#finx has friends on the internet

[finxwrites]

strange & grimm, which btw sounds like an urban fantasy affectionately parodic hardboiled detective agency. probably queer.

It was a hot, muggy night in the Enchanted Forest. Everyone with a lick of sense was down in the fairy glens, hoping the Winter Court would put in an appearance and bring a breeze on with them. Lucky me, I’m the sucker who fingered the Snow Queen for the missing persons case last winter, so I’m persona non grata in the fairy glens these days.

Just as well. I couldn’t afford to leave the office, not when it’d been so long since my last case. Though on a night like this, I might as well not bother. It was too hot for crime. Even the leaves on the enchanted trees were drooping in the heat. 

I was just about to call it a night when a dame walked in my door. Tall, blonde, legs for days, with an air of tragedy that could put an unloved stepchild to shame. I looked her over suspiciously for any cheery woodland creatures hidden in her golden ringlets. If she was a princess, I’d turf her right back out of the office, case unheard. Princesses paid well, but they were more trouble than they were worth.

No mice poked their adorable little noses out of her pockets as the dame sank into a chair and fixed me with a hard look. “I hear you’re the best in the business,” she said without preamble. “And I need the best.”

I leaned back in my seat. “Baby, I’m the only one in the business. It’s not a good genre for private dicks.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, yes, far too child-friendly for any sort of dicks.” Before I could recover from that little gem, she went on, “It’s a child I’m here about. My sister. She’s…she’s gone missing.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Please, Detective, you’re my last hope. The royal courts won’t hear me out, they think she’s gone on the lam!”

I nodded grimly. “One of those Bo Peep situations, huh?” I get a depressing number of those. All it takes is one wolf in sheep’s clothing—you’d think the kids would learn.

The dame glared. There was enough cold iron in her gaze to put a fairy off her ambrosia. “On the lam, Detective. On the run. My sister has…something of a record.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Your sister the child? She some kind of crime prodigy?”

The dame fidgeted, looking away. “She’s…” She sighed explosively. “My sister is Goldilocks.”

I whistled, low and long. Crime prodigy indeed—Goldilocks was wanted in five kingdoms for the most impressive string of burglaries the Enchanted Forest had ever seen. No one could ever prove she’d done it, but the circumstantial evidence had piled up higher than mattresses on a pea. No wonder no royal court would take this case.

The dame’s shoulders hunched defensively, but she bulled on without trying to defend her wayward sister. “She’s gone missing, and I know it’s not another one of her sprees. Something is wrong this time.” She turned back to meet my eyes, her lovely features harsh with poorly-suppressed fear. “It’s her first crime come back to haunt her, I just know it is. They’ve always wanted revenge—especially the baby of the family, and he’s all grown up now. What they’d do if they got hold of her—“ She cut herself off with a watery gasp; her eyes were wet with tears. “Oh, it doesn’t bear thinking about!”

I handed her a handkerchief and gave her a minute to compose herself. It gave me a minute, too, to decide if I was really going to be this stupid. You don’t tangle with the big predators, not if you know what’s good for you, and especially not a whole family of them. Families are a dangerous thing in any genre.

But I was her last hope, and I’m a sucker for lost causes. And if I didn’t get paid soon, this business would become a lost cause itself. I said a silent farewell to my good sense as it packed its bags and left for kinder climes. “Alright,” I told the dame, “Give me the facts. We’ll see what kind of a story they tell.”

[aethersea]

necromancy is that cheap compared to arrows bc the god of death is at your campsite doing it for a nominal fee bc unbeknownst to you your party is posed to knock some gods he feels have gotten too big for their britches down a peg.

that is extremely funny thank you. I was going to do a whole song and dance tearing my hair out over how the GOD OF DEATH is just AT YOUR CAMPSITE handing out FREE DO-OVERS, but then I remembered my friend describing the game she DMs where one of the npcs they keep running into, who was even a party member for a little while, is actually an old god who's waiting for the party to grow strong enough so they can smack some sense into his kids. so this checks out, really, perfect dnd experience.

[aethersea]

you just reblogged one of my endless orv reblogs with 'to watch maybe' so I had to infodump a bit

orv is Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint, an excellent korean webnovel. it is LONG. The novel proper has been finished for years, but the side stories are still ongoing (it's more like a sequel at this point). Lightnovelworld.com has a decent translation, and an official english translation is announced but not out yet.

there is a webtoon adaptation from which the pictures are from. It started good and is getting better and prettier all the time, which is great. But since ORV is LONG it won't finish for years and years, which is sad.

It's going to be adapted into five movies, the first of which will be out next year. There has been talk of an animated adaptation as well, but I couldn't find official confirmation anywhere.

The basic premise is that the book our main character was reading comes to life, and he is determined to direct it to a better ending than canon. That book was an apocalyptic fantasy novel.

Orv has incredible worldbuilding and an amazing cast, all with their vivid personalities and time to shine. It has heavy focus on close platonic relationships.

It is incredibly layered, and some of those layers won't reveal themselves until you've finished it. It is also incredibly meta. The relationship between a reader and the stories they love is a core theme.

One of the reasons I'm insane about orv is this: This is a book that loves it's readers. It takes you gently by the hand and tells you that you matter, that you're worth everything. That to be a reader is something amazing, and this author and this world love you.

oh man that does in fact sound absolutely baller. I've seen it around on my dash enough that I'd picked up bits and pieces of all this, but I hadn't actually seen any explanations anywhere, just vibes and character art. thanks for the rundown, this sounds so cool!

[aethersea]

trick or treat!

so there's this remote village, right, and they want to dam the river that runs down the mountain so they can have a steady source of water for irrigation. but because the village is so remote, and halfway up a steep mountain to boot, it's really hard to get supplies in, and harder still to do construction at the point where it would be best to have the dam, and the village doesn't really have the funds to overcome these problems. so the city council and all the village's best engineering minds have been debating this a while, but they're going in circles arguing about it.

now as you know, reclusive authors are always looking for remote mountain villages and the like in which to dwell away from the cloying closeness of the world. and this village has once such author, who overhears these debates one day, listens to all the arguing, and says, "leave it to me."

the author hikes up to the optimal spot for the dam. it's a bit of a trek, but you don't move to a remote mountain village if you don't enjoy long walks over difficult terrain. the author finds a good vantage point, and then just looks out at the river. looks up the river, looks down the river, gazes upon the flowing churn of water, eyes the sloping banks, contemplates the glitter of sun upon the stream.

the author proclaims, loud in the mountain air, "it's a nice enough river, I guess."

when the author returns to town, the townspeople mob them. "what did you do? how did you stop the river? what happened up there??"

the author responds simply, "I dammed it with faint praise."

[aethersea]

What is thistle?? :0

it looks from your reblogs like you've already found out, but it's a show that doesn't exist! it came to @magpiecrown in a dream and now we're goncharoving this thing. feel free to join in! the more the merrier!

[aethersea]

Trick or Treat!

THAT IS SO CUTE oh my goodness I LOVE your costume, what a little angel! oh I just want to pinch your cheek, you've turned me into a cheery old grandmother!

and since I happen to know you've turned in for the night, here is a lullaby to sing you to sleep

[aethersea]

📚 [sorry I didn't know what book to go with so I picked many haha]

You send multiple books, you get multiple fics! Kinda. See, I really want to read the stories that the people of Gotham come up with about their resident vigilante cryptids—rumors, urban legends, wattpad rpf with dubious content warnings, all of it. I have a whole list of increasingly insane theories about what the batfam’s whole deal even is, but I never got any further than writing the frame story for one of them.

Some highlights from the list include:

Batman is a warlock and Robin is a demon bound to serve him. When ten years are up, Robin gets Batman’s soul.

Batman and Robin live in the sewers and can pop up anywhere in Gotham via manhole covers. They’re always fighting Killer Croc for real estate.

Obligatory vampire theory! Batman is a vampire and Robin is the person he feeds from. If Robin dies, Batman will go into a frenzy of bloodlust and drain half the city dry.

Robin is a trickster spirit who helps Batman out because it’s fun, and because the Joker’s bad sense of humor pisses him off. Batman has to keep him constantly entertained or he’ll run off and join the Riddler.

Cass (in her terrifying void-black costume) is the vengeful shade of the previous Batgirl, who finally clawed her way back from the afterlife and is here to take no prisoners.

Vampire theory v2: This Time With Duke! Everyone’s a creature of night and darkness except Signal, who is the sun incarnate. STRONG teen paranormal romance vibes, heavy-handed metaphors of self-destructive love or something, definitely involves shipping Signal with one or more batkids.

Batman is a professional comedian who got sick of Joker’s bad clowning. Things got out of hand.

Batman & Robin aren’t real. Criminals are making them up. 

One of my favorites, though, is the theory that Robin is the ghost of a murdered child, who wants revenge for his murder but, in the meantime, is willing to help Batman make sure no more children end up like him. This would be a story written by one of Dick’s classmates, maybe for English class. Dick reads it and it’s a whole emotional roller coaster ride, especially the scene where Robin’s ghost looks in on his living parents, as he does often to make sure they’re safe, and wishes more than anything that he could hold them and be held by them just one more time.

[aethersea]

@solarnexas it's always ok to tag me & show me cool things, thank you! and you're absolutely right, I do absolutely love Goncharov

The Muppets as Goncharov (1973)

the only goncharov remake I want is a muppets version

[Image description: Gifs of the muppets with edited captions.

1 - Kermit, wearing a suit, says, "Yes, I am Goncharov."

2 - Several ticking clocks on a wall

3 - Miss Piggy and Kermit kiss, while Miss Piggy says, "Of course, we're in love; that's why I tried to shoot you."]

[aethersea]

Trick or treat.

[aethersea]

📓!

There’s an atla au of star wars that I have tried so hard to bend into a shape that I can actually write, but alas, all I have are ideas. This is the one that’s in the wips folder as Everything Changed when the Clones Attacked, which is ironic bc I cannot for the life of me figure out what to do with the clones. Maybe they’re being brainwashed at Lake Laogai? Or something???

Anyway. The story has two parts, prequels and sequels. Details under the cut, because this got a bit long.

In the prequels, the elderly Master Yoda of the airbenders is Avatar, and in his old age he’s stopped traveling the world and instead dispenses his wisdom from one of the great Air Nomad temples, nestled deep in the mountains where only Air Nomads can reach. He’s unofficial leader of the council of Air Nomad elders, which is….not great, really, not how things should be, but it’s mostly been okay. He’s been a good avatar overall, and it’s only in later years that he’s leaned so heavily toward the Air Nomads, and really none of this is enough to push the four peoples truly out of balance. 

Our story starts with Qui-gon Jinn, an airbending master traveling with his apprentice, helping a besieged queen from a minor Earth Kingdom escape her city. (I saw a post once asserting that the Earth Kingdom is actually a collection of largely autonomous kingdoms that all loosely recognize the authority of the Earth King in Ba Sing Se, and I like that a lot, so that’s the worldbuilding I’m going with here.) Qui-gon agrees to take Queen Amidala to the Avatar’s council to beg their aid. 

Along the way, they encounter a young boy living with his mother. The boy can do a bit of earthbending—and also a bit of waterbending, and a bit of airbending, and a bit of firebending. Which is impossible, because Avatar Yoda isn’t dead, but there he is, bending all the elements anyway.

I don’t think there’s slavery in the atla universe, but we could probably get away with indentured servitude of some kind, and Qui-gon acquires Ani in much the same way as he does in canon. He takes him to Avatar Yoda—and Yoda rejects him. Says, essentially, “This is weird as hell but it’s also not my problem.” (Frankly I can’t come up with an actual good reason for Yoda to do that, but just go with me here.) So Qui-gon angrily responds that if the Avatar won’t take responsibility, he will, and then gets himself enmeshed in Amidala’s political problems to boot. 

And then he dies.

Something something evil emperor, yadda yadda you know the drill. (Though I think the empire isn’t going to be the Fire Nation, despite the thematic appropriateness of fire spreading unchecked to consume all in its path. Palpatine is gonna usurp the Earth King, I think, and I do feel the prequels’ themes around entrenched systems with deep flaws, which are too big to fight as individuals and too implacable to change, will fit well with atla themes around earth.)

The sequels portion of things is even less plotted out. All I know is that Luke grows up in the same nameless patch of Earth territory his father grew up in, and he doesn’t actually discover he can waterbend until he’s practically an adult. It’s a shock to everyone—except, somehow, weird Old Ben who lives in the desert, who tells him that the next Avatar is supposed to be a waterbender, and won’t explain why he’s so convinced Luke is that Avatar given that he’s pretty emphatically not from the Water Tribes. 

Luke is finally convinced when he manages to airbend, under Old Ben’s suspiciously skilled tutelage. He can’t pull off any other elements, though, so they go off on a road trip to that swamp where you see spirits, to try to reach the past Avatars and get some guidance.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to both of them, Leia has grown up knowing she can firebend. This is kind of an alarming skill for the princess of an Earth Kingdom to have, and even more alarming given that she’s already an earthbender. So she’s kept it secret, and no one but her parents has ever known.

They can meet in some way analogous to the Death Star raid in A New Hope, idk I have zero plot in mind here. The point, as far as I’m concerned, is that the Skywalkers have fundamentally broken the Avatar cycle. Anakin shouldn’t exist, and yet he does, and he was born while Yoda was still alive. If he hadn’t existed, the next Avatar would be a waterbender, and that’s Luke—except he’s from the Earth Kingdom. If Anakin is a true Avatar, then the next one would be an earthbender, and that’s Leia—only then she shouldn’t have been born until after Anakin’s death. Nothing makes sense! Even Yoda and all the other past Avatars together have no goddamn clue what is going on!

Imagine their consternation when they discover that neither Luke nor Leia is the Avatar: it’s actually both of them together. Luke has air and water, Leia has earth and fire; Luke can visit the spirit world and be the bridge between humans and spirits, and Leia can speak to kings and maintain the balance between the four nations. The two of them, together, can defeat their father, defeat the emperor, and restore harmony to the world.

[aethersea]

Hello! I am really enjoying your Thistle the Show analysis posts, there are some really interesting ideas in that show! (and also from a goncharov-ing a story perspective they are so much fun to read)

eyy I'm so glad! I love that show, I love the heavy atmosphere and the overwrought symbolism and the 'power of the land' magic that's never fully explained and the tragedy of it all, god this show is so good at tragedy for something that does technically earn a happy ending. if KILLING OFF YOUR EPONYMOUS PROTAGONIST can count as a happy ending, god, I never recovered, even if he did come back to life afterward that still just MURDERED me.

it's so thematically satisfying is the thing T.T he dies and I'm just sitting there like....the themes......we're breaking the cycles of trauma and vengeance.......

[aethersea]

Vetinari is in Danger (When isn't he). His usual pawns are all preoccupied. Carrot meets The Tourist. The Threat can be anything you'd like, but Rincewind Must be involved. As the threat, punching bag or solution. The luggage gets to take a spa day.

I deeply appreciate the prompt when I was so in need of one, anon, but alas, I don't know how to write for the discworld, and I just don't have the creative energy today to figure it out. I wish I did, because this ask has put the image in my head of Vetinari and the Luggage chilling together at the spa while Vimes goes spare hunting down whatever nefarious entity kidnapped Vetinari to the Spa Dimension, and that's such a powerful image that it makes me wish I were an artist so I could render it.

[aethersea]

Ok so (according to good ol' Bram) there's a superstition that on certain nights, at certain times, blue flames spring up over sites of buried treasure. Dracula's all chill, driving Jonathan back to the castle taking and simultaneously taking the pups for a run (even wolves need enrichment) and suddenly there's a popup window that says $$CONGRATULATIONS! YOU'RE A WINNER! CLICK HERE TO CLAIM YOUR PRIZE!!$$$ so he marks the spots to dig them up later when he's not cosplaying as a carriage driver.

ok that is phenomenally funny, thank you so much for this information

[aethersea]

📓

I definitely played myself here, bc this post spat out when I was in fact too busy to answer asks :P but! I have some time today, so here we go!

So Leverage ot3, right, and it starts with Eliot. Eliot Spencer is a soldier, he’s one of the best soldiers out there, and one day he does what soldiers so often do: he dies. And death, he finds, is a strange country. He wanders the eerie disjointed landscapes of the afterlife, searching for…something. The truth of this place, maybe. 

What he finds is a man in a cage. The cage is of a metal as black as a starless void, and so cold that even Eliot's dead hands ache to touch it. The man, by contrast, is warm, his dark brown skin so flushed with life that it draws Eliot nearer like a moth to flame.

The man is asleep, or seems to be, though he stirs as Eliot nears. He’s wearing a strange draping garment of deep green, so vibrant a green that it seems wrong, alien, in this shadowed place, but the warmth of that green is nothing compared to the warmth of his face, even as it pinches and frowns with waking. He blinks open dark eyes, and they’re warmer still, like the sunshine Eliot knows he will never see again.

He sees Eliot, standing there at the bars of the cage, half reaching for him without having consciously chosen to. He smiles. Eliot’s dead heart squeezes in his chest.

The man coaxes Eliot into conversation with such casual good humor that it takes Eliot several minutes to realize he has no idea what’s going on. But although the man answers his questions willingly enough, it doesn’t really clear anything up. “Who are you?” gets him a name, though not one he recognizes; “Why are you here?” gets a sigh and a rueful, “Communication issues.” The man refuses to elaborate, claiming it’s not entirely his business to say.

Eliot is charmed in spite of himself. Charmed enough that, against his better judgment, he helps the man escape.

So yeah this is a Hades & Persephone au, where the goddess of Death can’t explain to anyone, much less herself, why she keeps kidnapping the god of Spring, who’s surprisingly good-humored about the whole thing. Eliot is just a random shade who gets dragged into their bizarre courtship, and somehow all three of them fall in love. At the end, when Hardison has eaten six pomegranate seeds and bound himself to half the year in sunlight and half in the dark, Eliot goes back and forth between them in the six months of summer, carrying messages and helping them weather the time apart.

[aethersea]

faerie court of the old school kind!

A fae being stands before you.

“Every day you will receive one thousand dollars in your bank account. But every time you lift a glass to your lips to take a drink, you will hit your front teeth on the first try. Every. Time. Do you accept this deal?”

[aethersea]

hey, what about conman in a bottle? <3

wip wednesday game

Elizabeth Burke, née Mitchell, was from a minor branch of one of the oldest families in the kingdom. Her marriage to a merchant’s third son had been something of a small scandal, but even when he’d had nothing to offer her but promises, she’d never hesitated in her choice. 

So Neal liked to believe, anyway. By the time he’d had reason to look into the Burkes, Peter had already been a rising star of the [magic crimes division], and everyone agreed that Lady Elizabeth had been either very shrewd or very lucky.