honestly broke my heart when they reunite and there’s just the gut-wrenching realisation that for her it had been a day or so but for him it had been like 3 months. I CANNOT EXPRESS THE LEVEL OF GUILT I FELT VICARIOUSLY THROUGH CAROLINE. Heartbreak aside, the romance is so fucking gorgeous and well-built, never forced, always well-timed.

supernutellastuff: I, like Yokan’s story, found Picturesque when I was done re-reading my usuals and I think I found it on a klarolinemagazine list for friends with benefits. This was a story that literally had me like ????? how had I never seen this story before?????? Like I said, I’m picky as fuuuuck and I just fell into this story and it swallowed me whole. The friendships in this story really make it come to life and the first scene (spoilers) where Klaus and Caroline are smoking together, and he’s like well it’ll just be us two left - I SCREAM the chemistry was already overflowing. This story builds upon their relationship gradually and it really feels like two freaking adults in a weird entanglement. It’s not filled with random plot twists and it’s not so true to life that it becomes boring, it is just the perfect balance.

X: A character you enjoy making suffer.

There isn’t really any one character in particular (Damon cough) but I kind of enjoy making them all suffer in some way but mainly because it’s I know the reader will suffer? And if that’s not sadistic, I don’t know what is lmao

#klaroline #klaus mikaelson #caroline forbes #the originals #the vampire diaries #klaroline fanfiction #ask game #ask games #a

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