#maideninorange

[woodswolf]

🌿🏜️🔪🪲?

writer's truth or dare ask game

🌿 ⇢ give some advice on writer's block and low creativity

honestly? just don't be afraid to step away. sometimes you're not in the right headspace for a project and that's okay. work with your brain, not against it - whether that's on a different WIP or just taking a break for a while. sometimes this means the WIP sits for a little while. sometimes this means you abandon it. roll with the punches, don't dodge into them.

like for example, i've been having One Of The Weeks Of My Life at my job recently and just feeling really burned out and depressed on the Major Fucking Crunch Time this project is getting into. i didn't feel like working on chapter 5 when i was feeling that terrible, but i was able to channel some of that energy into a side story. i've barely started it as of yet, but it's got a lot of potential, has required a lot of research, and just. it's helped burn off a lot of the negative emotion (because it involves a very similar kind of negative emotion and focuses on a kind of burnout recovery. lol)

🏜️ ⇢ what's your favourite type of comment to receive on your work?

long analysis comments are like the #1 kind of comment to get in my good books. i get an excuse to talk about Fun Details whether intentional or not and just generally feed information to someone who isn't fully aware of all of the complexities of a project yet (usually my partner lol)

however.

i personally consider that the highest honor i could ever receive would be recursive fanfiction. fanart as well, yes, but fanfiction in particular. it's more or less a reflection of my own process in a way; i write a lot of recursive fanfiction relative to my output, but i only write recursive fanfiction about fanfiction that really, really resonated with me, or that often were incredibly formative to me in their own specific ways. it's not enough for it to be a good story - it has to change something about me, alter my perspective or open my eyes to an entirely new world. often these end up feeling like (or just being) treatises on a particular subject; there are fics on hope, on grief, on forgetting, on becoming monsters. and it's just.... it's powerful.

i could link all of these if anyone is curious.

🔪 ⇢ what's the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project?

honestly all of the research i've done for DLD and other fics in the DLDCM (Dogs Leading Dogs Cinematic Multiverse) qualifies as really weird. outside of the semi-standard fanfiction-writer fare (e.g. symptoms of various injuries, or how to identify certain types of injuries like with that shoulder test), there are two broad categories of "what the fuck" research that i've gone into very extensively.

the first category, which i keep coming back to over and over, is all of the speculative biology shit. basically NONE of it is going to come up until more than halfway through catch/cradle at minimum, but at this point ive probably put close to ten hours of research into figuring out what the fuck is wrong with these things. (and that's just the research, not the processing that shit afterward.) i know what this guy breathes. i don't know exactly how his metabolism works, but i do have a general outline that seems approximately sound, and have a general principle for how it interacts with other metabolisms. i don't just know HIS metabolism by the way, i know like three other components' metabolic interactions and life cycles and to some extent their histories. and then we get into all of the other lore shit that is Very Present and Very Real and Very Probably Isn't Going To Be Written Down In Any Fics and also isn't strictly research based as much as vibes based but it doesn't have to be research based because my source is i made it the fuck up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! but tl;dr there's a CRAZY amount of various kinds of biology lore and 90% of it is never going to see the light of day most likely

the second category which has generally come about more recently is primitive / historical technology. generally just a lot of how you would do certain things - such as making paper, or refining clay, or working metal or glass - if you were starting from (almost) nothing.

additional shoutout to when i did some brief research on akkadian for one of my recurive fic projects, that was fun but really overwhelming and i ended up not finishing it myself lol

🪲 ⇢ add 50 words to your current wip and share the paragraph here

from chapter 5:

The ship doesn’t need any additional explanation. “I’ll set the course,” it says. Brief and to the point. He can’t help but appreciate that right now. The controls shift ever-so-slightly under his hands as they start following a slightly different autopilot route. It’ll set them up for the approach path they discovered on the second day — one that doesn’t cut through as many of the giant trees.

thanks for the ask!! :D

[incorrect-mugenri]

Tsubakura, referring to Shou's slime: Similar in taste and texture to gelatin, this jiggling mass of jelly can be sculptured into all kinds of creative shapes. As a bonus, it also doubles as professional-grade hair gel. It's the perfect cool summer treat!

[woodswolf]

Me before attempting to write Olimar again, one year ago: "Okay, this'll be interesting. Writing a character who isn't severely fucked up on two or five levels (but will be by the time I'm done with him). This will be nice a little experiment for myself."

Me now, having catapulted down the character study rabbit hole as I tend to: "Oh dear god, wait a minute: this guy is as deeply fucked up on the level of whom I usually write for! And I don't think that was my fault for once! I've been deceived! What the fuck?!"

(TL;DR: Your tags and ramblings made me Think, thank you. I'm certain you are having a blast tearing him to shreds in some terrible way I've yet to think of myself lol.)

(RE: all of this shit probably)

i have only really truly known this guy for a bit over a year and every little bit ive learned about him has only pushed me ever deeper into this endless well of fascination with whatever the fuck is wrong with him. this guy is a pathological liar as a method of self-soothing. who DOES that. how the fuck did he arrive in this scenario.

really when you get down to it olimar is like, perhaps one of the most depressed characters of all time, it's just that he's carefully crafted a presentation of symptoms that very cleverly hides this from both the audience and himself. this guy is literally miserable. he viscerally hates his boss and is frustrated with his coworkers where they're even relevant. he has somewhere in the range of mixed feelings on his job but generally wishes that it allowed him more time with his family. his family, which has so many undeniable problems it's difficult to even list them. where to start: his kids? his wife? his parents? every happy memory he has involves his family and most of those memories are brief glimpses at Connection that otherwise seems so absent from the rest of his life. he's a middle-aged man with a house and a yard and a wife and two-kids-and-a-dog and probably a white picket fence for good measure. he's ticking all the boxes that he was raised* to think were a one-way ticket to happiness. so why is he still so lonely? why isn't he happy? what is this general malaise that's hanging over his entire life? what's wrong with him?

(*whether or not he was actually raised on a variant of the american dream is a really interesting question but honestly not relevant here. there's a lot of interesting evidence in his logs supporting something more nuanced, but again. irrelevant)

and olimar's answer is that Actually! there's Nothing wrong! he's perfectly fine and perfectly happy and perfectly satisfied with everything in his life. nothing is wrong and he's perfectly happy and even if he weren't (which he is!!!!) he still has so many things that would make up for it. he has so many good memories that are just his that he can hold on to as hard as he possibly can for as long as he needs to until he feels better. he can write them down and read them back as a reminder until it sticks in his brain that He Is Happy. There Is Nothing Wrong. He Is Happy And There Is Nothing Wrong. because he did everything right, didn't he!! he made his choices and for the all the love of everything he holds dear he is going to stick by them. because he needs to. because if he doesn't, where would he even be?

and then this guy has the worst "vacation" of his entire life (DEFINITELY another blatant self-soothing lie btw, you CANNOT convince me that this guy would spend any more time away from his family than he absolutely has to what with his career) and the cracks actually kind of start to show. because he is very quickly launched into the worst series of circumstances he's ever experienced. and through it all he's just!! completely fucking Normal about it!! utterly fucking accepting of any outcome that happens to him because he doesn't feel like he really has any control. like he ever had any control. he should have fucking died. even before the thirty days are up he's just passively accepting of whatever happens. there are tons and tons of treasure descriptions or other entries where he expresses very explicit passive suicidality through things that could be jokes or offhand comments but really don't read like that. pikmin 1's entry for day 29 reads more like a reminder that he should at least try to not let himself die than an earnest attempt to actually do so.

and it's like, if he does survive pikmin 1, what does he even win? ever-increasing stakes at his job and ever-fewer ways to pretend that everything's fine. an ever-brighter flashing neon sign reading QUIT YOUR FUCKING JOB that he has to try increasingly hard to ignore. the job that keeps sending him back to the planet that almost killed him. the job that keeps sending him back to the planet where he barely survived by only his wits and the skin of his teeth. the job that keeps sending him back to the planet where he will die, because no one was supposed to save olimar.

and through it all you can see! you can SEE the way he gets increasingly stressed out as things go along. but he's still just going along trying his damnedest to pretend that everything is fine and he is happy and he doesn't need any help, that he shouldn't be trying to make an exit as quickly as he can and to maybe ask his wife to pick up a job so they can be a dual-income household now that their kids are a bit older. he doesn't need to be looking for anything better because he has the best he's going to get right here, and isn't that wonderful? shouldn't that make him happy?

and it's like, the way things are going he's never going to get there, and on some level he knows that. but olimar's whole fucking deal is that if he can't solve something he's going to throw himself at the problem over and over until either it gets solved or his skull splits open, a pattern that is only reenforced by the events of pikmin 1 and 2 and 3. so he knows that he's never going to be happy, but he's going to try this impossible task of being happy over and over until he either fakes it till he makes it or something kills him. so far it hasn't worked out for him, but maybe the NEXT time he blows up at somebody for no reason because he just can't take the stress of it all anymore!

as it turns out i have no idea how to end this, so on a tangentially related note: olimar is not a biologist by any standard and i will die on this hill. ALL of his piklopedia entries are creative writing exercises and i can ALMOST prove this. but that's a whole other post honestly. just kind of adds to the whole thing about how much olimar lies to the reader and himself.

[incorrect-mugenri]

This entire poll experience makes me want an AU where everyone has access to the internet now. Just to see how chaotic it would end up being (and also because I low-key wonder what the memes would be like lol).

from some of the tags I'd say we have a small glimpse into what this would look like and I'm obsessed, its so bad

But then again theres likely to be some silly, non-discoursey things! Which we have yet to think up. I am also curious about the memes. You think they have the clause-speak meme in Mugenri (I vote yes based on some characters mocking its speech)

Also I dunno what it counts for but some of the incorrect quotes here (remember when this was an incorrect quote blog like a month ago? lmao) are based on like tumblr heritage posts and iconic tweets and the like! A sampling of what it could be

Maybe when this goes back to being an IQ blog, people can submit in character tweets/tumblr posts? Those count as IQs right?

[woodswolf]

Hm...Could be brain fog or my own tendency to place my finger on the right word I need, nor do I know if this holds true for your other works (though you could probably yank me into some if you pull on my ankle at just the right time and place), but for Dogs Leading Dogs at least I ended up going with "portentous" of all words lol.

I originally wanted to say "foreboding", but that word just...never sat right on my tongue here. You have such a vivid, powerful way of communicating the sort of ominousness of the world of Pikmin, but that word does a disservice to the sort of wonder and sheer vulnerability that is also there and equally vibrant. So I ended up going with a word that essentially can be used to mean both at once. Yes, it is often scary, but well...you also aren't alone, for better or worse.

describe my writing in one word

See, at first when I saw this I thought this was incredibly specific to DLD, for an incredibly wide array of reasons. This is the longest work I’ve ever written, and I’ve just really enjoyed stuffing this thing full of foreshadowing for The Big Twist. (Not that it’s even going to feel like a twist after chapter 5, since the mask very much starts to slip in the latter half of that chapter, especially by a very particular definition of “latter half”. And not that it's even a twist to begin with, considering it's literally spelled out in the summary!) So it’s kinda natural that it’d feel like the future is bleeding into the present, because it very literally is (but also that isn’t how it works at all).

I also saw the combination of “ominous” and “you aren’t alone” so close together and just started going ohohohohohoho before I realized that there’s no way anybody could even possibly guess at that at this point, because that twist is three sequels down the line and I haven’t even properly started hinting at it yet. (Not to even mention that the meatiest of implications towards this, at least among the implications that will be present in DLD rather than other sequels, are going to be the ones in chapter 5 and 6 which obviously have not been published yet.)

But after thinking about it for a while longer, I think it holds in the general case. If nothing else, it’s a theme, or a tone — something is coming for these characters, whether they want it to or not, and while it’s very patient, it’s also very, very present. And it has thoughts.

Thanks for the ask, as always <3

[sukunekatano]

Mind doing Tsubakura?

tsuber!