#emberkeelty

ooohh i probably forgot or thought it was gonna be too much for tumblr but that's probably me being presumptuous.

It should be live now!!

emberkeelty submitted to caretaker-au:

https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/514733.html?thread=3111697837#cmt3111697837 I don’t expect you to publish this but I thought you might enjoy seeing it and I can’t send links in asks. Anon-meme AITA-fic!

first: thank you :) Charasriel

What made you ship it?

oh man. so much! everything about it! not in a world without you speech gets me... the whole asriel not being ready to say goodbye speech...

ironically, no mercy route probably made me ship it extra hard because of how much dread is injected into the dynamic there - i felt extremely bad about that route, but fascinated.

after all these years it's you i promise i won't do anything to get in your way, i can help maybe it would be okay if we just lived on the surface the two of us...

asriel's obvious obsession, and the rockiness between the two despite how close they were... that's fascinating.

2. What are your favorite things about the ship?

oh man, so many things about it!

I think charasriel is very obviously my peak 'go to' ship - it is very obviously what I love condensed into this. thing. I love the mourning, I love the codependency, I love all the different interpretations of their dynamic and different ways you can read certain things - and how you can never know EXACTLY how it went down which allows you to keep tackling the same moments from different perspectives. kind of like turning a little piece of trauma in your hands over and over again, kind of like flowey/az does haha. I love how asriel and chara are Bad Kids and things go the worst way possible and how they're both entirely different fascinating characters who Have Similarities But Differences. i love how different routes of the game lead to entirely different information on the characters and their relationship. there's so many tiny little pieces of insight to collect about their relationship, but it's all fractured from where you're collecting it.

it is the most pure and distilled codependency ship. you can write about things going wrong in so many ways. i'm a sucker for codependent childhood friends, and here the codependent childhood friends are super plot relevant and serve as this... backbone to every event, even though no one is aware of it.

3. Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

man i try not to complain but I actually AM a little picky about fanfic, so - genre of fic where Chara is Always Right. if you don't know the fic I mean, it goes like this... asriel has flaws (correct) but asriel is spoiled. chara is right because chara is a victim and has seen the abuses of the world. asriel is wrong because he is Spoiled and probably neurotypical and anyway none of what chara did was that bad anyway- - asriel is a simple sweet kid. always innocent. always morally right. always says chara that's wrong! - chara is a simple sweet kid. they just loved gardening. they are super sweet. they never wanted to hurt anybody!

basically i don't like when either side is painted as wholly innocent and flat because it's not how i read either character, but i also don't like when the story paints it as chara never doing anything wrong to asriel either. it's a complex dynamic that 'seems' simple

Friskriel

What made you ship it?

ironically, very similarly to chasriel, it's the not in a world without you speech. and then... the speech at the end too, where he acknowledges he's projecting and frisk's differences.

I mean... asriel is projecting obviously, and I think both that similarity and Recognizing the dissimilarities are both interesting things going on with that relationship.

i'm also... hm. I think a lot of people play very nice Frisks! but I always imagine Frisk did do things sometime to see just what happened. it's tempting right? so I always imagine a Frisk who could fundamentally understand Asriel, and an Asriel who can do similarly

2. What are your favorite things about the ship?

ahhh so one thing I really love is that... a lot of what's shared between Frisk and Asriel is stuff basically no one knows about. there's this bottle of secrets between them. Asriel is aware of what Frisk has done during time loops, and Frisk is aware of Asriel's true identity and what no one else knows about him as a character at the end of the game. there's also... so much potential for time travel shenanigans, and playing around with life and death. basically two kid characters rewinding time endlessly.

i love time loops. i love the idea of characters who wrong others and then get used to being able to just rewind to fix it. i love that flowey and frisk are the only two characters who can really bond over this together... this game both of them have played with each other, specifically

3. Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship? hmmm... definitely another case where frisk and asriel are often made too nice for me! i think a lot of separation of asriel from flowey as an identity happens as well, and so you end up with a lot of characterizations where it's like... the character frisk spent the majority of the game with isn't even really... IN the interpretation of the character fanficwise. I like some flowisk labelled fics, but tend to not get the bite I want out of friskriel labelled fics. asriel is... a brat! that's why I love him

basically, comes back to the fact that without injecting a bit of flowey in him, asriel is a character who doesn't have a lot of character meat to me

Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)

Well nothing says this has to be actually posted so:

"Bats aren't birds," Alucard says, looking rapidly between the two of them. "How can you possibly - they're mammals." Sypha snickers, presumably at whatever the Greek meant. "They don't have feathers." "Well, neither do bees and they're still birds," Sypha points out.

One reason the Castlevania fic just keeps going is I am endlessly amused by the different ways people tried to make sense of the world and how a lot of the time it's not even a matter of being more or less wrong but of coming at the question in an incompatible way. Why are you so dumb, Alucard, obviously bats can fly.

What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? Would others agree?

Terse. Simple, but in such a way that it often sets up some sort of twist by not mentioning something or not spotlighting it as important. People very much agree.

I think also... Well, very much an angst person, to the point that if there’s another pretend to be another person game the winning move would be to figure out how to write fluff. Lot of third person limited. Really love POV elements/subjectivity, and keeping track of who knows what and their interpretation of it is really important to me. Much more about breaking things than fixing them. When things are fixed/resolved it’s not done in apology format. Come to think of it, I’m not sure if that’s a disinterest in closure or that I prefer implied changed behavior over a formal statement of change. Maybe both?

What do you envy in other writers?

@sqbr this is an excellent idea and I am implementing it RIGHT NOW :D

omg these are the nicest answers!! @emberkeelty, @smallsith, and anon, thank you guys so much! This manatee from something I’ve been drawing today thanks you, too:

Even when I draw more stylized characters, I try hard to give them a sense of weight and volume, and I’m so glad that comes through.

"touga you're making it worse" It's cute how you say that as though you think it might discourage the dude whose purpose in life is to make everything worse always.