#Mac vs evil plots

[depizan]

I've started and deleted a number of posts in my re-reread of the Rogue Squadron books (and I'm only on the second book), because much of what I've wanted to say, I've said before. But villains and villainous plans, man... they have to make a different kind of sense the larger scope the story is.

Alternatively, it's really fucking weird how a book can go into great detail about a villain's plan and still leave me going: "what the fuck are you trying to do???" Isard's plan in Wedge's Gamble just makes my brain hurt. I'm not sure if the bigger problem is that it doesn't make sense unless her actual plans are different from her stated plans (but I'm pretty sure that's not the case) or if it's the violation of "how convenient for the author." (You know, that thing you really don't want your audience to think while reading your work.)

I find myself cynically thinking that Isard's plan to let the Rebellion take Coruscant, but with a people-melting virus to bankrupt the Rebellion, is the answer to Stackpole being unable to figure out how the Rebellion could actually take the planet. Sure, relinquishing tainted strongholds is a thing, but I'm pretty sure it's a "fuck you" done when a stronghold was going to fall anyway, and it probably isn't something you do with vital strongholds (unless it's a "fuck you" from the grave).

The plot wants me to simultaneously believe that taking Coruscant is vital to the legitimacy of the Rebellion as a power and that Isard can sacrifice Coruscant without sacrificing her legitimacy. And power base, really. Sure, she retreats first to her nonsensical prison and then to Bacta World...oh fuck it, I'll look it up...Thyferra. (Which is a whole other bundle of WTFery.) But she's still lost the capital planet, lost the infrastructure she had there, lost the political/psychological power of holding the capital planet, and just generally made her own position of power much less stable.

Honestly, it feels like she, Loor, and Derricote are the only actual people in (what's left of) the Empire. As if everyone working under or with them are literal drones, not people who might have reactions to the plan, to the loss of Coruscant, to...anything, really. Isard seems only to consider people's reactions to her plan in regards to the Rebellion (the Rebellion will be forced to spend loads of money on bacta to treat the people who catch the plague, or else be seen as bad) not how anyone on her side will react (oh fuck, Coruscant fell. guess that's it for the Empire.).

And the plague doesn't make sense (except in being in keeping with Isard's standard solution to things. that is to say, murder), since we're specifically told that the (human) workers in Derricote's lab wear hazmat suits when interacting with the test subjects, even though the virus is aimed at non-humans, suggesting there is pretty strong concern that it might affect humans. (We are told that it shouldn't be able to jump to humans, but I'm not sure which we're supposed to believe.) Do these lab workers know the plan? Do they have reservations? (Even if they don't have ethics/morals, what about the continued livability of Coruscant?)

(And, yes, the hazmat suits could be an abundance of caution, but it comes up when some of the test subjects are people that should have been questioned, but now can't be without revealing that they've been given the plague, and so won't be being released anyway. This means that the concern is strong enough that no one's willing to risk catching the plague--even though there's a treatment!--in order to interrogate the test subjects.)

Basically, it feels like Stackpole piles the evil on with regard to the plan in the hope that the audience will then not notice that it makes little sense for Isard to use the plan. She's evil; it's evil. Of course it makes sense.

Really, it all boils down to a what does this character want and do their actions match that. And that gets more complicated the bigger scope the story is and the more power the villain has. You don't have to put a lot of thought into it to make a school bully's actions seem plausible and in character. You have to put a lot more thought into it to make a big scope villain's actions seem plausible and in character.

If you're the leader of what remains of an empire, with control of the imperial capital, would you really abandon it? (Also, we never see Isard doing person running the empire things. She's written like a power behind the throne character, but she's on the throne.)

And, yes, you can have incompetent villains. (Lord knows, we have plenty of those in real life.) But I don't think we're supposed to see Isard as incompetent. (There's plenty of villain decay involving her later, but in this book I'm pretty sure we're supposed to be going "omg so evil" not "wtf.")

Honestly, there's a lot of weird self-defeating villainy in Star Wars. It may be in service of the idea that good will always win because evil is stupid, but it ends up somewhere in the vicinity of good will always win because it is slightly less incompetent than evil.

[juniperhillpatient]

no one asked but I will talk more anyway - the comedy of sunny derives from the characters & their tragedy mixed with their own awful choices. it’s not an overtly political show like South Park although early sunny has some decent political episodes like “gun fever” & Charlie wants an abortion.”

ultimately, this is a comedy about the worst people you know. the loudest, most obnoxious, nasty people you can imagine who are still people with trauma & baggage & feelings - “big feelings” even 😉 - & it works great when it’s this shitbag bunch of losers agains some clearly innocent or neutral outsider. it’s villains as protagonists & tragedy as comedy & character driven humor about wacky situations that these idiots get themselves into. that’s why episodes like “the gang inflates” & “Frank Vs Russia” work. it’s the gang in a stupid ass situation they’ve gotten themselves into being absolutely idiotic or freakish about it & working together as a dysfunctional team. these episodes reminded me of episodes like “the gang solved the gas crisis” & “paddy’s pub the worst bar in philadelphia.” not in terms of specifics, just in terms of the gang being an evil team scheming away.

It’s not that the gang can’t fight. If they’re not arguing they’re not the gang. It’s not even that they can’t have more significant conflict between them - “the gang misses the boat” is one of my favorite episodes & it involves the gang breaking up! but the comedy of that episode - the heart of episodes like that or “mac & Dennis break up” - is that these stupid assholes couldn’t escape one another if their lives depended on it! the other time conflict within the gang is funny is when they’re operating by their own insane internal rules & we get to see that at play such as the Chardee macdennis games or their many bizarre trials. those are great & only serve to strengthen the group dynamic by showing their bizarre & toxic rules that nevertheless work for them.

the show stops working when we the audience stop giving a shit about the gang or stop understanding the complexities of these relationships & why they always go back to each other in the end no matter what. imo season 15 at least tried to solve some of that (because the show absolutely lost sight of that in later seasons & I think the creators know it, & seem to want to remedy it) but the execution left a lot to be desired & the characters still didn’t always feel like themselves & and we still got a lot of crappy & unnecessary ham fisted jokes & forced plot lines & I have extremely mixed feelings on the drama because I do like some of it & I acknowledge Charlie Day’s incredible talent but it just did not feel like the sunny I know & love.

but all this to say I actually really feel that season 16 felt more like sunny than it has in years! & that’s because they leaned less than ever into misogynist jokes against dee & homophobic jokes against Mac & just the gang hating each other & instead let them be the wacky friends we know & love getting into hijinks! that’s what the show should be! in conclusion season 16 was mostly good & it’s because it let the gang be friends again

[23meteorstreet]

1 to 5 :)

1. how did you get into the show?

i heard about it back in like 2013 bc a yt channel I liked made references to it all the time but initially i was kinda scared to watch it bc I heard there was some offensive stuff and wasn't sure if that was my thing. then a few years later i was on a spring break trip w/ my high school and some ppl started talking about mac and dennis: manhunters for some reason?? and that made me so curious about it that I started pirating it a few days later lol

that being said... i didn't actually get into the show at that point. I got to about the first ep of season 2 and then just stopped bc even tho it was super funny I couldn't really connect with the characters and some of the satire felt a little too accurate to me. but from 2017 to like... may-ish of last year I watched a few eps here and there and made it to the beginning of season 3.

in october I was going thu a bit of an existential crisis (im mostly good now) and was looking for something funny to watch that hopefully wouldn’t suck up too much of my time (LMAOOO) and found it in my continue watching section on hulu and thought “this’ll be perfect bc i’ll probably just watch a season or so and then turn it off again”. yeah, that didn’t happen. (of course it probably helped that i’d watched i want you back earlier that year and realized i had a massive crush on charlie lol)

2. who’s your favorite character and why? (has your fav changed since you started watching the show?)

like i said in the last question it took me a while to pick a favorite but i literally caught one glimpse of charlie day’s freckles in i want you back and became obsessed with him & every character he’s ever played forever. aside from being super fucking adorable tho i genuinely think he’s the funniest character in the show. he has sooo many iconic moments and i love that he’s silly but also very capable like in charlie work :) also i really enjoy that he’s generally the “nice” one but he can also be very evil & feral at times. basically i like how complex he is lol. i just wanna wrap him in a blanket and feed him some spaghetti <3

3. what are your top 3 favorite episodes?

this is so fucking hard but here’s 3 off the top of my head:

the aluminum monster vs. fatty magoo : this is the one that made me finally get into the show! i loved that the characters were terrible to the point of absurdity. dennis putting on the dress was such an unforgettable moment & i feel like this ep is when they really found him as a character. charlie’s plot in this is also great, i love how he’ll end up in the most bizarre situation and just adapt to it (and the part where he's fantasizing about the drawing was... interesting to say the least lol). also any episode written by glenn & charlie is fucking iconic

the gang goes on family fight: this is just such a comfort ep tbh. family feud is always fun/funny and i love when the gang actually gets along. dennis’s freakout at the end was also super funny & relatable

the gang goes to hell part 2: after getting to know the characters for so many seasons, watching them almost die was strangely cathartic lol. it just felt like a love letter to the gang’s friendship, & it makes me think about how i’m so attached to these terrible fictional people. i could probably write a whole essay on this ep tbh. also the imaginary dinner scene is so funny to me, i love how much they get into it. 

also an honorable mention to charlie rules the world: charlie looks hot af in this episode (obviously) plus i love video game related eps in any show lol. It’s a fun ep to try to analyze charlie as a character, and i love that dennis just goes completely off the rails. 

4. name a song that reminds you of your favorite character

this is so hard bc all the songs on my sunny playlist are for ships/the whole gang… gonna go with leave me alone - fidlar bc of that one fancam plus i was listening to them earlier lol (ps. if anyone has any good charlie songs pls send them to me!!)

5. do you ship anything?

in no particular order: macdennis, charden, charmac, charmacden, deetress, chartemis, artemis/waitress (pretty sure i made this one up lol), charlie/scientist… i think that’s it? my fave are probably charmac, macdennis, charmacden, and deetress tho

[themovieblogonline]

Meg 2: The Trench Review: A Deep Dive into Disappointment

I will get you Meg 2: The Trench is the highly anticipated sequel to the 2018 monster thriller The Meg. Promising to plunge audiences into the depths of the ocean once more, this film reunites Jason Statham as the fearless Jonas Taylor as well as some familiar faces such as Sophia Cai, Page Kennedy, and Cliff Curtis. Despite the potential for thrilling underwater adventures and epic battles with menacing sea creatures, The Trench fails to live up to its predecessor's excitement and falls short in multiple aspects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG91B3hHyY4 The Bad: From the opening scene, Meg 2 sets a tone of claustrophobic tension as the team embarks on their mission to explore the uncharted trench. The underwater visuals are visually impressive, with the CGI capturing the mystique of the deep ocean. However, the film struggles to maintain this level of visual splendor throughout its runtime. As the narrative progresses, the novelty of underwater exploration starts to wane, leaving viewers yearning for something more captivating. The characters in Meg 2 suffer from a lack of development, which is disappointing given the potential of the talented cast. Jason Statham, as the returning hero Jonas Taylor, seems to be on autopilot, delivering the same tough-guy performance as in the previous installment. His character lacks depth, and his interactions with the new team members feel forced and uninspired. Wu Jing's character, Jiuming, a skilled oceanographer, initially shows promise as an intellectual counterpart to Jonas Taylor. However, he is ultimately reduced to a mere sidekick, deprived of any significant impact on the story. Sophia Cai's Meiying Zhang, the youngest member of the team, serves as the obligatory "genius child," but her role feels like a token addition rather than a meaningful contribution. Page Kennedy's DJ attempts to provide comic relief, but his humor often falls flat and feels out of place, disrupting the film's overall tone. Similarly, Cliff Curtis's James "Mac" Mackreides lacks the commanding presence required for a character in his position. These underdeveloped characters fail to create a compelling emotional connection with the audience, making it challenging to root for their survival or feel invested in their fates. The script of Meg 2 is one of its weakest aspects. The plot suffers from predictability, with its beats feeling recycled from other creature features. The malevolent mining operation, while initially intriguing, becomes a clichéd plot device that leads to a standard "good vs. evil" conflict. The film relies too heavily on cheap jump scares, diminishing the tension and suspense that should have been the movie's forte. Moreover, the narrative pacing is uneven, alternating between sluggish exposition and rushed action sequences. This imbalance leaves little room for character development or a deeper exploration of the ocean's mysteries. The script also fails to address several plot holes, leaving viewers with unanswered questions by the film's conclusion. The Good: On a positive note, the action sequences in Meg 2 are intense and engaging. The showdowns with the monstrous sea creatures provide some thrilling moments that attempt to redeem the film. However, these brief highlights are insufficient to compensate for the overall lackluster experience. The cinematography and visual effects elevate Meg 2 to a certain extent, capturing the vastness and beauty of the underwater world. The creature design is menacing, and the CGI is generally well-executed, giving life to the ancient marine predators. Nevertheless, the reliance on computer-generated imagery at times makes the action feel detached from reality, reducing the impact of the perilous situations the characters face. The film's soundtrack, composed by Harry Gregson-Williams, complements the tense atmosphere with haunting melodies and pulsating beats. It effectively amplifies the suspense during crucial moments, enhancing the movie's eerie ambiance. Overall: Meg 2: The Trench struggles to live up to the excitement of its predecessor. Despite its potential for thrilling underwater escapades and a talented cast, the film falls short in character development, narrative originality, and emotional engagement. While visually striking at times, the lack of substance and repetitive plot hinder its ability to make a lasting impact. Fans of the original might find a few redeeming qualities, but ultimately, this movie is a disappointing deep-sea adventure that fails to reach the depths it aspired to explore. Read the full article

[waaty]

I sense that you are a person who plays games quite a bit.... Would you recommend psychological games? That have that style of gameplay like undertale. But not in the fighting sense but like 2D and walking down every hallway and finding items (I suck at explaining myself) lol. As long as it has psychological/thriller overtones you just recommend :>>

oh sure!! i went a little hard on this so sorry for the length~

planet laika (PS1 - fan translation only - recommended emulator: duckstation)

i’ve talked about this game a bit already but it’s exactly what you’re looking for! planet laika is a psychological adventure game with light RPG mechanics. laika (protag) and a small crew are sent to mars to survey a colony, but the planet is covered with a kind of evil energy that makes the people on it lose their minds. you also learn about laika's childhood trauma, mainly through their three multiple personalities who are also used in gameplay. the gameplay is mostly talking to NPCs and solving light puzzles in new locations. the story is pretty confusing, but i really enjoyed it! warning for heavy content though.

silent hill 2 (PS2/xbox/PC)

another game with heavy content! this is a survival psychological horror game in which james (protag) receives a letter from his dead wife asking him to meet her in the town where they spent their honeymoon. when you arrive at the town, you find that it's been overrun with basically zombies. the story is heavily based around james' psyche as he deals with grief and trauma related to his wife's death. the gameplay mainly consists of finding items in scary locations while avoiding/fighting enemies.

mother 3 (GBA - fan translation only - recommended emulator: mgba)

if you like undertale, you'll probably also enjoy this game! undertale was heavily inspired by the mother series, especially in tone (a mix of humor and tragedy). while all three mother games are great, mother 3 is more like what you’re talking about. basically you mainly play as a young boy named lucas who goes on a journey to save his once peaceful island from pig-masked colonizers. the main themes are family and grief, but it also tackles things like capitalism and technology vs nature. the game mainly consists of talking to NPCs and traveling through locations fighting enemies (turn based RPG combat) to get to the next part of the story.

night in the woods (PC/Mac/PS4/xbone/switch/ios)

this is an adventure game where mae (protag) returns to her hometown, a dying appalachian coal-mining town, after dropping out of college. the story mainly consists of learning about an unspoken horror that lies in the woods just out of town, as well as themes of depression and poverty. the gameplay is mainly walking around town and talking to people to progress the plot.

[stuck-in-the-ghost-zone]

hello hello mx ghostiezone once again i am sending u 1am asks ^___^ anyway. 1) this is also a free pass 2 talk about YOUR ocs from what i have heard. their lore is so neat i am so so so curious i would love to know more. pls pls pls. 2) u r so cool actually. fond of mac ghostiezone. sending u excellent vibes & also sharing my raspberry tea with u rn >:) ok gn!!!

HIII HI ROSWELL IM FINALLY ANSWERING THISSS it's been sitting in my inbox for like a fucking month now I'm SO sorry but I am finally able to form coherent thoughts so I hope u don't mind if this is SO long. I am going 2 tell u ALL about tfobh. which is likeeee. the oc universe/story I am the most obsessed w nowadays. btw i post all of my oc thoughts @ghost--core so if u wanna know all abt my cringe little guys.... eyes emoji

so. the basics. there r 5 (technically 6?) main characters, and they're all supposed to feel like they've been dropped from totally different stories into one group.

Oliver Brody is the wholesome sitcom/slice of life anime. he really likes bugs, rides a skateboard everywhere, dresses in bright colors and is generally a rlly optimistic dude!!! he LOVES his wife and kids so much but during the plot of the story he is separated from them because. his wife works as a park ranger n got a job at a HUGE national park. so she and the kids moved out there to their permanent home while Ollie stayed behind in the city to finish his last few semesters of school (he wants 2 graduate n get a good job to support his family.... he is the world's SECOND most perfect man. you'll find out who the first is later.) he calls his wife every night to kiss his kids goodnight and talk to her about her day !! he's connected to the main group because he and henrik were roommates the first time he went to college :]

Jackie Bowers is the superhero/comic book. He's a freelance urbex photographer and spends a lot of his time exploring abandoned buildings. hes the youngest of the group n is still very much a child at heart, he LOVES movies and comics and gets excited very easily! he's very impulsive and that's kind of a detriment more often than not. he's also got magic! jackie has something called intrinsic magic, meaning he can call on his magic at will whenever he wants without any outside help. this makes it VERY unpredictable and hard to control and he's not very good at that (he's got lightning magic btw. he got struck by lightning when he was a little kid 😌 he calls it his origin story). he's very justice-minded and even though he's not Actually a superhero he's got a very black and white view of good vs evil. he's connected to the main group through henrik as well, who he met during his Frequent visits to the hospital for parkour-related accidents.

Merrow Atwood is a high fantasy/dnd style fae (half-fae, technically. his father was a human). there r two types of magic in the tfobh universe- intrinsic and ritualistic. fae can only have ritualistic magic, meaning they need some sort of outside force to call upon their magic, whether that be a wand or certain ingredients or a potion or a book or whatever. they can't just conjure things all willy nilly so it's a much more controlled, tame form of magic. they consider intrinsic magic dangerous because it's so much harder to control. so BECAUSE merrow is half-fae though. his dad had intrinsic fire magic. So merrow inherited that and hes got both types. during an accident when he was younger, he ended up setting a huge section of the forest on fire and was banished by his village, deemed cursed and too dangerous to ever return. he wandered in the woods on his own for a rlly long time, but one night he ended up sleeping in an abandoned building and that's when Jackie found him!! blah blah story stuff happens but. oh my god they were roommates. are they in love? are they just homies who kiss sometimes? who knows, least of all them! merrow is very level-headed, kind of aloof and mysterious without meaning to be and he knows NOTHING about pop culture/media/current events/ANYTHING like that. Jackie, known movie lover and big fucking nerd, has a FIELD day introducing him to everything

HENRIK SOMMERFELD. THE MAN HIMSELF. there's not really a single ""main character"" in tfobh. but god. henrik sure is something. he is like. the Frankenstein/Dr.Jekyll of tfobh. science man that tries to play god (thank u aster). he is SO morally grey and fucked up. HE DIDNT START LIKE THAT THOUGH. he and Ollie went to college together, became great friends n stayed in contact even after ollie dropped out the first time and hen went on to med school. he works at the big hospital and every day on his lunch break he walks down the road to the same bakery. this bakery just so happens to be run by his best friend in the whole world! henrik is. very tired and grumpy and closed-off and VERY hard to talk to. so he doesn't have a whole lot of friends. with the exception of Adrian, who I will get to next.

henrik and adrian are SO interconnected with each other that i CANNOT talk about one without including the other. so fuck my organization this is why I did these two last.

Adrian Daugherty is!!!!!! the world's most perfect man. he's the punk with a heart of gold trope. he's the older brother that loves horror movies. he's. so sweet. he dresses in all black with ripped jeans and a flannel shirt and piercings ALL over his face. he rides a motorcycle to work and looks like he could kick anyone's ass at any given moment. and he works at a bakery making cookies and pies all day. he risks being late to work in the morning to talk to stray cats on the sidewalk. he and henrik become friends solely because Adrian saw this miserable wet blanket of a man walk into the shop every day at 1:16 pm SHARP, order a black coffee and a croissant and sit in the corner to gloomily stare out the window until he had to go back to work. Adri dealt with this for about a week and a half before he started setting out the usual order 5 minutes before he walked in the door so it'd be ready when he got there. eventuallyyyy they started talking and adrian was the extrovert that adopted him. they became SO incredibly close.

and then. you see. you have to understand why I am choosing to call henrik the viktor frankenstein of this story. you see. Adrian dies.

Adrian dies, and henrik becomes SO consumed by his guilt and grief that he steals a book of spells from merrow. henrik doesn't believe in magic or ghosts or anything like that, but he's so desperate that maybe *something* will be able to give adrian back to him. he performs some VERY forbidden necromancy, and because he wasn't born with any sort of magic and knows absolutely NOTHING about what he's doing, he fucks it up ROYALLY. he ends up summoning a creature the book calls "the shadow" and accidentally fuses it with adrians corpse. this creates a new being that is neither shadow nor adrian. he names himself azrael.

Azrael. is. hmmmm. hes like. the sympathetic villain I guess? he's the horror movie monster. he's both somehow the protagonist and antagonist at the same time. he is. absolutely PISSED at the fact that he exists. he doesn't remember anything about adrians life, he just remembers suddenly being woken up to loud noise and a splitting headache and all the pain and agony of existence all at once. He lashes out at henrik and disappears.

Merrow finds out his book was stolen and is RIGHTFULLY pissed about it. he and Jackie are the ones that find henrik in the aftermath. they decide azrael needs to be found and destroyed because he was created with dangerous magic and realistically should have never existed in the first place, much to henriks dismay.

so the story goes, you've got two separate groups trying to hunt azrael down. henrik and Ollie don't want to kill him, theyre trying just to talk to him and maybe get him to calm down enough to be civil. The problem with their strategy is that henrik refuses to stop calling him Adrian. this just pisses Azrael off more because hes not who they think he is, hes not Adrian, he doesn't even know who Adrian is so he doesn't understand why theyre expecting him to be this. guy. on the other hand Jackie and merrow are hunting him down to try to kill him. Neither of these is a good option.

I REFUSE to create a story with an unhappy ending though, so it does get better in the end. merrow has a change of heart after some plot stuff and ends up figuring out a way to separate shadow from Azrael enough that he can still exist but won't have all the murderous tendencies of a demon. they have like. weird found family vibes at the end :]

[allykakamatsu]

Hypothetical P5A

Okay, gonna make this clear right up front, I wanted to make this post for a while but the main reason I decided to do it now is because the Atlus announcement thing is almost here, and also cause I saw a video on this topic by Thorgi’s Arcade (go watch it btw it’s good) and while I agree with a lot of what he said, there’s also some things I’d change, not just cause I disagree, but also cause I think it would be fun. Anyway enough beating around the bush, let’s do this

Gameplay

I’m a firm believer in the phrase, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and the Arena games are already really good so not much to change. That being said, I still wanna change some things. First off though, we are keeping this 1 vs 1, no tag team matches. The arena games already have a lot of Mechanics going on and trying to keep everything as well as some new stuff WHILE adding a tag team button, yeah no let’s not outside of maybe a bonus mode.

This means I can’t add Batton Pass in as a new mechanic to represent P5, but I have a solution, that being Technicals. Status ailments already exist in this game, so how about when you inflict one and do a specific combo you do more damage, also providing risk vs reward as the player with the status will have a better idea of what the opponent will do making them more predictable. Also as for Persona’s, mostly everyone’s will be fully evolved, minus Yu cause him getting a final boss persona normally is a tad to OP, meanwhile the P5 characters will have their starting Persona’s, but they will evolve for big moves, like awakened mode supers and instant kills

I’m also borrowing Thorgi’s Arcade idea of having supports giving a slight buff in battle, like if you pick Fuuka your meter can build faster for a bit, meanwhile if you pick Futaba you’ll get an attack and defence buff. It’s the fairest way to include them without having to make them playable. I know Rise is already playable but this roster is going to have to be small as it is, and being a support doesn’t mean you can’t be DLC later.

Also, we’re not bringing back the Shadow Characters, just, we are not dealing with the likes of Shadow Naoto again.

:readmore:

Story

I am about to cop out a bit here, but Thorgi’s Arcade video had a really good idea for the story so I’ll just link it here https://youtu.be/yyB5rEM9UVU

To summarise for people who don’t want to watch, Nyarlathotep, the main villain from the Persona 2 games, has been gaining strength from all the suffering humanity has gone through due to 3, 4 and 5, and has gained enough strength to create a new Joker to try finish what he started and destroy the world. Mitsuru might think the Phantom Thieves are behind it cause this is clearly persona related and the fact that the leader of the PT’s is also named Joker is public knowledge, Naoto gets largely the same idea, Katsuya and Maya decide to have their own investigation, meanwhile the Phantom Thieves are trying to prove their innocence and help save the world. Nice excuse to bring everyone together, but who will the everyone be?

Base Roster

Okay, I know the dream is getting everyone from Ultimax back plus the new P5 characters, but given Arc System’s standard for small base rosters, I’m not holding my breath. The ideal would be everyone plus who I’m about to say for P2 and P5, but I’m keeping it… somewhat realistic. Anyway onto the actual size, 16 seems fair enough. One more than the most recent Guilty Gear game for a series that had pretty big success so that sound fair enough. Let’s get the obvious out of the way though, all the base 8 Phantom Thieves besides Futaba are making the cut

Okay so that’s obvious but how will they play? Starting off with Ren/Joker, Smash Bros already laid a great foundation with him being very fast on the ground and in the air plus being great at combos, so I see no reason to change that. Also no need for him to be a Jack of all trades either cause spoilers, Yu is coming back and he already fills that role.

As for the others, Ryuji I can see being a slugger charge hybrid. Basically starting out he hits pretty hard but is a bit on the slow side to compensate, but just like any good athlete, give him a chance to warm up, ie do a charge input, and he becomes a lot faster and has better combo potential. Or we could make him a toned down version of Little Mac where he’s great on the ground but he’s in trouble the second aerial combat is involved. Then there’s Morgana who with his ability to turn into cars and the fact he introduces thief tools like smoke bombs, I can see him being a faster but frailer successor to Teddie.

Then there’s Ann who, no doubt, she’s a Zoner, and with her fire she’ll be Yukiko’s sort of successor. However instead of healing, I’d implement the fact that she learns concentrate and have it so the more she charges it up, the stronger her attacks get, but the Meter will gradually go down over the match. Yusuke, as tempting as it is to cop out and say ‘have him play like Vergil in Marvel vs Capcom’, I have a different idea. Namely, take advantage of the fact that Yusuke can learn counter by having him be the defensive specialist, set up ice traps to freeze the opponent, and if they get close, he can either counter or go for some combos.

Then there’s Makoto who would definitely be a grappler. I mean, she practices Aikido and is really strong, she can 100% pull it off. Finally Haru…… TANK! I mean come on, Haru wields an axe, has a grenade launcher, and Melady is literally a dancing tank in a pink dress, it just makes too much sense. I’d also give her a bit of armor cause if she’s slow she at least needs a chance to get her attacks in.

Okay so that’s 7 out of our 16 slots down, and given that one slot will have to be saved for the Evil Joker who would be the villain, we’re halfway done with 3 games to go, lord help me.

Okay, starting this off with P4, I’m gonna give them more than the others purely because they were the focus of the originals and there’s less realistic cuts I can make compared to 2 and 3. To make things simple, every returning character would play the same, and as for the ones I’d bring back for the base roster, we’ve got Yu, Yosuke, Chie and Naoto. Why them specifically? Well Yu is the main character, Naoto being a detective would basically mean she’d be the one getting everyone involved in the first place, Chie is currently training to be a cop as confirmed in P5 so her getting called in makes sense, and Yosuke is the best investigator after Yu and Naoto, he’s always up for a mystery and the second he learns Yu is involved he’s joining in. I just couldn’t cut him.

Now before the really painful cuts, Persona 2 is really easy. Out of Innocent Sin party members, by the end of the series Maya is the only one left with a Persona, and Katsuya is not only older brother of Innocent Sin’s protag Tatsuya, but he’s also pretty important and a detective so he’s definetly the one Maya’s dragging into this. As for how they play, they both use guns like Naoto, but how I’d mix them up is with Katsuya, I’d let him attack while moving (unlike Naoto who has so stay still to fire) at the cost of less combo potential, meanwhile Maya dual wields her guns so she’ll probably play like Noel Vermillion from BlazBlue where she’d more or less just use the guns to get longer reach melee attacks instead of shooting.

Now, for the hard part. There’s only 2 slots left, one of them basically has to go to Mitsuru (not that I’m complaining I’d probably add her anyway) meaning now I have to choose between the rest of the Shadow Operatives/SEES for the last slot. I narrowed it down to the 3 that were in the original Arena cause they’re the most plot relevant, but that still meant I had to choose between Akihiko and Aigis. I ended up deciding on Aigis though cause A, with Labrys not making the base roster someone has to represent the robots of the series, and B, with Akihiko currently pulling a Ryu by travelling to get stronger, it makes more sense that Aigis would be closer and easier for Mitsuru to call up. Honestly I was tempted to bump the roster up to 17 so I could have both of them on the base roster, but this is ArcSystems, 16 is already kinda pushing it.

DLC

Given that this is a modern fighting game, DLC is inevitable. However since this DLC will likely be like Ultimax where the story acts to wrap up loose ends and have a new story, it’s going yo be big, especially since there’s going to be a fight with Nyaraloptep, so go big or go home in this case. Okay so first order of business, anyone who was in the previous arena games who wasn’t in the base roster is getting added back in, it’s only fair. That out of the way, the new faces I’d add are Futaba actually being playable now and the big 4 P5 characters I skipped, Akechi, Yoshizawa, and Sophie. Before anyone asks though, Sophie was added into a Dragalia Lost collab with Koei Techmo not being credited so she’s likely Atlus’s copyright so she's safe to add.

With that out of the way, how would they play? Starting with Futaba, I’d think she’d be the resident puppet fighter, sitting on top of Necinomicon and only occasionally adding in some of her own attacks like a projectile. Also she'd also probably act as a bit of a grappler cause her Persona has tentacles (no hentai jokes please) which have long reach so that'll be perfect for it. Next up is Akechi who I can see as semi being two characters in one. My basic idea is that at first Akechi will be fighting with Robin Hood and he'll be a solid jack of all trades with a slight focus on rush down. However once he goes into his awakened mode he'll gain Loki, which will increase his speed and attack strength, at the cost of his defence, turning him into a glass cannon.

Next is Yoshizawa, or 'Sumi as I like to call her, and her thing will be she's the mobility focused fighter, namely constantly moving around the stage and poking at her opponent while doing it, at the cost of being frail. Finally there’s Sophie who would be a combo focused zoner, as in her standard projectiles (the yo-yo’s) wouldn’t hurt that much on their own, but she can string them together into the fancy yo-yo tricks to potentially do big damage. As for how much this DLC would cost, it’s going to be very big, so €25 to €30 sounds fair

I think that more or less covers my thoughts. I could keep going on about this for a while, but I think this is a good place to stop. Hope you like my idea!

[girlbossdennnis]

ok tell me abt the gangs fav horror movies then i would like to know

hell yeah! ok so, horror movies i think each member would like:

charlie - he would like the fun, bright and colorful comedy horror movies over the serious ones so movies like Killer Klowns From Outer Space, Evil Dead 2, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Zombieland, Sleepaway Camp 2 (lotta sequels huh)

and for fun i think he would like Little Shop of Horrors for it's musical aspect and most definitely tried to have his own audrey II by making frank buy this ridiculously expensive plant that he's sure is legit and names waitress II only to kill it within the week by watering it with the blood bucket

dee - i switch back and forth between what kind she likes cause her character seems to flip flop on being a pick me and hating all men a lot but regardless i do think she'd like more female killer movies like Urban Legend, April Fool's Day, Bride of Chucky, Tragedy Girls. I think she resonates with the movie Carrie a lot but wouldn't admit it. I also think she would like Midsommar and firmly would believe it's a girlboss type movie

dennis - like i've mentioned i don't actually think he'd like American Psycho or House That Jack Built type of movies cause i don't think he's that guy or trying to be that guy at all. I do think he'd like "smart horror" like Scream and Behind the Mask for it's horror homages. He'd also probably like more 80s horror in general like Prom Night, Poltergeist, and certainly Fright Night for it's vampirism and having two vampire (or vampire and his familiar i don't remember) dudes living together for years in solitude..

same with dee he also likes midsommar a lot but views it as a cult cautionary tale movie. this leads to many hours of fighting and arguing and finally having another in house trial to settle it once and for all

mac - DEFINITELY action horror no doubt about it. we know he already likes Predator but I'm adding Alien Vs. Predator as well cause it's monster fighting. I don't think he digs traditional slashers but would enjoy Freddy vs Jason for it's comedy and once again monsters fighting. Following the action horror line he probably would like Tremors and Army of Darkness and possibly Jaws but just cause he thinks he could take down the shark on his own

bonus: yes i said he hates slashers but i think he would watch the first Sleepaway Camp a lot cause all the male counselors are in literal booty shorts the whole movie and he's a man with taste and eyes

bonus bonus: the saw movies purely because they always explain everything at the end which helps mac cause he doesn't understand movie plots at all

frank - i think he's the wildcard in terms of horror and likes a bit of everything. Saw 6 specifically cause it has a lot of gruesome kills but on the other hand would love Scary Movie and it's sequels. Also Creepshow 2 and Eight-legged Freaks cause they're just fun watches for him with the anthology style and comedy monster movie. Definitely Jason Takes Manhattan and more specifically the scene where Jason takes his mask off in from of the kids like that's right up his alley man.

basically whenever they get together to watch a horror movie it's a constant fight cause they all have differing tastes in what they like in horror

[purble-turble]

Idea about Evil Clone MK: Claims, when people finally realize he's a clone, to be made from the ugly part MK doesn't want to think about- the bastard that points out that he can do whatever he want with this power and not even Heaven can stop him that is pushed deep down.

Interesting!!!

I guess I’ve been considering the evil clone scenario mostly from the point of view of the clone or Red Son but you’re absolutely right to bring up MK! This is an opportunity to hold a mirror up to MK so he has to confront his inner demons.. this clone knows all his selfish desires he’s trying so hard to suppress and decides to act on them.

I don’t know that the clone would refer to himself as the “ugly” part of MK.. more likely he’d think of himself as the strong part of MK. He says he’s the part that’s confident and isn’t afraid to use the power within him to take what he wants or care about what anyone else thinks about him. He taunts MK and calls him weak because he’s ruled by his fear of disappointing others.. maybe he even brings up Red Son too, because this clone knows that MK has a bit of a crush on Red but is too afraid to do anything about it. But HE was strong enough, and that’s why he gets to have Red Son and MK gets nothing. Of course this whole line of thinking is wrong and MK knows that deep down, but it still definitely hurts.

This plot thread kind of makes the Evil Clone MK be like the Macaque to MK’s Sun Wukong. And I love the themes of what is the true vs the illusory mind when it comes to those two, and in the case of MK and his clone that could be an interesting thing to explore and have MK defeat his inner selfish desires in the way Wukong does through Macaque.

...Although, since that’s already a story that’s been told, it could also be fun to have the focal point be on MK’s relationships with others. Specifically his friends.. the evil clone has obviously abandoned all of them in favor of joining the DBK family out of selfish desire for power (and potentially Red Son) and so views MK’s loyalty to his friends as the source of his weakness. It would make sense in a case where that is the focus to have MK’s friends be instrumental in the defeat of the clone, proving that friendship and loyalty breed strength, not weakness.

Well... whether it would be about nonduality or friendship, I heckin love all the possibilities of this plot. If I wasn’t so wrapped up in my Mac and Red comic I might write something about it.. don’t think I have the time or energy to devote to two large fan projects though..

so if someone else wants to create something with the evil clone plot (whether it follows this story line or something completely different) you have my blessing :U just send a link to it to me if you do.. honestly, I’d just love to see more MK clone stuff, I absolutely love the story possibilities~

[aion-rsa]

Venom: Let There Be Carnage – The Comics History of the Symbiote Rivalry

https://ift.tt/3APMTrk

Something that impresses me with a superhero movie like Venom is when it doesn’t rush directly into the expected villain. When there are four different Fantastic Four movies, and they’re all about emphasizing Dr. Doom, it’s a breath of fresh air when, say, Man of Steel only makes an Easter egg reference to Lex Luthor instead of going directly for that confrontation. The MCU Spider-Man has yet to meet an Osborn, guys like Thanos and Darkseid started out as ominous benefactors, and the existence of Heath Ledger Joker was merely a cliffhanger tease in Batman Begins.

Much like how the Justice League movie decided to take its time by giving us Steppenwolf of all people, the first Venom movie had Carlton Drake (who hasn’t appeared in the comics since the early 9’0s) and Riot (the most forgettable of all of Venom’s comic children). By letting Venom build himself up on his own, flanked by some rather mundane villains, it gave more meaning to Cletus Kasady showing up in the post-credits. Carnage, Venom’s main villain, gets more fanfare by appearing in the sequel where our hero is fully formed.

Since Carnage’s first appearance in 1992, the idea has always been to make a darker, scarier Venom. Venom was a villain at the time, sure, but he was also on the border of becoming more. Outside of his personal delusions and anger issues, he still claimed that he wanted to help the innocent and punish the guilty. Even when he was able to accept that Spider-Man was good, they couldn’t co-exist due to their different natures as vigilantes. Carnage was simpler because he was full-on evil and had no potential for redemption. He was something so sinister and malevolent that both Spider-Man and Venom knew it was worth it to put aside their differences and take this creep down.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage has hyped Carnage up as being out of Venom’s league and that was the initial push of the character. Over time, the two became roughly equals as Carnage became the go-to bad guy for Venom to punch.

So let’s take a look at the history of Venom vs. Carnage. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to define “Venom” and “Carnage” as characters wearing their respective symbiotes (excluding Peter Parker), or the symbiotes themselves. I’m not going to count Eddie Brock as Toxin, or Flash Thompson as Agent Anti-Venom or whatever.

Carnage’s Debut

Not counting cameos and build-up, Carnage’s first major appearance was in Amazing Spider-Man #361, starting off a three-parter. Spider-Man came to realize that he wasn’t enough to stop Carnage and he was going to need help. Specifically, he was going to need Venom. This was an awkward decision as Venom was at the time living his best life on an empty island, thinking that he had succeeded in killing Spider-Man.

Once Venom fully understood the situation, he accepted the temporary alliance. In the very first Venom vs. Carnage confrontation, Venom and Spider-Man tackled Carnage, got slammed into each other, then thrown into opposite walls. Carnage then caused a distraction by putting a baby in danger so he could escape. While he was dominant in that very brief scuffle, he still needed to run off, so I’m calling this a draw.

The handicap match continued into the last issue of the arc at a rock concert. In one-on-one exchanges, Carnage had Venom’s number, but Spider-Man was always there for the save. Spider-Man was able to use the sonics from the amplifiers to take out both of them. Technically a draw again, but it’s also a situation where Carnage regularly kicked the shit out of Venom and Venom only survived because he had help.

Maxium Carnage

Insert your Green Jelly cassettes and press play because it’s time for Carnage’s big ’90s crossover story. After the previous story’s popularity, Marvel decided to add more heroes, more villains, and make the whole thing a whopping 14 issues!

As Venom was a San Francisco vigilante at the time, he flew to New York to stop Carnage’s reign of terror. The first fight wasn’t even shown, as after the reveal that Carnage had Shriek and Doppelganger on his side, it cut away. A brutalized Venom was later found passing out while knocking on Peter and MJ’s door.

As Maximum Carnage was filled with so much filler and extra characters, there were various fight scenes of a group of heroes brawling with a group of villains. Venom and Carnage talked smack a lot, but nothing much ever really happened in terms of fighting. The story finally kicked into gear when Venom used a stolen sonic gun and blasted Carnage while Firestar assisted with her microwave blasts. This would have done the job, but Spider-Man got in the way and Shriek simply cut Cletus’ face open, causing his symbiote to respawn and bring him back to 100 percent health. Carnage and Shriek overwhelmed Venom and carried him off, along with the sonic gun.

Venom spent several issues being tortured until coming up with the plan to sneak some of the symbiote into the sonic gun so that Carnage would splatter Venom with more Venom. He punched Carnage down and escaped with gusto, hiding the fact that he was in no condition to fight.

It isn’t until the last issue that we FINALLY got a real Venom vs. Carnage fight. Venom was physically busted a bit, but Carnage was mentally busted. The heroes hit him with some MaGuffin device that caused him to be haunted by those who screwed him up in life. Venom pretty much just kicked Carnage’s ass around the city while Carnage tried in vain to escape. Every now and then, Spider-Man would appear and go, “B-b-but Eddie! Killing is wrong!” for the sake of giving Carnage a second wind.

Eventually, Venom punched Carnage so hard that Carnage’s brain ghosts went away. Knowing Carnage was more of a threat this way, Venom tackled him into a transformer. After the explosion, Cletus was knocked out and Venom got to weakly sneak away. Hey, good for him!

Venom: Carnage Unleashed

Venom was so popular that we got Carnage. Carnage’s initial storyline was so popular that we got Maximum Carnage. Maximum Carnage was so popular that we got a Maximum Carnage video game. Then we got Venom: Carnage Unleashed, a comic based on the popularity of the Maximum Carnage video game. It…wasn’t all too popular.

Still, it did give us the rarely used plot device that symbiotes can travel through phone lines and the internet! Symbiotes really are like pre-Crisis Superman where you can give them whatever power and people will just go with it no matter how ridiculous. As Carnage escaped from Ravencroft and commandeered a security tank, Venom eventually caught up with him and they had a fight on a runaway vehicle through traffic. Carnage eventually won when Venom got slammed by an oncoming train.

Their final battle here is a big pile of “That’s not how any of this works!” The two characters send symbiote tendrils into the internet, which were rendered on the Times Square big screen as the two brawled in cyberspace. Venom destroyed a nearby heatsink, which blasted both and knocked them out of the internet.

Carnage was ready for another go, but his kidnapped psychiatrist set him on fire and caused him to fall out a window. Venom reached through the phone lines and out the window to catch the falling Cletus because dying is WHAT HE WANTS. Which… no, that’s not true at all. Hell, even in Maximum Carnage, Cletus was freaked out about the possibility of dying.

Venom: On Trial

So there was a big Spider-Man/Scarlet Spider/Venom team-up called Planet of the Symbiotes that culminated in a 40-foot-tall Carnage, but there was never a specific Venom vs. Carnage moment, so I won’t go into it. Venom’s ’90s antihero run did have a storyline where Eddie was arrested and put on trial for all of his many crimes. Cletus Kasady was brought in as a star witness, which was an invitation for him to freak out and go on a killing rampage. I mean, seriously, guys. Come on. You should know better.

This story went all-in on Venom wrecking Carnage. Again, Spider-Man would interrupt and give Carnage a chance to turn things around. This time though, Venom decided to ride the wave by sneaking away while Spider-Man and Daredevil took on Carnage. Realizing that the two didn’t have a chance, Venom picked up a couple syringes filled with dopamine blocker and sprung into action. He smacked Carnage around, injected the blocker into his neck, and watched as the symbiote retracted into Cletus’ body.

Venom Triumphant

Howard Mackie wrote Spider-Man comics for a long while and he had an annoying tendency when it came to storytelling. He would come up with an interesting, if nonsensical, idea that would shake up the status quo, but instead of following up on that and using it to tell an actual story, he would just forget about it and move to the next idea that popped into his head. He was one of the main reasons why the Spider-Man Clone Saga was such a mess.

In the 10th issue of Peter Parker, Spider-Man, Venom broke into the prison where Carnage was being held. Despite the legion of heavily armed guards with flamethrowers and sonic guns, Venom killed them all so quickly that the artist didn’t even show it. Cletus, for some reason, figured Venom was trying to break him out of prison, but instead Venom was there to absorb the Carnage symbiote. Carnage barely put up a fight. Pieces of the symbiote were on him, but he didn’t fully transform or try to defend himself. Venom simply pulled the symbiote off of him and ate it, becoming stronger.

After this issue, there was barely any follow-up to this.

Venom vs. Carnage

This miniseries came out at a really weird time for those involved. Carnage was just a couple months away from being torn in half by the Sentry and being written out of comics for years. Venom was appearing in Marvel Knights Spider-Man where Eddie Brock got rid of the symbiote and it bounced around to different hosts until landing on Mac Gargan. Meanwhile there was a Venom ongoing that was more about a symbiote clone where Eddie Brock only appeared for a couple late issues.

In other words, in the Venom vs. Carnage miniseries by Peter Milligan and Clayton Crain, even the creative team had no idea who Venom’s host was supposed to be. Luckily, the story wasn’t about Venom or Carnage, but a new character who would quickly fall into obscurity anyway.

Venom and Carnage swung around New York City, giving the exposition. The Carnage symbiote was pregnant and Venom was explaining that there was nothing to do to stop the creature from going into labor. Venom was all about protecting the new spawn while Carnage wanted to destroy it, immediately. Carnage got the better of Venom by flinging him into the distance. Regardless, the explosive birth wore out Carnage so much that he could only plant the baby onto a nearby cop and escape to rest up.

When the two had a rematch, Venom was there to save the baby symbiote (Toxin) and its host (Pat Mulligan). As if getting revenge for that Carnage Unleashed story, Venom brought the fight to the subway and pushed Carnage into an oncoming train.

And… that’s really all the Venom vs. Carnage we get in Venom vs. Carnage! Once Venom sees that Toxin is a good guy and capable of kicking Carnage’s ass, he gets afraid of Toxin befriending Spider-Man and decides to team up with Carnage for once.

Carnage, USA

Carnage returned from his maiming at the hands of the Sentry, albeit without a bottom half. By then, a lot had happened with Venom. The symbiote was removed from Mac Gargan and joined with war hero Flash Thompson. Agent Venom went on to join the Secret Avengers.

Carnage, USA told the story of Cletus expanding his symbiote to overtake an entire town in the middle of nowhere. When various heroes went to oppose him, the Carnage symbiote ended up taking over Captain America, Wolverine, Hawkeye, and the Thing. When gaining a moment of clarity, Cap called in Agent Venom for help.

Read more

Movies

Venom 2 Trailer Breakdown – All the Marvel and Carnage References

By Gavin Jasper

Comics

Venom: Who is Carnage?

By Gavin Jasper

In their first meeting, Agent Venom easily took down Carnage with some explosive projectiles that came with sonic shrapnel. Then when getting ready for the kill – say it with me everyone – Spider-Man got in his face and went, “No! Don’t kill!” Carnage recovered, and overwhelmed Venom with his army of Carnage’d heroes. Then another obscure symbiote hero, Scorn, popped in to run Venom and Carnage over with a bulldozer and bring them into a facility that would blast their symbiotes off the hosts.

While Cletus and Flash had a fight based around the novelty that both were legless, the Venom symbiote latched onto a gorilla and ran for its life against an entire zoo full of animals with the Carnage symbiote. After almost being taken down by a Carnage lion (Spider-Man with the save), the gorilla returned to Flash and gave him the power to bring Cletus into custody.

As for the town-wide Carnage symbiote, most of it was taken out by an airstrike.

Minimum Carnage

Following up on Agent Venom, he had his own team-up arc with Scarlet Spider (Kaine) with the fun dynamic of a Venom who doesn’t want to kill and a Spider-Man who does. The two chased Carnage into the Microverse, where Carnage was able to create an army of symbiote clones. While Agent Venom was able to decapitate Carnage, the villain had attained some level of power where his body is more overall fluid and animated. In this case, Carnage could just reattach his head with no problem.

Although Flash had sedated his own symbiote and lacked the monstrous advantage, he was able to wipe out a bunch of the clones by amplifying his own inner sorrow outward through the Venom symbiote. Strangely, that’s not the first time Venom was able to do that. What’s left of Carnage slinked away, cackling.

Carnage and the clones returned to Earth and Voltron’d themselves into a giant Carnage. As Carnage tried to devour Agent Venom, Venom shoved a sonic grenade down Carnage’s throat and let the blast do the rest, taking out the enlarged Carnage symbiote almost completely. In the aftermath, Scarlet Spider jabbed one of his claws through Cletus’ eye and lobotomized him.

Venomverse

Venomverse is about a series of Venom hosts from different realities coming together to fight beings called Poisons. Under normal circumstances, Poisons are harmless. If one of them makes physical contact with a symbiote and its host, it transforms them into a nigh-unbeatable crystal-like creature with the Poison in control. By this point, Eddie Brock was Venom again and joined with all sorts of random symbiote heroes to the point that he came off as just a regular dude.

With their back against the wall, Eddie came up with an idea. They brought in Carnage from an alternate universe as a ringer. At first, Carnage fought against the Venoms, but they were reluctant to fight back. Once he saw the Poisons and understood that the Venoms wanted him to kill an army of twisted superheroes, he gladly joined their ranks. He just let them know that once he was done with the Poisons, he’d kill them next.

He ended up being a huge help, especially since the Poisons had a hard time bonding to the Carnage symbiote. Carnage died in an explosion fighting Poisons alongside Poison Deadpool (who was able to bypass his Poison’s mental control).

There was a sequel to this called Venomized where the Poisons returned and tried to invade Earth. They kidnapped Cletus, forced him to bond to an alternate universe Venom, and then bonded that to a Poison. While he was referred to as “Carnage” at times, the Carnage symbiote was never involved, so I’m going to skip this one.

But where was the Carnage symbiote during all of this?

The Red Goblin

At one point, Norman Osborn became the host for Carnage to give us a climactic villain to finish off Dan Slott’s lengthy run on Amazing Spider-Man. Knowing that Spider-Man was out of his league, J. Jonah Jameson decided to fight fire with fire by calling up Eddie Brock and blackmailing him into aiding Spider-Man. This led to a brief fight of Spider-Man, Venom, and repulsor-wielding Mary Jane against the Red Goblin.

Venom and Red Goblin brawled for a bit, but Red Goblin appeared to be immune to the usual symbiote weaknesses, so only Venom took damage. While he got some hits in, Eddie was too exhausted to continue. Instead he offered the symbiote to Spider-Man to give him the extra boost. This brief team-up allowed the two vigilante enemies to finally bury their lengthy rivalry.

Absolute Carnage

Now we get to Donny Cates’ bonkers run on Venom. Cletus had been resurrected and turned back into Carnage via a bunch of cultists who worshipped Knull, God of Symbiotes. Carnage then started going around eating the spines of those who were once host to a symbiote, getting stronger by the meal. Dark Carnage first fought Venom in a subway and easily overpowered him. Still, Venom got the win by grabbing onto the third rail while holding onto Dark Carnage. It was enough to knock Carnage loopy while Venom could get away and seek out help.

Venom and Spider-Man sought out Norman Osborn (who believed himself to be Cletus Kasady after the Red Goblin episode) and were ambushed by an army of inmates possessed by Carnage symbiotes. Overwhelmed, the two heroes broke through a wall and swung off into the night.

Venom got involved in another big fight against an army of Carnages and could have killed Osborn, but instead chose to save a wounded Mac Gargan nearby and brought him to safety. The Venom symbiote wasn’t happy with this and later left Eddie for Bruce Banner, giving us a fight between Venom Hulk and Dark Carnage. This turned out to be a dire choice, as Dark Carnage tore into Hulk’s brain, caused him to shrink back to Banner, then ate his spine. Carnage was stronger than ever.

Meanwhile, mad scientist the Maker had a machine that took the “symbiote codex” stuff Carnage was looking for out of former hosts without the nasty “tearing out their spinal column” part. Eddie unleashed the codex collection onto himself, turning him into a more powerful version of Venom. As he took on Cletus one last time, Carnage made note that Venom was screwed no matter what. Either Carnage killed and ate Eddie’s son Dylan or Eddie killed Carnage, which would wake up Knull and drive him to Earth.

Venom summoned the Necrosword to cut through Carnage, destroying him once and for all. For a time, at least.

Prelude to Knull

Wouldn’t you know it, killing Dark Carnage caused Eddie to absorb the Carnage symbiote into himself. Soon he was separated from Venom and stuck on an island while being bonded against his will to the Carnage symbiote. Dylan was able to remotely control the Venom symbiote and transformed it into a giant Venom T-rex. Like it wasn’t even bonding onto a dinosaur or anything. It was just the size and shape of a tyrannosaurus just because.

Eddie and Dylan had a dreamlike meeting in their minds while Carnage Eddie chopped down at the Venom dino. Eventually, the power of familial love was enough to overpower the Carnage symbiote and blow it up. Eddie rejoined with the Venom symbiote, and a little piece of Carnage latched onto a nearby shark to swim off and fight another day.

Okay, then! Phew! Going by every Venom vs. Carnage fight, I’ve judged them so that there have been six draws, eight victories for Carnage, and nine victories for Venom.

Congratulations, black ooze. Here’s hoping your red offspring doesn’t turn the tide at the box office.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage will be released in theaters on Oct. 1.

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[takusanno]

BLOG UPDATE: 25.04.2020

This blog has been under re-construction for some time now and it’s finally about done, so here’s what it involves:

Muses:

As mentioned many moons ago, I decided I didn’t want to mix my canon muses and ocs, so i have moved the ocs onto individual blogs @firecreated ( fire-make mage, Frankie ) and @crimsoncurated ( Archive mage spy/informant, Mags ). They will be very low and sporadic activity ( just like this blog ).

I also mentioned I decided I don’t like to have more than 6 muses per multi, so I have cut this blogs muse list down to 5 ( i hate having an uneven number so there may be another muse added at some point but it wont be one that was on here before because Reasons ).

The muses left on this blog are: Gray, Loke, Macbeth, Rogue, and Frosch.

The muses cut from this blog were Millianna, Jenny, Chelia, Siegrain and Ophiuchus. The girls may end up on their own multi in the future, while Sieg is likely to get his own blog because he is Different.

Interpretations and Divergences:

I am starting to reread FT very slowly to spark ideas and motivation. I did finish reading the manga way back when it did end, but I’m not very familiar with the later arcs, which is another reason why I’m planning the reread. 

As I go through the manga, some ideas and aspects of my portrayals may be adjusted, especially towards the end of the manga as some characters get destroyed by bad writing and I decide which parts I’m wanting to keep as canon and what I want to change. Below is a brief bit about where my portrayals are sitting at the moment.

Gray: i like to focus on his observant and artsy side but also the darkness that comes with having demon slaying magic. In order to use the demon slaying magic, he has a demonic element himself, which was activated by Silver during Tartaros. Gray now struggles with his new aspects and abilities and he is not as close to Fairy Tail as he was, because 1. he’s trying to deal with his problems on his own and doesnt want to risk hurting anyone from the guild, and 2. the fact the guild disbanded really threw him off and made him question things.

Loke: the lion aspects are more of a Thing and i will die with him being a gentlemanly knight. Him balancing his animal side and his gentlemanly ideals are my focus. He still flirts and can be playful but he knows where to draw the line, as his responsibilities are important to him. And any canon instance were he was inappropriate is excluded, see my divergence post here. I plan on some serious Celestial World building and the whole time-difference thing is going to be adjusted somehow, I just have to think some more on it.

Macbeth: The biggest thing with my guy here is that he still very similar to how he was in the Oracion Seis Arc ( also see this post regarding his hair, i dont do the fluffy style his more recent appearance had ). He does not care for ‘redemption,’ he is with Crime Sorciere for convenience and because the other OS members are there. I also ignore the Jellal vs Oracion Seis fight. Mac is Bad News right down to his dark and twisted core, he has always been this way, even before being a slave at the tower. There is no changing him.

Rogue: he is haunted by the evil ‘shadow,’ a demonic entity and the struggles he has because of this is important to note. He is doing his Best. I’m kinda 50/50 on a divergence where he is the Sabertooth Master so I think I would leave it flexible depending on Sting RPers ( as some would hc Rogue to be guild master instead of Sting ). The whole Welcome Home Frosch chapter didn’t happen. 

Interactions/Ships:

This re-construction also act as a soft-refresh on some things. 

Some bonds were started or plotted but are now dropped/reset as those blogs have deleted or reset themselves.

Some old ships ( as discussed with the relevant muns ) will be reset in light of shifting portrayals and also to keep organisation of blogs clean for both parties.

Activity/Following:

I want all my blogs to be relaxing, fun, no-pressure spaces, so that means limiting the blogs I follow, so no hard feelings if I don’t follow back!

It also means I’m not going to let myself get stressed about being ic here or even being here in general. I have other blogs and IRL stuff going on ( as everyone else does too ), so the activity here will be low and I’m prone to disappearing for a month or so at a time. If you don’t want my brand of Inconsistency around, feel free to unfollow/softblock at any time ( i know some people prefer to keep following only people who are active a certain amount, and that’s absolutely fine ).

I think that’s everything (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

[loadingwestern907]

Call Of Duty 5 For Mac Free Download

Download Call Of Duty For Mac. Free and safe download. Download the latest version of the top software, games, programs and apps in 2020. Oct 21, 2020 8/10 (502 votes) - Download Call of Duty 5 Free. Download Call of Duty 5 for free, a wartime FPS. Compete alongside the allies in the Second World War in Call of Duty 5 thanks to this multiplayer client. Anybody who plays shooters will know Call of Duty, a franchise of war games that take place. Free Download Call Of Duty 2003 Mac - Latest Updated till v1.5.5(Nov 2013). If you like this game, support developers, buy it.

Publish date: 2020-10-13

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Requirements: Android 4.3+

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Official CALL OF DUTY designed exclusively for mobile phones. Play iconic multiplayer maps and modes anytime, anywhere. 100 player Battle Royale battleground? Fast 5v5 team deathmatch? Sniper vs sniper battle? Activision’s free-to-play CALL OF DUTY: MOBILE has it all. FREE TO PLAY ON MOBILE Console quality HD gaming on your phone with customizable controls, voice and text chat, and thrilling 3D graphics and sound. Experience the thrill of the world’s most beloved shooter game, now on your phone for easy on-the-go fun. BELOVED GAME MODES AND MAPS Play iconic multiplayer maps from Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, available for the first time for free. Or squad up with friends in a brand new 100-person battle royale survival map. Join the fun with millions of players from all around world! CUSTOMIZE YOUR UNIQUE LOADOUT As you play CALL OF DUTY: MOBILE you will unlock and earn dozens of famous characters, weapons, outfits, scorestreaks and pieces of gear that can be used to customize your loadouts. Bring these loadouts into battle in Battle Royale and thrilling PvP multiplayers modes like Team Deathmatch, Frontline, Free For All, Search and Destroy, Domination, Hardpoint and many more. COMPETITIVE AND SOCIAL PLAY Use skill and strategy to battle to the top in competitive Ranked Mode or to win the most Clan prizes as you play with friends. Compete and fight against millions of friends and foes in this thrilling free to play multiplayer shooter. CHOICE AND COMPLEXITY Whether in gameplay, events, controls, or loadouts, CALL OF DUTY: MOBILE offers complexity and depth in an ever-changing experience. Have what it takes to compete with the best? Download CALL OF DUTY: MOBILE now! _________________________________________________________ NOTE: We welcome any feedback during your experience to improve the game. To give feedback, in-game go to > Settings > Feedback > Contact Us. Subscribe for Updates! ---> profile.callofduty.com/cod/registerMobileGame _________________________________________________________ Note: An internet connection is required to play this game. Please note this app contains social features that allow you to connect and play with friends and push notifications to inform you when exciting events or new content are taking place in the game. You can choose whether or not to utilize these features. 2019 Activision Publishing, Inc. ACTIVISION and CALL OF DUTY are trademarks of Activision Publishing, Inc. All other trademarks and trade names are the properties of their respective owners. By downloading, installing or using this App, you agree to Activision's privacy policy and terms of us, as may be updated by Activision from time to time. Please visit http://www.activision.com/privacy/en/privacy.html to view Activision's privacy policy and https://www.activision.com/legal/terms-of-use to view Activision's terms of use.

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Update on: 2020-10-13

Requirements: Android 4.3+

Update on: 2020-08-15

Requirements: Android 4.3+

What's new:

Call of Duty Mobile Season 9: Conquest offers new characters, Reznov and Nikto – Stronghold, and takes you to battle through the eyes of Reznov's war flashback. New Shipment 1944 map. And finally, the wait is over... Gunsmith arrives in Call of Duty Mobile! Customize and personalize your weaponry with a vast array of attachments.

Update on: 2020-06-11

Requirements: Android 4.3+

What's new:

Call Of Duty Mobile Season 7: RADIOACTIVE AGENT. Brand new updates with the much anticipated Battle Royale map expansion - 7 new zones, new BR class, and new Tank. Ghost and Price will be equipped with new gear to battle radioactive danger. Unlock new weapons to play in Tunisia and fan-favorite Gulag maps, plus Attack of the Undead mode.

Update on: 2020-04-29

Requirements: Android 4.3+

Update on: 2020-03-26

Requirements: Android 4.3+

Update on: 2020-01-16

Requirements: Android 4.3+

What's new:

'Season 3 Update is Live! • New Black Ops III and Yellow Snake themed rewards for ranked leaderboards • New Premium and Free Battle Pass rewards • New Multiplayer maps and limited time game modes • New Multiplayer Operator coming soon • Battle Royale will soon receive a new area! • New Battle Royal Mode and Class coming soon • Various bug fixes and optimizations'

Get Ready for some Spooky Fun

Call of Duty: Ghosts is yet another instalment in the Call of Duty Saga. Although Call of Duty is very popular among first person shooter games, there have been so many releases in the series that some people may have trouble keeping track of them all. Is Call of Duty Ghosts simply a variation on a theme, or does it offer something new and different? Find out by reading the review.

Call of Duty: Ghosts presents players with the fast and fluid game play that the original captured so well. People who are familiar with the original game should be able to jump right into the action and should have little trouble figuring out what to do.

However, Ghosts also introduces players to a brand new gaming premise. The player personalisation is stunning and really captures the feeling that you are playing the game with a team of skilled soldiers. The sweeping changes that the game presents also breathes new life into the old concept and helps make it more original that many people may expect.

Ghosts is set in a whole new world to the original Call of Duty as well as being slightly in the future. For a change it is the South American nations who pose the threat and gamers must strive to take down the evil forces of South America, who have made their money from dominating the oil markets and are now intent on dominating the world. The plot of the game is fairly simple and often feels like it is a bit too simple. Fans of great storylines may find that this is a little lacking in content.

There is plenty to do in Ghosts and missions are extensive and engaging. Although the campaigns are a little complicated at times, there really force gamers to use all of their skills and work hard to achieve their goals. Fortunately the controls are rather easy to manage and players should not be confused for long.

The world of Ghosts is rich and varied and there is a lot of area to explore. The varied scenery leads to a wide range of different tasks for players to complete such as flying helicopters over lush jungle, rappelling down skyscrapers and even engaging in firefights with the enemy in Outer Space. The whole Ghosts world is presented in a single map, which is extremely large and can be rather confusing at first.

There are so many new elements to Ghosts that gamers can enjoy the thrill of not quite knowing what is coming next. One minute you may find that you have to put all of your speed and strategy to the test to evade a group of hungry sharks. In the next scene you may need to take on the role of a dog to complete a challenge, which brings with it a whole new range of skills. Each new scenario that players are presented with requires a whole new strategy and this game is certainly going to keep gamers on their toes, making it anything but boring.

Call of Duty: Ghosts includes many of the great features that fans of Call of Duty have come to know and love. There are enough extra elements to make this game feel fresh and exciting, despite a few small setbacks. However, like many franchises the story has been skipped over a little this time around, which is a bit of a disappointment.

Pros

Call Of Duty 5 For Mac Free Download 2019

More team focus

Campaigns are exciting and engaging

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Cons

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The maps are too big

The story is rather basic

[arplis]

Arplis - News: CGMagazine

CGMagazine 5 Great Roguelikes to Play after Hades If you love Hades as much as we do, you’ve already probably run through Hell and back again enough times to have seen most of what the game has to offer. This being said, if you’re still looking for some roguelike goodness, we’ve compiled a list of games perfect for scratching that post-Hades itch: Darkest Dungeon Darkest Dungeon Darkest Dungeon – Red Hook Studios Platforms: Switch, Vita, PS4, PS5 (via Backwards Compatibility), Xbox One, Xbox Series S | X (via Backwards Compatibility), PC, Mac, Linux, iOS Developer: Red Hook Studios First off there’s Darkest Dungeon which, like Hades, is a dungeon crawler roguelike. Unlike Hades, however, Darkest Dungeon plays like a strategy-RPG so it is vitally important that your 4-person party is well selected and well-equipped. And we mean vitally important quite literally, as this game will wipe a feeble party with great ease. This all being said, despite how difficult it is and how oppressive it may feel at times, at the core of Darkest Dungeon is an infectious gameplay loop that will surely have you obsess about load-outs, classes, party positions and how to best manage resources. Final note: don’t get too discouraged when your favourite heroes perish – rebounding from devastating losses is part of the experience. Rogue Legacy Rogue Legacy – Cellar Door Games Rogue Legacy – Cellar Door Games Platforms: Switch, Vita,  PS3, PS4, PS5 (via Backwards Compatibility), Xbox One, Xbox Series S | X via (Backwards Compatibility), PC, Mac, Linux, iOS Developer: Cellar Door Games If turn-based strategy does not work for you, a great roguelike to try out is the Metroidvania-inspired Rogue Legacy. The main “gimmick” of this title is that all of the playable characters share the same genealogy and, as such, every knight takes after their predecessor in terms of individual quirks (such as Gigantism or Dyslexia) and in terms of upgrades to the handful of vendors helping you on the way. This means that almost no failed attempt is in vain as even the worst load-outs might, somehow or in some way, set you up for eventually achieving the family’s goal of freeing a castle overrun by evil. It’s addictive, it’s infuriatingly hard – it’s an impeccable roguelike alright. And with Rogue Legacy 2 being still quite a ways off from release, it’s available right now in Early Access, what better time than now to give the original a whirl? Spelunky 2 Spelunky 2 Spelunky 2 – Mossmouth / BlitWorks Platforms: PS4, PS5 (via Backwards Compatibility), PC Developer: Mossmouth / BlitWorks Speaking of sequels, then, the most recent entry on this list, Spelunky 2, manages to refine and make the right changes to the original’s almost impeccable wining formula. And whereas it is true that there’s nothing revolutionary about this continuation, Spelunky 2 replaces the original as one of the best roguelike platformers you can play today. In terms of what makes it different from other platformers of the like, such as the aforementioned Rogue Legacy, Spelunky 2 places a greater emphasis on exploration and is focused more about making the experience bizarrely unpredictable rather than throw-your-controller-at-the-wall difficult. Dead Cells Dead Cells Dead Cells – Motion Twin / Evil Empire Platforms: Switch, PS4, PS5 (via Backwards Compatibility), Xbox One, Xbox Series X | S (via Backwards Compatibility), PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android Developer: Motion Twin / Evil Empire Whereas, yes, at first sight Dead Cells looks like nothing more than a ‘2D Souls-like’, you can rest assured with knowing that this title stands tall and mighty on its own. As an action title, this entry differs from others in this list due to the fact that it exchanges being more methodical with high-speed intensity. What we mean by this is that even if, fundamentally, the risk vs. reward decisions are the same in Dead Cells as in Spelunky 2, for example, these decisions need to be made in the heat of the moment, which in turn, leads to either exhilarating victories or bitter defeats. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth – Edmund McMillen / Florian Himsl / Nicalis Platforms: 3DS, Wii U, Switch, Vita, PS4, PS5 (via Backwards Compatibility), Xbox One, Xbox Series X | S (via Backwards Compatibility), PC, Mac, Linux Developer: Edmund McMillen / Florian Himsl Topping off this list is The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, the grandfather of the entire roguelike genre and the one game that popularised randomly generated dungeons. Who could have predicted that an unholy combination between the biblical plot, the dungeon design of the first Zelda and the gameplay mechanics of a twin stick shooter like Ikaruga would lead to something so special, so attention-grabbing and so “hauntingly beautiful“? Now, of course, there are a handful of other incredible titles that we didn’t mention this time, but this is where you can come in: feel free to drop your own suggestions/lists below! The post 5 Great Roguelikes to Play after Hades appeared first on CGMagazine. #TheBindingOfIsaac #Rogue #EdmundMcMillen #CellarDoorGames #Hades

Arplis - News source https://arplis.com/blogs/news/cgmagazine-1

[diversegaminglists]

Games with undead protagonists.

(Not including Vampires and Ghosts since there’s already lists for those)

Skeletons:

Battle of the Bands

Battle Monsters (Fangore)

Breath of Death VII

Castle Crashers

Crypt (Early Access)

Divinity: Original Sin II (Several different undead species)

Graveyard Shift 2: Skelly's Revenge

Grim Fandango

Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit

Killer Instinct Franchise (Spinal)

MediEvil Franchise

Mr. Bones

Mutant League Football & Mutant League Hockey

Puyo Puyo

Raskulls

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas: The Pumpkin King

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge

Zombies & Revenants:

Ben and Ed

Blood

Contagion

Dark Souls Franchise

Dark Stalkers (Lord Raptor)

Dying Light: Be the Zombie

Gungrave Franchise

I, Zombie

i saw her standing there franchise (excluding the first game)

The Last Guy

Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare Franchise

Revenant

Reverse Crawl

RISK: Factions

Shadow Man

The Sims 1 (If a dead sim is revived by a grumpy Grim Reaper)

The Sims 2 (If a dead sim is revived with not enough money)

The Sims 3 (Life state)

Skullgirls - Squigly

Sonny Franchise

Stubbs the Zombie in: Rebel Without A Pulse

Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys

Three Dead Zed

Timesplitters: Future Perfect (Multiplayer)

Urban Dead

Zombidle

Zombie Night Terror

Zombie Panic! Source

Zombie Tycoon

Mummies:

ARMS (Master Mummy)

Dark Stalkers (Ankaris)

Decap Attack (Chuck D. Head)

Captain Commando (Mac the Knife)

League of Legends

The Mummy Returns (Imhotep)

Mummy Madness

Mummy Run

Powerstone

The Sims 3 (Life state)

Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy

Constructs:

Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura (Character background perks)

Belladona

Daraku Tenshi (Taro)

DOTA 2 (Pudge)

Frankenstein: Through The Eyes Of The Monster

Monster in my Pocket

Other:

Age of Wonders - Undead Faction

Age of Wonders II - Undead Faction

Age of Wonders III - Eternal Lords - Necromancer

Code of Princess - Lady Zozo

The Elders Scrolls Skyrim: Dawnguard - Plot requires the PC to become undead (or a vampire) to enter the Soul Cairn

Doom (2016)

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - Necromutation

Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy - One of the protagonists dies and is brought back from the dead, with no body heat.

Frederic: Resurrection of Music & Frederic: Evil Strikes Back

The Gunstringer Franchise

Heroes of Might and Magic II - Necromancer

Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Restoration of Erathia - The Necropolis Faction

Heroes of Might and Magic IV - The Necropolis Faction

Heroes of Might and Magic V - The Necropolis Faction

Heroes of Newerth

Lords of Magic

Lusterinia - Necromancers can become Liches

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor Franchise

Might & Magic: Heroes VI - The Necropolis Faction

Might & Magic: Heroes VII - The Necropolis Faction

Might and Magic VII, VIII & IX - Mages can become Liches

Might & Magic: Heroes Online - The Necropolis

Mortal Kombat (Scorpion)

Overlord

Rogue - You can resurrect as an undead in some versions

Skullgirls - Ms. Fortune

Soul Calibur Franchise (Cervantes)

Spawn: Armageddon

Undead Knights

World of Warcraft - The Forsaken

Skins:

Ark: Survival Evolved

Borderlands 2

Skate 3 - Unlockable Skeleton

League of Legends

Overwatch

Street Fighter

Special Mentions:

Altered Beast - You do RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE at the beginning of the game.

Corpse Craft: Incident at Weardd Academy - You fight with undead constructs but you’re not technically dead yourself

DarkSiders II - You play as Death

The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile - Despite the name I can’t work out what the protagonist actually is

NeverDead - The protagonist can survive being dismembered.

Planescape: Torment - The Nameless One is almost entirely immortal, and he looks like a zombie due to scar tissue, but he’s not technically undead.

Project Wight - Upcoming game but the Wight appears to be a mutant rather than an undead.

Threads of Fate - Rue can transform into a skeleton

[the-master-cylinder]

SUMMARY A “skybike”, a one-man, open-cockpit flying machine, attacks Dogen. Dogen shoots it down and finds one of Syn’s crystals on the pilot’s body. Carved into the crystal is a symbol of a dead tree. Dogen finds a murdered prospector, whose young daughter Dhyana saw him killed by Baal, Jared Syn’s half-cyborg son. Baal sprayed the man with a green liquid that caused a nightmare dream-state, in which Syn appeared and executed him with a crystal. Dogen convinces Dhyana to help him find Syn.

Dhyana takes Dogen to Zax, who identifies the crystal as a lifeforce storage device. Dhyana tells them about the ancient Cyclopians who once used such devices and says the only power against it is a magic mask located in their lost city. Zax affirms this and directs Dogen to find a prospector named Rhodes in the nearby mining town of Zhor.

Dogen and Dhyana are blocked by vehicles driven by nomads commanded by Baal, who sprays Dogen with the green liquid, paralyzing him. Dhyana drives them off and cares for Dogen, who in the dream world finds Syn and Baal looming over him. Syn fails to pull Dogen away from Dhyana: their will is too strong. Dogen awakes, but Dhyana is suddenly teleported away. A summoned monster appears in her place and fires electric bolts at him. Dhyana simultaneously faces Syn in his lair. Dogen shorts-out the creature, and it vanishes.

Dogen arrives in Zhor and finds Rhodes, a washed-up soldier, in a bar. Rhodes denies the lost city’s existence and refuses to get involved. Dogen leaves and comes upon a group of miners beating a captured nomad soldier. Dogen assists him, and the miners turn hostile. Dogen is out-gunned until Rhodes helps him defeat the miners.

Rhodes reluctantly agrees to help Dogen. Deep into Cyclopian territory, Dogen locates a large statue with a single eye and finds the crystal mask. Suddenly attacked by snake-like creatures, they escape, until they are accosted by a group of nomad warriors. Their leader, Hurok, grabs the mask from Dogen and accuses them of trespassing – a capital crime. Rhodes cites nomad law that a warrior can fight for his freedom, so Dogen duels Hurok. When Dogen spares his life, Hurok accepts Dogen as a friend and frees him.

Syn takes Dhyana before a massive crystal and forces her to touch it. Syn says the crystal is powered by captured souls, including that of her father. Dhyana, disgusted, says her warrior will come for her. Elsewhere, Dogen and Rhodes assault Baal’s encampment, and a chase ensues. After evading them, Dogen wears the mask and finds himself in the dream world with a burning tree. In his hand he finds an axe and hacks into the tree. The tree moans like the crystal in Syn’s camp and trickles a stream of blood. Dogen removes the mask and returns to Rhodes. Baal suddenly attacks, extending his robotic arm to spray Dogen, but Rhodes pushes him out of the way and is knocked out. Dogen, struggling with Baal, rips the robotic limb from his shoulder. Baal flees, and Dogen tracks the green fluid to Syn’s camp. He sees the nomads gathered around Syn, and Hurok greets him.

Syn denounces Dogen as an enemy, but Dogen says he has only come for Syn. Hurok refuses to kill Dogen and demands that he be allowed to speak. Dogen says Syn is a liar who wants to enslave them. When the crowd turns hostile to Syn, he activates the crystal, which stuns the crowd. Syn fires blasts at Dogen, but he deflects them with the mask. Baal grabs the mask and it shatters on the ground. Hurok kills Baal, and Syn teleports away. Dogen jumps onto a skybike and chases Syn into the desert, but Syn escapes through an energy portal.

Dogen returns to the nomad camp, finding Dhyana safe with Hurok. Dogen promises to fight Syn if he returns and destroys Syn’s soul crystal. Dogen and Dhyana leave the camp on foot but soon encounter Rhodes in Dogen’s truck. He picks them up and takes them into town.

DEVELOPMENT/PRODUCTION Charles Band-known only for a series of low-budget B-movies had finally cracked the big time, pulling off the success of his career, and doing it on a shoestring METALSTORM is the kind of film that everyone involved with wants to talk about, because so many things had gone right. Unlike other recent 3-D productions, the disappointments and problems during production were minimal. And there was the hope-hinted at during filming, rather than openly stated that they had on their hands that Hollywood rarity: a complete unheralded hit.

Critical response and box-office returns failed to meet that early enthusiasm. By Hollywood standards, METALSTORM fizzled when released. But for producer director Charles Band, his labor of love had struck gold. In the beginning. Band was thinking of METALSTORM in terms no loftier than those of his low-budget 3-D predecessor, PARASITE. “We started with the idea of doing something not much larger than that,” explained the quiet, low-key Band. “But then we began to get excited about the story and got some other very creative people involved, and we decided to go for something much larger.” The final budget figure for METALSTORM was less than $3 million, which makes it a mega budget production after the likes of such other Band projects as LASERBLAST and END OF THE WORLD.

As their concept and aspirations for the film grew, so did its budget and crew, necessitating some sacrifices on the part of those working on the production. Explained screenwriter and co-producer Alan J. Adler: “Neither Charlie (Band) nor I have taken a salary on this movie. We are working for love and deferments.”

But working on the edge has its compensations, according to Adler. “Charlie and I bounce ideas constantly to get the best thing on film that we can,” he said. “If the majors financed this thing, a car full of guys in suits could drive up with some crazy idea, and we would have to do it.”

Free to do their own thing, Adler and Band have come up with a simple story of good vs. evil; cowboys-and-Indians in a galaxy far, far away. METALSTORM’s plot revolves around energy crystals, the source of all power in a barren desert land, which are being exploited by an evil magician to gain ultimate power. Screenwriter Alan Adler conceived the film as a western, with a lot of American Indian mythology.” Working with that metaphor, Jeff Byron fills in for Gary Cooper and Randolph Scott, coming to clean up the lawless town; Tim Thomerson is the old drunken lawman who sobers up to help the hero; Kelly Presto is the shopkeeper’s daughter, kidnapped by the guys in the black hats; Richard Moll is the wise old Indian chief, almost-but not quite duped into supporting the railroad baron who wants to take his people’s lands; and Michael Preston is the all-powerful, black-hearted villain.

“I read everything I could find in the library on the Western mythology before I sat down to write this,” Adler explained. “I just woke up at 3:30 in the morning one day, got into the bathtub and wrote nonstop until I finished the treatment.” Although the setting and time of METALSTORM is left ambiguous, Adler based many of his ideas on the Atlantis legend, a theme he hopes to develop more fully in the proposed sequel.

With METALSTORM, Adler also sought to challenge himself by writing a script with as little dialogue as possible. “The movies started out without any dialogue,” he explained. “Besides, 3-D is a dynamic visual medium, and dialogue seems to stop the action. But just because it doesn’t have much dialogue, it does not mean that there are no characters and ideas in the film. Like a western, everything is very terse; everything means something. Bookish, soft-spoken and unfailingly polite, Adler seems an unlikely candidate for author of films with titles like PARASITE. CONCRETE JUNGLE and METALSTORM. A film buff and genre aficionado since he was nine years old, Adler has been an avid collector of film memorabilia for 20 years, including a priceless collection of old film posters.

Adler learned his craft by writing and producing local television shows in his native North Carolina, where he also attended a graduate school in film. But his life was changed when he saw STAR WARS. “I saw that movie, packed my bags and left town for Los Angeles.”

Band and Adler have a cooperative relationship rare in filmmaking, especially for a writer. “I’m on the set every day,” said Adler. “He helps me re-write scenes, and I stand next to him and make suggestions, constantly, from sunrise to sunset. Directors who do not listen do not have the value of a writer who knows the story and how a character should be portrayed. Charlie is the director, but there is a tremendous amount of give and take.”

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PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY Principal photography of METALSTORM began in February, and stretched for seven weeks. Filming took place in the Simi Valley, as well as the Vasquez Rock formations outside of Los Angeles. Few interiors were utilized, though the company was driven indoors early in the shoot during two weeks of bad weather. To bring Adler’s mythic Western concepts-as well as plenty of action to the screen, Band assembled an ambitious, hardworking crew of relative unknowns and newcomers, who are trying to make major producers sit up and take notice of their talents.

Among them is cinematographer Mac Ahlberg whose deft work in PARASITE, his first 3-D film, was justly praised. “The reason this movie looks good is because we did not follow the rules,” said Ahlberg. “We had a 3-D consultant at the beginning of the movie, but we got rid of him because he was such a pain in the neck.

“There really are no rules to follow,” Ahlberg continued. “Like when you do a painting or write a book, if you keep to the rules, you get boring. But technicians get very upset when you break the rules. Like when color hit the movies. I spoke to someone who was shooting the first color film, and he had to follow so many rules that it was almost impossible for him to do anything on his own. Now with 3-D, you have all these ‘rules’ and everyone is very scared. I think some 3-D films have failed because people have been so tied to rules.”

Some of the standard” 3-Drules call for long cuts, static cameras and avoidance of high-contrast scenes. Band and Ahlberg ignored them all. “I don’t listen to all those 3-D experts, of which there are lots,” Ahlberg said. “We did some high contrast scenes, and they were some of the best in the movie. Also we tried all the time to let the camera move.” A long Steadicam shot moving through the tent city is a good example of Ahlberg’s innovative 3-D cinematography.

“It’s never been done before.” explained special effects coordinator Frank Isaacs. “They were able to hold convergence on Dogen as he walked through a crowd. It’s as if you were walking behind him. You see the exact proper perspective. It’s a long shot, and you just sit back and enjoy the 3-D.

“Ahlberg knows how to dolly in and out of the scene, keep something on convergence and make it look real, as opposed to what everybody else does: anchor the camera down and let the action come at you,” Isaacs continued. “What he has done is to follow the action and let the foreground and background go their proper paths.”

Another 3-D tenet went by the wayside in their filming of a lightning-quick gunfight in the streets of the tent city, with seven or eight brisk close-ups of faces, guns and lasers blasting into bodies. “Everybody said you must have very long takes, don’t cut too much, cuts are difficult to do, and so on,” said Ahlberg with some impatience. “We found that lots of cuts are very exciting, and the camera should move a lot when people walk.”

Though Mac Ahlberg may not have kind words for 3-D consultants, Chris Condon has a few for Ahlberg. Condon designed the StereoVision lenses used by Ahlberg for PARASITE and METALSTORM, and gave Ahlberg his instructions on the use of the equipment. “There are so few errors in METALSTORM, and those that do exist are very tiny, said Condon, who has often been less than kind to films he and his lenses have been associated with. “Ahlberg really understands 3-D.”

The use of 3-D required extreme precision in shooting the live action. The use of multiple cameras for some shots necessitated extra care in the composition of scenes and the calibration of convergence in each camera. If a scene was planned to cut from a medium master shot to a tight close-up, the convergence of each shot had to be as complementary as possible to spare audiences a wrenching shift in focus, and painful headaches. This forced Ahlberg to be extremely aware of how a sequence might be edited while he was shooting it.

“You have to compose the picture so the audience looks at the thing they should look at,” said Ahlberg. “Because if they look at the wrong things, they definitely get eye pain. If you have converged on a face in the foreground and you have a telephone pole in the back, you have two telephone poles. You actually have this in real life, but you never think of it. You make the audience look at the things you want and not at the distracting things, such as the background.

“We tried to have a continuity of convergence and not strain the eyes of the audience,” Ahlberg added. “That’s one of the things I discovered when we made PARASITE, that you have to keep convergence under control. You can’t converge each shot individually; you have to have a kind of convergence sequence. Every shot’s convergence has to be done considering what it is coming from and what’s going to happen next.

Otherwise, a cut really is not a cut.” Ahlberg continued. “It’s a kind of dissolve, because it takes a second or so for the audience’s eyes to adjust to the new convergence.” Ahlberg believes that the best 3D work pays attention to the depth in a scene. “When you compose a flat picture,” he explained in his Scandinavian-accented English, “you do it so you can get some depth in it, using perspective in the foreground and background. If you compose an image like that and shoot it in 3-D, you get good 3-D. If you don’t make a composition which has depth in itself, if you think 3-D is going to supply the automatic depth for you, then many times you fail.”

Another characteristic of Ahlberg’s 3-D work is the avoidance of too many gimmicks. “In METALSTORM. (Ahlberg) has had the good sense not to abuse the 3-D.” said Isaacs. “He just throws in an occasional gag every once in a while, which works very well. It’s fun, but it’s not to be abused, and that’s what every other film has done so far.”

Despite his success with the process, and the near-unanimous acclaim for his work, Ahlberg is no fan of 3-D. “Really, I hope that I never will have to work on a 3-D movie again,” he said. “I find it so boring, so uninteresting.

“When I see actors in 3-D. I always have the feeling that you are looking through a glass window at them, like they are in a show window. In a flat movie, the actors are very present they seem to be right there. Why? Because in 3-D you have the glasses, the double images, all these things that take the actor far away.

“If I have two alternatives, to make a 3-D movie or not, I will always pick not to make one. I have one exception I like to work with Charles Band. I said when I made PARASITE that I would never make another 3-D movie, and still I’m doing them.”

BEHIND THE SCENES/INTERVIEWS

Actor Jeffrey (Dogen) Byron Remembers Metalstorm

You have been in several Empire films. . Jeffrey Byron: Yes. I met Charles Band when I auditioned for METALSTORM. I had never met him before that. I felt confident about getting the role and after I read for him and the casting director, I guess he agreed. I was hired the same day. They apparently stopped seeing actors after meeting me. Once I started work on the film I had a good rapport with Charlie, and soon after (during the filming of METALSTORM) he offered me the role in THE DUNGEONMASTER.

Which Band production was the most memorable for you? Jeffrey Byron: My favorite was METALSTORM. It was tons of fun to make, and when we were filming it, there was a special camaraderie with the cast and crew. We knew it was a low budget exploitation film but we also knew that it had a chance to be memorable. In the end it has turned out to be quite the cult classic. I enjoyed working with everyone. Tim Thomerson my sidekick and I had fun working together. I am sure there are lots of great (and funny) outtakes in the vaults.

We’re trying to imagine the casting process for THE DESTRUCTION OF JARED SYN… Jeffrey Byron: As I said, I was one of the first actors they saw for the part and once they met me they cast me. After they hired me, I read with many actresses for the part that Kelly Preston played including Demi Moore. She was the favorite and would have been hired but she was doing another project and wasn’t available.

METALSTORM was shot in 3D. Did this pose any challenges for you as an actor? Jeffrey Byron: Not really, other than it being a slow process. Lighting a scene for 3D, at least in that era, was time consuming…

Did you have to endure any grueling make-up or perform any of your own stunts? Jeffrey Byron: Makeup was easy. There were a lot of grueling fight scenes which were fun, but tough. And I loved my costume!

What was Band like as a director? Jeffrey Byron: Charlie was fun to work with. His real gift was the promotion part. He knew how to market a film. He was brilliant at that. He didn’t give me any direction, really. He pretty much left it up to me.

Going head-to-head with Richard Moll must have been intimidating..or is he just a big softy? Jeffrey Byron: Richard was a quiet, introspective guy.. .Nice, and easy to work with, but didn’t say a lot.

POST PRODUCTION/VISUAL EFFECTS METALSTORM’s innovative visual effects benefit from the collaborative efforts of 3-D whiz John Rupkalvis, inventor of StereoScope, working with visual effects supervisor Frank Isaacs and assistant Tom Calabrese. One of the most experienced technicians in the field, Rupkalvis served as both 3-D consultant and visual effects supervisor.

While the film’s live-action scenes were shot with Chris Condon’s StereoVision lenses, special effects photography used Rupkalvis’ StereoScope 3-D system, which works with, instead of replacing the prime lens of a regular 35mmcamera. To photograph miniatures in 3-D, it’s necessary to reduce the “interaxial distance” between the lenses from the standard 2.5 inches to as little as a quarter of an inch or smaller to create the illusion of scale. Since the range of interaxial distances on most single camera set-ups is somewhat limited, twin-camera rigs were employed on both SPACEHUNTER and JAWS 3-D.

But StereoScope offers the advantages of variable interaxial with the relative convenience of a single camera, presenting the regular lens of the Mitchell camera with an image already in the proper over-and-under format. Advantages of the single-camera system for effects work include less light loss than a beamsplitter and savings in the cost of film stock and lab work.

The effects requirements for METALSTORM ranged from simple rotoscope animation to complex blue-screen composites combining as many as five elements in a single shot. While 3-D effects were also featured in JAWS 3-D and SPACEHUNTER, the work of Rupkalvis, Isaacs and Calabrese (collectively working under the banner “Fantasy Creations”) was completed independently, and the trio were forced to experiment on their own to solve some of the vexing problems faced by those working with 3-D special effects.

“Hardly a day went by,” Rupkalvis said, “when we didn’t do something and suddenly realize that what we had done had never been accomplished before.

“There may be a model of the skycycles flying through the air, going through a background shot of a canyon, and at the same time it might include a live action shot of a real actor in a vehicle below, shooting rotoscoped lasers,” Rupkalvis added. “What’s really mind-boggling is that it’s all being done in 3-D, and every point, all the way through, matches.”

What makes 3-D effects so difficult, according to Rupkalvis, is the precise positioning required of the different elements within the frame at any one moment. While effects technicians for flat films speak in terms of background plate and foreground model, backgrounds” for 3-D effects are often both dimensionally closer to the screen and further back than the subject of the shot.

To insure that the models were always in the correct location in space, Isaacs and Rupkalvis would take precise measurements of the model at each frame of a particular shot. “We measured things with micro measuring equipment, with divisions as small as 4 millionths of an inch,” said Rupkalvis. “We took the 3-D down a 20-foot track, dividing each frame into increments. In some cases, when a model was on an angle, we had to take different measurements on the nose and tail, because we didn’t want the tail to appear to skim a rock that the nose clears.”

Their care pays off in an atmospheric night shot, where, surrounded by a crowd holding flaming torches, Dogen jumps on a skycycle to give chase to the fleeing Jared-Syn. The scene shifts to a long shot where a one-sixth-scale model of the cycle, matted into the live action, rises up and flies gradually out of the scene, staying in correct size, perspective and depth throughout the shot. The effects team even put the flickering light of the torches on the model, holding cutouts in front of the lights and moving them precisely for each frame of the cut.

METALSTORM’s climactic scenes feature a breathtaking chase on the skycycles through narrow canyons. To put the cycles in their proper places within the scenes, they and the background footage not only had to match in terms of size and perspective, but with convergence as well.

The convergence point determines the position in space of the entire scene; that is, which elements within a shot will appear to be off the screen, at the screen, or seemingly behind the screen. When the right and left-eye images are precisely overlapped, they will appear to be at the screen. The more the two images are “offset,” the more they will appear to be in front of or behind the screen.

A typical shot might involve a model skycycle flying towards a distant mountain. If the background element is improperly converged, it could appear to be much closer to the screen than originally intended. Instead of the skycycle appearing to be miles away from the mountain, it would appear to be flying straight into the side of a cliff.

The problem was compounded by the fact that the model shots were largely done before filming the backgrounds, because of scheduling problems. So, instead of flying the cycles through pre-filmed background scenery, the effects crew had to search through thousands of feet of footage to find cuts that would match the movement of the cycles.

“Since a lot of our shots were from ‘God’s point of view’ above the two models, you could get away with separate movement from the background,” said Isaacs. “It kind of makes it look more interesting. If you are going around a cliff and there is enough space to fit the model in, it doesn’t matter if he’s moving off axis.”

Much of the excitement of the final chase belongs to the dramatic point-of-view shots flying through the canyon. Much of the credit for those, according to the effects crew, belonged to pilot Vance Colvik. “I’ve never seen anyone do the things he did,” said Isaacs. “There’s one shot as the ground is coming up from 100 or 500 feet away. He was spinning and turning so you didn’t know which way was up.”

Al the climax of the chase, JaredSyn uses his evil powers for an escape to another dimension through a tunnel of energy. To create the effect, the effects team builta long, tapering triangular tube of plexiglass and hung it from monofilament wire. They mounted lights on the motion control system and closed off all but a narrow line of illumination.

“In complete darkness, with the camera positioned at the mouth of the tube, we raked the lights down the tube toward the camera,” said Isaacs. “We would shoot one pass, back the film up, shoot another, back it up, shoot another, up to 30 passes on one piece of film. We used multiple colors-reds, greens, blues-by taping colored gels over the slit of light. Sometimes we did more than one color on a single pass. It looks like pulses of light or energy coming at you down the tube. Since it’s made of plastic, everything reflects off the sides, so you get multiple triangles.”

Much of the effects work on METALSTORM involved shots that required rotoscope animation, including lasers, glowing energy crystals, the hyper-space tunnel featured in the climax, and assorted other effects. While rotoscope animation effects appear relatively simple, they’re very time consuming. Ultimately, three different animation crews were brought in at the final stages of postproduction.

An in-house team, Jan Carlberg and Tony Alderson, worked on the glowing energy crystals, the teleportation effect when Dhyana is whisked away to Jared-Syn’s headquarters, and selected laser beams, as well as coordinating the work that had to be farmed out. A second team, headed by SPACEHUNTER veteran Ernie Farino, was contracted to provide additional laser effects and other elements. Finally, a crew at Millenium Studios, the effects facility of New World Pictures, supplied optical enhancement for the sequence involving the “Chimera,” the energy beast that attacks Dogen.

3-D rotoscoping involves making two drawings for each frameone for each eye-drawn precisely to match the two slightly different views of the scene in which the artwork will be matted in. The primary challenge is to fool the audience into thinking that the flat artwork has the same degree of depth as the live action elements in the scene.

“If it’s drawn wrong (with the wrong convergence) in 3-D, even though it looks right on the flat picture, it could go to the wrong place or even come out backwards,” Rupkalvis explained. “The artist has to find the proper displacement in the actual scene where the drawing will be used. The difference between right eye and left eye drawings might not be that much, but you still have to match the scene.

“For each new frame, the drawings have to move a little bit,” Rupkalvis added. It may seem simple, just drawing point to point, but you have to be very careful with the positioning in space. If you have many elements, you don’t want the lasers to hit something in between. Every element that’s added has to relate exactly to every element that’s in the original photography.”

The rush to the theaters also affected the completion of the film’s optical effects. While bluescreen elements had been shot back in March and April, background plates weren’t shot until early June. Frank Isaacs spent three days screening thousands of feet of aerial footage before turning everything over to compositor Greg Van Der Veer, the son of renowned optical expert Frank Van Der Veer.

“Van Der Veer only had four weeks to composite everything,” Isaacs explained. “That included all the blue-screen shots, the lasers, everything. When you realize that it sometimes can take weeks to composite just one or two shots, you can see the kind of job he did for us. He locked himself away in a little room with an optical printer for four straight weeks and saved us!”

MAKE UP AND PHYSICAL SPECIAL EFFECTS Much of what the audience sees in METALSTORM from scars to scarves, from sidearms to Ball’s bionic arm-are the creations of Makeup Effects Labs, a partnership of three relative newcomers, Alan Apone, Frank Carrisosa and Doug White, who have been practicing their craft since their early teens. In fact, two of the partners, White and Apone, have known each other since their days at Culver City Junior High School in the Los Angeles area.

Back in those days, White was fascinated with drawing and building models and mechanical devices, while Apone had ambitions to be an actor. After they met, they haunted the local movie theaters together, sometimes seeing as many as four films in a single day.

They moved on together to Los Angeles City College, where they majored in drama and art. White did make up for the theater arts department, while reading voluminously to learn different techniques on his own. Apone turned from acting and began to concentrate on art direction and set design.

After school (and some excursions into other fields of employment), both White and Apone took positions with makeup artist Tom Burman, building articulated dummies for PROPHECY. In this highly creative setting, they had the opportunity to learn a vast range of techniques and tools of professional special effects makeup. They also met Frank Carrisosa, who would become the third partner in MEL.

In 1979 they decided to weld their varied talents together to start their own studio. Beginning in a modest 1,000-square-foot facility, their first film contract was EVILSPEAK, for which they created special makeup prosthetics and special effects.

Now housed comfortably in a, large industrial space in the San Fernando Valley, the three mesh their talents on a busy schedule of projects, working with a cadre of freelancers to offer a wide array of effects, costumes, props, models, masks and special make ups. Each of the three plays a different role in the team. “When we are working together,” Apone explained, “Doug : does a lot of the designing, I handle most of the business, and Frank I will head the shop as far as the techniques used and how we will rig things.”

For the versatile trio, METALSTORM was a field day, a chance to strut their stuff and exhibit every facet of their talents. Like many others involved in the film, their work was largely done for love, and a chance to show what they could do.

“We’d like to be a one-stop house for a producer,” said Alan Apone. “We want to give the producer everything he wants for the money he wants to spend. Obviously, you can’t do STAR WARS for $10,000. But we’d like to give producers the best they can get for $10,000.”

Some of MEL’s most unusual work involved the facial makeup appliances for the Cyclopeans, a race which is supposedly mutating and losing their features on one side of their face. “We started with a book on human deformities,” said White, but found that the actual way a human would look without an eye was too lifeless. So, we had to sculpt in more character, taking the liberty of adding wrinkles and other features. You have to overdo it even more for 3-D, which needs more light, and that tends to flatten out features. For Dogen’s tan, we had to make it much darker than usual for the same reason.”

MEL also had to abandon an ambitious plan to make sclera contact lenses which would give the Cyclopeans a double-iris effect. “I was going to melt two lenses together to show that their eyes were growing together,” White said. “I was going to do a chrome eye for the machine side of Baal’s face. All the scleral contacts got junked, however, because the actors can only wear them for a half an hour at a time. The eye gets starved for oxygen if you wear them too long, and we just didn’t have time on the production to work around that.”

The creation of Baal, Jared Syn’s bionic boy, was the most demanding undertaking for the makeup effects team, involving appliances and props which took five hours each day to apply. There were seven appliances for the face and skull alone, including one which looks like a surgically-implanted metal skull with staples all around the head to hold it in place.

“It’s all latex foam painted in silver pigments,” White explained. “Latex foam can be made up to be either very flexible or very dense, although it never really becomes hard. You use the flexible foam for the facial appliances, so the expressions of the actor will come through.”

Played by R. David Smith, an accomplished mime who was born without his left arm, the Baal character also has a pneumatically-operated mechanical arm, which shoots a green hallucinatory liquid just before he uses the death crystals. The arm featured three telescoping tubular sections and claws that folded out to grasp objects. Each section was pushed out by air pressure through small tubes attached to a compressor.

In reality, three arms were built: one that actually extended, one that was rigged to be torn off, and one which shot the glowing green liquid. “We shot it from every angle possible,” said White. “We did dolly shots as it flipped out in motion. We telescoped it toward the camera, and we fired the liquid into the camera.”

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The makeup crew originally tried to use Chemlite, the green glow found in “night sticks,” for the liquid in Baal’s arm, but its rumored toxicity forced an alternative. “They were going to use it in POLTERGEIST for the veins in the corridor monster,” said White, “but the story I heard was that the guy didn’t want the chemical near him, since he couldn’t be sure what his next child would be like.” Instead, White used ordinary fluorescent paint, which proved to be a suitable alternative.

Pneumatics were used again for one ambitious effect that never made it past the editing room: a shot in which Baal “mummifies” Dyana’s father as he steals his life force. Small tubes were attached at different points inside a life-like foam mask of the actor’s face. As the life force was drained, the bladders were deflated one by one by Frank Carrisosa, who operated valves leading to an air compressor. The resulting effect makes the face seem to shrivel and dry up. The effect was designed to avoid the use of expensive postproduction opticals, a must on the film’s tight budget.

While the “mummification” didn’t make the final print, MEL’s glowing “energy beast” did. Dubbed the “Chimera,” the electrically charged beast is sent by Jared-Syn to kill Dogen. While the sequence was enhanced in postproduction by a team from Millenium (Roger Corman’s in-house effects studio). it was designed as a simple in-camera effect. An MEL Cew sculpted a full body suit and cast it in rigid latex foam. The suit was then covered with Scotchlite paints, which act on the same principle as highway road signs and front-projection screens: while they look dull gray in ordinary light, they shine with a brilliant glow when light is aimed directly at it, in line with the camera lens. To complete the effect, the light was pulsated with a rheostat. “The idea was to come up with something you could do optically in camera, instead of doing rotoscope animation, White said.

The Chimera short circuits itself by stepping in a puddle of molten metal, which Dogen has blasted out of a wall of rock. Winston Jones, the actor inside the costume, slowly folded up his body, and the details of the costume were lost in the Scotchlite glow. The actor was then pulled from the scene, and a shot was taken of the background. A piece of animation of the beast shrinking into the earth was then rotoscoped onto it.

In addition to creating creatures and prosthetic makeup. MEL also provided designs for many of the film’s sets, props and the rugged, desert-scoured costumes, which were made by Kathie Clark, from concepts by White and H. R. Girard, an MEL illustrator.

The Cylcopeans’ costumes look like heavy leather carved in the shape of an exoskeleton. In reality, they were made from rigid latex foam that was sculpted, molded and painted. The use of latex had an unexpected benefit according to Doug White. “In the dailies, it even sounds like leather, like someone wearing chaps,” he explained. “When the actors moved or brushed up against each other, it creaked.”

The Nomads are outfitted in heavy, concealing robes, topped by menacing masks with energy crystals in their foreheads. Originally numbering only 15, their numbers grew to more than 10 (dubbed newmads’ on the set) for certain crowd scenes. As some scenes got bigger and bigger, eventually even a few ‘crew-mads’ were required. For one shot, even co-producer and screenwriter Alan Adler was suited-up. In low-budget films, everyone gets into the act.

SOUNDTRACK/SCORE For composer Richard Band (the director’s younger brother, by two years), the frantic rush to complete the film meant there was less than a month available to write more than an hour of original music. “In fact,” said Band, “I got the final reel a day and a half before my recording session!”

But Richard Band wasn’t really complaining-it was his brother, after all, who launched his musical career in 1977 with LASERBLAST. And although Band has worked for a number of other producers in the six years since (see 13:5:14), half of his assignments still come from big brother Charlie.

“Since we’ve worked on several films together, Charles trusts me to do whatever I want to do,” Band told writer Randall Larson. “He puts the music in my hands completely. On METALSTORM, he never even heard the main theme unul the recording session.

“Working with your family puts different types of pressures on you,” Band added. “I can exert a type of clout. But I can’t play some of the games I do with other directors when I’m working with family, just because it’s family.”

If Band’s deadline was tight, the musical opportunities were vast. METALSTORM was Band’s first “big” score, integrating a vast array of electronics with a 70-piece symphony orchestra (nearly twice the size of any orchestra he had previously worked with).

The result was thematically simple, yet complexly textured. Band worked with Producers Music Organization and programmer Gary Chang for the electronic portions of the score-performed by four keyboard players using more than a dozen different synthesizers, which was recorded live with the orchestra at the Burbank Studios recording stage.

RELEASE/DISTRIBUTION After principal photography ended in late April, editor Brad Arensman began to assemble the footage. One of his first chores, however, was to complete an 18-minute 3-D demo reel for use at the Cannes Film Festival, where the world’s film buyers gather each year. Both Charles Band and actor Jeffrey Byron made the rounds in late May, and both were elated by the reception the film received. Band returned to Los Angeles to screen the demo reel- which included several completed effects composites-for several domestic distributors. Universal, about to launch JAWS 3-D at more than a thousand theaters, took a strong interest. Reportedly, Universal executives were worried about the financial prospects of JAWS 3-D, and looked at METALSTORM as an inexpensive follow-up to run in those theaters that had already altered their projection equipment to run JAWS 3-D. Unlike the case with most pick-ups, where months may pass between an initial screening and a final deal, Universal agreed to distribute the film in a matter of days.

“When you show a product reel like the one we did, distributors always ask to see the rest of the footage,” explained screenwriter and co-producer Alan Adler. “When we showed it to Universal, they said it was a pleasure to see that the rest of the movie was as good as the product reel. Some people there said they liked the additional footage more. It was a real validating experience.”

There was only one catch. In order to release the film three weeks after the opening of JAWS 3-D, Universal needed a completed print no later than July 27. That gave Band and his postproduction crew less than two months to shoot some badly needed pick-up shots, finish the opticals and to cut, loop, score and mix the film.

Even as Band was completing the score and Van Der Veer the opticals, the marketing department of Universal Pictures was gearing up for the film’s August release. In addition to the standard barrage of print, television and radio campaigns, Universal attached a 3-D trailer to every print of JAWS 3-D, the first new trailer to be shown in 3-D in a generation.

CONCLUSION In the weeks before the film’s release, hopes from Band and his crew were running high that METALSTORM would transcend its humble origins and take on the proportions of a major hit. Alan Adler began work on the script for METALSTORM II, with plans for a trilogy. “We’d already started talking about certain monsters and landscapes,” Adler said. “It was to be one of the most all-encompassing pursuits of all time. Not only would Dogen pursue Jared-Syn through time, but through other dimensions as well.”

There was even talk about merchandise tie-ins. “If Band handles the marketing right,” Frank Isaacs said, “every kid is going to have a little Baal doll. I can see the kids at dinner, squeezing his stomach, sticking out a little arm that will shoot out green water.”

But visions of a sequel-or of millions of Baal dolls pushing E.T. off the shelves-were a bit overenthusiastic. Although it grossed more than $2 million in its opening weekend at 550 theaters, the film was pounded by most of the nation’s critics (except for the two Los Angeles dailies, which gave the film mixed reviews), and grosses dropped off quickly.

We made some mistakes,” admitted Band, already at work on a number of upcoming projects, including the revival of David Allen’s long-dormant THE PRIMEVALS. “But it’s only my second film as a director, so it was a great step as far as practicing my craft. It taught me a lot as far as what not to do next time.

Although hardly a blockbuster, METALSTORM will return a profit to its investors-and to the crew members who worked for little or no money to see that the film got made. Such profits should allow Band the luxury of slightly higher budgets the next time around, and perhaps even a more relaxed pace in which to work.

“The scenes in METALSTORM that looked the best were the ones I took the most time with,” Band said. “With $2.5 million, you can only shoot so many weeks, so you can’t give the time and attention that every scene needs. I took five or six moments in the film-the dream sequences, the scene where Baal gets his arm ripped off, and a few others-and spent a lot of time on them; too much time, in fact, in terms of our overall budget.

CAST/CREW Directed Charles Band

Produced Charles Band Albert Band Alan J. Adler

Written Alan J. Adler

Jeffrey Byron: Dogen Michael Preston: Jared-Syn Tim Thomerson: Rhodes Kelly Preston: Dhyana Richard Moll: Hurok R. David Smith: Baal Larry Pennel: Aix Marty Zagon: Zax Mickey Fox: Poker Annie

CREDITS/REFERENCES/SOURCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY Cinefantastique v13n06-v14n01 Delirium#03 Fangoria#30 Fangoria#28

Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983) Retrospective SUMMARY A "skybike", a one-man, open-cockpit flying machine, attacks Dogen. Dogen shoots it down and finds one of Syn's crystals on the pilot's body.

[fountainpenguin]

Hey, now that we're touching on the subject in your writing, want to tell us more about Sunnie and the gang? You know, personalities and who is playing host to which spirit? That kind of thing?

Yeah, I touched on them in THIS post, but admittedly that was very superficial information, and some of the information is slightly outdated too.

To be fair, I thought I’d have more time to introduce you to each spirit and host one at a time, since they weren’t supposed to appear in my works yet. “This Is Halloween” was originally going to be about the mirror caves throughout Anti-Pixie Isle for ~foreshadowing~ reasons that you’ll see later, but then this happened instead. Sorry for the info-dump. But not very.

Okay, so let’s talk about the zodiac spirits again. Luckily for me, I can just steal some of this stuff out of the Anti-Fairy worldbuilding dump I’m posting on the 7th since there’s no fanfic update that day, and link back to this post. 

Be aware that this post is massive. But when you’re ready to learn, here you go.

NATURE SPIRITS AND ZODIACS

What is the point of you creating nature spirits for your fanfics?

Giving Anti-Fairies culture that doesn’t totally revolve around evil. Don’t get me wrong- this is definitely a ‘fic about Anti-Cosmo’s rise to power. It’s an “innocence to corruption” type of story. 

However, I see canon Anti-Cosmo as a guy striking out mostly because his people are majorly discriminated against by the Fairies. I needed reasons for him to believe his people deserved to not be discriminated against, and reasons for the Anti-Fairies not to think, “Well gee, maybe if we stopped attacking people, they would accept us!” So, the way Anti-Fairies appear in my works is, many of them are good, cultured people who just happen to feel the urge to make mischief and deal with bad luck. 

They’re bearers of bad news, but you shouldn’t kill the messenger, so to speak. Many of them are offended at being called evil. We’ll watch Anti-Cosmo get past the point of caring and embrace the evil title. That was one of the harder things for me in writing Frayed Knots, but I think I did okay.

Anti-Fairies are creatures of bad luck, so I started by giving them a zodiac and major beliefs in astrology, fate, destiny, horoscopes, and I built out from there. This was also my way of explaining things that appear in canon, like the Darkness, or the temple to the chicken seen in “Chicken Poofs”. Additionally, many Fairies believe the stars are Fairy warriors. Anti-Fairies believe they’re stars. H.P. belongs to a religion that believes fairy dogs can die. In the show, Sparky stated that they can’t, so the Zodii believe they can’t. Different stuff like that so I can encompass as many bits of canon in the show as possible.

Finally, it was nice to create an entire culture so starkly different from H.P.’s, who grew up in Fairy World in my fanfic Origin of the Pixies. Considering the mixed feelings between Fairies and Anti-Fairies, it seemed appropriate to give them drastically different cultures and beliefs. Additionally, many fans love the Anti-Fairies and wanted to hear more about them in the show, so I wanted to have fun with this. I also wanted to keep my readers engaged since Frayed Knots is my second fanfic and has to cover some of the same worldbuilding stuff we already saw in Origin. I wanted to keep some unexplored territory.

AND, I wanted Anti-Cosmo and Anti-Wanda to be kept busy a lot of the time, which is why we don’t see them with Foop in the later seasons. I didn’t want them to be purely working on evil plans, since it seems their son would have wanted to get in on that action. Instead, I gave them a culture that has super strong traditions and beliefs, and made Foop the oddball who still has loyalty to his culture and reacts badly when he sees Fairies mock it and the Anti-Fairies, but he still thinks most of it is dumb and doesn’t want to get in too deep, so therefore pulls away from his parents and does his own thing.

I knew I’d be writing an extensive ‘fic that would probably take me years to finish, so I needed to have fun.

Don’t worry- while Knots does include a lot of nature spirit stuff, the zodiac still just Anti-Fairy culture and isn’t what I would call “the main plot”. This is still an FOP fanfic that tries to stay close to canon without veering the story into tons of OCs. Anti-Cosmo will be doing a lot of things in this story that have nothing to do with the nature spirits. We don’t even meet Sunnie until the war over godchildren is over. Then we get a big burst of nature spirit stuff before it fades out and we pick up the other plotlines again.

What are the levels of nature spirits?

Wise Ancients - Major deities; for all intents and purposes, they’re gods. I prefer using the terms “nature spirits” and “Ancients”, but they’re basically gods.

Ex: Mother Nature (Space), Father Time (Time), Tarrow (Reality), The Hocus Poconos (Unreality), The Grim Reaper (Death), The Cycling Hen (Life), Prince Morn (Light), Princess Eve (Dark)…

Those are all the Wise Ancients I’ve thought up at this time. More might come later. They’re the overarching set, and the other spirits are their children. 

The way I see it, space and time existed and mixed together. From this union, Reality was created. Reality gathered the sentience to take on solid, sentient form, and taught Space and Time how to take shape like him (Mother Nature and Father Time; Tarrow’s name obviously comes from tarot since he’s also viewed as the influencer of luck). Others followed suit.

Spirit Bears - Also considered Ancients, although they are always spirits of the land. They’re a subset of the Ancients who can only kiff-tie (I’m using that term to suggest reproduction in this sense) with other spirit bears. They’re basically personifications of different lands rather than aspects of nature. In Origin, we see H.P. doing paperwork and political things to get Pixie World recognized as an official World. In Knots, we see Anti-Cosmo dealing with the birth of the new spirit bear cub who represents Pixie World. Same timeline of events, but they play on different fields.

Ex: Fairy World (Tír Ildáthach), Anti-Fairy World (Hy-Brasil), Pixie World (Sprigganhame), Anti-Pixie World (Solis Infinitum), and what I suppose we would call Fairy Refract World (Avalon). 

Things like Patio World and Mattress World are small towns that don’t have bears. I’m not sure about Hairy World and Scary World yet, but I’m leaning towards those just being nicknames for different planes of existence, so they don’t get bears either.

I drew a comic that I plan to color and upload about H.P.’s interpretation of the spirit bears vs. Anti-Cosmo’s. I also drew H.P. holding Sprigganhame in one of my Inktobers.

Demigods - The children of the Ancients. The term “demigod” is meant to be all-encompassing, so it always refers to the children of the Ancients, exception being people like Tarrow who are considered major deities and therefore Ancients. As far as you’re concerned, I have listed the Ancients above, and their children are the demigods.

Ex: Dayfry (Love; Friday), Saturn (Fire; Saturday), Sunnie (Water; Sunday), Munn (Sky; Monday), Twis (Soil; Tuesday), Winni (Breath; Wednesday), Thurmondo (Leaves; Thursday)

They’re major spirits. Imagine it like, Tarrow is Zeus, and the demigods seen here are the other major gods on Olympus. 

There are other demigods (Ex: spirits that symbolize good harvests, good fortune, friendship, patience, travel, wood, stone, certain types of animals) who have similar powers to our gang, but while they might have small shrines, they don’t have official Temples. I mean, maybe some do, but that sounds complicated for my worldbuilding, so let’s not get into that.

Proper ways to address them would be as “the Seven” or “the zodiac spirits”. “Deity” is another acceptable term, as is “nature spirits”, though nature spirits refers to nature spirits as a whole, and zodiac spirits refers only to the Seven.

Minor Spirits - The children of the demigods. Some of them might have the same masteries as actual demigods, but if they aren’t born of the Ancients, they aren’t called demigods. Powers get watered down through the generations.

Ex: Multiple spirits of mist, clouds, lightning, mud, oxygen, etc. 

Anything you get when two aspects of nature combine. Periodic table level and stuff. Also known as lesser spirits. There are hundreds if not thousands of them, but they’re not as important . Like I said, they tend to be combinations.

I feel like it’s also worth pointing out that Fergus Mór mac Eirc’s Wikipedia page lists his mother as “the mist”. Literally the mist. Thus, I decided that H.P.’s namesake here (H.P.’s name is Fergus in my headcanon) is the grandson of Sunnie. This gets increasingly interesting when you do further research and find out that Fergus the Great died in a “freak storm”. Apparently, Sunnie had a temper tantrum and he got caught in it. H.P. is terrified of Sunnie as a result. Considering that I dropped Anti-Cosmo in the Water Year at random when I originally decided he was born in the Year of the Black Lake, this is very interesting to me.

Additionally, when minor spirits have kids, you go even smaller. This is where you get guardians of individual rivers, mountains, or particular forest groves.

Nature spirits are “everywhere and everything”, but they all have a single manifested form that embodies their sentience, heart, and that they use to communicate. If they want to talk to you with words, they have to haul their manifested form all the way to where you are, which is often inconvenient if they’re light-years away. Even they can only travel so fast. Otherwise, the most they can do is mess around with their aspect of nature (their “mastery”). For example, by making streams bubble or leaves fall or wind blow.

So, all those signs you think you see in nature in answer to your pleas? Pure laziness. They usually only get up when they have really important messages to deliver, or they’re on the run. If you pray to them, they might be interested enough to respond, but they’re not going to get up to do it and tell you directly. They just shake branches and stuff to signal that they’re paying attention. Super simple stuff that is easily waved off as coincidence by those who don’t believe.

It’s a whole network of spirits, but don’t try to keep them all straight. Focus on the main seven.

Who are the zodiac spirits?

Seven nature spirits who are the grandsons of Mother Nature and Father Time. They each represent a different element on the Fairy zodiac, and are named after the days of the week, which was my way of excusing why the days of the week were called such in the cloudlands long ago. I cared.

Each of the zodiac spirits is a son of a deity called Tarrow the Luck-Twister (also called “the cosmic jellyfish”). He’s basically the deity of fate, and since Anti-Fairies are obsessed with luck, you can see why they like him. 

However, each of the zodiac spirits has a different other parent (whom they tend to draw their element from), so they’re all technically half-brothers. Since nature spirits can produce children with either sex, some have a mother and some have two dads. Sunnie is an exception who was created asexually; he’s the water spirit and was formed from Tarrow’s tears after he got dumped by the Hocus Poconos.

I mean, the zodiac spirits are basically major region Legendary Pokémon, and then the minor spirits are each region’s lesser Legendaries. The Ancients would be Mew, Arceus, Rayquaza, etc. They’re above the main region Legendaries.

How does sex/gender work with the nature spirits?

Any nature spirit can deliver an “energy manifestation” (“child”) after they pair. The less dominant spirit will be the one to do so (*Dramatic music* The Fairy zodiac is organized according to age/dominance of the zodiac spirits). The “parent” who is “pregnant” with the spirit can decide the spirit’s sex, because some animals like insect queens can do that but I didn’t get to use that on the actual Fairies, so I gave it to the nature spirits instead because I don’t know.

My favorite dumb joke is that Tarrow is the ultimate dominant spirit against every spirit except for one, The Hocus Poconos, and this is actually the reason why he’s head over heels for her, because she’s the one that’s different. He only had one kid with her - Dayfry - who is his obvious favorite. The other kids were borne by their other parents. Nature spirit pregnancy only lasts for like thirty seconds after the spirits separate, I feel like I should point out.

Nature spirits have “true forms” and “projected forms”, as I will explain later in this post. While their true form would be their biological sex, the gender of their projected form may be different. Everyone interprets the spirits differently, remember? So if you interpret a biologically male water spirit as female, then the projected form you see would be a female water spirit. The nature spirit still interprets himself as male, and while he is aware of your interpretation, it doesn’t change the way he himself sees himself, which is his true form.

What are the Zodiac Temples?

Buildings in the cloudlands that are open places of worship for anyone who wishes to come, regardless of race. Anti-Fairies are by far the most frequent visitors. Aliens aren’t common since this is the Fairy zodiac here.

Each Temple has a public area that’s all decorated. That’s where most people visit. You can also visit one of a few more private side rooms so that you can meditate in peace and place your offerings in the provided dish.

The most important room in the Temple is the echo chamber, and only camarilla members and anyone of their zodiac who have been given explicit permission can visit there to meditate. 

The Temples were created during the Sealing War, when the zodiac spirits were considered too powerful and imprisoned. Their manifested forms are inside the echo chambers of their Temples, bound with magical golden chains. As such, while they can still communicate by creating aspects of nature, they can’t go anywhere except inside their Temples.

Sometimes when you’re in their Temples, they’ll appear to speak with you, but only when they want to and their advice should always be taken with a grain of salt- they generally have their own agendas in mind, and even when trying to help, they struggle to comprehend mortal affairs.

As a general rule:

Dayfry (Love) - Knows his name carries a lot of weight and doesn’t like to throw that weight around. So, he rarely reveals himself. However, if you appear to be desperate and crying, you can probably bring him out; he hates seeing anyone miserable.

Saturn (Fire) - You can win him over with impressive offerings and displays. He’s a sucker for flattery, but probably won’t show up if there’s nothing in it for him.

Sunnie (Water) - Sometimes appears if you seek his advice and he finds you interesting, which usually means intellectual. If he doesn’t think you’re worth his time, then you aren’t and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Munn (Sky) - Will reveal himself to almost any Sky year who asks, as long as he’s impressed. He rarely gives out advice, good or otherwise. Mostly he just listens to people while he eats the offerings they brought, and cracks jokes.

Twis (Soil) - Reveals himself next to never, even to his own camarilla representatives. Mostly, he only approaches a Soil High Count or Countess. No one beneath them has enough power to interest him. He’s a stubborn butt.

Winni (Breath) - Doesn’t always appear, but when he does, he’s nosy and likes to tell you what to do. Likely to get offended when you reject his advice, even when it’s terrible.

Thurmondo (Leaves) - Might appear if you push him hard enough, though he’s pretty nervous and spacy and doesn’t like offering suggestions. Not too helpful.

A nature spirit who gets “killed” while out and about will wake up again in their echo chamber. Like the shaman’s reincarnation site in Populous: The Beginning, though I don’t think many of you know that computer game. I was raised on it. No Temple means no reincarnation, so any Temple lost will send the camarilla into an immediate frenzy to rebuild it.

On the subject of Populous, your mana charges faster when you have a higher population. I borrowed that idea for the zodiac spirits too. More people born in their year on the zodiac boosts their power. People of their zodiac actively practicing in their name (namely, visiting a Temple) boosts their power further- no matter what race those visitors are, or which Temple they’re in.

So yeah, if you’ve ever wondered why they refuse to strike their own people, it’s because it hurts them. They have more fun knocking each other’s forces down and cutting each other’s powers supply than they do actually paying attention to the political and moral skirmishes going on. You probably shouldn’t ask them to help you out in times of war. They’d just as easily wipe out your allies who were born under different zodiacs. They play for their own team.

What do the zodiac spirits do?

Act as impartial votes on matters that concern multiple races, mostly (like the Bake-Off and the Olympics). We saw Mother Nature in “Balance of Flour”, but her children and grandchildren sometimes take the role of judge instead. They’re all in agreement that Nana’s brownies are delicious, much to Anti-Fairy irritation.

Mostly they chill at their Temples, snack on their offerings, and badger people to make monuments of them. It’s more complicated than this, but this is all you need to know for now. Just realize that the nature spirits have their own agendas and don’t like sacrificing their wants for mortals, and you’re good.

Yes, they are very powerful and they could snap their fingers and grant you a miracle as long as it falls within their zodiac influence, but that would be bad storytelling. Their powers are what got them into their high positions. They’re considered deities for a reason. But nowadays, their powers are limited due to being bound to their Temples. Mostly they just talk to you and give advice instead of solving all your problems.

What do the zodiac spirits NOT do?

Don’t worry - No major quests in the name of the spirits, no cryptic prophecies, and no manipulating anybody’s life without their knowledge. No major cosmic games that we’ll see Anti-Cosmo get dragged into.

The spirits definitely have their own agendas and sometimes use mortals as means to achieve an end, but the “cosmic game” they’re playing right now is ~mostly~ a competition about who can get the most worshipers and monuments. Like I said, it’s more complicated than this and there are rules that I as the author need to know to keep them in check. We can go into that one day if you want, but let’s get deeper into Knots first. These are the basics. All you really need to know is that Sunnie is a sore loser and he rage-quit a long time ago, so he doesn’t join the current play until he gets his hands on Anti-Cosmo.

But the “cosmic game” isn’t some major world-shattering thing. It just gives the spirits something to do to play with each other. Everyone’s gotta have something to work towards, especially when imprisoned.

The spirits are minor gods who are easily bored and need the camarilla to play card games with them and read bedtime stories more than anything else. Anything that keeps them entertained. A bored or angry spirit is the kind of spirit who will mess around with nature to the point that it’s annoying (Ex: Sunnie might dry up a river, whereas Saturn may make a volcano erupt).

What are true forms, projected forms, and manifested forms?

Manifested form - The single being that basically holds the brain and heart of the element or aspect of nature in question. Ex: Death is a huge thing. The Grim Reaper is Death’s manifested form. This is his soul, his brain, his mouthpiece, etc.

True form - The form a nature spirit was born into. The spirit sees himself in this form. For example, Sunnie’s true form is as a creature made of black crystal, with lynx-like ears. He has turquoise eyes and wears a turquoise cloak. He has really long white hair. That’s how he sees himself. That’s the way Anti-Cosmo sees him when they kiff-tie. It’s taboo to discuss or make monuments in the shape of a nature spirit’s true form. Immortals, however, can’t see projected forms, and only see true forms.

Projected form - The way a mortal interprets a nature spirit. This would be Sunnie’s water genie form. The Darkness projects the black and red vortex we saw in “Wishology”. Tarrow projects his jellyfish. Their true forms show very obvious weak points on their bodies, typically their chests. I mean really, really obvious. Flashing and glowing kind of obvious. Projected forms don’t show those weak points. Anti-Cosmo interprets Sunnie as a water genie, but Sunnie can’t see what Anti-Cosmo interprets him as; that’s his projected form. Sunnie only sees himself in his true form.

What does it mean to host / take a nature spirit’s favor?

A favor (spelled “favour” in Knots) is a piece of jewelry in a zodiac color. It can be any small token or piece of clothing. The spirits generally have a form they prefer (listed by spirit below), though shapes and sizes may differ, especially based on the personal preference of the one carrying it. The spirits are not technically the favors, though sometimes it’s believed that they are.

It’s very important to note that the spirits ONLY take members of the Unseelie Court as their hosts. Namely Anti-Fairies. This is because Anti-Fairies turn to smoke if they’re “killed”, and automatically regenerate within a few seconds or minutes. This means that if another member of the Unseelie Court, like another Anti-Fairy, turns to smoke near them, their particles might get mixed together when they reform. The same is true for the nature spirits, who turn to steam. Their particles combine as they regenerate. That’s kiff-tying.

So this is all… sort of a cross between “Miraculous Ladybug” and “Steven Universe”, apparently. But also Populous: The Beginning. Listen, I already had to drop my original plan of Anti-Cosmo’s accidental influence over bad luck when I discovered “Milo Murphy’s Law”. I refuse to drop the nature spirit stuff too.

As of now, 4 of 7 favors are held by the camarilla. Twis is extremely picky about who he gives his to, and Dayfry’s favor was lost a long time ago and hasn’t yet been found. Which spirits have active hosts depends on the camarilla at the time. When a new High Count / High Countess takes power, their old camarilla shifts out and a new one is called.

If you’re carrying a zodiac spirit’s favor but you’re not on the camarilla, you have to return to the Temple and return the favor to the spirit. That spirit then chooses if he wants to take a new host or take a break for awhile instead. Sometimes the break-ups can be difficult and a spirit will refuse to accept the new camarilla member, and instead throw a fit until the High Count or Countess reluctantly reinstates the old. Sometimes the extinction burst can’t be endured /shot

If a spirit has a host, they can split their awareness between their manifested form, their Temple, and as many hosts as they have, viewing all locations simultaneously. A spirit with no host is limited to viewing only their immediate surroundings and their Temple.

Rogue spirits can take hosts too, but rogue spirits usually avoid the cloudlands because that’s the territory of the main spirits and they don’t want to infringe. They hang out on Earth or other planets in the universe where their parents or older cousins won’t boss them around. Rogue nature spirits can only manifest their favors as simple beads on a simple string. You may have noticed none of the zodiac spirits has a necklace design. Those are considered “simple” and are for rogues. The zodiac spirits are too haughty for that nonsense.

There could be a few Anti-Fairies who’ve met rogue spirits and have agreed to carry their favors, but that’s something they’d likely want to keep to themselves. I don’t imagine rogue spirits are looked on very favorably. But it probably depends. A small town might worship a particular rogue who sticks around their area and always selects hosts in that town. Who knows.

The seven zodiac spirits mutually agreed to only have one host at a time for quote-unquote “cosmic game” purposes to cut down on power-playing. Thus, as a rule, they default to one of the two camarilla members for their zodiac. Because it’s Anti-Fairy culture to hold the camarilla position and retire with dignity if replaced, that creates a regular turnover rate and prevents the spirits from being stuck with someone who refuses to give their favor back and dies alone with it somewhere.

I mean, there’s no rule saying they HAVE to pick from the camarilla. But that generally gives them the most influence over politics, and it would certainly cause a stir among the Anti-Fairies if a random commoner was running around representing them and attracting attention.

What does it mean to be bound to a Temple?

First, I want to point out that the chains binding the zodiac spirits are gold. On the mural in the Blue Castle, the chains are painted on with inrita, the chemical that drains Fairykind magic. Touching the chains in the mural makes an Anti-Fairy’s skin tingle, and their fingertips will go numb for about two minutes. Inrita has no effect on the nature spirits, but inrita is painted on the mural to remind the Anti-Fairies that gold has a similar, painful effect on the nature spirits that inrita has on them. That probably won’t ever come up in Knots. We’ll see.

Being bound to the Temple means the zodiac spirits have a manifestation of themselves chained within their Temple. However, this is a bit difficult to explain, so I’ll do my best. Technically, the zodiac spirits still exist on Plane 23. Plane 23 isn’t physically “higher up” than the other planes. It overlaps every plane. Passing into Plane 23 puts you on the spirit level, and the spirits can wander around and see people, even if they can’t directly interact by touching them or anything. They’re like ghosts.

The zodiac spirits are bound to the Plane 23 version of their Temple. Therefore, you won’t see them every time you visit the echo chamber, although they can see you. They can choose if they want to create a manifestation of themselves within their echo chamber, which is pretty draining, but they can do that and will if they want to talk to you. It’ll knock them out for a week afterwards, though, so they can’t do it with everyone.

Okay, so then we get this:

Sunnie’s manifestation there is what Sunnie can use to communicate with Anti-Cosmo directly, using his mouth and words. That’s the aspect of Sunnie that Anti-Cosmo kiff-ties with. What this means is, this Sunnie turns to steam and Anti-Cosmo turns to smoke through a special ceremony where Anti-Cosmo agrees to carry and care for Sunnie’s favor, and then, well… knives are involved.

You’ll just have to watch things unfold in Knots to see how that goes down: All you really need to know is, Anti-Cosmo is basically Sunnie’s yoo-doo doll when they’re kiff-tied. Sunnie can feel everything Anti-Cosmo feels, as well as see the world through his eyes and hear through his ears. Sunnie used to be able to see the universe without a host, but he can’t do that while he’s bound. When Sunnie broke his tie with Anti-Cosmo in “This Is Halloween”, we saw Sunnie’s manifestation again. That’s the little Sunnie. The Prince of Water is still at the Water Temple, and has the ability to vaporize his manifestation at any time. However, if he did that, he wouldn’t have any other manifestation, and would completely cut off his awareness of what was going on in the Castle.

The Prince of Water can continue creating manifestations to talk to other people in the echo chamber even while kiff-tied with a host. As I believe I mentioned, the zodiac spirits can create lots of manifestations of themselves. However, it’ll knock them out for a week, and the manifestation will disappear if it isn’t tied to a mortal host. And, for “cosmic game” reasons, the zodiac spirits all agreed that they’re each allowed only one host.

Technically, because Sunnie quit, he’s not bound to that rule. He can have as many hosts as he wants as long as he’s not playing, but he would have to rescind all but one to enter the current play. However, that would be out of character for him and then he wouldn’t be Sunnie. When Anti-Cosmo meets Sunnie, Sunnie explains that he hasn’t had a host for… I think it was nine hundred thousand years. He’s a sulker.

Okay, are you following? This is where it gets trickier. The Princely forms of the nature spirits can still interact with one another despite being bound. Imagine that Plane 23 is an empty white void, except the zodiac spirits can see all the Temples. If they weren’t bound, they could see everything. So, the Prince of Water can basically go as far away from his Temple as he wants, floating in an empty white void, until he meets another spirit. Probably the Prince of Soil. 

They can hang out, talk, picnic on food from their offering dishes, kiff-tie, whatever they want. They’re just in a white void that occasionally has floating Temples. The golden chains stretch forever. Like I said, if they weren’t bound, they could see all of Plane 23. But while they’re chained, it’s a void for them.

That’s what it means to be bound. The kids are grounded from playing outside unless they’re supervised by a host, but they can still play with each other inside and hang out in their rooms. So obviously, Winni and Thurmondo are together like, all the time.

Don’t really know how much we’ll get into this in Knots. We’ll see hints of Anti-Cosmo floating in the white void when he kiff-ties with Sunnie the first time.

OKAY! That was the encompassing overview that I was going to share in the worldbuilding post next week, but it’s fine, you can have it now.

Now, let’s look at each zodiac spirit in more detail. Their powers were mentioned in a previous post. Now we’ll look at them more as people and demigods.

TARROW: The Cosmic Jellyfish

Deity of creation, fate, and destiny. Not technically represented on the camarilla. His color is red, and the First General wears a magical red cloak with a jellyfish clasp. The First General does not host Tarrow or carry his favor, but only strives to act impartially and make the final call if the camarilla get locked in a debate. He is meant to act impartially.

The cloak is mostly only worn when appearing before the public, especially during ceremonial events. Anti-Buster, the First General before Anti-Cosmo whom we see in Knots, adores it and wears it almost everywhere, except when he’s sleeping. He thinks it makes him look dramatic and you will see him constantly swishing and flicking it during this story.

DAYFRY: The Hummingbird, Leader, and Peacemaker

Love Years: 1989, 1996, 2003, 2010, 2017; Fairy New Year starts March 15th)

Mastery: Love, balance, loyalty, duty, politeness, gentleness, sacrifice, honor

Parentage: Reality (Tarrow) x Unreality (The Hocus Poconos)

Preferred Favor: Amethyst ring, usually worn on left middle finger

Modern Medium: None (Would probably be Anti-Kanin (Caden))

Overview: Dayfry is the King Solomon archetype- the wise leader of the zodiac spirits… or at least that’s what he tries to be. In reality, he’s a social creature who loves getting his family together to play games and enjoy the holidays. He tries to balance them all out by rushing around and soothing everyone, and keeping them from strangling one another.

All the zodiac spirits gave their names to the day of the week they were imprisoned in their Temple. Coincidentally, they were all imprisoned on different days, in the order of their birth. Wow! Amazing mythology coincidence! Dayfry, of course, gave his name to Friday. Friday is the first day of the week in the Fairy calendar. The work day starts Friday afternoon, and it goes until Wednesday afternoon. People get Thursday off, since the Big Wand gets recharged on Friday morning as we learned in “The Big Fairy Share Scare”, so obviously it must be running at its dregs on Thursday, and people don’t want to use magic or go out and about too much. Friday is a late start day every week. Nice. Additionally, Friday the 13th obviously occurs on Friday. Thus, Dayfry is a very respected deity  in Anti-Fairy culture.

Because of this, Dayfry doesn’t get out much. He may be social with his brothers, but he’s shy around mortals because he’s a huge celebrity. Also, he doesn’t like kiff-tying much. I’m sure he’s done it with a host before, but it’s just not interesting to him. We’ll only see him once in Knots, briefly, when he arrives to visit at the new Water Temple with all his brothers before it gets consecrated with Anti-Cosmo’s blood.

As previously mentioned, Dayfry is the only child Tarrow had with the Hocus Poconos, and is his dad’s obvious favorite. He’s present in spirit at a lot of ceremonial events, but he likes to stay out of the limelight. Like I said, shy celebrity archetype.

Note that Munn is the spirit of kindness and caring for others, whereas Dayfry is more the spirit of acting professional even when you have to work with someone you don’t like. Dayfry is the spirit of swallowing your pride “for the greater good”, of loving the people and prizing the community as a whole above yourself. Additionally, Dayfry is more the spirit of thoughtfulness and wisdom whereas Sunnie is education, logic, and hard facts.

Everyone is always shocked to hear that Dayfry is single and possibly aromantic asexual. But, well. Spirit of youth and virginity, I guess. I figured that a spirit of Love should either be completely asexual or completely pansexual, and since we’ve already got Tarrow running around… yeah, I went with asexual. Also, he’s purple. That’s obvious. He’s the spirit of balance, after all, so it just makes sense that if all his brothers are paired up, he just hangs out by himself as the odd one out. Not that he really minds. You could say that he gave his gift of love to mortals.

Temple: High South (Navy) Region - Plane 4 - Crowfeld, Anti-Fairy World

The Love Temple isn’t far inside the border of Anti-Fairy World, as it’s one of the places that non-Zodii Fairies frequently visit too. It’s actually the church-like building where Cosmo and Wanda were married as we saw in “School’s Out: The Musical”. I mean, come on, guys. It’s purple and people get married there. That was obvious.

Dayfry’s Temple is mostly your stereotypical place of worship. It’s a reverent, quiet area that allows peace and self-reflection and whatnot. It’s shaped like a circle and his echo chamber is in the very middle of it.

Bonds:

Dayfry is on decent terms with all his brothers. They mutually respect him. As the spirit of Balance, he has healthy purple bonds with all of them. However, he has no interest in kiff-tying. He just kind of does his own thing.

SATURN: The Lizard, Warrior, and Team Dad

Fire Years: 1990, 1997, 2004, 2011, 2018

Mastery: Fire, energy, comfort, emotional strength, passion, family, justice

Parentage: Reality (Tarrow) x Light (Prince Morn)

Preferred Favor: Ruby bracelet 

Modern Medium: Anti-Julian (Electro) (Note- I pronounce his name with the ‘H’ sound. I… I don’t know. He’s just always been that way for me.)

Overview: Saturn is the energetic, passionate warrior always willing to take up arms and fight to defend his loved ones. If you mess with his family, you mess with him. He’s even willing to deliver the first blow if he suspects you might mess with his family, though he’s not quite as paranoid about everything as Sunnie is.

Saturn is short-tempered, but as the embodiment of Energy, he’s also super productive. This guy gets things done, and fast. Quality may be questionable sometimes. You can perhaps see why he doesn’t get along well with Twis, who prefers to take things slow and do them right. In mythology, Saturn is the guy who cuts corners, and always has to be humbled by going back and doing them over again more carefully. Though when he doesn’t want to, sometimes he gets frustrated enough to set things on fire. Obviously, when volcanoes erupt, Anti-Fairies panic that someone has horribly offended Saturn.

Saturn is also said to have created the first genies, on level with the creation of Adam and Eve. These genies are called Asja and Galeras, and were mentioned in THIS post awhile back. As a genie breeder, Anti-Cosmo obviously has an interest in Saturn, and visits his Temple when facing major decisions regarding his genies.

So, Saturn is the warrior who cares deeply for his family. That’s probably his main personality trait: His passion. He stands up for what he loves and acts as a brave captain leading the armies of the nature spirits in battle in mythology. He’s easily irritated and revenge-seeking, definitely not someone you want to upset. He tends to devise sick and twisted tortures for those who offend him. He’s not exactly sly and subtle- he’s just the unstoppable, terrifying force, and if you engage him in battle, you will almost certainly lose.

However, he’s not so hot-headed that he’ll forgo logic to fight you. His military training always takes priority. Saturn isn’t the rash enemy who charges you when he’s taunted. He’s the brilliant battle captain who will organize his troops, calculate your weak points, and destroy you. He relies heavily on his faithful strategist, Sunnie, to help him organize his forces, although Sunnie usually tries to calculate plans that result in the least amount of people getting hurt, whereas Saturn is the guy who does care about casualties, but considers them a necessary evil to be sacrificed to win the war if need be.

Previously, I pointed out that the Fairykind don’t have important beliefs about solar or lunar eclipses, because they can’t see those events from the cloudlands. Though, they do have the Fairy-Clipse. Anyway, it seems appropriate to state this again seeing as Saturn is the child of the sun / light / day god and Munn the child of the moon / dark / night goddess. There aren’t any myths about Saturn, Munn, or their parents in regards to solar or lunar eclipses.

Temple: Far West (Maroon) Region - Plane 6 - Shadeblink, Anti-Fairy World

The Fire Temple is shaped like a chocolate chip. It’s all black, smooth, and shiny, with colorful windows where different flames burn behind the glass. There’s a transparent column in the center of the Temple where waves of fire flicker from the bottom and head up towards the top, and burst out occasionally like a colorful volcano. The echo chamber is at the base of this column (not transparent).

This Temple will most likely appear in Knots, probably more than once, but I haven’t gotten to that point yet.

Bonds: (Ordered from “best(?)” relationship to worst. Note that the Anti-Fairies took note of the bonds that the nature spirits share, and believe that similar relationships extend to those born in their year. For example, Saturn and Munn have a close bond, a “yellow” bond, so therefore they believe that Fire and Sky years are naturally compatible.)

Yellow - See Munn’s yellow section

Blue -See Sunnie’s blue section

Pink -See Winni’s pink section

Purple - See Thurmondo’s purple section

Green -See Twis’ yellow section

SUNNIE: The Turtle, Scholar, and Strategist

Water Years: 1991, 1998, 2005, 2012, 2019

Mastery: Water (+ ice), focus, tact, introspection, education, logic, tranquility

Parentage: Born of the tears of a god

Preferred Favor: Turquoise brooch, clasp, or badge 

Modern Medium: Anti-Cosmo (Julius)

Overview: Sunnie is basically a self-serving conspiracy nut who takes advantage of Anti-Cosmo for his own gain, but only when he wants to. He doesn’t like going out of way for things like that. That’s wasted energy, and isn’t practical. It took he and Anti-Cosmo a while to warm up to each other, but they’re usually a good team who work well in sync, especially when studying and making plans. It’s just… they have opposite attitudes about a lot of things. Sunnie will always prioritize survival, especially of himself, whereas Anti-Cosmo prioritizes things like protecting or helping others, even if it puts him at risk. 

Sunnie doesn’t really get the concept of honor, and will frequently take the coward’s way out by running off when things get tough. He doesn’t like to get involved, and when he does, it’s out of necessity. He can be very blunt and calculating, not afraid of stepping on people’s feelings in order to relay accurate information. However, he has low self-esteem and gets panicky and flustered in the face of criticism. He’s easily offended when holes in his plans are pointed out. He’s a scholar and a strategist. Book-smart, but not people-smart.

As previously mentioned, Sunnie is a strategist who puts his all into thinking, and so he’s also a very sore loser. While he doesn’t yell, he pouts and sulks a lot, and will often vent to Twis as Twis plows his fields. Captive audience, right? Sunnie is a complainer, but as a strategist, he does like to try and fix things. But only after complaining and sulking and having his feelings soothed. He likes having his back stroked and patted while he sprawls across your lap.

Sunnie is the scholar who loves to learn. He’s the guy you’d make offerings to when you have major exams coming up. He also has some stereotypical cat-like behaviors, such as sitting on your keyboard when he wants attention and knocking things off desks and cabinets just because he can. You can scold him, but he’ll give you that, “Try me” look and try to stare you down.

In addition to the liquid form of water, Sunnie is also the demigod of snow and ice. Technically he can also be the demigod of boiling water and steam, and he is, so long as we’re talking about steam from water. Fairies turn to dust and Anti-Fairies turn to smoke, but the nature spirits turn to steam. Sunnie has nothing to do with that.

Despite his sacred animal being the turtle, Sunnie is a very agile creature, and this gift extends to those who carry his favor. He’s quick on his toes and capable of rebounding off walls and ceilings with ease in a fight. One of the highlights of Anti-Wanda’s life is the time she convinced Anti-Cosmo to dress up as one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and take advantage of Sunnie’s agility field bonus. He denies this ever happened.

Temple: Central Star (Purple) Region - Plane 3 - Inkblot City, Pixie World

After H.P. knocked the old Water Temple down because of reasons, Sunnie’s bonds broke and he escaped. Anti-Cosmo chased him down and ordered H.P. to build Sunnie a new Temple. As such, the modern Water Temple was rebuilt in Pixie World, coincidentally also fulfilling the requirement of the law that in order to be legally called a city in the cloudlands, a place must have a Temple on the premises. Funny how things work out sometimes.

The modern Temple is square and very fancy. H.P. spared no expense, much to Anti-Cosmo’s horror at the over-the-top tackiness of the place. It makes its first (fully-built) appearance in “Sunnie Rise”.

The echo chamber is in the “undercloud” area, in the basement.

Bonds:

Yellow - See Twis’ yellow bond section

Blue - Saturn is Energy, Sunnie is Focus. Together, as Stone, they act as though hyped up on coffee and energy drinks.It’s worth pointing out that when I say, “as Stone”, we’re not talking about Gem-like fusion here. No. The Prince of Stone has two forms- either Saturn wearing Sunnie’s favor, or Sunnie wearing Saturn’s favor. It’s usually the first way around, Saturn being more dominant by nature. It’s the same title, even though the two are different.

The personality, mannerisms, agenda, and speech pattern of the more dominant spirit will remain intact, with just a bit of influence from the lesser spirit creeping in (for example, Sunnie’s agility bonus, or Saturn’s battle training); it’s not quite as harmonious a union as Gem fusion. It’s just one spirit borrowing the other one’s powers for a boost. The other spirit is essentially along for the ride, with no ability to control the body- they merely observe the outside world from a passive standpoint while the dominant spirit draws from their energy.

Basically, imagine Saturn wearing Sunnie’s brooch, his personality intact, but hyped up on energy drinks and with the grace of a dancer. The personality is the same, but the physical condition here (energy drink influence) and level of ability (agility) are different. The Prince of Stone will work ceaselessly on whatever task you set him too, usually without getting too distracted. 

And of course, when they come apart (the more dominant spirit takes off the less dominant one’s favor), the less dominant spirit will be “pregnant” for about thirty seconds before giving birth to - you guessed it - a spirit of Stone with a personality and interests similar to whatever was just going on with its “parents”. The title of prince is reserved purely for when two demigods wear each other’s favors, though, and isn’t passed on to the energy manifestation. The “child” is simply called a minor spirit of Stone.

Pink - See Thurmondo’s pink section

Purple - See Munn’s purple section

Green - See Winni’s green section

MUNN: The Albatross, Prankster, and Traveler

Sky Years: 1992, 1999, 2006, 2013, 2020

Mastery: Sky, acceptance, compassion, hope, faith, cheer, speed, safe travel

Parentage: Reality (Tarrow) x Dark (Princess Eve)

Preferred Favor: Sapphire piercings (usually earrings), but for those uncomfortable with piercings, his favor can even manifest as headphones 

Modern Medium: Anti-Wanda (Venus) 

Overview: Munn has a cheery disposition, quick to joke and look at the bright side, though he does have his nervous moments. However, he would rarely be described as “sad”. He gets disappointed at times, but he usually shakes those feelings off without dwelling on them much. He’s just a naturally happy guy, even in very stressful situations.

Munn plays the antagonistic role in much of Anti-Fairy mythology, as he’s viewed as a prankster who often taunts other spirits and creatures and gets into trouble. As the spirit of compassion, he’s a bit backwards in Anti-Fairy society. Anti-Fairies are often kind towards each other because they’re a social species who gather in colonies, but Munn takes things too far by suggesting they make friends even with people who have wronged them, like the Fairies. Gross.

As I mentioned, his prankster nature tends to get him into trouble. He’s a spirit of scouting, stealth, and the arts of escape, and loves to learn people’s secrets. He’s not the blabbermouth that Winni is, though they have been known to team up on occasion to gather information (and do things like set up the Wind Wand on the blue moon in the Vegon system while embodying the Prince of Wind).

Munn may play the antagonistic role in much of Anti-Fairy myth, but he’s still a very nice guy. He just gets excited and puts silly plans into action that usually result in stealing someone’s sacred item and realizing as he runs off with it that yeah, he probably shouldn’t have done that. His brothers generally catch and scold him, and he gets punished for his offenses, but no one’s ever upset enough with him that they would go as far as destroying his Temple and then hunting him down and killing him. They’re still family, after all.

Still, Munn’s adventures aren’t limited to the zodiac spirits, and he appears in mythology as the guy who pulls crazy stunts such as taunting Death and opening the gates of the spirit world into the living realm. Munn is the guy who would stumble across an ancient scroll about how to resurrect the dead and then follow it because, “That would be hilarious if this actually worked”. But, being Munn, he’ll probably mix at least one of the ingredients up, and end up with more than he bargained for.

Sometimes he tries to solve problems on his own, though most of the time when he knows he’s in trouble, he’ll flee to Saturn for protection, to which Saturn’s deadpan response when his half-brother comes skidding in is, “What stupid thing did you do this time?” But, those two are very close. Most people don’t like to mess with Saturn, and will let Munn off with a warning. Most of Munn’s punishments involve Munn helping to clean up the mess he made and return anything he may have stolen, and grovel his apologies. Saturn lets them do that. He just doesn’t like people hurting his family and will step in if they’re punishments entail lots of violence, is all.

Munn is also the demigod of fast, safe, and enjoyable travel, and the guy you would want to make an offering to, perhaps along with a copy of your planned route, if you’re seeking his blessing before a journey. His field bonus is Speed. Anti-Wanda, you see, was a brilliant choice for the Anti-Fairy to sprint during the Fairy World Games. Munn’s speed bonus extends much more to flying than it does to the ground, but Anti-Wanda is still a fast little gal.

Temple: Far East (Pink) Region - Plane 7 - Comet Falls, Fairy World

The Sky Temple is hardly the place you think of first when you think “temple”. Munn cares less about being worshiped directly than he does making people happy and enjoying himself. His place tends to be a wild party all the time, and a lot of sketchy things go on here. Comet Falls is a party town as it is- it’s the place where they had the clock tower that we saw in “School’s Out: The Musical”, when all the godparents were thrilled about the change of the season for their godkids. Anti-Wanda has been able to navigate it without getting into too much trouble, though.

The echo chamber is in the upper, dome-shaped part of the building. The Sky Temple is not scheduled to make any appearances at this time, though I have a loose Prompt about Anti-Wanda planned that will probably end up there.

Bonds:

Yellow - Saturn is Energy, Munn is Acceptance. Together, as Lightning, they are the embodiment of fun and new discovery in a relationship, and their bond is viewed as one of pleasure, exploration, playfulness, excitement, and perhaps a bit of lust. Together they’re seen as spirits who represent the honeymoon phase of a relationship.

Blue -See Winni’s blue section

Pink -See Twis’ pink section

Purple - Sunnie is Focus. As Cloud, they embody everything between playful teasing and deadpan sarcasm. You basically get Sunnie with speed powers and punk piercings, never missing a beat as he roasts you. It’s worth noting that Anti-Wanda carries Munn’s favor and Anti-Cosmo carries Sunnie’s, so these two could take on their Prince of Cloud state every time their hosts decide to be intimate. 

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, this is the joke from that one Inktober piece I drew about Foop saying he just got “the talk about where clouds come from” as he stares accusingly at his parents. It’s also a very funny joke about the giant cloud that accompanied Foop’s birth.

Green - See Thurmondo’s green section

TWIS: The Donkey, Farmer, and Merchant

Soil Years: 1993, 2000, 2007, 2014, 2021

Mastery: Soil, dedication, work, ambition, planning, harvest, physical strength

Parentage: Reality (Tarrow) x Some random gravity spirit Tarrow took an interest in, but whom Twis never really knew seeing as he was abandoned after

Preferred Favor: Thick brown belt with a citrine buckle

Modern Medium: None

Overview: Twis is the “solid as a rock” archetype in Anti-Fairy myth, stubborn and proud. He’ll usually be polite, if a bit gruff, unless you offend him, in which case he’ll probably leave and not come back. He holds long grudges, even if he doesn’t act on them quite as much as Saturn. For the most part, Sunnie is the only one who can sway his mind when he’s being an especially irritable grump. 

He’s a dedicated worker who doesn’t cut corners and will get the job done and get it done well, but at his own pace. Don’t rush him. He hates to be rushed. He doesn’t like criticism, or people in general, and is reluctant to reveal himself to anyone of less authority than a High Count or High Countess born in the Soil year. With exception of relying on the sunlight and water to grow crops, he prefers to work alone and will be extremely frustrated if you try to help but you don’t measure up to his standards. He doesn’t see working with young kids as a way of teaching or bonding with them, and instead will send them off anywhere to get them out of his way. He takes pride in his work and doesn’t like it when his stuff is messed with.

Twis is the spirit of harvest too. He works in tandem with Sunnie to grow crops. He’s also a spirit of bartering, as Anti-Fairies believe that all land has life which is represented by a spirit bear. Twis, then, is the helpful spirit who carries messages to the spirit bears if someone is too embarrassed to pray to them directly. He’s the spirit who gives you strength to stand in front of a crowd, even if Winni is the spirit of communication and memory who helps you find your words and speak clearly.

Twis recognizes what people want and is always willing to put forth the effort to ensure all parties are happy. He’s the merchant spirit who is there when you strike up deals in the marketplace. He’s the careful planner who is there when you are struggling with funds and trying to stick to your budget. He’s a spirit of making deals and keeping loyal to your promises above all else. If you remember, H.P. was born in a Soil year. I think that’s fitting for the Head Pixie.

However, while Twis may be a spirit of work, budgets, and planning, he’s not so much a spirit of charity. He’s very much the ant in “The Ant and the Grasshopper”, a believer that you reap what you sow. He doesn’t enjoy straying from his plans or making sacrifices for someone he can’t prove has put forth their best effort. Of course, he doesn’t like watching these people work either, because he has things to do, nor does he like them working with him. It’s a complicated feeling. The guy just doesn’t like social interaction much, and only Sunnie seems really able to get through to him. Even that’s because Sunnie is helpful and practical, and emotionally distant.

You would think he would be a brony or something, having an affiliation with equines and all, but ain’t nobody got time for that when they live in a paradise with temperate climates year-round. There’s so much to plant and harvest! Also did I mention that he will completely work himself to exhaustion, because he will.

Temple: Lower East (Teal) Region - Plane 5 - Mudhale

The Soil Temple is built straight into a mountain, and it’s the entrance to many cave systems throughout Anti-Fairy World. It collapsed during the early years of the War of the Sunset Divide. H.P. was actually born in the year it collapsed, which is appropriately named the Year of the Fallen Mountain.

After the war, the Temple was restored to its former state. It’s in the same location and is more stable and less likely to collapse now. The echo chamber is deep in the back, among caverns of glowing mushrooms and interesting fauna. Twis doesn’t like visitors and wanted his chamber out of the way.

H.P. and Anti-Cosmo visit the Soil Temple in “Dust to Dirt”.

Bonds:

Yellow - Sunnie is Focus and Twis is Devotion. Together, as Mud, they are the embodiment of loyalty in a relationship, and their bond is viewed as one of tenderness, sweetness, warmth, and pure affection. Together they’re seen as spirits who represent companionate love (the post-honeymoon phase of a long-term relationship).

Blue - See Thurmondo’s blue section

Pink - Munn is Acceptance. As Sand, they embody peace and friendship.

Purple - See Winni’s purple section

Green - Saturn is Energy. As Ash, they embody instability and resistance. Saturn is a creature of passion, and Twis isn’t much for emotions. Saturn likes to rush, Twis likes to take things slow. Twis sees Saturn as sloppy, and Saturn sees Twis as slow. They wouldn’t kiff-tie willingly unless there was a huge emergency. They just don’t get along.

WINNI: The Leopard, Teacher, and Healer

Breath Years: 1994, 2001, 2008, 2015, 2022

Mastery: Breath, communication, health, teaching, sewing, rest, self-care

(Note: Anti-Fairies don’t believe in medicine, because it doesn’t work on them like it works on Fairies. They believe in either praying for miracles or in herbal remedies to soothe pain even if they don’t cure sickness. So instead of being the “spirit of medicine”, they consider Winni the spirit of “remedies”.)

Parentage: Reality (Tarrow) x Life (The Cycling Hen)

Preferred Favor: Beryl button or pin (Anti-Bryndin wears the button on his scarf, Foop / Hiccup would wear it on a vest or coat were they to take Winni’s favor) 

Modern Medium: None (Anti-Bryndin hosts him in Knots)

Overview: Winni is the neat-freak homemaker of the family, who cleans his echo chamber obsessively. Between his nosiness, big mouth, his obsession with cleanliness, and living in a very frequented Temple, he’s the most likely to manifest himself, but you’ll probably get a tongue bath or preening in the process. For someone who so despises dirt, it’s a little surprising that he gets along much better with Twis than he does with Sunnie. Then again, it’s mostly Sunnie that finds Winni annoying rather than the other way around. Winni is still somewhat young for a spirit, and looks up to his elder half-brothers greatly.

Even so, Winni embodies the bossy mentor archetype. What he wants done, he wants done his way, and soon. He’s a bit of a jack-of-all trades, which means that many things come easily to him, which means he struggles to understand why other people can’t seem to measure up to his standards. Though he easily gets frustrated, he tries his best to shrug things off, put on a happy smile, and once again go over his instructions in careful detail. He doesn’t mind repeating himself, but he does get upset if you don’t want to listen to him.

As the spirit of medicine and herbal remedies, Winni obviously knows what he’s doing there. However, he has his set mindset about what helps what, and isn’t good at keeping up with the allergies of individuals, or even noticing if he’s just given them a deadly poison that wouldn’t kill a nature spirit. He means well.

Winni is basically the demigod of teamwork. Sunnie much prefers to work alone. Thus, the two of them are opposites, and because Anti-Cosmo plays on Sunnie’s team, Winni is a bit of an antagonist in Knots. Doesn’t help that he’s the spirit of Communication, and he’s a people-reader and a bit of a manipulator. He’s also horribly impatient, nosy as I mentioned, and a massive blabbermouth. In his free time, he enjoys all types of knitting, weaving, sewing, and embroidery. Most of the zodiac spirits prefer offerings of food, but Winni enjoys offerings of newspapers that keep him updated on the goings-on of the outside world, and he becomes super flattered if you make cross-stitches or sew plushies for him.

His inability to keep his mouth shut most of the time may have something to do with the fact that he screams every morning like a rooster, despite the fact that the rooster is Thurmondo’s sacred animal and Winni’s is the leopard. Maybe his mom and the little Leaves spirit rubbed off on him. The way I see it, Winni’s true form is actually heavily based off a rooster because of his mom, but because he spends so much time with Thurmondo, the rooster became associated with Thurmondo instead of him.

Temple: Lower West (Green) Region - Plane 3 - Godscress, Fairy World

The Breath Temple is also known by the name Temple of Healing. It’s a place of rest and strengthening, and rapidly speeds up the healing rate of all inside it- especially for magical creatures like the Fairykind. It contains a magical fountain, because in addition to being Populous trash, I am also confirmed Age of Mythology trash and I had to reference the Healing Spring.

Winni’s echo chamber is in the middle of the giant fountain. It’s like a volcano, but with healing water.

Bonds:

Yellow - See Thurmondo’s yellow section

Blue - Munn is Acceptance. As Wind, they embody politeness and structure.

Pink - Saturn is Energy. As Lava, they embody laughter and joy.

Purple - Twis is Devotion. As Roots, they embody oaths and fierce loyalty.

Green - Sunnie is Focus. As Blood, they embody sorrow and anxiety.

THURMONDO: The Rooster, Inventor, and Caretaker

Leaves Years: 1995, 2002, 2009, 2016, 2023

Parentage: Reality (Tarrow) x Death (The Grim Reaper) 

Mastery: Leaves, curiosity, courage, initiative, understanding, mercy, humility

Preferred Favor: Jade circlet or tiara, usually of overlapping metal leaves

Modern Medium: Anti-Kyler (Rufus)

Overview: Thurmondo is absentminded, tending to get lost in his own thoughts as he thinks up new inventions, or wanders off after an interesting falling leaf. He’s the type who doesn’t mind being alone to work, though he does love people, and talking to them, as he finds them fascinating and loves to hear stories. He’s generally low-maintenance, though he’s nitpicky about special ceremonies and insulted when they aren’t done to his specifications.

Namely, Thurmondo knows his place as the youngest and submissive. He and those born in his zodiac are often followers rather than leaders. A stickler for tradition, Thurmondo becomes upset when, for example, someone born in his year attempts to lead someone of another zodiac through a ceremonial dance. Traditions like that. He’s paranoid about getting in the way and a bit superstitious that if doesn’t play his part, order and structure will collapse.

He has a shy nature, though if pushed far enough, he will make an effort to stand up for himself. Of course, the results of that effort depend on the reaction of whomever he’s standing up to. Thurmondo has a brave heart, but also a humble one, which can lead him to second-guess himself. This prevents him from rushing into battle like hot-headed Saturn, but the more Thurmondo starts to second-guess himself, the more nervous he becomes. 

He used to be bolder in his younger years, but Winni’s really done a number on him; now, Thurmondo is viewed as more of an awkward and cowardly spirit than the clever inventor he once was. He still picks at his projects, but he doesn’t spend as much time on his research as he’d like to. His 24/7 relationship with Winni keeps his mind pretty busy. He’s easily distracted and can’t split his attention between separate tasks like Sunnie can.

Thurmondo may not be the one you would seek out for advice most of the time, but he would be the one you pray to when you don’t think you can go on any longer, especially when in unpleasant circumstances like abusive relationships (not even romantic ones necessarily). Thurmondo is the spirit of pulling through, the one who wants you to succeed and escape even if he can’t.

I wrote a potential Prompt about him and Winni, but because of the nature of abuse and coercion, I’m still deciding if I ever want to share it. If I do, it will be towards the end of the project, where only those with the determination to make it through the rest are likely to find it.

He’s basically given birth zillions of time and has oodles of children. The little guys never seem to last long, though. They often get… eaten.

Temple: High North (Blue) Region - Plane 4 - Near the FGP, Fairy World

The Leaves Temple is a quiet museum at its back, and the area at the front is full of puzzles, games, toys, and stuff to experiment and play with. Lots of fun for kids. the echo chamber is on the top floor.

Thurmondo’s Temple first appears in the distance during “Cotton Candy Oatmeal”, and is later visited in “Letters and Numbers”.

Bonds:

Yellow - Winni is Communication and Thurmondo is Curiosity. Thurmondo is also the spirit of change, especially the seasons. His spring form is one of innocence and discovery, of tentativeness and losing virginity. His summer form is one full of passion and delight. His autumn form is one of uncertainty, shame, passive-aggression, and reluctance. Finally, his winter form is one of fear and struggle, the relationship between him and Winni a drastic power imbalance of lust and abuse. Every winter, Thurmondo swears he’ll keep his memories and remember what Winni is like in winter and avoid falling back into his trap, but he loses his memories on March 14th every year, and with the new year, Winni patiently teaches him that he’s a nature spirit all over again.

Together, as Oxygen, they are the embodiment of uncertainty and hope in a relationship, and their bond is viewed as one of development, learning, realization, adaptation, and teamwork. It’s worth pointing out that from Winni’s perspective, the pair are literally creating oxygen when they’re together, so when Thurmondo resists him, Thurmondo is literally strangling people who need oxygen to breathe. Additionally, as a spirit with the ability to heal at an extremely rapid rate himself, Winni has some difficulty comprehending physical pain in others. Due to the oxygen thing, he’ll freak out when Thurmondo isn’t around, and is willing to use his powers of Communication for dirty manipulative tricks to make Thurmondo feel selfish and worthless when he wants to take a break.

Winni’s winter form has a better understanding that what he’s doing is wrong and might even feel guilty for it if you press him, though he’ll still shrug it off because he thinks he’s just doing his duty. In his autumn form, he is completely 100% convinced that he’s doing the right thing and that the people need them. In his spring form, like Thurmondo, he can also be viewed as a spirit of losing virginity, though he’s the “rite of passage” and “coming into adulthood” type of losing virginity as opposed to Thurmondo’s “wanting to give it to someone you love” or “the time just feels right”, because of course he is.

Together they’re seen as spirits who represent staying together out of necessity for the benefit of their children. Abusive relationships aren’t good from a human point of view, but for Anti-Fairies, who end up in relationships with those their counterparts do, it’s comforting to know that Thurmondo is sticking it out. When they remember the abuse Thurmondo takes from Winni every winter, suddenly the faults in their own partner don’t seem so bad.

Blue - Twis is Devotion. The weirdest thing is, Thurmondo’s field bonus is Copycat. Despite being the automatically submissive spirit, he actually can influence the mindset of those he kiff-ties with. As the Prince of Mulch, Twis’ Devotion combined with Thurmondo’s Curiosity would give you Twis’ body and personality, but instead of being devoted to farming, Twis would suddenly find himself super interested in Thurmondo’s inventions and research projects. Good luck dragging him away from those.

Pink - Sunnie is Focus. Again, Thurmondo has the power to influence the spirit in control, though whether he knows he’s doing it or not is up to debate. The Prince of Dew will lose Thurmondo’s spaciness, and is instead a brilliant mastermind who will rapidly learn anything and everything about whatever you give him to study.

Purple - Saturn is Energy. The Prince of Nitrogen is fast and furious, easily distracted, and prone to running off after anything that catches his attention and tackling it into submission. He’s super touchy-feely and will poke your face.

Green - Munn is Acceptance, but he’s also the spirit of compassion. Munn is a spirit of consent and joy, and when he and Thurmondo aren’t kiff-tied, he views his youngest half-brother in his hormonal summer form. However, when they are together, the Prince of Fungus gets slammed with all of Thurmondo’s burdens and self-doubts, and becomes overwhelmed with grief and shame. Munn doesn’t know how to deal with Thurmondo’s emotions, so the Prince of Fungus shuts down, withdrawing into himself and being mostly unresponsive, apart from the occasional snarky comment. He’s not too helpful and has a scathing outlook on the world at all times.

It’s super rare for Thurmondo to kiff-tie with other nature spirits, though, considering the hold Winni has on him. I can’t imagine any situation in my works when it would come up. Thurmondo’s fate is pretty set, and this post is simply here for you to think about the different possibilities that could result. But you shouldn’t really expect to see them in practice.

Here’s an overview zodiac kiff-tie chart. The background color of each box shows the color of the bond. The color of the text is the default dominant spirit.

There you go! That basically covers everything you could possibly need to know about the zodiac spirits! Whom you won’t be seeing until like Act 3, but okay, you do your thing and I’ll do mine.