Alyx/Atlas

He's doing the best with what he's gotttttt.

-a little random guy who causes problems. And fun

In Dolorem we learned a funny thing about grief and sacrifice.

There is often nothing to place blame upon but the circumstances. Or some kind of higher power, if you believe in that.

People do what they do because they believe they must, and blaming them for that would be like blaming the sun for burning your skin.

But those feelings need somewhere to go.

When you experience a loss so great that your world shatters beneath your feet, you’d do just about anything to make that pain disappear. In that moment, nothing matters more than the aching hole in your chest and you need to fill it, or you’ll collapse.

Some people choose to fill it with anger. Why me, why now, what did I do to deserve this? Fruitberries did this in Dolorem. He admitted that he was never truly angry at Couriway, or Feinberg.

Emotions are a powerful thing. They drive people to do things against their own survival instincts. They can heal and they can harm.

Fruitberries just wanted his friend back. That’s not possible, though, so he had to find something to do with all that rage.

Feinberg was angry, too. He chose to direct that anger inward, because the only thing he couldn’t stand more than the pain of loss was the pain of being responsible for it.

Everyone changed. That’s what happens when tragedy strikes. If there’s nothing to hold everyone together, they fall apart.

Why isn’t Couriway angry at everyone else? It’s unfair, how they’re treating him.

Couriway would raise that everything is unfair. Why did Tapl have to come back to life without his soul? Why did Feinberg have to bear the brunt of Fruitberries’s anger? Why did Reign fall ill with the same affliction the late King did, except he got to survive?

Unfairness, blame, anger, guilt; Couriway accepts them all as part of the crown placed upon his head.

When emotions are high, the worst thing a leader can do is reflect them back.

Someone has to keep the kingdom together. Someone has to protect people from themselves.

I know you appreciate us asking questions, so I'd like to know about your understand of how Feinberg process that in the fic Fine. What does he want, what does he need, and what does he think he deserves. Extra if you add how aware he is about the differences. (He probably isn't very he's kind an emotional idiot here.) If you can, you know.

-a little random guy who causes problems. And fun

Ah yes, the hero’s journey and the role of the protagonist.

What do they want? What do they need? What do they get?

That’s what the whole story’s about, isn’t it?

For me and my characters, I have a hard time making things that cut and dry. What does f!Fein want? If you asked him, you’d get a different answer than if you asked me. What’s the truth? Which is his genuine desire? They’re both true.

Well, f!Fein thinks he wants everyone to leave him the hell alone so he can fulfill his duty as a faulty human being and serve others until he can’t anymore. To an extent, he does want that. That’s why he keeps running from every good thing in his life. What he really wants, subconsciously, is also different from what he needs.

He wants to proven wrong. He wants to be wrong for one goddamn time in his life. About himself, someone else, the nature of his power, whatever.

As for what he needs? It’s simple. He needs to be loved. More specifically, he needs to believe he is loved. He needs someone to prove him wrong about his own self worth. He needs the very same cold, hard, evidence that his past has shackled him to. Of course f!Fein doesn’t believe that. He spent his whole life being taught that love is for good servants who deserve it. He doesn’t think he does. He never will, until…

f!Couriway, bless his heart, believes that love is enough. He thinks all he needs to do to help his roommate is love.

It’s not that simple. How do you go about convincing someone who spent nearly thirty years believing he is worth nothing but the things he can do for others, that he’s wrong? How do you prove that?

Unfortunately, f!Couri can’t use brute force to solve this problem. It starts with f!Fein. Fein needs to realize that he wants to be wrong. That he’s tired of living like he’s less than everyone else despite everything he’s done to break even.

f!Fein is someone who believes he was born with a great debt to the world. No matter how much he pays back, the interest compounds too fast.

He doesn’t need someone to forgive his debt. He needs someone to show him it never existed in the first place.

I saw something like this earlier:

“Gasps echo. Chairs scrape the floor. It’s not sudden—it’s slow. Methodical. Practiced.

She watches. It’s unlike anything she’s seen before.”

Nobody. Wants. To. Read. This.

It makes me nauseous. Seriously. Who the hell wants to read words one at a time with a million periods in between?

You don’t even explain anything. What does it mean for chairs to scrape the floor methodically? Slow, practiced, purposeful—these are just adjectives. They need context. Like, something of substance to give them meaning. It’s like a condiment with nothing to put it on.

No offense to those of you that drink salad dressing from the bottle. I know you’re out there.

Anyway, I don’t care how someone or something moved if you don’t tell me why. Why is it significant that the stupid fucking chairs moved like that? Tell me. That’s the whole point of the story. It isn’t just ‘things happen! Look at me jingling keys!’

For god’s sake, move on from your stupid chairs and their stupid scraping. I’m so serious. Move on. Nothing irritates me more than spending too much time on a moment that would take two seconds in real life for the sole purpose of being profound about it.

The pacing of your words affects how readers experience the story. If you want your audience to feel the shock of whatever lore-bomb you just dropped, you have to give them an opportunity to process it, which means you need to keep telling the story. Lingering there extends the moment. It never lets your readers breathe. You don’t want that.

I have to care, too. More importantly, you have to make me care. I need to connect to your story, your characters, in a way only human brains can. That’s the hard part. That’s the fun part.

There’s endless nuance like this that simply cannot be feigned. Writing is an art form, for god’s sake. People don’t make art just to look at it.

That’s why you still feel empty after generating your word salad inferior to the Wattpad ramblings of a teenager in 2012. The product isn’t the point. You have robbed yourself of the catharsis of making something. Something that would not—could not—exist without you.

It doesn’t matter a microscopic, teeny-weeny bit that “your” writing is beautiful and profound if the story sucks. A machine can’t tell a story because it doesn’t have experiences. It has a hodge-podge of scraped literature that it has been trained to emulate. That’s like using a hammer to frost a cake. You’re not going to get something good. You’re going to get the shitty product of using a tool that fundamentally lacks the ability to do the damn thing correctly.

The AI does not understand the hero’s journey or figurative language or subversion of expectations or the reason we tell stories in the goddamn first place.

We tell stories to connect with each other. As people. We make up some bullshit and translate it into whatever language and share it with the people we care about because there are things that can only be communicated through storytelling.

People hate this AI prose garbage because it’s not a human voice they’re reading. It lacks intention. The words need to be given meaning by a person with a life and experiences and pain and all that stuff a machine could never have or hope to replicate. If I can't get lost in the stream of consciousness of another human, as is my god-given right, I am not interested.

What’s the point of creation without the creation?

If you’re telling a story by relying on a machine, you’re not telling a story.

all i have to do is be around a person for a couple hours and i can pretty accurately make their character’s dialogue plausible. a few years and you get me finishing their sentences before they can think about what they were going to say. it’s my own superpower i guess.

going bowling with hax was an experience but to tell you the truth it didn’t change anything about his character bc all he did was reinforce what i already knew about him lol. (which is that he’s a lovely dude who is absolutely winning the idgaf war)

it’s awesome to hear from the hackingnoises enjoyers that i did him justice. i kept having to stop myself and go “would he say that? maybe he would say it but in a different way.”

uhh tl;dr understanding people is the why & how of my reasons for writing. i’ve made other posts about this and finding a middle ground between character and person. i write to understand. so i put a lot of effort into communicating that.

not in the story, no. couri doesn’t drink and i don’t think he’d like me writing him drunk lol. it was just a silly doodle. i could ask him but i don’t drink (much) either so i wouldn’t even know how to write that :,D

hello!! welcome to my glorified piece of scratch paper. i love asks & i love talking about my fics :D thank you for asking!!

i’m not quite sure what you mean, but the recurring theme between fein and couri in my work is something like this:

best friends that also despise each other and delight in getting on each other’s nerves. they also hold a kind of immense respect for one another that is frustratingly unique to their relationship and cannot be replicated with any other person in their lives, so they’re always cosmically drawn to each other because fate has a twisted sense of humor and thinks it’s hilarious to give them problems they need the other to help them solve.

they make each other worse and then, gradually, they make each other better.

Meta-phore — Chapter One: A Decision

“You died?” Rocky screeched. The computer translated it with much less urgency than Rocky’s native language. “Grace died? But Grace right here. Humans only die once. Grace said that.”

“Rocky!” Grace’s voice echoed in the small atmosphere. “Rock, calm down. I didn’t mean it literally. It’s a meta-phore.”