#like a horrible list

[kindnessoverperfection]

Please, if you can, take a moment to read and share this because I feel like I'm screaming underwater.

NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) stigma is rampant right now, and seems to be getting progressively worse. Everyone is using it as a buzzword in the worst ways possible, spreading misinformation and hatred against a real disorder.

I could go on a long time about how this happened, why it's factually incorrect (and what the disorder actually IS), why it's harmful, and the changes I'd like to see. But to keep this concise, I'll simply link to a few posts under the cut for further reading.

The point of this post is a plea. Please help stop the spread of stigma. Even in mental health communities, even around others with personality disorders, in neurodivergent "safe" spaces, other communities I thought people would be supportive in (e.g. trans support groups, progressive spaces in general), it keeps coming up. So I'm willing to bet that a lot of people on this site need to see this.

Because it's so hard to exist in this world.

My disorder already makes me feel as if I'm worthless and unlovable, like there's something inherently wrong and damaged about me. And it's so much harder to fight that and heal when my daily life consists of:

Laughing and spending time with my friends, doing my utmost best to connect and stay present and focused on them, trying to let my guards down and be real and believe I'm lovable- when suddenly they throw out the word "narcissist" to describe horrible people or someone they hate, or the conversation turns to how evil "people with narcissistic personality disorder" are. (Seriously, you don't know which of your friends might have NPD and feels like shit when you say those things & now knows that you'd hate them if you knew.)

Trying to look up "mental health positivity for people with npd", "mental health positivity cluster bs", only to find a) none of that, and b) more of the same old vile shit that makes me feel terrible about myself.

Having a hard time (which is constant at this point) and trying to look up resources for myself, only to again, find the same stigma. And no resources.

Not having any clue how to help myself, because even the mental health field is spitting so much vitriol at people with DISORDERS (who they're supposed to be helping!) that there's no solid research or therapy programs for people like me.

Losing close friends when they find out, despite us having had a good relationship before, and them KNOWING me and knowing that I'm not like the trending image of pwNPD. Because now they only see me through the lens of stigma and misinformation.

Hearing the same stigma come up literally wherever I go. Clubs. Meetings. Any online space. At the bus stop. At the mall. At a restaurant. At work. Buzzword of the year that everyone loooves loudly throwing around with their friends or over the phone. Feels awesome for me, makes my day so much better/s

I could go on for a long time, but I'm scared no one will read/rb this if it gets too much longer.

So please. Stop using the word "narcissist" as a synonym for "abusive".

Stop bringing up people you hate who you believe to have NPD because of a stigmatizing article full of misinformation whenever someone with actual NPD opens their mouth. (Imagine if people did that with any other disorder! "Hey, I'm autistic." "Oh... my old roommate screamed at me whenever I made noise around him, and didn't understand my needs, which seems like sensory overload and difficulty with social cues. He was definitely autistic. But as long as you're self-aware and always restraining your innate desire to be an abusive asshole, you're okay I guess, maybe." ...See how offensive and ignorant that is?)

Stop preventing healthcare for people with a disorder just because it's trendy to use us as a scapegoat.

If you got this far, thank you for reading, and please share this if you can. Further reading is under the cut.

NPD Criteria, re-written by someone who actually has NPD

Stigma in the DSM

Common perception of the DSM criteria vs how someone may actually experience them (Keep in mind that this is the way I personally experience these symptoms, and that presentation can vary a lot between individuals)

"Idk, the stigma is right though, because I've known a lot of people with NPD who are jerks, so I'm going to continue to support the blockage of treatment for this condition."

(All of these were written by me, because I didn't want to link to other folks' posts without permission, but if you want to add your own links in reblogs or replies please feel free <3)

[rocknrollsalad-moved]

i accidentally read another writer’s stuff and now i think i’m shit: a short story by me

[clonerightsagenda]

Lucy directs a lot of internalized misogyny toward sensitives for being airy fairy losers who just want to ~commune~ with the dead even though she routinely terrorizes her own team by going pss pss to the homicidal spirit who pushes people down the stairs, etc., so I hope the sensitive community gets wind of the extent of her talents and starts following her around as the world's most enthusiastic and least wanted fanclub. She's having to beat a crowd of Hot Topic-clad goth girls off with a stick and her coworkers are like you deserve this actually.

[hansoeii]

I'm very much not normal about loki and mobius right now

[shinybulbasaur]

Rules: Make a poll with five of your all-time favorite characters and then tag five people to do the same. See which character is everyone's favorite!

I was tagged by @suddenrundown, thanks for the tag! I was so tempted to put "eliot's baseball hair" but I resisted (also polls don't allow strikethroughs. sad). tagging @michinaranja, @vero-niche, @acidmatze and anyone else who wants to play!

[lainalit]

Rhysand stans:"nobody wants to talk about how Rhysand is a SA Victim"

Girl, I see constantly posts/tiktoks/content about how Rhysand is a SA Victim and 99% of the comments are always super supportive, but every time a Nesta post is made about how she was SA'd by the Kelpie and/or Thomas there are always some Nesta antis in the comments being like "her trauma, doesn't absolve her of being a horrible sister!!!!" even though the post has nothing to do with feyre

or than god forbid people point out that feyre is a Victim of SA in the hands of Rhysand all hell breaks loose, and instead of acknowledging what rhysand did was SA , most of the fandom is out here trying to justify it with the same old tired phrase of "he did it to protect her" or even worse out right denying it by being like "rhysand touching feyre's waist, arms, making her sit on his lap and kissing her against her will isn't SA because only certain circumstances need to occur for it to be classified as SA"

Don't even get me started on the people who believe that gwyn faked her SA and is secretly an evil lightsinger

And the one who rarely gets any recognition of being a SA Victim (besides from his fans) is Lucien. I saw a handful of posts/tiktoks from lucien fans that bring this topic up but those are not nearly as popular as Rhysand's posts and where are almost always some people in the comments of lucien's posts who are asking "when did he get SA'd?"

The majority of the fandom always talks about Rhysand being a SA Victim

[spoilers-ahead]

okay!! now that it’s not 2am for me, i’m going to post my selkie!jason todd hc’s straight up au apparently! 

(uh. this was supposed to just be a list of hc’s but i got slightly,,,, carried away)

his selkie skin looks like an oversized red hoodie in his human form, and is just warm enough to help him survive new england winters.

when the summer heat becomes unbearable, he slings the hoodie around his waist

alternatively, he just coasts it out underwater. perks of living in a coastal city!

willis todd was a selkie. he used to tell jason stories of what it was like to swim through the big, wide ocean. of how freeing it felt. how different it is, from the smoggy, heavy air of gotham --- different, but both theirs, in their own right.

but to be honest, jason doesn’t remember much about the stories he was told, or really, anything about willis --- he had been in and out of blackgate for most of jason’s life, working for two-face to try and make ends meet, before dying. 

what jason mostly remembers, are the warnings. don’t let anybody know you’re a selkie. don’t let anybody find your skin. they will find it, and they will use it to control you. even decades later, jason would still remember those warnings. 

catherine is the one who teaches him how to swim, who helps him trial-and-error his way into putting his skin on, and learn how to make the transition seamless. 

after she dies, jason spends three months as a seal, to just... exist. forget.   

although jason technically lives on the streets, whenever he can;t find food, whenever he can’t find somewhere warm to sleep, whenever just being human becomes too unbearable, he spends the night as a seal. he ends up spending more time in the ocean, than on land.

that’s not to say he’s very good at being a seal --- he barely knows how to swim, has to learn how to fish the hard way. 

when bruce finds jason stealing his car tires, he marvels over how nice jason’s hoodie is, soft and fluffy even after all of jason’s time on the streets, especially given the condition jason is in, ribs showing from malnutrition, and the worn and raggedy shape of the rest of his stuff.

jason is skittish when he goes to live in the manor, even after a few weeks. he always adopts an expression particularly similar to a cornered wild animal around alfred in particular, alfred, who keeps on trying to take his hoodie away, purportedly to wash it.

alfred eventually gives up on trying to force jason to wash it --- he figures that as jason becomes more comfortable living at the manor, he’ll wind up telling them why he’s so protective over that hoodie, and they can work something out then. 

whenever wayne manor overwhelms jason with how big and how decadently expensive all the decor is, jason runs away, run to the ocean. 

jason doesn’t actually end up telling alfred and bruce that he’s a selkie --- bruce just has a ridiculous amount of motion alarms, which are triggered every time jason ran off. he had followed jason the third night, and saw him transform. 

bruce doesn’t tell jason that he knows, assuming that jason kept this a secret because he didn’t fully trust either of them. he would later learn that he was right in this assumption (a rare win for bruce in terms of emotional awareness)

except jason doesn’t fully trust either of them, even after a few months. bruce impulsively decides to do a few things --- a) tell jason about batman and robin and his crime-fighting secret identity, and b) tell jason he already knows about him being a selkie. 

jason is absolutely bamboozled by the fact that bruce knows, and yet hasn’t tried to take his hoodie to control him, or to stop him from playing in the ocean for a few hours. 

in fact, (under alfred’s encouragement) bruce offers to take him to the ocean during the day, so he can get “a proper night’s rest that a growing young boy such as himself would need”

jason remembers what his father told him, to never trust anyone, never let his guard down. but bruce has known about jason being a selkie for so long, and he didn’t take his hoodie or try anything. of course he can trust bruce. 

and when he tries on the robin costume for the first time, it fits perfectly. just like his hoodie, his second skin. it fits just like magic. 

oh, it’s a little loose in some places, the legacy of dick fucking grayson a little heavy sometimes, but he’ll grow into it. he’ll make himself, if he has to. 

also, jason finds the fact that even though he’s a friggin’ selkie, his callsign is a bird (a robin, no less) incredibly ironic and funny 

being a selkie is actually so useful for vigilantehood. the amount of people who talk freely, openly, and loudly about their drug smuggling plans near the ports is quite frankly, ridiculous.

honestly, towards the end of his robin years, jason remains genuinely surprised nobody catches on to him or his tactics yet. bruce is very proud.  

even though jason is safe, has been safe for three years, and trusts bruce with his life, his skin, and everything, old habits are hard to break. so he has his hoodie on when he goes to find sheila. 

and anyways, he wants to see if sheila is a selkie too. he’s taking biology right now, and they’re learning about punnett squares. jason’s never met another selkie before, other than willis who he barely remembers. there’s a possibility that sheila knows something, anything, so he has to try. 

sheila gets a glint in her eyes when jason mentions that he’s a selkie, tells him that while she’s not one herself, she’s familiar with the myth. she has long suspected that willis was a selkie, she tells him, and she’s glad to have confirmation. 

jason positively vibrates with excitement, can’t wait to ask, to pester his mother (mother!) with questions upon questions until. 

until. 

sheila doesn’t do anything after she gives him to the joker. she just smokes and smokes. and she doesn’t tell the joker about his hoodie, despite how it would have been much easier for the joker to destroy him that way. much more painful too.  

small mercies, he supposes, in between hacking coughs that brings blood bubbling up his lips. 

after he dies, his hoodie is ripped and in tatters from the crowbar, with burns along the edges from the bomb. bruce has to carefully peel it off his body. 

when jason was alive, his magic kept the hoodie in perfect condition, always. even when the rest of him was covered head-to-toe in mud, or dripping sludge from the nasty gotham sewers. 

bruce stares at the same hoodie, blood-soaked and mangled, so incredibly dissonant from how he remembered it on jason, when he was bright, whole, and alive. 

he can’t stand it. the hoodie that was so precious to jason, that was jason, at the core of him, in this state. dirty and ripped and devoid of the magic jason had exuded. 

in a moment of desperation, late at night, bruce asks alfred to teach him how to sew. he doesn’t dare to practice on jason’s beloved hoodie --- instead, he starts with the suits in his closet, grabbing the first one he sees, regardless of price. rips a hole and sews it back together over and over until he perfects his technique. 

and then he washes the fabric gently, using baby fabric cleanser and scrubbing for hours upon hours until the last traces of the deep-set brown stain from jason’s blood washes down the drain.

he painstakingly sews the scraps of fabric back together with a red thread, carefully sourced to match the hoodie to try and make it flow seamlessly like it used to. 

it doesn’t work, not exactly. despite his best efforts, the creases bruce had carefully sewn together are prominent and thick like scars, littering the  soft fabric.

so he gives up. he hangs it over the grandfather clock entrance to the cave in his study. brings it with him every time he visits jason’s grave, because he doesn’t ever want to keep jason’s hoodie away from him, but he also can’t bear for it to get ruined. 

dick visits him. a rare occurrence, these days. 

dick yells at him, as he is wont to do. 

these days, it feels like they spend more time angry at each other than not. dick says that this isn’t right. isn’t fair to anybody, not to alfred, not to himself, definitely not to jason. he rants, jason deserves to be remembered as he was in life, not frozen in death. 

perhaps he is right. bruce is not unaware of the state of violent, cutting stasis he is in, this putrefaction of his life. and he is certainly not unaware of how it is affecting the people around him. dick. alfred. the neighbor’s kid, the one who wants to be robin.   

bruce tries. not for himself, but for tim. for alfred, for dick. even for stephanie brown, who sometimes, when she smirks just right, or says something with just the right twang, he swears he can see jason in her. 

he still can’t bear to put the hoodie away, because jason deserved better than to be forgotten, so he folds it gently and places it in his closet instead. 

he also can’t bear to look at it for very long, so he forces himself to every single day. 

it’s different from the glass case that houses robin’s tattered suit in the cave --- that, is a reminder of how he failed robin. this, this is salt in a constant, stabbing, festering would, reminding him of how he failed his son. 

it was stephanie, that eventually helped him figure out what to do with the hoodie. when she was young, young enough to cry at ripped pants and skinned knees, young enough that her mother hadn’t touched the drugs yet, her mother would dry up her tears, give her a hug and a kiss on the forehead, before patching her pants up. 

what not many people know, is that before crystal brown set her mind on becoming a nurse, she wanted to be an artist, first. and so she grabs her old set of embroidery needles, and stitched little designs. dogs and cats. stars and planets. tools and gadgets. 

bruce doesn’t react, doesn’t even move, even as stephanie finishes her story. she hangs there awkwardly for a second, stares up at jason’s suit, waiting for him to respond, before shuffling towards the exit of the cave. 

thank you, spoiler, bruce manages to croak out. 

ah, yeah, she says, shrugging lightly while slouching in on herself, any time, boss. she walks out, and bruce watches her go from the reflection on the darkened computer. 

that night, he takes out jason’s hoodie, smooths it out, grabs his threads, and stitches. 

he stitches on constellations, argo navis, for jason’s namesake in the greek myths he had loved so much. a tiny seal, playing with beach balls. little books, with quotes on the sides. a robin, big and bold. 

he tries to make it as true to jason as possible, not just in death and in bruce’s memories, but as he was in life.

jason wakes up abruptly.  

he wakes up in a coffin, cold, alone, and with a gaping hole in his chest. getting dipped in the lazarus pit only made it worse, only made him all the more aware of what he was missing, all the more conscious of it. 

he doesn’t bother trying to learn how to swim with two arms and two legs, instead of two fins and a tail. it doesn’t feel the same. it only reminds him of what he’s lost. 

sometimes, on sleepless nights that happen more often than not, he wonders what would have happened if he still had a hoodie, still could swim. 

if he still was robin. 

and he doesn’t have access to the cave anymore, or to the titan’s tower, or the watchtower, and his memory of the past is still patchy and shitty in some places. 

so in a burst of impulsivity fueled by the person he no longer is, he prints out photos of robin’s costume from the internet and recreates it on his own. 

if his skin is gone, then fine. fine! he’s perfectly perfunctorily aware that nothing about this resurrection of his is natural. if he doesn’t think too much about it, he’ll be alright. his hoodie, his skin, that was something he was born with, a birthright that died with him. 

but robin, robin was something that he helped shape. robin was something that he worked for, changed himself for. 

and the makeshift robin suit --- it doesn’t fit him, not anymore. no, it feels wrong, like a child playing with their parent’s suit. or --- he realizes, perhaps more accurately, like an adult realizing they no longer fit in their favorite clothes. 

and --- and --- what was the point of it all? what was the point, of trying to make bruce proud of him, of getting dick’s approval, of trying to futilely save people over and over again from the same gallery of supervillains who keep on escaping from prison?!

and what was the point of carving out a space for himself if the joker was just going to beat him out of it, and if tim drake was going to insert himself in the hole he left behind?

and then the next thing he knows he’s in titan’s tower hitting tim drake over and over again because who let him? who let him take jason’s role as a son, as a brother, as a hero? how dare he?

but when he’s slit tim’s throat and torn the ‘R’ off his chest, jason doesn’t feel any better. the robin suit still doesn’t fit. his hoodie’s still gone. 

he’s starting to think it never will, not again. 

sometimes, when he gets tired enough to let his mind wander, he wonders what happened to his suit. 

he’s pretty sure he died with it, so either the hoodie is with the joker, batman, or... gone entirely. (it’s not like they found willis’ skin after he died. maybe selkie skins just disappear in a cloud of sea foam once they die, or some little mermaid shit like that)

it’s a cold comfort, that nobody can manipulate him now. nobody can control him --- not even batman. 

(bruce had thought about it. when he first had his suspicious regarding who the red hood was, before he knew there was any trace of the son he once had left. he thought about using the hoodie, using jason’s selkie skin to coerce him, at least to stop murdering people, to stop hurting their family.) 

(he would never go that far, in retrospect, or at least, he doesn’t think he could ever. to do that to jason, betray his trust so thoroughly and completely... but it would be a lie to say that he didn’t consider it.)

bruce reflects on this as jason reveals himself, the joker tied up at his feet with a gun pressed to his head, and venom spitting from his son’s mouth.  

but when he lifts the batarang to hit jason’s gun, or wrist, or anything that’ll force him to drop the gun, he realizes that his hands are shaking. 

and when he throws the batarang, he knows a millisecond after he’s let go, that he’s miscalculated the ricochet. 

so when jason escapes that night, bruce knows he’s fucked up. 

jason goes off the maps, completely. bruce doesn’t know where he is, if he’s safe, if he even made it out of the explosion that night. 

it takes weeks. weeks for bruce to track jason down, from meticulously documenting the dropped threads of where the red hood was pulling strings in the gotham underworld behind the scenes, to tracking security cameras with facial recognition. 

once bruce manages find where he’s staying, make sure he’s safe, he knows what he wants to do. and, he knows what he needs to do. 

jason gets a package in the mail, five weeks after his disasterous meeting with batman and the joker. unmarked, unsigned, no return address. 

when jason opens the box gingerly and carefully, he holds on to his skin for the first time in years. and then, and then, and then --- something right slots into place. his fingers brushed gently over the tiny spotted seal he knows he used to look like, the books he remembered ranting to bruce about for hours on end. 

the robin, on the top left, over his heart, big enough to have changed him, yet small enough to not define him. 

it’s not perfect. it doesn’t even fix anything, not entirely. he still fights with bruce most times he sees him, tries to punch dick in the face, steadfastly ignores tim and steph the entire time. 

but it’s something. it’s something, and the next time nightwing, batman, spoiler, and robin fight a gang on the docks, the red hood gives them a helping hand before jumping back into the ocean and swimming away.

fin!

wow this got long

[whump-queen]

good idea: whumper tying their whumpee up and forcing them to cuddle

whumper’s arms wrapped tight and possessive around whumpee’s injured form—too strong to be fought off, or perhaps whumpee is just too weak by this point.

a softly murmured "behave” into the crook of whumpee’s neck while spooning

whumper digging their nails into fresh cuts, getting a whine and hiss in response—but they stop struggling, and whumper leans in close to their ear with a growling murmer— “mmn. good boy.”

whumpee feeling slow kisses pressed into the side of their neck that make their skin crawl

maybe whumpee gets their hands bound in front of them this time, so they can fit in closer against whumper. and its more comfortable too. “shh, let yourself enjoy this.”

whumper cuddling with their hand around whumpee’s throat, not squeezing or anything, just… resting there.

knowing that if they tried to pull away, that hand would tighten instantly and squeeze until whumpee was dizzy and writhing back against them

and size difference… their throat, so small and soft and delicate under whumper’s rough fingertips

the way whumper’s hands would fit around their waist— the way they could press in under their ribs until whumpee is choking and their chest is spasming

whumpee shivering when they feel low whispers in their ear. just… so sticky and possessive

whumpee waking up with sore aching muscles from being kept in the same uncomfortable position all night. they sleepily try and flex their muscles and move around—then they’re hit fully awake with a jolt of cold panic when they realize where they are—and that they still can’t move at all.

waking up with whumper’s arms still tightly wrapped around them and trying desperately to squirm away, before they feel whumper’s hold tighten around them and hear a sleepy possessive growl in their ear, “mnn… no. you stay.”

just… any of the ‘tied up and kept like that’ tropes melt my fucjfen brain

(shoutout @unorganisedalienrubbish for helping inspire today’s episode of terrible sticky intimate whumper shit)

[inimoose]

Just a little reminder that you are valid and deserve good things :)

DNI if you breathe air. This post isn't for you!

[mythalism]

…

[incorrect-riordanverse]

the problem with all these white authors like rick riordan who are revealing their stances on the israel-palestine apartheid is that they barely do anything but virtue signal when they claim “i’m on the side against war” “i’m anti-violence” “i abhor terrorism.” zero people are going to disagree with you. zero people believe what hamas did is justified. zero people think israel shouldn’t have a right to defend itself against terrorism. but that isn’t what israel is doing when they collectively punish all of palestine, who doesn’t even have an official army. when rick riordan says some wishy-washy bullshit about the violence suffered on both sides of the conflict, and words his whole dumbass blog post like it’s violence that is in any way equal, that literally helps no one. in fact, it’s so damn negligent of the 75 years of violence that palestine has suffered and been oppressed for. yes, there are innocent civilians in israel who are suffering, no one is disagreeing with you. that doesn’t erase the fact that israel is a disgusting state that has used state-sanctioned violence on a systemic scale since its conception, and the oppressed people have responded to that in violent retaliation (because OBVIOUSLY they would). israel is built on the subjugation of palestine, there is no equal suffering between the two.

[thelongestway]

hey no shade but you know dungeon meshi isn't actually based off dnd right? there are definitely some overlapping concepts and it can be fun to analyze it through a dnd lens but really it's its own homebrew fantasy setting. just checking bc i nearly got in an argument w someone over dungeon meshi lore the other day only to realize it was because they were trying to apply dnd lore to it ahahaa

Oh yeah, absolutely, it's its own thing. You don't even have to go far to show how it's its own thing: for one, the whole set-up with the dungeons being what they are isn't found anywhere else in D&D-inspired material that I know. You could maybe reflavor Halaster's Undermountain to something like the Dungeon Meshi dungeons, but that would be another layer of homebrew. That said, I do have the feeling that Ryoko Kui grew up on the same kind of D&D material that I did - stuff like Elminster's Ecologies, or old school Greyhawk materials. Her story genuinely feels like an AD&D game run by an old-school DM, maybe even earlier in the editions (hi, Chilchuck and "I'm a rogue, I'm not gonna fight"!). I don't mean that she follows D&D canon in any meaningful sense--her stuff isn't set in Greyhawk, nor on Abeir-Toril, nor on Krynn, etc. But I do think she's someone who's inspired by old school stuff, even as she makes her work thoroughly her own.

An acquaintance of mine once wrote that long tabletop games gain a quality that she called "being well-trod". This is when the players and DM are so familiar with the world they live in that it becomes, well, lived-in. They don't need to look up rules anymore to extrapolate: they understand the logic of the setting, and they get the same kind of intuitive feel for the world that we do when living in our own world, in real life. A feeling of where the boundaries lie, and how things work.

This is how I feel about Dungeon Meshi and D&D. It feels like a work written by someone who walked the same paths that I did, and whose work is therefore both new and startlingly familiar. That's it in a nutshell, but then I also wrote a bunch of examples, which got very long, so cut for length and spoilers!

I wrote somewhere in the tags on my Dungeon Meshi posts that it's incredibly surreal reading a story that seems to be informed by the exact materials that you base your own homebrew games on. Kui takes her work in a wholly different direction than I did - but the disparate elements of the story would fit in like a glove, because they're based on similar logic. I could quite literally take any of the ecologies elements of Dungeon Meshi and put them into a given module I'm running, and it would need less adaptation than 5e material. And most of the cultural/racial elements of Dungeon Meshi? That, too. Where it's not a one for one match, it would so easily be explainable by "different continent".

Let's take the example you're probably here from: the Canaries and elves in general, and let's take elves in general first. In D&D, there's been a switch in models of elven aging throughout the years: from "they are literal babies up until 60-ish, and then have 40 years of actual adolescence" to "yeah they grow to full adult size at about the same speed as the other races, and are then just culturally considered too young to make their own decisions". I am decidedly not a fan of the second model - I think it takes away from the cool biologies early D&D thrived on. BG3's treatment of Astarion's age of death, for instance, keeps throwing me. Yeah, I get it: it fits in with the edition they're working off, but I hate it. That's not how things work on our Faerun! But then we get to Marcille's backstory, and we see that she has the problems old school half-elves did, and you're like "oh, well of course someone invested in weird cool biology as an author would interpret elves like that." Her treatment of age makes sense to me. She makes the races as alien as possible, and hits that vibe of "D&D-style fantasy is its own thing, with its own set of rules" that I love. In contrast, and unlike any prototypes I know, Kui takes her half-foots in a different direction! They don't live longer than tall-men, they live shorter lives, closer to goblinoids. And I think it's for the same reason: because it's that much cooler to have different experiences of life in humanoid races. This is decidedly Not D&D, but it would absolutely fit into that vein.

With smaller details, I keep joking around here that the Canaries are grey elves, and of course they're not. But then Kui keeps putting in these tiny little details - which can be either nods to existing material, or the same extrapolations that other authors drawing upon high fantasy tropes have made. The white ships that have travelled all the way from Tolkien's Valinor to Evermeet and now to Shima. The fact that the Canaries have basically the right color scheme for grey elves threw me completely: I was not expecting that! Elves being that specific brand of destructive that they are - jeez, the Canaries would be right at home in Myth Drannor, or during the Crown Wars. So I joke around about these specific dolts a lot, and I am having an inordinate amount of fun seeing if my predictions that come from running a Myth Drannor game for a good long while now come true. And it goes on. Marcille doesn't prepare spells, and the magic here is obviously not Vancian. But Mithrun's teleport shenanigans are literally stuff I've done in games. The differences between races in D&D aren't because of wishes made by mortals; they're built in by gods for their own purposes. But the towns that spring up around anomalous spots and that have to deal with the weirdness have the same vibe. Kui draws on a more extensive tradition than just D&D, of course, but she transforms the tradition in a very similar way to old D&D. Of course the elves' magic in Kui's work does weird and creepy stuff with soulbinding and immortality; that's been their dark side since Tolkien and Celebrimbor's work with Annatar, and then it turned into stuff like elves regularly sacrificing their lives in high magic rituals in Faerun. Of course Senshi's backstory is about the dwarves that have dug too deep - but they are, of course, distinct from gnomes, and the gnomes are a peculiar and interesting breed of arcana specialists. Of course Chilchuck is a Burglar - but he works on dungeon delving unions, of all things! It's a familiar transformation, so the world makes sense to me, and I love it. So yeah. Tl;dr: not D&D ofc, but the vibe is there, and I am having fun with it.

Also - can you tell me about the argument? I am super curious, and I wonder if the person you were arguing with was working from 5e material.

[shadystranger]

Why did they use the most romantic soundtrack I ever heard in this show on a samdean moment

[aroaceleovaldez]

So, in your last post about the Percy Jackson TV show, I felt you lacked a few pieces of information/points. While it is true that the CGI in the film is pore and not constructed well, please note that while they have a large budget Disney has made a lot of restrictions to the show. In the original scrips there was a significantly larger amount of violence that would have needed more CGI. This was latter edited out of the script due to both restrictions and budget cuts for other parts in the show(sadly). Also to bring into prospective Sea of monsters the movie was made 10 years ago. Inflation has juristically affected the way money is used in films. Another thing to note is typically movie budgets are less than TV shows because they only are filming for one larger block of time. TV however they can take years meaning the acters need to be paid even for the time off set. This is not to say movies cannot take years, but it is to show that TV shows are filmed longer. I would also like to say I am genuinely not trying to be rude or unkind about your opinion and thoughts on the subject. I am just someone who has a different insight into the topic because of the things I know about the topic (I myself, am an actor and for the most part I think this is why the CGI was not the best as well as some of the script work). 

I did actually calculate inflation for Sea of Monsters versus the PJO TV show. We know the PJO TV show allegedly had a budget of $12-15 million per episode. For comparison, this is the type of budget Disney+ usually uses for stuff like The Mandalorian. I was doing a generous underestimate for the entire season which comes out to $96mil (12mil per episode x 8 episodes). Sea of Monsters' budget was 90mil. Here's that inflation:

So lil over $120mil. Going for a top estimate for s1 of the show (15x8) that's $120mil. And as far as I'd heard that may also not include stuff like budget for casting for the show. They are still roughly in similar ballparks.

Regardless of this - as an animator, i can tell you there is no excuse for that wonky CGI trident other than it being extremely quickly done. That's literally a transform error, like ctrl+t type stuff. That is a lazy and cheap trident, probably because Disney notoriously overworks and cheaps out with their CGI. The CGI problems in the show are majority because Disney's being cheap about it. This shows in nearly all the CGI in every episode.

If they had to remove violence from the script and so remove CGI scenes with it, then theoretically they should have more room in the budget for more or better CGI where it already is in the show. That money doesn't just vanish. Changing that in the script gives them less of an excuse, actually.

Also, as i mentioned in my previous post - if you don't want to CGI hydrokinesis, don't pick the franchise where the main character's defining power is hydrokinesis. If you can't have much violence, DON'T PICK THE GREEK MYTHOLOGY SERIES WHERE THE MAIN CHARACTER BEHEADS TWO PEOPLE IN THE FIRST BOOK AND IT ONLY GETS BLOODIER FROM THERE. You cannot have PJO without some level of violence. It's kind of very inherent to the series. Rick actually talks in his original Teaching Guide for The Lightning Thief about how, in argument against attempts to ban TLT (in this specific instance for "being too violent"), that monsters in the books poof into golden dust for a reason, because then they haven't "died." There is no blood. They can and will come back. Because it's fantasy. That is the excuse for all the violence. Of which there otherwise technically is a lot of.

If you are doing live action PJO you are going to have to have some amount of violence (and there is absolutely a level that is perfectly suitable for a PG13 audience. The show right now is leagues below that level. PG13 just means parental guidance for under 13 - this majority has to do with concerns about children under 13 replicating behavior on-screen. Past 13 kids know better than to do that, which is why that rating is a thing. There are plenty of film/media/etc that are way more gory and violent and are still PG13). You are going to have to CGI monsters/creatures to some degree regularly (alongside demigod powers like Percy's hydrokinesis even more regularly). And between those two things, characters are going to have to look like they're physically interacting with the CGI at times. Disney is capable of doing this. Disney does have the budget for this for the show. They're not doing it because they're being cheap. Disney has done this before and does it regularly. This is not anything new. It entirely has to do with CGI not having as many unions. They have no excuses. If they didn't expect to run into these problems then they clearly did no planning for what adapting the series would entail and didn't think at all of what the series actually featured before diving into it. And they have no excuse for that! That is step one!

[jackshiccup]

for all of alvin and excellinor's evil wickedness, their dynamic as a mother and son villain duo is just so hilarious bc it's like disappointed mother trying her best to ensure son's success vs. irritated son who hates overbearing mother who meddles (see exhibit a)

[silenthill2ps2]

well i gotta ask you for survival horror recs now

NO silent hill or resident evil because i'm mean and i want people to expand their horizons

haunting ground

rule of rose

clock tower

alan wake

fatal frame

siren

dino crisis

dead space

obscure

parasite eve

alone in the dark

cry of fear

crow country

deep fear

deadly premonition

corpse party

signalis

white day: a labyrinth named school

alien isolation

darkwood

lost in vivo

d: the game

faith

kuon