#cadybear420

[storyofmychoices]

Evie for @cadybear420 🖤💚🩶🤍🩶💚🖤

Evie is such an icon! Seriously, she is incredible! I love her relationship with Aiden. They are such a perfect pairing and I always enjoy what you create for them. You are a talented writer, editor, and creator. Thank you for always sharing your beautiful MCs and OCs with us. I love seeing all your HSS MCs and how different and well thought out each is! Also, thank you for supporting me and my blog. I appreciate it <3

@choicespride

[choicespride]

Valentine's 2026 Masterlist

Alpha

Kalani x Channing Date Night! - m!Channing Lowe x m!MC (Kalani Mochizuki) - @peonyblossom

America's Most Eligible

Juliet x Carson Date Night! - Carson Stewart x f!MC (Juliet James) - @peonyblossom

Blades of Light and Shadow

Certainly a Valentine's to Remember, but isn't every day for them? - Mal Volari x f!MC (Daenarya) - @storyofmychoices

Do No Harm

Aqua x Dom Date Night! - m!Dom Coine x m!MC (Aqua Montgomery) - @peonyblossom

The Elementalists

Elio x Atlas Date Night! - m!Atlas Ernhardt x m!MC (Elio Von Brandt) - @peonyblossom

High School Story

Jamie x Michael Date Night! - Michael Harrison x nb!MC (Jamie Baxter) - @peonyblossom

Lola x Hannah Date Night! - Hannah x f!MC (Lola Williams) - @peonyblossom

Some (mostly) sappy Aidevie Mpreg/Family Headcanons for Valentine’s Day 💓💓🫃🏻🤵🏽‍♀️💓💓 - Aiden Zhou x f!MC (Evie Ayana) - @cadybear420

Hollywood U

Jackie x Hunt Date Night! - Thomas Hunt x nb!MC (Jackie Winters) - @peonyblossom

You Belong with Me - Addison Sinclair x OC (Kenzie Bellari) - @theartoflovingthomashunt

Open Heart

Sydney x Ethan Date Night! - Ethan Ramsey x m!MC (Sydney Valentine) - @peonyblossom

Crossovers/Multiple Books

Oblivious MCs - All of Us: Her Story, All of Us: His Story, High School Story, High School Story: Class Act, It Lives Beneath - AOU f!MC (Jo Moreno), AOU m!MC (Dexter Del Rossi), HSS m!MC (Ryan Stevens), HSS:CA m!MC (Matty Wright), HSS:CA f!MC (Phoebe Orsini), ILB m!MC (Isaak Vance) - @peonyblossom

We all knew this would happen - Immortal Desires x Alpha - m!Cas Harlow x f!Gabe Adalhard x f!MC (Ripley Reese), m!Channing Lowe x m!MC (Kalani Mochizuki) - art and ID MC by @rjschoicesstuff, Alpha MC by @peonyblossom

[loreofyore]

Top 5 favorite movies?

Thanks for the ask!

Roman Holiday

You've Got Mail

Sabrina (1954)

Casablanca

Dead Poets Society

[choicesficwriterscreations]

March MC of the Month: Evie Ayana

Please welcome March 2024's MC of the Month! Each month, we highlight one MC or OC on our Meet My MC / OC List. They are selected randomly on the Wheel of Names, and eligibility requirements can be found here. We accept MC / OC profiles on an ongoing basis. Please feel free to send yours in!

This month’s MC of the month is…

@cadybear420's Evie Ayana!

More below...

1..In your own words, tell us what you like most about Evie.

It’s hard to choose a specific thing… but most probably her drive to keep moving forward. 

Before coming to Berry, Evie dealt with social anxiety a lot in her old schools. She didn’t have many close friends, she struggled to talk to people she liked, she had a little more insecurity about joining certain social/group activities, etc. And she’d lived in the same house all her life up until moving to Cedar Cove, so she wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about moving up north from the Bay Area and leaving behind what friends and memories and familiar places she did have. 

She does start out as a little more impulsive and “holding herself back” when she first comes to the school– unsure how to respond to Brian at first, unthinkingly introducing herself as “Emma’s wingman” to Caleb, gives Hugh a startled look when they make eye contact at the school assembly. She didn’t have quite as much drive for change yet and wasn’t expecting much from the school, but she was definitely going to stick with the few friends she did make (such as Emma). 

But one thing she did somewhat hope for was that Berry High was a new change of pace. And as Principal Hughs said on the first day assembly in canon, “That’s the great thing about a fresh start. You can be anybody you want to be”. This was perhaps the core motivator for Evie to start changing things. Soon enough, she comes to realize that Berry is sort of this “fresh start” for her, a chance to find herself in a brand new environment. She wants to be someone who is sure of herself, someone who can get shit done. And a school that strives to be welcoming to all is the perfect environment for that. That’s kind of what the OG HSS Trilogy always was to me. High school, but if it were, y’know, actually good. 

So, Evie is partly motivated by the fact that the environment at Berry is much more welcoming, and partly motivated because of the opportunity of a fresh start in a new town. And so she starts to push herself out of her comfort zone a little and soon becomes a lot more outspoken, protective, proactive, and helpful towards others. Evie becomes a lot more confident through her journey at Berry High. 

One major motivator for Evie is that her first friend and the one who takes her under her wing when she’s lost and nervous at the start of her first day, is Emma Hawkins, a socially awkward wallflower. So right away, she has some companionship with someone she can relate to a bit. And not only that, but seeing someone as socially awkward as Emma have no problem extending kindness to her, kind of motivates her to do the same with others. 

Another major green flag for Evie is also probably in her involvement in sports. In Evie’s old high school, she had considered joining football, but was nervous about it due to the team being all guys and not co-ed. Evie is fairly secure in her enjoyment of certain sports and wanted to join the football team at her old school, but was nervous about not being allowed to join and seeming like an idiot for trying to do so. She had heard that some schools might make exceptions for girls who wanted to join, since there generally wasn’t a girls’ football team, but she was still very nervous about the possibility of “sticking out like a sore thumb”. 

But since she was most familiar with Caleb of all the people she saw in the cafeteria and knew him to be a friendly guy, I had her sit with him and the other jocks at lunch that day to maybe get the chance to know more about the football team. Much to both of our surprises and delights, the sports teams at Berry are all co-ed and Caleb and Julian encouraged Evie to join football. And the best part? As she was on football, basketball, and baseball, she was treated like yet another part of the team. Rather than being pathologized, patronized, sensationalized, or tokenized for being a female football player/jock on a team of mostly guys… she was just treated as normal (Sonic Boom Knuckles would be proud, haha). As per canon, Brian did make a few comments to her during that one mini-race, but Caleb nonchalantly shot them down. 

And lest we not forget her beloved Aiden Zhou. He’s passionate and dedicated to his creative craft; but also shy, reserved, socially awkward, and afraid of coming off as a screw-up or a failure in social interactions. A major reason why Evie is so drawn to him (along with her finding him incredibly attractive) is that she sees a lot of herself in him, and she can relate to him. She sees how passionate he is, and that inspires her to do better herself. It inspires her to keep doing better. And as she works to improve herself and move past her own struggles, she can sort of connect with Aiden and help him with his struggles as well, as she understands to some degree what that sort of social anxiety feels like.

2...Do you feel Evie is like you at all? How are you alike or different?

Evie is very based off of how I am, especially when it comes to the little details. She’s a cat lover, she’s a picky eater and especially hates spicy food, she’s fairly into sports and writing, she’s obsessed with scented products and cute stuff, she’s pretty horny-on-main, and a lot more. I had Evie be a jock in each of the three books because I myself was involved in sports when I was in high school (though I was more of a track-and-field/runner and I didn’t really have a lot of experience in football, basketball, or baseball; meanwhile, Evie gets experience in each of those). I can’t play an instrument to save my life, and cheerleading is absolutely not my thing, and so the same applies to Evie. 

But in a more general sense… Evie is partly based off of who I am, and partly based off of the kind of person I aspire to be.

When I was in high school, I sort of dealt with social anxiety a lot, and even now I still struggle with it a fair bit. I did get along with a fair amount of people, but it was on a very superficial level with most of them and so I wouldn’t exactly have considered myself “well-known” back then. So I’ve imagined the same for Evie.

The difference, of course, is that Evie is much more outspoken, social, and heavily proactive in the school community than I was when I was in high school. I mean, I was a bit like that myself every now and then. But with Evie, she sort of gets more opportunities to be that kind of person, and she had somewhat more drive for it. And that’s what allows it to manifest. That doesn’t mean her anxieties go away by any means, she just becomes better at managing them. 

Though, one thing I’ve liked about generally being more shy and reserved is that it did sometimes help me stay a little more aware of boundaries, if that makes sense. Evie is much the same, and although she becomes a more confident person throughout her story, that doesn’t mean she also can’t be aware of boundaries– and that especially shows with how I had her approach her crush on Aiden in the first book.

Evie took a slight interest in Aiden when she first met him; it started out as superficial, but it developed into an actual more deep attraction when he invited her in to listen to him play. She’d sort of push herself to talk to him and hang out with him, but for the most part, she knew not to explicitly flirt with him (not that he’d really have minded in the game but yeah). Occasionally she’d be a little bit forwards with him by accident (see: teaching him how to do “sexy moves” at Brian’s party), but wouldn’t express explicit attraction to him until when he asked her to homecoming and admitted he did like her. 

And once she knew that he liked her back, she was much more comfortable with explicitly making romantic gestures/moves onto him. I’d never gotten that far with any of my high school crushes, but if I had, I certainly would have been the same. (It’s also worth noting that the more I replay the series, the more I feel like Aiden and I both share similar qualities as well, so naturally I envision Evie as someone who can relate to him). 

A final MAJOR way in which Evie and I are very similar is how very GNC we are. I’d say Evie is a lot more openly masc/butch leaning than I am, especially appearance wise (as much as I wish I did, I do not have defined muscles like Evie does, lol). She prefers to keep her hair short; she loves masc clothing like pantsuits, tuxes, boxers, and swim trunks, and she takes pride in her more masc body figure. Similar to me as well, there are a few feminine-associated things (for lack of better wording), such as flowers, glittery/sparkly patterns, heart shapes, general cute stuff, etc., that you can pry from her cold, dead hands. But there are certainly a lot of feminine-associated things she has a distaste for indulging in, such as wearing short shorts or high heels or doing cheerleading– not because they’re “feminine,” but quite simply because they just aren’t her thing. We also both have major bottom dysphoria and would rather die than ever get pregnant. 

3.. What is most important to Evie? What is their motivation in life?

Stability. 

Not just being sure that she can end up in a good point in life and nothing changes from that, but also being sure that if things do change, she will be able to manage it. Even when things are at their worst point, she wants to do what she can to fix the problem and make the situation better. 

For a lot of her life, Evie has been very unsure about what specific thing she’d want to be doing in the future, and while she agrees with the “it’s okay if it takes a little longer for you to decide” sentiment that people tell her, she does also know that she can’t spend her whole life indecisive, and the fact that she’s still figuring things out frustrates her sometimes. And as I’ve mentioned before, her and her dad’s move to Cedar Cove was initially very hard on her. Even as she gets settled in Berry and Cedar Cove, she worries about anything that could possibly disrupt it. 

A big contributor to her drive for stability is her parents’ history. After her dad Scott and Emma’s mom Julia had gone their separate ways with university as per canon, he’d eventually meet a woman in his year but with a different major. Her name was Rani, and he’d fall in love with and marry her after they’d both got their graduate degrees. Rani eventually became pregnant, but it was only a few months into the pregnancy when she realized she was not interested in being a parent. 

Scott, of course, had always wanted to be a dad, but he respected Rani’s decision. So, due to this contrast of life goals, the two divorced on amicable terms. Rani was okay with carrying the baby AKA Evie to term (though Scott was okay with it if she wanted to terminate the pregnancy), and after that she’d simply take on the title of being Evie’s Auntie Rani. And it was heartbreaking for both of them because they were otherwise a perfect match.

Evie knew the full story growing up, and while she did not resent Rani at all for leaving, knowing that story had amplified her own cautiousness– particularly when it came to her own romance. She’d crushed on Aiden, wanted to be official with him, and fell in love with him long before he did with her for each of those points, but she didn’t want to push anything too suddenly onto him. Often, she’d wait until moments, such as when Aiden confessed to liking her after asking her to homecoming or when he confessed he loved her at prom, before she’d start taking things further. She wouldn’t express romantic gestures and attraction to him until after he said he liked her. She wouldn’t confess her love to him until after he confessed to her. 

That doesn’t mean she’d never initiate, though. She’s the one who took Aiden outside to talk about becoming official, even though he ended up being the one to ask her to be his girlfriend. After their moment on Hearst’s rooftop, she had started making plans to ask him to be her date to homecoming (but of course, Aiden beat her to it). And she was the one to (as per my headcanons) dip him in their first dance at homecoming and (as per canon) initiate their first kiss during that dance. 

And make no mistake, all those moments– learning Aiden liked her, having a steady relationship with him that year, to the point of them becoming official in late February and him confessing he loved her at the end of prom, and seeing Aiden become a more confident and self-assured person throughout their relationship… she was incredibly happy about all of it. But in the back of her mind, she sometimes couldn’t help but think it to be too good to be true. Sometimes she feared that they’d end up the same way her dad and her Auntie Rani did: a seemingly perfect couple at first, all until one singular but major area of incompatibility. 

Later on in their relationship, she would start to become fussy over making sure Aiden actually enjoyed what he was doing with her, telling him she didn’t want to force him to do anything he didn’t want to do. This would become a point of contention between them, as Aiden would be a little upset at Evie not being fully sure in his choices. But in the end, they’d be able to work it out together. To this day she still isn’t fully sure about what she’d do if she and Aiden ended up separating, but she would become better at being able to manage any difficulties or disagreements between them. She would do what she could to better the situation. The two would eventually get married (Evie being the one to propose), having talked about it prior and both being sure that they were happy with each other.

As for everything else in her life? She does slowly become more welcoming to change. As of now, I don’t imagine her going through a lot of sudden changes in her life, but she does become more comfortable with the idea. A year after they marry, Aiden and Evie move out of Evie’s old house and into a cozy apartment in the Bay Area, and then move back into Cedar Cove but in their own home when they decide they want to have kids. Events like these where Evie does have a bit more control over the situation, do help her get used to the idea of major change. 

4.. What are Evie's biggest pet peeves/dislikes?

Evie loathes gender essentialism, gender complementarianism, TERFs, and the like (Then again, any person with common sense would loathe those things, haha). But especially as someone who is very openly and proudly GNC, she just absolutely loathes them. She hasn’t experienced a lot of direct bigotry from TERFs herself, but to put it briefly, she’s been paying attention to their behaviors, and she’s not having any of their bullshit. Especially not with their blatantly two-faced behaviors towards GNC cis people (especially cis female athletes with even the smallest bit of “masculine” features, AKA people like her3). All the more reason why she sings her praises to Berry for having co-ed sports.

For something on a lighter note… she can’t stand spicy food despite her South Asian heritage. A bit of mild spice is alright, but very spicy food is just… she doesn’t get the appeal at all. She’s generally a very picky eater, even being averse to most South Asian dishes. And overly spicy food is probably the bane of her picky eater existence. 

I imagine she just also dislikes… bullies in general. In her old schools, she would get bullied quite a bit, but she never quite knew how to stand up to them. So at Berry, she does try to change that, starting with standing up for her friends (like Emma) who get bullied. She aspires to be a protective girlfriend to Aiden and an overall reliable friend. It’s not always easy– such as when Isa and the hall monitors screw over Aiden and band and cheer, when band and cheer turn on the basketball team, or when Max and Kara frame her for sabotage. But she doesn’t let it stop her. She always tries to get through it, one way or another. 

5.. If Evie could change one thing - anything - what would it be?

I’m not fully sure, honestly. I imagine there are lots of things she’d want to change. 

Although it’s a bit more general, Evie would change… a lot of her past. She has way too many moments of “I look back on this thing I did in the past, and I fucking cringe at it.” She knows she’s grown from all that and has become a much better person, but it’s just hard for her to not feel bad about herself over her past mistakes. 

For something that’s a little more specific, her parental situation is something she’s sometimes wished she could change. To reiterate, she does not resent Rani for leaving and understands why she did. But there have been times when she’s wished that Rani and Scott never separated. From what Scott had told her, Rani sounded freaking awesome to her, and she imagined she’d have loved having her as a mom, along with Scott as her dad.

Rani would sometimes visit them, taking on more of a title of being Evie’s Auntie. But she wouldn’t visit often because it could be very awkward knowing the past, especially so when she and Scott hadn’t fully moved past their feelings for each other. 

Evie and Scott have had a very healthy relationship, but the situation with Rani has created some confusion for both of them. With Scott, he’s often feeling guilt. He’d told Rani that he was okay if she didn’t want to carry the pregnancy to term– Evie knows this and understands, but he sometimes feels guilty for having felt that way about Evie, even though it was before she was born. But he also sometimes feels guilty about giving Rani a pregnancy she ended up not wanting and seeing her carry that pregnancy to term even after realizing that, even though she had agreed to it at first and agreed to carry it to term anyways. 

I headcanon a big part of why he’s extra sweet to Evie, on top of her being his daughter, is the fact that he sort of considers himself lucky to have ended up with Evie. Rani chose to carry the pregnancy to term, even though both she and Scott were well aware that she was in every right not to. He’s always wanted to be a dad, and he got just that. So he tries his best to not take her decision for granted. 

With Evie, she’s certainly fine with having just Scott, but she’s known the story of Scott and Rani’s separation ever since she was very young and it’s hard for her not to feel like she missed out on having Rani as a mother figure. But she also sometimes feels guilty for feeling that way, knowing Rani did not want to be a mother. 

At one point or another though, she does come to terms with her parental situation. Rani would come to visit more often when she could as she and Scott were eventually able to move on from each other. 

6.. What is Evie’s favorite quote or song?

I don’t think Evie can really pick just one song, haha. Though Evie can't play an instrument for shit, let alone compose a song and a lot of the musical terminology Aiden uses is mostly just pure jargon nonsense to her… she's quite the enthusiast for good songs and soundtracks. 

She excitedly raves to Aiden about her favorite soundtracks from movies, video games, TV shows, etc. Often, she'll even recommend a show or movie to him partly on the basis of it having a bomb-ass soundtrack and almost 100% of the time, he will enjoy it, and they'll rave about the best parts of the soundtrack together. 

So it’s a little hard for Evie to pick just one song (or one quote, for that matter). Probably something Aiden composed for her, but I’m not sure. 

7.. Is there anything else you’d like to share about Evie? 

I guess I’d like to ramble a bit about how fun it is to build the character of my OG HSS MC, both within the game and outside of it. 

In Choices, I generally tend to prefer MCs with a more open-ended backstory and especially choices in what kind of personality they have and how they respond/behave/act. I know even the most choice-based story can’t account for every single granular detail about what we want for our MCs, but most of the time I just like being able to decide *who* my MC is whenever fitting. I like being able to make choices for the MC, and create my own backstory for them that sort of informs said choices, maybe even make two different versions of the MC that feel like completely different people from one another. (Truth be told, I’m a fan of any MC that’s allowed to have a spine and be proactive in the story, but the ones that are flexible in their character score extra major points with me). 

OG HSS is definitely a series that allows for stuff like that, which is part of why both the trilogy and the MC are my favorites of all Choices. There’s a lot of variety in the kind of story experience you can have, and probably only two or three moments where default dialogue made me go “Evie would not say that”. Honestly, I don’t think the series would have had nearly as much of an impact if MC had only one activity they could do, or one singular specific backstory for Scott and their mom and their old school. 

Although I haven’t really played as a MC other than “Evie Ayana” in any of my 7 playthroughs, I have tried a couple of different choices and routes for her. Once I’ve had her as a band kid instead of a jock, and I loved all the extra moments she could get with Aiden. Twice I’ve had her romance Michael, and as much as Evie would be attracted to him, they do not have all that much romantic chemistry (and so I’m making a new HSS MC for his route). One time I’ve even had Evie try and side against her own team at the basketball game in Book 2… and oh my God, it was so puke-inducingly out-of-character for Evie that I had to scrub it from my HSS screenshots history. 

Once I’ve deliberately made mostly bad choices for her (outside of her activity), and it was quite interesting to see outcomes such as losing the baseball game, losing homecoming crown and guest-of-honor-– and most notably, how she can lose her tryouts spot to her respective Hearst rival if she’s been mostly awful to the Hearst kids, even if she’s otherwise good at the actual tryouts. Like hello? I can make my MC not be nice? And face consequences for it? I like. I’ve sometimes seen the HSS MC get flak for being “too perfect” or “too much of a fantasy” or “not having much personality”, and I’m just like, “Honey, with all due respect… they’re only perfect because you made them that way.”

I’ll admit, with the most recent playthrough I did to record Evie’s official storyline, I did make the choices that would lead to the “good” outcomes. But with most of it, I was just making whatever choices felt right for the kind of character I wanted for Evie and then let things take their course. I wanted her to be someone who was fairly good at her sports. I wanted her to become someone who tries to step up and be a leader, and someone who is outspoken about her opinions and stays true to them, but also knows her boundaries. But sometimes she can act without thinking and that does make her very self-conscious a lot of the time, even as she becomes more confident throughout her time at Berry. Some of it was more intentional– I did want her to be fairly competent at her activities. But other stuff like the homecoming/prom crowns felt more like bonus things for her. 

Fun Fact: during my most recent playthrough, where I was recording the official choices and outcomes in the story for Evie, I kind of wanted a way to represent her lack of experience in baseball since I headcanon it’s Evie’s first time doing the sport. So what I did was I just took my glasses off and backed away from the phone screen a bit when the minigame choices were in session. And Evie did miss a few of the throws, but performed mostly successfully in the end, getting the tryouts spot and winning the baseball game.

I’ve actually gone through a couple of different “canons” for Evie, throughout each of my 7 playthroughs of the story. I’ve tried different routes and options for the sake of trying them out, but there are quite a few choices I’d imagined as “canon” for her that are now different. When I first played the trilogy, Evie was actually named “Cady Heron” after the main character of Mean Girls, my favorite HS-based movie (Scott calling her “Cady-bear” all the time is how I came up with my username). She had the blonde beachy waves hairstyle in the first book, and was a bit more openly flirtatious with the characters she liked (Aiden, Michael, and Maria), she told Koh’s secret to Isa out of panic and thinking that it would get Isa off of Koh’s back. I imagined her having figured out clear goals for herself by the end of the first day: take down Brian and Zoe, and get with Aiden+Michael+Maria. 

But upon developing her character, I was sort of trying to make her a bit more like me. With that in consideration, Evie would have been someone who wouldn’t be so openly forward and would take secret-keeping pretty seriously. In my “Evie’s official choices” playthrough I did have her slip the secret to Isa, but it felt so wrong, and so I had to restart the chapter right after the choice in order to choose otherwise. 

And I am planning to make a couple more OG HSS MCs too. One will be a male MC named Alan Parke, a cheerleader who is a total diva– he’ll romance either Maria or Emma, and he’ll be very flirty, preppy, and pompous. Book 3 would be a sort of a character arc for him where he may have to set his self-aggrandizing habits aside as he comes to sympathize with fellow male cheerleader Kieran, with whom he’s competing in tryouts. Another will be a female MC named Violet Jones, the one I’ll have to romance Michael. She’ll be a lot more suave and no-nonsense– she hates self-policing and is a lot more quick to call people out on their crap whenever she can, and will certainly have a lot more romantic chemistry with Michael than Evie did. 

And I’m definitely gonna have one or two MCs that are utter screw-ups at everything in the game– crap at their activities, they don’t win the dance titles, they’re cold to the Hearst kids. And I also wanna do a couple of playthroughs that switch activities between books. Some that are more slow-burn in their romances. I’m even planning an “AU/alternate timeline” playthrough where Evie tries band (and is mostly crap at it). Agh, there are so many route combinations I wanna do in HSS! 

Bottom line: it’s just really fun to give my MCs their personalities and make them feel like my own, and it especially applies with Evie. It brings me joy to build her character and share/discuss it with the fandom here (as well as seeing how others build their MCs too)! 

[aallotarenunelma]

3, 4, 16, 22-25

For the fic writers' asks

Hi Cady, this is so nice of you to send me all these questions! I enjoyed answering them. Thank you! 🩷

3. Describe the creative process of writing a chapter/fic.

I get an idea, and let it brew for a while - it's a matter of hours, days or weeks, rarely months. I quickly outline, if possible. Meanwhile, I gather the information needed to develop and write the idea. Whenever I get flashes of scenes and/or hear dialogues, I write them down on a notebook. When I feel that I have everything needed, I start piecing everything together, so that I get a better outline. Then, I either start writing, or I wait a little longer to refine the idea.

4. & 16. I answered them here. :)

22. Are there certain types of writing you won't do? (style, pov, genre, tropes, etc)

I am not a smut writer at all. I'm more a fade to black writer. If there's some spice, the writing suddenly becomes poetic. A good example is this one. :)

Dark romance. I find this absolutely unappealing.

23. Best writing advice for other writers?

Write what you want to read. Writing is a selfish process. You write first for yourself, then you decide if you share it with others, or keep it for yourself. So enjoy the process. It's tempting to decide to write what is popular, but if it's not what you enjoy, the written piece will feel unauthentic, whereas to when you write something you truly enjoy. It's important to enjoy your own writing.

24. Worst writing advice anyone ever gave you?

"Write X words a day." My words, by far the worst one! Best way to end up with a writer's block. No, no. What helped me was to stay in front of my draft for at least 30 min every day. Then, I would close everything, and try again the next day. No blame, no shame. At first, I would look at the time regularly because writing one sentence would be difficult. But then, I would write much longer than for 30 min, sometimes up to 2 hours. With this method, I wrote a novel's first draft in three months.

25. What fic do you wish you got more of a response on?

It wasn't an easy question, but in the end, considering the amount of work it required, plus the whole situation I was in when I wrote it, then I'll say Chronicles of a Crimson Summer. It's nearly 12 000 words long, written when my physical health was at its lowest, and to date, I consider it as my masterpiece.

[itlivesproject]

So I've recently started learning Ren'Py. I'm glad to say it is pretty easy and I've made a few test VNs that are functional, which makes me very happy.

However, I'm aiming to make HSS-based projects, so I do want it to resemble the Choices app's style like ILW and BB:TS do. But unfortunately, I'm having a bit of trouble achieving that.

I tried changing the text box, but it was difficult to fit the text into it right. And the buttons were even worse because they always came out looking wonky. And that isn't even accounting for the screen orientation– the version I have gives me only four resolution options that are all in landscape format.

Do you guys have any tips on how to effectively make my projects look more like the Choices style? Thanks!

The default settings for renpy are all geared towards landscape orientation. You’ll need to find in your game settings where it establishes the screen size. I think it’s in options.rpy but I don’t remember… we used 768 x 1360 iirc.

Whats happening with the buttons is that most likely, the set size for the choice button isn’t the same as your actual choice button. So if your choice button image is 768 x 150 or something but in the gui file, it’s set as like, 500 x 200, it’ll stretch and resize your image, distorting it into a weird looking shape.

As for text boxes and such, we basically had three different text styles: narration, player character, and NPC. The narrator had no speaker so if we never specified who the character was for dialogue, the game automatically routed it to use the narrator “style.” Then whoever was set to the playable character would have their text on the left side, and every other person would be on the right side. We did this in the screens file by customizing the say screen.

My main advice honestly is to just get in there, read documentation, test things out, and then get involved in renpy community forums. There are a lot full of really helpful people. I used the lemmasoft forums a lot, as well as the Renpy discord server. You can ask for help on specific issues and share what your code looks like so people can give you suggestions on how to tweak it the way you want.

Good luck with your HSS fan projects!

[gaiuskamilah]

Bloodbound, Story Analysis, Incest

HAHSHSJHDJD THE LAST ONE... well it is true i cant deny

[zhoras-bitch]

Chiming into the UT/UB discussion with my two cents.

The reason I didn't like UT is because its whole conflict felt so very artificial. They push these ideas, but the story gives me no reason to believe them.

The story tries to push MC and Kit's relationship as a forbidden romance, but the only thing that makes it forbidden is that Austin will throw a temper tantrum when he finds out about MC and Kit. As trashy as affair books like TNA, FCL, and TBB are, at least the MC and LIs' relationships actually feel forbidden.

They try to say MC and Kit's relationship affects the ranch, but the story gave me no reason to believe that.

They try to push Kit as a heartbreaker and a player, hence Austin trying to "protect" MC from them, but all we ever get is two scenes of fangirls/fanboys flocking around Kit, with Kit being totally unresponsive (on that note, I personally found Kit to be textbook definition of a personality-less customizable LI).

They try to give MC and Austin this backstory about their parents passing away when they were young, hence Austin's overprotectiveness and infantilization of MC, but it felt very poorly set up compared to MC backstories/traumas like the ones in ACOR and ILITW. They just kind of throw the background details at you and expect you to roll with it. Also, was MC being set with having a business major even all that important?

Heck, it didn't even feel all that sexually charged to me outside of the CGs, despite being a "17+ sexy" book. I generally hate PB's style of smut writing but at least books like TNA and Surrender and Witness are interesting in that their smut is fun to mock. UT just had me either bored out of my mind or frustratedly yelling at my phone.

There's also a point that a lot of people have brought up, where the whole "older brother protects younger sibling from their player friend" is supposedly meant for wlm and doesn't make sense otherwise. In a mlw route, that attitude would come off as slut-shamey; and in a mlm or wlw route, it'd come off as homophobic. These can be interesting concepts to explore, but the story doesn't acknowledge them. Though I'm not fully sure how I feel about that aspect, so do with it what you will. Though even as someone who likes to see gender-reversals of typical cisheteronormative relationship tropes (hence why I generally play GOC LI stories with a mlw route when I can), this book still felt incredibly flat to me.

Now I haven't started UB yet, but I do think that part of what appeals to me is Mandy being a LI. And not just in the aspect of having two non-GOC LIs. Despite Mandy veering dangerously close into the stereotypical "girly girl talk best friend that only exists to validate your feelings for LI and be your walking wardrobe" back in UT, she was actually the only prominent character I found remotely likeable. Like, the only one I felt was able to bring some degree of common sense to the table while Austin was acting like Caillou over MC and Kit's relationship.

So seeing her return as a LI is pretty awesome. Buuuuuuut like someone else said, it is weird that they did this despite hinting towards Mandy/Austin at the end of UT. Like, why not a throuple relationship between MC and Mandy and Austin? I mean, as much as I hated Austin, that still would have been pretty interesting.

One last thing I will say though. Outside of Mandy... I'm not sure what connection UB and UT are even meant to have with each other. IIRC, PB even admitted that they couldn't be bothered to include the option to transfer data from UT to UB, hence why people were getting Kits and MCs in UB that didn't match the ones they chose. I'm gonna hazard a guess that even HSS:CA has more to do with OG HSS than UB has to do with UT. Not that UT had a lot going for it anyways, but you get the idea.

Sorry for the long post, but yeah these are pretty much my thoughts.

I somewhat agree. I think that UT conflict works in theory, but there are a bunch of issues with the book's implementation that make it hard for some readers to feel invested and even plot points that seem to work against it, thus lowering the stakes. I'll try to keep it as short as possible, but here are my thoughts:

The story would work better if MC was in high school. I understand that they wanted to write smut, and that's why they couldn't do it. But narratively, 'My parental figure doesn't approve of my crush' is 1) very juvenile 2) works better when the parental figure actually has legal power and authority over MC. But when MC is a 20 something adult it's like. Girl (gn) you can do whatever you want, what's Austin gonna do about it? Get mad?

Austin and MC’s relationship should've been a bigger focus since it's essentially the main conflict of the book. Specifically I wish we saw more of Austin's loving side, saw how much he did for MC and grown to care about him the way MC does. That's another reason to set the story earlier too. That way we could've seen more of the aftermath of their parents dying, MC relying on Austin more as their caregiver and their only living relative and him fighting tooth and nail to protect his sibling. Without that emotional investment Austin is just some asshole, and it's really unclear as to why I as a reader should care about hurting his feelings.

Kit should've been more problematic. I agree with your point about how them being a player is stated but never really shown. I guess they were too afraid to make them unlikeable, but you have to give Austin a legitimate reason to be against their relationship with MC. Give them and Austin a sour past. Or make them wear a leather jacket. Just something that would scream 'trouble' to an overprotective older brother.

Finally, the resolution of the whole Austin and MC's conflict felt a little too... easy to me? I wish MC could call out the problematic side of Austin's behaviour more overtly, Austin reflect and meaningfully change, and them both come together as a family again.

(Typing this all out, I now honestly want a retelling of UT with highschooler MC, which is set shortly after their parent's death and centers largely around MC's relationship with Austin and his struggle to keep custody of their sibling without letting the family ranch completely fall apart.)

As for Unbridled, I think it's pretty obvious what they were trying to do. They saw UT was successful, so they wanted to capture that audience again with a sequel. But UT had no more story to tell, hence the spin-off. So to answer your question, the connection between UB and UT is literally just smut+cowboys+grumpy ML. Mandy is really only there to tie these books together so that they can market it under the same brand and (hopefully) pull in the same audience again. Which makes it doubly funny that UT fans seem to hate UB and vice versa.

Maybe they did plan to make UB about Mandy and Austin initially and then back paddled when they saw that a lot of people didn't really like Austin all that much? It's kind of a conspiracy theory, but it is funny to think about. It does make the entire Austin and Mandy plot line in UT essentially irrelevant, which is objectively not very good writing. But I didn't like Austin, so I'll take it.