Gabriella @gabriellawrites - Tumblr Blog

Hello everyone!

So, this is my writing sideblog! I’m Gabriella_Marie on AO3 and GabriellaGadfly on FF.net (though I’d recommend that you check out my AO3 instead - there’s stuff on there that I can’t post on FF.net because they don’t have the fandoms up, I always post on AO3 first, and there’s formatting I’m able to do there that FF.net doesn’t allow.)

Anyways, feel free to send me asks or message me, or ask me questions about anything! I’m always down for that!

Writing Progress: In-Progress Fics: (last updated 2/1/21)

#writing #fanfic #ao3 #writeblr #progress update

allright

came back wrong trope but the character knows that they came back wrong. they’re so acutely aware of how different they are now from how they were before that it drives them fucking insane. they’re stuck trying to return to somebody that’s long dead. they can never be the person they once were. everybody around them knows it. deep down, they know it too, but they’re trapped in a cycle of their own making. of trying to revive someone that no longer exists.

macgyvermedical

If you were in an apocalypse and you had limited access to sterile supplies or medicine, (and also you were fighting a guerrilla war) what would you do to try and ensure that you and your fellow medics could save/treat as many people/as much as you could?

(Let’s say it’s about 10-20 years into the apocalypse at this point)

It may not be glamorous, but setting oneself up for success here means basic public health measures.

Latrines are going to be important. Diarrheal illness kills about 1.2 million people per year and is often spread through drinking water contaminated with poop. As high as this number is, it used to be way, way higher before modern sanitation, and it still is very high in areas without clean running water and toilet facilities. Keeping poop away from drinking water is one of the best things you can do to save the most people possible.

In addition to latrines (which keep poop away from water sources), disinfecting drinking water is also necessary. The fastest low-resource way to do this is boiling for 10 minutes, but that takes fuel. If fuel is scarce, go for "sun sanitizing", or leaving water in direct sunlight in clear glass jugs for several days. Washing water and water for other uses generally doesn't need to be sanitized to this degree.

Keeping things clean is also vital. Unless you're doing surgery, sterilization isn't as important as just basic hygiene. That means making sure everyone is washing their hands as often as reasonable. Some kind of distilled alcohol (ideally over 60%) can help clean hands if water is scarce, but this takes resources to make. Soap can be made from lye (which can be obtained by running water through wood ash) and fat.

Basic nursing is also going to be really important when you don't have medicines to make up the difference. Keeping someone who is ill or injured adequately fed, hydrated, rested, and clean is going to greatly improve their survival even without antibiotics.

20-30 years into a major disaster from which the world has failed to recover means that your characters are probably out of pretty much all medicines. Some medicines can be made from plant material or other easily acquired substances.

Opium (for pain, cough, or diarrhea) can be made from any papavar somniferum poppy

Silexan (for anxiety) can be made from lavender

Salicylic acid (for pain, fever) from willow bark

Digitalis (for heart failure) from foxglove (very, very hard to dose and deadly to get wrong)

Alcohol (for short term muscle relaxation, sedation, sanitation) from any sugar and yeast

THC and CBD (pain, recent studies show that it doesn't actually improve anxiety or PTSD, but if it works for an individual, sure), from cannabis

Honey (for coughs, wound care)

Ether (for surgery, pain relief) from alcohol and sulfuric acid

Cocaine (for hemostasis and local anesthesia) from coca

You probably could make penicillin if you had a really dedicated chemist and a lot of the correct mold, but to make it at the quantities needed to treat an infection, you would need a lot of resources. Plus, it doesn't work against a lot of organisms these days (though it could treat strep and syphilis)

Probably others

As far as items go, a lot of things can be sterilized or at least cleaned to be reused. Obviously this won't work forever, since things will wear out, but the first few years you could do this. Here is a table from my very favorite book Improvised Medicine by Kenneth V. Iserson that talks about what can be reused and how to do it:

Iserson, K. V. (2016). Improvised medicine : providing care in extreme environments. Mcgraw Hill Education.

jdotsodomite

i hope you write (i hope we both write)

zetarays

hand in unedited hand

abyssal-ilk

i love hitting characters with the disability beam. we should all be hitting characters with the disability beam. my favorite activity

anistarrose

make that blorbo disabled. hit them with the disability beam. especially if they obviously were or should have been disabled in canon but canon didn't meaningfully dwell on it

anistarrose

frequently asked questions:

yes, mental disabilities count

but you should always expand your horizons into hitting your blorbos with beams of physical disability too, though

Hi! Do you have any new plot ideas that you're excited about?

Definitely!! Some fics I’ve been working on but haven’t published yet are a BNHA fic that’s set in a world where sedoretus are the norm (everyone is split up into two hereditary groups, morning and evening, and it’s highly taboo to romance someone in your same group; also, the standard romantic relationship is 4 people, two morning and two evening) - I’m having fun exploring how this changes social dynamics and norms and how Katsuki and Izuku being raised as essentially siblings would affect their relationship!

Another one is a short Transformers fic I like to call Megatron Reads A History Book and it Saves Cybertron - I’m going *ham* on the coding for that one

I recently discovered Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and it has my absolute most beloved character trope: person who grew up in an apocalyptic world travels back to pre-apocalyptic times and has to adjust to a non-destroyed world, so I obviously need to write something exploring Casey Jones Jr’s psyche

I’m writing a My Little Pony fic where both Twilight and Pinkie are changelings from the very beginning - I’m having fun exploring the alien psychology and cultural norms!

I’m also working on a Magnus Archives fic where Elias gets unpossessed around Season 3 or so, only he’s been possessed for so long that he literally cannot remember how to move his body anymore (at one point he tries to breathe consciously and that makes him unable to breathe until he almost passes out), so the only way he’s able to talk for a while is via Jon pulling answers out of him

Speaking of Transformers, I thought it would be fun to write something where Daniel from G1 has intense species dysphoria due to basically being raised and socialized by Cybertronians

A Martian/Severance fusion where the military’s wormed its way into NASA, so they sever to keep those two parts of the mission separate, and Mark hacks his severance chip to turn it on and off at will so that he can have some form of company while being stranded alone on Mars

An offshoot of the Tokyo Ghoul fusion where ghoul!Izuku swaps dimensions with canon!Izuku and doesn’t realize that the dimension he swapped into doesn’t have ghouls at all - he just thinks that he, personally, isn’t a ghoul in this dimension - he gets along pretty well with the alternate versions of his classmates until the reveal and it all comes crashing down

Or are you asking about plot directions for existing fics?

Thank you for asking! I always love chatting about my writing!

#writeblr #my writing

cyeayt

Shout out to Characters who are shells of their former selves! You died and you’re not coming back! You don’t recognize yourself and neither does anyone else, and it’s anyone’s guess what the fuck you’re supposed to be now!

#how to live when you’ve died #danny phantom fanfiction #dp daemon au #daemon au

ivipl1

"came back wrong" this "lived wrong" that, what about dying wrong. my death will forever cling to you, leaving behind a slimy trail and a metallic taste in your mouth. my soul will forever drag you down like the heavy corpse of a long-dead god, who somehow still grants wishes. you can't tell which one of us is the one not letting go. you know not even your own death will end this.

ivipl1

dont do this to me

ivipl1

people are already reblogging this with their blorbos im doomed

#andromeda #how to live when you’ve died #danny phantom #dp daemon au

thelastwhimzy

the fact that there are barely any fics about bart allen (yj cartoon in particular) healing from growing up in the apocalypse is absolutely tragic.

acaciapines

hello !! what are your thoughts on actors and acting in a world with daemons ? how do you think they would work ?

oooh this is super interesting...i've been thinking over this most of the day and i honestly think there wouldnt be a lot of like, huge and drastic changes. i do think people would cast for appearance of the human actor AND the daemon actor, so there would 100% be casting calls that would be like 'canine daemons only' because whatever character youre auditioning for would have a canine daemon.

BUT ALSO i think there'd be like. daemon costumes!! for places where you need a specific form but your actor isnt settled as such--like, maybe youre doing a documentary about a real person who settled as a parrot, and your actor is AWESOME but a rat. so there's a rat with a parrot costume :3 i feel like this would be more common on stage than on screen (think like, if youve ever seen the costumes of lion king on broadway, thats sorta the vibe i could see), since i feel like CGI tech would make it a tad easier to pass off one animal as another.

like i dont think cgi would replace a daemon actor entirely (to me thats like casting a human actor, and then using cgi to turn them into an entirely different person) but you would use cgi like how cgi is used today, like i know some cgi is used for costuming and stuff. so maybe a daemon has a sort of green screen type costume and thats how you get some species-changes, but like, their face and general shape is still their own.

on the same thread of movies/tv/shows etc, i do think on average there'd actually be less characters per show...like a show in our world would have four main characters, but a show in a world with daemons would have two--because the daemons are characters now too! so this might mean acting is even more competitive than it is today, since there's just less roles even if theres the same number of productions.

tho this varies based on how you present daemons in your world lol, in my 'ideal' sort of daemon-world they'd get as much sceentime as their human counterparts so you'd just have to cut down on total characters, but i write worlds where things are Not good for daemons lol.

along those lines i bet theres also daemon forms that are more vs less likely to get cast--i tend to go canine + feline are the most desired and thus like. "uplifted" forms so every hero has a lion etc, so if you wanna act but youre a sea slug you are going to struggle a LOT to be cast, bc productions would be like sorry we just need dogs <3 i think there would be a mammal bias and i wonder if there'd be anti-discrimination laws passed about this? i feel like that would be really contentious in-universe though, like a thing often argued about--people like, there are totally roles for snakes! (theyre only villian parts). or you can get cast with a fish daemon! (you will never get a main part and most of the time cant even get an extra part because its "too much work" to make the space fish-daemon accessible.) basically you can take this a lot of ways too!

if anyone else has ideas feel free to add on! or send me asks about unrelated daemon topics. i love talking about daemons :3

spookyfurybouquet-53d553e6

This is really interesting! Though I’m not sure you’d need to reduce the characters quite as much as you think, because I’d imagine that in a world with dæmons, there would also be more going on on-screen at any given time, since you have 4 eyes to watch the screen with and two trains of thought to process it. Like, for example, IRL, people would have no issue having a conversation with someone while their dæmon is having a conversation with the other person’s dæmon, so I see no reason you couldn’t show that simultaneously onscreen as well! I’d think that at any given time, there’d be two different things onscreen for you to pay attention to.

I’d also imagine late-settling teens or people who have unsettled for some reason or another (if that’s a thing in the universe you’re working with, ofc) would be in very high demand since they can portray any type of character

I’m imagining mid-budget sci-fi shows like Star Trek would portray aliens via rubber forehead prosthetics for the humans/non-furred dæmons and dying the fur of furred dæmons (yes, alien animals look exactly like purple leopards ><)

Maybe there would be a token species that connects to Dust in a different way (like the panserbjorne), but in general dæmons with makeup would be the default

Dæmons are also the default for animal actors (the ones that don’t need to touch humans, at least). You’d have the human standing just off-camera or in one of those green screen suits, and let the dæmon do its thing. I’d imagine productions would generally only use real animals for situations like a dog being a domestic pet or when they need to portray horseback riding.

acaciapines

oooh thats actually a really good point i'd never considered lol, i think bc i tend to write worlds where the. metal load? would total 100% but can be split different ways across a pair (ie, you can't go OVER 100, but you could have a 50/50 split, or a 70/30 split, in any way), but i love this interpretation actually. levels of thought we cannot even comprehend.

this actually makes me wonder if in a world with daemons its actually more common for teens to portray older characters (rather in our world where you have people who are like, 30s+ playing teens in movies). this might have horrible implications for teen star working conditions. i also think it depends on the world again....most of my worlds i love to make unsettling something that Never Happens (ie: it is incredibly demonized despite literally being so normal and in fact maybe it is settling that is a made thing) but in my 'ideal' daemon worlds unsettled adults would be SO in demand youre so right.

i love the idea of aliens just having daemons with dyed fur. totally agree here...i feel like any work of art portraying aliens with wildly different ways of connecting to dust would be maybe less mainstream? im thinking about like...how many aliens in media are more humanoid, or at least have features recognizable to humans--there are for SURE a lot of outliers too, but, idk. it would be really interesting to see where that art would go--i think even in this world today it is really hard to write an authentically unhuman perspective and i think that would be even harder if youre trying to Not have daemons? i guess its like how we (general) assume life would be carbon-based--its all we know and its how WE'RE here, so could there be anything else? im not a scientist so that might be wrong but. hopefully that made sense.

to me i actually think it would be the opposite...i feel like anybody could with a single glance tell a daemon from an animal so it might be too uncanny valley. like, okay, thats not an ox, that is a person, why are we treating this person like an ox. so i could see trained animals for sure still being a thing 'cause its waaaaaay too uncomfortable otherwise lol.

but wow! so many cool ideas here. i think thats one thing i love about daemons there truly is no right answer. just what feels the most fun to explore and there are so many fun paths to go down.

spookyfurybouquet-53d553e6

Yessssssss

And it offers a cool new way to rewatch the movie, swapping the spots the human and the dæmon are focusing on and making you more consciously aware of some aspects and less consciously aware of others!

(The way I personally imagine it, I think it’s still really difficult to *actually* multitask, but you can do related aspects of the same task, no problem. Like, the dæmon could be reading a Wikipedia article about a topic while the human is writing the essay, or the dæmon could hold a conversation with another dæmon at the same time as their humans are conversing, but one half trying to do their math homework and the other half trying to write an essay would increase the cognitive load so much that you’d barely be able to focus on either task, as if you were doing it while half-asleep.)

(Also, like, if you have 2 different sets of sensory input, I’d imagine you’d need the capacity to process everything coming in from both bodies - I don’t think focusing on two different areas on the screen is conceptually very different from one half looking at the clouds while the other half is birdwatching (but these are just my thoughts/headcanons, ofc!))

I also think that this might make captions more prevalent in movies/tv due to the constant talking over one another (I’d *hope*, at least ><)

A fun knock-on effect of dæmonverse movies/tv being more busy/crowded is that they’d likely see our movies/tv as being dull/slow and severed people/people from our world would have a hard time following their media and keeping track of what’s going on

Oh yessssss - teen star working laws would be *so messed up* (gotta get in all that moolah before their dæmon settles, after all - they can make up the school later once they’re rich XD)

(Interesting! Oh yeah, it definitely depends on the world! In my headcanon, unsettling tends to happen when something happens that shakes the foundations of who you are, how you define yourself)

(Also, I think a fun genre change that might happen is in zombie apocalypse movies - in my stories, I lean into the zombi apocalypse aspect - they’re edgy, tasteless R-rated horror movies where severed (possibly also dead) beings feed on/drain the Dust/bond of other people in a mindless attempt to feel something, making the other person severed too)

Yessss - animation can have more creative dæmons, but live-action is stuck with, yes, this green rhino is a rare alien animal

(Huh, actually, maybe animation would be more popular/not seen as just a kids thing, since with animation, you can give a character any dæmon you want, and it doesn’t matter what shape the dæmon that voices it is)

Also re: human sci-fi/space dæmons, I think show creators would be biased towards smaller animals, since I’d imagine that in present-day astronauts have only really had small dæmons, so that they can fit in the humans’ spacesuits and they don’t have to do R&D for dozens of different spacesuits for different species of animal (plus every kilo sent up to space is *expensive*)

No, I totally get it! Though I do think it might be a bit easier to imagine sapient life without dæmons than it is to imagine an authentically alien perspective, since they already have an example of the former with the armored bears.

Interesting! Me, I always imagined it was some sort of latent soulsense, so that insect dæmons hidden beneath clothing or out of sight would still register as a full person - which means that it wouldn’t work over camera (though now that I think about it, that would mean that visual media would lose some of its depth) but either way, dæmons would probably still work as animal protagonists in stories where the animals are meant to be sapient! (So dæmonverse live-action Lion King and Animorphs would have turned out *much better* than in our world ><)

That actually raises the question - would sapient animal/furry/anthromorphized object protagonists get their own dæmon-equivalents? What would they be? Maybe it would depend on whether they’re trying to do a ‘this is the secret life of __’ kind thing or a thing where this is just what people look like (though maybe they *would* give them dæmons anyway, no matter if it technically makes sense or not, so they don’t feel weird to watch)

(What would robot/sapient AI dæmons look like?)

Yes, I totally agree! There’s so many different paths to go down and so many interesting worldbuilding things to think about! IMO one of my favorite aspects of dæmonverse stories is the worldbuilding!

Also, a few more things: dæmon-touching/severance would probs be automatic grounds for an R rating, in addition to the regular body-swap trope (swapping both human/dæmon with the other person’s human/dæmon ofc), there could be a bodyswap where the human and dæmon are bodyswapped, and all dead/undead characters in movies below R would still have their dæmons (even if they disappear on death IRL),

acaciapines

ooooh okay i totally get what you're saying now bc thats how i see it too--same/similar tasks would be easy to multitask, so YES i see your vision. both halves watching the same movie would be that same task, so. oooooh chaotic and messy for us but just. thats normal life in a world with daemons...i imagine there'd be so much more room for foreshadowing and hidden, hard-to-find secrets since youre working double time to find and interpret those things--one half could notice, the other actually put ideas together. would be super fun!

god i hope captions would be more prevalent...i love you closed captions <3 i think it would be cool to see how they title captions...i think it would be cool if human and daemon both get the same 'line' so to speak, a nod to like. that's the same person!

i totally agree w/ that being how unsettling happens, i just love making worlds that are So Bad about it lol. as a metaphor <3

zombies being severed is literally so real that would be SO fun. whole new level of gore in which instead of copious amounts of blood its copious amounts of Dust which is just like, gold glitter dumped all over the actors' heads. everyone is coughing. its never coming out of these clothes. or the set. ooooh and you could have zombie daemons who are like rabid animals, stuff along those lines...

a huge win for animation!!! that would be SO fun too, imagine all the cool ways you could portray Dust or daemon settling in animation...so many avenues for creativity!

THE WAY I LITERALLY DO THAT IN A DAEMON AU LOL astronauts have gotta be small animals!! i also imagine they tend to be able to fly in some way both because people with flighted daemons are more likely to be drawn to the stars, but also cause its way easier to move around up in zero gravity.

i honestly always forget hdm canon has the bears just in the same universe as the humans gfjdkfg in most of my daemon aus it is Just humans so i think it'd be more of a struggle, but in a world more like hdm's where they've got a bunch of different species, i hope they come up with some really out-there dust connections.

soulsense is fun too...i dont actually have a reason for why you can tell i just think you Could Tell lol. and ooooh. sapient animals played by daemons is a great call which. i feel like they would get something right? i'd imagine in a world with daemons theres an even great human/animal divide: humans are the only species with daemons. so if youre making animals like humans, they HAVE to have daemons too, because that's the main thing that sets humans "above" other animals! i've used plants before, but i could also maybe see animals getting. bug daemons? (i feel like bugs would still be seen as lesser forms lol, but thats just bc i like making discrimination a thing in daemon aus bc it feels. yknow. that would Happen). if not other animals maybe they'd use more 'magical' type creatures, like it's Dust, but not Dust that takes any specific form--like a wisp or something.

i feel like moooooost robot/ai stories would just Give Them A Daemon, by the end of it, cause so many robot/ai stories in our world are about them wanting to become human. people who are based and awesome and instead have robots/ais be nonhumans but people in their own right, uh, probably come up with something? so some other way they connect to dust...maybe they see it directly? i could see that being a fun one.

wait a human-daemon pair bodyswap would go so hard actually. i love that being a trope in movies...there could be so many fun angles to take that. me when i finally get opposable thumbs and then realize that means i have to actually be the one to physically fill out all the taxes instead of just lazing in a sunbeam zoning out as i stare at all my tax forms. suddenly having to get used to a four/two legged gait. a daemon who is some sort of tiny insect constantly trying to go through tiny holes a human could Never fit through. their human keeps nearly getting stepped on because they forget how small they are now.

spookyfurybouquet-53d553e6

*absolutely* mystery shows where human and daemon are getting different sets of clues so you've gotta try and put it together from the evidence you have and the *vibes* you're getting from your other half, movies specifically designed so one way of watching gets you to take a different character's side than the other one, all the cool ways you could intertwine stories and rewatch them in fascinating new ways, and now I'm wondering how this extends to other types of media (novels with parallels on opposite pages, perhaps?)

Oh yeah, definitely! Or maybe they’d separate people with colors or have one set of captions on the left and another on the right

Hell yeah! Soulgore, my beloved XD (and as a bonus, you get to increase the stigma towards actual severed folk ><)

(Wait, is Dust actually big enough to see? I always assumed it was a subatomic particle) (though maybe the gold glitter effect happens when there’s *a lot* of it concentrated in one space, like when a dæmon dies (or maybe it’s movie shorthand so the audience is clear on what’s happening)) SAME - around the time of settling my MC desperately tried to stick to smaller forms since settling as something larger would absolutely crush their astronaut dream, and still ended up with a form that's just *barely* under the size limit of course, that doesn't matter anymore, since his daemon's dead now, but- Also, yeah, it kinda stretches credulity a bit to have so many small/flying daemons when you're so far in the future that people are born and raised in space now, but it still happens because Small Daemons = Space Daemons

I love the bug-dæmon idea! As a bonus, it makes it plausible that people never noticed and that animals *could* actually have their own little communities/civilizations under the nose of humans! (This might also give bugs more cultural symbolism than they have in our world, since you still gotta have all the classical dæmon tropes with bug dæmons)

(also now I'm imagining two human actors getting uncomfortably close off-camera so the one's bug dæmon has enough range to convincingly act as the, for example, lion dæmon's dæmon) Now that I think about it, there might be dæmons that specialize in playing sapient animals, so their human doesn't really act much at all, which is interesting to consider! For things that are like, this is an animal civilization instead of a human one, they'd probs choose a subset of animals to be sapient, like mammals, and choose dæmons from the non-sapient species

Yeah, that totally makes sense, re: robots/AI! Maybe it could be a lil mechanical/holographic dæmon, I think that would be fun!

Yesssssss (I wonder if the dæmon-in-human-form would still be able to touch other dæmons or if they can touch humans instead, now (personally, I’d vote the first option, b/c the body they’re in doesn’t change the fact that they’re the externalized soul (this also has the potential for *shenanigans*, with them desperately trying to avoid getting in contact with other people not in the know) Also re: the late-settling teen actor thing, I think this would probs lead to a higher rate of Issues among actors that started as kids/teens, because like, you're actively selecting for people that don't have a strong sense of identity/don't know who they are I also think book adaptations would be a lot better than in our world because here you have a built-in mechanism to showcase the characters' internal thoughts/conflicts on screen!

#how to live when you’ve died #daemon au #my writing

The curse of being an Elias fan:

I really want to include him in my Magnus Archives fics, but having him actually being able to interact with people would derail the plot *so hard* due to having to kill off Jonah to even be possible.

…..maybe I could write the stuff I’d otherwise write from Jonah’s POV from Elias’s

Just be like, hey, hey, this guy’s been trapped in his own body for the past two and a half decades, unable to move, only able to interact with the person who carved out his eyes in the first place, isn’t that fucked up, drop some hints about Jonah’s plans, and just leave the readers with that while we go back to our regularly-scheduled Archives crew bonding

#tma borrowers au #tma time traveller’s wife au #original elias bouchard #og elias bouchard #my writing

bctoastyyy

the kid with dead eyes

#how to live when you’ve died

notquiteaghost

"it's okay, i can peel back the layers of you until i find the soft and gentle core of you you've had to work so hard to hide"? no. no, it's okay, i know you're hollow; i'm here anyway. you don't have to pretend it isn't masks the whole way down. whatever face you want to wear, i still love you. i don't need you to be good or unflinching or the antonym of violence. if i did, i wouldn't be here. i wouldn't ask that of you.

notquiteaghost

i have nothing against a character who is layers of scar tissue and callous protecting a small little sliver of their before self, who just wants to be safe to let that sliver grow and heal

however. when the only thing under all the scarring is more scarring. when there's nothing of the before self left at all. when there was a precipice, and they tumbled over it, and even if they got back up they'll never heal right.

and then to have someone still say i care for you. you are broken and i can't fix you and i'm here anyway. so what if you're a ghost of yourself? you can haunt me

#bodyhopper bakugou au

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

A little animation for my new Gravity Falls roleswap fic, where all the humans are shapes and all the shapes are humans, feat: Bill and Ford playing a board game in the mindscape!

#gravity falls #gravity falls fanfiction #fanfic #Gravity Flats

ohhgingersnaps

opening up my own fanfiction document on my personal laptop to see if the author has updated it yet

ckret2

writing about characters in flatland is all fun and games until you say "they crossed their fingers" and go wait. hold on.

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Gabriella