#ill probably continue playing around with this sort of render ! or at least keep elements of it

[hinamie]

oversaturate

[sepublic]

Nocturn

           Nocturn is an immensely powerful Okotan demigod who possesses legendary strength. A four-armed, amphibious being with a bioluminescent appearance, translucent blue muscles, and lime-green skin, he is Umarak’s strongest ally.

           According to ancient legend, the demigod known as Nocturn struck the island of Okoto with such god-like strength that he split the entire land in half. Thankfully, the Elemental Deities were able to mend the damage, and any lasting scars that remained were soon forgotten when the island was made into the foundations for the present-day Okoto, all in order to contain Umarak the Deity of Shadow.

           Generations passed since the incident, and during those centuries Nocturn has admittedly let himself go quite a bit… His strength is a mere fraction of what it used to be (although it’s still incredibly devastating), and unpleasant encounters and broken promises have made him an outcast and a recluse with trust issues. As Okotan civilization thrived, Nocturn lurked in the island’s depths, occasionally venturing beyond Okoto into the seas beyond and exploring the darkened ocean floor below. Over the years, he’s accumulated a large variety of wounds and scars from his experiences, his most grievous being the permanent loss of a tentacle after a battle with the Manas Crabs.

           When the Great Cataclysm occurred, Nocturn quickly adapted to the horrific events and made his home in the deepest depths of the Region of Water, living an isolated life in which he hunted and fished for deep-sea prey, ate, and then otherwise just sort of sat around, occasionally swam a bit, and miserably contemplated life. He largely ignored the Skull Spiders, who were unable to access the depths he normally lived in, and in turn the Brotherhood of Makuta held no interest in him, not even knowing for sure if he was alive or not.

           Nocturn at one point helped Umarak the Hunter when the latter requested his help in securing and capturing the Great Temple Squid. Desiring a taste of the squid’s flesh, Nocturn obliged on this one alliance and proved to be an invaluable ally, securing the aquatic Rahi. Before and ever since, Umarak and Nocturn have had the occasional interaction and favor done.

           Upon Umarak’s alliance with the Brotherhood of Makuta, he called in several favors owed to him by Nocturn and had the demigod pay them off by helping in the war against the Okotan Alliance. Nocturn himself proved to be an incredibly difficult and powerful opponent for the Toa in particular, who he usually clashed with, and later Nocturn participated in the Brotherhood campaign in the Labyrinth of Infinity for the Mask of Control.

           After Makuta possessed Umarak, Nocturn continued to assist the Brotherhood in its attempts to raze Okoto, albeit at least a little suspicious of whether or not Makuta would honor Umarak’s promise to spare him and the other demigod allies from the destruction. Regardless, he fought the Toa at a final stand in Destral, only to be defeated in combat.

           Following the death of Makuta and Umarak’s imprisonment, Nocturn has since returned to his old, lonely lifestyle in the Region of Water. The Okotans have made efforts to reach out to him and make an alliance, even offering to absolve him of his cooperation with the Brotherhood- Nocturn is far better as an ally than an enemy. However, Nocturn has declined these offers, getting successively angrier each time, and so the Okotans have chosen to let him be.

           Nocturn has bulbous red eyes that let him see in a total darkness (with the exception of the darkness summoned by Umarak). He is an amphibious creature and is able to breathe on land and water, and can function in both environments with ease. To swim, Nocturn mostly relies on paddling his large, flippered feet to propel himself forward, and his muscles emanate a bioluminescent light in darkness. He has four arms, with his lower arms both wielding a pair of silver scimitars.

           One of his two main abilities lies in the silver tentacle that emerges from and is entwined with the flesh of his upper left-arm (and, prior to his battle with the Manas, his upper right-arm as well). This tentacle is able to stretch for incredible distances, with Nocturn hurling it forward as it rapidly extends towards its target (not unlike a fishing rod), and is incredibly flexible and strong. The tentacle is impervious to most physical damage, and sharp weapons are usually useless unless applied with colossal force- However, Nocturn himself is vulnerable to the pain of having his tentacle super-heated or frozen.

           The main feature of Nocturn’s tentacle is its ability to attach itself to anything, and permanently stick unless he wills it not to. This ability, functioning on Life energy, is similar to that of a Mask of Adhesion’s, except more potent and lethal. In combat, Nocturn will often cast his tentacle forward, where it will lash out and strike a target. At that moment, the target is permanently attached to whatever part of his tentacle has hit them, meaning it’s impossible to crawl further up the tentacle- They’re affixed through their soul itself to Nocturn’s tendril.

           Unable to separate themselves from Nocturn’s tentacle, many of his opponents quickly find themselves helpless as he swings around his tendril, keeping them at a distance as he repeatedly slams them into the surrounding environment, or else reels in his tentacle at high speeds, bringing his victim towards himself as he scissor-slashes forward with both scimitars, the massive strength behind them usually bisecting opponents completely. Like the rest of him, this tentacle possesses massive strength and is able to further crawl up along a victim, entangling them and allowing Nocturn to crush them completely as well. Prior to losing a tentacle, Nocturn preferred to use both tendrils to latch onto separate ends of a victim, and by applying his massive strength, tear them in half, often from afar in a vicious tug-of-war.

           When Nocturn battled the Manas Crabs, he suffered his most devastating defeat. The pair of crabs easily managed to grab onto both of his tentacles and began pulling him apart in an ironic echo of what he normally did to his victims. Despite Nocturn’s strength and incredible durability, he was helpless as the Manas’ colossal power tore out his upper-right arm, causing nerve damage to the spine. Trapped and wounded, Nocturn was kept as a play-puppet for days by the Manas Crabs, who repeatedly played tug-of-war with his upper limbs, his right tentacle usually giving way because it hadn’t fully regenerated upon each round. In constant agony, Nocturn was thankfully saved by Umarak, who at the time was trying to take advantage of the Manas’ distraction to capture them; Although he failed, this led to a long series of favors and interactions between the two. Nocturn was able to regenerate his right-arm in peace after the incident, but it returned without its signature tentacle, to Nocturn’s humbled dismay.

Sometime later, Umarak replaced Nocturn’s missing tentacle with a Life-Automaton prosthetic crossbow. The crossbow, channeling Nocturn’s abilities, gave him the ability to generate energy arrows to fire at enemies- Upon striking and piercing them, the arrows in question would stay attached to their target, not unlike Nocturn’s lost tentacle. From there, they would stay, eventually dissipating after a few hours; In that time, while the victim wouldn’t be concerned with removing the arrow and dying from blood loss, the arrow’s constantly-lodged presence ensured they couldn’t recover with a Mask of Healing in the time it took for the arrow to disappear. Likewise, the arrows are large enough that they can completely block a victim’s vein, in turn stopping their blood flow and killing them.

           Nocturn’s most devastating attack, a powerful punch, has been dubbed a wide variety of titles, from ‘Megaton Punch’ to ‘Tectonic Breaker’ and ‘Island-Slayer’. Nocturn has lost track of these names, most of which come from others, but he’s willing to employ one of them every now and then. By concentrating his life force into a single fist –usually his lower-right one-, Nocturn is able to launch a devastating punch surging with kinetic force into the ground. The impact of this punch is immense, usually crafting a gigantic, smoldering impact crater in the ground as the earth itself splinters and shatters, everything within a several-meter radius sent flying.

It was this technique of concentrating life energy that allowed Nocturn to split Okoto in half, although thankfully he has neglected on his training over the centuries and is at a fraction of his strength- Nevertheless, a blow from his Tectonic Breaker is more than capable of piercing any defense and can even tear apart solid bohrok. For Nocturn’s opponents, he thankfully requires at least several seconds of charging his Island-Slayer before he can unleash it, giving them plenty of time to stop Nocturn, or more often than not, run away as far as possible.

           As an Okotan demigod, Nocturn possesses an immense metabolism and durability, and often feeds on multiple colossal squids, razor whales, and other creatures every day. He has powerful regenerative abilities, able to grow back entire limbs and even repair his spine, although sufficiently deep damage, especially done consecutively over time, can lead to a wound not fully-healing. Likewise, Nocturn has a powerful immune system that renders him unaffected by virtually any poison or disease, as well as an incredibly long life-span whose end he hasn’t been sighting anytime soon.

           Aggressive, ill-tempered, and not the brightest person, most have come to dismiss Nocturn as a dimwitted brute. However, Umarak recognizes his abilities, power, and potential, and unlike most of the people who’ve interacted with him and known his past, he doesn’t constantly lord Nocturn’s previous feats over his head, which is a sore spot for the amphibious demigod. More likely than not, Nocturn probably has depression, which isn’t helped whenever he recalls what he used to be capable of. Nevertheless, his and Umarak’s relationship probably can’t be described as ‘gentle’, but it’s definitely a lot better than others Nocturn has had.

[ark-of-eden]

R is drunk and raving (not in the party way).

(R:) Additionally, I’m procrastinating like a fucking champion at working on fic construction, so you know the best use of my time is going off about random social media crap on the internet.

tl;dr: Putting all commentary in tags on Tumblr makes R cry and shit thousands of words into the Internet.

Every social media site inevitably develops sets of unwritten social conventions. Some of them actually make sense as being derived from meatspace etiquette and therefore you don’t really have to stress about remembering them as long as you play nice like a decent creature.

And some of them just don’t make any fucking sense that I can see. Folks on Twitter using a deliberately space-limited form of media to write a page’s worth or more in a string of 30+ rapidfire tweets? This is just how it’s done over there? (Tweetlonger exists but for some reason these massive chain-tweeters never seem to use it. Same with posting the whole thing in a long-form site like LJ/DW/Tumblr and just linking it to a tweet.)

And Tumblr has things that I literally had to put effort into learning after I migrated here, and after I learned about them I frankly decided to ignore them because I couldn’t see the point in them. Tumblr has this bizarre allergy to commentary and, likely derived from that, the practice of instead commenting by putting it all in awkward tags that render the tagging system not especially useful and are harder to get to if you’re actually interested in an individual’s thoughts about a thing and not just the twelfth instance of the same post crossing your dash in a day or two. It’s not like you can’t engage with people, because asks and messaging and such exist, but like...there’s this strong sense that it’s Terribly Ill-Mannered to weigh in with your own impressions right there, in the body of the post, typing your own words in that seductive, wide-open text box that appears all on its own when you go to reblog something. The properly-socialized Tumblrite eschews that tempting text field and instead posts weird sentence fragments in tag form (interspersed with actual tags that might serve to usefully categorize the post’s content), to the extent that some people can add on a good couple paragraphs of material down among the hashtags where others need to go looking for it on purpose if they want it. (I, at least, haven’t been able to find a plugin or something that automatically expands full tags on all posts so that I don’t have to fuck around with extra interface elements to get to them. I admit that I haven’t looked super hard, though.)

Preserving the original form of the OP’s post is a noble practice that I heartily support, but how is adding commentary a problem if you’re only adding a separate thing, not taking away or altering anything in the original...? This was already a practice/convention/code of social interaction on Tumblr when I got here, so I was never in the front row to witness this element taking shape. I suppose it must have made good sense at the time, but every time I see ten people reblogging the same post with no additions and a paragraph of tags appended to it, it’s like a splinter in my brain that has been digging into me for years now.

And I’m not hating on people who do that! I get that that’s The Way It’s Done Here and I am the deviant weirdo for continually adding comments directly onto things that I reblog. Tags are where individuality lives here, unless you’re producing your own original posts, which I guess other people are then supposed to reblog without commentary so that you have to go hunting after all the reblogs individually if you want to get an actual sense of what these people were all thinking when they reblogged your thing. It all just seems...so...WORK INTENSIVE, refusing to use site functions as they were intended??

Look, I absolutely know that my commentary is not the work of incisive genius that unfailingly adds value to every post I find worthy of my attention. We’re pretty much solid shitposting on this blog. Because I’m a little loaded at the moment and that gives me a handy excuse to run my fingers like an idiot (plus I put that readmore up there, so if your eyes are actually consuming these words, you have only yourself to blame for being here), let me run down relevant history of how we got here.

LJ was home for a good long while. Then shit got seriously messed up and Dreamwidth was created as a better LJ, so we migrated all our stuff over there. And journaling sites along those lines still feel like a native environment. I, in particular, am the most long-winded piece of shit we know and I am honestly incapable of talking about anything of worth in short form. It’s a sickness and I just sort of have to own it. :/ But that’s why journaling sites are a good place for me to live, because that’s where people go when they have the inclination to read meandering scrawls about the depths of other people’s lives or whatever.

We went to Twitter for a good while because all the cool people we knew from LJ were going there for some unfathomable reason. These people wrote things that were complex and fascinating to read, so all of them jumping ship to a place that limited them to 140-character chunks made no damn sense, but we loved those people and wanted to trust that they knew what the hell they were doing. And they probably did, and a couple of us were actually okay with Twitter, but I, being the long-winded shitpiece, spent a lot of time frustrated and kind of overstimulated.

Then things started going to hell more and more consistently for me personally (and us generally by extension, but that’s unnecessary detail). Bunkering down specifically to protect people that you care about from the fallout of your crazy is a fairly common thing for mentally-ill people to do, I think. So I’d shut up online until I felt stable enough to talk to people again. Those periods lasted a few days, then a week or more, then a month, then eventually I stopped talking entirely. I missed the LJ/DW format, but in the past I’d written about life events and things I was thinking about and such, so...at the time, all I really had to write about was the bad stuff. So LJ/DW was basically unusable as well.

I literally came here to be as shallow as I could possibly manage. Tumblr had a rapid, chaotic flow similar to Twitter, but could hold longer content like LJ/DW. We’ve never really used the site’s full functionality at any point, though. For at least a year, all we were following was the most lightweight, zero-calorie entertainment that we could find. (We actually came here for Flight Rising content, so there was a lot of that.) Being engaged with fandom in any consistent respect is an extremely recent thing.

And I’m not saying that fandom hasn’t got depth and complexity because it absolutely does and that’s one of the beautiful things about shared fan experiences. I kind of got into that sort of fandom by accident after getting here and rediscovering Transformers. But the unvoiced policy that I’ve always had here is to avoid the Too Real and dodge serious topics whenever possible. Thus, no gender theory, no neurodivergence or multiplicity, no nonhumanity, no religion or UPG, nothing with real substance behind it that bared real vulnerabilities. (Apparently this was a good move anyway because the nonhuman and multiplicity situation here on Tumblr is a bit of a clusterfuck? I honestly wouldn’t know, as I haven’t made a lot of effort to link up with those folks.) That’s still the policy. That might remain the policy forever until I reach some vaguely-defined threshold of sanity that makes me worthy of talking about those things in places and formats that other people can interact with.

And I’m sorry for all this talk about mental illness, but it’s simpler just to explain things clearly. I likely won’t go into any more detail about it on Tumblr. Or anywhere else, because I care about people even if I’ve never met them or talked to them at all and I still want to keep it all in the bunker to protect good people from the crazy. Sometimes, all you can do is just prevent the damage from spilling out into other people’s lives, and that’s the place that I usually operate from.

I’m still pretty drunk, so I’m allowed to ramble from too much truth serum, but all of that explanation was to get around to saying that the format of online communication that is most intuitive to me is the long, oversharing gut-spill of random people talking about things that are really meaningful to them - not in the sense of elaborate philosophy or artsy epistles to the cosmos, but just people being super real about things that are meaningful to them and going into lots of detail about them because gushing about things you love is great. And it’s possible to get that sort of discussion and gushing in Tumblr fandom, and I love it because it reminds me of better times, and the fact that I love it is WHY IT MAKES ME SO GODDAMN FRUSTRATED that Tumblr culture is basically stifling discussion and feedback and RESPONSE to things that people find interesting!!

Like, here’s how I see it. Unlike on LJ/DW, where you were limited to hyperlinking to a cool post in one of your own posts if you wanted your readers to go check it out, on Tumblr, if you find a super cool thing, you can pull it directly into your space and let other people experience it directly, exactly as you experienced it. But the thing is, I also subscribe to the My Blog My House concept. If I pull a thing into my “home,” I do it because there’s something homelike about it; it belongs in my home for some specific reason. I don’t take “ownership” of an item in the sense that I’m claiming it in place of its creator, but I’m taking ownership of it in the sense that it’s part of my Stuff now and it’ll get my fingerprints all over it and be blended into the general morass of Stuff that I recognize as my home. I don’t just pull random crap into my home for no reason at all.

And I just figure that other people are similar in the sense that they reblog things for distinct, unique reasons, not in the sense that they have some master plan for their blog content (some do, but it’s not necessary), but just that they have compelling reasons why they pick certain bits of content out of the larger river of their dashboard and put it in their own space for people to experience with them. I follow people based on the interesting things that they find interesting. I’m interested in why they’re interested in those things. They seem like interesting people to me because they’re interested in what they’re interested in.

But the WHY is a really important part of the equation for me. Did this person reblog that photo because they’ve been to that place themselves, because they like that kind of tree, because they reblog photos with that color scheme every Thursday? Did that person reblog that piece of art because they love that character, because they’re studying that art medium, because it reminded them of something funny they saw somewhere else? People attach their own context to things that they latch onto. It’s so freaking weird to me that people have to hide their interpretations or impressions in tags here on Tumblr, making them unimportant and optional in the process of sharing things they like with others. (Okay, people also share a lot of things they hate, but reasons for outrage are still part of the context that one adds to content.)

I WANT TO KNOW WHY YOU CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE SHOWING ME. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT MAKES IT IMPORTANT TO YOU. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT MAKES YOU THINK AND FEEL. Even if it’s a blurb about how giant robots fuck or a cute kitten video, I NEED TO KNOW THESE THINGS.

Not in excruciating detail or with insightful analysis or even a lot of text at all. Mostly, the things that people put in tags are things that, to me, are a really crucial part of the experience of being able to go into someone’s “home” and see the Stuff that they chose to put in it. Reducing oneself to a glorified signal repeater is...okay, I guess, though it turns a Tumblr blog into a kind of faceless stream of other people’s material a lot of the time. The personal touch is what makes it all interesting. And I’m just unutterably frustrated that, somewhere along the line, it was decided that personalizing an experience by sharing one’s own impressions of it became rude enough that polite society decided that it had to be hidden away in tags. I want all of it, so I do go looking for it, but omg it requires MORE EFFORT and BURNING CALORIES and BODILY MOVEMENT and WAAAAH, you know what I mean. :P

And possibly Tumblr society is right and it’s done for a good, decent purpose and I’m being pigheaded and uncool by insisting on doing things my way without bothering to try and understand the local customs. I’m not usually that much of an asshole, but I am about this, for some reason. And I admit that my craving for those personal touches could very well spring from how utterly isolated and lonely I am, so maybe normal people really don’t need all the extra info and actually do just want mostly-impersonal streams of content. And that’s fine, since I know I’m kind of a weirdo even on my best days.

I’m pretty sure that that was all that I really wanted to say. I’m probably overreacting about the whole comments-in-tags thing. Like I said, it’s kind of an irrational irritation. Also, I need to stop before I write myself sober and no longer have an excuse for all of this. If you actually read all of that, you are an awesome, generous person and I’m pretty damn certain that I love you even though I have no idea who you are.