I Love The Chain For So Many Reasons (players, Plot, Community, Characters…) But One Thing I Really

Reasons to Write a Play

If you’re an author, you should write a play. Even if your genre is high fantasy novels, even if your genre is romance novellas, even if your genre is poetry, even if you don’t watch theatre often, you should write a play.

Why?

1. It’s a completely different medium for storytelling that still puts your writing skills to use.

2. It’s an incredibly helpful exercise in show-don’t-tell. Like seriously. Wow.

3. A new way to write characters. You can’t shoehorn in extensive physical descriptions most of the time, so you have to resort to defining them by their actions and words. Again, see point 2.

4. You’re creating a piece of performance art without even getting up off the couch? Woah??

5. It’s so gratifying to watch it performed, or even just read, if you can. Like oh wow.

6. Lots of stuff that you never think you’ll need or use again outside of playwriting follows you back into your prose work.

7. The world needs more plays that aren’t just adaptations of Disney movies or 80′s jukebox cash grabs trying to ride the coattails of Heathers. Seriously.

8. It’s fun.

9. Like, really fun.

10. For real, I have never finished a writing project more quickly or with less burnout.

bruh

Concept: Star Trek style quasi-utopian deep space drama, except all of the ship’s non-human crew members are really obviously based on particular sci-fi horror tropes.

The chief physician is an amorphous mass of tentacles and teeth that’s infested the entire medical bay, transforming it into a quivering nightmare of meat and viscera. It speaks with a conspicuously posh accent; the human crew members affectionately call it “Doc”.

The head of security is a lurking, probably humanoid something-or-other that’s mostly imperceptible in the visual spectrum, save as a faintly shimmering distortion in the air. Her lack of visibility is treated as a running gag, with the most frequent bits involving a. other crew members not realising she’s in the room until she speaks up, and b. her making reference to various unlikely anatomic features which, of course, the audience cannot see.

The ship’s computer is a blatantly rampant AI that speaks in a chorus of voices. It tends to talk in cryptic, pseudo-religious metaphors which contrast to humorous effect with the mundanity of the topic at hand, and sometimes wanders off on rambling philosophical tangents that require whoever it’s speaking with to remind it to get to the point. You can tell when it’s paying attention to a particular part of the ship because the lighting turns blood red.

The lead science officer is just a huge fucking spider.

(The captain is an apparently ordinary – albeit extremely photogenic – human. We don’t find out what their real deal is until the season finale; what’s revealed firmly establishes them as the freakiest one of the lot!)

universe swapsies

Excuse the messy doodles, but the new costumes are fan-fucking-tastic.

I’m reading this thing about how farmers in Japan considered thunderstorms to be good luck because they’d make more mushrooms grow so some Japanese scientists created this lil electrical machine that they wheeled through the forest administering shocks to the ground to simulate lightning strikes and the areas that they shocked yielded twice as many mushrooms as unshocked plots of land ⚡️🍄

fucked up that we don't make belts with loops for holding blades or pouches for storing coins and bunches of dried herbs anymore

So while most rainbow capitalism is sticking rainbows on things and pretending to be an ally, Budweiser’s UK branch is giving credit to trans activists, and explaining pride flag colors.

Okay, hot take? Bisexual and pansexual are functionally synonyms, and the decision to ID as one or the other comes down to personal preference and interpretation, and any attempt to further separate the two is driving a wedge between two communities that should have nothing but love and solidarity for one another. 

We have more in common than not, and the words for our respective identities should not be pitted against each other. 

Give us a lil A5, D4, E5, H3, R1?

A5. what is their most impressive talent?Illusions. Sure, he knows other spells, he’s a decent swordsman, and he’s got a good voice, but illusions are the only thing that he has which is consistently really impressive. He’s got the imagination for it, too.D4. what type of clothes and accessories do they wear?Ha ha. Well Paisley has a red paisley scarf; it’s old but it has held up well. I think the aesthetic is a lot of reds and browns. As for his normal ‘uniform’ I think it’s something along the lines of the clothes in the original moodboard. A nice old coat, sensible boots, nothing baggy enough to be dangerous, a belt with a few pouches full of components, the Chain insignia on a necklace or on a loop off his belt. As for when he’s off duty, he probably has a few nice, light, baggy shirts. He probably hasn’t gone too far from a Riojan style.E5. do they portray their personality intentionally or let people figure it out on their own?He’d make it clear to anyone that he’s friendly enough, but I think he’d let people figure him out beyond any surface level “Oh this guy’s alright.”H3. do they like the snow?Probably likes it for a couple days, or when it’s falling lightly. He probably hates it when it’s constant and he can’t avoid the cold.R1. do they follow rules?In the Chain? Yeah. I think a lot of his sensibility comes from not actively wanting to break the rules like some of the misfit Helltroopers. He’s pretty content being a soldier, so why fuck that up? If it’s harmless fun, or if he’s making sure some delinquent doesn’t die, he’s not axiomatically opposed to breaking rules, though, and he probably wouldn’t follow an objectively bad decision as an order.