Hollow Knight Ask Meme!

Part 2 of Trimmed White Lady

I am a broken man for it

(Go read W&G. Go read it. The most fic of our generation. I’m completely empty now that’s there’s no further chapters left to come.)

Everyone congratulate @dropout-ninja; they survived the end of W&G and now I have to write pantheons as my part of the deal lfksdkgknjds

Yes! Yes! The letterbox claims its victim

Fanfic Writers: Director’s Cut

Reblog this if you want readers to come into your ask box and ask for the “director’s commentary” on a particular story, section of a story, or set of lines. 

Or, send in a ⭐star⭐  to have the author select a section they’ve been dying to talk about!

Hive Knight, The Dreamers, The Radiance~?

Thank you for the ask, I made my answers too long :D

Hive Knight: Are there any bosses you wish were friends instead of foes?

I feel like I’d say most of them XD 

The one coming to mind the most while writing this up is probably actually the False Knight. It’s a tutorial battle and seems straightforward enough early game, but finding the two brothers and hearing the final thoughts just makes me feel bad for killing him every time I replay the game. 

(I have a slightly similar reaction to the Pale Lurker fight, just because it feels so needless just to grab a key for a high percentage run, so Pale Lurker can be the second option here.)

The Dreamers: Who’s your favorite Dreamer? Why?

Hmmmm, I’ll go with Herrah on account of emotional damage. I love all the Dreamers and am always wanting to see more fic of the three of them together. But individually, Herrah was the first Dreamer I killed and just standing there killing her while nothing happened caused said emotional damage first before the other two got a chance. There’s something more sad about killing her than the others, to boot. Lurien and Monomon don’t seem to have many people close to them (Monomon has Quirrel, Lurien had PK?? and/or the butler guy that Grimmchild is always murdering). Lurien’s got no one alive/uninfected left. Monomon is trying to get the three of them killed. Meanwhile, Herrah had a lot of people genuinely loyal to her, plus Hornet. The difference between her and Monomon is that while both have someone alive that cares about them, Monomon is the only Dreamer to be advocating for the Dreamer’s seals removal. Herrah is still in the ‘seals cannot be undone/our duty holds’ mentality and maintains that mentality presumably because she’s trying to protect Hornet (the dreamnail dialogue about her doing everything ‘for her’). She just tends to always be the one I feel the most bad about killing. 

But also she’s a favorite because of how much potential political drama was going on between her and PK and the Mantis Tribe, and I have fun writing/reading that 

The Radiance: What memory from this game will stick with you the most?

So many…The Hollow Knight stabbing themself, the Abyss cutscene, Broken Vessel’s everything. Or walking through the dream tent towards the Nightmare King fight, looking at the veins with increasing nerves until the title card shows up and panic starts, or the ‘challenge’ the sun moment. Even just walking into Kingdom’s Edge the first time around. 

🥹 Thank youuu

A little doodle based on this amazing fic by @dropout-ninja i couldnt get this image out of my head

oh boy I get to feel embarrassed about being incredibly transparent, not the mortifying ordeal of repeat themes being seen

uhhhh

Dialogue or introspection and nothing else- self explanatory XD I have a dialogue problem. Things are emotion driven, or thought driven, and then action is driven by interactions, and the rest is a walking simulator in nondescript anywhere-land. The only thing that could be added are action scenes, because I go from never describing anything environmental or tactile to taking pages on a fight like it’s a DBZ saga

Anger issues- I have a tendency to give my main protagonists anger problems that steer their plot or come up often in introspection, ho boy. Often if they have a foil antagonist, they’d be guilty of this too. I’ve got too many povs that are just angry hurt people with bad coping skills. There’ll be plots based out of the consequences of actions, but there’s also just the aspect of having some empathy for them; you don’t have to forgive them, but you can see where they’re coming from and see that they’re people too. (I also just have an easier time writing what I am familiar with, and I’m familiar with rejection, bitterness, lashing out, and other unpleasantries as an angry person myself lol)

Fall from grace/dethroned power figures/gods/etc- happens to protagonists and antagonists in my sandbox often and I'm sure they hate it

intense (homo)erotic enemies/rivals dynamics- listen…there’s no excuse Half of the time I don’t even intend to set out for this to happen but it does anyway. I blame being a Transformers fan. So many hate boners and murder soulmates and homoerotic enemies ahoy therein. Will they kill each other from being stuck in a box together too long? Will they decide to see their familiarities and improve as people together? Will they make out? Who knows

Weird sadomasochistic vibes going on in the POV (especially in fight scenes)- this comes up whenever the above theme comes up and I have no escape. Fight scenes and memories of all the reasons you hate a dude aren’t supposed to sound so horny, and yet. And yet. You know what, I'll blame transformers for this one too.

mercy/cruel mercy- I have this habit of preferring characters to live, because character death means I can’t play with them anymore outside of the instances where it serves to impact another character/the setting in important ways. Since I was a kid, I’ve liked seeing themes of what ramifications would/do come from a character being spared, and its twist side of cruel mercy, whether because it’s the best option out of all bad options (stares at you, Wakfu season 2 and what horrors you did to my little child brain) or it’s a protag/antag deciding sparing an antag/protag is the worse fate and they’re feeling vindictive. 

Nonhuman characters and inhuman povs- I feel like most of the fandoms I’ve ever been in have few to no humans, and either that influences how I want to see more aliens/constructs/monsters in og works or I gravitate to those fandoms first, but either way, chances are high there will be aliens, monsters, androids, artificial constructs, fantasy races, or eldritch creatures playing large roles in anything I make. I really love playing around with povs from these types of characters and just trying to keep inhuman povs inhuman but also explore how that would look. I’m not sure I’m really able to explain it but let’s just say I’m the type of writer to look at a one-off character like Armus in Star Trek TNG and then spend over a year of notetaking going ‘but what would that existence be like’. Happy to report that someone told me I managed to make a comprehensible but very non-human alien narrator (in a Godzilla fic lmao).

Becoming more than what you were built for- tied to my above use of constructs or nonhuman forces, because a lot of times their stories involve having been created to be a tool/weapon for a single purpose and then, after either rebelling against that or having the environment remove that purpose, the slow journey to figuring out who they are, what they believe, and how they’re more valuable than they’d originally be able to think. Also goes for 'human' characters becoming their own person outside of whatever destiny they've been told they're supposed to have.

Found family- I just Like It. Happens in almost any of my fics and (eventually) happens in my og stuff too (or if not, it happened and then broke apart and the theme is instead how the hurt of betrayal/broken found family is just as valid as its counterpart tropes)

IMMORTALITY AS A HORROR CONCEPT- haha my beloved, thank you again wakfu for cursing me with the horrors

I'll tag @inthegloomglow @void-rainbow @ganondorf--apologist @loveandscience @darksidekelz if any of you wanna play too

Thumbprint challenge

I was tagged by the lovely @willtheweaver

Rules: look back on your works, both past and present, finished and unfinished. What are five to ten narrative elements or tropes that continuously pop up in your work? Give a list of these things!

OMG this one his hard, but I'll try.

Self-worth issues: most of my characters have to realize their own worth throughout the story

Love doesn't fix your problems but it gives you the strength to fix them yourself - that's it, that's what my stories are about and always will be

Supportive characters - I don't like my heroes to exist in a vacuum, they are always surrounded by people that support them and that they care about

Lovers coming from different backgrounds - I have yet to find true enemies to lovers but my MCs always come from the opposite end of a scale

Dreams and nightmares - meaningful (prophetic?) dreams or nightmares occur in all my works. I don't have a rational reason for that, maybe it's my own messy relationship with sleep 😄

Gentle tag for: @astorichan, @ramwritblr, @sunset-a-story, @satohqbanana, @sarandipitywrites

This comment will always live in my head rent free. Sometimes you just gotta summon a demon clown with a cowbell to fix the problems you caused. Behold the handmade gif created to honor it

Something I made for @grollow the other day and still like it, so it can go on here. Post reference came from here.

Is it time for me to show my first ever shitpost art on tumblr?

It is time for me to show my first shitpost on tumblr.

Behold, incoherency