The-princey-pie - Local Cryptid At Your Service

I keep seeing people making fun of using growled, hissed, roared, snarled etc in writing and it’s like.

have you never heard someone speak with the gravel in their voice when they get angry? Because that’s what a growl is.

Have you never heard someone sharply whisper something through the thin space of their teeth? Or when your mother sharply told you to stop it in public as a kid when you were acting up/being too loud? Because that’s what a hiss is.

Have you never heard a man get so blackout angry that their voice BOOMS through the house? Because that’s what a roar is.

Have you never seen someone bare their teeth while talking to accentuate their frustration or anger while speaking with a vicious tone? Because that’s what snarling is.

It’s not meant to be a literal animal noise. For the love of god, not every description is literal. I get some people are genuinely confused, but also some of these people are genuinely unimaginative as fuck.

Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Let’s spread the self-love 💗 (apologies for sending chain letters but i'll be honest: i DO find myself wanting to know which of an author's works they're most excited about at any given moment.)

Ayeee thank you for the neat ask game! I do wonder too what's someone's favorite works and why! Everyone who sees this feel free o do it too cause imma send this along on anon <3

Summer Wine In Verdant Winters

The last longer fantasy AU I've written about Virgil running a tavern to hide from his traumatic past. Naturally it comes back to haunt him. It has a cottagecore setting with some high fantasy elements on top of the found family and I've salviated writing all the food descriptions

Damocles' Gambit

Admittedly, I'm cheating here a bit by linking the entire series. But this has arranged marriage turned found family with some delicious hurt/comfort where King Thomas gets to be the best dad we all wished we had

Burning Fireflies

It's the best Roceit I've ever written where Roman is the loyal knight going after the runaway thief Janus - I'm just a sucker for tales about loyality and the tragedy that comes with it when it's mistrusted

Noblesse Oblige

Stemming from my Bridgerton obsession I just had to make it gay. So then we have some fake dating turned real feelings Loceit with a little mystery twist for spice. I cried while writing it but it's also the most beautiful imagery I've managed to this day

A Tad(pole) Tied Up At The Moment

The first Baldur's Gate 3 fanfic I've ever written (and am currently writing) where Astarion gets whumped properly before he gets the comfort from Halsin he deserves

This.

The inherent homoeroticism of killing your enemy and immediately regretting it

that post that’s like, fandom’s obsession with viewing characters as only relatable or shippable or defendable has ruined media literacy in being able to view characters through the lens of themes or narrative theory. character analysis one of my favourite forms of analysis but not at the detriment of being able to understand when a character represents something larger thematically in a story than what they would be if they were just a guy from your high school

someone: hey I noticed this thing you did in your writing!

me, kicking my feet up flirtatiously: oh??? do you want to hear my thoughts on why I did that? do you want a play-by-play of the language choices in every related sentence? do you want an exhaustive breakdown of The Themes???

There is an issue in this community with misstagged fics on AO3, specifically in the FxF tags. I don't know if it's going to reach the actual people or not but I'm still going to put this here:

A lot of MxM and FxM are tagging FxF ships in the main relationship category despite the ship itself only being written in the background.

Which is a problem because when you go into your ship tag to find fics of your ship, a ridiculous amount of them are off topic. And while yes you can lower that amount significantly by filtering and tag exclusion, AO3 has a built in feature that is made to avoid this.

I am going to use the Shadowzel tag for that because it's the most popular FxF ship on there and it's also one of the most misstagged rn. As of right now, there is 607 fics in the Shadowzel tag without filter. If you restrict the search to only include FxF, you are down to 397 fics. That is more than a third gone!

And it gets rid of some shadowzel content as well, so it's either you filter that out or you have to scroll through a tag where 1 out of 3 fics are about Astarion, Gale, Halsin, etc instead of the ship you looked up.

If your fic, let's take for example a Tav x Astarion, has either consistent mention of Shadowheart x Lae'zel, the most popular wlw ship, or has them in the background as support characters, or even just mentions them as a funny little wink and you want to make sure your readers know they are in here, you do not use the relationship tag! You go down to the additional tags and add "Minor Lae'zel/Shadowheart (Baldur's Gate)".

Unless the pairing you are tagging is the main focus or have a significant role and spotlight on them, you should not use the relationship tag! It clogs the feed for no reason, AO3 is not a website where you have to advertise your posts to the most tags possible.

Adding a visual for clarity:

my favorite trope is when someone believes they’re hard to love and someone who loves them like it’s breathing.

knight/lord ships are like. what if i would die for you. what if i wanted you to live for me. what if i wanted to touch you but could only be satisfied with being near you. what if i could touch you but only through the safety of our gloves. what if i couldn’t stop thinking about you right next to me. what if i bloodied my hands for you and never looked back at the wreckage. what then

devotion that corrupts is my favorite btw there's nothing wrong with it ever & it should be encouraged