Since there's so much stuff relating to sleeping on the show, let me just.
This is exactly how they would sleep if they were sleeping together. McKay as the little spoon and Sheppard as the big spoon. Not because Sheppard is the taller but because it makes sense with regards to their interpersonal dynamic, their respective issues.
Sheppard needs to hold on to him, to feel that he is within his grasp at all times, that he's not going anywhere. McKay is comforted by having Sheppard cling to him, pressing against his back because that makes him feel wanted (not even in the sense of being desired but that someone wants to have him around) and protected. The way Sheppard has twisted his arm under him shows us that he is used to sleeping spooning someone. The way McKay has folded his arms in front of him shows us that he is used to sleeping with someone pressed against his back. This is also why they don't really need that much space for sleeping.
Elaborating on my feelings about this post a little, particularly in the context of video of games with high replay value like Dragon Age (which may not have been what the op was talking about at all, but that's what was on my mind when I saw it)!
I definitely think a good game of this type should give you a complete and narratively satisfying experience if you play it through one way and never return to it. (I mean there are also games like Zero Escape where discovering every ending is part of the "complete" experience but that's not the kind of game we're talking about here.) You should be able to play a Dragon Age game once and enjoy it without feeling like you got an incomplete story, just like (in my opinion) you should be able to pick up the game and enjoy it without having seen other canon material that is by definition supplemental. (Whether these particular games succeed at the latter is another discussion for another post).
I love a book that rewards a re-read--Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series really does this for me and I'm looking forward to re-reading them again before Alecto comes out, and I went back and checked and the OP even tagged Locked Tomb on that post which doesn't surprise me one bit. Because it's true! Going back and reading Gideon after you've read Harrow and understand more about both characters and know more about the world and have starting to pick up on the hints about the true nature of certain characters... it's a thrill! Not because the story was incomplete the first time or incomprehensible, but because now you have the additional context to see all the breadcrumbs the author was dropping in a new light and it's just so, so rewarding and so much fun.
And I also love games that give me high replay value not just because they're fun to play (and let's be real I am not starting my ninth run of DAO because I'm obsessed with the combat mechanics) but because every time I get to experience a slightly different story and see the world and the characters from different angles. There is so much more to experience that way than you can possibly get on one playthrough. (And that's good in this type of game! We want our choices to change the story.) In DA2 there are sides of characters you won't see if you've only taken the friendship route and never rivaled them. I've written before about the templar ending of DA2 and how it reveals things that the mage ending doesn't and yeah, it's a "bad" ending and not everyone wants to play it but it's still another story that has things to tell us about the world. (And I'd venture to say that sometimes, we don't necessarily realize we are talking from the basis of experiencing slightly different stories.)
I don't think a story should set out to confuse its audience (in general--there are instances where intentional misdirection serves a narrative purpose but that's a digression here) but I also enjoy the experience of playing a new game unspoiled and without walkthroughs the first time and letting the chips fall where they may, and maybe getting a "bad" outcome because I didn't fully get what a quest was about, because you only really get one shot at the Chaotic First Playthrough. Being confused because you're in a funhouse labyrinth but it's definitely leading you somewhere is different than being confused because the story doesn't make sense, you know? And that first playthrough isn't an incomplete story, it's just one of many different ways you can experience the game. There will be plenty of time after that to replay with more knowledge and build the perfect world state, or make it Worse, or just choose something different.
So yeah, a story should work on that first level, that single read or playthrough, in order to be successful, but my favorite ones are the ones that do give me a reason to come back, and either offer me a new experience or deepen the one I had before.
i remember reading a take on why slash fic is so popular and it proposed that it's because it creates a romance where gendered violence/misogyny isn't present. this is interesting to me, because i've noticed that in fics for fanon m/m ships that have to take care of a canon m/f ship that's in the way, the woman will often be made out to be colder, meaner, and "not actually in love with" the male interest (which she is in canon). and in the examples i'm thinking of, the man love interest in a relationship has a history of abusive behaviour with the other man love interest. so there are still instances of abuse & sexism, except they are displaced.
hey i have a kinda silly question but! where in the timeline of sr2 do u think one should play the revelations mission? like do u prefer it at the beginning or the end? sorry if uve talked about this before but im curious what u think!
oh my god i LOVE talking about revelations do NOT apologise i will happily always talk about it
O!K! so for a long time i thought Revelations went at the end i would play it right before ultor cus its like a nice cap to tie it up neatly? idk but im like strongly of the opinion now it should be played right at the start like , i normally play it right after all the tutorial stuff and right before the main storyline but like, early game whenever and here is my EVIDENCE;
i think the opening is deliberately like, set up to make you want to go to the police station and get the phone records? like the whole conversation w/ Boss and Johnny after you bust him out is about Julius being missing and encouraging you to go see Troy, Boss even has a voiceline where they literally say exactly that.
i also would argue that the Boss in the Revelations cutscene is not a Boss who owns the city and has proven themselves; Julius talks about them like they havent taken over the city (at least not completely) and like they still have the need to ‘prove’ themselves in some capacity, he talks about them like theres still an option to stop what theyre doing and turn back, when a Boss who has taken over the city completely obviously no longer has that chance. revelations is about the Boss finally shedding the last traces of Playa and becoming who theyre going to be for the rest of the game.
like we see in sr3 that theyve changed drastically frm the end of 2 so if you have revelations at the end of the game it makes like.. less sense from an overall character arc; revelations is the Boss taking total control and leadership, its them taking control from Julius, leaving him behind with the Saints past and marking the transition from the Saints of the old days to the new Saints, under the Boss’ control.
SO thats my take. revelations is way more narratively consistent if you put it at the beginning! i think its a really pivotal moment in the Boss’ character and i think it sets up a certain like, dark tone for the rest of the game. thank you for asking me!!!
Look at the collection of snow globes on the desk under the lamp between the psychiatrists as they discuss what’s real and what’s fantasy and where she’s starting to believe that his time travel story is true. Look how she paces back and forth in front of them while discussing what truth is.
Look at how Willis is encased in a clear plastic bubble when he makes his time travel journey. The hazmat suit he wore when he first came from underground was also clear plastic, and all the scientists in the future wear clear plastic lab coats.
Look at the hotel she drags him into where now she is trying to convince him that his story is true after previously convincing him that he’s imagining it all. He’s convinced himself that he saw part of the story he told her on TV, but she says it was reality.
And look at the globe Brad Pitt puts his hands on when he’s talking about a model of his mind, and the clear globe above his head when he says his ex-psychiatrist already knows everything he thinks before he does.
What’s interesting is that the audience never questions that Willis is a time traveler and that his story about a virus that’s going to kill 5 billion people is true, but the characters aren’t sure. Willis isn’t even sure half of the time. He wants to stay where the air is clean, but he’s not the one in control of which time he’s in...the scientists get to put him in and pull him out whenever they choose, though even they aren’t fully in control of where they send him and they often make mistakes.
And in the end, it’s a scientist who causes the outbreak, a psychiatrist who couldn’t actually see what was in that scientist’s mind when he was telling her about his ideas, and another scientist who was the last one who could have controlled that outbreak, if only she could have talked with her own past self.
So, the actual word “writespace” is just me being a little bit idiomatic, it would have been less fanciful to say “here is a screenshot of the program in which I write, and the project I’m currently writing”, but the term is kind of fundamental to a few particular ideas I have about the way I write.
I am a big advocate of several things as far as the technical process of writing, and they are:
Writing in .txt format, formatting via markdown
Autosaves / Cloud Storage / Good backups
Versioning
Writing in programs (preferably some form of zenware) that are meant for WRITING, not word processing.
I’ll knock out a quick justification of these points below a cut:
1) .txt + markdown
It’s just a question of easy compatibility/minimal resources. .txt is usable across all operating systems, and easily saves and loads across a variety of devices. My computer and phone an handle text files very easily, and the formatting I use means that they’re super simple to copy straight onto tumblr. Markdown as a formatting scheme is fairly ubiquitous across the web. Markdown is very easy to learn, and its complexity scales easily from simple bold/italics up into things as complex as tiered headings, embedded notes/comments, and inline formatting like blockquotes and code. All much, much simpler than HTML, and just as easy to convert via wysiwyg editors. It prevents all the junk HTML/extra formatting that comes along with text that comes out of a .doc.
2) Autosaves / Cloud Storage / Backups
Should be fairly self-explanatory. Please learn to set this up, and more importantly, be practiced at retrieving backups as necessary. Learn where your files go and test what happens when you edit them from different places. The way my files are set up, my computer/phone will create different versions of a file if it detects a conflict. That is to say, if I make edits to the same file from two different places, it won’t save one over the other, if I’ve made different edits in a different place. It will detect the conflict and I’ll wind up with two different files. That’s really cool. I haven’t lost writing in a serious way in ages, and it’s just been such a load off my mind. I still reflexively ctrl+save on a periodic basis, but I also know that my writing program is autosaving every fifteen seconds. Which actually brings me to my next point:
3) Versioning
When I’m struggling with a chapter, sometimes what helps me most is to be able to scrap it entirely and start over. But I never like to delete anything entirely, in case I’m wrong about what needs to change. I like to have a system of some kind that lets me easily back up and retrieve earlier versions of chapters or segments or even just paragraphs, in case the ideas in them are valid later on. This can dovetail with autosaving/backups, because dropbox at least gives you the option to view the version history of a file. That means you can view the file at various points in its lifespan, and go back and retrieve previous iterations. Kill your darlings, but remember where you buried them, basically.
4) Writing Programs
Please don’t write in Microsoft Fucking Word. Word is a program meant for word processing, not for writing. It’s meant for taking extant text and formatting it specifically for print, or to exist as a virtual document. Writing that you intend to put online especially should be as simple and clean as possible, and writing itself is a lot easier if you don’t need to worry about margins/page sizes/all that extraneous shit that isn’t relevant to text that exists digitally. Those things should only be relevant as far as the view of the text you’re actually writing, and they should be readily and easily changeable for your own visual comfort.
So enter zenware. I personally use a program that’s a little less readily available than most other options, because what I use is a beta of the new writemonkey. If there’s interest, I’ll happily talk about the details of my process, and what one of my projects usually looks like, probably via a breakdown of the sort of image attached to the above post. But that’s a little less relevant, because the beta version of wm3 isn’t as readily/easily accessible as other programs are, right now.
Conveniently, the old version of writemonkey (http://writemonkey.com/) is still my #1 recc as far as writing programs go and has all of the same options I use currently, just in a slightly different format (worth noting that most of these are also plugins, and are behind a pay-what-you-like type donation). It’s a little bit barebones and hard to make an immediate adjustment to, but even just writing .rtf as opposed to .doc is a better option. For that sort of intermediate step, here are two other options you may or may not have heard of:
focuswriter: https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/
zenwriter: http://www.beenokle.com/zenwriter.html
Both make rich text format files as opposed to .docs, and can also be set to save as .txt by default. They both make their own cases fairly effectively, but I’d contend that once you start writing in a cleaner, less visually distracting space, your whole experience will change.
I don’t know of any good .rtf editors that are useful on phones, but as far as .txt editors, I wholeheartedly recommend Jotterpad. I’ve heard the recommendation of Writer for ios, but haven’t used it personally.
anyway! That got long, hopefully some of it was helpful! I’ll happily answer any further questions, as I said, another essential part of my process is talking about writing instead of actually writing.
It just occurred to me that people seem to have different ideas for what “shipping” (romantically/sexually pairing multiple characters) means, or why fans ship the pairings that they do.
There’s this mockery that given two characters A and B, the desire to ship them stems from one of two reasons:
1. Attraction
“I ship them because I find A sexually attractive and therefore deserving of happiness. Since A loves/lusts after B, they should be together to make A happy. (It’s all about A, someone I want.)”
2. Identification
“I identify with B and giving B a happy ending would validate my own potential for happiness. I want B to have A to get to that happily ever-after. (It’s all about B, a proxy for me.)”
There’s nothing wrong with either, except that the immediate link from ship to self tends to contribute to heated shipping wars, where disagreements get misinterpreted as personal attacks. Implied in both is a sort of self-insert limitation, that the narrative is aligned with and motivated by only one’s own romantic/sexual inclinations.
And if that’s all the reasons we ship, then it’d be hard to find a hetero woman shipping two men together, or a gay guy shipping a hetero pairing. Except people do, all the time, so clearly shipping’s more than just self-insert fantasy.
I can think of at least two other ways fans relate to their OTPs. First, where the fan is a well-wishing third-party:
3. The Best Friend
“A and B are so adorable and compatible that they clearly belong together. I just want them to be happy.”
Followed by perhaps the least emotional-driven reason:
4. The Storyteller
“A and B create an interesting dynamic with great potential. I’d like to further explore that by putting them in a romantic/sexual relationship.”
