Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Anonymous asked: hi, just want you to know, i think your search isn't working? nothing shows up, even when i use terms i know you've used. thanks for sharing your awesome writing with us, it always cheers me up to read your stories! p.s. i just read your post about amuniasa and it sounds AMAZING!!! keep up the good work!!!1

Ahhh yes, my search function is kind of a little fucker at the best of times.  I think it’s because there’s dashes in my url?  Things are p thoroughly tagged (although…not always logically) so like…try that?  Feel free to ask if you want a specific tag because (ha) I’m a mess and my Tag Page is like 70% complete at any given time.  But like, if you wanted all the Alleirat posts I’ve made or something, ‘words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/tagged/alleirat’ should take you there.

And thank you so much it was so gratifying to write it all out!

Anonymous asked: UM HI. So I'm the one that sent the ask about the magical gf things and I have a confession. I already knew it was from your magical book and was kinda subtly hoping you would talk about it?!?!?! I"M SO SORRY but like I said I'm so invested in this crap and would read the entire frikin thing. ALSO I LOVED THE EXCERPT. And now I'm leaving before I disgrace myself any further.

WAIT NO DON’T LEAVE

SO HERE’S IRONY FOR YOU: you came in and didn’t want to bug me so you asked in like a sideways way, BUT I DIDN’T WANT TO BUG YOU, so I didn’t talk about it.  (I’m a mess, I’m sorry, y’all gotta be explicit about this stuff because I have no self-confidence.)

BUT ON THAT NOTE let’s talk about perceptions of sex and romance in Alleirat?  Like?  I’m into it?

Earth is where the trouble comes from

So you know the code of chivalric love, where like the fair and pure maiden is adored from afar by the knight and on the one hand it’s kind of cool but on the other hand it’s predicated on the fair and pure maiden who can’t reciprocate or even really acknowledge what’s going on?  I like that first half but the second half bothers me like FUCK so I made a better version.

In Alleirat, sex and romance are considered linked, but not intrinsically so–having casual sexual partners is fine as long as your partner is aware and good with it, and sexual experimentation is considered normal (even expected) between the ages of like 16 and like mid-to-late twenties.  (People who are like ‘I am gay/straight and I am EXCLUSIVELY gay/straight and I have never experimented with another gender’ are considered weird and kind of to have missed out?  Like, they’re thought of as…having skipped an important life stage?  Societies Are Problematic, is my point here.)  Monogamy is common, but not mandatory, and conditional monogamy (which I’m about to get into) is pretty normal.

So, the courtly love arrangement, which is called amuniasa.  Like, say that you are a woman and you work closely with another woman, and you fall in love with her.  And you’re very much in love with her (commitment is Serious Business in Alleirat and cheating is considered an actual crime) and you tell her as much.  Now she has two options.  Either she can take you up on it and you can attempt a relationship, or she can acknowledge the honor you’re doing her with your feelings and declare herself amiasa, or ‘the beloved.’  Then you have the choice to remain committed to her as amdri (the lover).  Some basic rules of amuniasa include:

• Amuniasa is generally given the same level of importance as marriage, and there are a very short list of reasons that are considered valid to dissolve it.  

• Amdrin and amiasan are permitted, but not required, to engage in other romantic and sexual relationships.  It is common and accepted for someone to have both a spouse and an amdri/amiasa, although it’s not frowned upon if someone devotes themselves wholly to their amiasa.
• Brenneth’s right-hand during their previous stint in Alleirat (Krei The Tree Lesbian’s mother Torei) was Brenneth’s amdri, and never took another romantic partner during the remainder of her life.  Brenneth and Torei are held up as sort of the Platonic ideal of devotion and amuniasa.  (Krei’s coloring also suggests that her father looked like Brenneth, but she never met him.)

• The amiasa has a limited period of time to change their mind (often one year), and leading your amdri on with hints that you might one day return their feelings (or with sex) is considered incredibly cruel and dishonorable, and is a valid reason to dissolve the relationship.  (Your amdri is functionally off limits for sex for this reason.)

• Hassling your amiasa and trying to force them to return your feelings is not permitted and is a valid reason to dissolve the relationship.  It can also get you arrested, sent out of the city, or placed under what basically sums up as a restraining order.

• It is standard for the amdri to give gifts to their amiasa, or to perform great deeds in their name if they’re in a position to do so (also a thing that Torei is considered the ideal of).  Alternatively, an amdri might cook for their amiasa or perform another kind of service, like braiding hair, tending children, etc.  This is because Alleirat views service and gift giving as a mandatory core of every romantic relationship (…this extends to orgasms), not because the amdri is viewed as in any way subordinate or servile to their amiasa.  The amdri considers it a privilege to perform service and give gifts, and the amiasa recognizes the honor being accorded to them.

• It’s actually not common for amdri and amiasa to continue working closely unless it’s necessary, as it’s believed that this is unfair to the amdri.  They interact largely socially and on their own terms, to the extent that the amdri is comfortable with–this might be several visits in a week, or the amdri might travel quite a distance.  (Torei is considered an outlier, as she took a position as the captain of her amiasa’s guard and proceeded to live, work, and spend all her time with Brenneth for four years.  …there are songs about Torei’s devotion and selflessness and disregard for her own pain, is what I’m getting at here.)

• It IS common for your amdri or amiasa to know your children, if you have any, and is generally considered their de facto guardian in the event of a disaster.

• It is NOT UNHEARD OF for someone to executively decide not to even try to have a relationship and act as an amdri without telling their amiasa.  This is generally because they believe they have no chance with the other person and that their attention would make their amiasa uncomfortable, such as a man falling in love with a lesbian, or someone falling in love with someone aromantic.  This is considered fine, but it also means that you have no formal claim on the other person.
• This can also be because they have a terrible (justified) guilt complex and believe that the other person could never reciprocate as a result of four years of mutual attempted murder.  Not that I’m in any way vagueblogging about any of my characters here.

ANYWAY THIS HAS BEEN A PRIMER ON LOVE AND ROMANCE IN ALLEIRAT, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ASK OTHER QUESTIONS.

Anonymous asked: Is your magical gf's thing from your fantasy book? Sorry if this seems rude but I am like SO invested in your novels from what you've given us.

NEVER RUDE NEVER RUDE NEVER RUDE

ALWAYS TALK TO ME ABOUT MY NOVELS

And yes, my magical gf’s are from one of my fantasy novels, which I generally call Alleirat because I’m a lazy fuck who doesn’t title things until the last available second.  This novel is also called the “Earth is where the trouble comes from” book, which sums it up pretty well.  The Very Tall Tree Person is the right hand woman of the main character, and the Smol Death Machine…um, starts the novel as the bad guy buT IT’S A NOVEL ABOUT REDEMPTION AND IT’S NOT HER FAULT AND I LOVE HER V MUCH.

Anyway, for those of you who don’t know what’s going on: THIS is a basic rundown of the story, and THIS is some basic outlining of the way magic works, and this and this are about the couple in question.  The novel is currently like 35K and I’m doing it for Camp NaNoWriMo.

And like, IDK y’all I feel guilty forcing my weird original stuff on you, but if you’re interested I could post a section I wrote yesterday that I’m…pretty pleased with.

Anonymous asked: I watched Wonder Woman on its premiere and none of my friends have watched it yet - it's absolutely killing me not being able to talk about it in case I spoil it for them! But I just want to say that it is such a beautiful movie and the message it conveys is brilliant. Gal and Chris were a great casting and the acting was so so so heartbreaking. I am in awe. And I am not the same person that walked into the theatre.

Oh my God, dude, same, that movie was so…electric.  Like, it felt like a jolt of lightning right to the heart.  Everything was so beautifully saturated and powerful and the women were treated so phenomenally well and the heroism was so sincere and the relationship between Steve and Diana was so unbelievably good.  I haven’t felt so purely and authentically loved by a movie for quite a while.

It was amazing.  Absolutely amazing.  

Anonymous asked: *slides in* you're probably gonna hate me: Xavier/Erik, "Stumble into my Arms"

(I don’t actually…ship this…which I know makes me weird…so here, have another Real Dark Thing)

AO3 summary: “It’s going to be okay, Charles,” Erik says quietly, brushing dark curls away from where tears have started to dry under Charles’ closed eyes.  “You’ll see.”

“He’s a madman, Erik,” Charles says dully, past caring if Apocalypse hears them.

“He’s going to fix us,” Erik swears, like a man clutching to the last thread of his own reason.  “You and me, Charles, he’s going to fix us.”

“Go to hell,” Charles says, and turns his face away when Erik bends down to pick him up from the ground.

Actual summary: It starts with a missing scene that’s like 98% Erik being obsessed with Charles and Charles being in mourning for the man he used to know and also the whole entire planet.  Apocalypse lied to Erik about why they needed Charles and Erik is shattered, pretty much clinging to Charles as his last anchor point.  So when he discovers that this plan doesn’t end with Charles converted to his viewpoint and by his side, Erik goes off the fucking rails.  The fight is a lot shorter, since Charles is in better shape and Erik doesn’t do a heel-face turn halfway through.  On the other hand, Erik is in pretty bad shape, mentally and emotionally speaking, and his worldview is pretty well shattered, after the battle.  Jean rebuilds the house herself, alone, and the fic ends with Erik broken on the floor of Charles’ reconstructed study begging for forgiveness.  Charles presses his lips thin and does not answer.

If you want bonus pain feel free to imagine this as a soulmate AU.

Anonymous asked: I love the idea of all of those animorphs crossovers, but especially the star wars and avengers ones.

HONESTLY I MIGHT WRITE THEM.

But like for a preview: 

STAR WARS: General Leia somehow ends up on Earth and has a Very Grim Conversation with Jake that’s mostly about brothers and warriors and how to live through living through battles and loving someone who doesn’t carry that weight half so harshly.  Alternatively, Rogue One is caught by the Death Star’s blast wave and shunted across a universe, and the Animorphs find them broken and bruised and Cassian and Jyn look into their eyes and see themselves.  Chirrut and Baze call all of them ‘little brother’ and ‘little sister’ and it makes Rachel prickle.  The Animorphs go from six to eleven (Chirrut morphs a mountain lion and Jyn morphs a wolverine, I don’t have the others sorted).  K2 doesn’t make it to Earth at all.  Rogue One still dies for the cause.  The End.

AVENGERS: I have two ideas here.

1. The obvious, in which the Animorphs get a “gift” from the Ellimist (”DOES HE OWN A DICTIONARY” Marco demands) and are sent to a world the Yeerks never touched and pop up RIGHT in the middle of the Battle of New York and handily freak out the Avengers.  Especially Steve, who almost has a heart attack at the sight of a teenaged girl in a leotard sprinting at him and shouting “Toss me”, and literally almost gets his head cut off when he watches her vault off his shield and turn into a fucking grizzly on the way down.  Tony almost throws up when he sees a gorilla get disemboweled and start turning back into a teenager as a bunch of people yell <No medics, no medics, someone protect his head!>
   
2. The one I haven’t really seen yet, in which the War happens a little later (like it ends maybe 2001) and thus the Animorphs are only about 26 when the Avengers are formed.  Still pretty young.  SHIELD kept the whole Yeerks thing under wraps (so. many. NDAs.), so imagine the Avenger’s surprise when the late Phil Coulson is replaced with a young dude build like a football player who tells them to call him Jake, and who introduces his team of equally young people plus one bird as their new backup.

Both of these include Marco and Tony basically talking shit about each other incessantly, Bruce and Cassie talking in soft honest tones about how it feels to be afraid of yourself, Tobias and Clint making horribly unfunny jokes about their childhoods, Steve taking it upon himself to make sure Jake actually talks about the stress of leadership and about how afraid he is of getting someone killed (Bucky and Tom get compared…especially if this is still a thing post-WS) and Natasha and Rachel being really weird friends where mostly they spar.  Oh, and also Ax and Thor bonding about Poptarts.

I also saw Wonder Woman today and I feel like there’s a great AU where that crossover also happens.

Anonymous asked: MORAN I WATCHED WONDER WOMAN TODAY AND IT MADE ME CRY IN THEATERS! I said "fuck me up diana" so many times. And Charlie was one of my favorite characters out of their little outfit. (Besides Steve) Which story do you think is the most tragic out of theirs?

MY DUDE I’M A HARD BITCH, HEART OF STONE, THE WHOLE NINE YARDS, AND I CRIED LIKE MULTIPLE TIMES.  I COULD WATCH DIANA JUST FUCKING WRECK PEOPLE ALL DAY EVERY DAY FOR A YEAR.

And….mmmm, that’s a good question.  On like a strictly impulsive level, I’m going to say Diana, actually, just because…the loss of that innocence, the loss of that belief that humanity has the potential to be intrisically, truthfully Good, is a tragedy on a fairly legendary level.  Like, the world is lesser.

That being said…I’m going to say Sameer.  The Chief, as he points out so articulately, has lost a great deal on a cultural level (I was so pleased that they actually addressed that), but he knows everyone.  I loved the shot of him wrapping his arm around the German kid at the end, treating the Germans with the same familiar affection that he gives to the Allies.  Charlie, we don’t learn a whole lot about, but clearly he starts the movie with very few people to his name–he actually comes out of this whole thing with two new friends and a goddess buddy and also Etta who I think would be highly entertaining and very good for him.  

But Sameer…Sameer is clearly close to Steve far more than the others, and more to the point he’s not going to be…super well accepted by the Allied forces.  As he says, he’s the wrong color–the Allies just fought against the Ottoman Empire, and Sammy would be easily mistaken for an old enemy.  He doesn’t have people outside this weird motley little gang, and Steve was his friend, Sameer is always the first one to shout for Steve, to start running after him, to WORRY.  So anyway.  Give me all the fic of Sameer and Steve being old friends and Sameer and Diana sitting quietly together as Sammy drinks and Diana listens to all his old stories about Steve that no one else is really in a place to hear.  But Diana craves that knowledge, needs to know more about Steve in a way that scares her, and Sammy needs to talk, about his friend who died a hero and who no one will ever remember except for this woman, this goddess who’s sitting on the floor with him with tears clinging to her eyelashes, and if he tells her everything, every detail, and Diana lives on with Steve’s memory in her heart then maybe he won’t quite be dead.

Anonymous asked: Have you read Robin Mckinley's The Outlaws of Sherwood? And if so what where your thoughts?

MY BUDDY.

I HAVE.

Right so I think I’ve mentioned my overwhelming obsession with Robin McKinley’s writing once or twice.  And I love Outlaws of Sherwood!  This is a Good Ask!

All right, so for those of you who haven’t read the Outlaws of Sherwood and don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s Robin Hood.  The basic premise is that Robin accidentally kills someone of a higher status than him and, in the process of hiding him from the Sheriff’s men, his best friends Much (the son of a miller) and Marian (the daughter of a Saxon nobleman) convince him that someone has to take a stand against the regime.  As such, people who are being taxed to death or who have had their homes taken leave with him and hide out in Sherwood Forest.  As the plot progresses, their gang grows, and the standard robbing-of-rich-feeding-of-poor proceeds, Guy of Gisborne shows up, and so it goes.

The major difference between this and most Robin Hood interpretations is that (*gasp*) Maid Marian has a real personality!  She’s a fucking firecracker!  She’s an expert markswoman–Marian is the legendary archer of the Outlaws, and goes to contests in a green hood under Robin’s name.  Marian is a tactician and a fighter and a woodsman AND she teaches all the men how to sew a goddamn shirt.  MARIAN IS THE TOTAL PACKAGE.  She and Robin bicker all the time and she nips it right in the bud when he gets stupid and overprotective and there’s this stunning scene where Marian and Robin are sitting together under a tree and Marian falls asleep on him and Robin just like “my arm is going numb and there’s a tree root digging into my hip but if I sat here for the rest of my life I would be happy, I want to marry this woman under any circumstances if she’d take me.”  And honestly same.  Anyway.  I digress.

All right, so here’s My Thoughts about Outlaws of Sherwood, and they can basically be summed up as “what a good” but also as “this is such a good way to balance the realistic and the hopeful in this story.”  Because like, okay, Robin Hood is a popular story to retell, but, especially in more recent versions, they get really…determined to be ‘realistic,’ which turns into some pretty profoundly grim stuff.  BBC did a Robin Hood show a while back and I passionately hated it–Robin was a womanizing nobleman who treated his manservant Much very poorly, Marian had a REAL WEIRD love triangle with Robin, who was kind of a dick, and Guy of Gisborne, who was a presumptuous pushy pseudo-rapist, and the Merry Men were a nominal saving grace until Marian was murdered at the end of the first season.  At that point, I just fucking bailed and googled how it ended–spoiler, it ends with Robin, after a fuckbuddies relationship with a villain, being poisoned and dying while Nottingham burns.  And here’s why I had an issue with that: Robin Hood, most basically, is the product of a society that was just dead exhausted by the Crusades and the class division between the Normans and the Saxons and the general state of the world that they went “What if someone had the option to not be us” and it was a thing of HOPE.  The idea of Robin as a chivalrous outlaw and Much as a loyal friend and Marian as a charming maiden just rebellious enough to ally herself with someone outside the law started as a story about hope.  A story about the potential to do something to save the people being crushed under the weight of a nobility that didn’t give a good goddamn about them.  A story about the idea that someone might care about them.

BBC’s asshole Robin and indecisive (and fridged) Marian and browbeaten Merry Men aren’t loyal to that idea.  Nottingham being burned to the ground as Robin dies just says “rebellion is pointless and the little people will always be victims of the system no matter what anyone does.”  

B U T.  You know what is loyal to that idea, that core of hope?  OUTLAWS OF SHERWOOD.  Robin is the cynic, here, the pragmatic influence to Much’s ready optimism and Marian’s fire-bright idealism, but even Robin…he loves his people, even if he doesn’t love the dream.  He would rather live to fight tomorrow than die a martyr, but when a young man in ridiculous red clothes shows up lost and alone in Sherwood Forest, Robin can’t help but care about him.  Much is a devoted friend, not just to Robin but to all the Outlaws, and the one whose idealism bears up under the worst the world has to throw at it.  Marian is proud and fierce and the one who turns dreams and love into real action.  

You wanna know why Outlaws is my favorite Robin Hood retelling?  Because it walks the line between honesty (life as an outlaw sucks! they’re hungry and cold and they’re horribly wounded in the last battle against Gisborne! Robin is scared and/or exasperated 99% of the time and the other 1% is pretty much that one scene with Marian!) and joy.  Outlaws loves its characters and its story and its hopes and its dreams, genuinely enjoys the hell out of itself, and that means that it feels like Robin Hood.  I don’t like stories tangled up in their own shadows and darknesses, I like stories that can balance the darkness with some light.  And that’s what Outlaws of Sherwood feels like.  It feels like a forest–the shadows are deep and green and frightening, and the sunlight is so, so bright.

Anonymous asked: My friend describes herself as six foot negative 8. She is 5'2" and I just thought you would find this amusing.

This is so fucking good, give your friend a high five for me.

Anonymous asked: oh my god you're five foot nothing IM FIVE FOOT NOTHING I LOVE YOU HOLY FUCK CAN I GET A HELL YEAH

H E L L Y E A H