#common dreads

[iamtryingtobelieve]

Back in the day as empires made haste

To colonize, to claim, to control, and contain

We sat patiently in the future, helpless

[wardensantoineandevka]

Warden Antoine is so funny for being someone who will make a stirring declaration about how the Wardens have an opportunity to reach for a future in which they are dedicated to protecting and restoring and nurturing the life and landscapes lost to the Blight, that it is their duty and it will give them purpose as they reckon with the end of Archdemons, then immediately provide you with like three hundred pounds of explosives he personally developed from scratch so you can blow something up for him

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

anyone else have multiple traumatic memories associated specifically with holidays/family vacations? because that is a topic I never see discussed in all the So You Had A Shitty Childhood, Now What? self-help books i've been reading. but for me, it was a significant thing. and the more i think about it the more it seems like this would be an (unfortunately) common experience. would be grateful to hear if this matches other peoples' experiences...

[that-girl-glader]

Spot the difference games getting harder and harder....

[stubz]

"Bye Mister Max!"

"Bye Emira, have a nice day!" Smiles the human waving to the leaving youngling.

"Okay! How many do we have left? 1...2....3...hm. Only 5, small group." She sighs looking at the clock. Only 30 minutes to go till closing.

"So what do you kids want to--oh, Anthony! Your dads here!"

The human child ran to their parent, giving them a hug and babbling about what they did today.

"Alright, now only 4 left...wait where's Anwred?" Max mutters. He observes the room, 3 of the little ones were playing with the magnets on the carpet. Anthony and his dad were by the cubbies. Kim was cleaning up...where was Anwred???

"Oh hey buddy! What's your name?" asks Anthony's dad.

'Oh, there's Anwred.' Max thought.

The little youngling was peering up at the human parent. His little fur all messed up, likely from his afternoon nap, his little twin tails swished curiously on the floor, cheeks moving as they--

"What's in your mouth?!" yelled Max and Anthony's dad.

Max grabbed Anwred and forced open his little mouth while Anthony's dad helped hold him. After some hisses and wrangling, Max managed to yank out a plastic wrap from someone's snack.

"Anwred...we do not eat garbage. This will make you sick and hurt your tummy, do you understand?" Huffed a tired Max. Anwred stared up at him and the human sighed knowing there was not a single thought in the toddlers head.

"...guess it don't matter what species they are, little buggers will try to eat anything they're not supposed to." laughed Anthony's dad.

"Tell me about it. Kim, we're gonna have to go over trash with the kids again!" he calls out.

"So uh what is he?"

"Uh...he's mixed but I do know his mom is Wilko."

"Wilko huh? How old?"

"He's turning 3 in December."

"Aw, he's just a little pup then!"

"Ha, yeah."

"Are we doing a party for Anwred Mister Max?" asks Anthony.

"I don't know, we'll have to ask his parents."

"...wait he's a kid?" asks Anthony's dad.

"OH...Yeah...to be fair he isn't wearing clothes and isn't talking yet so...you new then?"

"Uh yeah, I just joined here with Anthony's sister...I just realized you put your hand in his mouth...and he has fangs, like shark teeth..."

"Yep. The teeth aren't that sharp yet. Like taking something from a human child."

"...I...I don't..."

"If you actually think about all the stuff you've experienced with your own kids and compare it to this then you'd realize it ain't that different."

"...y'know what, your right. I once had to get stitches from when Anth here threw a rock at me thinking it was the same as a tennis ball."

"There you go."

[unionizedwizard]

idk if it's a genre staple or something i'm unaware of, or just the writers who wanted to Develop A Theme, but i love the entire "Cool Grandpa Who Stepped Up (until he dramatically killed himself for the greater good) x Epic Granddaughter Who Stoically Endures Her Abandonment Complex" motif theyve got going on

and i love that the three main cast characters who literally embody this (alisaie/g'raha/krile) are canonically work besties. god. there's something in the water

*stoically is not fully accurate for alisaie but this is a grossly generalizing poast for comedic purposes. you understand

[nocturusvulpus]

Ok so hear me out; Eternal Sugar x Golden Cheese

Also bonus doodle cuz these girlies for sure have a height difference <3

[anachr0nismm]

I’ll rust with you, @carmillatism <3

[deoidesign]

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[sarafangirlart]

I wanted to see if there were more Perseus x Medusa retellings and yes…. Yes there were….

[elizabethrobertajones]

jump scared by the 4th Doctor saying "well" with an uncanny intonation to how 10 says it, except I thought that was just a David Tennant-ism considering he does it in everything eventually, like, that CAN'T have started with him copying this cadence and absorbing it into his being? Right?

[lollytea]

Delighted myself thinking about the witch kids again, specifically their various attempts to build a replacement portal during the Summer. I'm picturing lots of brainstorm sessions that stretch late into the night and when they get tired enough, they devolve into arguing over who gets the last piece of pizza or playing truth or dare or whatever.

Hunter is feeling really proud of himself for having helped Belos rebuild a portal before. He has experience! He can make himself super useful! And then Amity 'Woman in STEM' Blight is also aiming for the same thing. She's an inventor's daughter. Her Dad's main area of expertise is using magic to power technology. She has plenty of opinions on the mechanical side of things.

Hunter and Amity either click extremely well and are plotting away at a prototype immediately or they disagree on every trivial detail and cannot go five minutes without arguing about it. There's no real resentment here. They're both just used to doing everything themselves and struggle to work as a team.

I don't think the project would get off the ground without Luz. She keeps everybody from wasting time with dud ideas because she's already spent tons of time in the Boiling Isles attempting to build a portal home. She knows exactly what WONT work cuz she's already tried it. She's also got a knack for thinking outside of the box and knows that even though glyphs are rendered useless in this realm, they can still be utilized. If she draws just the right glyph combo and finds a bit of magic for the glyphs to soak up, she's pretty sure they can light this portal's engine up.

Vee reminds them that she's still got a supply of Hexes Holdem cards, which have been working pretty well for keeping her human form. Luz, who had forgotten those things existed, nearly hits the roof in excitement.

Vee doesn't contribute much to the whole construction process, but while she does supervise. She did a health and safety course while at Summer Camp and is diligently making sure nobody is getting their asses blown up.

Portal Building is not Willow's strong suit. She does not have Luz and Hunter's experience, Amity's engineering knowledge or Gus' enthusiasm for tinkering with human technology. So she does what she does best and offers support. She hypes her smart friends up. And when they start doubting that they're actually making any progress, Willow swoops in to encourage them that if ANYBODY can build a portal, her best friends can!! Once the team realizes that they're gonna need something super strong to hold the portal upright, Willow beams. Her vines!! Her vines are tough as hell!! She can do that!!

Gus falls behind a little at first. He might be a prodigy but his skills are quite dependent on the existence of actual magic, so he struggles a bit to find his purpose here. He's very eager to work with human technology but Luz knows more about them than he does. He's smart enough to offer ideas but Hunter and Amity always come up with them before he does because they're both annoyingly STEM brained and have gotten a bit competitive about it. Gus is given the task of gathering equipment for the portal with Vee and he tries not to pout about it. After they managed to track down a half busted TV at a lawn sale, Vee takes him to a petstore to cheer him up. Gus gloomily stares at the hamsters running in their little wheels. He idly thinks about an article he read in one of his human magazines. About how hamsters in wheels can create energy. Unfortunately, hamsters aren't magic.

Cut to 2 days later when the team realizes that the Hexes Holdem cards just aren't gonna cut it. They don't possess nearly enough magic to power up a portal. It's not gonna work. All the time they've spent on this, and it's not even gonna work. They need something else. Anything else.

Luz looks like she's gonna burst into tears. Amity is pacing back and forth. Hunter is like this close 🤏 to slamming his head against the wall in an effort to rattle a genius idea out of his brain. Willow is making a valiant effort to keep everybody from having a full blown meltdown.

Gus is staring intently at Flapjack who is pecking away at the floorboards again. Then he's like "Hey....hear me out....what if-?"

[broncoburro]

VERY FASCINATING THEORY... but I don't think Oscar agrees. Not that he has any reason to have opinions on designing disguises or anything.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

Can you expand on what you mean by Baron being "too cool" to really fit a horror monster? It's a very interesting concept and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is it that they're too active/involved/tangible and it detracts from their scariness?

I feel like I should preface this with a wall of disclaimers lmao 1/I am a hardcore, down-to-the-marrow, avid, deeply sincere horror enthusiast, esp. horror creatures. this usually means my mileage is vastly different from the average populace's, and my scaredy bone has been disintegrated by longterm exposure. most things in a piece of horror media won't scare me! so I practically never use that on its own as the scale to talk abt horror experiences, but when something does scare me it's always a special occasion to be treasured. 2/canon d20 is never really meant to be horror horror, and for good reasons: it doesn't fit the company's output, it takes a kind of carelessness in production estimation that is always a huge risk, it's often vulnerable in a way that kinda goes against how TTRPGs usually facilitates vulnerability, and for most people it's just! stressful! d20, even with the "horror-themed" seasons, generally just plays with horror tropes and stays focused in its goal of being a comedy improv tabletop theater show. 3/fantasy high's chosen system is DnD, which as I've mentioned before is before all a combat-based game system, which means the magic circle of play is drawn based on stats that facilitate and prioritize combat. want or not this affects every interaction you have in the game, and given fantasy high's concept from the ground up (everyone's going to school of DnD stuff to get better at DnD) it's doubly relevant. 4/This Is Fine I have no quarrel with this. my meters are internal, I do not ask this show to be anything it doesn't advertise itself to be, and what it is is fucking great! I like it! when I expand on this ask's question it will be like a physicist going insane in a lab. that's the mindset we're going in with.

disclaimers done. my stance on horror as a genre is that it's a utility genre rather than a content genre or a demographic genre; it is the discard of narratives. it's the trash pile. horror, above being scary, is about being ugly and messy, it's the cracks on the ground any story inevitably steps over to stay a genre that isn't horror. the genre's been around long enough to develop a codex and a general language that medias and makers and enthusiasts of the genre can use to talk about and build onto, but if you go into individual pieces there's really no unifying Horror Story. one person's beautiful life can be another's horror story, it's just how it is.

this makes The Monster a deeply intriguing piece of the genre. thing is a monster is in a decent percentage of any story - it's just when the antagonist force steps into something past a certain line traced out in the story's world. monstrousness is in pretty much every western fantasy story, it's in any story with a hero and something to vanquish or win; more than anything it's a proxy of that thing up there. the line in a narrative's world. the monster is the guard of the unknown lands, where heroic, civilized people don't tread.

what does this mean in the context of horror? the genre is about that perceived lawlessness, that "unknown land" so to say. we're in the monster's home. that's the literary context that we often walk into a horror piece with; the monster knows more than you about where you are. it may not understand you, but it holds more information than you, and with that it moves swifter than you, has more covered than you, and is more assured in its existence in this context than you. it's a struggle to catch up to it, it's nigh impossible to get one over it, and you're never sure it'll 100% work, because you just don't have the information necessary to.

with that framing you can kinda see where I'm coming from here: horror's often about the breaking of rules. I always think a monster's most effective when it breaks well-established rules of both existence and visual storytelling. think Possum (2018) or Undertale's Omega Flowey or the Xenomorph Queen - unique change in medium, unique change in graphic, unique change in design language, etc. in that sense I actually really like how canon baron plays out: they don't really function like anything else in the fantasy high universe, the bad kids have not managed to kill them when they've felled literal gods, their domain in fhjy literally introduces new mechanics to encompass their existence! from an experience design standpoint they slap mad shit. BUT! I can't help finding their character, like as a character riz (and the other bad kids, eventually) interact with, to be very... coherent? in design. this is kinda hard for me to articulate in words, it's more often a sense you get once you've looked at enough of these scrumptious fuckers, their general design and the way they show up is just kinda too clean, so to say. always kinda newly made? fresh unboxed. it, once again, makes sense for their lore - they are looking for more about themself from riz - and their function - they're an antagonist in a game experience, they're meant to be interacted with in a way that produces results and meshes with the existing magic circle - but that shininess takes away from the implied history they should have dominion over and the person they're haunting doesn't.

from another angle there is kinda something there about how put-together canon baron is as a concept; the domain they call home is riz's deep-seeded fears, extremely vulnerable things he's drawn borders around to quarantine and refused to walk into. things that from his perspective would irreversibly shatter certain pleasant fictions his world is built on top of. canon baron, While Extremely Cool, I feel is kinda too neat to connect with and signify the apocalyticized mess that'd result from this paradigm shift. the part where they're in riz's briefcase and looking through every mirror is Very Cool And Fucked Up! but ultimately the show draws a line around them as well, by making game-physical, tangible spaces they're in (the mirrors and the haunted mordred manor) and put riz and the bad kids there only when they need to confront stuff. riz is meaningfully narratively away from baron's unknown land for most of fantasy high.

with that and all of my disclaimers in mind my conclusion here is if canon baron wants to be a Horror Monster they'd have to cross way more lines. be a Lot more invasive. hence (holds up my class swap baron like a long cat)

[null-entity]

Night City BABY!!

Model: Me.

Photographer: The Remote Camera Trigger.

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[leeshajoy]

Broke: Hades is dour and grim and Persephone is a manic pixie dream girl

Woke: Hades is just a guy doing a job and Persephone is the scary one

Bespoke: Hades and Persephone are Gomez and Morticia Addams