Cococapes Writing Blog

Coco | She/Her | Creative Writer | Tumblr dumbass and Twitter user | Go follow me on twitter @cococapes

[cocoarchives]

There's a privilege in being able to organize well.

Or, that was what I was thinking anyways, sitting on the basement floor, feeling pages brush against my fingers, as I ungently unstuck them from each other and themselves.

There was a splotch of brown on the papers edge; an old stain, long dried, crumbs and a brown splotch indicating it's origin as cat food that someone cared little enough to clean up. It figures, I guess, considering the people who live here—

Lived here

—but considering it's left me picking up the pieces, I think I have a good reason to be mildly upset.

But that's partly my blame too, isn't it? After all, the book was in a discarded shoebox left underneath the desk, kicked to all hell by a little boy too aggressive to play a PvP quietly. Nestled next to a battered used copy of Good Omens and a dusty Life of Pi, this hardcover sat quietly to take that beating. Despite the fact it has never been loved, despite the fact that it has never been opened until today, despite the fact it was bought for the hype by a younger girl who loved the author until she didn't, it had sat there and waited.

Good on it.

I'm still not gonna read it anytime soon. Newer books are higher on my list anyways, and even older books even higher. If anything, the stain means that I can't sell it off, even if the colour hadn't seemed onto any of the words and left it otherwise pristine. So, that sucks I guess.

I dust off the crumbs and scratch at the stain, because it feels like a sticker that I could just peel off, like if I tried hard enough I could put this book into a condition where the used store would take it. And if it were under my nails, that's still easier to clean off than on a page, isn't it?

Anyways my grandmother died today.

[zanephiri]

1899

This show has been all that’s on my mind since it dropped! Definitely worth a watch!

[cocoarchives]

The Door at the End of the Hall

So there's this door at the end of the hall.

Well, technically there are two, but one door is significantly more foreboding than the other.

(The other door leads to the bathroom which is — you know — somewhat harmless.)

Now, you might be asking yourself, what is this door? Where is it located?

And well, to answer that question would take the magic out of it, would it not?

The one wooden door, so alike from the rest. And yet the way it stands... facing me directly as I enter its corridor — frankly I think it safe to call it its domain — it fills me with a sense of dread.

And when I go to approach it, as I must do every now and again, my hands do not shake. My body stands tall. And yet I cower in fear of the space that lays beyond.

What will I find there? Stains, rags? A world so afar from our own? Bandits, come to ransack the place? Or perhaps something more?

I look at it, and I am reminded of a book. A book where the house's interior is larger than its exterior. And I look at this door. And this door makes the story sound real.

So real in the silence of the empty space, save for myself and my small, quiet breaths.

So real as I take the handle and I push it down.

But alas, for now it is a container for a sink. A microwave. And another, perhaps more foreboding door.

[cocoarchives]

Nightmares of Nature, Chapter 2

The wind’s whistling choir roared in Techno’s ears, freezing the blood in his veins and the sweat down his neck. The click was quiet, a whisper in comparison, and yet it bounced from shadow to shadow like an animal rushing towards them from the trees in the dead of night.

It was all he could do to keep his hands still and steady and relaxed. It was all he could do to let the witch come out, lest before a druskelle .

“What are you doing.”

The boys turned around slowly, hands raised in surrender to the guard who had caught them in their escape into the cold winter before them.

It would be a lie to say that it wasn’t difficult to tell apart the men who protected Fjerda and its gods with their lives. Blue eyes and blond hair peeked out from under his hooded black uniform, completed with the stature of a man who was trained for his position for most — if not all — of his life. From behind him, the prince could feel the musician tense as the soldier’s isenulf made her appearance with teeth bared; the hound’s white coat as beautifully overgrown and wild as the clouds that he’d once seen dot the skies on his rare trips overseas with his father.

“We, uh,” Wilbur began, the beginnings of a tall tale being spun from his lips; one that surely would spill blood the minute it floated into the air.

With a sigh, Techno lifted his hood gently, letting the soft flames around him light up his familiar face.

“Stand down, soldier.” His eyes met the druskelle’s as he spoke, watching as the other’s widened in surprise at the sight that must have certainly been a bizarre one to behold; a royal in a cloak of seal skin and lemming hide, stood side by side with a commoner no less, outside in a freezing blizzard cold.

And the tone of his voice only seemed to convey as much.

“M’Lord?”

Yet it was the prince who was taken aback by the sound that escaped the throat of the guard as he let his rifle down. He’d expected something razor-edged and blunt like that of a blade and instead received… something softer in return. It held the sharpness of thorns that decorated the southern flowers which gave him his name. It carried the bluntness of a palm, something that could bring pain — red and hot — across one’s cheek, but also provide comfort if he so chose.

Click here to read the rest of the chapter, or to read the whole thing.

[qarameiio]

wow! You art is amazing and I absolutely love your sbi reincarnation au! I do have one question though, (feel free not to answer if it's like, plot important or you just don't wanna!) Is the Dream that showed up in the last panel also a reincarnation or the old Dream and he's simply immortal?

oh ho ho uh . spoiler alert i guess ! ? warning for Very Self Indulgent plot summary

the events of the story will take place in a timeline where lmanburg and the dreamsmp and all that have all collapsed and disappeared save for the big ole prison, and dream is bound to that place (and its general vicinity) for hundreds of years until he stumbles across Techno and Wilbur. he cannot die unless The Warden™ dies, and the curse binding him to that place is lifted. the plot of the fic is for The Boys™ to trawl through the memories of their past lives to find a clue as to where Sam is hiding

[weaver-z]

Divergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature’s long-term survival 

[thatbassistbitch]

please elaborate

[weaver-z]

Sure. Imagine that you need to make a book, and this book needs to be successful. This book needs to be the perfect Marketable YA Dystopian.

So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.

You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses. 

So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or Dauntless alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding. 

Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else. 

The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf. 

And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it. 

And by making this bare-bones world, crafted for maximum marketability, you expose yourself and every other YA dystopian writer as a lazy worldbuilder driven too far by the “rule of cool” and the formulas of other, better dystopian books before yours. In the following five years, you watch in real time as the dystopian genre crumbles under your feet, as the movies made based on your successful (but later widely-panned and mocked) books slowly regress to video-only releases, as fewer and fewer releases try to do what you did. And maybe you realize what you’ve done.

[roach-works]

one quibble: hunger games was intense and sincere and the writer had worked for tv and knew exactly what she was talking about when she wrote how media machines create golden idols out of abused kids and then leave the actual people inside their glamorous shells to rot. hunger games had a genuine core of righteous anger that resonated with a lot of people. the hunger games was genuinely angry about shit that is genuinely wrong. 

but divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn’t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn’t know what it was talking about, so she didn’t have anything worth listening to.

there’s a difference between anti-authoritarianism as a disaffected, cynical pose and anti-authoritarianism as a rallying cry by people who believe in a bitter world. and the former is something corporations and industries and publishing houses are so much more comfortable with. so divergent and the flood of books published and marketed alongide and after it showed how the dystopian genre was no longer truly revolutionary, no longer a sincere condemnation of corporate oligarchies. the mass-market dystopian genre was now nothing more than an insincere playspace for people who were writing dystopia as a safely distant, abstract make-believe stage for their pretty girl heroes, rather than a direct allegory for everything that needs to be torn down in this world today. 

[jackawful]

This is the second branch of this post I’ve reblogged and like the fourth I’ve seen and I’m just thinking about how the Uglies series, a pre-Hunger Games forerunner of the YA Dystopia boom, had significantly less staying power than it could have specifically because…with the toxic beauty standards forced on teenagers being a Big Theme, studios couldn’t figure out how to make a profitable movie out of it. The book got optioned multiple times, but a film version made in Hollywood was destined to fall apart at casting & makeup - their marketing methods relied on exactly what the series was criticizing, which is…part of what made it so popular with teenage girls to begin with.

You contrast that with how the marketing for the Hunger Games films directly contradicts the messaging of the text, and how Divergent seems ready-made for the big screen, and it becomes really apparent why the genre folded in on itself. Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticizing capitalism, and in doing so, butchered the genre.

There’s also something rattling around my brain about a correlation between how made-for-screen a dystopian book is and how much it Doesn’t Understand Dystopia, with the culmination being Ready Player One, a piece set in a dystopia that somehow still actively glorifies capitalism & that was literally optioned for film before the book was published, but I don’t…know how to expand on that point.

[cocoarchives]

Do you ever think about how covid-19 PSAs and commercials are comparable to the "duck and cover" PSAs from the Cold War era?

I can't imagine a small child coming up to me and asking me if I know how to survive a disease like bruh I just stayed inside and wrote fanfiction I don't know shit

[cocoarchives]

i was watching that one pm seymour tumblr binge compilation and there was that one post about build a bear necromancers and now catch me writing about build a bear necromancers instead of studying for exams

[cocoarchives]

hey it's been like, what... 2 days since I said I wanted to use tumblr more?

Still not entirely sure how to use this site. It's a blog? but also a social media? so you have to think real hard and be super profound? but also you can just post spur of the moment thinkies?

it's weird but I'm sure I'll get it eventually

[coffito]

Small bois inc

[fudgecake-charlie]

Absolutely ages ago my instagram people said that I should do an art tutorial with Ethoslab, and I finally did it. Actual annotated process pictures in a reblog maybe? (Also yes, I made his hood just an absolute UNIT of fluff for the lols. No I don’t know how he’d wear it up.)

[yeniihuenii]

a philza design based on hummingbirds! also hello! i’m yenii, and i’m new to mcyt tumblr! people might know me as moneyoniis too, i’ve heard good things so i’m here to vibe and post fanart every now and then. nice to meet you all! :D

[cocoarchives]

Hey so I've decided to maybe try hanging out around mcyt tumblr for a while, since twitter's kinda,, Anyways, hello!

On twitter I'm a fic writer, and I guess that means on Tumblr I am as well. I made this blog mostly so I could post original stuff more, but apparently that's not working out.

My works are primarily about the Sleepy Bois! I post them on my ao3, which you can find here.

If you want a sample of my work, my favourite is this one! It's based around the idea that Phil reincarnates every time he dies in a hardcore world, except the reason he's in a hardcore world is because he did something to upset the gods.

I really hope that I can learn how to use this platform, and maybe make a few friends along the way! Maybe find some old ones too? That would be cool.

[cocoarchives]

The Monster Called Loneliness

Loneliness.

In the dictionary, it’s an adjective.

In reality, it’s an ever-consuming monster.

Formless. Shapeless. Invisible. It’s something that we as humans have forever learned to fear, without truly realizing it.

It creeps up the walls without making a speck of noise, crawls in ever-shrinking circles around us until it claws at our hearts and screams with our cries.

Truly, a horrifying creature.

And I can feel it coming in the darkness, slipping in from the cracks in the windows or the gaps beneath the door. I can hear it, breathing in time with the wind that thawed the snow that fell down to the freshly springing ground. I can smell it, as crisp and cold as the winter left behind only months before as it whispered its sweet nothings into my ears.

Its words, they never matter. They could be the worst insults to ever be thrown at man, or the kindest and softest reassurances. All that mattered was that it spoke in a voice always so distinct, always so familiar, and that it could even bring the toughest of fighters to their knees in fright.

The attack could be considered a kind of magic. A spell.

If only we lived in a fairytale.

And as it comes closer, I could feel it brush against my shoulders, a ghost of a comfort once known, a ritual of people so close together, of laughter, of a smile, of praise and a job well done. And I could feel it cup my cheek with the phantom of a warmth of a loved one, a teasing reminder of a hope long forgotten, of soft skin and softer lips, of secretive smiles and exchanges taken for granted.

It too has warmth as it smiles. Knowing that it had another victim to claim within me, to break and crack open and take for dinner.

Perhaps it has the capacity to feel. And if it did, perhaps it would feel sorry.

But ever still, it is a monster, a nightmare, a shadow made real and solid, manifested from terror and thoughts long dead and buried into the ground. It comes from the absence of life, the absence of sound, all saved but one.

And that one just happened to be me.

But there are always ways to combat the demon that can never be killed, for every living thing has its weakness, and though this creature cannot breathe, cannot make a heartbeat, cannot even see, it still has a heel to pierce all the same.

So up flips my screens, the bright colours blinding in the illuminating dark. With a hiss, loneliness flinches back as the light fills the room, as my fingers dance along the symbols and lines we’ve learned to call letters, forming shapes we’ve evolved to call words.

I type, and I ask, and I wait for a response.

I plug in cords of black and white, as the monster pulls away. I pull headphones over my ears to drown out its words, and click buttons to mute its screams.

And as the familiar ringtone echoes throughout the silence, I could feel the non-existent presence of the beast slink away into the shadows, fall back to the world it came from, into the crevices of my mind, and into the mind of others. Into the sky, perhaps. Up into the clouds.

And I can’t help but smile as a wall of screams and arguments greet me, as I open my mouth to greet them back.

“Hello!”

[cocoarchives]

The Second Generation

They told us it was a privilege, to live out in the west.

That our parents had to fight tooth and nail to get “here”, to the new world, to a place where success was written in the stars and hope burnt its brand into their skin.

They said they hopped on boats — rarely ever planes — That they worked hard to get us the lives we deserve, to give us the best chance at living in society.

And truly, we are luckier than most. That should never be understated.

But it’s hard to remember that, when the words of strangers hit harder, when they speak of the history of our blood rather than the history of ourselves. When they speak of death like the guilt sits on our heads, of wars like the blood stains our hands, the fire of bombs lighting our eyes and the destruction elating our hearts. When they tell us stories like we were the villains, and they were the heroes to free us from evil.

It’s hard to remember that, when money has us cupped in its hands, giving us warmth and love and safety in exchange for our trust and loyalty. And when we fail to appease, when we fail to provide what we promised our king, it will not hesitate to drop us, to shove us mercilessly out of the castle walls, and laugh as we are forced to fend for ourselves.

It’s hard to remember that, when chaos trumps the order that came before it, when that so-called “homeland” that we may never see suddenly looks like a lonely paradise, a place straight from a fantasy. When those that mock us for our appearance become the harbingers of pain, a bait to attract even Death himself to this plain, a plight with no end.

They told us that our mothers and fathers escaped, but sometimes it’s hard to see from what.

When violence watches us from the cracks in the walls.

When greed breathes down our necks with a smile on its face.

When war is the beast that sits idle in our front lawns. Watching. Waiting.

They told us we are the second generation. The first to be birthed on their soil and speak with their tongue, the ones destined for power and for greatness, people with a future so far beyond the sights of our ancestors, with the ability to soar into the sky and be another dot, a bright light amongst the stars.

But how can we reach for the specks in the night when we are blind to them, when the suns so far away have become nothing but concepts to us — to the children who have never seen them — and to those that come afterwards, who will only ever see them as fairy tales?

They told us it was a privilege, to live in the west.

But now, it’s perhaps become more of a privilege to go back and visit home.

[cocoarchives]

Penance in the Poppy Fields

There are reasons that humans are made to forget.

There are reasons they are made to walk on the cobblestones as the memories of their past slowly fade away. Lost friends dissolving into dust and fog, the sound of soft snow under light footsteps becoming nothing more than a distant dream.

There are reasons that they greet those ancient remnants like lost lovers, and call it ‘nostalgia’.

Perhaps there are reasons — The god of war mused, walking betwixt a field of poppies — as there are reasons for why the deities hold theirs forevermore.

He could still remember the first gunshots of every battle that marked each land as his own, the cries that echoed through the air with every first blood drawn. He could feel the roar of every tank that had ever run over his sacred earth, just as he could feel the thousands of fallen horses that had galloped in their place only centuries before.

He could remember each and every soldier who’d ever seen him in the peak of conflict, who’d come to him and prayed to him in times of great need. He could see in his mind’s eye every instance that he’d failed them, when he watched empires fall and kingdoms topple, only for others to rise up in their wake.

Every step he took among the path within the poppies seemed to leave them brighter behind him, every brush of his fingertips over their delicate petals bringing a shine to the flower, one that didn’t seem to be there before.

And with every ruby kiss came another bright memory, of another fight lost, another future toppled to be replaced by something else. Another fallen father, brother, friend by his hands, their death no worthier than if he ran them all through with a blade himself.

And as War itself, as the deity for which these flowers bowed and glowed and lived, perhaps he had to accept that as true.

The smell fell over him, their perfume so sickly sweet, yet more freeing than the dusty grey fog in which he lived in for so long. The god closed his eyes and allowed himself a moment of peace in a field of his dead, a mere second in the scale of time, but in the present felt almost infinite in its eternity.

He let himself stay in the hands of all the souls he had touched. All the mortals whom he’s affected and afflicted, whose last breaths cursed his name.

Were the children among them?

His eyes flew open as the cool autumn breeze blew by, the thought an impossible nightmare he hated to consider.

If you want to keep reading, click here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29813154

[cocoarchives]

Forgetting

Around the age of 13, I had a strange fear of forgetting.

This isn’t really too weird for me, because I’ve always just been afraid of a lot of things at a lot of points of time, but this fear in particular really sticks by me to this day.

And there are a lot of reasons for it.

For one thing, how many people would say that they think about forgetting a lot? I’d say about 90% of you wouldn’t even think about it when someone asks you what you’re afraid of. You might even say that you... forget that you’re afraid. And that’s reasonable, it’s not something you’re supposed to think about, ironically.

But something you should know about me is that I

A. Am an overthinker

B. Lack any sort of confidence in anything I ever do

Both of these to the point that it caused my grades to slip an agregious amount, and anything my teachers ever did to try and help only made things worse.

(I got 60s in Art and Music that year)

So you implant this fear of suddenly being unable to recall the faces of friends, or staring blankly at your favourite book, or being told things you should know but just can’t remember, to a girl who has no confidence and is just afraid of everything. And suddenly that’s a new kind of terror that you’ve given a 13 year old child.

Anyone who knows me who reads this might be surprised. Arachnophobia sure. But forgetting? That’s not something I ever talked about.

But they’ve also probably never visited, never saw the white board I had in my room, of the names scrawled in scribbled handwriting in faded red and blue marker, putting photographs and labels in categories...

You get the idea.

I really can’t tell you how long I remembered the fear of forgetting. How long I thought it was reasonable to leave the names of my closest friends to dry up somewhere that I could see it. How long I tried writing in journals, to have a sense of record keeping, to have something I could hold onto and look at and remember.

Of course, I — ever the hopeful — believed memories could always come back. Now of course, I know that’s not a guaranteed.

But after the feeling had passed, after I had convinced myself of my unreasonableness, I tried to erase the names on my whiteboard wall. The surface was nice to have, to study, to understand concepts and write down definitions.

And I think it was the cheap marker, or the way that I wrote it, or maybe it was simply just science plus time. But no matter how hard I tried, the words just stubbornly refused to come off.

I’m not saying it’s still there. I think I managed to wipe it off a while ago, scribbling new ink over the old to get the whole thing off. But the entire white board is stained pink now, and no matter how hard I may try, that colour’s never going to rub off.

If that’s not a good of a reminder as any, I don’t know what is.