#swallowtailed

GRINS. i love talking about this twelve yr old webseries thank you SO much for this ask. the last time i did a full nmtd rewatch was about a year ago, and that usually includes lolilo. but i truly and steadfastly believe that nmtd was one of the best LIWs that came out of that era, if not THE best (i think LBD and call me katie are also up there!)

and i also hold true to the opinion that nmtd is one of the best maan adaptations to ever do it! like, should be ranked next to the tennant/tate maan in terms of understanding the intricacies of the original text and how to translate it to a modern screen. guys, they made beatrice and benedick talking head teen vloggers, because if they were 17 in 2013 of COURSE they would be ranting to camera about clotheshangers and dead birds!!! theyre fucking WEIRDOS who are obsessed with the sound of their own voices, and they're SHAKESPEAREAN! when we start to think about the format of the vlog as it emerged in the early 2010s, it's such a clever way to take advantage of the budding genre and use it to characterize these timeless characters of beatrice, benedick, and hero in ways that can be understood by modern audiences-- they ran INSTAGRAM ACCOUNTS! they held Q&A VIDEOS!! all in character!! it was a multi-media film project meant to emulate the feeling of a real teenager's life on the internet, and beyond just the sheer enthusiasm and dedication to it, they were successful because it still stayed realistic and true to character form

NOT TO MENTION. the added meta layer of the vlogger's camera being diagetic, and a force that Must be acknowledged whether you like it or not, being a CRUCIAL part of hero's scandal. hero's wedding is shakespeare's commentary on the concept of virginal purity and what it means when "a good woman is scorned," in front of her whole community, her father, and before God. in part it's so horrible because claudio chooses to confront her publicly, rather than address it behind closed doors. in nmtd, this becomes hero's birthday party, and while the general accusations lobbed remain the same (hero's a cheater, meg's a slut) the fact that it's recorded by MULTIPLE point of views and uploaded initially without her consent holds so much WEIGHT. the audience suddenly becomes complicit in a part of the harm: we, the youtube audience hungry for views, have to suddenly contend with hero as a real teenage girl, rather than a Character For Our Screens. benedick points DIRECTLY at us when shouting at dogberry to turn the camera off. you just ruined a 16 yr old girl's birthday party. don't you have any respect for her?

and to GIVE HER THE AGENCY to control what is said about her online. to let her decide for herself what she wants to put on the internet and fucking put all the rumors to bed! it's GOOD. hero is a character that i often find gets so shafted as Just The Pure Cousin but she holds immeasurable depth as a female shakespeare character and it's so GOOD that nmtd pushes her to a more central role. like! hero duke you are so so special to me.

also it's just so funny to think about don john as a shitty little 16 yr old with evil villain plots. that's just what being a 3rd year in high school is like, i think. and and and doesn't anyone even think about PEDRO DONALDSON. no one has really good takes on don pedro because he's mostly an asshole who exists to be a hypocritical jerk BUT pedro donaldson gets so complex and fun in these serieses. and where were YOU when pedrazar was trending yaoi in the streets because i literally still remember when we learned that one foot in boiling hot lava was RETCONNED. what a wild time.

thank you marsh! <3

22. are there certain types of writing you won’t do? (style, pov, genre, tropes, etc)

i had to think about this one... i think it's less that there are certain types of writing i won't do and more that i tend to gravitate to other things. i don't often write gen fic or dark stuff, but it's happened once or twice! and i can't really imagine writing in first person, but for the right concept and character, who knows!

...but again, if i can paint an unflattering picture of myself: i am a notorious fluff hater. i really have nothing to say about a cute moment between two besotted characters with no relationship problems. if a character tries to drink from a cozy cup of hot chocolate i'm flying through the air to kick it clean out of their hand. i love sweet moments in a greater story about many things, but pure sugary fluff is something i dislike and would find extremely hard to write. where's the GRIT. the ANXIETY??

unless the hot chocolate is spiked with sex pollen, that sort of fic is probably never going to happen 😅

74. you’ve posted a fic anonymously. How would someone be able to guess that you’d written it?

1. What fic of yours would you recommend to someone who had never read any of your work? (In other words, what do you think is the best introduction to your fics?)

this is tough because the fics that i’m proudest of aren’t necessarily the most representative of my output. if i had to pick something that was the most solidly my-fic-style while covering the themes that come up most, i’d go with “library magic,” aka caleb’s good ending. from there one can enter the overall caleb fic cinematic universe.

12. Are there any tropes you used to dislike but have grown on you?

an answer that is relevant to you: i used to be very uninterested in modern/realistic aus lol. this was when i was a reader who was a lot more interested in escapism (and also didn’t interact much with litfic for the same reason). now i like that if you spin it right, you can still be specific and/or esoteric enough to take people away from their typical lives.

47. If [insert fic] was a pair of shoes, what kind would it be? Describe the shoes.

hewwo this message is so so old i'm sorry

oh no i missed this one yesterday sorry marsh!! sleepover sunday now :D

(overview: thi is warforged, their dad is earth genasi and he [re]built them, they're both earth ashari from a small village in the wastemarsh, which is a magical wasteland on the edge of a massive crevasse that used to be a portal to the elemental plane of earth)

i have just. a bunch of writing about thi's home with their dad and it was always unlikely that the party was ever going to meet their dad or visit their home but thi invited pebble there once. here's some of it that i can share now!

there is very little metal here. an [thi's dad] has some tools tucked into a roll that’s carefully kept in a corner by a lamp and a small project most of the time, but it’s a hobby, not what he does for the village as a whole on the daily. most things are wood or threadbare fabric.

most of their precious things are on a small table that serves as an altar, names and images of four generations of earth genasi back to the ones who stayed on this side of the scar of life when it closed. candles and incense and flowers when thi can pick them.

when thi’s home, there are two longbows and two packs in a corner by the door. they’re usually unstrung. an taught her how to hunt, but his work mostly focuses on the ashy dead soil, and he stays closer to the village. growing up there was a point when thi started regularly going out farther and longer than he did to bring back food—thi wants to wander, an’s good closer to home. there was a point that she became a better shot than he is.

does quiche count? 

the problem is, right, that i love the concept of savory pies, and I make a pretty good beef pot pie that really is just beef stew in a pastry casing, but i don't actually have that many individual savory pies i like 

5. Favorite NPC.

In terms of NPCs I’ve created I’m fond of my NPC Eliza, who does the record keeping for the weird secret organization the party has joined but remains suspicious of. She was supposed to be a throwaway but I really like roleplaying fantasy bureaucracy so I wrote her a backstory. I haven’t ran that campaign since pre-pandemic though :( I would explain her cool backstory but some players follow me on here

In terms of NPCs in games I play, in the longest running one it’s a hard pick because our DM is REALLY GOOD at creating super interesting NPCs with cool  backstories and plot ties but atm it’s probably Luu, who is a warlock and also maybe a clone? Folks, we just don’t know, but we did find a room of people in [people sized] test tubes who looked just like them. The test tube part was pretty normal at the time we’d just broken out of our own test tubes but the hundreds of copies of a random person was not. And now they stay at an inn with us! but also I cannot stress enough that everyone in the world is very interesting and fun

19. Do you or your party have any dice superstitions?

I don’t personally beyond stuff like switching dice if you roll too many shitty numbers in a row, and I think both myself and everyone I play with are kinda aware of which of their dice are balanced like shit? But I share dice with a bunch of people so stuff like that doesn’t bother me. One of the players in the campaign I also play in swears the roll20 dice roller is biased against her and like to be fair it Sure Looks That Way

K - What character has your favorite development arc/the best development arc?

ohhh this one is surprisingly difficult and to be honest i just sat here Thinking for quite a while.

I haaaaave to say renee minkowski. she started out as such a rigid person, like. someone who literally could not have fun and actively hid the things that gave her enjoyment, someone who thought everyone was against her, who at every opportunity was berating eiffel and hilbert AND hera for not being up to her standards--and i can only imagine the awful kind of pressure she was putting on herself, if that’s what she was doing to them, and she was really fucking diligent about. well. everything. and by the time brave new world rolls around she had gained SO much self respect. her relationships become so much more nuanced. she stopped measuring herself (and everyone around her) in “how well do they follow the rules” and started measuring in “how is this person utilizing their strengths to make the world a better place?”. 

and at some point, i don’t know when exactly, but at some point minkowski stopped undervaluing and underestimating people and started demanding that they be the better person that she knew they could be. her “i get it, you’re hurting” speech to jacobi might’ve actually physically killed me. she put aside so much of her pride to reach out to a person who she had hurt so deeply--who had hurt her so deeply--and it fucking pays off. even fucking kepler, when he turns, says “I’m on jacobi and minkowski’s side.” his friend, and the woman he overthrew, who delivered a speech that cut deep enough that it was half of his reason to go back to humanity.

(i would be remiss if i did not mention the “you don’t have to (say yes)” version of james kirk, and while i’m not opposed to talking about fic like it’s literature cause it is, that’s more of a nsfw convo than i’m willing to get into on this blog.)

P - Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas).

I have been thinking about a swing dance au for fucking AGES but tbh might turn it into an original story. also, PROFESSIONAL SURFING AU OH MY GOD. my sister was going to get into it at one point and i’m not good but i enjoy it and i would LOVE to write about it oh my god. currently i’m fixated on critical role but i’d also love to see the dance au for the magicians.

X - A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.

oh man i am a huge sucker for the power of friendship (journey’s end, all of mlp, wrath of khan + into darkness, welcome to night vale especially the heist and parade day and....well MOST of the arc finales) and i also love love LOVE we used to be friends. fucking. anakin and obi wan’s final duel? the doctor and the master? terra vs all the teen titans? LOVE that shit.