#Ring demon story

[local-redhead-bookworm]

I love how Rings of Power has added depth to Orc culture. I've read a decent number of academic papers on Tolkien for college projects, and one of the things I've read that Tolkien said was that he could not reconcile how his protagonists treated Orcs with the idea that Orcs were fully people, because that would have made the callous manner in which his protagonists kill Orcs in combat wholly unacceptable. It's a moral dilemma he was well aware of, and I'm so glad that they're getting to be people with their own culture. They have mourning rituals, they have familial bonds, and they have kids. They've been inconsequential monsters for too long.

[skymagpie]

Language in World of Warcraft is the most unstable story and world building element - different languages come into play whenever the plot needs a language barrier which is very rarely in fact, and then language is never an issue, so much so that we are just to assume that everyone is using a spell that helps them understand different languages, thus rendering them pointless.

Back in the earlier lore, language barriers were a big deal, Khadgar could not understand the orcs hence why he was impressed that Garona knew Common and she was able to breach the divide between humans and orcs through this. The language was an important story element, not only on a technical level, but on a more symbolic level. And on a technical level, Khadgar had to enchant a ring that would help him communicate with other races in their own language. These were issues that had to be dealt with and it showed interesting character and lore traits by how these characters dealt with them.

However in modern WoW, unless literally everyone has a translator ring on them at all times, many things do not make sense. Why would a civilization of Highborne who were under a dome for 10.000 years suddenly understand both Orcish and Common? Why would the Highmountain Tauren not have their own dialects given that they were also cut off from the rest of the Tauren and the Horde? Even if we are to assume that they had contact with the Night Elves from Val'sharah, why would the Night Elves teach them Common instead of Darnassian? Not to mention the Dragon Isles being cut off from the rest of the world for thousands of years and yet the Tuskarr perfectly understand us and we understand them perfectly.

Of course all of this can easily be explained with A Magic Ring or a Magic Scroll, but this is like adding and element and then removing it. Yeah different languages are necessary and you can't have all these cultures all share the same language, but also by just magically removing it as an obstacle or a problem, it's like you never had it. It becomes flavor, rather than a cultural element. Yes, this is an MMORPG, but even if we had a magical ring of translation on us at all times, I wish the language barriers were more present where NPCs would ask us to be translators and mediators between different groups because of this barrier.

[alterigo06]

Hashira (+Ubuyashiki) nails, modeled by my sister and done by me

(I’ll add close ups in a reblog)

[val-of-the-north]

Barong my beloved divine beast.

Rangda is also cool as fuck.

These ancient rivals shall battle forevermore.

[aolechan]

This is my favorite shirt of him rn, what a cutie 😭

[winterwyrd]

The Moths, Mary Oliver

Happy belated birthday @lotrmusical! Suffer 😌

Part 2 of Mary Oliver LoTR (part 1 here)

[embers-archive]

Beeduo underground fighting ring au my beloved

[explosionshark]

top 5 horror book recommendations? it's spooky season and i need to get my read on...

Hell yeah! Gonna break this down a little. First an obligatory rehash of books I always recommend for this, these are like all-time faves for me

Wounds/North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud - can't choose between these two, so they're tied for my favorite single author short story collection. Nathan Ballingrud is one of my favorite writers of all time

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado - a very very close second for my favorite single-author short story collection. Machado is a beautiful writer and finding an author writing such powerful horror from a queer woman's perspective was world changing for me.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson - COME ON!!!! You might have already read this but consider reading it again! Absolute classic.

The Cipher by Kathe Koja - dark, fucked up meditation on art and addiction and toxic relationships. I think about this book all the time. A guy finds a weird hole in his apartment basement and then everything goes wrong (first slowly and then very very quickly)

Red X by David Demchuk - talked about this a lot before too but I really do love it. Fictional story inspired by real life serial killings that took place in Toronto's gay village over decades. The author inserts essays throughout the book that makes it part memoir as well. A supernatural story about real queer trauma.

--

Okay with that out of the way, here's some recommendations for stuff I think would be fun for Halloween specifically

Echoes edited by Ellen Datlow - OKAY CHEATING I ALSO RECOMMEND THIS ALL THE TIME BUT IT'S A PERFECT OCTOBER BOOK!!! Fuck-off huge ghost story anthology. Huge range of tones, pretty diverse group of contributing authors, it's my all-time favorite anthology.

Slewfoot by BROM - this one's got major autumn vibes. It's a story of a woman in Puritan New England who's accused of witchcraft. It's also a story about the devil. Kind of. The print version has really amazing paintings by the author, but I've heard this is also good in audio.

Come Closer by Sara Gran - this is a great little novella. Possession story that really packs a punch. I can't really say much more than that, but it's not a huge time investment and I think it's really worthwhile.

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu - if you can, get the version edited by Carmen Maria Machado (she adds in some great footnotes and it has some neat art too). This is a classic and also quite a brisk read. The original lesbian vampire story.

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - here's a new release for you! I always watch a ton of horror movies in October, and if you're anything like me maybe you'll want to read a horror novel about horror movies. This story follows a female film editor in 90s Mexico and her washed up actor friend as they help a retired filmmaker complete his famously unfinished last film, which he had been making with a former Nazi occultist before strange misfortunes and the occultist's mysterious disappearance forced production to shut down.

Okay that was double the amount of recommendations requested so I'm stopping here. Haha don't look in the tags don't worry about it there's nothing there you're crazy

[letsgethaunted]

Listener Stories #25

Welcome to Episode 170.5: Listener Stories #25! This is the episode where our Haunties (aka listeners) write in with their first-person spooky tales of cryptids, ghosts, curses, aliens, and more! Listener stories from this week’s episode include: a funeral ghost, a tarot reading from beyond, a crouched sleep demon that resembles the girl from The Ring, a grinch hand coming out of a closet, mirror portals, accidentally phasing into an alternate dimension for a year, shadow people with crow voices, a haunted jail hostel, lucid dreaming with a Bangungot, a salon ghost, and a spirit caught in a .gif. Some of the listeners whose stories are featured in this episode include: Justin S., Alanna “A.J.” S., Brett C., Charlotte S., Izzy P, Matt L., Carolina P., Nancy aka “NSA”, Joshua S., & Genevieve F.!

THIS EPISODE IS SPONSORED!! Find out more about this week’s advertisers below!

ZocDoc: Go to https://www.zocdoc.com/haunted and download the Zocdoc app for FREE to find and book a top-rated doctor today!

Apostrophe: For listeners of Let’s Get Haunted, go to Apostrophe’s website at https://www.Apostrophe.com/LETSGETHAUNTED and click “Get Started”, then use our code “LETSGETHAUNTED” at sign up and you’ll get your first visit for only five dollars!

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[geeksinhats]

Watch "Let Goku Die" on YouTube

Ok so I know @mothers-basement doesn't post here anymore, so I'm sharing his latest video because while this video is mostly about Dragon Ball, what he's talking about can apply to any form of hyperfixation, and I think people on this website need to hear what he has to say

[cherryflight]

Old Monk time!

Zaxaria vs. evil cloth thing, attempt 1.  You have no idea how long I’ve been looking forward to this boss in particular.  He’s such a cool concept and I have so much fun doing multiplayer things in this game.  It’s a win-win!  Well...not so much for my character...

Attempt 1: player phantom.  They managed to get me in a corner and I died.  Love the collapse gesture they did at the end.  GG katana person.  You were very patient waiting for me to climb the stairs. (also: nice try with God’s Wrath at the start.  There’s a reason I attuned Hidden Soul for this! :D  The regen aura from her blessed sword gives her away once she’s in the arena but it does make ambushes from the other side of the fog gate a little more difficult!)

Attempt 2: player phantom.  This one was fun!  It turned into a parry fight (curved sword offhand for me, shield on them).  There were so many moments where we both parried at each other, expecting an attack!  In the end, the victorious read was theirs.  GG magic/dex person!  There were a few unfortunate lag spikes but overall this one was a treat.  I’m so happy I got to practice my parry timing!

Attempt 3: player phantom.  Died due to stupid mistakes.  As in, “forgetting how I was holding my main hand weapon” stupid.  Guess I jumped in too soon after the last one and needed to mentally refocus.  GG dragon sword person, sorry I was a disappointing fight.

Attempt 4: player phantom.  What an honor this was!  I got bonked by a dragon bone smasher on fire!  GG, that was hilarious!  I love seeing that insane thing in action, and the fire buff just made it even more delightfully ridiculous.

Unfortunately, I had to cut it short here.  While the slayer of demons has all the time and as many tries as they have the willpower to handle, time marches on outside the game, and I have a job to be awake and functional for.

God, this is so fun I almost don’t want to win and move on?  I love seeing the builds everyone’s putting together!

Man, that first loss has put Latria in kind of a grim state though.  I think we’re one more body form loss away from pure black, if it’s not already there.  I’m not sure if I want to test it by checking on Sodden Ring access or on poor Rydell first...or if I avoid it all and go at the boss again.

We’ll see what happens when I play next, I guess!  I love this game.  I love this game so much.

[lightdancer1]

Now that I think about it:

It really is striking given everything with that one episode that there's no plotline where Tara accidentally kills off her love interest with that blindness spell early in Season 5 and Glory steamrolls everyone because the big gun went missing. It's basically one of this 'so this is how we done fucked up, don't do that shit' storylines that's seemingly begging to be written and.....nobody actually has. It'd be a perfect knife twist and it's not like the Scoobies would let Tara just leave with her obviously evil family even after that because they'd not want to lose someone ELSE after it.

So what does happen if they have to go through the Glory arc but there's no Willow (especially twistedly funny given later seasons if the Powers That Be cough her up again at the start of the equivalent of Season 6)? Would the butterfly effect mean she'd even brain-suck Tara, which was a pretty clear bit of her power boost that made her as formidable? If that never happens and they just use the hammer sooner, does anyone actually have to die?

I can also see if the PTB did decide 'oh wait, no, this one DOES have a destiny and she needs to get on with it' that a resurrected Willow after all that would be in the usual situation most of the 'Tara comes back' fics go of having entirely valid trust issues and having the 'wait HOW much time happened oh holy God WHAT is Glory and wow' reactions to a normal year on the Hellmouth.

Canon-wise Willow's an unkillable, fanfic exists precisely to do what canon wouldn't. And ultimately Tara was, after all, meant to be the replacement goldfish for Willow's old niche, so one can very easily see the Scoobies acting at a meta-level like that and creating something of the same dysfunction from a different route because she is very much NOT Willow in any of the ways that define her. She has a rigidly defined sense of ethics, she gets a backbone that has a more consistent sense of 'happens to me bad, happens to you because I'm traumatized nobody ever remembers it for the rest of anything ever'.

It would also be a suitably ironic knife twist given the 'big gun' thing that the very expectations here that set up the ultimate Dark Lord Rosenberg thing never happening lead to the Gang winning because Buffy beats the shit out of Glory with a magic hammer when she never gets her mitts on Tara because there's no Willow for her to argue with that one day and the butterfly effects are big, she never dies....and then the PTB have Willow turn right back up in the Magic shop alive, well, and utterly ocnfused at the end of the equivalent of that season going "What the Hell was that."

I would admittedly have the Dark Willow thing happen anyway as a result of overcompensating for realizing she was killed as result of relying on someone else's wisdom with magic and it's more Dark Lord Rosenberg, as I mentioned, rather than its canon aspect and Tara gets to be the replacement Willow and it does not spark joy while Willow in turn quite reasonably has major trust and communication issues and doubles and triples down on increasingly powerful magic sans magic crack analogy until she's full-scale Dark Phoenix and people belatedly have the 'oh shit we probably should have tried talking before now' reaction.

This may well end up the one other Buffyverse fic I write, though I'd basically breeze through the rest of Season 5 in the first chapter from Tara's POV and then at the tail end Willow comes back and the hilarity ensues.

Then again it's also equally possible for Willow to simply go 'nah, fuck magic, magic killed me, y'all already got a witch, computers it is' and then the Hellmouth Hellmouths and her destiny won't be denied and the paranoia of living on the place makes her take the same path while actually struggling against it when she gets a Monkey's Paw version of her own desire to be the big damn hero, but to be able to do that she has to be able to reach the power to do so and since she is who she is, it's impossible to have the power to abruptly start being capable of making reality do what you want without it going to her head.

And given that she did at least seem to be easily replaceable (with Willow and Tara equally unreliable narrators and the truth not quite matching up with what either of them think here and the two narrative POVs here) Dark Lord Rosenberg gets to be as much a case of venting that she in a sense was the replaceable sidekick on a television show and not a main character.

Almost every other canon possibility here has done this and having 'the person I love cannot see the demon for who she is' and then 'wait, she died, I didn't mean that' because the magic misfires a little harder in a laser-guided fashion and having Tara meet her intended niche a little harder than otherwise is....surprisingly under-used.

[54pht1x]

I just wanted to say real quick and explain my characters (TW! S3x abuse, S3x offender, unhealthy relationship, r4pist, 5talker)

(oldest) levitan, (second oldest) Asroth, (middle child) Azxel, (youngest sister) Shyaza➡️ Siblings, there names are based off of actual demons and fallen angels.

Asroth, Belazeb, Belgor, Asmadea, Mamon➡️Friends (inspired by 7 deadly sins)

Azxel, Prelyic, Trex, Olivia➡️Friends, all unhealthy for eachother. Olivia is the only okay one

Prelyic is an obsessive stalker, r4pist, and I guess you can just say a 53X offender towards Trex and Trex only sooo probably not ship them for obvious reasons but I really don't give a shit if you ship any other one of my characters lol. Anyways that's all lol, byeee(⁠◍⁠•⁠ᴗ⁠•⁠◍⁠)⁠❤

[terezillustrations]

I started drawing a comic about a lust demon forbidden from romance and a wood elf falling in love. I myself am a polyamorous demiromantic person, so this is a bit out of my element dynamic wise but I think it would be a beautiful story to tell and I just think the characters are so cute! You’ll see at the end the illustration the comic is based off. You can also read a little short story I wrote on the subject on my website in my pinned post, if you look for the Demon/Elf tab. I’m so excited to get to drawing this! I think it’s a great first comic to start off with, although I’m not sure where I’m really going with it, but that’s the fun of it all, tbh☺️ I already have an ending planned and I feel like that’s all I need to keep going and writing. I’ll try and keep y’all updated!

p.s.: All the demons are canonically non-binary (and the lust demons specifically are sexless when they’re not shapeshifting), but they have different pronouns and names that they prefer when among peers.

[buggzrfaeries]

there should be an addams family horror sitcom style show and one of the episodes they do the stuck in a mind prison crafted by an outside entity to be their ideal worlds so the entity can eat them or whatever and one of the characters (a hardcore goth) gets sucked into a vampire romance but instead of being wooed they just get bored bc the vampires arent actually monstrous besides pointy teeth and ears and they manage to break out n rescue everyone else

[peppermint-whiskers]

A Lust for Power

Scarlet Hellcat, a resident of the Envy Ring, aspires to do big things. She meets someone who can help her dream bigger. For a price.

This is for the @badthingshappenbingo prompt: amputation. Please proceed with caution! This is loosely based on Dante's inferno AND the seven deadly sins, but really only in concept. The setting and the way the rings work are gonna mostly be my ideas of how they should work uwu

Thanks for reading!