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Jul. 28th, 2019 04:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarlingonevarious things with numbers make a post:
1: I have not gotten any forrader on my intoabar prompt. Mostly this is the fault of our current weekly posting schedule, which we launched into in the mistaken belief that the story did not need further rewrites, and then promptly discovered that breaking things into chapters makes my coauthor want to drastically rewrite them. I am so fucking sick of this time pressure and the way it doesn’t let us work on anything else, and especially of the way we’re posting on Mondays which means that Sundays (ostensibly my day to recuperate from the work week) are a day of intense pressure to get the rewrites done. She contributes plot and snark, I contribute feelings and beta reading, and making 3000 words give you feelings all the way through is some heavy goddamn lifting. Supposedly it’s just tomorrow (today, but my CPAP machine says I’ve only slept for half an hour so it’s definitely not allowed to be tomorrow yet) and two more Sundays, three more chapters and then we’ll be done, but only if we actually finish this chapter and don’t have to skip a week. And this is the really pivotal chapter, and I am not remotely sure we can pull it off.
2; Uh. Hypothetically I was talking about intoabar. My prompt is “Wes Janson walks into a bar and meets Tali’Zorah”, which is not an instant nope (basically if I got Thane that would be an insta-default, I can’t write Thane) but is also not a prompt where I immediately know what to do (e.g. Wes+Zaeed XD). The thing about writing Tali, of course, is how one approaches the whole geth deal. Tali is very closely tied to Mass Effect worldbuilding, you almost can’t really break her out of it, so I’m either putting Wes (et alia) into the Mass Effect ‘verse or I’m doing your standard bar between universes. I’ve done enough with bars between universes that I want to change something up a bit, especially as the sheer interest of the personalities isn’t enough to make this story gel for me.
So one option I came up with is that Wes is the barkeeper rather than a patron, which gives me a nice excuse for Tali to strike up conversation with him, even though it’s a running joke in the Mass Effect ‘verse that gossiping with the bartender is a human-exclusive cultural phenomenon. Why Wes is running a bar between universes, whomst the fuck knows, but that’s not the sort of question that bothers me. He totally would, that’s all that matters. ^_^ Hobbie probably makes a cameo as the bar’s bookkeeper. The reason I’m not married to this option is that Tali then has to have something to talk about, which very swiftly gets into the whole geth genocide thing, and that is a situation where gamer devs trying to do moral ambiguity wound up at “but what if a likable person... was racist?” and then, as so often happens, backpedaled to “fantasy racism is okay because we like this person!”
(The whole ~resolution~ of the geth/quarians conflict in ME3 is a massive cop-out, because it revolves around the idea that the geth haven’t truly been sapient until now, and therefore it’s okay that the quarians had previously tried to genocide them in a moral panic over the discovery of sapience in the near-AI race they’d originally created as a substitute for slave labor. Also, the secondary idea that as soon as the geth do become fully sapient, all the quarians accept them as equals and begin working with them to rebuild their long-lost (because geth-occupied) homeworld. Personhood is not so fucking objective as all that, and perceptions of sapience are not so easily changed. Due to game mechanics, I’ve always played ME3 for the resolution where the geth and quarians reconcile, but I wish I was brave enough to play to the version where I let the quarians die so the geth can live free. I’m deeply uncomfortable with the idea that a former slave race’s ideal ending is coexistence with their former masters. Couldn’t sell anything else in this country, but blergle. :P)
Uh. Where the fuck was I? Right. So Tali talking about plotty shit gets into the fact that she is or has been Very Wrong about geth, which means that would probably turn into a JT Has Opinions story, which is not much good as a story. The other option is a riff on my old Tales from the Reaper War jottings (which I don’t think I ever archived anywhere), meaning basically that Wes and the Fab Four would be a Mass Effect 3 multiplayer squad, would run into Tali and her group — probably a mixed geth/quarian squad precisely to get around the awkward fantasy racism thing — and the story itself is a little downtime vignette in a wrecked bar on a bombed-out world (I’m picturing Benning, that being the only multiplayer map set in a recognizably residential area) with Wes and Tali comparing notes on... whatever.
(I feel like Wes as a player would strongly appreciate the Geth Juggernaut multiplayer character, which encapsulates the general Y-wing philosophy of “can’t dodge, doesn’t need to”. But I’m not sure how to incorporate that feeling into a story like this without going way too meta.)
3. I’m falling back asleep, so I will very briefly mention that I’m looking at apartments, doing some cross-stitching, and have a new coach at work, and expand on those later.
1: I have not gotten any forrader on my intoabar prompt. Mostly this is the fault of our current weekly posting schedule, which we launched into in the mistaken belief that the story did not need further rewrites, and then promptly discovered that breaking things into chapters makes my coauthor want to drastically rewrite them. I am so fucking sick of this time pressure and the way it doesn’t let us work on anything else, and especially of the way we’re posting on Mondays which means that Sundays (ostensibly my day to recuperate from the work week) are a day of intense pressure to get the rewrites done. She contributes plot and snark, I contribute feelings and beta reading, and making 3000 words give you feelings all the way through is some heavy goddamn lifting. Supposedly it’s just tomorrow (today, but my CPAP machine says I’ve only slept for half an hour so it’s definitely not allowed to be tomorrow yet) and two more Sundays, three more chapters and then we’ll be done, but only if we actually finish this chapter and don’t have to skip a week. And this is the really pivotal chapter, and I am not remotely sure we can pull it off.
2; Uh. Hypothetically I was talking about intoabar. My prompt is “Wes Janson walks into a bar and meets Tali’Zorah”, which is not an instant nope (basically if I got Thane that would be an insta-default, I can’t write Thane) but is also not a prompt where I immediately know what to do (e.g. Wes+Zaeed XD). The thing about writing Tali, of course, is how one approaches the whole geth deal. Tali is very closely tied to Mass Effect worldbuilding, you almost can’t really break her out of it, so I’m either putting Wes (et alia) into the Mass Effect ‘verse or I’m doing your standard bar between universes. I’ve done enough with bars between universes that I want to change something up a bit, especially as the sheer interest of the personalities isn’t enough to make this story gel for me.
So one option I came up with is that Wes is the barkeeper rather than a patron, which gives me a nice excuse for Tali to strike up conversation with him, even though it’s a running joke in the Mass Effect ‘verse that gossiping with the bartender is a human-exclusive cultural phenomenon. Why Wes is running a bar between universes, whomst the fuck knows, but that’s not the sort of question that bothers me. He totally would, that’s all that matters. ^_^ Hobbie probably makes a cameo as the bar’s bookkeeper. The reason I’m not married to this option is that Tali then has to have something to talk about, which very swiftly gets into the whole geth genocide thing, and that is a situation where gamer devs trying to do moral ambiguity wound up at “but what if a likable person... was racist?” and then, as so often happens, backpedaled to “fantasy racism is okay because we like this person!”
(The whole ~resolution~ of the geth/quarians conflict in ME3 is a massive cop-out, because it revolves around the idea that the geth haven’t truly been sapient until now, and therefore it’s okay that the quarians had previously tried to genocide them in a moral panic over the discovery of sapience in the near-AI race they’d originally created as a substitute for slave labor. Also, the secondary idea that as soon as the geth do become fully sapient, all the quarians accept them as equals and begin working with them to rebuild their long-lost (because geth-occupied) homeworld. Personhood is not so fucking objective as all that, and perceptions of sapience are not so easily changed. Due to game mechanics, I’ve always played ME3 for the resolution where the geth and quarians reconcile, but I wish I was brave enough to play to the version where I let the quarians die so the geth can live free. I’m deeply uncomfortable with the idea that a former slave race’s ideal ending is coexistence with their former masters. Couldn’t sell anything else in this country, but blergle. :P)
Uh. Where the fuck was I? Right. So Tali talking about plotty shit gets into the fact that she is or has been Very Wrong about geth, which means that would probably turn into a JT Has Opinions story, which is not much good as a story. The other option is a riff on my old Tales from the Reaper War jottings (which I don’t think I ever archived anywhere), meaning basically that Wes and the Fab Four would be a Mass Effect 3 multiplayer squad, would run into Tali and her group — probably a mixed geth/quarian squad precisely to get around the awkward fantasy racism thing — and the story itself is a little downtime vignette in a wrecked bar on a bombed-out world (I’m picturing Benning, that being the only multiplayer map set in a recognizably residential area) with Wes and Tali comparing notes on... whatever.
(I feel like Wes as a player would strongly appreciate the Geth Juggernaut multiplayer character, which encapsulates the general Y-wing philosophy of “can’t dodge, doesn’t need to”. But I’m not sure how to incorporate that feeling into a story like this without going way too meta.)
3. I’m falling back asleep, so I will very briefly mention that I’m looking at apartments, doing some cross-stitching, and have a new coach at work, and expand on those later.
