I read this book, a hard sci fi novel in high school. Fucked if I can remember the title but the basic premise was that there was a brain-nanite thing that you could inhale and it would change things. Also the Aliens enclosed the whole solar system in some sort of shield. Nothing in, nothing out.
There was a woman who was part of an experiment in probability. Her brain-mod would allow her to not only predict, but alter the ‘up’ or ‘down’ spin of some sort of ion or another that was completely random.
But think about it. Humans are against ALL ODDS the craziest, most intelligent, cruelest, most compassionate, gentlest, harshest beings. There’s no predicting a human because we don’t actually follow the universal laws of probability. To attempt to graph our behavior patterns in a sane quantifiable manner leaves you a little nuts. We perservere, survive. We have NO CHILL when it comes to some things, and are extremely lax about others. We can’t really be predicted, because we’re always altering our realities.
Even our greatest heroes face ‘impossible’ odds and survive. Especially, even. A human is at their shining best when the entire universe is in a point of flux. When choices become the most important things we have. We stare into the blackness between the stars and wonder. Hope. Dream. Wish. We change energy with a thought. We reach out and touch not just things but people, hearts, minds.
Aliens just watch us and are either baffled, indulgent, or terrified. We’re tiny beings in the grand scheme. Numerous but fragile. Perfectly adapted to hostile environs. We have taken aggressive adaptation to the point of modifying our bodies for our environments synthetically. We can take a situation from ‘we’re all gonna die’ to ‘holy shit we lived’ with just one flash of genius. We can stare into the face of danger and smile. We live for those life or death adrenaline scenarios. Some of us have made entire careers out of being batshit crazy.
Humans warp probability.
It’s technically classed as a psi ability in some alien lexicons, but one that’s passive. There’s various grades of it too. Captain Kirk, for instance, is like ‘Let’s make some noise’ and they all survive. Han Solo says ‘Never tell me the odds!”. Arthur Dent reaches into a bag and produces the question that fits the answer. River Tam turns the tide of battle with a mental flip of a switch. Samantha Carter again and again builds doorways between stars, sometimes with nothing more than her wits and the equivalent of a paperclip and tinfoil. Jane Foster survives longer than anyone else ever has with the literal force of chaos flowing through her veins. If she wasn’t human, she’d never have lived long enough to save her world.
These are all people who are extraordinary, who through their sheer humanity have built new futures.
Aliens can’t quanitfy us because we’re chaos in motion. Rogue physics, the edges of cosmic constants. Variables with no fixed value. We make choices, and reach out and touch other beings, and we take logic and probability and the most likely outcome of things and twist them into new shapes. It’s more than just creative thinking, high-stakes adaptation, or even empathy.
A human can literally even the odds.
That’s why alien crews like keeping humans around. We’re crazy and unpredictable and able to survive just about anything. We’re loyal for the most part, to love or money or Crew. Once a human decides that you’re theirs, they will literally warp the universal constants for their crew.
That’s our alien superpower, I think.
I was listening to some guy (can’t remember his name now!) on the radio the other day who was talking about how we don’t fully understand the human consciousness. Humans control their environment without even realizing what they are doing in most cases.
.Some interesting watching you might like: What the bleep do we know? A documentary about human consciousness. Will legit blow your mind.
What is wrong with mint and mint relatives? Thank you.
They’re lovely, but they MUST be kept in a pot, or a raised bed, or on a good-quality leash with a chest harness, because mint and its cousins spread like… IDEK, like a rash. Like dandelions. They’re tough, hardy and highly motivated. Even a tiny root fragment will suddenly turn into a Mint Tree if you don’t tear it up. I swear I’ve seen new plants popping up from BURIED SCRAPS OF LEAF. Once they’re in the ground they establish a beachhead and spawn secretly, possibly through osmosis. I cannot advise you to stick a mint plant in the ground unless you are a bold and unconventional disciplinarian.
The joke is that after running around after the mint like a spaniel chasing a whack-a-mole for a year, Dr Glass then planted a plant that would do the same thing.
Great plants, hard to kill, keep them in a pot (ESPECIALLY where invasive)
you know what also pissed me off about supernatural, though? the inability to commit to their own worldbuilding. even while clinging to a static paradigm, where The Masquerade is in full effect, they couldn't be consistent about what sort of underground magic communities do and don't exist. I know this can be blamed on multiple writers and all, but it drives me up the wall. f.ex. witches are All Evil and tend to work alone, until that episode with the familiars when you find a bunch of nice(r)
witches who go to witch
bars and hardly ever poison each other’s drinks, oh and also familiars are a
thing. a while later spike and cordelia are witches who’ve had a tempestuous
relationship for… centuries I think, aka witches can live for a really long
time, so there’s no way the bigger/older ones don’t all know each other. there
ought to be SOME sort of witch ‘society’, even if it’s just loose
communication. but no, after this you never hear of witches ever again, much
less familiars or witch
bars. then you’ve got
Bela, who caters to rich people who know magical artifacts exist, but there’s
no exploration of what that could MEAN – if Bela can hold down a job, then
enough of the country’s elite own and exploit magic stuff that it could –
SHOULD – have at least some effect on US politics, as in who gets power.
there’s never a whisper of that, but okay, this isn’t exactly the winchester
boys’ social scene. but failing that, some of these magic-obsessed rich people
should turn up for a
few episodes, either
haunted or else guilty of inflicting a monster-of-the-week on someone. heck,
one of them could be a recurring vaguely-helpful character that the boys stop
by and menace a bit whenever they need access to some excessively obscure
artifact. you already mentioned the mess of all those Alpha Monsters who were
powerful and unkillable and stuff, and had their own dread agendas with
potentially far-reaching consequences for their respective species, and then
just… vanished. I don’t
even remember how. and
then there’s the hunter community, which is the most inconsistent of all. first
it’s just these two and their dad, and then they start finding out their dad’s
old friends were all actually hunters or oracles or whatever. so far so good;
these are just Mysteries Of Our Father’s Past, and valid character/plot
development stuff. but there’s Bobby, who Knows Everyone, and Ellen, whose bar
every hunter in the country frequents sooner or later, and this means hunters
know each
other, know about each
other, they have a network of communication and they share intel, gossip, trade
secrets. but the moment the bar blows up there’s just no network, no
connection, nothing at all binding hunters together, even though Bobby still
knows everyone and Ellen and Jo are still around and plenty able to found a new
bar if they wanted to, or at least keep in touch with at least half of the
people who used to swing by their bar. oh and also the demons! they talk about
complex politics
happening in Hell, they
have some sort of prophesied demon queen who takes the body of a young girl and
has glowing white eyes (I don’t even remember what happened to her), they have
demon religion and spirituality to the point where Lucifer is basically Demon
Jesus – I’m pretty sure this is explicitly stated, Lucifer is to the demons
what Jesus is to really devout Christians, semi-mythical status and prophesied
second coming and everything – and the show makes an effort to flesh out its
demonic
characters, give them
personality and desires and drives, and it shows distinct differences in how
different demons feel about humanity, and about what they do, and all that. yet
despite all this, the only demon we meet who doesn’t immediately try to murder
the boys is Ruby. no one tries to bargain honestly with the boys, no one but
Crowley tries to aim the boys at their own enemies, no one begs for mercy or
lies about repentance. nothing. can you imagine if those demons who told Sam to
take up
his antichrist mantle
and lead a demon army decided that, since their Chosen One was unwilling, they
ought to convince him? what if a bunch of demons had started discreetly tailing
the boys, showing up sometimes to rescue them from really bad fights or offer
up dead monsters like housecats offering dead birds? ‘hey chosen one, we caught
you this demon who’s high up in Crowley’s hierarchy, do you want to torture him
for information yourself or do you want us to do it?’ they solemnly swear that
that they’ve stopped
killing humans, they keep quietly growing in number, and they always scram
before the boys are conscious enough to kill them properly. sam and dean have
many arguments about whether they were REALLY too concussed to stab their
latest demonic rescuer and get absurdly angsty and argumentative about it. I
know my rant has gotten pretty thoroughly disorganized and this is moving back
into must-have-a-static-paradigm territory, but I am a little bitter.
THIS IS ALSO SUCH A GOOD POINT there is just so much to be bitter about with this show, like, good god, you’d think that sooner or later they’d run out of basic narrative rules to fuck up.
Speaking of rules, I think this is a manifestation of one of Supernatural’s wider problems, which is that they just DO NOT SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THE RULES OF THEIR OWN UNIVERSE. Like, all they’ve REALLY nailed down is that demons can be exorcised, but anything that isn’t a demon is pretty much at the mercy of the plot for A) how powerful it is, B) how hard to kill it is, and C) how ‘human’ it’s considered. Like, everything from werewolves to wendigos are stated to be at least PART human, but basically their ‘humanness’ and subsequently the amount of sympathy accorded to them is predicated on how benign (or how attractive) they look in their human form. The magic of this universe is wildly unpredictable–the Winchesters sometimes do/dabble in magic themselves, but we never really learn how magic works. Does it require a focus? Does it require badly-pronounced Latin? Is it an expression of the user’s willpower? Is it similar to what demons do (implied when All Witches Are Wicked for the first few seasons) or not? Does it require natural talent or can anyone learn it? THERE ARE SO MANY QUESTIONS THAT ARE TOTALLY IGNORED. THEN there’s the question of societies in this supernatural underworld. Like, I think I’ve expressed in my John Wick comments how much I like functional underworld societies with rules and systems, but honestly it’s CRITICALLY necessary if you’re doing what SPN does and having the society Matter. I cringe every time I think about how clumsy and slapdash the hunting community was in Supernatural, because it had SO MUCH POTENTIAL, don’t talk to me about it, I made it work better when I wrote my spite novel. I’m sure I can think of fifty million more incomplete universe rules, but I can honestly feel my blood pressure rising right now so I’m going to stop.
OH MY GOD GUYS, please, if you’re a writer, let me beg you right now in person to figure out the rules of your universe and then commit. Here are some pointers.
Magic should work in a conceptually similar way to gravity: its rules should be consistent and should be able to be broadly extrapolated from the general effect, and if you’re going to BREAK those rules you’ve got to have a damn fine reason.
The sliding scale of ‘humannness’ should…slide less, to be completely honest, work your shit the fuck out EARLY or make working your shit the fuck out a plot point (please see Stormdancer for a good example).
If you’re dealing with questions of what makes someone human (@SPN FOR LIKE FOUR FUCKING SEASONS) then you should actively question like “Hey, my dude, can we morally kill this person for something they have no control over” unless your character took the trait ‘Callous’ somewhere in their history (which is also fine).
If you have an underworld society–or any society tbh???–WORK YOUR SHIT OUT. How do they work together (ex: hunters pretending to be ‘the boss’ when someone calls the number on that fake business card)? How do they support each other (ex: safehouses? maybe? this is never discussed in SPN? and I hate it?)? What are the things people differ on (ex: whether or not to murder the Winchesters, which, like, I know you’re supposed to be against that because they’re the protagonists, but by the time I bailed I def wanted someone to shoot them)? Is there an assumption of free exchange of favors or is there a strict financial/bargaining system? How much does one person vouching for another matter in the community? ANSWER SOME BASIC QUESTIONS FFS
Finally, most crucially, for the love of all that is good, Pick A Plot. One plot. It can have subplots (example: an overarching plot broken up by smaller missions, a la your average TV show) or multiple acts (as in a play, where you’ve got a couple major pieces that assemble into the main plot, like Much Ado where you’ve got (roughly) the matchmaking, the wedding, the vengeance, and the resolution), but it should be One Plot and you need to tie up those motherfucking loose ends.
This has been “Hey look turns out that 6K later I have Even More Complaints about Supernatural” with Moran.
Right, so, the absolute MOST loopholey bit of law in Alleirat is based on the ongoing detente between the two criminal organizations in most major cities and the lathan, the city guards. The way the major cities (there are four) and some of the smaller cities (to a lesser degree) operate is that there’s an undercity (Kal [city name], as in Kal Dase) in sewer tunnels or foundations and an overcity (Lai [city name], as in Lai Dase) on rooftops and abandoned balconies/etc. There’s generally a boss of Kal and Lai sub-cities, with ‘Below’ criminals specializing in more rough-and-tumble crimes and ‘Above’ criminals having a more cat burgler rep. Now, in order to prevent any gang-vs-law wars that might risk the Streets (the civilians between Kal and Lai), the lathan have a deal, and the deal goes something like this.
Any criminal from Above or Below is at jeopardy for the crimes they have committed for a given amount of time, and during that time capture by the lathan can result in trial and sentencing, which can range from labor to execution. However, the lathan cannot trespass onto Kal or Lai subcities without a writ for the arrest of a criminal and proof of their identity. If one of the lathan does enter the subcities without a writ, no crime committed against them in that location can be charged against any individual. On the other hand, the latha cannot be charged for any actions they take in self-defense.
The balance is extremely delicate and largely predicated on the fact that Kal and Lai operate on a certain code of honor. Other situations, like the ongoing bandit problem in the most rural areas and the White Touch, do not so much have that code, although the Touch has their own rules.
you know what also pissed me off about supernatural, though? the inability to commit to their own worldbuilding. even while clinging to a static paradigm, where The Masquerade is in full effect, they couldn't be consistent about what sort of underground magic communities do and don't exist. I know this can be blamed on multiple writers and all, but it drives me up the wall. f.ex. witches are All Evil and tend to work alone, until that episode with the familiars when you find a bunch of nice(r)
witches who go to witch
bars and hardly ever poison each other’s drinks, oh and also familiars are a
thing. a while later spike and cordelia are witches who’ve had a tempestuous
relationship for… centuries I think, aka witches can live for a really long
time, so there’s no way the bigger/older ones don’t all know each other. there
ought to be SOME sort of witch ‘society’, even if it’s just loose
communication. but no, after this you never hear of witches ever again, much
less familiars or witch
bars. then you’ve got
Bela, who caters to rich people who know magical artifacts exist, but there’s
no exploration of what that could MEAN – if Bela can hold down a job, then
enough of the country’s elite own and exploit magic stuff that it could –
SHOULD – have at least some effect on US politics, as in who gets power.
there’s never a whisper of that, but okay, this isn’t exactly the winchester
boys’ social scene. but failing that, some of these magic-obsessed rich people
should turn up for a
few episodes, either
haunted or else guilty of inflicting a monster-of-the-week on someone. heck,
one of them could be a recurring vaguely-helpful character that the boys stop
by and menace a bit whenever they need access to some excessively obscure
artifact. you already mentioned the mess of all those Alpha Monsters who were
powerful and unkillable and stuff, and had their own dread agendas with
potentially far-reaching consequences for their respective species, and then
just… vanished. I don’t
even remember how. and
then there’s the hunter community, which is the most inconsistent of all. first
it’s just these two and their dad, and then they start finding out their dad’s
old friends were all actually hunters or oracles or whatever. so far so good;
these are just Mysteries Of Our Father’s Past, and valid character/plot
development stuff. but there’s Bobby, who Knows Everyone, and Ellen, whose bar
every hunter in the country frequents sooner or later, and this means hunters
know each
other, know about each
other, they have a network of communication and they share intel, gossip, trade
secrets. but the moment the bar blows up there’s just no network, no
connection, nothing at all binding hunters together, even though Bobby still
knows everyone and Ellen and Jo are still around and plenty able to found a new
bar if they wanted to, or at least keep in touch with at least half of the
people who used to swing by their bar. oh and also the demons! they talk about
complex politics
happening in Hell, they
have some sort of prophesied demon queen who takes the body of a young girl and
has glowing white eyes (I don’t even remember what happened to her), they have
demon religion and spirituality to the point where Lucifer is basically Demon
Jesus – I’m pretty sure this is explicitly stated, Lucifer is to the demons
what Jesus is to really devout Christians, semi-mythical status and prophesied
second coming and everything – and the show makes an effort to flesh out its
demonic
characters, give them
personality and desires and drives, and it shows distinct differences in how
different demons feel about humanity, and about what they do, and all that. yet
despite all this, the only demon we meet who doesn’t immediately try to murder
the boys is Ruby. no one tries to bargain honestly with the boys, no one but
Crowley tries to aim the boys at their own enemies, no one begs for mercy or
lies about repentance. nothing. can you imagine if those demons who told Sam to
take up
his antichrist mantle
and lead a demon army decided that, since their Chosen One was unwilling, they
ought to convince him? what if a bunch of demons had started discreetly tailing
the boys, showing up sometimes to rescue them from really bad fights or offer
up dead monsters like housecats offering dead birds? ‘hey chosen one, we caught
you this demon who’s high up in Crowley’s hierarchy, do you want to torture him
for information yourself or do you want us to do it?’ they solemnly swear that
that they’ve stopped
killing humans, they keep quietly growing in number, and they always scram
before the boys are conscious enough to kill them properly. sam and dean have
many arguments about whether they were REALLY too concussed to stab their
latest demonic rescuer and get absurdly angsty and argumentative about it. I
know my rant has gotten pretty thoroughly disorganized and this is moving back
into must-have-a-static-paradigm territory, but I am a little bitter.
THIS IS ALSO SUCH A GOOD POINT there is just so much to be bitter about with this show, like, good god, you’d think that sooner or later they’d run out of basic narrative rules to fuck up.
Speaking of rules, I think this is a manifestation of one of Supernatural’s wider problems, which is that they just DO NOT SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THE RULES OF THEIR OWN UNIVERSE. Like, all they’ve REALLY nailed down is that demons can be exorcised, but anything that isn’t a demon is pretty much at the mercy of the plot for A) how powerful it is, B) how hard to kill it is, and C) how ‘human’ it’s considered. Like, everything from werewolves to wendigos are stated to be at least PART human, but basically their ‘humanness’ and subsequently the amount of sympathy accorded to them is predicated on how benign (or how attractive) they look in their human form. The magic of this universe is wildly unpredictable–the Winchesters sometimes do/dabble in magic themselves, but we never really learn how magic works. Does it require a focus? Does it require badly-pronounced Latin? Is it an expression of the user’s willpower? Is it similar to what demons do (implied when All Witches Are Wicked for the first few seasons) or not? Does it require natural talent or can anyone learn it? THERE ARE SO MANY QUESTIONS THAT ARE TOTALLY IGNORED. THEN there’s the question of societies in this supernatural underworld. Like, I think I’ve expressed in my John Wick comments how much I like functional underworld societies with rules and systems, but honestly it’s CRITICALLY necessary if you’re doing what SPN does and having the society Matter. I cringe every time I think about how clumsy and slapdash the hunting community was in Supernatural, because it had SO MUCH POTENTIAL, don’t talk to me about it, I made it work better when I wrote my spite novel. I’m sure I can think of fifty million more incomplete universe rules, but I can honestly feel my blood pressure rising right now so I’m going to stop.
OH MY GOD GUYS, please, if you’re a writer, let me beg you right now in person to figure out the rules of your universe and then commit. Here are some pointers.
Magic should work in a conceptually similar way to gravity: its rules should be consistent and should be able to be broadly extrapolated from the general effect, and if you’re going to BREAK those rules you’ve got to have a damn fine reason.
The sliding scale of ‘humannness’ should…slide less, to be completely honest, work your shit the fuck out EARLY or make working your shit the fuck out a plot point (please see Stormdancer for a good example).
If you’re dealing with questions of what makes someone human (@SPN FOR LIKE FOUR FUCKING SEASONS) then you should actively question like “Hey, my dude, can we morally kill this person for something they have no control over” unless your character took the trait ‘Callous’ somewhere in their history (which is also fine).
If you have an underworld society–or any society tbh???–WORK YOUR SHIT OUT. How do they work together (ex: hunters pretending to be ‘the boss’ when someone calls the number on that fake business card)? How do they support each other (ex: safehouses? maybe? this is never discussed in SPN? and I hate it?)? What are the things people differ on (ex: whether or not to murder the Winchesters, which, like, I know you’re supposed to be against that because they’re the protagonists, but by the time I bailed I def wanted someone to shoot them)? Is there an assumption of free exchange of favors or is there a strict financial/bargaining system? How much does one person vouching for another matter in the community? ANSWER SOME BASIC QUESTIONS FFS
Finally, most crucially, for the love of all that is good, Pick A Plot. One plot. It can have subplots (example: an overarching plot broken up by smaller missions, a la your average TV show) or multiple acts (as in a play, where you’ve got a couple major pieces that assemble into the main plot, like Much Ado where you’ve got (roughly) the matchmaking, the wedding, the vengeance, and the resolution), but it should be One Plot and you need to tie up those motherfucking loose ends.
This has been “Hey look turns out that 6K later I have Even More Complaints about Supernatural” with Moran.
you know what also pissed me off about supernatural, though? the inability to commit to their own worldbuilding. even while clinging to a static paradigm, where The Masquerade is in full effect, they couldn't be consistent about what sort of underground magic communities do and don't exist. I know this can be blamed on multiple writers and all, but it drives me up the wall. f.ex. witches are All Evil and tend to work alone, until that episode with the familiars when you find a bunch of nice(r)
witches who go to witch
bars and hardly ever poison each other’s drinks, oh and also familiars are a
thing. a while later spike and cordelia are witches who’ve had a tempestuous
relationship for… centuries I think, aka witches can live for a really long
time, so there’s no way the bigger/older ones don’t all know each other. there
ought to be SOME sort of witch ‘society’, even if it’s just loose
communication. but no, after this you never hear of witches ever again, much
less familiars or witch
bars. then you’ve got
Bela, who caters to rich people who know magical artifacts exist, but there’s
no exploration of what that could MEAN – if Bela can hold down a job, then
enough of the country’s elite own and exploit magic stuff that it could –
SHOULD – have at least some effect on US politics, as in who gets power.
there’s never a whisper of that, but okay, this isn’t exactly the winchester
boys’ social scene. but failing that, some of these magic-obsessed rich people
should turn up for a
few episodes, either
haunted or else guilty of inflicting a monster-of-the-week on someone. heck,
one of them could be a recurring vaguely-helpful character that the boys stop
by and menace a bit whenever they need access to some excessively obscure
artifact. you already mentioned the mess of all those Alpha Monsters who were
powerful and unkillable and stuff, and had their own dread agendas with
potentially far-reaching consequences for their respective species, and then
just… vanished. I don’t
even remember how. and
then there’s the hunter community, which is the most inconsistent of all. first
it’s just these two and their dad, and then they start finding out their dad’s
old friends were all actually hunters or oracles or whatever. so far so good;
these are just Mysteries Of Our Father’s Past, and valid character/plot
development stuff. but there’s Bobby, who Knows Everyone, and Ellen, whose bar
every hunter in the country frequents sooner or later, and this means hunters
know each
other, know about each
other, they have a network of communication and they share intel, gossip, trade
secrets. but the moment the bar blows up there’s just no network, no
connection, nothing at all binding hunters together, even though Bobby still
knows everyone and Ellen and Jo are still around and plenty able to found a new
bar if they wanted to, or at least keep in touch with at least half of the
people who used to swing by their bar. oh and also the demons! they talk about
complex politics
happening in Hell, they
have some sort of prophesied demon queen who takes the body of a young girl and
has glowing white eyes (I don’t even remember what happened to her), they have
demon religion and spirituality to the point where Lucifer is basically Demon
Jesus – I’m pretty sure this is explicitly stated, Lucifer is to the demons
what Jesus is to really devout Christians, semi-mythical status and prophesied
second coming and everything – and the show makes an effort to flesh out its
demonic
characters, give them
personality and desires and drives, and it shows distinct differences in how
different demons feel about humanity, and about what they do, and all that. yet
despite all this, the only demon we meet who doesn’t immediately try to murder
the boys is Ruby. no one tries to bargain honestly with the boys, no one but
Crowley tries to aim the boys at their own enemies, no one begs for mercy or
lies about repentance. nothing. can you imagine if those demons who told Sam to
take up
his antichrist mantle
and lead a demon army decided that, since their Chosen One was unwilling, they
ought to convince him? what if a bunch of demons had started discreetly tailing
the boys, showing up sometimes to rescue them from really bad fights or offer
up dead monsters like housecats offering dead birds? ‘hey chosen one, we caught
you this demon who’s high up in Crowley’s hierarchy, do you want to torture him
for information yourself or do you want us to do it?’ they solemnly swear that
that they’ve stopped
killing humans, they keep quietly growing in number, and they always scram
before the boys are conscious enough to kill them properly. sam and dean have
many arguments about whether they were REALLY too concussed to stab their
latest demonic rescuer and get absurdly angsty and argumentative about it. I
know my rant has gotten pretty thoroughly disorganized and this is moving back
into must-have-a-static-paradigm territory, but I am a little bitter.
THIS IS ALSO SUCH A GOOD POINT there is just so much to be bitter about with this show, like, good god, you’d think that sooner or later they’d run out of basic narrative rules to fuck up.
Speaking of rules, I think this is a manifestation of one of Supernatural’s wider problems, which is that they just DO NOT SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THE RULES OF THEIR OWN UNIVERSE. Like, all they’ve REALLY nailed down is that demons can be exorcised, but anything that isn’t a demon is pretty much at the mercy of the plot for A) how powerful it is, B) how hard to kill it is, and C) how ‘human’ it’s considered. Like, everything from werewolves to wendigos are stated to be at least PART human, but basically their ‘humanness’ and subsequently the amount of sympathy accorded to them is predicated on how benign (or how attractive) they look in their human form. The magic of this universe is wildly unpredictable–the Winchesters sometimes do/dabble in magic themselves, but we never really learn how magic works. Does it require a focus? Does it require badly-pronounced Latin? Is it an expression of the user’s willpower? Is it similar to what demons do (implied when All Witches Are Wicked for the first few seasons) or not? Does it require natural talent or can anyone learn it? THERE ARE SO MANY QUESTIONS THAT ARE TOTALLY IGNORED. THEN there’s the question of societies in this supernatural underworld. Like, I think I’ve expressed in my John Wick comments how much I like functional underworld societies with rules and systems, but honestly it’s CRITICALLY necessary if you’re doing what SPN does and having the society Matter. I cringe every time I think about how clumsy and slapdash the hunting community was in Supernatural, because it had SO MUCH POTENTIAL, don’t talk to me about it, I made it work better when I wrote my spite novel. I’m sure I can think of fifty million more incomplete universe rules, but I can honestly feel my blood pressure rising right now so I’m going to stop.
OH MY GOD GUYS, please, if you’re a writer, let me beg you right now in person to figure out the rules of your universe and then commit. Here are some pointers.
Magic should work in a conceptually similar way to gravity: its rules should be consistent and should be able to be broadly extrapolated from the general effect, and if you’re going to BREAK those rules you’ve got to have a damn fine reason.
The sliding scale of ‘humannness’ should…slide less, to be completely honest, work your shit the fuck out EARLY or make working your shit the fuck out a plot point (please see Stormdancer for a good example).
If you’re dealing with questions of what makes someone human (@SPN FOR LIKE FOUR FUCKING SEASONS) then you should actively question like “Hey, my dude, can we morally kill this person for something they have no control over” unless your character took the trait ‘Callous’ somewhere in their history (which is also fine).
If you have an underworld society–or any society tbh???–WORK YOUR SHIT OUT. How do they work together (ex: hunters pretending to be ‘the boss’ when someone calls the number on that fake business card)? How do they support each other (ex: safehouses? maybe? this is never discussed in SPN? and I hate it?)? What are the things people differ on (ex: whether or not to murder the Winchesters, which, like, I know you’re supposed to be against that because they’re the protagonists, but by the time I bailed I def wanted someone to shoot them)? Is there an assumption of free exchange of favors or is there a strict financial/bargaining system? How much does one person vouching for another matter in the community? ANSWER SOME BASIC QUESTIONS FFS
Finally, most crucially, for the love of all that is good, Pick A Plot. One plot. It can have subplots (example: an overarching plot broken up by smaller missions, a la your average TV show) or multiple acts (as in a play, where you’ve got a couple major pieces that assemble into the main plot, like Much Ado where you’ve got (roughly) the matchmaking, the wedding, the vengeance, and the resolution), but it should be One Plot and you need to tie up those motherfucking loose ends.
This has been “Hey look turns out that 6K later I have Even More Complaints about Supernatural” with Moran.
i just watched ww and. goddamn the look in steve's eyes as he closes the door behind him, because she is too good for him, he has blood on his hands, liar murderer smuggler, she is too pure and too perfect for his darkness to taint-- he heard what hippolyta said. they do not deserve her.
Listen, talk to me FOREVER about Steve’s guilt, about the way he dreams, that one night they spend together, that he wakes up and sees Diana’s perfect unmarred skin smudged with fresh wet blood, left there by his own stained hands. About the way that he sees her run toward the man who lost his leg to a mortar shell and he feels something crack in his chest, his heart breaking at her horror. About ‘what kind of weapon kills innocents’ and that ugly moment of silence where Steve wishes he could tell her something else, anything else, before he faces the truth and admits ‘in this war, every kind’. About how it feels like killing something, when he looks away from the crying woman and looks back to Diana and says ‘this is not what we came here to do’, and how it feels like being reborn–bright and painful and awful and new–when he watches her charge No Man’s Land, alone and powerful and pure and divine. About how Steve lost any belief he had in any god the world had to offer a long time ago, torn away in blood and mud and fire and the grey-green waves of gas, and having to acknowledge that he believes in her hurts, not because she doesn’t deserve it, but because she does, she is good and he is the one who will be remembered as bringing her down into this world from her paradise.
About the way his hands shake and he feels his throat close as he struggles to tell her that they’re all to blame, even him, everyone is at fault because people are nor always good and she is innocent of this terrible thing, she is the only innocent left in this war, and it is because of him that she is losing that innocence one day at a time, and forget the war, forget the people Steve has killed and the crimes that he has committed and the things he has allowed to happen, this is the thing that he will never wash from his soul. This is his greatest sin. This is the worst thing he has ever done, taking Diana’s pure and honest faith in humanity and breaking it with his bare hands.
It makes all of this much worse, somehow, to know that she doesn’t blame him at all.
you know what also pissed me off about supernatural, though? the inability to commit to their own worldbuilding. even while clinging to a static paradigm, where The Masquerade is in full effect, they couldn't be consistent about what sort of underground magic communities do and don't exist. I know this can be blamed on multiple writers and all, but it drives me up the wall. f.ex. witches are All Evil and tend to work alone, until that episode with the familiars when you find a bunch of nice(r)
witches who go to witch
bars and hardly ever poison each other’s drinks, oh and also familiars are a
thing. a while later spike and cordelia are witches who’ve had a tempestuous
relationship for… centuries I think, aka witches can live for a really long
time, so there’s no way the bigger/older ones don’t all know each other. there
ought to be SOME sort of witch ‘society’, even if it’s just loose
communication. but no, after this you never hear of witches ever again, much
less familiars or witch
bars. then you’ve got
Bela, who caters to rich people who know magical artifacts exist, but there’s
no exploration of what that could MEAN – if Bela can hold down a job, then
enough of the country’s elite own and exploit magic stuff that it could –
SHOULD – have at least some effect on US politics, as in who gets power.
there’s never a whisper of that, but okay, this isn’t exactly the winchester
boys’ social scene. but failing that, some of these magic-obsessed rich people
should turn up for a
few episodes, either
haunted or else guilty of inflicting a monster-of-the-week on someone. heck,
one of them could be a recurring vaguely-helpful character that the boys stop
by and menace a bit whenever they need access to some excessively obscure
artifact. you already mentioned the mess of all those Alpha Monsters who were
powerful and unkillable and stuff, and had their own dread agendas with
potentially far-reaching consequences for their respective species, and then
just… vanished. I don’t
even remember how. and
then there’s the hunter community, which is the most inconsistent of all. first
it’s just these two and their dad, and then they start finding out their dad’s
old friends were all actually hunters or oracles or whatever. so far so good;
these are just Mysteries Of Our Father’s Past, and valid character/plot
development stuff. but there’s Bobby, who Knows Everyone, and Ellen, whose bar
every hunter in the country frequents sooner or later, and this means hunters
know each
other, know about each
other, they have a network of communication and they share intel, gossip, trade
secrets. but the moment the bar blows up there’s just no network, no
connection, nothing at all binding hunters together, even though Bobby still
knows everyone and Ellen and Jo are still around and plenty able to found a new
bar if they wanted to, or at least keep in touch with at least half of the
people who used to swing by their bar. oh and also the demons! they talk about
complex politics
happening in Hell, they
have some sort of prophesied demon queen who takes the body of a young girl and
has glowing white eyes (I don’t even remember what happened to her), they have
demon religion and spirituality to the point where Lucifer is basically Demon
Jesus – I’m pretty sure this is explicitly stated, Lucifer is to the demons
what Jesus is to really devout Christians, semi-mythical status and prophesied
second coming and everything – and the show makes an effort to flesh out its
demonic
characters, give them
personality and desires and drives, and it shows distinct differences in how
different demons feel about humanity, and about what they do, and all that. yet
despite all this, the only demon we meet who doesn’t immediately try to murder
the boys is Ruby. no one tries to bargain honestly with the boys, no one but
Crowley tries to aim the boys at their own enemies, no one begs for mercy or
lies about repentance. nothing. can you imagine if those demons who told Sam to
take up
his antichrist mantle
and lead a demon army decided that, since their Chosen One was unwilling, they
ought to convince him? what if a bunch of demons had started discreetly tailing
the boys, showing up sometimes to rescue them from really bad fights or offer
up dead monsters like housecats offering dead birds? ‘hey chosen one, we caught
you this demon who’s high up in Crowley’s hierarchy, do you want to torture him
for information yourself or do you want us to do it?’ they solemnly swear that
that they’ve stopped
killing humans, they keep quietly growing in number, and they always scram
before the boys are conscious enough to kill them properly. sam and dean have
many arguments about whether they were REALLY too concussed to stab their
latest demonic rescuer and get absurdly angsty and argumentative about it. I
know my rant has gotten pretty thoroughly disorganized and this is moving back
into must-have-a-static-paradigm territory, but I am a little bitter.
THIS IS ALSO SUCH A GOOD POINT there is just so much to be bitter about with this show, like, good god, you’d think that sooner or later they’d run out of basic narrative rules to fuck up.
Speaking of rules, I think this is a manifestation of one of Supernatural’s wider problems, which is that they just DO NOT SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THE RULES OF THEIR OWN UNIVERSE. Like, all they’ve REALLY nailed down is that demons can be exorcised, but anything that isn’t a demon is pretty much at the mercy of the plot for A) how powerful it is, B) how hard to kill it is, and C) how ‘human’ it’s considered. Like, everything from werewolves to wendigos are stated to be at least PART human, but basically their ‘humanness’ and subsequently the amount of sympathy accorded to them is predicated on how benign (or how attractive) they look in their human form. The magic of this universe is wildly unpredictable–the Winchesters sometimes do/dabble in magic themselves, but we never really learn how magic works. Does it require a focus? Does it require badly-pronounced Latin? Is it an expression of the user’s willpower? Is it similar to what demons do (implied when All Witches Are Wicked for the first few seasons) or not? Does it require natural talent or can anyone learn it? THERE ARE SO MANY QUESTIONS THAT ARE TOTALLY IGNORED. THEN there’s the question of societies in this supernatural underworld. Like, I think I’ve expressed in my John Wick comments how much I like functional underworld societies with rules and systems, but honestly it’s CRITICALLY necessary if you’re doing what SPN does and having the society Matter. I cringe every time I think about how clumsy and slapdash the hunting community was in Supernatural, because it had SO MUCH POTENTIAL, don’t talk to me about it, I made it work better when I wrote my spite novel. I’m sure I can think of fifty million more incomplete universe rules, but I can honestly feel my blood pressure rising right now so I’m going to stop.
OH MY GOD GUYS, please, if you’re a writer, let me beg you right now in person to figure out the rules of your universe and then commit. Here are some pointers.
Magic should work in a conceptually similar way to gravity: its rules should be consistent and should be able to be broadly extrapolated from the general effect, and if you’re going to BREAK those rules you’ve got to have a damn fine reason.
The sliding scale of ‘humannness’ should…slide less, to be completely honest, work your shit the fuck out EARLY or make working your shit the fuck out a plot point (please see Stormdancer for a good example).
If you’re dealing with questions of what makes someone human (@SPN FOR LIKE FOUR FUCKING SEASONS) then you should actively question like “Hey, my dude, can we morally kill this person for something they have no control over” unless your character took the trait ‘Callous’ somewhere in their history (which is also fine).
If you have an underworld society–or any society tbh???–WORK YOUR SHIT OUT. How do they work together (ex: hunters pretending to be ‘the boss’ when someone calls the number on that fake business card)? How do they support each other (ex: safehouses? maybe? this is never discussed in SPN? and I hate it?)? What are the things people differ on (ex: whether or not to murder the Winchesters, which, like, I know you’re supposed to be against that because they’re the protagonists, but by the time I bailed I def wanted someone to shoot them)? Is there an assumption of free exchange of favors or is there a strict financial/bargaining system? How much does one person vouching for another matter in the community? ANSWER SOME BASIC QUESTIONS FFS
Finally, most crucially, for the love of all that is good, Pick A Plot. One plot. It can have subplots (example: an overarching plot broken up by smaller missions, a la your average TV show) or multiple acts (as in a play, where you’ve got a couple major pieces that assemble into the main plot, like Much Ado where you’ve got (roughly) the matchmaking, the wedding, the vengeance, and the resolution), but it should be One Plot and you need to tie up those motherfucking loose ends.
This has been “Hey look turns out that 6K later I have Even More Complaints about Supernatural” with Moran.
I HAVE N O IDEA WHAT YOURE TALKING ABOUT BUT TALK TO ME ANYWAY
YOU’RE A CHAMP AND I’M TALKING ABOUT THIS IN CASE YOU ACTUALLY WANT TO KNOW.
But so Krei, everyone’s favorite Buff Tree Lesbian (IN AN AMAZING SHOW OF RESTRAINT, THAT IS NOT HER ACTUAL TAG), really genuinely likes making flower crowns. It’s the only really finessed plant magic she’s good at–Krei is much more the ‘hey you need someone to wreck that wall, I got you’ type of magic worker, but she makes A DAMN GOOD FLOWER CROWN. (Her mother, who had a talent for delicate work and was known for her trellises as much as her sword play, despaired of her.) And of course since she’s a plant worker it’s practically legally mandated that Krei know the meanings of various plants, but her girlfriend Shiko is a baby who only just recently showed up in Alleirat and knows Nothing. So Krei gets away with a lot of shenanigans based on plant messages before Shiko finally buys a book of plant meanings off someone and bullies Brenneth into translating it for her.
But I just really want you all to picture a tiny serious-faced Japanese girl standing at the head of a small army of reanimated corpses with a crown of daisies and aster on her head the whole time.
Anyway I’ve been attempting to Novel for almost five hours now and I’ve decided that clearly I am too aggravated to write an emotionally wringing trial and sentencing. All I really want to do is talk about Shiko wearing flower crowns made by her girlfriend and Brenneth and Crispin sitting on a roof and looking at stars while they mutually get drunk on the most expensive wine Crispin can get his hands on and the fact that Brenneth and Krei are actually legally family according to Alleirai law.
So if you also wanna talk about that, hit me up so that I can pretend I’m being productive.
My aunt who is purportedly coming up to visit tomorrow and expects us to drop everything on the off chance that she actually deigns to drive all the way to Maine and honor us with her presence
Relatedly, the sect of my mother’s family who only speaks to her when they’re struggling with the fact that her mother is possibly the worst human in the world
My grandparents who are currently refusing to speak to my father because they’re awful people
My other aunt who is just a manipulative bitch and has currently convinced my father (her brother) that she’s on his side against their parents and that’s going to be ugly when it inevitably
My grandmother on Mom’s side who is SOMEHOW not dead yet and wow, God, please
The ongoing misapprehension that my extended family seems to labor under in which I actually give a good goddamn about them
The even more dangerous belief they seem to be possessed of in which they have any say about what I do
Their absolute delusion that they have an automatic right to being involved in our lives because well, we’re family
My overwhelming and undeniable bitterness about this is not news, but what IS very annoying is that:
I am bitter
Brenneth is also very bitter in the scene I’m trying to write here
To my shock, writing someone being bitter while feeling bitter yourself is a good way to spiral into being bitter about other things
As such I have gotten Literally Nothing Done and I’m really aggravated about all of it.
P:
Are you what George R. R. Martin would call an “architect” or a “gardener”? (How much do you plan in advance, versus letting the story unfold as you go?)
H A definitely a gardener. I’ll sometimes sketch out the VERY general outline of a universe, but almost never outside my own head–like, I currently have all three acts of my Alleirat novel planned out and I’m starting Act Two, as it were, but nothing is written down. I don’t think I’ve ever actually done a story outline in my life and I doubt that’s going to change anytime soon.
The thing about SPN is that all of its characters have such good potential, y'know? Like the Sam's Boy King of Hell thing you mentioned. And the Antichrist. And all the other characters whose potential was wasted so the show could revert back to it's lazy formula. I'm just really bothered about this. Idk man it pisses me off.
ANOTHER THING ABOUT THE WASTED POTENTIAL. AMARA. THE DARKNESS. PRE-BIBLICAL. GOD"S SISTER. THE BE ALL END ALL OF VILLIANS. Her plotline was so crap????? Season 13 confirmed and that was the best they could give us? I truly believe if they had played their cards right they could have created an amazing story arc that would’ve kept people engaged and saved the show from itself.
I’m just so much enjoying that people actually agree with me. Because you’re right! The characters by and large have a lot of potential! The dynamics have the potential to be really interesting! AND YET.
What is wrong with mint and mint relatives? Thank you.
They’re lovely, but they MUST be kept in a pot, or a raised bed, or on a good-quality leash with a chest harness, because mint and its cousins spread like… IDEK, like a rash. Like dandelions. They’re tough, hardy and highly motivated. Even a tiny root fragment will suddenly turn into a Mint Tree if you don’t tear it up. I swear I’ve seen new plants popping up from BURIED SCRAPS OF LEAF. Once they’re in the ground they establish a beachhead and spawn secretly, possibly through osmosis. I cannot advise you to stick a mint plant in the ground unless you are a bold and unconventional disciplinarian.
The joke is that after running around after the mint like a spaniel chasing a whack-a-mole for a year, Dr Glass then planted a plant that would do the same thing.
Great plants, hard to kill, keep them in a pot (ESPECIALLY where invasive)
One thing that makes Steve Trevor work in Wonder Woman is that they manage to hit the “Tries and fails to be protective” angle, but without any of the normal sexism you see in that trope.
It’s not “No honey, this is a job for a MAN, You can’t do that!” it’s “Diana! Stop! No! PEOPLE DIE WHEN THEY DO THAT! You can’t do that! I CAN’T DO THAT! NOBODY CAN DO THAT…Except You, apparently”
Yes! Exactly! And not only that but there’s no wounded pride scene where he goes like “How could she do that?”, “Why didn’t you tell me you could do that?” blah blah blah. Instead, he’s more like “Woah, can you show me more?” and “Hey guys, you know that thing we haven’t been able to do? SHE’S DOING THE THING! LET’S GO!”
In all the discourse about things boys do (crack open a cold one, come to the yard, are back in town) not once has someone mentioned the good old boys drinking whiskey and rye and singing “this’ll be the day that I die” and I will not stand for this good old boys erasure
Let’s talk about
Themyscira and just how different their society would be when it comes to sex and love
First of all as we saw there is no taboo on nudity. The naked body is not considered a big thing. Things like scars and skills in battle are quite considered a far sexier thing then nudity could ever be
Second it’s very likely that due to their immortality and isolation from the rest of the world long term romantic relationships live side with with polyamourous ones as well as casual sex
Which brings me to Diana….the only child on the entire island. Literally every single Amazon on the island would have known her since she was a tiny baby,.
Her fighting skills would be decades if not centuries behind the other Amazons, her skin would be flawless and barely have any scars on it and her muscles while adequate were nothing to really write home about. By the standards of Amazonian society she would probably be the least sexually attractive Amazon on the island. So imagine teenage Diana with her hormones raging, reading all night about the pleasure of the flesh and trying cringe worthy attempts to flirt with the other Amazonian warriors. And nothing works so frustrated she puts all her energy into her training until one day years later…she beats Antiope in a training match. The very same night she gets asked out by three Amazonians and suddenly Diana is finally the new hot thing in town and she is loving it
TL;DR: To the outside world Diana is the most attractive woman in the universe in Themyscira she was an awkward skinny nerd who couldn’t get laid for decades
Where is the lie
Or what if, because everyone saw her as the baby for the longest time, that she struggled to make everyone think and look at her as an adult.
We’re talking two centuries (according to Patty Jenkins Diana is 800 years old by the time Wonder Woman starts). It is one of the more frustrating things in her life.
Two centuries.
And even before she leaves the island the Senators still call Diana, ‘Child’. Imagine the things she did so the other Amazons would stop thinking she was the ‘baby’. We all know Diana can get pretty intense: she’d probably out extra even Antiope’s shooting an arrow on horseback while going through a ring of fire.
It got to a point that even Antiope was concerned.
So the first time an Amazon finally showed interest in Diana, after defeating Antiope and performing a (stupidly risky her mother would say) stunt that involved multiple fires, and then kissed her, Diana cried. It was embarrassing.
So wait, let me just say: if Diana’s used to having to put all her effort into making someone actually take her overtures seriously, the first time she tries to flirt with a mere mortal that person probably reacts like they’ve been struck by lightning.
Idea for a Buzzfeed quiz: We Can Tell How Old You Are Based On What Season You Stopped Watching Supernatural. Stopped watching in season 5? You got: 20 years old *that gif of Adam still in Hell*
I’m fucking wheezing this is so funny, someone with a friend in Buzzfeed do it and link me.
Also I have no idea if this is the gif you meant but it was the first one that came up under ‘adam supernatural’ and I’m cackling.
…Is that the one with the guy with the sports logo on his head, and his friends keep fucking around an inter dimensional illuminati toilet bowl? and at least one of the guys keeps dying all the fucking time?
One of the most bizarrely cool people I’ve ever met was an oral surgeon who treated me after a ridiculous accident (that’s another story), Dr. Z.
Dr. Z. was, easily, the best and most competent doctor or dentist I’ve ever encountered – and after that accident, I encountered quite a number. He came stunningly highly recommended, had an excellent record, and the most calming bedside manner I’ve ever seen.
That last wasn’t the sweet gentle caretaking sort of manner, which some nurses have but you wouldn’t expect to see in a surgeon. No; when Dr. Z. told me that one of my broken molars was too badly damaged to save, and I (being seventeen and still moderately in shock) broke down crying, he stared at me incredulously and said, in a tone of utter bemusement, “But – I am very good.”
I stopped crying on the spot. In the last twenty-four hours or so of one doctor after another, no one had said anything that reassuring to me. He clearly just knew his own competence so well that the idea of someone being scared anyway was literally incomprehensible to him. What more could I possibly ask for?
(He was right. The procedure was very extended, because the tooth that needed to be removed was in bits, but there was zero pain at any point. And, as he promised, my teeth were so close together that they shifted to fill the gap to where there genuinely is none anymore, it’s just a little easier to floss on that side.)
But Dr. Z.’s insane competence wasn’t just limited to oral surgery.
When I met Dr. Z., he, like most doctors I’ve had, asked me if I was in college, and where, and what I was studying. When I say “math,” most doctors respond with “oh, wow, good for you” or possibly “what do you want to do with that after college?”
Dr. Z. wanted to know what kind of math.
I gave him the thirty-second layman’s summary that I give people who are foolish enough to ask that. He responded with “oh, you mean–” and the correct technical terms. I confirmed that was indeed what I meant (and keep in mind, this was upper-division college math, you don’t take this unless you’re a math major). He asked cogent follow-up questions, and there ensued ten or so minutes of what I’d call “small talk” except for how it was an intensely technical mathematical discussion.
He didn’t, as far as I can tell, have any kind of formal math background. He just … knew stuff.
I was a competitive fencer at this point in time, so when he asked if I had any questions about the surgery that would be necessary, I asked him if I’d be okay to fence while I had my jaw wired shut, or if it would interfere with breathing.
“Fencing?” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “like swordfighting,” because this is another conversation I got to have a lot. (People assume they’ve misheard you, or occasionally they think you mean building fences.)
“Which weapon?”
“Uh. Foil.”
“No, it won’t be safe,” and he went off into an explanation of why.
Turns out, he was also a serious fencer – and, when I mentioned my fencing coach, an old friend of his. (I asked my fencing coach later, and, oh yes, Dr. Z., a good friend of mine, excellent fencer.) (My coach was French. Dr. Z. was Israeli. I never saw Dr. Z. around the club or anything. I have no idea how they knew each other.)
So this was weird enough that later, when I was home, I looked Dr. Z. up on Yelp. His reviews were stellar, of course, but that wasn’t the weird thing.
The weird thing was that the reviews were full of people – professionals in lots of different fields – saying the same thing: I went to Dr. Z. for oral surgery, and he asked me about what I did, and it turned out he knew all about my field and had a competent and educated discussion with me about the obscure technical details of such-and-such.
All sorts of different fields, saying this. Lawyers. Businessmen. Musicians.
As far as I can tell, it’s not that I just happened to be pursuing the two fields he had a serious amateur interest in – he just seemed to be extremely good at literally everything.
I have no explanation for this. Possibly he sold his soul to the devil.
He did a damn good job on my surgery.
This story inspires a little needed hope in the medical field. Thank you!
ok but like imagine all of the power rangers parents constantly asking where they’re going after dinner and eventually they all reply “um i’m in a band now??” and their parents are like AAAYYYYYYY I WANNA SEE YOU GUYS PLAY so on top of training and saving the world they now have to actually pretend to be in a band and play at school talent shows or whatever to keep up the lie. eventually they end up doing so well they book small gigs around town and theyre pretty well known and the lie just got so out of hand that now theyre signed to a record label working on their debut album
R: Are there any writers (fanfic or otherwise) you consider an influence?
Hell fucking yeah there are.
FANFIC
Honestly I love @determamfidd and @caffeinewitchcraft‘s writing styles more than words can say. Obligate hat-tip to @notbecauseofvictories, who is glorious. I’m sure there’s a laundry list of other people who I’m not remembering because I’ve been cleaning all day.
NON-FANFIC
Insert ode to Robin McKinley here. I love her writing literally more than words can address. I talk about her a lot.
Also PC Hodgell for armies and cities and people, lately Jay Kristoff who wrote Stormdancer, I should probably include KA Applegate who taught me how to torture my characters at a young age, and IDK Eric Flint who wrote 1632. I could definitely go on for A While with this list, but I’ll stop here.
…Grantaire. Like, just generally. It’s why the whole thing is from his perspective.
X: A character you enjoy making suffer.
GRANTAIRE. No smart comments please. But really, this whole fic could have the tagline “Grantaire has the power to move mountains and he suffers anyway.”
Z: Major character death–do you ever write/read it? Is there a character whose death you can’t tolerate?
This is Les Mis, darling, character death is what we do. I generally prefer canon if you’re going to do character death, and I don’t think I’ve ever written it except sort of in the reincarnation AU? Anyway, Avatar is a happy story, please rest assured that I have no current plans to murder anyone in this fic.
There are a number, but some I can think of right now are:
BED SHARING (especially if they’re still in that phase of ‘how DARE you suggest i’m interested in that person’ or alternatively ‘I can’t actually stand within six inches of this person without swallowing my own tongue and/or blushing so hard I combust’)
Soulmate AUs. I know they’re super fucking tropey and predictable but sometimes I just need a happy ending.
I know you know this, but Winter Soldier AU’s are my fucking weakness. I’m actively working on one for Hamilton and I’ve got plans to write one for The Song of Achilles and I wrote that general overview for
V: If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?
…um, off the top of my head I’d love to write a prequel OR a sequel for The Philosopher Poetic by @defractum, Silence Is the Speech of Love by someone whose tumblr url I can’t find, and In Spite of Song by @seagreeneyes who it will not let me tag, which are real good Les Mis AUs. I want a sequel any way I can get one for Dragonsfire, that one Aragorn/Arwen fic, including writing one myself. I desperately want to write literally anything in the universe of The Son of Man by @copperbadge, which is an absolutely fantastic JARVIS fic.
…this list could get long, okay, so I’m going to cut myself off here.
X: A character you enjoy making suffer.
Listen, I never met a character I didn’t enjoy torturing. All of them. God help them if they have a rough canon or anything even tangentially in common with a tragic archetype, because that just gives me Ideas.
We start with a slow pan down to Gotham as Oracle narrates
“Ask your average person who Gotham’s most famous citizen is, and you’ll get the same response every time: Bruce Wayne. Everybody’s heard of Bruce Wayne. You’ve probably heard his name a million times before. But there are some things that the average citizen doesn’t know about him. See, to the people of Gotham, Bruce Wayne is a rich kid who never grew up. They think he’s a buffoon, an airhead, a moron. But the truth is…”
*Batman bursts out of a window, screaming, on fire*
*record scratch, freeze frame*
“…they aren’t entirely wrong about that.”
EHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE
This is then followed by a series of clips from interviews with various Gotham citizens, all of whom give humorously ironic descriptions of Bruce Wayne’s idiocy:
“Bruce Wayne? I hear the guy gets through a super-car every month! Replaces every one, just like that!”
*Cut to shot of the Batmobile flipping end-over-end after slamming into one of Bane’s APCs*
“Wayne? Please! The guy would probably have accidentally killed himself years ago if he didn’t have that butler to babysit him!”
*Cut to Alfred physically restraining Bruce from going out to fight Scarecrow while having a broken arm, a concussion, and the flu,*
“I bet he throws away cash like it grows on trees!”
*Cut to Batman shouting “Hey, Lucius! Ask R&D to make some kryptonite/Nth metal alloy baterangs! Y’know, just in case!”
“I’m almost jealous. Super rich and he gets to hang out with gorgeous women across the world? Sign me up!”
*Cut to Bruce being slammed face first into a wall repeatedly by Lady Shiva.*
