#and it's ONLY in Asunder

[amygdalae]

Cradling two advil in my palm gently tenderly like a small baby bird

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Asunder

slow-paced high fantasy

a woman who has a contract with an eldritch entity allowing her to see the dead & survives by taking various jobs

when a job searching for stranded smugglers in a cave goes wrong, she ends up with the soul of a dying stranger bound to her shadow

along with a scholar and her old childhood friend, they travel to his home country to find a way to unbind him and save them both

dark fantasy world with gods, demonic entities, arcane magic, and semi-sentient beasts used as transport

[sardonicfactory]

beast of burden

[asunder2024]

i literally think about ferain every day. what a MAN. kind and conscientious and funny and hot and devoted and protective and romantic and just ugh his kindness stood out to me so much. karys needed so much grace and space and understanding and he offered it so immediately. like i LOVE him.

[108garys]

*gestures wildly at my spooky children* Do you see my vision?

Struggling how to articulate how much Cole in little hope is perfection and has been eating my brain since it popped into it the other day due to the recent dragon age resurgence

I don't know how much overlap there is with little hope being such a tiny fandom comparatively but picture it:

(long incoherent ramblings undercut)

Cole the spirit, the personification of the virtue of compassion, who's literal whole deal is being drawn to and untangling deep rooted pain, who has a complicated relationship with death and morality due to his largely misunderstood nature and speaks in riddles about people's inner demons

A puritan village consumed by witch hysteria? A villain who fell due to deep personal pain that ultimately becomes irredeemable? The themes of grief guilt and blame and narrative framing surrounding innocence, vice, overcoming inner demons? the inevitability that you can't save everyone and reconstructing what was lost? The ambiguity of well intentioned yet massively misguided actions? I could go on but it'd be a whole lot of nonsense ramblings lol

It would be fascinating if I knew where to go with it, like on the one hand, send my boy to go ruin those puritans whole day as he pops up out of nowhere, reads minds, outwardly spills all the tea and then dips but also what about Cole and Curie? The curator of stories who observes and records the end of mortal souls and could be compared to a knowlage spirit or something under dragon age terms and then Cole who literally makes people forget they ever saw him, it would be fun to see this put together well spoken figure and then weird kid who ligit thought he was a ghost for a bit there(I mean he had his reasons but still).

Other concepts could be Cole as the M's, even the worst ending would be reflective of Cole, both with and without the gun but Anthony's death would parallel pre character development Cole who kills out of a simplistic and misguided compassion and in general the ending makes me think of the death and birth of Cole(also the compassionate soul trophy regarding Andrew's personality traits and how that's the optimal route for him, need I say more?)

There's something to dig out there but the thing that kicked this all off was wanting to draw one of the M's in Cole's hat(if not a full outfit swap), not being able to pick which and really getting on the idea that Megan "spooky child" Clarke is right there with my original weird son lol

Also wouldn't it just be a whole vibe to draw Cole in little hope's three eras of 1692/1972/2020?

Well that's what's been gnawing on my brain and I still don't know what to do with it but at the very least I can throw this ramble out there lol

[0ccuria]

I love Champions of the Just so much. The personal aspect of it all and hearing your own corrupted voice speak to you just hits a certain way.

"What can you gain from being me?"

"Everything."

[eeveeights]

wow emma eeveeights drawing more memes are mabel who ever could have seen this coming

[brittlebutch]

have i been insane about this throughline on here yet?

[gilliebee]

thinking about this god damn quote every time jack gives brick heart eyes which is always

[smalltimidbean]

Can I give take a hug and cupcake headpats

Do we really have to go through this again kjlgdjlkfdg

No, you cannot - Cake is very violent towards strangers, and Cupcake is always with her - Trying to give either affection, let alone approach them, is basically a death sentence

[carduelism]

Cole worms because I grabbed Asunder instead of my typical book by accident and just went along with it and reread it at the park the morning. He is so so so

[the-gayest-sky-kid]

i hate him. why is he like that

[skuntank]

In my heart Diantha is a fuzzy queen

[amatres]

for all my complaints of dai, i will still give it that the opening is it's strongest point, and that's main problem in my eyes is that it does not let you have much room to make different personalities through out the game you play. while i think it would have been nice imo to have been able to see the conclave before it was destroyed, the fact the game is both so listless and limiting past the destruction of haven is the part it really falls flat. for me.

[johanthefriskiestofbits]

oooooo please tell me (who knows nothing on the subject) about orv swap au

hehehe. hehehehehehe. hehehehehehehhehehehhheheheh <- guy who is so normal

the premise of orv swap au (name has yet to be finalized) is this: what if kdj and yjh swapped narrative positions (reader <-> character) but very little else? what if a video game player enters a time loop to save his favorite character from dying over and over again and also to end the apocalypse?

admittedly it's not super fleshed out yet (a lot of the changes this premise would introduce are still not hammered out yet) but here are some points under the cut (novel spoilers ahead!)

orv swap au starts with pro gamer yjh who feels :/ abt his job, but hey, it pays the bills. despite (or maybe because of) his relative popularity as a pro gamer and networking with the agency/sponsors/people to impress, he's kind of isolated in a way that's detrimental, a facade of someone he's not whenever he's on camera

something to play around with is the idea of agency? maybe this yjh doesn't feel like he has any and has his hands tied between the lifestyle and being under public scrutiny and not having enough of a support system to leave everything behind. maybe he doesn't know what else he would even do. maybe he's aimless and drifting with nothing to hold on to.

his favorite video game is what i've been thinking of as World's Hardest To Play Indie Game (not based on difficulty but just on the experience of consuming it) a boring, exposition heavy, player-hostile, poorly designed, slightly buggy mess of a barely-playable game: twsa, a game that was not finished upon release and experiences with sporadic updates every now and then.

the ending tree to this game is so convoluted its insane. also theres no save states so if you die (very likely) u restart babeyyy.

twsa (video game) does have multiple endings, all of which happen when kdj, your main character, dies. some are farther into the apocolypse than others, some paths require meta knowledge of future events or character actions or items or whatever. the "true ending" is either analogous to the original 1863: kdj makes it to the end at the cost of everyone he loves, or hsy's modified 1863: kdj makes himself enemy of the scenario to secure a way out for the kimcom remnants.

there's branches on the choices tree where everyone dies and everything sucks and is bad forever and theres choices to make where kdj gets to make a family and they don't really get to settle down but they can get pretty close to it among the ruins of the apocalypse. through all his testing, yjh finds that these endings are nice but peter out - to get to the end of the apocalypse yjh has to claw his way there inch by painful inch, through betrayal and sacrifice, and he still cant fully get past it

i originally wanted to finagle a yoohankim 3 way swap but i couldn't figure it out. swap aus are a lot easier to work with when they're even numbers, at least to me, so this au features a ysa who is a video game company employee by day and by night she really has become god this time (and also a terrible indie dev). and this is how jungdoksang can still win !!!!

also yjh's coworker from Real Life hsy :) i haven't decided if she's like an employee for the same agency, or if she's someone else in the gaming circles that yjh interacts with sometimes (in my heart theyre in like some sort of discord server together), or something like that but she's around. whatever she does she is twitter cancelled for something. to me.

the only other character swaps are lsk and yma. yma is yjh's estranged sister (in broad strokes there's a vague bad parent situation going on here) (they used to be close until they drifted apart and slowly started hating each other [there is an abyss between them that neither of them can bridge]) (he feels that she betrayed him and threw him under the bus so he left [maybe he gets kicked out]) (she feels that he abandoned her to whatever situation they have going on [he didn't even try to take her with him]) and he has to find her when the apocalypse starts. yjh older sibling to yma gives us a whole different little dynamic to explore from kdj ysk (there's different levels of responsibility and guilt and blame when you're talking siblings that are soooooo interesting to me. sorry that i see any set of siblings and immediately try to figure out how to make them worse)

lsk is kdj's mom who appeared into existence at some point with kdj and they were both just adults. that's weird isn't it. oh well. i guess she can become a transcendent later too for funsies

everyone else stays in the same configuration of Real Person vs Character to me this is a very important aspect

this point has no precedent with the swap, nothing particular that would change to cause this, but it would be so funny if lgy was a little gamer boy who is an avid yjh hater. hates that guy. shows up to competitions to boo him. tunes into yjh's silent no-mic speedrunning streams to mald in chat but yjh +mods don't ban him bc its kinda funny.

anyways the apocalypse starts when yjh and his coworker/fellow gamer hsy are on a train to twitchcon and lgy is also there (also headed to twitchcon) and he brings bugs because he likes them but also to sabotage yjh specifically. its just funny if this happened. you understand

instead of having reader-related skills and abilities, yjh's skills are video game player based! he gets flavor text insight on people, location, and items, things like that. notably, he has the ability to reset, to bring himself back to the beginning of the apocalypse

orv swap proper follows yjh as the Player of the Game (Consumer of the Narrative) who lives hundred of lifetimes in this ruined-world-become-reality "replaying" [read: time looping through] the game to reshape it to save his fave character from self implosion (kdj with no dissociation is very prone to dying. all the time.). to revisit the idea of playing with yjh and the idea of agency, of creation, the only way to get past the apocalypse is to go off the beaten path, to choose options that weren't even there in the game. when in space, at his darkest point, yjh becomes a writer. in this story, at his darkest point, he has to become a creator too

please do not ask me how the epilogues go i dont know how the epilogues go (i don't want to throw yjh back into a train for milennia after he Just went through a thousand resets so i'm sending kdj for that but i havent fully planned how or why)

anyways, hope that helps!!! :)

[danielnelsen]

im rereading asunder and keep having to remind myself that all these characters have french accents fml