There's just something so fascinating about the way the Exandrian pantheon has decided to handle the Aeor Situation™ - by electing a few of their kind to be born as mortals in order to infiltrate the city.
The first to bring herself low was Ioun, and I can only imagine how lonely that must have been for her. To feel infinite wisdom creeping into her adolescent mind? To rise through Aeor's ranks knowing what they'd do to her if the authorities discovered the truth of her existence? Waiting, hoping, perhaps even praying that the other gods would follow through with the plan.
Sarenrae has a husband and children as Trist. I can't help but consider the parallels to Liliana Temult, with a 'higher calling' pulling a mother away from her family. The conversations in the temple suggest that she would have been aware of what she was by the time she started her family. Yet she loves them, cherishes them, even knowing that she might not see them again. Will Amaris, Haylie, and Topher learn that Trist is a goddess? Or will that only be discovered when they find their way to her realm in Elysium?
The Matron was once mortal, and she willingly returned to that form in order to help her newfound siblings dismantle the Aeorian threat. Her steward since childhood was Purvan, helping raise and guide her despite his old age. Imagine being a little girl, guarded by the Champion of Ravens himself and his wolven companion, completely unaware of your own divinity until later in life. Imagine the night she woke up, remembering her ascendency, seeing Purvan and recognising him.
And what of the families that gave birth to and raised the four Betrayer Gods? What of the halfling family who watched their precocious daughter scale a fence with far too much ease than it should be? The day the tortle's parents found him crying in pain and tearing at his skin to distract himself from a memory so distant and yet so real? Or Milo, who became a priest, not to follow in the light of the Dawnfather (like his parents may have thought), but to mock his brother even as a mortal?
These gods spent entire childhoods with families and friends, taking refuge from the skirmishes caused by their other siblings. Who, despite those similarities, have very different opinions of humanity, of Aeor, and themselves.
TOP 10 WEB VIDEO SERIES ON AO3 FOUND IN FANDOMS > OTHER MEDIA (2010-2023)
To make this ranking, all series titles in the Other Media category on November 29 (or the closest date to it) of every year were copy-pasted to Google Sheets, rearranged according to number of fanworks, and then manually filtered since not all web video series were marked as such.
Locked fanworks aren't included in the count because Wayback Machine can’t view those, only Ao3 users can.
Many authors started locking their works starting December 2022. It's most likely the reason the number of fanworks decreased or slowed down in 2023.
Bar chart starts at 2010 because there were no web series in Other Media in 2009.
The Dream SMP tag was only considered an Additional Tag in 2021-early 2022, which is why it's not listed in Other Media earlier than that.
Please refer to this post for more bar chart races.
Dedicating this post to @vsrobotjulie who requested this bar chart race.💕
Thanks for understanding and hopefully I didn’t mess up anywhere! 🙏
“essek wants the gods dead” “oooh, this is going to change essek’s mind about the gods” i’m sorry but that boy is a cultural luxonite. he has no strong opinions on the gods other than ‘well, they sure empirically exist’. he might have some issues with his home faith (understatement) but he was still raised in an ancient battlefield literally scarred by the horrors of the calamity where the prime deities are a bunch of affectionately tolerated minority cults. his entire society thinks they transcended the need for Gods with Shapes and my man is not immune to the luxon-centric chauvinism of his upbringing.
sure, given another few years under ludinus’ thumb he could have probably been swayed to team deicide, but that’s not where’s he’s at. where he’s at is hanging out in rexxentrum, getting made fun of by caleb for referring to the dawnfather as ‘an influential, if over anthropomorphized solar deity’. you can take the elf out of rosohna but you can’t take rosohna out of the elf. the gods? well, fjord and caduceus are very fond of theirs (tone of someone describing their friends’ baffling but periodically lifesaving hobby). he technically works for one now through the cobalt soul and he can respect her ethos. after that he runs out of things to say about them.
now the luxon, on the other hand… he’s watching this entire directors cut triple-feature like a hawk. trying to divine the secrets of the universe from a reality show and it might just work.
I do keep coming back to the thought that there is no reason to have stopped to see Astrid before going to Aeor if the point wasn't to try to recruit her for chaperone duties. It doesn't exactly seem like she's with the Vanguard or she wouldn't be hiding in a smut shop in Zadash.
Please, Astrid, come to Aeor with us. You can take potshots at your ex's new boyfriend the whole time. And he can't even say shit about it, because he's the one who invited you.
I feel so vindicated knowing that we all read those many microexpressions correctly. Laura was really playing an anxious queer woman in love with her best friend so accurately that we couldn't help but pick up on all the little nuances.
Ludinus: Predathos isn't interested in eating mortals at all and absolutely won't do anything that could be described as harmful to life on Exandria! It is going to only hurt the gods, and it won't do anything that will hurt us.¹
I watched cr abridged and got to the ep where Gus and Olly were introduced.. There has to be a way to involve them in what's about to go down lol, I miss them!