#choomchoom

[notwhelmedyet]

for the director's cut ask meme: can you talk a little about how you characterized Scattergun in KISKHS? he's wonderful and i love him and i would love to hear more about how you developed the character

😍 scattergun! yes of course. I’ll stick most of my answer below a spoiler cut, because I know there’s a lot of folks who haven’t gotten to read Keep It Secret, Keep Him Safe yet.

The short answer is I started with Eliot Spencer.

spoiler time: all of the conjunxes started as the Leverage OT3. It was a convenient shorthand to make them all distinct and to be able to start writing right away. Their characterizations drifted in the course of writing, but at the beginning my thought was that Scattergun was Elliot Spencer.In connection with that, I needed him to have a violent past. Of course, everyone has a violent past (they’re at war) so I decided it would fit best if he was an ex-decepticon. From there several other things fell into place: his relative isolation from the other people at the institute, his distrust of the institute, the guilt that shapes his own self-worth.I also needed to give him a hobby: something outside of violence that Scattergun could pour his emotions into while remaining fairly taciturn from the outside. I dismissed cooking as a possibility and landed (somehow) on music. It might have been a suggestion from you or someone on the discord, I’m not sure. It was in writing the section on his favorite musical artists that I realized Scattergun had been motivated to defect by his music and specifically by the tragic seditious artist Semisonic. This was one of those Eliot parallels that took on a life of their own.

His actual emotions and interactions I don’t tend to plan in advance - I do most of my characterization by improvising and then editing to make things consistent. Since the plot demanded Scattergun pursue the medical mystery, I needed him to be devoted to the point of self-destruction as well as canny. He’s taciturn partly to cover that he’s painfully shy - he’s good at burying himself in his work so he doesn’t have to engage with people as himself.

he’s also got some things thrown in that I just happen to fall for in love interests because I was falling in love with Scattergun

[sunderedstar]

Hey, I love your writing a lot! For the audience participation post, if you want to answer: what prompted you to take the tack you did with Killmaster in Waysverse?

haha, primarily because when Lost Light was first starting I had...such high hopes for a space/teleportation-themed Decepticon scientist! Brainstorm’s natural scientific foil! Whirl’s nemesis who is just as ridiculously, weirdly into the nemesis thing as Whirl is! a massive killing machine with a magic wand!

...and then JRo did pretty much nothing with him. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ so now he’s everyone’s weird grumpy robot uncle.

[secretsolenoid]

Marry is a Swearth Term

https://archiveofourown.org/works/17420639

It's a little short, but I wanted to get something up for Bex.

Gen. Anode & Lug.

--

Gift for @choomchoom!

[criminarchy]

choomchoom replied to your photo “@timelessmulder not to like. Nerd out or anything but here’s some...”

absolutely to nerd out but electron microscopes can only image dead things that can withstand a rigorous staining process and regular compound microscopes can observe dynamic processes in living tissue among other cool things!

That’s true!!!!!!!!!!! I uh... forgot about that. 

[prowlscreamevangelist]

cheering you on re: writing that prowlscream fic! 👀

haha thanks! i got 25k words into it last summer, and then i got busy and dropped it...

[timelessmulder]

perceptor! (send a character's name ask meme)

Realistic: percy is closed off and quiet due to ptsd and poor handling of his personal trauma, and would really just like to go back to being a scientist like he was before the war

While it may not be realistic it is hilarious: percy WILL throw down with optimus at the slightest provocation, he is so tired of autobot command. also drift has been trying to get him into meditation but percy is having None of it

Heart-crushing and awful, but fun to inflict on friends: percy has serious, severe guilt issues with failing to protect others and will count things out of his control as his fault. he almost always needs to be kept busy so he doesn’t dwell too much on things that’ve happened

Unrealistic, but I will disregard canon about it because I reject canon reality and substitute my own: serious vision loss in his right optic. very anxious about finding himself in a position where he is helpless to defend himself (like in spotlight: hoist) due to his near death experience. prowl intentionally tried to get him killed by assigning him to shadow kup

[notwhelmedyet]

H, M and V for the fic ask game!

(link to meme questions, I’m totally still taking asks)H: answered this one for Reed over here ->M: Got any premises on the back burner that you’d care to share?I'm secretive about my plots, for fear of them falling through and because I base so many pivotal moments on twists...but. honestly I'm too excited about this idea not to share it eventually. It's backburnered solely bc I can't let the Taking Care readers down again by doing another project before that gets finished. 😅Okay, so, I'm planning a mtmte/LL alternate ending fic. Most of the pieces are still up in the air but my goal is something that focuses in on each of the secondary crewmembers in turn and gives some closure to their character arcs. I'm reworking the mythology and the knights and trying to find alternate explanations for some of the arc mysteries that were set up in mtmte...as of right now, it's titled The Unforgetting.(plus there’s always the girl’s night out/boy’s night out style fic. someday.)V: A secondary (or underrated) character you want to see more of in fic?For MTMTE there are so many secondary characters who haven't gotten their time in the sun but I'm going to go with Censere. (Actually , wait, I have multiple answers bc I also have to vote all the female characters--give me more Nautica and Lotty and Anode and Lug)(......but consider: JAVELIN)

[sunderedstar]

For the wip ask meme - take

hehehehe

??: Someone took him! And since none of the Autobots left on Earth feel like taking my calls, or care about the fact that he’s gone missing –