#I have plans for the worldbuilding and it's going to be epic

[clickerflight]

Burned at the stake: Part 4

Masterlist

Part 3

One more part after this one. I'm so excited about this story, my goodness. Also, I have, like, four more vampire whump ideas and I can't stop thinking about them all and the worldbuilding for the world this all takes place in.

Content: Vampire whumpee, carewhumper turned just whumper, silver burns, toe and finger whump, dragged by the hair, talk of vampire trafficking, it as a pronoun, dehumanization

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"Kyle! Wait! I need you, I can't speak to it!"

“I won’t have any part in this, Joanna,” Kyle hissed, turning on her and using his extra inch to try and intimidate her. “You need to give him to someone who can take care of him! You can’t keep him here!”

She began to look uncomfortable, but she bared her own teeth right back. “No! The vampire was there for the first age! The first dynasty! Who knows what it could tell us! You know we don’t have much in the way of records from that time.”

“Oh for the love of-he was a Hippo hunter!? What do you want to know? How to kill a hippo?”

“It knows something! It knew who the kings were. Even the smallest details it thinks doesn’t matter could make all the difference! We could be-”

“Rich?” he snapped, shutting her up. “Joanna, you and I have been friends for a long time, and that’s why I’m giving you a chance here. Give him over to the authorities and leave him be. You’re no better than those stupid black market treasure hunters right now. He’s not dangerous and he shouldn’t be kept in your shed.”

He stared at her for a moment and she opened her mouth, still at a loss for words. 

With that, Kyle left and Joanna let him. She stood in her yard, turning to stare at the shed. She could hear the vampire moving inside, presumably trying to escape. She went to the shed only to lock the door and then went into the house to plan her next move. 

………………………

In the morning, Joanna woke up with a plan in mind. She hadn’t really been able to sleep as she turned the problem over, but everything seemed to resolve itself. She would just have to teach the Vampire english. It was a vampire, a creature of strange magic, so it should learn fast enough. 

As for Kyle. 

She dialed his number and she was unsurprisingly sent to voicemail. “Hey, Kyle,” she said in a docile tone. “Sorry about yesterday. You were right. I’m calling some people to take it-him. Anyways, I wanted to apologize. Maybe we should take a break while I sort this all out and I’ll talk to you in a couple of weeks, yeah? Kay. Bye.”

That should take care of it. She knew Kyle and he wouldn’t be eager to see her again until his temper cooled. This sort of thing had happened in the past and they were used to having to take breaks in their friendship when they had an argument. This one would probably be longer than the ones that they’d been through in the past, but that suited Joanna just fine. She had a vampire to occupy her time with. 

………………………….

The woman was back. Esial had forgotten to ask Kyle what her name was and now he was too afraid to try and get her to tell him through pantomime. She stared at him for a long moment, before taking a slow breath. She bent down and pointed to something on the floor, saying a word in her strange language. She pointed to another object and made the same sound. 

“Silveer,” Esial repeated. That was the metal that would hurt him, then. She nodded and pointed to another object, speaking another word for him to learn. 

The entire hour was spent like that as she pointed at things and named them. He was wearing something called a towel, though it’s purpose must not be for clothing because none of the things she was wearing was called that. There was a shirt and pants and hair and eyes and coins and shed. That was the name of the room he was in. He wondered what its purpose was when it wasn’t used to keep ‘vampires’ trapped. She had called him that and he tried to correct her that his name was Esial but she repeated the word until he understood. She seemed a bit annoyed with him by the end and left soon enough. He repeated the words in his mind for the next few hours of loneliness. He had nothing to do and he didn’t want to annoy her. He hoped she would feed him soon. He was starving. 

So, he practiced the words in his head hoping to get to the point where he would tell her what she wanted and beg her to let him go. 

She kept coming back and teaching him words of her strange language and he couldn’t understand the rules. The words made no sense and a horrifying feeling began to creep over him as he realized he’d just have to memorize everything. She was growing more impatient with him every time she came out, and grew even more annoyed when she saw him scratching at the cuff around his ankle. He shivered on the table, fidgeting with the now fraying towel and tried to repeat everything, but she was going too fast and none of this made sense. She didn’t explain the meanings of all of these words and he still didn’t know what a towel was for. 

At the end of another session after a long period when she had been away, which only made it harder for him to remember all of the words and how they fit together, he hesitantly asked, “Towel?”

She looked up from her book full of little squiggles, annoyed. 

He cleared his throat and asked. “Towel what for?”

She stared at him and a deep rage filled her eyes. She started speaking quickly, too fast for him to understand more than the occasional word. She was annoyed, though. He wasn’t learning fast enough and she was.. Running out of time? She said that a couple of times and Esial grasped the meaning of it. Running out of time for what?

“Time? How… long for…. Esial free?” he found himself asking. 

The woman turned her ire directly on him and he shrank back even farther on the table, nearly falling off the other side. 

“You. Are. Mine.” she said pointedly. “I saved you. I healed you. You stay until I am done.”

He lifted an arm, half sure she was about to strike him, but when he looked back, she had gone back to her book, muttering to herself. 

Esial wrapped his arms around himself, shivering. There were worse things, he supposed. He wasn’t entirely bored, sure he was hungry, but he wasn’t hurting either. He picked at his nails glumly, waiting for the ‘English’ lesson to continue. 

…………………………………

The vampire was becoming less willing to participate. Joanna should have seen it coming, but after it realized it wouldn’t be getting out anytime soon, it just gave up. It had only given the bare minimum to her and stopped flinching now when she yelled at it, but now it stopped caring entirely. It did not listen, it refused to repeat words, and all it said when she asked any questions was “Esial want out.” It even ignored her when she tried to correct its grammar. 

Joanna was getting desperate. She had put off school and work and everything. She had everything hinging on the paper this stupid vampire was supposed to help her write and now it just glared at her when she entered the shed and refused to say anything! Her life hinged on this now! She was relying on that paper and here she sat with a useless waste of space and blood and she was going to lose her mind. 

So, today, after a week of the creature’s silence, she walked into the room and continued right across the silver on the floor. The vampire realized the intent in her steps, but didn’t move quickly enough as she grabbed it by the hair, pulling its head back hard. It yelped, hand grabbing onto her wrist. 

In front of her, in her mind, was not a man, but a monster that her career depended on. She didn’t care anymore. At this point, he would either speak to her, or she would sell him to someone who would actually get some use out of him. 

“You will speak to me,” she said slowly. “Do you understand?”

Shakily, the vampire licked its lips, eyes darting around the room before it said, “Esial want free.”

Red hot anger licked through her and she moved, easily dragging the vampire off the table. It landed hard on the silver and screamed, writhing as it tried to shove silver away from it to keep from burning. She overturned the table, leaving nothing for it to scramble onto and left, locking the door behind her. 

………………………

Esial sat hunched on a bare patch of floor. His back and sides were littered with burns, his fingers and toes peeling where he’d pushed the silver back. Dry sobs heaved through his body, the chain rattling with each movement.

The woman caused him pain. She’d hurt him because he wanted to leave and he didn’t want to play her games anymore. Maybe that had been stupid of him, but he couldn’t take it anymore. He wanted out. 

He wasn’t healing. It had been weeks without blood right after a tough regeneration and the blood had run out as his body used it slowly as energy. He was starving and all he wanted to do was go home to his little mud shack and wait till he was strong enough to kill some birds. He wanted to wrestle with hippos and see his favorite crocodiles. He wanted his Maman back. 

He started rocking, sobbing and whispering for his Maman. He knew she was dead. He knew that his crocodiles were dead. Who knew how much time had passed. He got the sense that it was an enormous amount of time, and that only made him cry all the harder. He wanted to go home but he hadn’t even had a home when he had been taken and chained to that stake. 

And then the door opened.

………………………………

Kyle had got a call from Mary, Joanna’s neighbor, her voice looping in his head. 

Something was screaming. I know it was. She’s your friend. Check on her please.

Mary had bad blood with police in the past, and Kyle wasn’t going to bring them to her door if he could help it, but he didn’t think it would come to it. He wondered if the vampire had come back and killed Joanna. Or if Joanna kept the thing and it was screaming for help. 

He took a stake with him, just in case.

He reached Joanna’s house in the evening just in time to see her get in her car and drive off. He idled in the street, surprised. It seemed like she hadn’t noticed him, though, and she looked perfectly fine if not incredibly angry. 

He had a strange feeling in his gut as he parked in the street in front of her house. He took the stake out and trudged through the dew stained grass to the shed. The lock had been left open and he felt rather sick as he slowly opened the door.

The table was overturned, the chain of the ankle cuff caught under it as the vampire sat curled over his knees. There were painful looking burns covering his back and arms, his one visible hand red and blistered from clearing somewhere to safely sit. He slowly lifted his head and looked at the figure in the doorway, his eyes lingering on the stake in Kyle’s hand. There was no fear in his eyes when he saw it, and Kyle realized it was because he didn’t know what it was. 

Kyle tossed the stake out and walked carefully over the silver, kicking away some of the closer objects to the vampire. He was only wearing that towel Joanna had given him in the beginning, the edges of it unraveled. He was covered in sores and blisters, and all of those looked recent, but as he uncurled a little to see Kyle better, the researcher could see every single one of his ribs and his hollowed stomach. Vampires didn’t bloat during starvation the way humans did. 

Kyle crouched down and Esial stared at him. 

“Esial want free,” the vampire whispered heavily. 

“Yeah…. Yeah, I can do that for ya, buddy,” Kyle sighed, reaching up to run a hand down the back of Esial’s head. “I’ll find something to cut the chain. I’ll be right back.”

Kyle left the shed and crept around the yard until he found where Joanna had hidden all of her garden supplies. There was a branch cutter that looked like it might work so he picked it up and went back. 

Esial looked up again as Kyle got the cutters around the chain. He strained to try and get them through the chain, and while he dented the link, it didn't do much more than that. 

He instead turned to where the chain was connected. it was wrapped around a wooden support between the leg and the bottom of the tabletop. He opened the cutter as wide as it would go and bit the metal down into the wood. It gave a little, then splintered. He nearly fell over as the wood gave since he had been leaning his weight into the cutters. 

He dropped it on the floor and fished the chain out from under the table, gathering it up in his arms. There wasn't too much of it, but certainly enough to trip the already damaged vampire. 

Kyle held out his hand for Esial to take and the vampire did so, accepting the help up. 

Kyle carried the chains and shuffled his feet to clear a path for Esial, who followed along after him. 

As they stepped outside, Esial took a deep breath, looking up at the stars in confusion for a moment before he was distracted by something else. 

"Blood," he whimpered, looking to a lonely corner of the garden. Kyle could faintly see something black coating the plants there and could smell the faint scent of rot. 

"We'll buy you some later," Kyle promised. "We have to go."

Esial seemed to understand that and followed along to Kyle's car. Kyle opened the passenger seat door, dumping the chain onto the floor and stepping back. "Sit here," Kyle said, pointing to the chair. 

Esial gave him a confused stare. "Sit? But we to go?"

"Yes. You will see. Trust me. Sit."

Esial slowly did and Kyle gently closed the door for him, which had the vampire scrambling at the door in a panic, trying to find the way out. Kyle ran to the other side and got in, leaning over to take Esial's hands. "It's okay," Kyle promised. "You're not going to be stuck here."

Esial's wide muddy eyes seemed to bleed out panic and Kyle reached into his pocket. He kept a fidget toy there for when he was reading lengthy papers so he wouldn't chew his nails down so much. 

He gave the cube to Esial, showing him how some of the things moved and clicked and Esial took it, frowning at it as Kyle closed his door and started the car. 

Esial jumped at that, eyeing the lights that started up on the dashboard while messing with the cube. 

Kyle started driving and Esial stared out the window, eyes wide with shock as the world passed him by. Kyle wondered if he should avoid the highway, but he wanted to get home as quickly as possible, so as he got up to speed Esial gripped the cube like it was the only thing keeping him alive as he went faster than he'd gone in his entire life. 

"It's going to be okay," Kyle said softly as they drove and Esial looked down at the cube in his hands, turning it over and over. 

Kyle turned off into the small town he rented an apartment in. Joanna inherited her house from her grandparents, but he did not have that for himself. Still, he'd found a nice place to live and he had a guest bedroom. It had been used by a girlfriend he had at the time, but had been empty for months, and he was glad for it now. 

He parked his car and pulled his jacket off, reaching over and coaxing Esial's arms through the sleeves and zipping it up. 

"No one should be awake right now, but I want to be careful here," Kyle said before getting out and going around to open Esial's door. 

The vampire looked around as he stepped out onto the pavement, eyes wide as he took in every detail. It had to be so alien to him, considering how long it had been since he had been conscious. Kyle almost felt bad that he couldn't explain everything to him right now. Instead, he grabbed the chains, put an arm over the vampire to try and hide him more, and went up to the house. It was a building with four apartments and Kyle lived on the top floor. 

He got his key out, unlocked the door, and took Esial inside. He closed the door just as quickly and looked around. The apartment had not changed since he left of course, but he felt like he was seeing it with new eyes, imagining that he didn't have a single clue what anything in this room was.

 Kyle gently took Esial's arm. "Over here. Let's get you set up."

Esial went with Kyle to the guest bedroom and stood awkwardly, looking around at everything. The room was a little cluttered becoming Kyle's storage room when Jocelyn left, so there were books and totes lined against the walls. 

"Here," Kyle said, patting the bed. "For you to sleep."

Esial stepped over curiously, pressing his hands down onto the bed, eyes wide with surprise. 

With the vampire distracted, Kyle steeled himself up to feed him. Everyone got lessons in how to safely feed a vampire these days in case of emergencies, so he knew what to do, but he had to steel himself to actually do it. He pulled back his sleeve and went to the adjoining bathroom to wash his arm off, which got Esial's attention immediately. 

The vampire came to see what the sound was and stared in awe at the water pouring out of the sink. 

Kyle shook his arm to get most of the water off before turning and lifting his arm to Esial. The Vampire stared at it before looking at Kyle in confusion. 

"Blood. To eat," Kyle said, a lump in his throat as he said it. 

Esial frowned. "Blood? Blood is to Kyle. Not Esial."

"It's a gift. To you."

Esial gave him a skeptical look. "Safe?"

"Yeah?"

Esial went back to looking at the arm and frowned again. "Esial.... doesn't know."

"No, it's fine, you can have it. It's yours."

Esial shook his head. "Esial doesn't know-" the vampire mimicked something that Kyle didn't catch. "Esial hurt Kyle. Not know."

Kyle was still confused so he switched to the ancient Egyptian language Esial knew. 

"You do not know what?"

Esial's eyes lit up, like he had forgotten that Kyle spoke something he knew a bit better. "I do not know how to drink from a living thing. I only drank blood taken from animals. I do not want to kill you."

“Oh…” Kyle said, back in English. “I don’t really have a needle…. Can I feed you tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Esial replied, still in Egyptian which worked for Kyle since the Vampire seemed to understand him mostly fine though struggled with speaking the language. 

“Alright, you get some sleep here. You can use the blankets. We’ll figure everything else out tomorrow.”

“Alright.”

Esial's Rescue Art

Esial: @whumpsday @honeycollectswhump @writereleaserepeat @tragedyinblue @hyrules-sleepiest-knight

Part 5

[ckret2]

So is does the candidacy decide like the mayor for the multiverse?? Do the gods have a voting system??? Like do they start a supernova to vote? It just sounds like an interesting and also boring bureaucracy?? Also what are the departments.

also do the time engineers(giants??) just maintain timelines and ALSO ALSO is time baby related to them and if he is does that mean giant time babies in general maintain one planets timeline?? Just kinda curious:p

I picture whatever the gods have going on as like, petty small town council politics. But I'm not interested in worldbuilding the full politics of a vast multiversal pantheon—because this isn't a sweeping sci-fi epic about a space empire, it's a fanfic about a silly cartoon—and I don't want to lock them into a rigid defined government in case I think of something else more interesting to do later. So we're not getting more specific than "petty local politics" and "voting's involved."

There's an urban planning committee, and VENDOR's on it. THEY handle budgeting. I haven't had a need to think up any other departments.

Some Time Giants become cosmic engineers. Having telepathic control over time offers a bit of an advantage on the job. Not all Time Giants are cosmic engineers and not all cosmic engineers are Time Giants. They're not like born specifically to be engineers, they're just people. Big people who can control time. They can choose what they wanna do when they grow up just like humans do.

Canonically, Time Baby is the last surviving Time Giant. Generally Time Giant babies don't have jobs just like human babies don't have jobs. Time Baby's just conquered Earth because he felt like it and no one could stop him.

[caffetato-the-caffeinated-potato]

Yeah, I know this is a few days late. But this drawing took me a lot more time than I anticipated, and the executives weren't always functioning, so it is what it is.

It's hard to believe that I only started posting art Rise art in late September, and have already gained a modest following. I have @onejellyfishplease to thank for a lot of that, I believe. I would often make fanart for them and when they reblogged it I'd receive a significant spike in notes, and sometimes a new follower. So thank you, Jelly!

Jelly is also the one who encouraged me to make Tabletop Turtles, the first AU I've made since I was 12! And now I'm starting to be able to carve out my own following without needing to ride on Jelly's coattails.

Speaking of TTAU, how about an update? [Under the cut]

TTAU is still very much in development, though I'd say it is now out of the conceptual stage and is now in the planning stage. I've got many ideas for the story and am currently in the process of organizing those ideas into a rough outline and filling in some blanks.

The story of TTAU will retell the plot of the show, reimagined by the fantasy setting and different dynamics created by the separated AU aspect. Plus, with some of my own subplots and worldbuilding thrown in as well.

All that to say; this story will not be short. In classic Me fashion, I've managed to take a simple concept and turn it into an epic-length story. Because I'm incapable of telling short stories, apparently.

So, the comic probably won't be ready to start for at least a couple more months. I am a plantser, who leans a little more towards outlining, so I don't want to jump into the story without at least a general idea of where I'm going. I'll try to keep making some art for TTAU in the meantime.

And, because this is my first time ever making a comic, and literally every comic making advice video ever practically begs you not to start with a long comic, I'll be making several short comics as practice. I'll probably start with simple comic strips, work my way up to short stories. Some might be related to TTAU, but most probably won't.

Thank you for your patience, and your encouragement! Especially to @overthinkingspark-blue, @idk-im-just-here-now, @starsandspacefog, and @varianlikescheese! This idea would have fizzled out a long time ago without you guys bouncing my excitement back at me and keeping this flame burning.

And as always, if you have any questions, feel free to send me an ask!

[pluckyredhead]

I have fallen down a Fourth World rabbit hole (this is @ngoziu's fault) and am now reading everything DC has ever published with these characters, in order, as is my wont, and I have a lot of thoughts and feelings, so I'm going to start dumping them all here. Sorry.

Background if you have no idea what I'm talking about but want to read this post anyway (why?): in 1971, Jack Kirby left Marvel because he couldn't put up with Stan Lee any longer and came to DC, where they were like "Yes you can do anything you want" (this was a lie). He immediately began writing, drawing, and editing an incredibly ambitious epic that stretched over four simultaneously published books: Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen (we can mostly ignore this one), New Gods, Mister Miracle, and The Forever People. These books came to be known as Jack Kirby's Fourth World Tetralogy.

The books all center around the war between the utopian planet New Genesis, ruled by the benevolent Highfather, and the dystopian planet Apokalips, ruled by the evil Darkseid. At the heart of the narrative is "The Pact," aka The Cosmic Baby Swap. To ensure a (temporary) truce, Highfather and Darkseid traded sons when said children were very young - so Orion, Darkseid's son, is raised on New Genesis, and Scott Free, Highfather's son, is raised on Apokalips. Neither knows who their real father is until adulthood.

Orion grows up in a utopia, but tormented by his feelings of rage and otherness that he can't explain. Scott is raised in a torture orphanage, because that's just what happens on Apokalips, but eventually he escapes to Earth and becomes the escape artist Mister Miracle. The Cosmic Baby Swap begs what to me is the central question of the Fourth World, which is: what is the nature of good? Which boy will be a hero? The one born to good and raised by evil, or the one born to evil and raised by good?

TRICK QUESTION THEY'RE BOTH HEROES!!! GOOD IS MORE POWERFUL THAN EVIL! LOVE WINS AND FASCISM LOSES! This is so, so important to me and any version of these characters that doesn't understand the really not very complex symbolism here is invalid and kind of embarrassing for the writer (looking at you, Tom King).

Also Scott falls in love with and eventually marries Big Barda, one of Darkseid's fiercest warriors, who was born on Apokalips and raised on Apokalips and chooses good anyway. LOVE WINS AGAIN! BARDA TOPS HER TINY HUSBAND IN THE NAME OF PEACE AND COMPASSION!

Sadly DC canceled New Gods and Forever People after only 11 issues, which kind of killed Kirby's whole vision. Mister Miracle limped along until #18, but as a really pale shadow of itself. So we never really got the full scope of Kirby's original plans.

ANYWAY. That's the background. Now thoughts on the actual comics:

Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen: I love Jimmy, I love Superman, I love the Newsboy Legion, but this book feels very tangential to the whole Fourth World experiment and I think we can safely set it to the side. However, if you love the 90s Superboy series, I recommend dipping into this because it's the source material for a lot of Kon's worldbuilding (Cadmus, Dubbilex, clone Guardian, etc.).

The Forever People (1971): So I originally read all the Jack Kirby Fourth World stuff like...at least 15 years ago, when I was still relatively new to comics, and I'll be honest: I didn't get it. Kirby is sort of an acquired taste, and I didn't really have any context for what he was doing. I understood the metaphors, but I didn't get why people found the work appealing. And Forever People in particular was the book where I was like "Why. What is the point of this" the most.

Rereading it many years later, I find it to be a lot more moving and profound - like, the Happyland issue alone is a knockout. That said, Kirby is, uhhhh...not great at ensemble characterization without Lee, and the Forever People themselves are unforgivably bland. Default Guy! Big Guy! Black Guy! Girl! Kid! Props to Kirby for making it a not all-white group - and for introducing five out of seven of DC's first Black characters in the space of, like, two years - but it would have been nice if he gave them personalities, too.

New Gods (1971): This is Orion's book and the heart of the Fourth World. At its best, it's the pinnacle of "Makes no sense...compels me, though." Like, "Glory Boat?" I don't understand a single thing that happened in that comic but it's so fucking good. I just want to read thousands of words of comics scholars over the past 50 years going "????" in collective confused admiration.

Mister Miracle (1971): This was the book I was most invested in when I read the Fourth World years ago, because I already loved Scott and Barda from JLI, but now I think it's weaker than New Gods and arguably even than Forever People. Kirby doesn't seem as invested in going all in on Big Concepts here, and Scott escaping endless weird deathtraps is only compelling for so long. The later issues, after the other books were canceled and DC made Kirby pivot away from the Apokalips/New Genesis war, are nothing. But Scott and Barda (and Oberon and Shilo) are everything, so I guess it balances out. Anyway Scott clearly already knows a lot about Earth by the time he meets Oberon and Thaddeus Brown, so DC please feel free to hire me to write a Mister Miracle: Year One miniseries about Scott's arrival on Earth, thank you.

Okay, now for the post-Kirby (or really, intra-Kirby) stuff:

Mister Miracle (1977): This picks up the numbering from the Kirby series, running from #19-25, and was written by Steve Englehart and then Steve Gerber, and it sucks so bad. For three reasons, in escalating importance:

Riddled with continuity holes and factual errors that don't match what Kirby established. Himon is shown on New Genesis - how did he get there? Metron is depicted as subservient to Highfather when Kirby showed him as a neutral, independent agent. Etc.

The treatment of non-Scott characters is largely terrible. Oberon is written really condescendingly (Scott's like "Ride on my shoulders like you used to!" even though they definitely did not ever do that before, because Oberon is not a child). When Scott feels guilty that he's not actively fighting the war, Highfather's like "I don't want you to fight because I feel bad that I traded you to Darkseid, let Orion do it" as if that isn't the root of Orion's severe emotional trauma TOO. And worst of all is Barda, who is knocked out and captured in the first issue and spends pretty much the entire rest of the series unconscious, waiting for Scott to rescue her - except for the brief scene where she wakes up brainwashed, requiring Scott to beat the shit out of her. Lovely.

The series is reeeally fixated on the notion that Scott is a god, and extrapolates that to Scott deciding he's the messiah. Now, I'm not going to say that the Fourth World can't be used to explore Christian themes just because Kirby is Jewish, because Kirby was very definitely exploring biblical themes extensively and frankly I don't know enough about the Bible to say whether he was sticking religiously (ha) to the Old Testament. But I do think taking one of the central characters of a Jewish man's magnum opus and making him the messiah is, uh, pushing it. And there's no way to argue he's not a Christian messiah because, uh, he T-poses a lot in this series and Granny also specifically states that if Scott is the messiah, she'll find an anti-Christ to combat him (which...wouldn't that sort of by default be Orion? which just further proves that the idea of a messiah really doesn't work in the Fourth World framework). Anyway it's gross and I hate it.

New Gods (1977): I'm kind of using this as a catchall to cover all of Gerry Conway's New Gods work, which includes the actual 1977 New Gods series (which picks up the numbering from Kirby, so it's #12-19), the conclusion of the story in Adventure Comics, and the Justice League of America crossover with the Fourth World. (Also there's one issue of Super-Team Family where Lightray and Metron team up with the Flash to save Orion, who has grown really really big, but that doesn't fit with the rest of Conway's continuity so I guess we can ignore it.)

Anyway this stuff is not as infuriating as Mister Miracle, but it's also not...good. The central concept is that Darkseid has discovered that the Anti-Life Equation is contained within the brains of six humans, so Highfather sends six New Gods to protect said humans: Orion, Lightray, Metron (he doesn't work for you, Highfather), Forager (also does not work for you), Lonar, and Sensational Character Find of 1977, Jezebelle of the Fiery Eyes (Original Character Do Not Steal).

Mostly this series is frustrating because all the New Gods are wildly incompetent and fail completely at their tasks. Orion is dumbed down to The World's Most Basic Superhero (he has a big O on his chest now!). I spent the whole time yelling "HE CAN'T FLY, GERRY!" at the comics. Forager is lumped in with no mention of that whole thing where...he's a New God who was raised among the Bugs, who are being persecuted by the New Gods? I feel like that should be explained or at least addressed? (Presumably Kirby would have gotten around to it eventually.) Forager also should not be flying but here he does. I guess. Lonar flies too but mostly on his horse, which bothers me less for some reason, I'll accept a flying horse. (Also Lonar's human he's supposed to protect is Inuit and hoo boy is this comic racist. The poor guy wears a fur diaper the whole time and speaks a completely made up language.)

And then there's Jezebelle of the Fiery Eyes. Who is blue, for reasons that are never explained, and wears a bikini and fishnets because it's 1977, and mentions her fiery eyes (heat vision) every time she speaks. She's from Apokalips, but defected to New Genesis during battle. Which, like...I appreciate that Conway recognized that this team should have a female character, but what with Orion, Scott, Barda, and Inexplicably Present Himon, it feels like we have enough characters who have defected from Apokalips in some way? And it's just super weird that the ONLY female characters we have seen from New Genesis are Beautiful Dreamer of the Forever People (trapped in another dimension indefinitely) and Scott's dead mom. Like, what's the implication here? Heaven doesn't have women? Also, I know Conway was going for biblical names to match New Genesis and Izaya (he also introduces a Lucifar), but, like...Jezebelle? JEZEBELLE. Your only female New God and you named her "whore." Amazing.

And with that, we have covered the New Gods in the 70s (minus some Mister Miracle/Batman teamups). Next time: the 80s, and Kirby tries so so hard to kill Orion but DC won't let him.

[nondelphic]

hey! i was wondering if you have any advice for me: I am wanting to write an epic/high fantasy book, and i started with my worldbuilding, then i moved to characters and their individual arcs. my main struggle is coming up with the overarching plot, the main conflict. any tips for coming up with ideas?

thanks for the ask, anon!! (˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶) ♡⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

tbh i don't have a lot of experience writing fantasy, but! just because i don't have "a lot" doesn't mean i don't have any!! i was in a similar situation to you literally just a few weeks ago when i started worldbuilding and outlining a fantasy plot :D

so!! i'll just tell you the process of how i came up with my plot!! i hope it can help somewhat!

♡ pulling from your worldbuilding

the beauty of worldbuilding and having complete characters is that you literally have everything you need to START writing. but as you said, coming up with an overarching plot can be difficult. i don't know how extensive your worldbuilding is, but for me, my planning included a list of major historical events/eras in my fantasy world. from this, i just decided "okay, the plot is gonna take place during the *insert historical era from my fantasy world*."

then i'd think "okay... what was society like during this historical period?" what kind of power struggles, conflicts, or changes were happening at that time?" from there, the plot practically started writing itself! by narrowing down a specific time and place within your world, you're essentially placing your characters in a pressure cooker of events that are naturally going to generate conflict.

♡ character-driven plot

another approach you can take is to look at your characters’ arcs and ask yourself what situations would force them to grow or challenge their beliefs. think about what each character wants most in life—what would happen if they couldn’t get it? or what if they got it, but at a great cost? you can build the main conflict around these personal stakes, and that can really help drive your plot forward.

for example: say you have different species in your fantasy world, and one of your main characters belongs to a species that’s an outlier in their geographical area. maybe this species has been historically oppressed, or they’re seen as a threat due to some misunderstood ability or ancient conflict. you could focus on how your character fits into the world—they might struggle with their identity, trying to prove their worth in a society that fears or rejects them. this inner conflict could be the spark for a much larger plot, like starting a rebellion or becoming the key to resolving a long-standing feud between species. their personal journey, then, could naturally tie into the broader conflict of your story.

the key here is to use the uniqueness of your character's background and situation to fuel the plot. how they navigate the world around them can lead to choices and events that shape the entire story!

♡ external threats

sometimes the easiest way to spark an overarching plot is by introducing a big external threat. it could be anything from an invading empire, a natural disaster, or even a rising rebellion. something that shakes up the world your characters are comfortable in and forces them into action. this external conflict can intersect with their personal journeys and create some interesting tension.

♡ combining personal and world stakes

the most gripping plots often combine both personal and external stakes. maybe your character is fighting for their home or family, but there’s a much larger political or magical conflict brewing that they become a part of. it’s not just about saving themselves, but the entire kingdom or world. the trick is to make sure the personal stakes are always tied into the larger conflict, so it feels cohesive.

♡ take inspiration from your fav fantasy works

don’t be afraid to pull ideas from the things you love! if a specific scene, mission, or plotline really stuck with you in a book, game or movie, ask yourself why. for example, when i came up with my fantasy plot, i was inspired by a mission in the witcher 3 where geralt and triss are navigating the tunnels under novigrad. triss, living in secret as a mage, is forced to use these hidden passageways to carry out her plans. i remember thinking, “hmm… tunnels or catacombs are a great way for people with secret missions to carry out said missions!” that one detail sparked an entire subplot for me, where certain characters use an underground network to secretly move around, gather intel, and plot revolutions.

you can take bits and pieces from your favorite stories and use them as springboards for your own original ideas. sometimes it’s a specific setting, a character dynamic, or even the vibe of a scene that can get your creative wheels turning. the key is to make it your own and let it evolve naturally in your world!

i hope these ideas don't sound too "obvious" or like "well, duh," but rather a reminder that you've already done the worldbuilding, so use it!!

good luck with your epic fantasy!! sending digital hugs filled with all the creative energy i have left today to you and anyone else reading this (´｡• ᵕ •｡`)

[bearsintreesofficial]

a recreation of a sonic fanfiction i wrote when i was 10

ok y'all, some context is needed.

we have a song called cassiopeia coming out tonight. i made a tiktok that said if the sound for cassiopeia is used 100 times, i'll publish the sonic fanfiction i wrote when i was 10 that i joke about a lot but have never shared. anyway, this happened in an hour. i am shocked. i did not expect it to happen so quickly, if at all. i begin my search.

well, it turns out i can't publish it because the places it was published no longer exist, and 10 y/o me didn't back it up (although i thought i had). bummer. an early internet relic gone.

either way, the plot details are seared into my memory because honestly? for some reason, that small act of creativity was a core memory in my life. so while i can't share it, i can retell it, because it's silly and pretty accurately captures what it's like to be 10 and obsessed with a piece of popular media. so here goes.

enjoy, and stream our new single cassiopeia tonight.

SCENE OPENS

the fanfiction was about a page long. the story opens with me - in school, as i did most every day of my life up to that point. in the story, sonic/tails/knuckles live in the human world, and essentially function as superheroes. there's no explanation for it, they just are there keeping the earth safe and such. we are also friends. there is no explanation or backstory for that either.

with the setting established, we're straight into the action; an alien pod crash lands in our school playground after school. me and my friend are the only kids left. where are the teachers? who knows. as is evident, worldbuilding was not my strong point.

anyway, in this alien pod is...an alien. it was a spider that looked a lot like the facehuggers from the alien film franchise, because i'd seen a clip of that as a kid and it freaked the hell out of me. i call sonic (where did i get a mobile phone from?) and let him know something Serious is going down. sonic and tails arrive - knuckles is too busy trying to get the master emerald back from doctor robotnik in this instance.

my friend and i take a back seat and let sonic and tails deal with the weird alien thing. they deal with one, but as soon as they get rid of it 10 other capsules drop in the area. sonic and tails can't take them all, so me and my friend join in to help take them out. i didn't really account for how, but we're fighting all back to back and it's very epic. (sonic x was the prevailing sonic show at the time, and it was y'know - very dramatic. so this was like a scene from that.) tails even brings in the tornado two, his personal plane, to run rings around them. after we finish the final facehugger alien off, a final alien pod descends. but out of this pod emerges...

shadow the hedgehog.

the aliens had been sent by him, and he was here to take sonic down. this was all part of his master plan.

the piece then ended, because i suppose i was going to follow it up at some point. but alas, that did not happen.

moral(s) of the story:

archive the silly stuff you wrote when you were a kid, it'll be fun to look back on later.

stream our new song, cassiopeia. it has nothing to do with any of this, but i think it's neat regardless.

thank you.

[eerna]

Oh that ask you answered about how you would rewrite Callum and rayla's relationship in the show without changing major major details was really interesting and you liked of hooked me with the idea of trying to keep your rewrite within canon realm.

So I wanna ask what would your rewrite be for tdp in general outside of canon realm and do you ever plan on making a fic on it?

Ayy I'm glad, thanks~ I am totally up for some outside-of-canon idea throwing, sounds fun! However, keep in mind I am not saying my vision is what the show should have been like. I am not a professional writer. I can only give some ideas for how to fix the stuff I didn’t like and what would make the story engaging for me personally. And no, I would never write a fanfic based on this. I already have an unpublished 40k+ word TDP fanfic I can't complete because I lost my passion for the series, so going on an epic fantasy writing bender is definitely not in the cards for me. If any of my ideas sparkle anyone's fix-it wires, I give them my blessing to go forth and write it instead of me :) 

You asked for outside canon, but we gotta establish some rules first, because if I turned TDP into a story I PERSONALLY wanna tell, it wouldn’t resemble it at all, so we gotta keep it at least a little canon-consistent. In addition to that, this series’ refusal to disclose important worldbuilding info within the main storyline means my knowledge of its lore has enormous gaps shaped like tabletop guides and video game dialogue screens. I will rely on the wiki for this to the best of my abilities and if most of the lore is totally dropped, don’t blame me. In this rewrite I will establish THEMES, WORLDBUILDING, and CHARACTERS, and then even a bit of the PLOT. I will do my best to adhere to the existing themes and the worldbuilding. I’ll only use the characters already created for the show (while giving them a few new characteristics) and the plot will be only hinted at because dear lord I can’t map out 7 seasons of a TV show in a tumblr post. I am also gonna stay in the Y7 rating range because eff you people who think kids can’t handle interesting stories. There’s gonna be lots of ATLA comparisons because this show insists on trying to be ATLA and I can’t ignore that. Continuing under read more because this got LONG (I had to stop myself almost 8k words in. Someone save me). 

THEMES

TDP is trying to do way too much when it comes to themes - it wants to be complex and nuanced, but it doesn’t walk the walk. ATLA did it best, they kept it simple, but added a hint of complexity. We will do the opposite: we are concentrating on ONE big, nuanced concept that we will be writing around, and peppering in the other stuff as character garnish. The one big theme we will be concentrating on is THERE IS NO TRULY GOOD GUYS IN A WAR. We will be sacrificing the “How do we forgive and forget after the war?” theme because it would require starting the show after the war is officially done, as it is far too large of a concept to be used as a second-act theme (also, I was born first generation after a war, and my answer to that question is not the correct tone for an epic fantasy quest). Instead, we will make it a smaller scale character garnish of “how does this character put aside their hurt and work with the people who have hurt them?”. 

Secondary themes will be: You have to keep your mind open and learn from everyone you meet. Our planet deserves to be treated with respect. Everyone has a place in this world. Love can make people do vile things. Nature VS nurture. Divine right VS meritocracy. Plus other Truths that will be discussed in the following sections.

WORLDBUILDING

Again, ATLA made a very simple system of four (or three) different countries and then went ham with it. We can’t do that because I am not redoing the entire universe, but let’s try making it less overcomplicated while keeping the map sort of the same. The two nations at war are Xadia (as seen in the show) and the Neolandian Empire (includes all the human kingdoms). The areas are generally the same as they are in the currently available lore of the series, unless stated otherwise.

Magic

First, we gotta establish the magic system. The whole arcanum setup can stay the same. The world is made up of six primal sources: the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Earth, the Sky, and the Ocean. A deep connection to one of the primal sources is called the arcanum, and an arcanum means you understand what this primal source brings to the world, and the Ultimate Truth behind it. Once you understand this Truth, you can use the spells (in draconic language) connected to it to manipulate the world around you acting in accordance to this Truth, and this makes you a mage of primal magic. So it isn’t just controlling the elements, the Truths are applicable to a wide range of situations (for example, if you break a plate, you can put it back together by connecting to the Earth arcanum which understands that all things that are now broken used to be of one body and spell it back together). Creatures born to one of the primal sources understand this truth perfectly from the get-go, but they still have to learn the draconic incantations to effectively use spells, which is why not every primal source creature is also a mage. The more difficult the spell, the deeper your understanding must be - the most powerful mages live solely according to their arcanum’s Truth. But since the Truths can be contradictory or uncomfortable to tie to each other, the deeper you are connected to your Truth, the less chances you have of understanding other Truths. Creatures born to one of the primal sources don’t have the ability to fully commit to any other primal source - they can get it in theory, but can’t tap into its magic naturally. They all live in harmony with one another, balancing the world and its inhabitants. But there is one creature in the world born without a connection to any one primal source, but with the cognitive abilities to learn to understand them. That’s right, ALL humans have the potential to understand multiple arcanums, and are only limited by their philosophical abilities. This means our magic system is based on philosophical thought. Magical creatures are naturally predisposed to it, but it limits them, and are the equivalent to people who limit their worldview only to their personal lived experiences. Humans have the potential to gain limitless knowledge, but the difficulty of that path and the disadvantage with which they start out often discourages them from even trying. Magical creatures tend to view humans as inferior because they perceive them as incapable of living the same blessed balance as they do. They see their potential to learn multiple types of magic as a transgression against the ways of the world, and have outlawed any magic done by humans. This means humans were completely dependent on magical creatures for things such as shelter, physical defense, food, et cetera. And if you repeat to someone enough times that they are a parasite on the world and have no right to live in harmony with it, they are going to try and live as separate as possible in their own way.

And here we reach the dark magic. Dark magic can perform the same spells as primal magic - and yes, every single dark magic spell has its primal equivalent. They are simply different means of getting to the same end. However, dark magic skips the “needs a connection to the arcanum” part, and instead consumes the amount of primal magic energy proportional to whatever you need to do. To fix a broken plate with dark magic you need to say the spell, and provide the appropriate amount of primal Earth magic, through a plant or a creature connected to the Earth arcanum. Primal magic is lots of spellbooks, conversations and philosophy. Dark magic is necromancy, recipes, potions, way more scienc-y, as it requires a lot of experimentation and trial and error to determine how much magic needs to get used in spells to achieve the desired effect. Primal magic is borrowing, manipulating, and returning the magic around you to reach the desired effect. Dark magic is taking the magic and consuming it to reach the desired effect. Once you spend all the magic in one area, it takes centuries for it to get replenished again. The only effect it has on the user’s physical appearance is the black eyes for the duration of the spell, but none of that “gray white corpse” look (it looks cool but is way too on the nose). Dark magic use is strictly regulated and its secret closely guarded to ensure it is used only “in service of the Empire”. The humans use magical items in their everyday lives, which the show should showcase - we need to understand how much these people rely on the magic. I am trying to format it as the equivalent of plastic in our world, if you can’t tell - something helpful that’s not bad in small doses, but once you base your system on it, it totally ruins everything. 

History and geography

Xadia was once one land where humans and magical creatures lived together. The archdragons were never rulers - they were revered as gods by Xadians, seen as the embodiment of the primal sources on earth, but they stayed in their heavenly abodes, perfectly in-tune with their arcanums, above all squabbles of mortals. There were no countries, the nations organized in settlements according to their arcanum, but that doesn’t mean there were no conflicts. The primal tribes understood they had to live in harmony to keep the world balanced, but their opposing beliefs kept them at each other’s throats if they got too close to each other, so they all preferred to stay separated into societies that functioned according to the Truth of their primal source. Humans had no tool to deal with the dangers of survival in the dangerous magical wilds, so they too lived in these societies, protected by the primal magicians, but also seen as lesser beings in a magic-oriented world. Deviation from the laws and beliefs of society, including humans doing magic, was seen as a danger to the balance of the world, and some humans preferred to leave and start their own settlements. The settlements were small and fell quickly, but the largest of these was Eboreus, all the way to the inhospitable desert in the northwest of the continent, where dark magic was discovered. Empowered by this new power source, it grew into a kingdom named Neolandia, a safe haven where the humans despised by the magical creatures could find refuge. The dark magic ensured humans held resources for their own survival for the first time, and as their numbers grew, they needed more and more access to magical resources once they spent the ones already in their possession. At first expansion was easy, since the area was all wilderness, and Neolandia grew in strength. By the time they spread to the first Xadian settlement, they were powerful enough to take it on in battle once negotiations fell through, and thus the big war started. The territory ruled by humans split into kingdoms to make it easier to govern. The expansion was stalled over the past 500 years because their numbers stopped increasing, and also because the forces reached the Breach, the mountain range separating the continent in half, which is almost completely devoid of magical properties (aside from the Xadians guarding it). Conquering it would take a long time and a lot of resources that couldn’t be replenished until it is completely passed, so the Empire has to change its war tactics. Katolis, the youngest of the kingdoms, partially resides in the Breach and marks the frontier of the war. Katolians are soldiers, their culture devoted to defending and expanding the Empire. A year ago the king of Katolis and his High Mage did the unthinkable - they snuck into Xadia and slayed Avizandum, the sky archdragon who resided in the Breach. This sent the continent into an uproar, Neolandians empowered as god killers, Xadians angered at the defilement of their most sacred beliefs. Both await what magnificent magic will be unleashed upon the world now that Katolis has such a powerful resource in its hands.

MAIN CHARACTERS

Callum. The fourteen-year-old adopted son of Harrow, the king of Katolis, he doesn’t fit his country’s warrior ideals and feels rejected by both the society and his family. His mother, a Katolian general who famously perished in service of the Empire, married the king when Callum was very young. He is no good at fighting and is scared of war, so he prefers to spend his days hidden alone in some nook, reading poetry and drawing. He has an interest in magic from a lore standpoint, he doesn’t want to try it himself because it’s not something you just dabble in: if you decide to become a dark mage, you stay a dark mage until death. He is kind-hearted and emotionally mature, his mind open to any and all ideas, but this also makes him anxious and insecure - if anything is possible, the world feels unstable. Callum is going to be our protagonist, who we accompany as he learns lessons about the world and himself.

Ezran. We are rewriting the heck outta this little dude. He was supposed to begin his education as the crown prince of Katolis this spring, as he has just turned 10, but for some reason his father delayed it. Ez is very glad for this, as he quite enjoys being a carefree little kid with no responsibilities. He is everything Callum isn’t - social, silly, optimistic, and energetic. He loves the entire world and tells stories of the most basic things with the wonder of a fairy tale. This means that when he tells people he can talk to animals, they smile at him indulgently and marvel at the prince’s creativity. Ezran as a character is supposed to embody a child’s lack of awareness when it comes to differences between people - he sees everyone as his friend, and believes everyone is the same. The Earth arcanum follows the same principle, and here is where his ability to speak to animals stems from, even if he is totally unaware that he is doing magic. He is the kid in the zombie apocalypse - you don’t want him to be corrupted because he symbolizes the potential of future generations. However, at no point are we making him a monologuing mouthpiece or the best king who ever lived, since his story is in his potential to grow, and not his perfection as he is. I am writing Bait out because I honestly hate his role as an useless damsel in distress, and the role of the animal companion is already filled by the title character, and it’s not like I can write HIM out.

Harrow. The king of Katolis is meant to be Ezran 30 years into the future, an optimist who forgot how to believe in a better world because he was pressured to grow into the role expected of him. His wife, general Sarai, and his High Mage, Viren, supported (read: pressured lovingly) him and made him into the brave, fierce king he is today. A year ago he led a bold invasion into Xadia which was meant to turn the tides of the war - the plan was to kill Avizandum and harvest his body for magic for years to come, even subduing the Breach along the way. However, once the archdragon was slain, his body dissolved before it could be transported back to Katolis. Viren predicted the reason - archdragons were manifestation of primal sources on earth, so when all that magical energy was released from its physical form, it must have reformed somewhere. The answer awaited them in Avizandum’s nest, the Stormspire (now located within the Breach) - an egg of a newly reincarnated sky archdragon. Harrow and Viren took the egg and hid it from the world, buying time until Viren figures out what to do next. However, this close encounter with a god left Harrow’s faith in his life’s path shaken. Who is he to meddle in affairs he can’t even comprehend, such as the laws of the universe? Could it be that the survival of his people doesn’t have to be achieved by destroying the existing world? Did he choose wrong all those years ago? Looking at his small son, he can’t force himself to force the same choice upon him, not yet, so now Harrow is stuck in a limbo of his own feelings and re-examining his entire life with no one to confide in. 

Viren. I am totally stealing from The Kyoshi duology for his villain type, and I am not sorry. Viren is the High Mage of Katolis, the king’s closest advisor. He and Harrow have been the closest of friends since their youth, despite their wildly different origins. He was the son of an Evenere farmer family, and he got sent to a Katolian military academy, where he met young Harrow who had just begun his own education. The boys became fast friends, but soon Viren was recognized for his intelligence, work ethic, and high potential for dark magic. Dark magic is usually taught generationally within selected families which makes the study very elitist, but his drive and ambition led him to excel, so that by the time they finished education, Harrow took him back to his castle where he could become the High Mage’s apprentice. From the very beginning the drive behind Viren’s ambition was the knowledge that he is all that’s standing between those he loves and utter ruin - first it was the financial difficulties his family faced that were mitigated by his high paying position, and now it is the responsibilities of one of the most important men in the country. As mentioned before, Harrow faced many difficulties adjusting to the role expected from him as a king, and Viren saw himself as his compass, the one making the hard decisions that save the world until the king becomes strong enough to make them himself. And for a while, it seemed it worked and Harrow became the ruler that could defend humanity from Xadia, but ever since their return home Harrow has been growing more and more distant from Viren. For the past year Viren has been trying to figure out how best to harvest the archdragon egg. He knows he only has one chance to use its energy, because if he kills it, it will just respawn back at the Stormspire, and since Xadian forces have now been alerted and concentrated in that area, he won’t be able to get it back again. Dark magic relies on experiments, and he doesn’t have the right to experimentation. The dragon was supposed to power the Empire with magic for years, but now it turns out they get one single spell out of him. He knows that if word gets out, all of Xadia will descend upon Katolis, so he doesn’t even dare share his discovery with other High Mages. He’s been slowly breaking under the pressure, and the only other person who knows about the situation, Harrow, is of no help. Lately, he has even started saying their way of life is wrong, and they should have never stolen the egg. His strength is faltering. Viren is used to doing whatever is needed to save those he loves, but what happens when those loved ones are the ones preventing him from saving them? Harrow is a possible Ezran future, and Viren is a possible Callum future, a man who had to carve a place in the world for himself, who felt powerless until he discovered something that made him more powerful than anyone else, whose sense of right and wrong is so strong it might even overpower his love for his brother. 

Claudia and Soren. Soren is the himbo disappointment son, he inherited none of Viren’s intelligence, or magical talent. He is ambitious and a fantastic swordsman, a true Katolian, so he recently managed to score the position of the captain of the king’s guard at only 18 years old (his dad’s only comment was “Excellent, now you can report all of the king’s everyday life to me”). Claudia, on the other hand, is a magical prodigy - at only 16 years old she has almost reached the same level of skill as her father, which is something Viren is immensely proud of. However, Claudia is very chaotic and doesn’t take this entire “We’re the only thing standing between the Empire and total ruin” thing seriously, and likes to spend her days doing normal teen girl things such as inventing new potions and befriending the princes. Soren desperately wants his dad’s approval and is doing his best to get it at any price, making him a parallel to Harrow. Claudia doesn’t worry about what her dad or anyone else thinks, but she fully believes in “no price is too high to save someone you love”, making her a parallel to Viren. The siblings grew up with the princes, but Soren stays away from them (out of envy) while Claudia is friends with them. She taught little Ez the spell for speaking to animals when they were both kids, but she doesn’t know he still uses it on a daily basis in a totally non-dark way. She is the reason Callum knows as much as he does about magic, since she sees him as a cute little friend she can infodump to (as long as she doesn’t lay out the details of the ingredients needed for the spells, it doesn’t count as revealing big secrets of the dark arts. After all, what could a human boy do with draconic words??). He is of course massively crushing on her and remembering every word she’d ever uttered. 

Rayla. Our sole elven main character. The murder of Avizandum prompted Xadians to band together in a more organized manner than has ever been seen in history and retaliate against Neolandia with united forces. After a year of preparation, the first wave of attack is ready. The Moonshadow Assassins will send a pair of lethal killers to each of the five kingdoms, one to kill the ruler, the other to kill the heir, causing civil unrest and sowing fear. Rayla, the youngest of the band at 15, was sent to Katolis with the leader of the group and her adopted father, Runaan. She is everything that is expected of a Moonshadow Elf: a ruthless, fearless fighter bound by honor to serve her tribe. There is nothing more sacred to her than fulfilling the mission given to her by her elders. Any doubt or weakness is to be stamped out quickly and without a single thought. This mission marks the end of her initiation into her tribe - once she kills crown prince Ezran she will be considered a fully fledged member of the Moonshadow Assassins. Her character role is to serve as an opposite weight to every other child character, where she has already chosen her path and created a much more mature space for herself as a kid should have. She needs to learn that vulnerability is needed to live a fulfilling life, and showcase the effects of the golden child syndrome. In this, she is the foil to Callum.

Aaravos

He is gonna be the ultimate Big Bad, the god our characters deal with in the final decisive battle after all the smaller villains are done. The star arcanum doesn’t have much in canon lore as it’s meant to be a mystery, so I am about to invent a whole lot of crap. In this story it deals with the Truth of eternity, the existence of the universe as something so vast and limitless no mortal mind could ever comprehend it, and thus a “startouched mage” is an oxymoron. It also differs from other arcanums in that it’s not one single whole, but many separated ones that make up one bigger whole. Each star is a world upon itself. As mentioned, it is incomprehensible to everyone in Xadia - it is a rare thing to see a creature who comprehends even the basics of the star arcanum (which would be “I know I am less worthy than a speck of dust when compared to the infinity of the universe” - I don’t think many useful spells exist in that vein), and no elves exist of this race that are born to the knowledge. In that vein, instead of having only one archdragon, the star arcanum has as many as there are stars in the universe, and Aaravos is one of them. As opposed to the other archdragons, his interpretation of his arcanum makes him interested in mortal affairs. Sadly, this twisted interpretation also means he has interest in world domination, as he sees himself as the only creature capable of comprehending the ways of the universe, and thus that makes him the most logical choice for the emperor of the planet. As a character his role is to represent overstepping boundaries, the sin of pride, what happens when one has no limits - so the same flaw present in a lot of rulers, explorers, and desperate people, and it just so happens our main cast is filled with those. He is limited by not having a physical manifestation that can walk the earth, though, so he has to build one for himself. He infects mortal minds through star arcanum. There are no mages who are dedicated solely to star magic - the world is already filled with more secrets than one could fit in a lifetime, so why waste time searching the stars to an even more futile effect? Still, those who manage to figure out at least a little bit of the arcanum leave their minds open and vulnerable to Aaravos’ influence. He is NOT some puppetmaster who is to blame for every single bad thing that ever happened in history, though. In most cases his hosts are driven insane because they can’t comprehend the spells he is trying to teach them, so he has been searching for a suitable host for a long, long time. As there are no elves tied to this arcanum, this leaves humans as the only ones who can interact with it, be it through primal magic… or dark magic. Let me remind you, in this rewrite every primal spell has a dark equivalent, but where primal spells are fueled by mind’s ability to comprehend philosophical concepts, dark magic needs only a source of magic connected to the primal source tied to the spell. This is Aaravos’ connection to dark magic - he sees it as a possibility he’d never had before, a medium through which his hosts will no longer be driven insane before managing to build him a body. 

THE PLOT

I think the seven season, three-act structure first presented by the writers (before it went off the rails) was good, so I will stick to it! Each season will be dedicated to one of the types of magic (so 6 primal sources + dark) that teach the characters relevant lessons, be it positive or negative. However, I am switching it from a fully overarching single story to the ATLA-like episodic that builds up to a big story, simply because that is a much better format for TV in my opinion. I am gonna lay out only the basics here. You know the drill, they travel around the world and do side quests and help lots of nice people who help them in return. The fact that they are carrying around a god makes Xadians more willing to trust them, and the fact that they are missing Katolian princes makes humans feel the same. Also I am not calling the seasons “books” because this isn’t ATLA.

ARC 1 - lasts ~3 months

Season 1: Dark

Starting off with dark magic because this would be the kind most of our characters have lived their life knowing. The thesis of dark magic is “by any means necessary”. 

GENERAL OVERVIEW: The king of Katolis is assassinated by the Moonshadow Assassins in retaliation for the killing of Avizandum, the sky archdragon. The two Katolian princes and one of the assassins discover that the archdragon had been reborn as an egg, which the High Mage aims to kill once and for all. Knowing that the assassination is only the opening act of a horrifying war that could end both their countries, they steal the egg and escape the kingdom, planning on returning it to Xadians as proof that the damage Katolis has done isn’t irreversible. They reach the Stormspire, but the guardians there are unwilling to credit humans for the return of the egg, so the trio decides to keep going and find someone who shares their views.

CALLUM: He starts the season out unsure of his position within his family and his country, feeling like a reject from both. His father tells him “I used to think I would do anything to protect my kingdom, but I am not so sure that would be the right thing anymore”, which prompts Callum to think about his own position on the subject. He discovers he possesses the ability to perform dark magic. By the end of the season he concludes his little brother is what is most precious to him, and realizes that his country and empire were wrong in their approach to the Xadian issue. He swears not to do dark magic again.

RAYLA: She starts out as cold, focused and effective as possible, but the discovery of the egg and Ezran turning out to be a smart, optimistic little boy who feels no hatred towards her and could grow into a decent king makes her change her mind on the topic of bringing absolute war to the world. This enrages Runaan, who attempts to kill her for betraying her tribe. She manages to escape badly shaken by the experience, but she rationalizes it as “I am doing this for them, they will understand one day and be thankful for what I’ve done”. Her left hand is bound by a magic ribbon as a symbol of her oath, and every day that Ezran lives, the ribbon gets tighter until her hand will be severed. This too is, to her, proof of the sacrifice she is making for her people.

EZRAN: He is the only one capable of communicating with the infant dragon inside the egg, thanks to his ability to speak with any and all creatures in the world. This makes him feel responsible for something for the first time, as Callum and Rayla would have no other way to figure out if the dragon is doing ok. Other than that, his role is to be cute and optimistic while the teens are being emo.

VIREN: Viren could have saved Harrow’s life when Runaan got to him, but chose not to as the past year made him fear Harrow could no longer be a good ruler. He is well respected throughout the Neolandian Empire and has many resources, but he can’t trust them because the egg might be discovered and he might be declared a traitor. And so he sends Soren and Claudia after the princes, but gives them different jobs: he confides about the egg’s existence to Claudia, knowing he can trust her curiosity regarding magic and informs her to bring it back at any cost, while he tells Soren to kill the princes, banking on Soren’s obedience and the ability to do what is needed. In the meantime, he himself starts organizing defense against Xadia and buying time for the siblings to return. That’s his plot for the entirety of arc 1, he travels around the human kingdoms hanging out with people who respect him and grows more and more paranoid.

Season 2: Moon

The theme of the season is “Reality isn’t the only truth; you can only truly know the appearance itself, and you can never touch the so-called reality that lies beyond the reach of your own perception”.

GENERAL OVERVIEW: The first stop for the trio is the only crossing into Xadia, currently occupied by General Amaya, the boys’ aunt. The boys try to recruit her to help them, but she is unwilling to let her nephews risk their lives so they have to escape her too. The finale happens in Rayla’s home village, the assassin’s hideout Silvergrove, where she discovers she has been excommunicated and won’t get any help. They tell her it doesn’t matter that the dragon has been reincarnated, this battle has been a long time coming and there’s nothing that can stop it now.

CALLUM: After the disappointment of giving up on dark magic and being unable to trust even his own family, the discovery of his connection to the arcanum gives him a new sense of purpose. I feel like this arcanum is the best intro into mastering the rest because it involves keeping your mind open to possibilities and the knowledge that you do not yet know all there is to know, so that is his arc to learn this season. Rayla helps him understand it through her own arc, and he manages his first Moon arcanum spell in the season finale. 

RAYLA: She bonds with Callum because he is open and keeps trying to get her to open up. She still has her binding on when she meets Ethari, and he sees it as a mark of shame instead of what she has been convincing herself it is. She learns that Silverglove will never accept her back or understand why she has betrayed her mission, but that she has to stay true to her convictions. 

EZRAN: Having seen his aunt turn against him and the way Xadians fear Katolis, little boy needs to deal with the knowledge that his dad was a good dad, but a bad king. Just because he knew him as a gentle, happy man, it doesn’t mean that was the full truth of it. He resolves to be a good king one day in his stead.

CLAUDIA AND SOREN: Let them meet Terry here. Terry is an Earthbood elf who has done the unthinkable - he severed himself from his own arcanum, and has left his tribe behind. He offers to help the siblings after they save his life. 

Season 3: Sun

Theme of the season: “A thing can be warm and nurturing, but given the right situations, also destructive and cruel”.

GENERAL OVERVIEW: Next major stop for the trio is a community in the Sun territory where humans and elves secretly live together, and the humans practice primal magic. This is the season Soren and Claudia catch up to the trio, and this is where they find them. The season finale is Soren and Claudia’s troops VS the trio and the human/elf community. The trio wins and the siblings retreat. The egg is damaged in the process and has to be hatched. Welcome to the world baby Zym!

CALLUM: The only thing better than discovering he can do primal Moon magic is discovering he could also potentially do other types of magic as well. In his thriving era, slightly interrupted when Rayla confesses to him that she likes him and makes things awkward for an episode or so. They deal with it with care and love. Then Claudia and Soren show up and he has to defeat his friend to protect his mission, and this is what leads him to understand the Sun arcanum. All the good things he’d admired about Claudia are also destructive because she doesn’t know when to stop.

RAYLA: She has to learn how to deal with being untethered and unlimited by the rigid expectations of her society for the first time in her life. The rules of her upbringing, which once made her feel accomplished and safe, also left her scared to make her own decisions in fear of making the wrong choice. She needs to forgive her destructive, cruel side and find the warm, nurturing one, and no longer base her self worth on her family’s expectations.

CLAUDIA AND SOREN: Claudia refuses to learn the theme of the season and instead goes the other direction: “nothing done out of love can be wrong”. From her POV, the human mages of Xadia are delusional and sitting ducks, and would be better off joining Neolandia. She is heartbroken when Callum chooses them over her and his home, and declares him a traitor. She leads a small-scale attack against the village hiding the trio in one last attempt to get the princes and the egg.  I love the canon s2 plotline with her and Soren, so I wanna fit it in her, Soren gets very hurt in this battle, Claudia has to retreat to heal him, and the siblings switch places. Now Soren is the one no longer willing to follow orders, while Claudia finally develops the drive needed of a High Mage. 

VIREN: The guilt and fear of discovery (over letting Harrow die, but also the egg scheme they kept from the rest of Neolandia) drive his actions to become more and more erratic. The confident guy we’ve known since s1 is now running on fumes. At some point he IS discovered, but manages to defeat the person who knows it before word gets out. In his prideful desperation, he manages to establish connection with Aaravos for the first time.

ARC 2 - lasts ~3 months

Season 4: Sky

The theme of the season is “You are one with the world, air is all around you, but also inside you”. 

Timeskip so Claudia and Soren can make their way back to Katolis, the community ravaged in s3 can get rebuilt, and the trio can recuperate. Maybe 2-ish months? It’s been almost half a year since phase 1 of the Xadian counter-offensive has been released, and it’s time for phase 2.  

GENERAL OVERVIEW: The trio decide their best bet to prevent phase 2 of the Xadian counter-offensive, the full-scale attack on Duren (where the Empire gets most of its food reserves) would be to go tour the north showing off baby Zym and his connection to Ez, the next king of Katolis. The queen of Duren, Aanya, is a young girl only a couple of years older than Ez with a reputation for sympathizing with Xadians, and might be more willing to listen to them than the Katolians. Now that little baby god Zym is out of the egg and they can prove he likes and trusts them, Xadians should be more willing to listen, too. The point of the season is developing the trio’s will to fix the world. Meanwhile, Claudia and Soren (plus Terry) rejoin their dad and have their arc of “Soren wants out, Claudia is digging her feet deeper and deeper into the ground”. Terry knows about the second wave of attack for some reason and they all decide to go to Duren. 

Season 5: Earth

The theme of the season is free real estate because the wiki says there is no arcanum data for Earth yet. I am giving them the “already dead” thing. See, the mountains and the earth are stalwart and unchanging, the same as they ever were. Why worry about paths well established, your life is the same as another’s, it begins and ends the same way. This can also be interpreted as stubbornness, but mainly it is the arcanum used for mending and healing, as it deals with returning to true form. “To know yourself is to be unshakeable, we are all made of one.” 

GENERAL OVERVIEW: The “hits the fan” season. Rayllum gets together. Aaravos is invested in helping the Empire succeed because he needs his dark magic worker bees. Soren betrays his family’s secrets and helps the heroes before he dies, sending Viren and Claudia into hiding. At some point Callum used dark magic again out of desperation, and it was a star adjacent spell. However, Duren still falls, and it’s both side’s fault. Turns out that the kids really can’t do anything unless they have some kind of a power, and they are now willing to take it. With Aanya’s support Rayla and Callum decide to return to Katolis, which has taken the opportunity to sever itself from the Empire now that there are no easy ways to access it by land, and try to bring some order to the country and prepare it for Ez’ rule. Ez and Zym escape into hiding in Xadia with Terry’s help (he realizes that maybe seeing the world burn would NOT help him feel better), as it is obviously far too dangerous to keep them in the public eye right now, since that was the reason Duren fell in the end. Aaravos’ existence is now known to everyone. Sad sad sad. 

ARC 3

Season 6: Ocean

2 year timeskip. The theme of the season is “One is not in control, there are parts of yourself that you cannot understand, there are things that cannot be controlled, you cannot control everything, no matter how hard you try.” 

GENERAL OVERVIEW: The war has stalled for the moment, as the spectacular failure at Duren rearranged the map and introduced Aaravos’ existence into the world, so the game has changed now that both sides share an opponent and it is a god. Ez and Zym feat. Terry are on a quest to figure out wtf is an Aaravos from the Xadian side of the border, as they are probably the only incorruptible team in the game. Callum, now the High Mage of Katolis, is still guilt-ridden over how Duren slipped from him, and how easy it was to return back to dark magic. Rayla is dealing with trying to help a country that obviously doesn’t look too kindly to her existence. Viren finally reaches Harrow’s s1 arc and realizes this whole thing has gone too far, but Claudia keeps marching on, and he is determined not to lose his second child as well, so he stays by her side. The season is dedicated to Callum and Claudia both dealing with similar vulnerability to Aaravos and the story could really go either way, but ultimately, Callum learns to deal with it by letting go of control, while Viren kicks the bucket and sends Claudia straight into Aaravos’ waiting arms. He has a physical body and is ready to party.

Season 7: Stars

The theme of the season is once again free real estate, this time because the characters don’t have the ability to comprehend the arcanum of the season and have to make up their own, and it’s “You are insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and that is okay. Better to focus on doing your best regarding your own life and be happy than to perish in delusions of grandeur”.

GENERAL OVERVIEW: The Final Season. It’s Neolandia and Xadia being forced to unite against the same foe. No one side will ever get to claim to have won the war that was going on for thousands of years, and that’s great. The ban against human mages has to be lifted, the ban on dark magic has to be established. Those who couldn’t put their pride aside perished in Big Pride’s AKA Aaaravos’ party zone. I am intentionally avoiding writing character arc endings because I am trying not to reach 8k words on this thing, but you know enough by now to be able to tell what happens next. The divine right of kings is bullshit, we are all just regular people, and the divine is too smart to worry about our little lives.

And they all lived happily ever after~

[physalian]

#Writer Problems

Meet the 15th character in this series with a name that starts with A! No one will notice hahaha

Going back and deleting the sighs to shake things up a bit because there’s 120 in the manuscript

*checks notes* whoops you died already, Side Character, my bad

*one paragraph* Perfect. Amazing. Poetic. Profound. *the next paragraph* what is words do?

Knocking out a 6k word chapter in an hour/Spending a week on a single transition

*slaps down a shiny new character with zero plan* You don’t know anything about them and neither do I, let’s discover them together

Realistically, there’s gotta be at least one casualty from this fantasy battle so…. *rolls dice* no not you. *rolls dice again* yep. That’ll do. Sorry, pal.

Is this badass or stupid?

Is this hot or cringey?

*checks notes* damn it, plot hole.

Upon this most recent round of edits, you, Cool Side Character, no longer made the cut. Mayhaps you’ll be recycled later.

*checks notes* damn it, I fixed that plot hole by opening another plot hole.

Jesus christ I wrote ‘just’ 308 times across 120k words?

That is definitely not how you spell that

*dreams about my characters in full HD technicolor* awwww yeah, where’s the popcorn? *cannot replicate how cool it was in actual words*

Unes- Unnecs- Unessis- Unnessessarily- Unnecessarily fuck

Do I go with the British grey or the American gray?

*cries* this epic was supposed to be a novella

Well these two were supposed to be having an argument here. But making out is fine. I’d like to see where this goes.

Oops I forgot the straights, here that nameless dude over there isn't confirmed gay, so you can headcanon that he's straight if you want

Oops I forgot that marriage exists uhhh yeah their other parents are all dead or deadbeats

Fuck love triangles here’s a double-helix dodecahedron.

One day my fandom will write so much smut about this guy and I am here for it cause I sure ain’t doing it myself

Oops I forgot people with green eyes exist but brown eyes? I got 20

*describing the writing process* It was the best of times, it was the worst of times it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

I. Hate. Chapter. Titles.

Is this profound or pretentious?

*crafts an absolutely banger metaphor* I hope someone notices this. I put a lot of work into it

I didn’t spend 6 months perfecting this masterpiece for you to sass that the curtains are just blue. I’ll write the goddamn essay myself about all the depth behind my color choices, sir.

Picture that Spongebob dehydrated in Sandy’s treehouse meme ‘cause that’s me on round 12 of edits

I gotta be up for work in 4 hours but this monologue is more important

*distills 30 pages of worldbuilding notes into 2 paragraphs of a fluff scene* somebody will appreciate this, won’t they?

*listening to my book playlist* one day when this is adapted I hope this artist is still alive to compose the main theme cause this shit fucks

*cries* this trilogy was supposed to be just one book

If I turn this plot hole into a character flaw, they become the problem while I remain god

*looting themes, monologues, character names, and archetypes off the corpses of my dead WIPs* You won’t miss them anyway.

While it also immortalizes this person’s dickish behavior, yes, I will, in fact, write a whole character’s backstory as a middle-finger to this one bitch from 10 years ago.

*steps back to gaze at all the suffering done unto my deuteragonist* but it was worth it, wasn’t it?

*staring down yet another loathsome action set piece* whyyyyy do I do this to myself?

Nobody’ll notice my author insert if I dice them up and divvy them out in bits to my entire cast, right? Right? It’s like a shell game of what’s author and what’s fiction

These two are going to be a problematic ship one day and I will burn that bridge when I get there

*2am and I am scouring the internet for that one piece of a fort’s defenses because not remembering is the current root of my insomnia*

*Nudging my favorite character who isn’t the protagonist out onto stage* golly I hope the readers like him

Waiting. For. Editors. Takes. So. Long.

Holy butts accidental motif and deep symbolism fucks. I am so pretending I did that on purpose.

To subtext or not to subtext? Nah, to subtext. *laughs maniacally*

Trying to ride that line between so obvious it’s painful but also juuust enough foreshadowing so you slap yourself for not seeing it sooner

TIL that I have been using that word completely wrong for years. How quaint.

No you’re derivative schlock. I’m crowd surfing the books that came before and loving every second of it.

Damn I wasted a really good name on this throwaway character

*checks notes* wait, who's taller? Where does your hair part? Are you left or right-handed?

*musing over a character slated for death* damn, I really like you. Since I am in fact god, you shall live another day. *rewerites the entire finale*

God I hope people like this story

[mrultra100]

I know this is a bit sudden, buuuuuuuuut...

I've been thinking a fair bit about the canned MSM tv show recently. For those not aware, Big Blue Bubble was originally planning to turn My Singing Monsters into an animated series. However, they've since canned it for... reasons? I dunno, I’ll never understand how BBB came to can this idea, but from the looks of it, this series looked like it would be very good. I even have a few thoughts dedicated to how this could work, if it ever get brought back from the dead. And that includes things like the personalities of the main characters, along with some juicy ideas for things like worldbuilding based on the games' surprisingly deep lore.

Pom Pom- A cheerful soul motivated by endless creativity. Her main goal in life is to create various musical masterpieces as a sort of maestro. A bit like Charlie from Hazbin Hotel, if you can see it.

Mammott- The lovable doofus of the trio. Loyal to his friends, Mammott isn’t the brightest bulb in the shed, but his heart is much larger. Can get into sticky situations due to his state of mind.

Furcorn- The straight-Mon of the trio. While he’s more than happy to support his friends, he serves as the voice of reason within the group, especially with things like Pom-Pom going in over her head, and Mammott’s child-like curiosity getting the better of him. Is also both sassy and blunt.

While the general tone of this show would be similar to the laidback and wacky tone of the original games, Those Singing Monsters could have its own sense of worldbuilding, and that could be reflected in the tones of its seasons. The plot of at least the first season revolves around Pom Pom and co going on all sorts of wacky adventures across the Monster World, singing songs and getting into all sorts of mischief along the way. An idea for an overarching plot could go into in a couple of ideas.

Idea A- The rediscovery of the lost element of Fire, and the attempts made to bring it and the Monsters belonging to that element back into The Monster World. Could also expand on and and show off an animated iteration of the events of the Dawn of Fire, the events that led to its end and the Fire monsters being forced into hiding, and how it’s affected The Monster World since.

Idea B- Admittingly, this could work more as the plot of a Season 2, but the story of the Celestials could work. How they came into existence, their history with the Colossals, the formation of Starhenge, and how the end of the Dawn of Fire led them to being dormant. Due to some sort of problem, Pom Pom and co. would go on some sort of grand, season-spanning adventure to find the Celestials, reawaken them, and bring all of them back together.

It's not entirely perfect, but an attempt was made. Heck, you could even throw in more aspects of the franchise's world into this show for more plots; Things like the Magicals, the Shugafam (Probably have Shugabush be voiced by Kristian Bush himself), the Ethereals and the Pocket Dimension, the Rare and Epic monsters, the Wubbox and the Wublins, The Colossingum, Mythical Island, and more would all help with the stories of this show.

And as much as it sucks that it's currently canceled, maybe, in some sort of strange sense, there's hope for TSM. The franchise has been getting more and more popular in recent years, so Big Blue Bubble could be made to realize the potential of a MSM show, and roll with it. And besides, Fandemonium wasn't the best way to go around with the concept of a My Singing Monsters show. As much as I can get behind it, they should've thought about it more.

[relovaaa]

The Apollodyssey and the "canon" of my AU: an explanation

I have three major projects in the works, one of which is a "PJO reads" fanfiction project in which the canon characters, plus some OCs, read Trials of Apollo. It's a continuation of some of my favourite series, which don't/won't go past Blood of Olympus, so most relationships are already pre-established.

After that saga, which will be 10 "books" long (ToA + CotG trilogy + TSATS duology), there will be a sequel about everyone's lives after the reading. That will end about two to three centuries after the reading with a major tragic event and a bittersweet ending, which you'll learn about in a few years once I get to writing it.

The whole entire series is the "canon" of my universe. All the lore, background information, relationships, etc., will be established at some point in that timeline.

The second project is the Apollodyssey, which is like fanfiction of my fanfiction. It is a PJO x EPIC the Musical AU, where I replace [most of] the EPIC characters with the ones from my "canon". If you're reading this, I'm going to assume you already know the premise of EPIC, so instead, I'm going to explain a few things in the fic that might confuse some people.

First of all, let me get into the background. This fic is a combination of PJO and ToA, with elements from both series. What happened before the fic began was that Luke/Kronos teamed up with Python to take over Olympus. Apollo lost control of the Oracle of Delphi, which caused Zeus to turn him mortal and force him to lead the war against the opposition, and he wouldn't be turned back until he landed on home shores. This is my version of the Trojan War.

My version of Ithaca is Delos, but the royal palace isn't actually on the island. What is there is a temple to Percy, Apollo, and Grover, the three main residents of the Palace of the Horizon. The palace itself is directly above that temple, hidden from the average mortal. I'll explain the idea and lore of the Palace of the Horizon in the future. This is also why Grover is the equivalent of Telemachus in this AU. While he may not be Percy and Apollo's child, he is still their family. Also, his character is more like Telemachus than any of my Perpollo kid OCs.

While I switched most of the EPIC characters for my OCs or PJO characters, I kept the following ones the same: Aeolus, Poseidon, Circe, Hermes, Scylla, Zeus, Calypso, Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Ares, and Hera. Athena is also in it, but I have special plans for her. Those characters will all have their PJO characterizations, except Aeolus, Circe, Scylla, and Calypso.

The third project is my Perpollo Royal AU. I don't have much planned out yet, but I do plan to make it heavy on politics and overall worldbuilding. Also, in this AU, everyone is immortal and has their powers, but they're just that, immortals with powers. They aren't gods and they aren't a pantheon.

That's all for now, I might reblog this with an update to the overall lore once I've worked on everything some more.

[xxxdragonfucker69xxx]

Hi! 10kDays has had a vice grip on my psyche for the last week or so, and I'm really excited to play the preview. However, I don't wanna make anyone else in my group GM this game just because I want to play it, so I'd like to try out the GMless mode of play, and so would they, but none of us have any experience with that style of game.

Is there any game you'd recommend we look at for a general picture of how you intend GMless play to work? I do own Ironsworn, which has a GMless mode, so if that jives with what you're intending that would be really convenient lmao.

Thanks for your time!

So there's a couple of thoughts i have here, starting with the shape of the game and the pieces of it that need different kinds and amounts of attention:

The game itself is kind of designed in three strands: courses, combat, and the Face game.

Courses are an adaptation of the Arc/quest mechanic from Jenna Moran's Glitch. I've found that they reduce the GM load hugely, for two reasons: you can roll up half an hour before game, ask "who wants to be in the spotlight, what does your quest say is happening in your life right now, and what needs to happen?", and drop something in. Connections and debts are also designed to give you improv prompts, and to a slightly lesser extent perspectives. The other benefit of Courses is that they move planning burden from "GM, night before game" to "player, whenever they want to think about their blorbo". So on a large-scale, "figure out what the campaign looks like" view, you can get away with improvising every session and just following your own character arcs. Likewise, the District moves and intentions are intended to give GMs an easy "i don't know what to do next" button, and the focuses of mask/gear/bell are intended to share around the responsibilities of worldbuilding. Ironsworn's oracles are another example of how to help outsource some of that decision-making, and it's the reason Appendix Yi is earmarked to be a million random tables. For more information on how oracles work, please google Jay Dragon's Sleepaway on your work computer (or at least read this Twitter thread from NightlingBug).

There are a couple story structures that are well suited to wuxia and this game. There's the Shaolin Soccer/shadowrunner/classic ttrpg setup where you are clearly a team, and there are enemy teams, and you are doing hijinks against them. But there's also a Jin Yong wuxia epic type thing where you have, let's say three or four PCs, and you're maybe nominally on the same side but you're clashing a lot and you're tied together by sworn and blood kinship and you keep running into each other. I think the most pared-down version of 10kdays you could run and still call it a full game is 3 players, characters living sort of far apart so they rarely run into each other, and interactions are 2 of the PCs clashing at a time while the 3rd player picks up any NPCs, throws in some District moves, etc. You could do a 2-player game but the kinds of interactions you could have would be severely limited, I think. The Face game of politicking and building support structures is kind of just... you two, face to face.

Now the problem on everyone's mind is fighting. It's attention-intensive, everyone's interested in it, and depending on your setup there can be loads of combatants that a GM would normally be expected to pilot. Again, there are a couple of scaffolds for trying to do this GMless. The sample Techniques in Appendix Jia come with combat tactics to make use of them, so any player can pick up an NPC combatant and figure out what they're going to do. Fight choreographing like this runs the pitfall of it feeling sort of bad to hurt your friends effectively, at least for some tables, but there is the incentive of hitting your friend's Bite highlight when you grab the corpo thug and bite them in the ass.

It is one of my mid-to-low priorities to create like algorithm type protocols for enemy fighters to run themselves, though that's still in the pipe dream phase. One thing I'm looking at here is Katabasis by Rathayibacter, which has a super cool system for easily lining up combatant actions, enemy or not). Maybe I'll end up with literal combat loop Turing machines or something.

There's one more option here which is to lean the other way -- to foreground the GM themselves being a player. I'm talking Ryuutama dragons, I'm talking Fellowship Overlords. Obviously I one hundred percent have not added this yet, and I'm not even set that I will, but it's definitely a tool I'm thinking of to help manage the wuxia/cyberpunk/other bullshit genre merger. If you went this way, it would look like picking a district -- secret note, each district is built to amplify a genre. Gongshan is made to focus on wuxia/the bell, Jiaotou is made to focus on cyber/the gear, Youzhou is made to focus on punk/the mask, Jingcai Xin is made to focus on court and courtroom politics, and Yuanhai is made to play Nezha Reborn. Pick a district that corresponds to the genre the GM is playing as, turn those Moves into Heroic/Humbling Moves and the landmarks/NPCs into Treasures and Connections, turn the Intentions into Skills. Now you can combine this with what I first talked about, sharing out cognitive load, and focus on playing as a district/genre. Is that meaningfully different from being a GM, who let's recall still counts as a player at the table? I'm a sicko who loves being a GM so I'm unqualified to comment, but try out any combination of these options and see how they take you.

[kitkatopinions]

I think it was a mistake to make RWBY a grand epic adventure with relics, maidens, gods, and a supervillain. Keep the show within the simple and fun academy setting with a monster of the week style formula. With the occasional field trip to other places to freshen things up and meet new faces. As bad as the writers are, this would play to their strengths and not their weaknesses. Instead of bloating the cast and inventing new ideas only to never revisit them all while failing basic worldbuilding. Simplifying the story and limiting concepts to dust, aura, and semblances would also save money too. What do you think?

For sure. If we were talking about different writers, I'm actually one of those people that has no problem with the big changes RWBY underwent.

Back when V3 and V4 were new to me, I was totally on board with the changes! A good show can go through a... I don't want to call it a genre shift, but at the very least a plot shift. Things go from 'Ruby Rose and her friends attend a combat school, but there's something brewing under the surface' into 'Team RWBYJNROQ are on a world-saving adventure quest that will take them all over the world searching for magical objects while opposed by an immortal villain.' And to me, that's fine... Except that the writers couldn't handle that strain and couldn't manage to turn one into the other.

They're some weird combination of writers who plan and writers who fly by the seat of their pants, as in it feels like they have some things set that they want to do but never know how they'll get there and then just fumble to do it. This is a pretty bad thing when the show actually relies on things like magic system and world building now. A loose magic system was fine when it was 'Team RWBY has super-powers, they're in school to help them use it to destroy giant robots' but it's not fine when it's 'Team RWBY want to use the magical staff to save Penny and make a magical route to Vacuo and have to use the specific magical rules to do it and then they fall into a magical world that the gods came from.' That requires care and attention and lore-building, all things that the writers aren't good at. And big overarching plots are great, but not when the writers can't seem to actually get anywhere with it, can't seem to remember to have the mains learn and grow in significant ways, can't seem to keep track of who knows what, and can't seem to make their writing choices have any real significant impact.

I say this all the time, but the reason I have so many problems with the writing in RWBY isn't the thing itself, it's the fact that the writers don't understand what they can and can't handle.

This is why if a RWBY rewriter or fixer is like 'here's how I'd handle serious topics like XYZ' or is like 'I still plan to kill Penny/Pyrrha' or 'I'm definitely still including Maidens/Relics/Gods' or even does something like have Oz in Jaune's head or something, I'll caution them to be careful but I have zero problem with it actually because there's very little that I think a skilled and passionate writer can't do well (this is also why I'm never gonna be a 'stop making live actions' girlie.) But as for the RWBY writers we do have, yeah, they really should've stuck to what they were good at, the slightly more low stakes fun with an underlying tension somewhat episodic monster-of-the-week thing about teenagers and their fun little dramas. I'm not even trying to say that badly, I think I would love it! But instead what we got is a hot mess of jumbled half-complete ideas that are badly written at best and actively offensive and harmful at worst.

What a bummer.

[sevilemar]

Alright, to round out this little series, here is what I learned from running my first campaign* with a bunch of strangers-who-became-friends:

- Giving little worldbuilding parts to your players is fun: 'You enter a big, open train compartment. Who is already sitting in there?' or 'Frye, we are coming up to the house you spent your childhood in, what does it look like, and who is sitting on the porch right now?' Your players engage with he world and feel more connected to it, and it saves you prep time/improv brain space.

- Take notes as soon after the session as you can. No, seriously. Nothing is worse than to sit in front of your laptop doing campaign prep, and trying to remember which names you came up with on the fly and in the zone three weeks before.

- Designing fights does not stop when initiative is rolled, especially big, epic ones. Have more monster stats and minis than you think you need, have options to increase and decrease pain, problems, and pressure, and design it so your PCs can use their cool features. In DnD, it's a lot of work. In other systems, not so much.

- Do not presume everyone wants the same thing from playing together. We have had two players leaving because they wanted to have fun with friends more than they wanted to just play DnD, while the others are more focused on playing. It created frictions from the start, and while we were good at resolving it, it became too much right before the end.

- Your ttrpg table is a group, and that means it needs group maintenance from time to time, especially if you start out as strangers. It's especially important to put conflicts on the table as they arise, and resolve them together.

- Make sure no player has to sit still and listen for more than 15-20 minutes. It might work in actual play, but it does not in home games. If you need to introduce their character, make sure you either get to that point fast (no played out shopping scenes), or you jump to them on their own for a bit if it takes too long.

- When a PC dies, talk to the player if they want to continue playing the character or roll up a new one, or communicate another clear rule for it in session zero. And if they want to continue, find a way that makes the death matter. Invent a storyline where the party has to go on a quest to revive them, or if your NPCs revive them, they came back wrong, or they own their soul now, or something like that. If death is on the table, it needs to matter, or you can just take it off the table and go for a different tone from the start.

- Don't ever try to pre-plan something specific. It does not work.

- Incorporating little side quests into your campaign that are GMed by other players is fun, and also a lot of work. Talking to your Player-GM is a bit like a dance where you guess half the steps, because neither of you wants to give up too much of your plot, but you need to give up just enough to fit it together. And if you work together more closely, more like Co-GMing, you need a lot of communication and on-the-fly adaptability. It does help with burn-out, though, because you can just sit back and play for a bit, or you know there's your Co-GM who can pick up when you falter in a session because you're tired.

- Nothing is fixed except for what is said at the table, and there is always a way of weaving things that have happened into a story if you need to.

Let me give you an example: The very first adventure of my campaign was my party investigating the murder of one of my PCs mentor, and the burned ruins of their home. I described it as a regular looking arson, tying in (but not quite) to a series of arsons in the neighbourhood. I also had no idea who her mentor actually was at this point.

In the course of the story, I decided her mentor was a powerful druid who was part of a group that invented the Warforged, and had to flee and hide after an asassination attempt by another group member who betrayed them. And his murderer/arsonist/the bbeg of the campaign was not only a powerful necromancer, but had also been a member of the group.

But I had already described the site of the crime as a regular arson, shouldn't a fight between two powerful spellcasters have caused a lot more damage? Yes, of course.

Unless it was never a fight to begin with.

In order to explain why the site looked like regular arson, I came up with the fact that the mentor and bbeg were lovers once upon a time, and the mentor viewed his hiding and taking care of a baby no one knew the origin of (the PC) as his penance for doing unspeakable acts while creating the Warforged. So when bbeg found him, he accepted her killing him as the end of his penance, a sign that his sins have been forgiven and he was free to accept death in peace.

I came up with this about a third way through the campaign, and from then on, I gave them occasional clues as they chased after bbeg: a bundle of love letters they found in her room with her mentor's handwriting, but signed by a totally different name. A letter bbeg wrote to the PC alluding to the lack of fight in a taunting manner. An old companion of the mentor who only knew parts of the story.

And finally, in the end fight, bbeg projected the whole story into my PC's mind to taunt her with the truth, and show her that her mentor wasn't worth her admiration. It was my favourite part of the fight, and it wouldn't have happened if I didn't have to find an explanation of why the fight between two powerful spellcasters could be made to look like regular arson.

- GMing (and larping) made me a much better player. I am now at home at a ttrpg table in a way I was not before, and I feel like I can read a table and contribute to everyone's fun in a much more nuanced way.

- I do not like coming up with my own overarching story; it's too stressful. I'd much rather take a oneshot or a module as a guideline, and improvise around that.

*DnD 5e in Eberron, plot made up by myself around the PC's backstories, 4-6 players, ca. 2 years run time with irregular, roughly once a month meetings

[bloody-wonder]

starting new series (part two)

oops looks like i started ten more new series so here's another super long bookish post🫢

the series that was so good i'm prioritizing it this year is her instruments by mca hogarth (book one: earthrise). set in the same universe as my beloved cozy sci fi about an interspecies qpp, the dreamhealers, earthrise is a story about a down on her luck captain of a trading spaceship who gets roped into Wacky Hijinks after rescuing a space elf nobleman from space pirates. reese eddings has major stressed millenial going through the quarter life crisis energy so i related to her big time. her crew includes: a lion skunk centauroid, a giant bird that communicates in two word phrases and a pair of horny cat twins. yes, that vintage space opera cover doesn't want you to know it's actually a furry book lol. however, it's not about getting sexy with furries - it's about getting unsexy with space elves. speaking of whomst.

hirianthial is a tall blonde aristocratic space elf doctor and you can't touch him bc that would be too hot and inappropriate (and also he'll read your mind). reese hates him on sight bc he's a beautiful fairytale prince and she's a messy 30+yo who may or may not have been drowning her sorrows in binging space elf romance novels by the dozen. major "how dare you come to me now when i am this" scene from the last unicorn vibes. wouldn't it be embarrassing if reese's ulcer burst from anxiety and bad eating habits while they're being chased by the pirates and mr perfect had to operate on her esophagus? what a unique meet cute would that be!

lol to sum it up: i ship it, the furry crew ships it, reese is kicking and screaming refusing to accept that she's the heroine in a romance book, hirianthial manages to maintain his space elf mystique and keep calling her "lady" despite the fact that she's being a horrible little gremlin towards him and taking out all her issues on this poor man. the pacing of the romance is extremely slow, just the way i like it. one could even say this first book doesn't at all contain what an average romance reader would call "romance" - it's more about hirianthial becoming part of the crew during their various misadventures and reese learning to accept that fact. and about the horrors of meeting a very hot guy who is able to know all your deepest insecurities just from touching you. i can't blame reese, i would be cranky too😅

☝️that's me throwing away whatever you were planning to read next and bringing her instruments to your attention

series i'm going to continue next year (or whenever somebody finds time to finish writing his series):

a targaryen history by george rr martin (book one: fire & blood). as you might know, asoiaf is my favorite fantasy series of all time but i was hesitant to read this prequel lore book bc i was afraid i wouldn't like grrm's writing as much now that i've become much more well-read in fantasy and, more importantly, bc i didn't like the first season of hotd. luckily it turns out my appreciation for grrm's writing and worldbuilding is as strong as ever and maaan i just love the targaryens. i just think they're neat. they just want to marry brother to sister, you know🙂 i surprised myself by how much i enjoyed the history book format of fire & blood with its successive generations of kings and queens, multiple unreliable narrators and versions of events, trying to make sense of long gone triumphs and tragedies in hindsight. which i think is also the reason i didn't vibe with the show - it takes away this sweeping epic scope of the book, the weight of the centuries, the unrelenting pendulum of time, with individual fates nothing but blades of grass ground under the wheels of history etc etc and doesn't, in my opinion, manage to compensate for it by fleshing out the protagonists of the dance of the dragons enough for me to be able to get invested in their personal stories. i hope i'll like the second season more but i'm gonna keep my expectations low for now. i mean, it doesn't even have mushroom🍄‍🟫

the neapolitan novels by elena ferrante (book one: my brilliant friend). didn't expect to like this one so much either. most of it is good but not great - a very truthful depiction of girlhood and adolescent female friendships with their camaraderies and rivalries, a good exploration of struggling to access education as a way out of poverty, an atmospheric setting in the 50s naples - but then near the end there's a chapter where the author manages to encapsulate the characters' journeys and throw into relief the themes of the book so masterfully in so few words, using such simple yet impactful visual metaphors, i literally froze while listening to it in the audiobook and then paused whatever i was doing to sit down and reread it with my own eyes. i'm not a prose girlie so i'm rarely so impressed by an isolated piece of writing (the last time it happened was the epilogue of assassin's apprentice, as far as i remember). anyways, i obviously can't discuss it further bc of spoilers but to put it briefly ferrante succeeded in getting to the core of that special bond you shared with your teenage best friend and somehow managed to distill the essence of girlhood friendships into one single scene. chapter 57: if you know - you know🫠

the alexander trilogy by mary renault (book one: fire from heaven). when i finished the lymond chronicles several people recced mary renault's books to me bc they're also queer historical novels written around the same time (so 60-70s) - but having read the charioteer and now this first alexander book i conclude that those are their only similarities. dunnett's writing style couldn't be more different from renault's and, to be completely honest, i find the latter one extremely boring. madeline miller is actually a much better comp for renault (including the questionable depiction of female characters), except the song of achilles could at least be more explicit about the queer love story. not that i'm measuring the quality of these books by how smutty they are - in fact, the only thing i liked in fire from heaven was how renault managed to write around the scenes of gay sex while also making sure we know what's happening. anyways, normally i would just dnf a series where i was so unimpressed with the first book but as far as i understand the persian boy is really the main course here so i'll read that and then, who am i kidding, i will also read the last book in the trilogy bc of completionism. and tbh i'm not yet ready to let go of the image of myself as an elegant dark academia girlie reading classy mary renault books about ancient greece🧐

series i'm maybe going to continue sometime in the future:

london calling by alexis hall (book one: boyfriend material). enjoyed this first book much more than i expected, given that cartoon cover contemporary romance is very much out of my comfort zone and fake dating is one of my most disliked tropes. ig i just like the british humor of it all and that it really felt like those old nostalgic romcoms hall says he was inspired by. i would've liked to see oliver grapple more with how his parents fucked him up but maybe this is explored more in the sequel? which i'm hesitant to read bc it has an abysmal average rating on goodreads😬 i mean it could mean anything: maybe people are correct in that this story didn't need a sequel or maybe we're just unused to there being more to love stories after the characters get together, including more problems. alexis hall is a total discovery for me this year, i think i trust him to make it good, esp given that there really aren't any queer romance series like this out there, focused on a couple going through all the conventional stages of a relationship (dating, marriage, parenthood). but on the other hand i'd really like to hear an opinion from someone i know. so: did any of you read husband material? did you hate it too?👀

chrestomanci by diana wynne jones (book one: charmed life). this was just fine. i like wynne jones' writing and humor but i think this is the kind of book you should've read as a kid. as an adult i can't connect to its themes and characters anymore but what i can do with my adult brain is discern fatphobia🫤 seriously, this is the third time i see fatphobia in wynne jones' books - just small things that upset me and take me out of the story. wtf mam. anyways, i didn't think this book had anything interesting to offer, compared to howl's moving castle with its iconic characters or fire and hemlock with its wtf did i just read, so i was ready to dnf this series but then just the other day i saw a tumblr poll of people voting for their favorite chrestomanci book and the lives of christopher chant won in a landslide. so ig i'll read that just to be sure and then probably move on to the dalemark quartet or smth. i have an inkling i'd like a chrestomanci book focused on a different (cooler) protag more but i'm not going to prioritize it.

the tarot sequence by kd edwards (book one: the last sun). okay this one is a big maybe. like i mentioned before, i just don't like urban fantasy but i decided to try this series nevertheless bc it's so popular on queer booklr and i like to be in the know. and indeed the only thing i'm mildly intrigued by is the slowburn bodyguard romance - so slow in fact that the main guy has a completely different love interest in the first book. will i suffer through chapters upon chapters of boring urban fantasy politics just for the sake of this romance tho? not any time soon.

series i'm not going to continue:

the saint of steel by t kingfisher (book one: paladin's grace). i'm starting to suspect t kingfisher is not our blessed niche tumblr fantasy but in fact their barbarous mainstream award winning fantasy. what in the name of heterosexual lucifer was this?? lol i mean it's not a bad book or anything, ig i just didn't vibe with the religious aspect of the worldbuilding and, more importantly, the romance here is the textbook example of what i dislike in this genre: just two people being horny for each other from the moment they meet. i mean ik this is what it's like for allosexuals irl but when i see this in a book it just seems like lazy writing. the book opens with the most ridiculous meet cute ever (suffice it to say, nobody's esophagus was even involved) and if i were a normal person i would've dnfed right then and there but i forced myself to trudge through pages and pages of these two repressed middle aged people lusting after each other in cursive. which i understand is very relatable content for some readers but ig i could confirm yet again that hetero women's fantasies are not my fantasies. i finally finished it yesterday and picked up her intruments book two right away as a palate cleanser bc, as me and my book bestie like to joke, i don't want any romance in my romance lol. i was somewhat underwhelmed by thornhedge last year so i'm not really interested in kingfisher's novellas either. ig i could try other books from the white rat universe, the ones not focused on horny paladins, but maybe i shoud just accept that this author is not for me🤷‍♀️

the adventures of amina al-sirafi by shannon chakraborty. the city of brass was one of the most disappointing books i read last year but i wanted to give this author another try bc on paper her newest book seemed like the most up my alley story ever: potc are my favorite movies of all time, i completely support the middle aged woman protag agenda and if there is a thing i liked about chakraborty's writing it's that she's not afraid of setting her stories in the real historical periods of our own world and doing the research accordingly instead of just being "inspired" by foreign cultures and time periods. so i was very determined to like this book but unfortunately it didn't work out. you see, in a good fantasy adventure novel characters, plot and worlbuilding work in unison to tell a cohesive story - here on the other hand these three elements felt separate from each other. the characters seemed more like those tumblr posts showing little oc arts and listing their character traits under them than full-fledged dynamic fictional people with a function in the story. their motivation to go on an adventure and to move the plot forward, as it were, never seemed personal and important enough for me to be invested in their success. instead of serving the plot, the worldbuilding and the lore chakraborty researched and constructed so painstakingly derailed the story more often than not. as a result, halfway through the book i'm still waiting for the author to make me care about this team of misfits and the random girl they're searching but instead i'm hit over the head with the bird people island. sigh. but the biggest disappointment was ofc the demon husband😑 you can do so many sexy things with a problematic demon husband but ig chakraborty just has a unique talent for coming up with sexy ideas and bad boy love interests and then making them completely unsexy in her books. well ig i successfully confirmed this author is not for me and i won't try any of her books anymore.

the scholomance by naomi novik (book one: a deadly education). this book was released right around the time i started watching booktube so i vividly remember the controversy surrounding it. at first everybody seemed to hate it but later, when the sequels came out, there was a new wave of readers who liked the series a lot. i'm a big fan of spinning silver and uprooted (not to mention novik's work in otw) and i'm not immune to gritty magic schools by any means so i decided to give it a go. sadly, this turned out to be another dud. i have a sneaking suspicion this story was a much better piece of fiction in its past life as a drarry fanfic, before novik frankensteined it into a perfunctorily diverse, heteronormative, commercialized ya version of hp. i couldn't appreciate the worldbuilding bc it was delivered through a series of the most aggressive exposition dumps ever so the concept of this edgy school that wants to kill you just seemed silly to me. the romance was meh and the fact that i recently read in other lands that does a similar pseudo-hero/pseudo-villain dynamic much better didn't do it any favors either. i liked the abrasive personality of the main character but not so much as to force myself to continue this series in case it gets better. i'll start reading novik's dragon books instead.

2024 reading updates | goodreads

[leynaeithnea]

When you sit down to write something what is the kick starter that gives you the inspiration and what keeps you going while writing?

Heyo

Mmhmm, It sort of depends I think

For my originial stories (that i dont tend to be able to finish but lets ignore that for now) its usually a piece of dialogue, or an image popping up in my mind that i want to build a story around, rereading my intial notes and making pinterest boards; playlists etc etc usually helps me get interested and excited about the projects again (but instruggle with themes & worldbuilding for my og stories usually so I keep getting stuck)

However when it comes to fanfiction (which i just started again recently) its different

There I usually want to explore my favorite topics for writing (angst & hurt/comfort, dealing with trauma in some form)

And then look deeper into the characters minds

For example my Ody/Dio fic started out as simple "how does the trojan war affect ody?" As well as getting a bit inspired by the lyrics of Epic "all i hear are screams, everytime i dare to close my eyes", as well as some suggestions i got from some tumblr users (being so on edge from having to keep your guard up, that you draw a knife on a friend) and from there on it kind of developed on its own, with my only plan being there ending up being some spice for the fun of it (espeically for my iliad/odyssey fics rn like trying to stay as close to the sources as i can, within the framework of my story idea, eg. Its definitely not aligning with the iliad that dio and ody had an type of romantic/sexual relationship, but they have an interesting dynamic that is fun to explore, so in my story its not necessarily that its the type of "love" between them as would be expected today for people to have an intimate relationship like that, but its a twisted way of making it both the longing from being away from home, the shared weight of responsibility of a goddess attention on you and some more intense interpersonal feelings between them that are quite complex, i suppose i mixed odyssey odysseus and the more "emotional" odysseus we get in epic (that being said odyssey odysseus is not rly LESS emotional by any means (maybe contrary even), but theres more room for interpretation for whats going on in his head/his exact motivations for his actions are often something we can interpret, but not KNOW for sure

So i love exploring these interpretations and letting the parts i like from epic flow into them at times

So all of that kind of develops while writing and is something that then motivates me to carry on and explore another new aspect (first it was just "all i hear are screams" but in troy, then it was odysseus and diomedes "would-be" relationship, and by the end there was also a hint of "what it means to live up to the expectations of a goddess")

For my Ogygia story my desire was to have a retelling of the story that goes more into detail what happened during those 7 years that blends epic and the odyssey again (sticking more to the odyssey and adding in epic when it fits), because from the stories ive read there was always some lines in the odyssey that go unexplored or i dont like the interpretation on

For example "She pleased him no more", something that i probably adapted from your analysis on it iirc?, that initially she treated him nicely, but became more pushy over time only, or the emphasis in the odyssey that the reason ody couldnt leave was that he has no ship or crew (and calypso only helps him/gives her blessing for him to build his raft after Hermes told her so) as well as the lines between calyspo and hermes when she argues that the gods can keep themselves lovers but shes forced to give away hers, all of those (and a good bunch more) were aspects i wanted to explore there and kept motivating me to continue!

So its rly about exploring some aspects deeper through writing it, with giving them a bit of a personal flavor i suppose, those are rarely avoidable :)

Hope that answers the question and makes sense ^^"

[sixth-light]

TGH/TDR vs WoT season 2: what's in and what's out pt 2 (worldbuilding)

This time we're doing concepts and settings introduced in TGH/TDR (or introduced in EoTW but not in S1 of the show).

Introduced in EoTW but not S1 Caemlyn Andoran politics inc. Tigraine's disappearance

Tar Valon was substituted for Caemlyn in S1 but I believe it has been confirmed as a setting for S3. In terms of information viewers need to remember, Andoran politics only *really* start to matter when we kick off the Succession plotline & I expect will be scattered throughout future seasons until we get to the main event in S5-6 or so. If Slayer is in S3 (I think this has also been suggested) then we could start to get some infodumps about the whole Tigraine & Luc disappearance drama there. (Side-note: I think show-only people are going to find it hilarious if Rand has an uncle Luke (Luc).)

Introduced in TGH Cairhien Daes Dae'mar Illuminators The Choedan Kal (not named) Ogier politics and culture The search for the Car'a'carn Seanchan/the Hailene The secret of the a'dam/sul'dam The Black Ajah The Accepted test

Still missing from the show but first introduced in TGH: Ogier politics and culture(differences between steddings), the existence and location of the Choedan Kal, and the Illuminators. The Ogier stuff may or may not EVER be relevant. The Choedan Kal can & should be introduced to up the stakes from Callandor when it proves too dangerous, although may get easter egg mentions prior, quite possibly as a Lanfear back-up plan. The Illuminators - again only necessary when gunpowder and its potential for weapons start to become relevant. They could be introduced in Tanchico if the plot goes there or as refugees from the Seanchan. (NB: I think show-only people are also going to be REALLY sideswiped by that whole plot, gunpowder weapons are so rare in the popular perception of epic fantasy. It's going to make WoT really stand out.) Another note: in the show the fact that the a'dam can be used on sul'dam remains a secret from the Seanchan and was not presented as an empire-shattering discovery, and the lore has changed so sul'dam are just very weak in the Power. I think there's a chance that in the show it becomes something known but suppressed in Seanchan rather than a genuine/complete rediscovery. Given how long channelers live that would check out; the books never make anything of it but Alivia is old enough that when she was born there were still a few free channelers in Seanchan. The 'Consolidation' was not a short victorious war but a multi-century period.

Introduced in TDR Tear (the city/Stone), Illian, and Ghealdan Darkhounds Wolfbrothers losing themselves Wolves and the Dream/prophetic wolf dreams Wide-scale ta'veren effects Tel'aran'rhiod Forsaken controlling nations (including specifically Illian, Tear, and Andor) Grey Men Callandor/the fall of the Stone Mat's luck Set-up for the Tower Coup Egwene as a Dreamer/Egwene's prophetic Dreams Balefire Fireworks as weapons

As with characters, there's a lot of worldbuilding from TDR that hasn't come into play yet! I think this is mostly for pacing reasons. On the other hand, we actually got a lot of Tel'aran'rhiod in S2 which aligns with TDR, a book where characters spend about half their time having prophetic dreams (or so it feels like).

Mat's luck and Egwene's Dreaming abilities - these are solid/obvious S3 arcs for these characters that they didn't have time for in S2. No question we'll see them next season, I think, although Mat's luck might have more of a slow-burn introduction than just suddenly working.

The Forsaken - have only just all been released! We'll certainly see them taking over nations in the next season or two.

Darkhounds, Wolfbrother lore, Callandor, fireworks as weapons - I think this has all been held back for pacing. Famously Perrin's plot needs to be spread out to give him stuff to do in later seasons. He might not get prophetic dreams though since it's a bit of a repeat of Egwene's Dreaming and never goes anywhere much.

Similarly, it's a Big Deal when Rand gets Callandor and then it...stays where it is for five books, that's not good TV pacing. I suspect he will pick it up just in time to try using it and fail against the Seanchan. And we don't need to think about fireworks as weapons until Mat is in a place to take advantage of the possibilities.

Balefire, widespread ta'veren effects, Grey Men - these are all things which pose the question 'why aren't they being used all the time' once they're introduced, and the latter two will be quite hard to effectively and efficiently do in a visual medium. We'll get balefire eventually but at a much higher power level for our characters, and the other two we might never get at all.

Tear and Illian - genuinely no idea when we'll get to these cities! Illian we may never visit as not a lot happens there that has to happen *there*. We'll go to Tear (the city proper) at SOME point but...depends on a lot of things exactly when.