#every interaction is a ritual or follows some weird rules

[izzysillyhandsy]

A cool death - Ed's theatrical, performative suicide

"You know, I thought I'd have a cooler death than this. Something like being eaten, eaten by a tiger, or massaged to death by mermaids, or… belly-flopping into a volcano."

It seems I'm not done analysing The Scene from S2E2. It is a wonderful scene, perfect for rewatching - the music, the lighting, the double meaning of the things being said and the things unsaid, and the way it almost feels unreal, artificial and staged.

This is Ed's arranged suicide and he is playing by his rules, expecting Izzy to go along with it (as per usual). And at first, Izzy responds to it.

It is obvious to everyone that Ed is a highly dramatic person who loves the fantastical, symbolism and storytelling; he has a rich imagination and loves to perform. With Izzy, this is more hidden (especially in S1) but in S2 it becomes clearer and clearer that, in that regard, he is not that different from Ed. Both of them creating Blackbeard (their greatest fuckery) is only one example. The Kraken and the Shark is another.

For almost their whole lives, Ed and Izzy have been performing, creating theatrical illusions of their preferred realities to keep them safe, in charge and help maintain a certain lifestyle. But these illusions also helped in covering up their weaknesses (Ed can't kill, Ed can be unstable, Izzy loves Ed far too much, they're incapable of letting the other go, etc).

So is it any wonder that Ed, at his lowest point and just wanting everything to be over with, views his own suicide as a form of fuckery? He needs someone to kill him (the no killing rule extends even to himself) and so he arranges reality in a way to make that happen.

And for Blackbeard, it can never be an ordinary, boring, basic death. His death has to be cool and pretty intense.

Luckily, he has just the right person for the job - the master of real, sincere intensity: Izzy, who would do anything for him, who'd play along and follow him right into the fantasy, who has been with him for so long that he'd just get it.

And Ed makes it completely clear from the start - "I had a dream about you last night. I dreamt that you killed me." - this is about Ed and how Ed wants to die, dreamt up to the last detail. He holds Izzy's gaze. "It was good for me." - please do this last thing for me. He softly touches Izzy's (ungloved) right hand while standing up and getting into position - "I was standing. Just like this."

Izzy, probably half delirious from bloodloss and pain, follows Ed's every move with rapt attention.

So, how does Ed arrange his death? How does he imagine his last ever fuckery, his last shared fantasy with Izzy?

The execution of a mythical creature

Ed positions himself very carefully, at a good distance to Izzy and between Izzy and the stairs leading up to the door, with rays of sunlight coming from above.

From Izzy's POV, Ed must look like an angel ascending to heaven. Ed's posture and especially the way he holds his arms - almost a crucifixion pose - add to the impression. The sunlight frames him like a halo.

Contrary to the beginning of the scene, Ed turns his back to his executioner and calmly closes his eyes. He stands tall, proud and beautiful, accepting his fate with grace.

Perfect, beautiful and untouchable

Ed might be at his most beautiful and sublime in this scene. He is calm, dignified and regal. Izzy isn't granted the same status.

While Ed is a statue of perfection, Izzy lies on a filthy bed below him, drenched in his blood and god knows what else.

He's sweaty, his hair sticks to his face and his clothes are rumpled (and Izzy is normally so well groomed). His leather vest and even his omnipresent right glove are missing, as well as half a leg. He's so weak, he probably wouldn't even be able to sit up properly.

Also, in stark contrast to Ed, Izzy is almost hysterical. He's laughing maniacally, his face is contorted, and he's wildly emotional.

Ed is above it all, tragically beautiful and serene.

Surrendering to his fate

Ed almost projects the image of a hero or a revolutionary being executed by an evil henchman. He's Ed here - not the Kraken or even Blackbeard. His fate is decided by Izzy, Blackbeard's first mate. I think in Ed's mind, it is fitting that the man who "egged Ed on" to stay in his Blackbeard persona finally kills him when he can't do it anymore.

When Stede left him, Ed returned to Izzy without any plan what to do next. When Izzy kind of decided for him (at least that what Ed tells himself I think) Ed realized that he couldn't be what Izzy wanted him to be any more. He escalated the Blackbeard fuckery to become essentially Izzy's worst fear and nightmare.

Now, at the end of it all, he's back to being Edward, Edward who just wanted to be himself. And the man who had controlled him for decades gets to execute him. One last time, Ed is at the mercy of Izzy.

It is a compelling fantasy.

And Izzy finally, finally decides to stop playing.

At the beginning, Izzy seems entranced, a little hopeful, nostalgic and maybe even elated (even if everythings fucked to hell, at least this Ed wants to share with him). But as soon as Ed gets into position and expects Izzy to act executioner to his theatrical, arranged suicide - he just can't do it anymore.

Izzy could never kill Ed in any circumstances, but this must have been like a slap in the face (or, to be as dramatic as Ed, a dagger through the heart).

Izzy destroys the fantasy by essentially treating Ed like a little kid - "Ooh, you scared, Eddie?" and "Clean up your own fuckin' mess". He's not playing the part Ed chose for him, this is not who he is.

Izzy is not Ed's executioner. He is not a maniacal puppetmaster. He's not a higher power and Ed's not at his mercy. Ed is not a perfect, untouchable mystical creature and Izzy is not a hysterical wretch.

When Ed leaves (slightly disappointed, but not surprised, maybe even grudgingly approving), Izzy kills himself. Without any fuckery, theatricality and without an audience.

With his trusted scene partner gone, Ed immediately abandons his dignified hero fantasy. He throws himself into his next fuckery - the deranged killer. I'm quite sure that one wasn't as meticulously planned.

But when Izzy inexplicably comes back, the tables have turned. Izzy, who has finally taken control over his part in their shared destiny, appears on deck in the midst of lightning strikes and thunder. Now it's Izzy who is calm, dignified and untouchable - a mythical creature himself. Back from the dead, indestructible, disarming Ed with an impossible shot.

And Ed? Ed is visibly impressed. God I love those two. For the last time, Izzy is giving Ed what he wants, but on his own terms.

Finally, the crew kill Ed in the most dramatic way possible, in the middle of a fucking storm, on a ship doomed to sink with every soul on board.

Ed and Izzy can be proud - this was the most impressive fuckery of their lives.

[indignantlemur]

hello! I was wondering are there any etiquette rules for andorians that would confuse humans and vice versa? Thank you.

Hello, Skygirl! Sorry for taking so long to answer - still a bit broken, so typing is a bit uncomfortable!

To answer this question, first I'm going to break down what etiquette actually is. I'm going to keep it pretty simple, because literal tomes have been written about the nuances of etiquette in various cultures, and I'd rather not rehash the last five hundred years of social standards across the world.

Etiquette is defined in the Oxford dictionary as "the customary code of polite behavior in society or among members of a particular profession or group." This code is usually determined through a combination of majority opinion, traditional values, religious proscriptions, and social hierarchies.

From there, etiquette can be further divided into categories of politeness and manners, and business etiquette.

Politeness and manners basically come down to self-regulation to follow a social code of conduct by following normative behavioural standards and being, overall, pleasant company. A person has good or bad manners depending on whether or not they can adhere to these social standards, and an individual may have good or bad adherence to different types of manners relating to hygiene, courtesy, and social norms all at the same time. So, hypothetically, you could have a perfectly polite person with terrible hygiene and a weird disregard for others' personal space. Or, conversely, someone with impeccable hygiene, middling social awareness, and absolutely terrible manners. Literally any combination is possible, and one can see this just by looking at the folks who surround us every day.

Now, business etiquette is a little different in that it's much more goal-oriented and involves the necessary adherence to ethics and norms required to successfully facilitate transactions and generate profit. Business ethics can vary quite a bit between corporate bodies, and it's difficult to standardize a universal code of conduct because of the unique nuances each culture has regarding business, which usually results in a kind of culture shock for all of the parties involved.

A common example is the practice of napping at work, which in Japan is often seen as a sign of something called "inemuri" - earnestness and dedication to one's work, resulting in one working so hard that one is exhausted and falls asleep at their post. In North America, however, napping at work (when not on your break, and sometimes not even then) is a good way to get written up and fired. The two approaches are somewhat incompatible, as you can clearly see.

So, looking at all of the above, I think we can pretty confidently say that there are definitely going to be some things Andorians and Humans trip over when dealing with each other - after all, it still happens regularly within Human cultures, and we at least have the benefit of at least being the same species!

So! What would some common sticking points be?

In terms of politeness and manners, I could easily see Humans stumbling over the highly ritualized customs of the Andorians. Andorians society has developed over time to be very rigid in structure and social norms in every day interactions as a means of preventing internal conflict, which often gives Humans the impression that Andorians are cold and unfriendly. In truth, Andorians are only cool and distant with strangers, but their demeanour and a lack of expressiveness in their faces (due to chitin) makes them seem stoic and really quite unapproachable to the uninitiated even well past the initial introductions and early acquaintanceship.

Additionally, while Humans and Andorians largely agree on standards of hygiene and personal grooming there are a number of differences in how some of these things are treated within the different cultures.

For example, Andorians would sit and soak in mineral hot springs all day, if they could reasonably get away with it, to the point of conducting family meetings and minor business while soaking - unlike Humans, Andorians do not easily overheat and faint, nor does prolonged exposure to high heat bother them overly much. This habit of languishing in the water for hours on end is something which Humans tend to find excessive and, when it comes to meetings, inappropriate. Additionally, Andorians are fastidious about bathing prior to soaking, and forgoing that step is considered not only rude but incredibly unsanitary - a step which some Humans skip, or roll into a single event with soaking, to the horror of the Andorians. Adding further complications to such things, the Human tendency in certain cultures to view all nudity as inherently sexual baffles Andorians, who frequently soak together in familial, bonded, or mixed groups and see no issue with such things.

Similarly, grooming each other is often a sign of trust and affection amongst Humans and therefore not something we allow strangers to do outside of specific circumstances (barber/salon, wedding prep, etc.) As a very social and physical species, Andorians have no such compunctions about contact with others ranging from family to work colleagues and acquaintances. Andorians are very touchy and mean absolutely nothing by it most of the time, but they don't always remember that Humans do things a bit differently and have different ideas of what is and is not appropriate.

Cosmetics as part of personal hygiene and grooming can also be a point of confusion, as Andorians are fond of using brightly pigmented colours around their eyes and mouths across both sexes, even in professional environments. Humans, meanwhile, primarily market cosmetics at women, using products ranging from subtle to neon, and such a strongly gendered association would be considered bizarre on Andoria to say the least.

In terms of personal conduct in social situations, Humans can find Andorian customs to be extremely rigid and difficult to navigate without prior research. Andorians use a number of visual and verbal cues to indicate who they are, what Clan they belong to, and their station in society that are lost on most Humans who haven't taken the time to prep in advance. An Andorian can tell at a glance what most Humans need to play 20 Questions to find out. In fact, the very act of inquiring about these details inevitably irritates the Andorian being interrogated for information which, to their mind, should be quite obvious.

On the opposite side of this dynamic, Humans are infuriatingly vague to Andorians at times. Unless a uniform is involved, it is remarkably difficult to discern whether one is speaking to a social subordinate or superior when conversing with a Human and often times lower ranking and higher ranking Humans conduct themselves in the same manner.

And in terms of business etiquette, Andorians are very formal during business dealings and are not generally receptive to friendly overtures, which they regard as deeply suspicious - and small talk falls under friendly overtures.

When Andorians enter into a business meeting, they are there to reach an agreement, exchange goods and/or services, and leave. They do not want to be friends, they do not want to hear about your children or have you ask about theirs, and if they wanted your opinion on the weather or decor they would have asked for it. Honestly, when dealing with Andorians on mercantile matters, it is best to stick to business topics only until such a time as it is concluded. Discussing business over dinner, as some Humans are wont to do, just doesn't fly with Andorians; dinner is dinner, business is business, and never the two shall meet.

In the workplace, Andorians find they their work days and deadline schedules are not fully compatible with Human ones; Andorians work on a 36 hour day, requiring very little sleep at a time, and Humans function on a 24 hour day. Andorians receiving deadlines from Humans, such as "I need this done by the end of the day" often have to double and triple check if that means today-today or tomorrow-today. And Humans never seem to be available to cover shifts, since they always seem to be sleeping! It's very frustrating for both sides.

Hope this helps! If you have anymore questions, do let me know!

[wirewitchviolet]

Some thoughts on Nazi morale

That earlier reblog about bullies and leverage coupled with some recent news coverage has me in the mind to do a little public educating about the complete lack of a spine any given nazi out there has, the weird rituals and behaviors this leads to, and how some basic knowledge about all this leaves them a completely toothless threat in the vast majority of situations.

The really important thing to remember here, and I always have to remind people I’m not saying this to be mean, but because it is true, and genuinely important to understand, is that to become a nazi you first have to be just the most absolutely pathetic loser in the world. For real, it’s baked in. They have this whole mythology about their own innate superiority and right to rule over everyone else in the world based on some pure magical bloodline BS, but that’s inseparable from the fact that none of them actually have any sort of real power or success or happiness or friends. It’s not some class of nobility making stuff up about traits they have that justify their position. It’s just pathetic losers imagining all this secret untapped potential they have and then a whole second set of fictional beliefs about how everyone else in the world is keeping them back from realizing that potential by cheating at life somehow, all as a pretense for how they’re going to actively do every underhanded thing they can to get to their “rightful” place.

The two important takeaways here are that from the get-go the whole experience of being a nazi involves just this constant immersion in propaganda, self-delusion, and keeping up kayfabe that they have no barometer for what the reality of any situation is (our enemy is simultaneously weak and strong, etc.) and that there are in fact many very real reasons a given nazi’s life falls so short of the life they tell themselves they “should be” living which they’re never going to examine.

All in all, they just... don’t do well in reality. They don’t know anything, they have no social skills, they don’t really have the drive to actually do anything with their lives. They need hype and propaganda like a normal person needs oxygen. And while they’re never going to sit down and really self-reflect on that, they at least get that getting all hyped up and having people cheer them on is important for some reason or other. So here’s how that works out in terms of interactions with the real world.

Most of the time, a nazi just kinda sits around in their little isolation bubble where they don’t interact with anyone besides other nazis, and most of that is one-sided in the form of watching propaganda videos and following simple instructions. Every so often, one of them gets hyped up enough by the bootlicking the rest do to delude himself into thinking he has some sort of actual power to flex, and it’s time to plan an attack. “An attack” can take a lot of different forms. Might be a big organized effort to do something that gets national media coverage, might be terrorizing a single arbitrarily selected teenage girl. Might be a weird elaborate prank. This year for pride month for instance, some nazi had the bright idea to set up a website selling poison as fake HRT drugs and having followers hype it up with impersonations of trans people. The one important thing though is that unless the target is proven and tested as “safe” previously, it’s always going to take the form of something with basically zero risk of blowback or personal harm.

Letter-writing campaigns are a very popular choice. It’s pretty trivial to set up a burner e-mail account (or several thousand even) paste a form letter in, and hit send. Tracing it back to you would be a huge pain, and not something most people would even be inclined to do if you don’t use overtly violent language. This has been the absolute backbone of nazi attacks for the past decade or two at least. Other stuff gets more sensationalized, but if you look at the internal operations of something like Gamergate, 98% of it has always been form letters addresses and quota goals, trying to get various organizations to make public statements or fire people they’d arbitrarily chosen to target.

Now, this is the really important part. People often mistake nazi letter writing campaigns or similar activities for the real thing. When actual normal people organize a letter-writing campaign, it’s collective action. Can we show that enough people care strongly about this thing the company is doing that they reconsider if it’s worth it? If so, hey, mission accomplished, score one for direct feedback over flawed marketing research, everyone moves on with their lives. I feel like legitimate letter writing campaigns are pretty passe, with social media attention grabs having taken over the niche (which nazis will also imitate, but random burner accounts have less impact there). Still, people in positions to field these e-mails are largely still trained, I assume, with metrics like “if X number of e-mails come in griping about something, tell management, we’ll do what we need to to shut people up.”

Nazis however do not organize campaigns like this for the same reason, and capitulating is a tremendously bad idea.

Nazis do letter writing campaigns as a safe form of organizing an attack. It’s testing the waters. The entire purpose is to determine if and how the target will react to what perceived weight they are able to safely through around. If they go, “hey, video game company, apparently one of your employees once did a risque photo shoot, are you OK with values like that?” or “I don’t like seeing a bunch of queer pride stuff when I walk into a store” those aren’t customers you have to worry about losing if they don’t get what they want. That’s a predator in the woods staring you down to see if you’re going to hold your ground or if you’re going to try to run.

See, the whole “our enemies are both weak and powerful” thing completely destroys nazis’ risk assessment capabilities, so they’re relying on yours instead. If they try to scare you with a letter writing campaign about lost sales (or for that matter, if they’re trying to scare you with anonymous letters threatening you with violence), they aren’t making a demand. They’re asking if you are afraid of them. Because if you’re afraid of them, that means they can escalate to attacks that carry more personal risk to them, with the confidence that you aren’t going to fight back.

So what happens is you have the mistaken impression that you can just fire this one employee or pull this one marketing promotion and that’ll be the end of it, but now suddenly you have people showing up in your spaces acting violent. Not so violent it’s likely going to lead to a physical altercation (they’re still testing the waters and building up to that), they’re probably just going to shout slurs at your actual customers to scare’em off, or camp out like they own the place, maybe they smash up some products on shelves if they’re feeling really spicy. And if you don’t respond to THAT in a way that makes them think twice about messing with you, they’re going to keep on escalating, with threats to your employees and families, actual physical attacks, maybe some fires or bombs.

Also every time they take a bite out of someone and it doesn’t turn out to be more than they can chew, it’s just this huge rallying moment they use to do more recruiting and pushing for bolder attacks elsewhere, so they just become more of a threat to the whole world because you went and flinched.

On the upside, you can pretty much always deescalate things no matter how far they get just by demonstrating you aren’t afraid. You just have to do two things. Forcefully rebuke them, and loudly and publicly acknowledge that what you are doing is showing nazis that they can’t push you around. No euphemisms. If you don’t explicitly specify “nazis” or some more specific organization (Proud Boys, TERFs, whathaveyou) they’re going to internally spin that as you secretly being on their side. People constantly falter here and get stuck dealing with the same attacks forever as a result.

Also when I say “forcefully rebuke them” there’s a lot of ways you can do that, but you will need to step it up based on how far you’ve let things go. If you’re just course correcting because you realized you caved to a nazi letter writing statement, a big public retraction should have you covered. If they’re showing up on your doorstep in riot gear, you might need to get a little physical. You don’t have to like, walk up to whoever’s at the front of the crowd and see how many times his head bounces when it hits a concrete slab (although I’m sure that would be quite effective. You can literally throw a milkshake at one of these losers and he’ll start crying and run away like you threw a brick.

[gnothi-seayton]

I’ve been catching up on the “culturally Christian” discourse. I’m a bit disappointed that the most active posts are atheists going, “How dare you call me Christian?” instead of taking the opportunity to interrogate some aspects of themselves that are not as de-Christianized as they’d assume. I spent a large part of my youth trying to find those blind spots and I’m a second generation non-Christian.

But this points to what I see as one of the corner stones of Christian culture: emphasis of belief over practice. It started with Paul’s epistles where he introduced the centrality of faith. Jesus spoke of faith in the gospels, but not nearly as much as exhortations about how to live a moral life. Next, the Council of Nicaea established its creed, a series of “we believe…” statements that Christians still recite every week. Nicaea and every subsequent Council has laid down further obligatory sets of beliefs and anathematized anyone who refused to toe the party line. Christian states have made heresy a crime. Conversion became a prerogative. Many were killed because they refused to submit.

This emphasis on belief got cranked up to 11 in the Reformation. Where Catholicism teaches the importance of faith and works, Calvin taught sola fide, salvation by faith alone. Modern philosophy started around the same time and was self-consciously a merely intellectual exercise, unlike ancient philosophy. So when major breaks with Christianity came on the scene, it shouldn’t be a surprise they defined themselves with terms like “atheism” and “skepticism.” Their emphasis was also on (lack of) belief. Atheists evangelize their beliefs and are quick to ridicule any one for wrongthink. Politics are much the same, especially here on Tumblr.

Now contrast that with Judaism and Islam and other religions where relatively more emphasis is placed on correct practice than correct belief. There are certain doctrinal red lines, of course, but it doesn’t come up as often as the importance of prayer ritual (think of phylacteries or salat) or following certain behavioral rules (dietary restrictions, wearing certain clothing). Christian chauvinism tends to look down upon halakah and shariah as being backward or “medieval”. From an orthopraxy perspective, the Christian emphasis on highly specific doctrine might seem like a weird fixation.

I think it’s no coincidence that the Ethical Society was founded by a man who had once trained to become a rabbi. His organization focused on secular congregations and public outreach. Many of the culturally Christian atheists of the time were more interested in publishing tracts or debating Christian ministers.

So to think that even though you come from a Christian culture and perhaps were even raised actively in a church, that simply switching out one belief for another will radically transform who you are and how you interact with the world is incredibly naive. Start by looking at the ways in which you privilege belief over action in your life.

[cruelfeline]

The Hordak Bleatings Masterpost

The new and improved Masterpost! All of my ridiculous bleating in one place! Now with categories to allow you, dear friends and neighbors, to better marvel at the utter nonsense I get up to in my spare time. It shall be updated every so often/when I remember. 

some of these categories may overlap or perhaps not be perfect; I tried; there was... a lot

Enjoy!

Biological/Medical Musings

A Fairly Comprehensive List of Hordak’s Clinical Signs

I Wrote Too Much About Hordak’s Arms

And Then Someone Asked About His Elbows So Voila

Someone Else Asked About His Eyes

Yes; I Did Measure Hordak’s Ears via Fuzzy Math; You’re Welcome

A Brief Word About Dentition

Some Sad Thoughts About Clone Lifespan

I Like to Headcanon that Clones Have Naturally Different Eye Colors

Counting Hordak’s Ports

Thinking About Terrible Ways Prime Could Institute Biological Control

Doing Very Fuzzy Math And Wondering Just How Young Hordak Could Be

Spending Way Too Much Time Figuring Out Whether Hordak is Left or Right Handed

Why Tiny Food is Probably Ideal for Hordak (a joke ask I essentially took Seriously)

Discussing Hordak’s Temper

Considering Whether Hordak Needs Oxygen

Discussing Whether Prime and his Clones are Genetically Identical

Hordak in Relation to Other Characters

Entrapdak

Hordak Can Get Close to Entrapta Because He Needn’t Fear Her

Discussing Entrapdak Age Discourse

Bit More Regarding Hordak’s Maturity vs. Entrapta’s

Hordak Didn’t Manipulate Entrapta… But Catra Did

Assessing that Unfortunate Moment When Hordak Snapped at Entrapta

Further Assessing Hordak Snapping at Entrapta by Noting When He Doesn’t

On Hordak’s Wardrobe Change

Entrapta Shushing Hordak is One of My Favorite Interactions

The Entrapdak Scene Was Also One of Self-Love

I Really Like How Entrapta Talks to Hordak About Failure

Hordak Tells an Actual Lie and Succeeds

Entrapta’s and Hordak’s Social Differences Help Them Connect to One Another

I Would Have Appreciated A Scene Where Entrapta Learns About What Happened To Hordak

Hordak Takes Strength From Realizing That Entrapta Came For Him

Hordak and Entrapta Just Like One Another, and I Enjoy That

There is a Huge Difference in How The Alliance and Hordak React to Entrapta Being on Beast Island, and it’s Jarring

This is Mostly About Catradora But Kind of in the Sense of Why Entrapdak is Better, so Here it Goes

Entrapta Didn’t Teach Hordak How to Love; She Taught Him How to Be Loved

The Soup Scene is a Condensed View of Why Entrapdak Works in Light of the Rest of Hordak’s Arc

Hordak and Entrapta Search for One Another Alone, and it Makes Me Sad

I Love How Hordak Scooches Over for Entrapta to Join Him on his Throne

Catra

The How-Catra-Manipulated-Hordak Masterpost

Watching Catra and Hordak Switch Roles in Season Three is Fascinating

Hordak and Catra’s Low Points Indicate Their Core Problems

Did Hordak Abuse Catra? Did She Abuse Him? The World May Never Know

Comparing Hordak and Catra in Terms of Consequences and Agency

Hordak and Catra’s Apparent Ages Likely Affect How People Judge Them

Why Doesn’t Hordak Subdue Catra?

Losing and Regaining the Will to Fight is Another Hordak/Catra Parallel

Sometimes I Wish The Show Would Focus Less on Catra and More on Hordak

Why Catra Besting Hordak Isn’t As Satisfying As Catra Besting Shadow Weaver

Hordak Exhibits Some Level of Trust in Catra Even in Season 2... and She Betrays It

The Difference in How Hordak and Catra Handle Relationships followed by Why They Are Like This 

Some Brief Words on the Differences Between How Hordak and Catra End Up Driven to Destruction in Season Four

Musing About What I Actually Would Accept as “Hordak Abusing Catra”

I Think It’s Kind of Funny that Some Expect Catra to be Suspicious of Hordak Post-Canon

Two Scenes That Look Distressing Side-by-Side

Discussing How Catra and Hordak Start Off as Parallels but Later Deviate Due to Character Differences

Adora

How Adora and Hordak End Season Four Differently

Hordak and Adora Parallels

I Wonder if Adora Recognizes Some of Herself in Hordak

Other

This is Actually About Shadow Weaver, but Compared to Hordak, So…

Hordak Doesn’t Seem to have a “Rule the World!” Moment (compared to Shadow Weaver)

On Hordak’s Weird Interactions with DT

Watching DT Circle Hordak is Interesting

Let’s Compare the Circling Scenes, Shall We?

What Wrong Hordak’s Arc Teaches Us About Clones and Hordak

Wondering if Hordak Actually has Control Over the Etherian Horde (could he have stopped the war?)

Prime

There Is A Huge Difference In The Standards Prime And Hordak Hold Others Two Versus Themselves

Hordak and Horde Prime Handle Their Own Vulnerabilities Quite Differently

The Difference Between How Prime and Hordak Use Anger

The Moment Prime Touched Hordak’s Face is the Moment I Truly Knew That Something About Hordak’s Backstory was Very Wrong

Clone/Origin/Prime-Related Sadness

The Clone Thing

More Distressed Bleating about The Clone Thing

Hordak’s DMV Photo Disturbs Me

Hordak Isn’t Actually an Idiot About Disease Transmission

On Hordak’s Bodily Autonomy, or Lack Thereof

How Much of Hordak is “Hordak?”

I’m 99% Certain That Hordak Sucks at Lying Because he Literally Couldn’t

You’d Think Hordak would Think Things Through, But…

Hordak isn’t Really Proud of “Hordak” (with a bonus Adora mention)

Hordak Provides Excellent Fridge Horror

Hordak’s Behavioral Pathology Isn’t Actually Pathology

So! That Purification Ritual was Really Something

Despite Erasure, Hordak Remains Himself

The Clones Are Essentially Trapped By Prime And It Upsets Me

I Get Annoyed That The Clones Aren’t Discussed More By Our Heroes

Again, I Wish The Show Acknowledged The Clones A Bit More, Wrongie Edition

Wouldn’t It Be Swell If Prime Really Did Manage The Clones Like Livestock? 

It’s More Emotionally Poignant That The Clones Are Individuals Rather Than Drones

Prime’s Doctrine Ensures Hordak Blames Himself, and it’s an Awful Control Measure

Hordak Probably Isn’t Dumb for Using Uninsulated Cables; Rather, Clone Sadness is in Play

Why I Can’t See Hordak and the Other Clones As Colonizers (unlike Prime) (also a whole convo thread)

Thinking About Clones and Self-Care

Each Clone Will Have to Realize That They Were Victimized

Wondering if Horde Clones Might Feel Anxious Sleeping Alone

Why Prime Might Encourage Some Autonomy in His Clones (spoilers: for cruelty)

Completely Arbitrary Classification of Clones Post-Prime!

Prime is an Actual God to the Clones and it is Terrifying

Canon Plausibility of Blanket Burritoing Horde Clones!

I Appreciate That, Despite Their Devotion, the Clones are Portrayed as Legitimately Suffering due to Prime

Catra and Adora have Happy Memories; do the Clones?; does Hordak?

Morality/Punishment/Redemption Related

Morality is (sadly) not a Universal Thing

Don’t Talk to me About the Reset as “Proper Punishment”

Why Hordak Doesn’t Just Become a Good Citizen

I Think About Hordak’s Choices a Lot

Hordak as an Abuse Mimic Rather Than Pure Evil

Looking at the Horde Child Soldier Thing From a Certain POV

Emotional Support is a Necessary Part of Healing

Hordak Was Forgiven Without Redemption, And I’m OK With That

Hordak’s Arc Speaks Directly to People who were “Raised Wrong”

I Wonder if Hordak Would See anti-Princess Propaganda as Propaganda

Semi-Intelligent Plot/Story Observations

Hordak’s Portrayal is a Function of Character Lens

Hordak Gets Very Legit Development in Season Four

She-Ra Isn’t a War Drama and Here’s Why

Hordak Suffers From a Distressing Lack of Agency

Hordak is a Weirdly Unenthusiastic Lord

The Season 4 Finale Reframes Hordak’s Vulnerability 

Untangling Hordak’s Backstory in Light of What We Now Know

Why Hordak Getting Possessed is Narratively Good

Hordak’s Rebellion and Subsequent Possession Essentially Summarize His Story

There Are Big Differences Between Hordak and Prime’s Etherian Wars

It Is Pretty Unlikely That Hordak Would Have Pulled The Portal Lever

It Occurred To Me That Hordak May Initially Ignore FO’s Tech Because It’s Just Really Old

An Assessment Of The Villain Intro Cards, Focusing On Hordak

I Think It’s Silly To Blame Hordak For Everything - Especially When Considering Prime

Literally Just a Thread Explaining Why Hordak is Sympathetic

Some Words On Exactly How Terrible DT’s Reveal Was For Hordak

The Escalation of Hordak’s Situation is Really Something

An Anon Asks a Normal Question and I go on a Tangent About Hordak Compensating for his Inability to Innovate via Entrapta and Catra

There are Monumental Differences Between the Galactic and Etherian Hordes in Terms of Brainwashing and Agency

Thinking About Why Chipped Etherians May Not be That Sympathetic To Clones After All

Random Bit of Logicking About Why Hordak Calls the Princesses a Rebellion

Figuring Out Why I Find Hordak So Much More Sympathetic Than The Princesses

Brief Musing on How Hordak Might Face Antagonism From Both Sides Post-Canon

Hordak’s Story Touches on the Concept of the Imperfection of Authority

Someone Asked Me if I Found Hordak’s S5 Arc Satisfying

Discussing Whether Or Not Hordak Planned on Leading Anything After Conquering Etheria

Taking Apart an Abysmal Twitter Take Because It’s Fun

Talking About Prime’s Clone Troops v. Robot Troops

Talking About Hordak’s Emotional Age

Hordak’s S3 Backtory Being Part-Delusion Helps Emphasize the Inequality in Attachment Between the Clones and Prime

A Few Not-So-Nice Acts Hordak Commits That I Find Justifiable

Random Headcanons of All Sorts

Stupidly Cute, Pointless Headcanon #3825 (ears covered)

Stupid Pointlessly Cute Headcanon #4853 (yawning, with appropriate artwork)

Stupid Pointlessly Cute Headcanon #2938 (snoring)

Stupid Pointlessly Cute Headcanon #1423 (REM sleep)

Stupidly Cute, Pointless Headcanon #7845 (blushing)

Random Hordak-Related Thought #2935 (forearms)

I Like to Think That Hordak Does Cute Things in his Sleep

I Like to Think That Hordak’s Eyes Dim While He Sleeps

Literally Me Just Having Emotions

Thinking About the Stress of Maintaining His Image in the Horde

Why Hordak’s Trauma is Particularly Disturbing To Me (compared to Catra/Adora)

Catra Overcomes her Fear of her Abuser; Hordak Does Not

All of my Emotions over the S4 Finale

Hordak’s Goddamned Smirk Lied to Me

I Have Feelings about Hordak’s Enforced Self-Care

I Need Hordak to Know that He is Loved

Hordak Goes Pew Pew and It’s Cute

Watching Hordak Lift Things Makes Me Smile

Hordak’s Unreasonable Expectations Make Me Sad

Please Just Let Hordak Rest

A Sassy Post About People Complaining the Hordak and Catra are Forgiven

All My Words About That Hordak/Adora Scene

Hordak Taps the Asphyxiation Lever With Two Fingers And It Makes Me Happy

I Wonder If Individuality Felt Blasphemous To Hordak

Please Don’t Stab Clones In Their Ports, Thank You

Hordak Clasps His Hands And It Makes Me Anxious

Hordak Shaming Catra Mimics the Purification Room And It’s Disturbing

Watching Hordak Give Up Is Heartbreaking

I Worry About Hordak Handling Anxiety

People Being Considerate of Hordak Makes My Heart Smile

I Wonder If Magic Was Frightening to Hordak at First

Thinking About Hordak Progressing in Terms of Self-Care

Prime Never Calls Hordak by Name, not Even Once

Just Being Sad While Realizing the Sort of Life Hordak had to Look Forward To

Strange Fic-Like Things No One Should Read

Please Consider: A Concept Masterpost

Hordak Practices Eyerolling

Imp Hacks Up The Worst Color of Hairball

[gildedruinsarchive]

re; horror

hi 🥺 this is in my rules & i am gonna link this post in my pinned for some more visibility,  but i would greatly appreciate it if blogs who write nordic-themed horror would not follow me. this especially includes mids*mmar content, even if you’re a multi-muse. it also includes any kind of viking-esque horror.  

i’m a little bit more open when it comes to mythology blogs / mcu blogs with myths inspo? if you’re horror-focused & writing through that lens with graphic images and graphic imagery,  i’d say i’m probably not the best blog for you to follow? but if your character has simply Been Through It and that’s a part of their canon & backstory then we should be good to go? if ur worried u can just send me an ask!!!! 💛

if you’re a horror blog that has nothing to do w/ norse mythology / vikings / weird swedish cult rituals then i don’t mind if you follow me,  but i probably won’t be following back? my big exception is every horror musical ever, especially repo! thor’s repo verse is his only horror verse 🥲

if i’m already following you,  no need to worry about this,  unless you’re a multi & you end up adding a muse from mids*mmar. in that case i would really appreciate a soft block ❤️ i feel rlly rlly bad making a post about this but my brain gets so stuck on horror,  so i have to be really,  really careful not to feed into that tendency to fixate. i think everyone writing horror muses is so talented and creative and i wish that i could interact with you all but my brain simply will not let me 🥺 and i rlly rlly appreciate that you all want to follow me 💖 

[fipindustries]

The ludomancer

So you heard of parahumans fans using their own lives to come up with triggers and create their own fan capes? well, that is more than well trodden ground so i figured lets take it an extra notch and figure out my own fan practitioner, my own fanctitioner! (disclaimer: many of of the personal details here were either exagerated or fabricated for dramatic effect)

backstory

i had open heart surgery when i was 6 months old, and if niccolette belanger is anything to go by, having big openings in your flesh at a very young age is free real state for persky spirits. Just imagine this giant entrance direct to my chest, leaving my heart ridden with holes and openly exposed.

Now this was in a very modern hospital in and incredibly sterile enviroment so is not like there were a lot of grisly phantasmagoric spirits crawling all over the place, you i was covered head to toe in technology, multiple wires and tubes and god knows what else all poking out of my chest, back in those days i was more machine than human. So with that in mind i like the idea that perhaps some fairly young spirits of electricity, technology, science and artificousness got inside me.

nothing too wild and powerful considering these things were all relatively recent by the standards of the practisce, but enough to have an influence. The general result is that i would be naturally inclined towards STEM fields, mad scientists, math and engeneering as a kid. I would constantly find myself getting involved into these enviroments (even when i didnt want to) such as going to a course in robotics, going to a high school soecialized in mechanics, studing computer science in college, etc.

my life would go on more or less like normal, the spirits slowly growing inside of me but always kept in check by my own essense and sense of self. Until...

Awareness

i changed careers and went to live at a college dorm in the middle of nowhere, five kilometers away from the nearest city, a small oasis of technology in the desert and the central hub for the Wi Fi of my state. As the years went by i became more and more isolated, my Conections grew weaker, my own sense of self got thinner and thinner (exacerbated by me finally questioning my gender identity). my prescence on the world was almost non existant, spending most of my time in my dorm in my computer not interacting with anyone, browsing ever incresingly more niche or obscure websites.

in this oasis of technology in the middle of nowhere, with my personal conections and sense of identity growing weaker, the spirits within me started to grow stronger and stronger, starting to screw with my very perception of reality, pushing things so that i would start to go down weird rabbit holes online, reading strange texts in impossibly formatted websites that would introduce strange ideas about the nature of reality, some times even downright attempting to posses me (i would try to rationalize these episodes where i would experience derealization as just panic attacts).

The spirits of technology would introduce me to forbidden ideas online, dangerous memetic cognitohazards, basiliks that would force me to perform obscure rituals to summon  demonic entities from lost planes of reality, not aligned with human values. They would try and convince me that reality was a simulation and coax me to pierce the veil and see the true subyacent reality, that subatomic particles were capable of experiencing suffering, that i could be tortured for eternity if enough people were kept from getting dust specks in their eyes. If things had gone like that for much longer i would have probably ended up summoning or becoming an Ex Machina and probably an entire wing of the college campus would have been condemned.

Luckly in my college there just hapened to be a young dabbler who got wind of my situation. They took notice of me and were kind enough to put me in touch with an online community of witch hunters who specialized in cases like mine (the dabbler didnt take care of it themselves because they didnt want to accidentally reveal to me more than strictly necessary about the magic world, the group of witch hunters had a lot more experience solving this problems without the karmic burden of awakening someone)

The witch hunters were a fairly niche group within the larger community of witch hunters. They specialized in bayesian techniques. Using the tools of rationality to dispell illutions, glamours, mind tricks and half truths. They established firm rules for thinking and percieving the world so that Others wouldnt be able to decieve or manipulate them. Calling bullshit on the impossible. Their organization, the Magical Interference Restriction Institute, coordinated the efforts to develop safe protocols for the practisce in the digital age.

They exorcised most of it, gave me a few basic mental tools and rituals to keep the spirits in check and recommended me to try and forget about the whole affair. But fat chance about that, by this point my eyes had been opened.

The awakening

When i finished college and moved to a different city i did everything in my power to enter in contact with the practitioner world again. Walking around the city, reading craiglist adds, looking into different organizations. Of course i wasnt acting blindly, i was guided by some of the things that i had picked up during my posessions, the things the spirits had revealed to me, the forbidden texts that i had read and some of the advice the witch hunters gave me.

Eventually i managed to follow conections and came across a small cabal of practitioners who put the front of a board game club to recruit people and have a place to reunite while looking legitimate and not arising suspicion from the mundanes. The way the club would work was that on the front it was a normal place to play things like Catan, Carcassone, king of tokyo, etc. But on the back room they would “play test” new “games” between the senior members of the club. when in reality they would workshop new rituals to perform.

They would focus on a fairly recent branch of magic caled Ludomancy. Focused on the idea that any boardgame is in the end a ritual. it would be this communal activity with rules and mechanics, supported by the illution and the beliefs of the players who would manipulate symbols and idols across intricate diagrams. 

they saw my experience with rules, logic and technology applied to magic and saw enough potential in me that they allowed me to join. Their awakening ritual is a bit different than most since they customized it based on their findings and experiences with rituals. Instead os sitting in a circle the circle is inscribed in a board. The piece that you use to move through the board has to be carved by you and has to be composed of elements that represent you and that are meaningful to you and it has to hold within a couple of drops of your blood.

You throw the dice and move across the board and depending on what places you fall in on of the cards will be drawn from the multiple decks. These cards will either give you challenges to overcome to prove yourself, make declarations and impositions on the kind of practitioner you will be once you awaken or just be criptic messages and riddles that wont be relevant or mean anything to you until many years down the line. You have to overcome the challenges, answer the questions posed by the cards and most of all, play the rules cleverly so that you can make your piece reach the center of the board and scream jumanji to complete the ritual. Now the rules of every awakening playthrough change and they can be incredibly intricate and complex, it can take a lot of cleverness of a lot of luck to finish this ritual but once you do you find yourself in a much firmer and powerful grounding than most begginers do.

the practice

i would probably focus on shamanism, collecting spirits here and there, slow and steady accumulation of a power base. i would like to get into constructs, acumulating spirits, helping them grow, give them a bit of my own power to help the process along, like sacrificing one drop of blood every week, or establishing small rituals of worship, and then mix and mashing them together to build more complex spirits, also i would probably offer small favors to the local practitioners in exchange of tibdits, trinkets and sources of power, always keeping it low profile and not too ambitious, something like helping with a ritual here and there, being a pair of extra hands, mostly giving help establishing magic circles and drawing diagrams, running small errands, sending messages. it would help let other people know that im not too much of a concern and hopefully they would let me be

if you need help or want to make an exchange with me you could come to my house and i would offer to play a game (usually one i made up) and in the process of playing the game i would perform the magic that you need or arrange the cosmological and quintessential pieces inside and outside of you according to your request.

My implement would be a set of D&D dices that i can use to make a bit of augury, affect probabilities, dictate outcomes and, in times of need, cheat at my games a bit. the rest of my equipment would be booklets and notebooks filled with my own designs, rulesets and texbooks, lots and of graph paper and one actual RPG supplement that i would use to bluff some of the more out of date Others by claiming that i have tomes filled with arcane spells and a full compendium of magicl creatures.

eventually i would try to diversify, focusing more on crafting and building, going more for the angle of the toy maker rather than game designer. I would build complex structures in papercraft, small mechanisms with cardboard, intricate contraptions with some clockwork and some springs.

i probably wouldnt get a familiar, i just dont see my self commiting to a life long companion. i would desperatly try to establish a demesne but that would also be rather complicated since i dont see my self owning property any time soon either.

[user-43424]

A Fool's Glance at Hermetic Knowledge

"Reality, weather approached imaginatively or empirically,

remains a surface, Hermetic"

- Samual Beckett  

When you hear the term Occult, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Men with long beards in long black robes? Weird goth kids claiming to be Satan? Most people only see the Occult as a wired cult with rituals and demons. However this is a gross misunderstanding of the Occult and its practice. It hardly scratches the surface   Occult Knowledge, is. The term Occult comes from the Latin root words, “Cleare” to hide; “Occulere'' to conceal; “Occultare'' secret. Occult literally means hidden knowledge. It's hidden because for the longest time throughout history it was illegal to practice anything outside of the State mandated religion even when the Occult Knowledge itself predates the State religion by thousands of years. It is also hidden by the willfully ignorant. Some people are just lacking the inner insight of this philosophy to gain anything from it. So its meaning is hidden from them by their own ignorance. Just like some people are stronger than others some people are just wiser than others.

Before we go into the Philosophy we have to first talk about, the Master of Masters in Hermetic Knowledge, it would be a disservice if we didn't talk about the man, the myth, the legend Hermes Tristmegistus, also known as the “Thrice-greatest Hermes”. Hermes being the messenger of the gods and the God of hidden knowledge. He is a combination of the Egyptian God Thoth and the Greek God Hermes. The hermetic tradition goes all the way back to Ancient Egypt and Greece, thus why Hermetic philosophy is centered around Hermes Tristmegistus, God of Wisdom. The Emerald Tablets is the collection of the Wisdom of the Thrice Great Hermes, the Center of This Hermitic Tradition the Kybalion subscribes to.

Hermetic Rules of Thumb:

Keep This Stuff Secret –

Some people still see these ideas as threatening to them in some way. Be it a religious conflict or a misunderstanding of the topic. It’s important you keep this information to yourself while you are learning about it. We like to think that the world today is open and free to believe whatever we want to believe, but the world is always changing. Keep your work to yourself not just for your safety but also so your truths and experiences remain your own. Untainted by others opinions. It is also very important that you come to an understanding of this material according to your own fruition. The way you see things, live your life and experience life is unique and should stay unique while you develop yourself and the understanding of this world. I like to think God; The ALL; or whatever the “Source” is. It prefers us to come to an understanding of it on our own in our own way. So during the development stage keep your work a secret.

Don't Throw Pearls at Swine –

If you know someone that won't understand anything about Hermetic Philosophy save yourself some time and headache and keep it to yourself. Chances are that even if they do find it interesting they will more than likely misinterpret the meaning behind words and miss the message behind them. Keep your Pearls for others with pearls.

Milk Before Babes, Meat for the Strong –

As someone just starting to look into Hermetic Philosophy it wouldn't do you well to slap you with advanced occult stuff. That would be like giving you a lesson in quantum physics to a five year old. Not because the kid is dumb but because the kid has not formed a basic understand of key concepts and principles to formulate an advanced understanding of what quantum physics is. Once the kid learns the basic concepts of physics he can later tackle the more advanced knowledge on the topic.

Don't Crystallize This Into a Creed –

Wisdom degenerates when you do this. All truths are half truths and everyone will discover something slightly different during their journey. This is your personal journey.  A key part of the Kybalion is The Law. The Law is the Hermetic Principle of Cause and Effect in its aspect of the Law of Attraction, Vibration and Polarity. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Nothing escapes this Law. However, reality is constantly changing and so some laws may also need to change with what is current. Political law is not always factual law thus the problem with censorship. The tides of change may end up covering the truth but there will always be ways to hide the truth in plane sight.  You don't always want a stone foundation when a more flexible foundation is way more stable and will last much longer. It is also important that we all find our own truths and not impose on other truths but try to find the whole truth through the combinations of other truths.

Share when the Opportunity Allows-

This breaks all the previous rules, rules are made to be broken if we never broke any of the rules we wouldn't get anywhere as a species, new things would never be discovered and the world would be boring. Just be smart with who you share it with. Some will not understand you and others will downright refuse to understand you, don't need to create drama for yourself with people who can't handle your truth. Remember also that your truth Is still a half truth and always listen and learn from the truths of others. This is exactly what I am doing right now! Break the rules!

There are Seven Main Principles that make up the Hermetic Philosophy.

Mentalism – You will hear this from me constantly, the Universe is Mental the more you  understand this the better you will understand this philosophy as a whole.   

Correspondence – As Above So Below is something else you will hear constantly. Its is good for understanding paradoxes and hidden secrets of nature     

Vibration – Everything is in motion all the time, even when its seems to be at rest the atoms  that make up the material are still in motion.     

Polarity – Everything is Dual as a result all truths are half truths that make up the whole  truth of the Law. All opposites are identical in nature but different in degree. As a result of this Principle things like Good and Evil; Light and Dark; Hot and Cold are two poles of the same thing.  

Rhythm – Think of a  pendulum and its swing, everything has a rhythm, everything flows in and out, everything has its tides, everything rises and falls.  

Cause and Effect –  everything happens according to Law. There is no such thing as  chance, chances is just an unrecognized Law. Nothing escapes this Law.  People who understand this plays the Game and ceases to be an NPC.    

Gender – Gender is everything and the Law of Gender is set between a Masculine and Feminine principle. There is mental gender and there is physical gender. There is no exception to this rule in the Hermetic Philosophy. Every Male form has hidden female elements and every Female form has hidden masculine elements.  

This Philosophy is a Precursor to Science

These laws are present in everything. The most notable and concrete is that of Newton and his Laws of Physics. Newton's third law is: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The statement means that in every interaction, there is a pair of forces acting on the two interacting objects. This goes right along with the principles of Cause and Effect and Polarity.

Polarity is very well known in both Physics and Chemistry especially when in electromagnetism. It is present in the study of magnets where they label the two sides of a magnet; the North pole and South pole. You also see it in batteries labeled with positive (+) and negative (-) poles. Very familiar because you see them in almost every electronic device that needs a battery.  

Rhythm and vibration is also a physical science. The study of vibration is called Cymatics and it is used in the healthcare field, art and music and engineering and electronics. It is the one principle you see, feel and hear. You can’t see without light and the way it vibrates into your eyes. You can hear sound because of your ears and you can feel the same vibrations with your hands on a speaker.  

Gender is present in biology and psychology. It is studied in biology through genetic makeup of an organism. In psychology both the masculine and the feminine are present in the psyche through the Anima/Animus or in the Brahman the Shiva/Shakti.

Hermetic philosophy, is not a religion it is a very basic understanding of how our reality works. You can use this in any aspect of your life from your job to your hobbies to how you raise a family. Its principals are present in every field of study from physical sciences, political sciences, engineering, even literature and art. Understanding the hermetic principles opens up windows of deeper understanding that will make your path in life easier to follow. That is why I personally think about them whenever I encounter a problem.  

I hope you found this interpretation of the Kybalion interesting. It really has helped me understand spirituality and philosophy on a different level. This information can and has been used over the course of history to form a deeper understanding of the Universe and our role in it. I Am the Fool! May the light of wisdom show you through the darkest of times.

Sources: The Kybalion, by the Three Initiates

[gamerwoo]

Wonwoo: Out of Luck

Anonymous asked: hi :) do u have requests open? if yes, can i send u a prompt for a wonwoo smut? :D Ok, so the prompt is "give me your hoodie and fuck me in it" lol dont ask and maybe for gamer!wonwoo? 👀👀 If youll feel inspired for this, thank you! ♡

Characters: Wonwoo x female reader

Genre/warnings: pro gamer/overwatch league au, a little bit of fluff n angst but like it’s honestly all just mostly smut lmao (fingering, oral)

Word count: 4,147

Summary: Wonwoo has a lot of weird superstitions as a pro gamer, but he has two big ones: fucking you in his jersey before any games he’s particularly nervous for, and always wearing his lucky sweatshirt under his jersey during every game. However, when his team loses for the first time to yours, he fears that his lucky sweatshirt has run out of luck. So you decide to put some of your luck into it.

a/n: since I already have a gamer!wonwoo series, I decided to just put it in that universe. hope you don’t mind, anon!! 

You walked into Wonwoo’s room after Minghao let you into their team house, the first thing greeting you being your boyfriend’s back. Of course, he was wearing his Serpents sweatshirt, which was completely black with the bright red printing. There were snakes that went down both arms, but the thing that your eyes were always drawn to was the ‘WONU’ printed on the back with his jersey number below it. Ever since the team manager gave the Serpents those sweatshirts before the recent season began about two months ago, Wonwoo’s worn it just about everyday.

“Doing something?” you asked with a small smirk.

Wonwoo turned, his glasses pushed up the bridge of his nose as he looked at you before he went back to scouring his floor that was already covered in clothes. He’d only been back in the team house for a couple months, but he already made a mess of his room.

“I can’t remember where my jersey went,” he replied in almost a mumble as he scratched the back of his head, making a bigger mess of his curly hair. “I didn’t leave it at yours, did I?”

“No, I gave it back after the Soonyoung incident,” you replied with a slight chuckle at the memory -- even if it did embarrass the hell out of you and you couldn’t look Soonyoung in the eyes for about two weeks. “Speaking of Soonyoung, is this why he won’t let you live with him and Chan?”

Wonwoo scoffed, bending over to shift through sweatshirts and t-shirts, “Please, have you seen his room? He’s messier than I am.”

“Why are you looking for your jersey anyway?” you questioned as you went to sit in his gaming chair, pulling your knees to your chest and wrapping your arms around them. “You don’t play until Thursday, and it’s Monday.”

Your boyfriend turned to look at you, a smirk that made your stomach do flips gracing his face. His voice was lower when he spoke.

“We’re facing the NYXL on Thursday, and I need all the luck I can get until then -- starting today.”

You never knew what it was with Wonwoo loving to see you in his jersey -- and loving even more when you wore it while he pressed you into the mattress or bent you over his desk or had you in his lap in his chair -- but you never complained, and you especially weren’t now since you barely even had the time to see Wonwoo in person in the last two weeks.

In an instant, you were up and helping Wonwoo search for his jersey, making him laugh at your eagerness.

-

“I think Serpents versus Warriors is a match everybody always looks forward to,” you could hear one of the casters saying as your team walked through the crowd and up to the stage. “Because of the known relationship between WonU on the Sozhou Serpents and m0chi on the Busan Warriors, people look forward to seeing this game.”

“Yeah, there’s something about watching a couple kill each other in a video game that really seems to rile everybody up,” the second caster agreed. “The matches between Serpents and Warriors might be even more popular than seeing the two home teams go up against each other.”

You just smirked to yourself, giving hi-fives to the fans on either side of you. Yuta in front of you turned his head to give you a playful smile before he carried on to the stage, following Jihoon, Jeonghan, Mingyu, and Hongbin up to the computers. As you passed by Wonwoo who sat at the very end of his row of computers, you smiled at him and shot a finger gun at him, making him blush slightly and roll his eyes. 

It also made the crowd coo at both of you, which you ignored as you went to sit in your seat that was four away from Wonwoo.

Your coaches prepared you for this game ever since the Serpents’ first game. They were on a winning streak -- Wonwoo insisted it was the sweatshirt -- but your coaches were planning to bring that to an end. You and Wonwoo both knew well enough to not let the game get between you, which you learned that the hard way, so whether you beat him or not wouldn’t matter.

Keeping all of that in mind, you put on your headset and prepared for the game.

“So _____,” Mingyu spoke up, “what are the stakes between you and Woo?”

“What stakes?”

“If you win, are you getting a face full of mattress tonight?”

You heard the whole team groan, with Hongbin reminding Mingyu that their comms were being recorded, and Jihoon breathing out a, “Please just shut the fuck up.”

-

After the signing, you asked Mingyu to drop you off at the Serpents’ team house. You had been congratulated all night, as well as getting asked how Wonwoo was feeling about his team’s first loss of the season.

“Nobody likes losing, but he’s fine with it,” you shrugged even though you didn’t really get to see his reaction other than ‘shaking his hand’ at the end of the match which was actually him giving you a quick kiss and putting a childish pout on his face.

“He’s just happy he lost to his girlfriend rather than some other team,” Mingyu scoffed, sliding the poster he was signing over to Taehyung on his other side. 

But now you were able to have a real conversation with him about the game -- although, judging from the texts Chan sent you, you were sure Wonwoo was losing his mind for whatever reason. 

Not many people stayed at the team house anymore. Soonyoung and Chan had their own place they stayed when they did have to be in California for most of the year, Tao lived in his own apartment, and you had never really seen Sanghyuk around much at all. So as far as you knew, it was Wonwoo, Junhui, Minghao, and two or three other boys from the roster that you knew but only really interacted with while making the walk of shame out of the house in the morning. 

You went up to Wonwoo’s room, only to find it empty. You frowned, turning around and trying to think of where he would be. Did he even come home? Maybe he went to Chan and Soonyoung’s. 

“Hey, Hao?” you spoke up when you saw the Chinese player walking out of his room and down the hall.

He paused where you were, smiling at you, “Yeah, what’s up?”

“Where’s Woo?”

“Um...” he paused as he tried to think, his glasses starting to slide down his nose when he slightly scrunched his face. “I think we went to the practice room for a bit. He might be streaming or something. He was really sulky after the match, though.”

All you could do was sigh and thank Minghao before you made your way back downstairs and walked through the large house until you got to their practice room where they usually held scrims. You knew Wonwoo was probably upset over his weird rituals not working, but you’d also never seen him upset over losing before. You weren’t really sure what to expect when you saw him.

Entering the room full of computers, you saw only one person inside: Wonwoo. His back was to you while he clicked away at the computer, clearly in the middle of a game. He occasionally mumbled something to himself, but you couldn’t hear what it was. You just knew it wasn’t in reply to Twitch chat because he only had one monitor to work with in the practice rooms. 

“Hey, Wonwoo?” your voice was quiet and almost timid as you approached him. 

It wasn’t that you were afraid he would snap at you, but you were afraid of somehow upsetting him further since you were the one who ended his winning streak. 

He let out a sigh, running a hand through his hair and knocking off his headphones as “DEFEAT” showed up on the screen. His head laid back against the chair as he groaned, rubbing his face with his hands as you continued to make your cautious approach.

“I lost it,” he groaned.

You shrugged, leaning back against the desk as you gave him an apologetic look that he couldn’t see behind his hands, “It was just one match.”

“No, I mean my luck!” he clarified as he dropped his hands and looked up at you with a pout that you couldn’t help but melt at. “My luck is completely gone! Now I’m on a losing streak!”

“I doubt your luck is gone, Woo,” you chuckled.

“You took it,” he whined, gripping your hips to pull you closer before he buried his face in your stomach. “Ugh, it was probably from Monday.”

“But you beat New York, remember?” you reminded him as your fingers moved to play with his hair. “We didn’t do anything after Monday.”

The two of you had a ‘no sex before we face each other’ rule because you refused to give Wonwoo any sort of luck -- even if you didn’t believe that sex or his dumb sweatshirt made him any luckier. But it also just made sex after your game that much better.

“That was the last of it,” he insisted, his voice muffled by your body. “The rest of it went to you.”

All you could do was laugh softly, “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Give it baaaaack,” he whined.

“Wonwoo, I--” you paused, suddenly getting an idea. It might’ve been pretty stupid since it would feed into both of his dumb superstitions, but you would still get something out of it for yourself. You smirked, lightly gripping your boyfriend’s chin to make him look up at you. “I have an idea...”

“Will it make me win again?” he asked, a pout on his face and even in his tone. “Will it make my sweatshirt lucky again?”

“Maybe...”

He instantly perked up, “What is it?”

You bent down, whispering as seductively as you could manage, “Give me your hoodie and fuck me in it.”

You felt Wonwoo stiffen, and a soft groan came from the back of his throat as his hands tightened on your hips.

“Oh my god, why didn’t I think of that before?” he asked, though it was mostly to himself. “Get the door, okay?”

While you rushed to the door to lock it, Wonwoo stood up and took off his Serpents sweatshirt, as well as his white t-shirt that was underneath. When you turned back around, you saw Wonwoo wasn’t making any moved to remove his black joggers even though you could already see a small bulge forming in them.

He gestured for you to take off your own shirt, which you quickly did as you walked over to him. Your Warriors jersey was dropped, landing carelessly on the floor while you reached to un-clip your bra as well and toss that over onto another monitor.

“Arms up,” he instructed with a soft smile as his eyes raked your naked torso.

You stood in front of him, arms raised over your head. Wonwoo helped put his hoodie on you, chuckling when your head poked out of the top hole with your hair a mess. You couldn’t help but giggle, pushing the hood back and fixing your hair as best as you could.

While you did that, Wonwoo’s fingers moved down to your joggers, tugging on them until they made it far enough past your thighs to drop to the floor on their own. You suddenly felt arousal shoot through you, the realization of what was about to happen in the Serpent’s practice room. Somehow, the fact it was in the practice room only turned you on further.

Wonwoo gently pushed you to sit down in the chair he was just sitting in. He would’ve preferred doing this in his room, but he didn’t want to make the trip through the house and up the stairs -- plus there was less of a chance of being heard in the practice room. Not that he really cared if you were heard in the moment, but it made things less embarrassing afterwards.

Dropping down to his knees, Wonwoo’s eyes never left you. His eyes scanned over your body and how you bit your lip in anticipation, watching his every move. His tongue darted out to went his lips, always loving the look of you in something that was his -- especially if it belonged to his team and had his name on it. He felt that it really drove home that fact that you belonged to him.

“You always look so good,” he mumbled, dipping his head down to your clothed core as he put one of your legs over his shoulder.

You sucked in a breath when you felt his finger hook your panties and push them to the side. One of your hands went to his hair when you felt his plush lips wrap around your clit, sucking and licking softly. The finger he used to move your underwear aside teased your entrance, making you wiggle your hips as much as you could just to get it inside you. Wonwoo chuckled softly, the vibrations against you making you moan out quietly as he slid his long digit in easily, curling it and pumping at a steady pace.

You swung your other leg over the arm of the chair, opening your legs further to give Wonwoo more access. He smirked against you, lifting his head a bit to speak.

“Eager?”

You weren’t even going to deny it, nodding your head shamelessly. He couldn’t help but laugh deep in his chest before he brought his mouth back to your clit. He added a second finger, your other hand that was gripping the other arm of the chair going to his hair as well. You whimpered his name softly as he scissored his fingers inside you, feeling how wet you became so quickly. The room was quickly filled with squelching sounds as his fingers moved in and out of you, pumping at a faster pace.

“Wonwoo,” you whined, your head falling to the side as you watched him eat you out.

“Hmm?”

“Fuck me.”

Wonwoo’s eyes darkened, pulling away from you. His fingers slid out and he put them in his mouth as he stood up, seeming to decide how he wanted to do this as he sucked your arousal off of his digits. You stayed perfectly still as you watched him, waiting to see what he’d want you to do.

His eyes drifted to his phone that was still on the desk, softly buzzing and glowing to life with a text. With his glasses on, he could see it was from his groupchat with Soonyoung and Chan.

Hoshi: so

Hoshi: hows it feel to lose to your girlfriend

Hoshi: hows it feel to have your winning streak completely obliterated by your own girlfriend

Hoshi: 😏😏

You watched as Wonwoo’s eyes narrowed before he looked at you, almost glaring at you.

“Sit on the desk,” he ordered, nodding his head toward the space between two of the monitors.

You got up from the chair and positioned yourself on the desk between the monitors, your hands pressed on the space behind you to prop you up. You lifted your hips as Wonwoo hooked his fingers in your underwear, sliding them off your legs in record time. He had this new fire ignited in him that you’d seen before when you’d beat him at almost anything that you’d turned into a competition or when he had a particularly rough stream or match. It made you excited, arousal starting to drip down your thighs.

Wonwoo bent down to get a condom from his backpack before he stood up and pushed his joggers and boxers down just enough for his erection to spring free. He tore the condom wrapper open before he rolled the condom down his length, stroking it a few times to get it fully hard as his eyes scanned over you a few times.

“I can’t believe you ended my streak,” he grumbled, his eyes locked on yours as he stepped forward to align himself with your entrance.

You giggled softly with a cocky smile, “Angry?”

“No,” he scoffed as he thrust into your sharply, causing you to gasp and sit up straighter. He smirked at your reaction as he added, “just annoyed.”

He set a pace that was much faster than you anticipated, having to put your hands further back on the desk near the wall just to steady yourself. His hands gripped your hips tightly, keeping them in place while the rest of you rocked back with each snap of his hips. Your head dropped back, just inches from hitting the wall, while your eyes were half open to look up at him.

Wonwoo’s hands slid up from your hips, moving under the hoodie as they traveled up your torso and to your breasts. He kneaded them roughly, his thumbs rubbing over your nipples and making you moan out his name.

“Come on,” you breathed, a lazy smile on your face as you moved one hand to hold onto Wonwoo’s shoulder, your legs wrapped around him as well, “you can do better than that. I beat your team and fucked up your winning streak, and this is the best you can do?”

“Shut up,” he grunted, moving one hand out from under your clothes to put against your neck. He didn’t squeeze it, he just rested it there as almost a threat. 

“Holding back in-game first, and now this?” you teased, raising an eyebrow as a soft moan fell from your lips. You knew exactly what you were doing, and it was working judging from the way his eyebrows set lower on his face in concentration. “No wonder you lost, Woo.”

Wonwoo gripped your thighs with both hands, pulling you forward in a sharp tug. You slipped to your back on the table, nearly hitting your head as you gasped. Wonwoo’s thrusts sped up as he put one of your legs over his shoulder, drowning out any teasing words that you wanted to say and replacing them with mewls of his name.

“Is this what you wanted?” he asked, groaning at the way you clenched around him at this new angle. 

You nodded, shamelessly admitting it.

He bent over you, cupping your cheek with one hand while the other moved back to your hip, “You’re the biggest pain in my ass.”

His lips pressed to yours as his hips kept their fast, rough pace. One of your hands moved down to rub your clit in fast circles, chasing the high that you were so close to. His mouth moved down your jaw and to your neck, leaving wet kisses as he nipped and sucked at your skin.

“Fuck, I’m close,” he hissed.

“Me too...” you whimpered, raising your hips as best as you could in your current position.

Wonwoo sat up straight again, his fingertips digging into your hips as he moved his hips as quickly as he could. You could feel your eyes threatening to close as your orgasm approached, your back arching off of the table.

You came with his name coming out in a high moan, followed by whatever profanity your brain could think of, your eyes closing as Wonwoo rode out your high while also getting himself to his own. Feeling you clench around him pushed him over the edge, high, breathy moans falling past his lips as his hips began to stutter.

After the two of you had managed to come down, Wonwoo slowly pulled out of you and removed the condom, tying it up as he made his way over to the trash. He adjusted his bottoms while you just laid on the desk and tried to catch your breath.

“You alright?” he asked with a soft chuckle, leaning over to look at your face.

“Yeah,” you breathed, taking the hand he offered to help pull you up. “Feel better now?”

“I wouldn’t have been so worked up had it not been for your big mouth,” he told you with a laugh, poking your stomach as you stood up.

“Listen, we both needed it,” you insisted as you grabbed your underwear and put them back on before you put your own joggers back on. “Do you think your hoodie is lucky enough now?”

“Eh, maybe wear it for a little longer to make sure your luck rubs off on it.”

“You just like seeing me in your clothes.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

-

“It’s all tied up, and this last round will decide who wins: the Suzhou Serpents or the Chengdu Hunters,” the castor announced as the clock counted down.

As always -- unless they were playing -- you went to the game with Hansol and Seungkwan. Despite the fact Seungkwan still insisted he wouldn’t root for “the enemy”, Hansol was very supportive and cheered for the Serpents anyway -- including the rival tank duo that Seungkwan still refused to warm up to.

“They’re close to winning,” Hansol said in your ear above all the yelling as the two teams ran out of spawn. “Do you think they’ll do it?”

“They better,” you sighed. “I can’t be forced to wear that sweatshirt 24 hours a day again."

While you did like wearing Wonwoo’s clothes, you didn’t want to be stuck in a hoodie when you were in LA. You had become a walking waterfall from how much you sweat just stepping outside, especially since the sweatshirt was black.

“I hope the Hunters win,” Seungkwan said for the umpteenth time, pouting as he watched the screen.

“You wanna see _____ in the Serpents jersey some more?” Hansol asked.

Seungkwan’s eyes widened, realizing it was a catch 22 -- he either wanted Wonwoo’s team to lose which would result in more Serpents apparel, or he wanted them to win which would mean he would be cheering for the enemy. You and Hansol just laughed at him before turning your attention back to the screen.

It was back and forth a lot, but it was finally down to 99% on each side. The Serpents had control of the map, but the Hunters could flip it at any time. You were standing up with half the crowd, shouting encouragement at the team you were rooting for. Hansol joined you, but Seungkwan stayed seated, contemplating his decisions.

Finally, somebody stepped too far off the point, and the overtime bar went down in a second, half the crowd going absolutely wild. The arena changed to the colors for the Serpents as the team stood and patted each other on the back for their victory. 

As the Serpents walked across the stage to shake hands with the other team, Wonwoo’s eyes met yours in the crowd, flashing you a wink.

You left with Hansol and Seungkwan while Junhui went down to be interviewed. You went to the lobby to wait for Wonwoo while a handful of fans had gathered around the three of you, asking for pictures and autographs that you smiled and agreed to.

Finally, you felt an arm wrap around your waist as lips pressed to your temple.

“You did it,” Wonwoo grinned, pulling you closer into his side.

“I’m glad that whole crisis is over,” you told him. “It was silly.”

“Oh, _____!” you heard somebody call your name.

You turned around to see Soonyoung jogging over to you with a smug grin -- only letting it fall when he saw Hansol and Seungkwan beside you. Still, he went up and stopped in front of you, giggling to himself before he spoke.

“You left something in our practice room the other day,” he told you.

Your eyebrows furrowed while Wonwoo just gave him a puzzled look. Nobody had known you were in the practice room except Minghao, but they assumed you were just in and out.

“I did?” you asked, sure that you had brought everything home with you.

Soonyoung reached inside his half-zipped backpack, pulling out a bra that he let dangle on his finger by the strap. Your eyes widened as your cheeks heated up.

“This,” he began, swinging it a bit, “was on my monitor.”

You quickly grabbed the article of clothing before stuffing it in the pocket of Wonwoo’s hoodie. Seungkwan and Hansol were snickering behind you, Wonwoo joining in even though he knew he’d gotten caught about having sex in the practice room. But hey, it wasn’t like his underwear was found in there by his friends.

You glared at your boyfriend, growling under your breath, “I’m getting you back for this.”

He just smirked, “Can’t wait.”

[shy-magpie]

RQG 142

I used up all my delayed gratification avoid spoilers and not listening to a season a day; so in an act of optimism over evidence I am going to listen before bed instead of waiting for my lunch break at work. Come on dead!Shoin! It would be the perfect punchline to Zolf refusing to play, if Yoshida was killed by his own trap. I think I was wrong about Zolf's spell sobering up Skraak but we've got to be nearing the 24 hour mark in the next couple episodes. They have to sleep sometime. Eep! Streaming promo! Rusty Towers has to be doing well if they can branch out, good for them! What can I say I like rituals? Thank yous followed by the theme and intros make my brain light up. Alex went 3rd person over the stress of the series being up to 142? Time to poke the corpse. Exploding 20s sound fun but a pain to plan for. Body is in a state of disrepair. Panel open in the room indicates the bolt came from a trap Body is gross Adventurer not Shoin? We can't search the corpse? Not even for Alex's traditional wallet of backstory? Can't picture the layout (ETA  Babs you are amazing, and your map is my RQG post for tomorrow.) Explanation for this area having power, I just like hearing Cel talk. Locker by each door. No Alex, we don't trust them to be normal lockers. Fire ax, weird wrench, box. Box contains: Solvent, glue, a dead potion, means of applying glue/solvent Cel sounds like they are consoling themself for this not being a puzzle Zolf is not a public speaker, but I think I got the gist of it. Take the tool kits: we will need them whether this is a puzzle or not. Another dead trap. Thanks for the careful wording, Alex *Foul water pool surrounded by a walk way *2 dead kobolds :( *Killed by acid in the face from a creature I am tempted to mark the turnings but given the weird layout I don't think I could track it right even if I could juggle my MP3 player, this post, a pen and paper. Once again just going to trust them to spell out what's important. Yeah they would check for traps at every door. Ooh active trap. Its a well balanced team, nice to hear them give eachother credit for their respective strengths so readily. Dark hall way of options They are honest, and admit they are probably not checking for traps as they walk. Oh good Zolf doesn't actually have a Thing about Dancing Lights. It really was just a "could we not make it easier for people to shoot us?" coupled with a possibly IC trouble relating to how much moving around in the dark stinks without Dark Vision. Ha they immediately spot a tripwire they would have missed if they just had Zolf & Azu lead them in the dark. Chalk marking, ensuing discussion of what it means. Is that Zolf or Ben who is losing it over the puzzles? Cel, do you need a variation on the "a live dog is better than a dead lion" speech I nearly wrote when Hamid went after that ooze? Because dead scientists can't write up their findings. Love ya both, if you have to die, please not to something you could have just walked away from. Of course Zolf is going to indulge them; he took to Cel fast as Sasha and Cel is less squishy than L1 Sasha. Oh darn I have to be fair, learning what the symbols mean could be life saving later on. The glaive really is a 10ft pole, I was joking when I asked that. I hate the word "seemingly". Alex, don't break Ben. Hmm, this is actually pulpy fun. Getting us back to base levels after really intense beginning of the season or being readied for more emotional content? Most of the beats I'm expecting can't hit until they get off the island; could be the answers to the what's going on around here are intense. Final bets on it being Mr. Ceiling mark 1? Weird room with weirder floor. Clearly another puzzle. Once again how rich is this guy? That's a lot of money to go "I'm smarter than you are". Genre savvy is rewarded Dead wizard "I'm giving you this for free" is Alex implying that other info given without rolls has a price normally? Other room is completely flooded? Zolf suggests we mark the door.  Kinky Azu. Hamid switches mark to clearly writing the issue. This team backs a play,  so its now a Rosetta Stone of warnings Partially flooded room but no real danger? Ah Zolf catches that we could lose our path back if we keep doing letting water out. Flooded & trashed lab Speakers burst to life Break time Its Yoshida, arguing with himself. Cel is a delight. Azu is "going to shake" Yoshida Swimming sounds like a bad idea. Oh, caught that tone from Zolf, does he think Poseidon would mess with them? Worrying since Alex keeps tossing water related potions at them. Zolf and Hamid are making decisions as equals. Hamid no longer sounds nervous and Zolf still isn't pulling rank crap. Even Skraak is worried about Zolf. Oh right, better is a relative term. Still pretty depressed (mechanicaly grief stricken). Ok not to get to into it, but Zolf's mental health arc is really good. Like no show is perfect but Zolf going from the Paris breakdown to clearly putting the work in on changing how he talks about himself and relates to the team, but it not being a cure all? All while still being a fully contributing member of the team? Pretty damn good to see. Back to first room. Cel does not understand where Zolf is coming from. Cel, Azu, and Zolf have a brief conversation about Zolf's mood. Have I mentioned how great Azu is lately? Player vs Character thing? Because even without Alex lamp-shading it, Lydia doesn't strike me as the "you must be chipper" type. Zolf and Cel interaction. Zolf wants to put a pin in this and have a proper conversation later. Not sure how I feel about promising to "keep a lid on it". On the other hand its hard to balance expressing the emotion vs ramping yourself up vs the needs of the rest of the team. So much for me not getting into it. Flip-side: hey, turns out I can acknowledge an actual flaw in Cel while still thinking they are awesome overall. Crates of potions, including the stuff from the syringe spears. wanna grab a sample this time? Because I'm thinking the stuff in the spears is the stuff that makes the Kobolds so docile and may be a prototype for the alchemical side of the blue veins. That sounds cathartic for Zolf. (looting the place then letting Zolf smash the rest) Azu smashes too. Good for both of them. Ah point Cel, stuff could have airborne effects. Point Zolf, 2 way street, Cel should let people know that kind of thing. Speakers, what is up with Shoin? Assuming this isn't a pre-programmed contingency (which I wouldn't have thought possible until watching Alex), why is he using the script from the puzzle party while half of the traps are broken? Getting meta again Well maintained nasty trap with really obscure poison 2nd trap?! Isn't going to kill anyone, thank Alex. What in the Magnus Archives? Dancing mannequin room with weird heavy gas? Going to crawl on the conveyor belt. Its trapped too. Acid damage to Azu. Into initiative.

Skraak got a nat 20

Azu was hit with a syringe arrow of acid. 

Azu backs out past Hamid & Skraak

A second trip wire drops a grate! Hamid and Skraak are trapped on the conveyor; everyone else is back in the room.

Zolf sees Cel dithering and directs them to deal with the grate. No effect

Azu takes 7 damage

Hamid uses acid splash on the grate.

Oh cool, there is an actual rule for how long it takes to get armor on and off. It makes sense too, the better the armor is the longer it takes. From what I picked up, better armor would have more straps for better fit and have more thick overlapping bits rather than gaps

All Zolf can do is a heal check and help Azu get her armor off.

Cel offers the antidote potion, but we don't know what it does.

Hamid reassures Skraak, continues to splash grate

Cel can't really do anything

More damage to Azu

Sweet out of initiative

Zolf cleans Azu off, Azu takes a couple healing potions and that’s dealt with. The acid splashes didn't do anything to the grate. Lift the grate attempt one. Ah "come on Skraak,  we're going to help" so wholesome Zolf wacks it with his glaive, it has some effect but not a viable plan Speakers again, Cel points out they might need to meet Hamid on the other side. ...long story short lever attempt has no chance of working. Zolf: Hamid, mate, you're on your own Hamid: I've got Skraak. (winks at Skraak, Skraak blinks at him) Is it having little brothers? He is good with Skraak! Zolf: chin up, don't die on the conveyor belt. Hamid: yup gonna try Zolf: cool anything we can give you? Hamid: I'm pretty well equipped I think. Zolf: all right well we'll see you on the other side. Azu: Yeah, we'll meet you there alright. We'll see you soon Hamid: yeah Azu: alright Hamid: stay safe Azu & Zolf: you too And the end of the episode out takes are always fun

[dingoes8myrp]

Alien Franchise Thoughts

This weekend I happened to catch and rewatch Alien: Covenant. Right after that I caught and rewatched Aliens. This was sheerly through channel surfing luck that I watched these movies in this order. But, in doing so I connected some dots and had some realizations that gave me a new appreciation for the prequel series.

A Bit of Background

I can’t remember if I saw Alien or The Terminator first, so Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor get equal billing for being “the first” female action heroes I ever encountered. Prior to them I’d seen Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis watching action films with my dad. So seeing not Tom Skerrit’s Captain Dallas or John Hurt’s Kane but Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley take on the role of Action Hero was essential to my development as an eleven-year-old girl. I’m not even exaggerating for the sake of drama. Watching Ripley in Alien was one of the first examples I saw in media of a woman in a role I’d only seen taken on by male characters before. For this reason alone, the original Alien holds a special place in my heart.

The Original Series

I have mixed feelings about the franchise as a whole. I loved Alien and Aliens to me was just as good and is one of the few sequels that measures up to the original. It lost me at Alien 3 when they killed off Newt and Hicks in the opening crash land. Forcing Ripley into the “sole survivor” role becomes formulaic here and… honestly I’ve had no desire to rewatch Alien 3 and completely forget the entire plot other than the fact that it takes place in a prison setting and Ripley had to shave her head. And they killed off Ripley! I remember being very upset all around at Alien 3 and I think I mentally disowned it.

Alien: Resurrection brought me back around because Ripley was back! And there was Winona Ryder! However, Ripley wasn’t the same Ripley we remembered. She was some clone or hybrid or… I don’t really know what they were going for there. But, I looked at this film as a standalone almost AU installment and I’m actually very okay with it. Not my favorite by a longshot, but a slight redemption from Alien 3’s mess.

Alien vs. Predator

No. Just no. Denied. Why? What even? WHY?!

I’ve seen a few of these movies and if you’re a fan of big monsters fighting one another with a bunch of random humans caught in the middle, these movies might be your jam. If you’re a Predator or an Alien fan, though, it kind of doesn’t fit in with either in my opinion.

The Prequels

When I watched Prometheus I hadn’t done any research on it at all, so I had no idea it had anything to do with the Alien franchise. I saw a space-themed action-horror film with Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Noomi Rapace, and Michael Fassbender involved and I was IN, man. Honorable mention to Logan Marshall-Green, who is also awesome but I didn't catch in the trailers. So he was a nice surprise.

The opening scene was unworldly and gorgeous, much like the opening of The Mists of Avalon, which is a weird comparison, I know. But I was enchanted by this opening scene much like I was as I watched Morgaine Le Fey float through the mist that served as a doorway to a magical world. We see an unknown being on an alien planet perform a mysterious ritual and then plummet into the water. The first clue was the title card, which even then I thought “Oh, cool! They did the Alien thing!” but hadn’t connected it as directly related. I’d just thought it was a subtle nod because of the Ridley Scott connection.

I loved Prometheus as a film. I had a very similar reaction to it that I had to the original Alien movie. We had an ensemble of characters, all with their own personalities and enough development to make us care. Noomi Rapace became the reluctant hero as opposed to the expected Charlize Theron, who had been in the Ripley role (“He’s not coming on my ship.”). As the Alien clues dropped, I picked them up and quickly (excitedly) realized the film was somehow connected – it had to be. For me, that was just the cherry on top of a fantastic film.

Alien: Covenant made me feel much like Alien 3 did. The ending of Prometheus had been hopeful, echoing both the endings of Alien and Aliens. Our hero Elizabeth Shaw had survived and would bring android David along to find the Engineers and get her answers. Ridley Scott himself spoke about a possible sequel involving Elizabeth and David trying to do just that.

And then we got Alien: Covenant. Elizabeth and David were nowhere to be found and instead we were (hastily) introduced to an entire new crew of characters whose development was severely lacking in the film. We don’t even know everyone’s paired up in romantic couples until people start dying. When David did finally appear to rescue everyone I was excited. Yes! Finally, a tie-in to Prometheus. And then we learn Elizabeth died suspiciously and the franchise is turned over to David. To say I was infuriated would be an understatement.

I was more excited about the project Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn spoke about at a comic-con panel that would’ve followed Alien and Aliens (and maybe retconned some stuff) than I was about whatever Ridley Scott did next (I still kind of am, if I’m honest). Why would someone take a franchise helmed by a powerhouse female action hero and then make its lead an insane android and his pet virus? Why would I want to follow this asshole instead of Shaw, Daniels, or even Vickers?

Final Analysis

Watching Aliens right on the heels of Alien: Covenant made it easier for me to make some connections and parallels. In Aliens, a group of marines attempts to travel to a space colony that lost contact to see what’s going on. Ripley is brought along (with Burke, that shit) as a consultant “just in case” (even though everyone treats her like she has a case of the vapors when she tells them about the xenomorphs). The premise makes little sense on the outset. However, when we later learn Burke’s true motivation it makes perfect sense. Burke believes Ripley, although he makes a show of the opposite. And he wants to bag an alien to bring home and sell to the highest bidder. When the soldiers start stomping carelessly around blowing holes in things with there big dumb weapons, it’s infuriating to the audience, knowing what we know. However, it’s also infuriating to Ripley and we’re reminded why she’s there. These are soldiers who, of course, have no idea what to do with an alien species and probably aren’t used to exploring alien environments.

This is very similar to what’s going on in Alien: Covenant. Not made clear in the film due to the character development scenes (such as “the last supper” prologue) being cut, this crew are explorers and colonists. They’re not astronauts or scientists. A few of the characters appear to be military escorts or officers. Of course they’re tromping around without a care in the world. They don’t know any better. Their captain, Jake Bronson, dies mid-journey and his second-in-command, Billy Crudup’s Oram, is super insecure about his new position. This is frequently shown in his interactions with Katherine Waterson’s No First Name Daniels, who was also Bronson’s wife. Daniels has a comradery and respect with the crew not present with Oram. So, when Oram has to start making decisions he’s acting more on his insecurity and his need to Do Something and be taken seriously than acting on the information and advice he’s given. Also, once we know the relationships between characters everyone’s bizarre anti-survival behavior makes a ton of sense. After a certain point in the film, everyone has lost a spouse and/or a ton of friends. Everyone is grieving, scared, and not at all trained to be doing what they’re doing, and they don’t have a Ripley on board to help guide them. “Game over, man! Game over!”

Yeah, Alien: Covenant is what happens when you make every character a Hudson.

Watching Ripley’s reaction to Bishop in Aliens reminded me how iffy Ash the A.I. was in Alien. You know, he got all murdery and everything.

Then I remembered – oh, yeah – Alien: Covenant is a prequel. This means David is an A.I. precursor of some kind to Ash… which means he’s a faulty A.I. Also, Ripley encountered creatures and situations no one had discovered before to our knowledge (due to everyone’s reaction to Ripley’s story in Aliens). This ultimately means no one can make it out of these prequels alive or it compromises Ripley’s established story.

David is a faulty A.I., which hasn’t yet been experienced by anyone living who has encountered androids in space exploration if we go by the example of Ash in Alien. Failsafes haven’t been given to androids yet to limit their emotional depths or put rules in place to prevent them from harming humans. He’s creating creatures that are new. No one knows they exist, so no one is prepared for them (just like the crew of the Nostromo wasn’t prepared for the xenomorphs in Alien). Even heavily trained soldiers, scientists, and astronauts will be encountering deadly things they don’t know are out there: a highly intelligent rogue A.I. capable of experiencing emotion and evolution, mutated weaponized creatures unlike anything they’ve ever seen before, and an alien virus that mutates its host and is undetectably ingested.

Guys, ain’t nobody emerging as the lone heroic survivor of anything in this franchise (except the fucking xenomorph).

Having digested and accepted that information, I am grimly awaiting what happens next, and I really hope with all my giddy little heart that theorized Aliens sequel Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn teased is going to happen. I’ll even take a video game version.

Hicks and Newt deserved better and I stand by that.

[moonlit-tulip]

can we get an infodump on teleportpocalypse and magical girls?

Sure!

So, in the teleportation apocalypse world, the magic system involves performing a sequence of mental actions which correspond with, essentially, characters in a magical alphabet which can be chained together into magical programs. Magic is all about instantaneous effects before and after which mundane physics apply as usual; it can’t do things like “make this item magical” or “alert me any time someone enters this room”, but it can do things like “transform this item into a different substance” or “create a tripwire at the entrance to this room”.

The magic system was originally created with the assumption that users would have access to the documentation. The original users all died off millions of years before humans existed, though, and so nobody has access to the documentation. As such, while humans had access to magic, their access was essentially just a matter of noticing by trial and error that particular sequences of mental actions produced weird effects. Notably, since dangerous spells vastly outnumber safe ones, trying to invent new spells was an activity far likelier to end with the inventor dying in a dramatic fashion, and as such, while spell development happened, it was very slow.

For a long time, different societies each had their own distinct collections of the few spells they knew that were (a) safe to use and (b) did things which were useful rather than things like “produce a weird smell briefly”. But over time some travelers started writing compilations of spells from different places, and it eventually became possible to pull together a pretty robust library of the different spells which had been discovered. Still, since spells were generally put together on the basis of more-or-less random combinations of inputs rather than any genuine understanding of the system, while they were sometimes useful (e.g. for setting things on fire, or for creating otherwise-hard-to-acquire materials, or the like), they weren’t generally well-optimized for usefulness.

In a bout of bad luck for the world as a whole, the first person to (a) have access to such a library, (b) be reckless enough to want to engage in magical experimentation despite the historically-high odds of death, and © be clever enough to use that large bunch of magical code samples to reverse-engineer large chunks of the magic language without dying was kind of an idiot in many ways. To briefly summarize the somewhat-elaborate story of her life: she decided she wanted to use hew newly-acquired magical overpoweredness to take over her home country; her advisor, in an attempt at damage control, advised her to get some followers rather than popping in as a total unknown; she did so and took over the country; and she decided to reward her inner circle of followers for their loyalty by giving each of them access to a single spell she’d designed. Her spells, being designed by someone who actually understood the magic system, were uniformly actually well-optimized for use by humans. One follower got a very powerful healing spell, one got a long-distance spying spell, et cetera. And one got a teleportation spell.

They were all told to not share their spells around further, and most of them followed that, but the teleportation spell’s recipient nonetheless started sharing the spell around. She gave it to a few friends of hers; they passed it along further; and eventually the spell was more-or-less uncontainably leaked. Its creator tried to hunt down everyone who had it, but gave up once they started wising up to her being after them and scattering to all sorts of different countries, because with the magic system being instantaneous in the way it was there wasn’t really a good way to track them at that point.

And so, all around the world, there started being people with access to an untraceable easy-to-cast long-distance teleportation spell. Word about how to cast it kept spreading throughout populations, with no easy way to curb the spread; and things started breaking. Armies with the spell could pop into enemy rulers’ homes, bypassing all city walls and opposing armies and other defenses, and kill them in their sleep before installing themselves as the new rulers; thieves with the spell could grab piles of valuables and then vanish off into other countries to sell them off and be rich; bandits could steal farmers’ grain out of storage and get away cleanly and untraceably; et cetera. It became generally very easy to engage in and get away with large quantities of antisocial behavior which would otherwise be more difficult and be likely to get one killed. And so, globally, societies started destabilizing and collapsing.

It’s been about two centuries since then, and while society is now more-or-less functional again, it’s very much rebuilt in a manner shaped by the spell. Governments are secretive about their members’ identities and about where they spend their time, for fear of assassins; people are generally very secretive about where they keep their valuables, with any items kept in public assumed to be communal goods that anyone can grab and put wherever is most useful; various organizations attempt to run international law-enforcement firms which keep lists of known criminals and kill them on sight, in order to disincentivize the “act antisocially and then teleport a few countries away”; et cetera.

This last part, the details of what the world is like post-teleportation-apocalypse, is the part I’ve been stuck on for the past several years and which is holding me back from writing stories set in the world. I’ve got a decent big-picture sense of things at this point, but I need to draw in a lot more detail than I currently have before I can really envision the setting in sufficient detail to write in it. But once I’ve got that detail I feel like it’s going to make for a very fun setting for espionage-focused stories of some sort.

Then the magical girls world. This one actually has a whole big multiverse, and the rules of the multiverse-in-general inform the rules of the individual sub-parts thereof, so I’m going to start with that.

There’s a multiverse. It’s arranged in a star structure, with each of about 200 worlds being connected to a single central world but not connected to each other. Each of those 200 worlds, but not the central world, has a gigantic native reservoir of magic, which expresses itself in a fashion that varies on a per-world basis; some have magical creatures like dragons, some have magic be innate to humans, some have magic be external to humans but controllable via appropriate rituals, some have their magic totally inert, et cetera. Magic isn’t consumed on use; it’s just, while being used, unavailable for other uses. So there’s no decay-over-time in worlds with dragons or whatever, there’s just a cap on how many dragons could in theory exist. The per-world magic reservoir is huge enough that that limitation is rarely relevant to anything. Crucially, while the magic’s capabilities are nearly limitless given a sufficient quantity of it thrown at a task, one absolute limit is that it’s impossible for magic to interact with any worlds to which its own housing world isn’t connected; and, furthermore, impossible for it to do anything between worlds except for bridging the spatial disconnect. So transportation between the central world and a noncentral world is possible, as is creation of a stable portal therebetween, but (for example) remotely using magic to bomb out a world is not possible; you’d need to step into the target world for that.

These limitations make the central world a natural chokepoint. Whoever can block it up and make it unsafe to travel through can, in so doing, control every bit of multiversal transportation to go on. So, several millennia ago, an evil queen who stole all the previously-free-floating magic from her homeworld in order to make herself inherently magical to a ridiculously overpowered degree walked into the central world, displaced the trade consortium which had previously been using the place, and turned the world into a hub from which to systematically conquer the multiverse, eventually with the help of her descendants, who she imbued with a small echo of her own magical power. At first, the conquests were performed chiefly through her own overpowered magic; but eventually she started needing to stay in the central world full-time to keep it secure from counter-invasion by anyone in the multiverse who she’d made an enemy of, and so the conquests started falling to her magically-empowered descendants and the dozens of worlds’ resources they could bring to bear against each individual world they attacked.

So this faction, ruled by the evil queen, started invading another world. This particular world’s local magic took two forms: various magical creatures and materials around the place, and humans being able to magically bind things together, keeping the basic shape of one but with significant influence leaking through from the other. This could be used, for example, to merge oneself with a magical creature (gaining access to that creature’s abilities, at the cost of mental scrambling and value drift since one’s mind will be merged with its as well), or to merge a sword with a magical stone to imbue the sword with the stone’s magical properties, or the like. And they used this to fight back against the invading forces, but they were pretty horribly outmatched, and within a few years practically the whole planet had been conquered.

There was a particular kind of magical creature, local to a relatively small region of the world, which could emit a magical effect which, would, if other creatures were exposed to it for an extended time, hijack control of their bodies and minds, as well as magically altering their forms for greater usefulness to tasks such as “help build hives” and “grab and immobilize further creatures for me to turn into my minions”. These creatures weren’t too dangerous to humans generally, since they needed days of blasting magic at something before they got control of it and that required reasonably direct line of effect, but once in a while there would be an incident of one sneaking into somebody’s house, hiding there for a few weeks slowly building up control, and eventually turning them into a warped monster before getting discovered and killed off by the rest of the locals; so it was known that they were capable of dangerousness to humans.

So one particular group in that region decided, in a last-ditch effort to toss the invaders out, to attempt the following scheme: first, one of their members would bind a creature of this sort to themselves. Second, they would bind themselves to the sun, keeping its physical form but retaining their newly-gained magical powers “convert creatures towards which I’ve got reasonably direct line of effect into my minions”. Third, they would grab control of all the invaders they could and force them to either leave or kill each other.

It was a well-intentioned plan, and they even made token efforts towards ensuring that the value-drift issue wouldn’t get in the way (picking the most genuinely altruistic person they could find, and spending a day talking to her after she’d bound herself to the controls-other-creatures creature to make sure she was still herself before she bound herself to the sun), but they weren’t nearly as safety-conscious as they should have been (because their area was in the process of being invaded and they were afraid that, if they took any more time, they’d be caught themselves), and things went wrong as a result. In fact the merger had shifted her priorities, and while she still in some sense was altruistic, her priority had shifted from “help everyone attain happiness and flourishing” to specifically helping creatures she’d taken control of, and even there the goal was less anything resembling the sort of flourishing valued by humans and more about building gigantic elaborate hives to live in and acquiring more creatures for her to take control of.

So, about a week after that, people all over the world (especially in the sunny parts of it) started turning into monsters, grabbing other people, dragging them into sunny regions, and generally rapidly spreading into an out-of-control monstrous force. This successfully repelled the invaders, but it also turned the vast majority of the world’s population into puppets of the sun who were hostile to all life on the planet which didn’t want to become puppets of the sun. Societal collapse ensued.

A bunch of the invaders were caught in the initial wave of people-turning-into-sun-monsters, but overall as a force they were relatively unaffected, because unlike the rest of the world they had access to good global-scale communications and were able to respond to the first few incidents with a general call to retreat from the planet back to the central world. So most of them withdrew at that point. However, a sizable sub-fraction instead went “actually, no, we may have been invading this world but that doesn’t mean we’re okay just leaving all these people to suffer a literal planet-scale apocalypse, we’re going to stay and help”. And so they did. They helped hordes of refugees pile into caves, closed the caves off so that the sun-monsters couldn’t get in, and generally did a lot to help people make it through the disaster. Other bunches of humans did similar things on their own, without assistance from the ex-invaders, albeit with more difficulty.

Over the next few hundred years, most of the entirely-non-magic-assisted groups of humans belowground died off, because getting food without safe access to sunlight turns out to be really hard. But many groups had help from the ex-invader magical girls and their descendants, and many others managed to bind themselves to some variety of magical underground life in order to increase their chances of survival, and things more-or-less stabilized.

Cut to a few thousand years later. The magical girl who was leading of one of the underground civilizations decided to make an attempt at returning to the surface, as various civilizations occasionally did. Historically, those efforts tended to fail within a few weeks, with the sun-monsters coming down, dismantling whatever sun-protective architecture the aboveground group was using, and proceeding to do their best to get into the underground region the people had come from and grab everyone from there as well. But this one went differently, for two reasons. First, this particular civilization had an exceptionally high population of magical girls, and so was particularly well-equipped to drive off sun-monster incursions. Second, their leader, in specific, had magical power over clouds, and so was able to, instead of relying on protective architecture, set up a layer of eternally-present protective cloud-cover overhead.

So they were able to return aboveground. Once they were stably established there, their leader proceeded to start slowly expanding the layer of cloud cover, using an array of artifacts to bolster her ability to do so since her personal magical ability wasn’t enough to keep things up at that scale. She systematically made contact with every underground civilization whose cave she’d cloud-covered over and told them “hey, it’s safe to come back aboveground now”, and built her small civilization up into a full-on kingdom.

Such is the state of things in the current era. She’s been ruling for about seventy years now, during which the cloud cover has continually expanded, albeit increasingly slowly. As the borders have expanded, it’s become increasingly difficult to keep the place thoroughly defended from sun-monster incursions, but it’s nonetheless done well enough that they only do significant damage once in a while, not regularly. Additionally, sometimes the underground civilizations they discover have had sufficient binding-induced value drift over the course of their survival efforts that their populations aren’t able to get along well with the less-value-drifted humans; they tend to get magically sealed into their caves to continue living in isolation from the aboveground kingdom, but sometimes that fails for one reason or another and a crisis results. This is the status quo when the plot begins.

For this world, unlike the teleportation one, I’ve got a pretty robust plot worked out; I just need to figure out enough character details to be able to write it. To briefly summarize its premise, the plot involves the princess of one of the sealed-for-excessive-value-drift dungeons sneaking out, meeting up with the princess of the aboveground kingdom (daughter of the person who does the cloud-cover stuff), and going “hey, actually we’d be totally able to peacefully be part of human society, sure we devour people’s emotions but we don’t do it in an antisocial way”, and the two of them becoming friends (and eventually girlfriends), fixing the various broken parts of the world both within and outside of the cloud kingdom, and generally having adventures together. I plan them to start out going up against relatively small-scale antagonists, like other local magic-users, but eventually needing to go up against larger-scale threats, including the sun and its forces and, past even that, the multiversal empire whose attempted conquest kicked off this whole sequence of events.

[fancydunamancy]

4, 9, 13, 25, 30 for the DnD ask. :D

4. Your current campaign.

Oh man. Well, obviously I can’t say everything since all of my players are following me, but… :D The campaign started in a hospital where everyone woke one morning, their memory of the previous day rather hazy. After finding out that whatever afflicition they were suffering from was supposed to be treated by a bunch of asshole priests conducting weird rituals and keeping them locked in, the group decided to escape the hospital. Now they’re on their way to find out what exactly this strange malady is, how they got it and how they can get rid of it.

It’s my first “proper” DnD campaign, so I decided not to experiment and rather keep the setting pretty boring, using the races/languages/classes/monsters etc from the official 5e materials. Next time I’d like to come up with something weirder, but this campaign is great fun as well! My players have come up with such cool characters and, as it always it with DnD, they like surprising me and making me panic internally like “holy shit okay, i was not prepared for this crap”. Really though, my players are great and I enjoy creating storylines and NPCs a lot, so. Yeah.

9. Your favorite thing about D&D.

DnD has some rules, yes, but other than that you can do pretty much ANYTHING and be ANYONE. It’s not like with video games where you have a few set options that you need to choose from, here you just… have a bunch of nerds who together create a new fucking world and every session is unique and you can never expect what happens next. My favourite part is creating and playing characters and seeing them interact with your friends’ characters. Honestly though, it’s just hard to describe what exactly it is that makes DnD so special, you gotta try it yourself to understand what all the fuss is about. It’s the perfect game for every nerd with a penchant for storytelling.

13. Introduce your current party.

There’s Rony, the pretty half-elf bard who was supposed to be a giant slut, but always rolled nat ones on his seductions, so… Now instead of being a big player, he’s sporting a crush on the dumb trash wizard. Rony can be a bit of a sarcastic fuck at times, but, well, he’s cute and gay and likes kittens and we like him.

Then there’s Rosa. She’s beauty, she’s grace, she’ll punch you in the face. Seriously, she’ll fuck you up. She’s a tiefling rogue who is slow to trust people but quick to cut off their purses. Also she’s gay.

Pip is a human Good girl and a ranger whose home is the forest, but she’s afraid of the dark. She is badass and soft at the same time and also very gay. We describe her look as a “lesbian Aragorn”.

Gwen is a dwarven lady with the biggest family tree ever and a great ginger beard. She kinda accidentally became a druid because she was drunk and that’s pretty much all you need to know about her. She can turn from vodka aunt to mum friend to dad friend to spider!Gwen within five minutes. Cool, right?

Seth is… who the hell is Seth? We just don’t know. He barely talks. Apparently he has a wife and kids somewhere. His socks never match. He wears a baroque collar. He makes a living by selling porn books. We think he kinda looks like a long-haired Nicolas Cage. Sometimes he randomly turns into a llama. Don’t question it.

Then there’s my two main NPCs, Elora and Valrian. Elora is a tiefling cleric who is very sweet, caring, selfless, likes everyone and finds everything exciting (basically she’s all the things I am not lol). She wouldn’t hurt a fly, unless she really had to. And then she’d be very sad about it for the rest of the day. In the nights, though, she becomes a different person. Literally.

Valrian was fucking supposed to die during session one, but then he didn’t and here he is?? He’s basically an optimistic nihilist who never loses his chill and isn’t bothered by pretty much anything. He’s reckless and gets himself into trouble a lot. He likes to act stupid although he is actually very smart. His familiar is a cute lil magpie called Juliet.

25. What have your players done that you never could have planned for?

All of it. What usually messes with my plans is that they tend to spend forever on sidequests I expected to be short and then they swiftly glide through something I’d consider pretty difficult. Other than that, well, Rosa randomly stole a kitten, Rony probably created the first official contract the town of Erienna has ever seen. Oh and of course, what confused and amused me a lot was how nasty they were all to Val during the first session, although he was just trying to help. Then there’s the fact it took them like five sessions to notice that hey, one of our party members turns into someone else at night.

Then there’s also one thing that surprised me, but I don’t want the others to know that it surprised me, so. That’s it for now :) :)

30. Are your players diplomatic or murder hobos?

I mean they’re dumbasses, but I think usually they’re more or less diplomatic… If we don’t count that one time they nearly murdered two poor goblin passersby after falsely accusing them of stealing their money :D 

Thanks for the questions, mate!

[lewnatic]

For the D&D asks, 1-20

Oh gosh, okay. This is gonna be long so I’m gonna do it under a cut.

What was your favorite Nat 1 Experience?

I don’t think a lot of my characters have had really funny Nat1 moments, sadly. I will always remember the one when @zhixx​ made a goblin named Spook’em specifically designed to have the least survivability possible. The first time he was downed he rolled a Nat1 on his first death save. The feeling of comedic timing was just beautiful.

Favorite D&D Inside Joke?

“You are a privateer! BUT ON LAHND.”

Favorite Item Your Character received in D&D?

Phailyn was supposed to get a tome to increase his strength, but when his crush said she wanted it, he immediately fucking dropped it so she could have it. So the DM let me sneak off and get a scrying orb we’d passed up earlier. He hasn’t used it yet, but I just like the story behind it.

Ves probably considers Sikrikta to be the best item she’s received has a lot of really expensive shit she’s keeping just because she has bourgie taste. She got a bottle of wine as a gift that would have been 400g if she’d left it unopened. She’s drinking it gradually through the adventure. It’s good, but not quite as good as what she’s used to.

Teeki has a gaudy diamond crown that Bing bought for 300 gold. It does nothing. It is purely cosmetic. She loves it.

Basically I love frivolous shit.

Preferred Animal Companion (if you had any)?

Vesxlit has a familiar, if that counts. He’s a parrot named Brilliant. He talks like a normal human (in a setting where that is definitely not commonplace) and is a member of the Bardic College in the capital city of the nation we’re traveling in.

He’s a posh gentleman who helps Ves sew dresses. They spend 90% of their time arguing because, being a bird, his fashion sense is incredibly bright and garish.

Favorite D&D Battle Encounter?

Every boss fight Skaaren has done is goddamn awesome, tbh. My favorite is the first just because of how scary it was.

Keep in mind, we’re level 1 in Pathfinder, an Oracle (Ves) and a Barbarian (Cato.) We’ve just watched a big hole open up in the ground, and our characters don’t know why, but we’re looking for missing people (including the barbarian’s boyfriend Fabius, he’s important) so we figure hell, this is probably where they’re missing.

We find some of the missing people at the bottom of the hole, but we haven’t found Fabius, so we go deeper in. We find this creepy old woman doing some kinda ritual or something by a pool of water? Barbarian charges in to kill her and save his man, and… kills her very quickly.

Silence. We go to check on Fabius, and we’re not sure if we can safely move him. I’m running out of heals from earlier stuff and I pop my last one on him, and after a while of debating what to do a ton of undead start coming out of the water. Just a goddamn mob. Whatever the hell creepy-lady was doing, we were suddenly way in over our heads. Even if we picked up Fabius and ran, we don’t have a fast way out of this hole. And we start taking damage fast. Including Fabius.

I don’t remember the specifics of the fight. I think that’s a testament to how much we were panicking. I remember feeling the helplessness of being a mage completely out of spell slots frantically trying to hit things with my stupid mace.

And I remember when the fight was over, I stayed down there panicking for several more minutes, trying to determine if Fabius was even alive while the barbarian ran to get the local doctor in a town of which he didn’t even speak the language.

In the end, Fabius was okay, and we both got out of it alive. It was just that sense of dread and fear, that we didn’t know how the DM’s rolls were going or if anything we were trying had any impact. Skaaren has always done a stellar job since of bringing that sense of genuine fear into the game when he wants to, but that first unexpected taste of it was so damn cool.

Favorite D&D NPC Interaction?

Varis Vrynn was my favorite villain. Not because of his fight, or how he fit into the greater lore, but because of how @extravagantshoes​ played him. He was a slimy uppity elf in the city of Galthiel, a city with heavy class divides based on magic ability. Varis was a powerful diviner, and a lot of our party interactions involved everyone in the party trying to piss him off and Varis looking down his nose in disgust at all of us.

Then Cedlanna, our young sorcerer, got a conversation with him alone in his manor, where he wanted to make a deal with her. And she just ripped into him. Cut to the core of his insecurities and how with all of his riches on display, his manor still was incredibly empty–that for all the parties he hosted he was completely alone.

He was doing some really irredeemable things and later tried to kill us all but I still managed to feel kind of sad that we ended up gruesomely killing him.

Dumbest thing You & Your Party Did

Charging through multiple spinning saws comes to mind. Every time I try to sneak around in heavy plate armor also comes to mind.

I feel like I need to make a separate post to discuss just all the impulsive things Cato does. Turning an entire city upside down just for the chance to punch a specific guy in the face was one.

Most Epic thing You & Your Party Did

I might also make a separate post about this, but Cato and Ves convinced a bunch of lizard people that they were their gods.

Basically in this setting, the level 1 baddies generally fought are called Rapia. They’re kobold-esque in design, but they have a faith-based culture and… well, kind of a faith-based biology. Rapia need something to worship, they undergo gradual physiological changes based on the thing they follow. (Say it’s a sea creature, they might get gills.) And if they don’t have something to worship, they literally become sick and presumably die.

We’d fought a few before and looted crap from their caves, including a tiny hammer that we never could have used but the barbarian held onto cuz idk??

We later ran into some others by falling through the roof of their cave, but they didn’t attack us. They started to assume that we were the gods depicted on one of their cave walls. For the sake of brevity, a fight broke out later when we were trying to leave, and Cato gave the hammer to one of the rapia who was helping us escape. It turned out in the DM’s notes, this hammer had significance to the rapia, and was supposed to be given to the religious leader of a tribe. And so the entire tribe turned to our side and protected us. And… they started following us.

It was about this time that the DM broke character to tell us he had no plan of this happening, and I guess we just have a tribe of rapia now. And we’ve had the goddamn campaign balanced around having a tribe of rapia ever since.

What did you like about your Campaign’s World?

I’m gonna try to sum these up quickly cuz these stories have already gotten long.

The Ascension world has elements of what I affectionately like to call Pop Fantasy, there’s some genre-awareness while not being parody, and all the work on the pantheon Spi did has been goddamn amazing. I also cannot figure out the overarching mysteries and that is awesome.

Nejj puts a ton into immersing us into the world. I can always very clearly get a feel for the sort of setting he’s putting us in, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with the political intrigue he’s been setting up.

Skaaren’s got the weirdest goddamn races in his setting and I love every single one of them. He’s also packed the setting full of little cultural details, I swear to god he’s done extensive research into what we’re having for breakfast in the morning based on where we’re staying.

What was the most Interesting Lore you Found?

I seriously can’t pick a favorite here so I’m going to give a silly answer, and that’s that acolytes of Ves’s goddess commune with her by getting super high. 

Summarize Your Campaign(s) in a Single Sentence

One for each campaign:A group of weird rebels and one very ordinary guy dismantle the ruling government.Goblins discover crazy politics and necromancy, what happens next will warm your heart.Tourists getting intimate with the horrifying hidden truths of nature

Describe your whole Party Dynamic in a Sentence

The best bunch of weirdos and one stupid shady paladin.Loner rogue becomes Team Mom by sheer force of how much the other two hate each other.Bug Jesus and The Angriest Boy discover family in the form of lizards.

What Alignment do your characters lean towards?

I have a weird time choosing an alignment for characters cuz motivations change a lot for my nerds. Teeki was True Neutral but has become more Chaotic Good. Ves is Lawful Good I guess?? And Phai is a goddamn mess whose alignment has shifted at least thrice since his conception.

How do you tend to Take Notes (if you do)?

Badly! Next question.

Prefer Story/Plot Driven or No Plot/Character-Driven Campaigns?

I tend to prefer plot-driven, but I honestly think elements of both should be implemented in your narrative–occasionally giving breaks from the overarching plot to give the cast some time to dick around can give a breath of fresh air to roleplay.

Combat or Role Play?

Roleplay, of course. I actually used to think I hated D&D combat. It took a lot of great sessions to make me realize that the RP doesn’t stop for combat, and that’s when I started really getting into learning and enjoying mechanics elements.

Favorite D&D Monster/Creature?

Illithid. I would love to actually play as one someday.

Magic User or Fighter?

Magic is more engaging to me, personally, but I like both.

Preferred Weapon/Spell in D&D?

Tasha’s Hideous Laughter. In large part because of how it’s roleplayed in Critical Role tbh. I also have felt the high of Sneak Attack enough times to really love it now.

What was your Favorite Nat 20 Experience?

One time I rolled a Nat20 perception while we were on the road and it was literally just to find a coin on the ground. That might always be my favorite. 

[therowanblackwood]

“Am I cursed?” Because I am (I guess) sort of a professional Witch these days, I get this question from time to time. Because of the ubiquity of “white” (i.e., benevolent) witchcraft—and the efforts of modern Witches to clear the air—you might think that Witch paranoia was a thing of the past. However, my blog’s comments and email inbox tell a different story. Lots of people believe they may be under a curse or enchantment cast by a Witch. And they’d like to get to the bottom of it. I Googled it real quick to check up on the collective internet wisdom. Surprisingly, the answers to “How do I know if someone is doing witchcraft on me?” seem to fall into two categories: Witches aren’t real. Don’t be silly. Oh yes, there’s a great and evil curse upon you. Give me $500 and I’ll fix it. I feel like this topic deserves better. As Witches, we believe certain things are observably true—like, that magick gives us a degree of influence over the world. If you have the power to affect others through magick, then it’s only logical that other people have that power, too. And maybe sometimes they choose to exercise it. Maybe even on you. It’s certainly reasonable to want to know when you’re the subject of a magick spell, especially a negative or coercive one. If you don’t know about it, you can’t counter it. (At least, not specifically.) Pre-warned is pre-armed, as they say. It’s a legitimate question. It’s just not an easy one to answer. There is no psychic litmus test that will give you a result of “magick present/not present.” The best I can do is offer a list of signs that manipulative magick may be at work in your life. The last thing I want to do is incite witch hunts, so I’ll throw in one last word of caution. My answer to the question, “Am I cursed?” is usually “Probably not.” I could go into a lot of boring details about why that is, but it really comes down to the following three counter-hexing principles: Real magick is hard. Your own will is powerful. Nobody really cares enough to curse you (probably). Still, that’s no consolation if you really feel that you’re being peeped at by the evil eye. Here are some tell-tale signs that you may indeed be crossed, jinxed, hexed, spellbound, or bewitched: You have a lot of Witches as friends (or enemies). In certain locations and age groups, there may be dozens. The more magickal people you have in your social circle, the more the probability approaches certainty that someone has, at some time, done some kind of spell involving you. It’s not a big deal. You just accept it, the way you accept that someone’s probably talked trash about you at a party, or masturbated about you. Remember: Just because someone is a Witch (or claims to be) doesn’t mean they have the skill or motivation to influence you in a negative way. (See counter-hexing principles #1 and #3, above.) Also, the Witch who is adept enough to do harmful magick is also usually adept enough to know better. You’re on a string of bad luck that just won’t end. In Hoodoo, it’s referred to as being “crossed.” It’s not just about having a bad day—it’s one bad day after another. No matter what you do, nothing seems to be going your way. Underlying all the frustration is a nagging feeling that someone (or something) is out to get you. Traditional “uncrossing” rituals are designed to shake off the bad juju and get you back on your feet. Bad luck is not, in and of itself, a sign that you’re under a curse. It could just be that Fortuna is pissed at you at the moment. It could be a mundane group of events outside your control that are causing your current misery. It could also be that you’ve been sabotaging yourself—with or without outside help. Signs and synchronicity suggest that a curse is at work. Magickally charged bad luck can be difficult to distinguish from regular bad luck. But sometimes, little things happen that will clue you in. If you pay attention to these omens, you may receive clues about the nature of the spell and the direction it’s coming from. You see, while some cowardly Witch may be able to hex you without your knowledge, nothing is secret to the Universe. One observable fact is that truth, like the bubbles in champagne, always tries to reach the surface. Another observable fact is that Big Mama Universe has a mighty sense of humor about magick. Let’s say you get splashed by a speeding car on a rainy day. That’s just crappy luck. But if you get splashed by a speeding car with a license plate that contains your enemy’s initials, then your dog picks a voodoo-doll chew toy up from the wet curb and hands it to you, then you grab a magazine to dry off your boots and the first page you see has a mummy movie poster that says “CURSE!” in drippy letters…well, I wouldn’t rule it out. Your photos and personal stuff have gone missing. Negative spells often hinge on having access to the spell’s intended target (or their property). A photograph, a piece of jewelry, a bit of hair or clothing or bodily fluids—all of these are classic ingredients in spells both good and bad. But they are even more critical in enemy work, when the spell-caster needs to make absolutely certain their nasty magick sticks to the right target. The Witch may use these items to link a poppet or candle to the target. Alternatively, they may bury or hide spell components at the target’s home or workplace. If you catch someone trying to obtain your personal effects on the sly, then that person is either a klepto, a weird fetishist—or perhaps, a scheming sorcerer. There are areas of the South that are still steeped in Voodoo/Hoodoo. Some people there are reluctant to have their photo taken or leave their hair clippings at the barber shop, for fear that they may fall into the wrong hands. Do you have enemies with hex-casting skills? If your things have gone missing from your office desk—or worse yet, your gym bag—it might be time to get worried. You’re interacting with a person who does witchcraft all the time. Yes, it’s true. Some people use witchcraft every waking moment in order to get their way. Rather than candles and oils and whatnot, they use powerful personal energy—which is a lot more subtle. So subtle, in fact, that they do it right in front of you. The occult term is enthrallment. Non-occultists might describe it as charisma or persuasion. Enthrallers work their magick by either sapping you of your energy so that you feel bad, or infusing you with bursts of their own so that you feel good. (Sometimes both.) They are energy workers of a sort—though “serious” energy workers don’t like to give them that designation. Not all of them are Witches. Many become performers. Many become salespeople. Some enthrallers act like narcissistic or manipulative people, but they can also be quite pleasant. At least, until you realize you’ve been had. I bring them up because interacting with enthrallers can make you feel like you’ve been put under a spell. Psychically sensitive folks may even feel violated—like the enthraller has literally been inside your head or slimed you with their energy. Fortunately, unless the psychic manipulator is a true badass, their power is usually limited to their immediate presence. Once you leave, they will move on to the next target. You’re having thoughts, visions, and emotions that aren’t your own. I have to be soooooo careful with this one—because many of these same experiences are signs of mental illness. If your thoughts or visions are telling you to hurt people or yourself, please put the candles down and get some professional help. However, there are forms of magick (and empathy/telepathy) that can have strange mental effects. Sudden thoughts, unusual urges, intense feelings out of nowhere? If you’re normally a pretty level person, they can be a clue that someone is magickally messing with your head. It helps to take stock of your energy levels and emotions on a regular basis. That way, you’ll know when you’re off your baseline. Negative magick can leave you feeling physically drained and miserable. But so can a bunch of other, more mundane ailments. It’s best to rule out other causes before settling on psychic attack. You sense the presence of someone else’s magick. It’s the most obvious, but probably the most effective way to tell if you’re caught up in an active spell: You just feel it. Magickal energy has its own particular smell and taste. With a bit of experience, you can often tell when a foreign energy is swirling about. It could manifest as a feeling of being watched, or a sudden odor, or a nasty feeling hanging in the air. If you’re psychically skilled, you may even be able to see or feel who’s responsible in your mind’s eye and/or energetic body. Dreaming about a person can be a clue that their energy is tangled up with yours. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’ve cast a spell on you. Dreams can be triggered by anxiety, worry, attraction, or just random thoughts. But they can also be a cue from your psychic mind that someone is intruding on your headspace. There are all different ways that people work invasive or coercive magick. But they inevitably leave energetic snail trails back to their source. If you suspect foul play, try scanning your body for energetic cords and other attachments that shouldn’t be there. You can use divination or scrying to sniff out the origin of the disturbance. If all else fails, try doing a revealing spell and ask for the truth to come to light. Final thoughts on detecting magick As I’ve already pointed out, negative magick is extremely rare in real life. Although it’s not impossible that you’re dealing with a curse or hex, it is unlikely. Before you let fear or anger take over, calmly consider the answers to the following questions: Is there someone with a reason to cast a spell on me? Do they have the occult interest/ability to do so? And, is it actually affecting me? Make sure your assessment is motivated by information (the logical kind and the psychic kind), and not by paranoia or distrust. If you determine that you are being affected by someone else’s magick, you do have options. You have the ability to cut off intrusive energy and reclaim your power. Protection, reversal, and binding magick are all ways that Witches can counter aggressive spells. Each of these types of spells have subtlely different aims and results, so consider carefully what it is you want before retaliating. You can also take comfort in the knowledge that harmful magick brings negative consequences to the sender sooner or later.

[tipsycad147]

Spell detection 101: How to know if someone is using witchcraft on you

by Michelle Gruben

“Am I cursed?” Because I am (I guess) sort of a professional Witch these days, I get this question from time to time.  Because of the ubiquity of “white” (i.e., benevolent) witchcraft—and the efforts of modern Witches to clear the air—you might think that Witch paranoia was a thing of the past.

However, my blog’s comments and email inbox tell a different story. Lots of people believe they may be under a curse or enchantment cast by a Witch. And they’d like to get to the bottom of it.

I Googled it real quick to check up on the collective internet wisdom. Surprisingly, the answers to “How do I know if someone is doing witchcraft on me?” seem to fall into two categories:

Witches aren’t real. Don’t be silly.

Oh yes, there’s a great and evil curse upon you. Give me $500 and I’ll fix it.

I feel like this topic deserves better. As Witches, we believe certain things are observably true—like, that magick gives us a degree of influence over the world. If you have the power to affect others through magick, then it’s only logical that other people have that power, too. And maybe sometimes they choose to exercise it. Maybe even on you.

It’s certainly reasonable to want to know when you’re the subject of a magick spell, especially a negative or coercive one. If you don’t know about it, you can’t counter it. (At least, not specifically.) Pre-warned is pre-armed, as they say.

It’s a legitimate question. It’s just not an easy one to answer. There is no psychic litmus test that will give you a result of “magick present/not present.” The best I can do is offer a list of signs that manipulative magick may be at work in your life.

The last thing I want to do is incite witch hunts, so I’ll throw in one last word of caution.  My answer to the question, “Am I cursed?” is usually “Probably not.” I could go into a lot of boring details about why that is, but it really comes down to the following three counter-hexing principles:

Real magick is hard.

Your own will is powerful.

Nobody really cares enough to curse you (probably).

Still, that’s no consolation if you really feel that you’re being peeped at by the evil eye. Here are some tell-tale signs that you may indeed be crossed, jinxed, hexed, spellbound, or bewitched:

You have a lot of Witches as friends (or enemies).

In certain locations and age groups, there may be dozens. The more magickal people you have in your social circle, the more the probability approaches certainty that someone has, at some time, done some kind of spell involving you. It’s not a big deal. You just accept it, the way you accept that someone’s probably talked trash about you at a party, or masturbated about you.

Remember: Just because someone is a Witch (or claims to be) doesn’t mean they have the skill or motivation to influence you in a negative way. (See counter-hexing principles #1 and #3, above.) Also, the Witch who is adept enough to do harmful magick is also usually adept enough to know better.

You’re on a string of bad luck that just won’t end.

In Hoodoo, it’s referred to as being “crossed.” It’s not just about having a bad day—it’s one bad day after another. No matter what you do, nothing seems to be going your way. Underlying all the frustration is a nagging feeling that someone (or something) is out to get you. Traditional “uncrossing” rituals are designed to shake off the bad juju and get you back on your feet.

Bad luck is not, in and of itself, a sign that you’re under a curse. It could just be that Fortuna is pissed at you at the moment. It could be a mundane group of events outside your control that are causing your current misery. It could also be that you’ve been sabotaging yourself—with or without outside help.

Signs and synchronicity suggest that a curse is at work.

Magickally charged bad luck can be difficult to distinguish from regular bad luck. But sometimes, little things happen that will clue you in. If you pay attention to these omens, you may receive clues about the nature of the spell and the direction it’s coming from.

You see, while some cowardly Witch may be able to hex you without your knowledge, nothing is secret to the Universe. One observable fact is that truth, like the bubbles in champagne, always tries to reach the surface. Another observable fact is that Big Mama Universe has a mighty sense of humor about magick.

Let’s say you get splashed by a speeding car on a rainy day. That’s just crappy luck. But if you get splashed by a speeding car with a license plate that contains your enemy’s initials, then your dog picks a voodoo-doll chew toy up from the wet curb and hands it to you, then you grab a magazine to dry off your boots and the first page you see has a mummy movie poster that says “CURSE!” in drippy letters…well, I wouldn’t rule it out.

Your photos and personal stuff have gone missing.

Negative spells often hinge on having access to the spell’s intended target (or their property). A photograph, a piece of jewelry, a bit of hair or clothing or bodily fluids—all of these are classic ingredients in spells both good and bad. But they are even more critical in enemy work, when the spell-caster needs to make absolutely certain their nasty magick sticks to the right target. The Witch may use these items to link a poppet or candle to the target. Alternatively, they may bury or hide spell components at the target’s home or workplace.

If you catch someone trying to obtain your personal effects on the sly, then that person is either a klepto, a weird fetishist—or perhaps, a scheming sorcerer. There are areas of the South that are still steeped in Voodoo/Hoodoo. Some people there are reluctant to have their photo taken or leave their hair clippings at the barber shop, for fear that they may fall into the wrong hands.

Do you have enemies with hex-casting skills? If your things have gone missing from your office desk—or worse yet, your gym bag—it might be time to get worried.

You’re interacting with a person who does witchcraft all the time.

Yes, it’s true. Some people use witchcraft every waking moment in order to get their way. Rather than candles and oils and whatnot, they use powerful personal energy—which is a lot more subtle. So subtle, in fact, that they do it right in front of you. The occult term is enthrallment. Non-occultists might describe it as charisma or persuasion.

Enthrallers work their magick by either sapping you of your energy so that you feel bad, or infusing you with bursts of their own so that you feel good. (Sometimes both.) They are energy workers of a sort—though “serious” energy workers don’t like to give them that designation. Not all of them are Witches. Many become performers. Many become salespeople. Some enthrallers act like narcissistic or manipulative people, but they can also be quite pleasant. At least, until you realize you’ve been had.

I bring them up because interacting with enthrallers can make you feel like you’ve been put under a spell. Psychically sensitive folks may even feel violated—like the enthraller has literally been inside your head or slimed you with their energy. Fortunately, unless the psychic manipulator is a true badass, their power is usually limited to their immediate presence. Once you leave, they will move on to the next target.

You’re having thoughts, visions, and emotions that aren’t your own.

I have to be soooooo careful with this one—because many of these same experiences are signs of mental illness. If your thoughts or visions are telling you to hurt people or yourself, please put the candles down and get some professional help.

However, there are forms of magick (and empathy/telepathy) that can have strange mental effects. Sudden thoughts, unusual urges, intense feelings out of nowhere? If you’re normally a pretty level person, they can be a clue that someone is magickally messing with your head. It helps to take stock of your energy levels and emotions on a regular basis. That way, you’ll know when you’re off your baseline.

Negative magick can leave you feeling physically drained and miserable. But so can a bunch of other, more mundane ailments. It’s best to rule out other causes before settling on psychic attack.

You sense the presence of someone else’s magick.

It’s the most obvious, but probably the most effective way to tell if you’re caught up in an active spell: You just feel it. Magickal energy has its own particular smell and taste. With a bit of experience, you can often tell when a foreign energy is swirling about. It could manifest as a feeling of being watched, or a sudden odor, or a nasty feeling hanging in the air. If you’re psychically skilled, you may even be able to see or feel who’s responsible in your mind’s eye and/or energetic body.

Dreaming about a person can be a clue that their energy is tangled up with yours. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’ve cast a spell on you. Dreams can be triggered by anxiety, worry, attraction, or just random thoughts. But they can also be a cue from your psychic mind that someone is intruding on your headspace.

There are all different ways that people work invasive or coercive magick. But they inevitably leave energetic snail trails back to their source. If you suspect foul play, try scanning your body for energetic cords and other attachments that shouldn’t be there. You can use divination or scrying to sniff out the origin of the disturbance. If all else fails, try doing a revealing spell and ask for the truth to come to light.

Final thoughts on detecting magick

As I’ve already pointed out, negative magick is extremely rare in real life. Although it’s not impossible that you’re dealing with a curse or hex, it is unlikely.

Before you let fear or anger take over, calmly consider the answers to the following questions: Is there someone with a reason to cast a spell on me? Do they have the occult interest/ability to do so? And, is it actually affecting me? Make sure your assessment is motivated by information (the logical kind and the psychic kind), and not by paranoia or distrust.

If you determine that you are being affected by someone else’s magick, you do have options. You have the ability to cut off intrusive energy and reclaim your power. Protection, reversal, and binding magick are all ways that Witches can counter aggressive spells. Each of these types of spells have subtlely different aims and results, so consider carefully what it is you want before retaliating. You can also take comfort in the knowledge that harmful magick brings negative consequences to the sender sooner or later.

https://www.groveandgrotto.com/blogs/articles/spell-detection-101-how-to-know-if-someone-is-using-witchcraft-on-you