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screaming into her tea

@laylainalaska / laylainalaska.tumblr.com

Sholio on AO3. Mostly fan stuff (lately Biggles; also Agent Carter, MCU, books, comics, whatever catches my eye). Fic blog is located at sholiofic.
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Reblogged alessandriana
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basically I think that if your protagonist doesn’t want to fuck someone so bad it makes them look stupid, then there probably isn’t enough energy in your story. “Fuck someone” isn’t literal btw—they can want to uncover the secrets of their parent’s death, they can want to prove their worth, they can want a donut from one particular bakery—it can be anything so long as they want it so bad that they’ll make decisions that make any sane person go “are you a moron??”, with little to no forethought, or even tons of forethought and this is still the option they chose. Because they want to fuck that thing so bad.

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wait isn’t that just giving your characters a motivation???

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  1. You’d be surprised at how many people fail to give their characters motivation, and so write a story that’s less good than it could be.
  2. It’s surprisingly easy to come up with an incredibly cool plot and characters without giving the characters enough motivation to make it actually compelling enough to read or even write. If you have a cool af idea that you somehow just can’t bring yourself to write, ask yourself what the main character wants, and how is that driving their decisions?
  3. They need to want it so bad that it makes them look stupid. They need to impulse-buy a half-broken spaceship by mortgaging radioactive land, because they’re just that desperate to prove themselves more than a discarded scrap of a far greater history. They need to want their home and their people safe so much that they’ll risk their own soul to march across hundreds of miles of unknown and terrible danger to throw a cursed ring into a volcano. They need to love someone so much, and need them to know it, that they’ll blurt it out in the middle of a press conference or royal ball, or surrounded by enemies with a garrote at their throat or about to be frozen in carbonite or in the middle of a storm-tossed sea battle between pirates, British Navy, and the undead—or, they need to love someone so much that they’ll swear fealty to an evil emperor and kill a bunch of friends and children for the power to save them. They need to be so balls-to-the-wall insane in at least one regard that the plot isn’t just happening to them, they are in some way causing the plot.
  4. Also keep in mind! When it comes to character development, “WANT” is NOT the same as “NEED”! Sometimes a character knows what’s good for them, what will truly often make them happy, but more often they don’t. They want the acclaim and adoration of the crowds, but really they need the recognition, acceptance or love of one particular person—and maybe that person is their own self. They want to avenge the loss of their loved one, but really they need to accept the loss and move on. A refusal to accept what they need is usually going to get in the way of what they want—and sometimes they figure it out just in time to go forward and climactically achieve their goal, or maybe they double down on their character flaws in a classic display of Greek tragedy!
#writing#useful
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So as of 2/3 of the way through Babylon 5 season 3 (we just watched the "War Without End" 2-parter last night) I keep thinking: how does this show EXIST. What makes you do this, and especially what makes you do this in the 90s, when TV sci-fi was Star Trek and bright happy futures and episodes-of-the-week in which bumpy-headed aliens have cultural differences that are neatly resolved in 42 minutes.

What on EARTH makes you decide, in the middle of season 3 of a 5-season show, to flash forward to the end, in which we (and Sheridan) find out that it's all headed for an apocalyptic Bad End that can't be averted because all the other options are worse, in which Sheridan finds himself in the arms of the woman he's just starting to fall in love with, finds out that they're they've been together for years and have a son and ALSO this might be the last time he ever sees her because they're both about to be killed in the Bad Ending future and it's going to get worse than he ever could have imagined, only to be saved by the very enemy who had locked them up (and sacrifices his own life to do it, except they don't know that and probably never will).

And I'm absolutely feral about knowing that both Londo and G'Kar know that they're going to kill each other at the end of it all, surrounded by the ruins of a world their war and their hatred destroyed, except they don't know the context - they know the "what" and so they know there's no point in reaching out, no point in apologies, no point in doing better or being better or doing anything except doubling down on hating each other until the end of time, and even if they do manage to achieve some kind of detente, all they can assume is that it'll never last because they know they're going to die hating each other at the end of it all. But they don't know, they know they're going to die at each other's hands but they don't know they're going to die for love, saving each other and their friends and the world, and neither of them is going to die alone because they have each other and that (and their courage, and their willingness to do the necessary thing when the time comes) is what makes an eventual Good End possible.

We know how it ends now and at least half the characters also know how it ends and that there is no way out of the Bad Future and yet we're going to spend another two and a half seasons with them, because the thing that makes it all worthwhile at the end is the choices they make along the way.

WHAT MAKES YOU DO THIS, JMS

#babylon 5#b5#babylon 5 spoilers#my stuff
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Reblogged
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Imagine person A and person B of your OTP are dead. That’s it. They’re just dead. Find a new OTP.

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as if that’ll stop me

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… this is literally true of my current OTP*. It didn’t help.

*well, not OTP exactly because I rarely do OTPs in an exclusive kind of way, but you know what I mean.

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I genuinely could not even begin to tell you what fandom I was talking about here - this was from 2014, so god knows - but I was looking for a different post and came across this and .... welp. The more things change, etc.

(The post I was looking for is the "It's so cute how you think being dead is going to get you out of this ship" one, and if anyone happens to know the post I'm talking about, I would very much appreciate a pointer to it!)

In obviously unrelated news, I'm still watching Babylon 5.

#fandom
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Reblogged glorious-spoon
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northern usa comes with a secret fifth season, between winter and spring. it’s called “Gross”. everything is muddy and dead. allergies are flaring up but there’s not a green leaf in sight. the landscape is littered with piles of dirty ice. snow rain mix is probably falling. gross.

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This is an actual ecological season called prevernal spring, or false spring, when the plants start waking from dormancy, the snow and ice melts into mud to water the waking plants, and insect larva start growing so they can fly by the time flowers are ready to get pollinated, and the warm(er) days and icy nights help stress-proof the plants for the coming hot seasons. It is anticipatory, preparatory, and magical. And gross.

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I’m poetic enough to call it “Snowmelt”. It’s the season where the sides of roads slowly reveal the layers of gravel cars have spit onto them. A winter’s worth of trash and useful items alike appear from under the snowbanks they were dropped in. (One year we found my dad’s phone. It still turned on.)

Bone-dry air finally gives back some of its water, as icicles form and acquire cartoonish proportions. The entire world is cloaked in dead brown-gold grass. The world is made of white, and gray, and brown, and brown, and brown, until one day the snow melts enough to leave brown, and brown, and blue, soccer fields standing with startling shocks of water.

It’s not spring. But I’ve lived long enough to know in my bones that it won’t actually last forever. It’s just a step to get there.

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Alaska has a word for this! We call it break-up, the season when the ice breaks up and the snow melts and everything is mud and brown and blahhhhh. It could snow two feet at the drop of a hat or be 70 degrees for three days straight, and there's not a flower or a green leaf in sight, but it's not winter and it's not really spring in the sense of flowers and greenery. Technically it's part of spring, but it's also its own thing.

For symmetry, it is matched by green-up - when the leaves start to appear; though as far as I can tell this is just a Fairbanks-ism because I haven't heard it elsewhere - and freeze-up, when the rivers freeze in the fall. But break-up is the one that is definitely a distinct thing and everyone calls it that.

And yeah - it's muddy and messy and distressing at times, but it's also so fresh and wet and vivid and bright that it's hard not to love it as winter finally lets go.

#alaska#seasons
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Reblogged yalumesse
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I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.

#lifehacks
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