#lazuli talks

[lazuliquetzal]

What are some of your fav ic stories?

I'm going to assume this is asking for fic recs in general?? (if I'm reading this wrong you can send a follow up)

so some all-time favs across whatever fandoms (starting with Daiya bc assuming you're the same anon that's what we've been talking about)

(also I haven't read daiya fic in years so a lot of these are kinda old haha oh well)

The Daiya Recs:

while you sleep i'll be scared (by the time you wake up i'll be brave) by @makethewordsyours (Daiya no Ace, misawa, character study) which is The Eijun Characterization and everyone should read it. If you like the more introspective parts of my Daiya fic, this person did it better. The team bonding the shenaniganery the drama and immaturity and complexity of the high school athlete experience!!!!!!! Augh!!!!

i've been waiting for a girl like you by @toujou8 (rule 63 Daiya no Ace) aka the One Lesbian Daiya AU to Rule Them All. If you have weird emotions about gender and high school sports like I do, this series will remind you of them all at once. Okumura Koume I believe in you I'm rooting for you so hard I love you.

A Work of Art by @ryuusea and @sunflowernyx (Daiya, misawa, mangaka AU) it's about ART and STORYTELLING and BASEBALL. What makes a romance? What makes a GOOD romance? These are important questions for a shoujo mangaka.

How the Mighty Fall by ennacore (Daiya, misawa, RIVALS AU) where Eijun doesn't go to Seidou. Rivalry and pining and So Much Baseball. It's so satisfying when they finally team up, good shit, GOOD shit.

The Non-Daiya Recs:

New Wave by my bestest buddy @yellowocaballero (Batman, Stephanie Brown centric) where it's the 90s and Steph is the first Robin and teen girls are actually the future. There's punching. There's explosions. There's the neverending tug-of-war of Batman's justice and vengeance and helping people.

The Winter of Widows by @laughingnell which is a ASOIAF isekai. You don't really need to be super familiar with ASOIAF, of which I'm only passingly familiar. I am recommending this because it's really fucking good. Let's unravel the lie that cruelty is the mature and difficult choice. Let's have impossible faith, and with that faith, construct a better reality.

another leap of faith by @relativitetsteori (AC1, altmal, time travel). SUPRISED IT TOOK ME THIS LONG TO REC TIME TRAVEL. You all know I'm a sucker for time travel. ANYway this is THE AC1 time travel fic I've been waiting for since I was 12 years old. Excellent Altair voice. The STEALTH SCENES?? It's so fire.

In Threes by teariffics. Fullmetal Alchemist AU where Roy loses two limbs in Ishval, ends up being taken care of by the Rockbells, and then runs into two kids obsessed with alchemy. Excellent child writing, like, some of the best I've ever seen. I will never get over the shower puff.

to rewind by @soybean-official (Linked Universe, Legend-centric time travel) I WILL CONTINUE TO REC THIS FIC UNTIL IT GETS 3 BILLION HITS. What if Legend and his younger self swapped places and had to experience the mortifying ordeal of being known.

[maverique-n00b-witch]

Someone in a witchy fb group posted asking others to comment a picture that shows the energy they're bringing into 2023, and I posted this soup I made the other night. Literally the heartiest and most protein rich and nutrient dense soup I have EVER made. A ham bone, two boxes of chicken bone broth, onion, potatoes, pinto beans(which I had cooked from dry before adding to the soup), and lots of dark leafy greens were involved in the making of this soup. It's so comforting and nourishing that I can feel something in my soul actively healing as I eat it. That's the energy I'm bringing into 2023 with me. Nourishment for the body and soul, healing, and pride in my work.

Check reblogs for recipe if you're interested in making it yourself!

[lazuliquetzal]

*kicks down door* hey you wanna hear about writing comedy

I got around to completing The Disappearance of Narumiya Mei (which you should totally read—I have been informed that it is fandom blind friendly), but anyway it’s FINALLY done which means that I get to talk about it. This is a fic about aromantic (anxiety, rage, alienation, pride, etc) and it is, despite the title of this post, not a comedy. 

It’s funny, don't get me wrong, but it’s more of a drama. (Comedic angst, you know me.) 

But why is it funny? Why am I adding jokes to the serious and personal topic of aromantic alienation? Surely, it serves purposes other than amusing myself…

1) TENSION 

This story is a pressure cooker. It's approximately 25K of Narumiya Mei boiling until he explodes. Ideally, the reader is boiling along with him. But it would be utterly unbearable to have no release for 25K—hence, the humor! It relieves the pressure without actually removing the driving force of the story. There’s some mild jokes and funny narration scattered throughout, especially around the more exposition-y parts. I've mentioned this in my other post about comedy, but a well-placed joke will “reset” a scene, in a way. It’ll bring the tension down and create space for the reader to process information.

But there’s also a point when the jokes stop working. Not because they're not funny (you can pry the ominous rubber duck out of my cold dead hands) but because they're a distraction from the important stuff. Once you reach this point, jokes start ratcheting up the tension instead of releasing it. This is also Mei’s coping mechanism—the tension-release-buildup dynamic is happening for both Mei and the audience, and it stops working at around the same time. We love double-duty humor.

2) CHARACTERIZATION/THEME

Mei is the poster child of the obnoxious, arrogant star athlete. It’s mostly genuine (this guy is self-absorbed AF) but there’s also an element of performance in there, too.

The arrogance is a preemptive defense so that no one ever sees him as a love interest. It works because he is legitimately good at baseball, and he’s a hard worker, and everyone knows and respects that. 

But then you take away that history, and then all that arrogance just. Falls flat. He’s not ‘Narumiya Mei, best of the best’ anymore. He’s just this really annoying guy. “I’m the best pitcher in Kanto, I'm kind of a big deal” means nothing when talking to someone who gives negative shits.

We laugh because deflated egos are fucking hilarious. The world doesn’t revolve around you, dipshit.

(Oh, look—there it is! The thesis!)

3) AROMANTIC ALIENATION

There’s a running joke that, every time psychic supernatural stuff comes up, Mei gets hung up on the whole “what the fuck!” of it all while everyone else moves on. Shirakawa and Rise mention increasingly wild noodle incidents (with deadpan and nonchalance respectively), Harada takes literally five seconds to accept psychic powers into his life, and Kazuya quickly catches onto the emotional logic that Mei is dead set on ignoring. And all the while, Mei is busy screeching his ass off, radiating confusion.

This is on purpose. Our main supporting character is totally blasé about psychic powers, and the entire world totally accepts all the out-of-place supernatural nonsense that’s happening. There's humor in that by itself, but then when I make make Mei react with confusion about it, that's both a punchline and a message. 

Mei is alienated from the rest of the cast. He doesn't get romance, and he thinks everyone else is crazy for experiencing attraction. Itsuki’s crush on him is equally as ridiculous as Shirakawa’s ability to talk to ghosts. Are we not going to explain the ghost thing? Why does Rise have a crush on Shirakawa?? What the fuck is wrong with everyone????

Conclusion (?)

There's no conclusion I just think that comedy used on purpose is cool and I could talk about it all the time. Obviously, my primary objective when writing jokes is to amuse myself. But it’s very, VERY satisfying when everything is purposeful and builds off each other and yay. What if the joke was also the character was also the theme was also the atmosphere. What if everything was pointed in the same direction. What if.

[lazuliquetzal]

Hi! I'm the MRI anon, turns out, I really can't see a thing without glasses because I meant Akira meeting Mei and never realized about the spell checker checking that, it only works to create the most obnoxious phrases out of my things but never when I need it, I'm so sorry it felt that silly that day. So, huh, how would that meeting go?

MEI MY GUYYYYYYYYY lol dont worry about the typo, I typo ALL the time

Also oh god anon this question unlocked something in me. I have a whole essay on this. I'm so sorry you're about to get bricked in the face with my extensive bucket of onions.

Uhhh disclaimer that I have 100% lost the ability to interpret Narumiya Mei by any reasonable standard. Narumiya Mei is, in my head, defined by how I wrote him in Disappearance. The Disappearance of Narumiya Mei is required reading before if you want to understand half of this spiel. He is nowhere in the vicinity of the standard Mei characterization so if you haven't read that you may be lost.

1a) On the field, as opponents

Akira would find Mei super terrifying as a pitcher. He would never land a hit. Mayybe a grounder that immediately gets him out. Akira's too weak of a batter and Mei too strong of a pitcher for that to ever be a reasonable matchup. 3rd year Akira would fare better, but at that point Mei would have graduated already, RIP.

Mei going up against the twin battery--nothing but pure, competitive rage. He already wants to crush Eijun for daring to be a lefty in his district. Even worse, Eijun and Akira have this hilarious habit of being super insular when they play as a battery. They would not be intimidated by Mei at all, and barely pay him any attention, which of course pisses him off even more.

Mei vs the Furuaki battery--less rage inducing for Mei, thankfully. A more typical baseball interaction.

Akira would attempt to use his psychic dinner powers on Mei, who (sorry, this comes from the required reading) is so startled to come across another psychic in the wild that he strikes out. He then tries to subtly interrogate Akira about this (and also tries to find him after the game) but Akira is too stupid to know what he's talking about and also does not believe in psychics.

1b) On the field, as a battery:

A Mei-Akira battery actually wouldn't be that bad... Mei's standards are really, really high, which Akira would find intimidating (in his head, at least). I do think Akira's game calling aggressive enough to satisfy Mei's taste but he would not escape the lectures in between innings. This does not help the post-game anxiety. But he'd learn a lot, though!

On Mei's side, he'd be really tough on Akira, but he's also a good teammate. Akira is not on his shortlist of best catchers, but he respects the fact that Akira isn't a coward and makes his calls with confidence (even if they are sometimes the incorrect call). He does not know that Akira finds him terrifying.

2) Aroace on Aroace Violence

Mei hates Akira on sight for reasons he is unable to articulate. He knows it's dumb and irrational, and on paper he actually thinks the way Akira bullies Miyuki is funny and in theory he would want to be friends. Aroace catcher with a stupid sense of humor and probably has psychic powers? Like, they should get along, right?

The reasons are simply that Akira is too comfortable in his own skin and it bothers Mei. Akira's like "haha yeah I'm aroace :) anyway let's talk about snails" and Mei is like "if anyone even THINKS of romance in my vicinity I will OBLITERATE THEIR EXISTENCE and FUCK your stupid snails." Mei has too many complicated issues that he has never even glanced at, and Akira has been dragged and forced into regular and healthy communication since the day he left the womb. It's like when you have deep and unfathomable opinions on Batman and you see people in the wild having a perfectly great time playing with your dolls incorrectly. Instant rage, and if you act on it you're being an asshole.

Akira would find Mei annoying, but mostly because Miyuki becomes 10x more of an asshole when he and Mei hang out. Miyumei friendship is a hazard to everyone around them.

They'd probably be okay in group settings (let's temporarily team up to make fun of Miyuki Kazuya and crack jokes at the allos' expense!) but they would not choose to hang out on their own.

3) as psychics (I'M SO SORRY)

Akira's so weak as a psychic he doesn't actually believe in psychic powers. He thinks his dinner guesses are just lucky intuition. He thinks Mei is crazy. For the record, it is actually psychic powers and it is literally the only thing he can do. He probably would have been able to remember Mei in Disappearance but it wouldn't have helped because they don't interact, like, ever.

Mei does try to convince Akira of the existence of psychic powers but makes less than zero headway. He does not recognize the schadenfreude of this.

This is a metaphor for the way that Mei is hyperaware of the negative affects of amatonormativity on his existence, while Akira is so unsubscribed that being aroace is barely a drop in the bucket in his personal sense of self.

[lazuliquetzal]

so what's the game about?

HELLO ILY

There are actually 2 games (I am the idea hopper).

1) The game jam game.

So I joined the 2025 RPG Maker Game Jam. The theme is "Beyond Expectations," which, if you've read my fic, you know that plot twists and sending shit off the rails is one of my specialties, so I kind of had to join.

I'm currently at the stage of the creative process where I can't tell if it's good or not, but it's too late to swerve because it's due in two weeks and I have to finish. But the premise is basically "Doki Doki Literature Club meets Zelda meets Lazuli™️". This obviously makes it sound like the best thing in the world, but it is my first ever game so who knows.

2) The Worm Game

This was because @yellowocaballero said that, given my jack-of-all-trades skill set, I should make a game, and I was like "you know what I do have RPG Maker sitting untouched on Steam," so here I am.

The short version is that it's a murder mystery told through the eye of a worm, with some puzzles.

The other short version is that I work in a biotech startup.

[lazuliquetzal]

I keep on telling people you're the only one who knows how to plot. Can you teach all of us how to plot, please? I love you.

I AM SUMMONED? PLOT BRAIN SUMMONED?

I love plotting. It's my favorite part of the writing process. Plot is "things that happen" and the best part of writing is imagining things that happen. I'm going to assume that whoever may be reading this knows how to imagine The Happenings, so I'm gonna be talking more about structure, but in like, a kinda abstract sense.

A good plot is a little bit more than a string of events. Plot is like music: there's variation in rhythm and sound and melody, but ultimately there's cohesion, because it's all one song. You can have a bunch of wild things happening, but no matter how strange, there should be something that links them all together, because you're telling one story.

Plot structures are patterns in stories. I'm pretty sure most of them were developed as analysis tools (as in, story already exists > look! it follows this pattern) rather than as writing tools, but people use them as writing tools because it's a neat little way to organize the chaos that is "shit happens." Stories follow patterns for the same reasons music follows patterns: we enjoy the certainty of hitting certain beats. But we also like being surprised. A good pop song doesn't sound like a random collection of sounds, but it also doesn't sound like the middle slider of other songs.

There is this shared concept in both music and writing: the idea of tension and release. Basically, you're playing with reader expectation: there's an imbalance in the experience (tension), and we want to see that imbalance resolved (release). All the common plot structures deal with this basic pattern:

You set an expectation

There are complications to the expectation

You meet the expectation

And this rhythm is happening on multiple levels in writing. Scenes follow this structure (we're gonna get past that door, we're gonna find the murder weapon, we're gonna collaborate and come up with a plan) and all those scenes feed into the overarching expectation (we're gonna solve this murder!). I usually think of chapters as their own mini-story, part of the larger whole. And I think of scenes as their own mini-story, part of the larger chapter. I have engineer brain. I see the gears spinning in the clock. That's why all my chapters have at least One Important Thing happening, because that's that particular chapter's Step #3.

And One Last Important Thing:

In music, a delayed resolution is almost always more interesting than the standard resolution. In writing, that means you wanna drag out Step #2 for as long as you can. That's where the bulk of the story is happening, that's how you build tension, that's how you get people to turn the page.

So when you write a fake dating fic, those bitches better not get together until the very end. I came here for fake dating, not for real dating, damn it. If you resolve that expectation early on, you better replace it with a different expectation that's just as engaging.

But also don't drag it out for too long. Sorry. The hard part of writing is learning the difference between too short and too long. Writing is unfortunately a nuanced skill which is why my advice is like "do this but not too much teehee." But tension and resolution is just rhythm, you can build a sense for it if you engage with enough stories.

[lazuliquetzal]

Comedy Is A Lie: I’m Going To Explain The Joke And It’s Going To Make Everything Worse

A buddy asked me why I cut a good joke from one of my fics and my immediate answer was “it killed the tension,” which, upon reflection, is a pathetic answer that is mostly inaccurate and does not even come CLOSE to how much thought I put into comedy in my writing. So I guess I’m going to write this out and excise the demon of over-explanation. 

Part The First: What Is Funny

The biggest thing I try and keep in mind when writing editing comedy (and anything, really, but especially for comedy) is rhythm. Lots of parts to rhythm! Most obvious is the word-to-word/sentence-to-sentence flow. Timing is a really important aspect of verbal comedy, which is why performance is a good medium to use. You get to control the delivery of every sentence and the spaces in between. But when you’re writing, you have significantly less control over how a reader will interpret the rhythm: all you can do is word your sentences as best as you can and give them rhythm cues via punctuation. (This is why I use so many em dashes and commas… I'm working on that…)

The other part to rhythm is on a more macro scale. There are jokes that will roll along with the flow of a story. For me, these are jokes that don't deviate from the context of the scene too much. They connect one subject to the next, or they build off of each other (a ‘yes, and’ sequence, for example). Alternatively, the joke is delivered in a really understated way. Like passing off something objectively batshit as status quo. Either way, they flow!

Then there are jokes that will halt a scene in its tracks. These are jokes that recontextualize a situation, or make a particularly large leap from the current topic. Or, you've been setting up for this punchline for a while and this joke is payoff. Or the joke is just really, really funny. These are the kind of jokes where you need to give the characters (or the reader) a beat to process them. Sometimes. We’ll get back to that.

Part the Second: How Is Funny

So the point of all that rhythm stuff is that comedy has a flow! If every line is a witty one-liner, none of the lines are witty one-liners! If every joke is a one-hit-KO, you have left your reader unconscious. Basically, if you are constantly being #Funny, you become repetitive and predictable, and that is the death of tension (and humor is a tension-driven element). 

One way to think of comedic pacing is setup (AKA building tension) and punchline (AKA payoff). It’s a balancing act: the more you build up tension, the more satisfying the payoff is going to be, but if you spend too long building up, you start dragging. You want the reader to think, “I can’t wait for the punchline!” and not, “oh my god, PLEASE get to the punchline already.” 

Fun way to make the tension last longer is to put all those flow-y connector jokes along the way. The reader’s anticipating the Joke, so by giving them little jokes, it meets their expectations in little ways so that they don’t get too antsy.

Hey, what’s tension, you ask?

Part The Third: Why Is Funny

When I read a book, there are two emotions that get me to turn the page:

I don’t know what’s going to happen next, and I’m curious!

I know X is going to happen, and I’m anticipating it!

That’s tension. (Something something semantics—I’ve never taken a creative writing class, I don’t have a vocabulary) 

You can have the calmest, low-stakes fluffiest fic in the world but as long as your readers are experiencing either curiosity or anticipation, Congrats! You have tension! I, however, like putting readers on fast-paced rollercoasters, so that’s the lens through which I’m tackling this section, which is: how do I use jokes in a story structure context? What purpose does a clown serve?

I mentioned earlier that some jokes are bricks to the face: they demand to be processed. Most of the time, I put high-impact jokes in places where I need the story to “reset” in a way: force a beat so the reader can process both the joke and the plot. That’s using humor to release tension. Literally. Laughter relieves stress.

But! You can also use those jokes to make the tension even worse! If you drop a bomb and immediately press forward, no processing allowed, you get stressful comedy. You want to laugh, but also a bunch of other stuff is happening and it feels kind of rude to laugh, so you get stressed. Sometimes humor can undermine a climactic moment, but if you use the right joke in the right spot you create shrimp emotions. If you’ve read DotF ch8 you know what I’m talking about.

Jokes also just make for good plot points? A lot of jokes are built on recontextualization. Everybody loves a good twist/reversal/surprise in a plot. Just make a joke and re-frame it, and bam! You’ve plotted! (Everything I’ve ever written started off as a joke.)

Wait, What Was The Question?

Why did I cut the joke? It was a waste of a brick to the face. It was too referential, it required the audience to know/agree with something completely unrelated to the story, it didn’t build upon what I already established. It ruined the rhythm.

I need to emphasize that, despite all my Thoughts on this, the way I appraise my jokes is 80% vibe-based. I probably could have kept the joke, and it would have been totally fine. But I would know. I would know that my intended rhythm is broken… it would haunt me until the end of time…

[lazuliquetzal]

holy shit I just read lie by omission and wanderer's guide and I SWEAR it's like you ripped Kratos and Mimir straight out of the games. how do you get your characterization so accurate???

YOU ARE SO SWEET THANK YOUUU

this is low-key funny to me because. LBO is the ONLY fic I get the "your characterization is so accurate" comment on. My other fics are like, "your characterization is wack but I see the vision" lmao.

So idk how helpful my characterization advice would be. My personal approach for fic is basically: I'm acting.

There's like ten billion iterations of Hamlet out there. Every actor who has ever been Hamlet has a list of headcanons and nuances they inject into their performance. Sometimes he's a wishy-washy conflicted sad guy, sometimes he's just a quiet dude tapping into a well of repressed anger. There's classic Hamlet portrayals, who share many of the same traditional Hamlet traits. And sometimes the director plops the whole play into a post-apocalyptic grocery store in the underground nuclear bunker, and the Hamlet in that setting is not like other Hamlets, but nonetheless makes sense given what you've done to him.

An "in-character" Hamlet is when someone's interpretation of Hamlet slots in neatly to the plot of Hamlet, and provides believable explanations for everything that Hamlet says and does.

I do admittedly try to write a game-accurate Kratos. I do this by asking myself:

What does Kratos do in canon > Why does Kratos do that in canon > What kind of person has those motivations and is capable of those actions?

And then once I've analyzed that > What would this person do if Loki showed up.

I guess the important part of being #Accurate is referencing the source material. The fact that I'm writing time travel and I've been following the plot of GoW does a LOT of heavy lifting. I'm exploring the same themes as canon, and I'm in the same genre. So there's less work I need to do to make Kratos and Mimir feel familiar.

Normally, I'm like, "what if we were in Comedy Town," or "what if we move the slider between shonen and introspection further to the right" which is probably where that Lazuli Sauce slips in. The only character that got affected by that in LBO was Baldur lmao.