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cntrspll · 3 years

Text

this is a love letter to my own fic

hi hello hey, this is an essay about my own fic and the feelings i have about it. fic can be found here.

i am going to try so hard to keep this organized but i don’t know how well that will work soooo let’s go!

on the fic overall:

i just... like magnus. i think he is a fan fave for a reason, but i think there’s a lot of missing discussion of his post-canon situation and the development thereafter. when i finished listening to balance for the first time (in february-ish this year, i think?), i remember being super frustrated with where parts of the fandom had landed their focus. this isn’t an uncommon fandom thing, and i totally get where it comes from. some characters are just super relatable and a lot of fun to write about and have like absolute piles of stuff to unpack, so it’s totally fair that some characters get more focus than others, but where i felt that some of my faves got a lot of fandom focus, others... didn’t.

so this fic was in part an attempt to rectify that, because i wasn’t finding the unpacking of magnus and his emotional / mental state that i wanted. that being said, there are a couple fics that i did draw a little bit of inspiration from, the biggest probably being patterns of migration by goodnicepeople. the depiction of magnus as this big strong dude who also has these quiet vulnerabilities that he doesn’t like admitting to people is like, in part just really accurate to canon, but also something that i really wanted to see explored more, and i didn’t find a whole lot of other fics that fit that, so in part i just wanted to set out to put a little more into that.

also, like, i work in food service, and we are in a pandemic, and i moved in the middle of this year and i started hrt this year and have been dealing with the fallout of coming out and just kind of everything, and this fic was a really good way of just like, distracting myself from everything and sitting down for a little every day and thinking about something else and not so much about everything that was happening around me. so there is a good part of this fic that is just like, me coping with everything and trying to reorient myself a little. and it worked pretty well for that!

on process:

ok first things first, this was never meant to be 133k long. when i first sat down to write this, it was going to be a handful of snapshots set across [undetermined amount of time here] of magnus dealing with isolation and insomnia, and it was only meant to be like, maybe a 20k oneshot? that obviously did not happen. i think my original estimate once i accepted that this was gonna be multichaptered was like 60-70k, but then the chapters started getting longer with each one i finished, and then i wanted to add in an interlude, and then i decided i needed an epilogue, and here we are.

i’ll talk about this in other sections too, but as i wrote, i just kept finding more and more things that i wanted to talk about. i was also in the process of relistening to balance i was writing, and i kept running into little things that happened over the course of the show that i was like... oh shit! and that would inspire another scene or an interaction i wanted to write or something i wanted to focus more on, and the whole thing just kept getting more and more and bigger and bigger.

i’ve said it like 50 thousand times now, but i have never written anything this long before. i tried really hard to be regimented about the way i did it, because from the beginning i knew this was going to be an emotional journey for me to write, but i knew that if i let it slide for a week or so then i would never finish it. so to get through it, i wrote almost every day for a minimum of an hour. the process that i’ve found works best for me when i’m writing is using word sprints, putting on some music, and then forcing myself to tune out of social media and everything else for 25 minutes. i try to do between 750-1k words in that time period, then the site gives you a five minute break, during which i usually check twitter or fact check if i need to, and then i go back in and do another sprint. this works really well for me because i wasn’t trying to hit a specific word goal in any given day, just like... trying to sit down and write. i also tried not to guilt myself too much if i missed a day, or if i only did one sprint instead of two, or anything like that, and that’s kind of what helped me get through the whole monster without instantly dropping it as soon as i had another idea.

on mental health and recovery:

so one of my big personal pet peeves in fiction is the idea that trauma recovery is like, a one time single event deal. like, someone has this big horrible thing happen to them or they have some pressing mental health issue and then someone else walks in and they have one conversation and bam, everything is fine. i was exposed to a lot of [fan]fiction when i was younger that kind of supported this kind of narrative, and i get that there is a certain sort of wish fulfillment thing to that, but it also sucks, being an adult and having Problems(TM) and knowing that it absolutely does not work like that.

so when i set out to write a fic about trauma and mental illness and recovery, i felt kind of a responsibility to not fall into that trap and write it like, okay and then magnus and taako talk about it and taako’s like hey dude you’re depressed but it’s okay and then magnus doesn’t have nightmares anymore. also, because this is taz and the canon of like, historical accuracy is complete bullshit, i can put therapists and psychiatry and psychiatric medications in my fic and no one can tell me i’m wrong and it doesn’t exist. elevators exist, so i can make ssris and anti anxiety pills exist.

but also, magnus as a character is not going to jump into that right away. it is canon fact that he doesn’t like accepting or asking for help with stuff like this, and yes there are a couple big moments where he does, but like i bring up a couple times in the fic, mental health struggles are a big jump from like, a physical fight using swords and axes and shit. and this i think is really accurate to a lot of people’s struggles with mental illness, just taking that first step and admitting that you don’t feel okay, and that you need someone’s help to deal with it. that’s super super scary even to admit to like, your closest friends.

so that’s why magnus kind of shies away a number of times from some of the conversations that people try to start with him about mental health. taako and carey and lucretia and pretty much everyone else approach him at some point about opening up about this stuff, but he pulls away because admitting that kind of vulnerability to someone else is super scary, even if you’ve maybe admitted it to yourself already.

i also wanted to make sure that at the end of the fic, he wasn’t magically better. this is something else that i think people kind of forget, like... trauma and the problems that it causes don’t go away just because of therapy and medication. those things help, they help you reform the ways you think about yourself and about the world, but they don’t change the struggles you’ve been through or the sometimes biological problems that are causing whatever issue you’re having. and i remember reading a lot of fic when i was a kid where someone would be depressed, and then they’d fall in love and get magic dick or something and then they’d never be sad again, which... isn’t great.

but at the same time, i didn’t want it to end on this note like, oh everything is still bad even though he worked so hard to open up and get help, because that sucks, too. so it was really important to me that the fic end on a hopeful note, like, magnus isn’t cured. he still has bad days and bad weeks and sometimes he is just as low as he was before, but he also has like, normal days, which is something that i think you kind of forget can even exist when you’re depressed, or when you’re dealing with any mental illness. but like, i really wanted it to be obvious that things did get better and even if he’s still coping with it and it’s not going away, he’s okay. he’s gonna be all right.

on an unreliable narrator:

this kind of plays into some of the mental health stuff, but one thing that i love about taz that i really wanted to play into with this fic is the idea of limited perspective. griffin does some really cool fucking things with this, specifically in relation to the ipre and the big reveal in the last lunar interlude, with the idea of like... a character can only know the things that they know. like, magnus knows that there is a picture of him depicted as a red robe, and barry knows that they’re all red robes, and taako knows that they found the umbra staff next to a red robed skeleton and that the umbrella spelled out lup at one point, but none of them necessarily know all the things that the other person knew, and none of them know all the things that lucretia knows or that fisher knows or junior knows, etc etc.

unfortunately, just because the pace of the story picks up so much in that last lunar interlude, there isn’t a whole lot of space to explore that like, disconnect between all these facts that they each have as individuals. and given the perspective of mental health and the way that plays into your perceptions of yourself and your perceptions of other people’s perceptions, i really wanted to delve into like… magnus’s misunderstandings.

this is not a strictly straightforward unreliable narrator situation, but i did bring in some elements of that. i really wanted to explore the disconnect between how magnus sees and how everyone else sees him and his issues. there are also a couple moments where he flat out completely misinterprets their intentions, which unfortunately i didn’t delve into as much as i wanted to so they ended up mostly being fun easter eggs for, uh… me? i guess?

one of those moments is the scene in ch 4 where barry and magnus are sitting in the kitchen and barry starts to ask magnus something. magnus assumes it’s going to be about his mental health, and that this is barry stepping up as representative for everyone else to talk to him about it, but it’s really meant to be a precursor to their conversation in ch 6 where they talk about barry and lup and marriage and proposals.

magnus gets a little perspective on this later, i think in ch 7(?) where he’s thinking about how maybe their lives don’t completely revolve around him and he’s missing some of their perspective. but like, they all have their own shit going on, and they all love him and they’re worried about him, but also, barry is thinking about lup. lup is thinking about taako. taako is thinking about lucretia. lucretia is thinking about davenport, and davenport is thinking about his own issues, and so on and so on and they’re not all just like… waiting to pounce on magnus the second he shows weakness.

a lot of that plays into the hypervigilance of ptsd, too. magnus is very aware of any perceived threat, and he sometimes treats the people around him as threats, when all they’re doing in reality is thinking like, man i wish he didn’t live out here by himself all the time.

on a more meta note, i also have a tendency to make every character i write just like, a super good judge of character. i don’t think magnus is that, and i really wanted to lean into that. magnus does not read intention super well, even when that intention is genuinely good.

on the ipre and their relationships:

so i… really don’t write gen fic a lot. even when i do, it is almost always tinged with a little bit of background shipping, and there is some of that in this, but whereas in most fandoms i end up being a multishipper, for some reason with taz i’ve ended up pretty much only caring about the canon ships (sorry…). that being said, the platonic relationships in taz (and especially in balance) are some of the most compelling and important fictional relationships that i’ve ever encountered. like, they are just really well fucking done.

this being the magnus love letter that it is, i really wanted to focus on magnus’s distinct relationships with every member of the ipre crew. i don’t know how obvious this is in the actual narrative, but with the exception of the interlude and the epilogue, the story is broken down into one chapter for each member of the starblaster crew (in order, magnus, taako, merle, davenport, barry, lucretia, lup). i did this specifically because it was really important to me that i dive into all of them and their particular issues. i didn’t quite get the deep dive with merle or davenport that i would’ve liked to, but hopefully in the future i’ll get more time to explore that.

anyway, in case it isn’t obvious, lup is probably my favorite fictional character literally ever in any media created by anyone in the history of time. i say this only because a lot of this fic was set up to build to the conversation between her and magnus in ch 8 out on the mountain where he finally opens up for the first time. there are some really incredible unexplored parallels and relationships in taz (unexplored mainly because like, where would it even fit in canon), and while some of them are super self indulgent (ie, lup and mags, barry and mags), i really really really wanted to dig into those a little more. things like the conversation where taako is talking about everyone brushing over his trauma to rush to forgive lucretia, or lucretia talking about trying to learn to love writing again and recognize happy moments, davenport almost admitting that he’s not completely sure about stepping back into the family in his former role… i could write an entire fic on any of these, really.

but ultimately, this being a magnus fic, i tried to filter those conversations through a perspective of two things: first, how does this affect magnus and his mental health journey, and second, what can magnus do to help this. those scenes where magnus is trying to help someone with something and they’re like, backhandedly helping him are some of my favorite interactions in the fic.

the other thing i really really really wanted to explore that i never see enough of in fic is magnus and carey’s relationship. carey is canonically magnus’s best friend, and yet in fic i feel like she gets pushed to the side a little in favor of the starblaster crew. which i get, they’ve got a hundred and ten years of shared trauma, but also, travis flat out states that carey is magnus’s best friend, so… i mean, there is also a little bit of self indulgence here, because i am also a man who is exclusively best friends with lesbians, but you know.

that being said, i really wanted to emphasize that relationship in particular, which is why carey doesn’t have her own dedicated chapter and instead kind of slides in and out of each one and slowly helps magnus along the way. her personality i also feel is like, the exact kind of thing that magnus needs to push him into accepting / asking for help and moving towards recovery.

on real life parallels:

ok, i swear to god i did not intend to make this a holiday fic posted during the holidays. i started writing this in june, and again, it was only meant to be like 20k and not necessarily entirely set during candlenights. that kind of happened, anyway? candlenights just seemed like the best vessel to get all these characters whose post-canon situations i wanted to explore into the same room, and i finished the first draft around mid october and i wanted to give myself plenty of time for editing, so it honestly just ended up coincidentally aligning with the holidays. go figure.

that being said, isolation ended up featuring pretty heavily in this fic. that i think is to be expected to a certain degree given the nature of mental health and recovery and blah blah blah, but i probably unintentionally ended up leaning into it a little more because like… this year. and the holidays tend to be a time that a lot of us feel really isolated, and this year especially, but one of the big things for me this year is that like, all of my friends live out of state. the closest one to me is still a good 2-3 hour plane ride, which i am absolutely not risking. i had like a hundred plans to go see people and do things this year, and those obviously got cancelled.

probably the biggest one of those things was seeing a friend who i have kind of started a new years tradition of seeing, but we ended up calling that off out of safety considerations, of course. and it sucks! it’s not fun! i also moved out this year and i have my own place and in june i was really hoping that things would be okay by now and i could have all my friends come in from out of town for new years and that didn’t happen. and i wasn’t intending for this fic to be a kind of wish fulfillment of like, here’s my new place post-[saving the universe / coming out and becoming a real person], let me show my found family around my hometown and let’s make new holiday traditions together now that we’re no longer [fighting the apocalypse / literal children] and everything will be fun and happy and good, but that is kind of what happened anyway. [insert joke here that goes like “do you project your real world problems and mental health issues onto fictional characters or are you normal?”]

but yeah, magnus’s mental health struggles did kind of accidentally become a little bit of a pandemic / quarantine life parallel. i did not mean for that to happen, but it did help me tease out a little bit of what it is that i feel like i’m missing and what i want in the future when things are better, and i hope it helped some other people figure that stuff out too, maybe?

and in conclusion:

i said this a little bit in the final notes in the fic, but i am so so so grateful and emotional over the comments i’ve gotten from some of you. i’ve said it already, but this was such an emotional rollercoaster for me to write. i put a decent amount of my own mental health issues into the stuff i wrote into magnus, and it was genuinely therapeutic and like… super helpful and important. it was also a big struggle, and there were some scenes i came out of feeling incredibly drained and like i needed to not write for a week.

so that being said, those of you who have commented things about how this fic helped you deal with your own emotional turmoil or helped put something in perspective for you, i am genuinely so happy to hear that i’ve impacted you in that way like, at all. that is so incredible to me, and not necessarily what i set out to do, but it means so much to hear someone say that and also to know that someone felt comfortable sharing that with a stranger on the internet. thank you so so so much.

again, this fic means so much to me. the fact that it’s impacted even a handful of people in that way is absolutely amazing. some of the things you guys have said have had me seriously choked up. i am so glad that anyone even took the time to read all 133k of this, let alone that it affected people like that.

i don’t know if i’ll be writing more about magnus in this universe. i would love to! but i’m also super happy with where i’ve left his story. i have plans to explore the calen thing in the future, but only kind of tangentially in a side mention and not fully, so who knows? there is more though, a lot with taako and kravitz and lup and barry and hopefully one day i will find the motivation somewhere in me to flesh out everyone else’s situations a little more, too. who knows!

anyway, i just want to say thanks again to everyone for reading, and even more so if you are reading this dumb essay. you’re super cool.

#txt #fic talk

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utilitycaster · 4 years

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do you have any tips for getting into CritRole? I got into live plays mostly thru Taz and have been enjoying D20 as well, but CR seems to be more serious from the little I've watched? Humor was one of those things that really helped me settle into Taz and D20. The long episodes also make it seem daunting.

Hi anon,

You know, unless it’s something with a nonlinear structure like Discworld or something I’ll admit I’m always a little confused by questions of “how do I get into this thing” because like...you go to YouTube and you click ‘play’ and do so for between like, 90-odd and 200-odd episodes depending on whether you watch both campaigns or just one. And having written out my long and rambly response and said this like 5 times I want to say it here at the intro: there are a large number of reasons why I specifically am a bad person to ask, probably the greatest of which is I don’t know you or your life and I’m a firm believer that you shouldn’t make any decisions based on what an internet stranger tells you.

With all that said: I’m guessing the answer you’re actually looking for is the answer to one or more of these questions:

“compared to TAZ and Dimension 20, is Critical Role significantly more serious?”

“is using the podcast a reasonable alternative to watching”

“Do I need to have seen Campaign 1 to watch Campaign 2”

“is it really the 4 hour episode length that’s the issue here?”

Feel free to ask me again with a more specific query if I don’t hit on the answer you’re looking for and also I still seem like a resource that would be helpful to you.

Answering the easier questions first: the podcast is a great option and I caught up on Campaign 1 primarily via podcast (I started watching with the start of the second campaign so I’ve watched all of that, though I’ve relistened to a few episodes as podcasts on long drives).

You don’t need to see campaign 1 to see campaign 2; there are some things where campaign 1 knowledge is helpful but none where it’s necessary (and if you don’t intend to watch campaign 1, it’s easy to read the wiki or critrolestats to fill in the gaps) . I like both campaigns but starting with C2 might be an easier investment (not really in terms of length as it’s almost up there by now, but it’s a little smoother to start since they’re used to the format and it begins at the beginning instead of midway through a campaign).

Now: is it serious or funny?

Other than early TAZ Balance when they were mostly goofing around, I don’t think TAZ is explicitly comedy any more so than Critical Role is explicitly serious. I’d put much of Critical Role at the same general position on the funny to serious scale as TAZ Amnesty, and the average Critical Role episode is in my opinion funnier and less dark than The Suffering Game arc of TAZ Balance. In fact last night’s episode of Critical Role had some elements that reminded me of The Suffering Game in it and I was like “oh this is fucking dark”.

While we’re at it, while Dimension 20 is explicitly comedic, The Unsleeping City went fairly dark towards the endgame, and Fantasy High, especially the current livestreamed campagin, has gotten fairly tragicomic at times as well. It’s hard to maintain a long-running campaign that doesn’t have real emotional stakes, even if you’re also trying to be funny, and if someone somehow managed that I wouldn’t want to watch it. Similarly if you’re a group of real friends playing a long-running campaign it’s hard to never have any jokes. I think Critical Role is perhaps less silly at times, but it’s capable of being very funny as well as very serious.

Finally, on episode length: yeah they sure are long episodes. There’s no real getting around that, unless you want to skip around in which case I, a compulsive completist am the wrong person to ask.

You can watch episodes in halves (or quarters, it’s your life). The episode break is a reasonable place to take a real-life break, and that’s how I watch the current campaign - I watch to the break or almost to the break on Thursday night, and then from my stopping point to the end on Friday.

Finally, I should also note that the length of individual episodes only becomes relevant when you’re trying to keep up with weekly episodes. I’m currently very slowly working through Rusty Quill Gaming. Their episodes are just under an hour, but there are still almost 150 of them. I mean, CR also has a huge number of episodes so this comparison isn’t very helpful, but my point is total runtime is the actual daunting thing, not the length of an individual episode. I don’t want to diminish how intimidating it can be - I didn’t start until the second campaign began precisely for this reason - but no advice I would give will shorten that runtime.

#critical role #critical role spoilers #by implication anyway #Anonymous

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sazandorable · 4 years

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magnus archives end of the decade ask meme which im just gonna answer entirely bc it’s really cool!!

the archivist: when and how did you get into tma?

June 2018, so I’m at about 18 months of obsession now (and have literally been thinking about it at least once a day every day since). MAG104 Sneak Preview was the first episode that I had to wait for after being all caught up; it dropped right on my birthday, and gosh what an episode!

sasha: which episode you were most afraid of on your first time listening?

MAG018 The Man Upstairs and MAG024 Strange Music were the ones that most scared me, though others have unsettled or fucked me up more. 024 is now one of my favourites and does nothing to me anymore, but 018 still holds the title of most unpleasant, I think. I hate neighbours.

tim: at which part of the decade do you think tma would've scared you most and/or which part would it have scared you least?

I AM REALLY GLAD I ONLY HEARD THE MAN UPSTAIRS AND CONTAMINANT AFTER I MANAGED TO MOVE OUT FROM THE MOULD-RIDDEN FLAT I LIVED IN IN 2016-2017

For some reason though I think I’d have been completely immune to the scary elements while I was studying abroad in London in 2010. 18-19 yo Aza was an unwisely fearless idiot.

martin: which entity(s) would you have been an avatar of at the beginning of the decade? at the end?

Probs would have been a big fan of the Spiral or Stranger

basira: did you meet any new friends through tma?

Yes!! Basically 80% of my twitter friends and all of my discord friends are from TMA(/RQ). I’ve met up with quite a few IRL once or more and had a great time. (... I also dragged quite a few old friends into TMA, including some of my oldest best friends who are not big in fandom.)

melanie: out of the podcasts you've listened to over the past decade, how does tma compare among them?

Best overall, on all accounts, be it writing, plot, worldbuilding, natural-sounding dialogue, voice acting, editing, pacing, character development, handling of exposition, soundscaping, representation, humour...

to note, i’m not a huge listener of podcasts, but I’ve listened to WTNV, TPP-Juno Steel, Wooden Overcoats, and last week I binged the first two seasons of The Bright Sessions and was really enjoying it... and then it blindsided me with straightness I just absolutely couldn’t swallow, instantly dropped it and haven’t picked it back up x’’D Anyway, imo TMA beats all these shows on most if not all accounts; it also (imo) avoided losing steam and turning into a repetitive rehash of itself after a season or two, and doesn’t ever feel too fanservicey (to note, i’m fucking thrilled at no one being straight on Mars, TPP just happens to be just a little too campy for me). It also has a fantastic feeling of everything tying together and making you work and engage with the content, which I haven’t yet encountered in other podcasts.

(I also feel like RQG is better on all accounts than TAZ-Balance, the only other actual-play podcast I’ve listened to yet, although I really enjoyed it too.)

elias: did any episodes remind you particularly of any memories you made over the decade, whether scary or not?

MAG048 Lost in the Crowd, as well as the S3 mini arc of Jon travelling the world, reminded me of my own travels, although I had never gone on an entire vacation alone — it inspired me to start doing it, though, so now relistening to MAG048 reminds me of specific memories of travelling alone!

MAG053 Crusader and MAG064 Burial Rites reminded me of my time studying Egyptology and archaeology in uni >w< I came very close...

and MAG081 always reminds me of my own childhood curled up in public libraries.

georgie: what did you do while listening to tma? did you listen with friends or other people?

I usually listen to podcasts while doing chores or cooking, playing video games, or in public transport. In the case of TMA i also binged it at work. Consequently, I have specific memories of:

cooking meat while first listening to MAG018 The Man Upstairs

while cooking, cutting my finger deeply while listening to MAG034 Anatomy Class

my face lighting up while walking in the middle of the street as Melanie described the giant fucking thing in space in MAG106 A Matter of Perspective

reshelving books alone at work while relistening to the same episode an hour later and bursting into tears upon catching that holy shit is Jon ace

and I associate TMA with Stardew Valley and Breath of the Wild.

daisy: over the past decade, did you visit any of the locations featured in the statements?

I’d already been to London a lot. I’ve been to some places mentioned in passing like Lyon, Oxford, Edinburgh and Florence.

Post listening to TMA, I’ve made a point of going to the Tate Britain and see the Panopticon whenever I’m in London, and last time I was in Paris, for the francophone meet-up, we went to see the Rue Lagarde from MAG134! (Also Oscar Wilde’s grave for the RQG fans)

leitner: did you do anything this decade you wished you'd listened to tma before doing? likewise, did you do anything that you wish you'd listened to tma after?

God I’d have liked to have TMA while I was staying in London in 2010. Also wish I’d already found RQ in general and “had” it to help me through 2015.

Otoh it’s probably good I only found it after I was done with my librarian studies because it would probably have influenced me to stick to my original desire to go into archivistics or museum sciences, and I’m not sure I would actually have liked that as much as I enjoy being a public librarian instead.

michael: did the "influence" of any entities feature prominently throughout your decade? which ones?

Lonely, but in a positive way! Well, I’ve fucked a few people over, but that was self-defense, toxic relationships I had to cut off. Overall I’ve grown into my independence and am very happy about it!

#the magnus archives #about aza #decade meme

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ghosty-schnibibit · 5 years

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tumblr may be crumbling to the ground around us but i'll still be here, livebloging taz into eternity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

for real tho, i’m extremely hyped to finally see the end of this arc and tumblr self destructing won’t keep me from that. also i started doing my fourth (fifth? i’ve lost count at this point) balance relisten and i’m about half way through MotRL r/n and i can’t wait to experience the massive tonal shift in those two arcs lmao

i am... extraordinarily worried about literally every character based on this previously on. i'm especially worried about "duck says goodbye" in the description, like... i quit watching cr2 because molly died, don't test me griffin, don't you kill my favorite boy

pfff love these boys so

well that resolved itself incredibly quickly :|

aww, that's precious 0u0

oh right, kirby still exists

... oh no, that's bad

i've never seen butterfly effect :/

ned you dipshit ilu

business goats

hey ned maybe don't equivocate sylvans with literal monsters?????

oooooh that sounds bad

jake :D

DOES STERN JUST FUCKING LIVE THERE NOW?

oooooh no, that's bad, that is extremely bad

duck is my favorite boy 0u0

what was that noise clint

aubrey what did you do in high school

UMM??? NED WHAT THE SHIT?????

... didn't he just get a singular nail though? not a bunch of nails? i need to go back and listen to the last ep again, i must have missed that

god this music is so choice

oh it probably will griffin, it probably will

oh eww :(

INDRED NO!!! NOT MY BOY!!!!! D:

oh shit, that sounds terrible

ned you fuckin coward

ooooh bad noise

BAD LUCK

nice! good plan!

flashback time :D

drugs and hockey roundhouse

OH SNAP

ewww :(((

"you're bad kids, you're peeing on the floor like dogs" jesus griffin

IT'S THE COPS

minerva what the fuck

BEACON! :D

wait... so who the fuck was that???

]B E E F B O Y

WHY????? oh okay then

a crab-walking goat man is the best mental image ever

beacon is such a grouchy boy

what's minerva gonna say when she sees beacon busted???

oh jesus christ D:

nice, good roll :D

oh hell, that's fucked

duck is a very good boy

thb were kind of murder hobos lmao

poor duck has had his fill of head trama these last two arcs, hot damn

OH NO, THAT'S VERY BAD

ooooh no, there's griffin's ominous dm voice

"we haven't established what the timeline is" we're used to it griffin "it's been a few months" mcelroy jk griffy ilu

i would go to the pre-ned cryptonomica tbh

kirby origin story :D

... that's such a mundane but relatable detail, damn

aww, he calls her vicki :)

"i am not a man of faith" jesus, i know justin's playing duck as the anti-taako on purpose but ned is turning into the anti-merle

aww vicki :(

god this is deep as hell

ned stop putting your foot in your mouth i swear to christ

i'm gonna fucking cry :'(

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? IS THE JET PACK THE FUCKING FORD ANGLIA?????

ned no

well that sounds sick af

the tree has no ass

SOMEONE HELP HER PLEASE

what was that noise

they've used help out multiple times griffin, is this going to be this season's version of "i think this is our first ever death saving throw"???

all i can picture is mannequin magnus

aww, baby aubrey :D

"i don't wanna characterize the dad like that" the dad is gonna show up at some point isn’t he

OH BABY

"do you need help? and don't cuss" that's so sweet

wait what?????

HER NAME IS ALEXANDRA

is this because she touched the crystal??? or does this have to do with how she could hear alexandra's thoughts before????? also what in the world does the title "audience to divinity" mean??????????

oh eww :(((

"it has manifested an ass"

that was a cool ass accidental foley

aww, lil baby seed

IT'S THE GLOWIES AGAIN

what does this mean griffin i need to know

multiple candlenights shows! yay! :D

GRIFFIN YOU CAUGHT ME OFF GUARD WITH THE HAPPY LODGE MUSIC, THIS IS BAD

“we’ll keep the light on for you” we will be your tom bodett

god that's so cute, otp

... griffin really has forgot about aubrey's eye hasn't he

this is so good

at least travis hasn't forgotten lmao

well that's creepy :|

OH JESUS

THE SKIPPING IS SO CREEPY OH MY GOD

THIS IS FUCKING TERRIFYING

YOU CAN'T JUST END THE SCENE THERE GRIFFIN HOLY SHIT

okay i've relistened to the creepy voice section about five times and i swear to god something is being said backwards during the part where whatever it is says "aims to bring the planet back into balance," i don't know how to isolate that audio but damn if i'm not going to try

... so a bit of a raven and ram deal

i'm liking ned more and more as he develops, i think right now he’s still my least fave of the trio (which doesn’t say much because i love them all) but he’s warming on me

oh no, this isn't good

aww billy :)

THE PENDANT

HOLY SHIT NO

and griffin’s penchant for distressing notes appears once more

aww, minerva sounds so sad :(

oh minerva baby :(((

wait... hivemind??? like the thing that is possessing thacker?????

wait what???

MINERVA NO, OH MY GOD

I'M GOING TO FUCKING CRY

WHO IS SHE TALKING TO THEN

WAIT WHAT????? LEO????? IT'S FUCKING LEO??????????

in conclusion, hot damn that was one hell of an arc finale!!! i’m super glad we’re getting the next ep next week because i need some answers, and also i have so many questions. i’m starting to piece together bits and pieces of theory but i can’t wait to see what other theorists in the fandom have to say.

see you all next week!!!!! here’s hoping tumblr lasts that long lmao

#taz #the adventure zone #ghosty liveblogs taz #taz spoilers #taz amnesty

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apocahipster · 6 years

Text

here’s just some author’s notes for the huge taz fic i finished today

you can read it here if you want

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13468608/chapters/30877473

Author’s notes,, i haven’t proofed these so, apologies ;000

Wow. Huge. This is literally the biggest thing ive ever written to completion. I had the whole fic planned before I uploaded the first chapter, and to accentuate the planning I had a 100+ page document of notes and also had an excel sheet which looked like this:

(the yellow on the left means summer, and blue when it was winter. The second column is day of the year, third important dates. On the right is the events which I highlighted yellow as I wrote them)

and like this

Its also the first fic I decided to upload as I wrote each chapter because I knew it would take about a year to complete. I wanted fan support (which I got and loved <3 ) and I didn’t want to sit on the whole thing and constantly re-write it and end up hating it and never publishing it.

So the way this fic began is I was listening to TAZ balance for the first time and as I different scenes or dialogue occurred I started taking notes on my phone for how they would translate to a high school setting. This whole thing started around the time I was at crystal kingdom and ironically, that’s were im up to in my relisten at the time of publishing the last chapter.

The other, very original, formative idea for the fic was this:

Magnus beats up kids who are homophobic to Taako as a way to cover for the fact that he is also bi // Thinks he’s straight and overly supportive of his gay friends

Similarly, in the original idea, it was going to be Julia who had died, not magnus’ dad. There was a really depressing scene where magnus spent the day with Julia’s parents.

Another formative idea was,

My name is Taako, you know, from Instagram.

And I suppose in the end this was the most impactful because I decided that I personally specialise in writing comedy based things. I wanted this to be a light-hearted fun fic.

In the original fiction, Travis and the other McElroys show regret that Magnus’ story is formed around the death of a woman (Julia). Similarly in sensitivity to the McElroy’s personal background I decided that this was not the right thing to write about. But I also wanted this story to be a magnus emotional journey. By choosing his dad as the character who had died I could keep many things planned such as magnus’ one year gap, Fischer as a therapy fish, Magnus’ aggression etc.

My favourite TAZ character is magnus, if that wasn’t obvious. But ironically, I feel like of all the characters his dialogue is the most OOC. While I tried to keep his thought-logic and actions to Magnus I don’t feel like magnus would say 99% of what my magnus did. Conversely Taako seemed like one of those characters who would be hard to pinpoint but I actually found him easiest to write.

Taako’s magic stone which ultimately ruined the play was introduced as I felt I was focusing too much on Taako’s appearance and not the fact he is incredibly smart and a brilliant wizard.

So I decided to make this fic mostly lighthearted. I wanted to squeeze as many highschool tropes in like the gigantic party, the school play, the football match. The last chapter has a scene in a class for every subject as I felt like I somewhat forgot to write them ever being in class for a large chunk of the middle section. But then again no one really want to read about school do they?

I almost always write my stories to a song, but in this case it was an album. Vance Joy’s Dream Your Life Away, and while I love the music I never want to hear it again for like at least a few months. I would play the whole album every time I sat down to write this thing. It set the summer-time mood for the fic. If you listen to the songs youll probably find places where each song inspired bits of the fic.

The first song Wind’s of Change begins with the like ‘I miss you more than you could know’ which began the driving idea of Magnus dealing with the loss of his father. The song ‘first time’ begins with a line about jumping in the neighbours pool which obviously… inspired magnus jumping into a pool. ‘The best that I can’ inspired Magnus and Mr Waxmen’s interaction. I love the idea of a teenage boy who keeps doing the wrong thing, feeling shame in himself and in his mentor and trying to get better.

The song ‘from afar’ was initially Taako’s song. This whole fic was going to be a Taako / Magnus / Kravitz fic where Taako convinces Magnus to take care of himself and Magnus realises Taako is in love with him and this helps him discover he’s bi and it was super dramatic. There was (an still is) some Magnus / Kravtiz scenes too mostly in the form of flirting.

As I stepped away from this being a ship heavy fic this song became Lucretia’s song. Lucretia’s unrequited love to Lup was mostly written from the heart, and I’m so sorry to Lucretia stans, she deserves all the GFs in the world. But I felt this was a very powerful thing to write in a teen story.

Taako’s fear of LDR is also taken from the heart. In a way this whole fic was a serious vent from my high school experience. Similarly as I am now 21, I didn’t feel comfortable nor did I even really conceptualise any NSFW scenes for this fic. It just didn’t seem to have a place. Besides, sex is in almost all other teen movies and books. I also wanted to keep weed out of this one bc I personally hate how drugs are in every teen story.

I actually had a planned acronym for the IPRE, the Insufferable Prick Resistance Ensemble, and a short backstory that Magnus Taako Lup and Merle formed the group in their youth to complain about annoying classmates.

Writing Lydia and Edward was the worst. I don’t know how to write cool and sassy kids. Me at me: don’t make me do it again.

Heres the entirety of my prepared barry notes:

Barry

-Oculus, opens portals?

-Likes pretty girl?!!?!?!

I had a planned thing for how each of their grand relics could play into the fic but it was far too much work.

I was also planning on writing wayyyy more Lucretia and wayyyy less Barry. Bc Lucretia was basically me as a teenager. But I started writing Barry as one of my friends and this helped me just write bundles and bundles of Barry content.

I really didn’t have anything planned for davenport. Even drawing his yearbook I was like whelp idk. The idea of him becoming a sports strategist kicked in right as I was writing the paragraph about killian being the new jock, simply bc the section needed to be longer and frankly, I love how his story turned out.

Part of scrapping the original, edgy tone of julia’s death and taako / magnus romance was wanting to continue the tradition where TAZ is a world separate of racism and homophobia. I scrapped original ideas of magnus being provoked by homophobic remarks and transphobic remarks about lup, wanting this to also be an escapist piece like TAZ is. Therefore coming up with other reasons for magnus to get into fights was hard and also I hate writing fights bc ive never been in a fight in my life.

The first half of this fic I was riding an enthusiasm high and just adding scenes and conversations as I thought of them and listened to the story. By about the end of semester 3 I still cared about the fic but I was basically writing everything I had pre-planned with little innovation.

All in all, this was extremely fun to write, and I think it made me a much, much, much better author. I love anyone who read the whole thing sm.

#my work #hhhhhhh

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