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rocketcherry · 6 months ago

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Rewrite of this lovely post for summer seasonal depression besties:

it’s my fault. it’s just that when we met it was spring; his rainbow flowering hair and crackling laughter. there’s a little sun in him, a lot of play. and what a better time for blooming?

i didn’t realize it for the first few years - something shifting, something so subtle. the summer makes us all arid, the winter makes us all a little cozied together. i just loved him, because he was incredible, and i was the luckiest person alive.

it’s just that i realized that fall came with sudden bursts of cold. it’s just that winter frequently settled with soft snow blizzarding from his lips. it’s just that summer was the worst of all, his eyes dead. it’s just that spring loves me different; throws himself into it without the chilling ice of winter. i used to love that winter boy, you know? i loved how collected he was, the way in winter he took every step calm and collected that he could. but i carried him home tired one too many times, cleaned up one too many of the messes he made for no reason than to enjoy the sensation of community. and summer was worse; the shutdown, the isolation. how he became distant, a desert, caught up in his own head, unable to tell me what was wrong and unable to think i actually wanted to listen.

he comes home, his hair buzzed off. a dark smile on his lips. the shadowy parts of him are back. they loom like the sun overhead. he kisses me with his body held at a distance, a peck on my cheek that feels like an burn. he makes polite conversation and we go to bed early, our bodies untouching.

it is a lonely season, i think on the ninth day of this. Summer is fire. Summer is known for the burning of things. when i look at him, i see the boy i fell for, inhabited by an alien. he was the first man i loved so much i felt it would kill me. i can’t leave. when i wake him up with my crying, he tells me to shush and go back to sleep. he’s different like this, quiet, doesn't eat.

three days later i stare at myself in the mirror. i wonder if it’s me. if the fat on my body or something in my face or the wrinkles and he doesn’t love me. i try prettier lingerie, lean cuisine, i try different hair, more makeup, try harder. it doesn’t work. he looks at me the same; that empty gaze that neither loves nor condemns my actions.

somewhere in july i lose it. we’re fighting again, from car to restaurant to car to home again. we fight about stupid things, small things; i tell him i feel he doesn’t love me, he says i’m not listening. the circle goes around and around, old pain peeling back, new pain unhealing. He sleeps on the couch.

i wake up when i hear him crying, missing hair around him all messed up. the kind of sobbing that only comes at two in the morning, heavy and thick and hurting. my summer boy. my heart is breaking. he looks up at me like i’m his anchor. “i’m sorry i’m like this,” he says. and i start saying, it’s okay i’m here we’re married, but he just shakes his head and says, “I know this isn’t the real me.”

i hold his burning hand. he stares at the blankets. “i am different in summer,” he whispers, “i know i am and i’m sorry.” he looks at me. “why do you think i cut my hair? Buzz it off? get rid of the old me?”

i tell him it’s okay. we’re together and it’s okay, and then he whispers, “i’m sorry you married four of me.”

we lay there like that, his head on my chest. he falls asleep. i stare at the ceiling, thinking of the way he sounded when he was crying. how i helped put him in that pain. how i promised in sickness and in health and everything in between.

the next day i spend at the library. there aren’t enough books on how to love someone with seasonal affective disorder so i make my own, notes and pages and little ideas on post-its. and i take a deep breath and make myself a promise.

he comes home to his favorite dinner and we kiss and he’s uneasy but that’s okay. the next day i bring home flowers and the next day he finds little love notes in his pockets. i love his quiet, the way summer demands, understand his sex drive is racing; spend more time cuddling. we drink beer and we kiss and some part of him starts relaxing.

the truth is there is no loving someone out of their mental illness. the truth is that you can love someone in despite of it; love them loud enough to give them an excuse to believe they can make their way out of it.

and i learn. i remember the rebirth of fall, when he starts cooling. we kiss and go on walks in cozy sweaters. i remember his joy at little birds and his rain dancing. i fall in love with the colours in his cheeks and the little bursts of organizing. i fall in love with winter’s slow walks and coffee and shouting to music playing too loud on the speakers. i fall in love with his dancing, with the jackfrost energy. and when summer comes; i am ready. i remember that plains used to look pretty. i fall in love with the sunfire of him, with the beaches, with the blazing smile that spreads across his face so shyly. i fall in love with how he looks in patterned shirts and shorts and every day i find another reason to love him the way he deserves - the way i always should have.

he comes home with his buzzed hair and dark smile and a package in her hands. i ask to see what it is and that small shy grin comes creeping out. it’s sun screen packed in with medication. he looks at me with those wide eyes and that beautiful summer blush. “i’m trying to get better,” he whispers, “i promise.”

recovery doesn’t look immediate. sometimes it isn’t neat. i can’t say we never fight or that we’re suddenly complete. but each day, that tiny boy’s strength gives me another reason. i love him. i love him while he tames the roller coaster of fall; i love him for reigning in the winter blizzards; i love him for taking his summer and trying to be cool. it is hard, because everything worth it is hard. he spreads out his spring flowers; mixes the best parts of him into everything. learns to take summer’s silence for a moment before yelling in winter. learns to take spring’s rain and give it to autumn. we are both learning.

one day he comes home and his hair is different, but it’s a style i don’t know. i kiss it and tell him that he’s beautiful and the inside of me swells like a flood. i’m so glad that he’s mine. every part of him. the whole. i am the luckiest person on earth. and i always have been. but he’s hugging me and saying, “thank you for helping me,” and i can’t explain why i’m crying.

this is what love is; not always an emotion but rather your actions. the choices we make when we realize our lives would be empty if the other was absent. this is what love is: letting them grow, helping them find their way in out of the fire. this is what love is: sometimes it takes work to see how the thing you planted together actually grows.

this is what love looks like in an spring boy: it is summer and he glows.

Your wife changes her hair color every season and her personality adjusts slightly. You’re secretly only in love with Autumn wife. She just came home sporting her Winter color.

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rocketcherry · 7 months ago

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Hey Dapper! As an avid follower of- and equally avid inspiration-taker from your work, first of all, thank you for the work you've put into all this. It is a treasure-trove of knowledge and inspiration that has certainly made me very happy. Can I ask for your thoughts on Tharizdun? I've been trying to form a concept of it for in my own world, but I've had little success.

Monsters Reimagined: Tharizdun, the Whisperer in Darkness

Being the default "god of madness" Tharizdun brings together two of my enduring gripes with d&d: gods that no one would actually worship and the enduring legacy of depicting people with mental illness as dangerous lunatics devoid of empathy and reason.

As he currently exists in the DM's toolbox, the whole point of including Tharizdun in your campaign is to act as the powersource behind whichever final fantasy style endboss wants to start the apocalypse before unleashing a mass of offband lovecraftian tentacles. Derivative, trite, his singular desire to inspire others to end the world is MCU levels of failing to give villains proper motivations.

We can do better

TLDR: Far In the wildest depths of the astral sea the ur-god Tharizdun is formless and thoughtless, yet dreaming. Resembling nothing so much as a cosmic nebula of oily clouds, a vast and shapeless expanse of churning primordial chaos that pulses with synapses of psychic lighting containing a consciousness older than time itself. Like a sleeper beset with sleep paralysis the chained oblivion thrashes against a reality it can only barely perceive, sending shockwaves of destruction across the cosmos.

While scholars of all worlds debate the true origins and nature of Tharizdun they can agree on two things:

It is more powerful than all the pantheons of creation, and it is terrified.

Inspiration: I wasn't originally going to do a whole monsters reimagined on Tharizdun, instead simply gesturing on what Matt Mercer has done with the deity (using the roiling chaos as a throughline for much of his Exandrian worldbuilding) and leaving it at that.

Around the same time I got this ask though I was considering doing my own take on Azathoth, the so called "blind idiot god" of the lovecraft mythos, inspiration struck and I decided to alloy the two concepts into what I think is a stronger whole. There's a lot of overlap in the two formless horrors, partly due to Tharizdun being a d&d's attempt to dip its toe into eldritch horror, without quite understanding the thematic framework involved.

Like many other things ( Minorities, the sea, decay, air conditioning) Lovecraft was terrified of objective reality. This might sound like a joke, but fundamental to his mythos is the fear that earth and the white men that lived upon it were not the centre of the universe created by a loving god. Lovecraft lived in increasingly scientific times and the science supported the idea of a universe in which humanity's existence was the meaningless product of random chance. Azathoth was this anxiety embodied in its most extreme scale: the capital G god of the universe which sat in the middle of all creation that was not only uncaring towards humanity (as many of Lovecraft's creations were) but the embodiment of ultimate unthinking chaos.

Trying to port Azathoth (and most of the other lovecrafitan pantheon) doesn't work because the conceits of the genre fundamentally clash. D&D DOES propose a moral universe, and goes out of its way to simplify morality down to such a cartoonish level that it has objective answers. In Lovecraft the horror comes from the fact that the cultists and their fucked up alien gods exist, where as the moral christian god doesn't... in d&d there's no reason for the cultists to worship the fucked up alien gods because the regular gods are both existent and quite nice.

The default d&d cosmology has multiple infinite voids of chaos including limbo, the abyss, and the far realm. I've already given my take on one of these, but I wanted an alternative for the origins of the weird that wasn't specifically focused on entropic decay.

There's a fascinating (and very depressing) history over the term hysteria and the connotations of mental crisis with feminine fragility. The word itself comes from the greek word for womb and there's something about the idea of "primal birthing chaos" that's worth playing with insofar as it makes weird rightoids Jordan Peterson deeply afraid.

Taking these thoughts as well as my earlier gripes in mind, its going to take a bit of an overhaul to make Tharizdun/Azathoth as a credible antagonistic force for a campaign. Also, this might be my own bias as an author showing through here but I don't go in for the lovecrafitan "truths too terrible to be understood". I think the universe is a fundamentally knowable place and if things exist outside our means of perceiving them then we'll just bullrush through and work out a temporary explanation on our way.

Here's my Fix/Pitch: Both Tharizdun and Azathoth are supposed to represent primordial chaos and formless madness. D&D's less than stellar history with mental health issues aside, we know that "madness" isn't evil and it isn't the antithetical opposite of order: It's flawed reason, it's an inability to comprehend, and it's deeply scary for those going through it.

THAT ended up reminding me of a famous quote from lovecraft himself; "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown".

What if we make THAT FEAR into the god? Imagine the panicked sensation of being woken from the deepest slumber by a sudden noise, the door opening or a loud bang going off somewhere on your street..... the phantom horror of something touching you, crawling over you in the middle of the night before you have any of your senses or reason or memory to tell you that it's just your partner or your pet or your own bed sheets. That's the stuff sleep paralysis is made of and it's been haunting us humans since the dawn of time. It's also the same horror of being born, of being a non-thing and then coming into existence in fits and starts without any understanding of the world that you're now

Now imagine there's something out there in the astral sea, the plane of dreams and thoughts... powerful beyond all imagining but created without the ability to ever fully wake up. It is stuck in that first moment of existence because it may well have been the first thing to ever exist and it's been trapped in the shapeless nightmare of an infant since the dawn of time

THAT is how you make a god about the horror of the unknown. A god that is antagonistic to us because it is sacred of us, and it is scared because it has no way of knowing us, knowing the reality it inhabits beyond its own fear.

Adventure Hooks:

The greatest threat Tharizdun presents to most beings in the universe is having a nightmare about them. Through the inexplicable paths of sleep an individual's mind may find themselves connected to the entity's own... receiving terrible visions as the thinking clouds of Tharizdun's body churn in a variable brainstorm. Some aspect of this communion will be twisted into something terrible, birthed into the cosmos with the same shrieking fear and confusion that inspired its creation. Some desperate few seek out this communion, thinking in their hubris that they can give shape to Tharizdun's creation, that the terror beyond time suffers collaborators or requests. (Yes, I'm yoinking the dream-spawning ability of beholders. They were already weird enough before they started getting involved with dream stuff)

Despite being a living entity, Tharizdun is also a place, a plane unto itself streaking through the multiverse like a collossal ameoba through the primordial soup. There are landscapes within the god, whole continents that form and erode through seasons of surreality as the paroxyc titan dreams them into being. One can create portals into these landscapes, even fly a jammership across them, but the act of doing so invites an even more chaotic backlash than visiting the chained oblivion in dreams, letting its terror leak out into the waking worlds.

The name "chained oblivion" dates back to an eon when forces of celestial order attempted to keep Tharizdun contained in the hopes of preventing the escape of its creations or its contact with other minds. This period of the multiverse oft refereed to as the "Time of Quiet" sadly came to an end when the entity's bindings were shattered by a collective of villains and horrors today refereed to as the "Court of Fools" or "Troupe of the Final Void". The Troupe are a motley bunch, unable to agree on a theology but all wanting to pick at the slumbering titan like it was a scab on the skin of heaven. Some serenade Tharzidun with cacophonous music, others hurl saints and sacrifices into its body, some worship or hunt the god's offspring while others stab it with cosmic pokers, just to get a reaction. They want to wake the chained oblivion and don't care how much of the multiverse they have to burn to do it.

Like a mollusc producing pearls as a means of containing an irritating bit of grit, Tharizdun's roiling cosmic body will occasionally spit out an entire world or strange demiplanes as a means of dislodging something it could not pallet. While this has been the genesis of many realms both beautiful and terrible throughout the astral timeline, of late all these worlds worth taking have been colonized by the Troupe. Woe and pity to any mortal who calls such a world home, ruled over by tyrants who care only for destruction, unaware of a cosmos not coloured by Tharizdun's wake.

Titles: The chained oblivion, the spiraling titan, sire of stars, the Paroxsmal god, Lord of all Hysterics.

Signs: Stormclouds that look oily and churn with otherworldly light, formless nightmares and pervasive sleep paralysis, mass delusion, darkness that echoes with the god's muttering and the sound of distant flutes.

Worshippers: Ad hoc worship of Tharizdun tends to congregate around those who have received unwanted visions of the chained oblivion, as the harrowing experiance often bestows those that suffer it with an otherworldy weight to their words, to say nothing of occasional psychic powers. Many abberations likewise pay heed to the chained oblivion, either for directly giving them life or for its great and insuppressable power. Among these include Grell who refer to Tharizdun as "storm mother", The nightmarish Quori follow in the wake of the god's psychic emanations and make up a large faction of the court of fools, and the Kaorti, terrifying mage-things remade by exposure to the spiralling titan's heart who claim to be heralds for the entity.

Art

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