#god I love this fictional man so much

[thatmoonspell]

The Stag, oil on canvas, 22x28

Happy Birthday to the one and only, pansexual icon James Potter!! 🦌✨ I love this man 💛

Soooo I recently watched Saltburn and it gave me serious brainrot for a hot minute, so it’s a very Saltburn Jamie 😏☀️

*Murder on the Dance Floor intensifies*

I’m a mod in The Strutting Stag, a James-centric discord server! We are having our first ever writing fest currently, The Strutting Slut Fest if you’d like to join, please take a look! Or just come hang out with us, whatever man! ✨

I have a new instagram, where I post my HP fine art paintings 💛

[victorckk]

USHGHFHFFHF HAPPY BITTHDAY TO THE BBG

Happy Birthday, Neuvillette!

While reviewing my schedule, I noticed there was only a single entry for the day — one that managed to occupy the entire day.

Worried I might not find time to meet with you, I even inquired whether it could be postponed. Yet, the Melusines said nothing in response, merely guiding me to wait in the reception area.

Now, seeing you enter with them, bearing gifts and refreshments, it's not difficult to understand what's going on.

It is indeed a delightful surprise. Thank you all. It seems that there will be no rain for the day.

[conspicuous-clown-car]

what a morning,,,

here's a rant about the pressure community

I've been kinda lurking on pressure twitter for the past few weeks while all this shit went down and i just gotta say... jesus fuck.

I practically had a heart attack as soon as i opened my phone when i woke up and saw zeal was trying to sell pressure. Considering how he changed his profile last night to a strictly corporate one and then this? It seemed like a really hasty decision, and something serious was going on with him.

And yknow what, with all the hate being directed at him right now i don't blame him one fucking bit. I'd probably end up doing the same thing if i was in his shoes. Being autistic as well, i would just want to completely distance myself from this overwhelming bullshit. I think that's why he started to distance himself from the community in the first place (which unfortunately is kinda what led to some issues getting overlooked).

The tweet was deleted and pressure isn't for sale anymore thank GOD, but I'm honestly more worried about the actual people behind pressure than the game itself.

I agree that there's issues they need to fix, but its not an entirely black and white situation, and its pretty fucking complicated. With the sheer amount of people in the community its crazy to expect them to handle and manage everything themself, especially since they blew up in popularity in such a short amount of time, how the hell would they know how to deal with this???

Yes, there are certain things they need to actually address and take responsibility for that they sort of haven't, but attacking them to where it gets to this point isn't the fucking answer.

I wouldn't blame any of the devs if they never touch the game again, the way the community has treated them and has completely blown things out of proportion is insane. I feel like the main issue is the discord server itself but that's just me. From what I've seen its mostly just the community self cannibalizing, attacking each other, sending death threats, and doxxing people over shit that literally doesn't matter at all.

I'm not one to really delve into fandom drama, but this whole issue with certain possessive Sebastian fans and those who took it upon themselves to attack those fans is the stupidest fucking conflict I've ever seen in any fandom. Especially when this stuff reaches the people who work on the games who have nothing to do with it.

I agree that this is something the devs need to talk about head on with full transparency, no matter their feelings on it, because a main problem I've seen with them is lack of community management.

But again, y'all are forgetting the devs are REAL FUCKING PEOPLE, people who are bound to make mistakes, and get overwhelmed, and not know how to deal with suddenly having a giant fanbase. Harassing them and sending death threats is going way too fucking far and wont solve anything, because clearly all its done is made things worse.

Also god forbid they have boundaries and don't want to see certain things in the discord server. I'm not gonna get into the specifics, but as a queer trans person I think some of y'all are reading too much into the things they don't allow, seriously.

Reminder, I'm saying all this as someone who self-ships with Sebastian, and who's not entirely thrilled about him being canonically married. BUT PRIORITIZING A FICTIONAL CHARACTER OVER REAL PEOPLE????? THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YALL???

And to the people I've seen disappointed in zeal's response to all this on twitter, I'm with you, not seeing whats happening in the community doesn't mean these problems don't exist. But think about the shit he's going through, put yourself in his shoes and genuinely try to understand how fucking overwhelming this whole situation is, for him and the rest of the team. Especially after what's happened in the past 24 hours.

Tangent, but am i the only one who's seen a drastic change in the way fandom communities operate in the past few years? Like after lockdown fandom spaces have gotten more and more hostile, and people are just being so fucking mean to each other over the most trivial shit??? Listen I Get being chronically online, because i am, but at a certain point you just gotta log the fuck off and touch some grass, man. christ.

I really hope the devs take a break, they need it. I was excited about the update that was supposed to come out this month but I don't think it will now, and I honestly don't think we deserve it.

TL;DR: Pressure fandom, do better. Speaking from both points of view, no matter the various mistakes the dev team has made, the majority of this is on y'all.

And lastly, I'd honestly rather keep pressure exactly the way it is with no updates and no new stuff ever again than for it to turn into roblox slop like most of the games that are sold off on that platform.

[cicidarkarts]

Merry SelfShipmas to my beautiful, amazing, wonderful, gorgeous husband 🖤🖤🖤 Gotten me through some very tough times this year and I'm forever grateful! I love you so very much, Idrees 🖤🖤 😭😭

Oh and Merry Christmas to all my followers and moots, too, I suppose 🤣 I'm kidding you guys, Happy Holidays!! :) 🎀🎄✨

[rafayelsgf]

about to kay em ess WHAT THE FUCK XAVIER?????? the way he blushed when mc probably told him she liked him too (?????) AND THE CHUCKLE AND SMIRKFKWKDKKWC followed by the soft smile AND HIS RED EARS PLS I LOVE HIM

[bacchuschucklefuck]

Can you expand on what you mean by Baron being "too cool" to really fit a horror monster? It's a very interesting concept and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is it that they're too active/involved/tangible and it detracts from their scariness?

I feel like I should preface this with a wall of disclaimers lmao 1/I am a hardcore, down-to-the-marrow, avid, deeply sincere horror enthusiast, esp. horror creatures. this usually means my mileage is vastly different from the average populace's, and my scaredy bone has been disintegrated by longterm exposure. most things in a piece of horror media won't scare me! so I practically never use that on its own as the scale to talk abt horror experiences, but when something does scare me it's always a special occasion to be treasured. 2/canon d20 is never really meant to be horror horror, and for good reasons: it doesn't fit the company's output, it takes a kind of carelessness in production estimation that is always a huge risk, it's often vulnerable in a way that kinda goes against how TTRPGs usually facilitates vulnerability, and for most people it's just! stressful! d20, even with the "horror-themed" seasons, generally just plays with horror tropes and stays focused in its goal of being a comedy improv tabletop theater show. 3/fantasy high's chosen system is DnD, which as I've mentioned before is before all a combat-based game system, which means the magic circle of play is drawn based on stats that facilitate and prioritize combat. want or not this affects every interaction you have in the game, and given fantasy high's concept from the ground up (everyone's going to school of DnD stuff to get better at DnD) it's doubly relevant. 4/This Is Fine I have no quarrel with this. my meters are internal, I do not ask this show to be anything it doesn't advertise itself to be, and what it is is fucking great! I like it! when I expand on this ask's question it will be like a physicist going insane in a lab. that's the mindset we're going in with.

disclaimers done. my stance on horror as a genre is that it's a utility genre rather than a content genre or a demographic genre; it is the discard of narratives. it's the trash pile. horror, above being scary, is about being ugly and messy, it's the cracks on the ground any story inevitably steps over to stay a genre that isn't horror. the genre's been around long enough to develop a codex and a general language that medias and makers and enthusiasts of the genre can use to talk about and build onto, but if you go into individual pieces there's really no unifying Horror Story. one person's beautiful life can be another's horror story, it's just how it is.

this makes The Monster a deeply intriguing piece of the genre. thing is a monster is in a decent percentage of any story - it's just when the antagonist force steps into something past a certain line traced out in the story's world. monstrousness is in pretty much every western fantasy story, it's in any story with a hero and something to vanquish or win; more than anything it's a proxy of that thing up there. the line in a narrative's world. the monster is the guard of the unknown lands, where heroic, civilized people don't tread.

what does this mean in the context of horror? the genre is about that perceived lawlessness, that "unknown land" so to say. we're in the monster's home. that's the literary context that we often walk into a horror piece with; the monster knows more than you about where you are. it may not understand you, but it holds more information than you, and with that it moves swifter than you, has more covered than you, and is more assured in its existence in this context than you. it's a struggle to catch up to it, it's nigh impossible to get one over it, and you're never sure it'll 100% work, because you just don't have the information necessary to.

with that framing you can kinda see where I'm coming from here: horror's often about the breaking of rules. I always think a monster's most effective when it breaks well-established rules of both existence and visual storytelling. think Possum (2018) or Undertale's Omega Flowey or the Xenomorph Queen - unique change in medium, unique change in graphic, unique change in design language, etc. in that sense I actually really like how canon baron plays out: they don't really function like anything else in the fantasy high universe, the bad kids have not managed to kill them when they've felled literal gods, their domain in fhjy literally introduces new mechanics to encompass their existence! from an experience design standpoint they slap mad shit. BUT! I can't help finding their character, like as a character riz (and the other bad kids, eventually) interact with, to be very... coherent? in design. this is kinda hard for me to articulate in words, it's more often a sense you get once you've looked at enough of these scrumptious fuckers, their general design and the way they show up is just kinda too clean, so to say. always kinda newly made? fresh unboxed. it, once again, makes sense for their lore - they are looking for more about themself from riz - and their function - they're an antagonist in a game experience, they're meant to be interacted with in a way that produces results and meshes with the existing magic circle - but that shininess takes away from the implied history they should have dominion over and the person they're haunting doesn't.

from another angle there is kinda something there about how put-together canon baron is as a concept; the domain they call home is riz's deep-seeded fears, extremely vulnerable things he's drawn borders around to quarantine and refused to walk into. things that from his perspective would irreversibly shatter certain pleasant fictions his world is built on top of. canon baron, While Extremely Cool, I feel is kinda too neat to connect with and signify the apocalyticized mess that'd result from this paradigm shift. the part where they're in riz's briefcase and looking through every mirror is Very Cool And Fucked Up! but ultimately the show draws a line around them as well, by making game-physical, tangible spaces they're in (the mirrors and the haunted mordred manor) and put riz and the bad kids there only when they need to confront stuff. riz is meaningfully narratively away from baron's unknown land for most of fantasy high.

with that and all of my disclaimers in mind my conclusion here is if canon baron wants to be a Horror Monster they'd have to cross way more lines. be a Lot more invasive. hence (holds up my class swap baron like a long cat)

[seriousturd]

Ellis Mayfield is giving you a Thumbs Up!

[luck-of-the-drawings]

THE ORDER OF PALMS An order of holy folk that serve The Helm, working to create powerful Aasimar Paladins for the purpose of protecting any who hire their help. [BACKSTORY UNDER CUT]

One day, Gjör and her peers were lead by their mentor Opheria, to a mission far from their home. On the peak of that mountain village, they saw upon the horizon, the castle of their home go up in flames. Horrified and scared, the apprentices sought to follow their mentors guidance, and followed her lead into a small barn. It was there, that Opheria proceeded to slaughter each and everyone of the apprentices. It seemed she somehow had a hand in this sudden attack on the Order of Palms. Gjör D'annevual survived a sword through the 'heart', on account of a rare condition, that places her heart on the other side of her chest. When she finally managed to bring herself back home, the Order was insulted by her survival. She had so many better peers, why couldn't any of them have survived? This runt was seriously the only thing that survived Opherias wrath? It was better to just wash their hands clean of this. Thus the Order decided to banish Gjör from their ranks. She now travels the land in search of a purpose.

[stuffedsand]

innocent voting kazui every day is not enough i need a gun

[vancalox]

i want to talk about leda sooo much but i keep remembering that doing so means i have to own up to the fact that i not only made her survive the literal astronomican soul sucking process on terra via implied divine providence but also admit that During the soul sucking she had a god-emperor-bass-boosted supervision of like 45% of the plot of rogue trader and also a good chunk of dark age of technology history as well so now she literally thinks shes the honest to god blue check verified iconoclast prophet of big E himself

[vaguely-concerned]

I was just ambushed within the turbulent halls of my own mind by some headcanons about rye ingellvar's childhood that did 15000000 points of psychic damage to me and my heart personally and also made me almost sure of how I want to play it all at the end (very very differently from how I imagined going in!). some 'oh holy fuck this changes everything' rocking my own world bullshit going on in my neurons right now I'm reeling

[usertoxicyaoi]

crying my eyes out with tears of joy 2sung really said "here look true love really can happen even in your mid 20s and does exist and it can be as normal and simple and as lovely as this" for all us asian queers out there like .......

[notebookpapers]

as a lesbian I just need to tell you fully honestly that I saw shadowheart and was like “awh she’s so cute” and I saw Lae’zel and I was like “ooh mean. hot” and I saw Karlach and was like “WHAT A WOMAN” and then I laid eyes on Astarion and just fucking AWOOGA

[alex-just-vibing]

i need him in a way that is concerning to feminism

[edwardbonnets]

warning everyone now that my blog is about to become dragon age veilguard central, if you don't want to be spoiled please mute the tags #veilguard spoilers or #da4 spoilers !!!!!!!!!

this game has kinda consumed my body and soul

[aro-tarot]

I definitely did not just buy an expensive set of dice that has Astarion quotes in each die and is a really pretty set

Nope

Not at all

/sarcasm