A short set of writing questions.
Oct. 8th, 2022 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkit did a questions set about composition and fic creation, and enough of the questions are interesting to me that I thought I might also try answering it, because what is a journaling site for, if not journaling games, right?- Describe your comfort zone—a typical-you fic.
Relatively short and firmly grounded in my conception of what the world is like, or, alternately, building an entire narrative around a single scene, action, or gag (often punny). (People who have read my fic, what do you think that answer is?) - Is there a trope you've yet to try your hand at, but really want to?
Omegaverse, but probably not the regular version of it, mostly because there's a lot about it that I kind of tilt my head at and go "no, we can do better than that." So classification and caste systems, sure, possibly even heat and mating cycles, but all of it done with people who have the advantages of as much technology and societal familiarity as they can muster against it. (Even though, yes, it's very much a sex trope that evolved a society around it.) Knowing me, I'd probably be writing beta role POV in a few of them, because it really feels like there's an "outside observer and snark" space available to the people who aren't in the constant striving of alpha and omega. - Is there a trope you wouldn't touch with at ten-foot pole?
I can write things that require the Archive Warnings (and things with other possible content warnings that aren't the Archive Warnings), but I really don't like writing a lot of things that are actively cruel and evil to characters that haven't established themselves as deserving it. Sometimes, it's the canon that does the work for me in fic, sometimes, I have to do it myself. I might be able to make things work for me if I know there's the comfort part happening after the hurt, but I don't really do much for the hurt part unless I have to or it's someone that I feel that's deserved it. - How many fic ideas are you nuturing right now? Care to share one of them?
I tend to not have a thousand plot bunnies running through my head. If you look at most of my work, you'll find that it's the exchange circuit, writing to other people's ideas. (Even though, since I'm on the exchange circuit, I'm coming up with fragments and plots as possible requests for others to write.) Writing on the circuit also keeps me busy trying to put things together for others. Occasionally, someone doesn't provide prompts or a description, and I end up writing the thing I would have written myself for them, but for the most part, I'm focusing on the next deadline.
That said, there is one persistent idea that I'm trying to grapple around, and probably should get caught up to canon with to see if it shakes loose any other ideas on how to proceed, but it's way too fragmentary at this point to be worth anything, even though I've written at least one work in the universe of that space. I feel like I probably need to know more to be able to write more of it.
Despite working on a place where some part of my job is to recommend and suggest books to others, I often have little time to read, so it's probably a minor miracle that I had the time to get through the Night Vale novel The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home.
After finishing the book, I was finally able to figure out what felt off to me about the book and why it didn't land for me as well as it could have. Perhaps if I had listened to it on audiobook, Mara Wilson's narration would have helped, or at least smoothed things over enough that I wouldn't have noticed the jarring thing sufficiently.
Here it is: The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home is a perfectly fine novel, well-executed and compelling, but it is not a Night Vale novel.
( Spoilers! )
In any case, yes, I'm reading years-old books at this point and posting about them like there's still meta discussions to be had instead of already having happened everywhere where the Night Vale fans are. If you're a fan of the podcast, unless there's a specific plot point or series of plot points that reference what went on in this work, I'd say to pass on it and read a different Night Vale novel.
After finishing the book, I was finally able to figure out what felt off to me about the book and why it didn't land for me as well as it could have. Perhaps if I had listened to it on audiobook, Mara Wilson's narration would have helped, or at least smoothed things over enough that I wouldn't have noticed the jarring thing sufficiently.
Here it is: The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home is a perfectly fine novel, well-executed and compelling, but it is not a Night Vale novel.
( Spoilers! )
In any case, yes, I'm reading years-old books at this point and posting about them like there's still meta discussions to be had instead of already having happened everywhere where the Night Vale fans are. If you're a fan of the podcast, unless there's a specific plot point or series of plot points that reference what went on in this work, I'd say to pass on it and read a different Night Vale novel.
An Unpleasant Game in Pleasant Company
Mar. 30th, 2022 12:11 amI got to play a game on Sunday with friends that, if I had to describe it succinctly, I would say "It wants to be Nethack: The Board Game." For a slightly more helpful way of describing it, I would say that this is a game for people who enjoy both the gamebooks of the 80s and 90s (like Fighting Fantasy or Wizards, Warriors, and You. If you're not familiar with the idea of the gamebook, you can peruse Joe Dever and others' gamebook series called Lone Wolf for free at Project Aon) and the way that Nethack, as a game, expects you to learn about its mechanics and progression by trying things, failing at them, and dying. A lot.
The game is called Sleeping Gods (link to a non-spoiler review of the game) and I played it with a couple of friends for a few hours, because one of those friends was writing a review of the game. The premise of the game is that 1-4 players control an adventuring party of 9 (a captain and eight adventurers) as they sail in the world, having adventures and trying to collect proper artifacts to be able to reach one of the endings of the campaign.
( It has promise in the premise, but the mechanics are not promising at all )
A good premise, and some interesting decisions for mechanics, but the game designer could have made a better game from the beginning by giving the PCs a fighting chance for the early parts of the game and making them have to decide between succeeding at the small things or strategically failing at some of the small things so as to be able to save up their abilities for handling the bigger ones. (But that means they have to be able to succeed at the bigger ones once they've gotten a little bit of equipment and abilities, which I'm not entirely convinced they will be able to do.)
The game is called Sleeping Gods (link to a non-spoiler review of the game) and I played it with a couple of friends for a few hours, because one of those friends was writing a review of the game. The premise of the game is that 1-4 players control an adventuring party of 9 (a captain and eight adventurers) as they sail in the world, having adventures and trying to collect proper artifacts to be able to reach one of the endings of the campaign.
( It has promise in the premise, but the mechanics are not promising at all )
A good premise, and some interesting decisions for mechanics, but the game designer could have made a better game from the beginning by giving the PCs a fighting chance for the early parts of the game and making them have to decide between succeeding at the small things or strategically failing at some of the small things so as to be able to save up their abilities for handling the bigger ones. (But that means they have to be able to succeed at the bigger ones once they've gotten a little bit of equipment and abilities, which I'm not entirely convinced they will be able to do.)
A couple of thoughts that maybe can be explored if I get them out on digital paper and let other people look at them:
Random thoughts for a random day. Take, leave, or expand as you like.
- I would like someone who is not familiar at all with the universe of Within the Wires (the found recordings podcast created by Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson) to read the book they put out, You Feel It Just Below The Ribs. I have a suspicion that its main narrative tension will read differently to someone who is new to the world than someone who has been listening from the beginning. (Or, at least, someone who has listened to the first season.) I think I can accurately call the novel Season 0, or, depending on where Black Box fits in the universe, since I'm not a Patreon subscriber, Season -1. It does a lot of work setting up the universe that the podcasts then explore, and so I'm curious to see if a new reader, or one familiar with the genre of literature that the book is about, gets the same messages out of it.
- I'd have to listen to it again, and probably more than a few times with specific ears on, and I still wouldn't be completely sure, but there's something interesting with the music direction of Encanto that makes me wonder how many unique melodic lines there are in the film. Each main character, I think, gets one melodic line to themselves and I think most, if not all, of the music is how well those melodic lines blend with each other when there are multiple singers. Since Lin-Manuel Miranda is involved, I wouldn't be surprised if "single melodies/motifs layered on top of each other" was intentional, given the themes of the movie about family and family working together and what that means.
- Have I recommended the podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz to all of you recently? It's about sound design, so you'll hear a lot about how iconic sounds and jingles/network identifiers came into existence, but you'll also hear about specific technology (like the SM7 microphone), or the science of hearing and how sound works (with some neat demonstrations of how amplification and interference work), or the people who are listening all over the world for numbers stations and what they might entail. They've done Mel Blanc, Bronx cheers, John Cage's most famous work, the TR-808 drum machine, and several spotlights on what the world is like when you can't see anything and have to rely on your hearing to understand the world around you. Plus, there's the Mystery Sound in every episode, something that a person who is familiar with it recognizes instantly, but for others, might be one of those "hrm, I know I've heard that before, but I just can't quite place it." sounds. I'll admit, I haven't figured out as many of them as I might have been able to, but half the fun is trying to puzzle out what a sound might be if you don't immediately know it. (Although it'll never happen to me, because I'm sure there are more than enough listeners to the podcast that the random number generator disfavors me when I know the sound, there's also the possibility that if you guess the current mystery sound, you could win one of their T-shirts.)
- It's been interesting to watch eight seasons of RWBY over the years. Some of the storytelling over the years has gotten better as the technology that Rooster Teeth has had to work with has improved, which allows them to more closely deliver the envisioned ideas for the story. The effects work has increased and the style has stabilized over time (which, is, to some degree, why I think there's a reasonable Machete Order to watch the series in, to give someone a taste of what the series will become, then fill in the background of the why and then go forward, which right now seems to be 4-5, 1-2-3, 6-7-8) into a sort of mostly 3D but occasionally 2.5D kind of series. It's also grown into itself as the kind of story that can support two protagonists and their stories together.
Right at tne end of the eighth season, though, we got to see the possibility of a person's Semblance evolving or unlocking new depths in the right kinds of circumstances, and I realize that has all sorts of interesting implications for the worldbuilding that we probably won't get to see unless it becomes important to the plot.
I also kind of wonder how this series turns out in the alternate universe where Monty doesn't die but continues on to advise and showrun. The broad strokes are probably the same, but I wonder what kinds of details we would be different. And would it be the kind of story where the Wizard goes back behind the curtain, where the Tin Man has no Heart, the Cowardly Lion has no courage, and it's not looking like the Scarecrow has any brains, either.
And, y'know, I feel like RWBY is a good example of what kinds of shows we could be making if we had a robust public domain, because so many of the characters are based in works that are in the public domain, so they can be riffed on without the lawyers coming to say hello. Imagine what we could have in this show if we had a much bigger reference pool to draw from.
Random thoughts for a random day. Take, leave, or expand as you like.
I'm a lot late for the full end of the eighth volume of RWBY, and I have thoughts and opinions about the volume, but I suspect many of those opinions are going to be cemented by how Volume 9 turns out. And, I also know that maybe a couple people on my reading list actually watch the show. But, in the interim, and in hopes of possibly getting you to try the series out, I'd like to suggest that with eight volumes animated, that RWBY might benefit from the Machete Order idea provided for the Star Wars series. Machete Order re-orders the watching of the original and prequel Star Wars movies so as to make them more firmly about the life journey of Luke Skywalker. (The post linked to is the "how does the Machete Order work as more and more Star Wars movies get made?")
RWBY is available for free from Rooster Teeth, the studio responsible for creating and animating the show.
RWBY, as a series, tries to give equal weighting to its two main teams, Team RWBY (Ruby) and Team JNPR (Juniper), but I feel like as time goes on, it feels like Ruby (and team RWBY) are decoy protagonists, which is actually a shame, because a really girls-and-women-centered show would go over well in these times. Over the course of eight volumes, though, I feel like the writers have been much more focused on team JNPR, and at this point, I'd say that Jaune Arc has a legitimate claim to being the main character (or at least on equal footing with Ruby for main character). Although we're introduced to the members of team RWBY first, and they are often responsible for the major action of the series, a significant amount of the emotional beats of the series, and the biggest growth arc, are placed on the shoulders of Jaune. (He's the viewer substitute character, so whenever something needs explained, or some bit of physical comedy that involves getting hit by something is needed, Jaune is there to take it or to ask what would otherwise be an obvious question to all the geniuses and prodigies around him.)
The volumes in the order they've been presented are interested in telling a story of how children with varying levels of naivete end up involved in things that are far older and stronger than they are and how swiftly their ideals get trampled in the face of having to actually fight their enemies. Something that might have started as a show about people crushing soulless monsters with flashy action sequences and improbable weapons very quickly moves into how traumatizing it is to have to fight for your life against determined opponents who won't pull any punches because children are opposing them.
Throughout the eight volumes, I've seen three major arcs so far: Volumes 2-4, Volumes 5-6, and Volumes 7-(9, probably). Like in the Machete Order, Volume 1 and the four trailers (Red, White, Black, and Yellow) can get discarded for narrative purposes and then watched at any point where someone wants a break from the much darker content that comes later on. Volume 1 isn't free of dark content, but it's schoolyard bullying that almost turns fatal when someone's bluster turns out to have nothing behind it. (Also, it starts out with an airsickness gag at Jaune's expense in the first episode or two, which thankfully is only re-referenced occasionally, but if you are a person who is sensitive to that, skipping volume 1 entirely might make this show much more watchable for you. It may not, as the writers remember that Jaune gets motion sickness when flying, but they don't go all the way to providing audio of him like they do in Volume 1.)
I'm not sure what to call this rewatching cycle. Maybe someone who watches it can tell me a good name for it. For now, I'm going to call it the Arc Order, because double-meaning puns are always nice to have. So, if we're going to watch in this revised order, I think the sequence is: Volumes 5-6, Volumes 2-4, Volume 7-(9), although I'd wait until Volume 9 drops before going all the way through Volume 8.
Why this order? Volume 5 is the Haven Academy arc, and gives us a good taste of how everyone here functions as a team, as well as introducing us to the relics, the villains, and the stakes involved without having them reveal themselves in drips and dribbles over the first four volumes. It does step on Jaune slightly, as watching 5 first removes the first four volumes' worth of buildup and watching Jaune develop and instead shows him as a fairly capable team leader to start. But for a starting point where most of the people involved in the arc and the next arc are already introduced, Volume 5 is good.
6 after 5 is more development of both teams, RWBY and JNPR, as they try to make it to Atlas after their adventures in Haven. Blake and Adam come to the end of the arc started in 5, we learn the fundamental conflict of the series in volume 6, and at the end of 6, it's the right time to go backward and explain what the teams were doing in Haven and why they're headed toward Atlas. Volumes 2-4 cover Beacon and also introduces us to key characters that will be important in the Atlas arc that starts in Volume 7, with Neon and Flynt, Penny, Ironwood, and Amity. Also, it showcases why Cinder and company are aligned with the villains and showcases their ability to make things work for themselves. I don't think the major emotional stabs through Jaune's heart in volumes 2-4 are lessened any by having seen 5 and 6 first, and it gives useful context for why Jaune was the way he was in those volumes. Volumes 2-4 also explain a few more things about Team RWBY's teamwork development and provides an entire arc for Torchwick and Neo, so as to explain what Neo is doing in the later volumes.
Once the context of Beacon is established after we've seen how the team handled Haven, then it's time to go forward to Atlas and Mantle, where things get way darker with each successive episode, to the point where it might be worthwhile to take a break after 2-4 until all of 7-9 is available to try and rumble through all at once (or as close to all at once as possible). Volume 7 introduces a rival working team to RWBY and JNPR, whose philosophy about work boundaries is different than the ones we've seen so far. Volume 8 is very much about the consequences of differing philosophies and what lengths people are willing to go to for making sure they get the results they believe are best. It's a heavy arc so far, and if Rooster Teeth intends Volume 9 to finish up that arc, it will need to do some big work to try and pull up from the nosedive into darkness. If, instead, Volume 8 was the end of the Atlas/Mistral arc, then Volume 9 needs to do a lot of work to re-balance the scales so that the viewer believes the heroes have a shot at succeeding.
If this sounds like a show you may be interested in, go check out the show. Many of the earlier volumes are also stitched together as long movies you can watch on other video sites. Your total commitment through Volume 8 is no more than 20 hours, much of which can be watched in 10-20 minute episodic formats.
If you'd like to be more spoiled about the events of the series, or if you already know what's happened, I'm putting a more detailed explanation for the re-ordering underneath the cut. If you're already clicked through and you don't want to be spoiled, stop now.
( The Spoiler-rific version of the paragraphs above )
But, anyway, Arc Order (or whatever this idea is named) is 5-6, 2-4, 7-9, with the four trailers, 1, and the World of Remnant segments inserted whenever desired or when the viewer needs a quick primer or a refresher on things that have already passed in the show. Feel free to try it out and see if it makes for a less rough viewing experience than starting with 1 does. Or if it helps get the story arcs into a better position where someone understand and trace the actions of the characters more easily and effectively.
RWBY is available for free from Rooster Teeth, the studio responsible for creating and animating the show.
RWBY, as a series, tries to give equal weighting to its two main teams, Team RWBY (Ruby) and Team JNPR (Juniper), but I feel like as time goes on, it feels like Ruby (and team RWBY) are decoy protagonists, which is actually a shame, because a really girls-and-women-centered show would go over well in these times. Over the course of eight volumes, though, I feel like the writers have been much more focused on team JNPR, and at this point, I'd say that Jaune Arc has a legitimate claim to being the main character (or at least on equal footing with Ruby for main character). Although we're introduced to the members of team RWBY first, and they are often responsible for the major action of the series, a significant amount of the emotional beats of the series, and the biggest growth arc, are placed on the shoulders of Jaune. (He's the viewer substitute character, so whenever something needs explained, or some bit of physical comedy that involves getting hit by something is needed, Jaune is there to take it or to ask what would otherwise be an obvious question to all the geniuses and prodigies around him.)
The volumes in the order they've been presented are interested in telling a story of how children with varying levels of naivete end up involved in things that are far older and stronger than they are and how swiftly their ideals get trampled in the face of having to actually fight their enemies. Something that might have started as a show about people crushing soulless monsters with flashy action sequences and improbable weapons very quickly moves into how traumatizing it is to have to fight for your life against determined opponents who won't pull any punches because children are opposing them.
Throughout the eight volumes, I've seen three major arcs so far: Volumes 2-4, Volumes 5-6, and Volumes 7-(9, probably). Like in the Machete Order, Volume 1 and the four trailers (Red, White, Black, and Yellow) can get discarded for narrative purposes and then watched at any point where someone wants a break from the much darker content that comes later on. Volume 1 isn't free of dark content, but it's schoolyard bullying that almost turns fatal when someone's bluster turns out to have nothing behind it. (Also, it starts out with an airsickness gag at Jaune's expense in the first episode or two, which thankfully is only re-referenced occasionally, but if you are a person who is sensitive to that, skipping volume 1 entirely might make this show much more watchable for you. It may not, as the writers remember that Jaune gets motion sickness when flying, but they don't go all the way to providing audio of him like they do in Volume 1.)
I'm not sure what to call this rewatching cycle. Maybe someone who watches it can tell me a good name for it. For now, I'm going to call it the Arc Order, because double-meaning puns are always nice to have. So, if we're going to watch in this revised order, I think the sequence is: Volumes 5-6, Volumes 2-4, Volume 7-(9), although I'd wait until Volume 9 drops before going all the way through Volume 8.
Why this order? Volume 5 is the Haven Academy arc, and gives us a good taste of how everyone here functions as a team, as well as introducing us to the relics, the villains, and the stakes involved without having them reveal themselves in drips and dribbles over the first four volumes. It does step on Jaune slightly, as watching 5 first removes the first four volumes' worth of buildup and watching Jaune develop and instead shows him as a fairly capable team leader to start. But for a starting point where most of the people involved in the arc and the next arc are already introduced, Volume 5 is good.
6 after 5 is more development of both teams, RWBY and JNPR, as they try to make it to Atlas after their adventures in Haven. Blake and Adam come to the end of the arc started in 5, we learn the fundamental conflict of the series in volume 6, and at the end of 6, it's the right time to go backward and explain what the teams were doing in Haven and why they're headed toward Atlas. Volumes 2-4 cover Beacon and also introduces us to key characters that will be important in the Atlas arc that starts in Volume 7, with Neon and Flynt, Penny, Ironwood, and Amity. Also, it showcases why Cinder and company are aligned with the villains and showcases their ability to make things work for themselves. I don't think the major emotional stabs through Jaune's heart in volumes 2-4 are lessened any by having seen 5 and 6 first, and it gives useful context for why Jaune was the way he was in those volumes. Volumes 2-4 also explain a few more things about Team RWBY's teamwork development and provides an entire arc for Torchwick and Neo, so as to explain what Neo is doing in the later volumes.
Once the context of Beacon is established after we've seen how the team handled Haven, then it's time to go forward to Atlas and Mantle, where things get way darker with each successive episode, to the point where it might be worthwhile to take a break after 2-4 until all of 7-9 is available to try and rumble through all at once (or as close to all at once as possible). Volume 7 introduces a rival working team to RWBY and JNPR, whose philosophy about work boundaries is different than the ones we've seen so far. Volume 8 is very much about the consequences of differing philosophies and what lengths people are willing to go to for making sure they get the results they believe are best. It's a heavy arc so far, and if Rooster Teeth intends Volume 9 to finish up that arc, it will need to do some big work to try and pull up from the nosedive into darkness. If, instead, Volume 8 was the end of the Atlas/Mistral arc, then Volume 9 needs to do a lot of work to re-balance the scales so that the viewer believes the heroes have a shot at succeeding.
If this sounds like a show you may be interested in, go check out the show. Many of the earlier volumes are also stitched together as long movies you can watch on other video sites. Your total commitment through Volume 8 is no more than 20 hours, much of which can be watched in 10-20 minute episodic formats.
If you'd like to be more spoiled about the events of the series, or if you already know what's happened, I'm putting a more detailed explanation for the re-ordering underneath the cut. If you're already clicked through and you don't want to be spoiled, stop now.
( The Spoiler-rific version of the paragraphs above )
But, anyway, Arc Order (or whatever this idea is named) is 5-6, 2-4, 7-9, with the four trailers, 1, and the World of Remnant segments inserted whenever desired or when the viewer needs a quick primer or a refresher on things that have already passed in the show. Feel free to try it out and see if it makes for a less rough viewing experience than starting with 1 does. Or if it helps get the story arcs into a better position where someone understand and trace the actions of the characters more easily and effectively.
Okay, this may be "old man yells at cloud" territory, but being an Old on the Internet and watching technology develop over time sometimes means you notice the trivial things and wonder.
( A mandatory cybersecurity training where some things appeared a bit out of date and others provoked a conflict that may only be applicable to a small amount of people )
So, yeah, old man yells at cloud, because the security program is saying sensible things for security reasons that conflict with other things that someone might do to improve the security of their devices on a different vector.
( A mandatory cybersecurity training where some things appeared a bit out of date and others provoked a conflict that may only be applicable to a small amount of people )
So, yeah, old man yells at cloud, because the security program is saying sensible things for security reasons that conflict with other things that someone might do to improve the security of their devices on a different vector.
A few questions about fanfic writing.
Apr. 28th, 2020 09:35 pmThis thing, it is potentially interesting, is it not?
- Why did you start writing fanfic?
- Why do you write fanfic?
- How do you choose fandoms and why do you choose them?
- Do you have themes or plot devices you return to?
- Do you have any pet peeves?
- Which story/stories are you the most proud over and why?
The very earliest of my works, as best as I can tell, were borne out of the desire to emulate what I had seen on the screen, to write things of a similar nature. Since I don't have that notebook with me, I have no idea whether they're also self-inserts, but I do remember that I was trying to keep them to the page they were on, a self-imposed limitation to get an entire episode's worth of action on the single page. Being somewhere in the early phases of a double-digit age, I probably left out a lot that I might otherwise elaborate on, but I suspect some amount of that was formulaic material that the source could have also written in one or two sentences if they so desired.
The first thing I remember writing as fic (or at least as pastiche of pastiche) that I then subsequently read aloud, I wrote because I wanted to write a story in that particular style, and I thought it was a good fit for the length and prompts that I had in mind. This was still while I was in the early phases of a two-digit age, and might be one of the subconscious reasons that when I think about performance (or writing in general, fic or otherwise), my operating principles seem to be on the order of "more courage than brains" or "more courage than skill", even though the hit, comment, and kudo count on those works that I've shared with others, including y'all, suggests there might be some amount of brains and skill that goes into the practice of writing, in addition to the large amount of practice that goes into writing.
Now? Since I still do a lot of writing on prompts and fests and exchanges, I like to try and bring other people's ideas into existence. It's the kind of writing where having some structure already built into place makes the writing process easier, because most people, when they write prompts, they help you understand what angle they're coming from, and then it's an exercise to write a work that work with that angle and is still recognizably in the fandom. I stall a lot harder on my own ideas, unless it's one that I can also sink into a concrete something and produce with a clear picture.
Or, in at least one case, because the behavior of the canon aggravated me enough to say "That's nonsensical! This is how it could have happened, and it would have been much more in character for this person." So I tend to be a person who bases their ideas on the hooks that I can either find or think up and see what I can build from there.
I get introduced to new things through friends, for the most part, or through blog posts, or through interesting clips, and then I watch some of it, or I read it, and I decide whether or not there's enough interest in the material to keep going with it. One of the things that helps determine whether any given piece of media gets the fanfom nod is whether the story is good, the side characters are deep, and neither narrative nor characters make decisions that are flagrantly offensive nor out of their established characterization without explanation. Even then, sometimes it doesn't work for me, but the more times a narrative gets close or violates those principles, the more likely I'm going to bounce off of that piece of media.
Probably? I don't consciously know what they are, though, because I haven't gone back and analyzed my own works for themes and plot devices. Someone else who wanted to look at my corpus could probably come up with something, though. I generally try to have competence as the thing that keeps everybody going, as I find it a better narrative when someone gets outfoxed, outprepared, or otherwise outdone through skill, cunning, or being able to bring overwhelming force to bear on a situation, rather than by someone acting out of their character so that the plot can advance. If you've read enough of my works to make suggestions, then feel free to suggset some themes or plot devices I tend to use.
The biggest one is consistency of characterization across the narrative (or narratives). I can accept a lot of situations, plots, and character types, but I want things to be consistent across the narrative, or at the very least, that if something is going to be inconsistent, it will be explained in time, or, even better, it ends up being explained before the inconsistency happens. There are some other ones that are generally more related to "why is this person being a jerk unnecessarily?" and other such things where a characterization or plot, even though it is consistent, is not something I'm interested in at that time. I may end up being interested in it later, or I might decide, as I have with the Giving of Grief, to lay out my objections and aggravations with it because it's something that I really would like to have been better than it actually is.
That's a good question, and if you end up pressing me, I'll probably go wave at my statistics page and say "Pick a metric". That may not actually answer the question, because the biggest-in-stats work that I have is one that I made on a lark and subsequently struck a chord with a megafandom.
(There are a lot of works I've made on a lark that have accumulated a fair number of kudos from a megafandom. I mostly blame other people on AO3 and DW, and a fair amount of Tumblr, even though I'm not on it, for recommending my work when it appears.)
So, the one I'm most proud of? As a technical achievement, wrangling AO3 properly to display what I wanted, with lots of help and consulation and eventually creating a proper work skin for it, it's The Royal Test. Which is still currently my only lyrics-entwined songfic so far. And perhaps one of the more raw takes I've done on Adrien and Marinette and the relationship they have with Nathalie and Gabriel.
I don't know what of those works to be proudest of otherwise, though, mostly because the concept of being proud of a work is nebulous enough that I haven't a clue what to use as criterion for pride. I enjoy working on all of them, and I had a particularly good time working with more than a few of them, and most of them got some nice comments from their intended recipients to indicate that things went well at fulfilling the brief. I mean, the things that I've put out are generally things that I'm proud of, so that's good, right?
I mean, if there are ones that the rest of you think are ones I should be proud of, I'm all ears as to which ones and why, but I can't really give an answer about which one or ones I'm most proud of unless "most proud of" has a more definite criterion.
xparrot suggests that when fans speak negatively about their fandoms or creators in those fandoms, they do so carefully, both in the degree of the negativity, and the breadth of where the negativity is posted. Because fandom is often an emotional space, and too much negativity, or negativity too widely broadcast, might turn fans away from the fandom or cause them to stop, and less fans in fandom is no good. It's not a question of being Pollyanna, because there are real problems that happen in fanworks and canon that need to be brought out, examined, and discussed, but if you are trying to sink a ship by throwing every terrible accusation about that ship at it, without regard for any other perspectives, you're doing your fandom a disservice. That doesn't mean you have to like the ship, but it does mean that it's a better idea to not like the ship in more private spaces than harshing on it on main. (Generally speaking.) It's a really nice, nuanced argument about how gatekeeping can happen even if you're not intending to gatekeep. After all, if you're the person who likes that ship in a group of your friends who don't, you might be discouraged from writing that ship if all the people you're going to rely on to support you aren't fond of it.Thinking about this also had me thinking about a couple of pieces of negative feedback I've received so far, unsolicited, in some of my works, and in both cases, I think they were unmindful of what
xparrot was talking about. Example One was feedback about what would be a useful piece of information -- the French school system does not have homeroom, as the United States school system understands it. They have a different, but related, concept that, admittedly, a little research could have uncovered, but I hadn't done the research. The person who was trying to tell me this piece of information decided to take an approach that they thought was of the correct form of the compliment snadwich - say something nice about the work, say the thing that is the criticism, then say something nice about the work again. Unfortunately, the way that they phrased the opening compliment was "Yeah, this was cute and all that." and ended it "I roll my eyes whenever I see 'homeroom' in [this fandom] fic". As you might guess, this did not set a receptive tone for the piece of useful information contained in the comment, as it is far too easy for that phrasing to be read as someone being insincere or strongly negative about the work in question. Even if they had no intention of being harsh or negative in the delivery of the information. The information was still useful, and I took the useful information under advisement, did some research, and made a change. And also responded hostilely to what I had perceived as someone coming across with hostile intent. After a certain amount of back-and-forth, where I also apologized for the initial hot take, because it was still true that even if someone hadn't a clue about how to get the thing across, the information was useful and they should be thanked for providing it, it ended with a "see if I ever read you again, because you reacted harshly and rudely to me when I was trying to help you." I still contend that it was help packaged in a nearly-perfect hleppy way. Anyway. The entire set-up could be used as an example of tone-policing someone who genuinely was tired of seeing this part misrepresented all the time in works and was out of fucks to give for yet another clueless author. And when it comes to things like someone being -ist in their work, or perpetuating harmful stereotypes, the people who ceaselessly call in / out others on those actions are exhausted from having to do it all the damn time. To tell them "Well, you could have been more polite about it" chooses to substitute a person's feelings as more important than the harm they've done.
It may be hypocritical of me to say that one standard should apply for -isms and another for details such as whether or not another school system has a homeroom, but there does seem to be a distinction of degrees that could be useful in this manner. The actual fix was changing one line in the work, and not particularly hard to do, so, in my own head, the amount of scorn let out in the comment was disproportionate. Live and learn and try to figure out when it is appropriate to be a hothead at someone and when it's not. "Be careful about how negative you are."
The other instance of negative commentary was much more straightforwardly someone full of themselves and feeling like they had the right to say what they were going to say, even though a person who could read context would realize they were definitely not in the right space to be opining. I made sure to tag it as a "fix-it" fic, and mentioned that the character I was using was derived from where I thought the character's growth was in relation to where I thought the showrunners had decided it was. So things turned out differently, because that's one of the things that fic does, right? Produces new results for things that happened in canon that were deeply dissatisfying? So, despite presumably having read the tags on the work, Example Two comes barging in, using a guest account, and says essentially that the work is wrong, and that the way the character acted in canon had been foreshadowed all season, and that it was only logical for that character to have acted that way. Now, people who don't sign their work, clearly haven't read the signs, and are behaving in a generally clueless manner get made fun of. And allowed to stick around until they stop being amusing, at which point they're summarily deleted. So they get a small quip back about the canon not running on logic and an admonishment to at least sign their work, if they're going to be negative. The response to that proclaimed that they didn't need to sign a name, since their obvious correctness was still obviously correct. Which earned them a much longer and significantly more condescending lecture about what other options a person has to express that they didn't like a work other than stubbornly insisting Canon is God in a place that has properly tagged their work that they're not following the way that canon played out. Predictably, the other party flounced after again asserting the correctness of their cause and saying they didn't have to stick around if all they were going to get was insulted. There was not a posted reply of "And don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out," because that would have probably prolonged the thread of conversation, but it was certainly joyously uttered at the conclusion of that particular interaction. If the poster thought that, as a nonnie, they could convince someone of the supposed error of their ways by belittling them and ignoring all the signs that said such argument would not be countenances, merely because they were convinced of the rightness of their cause, well, that's certainly an argument someone with a lot of privilege would make. Or someone who didn't care about the actual argument, and just wanted to stir up some trouble in another person's space. In either case, they most certainly were trolling, and they certainly failed to observe "Be careful about how you are negative." Someone presenting an argument that consisted more of "I'm right, canon says so" might have gotten a treatment that was more polite, even if it would also suggest that this was not the forum for this particular discussion. Someone might be genuinely curious about the decisions made in the work and want to try and understand what brought a particular writer to those decisions, even if they themselves cannot fathom how it is done.
It also makes me think about the Giving of Grief. Where possible, I have tried to focus on things that I find did not age well or do not go well with current morals and ethics regarding how people interact. The idea was to generate a road map to where the Suck Fairy had been in the interim, so that people who might be coming to Pern because it was written by someone who is lauded in the science fiction community will know what they are getting in to, and to decide whether there's enough there to fight off the instinct to chuck the work against the wall and have no more to do with it. I'll admit that I'm also petty about the fragments of poetry and song in many of the newer works, as poetic verse and as supposedly instructional or entertaining works. Which may not be strictly about the Suck Fairy, but occasionally, it is about that, or the poetic form provides an illustration (often unintentional) of another fragment that is firmly within the Suck Fairy's purview.
At a certain point, perhaps when all of the posting is done at its current home, I am thinking about importing the entire series to the Archive of Our Own. Even though it's not necessarily a great place to have meta discussions, it's good to have backups in place, and putting it on AO3 might expose the work to a wider audience who would enjoy seeing its progressions and possibly take issue with some of its conclusions. It's primarily a negative work, because it was intended to find flaws, holes, gaps, and places where things don't work. I've tried to praise parts that do work, where I find them, because no work is composed completely of terrible things, but it wasn't the focus. And now, the question becomes whether or not this hundred-of-thousands of words work is the kind of thing that might fall afoul of being too negative and in the wrong way. I intend, as I import, to go through and make edits and corrections and otherwise examine what I was saying then to see if there are places where it could be said better, more clearly, or otherwise to make the AO3 version the Director's Cut version of the work, but it's a big meta. And it might appeal very much to a certain audience that is interested in discussing the flaws of a work. And it might be distressing to a certain audience that wants to enjoy the work and possibly write about it, but might forbear if they think the angry meta person will go into their comments and stmop all over it. I don't intend to. I might end up suggesting some tags if I feel like I got a different work than what I was expecting, but most of the time, when I read a work, there is something enjoyable about it that I can comment on, or, failing that, I can leave kudos for someone for something written well that I don't have a comment to make.
It's food for thought. Because there's been enough gatekeeping and shaming of people for liking what they like, especially directed toward women and toward people who like what women have written and created. Does it cross into the territory of "these things are profoundly -ist and calling attention to them is a worthy and useful thing to do?" I think it does, much of the time, and other times, I'm confused about things not working the way I would expect them to, given what little expertise I have on the matter. I would like it to be a primer on what kinds of things are likely to appear in the books, rather than sounding like someone being ceaselessly and pointlessly negative about a series that's profound and fundamental for a lot of people.
Ultimately, I'll probably post it, and see how the comments react to it. At that point, much of the work will be publication-date in the past anyway, assuming the importer picks up the original publication dates and assigns them correctly. That way, I won't be shoving a whole lot of this in the faces of the people who would much rather have fic to celebrate than meta to drag themselves through.
Anyway, go read the inspiring post for this one, too, as there's a lot of neat things in there, including someone making a decision not to use "trash" to describe something because it didn't have the same kind of meaning for much of the audience as it might have had for the poster.
There was much giddiness at the announcement that the Archive of Our Own won a Hugo Award at the 2019 Worldcon in Dublin, Ireland. AO3, and the OTW behind it, are a prominent voice in the conversation about the legitimacy and legality of transformative works.
An admin post went up on AO3 a little while ago conveying a reminder from the World Science Fiction Society, who administer Worldcon and the Hugo Awards, that the win by AO3 does not mean every work in the Archive, and every creator, is a Hugo Award winner.
The most immediate and common reaction to the post seems to have been, "We know. We were having fun. Stop harshing our squee."
Aside from those responses, though, there is a more serious question that goes along with these reactions. What did AO3 win a Beat Related Work Hugo for?
( Thoughts lie within )
The Archive wins because it is a technical marvel.
The Archive wins because the stories there fill so many needs that traditional publishing won't.
The Archive wins because representation matters.
The Archive wins because transformative works are an essential part of any and all fandoms, a conversation running mostly in parallel to their source works. People can choose their level of engagement with that part of the fandom, but they can't pretend that it doesn't exist.
The Archive won, and that means all the contributors to the Archive share in the win. Collectively, everyone who contributed to the Archive are Hugo Award-winning creators. To state otherwise is to ignore reality.
At this point, realizing that my voice is but one among many, and I'm not even to the level where I'm pulling out any citations, I'm going to leaveelf's roundup of the Hugo Things here so you can get more perspectives, including some solid roastings of the position that the Mark Protection Committee needs to be aggressive in enforcement (synecdochic brings the citation game to the yard, for example.)
An admin post went up on AO3 a little while ago conveying a reminder from the World Science Fiction Society, who administer Worldcon and the Hugo Awards, that the win by AO3 does not mean every work in the Archive, and every creator, is a Hugo Award winner.
The most immediate and common reaction to the post seems to have been, "We know. We were having fun. Stop harshing our squee."
Aside from those responses, though, there is a more serious question that goes along with these reactions. What did AO3 win a Beat Related Work Hugo for?
( Thoughts lie within )
The Archive wins because it is a technical marvel.
The Archive wins because the stories there fill so many needs that traditional publishing won't.
The Archive wins because representation matters.
The Archive wins because transformative works are an essential part of any and all fandoms, a conversation running mostly in parallel to their source works. People can choose their level of engagement with that part of the fandom, but they can't pretend that it doesn't exist.
The Archive won, and that means all the contributors to the Archive share in the win. Collectively, everyone who contributed to the Archive are Hugo Award-winning creators. To state otherwise is to ignore reality.
At this point, realizing that my voice is but one among many, and I'm not even to the level where I'm pulling out any citations, I'm going to leave
elf's roundup of the Hugo Things here so you can get more perspectives, including some solid roastings of the position that the Mark Protection Committee needs to be aggressive in enforcement (synecdochic brings the citation game to the yard, for example.)
Still no formal musical training, apart from the thing where I've been playing and listening to music for decades, so if you're expecting a lot of theory, you may need to go somewhere else.
This post contains spoilers for the third season! (It's really unavoidable, given that names are being named.)
When we last left our lot of heroes at the end of the second season, we had seen a lot, but we didn't have a full rainbow complement of powers and their uses. Having seen all the way through Reflekdoll, we can say we've completed the spectrum. And added a few more additional characters based on some of the other residents of the Miracle Box.
( And here come the spoilers! )
I'll be glad to hear what you have to think about these themes in the comments. And do tell me if the links stop working or you find superior versions to the ones I've linked. I'm trying for a certain amount of quality and fidelity, but it's always possible there's something much better around the corner.
And, especially after Reflekdoll, the transformative works community is going to hit overdrive, so expect a lot of fic to come through now that those events have been added to the canon. Also, Desperada and Reflekdoll both canonically confirm that the costuming of any given Miraculous wielder is dependent on them and not on the Miraculous, which makes for some interesting storytelling options when there are kwami swaps or other situations where someone not the usual wielder might take a crack at it.
This post contains spoilers for the third season! (It's really unavoidable, given that names are being named.)
When we last left our lot of heroes at the end of the second season, we had seen a lot, but we didn't have a full rainbow complement of powers and their uses. Having seen all the way through Reflekdoll, we can say we've completed the spectrum. And added a few more additional characters based on some of the other residents of the Miracle Box.
( And here come the spoilers! )
I'll be glad to hear what you have to think about these themes in the comments. And do tell me if the links stop working or you find superior versions to the ones I've linked. I'm trying for a certain amount of quality and fidelity, but it's always possible there's something much better around the corner.
And, especially after Reflekdoll, the transformative works community is going to hit overdrive, so expect a lot of fic to come through now that those events have been added to the canon. Also, Desperada and Reflekdoll both canonically confirm that the costuming of any given Miraculous wielder is dependent on them and not on the Miraculous, which makes for some interesting storytelling options when there are kwami swaps or other situations where someone not the usual wielder might take a crack at it.
Okay, I finished the third "season" of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, (which, really, is the back half of a 14-episode Season 2, split in the middle for reasons) and I have hit one of the things that makes me grit my teeth in storytelling, because something that I could ignore came back and became central to the plot of this arc.
So, at this juncture, if you're not all the way through the third season, here is where you have to make a decision about whether you want to be spoiled. The grand majority of this post is devoted to Entrapta's characterization and motivation, as I see it.
( Forging ahead? Here we go. )
Entrapta is already a giant plot point, and because of that, when her characterization is so teeth-grindingly awful, she throws off the storytelling. For the Season 3 arc, someone needs to make a decision about what Entrapta's characterization is and then situation her motivation in that character.
(I'll bet there's some fantastic fic that explores this situation, regardless of how it resolves it into something coherent, because this snarl is the sort of thing that fic is made to unravel and re-knit. As well as, I suspect, a lot of Adora/Catra/Scorpia in various permutations of that triangle.)
So, at this juncture, if you're not all the way through the third season, here is where you have to make a decision about whether you want to be spoiled. The grand majority of this post is devoted to Entrapta's characterization and motivation, as I see it.
( Forging ahead? Here we go. )
Entrapta is already a giant plot point, and because of that, when her characterization is so teeth-grindingly awful, she throws off the storytelling. For the Season 3 arc, someone needs to make a decision about what Entrapta's characterization is and then situation her motivation in that character.
(I'll bet there's some fantastic fic that explores this situation, regardless of how it resolves it into something coherent, because this snarl is the sort of thing that fic is made to unravel and re-knit. As well as, I suspect, a lot of Adora/Catra/Scorpia in various permutations of that triangle.)
The Magicians had a fourth season finale a little while ago. You can still see the fires burning over in that corner of fandom, and for good reason. I'm going to be linking to pieces written about the finale that do a far better job of summarizing what happened and what went terribly wrong with that idea. Those pieces, and my summaries and commentaries of them, have content warnings for suicidal ideation, completed suicide, and mental illness at the very least, so this may be something to avoid if you have seen enough, or you do not want to engage. The rest of this post is going under cut.
( The Fourth Season Finale of The Magicians, and why we could have seen it coming, thanks to Joss Whedon. )
( The Fourth Season Finale of The Magicians, and why we could have seen it coming, thanks to Joss Whedon. )
Guardian Profile Challenge: Silver Adept
Mar. 27th, 2019 09:36 pmI thought it was a good idea to try and write my own profile that extols my virtues. It takes a while to think about them, and there's always going to be some part of this where it sounds pretentious and insufferable. Based on the things that inspired this challenge, though, pretentious and insufferable might be spot on for what we want.
Silver Adept is not the kind of writer that is going to show up on anyone's rec lists. They don't have a big series with hundreds of thousands of words on the Archive of Our Own (AO3). Going over their collection of finished works, there isn't even a work that crests the moderately low fanfiction bar of 10,000 words. For those who use the site to post transformative works that put familiar characters in novel situations or expound upon the canons started by other authors, pulling, pushing, and often times fixing the errors of representation, characterization, and plot produced by other canon works, Silver Adept is a bit of an odd duck.
If you looked at Silver Adept solely by their Archive of Our Own output, you might be convinced that they're a fannish dilettante, never staying too long in one place, writing small works here and there before zipping off in some other random direction, writing whatever strikes them and posting it. Until you notice how many of those works have a recipient as part of their description, made as gifts for the other members of the community.
"Exchanges," they point out, "are about taking the seed of an idea proposed by someone else and turning it into a work that you can gift back to them. You get at least one thing in return, too, from your own idea pool, and it's really neat to see how others take a small prompt and then make a full work out of it. While there are a lot of creators out there putting together masterpieces of hundreds of thousands of words, I'm more like a short-order cook, taking ideas and turning out tasty creations on a relatively quick deadline."
Diving into the statistics that AO3 provides for each user, the "short-order cook" form still results in a cumulative output of about 50,000 words for each year on the Archive. In 2018, they crested 60,000 words, and celebrated two milestones - one of their older works, The Many Proposals of Nick Burkhardt, reached more than 100 "kudos" (the Archive's version of a "like") and one of their shortest works, Marinette Special, was the fastest to obtain 50 kudos, taking only a few weeks after its posting to reach the half-century mark.
To some, the idea of writing someone else's ideas when there are so many of their own to get down on paper (or the eelctronic equivalent thereof) seems absurd. But there's a thriving community of prompt givers and writers on AO3 and other places, like Dreamwidth, where Silver Adept maintains a journal of "interesting things on the Web, mixed with flat-out rants and the occasional deep dive into a particular topic."
On Dreamwidth, the idea of Silver Adept as a dilettante disappears, as there are posts full of meta (discussions about character motivations, worldbuilding, or other aspects that aren't specifically about narrative stories) about various series, and several instances of the "December Days" and "Fandom Snowflake" sequences. For "December Days", Silver takes a single topic (a baseball-themed Tarot deck or various aspects of the craft of writing, for example) and writes a post a day about that topic for each day in December. "Fandom Snowflake" is a fifteen-day challenge that starts immediately after in the new year, asking questions about a person's fandom history, experiences, hopes, and wishes. "It's a pretty long sequence, but what comes out of it is usually pretty good, and I enjoy doing it," they said. "Plus, it's a way to invite comment and to get to know others in transformative works. It can feel isolating to think you're the only person with your ship, your headcanon, your idea about how everything works."
Putting Dreamwidth and AO3 together significantly raises the number of words that Silver Adept produces each year on fandom-related topics, and it's very difficult to capture how many of those words exist in other Dreamwidth journals and spaces as commentary, but that's still not a complete picture.
"I call it the Giving-of-Grief because there's just a lot to unpack, and I'm probably paying more attention to the things that didn't go well in the worldbuilding and characterization than the things that do," they say about their multi-year commentary series on Anne, Todd, and Gigi McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern. Each week, they post about a chunk of narrative in a Pern novel or short story, going in roughly chronological order of publication of each series of Pern. For those looking for a comparison work to go along with Mari Ness's reread of Pern for Tor.com, or those impatient to skip ahead, Silver Adept provides an excellent read-along and commentary for modern audiences.
It is only when you consider all three of these places that you get an idea of the scope of output that Silver Adept quietly produces. The seemingly-diffuse spaces all add up together to a conclusion that Silver Adept is writing a lot more than anyone might guess, but only someone with as wide-ranging of interests as they have might see the complete picture. When asked, they said a "lowball estimate" of what they put out in a single year on fandom topics might be around 150,000 words. That it's not on a single work makes it seem easy to dismiss, but that's three novels' worth of production in what they call "easily counted things."
Silver Adept may never have an epic work to hang their hat on, although they hinted that something significantly more long-form was in the works, based on an "idea that refuses to get shaken off," but providing no further details. Not everyone wants to dine on long-form epics all the time. Sometimes what you want is comfort food. And Silver Adept serves that up in a lot of different fandoms, one exchange prompt at a time.
That sounds about right, if I were trying to write about myself in a way that is otherwise opposite to how I usually feel about my work. (Although I do get nice comments on those works that say that other people enjoy them, so it's not always a pit of nerves and worries about whether any given work resonated or worked well with the audience.)
Silver Adept is not the kind of writer that is going to show up on anyone's rec lists. They don't have a big series with hundreds of thousands of words on the Archive of Our Own (AO3). Going over their collection of finished works, there isn't even a work that crests the moderately low fanfiction bar of 10,000 words. For those who use the site to post transformative works that put familiar characters in novel situations or expound upon the canons started by other authors, pulling, pushing, and often times fixing the errors of representation, characterization, and plot produced by other canon works, Silver Adept is a bit of an odd duck.
If you looked at Silver Adept solely by their Archive of Our Own output, you might be convinced that they're a fannish dilettante, never staying too long in one place, writing small works here and there before zipping off in some other random direction, writing whatever strikes them and posting it. Until you notice how many of those works have a recipient as part of their description, made as gifts for the other members of the community.
"Exchanges," they point out, "are about taking the seed of an idea proposed by someone else and turning it into a work that you can gift back to them. You get at least one thing in return, too, from your own idea pool, and it's really neat to see how others take a small prompt and then make a full work out of it. While there are a lot of creators out there putting together masterpieces of hundreds of thousands of words, I'm more like a short-order cook, taking ideas and turning out tasty creations on a relatively quick deadline."
Diving into the statistics that AO3 provides for each user, the "short-order cook" form still results in a cumulative output of about 50,000 words for each year on the Archive. In 2018, they crested 60,000 words, and celebrated two milestones - one of their older works, The Many Proposals of Nick Burkhardt, reached more than 100 "kudos" (the Archive's version of a "like") and one of their shortest works, Marinette Special, was the fastest to obtain 50 kudos, taking only a few weeks after its posting to reach the half-century mark.
To some, the idea of writing someone else's ideas when there are so many of their own to get down on paper (or the eelctronic equivalent thereof) seems absurd. But there's a thriving community of prompt givers and writers on AO3 and other places, like Dreamwidth, where Silver Adept maintains a journal of "interesting things on the Web, mixed with flat-out rants and the occasional deep dive into a particular topic."
On Dreamwidth, the idea of Silver Adept as a dilettante disappears, as there are posts full of meta (discussions about character motivations, worldbuilding, or other aspects that aren't specifically about narrative stories) about various series, and several instances of the "December Days" and "Fandom Snowflake" sequences. For "December Days", Silver takes a single topic (a baseball-themed Tarot deck or various aspects of the craft of writing, for example) and writes a post a day about that topic for each day in December. "Fandom Snowflake" is a fifteen-day challenge that starts immediately after in the new year, asking questions about a person's fandom history, experiences, hopes, and wishes. "It's a pretty long sequence, but what comes out of it is usually pretty good, and I enjoy doing it," they said. "Plus, it's a way to invite comment and to get to know others in transformative works. It can feel isolating to think you're the only person with your ship, your headcanon, your idea about how everything works."
Putting Dreamwidth and AO3 together significantly raises the number of words that Silver Adept produces each year on fandom-related topics, and it's very difficult to capture how many of those words exist in other Dreamwidth journals and spaces as commentary, but that's still not a complete picture.
"I call it the Giving-of-Grief because there's just a lot to unpack, and I'm probably paying more attention to the things that didn't go well in the worldbuilding and characterization than the things that do," they say about their multi-year commentary series on Anne, Todd, and Gigi McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern. Each week, they post about a chunk of narrative in a Pern novel or short story, going in roughly chronological order of publication of each series of Pern. For those looking for a comparison work to go along with Mari Ness's reread of Pern for Tor.com, or those impatient to skip ahead, Silver Adept provides an excellent read-along and commentary for modern audiences.
It is only when you consider all three of these places that you get an idea of the scope of output that Silver Adept quietly produces. The seemingly-diffuse spaces all add up together to a conclusion that Silver Adept is writing a lot more than anyone might guess, but only someone with as wide-ranging of interests as they have might see the complete picture. When asked, they said a "lowball estimate" of what they put out in a single year on fandom topics might be around 150,000 words. That it's not on a single work makes it seem easy to dismiss, but that's three novels' worth of production in what they call "easily counted things."
Silver Adept may never have an epic work to hang their hat on, although they hinted that something significantly more long-form was in the works, based on an "idea that refuses to get shaken off," but providing no further details. Not everyone wants to dine on long-form epics all the time. Sometimes what you want is comfort food. And Silver Adept serves that up in a lot of different fandoms, one exchange prompt at a time.
That sounds about right, if I were trying to write about myself in a way that is otherwise opposite to how I usually feel about my work. (Although I do get nice comments on those works that say that other people enjoy them, so it's not always a pit of nerves and worries about whether any given work resonated or worked well with the audience.)
It appears that the spreadsheets of bids have gone up successfully, and there's a bidding form available, so if you have been browsing the Fandom Trumps Hate auctions, you can now begin to bid on fanworks that you would like to see happen. Minimum bids are $5 for most auctions, and some auctions are offering tiered amounts of work if the bids cross a certain threshold.
Check to see that the entity you are bidding on will accept a donation to the charity you would like to give to, if you are the high bidder.
And, also, this is both contact post and shameless self-promotion post for my auction, offering fanfiction for either Rooster Teeth's RWBY (all of the canon available on-line), Cartoon Network's Steven Universe (which just wrapped its fifth season not too long ago), or Avatar: The Legend of Korra (which The Dragon Prince inherited people from and is getting comparisons made to).
The bidding window is relatively short - it closes 8pm EST on 1 March 02019, so three days is all you have to mull over your choices and perhaps attempt to fight others for the fanwork of your choice. And also, if there is something that you really do want to win, you'll need to refresh the spreadsheet often, as there will be no notifications that you've been outbid by someone else.
(I'll be happy if someone bids on me, because Impostor Syndrome is a terrible beast.)
Also, if you are curious about what my writing style is, or what sorts of stories I have already put together as part of my prolific exchange writing career, you can visit![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
silveradept and browse.
Check to see that the entity you are bidding on will accept a donation to the charity you would like to give to, if you are the high bidder.
And, also, this is both contact post and shameless self-promotion post for my auction, offering fanfiction for either Rooster Teeth's RWBY (all of the canon available on-line), Cartoon Network's Steven Universe (which just wrapped its fifth season not too long ago), or Avatar: The Legend of Korra (which The Dragon Prince inherited people from and is getting comparisons made to).
The bidding window is relatively short - it closes 8pm EST on 1 March 02019, so three days is all you have to mull over your choices and perhaps attempt to fight others for the fanwork of your choice. And also, if there is something that you really do want to win, you'll need to refresh the spreadsheet often, as there will be no notifications that you've been outbid by someone else.
(I'll be happy if someone bids on me, because Impostor Syndrome is a terrible beast.)
Also, if you are curious about what my writing style is, or what sorts of stories I have already put together as part of my prolific exchange writing career, you can visit
Right up front, I'm going to admit that I have no formal musical training, and so this is mostly a listening experience rather than someone being able to analyze a piece of music and figure out the same sorts of things that a lot of the Into The Spiderverse people.
Also, by the time I'm done, secret identities will have been spoiled pretty thoroughly, so if you don't already know where all the Miraculous are and who has them, the first part may be safe, but the second part definitely won't be.
Also, the links, being that they are related to material under copyright, may vanish at any time, and that's a thing that happens. I'll try to be descriptive, but this is aural, and it's often damn hard to find anyone who is willing to provide backing tracks without sound effect or dialogue put over them.
( Onward to themes )
Anyway, that's my un-music-theoried thoughts about the use of licks and motifs in Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Chat Noir. The reality is probably very different than what I've laid out here. *shrug*
Also, by the time I'm done, secret identities will have been spoiled pretty thoroughly, so if you don't already know where all the Miraculous are and who has them, the first part may be safe, but the second part definitely won't be.
Also, the links, being that they are related to material under copyright, may vanish at any time, and that's a thing that happens. I'll try to be descriptive, but this is aural, and it's often damn hard to find anyone who is willing to provide backing tracks without sound effect or dialogue put over them.
( Onward to themes )
Anyway, that's my un-music-theoried thoughts about the use of licks and motifs in Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Chat Noir. The reality is probably very different than what I've laid out here. *shrug*
I finished the first season of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power today, (yes, I know I'm late) and I think it's abundantly clear to me now that one of my cardinal rules of storytelling is that characters must make sense for their setting. Otherwise, there will be yelling. And possibly blog posts, because what is a blog for if not yelling into the aether about something being good or bad, right or wrong, in our media?
First up, I find that I agree with Ana Mardoll about the problem of portraying Entrapta throughout the series, and the harm that comes from making the character that is closest to autism spectrum into a person who doesn't appear to care about the people cost of her experiments.
I'm not particularly fond of Mermista's characterization as a Valley Girl kind of teenager, mostly because that characterization of being too jaded for everything grates hard on me (even if it mostly turns out to be a front), and I don't like that Princess Frosta, the most East Asian looking one of the lot, turns out to be the one who has the cold powers and is portrayed as having an obsession with rules and protocol over Adora's warnings. I realize that working with a property that already has certain character designs built into it is limiting, but I'll bet there's a fascinating piece out there about the fact that the honor of Grayskull turns a pale-skinned blond-haired character into a taller, longer-haired and more powerful blond-haired, pale-skinned person. While the story leaves the deuterotagonist with darker skin, heterochromia, and no powers ever. And what sort of show it might be if the protagonist got turned into pale skin and blonde hair if she didn't have it beforehand but had to accept it as the price of becoming She-Ra.
(I do like the decision to give She-Ra a skort. Very practical when swinging swords about.)
Where I had a really bad break with the storytelling, though, is with Catra, and here's where the spoiler cut happens.
( It's not just a Buffy and Faith thing, not really. )
That said, She-Ra has a lot of things going for it, including a lot of room for the possibility of romantic relationships between princesses, so if it picks up a second season, I'm likely to be watching.
ETA:cimorene talks about the likely traumas inflicted on Adora and Catra both and how those might manifest, in ways the show got convincingly and in ways where the show might have needed better signposting and reinforcement of how those traumas interact with Adora and Catra's lives and relationships. There's a lot of "Yep, this." in that post.
First up, I find that I agree with Ana Mardoll about the problem of portraying Entrapta throughout the series, and the harm that comes from making the character that is closest to autism spectrum into a person who doesn't appear to care about the people cost of her experiments.
I'm not particularly fond of Mermista's characterization as a Valley Girl kind of teenager, mostly because that characterization of being too jaded for everything grates hard on me (even if it mostly turns out to be a front), and I don't like that Princess Frosta, the most East Asian looking one of the lot, turns out to be the one who has the cold powers and is portrayed as having an obsession with rules and protocol over Adora's warnings. I realize that working with a property that already has certain character designs built into it is limiting, but I'll bet there's a fascinating piece out there about the fact that the honor of Grayskull turns a pale-skinned blond-haired character into a taller, longer-haired and more powerful blond-haired, pale-skinned person. While the story leaves the deuterotagonist with darker skin, heterochromia, and no powers ever. And what sort of show it might be if the protagonist got turned into pale skin and blonde hair if she didn't have it beforehand but had to accept it as the price of becoming She-Ra.
(I do like the decision to give She-Ra a skort. Very practical when swinging swords about.)
Where I had a really bad break with the storytelling, though, is with Catra, and here's where the spoiler cut happens.
( It's not just a Buffy and Faith thing, not really. )
That said, She-Ra has a lot of things going for it, including a lot of room for the possibility of romantic relationships between princesses, so if it picks up a second season, I'm likely to be watching.
ETA:
cimorene talks about the likely traumas inflicted on Adora and Catra both and how those might manifest, in ways the show got convincingly and in ways where the show might have needed better signposting and reinforcement of how those traumas interact with Adora and Catra's lives and relationships. There's a lot of "Yep, this." in that post.Just a couple of stray thoughts that probably deserve nothing more than a stray thought, but they keep coming back to me:
- Things in RWBY are always named thematically. Sometimes it's easy to spot, sometimes not so easy. I'm a bit annoyed that it took me six seasons to notice this, but here it is. Signal Academy is where Ruby trained before going to the regional academy, Beacon. Signal -> Beacon. Pyrrha is initially from Sanctum Academy, and finally, it's been noted that Sanctum is in the same region as Haven Academy, where Season 5 was mostly spent. So, Signal -> Beacon. Sanctum -> Haven. The schools all have related names, and it looks like the regional school is one power of z more than the feeder academies around it. Atlas is an outlier, but it's also the name as a thing that encompasses the whole world, so it fits. We haven't yet seen any of the feeder schools for Shade, though, so it's to be seen whether it will also follow the pattern. Perhaps one of its feeder schools is Oasis?
- For as many times as Chat Noir has been temporarily converted to the side of an akuma, why doesn't Hawk Moth/Papillon just grab his Miraculous while he's on their side and then go after Ladybug after it's secured? Seems like it would be something that's really beneficial to him and it would deny Ladybug a critical ally in the next fight. More often than not, though, we seem to be showing Chat Noir joining the rush to try and incapacitate Ladybug, which rarely ends well for him or the akuma. It's just a show, it's just a show, but it's starting to bother me that for as much as Hawk Moth is supposed to be a big villain, he's...forgotten to read the Evil Overlord List more than a few times so far. But I'm not fully caught up to where everyone else is yet, so there's a possibility that he's going to get his act in gear.
- He's also incredibly terrible with children in general.
- The pronunciation of Rena Rouge in the U.S. version of Miraculous Ladybug makes me frown slightly, because the close front unrounded vowel sound, ("long-e") doesn't seem like a good fit in either English or French for that spelling. I'd expect "Reena" to be the spelling so as to get the right pronounciation consistently. Also, if "Rena" is supposed to be related to "Renard", the substitute name for a fox (used to avoid invoking bad luck on oneself...I linked some time ago to a thing about that very sort of substitution somewhere, but I'm not digging it up right now), as an page on Rena Rouge's civilian identity suggests, then the U.S. pronunciation is extremely unhelpful at making that connection. (Personally, I read "Rena" more like "Raina", but now that I've done a cursory amount of research, I could train myself to say it more like the "Renard" at the link.)
- If your game only has Facebook as a way of making sure your data gets saved if you ever have to cross devices or you have a backup fail spectacularly on you, your game is terrible, even if it is part of a mythos that I'm otherwise very interested in.
So, I ended up watching the pilot of the rebooted Charmed, after having initially given it a pass because the original was not a show I enjoyed that much. What drew me in was a Twitter thread by Lord Stabbington of subtitled screenshots (although the captions themselves were not reproduced in the text of the tweet) that suggested the reboot was ready to engage the 2018 audience and their concerns about women, empowerment, and feminism.
The original, in my somewhat scattered watching, seemed to fall fairly swiftly into being a story ostensibly about witches and vanquishing but that spent quite the amount of screen time focused on the romantic entanglements of the main cast, which wasn't the show I was looking for and doesn't ping my feminism radar, but it's also true that a lot of what I watched of it was in syndication, and therefore I might have missed the actual parts that were.
I'm not sure I can even give cautious optimism about feminism to the show based on the single episode, but not because it isn't trying. It's that what I saw seemed to be caricature drawn from the headlines of 2018.
Here be spoilers, if you also want to watch it without my opinions interfering. I'll even pad your decision time by mentioning that the effect for the disappearance and reappearance of the known supernatural character is going to be very familiar to fans of the Harry Potter movies, as it is essentially the Apparition twist. (The CW, the network producing and airing the new Charmed, is owned, at least in part, by Warner Brothers, so I imagine clearances for that effect were a lot easier to obtain than they might have been.)
Also, the reboot has been situated in a fictitious Michigan location, Hilltowne, with a college that has enough student population to support a Greek system, and that means I will be extra on my guard about location references and what the weather is supposed to be like if people make date references. (I suspect Hilltowne is supposed to be an Ann Arbor expy, making the fictitious unnamed college a University of Michigan expy, so if I continue watching, I might be extra-shirty about getting the university wrong, if this hunch turns out to be supported.)
( Spoilers! )
The original, in my somewhat scattered watching, seemed to fall fairly swiftly into being a story ostensibly about witches and vanquishing but that spent quite the amount of screen time focused on the romantic entanglements of the main cast, which wasn't the show I was looking for and doesn't ping my feminism radar, but it's also true that a lot of what I watched of it was in syndication, and therefore I might have missed the actual parts that were.
I'm not sure I can even give cautious optimism about feminism to the show based on the single episode, but not because it isn't trying. It's that what I saw seemed to be caricature drawn from the headlines of 2018.
Here be spoilers, if you also want to watch it without my opinions interfering. I'll even pad your decision time by mentioning that the effect for the disappearance and reappearance of the known supernatural character is going to be very familiar to fans of the Harry Potter movies, as it is essentially the Apparition twist. (The CW, the network producing and airing the new Charmed, is owned, at least in part, by Warner Brothers, so I imagine clearances for that effect were a lot easier to obtain than they might have been.)
Also, the reboot has been situated in a fictitious Michigan location, Hilltowne, with a college that has enough student population to support a Greek system, and that means I will be extra on my guard about location references and what the weather is supposed to be like if people make date references. (I suspect Hilltowne is supposed to be an Ann Arbor expy, making the fictitious unnamed college a University of Michigan expy, so if I continue watching, I might be extra-shirty about getting the university wrong, if this hunch turns out to be supported.)
( Spoilers! )
