#NOW THAT ITS CANON HE'S NYARLATHOTEP

[crowsgrudge]

kayne: what kind of great old one calls himself fucking john

john:

[blacknedsoul-blog]

I think the Deans are fucking Lovecraftian gods

If you're a regular reader of my nonsense, you may have noticed that on more than one occasion I've referred to the Deans as "Nyarlathotep Tumblrsexymen": no, I didn't have a stroke on the keyboard, this is a reference to an entity that appears in the stories of Howard Phillip Lovecraft. A writer who is widely known because there were even people who thought that the Necronomicon, a fictional text part of his work, actually existed (and because he was such a recalcitrant racist that it has become a meme about how extremely racist he was).

And since I'm still going through my pile of papers on Gothic fiction, let me take a moment to talk about Lovecraft's work, why I have reason to believe that the Deans have something in common with these creatures, and what that might mean for the development of Nevermore.

A Little About Lovecraft's Gods

To understand a little bit about the kind of creatures we are talking about, I have to stop at a brief (seriously brief) description of cosmic horror: This is a type of horror that takes elements from the scientific publications of the time (which makes it close to science fiction) to give it verisimilitude, it has at its core a deep nihilism, the breaking of scientific canons, the fragility of the human mind and societies contrasted with the vastness of the universe, an enormous fear of "the unknown" for the white man (fed by his racist paranoia), and seasoned with tentacles and creatures that remind us of sea creatures, because Lovecraft had an enormous fear of the sea.

The gods in these stories represent, on a symbolic level, the vastness of the universe, the terror of the unknown, and the fragility of the human mind: they are entities older than time itself, contact with them tends to shatter the mind, and humanity must be very, very grateful that most of them are locked away or incapacitated in some way. Also, the way to access them is through very specific rituals that have been lost over time, so thankfully they're not very easy to contact either.

Similarities with the Deans

Let's start with the most obvious: the Deans, like the Lovecraftian gods, seem to operate in their own plane of existence, beyond what humans understand as "life" and "death": Nevermore is a kind of limbo, but we know, thanks to the Raven, that these guys came from another place and had enough power to kick the crap out of psychopomps without any problem.

However, just like Lovecraft's gods, these enormous powers don't make them able to do whatever they want; as I said, these entities are usually locked up or incapacitated in some way and can only have contact with humans under certain circumstances (like being summoned in rituals), and getting out of their prisons usually requires vague events like astral alignments that are completely out of their control.

The Deans, like Lovecraft's gods, seem to be subject to rules that are above them, and while they can bend them a bit to achieve their goals, it's not like they can do much about it.

Another thing they have in common with Lovecraft's gods is the ability to create servants that function as extensions of them to fulfill their designs. There are many creatures that follow this line in the stories that speak of The Myths, but the best known are the Shoggoth that appear in the novel At the Mountains of Madness: artificial beings created by the Old Ones to rule the Earth, described as amphibious, amorphous masses similar to amoebas.

Although the Deans prefer their minions in the form of animated dolls. I suspect this decision is based on the story The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffman. I have no proof, but no doubt.

Now for the joke that brings this essay to life: the creature in Lovecraft's universe that most resembles the Deans is a being called Nyarlathotep. This creature belongs to the category of "Other Gods" (not the old ones like Cthulhu) and gets very nice nicknames like "Crawling Chaos".

Nyarlathotep is a being who enjoys causing chaos, death and madness wherever they go. They can communicate with humans, which they use to psychologically torture them and make them lose their minds. Something they seem to enjoy quite a bit. In the same way that the Deans view this sadistic battle royale, they have set up a fun game.

Then there is the ability to manipulate and alter the human mind, which is called into question in stories like Nyarlathotep and The Rats in the Walls (where it is apparently Nyarlathotep who messes with the protagonist's mind so that he tries to kill his friend).

This is something we've seen manifest in Nevermore in two different ways: the ability to trigger or unlock memories.

And the ability to change them. While we can't know if what was shown to Annabel is 100% real, we do know that showing her the end of her life caused a permanent change in the way she retrieves her memories: from the end backwards. If this memory is somehow altered, we also know that the Deans are capable of photoshopping people's memories.

Finally, Nyarlathotep has the ability to shape-shift, which allows them to appear as humanoids in several stories, such as The Oniric Quest of the Unknown Kadath or Dreams in the Witch's House. His human form is considered "unnatural", "strange" and "disturbing" by those who see it (remember that Lovecraft was extremely racist, so he always presents himself as a black man). As a pharaoh in the Randolph Carter cycle and as a charcoal humanoid figure in the second story cited).

Here, the human form of whatever the Deans are is also quite atypical: not only are they ridiculously tall (7 feet), they have heterochromia with a white-colored eye (which I would venture to say may be a reference to the cataract eye mentioned in the story "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe), and their synchronized movements are amusing on paper, but possibly strange to look at for the characters.

Otherwise, there are two other entities in Lovecraft's universe whose descriptions can be loosely associated with the Deans: Yogg-Sothoth and Azathoth. Both are beings of dual nature.

The former is an entity associated with omniscience and appears in stories such as The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Dunwich Horror. and is described as "the key and the door".

Azathoth represents omnipotence, is the center of the universe, and is described as "the beginning and the end" or "the alpha and the omega.

Implications for the comic

The fact that the Deans have elements in common with Nyarlathotep brings up an interesting point: although Nyarlathotep has far greater freedom than other beings, they is a servant of Azathoth. In other words, them powers are subservient to a more powerful being whose plans they must follow. They may amuse themselves in the process, but they is still essentially a butler.

On the other hand, the Azathoth connection might be vague, since this creature is a lobotomized god, so he can't do much. But if the reference is to Yogg-Sothoth, it gets a little more interesting, because that entity is the one who is supposed to release the original gods when the time is right.

And I don't know about you, but these references have me wondering if the Deans are working for something much more messed up than they are, or if they're using the souls of the students to bring back something much more sinister.

[katsona-the-katsequel]

Background Events: Persona Experimentation

Unethical experimentation on Persona Users has been happening since the beginning. But how has it evolved until now?

Warning: Some speculation will be involved.

TW: Human Experimentation

The Beginning

We don't have an exact date for when experiments related to Personas and the Collective Unconscious began. Phil and Nyarly's bet had been going for some time by the time IF took place. However, if we had to place a true beginning to the experiments, we would have to go with Stephen and the Demon Summoning Program. Along with Kyouji Kuzunoha, he's the only SMT character who's also canon to Persona. Makes sense, considering his weird transcendent nature. The tale may vary between franchises, but the Persona version goes like this:

By unknown means, Stephen managed to create the Terminal System to travel through computer networks. Since he's in a wheelchair in IF, then this Stephen also managed to connect to the Expanse (located in the Collective Unconscious) with the Terminal System. Since he didn't have a way to communicate with the demon who crossed and no Persona to defend himself, Stephen was was attacked and subsequentaly crippled. All of this had to have happened before 1996 for the timeline to make sense (Side Note: This also tells a lot about Stephen, since the incident had the perfect conditions for an Awakening).

The incident led Stephen to create the Demon Summoning Program, probably for personal use, since there was no upcoming war to prepare to (that Stephen could have known of). For some unknown reason, Stephen chose to upload the only copies of the program in the computers of Karukozaka High School. Was he an alumni? Did Stephen realize teens had more probability of connecting with the Expanse? Were Karu High's computers just that good? Who knows. Only Hazama and Tamaki took the program serious enough to use it, even if it was against each other. But that's a story for another time.

Like St. Hermelin would in a few months, Karu High briefly made the news before the entire incident was forgotten. That is highly suspicious on itself. My assumption is that there truly were some experimentation going on before this, amd they made sure to silence the press and make sure the students didn't snitch. Since Tamaki managed to hide among the student population as another victim (probably with Stephen's help), they never questioned her on her abilities nor disappeared her.

But who are they? Well...

SEBEC

The first formal organization seeking to gain a foothold in the Collective Unconscious was the Japanese branch of SEBEC, leadered by Takahisa Kandori. Their story goes like this:

When Kandori took over as head branch of SEBEC, they began to undertake the creation of a device capable of transporting matter from one place to another. Kind of like a portal. This had the main objective of helping to lower freight costs of imports and exports. Maybe even erasing them entirely. Key contributors were Setsuko Sonomura (an engineering specialist) and Dr. Nicholai (a scientist). Kandori kept the project so under wraps that those involved basically lived in the installations. Together they created the Dimension Variable Accelerator System, or DEVA System. However, they also pulled a Backrooms and accidentally connected to the Collective Unconscious.

It is probably at this point that Kandori awoke to his Persona, which was hijacked by the real Nyarlathotep. And thus, Kandori became a puppet in The Great Bet while believing he was achieving world domination or something like that. "But, Kati," I can hear you saying, "all of that was about the Collective Unconscious. Aside from Kandori, there were no Persona Users working with SEBEC".

Oh? OH? So quickly you forget about him?

Takeda. The man, the myth, the barely remembered NPC. All we know about him is that he is Kandori's right-hand man, the head of security at SEBEC and a Persona User. We don't even know what his Persona is, only that its couldn't handle the combined forces of the St. Hermelin students. His existence does imply something deeper: SEBEC is already employing Persona Users to their cause. They probably didn't know much about the phenomena (understandable, since they had just finished the DEVA System) and didn't have a definitive way of figuring out who could be a User and who couldn't. For all they knew this could be random. And so, a not-so-stellar security guard rose to become the second-hand man of the main antagonist. Just because he had the same power as him.

As we know, Kandori and SEBEC failed. But what was the fate of the staff that worked on the DEVA System? What about the little knowledge of the Collective Unconscious they had?

New World Order

Due to Nyarly's meddling, the NWO was founded in 1979 after they found Kiyotada Sumaru's head. They might have had supernatural advice from an ancient head and the backup of one of the most powerful beings in the Persona Universe, but no real Persona Users. Not one of those people had their shit together. The closest thing they had was Chizuru Ishigami, who was a sorcerer (most probable given true power by the Rumor Curse). When the time was right, we can assume Nyarly guided them to the remnants of Kandori's fuck up. The NWO revived Kandori and began their recruitment of the now-lost scientists and inventors. The NWO gave more freedom to their researchers than SEBEC did, which eventually led to the beginning of true human experimentation.

We don't see the worst of it unless you play Tatsuya's Scenario, where the hints they leave us are enough to call for a second Doctors' Trial.

Yikes. And this was only one known experiment.

Like SEBEC before them, the NWO also fell. But they weren't the only ones running supernatural and unethical experiments in 1999.

Kirijo Group

With the creation of the Dark Hour, demons shadows weren't only a danger of the Collective Unconscious anymore, at least, as far as the Kirijo Group knew. Now those in the know had to watch themselves every night to avoid being attacked by them. They couldn't always rely on the perfected version of the Anti-Shadow Suppression Weapons. That must have been the moment when they began to hear rumors of supernatural events in Sumaru City, which led them to the crumbling NWO.

As it turns out, the entire Death Incident a couple of months ago left a huge vacancy for their supernatural research division. And these guys seem like they have fresh ideas that might just solve their self-created problem! A secret scramble must have taken place where the Nanjo and Kirijo Groups tried to covet all the info and personnel that had anything to do with the NWO. Those who weren't important enough to know the truth behind Kiyotada Sumaru's head and their self-proclaimed high-class greatness could have become the precursors of the Conspiracy.

And so, the Kirijo Group now had better scientists, inventors and researchers than before, and more willing to dab on unethical territory. With the need for defense, the former NWO scientists must have suggested they try to create their own Persona Users, like the ones who kept barging into their labs back in Sumaru. Thing is, no one there knew how a Persona User came to be. They did seem to have the power to control a shadow to do their bidding... maybe all they had to do was link (whatever that meant) a human with a shadow. The survivors of these experiments would become bodyguards for the Kirijo Group's excursions to Tartarus. No one would last long, though.

Skip a couple of years and the unexpected happened:

A natural Persona Awakening.

Note was taken of the factors that had to do with the event: the User was a child and she had been in a highly stressful situation. This is how the Kirijo Group rounded up the 100 children they would experiment on to create Artificial Persona Users. All of them dying except for three: Takaya Sakaki, Jin Shirato and Chidori Yoshino (and Sho Minazuki). This violation to the Nuremberg Code probably fell to the side when Mitsuru found and recruited two natural Persona Users on her own. Nothing like flushing dozens of children's lives down the toilet.

We must remember that the Kirijo Group didn't know everything about Personas, and so believed that the stressful situation with a dash of fear of death was necessary every time the User wanted fo summon their Persona. And so Evokers were created. Better not think of the trial and error that led to those inventions. Nor the one that helped create Persona Suppressants.

Who cares if three failed lab rats ran away? Now the Kirijo Group had true Persona Users with them.

A lot happened after that, but that is a story for another day. What about the hypothetical precursors to the Conspiracy formed from the high-profile members of the NWO? The ones that fell through the cracks during the power vacuum?

The Antisocial Force

For once, this wasn't Nyarly's fault. The basic rich bitches would have remained basic rich bitches if it wasn't for Yaldabaoth. The creation of the Shadow Operatives and the less restrictive hold on Kirijo Group employees probably made all that Persona and Collective Unconscious experimentation more of an open secret in the science community. And like hypnosis, this is one secret that most didn't believe until they witnessed it themselves. Not all were skepticals, and those interested were recruited by Masayoshi Shido for the creation of the Antisocial Force.

They would be the new oppressive entity in this area, suppressing information and giving stitches to snitches. This wouldn't stop "Cognitice Psience" from becoming an increasingly popular field. Who knows what kind of experiments happened in and out of the Antisocial Force. They couldn't have been the only ones.

If there is one thing the new Kirijo Group managed to contain, was the knowledge of the creation of Persona Users. The Antisocial Force didn't even have the research from the original NWO scientists that would help them create Artificial Users. Yaldy had to put an already-Awakened Goro Akechi in Shido's path for them to have a User. And even with an actual User, they couldn't replicate the circumstances that could have helped create more. I doubt Akechi was very helpful with that, though. Can't have any potential substitutes for his job.

Nah, the Antisocial Force's forte would never be Persona Users, but rather humanity's cognition.

So, what was the order of events?

Stephen created the Terminal System and began working on the Demon Summoning Program.

SEBEC began working on the DEVA System.

Stephen completed the Demon Summoning Program.

SEBEC finished the DEVA System and, after Kandori's Awakening, began to recruit Persona Users (at least one other than Kandori).

After SEBEC's fall, the New World Order recruited the staff that worked in the DEVA System.

The NWO began to experiment with demons and humans.

The Kirijo Group hired all the scientists and inventors from the NWO.

The Kirijo Group began to create Artificial Persona Users.

After Mitsuru's Awakening, the Kirijo Group focused on children experimentation.

The Antisocial Force began to recruit experts in cognitive psience for personal experiments.

[inspectorlyfra]

HI MECHS FANS! THIS IS A POST ABOUT TBI AND LOVECRAFTIAN MYTH AFTER A FANWIKI RABBIT HOLE!

i was always like, kinda baffled at the fact that the bifrost is associated with yog-sothoth, when the biggest lovecraft thing, color out of space, is its own entity entirely? WELL yog-sothoth IS canonically described as a "congeries [jumble] of iridescent spheres" so i guess! it makes sense!

you could also argue that the color out of space is ALSO associated with the bifrost, ie the eggs from the meteor being what hatched into the squamous things that swarm the train

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE OUTER GODS YOU SHOULD INCLUDE IN TBI THINGS

Daoloth, the render of the veils, is an amorphous metal god that, among other things, can be invoked to see things as they really are (under the assumption that all humans view things through a veil to retain their sanity). Which sounds a LOT like Loki's "My eyes now clear" moment. Let Loki be Daoloth's pursedog.

Nyarlathotep!! As the most human of the outer gods, and as the one who enacts their will, he spends the most time around humans. He also prefers spreading madness over just straight up killing people, so you could tie him to the black box (spreading madness and leaving one survivor)! If you know that in the Norse myth Baldur's death was possibly planned by Odin, you could also say that Nyarlathotep influenced Baldur, thus setting up the eventual Bifrost Incident.

Tru'Nembra isn't very involved, but he is the unsentient flute that lulls Azathoth to sleep. Daemon flute that keeps it dreaming, etc.

AND! AND! The All-mother is not just a genderbend of Odin's All-Father status in myth. It's a title belonging to Shub-Niggurath, also known as "the black goat with a thousand young". She's described as "An enormous mass which extrudes black tentacles, slime-dripping mouths, and short, writhing goat legs." AND SHE IS YOG-SOTHOTH'S MATE! She also continuously spits forth these things called "dark young" which are tentacles and hoofs in the shape and size of a tree. Fucked up.

IN SHORT! USE MORE LOVECRAFT IN YOUR TBI WORKS!!!!!!!! DO IT!

[truebluewhocanoe]

The True Blue You- Author Commentary

Author Notes

Hi! This is the extended Author’s Notes for my fic “The True Blue You”, which you should definitely read BEFORE reading this post.

I like the Dr Nyarlathotep niche of Doctor Who fandom a lot. I want more Dr Nyarlathotep content (that isn’t porn). I figured a good way to promote that would be to write out my own thoughts on one of my Dr Nyarlathotep works and talk about how it came together. This is that! Most of this is going to be me talking about particular passages from the fic, the thought that went into them, and the references to other stuff that I’ve snuck in. ✨Let’s begin✨

Commentary

Hence his search for the Zero Room. Wherever he left it. So that he can unravel the extradimensional parts of himself into three-dimensional space and check that everything is in order.

Finding a good word for the Doctor letting out all their Nyarly was hard but I eventually settled on “unravel” and “unfurl”, mainly for the fabric & knitting connotations, because Looms. Aw yeah.

First comes the extraspatial limbs, then the temporal ones. His temporal tendrils and hooks hang in the air around him; vestigial eyes, the crystallised irises of his past bodies, dot his face. He snags a hook on one of his sleeves; he can taste its timeline, senses tracing the thread’s creation and transformation into a garment, tears and stains and cleanings. He deftly unhooks it, then takes a closer look at the sleeve with his fifth set of eyes. Microwave reflections let him peek into the molecular structure. 

First things first: this fic is, as is probably quite obvious to anyone familiar with the Dr Nyarlathotep tag, inspired by “In The Holding Tank I Built For Myself”, which I consider to be more or less the definitive work of this fandom niche. One of the many things I took from Holding Tank and incorporated into my own Dr Nyarlathotep headcanons is the idea that bits of the Doctor’s old bodies get repurposed into their extradimensional body. One of the lines of Holding Tank that stuck out to me the most was the Fifth Doctor’s eyes looking back up at the Doctor- which ends up being pivotal to this fic.

Second: I never actually explain how the Doctor’s clothes adjust to him going Nyarly. I’m not going to explain here, either.

He stretches his wings one set at a time, starting with the small, webbed ones at the base of his primary spine all the way up to the feathered vortex-gliders that span the width of the room when fully outstretched. (And, it should be noted, the Zero Room is much larger than it appears.)

This was inspired by a very old tumblr post (which I can’t find now!!!) headcanoning Time Lords are being, essentially, Time Vortex dragons. The implication is that Time Lords can, in fact, fly around in the vortex under their own power, but use TARDISes to do so the same way we use ships to cross the ocean instead of swimming it. I love this concept and had to weave it in to my personal Nyarly canon.

His hair unspools from short blond curls into nigh-Samsonian locks, closer to fibre-optic cables than keratin follicles. A crown of hard-photon horns sorts the strands, with ivory halos at regular intervals down the length to keep the bundles from separating. He leaves the ends in mind-space where they loop around the TARDIS's psychic docks. He runs his aft right hands through the hairs, untangling knots with crystal-jointed fingers.

I want to say that the Doctor getting extra long glowy anime hair was inspired by Sixie going super saiyan in the PDA The Quantum Archangel and the relevant trope from Dragonball Z, but this section was written within a couple days of the trailer for Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - Future Redeemed coming out, in which another favorite blond character of mine is revealed to have grown out his hair really long, so that’s probably where I actually got the idea from.

Time Lords plugging their hair into their TARDISes to communicate psychically was probably subconsciously inspired by Avatar (the blue people one, not The Last Airbender.)

“Crystal joints” is a phrase I use in another Dr Nyarlathotep fic of mine, A Black Fire Burning, which you could definitely say was the prototype for this fic.

Yes, the Doctor has both halos and horns, and yes, they are used for cable management. Deal with it.

Letting all of himself out is like taking off a corset after a long night.

I’ll let you decide which Doctor out of the First through Fifth has worn a corset. (My money’s on Three.)

She can’t sleep.

You might find some parallels between this fic and my last Who fic, After the Archangel, which also consists of a companion hashing things out with a Doctor after being unable to sleep due to a traumatizing adventure. I guess I have a type.

Which leads her back to the elephant in the room. The Doctor wasn’t like this when she first met her. The Doctor she’d met had been open and amiable and polite. And then he died and left her with someone she didn’t understand. Someone who apparently was not alright in the head after having come back to life, who is supposedly fine now but not the same as the way he was before.

And so we reach the elephant in the room that is this fic: I do not like that Big Finish tried to squeeze in more adventures with the Fifth Doctor and Peri between Planet of Fire and Caves of Androzani. It ruins all the appeal of their dynamic (not to mention the latter episode, one of the most beloved in all of Classic Who) and just isn’t necessary. So yeah, those episodes are not canon to this fic, and in fact you could say that the conflict of this story is in protest of their existence.

This fic hinges on the fact that Peri still would’ve had a bumpy go of things with the Fifth Doctor, because he also wasn’t a very pleasant guy to most of his companions (no shade, that’s just how 80s Who went), and also ran into a ton of extremely horrible situations! Peri’s successful companionship with the Doctor comes in spite of those facts. 

Writing the dynamic (and specifically, power dynamic) between Peri and the Doctor is a very tricky wire to walk but I think I did okay, in the end. The Sixth Doctor and Peri boxset by Big Finish ends on a note of the Doctor and Peri accepting that their life together probably isn’t very sane or healthy, but they do it anyways because they enjoy it. That’s the perspective I was trying to convey here. But that’s jumping the gun a little- let’s go back to the fic.

She looks at it, a great big thorny mass, as if M.C. Escher had knitted a scarf out of barbed wire. Then, without her even blinking, the thing bends, changing without changing, the duck’s head into a rabbit’s, and she sees a great spider’s web, or perhaps anemone, a thing of tendrils and gravity-defying lines. 

The ‘thorny mass’ is inspired by a certain alien structure in the book Blindsight by Peter Watts. I finished reading it right around when I started writing this fic and really wanted to sneak in something from it, mainly because it’s a great sci-fi horror book (as much as describing it as such is an injustice to all it is.) The “duck’s head into a rabbit’s” is a reference to the duck-rabbit illusion, which is also utilized in Blindsight. (Seriously, even referencing that book in my own work is a grave act of authorial hubris. I am not worthy!)

Then, something catches her attention, a blip on the radar of her millennia-made pattern-matching instincts, a slap of color and pattern that can’t be right, must be a trick of the light, a name in the static, Virgin Mary in the burnt toast. 

Invoking pareidolia here.

like the figurehead on the bow of a great ship

This was one of the central mental images I had going into this fic.

Humans consider the smooth eversion of a sphere, the simplest three-dimensional object, to be a form of paradox

“Smooth eversion of a sphere” means turning it inside out without breaking the rules of topology, as you might have seen explained in this perennially recommended YouTube video.

but his larboard greater forewing

Larboard is an outdated nautical term for “the left of the ship”, which was replaced by “port” due to how similar to “starboard” is sounded. Including it here is a reference to its infamous use in a certain fight in Final Fantasy XIV. I knew I wanted to use “larboard” to describe something of the Doctor’s Nyarlyness, which inspired the use of the similarly nautical “aft” earlier in the fic.

From seemingly random places across his body, purple-gold strands of what looks like stardust reach outwards, pulled taut clinging to thin air.

Inspired by, of all things, Origin Forme Giratina, as elucidated in this tumblr post.

She can’t make out his legs, the lower half of his body caught in a mirage with the posture of Schrodinger’s indecisive cat.

Of course, my headcanon for Sixie’s Nyarlathotep form is a bit more than “eldritch cat”, but I still wanted to work something feline in. The Doctor’s form seeming to be multiple things at once in a quantum sort of way was inspired by they'll turn me in your arms, lady by @lurking-latinist.

She can make out his face. It's almost the same, save for the spots that shine like jewels dotting it in two parallel lines like tear-trails beneath his eyes.

Knowing that the topmost pair of "jewels" is the Fifth Doctor's eyes, the mentioned “dozen" implies that every regeneration adds another pair, bumping the rest further down. A Time Lord on their last regeneration probably has eyes down to their collarbones!

Hold on, his arm shouldn't be bending that far. Counts the fingers on each hand- six. Wait, that’s not right.

I originally planned a bit where the Doctor held up all his fingers when checking that Peri was OK, only for her to count more than ten of them, but it didn't really work logistically (moved the Doctor checking Peri from the hallway to her room) or tonally (not the right place for humor.)

aquamarine nodules

I solemnly vow to never refer to the Fifth Doctor's eyes as "aquamarine nodules" ever again.

Hey, at least I didn’t call them "orbs"

“Um, Zee- Zed, sorry, Y, X, W, U, no, I mean V, then U, T, S, Q- is it Q?”

[...]

“Um, I was a kid playing in the backyard and a ladybug landed on my hand,” she manages to spit out, “And my mom told me about how they’re helpful because they eat other bugs.”

The Doctor sticks out an index finger, pointing up. “Follow my finger with your eyes and tell me more about ladybirds.”

“Lady- oh, right.

Emphasizing the emotional distance between two characters by highlighting their linguistic differences.

She couldn't quite make out what it was he was expecting her to say, so instead she looks a bit higher, at the strangely familiar blue… things… on his face.

Can you tell that I REALLY didn't want to call them orbs?

"I'm afraid I can't answer that, Peri," he responds, and she expects him to leave it at that but he continues, "Wanderlust is a powerful thing, not to mention its cousin, curiosity. I can only speak from my own experiences, but I find the more painful parts of the universe to spur me further onwards. Both to find the brighter spots, and to help where I can."

[...]

"In all my experience with your kind, Peri, I've found that no one is ever 'just' something. You're much, much more than that, Perpugilliam Brown."

Writing TV!Sixth Doctor is hard. Really hard. It’s hard to pull something consistent out of a character that was being actively sabotaged by the writers. So if it seems like EU!Sixth Doctor just shows up out of nowhere once we switch to Peri’s last POV section: sorry! I tried my best to communicate how unsure the Doctor is of where he takes this conversation. He’s more or less defaulting to mirroring what Peri throws at him… right when she takes a leap of faith and opens up to him. This is, more or less, supposed to be the moment in Sixie’s life where he realizes the value of not being so damn prickly all the time. He comes out of this story kind, if not quite wise to human nature yet. He’ll get there!

He pauses, and reaches up to feel his face. Back to normal. 

An idea occurred to me to imply that some remnant of the Fifth Doctor kept the eyes out in a really weird self-wingman tactic, but I don't like the implication that the past incarnations are separate consciousnesses, so I didn't go through with it

It's at that moment the Doctor realizes that Peri is, for all intents and purposes, more accepting of his being a polydimensional monstrosity with vestigial bits of his own corpses repurposed as sensory organs, than she is of his fashion sense.

“Monstrous” being the word that the Doctor mouthed earlier to complete Peri’s sentence. The biggest difference between this fic and the aforementioned Holding Tank is that the Sixth Doctor lacks the self-hatred the Doctor has regarding his Nyarlyness in that fic (and that the Fifth Doctor is implied to have in this one.) That’s TV!Six’s pride coming in to play. But as we see after Peri sees him, he’s got some frustrations with the fact that his full existence is inherently dangerous to other species. At some point during his conversation with Peri, it does occur to him that she very easily could have left the TARDIS over this, hence his final words to her before bidding her goodnight.

Closing Thoughts

Overall, my goals for this fic were: 1. Believably write the Doctor and Peri coming to an understanding after Season 22 that doesn’t just full-on retcon the shitty writing (yes, a lot of their interactions that season are just poorly written.) and 2. Write a long Dr Nyarlathotep fic that doesn’t resort to just making the Sixth Doctor an eldritch cat AND doesn’t use the word “tentacle” at any point, because that’s not what I’m about. I personally think I met both those goals, so I’m quite proud! Hopefully it produced a fun read. And thank you for reading this full-on author commentary!

[dr-dendritic-trees]

Fictional Despots Rated by How Much I Would Trust Them With Pandemic Preparedness

Because my brain decided to treat me to an experience so now you get one too.

Let's be clear, the despotic-ness and general badness of these people is in no way in question. This list is 90% villains. The question is not are they evil, its, how effective would their evil pandemic plan be:

The Emperor Mage, Ozorne Tasikhe: 10/10, he's organized, he has a big university experienced with epidemic response, that he's worked in. What more could you want from a villain.

Duke Roger of Conte: 6/10. He was trained in the same place Ozorne was, but he's also canonically, created epidemics for fun and profit, so I don't trust him.

The Dane Twins, Astrid and Athos: 8/10. They're efficient, and they're already trying to fix White London (just, in a villainous way). I take off points because I don't think they understand germ theory.

Osaron: 0/10. This character is COVID-19's inner monologue. No Thanks.

Prime Minister of the UK, The Black Pharaoh, Nyarlathotep: 7/10. He's a very organized villain, and he's got a vested interest in keeping the population up. But he has such... unusual ideas about 'helping' that I'm not sure I trust him (I would trust Dr. Angleton but we can't have nice things in this series).

Firelord Ozai: 2/10. This man is a dipshit. He can't fix problems that can't be fixed by throwing a fireball at them.

The Bone Shard Emperor Sukai: 2/10, he goes about making people sick to run his dumb army.

Asmodeus, Head of House Hawthorn: 7/10. Inside Hawthorn he'd probably score, like, 12/10. He's got medical training, he's good at his job and his (only) redeeming feature is that he's obsessively loyal. He... would probably have to be talked out of letting the rest of Paris rot by Thuan; but I have faith in Thuan.

Honourable Mention; The King In Red, Kopil: Honourable mention only because he isn't a villain character (although he is quite despotic) But I can't leave him out because I think Gay Capitalism Skeleton Grandpa needs more attention. 10/10. He has the power, the knowledge and the technology.

I will give notes on other villains as I think of them.

[the-antiapocalyptic-man]

Alright, she’s been mentioned a lot but not shown up yet, the cornerstone of the whole canon’s myth arc: Diana of Themyscira aka Diana Prince aka The Wonder Woman from Paradise Island. Buckle in, bc she’s kinda the key to the whole thing.

Born in 1900 on Themyscira to Queen Hippolyta*, Diana was among the group known as “Century Babies” alongside other future luminaries like Jenny Mei Sparks, Elijah Snow, Samuel Zhao, Alan Scott, and others. Blessed by Amazon patron deity Ares, War’s truce with the warrior women when come to a crashing end when he broke with the isolationist Greco-Cosmic pantheon and re-entered the world to begin one of his greatest projects: The Great War, quickly consuming Europe in an attempt at apocalyptic bloodshed to fuel his own power and incarnate as an immortal god-king (yikes, right?)

Ferried from her island home at the age of 14 by American Col. Stephen Trevor Sr. (*quick note I feel compelled to add since leaving it unstated could cause issues, I’ve split Steve into two characters--Steve Jr fights in WWII, natch--but obvs there’s no romantic relationship whatsoever between Diana and Steve Sr.), Diana entered the conflict as “America’s Wonder Girl” a so-called “World Wonder” who cut through Central Power forces, remember even decades later by German soldiers as an angel of death. Four years of almost uninterrupted violence and death ended with Diana’s murder of Ares in his guise as a British MP and her disappearance from public life.

It wouldn’t be until October of 1941 that Diana would return, now known as the “Wonder Woman” and participate in the action of WWII. Inspired by her WWI compatriots, Diana made the pitch to the US Government to create a league of other empowered individuals to bring about a swift end to the war and spurn on an untold brand of peace in its wake. Diana’s request was...summarily denied. It was too expensive, the required individuals secretive and difficult to locate, and idea of a group of comparable power to Diana’s own scared elected officials.

Balking at the cowardice of these leaders of Man’s World and unsuccessful with other governments, Diana went about seeking out extraordinary individuals with a taste for justice on her own. In short order, the loose collective of fellow wonders was formed, based in Coney Island and referring to themselves as The Justice Society of America. While the war raged on, the JSA fought their own war against the supernatural horrors and superhuman threats awoken by Nazi occultism and the lingering influence of Ares’ involvement in the previous World War.

It was around this time that Diana became involved with Etta Candy and the Holiday Girls, as well as Col. Steve Trevor Jr., son of the man who had brought here to the shores of Europe so long ago. Alongside these allies, Diana was introduced to one of her greatest foes and a threat to the very fabric of her reality: the lovecraftian gangster-actor known only as Johnny Sorrow. A faceless Nyarlathotep in a crimson suit claiming to be the anointed archangel of an insane alien god called The King of Tears. Allegedly a fellow century baby, Sorrow’s influence would push the horror of the twentieth century to such stark ends that Diana would retreat from public life again in the wake of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

No one would hear from Wonder Woman again for decades as “Wonder” itself fell out of common usage to denote superhumans in popular lexicon, HUAC would finally dismantle the JSA, groups like Challengers of the Unknown, the Sea Devils, Planetary, S.T.O.R.M. and early iterations of Task Force X and the Secret Six would take their place in navigating humanity’s place in a larger universe of magic and technology few of them could even begin to understand.

It was during this lost period that Diana could advantage of Themyscira’s hyper-advanced technology and magic to explore beyond Man’s World and into space, time, and the multiversal Bleed. Later referred to by fellow Amazons and heroes as her “space pirate” phase, Diana’s time exploring the Bleed would be one of the earliest modern interactions with beings like the New Gods and the Over-Monitors, as well the King of Tears’ wider pantheon such as The Empty Hand, the Cosmic Brainiac, and the Lantern-Maker Volthoom.

It was only during the appearance of Starro the Conqueror in Corto Maltese that Diana would not only reappear, but revive her dream of a league of heroes as she fought alongside heroes like Lantern Abin Sur, Atlanna of Atlantis, a young American scientist called “The Flash” and Bronze Wraith (Calvin Swanwick). While Sur and Atlanna wouldn’t team-up with the group again, their successors John Stewart and the Aquaman would answer Diana’s next call to battle as the Justice League.

*Jason, Diana’s twin brother, does exist in this version, just not as her brother bc tbh fuck that. He’ll show up down the line as Donna’s twin instead...and as the headverse’s Lord Chaos.

[azazelsconfessional]

((so i was gonna open up my askbox again but I got distracted doing this and watching streams i think idr what i did the past few hours, buuut there's something I need to cover first, especially since there are so many new people around! Hello! Especially since so many of you are playing OCs/MCs.

Don't worry, it's a tip to hopefully help you along! It may get a little long, especially as I try and provide examples. . .but hopefully it'll help.

I'm gonna talk a lot about OCs but this applies to canon characters too a bit. It certainly helps.

Tl;dr, you should have a character profile page.

(also remember that tumblr mobile doesn't really have direct access to Pages made with the Pages function on desktop, so you'll have to link them manually in your pinned or description or host them on another site(I used Google Docs in the apst) or in a regular post(this makes it very easy to lose as a forewarning) for maximum accessibility!)

(rules pages are also really really handy if you have alot of resteictions.)

So, in general, OCs have a bit of a lower reception rate in rp. Idk if that'll be the case here with MCs because they're, well, the main character. Housamo is also a series that lends itself well to OCs pretty well, especially non-human ones, but I figured I'd warn for that.

BUT. That doesn't mean you shouldn't play an OC! It just means there are things you need to keep in mind!

Think of all of the OCs you've seen--you all seem to be fun and wonderful people, and your characters are surely interesting. But. . .if you don't tell anybody about them, nobody will know what's going on or where to start, which makes asking questions a little hard, right? That's easier to work around with MC characters--we've played the game, we know the story, we know the characters, so we can figure out questions fairly easily based on that alone and go from there.

But with other OCs, especially those that don't represent charactera from mythology or fiction like many other characters in housamo do, there's like. Nowhere to start. We may see a face or some dialogue, but otherwise we don't have a frame of reference.

That's where a profile comes in!

Azazel-mun, I don't want to share all of the info about my character at once!

What if I don't know everything about my OC yet and want to figure it out along thw way?

The profile doesn't have to be super detailed! At most it shoule include things like the character's name and age and probably things like their location, profession, grade in school or place of work, etc., and anything you'd notice on the surface like their apperance. It's never a bad thing to include a description of their personality too, or a small section about their history/background. Little things that even you should probably know, too.

You can also section your profile off a bit into things like "surface info," "meta info," "things you could easily figure out about them," etc. That way, no one can spoil themself. Making lists like this can help you think these things through if you haven't already as well.

Let's use Azazel, a character that you probably know already, as an example here. I don't have a profile set

Name: Azazel

Species: Fallen Angel; Capra Therian - an anthropomorphic Goat (?)

Gender(pronouns): Male(he/him)

Age: difficult to calculate; several thousand years old?

Apperance age: hard to say, he's not human. Adult.

Origins: banished from his home world of Eden, has been in the human world for several thousand years

Profession: Priest of dubious denomination, most likely Catholic or Protestant; teacher at Daikanyama Academy; de facto head of the Missionaries Non-Profit charity Organization; supervisor of the Aoyama Missionaries

Role & Rule: Watcher; Revelation - allows him to see anything within the territory of the Aoyama Missionaries and anywhere the pages of his Artifact see

Apperance: Azazel is a 5'10"(180cm) tall, anthropomorphic goat of ambiguous breed, with fawn fur all over his body and lighter fur on his head and around his neck. He has brown, riged horns which curve out and back. Though his eyes are often closed, when opened they're red. He always carried around a leather bound bible with an eye on the cover, and is never seen without several chains on his person, although only the one(s) around his neck can be seen unless he's undressed.

He wears a black priest's cassock with a maroon sash and a capelet of the same color, with the same eye as on his bible on the shoulders of the cape, and brown dress shoes. The front of the robe is always open to expose his bare chest and the chains beneath.

Personality: Azazel is kind and doting, very fitting of both a teacher and priest, although his openly flirtatious, lustful, and secretive nature causes others to distrust him. He doesn't mind this at all. He has a strong adoration for humans, and values love in all of its forms more than anything. He's a bit of a passive person, often being unmotivated but working hard regardless, and seems to prefer to watch others and the world go by, although he won't decline most invitations to take part in it. He is always aware of anything that happens within the extensive territory of the Missionaries, and seems to know and see just about everything about anyone he meets, from their surface to their soul. . . .

If you know Azazel, or take note of some of the wording or question marks, you'll note I didn't explain everything(although I may have shared more than you want to.) This is just a bare bones exampe of how I do my profiles--but it can get even more bare!

I'll do two this time, a more vague version of Azazel's, and another that obscures information all together, using the same or a similar format to the above.

Name: Azazel

Species: anthropomorphic goat

Gender(pronouns): male (he/him)

Age: unquestionably an adult

Origins: Eden

Profession: Priest; teacher; head of a charity NPO; member of the Missionaries

Apperance: Horned goatman of slightly above average human height. Light brown fur, blond fur-hair, red eyes. Wears priest robes and a gold chain around his neck and chest. Carries around a bible with an eye on it?

Personality: Kind of eerie, but friendly and affectionate. A little flirtatious, especially towards humans. Seems to know everything about people for some reason?

Compare it to the one before--see how I've left even more things off or left things ambiguous while still sharing what's necessary or surface level? However, it's also not as engaging or as informative as the other one where I gave more information.

As someone who plays him, profiles like this aren't as helpful for me lol since he knows so much about everyone and everything, having a lot of details helps me play my character!

Now, as helpful as this is, this is also a character you probably know. So how about I do this with an OC? Normally I'm extremely detailed in my profiles and such, especially for OCs, sharing headcanons and ideas for relationships between characters. But, again, I'll try and show how you can show some info while leaving some up to people to ask about to later be filled in.

Name: Kezia

Faceclaim/Art Source: [this is where you would put where you get the art for any icons you use--if you draw it yourself, say so; if you use official art from a series, credit the name of the character and the series; if you use picrews, link the specific picrews. DO NOT USE ART YOU HAVE NOT BEEN PERMITTED TO USE. DO NOT STEAL ART. IF YOU CAN'T FIND THE CREDIT, ASK SOMEONE TO HELP YOU, DO NOT JUST SAY THAT IT ISN'T YOURS. DO NOT USE ART YOU HAVE NOT BEEN GIVEN PERMISSION TO USE OR THAT ISN'T FROM A SERIES OF SOME SORT.]

Species: Human

Gender(pronouns): Female (she/her)

Age: mid 20's~early 30's?

Apperance age: older than she looks?

Origins: Tokyo?

Profession: Professor; Witch

Apperance: A fidgety woman who looks older than she is. She looks anxious and confused as often as she looks curious and confident. Wavy light brown hair. Often carries around schoolbooks and is never alone, always with a Rattus Therian and often with a Nyarlathotep.

Personality: seemingly anxious, but curious and exploratative nonetheless. On the awkward side, but can still keep up with the Nyarls that accompany her. Gets into trouble when she gets ahead of herself in exploring and learning about the arcane, but her Rule allows her to disappear easily.

History: Has always been curious about magic and attempted to run through a Gate when they began to open up. Performed a summon and brought a certain transients to Tokyo and recieved her familiar and the magic to use her Rule as a result. Currently teaches at a college. She stumbled into a certain someone while attempting to explore time, and became a fan ever since.

That tells you a fair amount, doesn't it? Even for someone you don't know? It may even raise some questions that you could ask. At the same time, it doesn't tell you that much, and that can be as much of a hindrance for coming up with questions as saying too much can. It's really up to you what's too much and too little. Here's a more detailed version! Some things have been left vague or confusing in such a way that they could be filled in after being revealed through asks and play. That way, people are encouraged to/given ideas of what to ask--and you can still share things in the long run.

Name: Kezia

Faceclaim/Art Source: [N/A]

Species: Human

Gender(pronouns): Female (she/her)

Age: mid 20's~early 30's?

Apperance age: somewhere in her 30's, maybe even a little older

Origins: Tokyo, with some sort of connection to at least one other world

Profession: Professor of [?] at [?] Academy; Witch

Role & Rule: [?] & [?]

Artifact, Summon, Familiar?: Always accompanied by at least one Nyarlathotep and some sort of man-rat? She also carries around a book that's labeled as a Grimoire, but it's rare for someone to be both a summon-user and an Artifact-user. . . .

Apperance: A fidgety older woman wearing a labcoat and a witch's hat. She looks quite stressed and has trouble sitting still. Her ashy brown hair is thin and a little wavy, with some strands of gray. Although she often squints, she doesn't wear glasses. She carries around a lot of books relating to maths and sciences and one labeled 'Grimoire' decorated with arcane symbols from Gehenna and Old Ones. She's always accompanied by at least one Nyarlathotep and a very short, bearded man who can best be described as a brown rat therian with a human-like face. Sometimes there's a normal rat on her person or in her pockets.

Personality: Kezia is a fidgety and anxious magic practitioner. She's very curious about other worlds and has been since the Gates appeared in this Tokyo since she was a child, however she has been pursuing magic before then. She often appears somewhat confused about or fascenated by even her usual surroundings, but, at other times moves through the world with confidence even in unfamiliar territory. She also likes rats and other rodents, and as such will often avoid felines and birds of prey. She has a tendency to disappear, seeming to walk through walls despite assuredly being alive.

She's a little bit awkward with people, but somehow keeps up with Nyarlathoteps nonetheless. She's a good teacher, once she figures out how to explain things in ways others can understand easily, but can be a bit difficult to follow and flighty up until then. Aware of this, she's rather patient, if a little down on herself at times. However, she most often simply has her mind elsewhere. Despite this and the company she keeps, she's relatively sane. . .most of the time.

She shares a name with a witch from the world of Old Ones who made a pact with Nyarlathotep, believing him to be the Devil. . .and the ratman always at her side uses the same name as that witch's familiar as well. It's. . .probably just a coincidence. . .who would rightfully make a pact with Nyarlathotep?

History: Kezia is an adult human from this Tokyo before the apperance of the Gates and construction of the Walls. She's explored various witchcraft pursuits since she was a child, with what was originally a mere imaginative curiosity and fascination. After the arrival of the Gates when she was still young, she snuck over the fences built around one and attempted to go inside the massive pillar of light, which she attributes to the reason she often seems to struggle with her vision. Several years later, she performed a successful summon and she recieved her familiar, Brown Jenkin, transformed into a somewhat therian form from one of her pet rats, and was given some powers from Nyarlathotep. She has no discernable control over any of the chaotic creatures, however they seem to spend time around her regardless.

At present she's a professor of a subject that interests her at a certain college. She's had other dangerous run-ins due to her excitement over the arcane and "darker" arts, but doesn't seem to show any signs of stopping. However, after an incident in an attempt to explore time itself, she encountered a certain guardian of time and feels reluctant for once to explore it further. . .although she's become quite a big fan of his.

. . .i ran out of steam amd kinda lost track of where i was going. idk if that helped at all really. But maybe it did! I hope it did. You don't need to use any of those things exactly by any means, but that's the kind of thing you usually see in profile pages. Basics like someone's name and birthday and age and apperance and a little about their personality, maybe some history. Oftentimes things like powers and weapons and the like. Interests, hobbies, ways they could be intereacted with, etc. Just stuff that'd help you know the character.

I write everything in paragraph form, but everyone is more than welcome to use a more script format. I love making profiles, myself--it really helps to think about the character and details about them. Normally I make really, really detailed profiles, but maybe I'll try and be more simple about it this time around. depends on how i'm feeling.

I know this seems weirdly hypocritical given I don't have one but when I first made this blog there were like four of us including myself. I didn't see the need for a rules or profile page because I didn't anticipate that there'd be so many of us or, like, people from other fandoms or who aren't familiar with certain characters. I'll rectify that soon hopefully. But I figured I'd pass along this idea/knowledge to others.

. . .I'm gonna go reopen my askbox now. Feel free to send asks again, ask about this, etc! You can send me an IM too if you want. I'll properly close up the guest event tomorrow. I'm real tired rn lol so idk how much i'll get done, but i usually do things super late at night my time, so i have some time to pull my shit together haha))

[kationella]

32 Rules of the Persona Universe:

Being a hardcore Persona fan, I have also attempted to understand the very beings that help the characters across their journey.

Knowing that all Persona games take place in the same timeline (Except Innocent Sin), it can be difficult to get a grasp of what Personas and shadows can and can't do. Their limitations and what to they act different in each game. Their rules in that universe.

For this reason, I have made a compilation of the basic rules for both shadows and Personas (Personae?) with the only purpose of getting this shit together if I suddenly want to make a fangame.

To better understand how they work, I had to take a dip in Shin Megami Tensei and Megami Tensei, the games that Persona is a spin-off of. You don't need to be familiar with those games to understand my rules, I will only explain what is necessary for the explanation.

NOTE: I will explain the rules of the Persona universe only, not the Shin Megami Tensei one. From that franchise I will only borrow elements to complement what is canon in Persona. Different timelines and all. This will be large.

Here goes nothing:

1. There is a whole other dimension where the supernatural comes from. It receives many names, like TV world, Mementos, the Expanse, etc. Being a whole other dimension, is understandable why this place is so big.

2. Shadows and demons are the same thing.

3. Every universe is ruled by a God. When they are defeated, another one takes its place.

4. Even though they don't know it, humanity has great power over the Other Dimension and Gods in general, mostly thanks to mere willpower.

5. Humans can create Gods like Yalbadaoth. Yep, we are that fucking powerful.

6. There is a middle ground between the Other Dimension and ours, called the Velvet Room. Philemon is its master, creating attendants and helpers as he goes.

7. Philemon and Nyarlathotep are the beings who can jump from one dimension to another as they please. Other gods would need to be brought by the human subconscious.

8. The barrier between the two dimensions used to be sealed away, but a boy named Akemi Nakajima created the Demon Summoning Program to open a rift and summon demons/shadows to work for him. He never ended up using it, but did upload it to a computer network.

9. The first official rift between the dimensions was when a student named Ideo Hazama fucked up and made a shady ritual, taking his whole school to the Other Dimension. Even though the mess was cleaned up, it was too late. The rift was already open and now it was impossible to close it.

10. The Demon Summoning Program is also useful for people who haven't awakened to their true self, helping them as a tool to control shadows without the need of a Persona.

11. Humanity is subconsciously aware that the rift has been opened, think Bill Cipher style. Some people have chosen to research this shadows/demons. This made Philemon and Nyarlathotep make a bet on whether humanity would rise or destroy themselves.

12. You see a blue or golden butterfly? That's fucking Philemon.

13. Since shadows/demons are deeply connected to emotions and the subconscious (mostly negative), they can take the form of your inner self. The one you don't accept. Then we write shadows with a capital S.

14. When a Shadow is accepted by the person they're based of, they become a Persona. Your true self now whole.

15. It isn't impossible for shadows (or Shadows) to develop their own personalities and separate from their original purpose. Examples are "Teddie (shadow)", "Kazuya Toudou (Shadow Naoya)" and "Metis (Shadow Aigis)".

16. If a Shadow/shadow with a developing personality is left to their own devices for too long, they will most likely forget they were a shadow in the first place.

17. Philemon controls all about Personas and Nyarlathotep all about shadows. Though to be fair, all malevolent Gods can control shadows to a small extent. But Nyarlathotep has proven to be the only one capable to control Shadows.

18. Animals can develop Personas, but this is rare.

19. The desires of humanity can define their Shadow counterpart. Small children, being too young, have no Shadow at all. Once you develop a desire or hide a secret you gain a Shadow. If you have one great desire above all others you gain a Dungeon. However, if said desire becomes distorted, the Dungeon becomes a Palace.

20. Only Philemon can unlock a person's ability to summon Personas without becoming their true selves.

21. An Evoker is your third alternative if you don't have access to Philemon or can't accept yourself. Its a man-made device that invokes your Persona. There are other ways to force it out but they aren't recommendable. You could end up seriously messed up. At least Evokers are certified.

22. If a person with a Persona becomes unstable, their Persona will revert to a Shadow.

23. Ever since the rift was created, it has become extremely easy for humans and gods alike to open portals between dimensions. However, said portals are mostly technological. Examples are the explosion that caused the Dark Hour, TVs or the Metaverse App.

24. You can become possessed by demons/shadows. Thanks Nyarlathotep.

25. The dimensions have interacted so much at this point that sometimes glimpses from the Other Dimension can be seen in ours.

26. There are few people (mostly selected by a higher being) that can catch glimpses of the Other Dimension that appear in ours.

27. A Wildcard is a Persona user that can use more than one Persona. This is an ability that can only be granted by Philemon. The natural thing is to only control one.

28. If you want to directly gain Philemon's attention for whatever, you have to play the "Persona Game". A mix of a nursery rhyme and "Bloody Mary" type of game. This is basically a summoning ritual for him.

29. You can't summon Nyarlathotep. The bitch does whatever he wants. He mostly likes to play the long game.

30. Each person is associated with an Arcana. The only thing this affects is your efficiency when using a certain Persona. The Fool=Wildcard is some bullshit that Philemon applied just lately. There was a time where he allowed the whole squad to be Wildcards.

31. Being too long in the Other Dimension is not good for your health. This probably applies as well in places where the two dimensions have fused, though at a slower rate.

32. And finally: Defeating a Shadow automatically helps the person grow emotionally. Killing a Shadow kills the person they're connected to. In other words, Katsuya was on fucking thin ice when he shot his Shadow.

Click here to see 10 more rules!

[lightdancer1]

There is all the same a fundamental distinction in the Death Cycle

The position and function of Death of the Endless, Second of the Seven Primordial Concepts, can only operate when Time and Night exist, and when they have created Destiny, the first living being who will be the last living being as well. After the first iteration the being who exercises the function and title and responsibilities exists independent of them, but can only exercise them in this context.

Thus, in every single universe her parents come first, and then Destiny, regardless of the reality that as a being she ends up predating them and existing independently of them.

It's not a good Sandman story or storyline if elements of it don't get to the 'oh my Gods I now have the world's worst headache' stage, :P

This distinction also explains why Death works differently to the other two Endless shown to leave their functions/titles/responsibilities by will or not so much. Dream and Destruction leave their responsibilities and life continues on largely unfazed. If Death (or Destiny) were to truly do so reality unravels catastrophically. Destiny can briefly exist in moments where he has the luxury of choice and naturally seeks to extend them where he has them.

The other Six Endless are bound by a complex series of rules and restraints that limit their powers and influences even as they grant them absolute and unrelenting power within their domains (and in raw combat terms Destruction is bar none the mightiest of all the Endless). Death, as per Sandman canon, is bound by no rules and her only Kryptonite factor is the True Name, but that in turn means that she is her own worst enemy, and in truth she is.

She is given a bad hand, but it is her own problems and internalized distaste for her job and everything about it (as per A Winter's Tale) that fixes her down the particular kind of path she does go down. Nyarlathotep was a bit of a dick when he set it up this way, but he was also in his own sense trying for more compassion by giving her things that could have made each universe meaningful.

What Nyarlathotep did not foresee was that Death would grow attached to the individual iterations of the Endless as opposed to the concepts (which is what he expected) and that thus the entire Cycle hinged on the old 'creator intends one thing with a creation only for the creation to attain free will and go its own way') path.

Which in turn revolves back to a key theme of my original fiction that also applies to the fanfiction element. Creators create concepts from the beginning, but as with parents and children even the truly omnipotent and omniscient can find their creations surprise them and surpass their original vision.

That said, for all that his vision was more or less benevolent, Nyarlathotep did not and does not qualify for a truly benevolent creator toward Death of the Endless, as he is at best neglectful and at worst his interventions reinforce how little he truly cares about the entity as opposed to the deeper function she serves beyond the seven Endless.

[theexistentiallyqueer]

I really hate waking up to see that there was good meta that was circulating during the night and I have so many things I want to say but I have to go to work like a responsible adult in this capitalist hellscape. I’m specifically referencing this, this, this, and this, and I just got home from work and it was balls to the walls fucking crazy today, so excuse me if I seem incoherent and disjointed.

All of this made me think of a few very specific theories I have, which I’ve already mentioned in passing, but now I feel the urge to lay them out all together in one post, which are:

Loki is Goro’s original persona, and Yaldabaoth hand-picked him for a reason

Yaldabaoth, disguised as Igor, served the function of psychopomp cognitive guide to Goro that Morgana serves to Akira, Teddie serves to Souji, and Mitsuru serves to Makoto

Goro used Loki’s berserker power on himself so he could kill Wakaba

Robin Hood is the persona born from Goro’s bond with Akira and represents the justice he wishes he believed in

Goro is not a true wildcard and never was one

Plus some other ones reading today’s meta made me think about

So, without further ado.

Loki as Goro’s original persona aligns most strongly with two things: 1. actual dialogue during his boss fight, and 2. the larger framework of the game Yaldabaoth was playing.

For his boss fight I’m referencing specifically the JP-ENG comparison of that scene. One of the things the anon who did the comparison repeatedly references is that “psychotic breakdowns” is an incredibly erroneous translation of what Call of Chaos actually does:

!! 暴走させる means “to make [something] run wild/rampage/act reckless,” not to drive the psychotic. While it can be used to refer to someone wildly lashing out at others, it can also be used for a runaway car, losing control, acting without regard or just being reckless in a potentially dangerous way. In the Persona series, this term has also been used in reference to losing control of one’s Persona, and to a Shadow going berserk (for those who’ve played Persona 4 Arena Ultimax, the JP name for Shadow Frenzy, シャドウ暴走, also uses the term).

Goro’s ability makes people act recklessly without regard for others; it doesn’t make them outright psychotic. (Strangely enough, the first scene at Leblanc in the game translates the incidents related to this ability as “rampage incidents,” which is closer to what it should be, yet they consistently screw it up in later scenes.)

And the original dialogue follows up on that:

Makoto (JP): あんな、人を操ったり狂わせたりする力を、自分自身の心から生み出してたなんて…(“To think that the power to manipulate and drive mad others was born from his own heart…”)

And more subtly:

Futaba (JP): なのに人生ソロプレイだったから、目覚めた力は、自前の『嘘』と『恨み』の、たった２個だけ… (“Even so, ‘cause you went through life in single player, the powers you awakened were just your "lies” and “resentment”…“)

I feel like the original text upholds this argument, especially considering Goro consistently refers to Loki as his “true” power, and he is way OP with Loki in a way he’s not with Robin Hood–almost as if he’s had more time to level-grind with Loki than he has with Robin.

As for Yaldabaoth, I think the context of what Yaldabaoth actually wants is very clear: Yaldabaoth wanted Goro to win. He created a blatantly unfair “game” modeled after the normal “game” played between Philemon and Nyarlathotep, and the first thing he did was give a persona to one player two years earlier than the other. Yaldabaoth wants to destroy and remake the world, and he would have cherry-picked the angriest kid in the barrel to make that happen. Goro didn’t have some psychopomp cognitive guide in the form of a talking cat to explain the metaverse to him, and I think it stands to reason that Yaldabaoth groomed Goro as much as Shido did: Yaldabaoth was Goro’s psychopomp cognitive guide. Goro’s not-dumb enough to be immediately suspicious when a random app installs itself on his phone; it stands to reason that he only paid it any attention because some half-bald fucker with a nose longer than Goro’s Robin Hood mask planted the idea in his head of what it could be used for. Akira tries to delete the app twice, and it’s only after Ryuji accidentally triggers the Nav that he stops trying to get rid of it.

(I’ve seen the Goro was a subject in Wakaba’s research theories too as an explanation for how he could know so much of the metaverse without Morgana around to catsplain it to him. I’m not a fan of them, mostly because I think subtle writing is a concept Atlus is very much not at all engaged with, and if he really was a research subject that would have been dumped on us with all the subtlety of trying to assassinate someone by dropping roof tiles onto them, and I like my HCs and theories to be as in line as what can be explained most comprehensibly with canon until I decide to throw the entire baby out with the bathwater and say MY PLAYGROUND NOW. It’s a cool theory, it’s just not one that I’m into. The people who play with this theory are smarter and more valid than Atlus will ever be. And who knows, maybe Royal will prove me wrong. I am open to being proven wrong and Krist is already starting to feed me food from Royal that has me second-guessing, but I’m going to wait until the international release in March to have takes on this.)

As for Goro himself–I’ve always, from the first time I played P5 when I thought Goro as interesting enough in concept but wasn’t really ready to be a Goroboy, thought that Goro represented the Justice Arcana in reverse, which is interesting in that this Persona game you can’t reverse confidants’ cards. Goro is reversed Justice in and of himself within the main context of the narrative.

I don’t really jive with the idea that Goro started out with Robin Hood as representative of his ideals before he was manipulated and twisted by Shido, because it contradicts the context in which he had his awakening and it removes whatever degree of culpability or autonomy Goro did have in what he ultimately became. Goro is full of rage, and Goro acted on that rage. Goro got the slightest taste of power and went from 0 to acting on a desire from revenge in about thirty seconds flat. He definitely didn’t realize he was signing on for murder and Shido definitely groomed him into being his psychopomp hitman, Goro is the one who took the initiative to approach Shido in the first place because Goro wanted to destroy the man who destroyed his life and who did, in some sense, kill his mom. Not that I think it’s disingenuous to say that Goro did originally believe in a justice that was, well, more just, but there’s a vast chasm between the boy who used to pretend to be a hero of justice and a boy who decided what he wanted most was to humiliate his fascist of a father. Goro’s sense of justice was already hugely warped by the time he awakened to his persona. Justice is exposing Shido publicly and holding him accountable; justice for Goro was making Shido’s life a living very personal hell.

Loki’s power isn’t even necessarily to make someone go berserk. Goro actually explains how Loki’s power works at the start of his boss fight, and it’s carried through pretty well in the English translation.

Goro (JP): ちっぽけな存在でも、心の枷が外れると、桁違いの力を得る事がある。 ("Even a tiny being, once you remove the bonds on its heart, can gain unimaginable power.”) Goro (EN) Even the feeblest existence can gain tremendous power once the chains on its heart are broken. !! 枷 has a double meaning of both literal restraints (shackles/chains/etc) and more metaphorical ways to bind someone (such as relations to others, or societal restrictions on what you’re allowed to do). While “chains on its heart” is a valid translation, it fails to maintain that wordplay in English, and given how the power he’s talking about works, it’s almost certainly on purpose.

Loki’s power works by shattering the restraints on a person’s heart that stop them from acting recklessly in ways that hurt other people. I think a case could very much be made that the reason this seems to always result in violence on the part of those of Goro’s targets (and Goro himself) is because when you’re in that state, you stop feeling sympathy or empathy, and the dark impulses you bury deep inside (which everyone has) can reign unchecked.

When I first started to choochoo along the “Goro went berserk to kill Wakaba” train, one of the first things I started to speculate was that he was the first person he used Call of Chaos on. I started to reevaluate that today when I read all of that delicious food and found myself rethinking how Goro would have approached Shido, and I found myself drawn the conclusion that Goro brought Shido two things–the ability to gather secret knowledge and the ability to drive people berserk–but Shido would have wanted proof. And Goro’s an idiot, but he’s not dumb; he would have had that proof ready in advance. Goro would have been causing some psychotic breakdowns on a smaller scale before he approached Shido, just enough to make the news and catch Wakaba’s attention in her research, but not enough to cause widespread chaos on the scale that’s referenced in game, before he stepped foot through Shido’s door.

I find it very hard to believe that Goro didn’t know the basics of Wakaba before he killed her: single mom, no father in the picture, daughter roughly his age. Goro is the type to hoard information because it makes him feel in control, so he’d be given this name from Shido and want to know everything he can uncover about his target first–also he’s the one with the metaverse nav app and he’d need to know as much about her as possible to figure out what her distortion is.

(This is assuming Wakaba had a palace as opposed to residing in Mementos. I have no grounds to base this theory on, but I think she did. I won’t go into it in too much detail, but I HC that Wakaba’s palace was modeled after the Library of Alexandria, and Wakaba’s shadow was Hypatia. I’ll save the thematic whys of that for another post because they’re neither here nor there.)

I have a hard time buying that a teenager would just go from zero to being okay with murder without having some pretty critical hangups in the process, especially a teenager who kind of thinks of himself as a hero who has to get his hands dirty. You can’t really justify murdering an innocent woman who did nothing wrong when you measure her against people like Okumura. Especially when so much of that single mom’s life story should probably logically resonate with you.

(This is another reason I get upset that nothing in canon ever has Goro actively acknowledge his murder of Wakaba, because if it did it would have to grapple the between Goro and Futaba and the fact that Goro did to Futaba was exactly what was done to him, but way more directly. Atlus is not subtle and is also not capable of nuance or depth.)

So the logical line of thought is that Goro used Call of Chaos on himself to break the chains on his own heart (the feelings that would make him sympathize with Wakaba and see his own mother in her) so that he could kill her. I’d also argue that layered on top of of all of this is that Goro didn’t know killing her shadow would kill her, because Shido guarded her research closely and Yaldabaoth wanted a boy who would be willing to smash things. They were both grooming him to be their perfect little murderer.

By the point we meet him in the game Goro is heavily tied up in Shido’s conspiracy and all that that entails. His already jaded sense of justice will by this point have been warped beyond repair–until he meets Akira. Akira is probably the first person Goro has ever bonded with in his entire life, and a wildcard’s power is rooted in the ability to form bonds. Positive bonds specifically, because it’s only through those that their power can grow. I think we can all look at Goro’s life and agree that his relationship with Akira is the only positive one he’s had since he was like…….never years old.

And I specifically think that it’s through his relationship with Akira that Goro starts to reawaken to his true sense of justice. It’s textually canonical that Goro is jealous of the fact that the Phantom Thieves found a way to achieve their goals without collateral damage. I think that bonding with Akira–in a way Goro has literally never bonded with anyone else before–is what caused Goro’s second awakening and his tentative re-embrasure of the belief that justice is about helping, not hurting. Except he’s in two such different places at this point. I’m very on board with the BPD!Goro hc that’s become a thing lately, thanks to Krist and the goroboys discord server, but I’m not going to go into specifics because I’m not BPD. I just think that from what I’ve read of BPD it sounds valid, and if a person who is BPD says they get that mood from him, that’s extra valid

But Goro’s sense of self is clearly very split between Loki and Robin Hood and what they thematically represent. He wants to be a hero, but he still dresses like a tokusatsu villain half the time. He wants to be a hero, but he’s also a murderer. He can’t reconcile these aspects of himself.

Goro isn’t a true wildcard because he lacks the ability of connection. While the wildcard ability is granted by a cosmic entity (Philemon/Igor/Yaldabaoth/etc.), the degree of its manifestation is dependent upon the wildcard’s ability to connect with other people. The case could be made that Adachi and Namatame are wildcards because they’re both selected as game pieces by Izanami, but only Souji manifests the wildcard ability because only he is able to connect with others. The implication to be taken from that is that a cosmic force can grant an individual a persona and the corresponding wildcard ability, but that ability can’t manifest itself unless the individual is capable of wielding it–which Goro is not.

And very much unlike a wildcard, if you take the necessary steps Goro’s two personas do fuse into an ultimate whole. If you complete the development of Goro’s character to the extent the game requires, then Loki and Robin Hood fuse to become Hereward. I have some thoughts about this in relation to the fact that I can’t find any evidence that Hereward is tied to the Robin Hood myth, but all that aside: Goro’s warped sense of justice and his true sense of justice fused together in a way that’s, uh——-

Robin Hood is very bara and Loki is very twink. Hereward looks extremely similar to Robin Hood, but has a dark grey, an almost black, color design. Hereward literally represents Goro embracing that justice is grey, and that it’s okay for Goro to both want to be the hero and to want to see people struggle with the hard questions of how the hurts they’ve inflicted, intentionally or not, have impacted the people affected by them.

Goro was never a true wildcard to begin with. Yaldabaoth chose him because he was isolated. That he found his other half in Akira was dumb luck of the draw.

[shinydmoon]

Hypnos au info 2

(1 on CarzyMoonrules side blog)

1. Minato falls asleep everywhere(if he deems it a safe place). Bridge to Ariving Minato tucked himself in nooks and crannies if he wanted a nap. 12 Fullmoon shadows Minato has Orpheus to Attack/scare any threats plus Pharos can now snuggle with him(he couldnt before cuz the space was too cramped). November to ‘Graduation’ He fell asleep anywhere in the dorm, and the others had no issues as long as he; didn’t sleep on the ground in the common area, uses pillows and blankets if he sleeps on the floor in any of their rooms(Aigis room is why its not no sleeping on floors in general), No sleeping on the stairs in the cabnets and in the weapons closet, and he asks before he falls asleep on someone. Of course after regaining his memories Ryoji is always nearby if not sleeping along side Minato or being minatos pillow(Ryoji is the only one who mint actively doesn’t ask if he may sleep on him).

2. Minato is an artist and carrys his sketching supplies around with him everywhere(Exept when fighting) after getting them. Pharos/Ryoji sews and now Minato has a whole collection of Plushys made by Ryoji for him. Most of the plushies are of one of them in different outfits and those normally comes in pairs.

3. Minato has two plushies that mean the most to him. The first is Pharos’ first Plushy attempt of himself, Ryoji occasionally swipes it from him to update it/fix any weer and tear. The second is a squeaky toy version of Nyx in monster bird form that was made for him by one of his older siblings and given to him once he hatched. No one could get him to agree to throwing it away and being given a new one, eventually they just gave him the new one without anymore arguments.

4. Ryoji, Hamuko, and Kotone all had the same plush of Nyx. Kotone accidentally destroyed hers and was too upset to ask for a new one, Nyarlathotep slipped an indestructive plush of himself to her when she was sleeping later. Hamuko’s is seeable placed in the garden to watch over the plants. Ryoji still has his(upgraded one of couse) but he removed the squeaker, if Hypnos is having trouble sleeping and Ryoji has to go somewhere he tucks it in to Hypnos’ grasp.

5. After Regaining his memories Ryoji’s arms are coverd in bite marks from Mint chewing on them. He doesn’t mind as long as he doesn’t draw blood, it’s cuz the bites don’t hurt at all even if Minato were to draw blood.

6. Both Ryoji and Minato use Ryoji’s scarf to shut the other up. They tie it around the mouth then pull it tight. Ryoji also puts his scarf on Mint if he seems scared or overwhelmed, as if to say ‘Im right here, we are as we should be, you are safe, Family is right here’, Mint grabs the scarf to comfort himself.

7. Shinjiro is alive...Kinda. He gets revived around new years by Ryoji. He takes everything surprisingly well. -cuts to scene of him screaming in his head while standing frozen-. You know, for someone who was killed and all that. Ryoji also revives Mitsuru’s Dad and Ken’s Mom... And yukari’s Dad and just about anyone who is not Jin, Takaya, Ikutsuki, and The scientists involved in that whole thing.

9. All the members of SEES(except Ken and koro and Plus Ryoji) are forced to repeat the school year by Takeharu Kirijo as the whole shadows mess was not good for their grades.

10. Ryoji’s Room is the one right aross to Minato’s. They have separate rooms more to lessen any cludder seeing as they normally sleep in Ryojis room(Mint didn’t want to rearrange his room so Ryoji just set up his as their room from the start).

11. Morgana is Elpis(but male of course). Yes p5 still happens basically as in canon, yes Minato and the rest of his siblings can tell, yes Minato basically carried Mona around during Pq2 in this au, Yes Mona’s human form looks like pharos, and yes Minato babys him as Mona is younger.

[antiquery]

el’s guide to the lovecraft mythos

hey! so this is mostly a post for my dear friend will @wellsforboys, who asked for a primer of sorts on the best lovecraft stories, because his collected works are such a doorstopper, and reading them all in chronological order is quite an intensive task. these are, in my opinion, the cream of the crop; keep in mind that, for a lovecraft fan, my tastes tend towards the unconventional, and if you ask someone else you might get a very different list. i’m going to try my best to avoid the most intensely, egregiously bigoted, but if there’s something i feel merits inclusion despite the aforementioned bigotry i’ll include a warning. i’ll also provide links to all of these stories through the free online archive, but if you’d like to get a hard copy and delve deeper, i recommend this one from arcturus or this one from barnes & noble. if you’re strapped for cash and/or would prefer to read more online, here’s the link hub for the complete works. let’s get started!

lovecraft stories are typically broken up into two categories: the “mythos” stories, and the “dreamlands” stories. the former are the stories you typically think of when you think of lovecraft, if you know weird fiction— they tend more towards hard sci-fi, and usually deal with doomed scholars, hubris-ridden scientific exploits, the massachusetts countryside, outer gods, and various types of aliens. they’re far more famous than the latter, most of which concern the adventures of various vaguely keatsian protagonists in a narnia-ish realm dubbed the dreamlands, which is internally consistent and frequently cross-referenced. the distinction between these two types of stories is only a very broad one, though; characters, locations, and themes. frequently appear in both. the term “mythos” is rather misleading— all the stories take place in the same ‘verse, with the same gods and the same cosmology. really, it’s a division of style and subject material. personally, i prefer the dreamlands stories, but most lovecraft fans (unsurprisingly) prefer the mythos tales (which i will admit are more technically, narratively apt). i’ll try and include a roughly equal amount of both, so that you can get a feel for what you prefer.

so, without further ado, here’s the list! in chronological order:

the statement of randolph carter: first story, first appearance of my boy! here he’s wracked by ptsd from the great war and the recent eldritch demise of his boyfriend research partner; the story is told in the form of a police statement. this is one of the most gothic of lovecraft’s tales, and also the one with Alternate Universe Florida. it’s a fave.

celephais: sort of a dry run for the dream-quest of unknown kadath, but clever and unique in its own humble way. it’s got the same themes of refuge in dream, and it’s got a sweet ending that’s cleverly subverted by the protagonist’s later appearance in the dream cycle.

from beyond: people have mixed opinions on this one, but i’m fond of it. while usually classed as a dream cycle tale, it has that element of scientific hubris that pops up so often in mythos stories, and an absolutely chilling central premise.

nyarlathotep: first appearance of probably the most well-known mythos baddie after cthulhu. here he’s terrorizing innocent humans in the guise of Eldritch Modernist Nikola Tesla. will, for you specifically— if you like nikola orsinov from the magnus archives, you’ll like nyarlathotep (both the character and the short story).

the nameless city: this might just be my favorite one-off tale (though i am fond of the lovecraft reread’s hypothesis that the unnamed protagonist might be our boy randy carter, because this is precisely the kind of stupidity he’s so prone to). top-notch archaeological horror about exploring a deserted city that might not be as empty as it seemed.

the music of erich zann: lovecraft doing chambers, basically. it’s a clever little tale, and has an innovative use of auditory horror, which wasn’t all that common for hpl.

hypnos: probably the second most homoerotic story lovecraft ever wrote (though there are a lot of those, surprisingly enough). local keatsian meets a supremely beautiful, nameless man, they fall into dreaming (and opium addiction) together, things go downhill from there.

herbert west— reanimator: this one’s a bit longer, but it’s a cult classic, adapted into a delightfully campy 1985 film starring jeffrey combs. it’s about a scientist who goes Too Far, in the frankenstein sense, in pursuit of...well, you can guess from the title. it’s a fun modern (for the twenties) twist on the gothicism of mary shelley, and the title character is so much fun.

the hound: another super-gothic tale, and probably the single homoerotic story lovecraft ever wrote. actually, it’s kinda like a mini the secret history via poe. local decadents get into the occult over their heads, pay the spooky spooky price. gotta love it.

the rats in the walls: this one’s another classic poe-esque story, pretty clearly a riff on fall of the house of usher. it’s a wonderfully psychological piece of gothic horror, but huge trigger warning for The Infamous Cat Name. aside from that bit of unpleasantness, this is one of the first pieces where lovecraft handles the horror of ancestry well, with the classic conceit of a literal decaying house (or priory, as the case may be), and it’s pretty cool to see him really come into his own with something that’d so fundamentally define his work.

the unnameable: another carter story! this time he’s acting pretty transparently as lovecraft’s author avatar, talking about the value of horror fiction and, uh, fainting in terror at the slightest hint of any actual horror. better luck next time, randy. we’ll check in with him again in a few.

the festival: first canon mention of the necronomicon! exciting! and, if i recall correctly, the only story actually set in kingsport, one of the small massachusetts towns (along with arkham, dunwich, and innsmouth) that make up the major landmarks of lovecraft country. it’s about, as the title suggests, a Nefarious Ritual, and also astral projection? cool. it’s a pretty neat bit of creepery, nothing really special, but a good example of the kind of regional horror lovecraft was starting to handle particularly well.

the call of cthulhu: i’m basically obligated to include this one, though to me it’s not really a standout, because it’s so damn famous. it does get points for a clever and thematically intelligent narrative structure, and the astoundingly creepy idea of artists’ dreams being influenced by an Imminent Horror. 

pickman’s model: another super chambers-esque story, and one where the monologue formatting works loads better than it did in statement of randolph carter. like in music of erich zann (and, to some extent, call of cthulhu) this is lovecraft wrestling with the cosmic-horror implications of the fine arts. it’s also got a lovely twist at the end, one of those really chilling clincher lines lovecraft is starting to develop a knack for.

the silver key: chronologically the third carter tale, though no one’s entirely sure where it fits in the narrative sequence of his stories. it’s basically a modernist diss track, wherein our boy wrestles with the ennui that comes from, uh, reading t.s. eliot? (funnily enough, this is basically “the hollow men” via keats.) it’s not really a horror story, but it’s one of my favorites nonetheless.

the dream-quest of unknown kadath: FINALLY, we get to my favorite. this is a short novel chronicling randolph carter’s adventures in the dreamlands as he seeks out a dream-city that the gods have denied him. it’s the odyssey via lord dunsany, with a few twists— carter’s not really an epic hero, polutropos or otherwise, and it’s fun to watch him navigate a treacherous landscape in such an unconventional fashion. it has an excellent, atypical twist ending, and my favorite appearance of nyarlathotep ever. it’s also the chronological end of the carter cycle,* and our boy goes out with a very pratchett-esque bang.

the case of charles dexter ward: a lengthy slow-build tale of an evil necromancer and his impressionable descendent. it moves somewhat slowly, but it’s so delightfully atmospheric that you don’t really mind. bonus points for the clear riff on wilde’s the picture of dorian gray. also, first appearance of mythos deity yog-sothoth!

the dunwich horror: aaaand now we get into the string of very well-known mythos tales that lovecraft wrote around 1930. this is a classic, about an insular family with a destructive predilection for the occult.

the whisperer in darkness: a lovely slow-build and partly epistolary tale, featuring the classic Intense Stupidity of mythos protagonists. also featuring aliens from...pluto? and the first real appearance of the theme of bodily dissociation, which lovecraft got super into near the end of his career.

at the mountains of madness: this one’s so good. it’s more of a novella than a short story, about a doomed expedition to the antarctic sponsored by our favorite Dark Ivy, miskatonic university. it’s an awesome piece of worldbuilding about the pre-human earth, and a near-unique bit of sympathy for the non-human. it was also the inspiration for john carpenter’s 1982 classic the thing, as well as a tragically abortive guillermo del toro adaptation.

the shadow over innsmouth: i’d call this the climax of lovecraft’s writing on hereditary horror, and it’s brilliant. the ending is one of my favorite final paragraphs in all of lovecraft, maybe surpassed only by dream-quest. the story proper is about a young massachusetts native investigating the strange coastal town of innsmouth, and just why, exactly, something isn’t quite right about it. it loses points, though, for a truly horrible and lengthy application of dialect, and for being a very obvious metaphor about interracial marriage. sigh.

the dreams in the witch house: probably my favorite story after dream-quest of unknown kadath. it’s...kind of dark academia-y, actually, about a miskatonic undergrad who moves into a house formerly owned by a famous witch and discovers a method to travel to other dimensions— at a price, of course. lovecraft was never good at character building, but he did manage to create a genuinely sympathetic protagonist in walter gilman, which makes the ending all the more chilling. there’s also an awesome rock opera adaptation of this story, which i highly recommend.

the shadow out of time: another favorite! it’s the culmination of lovecraft’s late-career fondness for body-swapping horror, and as well as being genuinely cosmically terrifying (and wondrous) it’s quite psychological, in a way lovecraft wasn’t usually very apt at. it’s got alien civilizations! anticipatory soviet terror! the horrors of interplanetary colonialism! awesome libraries! what’s not to love?

the haunter of the dark: the last independent story lovecraft wrote before he died in 1937, it’s a beautiful send-up of providence, hpl’s hometown, and a delightful final appearance of my man nyarlathotep (albeit in a new form). plus...eldritch journalism? it’s great. also, i can’t mention this story without referencing this fic, which you should absolutely read immediately after the actual tale. 

and that’s it! happy reading!

* you can read “through the gates of the silver key” if you want, it’s technically the culmination of the carter cycle, but it was mainly written by e. hoffman price and edited by lovecraft, and i (along with plenty of other hpl scholars) don’t really consider it canon. it was lovecraft’s first real foray into body-swap horror, but because he’s trying to shove it into a character arc that’s already over and done with it doesn’t do very well. you get essentially the same narrative with “the shadow out of time,” done much more skilfully. to me, “gates” smacks intensely of derleth, lovecraft’s “posthumous collaborator” and Mythos Manichaean, which...ack.

[comeondowntosouthparkrpg-blog]

Finn “Firkle” Sinn

out of character info

Name/Alias: Alison Pronouns: she/they Age: 21 Join Our Discord: c; Timezone: est Activity: 6.9/10 Triggers: n/a Password: jimmy can fastpass my ass Character that you’re applying for: Firkle Favourite ships for your character: uhh Fike or Firkmore. Whichever bugs Kyle most.

in character info

Full name: Finn Nyarlathotep “Firkle” Sinn (I hate his canon name, I’m sorry.) Birthday: October 25th, (Scorpio) Sexuality, gender, pronouns: Death (Bisexual), Goth (cis man), “Don’t fucking talk about me” (he/him). Age and grade: Freshman, 14

Appearance:

Standing at the height of 5’7, but subtracting three inches the moment his boots come off. Firkle always wears two expressions, one of constant disdain, or a vacant one. Despite the eerie faces he likes to make, he has a rather pretty face. Heart shaped, large almond eyes, the color the storm clouds before the rain begins to fall, a small, slight turned up nose, a smattering of freckles on his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. More often than not, he straightens his naturally wavy black hair, his fringe hangs down, on his right side, past his chin, and the sides are shaved with an abstract design of geometric shapes.

He has piercings, including: a septum ring, a bar through his left eyebrow, numerous cartilage piercings, a bar through his tongue, and his collar bones. He has a total of 7 tattoos, a skull with horns and the word 'death’ over its forehead on his right upper arm; he got it when he was 13 and properly initiated into the cult. An Omega (Ω) on the outer side of his left wrist, “some ghosts are so quiet, you would hardly know they're there” in a small handwriting font on his left thigh above a small ghost line art. He has an octopus the size of a CD on his left upper arm, it holds little knives in each hand. He has a boo from Mario over his left forearm, accompanied by the three life hearts from Legend of Zelda, and the Space Invaders alien.

His body type is thin, though he does have lean muscle from several years of fencing. His fingers have numerous scars on his fingers from years of playing with knives. Pale scars, a very slight contrast from his already corpse-like skin tone. His makeup is usually just dark eyeliner and black lipstick, very rarely does he use any cover-up or contour. In contrast to his minimal effort in his appearance, he has a very decorated taste in clothing. Plain black skinny jeans, plain dark grey t-shirt, wallet with chains hanging from his hip, boots with studs and buckles, and his jackets, always black, commonly leather, have studs, patches, and/or patches.

Personality:

Firkle is a true nihilist, he believes that nothing really matters, and he’d defend that philosophy until the day he died. Though he lacks empathy and is an undiagnosed sociopath, having said that, when he finds someone he wants to nurture and cherish, he does so. He would murder for them, and take care of them through thick and thin. It's incredibly rare that this occurs, and he isn't fond of the majority of the people he talks to. He has a short patience for people he doesn't like, he's snappy and will start roasting people in hopes they will leave him alone. He often comes off as cold and reclusive, but it's actually because he hates talking to people, it makes him emotionally tired; though good at carrying conversation and it's the entirely of his school career, it makes him want to curl up into the fetal position and sleep for a week. Having control over his emotions is something he's mastered over the years and it's rare that he would snap at anyone outside of being tired. Anger, sadness, and even happiness are controlled.

Behavior wise, Firkle is cunning, often lying to cover for himself, and generally selfish. Admitting when he's wrong is something he despises doing, and he will get violent over small, insignificant disputes. Instead of getting mad or arguing, he's more likely to slap someone than to shout at them. (But if they do shout at him, he can get incredibly loud, and he does not take anyone's shit.) He's not selfish in the “all for me, none for you" sense, but he will let someone become a scapegoat as long as it keeps him looking like the Eldritch Golden Boy his cult sees him as.

When he hits his most stressful moments, he grows numb and acts robotic, because the only rational, sanity retaining, thought he can think is that none of this actually matters, and his pure form, the sadistic apathetic asshole he is deep down comes out.

History:

Firkle was born to a single mother, Maeve Sinn, due to the absence of his father after his conception, his mother gave him the name she felt was most appropriate for him, including her own last name. Finn is a traditional Irish name, Nyarlathotep is the name of an Elder God, and Sinn has been the last name in his family for ages. His name rhymes, but he's not fond of being called by his first name. When he was born, his mother was finishing her doctorate to start working full time as an alternative medical doctor. Commonly referred to as the local witch doctor, more accurate name than the population knows.

Firkle was raised by a goth and more or less by the cult his mother belonged to. Spending his earliest years, being laid down to nap on the pews of the abandoned church. By the time he was old enough to start school, the sadist fit in well with the resident goth clique. It took a long time for him to even like them, he betrayed them at gunpoint at one point, and it wasn't until they forgave him unconditionally, that he came to realize that he had friends. Not really his own age, as they were all four and five years older than him, but much closer in age than the group he was raised by.

Spending the next 6 years being numbed to be the most apathetic asshole he could be, in the one place on the planet where everyone was a bit on the psychotic side. Must be something in the water. 12, and in the 6th grade, he spent the second semester of school in the South Park public school system, creating a reputation of defiance early. For his 13th birthday, the following semester, he was properly initiated into the cult, no more sitting on metal chairs, or on the pews, he got to attend the rituals, not just the sermons. Throughout the next year, he became a very active member of the group, attending every sermon and ritual he could, even if it meant skipping out on things normal kids got up to. Homecoming? He was harvesting blood from a sacrifice. Despite how much time he spends at these meetings, they never became common knowledge. He just called it “therapy”, and never went into any details. 

Sample paragraph:

McDonald’s espresso, it seemed like a good idea when he bought it, but as Firkle sat at his booth alone, he came to realize how terrible it was. The taste was bitter and scalding, the way he liked it, but that wasn’t the issue. A gremlin released upon the world was, and it made the young goth livid.

Some punk ass eight year old came running down the aisle between booths, banging his fist down on each one, for no obvious reason. Naturally this caused the craved caffeine to tip over, soaking into a filled page of poetry, rather than into the goth’s blood stream. A great Shakespearean Tragedy. The pools of ashen misery he called his eyes just watched the liquid soaking into his pristine white page for an absurdly long moment, frozen by the thought he just spent three dollars to ruin a twenty dollar bullet journal.

Letting out a long overdue huff, he starts to sop up the remaining fluid. All of the pretty poetry pictures he had hoped to obtain were lost to time now, dumping the hardly used notebook in the trash with the napkins, he heads off towards the nearest location with any hardcover journals available. Doubtful any would ever be waterproof, the goth was still resolved. His mind void of any emotional attachment to the event further than the major inconvenience it happened to be. He had to draft the artwork his writing was before he could ever dream of posting it for his whole school to see, and now he was going to write a new poem. One called McDonald’s Espresso.

Headcanons:

-He plays violin. -He has a total of 0 expressions when anything happens, he just keeps this blank look on his face like he’s some sort of robot.

Anything else: I love you gays.

[geckcellent]

p5 is a spiritual/successor to specifically, p2

that proposed p2 hd remake?? yeah i’m excited at the prospect but also filled with DREAD bc we have it in all but actual remake, and the name of the beast is p5

disclaimer: i love p5 & am having a blast with it and am not dunking on p5 in any way! (except its lgbt treatment which is nothing.. new...., ..,.,)

SPOILERS for p5 and p2:is

so i know the internet’s been going wild about how much p5 is similar to p2 ever since all we knew about p5 were the keywords ‘joker’ and ‘catharsis’ and the color red and some dude on a chair,, but like the more i play p5 the more intrigued i get. this is some stuff i was thinkin about, feel free to add/discuss;

- cognition: the metaverse is basically a wilder extension of the ‘rumors becoming reality’ plot of p2.. and THAT plot was setting up xibalba, which was more or less the metaverse™ but more standard smt (enemy demons instead of shadows, everything happens in the real world..ish,..,). pretty much everything that happened in xibalba was the dungeon adapting to people’s cognitions on the fly, like a room that turned into a torture deathtrap for people suspecting traps was a heal/rest point for the uh, simpler folks,.,.. and bosses were straight up cognitive versions of people (like jun’s mom and eikichi’s dad, a pod of Actual Alien Dudes to name some). jun, that poor bitch almost legit wrote himself out of existence at one point thanks to a self hating panic attack

- fun fact he did not in fact succumb to that bc everyone reminded him how sad his gay boyfriend would be if he didn’t exist

- one of the funkier things about xibalba was that using that logic you could also dictate your dungeon crawling experience a little bc it let you offer input at times and going ‘yeah i think we’ve barely gotten started’ would mean Oh Boy Time To Grind but ‘yeah! i think we’re at least half way’ would set you up on a fast track to the finish. real interesting

- some cosmic asshole playing a cosmic asshole with way too much free time game: the underlying thing driving the entire plot of p5, yaldabaoth's 'game' is literally the same thing as nyarlathotep's scheme in p2:is (proving humanity is a bunch of dumbass stupidheads with 0 good points), but with a happier ending and also no sequel to call for/justify a huge FUCK YOU PLAYER, FUCK YOU RIGHT IN THE FEELS, WITH A GOD DAMN CACTUS IN A POT FOR GOOD MEASURE

- adding on to that i'm not there yet but presumably you don't punch out real igor... probably ..,?? you can give philemon a solid wallop right before the epilogue it’s my fav part lmfao,, nyarlathotep also plays... Uh not quite fair but at least he doesn’t outright rig it iirc

- tatsuya had a cool kinda intimidating loner dude rep while akira's more Outright Scorned but in general they both function around a tight group that the world at large either doesn't understand or is at odds with.. they serve different plot purposes and are shown from different POVs but there are definitely similarities between the masked circle and the phantom thieves

- hot topic: "joker". admittedly it's been ages since i played p2 and the details are fuzzy but joker (jun) feels like what joker (akira) could've become had he ended up flying solo without teammates as checks or friends to keep him sane and without a caring parental/family figure.. the only person he trusts is himself in a shitty world full of disgusting people and betrayal; basically, joker (jun) IS joker (akira), had akira been without a support network.

- in short, joker!jun and akechi being similar motivationally is suddenly way more fridge given how p5 plays akechi as ‘not that different’ and i am now distinctly uncomfortable,.,,

- i would be laughing at pq2 being p5-centric and set in a 'movie theater' world (or so i've heard), but im not and thats only because i'm more salty that they took this totally sumaru theatre-feeling setup while conveniently pretending p2 and before never happened

- on that note p5's lgbt handling makes me SO SALTY because BRUH, P2 HAS THE BEST LGBT REP OF LIKE EVERY ATLUS GAME EVER and p5's is..,, well ., ,i thought it couldn't get worse after p3/p4 trans jokes but eeeeeeeh i have officially found my least fav beach pickup episode. yusuke’s lobsters are some sexy thots but nah that dont really make up for that fresh cuppa what the fuck

- the thought of a p2 hd remake fills me with equal parts excitement and dread because we already got a direct spiritual/successor in all but plot continuity and its givign me the worst fucking whiplash

- i lied i am shitting on p5 a little let me just get this out there Hi I Am About To Strangle One Ryuji Sakamoto Personally,

- give us a canon gay like jun & and a best comedy bro and total ally eikichi and also canon gay ship like tatsu/jun and when will atlus let me fuckign rest honestly

- ok i am going to rest right now actually it’s 2 fuckign AM ramble over

[dreadlock-detective]

Tell us more about the cow cleric.

Ahaha, no problem! So, the Cow Cleric in the D&D campaign I’m in: A History!

His name is Tyrmeir Thunderoath, a War Cleric (level 13 currently), and follower of the god Tyr (Gee couldn’t have guessed from the name~). He was a sea captain and pirate hunter until he and his crew got sold out and he was washed ashore, one of two survivors. And his luck is not just story based - his player legit has the worst rolls ever. Now he’s a member of the Crimson Crows, a neutral peacekeeping group of sorts between two nations.

MORE TALK AND DRAWINGS AFTER THE CUT

He joined our group shortly after the group’s previous leader had left and my character, Adi, a fairly insane Warlock of Nyarlathotep, became the new leader. He appeared out of a forest clearing and introduced himself as a captain, and to this day Adi believes he sails boats in through the trees. He’s super honorable and lovey dovey and super-SUPER unsure of himself at all times. All went well for a while. And then he and Keldor, the group’s Barbarian and Adi’s defacto adoptive Grandpa, cooked up a plan to “free” Adi of her connection to the Old One.

By killing her. And then resurrecting her. but yeah.

She didn’t take kindly to that plan when they finally let it slip.

Shenanigans ensue. Adi gets put on trial for attempted murder (which wasn’t her fault - they directly messed with an Old One…) Somehow the judge in the case, a vampire named Walter gets the bright idea to bargain Adi’s soul from Nyarlathotep for the Necronomicon which we happened to have. BECAUSE THATS A GREAT FREAKING IDEA. But anyway, Adi and Keldor leave the party because Grandpa’s heart’s on the fritz and Adi is now powerless and now Tyrmeir’s following Walter and a mostly new crew down to the realm of the Vampires to fix some shit.

My new character is Cirilisa, the littlest drow witch. She does not understand the kind hearted cow-man. Because that does not compute to Drow lady.

She also grew up homeless and is super malnourished. Also that thing in the middle is a mushroom dude that another player played earlier in the campaign.

Along the course of figuring out the vampire town’s troubles we realize a vampire woman is in deep with this somehow, and seems to have a fascination with Tyrmier. This is where the drawing a while back came from where our PLAN A was “Use our super kind hearted really-bad-at-lying cow cleric to seduce the vampire chick”

He is super against this, because he is already going steady with the head cleric as mentioned before and, like, seriously is not okay with his body being used to accomplish our goals. Somehow our leader Walter manages to talk him into it anyway, agreeing that they don’t have to do anything sexual together.

To the surprise of no one, she was actually interested in kidnapping him to use in some sort of blood ritual to create super vampire/werepeople hybrids or something. Soooo Teirmier got kidnapped and strapped to a torture device and bled profusely while the rest of the team tried to break in and free him. Oh, I should mention our other wizard had gotten the power to reverse time for one action, because:

Our leader Walter damn near got the entire party murdered by letting loose a bunch of super evil vampire creatures that CLEARLY TOLD HIM THEY WERE UNDER THE EVIL LADY’S CONTROL. Good leadership is a running trend in our team.

Following that, we fight a horrible Blood Lord monster, Ciri gets her pour little heart ripped out of her chest, Walter manages to turn her into a vampire, and Adi and Keldor return, Adi now sporting Paladin powers from the god Kord, who Keldor is a follower of (and possibly the child of…)

Walter passes the mantle of party leader back to Adi. But she kinda had enough of that when her own party was plotting her death, so she passes off to Tyrmier! Cow leader ho!

And I’m out of old drawings, so super fast version of events since then:

His old shipmate, “Bastard”, who’s name is truly deserved, had joined us during the vampire quest (another player). We had been granted a ship for the journey back from the Vampires. Then we ran into pirates. and barely survived a fight with their leaders in a gamble for our lives. And as we’re all almost dead Bastard betrays everyone and becomes the new Pirate captain and if we don’t like it he’ll order the canons to fire into us. So Tyrmier lost his old friend.

For maybe the only good news on this list, his girlfriend cleric recovered from her horrible head trauma where she had forgotten who he was, so he doesn’t hate Adi I don’t think.

On our way to another city we got kidnapped by a cult of snake people. Tyrmier died in the first fight (he got better - Padaldin Adi to the rescue). his god Tyr was not amused. He gets up. We rest. He opens the next door boldly and loudly and is instantly downed again by arrows…

His orders are constantly fought by Keldor who thinks he’s too much of a wimp to lead. Tyrmier does not give much fight back.

During our stay in the city we get roped into being part of a military coup against its current leader. During negotiations Tyrmier again volunteers to be a prisoner while the rest of the party works something out. The next time he sees us we’re breaking in to the prison murdering people. We negotiate well.

After the leader is dead both Tyrmier and Adi realize the sword he was using is SUPER EVIL and, like, totally not good. Keldor picks it up. Is instantly possessed. And too strong for us to safely take out.

During a fight with a giant (like, super giant) slug jelly monster, its death throws involved it exploding corrosive goo everywhere. Tyrmier actually completely evaporated. A crazy roll of the dice got Tyr to intervene and reassemble him on the spot. Tyr is not pleased with his results so far. (I’m actually forgetting a death he had somewhere! I’m sad!)

Due to what has been decided by the Crow leadership as Tyrmier’s ineffective leadership, Possessed Keldor managed to murder another crow and Adi before being taken down, along with the demon in the sword. (Adi got better)

Now we’re down helping some hippy elves stop their horrible evil taint problem. First combat: A bunch of Red Caps (think little evil gnomes with giant metal boots if you’re unfamiliar) just beat the shit out of Tyrmier, and he goes down before his first turn (not dead though!)

Second combat: group cautiously walks into a clearing full of butterflies. Rolls stealth. Adi and Keldor notice there are bones littering the floor and back up quietly. Tyrmier and our new Warlock BOTH roll 1′s and just start stomping around wondering what the hell they’re walking on. Cue butterfly attack. Tyrmier goes down again as he tries to escape them. Only doesn’t flat out die again because it cued a big group discussion on our homebrew rules for instantly dying from damage. Hence:

Basically: Tyrmier is a wonderful cowman with the worst luck imaginable.He’s a hoot!

edit: OH! I remembered the other death! It was when we were attacking during the coup - we came upon a room of guards kinda unaware what was going on. Tyrmier walks up alone and tries to talk them into surrendering. He never even saw the two rogues in the corners. Another “Tyrmier is dead before the battle starts”.