Tag: tournamentsofroses

Re: the mermaid’s story. Well, I related hard to Gislin going “I don’t know these names”, haha! There is, thus far, a certain lack of emotional resonance, probably caused by the distant way the tale is told. Do color me intrigued though by all the neat concepts: forest-taint, greensleeves, etc. The Mirror Realm’s inversion of sea and sky. Amabel’s description of Iro was a highlight, really beautiful prose. “Only one hurricane” – loved that and also – “a whale pod escorted me.”

😀 Yep, this isn’t the proper quest story with the main cast, just a completely unrelated scene that came into my head about the idea of a complicated royal family tree inspired by Aquaman (the punch line involved the revelation that they were naming their kids after the daughters of triton), but then, even though I knew I wasn’t going to write a full fic about it, I tossed it into the “Rose Red” world and asked myself where it could be made to fit. Gael’s character as a lover of popular ballads and former apprentice artist is partly an excuse to have a character to retell all these side fairy tale stories.

 Amabel was already a mermaid (and harpy on the other side of the Mirror Realm- think of the world as a giant shallow bowl, ocean in the center, and in the center of that is a floating island where the Celestial Court lives surrounded by a waterfall that flows upward, very Narnia-esque, and on the underside of the island is the entrance to the Underworld). Most of Amabel’s backstory was already plotted out (she’s another story transplant where I changed and added details to make the idea work for this fantasy world. This is the giant sludge pile story), but not the beginning of it, before she ends up isolated in the human kingdoms. So there was a gap in the world that needed “Mermaid Society” anyway. Having Amabel tell a story about her homeland was, as I started playing around with the idea, a good way to introduce the important connection between her and Gislin. If the goal wasn’t to get the ‘Iro royal family comedy of errors’ out of my head and written down, for the Rose Red main story, it would be mostly cut to get to the last few things that Amabel says which have the most relevancy to Gislin. (It involving eating livers). Instead, it’s a rambling storytelling of “people whose names we don’t know” -which was me as the author making fun of myself.

The only one small hurricane was supposed to be funny, so yay!

The greensleeves especially are a concept that I think could work on their own for a fantasy story. At first it was just a power-set to give to the main character, but then I tried to think of a way to make a fantasy-world unique version of the Green Lanterns and mixed it with the Hanseastic League and maritime pilots. 

…and yeah, wow, my Teleri bias is really obvious.

For kicks, I’m making my way back through your “working on silm fic” tag and it’s a capital-D Delight.

I hope you find some amusing gems- and while I don’t usually tag which fics I was working on under that tag, I can imagine the ones where I am struggling with the CuiviĂ©nen Era fics are the most obvious and most amusing, considering how often they are complaints about ridiculous world-building problems because, as Tolkien himself proven, for any real Science! you have to throw the Arda cosmic myth out the window. Or complaints about how much a fic is either ballooning out of control or promises I’m almost finished- for weeks.

Tbh, I like Fingon & the Feanorians, but I am so, so, So Thankful for fans like you who give play to less widely-popular characters. Your takes on the Sindar, Teleri, and Vanyar are so thoughtful and well-written, and I love reading your stuff.

Thank you! Some of these were favorites from the first read, some I grew to love as I poked at them with the curiosity of ‘is this really an empty space? Wait, there’s awesome character potential here”.

Fingon it’s hilarious because I honestly forgot he was a character in the Silm at all, and anything interesting about him for me is not at all what’s popular about him. bland beige wallpaper boy is his tag for a reason.

I don’t love everyone, and I gloss over or ignore too many I feel guilty about, but I like to think with the wide range of characters and places I do write for there’s something for someone to enjoy. 

Is it Opera Omnia that distracted you from Of IngwĂ«? ‘Cause it’s been distracting me from my things. If it is, are you amenable to sharing your ID? You’re a very neat person, and it would be kind of fun to have you as a friend in-game.

Record Keeper and Opera Omnia. I never had Gameboys or PSPs growing up, so as an adult trying to basically turn my smartphone into that… Record Keeper was exactly what I had wanted Brave Exvius to be and is the gameplay I like best. But Opera Omnia is fun, though, and has character interactions (and now I’m waiting for the rest of the chapters and characters to be released). The music, especially the remixes, have been great- I almost dropped my phone in excitement over recognizing Final Fantasy II’s battle music, which is odd because damn if that tune isn’t a horrible ear-worm due to all the weeks of level grinding.

ID: 998995457 

How’d you originally get into the Sims (game) and Silm (book)?

(wracks my brain) The third expansion pack for the original Sims game, Hot Date, came out in 2001, and there was a free demo-like game online that my sisters found that introduced the game to us. I got the first game and that expansion for my birthday and slowly bought each expansion as they came out, then switched over to Sims 2. (Sims 3 didn’t work on our computer and I wasn’t enamored with the look, plus the gameplay was opposite what i wanted as a generational historical period player. The horses from Sims 3 I would kill for). Sims 1 I learned how to make recolors of outfits and faces/hairs, but never meshing. Sims 2 I learned how to use SimPE and Milkshape and got more into the creating end of things than playing.

Sims 1 had a custom content creator who made Silmarillion and LotR themed people/objects. (site is now defunct, but it was called The Simarillion).

I’ve shared the story before (can’t find the link, sorry) but I read The Hobbit the summer before I started 9th grade and started reading FotR before dropping it in aggravation. (Pacing/story logic sense of urgency issues. Plus a “Seinfield is Unfunny” where I was reading so much Fantasy that colored the granddaddy of the genre.) With the movies coming out, i read the books after The Two Towers came out (Eowyn/Faramir shipping was involved. I did not know it was a canon ship.) I wanted more. My library had The Silmarillion and the first Unfinished Tales. My favorite part of the LotR trilogy was those appendices of history in the back of RotK. The Silm was everything I wanted. 

More than ten years later here I am.Â