hi this is jony speaking. autistic/ADHD + a few other disorders. amateur writer & musician/synth guy. highly enthusiastic about aliens, obscure & non-obscure music, worldbuilding, The Absurd, computers etc. completely dogshit at tagging consistently
Secret Tumblr dashboards organized into a quicklist (links are actually just your Tumblr feed but filtered):
Only posts of those you follow.
Posts from your "favs" — the blogs you’ve liked and reblogged the most lately.
Posts you've not seen yet (will be empty if you've checked Tumblr beforehand).
Posts that are trending.
"Stuff for you" — Tumblr's recommendations based on your likes.
Links to original posters @roughentumble, @nightpool and @cyle with many thanks: sourcepost. 👍😊💖
I suppose this is technically a repost (rather than a reblog), but I'm making this one exception because a quicklist is fast, clickable and handier if right up front, and also the original posts were information and not art (and it's information you can find if you dig around Tumblr too). Still, if you would be so kind, please click on the sourcepost link and leave a like for the OPs, and reblog the original too (which is what I did just before this).
[Image ID: The Destiel confession meme edited so that Dean answers 'JK Rowling posted upskirt photos of a woman on Twitter' to Cas 'I love you'. /End ID]
No one doing this should be allowed to call themselves a feminist.
The wealthy author escalated a social media spat that resulted in posting a photo from a 2023 event at the Institute of Economic Affairs in
Let's not beat around the bush: Children's author JK Rowling sexually harassed someone. In some jurisdictions, this would count as sexual abuse. JK Rowling has committed a sex crime against a woman and fell back on the old rape apologist standby of "she was asking for it".
if ur skinny and u get all sad and mopey like "ohhh im so fat )): im so ugly and fat ))): being fat is the worst thing i could possibly be ))): i shoud lose weight and quit being so awful and fat ):" you owe every fat person 1 million dollars and if you say this shit to fat people directly, 2 million, and if you say "oh youre cute though but IM ugly and fat, i dont hate fat people i just dont want to be fat" when said fat person is upset about you saying how much you hate yourself for "being fat" its 3 million
THIS! It doesn't matter if someone is or isn't actually fat this is something so many girls (and guys) go through and no one should ever think they don't have a right ta complain they should be able ta reach out they deserve help or ta just vent without being told they don't have the right
And I'm a bigger girl but if someone skinny I know was saying that I'd be trying ta see what help they need that I can give
hi i have anorexia and comments like this have encouraged me to starve myself but im sorry you dont feel entitled to body shame fat people because i said it was wrong. youre allowed to feel insecure and to complain about it but i was posting about making comments about hating yourself for being fat and hating fat people being harmful to fat people, including fat people with restrictive eating disorders. its a nuanced topic but i dont think having an eating disorder means that you get to make comments that are harmful to fat people with eating disorders (or without tbh). so like. hope this helps?
and also can i just say that i never said that skinny people cant be insecure, i said that they shouldnt make comments about how much they hate fat people/hate themselves for being fat because its harmful to fat people who have to hear that about themselves? and like even fat people who dont have eating disorders are harmed by this? saying that drybegging fat people into saying how hot and skinny you are and how youre not ugly and horrible for being fat (like they are) is harmful and fucked up isnt me saying you cant be insecure, im saying you shouldnt be fucking horrible to the fat people in your life about it. having an eating disorder doesnt give you a pass to make other people with eating disorders feel horrible about themselves, and honestly i dont think fat people should have to also have restrictive eating disorders to be upset about this. like idk how many people would be listening to me on this if i didnt disclose that i have an eating disorder and thats not right either. anyway like thanks for taking the worst possible read on this post and weaponizing your eating disorder against me so you dont feel bad for triggering fat peoples eating disorders because you dont think we can have restrictive eating disorders
What advice would you have for a writer trying to switch to a more ensemble/Gen style of writing instead of a single fixed POV? One of my primary concerns is how to handle a character's inner thoughts.
Please go as ham as you want on this I will read it all
Lily :)
Lily this is such a good question! I will try to answer it in a useful way <3
(I wrote the above and then needed to open a doc to organize myself. I am so sorry for what lies beyond the cut.)
Disclaimer: I am not an expert, I’m just relaying what I know after a few years of intensive fic writing, having an interest in genre and the purpose of genre, and collecting as much fandom history as I can. This is from a fic writer’s POV because I am not terribly interested in writing original novels (but I have tried my hand at screenplays, again, big cast). I have no formal training in creative writing. I will be using examples from Rito Chronicles up to the point where you have read.
I will start by saying, my first fics had so many characters in them that I had excel sheets to track them, so I’ve always been into working with an “ensemble cast” of characters. Writing a longer fic from 1 or 2 POVs is not something that I ever did until the last few years. Those two fics are technically romance, but even when I write something shippy it's more "gen shaped" than "shippy shaped". What I mean by that comes down to the structural elements of what makes a shippy fic and what makes a gen fic, which is how we’ll start this journey, and then I'll talk my approach to characterization.
A Very Abridged Background on Genre
Genre is, above all, a marketing category. When you read a trashy romance, you know what beats will be in there, when they will be hit, and what to expect at the end. When you watch a half hour sitcom, same thing. Genre is how you find your audience, regardless of the medium. Fanfiction has an incredibly diverse set of tropes that contribute to romantic or general sub-genres, and it mixes, matches and evolves in a way that commercial media would never risk (to avoid alienating they eyeballs they need to sell to advertisers).
Fanfic has long been divided along the axis of Gen vs Romance, and Romance was typically divided by who was kissing (slash, femslash, and het). Ao3 was born out of these conventions, which is why it i organized the way it is.
Shippy fics (and I am calling them shippy fics because they have a distinct feel from traditionally published romance) typically rely on a trope or combination of tropes in order to fulfill the end goal of getting two (or perhaps more) characters together (I’m generalizing). Shippy fics are an entire genre to themselves that are informed by romance tropes and fanfic tropes and are primarily built on yearning. Good ones will keep the characters away from each other at crucial intervals (thought they were dead, must choose duty over self, etc.) with legitimate reasons. “Why can’t they be together now?” is the core question for these fics, and if there isn’t a strong reason for keeping them apart, the tension and yearning deflates, the fic falls flat. (Same goes for any romantic plot in anything).
The interesting thing about characters in shippy fics is how they slowly come to be on the same page through a series of realizations and moments of trust being built. The romantic relationship (or QPR works structurally the same in fic) is the central pillar of the story, so the character arcs should mirror each other to some degree, and the fic ends when they get together (or maybe after an epilogue). I’m generalizing a bit here of course, there are endless ways to play with the genre, but I’m going to restrain myself from writing a thesis on it.
Gen longfic tends to pick up other tropes and genres: action, adventure, coming of age. Any sort of genre that is not specific to romance (and many that are) can be included in gen. When we talk about gen in terms of fanfic it tends to be treated as the opposite of romance. There is also a lot of wank surrounding the shippy vs. gen fic (along wanky lines) about how gen is superior because it sets itself aside from “those nasty shippers who just want to make men kiss”. This is (obviously) complete bullshit. There is nothing more “noble” about gen, nor does it account for a more thorough exploration of character than shippy genres.
Structurally, there is a little more leeway with gen I think, but ultimately the difference (to me) is a matter of different tropes being used. The story can be just as narrowly focused on one (or, more rarely, two) characters as a romance can be, it’s just a matter of the fic ending when the closing point of the plot/trope is fulfilled.
But you asked about more I call “ensemble” fics, and while I do have to think about aspects of it, I have worked with multiple character POVs for so long, that actually translating what I do into words is a bit chaotic, but dammit, I’ll try.
In good fanfic (either shippy or gen) I don’t see much of difference in terms of writing. Both deliver a deep dive into the characters inner thoughts, histories, and progression arcs over the fic. The character should come out of a longfic changed for what they’ve experienced, whether that is falling for someone who they (very frequently, but not always) aren’t with in canon, or because of the forces of the plot.
My Approach
Listen, in a lot of my most recent work, I see and unattended NPC, ask if anyone’s going to pad out their characterization, and don’t wait for an answer. I try to apply some kind of canon logic to why they are the way they are (Mazli is a gossip because he told Link about the troubles of the village when Link approached; Laissa wants to be a warrior because of her line about taking Medoh down herself if she were a warrior; Bedoli is scatter brained because she couldn’t remember the song she gave Link in a quest) and try to give them some sort of distinct voice. For characters who have distinct voices in canon (Revali, Mipha, Sidon, Teba, etc.) I do the fanfic author thing of immersing myself in their voices and trying to replicate their speech and presumed thought patterns.
That’s the easy part. That’s just generating headcanons to flesh out your story based on canon. Here I’ll try to break down the relationships between character and plot.
1. You know the ending in a shippy fic, you just have to get there. In a gen fic you have to know what you are closing in on if you want to work your way there.
I’m an inveterate pantser. I do very little structural planning of a fic if I am not collaborating with another writer. In fact, I describe the list of plot points I want to hit as a “wishlist”. My wishlist typically includes some indication of who will get together, something interesting about birds I want to build into the world, maybe a crucial thing that has to happen before the second half of the story. But I always have my last scene in mind, so I can ask “how do they get to that point?” whenever I start another scene. Once I’m into the story, I can start ordering my wishlist into more specific scenes.
I use the Flashlight Method as I reach each point, and I let the points I have be flexible to accommodate things that may come up. In Rito Chronicles, this is typically me discovering that another character needs to have a POV in order to stabilize, solidify, justify a point that comes up later.
I typically keep 5-10 chapters ahead of what I have posted. This is usually enough to go back and add a detail to an unposted chapter if something comes up in my current chapter that needs to be anchored.
2. Let the characters do all the work
I’m going to talk about developing characters a little bit later, but knowing what the characters are about allows you to let them lead the action. But what I have found (outside of being really familiar with the characters) is you need to know who knows what, how reliable their understanding of the knowledge is, how they came across it, and if/how they use it.
If it feels like they’re just talking and it has no tension, add an agitator to a scene. This can be something external like noise, or injuries, but I frequently rely on a few characters to be agitators in specific situations (Harth agitates Teba, Mazli agitates Gesane, Nekk sets off Huck and Huck agitates everyone.)
I can’t really explain how to make a characters stories dovetail. My understanding is you can plan it and work backward from it, but I’ve never been able to execute it. These usually come about organically for me and I pounce on them.
My favourite example is in For Ages to Come when Gesane’s wings are clipped. Leading up to the incident, you see a little bit of rumbling about limited freedoms, how Teba and Saki were pushed into each other’s wings in an effort to get layin’, how Fyson is afraid to ask to leave.
The event ties together Gesane and Teba’s storylines when Teba defends him, and Teba experiences a moment of clarity about the cruelty of their world that he had grown so accustomed to. Fyson is so disturbed by the wing clipping, he is driven to finally ask for leave. Harth drops some of his asshattedness (for lack of a better term) to comfort Gesane, and see the connection between Gesane not being allowed to be with his Hylian love, and Harth’s wife dying while egg-bound.
Even better, it provided a moment to converge character, action, and worldbuilding, giving us the first detailed glimpse of the Rito system of justice.
Ridiculously, this was all to provide a Watsonian answer the question of “why doesn’t Gesane just go and kill the talus in coldsnap hollow himself instead of sending Link on a sidequest?”
3. Who gets the POV?
I debate with myself about this a lot when I’m writing, trying to balance it so we can have a diverse set of perspectives, but ultimately I decide based on who is carrying the plot, and who will have the most impactful POV. There are some times when I avoid a particular POV. Recently I opted for Harth over Saki, even though they were equally suitable, because Saki’s POV would expose some secrets to the audience that I did not want to come out.
When the plot is just what your characters do, it’s easy to just hand the appropriate character something off the checklist, and let them filter the experience through their perspective. This works especially well for foreshadowing and offhandedly providing some future info.
4. Introducing Characters
Dealing with character introductions in fanfic is a little bit different than original fiction. Most of the audience will know the characters from whatever text you’re sourcing them from, and will have sought them out. There are the occasional fandom-blind readers, but I personally don’t cater to them (and have long meditations on the borders of fanfic and what makes good fanfic, but that’s for another time).
In my case, I was dealing with entire villages full of NPCs and some OCs (to move the plot), so I was pretty strategic in how I introduced them. In Turns our Hearts I started with Kass and Teba, who I figured the audience would be most likely to know. I moved on to characters that the audience would probably know, (Saki, Amali, Harth, Fyson, Kaneli), and (with the exception of Gesane, who could have his own essay). I mentioned them relative to who they were, their positions in the layout of the in-game village, and tried to make their presence apparent right from the start by indicating who they were to Kass and Teba.
But don’t bombard your audience with names, especially ones they don’t know, right away (I say, breaking this rule at the beginning of one fic). Let them show up organically in crowds, letters, gossip, and if you give them a POV, make the first one really count.
Conventional advice has been that if you want a character to be liked, you need to give the audience a reason to be invested in them. Making them too cool, too strong, too good is usually unrelatable unless there is something to balance that out. Give them a vulnerability. Make them fallible. Do it right away because you have like a minute before your audience clicks off.
5. Interpersonal relationships
I’ve been told that one of the hallmarks of my writing is the intense interpersonal struggle, the webs that encompass every kind of relationship, how they morph and change, the implied history that unfolds as the series progresses. I do this with all my writing, but nothing can match the volume of Rito Chronicles, so that’s where it is most pronounced. It’s been affectionately called a Rito soap opera, because I go straight for the drama, and at the crux of all drama is interpersonal conflict.
My key ingredients for creating the interpersonal relationship hinge on proximity, history and “external forces”.
Proximity is next door neighbours, fellow warriors, merchants, a guard at the end of a bridge meeting the eyes of the Hylian who sweeps the stableyard. This is the thing I rely on to make the relationship make sense. Where would they have met? How well would they know each other based on these meetings? What is the level of formality based on their social proximity? Not everyone knows each other that well (though they often think they do in a small village), and you can exploit those misunderstandings to inform how the POV character views other characters.
History is something I make up as I go. To me, it feels like uncovering aspects of their characters and comes as a surprise. In For Ages to Come I called back to the impulsive inclusion of a disaster (the Collapse) that I did not yet know the scope of, with Harth being afraid of windy nights as a child, and recalling how his father carried him on the boardwalk, while doing the same for a distraught Tulin. (You don’t actually see him thinking this, he says something like this aloud to Amali in her POV after). Go back and re-read your work and things will jump out at you that you can play with here.
“External forces” have frequently been politics in my fics, but they’re also cultural differences. (Rito don’t have a word for ‘blond’ to Ariane’s amusement, but Hylian eyes also can’t see the differences in plumages between the identical NPCs.) Character POVs are filtered through these differences.
6. The limits of 3rd person POVs and how to leverage them
I go with a very retro fanfic method of delineating POVs, which is to slap the POV’s name at the top in bold and write their scene. I avoid “headhopping” between two characters in a scene because 3rd person limited POV offers such ample opportunities for distinct voices and unreliable narrators.
Every character is unreliable in Rito Chronicles. They piece together events from incomplete information, are influenced by gossip, justify shitty things to themselves as necessary (not just looking at Kaneli here), and they frequently misinterpret each other when they try to suss out what the non-POV character is thinking. It follows that some characters read expressions, irony, and what goes unsaid, better than others.
Sometimes it’s easy to figure out (Harth, though particularly obtuse, cannot possibly miss the fact that Gesane is having a breakdown after the wing-clipping). Sometimes they have no clue (Fyson cannot begin to comprehend what compelled Teba to clip Gesane’s wings). And sometimes only certain people know things (Gesane is thought to never laugh, but his laugh is just a breath that Guy and Ariane can recognize) Vary the emotional intelligence here.
The author should probably know what the non POV characters are thinking in a scenario though.
7. How much to pre-plan your characters
I really don’t. I go in and discover them as I go by writing within the confines of their characterization. It’s more important to know how they will react to something, because the why can be manufactured later. This prevents derailing the story with background that isn’t coming out organically.
Advice I’ve read is to give characters a secret that audience can’t know, and before writing them in your main work, attempt their POV in a WIP you intend never to publish. I haven’t always done that last one, but for some of the characters I find more difficult to get a handle on I do.
Always let the history laid out in your story inform the present thoughts and actions.
Final Remarks
If you made it this far... holy cow I barely did. I don’t really know how I do what I do. Everyone’s method is going to be different, but the one thing I cannot stress enough is: if your memory is like mine, you can’t avoid rereading what you’ve already written.
Inner thoughts are formed by previous events as well as the present, as I've tried to demonstrate above. How you write them in terms of narrative styling depends on you (whether you write close to the character, which is typical of Ao3 House style, or more distantly, like I do.)
If I haven't said it overtly in the text, I want to emphasize here: it's more compelling to write a simple story with complex characters than a complex story that lacks depth of character. This has always been my approach.
I’ve tackled this from a fanfic perspective, and the perspective of Rito Chronicles specifically. I hope this answers your question or at least entertains ♥
A lil master list for all the zelda related ask blogs I could find! If there's any others I've missed, pls lmk! HUGE thanks to naga for the inspo behind this & the original masterlist here ^v^. Note that some of these blogs may be inactive!
Interested in making your own ask blog? Check out Rahlin/Wren's guide for how to make and run one here: [Rahlin's ask blog guide]
Do it…you wont….
LET ME DrAW THEM!!!! *grabby hands*
Note: When you reblog please reblog with an image or at least the name of your oc so i can find it 😁
Also if you would rather send a Toyhouse link post it in the comments bellow vvvvvvv
Heya! Just saw ur zora doodles recently and WOW your style’s been a treat to see :D!! Sadly I only have one zora OC TT, so here’s my sassy zora bard Mirae!!!!
I fully understand if you can’t get to her cuz DAYM ya got a lotta requests 0-0
IT'S CALLED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! COMPASSION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NOT EMPATHY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THE WORD YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IS COMPASSION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Im so soooo so sorry your shitty little moodboards get 0 notes and your writing is so awful that the only engagement you get is when people are digging for dirt on you but literally no one on planet earth is faking having had sepsis on tumblr dot com for cookies. hope you get the cyclospora parasite and shit your pants in the Kingdom Hall you fascist freak
if ur skinny and u get all sad and mopey like "ohhh im so fat )): im so ugly and fat ))): being fat is the worst thing i could possibly be ))): i shoud lose weight and quit being so awful and fat ):" you owe every fat person 1 million dollars and if you say this shit to fat people directly, 2 million, and if you say "oh youre cute though but IM ugly and fat, i dont hate fat people i just dont want to be fat" when said fat person is upset about you saying how much you hate yourself for "being fat" its 3 million
THIS! It doesn't matter if someone is or isn't actually fat this is something so many girls (and guys) go through and no one should ever think they don't have a right ta complain they should be able ta reach out they deserve help or ta just vent without being told they don't have the right
And I'm a bigger girl but if someone skinny I know was saying that I'd be trying ta see what help they need that I can give
hi i have anorexia and comments like this have encouraged me to starve myself but im sorry you dont feel entitled to body shame fat people because i said it was wrong. youre allowed to feel insecure and to complain about it but i was posting about making comments about hating yourself for being fat and hating fat people being harmful to fat people, including fat people with restrictive eating disorders. its a nuanced topic but i dont think having an eating disorder means that you get to make comments that are harmful to fat people with eating disorders (or without tbh). so like. hope this helps?
We need weight loss ads now more than ever. Trump has reinvigorated the Fat Liberation group. The obesity epidemic is at its highest point ever. We need weight loss ads now more than ever.
Lol was this you
Seriously bruh, if you wanna make a case about nutritional defecits and the declining vitamin and mineral content in agricultural produce, the overall failure of public school physical education to provide any productive and meaningful instruction on personal health and correct methods of exercise, the ever-increasing cost of healthy foods, and the frankly shameful rate of child hunger and food waste all collectively contributing to poorer health in persons of ALL body types, I'm happy to play ball, but if the beginning and end of your platform is "there are more fat people than there used to be and being fat is bad so promoting eating disorders and drug abuse is good actually" then you are straight up wasting everyone's time
"Uhhh but everyone was skinny in 1920 look at this "fat lady" who was in a freak show at the circus lol and look how average she would be now" do you have any idea how many vitamins and other supplements we have had to insert into the food and water supply to combat widespread malnutrition in the last several decades
You realize how many people had teeth rotting out of their heads before we put fluoride in drinking water
Jesus fucking christ, google "B12 defecit"
The population was skinnier because we were constantly on the precipice of dying from shit like low zinc, you absolute dingbat
People being 'fatter' than we used to be is a GOOD thing, combating genuine weight-related health issues with a constant barrage of image-critical ads and the promotion of eating disorders in scientifically proven to be harmful and ineffective bullshit, and the fact that thinness as a beauty standard has been pushed to such extremes as intentionally infecting oneself with viruses and parasites amd chemically and surgically-enforced starvation over the past several hundred years only proves that this is not a natural default but a heavily-reinforced and artificial standard
I hate you Ozempic craze I hate you 'heroin chic' I hate you weight loss ads on public radio I hate Burn Fat Fast ads every thirty seconds I hate you I hate you I hate you
I grew up before the term 'thigh gap' was invented I grew up before 'hip dip' was invented I was born before 'muffin top' was a thing before 'clean girl look' was a thing before 'glass skin' was a thing before razoring off peach fuzz was a thing and I'm so so so fucking tired of us inventing new concepts purely for the purpose of convincing people to hate their own bodies enough to buy products
hello i'm the aircrash bureau @echo-mckellogg - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
