#metaaaa

[writesology]

"we have enough weapon and magic control, but what we need is idiot control!"

Meta Knight at some point during the whole Star Allies adventure

~Quotes☆Anon~

Snarky Meta is again returning with an ice-cold vengeance, I see.

Idiot control I'm wheezing-

[unadulteratedkr]

4, 8, 18 for the meta asks?

4. Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)

Jaime… I- I cannot save you. She is so brave to say this, and Jaime is shattered by her solemn confession. She looks scared this will chase him away; she looks so determined to ensure he knows she is just as human as he is. He lets out a half laugh, half sigh of relief as he looks upon the woman in front of him, standing tall, still only half dressed.

This is from my exchange fic from last year, (let it be for nought except for love’s sake) and it’s one of the best things I think I’ll ever write? Do I love that these two are honorable past the point of sense when it comes to other people? Yes. Do I love that they can be deliciously flawed and human with one another? Also yes.

OH. I’m also going to forever be proud of managing to make an acrostic message in cylch y Tylwyth Teg, the fic I wrote last year for @brynnmck‘s birthday. I thought it was gonna be easy, up until the moment I had a dictionary open to figure out how to start a sentence with the letter A for the gazillionth time 😂😂😂

8. Is what you like to write the same as what you like to read?

Oooooo, interesting. There’s some definite cross-over, for sure! I know I write a more amorphous combo of book and show characterizations because I just pick and choose what I like from both to make a hybrid demon of my own, but I will read strictly book or strictly show fic and enjoy them equally. I know in my writing, consent is key, and that is something I really need when I’m reading things too. (It’s no surprise to me that @kurikaesu-haru‘s Ella Enchanted AU I hyped into existence is currently murdering me in the best way with all the consent about to happen. I’m vibrating in my chair just THINKING about it.) (Also psssst, go read what she’s shared so far. It’s EXCELLENT AND DEVASTATING: A Way With Words)

18. Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

There are a couple of my WIPs that turned into BIG WIPs because I realized I wanted to expand the plot-lines I kept coming up with. The biggest culprit is my eventual exotic dancer verse where Jaime is a male stripper who teaches Brienne how to dance so she can use actually learning burlesque as part of her thesis on women’s sexuality which just started as “hey how about Margaery drags Brienne to a club and she sees Jaime in a gold thong and hornt happens as a result”. And then I wanted there to be more. And more turned into me researching what goes into writing a thesis. And learning about burlesque. And male stripping. AND SO MANY OTHER THINGS.

The first version of “let it be nought except for love’s sake” had a LOT less plot and was much more just “ehhh, feelings invade smut” and had a moment where Jaime broke down in Brienne’s arms.... and then I went, “Wait. Why is he breaking down?” And then I decided I had to invent a new reason, somehow ended up tripling my original word count to create a canon-divergent world where Jaime had been banished to a war-ravaged Stormlands, and I cut the original moment where Jaime broke down WHICH WAS WHAT MADE ME CREATE THIS WHOLE NEW STORY IN THE FIRST PLACE. 😂

meta asks for writers!

[helloitsvehere]

Star your tags killed me ilysm haha really wasn’t expecting to be quoted on my Baltimore fic 😂

nope no bmw, just a vw lol- but fun fact! Asad is a real dude- he’s our main homeboy when it comes to bar hopping and yes, he’s as annoyingly friendly irl as he is in the fic

[sunrisetune]

-Spoilers for CR. ep 77-

[Warning: Briefly described gore]

In re: Caleb and the Scourger: I don’t think Caleb was offering her forgiveness, and I really don’t think he’s offering himself forgiveness by proxy.

If I may draw our attention to three lines (copied from Disasterhuman’s awesome transcription of the conversation):

Caleb: Maybe if I can talk plainly with you and see one inch of change, I wouldn’t believe we were all damned. Scourger: I hope this lesson has been very useful. Caleb: It has. You’ve made what I have to do very plain.

He was hoping he could offer her forgiveness, that telling her she’s murdered entirely innocent people (+ most likely, given her reference to Trent, someone she loved) would shake her in some way. But it didn’t work. Now Caleb’s certain of something, which, is a significant alarm bell to me. As he and all of us just witnessed, certainty can be very dangerous. He see’s himself in her situation, he said as much to Beau, and then gets right into her face to stare in her eyes as she’s crushed to death. I think he’s convinced he has to kill all the scourgers now. Not just Trent (which I imagine was part of the plan). Not just to avenge his parents, on his way to his ultimate goal of “saving” them retroactively. But because he believes that nothing, absolutely nothing, can be done to save the other scourgers from themselves at this point; their own loyalty to Trent, to the cause, to the Empire, to “history”. They’re irredeemable. He knows what he has to do. He considers them his siblings, and that they deserve to have their deaths recognized. By Caleb personally, maybe?

And none of this bodes well for how he feels towards himself.

Caleb was definitely showing character development this episode, just don’t think it was.... the morally good kind. Which story-wise is great! Negative development is also development, and it can set up The Good Shit with regards to character dynamics and overarching goal complicating.

Less great for him as a human person. I’m more worried about him now than before we saw all that go down.

[a-whump-muffin]

In my head, Zhao Wuyi’s story is more or less concluded, which is why I haven’t been posting about him. There are certainly a few excerpts I haven’t posted here and I’ll find them eventually, but I’d like to wrap up his arc with some analysis.

He is my only fleshed-out whumper. Initially, I wrote from his perspective because I needed to frame the setting and circumstances (ancient china, intelligence bureau chief) and a box boy’s view would be too limited. Then, I thought about how he gained his position and realized that the conflict I set up for the kingdom’s past fit perfectly with this intelligence agency that was supposed to answer only to the emperor. And Zhao Wuyi had to be a hidden identity, because the previous emperor and his family were all executed.

That set up the parallel between Zhao Wuyi and Xiao Lai/his box boy: two sons of noble/royal blood who ended up with two totally opposite fates - yet both prisoners of their circumstances and hiding who they really were in order to survive their new life.

Zhao Wuyi being so upset by Xiao Lai’s imperfections was really a reflection of his own self-hatred. He wouldn’t admit it, but he and Xiao Lai were really quite similar. Both chose life over death, to become something “disgraceful” instead of dying. Zhao Wuyi wasn’t proud of who he became, even though he was serving the country. He felt guilty for living when his brothers, so much stronger and smarter than him, were executed.

Above all, Zhao Wuyi was a perfectionist. From childhood, he was taught that everything has a place and a time, and it’s the worst breach of misconduct to step out of line. He is cruel to Xiao Lai when he doesn’t perform as a “pet” should, and feels justified because of his own experiences.

天生我材，必有用 “Heaven made me, it must be for a purpose.” or “Heaven made me, I must have a use.”

I love this line from an ancient Chinese poem, because it fits Zhao Wuyi’s life so well. “Heaven” - both fate and the emperor, son of heaven, gave life to this identity he must take to the grave. The emperor spared him to use him for this one purpose. He feels that if he isn’t serving that purpose, isn’t being the best chief of the Wan’an Bureau and giving 110% of himself, then he has no reason for being alive.

A nice surprise about his character was my ability to turn him into a whumpee, and to carve out a redemption arc for someone who really was never looking for one. The reason I was talked into writing a redemption arc for him and felt I could justify it was because he never stood a chance, the cards were stacked against him from the beginning. He’s not an inherently bad or cruel person. But for him to not have turned out this way, the only way was to choose death.

Still, he does keep paying for what he has done for the rest of his life. He is forgiven by two people he wronged directly (Ling’er and Xiao Lai), but he is destined to live and die alone. After he is demoted, he makes it his purpose to clean up the mess he started (the dismantling of the pet trade). He never realizes that the emperor spared his life a second time not only for this purpose, but also because of guilt for making his nephew’s life hell.

He’s not miserable. He has a decent living. But he’s also eternally lonely.

The one thing that weighed heavily on him since he was young, the feeling of being utterly alone in a room full of people, never leaves him.

I was really torn between writing a happy ending, killing him off, or leaving him alive but leading an empty life. It was tough, haha. He didn’t deserve a happy ending, nor did he deserve to die for events that were out of his control, so I settled for the last option.

(In another world, he and Ling’er would have been a thing. Zhao Wuyi values confidence and competency, he likes Ling’er’s quiet determination and steadfast nature. Ling’er has these protective feelings towards Zhao Wuyi, like he wants to accompany this person and make himself someone Zhao Wuyi can rely on. But in this world, it wasn’t meant to be.)

[a-whump-muffin]

I have found that while I enjoy reading lots of physical whump, I really only write emotional whump (...and pet whump, which I would’ve never thought I would write). I mean, like, I found it a challenge to come up with ways to whump Ming Xu physically (aside from the moment of his death), but wow did I lay on the betrayal and sheer level of emotional trauma he felt to become an immortal ghost who has basically no chance of ever resting in peace.

(he states he can only rest in peace once he kills his teacher, who becomes an immortal minor deity, but on the other hand, if he ever actually managed to kill his teacher, he would never forgive himself. no matter how badly he was betrayed, it doesn’t change the years he loved him as a parental figure, nor how much good his teacher did for the rest of the world and the people he knew.

ghosts in this world are almost like...pandora’s box? when they die, the only thing that “crystalizes” into their new existence are the emotions they clung to when they died. for Ming Xu, that’s hatred. hatred, pain, rage, betrayal. even if he killed his teacher, he wouldn’t linger in this world out of grief for the one he loved dying per say...but because he would hate himself so much, he wouldn’t ever be able to forgive himself. deep down, part of that hatred is to himself as much as his teacher. hatred to himself for not being “good” enough to forgive his teacher’s actions, which make sense in the context of the situation.

you can maybe go as far as saying he can’t really feel love anymore. nor happiness. any underlying love is a ghost of the past, and it can’t drive his main actions anymore. happiness, he doesn’t feel it when he kills or destroys or tortures people. that’s just stuff he does to try and vent, to purge himself of the overwhelming hatred and pain. it never helps, because that’s not what he wants.

and the thing he wants, contradicts his very existence.)

this is why being made into a boxie in the box boy au is actually a good ending for him. if you asked him, he would probably choose that fate even if it meant being tortured for as long as he lived. he’d think it was fitting, for being foolish enough to trust another person. but he’d be glad to not have to think so much about the endless cycle of hating Luo Qing’an, hating himself for hating Luo Qing’an, and back it goes.

and at least when he inevitably dies in that universe, that’s it.

[a-whump-muffin]

I just need to justify to myself that my OCs are actually different from each other despite having similar surface dynamics ok-

(featuring the murder brats and mingxu/fusheng)

Bai Qin & Xiaoyi are the murder brats who fuel each other’s worst traits. Xiaoyi will eventually become 80% of Bai Qin’s impulse control, whereas Bai Qin shows Xiaoyi how to be confident in himself and take control of his own life (with murder...). They’re severely codependent, after a point. Xiaoyi loves Bai Qin’s loyalty, how he will tear down the heavens for the important people in his life, how he wanted him even when he was nothing and no one. Bai Qin loves Xiaoyi - how can he not, when Xiaoyi is his? His person, the one he chose to stand by his side, the one person who won’t ever leave him.

(and maybe that’s why bai qin has always been wondering what ah yao’s real name is - he needs to know if there’s a concern about ah yao someday going back to that family, and abandoning them)

Ming Xu & Fu Sheng are adults when they meet each other. In the box boy universe, Fu Sheng will eventually save Ming Xu at the cost of violating the contract with his employer. Fu Sheng will never be able to articulate why, it’s not as simple as this being “the right thing to do”. Though he doesn’t realize it, it’s because he is, in essence, saving himself. Fu Sheng will never leave the Red Brocade Sect. He grew up there, he wouldn’t know how to exist outside the toxic mindset they hammered into him. So he saves Ming Xu instead, as a proxy for himself.

Ming Xu has his own goals, his revenge, and later on Fu Sheng will join him. He asks Fu Sheng to help because he trusts him like he can trust no one else on this earth, and Fu Sheng agrees because in his whole life, Ming Xu is the only one who has respected Fu Sheng’s boundaries and never once pressured him to explain himself. They’re a lot healthier of a relationship, as a result of meeting as adults and not kids. They can exist without each other, and do in the original story they’re from.

(ming xu...i haven’t decided if he’s permanently mute from mutilation or it’s a psychological trauma/conditioned thing...they find their ways to communicate regardless. the drawing on the hand thing isn’t an ideal solution, so they’ll think of something else)

The fantasy story they’re actually from is a lot...ok way more tragic of an ending lol. So they get to be happy in the box boy au...which is a wild concept.

[a-whump-muffin]

does this count as meta for my own story...? ah well.

fun fact: I originally wrote the Emperor of Xing to be a “good” emperor - he’s fair, cares about his country, doesn’t let himself be blindsided by his ministers, etc.

however. the more I write about this dude from Zhao Wuyi’s pov, the more I come to hate his guts. it’s become increasingly disturbing to write Zhao Wuyi’s explicit gratitude towards his uncle for sparing his life.

because, you know, not murdering your traumatized 11-year-old nephew isn’t a low bar to set or anything. furthermore, this bastard actually gave that 11-year-old boy a choice between dying and becoming a ruthless commander and everyone thinks he’s so wise and benevolent for it.

and why couldn’t the man just let his nephew live? without strings attached? because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to control the boy once he grew up, that one day he’d return for revenge

(because if that boy is no longer legally his nephew, no longer “Jin Xinyan”, then if he dares to take revenge in the future, the Emperor can have him killed without a problem.)