Yet Improving

<3

if they don’t pay me to make a comic about the kids between arcs I will likely make one anyway and they won’t get any say in what happens 

I’m not even sure for how long I knew I wanted to end it on a time-skip epilogue. Pretty dang early, I think, like chapter 3 or 4 I was already collecting the parts where Wash would have micro flashbacks to the other freelancers before/while first integrating with a fragment and figuring out how I could parallel each one in the present, with Wash taking the place of most of them in the parallel. 

“No one was too large to fit under North's arm, not even Maine. No one was so prickly as to shift away if he dropped down next to them and tossed his arm over the back of the couch.” from chapter 2 becoming  “No one is too big to fit under Wash's arm, not even Caboose. (Especially not Caboose.) No one is so prickly as to shift away if he drops down next to them and tosses his arm over the back of the cushions.”, “In the end, as hypocritical as it is to say, he couldn't agree with her methods or her mindset (couldn't trust her), but when the universe fought South Dakota, South Dakota fought back. They had that in common.” from chapter 6 becoming “Wash isn’t sure if he can say he hates Locus. He couldn't agree with his methods or his mindset (can't trust him) but when he was handed a second chance outside of a jail cell, he took it. They have that in common.”, etc.

everything with the colors came sort of secondary to that? the colors unfolded for me a lot as I wrote. By the end of chapter 3 I had the rules for it down, but there was so much I couldn’t have imagined for it any sooner than in the moment. It made the whole fic that much more fun to write, and there’s a hundred little details that I can only hope get quietly noticed and, if not, at least can make me smile for feeling clever. 

(Like how sometimes words have a very convenient number of letters and I can put those colors in a very particular order)

All because I very selfishly, 1 chapter in, did not want to deal with constant dialogue tagging. which turned out to be the fic writing equivalent of looking at a low, barren hill, thinking that that’s ugly and you don’t want to climb it, and thinking that a much more enjoyable trip would be through the Alps

Man I wish I had more for the OC one, but I can say, for the RvB one: 

YES. FINALLY 

Red Team is a group of idiots who have been sent out to get them out of everyone else’s hair to track down the avatar and bring them back to the White Lotus!

Raised in the desert, got his laundry mixed with Simmons’, discovered personal expression. I think the thing with his face/eye in this is that he still got into some sort of altercation with Tex, but she’s a spirit in this so it did physical damage to his face and weird things to his eye. He had some spiritual proclivity already, but I think the blue eye can see spirits and spiritual energy more clearly than a normal human eye. 

(Back in RvB classic, I draw Donut has having lost that eye to the grenade, but then gets a new one when Chrovos resurrects him and the new one is all glowy. And then I kinda wanna just draw him having a blue eye after s17, even with the paradox fixed. They still know Huggins, so, hey why not.) 

Grif has a mixed-bending heritage, so Kai is a (hardly-practicing) firebender and they both have clothes that are a kind of color-style mash up of fire nation and earth kingdom clothes. He wears what’s comfortable. 

Master of neutral jing. Is a clever bender, but once combat has lasted more than a few turns at taking swings, he gets sloppy. He’s more interested in using his bending for other things, like kicking off a novelty pizza chain that runs on the gimmick of cooking your pizza over lava. mostly so he can eat the pizza and other people can pay for it. There’s a depressing lack of lavabenders to really pull this off, however, and even fewer who are interested in cooking pizza with it. That is to say, there is only one. And his name is Grif. 

A fortune teller once told Simmons that his primary rival for the positive attention of his preferred father figure would be the Avatar. He has not known proper rest since. He’s a firebender, but he’s mostly scared of his own powers. He’d much rather use practical, scientifically tested, engineered tools and weapons to achieve his goals. Simmons does, however, have a history with Going Feral and consequently wrecking shop. Fire extinguishers are a required part of his travel kit. Whether he has any secondary bending abilities (like lightning or energy sensing) is anyone’s guess. He’s confident he’d have no use for them, anyway. 

Rather than robot parts, Simmons has a massive lichtenberg scar that branches out from his left shoulder. He doesn’t remember getting it and doesn’t know how he got it. I know how. Sarge and Donut know how. 

Next time, hopefully: Sarge, Church, Doc

you did it

you broke Dallas down to her bare essentials 

I didn’t write Dallas just to be the Beta stand-in in the middle of all the fragment stuff but like... I didn’t not do that

I agree emphatically 

*is a pansy, does not tell anyone. Caboose knows cause he gets hurt all the time and it’s easier to fix it than listen to him be sad. Wash finds out cause Tucker saves his life when they first meet. Tucker didn’t think he remembered that until Wash almost brings it up to a sentient human stranger and Tucker about has a stroke

**kinda like Jinora in LoK, but he’s honestly not super good at it. not about to astral project himself anytime soon. this is part of what makes Wash’s encounter with Epsilon go truly bananas 

***but think of it like Knife Simmons. Technically Simmons is always Knife Simmons. They’re the same person. But also 9 times out of 10 Simmons is just Simmons. Fire is not exactly clean or organized 

 ****uses this power to reheat food and never have a cold bed

*****is artistic af about it; moves like an airbender. is also hella intimidating cause he figured out how to use earth bending to just grind rocks into dust to make more sand. it’s more sparkly. 

******this is a lot like Caboose being the avatar; no one’s super paying attention to him and most of the time he sounds like he’s reading your horoscope, not talking to the spirit that’s right over your shoulder that you can’t see and is drooling on you

(^7)maybe??? could be fun??? OMalley explanation??? will require more thought

I may (may?) maybe. Uncertainly. Potentially in certain universes end up writing... an au? sequel? Lateral extension? of mind over matter?? a canon divergence were MoM is my elaborate headcanon??? an optional romp featuring all of Blue Team where I get to more fully process everyone’s feelings while connecting some dots so that Blue Team is no longer a grouping of friends wearing similar colors and fully admits to being a grouping of people with the highest combat skills in the main cast (Doc notwithstanding) that, if able to direct that capability with skill, could literally kick all of the ass? 

or I might actually start pouring all my creative outlet into my ocs like a madman, who knows? i don’t predict the future I just set up for it poorly and then live in it

Y E S 

some conditions:

((I also plan to eventually revive Dallas in my OC universe where she will continue to protect disaster men while using them as dinner bait))

heckin y e s on intended brand

height is relative i guess though I consider myself a medium in the average encounter. although at almost 5′6″ I have found myself with many Tall friends 

this was too good not to draw 

they have to rehabilitate an 18 year old if they wanna live

edit: this post ate my html alive but I tried to fix it hopefully I didn’t miss anything

heck yEAH my dude you’re gonna need 3 things: hex codes, css skins, and super super simple html knowledge. Basically you create a “skin” to apply to your fic, and that informs how the site reads the html code you input. Ao3 has it’s own tutorial for making skins which is very useful for getting into details of what you’re doing, but it’s full of other information that’s not color-related. 

( Ao3 has a wizard for creating skins, but I only found out about it while making this tutorial and I don’t know how to use it )

fear not I teach (will write on assumption of no prior knowledge for anyone to use)

Step 1: snag hex codes. Hex codes are computer-speak for colors. [Here is a website with a list of colors and their hex codes which Ao3 should accept.] [And here’s another one.] Find the codes for all the colors you’re gonna want. Fear not: you will not have to type this code a billion times. Fear not part 2: if you need to add more colors later, this is entirely possible. 

Step 1.2: name your color. This is the thing you’re going to have to type and/or copy-paste a bunch of times to get the color you want. For my Mind over Matter skin, I just named the colors after the character speaking. So whoever’s talking I can just type ‘delta’ or ‘theta’ or ‘gamma’ etc. where Ao3 wants to know which color I want. 

Step 2: make a home for the hex code. This is where you make the thing called the “css code.” If you’re paranoid about losing everything like I am, I’d make a word/google doc somewhere to keep this. I’ll tell you where to put the code on Ao3 here in a minute. 

To make your code, copy this:

I copied this from my own skin. The bold parts are the parts you’ll want to replace. so replace the 2F4F4F with your own hex code (KEEP THE # SIGN) and replace beta with whatever name you picked in 1.2. Repeat this for however many colors you need! It all goes in the same css code. 

Step 3: make your css code a skin. Now you’re finally hopping over to Ao3. In all your user menus, hop over to skins, and then specifically hop over to my work skins. 

Then you’ll hop into create work skin

you should now be here (I just changed my window size to make it not painfully wide for a tumblr post):

Here you can pick a title for your skin or even a little thumbnail picture. The title is all that’s necessary tho. Scroll on down to that CSS box and copy-slap your shiny new css code into it. Then smack submit at the bottom and you got yourself a skin! Now we get to use it

Step 4: apply your skin to your work. On the page to edit your work (either the creation page, or the page to edit an existing fic), under Associations, there’sa drop down to select work skin. Just pick your skin from the drop-down. For this next part, remember: I believe in you. This is way easier than it might sound. 

Step 5: tell Ao3 to color your stuff. There’s a couple ways to approach getting your work into the HTML box on Ao3. The approach I use is to get my text into a google doc which can automatically apply necessary html codes. [Check out this post to get your hands on how to do that.] It’s really easy, you have my word. It will get all the bolds and itallics for you. What html is going to look like is a bunch of groups of words and letters inside these bad boys: . These are tags. There’ll be an opening tag at the beginning of the text it applies to, and a closing tag at the end. Like brackets around your text that tell the computer to pay attention to it. A pair of tags you may end up seeing a lot of is span(opening tag) and /span(closing tag). These don’t do anything on their own. If they get spontaneously generated somehow, don’t worry about them. Trying to “clean up” the code is a waste of your time. (You may also see tags that say p and /p. These are paragraph breaks, leave them be. em and /em is for italics.)

That was a bit to digest, but if you’re still with me, here’s the short of what we’re doing: we’re going to put 

And like this in the fic (I use dark-mode on ao3 all the time and, as you can see, the skin does not interfere. It’s only affecting the color)

Ta-dah! I hope this makes sense. There are probably way better tutorials out there and probably way faster ways of doing this. I encourage you to have fun, never give up, and experiment! At the very least, every time you see something like this:

Remember that, somewhere behind it, is a monstrosity hat looks like this

a;sdfjTHANK YOU SO MUCH I’m glad you like it!!

I’ve actually almost finished it!! All first drafts have been gone over with the beta, we’re in The Edit now!! If I’m not slacking, you’ll have the whole fic in the next two months!