#(i have a self imposed rule that i have to draw at least one thing a month)

[goldensunset]

joining the war on autism on the side of the autism etc etc

[xf-cases-solved]

S2E7: 3

Case: Bro... I don't even know where to start with this one. Before this stats project, I had seen 3 maybe one (1) time before, because I had never had any cause to repeat the experience. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to find that, while it is still just as terrible as I remember (and perhaps even worse), it is terrible in an entertaining way, so at least I enjoyed myself, even though I have no FUCKING idea what the plot was about. 

But I'll try to summarize it the best I can. The X-Files are reopened, which would be cool, except Scully is still missing, and Mulder is handling it... poorly. He is basically running his own self-imposed Russian sleep experiment, so much so that at one point during the investigation, a detective asks him if he's going to his hotel to get some rest, and this fucking edgelord sort of huffs a laugh and says, "I don't sleep anymore." Okay, Mulder.

But right, I haven't even said what he's investigating, have I? Well, I would say that he is investigating [REDACTED], but apparently this episode is following zombie apocalypse rules, because literally no one will say the word [REDACTED] out loud except for mb one scene where Mulder briefly references "[REDACTED] myths." Please keep in mind Mulder once showed Scully a shitty drawing of Bigfoot with tiddies and called it the Jersey Devil, so the word [REDACTED] must be pretty fucking cursed for him not to accuse anyone of being one outright. 

Anyway, something something, there's a trio of [REDACTED] in Los Angeles who are called the Holy Trinity, and they're committing murders that have a religious undertone, I guess? And then there's this other [REDACTED], Kristen, who isn't a part of the trinity, but is the ex of one of the people in the trinity? I think? Or he's the one who turned her into a [REDACTED] when they were doing kinky bloodsport stuff? Bro idfk. I was so distracted by the Everything™️ about this fucking episode to really pay attention to the story. It's about [REDACTED] but no one says the word [REDACTED], and that's all you really need to know.

An LAPD detective offers Mulder some assistance on the case, and Edgelord Mulder says, "I work alone," causing the detective to question why an FBI agent doesn't have a partner and we see all five stages of grief flash across Mulder's eyes, and by all five, I mean only one, and that's depression; in the ONLY scene I can recall the word [REDACTED] even coming up, Mulder rambles at a crime scene pathologist(?) about how he had thought such creatures didn't exist, and the pathologist says, and I quote, "You are really upsetting me, on several levels," which was really fucking funny and I wish more people reacted to him that way; Mulder meets a hot [REDACTED] who tries to feed him blood, and his only reaction is to grab her wrist and shout "AIDS!"; the hot [REDACTED] has a tragic backstory, but unfortunately the hot actress who plays her is not very good at acting so no one cares; and Mulder has a very sad hookup, which goes up in flames the morning after. I mean that literally, by the way.

Does someone die in the cold open: Yes. Some [REDACTED] kill him with hypodermic needles??

Does Mulder present a slideshow: He is all alone again since Krycek went and did that whole "trying to murder him" thing, so nah. But you can't keep Mulder away from his projector forever. I want to believe they will be together again soon.

Does the evidence survive the investigation: Looooool

Whodunit: [REDACTED]

Convictions: Yeah, nah fam.

Did they solve it: I guess I'll give Mulder a "yes, but." Yes, but there's no way he's going to be able to write a meaningful report on whatever the fuck that was, and also they all exploded so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[how do i determine if a case is solved? check the scale here: x]

THIS EPISODE IS SPONSORED BY: Hot Topic or My Chemical Romance or fucking fishnet gloves and eyeliner or something, man, idfk. What the fuck even is this emo-ass episode???

***

General Total Stats:

(green means stat has changed since last ep; red means new stat added to list)

Total Cases *Definitively* Solved So Far: 15 (did you really think mulder could solve a case without scully? i doubt that prior to her arrival in that basement office, mulder ever solved an x-file in his entire goddamn life)

Total Number of "Mulder/Scully, It's Me": 9 (she doesn't have cell service on the spaceship, or wherever the fuck she is)

Total Number of Times Scully Has Conveniently Not Seen Something Crucial: 6 (she didn't seen anything, but it certainly wasn't convenient for her; she probably would have preferred to be dealing with [REDACTED] than going through all of those... well, we'll get to that later)

Total Number of Times Mulder Has Been in Mortal Danger: 11 ½ (if he would have died in this episode i would have lost all respect for him immediately) 

Total Number of Times Scully Has Been in Mortal Danger: 11 (i think as long as we don't know her whereabouts it's valid to consider her as being in mortal danger)

Total Number of Sexually Charged, Uncomfortably Intimate, and/or Flirty Moments Between Friendly Coworkers: 16 (fuck it, if i counted him gazing longingly at the sky last episode, i can count him wearing scully's necklace the entire episode and holding it in his hand and staring at it sadly in this one. someone, somewhere mentioned recently in a text post that he would have had to lengthen the chain for it to fit him the way it does, and that's just ☹️)

Total Number of Autopsies Scully Has Performed On Screen: 5 

Total Number of Times Scully Plays Doctor: 2

Total Number of Times Mulder Talks to an Informant: 19 (oh my GOD how X would have roasted him if he had been in this episode tho. it would have been glorious)

Total Number of Times People Making Out in a Car Are Hurt or Killed: 2

Total Number of Times Someone Correctly Guesses a Password: 3 

Total Number of (Plot Relevant) Nosebleeds: 5

Total Number of Times Mulder Has Tasted/Sniffed/Touched Something Questionable Without Following Proper Safety Procedures: 3 (no, but that mfer came VERY close to eating blood, but thankfully his fear of aids prevented it (and not the fact that it was fucking weird for a stranger to offer you her blood to taste??? ok. i think it is way past your bedtime, mulder))

Total Number of Times Someone Says "Trust No One": 3 

Total Number of Times Someone Says "I Want to Believe": 4 

Total Number of Times Someone Says "The Truth is Out There": 2 

Total Number of Cigarettes Cigarette Smoking Man Has Smoked: 13 

Total Number of Maggie Scully Sightings: 2

Total Number of Lone Gunmen Sightings: 2

Total Number of Alex Krycek Sightings: 3 (no more krycek for right now 😔. but like mulder's projector, i want to believe he will return)

Total Number of Times I Had to Look Up What State the Episode Takes Place in Even Though I Literally Just Watched It: 11½ (i wrote it down, even tho i don't recall doing so)

Total Number of Times I Had to Look at an Episode's Wikipedia Page to Fill This Out Because It Was Fucking Confusing and/or Too Boring for Me to Pay Attention: 6 (this episode is fucking stupid lmfao)

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

They’ve put up all the Taskmaster season 16 interviews already, which I like. In recent seasons they’ve been putting them out earlier and earlier into the season, and I always thought they should really just put all of them up before the season starts, as those are meant to be a way to get a feel for the contestants ahead of actually seeing them. The way they’ve split it in earlier seasons has a couple airing before the season starts and then the others airing a few episodes in, so some give you that feel for ones we don’t know about yet and then some are just extra details about people we’ve already seen on the show, and it’s a bit confusing. I much prefer being able to watch them all beforehand.

I watched them all tonight, and quite enjoyed that. Liked the format of this one – finally making them draw a picture of Alex after years of drawing Greg. And God, Alex is good at his job. Sometimes I forget a bit, or just take it for granted, how incredibly funny Alex Horne can be while just really causally, deadpan, fucking with a contestant via simple questions. To answer one of the questions he asked – no, I don’t think anyone else could do that job as well as he does (though Paul Williams is also fucking good at it). I think a lot of other people could do Greg’s job, very few could do Alex’s.

The interviews were fun. I enjoyed how much of an impression Julian Clary made, as I haven’t seen him do much else so that was a nice way to get to know him a bit. Imposing and confident. The only one to not just do everything Alex asked him. Clearly it’s a character, but there may have also been an underlying bit of “I have had a very long and very successful career in showbusiness, I don’t need to be desperate to do well on a panel show.”

Lucy Beaumont’s reminded me of how much I enjoy watching Lucy Beaumont do anything. I’ve seen her do quite a few things by now, and I still don’t have much of a handle on how much of her ditzy persona is real, but I am looking forward to seeing if I can figure it out via Taskmaster. Not even try to figure out “her true hidden self” or whatever – I’d just like to know how much of it we’re supposed to assume is a character. Though the fact that I can’t really tell is definitely part of her charm. Nearly everything about her is part of her charm. She’s got a lot of charm. So much charm.

I liked Sue Perkins’ mix of Julian Cleary’s “I’m too successful to need to be desperate to impress on a panel show” attitude (the exact opposite of Lucy Beaumont, who came off as being full of “desperate to impress on a panel show” attitude, which is what I’d expected from her), and Lucy Beaumont’s struggling and scrambling. She came off as pretty similar to the Sue Perkins I know from other panel shows, which is exactly what I hope she’ll be on Taskmaster. The duality of humanity. The confidence and the scrambling. The cool exterior and the panic. It’s going to be fun.

Susan Wokoma was the one I knew the least well, even including Cleary, so seeing her was fun. It was funny to watch her after someone like Julian Cleary, who was deadpanning right alongside Alex. While Susan was the opposite, breaking into giggles at the absurdity of everything he said, reminding me that way of Desiree Burch or even Katherine Parkinson. Constantly surprised by the revelation of what show she’s on (which might be explained by her answer of “my agents wanted me to” when asked why she did the show). Her laugh is fun to listen to, as is her defensiveness every time Alex changes the rules. I look forward to listening to both those things for ten episodes.

Sam Campbell had me worried for a bit, with my bold claims that I think he will be better at the tasks (not even at the comedy, just at scoring points in the tasks) than anyone else on this season. It doesn’t bode incredibly well toward me being proven right that he couldn’t remember how pronouns worked and tripped over his words on every sentence when asked to make a pretty simple language change. That skill is integral to a lot of tasks. Though my hopes were restored when his picture was revealed at the end, and it was by far the best. That’s a skill I didn’t even know he had when I was listing the skills he’s displayed through his stand-up that I think will make him good at tasks. Turns out Sammy C can draw, add that to the list of reasons for my prediction! (Actually I’ve just realized I did already know that, he drew that picture that James Acaster brought in ages ago.) Anyway, he was huge fun, that was the sort of energy level I've been hoping he'll bring.

I had a friend on Tumblr apologize to me the other day for whether they talk too much about finding a comedian attractive, as though I am too respectable a person for such tawdry things and shouldn’t have to hear them. Which is a ridiculous thing to apologize for, given that I’m well aware that Tumblr.com is very much the talking about famous people you want to fuck website. I mean, I might personally use it for other things, but I’m not here to disrespect its main function. So having said that, I’ve had a crush on Sue Perkins since I first got into Radio 4’s The News Quiz when I was nineteen. I didn’t even know what she looked like until I’d been hearing her voice for years, but just hearing her on the radio was enough to do that (though… when I eventually Googled a picture of her, that certainly didn’t hurt). On the subject of voices, seeing Lucy Beaumont’s video has reminded me that that particular accent is… certainly an impressive accent. That’s a good accent. What's the least creepy way I can say that's a good accent? Because I'd like to do that. And look, I sort of think that everyone, regardless of their gender or usual sexual orientation, who sees Sam Campbell has at least a bit of a crush on him.

So there you go, I thought I’d end my post with something to let people know that no one has to apologize to me for calling comedians hot on Tumblr.com; I can do it too, even if I usually make at least some effort to say these sorts of things slightly less often than I think them. But I’m glad everyone is having a good time.

New season tomorrow! New season tomorrow! Very excited for the new season tomorrow (even though I’m going to see Grace Petrie tomorrow, which I’m incredibly fucking excited about, so I won’t get to watch the episode until Friday after work). Happy early Taskmaster Day to all who celebrate!

[kinocomix]

Metal band story devlog 10: OKAY. CHARACTER DESIGNS. LET’S GET TO IT.

So initially when I finally decided it was time for some character designs I faced a problem. It was not a lack of skill or frustration at my art, it was the fact that I don’t know what I’m designing really. let me explain:

I think a very important thing to do in general is to be aware of your shortcomings and I try to apply this rule to myself as often as possible without it being self destructive. one of those shortcomings is my inability to draw things that I’m not personally familiar with.

I don’t think I would have ever drawn shoes that weren’t my own, so you can imagine what that says about characters and people.

This tends to bleed into art block and a good solution for it is to usually find inspiration somewhere. I don’t like doing that, nothing wrong about it and before you accuse me of being on my high horse I will gently remind you and myself that there is nothing new under the sun. I will inevitably end up being inspired by something even if I’m not actively aware of it but I find that basing a design on someone else’s design feels derivative, which setting aside the legal issues of me wanting to publish potentially copied designs, isn’t very nice of me to do to my fellow artists. I’m better than that. In any case I needed to try to start somewhere so I tried making a design for character A. this is the classical musician. I didn’t base the design on their personality because that never not felt weird to me. I don’t want to know what someone is like when I see them, that’s not how people work. 

here is the pathetic first attempt, where i went in with “they’re probably tall and skinny” in mind:

I knew that A would be a classical musician, so I really wanted to include at least a vague reference to one of my favourite pianists, Nahre Sol. I think she’s very cool and so I opted to make A’s hair similar to her’s.

The actual image is upside down

It still looked boring as fuck tho so as is the case with character design, you iterate.

Here you can see I drew a crane, which is a thing you can do when you think designing people is boring as fuck which it usually is if you don’t have fun with the shapes. I really liked how the crane’s body looked like a teardrop and how long the legs were, it also was mostly black and white which went well with the “classical musician who wears classical clothes” vibe.

So I tried a more geometric approach, with long legs but It didn’t fit into the vibe I had in mind and the feet were so comically large i anticipated people would be distracted by it:

I defaulted back to a more organic looking teardrop shape and ended up with this which i liked:

Let’s note a couple of things about this: I liked the eyes, but i very quickly realised I can’t have that be the default shape of the eyes, because please look at this monstrosity: 

I came back to it the next day and made a realisation: those are some big legs. So I decided to lean into it and thought It would be cool if she was strong and muscular, and you’ll note that I’m saying “she”, we’ll get to that in a moment.

I had taken the time to think about the fact that I'd like her more if she was more in context. Because floating in the void like that, she’s just some character which was bothering me. So I started small and made a height chart with some general body types/shapes:

This made me more confident in the design because it had some story now, she was very tall and imposing. 

I was reminded of a tweet by Pseudonymjones where she talks about a kid who saw her and called her “the lady with the big muscles” which i thought was cool as fuck in may 2019 and still think is cool as fuck now.

This made me like the character so much more and It made sense to me because of everything that I knew so far about the character and the setting that she would be trans. All my research showed that metal musicians would be very likely to be normal understanding human beings and I already know what not to do and what’s preferable from the research I did for Almost Home.

So I present to you the first sketch of Leila:

Note: when designing characters I always design them naked, because clothes a character design does not make. They help, but you can’t start there.

Obviously the design will evolve naturally (and by the end of this devlog update) and get polished the more I draw her but I think this is a solid start. For starters let’s fix those ankles and draw some more sketches to get a feel for what Leila is like when she moves.

Okay, I’m digging the vibe. I also drew this other one where I forgot to factor in the pelvis when accounting for the length of the legs, so i went ahead and tried to edit it:

It looks a bit better, the legs still look gigantic but I think I want to keep that. I imagine she goes to the gym quite frequently on account of being a tryhard. Perhaps that’s one of the things I could explore in the story?

I also tried messing around with her face a bit. I ended up sticking to the one I originally made, which felt the most natural. Maybe that says something about me and how I go with the first thing I see, but it is what it is.

Also here’s a tip for anyone who might need it, you know those doll dress up games where you drag PNGs onto the model? You can use that system when trying to make variations of a design. I did it with a light pad.

This was when I consulted a friend of mine, Alaa. He pointed out the limbs i drew looked kind of ballooney. This wasn't from a lack of reference, it was the abstraction that was done improperly. You see here's two things to keep in mind: firstly I didn't want her to look muscular despite how strong she is. Obviously some of it is bound to show what with her legs as you'll see but I wanted her to seem like a quirky human at first. Secondly, while it's true that I tried to make the limbs with contracted muscles bigger if that's not tastefully done then it just looks silly. So here's where we're at now:

To the left here's you'll note two things, Alaa suggested making her five heads tall instead of 6 which we'll get to in a moment, and the fact that the musculature seems more real now. Here's what i decided to take from his suggestion: i like that the muscles look nicer in the legs, so i changed the legs to match and shortened the pelvis to make her a head shorter. Now about that missing head. Initially while this made the proportions better this also made her shorter which goes against the “awesome towering person” effect i wanted to give her so i had 2 options. I either could keep the extra length but try to fit it in somewhere which could work but it would add extra time to this entire process which I do not have and I am one human being; OR I could simply scale her up. This would make her base circle bigger which would require some quick math every time i need to put her in a scene but that's not an issue for me. 

And this is where we ended up. This is something we can use to make a turn around ref sheet once we have an outfit(s). For reference, I drew Graham from Almost home who is about the size of an average human:

Yes, Charlie and Graham are not actually short. Everyone is just taller than them cause that's my experience being short, It just never came up lol

Here's what I like about this and here's what I'm glad I did not include: I like the cartooney proportions that still show some respect to the human. I like that she has the stubborn belly fat that some body builders struggle with. I like that while she looks imposing and is to some extent, a lot of her personality traits will contrast that and give her depth and nuance. (Also in case you're curious, her base circle is 1.2 times the size of average characters)

A final note, which is by no means an insult to any stylistic approach or artist, there's a fine line to tread between “muscular curvy woman” and “pixar mom”. Here's a drawing on the back of a receipt that a friend drew with some suggestions on how to push the proportions. Solid suggestions, but they don't really fit the vibe I'm going for which is fine- when we make art not everyone is going to like it and that's just how things are.

And yes, she's still naked. Clothes come at the very end when we know we have all the proportions and visual quirks figured out. Buuut that's something I won't include in the devlog. Gotta draw the line of “okay, spoilers” somewhere. Next week, we'll start doing the rest of the cast.

Devlog updates on Tuesdays.

[chrysaliscreatorii]

Note

While my self-impose rules for this challenge do specify that I was not to draw the same creature twice, I made a small exception with 21 and 20 because, well, the whole deal with Sun and Moon it’s that they are basically fraternal twins, and I wanted to play into that concept.

So I count it as a yes-but-not-really thing. After all, I still needed to reflect the attitude of the characters and mimic their cloths. So… take that as you may, but I’m happy with the results.

…except Eclipse… truthfully, I wanted to do a more ominous design for him to reflect his bitterness, sadness and trauma, but it was one of those uninspired days, the day was ending in general, I just drew what popped up at the moment, and I wanted to do all the main cast in a row to have them all together, so he didn’t turn out as good as I wished… maybe in the future, but I don’t know.

Also, to Sun and Moon if you ever read this (lol), I honestly was going to draw you without hair and have those be scales as a lesson to teach you to stop teasing your brother about being bald since it’s obvious he’s self-conscience about it, but you are my favorite character in the show since I relate the most to you (no offense Moon, you’re cool too) so I felt bad and wanted for you to have at least one win instead. You deserve a break and a good vacation.

💞

Oh! And say hi to Jack the Jackal… yep. Jack-o-moon the Jackal. I went there, sue me. lol

Plus it fits him, look up Jackals. You’ll see what I mean.

[stuff-from-the-void-matron]

-Being The Duke’s Assistant- (3)

(a/n: some people really like this fic lol so here’s another chapter for y’all! also if you want a chapter 4 then please comment and reblog! otherwise I won’t have the motivation to keep writing more! thank you! <3)

–

-Learning About The Lords-

–

You’d seen more of your ex-neighbors since your run in with Vasile Kazloŭ the week previous. Seems word got around the village that you’d not in fact frozen to death or been caught and dragged into the woods by some snarling beast. And you knew a good few of them were just stopping by the Duke’s carriage under the guise of shopping just to see if those rumors were true. Not that you particularly cared what your ex-neighbors did now. If seeing you for whatever reason got them to buy something from the Duke then no skin off your nose. 

But today was different. Today the Duke said he’d be educating you on his biggest trade deals. Such deals being the Four Lords of the village. You’ll admit you gulped at hearing that. The four lords were quite notorious to the people of the village. And not for anything good despite what the fanatics would like to think..

Lady Dimitrescu, the mysterious lady who ruled the imposing castle upon the mountain that takes young women in to work but never lets them leave again. There’s a saying in the village that if a girl you know is going to work at Castle Dimitrescu then you should shower her in kisses since you’ll never see her again.

Lady Beneviento, the mysterious veiled doll maker who lives in a shadowy haunted manor that makes all those who enter there see their deceased family members. Seeing visions of the dead drives all who enter there to insanity. Most never leave, but the few who do are never the same as they were upon entering.

Lord Moreau, the monstrous looking recluse who controls the giant killer fish that has swallowed whole more than its fair share of poor fishermen of the village. It terrorized the workers at the Reservoir, devouring men like fish until they’d had enough and abandoned the site. It now sits in decay, waiting for the next fool to wander in.

Lord Heisenberg, the lord who owns the cryptic factory on the very edge of the village, where all the dead villagers bodies are sent and never seen again. Rumor has it that it used to be a coal mine but nobody living from the village has set foot in the rusted structure in decades. But despite this the factory’s smokestacks constantly billow dark soot into the sky.

Every villager knew of the four Lords. 

But apparently you were going to be learning more detail on them. Which you admit to not having much of. All you knew is what most every other villager knew. To be wary, be respectful, to pay your tributes, and do not draw attention to yourself otherwise. Those that drew attention were quite often known to draw their last breath.

The Duke it seemed was on good terms with each of the lords, at least you assumed so since he talked about them quite candidly. Not whispering their names in a hushed tone or with any amount of fearful reverence. Actually he talked about them as if they were just fellow business partners he has evening tea with. Which... well as far as you knew, could very well be the truth. But despite the Duke’s blasé outlook you felt yourself tense up when he mentioned how, as his assistant, you would be accompanying him on his future meetings with them, so it was best he told you about them now so you didn’t go in blind. Part of you wanted to just avoid that by not even going into the same building as the four lords. But the Duke squashed that thought by saying he couldn’t very well leave you to sit and twiddle your thumbs in the carriage while he was inside. 

Which you supposed you should have seen coming. You were his assistant after all. Where he goes, you go. It’s your whole job. So you steeled your resolve and took solace in knowing that while under the Duke’s protection you would be fine. you weren’t some random villager now thankfully. But even still... seeing the towering Castle Dimitrescu looming in the distance made you queasy. Your mind swam with the stories you’d been told as a child, warning you of what laid in that castle. The carriage drew closer to the imposing structure but you remained straight faced, not wanting to reveal how anxious you were. Plus, if you were being honest? This was all pretty exciting in a way! You’d left the village years ago sure, met lots of new people while you studied abroad. You learned about all the goings on of the world outside your simple village. But all of that paled in comparison to getting to meet the Four Lords.

You hoped you didn’t embarrass yourself..

-0-

While you got closer to the castle the Duke told you about the first Lord, Lady Dimitrescu and House Dimitrescu. Apparently they were famous for their incredible wine. The Duke even admitted to having a bottle of it himself stored away in the back. “For special occasions,” he told you with a smile. You also learned that House Dimitrescu also had their own vineyard where they grew all the grapes that went into the wine they made. He also revealed that there was a ‘rumor’ that Lady Dimitrescu had a very special bottle of wine in her possession, one that has belonged to her family for generations, that was called Sanguis Virginis. And its literal translation is "maiden's blood". The Duke was a touch vague on the wine, but he said that Alcina Dimitrescu has a secret process that enriches the wine’s flavor and gives it a thick bouquet. 

After that he began talking about the second Lord, Lady Beneviento and House Beneviento. The Duke spoke with a sad tone here, saying the Beneviento family slowly fell apart a long time ago. One by one the family members disappeared. And the current head of the household, Donna Beneviento, had a sister when she was a child, Claudia. But Claudia grew ill and passed away, causing her parents to grow depressed and soon after take their own lives, leaving poor Donna alone. The Duke knows Donna to be very kind, but also very lonely. She’s an incredibly skilled doll maker, even better than her father had been when he was alive. But she has trouble speaking with people without the aid of the doll friend, Angie, that her father gifted her as a little girl. He warned you that Angie could be a bit of a troublemaker, chuckling as he did.

Then came the third Lord, Salvatore Moreau of House Moreau. You raised an eyebrow when you noticed the small hint of revulsion in the Duke’s voice as he spoke about this lord. It seems that Moreau was... an odd one. The Duke tried to speak kindly of the man but even he, with his usual jovial outlook, couldn’t hide the slight way he cringed as he explained Moreau’s history. It seemed he had been a sailor at some point, and the very last of his family line, but some years ago he’d... changed physically to the point where he avoided people. He hid himself at the Reservoir his family owned and scarcely stepped foot outside of it. And after one too many... accidents there the workers abandoned the place, leaving Moreau alone to wallow in his self pity. The Duke warned you that Moreau did not look... human. And he asked you to please not stare at the man. He wouldn’t appreciate it, surely.

And then the final Lord, Karl Heisenberg of House Heisenberg. The Duke warned you that despite Lord Heisenberg’s rather casual sounding attitude, the man was quite harsh. And his factory was incredibly dangerous. He warned you to never stray from his side while there, for your own safety. You gulped but nodded as he continued. It seems the Heisenberg factory was a coal mining factory. You discovered that the Lord was an engineer, but the Duke revealed that he’d been known to tinker with things other than machines as well. That ominous note made your stomach drop. But you felt your anxiety lift a bit when the Duke told you that he was Lord Heisenberg’s supplier for a certain machine part he needs in bulk, so the man knew not to upset him. So you would be fine.

“But I think we’ll have to cut our conversation short, it seems we’ve arrived at Castle Dimitrescu,” the Duke said in a cheery tone you weren’t matching.

‘For any god listening to me... let us be alright,’ you thought helplessly.

-0-

[fictionadventurer]

@isfjmel-phleg, if you don't mind me being Catholic at your characters, I find myself headcanoning how they'd approach Lent.

(For the purposes of this exercise, I'm ignoring canon religious affiliations. This is just what I picture they'd do if they were in a religion that celebrated Lent. Please correct me if I'm wrong.). (And if this offends you, I can take it down).

Rietta: Actually rather enjoys Lent. Now their lack of luxuries isn't poverty, it's fasting. Probably goes to the ruins on the grounds every once in a while and pretends to be a hermitess in the desert and similar things. Her mother probably does several spiritual disciplines and Rietta probably adopts at least one or two of them. Excited by opportunities for almsgiving.

Rachel: Her parents have firm expectations of what children are supposed to give up for Lent, and she tries to follow it to the letter. Spends all of Lent fretting over the legalese of her self-imposed rules--is she doing it right, is eating this mildly sweet thing cheating on her penance, etc.

Amarantha: Has firm opinions about what everyone else should give up for Lent. Gives up something personal--penance is probably art-related, only drawing in plain pencil for the season or something. But most of her attention is focused on doing secret little good deeds for her parents.

Josiah: Is giving up all the things for Lent, and makes very certain you're aware of the intense spiritual disciplines that he's taking on. By the end of the first week, he's miserable and everyone around him is suffering for it. Somewhere around weeks 3 or 4, he cracks and binges on something he gave up, and spends the rest of Lent secretly wallowing in guilt and trying to ensure that no one ever finds out about his weakness.

Elystan: His health means that he's never been expected to do any real fasting, and he's never been interested in it. That doesn't stop him from abusing it as an excuse. He's the kind of kid who gives up schoolwork. Does things like claim he's given up Coregean for Lent, so he'll only speak in Latin. Anything Josiah wants him to do is met with, "Sorry, I gave that up for Lent." Josiah wouldn't need to give up anything that year, because living with Elystan is penance enough. (Of course, Elystan says the same about him.)

Tamett: Is totally up for the "giving up schoolwork" type of penance. He actually does consider trying to claim that giving up a study hour counts as penance, until a letter from home makes him feel guilty, and he decides to give up sweets.

Delclis: Gives up chocolate and calls it a day. No reason to waste any more thought on this than necessary.

[itsclydebitches]

Um one thing i wanna ask is why do you want penny to stay a robot? She would have been hacked again as it wouldn’t make sense for someone not to try it again... ignoring the pinnochio allusion thing cause of course RWBY shouldn’t follow fairytales like a script, but just thinking about practicality as the problem would just occur again.

Also, people complaining about how its a problem they cured her illness (having the virus)... why would you want her too keep the virus when its literally about to kill her and the cure is right there???? I dunno some of the complaints have me a bit confused and i need clarity on them.

Like, If they didn’t grab the relic for themselves, they would have been hunted by ironwood for penny, she would have been killed for the powers to open the vault etc... if they went to the vault with penny without their plan, she would have died... its all a lose lose for penny to me at least

Questions are genuine and I’m not trying to be rude or anything :)

Happy to explain, anon! :D

I’m going to break this up into three parts: The claim that people are upset about Penny’s virus going away, the idea that she’s in more danger as a robot, and the assumption that she had to be made human to fix this problem. 

The first is the easiest to tackle simply because I haven’t seen any of this myself. I don’t know why someone would “want her to keep the virus when it’s literally about to kill her.” My guess would be that there’s been some miscommunication at play. I’m not saying just because I haven’t seen these takes doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but rather that I have seen a lot of critical takes since Saturday and they all boil down to the fans being upset that Penny’s android identity was removed, not that the virus was removed along with it. Of course we’re happy about that additional outcome, we just believe it would have been possible  — even easy  — to achieve that same outcome without taking a core part of Penny’s identity along with it (more on that below).

Secondly, if one of the main arguments for Penny getting a human body is “It’s less dangerous” then I personally don’t find that persuasive. Yes, it means no one can try to hack her again... but it also means Penny can die all the horrible, messy human deaths that she was previously immune from (within the boundary of how long Pietro can give her aura, anyway). We saw it happen on screen. Penny was able to go from this

to this

purely because she was an android. Penny, due to her synthetic body, was able to be torn apart and then  — pretty casually it seems, based on Pietro’s comments  — be put back together, given more aura, and booted up with absolutely no downsides. Penny shrugged off death with a smile! No human body can do that. So yes, she’s vulnerable to hacking as an android, but she’s vulnerable to everything else as a human, things like Nora’s scars and Yang’s lost arm, things that android!Penny would have shrugged off. Each body has its benefits and its downsides, with my personal belief being that, from a combat standpoint, a synthetic body has far fewer downsides and far greater benefits. But that opinion aside, objectively I don’t think a human body is intrinsically safer for Penny in the long run, especially not after her biggest moment in the series was coming back from the dead. She can’t do that anymore. 

Which then touches on our third topic with the question: Why couldn’t the show have fixed android!Penny in a way that ensures she can never be hacked again? See, we have to remember that RWBY is a constructed, fictional story. Nothing “has” to happen. Or rather, nothing has to happen until the writers impose limitations on the text that the viewer expects them to adhere to. For example, if you impose the implied rules of 1. “Our four main characters will make it to the end of the series” and 2. “A character, without aura, will die from a spear through the gut,” then RWBY has to find a way for Weiss to survive Cinder’s attack (rule #1), but that solution can’t be, “Weiss is just randomly okay after a deadly injury, I guess” (rule #2). Hence, we get the solution of “Jaune unlocks his semblance and heals Weiss for her” and it works! It’s a solution that viewers like because it obeys all the rules, both overt and implied. Meanwhile, the problem with Penny’s solution is two-fold. The first is that it contradicts the entire journey she’s been on of “Android girl learns that she’s real and human just the way she is,” which I’ve already spoken about extensively (there are other posts on that), but the second problem is that the show ignores other possibilities and makes up new rules solely to reach this ending. 

Why is Penny made human? Because of Ambrosius’ rules. Why do those rules exist? Because the writers said they do in this episode. It’s not that they introduced these rules episodes or even whole volumes ago, thereby requiring that they adhere to them once Penny’s life is suddenly caught up in them (like with the Jaune example). Rather, the viewer only learned these were limitations while Penny was being fixed. So the writers could have just... not included those. There’s no reason why, in developing Ambrosius’ abilities right then and there, the show couldn’t have made them into something a little different. Have Ruby go, “We want you to magic up an anti-virus program that will heal Penny completely, with no chance of the virus returning. Thus, when you create something new, it doesn’t matter if that program disappears. The virus is already gone!” If the response to that is, “But Clyde, Ambrosius can’t create something he doesn’t understand” that’s a rule that the writers just made up. No one forced them to suddenly impose that limitation. It was a choice. Or even if we have to have it for some reason, you’re telling that the group gets to have the schematics for their escape route  — essentially inventing a teleportation system because Whitley looked at airship flight paths for a few minutes  — but they can’t have Penny or Pietro draw up an anti-virus program? There’s no reason why these rules couldn’t have been tweaked to cure android!Penny. 

There’s also no reason why Ambrosius needed to be involved at all. As just mentioned, Pietro exists and many fans (myself included) thought he would be the solution. Imagine for a moment we had a slightly different version of these events. Penny’s virus is briefly halted by Jaune and, finally given a moment to breathe, she asks where her father is. Last she saw, he was floating in a dead Amity after Cinder’s attack. This reminds Ruby that hey, Pietro made Penny! He’s just as smart as Watts and is far more knowledgeable of her systems. Maybe he can help? So the group heads to Amity and, due to the same techno mumbo jumbo that launched Amity in the first place, or had Klein heal Penny after her crash, Pietro says yes, he can get rid of the virus. Better yet, he can slightly redesign Penny so that she’s made un-hackable in the future, using (again, mumbo jumbo) parts from the now useless Amity. But it will take time. It’s then that the group receives Ironwood’s message and learns that they don’t have time. The reality that Penny will not be cured before the hour time limit necessitates that they come up with a creative way of dealing with Ironwood. Enter Emerald. Her semblance can make it seem like Penny is there, despite her being fixed by her dad miles away. We get an extended fight with Ironwood and, at episode’s end, the new and improved Penny catches up, ready to open the vault for them, this time of her own free will. 

Now, obviously I just made this up off the top of my head  — far from perfect  — but a scenario like this: 

Remembers that Pietro exists and lets him/Maria as an assistant do something for the plot

Re-uses Amity now that it’s just a floating pile of junk metal 

Creates a scenario where we get to see Penny and Pietro confront the fact that she was created to be a tool (sorry I originally made you so easily hackable/put a self-destruct in your brain) 

Maintains all the main story beats like Penny’s near escape, Ironwood’s message, and using Emerald’s semblance

Makes space to tackle other issues like the complaint that Ironwood was taken down too quickly 

Achieves the desired result of healing Penny without taking away her android identity 

Proves that, because we can easily come up with another solution, the idea that she “had” to become human is inaccurate. There were always other options 

Hell, we can even ask why the story bothered with a self-destruct threat in the first place. Seriously, why did Watts do that? I have my own headcanons, but the show never says. This act is the entire BASIS for Penny’s conflict and the show didn’t bother to a) say why he’d do this or b) explain why he’d do this when Salem would presumably like having a Maiden to control. It’s counterintuitive and the show never grapples with that. We have no canonical answer here. More importantly, what else changes if Penny’s self-destruct order is taken out of the narrative? Absolutely nothing. She’s still hacked and struggles to keep Amity afloat, still flies to Ruby, still wakes up and needs to be calmed down by Nora, still tells Whitley her order, still fights the Hound, still tries to escape, still tells Ruby to kill her so she doesn’t open the vault, and Ruby still realizes that opening the vault might be the answer. They could have taken Penny to the door and nullified the virus by letting her do what the virus ordered. Penny is fine now, they snag the Relic, and the group proceeds to save all of Mantle and Atlas. The only thing this self-destruct sequence brings to the narrative is a reason to give Penny a human body. That plot-point was introduced solely as an excuse to give Penny a human body. That never had to happen. It’s not that the writers had a story where, by the rules already in place, they truly had to change Penny to ensure they didn’t lose her, it’s that the writers carefully crafted a story that existed to justify their desire to change Penny. That was always the end goal. They decided they wanted this to happen and that’s the problem here. That they took a character who has spent her entire, fictional existence learning to love herself as she is and crafted a bunch of unpersuasive, needless, and contradictory scenarios specifically to get Penny to a place where they could erase all that. 

There’s no version of Penny that exists who truly had to get a human body to survive because Penny is a fictional character. Everything she does and experiences is thought up by our writers. Thus, at some point they thought up the idea to erase her android identity for a completely human one instead  — the part a lot of people are upset by   — and then made some messy attempts to write a story to justify getting that ending.  

[aurora077]

Securing Sect Leader Jin

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13926514/1/Securing-Sect-Leader-Jin

Chapter 1 - Before securing Sect Leader Jin, you must first secure the donkey.

Disclaimer: This will be a mix of canons so like in CQL, Wei Wuxian goes travelling after the temple’s events. However, he has been resurrected in Mo Xuanyu’s body rather than his own, like in the novel. Also I do not own MDZS/CQL that belongs to MXTX.

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“Wei Wuxian?! What are you doing here?” Jiang Cheng scowled.

“Shhhhhh! They’ll hear us!” he hissed, barely refraining from clapping a hand over Jiang Cheng’s mouth. That would have certainly gotten them caught because Jiang Cheng would probably have murdered him on the spot.

Jiang Cheng reluctantly shut up but glared fiercely at him. The effect was rather lessened by the fact that they were both hiding like thieves behind a large bush and spying on their nephew.

“Wen Ning couldn’t come today so I’m following the juniors in his place,” he whispered.

It had been a few months after the incident at Guanyin Temple, and while travelling was something he’d always wanted to do, he could admit to himself it was a bit lonely when his only company was a recalcitrant donkey. By chance he had stumbled across Wen Ning and A-Yuan who had just set out on their journey to give the Wen Remnants a proper send off and Wen Ning had expressed his dismay that he would not be able to look out for Jin Ling during night hunts while he was gone (he still felt guilty for being partially responsible for the death of the boy’s father and had dedicated himself to keeping him safe, especially since Jin Ling seemed to have forgiven him). Wei Wuxian had enthusiastically volunteered to be his replacement while the newly discovered uncle-nephew pair took the time to bond with each other. “Everything will be fine Wen Ning, you’ll see! I’ll be Jin Ling’s guard until you get back!”

It had reassured Wen Ning only partially, because while he could agree that Jin Ling would be safe, he worried that Wei Wuxian would not be. Far be it for him to comment on Wei Wuxian’s choices but he did worry for his friend who had no self-preservation skills whatsoever. But regardless, Wen Ning went along with A-Yuan and trusted that Wei Wuxian would keep both Jin Rulan and himself safe.

He did however forget to warn Wei Wuxian that he might bump into Sect Leader Jiang, who  took his nephew’s safety very seriously and followed him along on night hunts (in secret because Jin Ling was now Sect Leader Jin and he felt it was beneath his dignity to have his uncle trailing after him the entire time.)

To Jiang Cheng it just seemed like his little nephew was whining about being ‘a big boy now jiujiu’ and ‘you don’t have to hold my hand anymore jiujiu’ (well Jin Ling hadn’t used those exact words but Jiang Cheng had on jiujiu-coloured glasses). Jiang Cheng, of course, disagreed with Jin Ling’s assertion that he didn’t need to follow him. Being Sect Leader Jin actually brought Jin Ling even more danger than before because his position was not solid and many people wanted to kill him to take over the sect themselves or to destabilise the sect even more than it already was. So like it or not, when Jin Ling was on a night hunt, Jiang Cheng would be following closely behind. No assassin was going to get Jin Ling on his watch!

Luckily for our two stalkers the night hunt was relatively simple and Jin Ling, together with the loud Lan and the lone Ouyang with any sense in his head, had finished it up swiftly and they were just looking for an inn to stay the night before heading back to their sects in the morning. The boys got their rooms and tiredly went to take baths before dinner, unaware that they had been followed. This left Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng standing awkwardly outside the inn (because they couldn’t stick too close, they’d be noticed!), neither knowing what to say to the other. It was much easier back in the forest where they couldn’t speak because neither wished to be caught skulking around.

“Ah Jiang Cheng could you um….” Wei Wuxian rubbed the back of his head sheepishly, “Uh, nevermind…”

“What is it?” “It’s nothing, don't worry,” he said nervously. He was always nervous around Jiang Cheng now. Their days of easy camaraderie were a thing of the past.

Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes, “Just spit it out!”

That was familiar enough that the words spilled out before he realised it. “Uh so I left Lil Apple tied at the edge of the forest and I need to go feed him or he’ll get cranky and will wake up the entire town with his braying tonight. I just wondered if you would maybe, um..reserve-a-room-for-me-as-well when you go in…” he said, rushing the words, then stammering, “B..but it’s okay if you don’t want to! I’ll just try to get one afterwards, if they have any left by then haha.”

“Still travelling with that ridiculous donkey then are you? I thought you’d be holed up in the Cloud Recesses with Lan Wangji. Didn’t you leave together with him?” Jiang Cheng scoffed.

“Hehe, well Lan Zhan is busy, you know. Zewu-Jun is in seclusion so he has to help Lan Qiren run the sect.” “That doesn’t explain why you’re not there with him. I mean I never expected you to fall for Lan Wangji of all people especially when you’d have to live in Cloud Recesses with their 4000 rules and Grandmaster Lan who hates your guts, but hey there’s no accounting for taste.”

“Hey! Lan Zhan is great! Anyone would be lucky to have him even with their 4000 rules. And I told you, we’re just friends, it’s not like that,” he replied, pouting slightly. The truth was Lan Zhan hadn’t asked him to stay and he… well he didn’t want to impose. He’d already caused Lan Zhan so much trouble, with his sect and otherwise. It’s not as if he could have stayed forever anyway, he wasn’t a Lan and Jiang Cheng wasn’t wrong, Lan Qiren did hate him.

“Right, so you bowed in the ancestral hall for no reason other than to pay respects together with your “very good friend”, nothing more to it?”

“Exactly!”  he replied brightly.

Jiang Cheng huffed in disbelief but didn’t pursue the matter. He couldn’t tell if the sarcasm was lost or if Wei Wuxian was being purposefully obtuse. But whatever, far be it for him to help out that condescending, Wei Wuxian-stealing, Lan Wangji anyway.

“What have you been doing if you haven’t been in the Cloud Recesses then?”

“Oh you know, just travelling here and there. Seeing the world. All that good stuff. Experiencing the life of a rogue cultivator.” He didn’t really have a place to go back to after all, travelling was all he could do, but it felt pathetic saying it out loud.

Jiang Cheng raised an eyebrow, “Then how did you land up back here, checking on A-Ling? Isn’t that what The Ghost General does now that he has more free time than he knows what to do with? What could he have possibly been busy with that he had to ask you to do it? Not like he needs to eat or sleep.”

“How did you know Wen Ning does that,” Wei Wuxian asked, surprised. Jiang Cheng scoffed again, “Who do you think I usually end up behind bushes with Wei Wuxian? I’m surprised he didn’t warn you that I would be there.”

Wei Wuxian grinned slyly, “Behind bushes with Wen Ning huh, and here I thought you didn’t like him.”

It took him a second but the comment registered and his face turned red. “Wei Wuxian you..!”

Jiang Cheng was ready to throw hands. Wei Wuxian laughed and dodged and for a second the sense of familiarity was so strong it felt like no time had passed at all. But the moment soon evaporated and they were both left feeling wrong-footed. Wei Wuxian shifted nervously once more, fidgeting with his sleeves.

Jiang Cheng cleared his throat, “Well anyway your picky donkey isn’t going to feed itself is it? Get going Wei Wuxian! I really don’t need to wake up to the sound of an angry donkey in the middle of the night.”

“Right, well uh I’ll just go.. do that...” he dashed away quickly to escape the awkwardness.

Jiang Cheng sighed forlornly. It never used to be so difficult to be around each other. But he didn’t know how to interact with Wei Wuxian anymore. He’d fall back into his natural mode of grumpiness only to realise that instead of laughing about it Wei Wuxian would get nervous. Like just now. When he literally ran away to go spend time with a donkey instead of Jiang Cheng. Once upon a time he used to be the stubborn ass in Wei Wuxian’s life. Oh to get replaced by an animal! Called Lil Apple! Who’d bite his master if he displeased it! At least Jiang Cheng didn’t bite. He pouted internally. Shaking himself out of his thoughts as a large group of people passed him by to get into the inn, he made his way to the counter, even more annoyed now that he’d have to wait in a line to book a room. He’d normally warrant attention because of his status but it was crucial that he keep a low profile at the moment thus he didn’t draw the innkeeper’s attention to himself. As such, he ended up not-so-patiently waiting in line like a normal person.

Meanwhile Wei Wuxian felt like he could breathe freely again. “Ah Lil Apple, at least I know what to expect with you,” he said, trying to pat the donkey and almost losing a finger for his efforts. “Fine, fine, you only want me for the food don’t you?” he groused, pulling out a few apples and leaving them on the ground. “You’re a smart donkey aren’t you? I’ll be back in the morning so be sure not to eat them all at once or you’ll be stuck with this forest grass.” Lil Apple brayed contemptuously. “Oh don’t use that tone with me! Do you want to go back to the Cloud Recesses and share with the bunnies instead?” Lil Apple side-eyed him but took a deliberately slow bite out of an apple to show he understood the threat and would heed his master’s words, but that he did not appreciate it. When he was in the Cloud Recesses those darned furry rodents had covered almost every inch of grass and he could not get a bite in between. He had unhappily brayed, hoping to get some of those carrots the young humans would bring for the rabbits to sate his hunger, only to be unceremoniously tossed out when his master came back because the older white clad humans had been annoyed by his hungry cries. One of them in particular, the one with a tail on his face, also seemed to hate his master. He made sure to spit on his robes before he left. Only he could dislike his master. He really did not want to go back there, so he just ate his apple mutinously.

Satisfied that Lil Apple would be sated and would not cause a disturbance, Wei Wuxian made his way back to the inn.

“You there, with the flute!”

“Who me?” he asked, surprised.

“Yes, you. Your companion has booked you room 13,” said the woman, who he realised was the innkeeper, “He’s ordered dinner to be brought to the room when you arrive, so you should probably head upstairs. Dinner will be served in thirty minutes.”

So Jiang Cheng did reserve a room for him after all. He let out a sigh of relief. He’d wondered on his way back if he’d come back to find that he’d been left to find another inn as this one would surely have been full by the time he got back (he had sat for a while just chilling with Lil Apple). He’d even been ordered dinner. Jiang Cheng was being particularly generous. He wondered how he’d pay him back though. The silver Lan Zhan gave him was running kind of low.

He opened the door to room 13 (which he suspected was close to the juniors’ rooms given that it seemed to be one of the inns’ better ones) and came face to face with Jiang Cheng. He startled a bit but before he could say anything Jiang Cheng scowled, “There you are. I was wondering if you’d decided to disappear with the damn donkey. What took you so long? Don’t you know it’s a chilly night? What if you catch a cold with that weak body of yours?”

“You were looking for me? I was just reassuring Lil Apple, nothing major. Thanks by the way, for ordering a meal. And for the room. I promise I’ll pay you back as soon as I can. You can go back to your room, I’ll be fine, I’ve lived through worse than a cold night,” he said,  touched that Jiang Cheng had come to check on him.

“I am in my room,” Jiang Cheng said nonchalantly, “And don’t be ridiculous, did anyone ask you to pay? Dinner will be here soon, you should probably go wash the eau de donkey off of you before it arrives.” “

“Oh. Sorry, I must have gotten the wrong room then, which one is mine?”

“You are also staying here.” “Huh?” came his bewildered reply. Did Jiang Cheng just not want to bother paying for a room for him? He’d still be grateful for dinner and at least the floor of the inn was clean as opposed to outside in the dirt but he couldn’t help but feel a little disheartened. He had gotten his hopes up for a bed.

Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes, “Whatever you’re thinking, just stop. There were no other rooms left. So you can either suck it up and share with me for a night or go sleep on the donkey.”

When Wei Wuxian looked like he might actually be considering going back outside, Jiang Cheng’s scowl returned with a vengeance. “Oh I see how it is. You can go gallivanting around half the jianghu, sharing rooms with Lan ‘just a friend’ Wangji but you can’t stay one night with me, who you lived and shared a room with for years before...shit happened.”

“Th..that’s not it! And how do you know that anyway?” he sputtered, slightly impressed with Jiang Cheng’s knowledge of things that he wasn’t present for given that he didn’t think Jin Ling talked with his uncle about that time in their lives.

“Juniors talk to each other on night hunts, Wei Wuxian. I have overheard some conversations.”

Ah. Eavesdropping. He was slightly less impressed.

“A..anyway it’s not like that!”

“Then what is it like? You got him drunk and he tied you up with his forehead ribbon and then you went to the same bedroom. You can’t seriously expect me to believe it isn’t a little ‘like that’.”

“What’s the big deal with everyone and that damned forehead ribbon? It’s not like I stripped him,” he huffed.

Jiang Cheng was astonished. “You mean to tell me all of these years later and you still don’t know?” Shit, he was starting to feel a sliver of pity for Lan Wangji.

“Look I know it was my bad the last time at the archery competition, but this time it really wasn’t me! He did it on his own. And he was drunk, he had no idea what he was doing. So whatever importance it has to the Lan at least this time I wasn’t the one who started it.”

Yup, that was definitely pity he was feeling. The poor sod. He absconded with him in front of all the sect leaders who would have been happy to think Lan Wangji was being deceived, hid him from said sect leaders, bowed in the ancestral shrine with Wei Wuxian, shared a bed with him, tied him with his ribbon, and still got called just a friend. Any lesser man would break.

But also, wait… “If it’s not ‘like that’ then why did you act all shameless and say he was your type?” Jiang Cheng grumbled, annoyed upon remembering that first day of meeting him as Mo Xuanyu. “And then go on to share a bed with him in Cloud Recesses and in all those inns?” he continued.

“You’re not still hung up on that, are you Jiang Cheng?” he pouted, “You know, I was just trying to escape; from both of you at the time. I didn’t mean anything by it. Don’t you remember how easy it was to rile him up when we were in Cloud Recesses? Anything I said or did was against the rules. He’d get mad so easily. I tried my best to scandalise him this time so that he would kick me out and I could go off on my own but I had no idea he’d grown so tolerant in the years I’ve been gone. I only got away from you because of A-Ling. As for him, I thought it would be easier to escape so I did things that would make him want to kick me to the curb.  But nothing I did helped me to escape. Not even getting drunk, in fact, he even joined me in drinking once! I never thought I’d see the day. Eventually we got caught up in the mystery and he stood by my side when things went pear-shaped. You know I always considered him a friend even though I thought he hated me. Turns out he didn’t really hate me after all! Isn’t that great? You always said he did!” he accused.

“He always seemed like he did! Even you agreed. He was always so stiff. It’s not like we could have read anything else from his perpetually stony expression. I had no idea how he really felt until...well...” Jiang Cheng trailed off awkwardly.

Clearly Wei Wuxian was also not keen on broaching the ribbon or the shrine topic so he sidestepped it easily and went back to Lan Wangji. “Yes, exactly. Lan Zhan is such a good friend. I’m really glad that he doesn’t hate me. I value his friendship very much so don’t badmouth him Jiang Cheng, okay? You can badmouth me all you like but Lan Zhan is a good person and he doesn’t deserve it.”

He certainly doesn’t deserve this level of obliviousness, thought Jiang Cheng. It was somehow both good and bad for Lan Wangji that Wei Wuxian didn’t realise it. If Wei Wuxian did not return those feelings and truly did see him as a good friend, he wouldn’t have to go about feeling all guilty and obligated about it because that would 100% happen and Lan Wangji himself wouldn’t want Wei Wuxian to bear that burden. On the other hand it was bad because Lan Wangji would just be there pining away with no definitive answer and getting his feelings inadvertently stepped on when Wei Wuxian did something that was like rubbing salt in his wounds. But hey, he still didn’t like the man so, not really his problem. Especially since he would have had no feud with him if Lan Wangji himself hadn’t started acting like Jiang Cheng was enemy number one. He would have thought Lan Wangji of all people would know better than to listen to rumors. Clearly Lans did gossip after all. Wei Wuxian on the other hand...well he’d been dead for thirteen years, he had to get his news from somewhere.

He had such complicated feelings when Wei Wuxian first came back to Lotus Pier, and even though the truth had not yet been revealed, he’d still wished they could somehow go back to the way they were. That was until Wei Wuxian broke their unspoken mode of communication (through arguing of course), by actually physically attacking him in his own ancestral hall. Though he was starting to realise that maybe their shrine talk had devolved so completely because of the presence of Lan Wangji. If Lan Wangji hadn’t been there without his permission then Jiang Cheng would have had nothing to say about him. But he had been an outsider in a private space and had the nerve to bow in front of Jiang Cheng’s parents with Wei Wuxian like he was family. It had rubbed Jiang Cheng the wrong way and his words were even more scathing than usual. After now being explicitly told that he shouldn’t badmouth the man in front of Wei Wuxian, he really believed that things wouldn’t have gone so poorly if Lan Wangji just wasn’t there. Wei Wuxian was always the type to get mad on everyone’s behalf but his own, and in this case, he thought highly of Lan Wangji which didn’t help. All Jiang Cheng was looking for was an explanation, instead he had gotten an unwanted show.

“Anyway,” Jiang Cheng deflected, scrunching up his nose, “Whatever my thoughts on Lan Wangji, at least the man is always clean. You stink. Go wash up idiot.”

“Is it really that bad?” he sniffed himself. Okay it wasn’t that bad, A-Cheng, rude! But he was smelling a bit like a barnyard animal so he went behind the screen to take a quick wash before their dinner arrived. There was a basin with water and a clean washcloth to the side. Jiang Cheng had already freshened up since there was a scrunched up cloth in the corner. He felt like he was having an out of body experience. How many times in their youth had they been in this situation? Him coming in all messy from creating mischief somewhere and Jiang Cheng chiding him while making sure he took a bath and didn’t get sick.  Jiang Cheng never said what he meant. Always scolding him but worrying about him at the same time. Back then they were carefree kids, a vast difference from their current situation but maybe, just maybe, that at least was still the same.

Back then also had two beds, he thought mournfully, as they finished up an awkward dinner and he was faced with the reality of having to sleep on the floor.

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Author's Note: So I had this idea and have been trying to finish it for the longest time, but I decided to post chapter one at least and see how it goes because it is taking me longer to finish than I hoped.

[iwillhaveamoonbase]

Operation Cool Guy

Callum tries to be a cool guy to get new student Rayla to agree to a date with him.

Inspired by a scene in Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.   Rated M because of sexual references made, but not sandwiches were made.

--------------------------

Callum stared at the new girl, Rayla, out of the corner of his eye.  She looked good in their school uniform, long legs on full display, though she complained often about how the school wouldn’t let her wear tights underneath. It was hard not to notice her, with her almost pure white hair and striking purple eyes as well as a Scottish accent that was very much out of place in their California private school. She’d transferred for her final year after her parents moved to the States for work.  At least, that was the rumor.  Callum didn’t actually know.

He fidgeted with his jacket a bit.  Rayla was instantly popular and surrounded by people almost 24/7.  The star quarterback had asked her out who knew how many times, the last time resulting in Rayla twisting his arm behind his back and demanding he leave her alone.  Due to Rayla being a senior while Callum was a junior, they only shared a mixed-level science class together.  She always sounded so smart when she was called on in class.

A loud slam from Rayla’s direction caused him and everyone around him to jump.  “Just leave me alone, you dick.”  Her voice rang loud and clear as she refused to turn to look at the soccer captain who had, apparently, asked her out yet again.

“Rayla, I can show you a good time.  The best time.”

“Please,” she scoffed. “I’ve heard your exes talking in the locker room.  You expect a girl to suck on your dick and refuse to lick pussy in return.  No thanks.”

“It’s not sanitary,” he groused.

Callum watched as Rayla turned on him, staring at the soccer captain for a moment before laughing.  “The American education system has completely failed your ass, hasn’t it?  It’s self-cleaning, you idiot, and women tend to know how to find info to keep themselves clean.  Also, there’s no way you’d want me because I’ve licked pussy and if it’s so unsanitary, I must also be unclean.”

“Are you…are you gay?”

Rayla rolled her eyes. “I’m Bi, thanks for asking.  And you sounded really hesitant there, so let’s make something clear: I have two dads. Two GAY dads.  I have zero interest in dating someone who has homophobic tendencies, so you can stop hitting on me.”  

“I’m not-”

“Don’t care.  Wasn’t interested in your ignorant ass anyways.” Rayla turned back to her locker, effectively dismissing the soccer captain.  Everyone watched as he stared at her, mouth agape, before huffing and walking away, grumbling under his breath.  

Callum looked down at his phone.  A text from Soren had just come in, telling Callum to go with the plan and act like a tough guy with Rayla.  He’d had a crush on her ever since he had first heard her introduce herself, but there was no way someone has cool and interesting as her would like him.  Soren had insisted he could coach Callum and to act uninterested and all that.

Callum sighed, running a hand through his hair and closing his locker before walking over to her. He leaned against the lockers and tilted his chin to try to show-off his jawline.  “Hey.”

Rayla didn’t stop going through her locker nor did she even glance at him.  “What do you want?”

“Your number.”

“No.”

Callum internally winced. “I wasn’t that interested anyways.”

“Cool.  We done here?”  Callum didn’t have time to respond before Rayla closed her locker again and walked away. Several girls started trailing behind her, their chatter carrying through the halls.  

Callum sighed.  ‘Strike one.’

---------------------------------

Callum groaned as he thought about Soren’s latest text in his plan to get Rayla to agree to go on a date with him.  He’d acted uninterested, like he had an interest in typical masculine things like cars and bikes, and had even gotten detention for telling a teacher off. Rayla was still not responding to him or anyone else.  Maybe Soren was wrong; maybe all girls didn’t like bad boys.

The school was almost completely empty and Callum and Rayla were sitting in detention.  Callum for the teacher incident and Rayla for refusing to take off her tights and follow the uniform guidelines.  She’d loudly complained in class that she didn’t think a simple pair of black tights were a problem when the girls already had to wear knee socks but it had fallen on deaf ears.  Rayla rolled her eyes when she saw him there and turned away from Callum, focusing on her homework.

The teacher got up from his desk, glaring at them both.  “You two better be here when I get back.  I have to go talk to Ms. Smith about another one of your classmates.  Delinquents, the lot of you.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be an educator if you think so poorly of us,” Rayla grumbled.  Callum stifled a laugh as the teacher glared at her.

“You are an intelligent, respectable young woman, Ms. Burrows.  Why are you so determined to question authority?”

“I’m Scottish and Irish. It’s what we do.  People try to impose their authority and superiority on us all the time.  I question stupid rules and people believing they can tell me what to do without having good reasoning beyond ‘because I said so’ or ‘that’s how it is’ and, in the case of the uniform ‘because that’s how it’s always been.’  Change is good sometimes.”

The teacher pinched the bridge of their nose and loudly exhaled.  “I’ll be calling your fathers about this.”

“Ask to speak to Ethari. He’s nicer.  Runaan will tear you a new one.”  The teacher shook his head and left, grumbling about students refusing to behave and follow the rules.  

Callum turned to look at her.  “So-”

“I’m tired of people telling me what to do.  That good a enough reason for you?”

Callum shrank a bit at her blunt phrasing, looking down at his hands.  “I was going to ask you out-”

“Why?”

“I…I mean-”

Rayla turned her head away, scoffing.  “No, thanks.”

Callum gulped and thought back to Soren’s plan.  There was no way it would work.  Callum remembered his mother telling him to just be honest with others and he would be happier in the long run than if he tried to change himself to make someone else happy.  “Look, I’m just trying to tell you I want to be with you.”

Rayla turned her head and glared at him.  “OK?  Why? Why do you want to be with me?”

“Because you’re smart and cool and really pretty but not in a glamor way, but a ‘I’ll run through the woods and get dirty after climbing a tree but have fun doing it way’.  You’re tough and it was awesome when you twisted the quarterback’s arm behind his back and when you flipped John for putting his arm around your shoulders.  And I’m not this…cool guy who is unaffected by things.  I like to draw and paint and study different cultures and languages. I know I’m not cool enough for you, but I still really like you.  Your laugh makes my heart feel full and my day is a thousand times better when I get to see you or hear your voice and now I sound creepy and I’m going to shut up now.”

Callum turned away and fidgeted with his jacket.  Rayla was quiet for a few moments, before finally muttering a soft ‘hey’.  Callum turned back to see a strong flush on her cheeks going all the way up to her ears.  “That’s the first honest thing anyone has said to me since I got here.  I like you, too.  You’re pretty cute and you care about people around you.  When you did the ‘cool guy’ act, I thought I had misread you and I was really disappointed.”

“Really?”  Callum couldn’t believe his ears.  She liked him?  Him?      

“Yeah.  I’ve never seen cheekbones like your’s in person.  I’ve also got a thing for green eyes, maybe.”

“So, can I get your number?”

Rayla shook her head. “You haven’t earned it yet.  I’m still not happy that you pretended to be someone you aren’t just to get in my pants.”

“I didn’t-”

“OK.  I believe you.  That’s not what it was.  But…”, Rayla bit her lip, “you still have to earn it.  Keep showing me who you really are and then we’ll talk.”

“OK.  Deal?”  Callum held out his hand; shocked when Rayla shook it.

“Deal”

--------------------------------------------

Four weeks later, Callum was the proud, sole person in their school who had Rayla’s private cell phone number and a week after that, they were holding hands down the hall and he was kissing her in the alcoves between classes.  Soren had freaked out that honesty and being yourself had even worked but Callum was not going to question it.  The most amazing girl he had ever met was giving him a chance and he had never been happier.  

[my-brothers-corrupted]

Jackie, about the “overcorrecting” comment—I promise that wasn’t to be mean. It’s something that I recognize in myself that I think I see in you, too. Think about the last several months—your emotions have been huge, intense, and almost outside your control. Which is hard enough for people with typical brains, but people like us? It’s... heck, I don’t even know the right word for it. It’s frightening, at the very least.

Anti’s death didn’t solve things instantly, but it was a pressure valve that suddenly released. He was imposing his own will on literally every aspect of your life, and not in a way that was kind. With those constraints gone, I think your brain snapped back like a rubber band, and you started drawing lines in the sand of your own making. You and me, we need constraints of one kind or another—paths of least resistance in our brains that get us where we need to be. You’re doing your best to be in control of your situation, and I’m not going to tell you that’s bad or unhealthy because i don’t think it is, it’s what I do and I know there’s an ideal balance to be struck between control and flexibility, but I don’t know what it is so I won’t pretend. I think it’s proof of your strength and your wonderful, noble heart that you’ve done so well in the snap-back so far. You are overcorrecting and you are traumatized, but that���s not bad, Jackieboy.

Just promise me something, okay? The lines you’ve drawn in the sand, they aren’t very deep yet. They aren’t the path of least resistance. It’s gonna take time and effort and energy, and your energy is not limitless. Please, please, please promise me that you’ll let the others help you, that you’ll draw the lines together. People like us, we can’t survive long trying to form those paths by ourselves. Eventually something gives, and we need people to catch us, or better yet to walk with us to make sure we don’t trip at all. Promise me you’ll let your brothers support you as much as you support them.

Jackie looks thoughtful as he collects low quality burgers and chicken strips from the counter, sticking the straw of his orange soda in his mouth as he thinks.

“Okay, I get it,” he says, nodding. “I’m making my own rules finally. I get to choose what to do with the cash, with my home, with my self. It’s weird because Anti always told me I wouldn’t be able to make all the decisions he did. But now that I’m here, I feel so determined it hasn’t even slowed me down yet. And yeah... yeah. I should be proud of myself. I’m a good big brother. I am! I will be. Once we get settled, things will be even better. Like Dok used to talk about how routine would be good for me and things for me to be interested in, like Spider-man. I can have routine. I can have hobbies and interests. I can get my energy out when I need to because no one will tell me I have to stay locked in my room or chained to the bed.

“But... it has been crazy lately. One night we’re at home, then we’re on the move, to the airport, now we’re going to a new country... I used to get so scared and panicked when Anti would move us. I used to have meltdowns in airports so often that he would just possess me so he wouldn't have to deal with me screaming and crying in the middle of a crowd. I wouldn’t know where we were going or if we would be safe or what would happen to my brothers. But even though there’s still some questions, I know exactly where we’re going and how much money we have and what everybody needs. I’m okay if I burn out. I just need to get us all settled first. Then the others can help me have things like a routine and interests and freedom without it overwhelming me.”

He beams to himself, pleased with his own self-awareness, things he’s picked up from you and his siblings and the friends and enemies they have made along the way.

“I’m big brother now,” he says, and despite the truth that he is, in fact, doing wonderfully, there is something slightly off in the way that he says it. “I’m in control.“

As long as things stay that way, he’s sure he’ll be just fine.

[kendrixtermina]

You know you have utterly failed as a parent when your adult daughter’s reaction to you getting a job closer to home is not “Yay, my littlest sister is gonna get to spend more quality time with dad” but “i better make sure she has a key to my appartment in case she needs to avoid him”

one wonders i mom will finally get tired when she has to put up with him fulltaime after years of seeing him only in small doses, but after all these years ive learned to keep my expectations low

its just that she could do so much better. like ok i get that she is old and not super attractive & might worry because of that or be afraid of being alone, but even if you restrict your choice to only ugly middle aged men, you could get so much nicer ones? 

There are ugly old men who are funny, there are ugly old men who are kind, there are ugly old men who know how to enjoy things, there are ugly old men who show appreciation, there are ugly old men who don’t yell at you & pressure you all the time and, though a rare breed in this society, you might even find an ugly old man who does not make you do all the work. 

Like recently I happened to overhear a phonecall where he was basically threatening to dump her or at least questioning her willingness to make it work after she gave him so many chances & showed so much forgiveness & sympathy to him. 

Like does he really think he has the greater market value here? 

He and mom may both be old and ugly, but you know what mom is & he isn’t? Likeable and interesting. She makes friends with ppl everywhere she goes. She’s funny, generous, approachable, capable, practical...

Of course she has flaws too like only wanting to see the good in everything & not being the world’s most reliable person, but she wouldn’t be like, alone & abandoned if they split. 

He, however? He went directly from his mom’s place to being married to my mom & never had to be responsible for himself in his life. He’s never lived without pushing anything that doesn’t interest him off to others. Also, no one can stand him. He’s got about as much charisma and charme as a caustic toilet cleaner. He has like 2 people who are nice to him out of pity, obligation or moral princile (my mom & my brother) & that’s it. 

I don’t think there is anyone enjoys him or relaxes/ lets down their guard around him. 

If mom ever dumps him, he’s gonna rot down to his skelleton before anybody finds out he’s dead. 

I’m not saying that an indictment of a bad person in and of itself like, I’m getting eaten by my cats as an old lady, I have no illusions there. popularity is not morals. But he hasnt got those either. 

Geez. If I had a wife who is fun, likeable, awesome, cool, badass, generous & forgives me anything - & especially if I still the same sort of distractable loner type that I am now - I think I would at least fucking notice. Maybe I couldn’t give her all the attention she needs either & maybe I’d lose my temper once or twice too, but I think I’d at least listen to simple requests/ wishes like “please go on vacation with me” & ask her what she wants once in a while instead of always imposing my will under the threat of making myself insufferable if I can’t get my will. 

I just hope he doesn’t terrorize my youngest sister when he moves back into Mom’s appartment. 

I try to watch very carefully what I say around her cause I don’t want to put her in a loyalty conflict situation or get accused of turning her against him or something, & you should always be careful that you don’t dump/vent to a child to an unlimited extent anyways. 

But last times I visited she’d complain unprompted, like saying he never listens to anything she says & characterized him as asking any available family member to make him food whenever he pleases (I said nothing to this) 

He also demonstrated that he knew less about what topics she’s interested in than I do,  and I am not her father, did not make the decision to conceive her, and live in a different city. 

Needing to be away for work in no excuse; This is not about quantity but quality. No one’s asking anything impossible. 

When my grandfather had to work in a different country for a few years - long before whatsapp or zoom or even cheap phonecalls - he made up little nonsense stories for my mom & her siblings and sent them as letters complete with handmade drawings, so that he could be a regular part of their bedtime ritual.  My mom, now in her fifties, still talks with great emotion about those letters. 

Meanwhile, I remember that my father had to be away half a year when I was in second grade, and I know I experienced it as a definite relief, was glad that he was gone (no more fear of beatings or about confessing mistakes)  & hated when we moved to join him at his new workplace. 

My youngest sister is in a good place now, she had a lot of struggles earlier but now she has good grades & many hobbies; She’s pretty self-suficient and in some ways reliable, maybe a bit youthfully emotional still, but she’s getting to be a splendid young woman - she’s cool, she’s conscientious without being a boring rules stickler, she’s sly & has a great poker face, she’s thrifty but still knows to have fun...

I don’t want anyone to put a crack in that just before the finish line. It’s just a few more years until she’ll be 15/16 and essentially a finished person. It should be possible to avoid screwing her for life for just a few more years.

Well. Having I.s appartment keys can only help. 

[thatonealise]

On Worlds.

We inhabit them. We've christened ours Earth, but there are some who call Middle-Earth their home. I've heard many dashing tales from the Borderlands, and on all too many occasions guested in Azeroth. All these faraway lands are unique in their own right, sporting flora and fauna so diverse it really does make one wonder how such things came to be, whether out of nothing, or out of the wilds of human imagination.

I've always been under the impression that it would take a person too much blood, sweat and tears to fashion one. But here I stand, alone, and I need a place to set my latest overambitious and never-ending enterprise. It's a habit I'd always detested deep down, but came to respect over time, and now I say it is the prospect of making something grand, chipping away at it day and again, that gives me one more reason (among many, mind you) to get up early in the morning, and wonder what aspect of it am I going to work on next.

So it is, that I've been pondering on the sort of a world I would want you, the Player, to quench your wanderlust, and perhaps take your subconscious somewhere it has never travelled.

My research -- that hunt for inspiration, artistically speaking -- took me to media I have and have never ever witnessed, or heard, or read, or seen. I've browsed art, played this game and that; I've watched film and series, and I've brushed the dust off some of my forlorn literature. I've even dared to show up in the local library for once in an embarrassingly long (by a reader's standards) while, and borrow a "manuscript" or two I thought had a few interesting ideas. But, I have to admit, Stack Exchange remains my personal favourite. There are so many great minds there, with an equal knack for world-building, and even more thought-provoking questions granted inspiring answers. I can't recommend it enough.

On to the point, though, and it is that I've compiled a list of "archetypes" to take into consideration building my own world:

Earth-likes

What a surprise, huh? I believe it to be the most widespread archetype, and it is rather self-explanatory. An Earth-like world is more often than not a carbon copy of the blue planet (or our rather milky galaxy), with oceans and continents shuffled a notch to dodge the cosmic copyright, so to speak. It is again most common, and for a good reason: we know plenty about the science that keeps such worlds (and, by extension, our own) spinning, and the life living the way it does. It is a solid point of reference, backed with facts and studies so easy to look up on the web, or anywhere bookish, and it is always oh so tempting to use.

A few notorious examples taken from modern authors include...

...a continent under the influence of Celtic and Germanic myths; known as Middle-Earth of J. R. R. Tolkien.

...the super-continent of Stillness by Nora K. Jemisin.

...the Present World, to some extent a mirror of ours, and found in Kentaro Miura's Berserk.

...or the unforgiving deserts of Arrakis, credited to Frank Herbert.

...or Faerun, the iconic setting of Forgotten Realms.

...or even the Journey, courtesy of thatgamecompany, and the dunes one has to slide down rushing to the mountain's peak.

If at least two of the above ring a bell, you may have an idea of what brings all these worlds together, and by extension, what I think constitutes an Earth-like world. If not, then let me illustrate my point instead:

Go on, draw a comparison! It wouldn't take a particularly perceptive eye to notice that even a seemingly outlandish example, the desert planet of Arrakis, shines features not too unlike those we may find here on Earth, albeit "turned up to eleven," for the lack of a better expression. They are planets filled with oceans, and continents in between the oceans, most of them, and in general they follow the same rules we follow in our universe: desert storms rise as the wind blows, plates collide to erect mountains, and sentient life is soon to usher in an age of civilisation. Physics and passage of time progress the world as you would expect them to.

Naturally, there will be a degree of variation between Earth-likes. George Martin's Westeros, for one, is an otherwise conventional continent subject to unconventional seasons, some so abnormal they shape entire cultures -- consider the Long Night, for instance, and the impact it had on the Westerosi folklore.

Let's touch on Arrakis again: it is too an Earth-like world at the core, that suffered from a speculated misfortune of a near-miss encounter with a comet, and what once might have been an arid and bountiful world has now been left a scorching desert inhabited by massive sandworms that have evolved to swim through the sands as though they were oceans, and gobble up the teeny-tiny human wanderers crossing their "soil." A few similar worlds come to mind: Kharak, just as extreme and featured in the Homeworld series, and the much more famous Tatooine, the brainchild of George Lucas.

This big quirk -- extreme weather, unpredictable seasons, or morphed geology, or fictional species -- I prefer to dub "the Twist." It is something, a phenomenon or fact of life, that sets this world apart from ours -- something you can use to suggest that the world at hand is its own, and not Earth put in an alternate reality. Extreme biomes of Arrakis or Kharak, and bizarre seasons of Westeros, are just two examples of the Twist. Magic and magical beings found on Azeroth, or in Faerun, is another.

While the Twist is found in all archetypes, I'm of the opinion that Earth-likes depend on it more than others. Take away the Twist, and you will be left with yet another exoplanet, abiding by the rules we all know and, to be frank, find them too mundane to entertain us, or to leave a lasting memory.

As you'd expect, this was the first archetype I visited and considered for my game. The Twist I wish to feature, to go hand in hand with game mechanics I have devised, is the marriage (or clash, depending on your point of view) of science and magic, and the many ways cultures practicing either-or-both would balance them out, or tip the scales in one's favour if they so desire. I'm also very keen on endangering the Player on their journey, which I want to be perilous, and for it to matter more than the destination. Think of it as a world of vagabonds and gallivants, travelling from one bizarre place to a place twice as otherworldly, and embarking on life-threatening quests.

I've considered several worlds, most notably Kharak -- whose native species, the Kushan, traverse it on trucks and jeeps and other sand-crawling machinery. Cities on that scorched planet exist as only safe havens around, surrounded with lifeless sands, and to make it from one city to another is a dangerous affair indeed. The theme resonated with me quite a bit, but I did not find desert planets a good choice for my game, for many reasons:

It is, as the name suggests, a giant desert. There aren't that many biomes (just two, in fact, if you count largely mechanical cities as one) for the Player to explore, and there is little challenge in generating them on the fly, as opposed to a more varied world.

Throwing in arid biomes we discover in worlds like Middle-Earth or Narnia, or Faerun, felt far too conventional to me, and in my mind there would not be much room for an apocalyptic event so crippling as to make exploring this world nigh fatal.

Even if I dodged the desert altogether and rolled with a different biome or biomes, I'd still have to balance between two problems I doubt are easy to solve: featuring more biodiversity in a fundamentally monolithic environment, or more extremes in an Earth-like world that would not fit in very well.

Banality. Banality was a major concern for me, as there are oh so, so many Earth-likes out there in the industry, and the last thing I wish for my little side project is to offer yet another one. No sir!

Scope was the last but nevertheless just as important. It is difficult to fill up a giant continent, or continentS, with enough quests and points of interest to keep the Player invested. It is hard enough to produce enough scripted content, a la World of Warcraft, and it is harder still to delegate the creative matters to an automaton (Talking about you, Left 4 Dead!). Earth-likes, to my understanding, necessitate imposing scale, that I can not hope to achieve neither alone nor in company.

So I scratched this archetype off my list, and again I went searching every nook and cranny of the game industry and beyond for patterns and clues to make into archetype...

Otherlands

Perhaps not the best title to describe a world so otherworldly as to defy all laws native to our universe, but I nonetheless thought it described what I had in mind for such worlds best. Exotics, Otherlands, Alternate Realities, you name it: they spit on the natural laws we've always known, and turn what we consider to be natural upside down, from a relative point of view (I'd image they'd think we earthlings bend their ideas of what is natural, vice versa). They more often than not have so little in common with a conventional; continental world, that as a Player, you ought to be born anew, in a sense, as you have to come to terms with the new reality, and learn the rules alien to your human brain-box.

While not so abundant in fiction or film, there is an unexpected plethora of otherworldly examples found in video games. I suspect, as little more than a humble writer and not at all a qualified game designer, that the blame (the reason, rather) is at least in part to be pinned on the freedom of mechanics worlds detached from all physical boundaries allow. You're no longer on Earth; seldom even in our universe, and more often in a dimension forged by game designers to fulfill a very blunt purpose: to serve the gameplay, in full. I'd imagine it is times easier to set a game built on mechanics hostile to laws of physics somewhere abstract; mallable, in a way, to the designer's whim.

Thinking of examples took me to these fine pieces of digital entertainment:

William Chyr's Manifold Garden is, to me, a quintessential Otherland. It is set in an abstract world wrapping on itself, juxtaposing impossible geometry against Euclidean space. About the only link to our reality it maintains is the presence of gravity. Look up and down, try interacting with the objects or solving the puzzles, and you will very soon understand this is NOT the realm accomodative of your earthly instincts.

Alice: Madness Returns, too, features an Otherland (not Otherlands, fellow Alice fans!), a level set among the clouds, far above in the sky -- none other than Cardbridge! Playing cards dwell there, and glide along the windy streams to form marvellous paper castles in the sky, and bridges, and gates for Alice to cross on her way to the evil (is she really?) Queen's heartful (quite literally) domain. Like in Manifold Garden, physics still permeates this world, but the only "actor" it appears to affect is Alice herself. All that surrounds her, on the other hand, behaves in a way we would think odd.

Oddly enough, Valve's Ricochet is one more example of an Otherland, the way I see it. It's set in a pitch black void, a pocket dimension of a sort, and constricts its gunslinging inhabitants to a small archipelago of quasi-futuristic-looking platforms. It is in many ways abstract and disconnected from what we would brand a "real" world; akin more to a simulation than something even an advanced civilisation would be able to orchestrate in the vacuum of deep space. It instead serves a solitary purpose: to be an open and clear arena for the Players to pull off dextereous ricochets and physics-bending leaps from one spot to the next. There are no other earthly rules to govern this world, and beyond the dark arena is the thrice as dark abyss.

Of course, by this logic, one could consider more abstract games along the lines of Tetris Effect or even Pinball Dreams, to also fit under the same umbrella of otherworldness, and I reckon they would be right. Both games take place in places foreign to our expectation for a, dare I say, traditional setting. This is not to say, oh no, that Otherlands belong to just the games -- far from it! Otherlands are to be found in many other media.

Off the top of my head, I'd count that one scene from the cult-classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, as a "classic" Otherland in a mind-boggling nutshell:

The message I'm trying to convey, if not clear, is that Otherlands are very stubborn, and insistent on breaking you as an earthly thinker; to augment your mind and let it comprehend and utilise the new reality and the rules it enforces, like one would use the laws of our universe. "When in Rome," is the mantra they will have you etch into memory, until you think and interact with it as though you had never known another home.

The entire world, in other words, is one big Twist, standing in stark contrast to the little twists applied here and there to an Earth-like dimension. Furthermore, one could even assert that the Twist in an Otherland is turned on its head -- whereas in an Earth-like Twists were other-landish phenomena many in number but little in scope -- the Twists in an Otherland are instead few and far between, and grounded in reality. They are the links linking an Otherland to the Earth-like law. Say, physics would be very much expected in an Earth-like world, but treated as an exotic Twist in an Otherland.

To be a little more precise, an Otherland does not bother to stay true to the mechanics we think mundane and natural. It instead moulds or kills them outright, and throws itself at the mercy of the designer's wants and wishes.

Otherlands were an option, but not the option, that I'd choose for my world. I cherish the freedom they bestow upon you as a designer, but it alone did not convince me to opt for this archetype. Simply put, the downs outweighed the ups:

The world I wish to create will host fantasy far too Tolkien-esque to distance so much from Earth and earthly law. There is, in my view, a strong pull among many dungeon-crawling aficionados towards fantasy, and fantasy I will deliver. My own strain of fantasy, to be clear, but it will nevertheless mandate a degree of reality deemed by me too Earth-like to belong in an Otherland. I just can not see, at this time, a world of fantasy that is also an Otherland, not if I want my world to radiate welcoming familiarity.

This game being an open-ended RPG, it is difficult for me to envision it in an abstract environment. It calls, as I see it, for landmarks sensible to someone never ever "tainted" by the quirks of Otherlands, familiar and homely in a way, based in laws of physics and around points of interest grounded in our reality. Elevating it to be the Twist of an Otherland, brings the latter much closer to an Earth-like, but not quite. Neither this nor that, if you will, and that in turn leads me to the next and last archetype...

Near-Earths

Should you ever run into the same predicament as yours truly did in the paragraph above, I'd strongly advise you to consider Near-Earths. Not entirely Earth-like, but also too Earth-like to fit as an Otherland, a Near-Earth world is based to some considerable extent in the laws and traits of an Earth-like. It takes the best of both worlds -- mind-boggling Twists of an Otherland and experiential familiarity of an Earth-like -- and mixes them up to shape up something in-between.

Near-Earth remains ultimately an extension of an Earth-like world at its core, but to set itself apart it puts an emphasis on large-scale Twists -- that would be considered too outlandish for an Earth-like. One popular trope among Near-Earths is to feature earthly topology, strewn around the universe in the form of isles or even whole continents. Fundamental laws that define an Earth-like it bends to a fictional degree, but preserves the essentials, such as planets or stars or faimiliar dimensions, that make up our universe. Thus the link between our universe and that lives on, and it's easy for a newcomer to the world to find their way around with little to no hand-holding required.

I can't help but conjure up a few shots from Treasure Planet, which I gather needs no introduction, to illustrate my line of thought. Take one of the more iconic stills from this flawed masterpiece, R.L.S. Legacy docked at the spaceport of Crescentia:

It is in many ways familiar, I think, to anyone who has ever been to any run-of-the-mill harbour, except that ginormous frigate appears to stay suspended mid-air, not even ropes to hold it in place, and not at all swaying side to side on the high seas as one would assume. No, in this universe carpenters and shipwrigts build 18th century vessels propelled by internal combustion engines to fly through the breathable expanse that they call Ethereum. Indeed, there it is possible to breathe in space, so long as one stays careful not to lean too much on the taffrail and fall into the Ethereum proper, doomed forever to be a cosmic castaway.

Treasure Planet is very representative of a Near-Earth world, as I reckon the aforementioned scene proves. While grounded in culture and (partly) science of our universe, it strays a lot from what our scientists would deem feasible, to the point that it is fundamentally different from our universe in some respect, such as there existing a breatheable atmosphere everywhere in their universe, but not so fundamental as to defy every law of science we know in our world. Physics, and planets, and other celestial bodies and phenomena still exist there, albeit altered in a variety of ways.

Another such example would the High Wilderness, that we're told to travel aboard a literal locomotive, in the brilliant game and one of my many favourites -- Sunless Skies:

It, too, features all the same biomes and structures and many laws with a basis in our universe, and like Treasure Planet, it introduces a major twist: the space beyond the confines of Earth (which does exist in Sunless Skies, and generally follows our history with significant deviations perpetrated by Masters of the Bazaar) is an intricate maze of seldom interlocked and often overlapping topology, stacked on top of one another, and filled with an atmosphere reminiscent of Ethereum, breathable but named a different name.

It is still familiar enough to us as earthlings, and it would not take a seasoned Otherlander to pick the thing up and know the rules of play by instinct. Sure, we are driving a locomotive through time and space, and pass by living stars that govern all, called the Judgements, but the spaces we traverse and people we meet and phenomena we witness are not confusing in the slightest. Shrouded in mystery, maybe, but ultimately sensisble if given enough thought. There is not another dimension for us to consider, and impossible geometry wrapping on itself to comprehend, as seen in Manifold Garden. Nay.

On the Judgements, as a side note, I've found them to be an interesting twist in and of themselves: they are intended to be the law-makers that decide what is real in this world, and what is not. Kill, or posses them, and the world will return to a chaotic state, easily a contender for the quintessential Otherland.

One last sample for you to taste would be the city-state of Sigil, the center of all planes in the planar world of Planescape (pardon the tautology!). Also an earthly world in many ways, it departs from tradition by dabbling in the ideas of interplanar travel, and whole planes of existence drifting from place to place depending on the belief of its denizens. Name me a single spiral-shaped medieval town suspended miles in the air:

I hope my criteria is now clear, or clear-er, better still if as a day. A Near-Earth has some of its fundamental laws thrown away, or meddled with, but there is always at least some foundation identical to that of an Earth-like.

Enter the Wild

In the end, I had a choice to make; a choice of three options, all of which bore pros and posed cons. Weighing all of them took me several restless nights, about a week in total, and some creative encouragement from a colleague, who suggested I turn to Sunless Skies-esque worlds for inspiration: islands floating in the sky, nurturing islanders and their peculiar settlements. I fell in love with the idea in a heartbeat, and on and on I went searching for references. It implied to me a Near-Earth, and all the marks of distinguishment I outlined before for other archetypes pointed to Near-Earths as the perfect fit for my world.

I settled for a few points of reference, among them...

Variably-sized islands and quasi-continents of Dragon Hungers, complete with pocket cultures and hosts of creatures that dwell there:

"Outdated" and outlandish means of transportation between the islands, like airships or fire-breathing dragons, a la Sunless Skies:

Celestial bodies of Treasure Planet, like black holes or nebulas, making an appearance, though toned down a bit to ditch some of their more destructive and lethal properties. A black hole wouldn't spaghettify you in the blink of an eye, but falling into one will nonetheless bring a swift (albeit not quite so fast and unavoidable) end to your career:

What they amounted to, ultimately, is an amalgamation of varied islands, some as big as a continent, others as small as my balcony, and all sporting ecosystems never-before-seen on most other islands. They are suspended in the sky, fortunate to have a man-friendly atmosphere, with a devilish twist I'd rather keep a secret for the time being.

Wannabe heroes make their living sailing through this sky aboard mighty airships or fire-breathing dragons (among many other means of transportation), from one island and on to the next, undertaking quests and accepting commissions from the locals to earn themselves some sustenance. It's a floating world of vagabonds, gallivanters, and legends-in-the-making.

OR! Those same gallivanters may find a particular island, or spot upon on the island, very tempting to settle on. Indeed, if they so desire, players would be able to adopt a sedentary lifestyle, and see what the wilds beyond the comfort of their heart might bring one treacherously blissful morning...

Us locals have entitled this universe the Wild. Enter at your own risk, traveller, for you may never return. This theme seemed to me like a good middle-ground between all the problems I've outlined reviewing archetypes:

Scope was confined to the typical bounds of an island. Some are bigger than others, no doubt, but all of them are a far cry from the usual dimensions of a continent. A narrow scope, as such, is a scope amiable to developers limited in number, or readiness to tackle an enormous landmass.

Narrowed scope in turn shortens the distance one must travel to leave one point of interest for another. We're feeding two birds with one scone -- there is no need for us, as developers, to fill up the lands betwixt with something for you to do, and you won't have to drag yourself through an overstretchesd piece of half-arsed (pardon my French) filler to finally reach the objective that caught your eye in the first place.

At last, as my colleague pointed out, islands in space are capital. Done before to be sure, that road has been travelled many times (and so were most others), but it is still the Earth-likes that proudly keep at the victorious spree as the dominant archetype among the developers. A Near-Earth to me felt like a fair and much-wanted change of scenery, for once in a blue moon.

A floating world shattered into many habitable pieces by far imposes so many more factors upon the cultures, languages, civilisation, technology, and nature of the wild, that to turn it down in favour of an all-too-researched Earth-like world seemed a lazy way out the massive creative problem, I think, many people of letters and pencil and other trades would be thrilled to approach.

P.S. I do realise all my scribbled judgements are arbitrary, and the lines separating Near-Earth from Earth-likes, from Otherlands, is apparently fine, and entirely subjective. These are little more than my five cents; my five thoughts on the subject, and I personally found grouping these worlds into archetypes a good "bookmark" that I've used and will likely come back to designing my own worlds. Peace.

[ordinaryschmuck]

What I thought about “Agony of a Witch” from The Owl House

...Well crap. I guess I am reviewing every episode of The Owl House from now on...ARE YOU HAPPY WRITERS?! ARE YOU PROUD OF YOURSELVES?! ARE YOU SATISFIED?!

...

Anyways, salutations random people on the internet who probably won't read this! I am an Ordinary Schmuck. I write stories and reviews and draw comics and cartoons. And today, I'm reviewing the penultimate episode of The Owl House’s first season: "Agony of a Witch." It goes without saying at this point, but there are going to be HUGE spoilers for both not only the episode but the entire series as a whole. So if you haven't checked out The Owl House yet, I highly recommend you do so. It's an incredible show, and the next episode is the season finale. So now's your last chance to get all caught up. With that done and over with, let's get started, shall we?

WHAT I LIKE

That opening scene: These first few minutes perfectly sets the tone for the episode. The best example of how the tone is set is with the music. Or rather, lack thereof. The establishing shots of Belos' castle could have had grand and imposing music that gives "The Imperial March" a run for its money. But honestly, the pure silence says so much more about how serious this scene than any background motif could. Because while music does an excellent job of telling us how we should feel, no music means that the right feelings are already met. And in this case, the feelings are dread and terror.

But another thing that perfectly sets the tone is the fact that there aren't any jokes in this scene. If you had to ask me, I'd say that The Owl House is a comedy series with drama and story on the side. This is because the opening scene of every episode begins with trying to make the audience laugh with one or two jokes. That is every episode except for this one. Because "Agony of a Witch" does not open with any jokes leaving the audience with laughter. It begins with an ominous threat and leaving the audience in fear. All of which perfectly sets up how gutwrenching this episode is going to be.

Hooty’s an actual security system: But luckily, it doesn't take too long for the laughs to come right on back.

When it was implied that Hooty was the security system that Eda had set for her house, I never understood how or why. But now I do! Because it turns out that Hooty acts as a force of chaos that just annoys his enemies into submission. And I'm gonna level with you for a second: This scene helps make Hooty a fantastic character. For the most part, I find Hooty an annoying character. And it's partially due to his voice...mostly due to his voice...it's because of his voice. But, I'm sorry, a character wins points for me by accidentally beating an army without even knowing they're fighting.

I don't make the rules. I just abide by them.

“It’s because he’s got the hots for you, isn’t it?”: I like the fact that I pointed this out as a joke in my last review, only for this episode to not only address it but almost immediately dismiss it.

Plus, Eda winking with finger guns is always a win. Again, I don't make the rules.

Eda joking about the curse being a fate worse than death: Some people might make the audacious claim that joking about a fate worse than death soils the mood. And I would agree with that if this was actually a joke. Instead, it feels more like Eda is brushing off the tension by trying to laugh at it. That is something that many people-myself included-do to make people we care about feel better. To me, it feels pretty clear that Eda laughs about her situation so that Luz doesn't worry about her mentor. This shows how much Luz means to Eda, and we see something similar/more impactful near the end that cements that fact. For now, this "joke" is actually a great character moment when you take a second to analyze it.

Luz’s plan to steal the Healing Hat: Staying on track of development, let's talk about how much this scene reflects growth with Luz and Eda's relationship. Luz's willingness to steal from the emperor, and break who knows how many laws in the process, shows how much Luz cares about Eda. It's sweet to think about, even though it comes by Luz making the dumbest decision in her life. And while Luz's plan would ordinarily be a dislike, what turns things around is the fact that there are immediate consequences to Luz's actions. Eda's curse being permanent? Eda getting captured? Luz nearly dying?! All of this would have been avoided if Luz just stuck with the group instead of working on impulse. And there's not a doubt in my mind that's what she was thinking during her long trek home (more on that later). So, yeah. While Luz's plan was misguided, it still has the sweetest of intentions while also showing kids that bad stuff happens when you don't think things through.

Amity staying at home: Narratively speaking, this was a great decision. Amity acts as the voice of reason to Luz's antics. So if she went on the trip too, then she would have talked Luz out of the heist. And the writers found a brilliant workaround by having Amity break her leg in the last episode, to work as an excuse for why she isn't in this one. In fact, let's add more points to "Wing it Like Witches" for planning ahead. That alone makes it more clear about how that episode isn't filler.

Eda knits the cape for Luz: While Luz stealing the Healing Hat shows how much Eda means to her, Eda knitting the cape shows the feelings are very much mutual. It's made pretty evident in the beginning that Eda's planning to use the magic silk to protect herself. So having her instantly make the cape for Luz without a second thought is just the sweetest thing. And you know what? Who's to say that Eda wasn't planning to make the cape anyway? And Eda saying that the silk was for her was just a diversion to throw Luz off? Because if that's the case, then boy does that ending break my heart even more.

(Also, this acts as a fantastic setup for why Luz has a cape that makes her invulnerable to the Emperor's magic in the next episode. At least, I think that's the case going off of what Eda says in the beginning.)

The picture of Luz: Ok, am I the only one who would absolutely love an explanation for this picture? Yeah, it's obvious that Luz got into an eating contest to the death, but how did she even get stuck in this contest? Why was she even in this contest? And why was Eda so proud of this moment that she decided to frame it?

Screw the fanfictions of angst and/or Lumity fluff. Someone write a fanfic about THAT!

The tour of the castle: I talked about in my "Wing it Like Witches" review that I like how the show uses teaching the students as a way to give lore to the audience. And that's what Kikimora's tour does. It uses the student's willingness to learn as a way for the fans to learn more about the lore of the show. However, while these bits of background information is nice and all, there's one question I want to bring up:

How honest is this little history lesson about Emperor Belos? Because do you know who’s the one that can make sure history remembers Belos as a kind and just ruler who united the Boiling Isles? My guess is it's the same person who appointed himself as emperor.

Just a little thing to think about, if you ask me.

The Room of Relics: Gonna tell ya the truth: Seeing all of those relics made the inner child in me go, "Oooh. Shiney."

I'm not kidding when I say that I would love to learn more about each of those relics we see in this episode. I want to learn more about each relic's origins, which track they belong to, and what the hell they even do. And it's not often that I feel this way. Hell, I'm mostly the guy who never gives a crap about lore. But you better believe that if Dana Terrace ever writes a book explaining all of these relics, that I'll be the first to buy it.

Emperor Belos: ...Eep…

I'm not kidding when I say that "Eep" is the best way for me to describe Emperor Belos. The reason that makes Belos feel like a terrifying and opposing character is the same way Darth Vader and Thanos are terrifying and opposing. He's a character that feels like a force of nature that is so powerful, he could probably kill you just by blinking. And it's no wonder why Lilith was so terrified to fail him in the last episode. I'd be terrified just to look at the man without his permission! And that was before it was implied that he sacrifices witches who are covenless!

But, Belos frightening the crap out of me isn't the only reason why he's an excellent villain. What makes him great is that in his debut scene, we learn so much about him...and yet have so many more questions. Like, how can he talk to the titan? What's up with the giant beating heart on top of his throne? Why is he sacrificing witches and discarded palisman to give him power? What the f**k is up with the giant beating heart on top of his throne? Why are there pipes littered throughout his castle? AND WHAT! THE F**K! IS UP! WITH THE GIANT! BEATING! HEART! ON! TOP! OF! HIS! THRONE?!?!

Questions like these help make Belos more interesting of a character that I would love to learn more about. Even though seeing him makes me physically shrink in my chair.

Gus being told that he’s already his best self: I mean, this is just sweet. My man Gus needs more love, dang it!

Eda vs. Lilith: It's like the animators saw the first fight between Eda and Lilith and asked, "How can we make this more awesome?" Turns out, the answer is to make the fight more like an anime than the first one. And MAN, was it successful! However, being epic is not the main reason why it's a captivating fight scene. Because as excellent as it was to see Eda and Lilith fight for the first time, their battle lacked one crucial element that’s in their second fight: Tension. Eda's curse getting worse with each spell and Luz being in constant danger adds so much more tension to this fight. And as a result, it becomes more entertaining to watch Eda fight knowing the odds are highly stacked against her. Because even though Eda was destined to lose, you still hope for the best that she'll somehow win. Which makes her ultimate defeat all the more heartbreaking.

LILITH CURSED EDA?!: What?! WHAT?!

I mean, I expected Eda to lose and get captured. That was something I saw a mile away since watching the promo a few months ago. But revealing that Lilith is the one who cursed Eda?! I could have never predicted that! It was such a shocking revelation that I cannot wait to see how the show handles this going forward. Because, the way I see it, Eda is cutting ties with Lilith after this episode. Even if Lilith has some sort of logical explanation, none of it will matter to Eda. Hell, it already doesn't matter to the fans, who are already jumping on the "Kick Lilith's teeth in" train. As for me, I'm going to wait for the actual explanation before I make any judgments. It is made pretty clear that Lilith regrets what she's done in not only in this episode but through small interactions with Eda in the past. It might not justify her actions, but I am still willing to hear the full story before I come to the conclusion that Lilith must burn in hell. Unless her reasoning was petty revenge or jealousy. In which case, I would like to introduce Lilith to my good friend Frederick Ulisinsburg.

*Lifts up middle finger*

You can call him F.U. for short.

Eda’s goodbye to Luz: Everything about this moment is gutwrenching perfection. I want to start off by talking about the fact that Eda smiles as she's saying goodbye. Earlier I touched upon that Eda joked about having a fate worse than death was an attempt to relieve tension off of Luz. And it's the same thing here. Eda smiling is the only way she can convey to Luz that everything's going to be ok so that her protege won't be upset about their situation. There are just two things that betray Eda during this sentiment. The first is her voice. You can tell that Eda is trying her best to stay emotionally stable for Luz, but it's clear how she's really feeling through each crack in her voice. And credit goes to Wendie Malick for giving such a marvelous performance in this scene. The second thing that betrays Eda is her eyes. Every ounce of pain and sadness that Eda is feeling at this moment can be seen through her eyes. Don't believe me? Then watch this scene again, cover Eda's mouth, and focus on the eyes. You'll see what I'll mean.

And her last word to Luz being "Thank you for being in my life." That cuts deep man...IT CUTS DEEP...GAH!

Luz walks home: It's the moments that you don't experience that can have the most weight to them. We, as the audience, have no idea what happened with Luz as she walked all the way back to the Owl House. But the things we can imagine are much worse. The guilt Luz must be feeling during this walk, as every awful thing that she experienced replays in her mind, like a broken record. The idea of Luz going through something like that just...It just breaks the heart.

“Where’s Eda?”: It's the innocent way that King asks this question is what makes it sad. It shows the childlike naivety in King's character, and imagining what his reaction would be to the truth, makes it even more tear jerking.

Luz cries: Nope. Nope! NOPE!

I will accept a lot of things from this episode. Eda getting captured? Sure. Luz having a literal guilt trip? Why not? King getting to learn the hard way about what happened to Eda? Go for it! But you know what I won't accept? LUZ F**KING CRYING! I'm being one-hundred percent serious when I say that it physically hurts to look at that one single image. Even just thinking about it is enough to make me misty-eyed. And I HATE IT! I mean, I love it because the show successfully made me feel the exact emotions that I should feel. BUT I HATE IT!

WHAT I DISLIKED

I honestly wish I could say that there is nothing that I dislike about this episode. I really do. But there is one small thing that-very briefly-took enjoyment out of the episode. And that’s-

The Kids easily sneaking past the guards: Don't get me wrong, the funny antics that our trio pull off are very entertaining. But it shines a bad light on the Emperor's coven, when the best of the best witches get outsmarted by three children. Plus, this is the penultimate episode of the season. I'm not sure goofy hijinks are the way you want to go. Because while The Owl House is a comedy series, even the funniest of comedies know when to make jokes and when to be serious.

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But despite that one complaint, I still give this episode an A+. It was emotionally draining, and it makes both more excited and incredibly terrified for the season finale. Because we now know the stakes for the next episode. The question is, how will Luz survive.

Now, I'm sure there are people out there who probably hate this episode, and probably the whole series if you want to get into it. And to those people: I feel bad for you. And I'm not saying that as a joke or as a snarky remark. I legitimately feel bad for you. Because I felt a whole range of emotions not just with one episode, not just with one scene, but with one single frame of animation. That image of Luz crying was more effective in getting a reaction out of me than anything else that came out this year. And the idea that some of you won't feel the same way fills me with even more Agony.

[bluerosesonata]

A Window to the Soul: Game Mechanics and Characters in Ai: the Somnium Files

Spoiler-free!

Ai: The Somnium Files is an adventure game/visual novel for PC, PS4, and the Nintendo Switch by Spike Chunsoft in September 2019. Written and directed by Kotaro Uchikoshi, known for his Zero Escape Trilogy (999: Nine Persons, Nine Hours, Nine Doors (DS), Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward (DS), and Zero Time Dilemma (DS, PS Vita, PC), also available as the Zero Escape Trilogy on Steam and PS4), this game once again displays Uchikoshi’s signature combination of suspense, humor, and ludonarrative harmony that fans of his previous games are familiar with, alongside a cast of complex, compelling characters you’ll absolutely fall in love with.

For all my fellow Zero Escape fans, you probably remember the issues the series faced with financing, which ultimately lead to Uchikoshi helping to establish Spike Chunsoft and the eventual release of Zero Time Dilemma. In AitSF, more than ever, the fruits of that partnership are apparent. It feels we finally get to see a complete picture of Uchikoshi’s vision; Featuring fully animated 3d models, fully voiced dialogue, and some incredibly goofy and self-indulgent dance sequences, this murder mystery (and yes, it is a murder mystery) is absolutely worth it’s full price and your time.

The game has multiple endings (About 5, without checking), all leading up to and feeding into the true ending. One notable feature is that the timeline allows you to jump into previous played sections at any point of the chapter, and even provides summaries of the events that happened in each “node,” so unlike in the original 999,  you don’t need to replay through every scene of dialogue to get to each ending.

Rather than spend time analyzing the story itself- something that can’t be done to a satisfying level without spoiling the whole thing- I’ll just say that the way Uchikoshi literally has us get inside the heads of characters by “syncing” with them is a great story device, and is realized extremely well in the gameplay. For me, the Sync was used in all the right places to push me into genuinely caring about some characters, that, without the sync, I would be sympathetic to, but not feel a real sense of attachment towards.

What follows is a breakdown and analysis of how well the gameplay is designed, and some non-spoilery discussion of characterization and character design:

Mechanics:

The core gameplay loop can be broken into two parts: dialogue and investigation, and “syncing.”

The investigation portion of the game is similar to most adventure visual novels- investigating crime scenes, talking to NPCs to advance the story, examining your surroundings, and in my case, clicking on scenery over and over again to get funny flavor dialogue.

The flavor dialogue does not disappoint- and for me, the best minor feature included in the game ties to this. When you click on an object, you get an initial string of dialogue- but the indicator with the name of the object will only get grayed out once you’ve seen all the text related to that object. For some people, this might ruin the “fun” of clicking over and over again- like in 999, where some bits of dialogue would only display on the 9th time examining an object- but for me, it was a godsend, because I didn’t spend any time wondering if I missed anything funny.

The Sync gameplay loop is also mechanically brilliant. Part of the in-universe rules, which are emphasized over and over, is that the main character, Date, can only spend 6 minutes within the subject’s “Somnium”- the internal dreamscape of their mind- and that staying any longer could result in disastrous consequences. As such, each Somnium loop attempt can (hypothetically) be experienced in chunks of about 8-10 minutes. This set time frame makes it a breeze to play the game in small sections at a time and let your mind breathe a bit. The time limitation is challenging, but never infuriating; even when I messed up horribly and knew I had to restart a sync from the beginning, I would just use the time I had remaining to try out the goofier actions available to try out as puzzle solutions.

Somnium Files’ adaptability to being played in long sittings or in short bursts, while still maintaining an engaging, tense narrative is an incredible strength that not all games can boast of. Not a single part of the game felt like a slog or a chore to me, unlike a few puzzles in Zero Time Dilemma, where I ran into the perennial adventure game issue of  “okay, so I have this item, but where do I use it?”, “how the hell do I even solve this puzzle without a guide” (I didn’t), and “what do I need to do to unlock the next sequence?”

Characters

So let’s talk about these good characters. Some of you probably recognized the art style for the game’s key visual as the work of Yusuke Kozaki, best known by many as the head artist and character designer for Fire Emblem: Awakening and Fire Emblem: Fates. Even in his work for the Fire Emblem franchise, you can tell he doesn’t care much for drawing armor- which puts him in the same club as literally every artist I know who draws Fire Emblem fan art. His designs really shine in a contemporary setting, with modern clothing, and really give the cast a unified, unique aesthetic. Moreover, the designs are beautifully translated into 3D as well.

For a game that was most likely well underway in development several years prior to the boom of the subgenre, the design for A-set, (AKA Iris), an in-game internet idol and streamer, is incredibly in line with those of many successful “Virtual Youtubers”- for that alone it deserves some accolades. Fittingly, as part of online promotion for the game, Chunsoft posted a series of video blogs starring  A-set, as if she were posting to her own channel. (I missed all of these, and that’s a real shame, because I think they would have gotten me excited for the game if I had been paying attention.)

Despite Iris’ obvious and engineered marketability, I think my favorite design of the game is Aiba, the AI partner of the main character, whose human form only appears in Somnium and in the realm world as an AR projection imposed in Date’s cybernetic eye. The way her arms fade into glowing, electronic “nerves” at her arms is a subtle reminder of her artificiality, but her design also doesn’t make her more playful and goofy behaviors jarring in the least.

As far as personalities go, I would say that Date, our protagonist, manages to hit the perfect median- maybe even fusion- between the past male protagonists in the Zero Escape trilogy. Junpei, Sigma, and Carlos were all likable in their own ways, as the narrative character, but all had a level of blandness to them. To me, they served more as vehicles for us to participate in the Nonary Games.

In contrast, Date feels very much like his own, established person, and that’s not only a huge strength, but central to the overall narrative. (For all non-ZE fans reading this review- I apologize for the heavy use of ZE comparisons here.) Like Sigma, Date is a bit of a perv, but unlike Sigma in Virtue’s Last Reward, I didn’t feel squicked out by his behavior; Like Carlos, he cares immensely for the people important to him, and puts their wellbeing first; Like Junpei, he’s, also, a loveable moron.

There are other characters- Mizuki in particular- whom I can’t speak too much about without spoiling some of the enjoyment of their character arcs, but all of them have incredibly good and complicated interpersonal relationships both with and outside of Date.

Lastly, there’s Aiba. A good companion character is worth their weight in gold. After all, most of the time, they’re who you spend most of your time with, and for that reason, the more “annoying” ones always catch more flac for being so. For me, Aiba easily slides into my top 10 favorite companion characters of all time, along such members as Maya Fey in the original Ace Attorney trilogy and Midna from Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Most of the goofiest sequences in the game are instigated by her, and every time she’s on screen there’s bound to be something fun to do, not to mention the fact she’s our avatar used within Somnium. Combine that and her telepathic banter with Date, and you got a recipe for a dynamic duo.

In closing, every aspect of AitSF is absolutely delightful; It has tightly woven narrative gameplay, wonderful and complex characters, a storyline that, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t unravel the details of before they were revealed- and I didn’t even get into how great the voice acting is. If you’re looking for an enjoyable, self-contained game that you can beat in under 35 hours, Ai: The Somnium Files can’t be beat.

[soundwavereporting]

spoilers for chapter 1 of war for cybertron: siege!

title: Battle Suit

characters: Minimus Ambus, Soundblaster, background Buzzsaw

warnings: canon typical violence, s1 spoilers, planned corpse desecration, elements of IDW transformers, brief mentions of cannibalism, post-canon

summary: Minimus Ambus tries to sell a dead mech.

ao3 link in the notes!

Minimus arrived at the compound late enough that Soundblaster had finished his posturing and moved on to his seemingly favorite pastime: learning.

Minimus tapped the controls on his maglev-cart, directing it to remain in place as he waited for Soundblaster to finish whatever datapad had caught his attention. He hadn’t been around to see his reaction to another scavenger calling his thirst for knowledge typical Soundwave, but he had arrived quickly enough to siphon the last dregs of the unfortunate ‘bot’s innermost energon. There wasn’t even a stain on the floor to mark the spot where the bot had died.

He wondered when things like that had stopped bothering him.

He tapped his foot, scanning the number of guards and hangers-on milling about the compound. Considering the lateness of the hour, there were far more than usual—but taking into account Soundblaster’s domain had quickly become the only place on this side of Cybertron with a semi-functional communications network, Minimus supposed he understood. Bots had to get their reruns of old shows somewhere.

Besides. It was getting harder and harder to slip into Decepticon territory—each and every time he made the trek, Minimus was grateful for both his small stature and red optics. Despite that, Minimus suspected that with their recent victory, it would slowly become near-impossible to slip in and out undetected as the Decepticons began to establish greater control over Cybertron. He hoped what he had brought today would be enough to delay another trip for a few cycles—at a minimum.

“Minimus Ambus,” Soundblaster said, peering over his datapad, and Minimus nearly winced—no one had referred to him as Ambus since before the beginning of the war. Apparently, whatever Soundblaster had been reading mentioned his full name. Minimus wondered if it was an old copy of the Grand Cybertronian Taxonomy.  “And Ultra Magnus.”

Minimus didn’t bother looking at the broken armor piled in his cart.

“Twelve-point-five tons of scrap metal,” Minimus said. “Plus half a kilo of salvageable protometal.”

“Interesting.” Soundblaster set the datapad aside and leaned forward. Minimus had to fight the urge to take a step back—at this distance, Soundblaster was downright unnerving. “Where did you find him?”

“Decepticon territory.” Minimus neatly clipped out the fact that the frame had been found right outside Shockwave’s main laboratory.

Soundblaster hummed noncommittally. Buzzsaw chirped. Minimus found his gaze drawn towards the avian cassette—he had heard rumors about Buzzsaw’s particular brand of art. The mech had been commissioned to paint the fabled portraits in the Decepticon stronghold, but Buzzsaw’s passion—his true passion—was what he referred to as ‘mixed media’.

Maybe if Soundblaster wasn’t interested in the body, Buzzsaw would be.

“Not interested.” Soundblaster picked up a new datapad and handed it to Minimus, who tore his gaze away from Buzzsaw to take in the list of the week’s top-paying salvage. It was mostly long-range weaponry, paying the regular rate of a cube per ten kilos plus an extra half cube for every intact heavy-duty blaster. “With the Decepticon’s victory over the Autobots, we’ll be needing all the heavy artillery you can find.”

“Surely the Decepticons won’t be moving in on your territory so soon.” Minimus said it before he could help himself—breaking his first self-imposed rule of dealing with Soundblaster: don’t draw unnecessary attention to yourself. “They have the rest of the planet to conquer before bothering themselves with you.”

“They are leaving.”

Minimus looked up. Soundblaster’s face was unreadable as always, but Minimus thought he sensed the faintest hint of…discomfort? Disgust?

The not-Decepticon settled back into his seat and picked up another datapad. “Megatron will be seeking the Allspark,” Soundblaster said. “He will be leaving the minimum amount of soldiers needed to secure the planet—and that is when we will make our move.”

“‘Our’?”

Soundblaster didn’t seem to notice. Minimus refrained from questioning the sense—or logistics—of trying to sieze control of the planet at this time. It wasn’t his place, and he had already said his piece.

Besides, he doubted Soundblaster would actually listen.

“I would see about finding yourself some armor upgrades,” Soundblaster said. “Or a bodyguard, if you can afford one.”

“Thanks for the advice.” Minimus didn’t ask how Soundblaster knew the Decepticon’s plans. If he had to guess, he would theorize that the mech had a better understanding of Soundwave and Shockwave—and by extension, the Decepticons as a whole—than he would ever admit.

It was also possible that Soundblaster simply had his fingers in as many datastreams as his template. And with the sudden destruction of the interplanetary comms network, it was very likely the mech knew more than Soundwave.

Either way, Minimus would trust Soundblaster’s intuition—as much as a mech could trust Soundblaster, at least.

Soundblaster nodded in the corpse’s direction. “Did you know him?”

“By reputation only.” As a military commander, Ultra Magnus had been so far above him in the striata of prewar Cybertron Minimus had never dreamt of meeting the mech—much less hauling his corpse around in hopes of getting some energon for the next cycle. “Why?”

“Hm.” Soundblaster looked back at Minimus. “Curiosity.”

Suddenly uncomfortable, Minimus shifted in place and resisted the urge to make his way towards the exit. He had no desire to embroil himself in Soundblaster’s quest for self-idealization as the mech tried to catch up on a few million years of Cybertronian history and culture.

But Soundblaster didn’t pry further, and Minimus vented a sigh of relief as he made his excuses and directed the cart to follow. It gave out a single, mournful wail, then complied. Its AI was rudimentary at best, but considering his size relative to the amount of salvage a bot was expected to wrangle to survive, it was worth it.

Minimus left the compound, trying not to look at a group of mechs clustered around a recently-offlined bot. He was hungry, but his tanks weren’t empty enough to give more than a passing thought to trying to butt his way in for a mere sip of energon.

His dwelling was on the outskirts of Soundblaster’s territory—far enough from the main bunker that overcharged or desperate mechs rarely bothered him, close enough that there hadn’t been an Autobot-Decepticon skirmish on his street for a century or two. The entrance was more than wide enough to accommodate the cart, but the mech—Ultra Magnus—’s corpse very nearly scraped the top of the doorframe.

Minimus made his way to the makeshift energon dispenser. His rations wouldn’t last much longer—he would need to either dump this body or find some way to repurpose it quickly. Buzzsaw hadn’t followed him either, which meant he definitely wan’t interested.

He sipped the tasteless, gritty energon. Soundblaster’s advice drifted to the front of his processor. He didn’t have nearly enough energon or shanix to afford a bodyguard. That left upgrades.

His gaze was drawn to the armor. His plating crawled at the idea of it, but the damage was easily fixable. With some reinforcement to the chassis, plus a few gyroscopic modifications allowing him to manipulate it from the inside…

It was doable, easily within his abilities. If he started on it immediately, he would be able to finish it before the cycle was finished. More than that, it would be safe.

Safety was in rare supply these days.

Minimus just wasn’t sure he wanted to do it. But it wasn’t like he had much of a choice, was it? If Soundblaster didn’t make his move, the Decepticons remaining on the planet would. And if Soundblaster was wrong, the might of the Decepticon army would be showing up in this neighborhood sooner rather than later. 

Minimus swallowed his disgust along with the last of the energon and tossed the cube into the disposal.

Then he grabbed his tools and got to work.