Discover Top Posts Tagged with #shlee

Ayo and her childhood friend Shlee (vid 3)

#ayo edebiri #shlee #proof broadway #opening night #real friends

Ayo and her childhood friend Shlee (vid 2)

#ayo edebiri #shlee #proof broadway #opening night

Ayo and her childhood friend Shlee (vid 1)

#ayo edebiri #shlee #proof broadway #opening night

By the way: I think I managed to make Override very fun for me (so Override is the last volume of the "Halfway Homes" trilogy), in the sense that my main goal is to have a story where almost every chapter is from somebody else's PoV. I just really enjoy this format of starting in the claustrophic mind of someone like Shlee, who doesn't understand shit, has no perspective and no hindsight on anything and is quite genuinely drowning in his own brain (not his fault, but hey); then moving on to The Empire of Preys which cracks this universe open by introducing PoV characters who are experts in diplomacy, finance and politics (and rhanda is here too whooo!!! for moral support/bisexual chaos or something idk), and then closing the trilogy on a story told by dozens of different perspectives with completely different backgrounds, hopes, and dreams, was a really thematically relevant decision on top of being really exciting as a format.

I don't think I'll be able to pull off a one chapter/one new PoV ratio as I wanted because sometimes I can't tell the story if I'm not in one specific character's brain (and I think those who will be our throughline will be Anetha and Shlee, which kind of make sense since I still believe they are the emotional core of the series), but it's still pretty funky.

Also I'm not sure anyone has the fortitude to stay in Shlee's brain for the entirety of Override, least of all me. I did my time paddling in this miserable space frog's headspace, and he will just be less... suffocating if looked at from a distance. Especially since the potential for him to flip the fuck off is one of the major tension points of the story (honestly: understandable and legitimate, and navigating personal pain VS its impact on the rest of the world is one of the questions explored in that story, so, yeah)

#halfway home #the empire of preys #override #shlee #rhanda #anetha #my writing #I am planning to do character portraits for TEoP's PoV characters fairly soon!!#I just haven't drawn Mass Effect characters in a long time so I'll probably be a little rusty

just realized never explicitely mentioned it in here I think, but my oc Shlee is very much nonbinary. like he just never really had time/community to process what it would mean for him specifically, how that would inform the way he'd like the world to perceive him or his gender presentation or whatnot, but shlee's experience of being alive is Absolutely (and inescapably) genderqueer. How could it not be.

#shlee #ok when I typed shlee my tags wanted me to write shleepy #which #good job past me you earned a chuckle #but when you're a salarian male raised by asari and isolated from the world #and then when you do get out of the world you let everybody gender you in whichever way is more convenient #and it means basically nothing to you #like #to him “male” means nothing beyond being an extension of “salarian” aka “alien” aka “different from people I know”#but I don't think he would place any value on being male outside of that --he wouldn't even know he's supposed to or what that involves #especially since there's no clear external secondary way of telling the difference in his species anyway #also: being raised by the asari #what even is gender to him at this point but a vague concept as abstract as administrative districts #especially for someone who doesn't have any legal recognition of his existence #anyway I don't know why I felt like writing meta about Shlee again after a year of radio silence #I don't know I was just thinking about my little guy!!!

One of my big problems with The Empire of Preys is, without spoiling the details, that the crux of the conflict, the Thing on which everything else rests is.... horrifyingly mundane. It's basically just a case of cold maintenance of power and imperial pettiness. It's not particularly mind-blowing revelatory stuff; it's just kind of logical and mean in a way where it's hard to blame anyone really.

The problem is: because of this, I always had a hard time conveying that casual violence with the dramatic weight necessary to carry the energy of the rest of the story. In a way, it's almost... disappointing? It feels like it should be a huge conspiration, but tbh, it's probably something many niche journalists are already covering in-universe, a known problem for anyone with two analytic braincells living in the Milky Way at that particular moment in time. And so, for something so impersonal and systemic to be the dynamite that risks the lives and livelihood of so many characters in this story, I need to do such a good job of conveying the reach and the interconnection and the impact of everything, and it's *hard*.

I used to have the same issue back when this particular plot point was revealed in Halfway Home's first draft; knowing I would need much more time and a larger frame of reference to articulate and argument this specific point, I pushed the revelation to The Empire of Preys (very correct choice imo: Shlee is just kind of too uhh stupid and checked out of the real world to care). But now I face the same exact problem, except in a different setting.

I hope the consequences of that crux will be enough to solidify why the Problem is such a vicious one with such overreaching consequences on everyone's lives, but.... I hope it will be enough honestly. It's pretty complicated.

#personal #halfway home #the empire of preys #shlee #my writing #it's so hard to have your Big Bad genuinely being post-imperialism #and while I did give it a pseudoface it's still.... this character is still a part of the same system #chewed on and selected and carved by the system to serve it best and also suffering under its ideology #and the logic underpinning it all *is* absurd while being also inescapable #so it's really hard to pay it off in the way it deserves #(especially since IRL we also can't do much of anything about things like this at an individual level)#systemic and societal conflicts are really really hard to dissect properly in character-driven dramas #where everything needs to feel personal and close and earned #my writing is a lot about trying to reconcile these aspects but it's HARD!!!!

One thing I'm slowly figuring out about my style of character writing, especially characters in tragedies, is that they tend to have a Covert Emotion circumstances had them repress, often because of the social constraints surrounding them. It's the emotion they will not express, or will express sideways through a range of compensatory behaviors that never address the core issue.

For example (in my own writing), Shlee's covert emotion is anger. He can't express anger because he doesn't have the shoulders to carry it, was socialized to repress it at all time, and had to flatten himself to survive the more commanding presences in his life (Rhanda, then Anetha, then literally everyone on Omega) --complacency being a trait in him that everyone values; even when said trait is criticized, the end goal is still for him to listen and act the way another person wants him to act. This is not sustainable, and so his anger begins to overflow and bubble like toxic waste, with searing consequences for him and everyone it touches; and, ironically, it's the emotion that ends up defining him the most.

#halfway home #shlee #shlee t'selvi #my writing #writing #fanfiction

I'm FINALLY returning to Halfway Home and doing a cleanup of all of the little formatting mistakes that Ao3 sprinkled in there, and equalizing the last minute changes I made to the text and transcribe them back into my own files --which led me to discover I made some very good last minute additions, for example weaving a metaphoric throughline of associating Rhanda with oxygen, whether Shlee can or cannot breathe and the way that happens depending on their relationship (which makes a lot of sense given the entire context of him being amphibian and having to transition the way he literally breathes, and her physically controlling this). Very pleased to rediscover these small things!

Anyway, I'm trying to actually work on the physical copy of the story. I needed the break, but I'll try to make the necessary progress from now on. I really don't have much to do, just need to do it at this point.

#my writing #halfway home #shlee #rhanda #halfway there

#shlee

Trending Tags

Recently Viewed Tags

#shlee