#stormears

Thanks for your ask! I asked a Chinese friend since I’m not Chinese and I don’t want to make assumptions, and she said that she’s never met someone with the last name Mo, let alone a Guan Shan! I live in an area populated by a lot of international Chinese students, and it’s the same for me. Surnames like He, Jian, and Zhan are very common, but I haven’t met an A-Yi or Zheng Xi. I have met a lot of A-Tians though! I wouldn’t think his name is confusing or strange because of an English translation though, as a lot of names that are average in other languages are strange when translated.

Excuse me just a sec... just gotta breathe a bit. 😳😳😳

Thank you. Thank you so much, that means a lot. I sometimes think I get too carried away, and it’s hard to know when I’ve put things in that just don’t belong in the moment. My mind jumps a lot and it’s like I have to get everything down before I digress into something else. It’s the equivalent of staring at a plate of food and knowing you’ve got five seconds to partake before it’s taken away, and you get the next dish. I have to get it down fast, or I know I won’t write anything at all.

It can feel like a mess sometimes, and I can only hope I make sense. I’m very lucky, I have readers like yourself who keep me on my tightrope instead of falling through the air, and you’re very good at making sure I know when something can be tweaked or if it doesn’t read right, which I do very much appreciate.

I haven’t posted anything for Marvel, so you may have stumbled across my bookmarks, but I’ll let you know if inspiration strikes for any new fandoms. I think at the moment, I have so much planned for this one that it will be a long time before I get to that point though, so there’s that.

Aaaaaaand, there’s the little cubic Cloud in my head threatening me with violence for even contemplating writing Sefikura...

Since you seem knowledgeable about FF7 and even Crisis Core, I thought I would try out a Crisis Core question on you. One kinda silly aesthetic thing and one about a CC character in the fandom.

I have NOT played Crisis Core, or the OG game, but I am open to spoilers. I feel like no matter what I learn, if Remake Part 2 is anything like Remake Part 1, there will be fun and surprises even if I know the story front to back.  

So, I have NOT played Crisis Core and was wondering a few things about it. I saw a YT vid summarizing it a while back. It probably has no significance, but is there a reason or even a point in time when Sephiroth and Genesis started wearing their unique black and red coats instead of soldier uniforms? I’ve seen fanart of them and Angeal all wearing SOLDIER uniforms and hanging out as friends. From what I remember in the video, it’s not clear/I just don’t remember, if the three are actual FRIENDS or just friendly coworkers so to speak, who hang around each other because they are so far beyond the abilities and influence of other military men around them that they don’t relate to or interact with them.

But anyway, all three wearing the uniform may just be a fun fanon thing and perhaps Genesis and Sephiroth were never portrayed wearing it in canon, ever. The answer could simply be that the black coat is how Sephiroth was designed in the mid 90s so that’s all he ever wore, and the red coat is what they designed Genesis with in the mid 00’s so that’s all HE ever wore, and that’s that! But I’d be interested to know if my assumption is wrong, and they canonically were dismissing the standard uniform, and got away with wearing what they wanted because no one around them had the authority or balls to tell them what clothes to wear. 

Next, if you played CC around the time it was new, do you think you can describe the fandom perception of Genesis? Because I first found a vague description of who he was, saw some cool fanart of him, and THEN came across YT comments about his poetry-reading and how he was a copy-paste design of a celebrity at the time who PAID to have his freaking face in an FF game and like…I get the impression people are annoyed by him or hate him or find him cringe-worthy and am afraid to dig deeper. Yes I will form my own opinion but I definitely feel some secondhand embarrassment for liking this guy okay and then getting this vibe that he’s hated on. 

Thank you very much for taking the time to read my lengthy, non-shallow questions of “did Sephiroth wear a tanktop” and “do people besides me like the hot, poetry-spewing fire wizard” :) 

Goodness, what a question! Hmm… It’s been a while for me with Crisis Core, but I believe in the actual game, all we know for sure is that Angeal and Genesis grew up in the same town. So we can assume they’re fairly close, but whether or not the two are actually friends with Sephiroth or just friendly co-workers I think is up for interpretation. With the focus so firmly on Zack’s POV, we don’t really see too much of their dynamic in-game.

Read somewhere that in the USA, if a serving of food has less than 10 calories, the packaging is allowed to say “zero calories” even if, technically, the food has say, 7 or whatever

aww, that FHQ game poster is one of my favorites too... i had a lot of fun trying to squeeze in all these tiny details! i drew the original  picture at about A4 size thinking i would make prints later, though i have to figure out the best way to be able to ship them first! but thanks for inquiring, i’ll look into prints again now that i know peeps might be interested in them :>

I was a few days off in my estimate of answering this, but I’m finally getting around to it.

There seem to be basically two questions here: how to write long fight scenes, and how to avoid monotony.

Regarding the first question, fight scenes are definitely not my expertise, but particularly if you’re going to have a long/plot important fight scene, you really want to know what exactly is going to be happening, or you can end up with the fanfiction sex scene issue where characters have 5 hands and 3 mouths and are touching too many places at once.

Depending on how much they’re going to be moving, you may want to sketch out a map of where everything is before you start writing it. Where are the civilians, where are the obstacles, where will they be moving when. This can help you avoid the issue of contradicting yourself or losing track of what’s going on.

Before you start, writing out weapons, injuries, possibly even hits, can help a lot. You should know where they’re bleeding from, how much blood they’ve lost, what injuries will keep them from fighting as well. You should also know how each weapon works, what they can do with each one, etc.

This may all seem like a lot of work, but it’s a lot easier to do it before you start than to try to figure it out as you go.

What you want to do then is figure out how long and how much is enough. If you think of it as a movie, how much more does a 20-minute car chase give the viewer than a 2-minute car chase? What does your reader get from the 30th paragraph of action that they didn’t get from the 15th? And keep in mind that a lot of fighting is really energy-intensive and most people likely aren’t going to be able to fight for long periods of time, particularly once they start getting injured. People don’t want to fight for a long time, and incapacitating someone with a joint lock or kicking in their knee is more advantageous than trying to land--and taking--a dozen hits.

Dialogue can help break up a long action sequence, as can thoughts. Show your character reacting, show them planning, show them making their next decision. Fighting shouldn’t be all thinking, particularly if it’s fast up-close hand-to-hand combat, but if it’s going to be a long scene, there should be some strategy or something beyond just kicks and punches.

I suggest looking at @howtofightwrite for specifics for whatever type of fighting you’re planning on doing, as they have a lot of great posts about basically every type of fighting and weapons you can think of.

Regarding making the scene less monotonous, one of the biggest ways to prevent that is varying your sentence structure. You can also use sentence fragments as a way to indicate faster or more disjointed thinking. Longer sentences can show a more extended sequence, while shorter sentences or sentence fragments can show more abrupt actions or thoughts.

OH. MY GOD.

Are you talking about Conversing the Dragon? Holy shit. That fic changed my fucking life. I adored it when I read it for the first time… it’s been years, but yeah, that was a huge reason why I liked HitsuRuki so much.