#but then i started piling on secrets and mysterious backstory

[littleeyesofpallas]

[writers-potion]

Hi! I would like to ask if you could possibly give any tips on how to properly manage to introduce characters ?

Techniques for Character Introduction

There are many things you can consider for an impactful character introduction:

The Point of View of your novel

Whether your character is a POV character or not

The tone of your novel

What your character is like

In-Medias-Res

Immediately show the character in the middle of action.

Character(s) come into the scene running, fighting, laughing - whatever it is.

Good for leaving an impression

Could be an in-medias-res hook in the very opening of your novel, to introduce the main character.

Choose an action that "defines" the character. Perhaps it's something they do repeatedly (going to the gym at 5am every morning) or that shows a key part of their personality (digging through a large pile of laundry because they cannot keep their room clean)

Dialogue - Voice First

The character makes a voice entrance before we "see" them physically appear.

It helps the readers define the relationship between the character being introduced and the character that we've been following.

From Dan Brown's <Digital Fortress>:

"David?" "It's Strathmore," the voice replied. Susan slumped. "Oh," She was unable to hide her disappointment. "Good afternoon, Commander." "Hoping for a younger man?" The voice chuckled. "No, sir," Susan said.

In these few lines, we already know (1) Strathmore is Susan's boss, (2) quite high-ranking in some military/governmental/secret agency (commander??) (3) is male (4) has a sense of humor (5) seems to be quite friendly with his employees, etc.

By using phone conversations, you can also show how the POV/main character truly feels about the character on the phone - there's no need to make appearances. Perhaps they frown, or attempt to throw their phone on the wall in frustration while the other talks.

Via Another Character

This is where characters in the story talk about the characters even before they are introduced.

Often used with villains/characters with popularity in the story world.

Example: "You've heard of Joe, of course."/ "I'm sorry, who?" /"The president of Book Club? Red hair, freckles?"

Simple Intro with direct characterization

Sometimes, just writing a brief description about the character can be effective, especially if you have some backstory that really, really need to be there before the readers start following the character.

Here's a passage from Leigh Bardugo's <The Familiar>:

"Dona Valentina had been raised by two cold, distracted parents who felt little towards her beyond a vague sense of disappointment in her tepid beauty and the unlikelihood that she would make a good match. She hadn't. Don Marius Ordono possessed a dwindling fortune..."

The key here: provide interesting detail. There's no fun in saying, "Dona Valentina wasn't too pretty, so she had to marry Don Marius Ordono with little wealth." An image of a girl neglected by her parents and bartered for wealth is much more captivating.

Slow & Mysterious Setup

This one is harder to execute than the others on this list, but when done properly, it can produce a beautiful effect where the readers know who you're talking about without you ever having to name them.

An excellent example of this is how Marcus Zusak introduces Death (with capital D, who's the narrator of the story):

"I could introduce myself properly, but it's not really necessary. You will know me well enough and soon enough, depending on a diverse range of variables."

"Your soul will be in my arms." "I will carry you gently away."

Death continues to talk about his "job" like the above until it becomes enough for the reader to catch on.

Drop enough hints for your readers to recognize the character

Works best with an archetypal character - devil, vampire, demon, angels...some figure with distinct features that even when described mysteriously, will be noticeable.

Showing Attitude - For POV characters

Present a peculiar line of thought or show some attitude that makes the character immediately interesting.

This works wonderfully with POV characters - by giving the reader a crucial piece of the POV character's mindset to set the overall tone of the novel.

From Rick Riordan's <Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief>:

"Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood. If you're reading this because you think you might be one, my advise is: close this book right now."

Percy (the POV character) goes on a bit like this before we get his name, etc. in the subsequent section.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* . ───

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[bmaxwell]

The World of Oath

Oath: Chronicles of Empire & Exile bills itself as "A game that remembers."

It's best experienced with the same group of players rolling from game to game with the locations and denizens changing over time. There is no provided lore in the game. There is no flavor text anywhere. No backstory. "The lore book" says designer Cole Wehrle "is your first 5 plays of Oath."

Like so many works of art, you get out of Oath what you put into it. I was the chancellor in our first game, and my wife and daughter immediately named their factions. Kat played as The Seekers, the blue faction represented by a mysterious cloaked figure of whom only a single eye is visible. Our daughter chose black and coined them The Shadow Clan immediately. "I took this name from something I read" she sheepishly admitted. "That's okay" I replied. "So did they"

When my initial run as chancellor ended after a single game, I took the yellow player pieces and declared that The Empire of the Sun would reclaim their rightful position upon the throne of power, which we did. Eventually. We've played a whopping 15 games in a little over 3 weeks. We have plenty of stories of betrayals and triumphs, clever gambits and colossal blunders.

What I've been thinking about lately, though, is the world of Oath. It's as much a character as any of the players at the table. There are 23 site cards in the game box, 9 of which will make up the available world in a given game of Oath. Players play cards onto those sites, representing the denizens and buildings that make up the societies in those parts of the kingdom. At the end of each game, the sites (and their societies) ruled by the winner are carried over into the next game, and the rest are removed. Each site can hold from 0-3 cards, and typically has a special rule concerning travel or, if the site is the homeland of one of the game's 6 factions, a bonus for playing a card of that faction there.

At the beginning of your first game, the 6 factions are fairly balanced. At the end of each play 3 cards of the winner's advisor faction are added to the card pool, and some cards from the discard piles and the losers' advisers are removed sight unseen. This means that, over time, your world naturally starts to tip toward some factions and away from others.

For example, our first few games saw the winner using advisers of the Arcane faction. This meant that Arcane cards were added to our card pool (and to a lesser extent, Order and Hearth faction cards were added as well). More Arcane cards means those are more likely to be drawn and used, so they're more likely to be used as advisers for the winner and thus more Arcane cards will be added, and so on.

What this means for us that our world is essentially a magocracy with a strong authoritarian bent. We regularly see Arcane cards like Fire Talkers (+/- 3 attack dice if you control the Darkest Secret), Portal (spend a secret to travel to or from this Site without spending supply) and the Dream Thief (Pay 2 favor to swap any 2 face down advisers). If you think of magocracy like a technocracy, it becomes relatable.

We're also very strong in the Order faction's cards. Things like Curfew (You have to pay the ruler 1 favor before you can trade with denizens), Toll Roads (You have to pay a favor to a Site's ruler when you travel there), and Tome Guardians (Enemies cannot target or take the Darkest Secret in any way) make frequent appearances as well, eliciting sly smirks or exasperated sighs depending on your game state. We're heavily tilted toward these 2 factions, we have a fair amount of Hearth and Discord cards, very little in the way of Nomad cards. and almost no cards from the Beast faction - and yet, one in particular has been a mainstay in our kingdom. The Roving Terror comes up quite a bit. It allows you to spend a secret to discard a card from any site then move the Roving Terror there.

Since the winner isn't always tied to ruling the most sites, sometimes the kingdom changes very little from one game to the next, sometimes is changes wildly. As I write this, we've had a stable regime for the last several games and our game looks familiar from play to play. Our world feels both fantastic and dangerous. There's a lot of neat, mystical shit going on, but you maybe don't want to leave the house.

The site cards themselves are also key in informing the story of our campaign. One site card in particular has been a thorn in our side: The Narrow Pass.

The Narrow Pass says that, when a player is traveling to its region, they MUST travel to the narrow pass. Oath is a game where players will only get 5-8 turns in total, and you never have enough supply to do all the actions you want to do. In that environment, a card that forces you to spend precious supply traveling somewhere you DON'T want to go...well, it's prompted more groans and eye rolls than anything else in the game. My wife will say "Okay, I travel here then I muster, then I'm going to campaign against..." only for me to hold up a finger, pick up her pawn, and set it on the Narrow Pass. Cue the slumping shoulders as she winds back and reconsiders all of her plans.

I love this.

When I say that our Oath world is oppressive, the Narrow Pass is an ever-present part of that world. It feels like a wasteland where the citizens are doing their damndest to enact change while the chancellor, looking down at all of the lands they rule and their pile of money and insists that no, life is actually very good.

My wife has snatched victory by playing the Vision of Faith while holding the Darkest Secret alone at The Hidden Place. I've Blackmailed the chancellor to steal the Grand Scepter, granting myself citizenship then using the imperial army to seize relics for myself. We've had negotiations for citizenship fall through and lead directly to a change of power for the next game.

Every card and site in the game is influential under the right circumstances, and it all lends itself to weaving an emergent narrative. In a game with zero lore and zero flavor text, this is an incredible achievement. Oath is a real bear to teach, at the end of your first game you might know how to play. Sort of. You'll understand the actions, but not when and why to take them. It's the old "it gets good after you've played for 10 hours, trust me" thing that I've said and heard dozens of times.

Some people will never like it. I'm surprised that I like it. The game can - and will - end on a die roll after 2-3 hours. There's king-making aplenty. There are fiddly rules and, after 15 games within a relatively short span of time, I still need to consult the rules and FAQ's when someone takes the Campaign action more often than I'd like. The winner will not always be the player who played the best. When I made a conscious effort to see the game as a shared story we were telling together rather than a competition, I fell deeply in love with this game.

I've bumped my rating from an 8 to a 9, and finally a 10. I'm currently at the "I need some time to decide where this ranks in my top 10" stage. It winds my clock in a way that very few games have.* * A Study in Emerald comes to mind.

[tenpintsofsundrop]

okay so @star-mum asked me to explain the Gatsby reference in Emergency Contact and okay here we go

(hopefully this can be fairly short and not a two-hour nerd rant lmao)

Here is the passage from my fic:

You smoothed a hand across his shoulder, and raised your head, using your touch to gently tip his face toward yours. He quickly realized that your intention was to kiss him. And something ached in his heart - something painful and longing. He knew that it would not be needy and haste with the intention of pile-driving toward sex like your other kisses had been. He knew that it would be the metamorphosis of your relationship that he was not prepared to go through.  He nuzzled along your forehead, gently stopping you.  “Please don’t do this.” He murmured quietly into your skin.  He knew that it would break him.  He knew that this was the moment - like Gatsby reaching up toward the stars - this would be the moment that he was tied to you forever, damned by his love for you. Only, much different than Gatsby, he wasn’t destined for some grant fate if he didn’t have you. He was on a one way path to a messy death, and he was determined not to take you down with him.  Tears pricked the edges of his eyes at the thought. 

And here is the passage from The Great Gatsby that I was referencing:

He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. . . . . . . One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Now, I nerd out over The Great Gatsby so much. It's one of my favourite books ever. And as someone who is a firm believer in 'true love' - I am obsessed with how much the Great Gatsby gets it wrong, and I love playing off the symbolism and themes displayed in the book - showing how it's not a tragic love story, it is the story of a fucked up, very sexist man who puts all of his faults onto his 'love' for a woman.

So - in the passage featuring Gatsby and Daisy's first kiss - Gatsby is talking to Nick, trying to figure out where the turning point in his life went wrong, where he could go back and start it all over again if he could. And he picked his first kiss with Daisy. And this is especially important because this chapter also features a lot of talk about destiny, and it's where Nick reveal's Gatsby's esteemed mystery backstory that the audience was waiting for - how he was nothing more than a poor man on a fishing boat and he made friends with an older wealthy man and that's why he's so rich. Gatsby made himself very large - he made himself into something out of nothing, and he feels that he wasted all of his potential mourning over his lost love.

Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

This particularly, is really telling about Gatsby's character - he thinks that he has some grand epic fate awaiting him, even if he doesn't specifically know what it is, but he has to choose between that grand fate and Daisy. He has to go it alone. He is a fantastic man and he can't have a woman weighing him down.

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.

This single sentence is one of my favourite things I have ever read, and the term 'her perishable breath' has informed so much of my writing style - but I fucking love how this is described and how it sets them up as a horrible couple who are never meant to be soulmates. This is not a love story.

He thinks that his mind 'romps like the mind of God' - he thinks that he is this utterly perfect human being, someone who could be an inventor, a leader of the industrial revolution, a brilliant man. And he thinks the one thing truly holding back is his 'love' for Daisy - what later turns into an obsession for her. And it is really all spelled out when he describes her as 'perishable'. She is just a woman. She will never live up to the fantasy he has created of her in his mind. Especially considering the fact that when Gatsby finds out she has a child - he wants her to abandon her child to come and be with him - he clearly finds the idea of her being a mother to ruin his fantasy.

So - if this is such a flawed display of love, why would I reference it?

Because ever since the first time I read this passage, I have been obsessed with this idea - the idea that your first kiss seals your fate to someone - but in a good way. The idea that we are perishable and fragile, but when we become fated to our soulmate, we can both romp like Gods together and climb that ladder to the stars together. Not this flawed version where we ruin in on ourselves over the obsession, getting a fantasy version of a girl that will never exist.

Jason Todd - in a lot of ways, is like Jay Gatsby. He came from nothing, befriended a rich older man - but he does not have the confidence to believe that he has some grand fate waiting for him if he does not have his loved ones.

He thinks that he is poisonous and toxic and he is bound for a horrible fate.

He knew that this was the moment - like Gatsby reaching up toward the stars - this would be the moment that he was tied to you forever, damned by his love for you. Only, much different than Gatsby, he wasn’t destined for some grant fate if he didn’t have you. He was on a one way path to a messy death, and he was determined not to take you down with him. 

Here - he thinks that this kiss will seal y/n's fate in a horrible way rather than sealing his own fate. But - he is wrong, because this love will uplift him, and help them both become better.

So that is why I referenced it <3

[theveryworstthing]

So over on patreon Trevor asked for my take on the Addams Family and I grew up LOVING the Addams family movies so here we are. Instead of doing a straight up style interpretation, I decided to do a full on design challenge, using the characters as bases to make a black southern gothic Addams au. I actually drew the kids first, using the character bases of Wednesday and Pugsley to create some delightful kiddos I'm calling Sunday and Blanche. I of course then redesigned Gomez and Morticia into Carlisle and Mortesha.

The Addams have a very specific high aristocratic goth aesthetic (they've got a butler and nobody really works among other things) so in this re-imagining I wanted to go with vibes that run a little more middle class/upper middle class.  I thought it would be interesting to think about what would be considered weird and off-putting in an entirely different culture, and how being a big ol' goth is way less controversial than it used to be.

I tried to keep this short (HAHAHAHAHAHA) so I didn't spin off into an essay about villain coded families, black people in the horror genre, and normalcy as it pertains to social survival, but just...bits of that are in these designs and lore. Keep that in mind.

Also I made the kids twins because they've flip flopped in age so much in different media and also twins run in my family (i'm the daughter of one). And let's face it, I'm pulling a lot of their southern gothic traits from living as a southern goth so *shrug*.

10 thousand pounds of lore incoming loooooooooool.

The Parents

From the moment he saw her he knew that there was a 50/50 chance of him either never making it out of that swamp alive or marrying the figure that was creeping out from under the distant willow tree in a black cocktail dress. The third time she found him trussed up in one of her traps, he complimented her rope work and asked if she'd like to go out sometime after his head wound stopped bleeding.

Or while it was still bleeding.

If she was into that.

Some kids and a mysteriously burnt down Piggly Wiggly later, their love is still as strong and inescapable as a bear trap in a sink hole.

Carlisle Guillermo (now Addams through marriage but I wanted to give him two first names for a name since Gomez has two last names) makes a vaguely described living practicing ‘law’ around town. A loophole king, people come to him from miles around with contracts signed in blood, fights over chunks of hair buried in their rivals’ yard, dehydrated primate hands, memories that seemed like dreams until the evidence of their happenings became too real, and other regular Legal Items asking for counsel which he is all too happy to give. For a price. Sometimes that price is a homemade pie and sometimes it’s a million dollars, depends on who you are. Whatever you’re asked to pay it’s worth that price, and if you try to scam him out of work or he just plain doesn’t like you? Well. He knows how to twist a contract better than anything at the crossroads.

And he always gets his due.

He doesn’t just serve the local (living)humans though, there are many things that need proper legal representation in this day and age. You wouldn’t believe how many city councils try to build on sacred burial grounds even after he lets them know that his ghostly clients are totally gonna haunt the FUCK out of the ensuing shitty condos and curse their families for all eternity. At least 50% of his energy goes towards dealing with real estate bullshit.

Carl is an excitable and good natured(?) man who loves his family, cigars, dancing, and his many knife-based hobbies. People find him very charming once they get past the feeling that they’re talking to a sultry gator badly disguising itself as a human. I didn’t put a ton of deep thought into designing him, mostly I wanted to make a middle aged dude who looked like he would have been voted ‘most likely to smooch the literal devil’ in high school. Tbh he probably has, but no demonic ex’s can compare to his lovely wife~

Mortesha Addams(her name was already perfect so I just tweaked it)is a woman of many talents. A self proclaimed homemaker, she prides herself on a greenhouse full of Concerning Foliage, a beautiful wasp apiary, and a coop full of what are probably chickens that she keeps for what are probably eggs. She’s also an avid creator of the outsider art that can be seen around the estate. She has taken on the family business of selling her homemade goods in a little stall by the road just outside the swamp with her mom, and makes pretty good money doing so. A surprising amount of poison gets bought in quaint southern towns.

Speaking of poison, people who come out to the edge of the swamp to buy it are usually carrying a lot of secrets around, and Mortesha knows most of them. It’s not like she pries the truth out of people, it just so happens that many nervous hellos eventually turn into the tragic backstory power hour if she’s alone with a client for long enough. She supposes that’s just how people are. Despite the fact that the Addams are very active in the community (whether the community likes it or not) she especially, as a direct descendant of the first Addams matriarch, is seen as…Well not an outsider because the community feels A Certain Way about outsiders and despite it all the Addams are their people, but maybe something like an exception. They feel like whatever weirdness they’re hiding can’t be weirder than any given Addams, so they get a little loose with their words.

This is amusing to her, since Addams’ don’t naturally keep the kind dramatic secrets that their surface level prim and proper neighbors do. It’s much more fun to openly talk about those things.

Do they have a sadly decrepit yet terrifying grandma up in the attic? Yeah, like three. They got a tv, all the creepy porcelain dolls they could want, and they’re close to family. Where do you keep your gram-grams?

Any bodies buried on the property? Yeah some, but most are thrown to the gators.

Any creeping through the balmy summer night with ill intentions? Yeah dude, everyone loves a nice family stroll.

What about dangerous forbidden love? If an adult Addams isn’t incorporeal then they’re either queer or in a torrid romance with some person/thing mysteriously drawn to that awful swamp. Sometimes both at the same time. Most times actually.

Mortesha would know.

The current head of the Addams family is just as outgoing as her husband but a lot quieter and harder to read. She never really seems to get mad about much and always has a genteel smile for everyone whether they deserve it or not. A seven foot tall human shaped “Oh, bless your heart”. A perfectly composed Lady even when she’s, oh I dunno, burning down a Piggly Wiggly. You know. A regular southern mom. Chat her up at the hair salon for 50% off a jar of wasp honey with your next purchase of a mysterious but foreboding packet of herbs.

Designing her was pretty easy because I just drew a lankier Grace Jones and called it a day. I had some problems with her outfit simply because if we were going HARD southern gothic then she’d probably be wearing a white/cream dress with a fuller skirt but I thought keeping the silhouette and the black was more important. She’s supposed to be an anti southern gothic southern gothic character anyway. A woman who looks like she has a million secrets who is actually the most open person you could meet. For better or worse. The red hair came from a coloring error that I really ended up liking (my mom had red hair her whole childhood that only darkened up in high school so I can buy that an Addams can be naturally fire engine red) and the veil was to get more of that classic Morticia silhouette in there.

The Children

Sunday and Blanche are the twin children of Carlisle and Mortesha Addams. Some say the Addams clan got their cursed homestead when a wealthy local businessman made a deal with the devil and lost, leaving his grand mansion to his least favorite maid and cutting his losses once he realized that the swamp would do everything it could to drag the house into the water and take what was owed with its horrible curse. Others say that the family has just always squatted there and no one really cares because man, fuck that particular swamp. Have you been in there? Absolute horror show.

Anyway.

Blanche is the more outgoing sibling and quite the engineer/mad scientist in the making. He started going grey at 2 weeks old but considering he was also rocking some extra fingers, toes, and a tiny tail (he takes after his dad), his parents just put it on the 'not life threatening' pile and decided not to worry about it. He's the kind of smart that teachers find utterly infuriating, less a dog eagerly learning and obeying commands and more a hyena who keeps teaching itself how to pick locks. He has a few friends in his school's robotics club (which they honestly allowed him to make so the school could contain his... creations) but mostly hangs out with his sister exploring the swamp. They find all sorts of neat things in there! wedding rings, suspiciously lumpy garbage bags, cloaked cultists who can't read private property signs, it's an adventure every day!

Blanche is all about experimentation with his creations, his look, and his tether to this mortal coil. Is lipstick a cool thing to try? Let's find out. Can he get out of a strait jacket fast enough after being pushed into the depths of the swamp by his sister? let's find out. He's not dead yet and confused local doctors can attest to the fact that he's rarely attained more than a bad bruise so he's pretty set on continuing to kiss rattlesnakes on their cute little heads and have his sister practice her knife throwing at him until that fact changes.

Blanche is very much a country goth. Cowboy boots (customized by his mom), knife, and lighter are daily accessories. He likes to wear the crusty swamp jewelry they find (the rust adds a splash of color!) and despite appearances he does try to keep himself neat. He's just got  natural Grunge Colors and a tendency to wear clothes he likes until they fall apart. Pugsley always seemed the most modernly styled to me (which might just be because little boys clothes have been the same for a long time) so I wanted Blanche to be the most purposely fashionable Addams. Everyone else is goth by nature, but he's the only one truly familiar with goth as an alternative fashion.

I got really into designing Blanche because honestly, I find Pugsley to be the most boring member of the family. And he was hard to design! I had to mess with his vibe a lot to get him looking how I wanted. I know he's supposed to evoke an " 'evil' little boy next door who's parents never reign him in", but that's just goth Dennis The Menace.  I's 2020. We can at least go queer goth Calvin.

Sunday was much easier to design. Wednesday was my favorite as a child (of course) and I really wanted to keep the spirit of her look while adding things like billowy sleeves (it gets HOT down here), big poofy twists instead of braids, and a nice tie. She's a professional after all, been running the local pet cemetery since she was 6 and the previous groundskeeper met with an unfortunate accident after telling her that tarantulas don't have souls. Her specialty is creating beautiful naturalistic animal funerals similar to those that Maquenda (https://linktr.ee/artofmaquenda) makes, and she takes pride in creating miniature dioramas of her subjects after each burial which she uses as a kind of 3D catalog for future clients.

She really wants to try out her skills on humans one day. Well. Publicly try out her skills. Lotta random bodies float into the swamp. None of them have turned down her requests for diorama models so far. Most seem downright flattered. Plus, she usually figures out which graveyard/crime scene they floated over from and gets her parents to give them a lift back. She'll even help enact terrifying revenge from beyond the grave on whoever put them there if she's not, y'know, busy.

Besides arts, crafts, and pet based funerary arrangements, Sunday is an avid lover of archery (any ranged weapon really), books where little fantasy adventure animals die dramatic deaths, and history. She is That Kid who eagerly raises her hand when asked who Christopher Columbus was and ends up being sent out of class after 15 minutes for making 'a scene'. Her favorite party trick is just picking an item in the room and talking about how it relates to either some obscure historical figure with a buck wild life or a horrible disaster. At least one charity pancake breakfast ended with children in tears after her vivid description of the Great Molasses Flood of 1919.

Social-wise, while Wednesday is the girl that people ask to smile because they think she'd, "look so pretty", Sunday is rarely asked anything at all. People just kind of assume from her quiet nature (in between horrible history facts) that she's angry all the time and that she hates everyone. This is untrue. She hates some people but she's ambivalent to most everyone else and even downright friendly if you bother to talk to her like a person instead of a terrifying cryptid. Like, she IS a terrifying cryptid but she's also a little girl.  

That’s about it for now. One day I might do the other family members but for now I’m happy with the four I’ve redesigned. Making an au! Lurch in a family that doesn’t do butlers could be interesting. Over on patreon I put forth that he could just be Motesha’s mute little brother (similar bone structure) but Amy Crook had the nice idea of quote: “ a mysterious "cousin" that "helps around the house" whose origins are both long in the past and faintly unsettling. He's good for lifting heavy things, like that tank of propane you're about to throw into the burning Piggly Wiggly... “ which i now consider canon. Who's kid is he? How old is he? Not important. Anyone willing to commit arson with you is family.

Annnnyway.  This challenge was a lot of fun! I love indulging in AU’s.

[bloodgulchblog]

I feel like Pandora opening the fucking box here but I have to ask- What the fuck is Red vs. Blue. What is it? I've seen the first season twice I think but have never been able to watch past that. It's funny, sure. The first episode is iconic. But I still don't understand it, you feel? Do things happen in the later seasons? What is the appeal?

Shit, fuck, okay, so...

(This is a long post, and nobody concerned is at all surprised.)

You've seen the first season so I don't have to go over the very basic starting premise, at least. I'll try and avoid glaring spoilers.

ANYWAY.

Red vs Blue was only supposed to last for a couple of episodes, but it got away from them and the first arc (seasons 1-5) ran from '03-'07 and it's like 9.5 hours of content all together. Part way in, it found its legs and started telling a funny story about how this pile of color coded idiots in Blood Gulch got tangled up loosely in some stuff pointing vaguely in the direction of the alien war and saved the day. They go through some portals. They get wildly lost. They think they've traveled in time. There are a lot of stupid jokes that become plot points. They fight a guy who is a lot better at fighting than them. There's a big explosion. It's stupid, extremely 2000s in both good ways and terrible ways, and incredibly dear to my heart, all in equal measure.

After it ended and had been silent for a while, RT decided to continue Red vs Blue but this time it was going to have an actual plot on purpose! From the beginning! For real this time!

The way they did this was by retconning and adding onto the only backstory anyone in the Blood Gulch Chronicles had: Agent Texas was from a top secret military project (Project Freelancer) where she got paired with an aggressive artificial intelligence for space war reasons.

Seasons 6-8 (about 6 hours of content) form an arc that is called The Recollection. It starts a while after Season 5 ends, and introduces the character of Agent Washington (from the same project as Tex, naturally.) Wash is trying to investigate what happened back in Blood Gulch (and specifically where the character Church has ended up) while also contending with a mysterious, aggressive, mute man called the Meta who's been hunting down and killing agents for their AIs.

A lot of shit happens, there's A Twist that idk if you've already heard but it's fun if you haven't. It ends with some strong forgiveness and power of friendship vibes.

After that, seasons 9 and 10 are the Project Freelancer Saga (about 5 hours, can you tell episodes were getting longer) which has big flashbacks to what actually went down during the project. Season 9 is plagued (for me) by having the "current" events mostly be a bunch of stuff that happens as a dream sequence (more or less) for one character and nobody else in it is real. (It's interesting if you care about him, but otherwise it's a lot of sitting through things that don't matter.) 10 gets back to things happening in the present and it has problems from being ten pounds of plot in a five pound bag, but also I love Agent Carolina a lot and much of the plot is about her dragging the gang into a revenge quest to try to get closure so... *raises and lowers one shoulder.* (I have a lot of unpopular opinions because the flashback characters are some of the most popular in this fandom, but I think the flashbacks are one of the weakest parts of the whole show.)

The show ended there for a while, having resolved the Project Freelancer plot and given the characters a theoretical sendoff. Then, seasons 11-13 (The Chorus Trilogy, about 8 hours) were produced by a new showrunner and, quite frankly, it was better than RvB ever deserved. After heroically bringing down what remained of the super shady Project Freelancer, the gang is finally richly rewarded with being able to go home to Earth! Unfortunately, they get stranded on a colony world called Chorus instead and dragged into the civil war currently plaguing the planet. It is the best-handled arc in the whole show, really nicely done, and I very honestly think that Season 11 is the best place to start RvB if you aren't sure whether you want to or not. It stands alone really well, it came at a point where the show had matured a lot, and Season 11 actually does the work of re-introducing the characters and gives you enough information that you don't have to see anything prior in order to understand about them. If you like 11-13, then you can decide if you care enough to go back for the rest of it. If not, you can safely say you saw the best of the show.

The characters have responsibility and have to deal with what it means to have people depending on and looking up to you (especially when you're still mostly the same pile of idiots you've always been.) There's a lot of great shit in here about friendship and being flawed people trying their best. It's still dumb, RvB is always dumb, but it has a good heart.

15 and 16 were by a new guy, and were such badly-received seasons they took the guy who wrote them off the show. 16 is, hands down, the worst. 17 felt like an apology. It was really good, but oh god at what cost?

I figure if you end up caring enough about RvB you'll find out about this period on your own, otherwise summarizing it beyond "there's a lot of bad characterization and unfunny humor and there's a time travel plot, then the apology season was actually great" is wasting your time.

We don't speak of RvB Zero. It was so poorly received that neither does RT, now.

OKAY BUT WHAT IS THE APPEAL OF RED VS BLUE?

Full disclosure: While RvB matured some over time and got less bad about some of its jokes, the humor has aged badly in a lot of places and wasn't okay in the first place (looking @ u, homophobic jokes and the only black character is a guy who sleeps around and probably has a bunch of kids he doesn't support jokes, I cannot blame anyone for being put off especially by the early material) but when it's good it's witty, the breakneck pacing of jokes is great. When RvB is funny, it's really funny.

The characters are all very flawed and remain flawed, but most of them grow and you get to see them as people struggling with situations that are so much bigger and scarier and more important than the world at large has told them they're ever going to be allowed to be. The Blood Gulch crew are not just losers, but a specifically selected pack of losers. But the thing that matters about them is they can, despite their flaws and their frequently shitty personalities and their petty squabbling, band together when it matters. And when some very damaged characters who are supposedly "better" and more important than they are crash and burn and are at their lowest? The Blood Gulch gang goes "hey, you can sit with us" and offers some pretty unconditional acceptance and friendship that is pretty much lifesaving.

RvB isn't deep, the Freelancer plot is full of holes so big you can drive a tank through them, the first showrunner couldn't write female characters, I've mentioned how much of it was in poor taste, and I could go on...

But I bonded with RvB when I was young and a lot of the things in it have meaning to me, it's quotable as hell, and I owe RvB for a lot of enjoyment I had over the years messing around with ideas and characters in it and talking for hours to my friends about it.

[materializingthedisembodied]

And now, a repost of my earlier concept for what I came up with for a quality Haunted Mansion film, in the wake of new plot details and cast going around: 

The film should start with a series of striking images, taken from the ride, but done in a very realistic manner with some stylized elements, as if they were filmed on an antique motion picture camera: a man’s legs, stepping off the rafters inside a home under construction and a loud snapping noise, a hallway of formal portraits with the subjects decaying into rotting corpses, a medium with a crystal ball and her back turned to the camera, obscured by a large antique chair, a cemetery of stone monuments expanding gradually as if viewed by time lapse. Over this would be narration about some homes, some pieces of land, just being cursed, or doomed, and on these properties, the inexplicable and horrible builds up over the years, creating a cycle of negative energy that leads to a haunting which cannot be contained or described by the actions of the living - a crash of thunder, the title comes up, and then a smash cut to….

…a tour guide, in what is plainly a tourist attraction, foyer identical to the Disneyland mansion, delivering the rest of the opening spiel about the old Gracey house and how it contains 999 restless spirits, and should you dare to go inside, you might join them…forever! Cut to a bored and paltry group of tourists. A Halloween grade skeleton coated in cobwebs is slumped in the corner, there is a rack of postcards on a counter, etc. This scene transitions to the exterior - it is Halloween night, and the mansion sits on the edge of a swamp, but down the street is just typical street of businesses outside the gates and cemetery of the mansion. Jack o’lanterns are piled outside the gates and  fake cobwebs adorn the plaque bearing the Gracey Manor name.

From there, our protaganists, a twenty-something aged group of paranormal enthusiasts, are introduced sneaking into the cemetery after hours, talking amongst themselves about what they’ve heard about the Gracey place: the suicides plaguing the construction of it, that the owner was in secret a pirate captain and dumped his wife in a well, that no, it was the wife who murdered her husbands, that the owner was really an eccentric world traveler who collected cursed and bizarre artifacts and put them in the home, that a spirit medium investigating the house died under odd circumstances and her head was never found, that the owner and his wife died during an earthquake one day, and so on - all the various backstories both used and unused for the attractions around the world. Eventually, they sneak inside, and are greeted with what is clearly a recording of the same Paul Frees narration (when hinges creak in doorless chambers) and a hokey recreation of the skeleton dropping from the ceiling, which they scoff at. Going further in, they are in the portrait hall as in the ride at Anaheim, but the candles lining the walls flicker and die, then all the light seems to be sucked out of the room, leaving them in a black void, lightning and thunder booming in a very loud manner, the intruders panicking - until light returns and they find they are outside the mansion again seemingly, the trees gnarled and creaking in the wind, full moon shining down on the gravestones, and the blue lights flitting about the graves slowly turn into ghosts from all eras, ignoring them. The only place to run is into the house, as the fence around the graveyard seems to stretch into infinity, and once inside, the house warps further, changes around them, flickering between aspects of all the Mansion attractions, with them literally trying to find a way out, the ghosts alternately threatening them, or in the eventual case of Madame Leota and a tour guide who has been trapped in the netherworld of the Mansion, trying to help them solve the mysteries of what happened and escape.

This would leave room for concepts from all eras and iterations of the Mansion and it’s development, and also have space for the ghosts being self aware they are trapped in a tourist attraction in some cases and there being dark humor arising from their attempts to communicate, scare, or just avoid the boredom of being in the house for hundreds of years, mixed with genuine unsettling specters and grim concepts along with the investigators who broke in being genuinely emotionally affected by some of their experiences, given this proves the existence of life after death. That is what I would want to see, at any rate, not a film taking itself too seriously but also not resorting to trite lessons about estranged family or the value of loving each other, done in a manner that is at times genuinely unsettling and flat out weird.

After thinking about this general outline, a few more points came up:

A few more points, as I thought of them while preparing dinner.

it would never be explained in the film outright, but the core concept would be the house/tourist attraction building itself would be a cosmic level supernatural being in its own right and could change the interior at will, as well as holding the ghosts and entities inside ‘trapped’ there. basically a giant supernatural venus fly trap. it is alive.

the paranormal investigators trapped within would venture at one point into the literal ghost town from the end of Phantom Manor, perhaps the conservatory scene morphing into it

the end of the movie would have whatever section of the house they were in peeling apart, disintegrating, into a odd dark void of vaguely organic nature, with a barely glimpsed, tentacled, disturbing beating ‘heart’ that releases waves of ectoplasmic energy and makes them sick when the waves touch them. the house is threatened by them being so close to its core, so it literally spits them out, them landing roughly on the cemetery lawn, all except one who is missing….

the final coda of the film would be another tour group walking down the corridor of doors, as we know it from Anaheim and WDW, cheesy sound effects echoing about, the door handles shaking or knocking, but among the ‘family photos’ on the walls is one of the missing investigator, a look of abject terror on their face, seeming to look a little more decayed, and we hear a faint echo of their voice calling out asking where they are, to let me out of here, where is everybody?….then cut to sudden black, and THE END? title card as in old schlocky b movie horror and scifi movies.

[theaceofskulls]

Time to talk about another book but this time it’s Age of Sigmar rather than 40k.

Dark Harvest by Josh Reynolds is one of the most recommended Age of Sigmar books I’ve seen and I can definitely understand why. (Funnily enough of the three most recommended “for beginners” books of Age of Sigmar, Josh Reynolds has written two of them).

This book is a horror story set in the middle of a swamp dead in the middle of the Realm of Life, deep deep inside the forests. A quick bit of backstory here, the nearest city is Greywater Fastness, and industrial city that’s been agitating the locals, the nature spirits called Sylvaneth. The area is a slowcooking powder keg where the emotionally driven treekin are slowly twisting into something dark and cruel as the mortals cut down their forest in the name of progress.

This is not the story of that city.

This is a story about a strange protagonist who goes by the name of Harran Blackwood investigating a message from an old friend he’s learned is still alive and is in a small town that’s missing off most the maps. The roads to there are shrinking and Harran has no idea what his friend has become since he last saw him.

So he’s resolved to go there and kill him.

Complicating matters is the unfriendly town of Wald, the many mysteries that start piling up on each other, an unwelcome companion who is one of the few friendly faces, and something ancient stirring as a twisted harvest festival sweeps through the town.

The genre is horror and it’s fantastic, feeling like the much better version of The Bookkeeper’s Skull. However, it similarly has a sudden ending, with a small amount of anticlimax but not nearly to the same degree nor the invalidation which that book suffered from in its final pages. This book is less about its mystery surrounding the settlement and more the mystery of how it will resolve and why its characters are doing what they’re doing.

It lays out clearly, stopping short of flat out telling you, what the threats are, and instead lingers more on how close they are, with fantastic scenes where the protagonist observes them playing with their prey only to immediately leave unnoticed by the mortals that were inches from claws and fangs, leaving you with the question of what might happen if the protagonist were himself to turn around and look behind him. The atmosphere is thick with swamp and blood, and the creaking of wood. And the more you learn, the less safe it is.

And this applies to the protagonist too. Harran’s story is unraveled over the course of the book, but all the details are given to us by him and he’s quickly revealed to be unreliable, both in how he lies but also how much he doesn’t know or doesn’t understand. As is usual for horror protagonists of the sort, he comes bundled with a dark secret, a sin that forever changed him, but even once you learn it, it’s difficult to grapple with, especially when other characters forgive him for it while others damn him and he himself offers no defense of it and fails to ever fully reveal his motivations.

This book is great for seeing the melting pot of the Mortal Realms, slow burn tension based horror which indulges in the feeling of being unwelcome in a strange place, seeing into the eyes of religion of the setting, the Sylvaneth including some of their fringe collectives and splinter factions (pun intended), and is just overall a good read.

[thewildwaffle]

The Prisoner - Part 4

I was on a roll after part 3 and had this cute little scene pop up into my head. Plus, Garn really needed a moment to rest and take a breath, he’s been through a lot these past few days!

Part 1       Part 2        Part 3

The ship was relatively quiet. Or at least as quiet as a ship can be while bumbling around in space. Perhaps the more appropriate description was that the ship was peaceful. Garn decided that he liked peaceful. He wasn’t sure he understood what it was that he was feeling at first, he’d had so few peaceful moments growing up and working under the Syndicate, but once he figured it out, he decided that it was quite agreeable with him. It seemed to be for Porter as well. His smaller human friend had been recovering quickly after their run-in with Maika the assassin back at the Tupiti Space Port. He could now walk on the leg, albeit with a noticeable limp. Thankfully, it hadn’t seemed to affect his bright and energetic personality, much to Garn’s relief.

Right now though, Porter was asleep. As was Embry, the ship’s medic of sorts. During his time on the ship, he’d been able to piece together a bit more information about his new companions. Embry, he’d learned, had never actually received a medical license. She had training but had never finished. When he inquired more as to why, Embry changed the topic and became much more curt with any further additions to the conversation. Porter was a lot more forthcoming with his backstory. The gist of it was that he’d taken part in some big trading agreement with a private Earth organization and a splinter group from the Bartu Sovereignty that went bad. There’d been some illegal business “under the table” as Porter put it, and he’d been set up as the “fall guy”. The fact that he was a weapons expert and many of the illegal going-ons had to do with the criminal trade of experimental weapons only helped solidify his “guilt” to the authorities that cared. Porter had spent a good part of an entire rotation explaining in great detail how he’d talked, bribed, and fought his way out of the hands of bounty hunters, angry crime lords, sneaking under the radar of law enforcement, and in general living life on the run before he stowed away on The Shasta, this ship, where he met Kaya and Tig.

Then there were those two. The elder human and the kloxan’s story were still a mystery to him. All he’d really gotten to know so far was that they’d been part of a Galactic Confederation crew together. Garn didn’t know much about the Galactic Confederation, other they were considered a continual, pestering antagonist of the Trinn-Har’rups. He’d guarded prisoners of the GC captured by the Syndicate before they faced an unknown, though likely grisly, punishment for the crime of standing in the Syndicate’s way.

Garn felt that among the ranks of guards and soldiers, the Galactic Confederation and those that aligned with them were thought of to be pretentious, power-hungry manipulators. He’d always been around that sentiment, so he never questioned it before. He’d had no need to. Now he was on a ship that had two of them as acting captain and first-mate. Granted they were former Galactic Confederation, so maybe that old profile didn’t fit them. After all, he was now a former guard of the Trinn-Har’rup Syndicate, the stigmas tied up with him probably no longer fit so well either.

And anyway, Porter stayed with them, so they couldn’t be so bad.

Garn rose from the small pile of blankets, pillows, and towels that was currently acting as his bed. Porter had Embry help him scour the ship for as many soft fabrics and items that could be spared to make a spot for Garn to sleep until they could install an actual bed for him. It was nice, but he’d never slept on anything so soft before. Comfortable as it was, between the unaccustomed softness and the overall unfamiliarity that surrounded him, he’d had a hard time finding sleep. As carefully and quietly as he could, he made his way out of the sleeping quarters and down the short hall toward the main hangar room he’d been in when he’d first entered the ship.

The ship was old, but he had to admit that it had been well kept and he’d almost say lovingly maintained. He gave a small half-smile as his eyes ran over the designs in and around the ship. They were outdated. He might even call them antiquated. He liked it though. It felt right and… well he wasn’t sure how else to describe it. Inviting? Warm? Graceful? It was… he felt… like he could belong here. And that made him all the happier.

As he shuffled into the main room, he stood for a moment before he sat down on a bench along the wall to continue processing his thoughts. He wasn’t sure how long he sat there like that, listening to the hum of the ship’s engines and systems when he heard a small quiet grunt to his left. Snapping his eyes open, he searched in the darkness for the source.

His eyes caught a glint of movement from a chair. He felt his fur rise as he instinctively anticipated having to defend himself from an attack. None came though. His brain finally took in what his eyes were trying to see. There was no secret attacker, just human Kaya sitting in a very regal-looking chair. His fur dropped back down and he sighed a breath of relief.

“Sorry I startled you,” Kaya chuckled quietly. Garn could see her shoulders bounce slightly as she shifted in her chair. His eyes ran down her arm. Or where her arm had been. He’d been right earlier that day they’d first met. She hadd stopped what she must have thought was him going to attack Embry. The prosthetic he’d seen her wearing that day and every day since was now no longer attached. Her arm ended just above where her elbow should have been.

After a few tries, he was able to successfully look away. It was hard though. He’d heard humans were capable of surviving attacks or accidents even after losing a limb, but it had seemed like such a far-fetched tale that he wasn’t sure if he’d believed it. The shock alone of having lost a body part was enough to kill many species, but humans, as he now knew, were hardy and stubborn when it came to staying alive and continuing on.

“I… I didn’t realize you were here. I’m sorry I disturbed you,” he murmured as he stood up, feeling like he had intruded on something he shouldn’t have.

“You’re fine, Garn. Sit back down.” It wasn’t a command, it came out softer, like an invitation. He paused and considered that. An invitation. He slowly nodded and sat back down.

“Having a hard time sleeping too, huh?” the human sighed as she leaned further back in her chair.

Garn nodded sharply, then unsure how well humans could see in the dark followed up with a curt, “Yes ma’am.”

Kaya laughed again. “I told you before, you don’t need to call me ma’am.”

“Sorry ma-... uh, sorry. I will try to remember better.”

“It’s okay. I’m sure it’s what you’re used to. I, for one, know old habits die hard.” Her tone was soft and quiet. So unlike the interactions and reprimandings he was accustomed to in his life up to this point.

He settled down a little more, muscles finally starting to drop their worried tension as the two of them sat in the darkness. He eventually relaxed enough that he felt comfortable to break the silence.

“Are you… are you having a hard time sleeping ma- uh, human Kaya?”

She didn’t laugh this time, but Garn could hear the quiet smile in her voice, “We’ll get you through all your formalities yet.” She sighed and stroked her hand over where her left arm ended. “I am. Just some old phantom pains acting up again.”

“Phantom pains?” That sounded serious. Should he go wake Embry?

The worry in his voice must have been picked up because Kaya gently waved him back down as she reached to the counter and picked up a dark mug and sat back in her chair. “My arm may be gone, but sometimes my brain forgets. Sometimes it feels like my arm itches, sometimes it hurts, or at least my brain thinks it does. It doesn’t happen as much as it used to, but still more than I’d like. Especially when I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

She sipped slowly from the mug in her hand. Whatever was in it smelled sweet and calming. Kaya noticed him watching as she lowered the cup and rested it on her lap.

“Mint tea,” she explained. “It helps. Or at least, enjoying a warm cup of it helps me take my mind off the pain.”

Garn nodded silently, not sure what to say. He wasn’t sure what the etiquette was for this situation. He couldn’t take his eyes off her arm and where it ended, but he also knew that for many species, staring for too long at a person could be considered a challenge to a duel, or at least considered rude. Kaya didn’t seem to notice though, more focused on the mug in her hand.

“I brewed it myself,” She continued. “We’ve got a room here on the ship that we’ve filled with plants. It helps keep the air fresh, takes a bit of the strain off the o2 systems. That and sitting in the room or taking care of all the plants helps keep star sickness at bay.”

“Star sickness?” Garn cut in, unfamiliar with the term.

“Void sickness, star sickness, planet separation anxiety, there’s a lot of names for it. It’s not so much a physical sickness, but a mental one. I don’t know how many space-faring races have to deal with it, but it affects humans pretty frequently. It can get pretty nasty too, if it’s not dealt with. I make sure Porter, Embry, and I each spend a chunk of time in the plant room pretty regularly. It’s grounding. And relaxing. Smells nice too. A lot of the plants are, of course, good at filtering the air of impurities, but quite a few of them smell nice. Like the mint, for instance.” She took another sip from the mug and chuckled. “Even Tig likes going in there sometimes. You would think he’d find the humidity levels a pain on the circuits, but he says it doesn’t bother him. I think he finds the plants interesting. Sometimes I notice him laser etching bamboo stalks on packaging scraps when he’s bored.”

Garn hummed and nodded. He’d seen the kloxan do that too. Thinking of him and the human next to him now, he again started wondering at how different they were than what he’d always expected of someone from the Galactic Confederation. Just even in the past few solar rotations, the hard, no-nonsense shell he’d immediately attributed to her when they first met was actually more just her being firm and strong when needed, but thoughtful and gentle at her base. He’d learned so much in such a short amount of time. The galaxy was such a bigger place than he’d ever thought, so much more detailed and nuanced. It had all been so cut and dry and simple when all he knew was what the Syndicate told him. He exhaled deeply as he leaned his head back to rest against the wall.

“That’s quite the sigh,” Kaya noted. “Got a lot on your mind?”

Garn grunted an affirmative. Kaya sat silently as if waiting for him to elaborate. When he didn’t, she leaned her head back to rest against her chair and they both sat silently for a while.

Garn’s mind was racing, and at the same time, it felt like it was stuck in a sticky zawki pit. His thoughts were starting to run into each other and stretch or slow down until nothing was making sense anymore. Maybe he should return to the sleep quarters and try again to get some rest. He looked over to the human who also looked like she was having trouble with her thoughts.

“If I may ask,” he asked quietly so as to not startle her, “what made you want to leave the Galactic Confederation?”

Kaya tilted her head down to consider him a moment. Even in the darkness, he could see the lines around her eyes pull.

“I left,” she began and thought about it a moment, “I left to find my partner.”

Garn wasn’t sure what that meant, so he waited unmoving until she finally continued. Her voice was slow and deliberate, like she was carefully picking through every word.

“We… we were on a scouting mission and there was… an accident. We were separated. I was, well, I was recovered, but he wasn’t.” She paused again and looked down into her mug. Or maybe at her arm, Garn wasn’t sure. “I tried to convince them to go after him. They said he was gone. I appealed. I appealed again and again to higher and higher powers, but I kept getting nos. They told me he was gone and that trying to… recover him would… that it wasn’t worth the risk. He was a good man.” She frowned and looked up sharply. “He is a good man. I think he’s still out there. He survived. I can feel it. And I decided I was going to get him, by myself if I had to. Tig was on our crew as well. He’s been... a dear friend. Both to Ahmad and I before, and now. He believed me. He came along to help me find Ahmad.”

She looked back up at Garn. “Since we left the GC, we’ve found evidence that we were right, that he made it out alive. We just need to find him. And along the way, we’ve picked up a few other lost souls.”

Garn matched her gaze as he listened and thought on the information. She was on a mission. He, well, he was now for all intents and purposes, a fugitive on the run. Other than staying alive, he had no real plans, no goals. What was he going to do now? He must have spoken his question out loud before he realized it, because Kaya cocked her head and gave a small chuckle in response.

“What are you going to do indeed, dantum? I think that’s what everyone has to figure out. Until you do, though, I suppose you can tag along with us for a while.” She took another sip of her tea before she set it back down on the counter. “After all, it’s not like we’d be able to get rid of ya any time soon. Porter’s gotten attached.” She smiled and gave a short hum, “and I think you’d make a decent enough late-night conversationalist. Granted, you do need a little more practice.”

Garn felt a flicker of surprise and returned the smile. He’d like that. Here on this antiquated but cozy ship, surrounded by terrifying but welcoming aliens, he thought he’d really like that.

[clairenatural]

Sorry for the MASSIVE ask in advance but

I'm not a big fan of the S4 and beyond, post-cas Supernatural stuff not because I hate cas or his relationship to Dean, I think that was one of the better aspects of the show. I just hate how Supernatural, like many "monster-of-the-week" format shows that get popular inevitably think "Ah yes, what we need is a BIG COMPLICATED DRAMATIC PLOT that always ends up getting in the way of the basic structure of the show" and I think that although them looking for the demon-whats-his-name was always there from the beginning, the introduction of the concept of the angels in general was the start of that gradual escalation that eventually led to them doing ridiculous shit like dealing with leviathans or literally killing god and never resolving any of their previous issues. I know that's a big chunk of the show at this point, but if we're all allowed to have secret good versions of supernatural in our head that's my big thing. At some point a lot of the characters relationships and trauma cease to mean anything cuz like, they were already messed up characters at the beginning, but now Dean's been to HELL. and Sam went to EVEN WORSE hell with LUCIFER, etc etc etc. What did it matter that Dean died for Sam X number of times, and Castiel Y number. Who cares about their relationship to their dead mother or their abusive father anymore (a backstory that was already trauma central) because now super special Empty shit is happening without any of the prior shit getting any closure.

Supernatural is the TV show equivalent of those idle clicker games that wrack up currency into fake numbers they call "nonillions" or "dodecatrillions" or whatever because the scale ceases to have meaning. Would've loved a good version of Supernatural where they toned that stuff down after Dean went to hell and they still introduced cas and a lot of the other ensemble cast members, but he showed up every few episodes and was very sexy and helpful but also mysterious and Dean and he still fell in love without Dean having to be "The Righteous Man" or "Michael's vessel", but just a hot guy with Daddy issues. And also them increasing the number of episodes where Dean bonds with a child x10 cuz I'm a Dean fan and that stuff was always great.

Hello! Your reasoning for disliking how the show went post s4 is completely valid, tbh. You can have issues with a show and criticize it while still overall enjoying it--i have a ton of things I wish spn had done better. Like honestly I super agree with you about the trauma. I will commend jared for actually remembering that Sam has trauma about hell and lucifer because none of the writers did. And cas is just casually suddenly a member of an endangered species, which is never actually addressed, and even dean’s trauma gets erased. and ofc they can never heal from their childhood because j*hn keeps being glorified even after they establish that he sucks. And part of that is because, you’re right, they just kept piling new stuff on instead of taking the time to deal with what they already had. which is disappointing! But I enjoyed watching seasons 4-15 because I loved the new characters introduced and the emerging themes (and arcs--they did get super chaotic, but that’s honestly not the biggest qualm of mine because eventually the arcs just became the generic setting for my favorite little dudes to grow as characters in and that’s what matters to me).

my issue is mostly with fans who hate EVERYTHING about seasons 4-15 except the fact that sam and dean still exist, and even then they often complain about them being “out of character” (when, in fact, they’re just developing......as people tend to grow as people after their early-mid 20s). That’s what I don’t understand. Why keep watching a show if you hate the majority of characters and their development arcs.

[jemfisch]

⌠ MASON GOODING, 21, CISMALE, HE/HIM ⌡ welcome back to gallagher academy, JEREMY “JEM” FISCHMAN II! according to their records, they’re a SECOND YEAR year, specializing in ADVANCED ENCRYPTION & “MACGUYVER” SURVIVAL SKILLS AND NAVIGATION; and they DID NOT go to a spy prep high school. when i see them walking around in the halls, i usually see a flash of (old hip hop blaring from headphones, a broken crtv with the cords ripped out and repurposed, the smell of spray paint graffiti, brightly colored shirts with 80s patterns). when it’s the (cancer)’s birthday on 06/23/99, they always request their ICE CREAM SANDWICHES from the school’s chefs. looks like they’re well on their way to graduation. ⌿ kati, 24, she/her, est ⍀ @gallagherintro

STATS / PINTEREST / CONNECTIONS / CLASSES

INSPIRATION

fox mulder (the x files)

hogarth hughes (the iron giant)

will turner (pirates of the carribean)

robin hood

george weasley (harry potter)

aladdin

spike spiegel (cowboy bebop)

mark watney (the martian)

BACKGROUND + CLICK FOR BIO

his parents were high school sweethearts and married just before they attended college at harvard together, securing careers at the kennedy space center. 

jeremy fischman sr dies under mysterious circumstances in a lab accident and ellen is twenty-eight and left alone to raise baby jem. things only go downhill from here. jeremy was the love of her life and she becomes obsessed with his disappearance and all kinds of conspiracy theories, blows a bunch of her money. it doesn’t take long for her to be fired, savings blown on expensive equipment or sunk into internet hoaxes

they move to a rough neighborhood in gainesville where jem grows up. he likes jem, not jeremy, jeremy is his father. he’s never experienced the perfect life his parents used to live, the white picket fence, the shiny space shuttles. he’s only got this, and honestly, he doesn’t hate it. 

the neighborhood’s rough, but there’s a lot of fun characters, and his mom is practically his best friend – aside from his next-door neighbor, NOAH WARD.

jem’s mom does odd hacking jobs from the comfort of their home. some of them are shadier than others, she makes connections with a lot of private investigators in town and looks into people’s cheating husbands and tracks down birth parents and missing people. she does pro bono work too, a kindhearted woman, she can never say no to those in need, even if she’s not so fortunate herself. as jem gets older, he learns everything that he knows from her

every summer vacation growing up, jem and his mom would pack their bags and make home in a camper van, traveling across the country. in some ways, this was great mother-son bonding, but this wasn’t why they did it. his mom never gave up looking for the truth about her husband,  but hacking into secure, top-secret government databases is nothing like hacking into the gainesville city hall, it’s hard work, and they travel around the country methodically so that their signal cannot be traced. every summer they get close, but never close enough.

when noah moves away for college, jem stays home. he’s not comfortable leaving his mom. 

he keeps up with hacking jobs and keeping up with looking for his dad on the side. he doesn’t think they’ll ever find him, his mom holds out hope but jem is eighteen years old and a bit more jaded now, he figures the guy’s just really dead and well, the conspiracy of it all matters less and less when he knows that either way, he’s still grown up without him. 

a lot of jem’s social life is online, whether it’s friends from hacking forums or via soundcloud.

when he’s not hacking, he’s making music. his passions of technology and music mix and he creates his own beats and soundcloud, mashing together songs, and even putting together a popular meme track or two used on tiktok. 

it’s actually a bit lucrative, but that’s not why he does it. doesn’t even really use his name, catch him on soundcloud…username? uncutjems.

every time he and his mom get close to finding his dad, there’s just more to do, and it’s almost like someone KNOWS what they’re doing. 

jem’s right about that – he is being watched. since noah’s admission to gallagher, recruiters have been aware of the boy who taught her everything she knew. 

when gallagher makes the choice to start allowing male students, an agent shows up at his door offering him a once in a lifetime chance at a free education. 

jem doesn’t have any strong ambition to go into espionage, per say, but he won’t say no to advanced classes taught by some of the world’s brightest minds – and a chance to reunite with his best friend. however, he hasn’t stopped trying to get into the government’s records and still has ambitions of going into music production.

PERSONALITY. 

INTUITIVE. jem has a natural intuition about things and he trusts himself and his own opinions about things. i suppose you could perceive this as confidence, but honestly he’s just really SMART, good at absorbing facts even subconsciously and putting things together about people or situations. in a sense, he has a habit of being correct – he definitely comes off as intelligent, even though his grades in school have never been very good. he just has different priorities. 

LOYAL. make a friend out of jem and you have a friend for life, he’ll take your secrets to the grade and he’s pretty trustworthy. he’s the type of guy that gets along with pretty much everyone but he has a few select, close friends because he is somewhat intentional about the company that he keeps. he’s friendly and kind, but he keeps his inner circle of people he trusts close and somewhat exclusive. 

PROTECTIVE. kind of has papa bear energy, you know ? maybe the dad friend of your friend group, but in a laid back way, he might not seem like he’s the type to spring into action but call someone close to him a rude name and you’ll see his fist coming at your face. he’s protective but not possessive, i guess is how i would describe it, but i think he gives pretty good advice as well because he’s really hoping the best for ppl. 

MALINGERING. jem is kind of a SLACKER! at least, that’s what teachers have called him in the past, he simply does not dream of labor. he’s just kind of doing his own thing, will fake sick to skip a class, whatever else, even though he likes producing music he doesn’t really have a great ambition for anything, spy or otherwise. as long as he has a good computer setup, then he’s fucking chilling. 

MOODY. he’s laid back to the umpteenth degree when it comes to work or obligations, but he does have sort of mood swings, i guess he’s the sort of person that you would describe as grumpy at times ? definitely NOT a morning person and when he’s in an off mood, he can be hard to interact with or snap out of. 

DISORGANIZED. the sort of person to throw his stuff across the bed or leave piles of clothes on the floor to deal with later, maybe he’s not your favorite roommate for this reason. he has a habit of losing things that he just set down or whatever, things like that. 

HEADCANONS.

tbh you can think of him like...beca in pitch perfect ! he’s here bc he was offered a free education and he’s cool with that, but he’d rather be pursuing a future in music. a damn good hacker, though, and the gallagher recruiters are hoping that with some ‘ambition’ he’ll want to work for the government someday. 

played baseball throughout middle and high school and he’s fairly athletic – he can get pretty competitive when he plays, it kind of brings out a side in him that most people don’t expect to see because he’s fairly chilled out most of the time 

a boss with a slingshot. there is no reason for this, but he had one as a kid and he used to chase squirrels away from the bird feeders outside their home. he has great eyesight and his aim is great, but it’s literally the only weapon he’s proficient in

he’s not tiktok famous for his face, but he has two tiktok famous songs...he’s made like 12k in record deals for selling the rights, it’s just the kind of shit that he does goofing around in music software and he has a good ear for what is going to be catchy

he’s NOT a morning person, definitely a late night kind of guy, will stay up until all hours just fucking around on the computer and then he’ll sleep until 1 or 2pm, at least. getting up for morning classes is a struggle for them and he has slept through them on occasion.

funky sweaters, crazy socks, fun-patterned shirts, he dresses a bit like a circus tent at times, but you can’t say that he doesn’t have style – he dresses well, but it’s like he’s stepped out of a 90s cartoon or something

if he makes u a playlist he either wants to be ur friend so fucking bad or he’s head over heels in love with u

really likes making new things with old technology, he loves taking the macguyver courses and learning new things and he’s actually built his own computer and a lot of his own musical instruments 

usually has a couple bandaids because he’s a bit accident prone or can lose his focus when working in the lab. when he gets in his own head while working on a project, he literally cannot hear anything else – sort of selective hearing

likes fucking around with spray paint, if he can, he’s got a bit of an artistic streak and he doodles stickers on sticker paper sometimes. you can probably catch his tag around campus or even stuck to the latops of his close friends, it’s just a little man with a tv for a head. 

WANTED CONNECTIONS.

HACKING JOBS – if you STILL need a hacker for any of your wild backstory connections, jem is a great bet. he’s been doing paid jobs for people professionally since he could type, and he’s sort of an ace at getting in and out without leaving a trace...and he’s no gossip. so, your secrets would be safe with him. 

SMOKING BUDDIES – people that he can smoke up with, talk about life, talk about the bullshit of gallagher, but also people he can laugh with that don’t make him feel stressed or concerned about the future. 

MUSIC MAKING BUDDIES – if your character makes music, maybe they can collaborate on something...we’re about to drop the hottest mixtape of all time right here at gallagher academy i will teach myself garageband for this shit...jk but maybe

EX ON BAD TERMS – someone he dated last year...i’m imagining it was their first year and things were really great for the first semester, but shit fell apart second semester along with the school. maybe all the drama on campus caused distance, maybe he wasn’t there for them when they needed it, or maybe they got jealous of the way he always prioritizes noah ? a combination of things, we can hash out the details since i know some of you had some pretty angsty things going on second sem, and maybe it’s awkward now because it feels like there’s unfinished biz. 

EX ON GOOD TERMS / LOVERS TO FRIENDS – maybe someone that was a rebound and things didn’t really work and they saw that, maybe he wasn’t over his ex or whatever but they were able to stay friends ? it’s up to you how your muse feels about it but i want an ex that jem also has no hard feels about and actually is maybe sort of protective of them and cares a lot about them finding happiness, they bonded hardcore. 

EX-FLING – idk maybe they were hooking up for a while and then one of them started seeing someone else or one of them caught feels so they don’t hook up any more but it was super fun when they did !! also down for it to have been like a summer fling and once the summer ended. 

BROS – idk i would like for him to have a squad or something for him to just fuck around with <3 but it’s wholesome and they respect women

ONLINE FRIEND (ANONYMOUS) – he spent a lot of time on forums online and stuff so i’d love for him to have an online friend !! maybe cute if they just know each other by their screen names rn and we can do a bunch of text chats and maybe they both know they go to gallagher but they simply. haven’t met idk

ONLINE FRIENDS – also friends he met online that aren’t anonymous they could’ve met through any number of forums but probably have similar interests like music or hacking so they’re long time homies , someone he’s known almost as long as noah

ONE NIGHT STAND – self explanatory. maybe they’re super good friends and now it’s kind of awkward now and they want to get back to a place of normalcy but it’s simply not normal, maybe they fucked things up by breakin the tension on like. halloween or some shit. 

FRIENDZONED – someone jem accidentally friendzoned and maybe he doesn’t even realize it himself but they had a thing for him and he really just didn’t realize it bc he can’t tell unless you spell it out for him.

CLASS RIVALS – someone who tries really hard and cares about class a bunch vs. jem who doesn’t give a fuck but he keeps making the grade without really trying, so they’re ? bitter about it ? and so the two really do not hit it off because of that and they go back and forth , i just rly want a classroom rivalry. maybe even this rivalry and them nagging him actually motivates to try in the class just to piss them off 

 ENEMY – this person shared a secret with jem and then it somehow got out on the gossip blog idk ! they think jem told and now they hate him. 

anything pls let’s chat !

[popculturebuffet]

Adventure Time: What Was Missing Review

We celebrate Bi-Visablity day with our first look at adventure time! We get our first true taste of Bubbline when the two are forced to work together along with Finn, Jake and BMO to try and get a door powered by music and honesty open to get their stuff back from a well meaning creep what stole it from them. Gay Subtext, Jake shapeshifted into billy idol and rpping off a childlike robot’s face insue. Quit the band and then rejoin the band when dramatically approriate under the cut. 

Happy Bi Visablity Day! As you can tell i’m running behind, real life stuff coupled with not finding about this day until yesterday, something that for obvious reasons won’t happen again but i’m not going to stew in it too long. Point is it’s a good day, a proud day, and a day I naturally felt the need to celerbate as i’m bi myself, and have tons of bi characters I like, as seen by the fact that the two big arcs I covered for pride both had a bisexual as one of the main leads.  However my pride reviews also left me in sort of a bind as i’d used up most of what was in my tank. Luckily I had a few ideas, and among them a review I INTENDED to get to for Pride Month, but my overestimating my own productivity meant some got shelved for later. SO let’s take this one off the shelf and talk about adventure time shall we?  Adventure Time was my faviorite show once upon a time, being one of the front runners of the second annimation renisance of the 2010′s, it wasn’t a hgue suprise.. but it did take me a while to go from casually watching it to REALLY obessing over it, similar to regular show. Like Regular Show while the show wasn’t bad, it was just okay, with creative settings and what not but fairly simplistic characters. Season 2 would sharpen the comedy and add a smidge of emotoinal depth but it was with that season’s finale the show really showed what it could do: IN the same show that earlier in the season had a snail hyjack our heroes house and the two agree out of the kidness of hteir hearts and wanting hteir house back to help him get laid, we had a deathless, relentless monster who was determined to kill everything and voiced by ron goddamn perlman, who nearly succeded in beating our heroes and did end up possesing one of them and killing her for about 5 minutes. It showed the show could really step up in scope when it wanted while still getting really fucking weird and funny.  So season 3 crystalized all that, still having tons of great comedy but also having episodes like Memory of a Memory, which not only gave Marcie’s rather sad and complicated backstory, or at least the first pre-simon part, and the infamous Holly Jolly Secrets where we found out local weirdo and king of incels and ice the ice king was actually once a meek researcher who put on a cursed crown and ended up slowly devolving into madness like something out of a john carpenter movie. The show really deepend the cast, while keeping tthe usual brisk tone and it paid off getting better and better, then backsliding a bit, then going back to better by the end.  I did slide out of the show after a while, but I never really stopepd caring about it and the last year really made me step back and remmeber how much I loved it. And this episode is one of those reasons and one of the things that made season 3 what really defined the show. It was also one of the gayest episodes in cartoon history, before other cartoons actually got away with doing more.  What Was Missing was written by future Steven Universe creator and all around Peach, Rebecca Sugar, who was part of why the show got so sucessfl and steered the ship for a few seasons before leaving to make Steven Universe and even more animation history. Seriously I can’t blame her for her current sabatacle: Whatever she does next is going to have the pressure to utterly change the game and no one wants to step into that right away after running a show for 6 years. So what makes this so great? Well let’s figure it out shall we? 

The episode opens with Finn going to get his secret hunk of Princess Bublegum’s hair. Yup. I’ve had troulbe parsing this because what he’s doing is entirely wrong. BUTTTTT it’s also a 13 year old boy, said hair is naturally just a wad of gum, and the show clearly show’s he’s embrassed by the fact he still has this and that the person who thinks there’s nothing wrong with this is Jake, whose the same guy who once did this to his brother. 

So while his longterm relationship shows h’es good with women he’s not a good judge of what’s approriate. But after teasing his brother and letting him know he knows about the hair, Jake offers to share his hidden possesion, his blankie.. before a weirdo with a key on his head comes in and steals the blankie, the hair wad, and BMO’s controller then creates a door in time and space and heads through.  Our heroes chase after this dude through his doors  as he steals a toy from a kid for.. some reason, it dosen’t quite synch up with his later motive, and something from Bubblegum, who comes with along with Marceline who seemingly has something stolen. Our quintent eventually chase the guy to a giant door that’s unopenable, the door of the door lords.  PB explains what’s up: The dipstick who stole their stuff was a doorlord, a race that she attempted to lockup long ago.. but found it impossible “Because their doorlords” aka because you really can’t keep someone in prision who can just make a door out of it and whatever magic they had she clearly couldn’t contain, likely because of her later established hatred of magic and most likely just calmed down after that to avoid escalating things further. Or something. Why they never showed up again.. I really don’t know. The concept, a bunch of mysterious beings that can fold time and space and don’t talk, and as the episodewill prove have good intentions but go about them in a bad way, is really good and given the show had 7 more seasons after this, and started to really pile on the mythology, I question why this bit of it never came up again despite being really intresting.  

Marcy chides her for not just killing them all, which is hilarious in hindsight to me. While they likely had’nt thought of it  yet, her later backstory has her committing genocide on all the vampires of Ooo, hence why she’s the only one we see until Stakes. It just adds a bit of probably unintend depth to the line: Her ruthless, carefree pre-character development self probably just thinks that’s the easiest solution without considering the fact some of them may be innocent because she rarley considers anything. Just good character stuff. 

So Finn reads the door which reveals the gimmick it has: to be opened it has to be a song sung by a genuine band.. and the genuine part is something I honestly dind’t think about first few times watching this, but is a nice hint at how to really get the door open. More on that later. Finn suggests starting said band since most of the mhave musical talent with Jake agreeing as long as he can be the group asshole. 

Marcy, being the one who’s a musician for an unliving, is naturally the first to take charge, to Bubblegum’s annoyance but she suggests a chill jam, with Jake taking on a british accent, because 50% of all assholes in media are british and because only in britan could you sell an ep of you and your bandmate/brother fighting. No really that’s a thing that happened, thank yout odd in the shadows for letting me know that happened. 

The best thing? This CHARTED.  So yeah our band is formed and Marcy suggests a laidback jam and putting on a decent one that’s a nice gentle song about burying people in the ground but seems to be nice.. then it becomes clear what it’s about, and why there’s so much danged tension between her and bubblegum with one simple line. And it’s always a credit to a writer when you can pivot everything with a line, it’s a skill most need. 

“I’m going to drink the red from your pretty pink face” Yeah there’s no real grey area here. This is about explicit as you can be with their former relationship without outright shouting “They were a thing once” Or having Marcy do an accoustic version of Jodeci’s Freak N You. Which is a thing I want now if anyone reading this has olivia olson’s ear, or if by some miracle she’s reading this in which case “Hi I really love your work also why in the hell are you reading this i’m not that good holy shit thank you”, please ask her to do that.  And now we get to why I chose this one: I admit I put this one on the backburner because, as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t on screen full died in wool gay content.. and I was wrong. You have to take steps to get representation, fight hard, kick and claw and scratch and bite to get representation into media, let alone CHILDREN’S Media because god forbid we show kdis that GASP gay people exist and would give them slightly less money to throw at their competitors in money fights I assume bilionares have. just fuck off with this shit already, christ it’s 2020 and most shows that have had gay characters have gotten tons of attnetion and conservative assholes protesting it only makes the rest of us aware it exists and more liable to check it out. Fuck off and do the right thing you fucking greedy, selfish, incosidrat emorons. 

That tyrade out of the way the point is representation takes time and Rebecca took a hell ofa risk to her florshing career pushing for this. You don’t get to steven universe without this episode, for a number of reasons, and you don’t get to all the other gay without an example to point to and say “see this works your being stupid,, stop being stupid and let us gay dammit”. So I felt this episode, and these two in general as we’ll get to in later reviews, deserved it’s fair due. 

Back to the actual plot, Bubblegum responds to this mildly flirty and remotley suggestive line. with “Marceline, that’s too distastful” Peebs.. she just made a suggestivish metaphor about wanting to make out with you, she isn’t talking about how good your vagina tastes. which is probably really good because bubblegum is delcious but that’ snot a line of discourse i want to get into now or ever.  MOre on this in a sec.  Marcy naturally dosen’t take this well, nor should she, and launches into one of the series greatest songs and one of rebecca sugar’s best work, which is saying something. “I’m Just Your Problem”

Olivia Olson deserves credit too: While Rebecca wrote and composed this amazing bit of music, but her delivery is great, keeping the same tone the whole time while still singing beautifully and conveing just how.. hurt marcy is, with the excellent animation complimenting it. Rewatching it is a joy and I wish it hadn’t taken me this long to get back to the song again.  It’s also a real tearjerker, in a way I didn’t even realize at the time, as the lyrics point out why Marcy is so upset with her: She’s frustrated with how PB seems to resent the fact that unilke her subjects she dosen’t worship her, she dosen’t do what she says.. befor edigging in deep, asking if THAT’S why she avoids her and really cuts both her and the audience deep with this line  “It’s like i’m not even a person am I?” The animation also deserves credit for a moment.. I didn’t notice it before rewatching the song a few times for this review.. but while PB starts and ends the song angry... around this part she looks hurt.. like for one moment her stoic, needs ot be in control, needs to be mature and queenly at all times mask is broken and she’s shaken by realizing just how much she hurt her. It says VOLUMES about what they used to be without giving us a full backstory and it’s wonderful. She still cares.. she just can’t express it properly. Marcy continues her muscial slam saying she dosen’t need to justify herself, and that she dosen’t need to apologize, and shouldn’t be as the gate almostopens.. only for it to stop when Marcy refuses to be open.  And that gets to the heart of why the two fell apart back then, whenever back then was and what’s obvious from here: Both have a habit of holding people at arms length emotoinally but both are such VASTLY diffrent people they couldn’t get through each others walls. For Marcy she’s immortal and has gone through a few hundered years of watching anyone she cares about die, loosing her mother, having her biological dad abandon her and be utterly terrible at actually connecting with her or being empathetic anyway, and having her surrogate dad slowly go insane and having HIM abandon her too if for her own good and then presumibly finding him later as a horrifying shell of his former self, and her ex boyfriend solkd the one reminder she HAD of said man and insulted her over it. She’s had a hard, devistating life and as we see her at this point she keeps people at arms length because she knows they won’t last, it taking some time for her to stop treating finn like a toy to play with and start treating him like her friend and realize that even with her immortality just jackassing around for hundreds of years willl only make her more miserable.  PB also does.. but it’s becaue she’s a very regimented person who belivies things have to be one thing, is utterly rigid in her way of thinking, and rules her people with a benveolnt cnady coated iron fist. She means well, can care about people and is better at forming connectoins despite knowing they’ll be fleeting.. but also has a bad habit of just.. not thinking about what others FEEL just waht’s best to them. She opresses her people, spies on them, locked up an innocent child instead of helping her or adopting her like she clearly needed, and tried to genocide a whole race of robots simply because they MIGHT be a threat to her world. PB at this stage needs things so structured and so her way, she forgets sometimes.. she’s wrong. Wheras Marcy sees her immortality as a curse and hides it behind a seemingly carefree nature, PB sees it as neccity but let it cut her off from other people, still brefirend and love them but hold them a ta distance so she could do the things that needed to be done, the work that needed doing ot insure her people surivive forever and she dosen’t outlive them.  Both have been left stunted by their immortality, and both were in no shape for a relationship, thouguh while I’m sure marcy didn’t help with her issues with honesty, PB probably did the most damage, both not wanting to risk something outside her perfectly consttructed bubble threanting things, and not being able to resist trying to control her lover instead of treat her as an equal. Thankfully both would get better and by present day the two are toegheter or about to be, and both in the place for that to actually WORK. But this shows sometimes relationships just dont work because your not ready yet.. but that you CAN get a second chance, and the one benfiit of being immortal is you don’t have as big a risk as dying without having that chance come up. 

But yeah this fails, and while Jake storms off, Finn tries to have a friendly pasta dinner to keep everyone left together, with Marcy going to get a hot pot for them, and plugging it into BMO which is neat.  It’s PB”s turn and she just tries harmonics and it ends up sounding like a worse version of that song bill and ted play at the begniing of face the music.. and THAT probably woudlv’e worked better. 

At this point everyone falls apart with Marcy spitting on PB, PB walking off in a huff and jake leaving because it’s that part of the true hollywood music story. Also he’s shapeshifted into billy idol, which is awesome.  It’s then we get the second song of the episode.. and one every bit as good as the masterpiece above. 

Finn laments what happened, in song because of course, before admitting how he just wanted htem all together.. and wonders if their even his friends.. as the door glows and he finally realizes what opens it: The truth. This is where the genuine hint comes back together.. the genuine wasn’t in talent.. itw as in emotoinal honesty.  I really haven’t talked about Finn a bunch this review, mostly because he’s mostly just trying to help and be earnest.. but this scene beautifully ties that together showing that deep down, Finn is bothered by how dismisive the others can be of him sometimes and wonders if he’s a “Joke, your knight or your brother” That sometimes he wonders if they care. It’s both relatable as hell and really fits the character, showing PB’s sometimes dismissive attidue of him REALLY bothers him, and Jake and Marcy are guilty of the same at times. He genuinely admits though that through all this.. their his closest friends.. and it’s a really sweet song and really shows what finn is at his core through all his developments good and bad to come: An honest kid who just wants the best for people, and cares about those around him.. and gets those around him to open up as a result. It’s a freaking powerful sequence, and Jeremy Shada acts the hell out of it and the nimation is beauitufl. Good stuff.  The door finally opens and we find out the Door Lord just did all of this to get them to bond and work on their issues... which as I said is well intentioned.. but in a funny bit they whollop him anwyay because you know.. he did so by stealing from them and making them solve a musical riddle. Who does that? BMO gets his controller back, Jake gets his blankie and Finn gets his wad of hair with PB giving out an OH you like this is normal and FInn rexamining all of his life choices. Don’t worry bud, your about to make some considerably WORSE life choices that will make these look midly better!  We get one last bit of Bubbline tease as it turns out PB’s item.. is a t-shirt marcy get her, complete with blushing. Yet there was STILL  vitroicllically insane crowd who swore they weren’t gay because htey wante dto pair either of them with a 13 year old which .. agian no. Just no. No no no no. We also find out Marcy had nothing stolen she just wanted to hang out and we end on her chasing them.  Final Thoughts: As you can probably tell, this episode is a masterpiece and easily one of the series best, and not only that.. but it’s better than I remember. I THOUGHT this would be a quick review but the two hours it took to get this written and the more and more I found in the songs to talk about said otherwise. It’s easily the episode that put the show on the map, with holy jolly secrets being tied with it in this regardf or diffrent reasons, and the one that showed just how far it came. The music as I gushed is utterly fantastic and we’d get more.. then suddenly none once rebecca Sugar left because they coudln’t find anyone else apparently even though that makes no sense. Point is the episode is beautiuflly animated, deeply trenched in it’s characters, and even has some really funny bits like the runner about jake being the jerk in the band. IT’s great stuff and I highly recommend it even if you’ve seen it before. If you liked this there’s regular Loud House Coverage every weeeknd at some point, and regular ducktales coverage every monday if you’d like to follow to see that, and more reviews on my tabs and you can comission one for 5 bucks if your intrested of any episode of any show you want. Until we meet again, Go team venture. Play us out jodeci. 

[bitchbrisket]

First Lines Tag

Tagged by @slightlyintimidating

Rules: List the first lines of your last 20 stories (if you have less than 20, just list them all!). See if there are any patterns. Choose your favourite opening line. Then tag 10 authors!

As all my mutuals have been tagged already, I’ll just tag a couple of people, @tara-stofse and @rapidashpatronus

I’m also going to cheat and give you a favourite line from each one, simply because the first line is rarely the best and why not be a big fat show off where your writing is concerned? Didn’t link because I am a lazy cow but my AO3 profile is at the top of my page.

1.       (The Worst Witch 2017) A friend like you – 'Get in loser, we're going shopping!'

Sometimes I come up with good titles and sometimes I desperately flail around and this was the best I could do. Most people should know what the opening line is a reference to and it was the first thing I thought of when the idea of this fic materialised.

  ·         'I know you think you're hot stuff, but Dimity can run rings around you. You have the acting skills of a potato' she icily informed a miffed Arabella.’

  2.       (Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries) An education - 'I confess, I fail to understand the point of most of them.'

Again, another crappy title but for some reason, no song lyric or poem came to me on the subject of policemen raiding a Chinese brothel in the 1920s and confiscating vibrators because they look like suspicious instruments. I did lift the first line from the script because that is partly what I based the fic on. 0/10 for originality there.

  ·         ‘The benefit of having so many deities, Lin reflected, was that there was always someone in, should you knock on the door of their shrines.’

  3.       (The Worst Witch 2017) Poker – ‘Miss Bat scuttled along to the staffroom after her date and walked in, only to halt in surprise.’

Good Lord, I’m really not selling it to you with these boring titles am I? I’ve done the strip poker storyline with the hairpins in another fandom and couldn’t think up a clever title for that either.

  ·         ‘Clothes were strewn everywhere but in front of Hecate, there was a small pile of hairpins and nothing else.’

  4.       (The Worst Witch 2017) Which witch is which? – ‘Wychwood forest was a mysterious place, full of wrackspurts and helipoaths and blibbering humdingers. Sometimes you'd even see a crumple horned snorcack galloping along.’

Yes, alright I borrowed something off the world of Harry Potter. A fic based off a post off of a popular post on Tumblr and title borrowed off Dianna Wynne Jones I think.

  ·         'Watch out for the blibbering humdingers!' she shouted vengefully after the troublesome tourists.’

  5.       (The Worst Witch 2017) They do it with mirrors - 'I've missed you.'

Very general, basic bitch kind of starter. Dial up the smut o’metre because witches are having the equivalent of webcam sex. Written for the Hackle Lemonade Challenge, prompt kink. Wasn’t one of my favourites to write but it does have one of my favourite paragraphs in a smutty fic. Beats the first line anyway.

  ·         ‘She groaned and panted as her climax finally overtook her, glad of the extra support from the solid oak furniture. None of this modern rubbish that couldn't withstand a good hard fuck. There was a time and a place for IKEA but this was not it.’

  6.       (The Worst Witch 2017) Every inch of you – ‘Ada loved it when Hecate lightly raked her nails down her back.’

Diving straight into the smut for this other Hackle Lemonade Challenge, prompt kink fic. Title entirely appropriate.

  ·         ‘While many people over the years could make it happen, it was a secret delight to know that nobody did it better than her.’

  7.       (The Worst Witch 2017) The hum of your desire – ‘Ada woke up to an empty bed.’

At least it’s promising. The story can go anywhere when you start off with an empty bed. The bed is irrelevant anyway. They end up on the sofa.

  ·         ‘Hecate Hardbroom was nothing but a meticulous over achiever.’

  8.       (The Worst Witch 2017) You’re the night sky, trying to make me see your stars – ‘Hecate had been afraid to touch.’

Throws you right into the scene and lets you know there’s going to be a bit of angst in there. I love the song I took the title from (night sky – Leonell Cassio & Julia Mihevc) and I waited for a fic idea to materialise so I could use it.

  ·         ‘Ada could feel her breathing, steady and true, vibrating through to her heart.’

  9.       (Ghosts) Hide & seek – ‘Giggling madly, she galloped up the stairs to seek out the best hiding place ever.’

With several of the ghosts with backstories we have yet to uncover, the possibilities are endless. Poor Kitty had to die young so I gave her a death loosely based on an English ghost story, using all the unsavoury incidents involving her sister. Title needs no explanation.

  ·         ‘And shimmering obliquely in the corner of the landing, was the answer. The wooden chest. The one from the latest sailing ship that had brought back all that sugar and tea and rum.’

  10.   (The Worst Witch 2017) When breathing sounds like your song – ‘She hadn't let herself enjoy it at first.’

Luckily the only way from there is forward. For the Hackle Lemonade Challenge 2021, prompt firsts. Not sure where I got the title from, it’s possible I melded a couple of song lyrics together for it.

  ·         ‘I always feel thirsty after a pleasurable experience' she said cheerfully.’

  11.   (Holby City) There is no goat that foolish – ‘Serena patted down her wide brimmed hat and set off for a walk.’

It’s an ok start to the fic. The title is terrible but honestly, its just hard to find references to goats in general.

  ·         ‘She only just realised that they were conversing in English, not French. The other woman had a London accent. Good. She could shout at her more expressively in English.’

  12.   (The Worst Witch 2017) Sugar mouse – ‘What is it?’

So many possibilities here. The title does give it away, but still.

  ·         ‘In her nightmares, her grandfather had chased her around with an eyeball on a fork.’

  13.   (Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries) Stitch up - ‘I’d like to see you operate my sewing machine, Hugh Collins.’

Another shameless ripping off from the script. But nothing else can sum up this fic so perfectly. Title self-explanatory.

  ·         ‘Were sewing machines like dogs? He wondered. Did they take on the personalities of their owners?’

    14.   (Pushing Daisies) Girls don’t want boys, girls want damn respect – ‘Her boy always had an eye for the ladies.’

What a ridiculously clunky title. But apparently I couldn’t think of anything better. The opening line is much better.

  ·         ‘Calista was reminded of the principal at school that Emerson had crushed on so hard that he'd broken every fire alarm in the school over the course of several months just to get her attention. Some things never changed.’

  15.   (Holby City) Tell us the tale of a goat – ‘Did I ever tell you about how Serena and I met?’

A solid opening there, full of potential. The title is a bit crap. No, I have no idea why or how Serena would be working on the Italian railway either.

  ·         ‘You dressed one up in a poncho and called it aunt Gertrude?’ Fleur asked eventually. She really couldn’t think of anything better to say.’

  16.   (Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries) In the gracious light – ‘Jack tried not to let their questioning stares get to him.’

Based partly on the MFMM books, I’m happy with the opening line, it sets the tone. The title comes from Shakespeare’s Sonnet VII. ‘Lo! in the orient when the gracious light.’ With that, it ties in Jack and Lin quite nicely.

  ·         ‘After all, grandmama had warned him enough about the distraction of white girls. She had said nothing about white boys.’

    17.   (Holby City) Not yet – ‘Bernie wouldn't describe herself as an avid reader these days.’

Title taken from a line in the book Wicked. Opening line is pretty generic. I basically wrote this fic because Elphaba reminds me of Bernie in some respects. Also, premonition, sorry about that.

  ·         ‘In her mind, it was Serena in that cell, stretching out her hand to Bernie and chiding her affectionately for her delay.’

    18.   (Ghosts) Filth – ‘The Captain paid no attention to Lady Button's shrewish tone two rooms away.’

Simple title, simple opening line. Very direct. It’s the ‘why didn’t the Captain and Lady Button bond over the hot gardener in Lady Chatterly’s Lover together’ fic.

  ·         ‘The Captain sighed. That husband of hers had a lot to answer for. Bastard. He couldn't have killed her by poison or anything, no, he had to push her out of the damn window.’

  19.   (Ghosts & Holby City crossover) Over the top we go – ‘He couldn't believe it.’

So many things one couldn’t believe, a pretty generic opening. The title is a WW1 reference so not the correct war for the Captain but I used it anyway. Bernie is Haver’s niece.

  ·         ‘The Captain looked pleased but there was an expression in his eyes that Alison thought hid a sob in his heart.’

    20.   (Holby City) Boobs – ‘Arthur Digby was having a terrible day.’

Title, utterly crap, I know you’ll agree. Opening line, sums it up really. I like it.

  ·         'Well, call me Da Vinci and I'll paint you like one of those French girls.'

Art wasn't Fleur's strong point.’

So what did I learn about my opening lines? It does reflect my writing style, snappy and concise. I rarely ramble for long. Are they thrilling opening lines? Not usually. Do they set the scene or the tone? Much of the time. They are certainly not the best ones I’ve ever written. Considering that I don’t love most of these last lot of opening lines, I’m going to go with which witch is which? It’s the best one of the bunch, I think. 

[thurilostiel]

Do you mind talking about your Blind Oracle? She looks very interesting and beautiful!! I really love her design!!! 🥺🙏

Ok so first of all @cringeyvanillamilk @one-leaf-grimoire @shinyshammie cuz you all seemed interested in the OC of mine. Sooo.... *looks over at like 30 pages of written text for BO’s backstory and pet guides* I’ll start with most basic things, in a short list so that you can choose whenever to read all of this or just the summary.  Also Thank you for the name suggestions, they’re really fun and I had Lilith in there as well, but for like a slightly different meaning of the name. Name used by her: ‘Oracle’[after getting her grimoire], Thana Nickname given by Nozel, as she said she wasn’t given a name upon birth: Gulisa, and later Libi Full name: Lilith Razili Graddfa'r Ddraig Title: Blind Oracle Status: Of well respected Diamond’s Kingdom noble familly DOB: 20th of April Gender: Female Pronouns: She/Her Sexuality: [???] she might be ace, but that’s due to a trauma, still questioning Height: 164cm / ~5′4 feet Weight: 54kg / ~119 lb Eye colour: Deep forest Green -green that goes into grey’ish colour spectrum the farther from the center Hair lenght and colour: Long -while down they get past her shoulder blades, longest part goes till her waist- Dark brown with highlights [of slight reddish tones] Skin colour: Delicate carmely tan [typical Central EU skin tone] Special marks/scars: has lots of little scars on her arms and upper back, her eyes have a visible markings on the irises [will include pic later] Magic affinity/magic’s name[as the one written in the grimoire]: Light / Fallen Luster Magic type: Supportive summonings Favourites: food- fresh fruits, ice minties, a big meaty meal, mint ice cream drinks- fruit juice[apple and orange juices], water with frozen lemon/grapes and mint dos- hum melodies, take long walks with her companion[s], experiment with her eyes, making things for her pets and/or others dear to her don’ts- arguing, being descriminated, being in big crowds, having others play heroes for her [i.e. pretend there are robbers nearby and shove her inside an alley to ‘protect her’] Magic Knight Squad: She’s blind so she’s not that confident to get herself into this bussines Race: Half dragon (don’t @ me, you gave me this idea guys, you know where this came from) Personality: kind and shy pesimist, who always looks at the worst possible scenario to be prepared for anything she can think of. Known pets of hers : Emrys - an aftereffect of her father’s experiment, was with her from her 3rd birthday till May5th after her 18th birthday. Unidentified under-race of, what everyone assumed was, a wolf and fox mix, with low nobility mana levels, allowing him to use few ‘spells’ of flower magic. His favourite flower was a Pond Lily, and he loved to snack on freshly cought fishes. Died on May 5th. [need to finish his visuals, tho he’s inspired by a pet in a browser game Eldarya write down ‘Eldarya Rowtsya’ into google and this is really close to what Emrys look[ed] like] Mer - foundling Crystal Eagle of Oracle. He dropped out of a nest on top of a tree under which the girl was resting. He was a little hatchling then, not more than 2 weeks old, the smell of chocolate cookie brought him to such a brave act. Mer was too small to fly back up ot the nest, also Oracle hadn’t noticed that he’s an eagle untill about a month after he joined her on the adventure, and moved on right after giving him the rest of her cookie, making the smol birdie confused as he was never that far away form his nest and decided to stick to her. Mostly because she still got more cookies to feed him. He’s a little grumpy, but he helps her getting around on her travels. He loves chocolate cookies, corn, and ice minties. He’s getting mad really easily, while mad will refuse to eat and fly, instead will be stompin’ angrily on the ground so Oracle will hear him being mad. Meanings of names: Lilith - night monster, monster mother; also believed to be the name of first wife of Adam, a succub that brought fear to little children and pregnant ladies Razili - of Hebrew’s origins meaning ‘Lord’s secret’ Graddfa'r Ddraig - that’s just her father attempt to act human. ‘Dragon Scale’ in Welsh. Due to her mother’s pasing she wasn’t allowed to wear the noble familly name. Gulisa - Little[as in Weak] Heart [Georgian’s origins] Libi - My heart [Hebrew’s origins] Thana - Arabic name meaning ‘Death’ So the backstory goes a little like this: Lilith was taken out of her mother’s dead body about 2h after her death and put into the coffin on her mother’s chest as she was a silent one and not one of servants believed she’d still be alive. Her father was the one to react to her cries and open up the coffin to see his daughter trying to feed herself but getting nothing above few droplets of blood from now uncovered breasts. This caused her to be of a weak heart and health in general, would scratch easily, get exhausted from simple tasks... The father[a dragon and an idiot when it comes to human interactions] somewhat took care of her, not knowing what to do with babies he just stuck to giving her bottles with milk whenever she cried and if that didn’t work get a servant to change her daiper. Her real name was never used inside the castle, her father was using her [draconic version of] middle name or ‘shortenings’- he meant sweetheart but was saying weakheart, meant sweetie when saying hatchilng, you get the point- as everyone took her as a sign and incarnation of missfortune and death, thus called her Thana instead. Their explanation was that no child would be still alive while it’s own twin[brother] was born already half eaten by pests and parasites, and mother having her heart rotten due to a sickness. Last time she saw her father was around her 3rd birthday, month after that he was never seen by her, but they did met a few more times after Lilith was made blind. For years she was left to herself, only cared for in ways of giving her some food and preparing baths and clothes to wear. She wasn’t allowed to study things other than law and the ways of beautiful speach, yet she loved music. She missed her father dearly, but Emrys took up his place greatly, cuddling up to her whenever she was scared, hurt or cold. Her magic started showing around her 5th birthday and since then the elders started getting a bit suspicious. All was going normal, everyday lessons of law and how to speak in front of politicians, break for a meal, then the rest spent with Emrys on a walk around the gardens or in a library stealthy listening to the music lessons on the upper floors. Upon the day of her 15th birthday the elders took her to old ruins, where they marked her eyes with a ‘new emblem’ that was supposed to start a rebelius movement to throw the king from his throne, but after seeing Lilith crashing down with tears of blood and a new moon forming upon the sky they flew away in fear, leaving her there, unnecessarily taking away her sight from her. As the moon started forming, crimson fog hugged the dying girl, a single string of shimmering mana started leading the fog into the noble family castle. Before reaching the gates the unidentified experiment rushed into it and the fog moved back, leaving the castle alone for this day.  Emrys cuddled up to her and covered her with his own mana, focusing on her bloodshot eyes. The fog began cleansing itself, becoming shimmery, as if stardust created it. It later formed her grimoire, the book that would once be called Last Hope, as it’s light was powerful in means of healing and defending, but never there to harm, yet it’s magic was tricky and therefore never the same, no more was it to pleasantly sit back and observe the battle. There was a small peasant village near those ruins, they saw the great light and weird creatures, small circular beings surrounded by silvery feathers and hoops, and some creatures looked like those of stories of old times, the biggest shimmering creature resembled Pan, the great horror of forests. All the creatures dissapeared within a minute and peasants rushed to the ruins. Seeing the young girl in shambled yet definetly expensive clothing and tears of blood streaming down her face they called to her “Oracle! Oh great Blind Oracle! Send upon us a blessing of rain” and so her grimoire started glowing and send upon them the first spell “Moribound wish” which brought the clouds and flooded the noble castles of Diamond Kingdom for whole month. The people heard about an Oracle in old ruins and began coming to her, offering food and crops for a blessing or a prophecy. Her spell was limited, she oculdn’t use it however she wanted, and it called for rest quite often, so people became impatient, rude, envy of such power and ‘luxurious life’ of Oracle. Oracle was inside the ruins for more than 2 years, yet less than 4, she could never tell the time by herself, she always relayed on the good hearted people to tell her what time of the year it was.  Few peasants told the nobles about mysterious Oracle and the blessings she was able to perform- healing some of the elders, bringing rain and storms, and they decided to take her for their own happines. They took her from the ruins on May 5th, after a small battle that she decided to put against them, they killed Emrys as he tried to help her, and put Lilith inside the cage, forced a mask upon her face so they wouldn’t have to see the markings which some of the nobles recognised as the sign of rebelion. After half a year they got bored of her ‘miracles’ and let her go into the wild. She was somehow able to get into Clover Kingdom, her mask easily telling others that something was wrong with her.  But the little bird on her arm was an easy distraction, especialy with how many children would pile up just to be able to pet him or give him some food, so she was able to steal some food from the stands and sometimes money to survive living under the sky. One day she unfortunately tried to rob a Magic Knight Captain, of course not knowing who he was or what a Magic Knight was before that. Nozel Silva was his name, she made a note to remeber that name and upon hearing her explain why she tried to steal from him he actualy took great interest in her story. After a small series of questions which she answered truthfuly, greateful he wasn’t going to put her to jail, He made a decision to let her stay for a week in Silver Eagle HQ where she was able to create few little artifacts helpful in dungeons and unknown areas as well as develop a spell that allowed her to regain sight for a brief moment of 4 minutes. During the week he called her Gulisa, as she told she wasn’t given a name upon birth, and if she was it was long forgotten. Gulisa later turned to Libi which confused the girl, upon asking why he changed his mind he said that it may suit her better, but he’d still prefer to know her true name. Thanks to Nozel’s help she was able to gain money and buy herself a small house which the members of SE often visit after missions in which they found  new artifacts. Often times while practising her magic she’d find a dungeon and explore it with Mer. Few times while in Raquey she was stopped by some male who always asked her for a tea, and would tell her stories about folk-tale creatures, guardians of forests, oceans, skies and mountains, the devils and angels, the dragons and their homes of treasures. He presented himself by name ‘Lonan’ yet seems unsure each time he brings the name up, as if hesitating. He’d always pay for the tea and dessert and leave a package with crystals and some metal parts she’d been looking for. She still travels, but mostly around the borders of Clover and Heart Kingdoms. Searching for new artefacts that could maybe, just maybe, help her regain her sight. “The fact I’ve gotten used to being blind doesn’t mean I don’t want to see someone that I have but meet” “You have your spells don’t you?” “But they don’t allow me to see how I used to. Back then I saw people smiling, now when i use my spell you’re always frowning...” And that would be a brief summary of my OC. *Looks over at the pile of papers* Have I forgotten about something? EDIT: Forgot to add: She can’t fully see by using her spells, they allow her to see the basic outlines and few colours, they depend on her mood and levels of mana she got left, so she’s going blind 99% of time. Her mask was put onto her forcefuly and she was unable to take it down before going to Clover Kingdom. The nobles put her into the half-face mask and stiched it to her face, and she started wearing the ‘butterfly’ one after meeting with Nozel, it was first artifact she made in SE’s HQ. She knew the meaning of name Thana and that’s why she didn’t use it when she was free of elders’ will. Also I might need your opinion on this @thespiralgrimoire

[iturbide]

Hfjdhjf can I please have more information?? I think the reason I managed to float by so spoiler free was half because up until recently I never was super interested in Three Houses, and my knowledge was limited to what I was told about the routes. WHICH WAS APPARENTLY VERY LIMITED. V E R Y.

friend of course you can have more information

legit though I am so impressed that you’ve managed to stay spoiler free regardless of the context, I am massively spoiled for fandoms I’m not even in and yet you’re managing to come at it fresh like I did when I started my Golden Deer playthrough.

also this came in and frankly your wish is my command

But okay.  So.

Dimitri is honestly fascinating and a tragic, deeply flawed character in his own right.  But understanding his break requires backstory.  His mom died when he was still pretty young due to a plague that swept through Faerghus, and when he was around ten his father re-married an Imperial woman named Patricia von Arundel (who is also Edelgard’s mother, hence the step-siblings thing).  Edelgard, as it happens, had come to the Kingdom with her mother and uncle, Volkhart von Arundel, in order to escape the chaos caused by the Insurrection of the Seven, where the Imperial nobles seized power from the Emperor (Edelgard’s father), and the two became friends: she taught him to dance during the three-ish years she was in the Kingdom, and just before she left Dimitri gifted her a dagger, symbolic in the Kingdom of a hope for someone to cut their own path forward.

Two years later, Dimitri’s life basically becomes hell.  While he and his family are traveling through the neighboring lands of Duscur, their caravan is attacked: his father Lambert and his bodyguard Glenn are both brutally murdered, his step-mother goes missing, and he is the sole survivor.  He witnessed the people responsible, but although he tried to tell people what happened, the people of Duscur were blamed for the attack, and the genocide soon followed.  The whole incident came to be known as the Tragedy of Duscur, and it left Dimitri with massive trauma that went completely unaddressed: he suffers from survivor’s guilt and PTSD, he completely lost all sense of taste, he’s had a constant headache since the incident...oh, and also he sees hallucinations of the people who died.  So there’s that.

Now, because Dimitri was only 14 at the time and he couldn’t take the Faerghus throne until he reached his majority at 18, his uncle Rufus stepped in as regent in the meantime.  Rufus is pretty fucking terrible!  In fact, he sent Dimitri at age 16 to go put down a rebellion in Western Faerghus -- and again, Dimitri is a traumatized teenager who’s been getting no help or support.  The people around him, notably Gilbert and Felix’s father Rodrigue, are trying to foster him into the next King of Faerghus rather than tending to his very real mental and emotional needs following the events of Duscur, so Dimitri has been silently bottling up all of his problems for the better part of two years.  He...kind of snaps during that rebellion, and it ends up as a brutal slaughter; Felix bears witness to it, and ever after he treats Dimitri like a wild animal, calling him a beast and a boar.

This is all just piling on the trauma, as you probably noticed.  He manages to hold it together and keep up a calm exterior, though he’s deeply afraid of the darkness within him, and does his utmost to bury it and keep it under control.  At age 17 he comes to Garreg Mach, and over the course of the school year things just get progressively worse: he starts slipping and growing more violent over the course of repeated encounters with the Flame Emperor, since he recognizes the masked mages from the attack on his family’s caravan in Duscur and believes that the Flame Emperor must have been responsible for the Tragedy.  But he pretty much snaps during the revelation at the Holy Tomb, where Edelgard is unmasked as the Flame Emperor -- in the Blue Lions route, he literally crushes an Imperial soldier’s skull with his bare hands in his attempts to get at Edelgard.  It’s shocking, especially since up to that point the super strength that came from his Crest was played for laughs more than anything else.

He continues slipping in the weeks leading up to the attack on Garreg Mach, publicly alluding to his hallucinations and how they whisper to him and vowing to take Edelgard’s head himself.  CF is the only route where he actually stays pretty sane, so we’re going to focus on non-CF routes: in the battle for the monastery, Edelgard’s forces end up victorious, and he’s forced back to Faerghus, expecting to take the throne and rally a counterstrike against her...only to arrive and be accused of regicide when it’s revealed that his uncle Rufus has been viciously murdered.  Cornelia (who is, in fact, a Twisted agent) takes power in the Kingdom and basically hands it off to Edelgard as the ‘Dukedom of Faerghus,’ then orders Dimitri be imprisoned and later executed; but before he can be killed, his vassal Dedue manages to break him out of prison, though the escape attempt apparently costs him his life (he can be saved by other Duscur survivors depending on the results of an earlier paralogue, though -- the important point is that Dimitri thinks Dedue is dead).  After that, Dimitri spends the next four-ish years wandering alone in the Faerghus forests, the isolation exacerbating his already poor mental health until he’s openly conversing with his hallucinations; he also starts attacking Imperial forces he comes across in Faerghus and basically ripping them apart, leading to a lot of rumors about a wild beast on the loose.  Also, somewhere in this five year span he loses an eye.  No, we have no idea how.  Fandom burns for answers.

Now, Dimitri’s fate varies significantly depending on playthrough here.  In Silver Snow and Verdant Wind, he’s literally consumed by his rage and guilt and his desire for vengeance on behalf of those taken from him, and he ends up dying in pursuit of it.  In Azure Moon, he’s lost any real ability to tell reality from hallucination, and believes even Byleth is nothing more than a figment; he continues his single-minded pursuit of Edelgard, committing atrocities of his own and admitting to being nothing but a base murderer, the beast Felix accused him of being so long ago.  But eventually, through the intervention of Byleth and his classmates, he starts to come around a little more -- though it takes Rodrigue’s death and his final words, encouraging him to live for himself rather than those who have already gone, to really wake him up and get him moving forward.  The game takes the turn a little fast, but it’s still really touching to see Dimitri coming back from the edge and recognizing the importance of his own desires.  The campaign continues, they retake Fhirdiad, there’s a parley with Edelgard where she refuses to back down and continues to insist that war is the only option, things get crazy with the final boss like holy shit, but in the end after Edelgard’s been defeated, Dimitri offers his hand to her...and her final act is to throw the dagger he gifted her when they were children at him, and he instinctively kills her in retaliation.

Look, Dimitri doesn’t come out of this smelling like roses.  He killed a lot of people in very, very violent ways.  But he recognizes that what he did, even if he wasn’t mentally sound at the time, was pretty atrocious and spends the rest of his life seeking peace with as little bloodshed as possible.

But okay I have gone on for a long time about Dimitri so if you’re still here, congratulations let’s talk about my favorite Lord.

Claude is a mystery wrapped in an enigma.  That’s literally how he’s presented in the game, and it’s great.  He’s sociable, amiable, friendly, mischievous, and has a reputation as a schemer.  He jokes about his own reputation a lot, especially when he’s called out, but he’s wickedly smart, especially where tactics, information gathering, puzzles, and secrets are concerned.  We literally go through the whole first half of the game getting only the tiniest hints about him personally and what his aspirations are -- we don’t even know where he came from, he legit just showed up out of the blue when Duke Riegan named Claude as his heir -- and meanwhile he’s out there trying to unravel the mystery behind Crests, the Church, and the Flame Emperor -- and while he doesn’t manage to succeed before the timeskip hits, he manages to uncover an alarming amount of information.  Also, despite his reputation as an untrustworthy trickster, he cares deeply about the people around him and does his best to keep them safe, even if it means resorting to underhanded (but ultimately non-lethal) methods.

Once we hit the timeskip, we find out more of the secrets that he’s been hiding.  For context, Fodlan’s neighbor to the east is Almyra, and relations between the two nations have been...tense, to say the least: a few hundred years ago Almyra invaded Fodlan and a bad time was had by all.  In order to prevent it from happening again, the Alliance built a fortress called Fodlan’s Locket in the pass connecting the two nations (the pass being called Fodlan’s Throat).  Presently, the Alliance is headed by a communal council of nobles from the major families, who meet at regular round tables in order to debate business that affects their territories and pass legislature; the round table is headed by Duke Riegan, who had two children, a son set to inherit the title and a daughter who went mysteriously missing years ago.  Unfortunately, House Riegan and House Gloucester have never been on the best of terms, and when Duke Riegan’s heir was attacked and killed on the road while traveling to visit Duke Gloucester, there were a lot of rumors that Lorenz’s dad might have been involved, though nothing was ever proven in that regard.  It left Duke Riegan in a tough spot, though, since he was getting on in years and suddenly had no heir...at which point, Claude ‘miraculously’ steps in with his Crest and is named heir to House Riegan.

Turns out?  Duke Riegan’s daughter didn’t go missing: she eloped with an Almyran.  And that Almyran, as it turns out, became king of Almyra.  So Claude’s an Almyran prince.  Turns out, he didn’t exactly have a great time growing up, though: Almyrans view the people of Fodlan as cowardly and weak, so they viewed Claude’s mom as such...and Claude himself, too, since he was half-Fodlan.  No matter how much he argued or fought, it never seemed to matter.  He got bullied a lot, and started picking up tactics and poison mixing as ways to defend himself...but more than anything, he hated how small-minded Almyrans were when it came to him and his mother.  Then Duke Riegan’s heir died, and his grandfather reached out to his daughter, hoping to have Claude tested for a Crest -- which, as it happens, he bore.  Claude was so excited, believing that things in Fodlan would be different, better...

...and instead, he found that things in Fodlan were exactly like they were in Almyra.  People hated him for half his heritage -- just this time, it was for his ‘savage’ Almyran half instead of his ‘cowardly’ Fodlan half.  It was hilarious, in a sad way, how alike the people of Fodlan and Almyra were when it came to hating things they didn’t know...and that was how he decided on his goal.  What Claude wants to do is destroy the borders between people and forge understanding between them.  He found through hard experience that people always fear the outsider -- but if you break down the walls, there’s no ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ anymore.  There’s just people.  What he wants to do is unify the Alliance, then Fodlan, then perhaps even the world...not through force or subjugation, but by bringing them together, uniting them through what they share in common and helping them understand and find value in their differences.  His aspiration is to ensure that no one has to suffer like he did growing up.

And so, once things are all settled in Fodlan (and he’s assured that he managed to achieve his goal in small scale with his friends in the Alliance), he leaves Byleth in charge, forgoes leadership in the Alliance, and heads back to Almyra to continue working toward that aspiration.  He becomes the king of Almyra so that he can start working toward that larger goal from the other side of the border, intending to open roads toward peaceful diplomacy and trade with Fodlan.  He knows their bonds are strong, even when they’re apart, and he knows that they’ll all be reunited someday.  Also Claude is the only Lord who has the possibility to live in all routes (barring Silver Snow but he’s only listed as ‘missing’ not ‘dead’ so I hold out hope) which I think says a heck of a lot about how great he is.  He’s just so good and so kind and cares so much about people and he makes my heart warm and yes I’m done yelling about how much I love Claude for a moment.

So hopefully that fills you in a little on the other Lords at least in part please enjoy my novel-length ramble.

[aion-rsa]

What’s Happening With Marvel’s X-Men?

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This article contains spoilers for recent Marvel X-Men stories.

A long time ago, back at the beginning of the interminable, endless month of March that the pandemic has trapped us in, Marvel’s X-Men books were barrelling towards their first big post-Dawn of X crossover, X of Swords. And then the world stopped, and plans changed for the X-Men while everything was paused.

Now that we’re back, plans have changed, and books are coming fast and furious. So what’s going on with Marvel’s Merry Mutants? Which book did Storm get sick in? What book should you read for a good Laksa recipe? New Mutants, but we can answer all your other questions on what’s going on with the X-Men below. 

While we won’t rehash the entire thing, House of X/Powers of X reset the entire X-Men line. Mutants can’t die anymore (or rather, if they do, they’re resurrected from clone bodies and emergency backup minds by The Five and Professor X). The X-Men, and all mutants alive, are now living on Krakoa, a living, mutant island in the Pacific that, at some point in the distant past, broke in half, sending one part of it to a dangerous, monster-infested realm with Apocalypse’s first Horsemen standing guard making sure it didn’t return. 

Humans are back to hating and fearing mutants on a wide scale, but this time it’s mostly because the mutants are vehemently anti-capitalism, flooding markets with cheap, life-extending and health-improving drugs and vowing to take down the human world with economic weapons of their own making. This has the humans initiating some pretty intense Sentinel programs, particularly around the sun, where Nimrod – the adaptive Sentinel whose existence dooms mutantkind in one Powers of X future – was very nearly created. 

And amidst all of that, Moira MacTaggert, the secret mutant mastermind with the power of Groundhog Lifeing (when she dies, her consciousness is immediately transported back to her prenatal self to be born again with all her old memories. She’s on life ten now, btw), is frantically trying to manipulate events so that mutants continue to exist in the long run as the next phase in human evolution, averting a future where man-machine hybrids (like Omega Sentinels and the Children of the Vault) develop while humans and mutants are busy fighting among themselves. She’s also not allowing Charles and Magneto to revive any mutants with precognitive powers, expecting them to see her plan and ruin Krakoan civilization.

X-Men

X-Men, by mastermind Jonathan Hickman with art mostly from Leinil Yu, is where big ideas are being seeded for later use.

This is where the story of Krakoa and its estranged, otherdimensional partner Arakko was further developed (following its introduction in Powers of X and setting up X of Swords, the first mutant crossover of the Dawn of X era). X-Men introduced Hordeculture (think the Golden Girls if they were also ecoterrorist botanists); reintroduced the Children of the Vault; showed how depowered mutants get in line to get their powers back; and saw Magneto and Apocalypse threaten humankind with the most terrible weapon of all: finance capitalism.

New Mutants

It also, just prior to the break, X-Men had a spiritual crossover with New Mutants, initially a split book by Hickman and Rod Reis on the space issues, and Ed Brisson, Flaviano, and Marco Failla on the Earth issues. Brisson, Flaviano and Failla’s story follows a group of Earthbound mutant kids (including Glob Herman and Boom Boom) as they track down stragglers to Krakoa, like Beak and Angel.

Hickman and Reis took the original New Mutants plus Chamber and Mondo into space to go pick up Cannonball (who was living on Chandi’lar with his wife, Smasher). On the way there, they stole a King Egg from the Starjammers and brought it back to Earth, where it turns out, we discover in X-Men, the King Egg is a bioweapon created by the Kree to control the Brood for an eventual war with the Shi’ar. Broo, the supersmart mutant Broodling from Wolverine and the X-Men, eats the egg and becomes the Brood King.

Excalibur

Excalibur is the shining star of the line so far. Tini Howard and Marcus To are growing the mythos of mutant magic with a very odd team that includes Betsy Braddock (now back in her original body and the new Captain Britain); Rogue and Gambit; Jubilee and her mysteriously dragonified son Shogo; new earth mage Rictor; and Apocalypse, who is clearly up to some stuff. Apocalypse picks a fight with Otherworld and places a newly resurrected but still batshit Jamie Braddock on the throne of the magical realm.

Excalibur was one of the first books to return from hiatus, and it came back with maybe the best single issue of the entire relaunch in issue #10. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Marauders

Marauders launched as the story about the Hellfire Trading Company, the corporate arm of Krakoa that distributes the miracle drugs around the world while also smuggling mutants in trouble home to Krakoa. But Gerry Duggan and Matteo Lolli’s book quickly turned into the mystery of Kitty Pryde – why she’s not able to use the Krakoan gates that allow instantaneous travel around the galaxy, and whether she can be resurrected by The Five. That story has just about come to a head, but it is worth noting that it still contains a great deal of Hellfire Trading Company intrigue between Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw, and a lot of drunken pirate antics. The resurrected original Pyro does get a tattoo of the Marauders skull on his face at one point. It’s fun.

X-Force

X-Force, by Ben Percy and Joshua Cassara, immediately killed Professor X. He was resurrected, of course, but it served as both a notice that everyone is fair game, and alongside Marauders, keeps some slight mystery to character death alive post-The Five’s perpetual resurrection machine. It’s also the story of the Krakoan CIA, so it sets up the global threats facing the mutant nation, and then sends Wolverine to get cut in half fighting them. Also, Forge creates a bio-mech loader suit and smashes the two halves of Logan back together at one point. If that’s something you find yourself chuckling at, this book is going to exceed expectations.

Fallen Angels

Fallen Angels focused mostly on resetting the current Psylocke’s status quo. Kwannon was brought back to life and placed in her old body shortly before the reboot (very quickly: Spiral switched Psylocke and Kwannon’s bodies, then before they could be reverted, Kwannon got the Legacy Virus and died, then when Betsy used a villain’s powers to recreate her old body and reinhabit it, Kwannon…uh…got better…). Here, she teamed with X-23 and Cable, with ops backup from Mister Sinister, to track down Apoth, a technological being selling cybernetic drugs to humans.

It’s mostly setup for Psylocke, X-23 (now Wolverine again, I think), and Sinister while adding another technological foe to the mix. It leads almost directly into Zeb Wells and Steven Segovia’s Hellions, a book about Sinister’s team of mutants who are all gleefully, unrepentantly screwed up and are currently on a mission cleaning up some old clones Sinister left lying around.

Cable, Wolverine, and More…

Cable, Wolverine and the Giant Size issues, are still mostly seeding future storylines. Cable, from Duggan and Phil Noto, has only had a couple of issues so far, but it’s brought the Galadorians (the Spaceknights minus ROM, who belongs to IDW now, I think) into mutant orbit and given Nathan a sword for the crossover.

Wolverine, by Percy, Adam Kubert and Victor Bogdanove, has Logan tracking down illicit Krakoan flower dealers, and also Omega Red works for Dracula now. And the Giant Size issues are mysteries piled on mysteries piled on incredible art. Hickman has scripted all three, and so far, Storm caught a technovirus from the Children of the Vault in the Jean Grey/Emma Frost issue (drawn by Russell Dauterman); we find out what’s up with Cypher’s techno-organic arm in the Nightcrawler issue (from Alan Davis); Magneto buys Emma an island from Namor with art from Ramon Perez; and we get actual backstory and incredible Rod Reis art in the Fantomex issue. 

Empyre

The recently wrapped Empyre: X-Men’s opening scene is simultaneously one of the most important to the metanarrative of mutant struggle that’s been developing since the Professor’s “No More” scene in House of X #4 AND the best setup/punchline in any Dawn of X comic. It also starts to deliver on some of the rumored-but-never-announced X-Men ideas that were floated early after the reboot – Angel and M are two of the leads, playing out a little of the boardroom drama we hoped for after an X-Corporation book was rumored.

X-Factor

X-Factor, from Leah Williams and David Baldeon, more or less just launched. It’s about the team investigating and verifying mutant deaths, to put those lives into the queue for resurrection. This feels like the book set up to deliver on the weirdest promises of the relaunch, and the creative team are inventive, fun storytellers, so keep an eye on this. Williams has a very sharp ear for patter and knows her characters well – while it’s not an X-book, Amazing Mary Jane is a stunning accomplishment of delightful character work. Early X-Factor is more of the same, with more mutant high concept.

And all this is leading to X of Swords, the new X-writers room’s attempt to outdo X-Cutioner’s Song: a 22-part Tini Howard-led crossover where everyone swordfights over half of Krakoa. And still dangling in the ether, unannounced but long discussed, are Vita Ayala and Bernard Chang’s Children of the Atom, following a group of mutant teenagers who idolize the X-Men, and a Moira X book that’s expected to fill in some of the gaps in Moira’s many, many timelines. 

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