my sandbox #mysandbox

Alex. She/her. This is where I play tuoys. TADC/Caine heavy for time being. Maybe art sometimes.

[alexithymart]

i once described the process of writing as like pulling a knife out of your stomach slowly over the course of several days and im really feeling that lately i was so fucking right on that one. fact check: aaarrgghhhh ✅️

[mari-monsta]

why is it that when im reading fanfic i feel like i have a fairly good metric for if something is characterized accurately but when im trying to write suddenly its like ive never seen this character in my life. would he say that. would he fucking say that. suddenly i have no idea

[alexithymart]

all my characters ever want to do is banter. im going to put them all in saw traps.

[kittykamukura]

If you do not have a job then it's your duty to post about the characters Constantly. If you do have a job then it's your duty to imagine the characters in your job and also to neglect your job so you can post about the characters Constantly

[alexithymart]

ive just seen that alex rochon has said it annoys him that ppl are reading post ep 9 caine as masking, bc hes just trying to be attentive to the emotions of others and when it is and is not appropriate to be wacky tm, and that the ringmaster persona is the actual mask. and i actually agree with that on a basic level. but i think the thing being missed there is that post ep 9 caine is being read in the context of him having been deleted - among other arguably worse meddling w his code - and the best case version of that series of events was that the humans were going to forcibly manipulate his brain to make him more compliant.

and in response to this he gives himself what amounts to a lobotomy by the visual language we are given, then rocks back up like hi guys sorry about all that. ive done some thinking and ive decided im actually gonna be so compliant now. his heel-face turn reads as unbelievably coerced to me. what was his alternative? so yes i believe that the ringmaster persona is a mask, and i believe it's good to be attentive to the emotions of others and when it is and isnt appropriate to be wacky, but you cannot tell me that post ep 9 caine isnt masking BIG time, just in the opposite direction. this isnt caine apologia either - he DID need to change - but this is just not the vision of healthy self-improvement the show seems to want me to believe it is.

[alexithymart]

this, by the way, is why i dont buy it when people argue that "caine and jax are supposed to be foils, you low media literacy idiot, youre supposed to understand them as the person who chooses to get better vs the person who chooses not to." and its like what was jax supposed to do, then? cut out the part of his brain that made him an asshole? because thats what constitutes "getting better" for caine.

no, what jax needed to do was reach out. he needed to accept help, accept connection, and he refused to. there is no endlessly empathetic woman reaching out to caine. he can either come back acting regular, or he can stay deleted, thank you very much. the two options for recovery the show presents are: self-isolate until you figure out how to act sane enough to avoid getting exiled by your community, or self-isolate then kill yourself. profoundly evil show in this regard.

[alexithymart]

ive just seen that alex rochon has said it annoys him that ppl are reading post ep 9 caine as masking, bc hes just trying to be attentive to the emotions of others and when it is and is not appropriate to be wacky tm, and that the ringmaster persona is the actual mask. and i actually agree with that on a basic level. but i think the thing being missed there is that post ep 9 caine is being read in the context of him having been deleted - among other arguably worse meddling w his code - and the best case version of that series of events was that the humans were going to forcibly manipulate his brain to make him more compliant.

and in response to this he gives himself what amounts to a lobotomy by the visual language we are given, then rocks back up like hi guys sorry about all that. ive done some thinking and ive decided im actually gonna be so compliant now. his heel-face turn reads as unbelievably coerced to me. what was his alternative? so yes i believe that the ringmaster persona is a mask, and i believe it's good to be attentive to the emotions of others and when it is and isnt appropriate to be wacky, but you cannot tell me that post ep 9 caine isnt masking BIG time, just in the opposite direction. this isnt caine apologia either - he DID need to change - but this is just not the vision of healthy self-improvement the show seems to want me to believe it is.

[penny-anna]

one argument you often see about fanfiction is that it's like 'training wheels' writing? like 'oh it's fine to do that while you're still learning, it's easier than coming up with your own ideas'. and I have to say I have just never agreed with that.

[penny-anna]

in my experience it's actually pretty common for newbie fanfiction writers to gravitate towards coming up with OCs rather than writing about the canon characters (hence the infamous Mary Sue); this suggests that many people find that 'easier' than attempting to write about pre-existing characters.

I would say that recreating the characterisation, mood and general vibes of an existing work of fiction is in fact a skill in and of itself that's acquired via practice. A common compliment delivered to fanfiction writers is how well they have captured the spirit of the original work. Inexperienced fanfiction writers fail to do this.

When creating an original character you can, ultimately, say anything about them and now it's canon bcos you created them and you said so. conversely, well, if you are covering a well known song and start playing the wrong notes people will notice immediately.

In addition: a lot of fanfiction, IMO, is in actuality a form of metafictional literary analysis. a story where two characters sit down and talk about their feelings about a canonical event? literary analysis, which is of course a skill. Sometimes fanfiction is bad bcos the writer is not good at interpreting texts.

finally I have made this point before but you never really see anyone suggesting that fictional works based on existing public domain texts are on 'easy mode'. is it 'easier' to write something based on a copyrighted work than a public domain work? Of course it isn't.

[penny-anna]

I know I said 'finally' but I forgot a point:

A major strength of the transformative work is its ability to create dramatic irony. If a fanfiction's emotional resonance is dependent on being familiar with the source material that's not necessarily a bad thing. sometimes it's a sign that the author has done a really skillful job of engaging with said source material.

[whetstonefires]

it's true and imo these are the things that make fanfiction really effective as writing skill training, if you want it to be. i once saw a published novelist argue that fanfic trains you to be a worse, lazier writer because it allows you to 'skip over the work of coming up with your own ideas.'

and i thought this was a really strange thing to say because that's the easy part. like???

most people have lots of ideas; most people who want to write have more. it's very common to get 30-60% of the way into a piece of fiction and realize that you now have to stop inventing and start pulling-together, and you don't know how. which is why there are so many published novels out there that are really interesting and then the resolution is sort of awkwardly bullshitted.

the fact that fanfiction lets you skip the alternately overly-seductive and grunt-labor elements of 'making everything up' leaves you free to really engage with subtleties of craft and writing skills it's hard to get frequent practice in on with original projects, because you have to get the work so close to completion before you can even start that bit.

writing is not a single skill, it's several dozen. they don't all improve from the same types of practice.

you can make your OC do whatever and it's necessarily accurate, but it's more likely to yield a satisfying, coherent character if you're bringing strong textual analysis and characterization intuition background.

[sparklyeevee]

What fanfiction does allow you to skip is introducing the setting, most of the characters, etc. Which is great because a lot of beginning writers will get stuck somewhere on this part their first hundred or so attempts at an original story, and therefore never get any practice at the things that come after it.

[detectivehole]

"he would not fucking say that" i say with disgust, but im not talking about characterization im talking about his, like, vocabulary

[detectivehole]

[secretmellowart]

As promised, by request: memes about my latest comic.

[alexithymart]

the reason ive gone in for caine and not tenna even as i actually consumed the two medias for the first time within a few wks of each other is because tenna doesnt have a gay enough vibe.

[alexithymart]

they may both be showmen but caine is theatrical and you must understand that makes all the difference

[alexithymart]

the reason ive gone in for caine and not tenna even as i actually consumed the two medias for the first time within a few wks of each other is because tenna doesnt have a gay enough vibe.

[ajcrowlor]

big tshirt that says MY INTERPRETATIONS MUST HAVE A STRONG BASIS IN THE SOURCE MATERIAL on the front and THIS IS FUN TO ME on the back

[alexithymart]

one wonders why caine tadc who was cut off from any and all new training data sometime between 1996 and 1999 appears to know about mad max fury road

[alexithymart]

i actually think this is an issue w the shows development, not that he knows abt mad max fury road, but that it occurred to me to wonder about it. like for the first 6 episodes you have no reason to wonder why caine knows abt the 2010s era genre conventions he does, because the circus is not a Real Place that exists In Time. but then by episode 7 you start trying to establish the circus' relationship to the real world, and in episode 8 you actually have a timeline. but the new timeline is contradicted by what came before it.

so, thinking like a writer for a second, what do you do? you want this chain of events to have happened and you need to account for the time thats passed in some way but up til now you werent writing it with that in mind and you know it wont really parse. how do you make it work when it explicitly contradicts itself? well, you shove it into a freeze frame easter egg and hope by not drawing too much attention to it youll have enough plausible deniability to get by. pure speculation ofc, and there are other ways you could get to this sort of sloppiness. but thats what i would do if i had written myself into a corner like that.

[alexithymart]

one wonders why caine tadc who was cut off from any and all new training data sometime between 1996 and 1999 appears to know about mad max fury road

[mizuthe-cat]

give a character your issues it's literally free

[arctasy]

when the character is obsessive and desperate and guilty and scared and ashamed and traumatized and repressed

[alexithymart]

kinger trying to put caine back in the box and caine killing himself about it is a crazy thing to happen offscreen/only as freeze frame easter eggs and then never be addressed ever again at all in the show i must say. i doubted my reading until i found out abt the mount thing and it became the most likely possibility precisely because if it had happened, youd really think it would happen ONSCREEN!!!