#lamentablequeen

[unloneliest]

IIIIIIIIIII want to know about the complex machinations of the soul (and the web of reasons underpinning your story and symbolism choices)

WAH thank you i have like such a complex web of thoughts spinning in my head this week. i'm gonna put it under the cut but i've been thinking a lot about places imbued with enough magic that i'm considering them somewhat of characters? particularly the Forest vs castles in general, but as applied in specific to the castle that my oc silas had been the prince of specifically.

(silas is a part of the adult generation of my story? the story covers quite a span of time. the adult gen is introduced as 18-21 year olds & the story later follows their teen children as time passes; it doesn't stay in detail for the entire span of their lives. there's dull moments that aren't worth focusing a book on & the juxtaposition of generations is much more interesting to me. it'll be released nonlinearly)

point a is the Forest.

so like. the original inhabitants of this world are, to the humans and comparable hominids, giants, though they did not of course call themselves this. they were twice the size of humans and had unlimited magical power until the gods who made them got pissed they were using their unlimited magical power and took them out, creating humans and others in the process, & leaving a handful of diminished giants behind - they would now age to death/had limits to their magic/could not still have children.

and the Forest was beyond massive to them. the Forest in the valley is large enough that humans can live in the canopy, build homes on branches. giant magical forest. you get the deal.

but part of the deal of the Forest is that like - rather than fading out, most of the remaining giants consciously chose what to do when they were nearing their end, and used their still considerable magic to become a part of the trees. it was irreversible, and an end to their previous existence, but a way of preserving themselves as a collective and they're still able to communicate and have an impact with some highly magical humans. this is a very alive awake forest, and it's an alive awake forest that once experienced the world & time very similarly to the way that humans do.

my character rohsi escapes a shitty situation and finds out she does have magic powers and like. when gaining access to them also discovers that she's Chosen by the forest? for her this is a hereditary type of magical connection, and not one that the forest always activates - not everyone in rohsi's family has been forest chosen but it's easier for the forest to have a chosen person with certain attributes and those attributes are present in rohsi's family (but not only her family).

rohsi's mother, szadeh, was supposed to be chosen by the forest but a diety laid claim first; it left the forest with nobody to work with it and had ultimately catastrophic consequences for szadeh.

rohsi having uniquely strong magic/being connected to the forest has been true for probably close to a decade, but i haven't previously had the details of magical functioning to the level that i now do? ANYWAYS. even though "rohsi has weird magic and a forest connection" has been true i haven't previously gotten in to the like, ways the forest exists and is independently.

so what i've been thinking about is like - different people's magic works in different ways - some people are seers, some have a great talent for a particular craft, some have magic that most easily takes form as light, some are healers, some have natural resonance with different pieces of nature. and different deities have different domains of power. different natural features all have ambient magic of their own, too. but entities like the forest exist somewhere between all of these things, especially when they're enough of entities to have opinions about what's happening around them and can attempt to influence what's happening.

what's the nature of a forest, this Forest, and its magic?

communication/connection. i'm thinking about pando, i'm thinking about mycelial networks, i'm thinking about thee decay exists as an extant form of life post. and i'm thinking about how a community of people with shared interests and goals chose to become a forest together, and how that'd impact not just them but the plants they were in community with.

a lot of the abuse that rohsi experienced growing up was her being isolated from others; how is community and communication a strength? how does the functioning of the central group of characters resemble & deviate from the strengths of the Forest? how does rohsi's inclination to work well with the Forest impact the way that she does magic even when she is not working with the Forest specifically? etc etc.

also in this vein: how many people live in the forest now, and under what circumstances? is the forest as an entity representative of the coalition of allied resistances working against the monarchy on purpose? how does the relationship to the land that people who inhabit the forest - none of whom are supporters of the monarchy - differ from the relationship or lack of relationship people in other locations have and how is that reflected in/an extension of their politics? how did i not notice that i was doing this on purpose to this degree????

point b is the castle, possibly called north hold.

it's actually kind of just slightly north of the west edge of the valley but like. further north than that is mostly forest, so it doesn't get counted as a Further North that you could be in.

i have several inroads to thinking about this castle in conjunction with the Forest? i've been thinking a lot about the relationships that wakeful locations have to people in general, and the ways that members of the monarchy are alienated from meaningful relationship with the land despite ostensibly being rulers of it.

silas, of the adult generation, is the inheriting prince of the northern throne. there are three castles, three rulers, in the valley, but they function as one state overall. there have never been borders or edges or separate citizenships between the three seats of power - they're just the three corners of a single region, each "needing" their own local castle/monarch. i'm still working out the details on the structure of the government. a lot of it was invented when i was 13. by a dream.

but. the thing is. silas, as prince. he does think he's doing what's best for the people. he tries very hard to. it's not something he would turn his back on on a whim; he takes the duty very seriously. he is a prince but also a born leader. he's possessive and protective over the people who are his, both the unknown people he leads and the friends he loves. he's the younger of two sons. he's the only son remaining. he's haunted by the question of whether his brother would be handling things better than him.

there is no easily backed heir if something should happen to silas, if something first happened to his mother the queen & whoever it is she's married to [i have yet to fully develop. silas' parents/family dynamic but he's inheriting from his mother. no only men can rule in my universe. anyone can do anything forever, including gender transition. babes there's magic]. his heir until he weds and produces one is his cousin, but there's no guarantee there wouldn't be conflict over that, because there's others with similar levels of a blood claim on the throne.

things have been peaceful. silas was the spare and his mother can't have more children. there was no reason to expect it might be a problem, that there's only him.

it is a problem, that it's only him.

i can't get into the entire details of the circumstances because that'd just add. the entire plot of the actual first book. to this ramble. but silas' family is killed and his own life is in jeopardy. and he leaves. he runs off into the desert. and i've been rotating what it would take to make him do that, because he wouldn't do it just to save his own hide. it would take something very significant to convince him that it wasn't right/possible for him to stay and fight for the people by fighting for the throne.

part of the tragedy of silas is that it might have been possible for him to survive and win had he been able to connect with allies that truly supported him in the moments between when he finds out his family is dead & when he flees with jay. (jay is my best boy. who i talk the most about of my ocs. a guard/soldier/?? on the specifics who deserts and turns his back on his entire life when he's sent after silas to kill him because he knows that it's the wrong thing to do and would rather devote himself to silas' cause. listen to me. their relationship is everything to meeeeee but i'm getting off topic)

silas, when he returns to the castle/finds out his family is dead? he goes first to his mentor, norna. who is evil. i realized i love a fucked up mentor/mentee relationship after rewatching phantom of the opera at new years. i'm making her a sexy about it. it's better when villains are hot. she's in magic academia. she's butch. and she started going grey when she was like. twenty. and she knew his brother and he's been trusting her and the things she tells him are memories and she's a huge part of why he compares himself so much with his (much older) brother who died. and she's fully been manipulating him the entire time.

norna is sooo slay to me. i know she's done a lot of things wrong but she's hot about it.

ANYWAYS this is all just like, context around the idea that the castle, silas' castle home, it's a character too. oh i have to make a detour.

the biggest cities in this story, they're all built. well. let me take another step to the side.

in the valley, humans do not call themselves the people. they call themselves the people of the roads. because the giants used their magic to create roads that will never, not ever, need infrastructure upkeep, and that connect the most important central locations in the valley. if enough soil forms on top of one of the roads it might become buried and plants may grow in the soil above it, but literally nothing can damage them. the whole damn valley isn't full of roads, but the giant's roads between castles have seriously impacted the pattern of human dwellings & communities within the valley.

the connected locations each have their own "ruins"; highly magical structures abandoned by the giants, either when they went into the trees or before that during the great unmaking by the gods. so whatever castle it is silas grew up in, it either is a repurposed dwelling of the giants, or it incorporates one of those in the structures that have been built up around what the giants left behind.

the magic left behind by the giants behaves differently from a forest that was once people; it's aliveness is different but it was still created to be an active sort of thing. there was intention put into it.

what is the essence of a castle? a castle is meant to enclose, protect, enforce. a castle has strict delineations between what is inside and what isn't. a castle is stone and is of the earth. when danger threatens, the people in the communities around a castle come in to the castle for safety and protection until it's safe to return to their places outside of its walls. it serves and protects the people; or, it is at least supposed to do this.

if the castle's magic was created by the giants, it would not have stayed awake in their absence. and in the absence of all the giants, the humans and other hominids left the valley completely; it spent several centuries uninhabited. great magical catastrophe that altered plate tectonics and all that.

so the people who became the monarchs of the north when humans returned to the valley, well. originally they were the ones taking care of this abandoned castle/city, and making it a place people could live again. they're the ones who rediscovered the magical functioning of the castle, who established a connection and reciprocal relationship with the castle's magic. they woke it back up. they kept the connection alive and passing through the generations just like the crown did.

the valley wasn't originally intended to be a monarchy.

but like. what's the essence of a castle! what's the nature of its magic, the way the Forest's is communication? to protect and enclose. without active magical connection to people inhabiting it, it has no way of knowing there's anyone to protect. and that connection is something that has to go both ways.

norna is able to convince silas - if not completely, thoroughly enough that he starts closing himself off - that he's at fault for his family's deaths, and that his closest allies have been given cause to believe this too. his doubt and his withdrawal, his closing of himself off, that means - without realizing it - he's separating himself from the castle's magic. he mentally undefines himself as prince - not wholly, but enough. and the castle's magic going to sleep affirms that partial belief until it's whole. and that's why he turns his back on the throne. he believes it to have turned its back on him first.

but it didn't. it just didn't realize there was anything left to protect.

and when i think about the castle, about it alive, i think about it having a heart, some underground and physical representation of it having an essence. and i know that's influenced by a Number of things - the song of the lioness quartet's dominion jewel/book four climactic fight, the phantom of the opera final caverny bit, the so you want to be a wizard book with worlds each having something like a heart, probably barbie and the magic of pegasus' whole thing about keystones but i cannot remember enough about that to be sure - i just remember that there was something about the keystone of arches. definitely some fics i've read set in magical universes.

a castle with a heart, a stone radiating light, a light that goes dark when it sleeps; some kind of visual representation of the moment silas loses that connection.

something crucial, here: there's a post about what the individual unit of a bee is. i can't remember who it's by or find the damn thing but it was talking about how like, we're a part of our ecosystems? how if you're trying to define the singular unit of bee, that unit is hive. and how we're not separate from what's around us. and with my story like. that's how it is with magic. it's a deeply magical world, and though everyone's internal wellspring of magic is of variable size and not everyone has enough internal magics to use their personal magic to influence the world around them, anyone can use the magic that exists in the world around them to do magic, especially in collective group magics.

a barn raising is a type of magic. and the way that barn is rasied will include magical steps to minimize the risk of a fire. and the reason that it works is because it's a collective magic, dependent on ritual.

run of the mill academic magic users (read: anyone with any kind of training)? they may think of themselves as solo magical practitioners, but they're adherents of a school of thought. the group they are doing magic with is themself and the person who taught them how to do magic, or the many people; if they're using a spell or anything of that ilk, it's them and the person who created the spell.

high level academic magic users have learned about how all magic is collective and learned to do magic where they're in relationship with something in the world that has ambient magic: a fire, a flower.

without connection to the castle, and when explicitly disowned by a major teacher of his? silas' magic starts acting up, starts not working.

all of this has been like. developing in every direction at once for me, recently. it's not just one thing at a time. thinking about the castle having a heart means thinking about why it does, and how that exists as a coutnerpoint to the Forest, and that means thinking about rohsi's magic, and how rohsi skips straight to high level academic magic user methods because she grew up magicless and was already used to only doing collective magic & applies that principle to individual magic easily.

thinking about the conditions under which silas runs away with jay and how terrifying the disconnection from the castle must have been for both of them means thinking about what might wake that castle back up.

and nait is jay's son (& the son of two other adult gen characters who are jay's best friends/marital partners, riamin & ymalis; marriage conventions aren't 1:1 with our world). and jay never got to have a family with silas. silas never got to know nait. but they're still so fucking similar, in so many ways. of course it's nait who wakes the sleeping castle.

and that's knowledge he shares, because it's something he learned how to do from rohsi, rohsi with communicative connecting magic, rohsi with ties to the Forest. it's not something he ever has to carry alone.

jay more than anyone is the one who lost silas. he spends the rest of his life grieving. ym was the next closest to silas, and rohsi and nait are both so like silas it hurts. they're raising their son and then suddenly the kids he brought home with him, too, and there's echoes of silas everywhere even in their kids growing up in his absence.

and then nait's waking the castle.

and he's just a fucking kid!!! and jay and ym and riamin are so worried the pull of what's happening in the world is going to eat their son alive, because it killed silas. it killed silas but nait can't be killed and somehow that means it might be worse for him, though at first it seemed a blessing.

but anyways. thinking about whether the heart of the castle is conflated with sovereignty, that's currently on my plate. i need to stretch this web and explore the other key castles, too.

and i need to think about point c: the river, and how all of this applies to her.

because good lord, i think i finally have the right angle to approach the river with.

anyways. this is. a lot of words. it stretches in every direction at once and i tried not getting too far off topic with background information but like. i feel so fucking dialled in to enjoyable to write & include but also spot on symbolic representations of the underlying values of varying political groups in the story & the themes of the narrative in general????????? which i did NOT feel before yesterday when i started having most of the culminating brain waves on this stuff. holy Shit.

also um. thank you for asking me about this. ilu <3

[rosencrantzsguildenstern]

got tagged both by @yukimomodivorce and @squidpro-quo for the 10 characters, 10 fandoms game! possibly because I take forever to do these lol. anyway, here we go! these aren't necessarily my faves from each fandom, just my all timers

sasha rackett, rusty quill gaming (she made that podcast for me. my og.)

ros&guil, rosencrantz & guildenstern are dead (my brand. will always be famous. is this okay to do for this tag game? who knows)

kagura, gintama (KAGURAAA... almost put gin almost put shouyou. could put almost any gint character. its got a good cast)

kim dokja, omniscient reader's viewpoint (first character i ever considered a blorbo back when that word was trending for the first time. made me go crazy)

xie lian, heaven official's blessing (I DIE FOR IMMORTAL CHARACTERS i die for characters who continue to try and do good against the world and to their personal detriment.)

kimihiro watanuki, xxxholic (see above. almost put himawari almost put yuuko. xxxholic has a lot of characters that stick with u)

cheng xiaoshi, link click (I die for characters who keep trying to do good against the world!!)

charce lacroix, astra lost in space (haven't thought about him for a while but should shout him out because he kickstarted my fondness for crazy blond anime boys)

takashi shirogane, voltron (twas ill about him for multiple years of my life)

catra, she-ra (there are so many characters I almost put here but catra you will always be famous.)

this game has already gone around i7 circles so i'll tag some people outside of that... @infected-paul @mossman @lamentablequeen @perennii @banned-from-kansas

[perennii]

WOE! WORM BE UPON YE!

Tagging @lamentablequeen and @sevenyeargap pspspspspspspspsps show me ur worms :)

fuck it. worm on a string picrew chain. let's fucking go

happy worm creation my friends

tagging @areyoudoingthis @cursed-coat-of-homosexuality @peanutbutterex @tfemteach @piratecaptainscaptainpirates (no pressure 💛)

[rosencrantzsguildenstern]

catch me watching this whole mutual circle do this before i did. anyway going with my url instead of my name (chitra) because it's longer, & not making myself stick 2 any band or game but picking songs that i like!

R- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Fucking Dead by The Rentiers (immortal song)

O- Outliers and Hyypocrates: a fun fact about apples by Will Wood

S- Silhouettes by Colony House

E- Echo by Crusher-P

N- Nexus by Hiroyuki Sawano (from Promare)

C- CYBERPUNK DEAD BOY by Maiki P

R- Rendezvous by Kanaria

A- Aquemini by Outkast

N- Neon Tiger by The Killers

T- Treasure! by Trigger

Z- ZONE OF OVERLAP by Zool

S- Superstar by CG5

G- Good Girls (Don't Get Used) by Beach Bunny

U- Unknown (Till The End...) by Akugetsu (which, fun fact, I liked before I watched Alien Stage and then got jumpscared by in round 2)

I- Imperial Chain by Zool

L- Losing Track by The Mechanisms

D- Doctor by Truslow

E- Encounter Love Song by Idolish7

N- No Role Modelz by J. Cole

S- Super Psycho Love by Simon Curtis

T- THANK YOU FOR YOUR EVERYTHING by Idolish7

E- End-World Normopathy by Ghost and Pals & Vane Lily

R- Rhythm Doesn't Make You A Dancer by Jon Fratelli

N- NATSU Shiyouze (yeah! yeah!) by TRIGGER & Idolish7

tagging, if you want to do it, @perennii @lamentablequeen @mossman @joelletwo @ellaashmore @agentravensong @17yearcicada @garecc

Welp. Tag tagged by @justplaggin for the game

rules: spell out your name or url with songs

I couldn't resist, and thank you very much for it, Jay/Plagg!

To challenge myself, I'm gonna see if I can stick to songs from anime East Asian shows/stories

A - All-in (Alien Stage)

L - Last Dimension (TRIGGER)

W - wi(l)d-screen baroque (Revue Starlight)

A - Artistic Partisan (ALKALOID x Valkyrie)

Y - Yumemiru Architecture (Kagehira Mika; Enstars)

S - STRONGER & STRONGER (Zool)

A - Ame (MEZZO)

J - Joker Flag (IDOLiSH7)

O - OMEGA (STEREO DRIVE FOUNDATION; Yuukoku no Moriarty)

Y - Yume Shizuku (Re:vale)

F - Forever Note (MEZZO)

U - Until it Dies (覃云; Link Click)

L - Lily (Luck Life; Bungo Stray Dogs)

N - Now and Then (Re:vale)

O - Or the Beautiful Golden Drop (Knights; complete version out on May 22, so have the game version)

T - THE POLiCY (IDOLiSH7)

E - Eccentric Party Night!! (Five Eccentrics)

19 songs...and I tried to find ones that I genuinely enjoy right now (RIP to me making this challenge harder), so hence, the above mostly-Japanese-dominated list.

No pressure tags: @bobisnolongerhere @lizzieonka @rosencrantzsguildenstern @msperfectsheep-posts @mahounonbinary @praise-the-lord-im-dead @nitunio @akitchenknife @teslathelame @koi0boi @mihai-florescu @forebodinglight @imissthembutitwasntadisaster and anyone else seeing this because i am now incredibly curious about what songs you will choose (im so sorry if I forgot someone)