#Section 162

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BG3 Fanfiction Statistics, Part 2

Welcome to part 2 of my BG3 AO3 fanfic statistical analysis! In part 1, which can be found here, I discussed general fanfic data for the fandom and took a look at pairing trends for the player character, Shadowheart, Karlach, Lae’zel, and Minthara. In this section, I will discuss pairing trends on AO3 for Astarion, Gale, Wyll, and Halsin, then compare all 8 main characters and talk about pairings more broadly.

Please note that the data for this analysis was gathered between July 21, 2024 and July 24, 2024. I gathered data for the top 300 ship tags in the BG3 fandom, and due to time constraints did not look at pairings with fewer than 5 fics.

I will try and be as transparent as possible when discussing how I obtained and processed this data. A copy of my spreadsheet can be found here and contains all of the tables I will be discussing for anyone who wishes to take a closer look at the data. If you don’t care about the numbers and/or my thoughts about them, feel free to skim through this post and just look at the charts!

I will be referencing the “PC” a lot in this section. See part 1 for an explanation of my methodology, but basically I combined Tav, Dark Urge, Original Character, Reader, and You into one Player Character (PC) supercategory while filtering to prevent double counting. This makes it clearer who each character is typically paired with. It also drops the number of ships from 300 to 162. Throughout this essay, I will use “ship tags” to refer to the original 300 ships that I gathered the data for and “pairings” to refer to the 162 ships that remain when I condense the player character down.

CHARACTER PAIRING STATISTICS, CONT.

In part 1, I went through Tav, the Dark Urge, Shadowheart, Karlach, Lae’zel, and Minthara and took a look at who they are shipped with and their fic category (F/M, M/M, F/F, Other, Multi) breakdown. In this continuation, I will look at Astarion, Gale, Wyll, and Halsin.

ASTARION

Astarion was included in 50.2% of all fic pairings (the number of fics tagged Astarion/PC + the number of fics tagged Astarion/Gale + the number of fics tagged Astarion/Halsin and so on, divided by the total sum of all fic pairings). This percentage increased to 53.9% when otp:true was applied. This means that over half of all shipping content for BG3 on AO3 involves Astarion!

Astarion is in 7 of the top 10 ship tags and 64 of the top 300 ship tags. When I condense the pairings with the PC down, he is in 7 of the top 30 ships and 40 of the 162 total pairings. The loss of 24 ship tags comes from me having to condense down not only all his ship tags with the PC but also all his threesomes and foursomes and moresomes with the PC.

Notably, Astarion was the only BG3 character to have race specific ship tags – Astarion/Tiefling!OC (68 fics), Astarion/Half-Elf!OC (27 fics), and Astarion/Drow!OC (9 fics). These all got condensed down into the Astarion/PC supercategory as well.

Astarion/Gale is #4 and his next pairings with a non-player character are #8 Halsin and #9 Wyll. Pairings #1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, and 16 are all just him with different tags for the player character. Condensing down all the player character tags yields us his top 20 pairings.

As expected, the player character dominates his pairings with 11,756 fics. His biggest non-PC ships are with Gale with 2,431 fics (of which an unusually high proportion are otp:true – 1,752 – almost three quarters of all his fics with Gale), Halsin with 848 fics, and Wyll with 582 fics. Ignoring the PC, he mostly seems to be shipped with men – the first canon woman to show up is Karlach at #8 with 157 fics (an order of magnitude less than Gale). He has four threesomes (Halsin/PC/Astarion, Gale/PC/Astarion, Karlach/Wyll/Astarion, Wyll/PC/Astarion) in his top 20 ships. I was surprised at how high Cazador (#6, 387 fics) was at first, but a lot of that is likely from Astarion’s backstory.

#20 was Astarion/Astarion with 15 fics, which means that Astarion is following in the proud tradition of tumblr sexymen like the Onceler before him.

As expected from looking at Astarion’s pairings in general, he has slightly more M/M (8,923 fics) shipping than M/F (7,996 fics) shipping. M/M pairings have an unusually high rate of otp:true fics – that’s mostly from Astarion/Gale. Oddly, there’s a small number (51) of F/F otp:true fics – these are either genderbends or mistags.

Looking at the pattern of pairings with the PC only, a different pattern emerges.

This time, there’s significantly more M/F fics (6,910, 58.8% of Astarion’s fics with the PC) than M/M fics (4,182, 35.6%), though the numbers are closer when you look at otp:true (46.7% M/F vs 37.6% M/M). We can infer then that it is more common to ship female player characters with Astarion than men. The Other category is significant (1,601 fics, 13.6%) and likely was used for a tag for nonbinary player characters. There’s still a bizarre 38 otp:true F/F fics.

GALE

Gale is in 19.7% of all pairings and 26.5% of otp:true pairings. He has 33 ship tags in the top 300, which drops to 23 when I condense all the player characters into “PC.”

Unlike Astarion, whose chart was completely dominated by his pairing with the PC, Gale has almost as many fics with Astarion as he does with Tav. The top pairings for Gale are primarily with the player character – #1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are all just different tags for the player character (Gale/You and Gale/Reader are synonymous and so have pretty much the same number of fics). Condensing all that down yields the following chart.

There’s a stark drop off after the player character and Astarion – an order of magnitude decrease in fics (#4 Shadowheart/Gale has 111 fics, a massive drop off from 2,431 Astarion/Gale fics). And #3 is just a threesome with both the PC and Astarion. I’ve commented on it before, but Gale/Astarion has a truly unusual proportion of otp:true fics – something that indicates that there are no background pairings in most of that ship’s activity. I would not be surprised if many of those fics are modern AUs or post game fics that don’t feature the other BG3 characters much if at all.

The quartet of Astarion-Gale-Halsin-PC is prominent in Gale’s top 20 ships. All permutations of that multiship are present: #1 Gale/PC, #2 Astarion/Gale, #5 Halsin/Gale, #3 Astarion/PC/Gale, #6 Astarion/Halsin/Gale, #11 Gale/Halsin/PC, and #15 Astarion/Gale/Halsin/PC. Towards the bottom of his top 20 we start getting into his multiships with most or all of the main protagonists. This’ll be more common with the other companions – there are only 11 Astarion / Gale / Wyll / Shadowheart / Lae’zel / Karlach fics, so when these show up the list is descending into very low fic count pairings.

Looking at Gale’s fic category breakdown, M/M predominates with 3,859 fics to M/F’s 2,938 fics. Given the very high proportion of otp:true fics, we can assume that most of that is Astarion/Gale. Indeed, when we look at Gale’s ship with the player character (his only other substantial ship), we see a very different picture.

Gale’s ship with the player character has much more M/F content than his general ship content and also than Astarion. M/M content drops from 57.1% of all his fics to 30.5% of his ships with the player character, while M/F content rises from 43.5% of all his fic content to 68.1% of his fic content with the player character. ‘Other’ shipping is about 9.6% of ship content with the player character. Looking at otp:true content, a little more than half as many male player characters are shipped with Gale as female player characters.

There are, for some reason, 16 F/F otp:true fics for all of Gale’s ships and 7 otp:true F/F fics for his ship with the player character.

WYLL

Wyll is featured in 5.2% of all pairings and 5.7% of otp:true pairings, a truly stunning drop from the ~50% of Astarion and 20-26% of Gale. He is in 24 of the top 300 BG3 ships, a number that drops to 18 when I condense all the player characters into one category.

Interestingly, Astarion/Wyll outpaces Wyll/Tav as Wyll’s most popular ship. Like with Gale/Astarion, the proportion of otp:true fics for that pairing is unusually high.

When we condense all of Wyll’s player character pairings into one category, it (barely) edges out Astarion/Wyll, with 588 and 582 fics respectively (also note that no Wyll pairing has thousands of fics, unlike Gale and Astarion before him). What also happens when we condense the player characters is that Wyll does not reach a full 20 ships – he drops to 18 pairings. He has more than this, of course, but my methodology ignores all pairings with fewer than 5 fics. Therefore, Wyll’s 19th and 20th most popular pairings have 4 fics or fewer. I have represented these missing pairings with little :( emojis, because this is a sad state of affairs.

Karlach is by far Wyll’s most popular ship after Astarion and the PC, with 327 fics. The otp:true proportion is low, so it is likely often a background ship or has background ships. The next highest pairing is #4, Gale, with 54 fics. The numbers rapidly drop from there – by #6 Wyll/Lae’zel we are at 26 fics and by #14 Wyll/Karlach/Shadowheart we are down to only 10 fics.

Wyll’s pairings, like all of the male characters, tend towards M/M, with 1,010 total fics. F/M follows up with 794 and Other with 162. Much of his M/M fics come from Astarion/Wyll, as we can see when we look at Wyll’s ships with the PC.

Like Astarion and Gale before him, the proportion of M/F rises when we look at Wyll’s pairings with the player character specifically. Unlike Astarion and Gale, though, no category even comes close to breaking 1,000 fics. M/F has 357 fics (or about 60.7% of his fics total) and M/M has 224 (38.1%). With otp:true applied, M/F is 56.3%, M/M is 40.7%, and Other has 13.3%. These numbers add to more than 100%, so even on otp:true fics people are evidently tagging multiple categories. This is likely due to “Reader” fics with a generic reader.

HALSIN

Halsin is featured in 9.7% of all pairings, almost twice Wyll’s proportion. This drops to 7.9% though when you apply otp:true – a much larger drop than pretty much anyone else other than the PC. It’s likely because Halsin has a disproportionately high number of fics with threesomes, which eliminate a fic from otp:true if the threesome subrelationships are also tagged.

He is in 31 of the top 300 ship tags and 21 of the top 162 pairings.

Like every other man in this essay, Halsin’s ship with Astarion is very prominent. The first canon woman to show up is Shadowheart at #15.

As expected, Halsin/PC is easily his most popular pairing, with 1,637 fics. Astarion and a threesome with Astarion and the PC follow with quite decent fic counts of 848 and 456 respectively. The otp:true proportion for Halsin/Astarion is abnormally high. Gale and Shadowheart seem to be his other major ships. Gale/Halsin is #4 with 106 fics and Gale/PC/Halsin is #8 with 19. Shadowheart/Halsin is #6 with 36 fics and Shadowheart/Halsin/PC is #10 with 17.

The Astarion-Halsin-Gale-PC quartet shows up prominently in Halsin’s top pairings. In addition to the ships previously mentioned, Halsin/Astarion/Gale is #5 with 92 fics.

What’s notable about Halsin’s fic categories is the abnormally large number of fics tagged Multi – 1,257 fics, or 37.4% of the total. Given that he’s the poly companion, this makes sense.

Looking at Halsin with the PC specifically, the typical pattern appears. The percentage of M/M drops and M/F rises. Unlike the other characters and like his general shipping situation, the percentage of Multi fic is quite high – 32.7%.

CHARACTER COMPARISON

Now that I’ve looked at all the main characters individually, let’s take a look at how they compare to each other across a variety of metrics.

FIC RATINGS

In my individual character discussions, I didn’t talk about their relative rating proportions much, even though I was carefully tracking it. This is because all rating plots look just about the same until you compare people against each other directly.

Taking a look at all fics, I noticed a couple of things. First of all, Wyll is the companion with the least amount of horny fic written about him, with 33.4% of fics that include him in a pairing being rated Explicit. Halsin is the horniest, no surprise, with 52.8% of fics that include him in a pairing being rated Explicit – over half! Astarion has 41.2% Explicit fics while Gale has 43.6%. Amongst the women, Minthara has the highest percentage of Explicit fics (47.8%) while all three other women are within 38% – 40%.

Interestingly, the percentage of fics rated Mature remains within 22% – 26% for all companions except Minthara, who has 27.8%. The proportion of General fic is between 9% and 11% for Astarion, Gale, Shadowheart, and Karlach. Wyll has more than that, with 11.4%, while Lae’zel and Minthara have less than that with 8.4% and 5.6% respectively.

The situation does not change appreciably when I only look at fics with the otp:true condition.

FIC CATEGORIES

I have been talking about the percentage of M/F, M/M, F/F, Other, and Multi fics for each of the main characters. It’s interesting to compare them with each other. Please note, though, that in the individual character sections the percentages given were the percent of all fics for that character, and so the percentages added up to more than 100% because many fics tag several categories. In this section, the percentages given are a percent of all pairings. They therefore all add up to 100%, but it also means that fics that tag multiple categories are counted multiple times in that 100%.

The men all have more M/F than the women do (Astarion and Gale have the most while Lae’zel and Minthara have the least). Halsin, unsurprisingly, has the most Multi fic while Minthara has the least. Karlach has a surprisingly low proportion of F/F fic.

An interesting note is that the men all have less F/F fic than the women do M/M fic. This means that women are in background pairings to M/M ships or have background M/M ships in their focus fics proportionally more often than the men have background F/F ships or are in the background of F/F fics. The exception is Wyll, who has a F/F percentage close to the percentage of M/M fics in the womens’ fics.

Looking at ships with the PC specifically, some interesting patterns emerge.

Astarion, Gale, Wyll and Halsin have significantly (by more than 10%) more M/F content and less M/M content in their ships with the PC than their ships in general. Lae’zel and Minthara see a slight (less than 5%) increases in M/F and decreases in F/F as well. Shadowheart mostly stays the same. Karlach, on the other hand, sees a moderate (between 5% and 10%) decrease in M/F and increase in F/F in her ship with the PC specifically.

But remember, all these values include background pairings, and we have no way of knowing what proportion of each category actually contains the character we are interested in. So, what happens when we strip background pairings out of the equation by applying otp:true?

Wow! What a difference! Now, these values aren’t necessarily representative of all their pairings – just the ones that authors like to focus on without any background ships. Recall from the individual character analyses that often the second most popular ship after the pairing with the PC had an unusually high otp:true ratio. So we can assume, for example, that a large proportion of the M/M fics for Astarion and for Gale are from Gale/Astarion.

Every woman except Karlach is gayer than all of the men. Surprisingly, Karlach is the straightest companion by this particular metric.

Applying otp:true to ships with the PC specifically yields very different results.

Like what we saw with all ships, ships between the PC and men have significantly more M/F content than the mens’ ships generally. In this case, every man except Astarion jumps to around 50% M/F, and Astarion still jumps from 24.3% to 42.9%. The consistent pattern is that when looking at otp:true fics, M/M is preferred unless the pairing is with the player character, in which case M/F is more popular.

The conclusions for the women are not as clear cut. Karlach has more F/F and less M/F when looking specifically at ships with the PC, while Lae’zel has almost twice as much M/F when you look at her ship with the PC than her general otp:true fics – almost certainly due to the loss of Shadowheart/Lae’zel. Shadowheart experiences a significant (>10%) decline in the proportion of F/F fics, while Minthara sees a smaller one (~5%). What remains true, though, is that the majority of the player character shipping for the women is F/F.

The green bars in the chart are for the Other category, an expansive category that includes a lot of nonbinary PC shipping. You can therefore estimate how popular it is to ship each main character with a nonbinary Tav. Karlach has the most (18.6%) while Lae’zel has the least (5.2%). Everyone else is between 10% (well, 9.8% for Gale) and 12% except for Astarion who has 13.6%.

PAIRINGS

Most of both parts of this essay has been spent looking at each main character in relative isolation. But if you plot all pairings next to each other it paints a very interesting picture about each character’s relative popularity.

Astarion shows up 7 times in the top 10 ship tags and 12 times in the top 30 ship tags. The first non-Astarion ship is #4, Tav/Gale. There are no canon women in the top 10 ship tags – the first to show up is Shadowheart, at #14. Wyll does not appear until #18, in a pairing with Astarion. His pairing with Tav is #25. Lae’zel’s ship with Tav does not even make it onto this plot, at #38. Minthara is in an even worse situation – she first shows up at #60.

The results when I condense all the player character tags into “PC” are... stark.

Astarion dominates the BG3 fanfiction sphere in a way that is very surprising for a piece of media with six strong main characters. In fact, in order to actually be able to see the teeny tiny bars representing everybody else, here's a second graph with Astarion/PC excluded.

Astarion/PC is far and away the most popular ship, with 11,756 fics. Gale/PC is the second, with 3,500 – less than a third as many. Next is Astarion/Gale (2,431 fics) with an unusually high “otp:true” ratio, which indicates that it is frequently being written without any background ships. Surprisingly, Gortash/PC is fourth with 1,891 fics, followed by Halsin/PC with 1,637. Shadowheart/PC is the first woman to show up, at #6 with 980 fics. This is still 657 fics less than Halsin/PC and 911 fics less than Gortash/PC, which means that Gortash/PC is almost twice as popular as Shadowheart/PC. Astarion/PC has 12 times as many fics as Shadowheart/PC.

Karlach follows Shadowheart at #7 with 890 fics. Of the main cast, Lae’zel is next at #10 with 694 fics, and unlike every other Origin character her most popular ship is not with the PC but with Shadowheart. Wyll/PC does not make it into the top 10 ships, coming in at #11 with 588 ships. Notably, Raphael has more fics with the PC than either Lae’zel or Wyll, coming in at #9 with 745. Astarion/PC has a whopping 20 times as many fics as Wyll does and Gortash has over three times as many fics with the PC as Wyll does.

Lae’zel/PC finally shows up at #16 with 348 fics. Rolan/PC has more fics (#13, 477), and Astarion/PC has 33 times as many fics. Minthara/PC, meanwhile, is all the way down at #23 with 234 fics. Raphael, Rolan, Zevlor, the Emperor, and Haarlep all have more fics with the PC than she does. Halsin/PC has 7 times as many fics as Minthara/PC.

If you add up all the pairings each main character is tagged in, you get the following chart.

Astarion is far and away the most written about character in the BG3 fandom, followed by Gale and Halsin. If you divide these numbers by the total number of pairings, Astarion is in 50% of pairings, Gale is in 20%, and Halsin is in 10%. No other character breaks 10% - Shadowheart is in 7% of pairings, Karlach in 6%, Wyll in 5%, Lae’zel in 4%, and Minthara is in 1%.

Out of curiosity, I tallied up the numbers for Gortash as well. He appears in 6% of all pairings and 7% of otp:true pairings. This means that Gortash breaks even with Karlach and appears in more pairings than Wyll, Lae’zel, or Minthara, and if you look at otp:true he beats all the women and Wyll. This is despite Gortash having very few ships with characters outside of the PC, unlike most of the main cast who have notable secondary ships like Shadowheart/Lae’zel.

PAIRING ANALYSIS

Why am I focusing so much on pairings? Mostly because BG3 is an ensemble game – many fics will tag characters who show up for any significant length of time, even if just in the background. Therefore, if a character is tagged that is indicative that they are being included but not necessarily a sign that they are being focused on.

AO3 is a largely romance focused site (only 12% of all BG fics are categorized as General) and so characters in a pairing are more likely to be a focus of a fic. Of course this is not a hard rule, as in-depth character studies may have no pairings tagged at all or may tag a pairing that shows up in the background – but I have no way to distinguish these fics from a fic that tags a character because they show up for one paragraph. There is also the problem that many pairings are background pairings that are tagged but show up only briefly. To try and avoid that, in the following conversation, I will often be focusing on ships with the PC specifically. Fics pairing a character with the PC are especially likely to be focusing on that character and their romance and are much less likely to be a background ship than other pairings.

Looking at the data, the four most popular characters to ship with the PC – Astarion, Gale, Halsin, and Gortash – constitute the majority of fan works. Astarion, Gale, and Halsin in particular are shipped in all the possible configurations and these pairings are comparatively popular. Astarion/Gale is #3, Astarion/Halsin is #8 (above any Wyll or Lae’zel ships), Astarion/Halsin/PC is #14 (above Lae’zel/PC and all Minthara ships), Astarion/Gale/PC is #26, Gale/Halsin is #33, and Astarion/Gale/Halsin is #34.

So I did a little experiment. I went through my data and counted all the pairings that contained ONLY Astarion, Gale, Halsin, Gortash, and/or the PC. Then, I went through and counted all the pairings that weren’t in that group but did contain at least one of Astarion, Gale, Halsin, or Gortash.

Pairings containing ONLY a combination of the PC, Astarion, Gale, Halsin, or Gortash constituted 66.9% of all fic pairings in the BG3 fandom and (in a neat coincidence) also 66.9% of otp:true fic pairings. Adding in fics that involve at least one of these men with someone else ups the numbers to 73.3% of all fics and 75.0% of otp:true fics. Which means that only about a quarter of pairings do NOT include one of these four white men.

Now, it isn’t unusual for a couple of people to dominate a fandom like this. Many fandoms’ creative output primarily consist of only a couple of popular characters and their associated pairings. What is notable, though, is that BG3 is an ensemble game with 6 strong and nuanced main characters, three of whom are women, and two additional strong side characters, one of whom is a woman. But the four primary objects of fandom’s focus are 2 of the main characters, one of the side characters, and a villain.

This discrepancy is especially notable for Shadowheart and Lae’zel. For ages, when I’ve seen people bring up the relative scarcity of women in fanfic, the rejoinder is that the true culprit is the source media. Stories just don’t feature complex, interesting women with fully realized arcs, people say. There’s no narrative meat to for fandom to sink their teeth into.

This is not the case in BG3.

Both Shadowheart and Lae’zel have excellent narrative arcs that are well embedded into the game – Lae’zel has two game areas dedicated to her plotline (the creche and the astral plane) and you literally cannot progress the game past act 2 without interacting with Shadowheart’s dedicated area. The characters grapple with crisises of faith, culture clashes, and important decisions throughout the game – and who they end up becoming changes depending on the player character’s actions. This is great stuff! But it does not translate into fanfic popularity.

Lae’zel in particular is underrepresented. It’s notable that she is main character who is integrally tied into the plot and yet she is only tagged in 16% of fics – even including all the fics that merely tag her as a background character. She only appears in 4% of pairings. Her pairing with the PC comes in at #16, with 355 fics. But hey, her largest ship is with Shadowheart, so let’s look at the total number of pairings she shows up in – 1,319. Gortash/Dark Urge has 1,594 fics – that single pairing has 275 more fics than all of Lae’zel’s pairings added together. Gortash’s total pairing count is 2,052 and exceeds Lae’zel’s by almost 700 fics. Halsin’s total pairing count is over 2.5 times as large as Lae’zel’s at 3,346 fics total. Gale’s total pairing count is over five times as large, at 6,760 fics total. Oof.

Shadowheart is a bit better off – her pairing with the PC is the most popular woman at #6 with 980 fics. But this is still 657 fics less than Halsin/PC and 911 fics less than Gortash/PC, which means that Gortash/PC is almost twice as popular as Shadowheart/PC. When you take Shadowheart’s other pairings into consideration, things improve a little bit. She has 2,418 pairings total, which is about 400 more than Gortash’s total, though still over 900 fics less than Halsin’s total. But any Shadowheart/Lae’zel fan can tell you about sifting through their fics and finding that many only feature them as a background pairing for Astarion/Tav or some other more popular pairing. So let’s take a look at the otp:true numbers. Looking at otp:true fics only, Shadowheart has 765 fics and Lae’zel has 495 fics. Meanwhile, Halsin has 858 and Gortash has 800 – more than Shadowheart and much more than Lae’zel.

Neither Gortash nor Halsin really have arcs in game, though both of them do have implied arcs that happened before it. They’re interesting characters, sure, but undoubtedly Shadowheart and Lae’zel have more going on, more narrative meat to chew on. And yet, they’re completely overshadowed in fandom.

Speaking of being overshadowed, let’s talk about Wyll. Wyll is the only man in the main cast who is not particularly popular. He does not even make it into the top 10 pairings! He has fewer fics than Shadowheart or Karlach. Notably he has far far fewer fics with the PC than any other major male character and even several male villains. Gortash/PC has over three times as many fics as he does, Halsin/PC has 2.78 times as many fics as he does, and Astarion/PC has a whopping 20 times as many fics as he does. Even Raphael/PC has more fanfic! Even taking total pairings into account, Gortash still has more pairings than Wyll’s 1,770 total, while Halsin has almost twice as many.

A counterpoint that is commonly raised in this fandom is that Wyll is a boring character with less content than other Origin companions. Now, I disagree with this assessment of Wyll’s comparative boringness (I find him more interesting than Gale and much more interesting than Halsin, personally) but for the sake of this argument let’s not dispute this. The fact of the matter is that even if Wyll’s arc is half baked, Halsin has no arc at all and much less content in game. Gortash has even less content, with any potential past entanglement with Dark Urge being merely implied. Raphael doesn’t even have the implications of a past relationship with the PC, is never in a position to be in a relationship with the PC, and is canonically bad in bed to boot. And yet these men have far more fanfic with the PC than Wyll does.

I cannot help but notice that Astarion, Gale, Halsin, and Gortash are white men and Raphael presents himself as a white man.

What’s also notable is who doesn’t show up. Many minor non-player characters have quite sizable followings with a significant number of ships. Rolan, for instance, has 586 fics across 9 pairings. Zevlor has 393 ships, Dammon has 257, Kar’niss has 131, and Abdirak has 112. Other male characters that showed up on my list include Ansur (110, all with Balduran/the Emperor), Blurg (69, all with Omeluum), Vellioth (55, all with Cazador), Rugan (54), Kith’rak Voss (49), Sebastian (47, all with Astarion), Orpheus (40), Geraldus (29), Nere (22), He Who Was (21), Yurgir (18), Loroakkan (15, all with Rolan), Aradin (12), Danis (11 with Bex), Barcus (9 with the PC, not Wulbren), Petras (8 with Astarion), Guex and Ikaron (8 with each other), Franc Peartree (7 with Gortash), Lump the Enlightened (6), and Cal (6).

Meanwhile, if I eliminate Aylin and Isobel (not really “minor” NPCs), the first female minor NPC to show up in my list is Alfira with 58 fics. Nocturne follows with 57, Lakrissa with 34, Bex with 11 (all with Danis), Councillor Florrick with 8 (all with Minthara), Duke Stelmane with 8 (all with the Emperor), Kagha with 6, and Cerys with 6 (all with Rolan).

Councillor Florrick is notable because she has as much of a role in acts 1, 2, and 3 as Rolan, Zevlor, and Dammon yet she has no fics with the PC that showed up in my dataset; her only appearance is as part of a ship with Minthara. Ulder Ravenguard – a notable NPC from act 3 – never shows up at all, while Geraldus – a very minor NPC from act 3 – does. Rugan shows up but his boss Zarys never does. Neither does Roah Moonglow, who has a role in acts 1, 2, and 3 while Rugan only shows up in act 1. Araj Oblodra does not show up, but Sebastian does. Cal and Rolan show up in my dataset, but their sister Lia does not. Petras is the only vampire spawn to have over 5 of a pairing – Dalyria, who is present in all scenes where he is, does not. Alfira has the same presence in the story as Rolan (if anything, she has more), yet she shows up in less than a tenth as many fics. Vellioth, who never shows up at all, has 5 times as many fics as Viconia, who does.

The fandom has a definite trend for who gets written about, and it’s not women or Black people.

I’m not writing this to try and shame or guilt anyone. I have a dear friend who absolutely adores Astarion, and fandom acquaintances who I respect that are deeply invested in Gale, Halsin, and Gortash. And I don’t blame anyone for seeing a minor character and being intrigued enough by him to write fic. It makes sense that people are drawn to these characters – they’re really well written characters with engaging storylines. But all of the main characters in BG3 are well written, and who fandom chooses to focus on and prioritize says things about whose stories, whose lives, we pay attention to and care about.

I don’t expect this essay to change anything. Honestly, it’s mostly a primal scream of annoyance, broadcast to tumblr in hopes that other people who are annoyed by this phenomenon can find it. But it’s also a cold hard repudiation of any claim that the reason that women or Black people are underrepresented in fandom is solely due to the source material being lacking. BG3 proves that false.

[ciceroprofacto]

SOA supplementals

Primary Sources / Letters

Papers of George Washington RevWar Series volume 11 (all)

The Army Correspondence of Colonel John Laurens in the Years 1777-1778 compiled by William Gilmore Simms (p.145-162)

The Papers of Henry Laurens volume 13 (p.33-140)

The Political Writings of Alexander Hamilton by Holloway and Wilson (p.7-117)

Backstory / additional context

The First Conspiracy by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch (all)

The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution by Benjamin Carp (all)

Kidnapping the Enemy by Christian M. McBurney (all)

Strategy, Politics, Staff

Fatal Sunday by Lender and Stone (p.xi-122)

Washington's Secret War by Thomas Fleming (all: p.223-244)

To Starve the Army at Pleasure by E. Wayne Carp (various)

The Valley Forge Winter by Wayne Bodle (all: p.163-220)

George Washington's Indispensable Men by Arthur Leftkowitz (p.15, 45-157)

John Laurens and the American Revolution by Gregory Massey (p.86-106)

Washington's General: Nathaniel Greene and the Triumph of the American Revolution by Terry Galloway (p.165-171)

Wives / Women of the Army

Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation by Cokie Roberts (various)

The General & Mrs Washington by Bruce Chadwick (p.209-222)

Martha Washington: An American Life by Patricia Brady (p.118-126)

Caty: A Biography of Catherine Littlefield Greene by John & Janet Stegeman (p.48-59)

Pox Americana by Elizabeth Fenn (p.98-103)

Spies

Revolutionary Spies Intelligence and Espionage in America's First War by Tim McNeese (p.99-209)

General Washington's Spies on Long Island and in New York by Morton Pennypacker (p.1-119)

Washington's Spies by Alexander Rose (all)

Spies in the Continental Capital by John Nagy (all)

George Washington's Secret Spy War: The Making of America's First Spymaster by John Nagy (all)

Allies / foreign officers / special forces

Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution by Joe Richard Paul (all)

Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations by Craig Nelson (p.99-145)

Special Operations During the American Revolution by Robert Tonsetic (p.7-149)

Light Horse Harry: A Biography of Washington's Great Cavalryman by Noel B. Gerson (p.1-60)

John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy by Evan Thomas (p.97-133)

The Admiral and the Ambassador by Scott Martelle (p.49-54)

Tadeusz Kościuszko and Casimir Pulaski: The Lives of the Revolutionary War's Most Famous Polish Officers by Charles River Editors (Pulaski section)

Pulaski: A Portrait of Freedom by R.D. Jamro (p.85-99)

Steuben / Drill

The Drillmaster of Valley Forge by Paul Lockhart (p.105-113)

The Life of Von Steuben by Frederich Kapp (p.120-136)

Baron Von Steuben's Revolutionary Drill Manual: A Facsimile Reprint of the 1794 Edition (all)

Lafayette

For Liberty and Glory: Washington, Lafayette and Their Revolutions by James R. Gaines (p.98-106)

Adopted Son by David Clary (p.154-179)

Lafayette by Harlow Giles Unger (p.65-71)

The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered by Laura Auricchio (p.59-64)

[ithildinwrites]

let me convince u to read windbreaker (PART 1)

windbreaker is a manga by nii satoru and as of 2024 has been adapted into an anime! season 2 (KEEL arc) is coming in spring 2025 :D

i'm going to split this into sections okay here we go this is prob gonna be a long post

THE - MAIN/RECURRING - CHARACTERS (not in order of importance - more in order of appearance) (written last name then first name)

sakura haruka (the mc): sakura has two toned hair and heterochromatic eyes and has been shunned before he moved to makochi (town the series is set in) so he has a negative outlook on a lot of stuff and doesn't normally expect to be treater well by people so he is quick to anger. he also gets flustered very quick when someone is nice to him because he isn't very used to it. he didn't have friends / anyone basically before he moved to makochi and started at furin high school

tachibana kotoha: the first person sakura meets when he moves to makochi and he also saves her from these weirdo guys. nothing romantic has been implied between them btw, she just seems like a very good friend to him.

nirei akihiko (his fit changes literally in the same chap he's introduced and then stays like that lmao): the first friend sakura makes from furin even though sakura is hesitant about it initially. he's not very good at fighting but he's very smart and has a great memory. he's got a good heart. he carries a notebook with notes about lots of the people who go to furin so knows a lot about various people. i'd say he's 1/3 of the main trio alongside sakura and one other guy called suo.

suo hayato: genuinely i think one of the most mysterious characters in the show???? we know next to nothing about him. he's a very good fighter and has mentioned he has a master who taught him but that's about it. he's very chill and makes a lot of jokes but he doesn't look it. he's can be scary when he wants to though, i think he's the cold anger type of guy. he makes up the last bit of the main trio. also no we don't know why he wears an eyepatch

sugishita kyotaro: borderline worships / greatly admires umemiya (the number one guy at furin). he's a great fighter too but he's always angry and we don't know too much about him either. he's got some sort of rivalry with sakura i think but it isn't the main focus or anything, it's like a background thing sorta

umemiya hajime: the guy at the top. he's the number one at furin and the leader. he's very much gives big brother vibes and he's a very sweet guy and he just loves to garden lmao. he worked hard to get furin to where it's at today. he's also a third year. he has a whole arc dedicated to his backstory (wild bc we don't even know much about sakura's backstory). (i put two pics bc the second one is when u properly meet him, the first one he's just talking through the intercom at the school)

hiragi toma: one of the four kings of furin (the 4 third year leaders directly under umemiya). he has stomach issues so he's constantly popping pills lmao but he's a very good fighter. he is also often stressed because of umemiya.

togame jo: second in command of shishitoren (another gang / group). he talks quite slowly but he's a very good fighter and i really like him and his growth as a character throughout the series. he calls sakura "othello-kun" lol

tomiyama choji: the leader of shishitoren. he's very childish but he's a very good fighter. he kind of goes through it during the shishitoren arc but we learn a lot about his motivations and his (and togame's and shishitoren's) backstory during thar arc. he has a lowkey obsession with umemiya to start with, all he wants to do is fight him.

sako kota: there's a history between him and hiragi that gets touched upon during the shishitoren arc and throughout the next few arcs - like it keeps going until like 161/162 i believe, so we learn more and more about them even now. he's a very good fighter, i believe he was called one of the top 5 at shishitoren.

tsugeura taiga: one of the main 5 first years i think? along with obv nirei, suo, sakura and one other guy called kiryu. he's all about muscles and i think he might have an accent? i'm not too sure but he sounds like he's got more of a drawl. he's all about asking people what their virtues are which lowkey reminds me of todo from jjk. he's a really sweet guy though and his fighting style is very wrestling coded. oh update just confirmed he speaks with a kansai dialect - it was said in the notes in one of the later chaps

kiryu mitsuki: the last of the first year's gang i suppose. he's very strong and it seems he's popular with girls but !!!! he seems stylish and is on his phone a lot - i believe he likes gacha game.

kaji ren: he's the second year tamon grade captain. he has anger issues so he always has a lollipop in his mouth. he also talks super loud because the music in his headphones is very loud. he actually reminds me of sakura a lot.

tsubakino tasuku: one of the four kings. very older sibling coded and super caring to his kouhai. it is a guy but he just likes to put makeup on and wear heels and dress the way he dresses. he also is confirmed to be canonically gay! and is in love with (an oblivious) umemiya! i love sakura and tsubaki's relationship genuinely so much

i think from here on, i'll just put the pictures without a description because i want to avoid spoilers as much as possible :)

kanji nakamura

shizuka narita

suzuri shuhei

endo yamato

takiishi chika

THE PLOT (kinda) & STRUCTURE!

PLOT (or part of - as much as i can give without spoiling stuff): sakura moved to makochi to go to a high school called furin because it's supposed to be delinquent central with everyone fighting etc and he wanted the top spot in the school. but upon coming here, he finds out that furin actually protects the town and are their guardians essentially from other gangs and turf wars etc and he learns how to get along with people and makes friends because he's never really has friends before or grown close to anyone. it's a story about his growth and how he changes after meeting people and learns to be cared for kind of and that people can be nice, he protects the town and UGH so much more about building bonds with people :')

i actually see a lot of people compare this to tokyo revengers and i personally don't see the similarities? i watched tokyo rev recently and the only thing i could potentially see to be similar are that there's fights and gang / turf wars but that's more prominent in tokyo rev. i guess you could say there are close knit relationships in both too but i don't really know

ARCS:

introduction arc: chaps 1-4; eps 1-3

shishitoren arc: chaps 5-30; eps 3-10

KEEL arc: chaps 31-55; eps 11-13 (13 is where s1 ends so this will continue in s2)

sakura / tsubakino arc: chaps 56-66

roppo-ichiza / gravel arc: chaps 67-87

umemiya's backstory arc: chaps 88-97

noroshi arc: chaps 98-162 (currently on this arc / at its end i believe - the conflict in it ended so it's like just wrapping up)

MY PERSONAL NOTES / THOUGHTS

i just love this series for all the heartfelt moments and genuine growth you see from sakura specifically. also, whether you choose to interpret the relationships you see as platonic or romantic, they're written so well and i feel like they're so meaningful like they have DEPTH, they're not just surface level friendships or whatever. these people genuinely care about each other so much and it's so nice to see it because i feel like with these types of mangas you don't typically get to see the relationships / bonds between characters given this much care / attention during writing. i love it :')

THE RELATIONSHIPS (interpreted platonic or romantic whatever u want) - this will be continued in part 2

[oshinohoshi]

Oshi no Ko Chapter 162 thoughts

Putting aside my issues with the story and characterization, I like this chapter. It makes me feel things which is a strong suit of Oshi no Ko.

Sorrow, horror, and sweetness... it has a little of everything.

As an avid Ai stan, the parts with Ai hit me right where it hurts

Ai's smile below is everything. She loved those kids so much

I'm reminded of the bottom right art. Ai never did get to see their red backpacks but at least the little Hoshino family made happy memories together

Aqua looking after his sister is so sweet. It would hit harder if we had more of the twins interacting past vol 1 but it's still nice

I'm not sure how I feel about Aqua deciding he was reincarnated to protect Ruby. I can't quite put my finger on what's bothering me. Perhaps it's that he's once again making his life's worth revolve around someone else

Or that this disregards one of my favorite lines in the manga: "[God] brought two people who never had a mother in a real sense and a mother who gave birth to soulless children together"

There is a crucial element missing to Aqua's apparent life's purpose and her name is Ai

@aihoshiino's post explains this better than I ever could (thanks @insertusername99 for pointing this out to me)

LMAO I just read Claire's thoughts on the chapter after typing this and she brought this up too. Bc it's so true!

The art is so good. Mengo is amazing

HIKARU

He gets his own damn section because he's just so... AUGH

I'm baffled as to how killing Ruby would bring him closer to Ai

How does "the weight of his sin" help him manifest Ai's presence? Maybe his guilt over his involvement in Ai's death brings her into sharp relief through suffering and embracing his dark side amplifies that? I'm grasping at straws here

I still think his reaction to the DVD was genuine but if so, it feels like he should have had a change of heart

After learning Ai wanted to love him, why would he turn around and try to off their daughter?

Of course his logic is twisted, but it should work with what we know about him!

If you have thoughts, please share

Anyway, I want to compare Aqua's memory of Ai (left) to Hikaru's vision of her (right)

She looks ethereal in both. A fragile being. Ai looks over her shoulder smiling gently in Aqua's mind. She might turn away at any second but she's not gone yet. However, she has her back to Hikaru, beyond his grasp

In both panels Ai is not dressed as an idol. Those who love her remember her as she was when she wasn't on stage (or uhh that's what I want to say but I don't know what to make of Hikaru's view of her anymore)

Moving on...

Shadow Gorou. Until now he's been a manifestation of Aqua's guilt and self-hatred yet now he's dragging Hikaru to the bottom of the sea. Sure, I guess?

I'm probably wildly off the mark here, but it almost shows how harmful Aqua's attempt to kill Hikaru is. Shadow Gorou is scary

And despite Aqua's white stars, he looks horrified and in pain choking his dad. It doesn't look like a triumphant finishing blow

Given the giant moon behind Crow Girl, I guess we should stop calling her that as it seems that Tsukuyomi is not a stage name. But she'll always be Crow Girl to me

Next chapter (3 week break!!): Miyako is not having any of this dying to save Ruby bullshit. She will roll up on a motorcycle and pluck Aqua out of the sea using Ichigo's fishing pole. I have been predicting the fishing pole being a major player in the Hikaru/Aqua conflict for dozens of chapters and I know I cannot be wrong.

[gren-arlio]

So, I appear with Madou findings I forgot to give. And Yokai Watch updates.

I was supposed to show this in my last post but forgot to make a section for it, so I'm deciding to do it here, alongside other stuff.

Check it, a popularity poll around the time Saturn released. (The Schezo and Witch artwork.)

It's quite literally a popularity poll. There's the usual, Arle and Schezo being top 2, Witch and Draco in top 5, Satan being 6th, that nonsense. However, as we go down the list gets more interesting. Notably, Kikimora ranked 10 over Lagnus, who ranked 11th.

A few more notable placement is Momomo outplacing Suke (15th to 19th), Skeleton-T being 14th, and 20th being Honey Bee.

Waku Puyo Stuff:

So, a pal (@kirstenonic05 ) and I decided to go through some old Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon manuals we found online, and honestly? Yielded interesting results.

Waku Puyo Translations takes a super long time. Believe me, I'm working on them.

But with that, here's some of what we found.

Photo of Serilly inside one of these manuals. If you notice, there's some text next to her, so I decided to quickly run through these. The result is:

Serilly: A Rather Timid Mermaid

17 years old

210 CM (so about 6'10 in Ft.)

B: 93 W: 58 H: N/A (all in CM)

Undefined Weight, but likes round things.

A slightly naive girl with a complex due to being legless. She's paranoid that people are out to get her, but is actually lonely and wants friends.

Then after this, we have Harpy.

This stuff is partly in Korean, mostly because the best quality image I could find of this (The ones we had weren't the best,) came from Puyo Chatterbox, so the Japanese text could be easier to read.

Harpy: A Self-Proclaimed "Diva"

14 years old

147 CM (About 4'8 Ft)

B: 75 W: 58 H: 79 All CM

38 KG (About 83 pounds), and likes singing.

A young girl with wings who loves to sing more than anything else. But the heavens never bestow things to one person, and she's frankly bad at it. She's so bad at it, you can complain at the top of your lungs and she won't hear you. No offense given.

And then we got Incubus.

It reads as follows:

Incubus: The Invincible Narcissist

Unknown Age

181 CM (About 5'9)

71 KG (156 pounds)

B, H, and H: I don't want to tell you. (AKA. Undefined.)

Likes cute girls and himself.

A narcissistic Demon who loves any cute girls, no questions asked. Despite being confident in his looks, rumor has it that he wears makeup. According to Arle, he's a pervert like Satan and Schezo. There's really no serious men in this world.

And now, Draco.

So what does her bio say? Well:

Draco: The Energetic Dragon Girl (You could add Kung Fu if wanted...?)

16 years old

162 CM (5'3-ish. Are YOU taller than Draco?)

B and W: 78, with her H being undefined.

She chose to not tell her weight, and likes beauty contests.

A high-spirited half dragon, half human girl in a Chinese dress. She's a fighter of many techniques, has a variety of special moves, and can even breathe fire. Rumor has it, she's gets stronger depending on her popularity. (Or yours.)

And finally, Witch.

Ah, here we go.

Witch: The Tomboy Who Runs Her Own Path (directly doing translations gave me the tomboy of the Witch clan, which is...correct too? Your choice.)

15 years old

158 CM (5'1. Wow. She's short.)

B and H: 81 W: 58

45 KG (99 pounds)

Likes clean clothing and brooms.

A magical girl whose tone is influenced by The Drifters (a Japanese comedy band), with phrases such as "Oops!" and "That won't work!" She has a rivalry with Arle, but for some reason, she has a soft spot for Schezo. (You can also say she's very friendly to him.) She tends to be nosy.

Quick Yokai Stuff:

A while back, I posted the 3D models of the Yokai Watch collab finally being unearthed, so I decided to just quickly find some neat looking stuff.

This thing.

First thing I wanna say about it: Arle is legit part of the metagame. She's unironically amazing.

Second, just some promotional artwork I found of the game. I couldn't find more stuff for Witch for some... unexplainable reason.

(Thank goodness for my friend finding the last image. And also the watermark being noticeable enough.)

And honestly? That'll be all for now. Thanks for reading.

Adios.

[dailyanarchistposts]

I.4.12 Won’t there be a tendency for capitalist enterprise to reappear?

This is a common right-wing “libertarian” objection. Robert Nozick, for example, imagined the following scenario:

“small factories would spring up in a socialist society, unless forbidden. I melt some of my personal possessions and build a machine out of the material. I offer you and others a philosophy lecture once a week in exchange for yet other things, and so on … some persons might even want to leave their jobs in socialist industry and work full time in this private sector … [This is] how private property even in means of production would occur in a socialist society … [and so] the socialist society will have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.” [Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 162–3]

There are numerous flawed assumptions in this argument and we will discuss them here. The key flaws are the confusion of exchange with capitalism and the typically impoverished propertarian vision that freedom is, essentially, the freedom to sell your liberty, to become a wage slave and so unfree. Looking at history, we can say that both these assumptions are wrong. Firstly, while markets and exchange have existed for thousands of years capitalism has not. Wage-labour is a relatively recent development and has been the dominant mode of production for, at best, a couple of hundred years. Secondly, few people (when given the choice) have freely become wage-slaves. Just as the children of slaves often viewed slavery as the “natural” order, so do current workers. Yet, as with chattel slavery, substantial state coercion was required to achieve such a “natural” system.

As discussed in section F.8, actually existing capitalism was not created by Nozick’s process — it required substantial state intervention to separate workers from the means of production they used and to ensure, eventually, that the situation in which they sold their liberty to the property owner was considered “natural.” Without that coercion, people do not seek to sell their liberty to others. Murray Bookchin summarised the historical record by noting that in “every precapitalist society, countervailing forces .. . existed to restrict the market economy. No less significantly, many precapitalist societies raised what they thought were insuperable obstacles to the penetration of the State into social life.” He pointed to “the power of village communities to resist the invasion of trade and despotic political forms into society’s abiding communal substrate.” [The Ecology of Freedom, pp. 207–8] Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber notes that in the ancient Mediterranean world ”[w]hile one does periodically run into evidence of arrangements which to the modern eye look like wage-labour contracts, on closer examination they almost always actually turn out to be contracts to rent slaves … Free men and women thus avoided anything remotely like wage-labour, seeing it as a matter, effectively, of slavery, renting themselves out.” This means that wage labour ”(as opposed to, say, receiving fees for professional services) involves a degree of subordination: a labourer has to be to some degree at the command of his or her employer. This is exactly why, through most of history, free men and women tended to avoid wage-labour, and why, for most of history, capitalism … never emerged.” [Possibilities, p. 92]

Thus while the idea that people will happily become wage slaves may be somewhat common place today (particularly with supporters of capitalism) the evidence of history is that people, given a choice, will prefer self-employment and resist wage labour (often to the death). As E. P. Thompson noted, for workers at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, the “gap in status between a ‘servant,’ a hired wage-labourer subject to the orders and discipline of the master, and an artisan, who might ‘come and go’ as he pleased, was wide enough for men to shed blood rather than allow themselves to be pushed from one side to the other. And, in the value system of the community, those who resisted degradation were in the right.” [The Making of the English Working Class, p. 599] Over one hundred years later, the rural working class of Aragon showed the same dislike of wage slavery. After Communist troops destroyed their self-managed collectives, the ”[d]ispossessed peasants, intransigent collectivists, refused to work in a system of private property, and were even less willing to rent out their labour.” [Jose Peirats, Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution, p. 258] The rural economy collapsed as the former collectivists refused to be the servants of the few.

People who have tasted freedom are unlikely to go back to oppression. Therefore, any perception that people will become wage-slaves through choice in a free society is based on the assumption what people accept through necessity under capitalism will pass over, without change, into a free one. This assumption is unfounded and anarchists expect that once people struggle for freedom and taste the pleasures of freedom they will not freely accept a degradation back to having a master — and as history shows, we have some evidence to support our argument. It seems a strangely debased perspective on freedom to ponder whether people will be “free” to alienate their freedom — it is a bit like proclaiming it a restriction of freedom to “forbid” owning slaves (and, as noted in section F.2.2, Nozick did support voluntary slave contracts).

So anarchists think Nozick’s vision of unfreedom developing from freedom is unlikely. As anarcho-syndicalist Jeff Stein points out “the only reason workers want to be employed by capitalists is because they have no other means for making a living, no access to the means of production other than by selling themselves. For a capitalist sector to exist there must be some form of private ownership of productive resources, and a scarcity of alternatives. The workers must be in a condition of economic desperation for them to be willing to give up an equal voice in the management of their daily affairs and accept a boss.” [“Market Anarchism? Caveat Emptor!”, Libertarian Labour Review, no. 13]

In an anarchist society, there is no need for anyone to “forbid” capitalist acts. All people have to do is refrain from helping would-be capitalists set up monopolies of productive assets. This is because, as we have noted in section B.3.2, capitalism cannot exist without some form of state to protect such monopolies. In a libertarian-socialist society, of course, there would be no state to begin with, and so there would be no question of it “refraining” people from doing anything, including protecting would-be capitalists’ monopolies of the means of production. In other words, would-be capitalists would face stiff competition for workers in an anarchist society. This is because self-managed workplaces would be able to offer workers more benefits (such as self-government, better working conditions, etc.) than the would-be capitalist ones. The would-be capitalists would have to offer not only excellent wages and conditions but also, in all likelihood, workers’ control and hire-purchase on capital used. The chances of making a profit once the various monopolies associated with capitalism are abolished are slim.

Thus the would-be capitalist would “not [be] able to obtain assistance or people to exploit” and “would find none because nobody, having a right to the means of production and being free to work on his own or as an equal with others in the large organisations of production would want to be exploited by a small employer”. [Malatesta, Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, pp. 102–103] So where would the capitalist wannabe find people to work for him? As Kropotkin argued:

“Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor. That is why an anarchist society need not fear the advent of a [millionaire] who would settle in its midst. If every member of the community knows that after a few hours of productive toil he [or she] will have a right to all the pleasures that civilisation procures, and to those deeper sources of enjoyment which art and science offer to all who seek them, he [or she] will not sell his strength … No one will volunteer to work for the enrichment of your [millionaire].” [Conquest of Bread, p. 61]

However, let us suppose there is a self-employed inventor, Ferguson, who comes up with a new innovation without the help of the socialised sector. Would anarchists steal his idea? Not at all. The syndicates, which by hypothesis have been organised by people who believe in giving producers the full value of their product, would pay Ferguson an equitable amount for his idea, which would then become common across society. However, if he refused to sell his invention and instead tried to claim a patent monopoly on it in order to gather a group of wage slaves to exploit, no one would agree to work for him unless they got the full control over both the product of their labour and the labour process itself. And, assuming that he did find someone willing to work for him (and so be governed by him), the would-be capitalist would have to provide such excellent conditions and pay such good wages as to reduce his profits to near zero. Moreover, he would have to face workers whose neighbours would be encouraging them to form a union and strike for even better conditions and pay, including workers’ control and so on. Such a militant workforce would be the last thing a capitalist would desire. In addition, we would imagine they would also refuse to work for someone unless they also got the capital they used at the end of their contract (i.e. a system of “hire-purchase” on the means of production used). In other words, by removing the statist supports of capitalism, would-be capitalists would find it hard to “compete” with the co-operative sector and would not be in a position to exploit others’ labour.

With a system of communal production (in social anarchism) and mutual banks (in individualist anarchism), usury — i.e. charging a use-fee for a monopolised item, of which patents are an instance — would no longer be possible and the inventor would be like any other worker, exchanging the product of his or her labour. As Benjamin Tucker argued, “the patent monopoly … consists in protecting inventors and authors against competition for a period of time long enough for them to extort from the people a reward enormously in excess of the labour measure of their services — in other words, in giving certain people a right of property for a term of years in laws and facts of nature, and the power to extract tribute from others for the use of this natural wealth, which should be open to all. The abolition of this monopoly would fill its beneficiaries with a wholesome fear of competition which should cause them to be satisfied with pay for their services equal to that which other labourers get for theirs, and secure it by placing their products and works on the market at the outset at prices so low that their lines of business would be no more tempting to competitors than any other lines.” [The Anarchist Reader, pp. 150–1]

So, if someone has labour to sell then they deserve a free society to do it in — as Tucker once pointed out. Such an environment would make the numbers seeking employment so low as to ensure that the rate of exploitation would be zero. Little wonder that, when faced with a self-employed, artisan workforce, capitalists have continually turned to the state to create the “correct” market forces. So without statism to back up various class-based monopolies of capitalist privilege, capitalism would not have become dominant.

It should also be noted that Nozick makes a serious error in his case. He assumes that the “use rights” associated with an anarchist (i.e. socialist) society are identical to the “property rights” of a capitalist one. This is not the case, and so his argument is weakened and loses its force. Simply put, there is no such thing as an absolute or “natural” law of property. As John Stuart Mill pointed out, “powers of exclusive use and control are very various, and differ greatly in different countries and in different states of society.” Therefore, Nozick slips an ideological ringer into his example by erroneously interpreting socialism (or any other society for that matter) as specifying a distribution of capitalist property rights along with the wealth. As Mill argued: “One of the mistakes oftenest committed, and which are the sources of the greatest practical errors in human affairs, is that of supposing that the same name always stands for the same aggregation of ideas. No word has been subject of more of this kind of misunderstanding that the word property.” [“Chapters on Socialism,” Principles of Political Economy, p. 432]

In other words, Nozick assumes that in all societies capitalist property rights are distributed along with consumption and production goods. As Cheyney C. Ryan comments ”[d]ifferent conceptions of justice differ not only in how they would apportion society’s holdings but in what rights individuals have over their holdings once they have been apportioned.” [“Property Rights and Individual Liberty”, pp. 323–43, Reading Nozick, Jeffrey Paul (Ed.), p. 331] This means that when goods are distributed in a libertarian socialist society the people who receive or take them have specific (use) rights to them. As long as an individual remained a member of a commune and abided by the rules they helped create in that commune then they would have full use of the resources of that commune and could use their possessions as they saw fit (even “melt them down” to create a new machine, or whatever). If they used those goods to create an enterprise to employ (i.e., exploit and oppress) others then they have, in effect, announced their withdrawal from civilised society and, as a result, would be denied the benefits of co-operation. They would, in effect, place themselves in the same situation as someone who does not wish to join a syndicate (see section I.3.7). If an individual did desire to use resources to employ wage labour then they would have effectively removed themselves from “socialist society” and so that society would bar them from using its resources (i.e. they would have to buy access to all the resources they currently took for granted).

Would this be a restriction of freedom? While it may be considered so by the impoverished definitions of capitalism, it is not. In fact, it mirrors the situation within capitalism as what possessions someone holds are not his or her property (in the capitalist sense) any more than a company car is currently the property of the employee under capitalism. While the employee can use the car outside of work, they lack the “freedom” to sell it or melt it down and turn it into machines. Such lack of absolute “ownership” in a free society does not reduce liberty any more than in this case.

This point highlights another flaw in Nozick’s argument. If his argument were true, then it applies equally to capitalist society. For 40 hours plus a week, workers are employed by a boss. In that time they are given resources to use and they are most definitely not allowed to melt down these resources to create a machine or use the resources they have been given access to further their own plans. This can apply equally to rented accommodation as well, for example when landlords ban working from home or selling off the furniture that is provided. Thus, ironically, “capitalist society will have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults” — and does so all the time.

Moreover, it must be stressed that as well as banning capitalist acts between consenting adults, capitalism involves the continual banning of socialist acts between consenting adults. For example, if workers agree to form a union, then the boss can fire them. If they decide to control their own work, the boss can fire them for not obeying orders. Thus capitalism forbids such elemental freedoms as association and speech — at least for the majority, for the wage slaves. Why would people seek such “freedom” in a free society?

Of course, Nozick’s reply to this point would be that the individual’s involved have “consented” to these rules when they signed their contract. Yet the same can be said of an anarchist society — it is freely joined and freely left. To join a communist-anarchist society it would simply be a case of agreeing to “exchange” the product of ones labour freely with the other members of that society and not to create oppressive or exploitation social relationships within it. If this is “authoritarian” then so is capitalism — and we must stress that at least anarchist associations are based on self-management and so the individuals involved have an equal say in the obligations they live under.

Notice also that Nozick confused exchange with capitalism (“I offer you a lecture once a week in exchange for other things”). This is a telling mistake by someone who claims to be an expert on capitalism, because the defining feature of capitalism is not exchange (which obviously took place long before capitalism existed) but labour contracts involving wage labour. Nozick’s example is merely a direct labour contract between the producer and the consumer. It does not involve wage labour, what makes capitalism capitalism. It is only this latter type of transaction that libertarian socialism prevents — and not by “forbidding” it but simply by refusing to maintain the conditions necessary for it to occur, i.e. protection of capitalist property.

In addition, we must note that Nozick also confused “private property in the means of production” with capitalism. Liberation socialism can be easily compatible with “private property in the means of production” when that “private property” is limited to what a self-employed worker uses rather than capitalistic property (see section G.2.1). Nozick, in other words, confused pre-capitalist forms of production with capitalist ones (see section G.1.2). Thus possession of the means of production by people outside of the free commune is perfectly acceptable to social anarchists (see section I.6.2).

Thus an anarchist society would have a flexible approach to Nozick’s (flawed) argument. Individuals, in their free time, could “exchange” their time and possessions as they saw fit. These are not “capitalist acts” regardless of Nozick’s claims. However, the moment an individual employs wage labour then, by this act, they have broken their agreements with their fellows and, therefore, no longer part of “socialist society.” This would involve them no longer having access to the benefits of communal life and to communal possessions. They have, in effect, placed themselves outside of their community and must fair for themselves. After all, if they desire to create “private property” (in the capitalist sense) then they have no right of access to communal possessions without paying for that right. For those who become wage slaves, a socialist society would, probably, be less strict. As Bakunin argued:

“Since the freedom of every individual is inalienable, society shall never allow any individual whatsoever legally to alienate his [or her] freedom or engage upon any contract with another on any footing but the utmost equality and reciprocity. It shall not, however, have the power to disbar a man or woman so devoid of any sense of personal dignity as to contract a relationship of voluntary servitude with another individual, but it will consider them as living off private charity and therefore unfit to enjoy political rights throughout the duration of that servitude.” [Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, pp. 68–9]

Lastly, we must also note that Nozick also ignored the fact that acquisition must come before transfer, meaning that before “consenting” capitalist acts occur, individual ones must precede it. As argued in section B.3.4, Nozick provided no convincing arguments why natural resources held in common can be appropriated by individuals. This means that his defence of transferring absolute capitalist property rights in goods is without foundations. Moreover, his argument in favour of such appropriations ignore that liberties are very definitely restricted by private property (and it should be keep in mind that the destruction of commonly held resources, such as village commons, was imposed by the state — see section F.8.3). As pointed out in section F.2, right-wing “libertarians” would better be termed “Propertarians” (why is liberty according a primary importance when arguing against socialism but not when private property restricts liberty?). As Cheyney C. Ryan points out, Nozick “invoke[s] personal liberty as the decisive ground for rejecting patterned principles of justice [such as socialism] and restrictions on the ownership of capital … [b]ut where the rights of private property admittedly restrict the liberties of the average person, he seems perfectly happy to trade off such liberties against material gain for society as a whole.” [Op. Cit., p. 339] This can be seen by his lack of comment on how capitalism forbids socialist acts between consenting adults, not to mention quite a few numerous capitalist acts for good measure.

Thus Nozick’s acquisition of resources is based on the would-be capitalist stealing communally owned resources and barring others from using them. This obviously would restrict the liberty of those who currently used them and so be hotly opposed by members of a community. As Murray Bookchin noted, a free society is based on “the practice of usufruct, the freedom of individuals in a community to appropriate resources merely by virtue of the fact that they are using them. Such resources belong to the user as long as they are being used.” [The Ecology of Freedom, p. 116] As the would-be capitalist is not actually using the machines they have created, they would be in constant worry that their wage-slaves would simply expropriate them — with the full backing of the local commune and its federations.

So, to conclude, this question involves some strange logic (and many question begging assumptions) and ultimately fails in its attempt to prove libertarian socialism must “forbid capitalistic acts between individuals.” In addition, Nozick cannot support the creation of private property out of communal property in the first place. It also undermines capitalism because that system must forbid socialistic acts by and between individuals. Thus Nozick’s society would forbid squatting unused property or trespassing on private property as well as, say, the formation of unions against the wishes of the property owner (who is sovereign over their property and those who use it) or the use of workplace resources to meet the needs of the producer rather than the owner. As such, Nozick exposes how capitalism’s hierarchical nature means that capitalist society “forbids socialist acts between consenting adults.”

[art-that-fucks-you-up-tournament]

SET FIFTEEN - ROUND ONE - MATCH THREE

Excerpt from illustrated edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1972 - Errol Le Cain) / "La Mort de Marat (The Death of Marat)" (1793 - Jacques-Louis David)

EXCERPT FROM ILLUSTRATED EDITION OF THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER: This image is representative of all of part 4 of the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and is a part of a larger illustrated edition. However, I absolutely adore this piece on its own. Yes, it has the elements from the poem, but it adds so much mysticism to that section. I love the colors, the darkness and the blue with the splashes of color, and the albatross standing out, almost separate from the piece, in its blocky triangle with the red blood-like strings moving to the woman. I love how the ring of circles look like the phases of the moon, and gives me a sense of time passing, even with how immediate (i guess?) the albatross and the woman's interaction feels. Also, the ship becomes a ship of the dead, with the rotted sails and the hull of the dead crew. And then back at the center of it all is the Albatross. It also is just very 70s to me, and feels a little nostalgic, like an old fantasy novel cover or something. Its great on its own, and as an illustration of a poem, it picks up on the literal and the metaphors and themes of the epic. It just delights me. I would definitely recommend the poem, its a great epic about a stranded sailor and his doomed ship.

Something I just realized, writing this, is that there is no narrator visible, which I love. The poem is in first person, and I think that translates to this image. Obviously the reader is not the mariner, but there is a closeness that occurs with that tense. Same with this, the viewer is not on the ship, but outside of it, but we are viewing the scene from almost "over" the albatross, making that our focal point, and the albatross is what draws us into the rest of the scene. I love it.

(Sorry for the weird crop, I was trying to even out the curl from the page.)

Also, here are a few stanzas from part IV, (easily placed to be deleteable lol), for fun.

Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea! / And never a saint took pity on / My soul in agony.

The many men, so beautiful! / And they all dead did lie: / And a thousand thousand slimy things / Lived on; and so did I.

I looked upon the rotting sea, / And drew my eyes away; / I looked upon the rotting deck, / And there the dead men lay. ...

Beyond the shadow of the ship, / I watched the water-snakes: / They moved in tracks of shining white, / And when they reared, the elfish light / Fell off in hoary flakes.

And I blessed them unaware. / The self-same moment I could pray; / And from my neck so free / The Albatross fell off, and sank / Like lead into the sea. (@travelingsmithy)

LA MORT DE MARAT (THE DEATH OF MARAT): The first time I saw it was in a history textbook in junior high and when the teacher wasn't looking I tore the page out and used it as a bookmark in my diary for years. It looks the way pipe organ music feels. I want to fold it up and put it in my chest. (@ambientcrows)

(This is an illustration from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner book by Samuel Taylor Coleridge published in 1972 by The Arcadia Press, London. The illustration was done by Errol Le Cain. Only 100 copies of the book were printed.

"La Mort de Marat (The Death of Marat)" is an oil on canvas painting by Jacques-Louis David. It measures 162 cm × 128 cm (64 in × 50 in) and is held by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. A replica, done by the artist's studio, is also on display at the Louvre.)

[adndmonsteraday]

Red dragons, referred to by sages as draco conflagratio horribilis, and sometimes flame dragons, fire wyrms, and mountain dragons, were a breed of chromatic true dragon. They were covetous, evil creatures, interested only in their own well-being, vanity and the extension of their treasure hoards. They were supremely confident of their own abilities and were prone to making snap decisions without any forethought. The largest and most powerful of the chromatic dragons, and just the worst not counting Tiamat, red dragons were also the most fearsome and cruel. These dragons delighted in ruin, death and destruction. They breathed a cone of fire. In countless lands, they were considered the archetypal villainous dragon of legend and fable, exemplars of all their most notorious traits, and the red dragons thought so too.

“Rapacious, cunning, and destructive, red dragons are Tiamat's favored children, embodying the worst that dragonkind has to offer.” — Jothan Ironspell, from another world

Red dragons were physically distinguished by their enormous size and wingspan, which was the widest of all dragons, both in absolute size and relative to body length. The outermost alar phalanx was extremely long and made the wing appear to taper, while the trailing edge was the longest section. The trailing edge joined the body behind the rear legs and partway along the tail.

And of course they were recognized by their scarlet and crimson scaled hides. A wyrmling had small, bright, and glossy scarlet scales (becoming pink on its belly), which turned dull and a deeper red by the time they were young dragons. In older dragons, the scales grew thicker and larger, and as tough as metal. In contrast to their red hide, their wings and neck frills turned a purple-gray, ash-blue, or blue-black toward the edges, similar to metal scorched in a fire, which darkened as they aged. The pupils of their eyes faded with age, such that especially old red dragons had eyes that seemed to be orbs of molten lava.

A red dragon had two large horns upon their head, which pointed backward toward their wings. These horns, which were big enough to be noticeable from below, could be either straight or twisted and any color from white as bone to black as night. They had smaller horns on their chin, cheeks, lower jaw, and in rows over their brow, as well as on their beak-like snout. They also had frills around their ears that often combined with their cheek horns as they got older and a backward-sweeping frill running down their necks and spine, from just behind the head to the end of the tail. The frills around the dragon's internal ears assisted its hearing, by collecting sounds and ascertaining directions. A red wyrmling had the two main horns, but the others were only stubs.

They smelled of smoke, sulfur, and pumice. Their bodies were so warm that the air around them occasionally shimmered as in a heat mirage while their blood was, when outside its body, hot enough to produce steam. Smoke blew from their nostrils constantly. When a red dragon was enraged, flames flickered in its eyes and nostrils.

The vanity of red dragons was often revealed in their prideful postures and the looks of disdain with which they regarded all others.

A hatchling had a 1‑foot-long (0.3‑meter) 3‑foot-long (0.91‑meter) body and 3‑foot-long (0.91‑meter) tail, while an adult had a body length of around 12 feet (3.7 meters) to 18 feet (5.5 meters) and a tail length of around 17 feet (5.2 meters) to 21 feet (6.4 meters). The biggest great wyrms grew to 35 feet (11 meters) or 36 feet (11 meters) long in the body, with tails 26 feet (7.9 meters) or even 50 feet (15 meters) long. However, earlier estimates had adults as big as 80​ to ​99 hands (8.1​ to ​10 meters) in body length and 68​ to ​87 hands (6.9​ to ​8.8 meters) in tail length, and great wyrms as big as 174​ to ​183 hands (17.7​ to ​18.6 meters) in body length and 162​ to ​171 hands (16.5​ to ​17.4 meters). As red dragons of the same age did not differ much in length, one considered small would be slender and wiry while one considered huge would be fat, muscular, or thick of body and limb. A healthy red measuring 40 feet (12 meters) in body length would weigh 5,000 pounds (2,300 kilograms).

A dragon egg could be identified as belonging to a red by the very faint reddish spots seen when held in front of an intense white light.

“To have is nothing, to keep is all.” — A red dragon saying

Out of all dragon kind, reds were the most avaricious and were constantly looking to expand their hoards with treasure, no matter whose it already was, and they were the most obsessive collectors. They valued material wealth more than anything else—if it was worth something, they wanted it. They adored gold more than any other precious metal, loving its look and sound, and gathered gold pieces and treasures to make up much of their hoard. They also collected gems of red and fiery hues, like rubies and fire opals. They did prefer things made of metal or stone that would withstand the heat of their lairs and flame and last through the ages; flammable goods of cloth, leather, or paper were less desirable. Females had a greater preference for treasures with reflective surfaces and they generally had little interest in art. Other than that, they were so greedy they generally didn't care what they collected, and while individual red dragons could have certain preferences, there were no common trends across the species. They accumulated amazing hoards and showed them off in pride as a show of their own superiority, with a particular love for anything taken from a slain rival. Treasure placement, however, was practical and tactical: coins comprised its bed, gems and shiny things were placed in very visible locations but they didn't surround themselves with mirrored surfaces, and humanoid-usable things like armors were stored well back, so as to lure thieves deeper in. Valued trophies were stored and displayed and gloated over separately. Massive stones could be used to seal particular treasures in hollows. They knew the value, origin, and precise location of every piece of treasure in their hoards, and remembered well how and when they'd claimed it. Losing even one coin or tiny trinket could cause a red dragon to fly into a rage and hunt down and mercilessly destroy the supposed thief. If they could not, then they would rampage across the land, slaughtering all they encountered and devastating local settlements where a thief might hide they could calm down.

Red dragons were known for their swift and fiery tempers—if angered, they would explode into a destructive rage and become even more impulsive and vengeful. They never forgave even the most minor offense, theft, or infraction, and would kill the offender or, if they were unavailable, instead raise havoc to inflict their outrage on everyone else. They would kill even on a whim. Such rages were in part due to their fragile pride and feeling that any loss, insult, or defeat meant a loss of status if not addressed—causing chaos and destruction assuaged wounded pride and mitigated lost status. Their rage could only be quelled with blood and death or great tributes of riches.

“How can one imagine anything more magnificent than… a dragon, the paragon of creation?” — Bheilorveilthion, a red wyrm of another world.

They were incredibly vain, even by dragon standards, and were supremely arrogant. They thought themselves chosen by Tiamat herself to reign in her stead, with all the world their dominion and all the beings in it their subjects, while all other breeds of dragon were inferior. Red dragons believed they were the pinnacle of draconic nature and all other dragon species had departed from this purity. They valued vengefulness, rapaciousness, avarice, and ferocity above other traits and recognized these traits in themselves with pride. Thus, maintaining their status among their fellow red dragons was their main focus.

Preferring their own company and engaging with others only when it had purpose, they were solitary creatures and cared little for news of other types of dragons, though they did look for news of other red dragons in their area and of affairs in the world in general. They used other charmed creatures as messengers, informants, and spies to bring them information, paying particular interest in the deeds of fellow red dragons, with whom they always competed for status. If they believed their own achievements and possessions to be greater than these other red dragons, then they stayed in their lairs, smugly congratulating themselves. However, if they learned that the achievements or possessions of the other red dragons were greater than their own, then they would fly into a jealous rage, decimating the surrounding area until they believed that they had outdone their rivals. The dragon became much less cautious and foolish during this time and much more likely to underestimate their foes.

In turn, a red dragon would take efforts to ensure that they were seen as superior to every other red dragon in the area. They would often burn down only half a village or let a single adventurer flee from a battle so that word of their power spread throughout the region. They would also boast about their magnificent hoards. However, not only would this anger other red dragons and attract rivals looking to gain status but it was also like a shining beacon to adventurers, dragon slayers, and treasure hunters.

Red dragons believed that if a being was not strong enough to protect what it had, then it did not deserve to keep it. This applied not just to treasure, but to life. They despised weakness among their own kind. If one ever found out that another of their kin showed any signs of fragility, either by getting badly wounded or becoming senile or weak in old age, then local red dragons would descend on the lair, stripping it clean and usually killing the owner.

Reds were also highly territorial. They were constantly on the lookout for intruders in their territory, and especially other dragons encroaching on it, which was cause for death. Entering an area a red considered its domain was just asking to be attacked, especially if it was a rival dragon. If the trespasser was another red dragon, then conflict was inevitable and the fighting the most vicious, as neither would dare show weakness to the other as a point of pride. Thankfully, most other species were smart enough to flee if they realized the area belonged to a red dragon. Rarely, red dragons would adopt a protective yet patronizing manner towards creatures they saw as inferior that lived within their self-imposed borders. A few liked to set themselves up as rulers of communities within their territory, enjoying the feeling of power, but they reigned as tyrants, demanding obedience and using threats to gain it, and killing or destroying those that did not comply. In their view, humanoids were a renewable resource. Communities in or around a red dragon's territory could appease it with tributes and sacrifices. Some even required worship, but others preferred more covert means of control, wherein they were the secret puppet-masters pulling the strings in a network.

Red dragons hated any authority other than their own. They never asked elders for advice or information, even if doing so would save their lives as, to them, admitting they needed something their elders had was the same as putting themselves under their authority.

Red dragons had a habit of playing with their food. For example, some would enjoy talking to their victims before they ate them. They also disliked getting wet. In fact, in many ways, they were most like housecats.

A female red dragon was, if anything, even more willing to fight, particularly other female red dragons, with food and treasure as secondary priorities. They were less likely to surrender or yield if defeated. They were also more intolerant of other creatures and more territorial, and while a male might accept a bribe to let a victim escape, a female red would decline, eat the victim, and take the bribe. However, she could be impressed by flattery.

It was of course possible for a red dragon to not conform to the above evil habits. For example, a young red might find itself sickened by the cruelty its older kin inflicted on innocents and, after some contemplation, depart for a remote area where it could make a life on its own terms (becoming chaotic neutral) or even try to stop or undo them somehow (moving toward neutral or even lawful and good). These rogue red dragons were rare, and were liable to be attacked by their fellows, though no more so than normal.

Red dragons expelled an extremely devastating cone of fire. For an adult, this blast could be from 9 feet (2.7 meters) up to 50 feet (15 meters) or 60 feet (18 meters) in length and breadth, or even as long as 90 feet (27 meters) and 30 feet (9.1 meters). Its raw elemental fire could burn flesh and heat metal and, for ancient red dragons, could even overwhelm magical protections against fire.

They were naturally resistant or even completely immune to fire, but vulnerable to cold.

Like any dragon, and in addition to the common powers of chromatic dragons, red dragons gained an array of magical powers as they aged, though accounts of these varied. In one version, a young red dragon could affect normal fires thrice a day, a juvenile could use pyrotechnics thrice a day, an adult could heat metal once a day, an old red dragon could make a suggestion once each day, a very old one could use hypnotism once a day, and a venerable red could detect gems, kind and number three times a day up to a range of 100 feet (30 meters). In a later accounting, a juvenile could cast locate object once a day or more often as they got older, while an old red dragon could use suggestion, an ancient one could use find the path, and a great wyrm could discern location. They did not possess innate psionics.

Similarly, red dragons could learn and cast new spells of their own, similar to a sorcerer. They naturally favored fire-based spells as well as spells of detection and divination to help them analyze magic and appraise valuables.

They were skilled in appraisal, deception, and jumping, because, although they flew quickly, they were not very maneuverable. They could accurately estimate the value of any treasure or trinket, down to the last copper piece. They also had good hearing.

With its keen senses, a red dragon could track its prey like a ranger. This was especially effective if it had tasted a creature's blood beforehand and it was still wounded.

“Battle is a dragon's natural element; it is made for combat. It has teeth like spears, claws like scimitars, wings like hammers, and a tail like a battering ram. Lesser beings cower in its presence, and its breath fells armies.” — Munwithurix, a red dragon of another world

Highly confident combatants, a red dragon would, on sighting a potential foe, decide in an instant whether to attack. They rarely stopped to size up a foe or make a plan, instead relying on a general strategy they'd figured out earlier, often over years and covering every imaginable situation, and picking it on the fly. Usually, though, they just flew into their foes and blasted them with fire, then used their claws on whoever was left. If attacking small, lone, and vulnerable creatures, they preferred to land and slay them with claw and fang, rather than use their flame and risk destroying whatever valuables they might have, but not if it meant defeat or death. Against large groups, they would use spells and fire breath before landing. Like any dragon, they could fight with their claws, teeth, wings, tail, and just sheer weight. They loved this chance to show off their strength, but weren't shy to use their fire breath either.

Though they fought just as well in the air as on the ground, a red dragon was not agile in flight, so they usually elected to land and fight on the ground when appropriate, where they showed remarkable mobility and grasp of tactics. They would jump from point to point or fly short distances to seize an advantageous location from which to cast their magic or breathe fire.

They were not above trickery, either. For example, a red dragon might use polymorph self to disguise itself as a fire giant and demand tribute from travelers in a mountain pass it claimed. Charmed beings and minions could be ordered to support the story. Those who tried to fight the so-called giant would be surprised by a dragon. In turn, a red dragon could be tricked or baited into a trap by exploiting its love of gold.

Despite its ferociousness and unwillingness to retreat or compromise, a red dragon was not mindless nor suicidally reckless. It had enough of a sense of self-preservation to know when not to attack or to break off combat against a superior opponent, albeit reluctantly and if it could retain its pride and status in doing so; retreating hurt their pride most of all. Nevertheless, after first blood had been drawn, they were much less likely to retreat, even if it was an option. Their overwhelming pride led more red dragons to fight to the death than any other chromatic dragons. In particular, the fearless and bloodthirsty red wyrmlings lacked the sense to flee and had no clever tactics to back them up, so they usually fight and win or die trying. However, they valued their sight over other senses, and a blinded red dragon was most likely to retreat or, if trapped, try to bargain or beg for its life, but not without lashing out at every sound and smell.

A red dragon would not always kill a defeated enemy. They would regularly let some survivors escape to tell of its victory and thereby bolster its status. With an obviously weaker opponent, they might intimidate or trick them into providing information or performing some deed. The only requirement was that the red dragon got what it wanted, and if not, the enemy should die.

On a larger scale, despite their selfishness, red dragons would agree to ally and cooperate against difficult targets, such as attacking a large town or a well-defended citadel, and adopt appropriate tactics. For a town, this might just be landing and rampaging through the streets, and for a citadel, this might be something more nuanced, with one starting fires and another picking off defenders with magic and breath.

Between red dragons, there was rarely a duel or challenge. Rather, the younger would usually just swoop in and ambush the elder.

Like all chromatic dragons, reds lived their lives in cycles of activity and hibernation. While these cyclical rhythms weren't as extreme as green dragons, red dragons sealed themselves within their lairs for upwards of ten years at a time.

Their red scales gave them little camouflage or chance of them being overlooked. Young red dragons, especially wyrmlings, were easy prey for predators and hunters because of their bright, glossy, scarlet scales, so they tended to stay underground during the day and came out only at night until they felt that they could defend themselves properly. Otherwise, they gave little thought to caution or self-preservation and targeted anything they thought they could eat. Hence, they had difficult, dangerous lives. However, when they were older and not as brightly hued, and especially bigger and more powerful, they were much more confident. They preferred to be conspicuous, and had no wish to hide from lesser beings.

They spent their spare time concocting tactics for use in future battles, developing a wide variety of them. They were master strategists as a result. They also made schemes to achieve greater power, acquire more treasure, and defeat enemies.

They were carnivorous by choice, with a particular taste for young humans and elves, especially young women, an appetite for which they were notorious. They insisted that it just tasted better. It was not unknown for a red dragon to intimidate or charm the people of a local village into periodically sacrificing their young folk to them or else to kidnap young humanoids for later consumption. Otherwise, they made do with other humanoids, animals, and other dragons, again with a predilection for younger, tender flesh. Some dined on herds of domesticated livestock, appreciating the convenience, but preferred humanoids do the actual work. In any case, they preferred meat charred by flame, both liking the taste and finding it easier to digest.

Despite this, similar to most other dragons, red dragons could consume and live on just about anything, including vegetation and minerals. They just didn't want to, more than any other carnivorous dragon, so much so that a few would rather starve almost to death than eat anything other than meat. Strangely, red dragons were shy about discussing their dietary practices—the best way to find out was to ask them, at which they would threaten to eat the questioner.

Red dragons, as with some other dragon breeds, were unable to chew their food. Hence, to aid digestion, they swallowed small stones, pieces of metal, and even coins, which went into a small second stomach like a bird's gizzard. These stomach stones ground down their food and were eventually expelled in waste.

Red dragons were careful to bury their dung safely outside their lairs. It held small pieces of metal and stone and significant quantities of sulfur and potassium nitrate two ingredients of blackpowder. Such sites were revealed by the sharp smell, but sparks, flame, or a red dragon's fire breath could cause them to explode unexpectedly. Canny red dragons used their waste pits as traps for attackers, by persuading them to dig there or breathing flame when they were in range.

They drunk alcohol where they could get it, but this did not cause inebriation, no matter the amount. They drank only small quantities of water as needed, for flesh contained enough moisture to meet their dietary needs.

Owing to their magical metabolism, red dragons could go long periods without food, such as when sleeping, but they woke up ravenously hungry. It was reputed they could eat up to twice their body weight. Indeed, for example, a young red of body length 40 feet (12 meters) and weight 5,000 pounds (2,300 kilograms) would ideally consume 10% of its own body weight, 500 pounds (230 kilograms), each day. This could be accounted for by three knights or one good-sized ogre. However, as with most dragons, they could fast for months at a time, then gorge themselves into a state of lethargy once more, catching up on what they'd missed. Continuing the example, after 20 days, the young red might feast on twenty times its daily amount of food, 10,000 pounds (4,500 kilograms), which could be supplied by a whole adventuring company, equipment included. But they typically ate much more than they required.

During their active periods, they were known as voracious hunters, whose hunger ensured that the populations of any nearby creatures did not grow beyond ecological stability. Fortunately, like other dragons, they were wise enough to hunt much further afield than their own territories and went into long periods hibernation to allow populations to recover. This was not done out of concern for the ecology, but enlightened self-interest, to save themselves starving.

Red dragons typically dwelled in warm mountainous regions, hills, desert mesas, and badlands, though these were not necessities. The main factors in them choosing a place to live were primarily a high elevation and secondarily a high temperature; while cold did not especially hamper them, they did not like it, but would put up with it for the sake of elevation.[3] Many preferred to dwell within volcanoes—even within the caldera itself—or sulfurous geysers or other areas of geothermal activity, where the intense heat and dangerous gases kept others at bay and comforted a sleeping dragon. They liked to sleep near a source of heat. However, they could make their lairs almost anywhere, from ice-capped mountains to hills to deserted dwarf mines and holds.

They particularly loved to make their lairs in large caverns or cave systems that reached deep underground and received geothermal activity. These places were warm with the heat of their bodies and smelled of smoke and sulfur. Despite this, almost all red dragons required a high perch somewhere close by from which they could look over their domain—the higher the better, as they believed that their domain encompassed all that they could see. They were just as likely to be found up here as they were in their lairs. Otherwise, for security, they preferred to sleep and store their treasure deep underground, below masses of stone. Hence, noted dragon-slayer Smerdiuk Dragonbane mistakenly reported in The Compleat Dragon-Hunter that their lairs were often at the highest point in the region, as it gave them a sense of power and the ability to watch approaches.

Red dragons that dwelled within dungeons or the like would make their lairs in heated or fire-filled locations. In lieu of a high place with a panoramic view of the area, they keep watch in large open spaces or down long corridors, wherever they could get a wide view.

As it was rare for a natural cave system to have all the features a red dragon desired, they would claim spaces already excavated or constructed by others where possible, or else enslave other creatures to build or modify them. Hence, they would seize such places as dwarf holds and drow access tunnels. Furthermore, a red dragon ordered its minions to attend them as servants, keep the lair clean, keep watch for trespassers, and build monuments to it and place these around its lair. These praised the dragon's power and told of its life, deeds, and victories.

While within its volcanic lair, to defend itself and its hoard, a legendary red dragon could cause earth tremors, clouds of toxic gases, and geysers of magma or even clouds of noxious smoke or areas of intense heat. The lair of a legendary red dragon could alter the land around it, causing minor earthquakes up to 6 miles (9.7 kilometers) away, heating and tainting water sources within 1 mile (1.6 kilometers), and even opening portals to the Elemental Plane of Fire within rocky fissures, through which beings of elemental fire could cross over. They could also cause droughts and desertification up to 6 miles (9,700 meters) away or cause all open flames in that range to turn dark red and to constantly hiss, crackle, and spark in any circumstance. Alternatively, the dragon might use any open flame up to 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) away to listen through to a range of 30 feet (9.1 meters). (Such effects faded within a tenday if the dragon was slain.) For more conventional defenses, many reds enjoyed a well-camouflaged pit trap that would summon a fiendish megaraptor in with the victim.

As they made their lairs in high hills and mountainous regions, red dragons seemed particularly populous throughout the peaks of northwestern and northern Faerûn, especially those surrounding the great desert of Anauroch. They were rumored to be particularly numerous around the snow-capped mountains of the Spine of the World. In the mid–14th century DR, they'd also been sighted further east, over the Glacier of the White Worm and Ironfang Keep in the Earthspur Mountains.

Most likely, red dragons lived in more southerly parts of Faerûn too, but their habit of boasting of their hoards helped dragon hunters locate those who made their lairs close to civilization. Nevertheless, a couple of red dragons have been spotted over the Sunset Mountains in the Western Heartlands, the foothills of the Orsraun Mountains of Turmish, and even Tethyr.

Mating was initiated by the female every century or so when she felt the urge to have children. She looked for the nearest red dragon male with the most wealth and power. As such, males never denied their advances, as it was a sign of prestige among other males to be requested to mate. Avoiding inbreeding, they knew one another's genealogies via their reputations. Nevertheless, red dragon courtship was a risky matter, as the majority of potential suitors were still considered also as dangerous rivals. Females conducted much of the courting, though it was not unknown for males to try as well, and it typically saw the younger, though still high-status, usually female dragon carefully approaching the elder, usually male dragon. Rarely did two red dragons fight over a potential mate; such a battle would inevitably be deadly, and when a superior suitor pressed their case, all but the most unwise lesser would give up. Females tended to be the aggressors in mating.

After mating, the male would leave the female and not return, or else the elder then left the younger to protect the eggs. A typical red dragon female produced two to four eggs, and could control the number of eggs to limit the number of offspring, primarily to reduce the number of potential competitors in future. They had an incubation time of 270 days to 660 days or 22 months, and they were laid after approximately 165 days or 5.5 months. All were viable if laid under ideal conditions, namely deep underground and close to a natural heat source, for example, in a volcano's empty lava tubes. It should be kept within an open flame or at a temperature of no less than 140 ℉ (60 ℃) but it could even be immersed in a pool of lava.

The female jealously guarded the clutch, occasionally with the assistance of an old or infertile female. She rarely laid down her own life for her hatchlings, but would fight harder to protect them.

However, once hatched, even the wyrmlings were left to take care of themselves. Often, within the first few months, they would fight and kill one another until only one remained; otherwise, they would remain cooperative until they came of age. They remained close to the hatchery for a few years before spreading out to find more food and their own lairs. Hence, a full surviving clutch typically included two to five offspring from several matings, ranging in age from wyrmlings to young adults. Once her young reached the young adult stage of development, or sometimes earlier, the mother's natural instincts overruled her maternal ones and she forced all of her young from her territory, as she saw them as competitors. In fact, on occasion, after the young left the nest, the mother entered a temporary state of insanity in which she would attack, slay, and devour her former mate, if present, and any young that dared returned. There was never any familial or generational loyalty.

Under the categories of dragon aging, the offspring were counted as wyrmlings for the first 8 years and as young dragons for up to 200 years.

After 600 years or older, they started feeling the effects of age. They slept for increasingly longer periods, the range of their infravision and detect hidden or invisible creatures spells steadily shortened, and the chances of spell failure grew. After 700 years, these effects became pronounced and death of old age was a risk. On waking, an ancient red dragon could be very disoriented.

A red dragon became an elder at 950 years and an ancient dragon at 1,900 years. The oldest known red dragon lived to about 2,500 years.

When a red dragon was dying of old age, a few weeks before they expired they suffered a sudden senility or insanity. They became so unpredictable in this time they were especially dangerous. Otherwise, most would launch a suicidal attack against an old enemy, choosing to go down fighting and go out in a blaze of glory.

Like other dragons, they shed their skins as they advanced into each new stage of life. Red dragons would consume their old skins to regain specific nutrients.

While dragons could suffer the same range of mental illnesses as humans and other races, red dragons were more likely to display the signs of megalomania. Given the typical red dragon personality, this was extreme—the megalomaniacal red believed wholeheartedly they were nothing less than the most intelligent, most powerful, most important, and most beautiful of all creatures in all of existence.

When a slain red dragon underwent environment diffusion—an uncommon occurrence by which a deceased dragon's body decayed and affected the local environment there were two possibilities according to the landscape. In a mountainous or stony landscape, the ground split open where it had died, creating one or several small volcanic vents that spewed acrid smoke or else large sulfurous geysers. Otherwise, in less rocky or more fire-prone lands, a wildfire started, one that never spread beyond the site but also which never went out, no matter the weather or lack of fuel.

Red dragons hated silver dragons with a passion as their familiarity with the element of cold and other natural powers often made red dragons appear weak in battle with them, which they naturally resented. They also occasionally conflicted over territory, with the red's high perch often crossing into a silver's domain. Fights between them were often vicious and lethal, but silvers worked together and even enlisted human allies, so they generally got the advantage over the reds.

Similarly, red dragons who delved deep underground for their lairs would sometimes run into the deep dragons, also known as purple dragons, who dwelled in the Underdark.

As copper dragons regularly dwelled in hills that would be within view of a red dragon's perch, they commonly came into conflict, though the smaller copper dragons rarely won out against the more powerful red dragons in open battle. The coppers normally fled until they could find a way of improving their chances,[51] like luring them into narrow winding canyons and caves where they could climb walls and outmaneuver a red dragon. Of course, coppers viewed reds as challenges to be irritated and embarrassed as much as possible without getting killed.

Above all, though, red dragons hated gold dragons, because they were so similar to them, yet their natural moral differences were extreme, and because golds were, in a red dragon's view, "nearly" as powerful as reds. However, while red dragons might loudly proclaim that they would fight and defeat any gold dragon they came across, they often found an excuse not to fight when that time eventually came. Despite the reds' overwhelming arrogance and confidence, they weren't stupid and understood—even if they'd never admit it even to themselves nor hear it from anyone—that an equivalent gold was more powerful and victory was far from certain in any battle between them. Nevertheless, out of pride and unwillingness to back down, reds sometimes attacked wandering golds even when clearly outclassed.

White dragons, meanwhile, were seen as unworthy of even a red dragon's rivalry, and whites sensibly stayed out of the more powerful reds' paths. Occasionally, they came into conflict, but a red dragon was often happy to let a white dragon neighbor live nearby, provided they stayed out of the way and out of sight.

If not as food, all lesser creatures were treated as nothing more than potential servants or tools for a red dragon to use, and only while they were useful and effective. A red dragon in need of minions would typically find some local chaotic evil humanoids and demand they pledge their service, and if they needed encouragement, killed off their leaders. Those who did survive and serve a red dragon must be constantly obsequious to it and were fearful of displeasing their master or even delivering bad news lest they be roasted and devoured. While some served willingly, others would flee given the chance. The red dragon displayed a patronizing manner to these minions, who served it as agents, spies, and emissaries.

A small contingent of red dragons served high-ranking githyanki as mounts and companions, following a treaty established with Tiamat during the war between the gith and the mind flayers. These red dragons served the githyanki during their young age, being dismissed as soon as they reached adulthood and keeping the wealth accumulated over their years of service. These dragons resented their time of servitude, but were eager to participate in raids thanks to the promise of treasure and of growing in power. The dragons remained loyal to their riders as long as they were treated respectfully and were given ample opportunities to pillage. While not all red dragons elected allied with the githyanki like this, few counted them as enemies. Some of the descendants of these red dragons remained with the githyanki in the Astral Sea, becoming pact dragons.

Red dragons spoke Draconic with their own distinct accent, and also spoke both their own language and a language common to all chromatic dragons. They would also speak Common.

Moreover, soon after hatching, more than one in six wyrmlings could communicate with any sentient being, and the others gained this power as they aged, with over two-fifths possessing it by the time they were adults and almost three-quarters when great wyrms.

It was said the flesh of red dragons tasted extremely spicy. To be properly prepared, it had to be exposed to open air for at least two days and aged for some time. Anyone who ate red dragon meat that was not treated in this manner was susceptible to horrible cramps and extreme pain. Even if properly prepared, the diner would suffer for it the next day. Reputedly, a historical lord of Mulmaster would eat only the brains of red dragons. Smerdiuk Dragonbane enjoyed red dragon meat, but declared anything else an acquired taste at best. Recipes and techniques were documented in The Fine Art of Cooking and Seasoning Red Dragon. One dish was dragonblood soup, which included the blood, heart, and possibly flesh of a red dragon and was a work of foodomancy.

As with other dragons, a suit of armor crafted from red dragonhide would of course be resistant to flame, protecting itself but not necessarily the wearer. Only proper dragoncraft armor, a shield, or mantle would also confer some of its resistance on the wearer.

The blood of a red dragon was naturally a boon to any spell of fire magic, whether in a potion or ink or used as a material component. For example, three drops of red dragon blood were a potential ingredient in the ink used to inscribe a burning hands spell into a spellbook, according to a recipe in Book of the Silver Talon; it made a fiery beam with greater range and usefulness.

As told in the Book of the World, there was a draconic creation myth that told how, at the dawn of time, the great dragon god Asgorath died in the shattering of the Crystal Sun and where the drops of her red blood fell on the World, there emerged the Spawn of Asgorath. In mourning, these Spawn circled Asgorath and poured their breaths on the god to bring the god back to life, while one, the Renegade, shed their own blood on the World to create the metallic dragons. According to Dunkelzahn of Candlekeep in The Origin Myths – A Treatise, the Spawn of Asgorath almost certainly represented red dragons and this religion, doubtless created by red dragons themselves, upheld their supremacy among dragonkind and their views on purity, while the Renegade was likely Bahamut.

Circa 1357 DR, rumors spread in Mirabar that there was a great many red dragons living in the Spine of the World mountains, and that they were plotting a coordinated assault upon the lands to the south. While many sages dismissed this, stating red dragons were too greedy and selfish to work together like this, recent dragon attacks on Phlan and the Citadel of the Raven in the Moonsea were good evidence otherwise.

Source: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Red_dragon

[thequiver]

Who is....Jay Guthrie | Icarus? - A Reading Guide

Joshua "Jay" Guthrie is an X-Men affiliated mutant from Marvel Comics first introduced in 1984. Jay is the younger brother of Sam and Paige Guthrie, and the older brother of Melody Guthrie. Despite being part of the New X-Men during the Academy X era, Jay is most known for being part of the Guthrie family, as he has a number of appearances with them prior to attending the Xavier Institute and his family/home drive many of his motivations and choices. Jay has bright red feathered wings, a healing factor, and can harmonize with himself when he sings.

Jay's story deals very heavily with grief and suicide, if you're sensitive to those topics please keep that in mind before you continue the reading list.

Reading list under the cut!

Family Matters

These issues give us a look at Jay's experiences at home and his relationship with his family (largely focusing on the parentification of him and his older brother Sam). Later issues in this section also touch on grief and suicide.

Rom (1979) #Annual 3 New Mutants (1983) #42 X-Force (1991) #32, 36 X-Men (1991) #36 Uncanny X-Men '95 (1995) #1 Uncanny X-Men (1981) #437-441

Academy X

After the horrifying events of Uncanny X-Men #437-441, Jay is brought by his mother to the Xavier institute against his will. Things get....bad for Jay and the family Guthrie, ultimately resulting in Jay's death and yet another disappointing but yet completely expected parenting fail from Lucinda Guthrie.

X-Men (1991) #157-159 Uncanny X-Men (1981) #444 New X-Men (2004) #1-6 X-Men Unlimited (2004) #3B X-Men (1991) #162, 164-165 New X-Men (2004) #7-9, 12-15 New X-Men Yearbook Special (2005) #1 New X-Men (2004) #20-28, 32* *this is Jay's funeral and Lucinda speaks to his classmates...though remarkably little about what she says is actually about Jay

Krakoa

Jay was brought back to life on the mutant island of Krakoa where he..... doesn't really do a whole lot.....

X-Men (2019) #7 X-Force (2019) #32 X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic (2021) #101 (Jay's only in one panel but it gives us SOMETHING about what he's up to on Krakoa) X-Men: Before the Fall - Mutant First Strike (2023) #1 (again, Jay's only in one panel, but i's SOMETHING)

[yourultraarchive]

hello ☺️! i was wondering if you'd done a summary or translation for pg. 162, the police section, of the ultra archive character guidebook? i've been trying to track down where the idea of tsukauchi (the older)'s quirk being lie detector came from (i.e. whether this is a purely fanon creation or mentioned once offhandedly somewhere) and some people have attributed it to the ultra archive book, but it doesn't seem to have an official translation unfortunately. would you be willing to take a look? have a great day either way!

His archive profile doesn't actually mention his quirk, just that he knows All Might's secret, is in charge of the LOV cases, wants to catch AFO, and has great analytical skills.

I thought his quirk was introduced pretty early on? It's been a while.

But if not, it was definitely in MHA: Vigilantes (or, in Japanese, BNHA: Illegals), because they introduced Naomasa's sister there, and I believe that his quirk was explained in relation to hers (ie, her quirk was different from his in this way). Again, been a while so I might be wrong about the exact wording/placing, but it's definitely not a fanon concept!

[sunderedstar]

absolutely could not find the table of contents for Keith A. Smith's Non-Adhesive Binding Volume II: 1- 2- & 3-Section Sewings online anywhere, so here it is. for all your ILL/resource sharing/page scan request needs.

Part 1 1-Section Sewings

16 3-Hole PAMPHLET STITCH SEWING

20 DASH SEWING

21 THE LACED DASH

22 FIGURE 8

24 DOT-DASH SEWING (machine stitch)

26 THE TWIST Exit Backward

28 THE TWIST Exit Forward

29 DOUBLE DASH Alternating Exits

30 THE TWIST Exit Backward and Link

34 PEARL DASH

35 BOW TIE Running Stitch Sewing

36 THE HITCH Exit Backward, Lap and loop

38 ALTERNATING HITCH

42 SEWN CHAINS (linking to form a chain)

Part 2 - 2-SECTION SEWINGS

52 PARALLEL BARS

54 THE DASH

56 DOT-DASH

57 DASH BARS

59 DIAGONALS BARS

60 ALTERNATING DIAGONALS BARS

62 BARS ARROWS

65 STANDING Z'S OR LYING N's

68 BROKEN Z's

70 ZIGZAG

71 LIGHTNING BOLT

73 PINKING SHEARS

74 PINKING SHEARS WITH BARS

76 CARETS

78 SETS OF DIAGONAL BARS

80 LATTICE

82 Xs

83 ALTERNATING X's

84 2-SECTION TWISTED X

86 TWISTED X WITH BARS

88 LINKED X

90 SOFT K

92 TIED BOW

94 BARBER POLE

97 DESCENDING Xs

102 ALPHA Alternating Loops

104 THE WATERFALL Twin Link Stitch Sewing

107 CROSSED SNOWSHOES Intersecting
Chain Stitch Sewing

110 THREAD EYE A Link Stitch Sewing

113 THREAD EYE WITH X's A Link Stitch
Sewing

116 2-SECTION RUNNING STITCH

SEWING

Part 3 - 3-SECTION SEWINGS

132 MULTIPLE SECTION PAMPHLET
SEWING

134 MULTIPLE SECTION FIGURE 8
SEWING 1-Needle Sewing

135 MULTIPLE SECTION FIGURE 8
SEWING 2-Needle Sewing

138 MULTIPLE SECTION, MULTIPLE FIGURE & SEWINGS 1-Needle Sewing

140 TRIPLE DASH

142 TRIPLE DASH VARIATION

145 MULTI-SECTION ON TAPES LACED
INTO PAPER COVER

150 TANGENT BARS

154 UNEVEN BARS

156 ALTERNATING BARS

158 ALTERNATING LOOPED BARS

159 THE ROPE

162 TRIPLE PARQUET

164 PARQUETRY

165 G's

168 H's

170 BROKEN H's

172 DOVE TAIL

174 VERTICAL T's

177 FALLING DIAGONALS

178 DASHES & DIAGONALS

180 PAIRED DIAGONALS

182 STAGGERED DIAGONALS

184 STAGGERED DIAGONALS VARIATION

186 TRIDENT

188 ALTERNATING TRIDENTS I

189 ALTERNATING TRIDENTS I

190 S's

191 DOUBLE DIAMONDS

192 HEXAGONALS

193 ROCKET

194 LEAVES

196 HOUND'S-TOOTH CHECK

198 Ks

200 BRACKETS

202 SEVEN 7's

204 BROKEN HERRINGBONE

206 FOLDING V's

208 V's

208 V's I

210 TOUCHING ARROWS

212 AEROS Arrows

214 ISOLATED DIAMONDS

216 TOUCHING DIAMONDS

218 PISCES

220 TIRE TRACKS

222 ASSEMBLY LINE Z's

224 STAIR-STEPS

226 SAW BLADES

228 OPEN BOOK

230 ARROWHEAD

232 DIAGONAL T's

234 +s

236 +'s and X's

238 CONTIGUOUS X's (even number)

240 ISOLATED X's

242 CONTIGUOUS X's (odd number)

244 DOS ESQUIS

245 HURRICANE FENCE

246 DIAMOND X

248 3-SECTION TWISTED X

250 TIED CROSS

254 BOW TIED

258 HORSESHOES

260 LOOP THE LOOP

262 PINCHED P's

264. BOBBIN

268 SIDE BOW

270 COILED LINE

274 TRIPLE CHAIN

279 WOVEN CHAIN

283 LINKED STAR

286 BUTTERFLY STROKE

290 SHOOTING STAR

294 SPINE BRAID

296 THE COIL SPRING

[setteidreams]

Yu Yu Hakusho (162 sheets) has been added to the WIP section (https://patreon.com/setteidreams).

[shamelessislamreligionhorse]

Our worship should also reflect in our nature and interactions with all beings around us. Jagatguru Tatvdarshi Sant Rampal Ji Maharaj unveils an important section in the holy Kabir Sagar, pages 162 and 163, where God Kabir reveals that the true essence of humanity lies in benevolence and devotion. Just as a cow, in its humble existence, offers immense value to mankind - from nourishing us with milk to the practical uses of its body even after death. Similarly a devotee must embody selflessness and compassion too. This article also focuses on the intricacies of a devotee's relationship with his Guru and the kind of unwavering devotion they must embody to find salvation:

[the-s1lly-corner]

I wish to hear about the knd oc

>:3c

Give us the lore Silly!!!!

Sososo sorry for taking so long to get to this! Admittedly I was putting this off simply because theres so much lore! I'll be adding a cut to this because with me summarizing stuff, it's still a lot! I'll try to break it up in sections, since there are different.. chapters... for lack of a better word.. this ocs entire life is plotted out! From early childhood to present day when the show takes place! That's a lot of lore considering the character is well into adulthood by the time the main series happens!

Apologies if it's all over the place and some points are.. whack.. this is my first time putting everything into writing! I'll also need to talk about other ocs so this main one can make sense, mostly it'll be talking about their sector, in regards to other ocs! Also its 3am at the time of writing this + my stomach is being MEAN

With all that said, let's hope this doesnt turn into a novel!

Also also** lore may contradict what's in canon, maybe.. I'm not sure! I'm still not done reading the comics and I havent touched anything GKND so I'm unsure if theres any extra info that in unaware of that would complicate things

Feel free to send any questions about the oc!! Lore stuff, interactions with canon characters, ect!

cws: mentions of controlling/toxic parents but i dont go too in depth about it but just know that this is a part of her story. mentions of sexism as well, obligatory its there because "admin uses his ocs to process his experience with his gender as well as being afab and other stuff" but i dont go toooooo deep into it

Name; Rose Wood

Pronouns; she/her

Age; obviously since we're sliding around all over her time line I'll let you know based in the section... but shes in the same age group as Benedict and Monty

Appearance, present day; short, rocking a chubby mom bod! Red hair that's a little faded with a prominent streak of grey. Green eyes. Very curly and fluffy hair! Not sold on a length, but currently it's just last her shoulders! Often wears cardigans or sweaters, though I'm yet to make an "official" outfit for her... her default outfit! Short :( she stopped growing in her early/mid teens height wise, about 5'5

Appearance, KND era; assuming this is in the later half of her time as a KND operative shes tall by kid standards (assuming like. 4'6 is the average for girls as google is telling me). Lanky!! Very long hair, hair is more vibrant but that's really just a design choice rather than an in universe thing. Hair changes length, it starts at mid back but she cuts it to her jaw a few months before shes decommissioned. No default outfit but she swaps between her school uniform and baseball uniform (sports kid before her dad made her stop!!)

Personality; very sweet and kind, patient.. however shes no nonsense, though that develops slowly over time and really roots and shows itself in her young adult years. Lots of internalized feelings, as a child and teen, she feels she had to suck it up and put on a happy face because to do anything else would be "unbecoming", at least according to her parents. As an adult shes oblivious to the whole child vs adult war and doesnt realize how serious it is, shes just vibing

Occupations, past and current; knd operative (decommissioned), teacher (current)

Family; she doesnt talk to her parents all that much however she keeps in touch with her grandfather (very old, think 80s, rose was an oops baby + so was her dad LMAO), and 2 younger sisters. She does have other family members however they're not very fleshed out currently. She does have a son who is a teen by the time the main series takes place! Maybe I'll make a short follow up post on him!

Former Sector teammates, numbers and names; Numbuh 246 (Rose Wood), Numbuh 165 (Jamie Robinson), Numbuh 162 (Kimberly "Kimmy" Wilson), Numbuh 527 ("Sammy" Jones), Numbuh 129 (Davis Peterson) (the leader of the sector)

i'll probably make a separate post for her teammates, this post is already pretty long LMAO

KND days;

she joined within the very early days of the KND, after monty started it. i would go further and say shes a "first generation" knd operative, being there when they fought and overthrew grandfather. she didnt actually join a sector until the last year or two of her time as an operative, working solo prior on missions and helping built up the operation. thanks to her experience, she was sent to go basically work and "pass off her knowledge" before shes decommissioned.

a actually wrote in parallels between her sector and sector v for thematic reasons but i wont get into that here; but if i had to make a comparison shes like the numbuh 5 of the group. fairly level headed and in tune with whats going on as well as being able to step up when it counts to push through on a mission

"if she was sent to basically pass her experience, why wasnt she made the leader?". tight schedule on her part, parents cared a lot about keeping up appearances and they worked rose like a horse by having her sign up to a bunch of extra curriculars + her having her share of chores as well as her parents being strict. she just did not have a lot of time to spare. a lot of her ark is her slowly becoming more and more independent as time passes, but as of now shes pulling herself between being this model student to appease her parents and fighting for the knd's cause. ironic given the whole fighting against adult tyranny thing

there was some friction in the beginning when she first joined the sector, shes the second newest member the newest being 527 (Sammy). a lot of coming from 165 (Jamie), actually throws her failures in her face if they ever fumble a mission because of her whole history. they do eventually become buddies though, but its a slow burn!

she does get what she was sent to do done before she turns 13, her decommissioning is your standard decommissioning albeit with some pizzazz; she was a first gen operative but she was one of the last remaining ones at that time so its like. a whole chapter ending in their history with only a handful of others remaining. she doesnt get to be a secret operative

Teenager;

probably the most underdeveloped part of her story, i mostly focused on her childhood as well as the present day.. so this section and early adulthood is a little under baked. a lot of the themes as before are still here, overbearing and controlling strict parents completely dominate her time so she doesnt have much time to just. be. she does end up reconnecting with some of her old teammates, but theyre all of course decommissioned at this point in time. the only one who is still an operative is sammy, but thats due to them being so young in comparison to the rest of the sector and even then theyre at the end of their time as an operative. due to the whole "operatives arent to mess with the lives of ex operatives" rule thats mentioned, sammy doesnt interact much with rose or the others unless they approach them first.

main thing to note is that rose and davis have a short fling that quickly burns out due to teens being dumb: short explanation davis was insecure and jealous and rose did not want to deal with that on top of everything else going on with her. good for her for looking out for her health

she was not an evil teen, though, far too deep in her studies to really do anything rebellious as well as being afraid of falling behind and disappointing her parents

around this time, not long after her and davis break up her and her family moves out of town

Young adult;

she went NC with her parents not long after she turned 18, moving out soon after. she does keep in touch with her younger siblings, though. the breaking point was really her parents confirming that theyre disappointed with her existence. literally all but saying they wish they had a son instead of a daughter as a first born, lots of old values/views there that finally pushes rose over the edge. noting now that rose did have some feelings about her gender but never really explored it due to feeling the need to conform + this takes place pre 2000s so... but moving forward she does start to embrace herself and slowly take the time to get to know herself now that shes got the time and space to do so. i do like the idea of her experimenting between now and present day, and while she does eventually lean more towards presenting feminine there are instances where shes presenting more masc/feels more masc

while at college she meets someone, obligatory "i havent given him a name yet", they get together. everythings good, they have a kid. they break up. im still cooking up a reasoning for why they split but for now its just "they changed because they got married young, and now theyre older"

Present day;

a few years before the events of the show she moves back to town, i was going to say she moves in during the current events but i decided to be nice and give her a chance to get accustomed to being back in her hometown. i havent decided how it happens but she ends up getting in with the villains but like. not in the way that shes a villain too, in the "shes like the nice lady from down the street who makes some killer brownies so we all vibe with her". kind of just started as a joke that i turned into the canon for her because i can... kind of see that happening... this leads to her meeting benedict, blah blah she vaguely remembers him, they catch up and it leads to them getting together

i actually didnt originally ship them because "ooooooooouuugh father kinda...." actually it was because "the delightfuls need a decent parent figure because GOD!! i love father and my take on him does soften him a bit with time but GOOD LORD" and then it mixed with that and the "ooooooough hes kinda..." LMAO

not much to say other than shes the cool mom at the PTA meetings and just gets along with everyone, probably thinks the delightfuls and sector v are friends. which drives both of them up the wall they HATE it LMAO

Post series finale;

Dead/j

Okay well, that's just a concept. Admittedly I dont know what to do with her after the series finale takes place. Logically one can assume she just continues on with her day to day because shes not really involved in the fight against children, shes quite literally. Vibing and staying in her own lane asides from when she gets dragged into things by the people around her; even then shes still.. oblivious.. not much different than how Monty reacts to the knd stuff, when hes not recommissioned. Simply thinking it's this elaborate game of sorts, ESPECIALLY if she were to get dragged in through the delightfuls (who are. You know, effectively her step children thanks to her relationship with father)

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