Lmao. And None Of Them Are Completely Mentally Sound And Stable

yi city trio musician au? what genres would they be in, what would their fandoms be like?

Awww yeah, love a musician AU!

I have thought about the Yi City quartet as a literal string quartet before: Xiao Xingchen on first violin, A-Qing on second, Song Lan on cello, and Xue Yang on viola (lol). But in terms of more popular music?

Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan made a name for themselves as a duo, playing melody-driven indie pop/rock with poetic but thoughtful and socially conscious lyrics. Their later work included more love songs. Xiao Xingchen plays synths and does most of the lead vocals, and he tends to bring a dreamy, almost shoegazey quality to the music, but he also is known for artful, complex electric guitar work. Song Lan also plays guitar, as well as bass and other string instruments as necessary; favorites are erhu and cello. He'll sing backup with the occasional feature vocal, but they also have a fair number of solid instrumental tracks.

They got quite famous (at least within their genre) but refused to sign to a major label. Fans actually ranged a fair amount in age. The most vocal fans did skew younger, and the most annoying of these were the hipster crowd and music snobs ("they're so intelligent/progressive/underrated," "they were better before they got popular") as well as the obsessive, borderline stalkerish ones who also loudly shipped them. (Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen were a romantic item eventually, but that was not public knowledge.)

Unfortunately, they had a messy personal and professional breakup, and they both sort of dropped off the map for a while, to an honestly impressive degree. Song Lan went back to school and would occasionally put out a stripped back, broody single on his personal page with zero promotion, but Xiao Xingchen disappeared.

Xue Yang, meanwhile, works thousands of miles away, and he's an underdog, loud punk rocker, guided less by any political philosophy and more just stirring up a reaction. Main instrument is electric guitar. He's performed with a handful of other artists over the years, but the stints tend to be short. His fanbase is small but dedicated, including a lot of angry young people who resonate with his "message" and/or his looks.

And then, he has a new band, and they're putting out music that is a little less screaming, a little more melodic, with a more consistent, left-leaning message? Sometimes? The drummer is an energetic teenage girl who was busking with a set of buckets on the street before the bassist/guitarist took her under his wing and they both eventually joined Xue Yang's act. The guy hangs around at the back of the stage, sunglasses indoors and mostly not facing the audience, playing bass to complement Xue Yang's guitar most of the time -- and Xue Yang and A-Qing have enough stage presence that he can fade into the background just a little. But especially when he's on guitar, shredding a fancy solo, he's impossible to overlook, and the rumors that Xiao Xingchen is playing seedy clubs with a punk group begin to seem less and less like conspiracy theories....

AU ask game

Tonight is feeling like I need Jason to be sobbing on his hands and knees. Inconsolable. No one can get through to him except his team.

Is NFSW still banned on tumblr or can I post a link to my NSFW fic when I’m done?

Listening to He Who Fights with Monsters like… I haven’t been this queerbaited since Supernatural and Destiel.

i've done another fun trade with @wyyvoren !

Today, I happened to come across my first ever piece of serious writing from 2020. It was a Harry Potter fanfiction, and, at the time, was a piece longer than I ever could've dreamed of writing, sitting at around 77 pages in Google Docs. I read about the first ten pages, and OH BOY was it ROUGH.

But, I almost really like the idea that it was so bad. That piece of writing is five years old, and was when I first began by journey as a creative writer. In a way, the idea that it was bad was almost comforting, because I get to see how much I've truly changed and grown.

I looked at this piece of writing compared to one of my most recent fanfictions, and the difference is IMMACULATE in just the first two paragraphs. My old writing was heavily dialogue driven, contained so little detail, and felt rather bland, especially in terms of a character's emotions and actions. Now, I'm watching how detailed I am with each of my sentences, and how much attention I'm putting into each character. I can see where younger me was lacking, and where older me has recognized and fixed those holes and has grown beyond where I ever could've dreamed.

I think that, as writers, we often tend to lose track of how much we progress as we practice. It's really easy to get lost in the issues or problems we're having now, and neglect to think about how far we've truly come. We continue to focus on the negative instead of the positive; the future we want instead of where we were in the past.

My point is this: if at any moment you start to doubt your writing, or just think nothing is improving, go back and look at your old pieces. Don't change anything and just read through them. It's probably going to be really difficult, but it just shows how much you've grown and how much progress you've made over the course of your journey. I think you'll find that your writing has changed a lot more than you thought, and that, despite what you believe, you really have grown.

Instead of being embarrassed by your older pieces, use them to motivate you. Think about how much younger you would be shocked at how far you are right now, and just how proud they would be of you. You are currently at the position where younger you could only dream of being. And it's only going to go up from here 💖

🙉🙈🙊

Heads up that I resurrected a tumblr blog after never really using it in the first place so if it seems like I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t.

Happy birthday, Shizun!