one of the things about the murder drones fandom is that there is just no consensus on how to write cyn. bold text? code tags? Capitalizing Every Letter? does the narration spell out her every emotion? every sentence, or once per dialogue block? is it wrapped in asterisks like a chat roleplay, or colons like a markdown emoji?
you can just open cyn’s dialogue and put whatever your heart desires, no one can stop you
can we talk about the new chapter of Giggle, This Is My Gift To You? that shit’s got hands.
got to be my favorite take take on a tessa-cyn relationship. it doesn’t work and there’s layers to the tragedy there
think there’s something to compliment in the fact that it’s got me — a transhumanist vehemently rejecting dualism, with no love of humanity nor qualms against being a robot — on board with the disassociation and angst of losing your humanity.
i mean i still dont agree, but i feel ya girl
https://archiveofourown.org/works/52543831?view_full_work=true
people always talk about leaving comments on ao3 like it’s a nice thing to do, or the best way to encourage writers to keep writing, or overall like it’s how you Do Your Part in fandom
and yeah, all those things are true, but having spent the past few months leaving enthusiastic comments on as many things as i can, i have a different perspective
you should leave comments on fics because it’s fun!
taking the time to stop and focus on what i like about a story has made me way more aware of what’s going on in stories and what i like about them. there’s bit more actual comprehension and appreciation and not just beaming content into my eyes to fill time
i like noticing cool little things in fics, or riffing on funny events. i’ve never been very good at speculating or picking apart characters, but sometimes something clicks and it rocks.
and of course it’s pretty nice when you get a response and it’s clear you’ve made another person happy
so yeah, you should leave comments for your own sake, too. it makes reading better!
the brainworms are getting out of hand yall
was relistening to a scifi concept album (Vektor — Terminal Redux) and was like
what if you crossed this over with murder drones tho
the brainworms are getting out of hand yall
was relistening to a scifi concept album (Vektor - Terminal Redux) and was like
what if you crossed this over with murder drones tho
i kept thinking about this and it would kind of WORK tho.
here’s a good page to read Terminal Redux, since i dont think i can to it justice with a quick summary. it’s basically a short story, length-wise?
i have a reblog about owl house that tumblr has been struggling to send to for like twenty minutes now
im being silenced :/
i’ve got that “look at this cool rock” autism. impossible for me to enjoy memes & art unless there’s someone i can share it
this axiom wages eternal war against not wanting to be annoying and drown ppl in a flood of stuff.
but there’s so much cool stuff. look at it.
it happens to writers too
sometimes the guy who’s only seen boss baby goes “i’m about to make the next boss baby”
i think the reason J is so compelling as a character for me is that of all the disassembly drones, she’s the only one who does things.
as kind and lovable as N is, he’s down to do anything. he has a job and when questioned, can muster no justification stronger than “I guess I just want to be useful”
i have respect for V’s depth and her attitude makes her plenty fun to watch, but when J’s out of the picture and she’s pleading her case to N, what does she offer? free her, and “…we’ll only kill what we need to survive. Just you and me, N.” when she’s trying to kill Uzi, what does she think this’ll accomplish? it’s just so “…that thing leaves us alone”. at best, it preserves the status quo.
but J? she doesn’t just want to feel useful, she wants to be effective. she doesn’t just want to survive or amuse herself, she pushes her squad to be the top team. which isn’t to say her goals are good, or that she’s even going about them in a smart way (canon J is kind of dumb? it’s adorable). still like. she may be misguided, but at least she’s guided.
she’s fun to read and write about because for the others, you have to put them in a situation, but J’ll make trouble on her own if you leave her alone long enough
which is also why there’s so much potential chemistry with Uzi, because Uzi is the other character who does things. the whole plot gets started because of her! if she hadn’t pulled the trigger in the pilot, you can bet the two of them would be fighting for the story’s steering wheel and it would have been glorious
does anyone know what the “Oil Is Worker Drone Blood” tag means or do we all just add it for good luck
man today is blighted. send lesbians
choosing to believe the solver is real and wielding its power to make me get shit sleep three days in row and thereby prevent me from finishing the next hostile takeover chapter
im doing gamedev instead of writing again. can you forgive me
you ever feel the urge to scream crackling beneath your skin but you keep it tight under your stony façade and it’s like oh yeah my trauma meter just went up a lil bit didnt it
Hostile Takeover, Chapter 13!
yeah, it’s finally time.
https://archiveofourown.org/chapters/138050287
in which uzi tries to hack her way out of the afterlife, n does his best (it’s still not enough), and there’s a girl crying beneath a pile of corpses
cryptobro who’s also a murder drones fan: bitcoin will see the moon again
they: hey man how’s it going
me, who’s been repeating the cog mentality speech word for word for in my head the last five minutes: real healthy and sustainable how about you
may i know the reason why you ship them :3?
the shallow and true answer is i just like a pair of girls who kill mercilessly :3
but i do think there’s room for a cool dynamic where v forces j to relax and lighten up, distracting her from total focus on the job (and j lets her because v is at least reliable with her quotas), meanwhile j can offer v respect and validation and understanding that she would get even from n.
there’s also room for fun dynamics, like j being insecure about v killing more than her, and taunting j’s loyalty and a singleminded focus on effectiveness, meanwhile j nips at v playing with her food or breaking minor regulations
(and toxic stuff, like v obviously doesnt do enough to push back against j’s abuse, and i doubt the sadistic killer persona actually makes v happy, which what j’s validation is for)
…in practice though, i find it way easier to write these two as absolutely hating each other.
but i guess that goes for all the best ships in MD :p
it’s amusing (and by amusing i mean i feel bad) to me that Hostile Takeover is cruel to all its main ships.
sorry, dizzy fans, your ship doesn’t get to have pagetime
sorry, envy fans, your ship doesn’t get to be happy.
sorry, juzi fans, your ship doesn’t get to interact more than one chapter out of three
i feel like if ep7 trends enough there’s a decent shot one or two of the big nerdcore artists on youtube might make a murder drones inspired song
you cant comprehend how hard i’m gonna be looping that shit if it happens. i need this timeline to manifest so bad
@mchallwrites’s post about metroid reminded me i never shared this fic i devoured a little while ago.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/54081529
the fic is mainly focused on x parasites (and boy does it do interesting things with the all-assimilating hivemind), but the samus pov is insanely good. she’s scarier than the monsters.
if you don’t like being human i think there’s a lot to enjoy in this fic
best part is, you dont even need to be familiar with metroid. i wasn’t.
it occurs to me that, if the aesthetic is anything to go by, episode 7 is probably gonna outdo the culty bits of Hostile Takeover by a lot. rip.
no shame in getting topped by the source material i suppose
after a few days working hard and making big strides on the next chapter the tank feels empty today. hate it when my brain reminds me i can’t go full throttle literally all the time
guess today might be a break day
you ever find yourself anxious at the thought of looking anxious so you spend years crafting a fine suit off armor you call confidence, hardening it against each uncertainty you face, never realizing that fear drives all your behavior until one day find you’re trapped in those scales and don’t even remember what it’s like to touch anything else?
me four months ago: j is okay i guess. i like v or uzi way more.
me now: if i see a drawing of my beloved my day improves immediately
dont write fanfiction kids
how long can a chapter get before readers riot?
you aren’t hitting the ao3 chapter limit till you’re in the 100k range.
…which isn’t to say i’m never getting there. while i’d never compose a 100k chapter, remember izanagi? that script with 1.6k lines of code wrote saying it was gonna revolutionize workskins and blow everyone’s minds and Show Them All?
one of the design constraints is that if i wasn’t careful, it was very possible for all of the formatting code i added to push even modest chapters up against the character limit
i am locked in a life or death struggle with this next chapter. it’s kicking my ass. im kicking its ass. im biting and clawing. i see fear in its eyes
when the dust settles neither of us will emerge unharrowed
Hostile Takeover, Chapter 14!!!
i’m so tired
https://archiveofourown.org/works/51409288/chapters/138888781
i normally put a lil description here but it’s 20k fucking words long and my brain is fried from proofreading it multiple times and writing the css styles.
i hope y’all enjoy it
hyperfocusing on finishing a big chapter before the drop has really made the wait for ep7 fly by
i should probably make a deliberate effort to get excited, i have a weird mental block when it comes to looking forward to stuff. i’ve barely even really processed the new ep as a thing that’s really happening
it’s an hour and a half later and i’m still just sitting here bouncing
fucking sublime
what do i even do now
everybody’s here and liking each other’s ep7 posts. i like to imagine it’s like we’re all in a room together vibrating after that Experience
gah i have so many writer friends with so much good work and all of them deserve attention but i am so small and only have so much time and energy
come to think, what was alice’s end game?
was she like, trying to escape or was all the butchery just for the love of the game?
my asks are open btw. for anything, least until i have to write rules in blood.
somewhat interested in questions about writing, given how many of essays are the result of people asking me for advice. i probably have a few more good rambles up my sleeve
tbh nori and yeva have the exact same energy as the shounen protagonist with a token hetero love interest meanwhile they spend 100 pages expressing unending obsession with their same sex rival, dont read into that
Any tips on using fonts in ao3?
going to assume you’re familiar with the basics — creating a new workskin at Dashboard → Skins → My Work Skins, and selecting a skin on the Edit Work page. if not, AO3 has a tutorial for this
(though skimming the tutorial, it doesn’t seem to mention the <span> tag, which is your best friend when it comes to applying styles to a bit of text within a paragraph)
my “no, i dont want j murder drones to stab me and tear my flesh apart with her teeth” shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by the shirt
i’m gonna ramble hella hard about this, sorry, but that’s the bargain you strike when you shoot an ask my way
but there’s a fun story to my answer. you see, V/Uzi was actually my first interest, and in fact when i started kicking around the idea of writing Murder Drones fanfics, the first idea i seriously tried to work out was a V/Uzi fic
(for the curious, general shape of the idea was that Uzi encounters V first, railgun wipes her memory, fails to befriend her like she did with N and has to run away. Uzi then sneaks out again and again, exploiting the railgun-induced amnesia and errors to try and get through to V, leading to a kind of mutual rivalry as V tries to figure out why she keeps having gaps in her memory.
pretty sure it was going to escalate to Uzi hacking into V and potentially going dubious places. the working title for that fic was “Somnabulation”. which means sleep-walking, so it would have been kind of ironic for Somnabulation to be the mind control fic and Hostile Takeover the one that spends half its wordcount in memory simulations)
but i’m rambling.
i never ultimately figured out how to make the V/Uzi fic come together into something i liked. and i didn’t have that much motivation to do so, as there are good V/Uzi fics out there, like This World Couldn’t See Us or Hold On Tight To This Time, This Place
but, as you’ll quickly discover if you search the tag now, J/Uzi fics are a lot less numerous. i did like some of what i saw there, so i didn’t have a full on “if i don’t do this, nobody will” kind of motivation driving me
but then one day, out of the blue, a single thought occurred to me, an observation, comparison, an answer to the question of “what could a relationship between these two possibly be based on?”
and then the whole fic just crystallized around that thought.
(what was thought? i’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader, or perhaps i’ll save it for a minor reveal later on in Hostile Takeover. it’s not very profound, but when it occurred to me i did have the distinct feeling that i’m not sure anyone had thought of the connection i just made.)
and i want to emphasize, when i say it crystallized, i mean it seriously came together, all at once. on October 31 last year, i jotted down the outline, initially as something to post in a discord brainstorming channel, but then i spent all evening writing more and more, and came out the other end with ten thousand words of notes and scene sketches
but anyway, all of that yapping is a long way to say
at the start i preferred V/Uzi (V was my favorite character, and J barely registered as anything but a joke to me), and i began writing Hostile Takeover essentially as a writing challenge or puzzle to prove something, or even just as a practice run for the fic i really wanted to write.
but i think my phrasing here gives the game away, doesn’t it? i think very few people would write nearly 160k words in four months out of mere intellectual curiosity
so to finally, finally answer your question, my favorite is J/Uzi and by a long shot. the relationship absolutely grew on me as i wrote it. i’d genuinely go as far as to say my hot take is that it’s actually easier to have J/Uzi make sense than V/Uzi, if you’re being truly faithful to both characters. is this because J has less character to be faithful toward? shut up.
i think the biggest factor here is that in the course of writing HT, V stopped being my favorite character. i still find her a lot of fun when i’m reading her in other fics, but writing her has just brought a lot of her flaws to the forefront, and it’s hard not to be increasingly frustrated with her character. (is this self-inflicted on my part for writing a plot where V causing problems is the central driver? maybe)
but yeah, i’ve found myself so much less interested in V/Uzi as time goes on. one of my mutuals has describe vuzi as something to the effect of the blander, safer alternative to juzi, and don’t look at me i’m just misquoting him.
i never vibed with the solver color headcanons but it occurs to make that it would make for a very neat Vigor Mortis fusion, if solver colors = mana colors. (or more importantly, solver hosts = liches)
(if you haven’t read VM i’m judging you hard btw. it’s literally my favorite book series of all time and you can read it online for free. though fair warning i did little else but read it for about three or four days when i first tried it)
but anyway, it is pretty funny how the universes could click together. they’ve both got outcast protagonists awakening horrific body-warping eldritch powers — heck, how difference is there really between cannibalism and necromancy? (well, i guess the soul eating is also cannibalism anyway) — and they scale up to world-threatening potential, with their ultimate origins tracing back to humans foolishly replicating otherworldly cosmic power they didnt understand to see what would happen
hell, the eldritch god-entity of both stories is distinguished by the color yellow!