#him and his cultural ties

[javiersprincess]

i think about javier and his connection to mexican culture and i begin to weep i fear

[redux-iterum]

This is less an ask, but more a compliment- I love, love, love the choice to have Tigerclaw become Fireheart’s dad. I think it’s my absolute favorite change y’all have made from the source. It adds so much complex emotion and dramatic tension to a part of the story that always felt very flat to me. The scenes between TC and FH continue to stick with me. Brilliant change.

Aww!! Thank you! I appreciate the kind words you lot and Dullard have given me!

Tigerclaw becoming Fireheart's dad was sort of an incidental notion sprung from a few ideas taken to their logical conclusion arranged in such a way to crush the hearts of the then-hypothetical readers. And from how yall have reacted, that gamble was a success. I always found Goldenflower fascinating as the cat-wife of Tigerclaw and mother of her children, and her newly-minted role of matriarch puts her in the prime position to look at a young child who needs a mom and say, "My baby now." Tigerclaw would then be Fireheart's father, and Fireheart would have to confront him! And Fireheart would also be impacted by Tigerclaw's actions on an emotional level besides just Bluestar and Goldenflower and the Clan as a whole! Oh! How juicy! How dramatic! It's just like the melodrama canon likes to indulge in, except actually relevant to the plot and characters!

[sharksonfire]

Ik Pyro is from Sydney in the comics (most likely Woolloomooloo specifically since he mentioned his grandma lives there) but I have a really in-depth headcanon about him being from somewhere in Tasmania (in-depth enough to include animal motifs and broader historical things lol I thought about this way too hard) and I really want to form it into a proper fic but I really don't think it would be that interesting to anyone other than, well, me...

[e-adlirez]

Do you have any thea stilton ocs yourself? tell us abt them!

Uuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh *awkwardly stares at my little OC closet*

Okay so two things about me: 1. I am not typically an OC maker, and 2. I thrive better on bouncing ideas off of other things instead of trying to create characters from scratch. Both of these mean that I don't make OCs particularly often, and the ones I do make mostly end up being antagonists or villains (as I find it easier to make a foil to a protagonist than a protagonist that everything will be bouncing off of). Soooooooo with that preface, allow me to show you my tiny, tiny, tiny collection of TS OCs ^^

The first one is a guy who was made for a concept where the girls go to China for a student exchange and have to deal with China's.... cutthroat education system, to say the least. This character was cooked up by me and my friend @starlight-4eva, and the name he's most known by is "Yi", or "one" in Mandarin. (He does have a proper Chinese name, that being Wáng Wěilóng (王伟龍))

Now, Yi is essentially a product of the aspect of the Chinese education system where everyone is publicly ranked so there is a motive to excel (but also to be super-toxic to those in lower ranks). He is extremely cocky, arrogant, and unfortunately very intelligent. He was in the same school as Violet in China, and he competed extremely fiercely with her for the position of top-ranked student in their class (if this sounds like two kids fighting over a video game leaderboard yeah it is, just imagine it in a school setting and the score is their grades). The rivalry is very one-sided but also not really kinda, since Yi is actively trying to mess with her in their competing, while Violet is mostly just trying to survive in school (and by that I mean bringing her A-game to everything). No cheating in exams though-- Yi is way too good for that! Besides, why cheat when you have psychological warfare?

For the longest time, Violet dominated her class's leaderboard with Yi hot on her heels, but the entire time, Yi wasn't bitter. Named "Er" at the time, he knew that all it took for him to take the top spot was a single screw-up. A single mistake. A single millisecond where Violet let her guard down. And it happened.

Violet fell from first rank to second, and he, now taking the rank "Yi", was ruthless in letting her know all about it, giving her the name "Er", which in Chinese means "two", but also has connotations of inadequacy, worthlessness, and lack of intelligence. He never failed to gloat about it, and as a rattled Violet attempted to regain her top rank, Yi was more than happy to watch "Er" struggle and fail, all while holding an iron grip over his new title.

Violet was able to recover from her fall, but she was never able to regain her top rank. Even in her gaokao, the infamous college eligibility exam, she missed the chance to overtake Yi by 0.1% in score. 0.1% too short.

Mouseford was a good place to heal and open herself up to new people with different ideologies, but in this student exchange, some old wounds burst back open as she finds to her horror that she is not only having the exchange in the same school Yi is studying in for university, not only is she in the exact same class as Yi, but Yi is just as arrogant and smug as ever. He is a walking, talking red flag (a male green tea bitch, if you will), and he does everything he does to make Violet as uncomfortable as possible (down to mild sexual harassment. Nothing too crazy, just him being an unfortunately smartass delinquent who constantly says he and Vi are "tied together by Yue Lao's Red Thread of Fate and flirts with her, knowing full well how uncomfortable Violet is with it. Hey, anything to throw her off her game even by just 0.05% of her 100%. A small number like that is enormous in an exam that's worth 33% of their entire grade in a single subject, right?).

(Here's some old doodles I did of him and Violet in 2021, something something I headcanon that Violet is Year of the Steel Dragon while Yi is Year of the Steel Serpent, something something Chinese dragons are unable to fly when injured on the crest of their head according to some site I don't remember rn, something something allegory to how Chinese communities is basically like playing socially political 3D chess constantly)

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The second one is a bit weird, but you're gonna have to hear me out on this one. If you've seen him in my Artfight, then yes, he technically originated from a Thea Sisters fic concept.

Du Yaoguai/DYG is a snake demon (Chinese demon, not Western), and while his Artfight profile says all, I do have to give a little bit of extra context.

He was supposed to be an antagonist in a fic scenario where the girls, in a Seven Roses Unit thing, crash-land into a fantasy world based on mythical China, and because it's not supposed to be kid-friendly and because the Heavenly Court put a "VIP pass, no VIP no entry" sign in front of the world's barrier, outsiders are to either be killed or kicked out as soon as possible, whichever happens first. DYG, being a human-eating snake demon monster, has his eyes on the girls and would like to have them for dinner, and he's willing to use every trick in the book to get them to fall into his trap. Mansplain, manipulate, manwhore, if you simp I'm not stopping you, but my Artfight rules do apply to him even outside of Artfight

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And finally (for now), this is Olovo.

"But E, I can't make heads or tails of this crappy concept sketch!" Oh, I know.

You'll get to know him eventually :]

Anyway that's it byeeee--

[rohirric-hunter]

Something something not to be a Feanor apologist on main but Feanor saying that destroying the Silmarils would kill him is not actually over the top and melodramatic as many readers tend to assume but perfectly reasonable because, much like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum at the grocery store might have just experienced literally the worst thing to ever happen to them, the long lives of the Eldar doesn't undo the fact that they were living very close to the beginning of the world and didn't have the wide cultural experience that other people (and the real life reader) benefit from. Specifically Feanor lacked the ability to moderate his emotional responses by saying, "But bad things happen and that's a part of life," to himself because he had the great good fortune to live in a time and place where the bad things that happened were mostly very small and mostly didn't involve people dying and mostly weren't a part of everyone's everyday life. He'd already experienced more loss than most Elves of his generation and was faced with a lot of people who genuinely didn't understand (and in some cases showed little empathy for) the struggles he was facing. This doesn't justify the actions he took that made those struggles worse, or that hurt other people, but part of the tragedy of the character is that while he could have made better choices, he didn't really have a lot of the tools that make that easier, as he was sort of discovering the consequences of his actions in real time. Also there's a very real chance that destroying the Silmarils genuinely would have killed him and I think people forget that too.

[sysig]

Looking his very best, as much as he can anyhow (Patreon)

[starry-eyed-psychopomp]

Fics where Sizhui gets to be raised with knowledge of and love for his birth family, save me…fics where A-Yuan gets to be raised with knowledge of and love for his birth family…save me, fics where Sizhui gets to be raised with knowledge of and love for his birth family

[bitebitesnap]

Also I'm absolutely loving how Shallot is more in tune with his feral instincts like smelling out threats and just directly saying he'll hunt things bare handed like fuck yes give me the wild monkey aliens I've been deprived of

[darabeatha]

ANYWAYS- I don't have much energy in general but I just wanted to drop by and say I had a thought in regards to the rather unique shape of the scar on his forehead in his fate design (which is a reference to the oftentimes more commonly known version of his story that recounts the motif of his death being by dying from his people throwing rocks at him which is the version f.ate seems to have followed) that it's not just there to represent this version of the story but could also be a reference to an iconographic pre-Hispanic attribute from Tezcatlipoca itself that is called the Ezpitzal, which is this:

(though in this piece, Tezca is shown under the guise of Tepeyollotl, it's still tezca) The Ezpitzal is often shown as a stream of blood that emanates from Tezcatlipoca's head. Professor Batalla pointed out that this term also relates to the Nahuatl concept of expressing anger

'it’s worth remembering that Tezcatlipoca was a god notorious for sowing discord and deceit'

So I just thought of how fitting it would be for M.octezuma to have this and how similar it looks to his scar (or well, how fitting it would be to a fictional stylized version of course) as M.octezuma's name is basically a compound of the noun 'lord' and the verb that means 'to frown in anger' which altogether gets interpreted as 'he who frowns like a lord' or 'he who is angry in a noble manner' and well, how this ties back to the Ezpitzal as a symbol that expresses anger

NOW IT COULD just be the shape of his scar and there's no deep meaning behind it but I still think it would be a nice little detail about his design if that was the case (if not then its just me overthinking symbolisms again), not to mention that even after the Spanish conquest took place and how as a consequence, a lot of characteristic traits and symbolisms were lost in regards to images, even then the Ezpitzal was still depicted (though barely there) with these protruding rounded edges

[we-are-inevitable]

Is there a dish that Jack always comes back to putting on the menu? If not, what's his favorite dish/kind of dish to cook?

if there’s anything you need to know about Joseph Pulitzer, it’s that he’s overpriced and incredibly American— hence, i think he would try to do a gourmet burger restaurant. i do think that jack’s cooking would justify the price, though!

and since jack is kind of the creative figurehead of the cooking aspect- pulitzer doesn’t care about the food, he just wants his name on everything- then jack is 100% the kind of guy to experiment with specials. cooking styles, ingredients, etc. he does vegan and vegetarian options, flavor combinations that shouldn’t work but really do, and he just really likes having fun with it!

i think one of his favorites, and one that is definitely popular when he brings it back every few weeks as the special for a few days, is one inspired by his mother’s cooking and all of the authentic mexican dishes she would make. i think the burger would be different every time but it would always have that inspiration, and its a blend of food and culture that seems to hit the spot every time!

jack is 100% the kind of chef who would study foods important to cultures all around the world and use those ingredients and/or ideas to influence his cooking, always giving credit where credit is due

[helmarok]

genuinely so angry about this. you gave us a red-maned man with a big ol nose in the botw tapestry only for it to just have been another little white boy? no ganon? no hero ganon? like i was really hoping he'd have been the chosen hero but demise's curse and all of his previous reincarnation history has doomed him into being seen as evil by the kingdom he saved, and his portrayal as a villain in TOTK would have been his rage after what the people he loved did to him. that would have made a very good story about fate and the harm hatred can do but no that isn't what we're getting. did i expect nintendo to go the classic "ganon is evil!" route? yes. am i happy that they did after 30+ years of "ganon is evil!" formula? no of fucking course. i want more insight on him as a person and his culture. i want more lore on how he feels as a gerudo male and how he feels being born into a curse or being born as someone history has always scorned. but we'll never get it and that kills me

[inkshine]

*The aftermath of the storm in "Princess Andy"* Crewmate One: Did you ever think it would end like this? Crewmate Two: The mad sorcerer with an army of sharks doing his bidding is a surprise.

[frightfulfantasy]

Just want to post my tav on here bc I love them hehe.

This is Chance (he/they). He is a drow warlock with The Fiend subclass.

Lore/background in the tags if interested.

Anyways they're pretty hehe

[pronouncingitwang]

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[sysig]

Totally unaffected by this gesture of affection, definitely (Patreon)

[belovedblabber]

not to ‘weird feelings about my cultural stuff’ post on main BUT I am full of feelings about being part Armenian tonight, it’s the part of my heritage I have the most connection with/the most interaction with but even then I feel a lot of disconnect and even guilt about calling myself Armenian