Bid the forest floor goodbye. @thehowlingalpha - Tumblr Blog

me: *walking*

my cat: i am going to run in front of you. i am going to sprint in front of you so fast mid step and you are going to punt me into the sun

me: okay sir yes sir

#did my cat write this?

I LIVE

...surprise?

Apparently it’s been FOUR whole years since I logged on. Hot damn. I don’t know if anyone I used to keep in touch with is even around any more. I’d love to hear from you if you are, though. :)

Uhhh. What’s changed with me? Too much to relay, honestly, but in summary: I turn 31 in a couple weeks, I’m getting married in September, I moved to California, I work in home refinancing and hate it but am taking copyediting courses to hopefully free myself of its clutches soon. Woo!

I haven’t been in fandom since Voltron, which I drifted away from in 2019. Soooo who knows what sorts of things I’ll be re-blogging here. Either way it feels kinda cool to be back, so... I guess... see ya around?

#hey hi hello #knock knock #is anyone still around?

sneakybats

dracosmalfovs

once in the fifth grade this kid called me a homo and i thought it meant homeless and i was so confused i said ‘jeremy you’ve been to my house’

#i return to tumblr to bring you THIS

reddit-tales

What’s the dumbest thing you believed as a child?

When I was a pre-schooler, my mom told me that you weren’t allowed to ride a motorcycle or get tattoos unless your mother was dead.

One day, outside the grocery store I saw a big, tough looking dude covered in tats, straddling the loudest motorcycle ever. Damned it 5 year old me didn’t go up to him and ask, “Hey. Is your mom dead?”

Dude looked at me and said, “Yeah.”

And I was shocked that my mom was right.

indicativeof-sideways-escalation

That man was probably freaked tf out that some random creepy child came up to him unprompted and asked after his deceased mother

#oh god #that poor man lol

felixferne

it’s been literal weeks and i’ve only just realised this is meant to be read as “healthy burgers” and not “heal thy burgers”

randomslasher

Without the caption those weeks would still have been ahead of me

#......lmfao

burningitdownn

may 2019 bring you your “i’m doing better than i ever was” moment

smstransformers

Why only may?

smstransformers

Wait never mind I’m fucking dumb

#lmfaoooo

classic-al replied to your chat “Friend: I wish I didn't have to work. I just want money to fall from...”

Who was this? Brooklyn?

Oh god, I have no idea. I don’t remember this at all. xD My single braincell cannot recall a random conversation from 6+ years ago.

#classic-al

pics-that-make-you-go-hmm

thenatsdorf

matissethecatto

decadénce

super-mollio

First thing I ever wanted to truly tag

lovelyardie

Slinky

fozmeadows

on fanfic & emotional continuity

Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation.

Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character - let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred - you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different - perhaps wildly so - story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place.

Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity - not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit - the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.

Fanfic does not do this.

Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters - and fic readers - the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions.

The fact that ficwriters en masse - or even the same ficwriter in different AUs - can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative.

earlgreytea68

So I was reading this rumination on fanfic and I was thinking about something @involuntaryorange once talked to me about, about fanfic being its own genre, and something about this way of thinking really rocked my world? Because for a long time I have thought like a lawyer, and I have defined fanfiction as “fiction using characters that originated elsewhere,” or something like that. And now I feel like…fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters because then we can really get the impact of the storyteller’s message but I feel like it could also be not using other people’s characters, just a more character-driven story. Like, I feel like my original stuff–the novellas I have up on AO3, the draft I just finished–are probably really fanfiction, even though they’re original, because they’re hitting fanfic beats. And my frustration with getting original stuff published has been, all along, that I’m calling it a genre it really isn’t.

And this is why many people who discover fic stop reading other stuff. Once you find the genre you prefer, you tend to read a lot in that genre. Some people love mysteries, some people love high-fantasy. Saying you love “fic” really means you love this character-driven genre.

So when I hear people be dismissive of fic I used to think, Are they just not reading the good fic? Maybe I need to put the good fic in front of them? But I think it turns out that fanfiction is a genre that is so entirely character-focused that it actually feels weird and different, because most of our fiction is not that character-focused.

It turns out, when I think about it, I am simply a character-based consumer of pop culture. I will read and watch almost anything but the stuff that’s going to stick with me is because I fall for a particular character. This is why once a show falters and disagrees with my view of the character, I can’t just, like, push past it, because the show *was* the character for me.

Right now my big thing is the Juno Steel stories, and I know that they’re doing all this genre stuff and they have mysteries and there’s sci-fi and meanwhile I’m just like, “Okay, whatever, I don’t care about that, JUNO STEEL IS THE BEST AND I WANT TO JUST ROLL AROUND IN HIS SARCASTIC, HILARIOUS, EMOTIONALLY PINING HEAD.” That is the fanfiction-genre fan in me coming out. Someone looking for sci-fi might not care about that, but I’m the type of consumer (and I think most fic-people are) who will spend a week focusing on what one throwaway line might reveal about a character’s state of mind. That’s why so many fics *focus* on those one throwaway lines. That’s what we’re thinking about.

And this is what makes coffee shop AUs so amazing. Like, you take some characters and you stick them in a coffee shop. That’s it. And yet I love every single one of them. Because the focus is entirely on the characters. There is no plot. The plot is they get coffee every day and fall in love. That’s the entire plot. And that’s the perfect fanfic plot. Fanfic plots are almost always like that. Almost always references to other things that clue you in to where the story is going. Think of “friends to lovers” or “enemies to lovers” or “fake relationship,” and you’re like, “Yes. I love those. Give me those,” and you know it’s going to be the same plot, but that’s okay, you’re not reading for the plot. It’s like that Tumblr post that goes around that’s like, “Me starting a fake relationship fic: Ooooh, do you think they’ll fall in love for real????” But you’re not reading for the suspense. Fic frees you up from having to spend effort thinking about the plot. Fic gives your brain space to focus entirely on the characters. And, especially in an age of plot-twist-heavy pop culture, that almost feels like a luxury. “Come in. Spend a little time in this character’s head. SPEND HOURS OF YOUR LIFE READING SO MANY STORIES ABOUT THIS CHARACTER’S HEAD. Until you know them like a friend. Until you know them so well that you miss them when you’re not hanging out with them.”

When that is your story, when the characters become like your friends, it makes sense that you’re freed from plot. It’s like how many people don’t really have a “plot” to hanging out with their friends. There’s this huge obsession with plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us of that.

Idk, this was a lot of random rambling but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.

audreyimpossible

My mind is blown.

The novel I spent 5 years writing reads like fanfiction… It’s introspective, it’s much more about the beats in between moments than the moments themselves, it’s heavy on character moments and it’s low on plot. And those things aren’t a flaw that needs to be corrected. They’re a feature.

It’s not broken literary fiction. It’s a perfectly intact character-driven novel, doing what it’s supposed to do, while also being what I prefer to read. That’s so cool.

coolhandofagirl-deactivated2015

security called me at work today and told me they saw me outside chasing a frog around on the security cameras. i wasnt in trouble they just wanted to let me know they saw me. i didn’t catch him.

consultinganthropologist

One time I went to the art museum with my friend and we got into an elevator where there was a very conspicuous camera. My friend looked right into the camera and started salaciously rubbing his shirt over his nipples and giving bedroom eyes to the camera. I smacked him and told him to stop, he was going to get us kicked out. He said “don’t worry, they have a whole museum of fancy art to watch, they’re not watching the elevator cams”.

When we got to the top floor, the elevator doors opened and there was a museum docent standing there like she was just…waiting for us. She said “My friends in security asked me to come up here and tell you that they received your message and they like what you’ve got.” and she just. Walked away. And my friend’s entire body turned red and I haven’t stopped laughing to this day.

#dfgkjdfg I just howled

beardedchrisevans

#bless you chris evans

showerthoughtsofficial

People often say they hope their deceased pet dog is chasing squirrels in doggy heaven… what did all of those squirrels do to deserve an afterlife of torment?