Posts for my favorite romantic and platonic ships and pairings, favorite characters, cool characters, various AUs, and some writing! Search "Tarnished Silver", “Regrets and Love”, and “Fruit Loops au” for my fanfic!
• A character almost admits they were wrong and then pivots
• Two people sitting in a car after an argument, engine off, neither leaving
• Someone practicing a speech in the mirror and hating how it sounds
• A character lying for someone they resent
• An inside joke that no longer feels funny
• A public setting where private tension is simmering
• Someone seeing their ex unexpectedly and performing indifference
• A character giving advice they absolutely do not follow
• A confession interrupted by something mundane
• A person rereading old messages they shouldn’t
• A gift that misses the mark completely
• A character realizing they’ve outgrown someone mid-conversation
• Someone saying “It’s fine” and meaning “I will remember this forever”
• A moment where a character notices they are no longer the favorite
• Two people who used to be close struggling to find a topic
If your story feels stuck, it likely needs friction. Not explosions. Just a little pressure.
Had a random idea for Instrumentality Loopers. The Question of Mari, I think I'll call it. Mari Makinami is a Pilot in the Rebuild movies, possibly a coworker or aide of Yui Ikari who was somehow trapped as a teen.
In the continuity of IL, Mari wouldn't exist. The timeline trapped in a Loop is the series, which ends with End of Evangelion. But, as will be seen in Fruit Loops--the RWBY timeloop I'm working on--"canon" is... changeable.
So in one Loop, the group--made up of the Anchor Asuka Suzuhara, and both Shinji and Rei, and possibly a few others by this point--experiences the Rebuilds instead of the series. (Asuka, Shinji, and Rei are the Trio, named such by Gendo after he starts Looping and accepts his part to play in their plans and games)
Well, a couple Loops. The first time Asuka is the only one Awake, but the second time--several Loops later--everyone Looping is awake.
Including, much to the Trio's surprise, Mari. Poor Mari is floored to learn about the Loops, at first thinking it's just how Impact works. She knows it can create false worlds within Instrumentality. But the detailed knowledge the Trio have and the powers they show her soon have her convinced.
It's actually her calling Asuka "princess"--the nickname she used after spending time with Asuka aboard the Wunder--that clues Asuka in to Mari being Awake. Which is odd, as everyone else Looping in Asuka's world had a concrete existence and had spent time around the Trio, where as Mari had spent one single timeline with Asuka.
But as they near the end of this Loop, Mari's first repeat, she begins to worry she won't find them again outside of them experiencing another Loop in her timeline. She brings herself to confide in Asuka, and Asuka swears she will find her again.
The two are close, despite only knowing each other for two timelines, with Asuka stepping in as a sort of big sister for the--in canon--older girl/young woman.
But as the Loop ends, and Asuka can feel reality beginning to shift...
0o0o0
"Goodbye, Princess." Mari smiles at Asuka from inside her Eva, her voice echoing out over the beach where Asuka and Shinji sit.
But Asuka won't have it. Mari may not be her child--like her son Kyo and daughter Mana she so rarely sees in the Loops--but she is no stranger dragged into the chaos of their repeating lives.
So she reaches out, pulling on her massive reserve of Angelic power from scores of Loops, straining so hard she feels her Core starting to fracture and burn out, and grabs the essence of Mari right as the Loop resets-
And she blinks awake in her cabin on the Over The Rainbow, Mari sleeping in the bed beside her.
"There we go." she murmurs, rolling on her side to watch her friend sleep, "One victory in this mess. One day... one day I'll figure this out, and get my kids too. I know I can do it now..."
0o0o0
After this, Mari randomly appears in their Loops--sometimes another Pilot, sometimes just a student at their school--always Awake when Asuka is. Bound, somehow, to Asuka. Though she is not an Anchor, the Loop continuing if she dies before Asuka and the Loop ending even if she is still alive when Asuka dies.
Asuka gradually is able to bind Shinji, Touji, and Rei to herself as well, making it so she is never again alone in a Loop.
I will say the above is a result of Asuka being an Anchor and being part Angel, so Weiss will never be able to repeat this. Though Ruby and Roman almost always Wake in the same Loop, where one or the other Wakes. Often enough to be noticed, but not often enough the others actually say anything.
i can't do secret hidden lore or leave things up to imagination because i like showing people things too much . i'm like check it out do you like my story here's every single thing that has ever happened in it . i'm too excited for tacit implications i like to show off my characters like someone shows off their pet kitty that they put a cute hat on
every nolan film is about time. it winds its way through his filmography; it is fractured in memento, distorted in inception, expanded in interstellar, reversed in tenet.
every hopper painting is about stillness. it is found in every brushstroke; at dusk in automat, at dawn in morning sun, at noon in office in a small city, at night in nighthawks.
i have a friend who orbits ideas of power, another who delights in the prosaic and the plain. one weaves around systems and structures, another returns always to wonder at the sea.
there are other elements of course - our lives cannot be measured by single concepts no matter how large they may be - but time and again i think we return to the things that fascinate, the things that intrigue, the things we cannot quite tear ourselves away from. the themes of our lives.
canon is what happens in the text. e.g. merlin tries to poison morgana
a headcanon is a fact that you have personally made up as an elaboration of canon. it is your invention. e.g. i think morgana and gwen had a teenage lesbian situationship before the events of canon. or, i think modern morgana would love evanesence.
an interpretation is how one reads the existing text. it is not an invented fact nor is it a headcanon, it is a reading. e.g. i think merlin tries to poison morgana out of misplaced self-hatred. or, i think that one line was delivered with suppressed malice and shows a nuanced relationship.
fanon is the general fandom’s accepted headcanons and interpretations that elaborate or recontextualize canon. e.g. merlin is a badass waif and morgana is a bitch.
these are all different words with different meanings.
"All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said:
'Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine! I have a duty!'”
the draw of arranged marriage AUs to me is really the way the dubcon of it all binds them together. neither of them have a choice in being here, something else is foisting this upon them whether that’s their parents or the political situation around them or expectation or something else, but the point is that they don’t get that one choice. so they have to make a choice somewhere else, that now that they’re here, they’re going to make it work. they’re each other’s only allies, in this cage built around them. they may have been coerced into swearing to stand by each other through anything, but they did swear.
it’s not love at first, or second, or third sight. it’s not love in the wedding bed the first time, whether they grit their teeth through it or decide together to forgo that binding step and try to get around it as long as they can. it’s about sharing a bed with a stranger while you learn their nightmares and how they hog the covers. it’s about sharing a name before you even know each other’s hobbies. the appearances you have to keep up, and the connection you find in both being exhausted by them, laughing together because isn’t it ridiculous how you not only have to be married but you have to act like it’s perfect and lovely for everyone else watching. it’s love that creeps up quiet and slow, between shared secrets that make your wedding bands mean something for the first time, and trying to protect each other from the trap you’re both in. and it’s about having the mortifying thought of “oh my god, i have a crush on my wife.”
The draw to me is that the people forced together have to talk and negotiate like actual grownups about boundaries and expectations and each other. Real communication between adults is so damn RARE in fiction!
everytime I think "oh well this fandom for which i write is actually pretty well adjusted" and then i write a fic in which a character dies because I mostly write angst and crimefics, and someone i've never heard before pops out of the woods to comment that they're glad to see someone else hating that character and wanting them dead and i'm like. ok i killed them off because i liked them actually. but beyond that here's one more hidden face of the fandom i actually like to not have interacted with so far.
Reasons to kill off a character that are not "the writer hates them"
Writer wants to show how much everyone loves them by having them grieve the character.
Writer wants to show how important that character was to the plot by showing how much their death would change
Writer wants to lament how little importance they have in canon by showing how little their death would change, and yet love was still there etc.
Writer wants to lament how little importance they have in canon and invents a ton of reasons why their death would change canon beyond return even though it's unlikely it would have happened that way.
Writer isn't sure to do justice to their canon writing and prefers to kill them off so they're this unattainable ideal that they do not have to actually write.
Writer knew there was no way this character to whose glory they have written 150 drabbles would be suspected by the readers so they had them murdered at the beginning of the crimefic to throw off their readers.
Writer knew that objectively if someone was to die it was their fave because they have enemies / wouldn't kill someone else so can't be suspect / allows to explore what could bring another character to kill this well liked character.
Writer is sick of the fandom putting that character on a pedestal but they themself are pretty neutral about 'em so they just kill 'em off at the beginning of the fic to not add to the number of people who wrote about 'em.
Writer realised too late that there wouldn't be enough place in the plot for every character so let's kill one that probably no one will miss except a couple hardcore fans.
Writer can't afford so many characters but in this specific setting The Character they're least interested in writing wouldn't be absent unless forcibly removed first and by forcibly removed we mean murdered.
Writer is actually doing an homage to another story where the equivalent of that character is dead or has to die
Writer is feeling petty that day but holds no real inimity to that character
Writer is killing that particular one off just to torture one of their mutuals who loves that character.
the plot needed someone to die and they did a PickWheel about it
The plot began to head that way, and by the time the writer realized, changing course would make the story worse or completely undermine it so the writer has to stay the course and kill the character (the Stranger than Fiction dilemma. Except no real world person dies here).
The plot demanded someone make a difficult choice and the character was the only one who could do so without it being OOC and the writer wants to do them justice because they love the character so much, so character has to die.
Writer loves the character because they’re a self-sacrificing idiot and sometimes being willing to idiotically sacrifice yourself has consequences, up to and including death, and the writer wants to be faithful to the character.
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