True story: I got busted in 8th grade for writing NSFW Star Fox fanfic.
I wrote it for a friend who was just dipping his toe into furry subculture. In 1998, we didn't have a lot of options for fanfic. So if he wanted to read a story about a hot, anthropomorphic guy getting laid, he had to pay someone he knew IRL to write it!
Chris paid me $20 and I had until the end of the day. Took me two periods to write a short rescue story between Slippy and Flaco and I don't mind telling you he had a HUGE bird 🍆 because that's what I thought my friend wanted to hear about.
He did. And he decided doing this IN CLASS was the best way to experience it. And my dumbass decided to SIGN the damn thing with my REAL NAME.
Parents were called. Binders were confiscated. It was like a whole thing, man...
My mother had to come pick me up from detention. The school I went to was Christian-flavored so they told her to tell me it was wrong to write NSFW stuff.
But my mother is a real one. She didn't care about the sex, she didn't care about not paying attention in actual school.
She was mad I infringed on the Star Fox copyright. I got a huge lecture about how fanfic would end me up in jail, and it was creatively bankrupt to write someone else's characters.
(This is the same woman who just sent me an article on Madeline Miller's Circe with a note that said, "You could have written Circe, honey...")
YEARS LATER while working as a games journalist I met Star Fox game director Dylan Cuthbert. I told him this story, I told him how mad my mother got...
And he said: "I'm only offended you put Falco with Slippy. Why wouldn't you make the story about Star Fox?"
YAY KYOU LIVES! Was so worried I'd wake up one day to tragic news... My poor little Millenial heart can only take so much!
But instead I see this x-posted from X to Reddit and now I can breathe a little easier.
Translated by DeepL:
Hello, this is Kyō. <Shutline> will resume serialization on May 23.
Since undergoing surgery last September, I’ve had to deal with various minor health issues, and my recovery period has been longer than initially expected. My health has now improved significantly.
I sincerely thank all the readers who have waited so patiently.
I will do my best to work hard until the very end to bring this to a satisfying conclusion.
I hope you all stay healthy and have a wonderful day.
Thank you.
Now we're finally going to get some resolution to Shin passing out mid-coitus. Where IS Jake taking him...? And are we ever going to see a 'verse with these two or is Kyou just going to keep teasing it...
That's not a way for me to diminish it, it is still a story. It might be well written, it might not, but neither Larian nor any of the original writers have had nothing to do with it. It's a published expounding based on someone's interpretation of the events like many DnD based story books are, that you can choose to implement into your interpretations or completely ignore.
The bottom line, is that WOtC bought BG3 with money. It is up to you if capital dictates who has true ownership over art - personally, to me, I would rather not do that.
And fun fact: even if the book had been written or at least outlined by Stephen Rooney or any other of the talented people at Larian, you could still choose to completely ditch it,
Because none of it is real 💫
Edit: I'm glad Rooney had SOME involvement in the book! That does not change my point whatsoever though, if you read carefully.
I'm going to read the sample at least. I liked Nettle & Bone but found Swordheart too YA and Paladin's Grace too dull.
T.Kingfisher doesn't have a track record for spice. Or sex. Or dark sexual themes. ALL of which are intrinsic to an Astarion prequel where he's used by Cazador to lure victims with sex.
But she can write atmosphere. And horror. And humor. And like many folks on the autism spectrum, she's an accomplished mimic. So... *maybe* the book won't suck. And *definitely* Neil Newborn will bring his A game for the audiobook.
If Larian's never going to make another Baldur's Gate, then this might be all we get 🫠
Not really related to my usual Captive Prince talk but tumblr is basically my new livejournal now that FB is dead to me and LinkedIn is just... weird.
I'm not over Lola. She was the cat love of my life - a chance adoption when I was a QA tester at Sony in the mid-00s who lived to the ripe old age of 23 (!!) in my care. She was with me for breakups, layoffs, miscarriages -- and eventually a house, a marriage, and a baby (but not in that order). She would sit in my lap, sleep under my arm, and eat my food if I dared to look away for even a second. Fat and sassy, she was also True Gangsta when it came to meeting my now-husband's cats and surviving thyroid cancer.
I miss her every day. And I get sad interacting with other cats because no matter how awesome they are - they are not Lola.
This is making it REALLY HARD to adopt a new cat. Our family needs one because Penguin, the 4-year-old we brought home as a companion to the late Colonel Katz, is now an only cat and he dislikes it. He's anxious and lonely and really, REALLY want to play.
So we're back in the cat adoption trenches to search for a match. I've met almost a dozen sweethearts across a few different shelters. A few I met today seem like they'd be great fits for my home and my family!
...but none of them are Lola. No one will ever be Lola. And sometimes I think I'm broken because you're not supposed to get so hung up on one cat (or boyfriend or apartment) that you can't open your heart to something new.
Yashiro x Doumeki and the eternal draw of damaged people
Twittering Birds Never Fly (囀る鳥は羽ばたかない) is one of the longest-running manga I've ever kept up with. I think only Blade of the Immortal comes close for how invested I am in the will they/won't they.
Near zero chance you're reading my tumblr without already knowing the story. But just in case: Yashiro is a yakuza mini boss and Damage Incarnate who hires an ex-cop with an impotence problem to be his bodyguard. Doumeki conceives a platonic hero-worship obsession with Yashiro that eventually cures his impotence and yadda-yadda-near-death-yadda, the devotion turns into romance.
It's fraught and convoluted. There are hundreds of moments throughout the 8+ volumes of story where I just want to shake Yashiro.
"HE LOVES YOU. WHY ARE YOU RUINING THAT? OMFG JUST QUIT THE YAKUZA, YOU DON'T EVEN LIKE IT AND YOU ARE FUCKING 40, GET IT TOGETHER."
etc.
But still I go back.
There's a magnetism to Yashiro's trauma that reminds me of Laurent from Captive Prince. Both are victims of child SA from a family member. Both rise to positions of power in corrupt systems with strict hierarchies.
And yet... Yashiro is twice Laurent's age. His commitment to his maladaptive hypersexuality runs deep and is tied directly to his position in the Yakuza. Even with Doumeki's second confession ("Do you really think I could fall for anyone but you?"), we know Yashiro is gonna do something crazy...
And I am SAT for it.
(New issue comes out tomorrow....!)
P.S. About Blade of the Immortal... Fuck you for that Rin/Manji kiss, Samura-sensei. You know what you did.
Whoever tried to call this book a Captive Prince comp lied through their teeth.
I can appreciate a Gay Achilles. The Greeks were down and I imagine plenty of women in antiquity appreciated all that artwork just like they do nowadays.
But I can't get behind the depiction of Patroclus. He's written almost as "woman in generic fantasy book" -- he yearns, feels, angsts, yearns some more, then becomes a healer to stay useful to boyfriend because, "I'm too DELICATE to fight in a BATTLE."
And the sex scenes are so vague, the anatomy doesn't even matter.
Captive Prince has similarities in the rich language and the historical-adjacent fantasy setting. But it depicts a relationship between two men who occupy male roles in their respective societies. Neither of them expresses particularly feminine traits. And as much as Damen eventually yearns for Laurent... He is grounded in action, not angst.
I'm dragging myself through the last 40% of Song of Achilles. Not because I think it improves, but because I AM curious how the book handles Patroclus dying.
But this doesn't read as a satisfying M/M romance to me at all. It reads more like a reskinned M/F romance.
"Violence slid across the men like oil waiting for a flame."
This was the line -- in chapter 2 -- that made me sit down and really READ this book. Before this line, I didn't rate Captive Prince. Everyone else liked it but I bounced off book 1.
I can't even remember why I picked up book 2. I didn't bother to read the "story so far" summary or the dramatis personae -- I just started scrolling. I knew from the hype machine behind the series that the story is about a captive prince in the custody of another prince who hates his guts. But all the details (Auguste, the Regent's kinks, Nicaise and Laurent's trauma bond) didn't play a role getting me hooked.
It was the language. The prose CS Pacat uses is a unique mix of high falutin' word choice and emotional percision. Where other "fanfic-style" books are dialog heavy and a mishmash of irrelevant details, Pacat kept it tight and flowing. It made me feel smart while never talking down to me.
Newer "adult fantasy books for women" don't do this. I was SORELY dissappointed in The Poet Empress, The Knight and the Moth, The Second Death of Locke, and Ten Thousand Doors of January. All of which are highly praised books! ...but every single one reads like "YA but spicy!"
I don't like being talked down to. I resent the idea that "fantasy for women" is somehow less than "fantasy for men." And I'm deeply suspicious of books with FMCs purported to be over 25 who have the emotional maturity of 13-year-olds.
This feeds into my wish that there were more books like Prince's Gambit out there to read.
I got busted in 8th grade for writing NSFW Star Fox fanfic. My mom had to pick me up early and she was FURIOUS.
Not because I wrote NSFW fic. No, because I infringed on the Star Fox IP.
"Do you want to get sued? Do you want people to think you're unimaginative? A thief? Do your own WORK if you're going to be a writer!"
That's stuck with me well into adulthood. Even after meeting Star Fox lead programmer Dylan Cuthbert and telling him this story. I've always worried that whatever I write will be too derrivative. Too close to something. And whenever I did indulge in fanfic, it was with my head on a swivel, a VPN, and like 10 different pennames to hide my shame.
And now... bitches be getting 7 figure deals for the Harry Potter fanfic. CTRL+F+R is the solution to copyright infringement. All the most demented, plot-broken, unrealistic sex acts are FAIR GAME for the Big 5...
And I'm over here feeling all precious about my Capri fic. Worried that my original works won't find their audience. Angsting over picking the wrong names for my MCs because they sound too much like some other fantasy fuckboi name I read two decades ago...
I'm worried I'm never going to read a series like Capri again. I've tried almost all the recs everyone makes, and it's disappointment each time. No book comes close in terms of plot, pace, or characterization. Some do manage other things, of course, but even the books I finish send me right back to Capri.
Here's what I've tried:
Into the North. Historical, Viking captor/Roman captive. This one came the closest to scratching the itch because it's well-written with solid tension. But the dynamic is nothing like Lamen despite the slavefic DNA.
Knight & the Necromancer. Fantasy enemies to lovers. Well-written at the line level but I ended up DNF'ing because the pacing was all over the place and I utterly stopped caring whether or not they got together by 15%.
The Scottish Boy. Historical enemies-to-lovers. Instant DNF because it's written in third-person present-tense and that just didn't work for me.
The Prince's Assassin. Fantasy enemies to lovers. Reading level too low to keep me interested.
Part of the problem is the stigma of romance books. It's an "escapism" genre where things aren't meant to be deep or researched or believable. "It's not read as literature!" as my librarian grandmother would say when she caught me reading bodice rippers instead of Jane Austen.
Capri, as I understand it, was born from a soup of internet culture not bound to genre conventions. It reads different from other romances because it IS different. And everything else recommended to me wasn't written that way; about half the recs I get are straightforward Romance Genre books and the other half are commercial romantasy chasing "ACOTAR but make it gay!"
There's more books out there for me to try. And if not, I can get off my ass and write more Capri fic or finish my own story about a noble sold off as a ward to the knight who ruined his family.
But what I want is to crack open the next book and fall in love again.
It's one thing when you try out for something and get rejected. It stings in a new and different way to be rejected by someone you wanted to hire to do book marketing.
Like... is my writing really so bad that money can't offset working with it? Or is it just that indie publishing is so pointless now, that not even a paying gig with an indie book is worth it?
I really wish I could find someone I could pay to tell me what to do. Maybe I should I just hire a dom...? At this point, they're probably better at social media than book marketers.
Below the cut for those of you who can't wait... Please don't break the internet....
As usual, nothing about the cover equals what is in the chapter. We are close... SO CLOSE! But not yet...
As we saw, Doumeki tries to stand at Yashiro's request and is so dizzy Yashiro gets concerned and helps him to his bed.
Doumeki grabs Yashiro's hand and asks him not to leave, and then faints.
Yashiro being the good nurse he is, stays and nurses Doumeki while he sleeps.
Doumeki wakes up, feeling better, and finds Yashiro asleep by the bed.
This sight is a surprise to Doumeki and like always, a tender moment is interrupted.
Tsunakawa calls and tells Doumeki to come see him, and Yashiro wakes up.
Seeing Doumeki's distress, he asks if Tsunakawa called, then apologizes for falling asleep because Doumeki wouldn't let go of his hand and he felt compelled to take care of him. (Sure....)
Doumeki asks why Yashiro came there before (when Kamiya and mama were there). Yashiro pretends he can't remember why, and asks Doumeki if letting mama leave was good idea. Doumeki asks Yashiro if he ever said they were dating.
Doumeki explains that she was a childhood friend and that's all. He says that he was a "tattoo practice table" HAHAHAH!
Yashiro tries to avoid confrontation by saying that he doesn't care who Doumeki sees and he can have sex with anyone.
Doumeki raises his voice and tells Yashiro that even now he's still chasing him and asks if Yashiro is behaving this way because he's "running away." He asks him if it's better if Yashiro hears it from Doumeki's own mouth that he still thinks of him.
Doumeki tells him "Do you really think I'll fall in love with someone other than you?"
Pretty sure we all feel this scene. Doumeki tells Yashiro everything and we see a series of flashbacks of when he came to work for Tsunakawa and when he eventually ran into Yashiro again. He tells him he was jealous and stupid. He wanted to avoid Yashiro until he could stand shoulder to shoulder with him as equals. But he couldn't help it once he'd seen him.
Doumeki touches Yashiro's face and asks if he can see. He asks if it's his fault that this happened 4 years ago.
This exchange needs a real translator to word it right, but it appears that Yashiro tells him that it's not his fault and that Doumeki always blaming himself is too much for Yashiro. (I might be off the mark. He says he's being too self-conscious about it, but I get the feeling that this is the part that Yashiro always "hated" about Doumeki. The part of him that makes him want to "destroy" him.) Doumeki says "To me you are a kind, strong and beautiful person."
Yashiro is annoyed now and doesn't want to listen to this anymore.
Yashiro asks why he is telling him this now, after hiding it for so long. Why tell him now?
Doumeki doesn't answer.
And now it's time to stand on business. Come on, Yashiro!!!! CHASE HIM!!!
That's 64. (SOBBBBBBBBBING!!!!!!!!!!)
Boy oh boy was that DARK! Yes, confessions. Yashiro got all of it at once! But OMG, I don't know what Doumeki is thinking because the face he leaves with is determined!!!
Cross posting from Reddit because I just watched Bugonia and nobody else in my real life has. MORE people need to know my opinion than just my husband and the desk plant he bought me that can't talk back.
Spoilers for Bugonia, The Favourite, and possibly ever Lanthimos movie ever. Even the ones he hasn't made yet.
I feel like this man makes movies where, if you cut the last 15%, you get a completely different movie. And that he does that because of capitalism.
If you cut Bugonia in the ambulance , it becomes a surrealist thriller about a CEO escaping a conspiracy theorist serial killer . But add on that last 15% and she actually IS an alien and THE emperor and, no, you are not cool enough for alien subtitles because that costs extra.
If you cut The Favourite when the guards ride up to exile Sarah , then it's a sapphic love story. Add the weird oral sex/stepping on the rabbit metaphor in at the end, and it turns into this dysphoric warning against lesbian bed death.
If you cut the last 10% of *any* episode in Hulu's The Great, you accidentally add more accuracy to Russian history! ETA: Nope. Thought he was a producer here but Tony McNamara is the only overlap between The Favourite and The Great.
All this to say: it feels like Lanthimos makes his movies get progressively weirder with VERY clear stopping points. So that if he ever tries to get financing and an investor goes, "I dunno... that part at the end there was kind of..." he can just be like, "No problem! I'll cut just this tiiiiinnnnyyy bit. We good?"
Then just films it anyway and gambles on whether somebody in film bureaucracy can stop him. That's why he put SO MANY DEAD HUMAN shots at the end. Almost as a "Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah!"
I had a weird interaction on a writers' discord this week. There's a channel for finding critique partenrs with a generic label like "writing buddy." It doesn't *explicitly* say that critique swaps are required but the relationships are meant to be reciporical.
Along comes a n00b, posting a very long introduction and request for a buddy to email them privately with a bunch of personal info. It looked sus because it WAS sus - this person didn't want to participate in the discord. They wanted an emotional support human/editor they didn't have to pay.
Someone called them out for posting "a dating profile" to the channel. They OP apologized and followed up with, "But it's such a chore to go through critique swaps to find out if we're a fit."
And that rubbed me the wrong way, so I replied. "If you think critique swaps are a chore, are you sure about being an author...?"
And then... IN JUMPS THE OPPORTUNIST. This woman was 100% not in the convo to begin with. But she spawns in, delcares that SHE respectfully disagrees with my take and HER time spent in critique is worth money because SHE is a bestselling author of 11 books...!!!!!
It was a shocking thing to drop a sales pitch like that in a free author resource. Predatory and gross, even.
It got me thinking: I would NEVER buy this person's opinion. Because she's an asshole preying on aspirational authors who probably need to save their money to spend on professional editors or cover artists. If I'm going to make a serious go of being a writer, I don't want that scammy "gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss" energy anywhere near me. I'm doing this because writing is what I DO. Whether I am paid or not.
My writing village is smaller now. I don't think I'm going back to that channel. I did add one friend though: the mod who banned the Opportunist for self-promo in the wrong channel.
Look - I get it. Celebrities aren't like us. Child stars grown up with damage. Ariana Grande's life is pretty fucked up even if she weren't running around snatching up married men and mocking their jilted spouses in song form.
But call a spade a spade: she looks medically ill. Most of the cast in Wicked does, but on her, the extreme thinness is truly alarming because we KNOW there's something dark behind it. Manchester, Dan Schneider, Mac Miller -- girl has had bad things happen in her life. And she has, in the past, posted on pro-anorexia topics on this very site before deleting it all and pleading for the public to stop talking about her body.
And yet... Look at her. It's hard, right? You can see the suffering in every shadow of her arm, every hollow under a rib.
Most spaces online refuse to call it out. The new era of radical acceptance as a counterweight to malignant conservativism leads to a tolerance paradox where we declare "She's beautiful! She's gorgeous!" while she's visibly dying in front of us. And she told us NOT to talk about her body... but calling her gorgeous is only making her more sick.
(To be fair, maybe it's cancer. Maybe it's some other disorder besides anorexia, bulimia, or orthorexia.) But whatever it is can't be covered up with Bob Mackie vintage gowns, or healed through mindless praise drummed up by bot farms.
The older I get, the more overlap I find with people who like things that I like also like OTHER cool things I end up enjoying.
So for the people out here enjoying...
Heated Rivalry
Captive Prince
The Summer Hikaru Died
Baldur's Gate 3
Saezuru Tori wa Habatakanai
Attack on Titan
...try these things on for size:
Queer as Folk <- walked so Heated Rivalry could sprint
Swordspoint <- has the same grounded fantasy vibe as Captive Prince with a tender, delicate gay romance between two damaged men
Persona 4 (not 5) <- has the Japanese small town horror mystery vibe on lockdown and IMO the better voice acting
Maiden Rose <- same dark yaoi vibes as Saezuru, totally different setting
Valkyria Chronicles <- military fantasy tactics game with some truly great John DiMaggio dubbing
Also, hear me out... try the novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. It has almost *nothing* to do with any of the above, but it's one of my favorite books of all time and if you like the same things I like, chances are you'll like it, too.
baratheonpilled
discoholicmusic
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
snowghoul
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