@youngbloodbuzz / youngbloodbuzz.tumblr.com
Fandom: The Haunting of Bly Manor
Pairing: Dani Clayton/Jamie Taylor
Rating: M
Wordcount: 11,511
Summary: Dani almost has her life together, when a familiar face arrives back in town after ten years. A childhood friends AU written with @youngbloodbuzz
read it below or read it on AO3 here
Lion dancers: *beeing Good Bois, getting good grades in performance*
Baby lion dancer: *appears*
Lion dancers: *running fast as they can* BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY
it’s a new week!!! let’s do this!!!!! (cries uncontrollably)
My biggest tip for fanfic writers is this: if you get a character's mannerisms and speech pattern down, you can make them do pretty much whatever you want and it'll feel in character.
Logic: Characters, just like real people, are mallable. There is typically very little that's so truly, heinously out of character that you absolutely cannot make it work under any circumstance. In addition, most fans are also willing to accept characterization stretches if it makes the fic work. Yeah, we all know the villain and the hero wouldn't cuddle for warmth in canon. But if they did do that, how would they do it?
What counts is often not so much 'would the character do this?' and more 'if the character did do this, how would they do it?' If you get 'how' part right, your readers will probably be willing to buy the rest, because it will still feel like their favourite character. But if it doesn't feel like the character anymore, why are they even reading the fic?
Worry less about whether a character would do something, and more about how they'd sound while doing it.
I don't remember where I saw this piece of advice so I can't credit it, unfortunately
But it was along the lines of "instead of asking whether something is out of character, ask 'what would it take for this character to do this'"
Which I think fits really nicely with this advice of making the actual action itself also feel in character
This is excellent advice, that fits well in a broader bit of thinking I have about writing that generally goes "Reality is complicated and messy. Perfect consistency is both a) boring, and b) exceedingly unrealistic."
Characters are always at their most interesting when they behave in ways that we did not expect... because then we get to find out why.
THE LION IN WINTER (1968) dir. Anthony Harvey
merry crisis
upgrade
I can’t wait till this is on my dash again on December 24th tbh.
Is Grinch like his name or his species or his race or his occupation
"i want him bouncing and moaning on it" okayyyy and what abt struggling and sobbing on it 😐
Remember kids, every npc is romanceable through the power of delusion
I love how Arcane utilizes the meta language of film and digital media to convey its story.
The most obvious example of this is Jinx’s scratchy hallucinations. This is an exceptionally old film technique where you literally scratch the emulsion off of the film stock frame by frame. When done correctly this results in these sharp jagged gaps in the film that light shines through, resulting in this scratchy inconsistent effect.
So whenever Jinx is having a psychotic moment, the screen takes on the qualities of film stock and becomes irregular and out of focus, almost as if whoever was scratching those lines literally took the film out of the camera, scratch it, and then is trying to re-insert it back into the shot.
There are other meta-like moments in Arcane too. In season 2 when Vi punches the jaw guy in the pit fighter scene, her punch is SO STRONG that it literally dislodges the film reel briefly. Which is hilarious to me!
But the most interesting thing about this use of meta film language to tell the story is when the Anomaly comes into play. We first get glimpses of this when Jayce is walking through the storm right before exiting into the clearing at the top of the hexgate.
Instead of scratched film and other physical media tricks, the screen starts to… glitch. Like a faulty LCD TV monitor or a bad digital broadcast signal.
We never see this effect around any other parts of the show. ONLY around the anomaly and other moments where the Arcane is coming through.
And I think the reason they do this is because it makes the Arcane feel other worldly. Up into now all the visual effects and subtle tricks have been based on physical media. Film scratches, out of focus reels, dirt on the film stock, noticeable film splicing, projection issues, etc. It’s always been quirks of physical media.
But the Arcane is different. It’s not of this world. It’s MAGIC. So they switch to using noticeable digital effects when the Arcane starts acting up. Screen tearing. Streaming glitches. Color blocks and signal loss.
I just think that’s really cool. They could’ve just kept using film language to tell the story, but they use our familiarity with film language and start mixing it up to convey the magical other worldly nature of the Arcane. How cool is that?
if your weird enough with the homies you can break all boundaries of platonic/romantic love and make a third, more evil thing
a podcast...
