Zoe and Wash, while deeply forever ridiculously in love, are not drift compatible.
Zoe and Mal are drift compatible.
Kaylee and Wash are drift compatible, and they have the best piloted, sweetest running jaeger ever been seen in the ‘verse – the best piloted, sweetest running jaeger ever to run away from a kaiju.
SECONDED
(also, the sudden thought of River Tam in a jaeger is rutting terrifying)
She hung from the ceiling, a perfect, motionless sculpture of a girl in the process of becoming a fruitbat. Simon glanced up at her periodically, both checking that she was still present, and reassuring himself that the grind of the machines overhead would keep her from hearing what he had to say. It wasn’t that he was keeping secrets from her; River knew everything about her condition, sometimes more than he did. It was that she didn’t like being talked about, and he respected that.
“They weren’t trying to unlock psychic powers or anything like that, no matter what the rumors say,” he said, his voice shaking slightly. Kaylee shifted her weight from foot to foot, disturbed by that tremor in his words. Simon Tam was the best K-scientist she’d ever worked with. For him to sound scared…
“Those people, those monsters…” Simon paused to take a deep breath, relaxing a little at the taste of oil on his tongue. Enough time spent with Kaylee had turned grime into perfume. “They were trying to set up a neural bridge inside a single mind. They wanted to do away with the need for drift compatibility, and privatize the Pilots. Imagine being able to market Jaegers for domestic and commercial use, because you only needed one Pilot, and that Pilot was so doped and dependent that they could never leave you.”
“That’s horrific,” whispered Kaylee. “They…they messed up her brain tryin’ to do something as can’t be done?”
“Oh, it can be done,” said Simon grimly. “They succeeded.
“My sister is in constant Drift with herself.”
Tag Archives: writing in conceptuals
“never use this word because it’s common, instead use all of these things that i’ll call synonyms even though they carry different connotations and will change the meaning of your dialogue if you use them” — very bad and unfortunately very common writing advice
#amen #a fuckin men #sometimes you do want to say VERY #and sometimes you want to say SAID #and sometimes its important to realize that your characters don’t talk #like someone shoved the OED up their bumhole #just sayin’
DUM-E tries to make friends with the new robot arm, doesn’t realize there’s a person attached to it
You accidentally a fucking brilliant fanfic.
Again.
On inventing the “One ring to rule them all” verses
JRR Tolkien, part 3/?
I was referring to a very specific character trait I sometimes see in these so-called unrealistically perfect characters that bothers me – the rest of the self-insertion, perfect characterization, I enjoy the hell out of that. I agree with you that when the term is thrown around, it is incredibly gendered. The particular character trait I was speaking of, I see across gender lines, which is what I meant by that. I am sorry I was not more clear. I am not articulating well today.
(Okay, just one more! Since I reblogged squeelokitty’s reblog of my post, it is only fair I answer this ask publicly, especially since their original post was completely fair and addressed their particular concerns)
I actually totally agree with you. And the thing is? That sort of focusing on tragic backstory is almost exclusively a male privilege in popular culture.
Women don’t get to fixate. They’re expected to ‘get over it,’ and ‘get on with their lives.’ But two thirds of Batman media I’ve ever been exposed to has been “DEAD PAAAAAAARENTS.” Loki’s creeping “I’m the victim here!” mentality is from the same vein. It’s manpain.
What are the worst insults aimed at men? ”You fight like a girl.” ”Stop being a p—-y.” “You’re such a little bitch.” The c-word.
The worst thing a male can be called in our society is a girl. When we use Mary Sue, even in a ‘non-gendered’ way, we’re adding to that. We are using a distinctly female name as an insult. This isn’t a nonsense word. This isn’t an invented word.
Using the name genders the insult. And it is leveled as an insult. If someone says, “This character is far too fixated on their backstory, I find this boring and frustrating to try to read, and find their current relationship with character X to be more interesting,” that is criticism. “This character is SUCH a Mary Sue” is an insult. It provides no criteria. It provides no actual information. It is just a slur that you can level without having to provide any context. And by doing that, even if you use if on a male character, we’re tarring a character with a negative, specifically feminine brush.
If we have a problem with a character, I just wish we would address our particular issue, instead of using the term as a shorthand. Because it’s worse than useless, for the writer and the fandom at large.
maybe that other anon is trying to say that small text will help hide the fact youre a shitty writer
Unlikely. The same point stands — my writing stands on its own. Textual tricks have no effect on the quality of the writing.
That being said, I’d be glad to hear why you think my writing is shitty.
i just think u should use smaller text bcuz it makes replies look better. it can also add more meaning/emphasis to ur writing if u know how 2 change sizes.
I tried to think of a way to answer this without being insulting. I’m not actually sure I can. Then again, I feel kind of insulted.
In the first place, I personally find that textual tricks detract from my enjoyment and comprehension of writing. Smaller text is harder for me to read, in a literal sense. I have correctors set up in Stylish to make tiny text larger. I think those tricks have applications, but I find them mostly to be in poetry, and they should be used sparingly.
In the second place, if a reader is concerned about the way my writing /looks/, maybe they should be reading someone else. My sole concern is that my writing conveys what I want it to convey, that the meaning is clear. Making the text larger or smaller, moving it across the screen, or changing fonts — these tools don’t provide anything to the meaning of my writing.
In the third place, computerized writing already comes equipped with standard ways of providing emphasis. Italics, bold, and underline are standardized across many different platforms, browsers, and operating systems — did you know that almost all the ways to make the text smaller don’t work in Tumblr’s mobile app? But bold, italic, and underline do.
I personally prefer not to even use those as a way of conveying emphasis. You will have noticed that I surrounded one word in the third paragraph with forward slashes. I tend to use those in place of italics, and I tend to use caps in place of bold. It’s faster for me, and I don’t have to argue with html or any given platform’s vagaries for interpreting ctrl+i and where it should end.
Frankly, I know all the html tricks for changing text size. I’m a web developer. I know all the css tricks Tumblr doesn’t allow. These are design elements, not writing elements.
Basically, the idea that I need to change the size of my text to make my writing look better is insulting. My writing stands on it’s own. It would be just as good if I handwrote it and snail mailed it to my partners. It would be just as good if I read it aloud. The smaller text does not constitute an improvement — and people who base their assessment of “quality” on that kind of thing aren’t people I want to write with anyway.
why dont u use small text??
Why should I? Will it make my thoughts clearer as I try to translate them to words? Will it convey my meaning any more accurately?
I’m a storyteller. Why should I spend a whole extra step on something that has no relevance to the stories I’m telling? I’m usually in a tearing hurry to get my replies out anyway; what a waste of my time.
The days-after-episode, I am reminded of the day I got hold of the “teachers edition” of a textbook where they had reprinted one of my short stories. And in the back, as with every teacher’s guide, they had a list of questions about the story for the class to answer – and the answers.
And some of the answers were wrong. Or at least, inaccurate as hell in their assertions.
(yes I know, the writer is often the last to know their actual themes. But trust me, the things they claimed I intended in the story were….not accurate. That might be what was read into the story, but it wasn’t what I was thinking when I wrote it…)
My point being… whatever we think, whatever we’re pretty damned sure of, whatever we extrapolate… it’s just that, us taking the visible pieces and trying to half-ass a full picture.
The Strength of Common Words
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”—Ernest Hemingway.
The thesaurus is bad for your writing. The only acceptable use for the thesaurus for a writer is to recall that word that you know is exactly what you want, but can’t quite remember. Even in these cases, you should only draw on the thesaurus in matters of extreme importance, otherwise if you can’t quite remember the word that means the same thing as “energetic,” for instance, just put down “energetic” and move on. When you read back over your work you’ll find it didn’t really matter anyway; “energetic” plays just fine.
I’m disappointed every time I see a vocabulary post on all the different and better ways to say “happy” or “angry”or “sad.” I understand being excited by language—I feel it myself and encourage it in others—but nothing says happy quite like the word itself, or perhaps better yet, a smile or a laugh or an arm thrown around someone’s shoulders.
Context communicates a great deal. One of the remarkable aspects of writing is that the total effect of a story, a scene, or even a thought, is greater than the collection of words that make it up. Big, ten-dollar words tend to keep me at arm’s length from a story. Sure, I may enjoy the language for its own sake, but I won’t feel close to any of the characters because the language draws too much attention to itself and distracts from the story. Maybe you’ve felt that some.