#all lore and fun destroyed in the name of science?

[destroyusall]

I am very normal about Blacksommar (I am not) and I think I’ve decided that aesthetically it should be a gradient between hard sci-fi and medieval fantasy (with renaissance in between like an unholy concoction)

I’ve been reading medieval bestiaries and a part of it depresses me because they had such whimsy. That the sweet breath of panthers kept away dragons (nature’s biggest gay asshole that would swing on everyone) and I just don’t see that anymore

[kyriathanatos]

Are you and demilypyro dating

yeah, carbon dating, bitch! get in here we're learning about bones n shit!

so this little guy is called the bone hydra! (His name is Lerny but we're getting all science-y in here so we gotta use the genus name)

it's a monster that can be found in Hades, specifically Asphodel, and it's got 5 heads. Each head has a different method of attack, and any one of the 5 can be selected as the main head you will fight when you encounter it. This only happens after you have bested it 3 times, however! so keep on your toes!

Once the other heads are able to spawn, they will do so during 2 separate support phases where the main head has become invulnerable to all damage and you must destroy each of the other heads to be able to harm the main one again. scary stuff!

Lets talk about those heads and their abilities!

This little guy right here? This is the Yellow Variant. He's your standard bread and butter, but that doesn't mean he's a slouch! He's got access to the most abilities out of any of them. Being able to shoot a volley of fast moving projectiles, ground slam, and even summon other variants! You should not under estimate this little guy!

What about the other variants you ask? Well, lets go in order!

The Orange Variant here shoots out magma ball spittles! be careful, they can burn you, as they leave temporary magma pools on the ground! he's able to make the arena extremely hectic, so don't slouch on him!

Continuing on, this version is the White Blue Variant, Its horns remind me a bit of @demilypyro's actually! And just like her and her love of hammers, its got the ability to SLAM its big ol' head on the ground and do lots of AOE damage, and even make parts of the arena crumble away! dangerous... you'll have to move quickly against this one!

And now you've to the Green Variant! Hey... those are my colors! and its a summoner too? talk about stealing my whole thing. Anyway, this one can throw out some little balls that can spawn some really dangerous enemies during the fight! You gotta take those out before they spawn, or it'll get even more hectic!

And finally, we've got the Purple Variant, this funky little guy likes to shoot waves of long, slow moving projectiles at you! they're designed to trip you up and make you mess up with how intimidating they are, but as long as you face danger head on and dash directly through them, you're usually pretty safe!

anyway, that's just a bit of Hades based bone lore for you! Carbon dating is fun! I hope it helped! Soon you'll be getting that Titan's Blood from good ol' lerny here in no time. I believe in you! And I'm sure demily does too. :)

[rat-n-atty]

MEET MY OC CLOVE PART 2

(We will be continuing on where we had previously left off on Clove Lore lmao)

Redemption Arc (The depression arc more like it)

After WOTFI 2023, Clove was just going to lock herself up in her lab and throw herself into her studies but then she realized that SMG3 had the keys to her lab last (dumbass) so since she had nowhere else to go (she literally lived in that lab so she was basically homeless) so what does she do? she decided to go live under the bridge of the SMG4 castle.

She was surprisingly never caught down there but one day Mario did accidentally catch her down there with her pitched tent and fire. The crew wondered why she didn't tell them beforehand if she needed a place to crash, but Clove still felt guilty after years of rivalry with them, after she was seen as a friend, no longer a foe, she decided to live in the castle for a while.

Remember the last post when I told ya'll that Clove felt like she had no purpose after she sent SMG3 to the graveyard? Well, this is where we go into more detail about that.

Living at the castle and feeling like she had real friends who just liked her for who she was, not whatever she made, was pretty wholesome but it also brought Clove to the realization that she didn't really know who she was, without 3 or without her craft. Luckily, she had good friends to try and help her move on past her traumas and her new journey of self-discovery (yippee, healing arc!)

(I already did a relationship chart between Clove and the rest of the cast btw, you can find it here )

Genesis Arc (oooooh)

Needless to say, Clove had mixed emotions when she found out that Smg3 was still alive but when the corrupted Morchu appeared, this sparked a new interest in her and wanting to do the study of Memes and their entire history!

I want to say Clove was mostly neutral for this arc but this did give her a new hyperfiction (lamo)

Oh yeah, at the end of the arc, Clove gets her keys to her lab back from 3. That was kinda the whole mini-story arc with her, asking Smg3 for her keys back but she couldn't at first because she felt guilty about what she did to him and their friendship technically (they become neutrals after this)

Revelations (Shit is about to go down)

It's no surprise that Clove had enrolled to Omnia Academy along with Melony and Meggy but the reason she enrolled is because of her new dream to re-open her lab and turn it into a school for people just like her (awww happy Clove!) so she joined a science club.

Her shit with God box is also important because she had also read up on that when she was studying the YouTube remote ("The World's Cursed and Definitely Powerful Objects that would destroy the World if laid on the wrong hands" remember that book?) so she was definitely a G in this arc too.

But with Clove prioritizing her friends and saving the literal world, she gets kicked out of the science club (it's hella strict) Clove is heartbroken but then decided that she can just open a school by herself claiming that she technically has all the knowledge she needs now.

(Also bonus small arc, Clove and Smg3 gain a new understanding of who they are now and what they used to be, this revelation has made them somewhat mutual now)

The End? (is it the end of Clove Lore?)

I don't think Clove's story will really end but here are some small bonuses and fun facts!

Fun fact 1: Clove does eventually open her new lab/ school right on the showgrounds! (had to bribe Smg4)

Fun fact 2: Clove and Smg3 do become friends again and they're in a partnership with Clove in charge of making Smg3's bombs for him (They still love creating trouble together)

Fun fact 3: After IGBP, Clove grabbed a sample of the Eldrich goo and studied it (Results came back unknown...)

Fun fact 4: Clove still catches up with her Grandfather

Fun fact 5: Clove found out she had a brother when she reconciled with her family...she's not very happy about that fact....but she loves him to death (His name is Eden "Olive" Gadd) (Btw, he's like 5)

Fun Fact 6: Most of all the science junk she has in her lab comes from the dark web or Bob

Fun fact 7: She actually designed and made the Spy Rizz watches in WOTFI 2023

Fun Fact 8: This is what her WS and WOTFI 2023 designs look like!

Fun fact 9: When Clove first met Mr. Puzzles, the very first thing she wanted to do was experiment on him ("HOW THE FUCK WAS HE ABLE TO "Cut off his face and put a T.V in his place"!? I NEED TO KNOW WHAT KIND OF MINCHERNIARY HE USED!"

"ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS RIGHT NOW!?"

"...Sorry...")

Last fact....oh gosh...

Fun Fact 10: Clove x Smg3 real (or as I call it caffeinated chemistry...)

I wanna say Clove developed this crush on Smg3 way before the YouTube arc (so it made it extra dramatic for her to send him to the graveyard oooohh) It was mostly one-sided love and Clove had mostly kept it to herself (some days she was flirty and other days she was a wreak)

In the present time, Clove is fine with being Smg3's friend now but she never really forgot how 3 used to make her feel.

And that's all it for Clove Lore!

Thanks for reading!

BI GUYS!

[dzvagabond]

Self insert asks: 1, 2, 3, 4 & 7 for the self insert you’re currently thinking about/fixated on at the moment! :3

Thank you for the ask 💚💜

So I'm gonna talk about my main RE inserts right now so please forgive all the lore I am about to dump at you friendo.

1. What is your s/i's name & pronouns?

Ezio DiAngelo, they/them (RE4R)

Dr. Reneé Howell, but goes by Ren, she/her (Main RE insert)

2. How similar is your s/i to you? Are they a carbon copy, completely different, or a mix of the two?

Ezio isn't really similar to me, but they do carry ✨trauma✨ from my childhood. But that's pretty much it. They are their own person.

Ren, however, is very similar to me. Very caring and motherly, has my huge fascination for science and virology, and my intrusive thoughts about dissection of the human body.

3. Does your s/i have a full back story yet? Or is it still in the works? If it's done, can we see it?l

Ezio does have a back story and here's the gist of it: They were a human experiment at Umbrella Euro who received the prototype of the NE-α Type parasite that fully fused to their brain stem but never fully reached maturity to mutate them. Luis was brought on board to the project and seeing how they were treating subjects, specifically Ezio, he vanished with them in tow back to Valdelobos (RE4 Village). Then, Saddler employed him to discover the abilities of the Plagas under the guise of helping Ezio get back to normal, but ends up infecting them with it instead. Hence the reason on why Luis developed those lasers in the first place to destroy both parasites. But he couldn't since NE-α Type had already fused to their spine, and the Las Plagas was mutating with the already existing parasite.

Ren has a fully fledged back story (it's a lot) that you can read here!

4. How did your s/i feel when they first met your f/o(s)? How do they feel about them now?

Ezio was very skeptical about Luis at first considering they were an experiment he was assigned to monitor and he was an Umbrella scientist. Now, they are very much head over heels for him, and trust him completely. We're just gonna ignore Luis' fate for a sec haha

Meeting Wesker, Ren thought he had a complete stick up his ass but grew to respect him as a scientist. Now, Ren was/is disgusted on how he changed, on what he wanted to do. Very big divorced couple energy between them.

7. Give us 3 random facts about your s/i!

EZIO:

Born and raised in Italy, but moved across Europe quite often when they were younger. Resided in Spain when they were older.

They can speak 4 languages fluently: Italian, English, Spanish, and Dutch (the last one was for fun when they were in college).

Due to having both a prototype Nemesis Parasite and a Las Plagas parasite residing in their body, they can feel other Plagas around them and can almost "hear" the hive mind around.

REN:

Ren was an orphan, discarded by her parents to a Catholic run orphanage in her hometown. The nuns who ran the school were the ones to encourage and help fund her schooling, despite aging out of the system. Without them, she wouldn't have become a scientist at a young age.

She was killed and infected by her own project: The Nemesis before the events of the third game. Due to having been bonded with the progenitor virus as a fell safe thanks to William Birkin, after being infected the parasite bonded with her as well.

Ren always wanted a family, so before the events of the game (and spending a lot of time at the RPD), she eventually adopts the autopsy tech August (@valentinesparda 's insert).

[adifferentstarwars]

In essence, this is a blog to collect and organize one freak-wizard’s thoughts on one of the largest media franchises of all time, and how it’s innumerable contributors have changed and mutated it, for better and for worse, with new ideas and connective tissue; this blog will attempt to use these contributions, as well as the contributions of other fans, to craft a Star Wars.

“A Different Star Wars”, it could be called - one that disavows the rights holder’s hyper-commercializations of the Galactic Empire’s fascism (I’m hoping we’re all caught up to what that word means - lost fictional glory, death cult of heroism, outsider enemies who are at once a devious and impossible threat and a pathetic subhuman horde) and the right wing’s obsession with it as a virtue-signalling tower, and calls for more empathy, more gay shit, more aliens, and way, way more camp to inundate the franchise.

Below is an introductory “essay”/”discussion”. Sorry for the length. Further below is the actual blog. I hope any prospective readers can enjoy!

Star Wars.

A multi-media franchise held in high esteem by many, a framework for legends and stories, a multi-billion dollar franchise, and a lore-rich fandom-sink of oft-contested quality.

Originally a fun science-fantasy romp with a little too much creative inspiration from nazi-lovers (such as Joseph Campbell and Leni Riefenstahl) to be comfortable, Star Wars was simple: a small adventure of two hard-luck retainers, a farmboy wizard, an old knight, two rogues, a princess, and the black knight of an evil Empire in a strange galaxy. The mission was to rescue the princess, and destroy the doomsday device with the help of the heroic Rebellion. The principle characters are all human, or human-aligned robots, and one would not be blamed for assuming the battle between the Empire and Rebellion was strictly human business, despite a vast array of creative aliens on display at the first planet we saw. At the end of that story, the heroes have won and the evil Empire has been defeated for good in one great swoop of a Pyrrhic battle.

A short and sweet creation of just one great, visionary man! Well, one man and a legendary composer. And the band. And some writer friends giving him a lot of input. And a host of expert craftsmen and artisans. And y’know, that one great man’s wife did most of the script editing and made it workable as a film, too. And many, many film crew. Not too mention the actors. Actually maybe Lucas didn’t too to much more than give characters funny names. Or his own name. And tried to model the whole affair after standardized colonial propaganda based on some depraved creep’s writing. At least he had a lot of experience under his belt with. just two movies beforehand? It’s kind of a miracle this thing got off the ground in the first place, with a delusional loser like that at the helm, eh?

But then, that dorky little film was such a hit that it changed pop culture forever, made a more money in a few short years than some governments have made in their entire existences, and became a buzzword for an ignorant and malicious business man-turned president’s plan to shoot lasers at Russia with satellites! And so, obviously, there needed to be sequels! That weren’t slightly-incestuous follow-up novels!

The evil empire turned out NOT to be defeated at all! And it’s been 5 long years of war for the heroes and the Rebellion. The empire is bigger and badder and now the black knight has an evil wizard to serve! What is the Empire’s true capabilities and limitations? It’s not mentioned, because the absence of such makes it much easier to write conflict. All we know is that they are unequivocally evil, and powerful. They are everywhere and hold all the cards, and that makes it exciting for the heroes to outwit them and save the day. By the end, they are down one hand and a rogue, and are up a roguish duke, a shocking familial reveal, and the bittersweet ending - the bad guys have taken a victory, but the heroes are not out of the fight yet, as they pass by the galaxy a star with a fleet of kitbashed plastic beauties and John William’s hopeful music swelling.

The next film starts out hornier than it’s ever been again, with a daring dive into the criminal underworld of the galaxy to rescue the stolen rogue! And with prolonged shots that make it clear Lucas was serious about “underwear not existing in his universe”. Anyway, they strangle a big worm and vamoose right back into the main plot. The Empire is striking back (again), this time with... a SECOND doomsday weapon?? How can they afford a second, bigger one? How powerful Is the Empire? Not powerful enough to avoid being completely shattered after their doomsday weapon is destroyed again, it seems! With a bonus late redemption of the black knight! This time with the help of alien allies, and the Vietcong care bears from the forest moon. Surely, this is a new beginning, for new adventures, new villains, and a bright world of exciting concepts!

And, hey, it is! Fantastical pulp adventures written by a myriad of authors, exploring dangerous new worlds, fascinating new people, complex new main characters, strange and ancient forces, magical threats and friends! This story has the rouge and princess’ children kidnapped by a wizard who wants to feed them to a televangelist dimension-blob! This story is about a family of 70′s-looking beatniks or something crashing on the planet with the vietcong bears and helping them storm a castle to save the village and rescue their parents! This story is about the Rebellion’s New Republic fighting a death-fleet of death-worshipping skeleton-goblins trying to kill everyone! This story is about the New Republic fighting a alliance of randomly-murderous alien bugs who are sentient but now decide to kill everyone! This story is about the New Republic fighting a death-fleet of oppressed alien satans who also fought against the Empire but randomly went too far and started invading other planets for some reason, proving once and for all that the REAL fascists are the antifascists :)))) ! (/j) This story is about the New Republic fighting another death-fleet of skeleton-goblins, but this time they are from beyond the stars and are religious and the good guys get help from bureaucratic smurfs! This story is about the New Republic fighti

But they can’t sustain these heroes on unique pulp adventures forever, apparently. So they reintroduce the Empire! You thought they were defeated? Nope! Those giant warships gathered around their inaugural superweapon and evil wizard emperor were only a tiny fraction of the Empire’s power! The Empire is without limit and it turns out they had control over the ENTIRE GALAXY. Millions of worlds with trillions of subjects, and more than likely billions of soldiers! Against a cumulative, active allied resistance of. A few hundred thousand. Hum. How did the heroes win, again? Anyways, the Empire is fractured into warring states, which makes things easier for the New Republic. Until they reunite. And then fall apart and reunite again under a blue guy who wasn’t there before and his gilf boyfriend, and again with a clone of the evil wizard emperor, and again with a random Sith, and again with the princess and rogue’s child and so on for. More than a hundred years in-story? and further beyond that? That’s pretty cool! At least, if they didn’t keep trying to tell the same tired overarching story again, constantly upping the ante on the doomsday weapons. This van-sized ice cream cone can melt a sun? Cool and balanced.

It feels like this all has gotten away from us slightly.

At least the prequels they followed it all up with tried to do something new, dialogue be damned. A lot of irl-relevant discussions about war-profiteering and the descent of capitalist-run democracy into fascism. The reveal that the mystical, heroic Jedi knights of legend were just a repressive order of space-cop monks who hated it when men cried. The main character being the black knight from the first film. Some trans-coded robots fighting for a group called “the CIS” and being horrifically slaughtered by the good guys despite their very visible sentience and repeated attempts to surrender. An army of child soldiers who are also a guy and popular toy from the last two OT movies. Witty banter between a bunch of bisexual disasters. Overall silly, but pretty good in places.

And, that was Star Wars.

Until DISNEY, the House of Mouse, those Fuckers from Florida, came in and bought the entire franchise from itself, and tried to hammer everything out and back into shape. Everything aside from the movies? Non-canon! Excised! It’s a brand new universe to be explored! Except that goofy little CGI cartoon. That can stay. Let this wolf-fetishist cook. Give him some more shows. Wait why does that one look like Hot Wheels-

And they’re taking the franchise in a bold new direction of: more films! This one’s about the guys that died stealing the plans for the first doomsday weapon. This one’s the confusing, disjointed origin story of the rogues (well, one of them) from the first movies and highlights each and every thing they ever mentioned in passing to flesh out the world. It all happened in like, a few weeks and there were supposed to be sequels but the movie wasn’t as big as they hoped so whoops and then they didn’t make anymore movies at all because tv shows are much easier to make.

But THIS one, this is the start of a new trilogy! A new story, fresh and exciting for newcomers (despite the general consensus of needing to watch ALL the films to enjoy anything new. keep that in mind for later), with likeable characters acting out the major story beats of the... first film. Again, but bigger this time. Also the old characters are still here because they are marketable and nostalgic. The bad guys are once again a fascist Empire of indeterminate strength, except this time they want the audience to root for the bad guys a little?

Could that have something to do with the increasing popularity of internet commentators using the Empire as a “totally ironic” mask for their beliefs, indicating their willingness to buy an absurd amount of merch featuring the Empire (and indeed doing so)? Gee I sure hope generation tech isn’t serious about their “humanity first” racism and casual praise of a fictional fascist regime because then that would bring into question who they consider people irl haha.

Anyways, one of the rogues dies to his own son to tell the audience this is serious and also his actor fucking despises the franchise (but he’s a terrible person, so we can despise him right back~) so he’s out (until they give him more money) and the good guys win again, this time destroying the bad guy’s entire PLANET! Surely that means they are out of resources, considering how much it takes to terraform a planet (Ilum didn’t have trees before, they added those themselves), excavate the entire thing to the core and convert it into a giant solar-powered (it eats stars) shotgun. Surely they don’t have infinite resources again. That’d be silly. Despite the rocky start, we still have the new cast of characters! Let’s see what they can do.

And DO they do, taking the franchise in bold new directions, upending the cliches and assumptions that made up the last few movies. The quality of these decisions is questionable, but no one can deny that it’s trying something new, and good-silly, which is far more than can be said much of the franchise. Rejection of chosen one destinies, rejection of redemption, both the good guys and bad guys have been decimated, a grey coat of paint cast over the universe as it’s revealed the weapons of both sides being provided by the same corporations (which doesn’t make much sense, but more on that later), ending with the death of the wizard boy hero of the first 3 movies, and like a phoenix, the rise of another among a changed status quo! I wonder how this all will be handled in the next movie, what adventures will this small crew embark upon?

Not many, as it turns out! Despite everyone on every side dying majorly, supplementary material revealed that the bad guys had just as much wargear and fanatical troops as the Empire did, despite being constrained to the Unknown Regions which we know nothing about so I guess it’s justified? And the good guys are now back up to the strength the Rebellion was at in the first movie. Look, the Tantive IV is still there too! The ship from the opening of the first film? The Empire didn’t scrap it or destroy it to cover up the attack as a shipwreck like they said they would. So everything is back to normal, except the princess’ actress died and now they have to somehow work that into the film with horrible uncanny CGI. Little else has changed from 30 years ago somehow. Oh and the evil wizard is back after being thrown down a hole into an exploding reactor, which is silly and bad, but at least makes sense. It is science-FANTASY after all, wizards can just come back from that.

Anyways our one latinx hero is a drug dealer now. Sorry. Despite his character background being a military brat born and raised in the New Republic Navy, the cockpit as his cradle, his skin colour denotes that he ran drugs for a living. When? Dunno, but that’s what ol’ JJ Abrams thinks people with brown skin are like, so.

Oh and the asian heroine they introduced in the last film? They banish her to the background layer because people on the internet were extremely racist about her existence. Oh, and the black hero of this set of films? He just frets and worries over the safety of his white lady friend constantly and is bounced back and forth between like 8 different love interests and still ends up alone. But at least he’s a kind of a wizard now? Oh, and the principle hero of this set of films is just, thrown against the wall like a sticky hand. Her struggles of identity and rejection of destiny are thrown at the wall with her, because now she is the evil wizard’s grandaughter and also half of a “force-diad” (???) with the evil son, the culmination of which will either give the evil wizard ultimate power or explode him. Maybe she’ll turn evil? Nah.

And the evil wizard somehow hid a fleet of hundreds of extremely-expensive warships in an ice-field (the novel A New Dawn had the empire willing to destroy an entire planet just to get the shock-absorber fluid for the main guns of these ships’ standard loadout), in perfect condition, crewed by millions of secret cultists that he kind of just pulled out of his ass and he’s going to nuke the galaxy unless someone gives him his magic apple sauce.

The evil son turns good, his mother lays down to die like an old warhorse while everyone looks on sadly, and that was apparently her entire life’s destiny. Die so her kid could heal from dying, and then die again to save the hero who despises him and his antarctic-sized chest. The evil wizard explodes again, and a surprise fleet of copy-pasted ships arrives to help the good guys and blows up the secret fleet and secret cult and secret planet. The hero, who set out on her journey to escape a desert shithole, winds up right back on a different, uniquely painful desert shithole and takes the last name of the family she had a few brief and painful encounters with because her actual last name will get her lynched.

Interesting way to resolve all that.

There’s the tv shows! The endless. infinite,. Unceasing. painful parade of stories that cannibalize themselves with cameos and callbacks and nostalgia-baiting in an endless Ouroboros of literally 0.0000005% of an entire spiral-arm galaxy and constantly fumble with the new things they do create, with anything even slightly new or good being heralded as exclusively Genius Filoni’s Artwork of Legend. Hm. At least Rebels was fun, despite being guilty of the same sins. Andor might’ve been good absed on reactions, but I dropped Star Wars beforehand and I don’t trust a corporation to tell a story about resisting fascism.

Is the new Disney park good at least? Ah, you can go to Disneyland with your kids and watch guys in space-nazi spec-ops cosplay preach about the virtues of fascism. Interesting idea of “immersion”. then you can buy socks with their skull-like visages on them. This takes place slightly before the fascist bad guy regime is exploded along with it’s wizard, I think, so it’s trapped in a weird limbo of continuity. They took out all the benches and took out all the overhangs so now you can cook to death in the cruel Floridian heat, accessibility and health be damned. I guess that’s fun?

So. Star Wars is in a bit of a rough place, as it always has been, but ultimately I don’t think that roughness comes exclusively from creative decisions and ricocheting between production crews and directors. A large part of it comes from the fanbase, and the fact that every fucker has an opinion on a huge multimedia franchise and want to treat groups with all the moral ambiguity of a fairy tale as opposing sports teams that one can just choose to root for regardless of what they actually represent.

I’d like to recall to the scene in the New Canon comics where Darth Vader, a prodigy in the Force but having just crawled his ass out of a 1200km/h starship crash, uses the Force to pull the pins on hundreds of individual grenades of well over a hundred rebel troopers about to shoot him. The fascist-leaning fanboys of the once-villain-now-sports-team Empire loved this scene because it made their great man look cool, despite not being how the Force works, and despite the moment being a bizarre and gross attempt at making the fairy-tale Evil Overlord an underdog by pitting him against the actual underdogs of the story, in numbers that wouldn’t exist until years later in the timeline.

I’d also like to recall every single time the New Trilogy does something interesting with the Force, such as Luke, a prodigy in the Force, using the Force to project an image of himself lightyears away, or Rey, a prodigy in the Force, using the Force to heal wounds, and how, according to those very same fascist-leaning fanboys, those are unrealistic, canon-breaking travesties, blatant signs of a Mary Sue and the directors’ disrespect for the sanctity of the franchise.

It’s some pretty rancid vibes.

I want to fix that. I want to ignore all the weird right wing idolization and fix the things that gave them such ideas in the first place. I want the franchise to be more empathetic, more queer, and more camp. A clear fight between good and evil and the in-between that says something about the world that created it. I want to make things both a little crisper and a little fuzzier. I hope my ideas will be good.

[ruby-static]

Just out of curiosity, which OCs do you have tons of lore on?

Ohhh man where do I even start-

First of all, I have an entire cast of ocs for my webcomic project @hellonearth-comic. I haven't been able to work on it nearly as much as I'd like since starting it, but I have so many OCs for it with so much lore buzzing around in my head I'm desperate to share-

The whole story is set in a world where the earth is plagued by demonic imps after an event called "The Spill of Hell" (or otherwise known as "The Hellpocalypse"), and 2 years later a 19 year old video game streamer named Milo reunites with their lost uncle who has been trapped in the demon world for most of their life. Their family has a long history in demon hunting, so they end up starting up a demon extermination business called "Demon B. Gone"!

Along the way they find a lot of things, like a scientist who they found hiding out in their car while the evil lab he worked for was being destroyed, Milo's friends who formed a rock band, demonic rebellion and espionage. The usual shit.

For more fandom-oriented OCs, I have a ton of lore bouncing around my head for my Ducktales OCs like Mira and Bolt. I have an ask blog for them called @science-and-sorcery-dt based around their story, but I haven't been able to update that much either. (Despite how much I love these OCs and their lore 😭) I'm on break from college, so I'm currently working on starting it up again!

Either way, I just love Mira, Bolt, and the fucked up "fairy tale" prophecy they have to put up with and I'd kill to make more art/story content about them!

Another that comes to mind is my Owl House dude, Raven Leucosia. I have a ton of lore for the dude, his life, his "people" (the village of Sirens his family led), and the forbidden "lost coven" that has been in his family for generations. I love this weirdo fish dude, and his story is so fun-

And there's a ton more! I don't nearly have enough time and motivation to make all the content I want, but all these characters I make plague my brain and I love them-

[doyouremem8erme]

Can you tell me more about the Billion Eyes Back On You AU?

ohohoho *cracks knuckles*

so abeboy/a billion eyes back on you is the first au created for the laaauc! a bunch of general info is on the laaauc (lifetime achievement au award collection) blog, @laaauc.

basicallllllyyyy, it goes the same as canon from the main characters' point of view up until true colors. the only difference is that instead of the basement just holding the core's chamber, there's a massive underground laboratory instead. after andrias stabs marcy, she gets taken to the lab, where she undergoes several emergency surgeries and is put on stasis in the tank once she's stable.

dr. triturus treesun is the main scientist the au focuses on--a classic mad scientist, thinks-vivisection-is-ethical type. i jokingly call him an evil scientist, but he isn't actually evil, just amoral. he keeps marcy completely unconscious her whole time down in the lab, so she's not aware of any of what's going on, and doesn't suffer.

a couple times, while trying to figure out how to keep a human alive, he vivisects her under anesthesia . btw thats where the whole au came from . me and anne @commanderanne were like hey whats all the messed up looking equipment in the bg in o&y for. what were they doing down there. and anne was like what if they . peeked at her guts or something. and so we were like. what if there was unethical science? ANYWAYS she ends up waking up bc the dose was too low and is aware for a minute or so before triturus's assistant/boyfriend, dr. dismal, gets her under again.

there's also dr. laurel rue irvine-froude--my FAVE. god shes such a blorbo. she's a biomechanical engineer and knows her way around medical stuff. she actually knew marcy from before she was imprisoned in the lab--they worked on marcy's brain research project from the theme song takeover together. some of that knowledge came in handy when the king ordered her to build a helmet to let the core control marcy...

laurel starts out as following along with the actions of the lab, but grows more and more upset with the lab's practices over time. eventually, she decides that marcy needs to be saved before they hurt her any more, and seeks out the help of olivia and yunan.

of course, they're stopped by andrias and the core like in canon. as punishment for the rescue attempt, andrias forces them to start the core download immediately--without anesthetic, as had been planned. additionally, he has olivia and yunan hold marcy down for it. laurel leads marcy into the operating room where the equipment for the helmet is stored, plugs the cords into her legs and arms, and as marcy begs and cries for her to stop--laurel's last words before forcing the helmet onto marcy's head are "be brave, my child." at the same time, marcy has slipped into calling laurel "mom" as she begs her to stop. haha yea found family *starts crying*

eventually, laurel makes another, successful attempt to save marcy.

also, post canon, laurel, olivia, and yunan are all dating, and are all marcy's moms.

also bonus lore!

during one of darcy's excursions to newtopia, destroying buildings for fun with the excuse that it's testing its weapons or something like that, it encounters a young newt named wrenna adie dunwood. she's actually the "marcy cosplayer" from the theme song takeover!! darcy spares her because it remembered her from marcy's memories. her gay dads had died in the destruction of newtopia, and she flees the city on her own. she makes it all the way to wartwood after sheltering with a variety of communities of survivors and joins the resistance. olivia finds her in one of the camps of refugees in new wartwood while marcy is recovering from the events of sun digs its heels to taunt you and takes a liking to her. eventually, olivia, yunan, and laurel adopt wrenna as well as marcy. they r sisters i love them.

[kanasmusings]

[Translations] TsukiPro AGF 2021 - ZANSHIN Worldview

☆ 2021 TsukiPro Joint Air Stage - ZANSHIN - World ☆

A world not seen, a world unknown.

With the development of science and technology, humanity has been able to venture into new areas of research.

They have developed technology advanced enough to visualize what was usually invisible to the naked eye.

Something that was unseen… In other words, the mind.

# Zanshin

More lore under the cut, enjoy~!

A world not seen, a world unknown.

With the development of science and technology, humanity has been able to venture into new areas.

They have developed technology advanced enough to visualize what was usually invisible to the naked eye.

Something that was unseen… In other words, the mind.

Everyone is in possession of a heart, but it is only oneself who is capable of full control over it. It is a part of us that is the most difficult to understand, yet one that keeps us drawn and interested in others.

Joy, anger, sorrow, fun, love, suspicion, surprise, expectation, fear, misery Every single emotion can be a cause for action.

Visualizing these very emotions will enable mutual understanding, cause less conflict, give more love, and even make one overcome all kinds of fear. All of these are people’s ideals and hopes, ambitions and desires.

Though there was a lot of controversy, many scholars from all over the world gathered together to develop technology that would enable us to “see into the heart.”

Soon enough, it came into completion.

A system that enables us to visualize what is on one’s mind. Mind Embodiment System: MES

*******

At the time of its release, many protested about MES’s goals. They criticized and ridiculed MES, calling it “a forbidden sword that seeks to slash through what should remain hidden.”

However, the benefits of using MES were far greater than what was imagined, and soon enough, it widely became a part of life’s foundations.

Pursuit of achieving comfort, development of psychiatry.  Others use it to enhance entertainment, art, academia, and of course, military prowess.

Somewhere along the way, people began to take this new gift for granted… It was as if reading the mind had become natural.

Not once did they expect their own hearts to bare their fangs at them.

*******

All of the tragedy began with a certain country’s military research.  They believed that MES could be developed further to embody the mind.

If they could be materialized rather than just visualized, then it would be possible to influence it directly. It would be possible to guide, correct, and depending on the purpose, even destroy them.

Research was conducted in secret, and the military continued to develop a next generation weapon capable of subjugating or neutralizing a certain target.

This fearsome research, aptly named Neo-MES, was not made public until roughly 10 years since it began. 

The country that developed the Neo-MES was virtually destroyed after their own research went on a monstrous rampage.

A monster born from a person’s heart and mind… They called him [Regret].

☆ ZANSHIN - World 2 ☆

A monster born from a person’s heart and mind… They called him [Regret].

It was named after the “regrets” and “reluctance” born from people’s hearts. It attacks anyone as it pleases.

The world needed to be reclaimed.

So, there is only one thing to do.

---- Kill.

# Zanshin

A monster born from a person’s heart and mind… They called him [Regret]. It was named after the “regrets” and “reluctance” born from people’s hearts. It attacks anyone as it pleases.

Some tear people to pieces. As if to let its “hatred” out. Some swallow people whole.  As if it yearns for someone to help ease its “loneliness”. Some manipulate and control people. As if it was a tyrant out to satisfy his “pride”.

Form, shape, and power. It takes not one form, but the form of many. Yes, just as much emotion as humans can harbor.

Only one thing is for certain. It yearns for people. Those who are attacked by Regret are either killed or transformed into one.

A rational attack on a manifestation of their own mind was practically useless. They slowly lost hope.

Heavy artillery, bombs, bioweapons, neurotoxins, missiles, and even nuclear weapons couldn’t hurt Regret. All it did was bring disaster to the world they lived in.

Even if Regret was taken down, given enough time, it will be revived.

Regret soon began to take over the world. This monster that was unleashed slowly devoured everything… It cared not for its own country nor for the lands surrounding it.

*******

Five years have passed since Regret came into being. Nearly half of the world was under his control. 

Most of the people had given up on Mother Earth and started fleeing to the colonies floating in the sky.

… Will Regret soon conquer everything?

A ray of sunshine appears in a world once thought to be over. A remote nation managed to develop a weapon with special modifications that proved effective against Regret. 

It was technology made possible from the remnants of the military research that gave birth to the monster.  A kind of technology that allows the heart to be forged into steel.

A weapon of metal forged with traditional techniques.  Thus, they have created a weapon capable of challenging Regret in one final battle.

A weapon that uses its owner’s heart and mind as a blade…

The Katana came into being.

The world needed to be reclaimed.

So, there is only one thing to do.

---- Kill.

☆ ZANSHIN World - Additional Info ☆

SHIKI: Fly away!

SHU: To our youth!

TSUBASA: No, the hashtag is #calamari.

SHIKI: Anyway… (?) We’ve posted about Zanshin’s world, but let me summarize it for those who are busy.

1.) A parallel world in the not so distant future. 2.) Military use of a mind embodiment system and its imminent rampage. 3.) A monster that embodies the heart! It eats away at the world, so we kill it!

That is all.

# Zanshin

-->

SHU: The pamphlet will contain more of the technical terms and details. If you are like me who enjoys imagining and making theories after reading, then please check it out. (smiles)

SHIKI: For our comrades who do not want to read, then I still recommend getting it just for the cool illustrations and whatnot.

TSUBASA: Wow, that’s a little extreme.

# Zanshin

-->

SHIKI: The pamphlet’s back cover looks kinda like this.

TSUBASA: How wonderful!

SHU: That was the reaction you were hoping to see, isn’t it? Well, it is a world made up of black and white. 

SHIKI: Regret is like a white albino that can take on any form it wishes. Mind and heart affect each other, so in a sense, it is like black and white going against each other… More or less…

TSUBASA: Sounds interesting!

# Zanshin

-->

SHIKI: Look forward to the merch, too.

SHU: They will be available in the venue and for online orders. More details will be announced at a later time!

TSUBASA: We always enjoy making the booths, and I promise this year has a lot of cool ones! If you go to the event, please check our booths~! Zanshin! We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

[iaintyourbro]

The Unknown Journey Continues

Part 1

I know it's been a while... but I've been going down a rabbit hole with @starlight-samurai regarding time loops, Jenova, Minerva, and more fun. So I figured I'd try to put it into one post to get the insanity out of my head. Everything in here is based on things we've found by either going through more obscure Ultimanias, learning more about Dirge of Cerberus and trying to decipher what the hell Jenova is by putting together various sources - including other Square Enix games - and how they handled freakishly similar scenarios.

Did you know there is a companion mobile game for it that was out on the good old flip phones? Did you know there was an online mode in Dirge of Cerberus only available in Japan, but had story elements that were not in the main game?

The sad part is, there's still so much to go through...

(I've also had various discussions with @ourfinalheaven, Manu, who doesn't have Tumblr, so here is her Twitter. and Somebody's Nightmare (here is her Twitter). So I wanted to tag them here, as it's much more fun to discuss these ideas as a group, since it'll only help you build on and strengthen your own ideas.)

Please be aware, there will be Spoilers for FFVII - Almost all Compilation titles, Xenogears, and NieR Automata throughout this.

So let's go on a journey where we explore what actually already exists in the compilation - including the idea of the whispers and timeloops - how Minerva may play into everything, and what exactly Jenova is capable of doing.

I asked Sesi if he'd ever played any of the NieR games, because he'd said something that made me wonder if they were going to take a similar approach. As a very, very quick high level summary: NieR Automata deals with a time loop type of idea. The androids will be rebooted and repeat the same things over and over again. This is broken when 2B is killed by A2 because she becomes infected with a virus. That being said, you have the option after Ending E to either erase all of your data and end the cycle OR you can try again. The Pods have a discussion, and one asks, "But won't they just do the same thing again?" and the other replies with "Maybe. But it could also be different this time."

Here's Sesi's message back to me when I asked him about this (cleaned up a bit since we were having a casual conversation over Discord):

Maybe I could just guess based comparatively on the Dirge storyline, because that was sort of SE's first flirtation with “robots and androids” since they’re all programmed and locked behind like task managers and shit that can shut them down. The story of the online mode for DoC that came out in Japan, we never got to see it, you’re basically an Android OC and you have to get to “the end of the level” and then essentially die, and a new one takes its place. This keeps happening until Weiss is essentially freed from being able to be task managed by the guys who are suppose to be able to control them and I know from tons of years with Square games that they’re verrrrry bad at differentiating their narratives they tend to just keep “ripping themselves off” so is it anything close to that?

Cuz if so I think I kinda know what you’re saying and yeah, I agree, I think with CC bringing in its poetic symbolism and LOVELESS, and DoC bringing back the cyclic nature of the lore, whispers, premonitions and future visions, proto-Materia and the perversion of this next cycle since the planet can no longer cleanse and protect itself and its will is weakening lesser and lesser to the point where it’s fate is “in a true sense of jeopardy This time essentially it’s all tied in together and sort of played as though it's a fated track; a cycle of events and something has hitched it, thus the whispers manifesting and Sephiroth's higher implied control over his destiny. Of course, even all that is just their new red herring game, but it’s definitely a part of the lore they want to play with, in order to go back and reMAKE the OG with the comp inserted from inception. Also gut punch a lot.

Time Loops

I was somewhat surprised to find out that this concept is NOT new to FFVII's universe. It's discussed in Dirge of Cerberus... probably one of the least played and least understood of the compilation. (Trying to sell a third person shooter with terrible controls to a market of mostly people used to turn-based combat wasn't going to go well.)

On top of it, we didn't even get all of it, since online mode was never released outside of Japan, and the Dirge of Cerberus Lost Episode was on Amp'd Mobile and Verizon flip phones back in 2006. Were you around for the cell phones in 2006? I had the ones on the list, and how somebody could play a game on those blows my mind.

Square has a tendency to reuse themes from their other titles. Probably one of the most blatant is the similarities between Xenogears and Final Fantasy VII. They were both being developed at the same time and a lot of ideas that didn't make it into FFVII ended up in Xenogears.

NieR

So how does this work? In NieR (both Replicant and Automata), you play the same path multiple times. Each time, it's slightly different depending on what side quests you did your first and second playthrough, but there's also other subtle differences throughout the story. In Automata, you get to play as 2B your first playthrough and 9S for your second. They follow the same path, but you get it from his perspective the second time and it reveals a bit more of what is going on. However, even with some slight differences, the main plot points stay the same and the ending result it also the same.

Then on your third playthrough, you wake up in the Bunker, and you're getting ready to go on a new mission. This time, though, 2B is killed and shit hits the fan. Things get crazy, you play as a new character: A2. In the end, pretty much everyone "dies", but you can choose to "reboot" and try again. You also can say you are done and let them all rest and delete your save data (the game gives you the option for both Automata and Replicant, and with Replicant, it actually leads to a new ending).

The striking thing for me is... There are certain events that will always happen, no matter what.

Fixed Points in Time

It's been years since I've watched Doctor Who, but there was something that stuck with me, and that was the fixed points in time. You can read about all of them here, but here's the basics:

Now, of course Doctor Who goes into this with much more detail and it's a recurring theme. However, as you read through that page, you'll probably find many aspects that have been used in various JRPGs that you've played. And Doctor Who most likely pulled some of the idea from classic Science Fiction novels. Each story puts its own spin on it.

How does this relate to FFVII Remake? Well, when they say that the major plot points will stay the same, it reminds me of this. No matter what, Cloud must fall into the Sector 5 Church, the Sector 7 Plate must be dropped, Aerith and Zack both must die, and Meteor has to be summoned, to name a few. So, with a time loop, those things would still have to take place in order to prevent a complete collapse of reality (at least in how Doctor Who uses it).

Therefore, the Whispers are ensuring that the Will of the Planet is followed.

One of the major themes in FFVII is that of loss. People die and they do not come back. Yes, other FF games do allow this to happen (FFX, FFXIII, FFXV), but VII is not those games. It was written with that idea in mind, that once a person dies, they, just like in real life, are dead and cannot be brought back.

I've previously written that I think they'll make us believe we are able to change fate, but we will eventually be slammed with the reality that we can't. That is because the planet has determined that certain events are fixed points.

Xenogears

Xenogears takes a bit of a different approach to the loop idea. Instead of repeating the same time period over and over, it has the characters reincarnated, and the same outcome happens each time: Elly dies. However, each time it's different. After all, they're in various time periods, in some cases thousands of years apart.

In all of the lives of Fei (who will have a different name in each time period) and Elly (who is always Elly/Elhaym), Elly will end up dying trying to protect Fei and the others. In one life, she is a religious figure at a totally not Catholic church, in another she's the wife of a scientist who was working to create children from nanomachines due to mass infertility issues. But she is ALWAYS with Fei, even if his name changes.

In her Mother Elhaym time, this is when Lacan (Fei) finally snaps. Though he's not fully aware of his past lives, he becomes aware, the anger consumes him, and he becomes Grahf. Fei is then reborn into the time period you play the game in.

There's a lot to unpack with this, so I won't go into it. Grahf wants to destroy God (Deus) because he thinks if he does, then it'll stop the suffering (his suffering).

If you do want to read more about Grahf, you can do so here, but it probably won't make much sense unless you've played Xenogears up to that point... Since it's much later in the game that this is all explained.

Lacan's desire was to stop the cycle of Elly always sacrificing herself for his sake. Though Grahf is not a perfect existence - he's not fully "The Contact", he sacrifices himself in order to let Fei move forward, and hopefully stop the cycle, by destroying the Deus system. (Elly also tries to sacrifice herself here, but Fei goes after her and stops her.)

Now, some people may think I'm saying that Cloud or somebody is going to do this in order to save Aerith or Zack (or his village or mom), but in FFVII if they do the loop method, I don't think Cloud, Tifa, Barret, and the others are aware of it. Most likely, it's only 'Sephiroth' and Aerith who are aware of it.

How this Could Be used for Final Fantasy VII

I'm stressing could because there's so many different possibilities on how they use this (if they are using this), so please, don't take this as fact. This is based on speculation based on what we know.

A time loop is a great way to explain away the differences in the story that we've seen: Biggs being alive, Wedge living for longer than he should have, etc. Since these are not major plot changes, they can simply say that this time it'll be slightly different... but your fixed points (major plot points) will remain the same.

It's a way to pull in some of the more obscure themes from Dirge of Cerberus and also play with the LOVELESS lore.

It could all simply be a big red herring and it's really just a remake of OG, but with the compilation tied together nicely... since it works much better when it's combined and not in 50 different games, books, movies, etc.

I don't think it's a "sequel" per say, not in the way I generally perceive a sequel. It's more of a loop of the same thing. The question is, when is the loop started and what will cause it to end? When will the planet (if it even is the planet) determine that it's good enough to begin moving forward?

JENOVA, Sephiroth, Genesis, and Minerva - Oh My!

Let's be real... Genesis isn't exactly the most popular character in the FFVII Compilation... but what if they make him one of the most important to the story? //Ducks as various fruits and vegetable are thrown in my direction//

I think what Genesis is probably most known for is his love of LOVELESS. He has the entire thing memorized and randomly says lines from it throughout Crisis Core. LOVELESS lore is still something I'm trying to grasp, so I am not going to comment much on it. Once I understand it more, I'll update this.

...And then this happens. The secret ending for Dirge of Cerberus, where Genesis picks up Weiss. Weiss, who has now been introduced along with Nero in FFVII INTERmission and is an optional ridiculously hard boss in the Shinra battle simulator in chapter 17 of the main story. There is some lore associated with the battle sim - so if you don't plan on beating it or you just can't, you can look up the pre-battle and post-battle cut scenes on YouTube. They're very short, but interesting. (I beat this asshole last night - it's a hell of a fight.)

....To Be Continued because apparently Tumblr won't allow more than 10 images per post now.... Next will be more on JENOVA and Sephiroth along with Minerva.

[inspiredrawaw]

Heyo Allison! this October and Early November been something for the JSE egos and its community huh? With all the available lore, hints, theories and etc.~ what's your biggest predictions and theories for the Jacksepticeye Cinematic Universe? And what do you want to see to possibly become canon?

Hello!

IM GLAD YOU ASKED

So in Marvins spell book there was a periodic table, mentionings of a philosopher stone and a drawing of it, and iris = antimatter. With antimatter definitely being more associated with science and with all those in his spell book it leads me to believe Marvin knows alchemy.

Especially with the philosopher stone.

We know in the ego verse time is distorted and the portal we keep seeing may be a time vortex used to travel in time. And in Marvins spell book someone was able to figure out a passage of blurry text that if I remember correctly basically says a philosopher stone is needed for time travel by a high alchemist.

So we know Marvin needs a philosopher stone and Marvin doesn’t exactly seem like the type to just ask an alchemist for a stone so chances are he’s gonna make it himself

And there is no 1 define way to creating a philosopher stone. The ones that we know alchemists used back in the day were the 12 alchemical processes and the 4 color stages of creating the philosopher stone.

Based on what the 4 color stages are and what the 12 alchemical processes are they’re basically the same thing!!!! The color stages is about the major stages the creation of the stone would be in. As for the 12 processes is what happens specifically for that stage. The first stage being the blackening. Overly cooking the elements to the point of it becoming a black substance. Then it’s the whitening, to purify this black substance making it white and to separate this substance into 2 opposing substances. Next up is yellowness this is about unifying the 2 substances into a new unified substance, a sense of awakening to it. This stage is kinda confusing and has been combined with the last stage depending where your reading from. But this stage is also about the transmutation of silver into gold. The yellowing is where there is a significant change in the substance. And then the final stage is called the reddening. This final stage just show cases the end of successfully creating the stone. With the alchemical processes this is about just using multiplication and projection to make the stone more powerful and transmute metals.

The reasoning WHY I think Marvin is trying to make a philosopher stone is because in the video there was fire and for creating the philosopher stone a few of the processes deal with fire and heck the 1st stage is about scorching the ingredients!

the philosopher stone has also been called quintessence which is also what the aether has been called too which makes me believe the philosopher stone can be made out of aether.

And the philosopher stone can be made into 2 different ways. One way is to have it transmute gold and the other to transmute silver. And because the philosopher stone has that void in it I believe the silver void that was shown in Marvins spell book and as the name is a different type of philosopher stone that deals with the frickin COSMOS that can be used for time travel

It’s hard to say if the Marvin were seeing now needs to create the stone to do time travel because of the visions he’s seen in the crystal ball or he’s already done time travel and is seeing the after math and realizing he’s failed

But based on his reaction to the crystal ball visions of Anti I have a headcannon that Marvin used to be possessed by Anti but got out. Because Marvin has been the only one to break free from Anti it makes Anti feel threatened by him. Which is why there were the visions in the crystal ball. Anti was warning him.

And then on with antimatter. Antimatter could be what Anti is. Anti is made out of antimatter so he doesn’t exactly fit in with the rest of reality. Antimatter is also the opposite of matter and in the sense of alchemy that could also mean emptiness or void/aether. So for that I have one theory that Anti is made out of hyle known as the first matter and a philosopher stone is what formed him. Or Anti is made out of aether. And Anti could accidentally be an aftermath of Marvin messing with the philosopher stone. And the reason why I think antimatter is Anti is the iris= next to antimatter. The iris refers to an eye and all of Antis possession and puppetry deals with something going on with the eyes. Such as it becoming completely black or having blood drip down from them. So perhaps it was Marvin making a mental note to check the eyes of people to make sure they’re not possessed?

I also have a different theory dealing with the 4 color stages of creating the philosopher stone but in the psychological sense. The 4 stages in psychology is about destroying any inner conflict in a persons soul. And for the 2nd stage whitening Marvin had to split his soul into 2 opposing principles to later in the 3rd stage form a unity between the 2 opposites. But Marvin kinda fucked up on it so now there’s a good version of Marvin and an evil version of Marvin and the evil version of Marvin sided with Anti. Which is why there was a red Marvin in the vid.

Another theory I have is that silver void is a transmutation of silver and aether creating the silver void. But because the transmutation was done with Void that is from the cosmos it created this dangerous thing that Marvin warns a lot about in the spell book

But these are just headcannons amd theories and I don’t expect any of them to be true

As for possibly canon? Seeing more alchemy stuff from Marvin really. And Marvin fighting against Angi because then thatll mean he’s a (somewhat) of a good boi. Bedside that not really? It’s hard to say what exactly Seán has in store so expecting anything to be canon just doesn’t make sense to me. Plus I rather watch the videos with 0 hopes or expectations! It makes watching them fun

[jcmorrigan]

I saw the tag- I am gonna ask you about the crossover universe- (omg I’m literally gushing about this)

OH, IT IS TIME!

 So you can find a lot of this on the “What is the WHAM ARMY?” page on my blog – I’ll try to remember to link it; I’m drafting this in a word processor first so I don’t use it. Essentially, this is the universe I’ve created for my fanfic “Taking Back the Crown,” which is about…basically my favorite villains all moving into the same house and trying to take over the multiverse. And then it got lore. And more lore. Because I cannot write anything normal. The fic is nearing its 150th chapter and I’m nowhere NEAR exhausted of all the ideas I want to put in it – it’s just my big playground for hyperfixation fun. Anyway, here’s a rundown of the major points of it!

 THE CAST

 The main characters are the eight villains who are the founders of the WHAM ARMY. The faction name is an acronym of their first initials. They’re my ultrafaves, the villains I always get fluttery heart for, and probably the biggest collection of losers you can imagine. I’ll put them in order of the acronym and give you some background on how each entered the team.

Wuya (Xiaolin Showdown) – So the connecting factor between these people is that Mozenrath (his name is a few slots down) is their team leader and the one who decided to build a team in the first place. Wuya was recruited when Mozenrath found her puzzle box in an ancient vault. This is set post-series for XS (and Chronicles is not at all canon), so what had happened is in the big Showdown right after Raimundo was named team leader officially in the finale, the Xiaolin Monks won ALL the Shen Gong Wu to their side and stuffed Wuya in the box. So Mozenrath found her and let her out so they could be pals. A magic potion let her regain human form fairly early on, and her power isn’t even nerfed either the way Chase Young would’ve done.

Huntsman (American Dragon: Jake Long) – ADJL is also post-series in this timeline. Mozenrath has the power to resurrect people from the dead at will because he’s memorized an ancient and incredibly complex ritual that he can execute mentally (note that this means you can remove this ability from him by tampering with his memories). The Huntsman was resurrected so as to show Mozenrath around the old Huntsclan vault (which is where they found Wuya’s puzzle box). No other Huntsclan member survived the purge except Rose (and 88 and 89, but they don’t count and aren’t in this story), so the Huntsman is starting from square one.

Ayam Aghoul (Aladdin: The Animated Series): Basically just got sick of losing. He’d teamed up with a few other rando Aladdin rogues to try and pick a fight with Maleficent, and she sent him packing. So he ended up finding one of the few residents of the Seven Deserts who was powerful enough to match him AND had a similar grudge against Maleficent.

Mozenrath (Aladdin: The Animated Series): The man of the hour and the creator of the entire team. He starts the fic by crashing Maleficent’s KH Disney Villain alliance and trying to add himself to it, but…ends up being such a disrespectful nuisance that Hades just drags him straight down to the Underworld. That moment inspired him to get his OWN band of friends and start making a name for himself.

Archibald Snatcher (The Boxtrolls): Met Mozenrath in the Underworld after his death in film canon. Annoyed Hades one too many times by claiming that he wasn’t actually supposed to die, seeing as he isn’t allergic to dairy (he is), so Hades threw him in the same cell as Mozenrath and…

Roman Torchwick (RWBY): I started writing this fic in 2016, immediately post-V3, so it’s canon-divergent after the last episode of V3 (but I got all the later-game characters to show up eventually). Which means Roman is ALSO dead at the start of this fic. He ALSO comes storming up to Hades insisting he’s not even supposed to be dead. At the same time as Snatcher is already pestering him. Which is how Mozenrath, Snatcher, and Roman end up in the same jail cell in Tartarus and get the idea that maybe they should break back into the world of the living and try to build something BETTER than what any of the three had beforehand.

Mad Madam Mim (The Sword in the Stone): Mozenrath, immediately after breaking out of the Underworld, attempted to take over Arthur’s kingdom by just walking in and throwing magic around. It backfired horribly when Merlin showed up. But then Mim showed up to counter Merlin and realized that maybe she had a potential friend here who was as blackhearted as she.

Yzma (The Emperor’s New Groove): Post-TENG, no KNG or TENS (but I reference things from TENS every now and again). Merlin turned Mozenrath into a rat, so Mim brought him to Yzma’s Secret Lab to change him back. There, they found Yzma as a cat, and she so desperately wanted out of her living situation that she added herself to the team. She was also restored to human form shortly thereafter.

 There is a potential ninth member of the core in the form of Vexen (Kingdom Hearts). KH is canon-divergent after DDD and basically ignores almost every game that comes out after Fragmentary Passage. Vexen, as Even, was trying to integrate into life as a hero in Radiant Garden, except everyone annoyed him way too much, so he decided to go be with people that would give right back any insults he dished out. And then realized he was much happier being on the evil team and doing mad science with no ethics. However, he will not be promoted to the upper ranks because 1. it would spoil the acronym and 2. he is unanimously agreed-upon to be the biggest wet blanket of the group and nobody wants him at the founder parties.

(Imagine my disbelief when the actual canon arc for Vexen was THE REVERSE ONE IN WHICH HE JUST DECIDES TO GO LIVE AT RADIANT GARDEN AND NOT BE ANNOYED BY ANYTHING and that’s why JC doesn’t like Kingdom Hearts III)

 Anyway, this crew is a bunch of silly friends who enjoy partying, singing, dancing, drag, indulging in vices, causing mayhem, taking over cities, arranging for mass murder, piecing together smear campaigns…but they’re all pretty much ride or die for each other. And that goes double for the ships of the set: Mozenrath/Huntsman, Mim/Aghoul, Wuya/Yzma, and my favorite ship to end all favorites, Roman/Snatcher (RedHatBlackHat is the ship name).

From there, you have a B-Squad of, like, seventy other people based on my faves. Nonnie, I know you saw this because of Vincent Edgeworth, Victor Blake, and Albert Krueger, and they are three of COUNTLESS examples. It’s a found crime family that keeps getting bigger as I get more fave villains and there’s hardly a rhyme or a reason. Currently, they live in a floating fortress designed when they stole Terra Cyclonia (Storm Hawks) and hefted it out into the aether between worlds with crystal technology.

 They have a rival hero faction in the form of the Cinnamons: a gathering of people who they’ve wronged who turned out to make pretty good friends themselves. While the WHAM ARMY are the villain-protag team that you feel slightly bad loving the escapades of, the Cinnamons are the rainbows, fluff, sunshine, (secret crippling depression and anxiety), and pep-talkers of the multiverse. They’re the deuteragonist team as opposed to the “villains” of the story. They also have eight “leaders,” but they were picked up a little less quickly than the WHAM ARMY founders, instead coming together over the span of a much longer quest. These people are:

Sora (Kingdom Hearts): Heart of the team and the person who pulled them all together, because Sora loves everyone. He, Riku, and Kairi witnessed the WHAM ARMY wreaking destruction on both Radiant Garden and Disney Castle, and Sora decided no one gets to treat his homes-away-from-home like that and get away with it! Between Mozenrath and the still-looming threats of Maleficent and Xehanort, he’s now collecting pals from all worlds to fight against evil and do as much good as they can do! (While having sleepovers.)

Ruby Rose (RWBY): Before she, Nora, Ren, and Jaune could get into Mistral, Sora interrupted them on their path and directed them right back around to Vale with the news that Roman Torchwick was back in action. After an incident involving the Destiny Trio and Team RNJR having to team up and actually kill the massive Grimm unleashed in the V3 endgame, they all headed out to Radiant Garden together to continue their mission.

Papyrus (Undertale): Sora found him while exploring worlds and they clicked immediately as pals. Then the WHAM ARMY, who was living in Mt. Ebott at the time, sparked an anti-monster racist sentiment through the town, and Papyrus was advised to leave the world for his own safety, so he went traveling with Sora.

Stork (Storm Hawks): Maleficent, who is also an active player in this game, made a power play by destroying the Condor with the entire Storm Hawks team onboard while they were on the Far Side of Atmos (post-series). Stork, believing himself to be the only survivor, attempted to take his own life – only for Sora to show up just in time and offer him something better: hope that his friends survived, and new friends to tag along with until they could prove either way.

Jasmine (Aladdin): The Cinnamons came looking to Agrabah for more information on Mozenrath. When Jasmine heard he was causing chaos, she decided to get personally involved.

Katara (Avatar: The Last Airbender): Post-ATLA, no LoK. Sora made a trip to the Fire Nation to see if he could head off the WHAM ARMY’s latest scheme, and ran into the Gaang along the way. After helping Katara, Aang, and Zuko protect the Fire Nation from a very near miss, Sora invited them to come travel with him. Only Katara accepted at first, the other two wanting to clean things up on their homeworld.

Kazuichi Soda (DanganRonpa): Post-SDR2, no DR3. Xehanort requested Izuru Kamukura be used as a vessel, and Kazuichi went in Izuru/Hajime’s place so his buddy didn’t have to. But the first chance he got, Kazuichi turned and ran from the Castle That Never Was…where Sora had just crash-landed. Kazuichi patched up Sora’s ship, and immediately became part of his crew. (Worth noting: in this AU, the Remnants of Despair were never brainwashed and were completely aware of what they were doing. Kazuichi is basically a redemption story, trying to be a better person to make up for the hell he caused. Also, while on the Despair side, he’d hacked off his leg to sew Junko’s in its place, disabling himself – that leg goes through an arc regarding what prosthesis is in its place.)

Rapunzel (Tangled): After the Vardaros arc of S2 of Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure. Rapunzel was targeted by the WHAM ARMY because she was essentially a living MacGuffin for one of their spells. Sora showed up, and Rapunzel decided to go along with him for safety AND fun, leaving Cassandra to continue the pilgrimage to the Dark Kingdom. (Wrote this before KHIII was out. And before the Evil Cass twist.)

 And just like the WHAM ARMY, these folks have a huge B-squad that lives in the Radiant Garden castle and helps them deal with the various tragedies they have to clean up after. Riku, Kairi, and Jaune Arc in particular get a decent amount of stage time.

 As you can see, Maleficent (Sleeping Beauty/Kingdom Hearts) and her forces are another big set of chess pieces on the board! After she sent Mozenrath to gay baby jail and it didn’t stick, she’s been trying to continue plans for domination as usual but ALSO wipe the WHAM ARMY off the face of the multiverse. She, Jafar (Aladdin), Ursula (The Little Mermaid), and Hades (Hercules) all came straight here from KH. But I’m working to model that team’s inner circle on the team in “Quite a Glittering Assemblage,” the sister fic by gavillain (it’s basically this premise but Maleficent gets a team to start instead, but similarities end there, his is a whole different, fresh, and fun flavor). I’ve just gotten all these characters intro’d instory, but the other biggies are Loki (Marvel – I based him in the Cinematic Universe but he’s kind of just an amalgamation of Lokis), Dr. Doom (Marvel), Captain Hook (Once Upon a Time), Russell Edgington (True Blood), and Fish Mooney (Gotham). Currently, they operate out of the Forbidden Mountain in the Enchanted Dominion.

 There’s also a very new addition as of the 140’s chapters: the Heathens. This is a squad of villains with moral lines in the sand (and some antiheroes or corrupted heroes). Basically, these aren’t your killers for fun. These are the people who steal candy from the gas station and think they’re slick, but the point is they’re enjoying themselves so just let it happen. The four founders of this one are Harley Quinn (DC – based on The Batman but an amalgamation of Harleys that leans sympathetic), Yang Xiao Long (RWBY), Giovanni Potage (Epithet Erased), and Velvet Crowe (Tales of Berseria). Currently, they operate out of the old mansion in Twilight Town.

 The Xehanorts are here, and that team is largely who you think it is – though I stripped away Vexen, Demyx, Marluxia, Larxene, and Luxord in order to replace them ALL with Xaldin. More crossover shenanigans to come on this front. This team isn’t very active – they’re waiting for the Keyblade War – but they’re operating out of the World That Never Was.

 There’s also another side villain faction: the Morbians, led by Mirage (Aladdin: The Animated Series). These are the demons of fear, the stuff that lurks in your nightmares, and…the villains I really like but who I don’t quite think fit in with the WHAM ARMY or any other more prominent group. But to give you an idea of what the flavor of this team is, she’s recruited not one but TWO Boogeymen – Pitch Black (Rise of the Guardians) and Oogie Boogie (The Nightmare Before Christmas).

 There will be more villain factions to come, and I kind of want to splinter the Cinnamons to multiple bases as well. Obviously it’s easier to split villains up because they’re fun to write at war with each other – when I have hero teams come up against each other, usually they end up becoming best buddies instead of fighting, and that’s how I like it, but that’s why there’s just ONE BIG HERO TEAM as opposed to the many villain squads rattling around.

 THE SETTING

 So as you have probably gleaned, the multiverse setup is largely based on Kingdom Hearts, which is one of my favorite things (in the KH1 through Fragmentary Passage era anyway). There are many worlds that can be visited either by Gummi Ship or Corridor of Darkness. Basically any evil-aligned sorcerer can use Corridors in this ‘verse – they’ve opened their souls to Darkness and have magic, so they can do so.

 The implication is that every world represents a separate “story” or part of one. As in if it’s a work of fiction HERE, it’s a world THERE. Some characters are actually savvy enough to know they’re fictional (e.g. Megavolt from Darkwing Duck, Xayide from The Neverending Story). Most of them aren’t built to handle the news, though, and just shrug it off if told. (No, really, the cosmic order prevents them from taking that news seriously if they’re not from something that regularly leans on the fourth wall anyway.)

 But sometimes, things get AU’d in without their full worlds. I was inspired by how Final Fantasy is treated in canon KH, and once I started bringing in more FF stuff by the same method, I felt motivated to do that with MORE fandoms if I felt the characters could be divorced from their settings and histories easily. I’ve done it for most Disney Channel non-animated properties as well as Satellite City (ain’t that the worst combo you’ve ever looked at). I’m planning to do it for Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn because I’m coming up on a location I want to delve into the civilization of but don’t have many canon characters for, so guess what, you get the FE cast now.

 Major worlds or relevant locations in play are the Cyclonian warship, Radiant Garden, Twilight Town, and occasionally the Enchanted Dominion, but we move from plotline to plotline with journeys to many, many, MANY worlds of things I want to play with the settings and casts of. Also, the Cyclonian warship is about to get replaced with another WHAM ARMY base; we’ll get there.

 THE STORY

 For the first major “book” of TBTC, the WHAM ARMY has found a spell that they think will let them conquer the entire multiverse by giving them control over Kingdom Hearts itself. All they have do to is collect a bunch of MacGuffins that correspond to twelve elements: fire, water, earth, air, light, darkness, life, death, time, space, entropy, and aether. In order to do this, they visit the worlds of KH, RWBY, Avatar, Storm Hawks, Okami, Undertale, Wakfu, The Legend of Zelda, The Neverending Story, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and many many more. The Cinnamons catch wind of what they’re doing and start assembling. Meanwhile Maleficent is on the hunt for the Book of Prophecies and starts hiring villains on her team as well. After many madcap adventures and some devastating tragedies near endgame, the Cinnamons accidentally put the Book of Prophecies in Maleficent’s hands at the same time that Maleficent finally captures Mozenrath and gets him under heel. The WHAM ARMY and Cinnamons both launch attacks on Maleficent’s forces, and each walks away with what they came for. This is also the part where we slowburn up to the four major WHAM ARMY ships and many Cinnamon ships. In the end, the WHAM ARMY actually gets all the ingredients for their spell, but what they don’t know is it will actually cause the DESTRUCTION of the worlds. So an outside force intervenes (Discord from MLPFIM, who later joins the WHAM ARMY because he wants friends who actually appreciate him as a villain and won’t make him change) to stop them, and the next thing they know, they’re starting from square one.

 We’re now in the second “book” of this story. The Cinnamons are gathering up all lost friends – the rest of Team RWBY, the Gaang, the Storm Hawks (who did in fact survive the explosion), the lost KH characters. The WHAM ARMY, on the other hand, is gathering up more villains to bolster their forces for a new evil plan: to conquer the worlds one by one, starting with Atlantis (Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire) and using portals to link to other territories of interest. While the WHAM ARMY is essentially working through a to-do list of what they need before they can launch such a massive invasion, the Cinnamons are finding strength in numbers because the writing’s on the wall that between Mozenrath, Maleficent, Mirage, and Xehanort, things are going to get worse before they get better, and as evil builds, good will need to rise to protect the innocent. As for Maleficent, she’s no longer able to chase the Book of Prophecies, and so, because she’s got Hades, Loki, and Salem (RWBY) there and they’re all like “Even though we’re pretty godlike, we are not that happy with how the gods we knew have run things,” Maleficent’s new goal is to slaughter the gods of all pantheons (minus those in her care) and replace them with her allies.

 Anyway, as I had said in the post you saw, Anon – I basically take everything fictional I love and shove it into this AU for daydreams because it lets me imagine my faves having CROSSOVER INTERACTIONS and doing cool epic stuff on a multi-world scale. (But as much as I’ve talked up the epic aspect, a lot of it is just…like…people fucking around and hosting karaoke nights.) Anyway, I hope this gave you a good sense of the madness, and I hope it serves as a reminder to everyone that they can and should just. Make a daydream and/or fanfic universe that’s indulgent as hell. Just do it.

[aion-rsa]

Godzilla Singular Point: The Weird History of Jet Jaguar

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The latest take on Toho’s iconic, building-crushing lizard comes in the form of Godzilla Singular Point, an anime series now available in dubbed form on Netflix. Taking place in the not-too-distant future, this reimagining of the King of Monsters involves a group of human characters becoming aware – through rather bizarre ways – of a coming apocalyptic event. Now the only thing that can save them is a behemoth out to punch monsters and look out for the little guy.

No, not Godzilla. He’s actually the apocalyptic event. No, our hero is none other than Jet Jaguar.

Yes, it’s finally time for Jet Jaguar to get his due.

A concept nearly 50 years old at this point, Jet Jaguar is one of those characters who was initially doomed to fail, but lives on due to nostalgia and the golden notion of, “I realize most people hated that thing from my childhood, but I bet I could make it good!” At best, he was a rad addition to the Godzilla mythos. At worst, he was a dumb idea from a dumb movie. For the most part, he’s remembered as something goofy that gets laughed at, despite having some genuine earnestness.

Jet Jaguar was created from both a fan contest and a corporate game of telephone. Back in 1972, to jump on the bandwagon of tokusatsu giant superhero/robot shows, Toho asked fans to design their own superhero design. The winner was a half-man/half-bird robot with a lengthy neck resembling a stack of rings named Red Alone. The concept was turned into a full-on rubber costume, but they changed the color scheme, which upset the young winner. They later decided to just scrap the whole thing, keep the color scheme, and make their own new design. And so, Jet Jaguar was born.

The superhero made an entire one movie appearance in 1973’s Godzilla vs. Megalon. As the urban legend goes, this was initially intended to be a standalone Jet Jaguar movie that the studio just didn’t have faith in towards the end and they hastily threw in Godzilla and recurring Godzilla villain Gigan. While the claim is dubious and unproven, it certainly is easy to understand where the allegations come from.

Everything about the movie feels rushed. As the last-minute replacement for another Godzilla film that didn’t pan out, filming took several weeks and production was a mere six months. Even the Godzilla costume was whipped up in record time. As for the story, outside of the intro, the preexisting elements (Godzilla and Gigan) aren’t thrown in until about 2/3 into the movie. Up until that point, it feels like a Jet Jaguar vs. Megalon movie with the production team hitting the panic button.

The plot of Godzilla vs. Megalon is that a scientist Goro Ibuki is working on a robot called Jet Jaguar, along with his little brother Rokuro and his best friend Hiroshi. They get wrapped up in a plot involving a group of beings from Atlantis-But-Not-Really, who are annoyed at all the nuclear bomb tests going on in their neck of the woods. They steal Jet Jaguar and use him to guide their insect god Megalon to different cities for the sake of smashing them up and punishing humanity.

Goro and friends get their hands on Jet Jaguar’s controls and use him to lead Godzilla to where Megalon is. Then the Seatopians call some alien friends for a solid and have them send in Gigan. Jet Jaguar is able to break away from all control and becomes fully sentient, as well as revealing the ability to turn into a giant. It becomes a big tag team battle, mostly remembered for Godzilla doing the silliest dropkick you’ve ever seen, followed by a second one for good measure.

The villains escape, Jet Jaguar and Godzilla shake hands, they go their separate ways, and Jet Jaguar reunites with the humans heroes after shrinking back down. He gets his own snazzy theme song to close things out.

In Japan, the movie wasn’t all that successful. As the thirteenth title in the Godzilla series, it brought in the worst returns yet. Between public burnout and the movie’s lack of quality, it just wasn’t grabbing people. That said, it came out at just the right time in the United States. Released in 1976, it came out months before the anticipated King Kong remake. The American movie poster for the movie even bit on the King Kong poster by featuring Godzilla and Megalon duking it out while each standing on a different Twin Tower, even though the movie at no point took place in the States.

A year later, the movie would be cut down into 48 minutes so they could broadcast it on NBC in prime time, across an hour with commercials. The only reason I mention this at all is because it was hosted by John Belushi wearing a Godzilla costume, which is sadly somewhere in the abyss of golden lost media.

Getting back to Jet Jaguar – the topic of this article – I feel the need to bring up Germany’s handling of the movie’s translation. Rather than call him “Jet Jaguar,” they referred to him as “King Kong.” I mean…sure, why not. Even weirder, when the next two movies introduced fellow giant robot MechaGodzilla, Germany once again referred to the robot as “King Kong.” Guys, I know what you’re going for here, but it doesn’t work that way.

Anyway, Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla and Terror of MechaGodzilla followed Godzilla vs. Megalon and closed off the classic Showa Era of Godzilla movies. Not only did Japan need to rest Godzilla as a concept for nearly a decade, but this also meant that whenever Godzilla would come back, it was going to be some kind of reboot or new “only the first movie counts” installment. Jet Jaguar was never high on the list to be brought back, especially since MechaGodzilla completely overshadowed him.

He would at least get a little more exposure in 1991 when Godzilla vs. Megalon was featured in the second season of Mystery Science Theater 3000. While much of the episode is spent making fun of one of the Seatopians for looking like Oscar Wilde, they toss plenty of jokes at Jet Jaguar. Most memorably, they “translate” Jet Jaguar’s ending theme, which notes that his mother never loved him and he looks a lot like Jack Nicholson.

Due to rights issues, Godzilla vs. Megalon is one of the few MST3K episodes that is no longer legally available for viewing. This does make the original MST3K Collection Volume 10 box set (which included Godzilla vs. Megalon as one of the four movies) a collector’s item, as it was later discontinued and rereleased with The Giant Gila Monster taking its spot.

A stranger use of Jet Jaguar comes in the form of Certain Distant Suns’ music video for “Bitter” in 1995. While there’s not much of a narrative outside of the band playing, footage of Godzilla vs. Megalon being shown, and a few shots of guys walking around in Megalon and Jet Jaguar costumes, I really insist you give the video a look due to the ending. It certainly goes in a direction I wasn’t expecting.

In 1997, Jet Jaguar made his next official appearance in another frankly bizarre spectacle. In Japan, a series called Godzilla Island appeared on TV in three-minute increments. While it only lasted a year, there were a whopping 256 episodes, meaning almost 13 hours of footage. If you’ve never heard of Godzilla Island, you might be thinking, “Wow, almost 13 hours of Godzilla stuff? Why isn’t this more well known?”

Well, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that instead of using guys in rubber suits, the kaiju action was done with action figures. Yikes.

Not only did Jet Jaguar show up during these adventures, but they gave him the 90s superhero action figure treatment. Much like how they released as many figures of Batman as possible for different crime-fighting scenarios, Godzilla Island gave us Silver Jet Jaguar, Medical Jet Jaguar, and even Fireman Jet Jaguar. Collect them all!

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Movies

Godzilla vs. Kong Writer Talks About Spending 8 Years in the MonsterVerse

By Don Kaye

Movies

Godzilla vs. Kong Director and Writer Talk Future of The MonsterVerse

By Don Kaye

In the early 2000s, Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee was released for the GameCube and Xbox under the Atari brand. It was a fighting game featuring various characters from Godzilla lore and though Atari wanted to include Jet Jaguar, Toho refused. Still, at least Megalon was included in the game. There would be two sequels in the form of Godzilla: Save the Earth and Godzilla: Unleashed. FINALLY, Jet Jaguar was playable, because if there’s anything you can count on, it’s scraping the bottom of the barrel when you’re working on multiple installments of a nostalgic who’s who project.

He’d also return in 2014’s Godzilla game for PlayStation 3 and 4. The producer of the game didn’t even plan on putting him in there, but he saw that the programmers already were working on him and just shrugged it off. There was a special trick to summoning Jet Jaguar as a boss character. By ending up in three different Godzilla vs. Jet Jaguar scenarios and winning all three times, you would then unlock a special cutscene of the two shaking hands while a confused military woman would wonder about their history.

Around the mid-2010s, IDW Publishing was all about releasing a bunch of comics with the Godzilla license. Their mainline series was Godzilla: Rulers of the Earth, which went on for 25 issues. Early on, Jet Jaguar appeared out of nowhere during a fight between Godzilla and the team of Gigan and Orga. In human size, Jet Jaguar flew into Orga’s mouth, then expanded into giant size, causing the beast to explode. Especially awesome was that it came with the cliffhanger text, “Next: PUNCH! PUNCH! PUNCH!” a reference to Jet Jaguar’s theme song from the movie.

Jet Jaguar showed up regularly in the series, coming off as Godzilla’s designated driver friend and handler. What I mean is that he seemed to be out to protect Godzilla, but that meant having to keep his violent ally on task (ie. pointing out that Gigan was nearby to stop Godzilla from attacking Jet Jaguar) and throwing punches when the situation absolutely called for it.

This continuity played up Jet Jaguar as more enigmatic than anything, as although he was mechanical, the only human character who knew his origins was killed off before it could be explained. Even one of the invading alien villains saw him on a screen and basically went, “Oh crap. It’s THIS guy!” Regardless, he still came off as a total badass, winning fights against Godzilla, Gigan (the chainsaw-hand version), and Destroyah.

Then again, at one point he needed to be saved by the 1998 American Godzilla, which at least proved as a reminder to the robot hero that there are Toho characters far more hated than him.

Toho started using Jet Jaguar again, albeit in sillier ways. In 2019, as an April Fool’s Day prank, they put up a teaser on YouTube for a Jet Jaguar movie. They also had him appear a few times on Godziban, a Godzilla web series for kids that, once again, used dolls and action figures to tell its stories.

Now Jet Jaguar is a major part of Godzilla Singular Point. To get into specifics on the plot would be like explaining advanced calculus, but to keep on-topic, Jet Jaguar is the creation of Goro Otaki as both a way to ward off monstrous threats and as a company mascot. Considering King Kong’s role in King Kong vs. Godzilla was “kidnapped to be a company mascot,” maybe the Germans were onto something with the rename.

Anyway, this version of Jet Jaguar is more mechanical in appearance instead of having to rely on making him look like a human in a costume. Jet Jaguar is there to protect the heroes from the endless supply of monsters, usually taking some extensive damage. Still, the robot gets rebuilt stronger and stronger and becomes advanced enough to become self-aware and speak in…well, the voice of a teenage girl.

I don’t know, I guess I just figured he’d sound like Astro Guy from King of the Monsters.

There’s a big hard-to-explain twist, but the main thing to know is that Jet Jaguar becomes a full-on badass by the end of the series, turns out to be a huge key to the plot, and has a completely kickass showdown with Godzilla. In a way, Jet Jaguar’s journey in Singular Point is a lot like in real life, going from a lame idea that appealed to kids and gradually being understood as a respected part of the Godzilla mythos. Something initially representative of the worst of the franchise, proven to be something genuinely cool in the right hands.

Now it’s time for America to return the favor. Once again, timing is on Jet Jaguar’s side. The Monsterverse was on its way to the graveyard after the box office intake of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, but Godzilla vs. Kong came out at just the right time in the tail end of the pandemic to be a big success and keep the series going a little bit longer. There aren’t too many names in the toybox left to pull out, but at this point, Gigan and Jet Jaguar have to be high on the list.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Make it happen, Hollywood!

Godzilla Singular Point is available to stream on Netflix now.

The post Godzilla Singular Point: The Weird History of Jet Jaguar appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[grave-gift]

PLEASE talk about It Devours! and any other theories you have (esp about 171, I didn't spend 32 straight hours overanalyzing it for nothing p l e a s e) -local Carlos stanon

LOL okay thank you for the ask! I will number my ramblings the same way I did in my post. 

Long post is long.

It Devours!, A Spy In The Desert Secret, and general podcast spoilers. CWs for abuse, pregnancy, and mentions of PTSD, grief, and trauma, although I don’t elaborate on them.

1.) 171 thoughts: Complete thoughts will come in a separate post! Hopefully! I keep meaning to write it and my brain doesn’t cooperate, but the too long don’t read version is “33, 106, and 171 all are the same event from 3 different points of view (all of whom are versions of Cecil) and it’s a cycle of self-sabotage resulting from the abuse he endured from his mother.” I also have supporting lines from additional episodes for this, but on top of that, Mab the bus driver in it Devours is ALSO mentioned as seeing a flickering in a mirror, which is a very significant part of the Cecil Mirror Lore I’ve been conducting. It’s coupled with her feeling a prevailing sense of unease, like her and all her passengers are in danger, and it is... very familiar. I haven’t figured out what the implications of this are yet. I am still thinking. 

2.) Esteban Nonsense: I went through a lot of canon and a lot of thinking to determine that his birthday is probably around November 1st, 2017. This means that during the events of It Devours, Carlos and Cecil are literally preparing to bring a baby home. 

It Devours was released October 17th, 2017, and I read it as taking place before then in canon (because Joseph and Jeffery would have had to submit a manuscript for approval and editing, things take time.) It takes place between 111 and 117 somewhere in my opinion. Adoption is a long process, it takes months and more often years to get approved and to get a child, and maybe it’s different in Night Vale, but Carlos’ actions in It Devours become... a lot more tragic and frantic if you can imagine he’s anxiously awaiting his own child. His reaction to Janice almost being Devoured is emotional and powerful, and he obviously cares for her so so much, but when you add a layer of “I have to stop this now because our family is growing soon” it just. WHUMP. I live for it. 

For bonus whump, you could accept a headcanon I have that Cecil’s cousin Sabina is a surrogate for them, and in 113 she is pregnant with Esteban and not her own daughter. Then, imagine that Sabina is in Night Vale during It Devours.

For bonus bonus whump, also consider: Carlos trans, Carlos seahorse dad, Carlos currently pregnant, and early on, and fucking terrified of what’s happening around him (he did choose not to go out for drinks with Nilanajana and crew to celebrate the defeat of “The Smiling God,” just sayin’ 👀) [disclaimer I’m transmasc and I’m conducting original research into improving communication and resource accessibility for transmasculine people who want to become or are pregnant; this isn’t a fetish thing; trans people can choose how they use their own bodies; die by my sword if you’re a freak about this]

3.) Overanalyzing Themes: The thematic elements in It Devours are very interesting! It is, of course, a commentary on science/logic and faith/emotion and how completely devoting (ha!) yourself to one and denying the other entirely can be dangerous. In addition to that, however, it also deals heavily with themes of trauma, PTSD, and grief. 

For that first point, I want to point out that the logic/emotion argument is completely symmetrical between the major and minor characters, and that there’s 3 tiers, in a way. Carlos vs Pastor Munn and Gordon; Nilanajana vs Darryl, and Mark and Luisa vs Stephanie and Jamillah. Carlos and Pastor Munn are both fully “destroyed” in different ways (emotionally and... physically, respectively) by their absolute inability to view the other side of this debate. Nilanajana and Darryl both start out as very polar but learn, through each other, the importance of the other side of things, and the Dumbass Crew as I am calling the rest of them are just Dumb and I adore them. Additionally, there is one character whose worldview is a shockingly good balance between scientific/logical thought and faith, and it’s god damn Larry LeRoy with with historical dioramas. If you’ve ever studied history you’ll know that it is conducted primarily through empirical investigation, but it is impossible to fully understand what history can teach us without also using “the historian’s tools” (as my professor called them), empathy and imagination. Not to mention the artistic side of those projects, which... art is another excellent example of the blending of both logic and emotion. Larry LeRoy is the balance between these two and also he’s the one who actually talks Carlos down in the end. Absolute fucking hero. 

I don’t have... much to say yet about grief and PTSD and trauma but they’re in there, a lot, and there’s a lot of good lines about all of them.

Also interesting, but separate, Nilanajana on page 112 says “I don’t think of home as a place, It’s more the ritual of my life. The work I do every day, and the things I like to eat, and where I like to eat them.” and Darryl on page 113 says “Sometimes where you live is just a place, no matter how long you live there.” This is partially a way of tying him and Nilanajana together (and also highlighting how Nilanajana grows throughout the book as the protagonist), but it is ALSO a very interesting additional take on the “home is a name/place” vs “home is people I love” lines we get from Kevin and Carlos/Cecil in the year 3 finale (and partially in Holiday, the patreon bonus episode, but that’s not really important enough to get into here). Kevin: Things without names don’t really exist. So I’m going to call this…well, I’m going to call it Desert Bluffs! Desert Bluffs was the name of my hometown, and by naming it Desert Bluffs, this place becomes my new hometown! We are in my home!! We are in Desert Bluffs, no matter where we are in space or time. What is a town but a name, right? Cecil:  Carlos held my shoulder and said, “Night Vale is just a name, Cecil. Night Vale is just the name for an area where everyone you love lives,” he said. “Don’t worry about the name. Worry about the everyone,” he said.

Just something to think about. 

4.) Side Character Love: Bro this one doesn’t require anything from me like, big brain analysis wise, I just... I love Josh Crayton, I love Jackie Fierro, I LOVE THEIR SIBLING RELATIONSHIP??? I am so happy we got to check in on them!!! I love that Jackie is dating Sam for SOME REASON god that’s a mess and I love it. I love Laura, the waitress at the Moonlight All Nite Diner, she’s fantastic and it was so good to read more lore about her!! I love Abby and Steve and Janice, particularly Abby! We learned more about Abby’s character in one line of this book than we did in the rest of the entirety of canon (she’s cool in a crisis and then breaks down later, alone, in the shower. Making her the LITERAL opposite of Cecil. I adore them.) PAMELA,,,,, GOD,,,, 

Basically. It Devours is an excellent novel. I had a lot of fun with it. 

Also, this is what my copy of It Devours looks like.

[chorusnihili]

I'd love to hear more about the development of your Gaster! :D

BACKSTORY ASK MEME 1. How did you first come up with your muse’s backstory, if you did at all? Continued from here Also asked by @alagaster 

So I left off with the question of just how Gaster's soul ended up in pieces.

I’m actually going to detour at the moment and say that it was around that point that I had decided to make the blog.  I had a vague beginning and an ending, and usually that’s not enough for me to want to start, but I was excited, I had a lot of fun, so I went for it.

Honestly, one of the first things I need to have before I even think of making a blog is a good url.  Urls are super important to me, and generally, whether or not I think of a good one is a key factor in whether or not I actually make the blog.

But in this case, I was too eager to start and I actually just threw together chorusnihil so I could get started on the pages.  The thought process remained the same--the chorus is from Greek plays, the group of characters that narrate the actions occurring in the play.  nihil is Latin for nothing--and I later changed it to nihili, which is Genitive, to roughly make the “chorus of nothing” or “nothing’s chorus,” a reference to the fact that the guy wiped himself out of history, and so there’s no protagonist to narrate.  This was supposed to be a temporary URL, but I got attached to it, for reasons I’ll get to later.  

(And really, isn’t a roleplay blog a modern chorus in it’s own way?)

Also there’s the phonetic pun-- CORE-us, anyone?

So I threw together a lot of the basic bios.  Most of the stat pages are really bland, most of the guts of the story comes from the hidden details, most of which were added on later.  

Something that came up around this point was Gaster’s relationship to Asgore.  A lot of fanon pictures them as really close.  A lot of fanon also portrays Gaster as Gaster as desperately wanting to retake the surface, which...as mentioned previously, my Gaster just, wasn’t into.  

So it sort of put Gaster in between Asgore and Toriel--he wasn’t happy about the decision to go to war with humanity, but he wasn’t going to abandon everyone, even if he did become really reclusive.  

I thought about the idea of the human souls, and I knew that Gaster would immediately hate the idea of working with them.  And that was convenient, too, since it allowed me to further separate Gaster and Alphys’s work.  At first, it was just a heavy disagreement.  The idea that Gaster killed Asgore accidentally came a great deal later, but it honestly served to be a rather critical piece of the story. 

The design of the DT Extractor and Sans and Papyrus were also very vague concepts at this point. 

Revisiting the idea of his fall.  We know from the canon dialogue that he fell into his own invention and that he was scatted across space and time.  

The CORE is the common culprit and it was what I had chosen, too.  But how?  How could an energy source... do that? 

So the idea occurred to me that maybe--maybe that was exactly as it was designed to do.  After all, even in the real world, we have power plants that operate by ripping apart molecules.  So... magic.  Why not magic?  A machine that derives power out of ripping apart magical energy.

And monsters are made out of magical energy.  

Falling into that sounds like a very grisly fate, indeed.      

The idea of how he got erased from reality isn’t one I really have solidified.  G has a couple of theories, and I’m willing to roll with either of them, but, really?  I’m not super interested in making a hard reason for it.  Namely to adapt to other versions of fanon other muns might have. 

Essentially, the theories say that the CORE destroying him released so much energy that it tore a hole in the Determination that pushes the timeline forward, thus allowing the Void to enter and merge with his soul.  

From there, either, 

A., his Determination very briefly was larger than that of the Timeline, and he himself invoked a Reset, but given that he was outside of the timeline at the moment, it was corrupted and only erased certain parts rather than fully resetting.   I think that this was the original theory that I used in the original RP.  

B., the Void acted as a corrective force trying to correct the hole in the timeline.  In doing so, it erased Gaster from the reality, thus replacing the existing timeline with a new one in which certain things never happened.  

C., something involving the power of Rewrite that Gaster has from the duality of Determination and Void.

D., something else entirely.  

And so we had the scattered Unbound Gaster. 

Which, funfact, the name Unbound Gaster for the form was supposed to be temporary, as well.  It’s a reference to Unbound Hoopa for Pokemon.  (Which is why Provoked Form Gaster isn’t called Unbound Form!)

Within the original RP that I developed most of this lore, Refused Gaster didn’t exist.  In fact, that roleplay ended with Gaster’s permanent death--and being permanently forgotten to the world.  A choice he intentionally made because the damage he did to the timeline by falling into the CORE was still present and only getting worse, and the only way to fix it was to allow his Soul to come together and pass on properly, thus allowing the damage to mend.

It was sad.  I cried.  I got emotional.  

I got attached to a traumatic asshole character I literally had for four days.  

Somewhere in here, I began to think about the origins of Gaster.  Like, way way way in the past.  Some people have Gaster being actively involved in the war, but it didn’t work for my portrayal, of having him be so afraid of humans and the surface.  So for it to work out, I had him really young for the war, really young when everyone got driven underground.  

I killed off his parents because ......

Frankly I didn’t want to design them :|

There’s a lot of varying opinions and interpretations about skeleton monsters, and it’s a section of the fandom I’ve decided to stray away from for now.  

But I didn’t want the loss to be traumatic.  Gaster’s been through a lot already, and I have personal vendettas against characters who solely consist of trauma after trauma.  

So I decided to make the loss very distant--he’s aware he probably had parents, or maybe he came to be some other way--but he doesn’t remember them, there’s no tragic “my parents were killed in front of me,” it’s simply something he didn’t have, and something he never needed given the nature of monsters to be kind and caring.  

...

But it felt like it was missing something.

So I started to toy around with this idea of a mentor, one who played the role of a father-figure, one who would plant the seeds to give Gaster the appreciation of science and knowledge.  Someone who could take this lost and terrified boy and start to turn him into the intelligent and steady doctor we end up with.  

Then came the problem of how he and this mentor would actually meet; Gaster’s scar proved to be a convenient excuse, plus it gave me a backstory for that, as well.  A few humans attacked him and delivered the injury, and Gaster’s mentor found the wounded boy and took care of him.  

The mentor is meant to be a vague entity, and you can view this in action in this memory.  (Only partially because I didn’t want to name them.)  Unfortunately, as per the nature of characters created post hoc, their fate was already sealed.  I made the choice to cut their influence on Gaster’s life short.  

(If they were around longer, who knows?  Maybe they could have prevented some of the stupider things Gaster has done.  Maybe they could have changed fate.  But...  as we’ll get to, everything happened exactly as it had to.)  

Again, I made it a very distant loss.  It’s a rather simple conclusion that not every monster would be happy vacating the surface--Gaster’s mentor had lived there their entire life.  It was their home, they were not leaving, even upon threat of death.  And so it was a bittersweet parting, but one with closure, and Gaster said his farewells and departed to the Underground.  

Honestly, what I find really shocking about this character is just how intensely he wants to do good.  I mean, I’m no stranger to good characters, but few of my characters push it as far as Gaster does, and how quickly that feeling came to me, considering he started in the original roleplay as a ruthless asshole bastard more than willing to fuck over and torture a bunch of children just for a chance at being whole again.  

Most of Gaster’s early life in the Underground found in this post was written on the spot as I wrote that post, so it came really late.  

I still find it hilarious that he used to work in therapy.  You’re well aware you need therapy you fucking bastard.  Quit denying it.  

So, revisiting the idea of Gaster and Asgore.  I do like the idea of them being close, and Gaster even calls Asgore his best friend.  The declaration of war put a huge strain on the relationship.  

I originally thought about the idea of him accidentally killing Asgore for shits n giggles.  At my heart I am indeed an angst gremlin, so I was just thinking about what an alternate timeline where that happened might be like.  After all, Gaster’s angry, Asgore’s full of guilt, with the way monster magic works, it wouldn’t be too far of a stretch to think that it could happen.  

But the more I thought about it, the more it fit eerily well.  The guilt gave Gaster a reason to create Sans (and later Papyrus) as part of his belief in Karma (creating a life to replace the life he took) and to look into Alphys’s research into Determination enough to create the blueprints for the DT Extractor; both of these things were things that I couldn’t otherwise really fit into his storyline.  

And finally...

His declining mental state and despair over the concept of the DT Extractor was what led to him being distracted enough to make such a critical mistake and fall into the CORE.  

And given that the timeline changes when he falls, I realized that...  I could have this happen, and the current timeline be unaffected.  

Now, given that I said that I wanted to avoid more trauma in Gaster’s life, this decision might seem contradictory.  But, it also served a very important point--Asgore returning to life, that mistake being fixed upon his fall gave Gaster something to hold onto.  Something that made his fate not as awful as it otherwise would have been.  A small piece of solace in hell.  

Plus, Gaster’s guilt at the incident caused him to resign as Royal Scientist, further allowing him and Alphys to have their separate stories. 

And pretty much everything snapped together at that point.  Really, strangely well.  I joked before on this blog if I’m really the one writing it.

If Gaster had not killed Asgore, he would have never created Sans and Papyrus, he would have never created the DT Extractor blueprints; if he did not create the blueprints, he would have never been distracted enough to fall into the CORE, if he never fell into the CORE, the blueprints would have never ended up with Alphys, she could have never created Flowey, and if Flowey was never created, he could have never used the souls to break the barrier and the True Pacifist ending would have never come to pass.  

It all happened exactly as it had to.

It feels oddly poetic, given the way Undertale works.  

In some ways, it’s cruel.  Gaster regularly struggles with the idea that for his people to be happy, he had to literally be wiped out of existence.  But in other ways, it’s a comfort--for at least he knows that his suffering wasn’t for nothing.  That there was a purpose--that even if he had to be erased, he played a vital role in ensuring his people found victory. 

Oh.  One final note...  In finalizing this story, you may notice that Gaster follows a classic pattern.  We have a hero, who’s mostly good, but through his own flaws makes a tragic mistake and seals his own grim fate.

It’s called a tragedy and they’re common in Greek plays.

What was that about a chorus again?

I think that’s just about every important point I could cover.  That being said, if you couldn’t tell, this is a very fascinating topic to me, so if you have any further questions or need any clarifications, feel free to send them in.  

[newtafterdark]

Taste of Metal - Chapter 2:   Safe Inside Familiar Walls AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26157634/chapters/63644236

Summary: What if the overwhelming VR experience Gordon went through, had a deeper purpose than just being a simple simulation & a freelance debug job for him? But most importantly- what if Gordon Freeman listens to Metal & used to be in a band? aka. the "Metalhead Gordon AU"

- - -

Gordon couldn’t sleep, as much as his body wanted him to.

The pain was one thing, but the number of unanswered questions was the overwhelming main reason he had curled up in a blanket, staring at nothing with wide eyes like a startled cat.

Tommy had not moved much after he had teleported them both into Gordon’s apartment, aside from grabbing a water bottle and some painkillers from the kitchen for the shaken scientist.

“D-Do we just wait? I don’t… I don’t know what to do a-about any of this. What even is “this”? What happened? H-How are you even REAL?”, Gordon stammered.

Tommy gave him an apologetic smile from his spot at the end of the bed.

“I just am, Mr Freeman. We all were- uhm- we all are real! I… wanted to tell you during everything. We all did! B-But the code didn’t let us.”

“But you can talk about it now! What changed it?”

Tommy appeared a chunk more nervous at this question but continued anyway-

“You.”

“M-Me??”, Gordon stuttered as he found himself in the focus of Tommy’s vibrant glowing eyes once again.

“We didn’t think someone could alter the code of the simulation like you did, Mr. Freeman... Y-You freed us.”, Tommy said with a warm smile- “I… all of us will do our best to explain everything to you once everyone is here.”

“In my apartment?” Tommy rubbed the back of his neck nervously. “We thought bringing you here would be the safest option for you. It’s a place you know and would feel comfortable in. I-In general but also to talk about everything that happened?”

Gordon nodded slowly.

“I… yeah, I guess that makes sense. And when you say “we”... are you sure everyone will make it out alive without our help?”

“Absolutely!”, Tommy's laugh lines deepened at the edge of his eyes- “I think they are just wrecking the place now for fun now! :)”

That left Gordon silent for a few seconds.

“Oh. W-Well… I…”, Gordon let out a short shaky laugh- “Sorry that I keep you from joining the fun... and that I can’t add support myself-”

Suddenly, Gordon found himself being held once more. Tommy hugged him gently, his chin resting on Gordon’s head.

“A-All of us want you to be safe first, Mr… … Gordon. Fun mayhem comes second! And… a-and I am rather here with you than g-getting overwhelmed with the noise… as fun as destroying a facility might be.”

Gordon chuckled, brushing away a tear he hadn’t noticed falling. “Oh… uhm, thanks. For being here and… the foresight and all that. I don’t think we’ll be safe here in the long run though…”

The taller scientist tilted his head at that. “Why would you leave your home behind? You don’t have to when anyone who could tell on us has other problems to deal with. Much... much bigger problems at that!”

“What… okay, you actually need to sit my ass down and explain what the fuck is happening. Because... this vague shit? Not helping with my still high-stress levels, my man.”

“Resonance cascade………....2”, was suddenly muttered too closely into Gordon’s left ear, almost making the man yeet himself off the bed-

“OH SHI-”

Gordon stared, almost frozen in place.

“B-BENREY?”

The guard (or former guard now? had he even ever been one, to begin with?) was propping himself up on the bed beside Gordon, his lower body no-clipping through it. Seeing this happen in real life turned out to be way trippier than Gordon could have ever imagined.

Yet aside from that… and the very much scary boss encounter they had had with him in the simulation, Benrey looked relaxed. Comfortable even.

“Yo, Feetm-”

Instantly, Benrey got tackled by Gordon. Aggressively, yes - but not with ill intent. Benrey let out a startled wheeze but soon stared in shock as he was tightly hugged against Gordon’s chest.

“I still have no idea how any of this is happening, but I am so fucking happy to see your annoying ass alive, holy SHIT!”, Gordon laughed, ignoring the pain in his stump as good as he could.

Tommy let out a snort as a few pink sweet voice orbs escaped Benrey.

“uhhhhhhhhhhhh… You too, man? Wasn’t sure if you’d make it on your own… decided that Tommy was the best. He always is, but… ya know. For getting you out. Smarter than all of us combined, ya know?”

Tommy waved Benrey off with a blush but smiled.

“Y-Yeah but all that matters is that everyone’s okay. Do you think the rest of the team will be here soon? I w-want us to tell Gordon what happened. He… he really needs to know. There were enough secrets in Black Mesa. :(”

Gordon slowly let go of Benrey and sat up, returning to cradling his arm. He let out a sigh.

“You can say that again. I… I don’t know how much you all know about my side of things, but the bastards never really told me the most important details on any of the projects they assigned me to. I always had to peace everything together myself… which was frustrating as all hell...”

Now it was Benrey’s turn to let out a huff as he pulled himself on top of the bed and got comfortable laying down with his hands behind his head. Gordon decided to look past the fact that the man was still in full guard get-up, including his helmet and boots. At least he looked surprisingly clean...

“Yeah, that was, uh… their whole schtick. Always has been.”, Benrey said, scratching his cheek with- … that was an entire third arm he just grew and Gordon decided to look past that even quicker than the full guard-getup.

Suddenly the door to Gordon’s bedroom opened, making Gordon jump and hold tighter onto his aching arm- until he recognized the friendly face of Darnold…and the very large golden retriever that pushed the door further open to let herself in.

Gordon’s tense shoulders relaxed a bit at the sight of both of them.

“H-Hey...”, stuttered Darnold, giving Gordon a nervous smile and wave- “I just wanted to let you guys know that Sunkist and I checked the area and the apartment. Everything’s clean.”

Sunkist let out a soft woof at the sound of her name and then opted to rest her head on the bed near Gordon. Man, she really was huge. And very much 3D now. Another thing to add to Gordon’s “oh damn I’m starting to feel real overwhelmed by this entire situation”-list.

Tommy pet Sunkist’s head gently and nodded. “Thanks, Darnold! And that’s good! We are several miles away from the facility... but it’s better to be extra safe and see if anything is weird here!”

Darnold sat down on the floor beside Tommy.

“I’ll go check again in a few minutes… I don’t trust this supposed freedom just yet.”

Gordon opted to just nod at that. Speech was slowly failing him as his senses dulled slightly from exhaustion. He leaned back against his bed frame.

He was about to close his eyes as the sound of space being wrapped and time getting bent to his left pulled him right back into high alert-

Dr Coomer and Bubby stepped out through the portal that had formed way too close to the boxes with Gordon’s vinyl record collection, followed by G-Man who closed the portal with a wave of his hand.

“Hello, Gordon!”, Dr Coomer exclaimed, eyes bright and happy as he spotted the man currently half bundled up in his blanket- “Looks like you made it here with good Tommy’s help without... ehm… further harm.”

Bubby scanned Gordon’s form with his eyes and frowned.

“They actually did it, the bastards. Shouldn’t surprise me, but...”, he motioned at the air without aim, seemingly not being able to put his frustration into words.

Gordon just smiled softly at them, exhausted to all hell and back but so relieved and happy that the entire Science Team had made it.

He also noted that Dr Coomer’s limb enhancements were far more visible in real life than in the low-poly form he had been used to. It was interesting to see and the tech guy in him really wanted to ask the man about the intricacies of how they worked. But… later. That could wait.

Bubby on the other hand… there was something off about how Bubby looked. Gordon couldn’t quite pinpoint it, but he supposed that Bubby’s lore of having been created artificially must have carried over into his real-life form as well.

But once again, this was something for Future Gordon to ponder about.

Present Gordon wanted to know about the general “ok, what the fuck just happened???”, before diving into information that he wasn’t even sure he had the right to know about.

He noticed G-Man giving his stump a glance as well before the suited man materialized a simple wooden chair for himself and sat down on it.

Bubby and Coomer opted to join Darnold and Tommy on the floor.

With everyone finally seated, G-Man opened his briefcase and pulled a very heavy-looking folder out of it. Its casing reminded Gordon of the pattern and colour of a missing texture error.

“I am… certain you have a lot of questions, Mr Freeman.”

Gordon closed his eyes, inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. He opened his eyes again, looking at everyone in the room over once more before nodding.

[tanadrin]

So all the terrible retcons and geographic inconsistency (Kul Tiras wtf) and the time travel and the bullshit with the night elves is bad (Illidan is the worst character ever, don't @ me), but the most frustrating part of WoW lore to me is its failure to explore certain complex emotional themes in a really satisfying way--like, the people who expound and expand on Warcraft lore are canny enough to notice that these emotional themes *exist*, but not clever enough to actually work with them or build them out, and so the whole thing collapses into rule-of-cool melodrama. There's nothing wrong with rule-of-cool melodrama; I love rule-of-cool melodrama. But Warcraft lore is *begging* to combine that rule of cool melodrama with some really rich and interesting emotions and character interpretations, it sets them up and is all ready to knock them down, and just... doesn't.

Take the conversation between Saurfang and Garrosh in the Borean Tundra, in WotLK, the one that ends with Saurfang saying "I don't eat pork." I think that's emblamatic of the big theme that unites the Horde, that makes it make sense as a faction. The Alliance, after all, started as a defensive association in the face of the Orc invasion; its renaissance after the creation of Durotar and the invasion of the Scourge is only natural. But what is the theme of the Horde? Is it honor? Strength? Sheer brutality? Well, none of those things. Orcs claim to value honor and strength; the Forsaken are certainly various shades of very dark gray at best, the Tauren and the Orcs *do* seem like natural allies of a sort, but all the races of the Horde have something even deeper in common: trauma. The Orcs are still (cf. Saurfang) dealing with the emotional turmoil of having been both forced and partially complicit in the atrocities of the First and Second War--after which their homeworld was destroyed, they were forced into concentration camps, and they had to rebuild their culture and their identity from the ground up. They have to find a new place in a new world, and there's this tension between the younger generation that doesn't have firsthand experience with any of this and just remembers that the Horde used to be a name that struck fear into the hearts of their enemies (Garrosh Hellscream, for instance) and the older generation that remembers how awful that time really was, and doesn't want to see the old ways revived because it might just destroy their people for good this time. Then there's the Darkspear Trolls and the Tauren, who were both driven out of their old homelands, and fell in with the Horde as natural allies with similar cultural points of reference; and the Blood Elves, whose suffering in the Third War was severe enough to radically alter their culture, coupled with being betrayed by their ruler who decided that joining the Burning Legion and abandoning them sounded like a better time than rebuilding Quel'Thalas.

And then there's the Forsaken. Oh, man, the Forsaken. The Forsaken and Sylvanas are some of my favorite characters in all of WoW, because sure, you could look at it and say, "okay, creepy undead who like green things that go plop and mad science = evil, bad guys." But you'd really be missing what makes the Forsaken interesting. They're not the Scourge--they explicitly broke away from the Scourge when Arthas left Lordaeron. They're not invaders, either. They're in fact mostly the human population of the destroyed kingdom of Lordaeron, the inheritors of that land, but who are treated by the Alliance as interlopers with no right to the very towns and villages they have *always* called home. They're treated as monsters by every living person who ever knew them, and they can't help but regard themselves that way, too. "What are we, if not slaves to this torment?" is one of the casual interaction lines you get when you click on Sylvanas: they do not *like* being dead. But Sylvanas is ruthless and cruel and after Arthas is killed, wins the Val'kyr over to her side so she can keep making more Forsaken. Why?

Simple. Let us imagine: you are an ordinary person, of no unusually great or poor moral virtue. You are hurt, badly. Grieviously. In a way you will never recover from. And everyone you love, all of your friends and your family, the whole society you come from, now sees you as an unredeemable monster that should, no, must be destroyed. How long must you be called a monster before you decide--fuck it, I *will* be the monster they call me. Because, at least that way, no one can ever hurt me again.

The overpowering motivation for the Forsaken is not power or bloodlust; it's not money, or forbidden knowledge. It's making sure no one in the whole world is ever able to make slaves of them again. To make sure they will not be hurt. And the biggest misstep the Alliance ever made was not reaching out to Sylvanas with overtures of friendship as soon as she established her kingdom--because like it or not, she has the support of the people of Lordaeron, and thus a damn good claim to her position. Maybe, if they had, they could have influenced the Forsaken, shown them that they had friends and didn't need to resort to amoral methods to defend themselves. But as it stands, they only have allies of convenience in the Horde (at least until Sylvanas becomes Warchief), and they know that no one in Azeroth is quite happy to see them continue to exist and be free. Everything else about the Forsaken--their use of dark magic, their development of a new, even more destructive plague, their recruiting former servants of the Lich King and raising new Forsaken from among the dead of the ongoing wars--makes perfect sense from the standpoint of a people that knows they are under threat from all sides, and will do anything to survive.

(The Draenei could have been something like this, too, FWIW. Like, a broken people, a people of exiles who are most comfortable in the shadows and with moral ambiguity. But then Metzen had to go make them Righteous Space Goats. I mean, come on. They're just boring now. They were never going to be Horde-aligned--there's too much history with the Orcs  there!--but having a group like that on the side of the Alliance, to help drive home the point that there is not a clear good guys/bad guys distinction here, would have been really nice.)

That actually makes them a pretty damn good fit for the Horde. Moreover, it creates an interesting point of tension with the Alliance, which is clearly *not* always the good guys. I mean, there's the matter of orc concentration camps, but also consider the refusal of leaders like Daelin Proudmoore to contemplate peace (and the subsequent, somewhat... forced turn of Jaina Proudmoore from dove to hawk) and the steadfast refusal of many on that side to deal fairly with the races of the Horde just because they appear monstrous. And arrogance, hoo boy. Dalaran, Gilneas, the Night Elves--huge swathes of the Alliance are characterized by being arrogant and not a little cruel.

And what of Sylvanas becoming Warchief? I don't know where the BFA lore is going (I'm not playing retail anyway), but right now it looks like they're setting up another Garrosh type situation, and preparing for Thrall to retake the Warchief-ship, but if they do that it would be a real pity. First of all, because, well, we saw that already in Mists of Pandaria! What, are we going to besiege Orgrimmar again? Second of all--Sylvanas and Garrosh are *very* different people. Garrosh was, well, Proud; hence the Sha of Pride. He wanted glory and power, he wanted war for war's sake, so he could live up to his father's reputation as a warrior. He was willing to sacrifice everything else that made the Horde the Horde for that. Sylvanas, though, has one overriding motivation: Keep Her People Safe. Punish the people who hurt her is a strong secondary motivation--but it's part of that first one, because if she can make her enemies' victories painful enough, she might discourage them from trying to press their advantage. And her people *trust* her on this: "Dark Lady watch over you," they say when you take your leave. She is not an autocrat--she is their beloved protector. So, she makes the ruins of Lordaeron uninhabitable. She annihilates Teldrassil. Does she spend very many Orc and Troll and Tauren lives doing so? Very well. They aren't *her* people.

I don't think this has to be a tragic flaw leading to her downfall. It sure doesn't make her a good leader for the rest of the Horde, though (even though, on an emotional and aesthetic level, I am 3000% here for Warchief Sylvanas, even more than Warchief Vol'jin, who also had a lot of the creepy threatening vibe that made him a much more interesting choice than either Thrall or Garrosh). But you could make it one, and you could do it very well--they've already mentioned in the tie-ins that Calia Menethil, Arthas's sister, teeeechnically has a claim to the throne of Lordaeron. And, even more interesting, is no longer quite among the living, even if the mechanism of that unlife is happy fun magic instead of evil death magic. Moreover, she has some sympathy for the Forsaken. You could have a squaring-off between them, and you could have a Queen Calia--maybe. If you could bridge that gap and make her understand that the Forsaken feel fundamentally apart from the other human kingdoms now, if she could come to understand just how much evil the Alliance has done to them, if she could really grok what it's like to be them. Then you could have a leader who understands their trauma--but also wants to heal it, rather than lash out at anyone and everyone that might conceivably be a threat. That, too, would be very interesting.

(There’s a reason that, while I loved the Alliance as a kid, I only play Horde toons as an adult. It’s not just that the Horde feel more interesting and vivid to me. It’s that the hypocrisy and the arrogance of the Alliance stands out in much greater relief now. The Horde aren’t good guys--nobody’s the good guys, here--but they don’t lie about their motivations, and they don’t act with cruelty and then play the victim in response. Jaina was an important exception, but they badly mishandled her character in the runup to MoP, which I find very hard to forgive.)

But knowing Blizz, even if they go vaguely that route, they won't stick the emotional landing. There is a very good, if very OTT and melodramatic (in the best possible way), series of fantasy novels or games lurking *behind*, or perhaps parallel, to Warcraft's lore. It is a shame that Blizzard has done so much to obscure it with obnoxious cruft, retcons and timeline compression, repetitive use of the same handful of characters, stupid-ass time-travel plots that create ten thousand plot holes and inconsistencies, shitty tie-in novels (cf. everything by Richard Knaak), and a total failure to make half the world's characters (i.e., everyone in the Alliance) at all interesting. I have a daydream of doing my own version of WoW lore and posting it somewhere like on AO3, but one of the things that makes WoW lore simultaneously so interesting and disappointing to me is that it's embedded in the explorable, realized space of video game worlds. Hard to reproduce that in print, I think. Might be worth it to try.