#i was quite wrong.

[movingpawns]

I thought the other version of myself would be similar to me.

[cynicalmusings]

what was the inspiration behind aphros? -- @milkstore

i started considering writing for a minor god!reader when i posted this, mainly because i just felt really, really bad for xiao and all he’s gone through, and wanted to write some comfort in the form of a character who has stuck by his side for millennia and isn’t going anywhere any time soon, as well as somebody who’s experienced pain and trauma in their own way, so they can to some extent relate to xiao’s experiences and his suffering isn’t something alien to them, as well as to even out the dynamic and have xiao be there for them in return so it’s not all one-sided comfort.

another part of the reason for the idea of the reader being a minor god was also the fact that even when i read fluff for xiao with a human reader, i can never get it out of the back of my head that this human is going to die soon and xiao’s going to lose yet another person else he cares about. i wanted somebody he can rely on not to be born, live, and die in the blink of an eye so they can flesh out their relationship over time and really get to know each other.

a third inspiration for the fic/ character actually came a lot earlier. i saw this fanart of xiao dancing as alatus and thought, ‘i need to write something for this.’ originally, it was going to be a oneshot wit an implied mortal reader, but then i was like, ‘wouldn’t it be interesting if the reader actually knew xiao when he was alatus, and then helped him retain some of that side to him as time passed?’ i also thought for the fic that if i wanted to write a very intimate relationship between the two characters, the best chance to have xiao willingly be vulnerable would be to have the other character know him before he became so closed-off, so that they’re a familiar presence to him and hence he feels more comfortable opening up to them. obviously, you wouldn’t be able to do that with your average human, so i made the reader a god.

the way aphros’ character turned out specifically wasn’t really planned. i wanted to give them a name, and then i decided that i wanted to write them in third person, partly because i soon discovered they’d be much more enjoyable to write if the narration implied they were strongly their own character than a reader insert. in the post i linked above, you can see i was juggling a few options for what they would be the god of, and then i decided i wanted to incorporate quite a lot of liyue’s lore into the fic, including havria in regards to the archon war, and thought i could make the element sea-related so they’d have connections to her. i also wanted them to be quite weak powers-wise so i could explore their thought processes more than their elemental abilities and keep their existence pretty low-key, as well as providing contract to xiao’s physical strength, so something powerful like sea storms or anything wouldn’t do. eventually, i settled on sea foam, and the name aphros came from the ancient greek word for it.

for their personality, i knew i was going for something relatively withdrawn. not super closed-off, but quiet and contemplative as opposed to bright and cheerful. often, readers in xiao fics tend to be quite out-going, which isn’t a bad thing, but i wanted to slightly break the mould, i guess, with a character who was still kind but not as bubbly. i also felt like the fic would just… work better altogether if they were more withdrawn, because we’d get to see xiao making efforts to get to know them better, rather than having that mostly be the reader’s job like it usually is.

regarding aphros’ hobbies (e.g. calligraphy and painting and whatnot), i decided on artistic, ‘calming’ things, partly to contrast xiao’s life of violence and action and give him a chance to wind down when around them, but also to share his interest in art forms (which, in his case, is dancing) and show that the characters’ interests aren’t polar opposites. aphros’ gong also came from something similar, because i thought it’d be nice for there to be some musical aspects to accompany xiao’s dancing, as well as gongs typically representing healing, sort of, which could establish their presence as one of comfort and respite in xiao’s life, as well as aphros’ generally calm attitude. i also wanted to give them some ties to chinese culture, hence the hobbies and their clothing design.

regarding their mutism, i mainly thought it would be interesting to write and follow a character who doesn’t speak, in addition to drawing some inspiration from the traveller, who, although not mute, doesn’t talk much. it would also, again, give xiao the chance to make the first moves (e.g. in conversation) when it’s usually the reader doing it: basically, to explore character dynamics.

this answer got pretty long, so i hope i haven’t bored you to death, but i’ve ended up really liking aphros’ character, so… do expect me to answer mentions of them with an essay.

[rogueshadeaux]

“I hate the script, the vault dwellers sound so cheesy—“ my Brother in Steel you realize that’s the point, right? They were bred to act like the physical embodiment of an HR e-mail. Did you not catch the memo that Vault-Tec put out regarding their experiment facilities?

[bobcat-art]

mo dao zu shi? don’t you mean

Jiu Jiu’s Bizarre Adventure

(thank you @princess-of-purple-prose for the image description!)

[aeide-thea]

on principle opposed to describing art i dislike as 'masturbatory' because even though it's an alluringly contemptuous word to sneer it's impossible to reconcile with my pro-masturbation stance

[heybaetae]

maknae line + gestures of love 🫰🏼💋🫶🏼🌹🤟🏼 happy birthday @jkvjimin! ♡

[shepscapades]

can I possibly give post-destruction etho a hug it seems like he needs it/nf

I can’t think of a reason he would decline!

[uncharted-constellations]

These two have such a funny vibe, had to take Zelda out of half their games because you know she’d just be telepathically negging him the whole time. Theyre besties, theyre potentially related, she’s mentally whispering ‘Sandwich’ in his ear whenever he’s trying to focus.

Edit: Added funny page in celebration of me not having to rework these designs for the new game

[keferon]

Did you think I was done? Ahahahaha no, I have more.

Because chapter 70 of MOMU gave me the very dynamic between them that I missed so much, I just blacked out and started drawing uncontrollably lmao

Also. ALSO. I noticed a while ago that Prowl has the habit of..like…constantly frowning. So. I did a bit of research and made this graph.

In 70 chapters, Prowl frowns rougly 104 times. And the intensity of this gesture is very clearly correlated with the development of his relationship with Jazz, as you can see ahahahahah It might be wrong tho don’t take me seriously I’m not good with graphs

[anbaisai]

Imitating the tweels sounds fun until you get caught by the real deals themselves, oops

(With @umichipearl's OC on the right!)

[skradio]

the crane returns on the wind

[inwhichiramble]

Idk if this is just me, but does it seem like the Hunger Games movies left out most of the stuff about food in general?

Maybe I just noticed this because in my first read I was worried that all of them were cannibals, but like… in the movies it seems like they were never actually that hungry. Like, we know that Katniss and Gale have to hunt, and that Peeta gave Katniss the bread, but a lot of the details about just how hungry they were to get to those choices were just… gone. And when they’re in the Capitol on the Victory Tour, they mention the vomit-inducer but it was more of an offhand thing. What got me especially though is that in Mockingjay Pt. 2, their time with Tigris appears to be much shorter, but also… she doesn’t feed them! And from what I remember that was fairly significant in the books, especially considering the position they were in.

In the books, hunger was the driving force of the vast majority of decisions they made. Katniss literally spent a good chunk of her first games desperately searching for water—Haymitch rewarded their performances with food—Katniss described every single thing she eats and primarily characterizes new places based on their food (the Capitol and District 13 especially). TBOSAS supports this even further when you see how even people in the Capitol were starving in the aftermath of the war—that’s why sponsors were added to the game!

I just—the whole series is literally about starvation and what it means to be human, but the movies just focused on love and war.

[arktic-rage]

honestly I absolutely love the Avvar in Jaws of Hakkon. How they worship the gods, how they view the world around them, how accepting they are and just how interesting they are too. I absolutely despise how the Inquisitor and Companions make commentary as if they're stupid or wrong in their beliefs, or that they're "just crazy people who worship spirits".

The dialogue you don't choose or even the ones you do are on the line of condescending, and it's frankly insulting, especially that all options on the dialogue wheel fall on that line.

the Avvar are so fucking cool, I hate we only get a DLC with them. (I also miss the Chasind - I wish they weren't forgotten or left in the dirt by BioWare :( )

[markscherz]

Natural history museums hold innumerable misidentified specimens on their shelves. These specimens make their way into databases like GBIF, and muddy data that is used in global-scale analyses and other research drawing on such records. Careful verification of all specimens in a collection holding tens to hundreds of thousands of specimens would be a Herculean task that could take a dozen experts a decade. So, we often rely on spot checks.

Whilst searching our constrictor collection to see if we have any albino snakes (we don’t seem to), I came across this snake that had been identified as a Boa constrictor. It is in fact Malayopython reticulatus, a reticulated python. A quick new label and an update in our database, and I was able to move it over to the right shelf. Now it won’t muddy the waters further, and is able to be referred to by anyone interested in examining a retic.

How many more such cases are haunting our shelves of over 14 million objects? And that’s just the Natural History Museum of Denmark; there are billions of objects in similar collections globally. This is quite literally an astronomically huge problem.

[cringefailvox]

this is just a personal hc, but i actually think that alastor is the only overlord in pride who has a themed epithet. remember that he didn't give himself the title "radio demon", it was given to him by sinners because he was anonymous, because he didn't build his notoriety with his face or name. all of the other overlords are public figures whose reputations are attached to their actual names—reporters call vox "mister vox" to his face, and in the pilot katie and tom refer to sir pentious and cherri bomb explicitly. the only other classes of people who get titles are the morningstar family, the goetia, and the seven deadly sins, for royalty reasons. so i don't think vox would be referred to as the "television demon" or husk as the "gambling overlord" etc etc by the general public—everyone knows who they are already, it was only alastor's terrifying anonymity that earned him a title

[lgbtlunaverse]

Most annoying NMJ or JC take is when someone that dislikes them is like "oh you're a fan of him? *scoff* Well obviously you've only seen cql, where he was super watered down. In the novel he's a dislikable asshole and that's the objectively superior canon I'm working from instead of your woobified fanfic." Meanwhile your main canon is novel canon and you genuinely find novel Jiang Cheng and Nie Mingjue complex sympathetic characters.