#for reference i didn't even know those existed until recently

[itsjustpoopeh]

i just saw my lights flicker aht aht AHT don’t you do it alabama power DON’T YOU TRY ME RIGHT NOW

[mask131]

The missing Arthurian knight - rediscovered in 2019

Well the title is a slight lie - the missing knight wasn't rediscovered in 2019, it was earlier than that, but he didn't became public until 2019.

So what's this "missing knight" about? Well as the title says. There was a knight part of the Arthurian myth, and he had been missing ever since the Middle-Ages, and he was only recently rediscovered.

Or rather, to be exact - there was an Arthurian novel centered around a knight that existed and was a famous and well-known part of the Arthurian literature in the Middle-Ages, but that completely disappeared, and was forgotten by culture (as much popular culture as the scholarly one). Until very recently.

This rediscovered novel has been a hot topic of all Arthuriana fans in Europe for a few years now - and yet I do not see much talk about this onto this website, despite Tumblr being a big place for Arthurian fans?

So I will correct this by doing a series of posts about the subject. And this post will be the first one, the introduction post presenting to you "Ségurant, le chevalier au dragon" ; "Segurant, the knight of the dragon". A French medieval novel part of the Arthurian literature (hence the "chevalier au X" title structure - like Lancelot, the knight of the cart or Yvain the knight of the lion from Chrétien de Troyes), the reason this story was forgotten by all medievalist and literary scholars is - long story short - because it never existed in any full manuscript (at least none that survived to this day). It was a complete story yes, with even variations apparently, but that was cut into pieces and fragments inserted into various other manuscripts and texts (most notably various "Merlin's Prophecies").

The novel and the Knight of the Dragon were rediscovered through the work of Emanuele Arioli, who rediscovered a fragment of the story while looking at an old manuscript of a Merlin Prophecies, and then went on the hunt for the other fragments and pieces scattered around Europe, until he finally could compile the full story, that he then published in 2019, at the Belles Lettres publishing house, in 2019.

Arioli reconstructed the text, and translated it in both modern French and Italian for scholarly and professional editions (aka Honoré Champion in France, a reference for universities)...

... But also for a more "all public, found in all libraries" edition - the famous 2019 edition at Les Belles Lettres.

And not only that, but he also participated to both a comic book adaptation with Emiliano Tanzillo...

... and an adaptation as an illustrated children novel!

Finally, just a few weeks, the Franco-German channel Arte released a documentary about the reconstitution and content of this missing novel called "Le Chevalier au dragon: Le roman disparu de la Table Ronde". (The Knight of the Dragon - The missing novel of the Round Table). The full documentary is on Youtube in French for those that speak the language, here. And in German here for those who speak German.

Unfortunately there is no English version of the documentary that I know of, nor any English publications of the actual text - just French and Italian. But hey, I'll try to palliate to that by doing some English-speaking posts about this whole business!

[rimouskis]

could you explain more about what you view as the before era and what you view as the after? i need to learn my herstory

I think this requires a more detailed and educated/researched answer than I can give after an exhausting workday and an after-hours work event, but I'm going to do my best and also open up the floor in reblogs for people to chip in their thoughts

foremost: a DISCLAIMER that this post does not aim to shit on writers from the "before" era. there are many classic fics that I love and enjoy, even if I consider their characterizations to be "less accurate"* than the ones we have in the after era.

*aside to say: accuracy is based only off of literal media accounts we have of these men; we do not know them, we should not claim to know them, and they have had different comfort levels with the media knowing selective truths about their lives [sid out of choice, geno out of media xenophobia] than they did when these early fics were being written.

"before" fics (which I tend to refer to as "classic" fics, and had their heyday in 2012-2013 but continued up until 2016ish) tended to have more regimented roles for sid and geno. sid was usually the protagonist; geno was the love interest.

this came with a cascading set of characteristics assigned to each guy. sid was poor-little-meow-meow'd. geno was the pursuer in the relationship. sid usually bottomed. sid had the whole spacetoaster moment (he was the inspiration for the term, haha). there wasn't much a/b/o fic but sid was, like, the omega-fied one and geno was alpha-ized.

something I've been thinking about more recently is how 2012-2013 era sidgeno displayed signs of Migratory Slash Fandom. I don't think of MSF as an inherently negative/condemning thing, but I think it's a phenomenon that deserves to be mentioned/analyzed, yeah?

MSF thrives on big character differences.... like, grumpy/sunshine, sarcastic/broody, genius/empath. it's all about emphasizing disparate archetypes to create natural tension in a story. this works really well in most romance novels! I love it!

the issues arise when people try to make characters fit into these preset dynamics. and, frankly, when sidgeno first got big, we straight-up didn't know as much about sid and geno. I mean that. despite sid being EXTENSIVELY covered by media from age, like, 14, he was really tight-lipped compared to what we have now.

and geno was.... there. I don't mean that as a diss—he was INCREDIBLE, but the media totally passed him over again and again. or they helped contribute to stereotypes of him being a dumb oaf who didn't know english.

aside: ironically I think that helped in creating sidgeno and not, like.... sidflower or sidtanger. geno was so "DIFFERENT" from sid (aka: russian, characterized by media as not knowing how to speak [in comparison to sid's highly curated media soundbites]) that it meant he was the best candidate for A Ship with sid.

a lot of the really big writers who got into sidgeno were fandom veterans with lots of experience in other big fandoms. to me, that means MSF had a hand in all this. and we should be grateful, because it led to the BOOM of hockey fic, and of sidgeno fic specifically. modern hrpf wouldn't exist without it.

that being said, those template ship dynamics, plus the media's attitude then towards sid and geno in its coverage, led to those characterizations of whiny soft sensitive boy sid who needed to be rescued even though he was the best hockey player EVER, and geno as the lumbering tall strong alpha not-that-bright Love Interest Man.

this isn't to say every fic was this way, or that this is BAD. I, uh, love poor-little-meow-meow-ing sid and omegafying the hell out of him. what I'm saying is that it was a near-ubiquitous characterization across the board.

that all changed in 2016-2018. I personally wholly credit sevenfists, though I imagine it's more nuanced than that, but: my blog, I make the rules here. I don't know if sevenfists was psychic or just highly observant and absolutely excellent at reading people (and that's basically the same thing, right?), but characterization shifts began taking place in fic....

and the coolest thing happened, in that those characterizations were seemingly reinforced by more media coverage. the back to back cups brought with them TONS of interviews with and media about the team, and sid and geno in particular. the coolest part of it was that sid had loosened up a LOT and geno had gotten more comfortable (and had gotten a reporter firmly on his side).

the interviews about sid post 2016 were just SO different. so much information started coming out, and a LOT of it conflicted with Ye Olde Characterizations. as it turned out, sid was deeply one of the boys. he was funny. everyone liked him. he loved hosting. he was insanely comfortable around almost everyone, including strangers, because he's a little freak who's kind to everyone. he can make smalltalk like no one's business. he's kind of gross. he likes to giggle and be in on jokes and get into the thick of it. he isn't some blushing virgin bride sold off of mario's doorstep, yeah?

and geno, too, was finally getting the coverage he deserved. and his personality was both fortified by age and better shown to us through media. as it turns out, he isn't some happy go lucky oaf. he's mercurial and intensely aware of what others think of him (and he CARES). he's sensitive and thoughtful but also can lash out at random times. he has a wicked sense of humor that he uses as a defense mechanism and as a surefire way to get people to like him, which matters to him. and, as everyone says, he is SMART.

if you had to boil it down, I'd say that post-2016, it became clear that SID is the confident one and GENO is the insecure one. and fic caught onto that with a miraculously fast pace. also: they're more alike than they are different, but I still think romance inherently feeds off of difference and tension, so we still exaggerate things to make the stories ✨WORK✨.

I'm not going to give examples of pre- and post- era fics, because I don't want to point any fingers and say someone was doing characterization "wrong." that's not the takeaway I want anyone to have here.

fandom attitudes have changed. it's been 10 years since that first wave of fics, and while I don't think that's very long, it's a hell of a long time on the internet, and in a niche internet community. what was once the standard for fics (and what was well-read, and what people gravitated towards) was different. not worse—different.

I think it's fair to say the "after" era of fics is more "accurate" to what we know of sid and geno. it's also fair to say that this is only the case because we have a WEALTH of information, character-revealing interviews and videos and anecdotes, that Ye Old Authors could only dream of getting.

I really love the story of how everything has changed, and it's a fabulous microcosm of fandom evolution and how approaches to fanworks have changed and grown with fandom, and I think it's all so so cool.

[project-sekai-facts]

hello! i’m planning to make a video essay on the problems with ENsekai. i obviously have some bigger ones already, (typos, translations, etc) but i was wondering if you or anyone else in the community had some ideas of smaller bugs/problems within the game that i could touch on!

hi, sorry this response is a bit late, hope it's still okay

Here's some stuff I can think of:

There's been multiple instances of area conversations being fucked up, either them implementing straight up untranslated content which happened quite recently with a niigo Len area conversation, or just leaving it blank altogether which happened with a conversation unlocked from the current event. usually this happens with niigo for some reason.

the ads straight up don't work on some devices. i had to get a new phone recently and they work fine on it now but my old one literally couldn't handle them. it broke the UI entirely and force crashed if i tried to watch two in a row.

For some reason they sometimes do the reruns late or early. It's not really much of an issue (aside from when they reran Evillious like 3 months early), it's just a weird oddity. Like the spojoy rerun should've started a week ago and it still isn't here

The May mystery song. Got pushed back to June, pretty sure they put a tweet out about the delay but it's gone now if it did exist. Didn't release in June either with no word on it. July stream didn't even happen so god knows what's going on with it now

They keep having bugs that aren't present on JP. Falsely banning players, that thing the other day where it locked challenge lives. There's a lot more if you go through the backlog of issues.

Also they had to delay Awake Now due to "technical difficulties" when BFBY ran on EN. Not sure what those issues were.

Inconsistent song names

Using the wiki as a reference/for placeholder translations. I think they might've stopped it as of this event? But still it went on for 4 months lmao.

Okay the next ones aren't really to do with the game, moreso, the management

They were ridiculously behind on 4komas until like. Yesterday. This might be linked to staff layoffs, I know some of their social team got cut. Also just after that happened they opened applications for discord mod volunteers. Lol.

The absolutely disastrous contests. Mainly the halloween one.

For starters the halloween fanart contest was only open to players in america, canada and britain, despite being for the "global server', but also: they gave third place and promoted the account of someone who creates nsfw of the IP. Funnily enough, this was not against the rules. But, it's still a questionable decision, like this person was openly an nsfw account, and they're giving them promotion on the official twitter for an all ages game. Oh well, what can you do, they were fully within their rights on both sides.

Also p sure the cosplay contest is the only one to date that's actually been open for worldwide entries. South America keeps getting excluded.

Remember when the twitter mod made fun of the game's translations? Actually embarrassing tbh.

[alphynix]

Crystal Palace Field Trip Part 3: Walking With Victorian Beasts

[Previously: the Jurassic and Cretaceous]

The final section of the Crystal Palace Dinosaur trail brings us to the Cenozoic, and a selection of ancient mammals.

Image from 2009 by Loz Pycock (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Originally represented by three statues, there are two surviving originals of the Eocene-aged palaeotheres depicting Plagiolophus minor (the smaller sitting one) and Palaeotherium medium (the larger standing one).

The sitting palaeothere unfortunately lost its head sometime in the late 20th century, and the image above shows it with a modern fiberglass replacement. Then around 2014/2015 the new head was knocked off again, and has not yet been reattached – partly due to a recent discovery that it wasn't actually accurate to the sculpture's original design. Instead there are plans to eventually restore it with a much more faithful head.

These early odd-toed ungulates were already known from near-complete skeletons in the 1850s, and are depicted here as tapir-like animals with short trunks based on the scientific opinion of the time. We now think their heads would have looked more horse-like, without trunks, but otherwise they're not too far off modern reconstructions.

There was also something exciting nearby:

The recently-recreated Palaeotherium magnum!

This sculpture went missing sometime after the 1950s, and its existence was almost completely forgotten until archive images of it were discovered a few years ago. Funds were raised to create a replica as accurate to the original as possible, and in summer 2023 (just a month before the date of my visit) this larger palaeothere species finally rejoined its companions in the park.

Compared to the other palaeotheres this one is weird, though. Much chonkier, wrinkly, and with big eyes and an almost cartoonish tubular trunk. It seems to have taken a lot of anatomical inspiration from animals like rhinos and elephants, since in the mid-1800s odd-toed ungulates were grouped together with "pachyderms".

———

Next is Anoplotherium, an Eocene even-toed ungulate distantly related to modern camels.

(Apparently the sculpture closest to the water is a replica of a now-lost original, recreated from photo references in the same manner as the new Palaeotherium magnum. I can't find a definite reference for when this one was done, though – I'd guess probably during the last round of major renovations in the early 2000s, at the same time as the now-destroyed Jurassic pterosaur replicas?)

Anoplotherium commune is a rather obscure species today, but it was one of the first early Cenozoic fossil mammals to be recognized by science in the early 1800s. Depicted here as small camel-like animals, the three statues are positioned near the water's edge to reflect the Victorian idea that they were semi-aquatic based on their muscular tails.

Today we instead think these animals were fully terrestrial, using their tails to balance themselves while rearing up to reach higher vegetation. Their heads would also have looked a bit less camel-like, but otherwise the Crystal Palace trio are still really good representations.

———

Next is a sculpture that's very easy to miss in the current overgrown state.

Who's that peeking over the bushes?

Going all the way around to the far side of the lake reveals a distant glimpse of the Pliocene-to-Holocene giant ground sloth Megatherium.

A better view of the Megatherium | "Tree Hugger" by Colin Smith (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Fossils of Megatherium americanum had been known since the late 1700s, but the 1854 Crystal Palace statue was still one of the first life reconstructions of this animal. Its anatomy is actually very close to our modern understanding, depicted with correctly inward-turned feet and sitting upright to feed on a tree with its tail acting as a "tripod".

However, we now know it didn't have a trunk-like nose, but instead probably had prehensile lips more like those of a modern black rhino.

Something weird also appears to have happened to the Crystal Palace Megatherium's hands. Early illustrations of the sculpture all consistently show it with the typical long claws of a sloth, but today it's missing its right hand and its left has only a strangely stumpy paw – suggesting that at some point in the intervening 170 years there was an unrecorded crude repair.

———

And finally we end the trail with three Megaloceros, the Pleistocene-to-Holocene "Irish Elk" that's actually neither exclusively Irish nor an elk.

A closer look at the second stag and the doe.

There was originally a fourth giant deer sculpture in this herd, a second resting doe, but it was destroyed sometime during the mid-20th century. The stags also initially had real fossil antlers attached to their heads, but these were removed and replaced with less accurate versions at some point by the mid-20th century.

One of the stags' antlers suffered some damage in 2020, ending up drooping, and since then one antler has either fallen off or been removed.

In the 1850s Megaloceros giganteus was thought to be closely related to deer in the genus Cervus, and so the Crystal Palace reconstructions seem to be based on modern wapiti – specifically in their winter coats, fitting for ice age animals – since both the stags and the doe sport distinctive thick neck manes.

The stags from the other side.

We now know Megaloceros was actually much more closely related to modern fallow deer, and so probably resembled them more than wapiti. Cave art also shows that it had a hump on its shoulders, and even gives us an idea of what its coloration was.

———

…But wait!

There's actually one more thing.

A small statue sitting on the far side of the deer herd, missing its ears, and seemingly representing a Megaloceros fawn.

Except it's actually something very different and very special.

Ceci n'est pas un cerf.

Some recent investigation work revealed some surprising information about the Crystal Palace mammal statues – much like the nearly-forgotten large Palaeotherium, there was originally an entire group of four small Eocene-aged llama-like Xiphodon gracilis that had disappeared from living memory.

There was also no historic record of a fawn with the giant deer, but instead a suspiciously similar-looking sitting sculpture is illustrated among what we now known are the four missing Xiphodon in early records.

An 1853 illustration of the sculpture workshop. The four Xiphodon are shown in the center, directly in front of a Megaloceros stag and doe. (public domain)

Somewhere in the late 19th or early 20th century three of the Xiphodon must have been completely lost, and the remaining individual was misidentified as a fawn and placed with the giant deer herd.

———

Rediscovering a whole extra species among the Crystal Palace statues is exciting, but it also demonstrates just how much of these sculptures' history has gone completely undocumented. 

The mammal statues especially seem to have suffered the most out of the "Dinosaur Court", being often overlooked, neglected, disrespected (at one point the Megatherium was inside a goat pen in a petting zoo!), and subjected to cruder repairs. A total of five original statues are now known to be missing from this Cenozoic section – the original large Palaeotherium, the three other Xiphodon, and the second Megaloceros doe – compared to the two pterosaurs lost from the Mesozoic island.

Hopefully the excellent recreation of the lost Palaeotherium magnum is the start of a long overdue new lease of life and conservation attention for all of the Crystal Palace sculptures. It was disappointing seeing them all in such an overgrown state, and with signs of ongoing disrepair in places such as the plant growing out of the big ichthyosaur's back.

But there has been some resurgence of interest and public attention in the Crystal Palace sculptures over the last few years, so with any luck these historic pieces of early paleoart will survive on to their 200th anniversary and beyond, to keep on reminding us of where things began and how far our understanding of prehistoric life has since come.

[dinocanid]

If you read Xem's post, you will see that she states you should know the basics about that animal before confirming it. You should know that a wolf is a canine that is a pack hunter that lives mostly in the northern hemisphere. That they howl and usually hunt deer or some deer relative. The have fur and are pursuit predators. Those are the basics. No one except you and your friends said you're only a real wolf therian if you can name top ten unusual facts about wolves. How can someone confirm a wolf if they do not know what a wolf is? You yourself said that you differ from wild wolf behaviours. So you know you're not a wild wolf because of that. But twist words and play the victim I guess.

The OP claimed, very blatantly, that if you make a mistake about some species fact that someone else considers "basic knowledge" then they shouldn't be allowed to identify as that species anymore and should be gatekept from the label. Said basic knowledge included very common and easy-to-make mistakes. Someone can identify as a hyena without knowing at first they are feliforms and not caniforms, the OP said that they can't. Someone can identify as a wolfdog or a leopard, and mistake a wolfdog for a husky mix or a jaguar for a leopard in a photo. That happens, they can look very similar to each other. Idk how to explain that a hyena looks like a dog(canine), just like a thylacine looks like a dog. You can go most of your life before finding out the former is related to cats and the latter is related to kangaroos. You can put a leopard and a jaguar next to each other and it is difficult as hell to tell the difference a lot of times. Not all wolfdogs look like wolves, some just look like dogs especially if they're low content. Some dogs just look like wolfdogs or wolves without being wolf hybrids. See: the pile of movies and shows with "wolves" in it (it's wolf-like dogs being casted as wolves, lots of people don't notice). It's not common knowledge, it's fun facts you might stumble across in a "10 Things You Didn't Know About These Strange Animals" YouTube compilation at 3am.

The OP was stating very clearly that your identity becomes invalid the moment you fail a game of spot-the-difference. The OP post is capped off with:

"So yeah. You should know a lot about the animal you claim to be. If not? Don’t claim it."

I'm gonna be blunt that the OP had one of the most rancid takes I'd seen in a while. Knowing the creature exists was not stated anywhere in the post to be enough, you have to "know a lot".

Someone might not know that animal's realistic behaviors, or where they all live geologically, or what all of their body language means. Someone can know their theriotype before they figure out that later stuff, it's happened all the time and continues to happen. This also isn't covering non-earthly animal identities and how you can't even do ecological research on those. Someone can't go on wikipedia and read up on the ecology of their specific dragon species that has zero record of ever existing. Plenty of those with non-earthly animal identities are not less real as a result, it is an absolute buckwild take that earthly animal identities are somehow different with a higher bar of entry. That's not even mentioning people that identify as earthly animals with unrealistic ecology, because that's also a thing.

For the second part of your ask, I'm guessing you're referring to this recent one. You missed this entire chunk of the post:

"...I do not know most things about wolves off the top of my head. Don't ask me anything about wolf ecology outside the bare basics, I couldn't tell you. When I was really young I thought my nonhuman identity was a dog until one day I had the epiphany that I was actually a wolf. I didn't have to bury my head in research to figure that out, I just knew for not much reason. Any information on wolves I know today is stuff I picked up here and there over the years, independent of my identity"

To condense all of that into something shorter: I just knew I was a wolf before I knew much of anything about wolves. I didn't know I wasn't a wild wolf because I know a lot about wild wolf behavior. I genuinely don't know how that conclusion was drawn after reading that.

"Wolves are canines that live in packs and eat deer" isn't research, that's "I watched a movie once that had wolves in it", which is honestly the extent of what a lot of people know about wolves unless they're invested or something. That's not enough according to the OP, and if that's not what was meant then the entirety of the post was worded extremely poorly.

And this last part isn't related to anon, but I've seen a lot of responses since yesterday about "but why is research bad"? No one has said that it was, and I scroll the alterhuman tags almost daily. That's not something people are arguing. The point isn't "research bad, grr learning about animals sucks", the point is that this discourse is old. Like, old as hell. We're not gatekeeping nonhuman identities based on if you "know a lot" going in. We're not going to claim someone isn't a "real therian" if they get one thing wrong about their theriotype.

Let's say that someone is a leopard therian and posts a picture of a jaguar in some moodboard or something. You know the decent thing to do? You might let them know one of the photos is actually a jaguar, which will usually get you a "oh huh, thanks. didn't catch that". At no point do you suddenly have imply they aren't a "real" leopard therian. You can ask if they've maybe considered jaguars, but they are fully able to respond "yeah but no, I'm a leopard". And that's fine. Someone can be a hyena therian, accidentally say that hyenas are canines. It is absolutely fine and possible to say that hyenas are feliforms without pointing fingers and going "you're not a real hyena, because real hyenas would've known that already".

It's not 2012 anymore, we've grown past this. It is the strangest thing ever to see in the year two-thousand-twenty-four.

[musingsofanaroace]

Random Thoughts on Representation

In the post, I will cover my experiences with ethnic, AroAce, non-binary, and AuDHD representation.

I've heard young YouTubers say that they don't like "labels", and that people make too much of a deal over representation. They've grown up with it and don't realize how much it means to those who've only had it recently.

I grew up in the nineties and didn't see myself represented in the media. These people were "white" and "straight" and "cis" and "neurotypical". I didn't even have access to the words that would describe my experiences; therefore, I had to create my own. Or if I did know the words, I didn't know if they pertained to me.

Let's start with ethnicity. I'm white and hispanic. The only hispanic characters I remember was Anita in West Side Story and Desi Arnaz from I Love Lucy. Desi was portrayed as a hot-headed Latino and the butt of the joke. Anita was portrayed as a spicy Latina with a fiery personality.

They acted nothing like my padre's family and seemed a caricature of real people. Also, I didn't see myself in them in the slightest. They didn't represent my multi-ethnic experience.

Note: I know that My So-Called Life has a hispanic character Ricky Vazquez, but I didn't watch this show until I was in my mid thirties.

I related more to Ariel, Aladdin, Pocahontas, and Belle even though their ethnicity and nationality differed from my own. They didn't fit in, and that's how I felt.

Let's move on to AroAce representation. Until I had access to the internet in uni, I never heard this term. Instead, I created my own: nonromantic and nonsexual. And in the media, there was no representation. And no, Spock doesn't count!

The first AroAce representation I had was Georgia Warr in Loveless, and I was thirty-six! And I was quite excited when Heartstopper included an AroAce character: Isaac Henderson. Now, I know it's not the best representation, but you have to start somewhere.

Now, let's tackle trans representation. The only trans representation I had in high school was Boys Don't Cry, and it traumatized me. I only watched it once, but I've never forgotten it.

Also, I only thought trans referred to the binary: man or woman. I didn't know that terms such as non-binary and agender existed until I stumbled across the words in a psychology journal at my university's library. Up to that point, I had just used my own term: nongender.

Now, there's more trans representation. It's not perfect and doesn't yet include everyone, but it's getting there. I have hope for a brighter trans-inclusive future. One that includes more non-binary and agender characters.

Lastly, let's move unto AuDHD representation. Growing up, I wasn't diagnosed with either, but looking back, it was obvious that I had both. But the only autism representation I had was Rain Man, and the only ADHD representation I had was Bart Simpson. And I didn't act like either one of them.

If there was more accurate representation back then, I would've gotten diagnosed sooner than I did. (I was thirty-nine.) And with this diagnosis, I could've gotten the accommodations I so desperately needed in school and the various jobs I've had over the years.

Some days, I would come home from school or work and have a total breakdown. I would shut myself in my room, blast some angry music, and hide under a blanket. I now recognize this as a shutdown.

Some days, I would come home and couldn't handle a simple request from my parents or roommate. I would snap at them or dissolve into a blubbering mess. And many times, it escalated into a full-blown meltdown.

And that's probably why I only have a single, solitary friend. If I had the words back then, maybe my parents or roommates would've understood what I was going through. Understood that I wasn't mad at them or acting this way on purpose. They would've known that I was simply autistic and having a meltdown.

As of 2024, there are some good autism and ADHD representation out there, but not as many as there should be. Too many of the characters still fit a stereotype of autism or ADHD that represents only a small fraction of the community. So many different flavors of autism and ADHD have been overlooked by writers, producers, and studio executives. I can't wait for the day when I read or see a fictional AuDHD character and think, "Hey, that's me!"

This year, I heard an album that I wish I had in high school. It's so relatable and would've helped me out so much. Growing Up on the Internet by Noahfinnce. I'm so glad teenagers have such a powerful and inspirational musician to represent them.

Well, that's all I have for today. Until next time, take care and stay curious.

[jamtlandsarkiv]

I think it's so interesting that you headcanon Linnea to represent science. Myself, I'm really convinced that Björn has always been a natural science guy. He would have definitely had a lab at various points, or at least have owned a lot of scientific instruments, which works well with the apparently canonical thing that glass-blowing is one of his hobbies.

In my 19th-century-verse, he would have been really into inorganic chemistry at first. Once he came to accept the existence of organic chemistry, like how the European scientific community took a bit of time to do so, that's what he would research about instead. It goes hand-in-hand with how much of the Second (?) Industrial Revolution was inspired by advances in Ochem.

I can still see how Linnea can represent The Liberal Arts™! These are just some of my ideas on Björn's interests :) I'd like to hear more about his involvement in industry as well.

I love your vision of them so much! The way I think is that their interests aren't split nicely into "arts" and "sciences", because let's be honest here, Sweden was not known for its artistic or scientific contributions until very recently. The continental European countries ran circles around us.

When I wrote about music and literature, I was actually thinking about Sweden's disproportionately large footprint in the world of modern pop music and crime literature. For the natural sciences, I was thinking of Linnea's namesake, the guy who invented that system of biological classification and is probably the most internationally famous Swede in history. What I meant was "Linnea is a fan of music contests, reads lots of crime novels and has outdoorsy hobbies like hiking, forestry studies and birdwatching".

Same with my Björn: his hobbies are electronics, computers, weightlifting and woodworking which are nice references to Sweden's largest industries today being tech, iron mining and timber. My Björn is a very non-academic kind of person who prefers to do things, not produce research papers and engage in long debates with other academics. I imagine that he ran his own construction and engineering business for most of history, while complaining about those "good for nothing scholars" who "sat in their labs all day pondering things that don't matter". In fact, I think this was one of the disagreements that contributed to his and Mathias' rivalry too, because Mathias is an academic person...

I didn't know about that canon tidbit about glassblowing, but it makes sense with my Björn being a very hands-on person, even if the material he likes to work with most is wood. I think he would be familiar with blacksmithing as well. The thought of academic Björn is something I never considered, but I think it's very interesting to hear about everyone's different interpretations!

[sotwk]

Legolas & Tauriel in the SotWK AU

I recently received a Anon Ask asking me about my opinion/views regarding Legolas and Tauriel's relationship, but apparently Tumblr is screwing up a few things for me (including eating up the notifications for some Mutuals that I've tagged in my posts... grrrr!) and that Anon Ask somehow disappeared.

Note: This is how closely I track and value the Asks/Requests I receive. My inbox is pretty full, but I remember them all. Pending Asks burn a hole in the back of my head until they're answered. I never delete Asks, unless they're duplicates or (god-forbid), hate mail.

Anyway! I am determined to answer that deleted/missing Anon Ask because I'm stubborn that way. ;) So before I forget, here are some headcanons about Legolas and Tauriel as their relationship exists in the SotWK Universe:

10 SotWK Facts About Legolas and Tauriel's Friendship:

A Short Answer to the Big Question: Is there a romance between them? In the SotWK AU? NO. Legolas and Tauriel's relationship is mutually and entirely platonic.

However, they have something better than the unrequited pining Legolas had for her in The Hobbit series. They are BEST FRIENDS. In SotWK, these two are even closer and more bonded than they were portrayed in the films.

Legolas and Tauriel are "birthmates": a concept and term I created that refers to a Silvan tradition where Elf children born in the same year are believed to share a special bond akin to that of blood siblings. Elven "birthmates" become best friends literally forever--because it starts from birth and remains endless for as long as their immortal lives endure.

Legolas and Tauriel are devoted to each other, but as best friends, which is love powerful enough that they would give their lives for each other. If anything, Legolas is fiercely protective of Tauriel, so he would be wary of any foreign admirers that may approach her (e.g. Kili).

I gave a brief glimpse into the childhood of Legolas and Tauriel in Chapter 4 of my young Legolas fanfic, "Greenleaf's Day Out".

When they were children, Tauriel was the smart, studious, rule-abiding, well-behaved child while Legolas was the restless, rambunctious, cannot-sit-still mischief maker. But despite their personality clashes and constant bickering, they were great friends, school mates, and playmates.

Tauriel once aspired to be a healer and in fact began training to be one when she reached adulthood. However, her plans changed when the Woodland Realm grew dark and dangerous from the filth of Dol Guldur. Her parents were among those killed in the early attacks of the spiders, and so Tauriel then joined the Mirkwood Spiderhunters before eventually becoming a Captain of the Guard.

Unlike in the movies, Tauriel had known the Elvenqueen, Legolas's mother very well since she was just a child, and so she didn't need to have her death explained; neither would she have ever dreamt of accusing Thranduil of being heartless or unloving. She was well-aware of the family's history and therefore very loyal to the Elvenking and his rule, and rightfully so.

In her youth, Tauriel had a giant not-so-secret crush on Legolas's older brother, Prince Arvellas (who was her teacher/mentor for a time), but she eventually outgrew it. She also had strong relationships with all the Thranduilion princes, who were very fond of her.

Tauriel's fate and actual role in the events of BotFA (SotWK version) actually remains undecided in my head! Does she fall in love with Kili? I honestly don't know, and I will have to cross that bridge when I get there with my Durins Live fanfics.

For more Thranduil/Mirkwood headcanons: SotWK HC Masterlist

Tolkien Headcanon tag list: @quickslvxrr @laneynoir @auttumnsayshi @achromaticerebus @tamryniel @friendofthefellowshipsnerdblog @blueberryrock @aduialel @glassgulls @ladyweaslette @klytemnestra13 @creativity-of-death @heilith @fizzyxcustard @absentmindeduniverse @lathalea @tamurilofrivendell @jordie-your-local-halfling @ladyk8tie @scyllas-revenge @asianbutnotjapanese @conversacomsmaug @lemonivall @ratsys @a-world-of-whimsy-5 @entishramblings @stormchaser819 @freshalmondpandadonut @beekieboo @jezzibee

Interested in SotWK content?

Introduction to SotWK

My Headcanon Masterlist 

My Fanfiction Masterlist

[aita-blorbos]

AITA for refusing to fall into madness?

I (1,147M) have been in possession of a cursed magical artifact for about 1,100 years, which keeping around me has slowly driven me into madness. I struggled with this for a long, long time, causing me to lose my wife, the love of my life, survive a horrible worldwide atomic incident, and completely drive away my surrogate daughter, (7NB) who was abandoned by her only living parent, and who hated when I used to artifact to protect us.

The more I used it, the less I became like myself, and it was utterly terrifying, both to me and to those i loved. I used this until I was almost entirely corrupted for a long, long time, and was revolting to every person that came around me, and my surrogate daughter (1,007NB) wanted nothing to do with me, and couldn't stand to see me at all anymore. I became obsessed with a woman (827F) who subconciously reminded me of my deceased ex wife, and I acted horrible to her as well, kidnapping her many times and attempting to force her to be my bride.

I felt so subconciously guilty over the way I behaved that, eventually, I did something that no one in history nor in any parallel universe where the artifact exists managed to do; the artifact is incredibly difficult to part with, as the powers it grants you are so overwhelming and tempting it is difficult to see your own corruption, and even harder to resist it. But I have managed to mentally brute force my way out of it! I've succeeded in both keeping my fantastical powers and my sense of self, both entirely within my control.

A few of my friends I've met recently (1,047M, alternate version of moi), (29F), (CatF), have told me they disapprove of my methods of this action, referring to them as "immoral" and "donked up".

You see in order to do this, I had to redirect the madness the artifact forced upon me onto someone else. This did in fact take a degree of concious effort every moment I was doing so, and I did know what I was doing. I redirected my madness onto the previously mentioned women (now 927F), as she seemed discontented and bored and stressed with her own life, and I didn't believe she would mind a bit of a change.

Doing this drove her mad, causing her to fall in love with me. Over the past 100 years of this she's kidnapped me on a regular basis to show me her newest songs and art projects about how she is in love with me, which has become incredibly tedious, but not unlivable, as my loyal guards I created always swiftly come to my rescue.

The most recent time this happened she kidnapped both myself and an alternate version of myself, one who has lost both his artifact and his powers in exchange for himself. The woman found herself madly in love with both of us, as we're somewhat the same man, and the situation quickly escalated into the woman putting us into much more immediate physical danger than I am used to, as she was about to murder us. The alternate version of myself has been insisting that this isn't the true version of her and that she can be 'fixed', which made me very hesitant to actually inform him of how she got this way.

Our other friends as well as my guards managed to save us in time and incapacitate the madwoman, but when I gave one of them a kiss as thanks for saving me, my artifact didn't exactly seem to like that she was from another dimension, and promptly, immediately, failed on me. As this artifact was 1. generating the madness 2. keeping me alive and 3. pushing energy into the kingdom I built, not only did my beloved guards and kingdom all immediately disintegrate, but I also rapidly aged all these unnatural years and died, as well as the woman lost her (technically my) madness and went back to her normal state as both leader of a kingdom and a scientist.

All three of my friends as well as the woman are all in agreement that what I did in those 100 years was messed up, even moreso than the way I behaved for the 1,000 years before, kidnapping people willy nilly and unable to take others feelings into account. They all hate me very heavily despite my hospitality to my new friends (giving them a place to stay, offering to give my alternate self his powers back, training one of them in the art of swordplay). The four of them are the only people currently able to hold an (extremely biased) opinion of this, as all my other subjects died with my powers, and my daughter having been dead for a long time (100yrs) now.

I simply wanted to both stay myself as a person and harness my abilities to their full, positive extent, even if that came at a price. AITA?

[starclast]

INAZUMA ELEVEN: LETS PLAY FOOTBALL!!! ⚽🔥

Well, well, well...it feels a little weird to do this 😅 But anyway, lets start from the beginning.

Waaaaay back between 2013-2014, a new season of the Inazuma Eleven anime was airing. It was the now *well-known* Inazuma Eleven go galaxy season. Back then I kinda had heard the name *Inazuma Eleven* but didn't actually know or have seen anything about it (except from a parody/reference in another anime I saw before, but I didn't notice it until many, many years after 😮).

I wasn't really interested in a sports anime (because I'm not really interested in sports in general but oh well 🙄), but for whatever reason, I decided to give it a chance. I watched an episode, it was one pretty far already into the series (like 30 or something I think 🤔) so of course: I didn't have context at all of why were kids playin football against some bird aliens and showing off powers like if this was the Power Rangers 😶 But still, the bright colors and charismatic characters made me...actually kind of enjoy it!!? 😲

In any case, I decided to watch a few more episodes. Since I was pretty late into the season, I didn't have the backstory of the different team members and the reason why we where here in the first place, but overall, still enjoyed every episode 🤗 Sadly, at some points the episodes stopped comin to me so I couldn't see any more of the story 😢

Years passed and I pretty much forgot about the series (it was during this time that I actually learned about the existence of the original series and its characters tough ☝) ...until recently. You see, since last year I've been following a youtuber called: Rangugamer. It was actually tanks to him that I could finally watch the whole game of No Strait Roads (NSR) so I started to watch some of his other series too, then I noticed that Inazuma Eleven was one of them. At first I wasn't really interested in watching it but since I was pretty bored that time I decided to give it a chance.

The start was a bit rough because the story was pretty slow and the characters at hand didn't have that much of a charm but, as episodes went on and more jokes started to land better because of a better understanding of the characters and...out of hand dark humor 😅 ...I kind of started to like it! Similarly to what happened to me with Asagao Academy, since I barely knew anything about these characters, I could enjoy the weird out of character jokes and such that Rangu made every time and before I could notice it, I finished all his gameplays from the original saga!!! 🤗

And so, now that I had finished it, I decided to draw and show some of my favorites from here! 😄 (P.S: I drew most of them out of memory so some mistakes here and there may be found 😅)

First, lets start with no other than the captain itself: MARK! The prime reason why the gameplay series became so popular and more enjoyable overtime. Even if the *real* Mark is a lot more innocent and kind, its funny how Ran!Mark stills feels in the realm of canon whenever it comes to his adoration to football...Now I cannot her the word *FOOTBALL!!!* any other way 🤣

Jude is one of the few that I recognized before actually starting the series (what can I say? he is just so recognizable 😐). Since the very first time I saw him, I thought he looked silly with those goggles and cape...and to my surprise, he became my absolute favorite 😳 Poor guy had just suffered so much 🤧 ...both in canon and Rangu's version 😅 Sadly, this first try to draw him doesn't do him justice at all so, I'll try again and again until I feel satisfied with it 😤

Tooooriiiii!! 😆 I like her simple yet charming style and her endless cheerfulness. Definitely I would get along with her in real life 🤗

Shawn is a cutie. his backstory is sad (and it feels even sadder in the anime from what I heard 😢), but still he managed to move forward. Its a little sad he lost relevance in the third part of the story, but its okay, he already gave us a lot in the time he had 😊

Erik was...sadly not even present for most part of the story, so I missed a lot of his original backstory 😅 Still, his little problems with Sue during the second game and his *Oliver and Benji* moment in the third one where pretty enjoyable so, I wouldn't mind knowing more about him 😄

And finally, Shadow. The poor guy isn't even relevant to the main cast itself, but I simply love his design too much to let it just slide 😉 Besides, his *Kevin x Shadow* moment in the first game and the double Shadows situation in the second one made me laugh like crazy the first time I saw them 🤣

I'm currently still watching the go series so I may do more like these soon enough!! 🤗

[celticjade13]

I started reading IceMav after seeing Top Gun: Maverick. I didn't ship characters when I was younger, so seeing the first movie didn't trigger any IceMav feelings. (This also happened to me with Star Wars. Maybe an ace/aro thing?) So I'm new into the fandom, but y'all, I have some questions after going through fic on AO3.

Firstly, do fic authors know that DADT didn't exist until 1993? I've seen a handful of fics that address this but the policy in 1986 (the year of the first movie) was dishonorable discharge if you were caught. I see a lot of references to DADT in the 80's, and while it was absolutely a terrible policy, I can assure you the policy before it was way worse. I feel like this is linked to a lot of baby gays not knowing queer history. I posted last spring about a Target salesperson not knowing that the black t-shirt with a pink triangle saying, "Silence = death," was referencing the AIDS crisis. History isn't as far back as you think it is, kids.

Secondly, and completely unrelated to the previous thing, Tom Cruise is short. Kind of. He's actually the perfect height for a real-life fighter pilot and he's basically short compared to the absolute giants that are most other Hollywood stars. I understand fanfic's desire to want to capitalize on the size difference between Ice & Mav. But OMG, Maverick is a fighter pilot. (Naval aviator, whatever.) He's a badass. He lost Goose and he's got a rough relationship with Rooster, and I really only read fanfic where Ice lives, so we don't have to worry about that. And the Navy hasn't exactly been at the cutting edge of mental health treatment at any point in their history*, but he's really woobified in fic. I mean, I see it, fandom loves to take the small character who's been through the emotional wringer and turn it up to 11, but good goddamn, y'all, he's still Maverick. He's still arrogant and a smartass and has Tom Cruise's smile and flies fighter jets for the Navy.

So here's the crux of the matter: Are these developments from the recent influx after TG:M? Or have these been around since the first film? (I feel like anyone around during the first film knows DADT wasn't a thing because those letters in that order wouldn't even have meant anything until the early 90's.)

*A friend's parents were career officers in the Navy before retiring so she & her sister could spend all 4 years in one high school instead of moving partway through. Her mom was a nurse. One sailor came through the hospital/medical station/wherever and was given an evaluation. Sailor mentioned he slept with a weed wacker under his bed. Doctor asked why. Sailor said at night, the weed wacker came out and told him what to do the next day. Sailor was sent home very quickly after that. I asked how he even got into the Navy & my friend shrugged. This is the US military, y'all.

[front-facing-pokemon]

sandaconda SNIFFFF

this is true

sorry about the radio silence apart from the queued posts for the past few days, folks. i'm gonna drop all these asks and then give you a bit of an explanation, as well as a possible read on the future of the blog, down at the bottom of this post, if you care to read it

everyone loves appletun..! i used one to beat the champion in my first ever run of swsh because i thought it was so cute. and grass/dragon is a fun typing..! just one more way to be 4x weak to ice my belovèd

i don't even remember what this is in reference to unfortunately. this is the way to get to the grass gym from motostoke, i think..! though you have to go through a route to get to the mines

y'know, i'm not sure! perhaps if i knew what it was based on, i could tell you better

let them have it :/ they deserve it

okay. hi. you've reached the bottom. i have a confession! i have not been able to update the queue in like. a week

my commitment to uploading every pokémon in natdex order already fell off a little bit when the galar pokédex was out of order compared to the national pokédex and i was choosing to include regional forms in "natdex order" by using their placement in regional dexes. now that i've reached all the regional evolutions in the natdex, i've found that my previous methods for getting models and getting them to work are not necessarily panning out. this is, of course, for one specific pokémon: galarian farfetch'd. i believe this applies to the rest of the galarian forms that i have yet to upload, as well, as i can't seem to find models (that i know how to work with) anywhere on the internet. if you want to see the most recent state i was able to get galarian farfetch'd into, then here:

it's fucked up. you may have noticed that i also didn't post galarian corsola before cursola. that's partially because i forgot it existed, and partially because i didn't have its model so i didn't know it existed because of that

i don't really know what to do here. i haven't queued up a single pokémon in about a week, and even then, the pokémon at the end of the queue you'll notice are getting progressively more and more fucked up textures-wise just because of how difficult they're getting when i can't find the proper models and i have to throw something toegether in like an hour. which! this blog never used to take me an hour! it used to be a few minutes out of my morning, at most. now mornings are taking me upwards of two hours just to get these motherfuckers working—and now i've reached a point where i can't get them working at all

from my perspective, i have two options, neither of which i want to do. option one is to just post the pokémon that i have and can get working, skipping ones that i don't have or can't get working. option two is to just go on indefinite hiatus until i can get a hold of the models and get them working. i like neither of these options!

i suppose there's a secret third option, which is that i start using in-game screenshots like i almost did for phantump that one time, but those aren't the easiest to procure when i can't perfectly manipulate the model and the camera to get the angles that have become the style of this blog

i don't want to quit when i'm this close to the end (and especially when there's so many of you waiting for your favorite pokémon), but taking two hours out of my morning to get one pokémon working is becoming a chore i relent doing, and i've become unable to do it at all now that i can't get the models to render correctly

i don't have a solution to put at the bottom of the post here! i don't have a way to say "so because of this, i'll now be doing blahblahblah" because i don't have a blahblahblah that i can do. i don't know what the best course of action is, because i have never really encountered this kind of problem on the blog before. the hiatus i took back in 2020 was for completely unrelated reasons, and like 99.9% of you weren't even here for that. and sure, only like 20 folks read these asks, let alone down this far into them, but for those of you that don't, you'll just be missing out and confused. for those of you that do, i thank you for sticking around this long. this is not goodbye, and i don't even want it to be a temporary goodbye—but it is me saying that there are 18 pokémon left in the queue and i don't know how to add any more

the best solution is probably just to post the pokémon that i can and hope the models i can't get aren't anyone's favorites. how do we all feel about that? i could always try in-game screenshots, but that'd be such a big change in styling and visuals that i dunno if i wanna go through with it. i'm at an impasse here, and i've been avoiding even talking about it because technically most of the followers of this blog couldn't care less if there was a real individual behind it—they're just here for the silly pokémon images. but, y'know, hi! here i am, i'm a real individual running this blog, and it's not that easy anymore!

[epersonae]

The Cooking Project: an introduction

So I've posted quite a bit about my issues with executive dysfunction around cooking, which started the summer before Ryn died and have lingered since then. I've tried a few things to break through it, with limited success.

Then: I was talking to some friends recently and we got talking about "grandma recipes". (See also: @triflesandparsnips' work with soaps and lip balms etc.) In that conversation, I realized again both that I have a lot of cooking knowledge, actually, and that I have my own little collection of that sort of recipes.

I've watched food tv since long before food network existed, and I love figuring out and understanding how cooking works. And I have both a stack of index cards accrued over the years, and an actual binder of print-outs and magazine clippings etc etc, some of which date back almost 30 years at this point.

And then I looked at those cards, and OMG, there's so many that aren't quite complete recipes, including a few that don't even say what they are, plus a few that I've never made. The binder, too, is a mix of things I used to make all the time, and some that were purely aspirational.

wait, what are you doing?

So I'm trying this thing where I make something from my collection, and make some notes about it. (Yeah, I'm doing ye olde food blogging, what of it.) The idea is to get back into regular cooking not as self-care or maintenance or overhauling my daily life or whatever, but by exploring an old special interest, and enjoying the play of it.

the first recipe: key lime pie from tumblr

At the suggestion of one of these friends, I started with a recipe that I found here on Tumblr, at some point I don't remember when, that I've never made: key lime pie. (Apologies for no link, but I literally have no idea what post it was or even when I wrote it down.)

Recipe text, transcribed:

12 oz can sweetened cond. milk 3 egg yolks 1/2 c key lime juice

mix until smooth heat oven to 350F, prebake graham cracker crust for 15 min pour in filling, bake 15 min cool 30 min on counter, then in fridge for 4hrs - overnight

Notes:

sweetened condensed milk only comes in 14oz cans now. I did some math, and increased the lime juice by one tablespoon.

the recipe as I wrote it didn't say what size pie crust. I bought a 9" and I think an 8" would have been a better choice. the ratio of crust to filling was off and the outer edge was frankly silly looking.

I have, in the past, made graham cracker crust from scratch. it's pretty easy, but also premade pie crust, sure why not.

the prebaking was definitely too long, and it ended up tasting a little burnt. I'd do more like 10 minutes max next time.

I started preheating the oven before I mixed the ingredients, because I know how long it takes my oven to preheat.

if I had the experience, I think I would have made a meringue with the egg whites. maybe next time I'll try it.

I added the info about increasing lime juice, the crust size, and baking timing to my card for future reference.

Final thoughts

I would make it again! The filling was tart and creamy, a nice contrast to the crust, and I've always loved key lime pie. Very easy, tasty, and I've added the key parts of my notes to the back of the card.

Update, a couple of weeks later: ended up freezing two slices, will see if they're good unfrozen. (I have a soft spot for terrible frozen key lime pie slices.)

[missrosiewolf]

-aggressively sips orange juice-

So! What happens when you take an Edgy That Guy and ascend him into Godhood?

You get Shevarash, the elven god of revenge, loss, and hating drow.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: This dude needed therapy, not godhood. Fenmarel, for some reason, decided that it would be a good idea to help the most Anti-Drow elf to ever exist to become a god and it is because of this mindset that Shevarash has very few allies. He is so fucking focused on his tireless and unending crusade on the drow that only like-minded individuals will put up with him, such as Psilofyr and Callarduran Smoothhands.

Because let's be real: this man lives and breathes hatred. That is all he is now. Whoever he was before he became this person, this hunter obsessed with eliminating the drow is gone, destroyed during what is called the Dark Court Slaughter.

For those who are not familiar with this event in FR history or don't know what it is, the Dark Court Slaughter was an event that took place on Midwinter's Night in -4400 DR. It was the longest, darkest night of the year and an army consisting of Drow and Duergar swarmed out of the Underdark; the army overran both the dwarven realm of Sarphil on the southern shore of the Moonsea and the Elven Court at the heart of the great forest of Arocar. Countless lives of elves and dwarves were claimed that night, including most of the assembled leaders of the Fair Folk and the Stout Folk who had come to court to reestablish their long-standing alliance.

Among the few survivors was Shevarash but among the dead was his family. With grief and anger in his heart, Shevarash swore an oath to Corellon to become the hand of the Seldarine against drow to seek vengeance for the loss of his family.

(Demihuman Deities, p. 157)

And that is how Shevarash, likely once as carefree as most elves, became an agent of revenge. It's an oath he kept too. I would say that he became the greatest enemy the drow had because he was, for the remainder of his mortal life, relentless in his pursuit of the drow. He raided their underground cities, destroyed their shrines dedicated to their gods, and slew their priests.

However, Shevarash stories ends like many stories of revenge: his death. Shevarash was slain by a horde of myrlochar (soul spiders) after killing High Priestess Darthiir'eigg Aleanrahel and six of her consorts circa -4070 DR — 330 years after the Dark Court Slaughter. So ended the mortal life of Shevarash the Black Archer

But then Fenmarel decided to help him achieve godhood. Now Shevarash is the Night Hunter and Arrow Bringer. Fun fact: Corellon is the one who determines whether or not someone can join the pantheon, soooo they absolutely okayed Fenmarel's decision to help Shevarash undergo apotheosis. They okayed the most Anti-Drow elf to ever exist...becoming a deity.

Despite the fact that Corellon has TWO dark elf children (three if we count Vandria) and one of them is supposedly the favorite child (Eilistraee) because here's the thing: Shevarash (in his mortal life) hunted all drow, not just Lolthite drow — though Lolthites were his primary target. It didn't matter if you were Lolthite, Vhaeraunite, Eilistraean, Kiaransaleen, whatever — if you were drow, then you were his enemy. However, that changed once he became a demigod.

(Grand History of the Realms (2007), p. 27)

Yes. Eilistraee and her worshippers at one time, pre-godhood, were among Shevarash's targets. Demihunam Deities even states that it was only until recently (full disclosure: DD is a 2e Advanced Dungeons & Dragons accessory for the Forgotten Realms so by recently I'm guessing it's referring to 1370-1371. Either that or the late 1360s) that she managed to work out an some kind of truce with this guy.

(Demihuman Deities, p. 11)

An uneasy truce. Uneasy truces are typically truces that will only last a certain albeit unknown amount of time and given this is the Seldarine and fucking Shevarash — it likely would not take much to break this truce.

Not surprising given that Shevarash is not only the most Anti-Drow Elf to ever elf, but he also did hunt Eilistraee's followers in the past likely during his mortal life) — which, as Grand History of the Realms points out, is something he no longer does as he no longer considers Eilistraee and Eilistraeans to be among his prey (likely due to the fact that once he ascended he became aware that Eilistraee is nothing like her mother and brother). So both sides are likely tense from this history and while she may not be counted among his 'prey' anymore, that does not mean he likes her or even that she likes him.

They, at best, tolerate each other from what I can tell.

(not even gonna lie. I would not at all be surprised to learn if Shevarashans are still terrorizing Eilistraeans in some capacity despite this uneasy truce)

Is this truce still a thing in the current edition? I don't know because I don't where Shevarash and Eilistraee officially stand in the new edition in relation to each other. I can't tell you whether or not that truce is still on-going. It'll have to be up to individual interpretation.

My personal belief / interpretation is that this uneasy truce is likely fractured, perhaps severely so. With the return of the Dark Dancer and her brother, Eilistraee and Vhaeraun have achieved a new understanding of each other — as a result, they have a friendship and a truce (though their followers still get into conflict from time to time. Understandable, a long history of both sides hating each other and fighting each other isn't going to go away in a single night). Which is a problem for Shevarash because even though Lolth and her followers are still Shevarash's number one target, the rest of the Dark Seldarine (sans Eilistraee) is still very much his enemy. Vhaeraun is still his enemy. Shevarash's followers still hunt down Vhaeraunites. Shevarash, as mentioned in the screenshot I shared from p. 27 of the Grand History of the Realms, is now more able to hunt Lolth and Vhaeraun directly thanks to his becoming a demigod.

I can't see Shevarash at all accepting Eilistraee's newfound friendship with her brother due to his history with the drow and his mission. Eilistraee, for her part with this new friendship and truce, I think would protest against Shevarash still hunting her divine twin and his followers. Given what I know of Shevarash, I do not think he would see this as anything other than an incentive to return to crusading against Eilistraee as well. He is a very angry deity, consumed by hatred — he's not going to look at the nuance at the situation. Likely, he'll read this as Eilistraee as turning traitor, becoming corrupted, etc. etc. Because to him...drow are bad. It doesn't matter who they worship, in his eyes drow are bad. For Shevarash, there is no nuance. It's black and white, as clear to him as night and day.

He might tolerate the drow worship Eilistraee and he might tolerate Eilistraee herself...but that means nothing when he will eventually resume being hostile toward Eilistraee. And he will. It's not a matter of if, but when and it won't take much. Will he resume hunting her? Possibly, especially if she decides to break ties with the Seldarine.

I did have a section written up about the elven group who are disguising themselves as drow and raiding surface settlements (thank you lawful-evil-novelist for that bit of lore!). but upon further reading, I learned Champions of Ruins doesn't, unfortunately, definitively state that the group is Shevarashans. Only that they're a very anti-human group called the Eldreth Veluuthra, who are conducting these raids in hopes of increasing hostilities between humans and drow. The book further states that even though they worship the Seldarine, the good-aligned deities of the pantheon want nothing to do with them so as a result no cleric of the good-aligned elven gods are part of the group.

So it's up in the air if these particular EV raiders are Shevarashans (his alignment is listed as chaotic neutral; it's possible he didn't write them off completely unlike his good-aligned peers) or not.

[voidthewanderer]

I was gonna do this under a read more, but fuck it. You get to deal with me now.

Nothing is truly original and people need to get over this fact.

Yes, you can make original work, but someone, somewhere is going to find a correlation to an existing thing. It doesn't matter if the original work's artist has never seen what they're referencing, it came from somewhere.

The last truly original thing I have ever seen be created was the Cannonball Loop in Action Park, NJ. And you wanna know something about this monstrosity?

This thing never opened to the public because it was too dangerous even for the testers. Gene Mulvihill was apparently trying to pay people to try this death trap. His own son was even hesitant to try it. The last truly originally creative thing I've ever seen was a death trap waiting to happen.

Human creativity builds off of what it sees; changing it into something for an individual's own palette. A good portion of the time, it's a subconscious thing, you don't even realize that you create something that's similar to something else. It could be something even as simple as "I saw this thing a while back" and just forgot until you see it again.

I linked this before, and I'll link it again. TomSka's video on plagiarism in the arts. He talks specifically about his own experiences with plagiarism (both actual and not actual plagiarism). In all honesty, I do urge every creative to watch.

I shared this a while back specifically for his "Somerton Scale". Here it is typed out.

No Correlation -> Parallel Thinking -> Subconscious Appropriation -> Inspiration -> Influence -> Reference -> Allusion -> Derivative -> Imitative -> Cloning

So, obvious, the first point (no correlation) and final point (cloning) are straightforward. No plagiarism and blatant plagiarism. It's those in between points that I see far too many people get their fucking panties in a bunch. Most specifically, the two points I want to talk about; parallel thinking and subconscious appropriation.

The first two points kind of go hand in hand. Parallel thinking is the process of two unrelated people having the same idea. Now, why do I personally say that this goes hand in hand with subconscious appropriation? Well, there's a reason why certain riffs in music are called earworms or why an idea might sometimes be called a brainworm. You get an idea from somewhere that you love and you make it your own.

Let's take, for example, I dunno... Counting freckles on your partner. I can't begin to tell you how many times I have read this, quite frankly trope in free harlequin ebooks on Amazon. I used to have time to read a lot when I was younger and I didn't care what it was, as long as it was reading material. Did they all steal that idea from one another? No, they didn't. It's honestly a very human thing that actual real humans do. A person doing something to create a mental image of their partner; wanting to engrave every little detail into their minds. That is an adorable thought and a lot of people do it. I know I would.

It's these two points that I always see people throw the biggest, most absolute infantile tantrums. And, almost 98% of the time, it's always the only correlation between two pieces is the same idea. Yeah, you know my "Elect Death for President" art I recently did? I highly doubt I'm the first person to make art of such a dark concept. Especially since I even got the idea from the Wednesday 13 song of the same name. I'm also writing a fic based off the Creature Feature song A Gorey Demise, which was based off of The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Just because I'm using the lyrics of the song for the chapter titles, it doesn't mean it's plagiarism. Now, if I used the lyrics for the chapter titles, didn't tell anybody that it was based off of a song, and possibly changed the name of the story? Yeah, that might be a different story. But even then, that would more fall into the category of allusion (thinly).

As I previously mentioned, we see and hear things we like, it doesn't matter what the media is. Music, stories, movies, tv shows, even just the world around us, and locks it away into a place that we call our own. We make up our own little ideas based off of these things our minds take in; it gets twisted into our own personal tastes. Sometimes people just don't remember where they might get an idea from. Or, they do know, but it's just a small thing, it's not worth mentioning. That doesn't make an idea plagiarism.

Now, I wanna swing the topic slightly for a moment. Character creation and theft. I'm gonna be blunt with you guys, some of my characters are stolen... to a degree. What do I mean by this?

Savino and his brothers; they were all my and an ex-friend's rendition of The Midnight Crew from an old roleplay we'd had going on for like two years. Yes, Homestuck Midnight Crew. By the time I actually took control of the lot of them, they were shadows of their former selves; the only thing distinguishing them from what they were originally being that I hadn't actually made them human at that point or changed their names. If I'd never said anything, there's literally only like two people who would've known that they were originally a roleplay version of the homestuck characters.

The same thing with Jason. He's my former Turbo from my Wreck-It Ralph rp blog days. Now, granted, my Turbo was already pretty disjointed from WiR even in his initial creation, but once I left that era of my life, I didn't want to just throw him into the pit. I still wanted to use him for something; I loved him too much to do that. A fresh coat of paint, a new backstory, and he's now a part of my Fallout line up. Doesn't negate where he came from, however. But, again, if I hadn't said anything, only maybe two or three people would have known.

However, these characters are so disjointed from their original content that they're not that anymore and haven't been associated with their former selves for a long time. Without mentioning anything, most people would be none the wiser unless you previously knew me from those eras of my life. And I am still further developing these characters to further disjoint them from their origins. Vague references at best (Savino and his brothers initials being the same, as well as their crew still being called the Midnight Crew or Jason still sporting the facial markings I'd originally given my Turbo).

There's no real excuse to steal another person's character, however. Outright laying claim or using another person's character for any reason, especially without doing any sort of changes is no different than plagiarism. And, quite frankly, you must be quite the miserable person to do as such. Kinda makes me wonder, what else are you hiding.

Sure, it's possible to have a character that's similar to somebody else's without realizing it until someone points it out. It does happen, quite a lot. However, I also see it more often than naught someone just sees a character, hates how the original creator is portraying them, and then steals it. When they're called out about it, they throw a temper tantrum, claiming that it's totally their own character for sure. Some people are just cheeky cunts and extremely blatant about it.

Theft/plagiarism isn't something that should be taken lightly. Nor is it something that you should just throw around willy fucking nilly. It's a serious claim. And to claim something that you know doesn't actually fall under plagiarism/theft, honestly makes you a shit human being. It's time to learn that not everything you do isn't actually original.

I'll be the first to tell you, just because I ran my shit through a plagiarism checker and got 100% original content? Doesn't mean that I'm not the first person to come up with a brothel in a church or a scummy bad guy kidnapping someone for leverage to rule something. I'm not the first person to write two friends having drunken sex. And I know I won't be the last. You certainly aren't going to be the first to create your ideas either. But you also won't be the last, either.

Just, sit in your little bubble and create. And stay in your own goddamn lane. Unless it's actually, legitimately a beat-for-beat recreation of your work; just shut up. It's not as original as you might think it is.