Awesomesauce Served Daily

scrumrunnner:

john isnt brave enough to jump besides its too dangerous and its a foolish act no kids should ever think about doing so

JFC JANE

wecansexy:

kids these days with their johndaves and their dirkjakes back in my day we had to walk uphill both ways in the rain to find johnkarkat that wasnt awful hatesex 

There are kind Slytherins.

There are brave Hufflepuffs.

There are some stupid Ravenclaws.

There are twisted Gryffindors.

Your House doesn’t define you.

And please, the next time you’re about to tease someone for being a lowly Hufflepuff, or a slimy Slytherin, or a stuck up Ravenclaw or even a foolish Gryffindor, just remember that we are all Hogwarts students. We’re all part of the magic.

HOUSE PRIDE!

sir-alucard:

roachpatrol:

puelhathnofury:

This arose out of a conversation that mithingthepoint, pyrrhiccomedy, wizzard890, and I had. Many things were said, but some of the most salient stuff was about the differences between writing original fiction and writing fanfic, and the topic’s been percolating in the back of my head ever since.

I’ve been doing a lot of both lately, and what struck me most is that original fiction builds forward, while fanfic builds outward. 

Original fiction is, for the most part, linear — particularly in genre fiction (which I’m using here to refer to mystery/horror/romance/science fiction/fantasy. The stuff that usually doesn’t get labeled as Real Litrachurr). People play with the form, but there’s a core structure: an initial problem (or more than one, sometimes) or break in stasis triggers a series of events, which lead to some kind of resolution. The story might be told from one point of view or from sixteen points of view (hi, George R. R. Martin); it could have a cast of two or a cast of thousands; it could take place in a tiny leaky shack or across an entire galaxy. But no matter how broad the scope, the core narrative moves forward with each scene, and in a well-constructed story the subplots also advance the main action, though sometimes you don’t seehow until later. An original story is an arrow, essentially. It can be of any width, but it’s still moving forward. If it’s not, you don’t have a story, you have an encyclopedia.

When you’re writing fanfic, that core narrative already exists. Sometimes it’s a shaky core narrative, but it’s there. The canon’s given you the essential action; you don’t have to come up with it on your own. So you expand outward. You delve into backstory; you explore other points of view; you flesh out the world; you expand missing moments; you continue a plot thread the author set up or take it in another direction; you draw focus to relationships; you set the entire damn thing in a coffeeshop. You can write fanfic with narrative resolution, of course. I have, and so have a lot of other fanfic writers. But you don’t need that level of resolution for the reader to feel satisfied, because the reader has the canon for the narrative payoff, even if they don’t necessarily like how the canon ended up resolving. The payoff of fanfic is emotional — it doesn’t have to set out the narrative context or resolve a plotline or answer a question, it just has to elicit a response from its audience. It’s a different way of storytelling. Not better, not worse, just different.

So what happens when someone who’s used to writing fanfic transitions into writing original fiction, and that underlying structure isn’t there anymore?

It’s a harder shift than it looks. When you’re used to building and looking outward, it’s easy to come up with rich and fascinating characters and incredibly detailed worlds, and find yourself completely unable to tell the core story because everything has a story attached to it. Fandom can give us the desire to know a character completely and fully, to search for pages and pages of meaning in the smallest moments, to turn the briefest of interactions into thousands and thousands of words. And you can’t give original fiction that same microfocus, no matter how cool or interesting those explorations could be, because the forward motion of your story will grind to a halt if you try to expand every moment and explain every detail. 

Another way of thinking about it: every character in a story, every sequence, every setting serves a function in the larger narrative. I’ll use Inception as an example of this, because heist movies have such clear roles for characters to fill. Ariadne’s function in the story is to serve, at least in part, as an audience surrogate. When Dom and Arthur teach her the rules of extraction, they’re letting the audience know how this world operates, too. She also serves as Dom’s confidante and conscience of sorts, which lets Dom slowly reveal his backstory and helps give him the impetus to confront Mal and break her power. Is that the entirety of who she is as a person? Of course not, and the way she fills her plot functions tells us a lot about her personality. But we don’t get to see what Ariadne does between when she leaves and when she comes back. We don’t see her wowing Miles with her architectural savvy. We don’t see her panicking over the thesis she’s abandoned, or hanging out with her friends, or talking firearms with Arthur or disguise with Eames. Presumably she does all of these things at some point, and they’re significant in terms of her personal narrative, but they don’t actually move the movie’s narrative forward. And the movie’s story is what has to be told, in the end.

(This is even true of canons where the plot arrow is EXTREMELY wide, like Homestuck. Hussie basically said as much when he explained why he killed off about half the troll cast; they’d served their roles in the narrative, and he didn’t need them around any longer to tell the story, and their deaths caused a big shift in the way the fanbase perceived the story.)

In fic, Ariadne no longer has to serve the plot functions that she did in the movie, because well, you’re not writing the movie. Ariadne can take on whatever roles the author wants her to, in whatever circumstances. But that’s only possible because we already have some context for who Ariadne is, some foundation to build all those other stories on top of.

Fandom is, in short, about untold stories — but you can’t tell untold stories if you haven’t told the basic story first. 

And hey, this entire line of reasoning also explains why I can’t stand Victor Hugo.

BLESS THIS PERSON FOR MANAGING TO EXPLAIN MY PAIN TO ME. Seriously! The mantra of my life for the last four years has been ‘when are you going to stop wasting time on fic and start writing original stuff instead’ and it’s like ‘not only is that an awful thing to tell anyone but AUGH I CAN’T MY BRAIN DON’T WORK LIKE THAT????’.

Fanfiction makes you deduce and extrapolate and pull apart every detail and expand everywhere in ever possibility. Trying to go back to pegging a single narrative with a few characters and sticking to it has been like me learning to think with my brain inside out. The possibilities overwhelm me, I can’t settle on a plot, I want to write everyone’s story about everything or maybe throw the the whole world out and get one with robot cowboys.

Learning to discard potential and possibility as irrelevant to a singular hard-line main goal, one take, no breaks, no do-overs, is fucking hard when  how you learned to write was by indulging in every single wildass whim. 

owlmylove:

indigoire:

I’ve been seeing that damn Pirates! Band of Misfits trailer for at least a month now, or more accurately, hearing it as I do portering and ticket tearing, and there was always this one pirate voice that stuck out to me.

“Hm,” I’d say to myself. “That sounds a bit like tumblr’s favorite Hobbit. But no way, Martin Freeman is too busy in New Zealand, there’s no way he voice acted for a kids movie.”

So I finally looked it up on my phone at work. AND GUESS WHAT. Martin totally has a role. He’s the “Pirate with a Scarf”.

Guess John got to be a pirate before Sherlock could. Hope he at least invited him along on his adventures at some point.

Apparently, David Tennant is also voicing a character. He’s going to represent Charles Darwin, of all people. Definitely going to see the movie now.

They apparently also got Hugh Grant and BRIAN BLESSED (doing the voice of the Pirate King). I dunno though. It still seems like a really cheesy kids movie.

I’ve been seeing that damn Pirates! Band of Misfits trailer for at least a month now, or more accurately, hearing it as I do portering and ticket tearing, and there was always this one pirate voice that stuck out to me.

“Hm,” I’d say to myself. “That sounds a bit like tumblr’s favorite Hobbit. But no way, Martin Freeman is too busy in New Zealand, there’s no way he voice acted for a kid’s movie.”

So I finally looked it up on my phone at work. AND GUESS WHAT. Martin totally has a role. He’s the “Pirate with a Scarf”.

Guess John got to be a pirate before Sherlock could. Hope he at least invited him along on his adventures at some point.

tessen:

bokeh-:

cricketisindanger:

can we call it dunkin’ donuts?

lmao can i just reiterate this

this is my favorite

Oh

Yes

This is good

rainbowbarnacle:

ceruleancynic:

Oh my god. Yes. Yes. Take that, Guy Fieri. Falls of fucking blood.

megumiovvo:

Dont  mind me

im just a lightbulb

johndavefanfics:

holy shit alpha Rose gives me a raging lady boner

o same

shootingstare:

why do british people’s accents disappear when they sing

ihopericksantorum:

I hope Rick Santorum always reblogs “send me a letter/number in my ask and I’ll answer the question” posts but no one ever sends him one.

thegoldpiilot:

miles5280s:

Dirk describes the ICP Presidency as having started from the 2024 election, and then describes “several grueling terms of their presidency”. Assuming he means a minimum of three by “several”, that would put their duel with alpha-Dave at 2036 at the earliest.

But from this page, we know that alpha-Dave landed around the year 1980.

This is Dave in his 50s.

i can dig it