#i have big issues with the masked empire as well but the game is mostly just omitting info from there not actively lying

[niofo]

actually fun fact, but asunder was one of the last da books i read, it was long after playing inquisition, reading wot and some 150k into a fic, where i had a very different vision of what actually happened there. my bad i guess, i should first get familiar with all the media about my special interest before starting to write, but to my defense, in 2019 it was just supposed to be a short side project without that much depth. anyway, you can imagine my surprise when i read asunder finally and learned how it actually looked like... not just the mage rebellion (not started by anders, but by a vote organized by fiona, and the templars started murdering long before that), but also cassandra's whole personal quest makes no sense, my circle mage inquisitor and also literal first enchanter vivienne should be well aware that tranquility can be reversed thanks to shale.

i'm still not sure how i'm going to handle this in the fic, i think i'll just retcon it so it aligns with how it happens in the games (bcos i have cass' quest already written), but man it's just frustrating. why even publish this additional sources (books, comics etc) if you're going to mess with it/ lie about it anyway? asunder is my least favorite da book not just bcos i hate rhys and evangeline, but it's just overall so frustrating. and i expected to actually like it, bcos i like mage stuff and cole.

[exhausted-archivist]

In regard to my last reblog, I kinda want to expand on it.

The novels are 100% optional flavour text. They aren't required for you to really understand what is happening in the world. With the exception of Asunder, that one for me is a bit of a grey area but that is only because it covers aspects of two companions (Cole and Vivienne) that are glossed over and is rehashed entirely in an aspect by another companion's personal quest (Cassandra's).

Not even World of Thedas, the lore books are required because a big chunk of them are put in the game as codices. And the character stuff that's not? That's also flavour text and the fact that Leliana doesn't share background reports on your companions or you can't find them is a missed opportunity in utilizing Leliana. The whole "Game" aspect of Orlesian politics could have also been better incorporated through Josephine and Vivienne.

This is long so... cut.

But TLDR: Nothing is mandatory. World of Thedas, Asunder, and Masked Empire are just under utilized flavour text. They better not do the same or worse with Tevinter Nights.

We know they cut Cole from having Evangelina and Rhys appear for his personal quest and instead we got that weird thing with Varric and Solas being disagreeing dads on nature vs nurture. Rhys and Evangeline, but more so Rhys, are so important to Cole's background that I feel they could have brought them on with a little codex or preamble and it would have worked fine. They could have touched more on Cole's fear of becoming a demon again, his sense of identity and self, and even explored his whole concept of "helping" and his unique brand of compassion - because really Cole's form of compassion is a little off the beaten path.

But, that isn't because Asunder is mandatory, but because Cole isn't well anchored to begin with. They don't really explore him as a spirit/demon, they mostly use him as a way to tell you about other characters, and he's really wishy washy on even establishing what happened at the White Spire or with Seeker Lambert and just gives these sort of teasing/tantalizing starting points.

Which leads into a weak point with Vivienne. She has issue with how the war started. She has issue with the vote. She has issue with everything that happened with the White Spire. Which again, isn't explored and is just flippantly mentioned in banter with Cole or when she's snarking at Fiona.

We know she has issue with the vote because it was made when everyone was already dealing with Circles falling and templars killing people and extremist mages were killing other mages that opposed them. The vote was made not by people who were elected by the Circles - not entirely. They were made by whoever happened to get to Andoral's Reach and it was very much an emergency vote. She wasn't there for the vote and that's the start of the issue for her. Which, understandably this was written before Vivienne even existed, but with that they never resolve why she wasn't there for the vote or even aware of the chaos of the Circles. You kind of guess it's because of Bastien's health but yeah not really clear.

Both Cole and Vivienne's stories would be better anchored as well as give the Mage Templar war and the factions with in it more nuance if they even tried to incorporate the cliff notes of Asunder. It would also make it more of a flavour text and less of this murky grey area.

Which to make it even more murky and grey, Cassandra's whole plot of discovering the reversal to tranquility? Yeah that was discovered by a tranquil mage at the request of Divine Justinia. Literally every circle mage and Chantry person (of a certain rank) knows of its existence. Which they cheekily hide in ambient dialogue between Mother Giselle and another cameo character from Cassandra's past, Avexis. An elven mage who was turned tranquil because of the danger from her abilities to not only control small creatures but dragons.

That story Cassandra is known for? The dragons attacking the Grand Cathedral? Avexis was involved with that. Whole big thing in Dawn of the Seeker. But I digress.

Mother Giselle and Avexis talk about the reversal to tranquility in Haven. Everyone already knows but Cassandra's personal quest misleads you cause she's so pikachu-faced about discovering that there was a reversal and the Seeker's knew about it. Only half of the information should be new to her, the rest everyone knew about for a year and could have been beautifully folded into her story as to not only her mixed feelings on how she didn't feel as close to Justinia as Leliana was - because Leliana was in on it and Cassandra wasn't even aware that the Divine requested this happen behind the Seeker's back in 9:35 Dragon.

It would have been a great point to fold into the story to not only give more context to Cassandra questioning the Order but also feeling out of control and lost. Honesty would have been a good point in tension for her and Leliana to have.

But instead Cole goes largely explained, Vivienne is under explored and barely connected to the Mage Templar War conflict, and Cassandra is a (in my opinion) much less interesting rehash of something most people connected to the Chantry and Circles already knew for the most part.

Asunder is less required reading and more of discarded world building that amounts to a lot of missed opportunities.

Something I think that Tevinter Nights is at risk of if not worse. Either under utilized world building or they go full tilt in the wrong direction and it becomes the first required reading.

Specifically reading, because the first required additional media is the Legacy DLC of which they yoinked Corypheus and the whole start of the red templars from. And then again with Tresspasser which establishes and reveals so much vital information for the next game. Both DLCs, I think should have/be updated to free. Especially since it's been so long and they are required for the story now. And any "well players had to pay for them previously" is bs because new players can get the whole trilogy on sale for like 15USD. Deluxe editions included so they come with the DLCs - except for DA2.

Asunder and DLCs aside, lemme now circle back to the whole World of Thedas/Leliana and co thing.

The thing that grinds my gears about the World of Thedas bits is that a large part of them... are written to Leliana as reports. In game Leliana talks about doing background checks - how she isn't thorough enough with Solas because there wasn't enough time and more pressing things were coming. He slipped through the cracks. But everyone else? She got dirt on. Sera included. Leliana could have been a great vector to not only divulge more flavour text lore of our companions, but it could have also given us more aspects of conversation. How do they feel knowing Leliana gave us reports? Is sera annoyed because of the questions you can now ask? Is Blackwall sweaty because you might know details he doesn't? Does Iron Bull want to compare notes and see how good Leliana's network is?

There was so much they could have done with Leliana to not only make her more involved but made us more involved with the characters. It would have lead to more interactive story telling and folded in making the meta knowledge less meta as our Inquisitor actually used the resources of our spymaster.

Still, not required reading, but a way to fold in all the world building you've done to make the characters feel more real and give us a chance to bond with them. Even if we can't talk to them about it because "leaving it open ended for headcanons".

This also goes into how "The Game" is under utilized in Inquisition. So much of Inquisition is telling vs showing us or letting us experience something. Having more scenes where we walk in on Josephine dealing with combative knowledge, using our origins and background perks to play the game introduces us to the concept of Orlesian politics and perhaps we get perks - more soldiers, resources, gold, higher starting approval at the Winter Palace. Something that has more relevance to us and folds in this supposed system all of Orlais is beholden to.

A similar system could have also been used with Vivienne. Whether she was hosting nobles or if she wanted to gossip with you over a letter she received that she thinks could be of use to you if you know how to properly use The Game. It would have also been interesting if it impacted the noble npcs hanging out in the hall, if it became weighted depending on just how good you were. Less Orlesians meaning less support from Orlais and more reliance on other nations to legitimize the Inquisition. More Orlesians? A stronger army, more standing with the court and the Chantry, more ammunition for when you're dealing with Celene and Gaspard in the Winter Palace. Things like that. Simple story threads that didn't really need to go anywhere but perhaps impacted the ambient state.

It would have helped tie in Masked Empire and give it more weight (and also make Michel de Chevin be more than the rando the Imshael maybe killed).

Just saying... It's just under utilized world building in an interactive media.

[dreamsmp-au-ideas]

Fire Emblem AU

First house I want to focus on is the *insert drumroll here*

Green Gator House, where those who hail from the SMP Empire reside!

The SMP empire is the oldest empire in the continent of Carmine. While it once ruled over the entire continent, it lost that power after The Badlands and L’Mmanberg were formed. Despite this, SMP has the most land and all of its citizens are proud of its rich history. The Gator is the house animal because of its toughness and strength, with high populations at SMP’s beaches. This years Green Gators consist of the following

Dream- Dream is the future emperor of the SMP and is considered a prodigy in his speed and skill with lances. He’s generally friendly with most students, despite being distant towards those of other houses. Dream always wears a green hood to cover up his hair for reasons unknown to others. However, underneath his jokes is someone who is desperate to change the status quo, especially how those with and without crests are treated. Dream is totally planning to start a war but he’s only doing it for the good of everyone. He disguises himself with his mask when he needs to work with his less morally standing allies. These allies are people who worship a mysterious god *coughtheeggcough* which gives them great power in exchange for the blood of humans. Dream doesn’t like working with them but he has no choice. Dream in his mask and longer cloak becomes known as The Green Demon. While Dream does have genuinely good reasons for starting a war and his resolve to achieve a better future for his nation won’t waver, he does sometimes ponder it after hanging out with his classmates. Dream specializes in lances, swords, and riding. He has a weakness in faith and heavy armor. He doesn’t like being weighed down. He has two crests.

George- George is Dreams loyal retainer and one of his best friends. George was a commoner until Dream just happened to see him compete in a tournament and was like “I want that one”. Thus, George was taken in to train as his retainer and he became fast friends with Dream and Sapnap. George kinda stands out as one of the few commoners in The Green Gators, not that anyone would dare give him crap about it in front of Dream. George is one of the few people to know what Dream is planning to do and his main reason why. That is to say, why Dream always has his hair covered. George is considered the least chaotic one in the Dream Team, as him, Dream, and Sapnap are called. He’s well known for sleeping in the weirdest places, like in the middle of lunch. Despite this, he is not to be underestimated with his skill in bows and riding wyverns. George is colorblind which he accidentally keeps a secret purely because he forgot to tell his housemates. George specializes in bows and flying. He has a weakness in riding. He has no crests.

Sapnap: Sapnap is Dreams childhood friend because of their families close connections. That is to say, Sapnaps father is the financial advisor to Dreams father. However, Sapnap really doesn’t want to do that and would much rather become a general someday. Sapnap has great talent with reason and is called an arsonist by his classmates after he set their lunch on fire when he was stuck with cooking duty. In his defense, he thought that would make the lunch cook faster and didn’t consider the possibility of fire. Sapnap is a friendly prankster but he does have his worries. Dream and George have been acting more distant lately and he has no idea why. All they are offering is vague platitudes or just evading his questions. Sapnap specializes in reason (fire) and brawling. Weakness in flying and riding. He has a crest.

Puffy: Puffy is a noblewoman who has always dreamed of becoming a knight. Her family specializes in overseas trading but she would really rather stay at home and defend others. She’s one of the oldest out of her classmates and is quickly dubbed as the mom friend. Puffy takes a shine to her future emperor and calls him her duckling after he started coming over to spar with her. Puffy also becomes fast friend with Niki, even though they are in separate houses. Puffy has a lot of friends in other houses. Perks of being used to interacting with those different from herself from trading, she supposes. Puffy has a strong sense of honor and believes very highly in fairness. She specializes in heavy armor and axes but she’s not so hot at flying. She’s not a big fan of heights. She has no crest. Basically, she’s a tanky character who is good at taking physical hits but has very low speed

Schlatt- Schlatts family used to be a part of L’Manberg and he was close friends with Wilbur. That is until his noble family made a risky investment and it backfired. Hard. When none of the nobles would help, nobles from the SMP offered financial aid in exchange for them leaving L’Manberg for the SMP. Schaltt’s family agreed, but their financial position is still very fragile. Schlatts friendship with Wilbur fizzled out after that, mostly due to Schlatts bitterness at the nobles of L’Manberg. Schlatt is also one of the few who can tell somethings off with Wilbur eve before he goes all hunched over eyepatch dude during the timeskip. However, Schlatts not good with feelings so he doesn’t approach Wilbur about it. Schlatt is a cynic about the concept of an honorable noble and has major money hoarding issues. He’s constantly trying to come up with new ways to make some quick cash off of people because who knows when he’ll need some extra? He’s friends with Quackity and Tubbo or as he puts it “The only nobles here he can tolerate because they aren’t self righteous pricks” Schlatt has strengths in reason(fire) and swords with a weakness in faith. He has no crest.

Quackity- Quackity is a noble of a minor house. He’s set to be the next leader of his territory after graduation so he’s mostly here to have one last hurrah of having fun and prepare for leadership. Quackity tells loads of jokes and may appear not to take things seriously. The important thing to note is appears. Quackity wants the best for his people and is willing to do whatever it takes to be a good leader for them. He secretly does a lot of research in past rulers and how they succeeded. Quackity does goof off a lot in between classes, which mostly involves helping out Schlatt with his latest scam. Or trying to talk him out of it if he thinks its a bit too immoral. If he’s not with Schlatt, Quackity likes hanging out with Sapnap as well. Quackity has strengths in axes and authority with a weakness in bows. He has a crest.

Tubbo- Tubbo is also a noble of a minor house. He’s a middle child in a lot of siblings. He’s at the academy mostly so he can figure out what he’s going to do with his life. He’s one of the younger students there. His and Tommy’s families are actually fairly close due to both of them being close to their respective borders. Despite their families trading a lot Tommy and Tubbo has never met. They quickly became inseparable at the academy, despite Tommy being busy with his duties as Wilbur’s retainer. It sure would be a shame if they were separated and forced to fight each other in a war, wouldn’t it? Tubbo loves to hang out at the greenhouse or cook with Karl. He’s extremely skilled at magic, through hard work mostly. Tubbo has strengths in both faith and reason (wind magic) and has weaknesses in axes and brawling. He’s a classic squishy wizard character who cannot take many hits due to low defense. He has a crest.

If Karl decides to teach The Green Gators he has two options before the timeskip. He can either side with Dream or go against him along with everyone else except George. Each side has pros and cons that could be debated about all day and night but that’s neither here nor there. This is mostly just to cover the students and what their generally like and backstories because this is already long enough without going into the plot. Sorry about that by the way. Feel free to tell me if you want this shortened.

Ah I remember why I didn’t pick up the game. It’s because I’m going to get attached to all the characters and won’t be able to save them all and oh no I’m crying.

ANyways. This is good. I like everyone’s characters in here and I’m excited for more. Also ouch on the Clingy Duo angst. Oh god. Oh no.

[felassan]

hello MJ, I hope you are doing well! With the approach of DA4 drawing ever closer and the release of new non-game content, I find myself at a complete loss since leaving Thedas shortly after the release of Trespasser. I was wondering if there is somewhere a comprehensive guide to all the books/comics/etc released since then, so I can catch up on the juicy lore. I figured if anyone would know of something like this it would be you! Thanks in advance and have a lovely day!

Hi Nonnie, thanks for the nice message! :)

Let’s see! So we had Trespasser in 2015. Since then there have been no more The Masked Empire-style novels but there have been some comic series.

Dragon Age: Magekiller, which began Dec 2015. 5 issues. the story takes place before and during the events of DAI

Dragon Age: Knight Errant, which began May 2017. 5 issues. the story takes place in 9:44

Dragon Age: Deception, which began October 2018. 3 issues. set after Knight Errant, sometime around 9:44

Dragon Age: Blue Wraith, which began Jan 2020. 3 issues. The final issue is upcoming on March 18th. set several months after Knight Errant, sometime around 9:44 or 9:45 

Hope this doesn’t sound like a cop-out, but the Dragon Age wiki articles on these comics are actually pretty good summaries of the plots of these comics: 1, 2, 3, 4 (spoiler warning for the comic plots at these links obviously). These comics are kinda episodic in nature, as each is a miniseries, but between them runs an overall underlying plot that is developed a bit more in each new issue. And that plot does tie into Solas/his plans, what’s been going on in Thedas lately, the Tevinter Nights anthology (see below) and what we’re going to see in Dragon Age 4. If possible for you I’d super encourage you to buy the comics, especially Knight Errant, Deception and Blue Wraith - the characters in these ones are very endearing, it’s clear the writers of them care a lot about the world of DA, and imo these are like the best Dragon Age comics seen to date!!. I really think they’re great!

The other big thing we’ve had is Tevinter Nights, an anthology of 15 short stories that released the other day. The stories can all be read separately and in any order, but they are mostly arranged in such a way that shows the passing of time and development of plot threads Thedas. iirc 1 story is set during DAI, but the others all occur after Trespasser and some are after most of the events of the recent comics. these stories are well-written, smartly-crafted, woven together and a lot of new interesting lore is introduced. To me they seem like a sort of springboard for some of our future plot threads and again, the plots tie into Solas/his plans and what’s been going on lately in Thedas. There is also a fairly sizeable setup for Dragon Age 4. The anthology is a really enjoyable read and so again if possible for you I’d super encourage you to get it! If not, or in addition, not sure if this kind of thing is what you’re looking for but I wrote in-depth about all the new Solas stuff here, and summarized the other major non-Solas lore additions and plot developments here. spoiler warning for Tevinter Nights for those links obviously.

As @voidpussyblr says, they also put out a short novelization in 2018 called Dragon Age: Hard in Hightown. in-universe it’s written by Varric. There’s a plot summary on the wiki. It’s decent and there wasn’t overmuch going on in terms of juicy lore and not heaps of new stuff.

It also just occurred to me that @dalishious kindly wrote a helpful guide to the DA books and comics here, covering both old and post-Trespasser media. Sure it’ll be updated with Tevinter Nights stuff in time.

I hope this helps and if there’s anything else you’re unsure/confused about or wanna know pls feel free to drop me a line.

[vedj-f-bekuesu]

At this point I’m just watching the seasons to keep the momentum going after two great (and one flawed but still okay) seasons. With Friday being a Bank Holiday, I might get the rest of the pre-11 stuff wrapped up by the weekend. But enough of the future, how about the season I watched, Sons of Garmadon?

It had a lot to live up to based on its reputation, and I’m happy to report that it delivers on what it sets out to do. Issues with the season are fairly minor tribbles, but that’s something I can cover in the notes.

-Hoo boy, let’s get this out of the way; the movie did fucking wonders for Lloyd Garmadon. Spending like five seasons stuck to his blander “chosen one must learn” characterisation, this season gives him a very long overdue overhaul into a more modern chosen one protagonist who is way more entertaining to watch. Bonus points for having a look I can take seriously now...yeah, sorry, but the Anakin hairpiece with the strange approach to voice commitment never did for me, even as it became the norm for what I was viewing.  -To be honest, his teammates get some good material here too. Some more than others (Zane especially has a really good little arc where he gets to show his more calculating side. Cole’s arc is okay but I don’t feel it quite nails the landing as well), but they all get chance to banter and have character moments, which is mainly what I come into shows for as opposed to straight up development constantly. Shout outs to Jay who has small moments, but important ones that do really good for his character (I could go into why Lloyd and Jay make the most sense as leads...probably after my season watching is done). I also like the callback to a character moment he had in season 3. Also this finally feels like the writers are sticking to characterisation, this season mostly keeping what Hands of Time did with them. Not so much design-wise, but I’ve made it clear many times that I prefer the new designs to old. Also, I get to throw in Pixal as a main character now since she’s clearly on the team full time. She’s good here too. -The dynamics get their own section just because I want to restate how I prefer the dynamic between Jay and Lloyd compared to Kai and Lloyd so far. Seriously, Jay seems to step up to bat for Lloyd more than Kai at this point. And yet no-one really seems to be interested in it within the fandom. -There wasn’t really much in the way of side characters this season (I am aware that next season will change that). Misako was good for what little material she had, Wu was fun and actually became a solid character in his own right once he became a toddler, Dareth is solid and really gets to show his alternative way of helping out, and the police commissioner...eh, better than season 6 but I’m still not big on him.  -I can sum up Harumi in one sentence; Skylor but done better on every count (and also evil). She’s engaging when she’s acting as the more humble Princess figure, and she’s nicely hammy when she’s unleashing her evil side. I can see why people would be into Lloyrumi with such a investing act (for the record, I’m not). This all being said, those who say that Harumi had a point are missing one important detail; as much destruction has been caused with the ninjas’ close call; what alternative is there? I don’t see anyone else stepping up to save Ninjago so it would have probably fully fallen a long time ago. And even with the Great Devourer, Lord Garmadon was channelling his good side to deliver a finishing blow, he still needed the ninja there.  -We have three other villains and two of them are enjoyable. Ultra-Violet is committed to her crazy shtick and amusing, and Killow is definitely different to how I thought he’d be, but it’s a lot more enjoyable (especially when Garry Chalk is channelling every bit of his Sonic Underground Robotnik voice he can. Kind of like how Clancee was Ian James Corlett channelling a lot of his scrub monkey third class). Mr E can go rust though.  -Unlike the other seasons which people cite as dark, this one feels like it does actually go there. It’s not completely a dark season, mostly the end of Jade Princess and scenes between Game of Masks and Big Trouble, Little Ninjago. It was still pretty fun and light-ish hearted outside of that. -Weirdly enough, most of my quibbles are on the technical side. People cite this season as having the best animation...but I don’t really see it. In terms of visuals it’s a step up, but the actual animation doesn’t feel that different to Hands of Time. They learned to use flashier graphics everywhere. Which is probably why the intro is the way it is, and I’m sorry but this is probably my least favourite intro. I can’t appreciate the spectacle when focusing on anything is difficult to achieve. On top of that, there were still some glaring graphical fuck-ups (like when Cole is shown with the other ninja in a scene where he was captured, or when Lloyd was shown with green eyes in a shot despite being drained of power at that point), which aren’t really any different to the ones Prime Empire has.  -The pacing of the season wasn’t entirely smooth, but unlike other seasons it’s not like one set issue. It’s more like a concertina effect; it was very quick at first, then slows down, then speeds up again, then slows down, then finally hits an even tempo about halfway through. This is why I didn’t mention the likes of Hutchins, the parents or the Mechanic before; because of the pace, you don’t really get enough time to really get attached to them (doesn’t help that the Mechanic has Alan Marriott doing the voice in his cameo, and man does it not fit compared to Skybound. I’m glad when the Mechanic got more substantial stuff they went back to his original VA, that voice is so fun).  -My other big thing is actually the complete continuity snarl that’s Harumi’s backstory makes. They’ve thrown in so many random events over the seasons but because of the sheer vagueness of the timescales it doesn’t really break suspension of disbelief. But Harumi’s turn to darkness is clearly during the ending of season 1, which we have a much more tangible sense of time for. Harumi seems like she’s about 8-10 then, the ninja seem like they were 14-15 then, Harumi seems like she’s 15-18 now but the showrunner still insist that the ninja are teenagers? How does that work, the most generous allowance for time is five years, and that would barely make them still teenagers in season 8. Certainly don’t believe they could be teenagers as of the most recent seasons. -On a completely different tangent, can we talk about the toilet humour? Yeah, it’s not like it’s never been there (there’s been poop jokes, fart jokes, halitosis jokes, and who can forget that one utterly cringe scene in S3?), but Hands of Time and Sons of Garmadon do it in a way that just comes off as really weird compared to earlier toilet humour. Like, there’s the implication by Jay in season 7 that Kai has issues with constipation, Cole’s truth tea dose forces him to say that he pees in the pool, and then there’s Kai, right to Harumi’s face, all but saying that Jay has issues with peeing himself. Her reaction to it is fucking hilarious, but it’s still weird, even though knowing Vincent Tong he would totally do that. 

Overall, this was a great season, and it’s clear to see how this became such a draw to the series (meaning in hindsight, LEGO’s method of dealing with the new style was pretty much a winner). The issues I have don’t stop the quality being across the board. Aside from Possession, I think this may be a favourite season from the pre-11 stuff. 

Next time, we effectively get the second part to this story. Yep, it ended in a cliffhanger so we’ve hardly wrapped it up here. Time to see how the OG ninja and newer recruits handle themselves alone in Hunted. 

[benisasoftboi]

In Which I Explain The Entirety of Star Wars, Despite Being Very Much Unqualified To Do So

I have only seen one Star Wars movie - it was The Last Jedi. I saw it, with no context, two years ago in theatres when it first came out. I was very surprised to find out that it made a lot of people very angry, because I quite liked it, as did the friends I saw it with. I can’t say I remember much though.

All the rest of my Star Wars knowledge comes from its generally inescapable nature in the pop cultural zeitgeist. I might have seen a bit of Episode 6, which I don’t know the name of, when I was round a friend’s house once, but I was very tired, and it was about a decade ago anyway.

That’s just some context for my lack of qualifications to do this. My friend said I should still do it anyway. I will not be looking anything up as I write this, so all spelling mistakes and other general errors are mine. 

So anyway - The Entirety of Star Wars:

Original Trilogy 

There is a guy called Luke. He is played by Mark Hamill and he is George Lucas’s self insert. He lives on a planet where there is only sand, because in this universe all planets have only one terrain, I think. He drinks milk. The milk might be blue.

A guy played by Liam Neeson finds Luke. I think this guy’s name is probably Obi Wan Kenobi, but I might have that wrong. At some point he will die tragically and it will be formative for Luke, but then he will also come back as a ghost. Ghosts exist in this universe. 

Possibly Luke has known this guy for a long time or possibly he is a stranger, I am not sure. Somehow they end up on a spaceship.

Luke needs to learn how to use magic powers called the Force, which seems to be mostly telekinesis, and also lets him use a really fancy but probably impractical sword called a lightsaber that shoots blue or sometimes green or sometimes red light. This is called Jedi training. Jedi Knight is a religion. You can claim to be one on the census in the real world. They seem to be really serious people despite having a silly name.

Everyone also has guns that go ‘pew pew pew’ and nerds get really mad when you make fun of that.

Luke will meet many colourful and interesting people on his journey. These include:

A woman played by Carrie Fisher who is also his twin sister but he doesn’t know that until after they kiss. Her name is Leia or maybe Laia. She has silly hair. At one point she wears a slave bikini because she’s enslaved to a gelatinous blob because that’s just how it goes when you’re the woman in a 70s sci-fi movie

A guy called Han Solo because he is Edgy and Does Things Solo. He and Leia have a romance and it’s Drama. He also has a spaceship that people will build very impressive lego replicas of. He dresses like a cowboy. I’m 90% that he is played by Harrison Ford

A bunch of walking teddy bears called Ewoks who can kill you and live in a jungle

A guy called Lando Calrissian who I think wears fancy clothes and that’s all I know about him, he might actually be a villain I’m not sure. He might die?

A little blue robot who hid behind some rocks one time and then in the re-release he hid behind more rocks than before and the fans got Mad

A big gold robot who is nervous and gay and might be gay for the little blue robot, like they might be married but that also might be a meme I’m not certain

A weird green goblin thing called Yoda who makes Luke carry him around and speaks in broken English that annoying people have spent the last thirty years imitating. He dies, but then is a ghost so it doesn’t matter really

A guy called Boba Fett who is a bounty hunter. I genuinely have no clue how he fits in to all of this. He might not actually be from Star Wars, maybe I’m mixing him up with something else. 

Luke is also trying to fight the Evil Darth Vader who works for an Evil CGI Emperor of the Evil Empire. They live on a big spaceship called the Death Star and it looks like a moon but isn’t and people think it’s funny when you point that out for some reason. They are the Dark Side, which makes them easy to root against because they’re just cartoonishly evil I guess. I think they are also bureaucrats. They have Stormtroopers, who might be brainwashed people or might just be robots, or might even be clones. They all wear identical white armour with helmets so people don’t care when they get shot. Kinda like fencers.

Darth Vader is actually Luke’s father and this is a twist except not anymore. This means he is also Leia’s father, I’m not sure if she knew. Also Luke loses his arm. Darth Vader gets redeemed and then dies but also takes down the Evil CGI Emperor with him.

I don’t know what happens in any of the movies, but I know that the first one ends with them getting plans for or from Leia, not sure, the second one has the dad twist, and the third one has ghosts. Also they blow up the Death Star by shooting a garbage chute really hard. 

Prequels

These movies are widely disliked. The first one has too much bureaucracy. They are about Darth Vader’s backstory. He used to be a guy called Anakin. He will Become Evil. He will also meet many colourful characters. They include:

His love interest, who is called Padme. She wears a silly hat and dies of a combination of Childbirth and Sadness. I saw this bit happen one time when I was a kid and I was stuck round my mum’s friend’s house and her son was playing through this part in the LEGO game. It was sad

A guy with a red face whose name might be Maul and has robot legs? 

A guy called Jar Jar Binks who everyone seems to simultaneously hate and feel a desperate need to make sex jokes about 

Angry Jedi People

Probably some robots

Anakin hates sand and is pretty but grumpy. His hatred of sand is what will prevent him from finding Luke in the original movies. He falls in a volcano and gets turned into a robot man and it’s very dramatic. He has an angry red lightsaber. He murders a bunch of children by executing Order 66. Or maybe that was in the first set of movies I don’t know. I’m not sure how they made three of these movies, there doesn’t seem to be much to them.

Also there is something called ‘mitoclorians’ and I don’t know what they are but they make nerds Very Mad.

Expanded Universe

There was an expanded universe, but Disney said it wasn’t canon when they bought the rights, so now it isn’t. If I were a Star Wars fan, I would not take this lying down, because what right does Disney have to say what’s canon? Why is it up to the copyright holders? They are a corporation, not a writer. Expanded universes are always really fun and full of wacky nonsense that would never get put in the mainline stuff. I don’t like it when people try to dismiss them. 

Stand Alone Movies

When the new trilogy started, they also made some stand alone films. They were called Rogue One and Solo. Rogue One is about a woman named Gin or Jinn or Jin or Ginne or - I wish I hadn’t restricted myself to not looking anything up - Urso. The spelling doesn’t matter because she dies. So does everyone else. Then Darth Vader shows up.

Solo is about Han Solo and his friends and they have an adventure and there’s a robot who wants robot rights but she dies so no one has to address the slavery thing. Also apparently it was going to be a comedy but got reshot as a drama. I hope I never watch it because that sounds terrible, even as much as I like Donald Glover who I think is in it probably. I think his character might have been in love with the dead robot.

Sequel Trilogy

These movies are about a girl called Rey. She makes nerds mad by existing and being the protagonist. She is Space British. She is a scavenger and is friends with a really cute little orange robot. Somehow she ends up in space. She starts hanging out with Older Leia’s crew, which include a pilot named Poe Dameron and a guy called Finn, but I don’t know why he’s there. People ship them with each other, and also with Rey. 

The other person people ship Rey with is Kylo Ren, who I call Space Zuko because when I saw The Last Jedi, he showed up and I was like ‘oh, it’s Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender but in space’, because he has bad hair and is angry about his Daddy Issues. I hope in the next movie he gets better hair and fewer Daddy Issues like Real Zuko did. A lot of people get really angry about Rey and Space Zuko being shipped together, but they’re still the most popular ship on AO3. So no matter what happens in the next one, nerds are going to be mad about it, and I am not looking forward to it.

Kylo Ren killed his dad, Han Solo, because he was radicalised to be evil for reasons I don’t know. The guy who runs the New Evil Group, which is called the First Order, is an ugly CGI guy called Snoke. It was apparently a Big Twist that Kylo kills him Last Jedi, and it made nerds really mad. I don’t understand why people were surprised, because when I saw the movie, I saw that guy and was like ‘oh he’s gonna get killed by Space Zuko because that would be Drama and also from a production standpoint having a guy who needs lots of special effects is much more difficult than just having Adam Driver wear a scary mask’ and then I was right so maybe I’m smarter than all the nerds. 

There is also a guy called Hux and he is a ginger. I think he is evil.

The other thing people got really mad about was that Rey’s parents were not established characters. People wanted her dad to be Luke, I think, who is in Last Jedi. I was happy about this because I like Mark Hamill. He spent the movie teaching her about the force while they hang out on an island with a race of merchandising opportunities called Porgs. He dies at the end but he might be in the next one as a ghost anyway. 

Also there was a girl called Rose and people decided that not liking the character meant they could be mean to the actress, which is not true and everyone who was mean to her should be ashamed. There was another woman as well, but I don’t remember her name, she had purple hair and was serious and I have no idea if she was good or evil. 

Kylo Ren’s real name is Ben which is not very sci-fi. Maybe that’s why he changed it.

Though come to think, Luke isn’t a very sci-fi name either. 

Anyway, that’s everything I know about Star Wars.

Feel free to ask me questions about Star Wars and have me try to answer.

Do not, under any circumstances, try to actually explain Star Wars to me. I’m much happier as is, thank you very much

[gaygwenpool]

*slams fists on table* MYSTELEON

I knew you wouldnt disappoint! :D  tho you already know most of these lmaoo  lotsa credit to @herbofoo anyway, i dont remember which of these you came up with but Patchwork wouldnt be the same without your Good Good Content! (And of course thanks for all your patience as i cry about comics lmao)

I’ve lost all shame long since ive started shipping them so brace yourself for the self-indulgent cheese that is Chameleon/Mysterio in my Patchwork verse. (its reallly. really Melodramatic. i gave up all pretense.. also under the cut cuz its long..)

ask meme

Who cooks:

Mysterio! Although Chameleon is objectively The Superior Cook thanks to the long years of being a servant to picky russian nobility BUT exactly because of that, he really doesnt enjoy it, even less when cooking for others and not just himself. So it is usually Beck who prepares meals (that are not bad either, they are just simpler) but as often as they can, they eat out. That said, Cham is very well aware Quentin loves his cooking so sometimes, he makes them something. (Being sick isnt so bad when it means Chammy bringin you a big bowl of hot borscht :)

On the other hand, Cham has quite a sweet tooth which Q notices Fast and decides to learn how to bake. It took more effort and failed tries than it could have, mostly because he got cocky, how hard could this be and just. kept forgetting he put stuff in the oven.. But now he makes quite delicious cookies n cakes which make Dmitri almost tear up because tasty + Quentin baked something Specifically for him?? 

Who does the laundry and other chores:

Mysterio’s laundry is usually booby trapped so he has to clean it himself and he doesnt even let Cham near it. And he keeps forgetting gadgets in his civvies. Not to mention that again, for the same servant reason, Cham really doesnt enjoy house chores in general, so he usually just gets his own clothes cleaned somewhere else (especially since his fancy suits and even fancier gowns are the highest quality and delicate materials, he doesnt even Know how to clean them..) 

As for the rest of the chores, its pretty balanced, although Cham has more of an eye for things that needs to be cleaned up (and Beck already has cooking duties) so he does a tad more. 

How many children do they have + Any pets:

In my Patchwork universe there’s a whole Thing about Leon, the Chameleon of the Ultimate universe but I’ve tried to type up a short summary and failed, it’s a long story lmao ^^;; and anyway he isnt exactly their kid, he is just much younger than them and they ended up sorta mentoring him. 

However, they have Celavi, the escaped ex-spy beluga.(Yes, it started as a joke based on this post that accidentally grew more and more serious until @herbofoo and me were too attached to let it go) She counts pretty much as their adopted daughter that they both spoil to hell and back, I mean no surprise, she saved Cham’s life once and sometimes, she helps out with heists. (Mostly for the show, you should have SEEN the look on Spider’s face when a beluga splashed him. He is used to humanoid sharks, to Hydroman.. not like. real life beluga that LAUGHS at him) Beck’s voice: “Dont you dare to insult her, SHE IS PERFECT AND FLAWLESS and A GOODNESS INCARNATE!! -she is literally a deserted russian spy that was trained to gather everything that could be used to harm USA-yea, i have a soft spot for those ;)“

She was always surprisingly clever so she never really counted as a “pet” and at one point, she even bonds with a symbiote (together they are Vague, again long story ah ha). They dont talk but have quite some range of vocalisations so communication isnt a problem. 

Who’s more dominant: 

They both have pretty dominant strong personalities (ok chameleon’s a bit more complicated with that but like.) with big egos who dont like others questioning their superiority. (Of course not at the level of like Doc Ock etc, they are surprisingly flexible and good team players that can be willing to let someone else take the spotlight if they are Nice) But the whole point of their relationship is that neither of them is dominant over the other, they get enough of that literally everywhere else. It’s very reassuring to be so sure that they are on equal footing, cooperating, no hidden nooses around their neck. Especially in their line of work of course! 

(Also, for the other interpretation of this question: anythin remotely sexual happens Pretty Late in the story and both of them are somewhere on the ace spectrum so it doesnt happen that often but they are both verses tho Beck bottoms more)

Favorite nonsexual activity:

MOVIES!! Sprawled on the giant comfy couch, closer than technically needed, cuddling and watching old movies with great special effects and/or great actors! Listening to Beck excitedly rant through the most dramatic speech of the story as he explains how the next cliffhanger is done with hydraulics! Focusing so hard on the stars in his eyes and his excited tone and gestures and just the tone of his voice you forgot to listen to the words themselves! Watching Cham’s face flawlessly mimic the faces on the screen in a blink of an eye and secretly guessing which one will he pick next. Feeling his head slowly fall on your shoulder, eyes closed, his mask smooth but not tense, instead just.. peaceful. Slight ping of annoyance, after all, this is A Classic movie dammit, but it’s gone in a second because Mitya hasnt slept since thursday and you are just relieved he is finally getting his rest. Feeling his warmth under your hand on his shoulders and suddenly never ever wanting to get up again.. EHM. anyway

PLANING HEISTS TOGETHER!! and more or less successfully executing them but planning is actually even more fun aside from the Big Reveals and Entrances which are actually harder to coordinate than one would think! 

Lots of shobiz/job talk actually, they really enjoy what they do! Lots of people already mentioned that in their hc compilations but i agree, they love goin to see all kinds of movies and plays and performances as well as acting various scenes with one another!  

Their favorite place to be together:

NEW YORK CITY BABEYY. Sure they love to travel and see other countries (and cause mayhem there) but.. they love their mess of a city, it’s never the same without the webhead around as well as the bazillion of other heroes n villains bashin each other’s heads. 

Any traditions:

Oh so many pop culture references and inside jokes, oh my god. One time, they spent the entire heist (and its planning period) speaking strictly in famous movie lines and titles, Max and other sixers tried to join but didnt last too long :’D 

Beck also has a habit of taking pictures of people with Interesting faces or styles he sees and sends them to Cham. Also another fanon classic: together they have a running game, disguising themselves as moderately famous people and the other guessing who..

Their “song”:

‘This is me’ from the Greatest Showman, i just live for the two of them singin it in Cham’s car,off key but fully immersed and living it. 

What they do for each other on holidays:

Neither of them are religious but that doesnt stop Beck from going ALL OUT at any opportunity, Sin Six doesn’t do any heists around holidays because you Know he’d make them dress for the occasion or worse, write them themed lines…  They still meet for Christmas and Hanukkah and sometimes other holidays too because this is my AU and you can pry festivities-related shenanigans from my cold, cold hands. It’s always at Beck’s place tho because he can turn his hideout into the tackiest holiday-themed showcase but he aint roping them into it.  

On the other hand, Cham despises American commercialized holidays in general and Christmas time especially, since it’s not a big thing in Russia and  also once again, he has family issues for days. (Although relatively speaking, he is pretty over these, he is not gonna like mope around or anything) 

Anyway, what they do for each other is that they try to compromise, Dmitri doesnt sneer at stupid kitsch decorations every 5 minutes and Quentin ..chills a little. :’D To be fair, Beck makes everything fun and having Cham there makes Beck appreciate the details more instead of just goin into BETTER!BIGGER! frenzy.

Where did they go for their honeymoon:

After the fuckin Ages of pinning, when they finally end up together for realsies, they wanted somethin Big and Flashy! (Well Beck wanted and Cham kinda too but also with the option to merge with the crowd unnoticed and take some chill time) Anyway they went on a whole world wide tour! Starting with a luxury cruise, they took their time, lots of crime sprees to plan and execute, lots of local shows to see, lots of dumb heroes to fool, they’re gonna have it all! 

Where did they first meet:

Around the time when Cham and Hammerhead had their criminal empire running Fisk to the ground, Otto decided the Sin Six should team up with them for their ressources needed on one heist or something. They agreed but Cham insisted on actually going in the field, it’s been a while since he really stretched his face legs like this and the mafia life was starting to bore him. Doc made him team up with Mysterio much to the fishbowl’s dismay because why do they need another disguise artist?? He is the Master Of Illusions dammit, he can run circles around this guy, what the fuck Otto?? So at the start, he pouts and fumes under his helmet and in general he is his v unpleasant self but… He can’t help but notice that the new guy is a real professional, he even uses Traditional masks, he likes the same movies… And most importantly, he is actually interested in Mysti’s craft, asking questions and even LISTENING to his long winded answers… At one point he even wondered if that X thing was meant as a HOMMAGE to the Y movie, the Six never did that!! (Usually the rest of the sixers dont know the reference, heathens, and when they do, they mock him for it, that he’s copying ideas and mixin them ridiculously.  BUT THIS GUY GETS IT!!) So it doesn’t take long for them to hit it off, of course at this point without any real Trust behind it but it’s a start. 

(Though Beck does pay a visit to Otto like, buddy pal i know you’ve been planning on manipulating these crimelords to your end somehow and honestly, any other day i’d be down, i actually had a robot prepared for my own backstab but i was thinking they werent that bad and maybe we Could hold our end of the bargain this time and just. leave each other on good terms? Mabye? Obviously it’s purely out of respect for our teammate Kraven since him and Chameleon seem to have some history, nothing more, definitely nothing to do with how bright Cham’s eyes were when i was showing him the back of my stage… ) 

What do they fight over:

this whole post has been a mountain of cheese but im bringing more! Honestly, goin through my notes on Patchwork, their biggest arguments have always been about.. the other one not taking proper care of himself :’D Or them lashing out because they were scared and worried about the other and they cant stand being so vulnerable while the other pretends it’s not a big deal because they dont know how to handle genuine concern directed at them. 

Do they go on vacations, if so where:

GIVE!!! BECK!!!! HIS!!!! ISLAND!!!!!!They actually do have one, it’s where Celavi spends most of the time and they visit her often. But never for too long, neither of them can actually spend too long doing nothing.. 

[shastlelow]

Darth Vader (2020) #2

HELLO!  YEEAAAHHHHH!

Welcome back to This Week in Comics – Star Wars Style! The second installment this week.

With the three releases this week, I will end up doing three posts. I had thought about waiting, but after reading all three, I’m more excited than I thought I would be about Bounty Hunters #1, a new ongoing series telling stories of a band of bounty hunters in the time between Empire and Jedi. I will review that one on Friday or over the weekend. One of the primary characters I know of from the 2015-2019 run of Star Wars Comics, but I bounced around those titles, so need to do a little more digging on him after reading the issue last night.

Also, if you haven’t already, check you my summary/review of the limited series The Rise of Kylo Ren, which I posted Wednesday night. Great conclusion to a good limited series.

This post, however, will focus on Darth Vader (2020) #2 by Greg Pak, illustrated by Raffaele Ienco.

SPOILER WARNING: This review/summary may contain spoilers for this issue, as well as any previously released Star Wars media (Films, TV Shows, Novels, Comics, Video Games) released to date, including #NotCanon. Also, this post may CONTAIN ADULT CONTENT!

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….

Dark Heart of the Sith – Part II

Darth Vader revealed the truth: He is Luke Skywalker’s father. But Luke refused to join him and escaped.

Enraged, Vader has taken a squad of death troopers and the Imperial forensics droid, ZED-6-7, on a quest of revenge against everyone who hid Luke from him. Vader’s bloody journey led him from Tatooine to Padmé Amidala’s abandoned apartment on Coruscant.

And now he stands face to face with a ghost from his past. Does Padmé somehow live?

We start the issue in the great red POV aspect. Slight tangent here, and minor spoiler for the novel Thrawn: Alliances. I listened to that book, I didn’t read it. In that book, when Anakin would be using the Force in a fight, we’d get “double vision” and descriptions of what was about to happen. Something about it bugged me every time. I think it was the vocal direction. I wasn’t a fan. I get why it was needed, but it bugged me throughout the novel. Talking to others, mostly readers of the book, they didn’t have the same issue. Yet something here that is very much in the same spirit, I love. Guess it’s the difference between a visual medium and an audio one. (bleh, just thought of John Lithgow as Roger Ailes in Bombshell (a movie I enjoyed, actually). Bleh).

Back to the summary. We start in the red POV. It is the final act of Attack of the Clones. Padmé and Anakin about to be take out to the arena on Geonosis for execution. Padmé speaking, Vader responding. It seems our Dark Lord is still haunted by that kiss she never should have given him.

Vendaxa. Padmé asks, “What did you call me?” Zed scans and her and is amazed at the similarities. When she asks who he is, Zed responds, “Why, this is Darth Vader, the Emperor’s—” BLASTER FIRE!

Vader stops the bolt. He questions who she is. She says “Padmé Amidala, you said it yourself”

She continues on a four-panel page – all in red POV.

“…Queen…” – Padmé at the end of The Phantom Menace during the celebration, with R2, little Jedi Ani, Obi-wan and a handmaiden (Sabé) behind her.

“…Senator…” – Padmé in her apartment on Coruscant with Anakin and Obi-wan behind her.

“…daughter of Naboo…” – Padmé on the terrace by the lake.

“…back from the dead to haunt you to your grave.” – Padmé on Mustafar.

Back and forth over the next few panels of Anakin Force choking Padmé and Vader doing the same to “Padmé.”

They are then attacked by Vendaxan land squid and “Padmé” appears to escape.

Vader follows her. “Who are you? Tell me. Don’t be afraid.” Another parallel scene from the tunnel on Geonosis – “I’m not afraid.”

“Padmé” continues. “I’m angry”

Vader puts down his saber. “I see it now. Padmé is dead. But you wear her face. Speak with her voice. You’re the queen’s shadow. A handmaiden from Naboo.”

Zed kicks into gear, begins to point out the differences only a droid looking would notice.

It is revealed to be Sabé. She and Vader go back and forth over the events since Padmé’s death. They come to an agreement to make those that hid her pay.

Suddenly, they are surrounded by more creatures. Sabé admits that they opened the gate to let them in when she wanted Vader and Zed dead. “But now, maybe we’ve all got a reason to go on” and the fight off the brood together.

We get more red vision of events from Attack of the Clones side by side with the current events.

“You…fought well. Now come, we leave at once.”

Zed notices Sabé lingering. “When Lord Vader says we leave, we…”

“Droid, help me bury them” Zed protest, but Vader makes it clear he is to help.

When they are done, she comments that they were good soldiers who walked with her at Padmé’s funeral. “and they will be mourned. Not like you, Lord Vader. And not like me. No come, so you can serve your Emperor and I can have my vengeance.”

She informs them that after the funeral, they knew they didn’t have the whole story, so the went to Coruscant, and broke into Padmé’s quarters, and stole the security recordings. They were never able to decrypt them, so they hid them….

…on Naboo.

To Be Continued.

Master Shast LeLow’s Thoughts

Just want to state the obvious one last time. In my review of Issue #1, I said, “That final page, though! Obviously, this will turn out to be Sabé.” Not going to get too big of a head here, it was the only logical conclusion. But it feels good to be right.

This series is my early favorite of the three mail titles launched so far. I love the “behind the mask” feel of it. Zed is an all-star caliber droid. Seeing Padmé/Sabé team up with Vader was great, too. Just like old times, so to speak.

With that, it’s time the deactivate the lightsaber and clip it to my belt.

Remember, the Force will be with you, Always.

[theharellan]

* GETTING  TO  KNOW  THE  MUN :

NAME :  tas NICKNAME :   tas IS a nickname FACECLAIM :   i’ve used amaterasu for a while (my nickname in rp used to be ammy) but now i’m using my pikachu from pokemon let’s go. her name is slash, which is a legacy name i’ve used for my pikachu since i first played pokemon yellow, and THAT pikachu was named after a kid in this n64 game called snowboard kids or something like that PRONOUNS :   she/her HEIGHT : 5′6 BIRTHDAY : september 24 AESTHETIC :   cats doing anything. grey coastlines. mountains. i’m also a big fan of the casual flapper look, though not as big a fan (for myself) of the fancy sequined 1920 look. LAST  SONG  YOU  LISTENED  TO :   while i was doing job apps yesterday i jammed to the complete harvest moon: a wonderful life soundtrack FAVORITE  MUSE (S)  YOU’VE  WRITTEN : solas probably? like through this account i not only met a lot of cool and wonderful ppl who have bettered my life, but i’ve better understood myself and my own morals. also i just have a lot of love for solas as a character despite his flaws. you have to have a lot of passion for the character to be around for as long as i have, especially with the solas fandom/hatedom being as tiring as it is.

* GETTING  TO  KNOW  THE  ACCOUNT :

WHAT  INSPIRED  YOU  TO  TAKE  ON  THIS  MUSE :  i made this account like right after i beat temple of mythal on my first run through of da:i back in 2014. by that point it was pretty obvious solas was more than he seemed and i figured whatever it was that i wanted to write it. i had finished masked empire literally a week or so before da:i came out so felassan and the agent of fen’harel thing was fresh on my mind, so i thought he likely was a) ancient and b) potentially another agent. ironically the latter is the conclusion the viddasala comes to in trespasser. anyway his banter in mythal and around the game rly sold me on him, and as a character he really drove home stuff that da2 had set up with merrill (namely the nature of spirits), along with cole (i had not read asunder btw). and as i got to know him more i just rly appreciated the critical nature of his character. there’s this one faulkner quote i learned from GRRM/the asoiaf fandom: “The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself” and i think that describes a lot of what i find interesting in solas. he’s very much in conflict with himself throughout most of his journey, well before da:i and even the creation of the veil.

WHAT  ARE  YOUR  FAVORITE  ASPECTS  OF  YOUR  CURRENT  MUSE :  

his thoughtfulness. like, we all know solas is capable of being an ass and often falls short of true understanding, but when he does nail stuff he rly nails it. i think this is best exemplified in his banter with a tal-vashoth bull where he figures out a distraction that also reaffirms bull’s trust in his own sanity. overall he has a pretty strong understanding of trauma, talking cole down from a panic attack, etc

also i unironically love the hobo apostate fashion. genuinely. it’s also the most comfortable cosplay i’ve ever worn, bald cap aside.

WHAT’S  YOUR  BIGGEST  INSPIRATION  WHEN  IT  COMES  TO  WRITING : my rp partners. there’s a reason i rp rather than write fic skdjf.

FAVORITE  TYPES  OF  THREADS :   i love all sorts of threads. i like plotted and long-form so long as ppl are prepared to wait i’m SO SORRY ksdjf and i also like banter. it’s easier to write especially when i’m going through a period where writing anything i like is difficult, and keeps me writing.

BIGGEST  STRUGGLE  IN  REGARDS  TO  YOUR  CURRENT  MUSE :  sometimes the perception of him in fandom bothers me when i feel like it’s being applied to my solas. it’s why i’ve grown a little wary of hostile threads, oftentimes it feels like sb isn’t talking to/about my solas but their idea of solas, which would be fine if it didn’t feel like i was mostly being reduced to some kind of verbal punching back. also as i noted i’ve had better luck writing shorter things lately, and writing drabbles has been a struggle when i have so much old stuff waiting that it feels selfish to write for myself. also when a lot of stuff gets dropped at once (generally b/c there’s a wave of accounts that quickly vanish) it’s pretty disheartening, esp if it was stuff i was excited about. so like, most of my struggles are self-motivation issues, besides the aforementioned times where i feel like ooc perceptions get imposed onto me when i write canons.

TAGGED BY : no one but i stole it from @mercysought

TAGGING: @theshirallen, @hopewrought / @resurre-ct, @felandaristhorns / @deathsreflection, @tallowes, @ofthedas, @snowmcid, @valorcorrupt.

[rebelsofshield]

Panels Far, Far Away: A Week in Star Wars Comics 9/25/19

A crowded week ends the Age of Resistance, brings the fight to Darth Vader, and dives further into the inner layout of a dark temple. Yup, even when I’m over half a week later, I’m still gonna review Star Wars comics.

Star Wars Adventures #26 written by Cavan Scott and Adam Christopher art by Derek Charm and Megan Levens

Star Wars Adventures doubles down with two new Sequel Trilogy stories this week. Superstar team of Cavan Scott and Derek Charm showcase a lost lesson between Luke Skywalker and Rey and Adam Christopher and Megan Levens guide Tallie Lintra through Wild Space.

I’ve put a lot of praise over the past few years on the creative duo of Scott and Charm. The two have regularly proven a near unparalleled ability to tell creative and visually fun short stories starring Star Wars’ ever expanding pantheon. Their story of Rey and Luke may not be their most striking, but the ability for these two creators to tell fun and true to character narratives stays consistent.

While placing it in The Last Jedi’s chronology is more than a little difficult, “Life Lessons” still provides a fun little character study of its central duo along with lots of requisite action and humor. Charm and Scott manage to nail Luke’s world weariness while still keeping his sense of humor and nagging responsibility for duty and heroics. It manages to be a fun glimpse into Rey and Luke at a key point in their lives while also offering a sea serpent and Chewbacca saving Porgs.

It appears that Tallie Lintra is set to join the likes of Biggs, Porkins, Dac, and dozens of others shortlived pilots who became franchise staples years post mortem. This story of Tallie rescuing a stranded smuggler is surprisingly economical with Christopher plugging a full story into just eight pages. We don’t necessarily get more of Tallie as a character, but it makes for a fun enough tale and opens the door for further adventures later down the line.

Score: B

Star Wars Age of Resistance: Kylo Ren #1 written by Tom Taylor and art by Leonard Kirk

Kylo Ren is one of the most dramatic and thematically rich characters in the Star Wars saga. Whether you want to see him go down as a self-destructive force of evil or redeemed to join the light, the lost son of Han Solo and Leia Organa has carved a path of tragedy and intrigue in his wake. It’s hard to blame Tom Taylor for making three of his eight Age of Resistance titles orbit around Kylo, but now it’s time to give the son of darkness the spotlight.

One of the most inspired aspects of Kylo’s character has always been the insecurity of his own legacy. Star Wars could never replicate a villain of Darth Vader’s gravitas and pathos, so the shadow of this family history became a defining part of his character. “Out of the Shadow” takes this dynamic and spins it into a large scale galactic battleground.

The First Order looks to capture a planet that tested The Empire during its original reign. In particular, the local warlords and their mysterious god proved difficult for Vader himself. Kylo looks to bring this planet to heel while also fulfilling and also exceeding his grandfather’s example.

The resulting narrative is simple but effective. By pairing Kylo with a Stormtrooper that served in the original Imperial army and seeking parallels between both generations of Dark Siders, there is an impressive layering to the story that makes it feel more mythic in scope. Kylo’s struggle with his own legacy won’t be resolved by the end of this comic, but Taylor plots an effective glimpse into his back and forth.

Leonard Kirk succeeds in particular here. Many have complained about some of Kirk’s creative choices when it comes to rendering Adam Driver’s face to the page. Luckily, like his earlier Captain Phasma issue, much of the issue calls for a mostly masked protagonist and lots of large scale and high intensity action sequences. It gives Kylo a larger than life victory that he’s been missing from much of the recent canon.

Finally, after a year in publication, the Age of… maxi series has come to a close. While most of these comics were fun and forgettable, we did get a few stunners along the way and finally got to see more of some of the franchises iconic but less highlighted characters. Hopefully, this opens the lane for more exciting things to come.

Score: B+

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order-Dark Temple #2 written by Matthew Rosenberg and Paolo Villanelli

We are just a little under two months until Jedi: Fallen Order releases on video game consoles. With a new trailer highlighting the games story and gameplay dropping earlier this week hype is starting to build for this long overdue addition to the lengthy Star Wars gaming canon. Luckily, we have Dark Temple to hold us over.

Matthew Rosenberg continues to split the script for this series into two segments. The first taking place in a present sometime after Revenge of the Sith following Second Sisters hunting down of a Jedi holdout and the other following Cere’s adventures on the planet of Ontotho. Now separated from her apparently deceased master and uncovering the hints of a massive conspiracy, Cere finds herself searching for allies and desperate for survival.

As with last issue, Dark Temple offers two disconnected but nonetheless entertaining segments. Paolo Villanelli’s pencils are stellar at capturing in motion action sequences and his depiction of the Second Sister continues to be brutal, swift, and deadly. Visually it’s enough to make these openings exciting even if how they connect to the main story is still mostly a mystery.

Cere on the other hand is still struggling to define herself as a character. Thompson has crafted an intriguing and detailed conspiracy to ravel her up in, but as fun as it is to read, I still can’t help but feel that we are failing to get to know this young woman and what makes her tick. Luckily, Thompson populates the mystery with an enjoyable smarmy villain and a cantankerous droid sidekick that feels classically Star Wars.

Hopefully the less impressive aspects of Dark Temple come together over the next few issues. As of the moment, the plot and art are more than enough to keep me reading, but I would love to get to know more about the woman at the center of this comic.

Score: B

Star Wars Target Vader #3 written by Robbie Thompson and art by Stefano Landini

Writer Robbie Thompson is playing the slowburn approach to our getting to know the galaxy’s newest (sorta) cyborg badass. Each issue of Target Vader so far has slowly teased out the history of Beilert Valance with each giving us slightly bigger glimpses into his past. While backstory is never a substitute for poor characterization or bland dialogue, getting in touch with Valance’s past does help and slowly Target Vader is improving alongside it.

As it stands, most of the regular issues behind this comic remain. Valance and his bounty hunters are for the most part an uninteresting cast of characters and it’s more than a little difficult to get invested in their high stakes hunt of Darth Vader. The big reveal that the rebellion are the Hidden Hand at the end of this comic’s first issue still robs the story of much of its mystery. (There is also the possibility that this was a fakeout, but there hasn’t been info presented in the script to really challenge this reading so far.) The art is serviceable but is often let down by some bland coloring decisions by Neeraj Menon.

There are some of life though. As mentioned earlier, this issue’s opening flashback to Valance’s time in the Imperial military is the strongest of these so far and hints towards an intriguing relationship between him and Darth Vader that will hopefully get fleshed out more down the line. There is also a welcome wrinkle in bounty hunter, Urrr’k. While simply having a sharp shooter badass female Tusken was a great addition to the comic, the idea that she might actually be some sort of imposter or sleeper agent adds a welcome air of uncertainty to the ensemble and spices up an otherwise bland cast of characters.

All in all, there is still some thrill in watching a well laid plan by some galactic scum bring Darth Vader down to their level. Thompson centers the issue around one large trap of a set piece and the result proves fun despite the shaky foundation that is built upon.

We are only halfway through this comic so maybe the story hints that are starting to show themselves will make this story worthwhile. Let’s hope so, because the potential is certainly there.

Score: C+

[vvakarians]

DA 20 Questions

Tagged by @goblin-deity ! Thank you fam! If anyone wants to be tagged consider yourself tagged!

1. Favorite game of the series

Inquisition! It’s the one I started with! It’s an amazing and beautiful game. 

2. How did you discover Dragon Age? 

There was a cosplayer I used to follow here on tumblr that cosplayed as this character named Dorian, and then they cosplayed as Fenris. I looked into both characters because I really liked the designs. From there I checked out the game from the library and fell in love with DAI!

3. How many times have you played the games?

I’ve played DAI too many times to count, I can probably count on my pc, which is a handful of times, otherwise on my ps4 at least 25. DA2 I’ve completed exactly twice, played it four times. DA:O I’ve completed exactly once, but played multiple times, like three times I think.

4. Favorite race to play as?

Elves or qunari!

5. Favorite class?

I absolutely love mages, always have. In DAI I play as a necromancer or knight enchanter, in DA2 I play as a blood mage or a spirit healer. I have a harder time playing as one in Origins, but I usually play as a blood mage or an arcane warrior. Other than that I play as a Double Handed Warrior, usually a Reaver or some other scary subclass lmao.

6. Do you play through the games differently or do you make the same decisions?

In general I usually make the same choices kind of? Mostly because I can’t push myself to ally with the templars. I do edit my canons outside of the actual games, like Calliope allies with the Mages but they do end up saving the templars as well, just after they get to Skyhold. Artemaeus, my city elf who was adopted by the Dalish, sided with the mages but left the templars to fend for themselves (save for Barris who did not deserve to die). Honi, my Adaar, sided with the mages and conscripted the templars, she was pretty harsh on them but decided that both sides could benefit from coming together. In general I haven’t changed my stance on the Grey Wardens, it wasn’t their fault that Clarel had a moment of weakness in being manipulated and I couldn’t find my Inquisitors justifying anger towards them enough to banish them. With Halamshiral I can’t in any way place Celene on the throne, it’s just my personal thing. After reading Masked Empire I said nah. But if ya like her that’s cool. I don’t usually have someone drink from the Well, I considered it with Callie, but I felt that shit could go down from a Solas perspective and I was not about that angst. 

7. Go to adventuring party?

1st World State: Tauriel Mahariel /Ophelia Hawke/ Calliope Lavellan

DAO: Alistair/Zevran or Leliana/Morrigan or Wynne 

DA2 (When I need Anders): Anders/ Aveline/ interchangeable rogue

DA2 (When I need Fenris): Fenris/ Sebastian or Varric / Merrill

DAI (Base Game): Solas/ Sera or Cole/ Iron Bull

DAI (Hakkon): Dorian/ Iron Bull/ Sera or Cole

DAI (Descent): Vivienne/ Iron Bull/ Sera

DAI (Trespasser): Dorian /Iron Bull / Interchangeable rogue

2nd World State: Aviel Tabris / Valentyne Hawke / Honi Adaar

DAO: Alistair / Leliana or Zevran / Wynne

DA2: Anders (or Merrill)/ Isabela / Fenris (or Aveline)

DAI: Dorian (or Vivienne) / Sera / Iron Bull (or Blackwall)

3rd World State: Mah’Vir Surana / Sparrow Hawke / Artemaeus Lavellan

DAO: Zevran / Morrigan / Alistair (or Sten)

DA2: Fenris / Merrill (or Anders) / Interchangeable Rogue

DAI: Dorian (or Solas) / Cole or Sera / Cassandra

8. Which of your characters did you put the most thought into?

Calliope 100%, I put most of the thought into my first world state characters. Tauriel was the easiest to make and her canon hasn’t changed much, same with Ophelia, but all three of my heroes were well, well thought out. I’ve had four or five years of making them under my belt.

9. Favorite romance?

For angst, absolutely Solas. You can’t get much more angsty than that. Other than that my most favorite romance is Fenris’, he’s a character that I love greatly and as a sexual abuse survivor with PTSD I related to him a lot lmao. 

10. Have you read any of the comics/books?

I have all of the books except for Last/First Flight (?), I’m currently reading Masked Empire. I also have the World of Thedas Volume...2? And I have the first Magekiller comic.

11. If you’ve read them, which was your favorite book? 

Masked Empire for sure, it’s because I love Felassan.

12. Favorite DLC’s?

Trespasser or Jaws of Hakkon, I absolutely love the stories in both. I’m also biased towards my favorite of the series/I love killing Dragons. And Veil Quartz, I love Veil Quartz.

13. Things that annoy you?

The fandom mostly. I fucking hate some of y’all shits. I hate the lack of rep too, they did fucking great in DA2 with almost every LI being bisexual. Could have done that with DAI with the straight LI’s but, shrugs. Other than that I don’t hate it much. 

14. Orlais or Ferelden?

Orlais, it has the Emerald Graves and I love big ass trees. 

15. Templars or mages?

Is that even a question? Mages

16.  If you have multiple characters, are they in different/parallel universes or in the same one?

I have three separate world states, and then an AU with @trans-aloth . Calliope’s has at least 25 separate oc’s in it because I’m a fucking menace. Other than that they usually stay seperate. Alexx and I combined worldstates with Cianan and Callies for that AU. 

17. What did you name your pets?

I only have names for Calliopes world state pets, but I will def name the rest of the others when I play. 

Tauriel: Kili (mabari)

Cassiopeia: Ser Claws (mabari)

Merielle: Howl (mabari)

Serynn: Athena (mabari)

Fen’Asha: Pluto (mabari)

Ophelia: Willoughby (mabari)

Calliope: Bones (Deepstalker) , Enasalin (Dracolisk) 

18. Have you installed any mods? 

I did way back when I thought my computer could handle it. Still got all of them downloaded but I play primarily on my ps4 or ps3.

19. Did your Warden want to be a Grey Warden? 

Tauriel had accepted the fact that she needed to become a Warden and only was angry about it when Duncan said that it was no place for the children. She managed to convince him to let her take them however. Cassie did not want to become a Warden and fought it tooth and nail, but had nowhere else to go. Serynn had accepted it wholeheartedly, it wasn’t much of an issue. Merielle wanted to get out of the Circle but was difficult in taking the Ritual because she didn’t like the fatality rate. Fen’Asha was also in that same boat and at first saw it as another injustice. 

20. Hawke’s personality? 

Ophelia is a securely purple unless dealing with templars, then it’s Red through and through. Halcyon (their eldest sister) is a Red Hawke, Blue with her family, and Hero is a Blue Hawke, Red with templars.

21. Did you make matching armor for your companions in Inquistion? 

Yes! I usually do! I use a gold/red/black color scheme, so it involves a lot of fucking Dragon Bone. 

22. If your character could go back in time and change one thing what would it be?

Tauriel would have gone back and saved Tamlen. She would have insisted that they look for him and at the very least if they found him they would make him a Grey Warden too. If that wasn’t an option she’d make sure Evra and Krie didn’t get traumatized by the fact their father was killed by a mirror of all things. 

Ophelia would go back in time and watch their mother more closely, or perhaps ask Carver not to go to the Deep Roads with them. Leandra’s death was the hardest thing they ever had to go through aside from handing Carver over to the Grey Wardens. The estate just felt so empty without Leandra. 

Calliope would go back in time and save their best friend from being taken by the templars. But they also realize that things would have been vastly different or the both of them that way. And they also realize that they were pretty young when Isi was taken from the Clan, they wouldn’t have been able to do much. It’s just something that haunts them to this day. 

23. Do you have any headcanons about your character(s) that go against canon?

Calliope is a mage and a warrior, SO I MEAN. Calliope’s home clan is also from Orlais and their mother is a former slave from Tevinter who then went to the Kirkwall Circle after being captured in the Free Marches.Other than that they end up with a First Enchanter that’s an oc of @trans-aloth ‘s. I also have an oc that ends up with Varric, because I have a distaste for the real life Bianca. Tauriel also ends up in a poly relationship with Cassiopeia and Alistair. Other than that, Alistair, Zevran, and several other people are trans. 

24. Who did you leave in the Fade?

Stroud, all three times.

25. Favorite mount?

Dracolisk’s or any of the Harts, I love ugly boys and giant elk.

[aimmyarrowshigh]

Making A Galaxy Far Far Away: An Aesthetic Photoset Tutorial

Requested by @geleixi (and varying amounts of time ago by @rockett-to-the-purple-moon, @thenameisgreed, @pizzaplanethq, and probably others who sent nice messages that I went “Oh, what a nice message this means so much I LOVE IT SO MUCH I’M TOO ANXIOUS TO ANSWER IT WRONG I’ll just do it later” and then promptly NEVER answered it.)

Brainstorming & Photo Collection

Picking a Color Palette

Choosing Images from Collection

Coloring

Textures & Effects

First off: I am not even going to remotely pretend like graphic design is a Thing I Am Better At Than Anyone Else, because that would be patently false and ridiculous, but I also get a fair number of Asks about making photosets/aesthetic posts, so here we are. I’m planning to do a separate one, maybe, for how I do the Cartoon Girls All Grown Up and Nancy Drew Dream Games series, because the “brainstorming and photo collection” part is so different that it inherently affects the rest of the process.

BUT I also feel like I don’t see a ton of tutorials that go through the brainstorming/finding images part of making aesthetics, and I tend to think of my Graphics Style(TM) as “DEEPLY Uninterested in washed-out faux sepiatone grimdark Tumblr Coloring?? + Not Good Enough At Masks To Do Negative Space Well,” which might be some people’s level of ~graphics design passion(TM)~ too, so. That’s the ride for which this ticket has been bought.

Brainstorming & Photo Collection

Obviously, the specifics of this are totally different for every aesthetic, but all of the GFFA/swworlds start from the same seed: Star Wars Aesthetic.

Star Wars itself has a very particular Lookque, imo: it’s not quite retrofuture, it’s not quite dirtpunk, it’s not quite scifi, even. There are the insanely sumptuous (and hella culturally appropriative) queens of Naboo and the ramshackle toppled AT-AT where Rey lives on Jakku and the not-even-subtle-at-all-jfc Nazi inspiration of the Empire and First Order and the straight-up millennial Tumblr witch Goffik look of the Dathomir Witches and Zabrak siths and the blue, blue water of Scarif. There “isn’t” a unifying aesthetic through Star Wars, and yet, as Gareth Edwards said, there’s a LOOK and FEEL to Star Wars: if you go a little too far to the left or right, it isn’t Star Wars anymore.*

*That said, this tutorial talks about Crait, which was invented by Rilo Jon, who went both too far left and too far right but mostly... too far-right. BA DUM BUM! Anyway.

So part of what makes Star Wars Look Like Star Wars, to me, is that it ISN’T ever Too Scifi. There’s a realism in all of Star Wars’ disparate planets -- their looks, anyway; like, talking about how Crait, in this case, makes NO ecological sense as a planet AT ALL is another post entirely. (IT MAKES NO SENSE.) It’s different from, like, Doctor Who, which I think revels in its “we can make these aliens and planets look like WHATEVER” more? Star Wars tends to be very like... “we want to use practical sets and effects.” Even for planets that only appear thus far in Clone Wars and Rebels? So it’s definitely part of the intention of SW’s Aesthetic.

ALL OF THAT TO SAY, my first step with each planet is to figure out the best way to represent it using as much real-world photography as I can and how best to channel the ~spirit of Star Wars~ in the graphic. Sometimes I fail miserably. CURSE YOU, NAR SHADAA. But most of the time it helps provide a Framework for the rest of the brainstorming and photo collection.

SO. FOR CRAIT. (For another example/totally different look and process, I wrote up a little about Haruun Kal on its post here.)

Crait has the definite benefit of appearing in one of the movies, so the first part of photo collection was to screencap TLJ. I took the caps using the 1080p digital release at a 20-frame frequency, so even once I deleted the aps that weren’t of Crait (moving the Canto Bight frames into a folder for Cantonica, of course!), I had like... 1500 images just from TLJ to start the brainstorming and collection with.

First, I trimmed down those ~1500 screencaps to 168 caps that were distinct enough from one another to give me a sense of “what happens” in the scene and, more than that, “What Crait Looks Like.” Then, because there’s additional canon material of Crait besides TLJ, I saved the unlettered images of “Star Wars: The Storms of Crait” from comic penciller Mike Mayhew’s blog @mikemayhew -- if those hadn’t been available, which they’re usually not for planets that appear in the comics (THANX MIKE MAYHEW!!!), I would have taken and cropped panels from the comic at both 100% and screen-fit/60% sizing that had utility for a graphic about planet scenery and not character.

THEN, I looked at Wookieepedia and MSW. Crait was based on the Salar de Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia, so I Google image-searched that. There weren’t actually very many images of the Salar de Uyuni salt flats that I super loved, so I ended up saving images of other salt flats as well, particularly the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

THEN there was the issue of the red minerals, which were entirely fictional and not part of any real-world salt flat. BUT, there IS real red sand... so I saved some images of red-sand dunes (mostly Mui Ne in Vietnam). I also went through my Star Wars Stock Folder to find images of crystal caves and mines that I’d either saved for other planets in the past, but didn’t end up using, OR just saved because there are so fucking many crystal-based planets in SW.

Each of my big graphics series has its own Stock Folder for unorganized images that just strike the right Vibe~ and might be useful someday, in addition to every planet (or cartoon girl, or US state for the Nancy Drews, etc) having its own folder for specific/organized image collection.

My Star Wars Stock Folder:

So there were already a lot of crystals, star destroyers, blasters, and bunkers that were actually in snow but whatever it was white and crystalline, to work with. I added some workable Crait-like images from the stock folder to Crait’s collection, too.

AND THEN, finally, I LOVE the vulptices, so I searched for (and found!) some of the concept art and 3D modeling images from ILM, and I put those in the folder, as well.

I also saved this, hoping I’d be able to make it work because it’s SO CUTE, but I couldn’t, but here LOOK HOW CUTE:

And then, lest I stay in the image-collection rabbithole forever, I said, “OK, that’s enough.” I ended up starting to actually MAKE the Crait graphic from a collection of 272 images:

Picking a Color Palette

Obviously, the dominant colors of Crait are red and white, so the aesthetic had to be based in red and white. My first instinct was to make a duotone aesthetic using only red, white, and black/grayscale. Something like this:

Which... I don’t hate, or even dislike. It’s definitely more in line with popular Tumblr aesthetic, uh, aesthetics. But I usually don’t like landing on that kind of coloring because it ALWAYS, ALWAYS whitewashes people of color (and jeez, it even whitewashes white people -- look at the model in the fourth frame down on the left, or Luke in the bottom-left.) The “vibrance -100 + Selective Color Red>Red + 100″ always ends up doing the above example to, in this case, Poe: turning him into a licorice man.

So then trying to correct THAT either whitewashes the FUCK out of him/people in general:

(Toning down the red)

Or introducing other colors back into the graphic as a whole:

(Upped yellow and cyan.)

So I nixed that coloring before I even started. (These examples were made after the fact purely to serve as examples.)

I went back to the drawing board, AKA the Crait image folder.

But looking at the collected images -- especially the screencaps and the panels from the Storms of Crait comic -- I was struck by how much Crait also incorporates yellow and blue. (Note that I really, really wanted to try to include Trusk Berinato and Bail Organa... but we’ll talk through why that didn’t work out.) I LOVE @droo216‘s bright, almost jewel-tone edits which I 100% know I don’t have either the patience or skill to make, but I liked the idea of trying to make Crait’s aesthetics in a primary colors + black/white scheme.

Which I actually really like! (Again, made post-facto as an example.) But again, red vibrance DiD tHe tHiNG!!! to Poe and ESPECIALLY to Finn and Bail.

So a high-vibrance look emphasizing bright colors was a no-go. Besides, going back to the source material: high-vibrance and high-energy are the opposite of what the planet of Crait is about. It’s a dying husk of a planet, being killed slowly by its own ecology as the salt in its crust dries out everything beneath it, sucking up water until everything either evolves into living crystal-dogs or goes extinct (thank u Rilo for not including dune-worms, this is the one thing you did right). Crait wouldn’t be vibrant.

But... aha! It’s also distinctly layered. I’ve done three-panel swworlds aesthetics before, so I decided to do that for Crait, too: first a mostly-white graphic like the salt crust, then white+red+yellows in the middle, and finally a dark layer of almost entirely red like the mineral mines.

Choosing Images from Collection

With the color palette and “feel” decided (dying at the surface, then growing richer and redder and angrier as the photoset moved downwards), I was able to choose images.

NEKKID PHOTOSETS SANS ANY EDITING! XXX! But for reference to see both cropping and for reference on choosing.

TOP IMAGE, MOSTLY WHITE:

L-R, TOP-BOTTOM:

I saved this image from my dash at some point and have been tossing it into planets’ folders every time there’s a white-based color scheme. It almost got used for Ilum, but at the last second wasn’t. I felt like it fit the coalescence of Rey’s Force strength here, and also the kind of “last wisps” of Luke Skywalker, well.

“Lifting rocks.”

I’m actually still not 100% whether I should have landed on a vulptex here, but dammit they were one of the only good parts of TLJ. This vulpie baby is on the salt surface, looking out at the blinding sun, so she seemed like a good fit compared to the other caps of vulptices -- the ones loping on the canyon surface at the end were all very motion-blurry.

Carrie in that gorgeous coat in homage to Harrison in Blade Runner makes me weepy, and those were some of the most beautiful shots in the movie. This one had a good balance of white and black, so it could be placed around any level “busyness” in the surrounding photos. Especially since I suckkkk at negative space.

I saved this image to the Crait folder like the day it was announced as a planet in the upcoming Episode VIII and given its first peek. I love it!

Hi, salt flats, and also Star Wars spaceships. I actually had a lot of trouble with the level of green in this image, but the ~essence of Star Wars is PEW PEW SPACE BATTLE, so.

This is an ice sculpture in real life! It reminds me of the vulptices and is cool as hell.

The Millennium Falcon! I toyed with different caps that showed it in actual battle, but the blue would have been hardest to work with in this photoset compared to the others below. Plus, now I can save a bunch of Falcon-in-flight pictures for use on planets that only appear in the novels or comics.

NECESSARY, ICONIC, PERFECT, THE MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT HAPPENED ON CRAIT.

Fine, this is a snowy mountain and not a salt flat, but I liked the striations in color and gentle variations in grayscale.

 This was the palest/least Bright Blue sky of all of the Falcon screencaps from Crait.

I tried a few screencaps of Crait from TLJ, but I landed on using the full-panel image of Crait from Storms of Crait. It has the cleanest definition of the “planet from space” options we have of Crait.

This is a promo image, not a screencap. It’s a much crisper view of the ski-speeders. I love the vivid color difference.

The blue-and-yellow additions to the color scheme didn’t work out, but I did still want to include Storms of Crait. This shot had a little more blue in it than I would have liked, but it has Leia in a ski-speeder back before the salt caused them to rust out, too!

Remember when it seemed like the Crait battle’s new AT-ATs would be super cool and like, do more than stand there menacingly behind Kyle? Me, too.

POE! DAMERON! HAS! NEVER! DONE! ANYTHING! WRONG! IN! HIS! LIFE!

KYLE! HAS! ONLY! EVER! DONE! WRONG! IN! HIS! LIFE!

I tried out like five different tiny-frame-difference screencaps of the ski-speeders kicking up red minerals, and I decided that this one, with a clearly defined spray of red surrounded by white and bluish sky, suited the placement here best: there’s red in the panel to its left as the main color, but minimal red in the above- and below panels.

I wanted to include actual Connix, but she’s wearing yellow and only ever shows up surrounded in brownish-black darkness, so here, have one of my standard Fashion Rebel Officer Stand-Ins instead -- the red and white obviously played a part in picking this shot over the rest of the options from the photoshoot.

I LOVE this slightly mystical shot of a Rebel pilot slash astronaut on a rain-slicked salt flat. How perfect?!

As we get down to the bottom of this middle panel, I wanted to include more destruction and more presence of yellow and orange. This image has a good balance of “negative space” in the sky and salt flat, and then the explosion of Nodin Chavri’s ski-speeder (I think?) ties in well to...

Finn and Rose, post-collision. I wanted to include Rose, and the almost JJ Abrams-esque white starburst in the center of this cap is a good balance to the spray of red around a ski-speeder two panels above.

Luke on Crait in the Rebel Alliance...

And Luke on Crait in the Resistance.

This was a kind of “????” moment of characterization -- and general direction -- in TLJ, but Luke surrounded by red as an old man would fall right below Luke as a young man, on his first mission after the Battle of Yavin, when the three graphics were aligned.

I wanted to use the straight-up concept art of the vulptex, but the black around it was TOO black, if that makes sense? So I layered it over a darkened cap of the vulptex who leads Poe to Rey and freedom. This is one of the very rare shots that I use an edited base image.

Han and Chewie! I had to include Han and Chewie. The unlettered panels from Storms of Crait that show the mineral mines are stunning; I highly recommend heading over to Mike Mayhew’s page and taking a look. The detailing of the crystals is something I wish I could have captured better at this scale.

This is one of the red-sand dunes I saved! Crait doesn’t have any living vegetation, but the drama of the black, stormy sky and the red sand drew me in here.

Some CGI crystal caves... I saved these ages ago for use on Ilum or Dantooine, I think? (Same with what will be #11 below.) I don’t love using CGI, but I think the crags on these crystal growths suited the images from canon!Crait.

A screencap of the TIEs chasing the Falcon through the mines. This was honestly one of the most visually stunning parts of TLJ, and it’s so split-second that most people missed it AND most of the screencaps have a lot of motion-blur. I’m really pleased that this one came out so crisp, and I knew I had to use it as an “anchor image.”

Finn, full-on, in red. I’m realizing belatedly as I write up this tutorial that I showed Poe face-on and Finn face-on, but I stupidly chose to show Rey only from a distance. I AM A FOOL! A FOOL!

Aren’t these resin crystals amazing? The full-size image actually shows them surrounded by snow, by the tree-stump they’re on wouldn’t fit Crait, so I cropped in closer on this image than I did for most of the Crait set.

Another shot of the Falcon in the mines. I like the way the framing of white sunlight here echoes...

Leia’s face, a bright spot in the dark, watching out over the salt flat. :(

(See #5 above!)

And again, the homage of Carrie’s coat looking like Harrison in Blade Runner made me sad, so I THREW IN ANOTHER HAN AND CHEWIE. The mining equipment here shows more detail than in the screencaps above, too.

Coloring 

Like I mentioned waaaay above, in the intro: I never use set colorings for photosets. (Except Halloween Spookstravaganza, because jeez so many of those screencaps are like 240p VHS rips and it’s just not worth putting in Effort(TM).)

That said, I think one thing that I do differently than I see in most tutorials is this first step:

I ALWAYS start Aesthetic photosets by arranging the images and then *BRINGING THE CONTRAST ALL THE WAY DOWN.* This is especially helpful on photosets that include a mix of real photography, CGI screencaps or art, and/or comics panels, but it’s also just useful in general for photosets that use images from a wide variety of places.

The reason I do this is because it helps to “smooth out” the differences in light source, color balance, etc., that are part of the raw base images. For this set, it also helps to define the variations in color between very similar shades: the craters on Crait, the wisps of clouds, etc.

In some cases, I’ll do two layers of Contrast -50. For Crait, I did a later of Contrast -50 and then a layer of Contrast -15.

Then, I Select All > Copy Merged > [Turn Off Contrast Layer View] > Paste As New Layer.

Now, the “smoothed” version is placed as a layer above the raw layer. From there, it depends on the look of the photoset what I do -- sometimes, I leave it as-is, but I almost always lower the opacity on the “smoothed” layer until the level of contrast and balance looks consistent across the whole photoset. For Crait, I ended up with the “smoothed” layer set to Lighten 100%.

Selective Color time. There are two ways I usually start this: either one color at a time -- especially for Aesthetics like Pheryon that will essentially be monochromatic -- or, in this case, I looked at the balance of the three main colors that would carry through the entire Aesthetic.

REDS

Cyan -100 (This brightens the vivacity of the red.) Magenta +100 Yellow +100 Black +35

BLACKS

Cyan 0 Magenta 0 Yellow 0 Black +100

WHITES

Cyan 0 Magenta 0 Yellow 0 Black +100 -- This is NOT my usual setting for adjusting white, and since white is one of the main colors in the Crait Aesthetic, it might seem counterintuitive to make the white darker instead of brighter. However, this will help to make next step of color adjustments “take” on the white/whitish surfaces a lot more easily, and it will also help to balance out the bluish sky areas with the white background areas. (I’m not sure this explanation makes sense? But it’s what I did.)

Then, I Select All > Copy Merged > [Turn Off Selective Color Layer View] > Paste As New Layer > Either COLOR or HUE 100%.

“Hue” is more effective for smaller, more incremental color adjustments -- for BIG SWEEPING COLOR CHANGES, “Color” tends to work better. But it totally depends on the photoset! Try both, and see which you like better.

I feel like this is kind of the step where my process of making aesthetics stops being any different from most tutorials -- but this has been HUGELY helpful for me, a non-graphic designer-person, to be able to create a kind of “base image” that has very similar color values, brightness/contrast, and vibrance.

Sometimes this step helps to create really extreme color differences, such as in the Raydonia Aesthetic, and other times, I use it to just adjust one or two color-values so that there’s more consistency in, say, shades of yellow or shades of green, as in the Takodana Aesthetic, for which I just wanted to create a more cohesive palette of green in particular... it started out with a zillion greens, and I wanted to bring it all together into one “aesthetic.”

I think this step, and the reasoning behind it, are why SO MANY PSDs for aesthetics rely on a layer of either gray or sepiatone-ish set to Darken or Multiply as one of their key layers. But I’m just not about the grimdark life, and if I’m making an AESTHETIC OF A THING, I want the aesthetic POST to actually HAVE THAT THING’S AESTHETICS, you know?! I want to use the colors of the thing that I’m saying is meant to evoke the visuals of the thing!

Anyway. Now you have your BASE IMAGE. Often I’ll Merge All here, just for my own sanity.

Then I go in and make any other other adjustments on a “coloring” level that I think will help with the “vibe” I’m going for! For this Crait set, I definitely needed to bring the brightness up so that the white and red popped. However, bringing up the brightness also swallowed a lot of the detail in the white surfaces -- especially the planetary surface of Crait in that bottom-right space -- so I decreased the contrast again.

Brightness +70 Contrast -50

And then I go in for the macro-level adjustments of color using any mix of Selective Color, Hue/Saturation, and Color Balance that works. For Crait, that was more Selective Color, because since I had decided on my color palette, and it sadly did not include blue, I needed to start by taking out as much of the blue, cyan, and green that I could.

And I’m ngl, I told myself the WHOLE FREAKING TIME I was making this photoset that I needed NOT TO DELETE THE PSD RIGHT AWAY LIKE I USUALLY DO so that I could write up all the settings for this step.

But it was a reflex. And I deleted the PSD right away like I always do.

So suffice to say, I just futzed with the levels one at a time until the RED was brought up a little, the YELLOW was brought up a lot, and everything else was brought down and/or hue-adjusted to sliiiide into being yellow, red, or black/white.

Another Select All > Copy Merged > [Turn Off Selective Color Layer View] > Paste As New Layer > Either COLOR or HUE 100%. I think I also DUPLICATED this layer and set it to SOFT LIGHT 50% and then duplicated it again to SCREEN 50%.

I could have left it like this, but I am me and I am nothing if not Extra All The Time, so I opened up my folder of light textures (and other textures) and decided to Go To Town.

Textures & Effects

For your Aesthetic-Making Purposes, here are the three I used on the Crait set:

The first two were set to Screen 100%, and the bottom one was set to Burn 15%. I layered them in this order.

It still looked incomplete, so I decided to use this POWDR Element from Creative Market, which is actually like 5400x5400 pixels and which I’m not going to share here because I paid for it and don’t want CM to revoke my access or whatever, but it looks like this, only HUGE:

I also set this element to Burn 15% and moved it around the image until it looked the way I wanted it.

Textures and effects aren’t In on Tumblr anymore, but I really like using them -- they add, not to be cheesier than usual, texture to an aesthetic post, and I think that they can also help less-skilled graphic-makers like me to hide any myriad of imperfections in coloring, sharpening, whatever. I’m an especially big fan of this noise element (set as a pattern on Screen), so I’m going to share it here even though I didn’t use it on the Crait set:

Most of my textures have been saved over the last literally twenty years since I started making fannish graphics and photosets, largely from defunct old LiveJournals, but there also used to some great sources for them on Tumblr and still are live sources for them on DeviantArt. Just search around and you’ll find what you want! :)

In conclusion, I think it’s infinitely more fun NOT to rely on premade PSDs or standardized Settings, but I also recognize and fully respect that if I made graphics differently, I would probably get easily 5-10x more notes on each post than I do. But I make graphics the way that’s fun for me, and I just try to learn a little something from every set I make. The GFFA Planets/swworlds in particular have been something that I started, originally, because I wanted to catch up and learn about Star Wars planets that I felt like I was missing because I don’t have any fannish history with the Old EU, and I wanted to learn about them in a way that helped me feel like I was engaging with the SW source material AND making the enormity of the canon more accessible to other newish or casualish fans, like I was two years ago when I started this aesthetic series. I like making aesthetics that are genuinely inspired by the aesthetic of the thing that I’m calling it an aesthetic of, so even when it ends up just looking like rainbow barf (CURSE YOU, NAR SHADDAA!!!) I’m having fun.

THAT SAID, here’s how the time breakdown for the Crait set works out:

TOTAL TIME INCLUDING IMAGE COLLECTION AND SCREENCAPPING: Est. 20 hours.

COLORING AND ACTUAL GRAPHIC-MAKING PART: 7 hours.

WRITING UP THIS TUTORIAL: 5 hours.

So, um, if you are so inclined, here is my Ko-Fi link. I post at least two graphic sets every week, sometimes up to 25 (usually during October).

I hope this was helpful at all! I had a good time thinking about my process in-depth like this, and I would love to get tagged in any aesthetics you might try making using a similar method! :)

[saintheartwing]

Invader Zim: DON’T READ THIS BOOK

I made this little story in honor of the release of “Enter the Florpus” a while back, hope you enjoy it!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Senior was not what you'd call an ordinary Irken, because unlike many, many other Irkens, he had inside him something special...

A conscience.

The metallic computer on his back, embedded deep in his body, the "PAK" as it was called, was designed to try and suppress negative feelings and desires towards the Irken Empire. The rather bug-like, green-skinned, black-antannae-having aliens who's leaders were just taller than everyone had their PAKs work hard to make sure nobody rebelled against the status quo. But the thing was...the "Superior Irken Empire" was stupid. Very stupid and very arrogant. They hadn't bothered to check to see if their PAK's anti-viral software or basic fundamental foundational mainframes were up to snuff. They'd just assumed that, since they'd conquered most of their would-be enemies and allies, what did THEY have to worry about people trying to infect or fiddle with PAKs?

They were wrong. Now there was a growing host of Irkens who were beginning to think different, and Senior, the Senior Communications Officer of the Massive, was one of them.

And he loved Earth, especially it's culture. He loved its art, he loved its music, he loved its movies, he loved its games. He could play them for a hundred years and not ever get bored. It was difficult, however, to sneak things from the black market that sold Earthen items onto the Massive if you weren't careful, and even MORE so now that the black market had had to pick up and move, and he hadn't found the new location yet.

So that was why he was standing not even at a secondhand store...but some dingy, pathetic-looking hole in the wall on the East side of Conventia, the Convention Planet. The place appeared to be devoted to secondhand items, mostly clothing and the like. Not that Senior needed it. Irkens only really wore one type of clothing depending on their job, and he had a communication officer's garb.

Black gloves, black boots. Faintly bellbottom-esque pants and a green long-sleeve shirt with a grey undershirt that slid up the neck, with a green "mask" that only covered the lower region of his face, with a communication officer's personalized headset, which wrapped itself around his head, the ends placed on either side of his "ears". His shoulder and arm sections were a darker shade of green than the "half mask" and chest and pants he had, and his eyes were also a beautiful and entrancing shade of green as well as he looked around the shop. The storekeeper, a faintly yellow-eyed, rather unfortunate-looking Irken, pled for Senior to look around and see if he could find something of use.

So Senior, feeling sorry for the rather run-down shop and the shopkeeper, peered about the shelves, the counters, the racks, and...he noticed something. Something that had a kind of magnetic quality to it. A volume of some kind, a book on a low shelf that was gathering dust. He plucked it off the shelf, and looked it over. It wasn't thick, that was for sure, and not tall in height either. It appeared to be bound in some kind of leather, but the leather of some sort of animal he didn't recognize. Normal Earthen leather was brown, most types were brown, this was...purplish/black and with an odd texture to it at that!

There wasn't any title or inscription, but there was an inch wide iron strap runnning completely around the book that kept it shut and locked, for a small, rusty iron padlock of antique design was hooked through a hasp where the ends of the iron strap overlapped. "Mind explaining where this came from?"

"Oh, it's from Earth, sir. A volume of the utmost rarity. I snuck it out of a hotel room. You see, the rpevious owner had vanished from his hotel room, and nobody ever saw him again. While the authorities were trying to decide what counted as evidence, yours truly snuck the book out because it looked so fascinating!" The yellow-eyed Irken said with a grin.

Indeed, there were actually quite a few aliens on Earth, Irkens included, and not just...ZIM. They were trying to eek out a living away from the typical issues that came with being in the Empire, and selling Earthen things to tourists or the like was a simple, easy way to do so. Especially since so many Earth people were idiots, who couldn't recognize when someone was an alien!

Senior opened up the book, the iron hinge at the back moving without much difficulty, and his heart almost leapt into his mouth. At the top of the very first page was Latin. An ancient language, a dead one, and he knew what it said. "Recipes and Conjurations, Volume 1". He'd been using Latin as a way to pass notes around the Massive to his dear friends who felt very much like he did, and teaching them how to read it. The Tallest, his bosses, sure as hell couldn't read it and neither could any of their loyalists, it was, after all, a filthy huuuuuuuuuman thing. Who gave a shit?

But he could read it very well. This book looked very promising. There were tantalizing headings. "To Be Invisible", "To Make A Demon Bring Three Bags of Gold", "To Make Three Women Appear in Your Room". Intriguing indeed. FLIP-FLIP-FLIP!

He flipped through the pages, looking at what laid within when he stopped, eyes wide at the picture that laid in the center of the book. It was a very well-painted, beautifully detailed picture indeed, and though the parchment of the book was faded, the brilliant colors of the hungry and somewhat small-looking dragon within were undimmed. Wow, the thing was U-G-L-Y, it ain't got no alibi, you ugly, hey-hey, you UGLY. Bright yellow eyes, wicked claws, green, mossy scales on its body, a thick red tail, curled around a rather horrific amount of skulls in the back-

HUMAN skulls. And one of them looked rather fresh, the others looked old, somewhat cracked or dusty and the dragon itself wasn't as thin as he'd thought, in fact, it sort of had a very faint bulge to its gut.

What if?...no, that was ridiculous, a silly idea.

...but still...

"Any...um...other books like this in your store? It says "Volume 1", I wondered if..."

"No, afraid not."

"Okay. Tell you what. I'll give you fifty for it." Senior offered.

Soon he was walking out of the store, and sneaking the book into the Massive under his shirt, feeling very satisfied as he headed to his room, looking through the book in his lovely white bedroom as he laid on his bed and rested his body on the comforter blankets he had. "Hmm." He titled his head to the side, examining it closely. He poured over the book for a good hour before returning to the Bridge, where the Tallest were waiting.

Uh oh. They had that look in their eye. Both the Tallests had thin claws sticking out of their gauntlets, they'd cut off their thumb when they'd become Tallest. They had big round chest compartments, a thin "stomach" region that was almost like a ribcage riding down from the chest to their lower bodies, held under a sort of "dress", or a robe. They were very tall too, Senior was a good six foot three, but the Tallest were six foot six. Red and Purple, named after their eye color and having armor coloring to match, were grinning evilly.

"We KNOW you snuck something onto the ship." Red said with a dark chuckle. "We caught you this time! Purple here actually noticed the bulge in your pants."

"...why were you looking at my pants?" Senior inquired, raising a nonexistent eyebrow up into the air.

Purple immediately blushed. "That's not important." He said quickly. "Although you've a lovely set of eyes. At any rate, what is it? Remember what happened the last time you snuck some Earthen junk onto the ship?"

"Yeah, I had to share." Senior sighed. He'd tried to sneak a bunch of Earthen candy and everything onto the Massive once. He'd WANTED to send it to his wife and children, Vortians, a grey-skinned race with goat-like horns and springy legs but the Tallest had caught him and he'd been forced to give up his candy to them. "It's just a book." He muttered. "It's not anything you'd be interested in, I mean, it's all in Latin."

"Hey, we're not stupid!" Purple insisted, giving Senior a glower as he folded his arms over his chest and glowered. "We've been learning Latin ourselves, y'know! We managed to find a crumbled-up translation key in the garbage while Red and I were in the cafeteria and looking for somebody to stick garbage duty on. We're pretty good at it now! So hand it over."

Senior sighed as he reached into his pocket and pulled it out, the Tallest examining the book, stopping at the picture of the dragon. "...myyyyyy myyyyyyyyy." Red whispered. "What is this creature?"

"They call it a "dragon", right?" Purple remarked, raising a nonexistent eyebrow up as he looked it over as he sniffed at the book's cover. "...YECH. I recognize that smell. This "leather" isn't "leather"! It's SKIN! Somebody's skin!"

Senior gagged in disgust, wiping his gloved hands on his shirt, cringing, sticking his long, wormlike tongue out of his mouth. "YECCCHH!"

"EW!"

"GROSS!"

"BLAUGH!" The other crew mates on the bridge all looked disgusted. But one of them, Dyte, an Elite Guard who wore thick armor and a metallic facial mask over her lower head much like Senior did, looked intrigued.

"How do you know what human skin smells like?" She quietly inquired.

Purple blushed again. "Well, um...we, uh...we get stuff off the black market too...Zim sent us up this really irritating kid with an overly cheery smile for an experiment and he said he wanted us to see him replace the kid's brain with a probe, so..."

"And that's what happened to my cranial cavity!" Nick remarked cheerily to the guidance counselor at school, who was projectile vomiting in the nearby bathroom. "The Tallest cooked and ate my brain with a light wine sauce! The red one kept calling me "Clariiiice" and laughing evilly, too. Purple only really "likes the skins" though, so he got to-"

"OH GOD PLEASE I'VE NOTHING LEFT TO THROW UP BUT MY NUTS-BLAAAAUHGGGKK!"

"We think we'll keep this." Red said with a laugh as he and Purple headed back for their room, looking over the book, leaving poor Senior and the crew to manage the bridge as they poured over the tome. Yes, it was bound in human skin, and older than the 18th century. There was an inscription faintly faded on the inside cover of the story that read "Open not this book twixt dusk and dawn, lest you unleash the Devil's spawn."

The book was indeed full of magical recipes and conjurations but the REQUIREMENTS were rather difficult. One of them, for example, to get a demon to give you three bags of gold, asked that you get fat melted from the hand of someone hanged upon a gibbet! You poured the fat into a salt circle and the demon would appear and drop off the bag of gold. You had to have the salt circle, or the demon would drag you down to Hell!

But of course, that picture of the dragon really drew their attention most of all. Those green scales, those long, bluish/black claws it had! It had a foul, wicked-looking set of black wings, scarlet filaments dangling from its head almost like seaweed, its eyes a bright yellow, with sickeningly dark red pupils. The thing squatted on a tiled floor of stone, jaws slightly agape, its expression rather ravenous despite looking like it had just eaten not that long ago. Behind the dragon laid the skulls, thirteen of them, all done with such detail it was creepy, and the discoloration on some of them clearly showed a few were older, others were not. The accuracy was creepy to the Tallest, though they'd seen plenty of dead bodies and the like and had no problem making others suffer, there was...just...something. Something about the picture that seemed eerily real and freakish.

"Let's study this." Red insisted. "There's gotta be a spell in here that we can try out."

The two stayed in their rooms, ordering dinner to be brought TO them as they kept pouring over the pages. About half an hour later, poor, beleaguered Senior was knocking on their door, a tray loaded up with food for the Tallest to enjoy. But...they didn't answer.

Senior had a creeping and unpleasant feeling rising in him. He gulped nervously, and then put the tray down, slowwwwwly opening up the door.

They were...gone. The room was an absolute wreck. Chairs had fallen over, the window that looked out at the expanse of space beyond had almost cracked open, the bookcase had fallen, the bed was torn up, the carpeting had big gashes in it, and...the Tallest's PAKs laid on the ground to the side, as if...spat casually out like watermelon seeds.

The book laid on the floor in the middle of it all.

Senior decided he was not going to pick the damn thing up tonight. He slammed the door shut and raced off, and he headed to bed, burying his face in his pillow, and trying very hard not to think about what had happened to the Tallest. Trying VERY hard and failing.

Come the next day, Senior spoke to the crew of the Massive. With the Tallest gone, HE was now the Tallest on the ship. And they needed to decide what to do. First order of business...

ZIM could have the stupid book. So they'd teleported it to his house, and the small, ruby-maroon-eyed Invader eagerly accepted the "gift" from his Tallest as Senior informed him that they'd have a long chat about the new state of things later. Still, Senior wasn't a cruel person. Even if he was furious with Zim for stupidly getting Tallest Miyuki and Spork killed, even if he thought Zim was a jerk, a selfish monster with an ego the size of a planet who'd gotten Senior's favorite boss, the woman he'd loved as dearly as a sister, killed...

"...look, Zim...don't...open that book between dusk and dawn on Earth. It's...what? 6 in the morning and 8 at night? Don’t look at it night, don't open it up then, alright?" Senior said. "Just don't."

"Yeah, yeah, sure, sure!" Zim said in his rather loud voice, looking very certain of himself as he examined the book. It was a good thing it was already past dusk now. "I'll be fine!" He said as he looked over the picture of the dragon. "Oooh, that's one VERY nice dragon. I should make my own!"

"Yeah, quite a nasty-looking thing, huh? Sort of a lean, mean green eating machine." Senior confessed.

"Not that "lean", really." Zim confessed as Senior gulped.

"...oh? Wh-what's it look like?"

"Well, he still looks hungry alright, though he's not thin or skinny. Kind of tubby a bit, yeah, bit of a bulge to his gut. And there's fifteen skulls in the back and the dragon also looks kind of...well, smug!" Zim laughed. "Sort of reminds me of myself!"

Senior looked very pale. "Uh...w-well, um...g-good luck! Bye!" He said, cutting the call off, as Zim was left alone with the book as he poured over it even more, grinning at the insides as the computer translated the Latin for him.

"Oooh, so I have to get fat from the hand of a man hung from a gibbet...computer! What's a gibbet? I need a gibbet!" Zim proclaimed dramatically.

Zim spent a good deal of the night reading through the book, eagerly imagining what sort of nasty stuff he could do and what he could summon. He especially wanted to try out a spell within the book that involved 18th century German needlework. He'd insert the needles into spots on the filthy DIB'S body and it would summon a demon that would make him king of any land he wanted...complete with a fancy-looking crown too. GIR could keep the crown, his robotic servant liked shiny stuff.

The next morning, the sun bathing its rays through the window, Zim looked at the book. He had closed it three hours earlier, and he knew that he wasn't supposed to open it again, and he didn't carry a backpack he could stick the thing in. Plus, his pants pockets weren't big enough to hold the book. Still, he wanted to keep reading it...and more importantly, he wanted to capture Dib and show him in excruciating detail what he intended to do to the black, scythe-haired young lad. So he put the book down atop a nearby table, putting a glass of soda on top of the picture of the hungry dragon as he headed off for the laboratory, going to take the elevator in the toilet. "GIR! Go fetch me the Dib immediately! I must be ready for him!"

"Okeydokey!" GIR said, the little blue-eyed robot saluting cheerily and sauntering out the door, Zim rubbing his clawed, black-gloved hands together as he headed down into the laboratory as the rays of the sun filtered through the window and onto the table.

Thus, he didn't hear the crash of the glass as it fell off the floor a little while later.

...

...

...

...Dib was astounded to see what he saw when GIR brought his tied-up form to the house. There was broken glass all over, the tables had been ravaged along with the couch, tears and scratches and slashes all over the carpet and walls, and windows had been broken into chunks, and Zim's PAK laid to the side, as if it was a wad of trash just tossed to the side. GIR looked around in confusion, finally racing to the television, embedded in the wall as if tossed at something in a panic, and he began sobbing. "OH THE HUMANITY!" he cried out as Dib nervously gulped and then tried to speak up, to address Zim's computer system embedded in the house.

"What...happened?" He inquired as he finally wriggled free of the poorly-tied ropes he was stuck in.

But the computer was silent. Something had clearly damaged it. And...a book laid nearby. Dib looked it over, picking it up, cringing. Ugh, the thing was made of human skin and what was this picture? A dragon, and...wow. WOW, he looked smug. A jolly little fat beast, a grin on him from ear to ear. Dib glanced around the room, looking down at the book, and then at...the pile of skulls...in...the back of...

His eyes went wide. He slammed the book shut, and he took off his belt, wrapping it firmly around the book and he barreled out of the house, and headed off for a long-since abandoned house. He stuffed the book inside the decaying couch, ignoring the hissing cockroaches that laid all about, and the glasses-wearing young lad barreled out the door, not stopping to look back.

The house remained untouched for the next few weeks, and then, one night, a terrible storm happened. A bolt of lightning struck the house, and it went up in blazes, reduced to a heap of charred beams and powdery ashes.

People crowded all about the ravaged house, Dib included, as his eyes slowly widened behind his glasses, Professor Membrane and Gaz looking on, intrigued as well. His dad and sister could see something was VERY off...because what laid in the wreckage of the burned up house was a pile of skulls. Skulls not only of human origin, but of distinctly...something else. And not just those skulls, but a great amount of bones nearby that were more obscure in origin.

Professor Membrane immediately cordoned off the place and took claim over the spot. Nobody contested this. He was, after all, THE Professor Membrane. He took the bones to his laboratory for research and within a few days, and with Dib helping him, Dib occasionally giggling for some reason over one PARTICULAR skull indeed, snorting a bit as he held the skull up and made it "talk" in a high pitched, irritatingly arrogant voice, he made an announcement.

The skulls were, indeed, not all human. Some of them appeared to be...mutant. Some kind of mutant bug, an offshoot of the insect race that had gotten to human size. Thank goodness they were dead! Who knew what horrors they'd unleash if they ever met any unfortunate human, insects that size would destroy the whole world! Dib didn't seem to mind this, since he'd been the one to suggest that they were insectoid to begin with. In fact, he'd gotten even more praise from his father by suggesting he knew where they could find where the things were hanging out. Zim's house was picked clean within a day, and a VERY happy-looking Dib got to keep GIR and Zim's other robotic servant, Minimoose, for himself.

They didn't mind. After all, he had cable. And Dib got praise for having realized all along that his neighbor Zim was actually an EVIL MUTANT INSECT BENT ON TAKING OVER THE WORLD! Dib suggested that Zim and several other mutants had been gobbled up by a "superpredator" that had burnt alive within its lair inside the abandoned house, and there, but for the grace of god, went them.

They couldn't quite identify what the predator was though. Professor Membrane finally threw up his hands and suggested it was some kind of saber-toothed tiger, a leftover from an age long gone by that had eaten up quite a few people indeed. And based on the dental records, it had been all over the country! Thank goodness it was dead and gone.

But when Dib got a call from a frequent customer of his, someone who was happy to buy up Dib's recorded television shows like Mysterious Mysteries and the memorabilia it had, something wiped the smile off his face that had been there ever since that house had burned down.

"So...he's really gone?" Senior quietly asked.

"Yep! He's not only merely dead, he's really most sincerely dead!" Dib laughed as he sat at his desk, looking at his computer screen.

"I'm just glad that damn book is gone." Senior confessed, now sitting in the main chair of the bridge, on his way to the Tallest homeworld. There were gonna be some changes now that he was in charge! "It can't hurt anyone else."

"Do you know who wrote it?" Dib wanted to know. "Did you ever read enough of it to find that out?"

"No clue. But I'd keep your eye out just in case. Reach out to your contacts, and keep a look out, just in case-"

"In case what?" Dib asked, chuckling a bit. "The book's gone! That dragon's gone."

Senior looked at him, looking surprised. "Didn't you read the title?"

"No?"

"Recipes and Conjurations, Volume 1. VOLUME ONE, Dib."

Dib's face turned pale.

[thebibliomancer]

Essential Avengers: Avengers #130: The Reality Problem!

December, 1974

Not sure what this title means.

And I think “one of the greatest battle issues ever!!” is maybe overselling it a bit. But I appreciate that your own stories excite you, Steve Englehart.

Last time: Kang kidnapped Mantis, Scarlet Witch, Agatha Harkness because one of them was destined to be the Celestial Madonna (it was Mantis) and Thor, Iron Man, and the Vision to stuff into Macrobots to cause World War III. Swordsman, Hawkeye, and Pharaoh Rama-Tut freed the other Avengers but at the cost of Swordsman’s life and Rama-Tut and Kang disappeared into the time stream after slightly nudging a lever.

This time: A bunch of villains interrupt a perfectly good funeral.

But the splash page was a bit ahead of where the story actually starts. After thwarting Kang in China, the Avengers have returned to Avengers Mansion to catch up.

Hawkeye tells the Avengers (and Agatha Harkness who is sitting in on the meeting and distracting Wanda with her cat) that Captain America has become Nomad. They’re all just thrilled that Cap is getting back out there into the game of punching people in the face after he was so disillusioned post-Secret Empire.

Iron Man assumes that Hawkeye is going to be rejoining but Hawkeye is non-committal.

Then Mantis comes in and tells them that this is goodbye. She doesn’t feel she can remain with the Avengers after her actions dishonored them. She’s going to return to Vietnam and try to figure out her past. And she only asks she be allowed to take the Swordsman’s body to bury it in Vietnam.

As far as she knows, it is where he was the happiest.

It occurs to me that because of the nature of the biz, they are going to bury him without knowing his real name (Jacques Duquesne). Or his life outside the mask at all. It actually turns out that he had a daughter and although he never really raised her, apparently swording is genetic because she became a master of the blade too. But because Swordsman never told even Mantis anything outside the swashbuckling persona he wanted for himself, the Avengers don’t learn about her until 2014. And who knows how many years that is in sliding timescale time.

Just goes to show. If you’re a superhero with a secret identity, make arrangements. You could die during the next big event. Although it might later turn out that you weren’t dead or you may be resurrected so it could be hard to make any kind of arrangements you’ll be happy coming back to.

Anyway.

Thor says that they were holding off on burial arrangements because they were waiting to see what her wishes were. And says thee nay to goodbye. Obviously the Avengers are going to the funeral.

Mantis is shocked that the Avengers are sticking with her after the terrible way she acted but Thor says “thy chastened demeanor doth reflect a penitent soul.” I guess as long as you know you goofed up?

Scarlet Witch can’t go though. Agatha Harkness insists that she get back to her witchcraft studies. And although she doesn’t say anything out loud (because it would be in poor taste) she wishes Vision would stay with her because she still doesn’t trust Mantis around him.

Vision does initially decide to remain. But because he no longer trusts himself. He has frozen up in the middle of battle three times now: once against Dormammu, once against Zodiac, and now once against Kang. He doesn’t feel fit company for the Avengers.

But Iron Man and Thor talk him into coming. Its better that he be along where they can aid him if necessary than cooped up alone in the mansion, since Wanda is going to be sequestered.

ELSEWHERE, the Saigon Diamond Exchange. A probably-ex-GI has covered himself with razor blades and called himself the Slasher. I’m not sure how he feels about shipping but he’s slashing prices down to nothing!

... he’s stealing the diamonds.

And he means business. When a security guard tries to intervene, the Slasher back hands him across the face, causing several spurts of blood.

And then he runs off with the diamonds. And since nobody can block his way without getting cut, he escapes easily. THE PERFECT CRIME.

Hours later, the Avengers Quinjet over to the abandoned temple of the Priests of Pama.

Mantis chose this spot for the Swordsman’s burial. BUT ONLY BECAUSE IT FILLS HER WITH AN OVERWHELMING SENSE OF TRANQUILITY. Its not like she believes that she was raised here.

(I think there’s a somewhat darker reason she chose this location but we’ll get to that a moderate amount down the line)

And then the burial.

Hawkeye thinks something that I had been thinking. That Swordsman was basically a Hawkeye that never got the breaks. And with that realization, Hawkeye is sorry for giving him so much grief.

Mantis lets her feelings out in a chant of lament and then asks Thor to speak for Swordsman as a god, despite not knowing Swordsman’s chosen faith. But hey, if he was Norse, he definitely earned a place in Valhalla. Died in battle.

Thor: “All Father Odin, we who be immortal are ofttimes tempted to forget the meaning of mortality -- that life is but a temporary gift for most. A man cannot exist without the knowledge that he may forfeit that gift whenever he places himself in the path of peril... yet men do risk their lives, and sometimes lose them, for many and varied reasons... and the greatest of these... is love.”

And then they bury the Swordsman.

So he’s gone forever.

And then the Avengers hear a scream from outside the temple and go rushing into action. They’d have liked to mourn the Swordsman much longer but being an Avenger means running towards the screaming.

And they find Iron Man foes the Titanium Man and the Crimson Dynamo and Thor villain and Master of Evil the Radioactive Man chasing a man out of the jungle.

The man sees the Avengers and hopes they’ll save him but he doesn’t make it before Crimson Dynamo and Titanium Man start blasting him.

But they’re not killing him. They say they are only teaching him a lesson. For this man, Sen Fa, struck his wife so hard that she died of it.

The Avengers run to intervene but Crimson Dynamo goes Red Light. This is their business, the business of the Titanic Three. And the Avengers have no authority here.

See, this is after the Vietnam War cease-fire but before the fall of Saigon. And in North Vietnam (which is where the temple is, I guess) the Titanic Three are the superheroes.

Radioactive Man recaps their origin. He was sent to America by his Chinese masters and then joined the Masters of Evil but he met defeat each time. Likewise, Titanium Man fought Iron Man several times for the Russians and always lost. His final mission was to persuade the exiled Crimson Dynamo to return to Russia. Instead, Titanium Man joined Crimson Dynamo as an independent agent. And hearing about it, Radioactive Man broke out of prison to join them.

The three allied themselves with the Viet Cong, the only popular front in Vietnam, because none of the superpowers could touch them without political complications. And together they became the TITANIC THREE!

Here, they are the LAW. And the Avengers are trespassers. So kindly gtfo.

Now this is a fascinating concept. I always like for non-America countries to have their own superheroes. Because you’d think that logically, the same amount of weird lab accidents, mutations, and inventing would happen outside America and create superheroes and villains.

Failing that, during the Cold War, a lot of comic villains were enemy agents sent by Russia or China to America to steal plans or sabotage or fight American superheroes or whatever. If they would just stay home, they could be the Russian Avengers. (The Russians do get a superhero team later which includes a guy who turns into a BEAR!)

But with the Titanic Three you get the added wrinkle that they’re all devoted communists but tired of how their homelands treated them so they all moved to Vietnam to be superheroes there. Still half-communistic but independentish from China and Russia.

And they may not act like the Avengers would view superheroes (clearly torturing a helpless captive) but on the other hand, they tracked an abuser and murderer through the jungle to bring him to justice. On some level, they do seem committed to the idea of being heroes. Maybe if only to put some tallies in the win column for a change.

I expect it only to last until someone wants to use one of the three as a villain of the month.

Anyway, Iron Man takes great exception to being told to leave. Titanium Man and Crimson Dynamo were responsible for the death of a woman he loved and the Viet Cong was responsible for him becoming Iron Man. So he is itching to pick a fight.

Thor holds him back.

Thor: “‘Tis their land now, and even as we may not follow Dr. Doom into his kingdom of Latveria -- so are we powerless here!”

Well, the Avengers did go into Latveria once, although they were lured into a trap so it probably doesn’t count.

Iron Man then attacks Thor to get him out of the way.

It goes about how you’d expect.

Thor is mostly embarrassed that Iron Man is making him settle this dispute so publicly. And in front of their villains, no less! Geez, Tony.

Anyway they agree to leave and head for Saigon to investigate Mantis’ past. Since Captain Marvel is Kree, they broadcast a worldwide signal for him or Rick Jones but they’re both busy in Captain Marvel’s own book so the Avengers go to do some legwork.

Mantis goes to a house she remembers living in when she was young but the inhabitants tell her the house was only built two years ago.

Leaving Mantis to realize she may be mistaken about her whole life and being.

Hawkeye asks whats the deal with Mantis anyway and Vision recaps all the Mantis highlights, which is handy for any readers just tuning in. Although because he’s a gentleman he doesn’t share that Mantis was aggressively flirting with him before Swordsman’s death.

Mantis leads the Avengers to other landmarks from her youth but nobody at those places remembers her. And her spirits sink lower and lower.

The tour just so happens to go by the Slasher’s hiding spot (oh yeah, he was set up in this issue, wasn’t he?) and he instantly assumes that they’re looking for him. Because he has an over-inflated sense of his own importance and a little bit of paranoia.

Initially, he plans to just lay low until his fence arrives so he can palm the jewels off on him. But then he happens to spot the Titanic Three walking around on another street.

Because they can just visit Saigon whenever they want because nobody can prove they’re with the Viet Cong and they probably beat up anyone that accuses them.

But that gives the Slasher an idea.

Meanwhile, some brief Mantis self-doubt. Her whole life as she knows it is probably a lie, implanted memories by the dead Kree priests. And she doesn’t see herself as any kind of Madonna, not after how she treated Swordsman and tried seducing a man already in a relationship. And if she is the Celestial Madonna, then who is her mate supposed to be?

And then this character moment is interrupted by an action scene.

The Titanic Three show up with the Slasher yelling about the Avengers abusing their privileges. And now that they’re not in North Vietnam, Thor has no problem throwing down.

Thor gets into it with Titanium Man who blasts Thor and then tries to hold him down, accusing him of bothering a Viet Cong sympathizer. Thor just hammers him.

Crimson Dynamo tackles Iron Man claiming that the armored Avenger only blames him for Janice Cord’s death to spare himself. And then Iron Man blasts him in the face.

Crimson Dynamo realizes that Iron Man is even stronger than last they fought and decides on a strategic retreat down an alley but a hooded figure swings from a rooftop and kicks him off his feet. Which Crimson Dynamo is kind of befuddled by. Dude knocked him on his ass with his bare feet.

Meanwhile, Hawkeye shoots Radioactive Man in the face with a FOOM! arrow because he’s bored of talking politics.

Meanwhile meanwhile, Mantis engages the Slasher. But she’s out of sorts what with Swordsman’s death and learning that her past is a lie. In a brief exchange, the Slasher gets the better of her, BOP!ing her across the face. Thankfully without using any of the many blades glued to him.

And then Vision steps in.

Slasher tries to tackle him but Vision just goes diamond-hard and Slasher bounces off. Some of his little blades even break off in the impact. It’s pretty great.

It’s stuff like this why Vision has one of my favorite power sets.

Anyway, Vision then uses Solar Beam which was Super Effective because it knocked Slasher’s diamond sack loose. The not-so-sharp sharp guy goes scrabbling for the diamonds.

But Titanium Man calls the fight to an end. See, the Slasher told the Titanic Three that the Avengers were harassing him with trumped up theft charges. But he really did have stolen jewels!

Plus, Thor says that the Avengers didn’t even know of the Slasher’s existence until his fight.

Titanium Man: “So! We have been duped! He is a thief -- and as such, he deserves no aid from any decent man!”

The Slasher: “Decent man? You? YOU’RE A COMMIE!”

Titanium Man: “Come, comrades. We need not listen to this filth. We have no further business here.”

The Slasher: “No! Come back! You can’t leave me -- to them!”

Thor: “This man did precipitate battle most foul between two bands of super-beings! To think that one such as he could do that.”

The Vision: “But isn’t that always the way, Thor? Whenever a war is fought, it is never the people who must fight it -- who have any reason to bring it about.”

You sure said a thing, the Vision. A thing that is probably relevant to the country you’re currently in. A thing about a Western guy causing a war in Vietnam after trying to rob the country.

Anyway, the issue felt kind of fillery. Like Englehart needed some Mantis exploring her past before what happens next issue but didn’t want an issue with just with that. So we get a little engineered conflict between the Avengers and the Titanic Three so the action buffs have something.

Still, it gave us the Titanic Three.

Oh. Also, back in the post for issue #126, I said I’d never find out why Klaw teamed up with Solarr. I was wrong. The letters page included in this issue has what I guess was the winning fan theory.

“While Klaw was in a Rudyarda prison, he requested for privileges to get American newspapers, seeking perhaps, an ally to free him. The permission granted, strangely, he read of Solarr’s battles with Cap. Solarr, a maniac with no scruples, who would murder without remorse, was the perfect ally. Calling a human contact on the outside, Klaw set up the freeing of Solarr. Solarr, grateful and anxious for another chance to kill and pick up a few thou, springs Klaw from the Rudyardan slammer, and the end result, AVENGERS #126!”