So Thanks - Tumblr Posts
Hello hello I hope you're having a good day, may I please request dating headcanons for Elliott from Stardew valley with an s/o who loves to write just like he does?
Elliott absolutely loves that you're a writer like him!
He feels like you truly understand how difficult it is as a writer
He'd be more than happy to read your works if you'd let him
and he would be grateful if you read his too
The two of you can help each other out whenever either one of you has writer's block or just having a hard time writing
A lot of his work is inspired by you and how you encourage him to keep writing!
In his book, he most likely has a character that is heavily inspired by you and your personality
Editing or critiquing each other's grammar and mistakes while writing
Reading dates while sitting on the docks together
Library dates are pretty often too :)
Literally, all of his books are dedicated to you
somebody requested the aftg hotel scene so i had to deliver >:3 comics are fun!!
This truly feels like some kind of an epiphany. I’ve never thought about this from this place before, but you’re right.
Especially the part about spending time with the characters is something I can totally identify myself with. While writing one of these character-driven stories, I always thought like “Ugh, they’re just ... there, you know, nothing happens, they’re just living their life, so where’s the point?”
But that’s it. That’s exactly the point. The point is spending time with the characters you love, the characters you want to get to know better (and also helping the readers to get to know them better at the same time). Just as it is with your friends. As it’s said before: “Many people don’t really have a “plot” to hanging out with their friends (...) lives don’t have plots.”
That’s so true and so important to understand.
I’d never describe my style of writing as fulsome, even less perfect and I’m always trying to develop the way I’m telling stories, which leads to the fact that I find myself often confronted with ‘professional’ writers who focus a lot on plot and less on characters. So when I compared their advice with my stories, I always had the feeling of not “doing enough” or just not being “mature enough”.
Reading this really helps me to understand why I (and so many other writers as well!) choose to write their stories in another way and why it’s working all the same, even better for some of us.
So, I guess I’ll just keep spending time with characters in my fanfictions, letting life and love happen, and everyone who enjoys that as much as I do is free to read it.
I didn’t add anything new to this post but I really needed this to get off my chest.
Thanks for this inspiring post. :)
Edit, because of @rebecca2525’s reblog:
I also do think about my plot and outline it (at least most of the time; sometimes I even know the end of the story before everything else), but often it’s more like “Huh, I’d like to know what the characters would be like in a situation like this” or “I wonder what it would be like if they were just *insert wild fanfiction idea here*” or “Oh my god, wouldn’t it be funny/cute/interesting, if ...” and so on. So what I’m really planning are the circumstances or the topic of the story (as well as where I want to go with the it, even though that doesn’t always work out as I wanted it to), rather than a real or whole plot. I‘ve got some kind of a hook (if that’s the right way to say) and that’s the point where I’m putting the characters in and also start with focusing on them. Not because I want to write the plot, but because I want to experience the story with THEM and from their point of view. And I want to know how they feel and express that.
For me, the idea starts with the characters and yes, maybe the idea is what makes me begin, but the characters are what makes me continue.
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.
*Cracks knuckles* alright Doodle, the day has come...🫵 YOU 🫴 GIVE 🤲 ME ✍️ ART TIPS/POINTERS
(Cuz ur art is amazing)
I AM HERE (also thanks youuuuu)
AHEM okay, let me think for a sec....
Line of action. You might have heard of it, but the best way I can describe it is- well in the name! It's great for helping with poses n'stuff, the best way I can describe it is using some pictures below
See how all the characters seem to follow in the shape of the line? That's basically what the line of action is! It's sort step one before you get into the blocking and details of sketching. It helps add fluidity. Of course this isn't to say you have to use the line of action all the time, but it's really handy when trying to draw something and you don't know where to start!
You also can use the line of action for limbs! Not everything is a straight line when building a skeleton/base. I wish I would've known this earlier, because almost allll of my how to draw books would have everything be perfectly straight, and while some poses and stuff require it, yes, it tends to make poses rather stiff.
SKETCH LIGHTLY! This is mostly for traditional, but I find sketching lightly makes it easier to erase, as well as making the final drawing clearer. Also, sketch loosely! The random strands and sketches can help add some extra details and ideas as you work on the fianl peice, if you want.
I might get swarmed for this take, but I really don't think you need that deep of an understanding of anatomy. Now, you should still study and reference it, but I don't think you need to be able to name every bone or muscle in the body if you dont want to. Just have a basic understanding of it! It's good to know what areas can twist and bend, and knowing what's attached to what, and how it affects the pose. One thing that helps is 3D rigging videos. Here's one that explains it perfectly in a matter of seconds, and introduces so.ething called "skeleton hierarchy" or just hierarchy
Get out of your comfort zone!! It's scary yes, and 9 times out of 10, it's not gonna look good at a first attempt! BUT YOU GOTTA DO IT MAN ITS THE ONLY WAY TO IMPROVE!!
Thats all I've got!! I'm really tired because I got back from a family trip, but if you have anymore specific questions feel free to ask!
I wanna talk about The Angel Who Would Be Crowley.
Because I had a certain set of expectations, which got thoroughly trashed in the first five minutes of S2, and my genuine response is, "Oh, fuck, yup. You're right. That's WAY better."
Looking around at GO fandom, I'm not alone in this. So let's talk about it.
Basically, a lot of people (myself included) believed that he was a high-ranking angel, and therefore as chilly and remote as every other powerful angel we'd seen at that point. We pictured Crowley-To-Be as long-haired, regal and imposing --and the fanart at the time reflected this. I'd link some if Tumblr didn't hate links.
Something like this:
We were collectively drawing on a few things --mostly, Crawly's appearance and general bearing in the Biblical scenes of S1--
--But also scattered hints of his importance, backed up by conspicuous absences in Heaven and a few profound displays of power. That's all better covered elsewhere, so I won't reiterate the arguments here. All I'm saying is: I think our headcanons were justified.
But it turns out he was this:
!!!
With his curly little--!!
And his neat white--!!
IT TURNS OUT, he was an angel who squeaked and squealed when he was happy; who flailed his arms around and made explosion noises with his mouth to explain nebulas; who preened when told his stars were pretty. Furfur, who knew him before the Fall, says:
"You used to jump on me back, little monkey in a waistcoat..."
(The use of a diminutive there, 'little'...oh, that fascinates me.)
In a pretty huge subversion of expectations, we're given these glimpses of an angel who was sweet, and joyful, and heart-meltingly silly.
In sum...an innocent.
(Perhaps innocent to a troubling degree.
We see how he troubles Aziraphale, during their first conversation. He starts looking around and behind them, checking to make sure that no one can HEAR the blithe and reckless things coming out of this angel's mouth. This angel who talks like he's never been reprimanded in his life; like it's never occurred to him that anyone would want to hurt him.
Before the Beginning, Aziraphale understood Heaven better than he did. The danger is plainly occurring to Aziraphale.)
So now, we the viewers are in on a cruel joke that Aziraphale has known all along, which is that this --THIS-- is the angel who--
*checks notes*
--did a million lightyear freestyle dive into a boiling pool of sulphur. For asking questions.
...Imagine you are Aziraphale, and everything inside you wants to believe Heaven are the Good Guys, and God is Good and Everything She does is capital-R Right...and now try to reconcile that. Keep trying. I don't think he ever totally managed it in 6000 years.
All this gets further complicated when we learn that, despite all of the above, we were still right. That sweet excitable babby up there?
He WAS a powerful and high-ranking angel.
That much is explicitly confirmed, with significant evidence that he could have been among the mightiest of archangels...
...Who apparently accosted his fellow angels for piggyback rides. And was remembered millennia later by those (now fallen) angels as something 'little.'
What does that tell us about who he was? Is?
Hell, Aziraphale has known to be wary of the archangels (and the judgements of Heaven in general) since before the Fall even happened. He chooses to believe they are Good; he can't fool himself into thinking they are Safe.
Yet he's absolutely certain that Crowley won't hurt Job's children. Enough to stand in a burning building and say to them, "I can't save you, but don't be afraid. I won't need to."
And what reason does he give?
("I know you."
"You do not know me."
"I know the angel you were.")
What does that tell us about who he was? Is?
("The angel you knew is not me."
But how is Aziraphale supposed to believe that, when he can see him all the time?)
tl;dr --yes, this is better. I love the tragedy of it.
'Innocence died screaming' and all that.
Thanks for reblogging my post! :D @theidioticcowboy I really appreciate it!
hey I wanted to wish a very special disability pride month to every disabled person who’s getting worse. to people who are losing the ability to do things they used to do. people whose symptoms are increasing in severity. people who are developing new symptoms. people with degenerative and terminal disorders. people who are dealing with new disorders on top of preexisting ones. happy disability pride month to everyone who knows they’re not getting better. there’s nothing wrong with that, and you deserve to take pride as much as anyone else.