Robert Downey Jr For Ragmag Magazine.

Robert Downey Jr for Ragmag Magazine.

Thank you for mentioning these @the-kitteh ^_^

Depressing arc reactor headcanons.

1. The arc reactor freezes when it’s too cold causing severe pain to the surrounding muscles.

2. If left in the sun it superheats like the seat belt buckle in your car and can burn Tony.

3. It decreases Tony’s lung capacity far below that of your average human.

4. Tony has asthma.

5. Once the arc reactor is removed Tony begins to function without chronic pain and is absolutely amazed at how easy everything is.

Thank you so much ^_^ I’m planning on having Ch2 out Saturday and Ch3 on Tuesday, I’m hoping you will love those as well!

There were moments where Bucky wondered what could have made Iron Man, possibly his best friend here in the future, sarcastic and gentle and funny and caring, hate Tony Stark so much. Moments where he wondered what Tony Stark, who could manage to be kind and generous to the assassin who had murdered his parents, could have done to Iron Man. But he never dared to ask, afraid of the answer. 

The first chapter of my final fill for this round of @tonystarkbingo, square T2 - Armor Kink (which I interpreted… fairly freely xD).

There were moments where Bucky wondered what could have made Iron Man, possibly his best friend here in the future, sarcastic and gentle and funny and caring, hate Tony Stark so much. Moments where he wondered what Tony Stark, who could manage to be kind and generous to the assassin who had murdered his parents, could have done to Iron Man. But he never dared to ask, afraid of the answer. 

The first chapter of my final fill for this round of @tonystarkbingo, square T2 - Armor Kink (which I interpreted... fairly freely xD).

Oh wow this...

I just thought - this is also why people say they ‘lose control’ of their characters. I once had a friend being like ‘how on earth do you lose control of characters, I’ve never ever had that happen’ and back then I thought it was about them needing to write longer stories, but it might be just this. The fact that fic is all about the characters means that the plot needs to form around them. And sometimes, that means the plot doesn’t develop the way you planned it to because it doesn’t fit the characters or their development.

I love every single bit of this (and also the explanation of why I usually can’t watch an entire series because of the way they ‘develop’ their characters (or don’t... One very frustrating point for me is resetting characters after what I thought was a good development).

on fanfic & emotional continuity

Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation. 

Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character - let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred - you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different - perhaps wildly so - story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place. 

Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity - not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit - the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.

Fanfic does not do this. 

Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters - and fic readers - the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions. 

The fact that ficwriters en masse - or even the same ficwriter in different AUs - can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative. 

Y’know, NaNoWriMo isn’t actually about getting 50,000 words in 30 days

Yeah, that’s the Goal – but it’s not what it’s about

NaNoWriMo is about sitting down, starting a project, and learning to manage that project and keep going even when it gets hard

it’s about building skills and forming habits and developing discipline and learning more about yourself as a creator so you can get a sense for what writing methods do/don’t work for you

its about trying things – about making discoveries and making mistakes, and about making progress without getting mired in the minutia so you end the month with more words than you had when you started

It’s framed like a contest ‘cause goals and prizes make things fun, but you’re only really playing against yourself

50,000 words is only a target to shoot for ‘cause without a target it’s pretty hard to practice your aim