#karlacton

🤔 I might have a strategy here.

fuck: Matthias, because that would be funny as all hell. like. could you fucking imagine? the drama. the hilarity. the sheer undiluted chaos.

marry: Kaz, because he’s got that kruge and I think we could work something out. there has to be some scams we can get away with if we’re married. some tax breaks. it could be very financial and very sexy of us.

kill: nobody. after those two clowns are out of the way everyone is pretty chill, so therefore I present the alternate version of this game: Fuck Marry Chill.

chill at a cocktail bar until we get rambunctiously drunk and end up either in a cell or in the gutter: Jesper, of course.

chill at a museum playing that age-old and highly intellectual game of Root Loot Boot: Wylan. naturally.

chill with some beers on a rooftop, legs dangling over one of Ketterdam’s finest shopping streets, water balloons filled with foul-smelling substances at our disposal and an army of younger Dregs waiting down below to snatch up the dropped purses of the people looking skyward and shaking their fists: it has to be Inej. who else?

chill and shittalking over a decadent brunch that lasts well into the night and ends just as rambunctiously as my night out with Jesper did: Nina, absolutely.

chill and commit arson: Kuwei. what a night.

[tries to think of other “fluffy” stuff with an “… but make it abusive” stipulation]

Admittedly, you, Ace, and I have indeed come up with all sorts of ways to make specifically sickfic awful, such as “character A and character B are so ridiculously enmeshed that they literally cannot do anything else if one of them is sick, they both have to stick together and that’s... not healthy...” and “character A deliberately making themself sick to force character B to stay around and take care of them.”

I have more than once gone through some “list of fluffy domestic prompts!” blog and, uh, made them not so fluffy. It’s kinda a fun exercise. Let your imagination soar. (Also something something, unsettle these tropes and their assumptions to engage with the everydayness of abuse, especially in cases where the prompt itself... could be reinterpreted as Bad with very little change necessary. Not that you need to defend this stuff with anything beyond “I like it when the characters feel bad.” 

Of all the possible tropes, I’m flattered you chose to interrogate me about these

Mind control

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |

I gravitate to these characters so much it’s not even funny. It’s the best kind of power fantasy, not to mention the most sensible: why wouldn’t you end a fight before it’s even started? The fact that it’s so often keyed as solely the provenance of the villains makes it even better. Did the mind control kink come first or the villain kink? is the new chicken and egg question.

I especially like it when associated with underdog characters: either those of less social clout and/or people who are physically weaker, to turn them from a complete nonentity into the most terrifying piece on the board. A way to not only even the playing field, but demolish it altogether.

“always holding a torch for you"-type love

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |

Romance is pretty uninteresting to me as a topic, so there isn’t really much a canon ship can pull out to make me ooh and aah. I don’t hate it though.

The idea of it anyway. So often in media it’s portrayed as this consuming, yearning thing that dominates the whole character and that’s like. Come on now. You’ve got a whole world to meddle with and you’re worried about pining.

Edited: the implied bit in ACOL where Holland holds a torch for Talya is both interesting about him as a character and makes me crack up. It’s very telling that a thirty-seven-year-old man counts a flame he had at eighteen as his one true love and suggests a lot (he’s a romantic, he’s sentimental, he’s deeply lonely and starved for love), but also, A THIRTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD COUNTS A FLAME AT EIGHTEEN HIS ONE TRUE LOVE. It’s ludicrous. Especially when she is literally never mentioned once in the seven (?) hundred odd pages that came before. Gotta try harder than that Schwab.

This also suggests Holland does not consider drawing a knife on him while he sleeps a dealbreaker. Which. I like. For reasons.

Long-term captivity

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |

If it’s done well, yes. Which rules out 90% of mainstream media: their way of handling captivity on the page/screen is either gross (meh) or boring (indefensible). One example I do like is Elektra King and Renard in The World Is Not Enough, and it’s probably not a coincidence that it deals entirely with the aftermath of their time together. The scene where she takes off her earring? Delightful.

In fic though, where you can dig into the emotions and the complexity and the gutwrenching horror of it? Fuck yes. There’s an astounding Bane/John Blake fic for this, Stiffen the Sinews, that I’m still not over. I didn’t even watch the movie but damn.

Brainwashing

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |

Rather not if the character is being brainwashed, Yes/Fuck yes if the character is doing the brainwashing.

Rather not: it’s either glossed over if done wrong or else profoundly unnerving to me if the narrative doesn’t flinch. I prefer stories where the character knows they’re doing something wrong and does it anyway, out of love or weariness or whatever, fully aware of the wrongness all the time. Espionage fiction is a huge thing for me as a result of this.

Yes/fuck-yes: it’s mind control, but in the real world. That level of control and delicacy is very alluring.

Heroic sacrifice

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |

In theory yes. In practice so much of mainstream media uses it as a gotcha for instant emotions that I’m wary now.

Media: heroic sacrifice! Look! Bittersweet! Turn on the waterworks!

Me: bold of you to assume I have emotions

(I was not a fan of the Kylo Ren ending, even though he was my favorite character and I fully expected him to die)

I don’t know. Heroic sacrifice when done well can be catharsis in the purest sense, but it’s so rarely done well.

And you of course know my thoughts on Holland’s alleged sacrifice, but to sum up again: IT WAS NOT A SACRIFICE because 1) he had no way of knowing his death would have that effect or any kind of effect on the world and 2) the narrative spent three books establishing he wanted to die. Getting exactly what your exhausted, traumatized, despairing psyche wants at the end of the series is not a sacrifice. It’s a lot of things, most of them shitty, but not a sacrifice.

I don’t care at all for emphasizing Lemony vs. Olaf because it gives off a “good vs evil” vibe and a strong nemeses narrative, which is less interesting and less befitting ASOUE than Lemony having his whole fucking life destroyed by the actions of a loathsome man who, while certainly one of Lemony’s enemies, actually didn’t care about him that much.

ok that’s a lot kfjdkf gimme a sec

top 5 words

1. sprezzatura

2. saudade

3. vicious

4. smoke

5. thorns

top 5 characters

1. andrew minyard

2. neil josten

3. victor vale

4. isabelle lightwood

5. julian blackthorn

top 5 color combinations

1. black and white (sorry i’m a basic bitch)

2. pink and aqua

3. green and pink

4. pale pink and gray

5. dark blue and gold