Dylan Hague

26, he/him. Author of BLADE OF THE COVENANT, SHADOWS OF THE SKY, and TEEN TITANS: FIREWORKS, among other stories you might not have read. Lives off apple cider and chicken broth. Views are my own. Orcs are great. https://www.ko-fi.com/dylanhaguethewriter

[fellshish]

i write for myself not for comments but dear god getting comments does so remind me of the joy of writing and sharing something

[the-uncanny-dag]

[werewolf-transgenderism]

in the "vampires repelled or harmed by crosses" type of vampire story what do you think happens if you are a vampire who isn't christian. I'm sure someone has written about this somewhere but like if you're waving a cross at a vampire who's like. jewish or buddhist or muslim etc etc I feel like that wouldn't be effective. do you need to be like the guy from the mummy and have an arsenal of religious symbols to break out in case of paranormal or supernatural occurrences

[maniculum]

I’ve seen this taken in a number of different directions, actually.

Vampires are repelled by holy symbols generally. They all work. (Variation by Terry Pratchett: it matters whether the vampire recognizes the symbol.)

Vampires are repelled by faith, so the vampire hunter has to use a symbol they believe in. (Lots of riffs on this one. I recall a short story I read many years ago wherein a well-off suburbanite attempted to bribe a vampire, only for the vampire to scream & flee due to the suburbanite’s unshakable faith in Money.)

Vampires are repelled by symbols of whatever their beliefs were in life. (This might be a Tumblr original.)

It really is only crosses, but nobody is sure why. (Buffy the Vampire Slayer*.)

It actually has nothing to do with holy symbols; due to a quirk of how vampire brains work, they’re repelled by right angles. (Peter Watts, Blindsight)

Fertile ground for speculative worldbuilding, it seems.

* This is never interrogated, but there’s a very weird tension between how none of the characters are particularly religious but they’re all 100% certain that only Christian iconography works. As far as I recall, the only comment made in-show about this is a Jewish character noting the awkwardness of putting a cross on her wall for protection. There’s no suggestion that the idea of using a different symbol occurred to them, but there’s also no suggestion at any point that anyone sees the apparent unique efficacy of crosses & holy water as metaphysically significant.

[dykebeckett]

there’s an episode of doctor who where any strong belief repels them and a soviet soldier wards off vampires with a hammer and sickle pin

[lyricwritesprose]

I believe there was also an issue of the X-Men where it was necessary to have faith in your particular symbol and only Kitty and Kurt could do it (they are Jewish and Catholic Christian, respectively). Also I think the symbol could be pretty roughly improvised if it had to be. Like, I think Logan tried two sticks and got nowhere, because he's an atheist or at least strongly agnostic, but Kurt used the same two sticks and got the classic Dracula recoil because he Takes Catholicism Seriously.

[flameraven]

In the Mercy Thompson series the main character uses a necklace with a lamb pendant to repel a vampire, because it's the faith that matters and not the specific symbol, and she doesn't like crosses.

[dylan-hague]

In the Claes Bang Dracula miniseries on Netflix, Dracula claims that his aversion to the cross is on account of his diet: he killed and ate so many peasants over the years who were subject to oppression by the Catholic Church that he developed a biological aversion to their symbol.

Personally I like the faith thing the most, and am using it in All the Angels, but this one was interesting to me. Could be expanded on, maybe a story where you can identify a vampire’s habits and choice of prey by their mannerisms or manifestations. Could build some sort of mystery around that? I dunno.

[boydykedevo]

Hey wait lemme do a spotify wrapped game: what’s the first song on your list that’s not by one of your top five artists and how high is it

[dylan-hague]

Not a Spotify user, but I bum my dad’s Apple Music, and Apple Music has Replay. Same thing, basically.

My top five artists are Mayday Parade, My Chemical Romance, Paramore, the Avett Brothers, and Theophany.

My #1 song is Audrey Hepburn’s Moon River.

I first listened to this recording three weeks ago. I got a little stuck on it.

[dylan-hague]

Sneak peek of something I’ve got cooking in my downtime. I’m a day late, but I figured I might as well share.

Happy Birthday, pal.

[dylan-hague]

Update to this:

Holy crap, I forgot how fast I write action. I’ve been working on this draft for like three days, and I’m almost 4,000 words in. Working title: Captain Mick.

Some notes:

He’s a riverboat pilot, as one might expect. Legally, he doesn’t have to be, he can do whatever (in 1928, he was a boat pilot, a gaucho, and an aviator, so he’s already a Renaissance man), but a riverboat adventure sounded really fun to me. He was just a pilot for a local boating company, first mate on their flagship, but when the boss man disappeared, he ended up in charge of the whole show. He’s not crazy about the responsibility, but he does his best.

He has a knack for hearing “The Music”, which lets him do fun cartoony stuff. If he listens hard enough, he can hear the music of the world around him, and acting on beat gives him strange abilities.

Everybody calls him Mick. His parents called him Mickey, but that was a long time ago now. His boss calls him Mick, his friends call him Mick, he calls himself Mick. He hasn’t even heard the name Mickey since he was a boy.

[dylan-hague]

Sneak peek of something I’ve got cooking in my downtime. I’m a day late, but I figured I might as well share.

Happy Birthday, pal.

[dylan-hague]

”Sometimes scars turn out to be scabs.”

Tremendous props to @AlexCalex_art over on Twitter for this portrait of Lila, the main character of my novel ALL THE ANGELS! Definitely pop over there and give their work a little love when you get the chance.

And of course, if you’re interested in reading Lila’s story, the book is available for free over at readalltheangels.wordpress.com, or on my WattPad!

[dylan-hague]

The artist of this piece recently moved over here to Tumblr! Go give ‘em a follow at @alexcalexart!

[dylan-hague]

”Sometimes scars turn out to be scabs.”

Tremendous props to @AlexCalex_art over on Twitter for this portrait of Lila, the main character of my novel ALL THE ANGELS! Definitely pop over there and give their work a little love when you get the chance.

And of course, if you’re interested in reading Lila’s story, the book is available for free over at readalltheangels.wordpress.com, or on my WattPad!

[dankmemeuniversity]

[foreverpetty]

I’m

[dylan-hague]

Genuinely shocked that I got this one.

[prokopetz]

Doctor Robotnik is a fun one to throw into those "what would [media character X] do with [cursed artifact Y]" hypotheticals because the answer is always "misunderstand or disregard its intended purpose and use it to power a giant evil robot". The One Ring, the Death Note, the Necronomicon – it doesn't matter. Evil robot. The question isn't what he'd do with it, but how it's going to go horribly wrong.

[dylan-hague]

Eggman tries to power a giant evil mech with the One Ring, only for Sauron to possess the whole thing because Eggman built the mech in Mount Doom. Egg-Sauron rips Barad-Dur out of the ground and uses it as a giant mace. Super Sonic has to join the Battle of the Black Gate so Aragorn and the boys don’t get squished.

poor Frodo and Sam have to scale Egg-Sauron to get the Ring back. Sam blows up like four badniks with a frying pan. Frodo is openly weeping the entire time, because How Did It Get So Much Worse.

Sonic somehow gets the Ring for like, a second (grabbing rings is just what he does, of course he was gonna get it), and he just. Passes it off to Frodo. But he had it for just a second, which technically makes Sonic a Ringbearer, so they let him sail to the Undying Lands with Frodo and Gandalf.

Eggman gets turned into a Gollum by the time it’s all over. When we see him in the next game, he is back to normal and we never talk about it again.

[sharkrad08222222]

Their is the Gollum, not a gollum.

having robotnik turn feral, and having sage to hose him off and point at metal to get his mind working again would be pretty funny though.

[dylan-hague]

I agree in principle, but it’s likely that the Ring’s corruption would have a similar effect on other members of the race of Men. (Hobbits, as we all know, are an offshoot of humans.) We got close to seeing this explored in the Jackson films, where a deleted scene depicting a corrupted Frodo with Gollum-like features. We never got the opportunity to see any physical effects on Isildur, since he didn’t have it long enough for those effects to take place, but it’s totally possible.

I used the term Gollum as shorthand for “corrupted creature with traits similar to the character Gollum”. But I’m sure you know that, you just wanted to be pedantic.

[prokopetz]

Doctor Robotnik is a fun one to throw into those "what would [media character X] do with [cursed artifact Y]" hypotheticals because the answer is always "misunderstand or disregard its intended purpose and use it to power a giant evil robot". The One Ring, the Death Note, the Necronomicon – it doesn't matter. Evil robot. The question isn't what he'd do with it, but how it's going to go horribly wrong.

[dylan-hague]

Eggman tries to power a giant evil mech with the One Ring, only for Sauron to possess the whole thing because Eggman built the mech in Mount Doom. Egg-Sauron rips Barad-Dur out of the ground and uses it as a giant mace. Super Sonic has to join the Battle of the Black Gate so Aragorn and the boys don’t get squished.

poor Frodo and Sam have to scale Egg-Sauron to get the Ring back. Sam blows up like four badniks with a frying pan. Frodo is openly weeping the entire time, because How Did It Get So Much Worse.

Sonic somehow gets the Ring for like, a second (grabbing rings is just what he does, of course he was gonna get it), and he just. Passes it off to Frodo. But he had it for just a second, which technically makes Sonic a Ringbearer, so they let him sail to the Undying Lands with Frodo and Gandalf.

Eggman gets turned into a Gollum by the time it’s all over. When we see him in the next game, he is back to normal and we never talk about it again.

[dylan-hague]

Couldn’t sleep, so I did this while listening to Old Time Radio. If it looks like I colored right over my lineart layer, shut up no I didn’t.

[dylan-hague]

A little sketch of my MC, Lila, done between drafting days.

[dylan-hague]

Yeah, I’m workin’ on somethin’.

Happy belated Public Domain Day.

[dylan-hague]

I like to listen to Neil Gaiman when I sleep. I have a handful of stories I like to cycle through—“Only the End of the World Again”, “Bitter Grounds”, “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar”—but my favorite is “The Goldfish Pool, and Other Stories”.

When I started doing it, that story inspired me to keep writing. When I listened to “The Goldfish Pool”, I would have a good day of writing the next day.

Now, Neil’s voice means rest. Maybe I’m disappointed because I’ve not accomplished much that day, maybe I’m worn and weathered because I’ve spent all my energy on the people around me and kept none for myself. Maybe it’s just been a bad day, everyone has those.

It doesn’t matter. That old man’s voice comes out of my speaker, and the day is over. I can cast off the weight of my world, and sink into nothing for a little while. It’s not much of a luxury, I suppose. Maybe it’s even a little silly. But it helps.

“It was raining when I arrived in LA, and I felt myself surrounded by a hundred old movies.”

[dylan-hague]

Hey, y’all remember me?

So my name is Dylan, and I’m a writer. You might remember me from a fanfic I wrote several years ago called TEEN TITANS: FIREWORKS. Got somewhat popular on here back in the day.

Well, I just wanted to share some exciting news: my new original horror novel, ALL THE ANGELS, is complete, and will be made available to read online for free! First chapter is up on the website right now, and future chapters will go up on Sundays and Wednesdays throughout this month!

If you’re interested, check out the book at readalltheangels.wordpress.com. Again, totally free!

Thanks for watching, and I hope to hear from you all soon!

[dylan-hague]

10-2-2023.