#it's kind of...small scale?

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads

The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

YA gothic horror

Victorian fantasy where mediums can commune with spirits - if they’re registered and controlled

a trans boy attempts become a Speaker as a boy, but is found out, threatened with an arranged marriage, and sent to a finishing school to ‘cure’ girls from veil sickness (hysteria)

he quickly realises girls are disappearing and their ghosts start begging him for help, and he tries to investigate and expose the horrors of the place, and survive

autistic trans boy MC, trans girl love interest

[redbean-nom]

fascinated by the implied fennec-ventress-phee friend group in tbb. even more interesting (funny) when you add boba in there during the tbobf era.

[synthaphone]

Finished the Royal Centibytes, in both pre- and post-conversion flavors!

I thought court jesters would be a fun change of pace from king/queen or prince/princess- there's a precedent for royals to occasionally be things like heralds and war(?)horses, and I wanted to make a royalgirl who isn't a princess, noblewoman, or queen. I got to learn a little about some historical female court jesters while looking for references, which was cool!

I agonized for a while over whether I should put eyelashes on the one that I arbitrarily assigned 'Royalgirl', but ended up deciding that they look cute.

[mayasdeluca]

STATION 19 7x03: 'True Colors'

[cheecats]

Can I request Shadowsight for the designs? Or maybe Frecklewish if you'd rather?

I'm curious what either would look like in your style! (Which I adore btw it's SO good)

i know Shadowsight is described as small in the books, but I prefer to interpret him with the Tigerstar(tm) tallness with Dovewing's build, and that he tends to shrink down/lower his voice while talking to appear as meek/non-threatening as possible because his peers get nervous around him

[gayemeralds]

ngl people saying this on a post about sonic the hedgehog characterization is funny. you’re going to recommend idw sonic comics which are *checks notes* an insanely controversial characterization that polarizes the entire fandom to this day?

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

i would kill for your de/isat swaps theyre so good already and i am eating it up. so glad im not the only one who saw the parallels 🔥

Thank you! I have been having an absolute blast drawing them; the parallels are too good to not have fun with it!

[veresidae]

i will not inundate the tags with my little dog but heres some full bodies of his layers or something. I cannot beleive i didnt do this last time. His vest is functioning and everything. also have him grovelling over here

[onlyfangz]

do me a favour, the next time you see a post that basically equates to trans men dont have any issues, or trans mens issues are miniscule in comparison to more important queer people, go to op's blog and count how many posts there are that are positive towards trans men.

[ardenrosegarden]

In England, English and Norman barons kill each other to seize the throne and in France, the Carolingian unity having been shattered, the little Capetian king managed his meager possessions under the vigilant and hostile eye of the great feudal lords who watched over over their strongholds and control his every move. Brittany, if it wished, could finally spread its wings. Conan III is careful not to do this and is content to govern peacefully, only too happy that the English and French ropes which hold him by the neck are suddenly so weak. A good duke, good husband, good Breton, he has everything going his way, but was unfortunately a bad father; on his deathbed he disowns Hoël, his son, and chooses as his heir Conan IV, a little boy of 9 years old, the son of his daughter Bertha.

Gilles Martin-Chauffier, Le Roman de la Bretagne

[chiropteracupola]

some may ask why I want to put something that squeaks inside one of my dolls and the simple answer is that this will be a far finer representation of david balfour if he can make an upsetting little EEP noise when squished

[threewaysdivided]

Hobson Heckled into Historical Haute-Couture

Continuing the Dan Jones & Dragons gala parade with Hobson, the Flower Crowns' oft-harried Halfling Warlock (played by the ever-wholesome Dan Floyd). Is he trying to massage away the realisation that letting his literally-half-brained patron choose his gala attire might have been a mistake? Is Valse giving him a headache over something else entirely? Did he use Detect Magic in a room full of powerful items and accidentally flash-bang himself? Yes.

More Flower Crowns Gala Outfits: Morenthal | Gelnek

As always, design talk under the cut:

But before that, a short story: I've been following Dan's content on Youtube for... oh jeez, that sure is almost a decade now, both on his current New Frame Plus/Playframe channels and back when he was the primary founder and narrator for EC. His old games education videos helped me get one of my earliest jobs in project work and introduced me to a bunch of media production concepts (like scope management) that would go on to inform some of my own storytelling analysis posts. It was a startling little moment of artistic ouroboros to realise I was mentally running through key points from Dan's own Pose Design 101 video as I was drawing his DnD character. Never expected things to come full-circle like that, but if you're seeing this, Dan: here's to you 🫡 If you're not Dan and haven't already, do go check out his stuff - it's all super well-produced, informative, funny and he's just an overall stand-up guy.

Now: onto the tiny little nerd and his passé party attire

This was a really fun costuming challenge, with a bunch of interesting curveballs thrown in the mix. Unlike the rest of the Flower Crowns, Hobson didn't choose his own party outfit: it was picked out by his patron after Valse kibbitzed him into giving up and letting a heroism-obsessed Fey call the shots. Dan cited Valse as having the fashion sense of Stede Bonnet-as-depicted-in-OFMD, briefing a vaguely 19th century-style outfit that had frilled sleeves and 'would have looked gaudy even when it was in fashion a century earlier'.

Actually dating his outfit was the first challenge. D&D settings are kind of an anachronistic uchronia, with classic swords-and-sorcery fantasy campaigns potentially pulling inspiration points from anywhere across the Arthurian era up to pre-war modernity. Which leads to the question: how do you make something seem dated in a setting where most everything looks vaguely ye-olde-fantasy? The other challenge was that, IRL, the 19th century (i.e Victorian era) was when menswear started taking on a lot of the shapes that would eventually become modern suit and top-'n'-tails fashion. Since Trilby was already going to be wearing classic top-'n'-tails formalwear, I decided to set Hobson's style earlier in the 1800s-1820s and pull in some 18th century Stede Bonnet flourishes to visually set them apart. This article provided some great reference images, and once I hit on the figured silk waistcoat I knew I had a potential starting point.

Colour-wise, I stuck with the burgundy-and-gold palette the Dans gave Hobson in his official gala stream art, since those looked good together and matched up with Dan J's tendency to draw Hobson wearing greens/earth-tones and Valse in reds/jewel-tones. The combination is a lot more colourful and richly saturated than is typical for this style of Victorian-adjacent clothes, which felt appropriate for Valse's gaudy tastes.

Fabric-wise, I figured a fun way to gaudy things up even further would be to lean into the silks and satins that were fashionable at the time, but make all of his outfit shimmery rather than just a single feature piece. As a bonus, silk and satin clothes tend be hot, inelastic and have horribly itchy seams if worn unlined, which felt like exactly the kind of thing Valse's all-form-no-function sensibilities would inflict upon the small, long-suffering fellow. Both these fabrics also have a habit of behaving hideously and ripping themselves apart when worn wet, which makes this a great outfit to, say, accidentally fight an Aboleth in. Poor Hobson.

Some other details, just for fun: 1. Hobson's sketch layers include a drawing of his un-removable cursed left bracer. He's pulled the frilly, puffy sleeve over it but you might spot hints of the shape and the gem if you squint. 2. The reference waistcoat I used had floral embroidery on it. Had this actually been a Hobson outfit, I would have converted them to his garland flower (Forget-Me-Nots), but since it was a Valse pick I decided to make them Senaliesse chrysanthemums; a flower given out to friends of the Feywild's Summer Court as a sign of protection and favour. (It also adds extra layers to Pocket mistaking Hobson for a denizen of the Fey, which is fun).

Close crop on the details because I'm very happy with how they turned out:

[bixy]

I usually use polymer clay but experimenting with air dry, these are supposed to be a birthday present for a friend and I’m stressing bc I don’t have varnish

[tsubasaclones]

the way she just shoves it in the top with no bubble wrap or ANYTHING protecting it luz your figure is going to get scratched and/or break in there. guarantee.

[possamble]

Question to a fanfic writer: do you think that, in Marcille’s research ways *And* her love for romance novels… would result in her writing some in-universe fanfics of her own? Like, maybe she hypes herself up on something and get disappointed, or maybe she finds some character decision isn’t as ideal as she thinks it could be? Or it’s as simple as she wants to play around with the characters and see what happens?

I can’t help but imagine a scenario where she’s struggling with some romantic trouble irl and she’s struggling with deciding on what to do, but then the answer slaps itself upside her head when she rediscovers her fanfics and how she LITERALLY made a character or two do the exact romantic decision she needs to do? It would so silly but yet I can’t help but find it so charming. Hell, just the imagery of her writing romance fanfics of her own At All is just… delightful to me hehehe.

you know I've been rotating this in my head since I saw it this morning and. I went through a wild journey of opinions before I realized... Marcille wouldn't think about fanfiction like we think about it. In the modern age, yeah, she'd be a complete tumblrina -- but we're talking about a 17th century-ish fantasy setting.

Writing before the digital age was a physical commitment to investing ink and paper into your thoughts -- and this is even before mass production can make pens and notebooks kind of whatever to buy and use on a regular basis. I'm sure the situation wasn't dire, but I really can't see Marcille, perfect honor student, using her allotted supply of stationery at the academy on super frivolous things.

Fanfiction has been normalized incredibly fast in the past few decades. Think about now normal and popular D&D is nowadays compared to how much people looked down on it 20-30 years ago. Fanfiction was a freakass nerd thing to do until relatively recent history, something that was even considered offensive to the original creators.

Remember, we've already seen Marcille react to adaptations with disgust. She's kind of a hater and an elitist fan. She also considers herself a Reputable Academic. In a setting where a digitized culture hasn't reframed fanfiction as an act of appreciation and creativity, she would absoluuuuuuuutely think that fanfiction was complete loser shit.

If she did write anything about her favourite books... She'd. She'd be one of those assholes who writes huge scathing reviews of Dal Clan translations into Common. She'd be the fantasy equivalent of those Weebs/Japanese elitists on twitter tearing through every single localization choice in anime and JRPGs and being so so annoying about it.

If we're being charitable, we could say she'd be able to appreciate non-faithful translation choices that still do a good job of carrying over the original spirit of what was said. But I think we also have to acknowledge the possibility that, at her worst, she'd really really be like those guys who were malding about the Unicorn Overlord localizations so hard the (correction: Final Fantasy Tactics Creator, not the Unicorn Overlord devs) had to step forward and ratio them. (The silver lining is that she'd never get published in the arts review newspapers/journals that she submits her essays to. those poor editors just have to deal with her being persistent.)

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

The Saint of Bright Doors

a surreal Sri Lankan fantasy about colonialism, revolution, mixing fantasy with the modern world

follows a man raised by his mother to kill his father, a god-like cult leader

but as an adult he puts aside his life of violence and moves to the city for a quiet life

he becomes fascinated with ‘bright doors’ around the city that never open and have no other side, and joins a group studying them to find out more

and a support group for those with divine heritage that becomes increasingly revolutionary, until the task he was made for reemerges and his life upends