#a lot of that information came from various wikis

[yamayuandadu]

Is Humbaba's appearance ever described in detail in any written sources? When looking online, I keep seeing artists depicting him in very specific ways (head covered in entrails, scaly skin, snake phallus...), but I'm having trouble finding the sources for those same specific details

This is something I've spent quite a lot of time investigating myself last year when I was working on his wiki article. The short answer is that not really, but we can piece something together from the available scraps - and it’s not really similar to the modern standard you're describing. You are definitely looking in the right places for Humbaba information if you found no trace of these traits - only one of them goes back directly to an actual source, and even then it’s less firm than it might seem at first glance. More under the cut. 

The textual sources are actually very lax when it comes to describing Humbaba’s appearance, What is emphasized are his supernatural powers and authority granted by the gods - Wer (they set this guy up like he’s the next arc villain in a shonen in the Old Babylonian version’s Sippar fragments) and Enlil or Enlil alone. There’s a decent chance he was viewed as largely human-like. Andrew R. George ( The Babylonian Gilgamesh epic: introduction, critical edition and cuneiform texts, p. 144) describes him as “essentially anthropomorphic” though speculates he might have been imagined as tree-like. Multiple considerations regarding Humbaba’s iconography can be found in the articles from Gilgamesch: Ikonographie eines Helden, especially in Lambert’s and Collon’s. Collon essentially just concludes that Humbaba was simply depicted as an unusually tall and/or broad but still largely human-like figure, Lambert notes similarities to the lahmu (so we’re still within the realm of burly hairy men, essentially). Piotr Michalowski (A Man Called Enmebaragesi, p. 205-206) argues that at least in the standalone narratives Humbaba was essentially a parody of various peripheral “barbarian” rulers. It is perhaps worth pointing out that while the etymology of Humbaba’s name is up for debate, it is clear that it was originally an ordinary personal name, and individuals bearing it appear in administrative texts from the Ur III period before Humbaba the literary character arose.

While myths and the epic itself are lax, plenty of information about Humbaba’s appearance can be found in other genres of texts. This evidence has been collected by George (same monograph as above, p. 146-147). His face was regarded as outlandish, with a bulbous nose and big eyes. There are references to diviners spotting Humbaba’s face while analyzing animal entrails. An artistic representation of this phenomenon is seemingly known from one exemplar, and is the source of “entrails-faced” Humbabas in modern work.

A unique sculpture from Neo-Babylonian Sippar seen above (you can view it from more sides here) is inscribed with a short formula starting with “If the coils of the colon resemble the head of Huwawa”, and has accordingly been described as the visual representation of this statement since the 1920s. Identification as Humbaba has been affirmed for example by Anthony Green in his 1997 article Myths in Mesopotamian Art (p. 137-138 + 150 for a confirmation of the museum number; published in Sumerian Gods and their Representations; you can find it online,it’s worth checking out since it also includes timeless classics like Wiggermann’s Transtigridian Snake Gods and Westenholz’s Nanaya, Lady of Mystery). I’m not actually aware of any parallels, but it’s a cool, striking visual and I personally don’t find its modern fame undeserved.

However, it needs to be stressed that it’s not standard. Humbaba’s face is also quite common in visual arts. In fact, it’s so common that Frans Wiggermann (Mesopotamian Protective Spirits: the ritual texts, p. 150) argues that the face came first, with the name perhaps representing a unique sound made by the creature while grinning or laughing (what is this, One Piece?) and only developed into a literary character later. These images served an apotropaic purpose guarding doors (examples have been discovered in situ), appear chiefly in Old Babylonian times, and show remarkably consistent traits, here are some I’ve assembled for the wiki article last year:

Scaly skin doesn’t show up anywhere as a trait of Humbaba’s, as far as I am aware. That’s Tishpak’s thing. However, it is perhaps worth noting that a type of lizard, ḫuwawītum, was named after Humbaba (George, p. 145). This was discussed briefly by Claus Wilcke a long time ago in Humbaba’s entry in the Reallexikon (p. 535); he pointed out the animal was compared to a gecko or what he identified as some variety of agamid. Not sure if anyone ever tried identifying it more precisely with any species of reptile which can be found in Iraq or Syria. Given Humbaba’s apparently outlandish looking eyes my first thought was a chameleon, honestly, but don’t quote me on that, plus note that it seems chameleons were called bargunna (or bargungunna).

As for the other reptilian matter, snake phallus is a part of Pazuzu's iconography (see his Reallexikon entry by Wiggermann, p. 377), not Humbaba's. As far as I can tell, the Humbaba plaque above is naked and shows no such characteristics. Many other possible depictions of Humbaba show him in some sort of kilt with no phallus of any sort in sight (see the numerous seals shown in Collon’s article mentioned above, for instance). I know the snake phallus claim was even on wikipedia at some point - long before my involvement - but it doesn’t come up in any publication about Humbaba I read from within the past 40 years.

[cyndraws]

Kaishin secret santa 2023

This is a Kaishin roleswap au for @blueamphibians! I hope you enjoy this art + my ramblings on the au underneath. Because of course, I couldn't just leave it as one piece of art haha (ehem please buckle in for preparation)

Many thanks to @dcmkkaishinevents / Mack for hosting this event, it was super fun participating and interacting with the community <3 <3 As a side note, I would absolutely recommend it to others who are considering signing up next year. Everyone is very friendly!

(Hey Blue, I had more art planned but unfortunately many things came up. But I hope you enjoy this anyways! I might draw some more for you later ^-^ Thanks so much for this prompt <3 <3)

Edit: I have decided that now you will receive a completed arts + ramblings + some WIPs behind the scene hahahaha https://www.tumblr.com/cyndraws/737208478471487488/kaishin-secret-santa-2023-extras-basically-wips?source=share

AU ramblings under the cut (ngl it's a lot):

Random details and notes that don't really fit anywhere. Mostly about the fanart:

Kaito is 1 year older than Shin and is taller than him

This scene is set over the Haido City hotel. In the distance you can see Shiriyomi Trust Hotel (can't full recognise it behind Kaito but I assure you I drew it lol), Tokyo tower (easy to spot) and Roppongi Hills Mori Tower (Just behind Shin on the right, the one with the lights in a --u-- shape) Main reference: https://www.detectiveconanworld.com/wiki/Haido_City_Hotel

I was also screaming at the Kaishin pic in ED70 throughout this LMAO.

Kaito breaks through Shinichi's mysterious KID persona in this drawing and Shinichi shyly reveals his face behind the mask. Kaito then produces a blue flower, claiming it matches Shinichi's beautiful eyes (he's also the one who bred it)

Kaito has extra pockets sewn into his uniform to carry more tricks. This wasn't really necessary in canon, but here, Kaito has to be prepared to investigate at any moment.

Lmao help me render hair *stares at Kaito's* Cool effect but not quite right. I need to go experiment later.

Kaito/Shin getting shrunk (aka Conan situation) never happens in this au. But Haibara and the other victims are still around. Haibara still lives at the professor's.

~

Background:

Yusaku was much more entangled and involved with Toichi and his fight with the Black Org. Side note but in this au, Snake is from a division of the Black Org

As a result, they both end up being killed during the fateful accident. Yes, both Shinichi and Kaito are there for it. They were going to be introduced to each other on that day, but well,,, we can see the way it ended.

It wasn't well known that the Kuroba and Kudo family were close at all. Extra vigilance was taken after the funerals to ensure their safety. Their families parted ways for the better or worse after thsi event.

Yusaku's and Toichi's friendship/rivalry included collaborating for some heists, having a second secret base in the Kudo mansion, and Yusaku donning the Night Baron costume... even if he was just hidden in a car and sending information to Toichi via an earpiece lol.

After their husbands' deaths, Yukiko and Chikage meet up occasionally and travel together in secret.

~

Shinichi:

Shinichi never became a famous detective. The years after Yusaku died in the tragic accident, Yukiko and him tried their best to move on with varying success. Shinichi's dream to become a famous detective never came to fruition.

This was because for various reasons including not having Yusaku's guiding hand to develop Shin's detective skills, was only being taken to crime scenes for a year, and of course the trauma.

After avoiding detective work as much as he could (well considering that he's still a corpse magnet), Shinichi finally starts to dig through his memories. From then, he uncovered a strange inconsistency with the logic of his father's death and starts to obsess over the idea that it was a murder.

Shin painstakingly and slowly investigates in the shadows with his *ehem* admittedly rusty detective skills and chases after the very little crumbs left by the organisation. What he uncovers is that the accident wasn't one at all, but premeditated murder by an encompassing third party.

Shinichi finally finds a lead to,,, Jii Konosuke. This takes quite a few years, and Shinichi is 15 when he confronts Jii.

Jii reveals everything after Shinichi's deduction and also mistaking him for Kaito. And such Shinichi is brought into the fold. Shinichi also makes up his mind to take on the KID mantle, greatly sympathising with the fellow teen whose father was also involved.

The years after Shinichi uncovers the truth, he learns many skills such as disguise, acting and magic from Jii and Chikage. However, his magic skills will never be on par with Kaito's.

Shinichi in this au has more acting and disguise skills from living with his mother. She passed this skills onto him, and they bonded over it to recover from their grief.

When Shinichi is 17, he officially takes on the role of KID. Chikage permanently locked the KID cave in the Kuroba house, and the KID cave settled in its new home in the Kudo mansion. Inside the second base previously used by Toichi and Yusaku.

Shinichi as KID:

Well, he's just as dramatic as Kaito in canon, but it's a different kind of dramatic. Shin is more of a mysterious and cryptic phantom thief and wears a menacing Night Baron mask. He overall speaks less, and when he does, he says a lot of dramatic lines. Like in theatre almost, with plenty of double meanings.

He takes on a lot of aspects from the Phantom Lady and Jii's interpretation of KID.

And also, I was inspired by the Black Knight, Shiragami in canon, and AngelicSentinel's fantastic fic, Heart of Eternity. I guess you could describe it as more theatrely, cool and princely. He's still very athletic (laughing at Shinichi being Tarzan as Shiragami)

Unlike Kaito, Shin's notices often involve cryptic riddles. It satisfies Shinichi's puzzle loving side and adds to his mysterious reputation.

It's funny to me how Akako's 'Demon of Light' moniker is still accurate haha

Shinichi investigates a little in the shadows and is overall a touch more hot-headed than Kaito KID

He uses a lot more gadgets to cover for his lesser magic skills. He's still learning though! A lot of them are references to Conan's and KID's in canon. Between Jii and Agasa, he gets a lot of them haha. This includes:

Mask/monocle -> voice changer, mask to cover for poker face, zoom and night vision, tracker, microphone and radio, gas mask.

Transmitter/microphone -> button stickers, bugs in general, cufflinks. In some cases, a camera but it must be asked for first. Shin uses these to cover for Kaito's doves in canon.

Wristwatch -> Clock of course for his heist times, tranquilliser, emergency flashbomb (KID has one in canon too)

Shoes -> jet powered rollerskates (equivalent to skateboard). Of course, Shin still kicks things but it looks more to take down the occasional criminal, trigger emergency traps, and more. He doesn't kick often because it doesn't really suit the image of KID + it's a unique skill to have.

+ other usual KID gadgets -> smoke, flash, sleeping bombs, grapple gun, hang glider, etc.

~

Kaito:

He's still an aspiring magician

Since there's a rising amount of cases in Beika, Kaito gets recommended by Nakamori because of his magic skills. The idea is that his knowledge of magic tricks will help uncover the criminals' tricks... Well this includes basically all cases lol. It works though! And the news of Meitantei Kaito starts to spread.

Kaito falls in love with the dramatics and triumphs of figuring out a criminal's trick. He starts to get called into Beika every time a case is discovered. One different to Shin is that Kai gets called to the cases instead of the cases coming to him.

His detective persona is like KID's in canon - flirty, dramatic, confident, charming, a bit of a pervert, and a classic showman's personality. Aoko is sick of it hahaha.

Kai's deduction show is very dramatic. He uses flashy magic tricks to reveal evidence and tricks, and uses his magic to take down criminals.

This includes his acrobatics, trusty card gun and traps he set beforehand. I like to headcanon that Kaito invented his cardgun first before integrating into KID. Kaito's cardgun includes the normal sharp cards (Kaito uses it to pin down criminals with their clothes, cut ropes, etc), tranquilliser laced cards, smoke and flash bombs. And also sleeping bombs but he uses it vary sparingly because even that toes the law a little too much... Megure is exasperated but the criminals are taken down quickly without much harm so he lets it slide

Kaito also follows in the spirit of dubious investigation. He changes his voice, uses his doves to spy on others, uses disguises (very very rarely), and is noisy overall.

Kaito and Hakuba:

Has a detective rivalry with Hakuba.

Hakuba still thinks, even in this au, that Kaito is KID. After all, Shin's profile is very similar to Kaito's. Kaito vehemently denies it but acts like a KID fan around Hakuba to annoy him. He isn't really though, citing KID's magic to be third rate, but he is still intrigued.

Hakuba offhandedly slips in wording and insinuations to Kaito's huge annoyance. You can imagine them bickering at a crime scene while Megure is just Too Used to this.

Much later on, when Kaito learns Shinichi's identity, Kaito tells Shinichi's about Hakuba's warnings. So Kaito is kinda a messenger between the two. Despite Hakuba being annoying, Kaito knows he can trust him.

~ Other character interactions:

Shinichi and Kaito:

Shinichi is still a corpse magnet. So he encounters a case, calls the police, and escapes as fast as he can after giving a witness statement. This is partly to avoid the awkwardness of meeting Megure and the police officers (he hasn't met them since his father died), as well as his new night job.

This results in the most frustrating yet amusing situation where Shin and Kaito miss meeting each other for quite a few years. Shinichi is busy hurrying off while Kaito is called to the scene and busy listening to the details.

Quick sketch I may/may not fully finish in the future:

Description: Set in suburban Beika. Shinichi is at the foreground, looking at his watch and worrying about meeting Jii on time. Meanwhile, next to a police car, Megure merrily discusses case details to Kaito. Kaito is glancing over to Shinichi in curiosity while keeping an ear open. He has his hands in his pockets. Behind Megure, the scene has police tape barring entrance.

~

Kaito thinks KID is a third rate magician but can appreciate the dramatics and mysteriousness. He is Intrigued. This leads to a meeting later on. Kaito uses his connection to Nakamori.

Shinichi is of course startled by Kaito's namedrop.

... Sorry no more details/plan about their meeting. It's definitely a dramatic face off though.

Regarding Shinichi's identity reveal, I was playing around with the idea that Snake is there, threatening the two at gunpoint and sneering over the '"lovely family reunion between father and son". It would definitely spur Kaito to grill Shin for more details

~

Shinichi and Hattori:

Hattori hears about the "Meitantei of the East" and goes off to meet him and challenge him to a deduction battle. He doesn't know how to contact him, so he goes with the strat of wandering around Beika until he runs into a case. He figured that with the high rate of cases being reported, he's eventually run into Kuroba ,,, yeah hahahaha Thats his entire plan

Luckily for Hattori, his detective luck exponentially multiplies with Shin's and a scream runs out. As Shinichi is reporting the crime and tried to head off, Hattori slings an arm around his shoulders to stop him from sneaking off.

Hattori loudly greets him as Kuroba despite Shinichi's insistence that "No, I am NOT Kuroba, please get your arm off me". Insert much scepticism from Hattori.

Even after they part ways, this isn't the last they see of each other. Hattori keeps wandering around Beika while running into Shinichi. They eventually become friends huhu.

Shinichi and the Detective Boys:

The Detective Boys admire Kaito a lot. Obviously they've watched the news reports on TV. So when they see him at the park playing soccer, they glomp him HAHAH Poor Shinichi

At this point I think people mistaking Shinichi as Kaito can be a running gag. The Detective Boys keep annoying Shinichi and even attempt breaking into the 'Edo house' to see the ghosts... Shinichi is still not happy. And also, when they visit Haibara, they're basically next doors so Shinichi's never going to get them out of his life.

Despite the annoyance, he eventually becomes fond of them and takes on the big brother sort of role.

When Kaito and Shinichi get acquainted, they take the DB on outings a lot. The DB is very fond of Kaito-nii-san and Shinichi-nii-san.

[mynnthia]

hypothesis on the ethnic/cultural background of izutsumi's mom

[disclaimer: i am not a professional ethnographer, nor of any of the ethnic groups mentioned in the post. this post was written based on research done over the course of a day.

if you have any corrections, feedback, etc, please feel free to inform me! my inbox/dms are open. if there is any misinformation present, i aim to correct them] ----------

idk if anyone else into dungeon meshi has noticed this, but i think izutsumi's mom (and therefore, izutsumi herself) might've been of Nivkh (indigenous east Siberian) heritage?

[details and explanation under the readmore, its slightly long]

when dungeon meshi chapter 59 came out (~2019), i saw a few people speculating that izutsumi's mom might've been Ainu because of how her clothing style notably differed from typical Japanese clothing.

while the Nivkh robe's trim features a different pattern style (swirly) than what izutsumi's mom wears (triangular), the Nivkh robe still looks to be a closer match than Ainu robes, especially in the collar/neckline & sleeve cuff areas.

note how the Ainu robes (image 2) have a different neckline style and wider sleeves:

heres more images of the robes, but from the past this time, found in Wikimedia Commons:

image 1: Nivkh robe from 1871 image 2: Sakhalin Ainu girl (left), Nivkh boy (center), Hokkaido Ainu girl (right) in 1912

Nivkh people have had interactions with Japan dating back centuries too. heres an exerpt from wikipedia:

"For many centuries, the Nivkh were tributaries of the Manchus. After the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, they functioned as intermediaries between the Russians, Manchu and Japanese, and also the Ainu, who were vassals of the Japanese. Early contact with the southern Sakhalin Ainu was generally hostile, although trade between the two was apparent"

(sorry historians for quoting wikipedia as a source here. a lot of the more reputable sources are 20-200+ page papers, and not concise enough to put on a tumblr post)

the English language wiki doesnt have much more detail on Nivkh-Japan relations unfortunately, but there seems to be more info on the Japanese language version of the page.

i've also seen at least 1 speculation that izutsumi's mom might be Mongolian, as her robe somewhat resembles a Mongolian deel. in my opinion, the robe's neckline trim having patterning makes it resemble the Nivkh robes more. this – combined with the fact that prior to the 1900s, Japan-Mongolia relations consisted mostly of Mongolian forces trying to invade japan repeatedly – makes me think Nivkh (or some other indigenous east Siberian) heritage is more likely.

i wont rule it out entirely though, as i don't know how much Ryōko Kui cares about historical-based cultural relations. regardless, here are various deel styles across different Mongolian ethnic groups, if that is of interest to anyone:

i dont really have a profound conclusion for this post tbh. i wanted to document what i found, and figured i might as well share it to tumblr.

theres limited amounts of easily accessible information on traditional eastern Siberian clothing out there, but here's 1 source i found that goes over a few groups (including Nivkh):

[thelostgirl21]

Well, here goes nothing! Wish me luck!

For those of you that are curious to see the articles I'm mentioning...

Collider article

Looper article

Screen Rant article #1

Screen Rant article #2

Screen Rant article #3

Dual Shockers article #1

Dual Shockers article #2

The worst (and most incendiary) of them is likely the "Looper" one, with claims things such as: Unlike Eskel's (Basil Eidenbenz) character, who had fans fuming during "The Witcher" Season 2, there is no point in introducing Radovid if we're not going to follow his villainous origin story. This is the man behind hateful anti-magic rhetoric that propels this universe to fight for magic users' safety.

Although the "Dual Shockers" one, starting with "Imagine if the cunning but despicable Cersei Lannister was made out to be a harmless love interest in HBO's adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones – the fans would riot – and something similar is happening in Netflix’s The Witcher" isn't bad, either, by making it sound like Sapkowski devoted as much ink to buidling up his villain as R.R. Martin did building up Cersei! And that both share a similar presence and importance in their respective books series.

And the image I sent them a link to:

Am I too optimistic hoping this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?

Because, while the moderators (bureaucrats, administrators, specialists...) haven't been trying to necessarily imply that I was wrong with my edits (ex: adding a footnote specifying that Ciri was not officially engaged to Radovid in canon), there's been a lot of:

"This [picture making a compilation of everything Sapkowski wrote] isn't needed/we just cite books and page numbers."

"We generally don't put markers into the intros."

"The intro paragraphs generally will ref across lore particularly from well established chars but the first parts of his bio are from the books and the dynasty site."

"We don't really include a lot of quotes unless it's important."

Guys, I can fully acknowledge that this is how things have always been done.

But the way things have always been done is currently contributing to the spread of misinformation about the content of the source material, and making things very unpleasant for fans of the books and the TV show.

So, maybe we need to do things differently?

The dynasty site is not an issue itself because all of that extra information came from Andrzej Sapkowski himself.

An article stating "in the books, Radovid has two sisters" is technically talking about things that aren't directly stated in the books, true; but that are still featured in the extra information that was released to the public about those books by the author.

One would thus reasonably expect that such information be included in the introduction of the character on the Wiki, as it belongs to the same lore and the same universe as the books, and fully reflects the author's intent.

The videogames don't. They aren't a companion piece to Sapkowski's books. They simply use Sapdkowski's universe as a skeleton, upon which they built more material.

Having made sure to avoid contradicting (or not contradicting too much) what has already been written by the author in the books does not give you any license to appropriate his work, and then claim that what you've written exists in the same universe / belongs to the same lore as those books!!!

Especially when the author himself has already made his opinion very clear that the videogames can't be considered as being a prequel, sequel, or complement to his work.

And has had his own share of issues with the way the videogames rose to the level of popularity it has.

Full disclosure, the first time I heard about the books, I genuinely thought that Andrzej Sapkowki was the equivalent of David Gaider in North America (one of the lead writers for Bioware). I thought he'd written original material for the games and various books based on those characters, the same way David Gaider had written material for the "Dragon Age" videogames and extra books based on the videogame lore that he'd helped build and establish.

But Sapkowki's books were never written with videogames or TV shows in mind.

I'm a gamer. So, unlike Sapkowski, I do love when stories are told across a bunch of different mediums. I loved learning more about the relationship between Maric Theirin (Alistair's father) and Loghain Mac Tir in Gaider's book "The Stolen Throne".

But David Gaider is a writer that will collaborate with a whole team of writers to create characters and stories that populate that world across a variety of mediums.

It is normal and respectful for the Dragon Age wiki to integrate everything found in the books and the games together in the introduction the way they do on that page, as it is all part of the same world!

But not when they aren't.

I can fully understand that Sapkowski isn't a fan of that approach. I may not share his opinions about it making no sense and being idiotic, obviously; but I can understand and appreciate that he doesn't see any appeal to it, and has no desire or interest to participate in that kind of global world building.

And I especially don't think there's anything wrong with him wanting each adaptation of his work to be considered their very bown thing, rather than be all part the same lore / universe.

He's allowing other people to give him money to use characters and worlds he's built virtually any way they'd like, and enjoy themselves!

The least we could do should be to respect that "The Witcher" 's videogames and "The Witcher" 's books aren't tightly woven together the same way "Dragon Age" 's videogames and "Dragon Age" 's books are, and have it being reflected in the Wikipedia.

Or, at least, reflected enough that it doesn't end up generating such confusion that the actual content of Sapkowski's books series get substituted with CD Projekt Red's writings on entertainment websites articles, for frak's sake!

By the way, thanks @fishesfisher for having reminded me that there's literally no reason why one adaptation should be sharing the same page as the books, other than trying to pretend that they are both part of the same universe.

Not sure I'd be able to win that argument (about putting three different tabs rather than a single one: one for the books, one for the games, and one for the Netflix show), but I sure hope they (the mods, admins, specialists, etc.) should care enough that the situation is completely going against Sapkowski's wishes that his books and the videogames be considered as two different stories being told by different writers rather than part of a single universe; as well as causing needless harm to the fans of the books and the TV show.

And that they'll be willing to discuss potential ways we could use to fix this in order to allow the source material and its adaptations to coexist more respectfully on the main page, and avoid such confusion.

If they don't... Is there any way to ask for a divorce from the general wikipedia of the Witcher?

I mean the videogame also has its very own additional gaming wikipedia , on top of the one that was created for the books and its adaptations.

Can we create a "Books only Wikipedia" and a "Netflix only Wikipedia"?

Like seriously. Why should the game need its own wikipedia if they're going to be front and center on "The Witcher" 's general wiki anyway, and they don't give a damn about what Sapkowski wants?

I'd rather have each member of my Witcher family live in separate homes and go visit each one individually, than watch them constantly fighting each other and ignoring each other's needs!

If divorce is the only way to ensure that the books get accurate representation, and the media stops being confused about what goes where, sign me the fuck up!

Well, after I see if there's any opening in fixing things first. I mean, maybe they just don't know that Sapkowski doesn't consider the games as belonging to the same lore/universe as the books...

Like I said, this could actually be the start of a beautiful friendship!

[jamiebluewind]

Shubble and Wilbur situation

This is a post compiling links to all the information on the Shelby Grace aka Shubble (formerly lilshortysgs, she/they) and William Patrick Spencer Gold aka Wilbur Soot (formerly SootHouse Wilbur and current lead singer of Lovejoy, he/him) situation that I have found. I tried my best to keep my language neutral and put all the data in one easy to look through place so that everyone can see it and make their own decisions (I also attempted to reblog most of it myself so that the version linked is frozen to the one that existed when I read it). I've included a post with the public reactions of content creators, which - while decidedly not neutral - show the public reactions of a lot of people who knew one or both of them at the time.

That being said, I'm one person. I probably missed plenty of stuff and there is most likely new information that has came out since I posted this, but I tried my best with what I had while also sick with bronchitis. The post I personally made on the subject is linked at the very bottom (I wanted to be as transparent as possible).

Anyway, here is everything I've gathered.

(Also, for anyone who is still learning English, bias in this case means something that sways opinion one way or the other)

The re-upload of Shubble's video on YouTube (Post where video was taken from is at the bottom of this post due to containing the opinion of a tumblr user)

Post that describes Shubble's video in text form for anyone who can't watch the video

Note: Text concerning the video is fairly neutral and accurate (other than Wilbur's name being used which was not stated in the video and was revealed later), but the last paragraph at the bottom contains @mysticalblue09 's opinion as someone who does not personally know Shubble or Wilbur (as far as I am aware), so be mindful of that.

Link to Wilbur's appology on Twitter/X

https://x.com/WilburSoot/status/1762505851699380353?s=20https://x.com/WilburSoot/status/1762505851699380353?s=20

Post with image of Wilbur's appology and a compilation of reactions (bias warning). Original post by @raixkim with additions by @galaxyempire-lilith (both all verified by me) and myself (all images save a link to one reaction and embedded video of another)

Note: I went through various minecraft roleplay wikis and former and current members of Lovejoy and added as many screenshots as I was allowed to in my reply (image limit) on March 4th (then I got to sick to finish the post). This is only to show how people in their circle at the time and former and current Lovejoy members publicly reacted to the news and not to gossip or shame someone for what they did or did not say. (Also, I genuinely attempted to find public posts by someone who knew one or both of them that was supporting Wilbur or even not supporting Shubble to keep my addition neutral, but I found none on my own after going through multiple discords and over 70 Twitter/X profiles, so I had to eventually give up)

Shelby's full statement on Wilbur's apology (just images)

Direct link to it on Twitter/X

https://x.com/shelbygraces/status/1763623249416704219?s=20

----------

Below are links to a couple how tos, links to posts by tumblr users that contains personal bias, and my own post on the topic. These things are all by people not directly affiliated with the parties involved. While most of them are not actively combative, most show some level of bias towards Wilbur Soot/Gold. I put all of them at the bottom because I wanted readers to make up their own minds without being influenced by my opinions or the opinions of people not connected to Shubble or Wilbur. Hopefully by this point, you'll know if you want to read more or stop here.

My personal reaction

Ideas on what to do with merch from things you no longer like/want to support by @elfchaos

Bands similar to Lovejoy by @st4rryskiescO

Tip: You can block an artist on Spotify mobile (some sites say it doesn't work on desktop) by going to the artist profile, clicking the 3 dot menu, and selecting "Don't play this." As of this time, I could not find a similar feature on Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, or Pandora other than individually disliking songs.

The post I found the Shubble video embedded in with a list of what @proudfreakmetarusonniku felt they learned during the video

Post that contains the opinions of @mor-starz on Wilbur's influence going forward. Includes a link to a video that summarizes everything (video wasn't linked in the previous section because while it is the closest to neutral I found, there was still bias in the video and thumbnail)

A post with reactions of Wilbur's reddit community and some of his mods by @megastrangeskeleton

Since then, all twitch mods have been removed/unmodded by Wilbur as well as the bot that linked to charities. According to multiple former mods (including kalli which can be found on twitter/x), someone made a new account on May 1st that is a Simpson's reference (jebediahspringfield12345), followed Wilbur, and was modded by Wilbur within minutes of following, leading them to believe that Wilbur made an alt account (named after a show he's known to enjoy) and then made that account a mod to avoid getting banned for having an unmodded account.

[traincat]

Random question but do you know if the 616 Coffee Bean gang and Felicia have canonical birthdays?

Oh, this is a tough one. Superhero comics birthdays are a little rough -- sometimes there's no information, sometimes there's contradicting information, sometimes there's a birthday but it's for one Eisner winning miniseries that is about the fictional "real people" who, in the comic, inspired the superhero characters. (And even in that example it was two different birthdays, one in the single issues and one in the trade.)

I don't think there's an "official" canonical birthday for Peter. I've seen a lot of people use Spider-Man Day -- August 1st -- as his birthday, because it's the anniversary of Amazing Fantasy #15, Peter's very first appearance. Even though it isn't, actually, the anniversary -- there's conflicting dates for the release of Amazing Fantasy #15. Some information says it actually came out June 5th, other information says August 10th. So you can see how we're getting tricky already. I don't think there's anything wrong with using any of those dates for Peter's birthday, but if you're someone who wants one specific date -- there just isn't one. I know his passport is flashed in Spider-Man: Far From Home, although I can't remember if the date is shown (and I'm not looking at that movie again), so it's possible there's a concrete birthday that could be pointed to for MCU!Peter. But would it apply to 616!Peter? Shrug. That's the kind of thing people need to decide for themselves. Personally, I think the Amazing Fantasy #15 dates (all of the various ones) are really interesting if you wanted to run an astrological chart to look at the impact of the character on our world -- his continued relevance, the shifts in characterization and tone throughout the decades, how he reflects and is reflected upon by our real world. But that's a different thing than an in-universe canon birthday.

And it's difficult to use first appearances as birthdays for the other characters in the gang -- you could for Mary Jane and Felicia, if you wanted, but Harry and Gwen appear for the first time in the same issue, which would give them the same birthday by that rule, and the same goes for Flash, who appears for the first time in Amazing Fantasy #15 alongside Peter.

Harry does have a birthday listed in canon -- Dark Web #1 says his birthday in December 13th. I don't have any particular feelings on this or reason not to just go with it, aside from my deep and burning hatred for the whole Dark Web event. It's a little cute if Harry Osborn, given the sliding timescale, was born on the exact same day as Taylor Swift. He has the energy.

For Gwen and Mary Jane -- we don't have birth dates in 616. We do have issues that contain birthday parties. And I really need to get my refs folder back on my laptop because this would go so much faster if I could just look it up that way. (If you google "Mary Jane Watson birthday" it will tell you August 19th, but that's from someone's wiki for their fan project. There seems to be a general September birthday for Gwen from ITSV, but I don't know if I would choose to use that for 616 Gwen, personally. That's another "you gotta do you" situation.) Spectacular Spider-Man #9's backup story, Sweet Revenge, features a surprise birthday party for MJ, explicitly on her birthday. Again, the older comic dates screw us a little bit -- the cover date is September. The information I can dig up says this was actually released May 16th. Gwen has a birthday party in Amazing Spider-Man #87.

Again, I have conflicting dates for this one, but it's a little funny -- the two dates I've found are August 1st and August 10th, two of the dates given for Amazing Fantasy #15's release date. I kind of like the idea that it's actually Gwen's birthday that the grand Peter celebration falls on. There's something very starcrossed lovers about a date assumed to be Peter's birthday actually being Gwen's. Something something how intertwined Gwen is with the text, long after her death.

For Felicia -- I have nothing, unfortunately. I can't think of anything that would even give us a reference to get close to a month, let alone a date. The same goes for Flash. If anyone knows differently, please let me know!

[mornyavie]

The vanishing of the video game instruction booklet is really shaping how We As Gamers talk about older video games I think.

(yes my-smial this is about the videos you think it's about)

Because back in Ye Olden Days big video games often came with a little info booklet in the packaging, and they still do that but they no longer have Game Information in those booklets mostly. And they used to do a lot of that! But remakes don't have them, digital downloads (official or, ahem, community-supported) don't have them, even stuff like wiki articles usually has next to no information on them, and that really changes the context in which certain aspects of old games play out.

Specifically, older games often have the reputation of being very low on information and forcing you to experiment and figure things out for yourself, and while there's definitely games where that's true, also often there's just a manual that came with the original packaging that they assume you read.

I'm watching this poor guy do a blind playthrough of A Link to the Past, and he has no idea what any of the items even do, there's very little explanatory text in the game. So for instance he's spent almost two hours of gameplay having no real idea what the boomerang does, and coming to various slightly-wrong conclusions about what enemies are immune to it, what the stun condition does, etc.

One could conclude that the game doesn't tell players much and has bad explanations/tutorials.

But you weren't supposed to figure it out through blind experimentation, you were supposed to go look up "boomerang" in the little booklet that came in the game box:

The very first Zelda game doesn't just plop you into an open world with no instruction, it comes with a guidebook on how to get started.

These booklets are also where some of the lore/story is explained, in games with little storage for conversations and cutscenes.

So like when modern games try to emulate a "retro" feel in a game by being low on information, or when modern gamers do "blind" playthroughs, they aren't always accessing the Pure Developer-Intended Artistic Experience that they sell this as. Sometimes the developer intended them to have a lot more information!

(Which of course is not how everyone always experienced the game; people were always buying used and playing their older siblings' games and throwing out the manual without reading it.)

[dreamcatcher-roulette]

Since I enjoy collecting things (big surprise) this year I've been working on collecting every Dreamcatcher music show performance in a quality that doesn't suck ass (aka not the seven pixels that YouTube compresses the official uploads down to). It went pretty well!

Pseudo research report under the cut (because I'm a massive nerd).

Scope

I started this project with the goal of collecting a full set of "music show performances". I didn't realise quite how ambiguous that definition is. After some deliberation I settled on the following as constituting "regular" performances:

Show Music Core

Inkigayo

The Show

Show Champion

M! Countdown

Music Bank

Simply K-Pop

Everything else I classified as misc. Most notably I left K-Force Special Show in the misc category despite there being quite a few performances on that show in the early days. This mostly came down to how I'm storing the files — I've organised the regular ones by era, but the K-Force Special Show performances frequently happened in between comebacks making them difficult to sort in that fashion. That and difficulties in ascertaining whether I do actually have all of them.

Methodology

The first step in collecting anything is finding out what you need to collect. I was surprised at how difficult it actually is to get a complete list of all of a group's music show performances. There are some fan sites which do a good job of presenting a lot of well categorised individual links to Dreamcatcher's appearances but I was hoping for something more "from the source" (aka the music shows themselves) and ideally machine readable to cross check that nothing is missing, since, for example, a collection of links to all official Inkigayo performance uploads is not a list of all Inkigayo performances (some never got official uploads). I ended up finding /r/kpop's music shows wiki fit my needs the most. The information is all in tables and sorted by music show and date which what I wanted.

Unfortunately, the main tables of /r/kpop's music show wikis only list debuts and comebacks, so I had to index and search all the individual pages to find what I was looking for. This involved spending a couple of afternoons opening up nearly 2,000 tabs of Reddit* and then downloading them using the SingleFile browser extension (Reddit rate limits you quite harshly and so I had to open a bunch of tabs, check they loaded, wait, and then repeat, which slowed it down a lot). While maybe a little overkill I did this for multiple reasons. Firstly, Reddit's search sucks, and I didn't trust it to find all instances of what I was looking for over so many pages. In contrast Everything's in-memory file content index beta is really good. But secondly, this is much more extensible, and now I can find any other group's performances as well (between 2017** and 2023).

*Reddit does not archive Simply K-Pop well at all (which caused some initial confusion), but the official Arirang website works fine as an alternative (albeit one that is somehow even slower than Reddit at opening new pages).

**Reddit's music show wiki pages start right before 2017. This is very convenient for a Dreamcatcher archivist, but, unfortunately for me, curiosity got the better of me and I did venture further out into the unknown. For 2014-2017 I have some scattered archives from various official websites, Twitter accounts, and Korean catch up services. I'm less confident in my music show data for this period in the general case but because the rough start and end dates for the two Minx promotion cycles are known I am confident enough that all the gaps I have in there are genuine gaps and that I'm not missing a performance date.

Once I had my wishlist I then had to go out and, you know, find them. And figure out what "best quality" actually means. I learned a lot about video encoding against my will. I also learned that HEVC is fucking haunted. When multiple sources were available I ranked them as follows:

2160p HEVC > 2160p h264 > 1080p HEVC (one weird edge case I didn't know what to do with) > 1080i h264 > 1080i MPEG2 > WEBDL (usually some kind of web livestream or online catch up service recording) > YouTube

Which I represented in my spreadsheet as:

This should be mostly uncontroversial, however, there is a slight complication in that the 4k broadcast copies are not all native 4k but often upscaled from the 1080 source (I can't find specifics on this as the information, if publicly accessible, would be in Korean, and there is only so much Google Translate can do, but the technical broadcasting details probably aren't public to the extend I am interested in regardless so I'm mostly basing this off information gleaned from secondary sources). As far as I can tell there exist two "grades" of upscales: one of which is upscaled by the network before being pushed out to a UHD channel, and one of which is upscaled by the end user by either recording a HD channel in 4k or running an existing recording through an upscaler. Traditionally upscales aren't very desirable due to providing no real material benefit you couldn't get from playing the 1080 copy on a 4k display yourself. Or, for people with an archival mindset like myself, because ones that actually look a bit crisper introduce "magic" pixels which may or may not have ever existed. See below for an example of this taken to the extreme (note the faces):

No one wants that, right? AND YET SOMEONE THOUGHT THAT WAS SUCH A BIG IMPROVEMENT THEY DELETED EVERYTHING ELSE, AND NOW IT REMAINS THE ONLY COPY I CAN FIND. Monsters!!! Anyway.

While upscales usually aren't desirable, I did come around to the idea that the network upscales deserve their place at the top of the list. There are a couple of points working in their favour: one is that they are, presumably, upscaled much more directly from the source, allowing them to avoid some of the data loss that being encoded into 1080i h264 and then upscaled would cause. The second is that quite a lot of them are encoded directly into HEVC, which makes the confetti and flashing lights look noticably smoother than the regular deinterlaced 1080i copies. Also, finally, as a touch of personal preference (especially in the case of 4k h264 where the second point doesn't apply), these do come pre-deinterlaced which is nicer for my chosen method of playback. Although some of those points apply to non network upscales too, the "impurity" of them far outweighs any benefit in my eyes, as I have more faith in whatever the network standard is than some random person on the internet trying to "fix" a file.

So how did I tell the difference? Also a frustratingly difficult problem, one which applies not just to spotting fake upscales but also to finding real TV recordings instead of lower quality catch up service clips. For the 1080 copies one of the biggest things was that the TV broadcast copies (unfortunately) always come through in 1080i. 1080p is suspicious. It means something has been touched (although sometimes in a way that is forgivable when nothing cleaner exists). File sizes are also a good sanity check. A single song in h264 should be in the 200-400MiB range, MPEG2 is 400MiB+. (For reference YouTube, and other inferior WEBDLs, usually come in at under 100MiB). This is a good reminder of why size does not always equal quality, because, in this scenario, worst to best is 100MiB < 450MiB < 250MiB.

On the 4k side: Music Bank, Show Music Core and Inkigayo are currently broadcast on UHD channels with a UHD variant of their channel names in the top right, which is a good indicator that something was recorded from a UHD source. (Although I've found 1080p copies recorded from UHD channels, so the presence of the logo doesn't mean no downscaling has occurred). Recent "4k" M! Countdown, Show Champion and The Show recordings, in comparison, appear identical in channel watermark to the 1080 copies. This and the fact that the only 4k copies I've found are from a source known to dabble in AI upscales means that I'm not going to trust these are genuine without further proof, and this was the main category of files which I decided against adding to my collection. (Note that The Show was in the past the only show that was broadcast in 4k, first on UMAX UHD and then on SBS F!L UHD, it is only recently that that seems to have stopped (or, no one has been recording it)). I paid less attention to the 4k file sizes than for 1080. 4k HEVC seems to come in pretty reliably at just under 1GiB, but 4k h264 is all over the place due to I think some differing quality profiles between uploaders (a range of 1GiB to nearly 3GiB). The latter is annoying because it means I can't figure out what the "true" recording should be, but I did develop an internal ranking of the trustworthiness of sources which was the tiebreaker when two differently sized 4k h264 recordings existed.

I prioritised collecting existing cuts where applicable (although many were not cut nearly as meticulously frame perfectly as I would like) but there were quite a few where I had to cut them out of full broadcast recordings myself. There were also instances where only the main performance was saved in 4k leaving interviews behind. In those cases I decided to keep the highest quality available for the bits in which it was and store the other segments separately.

Results

Alright, the fun stuff! I have successfully catalogued:

317 Dreamcatcher music show performances

34 Dreamcatcher miscellaneous appearances

46 Minx music show performances

16 Minx miscellaneous appearances

Those links go to mostly complete YouTube representations of what I found with exceptions listed in the descriptions of the playlists. You can also of course find a published version of my beautiful spreadsheet here. Finally, if you've made it this deep I would like to just quietly tell you I'm more than happy to share the originals, but please message me privately as I don't want to publicly host questionably copyrighted content on my good and morally upstanding posting images of dreamcatcher photobooks blog (for legal reasons the entire existence of this collection is a joke).

Honestly I'm pretty happy with the completeness of the collection after my first pass. The list of ones I would consider "missing" (aka not good enough quality) is:

It's almost all Simply K-Pop, which makes sense as it seems to not be archived with the same enthusiasm as the others. The missing M! Countdown, meanwhile, does kind of hurt, since it's ruining an otherwise perfect run. I'm out of ideas for now but am not going to give up on it forever, I have seen evidence that proper recordings exist, so I'm sure they have got to resurface eventually.

As can be seen in the breakdown for this section the percentage of MPEG2 recordings is also a pretty major victory, with the vast majority being h264:

For Minx things look a bit worse:

But then again I hadn't been expecting much to begin with. To be honest, watching all of these to check quality did drive me a little insane. There is a reason I don't own Love Shake and Why Did You Come To My Home, and it's not purely the irresponsible financial decision, it's the thought of spending that much money on something I actually really don't like. Watching Minx performances is amusing for a little while, but man, am I glad Dreamcatcher exists instead.

It's also evident that people were holding to completely different standards even just a few years earlier, as this is where all those MPEG2s in the overall numbers are hiding:

Future Work

While I'm confident I've successfully catalogued the "music show performances" as defined in the scope, I know there is still much more to be discovered under Misc Appearances, as those were filled in not via a predefined wish list but just by what other recordings I happened across in my search for the original goal. The obvious next step would to be a little more systematic about finding out what I'm missing in that category by scouring some Dreamcatcher specific archives, but because I've already exhausted the full collections of my two main sources of recordings I'm not confident I would uncover many more performances outside of YouTube in that way, which isn't really that appealing.

I'm probably more likely going to do something about my performance outfit images collection which has been slowly but steadily increasing over the years. I'd like to put them into a proper searchable database alongside performance dates, which would have a similar effect of cataloguing the missing performances, but with the visual element that the spreadsheet lacks.

But then again, I also might not :)

[horizon-verizon]

I agree with you that the show is bad in terms of writing and characterization, and probably i won't even watch the next season, but if I'm being honest you seem to hate the show so much why are you still searching for posts related to the show and respond to it if it's bother you this much?

FIRST

I don't actively or habitually search for the show or anything related to it in Tumblr with the purpose of fighting with others or proving how smart I am.

I do reblog with corrections, counterarguments, or praise if I feel strongly enough about what's being said AND if I have the energy

posts about it pop up in my feed in the "Based on what you liked!" list because I don't block their tags

OR I get asks about the show's characters and/or writing.

I write of the main experience I have to write against the claim that I "search" for HotD posts as if it is a continuous action. This is what usually happens. And the person sending the asks about HotD are usually those who only ever watched the show and never read the books, are antis, or have skimmed the books and read the wikis instead of actually doing some independent thought and deeper research with comparative analyses.

It is less common/rare for me to begin a discussion from an original green stans or an avid HotD lover. *EDIT* Now, as of 2023, there are asks with links to posts by others (mostly made by green stans) that the asker asks me to consider/think about and respond. I mostly respond to those already responding to others or to those who make comments and reblogs of my own posts, like what happened in my Sansa POST and one Daemon/Nettles POST.

I’m saying, anon, that it could be a lot worse. I could become a greater menace to others on this blog than you presently think.

SECOND

Before I started writing original posts or answers to asks, I collected various team black and team green posts, and I still do so today. Why? Because I actually wanted/still want to know the arguments each team makes. Because in general, I like and want to hear how people think about things.

I came to Tumblr wanting to collect posts and make a blog I can use to reference material and arguments but still have more personal freedoms to do this. (Which is also why I refuse to put “anti” tags just for the sake of “politeness”.)

I basically want to make my blog a reference point thus I will force myself to add stuff about HotD/greens’ opinions as much as I can stomach.

I want to know what logic they present, where does it fall short, what maybe-good points they make, how much they actually know about history, human psychology -- how much I know and need to know about somethings after reading, etc.

Which is related and goes into my next reason....

THIRD

It’s not a matter of superficial “like” and “dislike”. The show “bothers” me more than a matter of bad writing and bad characterization.

After watching the show, you get more people feeling justified by their already existing illiteracy/refusal to learn (beyond their conservatism) and their theories about the canon material. (POST).

You even get people mixing up the show’s events and portrayals and changes with the canon, thus there are people out there with ideas of what this story/part of the Westerosi history is about when they are simply ill-informed or dead wrong.

It’s twisting the narrative, checking all the boxes, to make it more “modern”, “palatable” to performative activism, or/and (thus) make it a lot more marketable to more people. To follow up and revitalize the fervor for the horrid ending of GoT (which was itself sexist as hell) without actually keeping the substance and philosophical/political weight of the original story that lets us know the greens were the unequivocal villains.

Here are a few reblogs/posts/articles by me and others about the actors, marketability, how HotD fails at some things, etc.: POST, POST (you can go to the “performative activism” part), POST, POST, POST, POST (you should really get into this one, it begins to explain how the writing itself doesn’t support accountability), POST, POST, POST, POST, POST,  POST (this one talks about Hollywood and Rhaenyra and feminism). Your choice to read all or a few or none.

And after listening to the “neutrals” AND what non “neutrals” say about “neutrals” (of both teams), I found that there is no such thing as a “neutral” unless you really never or never watched/read any ASoIaF product and thus have no existing opinion about its themes and characters and events. But then you’re not a fan, you’re just someone who knows the fandom exists.

Unless you are like the former brideoffires (Tumblr)/starlight and seafoam (Twitter), who looks at the F&B characters--esp Rhaenyra--as set up to Dany's story and recognize the larger composite picture of misogyny-leads-to-great conflict/Dany-is-the-fixture (to put it very simply).

When you read about the Dance and if you know anything about civil wars and how/why they happen, you should know that you can almost never philosophically or ideologically not pick or at least favor a side. It’s nearly impossible once we are acquainted with why the sides are fighting and the historical details of how this civil conflict happened in the first place, specifically when one side has done nothing to the other before, nor present any true, future threat. Of course things change, as they do in the Dance where the sides commit war crime after war crime & lose more of their own kids, but it was very clear the greens began it through the sexist usurpation to gain power for themselves; they also had little to actually fear from either Rhaenyra or any lord if she had ascended peacefully.

Again, unless we don't know, we can't fully care, and once you start actually caring, then you take a side and form strong opinions. In civil wars, there exists hatred or the need for dominance within the territory itself and it usually comes from a particular background that cannot be ignored but can also be messy and conflicting.

Plus, I found that most of the neutrals (not all, one still has to listen to why one says they are "neutral") are really people who think the greens are in the moral right, are the “fun” and “better-developed” characters, or are the more politically savvy. Yet also refuse to look any deeper to see how their arguments make no sense for the story the show rips off of. Basically, team-greeners who refuse or don’t know they are wearing the cape, or are trying to hide it to make team blackers look stupid or get one on them and seem “reasonable” while actually trying to push forward this narrative of “soft femininity wins all”, conservatism, conformity, patriarchy, etc. 

This following is only in the observation that there are sympathy-changes made for them while the blacks and Rhaenyra are not only similarly dumbed down but also the writers have been trying to assign them certain negative traits or behaviors that can't be feasible as to what we understand them before the show existed.

HotD is actually fostering that sort of bullshit with its refusal to:

**(in context of the next 3 pts.)**Alicent and Aemond as they are: entitled, sexist, classist, blood purist people who intentionally attack and target Rhaenyra for the sake of power and male privilege

working behind the faux romance/friendship of Rhaenicent.

dumbing Rhaenyra down, watering her passion down

removing almost every character's accountability or drive for power (female for this one) by making them more reactive than active and even then there not much of a substantial or meaningful reaction

sexistly making Alicent a dumber and more sexually abused version of herself, giving all of her accomplishments or actions to her father, Otto. Benevolent sexism.

Thus I cannot ignore the show or its glaring faults. It has such popularity and influence over how people think about women, children, who deserves what and how/why, and how people express themselves and live with such cognitive dissonance, that I feel I have to say something against it. Even if it’s a dumb Tumblr post.

[hanako-san]

actually in regard to the "hanakos favorite animals are rabbits" thing, thats been around on the wiki since at Least summer of 2020 so its unrelated to the halloween thing since that came like. way way after the fact. idk where people got it either but it was not from halloween

Thanks for correcting me. I also don't know where people got it from, but suggest wiki … without exaggeration, there everyone can write various nonsense like this about Amane and rabbits. Wiki is not really a good source of information. Anyone can add anything they want there.

I checked and most of them come from either the bonus mangas or the original manga, but so far there has been no information that Amane likes rabbits, cats, etc. I'm up to date with the manga and this is kind of weird to me. Where is the information that Mokkas look like rabbits to him? All we know is that he can't beat them at cards.

are 3 options 1) It's a lie 2) or this information is somewhere (doubtful) because I think our great translators would translate it for us and I'm also active on Twitter so.. so far I haven't heard such information.

3) interview with AidaIro (that seems most likely to me), but they could also have given such information in the bonus manga, spin off, in the original manga, as well as other things like that he likes Katanuki

But even in 2020, I haven't heard or read that Amane likes cats, rabbits, and thinks Mokkes look like rabbits to him. In fact, how do they know what he's thinking? Since his thoughts are shrouded in mystery to us.

Even you anon don't know where they got it from…so I guess that says a lot.

Thank you for the ask

[nanakibh]

Show Off Your Aesthetics! Akademeia Autumn Arts Festival

Thank you for playing Final Fantasy Agito. We are pleased to introduce the new event.

[Request]

Oh my, how lucky of me to run into you here.

Don't you think we Agito cadets are going back to fighting a little too much?

I don't think it's good for us to be spending all of our time that way.

So, I have a proposal.

What if all of the cadets make paintings and display them in an exhibition together?

Hey, hey! Isn't that a good idea? I'm sure that a lot of people would want to come see artwork made by Agito cadets.

I'll take care of the venue and things, so you guys should work on the paintings that will be displayed.

Huh?! There aren't enough canvases? Should've known... Then, how about this! If you go to this place, you can get your hands on magic canvases. Do your best to get some. I'll be counting on you!

Carla Ayatsugi

---

Updated ~20:00 Tuesday, November 25th, 2014

Thank you for playing Final Fantasy Agito. We will now announce the results of the event.

[Report]

Huhuhu, the exhibition was a smashing success! Incredible! I'm a genius!

At this rate, I should be able to recoup the money I spent on the preparations right away. I knew it was a good idea to include pictures of the artists next to their paintings!

Ah, your paintings also attracted quite a bit of attention. There were some people who wanted to purchase them right on the spot.

Mm-hmm. Money is what's most important to me, though. Art is profound.

Hm?

Huh?! What?! Instructor... Kurasame?! What are you doing here?

A-and Chairman Khalia, too...

Err, um... You see, this is... I-it's volunteer work, of course!

Yes! Yes, indeed! It's nothing out of the ordinary!

Oh dear, who could have done this? Who would spread such awful lies about my work!

I will donate the proceeds to the less fortunate! We are all aspiring to be Agito, after all! So it's obviously the least I could do!

Yes! Now, please take care, you two!

... ...

... ... ... ...

... ... ... ... ... ...

*sigh*

I'm in trouble. It took a lot of money just to rent out this venue.

Hey, hey! Lend me some money~! I'll definitely pay you back later!

Carla Ayatsugi

---

[Results]

We are pleased to announce the results of the event, "Show Off Your Aesthetics! Akademeia Autumn Arts Festival".

The number of times each quest has been completed is as follows:

Cinque's Canvas: 148,383 times Queen's Canvas: 25,928 times Deuce's Canvas: 15,597 times Nine's Canvas: 8,045 times

Thank you for your participation.

Please continue to support Final Fantasy Agito.

---

Note: I'm not sure if the results indicate character popularity. None of the announcements say what the rewards for the event were. Nor did they explain how the event was to be played. Based on some other information I gathered from an Agito gameplay wiki, it sounds like you would need to collect basic Magic Canvases (purple, light blue, orange, and blue) from quests of various difficulties. Then you would combine them with other materials to create each character’s canvas and receive a special reward. Since Nine’s Canvas was completed the least, that might mean that his blue canvases came from the hardest quest.

Each canvas quest came with a little note from the characters:

Cinque: You paint, too? Hmmm. Maybe Cinquey will paint with you. Hey, hey! If you feel like it, you should bring me lots of “Purple Canvases”! Paint a lot and you’ll get a prize!

Queen: A beautiful painting enriches the senses. May I paint on the “Light Blue Canvas” with you?

Deuce: Isn’t it wonderful that we can help those in need by making paintings? Let’s paint our dreams on the “Orange Magic Canvas”!

Nine: Hey, you. Do you have a “Blue Magic Canvas”? Let’s show everybody our passion!

The rewards were as follows:

Cinque’s Canvas: Coeurl? (The question mark is part of the name.) Queen’s Canvas: Splendid Cube Deuce’s Canvas: Last Illusion Nine’s Canvas: Our Idea of Agito

The names are very puzzling, but I think they might’ve been decorations for your dorm room.

[lollytea]

Thinking very hard about the creature known as Grometheus

Next to no canon information has ever been provided about this thing. Where it came from, how long it's been around, nothing. It's unknown if it's categorized as a beast or a demon or what. Maybe a distant relative of the basilisk? Idk. The wiki just calls it an animorph.

Buuuuuuuut its full name has a very familiar rhythm to it.

Grometheus the Fear Bringer

Do you know what it sounds like?

A title granted to a talented illusionist.

Which just leaves me wondering.

The Boiling Isles is a world of transformative curses. Its a world where humanoid witches can become beasts via various methods. (E.g. Eda and Lilith, Darius, Belos, Luz)

So....hypothetically. If there was a witch named Grometheus a long time ago who excelled at illusion magic....just what happened to them?

I imagine that the area of illusion magic comes with the threat of mental deterioration, for both the illusionist and the victim. And based on the magic amplifier that Gus has, it has the potential to violate other peoples minds and tear the most depraved frightening memories out of them.

In TTLGR, Bria stated that illusion magic "Can't even touch [her]" but LR and KT proves that it can. Just not in a conventional sense.

Illusion magic can dig into the mind. It can be so intense that it causes physical pain.

So what's the key aspect for an illusionist to achieve that level of power?

Fear and memories.

Once an illusionist realizes the potential that fear and memories have, they start working towards utilizing it in their experimental spellwork.

Maybe that's how Grometheus started off.

Maybe they were the one who invented Gus' magical amplifier.

However, imagine living like that. Extracting all the depravity from several people across the Isles for the sake of research. It's a lot for one person's mind to handle. It's like a slow gradual rot inside the brain.

I don't know exactly how the transformation would have happened. Maybe it was a mutation of negative emotions.

Maybe Grometheus was lonely. Maybe they were angry. Or maybe there were just so many memories and fears in their mind that weren't their own, that they couldn't hear their own thoughts anymore.

Maybe they lost themself.

Maybe they drowned in it. They drowned in all the fear that was hoarded inside of them and they became fear itself.

Maybe?

Nobody ever expected history to repeat itself. What happened to Grometheus was not likely to ever happen again. Because Grometheus' magical battery was so overwhelmingly potent that it ate them from the inside.

Surely, there would never be an illusionist that powerful again.

Surely.

Anyway, fast forward to a sixteen year old Gus Porter at his final year of Hexside. He's Grom King.

And Grometheus the Fear Bringer didn't stand a chance.

Gus is standing on wobbly legs as the crowd's cheers pound against his eardrums.

He was supposed to defeat the monster and send it slithering away again for another year.

But instead, there's a creature's corpse withered at Gus' feet, and as the rotting gunk melts away, he's not surprised to see a witch's skull.

Why would he be surprised? He saw it all.

Gus is standing there, horrorstruck, as some stupid crown materializes on his brow.

He killed one of his own.

And now....all of that creature's memories and fear belong to him.

It's like a rot inside of him.

He could drown in it.

Do the spooky/horror centric Gus enjoyers wanna hear an idea?

[thefoxlady]

(Anon behind asks 1, 2, and 4 again. I'll specify that it's me every time. though at this rate maybe I should give myself an anon name lol.)

For reading about the dst storyline, this page (https://dontstarve.wiki.gg/wiki/Story_Line) (I hope the links work) gives a decent description of events inside and outside of the constant in order. Though it's not perfect imo, I personally don't like the wording on some things.

It should also be noted that because some developers have said a few contradictory things in the past, the lore can be a bit weird in some parts? So not necessarily everything on there is entirely true I believe and it has to be read carefully.

For more detailed lore, this page talks about Maxwell's backstory (https://dontstarve.wiki.gg/wiki/William_Carter_Puzzles)

This page talks about Maxwell and Wilson meeting after Maxwell's former assistant Charlie freed Wilson from the nightmare throne (after Wilson freed Maxwell) They then form a truce (after getting into a fight once lol) and they build a portal together that allows the other survivors to join the same dimension/world/timeline(?) as them. (https://dontstarve.wiki.gg/wiki/Cyclum_Puzzles)

and this page has images showing the lore of the ancients (a species that came long before the survivors and are native to the constant, but they all died out because (in some way) They (the shadow gods of the constant, possibly also the lunar gods? it's... complicated.) killed them all by turning them into the shadow creatures. (https://dontstarve.wiki.gg/wiki/Metheus_Puzzles) (Ps, for this one, the images given show the original colors, but they're likely NOT accurate. The accurate ones can be found by looking them up, and they're mostly shades of yellow in color.)

For additional lore, you can also read about the gorge event, the forge event, items in the ancient archives (various character quotes talk more about ancient lore) and the ancient murals/items in the ruins (additional ancient lore) And if you have a lot of time available/you're really bored, you can read character's quotes on the wiki too. These are usually good for learning more about character's personalities, but they can also contain (sometimes pretty important) lore.

If you want to watch something, there's a two part series by a youtuber called OrangE that explains the dst lore in a humorous way BUT. I wouldn't recommend watching the parts until reading the rest of the lore, because some things are opinion/speculation on the lore I believe and some of those things are wrong (ex: at one point in the second part I believe a character is called Metheus and another character is called Cyclum when I believe canonically it is the other way around.) (Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klrHnnb3AIw) (Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy8vPqOdAqk&t=837s)

There is also this video which shows the in game play "The Doll" which is Queen Charlie retelling her story (through a biased, unreliable view. It gives more information about Them, and shows how being queen (And manipulated by Them) has changed her view of events. (The king/Maxwell's actions, of course, aren't accurate to cannon because Charlie (And possibly They) have a grudge against him and so she portrays him as much eviler in her play.) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGTfmJ4L294)

There is also the character shorts of course, but also the official game play trailers by the developers on their YouTube channel (Klei Entertainment) They have a playlist on their channel with all of the videos, but they are in reverse order so you have to start with the last one on the playlist and work your way up. (Also, there is a short animation called "Inevitable", but it's likely not cannon and even if it was it's not really story or lore relevant.)

Also, to elaborate more on Maxwell and the throne.

Before the throne, Maxwell just wanted to be a famous magician. When he got the Codex Umbra in a train crash (that he almost died in) he just wants to use it for magic at first. And it works, as he does become wealthy (I believe) and well known. He also got his assistant, Charlie, and at first they had a good relationship, but over time Maxwell became more and more obsessed with deciphering the codex, even though he was aware that it could be dangerous In encore, Maxwell's rework short, we see that the shadows/codex harm Maxwell physically and mentally. And also that he's probably going insane, considering the writing all over his walls (which is seen in the William Carter puzzles as well.) (Also something notable: In his in game lore summary, it states that the dark knowledge found deep within the codex "addled his mind and clouded his heart" meaning that the codex made him more insane and a worse and/or more distant person, basically.)

Charlie, scared by this, suggests they take a break after one last act. There's a video of this final performance at the end of the William Carter puzzles (It's on the wiki I believe) and clips of it play during encore. In it, during the act, shadows reach out of the codex, grab, and kidnap both Maxwell and Charlie (very much against both of their wills).

We don't see how exactly Maxwell ends up on the throne and Charlie as the night monster, but we do know that Charlie was attacked and became the night monster/grue after and Maxwell feels guilty and responsible for that.

We don't know how long Maxwell was on the throne for, because time in the constant does not move in a normal, linear way like it does on Earth. He refers to it as "eternity" though, he asks "What year is it out there?", and when being freed from the throne he dies nearly instantly, with even his bones turning to dust. So he was probably on there for a long, long time.

During that time, he was completely tied down on the nightmare, the only human contact he got was when he spoke with a survivor at the start of each world or when making a deal to bring them into the constant (and he used projections or shadows to do those, because he was still trapped on the throne), and he had to listen to the same song on loop for that entire eternity. (Chances are he didn't get to eat or drink anything at all during that time too, but it's unknown if he could feel hunger, thirst, etc while on the throne since it kept him alive.) (When examining it, he also describes the throne as "painful".)

At the end of adventure mode, when speaking to Maxwell, he says

"I don't know what they want. They... they just watch. Unless you get too close... Then... Well, there's a reason I stay so dapper."

I believe that his "dapper-ness" is implied to be how he recovers his mind/sanity on his own, which could imply that the reason he stays dapper is to prevent himself from completely losing his sanity because of Them. It could mean other things, though.

There isn't much known about the shadow god(s?) that imprisoned Maxwell, known only as Them (or They/Their) (Usually with a capital T? But it was inconsistent in the past.)

What we do know, though, is that

They caused the death of an entire species, transforming them into the violent nightmare creatures that attack the player at low sanity. A former ruler of the ancients, the ancient fuelweaver, says that "They will not show mercy as I have." Considering that fuelweaver tries to kill you, calling it saving you, he seems to be implying that what They will do to the survivors/characters is far worse than death.

There is also another character, who is encountered in the forge event, known as battlemaster Pugna, who speaks more about Them. He sends enemies to kill you because he believes that the survivors/players are working for Them, and the throne. He speaks a little bit about Them during the event.

"... Do you understand the forces you serve? They destroy all They touch... We were severed from the Throne! Trapped in a realm of stone and fire! That is why we cannot let you win."

He also says that his goal is to destroy the throne.

They are described and shown to be incredibly destructive and murderous, and their magic, shadow magic, drives people to insanity and makes them behave differently.

Being very obviously evil, it'd make sense if They had Maxwell tortured further while on the throne (especially psychologically, since they are well. insanity god(s) basically.)

Maxwell doesn't really talk about his experience on the throne (either because he doesn't like to talk about his past in general or because the throne was particularly traumatic) so there sadly really isn't much to go off of, though.

Some of his quotes do show how the experience has changed him in small ways though. His quote for a wooden chair is "I'm appalled by the idea of sitting for some reason." and when it is burnt he says "Better that way." When looking at a phonograph, he says "That accursed thing!" and for the in game ragtime record he shouts "Destroy it!". for the other records, he says "Forgive me if I've lost my taste for music." and "Silence would be preferable." For some of Wigfrid's battlesongs, he'll say "No. I do NOT sing."

And, while Maxwell might partly enjoy the power as ruler of the constant, he hates the throne and he didn't want to be on it at all. In the checkmate epilogue room, where the throne is located, there is a hidden portal. When it's activated, all it does is bring the player back to the start(?) of the room, and Maxwell will tell them "Don't you think I've tried that? This is the end of the line. We have no escape." If the player tries to attack and kill Maxwell, they are struck by lightning and if they used something to attack him, it is destroyed. Maxwell responds to this with "The throne won't allow that. I've tried." Which... Has pretty dark implications. and shows that he tried everything to free himself.

"Why didn't he make it easier for the survivors to reach the throne if he wanted off then?" The most common answer to this is usually that he makes it harder to get the survivors to hate him and thus be more willing to beat the challenges (due to spite) just so they can face him in person. I personally think that They forced him to make it difficult to "prolong the game" and make it more entertaining for Them. That, and I think he partly feels like he deserves to remain on the throne, as when the phonograph playing ragtime in the throne room is turned off, but then on again, he says "I suppose I deserve that." (he also shows guilt over things in some dst quotes) That's just my theory/speculation, though.

As for why he brought people to the constant in the first place, we don't know for sure either, but the two most common theories for it that I see are that Maxwell is kidnapping people in the hopes that one of them will free him, or that he's kidnapping people to entertain himself. I personally disagree with both of these and instead think that They probably had him bring in certain numbers of people to entertain Them, because Maxwell brought children to the constant.

While he probably was desperate to be freed, I'd think he'd just bring more adults in if he could, since on average they'd be better at surviving. And I highly doubt he'd find the suffering of children entertaining, considering that he seems quite fond of children (at least human and. larvae ones.) When examining a pipspook, the sad, passive soul of a child that was brought to the constant that then died in the constant, Maxwell says "I'm so sorry." (which is, as of his rework update, the only time he genuinely says the word "sorry" in his quotes. And when examining a flower they leave behind after finding a toy that they lost, he says "I hope they found peace." He also has decent relationships with the other children survivors, except for maybe Wurt (I believe that Wurt's quotes about records have her say that Ragtime is the only one she wants to listen to? which might be why Maxwell is less friendly with her.)

There's also an animal in game, a small, friendly baby lavae that is obtainable by killing the dragonfly, and Maxwell has really sweet quotes about it ("I can say with pride that it is comfy and cozy." when it's egg is warm, "You're not a hellbeast, are you? Nooo. Just misunderstood!" and "It's happy with me, and I with it." when it's fed, and "Just like old times." when examining it's older, pet form. Maxwell is also distressed and sad when it does poorly: "I knew I would make a terrible pa-pa." when the egg is too cold, "It's hungry. Why is it hungry?" when it's hungry, and "I think it's going to die!" when it is starving.)

It is possible though that he only got to know the bare minimum about his victims before bringing them in, and he didn't know which ones were children, but then I'd think he'd stop quickly after realizing that they could be kids, if he was bringing people for fun. Which is why I think that instead he had to bring in enough people to please Them and prevent consequences and additional torture for himself, which would force him to keep bringing people. (That's just my guess, however, and cannon doesn't really say much on the matter? It just says in his lore summary that he was "compelled to ensnare more victims in the Constant's trap." without saying what compelled him. I think that wanting someone who could free him probably played some role at least.

(HOWEVER. There is at least one person who Maxwell tried to bring to the constant intentionally, that being the man he owed money to when he was still William Carter and starting out as a magician. This failed because Wes got in the way, so he responded by trapping Wes in a box and having it guarded with clockworks. This showed that Maxwell was pretty petty and held grudges and I personally think that it was really wrong of him to try and bring someone to the constant on purpose and that this was a bad thing he did. Maxwell isn't not a complete monster but he also definitely did do bad things in cannon and I wouldn't really blame for disliking him for that, even if I don't. That and he's prideful and arrogant, though that's possibly just what he wants other people to think he's like.. Also, in Wes' in game lore entry, it's stated that "being the kind soul that he is, Wes holds no grudge against Maxwell..."...so at least Wes isn't mad at him for what he did.)

Once Maxwell's off the throne, he grows as a person and becomes more humble. A good example I can think of is comparing his old, Don't Starve quote for his statue ("Now that's a fine statue.") to his remark on it in Don't Starve Together, which would take place later in the timeline. ("It seems silly now...") Other characters also speak positively about him, like Ms. Wickerbottom who says "He's actually quite a sweet boy when you peel away the ego." when examining his statue in dst. Wolfgang refers to him as a friend, Wigfrid calls him ally multiple times and she wants to toughen him up, and in the encore short it's even shown that Woby, the dog, cares about him. (Which means a lot, considering Walter has a quote about Woby growling at Maxwell showing that she disliked him at first.)

...speaking of encore. Maxwell's decision to work with Charlie. (I'm assuming this is what you mean when you say that Maxwell will betray the survivors, feel free to correct me if you mean something else, though.)

Queen Charlie is trying to manipulate Maxwell to her side by showing him specific memories of them together, and how their relationship was damaged by him getting too invested in the codex, and telling him that he should have just told her what was going on.

And when Maxwell agrees to the deal, I don't think it's because he particularly wants to harm the survivors and while i think a small part of it might be that he wants to have some of the power he had on the throne, I think the main reason he does it is out of guilt.

Before his rework, he used to apologize to Charlie when examining his codex umbra. Considering quotes like his "I suppose I deserve that." mentioned earlier, and other quotes like his "Ah. I thought I'd run out of people to disappoint." when examining a cracked pearl (the cracked pearl is obtained after giving it to the person you were told to give it to- they fight you, and defeating them breaks the pearl, and so it's not even the player's fault for it breaking) plus Maxwell's quotes for pipspooks, he seems to feel bad, guilty, and regret things, even if they were things done on the throne or things out of his control, so it'd make sense for him to feel incredibly guilty about what happened to Charlie, as his actions resulted in her not only entering the constant, but becoming the night monster and later the queen.

I think he views helping Charlie as "repaying" what he owes her, or helping someone he hurt, even if it does mean working with the shadows. So far, we haven't seen him harm another survivor in the pursuit of helping Charlie, though he seems to be aware that Charlie's end goal is to bring back Them/Fully allow Them into the constant. (Which. would obviously not be good for the survivors. Or him. Or Charlie.) It's possible he's hoping to stop Charlie last second or try and change her mind, and it's possible that he is going to try and bring Them back even if it means betraying the others, but there really isn't enough showing what he's actually doing for Charlie in the cannon (and exactly why he's doing it) to say anything for certain, imo. (Also its possible that he doesn't see an issue with what he's doing at all and he might think he can help Charlie while still assisting the survivors in survival.) (Not really related, but Charlie is also being manipulated by Them, and her play suggests that They are a part of her, which is why she's doing bad things- They're lying and misguiding her intentionally.)

So um. incredibly long explanation short, in my opinion, Maxwell did genuinely do some bad things and he has character flaws, as all characters should, but I'd say the real villain/person/thing to blame for a lot of it would be the shadows/Them, who kidnapped Maxwell and Charlie to begin with. And also I wish Klei gave us more lore about what was going on.

(I hope you don't mind the... blocks of text, I'm surprised that I even wrote this much considering that Maxwell isn't even one of my 4 favorite dst characters (I consider him a second favorite character? And that's mainly because I like his dynamics/interactions with other characters) not doing all this to force you to change your mind of course, I just like talking about the lore of my favorite game. and this was fun to write, I even learnt a few things. Also I could've missed something and there might be spelling mistakes because I'm up at 1:50ish at night and a bit sleepy lol.)

(Also I'm sorry if I over explained a lot of this, I'm not sure exactly how much you do know about the lore and story and I don't want to accidentally not mention something important in case you don't know something)

That's okay, lot of text to read though, I'm just going to pin this just in case. In the encore short, I thought he was going to betray the survivors but I guess I was wrong :/

But hey, at least I have an up to date timeline of the lore right?

(This got me thinking about Constant Hell, my DST creepypasta, and rewriting why and how the survivors became tormentors and hate Maxwell so much... Maybe I could make it to where the creator of the mod puts all their anger and hate towards the world in the mod with the tormentors being all their anger and hate bottled up in all of them which resulted in the tormentors hating Maxwell so much. Yeah... Maybe that's a better reason.)

[cafalla]

Dorothy, Volume 1 (2005) Background // Part 1 of 3

Today I wanted to talk about and show off Dorothy, Volume I (2005). 

This book is my biggest scanning project to date (148 pages). So it took quite a while to scan and edit this book. Same goes for writing this post. For tumblr's sake, I've broken it up into 3 parts.

This is Part 1 of 3. See the end of the post for links to the other 2 parts.

Part 1 will focus on my sorta deep dive into the wayback machine for information on this comic, and the cool stuff I found out about it!

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This book is a collection of the first four chapters of the Dorothy comic, which is based on the story The Wizard of Oz. The comics were originally published in a single magazine format starting around 2004.

These comics are super interesting to me, because they are green screened photographs of an actor/actors/props with a digitally edited environment. From the very short wiki entry for Dorothy, I learned that comics illustrated with photographs are called “fumetti” or “photo comics”. 

I can’t say I’ve ever seen a comic like this before, so it was a super interesting visual experience. I admittedly was very impressed when I found this book buried in the thrift store children’s story book bin.

Like, "What the heck did I just find? This is so cool!"

I was even more surprised to find out that this was a signed copy from one of the creators and writer, Mark Masterson, that was signed at Emerald City Comic Con back in 2007. I think that's a different signature on top, but I can't make out who it belongs to.

Like what!!! What a weird find.

I felt compelled to buy and keep it, even if it’s not something I personally would pick up at the store. 

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So, a bit of a detour before I go into the book and share some scans.

I tried searching the internet for more info on this comic, as it just felt like a cult classic type of thing that other people would've been talking about…right?

Nothing came up besides a short bare-bones wiki and some links to purchase the comics from various online comic stores.

Really? Nothing?!

But then I had an idea to search the wayback machine, and I was able to get access to the old main site! 

Here is a screenshot of how the site looked from 2004 to 2005.

Unfortunately, a lot of the images are broken and do not load. I'm not bothering to include other screenshots of the different tabs because of this. There isn't much to see.

However, I did get lucky with the downloads tab! 

There were some wallpaper images still available to look at, so I went ahead and downloaded them.

I’ll probably throw those up full size on my Internet Archive account too, why not.

Here's how the site looked from 2006 to 2007.

The site remained mostly unchanged during these two years, other than updated news info.

Here's screenshots of how the links appeared.

The Twister Times aka the news and updates tab:

The Great Store of Oz aka the store and merch tab:

You know I'm going to be on the hunt for Dorothy merch now. The designs are pretty lackluster but I feel I'm in too deep in the Dorothy sauce to care. All I feel is the desire to obtain one of these T-shirts someday.

The Balloon Rides aka the self promotion and other related links tab:

And lastly, the Behind the Curtain aka the cast, crew, and behind the scenes tab (my personal favorite):

Even though these pages used to be public, and I doubt any of their contact information is correct in 2023, I am not going to post any screenshots of their bios.

Well, I'll post a bit of just one. I felt it was pertinent to point out that Mark Masterson's photo was…this…

Which uh….was certainly was a choice…

But also, this was the mid 2000s. Most people would've seen this as edgy, quirky, and funny, as opposed to cringe and off-putting.

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Before I talk about the actual comic and such, I did want to share screenshots from the behind the scenes tab. THIS was the kind of stuff I was interested to see after reading this comic.

I have a feeling these may have been the same photos under the BTS tab on the 2005 version of the site.

Very cool stuff! Cool to me, anyways.

I'm glad I got to see a glimpse into what the site looked like at the peak of this comic being published. It looked like they were doing rather well and having a good time.

Unfortunately, the site all but dies after 2007. This was also the year the last comic, Issue #7, was published. According to the very short wiki, Issue #7 also ended on a cliffhanger! How sad.

At least we can still experience and appreciate the art and comics that were released.

Before I dive into the content of the book, if you'd like to experience it without spoilers, you can read it on my Internet Archive account.

If not, then come along! Let's get to the (abridged) story of this now defunct comic!

Part 1 -> You're Here! Part 2 -> Chapters 1 & 2 Part 3 -> Chapters 3 & 4

[winterfurst]

[it’s time for that

MIQO.TE LORE POST........

-Miqo.te are descendants of the M.ithra (a very feline race from FF 11).

-they’re split into two separate ethnicities (seeker of the sun and keeper of the moon

Satoshi is half and half. he has more seeker of the sun in him but he has things of his father’s half too (such as the more pronounced canine teeth and his reverence for Menphin.a

Sun Seekers worship Azeyma the Warden and Moon Keepers worship Menphina the Lover

Satoshi worships Menphina

Due to their exposure to light, the pupils of a Seeker of the Sun Miqo'te are vertically aligned slits with irises faintly colored. It is common for their eyes to be disparately colored from birth, a trait considered auspicious among their kind.

In contrast, due to their exposure to darkness, the pupils of a Keeper of the Moon Miqo'te are large and round with little iris exposure. They are distinguishable from their diurnal cousins by their darker fur, larger ears, rounder eyes, more pronounced canines, and longer, skinnier tails.

The groups share a superb sense of smell and powerful leg muscles, results of a long evolution geared towards hunting and predation.

the Seeker of the Sun Miqo'te's ears are wider with thick hair, while the Keeper of the Moon Miqo'te have stylized ears with short hair and are slightly longer and thinner.

Sun Seekers are diasporized across Eor/zea

sun seekers are mostly found in Limsa Lom.insa. many of them do not follow the clan hierarchy closely or at all 

satoshi is one of those and if you tried to get him to join back with a clan he will go no

theres also a clan down in Thana.lan in the Sagoli desert. The U Tribe 

Moon Keepers can be found in the Shroud. Some of them get a long with the Gridanians and some of them are poachers 

female Miqo'te vastly outnumber males, a unique trait among Eorzea's races

A few facts about the Seeker of the Suns

Roughly a head shorter and smaller of body than the average Hyur, the Seekers are blessed with a wiry strength, surpassing agility, and the stamina to run for hours under the blazing sun—a combination of traits that makes them uncommonly suited to hunting in arid climes. As many Seekers are adept at climbing and diving, they also make for excellent sailors

The Seekers of the Sun are a highly patriarchal culture, with each tribe centered around a strong breeding male (nunh) whose duty is to form a harem and lead his people to glory and prosperity. Young males are born and raised as "tia," and must either assume the position of nunh by challenging and defeating an existing nunh in single combat, or leave the community to find a harem of his own. In particularly large tribes, multiple nunh may coexist in the same community, though such cases are rare

Satsuki challenged this. A lot. And she ended up becoming the first woman leader of ANY Miqo.te tribe. She was stronger than most males and she shunned the patriarchal culture that existed in the clan before she took over. When Satoshi was born, she and Miles sought to make sure that he wasn’t going to end up like his ancestors. 

While not impossible, a Seeker of the Sun choosing his mother's name to be his last, would amount to shunning his culture and adopting the rules of the Keepers of the Moon. There will be some Seekers of the Sun who will respect this, but others who frown upon it

Satoshi straight up did this and he is looked down on by a  LOT of of his kind that are not the ones that he knows in Limsa L.ominsa

There’s 26 Miqo.te clans for each letter of the Eor.zean alphabet. 

Satsuki’s clan was most likely an offshoot of either the S or K clan. Which happens often with males. Again, Satsuki is just weird. She took a Moon Keeper (Miles) as a husband so...

Some male miqo.te leave the tribe to try and become breeding males for themselves and establish a new clan. most females don’t follow tho so they die out

Satoshi kinda did this? but he left because he couldn’t deal with the grief of losing his parents. no one followed him because they perceived him as weak. 

About names... 

Technically Satoshi and Satsuki should, well, be S’toshi and S’tsuki cause probably of the S tribe bull shit but again, Sats tribe was weird and she was weird and since her tribe was an offshoot, I’m sure she had leeway to screw with some stuff. 

A few facts about the Keeper of the Moon

Roughly a head shorter and smaller of body than the average Hyur, the Keepers of the Moon are distinguishable from their diurnal cousins by their fur, dark as fog, and rounder eyes with large pupils. They also have larger ears, more pronounced canines, and longer, skinnier tails

Though lacking the physical stamina of the Seekers, they make up for this with a fierce strength of will and unerring instincts. With their keen intuition, Keeper hunters have been known to easily snare even targets concealed in the gloom of night.[3] Keepers are known for their reticent and brooding personalities, but are also respected and sometimes feared for their tenacity

Though lacking the physical stamina of the Seekers, they make up for this with a fierce strength of will and unerring instincts. With their keen intuition, Keeper hunters have been known to easily snare even targets concealed in the gloom of night. Keepers are known for their reticent and brooding personalities, but are also respected and sometimes feared for their tenacity

In contrast to the Seekers of the Sun with their male-dominated tribes and harems, the fundamental unit of Keeper of the Moon society is the family, centered around a strong mother figure and her children. Keepers are known to form small communities composed of two or three families who hunt together

Now ya’ll know why Miles miqo.te was so attracted to Satsuki miqo.te. she pretty much embodied everything that the keepers of the moon loved. and im sure miles fell hard and fast. 

satoshi physically resembles seekers of the sun but he absolutely 100 percent loves his keepers brethren outlook more 

satsuki was everything to satoshi

The men of the Keepers of the moon live a wanderer's life, and the women generally believe that men are at their best in small doses. Keepers of the Moon are not raised with a father, and so women and children keep the hearth, ply various trades, and accept game and visits from the menfolk.

idk this just makes me laugh lmfao 

i bet miles tried to leave and satsuki was just “wtf are u doing dumbass’ 

I don’t know much about the mit/hra personally but it does sound like that the keepers of the moon take after them more than the seekers of the sun do 

what follows are my own personal headcanons i guess

evolution wise, miqo.te evolved from the mith.ra and they lost many of the cat like appearance that the mi.thra had. such as the feline like face 

miqo.te can still do things such as pur and they LOVE raw fish. catnip is their worst enemy 

many different clans have various different tattoos for their faces 

their ears are indicative of their mood. 

so is their tail. 

their ears are sensitive! but not in a bad way. some miqo.te dont like it when you touch them but most of the time? they really do

and head scratches ;v;

dont touch their tail tho 

[kermits-cup-of-tea]

the DAM is reportedly one of the worst to deal with in terms of repatriation regarding NAGPRA (native american graves protection and repatriation act; it serves to "protect and return Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and cultural items [nps.org]), it was put into federal law in 1990 and "applies .... to all remains or objects discovered, even before November 16, 1990" [wiki] and applies to all federal institutions. the way it works is, federal institutions must catalogue and report all indigenous remains and artifacts to the corresponding nations, and then the related nations can go through with paperwork for repatriation or they can choose to let the museums keep their remains or artifacts - repatriation is a long, and difficult task both monetarily and emotionally, but it gives the nations a choice in what happens with their history which is why it is so so important

what the DAM is doing is frankly, pardon my french, fucking criminal. they house currently, according to the denver post article and their website, 18,000 artworks from various indigenous artists, both historically and modern. at the time of NAGPRA being passed, they lied to the Tlingit nation and said they only had 5 objects, when their records showed they had at least 325 Tlingit works. both Tlingit and Haida tribes have filed multiple NAGPRA claims (2002, 2007, 2017) that have gone unfulfilled, which is against the federal law they are filing the claims under

and the worst part? this lack of respect both for the people these items belong to and the lack of respect towards the law and the people the DAM claims to hold in high esteem (citing their mission statement here which can be found on their website but i've included a screenshot of the native american section at the bottom of this post; the DAM also cited Hopi law as a reason why they couldn't return an object - for reference the Hopi nation lives in Arizona. the Tlingit and Haida nations are from Alaska) is that:

"[the DAM] offered to have a copy made of the partition", and would send the copy to the Tlingit nation and they would keep the original because, and i quote from the article, "A copy would mean nothing to us." i will repeat that: "A copy could mean nothing TO US (the DAM)" and then the native arts curator for the DAM was quoted saying "We're not in the business of just giving away our collections," Lukavic said. "Nobody is.", because apparently the three NAGPRA claims aren't enough. i just. how fucking dense do you have to be to not see what's wrong here. they are not the museum's objects, they are stolen, housed on stolen land. let the people they came from have their objects back.

as an anthropology/archaeology student and someone who has native family (Anishinaabe), shit like this gets my blood boiling because these institutions are acting purposefully obtuse hoping that the miles and miles of paperwork will eventually lead people to give up so they can keep their stolen artifacts and remains. it's horrific. museums should be places for safekeeping and if the people decide the object needs to come home it is not up to white curators and councilmen to decide whether the native nations have that right to reclaim their history.

ok rant over, i need to go take a breath but please go read this article because it provides a lot of context and information that is really important as to why i am so pissed at the DAM in particular (i am also pissed at other institutions but the DAM has a reputation of one of the worst to deal with in terms of repatriation and NAGPRA)

i'll come back and edit this later but i've been watching this particular event happen with the DAM since 2019 so once i calm down i'll be able to make this make more sense/be more understandable

You know what is cool?

Being an archaeologist

You know what is even cooler?

Being an archaeologist in the 19th / early 20th century

Those are the centuries in which people started to understand the real importance of archeology

People went completely nuts about antiquities. Hundreds of people sailed to Egypt just to take possession of some piece of jewellery, a mummy or a piece of fresco

But imagine

Being the first one to set foot in Nefertari’s tomb, or examine for the first time the fragile mummy of Tutankhamun