Rest In Peace Chadwick, You Will Not Be Forgotten.

Coming into a fandom late

I’d pay top dollar to watch this for an hour

on fanfic & emotional continuity

Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation. 

Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character - let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred - you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different - perhaps wildly so - story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place. 

Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity - not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit - the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.

Fanfic does not do this. 

Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters - and fic readers - the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions. 

The fact that ficwriters en masse - or even the same ficwriter in different AUs - can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative. 

I am a(n):

⚪ Male

⚪ Female

🔘 Writer

Looking for

⚪ Boyfriend

⚪ Girlfriend

🔘 An incredibly specific word that I can't remember

FIGHT!

Who would win? Vote now!

Like = Markiplier

Reblog = Darkiplier

I’ve seen a lot of posts on my dash tonight about users who are threatening suicide, with other Tumblr members posting in effort to try to get ahold of them. I think you all should see this:

IF THERE IS EVER A TUMBLR USER WHO HAS POSTED A GOOD-BYE MESSAGE, SUICIDE NOTE, VIDEO, OR ANYTHING OF THE SORT, PLEASE FOLLOW THIS POST.

1. Scroll to the top of your dashboard.

2. See the circular question mark icon at the top? It’s the third one over from your home symbol. Click on that, and a screen similar to the one in the picture will come up.

3. Where you can type in questions, the box with the magnifying glass at the top, type in the word “suicide.”

4. Click on the first link that shows up. It should say, “Pass the URL of the blog on to us.”

5. Type in the user’s URL and tell Tumblr admin that the user is contemplating suicide and has posted a message indicating that they are going through with it or will be attempting. Hit send! Tumblr administration will perform a number of actions to contact the user and take the necessary steps to prevent the suicide.

TUMBLR: THIS COULD SAVE A USER’S LIFE. PLEASE DO NOT IGNORE SUICIDE THREATS.

Reblog this to keep other users aware. Suicide isn’t a joke, and neither is someone’s life. If you didn’t know this, someone else may not, either. Pass it on.

This post is old, but you are STILL ABLE TO GET AHOLD OF TUMBLR STAFF in an emergency: this just happened to me recently. All you have to do is email SUPPORT@TUMBLR.COM and they will handle the situation for you. Thanks for passing this along, guys!! xo Kate

My Hero Academia and Dark Souls I. This is gonna be a nightmare.

Some Bayverse Positivity

So, Bayverse is what essentially got me into Transformers. While Michael Bay himself is, ya know, bad, the films alone are what helped shape my love for this franchise. So, since the Bumblebee movie will mark an end to Bayverse, I thought it would be cool to list out some of the positive things I think Bayverse brought us.

- The designs of the robots. They gave us #THICC and fuckable robots when they didn’t have too. God bless.

- The score. Steve Jablonsky is the OG and part of why I tear up everytime I watch the “Arrival to Earth” scene from the first movie has to do with how amazing every single movie soundtrack has been. 

- The action. So I personally felt that Bayverse had some of the most amazing choreographed action scenes in modern film - the forest battle where Optimus tears through a gazillion Decepticons, the collapsing building scene from the third movie, the end battle in TF4 with Lockdown, Optimus, and the humans (I know this sounds like a stretch but to me the action in Bayverse was hella lit) 

- The CGI. During the first movie, the visual effects team literally had to invent a new system to be able to animate the bots. When they were animating Devastator, it set one of their computers on fire. The CGI in each movie only improved, and I’ll always stand by my opinion that Bayverse was snubbed at the Oscars for visual effects because holy s h i t the details put into each bot is amazing. 

- Out of every transformers continuity, I felt like Bayverse was the most “real” in how it portrayed war and suffering (esp how it pertained to Optimus and his behavior) while they definitely didn’t go as into depth as they could, I can appreciate that they tried interweaving politics and everything into the story.

But yeah. Feel free to add what you enjoyed about Bayverse. I’d always kinda wished TF would get a reboot, although a didn’t expect it to happen this soon.