For the fic ask meme you just posted: 🏴☠️ as a general question! Is there a time you can think of where the characters in a fic you were writing just wantsd to go in a wildly different direction from your planned plot? (Alternately, what was the worst time?)
this happens to me a fair amount, probably because I am not, as I have discussed before, a planner. if I don't know where things are going and barely have a plan how can I be surprised when the writing doesn't go according to the vague plan I do have?
that being said, there are definitely notable times where I've been like "the fic I thought I was writing is not the fic I am writing." the one I talk about all the time is our love would live a half-life on the surface which was a fic that was supposed to be a fix-it and then ended up being not actually that at all.
(or, like. it's a fix-it if you're xue yang but only if you're xue yang and also only if you're xue yang and not looking at anything about your own life and feelings too closely, but then again that's part of being xue yang.)
other fics where this has happened, however, include Drift (was going to be about Vegas's consent issues, ended up only being barely about that and mostly about Pete and Pete's relationship to the concept of having a normal life with normal friends. the inverse of that was Recidivism (also vegaspete) where Vegas made a fic about Pete's dad about his dad, but that should not have surprised me.
there are probably others. I mean, I do think of the time loop fic (unposted as yet) where Caleb took over a back half that I didn't plan on writing at all.
Tbh my six-year-old has been watching Gavv with us and has been super into it and he just tunes out these scenes, he's here entirely to watch Shouma eat snack foods and to get up and do the henshin poses with him. He's also a big fan of Sachika because he loves pink stuff. Couldn't care less about the Stomach Family, those scenes are basically just for me and my partner.
Me: *going out of my mind about the scenes with the Stomach family*
Gremlin: *visibly impatient to see the Gochipod again*
If you're looking for BL that isn't about students, I can definitely recommend Lovely Writer--it's a currently-running Thai drama (5 episodes so far) and it's delightfully meta, as it's about a novelist getting slowly seduced by the lead actor in the TV adaptation of his best-selling BL novel. There's a lot of entertaining commentary about popular tropes and how novels and shows are made and marketed. (I watched it all yesterday, so I may be biased.)
man the genre is really getting advanced these days with all these winking at the camera “some of this is a bit silly innit” shows being made... sounds like it might be a fun one.
i bear no ill will @ cantaloupes, it’s just a really fun word to say.
ft. the orion’s chore roster and briefly starring stinger.
.
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Tsurugi, of legendary fame and multitudinous talents, joins the crew of the Orion to battle Jark Matter and defeat Don Armage once again. Attendant to this is the addition of his name to the chore roster.
"My word," he mutters under his breath as Kotaro and Garu bicker in front of the holo-screen displaying the day's tasks. His name is there, in his preferred shade of red, in the same box as Spada's and Stinger's (his appears twice, the other instance in the box marked 'Maintenance'). "You have me on kitchen duty."
Hammy, who'd cheered for being in the 'Cleaning' box, elbows Tsurugi in the side without an ounce of self-consciousness. "Everybody gets to be on kitchen duty, no excuses - uh, aside from injuries or away-team missions, stuff like that."
"Besides," Kotaro adds, "It's not that hard. Spada tells you what to do, and you do it."
"Sounds simple enough." Yet Tsurugi knows the many ways even such simple things can go wrong. Well, it's not as if he didn't have the time, or thought it unfair. He'd just been surprised, "The Commander has you lot keeping a tight ship, it seems."
Garu and Kotaro snort politely into their hands, and Hammy cackles. "Raptor comes up with the chore roster. The Commander's not exempt!"
After a moment's thought, Tsurugi nods. That tracked, and well.
.
.
.
Upon arriving at the kitchen, Spada orders Tsurugi to wash his hands, put on an apron, and get to mincing.
"I assume you know how," says his raised eyebrow and the cutting board and knife he passes to Tsurugi. And, Tsurugi does, is the thing, so he washes his hands, puts on an apron, and gets to mincing.
Stinger, seated across him with a tub of potatoes he's peeling by hand and by tail, sees the confusion that hasn't quite left Tsurugi's visage, and takes pity on him in his unique way.
"He's just like that."
"I've met lieutenants with less mettle than that," Tsurugi says, quickly peeling the onions of their papery shells and cutting off the hard nubs at either end. "You'd think he's got prime run of the place."
"I do," Spada cuts in, figuratively and literally as he passes by with a crate of a type of shellfish Tsurugi knows goes well with soup but whose name escapes him entirely. "It's my kitchen, after all."
Stinger gives him a little salute, face impassive, and sets another pair of potatoes on his steadily growing pile. Tsurugi, amused, pauses in his mincing to say, "Spoken like a true chef. You're just full of surprises, aren't you, Spada?"
"They're only surprises if you don't spare a moment to think about them." It's not quite flippant, and not quite berating - but Tsurugi ducks his head nevertheless, returning to his task with the vague feeling that he'd been scolded.
After the onions come the garlic, then he's made to wash pot after pot of leafy greens, and then beans, and somewhere along the line Tsurugi's had to roll up his sleeves (Stinger, coatless, "Why didn't you just hang it up in the first place?") and put his back into it, as the saying used to go.
"This feels like cruel and unusual punishment," Tsurugi says, contemplating what looks like a cantaloupe but has… eyes.
"My kitchen, my rules," Spada proclaims with all the air of a military-bred monarch. "Everyone pitches in, no excuses, and if you're helpful, you might get a reward."
Tsurugi's interest is piqued. "Oh?" His mouth quirks, the insouciant line of it sending Stinger to the pantry for another tub of potatoes despite the mountains around him. Spada, sharpening a knife at the opposite end of the kitchen counter, hums in assent.
"Do I get a say in what kind of reward it'll be?" Tsurugi sets the cantaloupe-but-with-eyes aside before sauntering over, inadvertently proving that he's in the best company given his (in hindsight) very terrible decision to try Spada's patience when he leans his hip against the counter and smiles at the chef.
The chef who smiles back, all finely-sharpened edges like the knife he's holding, as he asks, "Do you run this kitchen?"
Tsurugi stills. The knife in Spada's hand is very sharp -- and very close.
"Ah. No."
"Right. It's my kitchen, and in my kitchen, you're only allowed to say 'oui, chef'. Comprende?"
Tsurugi nods, woodenly. "Oui, chef."
A moment passes, and then, the door slides open, and Shou swans into the kitchen, blessed with the unique ability of chaotic disruption. Tsurugi thanks him fervently in his mind and hurries back to the cantaloupe-but-with-eyes.
"Spada! Am I too late?"
"You're too early," Spada scolds, fussing about the counter and setting a tray with tea things on it before the commander. Tsurugi, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible as he cuts out the eyes of the cantaloupe, notes the blatant disconnect between his words and actions.
"Sit and wait, I have a new recipe for you to try."
“I look forward to it!”
When it seems like all Shou is tasked to do is sit and wait for the kettle to boil, Tsurugi speaks up.
"I thought even the commander isn't exempt from helping out." Shou and Spada blink, look at each other, and then look back at Tsurugi in sync.
"He's my taste-tester," Spada says. "Spada doesn't trust me with his knives," Shou offers in counterpoint. Spada nods and adds, "Or my pots or pans."
Peering in from the pantry, Stinger also pitches in, "Don't ask about the oven." He ducks back out of the conversation quickly, pausing just enough to squint accusingly at the commander.
"There are higher settings on it for a reason, I'm sure!" Shou insists (to himself, Tsurugi agrees).
"Reasons you're not allowed to experiment with in my kitchen." Spada's proclamation cuts the conversation short, to no one's protests.
The commander is served tea, and Tsurugi finishes with the cantaloupe and is pronounced free of servitude. Since Shou is apparently waiting to do his bit under Spada's incontestable and authoritarian regime (no excuses, no exemptions, indeed), Tsurugi sits with him to talk engineering and cookies, and adds a healthy sense of self-preservation to his anticipation of the next time the chore roster sends him to Spada's kitchen.
That’s not really that hard: wine gums! I generally prefer the ones you can buy in Poundland, I think they just taste the best? But any wine gums are good wine gums. I missed them an insane amount when I lived in Italy.
Pyxis: give us 3 movie recs!
I feel like this is going to be hard because I don’t really watch movies that aren’t mainstream and that people haven’t seen. It’s hard to recommend things that aren’t obscure because most people have seen or heard of them. I’ll go with:
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya: I’ll be completely honest here: I’m not actually the biggest fan of Ghibli movies. Some of them don’t appeal to my very Western need for a cohesive 3-act narrative, they feel too whimsical and surreal for my tastes. I have those I like, and those I don’t... I don’t actually know where Princess Kaguya lies in that spectrum. I can tell you that it made me feel a lot of things at once. It’s very much Kaguya’s tale, she is so human despite being something that isn’t human at all, and to see how the world refuses to listen no matter how loudly she yells through action and voice is disheartening. But not every story has to be positive, and I’d definitely recommend watching it.
The VVitch: I absolutely hate horror movies usually, but I wanted to give this a try and it was amazing. The feeling of dread in everything the family does, the slow, inevitable slide towards utter chaos, the fear of the unknown going hand-in-hand with the very real, mundane fears of the time: starvation, death being around every corner, sin... the performances are powerful and the decision to go with Jacobean English was awesome. It’s such a good movie, don’t let the fact it’s a horror put you off.
Centurion: God, this is a weird one. It’s not very famous, but I think it’s good? It’s about a bunch of Romans who end up stuck on the wrong side of Hadrian’s Wall and are desperately trying to escape back to Britannia (it’s Scotland, it’s a very sympathetic cause), and end up being chased by a group of Picts, including a mute genius tracker, and the things they are willing to do and sacrifice - including each other - to get out of what they rightly view as hell. And when I say chased, I mean chased - they’re on foot, and the Picts are on horses. It’s got the right sense of fear and anxiety that’s necessary for this movie, the characters are relatable in all the best and worst ways, and it’s honestly, for me, the only Michael Fassbender movie I really remember well, lol (X-Men doesn’t count). It might not be good or historically accurate, but I remember liking it a lot. It also has Mickey from Doctor Who.
