Notes and Errata of Mark of the Asphodel

Stolen from damoselcastel on tumblr and a bunch of other people besides.

Send me a 'ship and I will tell you:

• When or if I started shipping it.
• My thoughts:
• What makes me happy about them:
• What makes me sad about them:
• Things done in art/fic that annoys me:
• Things I look for in art/fic:
• Who I’d be comfortable them ending up with, if not…

[The art/fic part is the draw of this one, as I don't think I've seen that asked before.]

Stolen from Ammie on tumblr.

Pick any passage of 500 words or less from any fanfic I’ve written, and stick that selection in a comment. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what’s going on in the character’s heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

And I do mean "any," so feel free to poke at Archanea-fic, Magvel-fic, and crackfic in addition to the Jugdral-centric stuff.  Obviously I ought to remember the more recent scribbles with more clarity and depth but if you go after "Starchild" or "Another Piece of Blue" or whatever I should have something to say.

Meme ganked from Ammie and Lua. Post the first lines of your last 21 fics.

I'm not counting time/place stamps unless they're part of the actual 'fic structure. I will count epigraphs if there are any.

1: "Well, you look out of mortal danger."
2: "Lords above, we give you thanks for the food upon our table. Bless the toil of those who produced it, bless the hands that prepared it and the guests who come to share with us tonight. In the name of blessed Ethnia and her servants..."
3: "Oh, Ishtar, did you know there was a beautiful flower garden in the yard? Let's go take a look."
4: The lantern in Patty's hand didn't do much against the ink-black darkness of the catacombs beneath Belhalla.
5: One ounce of gold for an ounce of salt.
6: Flashes of light, like the sparks thrown off by a stoked fire, floated through Arthur's head in the moments before he opened his eyes.
7: They said that if he just kept his eyes fixed on the horizon, he'd stop being sick.
8: Nanna counted out her own breaths- seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty- as she felt the blood coursing through her father's left wrist.
9: She never has forgotten that the Mother Abbess did not want to teach her.
10: Eirika kept glancing down at her hands during the drive.
11: Lachesis thought they'd been getting by with very little until the hour came to pack up their lives.
12: Cheap bracelets touched in gilt jangled against each other as Laylea stretched her legs out on the settee.
13: When Leif woke that morning, he saw snow piled thick on the windowsill outside his room.
14: "Lord Azel."
15: The imminent arrival of their guest sent Lady Fee into a tizzy; her pleasant voice turned sharp and childish, strands of her short hair floated every-which-way, and even her earrings seemed off-kilter as she rushed about the estate making preparations.
16: (I was a child, I wasn't worried)
17: Small chips. One side rough, the other smooth, like a wave-polished shell.
18: In a sense, it was all Kyle's fault.
19: It looked innocent enough, corked inside of its bottle.
20: The first year/Too old to be a daughter. Too young to be a rival.
21: Innes blew a perfect failure of a smoke ring, which fit with the way everything else was headed that particular session.
Bonus (the most recent WIP I worked on): Glade ran his fingers through his hair in a vain attempt to tame the cowlick at he back of his head.

I like how going through the last 21 takes me clean back to the Archanea/Magvel stuff.  Basically, I've abandoned a previous habit of writing some kind of scene-establishing descriptive passage and just tend to dump the reader right into the 'fic.  The opening lines are about evenly divided between "thematic-type thing that is relevant to Larger Things" and "the 'fic starts here," I guess.

Ganked from raphiael .  Pick a trope from this list and provide a fandom/pairing and I'll tell you something about the story I'd write for that combination (i.e. write a snippet from the story or write not!fic or tell you the title and summary for the story I would write)

1. genderswap
2. bodyswap
3. drunk!fic
4. huddling for warmth
5. pretending to be married
6. amnesia
7. wingfic
8. cross-dressing
9. forced to share a bed
10. truth or dare
11. historical AU
12. accidental-baby-acquisition
13. apocalypse fic
14. crossovers!
15. High School / College / Band AU

Stolen from Raphi and Nico.

1. Pick a pairing or a character
2. Ask me my particular headcanon regarding something about them
3. Post to your journal to share your own headcanon!

Just FE, please-- I don't have developed headcanon about other fandoms.

This one has some good questions. Stolen from kyusil .

If you give me a character I will say:

* Why I like them
* Why I don't.
* Favorite episode/scene
* Favorite outfit
*OTP
*Non-romantic OTP
*Headcanon
*Unpopular opinion
*A wish for them
* An oh-god-please-don't-ever-happen-for-them
* 5 words to best describe them
* A nickname for them

FE only this time, because my "headcanon" for GW, BSSM, and the like isn't really developed enough to be worth talking about.

-x-

( Crack idea for an FE4 remake in light of FE13 )

I appreciate Fire Emblem's Old Guys.  I don't mean the Marcus-types (though they're good too), or the ancient sage-types, but the older dude, usually heavily armored, that you get at the middle or end of the game.  The one with crap stats and an affinity for small children.  I almost always use Lorenz in Shadow Dragon because I think he's a great character and his story is heart-rending.

The Lorenz archetype persists through the series-- Hannibal, Douglas, Tauroneo-- but Magvel presented the best of the lot, IMO.

Coming in at #9... Duessel.

( No, really. )

 Boy, raphiael  has some good memes going on her tumblr, and some really good material posted to cover them.  I stole this one, too.  

Top Eleven Fire Emblem Characters.  The catch here is that I'm not bringing headcanon or ficcing potential into it, so a character whose appeal to me derives largely from what they could be instead of what they are on the screen (Lilina), or who annoy me onscreen but are redeemed by meta and fanfic (Eirika) will not place highly.  Or place at all.

#11: Serra and Lute (tie)

( Words of explanation )

I would probably not want to spend time with either of these girls in real life, which is why they're down at eleven.

Let's get this over with and off my desktop.

Day 7: Favorite Game.  Pass.  I haven't even played FE10 yet.  All the ones I have played I like for different reasons, except FE9 which I really don't much like as of yet.  

Day 12: Favorite Class.  Hm.  Shooters?  Am I allowed to say shooters?  I dunno.  I like mages, cavs/pallies, and peg knights a lot.  A Lot.

Day 19: Favorite Weapon.  I dunno.  There's no FE weapon I've fantasized about using the way I once wanted Sailor Senshi powers or my own Gundam with a beam scythe. I have to admit, I like Ephraim's Reginleif.  That's a great weapon to start off with.  Maybe I like it 'cause it's Ephraim's?

Day 24: Favorite Sacred Weapon.  Mm.  In a sense, they're all so conceptually (and often visually) similar that there's nothing that really stands out as "better" than anything else.  Durandal looks ridiculous.  Ragnell looks pretty ridiculous, too.  Armads carries a curse.  The holy weapons from Jugdral and Archanea have something sketchy going on with them.  The Sword of Seals is pretty interesting, and Alm's goddess-powered Falchion is interesting.  Meh.  I'm just not passionate about it.

Day 26: Scene that made you go "awww."  Good ending of FE5, Leaf confessing his feelings to Nanna.  Adorable.

Day 28: What the next FE would be like if I designed it.  Can you say "crossover time"?  With ocean battles.  And sea dragons.  Oh yes.  And a Peg Knight as the main character.  Lance-using chick!Lord on a flying pony, plz.

Day 13: What character do you relate to most, and why?

...

That's an interesting question, because it's not the same thing as liking a character.  I don't particularly relate to, say, Ephraim.  And characters that I might gravitate toward, like the bookish magey-mages, are often too cheerful and cutesy for me to really relate.  I can get inside the head of, say, Merric for the purposes of a story, but I don't look at him and go, "Oh, that's me!"

I admit to doing that with Lute.  Actually, Lute is like a teenaged version of my mother.  Scary.       

The characters I tend to actually identify with-- and there's a scattering of them, across the gameplay classes and the various continents-- are the pragmatic ones, or at least the ones that show a passing flash of it.  That's not exactly a popular trait in the kind of video game where starry-eyed idealism and empathy tend to be the hallmarks of the good guys.  It's often a trait found among the antagonists.  But a touch of pragmatism, of skepticism, of being able to analyze things in a rational fashion at least some of the time... that'll boost a character pretty high in my estimation.  

I guess it's a little strange to say I get the warm fuzzies over characters who manage to show some level of critical-thinking skills, but it's true. 

 #17 Favorite Stat

...

Not even going to BS an answer on that one.  I mean, when two complimentary character types are offered, I do tend to prefer one of them; I tend to use the mercenary/hero over the myrmidon/swordmaster, and the Sain-type cav/pally over the Kent-type cav/pally (I'm not calling them the Cain and the Abel because at this point it's too bloody confusing to figure out which one is supposed to be which, but we all know Kent and Sain, right?), but in terms of one single stat?  No idea.

-x-

Meh.  Wasted night.  Was supposed to go to "The Meeting of the Whole," which is where citizens can go see the city councilpersons doing their thing prior to their official meeting, but it was cold and I didn't sleep well last night and I ended up curling up with the cat and zzz.

Things I kind of want to do:

1) WIP review
2) Fanart spam post.
3) Music & fanwriting post
4) That post on kids in fiction that I promise kyusil  months ago.

I think any of those would take more effort than I have in me right now.

-x-

LSSU published their annual "words that need to die" list.  I thought "iconic" should've topped the list, but then again I don't expose myself to Martha Stewart and other such TV programs, so the "amazing" thing blew right past me.