One of my favorite things is reading fic comments and realizing that just because I know how everything is going doesn’t mean my readers do.
A Reylo Selkie AU
Rating: Explicit
Tags and Warnings: Rape/Non-con Elements, (See Author’s Notes, )Alternate Universe – Modern Setting, Alternate Universe – Fantasy, Folklore, Selkies,Violence, Slavery (basically), Mythical Beings & Creatures, Nudity, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Summary:After the death of her mother, Rey and her father packed up and moved away from the island she was born on to spend the rest of their days in the unforgiving desert. She’d spent fourteen years in the sand and the heat, longing for home and the ocean that sang to her every night when she closed her eyes.
But with the death of her father, Rey was given the opportunity to move home again. She’d known it wouldn’t be the same, but she hadn’t expected it to be so… strange. There’s something different in the air now, something haunting that lingers in the air and plagues her dreams. But what does it mean for her, for the island, and for the mysterious man she almost remembers?Start from the Prologue Or read Chapter Three now!
I also enjoy a/b/o, but like any trope it’s gotta be done to my precise tastes, y’know lol… It took me years to write my own because I wanted to address the things that bugged me. I think I did ok. I don’t think I could do another long fic, but I suppose “never say never” will bite me in the ass eventually ��
I feel that. I keep trying to play with certain aspects of A/B/O that I find most interesting but there’s only so much a person can do in one fic without it getting bogged down, ya know? I guess that’s why I keep writing them lol.
But yeah I also get the need to have tropes done to your precise standards. I’m kind of like that with certain AUs, too.
i am eternally aggreived on behalf of people who were clearly never taught what literary analysis can be. people who were never shown the incredible satisfaction when you see something in a piece of literature and you can /prove/ it’s there, the slow and careful tugging at an image, at chasing implication and meaning, at pushing and pushing until it all falls into place.
sometimes that looks like catching a “throwaway” line in a novel (“[the drawings] remembered Beardsley”) and chasing that single image until you have five thousand words about attempted freedom, conformity, and inescapability.
sometimes that looks like noticing a motif of reused roman ruins and going through and through until you can argue about colonising gaze and welsh devolution.
sometimes that means reading a novel where every chapter tells a story of someone telling a story and proving that that is an attempt at catharsis that fails.
it’s not all “the curtains are blue therefore the character is sad”
and besides, that’s actually “this character seems sad but the author never says so > how does the author create that? > oh hey there sure are a lot of washed out or cool colours in this scene > wait hold on the furnishings are almost obsessively described > does that say something about material culture? can i parallel that against appearances vs reality? > “in this essay i will argue that this short story interrogates arts and crafts aesthetic ideals by portraying an obsession with furnishings that ultimately leads the main character into despair. In order to do so let me first demonstate the connection between the furnishings and the emotional state of the main character”
@ltleflrt replied to your post “@unforth-ninawaters replied to your post:
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These are basically my complaints about a lot of a/b/o tbh.
Yeah, I can see that. Especially the social commentary and the under and over explaining.
One thing I always think about is like… if alphas and omegas developed a relatively long time ago in human evolution, why are male and female still the primary sex designations? I would think, even though they show up later in life (for the most part) that the stuff that determines whether your primary role in reproduction is to impregnate or be impregnated would be the more important stuff.
Another thing… male omegas are always kind of lumped in with all other omegas, which makes sense but I always wonder like… depending on when the A/B/O stuff was introduced to human society, there’s a possibility that male omegas might be seen as the best thing in the world, right? Wouldn’t there be some cultures where being a male omega or a female alpha would land you a lot of social status? Or at least a special social class with some dignity and respect? What kind of inequality exists between male omegas and female omegas? (Because you know there’s gotta be some, right?)
Ugh I’m rambling again. But yeah, the thing about A/B/O is that it’s ripe with opportunity to explore social dynamics and structure and even alternate history, but a lot of it is copy/paste hot button issues.
(still delayed) December 18
Exams are over. I hope I’ll catch up! No watercolour this time, just ink on normal paper and some photoshop. Nice and easy.
Number 18: Dean/Tessa
The Victorian Reaper pair.
Bad urban fantasy is reaaaaally bad.
Oh, no question. Flat characters, love triangles (gag), prophecy that involves one special person saving the world, simultaneous over and under explaining of the world and how it works, refusal to use words like werewolf for some reason… and none of that takes into account the skill of the writer and *how* the thing is actually written. (Oh! And I almost forgot heavy handed social commentary that doesn’t make sense in the context of the universe created by the film/book because it’s topical and heavy handed and copy/pastes real world issues into the fictional world and doesn’t consider how social inequality would be different in the fictional universe.)
Bad urban fantasy can be painful, honestly. Which isn’t to say that any of the things I mentioned can’t be done well – I do believe they can be (except flat characters) – it’s just that they’re particularly irritating in bad urban fantasy.
This is Not a Blog 