yukie1013: (Default)
So I was taking Aerionn the b'elfy holy/protadin punklet through the beginning Pandaria quests last night, and the following occurred to me:

As much as I love the Hozen and I seriously want to hug all of them, I kind of wish they were more developed. I also kind of wish they were more like the original Monkey King. Like Sun Wukong. Not with the UBERHAXX necessarily, but the general attitude and cleverness and most of all identity. The Hozen have some solid foundations, but their cultural identity and their culture fullstop isn't fleshed out as much as it could be.

The little bits and pieces that we get about their culture are neat--how and when and why you get a double name, their hilarious poetry, their linguistic quirks...yeah there's some deeply, DEEPLY facepalm-worthy gaffes and stereotypes to be found, but homework WAS done. It doesn't quite make up for the *GROAN* moments completely, but it's there?

And that just makes me want MORE dammit. XD I'm not sure how much development the Jinyu got, as I am FAR AND AWAY NOWHERE NEAR PANDARIA with my Allyside characters (the highest-level one is Eveynna, Stormwinder-Theramoran pally extraordinaire and queen of the epic !Newfie accent, at 30), but yeah. I do wish we'd gotten more. Compared to the amount of work done with the Pandaren, it's like an Ensure pudding cup next to creme brulee.

I know that not everything can be put into a game, and that Pandaria is light-years better than Cata with regard to the completeness of questlines (even if a lot of the storytelling is still execrable...the stuff dealing with the Pandaren and Jinyu and Hozen and Mogu and Co. alone is fantastic but the second practically any named mainstream NPC besides Anduin gets into things, everything spirals rapidly down the flush-hole), but...yeah. When you put one up against the other you get wistful. (Well...you do if you're me. :B)

I'm probably going to end up fiddling around and expanding upon a lot when I get to writing about Pandaria. Because well that is what I do. If something feels too spare and I'm still hungry I make more snack food.

And also it will feature AU!Garrosh not being made of fail, and a distinct lack of stupidness with legacy characters. :D
yukie1013: (Default)
Talking about the books I've read, now! I've not read all of them, yet, but I'm going to try to for posterity's sake if nothing else. (I may, however, avoid some of them, because emotional abuse and ableist bullshittery about addiction are two of my huge "shove-a-runeblade-up-your-nose-o-gram!" buttons.)

The books I've read all of:
-The Last Guardian
-Lord of the Clans
-Of Blood and Honor
-Arthas: Rise of the Lich King

The books I've read a little of:
-Beyond the Dark Portal
-Cycle of Hatred

All of these have timeliningLOLOLOLOL to some extent, though some have it worse than others (Metzen, what is this even). Some authors are better at keeping internal consistency, others are really not. Of all the books, I liked The Last Guardian most. This is sort of kind of damning with faint praise because none of the books are especially AWESOMESAUCE per se, but out of all of them, it was the most technically solid.

So I'll give a short rundown of my thoughts on all these and try to keep it concise (LOL). XD

SPOILERS needless to say.

...and struck him upon the dangling participle. )

SO YEAH that's my stupid reviews of things! Whee! I may come back later an expand on some of this or I may just keep faffing around growing carrots in Pandaria. XD
yukie1013: (Default)
So I *cough*procured*cough* some digital copies of various tie-in novels and comics and et cetera and so forth on night during a fit of insomnia and boredom. Haven't managed to read much of Knaak's malarkey beyond a few sentences (the cadence of his writing is just irritating as almighty fuck to me, like every sentence is like "s/he was an adjective, adjective noun" and it reminds me of this goofy song my sister and I sang as kids: "oh in the dark, dark woods you find a dark, dark house and in the dark, dark house you find a dark, dark room" etc. and it ends with finding a ghost in a dark, dark box, but my sister tended to put the box with the ghost inside of fifteen or so MORE prior dark, dark boxes--or as many dark, dark boxes as she could get away with before my dad flipped out and demanded we knock it off) but I did manage to read some of it!

HERE I SHALL YAMMER ABOUT THE THINGS I READ! This isn't really a review asmuch as a bunch of impressions and random piles of bollocks. I'll cover the manga/manhwa and comics in this entry; books come next.

Needless to say ZOMG SPOILERS


words, pictures, and funky text formatting! )

I'll be gettin' into the actual novels in my next post.
yukie1013: (Default)
So the stupidness what is canon right now has inspired me to actually try to explain this guy, as by now they're so radically different as to make people wonder what I'm on probably! WHEE!

Oh well. I have fun writing him and he actually makes sense. (Also, he has not shaved his head and tattooed his lower jaw. And his head is not too small for his body. And he doesn't wear the stupid HORNS OMFG what is that even. He does however have a big ass Warsong Clan mark tat on his back now.)

Anyway, I'mma start off here by discussing his Many Issues because they govern a lot of his life for along time (he gets better) and they're what cause the most problems for him. They fall into three rough categories:

1) issues dealing with himself
2) issues dealing with culture
3) issues about his dad

So I'mma go through all of these. This, again, is AU!Garrosh, so if something seems WTFz0rs it's probably not canon. Mwah hah. Also, I am NOT making excuses for the stupid things he does (which are not the same stupid things as canon, but are still stupid). I'm trying to explain why he thought he should do 'em. XD

this is an LJ cut that isn't wearing pitlord horns )
yukie1013: (Default)
You are probably pretty damn Canadian if:

-You are writing AU!not-so-damn-stupid!Garrosh Hellscream explaining just WTF he was doing with the Evel Knievel dirigible shit...

...And you write him as saying he was "trying to deke that damn dragon out, keep it away from the rest of the zeppelins" and then realize that you've written an Orc explaining that he was trying to deke something out and that you didn't even think twice about using "deke" even though Orcs probably don't say "deke" and chances are a bunch of your readers won't know WTF that word even means anyway. lawl.

In conclusion, nonstupid punkass Garrosh is fun to write because he does things like almost Leeroy a zeppelin into a mountain in effort to deke a dragon out so it doesn't eat the rest of his troops. And hey if the Alliance sees him being a a raging badass deke-master or their airship pwns the dragon too, so much the better.

Also I've had too much caffeine.

ETA: Uh wow lol maybe I should explain the Canuck-ese--'deke' is abbreviated from 'decoy', and it's hockeyslang. XD Deke (out) = feinting, faking someone out.
yukie1013: (Default)
I know I've ranted about this in short form in the past but I've finally got a full post's worth of material about it now!

Hokay, so. MIND TALENTS! They've been around in literature and stuff since way, way before Spock made his debut on the scene. My first encounter with them in fiction that I can remember was - okay. In books, it was Monica Hughes's The Dream Catcher and then again in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door. On TV, it was that old 1990s X-Men cartoon (hey shut up, it was fun XD) and Counselor Deanna Troi. It's The Dream Catcher that's really the inspiration for how I write societies of people with mental talents; I wasn't really a Trekkie although I have a tone of friends who are. I don't doubt there's some Vulcan influence in my work too - but I digress.

The point of this post was not navel-gazing, it was how to write or RP mental talents in a way that doesn't annoy the bejesus out of people.

This is all my opinion, of course, and I know my way isn't the only way, but the examples I'm about to give are largely in the category of 'this is how NOT to do it well'. Discussion's more than awesome but pls refrain from talking to me as if I were a mentally defunct jumping bean XD

Of course every universe has its own rules; the examples I've given are from my own games and writing and from stuff I've seen myself. These deal with characters who have control over their gifts for the most part.

ETA: It occurs to me that I totally left out any stuff about n00bs. A n00b psychic is prolly going to get an eyeful of brain by accident OFTEN and end up flailing around because they would rather not have seen that dude thinking about that thing that time. This can ALSO be RPed or written annoyingly (along the "OH TEH MELODRAMAZ AND TEH WANGST AND TEH SORROEZ, and so on" lines of things) but for the most part I've dealt with developed psychics, so it's them I'm rambling about mostly. I'll likely deal with n00b psychics at a later date. This is principally about psychics who can control their stuff.

words omg~ )

OH GOD FIC

Feb. 11th, 2008 11:34 pm
yukie1013: (HEH HEH HEH FIRE)
flinkie dared me so I did it. *chuuuu* to thee for helping me out so much and checking for IC and typos!

TITLE: [clever thing wanted!]
FANDOM: Benighted/SPF/Fate
CAST: Vicky, Jer, Gil, Forest, and a posse of squeaking avian familiars.
DISCLAIMERS: Fate belongs to TypeMoon; SPF belongs to umbra_elf. Benighted belongs to ME, h0rz. XD

*** )
yukie1013: (pun-ishment)
I'm of the opinion that sues and stus are more often than not in execution and not concept. Sure, there are concepts and character sheets that are just not redeemable, and require a generous amount of red-pen hack-and-slashery to rescue them from the bottom of the barrel. Those are the most extreme cases, and those are the ones that the litmus tests mostly apply to.

Basically, any character can be an attention-thief and a pain in the neck, depending on how they're written. If you have a very normal character, they can still fall into 'annoying' if they're written in such a way that the writer's "look, a virtuous Everyman!' gesticulation and self-promo is palpable. You can name me all the ways your character isn't a Sue or Stu, and they can be perfectly valid, but boy howdy will it ever fall apart in action.

more babble beyond this snip! )

As usual, this is just my opinion, YMMV, all rights reserved, all lefts signalled well ahead of time, do not fold, sprinkle or masticate, discussion is good XD This is based on my experiences beta-reading and proofing stories for writers' craft classes and friends for ages, so - yeah. My experience is my own, and I know that others' views will differ. One only becomes wrong about experience when one insists that one's own is the default or only valid take, and I refuse to be that sort of ding-dong. XD

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