#like an angry deity

[absentmoon]

ok its 11 i can talk about this because it doesn't count (because its 11)

[potatobugz]

Lucky is he, Who lives unaware

[sarafangirlart]

A review of Hera by Jennifer Saint

So ummm, lot to unpack here, I know a lot of y’all requested this so here it is!

Positives:

I like Hera’s motivation for why she married Zeus, it actually makes more sense than her marrying him out of shame, it’s more in character for her to do it to take him down.

I like that Hera’s emotions and feelings while she’s pregnant reflect into how her children grow up.

I like how she’s sympathetic towards Asteria but then grew angry and bitter over the years and didn’t extend that same sympathy towards her sister Leto.

The scene with Asteria and the aftermath really made my skin crawl.

I like how it’s left in doubt whether Echo was really helping Zeus.

The final few chapters just… wow genuinely thought provoking idk if I can sum up my thoughts in one review.

Seeing Hera justify her horrible actions to herself was interesting

The author is clearly an Ares x Aphrodite shipper and I respect that… to an extent.

Hera’s relationship with monsters was so cool and interesting.

Negatives:

I hate that we just skip past the Titanomachy

Ironically I find Zeus and Hera’s relationship super underdeveloped, I wish we knew more about their relationship during and before the Titanomachy, show that she deeply loved and trusted him like a sister, but I just… don’t really get any of that so Zeus’s betrayal doesn’t feel as upsetting as it could’ve been.

I didn’t really find Zeus’s characterization that interesting, he’s just a prick and that’s it, tho I appreciate that he still has a slight fatherly side.

I really don’t care for adaptations that make Hera hate Zeus, I find it more interesting if she started off loving him only for that love to weaken as his abuse and infidelity kept going.

The pacing is all over the place, first half was fine but after that it was way too rushed, the Gigantomachy is only one chapter long and the Argus myth is only 2/3 pages long, the Trojan War was rushed over too.

I do not like how Hephaestus is characterized, when it’s shown that the book was using the “Hephaestus frees Hera in exchange for Aphrodite” thing I had to put the book down for a while, at one point point it’s even said that he helped the Greeks bc he hated Aeneas which just… no (even the Aeneid disproves this) he likely helped the Greeks bc Hera and Athena asked him to, much like they did with Ares.

I do not understand why more of Hera’s relationships with women aren’t explored, why tf was Thetis only mentioned towards the end of the book? Why don’t they have any meaningful relationship or even speak to each other?

Why is Iris so boring I know she was a blank slate in the Iliad but c’mon this book adapts the Heracles/Lyssa myth why not go further and make Iris a little gremlin?

I don’t like how bare bones her relationship with her daughters is, I know there is very little in the source material but c’mon there’s so much more you can do here.

Clymene was kinda boring, she’s just kinda there doesn’t really do much and I was so disappointed (maybe bc my version of her is a lot more angry and vengeful? Idk).

Hestia was kinda bland, she’s only there to comfort Hera and only starts becoming interesting towards the end, at which point she leaves the narrative.

Overall I give this a 2.75/5

[hermes-helpol]

Sitting outside during a storm, watching, listening; enjoying the rain and the lightning and the thunder and thinking of Lord Zeus.

Thinking about his stories; what I know and how much I know I'm oblivious to. Wondering what I can learn from him. Reminding myself to research him later.

Thanking him for the storm. For every drop, every flash; every rumble.

Thunderstorms are something we have always adored both collectively with my system and together with our family/mother. But this one was truly magical because I got to experience it with Lord Zeus in mind.

I love religion 💜.

[swan2swan]

Brain accidentally tripped over a broom and stumbled into a big box that said "DO NOT OPEN", and now there's "Barrissoka is Star Wars Narusasu" everywhere, help me put it back in the box.

[whispers-of-delphi]

I play Guild Wars 2 a lot, and this was my offering to Apollo. It's definitely one of the silliest offerings I've made but I like to think he enjoys it 🤣

[gxlden-angels]

I've got a personal situation going on that I want to eventually talk about here, but in summary transphobes and fundamentalist christians hate women and can suck my spiritual dick about it

[its-fjori]

...........................🐟

........... 🐠 🐠

......🐟 🐟

🐠 Grimtusk 🐠

.....🐟 Fishing Daily 🐟

.............🐠 🐠

............................🐟

Summoning the Grimtusk Fishing Hole so I can get Taivan tomorrow

[krystxellyn]

People interpret others saying that Lucifer can be masculine or feminine as “Lucifer can show up as a woman” which isn’t impossible as basically any deity can change their gender or their shape entirely because they are not physical, and I’m sure ppl have had that experience with him, but for me when he’s on the fem end of the spectrum he’s either bodiless and just like. Really light energy (like a Christmas light? The ones that look like they have sugar on them) -OR- one time he showed up like The Fallen Angel painting by Cabanel except he had lash extensions and body glitter all over

[darker-souls-born-of-blood]

Lord satan how does he appear to you ?

He has a few forms He likes to use. He mostly appears like this

Although he occasionally appears as Molag Bal or Mehrunes Dagon from the Elder Scrolls series

In my experience Infernals appear in ways that would make them recognizeable and they approve of the appearance. Lord Satan rarely appears in a form similar to Mehrunes Dagon and has only done so once. He seems to more strongly prefer the first one

[seraxfemme]

🔥

[red-dyed-sarumane]

this dosent need to be answered seriously but what are keppi's thoughts on material possessions. actually. does he judge people for anything does he just accept the person for all their harmless desires

u know he may live in a lake but hes somewhat of a magpie type of person as in he likes to collect things he thinks are neat. a lot of the rocks at the bottom of his lake are his personal collection of ones he thought were cool. overall tho people are more important to him than objects & he does get a little irritated when people start to prioritize an item more than other things in their life. like he gets it but it doesnt sit right with him. in terms of collections tho hes pretty neutral like "oh u like stamps thats neat!" & not really put too much thought into it. he thinks its just something people do naturally.

[kiyomitakada]

[ID: tags reading #[guy who is still very much insane about anime boys voice] it's giving Successors, #house md. End ID]

[clutching the bathroom sink] do NOT think of a house md L + successors death note AU you're better than this

[chickensoupleg]

I had an idea based off of this (It has nothing to do with said idea the context is the Sims 4)

So Neil gets married to his first wife, all is well, she gets pregnant. What he doesn't know is she's some deity of some form or another and was either in a selkie skin situation where she can't return home because Neil has something of hers or knew that she can't legally just run away with child without Neil getting the law involved and put herself in danger. How a mortal man would put a being too powerful for him to even dare lay a hand on (He does anyways) in danger who knows, but whatever it is, she's not budging for a good couple of years.

Anyways, so at some point she does actually leave, abandoning her son to the dogs despite the possibility that she could have tried to bring him too, but simply could not. It could be a time thing, where her point of freedom was short and grabbing Billy without alerting Neil was too risky, a mortality thing where Billy being part of Neil's blood too made him impossible to bring where she was going, or just simply she did not want to.

Regardless, now Billy's stuck with Neil, time passes, joy of joy they end up in Hawkins.

Billy remembers his mom, definitely. Probably idolised her as many children do, especially when said parent tried protecting you from your other parent and gave you happy memories. Very likely he had no idea that his mom wasn't just a mortal woman.

Very likely – before the Mindflayer got its grubby slimy little tentacles in Billy – it didn't know either. Why would it. So, after it DOES get its nasty little whippersnappers into Billy it just... goes horrendously wrong.

Turns out adding the Upside Down to Godly Blood is a horrible combination and should not be done under any circumstance.

It becomes a horrible rendition of slowly distorting Billy's body so badly he might as well just been Mindflayer 2.0 but with exactly one (1) soul suffering in agonizing pain and misery.

It doesn't stop his mind from going between completing the Duty forced upon him and trying to figure out why everything in his bones hurt.

Pros:

-Nobody gets melted, hooray!

-The original Mindflayer + Henry now have to fight this Holy Blood with the mind control, and turns out a small child is much easier to control than WHATEVER THIS IS.

-The pain of summer being legal and a thing is likely not as severe but still very uncomfortable because someone on this brain council likes it cold.

Cons:

-Billy does not get his memory of him as a kid on the beach with his seven foot wave shown to him by a girl he doesn't really know but was about to feed to a massive monster in the mall and therefore remembers what feeling safe was like.

-Max still gets trauma regarding said brother, just in a different ice cream flavour.

-He doesn't understand what is going on and he's never gonna get his answers because it's too late for him.

[honourablejester]

I’m realising as I browse around that I really love lore when it comes to ttrpgs, games and game worlds. And by that I don’t mean I like to obsessively learn lists of dates and wars, and the names of leaders of factions, I mean …

I like learning weird, juicy details about the worlds of games. I like finding little nuggets that say things about the set-up and culture and assumptions of the world. I like finding fragments of ideas to hang whole story and character concepts off.

I love that in D&D 5e’s Spelljammer, the Astral Sea is full of the corpses of dead gods that you can fully sail up to in your ship. Just. Floating out there. Waiting for you to rock up to them.

I love that in Sunless Sea, the king of the drowned is the way he is because he fell in love with an eldritch sea urchin from space, and successfully married it. His niece is an angry sentient floating mountain whose mother is a goddess-mountain and whose father is a face-stealing humanoid abomination. This is fine and normal.

I love that in Starfinder, there are mysterious bubble cities in the surface of the sun that the church of the sun goddess discovered and cheerfully occupied despite having no idea who the hell built them or for what purpose.

I love that in Dishonored, the entire industrial revolution that has built the empire we’re in the midst of saving or destroying was built on the properties of whale oil harvested from eldritch tentacled whales that live half in the oceans and half in an eldritch void personified in the form of a weird-ass black-eyed shit-stirrer of a deity who was formed from a murdered and sacrificed child. And this is largely a background detail.

I love in the Elder Scrolls that the dwarves up and fucking vanished, as a race, at some point in history and absolutely nobody has any clue what happened to them or where they went, but their technology is so insane that ideas like ‘they time-travelled’ or ‘they erased themselves from existence’ are absolutely on the table.

I love that in Numenera, so many incredibly advanced civilisations have risen and fallen on this world that it’s absolutely littered with bonkers science fiction artefacts that have caused the current medieval-esque society built over top of them to develop in bizarre ways, and also you can find a mysterious artefact that absolutely baffles and delights your character, but that you the player will fully recognise as a slightly-more-advanced thermos flask.

I love that in Fallout, an irradiated post-nuclear apolocalypic hellscape, there’s a cult that worships the god of radiation as they have come to understand it, and they are mysteriously immune to radiation with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. They’re not ghouls, the usual result of fatally irradiated humans with some resistance, they’re perfectly normal humans who can somehow just tank rads all damn day. It could be a mutation, but Lovecraftian gods apparently do also fully exist in this setting, so it’s also possible that maybe they were on to something with this Atom thing.

I love that in Heart The City Beneath, there’s a mass transit train system that they tried to hook up to the eldritch beating god-thing buried under the city so that they could metaphysically chain the stations together more easily, which went horrifically and metaphysically wrong in entirely predictable fashion, and now there’s a whole order of train-knights who have to keep people safe from the extradimensional weirdness magnet the network has become.

That, and all the fantastic little details you can stumble across. There’s a biotech augmentation in Starfinder called an angler’s light that gives you a little angler-fish bioluminescent antenna on your forehead, and it was developed by asteroid miners who needed light but also both hands free for work. In Dishonored there’s a festival that everyone pretends is outside of time so nothing you do during it can be held against you. There’s a god of snuffed candles mentioned in a single line from Heart The City Beneath who has pacifist cannibal priests, and that is literally all the information you get on him.

While things like the history and geography and timeline of a world do also fascinate me, I’m not really here to memorise stuff like that. I’m here to find weird little nuggets of information and worldbuilding and delight in them. Give me funerary customs and weird myths and oddly specific circumstances and baffling little objects and absolutely bonkers cosmological implications. Give me the corpses of dead gods, and aesthetic movements with highly specific backstories, and bureaucratic fuck-ups of titanic scale, and mysterious things that seem to break all other rules of your setting with absolutely no explanation because people in-universe have no fucking clue how they work either. Why are the Children of Atom immune to radiation without ghoulifying? Not a clue, but Confessor Cromwell has been cheerfully standing in that irradiated pond that kills the player character with about 10 minutes of exposure for the last year and he’s still absolutely fine.

I just. I really love lore. I like my settings to have some meat in them, some juicy details to dig into, some inexplicable elements to have fun trying to explain. Particularly that last bit. I feel like a lot of people when building worlds feel like the rules have to be absolute and everything has to have an explanation, but nah. Putting some weird shit in makes everything immediately feel bigger, more real, because we don’t have even half an idea of how our world truly works, there’s always something we just don’t fully understand yet, and you can put that in a fictional world too. Some mysteries, some contradictions, some randomness, some weirdness. There’s a line, obviously, this depends on execution, but a little bit of mystery really does help.

Lore is awesome. And weird lore is even more so. Heh.