#its more common to get the evil version

[starjellie]

[thealmightytrashdump]

Can you make some headcanon about his childhood? 🤔 i know he was manufactured so i suppose there were some "standards" he needed to follow at that time.

I like to imagine baby wesker couldn't be a child really. Like he was immediately groomed from maybe 7-8 weeks old to be "superior." Taken from his parents at a very very very young age. Raised mostly likely in a strict competitive environment all his life. No wonder this man has a ton of fucking issues.

First off. Getting chosen/kidnapped/orphaned. They had to select a child with quote unquote "superior genes." I'm halfway convinced they chose upper middle class white children, mayhaps with the 1940s Nazi Hilter Aryan race mindset. Spencer was in an older generation with older generation concepts cough RACISM cough so to speak.

So they obtain the child, in order to do whatever the fuck to him, they erase his birth identity from existence. Scrub him from the world and give him the new name they chose to fit the project. Albert Wesker.

Maybe they even went as far as given him a fake birthdate. Not birth year, but a fake birthday. (Basically canon at this point)

Wesker probably couldn't celebrate any holidays, or maybe all he would get as gifts were expensive reading materials/study guides/office supplies. Maybe the toys they gave him were secretly tests and puzzles and whatnot.

Maybe some of the other Wesker children were different ethnicities and they just didn't make it. So in a twisted sense perhaps that confirmed some prejudices that may or may not have been had by Umbrella's founders.

Of course his caretakers would encourage suitable behaviors and discourage certain idealogies. Not necessarily correcting bad behavior per say, more so correcting any undesirable traits like free will and fun. So maybe even from a young age, he was taught that being cruel was okay, maybe necessary to survive his upbringing. He didn't know better and no one was certainly teaching him good morals. Me thinks he wasn't raised religiously, but definitely could be wrong on this.

Of course being specifically chosen to be in the project means he naturally excelled in a boarding school learning environment. He definitely got some excellent af education.

Maybe he was on the autistism spectrum and they catered/designed his education for him specifically to succeed. Maybe they just abused him hard enough for him to learn how to survive despite any perceived learning setbacks. Either way, he did graduate at 17.

I like to think he was privately tutored but also maybe got some public university experience (where he could've met William), but canonically they supposedly met after he got his degrees and was shipped off to the arklay mountains where he worked under Dr. Marcus, right?

I like to think one of his private tutors tried to unbrainwash Albert and the trio founders of Umbrella stopped that nonsense real quick.

He has to have been raised with the other Wesker children and had to have realized their deaths/project failure was too systematic and put two and two together. For sure, Alex was the favorite of Spencer, and Albert (in terms of the wesker program) was average at best. He was superior genetically to Alex, but she was way more Intellectually advanced. Perhaps, he was an unruly child and needed a stricter lifestyle than Alex did. Either way, this is why Umbrella recuited William in, and tried to pit him and Wesker against each other. It would give Albert a goal to work towards, to strive to be better so to speak.

Albert was, of course, intelligent enough to not make enemies of his peers, Alex and William included. But that doesn't mean he liked them. Or hated them. I think he thought of them as coworkers.

His "friendship" with William (who was not raised to be a really smart sheep) definitely introduce some very interesting concepts to Wesker.

'What if not sheep but instead, a sherpard?' Which sparks his initial interest in learning about Spencer (who at this point imprinted himself on Wesker's psyche) and Umbrella. He was initally content with just getting his "dream job" as a researcher in Umbrella, but eventually begins thinking like "a sherpard" thus makes the deal with an increasingly paranoid Spencer to betray Dr. Marcus.

Of course, that means he's still under Spencer's thumb but he's starting to see the fucked up lamp in his dream bubble of a life. So schemes to get out of it by either: convincing Umbrella to let him join the military for some juicy secret B.OW. testing OR attempting to leave his predetermined life via joining the military.

(This would be around the time the virgin Wesker meets the hot dommy future Jake mommy. Mans never stood a chance.)

Either way, he must've not liked the vibes of the military because he immediately comes crawling back to being a researcher in Umbrella. Maybe due to his military experience, he gets promoted to head of security in arklay and selected to be undercover via S.T.A.R.S. Cap Wesker. Two positions, he most likely disliked heavily.

Keeping in mind, around this time, Alex was off on some island being God, William was making breakthroughs with the G virus, and now there's a new bitch(s) introduced as another rival in his life: Alexia Ashford (and her brother) who creates the T veronica Virus.

I imagine at this point, he's getting burned out, overworked, and basically the lowest asshole on the Umbrella totempole among his peers. I bet his ego was bruised and he just got tired of it.

At this point, he only had the T virus credited to him (and William), and he didn't even create it. Dr. Marcus (and co.) created it. All this man has at this point is knowledge and a ton of research and a killer body that survived one progenitor virus (this has enhanced his immune system and most likely gave him his naturally fit buff hot body.)

When the revived Queen leech Dr. Marcus starts fucking things up in the arklay mountains, this motherfucker's first thought after he realized he couldn't contain the problem (as head of security, Wesker would be the problem solver), he fucking decides to dip. "Bollocks to Umbrella." He says, and cuts a deal with some random ass organization/US military and accidentally dies trying to get some last minute B.O.W. research to sell.

Remember he had William design him a specific version of [Insert virus here](I think it was the T virus with some Wesker goop mixed in) so he probably did that as a failsafe, so he could survive. Though, it was probably untested but at this point, his career has basically imploded, and he knew it.

He literally writes that the arklay mountain and the raccoon city incident was the downfall of Umbrella and it was technically his (and William's) fault. He has nothing to lose (except his life), and everything to gain, if his gamble paid off.

And it did. He survives, and gets called a fucking loser by Chris and Jill and also sergei. Lmao. No wonder he was so smug and petty when next he sees them. Wanting to gloat and show off as much as possible.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Monsters Reimagined: Bandits

As a game of heroic fantasy that centers so primarily on combat, D&D  is more often than not a game about righteous violence, which is why I spend so much time thinking about the targets of that violence. Every piece of media made by humans is a thing created from conscious or unconscious design, it’s saying something whether or not its creators intended it to do so. 

Tolkien made his characters peaceloving and pastoral, and coded his embodiment of evil as powerhungry, warlike, and industrial. When d&d directly cribbed from Tolkien's work it purposely changed those enemies to be primitive tribespeople who were resentful of the riches the “civilized” races possessed. Was this intentional? None can say, but as a text d&d says something decidedly different than Tolkien. 

That's why today I want to talk about bandits, the historical concept of being an “outlaw”, and how media uses crime to “un-person” certain classes of people in order to give heroes a target to beat up. 

Tldr: despite presenting bandits as a generic threat, most d&d scenarios never go into detail about what causes bandits to exist, merely presuming the existence of outlaws up to no good that the heroes should feel no qualms about slaughtering. If your story is going to stand up to the scrutiny of your players however, you need to be aware of WHY these individuals have been driven to banditry, rather than defaulting to “they broke the law so they deserve what’s coming to them.”

I got to thinking about writing this post when playing a modded version of fallout 4, an npc offhndedly mentioned to me that raiders (the postapoc bandit rebrand) were too lazy to do any farming and it was good that I’d offed them by the dozens so that they wouldn’t make trouble for those that did. 

That gave me pause, fallout takes place in an irradiated wasteland where folks struggle to survive but this mod was specifically about rebuilding infrastructure like farms and ensuring people had enough to get by. Lack of resources to go around was a specific justification for why raiders existed in the first place, but as the setting became more arable the mod-author had to create an excuse why the bandit’s didn’t give up their violent ways and start a nice little coop, settling on them being inherently lazy , dumb, and psychopathic.   

This is exactly how d&d has historically painted most of its “monstrous humanoid” enemies. Because the game is ostensibly about combat the authors need to give you reasons why a peaceful solution is impossible, why the orcs, goblins, gnolls (and yes, bandits), can’t just integrate with the local town or find a nice stretch of wilderness to build their own settlement on and manage in accordance with their needs. They go so far in this justification that they end up (accidently or not) recreating a lot of IRL arguments for persecution and genocide.

Bandits are interesting because much like cultists, it’s a descriptor that’s used to unperson groups of characters who would traditionally be inside the “not ontologically evil” bubble that’s applied to d&d’s protagonists.   Break the law or worship the wrong god says d&d and you’re just as worth killing as the mindless minions of darkness, your only purpose to serve as a target of the protagonist’s righteous violence.  

The way we get around this self-justification pitfall and get back to our cool fantasy action game is to relentlessly question authority, not only inside the game but the authors too. We have to interrogate anyone who'd show us evil and direct our outrage a certain way because if we don't we end up with crusades, pogroms, and Qanon.

With that ethical pill out of the way, I thought I’d dive into a listing of different historical groups that we might call “Bandits” at one time or another and what worldbuilding conceits their existence necessitates. 

Brigands: By and large the most common sort of “bandit” you’re going to see are former soldiers left over from wars, often with a social gap between them and the people they’re raiding that prevents reintegration ( IE: They’re from a foreign land and can’t speak the local tongue, their side lost and now they’re considered outlaws, they’re mercenaries who have been stiffed on their contract).  Justifying why brigands are out brigading is as easy as asking yourself “What were the most recent conflicts in this region and who was fighting them?”. There’s also something to say about how a life of trauma and violence can be hard to leave even after the battle is over, which is why you historically tend to see lots of gangs and paramilitary groups pop up in the wake of conflict. 

Raiders:  fundamentally the thing that has caused cultures to raid eachother since the dawn of time is sacristy. When the threat of starvation looms it’s far easier to justify potentially throwing your life away if it means securing enough food to last you and those close to you through the next year/season/day. Raider cultures develop in biomes that don’t support steady agriculture, or in times where famine, war, climate change, or disease make the harvests unreliable. They tend to target neighboring cultures that DO have reliable harvests which is why you frequently see raiders emerging from “the barbaric frontier” to raid “civilization” that just so happens to occupy the space of a reliably fertile river valley. When thinking about including raiders in your story, consider what environmental forces have caused this most recent and previous raids, as well as consider how frequent raiding has shaped the targeted society. Frequent attacks by raiders is how we get walled palaces and warrior classes after all, so this shit is important. 

Slavers: Just like raiding, most cultures have engaged in slavery at one point or another, which is a matter I get into here. While raiders taking captives is not uncommon, actively attacking people for slaves is something that starts occurring once you have a built up slave market, necessitating the existence of at least one or more hierarchical societies that need more disposable workers than then their lower class is capable of providing. The roman legion and its constant campaigns was the apparatus by which the imperium fed its insatiable need for cheap slave labor. Subsistence raiders generally don’t take slaves en masse unless they know somewhere to sell them, because if you’re having trouble feeding your own people you’re not going to capture more ( this is what d&d gets wrong about monstrous humanoids most of the time). 

Tax Farmers: special mention to this underused classic, where gangs of toughs would bid to see who could collect money for government officials, and then proceed to ransack the realm looking to squeeze as much money out of the people as possible. This tends to happen in areas where the state apparatus is stretched too thin or is too lighthanded to have established enduring means of funding.  Tax farmers are a great one-two punch for campaigns where you want your party to be set up against a corrupt authority: our heroes defeat the marauding bandits and then oh-no, turns out they were not only sanctioned by the government but backed by an influential political figure who you’ve just punched in the coinpurse.  If tax farming exists it means the government is strong enough to need a yearly budget but not so established (at least in the local region) that it’s developed a reliably peaceful method of maintaining it.  

Robber Baron: Though the term is now synonymous with ruthless industrialists, it originated from the practice of shortmidned petty gentry (barons and knights and counts and the like) going out to extort and even rob THEIR OWN LANDS out of a desire for personal enrichment/boredom. Schemes can range from using their troops to shake down those who pass through their domain to outright murdering their own peasants for sport because you haven’t gotten to fight in a war for a while.  Just as any greed or violence minded noble can be a robber baron so it doesn’t take that much of a storytelling leap but I encourage you to channel all your landlord hate into this one. 

Rebels: More than just simple outlaws, rebels have a particular cause they’re a part of (just or otherwise) that puts them at odds with the reigning authority. They could violently support a disfavoured political faction, be acting out against a law they think is unjust, or hoping to break away from the authority entirely. Though attacks against those figures of authority are to be expected, it’s all too common for rebels to go onto praying on common folk for the sake of the cause.  To make a group of rebels worth having in your campaign pinpoint an issue that two groups of people with their own distinct interests could disagree on, and then ratchet up the tension. Rebels have to be able to beleive in a cause, so they have to have an argument that supports them.

Remnants: Like a hybrid of brigands, rebels, and taxfarmers, Remnants represent a previously legitimate system of authority that has since been replaced but not yet fully disappeared. This can happen either because the local authority has been replaced by something new (feudal nobles left out after a monarchy toppling revolution) or because it has faded entirely ( Colonial forces of an empire left to their own devices after the empire collapses). Remnants often sat at the top of social structures that had endured for generations and so still hold onto the ghost of power ( and the violence it can command) and the traditions that support it.  Think about big changes that have happened in your world of late, are the remnants looking to overturn it? Win new privilege for themselves? Go overlooked by their new overlords?

Art

[cy-cyborg]

Disability Tropes: The disabling change of heart

When a character in a story becomes disabled, they'll sometimes experience a trope that I like to call "the disabling change of heart". This is when the character goes through a massive change in their outlook, their personality, their goals or even roll in the story, specifically because they became (or are about to become) physically disabled. Sometimes, this will be in relatively small ways: the happy-go-lucky comedic relief character might become bitter, angry and jaded after getting into an accident that caused a spinal injury, or the severally depressed and nihilistic character might suddenly start acting more cheerful and hopeful, stating that loosing their leg has "put things into perspective and showed them what really matters". In other cases though, the impact is much larger, the heroic character you've been hearing about looses an arm thanks to the main character's actions, causing them to become consumed with anger and self-loathing which they take out on everyone else, eventually becoming an antagonist as they seek revenge for what the main character did to them. The morally grey or even villainous character is injured by their own scheme, giving themselves a permanent disability in the process, which prompts a change of heart and leads them to turn their lives around and become better people, maybe even deciding to team up with the heroes.

Now, having a character go through a personality and goal change due to a major life event, such as becoming physically disabled, isn't inherently bad. A lot of writers are told to tie major shifts in your character's development to major life events, because realistically, something like becoming newly disabled will at least impact how you view the world around you. I very frequently talk about how if I didn't loose my legs, I would have become a vastly different person, but the issues with this trope depends on how it's used and the reasons behind these developments, and whether or not the change suits the character in question.

Before we get into things, I would like to specify that in this post, I'm only going to be talking about how this trope is used with physical disabilities and other easily visible forms of disability. It does show up with characters who develop disabilities under the mentally ill and neurodivergent umbrellas, and is actually a bit more common than what I'm talking about today, but the specific ways its utilised are so different that it's more or less a separate trope, and one that deserves much more attention than I could give it here as this is already going to be a pretty long post. So for today, I'm keeping to it's use with physical and visible disabilities, and we'll talk about how this trope is used with neurodivergence and mental illness another day.

The main thing you need to be mindful of is ensuring that you, as an author, are not including your ingrained biases about disability into the reasoning behind the change. Let's look at one of the examples from before, an evil character who, after loosing their arm (because it's almost always loosing an arm for some reason) becomes a villain and wants revenge against the main character. In a story like this example, the character who became an amputee often views this new disability as something that has ruined their life. It's something that has caused them to suffer, and they want to make the main character (or whoever has "wronged" them) suffer like they did. Stories like this example portray disability as something that is not just horrible, but life-destroying, especially with villains who become all-consumed by the misery this disability has brought them. Many stories that utilise this version of the trope also often perpetuate the idea that if you become disabled, you'll have to give up all the things you love and your goals, even when this wouldn't necessarily be true for the character in question.

Let's say your character was a knight, and the main character cut off their arm in a training accident. obviously you can't be a knight with only one arm because you can't fight anymore, so they left their order. Now this character has become a villain and has found power that "makes up" for their disability, perhaps magic or some other force that doesn't exist in the real world, and are back to get revenge on the character for ruining their lives. Here's the thing though, the loss of a limb, or at least, the loss of an arm specifically, often isn't the career ender people think it is, even back then. In fact, there are many historical records of real amputees continuing to serve as knights and other similar military roles after loosing an arm or at the very least, continuing to fight in other ways. One such example was Götz of the Iron Hand, a mercenary knight who lost his arm to a cannon. Götz had fought as part of the Roman empire's military in 1498, but shortly after left to form his own mercenary company. He lost his hand in 1504 and continued his career as a mercenary with the help of an iron prosthetic capable of holding his sword and the reigns of his horse, among many other things such as writing, for another 40 years. Götz wasn't unique in this though, several suits of armour from the same time period have been found with integrated prosthetic hands, though the names of their owners are unknown. There was also Oruç Reis (aka Aruj Barbarossa), A privateer admiral who served the Ottoman Empire in and around the Mediterranean who lost his left hand - earning him one of many nicknames: Silver-Hand, thanks to the colour of his prosthetic. Oruç, like Götz, continued his career for several more years until he was eventually killed in 1518.

My point in bringing this up, is to highlight how important it is to double check that the reason your character's whole motivation for turning to villainy, isn't just based on your ideas about what a disabled person can or can not do. Actually double check it, research it, especially if it's important for your plot.

Even in the cases where the disability in question actually would stop someone from being able to do something, the incorrect assumptions can still occur and cause issues in different ways. For example, a character in a more modern setting who looses their arm due to an accident the main character was responsible for while serving in the military would be discharged, ruining the character's plan to become a general some day. This absolutely would be devastating for a character like that, and they realistically could struggle to adjust, both in terms of getting used to their disability and finding new goals for their life. They may well feel anger at the main character, however, if you are portraying just living with a disability, in the case of this example, living with an amputation as inherently "suffering" for no other reason than they are disabled, it is still perpetuating those really negative ideas about disability. I've said this a few times in other posts, but villains who are evil or even just antagonists purely because they're disabled or are trying to avoid becoming disabled is a trope all its own and one that is best avoided if you yourself aren't disabled, as even outside of spreading these negative ideas about life with a disability, it's just an overdone and overused trope.

But what about when this trope goes in the other direction? when you have an antagonistic or even just morally grey character who becomes disabled and this is the catalyst that turns them into a good guy?

For the longest time, I knew I usually disliked this version of the trope too, but I couldn't put my finger on why. With disability being the reason someone became a villain, the underlying reason it's there is often able to be boiled down to "I, the writer, think being disabled would be terrible and life like that is inherently suffering, so this character is angry about it," which is obviously an issue (the "inherently suffering" bit, not the anger). However, when a character becomes good due to becoming disabled, the reasoning is usually more along the lines of, "this is a big change in a character's life that has caused them to reconsider and revaluate things" (or at least, that's what I thought). This isn't bad, nor is it necessarily unrealistic. Hell, as I already said, I do consider my disability to be a catalyst that made me into who I am today. I also know plenty of people who, after becoming disabled later in life, did have a big change in how they viewed themselves and the world, and who consider themselves better people since becoming disabled. It's far, far from a universal experience, mind you, but it does happen. So why did this version of the trope still not sit right with me?

Well, I think there's a few reasons for it. The first being that there's a tendency for non-disabled people to think real disabled people are just incapable of evil deeds, both in the sense that they aren't physically capable of doing them (which is bad and not even always true for the reasons we already discussed), but also in the sense that there's this idea that disabled people are, for some reason, inherently more "good" and "innocent" - As if breaking your back or loosing a limb causes all evil and impure thoughts to be purged from the body. This is a result of many folks viewing disabled people as child-like, and thus attributing child-like traits (such as innocence) to them, even subconsciously. This is an incredibly common issue and something disability rights organisations are constantly pushing back against, as this mentality can cause a lot of unnecessary barriers for us. With how often I and many other disabled people are subjected to infantilization, I would be honestly shocked if it wasn't at least partially responsible for people thinking becoming disabled is a good reason to kick off a redemption arc.

This infantilization isn't unique to physically disabled people by the way, in fact it's way, way, more commonly directed at people with intellectual and developmental disabilities - or at least, people are more open about it, but as I already mentioned, how that is reflected in tropes like The Disabling Change of Heart is vastly different and deserves a post of it's own.

That's mostly just speculation on my part though, since that infantilising mindset does show up a lot in media, but not usually as part of this trope specifically.

However, it's not the only reason I wasn't a fan of it. When the disabling change of heart is used to fuel redemption arcs, I think, once again, that the disability itself being credited with causing the change directly is another factor. When this happens, it's usually because "it put things into perspective for me and showed me what really mattered."

This sounds better than our previous example on the surface, but stories that use this logic are often still portraying disability as an inherently bad and tragic thing, something so bad, in fact, that it makes all the other (legitimate) issues they thought were massive before seem so small by comparison. This is a type of inspiration porn: content made to make non-disabled people feel inspired or just better about their own situation. It's the mentality of "well my life is bad, but it could be worse, at least I'm not disabled like that!"

In a fictional story, this might look like an athlete character who dreamed of making it big so they could be famous and get out of poverty. They were a dick to anyone who got in their way but only because they were worried about not being able to make rent if they don't constantly win. One day though, they overworked themselves and got into a car accident on the way home because they were too tired, and now they're in a wheelchair and can no longer walk, which is (supposedly) absolutely tragic and way worse than anything else they were already going through. But they end up becoming a better person because it has put things into perspective for them. Yeah they were struggling to make ends meet, but at least they weren't disabled! Now that they are, they know they shouldn't have cared so much, because money doesn't matter when compared to not being able to walk, right?

As well as portraying disability in a negative light, these kinds of stories dismiss and diminish the other struggles or challenges the character is experiencing, placing the status of "not disabled" above all else.

There's also the fact that, when a lot of real people say their disabilities had positive impacts on their lives, they don't usually mean the disability itself is directly responsible for the change. There's exceptions of course but for myself personally, and most of the people I know who say they are better people because of/since becoming disabled, the disability has been more of a neutral catalyst than the actual cause of positive change. Meaning, it opened the door to allow those changes to happen, but it wasn't the direct cause. For me personally, becoming physically disabled at a young age didn't make me a nice person like people expect, I was still a little judgemental asshole for a lot of my childhood. However, because I was disabled, I had to travel a lot, initially because I needed medical treatment that my local hospital wasn't equip to provide, and later, because I started competing in disability sports. because of both of those things, I met people I never would have otherwise who made me reconsider what I'd been taught on a wide range of subjects, and made me question where those beliefs had come from in the first place. When I say my disability played a part in who I became, it wasn't because my disability itself change me, but it helped me meet people who were positive influences on me and my life. but when creatives make characters who experience arcs like this, they ignore this, again, defaulting to the "this was a bad thing that just put all my other problems into perspective" reasoning.

Some iterations of this trope also use disability as a kind of "karmic punishment" where the disability is portrayed as a rightfully deserved punishment for an evil character's deeds - usually something relating to the disability they acquired but not always. An example might look like an evil tyrant who punishes the rebels they captured by cutting off their hands. Eventually, this catches up with him, maybe the friend or a child of one of the rebels is able to capture the tyrant and cuts his hands off as payback so that he gets a taste of his own medicine, a taste of the suffering he imposed on others. Now facing at least one of the same realities of the people he subjugated, he realises the error of his ways. With some pressure from the main characters, he has a change of heart and surrenders himself, steps down to let someone else take his place, or perhaps he decides to start changing policies to be more in-line with these new morals until some other character usurps him, becoming an even bigger threat than the previous former tyrant.

Once again, stories that use a disability like this are still portraying the disability as an overall inherently bad thing, but there's the added layer at play in this example. The thing is, there are a lot of people in real-life who actually believe disability is a punishment from God. I remember one time when I was over in the US, an older lady came and sat down on the seat beside me on the bus and started asking me about my disability and specifically, how I became disabled. This isn't an unusual interaction, it happens fairly regularly whenever I use public transport, but on this particular day, the conversation suddenly shifted when I told her I became disabled when I was very young. This woman, despite the bus-driver's best efforts to get her to stop, ended up lecturing me for an hour and a half (during which time I couldn't move due to how my wheelchair was held in place) about how my disability was punishment from God for my parent's sins. She then tried to convince me to attend her church, claiming they would be able to heal me. And the thing is, this isn't an uncommon experience.

A lot of disabled people are targeted by cults using this same method: they'll convince people their disabilities are a punishment, make them believe they deserved it, that they just weren't good enough, but don't worry, if you repent and come to our specific church we can heal you. There was even a case in Australia recently that uncovered a cult called Universal Medicine, who taught that disabled people were reincarnations of evil people, and that being disabled in this life was their punishment, as well as that parents who have disabled children were being punished for other sinful behaviours. They were found to be operating a disability care service named Fabic that was being paid for by the NDIS, a subsection of the Australian government funded healthcare system that specifically aids disabled Australians by paying for and subsidising treatments, technologies (such as mobility aids) and other services relating to their disability. Fabic was found to be stealing excessive amounts of funding from their disabled clients under the guise of therapies and carer services, but was not actually helping their clients at all. Whether it's just taking advantage of them to get their money, or actually using this logic as a justification to mistreat them, this mentality of "disability is a punishment" actually gets real disabled people hurt or worse, and so seeing it come up in media, even if there is no ill-intent, can be very distressing and uncomfortable for disabled audiences.

So with all this being said, is the disabling change of heart a trope you should avoid in all it's forms and versions? No, but it does need to be handled with extreme care. I do think it should be avoided as a reason for a character becoming evil for the most part. If that really can't be avoided in your story though, at the very least, ensure that you foreshadow the change. Your happy little ray of sunshine, embodiment of sweetness and innocence type character probably isn't going to turn murderous and want revenge for an accident for example. A character who is likely to be driven to that kind of extreme of wanting revenge for their disability, so much so that they become a villain, probably already had at least a few traits that would predispose them to that line of thinking already, before becoming disabled. As for when it goes in the other direction, and you have a character becoming a good guy, avoid using the reasoning that "the disability put things into perspective for me". Instead, if you must use this version of the trope, use the character's new disability as the reason they encountered other people and situations that challenged their views, things they wouldn't have encountered otherwise. No matter the reason though, be very careful to avoid inspiration porn, and as always, try to find a sensitivity reader to give your story a once-over, just to make sure something didn't slip under your radar.

[Thumbnail ID: An illustrated image showing the same elf character twice. The picture of her on the left shows her laughing evilly, two tiny horns protruding through her brown hair. She is wearing a black dress and red shoes. On the right shows her in a yellow dress, sitting in a bright pink wheelchair with her head held eye and her eyes closed. The horns have been replaced with a glowing halo. In the centre is text that reads: "Disability Tropes: The disabling change of heart." /End ID]

[firestorm09890]

this is going to be an odd post but having finished Don Quixote, I think... Project Moon turning Limbus Company's version of Don into a vampire is not any more of a disservice to her source material than anything else they could've done with her character.

The arc everyone expected from her was that she'd witness the horrors of the city and it'd shatter her whimsy, and now that she's a vampire, she's... definitely going to be doing something different. But you know what?

Nothing like that- having beliefs shattered by seeing the horrors- happens in the book Don Quixote.

He goes through 99% of the story with his delusions intact, unbreakable by anyone or anything. If he sees something that doesn't line up with his beliefs, he says an evil enchanter has changed its appearance. The closest he gets to having his beliefs changed by his experiences is when he starts seeing inns as they are instead of as castles, near the end.

His spirit is broken when he loses a battle and is forced to go home and take a year off of knight errantry... but not because he realizes he was wrong, he's sad because he has to take a year off of knight errantry.

You know how he stops believing in his delusions?

He gets sick, with the text saying it's from depression, and then after a few days of being in bed, he wakes up completely sane and holding the belief that everything he did in this book was stupid. And then he dies.

I'm not going to lie, I don't like the ending very much. And giving that ending to Limbus Don would, despite being accurate to the source material, not be great and would probably be widely considered as bad writing.

The story of a girl realizing that the City sucks is about as faithful to the original Don Quixote as her suddenly being a centuries-old vampire because neither of them actually happen in the book and both would change the entire structure of the story if they did happen. Also, "bright-eyed person who believes in justice learns the hard way that the real world is too harsh for that fantasy" is a very common theme in the City that we've already seen with Finn from Yun's office in Ruina, Garnet from Leviathan, and pretty much every fresh fixer out there, so basically I'm saying I support this decision

[gatorbites-imagines]

Can i request the continuation of jason todd and dick grayson yandere ask? Maybe add in smut aswell. (Don't force yourself!, Take a good care of yourself 💗)

-🥚 anon

Yandere Jason Todd x speedster male reader x Yandere Dick Grayson

Part 2

Headcanons

Imagine sitting in a spinny chair petting a cat like a bond villain. I have wanted to write a part two for this for a while. Instead of reader just dating his og universes version of them, what if reader was dating multiple people 👀? Cuz you cant imagine the kid of Thawne being a nice person.

Ill refer to readers original universe as OG verse, and the yandere universe as yan verse cuz its easier to understand.

Part 1 can be found here

In part 1 yan Dick and Jason has pretty much abandoned their former dimension in smithereens after having wiped out the entire justice league, as they tried to stop them from crossing dimensions and tearing a hole in reality itself to find you.

So, when Yan Dick and Jason appear in your OG dimension, different procedures set up by the league notify them about the tear in reality and how unstable it is. They’d rush there and find two bloody and battered versions of Dick and Jason, and thinking they fled some battle or a doomed timeline, they bring them to the tower.

When Jason and Dick wake up, they immediately fall back on the many tricks they had been taught under their batman, who was apparently even better at lying than OG batman, as they believe them when they claim their home dimension was destroyed and they have nowhere to go.

It takes a while to work Yan Dick and Jason into the league and their hero roster, but they never suspect them of being anything less than heroes and stable. They start calling them Rick and Jay since it gets confusing with multiple people named the same thing.

They don’t drop hints that they know you, but they do try to figure out where you are and what you are doing at all times, but its harder than they thought it would be. Who would have thought trying to track a guy that can cross dimensions and time at will would be so difficult.

Rick almost bursts a blood vessel when he hears some of the younger OG league members talking about how “Mach 10 has been dating multiple people at once”, and Jay wants to curl up into a ball and disappear and tear himself apart.

Their obsession finally starts showing through the cracks as they use league resources to find you and stalk you. More and more cracks appear in their masks and fake personalities, as they see you going on dates with other people.

Jericho, Jamie Reyes, Roy Harper, Garth, Kyle Rayner, the list went on. You seemed to be dating multiple people at once, at the same time, as you used your powers to be in multiple places at once.

You weren’t a good person, so you hadn’t even felt bad when Jamie had cried finding out you were cheating on him with multiple people, you just shrugged and asked him what he had expected from Thawnes offspring.

It was common knowledge amongst the younger league members that you were down to a roll in the sheets with most, but there wasn’t a loyal bone in your body, and you could easily turn on whoever you were dating at the time if it was part of a plan.

Of course. Rick and Jay never saw you as the problem. How could you be? You were perfect, you were everything that mattered in the multiverse, and you could do no wrong. It had to be your partners that were the issue, they had to be neglecting your needs and leaving you having to resort to finding different ways to meet them.

OG justice league knew Rick and Jay had some issues, but they had always blamed it on coming from a dimension that had been destroyed by some unknown evil. But as time passed, they started to think that maybe the backstory they had been given wasn’t true.

It came to a head when one day Rick almost gutted Roy after he and Jay had followed you around Coast city, where you had met up with Roy and the two of you had gone on a date, ending with you two back in Roy’s apartment.

Rick and Jay were both cracking as they saw others put their grubby disgusting hands all over you and just doing whatever they wanted. Whenever they heard others insult you, they felt like repeating what they had done in their original universe.

After Rick attacked Roy, he was placed on probation. Jay was more subtle about his plans, as he wasn’t as blinded by rage as Rick and was more fueled by not feeling like he was good enough and blaming himself.

People didn’t even put two and two together for a while when your non league admirers started going missing, only to be found much later dead in many different ways. There was no way to tie the murders together, but it was clear there was a pattern, but no one could figure out what it was.

The league finally discovered just what type of people Jay and Rick were when you one day wandered into the tower. Maybe the league needed your help with something involving the speedforce, or the negative speedforce.

But the moment the two yanderes saw you, it was like they became completely different people, the masks they had been wearing for months shattered as they almost stumbled over each other to get to you first.

You just saw in your seat grinning to yourself as they clambered into your lap, vile threats of what he could do to anyone who touched to passing Ricks lips, as Jay warbled out apologies and begs for you to love him and appreciate him.

The league wasn’t sure what to do, but their suspicions only grew. It got to the point where they somehow track down the dimension the Yans originally come from, to see what really happened. Imagine their horror when they learn Rick and Jay killed all of them out of obsession fueled love for you.

But when they finally figured out the truth, Rick and Jay fully dropped their roles and started chasing you around like lovesick puppies again, butchering anyone who got in their way.

The league could lock them up, but they had also seen what happened when they were separated from you, and as long as they were around you and an had no reason to lash out, they seemed fine for the most part.

You had moments where you would peace out to different dimensions, especially when Rick and Jay started foiling all your attempts to mess around with other people, Rick always exploding in rage and Jay breaking down in tears and wails of misery.

Again, you were never a good person, and they annoyed you sometimes, but it was kinda cute to have them begging for scraps of your attention even as the league tried again and again to capture them and lock them away.

Rick and Jay never find a way to lock you away, you are just too powerful. But they at some point stumble across ways to make themselves stronger so they can keep up. Like making themselves speedsters, or developing gear to follow and track you, they come up with something.

But you learn an easy way to distract them is by piling attention on them for a while, get them comfortable, then you can peace out when they get on your nerves.

Jay is always easier to trick than Rick, as Jay is always aching for any tiny piece of attention and love youll give him, his knees always buckling when you kiss him or hold him, words almost akin to worship always tumbling out from between his lips towards you.

Rick is harder to trick, as hes always suspicious and angry, but an easy way is to dominate him in some way, like tying him up and then leaving him there, leaving him to get out on his own, or get help from Jay if he needs it.

All in all, the league is scared and cautious, but knows they wont be an active threat to the league as long as they have you. And your relationship with your yanderes is nowhere near healthy, with you only loving them like someone would love a pet or a toy, and them loving you way too much.

But what can someone expect from the offspring of Thawne, and two extremely unstable Bats.

[theoutcastrogue]

Cold Iron in folklore, fiction, and RPGs

'Gold is for the mistress—silver for the maid! Copper for the craftsman cunning at his trade.' 'Good!' said the Baron, sitting in his hall, 'But Iron—Cold Iron—is master of them all!' — Rudyard Kipling, “Cold Iron”

Folklore

Drudenmesser, or "witch-knife", an apotropaic folding knife from Germany

The notion that iron (or steel) can ward against evil spirits, witches, fairies, etc is very widespread in folklore. You hang a horseshoe over your threshold to deny entry to evil spirits, you carry an iron tool with you to make sure devils won't assault you, you place a small knife under the baby's crib to ward it from witches, and so on. Iron is apotropaic in many many cultures.

In English, we often come across passages that refer to apotropaic cold iron (or cold steel). "All uncouth, unknown Wights are terrifyed by nothing earthly so much as by cold Iron", says Robert Kirk in 1691, which I believe is the earliest example. "Evil spirits cannot bear the touch of cold steel. Iron, or preferably steel, in any form is a protection", says John Gregorson Campbell in 1901.

Words

So what is cold iron? In this context, it’s just iron. The “cold” part is poetic, especially – but not only – if we’re talking about either blades (or swords, weapons, the force of arms) or manacles and the like. It just sounds more ominous. There are “cold yron chaines” in The Fairie Queene (1596), and a 1638 book of travels tells us that a Georgian general (in the Caucasus) vowed “to make the Turk to eat cold iron”.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang defines “cold iron” as a sword, and dates the term to 1698. From 1725 it appears in Cant dictionaries (could this sense be thieves’ cant, originally? why not, plenty of words and expressions started as underworld slang and then entered the mainstream), and from ~1750 its use becomes much more common.

NGram Viewer diagram for 1600-2019.

In other contexts, cold iron is (surprise!) iron that’s not hot. So let’s talk a bit about metallurgy.

Metals

In nature, we can find only one kind of iron that’s pure enough to work with: meteoritic iron. It has to literally fall from the sky. Barring that very rare occurrence, people have to mine the earth for iron ore, which is not workable as is. To separate the iron from the ore we have to smelt it, and for that we need heat, in the form of hot charcoals. Throwing the ore on the coals won’t do much of anything, it’s not hot enough. But if we enclose the coals in a little tower built of clay, leaving holes for air flow, the temperature rises enough to smelt the ore. That’s called a bloomery.

clay bloomery / medieval bloomery / beating the bloom to get rid of the slag

What comes out of the bloomery is a bloom: a porous, malleable mass of iron (that we need) and slag (byproducts that we don’t need). But now we can get rid of the slag and turn the porous mass to something solid, by hammering the hot bloom over and over. And once the slag is off, by the same process we can give it a desired shape in the forge, reheating it as needed. This is called “working” the iron, hence “wrought iron” objects, i.e. forged.

a blacksmith in his forge, with bellows, fire, and anvil (English woodcut, 1603)

This is the lowest-tech version, possibly going back to ~2000 BCE in Nigeria. If we add bellows, the improved air flow will raise the temperature. So smelting happens faster and more efficiently in the bloomery, and so does heating the iron in the forge, making it easier to work with. And that’s the standard process from the Iron Age all through the middle ages and beyond (although in China they may have skipped this stage and gone straight to the next one).

If we make the bloomery bigger and bigger, with stronger and stronger bellows, we end up with a blast furnace, a construction so efficient that the temperature outright melts the iron, and it’s liquified enough to be poured into a mould and acquire the desired shape when it cools off. This is “cast iron”.

a blast furnace

So in all of this, what’s cold iron? Well, it’s iron that went though the heat and cooled off. (No heat = no iron, all you got is ore.) If it came out of a bloomery, or if it wasn’t cast, it’s by definition worked, hammered, beaten, wrought, and that happened while it was still hot.

Is there such a thing as “cold-wrought” iron? No. In fact, “working cold iron” was a simile for something foolish or pointless. A smith who beats cold iron instead of putting it in the fire shows folly, says a 1694 book on religion, so you too should choose your best tools, piety and good decorum, to educate your children and servants, instead of beating them. When Don Quixote (1605) declares he’ll go knight-erranting again, Sancho Panza tries to dissuade him, but it’s like “preaching in the desert and hammering on cold iron” (a direct translation of martillar en hierro frío).

Minor work can be done on cold iron. A 1710 dictionary of technical terms tells us that a rivetting-hammer is “chiefly used for rivetting or setting straight cold iron, or for crooking of small work; but ’tis seldom used at the forge”. Fully fashioning an object out of cold iron is not a real process – though a 1659 History of the World would claim that in Arabia it’s so hot that “smiths work nails and horseshoes out of cold iron, softened only by the vigorous heat of the sun, and the hard hammering of hands on the anvil”. [I declare myself unqualified to judge the veracity of this statement, let's just say I have doubts.] And there is of course such a thing as “cold wrought-iron”, as in wrought iron after it’s cooled off.

Either way, in the context of pre-20th century English texts which refer to apotropaic “cold iron”, it’s definitely not “cold-wrought”, or meteoritic, or a special alloy of any kind. It’s just iron.

Fiction

The old superstition kept coming up in fantasy fiction. In 1910 Rudyard Kipling wrote the very influential short story “Cold Iron” (in the collection Rewards and Fairies), where he explains invents the details of the fairies’ aversion to iron. They can’t bewitch a child wearing boots, because the boots have nails in the soles. They can’t pass under a doorway guarded by a horseshoe, but they can slip through the backdoor that people neglected to guard. Mortals live “on the near side of Cold Iron”, because there’s iron in every house, while fairies live “on the far side of Cold Iron”, and want nothing to do with it. And changelings brought up by fairies will go back to the world of mortals as soon they touch cold iron for the first time.

In Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword (1954), we read:

“Let me tell you, boy, that you humans, weak and short-lived and unwitting, are nonetheless more strong than elves and trolls, aye, than giants and gods. And that you can touch cold iron is only one reason.”

In Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (1968) the unicorn is imprisoned in an iron cage:

“She turned and turned in her prison, her body shrinking from the touch of the iron bars all around her. No creature of man’s night loves cold iron, and while the unicorn could endure its presence, the murderous smell of it seemed to turn her bones to sand and her blood to rain.”

Poul Anderson would come back to that idea in Operation Chaos (1971), where the worldbuilding’s premise is that magic and magical creatures have been reintroduced into the modern world, because a scientist “discovered he could degauss the effects of cold iron and release the goetic forces”. And that until then, they had been steadily declining, ever since the Iron Age came along.

There are a million examples, I’m just focusing on those that would have had a more direct influence on roleplaying games. However, I should note that all these say “cold iron” but mean “iron”. Yes, the fey call it cold, but they are a poetic bunch. You can’t expect Robin Goodfellow’s words to be pedestrian, now can you?

RPGs

And from there, fantasy roleplaying systems got the idea that Cold Iron is a special material that fey are vulnerable to. The term had been floating around since the early D&D days, but inconsistently, scattered in random sourcebooks, and not necessarily meaning anything else than iron. In 1st Edition’s Monster Manual (1977) it’s ghasts and quasits who are vulnerable to it, not any fey creature. Devils and/or fiends might dislike iron, powdered cold iron is a component in Magic Circle Against Evil, and “cold-wrought iron” makes a couple of appearances. For example, in AD&D it can strike Fool’s Gold and turn it back to its natural state, revealing the illusion.

Then Changeling: The Dreaming came along and made it a big deal, a fundamental rule, and an anathema to all fae:

Cold iron is the ultimate sign of Banality to changelings. ... Its presence makes changelings ill at ease, and cold iron weapons cause horrible, smoking wounds that rob changelings of Glamour and threaten their very existence.... The best way to think about cold iron is not as a thing, but as a process, a very low-tech process. It must be produced from iron ore over a charcoal fire. The resulting lump of black-gray material can then be forged (hammered) into useful shapes. — Changeling: The Dreaming (2nd Edition, 1997)

So now that we know how iron works, does that description make sense? Well, if we assume that the iron ore is unceremoniously dumped on coals, it does not. You can’t smelt iron like that. If we assume that a bloomery is involved even though it’s not mentioned, then yes, this is broadly speaking how iron’s been made since the Iron Age, and until blast furnaces came into the picture. But the World of Darkness isn’t a pseudo-medieval setting, it’s modern urban fantasy. So the implication here is that “cold iron” is iron made the old way: you can’t buy it in the store, someone has to replicate ye olde process and do the whole thing by hand. Now, this is NOT how the term “cold iron” has been used in real life or fiction thus far, but hey, fantasy games are allowed to invent things.

Regardless, 3.5 borrowed the idea, and for the first time D&D made this a core rule. Now most fey creatures had damage reduction and took less damage from weapons and natural attacks, unless the weapon was made of Cold Iron:

“This iron, mined deep underground, known for its effectiveness against fey creatures, is forged at a lower temperature to preserve its delicate properties.” — Player’s Handbook (3.5 Edition, 2003)

Pathfinder kept the rule, though 5e did not. And unlike Changeling, this definition left it somewhat ambiguous if we’re talking about a material with special composition (i.e. not iron) or made with a special process (i.e. iron but). The community was divided, threads were locked over this!

So until someone points me to new evidence, I’ll assume that the invention of cold iron as a special material, distinct from plain iron, should be attributed to TTRPGs.

[arceus-insanity]

Why Did Teen & Tween Girls Love Creepypastas so Much?

The creepypasta fandom was my first fandom, it introduced me to fandom when I was 13 and every once in a blue moon, I check in on it. But why was it so popular amongst young girls? Part of it is that the line between ‘canon’ and fandom was made of tissue paper with a ton of holes. It allowed a feeling of engagement and belonging as anyone could add to the lore, and there was a possibility of your story or character taking off.

But after seeing the endless anti-writing advice of WhY dOeS eVeRy ViLlIaN nEeD tO bE cOmPlEx! No Tragic villains! We only want evil for the sake of being evil! I’ve been thinking about how all the creepypastas have sympathetic backstories, more of the creepypasta characters have tragic backstories than murderers.

Now I’m all for evil characters who are just asshats like Jack Horner (Dreamworks Puss in Boots 2), or the classic Disney villains, but so many spout this ‘advice’ without getting into why evil for the sake of being evil villains are good, or the pitfalls of tragic or complex villains, hence why I’m calling it anti-writing advice.

So why did tragic creepypasta characters work so well?

For starters and addressing one of the most dissed aspects, is the story quality, while with anyone writing or adding to the fandom quality varied to extreme degrees, most of them including one of the most well-known (Jeff the Killer 2011) was shit. These stories weren’t popular because they were well written, they were popular because they were engaging. They are like campfire stories, their value wasn’t based on quality but on the ideas they had. 

Now Teen girls and tweens are shamed for everything (See all the criticism Turning Red got for being ‘cringey’), they are dealing with the lack of respect a child gets and the expectations of an adult (to simplify). It’s also a common age for us to be discovering the darker elements of the world, assuming we haven’t experienced them ourselves yet. Many are dealing with bullies, or dealing with being catcalled or worse (a lot of the girl creepypasta’s were sexually assaulted, or betrayed by their partners). But I think a huge part of it is these characters let us live out our rage through them (to an extreme) (I recommend watching this short video on what I’m talking about, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2Ea8fwetA8). One of the criticisms I’ve seen for Encanto is how peacefully the movie has Mirabel treat Alma after everything. Part of that was to allow viewers to live out the idyllic ending that many people who relate to Mirabel in her mistreatment by her family and community where their (for lack of a better word) abusers realize they were wrong and change. The group levelling this criticism or writing and/ or reading many of the fics on ao3 want to enjoy the other confronting your abuser fantasy, the revenge route, whether that be violent or not.

Jeff the Killer; Woods (2011) Vs Hodek (2008)

Now him and Slenderman being the most famous creepypasta’s out there, Jeff’s story is known for how shit it is. The famous 2011 Woods version isn’t going to win any rewards for its writing, but it’s not the original, so why is it the famous one, especially as I heard the OG was better, or at least more realistic? Well, I read the original, watched the video, the wiki and the official DeviantArt summary for it, and wondered how the Hell is this better written or more realistic, maybe by a molecule. It was harder to follow along how Jeff Hodek became a killer. But more than that, he was boring and what could have made him a ‘relatable’ (read understandable or even interesting) character was only in the summary and didn’t have any focus on it.

Meanwhile Woods, in the main confrontations in his story, didn’t start them. First, it was some violent kids going after him and his brother and not being prepared for someone who could and would fight back, albeit very violently. This is followed by the adults (his parents and the police) only listening to one side of the story and refusing to do any further investigation, which Liu purposely takes the blame for getting taken to juvie. His mom forces him to attend some random little kid's birthday party so she can fit in even after the prior events, where those bullies then show up to attack him again. Jeff wins again but arrives at the hospital with his signature white skin. And when he gets home and ends up killing his parents, it's after his mom says “get the gun”, after finding him mutilating himself in the bathroom, not call the doctor, or authorities, kill him that's the call. The only time he starts an incident is at the end of the story, and the start which takes place after so he’s on the run in this, and how far the violence goes isn't shown in those instances. Is this some badly written power fantasy bullshit, yes, but it’s interesting, it’s engaging, and Jeff can be used as a way to vent rage with a needed amount of distance

Eyeless Jack: Everyone Gets Backstories

Eyeless Jack is a perfect example of how every popular creepypasta character had a tragic past because he did not come with one. In his original story, he’s just a scary monster who breaks into someone’s home, steals an organ and the next night kills someone in that house. There are some interesting aspects, such as his surgical knowledge and the evidence that Eyeless Jack eats people, but most he seems to be a cross between a slasher and a monster. Then someone else gave him a backstory. It had him as a medical student that a cult sacrificed to some god turning him into Eyeless Jack. And for the most part everyone accepted that as Jack’s backstory, to the point his wiki had to include it

Carrying This over to The League of Villains (My Hero Academia)

Now years after the fact and a couple of fandoms later, I finally give in and read My Hero Academia. Now the fan content that pushed me into the series were major Midoriya fans and of Class 1A. And the Fics I first sought out reflected this, but it did not stay that way. I ended up becoming a massive fan of the League of Villains, and my opinion of Deku, 1A, the Heroes, and their supporters soured more and more over time. I found that the LoV weren’t the system failing but working exactly as intended, as not only were we shown the humanity (& backstories) of the League, but the ‘heroes’ constantly making disturbing decisions and doubling down.

A huge part of why I got into the series was because the early arcs seemed to present themselves as not just being a hero story but a story that challenged the toxic elements of not just its society but others as well. But as it went on not only did the protagonists fail to live up to that, but so much of the later arcs reframe the beginning arcs for the worse. The League however delivered on what drew me to this series, there were other elements, like the smaller cast allowed there to be some actual focus & development on the characters in the short moments we got with them.

While we were constantly with the heroes, we were constantly being introduced to new characters, and focusing on the supposed ‘greatness’ of an abusive monster, and spoiled abusive brat. The solutions the hero side showed were painfully superficial, avoided dealing with any of the root issues caused by their ‘wonderful’ hero society, doubling down to hell & back and more often than not just plain stupid & ignorant.

Why I Can’t Like the ‘Good’ Victims

Part of what inspired this post was another post (It’s been months since I saw it so this isn’t an exact quote) saying that Dabi (Touya Todoroki and one of the main members of the League) was the rage of eldest daughter syndrome. Not Fuyumi, his younger sister by less than a year, and very blatantly parentified, Dabi.

Why? For starters, while Fuyumi’s intro page says she resents her abusive father, her actions paint a very different story. In practice, she’s the most eager to be a loving daughter, and constantly supports him, even against her younger brother Natsuo who doesn’t want to forgive him.

Rei is even worse for this, telling Fuyumi and Natsuo that she forgives the man who abused her to the point of a mental breakdown the first time we meet her, because he sent her a flower. And is seen at the end pushing his wheelchair around, so his caretaker.

Did I forget to mention that Touya was believed dead, at age 13, as the result of that thing’s ‘parenting’, read abuse and grooming

I want to like them, there are so many characters in this series that I want to like but I just can’t force myself to after reading this series. Because as a blatant of an example(s) the Todoroki family is, they aren’t unique.

This whole series demands that everyone be good victims, and shows that a good victim must not only be silent on their mistreatment, never act out in even the slightest way, but should support their abuser, the reward of which is going back to the same circumstances that enabled this to begin with.

[in1-nutshell]

Hello! I hope you’re doing well! So, in G1, there is an episode where four Autobots ended up briefly turning into humans, called Only Humans. That episode was fun, but sadly, there were too much actions and not enough bots experiencing common phenomenons of a human body, which would have been SO fun! So may I request a similar scenario with TFP Ratchet, Optimus Prime, Arcee, Bee, and Bulkhead? But this time the times where they stayed humans were longer than that G1 episode, and during the time these guys got to experience all kinds of human body experiences like hiccups, goosebumps, throwing up, falling inside of their sleep, strung by mosquitoes, and maybe even a cold, so on and so on. And tbh I just want to know who do you think would be the ones to freak out ant goosebumps (think that bugs are crawling under them) and who would be the one to think that a 39 Celsius fever + a nasty throw up is probably normal for human body and no cause for concern? And to make this funnier I ask for a random unlucky Autobot to actually got to suffer from motion sickness (ironic, since they used to be cars themselves, and now they can’t even ride anymore without feeling like dying), and another to be truck by a tough cold/flu and had to suffer through unfamiliar symptoms like coughing, sneezing, chills, and stomach aches, and another to find out they have nasty allergies of a random kind and effect (these can all be more than one if you are feeling evil)

but of course the three kids are there to help them through this tough time— not without occasionally making fun of them a bit tho.

you can do this either in a story telling form, where you write out a whole entire story chapter, or the bullet point list regarding how different the reactions of everyone would be.

YEEEE! This request was fun to do! The bots are going to get the 'whole' human experience.

Hope you enjoy!

Human Buddy and the Kids helping turned humans Ratchet, Optimus Prime, Arcee, Bumblebee, and Bulkhead

SFW, Platonic, mentions of puke, Human reader

TFP

Relic accident. Enough said.

The relic, as it turned out, had the capability to turn anything of Cybertronain origin into the organic version of it depending on the planet it was on.

That was how the charges found their guardians on the floor looking dazed and confused.

Thank goodness they had clothes on.

After further inspection from Wheeljack, they all got the news.

The good news this was all temporary, they would turn back when the effects wore off.

The bad news was that this was going to last for entire week.

Which shouldn’t have been a problem… if some of them didn’t get sick.

Oh joy…

Ratchet

The Cold.

Ratchet was fine for the first day, though he was constantly complaining about the work that still needed to be done.

It was the next day that the symptoms came up.

Buddy and Raf are the only ones who manage to convince him to lay down and rest.

“Please Ratchet, your sick and need rest.”--Buddy

Ratchet trying to pass Buddy but Raf steps in front of him.

“Do it Raf!”--Buddy

“Do—cough—what?”--Ratchet

Puppy Dog Eyes activated.

“Please?”--Raf

“… fine.”--Ratchet

Buddy high-hives Raf before helping him back to his bed.

His immune system was new to its surroundings, easier for illness to sit in.

Worse that he was older than the other as well.

He was much more vulnerable to catch simple things.

Most of the bots and recently turned humans are worried about Ratchet’s health when he started sleeping more. But June and the others reassure them that Ratchet’s going to be fine.

Ratchet wants to work, but the kids and Buddy don’t let him.

Jack and Buddy oversee Ratchet’s temperature and basic medical supplies.

Buddy does their best to explain to him what is happening to his body, for reassurance.

Miko plays him classical music for once.

Blame it on the pitiful sick look on his face.

He expected some loud rock music but found it surprising when Miko began playing the keyboard softly.

Its an almost foolproof way to get him to sleep fast.

Raf sat by him telling him stories and helping him eat his food.

This wasn’t his best experience, but he certainly has much more respect on human biology and for the kids now.

Ratchet now has a mini human well-care kit in his habsuite.

Optimus Prime

The Hiccups.

Optimus was just trying some of the different waters the kids had been recommending.

“And what is this one?”--Optimus

Optimus already starting to drink.

“Sparkling water.”--Buddy

Optimus stops and looks at the water horrified.

“Why are you looking at it—OH! Wait Optimus its not ‘sparkling’s’ water is a type of water with minerals!”--Buddy

Optimus puts the water down but swallows the water in his mouth.

“Human’s drink minerals? As in the deposits?”--Optimus

“… I’m not explaining this one. Raf! Your turn!”--Buddy

Then they heard the sound.

Optimus was surprised to hear it.

Then he made it again.

He looks a bit disturbed.

He wasn’t voluntarily making the noise it was just coming out of him just like that.

Jack and Miko try to explain what hiccups are.

He gets a bit more disturbed yet intrigued.

This wouldn’t be so bad… if that noise would stop trying to interrupt him from talking and making his chest go bump!

Raf suggests ways to get rid of them.

They all go through the list until they reach the last one.

Scaring him.

They knew it was going to be a tough one, Prime wasn’t scared easily.

But Buddy had an idea.

A very dumb idea.

Optimus was talking to Jack when he noticed Buddy leaning on the railing.

He was a bit on edge seeing them so casual near the ledge.

They sat on top of it.

Then began tittering backwards until half of their body went to the other side.

Optimus is running to Buddy’s side trying to stop them from falling backwards.

Buddy just hung from their ankles looking up at him with a smug smile.

No more hiccups.

Problem solved.

He does try and scold Buddy for the recklessness… but he is also glad the hiccups are gone.

When Optimus turns back to normal, he insists to Agent Fowler to have better rails in the base.

Arcee

The Mosquito bites.

Oh, Jack had warned her about these little guys.

And now she knew why the kids were complaining about.

She wanted to eradicate every single one.

Arcee trying to squash some of the mosquitos with her hands.

“Why!”-Arcee

SMACK!

“Won’t!”--Arcee

SMACK!

“These!”--Arcee

SMACK!

“Things!”--Arcee

SMACK!

“Die!”--Arcee

SMACK!

SMACK!

Buddy and Jack already dosed with repellent.

“Felt that.”--Buddy

“Yep.”--Jack

The two humans fist bump while watching Arcee fail to smack another mosquito.

With some heavy rain, some had managed to get into the base. There weren’t many, maybe four, but they were enough to leave Arcee’s arms and legs littered with little bites.

The kids did get bitten too, but not as much as she did.

Arcee did try to use the repellent, it didn’t do anything for her.

Buddy and Miko help put anti itching cream on her, but she wants to scratch them all so bad.

When she thought they weren’t looking she would begin to scratch furiously.

Arcee didn’t know that her skin would show that she had scratched. She freaked out a bit when she scratched a bit too hard on one and it started bleeding.

Raf and Jack clean and disinfect the scratch which welcomes her to the pain of antibacterial spray.

She swears that it was the most painful thing she had to endure yet.

Raf decided to decorate the little scratches with band aids so she would scratch them.

When Arcee turns back to her normal self, she is relieved.

She has much more respect for the things humans have to do daily.

Will never tell Jack to suck it up when he has a mosquito bite again.

Bumblebee

The Motion sickness.

Oh, the Irony.

Bumblebee was a fast muscle car before!

He shouldn’t get sick when going over 15 miles per hour!

Now he was getting queasy in riding with Smokescreen and Buddy.

He feels awful.

Sweaty

Clammy hands

And something feels like something is trying to crawl out of his throat.

Bumblebee looking a bit pale as Smokescreen makes another sharp turn.

Buddy looks at Bee.

“Hey Smokes, you mind rolling the windows down a bit?”--Buddy

“Why?”--Smokescreen

Bumblebee groaning.

“Unless you want to see what the inside of a humans stomach holds, I suggest you open up the windows.”--Buddy

Windows immediately roll down.

Bee sighs with a bit of relief as the wind rolls past his face calming his stomach.

At first the two thought it was Smokescreen crazy driving that was making him sick.

But that wasn’t the case.

Buddy Bee and Raf were inside Ultra Magnus and he got queasy there too.

Magnus was one of the safest and slowest drivers on the team.

It was just him.

Bumblebee refused to leave the base after they came back.

He’d rather hang out with the kids on the couch and play games with them than go outside in another vehicle.

When Bumblebee returns to normal, he is so thankful the queasiness didn’t follow him.

He is now much more attentive to the kids when he is driving now.

His subspaces now have barf bags, just in case.

Bulkhead

Throwing Up.

All Bulkhead wanted to do was have the full human experience with Miko.

He went with her to a monster truck rally that Buddy had managed to get tickets to.

“Wow! I can’t believe you got us ticket to the rally!”--Miko

“Me neither!”--Bulkhead

“No problem, guys, just enjoy yourselves.”

“I mean I tried booking these babies in advance, but everything was booked or too expensive. How did you get the tickets?”--Miko

Buddy simply starts drinking their soda.

“Buddy?”--Bulkhead

“What you don’t know, don’t hurt.”--Buddy

“What?”--Bulkhead

“What?”--Buddy

The trio bought all sorts of junk food and sodas.

He found himself enjoying the time at the rally.

Everything was good.

Until he got back to base.

He suddenly became pale and sweaty.

The next thing Bulkhead knew, he was staring at a trash can with a bunch of mushy stuff with Buddy and Miko on either side of him.

Buddy had some of the mushy stuff on their arms, while Miko was rubbing his back gently.

The mushy stuff did stink a lot.

He felt something come out of his mouth and spew it into the bin, once again getting it on Buddy’s arms.

Bulkhead tried to apologize but it was hard to catch his breath.

Turns out a whole lot of junk food and soda was not good for you after all.

No matter how good it tasted before.

He doesn’t want to touch food while he is like this.

The kids try introducing him to lighter foods so he can at least eat something while his stomach recovers.

He likes the different kinds of broth they bring in.

When Bulkhead returns to normal, he asks Miko to stash barf bags in his interior.

He wants to have them just in case the kids need them.

Has so much more respect for them.

Will slap someone in the head if they mention to the kids to get it over with while their stomach is not feeling good.

[fantasy-anatomy-analyst]

So I know you’ve given the old black dragon from Dungeons and Dragons a redesign in the pats but I thought I would ask for your thoughts in the redesign coming soon in the new handbooks. There is a video on YouTube where one of the designers is interviewed about the new dragon designs. He says they designed the dragons more as characters then creatures which likely influenced a lot of the design choices. They want this thing to look evil. Do you think the design has improved? I also want to know if there any major changes you would make. I know in the past you had issues with the horns.

comparison time! old and new!

(image description: a side by side look at the old DnD 5e black dragon design and the new black dragon design. the old one is more multi colored and shows a variety of design choices that are common for making dragons look "cooler" but have no real function. the new design is more cohesively colored a very matte black with a white face and is anatomically more similar to a giant crocodile with long legs. end description)

I absolutely think the new design is so much better. the horn problem has been solved!!! my issue with the horns in the previous design was mostly that they just overlap the mouth! even taking into consideration how wide they might be, they line up directly with the open mouth and extend further forward than the mouth, making them a pretty huge impediment! but now the horns curve below the jaw and don't extend beyond it, so they're a lot less cumbersome! overall, this design and posing also makes so much better use of illustrative shape language, look at how little the body parts overlap each other! much cleaner. I appreciate the bony looking spines with minimal membrane between them, as opposed to the old version that just had the big sail fin on the neck for no reason. I kinda miss the striped coloration of the old one, but this new design is far more cohesively colored and so much more focused on really making it look like a black dragon, with nice subtle greens on the underside for that good ol fashioned countershading. I also like that the face is white to give it that skull-like vibe instead of shrinkwrapping the face to make it look like the underlying skull. overall, there is way less shrinkwrapping on the new design, it no longer feels like the skin has been vacuum sealed to the skeleton and musculature.

That said though, even considering the intention of making it look evil more than making it look like a real creature, why in the year 2024 are we still skimping on dragon wing membrane near the torso, making the wing fingers extend so far beyond the membrane, and adding random wing holes instead of making use of more interesting battle scars all over the body?

here is a very quick paint over to alter that and show how the design could just be tweaked a tiny bit and not lose any of its coolness while adjusting the things i have a pet peeve for

(image description: same as above, but now on the new black dragon design I have colored in the random holes in the wings, erased the overly extended wing fingers, and added more surface area to the wing membrane where it meets the body. end description)

could absolutely be done better, this was just my quick sloppy solution. even just adding a little more wing membrane would be good enough, I don't know why there is still this insistence on leaving such a massive gap between the body and the nearest wing finger. or leaving so much finger extended past the membrane. what are those fingers there for. why do they still have big claws. these dragons have proper forelegs, they clearly aren't using those big cumbersome wing hands for anything other than flying, and the thumb is perfectly useful as a gripping tool all by itself. the fingers only get extended like that for the Look, but i think there are other ways to make the wings look cool. like giving them interesting colors and patterns on the membrane! why not extend the facial coloring here to the wings? enhance the skeletal vibe by making the underside of the wing arms all pale, maybe put some striping on the membrane? that would be neat!

[catsteinbooks]

The Thin Dark Duke of Hell

Haven't actually written a meta before, but I've been mulling this around in my head, so here's my take on why I think Crowley is likely to be a Duke of Hell in season 3.

Reason 1: it makes narrative sense

From a story-telling perspective, it's the logical starting place for season 3. Especially if we consider how the original idea was developed as a sequel to the book.

There's no body-swap in the book. Neither Aziraphale nor Crowley has heard from "their sides" at the end, so technically they're still connected to Heaven and Hell. They haven't been punished or kicked out. They even speculate that maybe everyone will just pretend it didn't happen.

And now we're approaching the Second Coming. The Big One. "All of us against all of them." Where are our heroes? Well, time has passed, things have happened. It's reasonable to think that maybe they've both been promoted. (Crowley, in particular, is often getting promotions, usually for things he didn't do.) And story-wise, they're set up as opposite numbers, so it makes sense that their positions as the sequel story begins will be of similar status.

Applying this concept to the screen version, we know Aziraphale has been offered the Supreme Archangel position. Therefore, if Crowley is to be his counterpart, he has to have a high rank in Hell. And there's a Duke of Hell opening to be filled. (Sorry, Shax, I think Crowley's going to snatch it out from under you.)

Reason 2: it fits Crowley's character

"What?!" you shout. "Crowley hates Hell! He turned them down! He doesn't want to go back!"

Correct. He doesn't. But he will if he thinks he needs to. Because he and Aziraphale have a huge, defining commonality: they love Earth and Humanity and don't want it to be destroyed.

Yeah, Crowley will probably wallow for a while. He deserves some time to get insanely drunk and cry. Sort of like he did when he thought Aziraphale was dead in season 1. But the thing is, Crowley always comes back. He's always ready to run. He always threatens to run. He hops in his car and drives somewhere. But he never actually leaves. Because there's no point in going away somewhere without Aziraphale. And that hasn't changed. If Crowley ran away now, he'd still be miserable, but without any music or whisky or his Bentley. It would be... pointless.

So what's a heartbroken, grieving, furious demon to do? Vent his pain in the best possible way: thwarting everyone and everything who hurt him and took away the angel he adores. He knows what Heaven is planning, because he saw it in Gabriel's file. He doesn't want Earth destroyed, he doesn't want Heaven or Hell to win. And he has an opportunity to sabotage the whole thing from the inside.

Which leads us to...

Reason 3: Crowley has a way into Hell already

There is a great meta here about Crowley's conversation with Beelzebub in Hell and its potential season 3 impact. The TL;DR version is: Crowley DID technically find Gabriel, and Beelzebub promised him anything he wanted (including being a Duke of Hell) in return.

Is it a somewhat dubious contract? Sure. Would that stop Crowley? *snort laugh* The demon who makes up legal clauses on the spot to save humans is well-equipped to argue his way into Hell's highest position in order to save the entire world. It's probably much easier than driving a flaming Bentley all the way to Tadfield.

So where does this leave us?

Aziraphale is up in Heaven, ready to burn it to the ground. You saw him when the Metatron mentioned the Second Coming. That was not a happy angel ready to do what he's told. And, frankly, Aziraphale is not actually capable of doing what he's told IMO. No matter how much he tries to follow the good/evil dynamic, he ultimately ends up choosing what is Right over what is Good.

Crowley in Hell would be doing the same kind of thing, albeit in a more subtle, sneaky way. After all, he spent 6000 years thwarting Hell all over the place and getting away with it the vast majority of the time. He knows how to mess with them. (And can you just imagine what would happen when demons like Eric asked him questions and he answered them?! He could gather his own little army with one Suggestion Box.)

So when shit hits the fan, as it inevitably will, we'll be left with both our ineffable heroes (gn) poised to do the exact same thing: destroy the machine from the inside.

Even if some of the other fan speculations prove true (memory wipes, for instance), I think it still makes narrative sense to have them both in equal-but-opposite positions. Because no matter how much the enemies are trying to mess with them, if you take a certain angel with an opportunity to fuck up Heaven and a certain demon with an opportunity to fuck up Hell and you bring them together (which, let's be honest, has to happen no matter what the storyline is), it's going to be pretty darn epic.

[mirageofadesert]

Female Power Done Right: A closer look at Pian Ran from TTEOTM

The seductress: regulating sexual morality

Female characters have always been stereotyped in popular media. While this isn't limited to the portrayal of women, it has affected them disproportionately and usually in a negative way. There are a number of common stereotypes of how women are portrayed, such as the virtuous woman, the seductress/femme fatale, the Mary Sue and more. While I don't want to say that TTOETM doesn't rely on these kinds of stereotypes to tell its story, the show does get some things right when it comes to its female characters. Pian Ran is the best example of this.

Most temptress are villains, because female sexuality is often framed as something negative, something dangerous. Sexual morality serves to regulate gender relations, for example through various sexual taboos and prohibitions on premarital and extramarital sexuality or homosexuality. In the major religions and many cultures, sexuality is traditionally placed in the service of procreation. In the ascetic-monastic traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity, which are characterized by sexual renunciation, sexuality is equated with ignorance, desire, attachment or sin and is considered an obstacle to salvation. As women are identified more strongly with physicality than men, sexuality and instinctually in all the religions mentioned, the widely received stereotype of the sexual seductress emerges, which has been used to justify a wide range of discrimination.

Therefore, seductresses are not about female sexuality, they are (through the male gaze) objects of sexual desire for men, while also being a negation point of sexual morality. Virtuous women, especially protagonists, are often sexualised, but not portrayed as sexual beings. In contrast, sexual women are often the competition of the main character. They tend to use their physical attractiveness to attack or steal the main character's love interest, or to overpower the hero with their evil tricks. For this reason, they are often associated with animals that are seen as deceitful, cunning, poisonous or dangerous (e.g. snakes, scorpions, foxes).

At the first glance, Pian Ran fits this archetype well. She is a fox demon, who feeds on the life energy of men. She seduces them, using their sexuality for her own gain and entertainment. Pian Ran also dresses "provocatively" and doesn't conform to social conventions. When we first meet her, she is playing the historical version of strip poker, not just for the money, but because the desperate men amuse her. In the same episode, she forces Ye Qingyu to accompany her to the market and uses her sensuality to throw him off balance.

However, Pianran also subverts this trope. Her sexuality isn't portrayed as something negative, it's accepted by the people around her. Ye Qingyu never judges her for it, even though he is the polar opposite. Ye Xiwu never looks down on her either, instead she comes to him for advice and even flirts with her.

Sun Zhenni's performance deserves a lot of praise. Her sexiness doesn't feel "sticky" or "creepy" to me, like many other characters of similar type do. She has a natural sensuality that isn't over the top, more sassy than naughty. You can tell that she studied her character a lot and tried to portray her as nuanced as possible.

Pian Ran is also much more than just another fox demon and seductress. She is a complex character. But her main theme isn't really seduction - it's working life.

Pian Ran vs. work life

This theme runs throughout the drama, from Li Susu offering her a letter of recommendation for a particular sect when they first meet, to Pianran's work for Tantai Jin - and her resentment of it.

She has to work to survive - literally, as Tantai Jin tricks her into believing she has swallowed a pill that will give him control over her life. "Take the pill", which will change your life and take away your freedom, is also a reminder of how certain drugs and their side effects work. While she's not without a certain amount of freedom and has her own command within the Jing Kingdom, she's tied to Tantai Jin's command and rigorous work schedule.

Our girl is a for sure a regular on r/antiwork...

This theme makes her a relatable and likeable character. It also shows how her character is a comment on current social issues, beyond gender roles. This is one of the strengths of TTOETM, it’s strong social and moral message that goes beyond the plot of the drama.

Pian Ran vs. love life

As a character, Ye Qingyu is the opposite of Pian Ran: Virtuous, very righteous and rigid. But he never judges her for her behaviour, he always understands her and gives her space. And most importantly, neither of them changes who they are as their relationship progresses. She doesn't suddenly become a modest woman, he doesn't turn away from his ideals - except maybe in that cut arc in Jing Kingdom in the 3rd arc.

In many ways, Ye Qingyu and Pian Ran embody the classic trope of the seductive and virtuous hero: she affects men in a certain way that causes them to stray from the straight and narrow or interferes with their domestic arrangements. For example, when he spends the first night with her and thus neglects his duties as head of the family, or when she contributes to his changing sides and joining Tantai Jin. In short, she is disruptive.

When she advises Ye Xiwu/Li Susu on how to seduce Tantai Jin, she suggests various manipulation tactics to gain his attention and favour, but Pian Ran also gives genuine advice - to both of them, actually (although sometimes it's my accident).

One could make the argument, that they were aiming to frame her initial strong sexuality as a coping mechanism due to the loss of her husband and love threads. The absence of her love threads manifests quite different to Tantai Jin, mainly in form of attachment issues.

However, the show doesn't try to make a point about female sexuality by emphasizing a change in Pianran's behavior based on finding the right man. If anything, it's Ye Qingyue who meets her halfway by having a premarital affair. What I like most about their relationship is that they are each other's equals. They both have high ranks in Tantai Jin's kingdom and army, and he listens to their advice and treats them equally. Moreover, Pian Ran is never a damsel in distress. Even when Ye Qingyue dies for her, it is because she was blindsided by the attack while she was winning her own duel. In the end, she shares the fate of most seductresses who disrupt the social order - she dies (if they don't join a convent). The difference is that her death is a tragedy and not framed as a regulation of sexual morality and gender relations.

Female Friendship

Before I dive into the relationship of Li Susu and Pianran, I want to comment on the common dualism of the sensuous vs. the virtuous woman. Li Susu (or Ye Xiwu) is not the virtuous heroine, it’s (again) Ye Bingchang mirroring Pian Ran. This is something that subverts the whole trope! It's the virtuous woman who become disruptive and falls from grace, while Pianran becomes a righteous heroine. However, while Pianran doesn't become virtuous, Ye Bingchang tries and fails to use seduction to manipulate Tantai Jin. She also has an additional set of love threads that make her seductive to men without using her sensuality or sexuality. It's a fascinating dynamic. As I said, TTEOTM is not a perfect show with a feminist message, but it certainly tries to subvert gender stereotypes - and not just with its women, but that's another issue.

Pian Ran's third important role in TTOETM is that of Li Susu's friend, who supports and guides her. What makes their dynamic so interesting is that while Pian Ran looks younger than Li Susu, she is considerably older (well, if you count age by years lived, not by date of birth). They are flirtatious, they share a horse and a bed, and they pass the Bechtel test! Li Susu even risks her health to cure Pian Ran of Tantai Jin's blood curse.

Both subvert gender expectations in their own way. They are strong characters without abandoning their femininity. The empowerment and the feminist ideas, they are embodying, also come natural to the storyline and are not just tropes. Therefore, they are relatable characters for a modern audience (except when they are not).

Edit: Got rid of some spelling mistakes!

[batbirdies]

I just feel the need to remind people that when you’re getting upset about bad rep of your blorbos in fic please remember that 90% of fic is just badly written. Almost ALL of the common complaints I see about fanfic are because most unprofessional writers just aren’t very good at it. I promise you that the people writing two dimensional versions of your blorbo aren’t doing it on purpose. They just literally aren’t good at this.

If they totally misrepresented your fav in order to prop up their own fav it’s probably because they couldn’t think up a more balanced way to represent what they wanted to showcase because that would be complicated and multi layered and difficult and this other way is simpler and straight forward and doesn’t require the same level of skill or comprehension, dedication or effort.

Like… I don’t like to bring this up much because telling people “yeah I mean most fic is just bad” can be discouraging to people who already worry that their writing isn’t very good. But that’s just not the point.

Fanfiction isn’t published. There are no rules and its purpose is to be fun! For the writer just as much as the reader (if not more) and readers can just go away if they don’t like the thing. They don’t have to read it!

I just see so many posts complaining about how fandom does so many things wrong and it’s like… yeah this is like complaining that hobbyist artists work lacks depth and imagination and being disgusted by how bad the perspective and shading and color choices are. Like?? They’re not a professional and they are out here doing this for fun. MOST PEOPLE ARE BAD AT ART.

I just want people to stop and think sometimes before they jump on certain fans or fandom tropes as the root of all evil in their fandom. Like is it the trope or is it that the trope is being written clumsily and without skill?

In which case… does it make sense to complain that hobbyists just aren’t as good as you wish they were? That their free content is obnoxious to sift through on the hunt for something good?

Maybe you don’t think they should be allowed to have a fun time if they aren’t good at the thing.

Maybe you should think about what that says about you.

I’m not saying never complain about stuff you hate seeing, you’re still allowed to hate it. But the vitriol directed towards the writers is where I get confused and caution people to think about how much sense it makes to get mad at people for not being good at their hobby.

[jessicas-pi]

evil space dad and his evil space daughter

theyre on an evil space family road trip to Jotunheim

I don't have a little ficlet to go along with this art, but I do have some story/plot outline ramble stuff!

so. without further ado,

IDEAS!

Skoll and Hati are actual characters from Norse mythology, so Baylan Skoll and Shin Hati are both very fun and somewhat difficult to fit into the Rebelvengers AU! Here's what I've got worked out: Baylan is an Asgardian who was once well-known for both his wisdom and his swordsmanship, but over time, he was slowly consumed by fear over the foretold fall of Asgard in Ragnarok, and set out to prevent it. Shin is a Light Elf who he finds and begins training—more on that in a bit.

I'm going back and forth on if I want them to have killed the mythological wolves Skoll and Hati (who were said to devour the sun and moon during Ragnarok) as part of Baylan's plan for preventing Ragnarok, and have Skoll and Hati be the wolf skins they're wearing, OR if I want Baylan and Shin to BE the Skoll and Hati figures in the Rebelvengers AU, with the wolf-skins as just references to the OG mythology. Either way, there'll be a kind of becoming-the-future-you-tried-to-prevent thing, and Baylan and Shin unintentionally start the ball rolling on Rebelvengers Ragnarok in the end. (Despite my Evil Space Family jokes, they are more sympathetic characters here than in canon—misled heroes, rather than outright antagonists. Might give them redemption arcs, idk.)

but, BACK TO PLOT STUFF!

When a pair of Jotun warriors shatter the Bifrost in a last-ditch attempt to keep the lieutenant of an extragalactic warlord from invading Asgard and obtaining the Tesseract as part of his evil plan to destroy half of all life in the universe (it's a long story), the resulting shockwave throws many Asgardian warriors, including Baylan—who had returned to Asgard to assist in the battle against said extragalactic warlord—into the abyss. But instead of plummeting into nothingness, the energy from the explosion ends up sending him hurling along one of the branches of the World Tree, and eventually leaves him stranded on the dead planet Svartalfheim.

Soon after, he finds Shin, an orphaned Light Elf girl who was also cast onto Svartalfheim by the Big Bifrost Kaboom, and trains her, becoming someone she looks up to as a father. They manage to scrape out their survival for five long years, before they eventually stumble upon the five-thousand-year-old wreck of an Asgardian prisoner transport. They explore it, and piece together its story. The crew was killed in the crash—as evidenced by the empty heaps of armor, the warriors' bones long turned to dust—and the stasis pods containing Dark Elf prisoners taken in the Battle of Svartalfheim had all been smashed.

All, that is, save one.

They open the last pod and find that the prisoner within is alive. Awakened from her hibernation, this Dark Elf briefly attempts to murderize them both until they talk her down and convince her they have a common goal—getting off this planet. She agrees to an alliance, and they begin planning a way to escape Svartalfheim, combining his knowledge of seiðrcraft and her ability to walk between worlds to escape.

But her goals are much deeper—and much more sinister—than Baylan and Shin could imagine...

to be continued

---

also here's a version without the blue tint. just because.

[parkcivconfess]

Buzz buzz ! Got some potions HCs this time (This could apply to both PKCiv and PVP Civ but i'm using PVP Civ as my frame of reference since its the one i know more about, also brainworms) Potions in PVP Civilization are very customizable and some iron and diamond swords brew ones to take the edge off. Because lets be honest, they would absolutely use potions recreationally down in the lower layers. PVP is very stressful to not only the body, but the brain! Specific recreational ones i have written down: Nausea - VERY powerful in the wrong hands, often diluted for recreational usage and its effects are similar to alcohol. Also has the simple recipe of Awkward Potion > Wheat. When undiluted can be used to knock someone clean out cold, especially if they don't have a tolerance (Cough cough Evbo) Swiftness - Gets you extremely wired. Also needs to be diluted if you just want it for the adderall-esque effects it grants. Slow Fall - Calms you down, you literally feel light as a feather. Still does what it does in vanilla but also goes to your head. Very good for those that are anxious. Non recreational bonuses: Resistance - Its ibuprofen! Higher the potency the better it does for pain. Usually requested by those that have chronic pain from past injuries. Add a golden apple to your potion of healing to get this one. Withering - Extremely corrosive substance. Evil potion made by evil users and also, extremely complicated and its ingredients are rare (Where the hell does one get wither roses in this place? Someone found out..) Instant Health - Heals superficial damage very efficiently but struggles to heal below the skin, usually used for very light injuries like small cuts or bruises. Higher the potency the better it performs as always, but cannot heal long term damage done by Withering. Regeneration - A slower alternative to Instant Health that can heal more for the user such as broken bones or muscular damage. Higher the potency the quicker it heals injuries. Struggles to heal damage done by Withering, but it CAN be done. Might take more than a few potions though.. Slowness and Weakness - They do as they are described, and both make moving your arms and legs very hard and very painful depending on the potency. When paired together, they're great for incapacitation without knocking someone fully out! Alot of potion ingredients are found around the layers, most of them are foragable and some can be purchased at the iron and diamond layers respectively. Prev ask i sent: LOVE your warden evbo hc btw it sounds very cool. Would love a fic with that premise fr Till I send an ask again! - 🐝

TYYYY i love my version of evbo even if it's not the majority . that fat boy is MINE

MY PKCIV LORE BELOW!!!

lore 𓄧 building

herbalism and alchemy was most common on the fighter level, and practice's died out when the fighter layer was closed off due to the parkour villain and all his evil shenanigans. see'watt keeps those practices alive, also has many journal's and books detailing all kinds of things from the fighter level because he didn't want anyone to forget where he came from.

when he died, evbo was the one who inherited said book's / journal's because see'watt had no family left to pass it on, and nobody wanted to touch anything that was his but him.

there had to be over 100 book's, thoughtfully handcrafted with so much love and care, even having drawings of flowers he didn't know existed, music, custom's, marriage practices, everything you could think of was in there.

he revived see'watt shortly after when he found an unfinished book that detailed see'watts family recipes, one of which see'watt had actually fed him when he was getting the disc's. he didn't want him to starve to death and not get all of the disc's. it was the best thing he ever ate. yeah he cried about it. yes see'watt had to comfort him.

POTIONS

withering

* sucks the life out of the user / victim, usually connected to a specific location said person's life force is going to for a higher power or ulterior motive. uses the crushed up bones of wither skeletons and wither flowers, given its name.

can be used to cleanse one of poison's if done correctly, similar to charcoal or a parasite cleanse. often used as a medicinal remedy in the 5th layer — (chain boots) for extracting venom and ridding one's body of disease. it's very risky, though, and only experienced herbalists should try it!! (like see'watt but i digress).

haste

* gives user speed and strength (much like swiftness or resistance potions), but at the cost of their body deteriorating overtime. see'watt often used these to get ahead in parkour battles while still trying to earn the evil champions trust because he's quite weak himself and needed an upper hand to win. he's still recovering from that.

makes user physically unable to sleep until effects wear off. how do you think see'watt made all of those book's? he was bored and wanted to preserve his culture and couldn't go to bed.

MEDICINE

care / remedies

* seaweed was used as bandage's or to soothe burns, like aloe vera. it was also used as a form of twine when dried, often used to reinforce the outside of cast's.

glowberries we're used to treat stomach bugs due to the properties that make glowberries, well, glow, also have lot's of antibodies in them! often used in skincare for dry skin or as natural decoration. sometimes put inside lantern's or made into oil for oil lamps.

spore blossom petals we're used to make saturation potions last longer, and a traditional form of plant tallow (← made from beef / chicken fat, herbs are added for taste / smell, used in cooking and as soap).

[pheenixbabe]

shifting in media

the portal. this shifting-based concept is one of the most common in multiverse media by far due to its simplicity. go inside in one universe and come out in another. its so popular, some shifters like to visualize it to reach their dr.

now playing...wonderland - caravan palace

1. equestria girls

twilight, sunset shimmer and pinkie pie (yes, pinkie pie) enter from the pony-verse side the human-verse by walking through a portal. or in this case a crystal mirror.

2. cupid (monster high/ ever after high)

both monster high and ever after high have a character named cupid. which is canonically the same person. she goes from monster high to ever after high, which i guess takes place in the same universe and is more of a transfer (?) but because the stories are so separate from one another, ill call it a shift.

4. coco

in the movie coco, in order to contact his ancestors, miguel makes the impossible trip across realms in order to reach the afterlife. for those who believe that heaven/hell are shifting, based on the belief of the deceased, this is a classic reality shift!

5. coraline

to escape her parents who coraline continues to clash with, she goes through a portal to an alternate version of her new family home (where people have freaky button eyes!) to find the quintessential "perfect" parents.

5. alice in wonderland

I had to include this last since its just so iconic! i mean, it even has a shifting method named after it...i dont think i need to explain how this correlates: alice gets sucked up into a portal to a waaackkkyyy weirrrddd universe.

honorable mentions

the owl house.

star vs the forces of evil.