gurathin, thiago, indah...starting to get the sense that if murderbot didn't have any specific person playing the role of "someone i deep down respect who i'm convinced hates me" at any given time, presaux would have to assign someone, for enrichment purposes

Since you're answering asks again, are you going through the ones sent before, or are you scrapping them and answering newly sent ones?

Asking this because I can't remember the few I sent before.

I'm going through the ones from last year first -- those were the oldest two sets of asks in my drafts. Next week I'll be doing two more of the creators I'd left on read in my drafts, etc.

The only ask I have left unanswered from you right now is the one about Magical Girl outfits for Gene & co! ^^

soon erik is gonna run out of petnames for listeners.

we finna have a listener named pookie 💀

watching boy meets world s2 is so funny bc it feels like every episode we're being told in some new way that cory has a severe case of comphet ... the way he just cannot understand how pairing off works no matter how hard he tries, the way he asks topanga out not because of any genuine feelings but because everyone else is pairing off and he doesnt want to be an outsider, the way he seems genuinely terrified of being in relationships and pursuing girls for the rest of his life like its an inevitability he does not want, the way he becomes way more enthusiastic about dating once eric tells him he doesnt even have to like the girl hes pursuing, the way he literally never pursues a girl because he likes her but because of some outside force (a dance, a party, the girl asks him first, general societal pressure etc), shawn telling him "the closet is your friend" ?????????? cory sees the idea of heterosexual relationships as an inevitability in life, he seeks it out not because he genuinely wants to date girls but because thats just what you're supposed to do if you're a guy. its just so interesting to me, especially because of how it completely contrasts the many retcons from season 3 and on that assert that cory, in fact, has been capable of feeling heterosexual love this whole time and actually has been dating topanga since the age of 5 or 3 or since infancy or whatever. i understand they try to explain away his aversion to girls in s1-2 by saying that cory just had a phase in which he was grossed out by girls and didn't want to date them, but even then i don't think a 12-14 year old who is going through a cooties phase would be THIS invested in trying to date several different girls just to not be othered. corys desperation for conformity and how that manifests itself in chasing after a heteronormative fantasy is so baked into his character and it feels so unintentional yet so purposeful at the same time

the seventh virtue drafting journey is soooo crazy to me bc I did the 10k day in may 2021 & then exactly a year later I was 60k into the manuscript & then from august 2022 to early march 2023 (a tiny bit over 6 months) I wrote the remaining 138 000 words LOL

hawk as a character doesn’t do much for me but conceptually he’s got one of the most interesting relationships to Gender out of all the cobra kai kids. he goes from this meek kid who’s bullied because of a facial deformity (which is honestly very minor, but personally I think you’ve got to suspend your disbelief and treat it as a stand-in for a much more noticeable, ugly scar—like a tehanu in the earthsea ghibli movie situation) to a juvenile delinquent and the poster boy for kreese’s cobra kai. all cobra kai students have an arc about how what they’ve learned has made him for aggressive, but his is by far the most drastic.

his masculinity is EXTREMELY performative—which isn’t to say that how all cobra kai’s male characters express their masculinity isn’t one of, if not the, main thing that defines them individually and socially—it is! and that’s not getting into how female characters navigate this. it’s just that his masculinity is the most visually performative out of all the guys, marked by a drastic change of appearance, including permanent body modification, and him taking on a chosen name, hawk, which the other characters sometimes ignore because they know using his given name upsets him (feel free to interpret this however you want!). he remakes himself with this entirely new, hypermasculine persona, which is camp as hell BECAUSE of his attempts to be macho (@/ a furioushawk's meta posts inspired me here, you made me appreciate the hawk cry sound effects lmao), and he's awful!

he goes from a meek, bullied kid to one of the most aggressive students in cobra kai, he finally got a chance to assert power and now he'll do anything to keep it.

which makes him one of cobra kai's most fascinating characters when watching it from a Gender Angle not because his masculinity comes naturally to him, but because it's so obviously and intentionally high-effort. because the veneer is so thin!!

just like her

As Julie grows up she starts to realize all she shares with her mom.

The way her belly laugh is starting to sound almost exactly the same as the one Rose would let out when something truly hilarious happened.

The way she only ever brews her tea in the porcelain pot that matches the tea cup in the studio without a second thought. ‘Tastes better that way’ Rose had always said, ‘it makes every cup special.’

The way she catches a glimpse of herself in a mirror, her curls piled high on her head and wearing her mom’s favourite hoodie and she’s struck by the likeness, once more overwhelmingly grateful she inherited her mom’s curly hair and deep, brown eyes.

The way she catches herself running her hand along Carlos’ shoulders when she walks by where he sits at the kitchen table, doing homework. She recognizes it as Rose’s habit, her way of letting her kids know she was there if they needed her. She’s blinking away tears when Carlos looks up at her with tears of his own.

The way her hands flex unconsciously before settling on the keys at the piano. Ray pulled out an old home video a few weeks ago and Rose had done the exact same thing before beginning to play. How now, she can’t think of anything else when she sits down to play, but in a happy, sort of melancholy, way.

The way it still hurts that her mom is gone from the earth forever. But how it hurts less when Julie starts to notice the ways Rose will always be around.

oh so when the 58 year old lady has to get a mammogram alone it's all "Wilson forces a prostitute to stay with her" but for MY mammogram alone I have to sit through the operating lady call me unsanitary for not shaving. make it make sense.

A fun fact abt me is I Hated the smooth shark meme .

*hits post button and passes away*

somehow i totally forgot that i had a fic to finish and to post

Mikey way type of guy to have Rae Dunn decorations in his house....

that post i made on my writeblr about how there's this one story i have out with a mag that i want rejected because i have a story i think suits the mag better.....live cam footage of me receiving the rejection email on my rainy evening walk

🫶

In 1985, one of the only persons interested in an interview with a “new” writer called Terry Pratchett, after his publication of the Colour of Magic, was one Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman was writing for Space Voyager at the time. "The Colour of Pratchett" was the name given here:

It ran exactly one page inside the June/July issue of that year. The interview took place in a Chinese restaurant in London.

Here is Neil many years later holding that issue. You can see it here if you want. Warning: extremely emotional video.

Neil arrived wearing a grey homburg hat. “Sort of like the ones Humphrey Bogart wears in movies” he later wrote. (Before saying that in fact he did not look like him, but like someone wearing a grown-up’s hat). Terry Pratchett, photo courtesy of one @neil-gaiman, was in a Lenin-style leather cap and a harlequin-patterned pullover. At this point, Terry was already a hat person, although not that hat.

Terry offered Neil this : "An interview needn't last more than 15 minutes. A good quote for the beginning, a good quote for the end, and the rest you make up back at the office"*. (Terry Pratchett had worked many years in journalism by this point ).

But the meeting went terribly well. The two of them realized they had "the same sort of brains". So well indeed, that in 1985, Neil had shown Terry a file containing 5282 words, exploring a scenario in which Richmal Crompton's William Brown had somehow become the Antichrist. Was a collaboration in the cards as of that moment? Not really. But Terry found in Neil someone to whom he could send disks of work in progress and to whom he could pick up the phone sometimes when he hit a brick in the road of his writing.

Terry loved it and the concept stayed in his mind. A couple of years later, he rang Neil to ask him if he had done any more work on it. Neil had been busy with The Sandman, he had not really given it another thought. Terry said, "Well I know what happens next, so either you sell me the idea or we can write it together". **

And as you know, unless you’ve been living in Alpha Centauri, the rest is history. That was the beginning of what would become William the Antichrist and later would get the name Good Omens:The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. (Title provided by Neil Gaiman and subtitle by Terry Pratchett).

From the introduction to William the Antichrist: “In the summer of 1987 several odd ideas came together: (..)I found myself imagining a book called William the Antichrist, in which a hapless demon was going to be responsible for swapping the wrong baby over, and the son of the US Ambassador would be completely undemonic, while William Brown would grow up to be the Antichrist, and the demon would need to stop him ending the world. The unfortunate demon, whom I called Crawleigh, because Crawley was a nearby town with an unfortunate name, would have to sort it all out as best he could.

It felt like a story with legs.

Terry took the 5,000 words, and rewrote them, calling me to tell me what he was doing and what he was planning to do. The biggest thing he was going to do, he told me, was split the hapless demon into two characters – a would-be-cool demon in dark glasses (which was, I think, Terry’s way of making fun of me, a never-actually- cool journalist in dark glasses) who had renamed himself Crowley, and a rare-book dealer and angel called Aziraphale, who would embody all the English awkwardness that either of us could conceive.”

William the Antichrist being a direct inspiration of the 1976 film The Omen. If the baby swap had just been a little bit messier and the kid had gone off somewhere else he would have grown up as somebody else. “And then there was a beat and I thought, I should write it, it will be called William the Antichrist” says Neil. ***

“The first draft of Good Omens was a William-book. It was absolutely in every way it could be a William book. It had Violet Elizabeth Bott, it had William and the Outlaws, it had Mr. Brown”.

Over time they realized that they would have more creative freedom if they in their own words filed off the serial numbers. William and the Outlaws becoming Adam and the Them.

But the spirit of Just William was never far away.

The joy for Neil was to construct “perfectly William sentences”. The one when Anathema tells Adam that she has lost the Book, and he tells her that he has written a book about a pirate who became a famous detective and it is 8 pages long… that’s “a William sentence”.

Good Omens was also inspired by a particularly antisemitic moment in The Jew of Malta and John le Carre's spy novels. (Neil’s ask)

“When we finished the book we estimated that the words were 60% Terry’s and 40% mine, and the plot, such as it was, was entirely ours.”

(Here are some slides of mine where I go into some other details concerning the origins of Good Omens).

*Quote: from Terry Pratchett A Life With Footnotes by Rob Wilkins, but said by Terry of course.

** All the quotes, facts listed here : see above.

***all other quotes by Neil Gaiman from various interviews and asks I’ll link.