#Reynir Arnason

[thatmintleaf]

[nebulardrip-art]

inspired by minna's two beach pieces as well as @lanavecorona 's

[ferwuo]

oops. forgot to post.

[darethshirl]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Stand Still Stay Silent Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Reynir Árnason/Onni Hotakainen Characters: Reynir Árnason, Onni Hotakainen Additional Tags: Angst, Angst and Humor, Grief/Mourning, Dreams, Dreamscapes, Blood, Very light Horror Elements, Post-Ending, Pre-Relationship Summary:

“You think I need your help?” Onni cuts him off, his eyes ice-cold and glinting. “You think you, of all people, could possibly understand me?”

In the past Reynir would have flinched at the harsh tone; now he straightens his spine, lifting his chin with equal amounts of stubbornness and strength. “I think I’m the only one willing to try.”

—

Onni and Reynir finally have a proper talk.

[singularscissor]

@that-gay-jedi requested that i talk some about material conditions and their effect on worldbuilding so here's something I'm thinking about

One area where the conditions of day to day life never seem to be fully considered in their impacts on the worldbuilding: magic systems.

I'd have to do more research to support this theory, but I think that this is one of the major ways that D&D has shaped how we Do Worldbuilding in fantasy. Most magic systems, in the way they are shown to us, have a lot of very combat-focused applications. Even if it's not all fireballs, lightning bolts, and more classic D&D wizard type stuff, physical/elemental type magic is explored from the angle of "how do I hurt/kill people with this" or "how do I destroy things with this"

But. If you're in a roughly pre-industrial fantasy world, and a portion of the population that's at all significant has magic, or can learn magic, that affects the natural world, the oldest and most widespread type of magic or method of using magic likely isn't going to be for warfare, and even when writers question the combat-centered magic, they usually go for like, exploring how magic is incorporated into the arts or something

Which is great. But in most pre-industrial societies, like 90% of the population is rural farmers. What I'm saying is, where is the farm magic.

The first spells to be developed, the oldest and most well-known spells, should really be like this:

banish slug

repel frost

corral

loosen dirt

uproot

magic scythe

separate chaff

repair horse

castrate bull

deworm

summon scarecrow

peel sheep

direct moisture

What farmer even today wouldn't find loads of uses for magic? Charms that keep patches of ground above freezing. Magical explosions that disseminate seeds instantly all over your fields. Shade spells to protect your plants from beating sun.

If magic can summon demons or familiars or make constructs to do stuff for you, you bet your ass that stuff was used by farmers long before it was ever used for fighting. The most culturally important use of necromancers isn't creating soldiers to form undead armies, it's reanimating your dead mule so he can still pull your plow. Farmer warlocks will summon demons from hell to haul manure for them.

If you have wizards in a fancy wizard private school learning how to create a shield of frost, that knowledge had to come from somewhere, and the answer is probably thousands of years of farmer wizards learning how to magically protect their crops from extreme heat and cold.

I want to see side notes in worldbuilding about how every spell used for combat is basically a repurposed farming spell.

This spell for summoning a magical suit of spectral armor that shatters weapons? Yeah, that was originally developed for chickens so foxes would shatter their teeth when they tried to bite them. It was used for centuries before someone thought of trying it on a person.

[skrankku]

3D fresh laundry for Reynir Arnason please?

At least the eldritch horrors think he's cute.

[wilwywaylan]

Drawn for the Halloween exchange on Livejournal, that one is for Ploum ! I chose the prompts “pumpkin (contest)” and “magic runes”. And this popped out. Look at them being happy and cute and cuddly !

Drawing an owl is hell. Also I had to alter Reynir’s hair just to show Kitty blepping.

[image ID : Reynir Arnason and Onni Hotakainen are sitting together, surrounded by sheep and their animals. Onni, a white man with chin-length, very light hair and blue eyes, is digging into a pumpkin held between his crossed legs. He’s wearing a white shirt, light brown pants and brown boots. He’s holding a spoon full of pumpkin and looking at Reynir. Reynir, a tall, white man with freckled, a long red braid and green eyes, is holding out his knitting work proudly. He’s wearing a white and black sweater, black pants and white socks. On his head, Kitty, a white cat with a brown head, black ears and tail with a brown tip, and brown paws, is resting. Her tongue is a little bit out. Reynir’s work is a long piece with a large rune in the middle, in golden brown tones. On Onni’s right, a large european eagle owl, brown and black, is digging into a bowl full of pumpkin. On Reynir’s left, a brown and white islandic sheepherd dog is sleeping. There are two sheep : one behind them, sleeping, and the other one behind Reynir, eating one of his balls of yarn. On the foreground are three pumpkin, one large with a rune carved on it, and two small ones, one bearing the SSSS logo. End ID]

[onthebirdspath]

can’t stop won’t stop

[windfighter]

Today's whumpcember-prompt is "The end is nigh" and I was brutally reminded of this terrible art I made 5 years ago... ^^'

[shandy-k]

Onni and awkward questions about owls.

Based on this work (warning: russian language).

[thatmintleaf]

Sketches sketches✨

[gaell-dragons]

hey look i made memes

kinda spoiler one under the cut huhu (im sorry)

[crazyapplekiss]

Mortal Enemies

Golden Child,

With hands of fire and eyes that match the skies

You burn the world where you touch it

and speak a tongue that I may never understand,

Still I try my best to be your ally

but your look means something far from friend.

Fearless Child,

With hair of smoldering embers and eyes of evergreen.

You walk a mile where I can't ever see

and speak of things I once deemed imaginary.

You talk and smile at me like we are friends,

Yet I wonder if you still resent the day we met.

Child of Fire, Child of Charm,

You mean neither no harm.

For all this is worth, hold onto your friendship.

If your harsh world has not yet taken it,

The universe wills it.

[autistic-lalli]

Hi! I've been really curious about a specific section of the first adventure. I'm not sure if it's been covered already, but do you remember the part where Lalli overextended himself and had to rest for several days? The crew was really worried about him but when Lalli woke up nobody paid him any mind. He even had a little dream sequence showing how subconsciously Lalli wanted them to show concern. Would you please analyze that, I think it would be really interesting and I'd super appreciate it! Thank you

Oh my sweet anon, I would love to analyze this scene for you. It’s very long, so the rest is under the cut.

I have no idea how long this post is going to be as I write this, so we’re going to just go through this whole sequence of action from the beginning. I'm also going to try something new of citing page numbers! Probably because I have a deep destructive craving to be in school again.

First of all, Lalli’s autism is pretty important to understanding his perspective here (it always is, but, you know.) So check out my 30daysofautisticlalli tag if you haven’t already.

Lalli scouts a route for the tank, then promptly goes to sleep in the front of the tank (at Tuuri’s insistence.) He’s been working all night, he just wants to go to sleep, and now Tuuri’s trying to talk to him and making him sleep where he’s not comfortable. And, oh! Now he's motion sick as well (374).

Then, he gets woken up to find out there was something wrong with his path he scouted (381). This is important for two reasons:

One, Lalli made a mistake.

Two, something changed unexpectedly.

On the first point, Lalli relies on his competence. (If you’re into enneagram, thinking of a 5w4 will be useful here.) Lalli is good at what he does. He is independent. When you’re good, you survive. When you’re independent, you don’t need people, and you don’t get hurt. When you’re good, you stay under the radar. Lalli and Onni feed into one another in this way—Onni wants Lalli to be good so that Lalli can be safe from the world, and Lalli wants to be good to at least keep Onni off his back, if not to impress him.

And here he is, facing down a mistake.

He’s tired. He’s cold. He’s failed. And now Tuuri is yelling at him, and everyone is staring (382).

(We’ll come back to this.)

The unexpected change also plays into this. Change, even expected change, can be difficult for autistic individuals. For me, it feels like a massive turning of a ship—a huge movement that takes a long time and a lot of effort. So when Lalli is faced with the snowdrift, it’s a huge shift in his mental direction. His day doesn’t consist of sleeping and occasionally clarifying directions. And now he has to figure out what he should expect.

But, before he can figure it out—

He’s tired. He’s cold. He’s failed. There’s been sudden change. And Tuuri is yelling at him while everyone stares.

Lalli has a meltdown/shutdown.

I explain it more in this post, so I won’t go into detail here.

The rest of the crew is mildly distressed, I would say, disappointed perhaps. Moderately inconvenienced. But this situation is not as upsetting to them as it is to Lalli.

Notably, Sigrun comments that “We just have to accept today as a failure” (383). And how does Lalli respond?

He speaks directly to Sigrun and says, “I don’t fail.” He recognized one word in Norwegian, and it was failure (384).

He doesn’t fail. He’s not done. He’s not done working. This isn’t the end.

Failure means putting people in danger. Failure means drawing extra attention. Failure means not being good enough.

Lalli doesn’t fail.

When Lalli decides to go out scouting again, Tuuri knows he’s putting himself in unnecessary danger. She snapped at him, but she backs off pretty quick as soon as he decides to go (384).

Sigrun fully supports him going. On the one hand, this seems like poor leadership on Sigrun’s part. Lalli has absolutely overworked himself, and pressing on in adverse weather on top of that doesn’t seem wise. On the other hand, I suspect that this is a testament to her trust in Lalli—she knows he knows how to do his job well. If he couldn’t do his job well, she expects him to say something.

We get Lalli’s flashback now. And this really solidifies why Lalli is so determined to not fail.

“We’re not allowed to make mistakes, not under any circumstances! Grandma made one mistake, and see where that got us.” (390)

Failure brings catastrophe.

Failure brings grief.

Failure kills people.

Lalli likely would have already carried these lessons from his childhood, but Onni’s well-intentioned harshness only solidified Lalli’s cockeyed perfectionism. Even though Lalli and Onni spend very little time interacting directly on-screen, it’s behaviors like these that reveal how much Lalli wants Onni’s approval.

And this brings us to Lalli’s luonto stunt (396-399). This moment is culmination of all these things—Lalli is desperate to prove to himself and to everyone else that he is competent, that he doesn’t fail, that he’s dependable and reliable.

(Small digression:

There’s an interesting parallel and line of growth when you compare this instance and the giant encounter with Emil. Both are moments when Lalli pushes himself beyond his capabilities. Here, Lalli does it for largely selfish reasons—it’s about his image, how the others perceive him, and how he tries to live with himself. Arguably this also leaves the crew at a disadvantage when the ghosts attack. If Lalli had shown more restraint, that situation could have been drastically different, which would have then changed the course of the entire expedition. Lalli choosing to push himself is a quiet turning point with far-spreading implications.

But! The incident with Emil and the giant is very different. Lalli saves Emil in the eleventh hour. We know it’s for Lalli, in a way, as he clearly has romantic interest in Emil by this point, but it’s also distinctly not a selfish action. And the narrative supports this selflessness—Lalli ends up in Emil’s mind, which allows Lalli to continue to protect Emil even while incapacitated, unlike the isolation of the previous encounter.)

I think it’s also important to talk about sisu here too. If you’re not familiar, sisu is a Finnish word and concept, untranslatable to English, that broadly means a sort of cold determinism in the face of crisis. It’s way more complicated than that and I do not feel equipped to elaborate further, as I am not Finnish and have no formal education in Finnish culture, but Lalli’s use of his luonto is clearly an example of sisu. In fact, I’d argue that this is what makes Lalli more of a protagonist than Onni; Onni is the more powerful mage, but Lalli? Lalli has sisu Onni couldn’t dream of.

Everything is quiet on Lalli’s front for the next while. The crew is preoccupied with staying alive and finding vaccines. Emil is the only one who displays significant concern over Lalli’s state, and he stays by Lalli’s side whenever possible.

Why doesn’t anyone else show much concern? I’m not actually totally sure, but I suspect it’s a combination of factors. First of all, Tuuri isn’t concerned because she’s seen this before. She knows Lalli will wake up, they won’t talk about it, and everything will be fine (: Presumably Sigrun is following Tuuri’s lead here. It’s inconvenient to her to have Lalli out of commission, but it’s not inconvenient yet, so he gets a pass—besides, he deserves the rest. Reynir likely doesn’t know what’s going on (and is admittedly preoccupied with visions.) Mikkel is likewise preoccupied with keeping the rest of the crew in one piece.

Quite frankly, once Lalli passes out, things simply don’t stop happening.

When the ghosts come, Lalli is clearly terrified (473). They’re something new and something dangerous, and he doesn’t know the extent of the damage they could—or are—causing. He fights them off as best he can, and the dust settles.

(Worth noting as well that I don't think Lalli knows Onni came to the rescue. We saw that happen through Reynir's eyes, not Lalli's.)

And now, Lalli “wakes up.”

What does he dream of? What does he want?

First of all, he’s able to verbally communicate with everyone else. No one is unintelligible (512).

Emil is there, Emil has been worried, and Emil is happy to see him awake. If you pay attention, even Emil’s physicality towards Lalli is different here.

In fact, everyone has been worried. And everyone is happy to see him awake.

Sigrun congratulates Lalli and voices her appreciation. She adheres to his physical boundaries and congratulates him with a pat and not a punch (513).

Mikkel is going to make lots of food. Reynir is going to cut his hair (a boy can dream, I guess.)

And in our final moment, Tuuri “translates” for Lalli. He answers he doesn’t need it. Lalli is independent of Tuuri, able to function in the group outside of her.

And then he wakes up, alone (514).

This is the first time we really see how incredibly lonely Lalli is.

There’s a double edge sword to this situation: firstly, Lalli did push himself too hard, and he would like recognition for his efforts. He made a big sacrifice for the crew and justifiably wants to be thanked for that.

However, he didn’t just do it for the crew, remember?

He was trying to prove something.

And now, as the crew is fawning over Kitty, he’s faced with the fact that he didn’t succeed. He didn’t prove himself to them.

Lalli stops trying to get their attention. The food is still bad. No one besides Mikkel has noticed him.

Unfortunately for them both, Emil is excited to see Lalli awake, he just didn’t notice him right away. He even goes on to express his worry... but it’s too late. The damage has been done. Lalli’s feelings have been deeply hurt, and the infamous Soup Incident occurs.

When you’re independent, you don’t get hurt, right?

When Tuuri approaches Lalli we catch another layer: more unexpected change. Not only did nothing go how Lalli wanted when he woke up, they aren’t even at the camp he scouted!

“Oh that! It was good, but got overrun by ghosts and we had to move on. So we drove for a bit and ended up here. You know, finding a safe camping spot turned out to be rally easy.” (520)

Tuuri has a nice habit of accidentally saying the worst possible thing.

Lalli failed.

He was just trying to recover from his previous mistakes, and he failed at that, too. And not only that, but Tuuri thinks she can do his job just as well.

And so the question becomes: Do they need him? Do they care?

While it wasn’t a picnic for anyone else, Lalli has undergone a great deal of emotional distress in the last couple of days, and that—that’s what no one notices or does anything about.

With Lalli, it always comes back to the language barrier, magic, and neurodivergence. They’re all layers and metaphors and experiences that feed into each other. Lalli in inherently the most isolated person in the crew. Even Reynir, who wasn’t supposed to be there, has a better connection to the others. No one experiences the expedition (or the world!) like Lalli, and the only person he’s capable of putting it in words to is Tuuri, who, quite frankly, doesn’t put in the effort to understand. He almost experiences a different reality than the rest of the crew, and even those who know that don’t realize the gravity and impact of that difference.

And likewise, Lalli knows everyone else sees the world differently than him. So not only is the void between himself and others there, but he’s also aware of it. Which makes it that much harder to try and bridge.

So Lalli goes back in his personal box. Safely isolated further, but on purpose. Because at least then it’s his choice.

(And that’s why Emil’s personality and persistence are so so so important, but that’s a different essay. That I’m happy to write. Just send another ask. I love doing these.)

[crowbarrd]

Apparently it's catboyvember? As such I humbly offer you SSSS catboys