#i hope this many images on a post doesnt like instantly kill me and everyone i love

[briarborealisocs]

TOH OC: SOLSTICE FINCH - INTRO POST!

im in my brainrot era and @doeblossom just posted a huge doodle dump including sol:

so heeere's solstice!!

lines on the owl house style ref by @doeblossom, colors by me :)

SOLSTICE "SOL" FINCH is a TROUBLEMAKER and and SCAMP. but most importantly shes my friend. and also my toh sona!

she's an official in the emperor's coven at the ripe young age of 16. because shes cool like that. she attended hexside and mentored under lilith since she showed so much potential in the potions track. she sure was a little prodigy, still is! she was rivals with amity (as you can see in a preliminary doodle in doe's post) which is very silly considering the age difference between them. sol was 15 beefing with a 13 year old, because said 13 year old was a little pretentious !

i'll keep it brief from here

sol attends hexside and skips several grades due to her skill in potion magic

sol accidentally wins the emperor's coven tryouts and finds herself as a coven scout at 15 years old

sol invents a new type of potion that ends up extremely personally useful to emperor belos himself and gets promoted to a coven official, similar to kikimora in status. when asked what this potion is she only ever describes it as a "foot cream," even though that's surely not what it actually is. right?

sol's main job in the coven is to keep brewing useful potions and invent new concoctions on the side

since sol is the same age as the famed golden guard, she befriends him by force. he has no choice. she literally just pesters him until he gives up trying to tell her to go away. real extrovert adopting introvert energy, except the introvert in this scenario is the so called "golden brat" who exudes enough smug energy to level small towns and the extrovert is solstice, who is well known in the scouts for having "mad scientist energy," whatever that means

turns out there's ANOTHER teen in the castle, @doeblossom's toh sona doe "boe" whispers (or maybe its boe "doe" whispers... point of contention among the castle gossip). sol befriends her too (see figure below)

first image by @doeblossom

THUS BEGINS THE SHOW. with these three (lovingly dubbed "anxietrio") being besties and having shenanigans happen in the background. obviously since its the owl house there's lore but. we don't have time to unpack all that in today's post

SOME DOODLES!

I HAVE... WAY MORE THAN THIS. BUT STILL!

[redwoodrroad]

ramblings on guild wars 2 storytelling

im thinking about.... the shadow of the dragon

like ok idk if i should tag this as spoilers at all because it’s all old news, but im really thinking about the shear cleverness that the writers at arenanet had for the shadow of the dragon. like in the dream / prologue quest for sylvari, even caithe doesnt know what the shadow of the dragon is--she says it’s like nightmare court influence, and shit man! the quest is even called “Fighting the Nightmare” like a big fuckin red herring to what the shadow of the dragon really is. and ok upon writing more, im gonna put everything under a cut and tag it anyway because there are definitely spoilers for everything between the ending of the personal story to the end of living world season 2. let me know what you think !! also heres a hot pic of my sylvari but go ahead and read the rest below:

so.... the dream. caithe tells you one thing, but you even go to the pale tree eventually and shes like “this is a sign that you must fight and defeat the elder dragon. uh zhaitan, i mean--definitely--definitely zhaitan, no one--no one else, nope, all zhaitan.” and you as the player just Accept It. and why wouldn’t you accept it! you TRUST her, she’s the first leader figure you know of when you first start as a sylvari, and if youre playing the game for the first time as a sylvari, she’s really the ONLY leader figure you know of, and it’s fascinating and immersive. you really feel like you can trust the pale tree because everyone sets her up to be the wisest among the sylvari, and the widely-accepted assumption is that she created the sylvari anyway. even if you chose the green knight sub-dream thing and meet Malyck, learning that he probably came from another tree, the theories just stop there: there must be other trees. of course, some researchers would take note that there were several seeds in the cave from which Ventari got the one seed, and their next question had always been, “but where did the seeds come from?” and who would even think about there being some overarching thing like a dragon being the source of the seeds??

back to the dragon: what i really wanted to get at was the Wyld Hunt. caithe helps you fight the shadow of the dragon, and the pale tree tells you it’s your wyld hunt to track down the aspects of the dream--the image you see (the white stag, the green knight, or the shield of the moon), the aphorism of ventari, and Zhaitan. she tells you that a major part of your wyld hunt is to kill zhaitan. to me, i feel like the other two things are smaller; theyre less awe-inspiring and amazing and risky, and the game sets them up to be solved over the course of like.... a couple days. once you’re at the right level, of course. the zhaitan campaign is LONG and requires the three orders of tyria to come together, and you form an entire guild, you fight for and lose Claw Island, the main lookout spot for the trade center of all of central tyria, like there’s weight to the zhaitan campaign that the other two sub-dream things just don’t have, and not only does the game set it up that way, but the writing itself makes you FEEL the weight of it. you even lose your mentor to zhaitan, so that really, to me, solidifies zhaitan as the Pinnacle sylvari player character antagonist.

snap cut to Trahearne cleansing Orr. this is his wyld hunt, and it’s Big for him. think about it--he’s been working towards this for thirty years; he’s the FIRST firstborn, and he has been working towards his wyld hunt for the entirety of the sylvari existence. when you help him cleanse orr, and you’re standing there watching him bask in realizing that he was able to complete that task, you can just feel how meaningful that moment is to him. in my mind, the sylvari player character expects that to be what they’re gonna feel when they defeat zhaitan--remember, they probably didn’t get that with the other two accomplishments, even though those things were also major parts of the dream.

so you fight zhaitan, and..... you win. the pact wins, zhaitan goes down, and theres a huge party in fort trinity. there’s no.... like..... game mechanic that would give you the feeling or satisfaction of completing a wyld hunt, and the time that i first played the personal story, it felt..... underwhelming. if i was to imagine it from a sylvari perspective, at least (my commander is human, but my sylvari is with him through the story, so ideally he would get the sylvari-centered dialogue). even when you talk to caithe, she says, “Our shared Wyld Hunt started together, so it's fitting that we end it together.” caithe Says that you completed your wyld hunt, and that’s really the only validation you get as a sylvari in this epilogue. on first glance, that really seems like.... kind of bad. like a bad wrap-up. thats it? thats my wyld hunt? what about trahearne’s moment of exhilaration? and you even talk to him later and hes like realizing how much of a weight was lifted off of him in finishing his wyld hunt, and hes absolutely living for it--but for the sylvari player character? you get none of that. like i said, at first glance, this almost sort of seems like a weird cop-out, like the writers just didnt know what to do or how to translate that feeling from trahearne to the player character. even when the character says “yes! i completed my wyld hunt!” it’s.... sort of dry. in my mind, it’s meant to feel dry: like even the player character can’t convince themselves that they really completed it, and of course, we’re not convinced either as the players.

flash forward to scarlett’s war. flash further to living world season 2. if you played it, you know exactly where im going: you go to the leadership summit in the omphalos chamber in the grove to talk about the new elder dragon situation, and lo and behold.... the shadow of the dragon appears. for non-sylvari player characters, this is just kind of a whatever moment--it’s WILD, and it’s surprising, and you realize there’s really more trouble brewing than anyone expected, especially any of the racial leaders, right?--but it’s not..... a discerning, familiar, ironically-terrifying moment. when youre a sylvari player character, you practically saw this coming. I really imagine this as the moment--the Defining moment--that the sylvari player character realizes that their wyld hunt isnt actually over and only just began with the death of zhaitan.

and then you go through the rest of season 2. you follow caithe’s memories in order to find her, and in these memories, she and faolain are trying to track down another firstborn whom Knows something. you go through three significant memories, and once you get to the cave that houses the third memory...... and you realize exactly where the sylvari came from. beyond the pale tree, beyond ventari, beyond malyck, beyond the seeds, beyond the cave--it all comes down to the dragon. the dragon Mordremoth. if you’re sylvari, you realize it on a level beyond that which anyone else in the immediate vicinity can even comprehend. for my characters, my human commander learns the truth, and his sylvari boyfriend has to just watch him turn around and process the information in silent horror. then of course, you face the shadow of the dragon for Real. and THIS is the moment the sylvari player character’s wyld hunt is truly completed. i imagine that after defeating it, the sylvari player character actually Has that moment of satisfaction that trahearne experienced the year before, and it feels spectacular. it’s everything they expected it to be!

but it’s instantly overshadowed by the full realization that sylvari are dragon minions to modremoth. small victories and huge defeats, much like we’ve seen in many of the more recent chapters. much like we saw with the end of the mordremoth campaign too, much later.

really i made this post out of my own complete realization that the magnitude of the sylvari wyld hunt wasn’t cruelly brushed aside or downplayed in the personal story; rather, it was purposefully downplayed because the sylvari player character hadnt completed their wyld hunt as the pale tree “wisely” suggested. and to bring that back in season 2 and Continue to utilize this concept of small victories crossed with massive defeats.... look i just think this stuff is great, i just keep learning more and more about this game and all its compelling uses of storytelling, and i hope this made sense because it’s 2:30am as im writing this sentence, and i ALSO hope you find it as compelling as i do

i also hope im not reiterating a point someone else has already made once haha, and if so..... same hat! :D and thank you @luxaleigh for listening to me ramble on about this earlier tonight this stuff is so fun to think about