#and the god power logic she uses is just discworld god logic

[makanidotdot]

ELUNE CONVO FIX IT part 1

i did it i finished!! finished enough anyway

How about instead of Tyrande getting possessed by Elune, we actually got to see them have a conversation about why tf she won't let her kill sylvanas!!! And get some real payoff for all the "hmm something's off about Elune"!! And more!!

Warning this one is long and boring. part 2 is way better lol

sry she should more serious here but w/e we're just going with 'angy' lol

i think i drew these same poses in the sylvanas one lol oop sry my brain library is not vast

ok one thing i added at the last second was elune is like pulling from tyrande's personal elune power to get her real form back to properly tell winter queen to fuck off. and that's why tyrande looks like she has spider webs on her it's just glowy elune magic

and then winter queen does go fuck off bc i didn't want to draw her anymore

End of part 1!! Also when tyrande is watching elune and WQ yell at each other I imagine it like a kid watching their mom get in a fight at the grocery store or smt lol

[friendlyneighborhoodborg]

Julerose AUs

No matter where, in any universe, I'm yours.

These two background gays and their wholesome vibes are almost single-handedly keeping me in the miraculous fandom, I swear to god. You could put these two in anything that isn't Miraculous and it would be all the better for it.

Such is the nature of many conversations I've had with @le-chiggin-nuggie over the years, coming up with AUs that these two could (and rightfully should) be the stars of. I'm posting some of our favorites up here in the hopes it will intrigue and inspire- we've had a lot of fun coming up with them, and writing little bits for them, and I want to share that with you guys here.

Description of each AU under the cut:

Starting on top left and going clockwise...

Carnaval Clandestin. This is an idea of mine that I'm currently writing a full story for. I've seen a few of circus-ey type AUs, and I am absolutely trash for spooky carnival stuff, so I decided I'd throw my hat in the ring. These performers may lean heavily into shock value and creepy stuff, but it's all in good fun. They don't mean any harm, really. Juleka in this AU is the mysterious head clown, nicknamed "Reflekta." She has shapeshifting abilities and can look like anyone else, and takes no small amount of pleasure in using her abilities to scare the living hell out of patrons. Rose, or "Princess Rose," as she likes to be called, is a budding alchemist who sells novelty and remedial potions out of her snake-oil caravan.

Pirate and Fairy. This is what you get from trying to overanalyze Peter Pan, a stupid book which has no cohesion and makes even less sense than Wonderland. Pirates and fairies are a fantastic combo, however, and since Juleka's mom is literally a pirate and Rose acts like she was pulled out of Cinderella, that's what this picture is. I just drew a simple, generic action scene, no actual story behind it. This just seems like the logical conclusion for a high fantasy or DnD AU, but anyone can do what they want with this. Nugg's also suggested Rose as a mermaid, I know Princess!Rose is popular, and all of them work just as well.

Teen Titans Crossover. This is a favorite of Nugg's, putting Rose in the shoes of Starfire and Juleka in the cloak of Raven. Pretty self-explanatory here. Others may have their rosters, our reasoning is such: Kim is Beast Boy and Max is Cyborg, and sometimes they're paired off as well. Nathaniel takes Robin's role, Alix is X, Chloe's Terra and she LIVES, Marinette and Adrien are Jinx and Kid Flash, and everybody else is everybody else.

Death and the Vampyre. This one came about after listening to too much Steam Powered Giraffe. "Delilah Morreo's" throwaway line about the eponymous vampire queen being friends with Death, coupled with familiarity with Discworld's interpretation of Death, led to this idea. Perhaps Juleka is a vampire who's been stuck in her castle for hundreds of years, explaining her dated clothing. Perhaps Rose is the chipper "new" Death, who does the duty with pep and respect. They meet. Sitcom antics.

Angel. Nugg's idea, and a very interesting one. It's forbidden for celestial beings to fraternize with mortals... but that's not stopping Rose from playing favorites. A bit of good luck to brighten Juleka's gloomy day, perhaps, or some divine inspiration on her music. If she were only able to be seen by her... That's the setup, the rest is up to the prospective storyteller.

Different Heroes. Nugg's currently in the process of writing a story involving a full new set of Kwamis. Rose, or "Princess Oz," holds the Lion here whilst Juleka, "Corbeau," holds the Raven. Given how that last season ended, the side characters may need new kwamis anyway. And making Rose's new miraculous a crown and Juleka's a capelet? *chef's kiss* Immaculate.

Wonderful. Here's one we don't see around too often in any fandom- a crossover with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Gotta love those classic madness vibes, and it's so old that which Wonderland you use is like a sliding scale from Disney Animation to American McGee. That, and I've been on a total Alice kick ever since I found the Royal Ballet production online, which everyone should watch at the earliest convenience.

Well, that's seven AU ideas to inspire art from everyone! Many thanks to @le-chiggin-nuggie for their contributions and for being an incredible fount of creative ideas. All these ideas are free to use or change however you want. And Happy Pride, everyone.

(Image Id: A circle of seven drawings depicting Juleka and Rose in each of the described AUs, surrounding a bubble which reads "In any universe, I am yours.")

[specialsituationsgroup]

a Study of Discwrold

Color of Magic, pt 9

In which Pratchett repeatedly disses his talent in STEM.

THE SENDING OF EIGHT

1 "The Disc offers sights more impesive than those found in universes built by Creators with less imagination and more mechanical aptitude. [...] the most impresive sight - if only because most brains, when faced with the sheer galactic enormity of A'Tuin, refuse to belive it - is the endless Rimfall."

Bless.

2 "The gods themselves, despite the splendor, are seldom satisfied. It is embarassing to know one is a god of a world that only exists because a probability curve must have a far end. Especially when one can peer into other dimensions at worlds who’s Creators had more mechanical aptitude than imagination."

Terry laments his STEM skills, but he seems to know the lingo. Also, since the Creator is Pratchett, then Veinari's subdued rant in Unseen Academicals is directed at him.

Yes, I know Vetinari is just Pratchett's mouthpiece for his own quiet anger at our world, but still. Irony.

3 We meet Fate and the Lady. Fate looks like a kindly midle aged man untill you notice his pupils are black holes. The Lady has creepy emerald eyes, but she gives the same vibes as Anoia, godess of lost causes.

4 "Disliking [Twoflower] would be like kicking a puppy."

Aww.

5 "Magic had indeed once been wild, but had been tamed by the olden ones, who had made it obey among other things, the Law of conservation of Reality. This demanded that the effort needed to atain a goal should be the same regardless of means used. [...] some of the ancient magic could still be found in it's raw state. There was the metal ocitron, and the gas octogen. Both radiated dangerous amounts of enchantment."

Magic as atomic physics?

6 "It was all very well going on about pure logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle, and gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows."

Hah!

7 There was a faint sound [...] Rincewind peered around. There was no-one nearby. This worried him. [...]" [the Troll] was exceptionally angry. This was because Trolls generaly are. It was exaberated by the fact that the instantanious teleprotation from its lair [...] a thousand miles closer to the Hub had raised his temperature to a dangerous level, in acordance with the law of conservation of energy."

Pratchett was not meant to be a scientist, but he knew just how much science to pepper in to higlight the absurdity. XD

8 "Although he could read the message, the letters were completely unknown to him. Somehow the message was arriving straight into his brain, without the tedious necessity of going through his eyes."

Is this magic? It doesn’t behave like Rincewind said. For that matter neither did the Trobi insurance, or the karmic ripples of Rincewind’s lie.

Note: -A few hints of science will give legitimacy to your setting, making it more thought-throug, while at the same time highlight how fantastical it is. -The problem with Discworld as a parody of DnD is that it undermines character agency. In this book, a Troll is teleported onto Rincewind's path becasue of a malicious god's roll of the dice, whereas in "Guards! Guards!", the Dragon is summoned to Ankh Morpork by a power-hungry grand master by his own volition. There can be no consequence for characters’ choices if the plot happens by outsde influence and/or at random. -Pratchett is not overly concerned with consistency.

To be continued...

[antiquery]

@pythionice some thoughts on the dream-quest of velitt boe— again, thanks a million for the rec!

as you might expect from, like, the general way i am now, i grew up on portal fantasy. the most important books for my childhood self were a wrinkle in time and the chronicles of narnia, and they shaped my worldview pretty profoundly— both in terms of religion (planting the seeds for the specific brand of anglo-catholic i ended up becoming) and in terms of how i think about stories, about the power of narrative to alter the world for the better. besides that, those stories are the ways in which i learned how to dream. they formed the infrastructure of my childhood fantasies— like every other little girl i saw myself in lucy pevensie and meg murry, and when they had amazing adventures, i saw that as a possibility for myself. i still do, in a less literal way; i wrote my college essay on portal sci-fi and fantasy and the ways in which it shaped the ways in which i go about learning and academia. 

i didn’t read lovecraft as a kid, though, which is probably a good thing— at five (when i read lewis and l’engle for the first time) i didn’t have the emotional or intellectual maturity to understand that you can’t take the author at face value, as entrancing as his stories are. the dream-quest of unknown kadath is a story i would have absolutely loved as a child— it has that vivid, dreamlike (ha) sense of wonder and adventure that characterized all the narratives that made their way into my heart at that age. that’s why randolph carter’s story arc is so idiosyncratic in lovecraft’s canon— it’s a fairy tale. a thematically complex fairy tale, yes, but that sort of story nonetheless, happy ending and all. it’s about kindness and home and childlike wonder, and the inimitable light of the human imagination, even (especially) in a universe that’s dark and cold and hostile to us. such was the thesis of the stories that mattered to me as a child, and so many of the stories that matter to me now— what is discworld if not a cry of defiant hope in a terrifyingly cruel, empty reality? lord, what can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the reaper man?

but, but. it’s not all that simple. it rarely is. lovecraft, as we know, was an egregious racist and misogynist, and those attitudes are pretty inseparable from his work. as much as i love the dream-quest, as much as it matters to me as a story about home and wonder and hope— it’s racist, it’s misogynist-by-omission, and it’s pretty fundamentally colonialist. we can’t ignore that, and we shouldn’t ignore that. none of those things take away from the central theme of the novel, but we know that lovecraft intended them to qualify it: this sort of story, this sort of adventure, is only accessible to a very specific kind of person. as a child, i wouldn’t have comprehended that— i would have identified with carter as readily as i identified with lucy and meg— but, just like with every other portal-fantasy story i read with a male protagonist and those explicit themes of exclusion, i would have internalized the attitudes about just to whom these stories belong. i did internalize them! i still catch myself thinking like that sometimes— falling into that familiar trap of disdain for women at the center of stories like that. not consciously, but it happens. and it isn’t a coincidence that there are no women, anywhere, in the dream cycle.

the dream-quest of velitt boe is a story about returning to the stories you loved as a little girl, loved for their wonder and imagination and beauty without the understanding of their uglier aspects that you have now. it’s about trying to reconcile those two things without losing either, and the pain of being shut out of the narrative. it’s susan pevensie returning to narnia as a grown woman, older and grayer and having lost her train ticket all those years ago— no longer the protagonist of this tale but willing to look at it with clearer eyes, and maybe find again a bit of the wonder she’d known as a girl.

and yet, and yet— velitt is, now, the protagonist. it’s not randolph carter’s story any longer, despite the very clear love for the original tale that exists in the text. and because she is the protagonist, an older woman with clearer eyes and mind and heart, we get to see the world that the original takes place in from a very different perspective. now we see the darker, uglier side of the dreamlands that were always so kind to carter, so much lewis’s narnia rather than martin’s westeros. the story loved our dreamer-hero in the original, but it doesn’t now— this world is not kind to its women, not kind to those who don’t fit the mold that carter (and the rest of lovecraft’s protagonists) do. that makes sense, given the prejudices of the author, but (by design) we never see that in the original. we rarely even think about it— the best lovecraftian reception fiction, work like ruthanna emrys’ winter tide and victor lavalle’s the ballad of black tom, forces us to think about it by bringing the people lovecraft marginalized front and center. gorgeous and wondrous in the original, in this dream-quest the dreamlands are sorrowful and hard, ruled by cruel and capricious gods who could care less about people not important enough to devote attention to— people like velitt, rather than people like carter. they’re not kind to velitt, and they aren’t a place of adventure and wonder like they are in the original, despite the fact that she (like carter) has a past as an adventurer. the way johnson uses the dreamlands as a setting reminds me a lot of the way emily bronte uses the moors in wuthering heights— melancholy, beautifully haunting, reflecting the thematics and privileges of the narrative like a mirror. 

carter, then, is something like the heathcliff of this story. not in personality, obviously, but in the ways in which he personifies the setting. as unkind and terrible as the dreamlands are, there’s still a wonder there, a trace of what’s present in the original— as dark as this world becomes in johnson’s narrative, it still retains, in parts, that joy. lucy through the wardrobe for the first time. similarly, we see a side of carter that logically ought to exist but that lovecraft doesn’t ever linger on— dismissive, arrogant, inconsiderate not out of malice but out of a kind of self-centeredness that by rights ought to develop when you’re the protagonist of a fantasy story like his. but as much as he reflects the problem of the setting and the narrative itself, we can still see the side of him that’s endearing in the original. that’s why there’s still such a painful, lingering affection between him and velitt. appearing just as he does in the original dream-quest— young, good-looking, blessed by the original narrative with a (conditionally) happy ending— he’s the focal point of all this story’s complicated feelings about the original, all that bittersweetness that comes from returning to a very deeply loved story with grown-up susan’s painfully clear eyes.

one of the great triumphs of the book is that the awful, painful melancholy of this world and its childlike portal-fantasy wonder can coexist. it’s present in the relationship between velitt and carter, in the way carter personifies the original narrative, in the way the story treats velitt herself. this dream-quest isn’t an easy book to swallow, nor should it be— it’s lovely, haunting, and it aches in that very necessary way that’s present when you return to something flawed and difficult that you loved unconditionally as a girl. for me, it hit very close to home. i didn’t love the original dream-quest as a child, but i loved stories very much like it, and sometimes think that much of the way i feel about the dream-quest now is a function of the little girl i remember being, the five-year-old who stayed up till midnight reading the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe, her very first introduction to wonder. johnson captures that juxtaposition of feeling perfectly— between the uncomplicated joy of knowing a story as a child, seeing yourself in it and learning how to wonder; and returning to it as an adult, that bittersweet but still very present love, tinged with the sadness that comes from understanding. through the wardrobe again, seventeen or fifty-five— having lost your train ticket, made your choice and known that it was the right one, grown up— but still making the choice to step through, even just one more time.

[shytoki]

White Diamond Theory - Steven Universe Wanted - Who is White Diamond?

Okay. So I don’t normally do theories. Like at all. But this I couldn’t keep to myself because I find it super fascinating. I might do a vid on it later, but for now I’m just going to post this.

**Note: If someone else has also mentioned this theory, I'd love to know what they think and their supported reasons, too! I love the SU fandom!**

Wanted Steven Universe Special

Okay, so there has been a lot of different things that are answered (like how lion came to be) but this just gave us more questions (Did one of the Diamonds SHATTER Pink?).

The one thing I think it might have hinted at was who or what White Diamond is. 

So rather than keep you in suspense, I’m going to just come out with it as I want to get to the supporting points. 

Everyone...White Diamond.

This was in the title of Off Colors then quickly pans down to start the episode. 

Wait. Shy...isn’t this a just a building? A temple to White Diamond.

No. I don’t think so, at least in regards to this theory. 

The Diamonds and the Diamond Authority are the rulers of the Gems. However, I think that White Diamond is in fact HOME WORLD. Or at least somehow apart of Homeworld. 

I know it sounds crazy but there are a lot of things to support this. 

Reasons why I think White Diamond is Homeworld. 

Size. The Diamonds are collectively the largest Gems we have seen that are SINGULAR Gems. Only when most Gems fuse do they grow in size. However, both Yellow and Blue are significantly larger than other Gems. Safe to say, that the most important Gem of them all, aka White Diamond, would be equally, if not, larger. So she can conceivably be that large.

Lack of Information. There is very little information about White Diamond. Gems barely talk about her, if at all (actually). So how is this relate to that? The other Diamonds are referenced pretty regularly, even Pink Diamond, and thus more accessible than White Diamond. Gems don’t really reference White Diamond (in fact, I think that White Diamond was coined by fans in the obvious, we saw another Diamond on the Moon Base mural and the Diamond Authority emblem has a representation of White Diamond), because they never talk to or interact WITH her. 

During the episode, The Trial, the way the Blue Zircon addressed the Diamonds (with the theory that one of the Diamonds might have shattered Pink) sounded like only those two Diamonds existed. They didn’t bother waiting for White Diamond as well. 

Our Own Mythos and other Human Concepts. So this in relation (and probably one of my more stronger points to this theory), on the factor that WE have similar mythos and equal beings similar to White Diamond. Think about Gaia or Mother Earth (Mother Nature) from Greek mythology. She is the personified version of Earth. She is considered to be a creator and nature itself. I think White Diamond is the Gaia of Homeworld. I also think, that like Gaia, White Diamond gave “birth” to the Diamond Authority. I don’t think there is a kindergarten that the diamonds came from. Possibly, White Diamond tore a piece of herself or somehow gave birth to the Diamonds who then created Gems, like Gaia birthing the Titans/Gods, and then those entities creating creatures in their likeness and (by the nature of Homeworld) for their needs. 

This also ties into my reference for the deities from Dungeons and Dragons. So, I’m a crazy geek, but the deity system in D&D gives the gods a level in terms of their god powers. The highest is level 20. There is ONLY ONE god that is above that at level 21. This god is general considered the one of nature and is considered Neutral to the truest sense (AKA neither good or bad, lawful or chaotic). 

Additionally, in the Moon Base mural, is White Diamond is cradling Homeworld with both hands.

It can be argued that she’s cradling Homeworld in an oppressive notion. But also look at the place of Homeworld. It’s the only one from the murals that is located like a womb location, as a form of symbolic meaning that White Diamond is the Mother of Gems. (So this is more of a reference for us versus the Gems history themselves. 

>>> MINI SIDE-THEORY ON DIAMOND PERSONALITIES Likewise, if you see Pink Diamond’s world location of Earth, she is the only Diamond holding her planet above her. Maybe stating that Pink Diamond was, in fact, empathetic to humans and considered humans as great beings like Rose thought. Blue Diamond is holding one of her planets very close and almost in a caring nature, and even looking at her planet. However, she’s LOOKING down on her planet, so her sense of superiority over her charges, much like a farmer over sheep. Yellow Diamond is holding two planets in a sense of balance. You would assume that she is the more justice driven over Blue, however, if you look at where SHE is looking, she is not LOOKING at the planets in her hands at all. She is looking and holding her head distinctively up, like holding her nose up in a superior fashion. This might reference how Peridot thought her Diamond was just and logical, but realized she wasn’t.<<<

Furthermore, we have reference of creatures where planets/life is sprouted from such as the World/Cosmic Turtle. And Terry Pratchett’s Discworld has a similar distinction.

Ending Thoughts.

While I think that White Diamond is embodiment of Homeworld, I don’t think she doesn’t have a physical existence. She might even make an appearance and talk to Steven. Personally, it would make for bad TV if she didn’t make an appearance. She might even be dormant, which would explain the reason why she hasn’t made another Diamond. Or something might be wrong with her, like an illness. She might be so reclusive and closed off, that only the Diamonds speak to her. 

Well. That’s it. You can think about is as you wish. You can send me Asks or answer to this post so we can all start a discussion on this too. I’d love to know what you think of my little theory about White Diamond.