#(i want to do more with all my vampires & i want more vampire characters & i want more vampire lore and and and)

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 12/24/2024

pair of portentous tuesdayposts: this one is christmas eve and the next one is new year's eve

trying something new with the reading section, where i list off a bunch of books i bounced off and briefly explain why. let me know if this is interesting, or if it's more interesting when i finish a book i sort of enjoyed and really dissect what didn't work for me like with that annoying evil wizard book a couple weeks ago.

listening

the true champ of the past few weeks has been friends at the table's (an actual play podcast about critical worldbuilding, smart characterization, and fun interaction between good friends) horror/weird west season Sangfielle, and i know i have listened to about sixty hours of it bc i have played about sixty hours of stardew valley. i am currently on ep 49, one before the last finale episode, and it feels like it is wrapping up in a very rushed and weird way? maybe i will feel differently after listening to the six coda episodes wrapping up everyones' characters?

the song of the week is fleet foxes’ white winter hymnal, which is morbidly festive without being strictly christmas-y and is not salting the open emotional wound within my chest that is The Holiday Season. album released 2008. christ im old

-

reading

the concept of this gag award is EXTREMELY funny to me. i wish the EFF sent them a little physical trophy. perhaps a challenge coin.

bounced off a lot of stuff. the six larger books and the far top right are all from my absolute favorite thrift store with the worst vibes, who regularly has a 8/$1 media sale bc they actually want to be more of a kitchen goods and home decor thrift store and don't really want to constantly be overflowing with records no one buys. yet here they are.

i really do need to find a good indie used bookstore around here that will take books and give me back slightly more in store credit than in cash. bc i would like to fill some missing chunks of trilogies/fill out the star wars shelves a little more. but every time i have gone to half price books i have had an unpleasant time.

lumberjanes/bravest warrior/adventure time were not making me feel nostalgic and in fact made me quite sad instead (more in a memento mori way than in subject matter) so they're going to a friend's kid

glad i looked up Heartthrob (despite the really good premise of woman haunted by her heart donor) on my library's comic app bc the third one seems to mostly take place in a mental hospital which is really never a vibe i want

GRIFTER has art i don't love and a bland storyline about an ex-marine who is the saddest boy in the world and can also detect literal space aliens living among us. no thank you

tangle's game has a close-call near-sexual assault in the first chapter. no thank you! cool dystopic social credit score premise but no thanks!

gil's all fright diner is about the king of vampires and the duke of werewolves but they're hicks. the narrator hates that they're dumb hicks. did not jive with the authorial voice on this one

i bought Two Tickets to Tangiers in high school bc it looked cool and have only cracked it open now, almost fifteen years later. fifteen year old kay did not yet have the context clues from the cover that it would be a very racist travelogue

i need to stop trying agatha christie. i am never going to like agatha christie

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watching

somehow i have seen the first tinker bell fairies movie three times this week bc that's all my bestie's toddlers want to watch. a really stupidly stacked cast??? how did all these people have free time in 2008???

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playing

finished the community center in summer 2 of stardew valley (wildly popular and very intense farming sim) and would have finished it in winter 1 if not for the FUCKING pufferfish. i hate fishing minigames and i especially hate the fishing minigame in stardew so i am excited to leave it the fuck alone for a while.

my cauliflower got stupid mchugelarge?? i do not know why they did that. also a meteor fell on my farm and gave me a bunch of really valuable ore, just like real life meteors.

i do kind of regret picking the beach farm bc so much of my day is spent watering, but i am trying to lean harder into animal products and being more of a fun silly flower farm instead of the intense agriculture i find myself doing. i have the greenhouse, i have a small patch of sprinklerable land, i will simply make sure to buy some of every seed each season and if i really need something i will toss it in the greenhouse.

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making

people are being very gracious about their mediocre colored pencil portraits. most of my gift budget this year was two flat rate boxes to my siblings. silly little pet portraits are very cost effective if you already have art supplies, nice paper, gumption, and very cheap small frames.

[maxpilote]

In the wake of finishing Dragon Age Veilguard, I've been thinking about what adventurers do when the world is saved. What does life look like when you return home carrying all the baggage you collected on your journey? How do you just live a life after that?

I think about this a lot in the context of one of my tabletop characters, specifically my Pathfinder 1e paladin. Callais spent a wild six months chasing a death cult intent on resurrecting Tar Baphon (think PF1e's version of Vecna, to be overly simple with it). Over the course of this adventure, she made a personal enemy out of a demon lord, was anointed the mortal avatar of her deity, purged an entire village of old god worshipping murderers, and learned her father was the vampire king of the country's capital -- which is a bit awkward when your goddess is staunchly opposed to undead. Those are just the high points and all before the party even faced off against the death cult's leader.

After all of that -- and then some -- she's just supposed to go home and be a wife and mother? Does she just lead sermons in the church or play the dutiful housewife? Where does her armor go? Where does her sword rest?

Basically, how does one retire after you save the world?

And I've been kicking around these thoughts quite often in the last few days when it comes to my Rook -- and not just because of the startling parallels between her and my Pathfinder character. My friend knows exactly what I'm talking about.

Some games give extensive enough epilogues that you don't really need to have these questions. Veilguard is not one of those games. (For the record, I love Veilguard despite and sometimes because of its flaws. And I will not be engaging in a debate otherwise.) And I love that I lived to a time when fanfiction is more common and acceptable. So, I can fill in these blanks. We are all filling in these blanks. I might some day when the horrors of holiday retail aren't doing their best to break me.

But you know, I just wanted to ask the question. What do you do when you wake up the next morning and you don't have to kill a god? When you don't have to fight an archdemon or prevent some world ending catastrophe? What do you do the day after that?

How do you find purpose in the wake of victory?

[xaeyrnofnbe]

literally could not get through angel & faith season 10. it annoyed me too much. i do not know why

season 11 was cute as hell even though the premise was ridiculous. literally just spuffy all the way through. no complaints honestly. spike in general was just such a Dude. like literally just A Guy. loved it. loved buffy and co fighting the government

i read the first part of season 12, then the synopses for the rest of it bc i wanted to know roughly what happened even though the introduction irritated me so much i literally could not find it in myself to read any more in depth. honestly i kind of wish i hadn't even that first part. literally none of that is at all appealing to me whatsoever.

yeah the final season pissed me off so much immediately and i had to go start reading the other comic runs instead. which has been fun so far. the plots have been a lot more coherent

final thoughts on seasons 8-12: weird as shit with some really fun stuff sprinkled in. utterly and wildly ridiculous for the most part and, at times, incoherent. but some of the worldbuilding was fun but not all of it (for example i liked archaeus a lot as a concept but didn't like how hard everything leaned into vampires being explicitly a form of demonic possession).

didn't like any of the romance except for what buffy and spike had going on, which was the main thing i was invested in and i just loved bc it did all the stuff with them i WANTED to see on the show.

would have liked to see more of spike in space though but that's just cause i have doctor who brain rn i think.

xander got the closest he ever has to getting character development during season 10 but didn't quite make it over the threshold 👍 good try buddy you'll get em next time

didn't understand what was going on with willow at any point. if she had an arc i didn't understand it

dawn was barely a character, though ig that's sorta consistent with who she was on the show? kind of? except instead of being a plot device she now gets reduced to a love interest for xander, which, gross.

i stand by my statement that it was a wild ride from start to finish. season 8 was definitely the worst of that though. yeah

as far as buffy comics go, so far i have read:

buffy season 8 (a wild ride from start to finish, everyone was out of character, i still have no clue how anyone came up with ANY of that. i've kind come to terms with it though. funny as hell in hindsight.) (bonus points for the spangel crumbs littered here and there. points withdrawn for buffy's reaction to them.) (season 8 is bonkers bananas all the way through, you have GOT to read it if you haven't. hell of an experience.)

buffy season 9 (a lil rough around the edges but the plot was much more casually engaging, buffy and spike had some very cute moments in the first half and overall i just like what the comics do with spike's character, even if it's a little inconsistent. oh and the plot twists were very silly and fun) (spoilers: the resolution was a little weird but i found it much funnier than i probably should have when illyria sacrificed herself. guy trying to destroy the world bc his girlfriend died and illyria was just like. hey i knew a guy who's girlfriend died one time. how'd he live with it? no yeah he didn't. he died. sorry.)

angel & faith season 9 (loved the callbacks to prior stories, though the stuff with whistler was kinda lost on me. pearl and nash were ok. i liked seeing drusilla again! though i'd prefer to see more of who she is now. the plot involving angel's nipple piercing struck me dead on the spot, weirdest part of the whole thing.)

spike: a dark place (extremely silly, spike leading spaceship full of giant cockroaches was not something i knew i needed but they were so so entertaining. generally just so amusing. i'm totally incorporating an appreciation for space into his character when i write him now.)

spike: into the light (PEAK comic!spike. thank you james marsters. easily the lowest-stakes, most grounded of anything i've read so far, which was extremely refreshing. this guy gets dragged through the dirt the whole time and still manages to be hilarious and endearing throughout. loved him narrowly hiding his vampirism at every turn from dylan. my favorite detail was the constant flapping of the bottom of his shoe.)

buffy season 10 (currently a little ways through, EXTREMELY promising so far. total vibe shift from seasons 8 and 9, way more in line with the feel of the show. every scene with buffy and spike has me kicking my legs and twirling my hair. love those two. dunno how to feel about giles yet. i am ECSTATIC at the notion of xander finally getting some character development, but i'll hold back on celebrating until i get firm confirmation.)

angel & faith season 10 (reading at the same time as buffy s10, the different art styles are a bit jarring to bounce between. genuinely the art in this one is making it way harder to connect with. i LOVED the style in s9, so the shift to realism has been disappointing to say the least. genuinely i just Do Not Know how to feel about this season yet.) (also separating your 2 main leads when their dynamic was the central focus of the last season is certainly A Writing Choice.)

[tenderjock]

I’m with you, my love The lights shining through on you Yes, I’m with you, my love It’s the morning and just we two

[caramelldraws]

A girl dreaming of marriage and children

Aaand one year later: I added some colors!

[scaramutual]

anyone else feel like they just aren't cut out for real human connection or is it just me

[dervampireprince]

I just rewatched moonknight and your audios are literally the only thing keeping me alive in that somewhat dead fandom THANK YOU 😭😭🙏

i do feel adrift making moon knight stuff still so thank you

[r0semultiverse]

What We Do in the Land of Ooo

🧛‍♂️ What We Do in the Shadows x Adventure Time crossover AU! ⚔

Finn Mertens in place of Guillermo de la Cruz

Marceline Abadeer in place of Nadja of Antipaxos

Bonnibel Bubblegum in place of Laszlo Cravensworth

Jake the dog in place of Colin Robinson

Vampire King in place of Nandor The Relentless

Betty Grof in place of The Guide

The Lich in place of Baron Afanas

Peppermint Butler in place of Wallace the Necromacer

Simon Petrikov in place of Derek

BMO in place of Nadja Doll (her old consciousness uploaded or something was an idea I had)

Marshall Lee & Gary Gumball/Prince in place of Sean & Charmaine

[thewingedwolf]

they were doing “is madeleine a pedo for being attracted to claudia” discourse on twitter the other day and i would like it very much if twitter was just nuked as a website lol

[monstersinthecosmos]

As a fellow Marius lover, I always find it kind of disheartening how most of the content/fandom talk about him (meta, fic, fanart, etc.) revolves around m/m ships (Marius/Armand in particular but I’d even go as far to include Marius/Daniel here) when, in my opinion, Marius is like the one male character in the VC universe whose relationships with women are far more interesting than his relationships with other men (the only other character might be Lestat but even then it’s pretty 50/50). They’re so monumental and so full of complexities and pain and so much love and they define him and inform his character in ways that I think, his relationships with men simply do not. Interesting/hot under the right circumstances? Sure but like ARE YOU GUYS SEEING THIS MAN??? AND HOW HE RELATES TO WOMEN??? It’s one of the best things Anne ever wrote and I can never get enough of it and it makes me sad how little content there is of it and I feel I can never say this out loud because I would never want to make people feel bad about what they ship (truly not my intention here) but ugh SO MUCH potential there for life changing discourse and meta about Marius and the women he’s loved and lost and have shaped who he is and there’s like… nothing.

Tl;dr the reason I’m sending this ask is because I’m a firm believer that you must be the change you want to see in this world and because YOU get it! And every time you post or write about Marius/Pandora (or Marius/Akasha! Or talk about Marius/Bianca) an angel gets its (black) wings. You are seen, you are loved and appreciated tysm <3

OKAY FIRST OF ALL THIS WAS SUCH A DELIGHT TO GET IN MY INBOX, SECOND IM GOING TO BE COMPLETELY HONEST AND ADMIT I FEEL TOO INCOHERENT TO TACKLE THIS TOPIC HAHA. I don’t feel articulate enough to do it justice. And I don’t say that to be obnoxious and self deprecating but like in all honesty idk how to synthesize it neatly but I think you’re sharing some GREAT IDEAS. 

I have to say this in bullet points because I don’t feel equipped to string this into a cohesive post:

Marius was based on Anne’s husband, and Marius/Pandora was based on their marriage!!!!! And I think it explains a lot about why their relationship feels so fuckin POTENT to me, like it’s so genuine!!!!!!! And like knowing that I think it makes sense why she wrote him so HOT lol. Like she’s just writing thirsty stuff about her husband right? LOL

Also like insofar as there’s a lot of genderfluidity in VC there’s also something vaguely misogynist about it at times. And Anne Rice was a mega feminist and her work had so much womens lib in it!!!!! So I don’t think it’s intended as misogyny at all vs. Anne having conversations about gender and maybe her own relationship to gender. I think enough characters have said vaguely misogynist stuff that it makes me think it’s an Anne Problem vs being Watsonian. (This is also a historical/time period issue and we can discuss another time if and when vampires are supposed to break out of that when they transcend humanity and social constructs even when they’re still saying weird sexist shit at their big ages.) But I say that to say all VC characters are a tad sexist, even if perhaps she was writing with the intention of her own male power fantasy/male superiority/penis envy. AND THAT MAKES MARIUS VERY INTERESTING. 

Cause like really the three main ladies in his life (Akasha, Pandora, Bianca) DO define him so much! And we don’t see him pine for Armand the way he did for any of them! Why!!!

Like there’s that aspect of sexism where women can be infantilized by men who don’t think they’re being unkind and it makes me wonder, especially when the author is a boomer, like where is that line between condescension and respect? I don’t have an answer here, this is too big-brained for me LOL but like he is SO devoted to the women in his life and I just wonder like if he sees them as creatures unlike himself, you know? 

This is headcanon territory but I bet he’s such a fucking sub to Pandora lol and it just thrills me that he spent 2000 years begging Akasha for affection and she ignored him the whole damn time wow. And he continued to simp!

AND ALSO LIKE, I think people DO NOT DISCUSS THIS OFTEN ENOUGH, but did we forget that he chose Armand because he needed a Bianca rebound? He was absolutely TORTURED by his love for Bianca and picked Armand because he didn’t want to kill her oh my god. Oh my god!!! HE KEPT HER LETTER IN HIS POCKET OVER HIS HEART OKAY??? HE DIDN’T WANT TO DRAG HER INTO HIS COLD AND FATAL DOMAIN????? Fuck lol

It’s so fucked up that he didn’t go after Armand but spent like actual fucking millennia trying to find Pandora. HE KNEW EXACTLY WHERE ARMAND WAS AND LEFT HIM THERE LOL BUT PANDORA HAUNTED HIM EVERY NIGHT OF HIS LIFE FOR CENTURIES.

After everything he wound up spending like 200 years with Bianca or something and ?????? CORRECT because Bianca was the fledgling he actually wanted!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But it’s odd, I know I’ve said this 337589235 times, but Marius like. Has an idea of the person he wants to be and he tries SO HARD to live by logic & reason and he just can’t reconcile with the fact that he has EMOTIONS. And so like part of the person he wants to be like, open/empathetic/wise and he begs his lovers/students/fledglings to CHALLENGE HIM when he’s not actually healed enough to be challenged? And to me there’s something kinda like, extra spicy about it when you’re in Rice World and you’re a lil sexist; how much that burns EXTRA when it’s Pandora or Bianca sticking up to you or AKASHA FUCKIN IGNORING YOU. 

Just really incredible that this person who is like the epitome of a patriarch has such fucked up relationships with all the women in his life. And like he underestimates these women, like the way he tries to manipulate Bianca and she leaves him! PANDORA AND AKASHA ARE UNAVAILABLE TO HIM AND BIANCA FUCKIN LEAVES.

akasSHA JUST IGNROING HIM!! JUST STRAIGHT UP FUCKIN IGNORING HIM FOR 2,000 YEARS!!!! HE'S OBSESSED WITH HER!

Anyway Enkil is ignoring him too but he doesn’t give a shit about that guy tbh lol 

Also the amount of space he gives Eudoxia and Zenobia in his book like there’s more here too but tbh it’s midnight and I can’t start unpacking. I just think like, in 2000 years it’s interesting how Eudoxia wound up having such a lasting impact on his life. 

I did just peek at the Eudoxia part and I’m dying, he goes “Her face was small, oval, and as close to perfection as anything I've ever beheld, even though she bore no resemblance to Pandora who was for me perfection itself.” CERTIFIED WIFE GUY.

What kinda mommy issues are we dealing with here? HIS MOTHER WAS A SLAVE THAT DIED IN CHILDBIRTH AND HE INHERITED HER GENES AND LOOKED LIKE HER AND DIDN’T LOOK LIKE HIS FATHER & BROTHERS? AND HE’S SORT OF AN OUTCAST AS A HUMAN LIKE ? THE STIGMA HERE? AND THEN HE SPENDS 2000 YEARS WORSHIPPING HIS NEW MOTHER??? PERHAPS YOU COULD SAY ENSLAVED TO HER? IDK MAN. 

IS THIS ALSO WHY HE WAS SO OBSESSED WITH LOSING PANDORA?

The irony too, and something I think a lot of people miss, is that he DIDN’T WANT TO MARRY PANDORA LOL. He wanted to be betrothed to a child so that he could FUCK OFF and NOT get married because she wasn’t old enough to get married! He fucked off! He went exploring! He said this is not for me! 

AND TO GO OUT INTO THE WORLD AND BE MURDERED BY HIS MOTHERS PEOPLE???? IDK. 

I’m not sure how these last two points tie into anything but I just wanted to mention his complicated relationship with Pandora and his own heritage lol. And then Akasha like DELIVERS Pandora to him because she’s like “wow this guy needs somebody lol and I am not emotionally available” — Akasha who was famously a violent genocidal radfem and who would not approve of his relationship with Armand but explicitly allowed him to have Pandora and Bianca. IDK WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN! 

Did Akasha approve of these women because she knew Marius was completely pussywhipped and would worship them and she wanted to see someone mommydom the fuck out of him and she knew that Armand would never be that person? 🫢

And again I want to say like, taking the author into consideration!! Anne Rice had a HORRIFIC relationship with her mom so you see these themes pop up occasionally in her work. DESPITE ALL OF THAT SHE IS STILL A FEMINIST AND WRITES ABOUT MATRILINEAR FAMILIES like The Great Family or the Mayfairs. But thinking about Mothers in Anne Rice Works makes me think a lot about this like, the damage they can do and the voids they can leave even when you’re a feminist and love women! You see a TON of this with Gabrielle and I always think that Lestat & Marius are such similar characters that you can do a lot of extrapolating or backwards engineering to ask questions about them and how they work, since we get SO MUCH Lestat POV in this series to work with and how we can zoom out sometimes and ask like, what is common across her entire body of work and what is more specifically common between Lestat & Marius and WHAT EVEN MORE INTERESTINGLY is a result that they were both based on her husband in their inceptions. 

Like how much of this has to do with Marius’s actual feelings towards men vs women on purpose, or how much was subconscious author bias, how much was simply that Anne Rice based him on her husband and she was THIRSTY, idk. It’s always hard to say in VC because Anne was such an intuitive and self-indulgent author and the stories are so weird!!! So your mileage may vary!

But I agree with you that these are FASCINATING relationships!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And I like Marius/Armand too (I recently made a post about how I didn’t “””””ship”””” them but then I spent 2 months working on a M/A fic every day and now I think I’ve corrupted and converted myself LMAO) but yeah like. There’s such a lack of substance between them in the end. He treats Armand like he’s temporary, fucks up and moves on, and it’s such a departure from how DEVOTED he was with all his other partners. 

Wow I didn’t think I had a lot to say, sorry about that. !!! EVERY TIME I BROUGHT A POINT UP I THOUGHT OF 5 MORE POINTS GOSH I COULD TALK ABOUT MARIUS ALL DAY.

[icewindandboringhorror]

I have a big google doc thing where I keep track of media and stuff (putting everything in loosely ranked categories), which is mostly just for my own reference so I know what tv shows I've already seen before, etc. and I never really look back through it, typically just a quick "okay, watched two movie in the past 8 months, need to quickly slap them somewhere in the lists. okay. done. save document. exit". But today I was actually reading through some of the old notes and there are like... MULTIPLE places where my comment is basically "It would have been good if it were about elves" or "I wish there was a fantasy show made in this same style" or "It's well made, but I just keep thinking about how I would like it more if everyone was an elf or was in old 1700s costumes" or etc like...... lol.... Most biased media ranking system on earth blatantly made by someone with an extremely hyperspecific range of narrow interests. It'd be like if a food reviewer only had 5 foods they actually liked, so they'd just go to a pizza place and be like "eh, the pizza was okay, but I just think it would be better if it was cereal instead. :/ ...2 out of 10"

[what-is-it-to-be-pk-esque]

My partner finally finished BG3 but has no idea that his ending was actually bad cause he was a pro-Vlaakith githyanki who rode off with Lae'zel but got NO EPILOGUE where Withers points out y'all died im 😭😭😭

they have no idea what happened with Gale or anyone else (who was still alive) after flying away 🙃🙃🙃

[b0nelessdoodles]

started off the new year running a randomly generated dnd game and this bastard was something like a big bad and now he lives rent free in my brain

[ruvviks]

made the realization my vampire story would work best as a video game and now i can't stop thinking about it

[broke-on-books]

☕

The live action Scooby-Doo movies?

I did not see this ask until RIGHT now (first time on desktop since crab day, second time since Nov 5 2020 [which was DOUBLY experience since I got my phone taken the same day]) so I'm going to assume this ask got eaten on mobile because tumblr, HOWEVER you poked a bear with this ask anon (as I'm sure you knew when asking) SO without further ado: my Scooby Doo live action opinions

So when you say 'live action Scooby-Doo movies' I'm assuming you're talking about the James Gunn films, starting with Scooby-Doo (2002) followed by Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, just due to like, generally popularity and also the fact that I have actually seen those films. However shoot another ask if you wanted me to include Curse of the Lake Monster in this (because I will if anyone cares and turn this into a live-action scooby dissertation, i'd just need to like. watch the movie first) But anyways where I'm going with this is that this post is about the Gunn movies aka the ones with SMG, Freddie Prinze Jr., Linda Cardellini, and ofc our #1 man, Matthew Lilliard.

Okay so my take on these movies is... complicated. I wouldn't say it's as complicated as my feelings towards SDMI, because I watched the live actions way less as a kid and generally care less about them, but still no matter how much shit I throw at these two movies there are parts that I generally like (even love) that stops me from totally condemning them wholesale. Like the fact that these movies are FUNNY! There's so many moments from this duology that are just beyond iconic "like, that's one of my favorite names!" the whole thing with Scooby in the dress at the airport, ET. CETERA (like I can go on!)

The Gunn movies are genuinely SO fun and I can 100% see and understand how they've stood so well in the public view as a representation of Scooby. HOWEVER, this is where you start to see my problems with them. For the general American, (because that is the audience I'm familiar with) ESPECIALLY millennials and younger, who happen to make up the majority of both people on this site AND people I talk about Scooby with in real life, these movies, and the elements they introduced as "quintessential scooby tropes" are the base of their understanding of the Scooby franchise, along with likely some miscellaneous WAY episodes and maybe SDMI.

Which is where I get pissed off. In the pushing of the narrative of "breaking away" from the Scooby norm, Gunn basically invents (aka totally makes up) an idea of what classic era Scooby was like, cementing an idea of classic Scooby into the public mind that is totally disingenuous and just straight up false. For example, in attempting to portray Daphne as having taken strides to be seen more seriously in solving mysteries and defending herself, it pushes the narrative that in the classic era she WASN'T taken seriously, and only existed as a damsel-in-distress prop of a character, which is just not true??? Like yes, Daphne is clumsy, that's a part of her character, and her friends (because, fun fact, the gang ARE friends) joke about it sometimes because that's what friends DO. Framing that in some kind of sexist "that's all she does" lens is just total bull, especially as gang members fall into secret passageways/get lost etc. in WAY ALL THE DAMN TIME because that's how the plot functions! Like are we calling Velma ditzy for losing her glasses every other episode? Of course not, and Fred falls into passageways all the time, not to MENTION Shaggy and Scooby and all they get up to. Also one last thing on the topic of Daphne, like this idea of her mystery solving skills not being respected by the gang is just so supremely bullshit it amazes me sometimes, especially when she was the LEADER (or leader adjacent) through pretty much all of her appearances in the 1980s [Not that James Gunn could look at '80s era Scooby without spitting on it, but I digress]

AND THIS IS JUST DAPHNE! Like the perceptions pushed towards Fred (and Velma, but mostly Fred) through these movies are just as bad! Like okay, with Fred---In these movies Fred is just an asshole. I hate Gunn Movies!Fred. I mean yeah he can be funny but it's almost always so mean! Almost nothing makes me madder than a mean Fred by the way. If he's putting other gang members down (even halfway, like with his whole "dorky chicks like you turn me on too" line, which... ew) then to me something has gone very, very, VERY, wrong in your basic understanding of Frederick Herman Jones as a character. Like he's the cheerleader! He puts himself in between his friends and danger! He loves nets, and traps, and Elvis impressions, and wrestling, and the trapeze, and cars, and most of all he LOVES sharing the things he loves with his friends! (Sometimes to a bit of an extreme. No one wants to hear about your net facts, Fred) And the live action movies just don't understand that at all. And I know there's maybe something to say I suppose in that some of those aspects of his characterization hadn't been "established yet" by the time "Scooby-Doo" came out in 2002. But it's there if you look. For Fred Jones, being the leader means being the caretaker, (he's the Mom friend what can I say) and any version where he's cruel and arrogant and just DOESN'T CARE about his friends in the way he's shown to in the Gunn movies is just so far from Fred to me it's not even funny. And what makes it even worse for me is that this (or at least something similar) is the idea of Fred that has really spread to the popular culture. Just the "leader", the jock that makes the rules, the one that [insert X adaptation here] finally gave a personality and made interesting (something that has been said more times than I can count for pretty much every gang member, save Shaggy and Scooby).

And I haven't even touched on Velma, and how they gave her a bit of a early 2000s smart superiority girl complex against Daphne, plus the whole makeover thing and etc. etc. The Gunn Movies are pretty much what would happen if you took someone who hadn't seen Scooby since they were 7 years old (and honestly had a pretty negative outlook against it then) and tried to "fix" it, only his memory was so bad he just made up problems (and threw in a good helping of early 2000s style sexism with it) convincing pretty much the entirety of the popular culture that said problems exist and that Gunn was absolutely brilliant for fixing them (and then bringing up said "problems" whenever anyone wants to talk about Scooby) and this entire rant has been without even fucking MENTIONING what is probably the reason you, anonymous tumblr user sent this ask in the first place, to I, Swishy "Scrappy Doo Redemption Arc" Broke-on-books (dot tumblr dot com), which is his HIGHLY SUCESSFUL and utterly sadistic character assassination of my number one man, Scrappy Doo.

And I am going to try my damnedest here not to get totally into my highly passionate opinions over what James Gunn did to Scrappy in the first of his Scooby movies and how thoroughly it has pissed me the fuck off because I have been writing this post for over an hour now and if we start to really get into my feelings on this topic it will certainly be a couple of hours more but like. That Fucking Bitch. I give James Gunn personally a solid eighty-five percent of the blame for making my life as a Scrappy Doo fan UTTERLY unbearable with this stupid fucking movie alone, and just his Scrappy crimes would honestly be enough for me to say that I hate this movie, not even considering the numerous Scooby crimes I've been talking about here for the past million paragraphs, but the part about this movie that makes me the MOST mad the most pissed off is that it's actually a good fucking movie. James Gunn wrote two hilarious and entertaining movies that have become beloved in the popular culture for their successes in that arena, while at the same time pissing all over the core themes and messages of the franchise of which it was based, that of friendship.

TLDR; The Live Action Scooby Doo movies (written by James Gunn) are highly entertaining and fun pieces of media to watch, and are widely loved by the general public and looked at with fondness and nostalgia because of that. However, as a hardcore Scooby Doo fan (writing that phrase sounds so ridiculous but oh well) the existence of these movies and their impact on the popular culture can be extremely frustrating (despite any personal nostalgia said fan may have) due to their spreading of a misinformed picture of what "typical Scooby Doo" looks like. This picture is especially frustrating due to the fabrication or exaggeration of problems present in classic Scooby (such as sexism in regards to the girls), as well as giving more ammunition to other problems in Scooby fandom (such as oversexualization, and sexualization in general, which no one wants to see in regards to their children's cartoons, like HONESTLY.) Discussions of sexism and sexualization in Scooby (both of which ARE present and are issues, although not at their worst in WAY) can often lead to an overlooking of the issues that are very present and clear in WAY and have continued since then with far too little resistance (I'm 100% talking about the racism here) HOWEVER that topic deserves at least a dozen posts of its own that I am no way informed or qualified enough to even begin to think about writing. The Gunn Movies are frustrating to many longtime Scooby fans because of these reasons, but for me, and fellow Scrappy Doo fans there is also the added aspect of the demonization of Scrappy Doo in the live action movies and the affects that has had on the popular culture as well, making it uniquely inhospitable to like or enjoy the character of Scrappy. End post.

[cream-and-tea]

how do werewolves work in lmd (plus anything else like that)

OK SO.

(this got very very long)

(just as a warning)

(also i’m going to tag @transmasc-wizard bc i remember you asked about this a while ago and a lot of this response comes from what i had typed up to respond to YOU lol)

(okay here we go)

there are (putting it very very basically) two main kinds of magic in the Ghost Story Universe: mortem (Death Juice) and vita (Life Juice). they draw from the same source (God Juice) (which is also the source of the apocalypse but that’s another post entirely) and are kind of different aspects of one thing, but still act as opposing forces. equals and opposites, can’t have one without the other, etc etc. the point is that even though they’re two different types of magic they share the same set of rules and operate under the same basic facts. one of the most basic being that magic is physically taxing to use. no magic comes without a cost

so this is pretty straightforward. and generally it isn’t anything too debilitating, but the more powerful the magic and the more magic used, the more damaging the physical effects become (for example: early on agnes’s chitchats with the ghosts she sees don’t really wear on her because it’s a very passive form of her power, but as the plot progresses and she actively draws on it more and more she starts to develop chronic headaches). the more active magic bullshit you do in succession —> the worse you’ll be feeling the next morning. people would usually need to rest for upwards of a few days after performing a major act of magic and the reason The Library focuses so much on endurance and repetition is to prevent that from happening. it’s to the point that some majorly powerful stuff is possible but the benefit of it is almost completely outweighed by the potential damage it would cause.

rambly worbuilding aside, this is really just a preface so it makes sense when i say: vampires and werewolves are what happen when people push their magic to far.

they’re basically the most extreme end of the spectrum for either kind of magic. vamps are a result of overusing vita (blood life stuff), and wolfs are a result of overusing mortem (spooky death stuff). this happens to people when they’re drawing on so much magic that their body literally cannot support it anymore and starts canabilizing itself in order to support the magic and prevent the person from just. coming apart at the seams. a Regular Person body is just incapable of handling that amount of power, so in turn they have to draw their sustenance from a different non-human source. the comparatively small piece-of-magic-apocalypse-juice in them mutates and co-opts the functions of their body in order to save that body from collapse. both vamps and wolves have to feed CONSTANTLY or they risk their bodies giving in and all their organs straight-up failing. it’s a slow transformation process and sort of representative of how much Whatever Caused The Apocalypse has become so deeply ingrained in every part of the new world. again: it presents differently but it’s all the same stuff in the end.

the world is full of monsters and weirdness and general spooky bullshit but vampires and werewolves especially have an ENORMOUS amount of stigma surrounding them because of the fact that most people still see regular magic users as recognizably human, and view the transformation as a transition from Human Person With Emotions Who I Should View As Such Despite This One Weird Thing to Inhuman Monster. most magical creatures aren’t seen as sentient in nature and many of them are actively dangerous to humans, so if someone pushes their abilities to far and ends up undergoing the transformation then it’s seen as a shift from being one of Us (normal people just trying to survive this crazy broken down to world) to being one of Them (unnatural monsters that came about as a result of the evil forest and apocalypse and want to destroy humanity), except that obviously the people who are turned are the same people they were before, just with an extra set of challenges and probably more bloodlust (which i can see being a bit of concern but c’mon. are u really going to let a little killer instinct get in the way of a lasting and meaningful relationship. weak).

They’re also used as an excuse when it comes to hatred of people born with magic at all. bc sure it SEEMS harmless when you kid is learning from their dead grandma or healing a little bit faster than normal, but with ONE WRONG MOVE they could become A VISCOUS BEAST or a BLOODSUCKING MONSTER and do you really want to take that risk?? wouldn’t it be better to stamp that out now before someone gets hurt??? even in places like The Library, which usually serves as a safe-haven for people born w magic, vamps and wolfs are seen as somehow Lesser. The Library toutes them as cautionary tales and failures of magic, basically a warning of what not to do to their students.

to get into the more specific abilities and effects and What Being A Vampire Or Werewolf Means i’ve made some handy little lists (ft. calliope and luca macnamara, a book 2-3 character that nobody knows about lol) (please click tumblr absolutely wrecked the quality):

so. yeah.