#fully deliberate

[not-poignant]

Hi Pia!

I was just wondering why you made the Each Uisge Welsh when he’s a figure from Scottish folklore, particularly the Highlands and Islands. I’m from the Isle of Skye, Scotland, and the loch near my home has it’s own each uisge myth attached to it. Even now, parents will tell kids not to go too close to the water or the each uisge might snatch them away. When I was a little kid, I wouldn’t go on the loch on my dad’s boat because my grandpa had terrified me with stories of the each uisge and I’d convinced myself it was real.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still thrilled to just have an each uisge in fiction, wherever he hails from, and Augus is such an icon.

Ooo it's been years since I've gotten an ask about this.

So yeah, the Each Uisge is Scottish and I actually talked about this a fair bit while I was still actively writing the canon and Augus as a main character (which was I think over 5 years ago now). But it was fully intentional, and ties into the fact that the Each Uisge and Glashtyn shouldn't be sharing a lake at all.

I used to talk about this all the time back when I was still writing the canon. You can see a response to an ask here from 2013 which explains it. And here's some of the relevant info:

Mafydd, like Gwyn, Augus and Ash (in this story - the Glashtyn is usually from Manx and the Each Uisge is usually Scottish, but to make Augus and Ash work as brothers, Augus got uprooted when the lake made a mistake, and now they’re both Welsh) are all Welsh and are all - at this time (at the time of The Drawn Bead) - living in Wales.

This was actually going to be explored in a lot more detail in the fourth installment to the Fae Tales canon, (working title Mirror Realms) where the Nightingale escapes and Gwyn, Augus, and Ash all go down into the underworlds to deal with that, and along the way Augus and Ash meet their mirror counterparts, i.e. the genesis of their fae-realm incarnations, and learn why they were both born into the wrong lake years apart.

But yeah, I think the Raven Prince alludes to this several times as well, that Augus is born in the 'wrong lake' and is an atypical waterhorse because of it.

I'm sure it's in some of the canon side stories but that's a lot of words to ctrl+F through so I'll just leave it as 'oh yeah there's a reason this Each Uisge is so sophisticated and different and has a brother when he shouldn't.' Like, the Glashtyn isn't inherently Welsh either!

It was wholly intentional. I mean if you look closely at all the folklore, it's all messed up - Gwyn's entire family lineage, for example. But Augus and Ash both being born on the fae side of Wales and then both of them being completely fucked up because of it was fully intentional. The Glashtyn doesn't look like that, anon. And the Each Uisge was never supposed to be Gentry Courtier, and yet here we are. :D

[sluttypatrickstar]

i cannot fucking believe i am wheeling this out again

[tomurakii]

I like bloodweave. Okay. But I DON'T like the version of them in fanfic where Astarion is a dick and Gale is like. Whining and pleading for him to be emotionally vulnerable (or just. Nice to him) prior to the relationship being established. Because that is just not accurate. Gale needs the player to express interest in him during his weave-teaching scene before he even considers hitting on them properly. Gale is entirely resigned to his fate and needs someone else to pull him away from it. Gale only starts being sweet and romantic and devoted after you accept his love confession and give him hope for the future. Gale says fuck all and then slinks away to cry privately if you break up with him.

Like he isn't chasing after people lmao. He isn't dropping to his knees and crying about anything much less this dickhead he met a week ago. He is overwhelmingly passive about literally everything personal to him up to and including his own death (provided there are no casualties/there is a good reason) until after the player expresses that they care about him. Astarion is not doing that in any of these fics.

Like Gale is friendly and a dork and doesn't wanna get murdered but he fully has a suicide plan. He thought the artefacts would help him survive but he didn't believe he'd ever truly live again. If Gale confessed and Astarion said/did like one (1) mean thing afterward Gale's romance is closed off forever. He's wandering into the forest to cry. He's killing himself immediately. His fragile ego and self worth can't take it. You have to understand that when we joke about him being pathetic it's not bc he's like. Sopping wet and chasing people down and begging for a scrap of attention. It's because he craves affection but would literally rather die than ask or even hope for it until someone else forces that hope back into his serotonin-deficient tadpole brain.

[blueskittlesart]

deeply refreshing to see someone critical of Swift who also like, genuinely likes her. Like i'm neutral to positive on her, but the online discourse has been absolutely rancid. flipping between "Taylor Swift has never done anything wrong ever and she's a fucking genius" and "Taylor Swift is the worst lyricist of all time and also a bad person" is exhausting, so thank you for like. nuance or something lmao

not to make it serious for a sec but i genuinely think that being able to like things that are bad is really important. like I think that it's an important skill to be able to look at something and see what you personally enjoy about it and then take a step back and acknowledge that objectively it's flawed. and to also be able to acknowledge that liking something isn't necessarily an identity or a moral stance. and i think that fandom space in general could really benefit from more people taking the time to learn how to do that. it's okay to like things that are bad

[intrepidtrickster]

Moominvalley and Snufmin

S4 Spoilers Under Cut

I’m so disappointed in how they handled Snufkin and Moomintroll this season. I had my worries, but I also had a lot of hope. They did deliberately put in those interactions. The team also kept reacting to mentions of Snufmin with winks and nudges in interviews and videos they put out. It makes me wonder what the point was. I genuinely feel like this was queerbaiting. And I don’t want to use that term because it doesn’t feel like one to use lightly. Even more so since I had such a great love for Moominvalley’s other seasons. Especially 1 and 2. It was genuinely really beautiful and soft and had such lovely queer undertones and moments. But I think it’s more than fair to say that the team knew about the reactions and how many people were introduced to it via Snufkin x Moomin. And they seemingly used that. They gave us build up but didn’t follow through. When it came down to it, they shrugged it off and didn’t address it at all. It felt so removed from Season 4. And I think that that, in essence, is queerbaiting. Because if you keep nodding to something throughout a series, using it to keep your audience waiting for the ‘inevitable’ conclusion to it that’ll certainly play out by the time the story ends only to snatch it away once you’ve secured your viewers and money, that is what that is. And I honestly expected better from the studio. If they weren’t going to commit, then they shouldn’t have kept bringing hopes up and making it seem like the direction it would go in.

(forgive the essay in the tags- I was thinking so many things)

[mumblesplash]

ok i will say the animation improvement in arcane s2 is kinda shocking to me, not because of anything flashy or spectacular but bc of the stuff that isn’t. they’ve improved the characters’ microexoressions and anatomy in ways i genuinely can’t believe they even bothered with

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The more I see your work and the more I see of poorly drawn scum villain, the more I'm tempted to do a poorly drawn tgcf 🥺 (I've only just started listening to it and I absolutely love it!!)

I just don't think I'm as funny as both of you and don't know if I could commit to uploading as regularly as you both do.

But oh! I am SO very tempted!! 😭

Working on an adaption of an existing media as a long form project is honestly my strongest recommendation for getting your creative brain going! Of course, there is still planning and hard work that goes into it, but the biggest creative pressures are much lower (And when anxiety brain is quiet, art brain thrives!)

That said, projects like this are a huge commitment, and I'm a bit of a freak case when it comes to the grind. PD-Scumvillian and I both put a lot of work behind the scenes to make it seem as effortless as it is. I'm wholeheartedly giving you my support should you go through with it; feel free to reach out and ask for tips and tricks!

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Obviously the structure of an episodic series often requires characters to go from 'complete strangers' to 'close friends/family' in an unusually short amount of time. I get it.

Writers need a 'new guy' in the group to ask questions about the setting that the audience can't, but still (especially in comedy shows) want the fun dynamics that come from all the main cast knowing each other super well. It's one of those functional tropes like L-Shaped Blankets where you're required to suspend your sense of disbelief.

Having said that, I love when writers choose to take this trope and retroactively justify it by later on revealing that the Seemingly Normal Everyman Character is actually as unhinged as the rest of the group— it's just that their weirdness manifests specifically as an ability to form found family dynamics with literally any group they join, almost immediately after joining.

Like, you assumed that they just fit in so well because your group has a special vibe, but then you accidentally left them in the supermarket for like five minutes and by the time you realised and went back they were already Blood Brothers with the cashier.

Characters who are like friendly dogs in that you can put them essentially anywhere, with anyone, and they will just be like “welp! Guess this is my New Family now” and just go along with it.

[baphometsss]

if i see one more post about how solas/mythal/elgar'nan had a weird love triangle thing going on i'm gonna scream

[thesummerstorms]

The other thing that I think I would want in an Annabeth Wayne AU that I don't think I've seen so far is Bruce being absolutely pissed at Athena.

It was bad enough with Talia and Damian, but Athena is a literal god of wisdom who should know better AND he doesn't even have the "culpability" of having slept with her.

She one hundred percent saw Batman, tactician of the Justice League, was drawn in by her aspect of the Goddess of Strategy, and proceeded to create a child without his consent, a daughter who she didn't even raise before the child became a weapon.

And like whatever else, however fucked up Damian was by his own training to become a child-weapon, at least Talia loved Damian.

Whereas Athena loves Annabeth in the way a Goddess loves, not the way a Person loves, and I don't think Bruce, whose entire identity is so fixated on his relationship with his own parents, would recognize that as love at all.

And, like, Talia put Damian through a lot of shit. I think Bruce would be angry there too. But when push came to shove, she at least at some point brought him to Bruce because she thought it was in her son's best interests.

Athena actively lead Annabeth away from Bruce and into the streets at the age of seven, which Bruce would never see as in her best interest, whatever Athena's godly perspective is, however badly he reacted after Jason's death, even though he couldn't see (and dismissed the idea of) the spiders and the monsters. She was seven. In the streets of Gotham.

Athena let Annabeth fight a major role in two wars back to back without being there to train her or protect her or love her or even advise her. Athena advocated for the cold blooded murder of the other children who had actually tried to keep his daughter safe. Athena sent Annabeth against Arachne when Athena's children have universally died on that quest for a thousand years.

Athena let Bruce think he had gotten Annabeth killed because of his own inability to handle his grief. Let him think his daughter was dead or worse for years. Would have let him keep thinking that if the Fates didn't have other plans.

And just, in true fashion for all of my ideas on a PJO x DC crossover, everyone really comes out more traumatized than before. This includes Bruce.

Because now he wasn't just used unknowingly for a child just once, but twice. And in both cases he's going to have to live forever with the guilt of not having been able to protect his kids from what their other parent wanted to make of them

(On top of all the ways he has directly failed them and made any complexes worse, of course )

[doloresdisparue]

i so often see people say "lolita should have been written from dollys perspective" and while i understand the sentiment (apart from the fact that its a stupid argument because a book from dollys perspective would be a completely different book and not fulfil any of the narrative functions "lolita" does) what annoys me here is... THOSE BOOKS EXIST. but theyre not going to become cultural juggernauts overnight, not even the good ones. you have to actually seek them out and read them.

i started looking for lolita adjacent books a year ago and i could name you 5 lolita "spin-offs" off the top of my head, NOT counting 'los diary' because that one sucks or 'my dark vanessa' bc at least that one is fairly well-known (roger fishbite, molly, journal de L, LO, darling river) . i could immediately name you another five non-lolita csa books from the victim/survivor pov that i personally read and liked (mysterious skin, lullabies for little criminals, a good chunk of the george miles cycle, flying in place, gemma) as well as another five that i didn't love but that had redeeming features (living dead girl, a little life, such a pretty girl, tricks, the day before)

this isn't even counting books that interrogate the gender stereotypes in perpetrator narratives (any man, tampa) or books taking the pov of children trying to cope with abuse they cant conceptualise even if they arent directly experiencing sa (room) or the nonfiction book about the horner case (the real lolita), the fictionalisation thereof (rust & stardust) or memoirs heavily featuring lolita (being lolita, excavation).

this is just stuff i found in the last year (as someone who usually avoids drama, ya, romance and crime novels) and i have probably 50 more on my tbr. these books are not hard to find, definitely not in the age of goodreads, but we do actually have to look for them and talk about them if we want to highlight these types of narratives in the cultural discourse instead of attacking another book that happened to get famous for not being something completely different.

[invinciblerodent]

an entirely expected side effect of me whipping out my old external HDD is that now I AM going to rewatch basically the entirety of my canon game of Inquisition that I had mostly recorded back in like '15-'16, and get my heart torn right out again by this damn guy making this damn face

he deadass goes "😢" doesn't he

[starryoak]

I think the reason I differ from a lot of Akechi fans (and I am sincerely a fan!) is that I don’t find his backstory all that sad or for that matter interesting. It might be because I see it more interesting analyzed as a warped reflection of Ken Amanda’s backstory rather than a unique story of its own. And his plan, I find it pathetic more than anything else, sad only in its level of sheer stupidity, shortsightedness and miserable ineffectuality of self obsessed teenager-hood. But that’s what’s compelling about it and him! in my eyes, what’s interesting and unique about his character and has the potential to tell new stories that haven’t been done before has nothing to do with his pain or his redemption, except when kept in conversation with the undeniable fact that his plan was an ass-backwards idiotic and selfish plan fueled on nothing but spite by a deeply self-centered child who grew into an egotistical young adult without any reckoning of how completely stupid and impossible it all was.

[witchhazelevesque]

Do you ever just sit back and realize. damn Hazel and Leo canonically committed suicide.

[mumblingsage]

Following up on my "I find it more comforting to read about characters getting by despite facing the same challenges I do" post, the read I'm enjoying a surprising amount today is David Brin's The Postman. Yes, there was a movie. 1-sentence summary: Civilization is rebuilt post-apocalypse by the power of hope symbolized by dedicated civil servants.

Also, for a book written by a guy in the 80s, it's surprisingly okay about women.

[krystaldeath]

Praise The Virtual Diva

The One Who’s Always On Her Damn Phone