How do you know you can trust a creature/machine who’s main attributed ability is to get into your head and relay information directly? And not just their specific paladins: Blue sends that image of Voltron’s complete form to all of them.
Equally worrying, they can do so without it being an obvious hallucination. After all, Shiro didn’t know that they’d never left the hangar in Space Mall. The information felt completely natural and from his own perceptions. Experiences are the way in which humans, at least, develop their opinions and reactions, and those are highly tied to emotions.
Kinda puts a new spin on the fact that not one paladin or member of the team has ever found the lion’s abilities more than passingly odd, huh? Even though it came from the same place that corrupted Zarkon and Honerva. Even though they’ve seen monsters form out of that energy. Even though it made Honerva deathly ill.
Not one person has ever gone ‘maybe this stuff isn’t safe to be around’.
hey fellas last night i took a medication which is more or less the anxiety equivalent of a horse tranquilizer & essentially enterred the fifth dimension of sleepwalking in which i awoke but enterred a dissociative fit so strong i was really confused why my loving girlfriend was not my good friend and fellow viking bjorn, who i had to bring some furs to. also i might’ve cried about this. don’t remember
was informed i left out the best part of this 3am experience which was the bit where i, in tears, gestured to our dog and shouted, “i don’t know what this is!”
All I’m saying is that the chemists would definitely give the mathematicians a swirly
Um, excuse me: geology is literally the most jock science possible.
Sorry but geologists are basically the stamp collecting weirdos of science
But I climbed up that mountain to get that stamp I mean rock
Geology attracts so many outdoory bros/outdoorsy nerds with existential crises/people who always dress like they’re ready to spend a week in the field
We’re the nerds who refuse to believe they’re nerds. Trufax.
I submit that there is no one geological orientation and present this for discussion and further refinement amongst my colleagues here on tumblr dot com
paleo…magic? Is that super secret branch that all the Jurassic Park scientists belong to because idk any other way to explain that massive logic fail except that someone waved a magic wand and made everyone think it was a legit branch of science
ahahah no it’s paleomagnetism, aka paleomag or paleomagic, because people who study it are paleomagneticians aka paleomagicians. Also called ‘magnets aren’t real, physics is made up, fire is scary and Thomas Edison was a witch’
we also call paleomagicians ‘giant wasps’ because you know they’ve been somewhere because there’s all these 2-inch diameter holes in the rocks.
That thing you wrote that isn’t “good enough” to put up on the AO3. You can put it up there! The AO3 isn’t meant to be The World’s Classiest Showcase. It’s an archive. It exists because most other forms of hosting fannish work eventually degrade or disappear. Accounts get deleted. Websites shut down. The AO3 preserves those things. Ten years from now you’ll be like, “Shit, there was this really great tag essay, but the person changed their Tumblr URL and then Tumblr closed up shop…” (look, even Tumblr will die eventually) and your only hope of finding it will be if the page was cached, or if somebody uploaded it to the AO3.
The AO3 exists to preserve ephemera as much as substantial works. You know how valuable it is for archaeologists to be able to read the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii? The little things, the notes, the headcanons, the notfics, the meta, the back-and-forths, are all important too.
YES YES YES THIS.
Tumblr’s likely to die sooner than you expect, and suddenly – it’s owned by Yahoo. (Anyone remember
del.icio.us, later delicious.com?) Yahoo’s trying really really hard to squeeze money out of tumblr and it’s not working, for all the reasons discussed in synec’s post and because a huge portion of its userbase is 13-18 years old and HAVE NO DIGITAL MONEY so can’t buy things online even if they wanted to.
There is no “worthy to be on AO3.” None. The early fics were often really well-written; it was a high-standards archive – not because “it strove for high standards” but because the only people who knew it existed, who cared about a new multifandom archive, were the ones who’d been around watching archives disappear for years; they were veteran fic writers who wanted a permanent place to share their stories. It took a long time for AO3 to have enough server capacity to allow open invites; in the early days, it was friend-of-a-friend for invite codes. (They wanted more people; they couldn’t handle a flood. So they handed out a few codes at a time)
We even talked about it while setting up the original terms of service – knowing that by saying, our standards are less restrictive than ff.net, less restrictive than LJ, we were going to eventually have HUGE amounts of really bad fic. FF.net got the nickname “pit of voles,” and AO3 was going to outdo that… eventually.
And. We wanted it ALL. All the reader-insert Mary Sue “date with hot dude” fic; all the “quiz to find out which power ranger you would be” fic; all the “band came to my home town and their bus broke down in front of my house and they needed a coffee and…” fic. And later, all the meta: the thinky character analyses; the “who’d be best on a first date” discussions; the “why the new movie sucked rocks and should never have been made because they ruined my favorite sidekick” rants.
ALL. WE WANT IT ALL.
AO3 is not about “the best of fandom;” it’s about “the truth of fandom.” And the truth is, fandom is not comprised of 90% well-written tightly-plotted carefully proofread fic. Fandom is comprised of people who love their favorite shows and books and characters and want to share that love with others.
AO3 are not the fanfic standards police. We’re the ones cheering for the “GLOWING BLUE SKELETON DICKS” tags.
Someday, some fandom archaeologist (and yes, there will be fandom archaeologists, isn’t that awesome?) will sift through the badfic, the quick drabbles, the Mary Sues, and write articles for peer-reviewed journals chronicling the complete collected works of some of the 21st century’s greatest authors and how you can see in THIS self-indulgent Protagonist/OC clusterfuck the origin of those characterization tactics and flow of prose that make your subsequent masterworks truly shine as beloved classics, and THIS short character drabble gives THAT story arc in your well-known later story an exceptional poignancy and depth if one considers it backstory.
Also that fandom archaeologist’s teenage daughter will think the self-indulgent Protagonist/OC clusterfuck is the best thing she’s ever read.
I see a lot of writing advice, particularly about giving characters flaws. The main advice is “everyone has flaws! make sure to give your character flaws or else it’s not realistic!” And after thinking about it… I would like to challenge this.
It essentially posits a view of human nature that there are good and bad traits, and that these traits can be neatly diagrammed into separate columns, one set of which can and should be eliminated. It tends to go along with a view that posits character development should be about scrubbing away of “flawed” traits until the character achieves more a higher level of goodness, or else the character doesn’t and falls into tragedy. This is not untrue, necessarily. There are definitely some “flaws” that are 100% bad and sometimes a good arc is about slowly losing them. However, I could call this advice incomplete.
Consider thinking about it this way. Characters have traits and often whether or not that trait is a flaw is purely circumstantial.
For instance, fairy tales I read as a child. In some, when an old beggar asked for money on the road, it was a secret test of character. The prince who gave the old man money or food would be rewarded. But in other folktales I read, the old beggar would be malevolent, and any prince who stooped to help him would be beaten, punished for letting his guard down. Now, in a story as well as in real life, either of these scenarios can occur–a stranger who asks for help can be benevolent or malevolent. So which is the flaw? Is it a “flaw” to be compassionate? or is it a “flaw” to be guarded?
Trick question–it’s purely conditional. Both traits are simultaneously a strength and a weakness. Either has an advantage, but either comes with a price as well. And whether the price is greater than the advantage depends on circumstance. The same can be said for most character traits, in fact!
An agreeable character who gets along with everyone will be pressured into agreeing with something atrocious because it’s a commonly held viewpoint. A character who’s principled and holds firm even under great pressure will take much, much longer to change their mind when they are actually in the wrong. A character who loves animals and loves to shower them with affection will get bitten if they try the same on every animal. As the circumstances change, flaws become strengths, and strengths become weaknesses. And even a trait that’s wholly virtuous, such as compassion, comes with a price and can be turned for the worst.
You don’t have to think about inserting flaws into your character. Your character, even the most perfect “Mary Sue,” is already flawed the moment you give her any traits at all. The problem with Mary Sue isn’t a lack of flaws, it’s a lack of circumstances to challenge her properly, to show her paying the natural price. Your job as an author is to create circumstances in the narrative that 1) justify why these traits exist in your character 2) show what your character gains from these traits and then 3) change the circumstances to challenge her.
Make your character pay the price for their traits, for their choices. And then, when challenged, you can make a hell of a story by showing us how they adapt, or why they stick to their guns anyway.
this is well said. there is no such thing as a mary sue character, really, only a mary sue story. when every other character and circumstance revolves completely around the protagonist, that protagonist becomes a mary sue, no matter how ‘flawed’ they are. when the story is true to its own momentum and consequences, and the other characters are complex and have their own motivation, even the most perfect character can’t be a mary sue.
a mary sue isn’t a ‘perfect’ character, it’s a black hole that eats the story.
okay so i want the golden knights to win but that was goalie interference
just moving along like everyone else 