next year’s words

michael-anna, reading and writing things, mostly in the speculative zone. 📖: The Silver State, What Wakes the Bells, Saint Death's Daughter 🎧: The Ruins of Gorlan background credit: eberhard grossgasteiger on Unsplash

[wordsgood]

i keep sticking loreleaf in relationships where he’s the tough one who takes the hits in a fight because he’s a scrappy alley cat who ends up with sheltered yet traumatized purse dogs but tomodachi life has offered me an intriguing reversal of this and it’s loreleaf x magnus burnsides

[wordsgood]

scrappy alley cat VS enthusiastic sheep dog. who will succeed in actually throwing themself in front of the bullet to protect the other. who knows. the bad guy has probably gotten tired of watching them fight about it and has gone home. loreleaf has never had someone who wants to take the hits for him soooo bad and it makes him so confused he’s kind of pissed about it. like “sit the fuck down burnsides you’re taking away the only thing that makes me useful and if I’m not useful then you won’t keep me around.” then magnus picks him up like an actual alley cat as a goof and all of loreleaf’s thoughts dissolve into a giant rainbow flag

[wordsgood]

i keep sticking loreleaf in relationships where he’s the tough one who takes the hits in a fight because he’s a scrappy alley cat who ends up with sheltered yet traumatized purse dogs but tomodachi life has offered me an intriguing reversal of this and it’s loreleaf x magnus burnsides

[asterdeer]

i’m going to start a new fic series just called “tomodachi life crack taken seriously” and it’s just various oc x established character fics and weird crossover friendships inspired directly by whatever weird shit happens on my tomodachi life island

[wordsgood]

ohhhhh my god adder has fallen in love with elliott stardewvalley. the inspo for sepheri who is adder’s canonical love interest. we’re so fucking back

also, loreleaf has managed to get both michael AND jon to fall for him, so that’s going to be a fun fic. stupid and self indulgent! but extremely fun

[wordsgood]

jatatyla and tracy were my first couple in tomodachi life, they were the first ones to get married, and now they’re the first ones to have a kid, and it has made me unreasonably emotional…….. like. man. tracy and jat were my first queer characters ever, they were in love before i knew that being gay was a thing. (in one of the first drafts of prophecy girls, jat got injured somehow, and she and tracy were isolated in a cave somewhere, and tracy had to keep jat alive, and she would sing “you are my sunshine” while jat recovered. still some of the gayest shit I’ve ever written and i was like ELEVEN.) it’s just. i love them so much. I’m so glad this is how they turned out on the game because it’s delightful, taking a little memory lane stroll. yuri wins.

[wordsgood]

i do think part of the appeal of making the twins and chance into robots/ai/cyborgs/whatever is that i’ve read a few books that deal with robotic characters that made them so human that it felt pointless that they were robots at all. if you’re just going to swap a few biological descriptors for mechanical ones and say ‘binary’ a couple times, but the robots still feel and think and process and act like humans………truly what’s the point? i want to put more thought into it. catch up on murderbot, maybe watch some star trek tng. any good robot/ai/cyborg character book recs are welcome also

[wordsgood]

i couldn’t fall asleep until 5 am because of post surgery issues (nothing serious or unexpected, just distressing and uncomfortable) so i caved and bought tomodachi life and made a bunch of ocs. in less than 24 hours, here’s the progress:

jatatyla (jay) was my first mii. she is literal perfection. her first quirk was the dramatic bowing greeting and it suits her so well it makes me want to cry

jay and loreleaf (my 2nd mii) are very good friends!!

doli lin is there and is also very good friends with loreleaf, although he isn’t bonding with jay as much as i hoped. definitely non canonical

yuri happened so fast once i put tracy on the island. she saw jay once and went down like a lead balloon. the island is 4 hours old max and tracyjat is already trying to rename it Lesbos

encouraged, i put marou on the island, nudged him and loreleaf together, and……..they did not click. rip. crying in the rain. love loses.

i did however make my first non-oc mii, michael from the spooky tapes podcast, and he and loreleaf are FAST friends and almost moved in together. they bonded over antipsychotics. very sweet unhinged blond man (gender neutral) friendship

i made lev and adder, and they have formed a cute lil friend group with jay, mainly based around ax throwing and going to the range (shooting, not golf). they had rough childhoods.

i’m having a lot of fun and i’m only 10 miis in <3

[wordsgood]

can you have multiple islands in tamagotchi life or is it just the one file because i do want to have a good quality island with ocs and a handful of favored blorbos to round it out but i also very much want to give loreleaf a gay the bachelor island dating game situation. just throw aaaall the male blorbos and eligible ocs on there with him and see who wins.

[wordsgood]

exhausting to report but. i have had another deep six brainwave.

[wordsgood]

so in this tentative version, there’s no assassin organization, lev isn’t an assassin at all, the twins are androids who do the dirty work for some corrupt ceo/crimelord type, chance is a pleasure bot who can also do assassinations, and lev is the technician who takes care of them. which she does in the sense that’s she’s supposed to, ie keeping them updated and repaired etc, but she also cares about them as people, enter the are-androids-people sci-fi hallmark. and like. i don’t know why that is even better to me than when all four of them were tern assassins who grew up together. because they aren’t family now, lev hasn’t known the twins and chance all that long, really. but she loves them. that’s just. that’s the center of deep six. lev loves them. she starts the plot because she loves them. chance makes the choice to save himself because lev loves him. they all survive because she loves them. and now it’s not even because they’re the only family she’s ever known. it’s because she’s lev and she chooses them.

[wordsgood]

exhausting to report but. i have had another deep six brainwave.

[wordsgood]

not to be a hater on main but i still think it’s the funniest shit ever that ir*n w*dow’s whole Deal was wu zetian wanting revenge for her sister but she never actually like. grieved her sister. or remembered her sister fondly. or mentioned her name. feminist win: this nameless woman was fridged for a female character’s manpain!

[aroaessidhe]

2026 reads / storygraph

The Flowers I Deserve

polyamorous lesbian gothic fantasy

a woman immune to floral poison is invited from the monastery she spent 5 years in after her father died, to be a poison girl for the female demon king

as she grows closer to the king and her other poison girls, she tries to find out what happened to her mother - a poison girl for an Earl who never compensated her family for her death

while the king and her living castle have secrets of their own

[wordsgood]

trying to figure out what class i should make judah when i do my next bg3 run with her, which has been fascinating in figuring out What She's About. and there's no class that really Gets her in total, and no good standard multiclass, so here's my plans once lent is over and i get to play video games again:

3 levels of college of valour bard (suits her very early background, closest thing to a privileged, noble sort of class)

3 levels of way of shadow monk (very early post-vampire-turning judah, after getting kicked out of her home and struggling to survive on her own)

3 levels of assassin rogue (same as above but after some time has passed and she's more skilled, More Dangerous, also has weapons now)

7 levels of gloom stalker ranger (further continuation of her post-vampire life, some refined skills from her time at her anti-vampire vampire commune)

3 levels of vengeance paladin (sharp turn in combat priority after the deaths of her friends at the hands of the commune, and after her century-long dirt nap when she's out for the blood [lmao] of her maker)

which is assuming i get as far as 19 levels in the 20-level mod, which i'm not sure if i've done yet; i want to get at least An Single Feat eventually so i'm not sure which class i'll go for first. in an unmodded run i'd just dump the bard and do 3 levels each of the others. perhaps obviously this is Not meant to be a hyper-optimized kind of thing, just full roleplaying nonsense. but insofar as you can avoid magic in bg3 without doing a fighter or barbarian, i wanted to avoid it since, in her book/story, her magic has been sealed away and she can’t use it. still, this kind of dex-based stealthy but still hard-hitting fighting style really suits her, it has that kind of “doesn’t fight fair but is still capable of demolishing someone up close if the situation calls for it” vibe that she brings to the party.

[forcewound]

one of the best things you can make a female character is really bad at interpersonal relationships

[wordsgood]

currently reading yet another hamlet retelling so it’s time to think about my dream retelling, a story set immediately post romeo and juliet and post hamlet where benvolio and horatio meet after watching their social circles be decimated by tragedy and find out that there’s a ghost/a curse/both/something spooky they have to solve together before another wave of violent death hits, possibly saving some shakespearean comedy from becoming a tragedy in the process

[wordsgood]

k i finished the book and it was fine but now i'm just thinking about how much i love horatio SO:

ghostssssssss!!! adding ghosts to r&j is so fun. because it's already haunted. it's haunted by everyone in those two stupid families who have already suffered from The Feud. it's haunted by unnecessary violence. but it won't be haunted by romeo or juliet. they died defying The Feud. they died vindicated. everyone else is haunted by their place in the structures that caused it all.

mercutio is haunting the SHIT out of those families, tho.

i really need to reread r&j. i saw hamlet late last year and just finished this retelling but it's been a minute since i engaged with r&j. my ideas wrt r&j might be a little half baked.

(benvolio is a woman here and her name is beata)

do i believe in giving tragedies a fix-it fic style happy ending? no. but the more i think about horatio the more i want to give hamlet back to him. idk man.

they meet because they're both running away from their own homes and, coincidentally, toward each other's, and collide somewhere in the middle. beata isn't being haunted by anyone, but she's seen mercutio's ghost, and when she sees horatio across the room, she also sees the ghosts lingering around him: r&c, maybe, or maybe laertes.

i'm too tired to keep going now but i had a whole head full of Thoughts today so i hope i'll be able to remember the rest of them tomorrow

[wordsgood]

there's this book that i wanted to check out from the library months ago but i didn't put it in my tbr list for some godforsaken reason and now i only remember vague details about the summary (a woman who is a serial killer and owns a bed and breakfast and buries the bodies in the backyard i think? and then she meets a man who is also a serial killer when he comes into town for some kind of festival? I THINK?) and i can't figure out how to search for that. and now i'm wondering if i'm going to be that person the librarian hates who comes in asking if they can help me find a book from details they probably can't search at all.

[wordsgood]

currently reading yet another hamlet retelling so it’s time to think about my dream retelling, a story set immediately post romeo and juliet and post hamlet where benvolio and horatio meet after watching their social circles be decimated by tragedy and find out that there’s a ghost/a curse/both/something spooky they have to solve together before another wave of violent death hits, possibly saving some shakespearean comedy from becoming a tragedy in the process

[wordsgood]

i was going to complain about why everyone has been gatekeeping havana rose liu from me when she’s theeeeeee jatatyla faceclaim but then i remembered i saw her in no exit so that one is on me. rip