#i'm just saying that like any place it's complex. it's got its good things and it's got its bad things.

[girltakovic]

hello upper middle class northern usamerican tumblr user. i want to play a game. you will notice that you are in a super america convenience store in rural kentucky - you have three minutes to purchase a snack and drink of your choice and make normal small talk with the cashier. however, if you use the word "cryptid" or generally make reference to appalachia and its inhabitants as "wild", uncivilized, or lacking restraint around alcoholic beverages during your time here, i will personally tie you to the chassis of a four wheeler and tip it into the river. live or die. make your choice

[mysteryshoptls]

SSR Rook Hunt - Room Relaxation Vignette

"Happy Birthday"

[Exterior Hallway 2F]

[birds tweet in distance]

Rook: Oh my, that little one over there… Mhhm, welcome back. I see you've decided to spend your winter here this year.

Cater: Hey-o, Rook-kun. Whatcha doin', staring off into the distance like that?

Rook: Oh hi, Cater-kun. It seems like the little bird that left its nest here on campus in the spring has returned. I'm just glad it's doing well.

Cater: A little bird…? Wait, are you talking about that bird waaaay off in the distance? It just looks like a normal bird, doesn't necessarily mean it's the same bird you saw before, does it?

Rook: Not at all, it's definitely the same bird. Each one has a completely different look from each other, so I'm sure it's the same one.

Cater: U-Uh huh… I think it's a little too difficult for me to see.

Cater: Ah, right! I'm changing the subject a little bit, but it's your birthday tomorrow, right?

Rook: Oh là là! You remembered my birthday? I'm floored!

Cater: Obvi! You think your good pal Cay-kun'd ever forget a batchmate's birthday?

Cater: Now, inquiring minds want to know, Mr. Birthday Boy Rook-san! How do you plan on spending your birthday?

Rook: Mhhm, let me think…

Rook: I think I would be content just spending it like any old day, surrounded by good friends!

Cater: Ehhh, come on～ And just when I thought this was my chance to learn a little more about your life that you keep close to your chest…

Rook: You wish to know more about me? Oh my, if you stare any harder, Monsieur Magicam, I'll simply combust on the spot.

Cater: I didn't think I was staring that hard… But I get it, you don't want people prying into your business ♪

Cater: Then, how 'bout I extend an olive branch… Wanna take a pic to celebrate your Birthday Eve?

Rook: Oui, I'd be honored!

[snap!]

Cater: Oh, Rook-kun, your smile's dazzling! Ah, I just thought of something good. I'll send you the photo later ♪

Rook: I look forward to it. See you, Cater-kun!

[Pomefiore Dorm – Hallway]

Rook: ―Confirmation of this week's schedule of events for each grade… Done.

Rook: Ballroom usage requests, confirmation of head counts for each room, equipment returns… Done.

Rook: Oh, look at the time. It just flew by as I was finishing up my Vice Housewarden tasks. The showers should be free by now, no?

[Pomefiore Dorm – Rook's Room]

Rook: Perhaps it was thanks to that hair mask a fellow dormmate recommended me, but my hair feels silkier than usual today.

Rook: It's good to give myself a little special treat before a special day, after all.

[Pomefiore Dorm – Rook's Room]

Rook: ―I've finished my skincare, body care, and haircare routine.

Rook: I'm completely ready to listen to Roi de Neige's melodious voice! His radio program should be starting soon―

Rook: Oh? It looks like I still have a little over 10 minutes left. I must have been a tad too hasty in my eagerness.

Rook: I suppose I could fill out that "Survey on Quality of Life Improvements for the Student Body" in the time I have left.

「Survey on Quality of Life Improvements for the Student Body」

Rook: Improvements, hm. If I were asked any time before this, I'm sure I would have had much to say on the school regulation that has freshmen and sophomores sharing a room.

Rook: Sharing a room with fellow classmates may have its moments, but nothing is better than my personal time alone.

Rook: I still vividly remember the joy I felt when I became a junior and was assigned my own room. This is what I call paradise!

Rook: Not only am I able to protect my privacy, but this is a perfect place for me to surround myself with beauty and love. I have no complaints!

Rook: If I were to come up with one thing to put down… I would like a safe. I'd want something sturdy with a complex lock that cannot be opened easily.

Rook: If I were to have one, then I could keep safe my trove of journals, my precious photos, and even that one thing I got my hands on that one time… Heheh.

Rook: …Oh, whoops. While I was drifting off imagining all the things I could place in a safe, I seem to have completely filled in the field.

Rook: I'm sitting here in a paradise I built for myself, and I still had so many desires to write down… Ah, me, oh, my! How selfish could I possibly be?

Rook: Thinking back on it, I've not had many memories of staying in the same place for years like this.

Rook: Even after three years here, I find that every single day brings new thrills that keep me just as excited as the first day.

Rook: …Well now, with that, the survey is done. ～fin～ And perfect timing, too.

Rook: It's finally time for Roi du Neige's special radio program… I can't wait! I've been counting down the days ever since the day it was announced.

Rook: BRAVISSIMO!! THAT WAS A PURELY BLISSFUL EXPERIENCE…!

Rook: His dynamic vocals sparkled like an étoile in the sky… It was completely different from his usual sweet manner!

Rook: I could feel my heart completely taken in by the way he beautifully weaved from topic to topic that brought to my mind a silky-smooth kaleidoscope.

Rook: What could his "new work" be that they mentioned on the program…? Aah, I cannot wait for more information to be released…!

Rook: When it comes to updates such as this, there's a higher degree of vivacity in receiving it through a live broadcast rather than an article or a recording!

Rook: I wonder which store he got that pie he said he ate "a little too much of" from…?

Rook: If I'm not mistaken, there are quite a few well-known pâtisserie near that recording studio.

Rook: If it's a new place… I believe the actor who will be co-starring with him in his upcoming drama series is known for his serious sweet tooth.

Rook: Perhaps if I look into the shows they've appeared in or check their online posts, I might be able to figure out a hint as to which place it is. I'll check later.

Rook: I must listen to the program once more and record my heartfelt thoughts into a letter… No, wait! I must first jot down every single emotion it made me feel into my diary!

Rook: …This should be all of my thoughts on the radio program. Every single word I had for it meant everything to me that I felt as though it almost became a word-for-word transcript.

Rook: Now, what else stirred my heart today…? Ah, yes, Cater-kun remembering my birthday was lovely.

Rook: Ahh, yes. I should also write down the joy I felt in being reunited with that little bird once more.

Rook: Today was a wonderful day. I wonder what beautiful things I will encounter tomorrow.

[Pomefiore Dorm - Rook's Room]

[door opens]

[door shuts]

Rook: ―Someone's door just opened… Ah, right, there's early morning practice for the track club today.

Rook: As soon as I hear some kind of noise, I snap awake. It may still be early, but I think I'll start getting ready for the day!

Rook: First, I'll take off my sheets and pillowcase… And leave it in a basket in the hall.

Rook: They'll even return it here front of my door after its been washed, so thankfully I can make my bed myself.

Rook: Ordinarily, the laundry ghosts would do everything for me, but… I just can't feel comfortable having anyone enter my room.

Rook: I appreciate them for listening to my vehement non. Now that I've finished with that, I should go wash my face.

Rook: The quiet atmosphere of the washroom in the early mornings always puts me in a refreshing mood. Now then, I think I'll use this lotion today.

Rook: Before, I knew nothing of skincare, let alone makeup. But with my transfer into this dorm, I was reborn anew!

Rook: I may still be a novice in this regard… But as a student of Pomefiore, I cannot allow myself to shirk on the proper regard for skin care.

Rook: For example, when it comes to UV protection, I've learned that it's not enough to simply apply sunscreen, but I must moisturize myself beforehand.

Rook: I had no idea there were so many types of cosmetics. Aaah, this world is brimming with such spectacular surprises!

Rook: The company who makes this one strives on having fragrance-free products, to the point where they even refine their raw materials as best they can to minimize any lingering aromas…

Rook: However, if this is the extent of what a commercially available product is capable of, it may be beneficial to see if we in the Science Club can look into creating completely fragrance-free cosmetics.

Rook: Next, I'll use concealer. When I asked Vil for recommendations, he gave me an array of colors to choose from to help cover my freckles.

Rook: In the end, after taking into account my skin tone and testing out many different options, I selected this concealer because it had no scent and it adheres well to my skin.

Rook: Similar to how wild animals will protect themselves with camouflage, I must evenly smooth it all over my skin… Good, this should be enough for the base makeup.

Rook: Ah, right. I should use the special eye cosmetic palette that Vil recommended to me when I joined him shopping the other day.

Rook: The way the fine pearl powder shines is as beautiful as sunlight streaming through darkened winter clouds.

Rook: LA PERFECTION…! A perfect look for a perfect birthday!

[doors open and close]

Rook: ―It seems the other students are slowly awakening. Mhhm, I'm sure in another 10 minutes or so, the washroom will be absolutely packed.

Rook: I think I'll quickly check Magicam before changing into my uniform. Has there been any news on Roi du Neige's… Oh?

Rook: It looks as though I received a message exactly at midnight. Oh, this is from―

[Main Street]

[Pomefiore students chatter with Rook]

Cater: Ooh, looks like he's already been cornered by folks～ As it should be on a birthday!

Cater: Rook-kun, Happy Birthday! Your makeup is on point today! Can't expect anything less from a Pomefiore student ♪

Rook: Merci, Cater-kun. And I absolutely loved the message you sent right at midnight.

Rook: Not only did you decorate the picture beautifully, your message was extremely heartwarming.

Cater: I'm glad you liked it～ Soooo… Wanna snap another picture now that it's your actual birthday?

Rook: OUI!!

Requested by @farfalla049, @thelonepearl, and @mizumire.

[halfway-happyyy]

lowkey in a weird funk depressive episode and i need boyfriend!frank to take care of me out of desire and not consolation (shoutout jeff buckley) like i want him to want to take care of me because it makes him feel better

I'm sorry you're going through this, I know how rough it can be. sending love & holding space for you.

right so, it's safe to say that frank knows his way around a depressive episode or two. knows what it's like to be at the mercy of thoughts that swirl around his brain like a virus, infecting every good feeling he's ever had. so when your sleep becomes shoddy, when you start to disappear mid-conversation, he knows something's up.

"where'd you go just now?" his voice lacks the accusatory tone you think should be there, and in its place, is genuine worry. his concerned gaze on yours, searching for a solution, or a clue, as to what's going on in that beautiful mind of yours.

"I'm right here, frank." your smile is laughably fraudulent, but it's all you can manage at the moment, and fortunately for you, he sees right through it.

he reaches for your hand, as if mere touch could scare away the ugly feelings, and murmurs, "you don't gotta do that, kid. not with me."

and in your mind - this episode could not have come at a worse time. what often feels like a series of blissful years, has only been about six months. that's how long frank's been a permanent fixture in your life. and while you guys haven't made the jump to housemates yet, he's over almost every night any way.

he clears his throat, pulling you from your reverie. "how about this, huh? you tell me what percentage you're operating at, and I'll carry the rest. I promise."

taking a deep breath, you murmur - "I'm sitting at about a solid twenty percent."

he nods, keeping his low voice even and measured. "alright kid, we can work with that. I've got the other eighty percent."

he starts by preparing you your go-to survival meal, and while he doesn't expect you to finish all of it, he encourages you to have as much of it as you can. next up is a shower; he offers to get in there with you, but you're content just to have him in the room with you.

and the thing about frank, is that he's doing right by himself when he's taking care of you. in the six months you two have been together, you've pretty much become an extension of him. so when you're off - when your world feels like it's caving in on itself, his does as well. and the old man is nothing, if not a fixer.

it's only when you're curled up against the solid warmth of his naked chest later on, that you're able to utter, "I'm sorry you feel obligated to take care of me, frank."

he doesn't say anything for a long while but the breath that hitches in his throat gives him away. his hand resumes the reassuring circles against your shoulder blade.

"I don't feel obligated at all, kid."

he understands the complexities of chemical imbalances, well. it's a road he's traveled down many times, though it's mostly been a lonely one.

silence settles between you before he presses a kiss to the crown of your head.

"all I'll say, is that you could do your worst, and at the end of every day, I'll still choose you every single time." another kiss. "that's how this thing works, kid."

the measured rise and fall of his chest tells you he's drifted off, until he clears his throat and gruffs, "we don't have to figure everything out today. we just gotta take it one step at a time, and I'll be right behind you for all of it."

and for now, that's enough.

[novantinuum]

jen's "Hard-Light Hybrid Steven" headcanon dump

Okay so I'm just making this its own post, because frankly at this point... the original post is so hard to get all the pulp out of due to the headcanons being spread over multiple reblogs and half of it being in the tags.

So here we go. Self indulgent headcanon time. This is how I'm now personally interpreting things within the realm of my own fic work and the post-canon storylines that live in my mind. This is NOT, however, a work of meta- I am by no means suggesting this to be what I see as "canon," only having some fun playing around with ideas I think are cool on a speculative fantasy anatomy level. Take it as you will basically, lol. This is ultimately just for me.

With that stated:

"jen what the fuck do you mean when you say hard-light hybrid Steven, what are you even suggesting"

Essentially I am proposing that Steven becomes progressively more hard-light based in form as he ages. When he was born he was two almost entirely separate halves mashed together- organic and gem- and those two halves slowly but surely merge over the years (hard light replacing organic matter) until one day they are literally inseparable, and Steven is one permanently cohesive being... entirely hewn from hard-light, but with a level of anatomical complexity that still makes him a complete anomaly amongst Gems and humans alike. Instead of the innards of his body being solid light, he is still formed of cells- only now, those cells are entirely hard-light.

His gem is somehow mimicking the form of organic matter with a level of detail that's absolutely unobtainable by shapeshifting or tailored reformation alone. Steven has become the single most complex hard-light system to have ever existed.

Some more specifics on how I imagine this merge working:

Much of the "merging" is natural over time, basically his gem branching out new bits of hard-light circuitry within his body as it integrates within his system.

However, this process is sped up significantly by all the spills and injuries Steven deals with throughout his childhood... because his body's instinctive response to injury is simply to replace damaged cells with hard-light analogues. An almost instantaneous patch job.

Steven's component halves being so distinct early on is a large reason why he takes so long to harness many of his powers.

This is also why Steven's (mostly) organic half is so weakened during the split in Change Your Mind- at that point there's a lot about his anatomy that's been converted to hard-light, so it's basically as if White Diamond yanked the power source out.

(Same idea for why he's so weakened during the movie when his gem's on the fritz... his gem's connection with the rest of his body got partially severed for a time, which. Is not Good for someone who at this point is more hard-light than not hard light.)

At a certain point post-canon, it becomes impossible for Steven's organic and gem halves to be separated. They are so tightly integrated that attempting to remove the gem would only poof him.

Now, here's the thing though...

Steven does not realize that Any of this is taking place until the blunt reality of his strange new anatomical nature is put on display for all to see... when he actually DOES poof.

Here is how (in my own post-canon musings, which I have simplified here because y'all don't live inside all the intensive lore that jangles about my brain) I envision that taking place:

So, Steven would be in his mid to late twenties at this point. He's married to Connie, and they have an infant son.

Recently, there was a fairly severe Gem incident that left Beach City and Little Homeworld pretty damaged. Things are still being mopped up from that.

Steven, Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl head out on a quick mission one day to intercept one of the last few supporters of the Gem who attacked the Crystal Gem's hub of operation, and at first it seems like it's gonna be a straightforward trip.

Then, Steven sees the Gem in question pull a destabilizer wand on Garnet, and- unwilling to watch her to get ripped apart like that again- throws himself in between. He can take it, he thinks. These things never hurt him one bit as a kid

He cannot take it.

He poofs.

His gem unceremoniously falls to the ground, along with the clothes he was wearing and whatever he had in his pockets.

Cue the others going "what the actual FUCK" because based on everything they've ever witnessed and known about him no one had "Steven poofs" on their bingo card.

The insurgent Gem is captured and dealt with, but now... oh, boy. There's literally no playbook for this. Nobody knows what to expect.

Steven's gem is quiet for WEEKS. During that time, the Gems end up consulting the Diamonds on Homeworld to ask for intel on diamond reformation, but none of them are much help- Rose and Steven are the only ones who have actually poofed. Beyond them, this is completely unprecedented.

In a very vague sense, Steven is aware of what must have happened during this time... (even if a part of him wants to deny it, because How???)

He can pick up vague snippets of what's happening just beyond his reach... catching voices and what must be faint sensations of familiar people handling his gem, but beyond that he has no awareness of the passage of time, and he has no means by which to reach out to them mentally.

It takes almost two months for him to finally reform. When he does, his gem quickly shifts through its previous three forms and then just... outright h a n g s for a while on the new one... as if what's trying to "load" up is so complex it's goddamn buffering.

(my brain can only think of This image uyhjfsdbyuhjfg)

No one really knows what to expect but when he finally reforms, he... looks mostly the same? Still rather human in appearance, externally? The only notable difference is that his irises are pink now. (But with no diamond pupil- not unless he's going Full Power Mode.)

Steven also reforms WITH an outfit much like a Gem would.

The second he's back, he runs to embrace Connie (who is sobbing in relief) and asks how long he was out.

And he did NOT anticipate that answer to be two months.

As it turns out, he missed quite a few baby milestones while he was gone, and he feels horrible about it- it's not his fault of course, but he feels so bad that Connie had to go that long without his support, and that there's all those special "firsts" with his son he'll never get to experience.

This whole incident marks Steven's final "retirement" from participating in real combat- he outright tells the Gems to not involve him in any other combat situations unless the whole ass planet is under threat, basically. The potential risks are just not worth it now that he knows how long he'd be out of commission, should he poof once more. He can't put his family through that again.

Now, with all that outlined...

Ways that Steven is Weird now:

He looks rather human- his hair looks like hair and his skin looks like skin- but after he reforms, literally every "cell" of his body is fashioned out of hard-light.

However, if one were to theoretically slice him in half (which I PROMISE I am not going to do, this is only a thought experiment ahahah-), his internal anatomy would glow much like the Gems' do. (See below image for what I mean.) The "human-like" appearance of his skin and hair and other externally visible features does not extend very deep.

He "bleeds" pink now- but it's only surface, and is all just excess hard-light. No real blood.

His body would no longer show up on a radiograph- just the gem.

Many of his anatomical features (not all of them, though) are now vestigial in certain ways-? Like, various functions have overtly been taken over by his gem... he doesn't need to breathe or have any lifeblood beyond light pumping through his system, so his heart and lungs serve no necessary purpose anymore... but all of these organs still "exist" as like an echo of what once was, perfect mimics of their organic form but hewn from hard-light.

That being said, Connie enjoys the reassurance of his heartbeat, so he retains that function while conscious.

(Not to mention, "breathing" is literally just a habit for him by this point.)

HOWEVER, when he sleeps (another thing he technically doesn't Need to do but does anyways) his breathing and heartbeat stops entirely and it kinda spooks Connie out. The literal only evidence she has that he's still kicking during these times is the soft hum of his gemstone.

He does not have a biological NEED for food or water anymore and can fully operate on exposure to light alone, but he still really enjoys eating and drinking anyways. In fact, he's still able to absorb energy from food... so it's basically like he's over-charging his battery or whatever. He also still experiences taste (so still posesses some form of taste receptors) and instinctively feels "hungry" at meal times, so like... the running theory is that he must have hard-light analogues for all these receptors and neurotransmitters and hormones that communicate sensations like hunger in his system even though their function is entirely redundant with his gem powering everything.

Furthermore, his memories and sense of self and everything one might refer to as "the soul" is stored exclusively in his gem now. Which means, if one could manage to analyze his brain like one could with a human brain, there would be entire sections that simply... don't light up the way that others (such as the parts of the brain that govern motor control, as an example) do. This is because all the "data" once stored there has migrated.

He can fully shapeshift now, if he wanted to.

He can also still visually "age"- it's all based on his mental state, same as before.

But despite being hard-light in nature now, he can still interface with organics in fusion because his form is still so organic in shape and function. He's still the bridge between humanity and gemkind. I like to think that... theoretically... a Gem might be able to fuse with an organic too, but the sheer burden of trying to shapeshift and maintain such cellular complexity is what stops this from happening.

Steven, though? His very existence as a hybrid acted as a template by which hard-light could learn to understand organic life. He is still an intensely unique being, even IF he no longer consists of any actual organic matter.

_

I am sure I will probably add something to this later, but for now, those are all my musings.

Anyways, thank you for taking a brief visit to the deepest recesses of my brain, where I am chewing at the drywall and bouncing around the room like a cat who has just devoured the goddamn motherlode of catnip. Good night! !! :DDD

[heroicn0nsense]

I guess I'm about to get real vulnerable on main here, but I saw some kinda "BookTok" disk horse cross my BlueSky feed, and it's got me thinking in a way I really can only discuss without a character limit. But it feels kind of relative to an over all trans creative experience. Maybe more specifically for us masc people, but. You know. Maybe the threads are different but the weave a similar picture. Anyway, this is kinda what my tumblr blog has become, and so here goes. Please note I also use 'queer' as an all encompassing term, as to me it is the most inclusive word I can use despite its dubious origins and history. Sorry if that upsets anyone.

The funniest thing about this whole conversation popping up was the fact that I had just been lamenting about finding the concept of 'romantasy' fun but what I'd give to find or read something with a transmasc protagonist paired with an opposite partner of any gender. Something my masc bisexual ass would love to see. Mostly because I see and support so many ones that are sapphic in nature, but hardly see any masculine. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places but Anyway. Just so happened that in the next hour I saw what I was looking for cross my Bsky feed, but with the author show casing the really nasty and negative comments he received on his concept. things like but not limited to:

"of course the transmasc character is a twink bottom" "just a girl who got a mastectomy" And other just Internalized Misogyny and Heteronormative things that affect a good portion of us transmasculine guys.

And idk, man it really struck a nerve with me.

If only because first and foremost, the author is writing something he wanted to see. Filling a niche and void he wanted to see realized, and like so many other authors' works, in a way that feels personal to him. And to attack it in such a way was pretty vile.

Queer stories and creations in of themselves are personal stories, because we write from our own experiences, and put them in our original works whether subtly or not so subtly. It's there, and you can't separate the queer experience from a queer work because by its very nature its queer. But also like, that experience isn't the same for everyone. And we shouldn't expect it to be. So, no, not every work is going to be what you want or associate with. But we should be uplifting all of it so that someone with an idea or concept that does speak to you will have the confidence to bring it to the table. And yeah. Unfortunately, that sometimes means that cliches are gonna happen. That twink ass transmasc might end up being a bottom 75% of the time.

But it also like, led me to associate my own struggle of accepting my own body and transness and some of my own preferences in the bedroom.

I'm not saying that all writers, artists, or creators are using their method of making art to explore their own hang ups with their gender and bodies, navigating this absolutely messy and strange world of norms and expectations while simultaneously seeming to want to turn them on their head. Gender is complex. Being trans is complex. And it gets weird, and sometimes we need outlets to work our way through it.

But also, most of us transmasc people have vaginas. It's just a fact of life. We've got a big ol' gaping axe wound of an organ sitting between our legs and for a lot of us, it still feels good to stick something in it, and we shouldn't be ashamed of that at all. And hell, a lot of us are short, considering our genetics are wired that way and no amount of HRT is going to change the fact some of us aren't going to get past 5'5". But sometimes, especially with what is expected to be masculine by gender norms, and the physical form of a cis male body, it can sometimes be really hard to reconcile that.

I know it was for me. To the point where I often struggled with my sexuality and my relationship with intimacy about it for a long time.

I made my character Akihiro while I was, and still am parsing through a lot of my own dysphoric issues, and paving my own way to acceptance. And that's made him a deeply personal character to me. And he has grown and changed as I project a lot of those issues on to him and his development. Akihiro has been an exploration of myself as much as he is an an original character that I role play. But not so much in the ways of personality, but more in the ways of the challenges with which he is presented and has to navigate himself.

Akihiro is a trans man in a world that is accepting of it. Society has progressed past these petty and arbitrary standards. But he becomes a cyborg at a time where the question is instead what it means to be human, and so...The aspect of depersonalization, dysphoria, and depersonalization he experiences at the hands of transhumanism is not so different than what I have and do experience in my own transition.

Akihiro wasn't always trans. That was honestly a pretty recent development and one that I did struggle with making. And I realized I was struggling with it because of those same dysphoric issues. And I just needed to let them go.

It was reflected in another recent development; the way that I had Akihiro handle his genitals when he was presented with the option to upgrade from none to a functioning set. And he chose to go with what he had been born with, the genitals he had when his body was mangled. He went with a vagina. Because he wanted to embrace the body he had taken for granted before he lost it, and not some idealized version of himself he could have obtained at any point prior.

And yeah. He 'bottoms' the majority of the time for his boyfriend because he enjoys it. But it doesn't stop him from topping him either, nor enjoying that. Nor had it stopped him previously from being intimate with other men and women. And that's his preference as a character.

And who are we to say it wasn't the same for this author? Where he is putting his feelings and acceptance of his own body and desires onto paper? And that is being met with such vitriol because it's not someone else's idea of what is masculine, or whatever. I don't know. Maybe they weren't. Maybe they did just wanna write some twink ass boy getting dicked down and like, that's fine too. Why do we have to be so mad about that?

And maybe this was just a lot of words to say that I think we get so wrapped up in words and labels for things that it completely erases the nuances of our own experiences and it turns right back around to being so queerphobic and limiting. And we don't give ourselves, much less other people, the grace to create the things they want to, and from a place of their own experience and desire. It's harmful.

[sxorpiomooon]

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Pile 1

Pile 1 I'm sorry, the first thing I noticed was that my eyes kept forcing themselves to shut down for some reason it's like when you are thinking about someone and you sort of force yourself not to that's the vibe. I feel as if this person feels like you are walking away from this connection. I want to tell you that you are very brave for making this decision as I can see how stressed you look. Pile 1 might be extremely exhausted I heard "it's time to go" and had a vision of a clock tickling a brown one very light or dark academia core I think it was 9 o clock? I heard "i let go off what no longer serves me". This person has a victim complex they still that they are the victim here, the one who was wronged they are refusing to see the truth it reminds me of the first thing I mentioned while writing this the eye thing. This person self sabotages things and then cries about it. It's like someone is crying with their eyes closed to everyone that they are tied with rope and can't move but they don't realise that they are never tied in the first place. OML im so mad😭😭😭 this person has placed everything in your power I'll tell you what this is the kind of man who would NEVER plan ANY dates or anything and will ALWAYS say "we'll see" etc I'm so mad this person refuses to put any efforts and wants you to do all the WORK and they might also Gaslight you oh my pile 1 you are doing right throw this son of. A bitch away this made me mad too. Also for those who need it, the flower that you guys choose is lotus and the reason why lotus is my favourite flavour is because even while being surrounded by mud, it never loses it's beauty and goodness. I hope you remember that<3

Pile 2

i like this whoever this person is they might be really forgetful air signs if you are asking about a man ooo he good looking might have good eyes but dark circles I'm seeing a dark blue tshirt and very dim yellow lights is this a party no idea a libra is involved anyways this might be a new connection or you guys might be starting a new cycle. Also the second thing I got and I forgot to include was that whenever this person remembers you they might do it in a very pleasant manner it's like a bunch of people talking about you and all a sudden they'll be like "ooooooo xyz? Oh yea they're good they're nice they're very nice i like them" that's the vibe I'm seeing whiskey??? This connection has alot of raw potential only slowly unleashing or revealing itself now, you have the power to take this connection wherever you want it go rn. There are endless possibilities. Apples keep playing in my head SOMEONE STPP IT. I hope you don't take this the wrong way but I feel like either they feel like this or its both of your energy but there's something about childhood trauma here I keep hearing something shattering like plates or glasses broken family and disharmony is what I heard. And this person might also think that you might be a loner or someone who just really enjoys their own company I had a vision of painting? I guess this might also be interpreted as this was a connection with alot of potential but past trauma kinda ruined shit for the both of you and if that's the case I'm so sorry to my pile 2

Pile 3

Someone here might speak like singing as in even while saying normal sentences you might say it in a very melodious manner something about singing also had a vision of a takeaway as in the window and vibing alibi started playing YOU WONT BELIEVE WHAT UUST HAPPENEDNNOTONCE BUT TWIECE OKAY MY RUMBLR CRASHED OUT OF NOWHERE AND THEN OPENED AND I WAS SVARWD THAT MY 3NTIRE READING WILL BE WASTED BUTBIT GOT RESTORED AND THEN IT HAPPENED AGAIN BUT AGAIN IT WAS RESTORED. Anyways for some of you something might have happened in this connection that destroyed it as in there was so much hope and light which all ended up in darkness for some reason "all this rage was once love" came to my mind and a very nice warming instrumental played in my head. This is a pile for a very few of you, you might be asking for a past connection. I think there is hope however there's also a need to let go off your emotional baggage in order to continue to connection or for anything. This person also feels this way, that you might have walked away or both of you did because of the unreleased trauma. I hope everything works out in your favour pile 3 <3

[bigskydreaming]

@hood-ex

Now I'm headcanoning that Dick calls Bruce "B" because when he was a kid he was like okay I don't feel good calling him Dad because that makes me feel like I'm betraying my original Dad but also I don't want to call him Bruce because it feels weird to call your dad by his name and I mean, he's my dad pretty much even if nobody else says so or if its official or whatever - I KNOW. I'll call him B and yeah everyone THINKS that's short for Bruce but I know its actually short for BATMAN and so I'm not calling him Dad OR Bruce and thus I don't have to internally resolve that issue ever, huzzah, I have cut through the tangled Gordian Knot of my Filial Loyalties. I now have emotional plausible deniability! Nailed it!

Dick Grayson: Well I inherited my looks and acrobatic skills from my first dad and obviously can't inherit anything like that from my second, so to keep things fair, I'm gonna copy Dad #2's emotional intimacy issues which is basically like inheriting traits, its close enough. It counts. Of course, I obviously gotta disguise having inherited/copied his emotional intimacy issues because otherwise everyone will know that I've done that and why, which would defeat the whole point of having emotional plausible deniability. Look, I've thought this through. I've figured things out.

He confesses this to Donna or Kory or Roy at some point - or alludes to it while concussed, the more likely scenario - and they just look at him and are like yup, you are your father's son. And he goes all shyly pleased because Dick not so secretly loves when people reference or acknowledge his paternal relations in a way that doesn't invalidate having another father but also leaves no doubt which father they're referring to. Because that saves him having to do the emotional gymnastics of WANTING to see something as an acknowledgment of his connection to one without feeling like him having this want is in some way a betrayal of the other.

(Dick Grayson has never been more emotionally well-adjusted than Bruce, lmao, this guy puts the I in Issues as in I Have Them, and its not even the issues that he's inherited/copied from Bruce or arose from their own dynamic or Bruce's parenting, he's got his own from his own trauma and the ways it DOESN'T correspond exactly to Bruce's....the abandonment issues and fears/insecurities about stability and his place in the world or society, etc.

So its never been that Dick is more adept at navigating complex emotional dynamics than Bruce, despite their very different reputations in this regard - IMO at least - its more that Dick more often has occasions where he digs in and does the work to navigate messy emotional dynamics or relationships in order to make things work or resolve shit. But this isn't because its any easier for him than Bruce, its because compared to Bruce, Dick feels less secure in his relationships or in the likelihood that people will come to him or that he'll be okay if they leave or things fall apart....so he feels more incentive to fix things or at least slap duct tape wherever possible in order to shore up breaches in his relationships.

Bruce on the other hand has always felt less drive/incentive to NEED to do this, because as much as he may want to, he has an awareness of "if things fall apart, life will go on" to fall back on. While I don't believe he actually LIKES being alone, he's been alone many times in his life and there's no association for him that alone = not being safe, having his actual needs attended to or secured, etc. He knows he can survive being alone, its not as fearsome a specter for him as it is for Dick, who grew up in a big, happy communal environment and more often than not only seeks solitude to punish himself, but doesn't actually do well in solitary environments.

Which in turn all loops me back to my big issue with Bruce and his dynamics with his kids being that while I concede how and why managing his messy and complex emotional relationships isn't easy for him and doesn't come naturally, I'll never accept that he CAN'T do the work and make them better for himself and his loved ones. Dick is the proof. Because if Dick - who isn't actually any more naturally predisposed to navigate those things, just more naturally predisposed to know/understand that he wants and needs them - can buckle down and make it happen at least some of the time, his father is at least as capable of doing the same. He just more often than not DOESN'T.....in no small part because he's grown to expect and rely on Dick doing it so he doesn't have to.

Course, here I have to acknowledge the variable that is: these are fictional characters and they can only do what their writers write them doing. And so a huge part of this issue is that canon writers are too enamored of their Stoic Man-Who-Thinks-He's-An-Island Power Fantasy and his Emotional Support Son TO mess with this dynamic too much, and so there's no incentive on THEIR part to write Bruce taking the initiative here. And from their perspective, using Dick Grayson to resolve any narrative issues that may arise from Bruce anointing himself the Patron Saint of Dads Who See Their Families Falling Apart and Go Pick Up Another Hobby continues to yield dividends, so why alter a winning recipe, y'know?

And then of course, this all funnels into my frequent rants about how if fanfic is so transformative, why not more transformations of this dynamic since the only thing really stopping Bruce from being written as the Fixer in these issues is canon writers not WANTING him to be. And thus there's literally not anything holding more writers back from having Bruce be the one to actually change and grow and do the work to be the actual parent to his kids other than a) not wanting him to do any of that either or b) the normalization of lowered expectations/responsibilities for Bruce-as-the-actual-parent due to canon repeatedly beating us over the head with the precedent of actually its fine if he never grows even a single size in Parental Accountability, his kids will pick up the slack, that's their job as the supporting cast for him, the franchise epicenter).

[strawbeelemonade]

PLATONIC HEADCANNONS: being miles morales best friend but your also a bit insane (Part 2!)

i'm gonna try to remember to start specifying when something is intended to be platonic or romantic.

🕷- I was literally unable to cram everything I wanted to say in the first one.

🕷- Miles is really only comfortable showing you his drawings.

🕷- He's an incredibly awkward guy, but the words come so easily when he hangs out with you. he doesn't choke up like he does with other people at school.

🕷- When he gets his powers his first instinct is to call you. He’s literally halfway through punching your number into the keypad until he stops and decides against it. He knows your number off by heart now.

🕷- You appear and disappear like a ghost its so random.

🕷- Honest to god, he lowkey thought you were homeless until you invited him over to watch Barbie Mermaidia.

🕷- “Bibble is so me.”

🕷- He’s the only person you let over at your place. its small and in the basement of an old apartment complex. the landlord couldn’t get anyone to pay to live there. you live alone.

🕷- You struck a deal, and they let you crash there as long as rent was on time and you fixed their washing machine for free.

🕷- Miles asked how you got to live there for so cheap. You tell him it’s because someone died on the couch he was sitting on.

🕷- He sits on the floor.

🕷- Miles is so eager to share his new powers with someone.

🕷- No seriously, between all the stress and lying and anxiety its nice to let himself get excited about it. To let himself have fun and see what he can do.

🕷- You guys TOTALLY video tape him trying out his new powers for the first time.

🕷- I can imagine you finding an abandoned alleyway on some random ass street after school and filming Miles Trying to do a backflip LMAO.

🕷- You gotta fish him out of a trashcan after he tries to spider climb up the wall.

🕷- You know that thing where a group of friends duck tapes one of their friends to a wall for fun? You get miles to do that to you.

🕷- You guys can’t stop laughing, The best memories of your lives are in those videos.

🕷- He’ll take you up to the top of buildings to show you the graffiti art he painted!! he’ll let you sign it off with a dick and balls or a heart if you want. You guys do homework up there together as well.

🕷- ’M & (Y/I) were here’ has been painted on every available surface of New York.

🕷- You both have the bright idea to hop on his back and go web slinging around the neighbourhood. He can carry you easily.

🕷- Miles decides If you don’t tell him to slow down, then he’s not going fast enough.

🕷- You NEVER tell him to slow down.

🕷- “Faster!!!“

🕷- Now that he’s got super strength he can put you in an inescapable headlock, he doesn’t do it too tight but he holds you there until you tap out.

🕷- He takes you to the coolest spots with the best views.

🕷- You regularly cover for him.

🕷- “We were at Jamba Juice the whole time officer I swear.”

🕷- Miles side eyes you knowing damn well he was no where NEAR a Jamba Juice.

🕷- ’Thanks’ he’d mouth.

🕷- You and Petter B will get along like a house on fire.

🕷- While Miles is extremely unimpressed by him, you don’t seem to care about any pre-existing expectations one might have when you think of the guy behind the mask of Spider-Man, your cracking jokes and feeding your pet rat a couple of French fries while the three of you sit in the diner, planning your next moves carefully.

🕷- Peter B can tell you’re a good kid. He’s at an age where a lot of your batshit tendencies don’t really faze him as long as your not hurting yourself.

🕷- Speaking of which.

🕷- When him and Miles get the chance to talk alone he warns him that he needs to be careful.

🕷- He tells him that normal relationships aren’t possible anymore. And stresses to him what a life like this can mean for your loved ones. especially since you found out his secret. This line of work isn’t just dangerous for Miles, but for you as well.

🕷- Miles is a little shaken after the conversation, no matter how gently Peter tries to put it. But what he’s implying is clear. He tries to shake it off and enjoy the time you both spend together. He won’t admit to himself that Peter is right just yet.

🕷- It’s just so easy to tell you everything and rely on you.

🕷- There will be a moment sometime in the future when reality sets in, but for now Miles makes the same mistake every Spider-Man does.

🕷- He has a best friend. :(

🕷- On the other hand, Peter comes to the staggering realisation that your actually extremely prone to accidents and danger all on your own. And he appropriately does a complete 180 from ‘casually distant bum-uncle' to ‘I am your dad now’.

🕷- It’s Nothing personal, kid. now stop trying to get in the middle of fights with dangerous criminals and let the adult— or at least the guys with super strength, stamina, speed and resilience— handle it.

🕷- He demands you stay out of the crossfire, but, to no one’s surprise you don’t listen.

🕷- You’re willing to throw yourself in front of Miles to shield him from anything, much to your best friends terror.

🕷- You hold your own surprisingly well against opponents that would be considered reasonable threats otherwise. You’re resourceful, grabbing anything and everything you can get your hands on. you get a terrifying look in your eye.

🕷- No matter how impressed Peter is, He will slingshot you around with his web-shooters to propel you out of the way of oncoming attacks. He will do this for both of you, but feels the need to do it less for Miles. He knows he can take what’s on the other end of the punch. But No matter how untouchable you make yourself out to be, you can’t.

🕷- “Do I want kids?”

🕷- He takes you on as his responsibility just as much as he does Miles.

🕷- Spider-Gwen also looks out for you in battle.

🕷- She’s more laid back, and even a little suave about it too.

🕷- She secretly wishes she had someone like you in her universe. What she wouldn’t give to decompress with you after a long day of patrolling New York.

🕷- She’s actually the most normal about you having a pet rat. You know, the one you grabbed out of a garbage can in a subway station. Yeah, That rat.

🕷- Miles watches you both get along like a house on fire and just quietly falls behind you both since he’s not sure what to do or say.

🕷- He’s so awkward, poor guy.

🕷- Your tendency to go off for days at a time ignites everyone’s curiosity. it’s a concerning habit, and Gwen even endeavours to follow you to see where you disappear to so often.

🕷- She’s unsuccessful.

🕷- It's never said out loud, but when she’s facing the one-way ticket home she finds herself wanting to stay just a bit longer. Not just for Miles, but for you to… She wonders what you’ll get up to while she’s gone.

🕷- …

🕷- Peter Porker vibes with you so hard.

🕷- no wait don’t scroll away wait

🕷- he WILL gift you the freakishly large cartoon mallet. Sorry, but miles didn’t appreciate it for what it was.

🕷- He would be cracking jokes and doing bits with you through out the whole goddamn movie.

🕷- Miles can usually let you do your own thing without sparing a second glance, but the looney tunes laws of physics that Porker exhibits WILL rub off on you at least a little.

🕷- It’s contagious. And when you start flattening eachother into to perfect discs it freaks everyone out a little.

🕷- He’s got enough to worry about in the plot,,, Damn,,

🕷- Spider Noir teaches you how to throw a good punch

🕷- in exchange you let him mess with your phone as much as he wants

🕷- "how the hell do you work this thing?"

🕷- He likes you, he thinks you got a lot of guts.

🕷- You were actually the one to design Miles’ suit. He took inspiration from one of your drawings in your school notebook.

🕷- You've always believed in him, and that made him believe in himself too.

[snoevergarden]

Remnants of the Heart ⟡˖ ࣪

contents: Family trauma | Attachment issues | Trust issues | Hurt/Comfort

The constant arguments between your parents. All the trauma dumping on you. But when you needed someone, no one was there for you.

Growing up, the way these things affected you emotionally weighed you down so much

You had a hard time opening up to your parents. Kept everything to yourself. Barely let your friends know the real truth.

You didn't bother much about it. Yes some random nights you would burst out crying from a childhood trauma. Or get envious of seeing other's relations with their siblings because even your own kin always shut you out.

But even after all this, you made it through everyday. You don't know how, but you did. If there was one person there for you, it was you alone. It was always you. At least that's what you thought.

From highschool to later adult life, Zayne has always been a good friend to you and now your primary care doctor.

He knew its and bits about your family problems and your own emotional problems. He's a doctor, he knew about your emotional stability.

Between the two of you, Zayne was more reserved. You were so transparent, a bright light that got along with everyone.

But there was a part of you that was kept hidden so well that not even Zayne could enter. And it always bothered him.

It bothered him how such a free spirited person could have a place in there heart that was forbidden for him to know about.

Zayne didn't know when he started to see you more than just a friend. Maybe he never really saw you as just a friend.

Your affection towards Zayne weren't all platonic either. Your heart yearned for him.

But afraid to tell him, afraid of getting attached to him. To make him yours.

Friendships have a safe boundary. But when you're in love, you pour your hearts out to each other.

When Zayne confronted you about his feelings, you felt scared. You wanted to run. No. You should be happy. He reciprocates. Why are you scared?

Zayne was a family friend. He knew about your family. About you. He knows you and understands you so well that sometimes you think he's peeking right inside your heart, your mind.

Running away from home and crying in the swings. Walking aimlessly towards home from school, because you cried yourself to sleep and didn't even get much sleep. Late night calls to make sure you're feeling okay. He was all there.

Yet why that forbidden part of your heart couldn't let him in? What more must he do to gain your trust. He would do anything. He might not show it, but Zayne would do anything for you.

So when he took your hands in his and gently opened up to you yet again about how he felt for you. Saying he was there for you no matter what and uttered those three most precious words, you couldn't keep it in anymore.

You burst out crying. Exactly like you did when you were nine, all alone as a child. Quiet sniffles so that no one heard you.

But now, you couldn't even keep it in. Sobbing loudly like a child as he took you in his arms and let you cry it out.

He never understood how anyone could hurt someone with a good heart. You weren't naive or maybe you were, but you never understood the complexities of human beings, their complex emotions.

You never understood what you did wrong for your mother to not listen to you. You never understood what you did wrong for your sister to shut you out. You never understood what you did wrong for your father to see you as a burden.

You never understood any of it.

But Zayne, he knows your pain. He understands it. He's your best friend, your soulmate.

He understands the pain your heart has gone through. The traumas, the betrayals, he knows it all.

"From now on," he kneels down in front of you. "I want you to know that I'm yours." With his thumb he wipes your tears away. "That your heart is safe with mine." Zayne puts your hands on his chest. "Because I knew from the start that I can't trust my heart with anyone but you."

You've never felt this much love. You could only sob in pain because you weren't able to say anything to him. You loved him. You loved him so much. But you felt so helpless.

"I love you." He whispered.

"I love you too." Your cries inflicted pain upon him. "I love you a lot. I'm so sorry." He didn't know why you were apologizing.

You always blamed yourself for anything bad to do with your family. That's how it's always been.

Felt isolated all this time thinking you had no one. But there he was, offering his heart to you, looking at you with eyes that spoke of love and that you were the only one that mattered. Nothing compares to you.

He waited, patiently for you to let him in.

He loved you, silently as to not scare you away.

He healed you, with love because love was all he had for you.

His heart was long given to you, because you were his safe space. His one and only.

But now, you had someone to call yours. Someone who would put you first above anything and anyone.

Someone to call 'home'.

All this time, home was but a place to you which you desperately searched for. Never realizing your true home lied within the person whose fate is intertwined with yours.

. ❄️♡

[tyrantisterror]

At Sea Without a Map Post-Script

After two months of so, my little writing experiment At Sea Without a Map has come to an end. And because I'm vain, I not only felt compelled to share it, but to talk about it in depth after the fact, so here we are. This is going to be long, though, so I'm not only going to break it into sections, but put it all under the cut for the sake of your dashboard. So go ahead and dive into the depths of the Sea of Monsters with me one more time!

Part 1: Never Stop Blowing Up

The writing process of Wizard School Mysteries Book 3 was really strained - not because of the book itself, mind you. When I was actually able to work on it, Book 3 came together really well - I think it required the least substantial rewrites of any my novels thus far. It's just that real life was kind of beating the shit out of me while I was trying to get it done - or maybe the better metaphor was that it was just slowly but steadily draining me of energy all the time. I'm honestly surprised I got the book out in roughly the same amount of time as the first two - by the way life had been treating me, it should have taken longer.

But when I got done with it I was accutely aware of how tired I was. I still had the creative drive, but fuck I needed something simple as a palette cleanser - something easy, and more importantly, something that was allowed to be bad. I needed something creative to do that was surplus to requirements and fully within its rights to suck ass so long as I had fun making it.

Around this time, I decided to rewatch Dimension 20's Never Stop Blowing Up. Brief explanation of what that is: Dimension 20 is an actual play show, i.e. a recording of people playing D&D and other TTRPGs. I'd say its reputation is built on the contrast of its main DM, Brennan Lee Mulligan, who makes these meticulously crafted campaign plans, and his chaotic band of improv comedian players who promptly derail those plans spectacularly. Like, a good deal of the show's humor comes from Emily Ashford or Ally Beardsly doing something so off-the-wall that it shatters whatever the scene was going to be and creates a far more absurd and zany spectacle in its place. Which is why Never Stop Blowing Up is pretty notable, because it's the one campaign where Brennan himself is the agent of chaos, fully unleashing his own brand of madness that the players struggle to keep up with. And fuck does he seem to have fun with it.

Of course, all of the analysis above is purely from the outside looking in - it's likely that a lot of the "chaos" is played up for the audience. But still... there is something to the idea of a person who's been working on meticulously structured stories letting loose and just doing something extremely stupid.

So I decided to give myself a Never Stop Blowing Up moment - a short story that would be simple by design, with no standards to live up to or goal beyond "have fun telling a silly little story." I then came up with a few key criteria:

It can't be set in the Midgaheim/ATOM universe. I don't want the burden of figuring out where this story would fit among others.

It's gotta be a romance. People who've read my books might have picked up on the fact that I like to write about people falling in love, for the same reason I like to write about fire-breathing reptiles and friendly monsters (i.e. I use writing to indulge in things I'll never experience in real life). I've only used romance as subplots in my fiction before, and tend to feel a bit guilty if I focus on it too long - like I'm being self indulgent. Well, this is all about self indulgence, so the romance should be front and center.

It's gotta be SIMPLE, episodic even. Not complex plotting required.

I almost chose my xenomorph romance for this, but I had developed its outline to the point where it would be too complex to fit. I then considered a sort of superhero story that could be pitched as "what if Bringing Up Baby but Katherine Hepburn's character is a Harley Quinn-esque supervillain and Cary Grant's character gets turned into some sort of horrifying genetic mutant in the first ten minutes." That one hit a weird roadblock when I got to the character brainstorming phase (the first phase of any writing project I do) - I was trying to figure out what the mad scientist who turns out Cary Grant-figure into a mutant would be named, came up with the name "Dr. Skullfuck," immediately realized that having a character named "Dr. Skullfuck" is a Mark Millar-ass writing move that I could not allow myself to do, but then couldn't stop thinking of the name "Dr. Skullfuck" and giggling, which just brought all thinking to a grinding halt on that project.

(I'll still probably do it someday, though - just, you know, without Dr. Skullfuck)

Inspiration struck again, though. I'd been getting into Epic: The Musical, a musical retelling of The Odyssey, and it put me in the mood for a sea monster story. But, more than that, it got me thinking about one particular archetype from sea monster stories - but that brings us to the next part of this Post Script...

Part 2: It Was Always About Calibani

Ok, so, one of the big changes Epic: The Musical made involved Odysseus's encounter with the sirens, and before you read more of my rambling, I'd like you to watch two animatics for the two songs in question here:

A summary: one of the sirens takes the form of Odysseus's wife to try and tempt him into getting in the water, Odysseus tricks her into giving him directions, captures her and the rest of her kind, and proceeds to have his men slaughter them horribly. In the OG story the sirens don't die - nor does their song involve imitating a man's wife, for that matter, it's just a really pretty song.

This is done for an important narrative purpose - Epic: The Musical is focused on analyzing the moral ambiguity of Odysseus, and how it is constantly challenged by the impossible choices he is forced to make in his attempt to get home. At this point in the musical, Odysseus has decided to stop trying to be a compassionate man, shirking all mercy in favor of utter ruthless pursuit of his goals. These two songs are meant to be unsettling as hell - this is the beginning of a series of heartless choices by both Odysseus and his men that will culminate in the mutiny and complete annihilation of Odysseus's crew, as well as Odysseus himself being so hopelessly stranded that nothing short of divine intervention will save him.

I bring this up because when I first heard these two songs - specifically while watching these two animatics - it, like... it devastated me. I was so horrified and sad, so shaken by it. And part of it was for the reasons outlined above, but admittedly that wasn't the gut reaction I had. No, my immediate reaction was, and I quoute my own broken brain verbatim here: "You can't kill the sirens! They're not for killing, they're for loving!"

...now, those of you who know me are probably not surprised by this very stupid sentiment coming from me. One of my more popular posts is just me talking about how down bad I would be for various folkloric monsters whose whole shtick is "looks like a pretty lady but Watch Out." But as a person filled with immense self loathing and doubt, my brain immediately looked at that very stupid sentiment I expressed and said, "Wait, no, that's fucking dumb, I'm fucking dumb. The sirens are remorseless murderers. These sirens in particular preyed upon a man's love for his wife, who he has not seen in twelve years, to convince him to let them kill him. They are, by all standards of morality, Very Fucking Evil, and if they were not women you would not feel bad about them getting killed."

And as my brain argued with itself over this topic, I got to thinking about the various monstrous/othered sea women of The Odyssey - not just the sirens, but the witch Circe, the nymph Calypso, the monsters Scylla and Charybdis. And I thought about the others of their kind in other myths and folktales - selkies, mermaids, etc.

There's an archetype of sea monster that focuses entirely on one specific anxiety sailors are prone to, namely the fact that (for a good deal of human history) being on a boat meant spending a lot of time away from women. The horror of this monster is how it uses that desire for female company to tempt people into danger - like a mirage, it leads you to expose yourself to danger in pursuit of an illusory comfort.

But, unlike real world mirages, these monstrous sea women DO exist in their stories. More than that, they're often, like, sad and lonely. Their narrative purpose is just to be a temptation, but that doesn't change the fact that they do have lives of their own in these worlds. And, softie that I am, I can't help feeling sad for them, especially the ones who actually seem to want the same companionship the sailors they tempt want. Sailors don't stay with their Circes, they don't marry their Calypsos. The sirens live on a barren rock, alone, Scylla is left to wallow in misery at her monstrous form, and the selkie always has to leave for fear of being trapped by a person who won't love her on her terms.

I realized I had my hook for this simple, easy, silly little sea monster romance story: I was going to give a sea woman the happy ending she'd never get from anyone else.

Sailor may be the protagonist, but make no mistake: At Sea Without a Map was always, always, ALWAYS about Calibani.

The goal with Calibani was simple: I was going to set up a fairly standard Monstrous Sea Woman, but where other stories would let her be in one episode of the travel narrative and move on, this one would stick around. She'd be an unambiguous predator of human beings - an open and admitted maneater - but she would have no true malice to her. She, like all predators, eats what she can get to survive, and it just so happens that she's adapted to eat humans. And the story would pose the same question to the reader that my brain posed to me during Different Beast: is there any way you could make a siren-style sea monster sympathetic? Can you make a normal person who doesn't have my particular brain rot look at a maneating siren and think, "You're not supposed to kill her, you're supposed to love her!"

One of the few unavoidable plot points of At Sea Without a Map was that Calibani and Sailor's relationship would become romantic. What kind of romance it was could have varied substantially - it could have been one-sided, it could have been toxic, it could have been far more tragic OR far more comedic. But it was always, always going to be a romance of some sort - the goal of this experiment was to make you, the reader, love Calibani. All else was icing on the cake.

I decided to base Calibani's personality on Miranda from The Tempest - i.e. a sweet girl who is both wordly and naive, who understands the strange setting of our "lost at sea" story far better than the audience viewpoint character does, but views the mundane world of the audience viewpoint character with wonder and naiveté. In fact I almost named her Miranda outright... except I already had a character in the setting I chose for this story who had that name, and as an allusion to the same Shakespearean character no less. So I settled on naming her after Miranda's adoptive sibling (of sorts), Caliban - more fitting in some ways, as Caliban is a fish-human hybrid who is arguable more native to the magic island in The Tempest than Miranda herself.

(Calibani isn't the only Tempest name homage, either - her mother, Sycorax, takes her name directly from Caliban's unseen but oft-spoken of witch mother. Dr. Antonia Warefore takes her first name from Antonio, one of the human villains in The Tempest who hopes to use being lost at sea as a way to perform a coup. And the mothman Iriel takes her name from Ariel, the wind spirit in The Tempest who aids the wizard Prospero in controlling the magic island. If Sailor has a "real" name, it's probably either Ferdinand or Miranda, the two lovers who manage to blend civilization and the wilderness together with their romance.)

Visually, I wanted Calibani to not be any common archetype of sea monster woman, but rather something that evokes the popular images while still being her own thing. She's not a mermaid or a siren or a selkie - she's basically "what if a sea serpent was also a girl." In-universe, she's chubby because she, like all marine megafauna, needs blubber to survive. Out-of-universe, she's chubby because I've found that routinely drawing cute chubby girls is good for my mental health.

Part 3: CYOA

Now, while we live in a post-Muncher society where shame and cringe are emotions only the cowardly should experience, I am nonetheless Very Catholic about expressing my own feelings of, like, liking girls and shit. I cannot help feeling guilty when publicly expressing adoration of women without, like, an excuse - it's gotta be a joke or something, you know? I can't be genuine about it, or else Jesus will beat me with a cane for disrespecting women with my lecherous gaze.

But luckily I've cultivated a loyal audience of fellow monsterfuckers, which meant I had an excuse lined up: if I made this a choose your own adventure type deal, a story with audience participation, then you all would be my accomplices. And Jesus can't cane all of us! He doesn't have enough hands! I found a loophole bigger than his stigmata!

Plus I love collaborative story-telling - there's a thrill in not having total control of where the narrative is going. As Brennan Lee Mulligan must know, there's a joy in having to deal with the chaos thrown your way by letting others grab the figurative ball, even if just for a moment.

Part 4: Offbeat Melody

Since I did not want to set this story in Midgaheim, I decided to steer myself away from a vaguely medieval setting altogether. But I also didn't want to limit myself with the need for "realism" that putting it in a normal sea would require, and making a new setting whole cloth would start pushing this project into "not easy" territory.

Luckily, I had a setting lying around that I hadn't played with in a while, which just so happened to have a location that was PERFECT for the sort of Never Stop Blowing Up style madness I was aiming for. For a few years I ran a Monster of the Week TTRPG campaign called Offbeat Melody, and one of its core setting elements was taking the goblin universe hypothesis in paranormal science (yeah it's a real hypothesis) to an illogical extreme. We had specifically seen glimpses of the Sea of Monsters in Offbeat Melody, i.e. the parallel universe where monsters like Nessie, Ogopogo, Champ, and the like all hail from. Well, why not have a whole story set there? It's literally a universe devoted solely to creating sea monsters - what better place to strand our modern Odysseus?

Offbeat Melody was always sort of a Never Stop Blowing Up project, or at least NSBU adjacent. Some of my most unhinged story-telling moments are in that campaign - you could make a supercut of just the "commercial breaks" in the various sessions and it'd basically be an I Think You Should Leave episode. Taking one obscure corner of its multiversal world and exploring it in detail was perfect for this project.

Part 5: Monster by Monster

With our main romance as sorted out as could be for a CYOA story, it was time to figure out the "episodes" of this sea voyage. I settled on there being ten to roughly align with The Odyssey - just in terms of number, mind you, not in a one-to-one comparison. The first was, obviously, Calibani herself, which left nine more slots for me to fill with monsters. Let's go through them together in brief:

Tree Storks - any lost at sea story eventually has to get its protagonist into an island at some point, but this immediately begs the question, "Why don't they just stay on the island where it's safe?" The answer to that question has to be, "it's not safe there, actually." The Odyssey does this quickly and cleverly with a one two punch: the first island seems safe until you realize the food on it brainwashes you into forgetting everything except your desire to eat it, and the second island is full of delicious sheep but also giants who will eat you just as easily as they eat the sheep. When other islands show up in the story later, you immediately regard them with suspicion, because you don't know HOW they're going to be fucked up, but they definitely will be. My goal with the second episode was to establish the same sort of danger - that land is NOT safe, that islands WILL be fucked up and dangerous in ways you might not expect.

I also wanted to establish that this is not just a sea of monsters, but a very WEIRD sea of WEIRD monsters. It couldn't be any old monster on this island - it had to be one that was unique, unexpected, and maybe just a bit silly while still being menacing.

I've always felt that there's a lot of un-mined horror potential in storks, cranes, and herons - any bird with a long neck and spear-like beak it uses to stab smaller creatures from above. Just imagine yourself in a frog's place in the world - tiny, going about your business, when suddenly something shoots down at you from above and impales you before you even feel the shadow fall over your face. Or perhaps you did see the shadow - some of these birds spread their wings to create shade specifically to attract fish, and then spear the poor little bastards.

Well, what do people often look to islands for when out at sea? Shade - the shade of a palm tree. And palm fronds kinda resemble feathers, don't they? Wouldn't it be both ludicrous and terrifying is there was a stork big enough to mimic a palm tree - and wouldn't that be a DEVIOUS trap for a sun-drenched sailor to fall for? So the Tree Storks were born.

The Globster - I made a list of sea monster archetypes in the early planning for this project, and one I wanted to include was a kraken, i.e. some sort of tentacled sea beast. But I didn't want to do JUST a big squid or octopus, or even a riff on them. I wanted to take the idea of "big sea monster with lots of tentacles" into a stranger direction.

Since the Sea of Monsters is explicitly the home universe of lake and sea monster cryptids, I thought it might be fun if ASWaM's kraken equivalent was a globster - just a big ball of rotten meat. I love drawing monstrous faces, so I decided it'd just be, like, MADE of hideous rotten faces, all melting and congealing together, with its tentacles doubling as the tongues of its many mouths. A perfectly wretched image that, like the Tree Storks, would do well to establish how Fucked things could get in this setting. Plus similar monsters had appeared in Offbeat Melody, which would make for a fun sense of familiarity for the, like, five or so readers of mine who had listened to that campaign before.

Captain Peter & the Dolphin - Another thing I did in the early planning stages of this project was make a list of the different sea voyage stories I know and love, the most contentious of which is The Life of Pi. That's a story that I love on a literal level but kind of hate on a figurative level - its whole theme/message is that doubt is the worst thing you can have, that if you don't commit to believing something with zealous conviction you are a coward. As a person who thinks doubt is valid, that "I don't know" is sometimes the ONLY truly valid answer to a question, I have issues with that message.

But I can't help loving the beautifully ludicrous idea of a non-anthropomorphic tiger sailing the ocean on a big Odyssey of its own. Like, if that story didn't actively hate me for being agnostic, it would be one of my favorites.

So I decided to, you know, just steal the idea of a tiger Odysseus. The tiger in The Life of Pi is named Richard Parker. Richard Parker also happens to be the name of Peter Parker's dad. Hence we get Captain Peter - the figurative son of Richard Parker, if you will. And to ratchet up the absurdity of a tiger Odysseus, I made him a pirate and the sole sailor of his voyage. Somehow, this tiger has manned a boat on his own.

Captain Peter was intended to be the hero of another story - a sign for the readers that it IS possible for a stranded person (or, in this case, tiger) to survive out here. To that end, he had to rescue our heroes from another threat, but not one that would be interesting enough to take the focus off of the tiger pirate. Originally I planned for that threat to just be a big shark, but I ended up liking my shark design too much to put it in a role that small, so I quickly designed a nasty dolphin for the role instead. I think that worked out well, honestly.

Dr. Neptune - Episodes 5 and 6 were the mid-point of this journey, so I wanted the two monsters of those to escalate things significantly. I figured episode 5 was probably a good place to FINALLY give some meaningful exposition on what was going on, and there are a lot of stories about mad scientists doing weird shit on islands in my big list of sea voyage stories I love. So we get Dr. Neptune, a classical brain-in-a-jar mad scientist who's affable enough to give more-or-less accurate exposition but loony enough to be a problem. This also felt like a good spot to remind the reader that Calibani is not just a girl with a tail but rather a Sea Monster herself, and one that we'd been making stronger by allying with.

With his human-but-not-quite nature and cyclops eye, Dr. Neptune could sort of be seen as the Polyphemus of this story, couldn't he?

The Crocodisle - One of the sea monster archetypes on my list was "the island that's actually a sleeping monster," of which there are many in mythology and folklore. My favorite is the Jasconius from the voyage of St. Brendan, mainly because it's more or less benign and actually comes back to help St. Brendan and his crew at the end of the story. I always love when I can find an old story with a friendly monster in it.

When thinking of my own spin on the island monster concept, I remembered the only Magic the Gathering card I had as a kid, which I still have and love to this day: The Sandbar Crocodile. This card already inspired Crocogon's color scheme in The Atomic time of Monsters, but I felt I could go to that well again one more time, and so made a crocodile that wasn't just a sandbar, but a whole damn island to itself. And, like Jasconius, it turns out he's pretty chill.

I did not think of the pun name "Crocodisle" until I was actually writing the chapter in question.

The Femdom Mermaids - These three were a late addition to the roster. When I had Calibani bring up mermaids early in the story, I realized as soon as I wrote her rant about them that we'd HAVE to meet some later on in the story.

The readers had significantly shaped Calibani and Sailor's romance by this point, and I decided that it could be useful to have a chapter that was devoted to showing definitively how these two were good for each other. I thought the mermaids could provide a good contrast: have them act out a seemingly more benign take on the monstrous sea women trope (they abduct our hero to protect and care for them!) only for it to quickly feel MORE deranged than Calibani's comparatively simple desire just to eat him.

The spirit of Calibani's rant about mermaids was taken from weird* girls I knew in high school complaining about cheerleaders, so I wanted the mermaids to look like the sea monster equivalent of popular kids to Calibani's chubby weird girl. Two of them got the names of famous beauties - Helyne = Helen of Troy, Clio = Cleopatra.

(*when I say "weird" I mean it in a complimentary and affectionate sense)

Bob, meanwhile, kinda... rebelled, I guess? Before I had names for them, I listed "bob" by her as just, like, a descriptor for her hair cut, but then I liked it as her name, and once she was named Bob she became more than just a mean popular girl. She was a weirdo too, the little punching bag of the two mean popular girls who did their dirty work and smiled through their abuse because hey, at least they included her. It gave the trio an easily defined dynamic, helped make two of the three more visibly nasty, and gave us comic relief in an arc that could very well have gotten too uncomfortable otherwise.

And I guess it worked - readers REALLY loved Bob, and were very vocal about it, and I realized mid-arc that I had accidentally made her too likable to just leave in this arc. So Bob got to be rescued from her awful friend group thanks to readers like YOU.

Lord Ironteeth - yeah, this was the shark that was too cool to be a minor threat. When I drew his noggin, I realized he would need a chapter of his own, one with gravitas. I decided he'd specifically be the threshold guardian -once we beat him, we'd know for sure how to get home, even if there were a few more threats in store.

Spindle Inc and Sycorax - when I was a kid I used to have this recurring nightmare about being on some sort of underwater sea station that had this huge sea serpent trapped inside it. I'd look at the sea serpent from a window within the station and see it coiling in its tank, only for it to look at me with fury. In that glance I would suddenly realize two things with absolute clarity: first, it was going to break free and kill everyone, and second, we deserved that destruction for what we had done to it. The terror of the dream was less that the sea serpent was going to break free, and more the guilt of knowing that all the mayhem that was about to unfold was our fault to begin with.

I thought that would be fun to homage with the penultimate chapter of this story. OBVIOUSLY the sea serpent was Calibani's mom, obviously the trauma of its capture was why Calibani grew into a predator that specializes in hunting humans, obviously we would have to free the sea serpent despite that running counter to Sailor's goal of getting home. Easy, easy, easy plot point to include.

Spindle, Inc. is the primary antagonistic force in Offbeat Melody, so they easily slotted into the role of the arrogant humans who captured this monster for nefarious and selfish motives. They could tie a lot of other plot threads together too - Dr. Neptune was a scientist who worked for them as a contractor only to get screwed over (i.e. they stranded him in the Sea of Monsters, expecting him to die, and then used his research to make their own base of operations in it), we'd learn of him through a spindle briefcase left behind by some unfortunate rogue agent who got eaten by the Globster while he was trying to escape, hell they could even be one of the possible origins of Sailor themself (more on that later). Very useful villains, Spindle.

The Abyssal Mother - I knew the last sea monster would need a lot of punch to it. I briefly considered just a big whale - the Moby Dick to Spindle's corporate Ahab - but it felt underwhelming after all that came before. So I went for arguably the most dramatic possible sea monster, a full on Cthulhu-style elder god. If you're a frequent follower of this blog, you might know I have particularly high standards for Eldritch Abominations, so I realized this was going to be a pretty big challenge for me to live up to, and decided to keep the cthulhu in question reserved to the last few entries as a result - the less it appears, the less it has to live up to.

I realized I had a good angle when my experiments with the Cthulhu "squid for a head" concept ended up having a face framed in shadow - you know, the same visual that our protagonist has in most appearances. That provided some very juicy parallels between the two that made this final monster feel particularly noteworthy to me, ones that I'll leave you to ponder, since they tie into...

Part 6: Themes

I did not set out to have a theme in this story. I just wanted to make a sailor and a sea monster kiss. That was my only goal.

But I really don't begin with theme in ANY of my writing. I figure out topics I want to address, but for all my novels I feel like the themes didn't start coming together until about halfway through the first draft, when enough of the elements of the story had been set down and interacted with each other enough for me to realize what I was saying with them. A huge part of my second and third drafts for my novels have focused on making the themes of my stories more concrete and unified.

Well, ASWaM is very much a first draft of a story, but it's a simple enough story that I think the theme found itself pretty well despite lacking subsequent drafts to refine it.

ASWaM is about doubt and direction. It's about being adrift in a world that is in many ways hostile by nature, about not feeling like you're where you're supposed to be or even WHO you're supposed to be, and about setting off aimlessly in the hope that maybe you'll find your way to that mythical land of "what my life is supposed to be."

When I began the story, Sailor had amnesia and wore clothes that obscured their identity as a way to make it easier for anyone to step into Sailor's role. Sailor had to feel like You, the Reader, and so we don't know their name, their gender, their eye color, their hair color, even their skin color (note that their hands are always wearing gloves, and their face is always in shadow).

But it also meant Sailor is, well, undefined, at least at the start of the story. Sailor doesn't know who they are, what they are, how they came to be. Sailor feels distinctly that they should be Something Else, should be Somewhere Else, should be Someone Else, should not be who/what/where they are. Sailor is plagued by doubt, by a need to go in a different direction, by a need to be other than they are.

This initially contrasts with Calibani, who begins the story very confident that she is doing exactly what she was designed to be doing and acting exactly like she should be. As they interact, they begin to shift each other in opposite directions - Calibani questions her existence and nature, sometimes to a self destructive degree, and Sailor begins to find something about who and where they are that they like. They find a healthy middle ground together - doubtful enough to want to be better people, but with love for themselves that allows them to not feel the need to up-heave their lives entirely.

I knew at the start that I would build an expectation for there to be some answer to the question of who Sailor is and where they came from, because those are the questions that begin the whole narrative. I brainstormed a number of answers to those questions, but once I got a few chapters into writing the story and saw this theme of doubt developing, I realized I couldn't answer them. From a thematic standpoint, the doubt HAD to remain. So I gave hints to possible answers, bits of evidence to support the possibility of them being true, but never planted a smoking gun that answered it for sure.

Sailor can't know the answer because NONE of us know the answer. Outside of blind Life of Pi style faith, you cannot know for sure that you are living the life you're supposed to live. All you can do is figure out whether you're happy with the life you've got, or if you need a change. Sailor will never know who they are supposed to be, but they did learn who they are, and they love that person now.

For those curious, the possible Sailor origins are:

Occam's Razor: they're exactly what Dr. Neptune theorized, i.e. a human who got stranded in the Bermuda Triangle (or the Devil's Triangle or any other number of paranormal triangles) and fell into the Sea of Monsters. The trauma of that experience gave them amnesia. It's just brain damage and bad luck.

A Spindle Experiment: Dr. Warefore mentions that Spindle has been trying to find a way to make a human who can evolve like the denizens of the Sea of Monsters. Sailor may well be an attempt to do just that, perhaps one they wrote off as a failure and abandoned (they do that a lot)

A Deep One: Sailor is the offspring of one of the denizens of the Sea of Monsters (most likely the Abyssal Mother herself) who has somehow been tricked into believing they are human, to the point where they seem to be human to everyone else, even other monsters. Maybe a human summoned a sea monster to breed with on earth, and Sailor ended up being subconsciously drawn back to the Sea by their blood. Maybe Sailor never actually lived on earth at all, but was only made to THINK they had as part of the transformation into a human.

The Platonic Ideal of a Sailor: the Sea of Monsters is full of archetypal concepts, and arguably a sailor trying to find their way home is just as archetypal as any sea serpent, mermaid, or kraken. Our only proof that humans aren't native to the Sea of Monsters is Dr. Neptune, and he's not as reliable an expert as he claims to be.

This theme of doubt and direction also made the compass more important to the narrative than a simply mechanic for audience participation - a compass, after all, gives direction, and the feeling that Sailor is not where they're supposed to be, that they need to head in a different direction, is ultimately the catalyst of the plot. The compass is, in many ways, the antagonist of the story - the force that keeps Sailor from accepting themself. I realized this a little after I started making the different directions have personalities - initially they just represented broad concepts (North = follow conventional wisdom ala the North Star, South = preserve your short-term self interest at all costs, East = act with curiosity and be willing to take calculated risks, and West = throw caution to the wind and do anything that seems novel and exciting), but over time they became little characters themselves.

Since it was our thematic antagonist, I decided to pepper in some ideas about what the compass might be in-universe - and, in a move that would no doubt frustrate the compass, we also don't know for sure which of those is "correct." Is the compass a poltergeist, some amalgamation of dead sailors who try to steer other lost souls home? Is it a malign entity that leeches off of those desperate enough to seek its aid, living through them while pretending to aid them? Is it a device Spindle made to lure sailors to their clutches, OR to guide their experiments in human/monster hybrids? Was it a cursed item that forced a sea monster to assume a human shape? Who can say - the compass sure can't, it can only tell you a direction to go in.

Part 7: Q&A

Since this was an interactive story, I felt it was only fitting to add one last interactive element to this post-script write up, and some of your happily obliged me by sending in questions.

When I noticed how fast readers were falling for Calibani, I figured there was a good chance we'd end up staying in the Sea of Monsters. By chapter 7, I figured it was more or less a given, and by the end of the Lord Ironteeth encounter I was almost 100% sure Sailor would remain at sea. There was always a chance, though - while a look at the polls shows that the audience got more and more on the same page towards the end, there were always dissenting voices, and the desire to get an answer to the question of Who Sailor Was remained strong, as a number of people kept trying to find angles where they could get that AND stay with Calibani.

I was surprised early on by how easily the audience fell in love with Calibani, to the point where I made a few posts commenting on it. I mean, I shouldn't have been - as I said earlier, I have cultivated an audience of fellow monsterfuckers on here, and I know at least a few of them saw my bait and knew they could get me to be freaky in a way we found mutually agreeable (thank you all again for helping me escape being caned by Jesus for being horny).

Like, we REPEATEDLY ignored developing the plot in the Tree Storks chapter for several days just to spend more time with Calibani - something that I enjoyed immensely (this whole thing was an excuse for me to write and draw a cute chubby sea monster girl as much as possible aftter all) but also knew as a storyteller was not what most would consider a good story call. I like how it turned out, but it defied conventional narrative wisdom, you know? I was surprised.

On the other side of the coin, I was also surprised by how the audience NEVER chose an option that was humorously disastrous. I gave plenty of them, and, like, generally in collaborative storytelling there will be at least one moment where your collaborators decide to do the really, REALLY stupid thing that makes everything spiral out of control really quickly. I figured at least once the audience would choose the troll response, but no, you guys worked hard to keep Sailor and Calibani alive. You refused to let them hurt each other, refused to let them throw themselves into danger, refused to imperil them for your own chuckles. It was very sweet and unexpected.

I say "you refused" but to be fair it's not like NO ONE voted for the troll options - they generally got a handful of votes, just one that was beaten by a landslide of more reasonable options. Hopefully those of you who voted for the troll options enjoyed Bob throwing you a bone by disintegrating Dr. Warefore - that was my consolation prize to you.

Yes. I knew at the beginning that there would be two endings for this story: either Sailor leaves the Sea and goes home, or Sailor stays there forever. Or, you know, Sailor dies as a result of you guys choosing several stupid options in a row, but as stated above you guys avoided those scenarios pretty decisively.

Had Sailor gone home, the following would have occurred: first, they would forget everything that happened in the Sea of Monsters. Second, they would wake up in a hospital, having been found in the Atlantic Ocean by a human-recovery charity run by... oh, isn't that funny, some tech company named Spindle Inc! Spindle would foot the medical bills and even offer Sailor a job, but Sailor would decline because even now they're still not sure what Spindle even does. Sailor would go back to their life and find it familiar and utterly mundane, but not particularly happy. Their father died when they were 18, their mother was never in the picture, they have no siblings. They worked an office job and were sort of a nonentity - that position has long since been filled, but Sailor gets a new job and lives out much the same life: simple, mundane, dreary. Every now and then they get a pang of desire to leave, to go to sea, but they push it out of mind. They never even see the ocean again as long as they live.

Sailor would have gotten the normal life they thought they were supposed to have, the normal memories and name and identity, the mundane life of a normal person. And they just had to trade everything they found in the Sea of Monsters to get it. A question is answered, a direction is followed, but is it the right answer, the right direction?

Well, I think doubt would have remained.

I had a very vague idea for there to be some sort of man-eating giant in, like, a crystal castle. He got cut to make way for the mermaids.

I wanted to fit in a big whale and a giant crustacean, but there wasn't room or an interesting angle for me to want to make room for them. Saved for a possible sequel, I suppose.

I also wanted to have a scene with, like, DOZENS of sea monsters, including some of the ones from Offbeat Melody, but the goal of "this should be EASY you dumbass" made me kill that idea pretty quick.

Thank you!

The primary inspirations were:

The Odyssey and Epic: the Musical

The voyage of St. Brendan

The many "weird shit happens on an island" movies in Toho's filmography, i.e. Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, Son of Godzilla, Yog Monster of the Deep, Matango, etc.

The Island of Dr. Moreau

The Boy and the Heron

Ponyo (specifically Ponyo's parents - I wanted Sailor to have the same desperate energy as that wizard who fucks the giant sea goddess)

The Life of Pi

Slay the Princess (perhaps most obvious in the use of second person narration, multiple voices in the protagonist's head, and falling in love with a creature that has tried to kill you at least once)

I'm going to use this to springboard to a related point in a second, but first a genuine yet humorous answer: Yes, absolutely yes, I am enough of a big romantic sap that I would give everything about my life away to be with a person who loves me and explore a world of monsters in a heartbeat. Hell, I would have jumped in the water the minute Calibani asked and died with her fangs in my neck and a smile on my face. I am dumb this way. Do not follow my example.

On that related point, though... Most stories like this, I daresay ALL stories like this that I know of, end with the hero abandoning the fantasy world in favor of reality, never to return. And that seems like the proper choice and lesson on the surface - we don't want to tell audiences to give up their real life in favor of a fantasy, after all. That's encouraging escapism, and that's not healthy!

But, like... textually speaking, the fantastical world IS real to the characters in these stories. And it's often not really an escape - was Sailor's life devoid of conflict and suffering in the Sea of Monsters? Fuck no! It's just that they figured out how to deal with that conflict and suffering - they built skills and a support system, they adapted, they learned how to overcome what was there.

I think it can be argued that sometimes the return to a "normal" world is, in itself, an escape - the idea that your life can spiral into chaos but that's ok, you can just reset everything and go back to The Way It Was and Should Be is just as unrealistic and unhealthy an idea as You Should Escape to A Better World. Sometimes your plans for your life fall apart, sometimes you're thrown into a place you never intended to go, sometimes you have to learn skills you never anticipated needing and ally with people you never thought you'd befriend to deal with problems you never dreamed you'd have to overcome. And sometimes it's ok to look at your derailed life, your Not Where You Should Be life, and say, "Well, I've learned how to live here... maybe I can stay."

Especially if there's a cute chubby sea monster girl who loves you.

Bob was never supposed to appear past chapter 7, but about halfway through that chapter I realized the audience and I myself would be heartbroken if we didn't rescue her. Definitely for the best - she provided some well-needed comic relief in the final chapters.

This is gonna sound snarky, but, yeah - there were 58 choices with four options a piece, and we only chose one of the four. While some of the options would have similar results, almost none would have had identical outcomes. And some would have been VERY different.

Like, to go back to the beginning: when Calibani attacked, we could either throw a net on her, harpoon her, try to drive around her, or hide below deck. We picked the net, but for the other three options:

Harpooning would result in us hitting her in the thigh, causing her enough pain that she collapses on our deck and we, horrified at the violence we committed, just sort of push on. Calibani would be wounded for at least the next chapter, perhaps longer, and significantly weaker (and probably harboring a great deal of hidden resentment while also being genuinely scared of Sailor). She would be vulnerable during the stork attack, forcing Sailor to take a more active role in that chapter.

Trying to steer around her would result in us essentially fighting her with our boat, resulting in the boat capsizing and Calibani getting tangled up in it. We'd wake up alone on Stork Island and have to travel in search of our boat, alone and vulnerable among man-eating trees. We'd run into Calibani again, also beached and in trouble, end up recruiting her to help us get our boat out of the sand.

Hiding below deck would end in a sea storm that leaves us inside our boat as it's beached on Stork Island. We'd fend off the storks alone, and run into Calibani once we get our boat out to sea, as she got away more or less unscathed.

All of these would have majorly changed the trajectory of our relationship with Calibani and our identity as Sailor, despite seeming to have the same component parts on the surface. Now account for how similarly slight changes in the other options could have gone, and we could have had a very different story indeed.

Part 8: Our Girl

I just think she's neat!

[sandyca5tle]

Slimeshifter HRT Story - Enquiries

I poured out of bed, forming myself into a humanoid form and walking over to my wardrobe. Today was the day I'd arranged to go and talk to Dr. Othek about the weirdness in my transition, as well as ask for any more information he had, so I'd want to get dressed. I hadn't actually told him anything about why I wanted to see him, just that I wanted to talk to him, in person, about some parts of my transition I had questions about.

I finished getting dressed and prepared to head out, quickly extending a few tendrils to grab my phone, purse, and keys from their places as I headed to the door, also using my tendrils to lock the door behind me while beginning to walk down the stairs of the apartment complex. Since starting shapeshifter HRT I'd actually found using my tendrils to do stuff without actually having to move close enough to use my hands incredibly useful. I'd practiced/tried this before of course, but it'd never quite worked before, like it did now, which I suspected was due to the fact that since starting shapeshifter HRT I've had that improved bodily connection, I kinda know what every part of me is doing - its shape and form clear in my mind - add in the ability to see from any part of my body from being a slime, and it's really easy to manipulate and do things with my tendrils now.

I stepped out into the cold morning air, instinctively shrinking a little to help keep myself warm - it was a less fun effect of my transition, not having an internal source of heat meant that the cold hit me a lot more - granted, I didn't need 37 degrees to keep functioning, but as the weather got close to freezing I'd found I had more and more problems, given I was a large percentage water. Despite retreating into my clothes somewhat, it actually wasn't cold enough to pose any risk, but nonetheless I quickly made my way to the clinic.

It really didn't take me long anymore to get to the clinic, perks of living within the city rather than having to travel to it, and I was glad to get out of the cold, quickly talking to the receptionist to confirm my appointment before being directed to the waiting room. As before, I was glad to make use of the tail hole the chairs have, something that I had come to realise was better in Hyper City than back home, but was still very much appreciated as so many places weren't great at accommodating us. On the note of 'us', as I looked around, I once again spied a few people also on various forms of AHRT, a couple I recognised from my previous visits, smiling to myself at seeing the progress they had had. I also noted that generally the creatures here were generally further along, although there were a few who were clearly just starting, which made sense I supposed, it had been at least 2 years since this had become majorly available, so there's plenty of folks who were a good ways into their transition.

It wasn't much longer quietly musing to myself before I was called up, and pointed to the doctor's office - even if I already knew where it was.

"Ah, Miss Sandy, good to see you again," Dr. Othek announced with a wave

"Nice to see you again too!" I replied, smiling

"So, I understand you arranged this appointment to talk about some questions and queries you had about your transition," As he stated this he had a somewhat odd look on his face that I couldn't quite decipher, but it almost seemed like he was trying to say more than he was "I hope everything is going fine with your new medication?" He asked, now changing to a more genuine expression, one of concern

"Oh, yeah, no problems with the shapeshifter meds, been great so far, you should see what I'm doing with my tendrils," I told him. He raised an eyebrow, a smirk appearing on his face before I quickly realised what I'd said "Just for like grabbing items and- it's like having a bunch of extra arms that can just grab things for me," I quickly explained with a slight blush "I mean, they literally are as far as I'm concerned, just thinner and without fingers," I added thoughtfully

He chuckled "I'm glad you're not having any issues with your treatment," He said professionally "But if you're not here about that then what are you here about?"

"Well, we kinda talked about it last time," I tapped the middle of my torso, indicating my core "But I'd love to know where all my slime is stored," I told him "I mean, I seem to just be able to store endless amounts of matter within myself, which I'm fairly certain is impossible, unless I've got a TARDIS inside me now, which is equally impossible," I explained

"Maybe you just have a large internal capacity," The doctor posited

"Even then I've got more mass than could reasonably fit within something the size of my core, at least not without causing some kind of issue. I mean, you've seen my dragon form, and I can go a lot bigger than that, with that kind of mass condensed into such a small space you'd think something would happen? Instead I'm completely fine, no collapsing in on myself,"

The doctor's eye's widened "Even bigger?" He muttered "I suppose you're right though, that much mass inside such a concentrated area would have some kind of effect," He agreed

"Do you have any idea how it works? I mean, you prescribe the stuff, I hoped you'd know about it," I asked

Dr. Othek looked down, ashamed "I must confess - no, I do not know - or at least not specifics" He told me, much to my surprise and horror. He looked up at my face, seeing my reaction "Before you worry, I know the procedure is safe - or as safe as this kind of thing can be - but I cannot honestly say I fully understand it." He said "I know what is healthy in a human, and I know what is healthy in most animals, so for many patients I have been able to approximate what a healthy midpoint is - of course there has been issues, but in a multidimensional nexus filled with magic, there is always something I can do to help remedy those problems," He paused to breathe "Even the dragons, the sirens, the lamias, there is enough information on each of them that I can guess what works for them, and they're close enough to some terrestrial animals that I have those as references." He let out a sigh "But, for people like you, those whose species are so far divorced from 'normal', I have no reference," He explained "I mean, of course I've tried my best, and as I told you, I believe that it's as safe as it can be, but my information is sorely lacking…" He trailed off

"If you didn't know what you were doing, why did you do this?" I asked, a little anger bubbling through my curiosity

"Because I wanted to help!" He said back to me "And I heard that the only supplier for you all wasn't exactly helpful. So I looked into it and found this company was looking for doctors to partner with to help with distributing the meds to those in need as well as making sure they were healthy, so I starting working for them," He took a pause "At first it was fine - they only had a small selection, and most to all of the effects were documented. But then, as they developed more and more treatments, the documentation on effects and standards became less and less reliable, with patients reporting more and more effects that I was unaware of, and it's honestly felt more and more experimental… And I mean that, I've done a little bit of poking around, and the medicines they're prescribing I can't find any record of them being tested properly,"

My eyes widened a bit at that, and I could tell he seemed distressed about all this, so I bit back the irritation that had been growing at having all of this hidden from me and others like me "So why continue? Why not leave and say something?"

He smiled sadly "Because I want to help. If I leave and say something, then best case the company gets shut down, but that leaves so many folk like you without your medicine," That hit home for me - I hardly wanted to give up this miracle, even if the people behind it seemed questionable in their methods. "Worst case nothing comes of it, I get fired, and they get a less scrupulous doctor who'll just go along with their experiment to God knows what end," He took a breath "So I stay, find out what I can without arousing suspicion and help my patients navigate whatever happens so they can get the body they want,"

I looked at him as he finished talking, the cheerful demeanour he'd always presented with had all but vanished, instead replaced by a man who was tired and stressed "Thank you," I said "I mean, obviously, not a fan of being given experimental meds without my consent, but thank you for trying to keep us all safe and help us,"

"I don't do it for the thanks…. but it is nice to hear it," He replied, rubbing an eye under his glasses "As I've said I can't look much more into whatever is going on, in case they decide to fire me for looking into whatever they're doing, but if you want to look into it yourself, I can point you in the direction of some information sources I've found, may as well have someone look into it, see if it's really as bad as I think," I blink a little in surprise at him "You don't have to of course, it's up to you,"

"Uh, no, it'd probably be goo-d for someone to look into it - I can certainly try, but I'm not sure if I'll find anything," I told him

"An attempt is better than nothing,"

I nodded "I'll try,"

He took a breath, pulling his cheery demeanour back together "Well! It's nice to have that off my chest - nice to have someone to talk to about it," He said "I wish I could have given you better answers miss Sandy, but I hope this conversation has at least been helpful,"

I smiled and nodded "Not quite what I expected, but it's certainly given me some things to think about, thanks doctor,"

We both stood up, giving a handshake, before I headed back out of the office, waving goodbye to the receptionist as I did so.

The walk back consisted of me mostly being lost in thought, mulling over everything the doctor had said - that, while safe, my and others' medication were unknowns, and potentially experimental, which added the extra questions of whether or not we had all been incorporated into one big experiment without even knowing. These thoughts churned away in my mind even as I reached my flat, opening the door, with my claws rather than a tendril this time, and entered, quickly deserting my clothes near the door and leaping onto the sofa, pooling a little as I let my body relax in a way I wasn't sure my mind would for a while.

I had some shit to work out.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sorry it's been a while since the last part of this, got distracted by another project, but dw still continuing this story, and honestly I think the break did me some good. But yeah, hope y'all enjoy the first bit of this where I'm starting to set up some of what is gonna run alongside the normal transition entries of this second part of the series! First - Prev - Next Writing Masterlist Tags under the cut (Let me know if you want to be added)

@calliecwrites, @friedsputnik, @now-entering-the-goop-zone, @scrubbinn, @lilacinthefog,

@mint-and-authoress, @losttodreams, @redroversendjayover, @ariathelamia, @kanithecatdemon

[nogenderbee]

♡˗ˏ✎*ೃ˚ 𝕃𝕚𝕘𝕙𝕥𝕤 𝕝𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕣 ₊˚ˑ༄

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ anon request: Hi, friend! Could I request Solomon, Lucifer, Mammon, and Simeon with a reader who likes lights? Reader would collect lights (like lamps, nightlights, etc) and decorate their room with them.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ Hi love!! Of course you can! Also so sorry for this being so short but yeah- I didn't wanted to force anything -w- Hope you like it anyway!!!

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ fluff

✧ Lucifer honestly sees it as passion like any other

✧ he thinks it's nice that you got something you like and isn't too... troublesome with it... untill bill for electricity comes in lol

✧ he knows how much you like it and won't stop you from putting it around house if you'd really want to... but he'll warn you that Asmo will definitely pay attention to that and may complain about it if you "choose wrong design or place"

✧ he also tries convincing you to keep the lights off at least at night... or not I'm broad daylight if there's even one in hell

✧ if you fall asleep with lights on and wake up with them off, you can immideitly be sure it was Lucifer. But he meant nothing bad by doing it!

✧ he does his best to support you so if you ever decide to go for some light shopping, he'll sometimes come with you and share his opinion if you ask about it

"Sure, take it. Hm? What do I think about it? It's... a bit too complex for my taste... but I can see it fitting into your room perfectly."

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

@wabatle - come get your scary brother!

✧ once Mammon discovered your unique liking, he first called you a weird human

✧ and then the next day he bought you some lights as a gift

✧ he just has to be a tsundere about it... If you ask him why he got you that gift, he'll just say it's so you won't be whining to him later

"It's just for your weird human obsession! I was simply done with you whining about how much you want it! ... Do you like it tho?"

✧ all you have to do is to mention him what lights you're obsessing on in the moment and first thing he'll do once you part is go buy you them

✧ and if he can't he'll just go to casino to win some money so that he could afford it... which... has 50/50 chance of succeeding...

✧ though if you keep your lights on while sleeping, even some, he'll be grumpy about it and be stubborn to turn them off for the time of sleeping

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

✧ Solomon probably had something similar but only as a phase...

✧ he's human as well so he totally gets from where you're coming from!

✧ honestly, he's actually quite fond of how much lights you stole and finds your room really cozy

✧ at some point, he most likely asked you to help him pick some lights for his room too and didn't had the heart to decline any ideas you seemed so passionate about so he ended up buying whole store

✧ he doesn't really care if you keep lights on or off during the night... as long as he has a way of facing the opposite way than the light, he doesn't mind letting it stay if it helps you sleep

✧ definitely tried making some flying light orb or so, thinking you may like it!

"Hey, I made something for you. What do you think? Is there anything you want added to it?"

✧ overally, he's very supportive and will protect your hobby as best as he can if anyone tries insulting it

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

✧ Simeon is honestly very supportive of any hobby you may have that isn't dangerous to you or anyone for that matter

✧ he's just happy you have a passion, even if it's something simple as collecting lights!

✧ he'll most likely go to all or most of your shopping's just because he loves to see what's the lights you like or want

"Oh? This one? I would've never guessed it's in your taste... But it's good to know! It certainly has its own beauty~"

✧ he'll also try buying or even making a light for you! It doesn't have to be any ocassion... but if it is, he'll probably try extra hard to make it a good one

✧ though if he's making the gift... he'll probably as someone for help since he's afraid of messing something up and would rather have someone who knows more about it than him to watch over what he's doing

✧ he also doesn't really care if you keep the lights on or off at night! His realm is rather bright so he'll fall asleep anyway~

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

@vodka-glrl - come get your soft angel~

[arsonsara]

[The phone rings four times, and just before it can ring for a fifth, the phone is answered.] "Hellosie posies, you've reached the home of one Arso-" "...ahem." "This is Vivian speaking, can I help you?" [Silence.] "...H-hello?…" [Silence.] "...O-oh...oh my stars. Is...is that you? Goodness gracious, it has to be! I mean I don't remember anyone else who wasn't as...talkative. And nobody ever really called me like this except…" "You..." "Hahah...oh god, how long has it been since we last talked? Years now? It feels like only yesterday I got that call from you and just...let my gourd pop open! Hehe! I had a lot on my mind back then. To be honest I uh...still do." "Things are...better than they were. At least in a lot of the places that count but, the world keeps spinnin' y'know! It's enough to make you dizzy sometimes, hehe! And sometimes I get...pretty dizzy." "...I'm really glad you called. I've been really dizzy lately, a lot of memories are coming back to me that are a bit...rough to organize. Like a jigsaw puzzle and the pieces just sorta...change shape every-time you try to place a piece. Heck I don't know what i'm even building at this point! I don't think any of us are! Hahaha! Ahahaha!…" "But...i'm worried. About...someone I care about. They're a friend of mine that means a lot to me and...from what I could gather she's not doing as great as I thought she was. I mean i've...never met her. Is it weird to consider someone a friend if you've never met? I mean one of her friends has been trying to talk to me lately...does that count?" [Silence.] "...Are you here to lend an ear, stranger? That friend of a friend i'm referring to he's...talking about stuff like that lately. Lending an ear. Are you trying to do the same for me again?…" "...Thank you…" "...I guess I should...just get started."

On July 3rd, 2023, posted exactly at 5:44 PM Eastern Standard time, I wrote my personal review of my thoughts regarding the Anti-Fiction ARG Story Project, Welcome Home. I don't quite remember specifically when I came across the Welcome Home Website, but it was during its earliest incarnation, and I've been around since its inception on the internet. And ever since, it has captivated me and only continues to grow and reach towards loftier, dreamier heights and crawl into darker, isolating caverns. I don't wear my fandom seniority as a badge of pride, but can't help but fawn over it the same way someone does a hand-made gift. That's what Welcome Home is to me, in a lot of ways: A gift. It's a beautiful and haunting story, a complex and enrapturing puzzle, and a stunning, awe-inspiring work of art and despite how small the present box it came in was it just keeps getting bigger. There is a lot I could say about Welcome Home now that we're further into its story. When I wrote my review of it back in 2023 it was practically just getting started, and there are a lot of discussions I could have regarding all we've seen from the two Halloween Updates and the absolutely insane knockout that was The Homewarming Update… But i'm not here to talk about that. At least not now, because I want to zoom in on not just a particular update, but a particular character within Welcome Home's cast. The one that caught my attention the most, stole my heart, and as of the recent update, spoke more to me than anyone else on the cast. And I can't think of a better way to start than here:

For context, I always love playing into a scene or story even if it's just in small ways. When I wrote this signature in the Guestbook I thought it'd be fun to play in the space of Welcome Home being a real piece of lost media, whilst also sharing my love for the character that made my heart flutter like a butterfly and couldn't help but make me giggle. At this point in time, when I wrote that message, we didn't know a lot about Julie Joyful. We didn't have as much media surrounding Welcome Home aside from the biography pages that gave us descriptions for everyone in the cast. We didn't even have proper voices for the characters yet! And somehow Julie Joyful was the one out of everyone in the cast where I picker her out from the crowd and said: She was my favorite. Not just that she was my favorite, but that I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, without even a smidgen of hesitation: If Welcome Home was in fact a real show that I grew up with as a child, that Julie Joyful would be the one I loved the most out of everyone. And as days turned to weeks, weeks to months, months to a year, year to years, and as Welcome Home has grown and flourished we've only come to learn more and more about this delightful as a daffodil Rainbow Monster. Can you tell that she's even rubbed off on me? This most recent update, April 12th's 2025 Springtime Salutations update, gave us a lot to learn about Julie Joyful. Not only did we see her at her brightest, her peppiest, her singingest, her skip-hop-and-jumpiest...but we also saw her at her darkest. Julie has quickly become one of my favorite characters in media ever. The more we saw of her the more my heart was captivated, and now that we've reached such a primal boiling point for her character, I felt like now was the time for me to give her the proper celebration she deserved. Like a hand-written letter in a pink envelope, covered with stickers, full to bursting with confetti and game pieces and little knick-knacks and doo-dads...and in the card i've written a deeply earnest and sympathetic thank you. Because out of a lot of the characters i've grown attached to, there are few like Julie who equally embody the person I want to be, remind me of the person I am, and make me feel truly seen. I think that's enough pre-amble ramblin'. Let's get started, shall we?

---

One of the big things that captivated me about Julie Joyful, once more updates began to roll on and we got to see more of the scamperingly sweet Rainbow Monster in action was just how utterly, reverently silly she was. She speaks in such a squeaky, chipper, bouncy lilting voice and is constantly talking a mile a minute, throwing out mounds for pounds of alliteration, spoonerisms, rhymes and a gargantuan greenhouse worth of flower names and funny games. Out of everyone in the cast, she's the one who is the most childlike in demeanor, and it seems no matter the reason or the season she finds some way to make a simple occasion into an all out affair! At least, when it comes to her appearance on screen. Within Welcome Home, there is something of a divide between the cast: How they appear in media made for the Welcome Home TV Show, through merchandise and other second-hand findings, and how they appear when the cameras are "off" so to speak. Throughout the website's history there have been hidden videos and audio logs where we seemingly see the neighbors of Home interacting with each-other on a far more casual, day to day basis. Almost as if the world of Welcome Home is real, that that little clearing in the forest with cutesy houses surrounded by a phantasmagorical cornucopia of brightly colored trees is somewhere out in our real world, and the merchandise surrounding the show is only a representation of the real thing. Almost like learning about someone through a game of telephone. Welcome Home has already played with a lot of themes regarding the restrictions of television for the time period of when Welcome Home supposedly aired, and art created for the sake of a corporate end-goal. Think about it, all of the things we learn about Welcome Home aren't from the show itself, we as an audience have never even seen an episode, let alone a clip or screenshot from the actual puppet show.

All of it is secondhand merchandise or advertisements, at least with regards to the physical remnants we have of the Welcome Home TV Show. And as the story continues, we keep seeing characters drift away from their television personas and show us more of who they really are, and the more that time passes things start to weigh on their minds more and more, become heavier and heavier, and the seams at the edges of their existences, their realities, start to fray… But it started out very subtle, and gives us a lot to think about regarding how the cast actually feels about eachother outside of the "show". One of the differences from her Show Persona and how she truly interacted with the rest of the cast, didn't have anything to do with her character herself, but rather how another person reacted to her. In "The Show", Frank Frankly is constantly seen as a grumpy grump and a sourpuss when it comes to dealing with Julie's constant shenanigans. Crossing his arms, rolling his eyes, saying thinks like "Not again" and "Julie, we've talked about this." This isn't to say Frank's Show Persona dislikes Julie, even in spite of his apparent frustration with her allyoop antics, where Julie is Frank is never far behind and there's always something of a begrudging fondness for her. A very "Yup, this is my circus, and that is most certainly my monkey." kind of attitude.

Yet when the cameras are off, it's almost the complete opposite. In one of the hidden-videos from the first big update, we hear Frank bringing Julie to his freshly grown tomatoes so he can get advice on how to deal with the beetles that have been eating them. It's odd to think about isn't it, Frankly coming to Julie for advice? By this point we knew a little bit about Julie regarding her affinity for plants and flowers, but it's still a bit odd isn't it? And before we know it, Julie breaks out into her usual serendipitous self, with her absitovely posituley silly observations and suggestions, but instead of the usual exasperation we're used to from Frank Frankly, he reacts far more warmly. Even joining in on Julie's little games and bursting with laughter when she says his nose looks like a Banana! It feels like it's almost a completely different dynamic, the two sharing in a very small, sweet, domestic moment of silliness, and both of them feeling like true best friends. Not only that but in another one of these secret videos, we see Julie trying to convince Barnaby that she's capable of telling a good joke, only for the big blue dog to heckle her to no end! And for the first time we see Julie actually get frustrated at being belittled, trying her best to be seen as funny only for Barnaby to keep pulling at her leg and steaming her. We get to see a little more regarding Julie's thoughts on Barnaby in this most recent update, so we'll put a pin in it for later. For now, let's dig into the fertile discussion regarding Julie's siblings, Franny, Jonsie and Bea. The Springtime Salutations update gave us a LOT regarding Julie's family, lore about Rainbow Monsters, and us actually getting to see The Joyful Family interacting with other members of the cast, and their sister! While we don't know the precise age of anyone in the cast, it's safe to say just based off of interactions that Julie is the youngest of the Joyful's, as there's a certain level of fraternal responsibility the three have over Julie, or at least they behave as such. Afterall, the story is functionally about Julie going to her siblings for help, only for everyone to eventually realize Julie's made a mistake and accidentally having made a mountain out of a molehill. And during the family talk amongst each other in "A Darling Broadcast", the Joyfuls ask why it is that Julie hasn't joined their band, and that they want their "Dynamite Drummer." But...Julie doesn't play the drums. At least we've never seen that! She sings, talks and kisses the flowers and that's what makes them bloom, as we learn in the storybooklet "What Makes The Flowers Bloom." Not only that but in Julie's biography and implied elsewhere on the site, she moved out of her home with her siblings in the cave so she could move to the neighborhood of home! But...why? From what we know about Rainbow Monsters and their culture, they seem to all be cohesive family units! And when Julie is asked about when she'll join the band, she avoids the question by pretending that the connection is breaking and hangs up. And even afterwards, we hear Bea talk about how she hopes that one day Julie will join the band. But for as much as she seems to love her siblings, she doesn't seem to want to be in the band with them. Maybe their constant insistence on her joining the band, of her being a drummer was what made her move away? A feeling of being constrained by the views of her peers? Not only that but we don't get to hear any interaction with Julie and her family when the cameras are "off". As time goes on the line between the show, the world of the show, and our world continue to blend, but we haven't seen any interactions from the Joyfuls that would explain what exactly happened between them…

This next part is going to get into heavy spoiler territory regarding a lot of the secrets in this most recent update, so if you don't want to be spoiled, I recommend finding them on your own and coming back afterwards. But later we learn something very important: Julie is terrified of the idea of being a "bad" rainbow monster, and being unable to live up to the example of her siblings. Over the course of the secret videos in this update, we see Julie; who is sometimes accompanied by Frank, attempting to get a black tulip made of felt, with an odd looking eye in the center of its bud that looks similar to the Marlo Logo, Marlo being a corporation tied with the creation of Welcome Home. It seems that out of all the flowers in the neighborhood, Julie can't get this single flower to blossom, and what once starts as apprehension soon grows into outright terror at the idea of failure. She starts to fear whether or not this is "just the start", that she'll loose her ability to make plants grow and blossom and that Home will be full of nothing but wilting flowers and dead fields. She agonizes over the idea of if her siblings found out, that she can't let them find out, that nobody can know.

Now, up to this point we've seen another Welcome Home resident behave in a similar manner: Eddie Dear. In the Homewarming Update, we see him start to grow stressed over not being able to do his job of delivering presents for Homewarming to everyone in the neighborhood, cooped up in his post-office and growing frustrated that he can't do anything, even saying "Who’s ever heard of folks gettin’ recognition for nothin'? No one, that’s who!" Eventually, he goes outside to learn that the Neighbors have already done all the delivering for him, and that he doesn't need to do his job, he can simply enjoy the festivities!… But when he tries, he starts seeing things nobody else can. Things that feel like aren't meant to be seen. Things he doesn't want to see.

It seems that the "Roles" of the characters within Welcome Home almost act as an anchoring point for them. That if they aren't able to be who they are, they start to slip, they start to see things, and the world around them begins to twist and shift. Julie herself, the more stressed she gets, starts to speak differently. Her voice is lower, her tone is more quiet, reserved, far more human and less cartoony. Almost like she's becoming a completely different person. But unlike Eddie, whose anxieties seem to stem from recognition or the knowledge that he's doing a public service for the people he cares about, Julie's seem to come from a deep seeded fear of failure. Earlier in the videos we hear her talk about how sometimes she worries about what Barnaby and Howdy think of her, that she thinks she isn't funny, and she tries brushing it off as friendly ribbing, but the tone in her voice clearly lets us know that ribbing or not that it still hurts her sometimes. Not only that but we already have the expectations she feels she has from her siblings. Were these fears she imparted unto herself for feeling like the odd one out of her family, or was there some form of long-form confrontation within the Joyful family from a young age that left her feeling like she not only lived in their shadow, but needed to live up to their example. There are a lot of things we can speculate about Julie's relationship and feelings towards her family and her friends, but one thing is certain: Julie believes that she can't let anyone see her slip. They can't see her when she's unhappy, and they most certainly can never, ever, ever know that she did something wrong. It almost puts her kind of playtime into perspective: You don't need to worry about loosing if the rules to a game are so loosey goosey, or even if loosing is the fun part, as we see in the video where Eddie and Julie play pretend as corporate business workers. Hell, maybe Julie's exaggerated break down of Everything Inc. going "Out of Business" was foreshadowing for Julie's actual fears of failure. But the point is, it doesn't matter if you loose if the rules are made up to be nonsense and a winner can simply be picked at random, or if the purpose of the game is simply to have fun and have no proper goal. But once there are rules? There are stakes. And there's a punishment if you loose.

Now here's a question that seems to be floating around the fan communities of Welcome Home: Is Julie's pollyanna attitude genuine, or a front? When we see her break down in front of the Black Tulip, is this us finally seeing her true colors, mask off? I think the answer is more nuanced than a simple yes or no, but what I do believe is that Julie's demeanor comes from a genuine place. We've seen her behave all serendipitous and silly when "the cameras are off" and I don't think she's secretly a constant bundle of anxiety on the inside. I think her being so joyful is what she does to quell her anxiety. It is what makes her happy, it's what makes life worth living, but it is a coping mechanism and up until this point, a pretty effective one! Not only that, but Welcome Home is always constantly playing with our perception of where the boundaries lie between our world and that of Welcome Home's.

I'm not the only one to have come to this conclusion, but I believe when we hear Julie's voice break we're hearing what her original voice-actress sounded like when she was out-of-character, and potentially Julie's fears are mirroring that of the original actress. So, are we seeing Julie, or her actress? I think it's both. I think we're getting both an in-depth read on Julie's character and starting to see behind the curtain of what the production crew was dealing with, to a certain extent. To what extent, we don't know, but with how often Welcome Home blends the lines of reality, I think we're witnessing a co-existing truth and not something that contradicts itself. There is another thing I am absolutely certain of regarding Julie's reaction to the Black Tulip not blooming: This is a trauma response. Julie isn't just being traumatized in the moment from the Black Tulip not blooming, something had to have happened to her in the past to make her react in such a way.

It gets to the point that, for the first time in the series, we hear one of the characters swear! JULIE SAYS "SHIT!" And by the end of it all we start to hear her threatening the Black Tulip, saying that by Homewarming when Winter comes that they'll never be seen again, that nobody will know it's there! She's threatening the Black Tulip, and in the same breadth convincing herself that this is something she can bury and that no one will know of her shame... ...Say… Remember when Julie was the one who played the main character in Sally's rendition of The Telltale Heart? Almost like it was foreshadowing this very moment, and that Julie feels the same amount of guilt and shame over not being able to bloom a flower as much as the main-character in The Telltale Heart feels about killing another person? Safe to say, these emotions can't be coming from nowhere. Something happened to Julie Joyful. And if that isn't enough, the last secret page we find for the update is Frank, seemingly exploring the Forests of the Outskirts of Home, the sun is starting to set, and he's looking with a thousand yard stare at something we can't see. And the image's name is called "uhoh."

Remember in the Halloween Update, when Sally told the story of why you don't leave your home after dark? Did Julie stay in that forest, berating the Black Tulip until the sun came down, and Frank has found the aftermath? Or is this before the sun goes down, and Frank is seeing something else… Either way, from what we can tell, it can't be good. And I am dreading the next update. I hope above anything else that Julie will be okay. But at this point, it's hard to say. --- Julie has always been an important character to me, ever since Welcome Home started. I was recently transitioning, voice training, and when I finally got to see Julie in action proper, the first thought I had is that I wanted to be just like her. Exuberant, goofy, caring, silly, reverent, colorful, joyful, she was the embodiment of everything I so deeply, deeply wanted to be. And in this update, I wasn't just thinking about how much I wanted to be like her. Julie reminded me of myself. Of fears i've had, of struggles i've gone through, of the terror that grips your heart when you think you are on the verge of a failure you can't come back from, a failure that will make you worthless. I don't say this to garner sympathy, and whilst we all go through our own struggles, i'm happy to say that i'm in a better place than I was when Welcome Home came out, and that the future looks even brighter. But i've never had a character both embody the sort of person I wanted to be, and the sort of struggles that gripped my heart. In a weird way, it made me feel more like Julie than I ever did before, over something I never thought the two of us would share. There's a lot more I could talk about regarding Julie, and as deep as I go I feel like I am only ever going to scratch the surface. There's the discussion of the queer theming in Welcome Home regarding the Show seemingly forcing Julie and Frank into a relationship, and the potential romance between Frank Frankly and Eddie Dear. I could talk about what is essentially the "Beta" of Welcome Home before all of its details were canonized, where Julie looked far more wonky and had the name Julie B and the seperate story that tells. (which I personally believe is referenced when Jonesy calls her by the affectionate nickname of Julie Bean.) I could talk about how before we even met The Joyful Family, I made a Self-Insert OC of a Rainbow Monster named Vivi Vacilate, how she'd interact with the rest of her cast, wrote up her own theoretical "It's-For-You Talking Telephone" script and even what-if scenarios of how she'd be incorporated into the ARG itself, playing with themes of fan-creations for works like this and the strange nature of how things manifest through Welcome Home as a show, with there being a question of whether or not Vivi was an actual character or a fan-creation that somehow manifested itself alongside the show. I can talk about what I think the future holds for her character, for the story as a whole, and what it'll mean. And I more than likely will, in the future, whether between friends or in errant posts or maybe even another analysis like this. Only time will tell what form it takes, but there's one thing I do know for certain: I love Julie Joyful. Never has there been a character that has brought me such happiness into my life and made me feel so known. Never has there been a character that represents everything I want to be in life, how far i've come, and the lengths i've yet to go. I don't know how Welcome Home will end, whether it'll be happy, sad, scary, or all if it at once. But no matter what happens, Julie Joyful will always have a very, very special place in my heart. I commend Clown for planting this little seed, all of the artists and writers for giving it some good soil and watering it with their love, and to Cyberscraps for letting its voice bloom into something beautiful and inspiring. And i'll always cherish it. ...Oh, no wait, there is one second thing I know for certain. ...I really want that Julie Plushie... ---

"Thank you again for listening to me again, Stranger. I needed that more than I thought I did. Sometimes you have thoughts that just keep bubbling up inside you until it POPS like an overstuffed grape and just gets messy and all over the place but...now I feel better...at least a little…" "...I guess all there is left to do is wait. I mean i'm used to that now and i'm a patient girl but...it's...really all I can do right now, isn't it?" [Silence] "At least I can say I did all I could! I had some help of course, I don't know if I could'a done it all by my lonesome! So here's hoping that when things happen again that maybe...they'll be better?…" [Silence] "...Is it silly of me to think that way?…" [Silence] "...I guess so. But...maybe that's not all that bad. Stranger, I feel like it's my time to go, and i'm sure you have places to be but...can you do me a favor? If you can?" [Slience.] "...If you..."

"Happen to come across her…" "Can you let me know if she's okay?" "That I hope she's okay?" [Silence.] "...Well...it's worth a shot." "...Goodbye and uh...g-goodness what is that thing he says…" "...Don't forget to wave up high." [Vivian hangs up the phone.]

[wanderstorms]

Lonely

Pairing: Billy Russo x fem!reader

A/N: gif not mine, also sorry in advance. Please read content warning.

CW: death/suicidal thoughts, angst, desperation, some pinning. Let me know if you think I missed some.

Billy has worked with many people, politicians, military men, socialites, their families, and their spoiled daughters; he's met many people, but somehow, none quite like you.

Your father, a VIP, contacted him to be your shadow for a year while elections occurred, his precious daughter; somehow, he expected the same as the others: a spoiled, entitled little rich girl. He did not expect... you. Who worked the most typical job in New York, didn't use his last name, nor his money, nor his status, nothing from him. He was not impressed at first, because that was a signal, you were angry at your father, surely; but then, one day, you confronted him.

'Why are you following me?' You asked, not angry, not surprised, just kinda bored. 'Was my mum or my dad?'

After that, you didn't let him stay outside your apartment; each time you met his gaze, you signaled for him to go inside. The first times it occurred, of course, he resisted, because it was not professional, then you appeared outside his own apartment, across the street with a good view of yours.

'I think it'd be easier if you just came to mine.' You looked around. 'I mean, it's cosier than yours, and the least I could expect, with all the money they're paying you, is a place with a heating system, it's freezing'

After that, he simply started staying at yours; in fact, it was easier, because you were careful, systematic, he would say a little paranoid; but that way he got to know you better, he got to see the shadows in your eyes, the way they lighted up at little things, but then dulled, like life was snot as exciting as one could expect.

You were 'stupidly intelligent' as you liked to say, and that was not an erroneous statement. One second you were talking about the complex physics of a black hole, and the next you were questioning if the fruit kiwi was named after the bird or vice versa. He laughed, it was ridiculous the way you moved to one topic to another without missing a beat, and expected him to follow. After a couple of months, he was certain he'd follow you anywhere, just to witness the next occurrence.

One late night, or early morning as you liked to call them, he witnessed another thing, something he would not have expected ever, not even in his most dark and twisted dreams.

'Do you ever think of just... disappearing?' You murmured while lying on your side

'Like changing your entire identity and moving to another country?' He was lying on his back, afraid of looking at you because somehow, every time you looked at him, he felt his tattered soul exposed.

'No, like disappearing, like people just forgetting you were ever there.' Your voice was small, so quiet that he was afraid of mishearing you.

'Do you?' His voice was quiet too.

You sighed and he thought you fell asleep, but then, your voice was there, sad, small, lonely 'I do'

Then, he paid even more attention, the way you looked at certain things, with longing. Other times, when he arrived at his shift early, he studied you from afar, the way you treasured some things, how you held yourself, as if tired, as if lonely.

The contract came to its end, and he was back to his ways, but somehow you lingered at the back of his mind, and he surprised himself checking on you; more often than not, he was following you. He told himself to check for any lingering threat, but he knew there was none.

His phone buzzed.

I'm fine, stop worrying :)

The smiley face did nothing to settle his mind. Because it was there, it was not a threat, because he knew you wouldn't do it, but you longed for it. You'd told him months ago.

He'd changed his ways; he no longer had one-night stands, not when he wanted to be next to you, hold you, and make you change your mind.

'Billy.' He could hear your voice, the way it trembled when you confessed your deepest desire. 'Is it wrong?'

'What?' He reached to move a strand of hair out of the way, and his fingers lingered on your cheek. 'What's wrong?'

You let out a trembling sigh. 'That I want to die.' Your eyes went wide and scared, like you hadn't meant to say it out loud.

He froze. 'What do you mean?'

'Nothing.' You turned around and out of reach. It scared him.

Because he didn't want to let go, in that year, he found himself wanting to be near you, with you, and making your eyes and face light up at the little things you seemed to enjoy.

'Don't.' He said, taking your hand and pulling you back to him. 'Don't say that, I'm here. With you'

You felt the erratic beat of his heart below your ear. 'Billy, please don't leave'

Your hands fisted his sweater, your tears fell, and his heart broke. He knew he was not going to leave, but were you?

[maverick-werewolf]

Daily Werewolf Thoughts - Days 10-16

More not super prettily formatting werewolf thought posts that I've been doing daily!

Day 10- You don't really love werewolves if you don't enjoy terrible werewolf movies. Which the vast and overwhelming majority of them are terrible, at least if you ask me. But I just love werewolves so much I am driven to watch them (I also love movies with all my heart and soul), and even if the film is beyond terrible - again, as most of them are, even the ones people say are good - there's going to be a few moments that make it worth it, because werewolves are so badass, and I absolutely love studying how they created the werewolf for any film. Here's a bit of a rant for today...

One such film and series is Underworld. I hate the Underworld movies. Yes, stone me. They're terrible. The only one I enjoyed in its own right at all was Rise of the Lycans, since it had a far more compelling story than Selene's tight black leather (I understand why men enjoy this, in their defense) and absurd motivations that only extend as far as what the director wants for the next action sequence - and it was set in the Middle Ages, which is way better as a werewolf story, imo. Anyway, regardless of how I feel about the movies, I LOVE how they handled the practical effects on the werewolves.

The Underworld werewolves are unmatched. I'm not crazy about the design of the main "lie-kans" - I will never forgive the movie for the "lycans" thing btw - because they were specifically designed to be more "cat-like" or even more like a pitbull. For some reason people like to use things like cats, bears, etc to design something called a "werewolf." So I think those initial ones, like in the first film, frankly look pretty stupid. But the "feral" lycan "breed" or whatever they're called that have the more wolfish heads are a very cool design, and ultimately what I'm talking about here is how they were created and put to film. Sidebar: I'm not one of those people who thinks that the instant a movie uses any CGI, it should be condemned; CGI is a tool like any other filmmaking tool, and it can be used to achieve things we otherwise could never film and that are artistically beautiful and creative; but yes, I do prefer practical effects where they can be used.

The werewolves in Underworld were created using bodysuits, animatronics, and creature actors. They wore leg extensions, got big guys in the first place, and had extensive work for muscle, hair, and especially the faces and facial animations. The entire face is created using servos that respond to controllers held by workers off-camera to animate the werewolf costume in real time, while it's being worn by a person. The entire face, eyes, mouth, lips, etc were fully animated using a complex system of animatronics, and a comm system so the actor can be given instructions from the lead puppeteer so everyone can properly sync their work - and the final effect is such a step beyond anything we've seen from werewolf designs of this size in film before - or since.

There are better videos of the later films that had more advanced technology, like Underworld: Evolution (terrible movie but great werewolf effects), but here's one on youtube that has a lot of what was involved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jWIF8lSlxg&ab_channel=IsaacKoo

*: "feral" by definition most often specifically refers to domesticated animals that have gone wild again and sounds very odd when used to refer to something like a wolf (but it always happens anyway because people don't care about the English language; ask any video game about their "feral wolves")

**: "breed" specifically refers to controlling the birthing of animals to produce a desired outcome, as in domesticated animals, such as dogs, cats, sheep, etc., and it makes me want to become a hermit living alone atop the Himalayas when I see people use it for werewolves

Day 11- I've often wondered what exactly set me down this path of being completely and hopelessly obsessed with werewolves. I've never really had an answer. I've speculated it was just Halloween itself, seeing the very rare and occasional werewolf around, since that's always been my favorite "kind" of werewolf. I have distinct memories of a little werewolf statue in a Hallmark; I really loved looking at that thing (never got it, though, sadly). I've occasionally wondered if it was watching Scooby Doo at my grandma's house - but in retrospect, the werewolves in Scooby Doo of that era weren't much to write home about, so that probably wasn't it. I do know for a fact I've been obsessed with them for as long as I can remember, certainly by age 6, so whatever it was, it started early. I was reading Sabine Baring-Gould's The Book of Werewolves when I was 8, searching for werewolves in video games forever, and I'll never forget the first werewolf figure I got to decorate my desk.

If you ask one of my favorite professors, who sat on the committee that passed ultimate judgment upon what became my book The Werewolf: Past and Future, she would tell you I was led to love werewolves because of "dream visions" (she is a professor and lifelong student of Old Norse, Old English, and the cultures, many sagas, and histories thereof). I told her about how my earliest memories of werewolves and the start of my obsession with them were actually long series of dreams and nightmares I had - a white werewolf would always crop up in them, sooner or later. Sometimes he was on my side, sometimes not. My dreams and nightmares are... very detached from reality in the first place, but the white werewolf became consistent for a long time. What put the idea of a werewolf into my head in the first place? I'm really not sure.

Some of my favorite experiences with werewolves come from playing as them in classic RPGs, including ones where you aren't technically supposed to be one. I loved playing a werewolf in Neverwinter Nights using character editors, cheat codes, and scripts on the big roleplaying server I played on. Now THAT was fun, but that's a whole separate story.

Anyway, I really don't even know. All I know is, I've loved werewolves for as long as I can remember, and I always will, no matter how silly that might seem.

Day 12- Remember when video games called RPGs had actual roleplaying elements in them? Some of the only games that have ever let you play as a proper werewolf are the Elder Scrolls series, specifically Daggerfall and Morrowind: Bloodmoon, the latter being my absolute favorite werewolf game ever. Why? Because you actually played as a werewolf - and all that came with it - instead of lycanthropy being a cool thing and/or awesome button.

In Bloodmoon, if you are a werewolf (having either become one from surviving a werewolf attack - werewolves spawn with INSANE rarity, trust me I found one naturally and it took me weeks, in the wild of Solstheim or you can become one through the main Bloodmoon questline), you will transform each night. You must devour 1 humanoid (playable race) NPC or suffer from hunger and exhaustion the following day, lowering your stats. The transformation will break any armor you have equipped. If someone witnesses the transformation, word of your true nature will spread, and you will be hunted. You are also attacked on sight - but NPCs will often run away rather than dare attack you. Your stats are insanely boosted, you run like the wind and leap to the point of almost flying, and you can destroy nearly anything in your path. It is one of the single coolest things in all of gaming and nothing like it has ever been recreated (I have biases).

Being a werewolf became part of your character and changed your entire gameplay experience rather than just being an "ability" or "race."

Many of these systems were also in place in Daggerfall, Morrowind's predecessor. But Morrowind was the last game of the ES series to incorporate proper werewolf mechanics. In Oblivion, we got exactly nothing, which left me crushingly disappointed as a child. In Skyrim, you have an awesome button werewolf mode wherein you must continually devour enemies in order to maintain the werewolf form. It's cool and it's fun, and I'm very glad Skyrim had werewolves playable at launch, but it doesn't have anything approaching the same feel as "being" a werewolf in Bloodmoon, where it is a curse. It can be an inconvenience, it can be an advantage, and it's something you have to plan your gameplay around - and something you must hide from everyone around you. That is what playing as a werewolf should be. I'm likely to make another post soon talking about that some more, because it's a favorite subject.

Anyway, therefore, Morrowind's expansion pack Bloodmoon is easily one of my favorite games ever made. It is really the only game where you can really play as a werewolf instead of a reasonably cool and fun but ultimately far less interesting alternative.

I also recently wrote a big ol' article about the best video games that let you play as a werewolf: https://maverickwerewolf.com/werewolf-facts/werewolf-articles/werewolf-article-play-as-a-werewolf-video-games/

Day 13- A werewolf's transformation sequence is one of the single most important things in any werewolf story. It might even be -the- most important. After all, the crux of werewolves is that even a man who is pure at heart (etc) can become a monster - and back again - and the sequence undergoing such a traumatic change is quite a thing to tackle.

I've seen it approached many ways. Painfully (obviously), painlessly, slow, fast, as something undesirable and as something desirable, as something controllable and uncontrollable - I swear this isn't innuendo. Anyway, personally, my favorite will always very easily be the most classic concept of the werewolf transformation: painful, traumatic, and very, very bad. I am not here for cuddly or happy werewolves. I'm also a fan of the werewolf not remembering what happened, but I'll ramble about that one later.

This also actually has basis in legend, as well. Even in antiquity, witnessing a werewolf transformation would potentially bring one to madness. This is mentioned in several stories, including but not necessarily limited to Niceros's story, in which witnessing the werewolf transformation freaks him out beyond reason. When he realizes the soldier he'd traveled with was a werewolf, he swears never to go near him again: "I couldn’t have eaten a crumb of bread with him, no, not if you had killed me!"

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, oft hailed as one of the "first werewolf legends" (that we have recorded, anyway), we also get our first proper werewolf transformation ever in the form of the legend of Lycaon...

"[Lycaon] howled his heart out, trying in vain to speak.

With rabid mouth he turned his lust for slaughter

Against the flocks, delighting still in blood.

His clothes changed to coarse hair, his arms to legs—

He was a wolf, yet kept some human trace,

the same grey hair, the same fierce face, the same

Wild eyes, the same image of savagery."

I've always found it interesting to note that his clothes became coarse hair, rather than him tearing his clothes off. Just a little difference there between this and many other legends.

Lots more on the ancient Greek tale of King Lycaon here: https://maverickwerewolf.com/werewolf-fact-66-the-legend-of-king-lycaon-of-arcadia/

There are a few legends, of course, that don't make it quite this dramatic. But popular culture carried over the painful transformation sequence for those with the werewolf curse, by and large, and it's incredibly effective. Everyone remembers seeing the first transformation in An American Werewolf in London (as much as I think the movie itself frankly just sucks), and likewise no one was exactly taken by a guy jumping really high and painlessly CGI'ing into a wolf in like .3 seconds.

I obviously have a lot of opinions on werewolf transformations, just like every other werewolf thing. The best and most memorable werewolf transformations are painful, dramatic, and traumatizing - because, after all, being a werewolf is neither a fun thing nor a good time... not for anyone involved.

Day 14- There's something I deeply hate in media, and it's when someone says "a werewolf scratch can turn you!" What on earth?

I have a lot of thoughts about all of this, obviously, and I'll get more into the whole werewolf bite thing later, but let's entertain if you will this notion that becoming a werewolf is like rabies. This is an extremely Early Modern concept, following the rise of scientific thought and the dismissal of all things mystical, religious, magical, mysterious, and allegorical, but even then, a werewolf spreading lycanthropy (in itself an Early Modern concept, as it was viewed as a disease, not a curse) via bite has no basis in folklore already. Does that make it bad? Nonsense, a werewolf bite is a classic storytelling element - that, once again, almost certainly comes from The Wolf Man (1941). It's so classic that for some reason zombies later completely lifted it and now everyone acts like it's a zombie thing, which is completely unfair.

But a werewolf scratch? Really? Even if we're equating it with rabies, that still doesn't work. And how stupid is it for someone to be like "oh no! the werewolf SCRATCHED you!" When I hear "scratch," I think "my cat got a little too excited about the tummy button," not "I've been mauled by a giant twisted man-beast and now I will inherit its curse." How does a werewolf even "scratch" someone without taking an entire limb off or raking red rivers through your torso? Are we sure it was a werewolf, or is it a chihuahua*?

I really wish this "werewolf scratch" thing would stop. It's just bad all over. Bring back werewolf bites exclusively.

*: what pains me is that some people would find this hilarious and make this their exclusive takeaway, because werewolves have just become jokes

Day 15- I love a wide variety of werewolf designs. If the werewolf is presented well, the design doesn't always matter that massively, as long as it doesn't look incredibly dumb and/or doesn't even resemble a man or a wolf. Unfortunately, it's amazing how often this happens.

Many monster design classes do actually say, when designing a werewolf, absolutely don't use a wolf as a reference. Artists are told by everyone under the sun, including filmmakers: use dogs, cats, bears, mandrills, hyenas - I've even seen mules, foxes, bats, badgers... and above all, they are told explicitly: whatever you do, don't use a wolf as inspiration. That'd be like, expected or cliche or bad or corny or something, because it's a WOLF monster. And we can't do anything "expected."

Werewolves are two things: human and wolf. If you're drawing the majority of your inspiration from a bear or a cat or a fox or hyena or whatever else, why even call it a werewolf? Why not make a different creature entirely, like the Beast of Gevaudan?

(more on that remark here: https://maverickwerewolf.com/werewolf-facts/the-beast-of-gevaudan/ )

I can understand the desire of some to have some particularly "memorable" or "unique" design (although I have never been taken by any of these attempts, nor do I remember them fondly), but ultimately, it baffles me that someone would choose to draw more directly from animals that aren't wolves for a werewolf design. Then again, you can also go too far in the opposite direction and just end up with fluffy wolf-people, and those can look far too cuddly (at least to... modern audiences; no one thought the werewolves in Dog Soldiers were cute even just a few years ago).

It's a careful balance to walk. When I was very young and innocent, I hated that many designs removed the tail from a werewolf (which they have in legend and I think it looks cooler), but I completely understand now. I also understand wanting to change the head shape, ear shape, etc, but all of this can be achieved without making the werewolf look like some other animal or like nothing in particular. There's a reason the Underworld werewolf design that became ubiquitous for so many werewolves afterward - Skyrim, for example, and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, just to name two - was the one with the wolfish muzzle and head shape, not the "cat pitbull" design from the first film.

Call me old-fashioned (I am), but I want a werewolf to look like what it's called. Note: I'm also not knocking the quadrupedal but still part-man looking designs, although those are far from my favorite, but it should still have wolf features. At least a few.

Day 16- Another werewolf folklore lesson! How about "curing" lycanthropy? What was that like in folklore - lifting the werewolf curse?

As per usual for my discussions, I have to mention that being a werewolf was not considered a "disease" until relatively recently; it was a magical curse, not an illness that could be "contracted" or "cured," and individuals were not "infected." Likewise, there weren't exactly a lot of examples of a werewolf curse - as per traditional "transforming between man and beast on a regular basis" definition of "werewolf" - being lifted in folklore.

There are some examples of more unusual variations of the curse being lifted, however, namely with those who end up stuck in a more seemingly permanent wolf form. Removing a magic item that cursed you to become a werewolf is fairly common, such as the magic skins donned by Sigmund and Sinfjotli in the Volsunga Saga; when they wore them, they were wolves, and only returned to human form when they managed to get the skins back off again. Another example is Melion (titular character of a British lai), who was trapped in the form of a wolf when he put on a cursed ring.

And in at least one story, that of Guillame de Palerne, the werewolf returns to his human shape when the one who cursed him is killed. This is a special case in that the werewolf never actually returned to a human form and was in fact stuck as a wolf, so it's not quite your typical werewolf example, but it is still from a French story whose title was translated as William and the Werewolf - and it's a good story.

However, in the vast majority of cases, especially with the werewolves that are more in line with what we think of as proper werewolves (transforming back and forth, instead of stuck in a wolf form), either the werewolf stayed a werewolf and it wasn't really that big of a deal (such as in several ancient Greek tales and some medieval tales, for example)...

Or else the werewolf was killed. Popular culture sometimes insists the only cure for lycanthropy is death, and that also often held true in many legends. It's also quite fun and dramatic, of course, although I do get tired of the werewolf predictably getting wasted.

There is, of course, a Werewolf Fact for this: https://maverickwerewolf.com/werewolf-facts/how-to-cure-lycanthropy/

[shotgunsermon]

I’m a FREAK for lottie right now so if you’ve got any lottie freaky stuff..I’m all ears

(Also I love to think lottie has either got her freak on in a fancy ass jacuzzi or if she was drunk or something a pool/ping pong table. I’m not elaborating anymore)

... oh i'm listening.

anyways mdni for real this time i'm just gonna give an x reader ramble about the jacuzzi thing.

afab reader cus lottie's gay as hell and also its just how it came out. also crude language? i guess? i'm not the flowery prose type lmao. this is fuckin nastyyyyyy

no crash daddy's money lottie getting her freak on in a fancy ass jacuzzi... god

maybe she's staying in that big ass penthouse apartment complex her dad has for the summer or something and of course you get invited along because she doesn't wanna be lonely the entire time. not like mr matthews cares. his card is practically bottomless

the place is like, horrifyingly fancy. lottie is so casual about it that you're reeling the whole fucking time. her dad casually paid for a whole ass private bar with, you guessed it, a hot tub.

you skinny dip, obviously, because who cares, it's private. and you've GOTTA get fucked off some wine you can't pronounce, super rich kids style. it's a given.

as soon as the jets warm up and you both get situated, she gets handsy FAST. she doesn't even have to be drunk.

two guys chilling in a hot tub five feet apart (cus they're not gay)? no way. she's right on top of you the whole time, champagne glass in one hand and the other on your thigh under the water

total fucking tease at first, my god... she just keeps talking about how warm the water is, how good the jets feel, but doesn't do anything besides rub your thigh or guide you a little closer with a hand on your waist every so often

but one glass turns to two and two turns to you-both-lost-count-and-now-you're-making-out-so-it-doesn't-matter

cannot. keep. her. hands. to. herself. that's so important. tactile lottie my love. she's literally all over you. and she definitely dunks the both of you a few times because she's drunk as all hell

okay so maybe you lose track of what's just making out and what isn't and maybe now lottie's got you pressed back against the wall of the tub and a hand between your legs while she does an absolutely sloppy job of riding your thigh... maybe just a little

definitely makes a joke about not being able to tell if it's the tub or if you're just that fucking soaked (a bit of both, but shh)

whiniest. drunk. ever. she's LOUD and proud.

riding your thigh and trying to get enough friction to work with but also the hot tub makes everything slick and she keeps slipping. so maybe you finally take pity on her and slide your hand down to start fingering her. getting each other off in a fancy hot tub for the win

you thought that finally giving her something would slow her down or make her fumble, but no she just gets even more insistent that you cum first. starts going fast as hell on your clit and cursing under her breath, praising you for getting her off while she gets you off... god she's such a freak

"that's good. right there, yeah. good job, baby" while your hand shakes as she's making you see fucking stars by easily pushing two fingers in and out with how wet you are (from the tub and from literally everything else)

when you say you're close she gets actually feral. grabbing your hip with her free hand and tugging you closer, thrusting her fingers fast as fuck so her palm grinds on your clit each time

she's still talking dirty, but like, in a sweet way. she's kinda shy even drunk off her ass. mumbling shit like "you're so pretty".

the most intimate freak. she's an empath of course she is. at some point she just starts whispering "love you" over and over

and then you immediately cum because that's lowkey way hotter than anything else she could've said

of course she sees your blissed out face and immediately her hips fucking STUTTER

she swears up a storm under her breath and you're literally too gone to even notice she came too until she gets whiny and has to stop your hand

aftercare. it's so important to her. definitely tells you you did a great job and just rambles for minutes on end about how good you were and what she liked. gives you kisses all over your face and helps you dry off when you two finally get out of the tub

this definitely becomes a once weekly thing while you're staying at the penthouse. rev up those jets and pop some champagne and yall are getting utterly freaky within minutes