#i know i did the world building but i think its very very neat

[xiaq]

Favorite fantasy series: The Folk of the Air. I do NOT understand the hate this series gets on booktok/IG. The world-building is immaculate, the politics are juicy, the writing is engaging, and the romance is a slow burn that’s secondary to the plot and character development. I will read anything that Holly Black writes.

Favorite sci/fi series: The Murderbot Diaries. These are quick, quippy, and satisfying reads. I would die for Murderbot.

Favorite romance series: Not sure if they count as a series since they’re all standalones in the same universe, but Ali Hazelwood’s books ft. Women in STEM having unrealistic romances gets an A+ from me. If you need easy beach reads with happy endings, go for one of these (Also, the first book started as Star Wars fic; neat!).

Favorite graphic novel series: I’ve been following the Heartstopper webcomic for years, but I finally purchased/ re-read the print books this year. If you want sweet, nostalgic writing with diverse queer representation and whimsical art, Heartstopper is for you. If you want a historical/educational story, I highly recommend the Marchseries, which is an autobiographical view of the civil rights movement by John Lewis. 

Favorite historical romance: I know I’m not supposed to judge a book by it’s cover, but I put off reading A Lady for a Duke despite rave reviews because I simply did not vibe with the cover. This was a terrible choice. I read this book in one euphoric sitting and then re-read it two additional times this year. The banter! The pining! The drama! 

Favorite fantasy: A Taste of Gold and Iron and its follow-up short novella Tadek and the Princess. These books may have changed my brain chemistry. I loved this world and its characters and the novella made me cry like a baby.

Favorite science fiction: The Martian. I’d read this before but I re-read it on a work trip and fell in love all over again. Such an excellent science-y sci/fi book that nonetheless feels very approachable and fun.

Favorite non-fiction: They Were Her Property is the driest book I read this year but the content was fascinating (and horrifying). If you want to interrogate your perception of white women’s role in slavery (and, to a lesser degree, the role of Christianity therin) — take your time, and be ready to adjust your worldview—especially if you think Gone with the Wind was an accurate portrayal of the south. How to Survive a Plague, on the other hand, is less dry—you can tell a journalist wrote it—but it’s very detailed. It’s rare that I don’t finish a book in one or two sittings, but this took me over a month. If you’ve ever wondered about the social history of the AIDS epidemic and how a diagnosis went from a quick death sentence to an easily manageable condition (and how hard grassroots movements had to work to get some fucking help to make that happen), this is for you.

Favorite comic: Infidel. Damn. The art. The narrative. So short but so impactful. This is horror, so be mindful.

Favorite graphic novel: This is a tossup between If You’ll Have Me, a sugary-sweet sapphic romance, and The Prince and the Dressmaker which is an equally adorable story about expressing ones true self regardless of social expectations.

Favorite WTF: Butcher and Blackbird and Bride. I’m still not sure how I feel about B&B but it was certainly an interesting way to spend two hours. Bride is on the list purely because reading the word “knot” on a print page instead of an AO3 tab felt illegal.

Favorite feel-good/comedy: Monstrous Regiment. I’ve read this book so many times and, after the election, I read it again. I doubt any other book will surpass what has become an emotional support story for me.

Favorite YA: Cemetery Boys (Magic! Mystery! Queerness!) She Drives me Crazy(Athletics! Misunderstandings! Enemies to lovers! Queerness!), and A Little Bit Country (Country music! Thinly veiled Dolly Parton references! Queerness!) (Hm. Seems to be a theme here).

Favorite Sports Romance: Icebreaker (the Graziadei one, not the Hannah Grace one). You know how a lot of hockey books (my own included) can be light on the actual hockey? Not the case with Icebreaker. The character development was lovely, but the hockey was divine. Graziadei clearly knows and loves the sport.

Favorite historical fiction: What the Wind Knows (Mystery! Time Traveling! Love! Ireland!) and Kindred (Mystery! Time Traveling! Love! The Antebellum South!).

Favorite Space Odyssey: Gideon + Nona the Ninth. I had to make a special category because neither sci/fi nor fantasy feels appropriate for this yet incomplete series which is as rollicking good fun as it is completely confounding. I still have no idea what’s happening but I can’t wait to read the next one.

Favorite pleasant surprise: A Court of Mist and Fury. I waited so long to read the ACOTAR series because I got such conflicting reports from folks. I took the advice of a reader I trust and powered through the first book. ACOMAF was worth the contextualizing journey. I loved it. I’m still working through the rest of the series but this book was an unexpected joy.

Least favorite book: Lol, no. We don’t play that game here.

[novelconcepts]

There’s a line from American Gods I keep coming back to in relation to Yellowjackets, an observation made early on by Shadow in prison: “The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment.” I keep rotating it in my head in thinking about the six survivors, the roles they occupy in the wilderness, and the way the show depicts them as adults in society.

Because in the wilderness, as in prison, they’re trapped—they’re suffering, they’re traumatized, they’re terrified—but they’re also able to construct very specific boxes to live in. And, in a way, that might make it easier. Cut away the fat, narrow the story down to its base arc. You are no longer the complex young woman who weighs a moral compass before acting. You no longer have the luxury of asking questions. You are a survivor. You have only to get to the next day.

Shauna: the scribe. Lottie: the prophet. Van: the acolyte. Taissa: the skeptic. Misty: the knight. Natalie: the queen. Neat, orderly, the bricks of a new kind of society. And it works in the woods; we know this because these six survive. (Add Travis: the hunter, while you’re at it, because he does make it to adulthood).

But then they’re rescued. And it’s not just lost purpose and PTSD they’re dealing with now, but a loss of that intrinsic identity each built in the woods. How do you go home again? How do you rejoin a so-called civilized world, where all the violence is restricted to a soccer field, to an argument, to your own nightmares?

How does the scribe, the one who wrote it all out in black and white to make sense of the horrors, cope with a world that would actively reject her story? She locks that story away. But she can’t stop turning it over in her head. She can’t forget the details. They’re waiting around every corner. In the husband beside her in bed. In the child she can’t connect with across the table. In the best friend whose parents draw her in, make her the object of their grief, the friend who lives on in every corner of their hometown. She can’t forget, so she tries so hard to write a different kind of story instead, to fool everyone into seeing the soft maternal mask and not the butcher beneath, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.

How does the prophet come back from the religion a desperate group made of her, a group that took her tortured visions, her slipping mental health, and built a hungry need around the very things whittling her down? She builds over the bones. She creates a place out of all that well-intended damage, and she tells herself she’s helping, she’s saving them, she has to save them, because the world is greedy and needs a leader, needs a martyr, needs someone to stand up tall and reassure everyone at the end of the day that they know what’s best. The world, any world, needs someone who will take those blows so the innocent don’t have to. She’s haunted by everyone she didn’t save, by the godhood assigned to her out of misplaced damage, and when the darkness comes knocking again, there is nothing else to do but repeat old rhymes until there is blood on her hands just the same.

How does the acolyte return to a world that cares nothing for the faith of the desperate, the faith that did nothing to save most of her friends, that indeed pushed her to destroy? She runs from it. She dives into things that are safe to believe in, things that rescue lonely girls from rough home lives, things that show a young queer kid there’s still sunshine out there somewhere. She delves into fiction, makes a home inside old stories to which she already knows the endings, coaxes herself away from the belief that damned her and into a cinemascope safety net where the real stuff never has to get in. She teaches herself surface-level interests, she avoids anything she might believe in too deeply, and still she’s dragged back to the place where blood winds up on her hands just the same.

How does the skeptic make peace with the things she knows happened, the things that she did even without meaning to, without realizing? She buries them. She leans hard into a refusal to believe those skeletons could ever crawl back out of the graves she stuffed them into, because belief is in some ways the opposite of control. She doesn’t talk to her wife. She doesn’t talk to anyone. It’s not about what’s underneath the surface, because that’s just a mess, so instead she actively discounts the girl she became in the woods. She makes something new, something rational and orderly, someone who can’t fail. She polishes the picture to a shine, and she stands up straight, the model achievement. She goes about her original plan like it was always going to be that way, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.

How does the knight exist in a world with no one to serve, no one to protect, no reason propelling the devastating choices she had grown comfortable making? She rechannels it. She convinces herself she’s the smartest person in the room, the most capable, the most observant. She convinces herself other people’s mysteries are hers to solve, that she is helping in every single action she takes. She makes a career out of assisting the most fragile, the most helpless souls she can find, and she makes a hobby out of patrolling for crimes to solve, and when a chance comes to strap her armor back on and ride into battle, she rejoices in the return to normalcy. She craves that station as someone needed, someone to rely upon in the darkest of hours, and she winds up with blood on her hands because, in a way, she never left the wilderness at all.

How does the queen keep going without a queendom, without a pack, without people to lead past the horrors of tomorrow? She doesn’t. She simply does not know how. She scrounges for something, anything, that will make her feel connected to the world the way that team did. She moves in and out of a world that rejects trauma, punishes the traumatized, heckles the grieving as a spectacle. She finds comfort in the cohesive ritual of rehabilitation, this place where she gets so close to finding herself again, only to stumble when she opens her eyes and sees she’s alone. All those months feeding and guiding and gripping fast to the fight of making it to another day, and she no longer knows how to rest. How to let go without falling. She no longer wears a crown, and she never wanted it in the first place, so how on earth does she survive a world that doesn’t understand the guilt and shame of being made the centerpiece of a specialized environment you can never explain to anyone else? How, how, how do you survive without winding up with blood on your hands just the same?

All six of these girls found, for better or worse, a place in the woods. All six of them found, for better or worse, a reason to get up the next day. For each other. And then they go home, and even if they all stayed close, stayed friends, it’d still be like stepping out of chains for the first time in years. Where do you go? How do you make small choices when every decision for months was life or death? How do you keep the part of yourself stitched so innately into your survival in a world that would scream to see it? How do you do away with the survivor and still keep going?

They brought it back with them. Of course they did. It was the only way.

[oh-no-its-bird]

Mayhaps I want to ask about "genderfuck"

From this ask meme

Oh this is a fun one actually, like, in my heart. It's also an Ichigo one, full disclaimer, so

SUMMARY // Hatake Ichigo and the trials and tribulations of being a shinobi girl hitting puberty, who just so happened to have been born a boy. --- "Maybe I should just castrate myself." Ichigo sniffled. "Ichigo," Her mother sighed, still patient. "You are not allowed to try and castrate yourself till at least 20." "But it'll be too late by then!" She wailed.

I think I might have already posted this one snippet of it bc I remember thinking it was funny, but oh well Ill just post it anyways if that is the case.

But like, eunuch Hikaku mention:

"I bet Hikaku-sama would know how to castrate someone." Ichigo mumbled, kicking at the floor dejectedly, and her mother paused. "Why in the world would Uchiha Hikaku know how to safely castrate someone?" Ichigo stared at her mother blankly, who stared back with an equally confused expression. "Um, cuz he's a eunuch, right?" "Excuse me?" Ichigo frowned. "He had to chop of his own thing, for some mission in the Daimyo's court or something, right? Before he became clan heir?" "Where did you hear that?" "The twins told me!" Ichigo scowled, oddly miffed by her mother's doubt. "And you believed them?" Ichigo planted her fists on her hips. "Well when I asked Kagami, he believed it too! And every time after that when I mentioned it to people, no one argued!" "Hatake Ichigo," her mother began, setting down her knife with a soft clack onto the cutting board. Ichigo froze at her mothers dangerously level tone. "Have you been going around telling people that the Uchiha clan heir is a eunuch." "Um." Was all she could manage, finally realizing she may have messed up. Just a bit.

Anyways I thought it'd be fun to tackle being trans specifically set in early konoha, and all take a fun little peek at all the world building aspects I could possibly dig into with it!

I have an older post still buried in my drafts about my takes on how it's interesting to think ab how Konoha developing as a village might have impacted the trans experience of its shinobi and civillians— specifically from the standpoint of paperwork.

Thinking something along the lines of, earlier konoha had more unregistered home births and messy paperwork that also made it very easy to go in and change details of by simply going to an office and saying "Hey btw my mom filled out this form wrong when I was born. I'm a girl just so u know." And you'll just kinda get a shrug and a "oh ok cool, I'll change that then"

Vs more modern Konoha where you might get some more complicated loops to jump through and extra paperwork stating specifically that you are trans and would like to Officially Request (tm) a change in the presenting gender listed on your file and also would you like to sign up for our hormone therapy or any gender affirming surgery?

Just like. Thinking ab the little things and progression and changes through time (none specifically good or bad) at how things are done depending on the state of the village. Fun to think about

Sorry anyways:

For this oneshot, if I ever continue it, I also would have fun in playing with how different clans and groups see gender.

Like, Ichigo goes to the Orochi who are rather infamously gender apathetic and kinda just do their own thing as part of their clan culture.

The Shiranui make a cameo with their concepts of how gender can be used as a weapon and presenting yourself certain ways is just another tool in the box to play with for a shinobi

The Inuzuka come in w their matriarchal clan to talk ab the concept of womanhood or smthn quirky like that, I'm not too sure yet but I think it'd be neat if they were there

Just. Having fun exploring the ways different clans and their cultures view and interact with gender. Some clans are welcome to the concept of trans people, some clans legit just don't care, some clans have trans ideas built into their identity, others might think it a bit strange but ultimately not their buisness, etc.

Then also the differences between how shinobi clans treat gender and transness vs how civilians treat it (w the shinobi caring a whole lot less ab it all. Probably bc they have other things to worry about)

Early Konoha is already so ripe w potential as a melting pot of cultures meeting for the first time ever ,,, I wanna play with it.

I will say tho going into it and still now, I kinda just plan on steering clear of transphobia— if it were to appear it'd be in flashes and get a "damn, that's crazy. Anyways." Reaction from Ichigo as she goes back to asking Tobirama if he has a cure for her growing a beard

I like playing things as straight as possible and really leaning hard into "ok but what are ALL the reactions I can get out of this and how do I play with them" but I kinda just. Don't wanna write that. This'd be a fun, silly comedy about a ninja girl learning ab shinobi clan history and gender culture and I will indulge myself on that

ANYWAYS ! thank u for playing the ask game w me Domoz, sorry I dive bombed u w Ichigo for ur reply rip

[ammyamarant]

Kamen Rider Gavv ep 1 thoughts

Just going to watch one episode right now because I need to finish Kabuto and I need to Know what Kabuto has up its sleeve. But, the tl;dr of Gavv: Cute show, I can see how traumatized this poor kid will get by the end

Gavv ep 1

okay so I’m already reminded of W. Wonder if there will be a mentor figure that dies like Soukichi does in the first fucking five minutes of W

oh neat doors. I’ve seen Labyrinth too.

jfc how old is this kid he looks baby

yeet out of a plane and the tinkly “oh this is the world mom is from” music lmao

lbr considering the environment you just escaped from and the way you were happy to be freefalling because you were where your mom is from, I think needing some food is understating it.

"what do you have? Do you eat it?" has the same energy as my "what is gender? do you eat it?" joke

WHAT IS YOUR BODY MADE OF

Karakida I want your jacket. Give

Ah you have no communication skills. Understood

"This isn't a monster case" "So what is it?" "Woman fucking killed her own husband and shh keep your fucking voice down"

"today's harvest" and it looks like bloody organs. Hey I've seen 12 Hour Shift too.

oh you've never been allowed actual food have you

oh goddamn it I can hear Apollo aiming the dodgeball already

my dude. you got a tummy ache then gave birth to something. human women would kill for that to be their normal gestation cycle.

mm, cgi is kinda……………………

"hey now I've been fed actual food and have real energy I can make minions" yeah I mean that makes sense. People get all kinds of bodily processes back once they've been properly fed. Usually takes a while for their body to recover but hey you ain't human so I get it

this kid is so sweet and kind giving obvious main character (yeah I know it's shouma) a place to stay and some sweets to eat.

oh right the street drugs WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT HENTAI ASS THING

oh it's just a mouth. Wicked teeth.

Shouma is such a sweetheart

Also ye, I can see why Shouma is enchanted by sweets if his mom never let him have any of the family drugs.

excuse me I need to figure out a way to get into this world and beat down this addict before he hurts this kid

Shouma I would like a full rundown of what you can do because was that super speed and running perpendicular on a vertical surface? My dude? Answers?

Mm, sick monster design

Yeah, the monster and the kid both being like "hey what the fuck" to Shouma is fucking hilarious.

oh fucking ow

your mom turned into a bloody organ thing. Are we sure this isn't just a horror movie?

I feel like these minion things showing up saying "eat gummy!" shouldn't feel as threatening as they do.

OH GOD THE CRYING EYES. I'M HOWLING

"oh with the other one" lmao

I wonder what this show is like on edibles because the bright colours are fun and I had a blast watching Ex-Aid baked. Tho I'd consider that a little too on the nose considering the street drug metaphor of those dark candies

little dudes go somewhere safe that isn't under the fighting feet!

oh interesting so if he gets a lot of battle damage he can repair it by using another minion. Very neat. Wish more "battle damage" was repairable that easily. Looking at you, 3rd Birthday.

oh calling both of them monsters and Shouma just taking it is heartbreaking.

I'm definitely feeling the difference between Takaiwa and whoever the suit actor for Gavv is, but it's more "huh, that's a different way of doing the stunts" than anything bad. I do miss Takaiwa but that's mostly because he's a fucking legend. This guy's doing great, tho.

did… they repurpose the build driver for this?

takaiwa usually stood upright, even for meek characters like Ryotaro, while it seems like this guy's default stance is hunched over. iiiiiiiiiiiiiinteresting. Says a lot about Shouma in this form

okay I was about to say this Rider Kick is lame, but nah, it's pretty good.

Shouma you are sunshine and joy wrapped in ptsd. That's not even a joke I know you're fucking riddled with ptsd from just your memories of your mother alone

Shouma you are not Eiji stop being a hobo

Cute show.

[petalsscribbles]

3. first impression

"We're here, young master." The driver says, capturing Yn's attention that was up until now stolen by raindrops sliding over the car window, imagining they are in some sort of one on one race.

"Thanks. I'll see you at 3." Yn says as he gathers his things, gets out the car and unfolds his umbrella.

The rain isn't particularly heavy, but it's not your usual springtime shower either. The school's building lives up to it's reputation. The academy is well known for it's prestigous status, famous alumni and snobbish appearance. The architecture is old but well kept, the gardens and yard are neat and tidy.

Here goes nothing.

Other students run by him covering their heads with their bags as they try to get to the school as dry as possible. Yn wonders why most kids didn't bring an umbrella, but he supposes not everyone obsessively checks the radar like he does.

"Excuse me, are you Yn Ln?" Someone asks right at the entrance as Yn shakes the droplets off his umbrella. The boy is dressed in the schools uniform, face-wise about the same age as everyone else but taller than most.

"Yes, that's me." Yn confirms. The boy smiles and holds out his hand.

"I'm Lee Heeseung, the vice president." Yn takes his hand and shakes it. It's ice cold, but he decides not to comment. "Mr. school president asked to take you on a tour personally once he's done with his duties for the day. He should be finishing up by now, actually. I'll take you to him. Shall we?" Heeseung explains and points towards the staircase in a gentlemanly way.

"So uhm..." Yn starts, having no idea how to start a friendly conversation. "What's your favourite planet?"

Heeseung looks taken aback but doesn't question it.

"Venus, I guess." He answers a few beats later.

"That's a good one. Did you know Evening Star and Morning Star are both actually Venus? The acid clouds in its atmosphere make it very reflective and shiny so people think it's an actual star."

"Really? That's cool. What else should I know about my favourite planet?" Heeseung says and Ynn doesn't have to be told twice.

"A day on Venus is longer than a year. It takes 243 Earth days to rotate but 225 Earth days to orbit around the Sun. Also..."

"Sunghoon's gonna love you." Heeseung chuckles to himself, quiet enough to not interrupt Yn's Venus fact-spitting streak.

The rest of the way is spent by Yn's ramblings about Mars and Heeseung patiently listening.

"We're here." Heeseung announces, knocking twice on the door frame. The school president turns around to face the two, flashing Yn a friendly smile. Everything about his looks is unfairly perfect, as if he was chiseled by God himself. Yn doesn't know whether to feel insecure or stare in awe.

He makes his way towards them with long strides but stops midway, his lips curving into a frown and eyes turning dark red. What once was a welcoming expression is now contempt. Disgust.

Heeseung takes a step forward, shielding Yn with his tall frame.

"Hey, what the hell is wrong with you Sunghoon? Snap out if it right now." Heeseung warns. Sunghoon's eyes go back to normal, but the scowl stays as pushes past them and leaves the classroom.

"Did I do something wrong?"

"No! No, you didn't do anything wrong. I don't know what's gotten into him today. I'll text Jungwon and he'll slap some into him." Heeseung reassures.

"I see." Yn says, feeling a little dejected. His only hope is that he'll be in a better mood next time they meet.

"Well, I guess that leaves the touring duty to me. Follow me."

They resume their little walk around the academy, but Yn can't help a glance in the direction Sunghoon went, the hateful gaze still lingering in his mind.

A/n: The Living Sculptures of Pemberley is such a great song to listen to while writing frfr

taglist CLOSED

@starchasing-cryptid @foxilsdenn @moonslie04 @kkurbys @winter-world @bleedingxheartt @gnusihcom @dkmyman @mortifesboy @kkyoluv @teoluvsyou @bubblztaro @conwunder @xavi-in-kpopland @monstaxpuppy @gabrielllx @tarotarosung @livingsecret

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[zoeys-ksbd-fan-blog]

Book 2 First Impressions / Rambling / Whatever

Part 1

Aaand were back.

The opening handful of pages are mostly her deciding what the hell she is going to do now that the true nature of her reality have been revealed.

What if Babblefishes were terrifying.

Probably gonna make this my desktop background.

Also it's nice to see Allison choosing her own fate by leaving in search of Zaid. She's starting to become a hero.

Also one of the page descriptions mentions a terrible secret Allison had. I dont have any theories as to what that could be other than a joke about how she is in a sorority.

Aw shit more world building.

Also i am reasonably sure that many of the people in the comments are role-playing as speakers in Yisun's court. And i believe some are pinned because once you get passed them you see more recent comments that are more normal.

Ayy, its Aesma. She has a trio of stories about her in text form.

She is one of Yisun's deciples (or was, pretty sure they're all dead now, including Yisun) and unlike the others which are great powerful thinkers. She is arrogant and destructive. In fact unlike almost every other god she acts very human.

This is the first mention of her creating humanity. Which is interesting, because humans are like her. Arrogant, foolish, often self destructive. We don't know her motivation for creating humanity, but this is a great detail.

Humans were made using the essence of Yisun along with Devils. Angels. And "servants" which seem to be most everything else. Are the common creatures in Throne immortal? Because it says that Humans are the only true mortals.

Relatable.

So this definitely means the angels are genderless right?

Which would make sense since White Chain is more human than the other angels.

Sorry for thinking it's hot when characters are experiencing the worst torment of their life. As if it's my fault.

Anyway, White Chain's been killed. Or, well, banished. Since angels don't die. This is the Void, we've seen it a few times before. It's the space between worlds.

Also, clearly it isn't just Chain's armor that looks female since clearly their true form does to.

For context normal angels look like this.

They have consistently denied being a woman. Were they in denial?

Also have i mentioned how good the art is yet?

Or instead of speculating i could have just read the next panel. White Chain is a she!

Neat! That number at the start of their name is their reincarnation. White Chain's is 82. But the other angel seems to not think so, did she lie about some of her reincarnations?

Aaaand looks like I'm out of images for this post, see y'all in part 2!

[ace-shenanigans]

What do you think about the other SVSSS characters? Are there any others you like besides Shen Jiu?

Thoughts under the read more cuz this gets wordy, and im only doin the characters i think about the most (sy, airplane, lqg, lbh, yqy)

I have many thoughts about them and i def have my faves besides SJ, but he scratches my brain in a particular way I cant really explain.

Shen Yuan is an interesting main character, his status as 'most unreliable narrator' presents the story in a way that makes it both entertaining and infuriating to read. His views on himself and the world around him are so skewed by his late transmigration and deliberate emotional obtuseness, and I wonder how different things wouldve been if hed been born into the world like airplane. I like his relationships with the other characters, especially liu qingge and his own disciples, but im not really a big fan of bingqiu (blasphemy i know) Cute ship just not really my thing.

Speakin of airplane, hes another one thats fascinating to see. Hes so much more competent than he lets on but even he seems under the impression hes not all that great, which begs the question of how much of his first life trauma persisted into his second. Its a shame we dont really get to see him shine all that much, but hes a very entertaining second lead. That said, hes not really one of my faves (double blasphemy, burn the heretic), but i do like the fanart of him

Liu Qingge was my favorite character originally, i like his bluntness and his relationships with both versions of shen qingqiu. Enemies to friends (to lovers) is a trope im weak to, as is the miscommunication trope when its done correctly. His dedication to the sect and his devotion to sy!sqq is so fun to explore, especially as a liushen shipper. I wish we got to see more of his misgivings with the og goods get addressed, such as the brothel visits for example, but that might just be me wanting more sj!sqq content lmao

Luo binghe is a neat character, and a decent story driver. I love how his svsss and pidw versions are both so similar in some regards, and yet are notably very different characters all the same. Bingmei being more open about his insecurities because he has a genuinely safe space to talk about them is a cool contrast to bingge, who likely has to be somewhat on guard 24/7 even with his most trusted wives because of the nature of pidw's world building. His interactions with sy!sqq, lqg, nyy, and mf are all fun to explore as well, especially in how they differ from what sy originally expected. I also appreciate how absolutely unhinged he can be, and the degradation of his mental state throughout the books because of xin mo, sy!sqq's mixed messages, and his own attempts of self harm by regularly trashing his dreamscape is written so well.

I could make a whole separate post about Yue qingyuan, the things i love and hate about his character, and the tragic nature of his relationship with both sqqs, but then we'd be here all night lmao. Outside of SJ, hes my favorite character in the whole series. Hes such a tragic figure that does so little yet so much for the story, and I wish we had gotten more of his story in the extras like we did for SJ.

[arcane-ish]

I miss miss my Zaundads, but let's talk about moms for a bit

Vander and Silco were my jam in season 1 of Arcane.

Let's talk about their presence or lack thereof in season 2 so far and what might be coming instead.

They didn't have much of a presence in season 2 so far. I kind of expected we would have gotten more Jinx hearing Silco's voice in her head and that it would have been more of a story about what are her wishes versus what are his wishes and I expected that ther would be more creeping buildup to the Warwick stuff in the background.

They didn't end up going for that and I don't really have a problem with it.

I think in a way season 1 benefitted a lot from that traditional paternal power structure presence (and how it falls apart) and I think it's actually kind of brave to move away on that and build something without it. (note that even Singed who had a dark father presence in his own way, both as a mentor to Viktor and the one who creates Jinx with Shimmer was barely present in season 2 so far even though we expect him to do at least one more act of fathering).

And in a way it's forward thinking because of course their main characters, Jinx, Vi and Caitlyn are female so so they are going to step into the position of power role, they are going to female mentors or pseudo mothers.

(sidenote: as much as I think it would have been a cool and tragic and interesting story to see Jinx torn between what are her own wishes and what are Silco's wishes, I think it's also pretty neat that they went for not that and instead it's just Jinx having to figure out what she wants and what she is)

So.... mothers!

The main mother presences were of course Ambessa and Cassandra. And we have Jinx being forced in the Silco role with the young girl.

Ambessa of course is the overwhelmed mother, who already lost a child, invades the home of her other child and has to juggle pressure from the outside.

I got to say I feel really, really, really cheated that we didn't get to see a longer "seduction" scene where we see Ambessa manipulating the chembaron into attacking by inciting her rage over her dead son by Ambessa relating to how she lost her son.

She also steps into being a dark mentor to Caitlyn.

With Caitlyn the presence of Cassandra looms large and one of the most intriguing things was the little hint that Vi dropped that she knows that it feels like to step into her mother's role.

In theory she could have been referring to Vander and we could get something like in season 1 when she hallucinated him during the Sevika fight. But I'm optimistic that maybe we will get a flashback to Jinx and Vi's mom and how Vi was still sort of also in a mothering position with Powder (does that mean that Vi has failed her "child"?)

I do wanna say, if Jinx is going to mostly echo what Silco did with her, I don't necessarily consider that "motherly" just because Jinx is female. So Jinx could just as easily be "dadding" Isha. Or maybe she will remember her own mother or Vi and create her own blended version.

The only of the season 1 "dads" who still had decent amounts of screentime in season 2 so far is Heimer and I think its noteworthy that despite there being the "this is my former student, this is my current student" to me he doesn't feel very dad-like to me anymore.

In season 1 Heimer was a traditional dad/male mentor figure. He has students, he encourages them, he scolds them, he is disappointed that his influence on the world was negative, he is hurt when his "son" throws him out.

In season 2, it feels like he has accepted a new position in life. In season 1 his "dadness" was based on his knowledge and in season 2 it feels like he sees himself as having no clue and now having a lot of kid like enthusiasm. In way he put himself more in the student role because he realized he had no idea what was going on.

Of course it's possible that Warwick and Singed's roles will ramp up over the season and we will have more mixed approaches to "parenting" in general rather than primarily "mothers & daughters". (ie that Ambessa versus Warwick could be "the mom" versus "the dad")

(don't let me dream of Ekko co-parenting Isha or parenting his tree followers)

Of course there's a chance that Viktor will join the "dad club" in that he dads his followers, in the sense he creates something and feels responsible for what they do, just like Jinx will presumably have to deal with the responsibility of people following her.

[alexanderwales]

My early impression of Factorio: Space Age are extremely positive, though it's much more geared toward veterans than I would have expected. I guess sushi belts aren't entirely mandatory, but I don't know how you would get by without them. They are easier now, but there are other mechanics that take things up a notch.

Mild spoilers follow, but it's not really a spoiler kind of game, and the UI seems very ready to give you all kinds of information about places you haven't been and things you haven't seen.

It's got a ton of content, the game design is overall fantastic on several levels, the music has been great, and in general I'm just a huge fan of it.

I am curious how well it holds up on repeat play, since a lot of doing a blind playthrough is figuring things out, and after you've figured them out, a lot of the gameplay is gone.

One slightly negative note, at least for me, is that the early game felt much too longer when I just wanted to get to space, and I kind of wanted … I don't know, an accelerated start option, not necessarily something like Faster Start, but a few technologies researched and maybe a tiny starter base or something. Setting up a furnace stack by hand is not something that I feel like I really need to do again, but I did it for the first SA playthrough, because I wanted the default expansion experience. I did kind of regret it in the end though.

I made it to deep space science in SE, so that's the point of comparison for me, and this is far far less of a grind, along with far more interesting challenges. The cheap rockets that can't carry a lot really incentivize building up a proper base on each planet, one that can make its own buildings and infrastructure, which is neat, and thankfully on all but Gleba (and Nauvis) you don't really have to set up permanent defenses against enemies, which can be a bit of a pain if you want to get on to the next thing. I set up defenses on Nauvis, and that was a time sink, but with the enemy expansion mechanics it was very very necessary. I think next time, rail world setting might be better, but I don't know how that would change the other worlds.

I think the thing that I admire most about it is that they really worked hard on making sure that each planet was very very distinctly different from the others, that each planet had some kind of new threat that was very different from the others, that each planet had gameplay mechanics that were very different from the others ... and it all works wonderfully, at least so far.

There are a few things that I wish were in the expansion, which aren't (at least as far as I know), and some of those are a matter of creative vision, some are a matter of development time taking forever, and others are just engine limitations. The spaceships are ... I mean, they're fine, but it's very clear that they're using the "surface" class, which is what I would have expected, but still means that there's none of the cool space stuff like docking procedures and ships that split apart and spinning up for artificial gravity. It's another interesting challenge in terms of game mechanics, but it's definitely aesthetically the worst of the new things.

The spaceships do not particularly look like spaceships, an issue which I think could have been partially solved by having new spaceship wall sprites and requiring the spaceship to be enclosed. The rocket engines look incredibly cool when they fire up, but then you look up at the gun turrets just sort of clinging onto this platform, and it seems a bit jank. But it's also the thing you probably spend the least amount of time on overall, since the ships get built a few times and then never looked at again, moving between planets without much intervention once the design works well.

(The space map is also a bit of a disappointment. I wasn't expecting orbital mechanics, but ... actually, I think I would have liked some kind of simulation of it. Launch windows for shortest time between planets would have been cool. Some circuit-readable calculation of how much thrust/time it will take, which rises and falls with the motion of the planets?)

But yes, overall, very positive on the expansion. I think there are a few kinks that aren't quite worked out, but in my opinion they're nothing major, just some features and mechanics that aren't signposted or a few wonky UI elements.

[superbdragoncollection-stuff]

Hey, if you're running out of The Handmaid's Tale quotes to use, The Postman book is right there.

After the apocalypse, a man named Gordon picks up a postal worker uniform to protect himself from exposure. He gets mistaken for an actual postal worker, and begins a con to survive that he is a federal representative.

He accidentally revives the United States of America by showing that government is not this monolith, that federal workers are not evil scheming goblins. They're us. We are the ones who create society, we are the ones who build government. And without our support it goes away.

"It's said that 'power corrupts,' but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable."

"Of course we can establish constitutional checks and balances, but those won’t mean a thing unless citizens make sure the safeguards are taken seriously. The greedy and the power-hungry will always look for ways to break the rules, or twist them to their advantage."

"It was called ‘the Big Lie’ technique, Johnny. Just sound like you know what you’re talking about—as if you’re citing real facts. Talk very fast. Weave your lies into the shape of a conspiracy theory and repeat your assertions over and over again. Those who want an excuse to hate or blame—those with big but weak egos—will leap at a simple, neat explanation for the way the world is. Those types will never call you on the facts."

Its about how the US government did not collapse because of a single disaster but a dozen different causes and people deliberately dismantling our systems and attacking FEMA workers.

It is in the same category as The Handmaid's Tale. Instead of just women's rights, it's about civilization and government.

The bad guys are a bunch of right wing militia guys who deliberately trashed the US to fulfill their sick twisted fantasies.

Our hero is believed because he is providing a service. I guarantee you people know he is lying. But his con is very clever, he doesn't push it too far. All he is doing is delivering the mail, not threatening local warlords(directly). I guarantee you people know he is lying and they tolerate it because he delivers the mail.

[ganondoodle]

i know i said i wouldnt be ranting about totk anymore, but i realized i didnt really count the sage dungeons as story (dont ask me why) so i thought im gonna write a better summarized version of my opinion about totk (i have around 60% of the game, all lightroots, not yet all shrines (missing like .. 20 or so, know the reward), not all krogs (dont know the reward), not all mayoi (half know the reward?) )

(in no particular order)

good stuff (in my opinion)

the. MUSIC! god the music is good, it was good in botw too but now with much more different bosses it really is probably one of my fav soundtracks of all time (most fav are all three phases of the end fight, the pre-fight to that, the build up one before all of those, Frosgeira (wind tempel boss) the glorious mASTER KOGA and more tbh)

the build up and end boss fight(s) are fantastic, i dont think im ever not gonna have my heart racing when approaching it (despite now skipping almost the entire way bc i set a teleport thing right before it) just bc the build up is so well made and the music(again) is such a banger and the fight(s) itself is so fun too, tbh i keep wanting to play it just bc its so fun

i LOVE how many themes play into the music (endfight alone had so many layers, fav probably is ganondorfs classic theme and calamity ganons both in the same piece among much more, and daruks theme in the fire temple)

(edit) YOU. CAN. TOUCH. DA. DRAGONS!!!!

ganondorf

ganondorfs design (x3)

ganondorfs weapon designs

ganondorfs voice (japanese)

everyone elses voice (japanese)

all voices (german)

thE YIGA!!! i love everythign about them and am so happy they got to be more than just some mini mission

(edit) also the fact that they get zonau tech to work without any special ghost powers is so ????

(edit) koga can summon and use zonau tech unlimited?? hes so cool

NO stealth mission!! (as far as im aware)

bosses are very different from each other

main dungeons are not too short and not too long and mostly fun (mostly bc i personally didnt like the gerudo one), i love that you can still somewhat cheese them and do them your way

sages felt like they got a bit more involved

(edit) you gotta do more stuff before getting to the actual dungeons and i really like that, feels less like a fetch quest but that you are actually helping

(edit) each sage is actually there in the dungeon and is required for it, which is great!

each settlement saw a much bigger danger/change (tho that has more impact if you have played botw) and its problems felt much more real

shrines are well varied tho i think overall a little easy (only got stuck on two so far and later solved them easily bc when i first started them i was tired and exhausted, no brain left lol)

NPCs felt less flat + more bigger sidequests that felt like they had more impact

cool new monsters + designs

the underground was pretty appropiately creepy

the sages abilities are neat

you can refight bosses!!

stable points system is a neat way to encourage you using them

weapon fusing is neat

(edit) the forest of the krogs being corrupted like that is both creepy and a neat nod to oot

(edit) the vai gerudo outfit being gone!! (one) evil has been defeated

(edit) the health bar going so far off the middle in ganondorfs second phase is honestly just funny hnjdfdjk unfortunate that you only need the master sword and with a few perfect dodges his health melts like butter in the summer

(edit) the music when dragondorf transforms sounds so sad .. its probably meant as a oh no world is actually ending sad but i like to think of it as a oh god what did he do to himself sad

the scene where rauru seals ganondorf kinda fruity

(graphic, animations and the overall world is still fantastic)

bad stuff (in my opinion)

everything zonau they feel forced into every bit of the world and its history (i know them being somewhat alien is intentional but not like that) it feels crammed into places they werent before and shouldnt be and it makes it all feel very artificial

the glyphs/dragon tears/memories really ruined alot for me, while it gave you insight as to what happened, it felt like it showed you too much and too little at the same time and i think it would have worked better if it was all in text for once if even at all, so the past stil stayed a mystery and youd be left wondering

timetravel .. really wasnt necessary and felt more like an excuse to get rid of zelda + make her the poor little sacrificial girl again + and to make her turning into a dragon as tragic as possible, like nothing but a stepping stone to the big reveal tm

shiekah tech being not just fully irrelevant but practically erased, wiped off the world (i know about the literally last guardian parts in hateno, it feels more like an oversight tbh, purah technically using it ... tho i dont think she ever calls it that, the purah pad is jsut the sheikah stone but worse), there being no good explanation, no remains, nothing as to why it would suddendly stop working and why even the titans and ESPEICALLY the shrine of life would be destroyed, if anything why wouldnt you enshrine it as a memento to history it was such a focus in botw and so well integrated into the world that it being fully gone, not even old overgrown, or visibly reused to build homes etc., or remains of how they built the og shrines in the underground feels like a HUGE missed opportunity (seriously it would have been so easy to make the ancient shiekah base their tech on old zonau tech, without stealign the gocus but buildign a connection)

all of the continuity problems, totk feels like botw didnt happen and the excuse of 'they didnt want to confuse new players' doesnt make a lick of sense in my eyes bc; its supposed to be a sequel, if you want it to be a standalone game then dont call it a sequel- if you start to play a game with the sequel instead of the first part its your own damn fault if you get confused; if anything, it would have been a good opportuntiy to make people interested in botw so theyd buy and play that one too

ganondorfs character is very flat, you basically get to know nothing about him (yuno even calls that out midgame but its never elaborated upon nhgfrdfhkk)

the zonau and their kingdom of hyrule is presented as this so perfectly good thing to such a degree it turns creepy, the end cutscene with mineru going poof was kinda uncomfy to watch tbh

the reward for all shrines being essentially a reveal as to who the hero in the tapestry was and it being, of course, some weird half zonau is the lamest answer to a mystery i didnt want an anwser too, it doesnt feel like it came naturally either (again my point of the zonau being forced into everything)

the shrines (zonau) feel so much more unnatural than the shiekah shrines, alien in a bad way and not in a good way + really are like a bad reskin of them, their sudden appearance and use is so much less logical

back in botw i was doubtful of if the shiekah tech wasnt going to far too modern tech and cause it all to feel like a bad mix of modern tech and medival fantasy, but they balanced it perfectly (tho the eponator zero was very much the limit imo) but the zonau tech .... oversteps that line i think, it really does feel, more than anything else, that it was just bc they wanted the stuff to be in there bc it might be fun to play around with, im not against that kind of stuff mind you im all for fun, but it feels a little like they thought of a box with endless stuff to play with first and a zelda game second (if you get what i mean)

quite a few quests or things in the game seem like they are more and then end in a dead end (the worst of all is impa saying she wants to go research what could help zelda turn back, and i was excited and convinced that shed give me a quest to find some mcguffin that would do that after i beat ganon but there wasnt anything you could actually do; less bad one but disappointing nonetheless the dongos were mentioned and treated like this big awesome thing from alot of NPCs all around the map and then when you find them they are bascially just gem vending maschines)

the way zelda turns back and link gets his arm back is incredibly unsatisfying, none of them even have something like a scar, or mark from it all, zelda spent thousands of years as a dragon (a transformation that was said to cost your soul but i guess that wasnt true) and link had his arm bascially eaten by miasma and he gets it back like it was never lost, zelda returns all intact as if nothing happened, getting blasted by some magic tm by two ghosts that were supposed to be long gone is the solution to all problems!!

(edit) link losing an arm wouldnt just be super intersting but also lend itself well to lead up into the next game where his prothesis is the focus and source of abilities

(edit) zelda got done so dirty, instead of her actual interests and character to shine she just gets shoved into yet another crisis surrounded by strangers in a world that looks like hers but isnt, and all she does is beg the ancient sages to swear to help link and sacrifice herself again (can you call that fridging? bc she sure feels like she got fridged) i like zelda and i dont like how much i didnt care about her and tbh im angry at the game for that

(edit) both link and zelda not even slightly changing in the years btween botw and totk kinda boring, like a haircut can only do so much

(edit) sonia really is the wife that dies to make husband sad thing isnt she? i get that gan had to get his hands on an enigma stone but i feel like there had been better ways to do that, the fact that she dies that easily is almost funny honestly, why does ganondorf even have weapons when he can just one punch people to death (tho i find it funny to imagine he can literally just kill people in one punch but hes too prideful to do it most of the time so he always uses weapons to look more cool)

(edit) so many new characters that you barely get to see or interact with, i really ... couldnt get myself to care much

(edit) zonau tech being so irrelevant to the games story while its also the focus is .. weird, its really just play doh for the players and nothing else honestly

(edit) monsters mining sonanium feels strange bc ... they dont do anything with it? the best thing i can think of is that they were told to do that so link cant .. upgrade his battery thignies? but then again you could just destroy the mines and remaining constructs to stop it .... also you really dont need anything zonau tech related to beat gan?

(edit) ganondorf beign so utterly uninterested in their tech is weird considering how he dealt with shiekah tech (and we KNOW it can get corrupted) he should be a tech nerd tbh

my twitch VoD of the first time beating the game getting muted at the credits despite me talking over it

nitpicks (in my opninion)

(edit) ganondorf should have a bit more of a boar inspired design, as treat, i think

(edit) the enigma stone wandering back to ganondorfs forehead even after transforming is? weird? i guess an excuse for da epic last stabby but still? (how cool would it have been to have to plunge into his mouth and break it there or something)

(edit) the underground gets a lil old after a while, the fact that its pretty much the same everywhere aside from some .. very strange flowing magma is a lil boring

(edit) ganondorf could have gone way more crazy with abilities and all that, imagine hed spwan multiple miasma arms on himself when you get him to a certain level of health

(edit) i miss unique weapons, there arent even normal axes around anymore, everything is about fusing really, i miss the cool shiekah tech weapons

(edit) the forest of the krogs being largely irrelevant is kinda weird

(edit) mineru being the sage of spirit still is kinda meh, the robot is neat but i thought tauro or purah would be the surprise sage tbh

(edit) the bosses were a little easy (i did boldo gohma rather early and did it without even getting hit)

you cant talk to koga normally :(

you cant find koga again after the last fight :(

you cant refight him (to my knowledge) :(

i find it very strange that yuno seemingly lost daruk shield, despite him having inhereted it in botw

the sage powers are not .. very great integrated, while its fun to haven them run around and help you fight, to actually use their powers you have to chase after them, something that in the heat of a battle is very annoying to do, constantly activating the wrong on or them losing their charge up when they get knocked over is like trying to herd a wild pack of geese while a three headed dragon is shotting laserbeams at you

some widlife just disappearing all of the sudden is very strange (like the rhino in hebra)

some new houses or settlements would have been cool, that the material things at the sides of roads are really only for you to play around with and not to build anything that lasts

you cant fight ganondorf (non dragon, even the dragon is locked to that evening sky) in the sunlight, night or rain, i would have loved to fight him at various times of day

their refusal to show any kind of blood is honestly turnign serious scenes into very awkward ones, sonia just getting punched and she dies with not even like, losing some spit from the force or something, or the fact when you defeat ganondorfs second phase he acts mortally wounded but doesnt even look scratched is just :/

amiibo stuff while neat being included its really mostly just bloating your inventory, if i wanted 5 vaguely different link outfits then i would have gotten the amiibo for it

why hide the -now-totally-not-phantom-ganon-armor- behind such a long questline and then .. have that NOT be upgradable

they put in a house building thingy and then not let you have a roof or a tree or something :(

at some point stable points jsut get you more and more of those free staying over night tickets that i maybe used .. once at the very start and now its just accumulating in my inventory

only one new horse coat pattern :(

satori now only being a thingy that shows you caves is kinda boring, i loved the mystery around it in botw (additionally, that it shows you caves you have completed already kinda sucks)

the end of the shrines isnt that cool anymore, speaking to a mummified monk that gives you essentially his last remains of life energy is so much cooler than a statue of the oh so awesome god king and his wife

the many references and reuse of old names is neat but together with timetravel etc. it easily leads to confusing and fighting among fans for who is more 'right' and its just .. tiring

(edit) considering how much of the advertising was about the sky islands i wished there were more and bigger ones, the underground (that was a little one sided after a while, it all looking the same rly) could have been alot smaller if the sky was bigger instead

(edit) i wished there was more of a sense of .. lost life in the ruins you find, from all races, the ancient ruins are jsut some bridged and ceremonial stuff and i wished there were more like .. houses, like people actually lived there and it not being all around beign a platform for you

(edit) the fact that the half zonau hero exists mean either rauru and sonia had kids but those were clearly not important enough to ever show nor mention, or there were other mixing of them before they all mysteriously died out the fact that the ancient hero was half zonau means their genes survided till then but somehow it never came up? the tapestry still exists and impa and purah say like its a well known fact that the hero looked like that (not at all close to any modern species) when you talk to them while wearing it (the fact that the hero armor thingy is very reminiscemt of ganondorf is like some backtreading bc we were theorizing about the hero having been ganondorf once and they wanted to stop that .. but the more funny thing is the HC of its a descdendet of rauru and ganondorf nhjdfknhdgkfnhkfd) (edit to add to the HC; the game being a big battle about child support is funnier than it should be idk if nintendo knew what they were doing adding details like that)

all in all it just feels like missed opportunities, lost potential, and more a game build around some game mechanics they really wanted to get into than telling a neat story, espeically so bc they called it a sequel, most of my complaints wouldnt be there if it was some alternate thing instead

i probably forgot stuff but if i think of more i will add them later with a little note that it was added in an edit (sidenote, i find it funny how much more nuance that whole conflict would get if rauru and ganondorf were bitter exes bfdrjfbdfndk)

[lynxfrost13]

LYNXXXXXX for the ask game..... 1 for sonderbar and 3, 6 and 14 for pebble 🥹🥹? I heart him fuckkk also. 20 for voel pretty please.....

RENEEEE TY FOR THE ASKKK

Sonderbar

What was the original thought that led to the creation of this character?

I wish I could say more, but I just went "what if a replika thought they were a different unit" and from there I thought going from a really low ranking/common unit to one of AEON's top dogs would be really fun to explore!

3. How long was the process before the character reached its final version? (or a version that would be clearly recognizable as the character?)

OKAY I actually have the exact time and date of her conception for you: July 22nd in the year of our lord 2024

^ This was the original thought that led to her, but I didn't make her intro post until August 3rd, which is definitely when she became the Sonderbar we know today, I remember spending a solid chunk of time trying to name her and work out some of the more fun details about her that night, like her arm defect! Also I think I have mentioned it before but she was originally very different character wise, she was a lot more of a real threat and not at sierpinski, and even had gotten a destabilized adler unit to be by her side in that version of her which I did think was a really neat idea!! However I am very happy with the beautiful girl I have today, idk something about her being much less able to become a falke in the setting she's in really gets me and feels more realistic to the setting of sierpinski/signalis to me.

Pebble

3. What was the first thing you decided on, the character's name, appearance, personality or their role in the story?

Appearance! And he's changed a bit since then! I went through and dug up his first ever art pieces for you for fun! The first pic was his birth into the world... 4 years ago... shortly shortly followed by his first ref... looking at my old art of him is wilddd but here's his progression from 2021 -> 2022 -> 2024

6. What was the thought process behind their appearance? Did you go mostly for the aesthetic or are there other reasons they look the way they do?

Tbh he was just made for the aesthetic at first, I originally tried to make him look more like many types of river rocks but settled on the stone and moss look. He's also originally from wings of fire so I also took into account what type of dragon he'd be: a mud/sea hybrid! He gets his fins and glow spots from the seawing side, and his chunky solid build from the mud :)

14. Do you have any quotes tied to the character, either from the story itself or from another source that fit them?

Idk if song lyrics count but I'm counting them, Karma by AJR is THE Pebble song and if I had the skill and patience the animatic I'd make would be legendary... these lines especially I think are really defining for his character:

Time, I know we're out of time But what if sad thoughts come and I can't stop it Bye, I don't wanna say bye If only I could keep you in my pocket...

^ I say it's very character defining mostly because although he's sort of in sotry/lore limbo right now (the amount of retcons and rewrites he's gotten... I might yap abt those one day) Pebble's always managed to have this core theme of moving on from grief funnily enough. He does lose someone important to him (again kind of old lore, originally he lost a partner -> changed to child -> partner again -> in limbo again but I think it might become a loss of a best friend and/or partner. This is up in the air rn mostly because at the time I wasn't happy with how those other versions of the character existed solely around Pebble and weren't really characters in their own right. Perhaps this is hell). I really have to work on my wof worldbuilding and Pebb's story again tbh, he deserves it and now you've got me thinking about him again... I actually also might put him into Voel so that leads into a nice transition lmao!!

Voel

20. Bonus question: share any additional thoughts, art, favourite scenes, anything you've been waiting for a chance to ramble about

aw fuck this is gonna be such a long post I don't think I've done a true yap sesh abt Voel yet... I'm gonna try to keep it to the bare bones but THERES SO MUCH I WANNA YAP ABT AND WORK OUTTT AUGHHH a lot of this text is copied from random discord places where I've already done some talking so I'll put that stuff in quotes

Also just for fun but I think it does better at giving the vibes for everything is my eternally in progress pinterest board for Voel + the lands and races here

"So the background for how this world was formed into what u see on the map is that originally, the world was a barren and dry wasteland inhabited by one single being, Arvellis (names are being workshopped rn). They only knew the world they were born into but fell in love with it despite it being incredibly harsh to live in. They spent their entire life exploring the wasteland hoping to find someone, anyone to share it with, but eventually they realized and accepted that they were completely alone. Their heart couldn’t take the grief, and they died (rip lonely guy 😔). Their body was full of a lot of potent magic though, and so as it rotted and as its blood seeped into the ground, it became the catalyst for life on Voel! There was also a small explosion of that potent magic caused by the heart upon dying, which is why there’s the lake where it is. Arvellis was HUGE so parts of their body are still easily recognizable as landmarks present day, notable the ribs in the desert, and south Quara's islands are made up of skull fragments"

Okay so that's how everything is created and from there I've got those 4 main regions with their respective races:

Thros is the primarily rocky desert region (formerly grassy plains, scrapped that though). The Throsians inhabit it, they're inspired by a mix of real life animals (long distance running plain mammals, wasps, pangolins, etc) as well as buggy type aliens and the draenei race from warcraft. Here's some old ass sketches from when I finally solidified a lot of their features, I think the bottom headshot and the headshot next to the big YES are the most accurate to what they look like. Originally I considered making them mammals but idk about that... I might still keep them mammalian but get rid of the small sexual dimorphisms they had. They've got weird ass sturdy feet that are built for both running on rocky and rough desert terrain, and along with their long legs they're also very long jumpers. These guys can run for ages at a steady pace because of gill-like structures on their torsos that help them take in more air as they're in motion, and they've also got their tails for balance!

Culturally I'm still figuring a LOT out for these guys but Throsian cities are kind of cool in that they're inspired by paper and potter wasps in terms of how organic they look. This was a super rough sketch from a while ago kinda showing that. All Throsian cities apart from their "capitol" one (which is essentially just the crossroads city so it's big bc there's a lot of Throsian commerce happening as well as travel) are nestled into the ribs of Arvellis. Yeah the dead giant guy. His ribs over time turned into stone and fragments + whole bits are scattered across the entire desert. The cities being nestled in and on there is also practical since it keeps them in a cool location with less sun beating down on them. Also it's cool as fuck to live right on the bones of a dead god.

Quara is a little weird in that it's kind of spread out, and the Quarans as a people are also generally split into three groups based on their region + regional culture divides. They're essentially fish folk/mermaids with legs lmao. Here's some ancient ass brainstorming from early last year, they were originally ALL called Tideborn before I swapped to the general name of Quaran for the race so sorry if it's a bit confusing.

"For a long time the tideborn as we know them today were united under one leader and they were a very strong unified nation across Voel, with lots of underwater highways of a sort connecting the different islands. Slowly over time though cultural and physical differences grew and they sort of just naturally drifted apart into individual little groups. The southern tideborn and northern tideborn are often in disagreement over how to best worship the tidemother and tend to not get along present day as a whole in terms of culture (there are lots of individual exceptions of course, and city dwellers intermingle much more). It’s not a hostile relationship, they keep up a business relationship and trade often, but each thinks the other has the wrong idea. Southern tideborn really stick to the idea of the tidemother as a wanderer first and then protector. And they tend to have much smaller but more frequent villages, with many of them passing through the villages and acting like wanderer knights of a sort (I love knights. Fish knights. Let me have this)

Whereas the tropical tideborn think more along the lines of, protector over wanderer. They have strong, large fortified cities that are connected to each other and from there they protect people much more locally (and if needed they can send their people in huge groups to assist during like. Natural disasters, disease spreading, etc on a more global scale)

The temperate water Tideborn are kind of a weird middle ground? They’re not wanderers in the sense that their southern cousins are, but they tend to be traveling merchants and entertainers and such instead (they see that as a way of helping people too. Not just saving them from danger but providing goods and stories) and their influence on both of their brother groups has led to this odd little coalition that serves as a loosely united leadership for the tideborn as a whole."

This is all hella old and some things have changed but most of it is still true. The Tidemother is the deity that all of the Quaran cultures revere regardless of their differences!! Also I made it a lil confusing but Northern Quarans are the tropical fish variant, Southern are the arctic fish variant, and the temperate Quarans are a mix of tropical, arctic, and freshwater/river fish variant. Northern Quarans tend to physically be shorter,more slender and naturally have lots of bright colors and patterns, Southern Quarans on the other hand tend to be very large size wise. They're both taller and usually more heavyset since their bodies adapted to storing more fat for the colder enviroment. Again the temperate Quarans aren't as fleshed out but they have a lot more variety in terms of body shape, but color wise they're never as eye catching as their northern cousins.

Culture wise something that has changed is Southern Quarans do also have a few small fortress type cities, nowhere near the scale of the north though. I really struggled figuring out the general architecture style for both south and north Quara, but I think these rough sketches do a decent job of showing what I want. Sorry abt my handwriting but yeah! Northern Quarans tend to have very organic and round strucutres with lots of open space due to the tropical climate. A lot of their structures are inspired by conch shells and underwater organics, and their cities also tend to be very busy visually, with a lot of buildings intertwined/ stacked which can almost make it feel like the city is crawling on itself. Although the building layout is super busy, Northern cities do always have a clear and wide main highway going in and through. Southern Cities on the other hand are very bare bones at first glance. They can come off as very cold and rigid and that's bc Southern Quarans love their inorganic structures. They use a lot of hard straight edges for their structures, with really tall ceilings and neat square or rectangle layouts. It's not that they don't like incorporating organics, but they like them contained and orderly. If you go up to any South Quaran city wall it's guaranteed to be intricately carved, either with artistic depictions of historic figures, animals, etc or just patterns.

OH also fun detail since I will be talking about the skeleton of a magic system that I have rn, but Southern Tideborn have a tradition of getting magical tattoos as a sort of coming of age ritual.

So next up is Dekthros and its draconic citizens, the Dekthrians! I'm currently in the process of reworking them to try and make them fit a little better into the world/not be just generic dragons/dragonfolk because I worry that they are (Ultimately I'm creating all of this for myself BUT that's exactly why I want to change things). So the fun thing about the Dekthrians is that they all mostly live in the mountain region of Voel, but they live underground since that region has a lot of naturally sprawling caverns. Think of like how expansive and huge the new minecraft cave enviroments are and how sometimes they don't even feel closed in, that's basically what it's like. The big thing the Dekthrians have going for them is that they're generally known for their skill when it comes to crafting and forging weapons, armor, and jewelry, and their cities aren't called Forge Cities for nothing. At the center of each city is a giant forge and crafting center, inspired by Ironforge and dwarf architecture from warcraft (all of their aesthetic is generally warcraft dwarf inspired. There is a theme here of me taking a lot of inspo from warcraft aesthetics lmao). Another thing I think is really awesome is that the Forge Cities aren't isolated, but there's a lot of different smaller settlements in pockets of the underground all connected by major underground tunnels. An easy and safe way to travel through the otherwise very harsh mountain range is by just traveling the cave system, it's well lit and easy to go on foot or via other transportation modes, and there's plenty of points where someone could stop and spend a night resting. I've done almost no art when it comes to Dekthros or its inhabitants but here's a really fast concept scribble I did a while ago for a tunnel/forge city. They tend to have a lot of bridges built across for accessibility, and Dekthrians tend to layer their homes vertically since the caves allow for that. They literally just dig into that rock and live there!

Physically I don't have too much to say about the Dekthrians other than they're mostly built like the typical western dragon... but I'm planning on fleshing them out at somepoint to allow for variation from their chunky bulky builds (I have to work it out, but I'm planning on potentially a variant that lives on the coast, mostly as an excuse to put Pebble into Voel lol, but also a more serpentine/cloud serpent inspired high altitude variant...). The cool things that I do have about them though are some of their cultural bits, mostly their visage crafting and their funerals. The visage crafting is partially in limbo right now as well due to figuring out what the limitations should be and if it should even exist as it is right now, but essentially a coming of age thing that most Dekthrians participate in is designing and crafting their own tool/weapon/accessory of choice that the also enchant to give them a smaller form more similar to the size of the other Voelian races as a way to integrate better (Dekthrians are the largest of all the main races, with Quarans and Throsians being in a similar range and Teelans varying more... I'll get to them later tho). Again I do have to workshop it but I really like the idea of it being a big deal in their society to spend a long time designing something that's just right for you!! Whatever a Dekthrian makes/chooses is pretty permanent in that making another visage is incredibly difficult due to the magic system I'm also still working on!!

Anyway the other thing I think is really neat about them is their funerals because they go all out. Some more copied text coming up

"it ties into the idea of their primary god being The Mourner... The Dekthrians build off of this and their traditional funerals are basically these very beautiful parties. Everyone is invited regardless of whether they knew the person that died, because this is a chance to get to know them now. The entire thing lasts several days, with the first day being the cremation (burial also happens but is less common. Each family member contributes to the lighting of the fire in cremation) and families tend to have a place where their visage tool is stored afterwards. Not much else happens the first day apart from a quiet moment for personal mourning. The next day is when festivities are expected to start, and these differ from group to group on length and what they do during them. Some parties last a couple days, some last up to a month (tends to happen with popular figures or leaders). The common things in all of them are stories, incredible food, and lots of games. Most Dekthrians try to do activities that the dead person would’ve enjoyed, so maybe poetry reading would happen at one, or there would be a concert at another, etc. It’s a lot of fun and they do a really good job of not just partying but also remembering that person. The last day, whenever it is, usually has a big send off to the deceased, where everyone gathers and a nighttime fire display with lots of colors (magical fireworks basically) marks the end of the ceremony."

Theyr'e the only race whose funeral/death rites I've fleshed out, I do want to get around to everyone else eventually.

Okay last of the races are my favorite children, the Teelans! Aesthetically they're heavily inspired by both the brokers from warcraft and a lot of cool pottery and mesoamerican art and architecture! Here are the brokers for fun because I think they deserve more love (#1 broker fan here they were the best thing to come from shadowlands and I'm dying on that hill)

Teelans are a funny race in that they are technically constructs (animated beings that are usually crafted/sculpted/grown etc) but they're fully sentient and intelligent, where true constructs might have some personality they're ultimately made for a purpose and aren't sentient. The super fun thing about the Teelans is that they're essentially living clay dolls, and a huge part of their culture is self expression and body modification. The variety you can get in size and shape in these guys is one of my favorite things about them, here's some old arts of them.

The blue "flame" is what separates them from true constructs and it's kinda like their soul/consciousness. They're really hard to fully kill because of that, you'd have to completely pulverize their body and leave it unsalvageable. Also a fun thing is that the way Teelans are "born" is via an enchanted mud pit that they emerge out of all goopy -> they then dry out into a very basic humanoid shape and from there they start making adjustments and modifications themselves as they progress through life. They also can't die from old age! I feel like I don't have as much I want to say about them but another thing I think is neat and that transitions semi nicely into other stuff is that Teelan homes are true constructs. Teelan cities technically CAN just get up and move anywhere anytime because most buildings are animated constructs!!

I also don't have a lot to say about constructs apart from what I've already said, but I do want to point out a notable one called the City Colossus. No one really knows who animated it or why they did it (it's theorized that it woke up/was "born" due to a high saturation of god blood in that region...) but the Colossus is always traveling around Voel, and it's become a weird mobile trade hub of sorts. There's again, still a lot I'm working out like whether all of the races inahbit the city -> or if I want to make someone new OR I have considered leaving it abandoned and I do like that a lot. Anyway, the Colossus is completely harmless and just completes its route every year and I love it a lot.

The last thing I really wanna talk about is the magic system which is undergoing some serious reworking, what I can definitely say about it is that everything in this world does have magical properties of varying degrees, with organic creatures having more typically (an exception is the Teelans but they're weird). There's two primary types of magic that can be performed, enchantments and wards. Enchantments are usually assumed to be "temporary magic" and while that is true a lot of the time, the main difference between an enchantment and a ward is where the magic comes from. Wards come from a magic user drawing on their own magic, which is a lot more taxing and typically reserved for bigger permanent spells (for example, Quaran tattoos or Dekthrian weapons) where enchantments make use of other magic sources (so this would be like using animal and mineral ingredients or potion brewing to give temporary effects usually). It's mostly undergoing some reworking because I like it when magic is a little more grounded and has hard set rules, and I felt like earlier on Voel didn't have that! I'm currently trying to figure out the consequences of someone overusing ward magic, it's probably gonna involve just dying from being so drained buttt I'm also playing around with the concept of draining yourself of magic leading to something worse... idk as you can tell a lot of this is still very much being developed!!! That's basically all the big stuff but for fun and as a treat if you made it to the bottom of this, here's some different rough creature concepts for this silly world

[autisticlalna]

less fun shitpost, more on the emotional side of things:

i dunno man. i think i personally am taking it super hard bc yellow was one of my favorites. like, a lot of people in the dominion fandom favored blue, but i really liked yellow and included a "i think he's neat" joke in the og version of the powerpoint (which i guess i get to write a conclusion to the sbk section of now)

the whole thing with me writing Yellow In Limbo was "nobody talks about this guy except for aces sometimes, i have a lot of emotions about him and how he died, what if he got to meet avoid". and literally while i was writing the first two chapters, when i hadnt even told anybody outside dnerds about it yet, we get the end of episode 12. the first ever canonical on-screen appearance of yellow.

(and even with a tiny snippet of crossing the rubicon eeeee ok i am still not over that. i was actually considering including that moment in the finished pmv but i had so much trouble trying to get the clip and decided it wouldnt work tonally/visually unless i reanimated it, and then my laptop died right after rendering and uploading, so. o7)

point is, i was thrilled for yellow to be here, and super into the mystery of How he got here. i dont remember if i really talked about my theories much bc they were very scattered, but ive been constantly trying to figure out What Happened To Summertime. bc the original thought i had after the reveal was that summertime was yellow's reincarnation somehow, but yellow had none of his memories and summertime seems to be completely Gone, and we still dont know why the gold farm caused it or what was the deal with the design of it (bc viking did hint the design was for a reason and related to it somehow!!)

we finally get to see a recap of the finale-that-never-was, we get the flash of "you're broken it didn't work you're broken", and then we got the book! holy fuck, the Book! volm just.. had the Book! and gave it to yellow! and egged him into trying the ritual! and like.. obviously the ritual wasn't going to work. it was never going to work, or if it did it was going to herald the death of the server. that was how it was in dominion, that was how it was here. of course olm was co-opting it for himself.

the fact that yellow doesnt get his memories back is something im undecided if im okay with or not. it wouldve been cool to at least get a hint of who dviking used to be, but mostly im stuck on trying to figure out if i think this is narratively satisfying or not. bc again, i knew the ritual was going to fail from how it was set up in both series. but i think the reason why im undecided is because dominion was going to be open-ended, and this is... very final. yellow doesn't get his memories back. blue is gone, never mentioned past yellow's recap. we dont learn anything more about the book, or how he got it. yellow has a whole-ass breakdown before being buried, and then the world is erased.

(and like, ive already talked abt how i dont like the joke abt the world being erased. those emotions are still very much present. but im trying to focus on the Rest of the ending rn)

there's this finality to it. yellow is gone. we finally got to see him after two years, and then he dies with no fanfare. book snaps shut. questions remain unanswered. there was over half a season's worth of build-up, starting from summertime's weird flashbacks, and then he's gone and that's it.

i don't know, maybe viking does intend to still do things with blue. whatever it is, it's not going to be sbk season 2 - he's confirmed a few times that it's gonna be somebody entirely new. which im excited for! i like new vikings. i like summertime. but this is an ending without an ending. its not a cliffhanger, like dominion's intended end, its not an answer to two years' worth of speculation, it is literally "rocks fall, yellow dies".

again, there is a bias here. i started writing yellow in limbo with the goal of making people care about yellow bc i only ever saw people talk about or draw blue. i found yellow, and what he represents, compelling-- dviking is a character that has always been paradoxical in nature and behavior, and examining that through the lens of his halves only works if you analyze both halves.

i just wish we'd gotten something. some kind of closure. or, at least, that yellow's final breakdown hadn't been followed up with a joke about how all of it was pointless.

[oneatlatime]

Avatar Day

I'm back!

"A hundred years passed and my brother and I discovered the new Avatar" That wasn't just chance, was it? Wanna bet that it also wasn't just chance that Zuko was near enough to see the beam of light?

HOW LONG DO YOU HAVE TO BE ASLEEP FOR A SPIDER TO SET UP SHOP IN YOUR MOUTH?!?!?

"What are you doing in my mouth" is a sentence so ripe for innuendo-isation that my brain tripped over itself trying to come up with a dirty way to spin it.

Love the boundary talk too. I had no idea that kind of therapy speak was around in the early 2000s.

There has got to be a more efficient way of stopping someone who can canonically fly than pulling down a whole ass tree vaguely in their path. And how strong are these rhino things?

Did that mask guy just try to bomb a child?

Tee Hee. A Pee Pee.

Boomerang has to come back though. That what boomerangs do. I refuse to believe that boomerang is gone.

I guessed about halfway through season 1 that Zuko would have to go through some identity struggles in this show, but I was wrong! It's Sokka who gets to reevaluate his identity. Ponytail guy doesn't have the same ring to it.

Dingalings all over this episode.

I've been wondering why we weren't seeing more Avatar themed places and events. Granted, the avatar's been missing for a century, but in a world where there is recurring proof of a spiritually endowed god-like person's existence, I would expect more temples and Holy days. I mean, we can't even prove that any of our gods exist and we still commit to building megachurches. Imagine how easy it would be to fundraise to build a temple to an Avatar when there's the underlying threat that if you don't donate, the demigod in question could show up at your house.

Two things: first, there were some serious resources invested in these floats. Either this village is loaded or has priority problems. Second: Aang is now well enough known worldwide, that villages he's never been to can accurately depict his appearance, costume, and personality. It really never occurred to them to lay low, did it?

"That's the biggest me I've ever seen." I'm curious to know your sample size.

Sokka could totally carry a torch. It's the torch that wouldn't be worthy of the wielder.

That about sums up my reaction too.

Zuko's in this episode. Hi Zuko! I'd know that musical trill anywhere. When was the last time I saw Zuko?

So I know that Zuko's got a wisdom problem, but could he at least wait until after dark to rob people? While wearing a very recognisable costume that is prominently featured on its own Wanted poster? Just a little common sense I'm begging you.

So in character for it to be Katara who takes action first when Aang is insulted/has his effigy set on fire.

This guy is stupid right? Kyoshi was around at least, what - two hundred years ago? And there's been two avatars since, who as far as I can tell aren't Kyoshi reincarnated but are whole other people, and he's still blaming Aang for some rando's death?

Pro tip: anyone introduced with the expression "glorious leader" is invariably neither glorious nor a good leader. Good leaders don't need hyping up.

I was wondering if that little remark about water tribe money at the beginning of the episode was going to have a payoff. Every time I think it's simple worldbuilding, it turns out to be plot. This show is so neat.

The loss of boomerang is having unforseen effects on Sokka's mental state.

"I can't do that [save the world] with people thinking I'm a murderer either." Says Aang. "So what exactly do you think every earth kingdom and water tribe person assumes you're going to do to the Fire Lord?" Says I. To be clear, I don't want to watch a goofy 12 year old commit a war crime, but I guarantee that no one in the avatar world is under any illusions about any fire lord going quietly.

How does Aang know how do push the 'expert detective' button?

How long is Katara's arm?

Ok I'm guessing from Katara and Aang's reaction to the polar leopard boots story, that Aang knew that Sokka could be conned into helping with 'expert detective' talk, because Sokka has retold the polar leopard boots story 800 times.

Sokka understands the importance of looking the part! Hang on I got a gif for this.

Well-known top three rich person activity: money fondling.

Moneybags should have put those metal reinforcing struts on the roof too. He probably cheaped out.

Oh my GOD this is peak sibling energy. This is MY thing. No touch. ME DO. MINE. Yeah I know it's obvious to anyone with eyes but I'M THE ONE WHO GETS TO SAY IT OUT LOUD.

Loving the bubble pipe.

HYBRID ANIMAL

NOT A DRILL

Rat Elephant?

Too late my man. The only person who didn't see that is Aangy.

Super nitpick time! Why did they build a defensive stockade when there are highly climbable cliffs 50 feet away and the fire nation have cliff-climbing tanks?

Funny how the mayor guy says "clear her name." Aang wants to clear his own name, the mayor wants to clears Kyoshi's. At least some people get that avatars are different people.

Last visit to Kyoshi was: -Harassing local wildlife -Misogyny -Crossdressing -Burning down the whole village -Harassing local wildlife again

What in that list inspired Suki to change the world/fight in the war?

Respect the props Katara.

I found the sane people is this village! You know what I love? When they're listing Aang's good points, being the Avatar comes FORTH. They get that he's more than his title.

I'm sorry but I cannot believe that this painting, which lives in a building without a door, is three hundred years old. Unless that thing is behind 15 layers of varnish or invisible glass, humidity would have destroyed it in the first decade.

Katara getting ragdolled got a big laugh from me. Plus the follow up pipe to the noggin. Gotta love a sibling slap fight!

With that model of justice it's no wonder the sane ones are in jail.

Sounds like someone was chasing butterflies when he should have been paying attention...

Zuko again. I'd forgotten he was in this episode.

"There is a simple honour in poverty" is a good-sounding line, but I'd believe it more if it wasn't coming from a former crown prince who, until like three weeks ago, never wanted for anything.

Can someone please make Zuko aware of the fact that honour as a concept exists outside of an avatar-capturing context?

In my experience, the hope you give to yourself when there's no hope left is less hope and more spite. Still works though.

Was all that talk about not touching Kyoshi's things just talk, or did the water tribe siblings have to steal this stuff?

YES Sokka is RIGHT stuff has POWER.

Did Koh steal their brains as well as their faces?

The village idiots fucked around, and now they're gonna find out! this is going to be good.

So Chin the conqueror was about as smart as the people of his village. He really thought he could take on the Avatar?

Good Lord avatars can move tectonic plates?

She's blowing a continent. She sailed a continent. Without a sail.

Tiny Momo.

Badadss lady speech aside, it's pretty funny that Kyoshi used her ability to manifest to be the opposite of helpful.

Just when I thought he couldn't possibly get more stupid, he sinks to an even lower level of dumbass. Zuko sucks all the common sense out of any room he enters; the only thing that's kept him alive this long is being in proximity to the world's wisest man as balance. So what does Zuko do? Rides off into the sunset WITHOUT Iroh. Dumbass. I give him two days before he dies in a freak foraging accident. Dumbass.

SERIOUSLY. DUMBASS.

Never thought I'd be happy to see these guys, but here I am.

Petty Aang! I've never seen petty Aang before. Boy contains multitudes.

Screw artifact preservation.

Three of these jokes in a single episode. This episode does rather feel as though it was written with the brakes off.

The lead rhino takes one look at Aang and is like "I'm not going to mess with that. Let's burn down some buildings instead." Let the record show, the lead rhino has more sense than Chin the Conqueror.

I knew it! Boomerang came back!

Raw dough. Uncooked dough. Their new snack is salmonella. "This is by far the worst town we've ever been to." Thanks to Sokka for the thesis statement.

Final Thoughts

This episode was hot nonsense! And I love nonsense, but it's too far when I find myself rooting FOR the rhinos. To be clear, I loved this episode's humour and especially the sibling dynamic between Sokka and Katara. I've literally had that exact conversation with siblings, usually about who gets to be the one to tell Mom about the spectacular awesome thing we saw that totally wasn't our fault and that we totally saw without going somewhere we shouldn't have.

But! The villagers? Stupid. We cut to Zuko? Heretofore unseen levels of Stupid. Even Iroh was being stupid. You do have to let children learn things for themselves and make their own mistakes, but in enemy territory? With a documented history of dumbass behaviour? And a propensity for dressing as a wanted criminal, while also being a different wanted fugitive while out of disguise? Mark my words; it's going to end stupid.

I loved the C plot with Sokka and identity. It's funny how it parallels/speedruns the journey Zuko's going to have to end up doing at some point (he'd BETTER), although probably not in a single episode with goofy props. If only teenage identity crises were as easily solved as a returned boomerang.

That scene with Kyoshi sure was something, huh? I actually rewound and watched it twice through before I tried to comment on it, because I was too enthralled to do anything but watch.

If all Avatars can do what Kyoshi can do, then Aang is: a) nowhere near as developed an Avatar as I've been assuming, and b) going to be really really scary one day. Not sure how I feel about Scary Aang. Although petty Aang was fun.

I love monster of the week episodes with low stakes and high humour, but this one was had so much stupid coming at me from so many directions that it did get a little annoying. Still, I'll rewatch it. That Kyoshi bit was delicious.

[tokiro07]

In a recent interview, Eiichiro Oda said that he probably won't do any more manga after One Piece (or at least nothing huge) because the world he constructed for One Piece inadvertently allowed him to explore pretty much every type of story he wanted to: Mock Town was a Western, Egghead is both a sci-fi and a murder mystery, Thriller Bark was a horror, etc. He never did it, but Oda probably could have found a way to work in a high school drama or romantic comedy if he'd really wanted to. I would argue that's how the Hungry Days promotion came about, he probably wanted to see it explored at least a little bit but couldn't quite find a good excuse for it

Undead Unluck, as I think at least one of us has mentioned before, is very similar: it can be whatever it wants to be whenever it wants to be. A sci-fi horror against the emotion-eating aliens on the space station, a zombie apocalypse Western against Spoil, a wuxia against Feng, competitive gaming against Spring, sports against Void, and now of course the high school AU centered around Chikara; Undead Unluck can do it all! If we end up going into Lucy's mind and it becomes a swords and sorcery fantasy with Lucy captive in a castle by a dragonified Ruin, would any of you really be surprised? Would any of you even complain? I wouldn't, and in fact I hope it happens now. That'd be such a funny way to get both Ruin and Lucy back into the main story

I don't know if I've ever really talked about it before, but there are certain niches that Jump manga fill. I don't mean in the sense of genre like sports or gag manga, I mean more thematically. When My Hero Academia started, the consensus was that it was the "new Naruto," with its plucky underdog protagonist competing with a cruel and prodigious rival and a society that discredits him for the circumstances of his birth. Black Clover draws inspiration from a ton of big name manga, but Bleach is probably the one that it best resembles in the structure of its world (the Clover Kingdom resembles Soul Society, the Magic Knight squads resemble the Thirteen Court Squads, and the Grimoires are basically simplified Zanpakutou)

Over the years, I've seen many things take major inspiration from Naruto, Bleach, Dragon Ball, etc., but shockingly, there was a long stretch where I never saw anything try to emulate One Piece, at least not in a way that was particularly obvious. The closest was Toriko, creating wild and imaginative animals, plants, etc. the same way that One Piece creates its islands, but nothing had a cast that felt reminiscent to me

Interestingly, the first one that I noticed that felt like what I was looking for was Dr. Stone, and that only sunk in for me when Senku had his group build a boat and put up a sail with their own unique symbol. I realized in that moment that where Toriko had covered the spirit of adventure that One Piece had, Dr. Stone covered the spirit of friendship and togetherness: every time a dilemma came up, the solution was almost always finding a new ally and awakening their talents, applying them in a way that they'd never thought to before, or reconciling with an old enemy for the sake of progress. "My friends are here to do the things I can't, and I'm here to do what they can't." This is one of the core tenets of One Piece, and while it took me a while to notice, it was equally a part of Dr. Stone's core as well

Undead Unluck does something pretty similar, though not as overtly, since the cast don't really have neat roles like "navigator" or "doctor" or "chef;" instead, everyone has their areas of expertise that can be used in multiple situations, so the individuals best suited for each situation are carefully selected, and if none are available, the hunt begins for someone who is. I think this didn't sink in because it didn't become nearly as prevalent until after the timeloop, but in retrospect, the first half of the story was like the pre-timeskip Straw Hats', unprepared and unable to reach the world's ceiling when finally faced with it, only to come back stronger and wiser in their journey to come back together

Coupled with its ability to be (Chucky voice) genre-fluid, Undead Unluck has unexpectedly become in my opinion a more than worthy successor to One Piece's particular niche in Jump. I've had this thought for a while now, but I think that Undead Unluck might actually be a good glimpse into what One Piece would have been like if Oda had been able to stick to his original five-year plan. It isn't able to take nearly as much time to flesh out its world, but its streamlined approach elegantly allows us to get to know enough about the cast to be invested while still allowing attentive viewers to pick up on fine details. Where One Piece ballooned to be a 30-year venture because Oda kept having more ideas he wanted to share and angles he wanted to analyze, Undead Unluck seems to have a stronger clarity to its vision and commitment to ensuring that vision is realized ASAP without sacrificing any of the essentials. Neither approach is wrong, it's just good to see that there is in fact a world that exists where One Piece would have been able to be just as solidly executed even without entertaining every whim and flight of fancy that its author could dream of

Of course, One Piece is still going, and likely will be when Undead Unluck naturally concludes, so calling UU its successor is definitely a bit of an overstatement, but my main point is that I'm glad that we're starting to see authors who aren't afraid of sharing One Piece's niche, and more importantly are doing it in a way that's fairly subtle, but identifiable. It's an extremely comforting sign for the rapidly approaching post-One Piece world, and I can't wait to see what fills the coming power vacuum

[cer-rata]

Hi! I wanted to ask about your process making of Conrad. I been thinking on creating my own oc but I really don't know where to start and when I read "heart of Gotham" he feld like a pretty solid character and very interesting too.

So I'Il like to know, how did you come up with him? Where did you started end how did you follow with his story?

And if you have advice on building a character I would love to hear it, thank you! :D

This is so nice? I think the biggest anxiety around creating a OC-centric fic is that your baby just won't be as interesting as the canon characters, or worse is actively agonizing to witness, so it is nice to see that he stuck out to you positively.

This is a lovely question and I want to give you a thorough answer.

Spoilers? I guess? But only for things I've already published.

On Conrad:

When I'm writing fanfiction, OC or not, I like to look at the existing world building, find a detail that I think is really neat, and then put it somewhere it doesn't belong. I love Star Sapphires conceptually, if not always in execution, and wanted to play with what it means to be powered by love, and to do it differently than the classic obsessive, toxic, homicidal Sapphire that Carol became back in the day before it was a proper corps, and Geoff did his lantern lore tinkering. But I also didn't want to make it a purely heroic, morally unambiguous thing. All emotions are neutral and love can go in a lot of directions. I knew it had to stem from some kind of pain, partially because that is the standard set in canon, and also because I feel that heartbreak is love at its most intense and difficult to control, and that level of extreme emotion is needed to attract a ring.

So I started thinking about the kind of person that would be capable of feeling love that deeply and then I realized that the most emotionally volatile time in most people's lives is the teen years. Especially when it comes to affection. I'm not excluding my ace friends here either, even if it's not romantic or sexual in nature, teenagers tend to form really strong bonds, due in part to the aforementioned emotional volatility. So I knew they needed to be a teenager.

I wanted him to be a boy because I think the love corps being gender biased makes no sense, and playing with masculine stereotypes of what love means interested me. I am a guy, I like to write what I know. I also wanted to play with the idea of what it means to be a guy in the first place. Conrad's boyfriend, Darren was kind of created to be a more standard masculine ideal: Big, strong, uncomplicated, aggressive. I think on a level Conrad envied that and the safety that came with it. Conrad on the other hand was more complicated. There's a lot of softness there, an emotional rawness even before the tragedy, and he doesn't hide that. He's very openly gay, honest and clear about that, but he's also not pressed to present in a certain way. He liked that Darren protected him, and he didn't like conflict. None of that was from a place of confidence necessarily, more an aversion to being inauthentic. He doesn't think highly of himself, but he's also not interested in pretending he's anything else. It's not that he doesn't care what people think of him, but he just can't be anything else than what he is.

Frankly, there's also a tendency to write black boys and men as wildly binary. Either hyper masc and aggressive or toothless and palatable. I didn't want Conrad to be so clearly defined.

So I had the basic outline of his vibe by that point, I didn't have all the specifics but I knew that I needed to create an awful situation for this emotionally vulnerable kid. That's where Gotham came into play. Bad things happen to people every day in Gotham, and despite that, the regular folk keep living their lives. It quickly became important to me that Conrad represent a very average person in a very strange city, with average ambitions and circumstances. Being raised in a working class home was a given, because I didn't want to lean too far into the poverty narrative, but I did want to draw some distinction there, and contrast that kind of worldview to that of the better resourced batfamily. I wanted to make the change in his status quo even more jarring by not making him someone with any ambition to be a superhero, and make his more typical understanding of the world clear and consistent.

I also wanted to make him the child of immigrants, but swerve away from the stereotype of the inflexible, emotionally unavailable first generation parents. They're not perfect, they are distant in how they respond to his sexuality, but it was important that they were smart, fairly progressive, kind people who clearly cared about their son and his happiness. I don't think a parent has to be wildly abusive to cause pain for their kid, sometimes they really are trying their best, and the kid knows they’re loved, but they still leave some sore spots to work through. I tried to take that approach with my characterization of Bruce too, actually.

A lantern ring is an incredibly powerful weapon, and Gotham doesn't usually feature characters that powerful, it doesn't fit the genre, and I knew that. So I kept him from training properly for the story so he was always struggling to figure out what he was doing as a way to not have to start him out with lantern-tier threats. On the note of the ring, I also was specific about countering the classic hypersexualized depictions of Star Sapphires, not out of any moral sensibilities (though I do suppose I’d feel odd putting a sixteen year old in a laser speedo), but because I wanted him to have to build the confidence to be showy if he even wanted that. His insecurities about his body are pretty standard stuff for any teenager, and while not a full on complex, I wanted to be a little realistic about what he was willing to wear. I wanted to emphasize that love is not just about attraction and sexuality…though yes, for him specifically those are factors. But specifically not the only places he draws power from. I like to think they all have a central love that they tether to, and branch from there. Were I to make another Star Sapphire after him, I would most likely go in a completely different direction and focus on a different facet of love to be the core of their power.

Anyway, so then I had "Gay Black Teen Boy from Gotham who is Nice Enough but Not Terribly Interested in Sticking His Neck Out." I then picked a life altering tragedy that was in some ways intended to mirror Bruce's and spark a similarly intense desire, but smaller and more focused in scope.

This may be hard to believe considering I made a character who is literally powered by love, but at that point I had no intention of having Conrad date anyone. The story initially was much more dour and lonely and I didn't anticipate a happy ending. It was going to be bittersweet at best, but tragedy was more likely. I changed my mind a number of times actually, frankly I think the fact that the story logically flows is amazing, because I was writing to at least four different goals over the course of it.

Damian made the most sense to me as a point canon character because of the ages I was going with, and how hard his personality contrasted Conrad's. I put them in the same school and tied him to the tragedy for convenience, honestly. I thought it would be interesting for Damian to be drawn in through his guilt and inability to leave a problem unsolved, and because of that grow to have a civilian friend who was disarming enough to not trigger his defenses, and THEN becomes wildly dangerous, so he'd already accepted him into his sphere and then had to deal with it. I...wrote them with more chemistry than I'd planned to (yes, Damian is a blorbo, I'll admit it okay), and suddenly it became less about the lore implications and impact on Gotham's power balance and more about whether or not either of them were capable of love anymore. For a long time the answer was no, their ill-considered hookup was supposed to hurt both of them to the point of closing off to each other...but I got to a point in my own developing worldview where writing that the answer is "Not everyone gets to get better" became untenable. And I didn't think that kind of pessimism even made sense for the story I'd written, its tone, and how I characterized Conrad and Damian.

He definitely developed as I wrote him. I generally only knew what I was doing two to three chapters in advance, so there was always some uncertainty, but I had a pretty good idea what drove Conrad early on, and knowing what he cared about was helpful. Sometimes when people talk about magic systems, they talk about creating a power ceiling and sticking to it. I kind of wanted to show you exactly what Conrad could be willing to do very early on, so there was always this question about where his center actually was. I assume you're up to date, so you saw the kind of darkness he could reach come up a few times, but notably always stopped before stepping completely off the path and into something more sinister. He's nice, he's so nice, and I wanted to show how nice isn't enough to build a moral framework on, and he's still figuring out what his actually is. That's going to continue being a theme for him even after the fic actually.

Somewhere in there it turned into an AU I wanted to explore more, and then I started projecting Conrad's arc further out, and I did make a few choices in service of that.

Anyway, on general character creation:

I think the most important thing is that a reader kind of understands what a character is about. Not that they should be predictable, but they should feel consistent enough that when you are surprised, you can think back and go "Oooh...no actually yeah, I see how that happened." And that only really happens when you as the writer know the core of what they care about. Conrad wants to feel Safe, and he wants to feel Accepted. That's universal stuff, but it's important because that's where his ambitions end. He doesn't know what he's going to be doing after high school, he doesn't think that far ahead. Darren was his world because he just doesn't think past the present. Because his desires are so simple, so primal, and become so painful for him, then I feel it logically follows that he's willing to break through what he thinks are his boundaries in order to achieve them. You can even threaten either of them separately, but when both are in jeopardy at once, he's willing to do just about anything really. So I as the author always knew what his tipping points were, and could sprinkle them around to watch him trip into them and hurt himself. I want the reader to be able to see where a scene is going and go "Oh. Oh no he's about to do something he'll regret." So consistency of desire is important, because it colors everything else. Then you can make him sacrifice those desires for something he's come to realize is more important, and boom, you have a cathartic/agonizing growth point and can recontextualize from there.

Themes are important for long work, but I like to figure out who the person is first and then pick a theme that they'd struggle with figuring out. Wonder Woman wouldn't struggle with any of this, and as such wouldn't make sense to explore the question through. I'm sure you can come up with a theme first, but I like starting with characters and figuring out what their story is.

Gender, sex, race, orientation, health status: These are all important to know, even if the story isn't about any of those things specifically, because every one of those details imply different experiences and invoke different stereotypes. So don't agonize, but do think about WHY you've made the character this way. Are you leaning on stereotypes? Have you accidentally recreated an unfortunate trope? I am a black writer, but even so, when writing a black character I need to be aware of what ideas I'm perpetuating. I wrote Conrad's anger the way I did specifically because I wanted to avoid supporting the image of an "angry black man," which doesn't mean that he cannot BE angry, but does mean that I need to be mindful of the way he is, and why.

There are a lot of spreadsheets and character question checklists and stuff out there, and I'm sure they're great for some people, but they irritate my ADHD and I feel like if I need to constantly refer back to what my character likes, especially my main character, then I don't have a strong enough sense of who they are, and I really need to, this is an OC, every decision I make is the only canon there will lever be, so I need to have a grip on what I want.

Don't be afraid to make them goofy. Conrad is so goofy, and it is part of why Damian becomes fond of him, but that's not why I made him like that. I made him offbeat and awkward (but not shy), to create a specific dynamic in his dialogue. He's not cool, he doesn't care about being cool, but he is still insecure, and that insecurity manifests in oversharing, in a certain shamelessness. He can't handle sitting with shame, his self esteem is too weak for that. So his lack of guile, and lack of panache are both fun quirks to help me differentiate his dialogue, but also important clues about how he takes things and then I can flatten those out when he's being serious, or scary. If a character starts out cool, and that's never challenged, then it's boring and you get into Mary Sue/Gary Stu territory. It's totally doable to start cool and then add nuance, but I think it's easier to start a little weird and then reveal why they're neat when the situation calls for it. My advice boils down to this: People love fuckups, they love humans, they even love monsters. The greatest sin is for someone to be boring, and being too sad or too perfect is boring. I have to let Batman have a sense of humor for that reason. 

Since creating Conrad I've also taken to picking some scenarios that people have a general standardized reaction to, making a different decision, then figuring out why that makes sense. Really early on I decided that he didn't get jealous easily, notably so, and worked out that it was partially because he doesn't feel entitled to anyone's attention, but also because if he loves someone, he wants them to be happy and that doesn't necessarily have to involve him. So figuring out that Jon had feelings for Damian didn't do anything to him, because, well, Jon is in the 8th grade, that would be ridiculous to feel threatened by at that point, but also because someone loving Damian that much to him is a good thing. He loves Damian, other people should too. Which is...kind of a good trait, if only it didn't stem so much from his lack of self-worth.

I think every character choice should be intentional. They don't all have to be deep, but the more specific you are, the more tools you have to play with, and the more ways you can twist them out of shape. When you make decisions and stick with them, you create limitations, and those limitations are where I think an interesting plot comes from.

Shockingly, I do have more thoughts, but I feel like this is already far more than you asked for, and I do need to finish chapter 12, so I’ll cut it here. 

Also…this ask truly made my evening, and as such I feel compelled to share a tease of how I plan to celebrate the completion of the fic.

Look at him go!