Journeys end in lovers' meeting

Me reading enemies to lovers fics in 2021

Okay. What literary criticism IS, is like taking a mechanical clock apart to see all the gears and learn how it fits together and approach your next clock with more knowledge of what makes it tick.

Cousland's Revenge

The original tweet summarizes it pretty well. Fanfic tends to be popular among certain types of neurodivergent people (aka people most likely to read excessively as a child, and have burnout as an adult) for the same reasons that we tend to hyperfixate–neurochemical signaling (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly). What I mean is, for people who are really dependent on changes in dopamine/serotonin/neurotransmitter levels, who have low levels or wonky neural reward systems (perhaps the most common types of neurodivergence)…people like us rely on dependable external sources of those neurochemicals. In order to function, we spend a lot of our free time trying to level out our brain chemistry using things that can reliably bring us a steady stream of joyful moments (rewards) without costing too much of the mental effort that is already in short supply. 

significantly: the investment of reading has to be balanced with a steady “return on investment”–and this return has to start fairly quickly. because again, we don’t have a lot of attention/energy to invest on tiring things. we have perpetual “low batteries” in that regard.

that doesn’t mean these stories are “simple,” or that they lack complexity or value–only that the reward has to come in short regular intervals, and it has to have a low “upfront cost.” which is why fanfic stories are so perfectly formulated for neurodivergent readers–they are often beautifully written, but skip a lot of the upfront costs (of introducing new characters, of world-building, of getting the audience emotionally connected to the story elements).

the nature of fanfiction is that the reader has a pre-existing relationship with this world and these characters. that–combined with the shorter average length of fics–means that fan fics very quickly start “rewarding” the reader in a way that traditional fiction struggles to. that’s not a bad thing! and maybe it’s something more traditionally published writers should be paying attention to.

Penumbra, a small self-indulgent personal project

This map was created with the idea that Kirkwall is located on a man made river delta due to the quarry that Lowtown was and also explains why the Wounded Coast became so “wounded” with shipwrecks. And with essentially a dormant volcano (Sundermount) nearby. As for the pit that Lowtown is,  think of how a quarry is formed, they largely end up looking like this:

So imagine those waterways breaking up lowtown into sections being a man made waterway carved into the quarry to connect out to sea.If you walk around in game, particularly the forge, you’ll see waterways underneath as well. So that adds to why I think that “u shape” are just water ways or a man made river

The labels are for the following locations: A: Darktown B: the Docks C: The Gallows D: Lowtown E: Hightown I have it in my head they have bridges connecting the sections of Lowtown.  And the two locations for Hightown are really to separate Viscount’s Keep and the Chantry from the rest of Hightown.  But also gives a reason for why they say when Anders blew the Chantry up it “changed the tide” because the cliff it sits on basically broke off and dropped into the water. 

Those two orange dotted lines is to represent the “Chains of Kirkwall” that when up, prevent trade. 

Anyway this is the more basic version of the map I made, with all my other labels removed. The more complex one is for the purposes of one of my fics.

I made this map with wonderdraft, in case anyone is wondering.

I don’t know how accurate this is but it makes sense to me that the chains connect to the Gallows, assuming that once upon a time it wasn’t a mage prison but a fortress to protect the city.

This is based on this [concept art]: