#gloomverse week

[papier-ciseaux]

How did you get there, girl?

Illustration for the prompt "Worship" :)

[prompt-verse]

After many years of absence, we're bringing Gloomverse Week BACK! Why? Because it's fun and I wanted to :D

The week will start on Sunday November 10th and end on Saturday November 16th. More info below the cut + the written out prompt list!

The concept of a "gloomverse week" is to bring the fandom together as we all make art based on a set of prompts during a period of time! Here are some guidelines:

You can use one or both prompts

You can skip a day if you feel like it

It's okay if you're late for a prompt

You can draw, write, edit... use whatever creative outlet you want!

You can tag your art as #gvweek and #gvweek2024 to be more visible

I will reblog all the art made for gvweek that I can see, feel free to tag this blog or send an ask/DM if I missed yours, or if you don't want it reblogged!

Most importantly, have fun :)

Here is the prompt list outside of the image:

Day 1: Beach episode / Magic Day 2: Alternate Universe / Theories Day 3: Family / Nightmare Day 4: Original Characters / Side characters Day 5: Stars / Storms Day 6: Relationship / Worship Day 7: Blood / Myths

You can check out @gloomverse-theories for ideas on Day 2, @offscreen-gloomverse-probably for general interactions ideas, and @gloomverse-refs if you want character sheets!

[lyricpersonarts]

For today's GV week! The prompt was "beach" but surely the sea is close enough...

[blueoctobass]

Gloomverse Artfight 2024

Hello everyone! Like every year, our discord fan server is organizing an artfight themed around gloomverse. This year, it's Team Candy VS Team Cake! aka Harold VS Cakegirl

In an artfight, two teams compete by drawing or otherwise creating something for the other team and earn points by doing so. Since this is a fandom event, the goal is to encourage fancreations so people can request both OC and canonical characters! Attacks can be drawings, but also writings, edits, pixel art, and more! All creations are welcome.

The event will last 3 weeks, starting Friday July 19th and ending on Friday August 9th 2024.

Here are the main rules:

Be a member of the discord server, and above 13 yo (link in a reblog)

Join before the start of the event (that's July 19th!)

Participate at least once!

Communicate your preferences for attacks

If you have any questions, feel free to ask or dm me!

[gloomverse-theories]

How Cirrus’ childish behaviour is symptomatic of the problems in stratoversian society

Stratoverse is a foreign country with a culture still clouded in mystery, but we were given snippets into its inner working thanks to Indigo, Virga, Nim and Cirrus. So far, all of the stratoversian with screentime displayed various levels of immaturity, more or less subtly. Before I can dive into those, let’s define something.

What is Maturity?

“Maturity” is a buzzword that gets thrown around, but people would be hard pressed to give it a clear definition. How do you define maturity? It’s the state of being mature, says one dictionary, proving its uselessness. Maturity is being an adult, but Cirrus insisting that “he is an adult so you can’t make him do anything” is ironically a big sign of immaturity.

Being mature is a list of behaviours, such as:

Managing your own emotions

Recognizing other people’s emotions

Taking responsibility for your actions

Establishing your boundaries and respecting other’s

Being able to apologise

Being able to handle failure, rejection, or being wrong

Being open-minded

Maturity is not only a virtue, but also a skill. It’s one that is expected out of adults and even older teens, but no one is perfect, no one is mature at all times. Being mature is hard work, being responsible is difficult, admitting you were wrong can seem impossible, but it’s still something everyone needs to strive to in order to live in society. It becomes a problem if the moments of immaturity outweigh the moments of maturity. It becomes an even bigger problem when you give someone like that power.

The thing about power is that you can ignore your responsibilities if you have enough (sorry Uncle Ben), and Stratoversian society is built on power.

Let’s take a look at Cirrus, as he is the prime example of an immature Stratoversian

Cirrus’ immaturity

Our first impression of Cirrus is that of a stuck-up jerk who belittles people for something as trivial as wearing shoes. Our second impression of Cirrus is that of a man-child giving himself a headache after throwing the aforementioned tantrum. It is not a brilliant introduction, he is made to be unlikeable, so unlikeable that even the one character he interacts with is glad to see him gone.

From the get-go, he demonstrates that

1. He is not able to manage his emotions and even hurts himself with how he expresses them

2. He does not recognize he was wrong for getting angry or apologises, instead he “ignores” her “disgrace” for a moment

3. He does not respect the president’s order to stay out of Gloomverse, showing that he does not care for the consequences of his actions and does not take responsibility for them

4. He is very close minded of anything outside of Stratoversian norms

And that’s just from his first appearance! Without even mentioning his catastrophic rapport to Nim!

In his second appearance, Purple aptly remarks that Cirrus “act like a five year old”, and he is right.

Cirrus insists on coming with Nim to Wallis’ show, claiming interest in the culture. He promised to behave, but forced Nim in a position where she had to accept his demand or risk having him show up without being supervised. Fast-forward to the time of the show, and all of his previous claims fall through. He is still belittling the culture and Nim needs to remind him of the very real consequences for Her in order to get him to settle down. The show starts, Seaweed shows up, and Cirrus gets a teenager crush, and proves once again what little handle he has on his emotions. Cakegirl arrives, and Cirrus does his good action of the day by saving Harold from a fall to the death.

When the world conference rolls around, Cirrus spent three weeks in jail, and it did not teach him anything. He finally crosses the line with Nim and gets an overdue call out on his behaviour. She establishes some very clear boundaries here. She’s tired of babysitting him! Unfortunately, this does not stick, because Cirrus follows her back to the ruins. He literally has no valid reason for doing this. What’s more, we have yet to hear a single apology from this guy.

Then, the Beach Episode comes. Cirrus does not miss the opportunity to show off his wonderful temper. But we get a little more this time, we get a crack. For the first time, he manages to keep a straight face as he recites a law of Stratoverse. This happens once again in A Day on the Town when cirrus talks about his fathers’ ranch. You can tell it’s a sore topic because he remains emotionless.  After all his exuberant display of outrage, this is the one topic where he doesn’t allow himself to feel anything.

And we will unpack that later!

Indigo as a parallel

Indigo doesn’t get revealed as Stratoversian right away. He’s a working DJ, he’s the president’s personal hitman, he’s a delusional playboy… He is a lot of things, depending on what he needs! Overall, Indigo is selfish. He does not care what others are going through, or the consequences of his actions on them as long as he comes out unscathed.

Contrarily to Cirrus, Indigo has his emotions in check. He does not care about what other people do if it doesn’t affect him, while Cirrus gets introduced by yelling at Nim for touching the ground. Indigo is smiling most times and even if he is an “open book”, his emotions are not the burden of others. That is, unless you press a sensitive point, like his sense of self. On the other hand, Cirrus’ temper is something everyone else has to deal with and tip toe around. The only time when he can keep it together is when it’s something he’s sensitive about.

Where Cirrus shuts down, Indigo flares up, and so they make for interesting parallels.

Indigo’s immaturity is different from Cirrus, because they had different lives, but the root of the problem is once again Stratoverse. Thanks to Indigo, we got context for Stratoversian childhood and expectations. And it’s pretty terrible.

Let’s talk about it!

Cirrus’ childhood

Stratoverse has some kind of incentive to make every citizen gain weather magic. The reason why is still a mystery and worthy of plenty of theories, but it is not today’s focus.

Indigo explains pretty well how this happens. Children are separated from their families, given to caretakers and taught about the weather cycle. Nim mentions that she got “floated” a lot as a kid, so it’s not a full no-contact situation - at least not for everyone - but it’s still rather isolating. Indigo tells us that he “wanted to live in the sky with [his] parents”, and so did most other kids.

Cirrus is an exception though, because his fathers live on the mainland in a ranch. They do not have magic and they can’t live in the cloud city. There’s no one waiting for Cirrus in the clouds. When other children finally regroup with their family upon getting magic, Cirrus would be leaving his behind forever. As he loves to remind people, it’s shameful to touch the ground. He still holds them dear in his heart, as shown when he punched the president for badmouthing magicless people, or when he almost cracked after Rylie’s question. Nevertheless, it still got ingrained in him that he should be ashamed of his origins, from how meek he was when talking about his dads’ ranch. Stratoversian propaganda is very effective if it can convince a country kid that a leaf is actually disgusting and touching the ground a disgrace.

Cirrus is powerful, he probably got magic early on. Let’s say 12 years old. From that age on, he grew up with no parents, no guardians, no caretakers. It’s during teenage years that people learn to be mature, to manage their emotions, to handle conflict and to respect others. They can either learn it in school, from teachers or peers, or from their family. Cirrus had neither. He can’t go to his family and he doesn’t have any friends if his attachment to Nim is anything to go by.

Speaking of, let’s focus on Nim and Cirrus for a little bit now.

Cirrus’ attachment to Nim

Cirrus and Nim are both grown adult, and they’re both royalties. They’re not siblings however, and don’t know much about each other. For all due purposes, they are colleagues. Cirrus seems to have some years of anteriority over Nim, but other than that they’re equals. They have no need to interact, and Nim would even prefer if they didn’t. Despite that, Cirrus clings to her with force. We know from Virga that the trip back and forth to Gloomverse takes a full day. Cirrus come visit her multiple times, and his first visit (that we know of) lasted less than an hour. He clearly doesn’t approve of what Nim is doing, but that doesn’t stop him from checking up on her.

Why?

Because he is a fucking desperate for a human connection, except he has no clue how to go about it, so he clings to the only proper relationship he has in his life: his royal colleague!

He can’t turn to Virga because she’s already proven herself to be unsafe by punching him and making fun of his ideas, and he can’t be around the king because everyone expects him to dethrone (and kill) him, so Nim is the only one he has left. She’s also polite and nice enough to tolerate him, and he takes it as the greenlight to be even more clingy. He’s unconsciously forcing her to mom him, and she has to be responsible for the two of them.

Nim is stuck trying to appease him and maintain a cordial relationship because her own situation is unprecedented and precarious, and there’s a high chance he could jeopardize her passports and permits if she actually spoke her mind! At the world conference, she finally speak up because she literally has nothing to lose. She spent three weeks in jail because of her association with Cirrus, and her passports and permits to study have been thrown out the window. So when he belittles her and her interests, she snaps, because she can.

Their relationship is not a balanced one, but it’s progressively becoming better. Now that nothing is at stakes, she can be honest and actually tell him off, which she does!

Royal Responsibilities

You may have already read a few pieces about it (like this rant), but the prince and princess titles doesn’t seem to come with a lot of responsibilities. It seems that only the king and queen can make any meaningful decisions, and the prince and princess’ role is to support those decisions.

Cirrus is interested in making life better for the magicless. He has family at stake even. Yet he is shown running away from any responsibilities he might have in Stratoverse to follow Nim, and aggravating the tense relationship between Gloomverse and Stratoverse by punching the president. It’s not really his fault though, because that’s the way Stratoverse’s society is built: the most powerful have the most power, and the ones with power can do what they want because they’re powerful. You don’t agree with a political decision? Duke it out with the politician. Someone made a mistake? Punch them to teach them a lesson. That’s what he learned, that’s what he does.

And what he does is selfish and immature, because that’s what the system thrives on. People are encouraged to remain immature, to act on instinct, to punch the people they don’t like, to be selfish and not think of others. The system relies on Stratoversian being too busy fighting to survive, too selfish and immature to give a damn what others are going through. It keeps people from organizing and rebelling. It keeps the system going.

Summary

This went in a different direction than what I thought it would. Here’s a summary:

Stratoversians, especially Cirrus, have been regularly characterised by their immaturity – especially when it comes to handling their emotions. They resort to show of force, they establish dominance with their magic, their bodies, their voice. Even Indigo resort to it when pushed to the brink. The way children are raised in Stratoverse often leads to immature adults because of a lack of appropriate education and doing the equivalent of giving a teenager a gun. Stratoverse culture is one of power, where rationality is dismissed in favour of strength. This keep people from trying to change the system: the people in power benefits from it, and if someone were to try and change things, a punch in the face will put a stop to it.

Cirrus is a product of that society: immature, impulsive, careless, and full of prejudice. So were Nim and Indigo, and they’re all on a journey to unlearn those things, albeit at different speeds.

[oivatank]

Gloomverse Week, Day 5: Crossover

I had even less time today to complete this one, but here you go, a pair of angry moms!

[tokenscribbles]

Gloomverse week day two! steampunk!

steampunk is something im very not used too and i dont think i quite got it right but this was really fun :D

[sleeping-hobo]

GVWEEK, DAY 2: MAGIC SHOW

A Very Angry Man

I’m really happy with how the coloring turned out for this!

[kisshufan4ever]

gloomverse week day 5 crossover the harold gloom saiki k crossover no one but me needed 😂

[dramartist]

@gloomverseweek: Magic show~

°Okay, so while I wasn't able to do the whole week, I did want to do one prompt and that was this. We don't get to see what else happens in Seaweed's show so I thought, why not!

[sheyhem]

I’m a bit late like two days rip but here’s my drawing for Gloomverse Week Day 1: sidecharacter / oc

For this I decided to revisit my old gvoc from like two years ago! His name is Finch and he likes taking care of birds! :D

[papier-ciseaux]

For the prompt "Myth"! Inspired by the sort of stained window showcasing the mancers!

[prompt-verse]

Hello Everyone!

We're going to hold a Gloomverse Week during the coming months!

When should it happen?

And if you have any prompt idea, feel free to leave it in the notes!

[eeveegirl13]

This scene was so powerful. It’s why Hobo is my favorite Gloomverse character. No matter what he thought on the situation he did not say anything. Instead he comforted Harold who needed it the most in that moment and promised to stay by his side thouh this ordeal. His kindness exceeds all the other characters and he truley just wants his friends to be happy! That’s why I decided to put on this scene.

My edits: 

 * I gave lemon chap his hat so you can tell him apart. I also gave him arms. 

* Lemon kid is hugging Gloom 

* You can now see Hobo’s knees 

* More shading 

* More detailed background

[gloomverse-theories]

How old is Indigo?

Yep, we're doing this.

So what do we know about Indigo's life? Well actually quite a lot! Thanks to Ylil, we got to learn a lot about this guy's life.

Firstly, Indigo is definitely over 18, I think we can all agree the manchild is indeed an adult. I'm not going to need proof to convince you all of that fact, hopefully.

Indigo spent his childhood in Stratoverse, specifically on the land of awareness. There, he was taught all about clouds and weather, until he eventually got magic.

He left right after getting magic, or at least it's implied that he did, as turning Indigo drove him over the edge and really affected his self worth, possibly due to increased bullying. He even says it outright that being Indigo was a reason for "being laughed out of [his] own country"

So he left after getting magic! Which should be around 12 years old, probably ranging from 10 to 15. Stratoversian being more powerful in general, and Indigo not being shown as weaker than average, we can deduce that he got his magic at around that age, and not later. He may just have left without magic and died at sea if he hadn't got his magic at the same time as his peers.

Alright, that's great and all, but for now all I've established is that Indigo left Stratoverse as a young teen and is now older than 18 in gloomverse. How is that theorizing about his age?? Is what you may ask.

Worry not, dear reader, for I have just the thing:

Queen Virga of Stratoverse, current strongest magician in the world.

How does she relate to Indigo you ask? Well...

Indigo doesn't recognize her.

That's pretty telling actually. And given Indigo's track record, it seems improbable that he is feinging ignorance to seems inconspicuous. Possible, but not probable. So the rest of that theory lays on Indigo being too dumb to pretend to be dumb.

Anyway

Why is it important that Indigo doesn't recognize her? Well as a stratoversian, Indigo was given classes about Stratoverse and weather. Since the country relies on brainwashing the kids to love their country and clouds, knowing WHO the (current) queen is and what she looks like sounds important. I know Indigo right now isn't a model student, but in the past he just might have been! He tried hard to belong, and the stuff you learn as a kid isn't so easily washed away.

Hence this: Virga wasn't the queen at the time that Indigo lived in Stratoverse.

That's cool and all, but now we have the same problem as with Indigo: How old is Virga???

Well, she's actually easier to figure out.

I'm going to assume Stratoverse/Yellow is reasonable enough not to let children be in charge, and that a person needs to be 18 or older to fight for the royalty's titles.

I mean, the last time they did, bad things happened...

Prisma was considered to all, as a respectable, and beautiful magician, and she took the job at a surprisingly young age. The exact age is unknown, except that she was 'nearly an adult' when she came into power.

So, Virga is older than 18. yay

But she has been in office for quite some time now! At the very least three years if the world leaders' meeting is every year. More if it's espaced of two, three, etc, years. Since the conference takes a couple of weeks, it would make sense if it wasn't yearly.

Cirrus, having no reason to be present unless it's a former meeting, punched prez during a conference. Virga mentions it was forever ago, which could be just smack talk, or hint that it wasn't even during the last conference. Nim is a "better choice than the last", so she wasn't there at the previous conference, and the last princess was 'chosen' by Virga, aka came into the position while Virga was already queen.

She's at least 21 if the conference is every year and she became queen at 18. That's the lowest age possible for her.

But Virga has very strong mommy energy, as seen here:

I'm not saying those children are her own, but she definitely watched them grow up, so we can add a +10 years to her counter. 28 years old as a bare minimum.

Alright! It's safe to say Virga is at least 28 years old, in the best case scenario. In a more realistic one, she would have took the princess title at 20 and the queen title a bit later, she seems to be quite experienced too, so let's say she's in her middle-end thirties.

However there's a very important piece of information I haven't considered yet...

Stratoversian can live older than average, and look fresh even in old age (just look at the king who's supposedly at least 80 years old!!). So despite looking rather young, Virga could actually be in her 60s and we would have no idea.

Back to Indigo! Comparing him to Virga leaves us a couple options!

Indigo is the same age as Virga

I'll consider "same age" with a 2 years margin.

While it adds Angst to think Virga was one of his bullies, I think it's more likely that they never met each other. Stratoverse is still a big country, it's unlikely everyone knows everyone (Nim and Cirrus didn't know each other as children for example). Being the same age as Virga, Indigo's age is ranging from 26 to 40.

Indigo is older than Virga

Oh man, he's old in that case... Older than 30 at the VERY LEAST! Because Virga being 28 is the best possible scenario.

Indigo is younger than Virga

This one is actually very interesting... Because it means Virga wasn't queen when Indigo was still in stratoverse. If she took the throne at 18 and Indigo left at 12.... Then their age gap can only be 6 years. Otherwise, Virga would be queen before Indigo leaves. Of course, the later Virga takes the throne, the larger the age gap can be. Taking the throne at 24 means Indigo can be 12 years younger, and so and so....

So in this scenario, Indigo's age remain unclear.... Yet this is the most likely scenario.

It really all depends on Virga's age tho... The best guess for her age being late thirties, I think it's safe to assume — after everything I've presented you — that Indigo himself is in his early thirties.

TL;DR: Indigo is at least 30 yo and this post has been in my drafts for almost 2 years now.

[oivatank]

Gloomverse Week, Day 6: Country Swap

Say hello to Eilyr (I have no idea how to pronounce that XD), aka Inverse Rylie!

This one isn’t too complicated, but I mean, Inversians aren’t exactly the most... “colorful” individuals 😏

I decided to take her magic show outfit and make a formal version of it, which I later realized looks a lot like Yma’s outfit lol!