baudshaw

[baudshaw]

okay but how is Z-A going to make me fear for my life the way arceus did

[baudshaw]

The Dreams Hat controversy, four years later!

[baudshaw]

Possible cultural origins of all Sky seasons

Gratitude: Bhutanese (the only one directly confirmed)

Lightseekers: Slightly Japanese

Belonging: None, supposedly based on “ugly sweaters”

Rhythm: None

Enchantment: Middle Eastern Sanctuary: None

Prophecy: Worldwide

Dreams: East Asian

Assembly: American/British Scouts

TLP: Possibly Western Europe

Flight: Siberian/Inuit

Abyss: Northern Europe

Performance: British?

Shattering: None, inspired by the creatures of Sky

Aurora: None, inspired by what Aurora probably wears

Remembrance: 20th century European

Passage: Ainu and Japanese influences

Moments: Wild West American

Revival: None

Deer: Chinese

Nesting: None

Duets: Mediterranean

Moomin: None

Radiance: Indian

[baudshaw]

50 seasonal concepts I made for Sky!

Updated from my seasonal concepts a few years back. It adds a lot of new ones

If you find any these concepts interesting, please say so and I’ll elaborate for most of them!

Aviary Village

Season of Rebirth: Basically just Revival 2, the Hopeful Steward seeks to establish new visitors in the village. All the season guides get their houses now: Belonging Guide gets a small hut/igloo, Sanctuary Guide gets a floating island with a small tent, Prophecy Guide gets a mini cave, Assembly Guide gets a tree fort, Abyss Guide gets a flying boat, Performance Guide gets an actual home, Void of Shattering gets a weird rift in reality, and Remembrance Guide gets a small shrine. It's unlocked similar to the Revival quests.

Season of Life: Hopeful Steward works with the Master of Life (the season guide) in order to establish a garden plaza behind Aviary Village.

Season of Guiding: Hopeful Steward works with the Skykids to establish a Helping Hall, which is like a center for all player guide. It also radically changes the guide feature. Now, veteran players can queue up to automatically teleport to any new moth asking for a guide.

Season of Hope: Hopeful Steward finally gets a house of their own, and an updated quest system as well.

Season of The Void: Remember the rift for the Void of Shattering? Well, they've allowed you to access six new, detailed memories: birds, butterflies, Ancestor Spirits, King Krill, cosmic mantas, and the Dawn Ember. The shard mechanics are radically changed, with new underwater shards and aerial shards, plus an update to the old shard mechanics to make it more like a tutorial and easier to get AC.

Isle

Season of Nocturnes: “These dark lands, once our childhood home, have been abandoned for centuries. Now we have returned long past its saving. What must we do?”

Season of Gusts: Cast out from the Isle, four young spirits try to create a makeshift home in the clouds. But they better watch their step!

Season of Homelands: The Home Island is retconned to be a part of Isle, and the new lore is that it was an ancient shrine used by the oldest of spirits. Their descendants plan to remake it and turn it into something new.

Season of Release: For so long, this strict warrior clan in Isle forbade anyone from entering. But their thoughts change after meeting a young child.

Season of Alter: In the deepest bowels of the Isle Temple, an old community seeks to transform the realm into a glorious paradise. But failure is at every corner.

Season of Tears: A family group in Isle has seen their once beautiful meadow grow more and more deteriorated. Should they stay true to their roots or venture to better lands?

Season of Dunes: Not Sky x Dune, I swear! Instead, we have a unique culture that's adapted to the conditions of this harsh desert... oh wait...

Season of Pilgrimage: Lost and dazed, these young travelers never even made it to the land of Sky. But they’re determined to see this beautiful world, or at least what’s remaining of it.

Season of Harbors: Merchants from afar have planned to make a center of culture by the sea. But when trade is slow, problems start to arise…

Prairie

Season of Binding: A strange group of floating islands is connected by an odd stringy material. You and a group of spirits try to explore it, but a cute new creature reveals itself.

Season of Exploration: “What happens when your desires to go forth outpace the land you can find?

Season of Abundance: Four rural ranchers love to bicker about what foods they should get. In their barn, no food goes to waste.

Season of Harvest: Cultivating the vast lands of Prairie requires strenuous work. Are these spirits up for the task?

Season of Exchange: Instead of using candles, these fledgling spirits have planned to make a new fiat currency! But convincing the people of Sky to use it is harder than they think.

Season of Knolls: These cloudy hills were occupied by many rival spirits, but they all passed in the Shattering. Who owns it now?

Season of Clay: Slowly build a small mudbrick village into a thriving hub of arts and crafts, all with the help of the Earthen Expert and a small group of spirits.

Forest:

Season of Withdrawal: “In these harsh rains, not even the warmest campfire can save you. But it must save them. For if they go, then everything goes."

Season of Protection: One guardian, barely an adult, has to help four young children in these rains of darkness. A cozy shelter has been constructed, but it cannot last forever.

Season of Brinkmanship: A large connection of expansive mines lies below the Forest, inviting many to try their luck. But some have come for more than just ore.

Season of Loss: Spirits from many ages have to learn to process a devastating battle together by trying to re-enact it.

Season of Structures: A new land in the Hidden Forest reveals a small community living in a pristine land. They have unique wooden buildings, but a new type of crab threatens them.

Season of Lightseekers 2: Because they’re just so epic, they get a new Lightseekers Fort to scout the area and summon light. Lightseekers Guide not included, they're the most forgotten character in Sky history.

Valley

Season of Innocence: “The snow is as pure as ever, so pure that it absorbs all imperfections in the land. Yet still, the land is not perfect!”

Season of Liars: The dark underbelly of the Valley city has been exposed! Corruption in the sports betting market has been rampant among the youth of Valley. What can you even do at this point?!

Season of Floating: A strange spirit has been trying to conquer the skies by learning how to fly. Yet all their friends use boats.

Season of Prosperity: A bustling center of architecture has burned down. It’s up to four inexperienced designers to re-create it while adding their own touch.

Season of Glories: The Valley Elder's first expedition into the harsh realm led to disasters and failure. Their acolytes have stayed behind to work through the damage.

Season of Mastery: The Oracle of Triumph, a re-used version of the Valley Priestess from Sky's concept art, is the season guide. They live in a grand training camp in the interior of Valley, offering to train Skykids to learn new mechanics like candle swinging and light-throwing.

Season of Convergence: A strange natural phenomenon has attracted a massive amount of shards. As you explore deeper, you'll learn the true reason why...

Season of Heights: To the tallest mountain of Valley, four spirits try to mount an expedition. But strange things happen when you’re so close to the stars…

Wasteland

Season of Beneath: “And so, the spirits have made it here. A land that stars never reach. A land that, somehow, is inhabited. Who would willingly reject themselves from the Light while still being part of it?”

Season of Stability: One lone spirit goes through a horrific journey to recall their past, ending only in tragedy as they find out how they died.

Season of Hiding: Those horrific creatures may not be fully conquered, but in a remote outpost, some have talked about change. They believe that by studying their behaviors, they can outsmart the Dark Dragons.

Season of Collapse: A large dock is breaking down due to poor management. Most spirits want to evacuate, but a nostalgic loner believes in something better.

Season of Burning: (my main one): Traumatized by the war, some spirits still believe there’s a battle to fight. What campaigns will they go on? Nobody knows as they go on an adventure of a lifetime.

Season of Desolation: Even in the Golden Wasteland, this dump would never be willingly inhabited… or so, one might think.

Season of Sharing: This tight-knit community sent soldiers to both sides of the war. After both sides lost, their purpose seems unclear, until someone new steps up.

Season of Survival: Rejects from the Forgotten Ark, these gloomy spirits feel like they have nowhere else to go. But once they find a pristine lake filled with wildlife, their attitude start to shift.

Vault:

Season of Relinquish: “What if both the light and dark could be left behind… to forge a new world? Something that truly belongs to us? I have been thinking a lot, in this place beyond order and chaos.”

Season of Stories: Writing is all these spirits want to do. Who can blame them, with that beautiful library of theirs? But with no one to read it, they feel frustrated.

Season of Reality: Literally jutting outside of the Vault of Knowledge, this weird outpost is right on the Eden Mountain. Despite the harsh winds and strange conditions, some spirits have found a home here.

Season of Emptiness: A horrifying, unreal part of the Vault of Knowledge has opened up, distorting everything around this once-vibrant temple. The Shattered Rogue has been horribly affected by the darkness, and their light is waning.

Season of Facade: The Vault Elder tried to expand the Vault of Knowledge, but it caused strange... errors to occur. Truth and lies seem to blend together in this area.

Season of Opening: Trapped in a bunker for the war, these spirits have a warped perception of time. Can you convince them that they now live in an era of peace?

Season of Closing: A sequel to the Season of Opening. After realizing the horrors of the Shattering, the spirits from the bunker go to the Vault Elder to beg for help. But nobody is there.

[baudshaw]

TWO EMBERS IS COMING SOON

[baudshaw]

My personal guess as to what the 6th Sky anniversary head cosmetic will be.

(If you didn't know: each of the Sky anniversary hats have a number of stars in their design which correlate with how many years Sky has been out! So for example, last year was the 5th anniversary, and the cosmetic that year was a tiara with 5 stars on it.)

[baudshaw]

Light awaits nostalgia in big 2025

fuck you. beta teth cutscene

[baudshaw]

Watch to see all Moomid fans get obliterated

[baudshaw]

Two Embers my beloved I am eagerly looking forward to you

[baudshaw]

Skytober Dump Week 3

[baudshaw]

Nevermind I was wrong. Time for Nesting 2.0!!!!!

ITS HERE. THE NEW SYMBOL IS THE ARAMAIC SYMBOL FOR *RESH*. RESH IS USED IN THE CONCEPT ART TO REFER TO THE EDEN ELDER. THE NEW SEASON IS TWO EMBERS AND SPECIFICALLY EDEN ELDER RELATED STAY CALM. OR DONT TWO EMBERS T-MINUS 2 MONTHS

[baudshaw]

I advise everyone to look at the Aramaic alphabet.

👀

(ps: please keep any spoilers and info from leaks away from this post -ymir)

[baudshaw]

ITS HERE. THE NEW SYMBOL IS THE ARAMAIC SYMBOL FOR *RESH*. RESH IS USED IN THE CONCEPT ART TO REFER TO THE EDEN ELDER. THE NEW SEASON IS TWO EMBERS AND SPECIFICALLY EDEN ELDER RELATED STAY CALM. OR DONT TWO EMBERS T-MINUS 2 MONTHS

[baudshaw]

The omori worshippers are gonna have a field day with this one, good luck

OMORI and Detroit: Become Human's Plot Twists - How A Bad Plot Twist Ruins The Story Instead Of Enhancing It

In the 2020 game OMORI, the story's plot twist is that the main protagonist's sister, Mari, didn't kill herself as the player was led to believe - instead, the main protagonist himself accidentally killed her in a fit of rage after an argument they had and his best friend subsequently covered that up by staging it as a suicide.

In the 2018 game Detroit: Become Human, the plot twist of Kara’s story is that Alice, the seemingly human child Kara took care of after the two broke free of Alice’s abusive father, was actually an android all along. 

What do they have in common? The answer’s simple - not only are they emblematic of their respective games’ shoddy writing, they detract from the story they’re supposed to elevate.

First things first - both twists don’t make sense upon scrutiny. OMORI’s plot twist in particular hinges on a huge contrivance - the fact Basil just so happened to be present in Sunny’s house (for reasons the game leaves unexplained) at exactly the right time to witness Sunny committing manslaughter and come up with a plan to absolve him of any blame. Furthermore, the twist’s insinuation that Mari overworked Sunny and didn’t tolerate his mistakes comes out of left field, as Mari was consistently portrayed as kind and flawless (both in Sunny’s dreams and in the real world via the photo album)  throughout the game up until that point.

Alice’s twist only works because the story lies to the player: Kara finds a magazine with a picture of Alice’s model at the beginning of the game, but it’s conveniently blurred. While there are some hints that Alice is an android, such as the fact that she refuses to eat even when food is presented to her, this clashes with one of the main levels of Kara’s story, which has her looking for food and shelter for Alice’s sake. This implies that Kara deliberately ignored Alice’s true nature, for reasons that will be elaborated on later.

Alice’s twist, however, does have some solid hints at the very least. That brings me to a problem exclusive to OMORI’s twist - the game spends most of its runtime hinting at the red herring of Mari having hanged herself as opposed to the twist of her having been shoved down the stairs. The only tangible clues to the twist are the prevalence of staircases in the brief cutscenes before Sunny fights his fears and the hands motif, but they are not enough. If the point of the reveal is that Mari didn’t kill herself, what’s the point in hinting she did?

Secondly, the twists’ linchpin characters are flat in terms of personality. Alice is the quintessential “little girl” in videogames: cute, small, withdrawn, barely cries (she doesn’t even go into hysterics at a concentration camp), constantly needs to be cared for and protected, at most steers you in the right moral direction if you do something “problematic”, even if for her sake. This, allegedly, is supposed to stem from her background, as she was abused by her father, but even the android that Kara spots and that makes her confront the truth has the same quiet, demure, sad demeanor, implying that it’s simply how Alice’s model is programmed to be. Alice is not a character: she is a pet you are supposed to find adorable. The twist that she was never a “real” human, therefore, falls flat on its face: she doesn’t prove anything about the depth of emotions androids can experience. For all intents and purposes, she is the doll racist humans see androids as.

Aside from a brief interaction with Hero in the first several minutes of the game (which is promptly forgotten as soon as it ends), Mari spends most of its runtime only as fuel for Sunny and his friends’ grief. She is given no personality beyond being the Team Mom, isn’t fleshed out in any objective flashbacks (as in, flashbacks not colored by Sunny’s perception of her), and if the vision Sunny experiences on Two Days Left is her ghost, she isn’t plussed in the slightest by her dear little brother profaning her memory by deciding to keep up Basil’s lie. The one flaw the game tries to give her - perfectionism - has no bearing on her character until the moment the game uses it to give Sunny a reason to lash out at her, and the negative impact said flaw had on her life before the argument is glossed over. OMORI’s point that her desire to be perfect was the reason for her downfall, therefore, falls flat on its face: for all intents and purposes, Mari is perfect. 

Finally, both twists are detrimental to the stories they are in.  Supposedly, the twist of android Alice is meant to make you question whether or not you, the player, are going to love her all the same even after learning that she’s not human (although the question should be moot since all three protagonists are androids and the most popular one in the fandom is the most machine-like one). What the game fails to answer, however, is why Kara refused to accept reality and deluded herself into thinking Alice was human to the point of endangering both of them for the sake of playing pretend (this, on top of everything else, makes replaying the game much more frustrating, as you no longer care to give Alice proper shelter as she doesn’t really need it). The implication is that she, herself, believes an android child is inherently less deserving of love as a human one, an interesting concept of internalized bigotry that is never explored. Even worse than this, what before could be seen as a touching relationship between an android and a human, who despite the hatred surrounding them can form a family out of natural love, is now nothing more than two androids following their programming: Kara keeps being a caretaker as she’s supposed to do, and Alice keeps being the perfect little child as she’s supposed to be. While they both rebelled against their abusive master, it means that, at their core, they didn’t even deviate in the first place, and instead forced themselves back into their pre-programmed roles. This is the complete antithesis of the message of the game, which is that androids are more than their programming and they are, instead, people.

Similarly, OMORI’s plot twist turns what could’ve been an interesting story about such topics as teenage suicide and suicide bereavement into a farce. It’s one thing to play this game under the impression Sunny and co. are struggling to live a life their beloved sister and friend unexpectedly removed herself from, but it’s very different to replay it with the knowledge that all the pain Kel, Hero and Aubrey went through was pointless since Mari never killed herself in the first place and stemmed from one of their friends desecrating her corpse. Without warning, the story turns from being about overcoming the grief of losing a loved one to suicide into being about grappling with the guilt of a manslaughter and a huge lie that destroyed multiple friendships - a lie Sunny directly facilitated by lying to his friends by omission to save his own skin. The only character in the game to call Sunny out on this is his suicidal depression (!!!), and its arguments are framed as irrational self-loathing so they’d be easier to dismiss; the game’s best ending, meanwhile, has him conveniently avoid the consequences of his confession by moving town, not caring anymore about the feelings of his friends (or the well-being of Basil, whom he leaves to bear the brunt of the consequences). None of this would’ve been a problem if the game simply focused on Sunny moving on from blaming himself for his sister’s suicide instead.

So, this brings me back to the post's title - not only should a good plot twist be properly foreshadowed, but it should enhance the plot when experienced multiple times. The twists in OMORI and DBH fail to do so, and create the impression they were haphazardly inserted into the plot for the sake of subverting the audience's expectations, with little thought given to how they retroactively affect said plot.

Unfortunately, the only expectation they manage to subvert is the expectation of a completent story.

[baudshaw]

Introducing the new and improved... Sky Research Poll! Fill out your various opinions on Sky here.

[baudshaw]

[baudshaw]

Hey baud, me again, do you remember that you wrote like 30 seasons concepts?

I was inspired by the one called season of pilgrimage, but I don't have a good reference for the spirits' names (i have some ideas for the designs), whenever you can (dont worry about answering if you dont want to), could you develop more about that season?

PD: sorry for beign a little bit annoying, but i LOVE the creativity you have for writing

(A bit of this is taken from my Gratitude 2.0 season idea, actually, but I think it fits here as well.)

It takes place “behind” the Isle of Dawn, in the ocean. The main structure of interest is a small raft that’s crash-landed on the island.

The quests involve repairing the raft and setting it out to the sea. Each quest has one spirit requesting a task from you. It can be done alone, but it’s a bit faster with multiple people. At the end, the spirits use the raft and go to the Isle of Dawn, thanking you for fulfilling their journey.

The items are very similar to the base game, but a bit expanded. These are poor children, after all, so their clothes are more basic.

Pilgrimage Guide: Slightly taller than the rest. For the ultimates, they have a fancy mini-raft prop, a long flowing hair, and a purplish mask.

Fish Whisperer: Has the Knifefish Call and wears a long tan robe with a dark brown hood.

Sturdy Sailor: Has the “rowing” emote and wears a short tan vest outfit with a brown oar prop and a slightly long hair.

Impatient Recluse: Has the “angry walk” emote and wears a short, messy hair with thick bangs as well as a large light brown cape.

Cracked Caretaker: Has the “reeling from damage” emote and wears a nearly destroyed mask, a short purplish-brown cape, and a curly hairstyle.

It’s a bit short, but I hope you like it!