Devann • 30+ • she/her • bi aroace
My favorite mythological characters are Lucifer, Loki, Medusa, and Persephone. I automatically gravitate towards the biggest trash fire in any given fandom. Honestly that's probably all you need to know about me
You keep making jokes like “teehee as a family abolitionist I just want children to die in the woods” but like… that actually is what happened to kids before the invention of the family. There actually is no alternative
this is the funniest ask ive ever gotten in my life
casveman in 40,000 BC after letting the fifth baby crawl off into the woods alone: hmm . maybe we should come up with another way to do this i dont think the first four are coming back
If could offer a tip to writers of setting-change AU fanfic, as someone who tends to be hot-and-cold with them…. it’s important to have some idea of what the dynamic between your characters is, what about that dynamic appeals so much to you, and whether that dynamic can be recreated with a setting change. Sometimes it can’t; it’s deeply intertwined with the specific circumstances they go through in the original setting and plot, and moving them to another one would so completely change their stories and their character arcs that it’s a fundamentally different relationship. (For instance, it’s really hard for me to imagine Utena/Anthy working in an AU; so much of why they’re compelling is wrapped up in the story of Revolutionary Girl Utena. A lot of period romances don’t really translate to a more modern setting with modern social mores, though some do; there’s a reason that people do present-day riffs on Emma but less so Mansfield Park.) But more often than not I think AUs can work, but some are going to be easier to pull off than others – both in the sense of the particular AU you choose, and how easily your ship can be moved out of its setting in the first place. And in order to do that, you still need to figure out what are the basic beats of their story and dynamics of their relationship and how to translate those into this new setting.
For instance, for Garashir from Star Trek: DS9 to “be Garashir” in my book, there needs to be: a) a major difference in their worldviews, with Garak having a greater willingness to cross certain lines, b) some shared cultural and/or intellectual interest that they bond over, ideally something that gets them arguing, c) specific traumatic experiences that they support each other through, as with episodes like “The Wire” or “In Purgatory’s Shadow/By Inferno’s Light.” Also all of this needs to be d) mutual – e.g. they share cultural things, it’s not just one teaching the other about them – and they need to view each other as equals and have a fairly even power dynamic. This is even more important than Garak being an alien and Julian being a doctor. If you don’t have at least 3 out of 4 (but ideally all 4), then you just have a story of an older man falling for a younger man, which is perfectly fine but it’s not really Garashir on its own, so you may as well just write original characters at that point. And I’m just giving this as an example because they’re my current OTP, but every single ship has particular important “stuff” that is why people like them, what makes their relationship tick. For Victor/Yuuri from Yuri!!! on Ice, for instance, some of it’s about the dynamic between them (established star in their shared field x newercomer whose career has hit a speed bump) but a lot of what makes them “compelling” to people is also about the particular beats of their story in the anime. AUs work because usually the setting, particular jobs they hold, etc. are less important than the dynamic between those characters, and understanding that and keeping a lock on that is key to making sure it really is “Destiel in a coffeeshop” and not “original fiction that just happens to use the names of preexisting characters.”
This also doesn’t just apply to shipping fic, either. Any relationship – romantic, sexual, platonic, familial, professional, adversarial, etc. – is going to have particular defining features without which it feels like a different relationship, and you need to figure out how to make those work in your new setting. If you’re doing something more focused on a particular character, you need to ask yourself how much would this character be different under these circumstances (experiences make people! someone who has become who they are because of capital-T Trauma just won’t be the same person in a fluffy high school AU) vs. what are the core parts of her personality that would and need to stay the same to keep her recognizably Your Blorbo. (You need to do that with the individual characters in relationship fic, too.) But overall, the question to ask yourself is: why am I writing an AU? Why not canonverse – or conversely, why not original fiction in this setting? Why do you want to put these characters or this relationship in this particular time/place/set of circumstances? What do you hope to get out of this alternate universe? Your answer to that will help guide you in answering the rest of these questions.
(Also, to be clear, this specifically applies to setting-change AUs, not ones set in the canonverse. In a canonverse AU, even one that is fairly canon-divergent plot-wise, you can play around more with the character dynamic (what if the more powerful one is now the weaker one? for instance. or what if one had made this one particular choice, how do the butterfly’s wings shuffle everything?) and still have it be recognizably those characters because they’re in that original setting, reacting to at least some familiar other characters and events. But if you change both setting and dynamic then it starts to feel more like original fiction in cosplay. You’ve changed too much at once. Think of it as an experiment where you’re playing around with changing one thing at a time and using the canon as your control.)
It’s still surprising to me how underrated this ship is. These two share so many moments together where they clearly rely on and care for each other, that they can understand what the other means wordlessly. Their relationship dynamic is simple and yet there is so much depth. Especially, I was rewatching the battle of Zoro & Luffy vs Kaido, in which Zoro once again claims that if Luffy dies, he’s going with him. BASICALLY, he’s saying that he has no reason to live if there is no Luffy, and RIGHT AFTER Luffy CONFIRMS that?
Just in general Oda has developed their relationship; you can actually see the difference in how their trust level is building from the beginning, and how Zoro changes because of Luffy. I cannot wait to see Luffy learn how many sacrifices his swordsman has done for him.
Yet it’s weird that it’s not a popular ship? Every time I bring it up, I get various responses like “oh I’d have never thought to ship them” or “why would you??”. WHY WOULD YOU NOT? Just look at them!? They are clearly beyond normal friendship.
I was young, so it feels like something I read in a book sometimes. I remember how chilly it could get at night in the summer, which doesn’t seem to happen as much anymore.
That’s actually the thing that seems to keep popping back up in my mind - that like, it was really chilly in the mornings in summer even, and it would warm up, and it seems to just kind of… stay warm all the time.
I dunno. The seasons were more distinct, there were bigger temperature swings on individual days, and like… weather was more predictable on a seasonal basis, if not on a daily basis.
Like… the kind of seasons you read about in Olde Tyme Books? They… were real things. We didn’t always have snow on Winter Break, but we had a pretty predictable number of snow days?
And it almost feels silly to talk about it. “What were normal seasons like, Uncle Spider?”
But yeah.
Watch seasonal-based movies made before about 1975 – ones set around Easter, or Halloween, or New Year’s – and pay attention to what people are wearing. Late October? It got cold when the sun went down, like ‘put on a jacket’ cold and I’m not talking northern US, I’m talking Georgia.
Today (Aug 18) is only a week before the start of most public schools in the US. A week from now? Back then, it’d already be chilly in the morning, enough to need a windbreaker on the way to school. By midday it would’ve warmed up, but even in Georgia the mornings had a nip to them by end of August, start of September.
And in northern Virginia, not sure about now, but the schools used to plan for ten snow days a year. I recall one year we had eleven days off thanks to a foot or so of fresh snow every two or three days. Even in years we didn’t use all the snow days, there were still frequent late openings and early closings. It wasn’t all that uncommon for summer vacation to start a week later, because those days had to be made up, somewhere.
Locally, this summer has (despite the terrible heat elsewhere in the US) been a strange bit of callback to my childhood. Excepting two nights all summer, every night it’s dropped to 72F at the highest, but most often in the 60s – with the caveat that it sometimes took half the night to get there. It’s not a sharp drop like I remember, as a child. But at least it has been cool enough to leave the windows open and a fan on – and that’s the kind of summer I grew up with, in Alabama and Georgia (regions significantly warmer, otherwise, than the mid-atlantic where I live now).
That sharp drop was the reason my dad installed a whole-house fan every place we lived: because the evening air would legitimately drop a good 5-10 degrees as the sun set. Enough to open the windows, run the fan, and the whole house would cool right down by dinnertime.
Now? If we go by last summer, even having a house set up perfectly (central open staircase) for a whole-house fan, what’s the point if the temperature stays just as high after the sun goes down, as it was before?
I recently read a poem about climate change making the seasons less familiar in a poetry collection published in 1978.
I was like, excuse me? It was noticeable already? Obviously I know it’s changed in my lifetime, but…
need a bi4bi t4t m/f pairing where the girl is a giant freak and not in the “cute manic pixie” way but in the “unethical experiments in my fucked up laboratory” way and the guy is a golden retriever who thinks he can fix her. and he brings her cute bento lunches and she’s like “bradley shut up put on your fucking gloves and hold this possum down so i can graft these giant grasshopper legs to it”
Being a member of Flint’s crew must be exhausting. Twice a week you’re put in an impossible, desperate situation then the captain does something unhinged and saves the day in a way no one understands but everyone has come to expect anyway. He tells you to do something, you do it; two hours later, he tells you to do the exact opposite and you do it too (he makes a compelling argument). The crew voted him off six times already and somehow he’s still captain; no one has anything to say about it. There’s no way he’ll wriggle out of this one, you tell yourself for the eighth time this month. No one wants to die for him. You’ll all do whatever he wants you to do. He can control the weather.
