I'm thinking about the fact Corvus and Meulin just barely get sleep. Corvus doesn't sleep being piled up with work and Meulin actually avoids sleeping so she doesn't experience more nightmares. Semiu is the only one with a normal seeming sleep schedule. I'm just imagining her dragging Corvus and Meulin to bed, begging for both of them to at least get an hour.
she can be successful, as a treat. Semiu tucks all three of them into bed and for once Corvus and Meulin get a good nights sleep with Semiu... my yuri....
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it's interesting to read this considering what kind of background we have on the old one...
bc like. lemuria was most likely made before the schism happened, which at that point had no scion. he went quiet afterwards, with no news about his whereabouts until AFTER spider and raven sealed themselves away in the events of emp2
so at that point... he MUST have heard about the scion. he must have heard that the wizard was a part of it, that they were it. and if the scion is necessary for the first world to come back...
itd be interesting to imagine a world in WHICH the old one wasnt absorbed... because we can really only wonder and think about the old one's intentions by that point. did he really change, or was he simply playing a role to get back to lemuria?
was him gathering everyone at the von trap estate, getting the schism and the arcanum back together, only a ruse? or was that him trying to do right by the guilt he felt when he left lemuria behind?
even with all that we see of lemuria and the various tests and experiments that he does, all of that was in the past. but when were constantly confronted with what he did in order to secure a new first world, we're ultimately left to wonder if his turn over to a new leaf was real or if it was simply a ruse to get what he wanted....
i think the most interesting part is that most of his heroes did not end up becoming his scion...
I’m starting to see the problem people are having with Young Sheldon, especially those related to or are autistic and OCD. Sheldon clearly shows signs that he’s OCD or OCPD and his parents, or his mother anyway, seems to tell that something isn’t right. Almost all his entire family suspects something is wrong and yet nobody is willing to get him the help he needs because they don’t want him to be crazy. There’s a stigma there and it’s understandable of course considering the timeline that Sheldon grows up in in the 1980s-1990s. Mental health doesn’t become much more accepted until later I suppose but it takes away whatever humor their trying to make of Sheldon’s life when the entire family is exasperated with Sheldon’s neurosis and treats him like he’s a spoiled brat when in reality he’s battling mental illness and isn’t at fault for thinking the way he does...
Okay... I need to get back out of my writing rut...
So here are my rough outlines of my AUs... except the Interview with the Vampire one is less of an AU and was inspired by just one scene... where Louis watches the sunrise at the movie theater...
Interview with the Vampire inspired fic (Max Phillips)
Max has no idea he turned you when he helped you out of a car accident...
He'd been attracted to you for a while, but when he took you to the hospital and an attractive guy showed up at the room Max fled...
He didn't realize the blood on him wasn't all yours...
So he's stunned when he sees you YEARS later... and you look exactly the same...
He's not letting you get away a second time...
After a game of cat and mouse, you both end up together... watching everything you missed together...
IT AU (multiple Pedro boys...)
Would follow the main story with the reader being the equivalent of Beverly...
Marcus Pike would be the equivalent of Ben...
Marcus Moreno would be the equivalent of Bill...
Frankie Morales would be the equivalent of Mike...
Ezra would be the equivalent of Richie...
I'm still figuring out the rest... and I'm open to suggestions...
The Fifth Element AU (Triple Frontier boys...)
The reader would be Leeloo...
Frankie would be Korbin...
Santiago would be Ruby Rhod...
Will would be Cornelius...
Benny I'm still not sure about...
Moulin Rouge AU (multiple Pedro Boys...)
Reader is Satine...
Marcus Pike is Christian...
Frankie is a dancer...
Patrick Jane might be the duke...
This is about as far as I've gotten...
Now... I welcome any and all ideas you lovlies might have!! 💚
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Right now All I want is a woman to sit on my face as I eat her out till her legs grow shaky and she falls on bed, unable to resist as I keep pleasuring her
I’m thinking this’ll probably be shorter than my usual posts on writing and storytelling, but we’ll see. Anyway, this is just my personal take on stakes.
Which is that *drum roll* you don’t actually need stakes to tell a story that people will read. Crazy, right? But I mean, the slice-of-life genre exists for a reason. Is it an outrageously popular genre? Maybe not, at least not in the West; Japan has s-o-l and a related genre, iyashikei (I’ve previously reblogged a definition of the latter if you’re interested), and both are more popular over there. Why? I dunno, but I suspect there’s less of a stigma against escapism in Eastern cultures; Miyazaki talks about the concept of ma in an interview, and how he works that space for breath into his movies, and it makes me think that there’s a relation between the two. I could talk about how Western culture, from our schedules to our media, encourage a constant state of doing without stopping to rest and simply be, but that’s a subject in and of itself, and I’m already off-topic.
The purpose of stakes is to introduce tension to your story, or to escalate tension. Your character(s) want x, or want to prevent x from happening; the greater the impact of not getting or preventing x on your characters, the higher your stakes. And the higher your stakes, the more invested your audience will be, so the logic goes.
Popular media of a more adventurous persuasion often takes this very literally, and puts the entire world/galaxy/universe in jeopardy, because what will affect your characters more than the entire world blowing up, amiright?
...
... No, actually, you’re not.
Red from Overly Sarcastic Productions (yes, I know, I reference her a lot, her stuff is just SO GOOD you should watch it) has a video on Youtube talking about the end of the world, and if I may summarize/paraphrase her, stakes don’t work like that; chances are, few things will affect your characters more than the blowing up of their personal, subjective world. In Andy Weir’s Artemis (spoilers ahead), the highest stakes throughout the book are whether or not the protagonist can save the inhabitant’s of humanity’s first lunar colony, comprising at most a few thousand people. According to the above logic, that should be a “Yeah, sure, kinda interesting”, but it was pretty suspenseful because the lives of people we knew and liked were at stake, not the whole world.
Humanity is growing more interconnected than ever before, but most of us have a few hundred people whom we perceive as having impact on our lives; everyone else is mostly treated with indifference. Not because we’re a cold, apathetic species, but our conscious minds aren’t capable of making deep emotional connections beyond that point.
Another part of this is that the audience is taking something of a gamble with every story they pick up. Does it end happily, or sadly? Marriage or death? And while there is certainly some satisfaction derived from a well-written tragedy, that’s really hard to pull off when the story’s entire world is destroyed and stays destroyed, to the point that I can think of precisely one example that did make it work: The Cabin in the Woods (and there are a few asterisks there, like it being a horror movie). So unless you can pull off one of the most difficult tasks any writer has ever attempted, you probably won’t write the end of the world, or even the end of your characters’ world, though that’s a more realistic goal. Remember that gamble the audience is taking? If you put forward the End of the World in a full-length novel (short-stories have more leeway because the audience investment is usually in the low tens of pages, and not in the mid to high hundreds), the odds of you writing it and satisfying your audience are so astronomically tiny that most authors aren’t going to actually write it. So the audience bets that your protagonists will prevail in preventing it. And they’re almost certainly right.
Let’s say you pick up a book, regardless of genre, set in a small town. There are good people, and decent people, and a few creeps. Most of the book takes place in this small town, and the author really writes characters well, to the point that there are a few characters you adore despite deep, nuanced faults, and some you hate with a fiery passion, even if they have redeeming qualities. This small town feels real to you, and while the story alludes to a wider world, grounds itself in this wider world, the meat of the story is here, wherever here is. We grow with our characters along this journey, and love this beautiful tapestry the author’s woven for us.
And then we find out that one character we love is going to die.
The world will keep on turning. This town will keep on living. In that literal, objective sense, the stakes are pretty low. But this light that’s kept us reading for five, six, seven hundred pages, will soon be snuffed out. And if the author has written this story half so well as I’ve described, the ending could be good even if, or perhaps because this character dies. In short, this character’s death is a very realistic outcome.
I’d bet the farm you’re more invested in this one character than in any number of worlds. In fact, a lot of those stories know the audience knows the EotW won’t happen, and so the suspense and shock, and plot twisting, if they’re written well, comes from which of our beloved characters will die.
And they don’t even have to die, really; even a protagonist not getting what they want can devastate your audience.
I once heard (and I wish I could remember the source of this) that in poetry, anyone can write of grand and noble ideas and objects, and sound wise, even profound, but it takes a true master of the art to appreciate and bring forth profundity in the mundane, the small, the innocuous. I think the same can be said of fiction; not that we all need to write literary fiction (good luck prising the dragons from my cold dead hands), but that maybe rather than writing grand sweeping vistas and great armies, we could write all the little happenings in a single tree. Travelling the length and breadth of an entire fantasy world can be a fun time, don’t get me wrong (Paolini was one of my favourite authors growing up), but if writing grand adventures ever gets stale for you... maybe try writing about that tree. Its breadth might not impress, but them roots might grow deeper than you ever imagined.
