prompt list ► CHAOS: a distinctive area of broken ground

[dedicating this one to @biotictrash and @renlyslittlerose <3]

Kaidan has never met anybody quite like Shepard.

He thinks about that more often than he might like to admit. He thinks about it over his morning coffee with Shepard’s bark of loud laughter rattling the table, filling him with a warmth he can’t explain. He thinks about it before getting to work on his afternoon reports, Shepard sprawled out on the seats in the starboard observation lounge where Kaidan likes to linger. He thinks about it on the shuttle ride to their mission, Shepard’s gaze boring into him across the cabin but always drifting just as Kaidan looks up. 

Most of all, he thinks about it when Shepard’s not around. 

Because when Shepard’s not around, Kaidan can see the chaos in Shepard’s wake, clear as day. Broken ground where his boots have tread, and Kaidan always seems to be following these trodden paths like he has nowhere else to go.

And Kaidan knows that isn’t true. He could have left the Normandy behind, gone to work with Hackett and stowed away the best part of three years to some forgotten corner of his mind. He could’ve gone silent, underground, fully within his newfound Spectre capabilities, and hunted for his biotics division to aid the war effort in his own way. 

He didn’t have to follow Shepard.  

Kaidan tells himself that every day, as if it’s an essential part to an equation he can’t quite solve. He runs the same algorithm, the same sequence of logic, always to an answer that doesn’t make sense. Not at first.

Slowly, though, Kaidan manages to find reason in the places he never thought to look.

It’s in the way Shepard always fixes him with a smile after his laughter dies out, as if to make sure he got the joke. It’s in the way Shepard always seeks him out, deliberately spending time in that quiet observation lounge to be with him. It’s in the way Shepard, for all his bravado and his bluster, won’t look at him before they touch down on a mission that could go so badly wrong.

Kaidan follows sequences, reason, rhyme; things that make sense. Shepard chases after the unknown with a ferocity that shakes a galaxy to its core.

For every neutral ground, there must be chaos. Kaidan understands that. 

Aside from my own, I’m assuming.

Literally any fic by the following writers: @vorchagirl, @hawkeykirsah @knightcommanderalenko, @biotictrash, and probably whole lot more I’m forgetting.

Admittedly, I haven’t been reading nearly as much as I used to, much less writing. However, if you go to any of those writers, I’m sure they could also point you towards some good material as well!

It can definitely feel like he's being overly harsh on Bioware, but Schreier's entire body of work at Kotaku and also his entire book on game development has had this tone. He keeps his scopes narrow per story, and he has brought the hammer down on other developers too like Rockstar and Naughty Dog who have demonstrated unhealthy work practices as well. I'd def recommend his twitter because he's always discussing changes needed to be brought to the WHOLE industry.

Oh, he’s the one who did the Rockstar article? Alright then, I remember reading that one and thinking “thank God they exposed all that” 

I’ll have to check his twitter. And perhaps all conversations happening right now about the article. 

Yes, and I would also absolutely recommend his book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels! It's super great and enjoyable for anyone wanting to learn how games are made. I personally think Bioware's response is pretty pathetic. Of course games are hard to make, of course you try hard and take feedback, but to call out the higher ups for harming their developers is not pitting devs against one another. It's making sure no one gets away with what they were getting away with.

They’re not even acknowledging that something went wrong and that they’re trying to improve. It’s also poor damage control to post it minutes after the article was published. And it made no sense. I actually read their response before reading the article and I thought the article would be going after specific people, since Bioware implied it, but it was nothing of the sort. 

And that tweet of Schreier here saying devs are disappointed because it feels like nothing has been learned and no changes will come is just :’(

I find that people who are interested in a concept or the story you're writing will stick around, and will be invested regardless of how many chapters there are. And sometimes it's not a huge mass of people. I honestly have very few regular readers on my zombie au, so I think it helps that I have had a single ending in mind since I wrote the first words of the fic, because it kinda does comfort those readers that you have a full plan to finish the fic.

Yeah, that sounds really comforting honestly but I don't know many writers who will say "I have an ending in mind and trust me" when they start a WIP. I think it might depend on the story like you say ('I am that interested in it so I am taking the risk’) or basically what you know of the writer. If they have completed a WIP yet, things like that. That might help?

And see, I’m interested in all this because I'm trying to get over my WIPs aversion because so many fics in the "looking for readers" page of the resource hub are WIPs. And I always planned on reading your zombie AU... but thinking I'll do that when it's completed. IDK, I feel like I've been a bad reader ^^''

YOU DIDNT LIKE PROSCIUTO??

we made fun of it the whole time until it suddenly hurt like fuck and left us shook for days

yeah like we felt a lot of pain after that movie like a LOT