#All the Creation

[artisticvicu]

Summary:

Echo'a Velundaleht, Warrior of Light, Bringer of Hope and the bane of any villain's existence.

Or so the moniker goes. It changes, sure, adapting as needed to appease the masses or be used against him, but that doesn't mean he ever likes it. Not when there's more than just enemy blood on his hands and situations rob him of those he cares about.

At some point he's going to stop caring. At some point, he's going to be done with all their stupidity and the endlessness of it all and simply watch the world burn just because he could.

That thought scares him more than his own death does and he can't help but wonder for how much longer it will.

At least he has the Scions. If he had been on his own, he would have shattered a long time ago. He just hopes he hasn't leaned too heavily on them in turn.

 

Complete at 47 chapters until Dawntrail 7.1, probably.

This contains predominantly Shadowbringers and Endwalker content. Unless noted otherwise, each chapter is named for the quest it appears in.

Chapters 42 through 44 uploaded.

[bloodybellycomb]

One massive, legitimate way to improve as a writer or artist or in any creative endeavor really, is to become absolutely obsessed with something and to allow yourself to be weird about it. Genuinely mean this btw.

[stellaseveride]

ELEMENTARY | 2.19 The Many Mouths of Aaron Colville

[magicicephoenix]

i finally finished reading I see you, Sundrop! by @shirajellyfish and IT'S SO GOOD I CAN'T BELIEVE IT TOOK ME THIS LONG TO FINISH IT RAAAAAAA

i will be gushing about it in the tags but here's a lil animation i made based on the below paragraph in chapter 6 that gave me such a strong mental image that i had to make it real :)

[birdmans]

ALICENT + AEGON, HELAENA, AND AEMOND

[ditzybat]

tim drake is the type of guy to drop random lore then walk away.

tim: ugh i hate baseball, it’s like, when you have to play it in order to save a whole planet once, every game after seem boring

dick: that’s not…

tim: only downside to that was how we almost totaled barts brand new spaceship

dick: what spaceship??

—

tim: oh, hi mom

shiva: hello timothy, how are you? still keeping up with your training i take it?

bruce: mother? she’s not your —

shiva: let’s spar then timothy, let’s leave it strictly non lasting injuries, i don’t rather feel like dying by your hand again today

tim: of course!! ^-^

bruce: again?

—

tim: man i forgot to take my meds again

duke: your meds for what?

tim: i have no spleen, so i have to take probiotics, it really is manageable but i dont know where those pills went

duke: i’m almost scared to ask, tim, how did you lose your spleen?

tim: weird spider dude, it was a whole thing

—

tim: you talk a lot of shit for someone who got replaced as heir to your immortal grandfathers empire by me

damian: you what!?

tim: i regularly beat his ass at online chess every week too, and i don’t think you’ve seen him since he stole your corpse

—

tim: here

jason: what’s this?

tim: a box of all the photos i took when i obsessively stalked you for your entire tenure as robin

jason: thanks?

tim: you’re welcome, bye!

jason: … creepy ass kid…

—

steph: so how did you to get together?

bernard: well —

tim: i saved him from a getting cut open by chaos monster cult members

bernard: yep, i was rescued from being a vessel for a greek god, and we just really clicked afterwards

steph: well, it’s better than the brick

[chloesimaginationthings]

Do you guys like FNAF fan games?..

[astrhae]

crowley used the metal tool in season 1 to start time, and we learn that he's used it first to start space. to create the stars -- he still remembers how. he still remembers all of heaven's passwords: in the book crowley is described as an optimist because he has the "utter surety... that the universe would look after him". not god, but the universe. and of course he does: he helped create it and he's looking after it, too.

think about it: aziraphale had a sword, but crowley is about to face satan who wants to destroy the world, and crowley's only weapon is a tool of creation

[aethersea]

another thing fantasy writers should keep track of is how much of their worldbuilding is aesthetic-based. it's not unlike the sci-fi hardness scale, which measures how closely a story holds to known, real principles of science. The Martian is extremely hard sci-fi, with nearly every detail being grounded in realistic fact as we know it; Star Trek is extremely soft sci-fi, with a vaguely plausible "space travel and no resource scarcity" premise used as a foundation for the wildest ideas the writers' room could come up with. and much as Star Trek fuckin rules, there's nothing wrong with aesthetic-based fantasy worldbuilding!

(sidenote we're not calling this 'soft fantasy' bc there's already a hard/soft divide in fantasy: hard magic follows consistent rules, like "earthbenders can always and only bend earth", and soft magic follows vague rules that often just ~feel right~, like the Force. this frankly kinda maps, but I'm not talking about just the magic, I'm talking about the worldbuilding as a whole.

actually for the purposes of this post we're calling it grounded vs airy fantasy, bc that's succinct and sounds cool.)

a great example of grounded fantasy is Dungeon Meshi: the dungeon ecosystem is meticulously thought out, the plot is driven by the very realistic need to eat well while adventuring, the story touches on both social and psychological effects of the whole 'no one dies forever down here' situation, the list goes on. the worldbuilding wants to be engaged with on a mechanical level and it rewards that engagement.

deliberately airy fantasy is less common, because in a funny way it's much harder to do. people tend to like explanations. it takes skill to pull off "the world is this way because I said so." Narnia manages: these kids fall into a magic world through the back of a wardrobe, befriend talking beavers who drink tea, get weapons from Santa Claus, dance with Bacchus and his maenads, and sail to the edge of the world, without ever breaking suspension of disbelief. it works because every new thing that happens fits the vibes. it's all just vibes! engaging with the worldbuilding on a mechanical level wouldn't just be futile, it'd be missing the point entirely.

the reason I started off calling this aesthetic-based is that an airy story will usually lean hard on an existing aesthetic, ideally one that's widely known by the target audience. Lewis was drawing on fables, fairy tales, myths, children's stories, and the vague idea of ~medieval europe~ that is to this day our most generic fantasy setting. when a prince falls in love with a fallen star, when there are giants who welcome lost children warmly and fatten them up for the feast, it all fits because these are things we'd expect to find in this story. none of this jars against what we've already seen.

and the point of it is to be wondrous and whimsical, to set the tone for the story Lewis wants to tell. and it does a great job! the airy worldbuilding serves the purposes of the story, and it's no less elegant than Ryōko Kui's elaborately grounded dungeon. neither kind of worldbuilding is better than the other.

however.

you do have to know which one you're doing.

the whole reason I'm writing this is that I saw yet another long, entertaining post dragging GRRM for absolute filth. asoiaf is a fun one because on some axes it's pretty grounded (political fuck-around-and-find-out, rumors spread farther than fact, fastest way to lose a war is to let your people starve, etc), but on others it's entirely airy (some people have magic Just Cause, the various peoples are each based on an aesthetic/stereotype/cliché with no real thought to how they influence each other as neighbors, the super-long seasons have no effect on ecology, etc).

and again! none of this is actually bad! (well ok some of those stereotypes are quite bigoted. but other than that this isn't bad.) there's nothing wrong with the season thing being there to highlight how the nobles are focused on short-sighted wars for power instead of storing up resources for the extremely dangerous and inevitable winter, that's a nice allegory, and the looming threat of many harsh years set the narrative tone. and you can always mix and match airy and grounded worldbuilding – everyone does it, frankly it's a necessity, because sooner or later the answer to every worldbuilding question is "because the author wanted it to be that way." the only completely grounded writing is nonfiction.

the problem is when you pretend that your entirely airy worldbuilding is actually super duper grounded. like, for instance, claiming that your vibes-based depiction of Medieval Europe (Gritty Edition) is completely historical, and then never even showing anyone spinning. or sniffing dismissively at Tolkien for not detailing Aragorn's tax policy, and then never addressing how a pre-industrial grain-based agricultural society is going years without harvesting any crops. (stored grain goes bad! you can't even mouse-proof your silos, how are you going to deal with mold?) and the list goes on.

the man went up on national television and invited us to engage with his worldbuilding mechanically, and then if you actually do that, it shatters like spun sugar under the pressure. doesn't he realize that's not the part of the story that's load-bearing! he should've directed our focus to the political machinations and extensive trope deconstruction, not the handwavey bit.

point is, as a fantasy writer there will always be some amount of your worldbuilding that boils down to 'because I said so,' and there's nothing wrong with that. nor is there anything wrong with making that your whole thing – airy worldbuilding can be beautiful and inspiring. but you have to be aware of what you're doing, because if you ask your readers to engage with the worldbuilding in gritty mechanical detail, you had better have some actual mechanics to show them.

[itty-bitty-sunshine]

It's been 10 years and just now im learning how to draw the ogs smh

Happy ten years at Freddy's! 🎉

[single-snail]

i would rather die than go on the spn cruise but also i hate the idea of it happening and not being there to witness it

[artisticvicu]

Summary: They weren't supposed to come to Teyvat. Kaveh should have known better than to coax the otherworlder from their path, to have left things be. No, wait, that wasn't fair to Kaveh. Alhaitham had asked. He had been curious, just as Kaveh had been eager when the otherworlder had changed directions to at least fly by. Kaveh couldn't have known the Fatui had been watching the otherworlder. Kaveh couldn't have known that Alhaitham would end up leaving him in Sumeru City - unconscious, alone- no, Lesser Lord Kusanali was with him. Lesser Lord Kusanali had sent Alhaitham with Wanderer to get the otherworlder, had...had....... He really hated nausea. The pain he could deal with but the nausea could go away and never return. Maybe he should try and get some more sleep. It would be nice to wake up to a rescue, especially with how bad his injuries were. They were looking for them, right?

Also on Wattpad, DeviantArt, and FanFiction.net.

[dead6ite]

i spent, literally all day on this. and i am praying to bill cipher that it does well

three separate ciphers used here, feel free to decode and comment what you found!

but seriously, this is like my magnum opus here. please give him love!!

i’ll be posting a monochromatic version after this

[jakeperalta]

@giftober 2024 | day 29: doors ➛ pride & prejudice (2005)

[movie-gifs]

ALL OF US STRANGERS (2023) dir. Andrew Haigh