#and creation is my lovely little kind eldritch horror

[inwhichispeak]

have this doodle for my second ever drawing on my ipad with an apple pencil! (i got it today) (i am very excited)

[idiotmf]

Moving into a house infested by shadow demons

I may have this recent obsession with my newest creation for random blurbs I write, but... hear me out while I dump random information on you that you didn't ask for... (also NSFW, minors scram)

Shadow demons are beings made of, well, shadows. They can hide in yours or manifest as anything they want, shape-shifters if you will.

Since they are beings made of shadows, they cannot catch light, therefore they are a little hard to make out, often appearing more as a silhouette but they do have very distinctive, glowing eyes.

Very original, I know.

Now... They infest houses, apartments or just general areas. They're typically regarded as low level demons, as they are bound to the area they infest, feeding off of human emotions; specifically strong emotions like fear, hopelessness and, most importantly, lust.

I currently have two shadow demons that I adore writing about and they are... Well, I feel like they would hate each other.

× Aryllus

Aryllus is a sweetheart. He isn't interested in feeding off of emotions. He finds life fascinating, he loves spending his endless time reading, observing the animals and humans outside this old brick cottage that he can't leave.

He's very blunt and emotionally not the most intelligent but he makes up for it with his academic intellect. He's been trapped here for a century, maybe two. He doesn't know. Time is of no concept to demons, after all.

He's also shy at first. He doesn't want to be discovered by humans. He dislikes being treated like a pest or an inconvenience, so he would rather starve for all eternity than be viewed as a monster.

When you do discover him, and you don't seem afraid of him, he rejoices. He's patient and gentle in every interaction, thinking he has no morals as a demon but very clearly being a kind entity.

But... be careful, even if a shadow demon's primary food is emotions, Aryllus will probably steal your sandwich. And then try to eat the plastic it came in. (-_-')

And then there is...

× Oryllion

Oryllion is heartless, manipulative and possessive. His only interest lies in breaking the inhabitants of his infested house, making them his mindless little toys for his insatiable hunger.

His preferred method is keeping you in a constant state of arousal by any means necessary. You're working on something? Too bad, he's eating you out/ sucking you off under the table. You want to leave? No, he's tying you up with his tendrils and attaching little suckers to your nipples until you scream in agony and pleasure.

He's dominant and degrading, never once uttering your name. You're merely his pet or his toy. His eyes, while nothing more than glowing white orbs, show disgust with you. Even while he shapes his body into the most incomprehensible shape, writhing with obscene appendages and a sheer endless amount of limbs just to force you to orgasm for his next feast, he clearly looks down on you. Humiliation is a part of the fun for him.

But... As much as he wishes, even Oryllion can't fuck everyone into submission. Occasionally, families will move into his domain, much to his dismay.

But hey, at least he gets to traumatize children with his SFW Eldritch horror shapes for a quick snack.

[acoraxia]

sorry to bother but could you tell me about your version of nuwa? she’s been a fav of mine for a while , and idk how i feel about lego monkie kids nuwa

god YES okay so thank you to @hagstones for listening to my ramblings and agreeing with me that Nuwa should be a little fucked up and a little weird in all terms that are unholy.

spoilers ahead for anyone that hasn't seen S5 ig

Nuwa in my version is essentially an actual snake in terms of not being capable of feeling the same connections/emotions humans do. She created humans, yes, with the capability of doing things she cannot do. She cannot love someone she can only trust them; she is the person you go to for logic and exchange. She is the same goddess who essentially lead a war to happen and then killed the spirits she sent down herself for "being too cruel".

She's so morally complex she doesn't fall into a kind demeanor. She smiles and it feels like she's more amused and delighted by a situation than she is sympathetic. She's not villainous either because to label as her feels wrong? She's not motherly either which is what icks me the most about the LMK fandom right now when it comes to her. She's a snake! She should be more snake-like imo! She should bite and spit venom or show lack of care towards someone's issues unless they bring something worth her time to look at.

I think the idea of having her create a cycle... is kind of stupid! Why would she care about that? Why would she do that? She seems like the type to watch people die and only intervene when it goes on for too long or when something catches her eye? Why would she do something like start a cycle? I do not know! She's the essence of Life but that doesn't mean Life is warm and welcoming all the time, y'know?

I always pictured her as that horror version of Rose Quartz where she says "we're creating life from nothing" and Fuxi stares at her as the people she creates start wars and bloodshed and conquer people and wonders how long it'll take for one of them to offend her and cause her to make them suffer a little. Gods are funky! They're meant to be intimidating! Even the friendliest of gods are terrifying!

LMK failed in capturing the fact she's a god imo she felt more like.. a mini boss? an aid? she doesn't really have much of an intimidating aura?

TLDR; my version of Nuwa is eldritch and uncanny and highly based off the horror designs of the gods who's not capable of loving her creations because she herself cannot feel love, only a humming beat of trust in the presence of people she 'enjoys' being around

[inbarfink]

For a while now I’ve been considering the option of, like, what if… There’s a new DHMIS season or like a whole new version/adaptation - and they’re not not gonna follow up in any way on the stuff with Lesley from the first season in DHMIS TV. And the final few episodes of that new season are gonna have, like, Duck or something come face-to-face with some totally different ominous secret about how the World of DHMIS works that seems to totally contradict both the stuff with Roy and the machine in ‘Dreams’ AND the shit with Lesley and the stairs in “Electricity”. 

Like, I’m not just thinking about it as a ‘haha funny troll!". My thoughts are… So, one of the recurring themes of “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared”, especially in the TV Show, is like the Existential Horror of Being a Fictional Character. And Creativity has been a theme since, well, the very start. And DHIMS always loved its 4th-Wall-Break, always loved to remind us that this is a show.

So what if the Hidden Truth about why their world is so Wrong is just… the real actual truth? You know, that they are a bunch of fictional puppets for a show created by Becky Sloan, Joe Pelling, and Baker Terry? 

And for the characters that would be just as much of a horrifying eldritch revelation as anything we could dream up for them, y’know? That they’ve been created basically just to entertain strange unseen beings via their misery, that they are being watched 24/7 in the sense that when they are not watched they basically don’t exist, that their life and wills are totally controlled by these unknowable strange beings who possess a level of free will they can’t even conceive of. 

And they can’t even really perceive this truth fully or reach the actual real world cause, well, they can’t exist in the actual real world or interact with their real creators. Because once you take them out of the context of the show, they just go back into being puppets and costumes. The DHMIS creators could probably pretend to have a conversation with their puppets, or hypothetically the DHIMS characters could talk with a fictionalized version of their creators - but a real interaction between them is metaphysically impossible. 

So the climaxes of both the Webshow and the TVshows are, like, Red Guy and Yellow Guy (respectively) coming as close to understanding the nature of their reality as their little fictional brains can bare - which they process as these weird surrealist metaphors because that is as far as they can grasp it before their brains literally become felt and cotton.

Red Guy, especially in the Webshow, was always the one most exacerbated by having to deal with the Teachers. He very much does not enjoy being the Main Character in a story. And he’s generally kind of a cynical pessimist. And so for him, Reality - the DHMIS Webshow - seems like some sort of ominous and impersonal machine that exist for nothing but tormenting himself and his friends.

Roy might be involved because, being one of his friends’ parents - that makes him both a sort of authority figure, and a creator of sorts. So for Red Guy’s mind he’s like a stand-in for their actual creators (since Red Guy doesn't know his own parents - he's at least the closest he's got. Plus it is Yellow Guy that has become the target of the torment by the final episode. That whole thing with Yellow Guy and Roy really is a creator tormenting his creation) . Or maybe it has something to do with Roy being credited on all of the episodes?

Implying he’s some sort of liminal being with connections to both the real and fictional world?

Meanwhile, Yellow Guy is a lot more willing to play along and try to enjoy the Lessons he is given. He’s not as stressed about being free as Red Guy is most of the time. And we know his sense of imagination can be very sweet and adorable.

But at the same time,Yellow Guy suffers a LOT as a result of the Lessons. And when he is fully charged, he pretty quickly becomes uncomfortable with the teachers’ condescension and the strangeness of their lives. So Lesley’s whole setup showcases his more conflicted feelings about the Reality. On one hand there is something charming and whimsical about Lesley, but she’s also kinda ominous and creepy.

And Yellow Guy’s Enchanted Cyborg Intelligence gives him a… slightly more accurate understanding of the situation. Yellow Guy’s Reality, with the Big and Bigger Boys, shows he has some understanding that this world exist for some sort of edutainment (where Red Guy only saw it as torment for the sake of torment) and his idea for the Person Behind Everything is… at least Mostly a live-action human. 

Making her a step closer to the actual creatives working on DHMIS compared to Roy.

And the extra set of stairs might show that, like, Yellow Guy at least has the potential to understand that his Reality is not quite the end of the story. Like that, yeah, there IS another level of understanding above meeting Lesley - and that is the Real World with the real creators, the one he could never actually meet.

And now the question is, what would Duck’s Reality be? What would he see, if he had a chance to peek behind the curtain?

[honourablejester]

While on the subject, my favourite subclasses (so far) for each D&D 5e class:

Artificer: Gonna be honest, I don’t do much with artificers, but just going on vibes, while I understand it’s not the most mechanically brilliant of the options, I still just love Alchemist. I just like me some bubbling beakers, you know?

Barbarian: Ancestral Guardian. I love Zealot, I love Wild Magic, I could be persuaded towards Beast, particularly for small characters (scuttly little beast barbarian gnome, I like the vibes), but it’s still Ancestral Guardian. I want to be a barbarian with a pack of ghosts following them around!

Bard: For the longest time, it was Lore, for similar reasons that Knowledge clerics are my joint first favourite clerics. It feels like the old Irish bards, the oral knowledge and magic, and I had a ghoulish little half-elven lore bard named Feyla Thenn who was a lot of fun. But recently … I really like Creation? It definitely does have that spellsinger vibe, singing things into being, and honestly the ability to just sing myself up 50ft of rope, or a grappling hook, or a ladder, or a key, is just … endlessly useful and fun.

Cleric: If I have to pick one, singular, then Twilight. But it is two, because every time I make a cleric, Twilight and Knowledge have a fist fight in my head, and the only reason Twilight wins is because it’s prettier. I like twinkling sparkly bits. But Knowledge is forever there, loyal and true, waiting for me to return to it. (Tempest is the runner up, because I like big booms and I cannot lie. Also ocean).

Druid: Stars. No competition. If I make a druid, they’re gonna be a Stars druid, unless there’s a compelling setting reason for them to be anything else. I like land druids, I’ll flirt with spores, but as a stars druid I get to turn into a mobile starfield and smite people, and there’s just no beating that.

Fighter: Like the artificer, I don’t do much with fighter, but both Rune Knights and Eldritch Knights have a bit of a draw to them. Particularly Rune Knights. I like the hulking, placid, but smarter and more dangerous than you think sort of vibes they have.

Monk: Again, not my class, but I do enjoy a Mercy Monk. I also weirdly have a fondness for the Sun Soul? I like shiny things and radiant damage, but also the Sun Soul gives me kind of anime vibes? Channeling your ki into a radiant aura. IDK, I’m just weirdly fond of the Sun Soul as a concept.

Paladin: As we’ve discussed, a threeway fight between Redemption, Watchers and Devotion, but my love of John Donne and the imagery of weary gothic knights in a world of darkness forever pulls me towards Devotion first. Though, you know. Cosmic horror definitely gives Watchers some points, and I like the mercy first ethos of Redemption.

Ranger: Fey Wanderer. I like skills and languages! For themes and imagery, though, Swarmkeeper. I want a warforged ‘scarecrow’ ranger with a flock of crows. I want a dhampir or changeling swarmkeeper with a swarm of moths. I like swarms. Swarms are good. I love the imagery.

Rogue: Phantom. Again, fairly big gap between this and the closest runner up. I really like ghosts? Like with the Ancestral Barbarian, I just really like ghosts, and the story potential of a character that is perpetually followed by them. Aided by them. I will also give some points to Swashbuckler, though, because I enjoy a good old fashioned daring scoundrel, and I really like swashbuckler movies.

Sorcerer: Aberrant Mind. Again, I enjoy the horror-themed subclasses? Though having played a Clockwork Soul, I also like their whole ‘return to centre’ sort of feel. And, you know. I enjoy a tempest cleric, so Storm sorcerers also get a look in. And Draconic, because ‘my grandma is a green dragon’ is always fun. I think sorcerer is the main class where I kind of like everybody and will give them all a whirl.

Warlock: Fathomless or GOOlock. Neck and neck. I do enjoy a Genielock, there’s fun to be had with Bottled Respite, and I have a fair few ideas for Celestial too, because I like the idea of being hired, on a mercenary basis, to aid the forces of good. I love the idea of some pragmatic deva somewhere just hiring, no convictions necessary, I will simply pay you in magic to fix this evil for me. It’s a great vibe. But Fathomless and GOOlock fill my cosmic horror love so well. I think the edge might go to Fathomless. Because tentacle. And also ocean. Heh.

Wizard: Illusion. Scribes and Abjuration hold joint second place, I love them both dearly. Bookish wizards and tanky wizards are excellent. But I love the diggy, trickster, seeker nature of illusionists. I love the playing with reality, the use of illusion to hide or reveal truth, the philosophical underpinning of a character that chooses, fully consciously, to pursue this school of magic. Also Phantasmal Force is an evil, evil spell, and I love it. Pick up the Metamagic Adept feat and get subtle spell, have a tonne of fun.

There are probably not surprising for most people, but I hadn’t gone through it by class before. So. Here we are?

[godspeedmajortom]

Miscellaneous Malevolent musings now that I've caught up with the podcast releases...

Loved the "Dunwich Horror" vibes in season 3

Seasons 2 and 3 worked better for me than Season 1, I think because the shape of the arc and the overall goal was clearer

Could do without the amazement at "ruins older than this country," though. America is such a recent creation, and there were people here well before it. Ancient structures should not be inconceivable. Not that I want to go in the HPL direction of native peoples being corrupted by eldritch gods, more that it's ignorant to assume there was nothing here before the colonists. There are better ways to marvel at the impossibility of a place, like the scale of the structure or an unnatural texture or shine or echo or non-local stone (like obsidian in New England lol).

Not sure if this has been confirmed or refuted anywhere, but I headcanon that Arthur wrote the “Some Would Call It Madness” song

Arthur, John is not your conscience. He has no authority to tell you whether you're a good man. He's still learning what "good" means. He's a friend who can provide a second opinion at best. I know you're lonely and you want reassurance, but he does not have the human frame of reference to give you a valid answer. Sorry, dude.

On that note, Arthur seems to have two categories for beings: person and monster. Monsters are evil and should be punished, people deserve respect and can grow from their mistakes. I don’t think he has a clear philosophy yet for what distinguishes them, beyond his gut feelings or rationalizations for his actions (see: cultists are irredeemable and deserve what's coming to them, certainly not people who maybe made a bad choice, got in over their heads, and could use a second chance). Like, John is right that he and Yellow are fundamentally the same, however much Arthur wants John to be in the Good and person-like category. The main difference is that Arthur trauma bonded with one and came to like him, then expected the other to replace him immediately under different circumstances and was disappointed when he didn't. I'm not sure where Arthur puts himself on the person-monster scale. I mean, he considers himself a person, and he typically thinks he's in the right. But he toes the line with cruelty sometimes in a way that does concern him, and he still has so much guilt and shame about Faroe. He's complicated, that's the point of the story. I can see him going full "he who fights monsters," or embracing mercy and forgiveness as human virtues.

Arthur giving the cana water in the prison pits takes on a new light after hearing the whole "I am the captain of my ship" poem and hearing what happened to Faust

Petulant child John is still the best. He is especially childlike in Ep29. The movies! The handkerchief! He has so much ambition and so little agency.

On the other side of the John coin, I'm very curious about how John actually killed Emily and Parker, especially given his limited power on Earth. I imagine it's something that can occur in the ritual of opening his book. The details will surely be revealed at the least opportune moment.

Speaking of coins: Kayne, you sick fuck, I love you, what are you, what the hell game are you playing. He clearly has more direct influence on Earth than the King in Yellow, and he has some kind of influence in the Dreamlands/with the King to return John to Arthur. Presumably, he needs both John and Yellow, maybe also Arthur, for whatever he’s planning. Or maybe he just wants to be entertained by Arthur inevitably blowing up at John for lying to him and betraying his trust again. Fun times for everyone!

[nightmarecountry-a]

I am thinking about the way that like... okay. When people write Dream's treatment of his subjects as like, analogous to real-world abuse, as if he's holding his creations hostage or some shit and denying them basic human rights, that shit bores me; no one involved is human, it follows that their understanding of the world and their place within it isn't either. It's why my dream and nightmare OCs don't mind the role they play; they're created for it, it's their purpose. Not in the same sense as a human career or even a human sense of purpose: I mean "created for it" in the same way that a clock is made to tell the time, or a sail is made to catch the wind. My Corinthians are outliers in that they relish their purpose but rebel against Dream's control, but it's clear that they are the exception, not the rule. You don't ever get the sense that Dream is behaving in a way analogous to a real-life person abusing their power over someone.

However! That doesn't mean Dream isn't ruling like an asshole. Gault rightfully points out that his creations didn't return to the Dreaming out of love, but out of fear of what he would do to them if they stepped out of line. His reaction to that slight is the same as his reaction to the Corinthian's initial act of rebellion: he snuffs it out, one way or another (either by banishing them to the Darkness in Gault's case, or attempting to unmake them like the Corinthian) without asking questions. He does what he believes is appropriate for a creation stepping out of line, and he doesn't listen to them or their reasoning. That's like... his whole arc: learning to listen to others, including his creations.

And all of that said, let's get to my main point, which is that MAN I love the potential for horror with Dream, with the way he rules his realm. With his creations as tools that can be sharpened and broken down and recreated to his will; they're there to serve humanity, just like him, and just like him they have no choice in how they are made nor how they are used. I've written before about how fuckin' spicy body horror type shit can be (the Dream I write over on unheardmuses will reach into his creations and adjust them like he's fixing a wrinkle in their clothing; not out of malice, but because he is Endless and asking him to view a creation as his equal is less like asking you to view your OC as an equal and more like asking you to view one of the microbes that live on your body as an equal; his understanding and his mind are so fucking vast and infinite that it takes EFFORT for him to narrow it down and empathise with anyone on an individual level, which is part of what he re-learns with Death). I love pretty much every portrayal of the Endless I see but I really dig stuff that leans into the completely inhuman and incomprehensible, eldritch aspect of it all.

That's the kind of background I tend to write my Corinthians with: with a ruler who, until the VERY recent present, commanded respect through fear and complete intolerance for any rule-breaking. And while the first Corinthian isn't JUSTIFIED in what he does, it makes a lot more sense that he believes Dream "only cares about himself, his kingdom" and "his realm, his rules" if you bear that history in mind. It makes a lot more sense that he'd go "yeah I'm fucking tired of this, I want freedom in the Waking" after thousands of years of that then getting that small little taste of what a human life can feel like. Yknow???

[sapphickx]

some hermie theories/predictions

because he was barely present in the last episode and he is still super blorbo-fied in my brain here are some of my predictions on this little weirdo:

After going through few more batman villain characters the teens/maybe specifically normal will call him out for all the method acting bullshit and through some means convince hermie to stop constantly method acting. So then for like the first time both us and the characters see what the actual hermie is like, and this is like some grade a angst potential. I’m talking like; hermie constantly acting like other characters because he thinks his own personality sucks / has no real personality. Not knowing who he really is. Just some nice identity crisis shit. Can also be a parallel to Normal’s arc, cus we love parallels in this household, also it would be cute for them to bond over

At some point in the campaign our boy is doodler-ized. we know the doodler can easily controll/manipulate people who are over obsessed with something. and hermie seems pretty obsessed with perfectly embodying fictional characters. So maybe the doodler could fuck his mind up and all the teens will have to deal with that. At that point it’s up to them whether they fight/kill him, banish him, or try to save him. we know that doodler-ized people can be saved if they’re convince that the thing they’re obsessed with is wrong/not worth it. So maybe they convince him that being himself is more important than any role. again, some nice identity angst but with eldritch horror this time. bonus points if he and normal’s relationship is a lil more developed and normal can be the one to get through to hermie (i know “saved by the power of love” is corny but gotdamit i like corny!)

hermie is revealed to be somehow connected to the s1 dads/ s2 dads / doodler / willy / anything else already established in universe. Maybe he’s somehow from the forggoten realms? Maybe he’s some kind of chaotic creation of the doodler? oh god what if he’s somehow related to scam / mark likely, it’s sounds kinda stupid but he does give likely vibes sometimes. Idk something similar to the Paeden reveal from S1. I feel like anthony likes / is good at doing crazy reveals like that so maybe that will happen with hermie.

and finally maybe... he’s just like a comic relief npc guy? like me and a lot of other fans like him but compared to paeden he doesnt have the super strong instant connections to the rest of the team. which is pretty expected since paeden was a funny lil guy who the dads and audience instantly fell in love with and wanted to keep. so maybe... hermie might just stay a joke character. maybe he wont develop, and eventually he’ll leave the group or get killed. idk this is kind of a pessimistic view, knowing anthony i’m sure he’ll find some way to emotionally devastate us with hermie eventually. i would love to see hermie develop and do some introspective shit, but it���s all up to anthony (who’s already got a lot to do) and the teens interest in the character.

Anyways, just felt like writing a bunch about hermie my weird boy hermie. if any of these happen then uuhhhh... im big brain smart cool girl idk. 

[sk1fanfiction]

the many faces of tom riddle, part 5

 - more myth than man... or not? the mortality of tom riddle and the anatomy of a villain-

That leaves us with Ralph Fiennes’ portrayal of adult Tom Riddle/Lord Voldemort in movies 4-8.

I generally find adult Tom Riddle disappointing, even in the books, in terms of character depth. Instead of delving into his motivations and the inner psychology of a villain, we get... slight body horror? And in the movies, it’s even more egregious. 

If a story is as good as its villain, adult Tom Riddle is a bit of a let-down, especially on-screen.

“I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost . . . but still, I was alive.”

Perhaps the very first time I watched it, I found this scary, but I must confess that nowadays, Voldemort’s resurrection is more funny to me than anything else. The forked tongue and the nose slits, yes, are supposed to allude to Tom Riddle’s loss of humanity, but I don’t think it...worked out that way in practice.

I know that’s how it is in the books, but ugly equals evil (and vice versa) is a tired trope. not only that, but under the CGI, Lord Voldemort is so difficult to relate to, so inhuman, that it’s hard to (1) see his true depravity (2) connect with him emotionally (3) at least for me, not laugh at him flapping around the graveyard in GOF like an oversized crow. 

Now, the reason I’m going on about this is not (just) me being petty. Lord Voldemort is the Boggart for most of the characters in the HP universe, meaning their greatest fear is Lord Voldemort. He represents Fear; as such, he should be utterly terrifying. Now, I don’t mean horrifying in that sense, but Voldemort’s grand entrance should at least feel somewhat unsettling, have some sort of a Gothic atmosphere...

"But then, through the mist in front of him, he saw, with an icy surge of terror, the dark outline of a man, tall and skeletally thin, rising slowly from inside the cauldron."

Visually, this looks great. But it’s not scary. And I’m not a purist by any means, but the words are scarier than the book. Darkness induces fear. 

“The lack of any kind of visual stimuli increases anxiety, uncertainty, and tension.”

So, having Voldemort’s pale body materialize isn’t as scary as it could be.

Furthermore, I think Fiennes’ overexaggerated expressions would actually come across as properly horrifying/threatening rather than funny if they just left his face alone. Yes, Fiennes does manage to emote the fear and the anger through the CGI, but it’s like he’s too alien to be scary, at least to me. The amount of memes with Voldemort suggest I’m not the only one this way inclined.

I think there’s probably a problem going on with the uncanny valley. (Images from the Mori essay linked).

[When things are still]

[Creepy things are creepier when moving]

Now, I assume Voldemort is meant to be zombie-creepy, or at least that how Harry describes him in the books.

"The thin man stepped out of the cauldron, staring at Harry...and Harry stared back into the face that had haunted his nightmares for three years. Whiter than a skull, with wide, livid scarlet eyes and a nose that was flat as a snake's but with slits for nostrils...."

Now, we can’t get Harry’s experience of being haunted by Voldemort in his dreams, because what I think makes Voldemort’s countenance so truly frightening to the other characters isn’t his snake-like nose or his red eyes, but the potential. Voldemort is, in essence, the Grim Reaper. You are at his mercy, and you’re probably going to be dead. 

“This time, I shall enter the fray myself, Harry Potter, and I shall find you, and I shall punish every last man, woman, and child who has tried to conceal you from me. One hour.“

And yes, Voldemort can be quite funny and witty, but..

“I will allow you to perform an essential task for me, one that many of my followers will give their right hands to perform.” (To Peter Pettigrew)

...it’s still incredibly dark, sadistic humour. Whereas the teenage Tom Riddle we’ve been discussing has just barely dipped his toes into evil, Voldemort is, well... swimming in it. At this point, he think he undeniably enjoys causing pain.

And much of what makes Voldemort scary is subtle. 

For example, what I personally consider haunting is the fact that he’s got a cave full of Inferi. A cave full of reanimated dead bodies. 

Either he dug them up, which is unlikely... or perhaps, a twenty-seven-or-so-year-old Tom Riddle would lie in wait like a bird of prey, very quietly and patiently, perhaps reading a book, waiting for an unsuspecting Muggle to wander past. Maybe killing is a game to him at this point, when it’s not so personal as killing Harry Potter. Maybe it’s a whispered Avada Kedavra, and then he carries the dead body away to his cave. Maybe he Imperiuses them to walk off the cliff. Maybe he tortures them first.

Shudder.

And I don’t think you can show that kind of horror through any CGI or make-up, so...

You know what is terrifying? Revolting? True crime; real-life people who do unspeakably horrible things. And I think a lot was missed out on, in stripping Tom Riddle physically of his humanity. Yes, Riddle is a monster...

But, as we’ve seen, he’s a human monster, not some eldritch horror from the seventh level of hell or something.

I just think it would be interesting to have this perfectly normal-looking human do all the horrific things Voldemort does. I want to see that sick joy in a human face and feel disgusted. I want to see fear make his bottom lip tremble, and feel a misplaced sense of empathy. (Think President Snow from the Hunger Games -- now, that’s a sick, twisted villain who we can relate to as a human being, but still love to hate -- or what about The Joker?).

And out of everything they chose to CGI, why on earth did they not make his eyes scarlet? That might have made him look at least somewhat menacing, rather than a failed lab experiment.

(Don’t even get me started on his and Bellatrix’s death scenes in the movies-)

Here’s President Snow. He’s got a cute little granddaughter, he sends kiddies to kill each other Battle Royale-style every year, and he poisons all his political opponents. He’s also a master manipulator and has a penchant for white roses. They cover up the smell of the sores in his mouth from eating the poison too, to conceal his treachery.

Heath Ledger as the Joker in Dark Knight (2008), who is, according to NYT (which I totally agree with), the best Joker. Now this is a villain done right, with many Voldemort-like traits. On a scale of one-to-ten, he’s absolutely terrifying. Why? He’s (unlike Voldemort in the movies) incredibly intelligent, shows young-Tom-Riddle-like skills for charm and manipulation, plays with humans like they’re his own personal psychology experiment (and to hell with the Institutional Review Board), and has one, single, very clear goal -- chaos. Like Voldemort, he wears an inhuman mask that’s not horrifying in its own right; but unlike Voldemort, the human is all there -- terrifying, real, and with a bottomless, obsessive desire to destroy. His disordered thinking is all out there for the audience to see. The Joker’s motivation is to enjoy himself; whereas Voldemort seems to lack drive. Why does he want to take over the world -- who knows, with Voldemort? The Joker wants to see it burn.

Let’s try to do the same with Lord Voldemort:

[SLIGHT FLASH WARNING]

I had to go with this because Voldemort isn’t legitimately terrifying in many scenes. And yes, this unrefined anger somewhat speaks to Tom’s immaturity

By this point, seventy-one year old Tom Riddle is a hollowed-out shell of a human being. After decades of building his power, he was defeated by a one-year-old, and ended up slumming it as a spirit for a decade, got defeated again, was a shrivelled-up baby for a year, then finally got his body back.

He’s angry, okay! And Fiennes does a great job of portraying the sheer, destructive, unbridled rage of this character.

The body language. again, since his face is inhuman, this is super important. and Fiennes’ body language is great. Voldemort/Riddle commits to his actions. He is very emotionally-driven.

But yet, he doesn’t feel capable, in the way that the Joker or President Snow do. Yeah, we know anecdotally that he’s incredibly evil, sadistic, and second only to Dumbledore in terms of power, but he loses to a baby, and then that same baby as a teenager. So, we really could have done with seeing Voldemort’s power, cruelty, and evil firsthand a lot more often.

Voldemort is not well-characterized. I don’t understand his motives, and the ones that I do understand are not compelling.

Not to die? Well, he’s already made several Horcruxes. Why not sit back and relax? Why start a war and risk himself?

JKR said that Voldemort’s great desire was to become all-powerful and eternal. But that’s... boring! It does little to tell us about Voldemort, other than that he’s a villain and a wannabe dictator. 

Furthermore, the charm, manipulation, and cunning that are hallmarks of younger Tom Riddle’s personality are gone.

Is Voldemort (to return to Jungian terms) all shadow? An empty creature of simple creation and destruction, perhaps? We’ll discuss this further down...

And this isn’t a problem of having a fantastical world with magic and the like. Grindelwald’s quiet, self-possessed, almost coy “So you think you can hold me?” was infinitely scarier than anything that has ever come out of Voldemort’s mouth. It was chilling. 

OOTP is my favorite book, and the Ministry sequence is one of my favourite in the films. 

This scene where he psyches out Harry, talking so quietly that he could just be a little voice inside his head (and again, during the possession scene)? Absolute perfection. 

Why? Because this showcases what’s truly scary about him. Voldemort can get into your head. He can make you do things. And perhaps, if we had seen that more often, we’d understand how scary he is.

I wish this had been his grand entrance, and not whatever that scene in GOF was. Somehow, him screeching “I WANT TO SEE THE LIGHT LEAVE YOUR EYES!” is not menacing. At all. 

But, I can’t help but think how much greater the emotional affect would be if he had more human features (think the burned-and-blurred, waxy features from Dumbledore’s memory). 

Just imagine these scenes if Voldemort looked human, and spoke as quietly as he did in this one.

Because of the reason that I have little to go on in terms of characterization that I haven’t already covered, we’ll discuss the myth and legend of Lord Voldemort.

I can’t decide if the statue in the films is supposed to be the Angel of Death or the Grim Reaper. He has a skeleton and carries a scythe, but he also has wings. There are so many different interpretations, attitudes towards, and personifications of Death across the world that I don’t want to draw any one conclusion. But I must wonder if Lord Voldemort, with his yew-and-phoenix wand (which carries heavy symbolism of immortality and rebirth) and almost deified figure is meant to be a personification of Death himself? His name, Lord Voldemort, is a shade close to Lord Death.

For years, it has stumped me that wizards and witches are afraid to utter Voldemort’s name, especially since we only see the Taboo in the middle of the last book. It didn’t make sense just based on fear; in the real world, we don’t circumvent Hitler’s name, for example.

Perhaps this may have been obvious to others, but it wasn’t to me.

Here’s a counterargument to myself; why Voldemort shouldn’t look human.

Voldemort, in the Wizarding World, is seen as a literal deity.

I promised to attempt to answer this question in Part 3: 

And so, I can’t help but wonder if the opposite is true… if Tom Riddle creates Horcruxes, would that grant him additional magic powers?

In Part 3, I likened Tom Riddle to a sorcerer in Russian folklore, Koschei the Deathless, also famous for sequestering his soul in objects. This source suggests that Koschei was considered not an ordinary magician, but a representative of the ‘other’ world, the world of death.

So, what if... creating Horcruxes makes you... more than human? Now, I could definitely see god-like status being appealing to sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle. Perhaps, even appealing enough to kill for. Now, his proclivity for Avada Kedavra makes sense. We know it’s an incredibly sinister spell, but at the same time, it’s a very humane way to kill. Why might it be so horrifying?

Here’s a weird theory.

To the best of my knowledge, no one but Voldemort is seen using the Killing Curse more than once or twice. 

Perhaps, ordinary mortals can only cast Avada Kedavra a few times, but Tom, having split his soul and having become in some way a non-human instrument of Death, can cast it however many times as he likes, and that is part of what serves to make him so terrifying.

This makes the idea of Voldemort tossing around Avada Kedavras actually incredibly terrifying, if you take into account what that might mean.

The collective cultural fear of speaking Voldemort’s name supports this theory.

Take the chthonic (underworld) deities of Greek mythology; most notably, Hades and Persephone, the king and queen of the underworld.

Hades, the god of the dead, was feared. 

So feared that the word ‘Hades’ (”the unseen one”) was so frightening, that people came up with all sorts of euphemisms to circumvent actually saying it and he was rarely even depicted in art. For example, they would refer to him as Pluto (”the rich one”), Clymenus ("notorious"), Polydegmon ("who receives many"), and perhaps Eubuleus ("good counsel" or "well-intentioned"), amongst many other names. 

However, he was not seen as evil; just stern, cruel, and fair. Like most Greek gods, he had an associated cult (the Death Eaters, anyone?)

Another interesting connection between Hades and Voldemort is that Hades was associated with snakes.

Persephone (suggested to have a pre-Greek origin and probably pre-dates Hades), who was also a vegetation/fertility/spring goddess, similarly, was referred to as Despoina (”the mistress”), Kore (”the maiden”), etc, because as the terrible Queen of the Dead, it was considered unsafe to speak her name aloud. In mythology and literature, she is sometimes referred to as ‘dread Persephone.’

--Just like how Lord Voldemort is referred to as The Dark Lord, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, You-Know-Who... (and if you’re Dumbledore, ‘Tom’.)

Her central myth served as the context for the secret rites of regeneration at Eleusis (which was basically a mystery cult devoted to her and her mother, Demeter), which promised immortality to initiates.

We don’t know for certain what exactly went on, because, mystery cult -- the members were sworn to secrecy -- but it revolved around immortality and rebirth and possibly psychoactive drugs. 

Perhaps ironically, in comparison to the Death Eaters, anyone could join, as long as they could speak Greek and had never committed murder.

And that concludes my assessment!

[willowaudreykeyes]

Prompt: myths and chaos with Logan with the line “so apparently microwaving this ancient manuscript isn’t a good way to find out its secrets.”

Remus’ Puzzle Temple Of Friendship And Chaos

Warnings: Baby eldritch thing, tentacles, one eye, vague sexual reference that’s from a song

Platonic Logince, brotherly-and-on-good-terms Creativitwins and Intrulogical of whatever relationship interpretation that you want.

------------------------------------------------------

Roman

“Remind me to thank your brother at dinner tonight.”

“That’s if we make it to dinner. And you all call me extra; he made an entire temple for us to explore within a week!” He spent a lot of energy on it too. I still remember the shaky finger he pointed at me after the second day of working on this Incan-like temple; slurring tiredly about not going into the space between our Kingdoms and ruining the surprise. He also forced me to carry him to his room as he dangerously swayed on his feet. I’ll have to thank him by working just as hard for his and Logan’s adventure after the two of us finish this one.

“I know; yet I’ve yet to thank him for doing so. And I must ask how long it took to make this language.” Taking my first glance at said language, I recognise it immediately as the first language that Remus and I had known. We had known it better than English at one point, until Patton insisted that we make English our main language so that we wouldn’t confuse Thomas. 

“Oh, we’ve always known it. We used to speak it in front of Patton as kids to confuse him and we still use it occasionally whenever we send a letter, or in his case a slab of mysterious leather, between our Kingdoms.”

“So you can translate this?”

“Of course!” I hold the slightly chipped black and red tablet out at arms length, quickly noticing that everything on the tablet makes no sense. No wonder he was so tired after every day in the Imagination; he even made us a puzzle. “It’s encrypted though, so we have to figure out what the cypher is first. And knowing Remus, it could be anything.”

He takes it from my hands and adjusts his glasses for the fiftieth time today before tapping his chin. I doubt Logan realises that he has so many visual tells when he becomes passionate and interested. “He would leave a clue somewhere where we could find it. He’s chaotic, not unfair.”

“Aha!” In a spark of inspiration, I rough up my hair and gain a huff of defeat from the neighbourhood nerd as I do the same to his own. It had dust from the temple in it anyway. “We just have to think like Remus! Now what’s the most logical place to put a cypher for this thing?”

“Where we found it.”

“Okay. Now what’s the opposite of that?”

His eyebrows do that cute thing where they pinch down a bit when he’s confused. I don’t bother hiding my smile as his eyes shift around, taking in invisible words as he tries to find my line of thinking. “I’m… not following. The opposite of where we found it is every room that we didn’t find it in, and we went through forty-three rooms and eight hallways; perhaps half or less of the entire temple judging by the size and spacing between each room.”

“And only twelve not-too-tough traps, which is less then his usual quota…” Probably because of the exhaustion, but I should have figured that out earlier. I’ll up the level of hazards in his next one as a double thank you for his hard work. “Anyway, we must think chaotically if we are to beat the chaotic one!”

With a silent nod, he attempts to fix his hair as I take in our camp and the temple before us. It’s very reminiscent of an Incan temple in design yet is mainly made out of pitch black obsidian; with intricate wall carvings engraved with pure ruby, emerald, moonstone and diamond; and a whole lot of animal and human skulls that are packed tightly into every ceiling. And I must say, adding the creatures from both of our Kingdoms as the wall carvings is a nice touch. 

Except I won’t say it out loud because the majority of them are of naked people, naked cannibals and of naked murders. 

At least our camp has some more class to it! Logan wished for something realistic, but was soon swayed by my enchanted Harry Potter tent that’s magically large enough to have a working bathroom and still look like a ‘regular’ camping tent from the outside. I do like regular camping, but I prefer to have a shower after a tub of Thomas-knows-what is dropped over us and getting into every uncomfortable crevasse. Just thinking about that disgusting concoction makes me shudder.

“... Perhaps our microwave?”

I snap my gaze back to him, beaming at his rather shy sounding remark. He always sounds shy when he says something that deviates from his path of logic. At least he’s opening up a little more. “Perfect! I knew you’d think of something!”

“It was the first usable thing that I saw. Were you daydreaming again?”

“Nope- Using the microwave to solve a cypher sounds like something Remus’ mind would think up. He did mix sardines, lettuce and one of your ties in the blender before drinking it once.” I mumble the last half -I probably shouldn’t out Remus just yet for drinking Logan’s tie a few months ago- and put the tablet in the microwave and set it to three minutes. Three is the magic number after all.

“Did you say something?” 

“Mumbling ideas to myself is all!”

The microwave suddenly glows a bright purple and I manage to drag Logan in close before blocking something from hitting the both of us with my summoned shield. With a pop, crackle, fizz and several loud noises that sound like tearing metal; I risk peeking over it in perfect sync with Logan. The sight of three large tentacles wiggling out of the new holes in the camp's microwave brings out a sigh from me. A very loud sigh. Remus could probably hear it and currently giggling to himself from the comfort of his bedroom.

“It may be best not to touch those. Or the microwave.”

“But the tablet!” Logan pushes by my shield and barely escapes my reach before I am able to pull him away. With a straight posture and a quick slick back of his hair, he opens it and nearly jumps into my arms Scooby-Doo style from the loud pop that occurs. I’m in front of him again within a moment, but the usual feeling of hostility that Remus puts on his dangerous creatures as a warning is lacking. At least this thing won’t try and face-hug me like that faceless chicken that guarded the temple did.

Inside was a brown-black-blue ball of tentacles, with three longer than the others that retract out of the newly-made holes in the microwave. My heart stutters as a singular, goat-like, boysenberry coloured eye opens from one of the many seams in the creature; just to quickly dart it’s vision between the two of us before landing it’s creepy gaze on Logan. “Huh. So apparently, microwaving the ancient manuscript isn’t a good way to find it’s secrets- but a great way to hatch an eldritch abomination.”

“If you’d hand me a blanket, perhaps bringing it with us would be advantageous in future explorations.” Of course he wants to bring the nightmare creature; he always does. I hand him the nearby dish towel instead as I don’t feel like leaving this thing alone with Logan would end nicely.

“As long as you're carrying it.”

“Of course; you’re the one with the sword and shield.” I’m rather sure that that means that he would make me carry the disgusting creature if I wasn’t the one with our only ways of defending ourselves; and I don’t know if I should dramatically put my hand to my chest in horror or just pout.

I go for the pout.

Only for it to be rather rudely ignored as he cradles the little beast in its new home, wrapping it’s longer tentacles around Logan’s hands and attempting to remove his watch for a moment before I manage to grab it before they do. Logan’s too busy holding it in one hand and going through his cue cards to notice though. “And I shall name it as randomly as I can; since Remus seems to name all of his creations.” 

“Why?”

“It’s only polite to follow custom; and the custom for Remus is to name his creatures.” I hate everything about this -plus the tablet is just full on missing or destroyed now too- but Logan seems enraptured by the little thing. I roll my eyes and put on my backpack as Logan already begins walking up the temple steps. We just had lunch, so we have a chance of leaving before dinner, but I highly doubt it.

Despite not being able to see, the creature manages to grab out one of the cue cards from Logan’s hand before letting him snatch it back. With a quick smile after reading it, he pockets them all again before getting a better hold of the thing before it runs away and eats a whole deer or something. “It’s name shall be Anaconda-Do-Not.”

God-fucking-dammit Remus. I frown at the thing as we enter the fire-lit entrance, glad that its eye is hidden under the dish towel. Sheep eyes have always kind of creeped me out; especially on things that aren’t sheep. “You’re not allowed to hang out with Remus, Virgil or Janus anymore if they keep giving you those weirder cue cards.”

“This one’s from Remus. It’s a metaphor about-”

“I KNOW WHAT IT IS!” A light pain follows my facepalm, but I ignore it and march onwards. Hoping to get rid of this thing as quickly as possible. “Let’s just… go shove it into a keyhole or something already.”

------------------------------------------------------ 

By the way, I really hate that stupid Anaconda song and so I know that it’d be perfect for Remus. Hopefully the ending is alright because it was the only bit I really had issues with ^^’

Oh and Remus definitely fell in love with the new Eldritch creatures name.

@ladyedwina @5am-the-foxing-hour @sparrowofsong

[helioark]

A Guide to the Amber Woods 

This blog, its writings, and its characters are all copyright to the author of this blog. All opinions and ideas expressed within are not guaranteed to be factual and are the product of the blog owner’s research and creativity. Trust not the Fae. 

… 

Where Am I?

Welcome to the Amber Woods. Currently located in the midst of the verdant depths of the Willamette Valley, the Amber Woods are the haunting grounds of an ancient, secretive Archfaerie, fallen from grace and on the run from his past.  He answers to The Warden (or Cecil, if you’re on good terms) and he lives in a strange-looking cabin by the river, selling trinkets made of amber and glass for unusual forms of payment. The sun is red in the sky, and the shadows of the trees are long against the ferns. It’s hard to concentrate with the sound of the river so loud in your ears, which is odd, because you’re nowhere near it. You keep walking, because you came here for a reason.

What was it again?

Who’s Who?

The Author

Hi! My name is James, I’m the (very human) author of this blog. I hail from the misty locales of Oregon, where the rain is our sunshine and you end up in the town center of TIllamook no matter how many times you think you’ve left it. I’m a self-diagnosed mythology nerd and a semi-consistent creative writer with a love for horror and fantasy. I run this blog to practice my writing, interact with people who enjoy the topics I write about, and to give myself an outlet to express my love for the weird shit I find on the internet. Most posts that are not focused on faerie mythology, eldritch/occult stuff, or similar are the things that I post. Almost all of that content can be found under the hashtag [# not the warden], or if I’m lazy, no hashtag at all. If you want to ask me about my research, creative story lines, or just tell me about your day, my inbox is always open! 

The Warden 

The Warden is the character I run this blog as. He is my original creation, though he is heavily inspired by several Celtic, Irish, and British folkloric legends. In the Amber Woods canon, the Warden and I are separate people that exist at the same time. Almost all of the content that The Warden deals with is tagged [# the warden speaks]. 

The Warden will answer asks about the Fae, his past, or the occult, and does business through the inbox. It is not necessary to do business in order to ask a question, and asking a question does not require payment. If you wish to buy amber from the Warden, he will expect you to give him something valuable in return. The Warden will make a post with the hashtag [ # restocking] to announce that the inbox is open for amber selling, and a post with the hashtag [ # out of stock] to indicate that it is closed. As with all transactions with the Fae, mind your manners and your words. The Warden is kind but will not hesitate to rob you. General offerings are also appreciated, and will be used to make lunch. As with all faeries, follow the rules. Additionally, never mention crows.

If you would like to hear it, below is part of The Warden’s story. Also found below is the tag directory and some necessary disclaimers. I hope you enjoy your visit to the Amber Woods! If you don’t, well, that’s hardly our fault, is it? 

. . . 

The Warden is an ex-Archfaerie of the High Court of Summer, where he ruled at the right hand of the Midsummer Queen herself and was responsible for defending the Courts of Summer against defamation and attack. He hails from one of the first generations of the Aos Sí, born on the edges of the last great war between the Fomorians and the Tuatha Dé Danann, rescued from near certain death by Ghillie Dhu and given to his sister for safekeeping. He is the eighth child of the Last Great King, younger sibling to the seventh daughter, the powerful sídhe who would eventually come to rule the Summer Courts.

 He ruled as commander of the armies of midsummer and guardian of the great emerald woods of the hills for nigh on six thousand years, becoming known to many humans as The Green Knight. The story of his downfall is not mine to tell, but after committing a great act of treason against the Queen, he fled the Summer Court and wandered the edges of the feywilds for another three thousand years, acquiring enemies and friends alike, hiding his face, never speaking his own name. Some say that the legend of Crom Dubh stems from this period, but the Warden denies this. 

After some time, The Warden wandered a little too close to the edges of the world and discovered the truth of his past, hidden from him by his sister. He chased these threads of history into the twilight hell of the Gloaming Courts, and he currently refuses to tell anyone anything else about what happened then besides the fact that he stole an artifact of great power and barely escaped with his life. Using this artifact, the Amber Woods were created, and the Warden finds himself now haunting the forests of the Pacific Northwest, exchanging the bereft dreams and wishes of humans for amber. He hides from the Queen of Midsummer yet, but he swears that someday, he will reclaim his inheritance. How, I do not know.

… 

How to Navigate the Woods

Taglist: 

[ # the warden speaks]: Denotes a post that the warden has reblogged or added onto. 

[ # not the warden / # the author speaks]: Denotes a post that I have reblogged or added onto out of character.

[ # machinations of the fae]: Denotes a post that describes an action, creation, or person belonging to faerie lore that isn’t about the warden.  

[ # abominations of the fae]: Denotes a post about non-faerie cryptids, beasts, or other affronts to sensibility. 

[ # teaching the mortals how to speak with faeries]: Denotes a post where someone breaks a rule of faerie etiquette in the ask box. 

[ # under hill / # under hill and stone]: Denotes a post about the feywilds or faerie geography, usually. 

[ # four courts under hill]: Denotes a post about the seasonal faerie courts. 

[ # tales of the tuath de]: Denotes a post about or concerning Celtic, Irish, or Gaelic mythology.

[ # the unspoken rules of the amber woods / the unspoken rules]: Denotes a post that is part of the Unspoken Rules series, either about the Amber Woods or a mundane place 

[ # amber sales]: Denotes a post about the selling of amber through the ask box.

[ # restocking]: Denotes a post about opening the inbox for amber sales.

[ # out of stock]: Denotes a post about closing the inbox for amber sales.

[ # fear not! / # be not afraid]: Denotes a post about angels.

[ # nicene lore]: Denotes a post about specifically Christian or Catholic lore.

[ # eldritch thread]: Denotes a post that interacts with several other eldritch or occult blogs. 

[ # sigilcraft]: Denotes a post about the Author’s sigilwork.

[ # ____ cw]: Any content warnings will follow this format: (thing i’m content warning) cw. If you would like me to content warn a specific thing, message me.

[ # blogname]: Denotes a post specifically interacting with a blog. 

[ # f scott fitzgerald’s reanimated corpse]: Denotes a post about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s reanimated corpse.

[ # hillkeeping]: Tagged onto any post that details changes made to the blog, its workings, and/or its lore. 

I will add more as necessary. 

… 

Hillkeeping

This blog sometimes interacts with @thetatteredveil and @normal-horoscopes. It was inspired by both of these blogs and does not claim any canonicity within said blogs. Both blogs exist within the Amber Woods canon; none of their content is considered my intellectual property.  

If you would like to create a blog or character within the Amber Woods canon, message me! I would love to work with other creators and writers. 

As stated above, all information and creative licence posted within this blog cannot be considered consistently factual. I have done surface-level research on the common Gaelic, Irish, and Scottish folklore and mythology that forms the basis of my characters and stories. Check your facts and consult with experts, of which I do not consider myself one. 

Finally, friends, be kind to each other and the world you live in. You have no idea what listens to you when you think you are alone.

[axther]

hey lover!

They walked with the Universe on their shoulders, and made it look like wings. 

tamaki amajiki x gender neutral!eldritch abomination!reader

a/n: thank you so much to the wonderful wonderful @what-the-censored-xd​ and @pixxiesdust​ for being my beta readers!! and thank you to @v0mpy​ for requesting!! finally, a story where the love interests actually get together and stay together 🥴

Sweet was the light that beyond the window breaks.

Tamaki Amajiki knew this well. Said light was always coming from the side of his best friend’s room, illuminating the side of their face. Sometimes, it didn’t need to, their own radiance showing, or maybe the light of a dual monitor system. Their eyes would flick left and right, smiling softly at the spiralling chat on the bottom right corner, as they conquered kingdoms. Their hands were fast and sharp, tapping and flying across the keyboard with a vengeance, and when they won a battle, they would lean back with a satisfied sigh. Maybe there was a streak of paint on their arms, and in spare moments, they would try to rub it off. And in even sparser seconds, they would look at Tamaki on their bed and give a sweet smile. 

YN LN. The love of Tamaki’s life.  

YN didn’t necessarily know that, though. Tamaki made absolutely sure they had no clue, short of him blushing when they were around. But since they knew him since he was a child, they easily brushed it off as him simply being...him. 

In the late nights where the darkness was overwhelming and his thoughts were too loud, he would sneak into their dorm and watch them play in the wee hours of the morning. He would take in the scent of paint, the faceless worlds on their walls, trapped on canvas or paper. It felt almost surreal. And as he would watch them, he would wonder. Was he enough? Would he ever be enough? 

Ah, but those were the late nights. The nights would bleed into days, light breaking through other windows, and YN would move from their desk into a wide room, with brick walls on three sides and floor-to-ceiling windows on the other, like a gilded cage. And YN would paint, colours of every kind sweeping across the racks of canvases, paints sliding and paints, prying off the brushes into something unfathomable. And Tamaki would watch them until the sun was done rising and the early morning fog would clear. 

Sometimes, he wondered. YN had never shown a quirk nor spoken of one. They were enigmatic in all the best ways, ways that snared and contained Tamaki like a blanket. They never judged him, never differed. They were effortlessly elegant, accidentally regal, casually divine. They created and destroyed as they pleased, and none could stop them. Sometimes when they spoke, their eyes would seefade into worldsthoughts of a world that Tamaki couldn’t even begin to fathom. YN rarely spoke of home, but when they did, it was a dark place that they could only spit harsh, short words of. Thatere was something deep that Tamaki didn’t dare touch, lest he watch their friendship crumble before his eyes. 

Tamaki loved them. And it could destroy him at any moment, in a single, breathless second. 

He never wanted that second to come, but like most things in his life, disaster loved him. That second answered all his questions, all the wondering if he was enough. It all came to a halt as the world froze, and he knew.

He wasn’t enough.

“It’s done!” 

YN stood in front of a massive canvas that stretched above them, resting their hands on their hips in satisfaction. Their accent rang through their pride, and paint was everywhere on them, but they had a small grin on their face. Tamaki was behind them, staring up at the work with quiet horror. 

Before him was what could only be labelled as a monstrosity. It was pure chaos, with deep blues and greens swirling across it like the sea had risen to the earth and taken a sturdy form. There were yellow and lime green fires cast across it, thick billows of smoke rising to the top of the canvas. The main centrepiece was like a horrible streak of blood: a creature in the middle, a tall, mutilated, spectral creation. It had ribs, Tamaki could tell that much, but too many, and they were hanging out and contorting it’s entire torso. It looked up into the sky of chaos, and he could almost hear the cry from it’s nonexistent mouth. 

“It’s incredible,” he whispered in awe. He took a tentative step forward and YN glanced at him. 

“You think so? I’m sure it could be better, but to be honest, I’ve been working on this for months.” They glanced up at it again before turning to Tamaki. “What do you really think?” 

“It’s so…” hHe hesitated, staring right at the creature. It wasn’t so terrifying up close, but instead seemed to be mourning. “It’s so sad.” 

It came out as little more than a reverent whisper, but YN’s raised eyebrows said enough. 

“Really?” 

“I-! I’m sorry!” Tamaki recoiled his hand, not even realising that he had been reaching forward. “If that wasn’t what you were going for, then I’m probably wrong!” 

“No, no.” YN paused, tilting their head. “That’s exactly what I was going for. I just...didn’t think you’d pick it up. Most people don’t.” 

“Huh?” Tamaki looked at them with wide eyes and a flush. “W-Well! Then it’s...it’s great!” 

“Nice.” YN nodded, though it seemed more like they were musing. “I’m glad, then.” They turned to grab a rag, wiping their hands. Tamaki’s eyes flickered across the entire canvas, trying to take in as much as he could when he noticed a figure in the bottom middle of the canvas. He tilted his head. 

“Who’s that?” 

YN turned, curious, before realising what he was eyeing. They faltered, turning back around. 

“It’s nothing. Just...just something extra.” 

“Oh.” Tamaki stepped back. “What are you going to work on next?” 

“I dunno,” YN shrugged. “I need to get more supplies, but after that, it’s kinda up in the air.” 

Tamaki nodded. “Okay.” 

He wished he could say more, but all he could think of was the small, kneeling figure before the great calamity. They looked so hopeless, so pleading.

And quite suddenly, the painting didn’t seem to be about the monster after all.

Tamaki was walking with YN down an open mall, watching them glance at shops and talk about their latest work. There were lights strung about, and sparse boards served as a makeshift room, letting the sunlight soak through. It was neither busy nor empty, with people scattered about. YN was in step with Tamaki, sighing. 

“I, uh, wanted to encompass…” YN waved their hands about, trying to tie their words to their thoughts. They couldn’t seem to focus on one thing until Tamaki ever so gently began pulling them towards a corner store with mock paint splatter along the walls. YN didn’t resist, instead electing to still try and speak their mind. 

“It’s like, this thing. It’s really...opaque.” They paused, pursing their lips. “That doesn’t make sense.” 

“I can try...to help you get it out…” Tamaki murmured, watching a couple point at a bright blue paint through the glass of the doors. “Do you have the...the basic idea?” 

“No,” YN snorted. “I just know it’s...dark. Angry.” 

“Angry?” Tamaki glanced back at them, daring to raise a concerned eyebrow. “Why...why angry?” 

“I dunno.” YN’s eyes grew dark for a second, unfocusing like they were somewhere else, when a distant rumble echoed through the road. Both turned toward the sound alongside most of the civilians, and Tamaki grew stiff.

“What was that?” YN murmured, a casual curiosity on their face. “Thunder?” 

Tamaki stepped in front of them. “That wasn’t thunder.” 

There was a moment of pure, thick tension, a tension that was palpable and making the hairs on the back of Tamaki’s neck rise, and YN put a hand on his shoulder. They opened their mouth to say something, but Tamaki stared down the cobblestone road with an unblinking stare. There was movement, barely any, and Tamaki gave a shuddering blink. 

Then, it hit like a mule kick. 

There was a tsunami of pure air, rushing forth in an uncontrollable tide. The lights flailed in the wind and civilians were shoved back down the street. Tamaki managed to nearly throw YN into the store before getting flung into a candy shop sign, yelping when the collision made his spine pop. As he gathered his breath, he used his quirk to manifest tentacles, staring straight ahead. 

A man strutted forward, oozing confidence, purple hair pulled high in a winding ponytail. When one civilian shakily tried to dial 119, he raised his fist in a sharp motion. A square column shot from the ground and fired the poor woman into the air. It was almost comical, how she was there and then she wasn’t, but Tamaki rushed forward and caught her, placing her gently on the ground before facing the man. The man stood for a minute, letting the remaining civilians clear before focusing on Tamaki. 

“Where,” the man droned. “Are your heroes, boy?” 

Tamaki narrowed his eyes, wondering if the woman’s call went through. He looked over at her, only to see YN standing over the woman in a protective stance. YN glanced back periodically at Tamaki with worried eyes. He glanced back, only to see the man was much closer that he had anticipated, maybe only a yard away. Tamaki was tempted to leap back, but the man stood right before the glass windows of the paint shop, and Tamaki’s nerves were steeled. 

YN was there. YN was there. YN was there. 

“What is your name, boy?” The man growled. Tamaki kept his mouth sealed, keeping eye contact with the man’s blue eyes. “I am Yigrallas Initi, son of the Great Yoson. I have come to seek out revenge on my father’s killer by destroying the world they hold so dear.” 

None of it made a lick of sense to Tamaki, but he realised that Initi had an accent he could place. It was the same accent YN had, the one that no one could pin the location of. He narrowed his eyes. 

“I won’t give you the chance.” 

Tamaki began rushing Initi, just hoping to get him away from the paint shop, and Initi waved a gloved hand. The earth beneath Tamaki spun and he nearly ran across the entire street before righting himself and seeing Initi turn and face Tamaki. He realised that thank god, Initi was looking away from the paint store. YN was inside, ushering the woman, spare customers, and workers into the backroom or under the counter. They stood near the back door, narrowing their eyes at Initi. 

“Do not get distracted, boy.” Initi raised his fist again, but before Tamaki could be rocketed by the stone under his feet, he skipped to the side and narrowly missed a rock to the jaw. Initi growled. 

“You are a fleeting one.” 

It began a dance; Tamaki leapt back and forth, trying to avoid the wind and rocks that Initi tried shooting his way. It was strange how Initi seemed to only be mildly annoyed the entire time, but Tamaki didn’t think too hard on it. 

That was a lie. He thought about it-a lot. 

Was Initi planning something? Were there others? Where were the actual, licensed heroes? Were they even coming? Tamaki thought enough that he was too slow, getting smacked with a boulder the size of an outdoor table. Initi let out a laugh. 

“The little bird touches the earth,” Initi mused, watching Tamaki fall to the pavement. Tamaki’s head was spinning. The rock hit much harder than he anticipated and made him go still for a moment. Everything echoed, like Initi’s footsteps, his chuckles, the bell. 

The bell? 

Tamaki managed to open his eyes and saw YN storming out of the paint shop with a fury in their eyes. 

“Tama!” 

Initi stopped approaching Tamaki and turned. YN’s eyes met Initis’, and there was an instant look of horrified confusion. Initi’s eyes widened, impossibly so, before a ferocious glare glare overtook his face.

“Z’ythras.” He growled. 

“Yigrallas,” They hissed. 

“You killed my father,” Initi’s voice plummeted, and his hand made a choking motion towards YN. They cooly stepped to the side and avoided the plume of fire from Init’s palm. 

“He deserved it,” They reared up, putting both hands before them like they were planning to punch the villain. 

“He did nothing!” Initi howled and ran towards YN. Tamaki tried to protest, but his voice was stuck in his throat, and he smelled blood. 

“He destroyed everything I loved!” YN’s face was uncharacteristically enraged, running right into Initi and socking him in the nose. He yelped, grabbing a handful of their hair and dragging the both of them to the ground. It was straight, raw, hand-to-hand combat, and Tamaki watched in awe as YN held their own against Initi. 

“He hunted demons. Demons like you!” Initi managed to spit out, before straddling YN and placing his hands around their throat. 

“You…” YN was choking, trying to pry his hands away and kicking him in the stomach. “You have no idea...what he did…!” 

“You killed him!” Initi dug his nails into the meat of YN’s arm and used his spare hand to grip their ribs. “You murderer! My father was a good man, and he ended the plague of-of!” Initi didn’t get to finish his sentence when YN picked up a piece of rubble and smashed it into his face. There was a streak of blood and dust of Initi’s face and YN scrambled away, towards Tamaki, who was still trying to get up. Initi grabbed their foot, though, and they slammed into the cobblestones. There was a groan, and then Initi climbed back onto YN and began choking them, slamming their head with as much force as Initi could muster.  

“You served them! They did nothing but kill and destroy, and you served them willingly! You must die!” 

Then, there was silence. 

Initi stared down at YN, and Tamaki tried to yell. They were completely still, and there was something leaking from behind their head and staining the bricks. It wasn't red, but a gaudy silver that was only there for a moment before disappearing into the air. 

YN was dead. 

Tamaki wasn’t enough. 

He felt his heart stop and a white-hot rush in his blood. Tears swelled forth, and thought the blur, Initi looked at his hands with shock. The man didn’t seem to even know what he did, standing with a gasp. It was all so suffocating, seeing YN’s still corpse and knowing that he would never hear them again. It was a horrible, quiet peace that made Tamaki choke on his own sobs. 

Initi looked at Tamaki, and slowly began stumbling towards him. Tamaki felt such a deep hatred for the purple blob in his eyes, and wanted nothing more than to crush it. 

Then, there was a whisper. 

Initi stopped, and the tears fell from Tamaki’s eyes. It was enough that he could see someone writhing on the ground behind Initi. The man turned, and let out a gasp. 

There were two YNs, and one YN rose like a puppet cut from it’s strings, breathing like they were starved for air. Their head was back in a way that seemed almost painful, until it snapped forward. The other YN-the corpse-melted like red goo until the skeleton was the only thing left and it rose, standing perfectly behind YN. The ground around them began shifting, until chunks of the pavement were uprooted, and five more skeletons crawled from the dark dirt, bugs and filth clinging to the yellowed bones. There was a second, a brief, imperceptibly chaotic and still at the same time. 

The perfect eye of the storm. 

Then, YN’s voice leaked through while they still faced the pavement. It wasn’t the sweet, kind voice Tamaki knew, but a sound like a thousand angry hornets if they could speak at once. It made his entire body freeze in horror. 

“Sixty five million, three hundred and forty  thousand, and five hundred and sixty minutes.” YN paused and sighed heavily. “Five hundred and sixty-one. One hundred and twenty two years, seven months, and twenty four days.” 

YN looked up, and their eyes were a startling pitch black with bleeding red pupils. They didn’t even seem to see Tamaki, tunnel vision focused on Initi. The skeletons, which had been looking down, snapped their heads up to look at Initi. 

“I am considered young for my kin. We are ageless in infinite chaos. Possessive of everything and nothing. We are the rulers of the empty voids. Your father destroyed my home and peoples for sport and was killed by the Ancient Laws, written by Father Dragon and Mother Hydra. I killed Yoson Godslayer. I am Z’ythras, the Last Great Old One, and you have hurt my love.” 

At once, Initi let out a horrified yell as the skeletons ran at him, almost on all fours. It was frankly terrifying, a suffering, malicious vision of Initi being ripped to shreds. His screams were miserable but Tamaki could only focus on YN. They turned to Tamaki, brows furrowed, and ran to him. He tried to whimper something, anything, but YN simply cradled his head and blocked the bloodshed. 

“Sleep, my love. All will be well.” 

And all Tamaki saw was darkness. 

When Tamaki woke up, he was screaming. 

He was in a cold sweat, gripping at blankets and anything he could see. He felt overloaded, terrified, until the door opened (there was a door?) and YN walked in. They smiled in the comforting way they always did, and Tamaki relaxed. 

“Bad dream?” They murmured, tucking some of Tamaki’s stray hair behind his ear. He panted, but the burning in his lungs was quelling. He started rambling, eyes darting across YN’s guest room. 

“Y-Yeah! You died, and there was this man, and-and he was after you, and there were skel…” 

Tamaki looked at the open door and saw not one, not two, but six skeletons, all curiously edged around the door like puppies. But if they were puppies, Tamaki would’ve been fine. Instead, he began choking on his breath again, and YN grabbed his face. 

“Tama, focus. Focus. You’re okay. They’re not going to hurt you.” YN looked both concerned and humoured, and one of the skeletons jostled the other in what seemed to be embarrassment. 

“Then-then-then you-and he-and they-and you-” 

“Just take a second, Tama.” YN soothed. “Breathe. I can explain once you’re calmed down.” 

It took Tamaki more than a second, but he was able to breathe normally, and if he kept his eyes on YN, he wouldn’t be able to see the skeletons in the corner. 

“So…” Tamaki gulped. “What…?” 

“Everything you’re going to hear is going to be…” YN hesitated. “Unbelievable. Absolutely insane.” 

They stood and turned, tugging their shirt up just the slightest. Heat flushed Tamaki’s cheeks, but he noted a sticky-looking spiderweb pentagram tattoo. It had the All Seeing Eye in the middle, and he tilted his head. YN glanced back. 

“I am not human. I might’ve been, at one point, but I can’t remember. I am part of a race of gods called the Great Old Ones.” 

“You said...that they were dead.” Tamaki winced at the words, and YN lowered their shirt. 

“Yes. I am the last one.” 

“And that the guy, his dad…” 

“Killed them. The Great Old Ones…we were powerful. Divine. Horrifyingly ethereal. We were the ultimate hunt. And Yoson was the ultimate hunter. He sought us out, and for the first time in millenia, someone managed to kill one of the Great Old Ones. But Yoson wasn’t satisfied.” YN’s eyes went dark, and Tamaki searched through them. There was nothing but ageless regret. “He went after all of them. I wasn’t there when it happened. I was on Earth actually. Here. But when I came back, it was all up in blue and yellow smoke. My father, he was the last one to be killed. And I saw him standing there, mourning for my mother.” 

“Then the painting…” Tamaki baulked. “That was your father?!” 

“Mhm.” YN hummed, sighing. “I was the only Great Old One that couldn’t be inherently killed, so Yoson went after me. And since the Ancient Laws, written by our-my forbears said that it was perfectly reasonable to fight back, I did.” 

“Did he...kill you?” 

“Oh, yes.” YN hummed again, looking both miffed and satisfied. “Four times. The fifth, I got hit by a car. The sixth, of course, was Yoson’s son. Who, naturally, is dead. Like father, like son, I suppose.” 

“And…” Tamaki glanced at the skeletons. One waved timidly, and there was some more jostling. 

“They follow me around, unless I want to be discreet. I didn’t want to scare you.” 

“You and the villain, you two had...have the same accent.” 

“He was raised on the ruins of my home, I suppose. Yoson was from there, too.” 

“And you…” Another furious flush rose on Tamaki’s cheeks, and YN tilted their head. 

“You called me your lover?” 

YN’s eyes went wide, and the skeletons froze. Four dashed away, one slunk behind the door, and the last literally collapsed into a pile of bones. YN themselves were bright red, scratching the back of their neck and looking away. 

“Aha, well, that was...I mean, if you don’t want to, then it’s okay! But I know...it’s, uh…” YN trailed off, nervous for the first time that Tamaki had seen. Someone who was an immortal god, levelled to a blushing flower. Some he loved, blushing for him. 

“Am I dreaming?” Tamaki pinched himself, and YN sat up. 

“Oy! Don’t hurt yourself more!” One of the skeletons (the one behind the door) nodded fervently with YN’s cry. 

“But you’re really...you love me?” Tamaki pointed at himself. “Well…” YN paused, taking a deep breath. “Yeah.” 

There was a moment, but unlike all the others, it was kind. It was soft and gentle, like staring at the stars on a clear summer night. Tamaki’s heart pounded through his stomach. 

“Well, I-! I like you, too!” He nearly hollered it, but YN lit up like a tree again. 

“Then do you wanna be, like...dating?” “Y-Yes! Please!” He leaned forward. “And does that mean we…! Can we!” He couldn’t finish his sentence, he was too nervous, but YN smiled. 

“You wanna kiss?” 

There was a rattle and all the skeletons were back at the door again, but Tamaki ignored it in favour of staring intently at YN’s lips. He gulped and nodded. They leaned closer, ever closer, and Tamaki’s heart raced, and it was like he was going to have a heart attack. 

Then their lips met, and it all paused, and suddenly, this one moment made up for the bad ones. 

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

Lovecraftian Horror: Do’s & Don’ts

So, I was on @pwbi​‘s Discord, when someone posted a picture of a drawing of a fossil giant fish and it got called an Eldritch Abomination. This makes me feel angry and so it’s time for the Patently Absurd Guide to Incomprehensible Horror.

Eldritch Abomination is the generic term for a monster hearkening back to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, but it has become so overused that TV Tropes at one point infamously called the titular witch’s ghost in Scooby Doo and the Witch’s Ghost an Eldritch Abomination.

So, in the name of helping pop culture (or at least D&D) understand what it really means, there are a few key points I have identified, and if you’re lacking more than one then you generally don’t have an Eldritch Abomination.

Unfathomable Form: This is what everyone immediately thinks of. Unfortunately, because Lovecraft’s work popularized the trope and his breakout star is Cthulhu, everyone thinks you can add tentacles and you’re done. NO. Cthulhu is low-key a bitch in Lovecraft’s own work. He’s just a squid head, a man’s body, and bat wings.

Unfathomable Form means that whatever you are looking at is unfathomable - it’s not just that you don’t understand it, it’s that you can’t. We all crack jokes about game glitches - but imagine if one of those happened in real life.

“Ha ha ha! His ass is clipping through his face while he floats towards me... wait I’m not playing GMod right now!”

But how about we take something less seemingly silly. How about color? Most human eyes are sensitive to 3 wavelengths of light, resulting in the spectrum of colors we all know and love.

But let’s consider the mantis shrimp. Their eyes are sensitive to 12 wavelengths of light. Try imagining and adding 9 additional impossible colors to the rainbow. You cannot do it because you cannot fathom something you have no frame of reference for. You literally can’t understand the world as seen by the mantis shrimp, and that’s a real animal!

Incomprehensible Motives: Let’s talk about one of my other favorite franchises for a moment: The Elder Scrolls. Most people would probably expect me to cite Hermaeus Mora as an eldritch abomination, but he fails this particular test. Old Mora simply craves knowledge. He’s curious, and that is an inherently very human motive. But do you know which Daedric Prince does pass this test?

Sheogorath, Daedric Prince of Madness. Because contrary to how he’s portrayed in-game, he’s not the Daedric Prince of “Ooh Shiny” he is the Daedric Prince of Madness - ALL forms of insanity at. The. Same. Time.

Have you ever been depressed? How about manic? Are you bored? Excited? He is all of those things and so many more at every moment of his entire existence. That is a state of mind that is literally incomprehensible to any human and we didn’t even have to start making up entirely new feelings.

Some people will comment with the “Blue and Orange Morality” trope, and that’s a fair analogy, but it still falls flat, because most of the time the moral compass being pained blue and orange is not incomprehensible, just different from our own.

Impossible Origins: Lovecraft codified this with his description of the Star Spawn, Cthulhu’s posse. The Elder Things - basically starfish aliens - look weird to humans, but are made of the same mundane matter. The Star Spawn and Cthulhu himself are made of some kind of matter but not the matter native to our universe. It has inherently different properties from ordinary matter that look like magic weirdness from a scientific perspective, strongly implied to be why Cthulhu’s face regenerates when a boat plows through it.

That ain’t regeneration, just what the stuff he’s made of does.

Hermaeus Mora flunked the motives test, but he passes this one with flying colors. He is reputedly made of concepts discarded during the creation of the Elder Scrolls universe as incompatible with the fundamental basis of reality. He is quite literally made of concepts that cannot exist. Perhaps something like a sharp sphere? Perhaps that’s too close to comprehensible to be one of them.

Bonus Criterion - Cosmic Insignificance: A lot of Lovecraft’s work hasn’t aged well, and not just because of the racism. His works simply don’t inspire fear. But to be fair, they’re not really aimed at creating fear, but at a sort of existential despair.

In the universe of the Cthulhu Mythos, humanity is nothing special. Everything we think we know about the universe is wrong. Physics is fundamentally different than what we believe. And on top of that, gods exist, but they aren’t any of the gods we’ve ever believed in, and these gods don’t really give a damn about our existence one way or another. Morality and religion are just lies we tell ourselves so that we can sleep better at night.

The Cthulhu Mythos is essentially a pessimist’s view of nihilism, and that’s why I’m making it a bonus category rather than a fundamental one. Nothing in the original works written by Lovecraft himself has an inherent “madness aura” like you see in D&D. In the works of Lovecraft, people go mad because they find out that everything they believe in is made up and wrong and they don’t cope well.

Except... most of us Millennials and the generations coming after us are also pretty nihilistic. The Boomers are ruining the world and we have no future to look forward to, so we’ve decided to enjoy life while we can using what little we have.

Lovecraft looked into the Abyss, and when the Abyss looked back it terrified him. My generation seems to have collectively looked into the Abyss, and when it looked back we decided to wave.

[pixelgrotto]

Calling Cthulhu, part one

In 2019, I began to get serious about delving into the world of H.P. Lovecraft. Thanks to pop culture I’d had a passing familiarity with his stories and the creations within them - in particular that octopus-faced star spawn named Cthulhu who now even has his own children’s books - but the deliciously unsettling appeal of the Mythos created by America’s first cosmic horror writer wasn’t truly apparent to me until I played my first game of the tabletop RPG Call of Cthulhu.

As someone primarily coming from a Dungeons & Dragons background, I found Call of Cthulhu to be a breath of fresh, eldritch air, sporting an elegant system that’s nearly as old as D&D and has, since 1981, reliably served as an excellent alternative for players who would prefer to solve mysteries rather than kill monsters. But while D&D’s had several video games translating its tabletop feel to a computer space, the specific “Call of Cthulhu” license has only had a handful of electronic efforts bearing its trademark, even though you can find the “Lovecraftian” label applied to dozens of games these days (many of which bear only passing references to the uncanny, otherworldly horrors hinted at by Howard Phillips Lovecraft). The handful of officially licensed CoC games that do exist are a mixed bag of janky oddness, which is perhaps appropriate considering that they’re all dealing with the idea of humans learning about ancient, insanity-provoking horrors. 

Since I love a deep dive into the jank, I’ve decided to play all of the licensed Call of Cthulhu games over the next few months to see how they fare. I’m skipping one - Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land - since it was originally a mobile game ported to the computer, and there’s no option to currently buy it on Steam. In its place, I’ll be checking out The Sinking City, a 2019 release which looks much better...and was almost a CoC game before the license got pulled away in the midst of development.

Kicking things off are Shadow of the Comet and Prisoner of Ice, two CoC point ‘n click adventures that were released by Infogrames in 1993 and 1995, respectively. Both games have fallen into the cracks of history, obscured by stronger adventures from those same years made by Sierra and LucasArts, and while I like to think that my tolerance for point ‘n click nonsense is higher than most peoples...I can see why. 

Shadow of the Comet, for one, has nice production values. The graphics are solid, though occasionally garish (the sky is a little too blue) and sometimes bordering on parody (the character portraits seem to be traced versions of famous actors, like Jack Nicholson). The music, while minimal and kind of tinny, could also be interpreted as dread-building, which is a good quality for a horror game to possess. But these positives fall before the big negative of the control scheme, which feels like it was created by developers who intentionally ignored the point ‘n click standards of the era, like the famous icon bar engine of Sierra or the SCUMM verb system of LucasArts, in favor of a clunky amalgamation of keyboard and mouse that makes navigating your character and item hunting about as much fun as having a Mi-go remove your brain. 

The plot for Shadow of the Comet is also a flabbergasting beast. It begins as an obvious riff off of Lovecraft’s famous The Shadow over Innsmouth story, with a reporter named Parker investigating a New England town named “Illsmouth.” Instead of uncovering a village full of Deep One hybrids, however, the game’s plot quickly diverges in an impressively scattershot manner that prompts some truly dumb puzzles. At one point, while trying to figure out why the locals worship Hailey’s Comet, which passed by Illsmouth years ago and is somehow connected to the Elder Gods who manipulate the place, Parker transforms into a bird and talks to a Native American who spouts mumbo jumbo that makes no sense. At the end of the game, Parker prevents the resurrection of...one of the Elder Gods (it’s all frightfully unclear, even if you have great familiarity with the Cthulhu Mythos) and in a decidedly un-Lovecraftian finale, the townspeople meet him at the docks, cheer his victory, and all yell out a THANK YOU PARKER chorus as if this is an episode of Scooby Doo. 

Is Prisoner of Ice any better? Well...not exactly. The control scheme’s superior (or normal, I should say), but with chonky polygonal models replacing clean sprites for the characters, the game arguably sports a wonkier look than Shadow of the Comet’s clean pixel art. And the story once again goes nuts faster than a little kid reading the Necronomicon. The beginning’s strong, with a claustrophobic submarine setting that sees crew members falling victim to monsters unleashed from cold icebergs, but then the game straight up becomes Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, with the dull military protagonist Lt. Ryan traversing the globe (alongside a woman who seems suspiciously like Fate of Atlantis’ Sophia Hapgood) to keep the Nazis from unleashing eldritch forces upon the world. Then Parker from the first game shows up again, which I guess is sort of nice fan service, and a time travel sub-plot gets tossed into the mix at the eleventh hour, because Lt. Ryan is secretly a chosen child from the future who’s destined to save us from...I don’t know, Dagon mobs or something. It feels like a 90s comic combined with Cthulhu Tech, the mid-2000s tabletop system that mashed Cthulhu and anime mechs together, and I suppose if that kind of weirdness is your jam, you should...maybe give Prisoner of Ice a try?

And that’s really all I can say about these two early Call of Cthulhu efforts. They’re not great, but for hardcore Cthulhu heads, they might be worth the pocket change it takes to purchase them on Steam or GoG, if only to witness curios from another era. After Prisoner of Ice, the CoC license would remain unused for quite some time, even as games that have retroactively been labeled Lovecraftian, like Quake and Eternal Darkness, came and went. In fact, it wouldn’t be until 2005, a full decade after Prisoner of Ice’s release, that the Call of Cthulhu name would emerge once more for a little Bethesda-published effort entitled Dark Corners of the Earth...a game that would be a step up from these two experiments in the point ‘n click space, but still full of copious, maddening flaws. I’ll dig into that one next time.

[vaguely-concerned]

I played Death of the Outsider finally and I have some Feelings about it

and most of them not very positive. nice stuff first tho!

THINGS I LIKED:

- billie is such a good character. still new to her old self and slightly tender from coming out of the protective shell of lies that was meagan foster, full of old scars and doubts and bitterness but trying for something better, something kinder even though she still doesn’t quite understand what she’s walking towards -- the genuine care and tenderness in her voice when she talks to daud or thinks about deidre. I love her.

all that and she effortlessly IS also the queer disabled woc the gamer bros refuse to believe could possibly exist. exquisite. 

- the idea of ‘killing’ the outsider is compelling, but it’s the sort of idea that needs a full length game to support it and its implications. cool idea, completely wrong execution.

- saying that: I love that the injustice of the outsider’s creation being righted is only made possible by a long unbroken line of mercy and kindness. daud saved billie from the streets, corvo spared daud, daud saved emily and spared billie after her betrayal, billie tried to save aramis stilton and became entangled in the void, emily spared billie, billie took this job in the first place partly because she loves her dad daud and wants him to find peace. that idea is so beautiful that I wish the rest of the narrative was strong enough to hold it up lol.

there’s also something going on here with other people holding on to the important pieces of you -- that billie is ‘all that is left’ of daud after he’s dead. once he saved a child from true loneliness and gave her a purpose, made her feel seen again, gave her the closest thing she had to a home, and when he’s completely lost himself in the void... that kindness is still alive in billie, and she helps him find his way. again that is really touching and thoughtful and plays wonderfully into the chaos system in these games thematically! too bad about all the stilted dialogue and characterization messes and uh. everything else. 

- most of all I love how clear it is that billie and daud love each other. it’s a quiet love that has nothing to prove anymore, it’s survived all the blood and the ugliness and everything they’ve done to each other and to the world, a love with no demands left. it’s not the sort of love you usually see, in all its unsentimentality, but it’s real. when daud tells her he’s proud of her and trusts her no matter what she chooses to do, you feel how much he means it. (making his insistence on trying to make her choice for her all the weirder -- see my long rant of lamentation about his characterization in doto below lol)

there’s something about daud’s undramatic yet complete acceptance of and respect for billie that... I didn’t know I needed this, but it was a nice gift nonetheless haha, thank you. (it’s similar to how good it feels in D2 when you realize corvo just likes emily a lot as a person, even aside from her being his daughter. a good series for father & daughter stories)

- this carries over from D2, but I think the journal/log entries are better written and more insightful than the stuff out in the world.  

- it cannot be overstated how much the gameplay loop of these games is just... pure crack cocaine for my brain haha, very few things give me this specific kind of brain tingle. I love the sound of looting and I love the art style and ambiance and I love planning out a strategy after finding all the options and I love never being spotted or killing anyone and I love the puzzle elements they put into exploration sections and I love the feeling of how you move through the environment. it’s one of the few games where I routinely get so into it I end up with a crick in the neck because I’ve been so focused for so long and never noticed I’ve been sitting in a way that makes my entire spine hate me. I needed something to get me through the last few days and it did deliver that, at least. karnaca is pretty enough that I didn’t even mind that most of the levels were recycled from D2 either. 

- I’m not quite sure whether I understood this right but there’s a woman standing behind daud in the void -- I wonder if that is actually his mother and he’s been so close this whole time? at first I thought maybe it was jessamine but god no I hope she’s finally at peace after All That Nonsense, she shouldn’t have to hang around there anymore. there’s also a figure near him I could swear was corvo with his mask on, but he’s not dead canonically so that would make very little sense. oh well I’ll take my feels where I can get them even if I have to make them up wholesale  

- the bankheist was cool as fuuuuuck, that and the emotional impact of daud dying was sadly the height of this game for me, after that it all went mediocre real quick     

- paul nakauchi as shan yun was, as I have said before, a blast. ‘ugh I cannot continue my throat is as raw as a plucked pheasant’ fsdkfhlsadjkhfas

- daud’s funeral is genuinely touching. she gave him the entirety of her old life for a sendoff, battered and worn and dear as they both were. someone hold me 

THINGS I  H A T E D:

- the stuff they did with daud’s characterization. I am so unreasonably angry over this haha, the more I think about it the more I hate it. I think there are paths you could go with his ACTUAL character to make this work, but this was not it. I’ve said this before, but his most iconic, most defining scene is him surrendering himself to corvo’s judgement without justifying himself or deflecting the blame for any of what he’s done. this isn’t even regression in his character, it’s just.. a different character altogether. they could have gone for the angle that delilah almost managed to end the world b/c daud showed mercy and that’s the reason he’s moved to action, I think that might be a more compelling motivation for him at least. OR have him be more conflicted about how to do things -- violence is still the only tool he knows how to use but it’s not what he wants to or even can be anymore and the conflict troubles him, ‘His hands do violence, but there is a different dream in his heart’. or even use a different character for the ‘kill kill kill’ angle, he didn’t need to be here for this dlc at all.   

also, just on a purely practical level... for all his flaws and longstanding moral shortsightedness daud is not a stupid man. why the FCK would he be so sure that killing the outsider will fix anything? if I, dumbass extraordinaire, could within half a minute wonder if maybe something even worse would take the outsider’s place if you removed him... why does that never occur to the Knife of Dunwall tm, a man about Void for like half a century or whatever?? ugh fuck this, I’m having a hard time explaining exactly why it all feels weird and wrong to me, but know that it does and that I Do Not Like It lol. I feel cheated out of something important I thought I had.  

- again, this should have been a full game. (I think it is sold as one already, but it just hm isn’t) there’s way too much shit of literal cosmic importance for the game’s universe being picked up here for something this short to cover. save this HUGE idea for a rainy day should you ever want to do another game in the series and do something else with the dlc, honestly. 

- god but the outsider is insufferable in this. I don’t know what happened, but by the end I was like ‘*thoughtfully strokes chin* maybe daud has a point billie keep that knife handy’. he’s annoying and boring, which is wild to me because he was always a lot of fun in the other games.

for real tho I don’t know if this is just my atheist-but-still-angry-at-god-somehow??? talking, but daud HAS a point. people are responsible for their own actions, but the outsider didn’t have to do any of what he did either. he could have chosen to be bored through the centuries instead of seeing what people would do if you gave them such ~*morally neutral*~ abilities as y’know summoning a bunch of rats to eat other people. the game wants me to buy the ‘but really this black eyed boy is woobie tho uwu’ so badly and no I’m not buying that give me my refund I want my chaotic neutral bastard back pls. I’d probably be more inclined to want to help him like that. where’s his salt gone, arkane. if you didn’t want him to be edgy why did you make him look like that.  

- this is the lamest possible version of the outsider’s backstory lol, it feels like the pearl clutching panic about satanic cults back in the day all over. listen if it’s this easy to make a god the thrill is sort of taken out of it, if these randos did it anyone could. also how the fuck are they just normal-ish people anyway? why do they follow modern fashions? haven’t they been hanging around for thousands of years, haven’t their culture changed in any meaningful way? (I realize these aren’t the same guys as back in the day but it’s just weird) why do they speak a language billie and the player can understand? why did anyone think ‘idk some cultists no one’s ever heard of before with no thematic significance whatsoever’ was the way to go world building wise? they’ve taken all the unknowable eldritchness out of the eldritch horror and we’re all poorer for it now haha 

relatedly the last level is... just not very good. you come down from the awesome bank heist and then there’s... whatever the fuck this was.

- while I do like billie finding daud in the void and him remembering her I hate that he goes out still full of self loathing and rage when you talk him into the nonlethal option, that he can’t forgive himself or find any sliver of hope or peace. I wish there had been a few more moments for the two of them to come to peace with themselves before he gave the outsider back his name, some real catharsis. as it is I was annoyed when the outsider ‘woke up’ or whatever b/c it felt like he was stealing attention from what I was actually emotionally invested in and not done with.    

they had  n o t  built up billie’s or my sympathy for the outsider well enough either. again this is something I think they could have done if they’d structured things differently, if they’d been more deliberate in making you understand he was basically a child and letting you dwell on it. because there is a parallell there between him and billie, and billie and daud, but I, how do I put this, did not give a fuck  

in short this was really similar to my experience with D2 in that there’s enough good there that it’s all the more painful when it fails to deliver on it again and again, and it ruined things I already liked about this story from the first game (daud’s arc and everything to do with the outsider, mostly). give me some months of denial and hard core headcanon work and I’ll probably be able to live with it

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“Why did you do it?”

They had flown alongside each other in silence for some time; She asked this after staring at the Vessel for several minutes. With the Seals long broken their body had begun to reflect their true age; they weren't yet nearly as tall as the Hollow Knight had become, but their proportions fit their size better and they did not threaten to topple from the weight of their mask. So too had grown their stolen wings, which were strong enough now to carry them in flight; pale, finely scaled gossamer that beat hard and then stilled, allowing them to glide. The ragged cloak the Vessel had been born in was exchanged now for the armor and furred mantle of a Nailmaster; their old nail, modified to fit their new size, was hung on their hip and swayed in the rushing winds. When She spoke and they turned their head to look at Her, the scar down the middle of their porcelain visage was nearly imperceptible from the years since its creation.

The Radiance probed the surface layer of their mind as though She had struck them with a Dream Nail, but all She registered was a confusion regarding Her question. She looked ahead again, steering Her own flight, and said, “You repaired your mask after dragging Me into the Void. You tried to abandon godhood and became this.” With one arm, without looking, She gestured towards their body. “Why?”

No answer, at first, was offered. She could feel emotions swirling under the surface thoughts their consciousness limited Her to, half-formed words and spiraling phrases that told Her they were searching for the right words. When they formed at last a sentence, it was the face of a storm of synonyms and connotations. Language was an odd thing for how little it conveyed. I wanted a life of my own carried just beneath it feelings of bitterness and hope, a glimpse at a dozen memories, a desperation for agency. Even simply I signified musings of who “I” was, a struggle for a name. Vessel, Knight, Shadow, My Friend, Ghost, Little Ghost, Ghost of Hallownest, I am Ghost.

The Radiance ignored all of this. She focused on the sentence as they had built it.

“A life?” She said, a little contemptuously. “Is that all? A life of mortal toil and suffering? Divinity is a life, Lord of Shades, one infinitely superior to that of this minuscule shape. The power I commanded at My peak...you passed up omnipotence, mastery of your domain, to wear gaudy armor and swing a blade. You’re a fool.”

I am not the Lord of Shades, their thoughts thundered. (Under the backtrack in thought was what the Radiance recognized as phrases they had tried to say simultaneously: god of a grave, king of siblings slaughtered, eldritch, alone.) That thing may live in me, but I nearly lost my mind to it. Divinity was death (loss of I…). They stopped briefly to beat their wings; in the moment’s silence this brought, they scanned the barren ground below and allowed themselves to calm. They considered and said, It was too great a sacrifice not to hesitate in making. I fought to rid the world of you, and I believed I could have the chance to live in such a world.

“So it was out of spite?”

Most of my decisions are out of spite. We have a commonality there. But no.

“Make up your mind. You just said--”

I found a SELF, Ghost pronounced. I learned I could be more than a Vessel (king’s toy, empty, hollow knight, sacrifice, nameless), more than a killer (feral thing, storm-lashed, murderer, vicious beast, nameless)...Their thoughts continued to wrestle with each other, and the Radiance laughed loudly. Her course through the air momentarily drifted as She guffawed, then She adjusted Her furred wings and banked a little closer to Her companion.

“That just makes you even more of a fool!” She replied. “What are you but a Vessel and a killer, if you refuse to be the Lord of Shades? What is a Nailmaster but a bug trained in death? And your status as a Vessel cannot be escaped, unless of course you embrace the Void entirely. Do you always contradict your own reasons like this?”

Do you always pretend to exist in a vacuum?

That reply came with a maelstrom of biting words and seething rage behind it. Her flight wavered again as She was buffeted by buried screams of memory: a single, purple moth croaking out explanations, alongside a thousand orange pustules and the eyes of attacking husks. The condemnation was clear. But with the meanings they pushed on Her were those they had meant to reserve for themselves: an elderly bug clutching a beautiful flower, those same flowers decorating a grave, a tall pillbug wearing a white mask as a hat, a broken Vessel reaching for them as it died, an enormous bug in Nailmaster’s armor, Hornet. These flickered through Her eyes too fast see clearly, but the weight they held in the Vessel’s mind shook Her more than the recollection of infection did.

The Lord of Shades has no one. Eternity alone with all those Shades (echoes, siblings, dead, regrets)? I cannot abide the thought. I love them, I always shall...but there are things outside the Abyss I love as well. Their explanation paused as the two of them flew beneath a storm cloud, the arcs within illuminating them in harsh blue-white. But Ghost’s mind had crescendoed with the thought of loved ones. As the Radiance searched for a train of coherent thought, a kind of peace filled them as though they had forgotten who they flew with. I found friends. A sister. A bug who considered me progeny (his student, his child, heir, fellow, beloved). I wanted a future with them. A future, in the world that taught me I could love and be loved. I rejected godhood because I decided I deserved a future.

“So you aren’t only a fool, you’re also pathetic. Mortals have no future, we blink and they’re gone.”

Of course, I was wrong to believe I deserved that. My work wasn’t finished, for you still live. And you, glorified lumafly? If you despise this condition so much, why not stay submerged within the Void? You almost make it seem preferable to this form.

Looking down again at the body in question, the Radiance scowled. Gone were Her metallic legs, gone were the ever-changing and prehensile wings, and gone was Her crown of horns; climbing out of the Abyss, shaking, She had been horrified to find Herself reborn as little more than a tall moth. Alabaster fuzz covered most of Her body, ending just before the claws of Her legs and four arms. Her wings, now a desaturated yellow-grey with only traces of gold patterning, hung limply around Her like a cloak when unused; flying on them now, though those golden circles shone brightly, She could barely stand to look at them for their relative drabness. The reflections She had seen of Her face had been similarly disgusting; two bristled antennae, angled forward and out in crude mockery of Her old horns, swayed in every breeze. She didn’t want to consider how they looked now, buffeted by the winds of Her flight and the harsh lands below. The only true sign of what She had once been was the constant glow of Her yellow eyes, and that only served to confuse and frighten those who saw it.

She seethed at the thought of those bugs’ uncomprehending faces. “How are those circumstances at all comparable?!” She demanded, and when a silent chuckle rolled through the Vessel’s thoughts She grew only angrier. “Had I known I would be reduced so, perhaps I would have stayed drowned! But I was powerless, cold, dying without end, do you understand? You passed up all the power of the Void to have your ridiculous ‘future,’ but I? I?” The Radiance stared at the ground hundreds of feet below, recalling the despair She had felt immersed in the sea of shadow; the despair that hadn’t truly left Her since. “...I was forced to choose between torture in the dark and this weak, drab, finite shape. I don’t know if I chose well. Both fates were horrors beyond anything I could have conceived.”

She had hoped to stir some sympathy within Her companion, but Her words seemed to have the opposite effect. Beneath Ghost’s surface thoughts boiled an anger renewed. Whisperings of how dare you and selfish moron were discernible in snatches, until they formed a sentence to project to Her. Woe to the god gone mad, Ghost thought. Forced to endure a consequence for the first time in her existence, a horror no doubt eclipsing all the pain and death her infection wrought. To think a single apocalyptic tantrum could have brought this upon her. Awful, truly.

“Sarcasm shouldn’t be attempted without a mouth,” the Radiance noted aloud. “You convey both too much and too little. I don’t know why I expected you to understand, Lord of Shades. You’ve never known what it is to be immersed within your own element, only to be attacked and suffocated by your oldest enemy. Nor have you ever felt the love of worshipers.”

And you, contrarily, have never known any other kind of love (siblings, teachers, friends, quirrel, quirrel, quirrel…). I do not envy you for having the likes of the Moss Prophet to babble your praises. If it weren’t for who you were and all you’ve done, I might have pitied you.

The Radiance glared at the horizon as She withdrew Her attention from their thoughts, blocking out whatever else they may have wanted to say. “I cannot wait,” She murmured, lowering Her gaze to scan the ground below, “until the day we can treat each other as enemies once again.” She didn’t have to look to know that Ghost shared the sentiment—and was probably tightening their hold on their nail, dreaming of that very moment. Speaking louder She added, “Pharloom isn’t far from here. Follow me, we’re nearly there.” With a shining flap of Her wings She began to accelerate.