#like i’m not saying Don’t Change Anything about the story - god knows lovecraft could use it

[metaphysicae]

look i love guillermo de toro but his show’s adaptation of dreams at the witch house was a fucking mess (granted he was not the writer but ????)

[rocket-69]

Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky Q&A 10/23/22

Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky joined the Fallout Wiki discord server to answer a few questions. Jason Taylor could not attend, but all three of them answered some questions in text sent ahead of time.

Interviewer: On a different note, we’ve been having a lot of questions about the idea of the US being divided into 13 commonwealths, and why. In the Fallout Bible Tim, you said that it was Leon’s idea to use a 13 star US flag, and had an idea for 13 super states, but didn’t finish it. LeonB: I picked that flag because it looked cool, I’d never seen it before Interviewer: Which is a guiding principle for a lot of great choices, that gut feeling. LeonB: Definitely

Tim Cain: Not to backtrack too much, but did I find a note from our marketing dept with two suggestions for a name for the game: "No Man's Land" and "The Deathlands". We politely declined.

Interviewer: To elaborate a bit: A lot of fans seem to believe that everything was pre-written and pre-made, and you just rotely executed that brilliant design. As I understand it, it was closer to how Deus Ex was made, with plenty of gut feelings and bold work with the box cutters to remove what didn't work (Warren Spector mentioned cutting a 500 page design bible to just 270 pages)? LeonB: We didn't have a huge design bible, per say. Not to the detail level it sounds like he was talking about We were flying by the seat of our pants Tim Cain: I remember when I was asked for a vision statement for the game. I was surprised because the team KNEW what we were making. Then I was told it was for admin and marketing. I tried twice and failed twice, then Chris Taylor wrote an amazing one. LeonB: Certain aspects of game dev never change - no matter how carefully you think you're scoping you always have to cut content and stitch what's left back together

Interviewer: Speaking of content that wasn't cut: An interesting question comes up from time to time, that is, when implementing special encounters (aliens, the police call box, dinosaur footprint), did you ever consider them as anything beyond a cool little Easter egg? A more direct part of the story? Tim Cain: No, I don't think so. Special encounters were tied to luck and meant to be fun and a potential source for cool items. No story elements, since they might never be encountered by some players. LeonB: Mostly we made those because we thought they were funny Interviewer: (and they were, plus the increased critical chance is awesome) Tim Cain: Although it would have been funny to comvince the Master to give up his plans using a velvet Elvis painting as a bribe

Interviewer: Speaking of the Master, he (it?) seems to have gone through many iterations. The Vault 13 timeline suggests he could have been an ambulatory foe - or was he always intended to be this glorious mess that they probably carted to the Cathedral in a barrel all the way from Mariposa? (For those who don't know what I'm talking about.) LeonB: I may be misremembering, but I felt he was ambulatory enough to get to the Cathedral on his own, especially depending on what he fed on/subsumed into his body, and then he became part of the overseer's chair over time I don’t remember him ever being planned to be ambulatory in the game, though

Interviewer: Were there ever intentions of integrating more eldritch or extradimensional aspects into Fallout, such as Old Gods, Elders, and more Lovecraftian things, or was Fallout always more intended to be like Buck Rogers than Lovecraft? It certainly had the Master, his corridor of revulsion, the psykers mentioned by Avellone to be closer to Childhood's End than just spoon benders… LeonB: I love Childhood's End, but I don't think I'd read it back then It was mostly supposed to be more Road Warrior/Buck Rogers, I just loved the aesthetic of the Thing movie Tim Cain: I think the more elements you throw into an IP, the more diluted it becomes. I regret adding the ghost to the Den (and yeah, that was me) because Fallout is so rich and has so much to explore that it doesn't need the supernatural elements to be creepy Interviewer: Uh-oh, this confession will not go down well with some fans. 😉 Tim Cain: I think the IP as a whole is better when it has limits

Interviewer: we had a question about Rhombus, do you remember this take on the T-51 talking head model? It definitely looks different from the end talking heads, but a lot like the in-game sprite.

LeonB: That looks like a badly lit and textured version of the digitized clay head. Not sure what's up with that armor, we used the same armor model for all the talking heads wearing power armor, taken from the model I made for the intro Interviewer: It's from an ancient German preview for Fallout GURPS, which included a shot of the process of digitizing the models. LeonB: Weird

Interviewer: Now, while I dig that up, a question. A big question. Do ghouls poop Or rather: Do ghouls need to eat and drink? Or is ghoul biology something that was written differently whenever it needed to work a certain way (Fallout 1 has Necropolis and endings tied to water, but later on it got confused; VB design docs even have a note "do ghouls even poop") Tim Cain: To quote my favorite book title "Everyone poops" LeonB: Jason and I bout that for Tim for his birthday Tim Cain: I always thought they ate and drank and breathed. They just aged slower (but sometimes things fell off or grew weird) Thank you again, Leon LeonB: any time Interviewer: Found it. And Tim Cain won't believe what the thumb is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haKOhyUqk4c LeonB: Timmy! Tim Cain: Oh. My. God. I’m 12 Interviewer: What about Woody and Coffin Willie? Woody spent several weeks as a 'mummy' exhibit, and Willie was buried alive for a couple of months. Are they just a fun joke, or? Tim Cain: They remind me of The World's Smartest Orc in Arcanum. Someone was making some money…

Interviewer: And getting him to break character... Now, back to questions, since we're in the final stretch: Talking about limits, what's something either of you don't ever want to see in Fallout? Or something you could remove from Fallout like it never existed? (We already have the ghost thing on record, sir) Tim Cain: I am not a fan of the talking Deathclaws. They were meant to be the biggest baddest scariest thing ever. Not librarians. LeonB: Hear hear

Interviewer: Random question: Did the Overseer ever have a solid name? We have "Jacoren" from the concept art, but beyond that.… (for those who wonder)

LeonB: No Tim Cain: Internally, he was always referenced as Overseer LeonB: He was originally named that (obviously), but after that drawing I don't know that I ever referred to him that way again Tim Cain: That sketch really captures his eyebrows

Interviewer: Oooh, this is good. How did the original designs for the original robots (ie the floating Eyebot) come around? Was its design based on something specific that existed? LeonB: I honestly don't remember We were just trying to make robots that looked like they belonged in 50's b-movies Tim Cain: Wasn't a floating one pitched to reduce needed animations? LeonB: That's a distinct possibility

Interviewer: Given that we're slowly, but inevitably approaching the end of our roundtable, did either of you have questions you wished were asked, but never were? Aside from the ones I received and filed under cool-stuff . Alternatively, any message to the community at large? Tim Cain: Thank you all for your support. I don't go to conferences much, but when I have, I have met some of the nicest fans I could ever hope to have. Also, Fallout fans are just smarter and better looking than average, don't you think? LeonB: I can't think of any questions we missed (here or in any of the other interviews we've done), but I again want to thanks everyone for being such loyal fans to something we made as a labor of love We were hoping people would love it as much as we did, and it seems like it worked out Interviewer: Meeting you today, I believe I speak for everyone that we can see why it came out the way it did. Tim Cain: Talent (Leon) and Luck (Tim) LeonB: Aww, thanks But I've always said I cranked my Luck up to 10 It really was lightning in a bottle

Interviewer: Alright, so here's a popular question. Zusk asks; "Hey! There is this question I always wanted to ask you two. At the start of Fallout 2's development Fred Hatch proposed a outline for Fallout 2's story that didn't end up getting made. A few developers have talked a little about this in the past, but I was wondering if you could perhaps share a little more about your rationale at the time and what Fred's story entailed? Included is an excerpt from Honouring the Code: Conversations with Great Developers that goes into it a bit. Thank you for taking the time to reach out to the community like this."

Tim Cain: Fred's team's story started with the player getting amnesia and losing their memories (i.e. levels) and then wandering into a town that is colorless (just shades of grey). It turns out a computer is running it based on old episodes of Leave It To Beaver. That's mostly what I can remember LeonB: Tim has a waaaaay better memory than I do Tim Cain: Also I take LOTS of notes

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Tim Cain Text Q&A

Q: Was Fallout at any point going to be real-time like Diablo or real-time with pause? Or was it always designed with turn-based combat in mind? A: Fallout was always designed to be turn based. At one point, when Diablo had shipped and several higher-ups at Interplay were enamored with the game (or its sales figures), we were asked to consider a real time version. The projected time and money costs to change the design persuaded them that it was bad idea.

Q: Did you have the idea of the GECK while developing Fallout 1 or is that a later idea the game during the conception of Fallout 2? A: The GECK was conceived during Fallout 1's development. The proof? Page 5-34 of the manual for Fallout 1.

Q: Do you remember who came up with Nuka-Cola and why it was named as such (not wanting to tangle with the world's biggest soft drink corporation aside)? A: It was either Chris Taylor or Scott Campbell. And only they can reveal the secret behind its name.

Q: In the Building a Better RPG talk, post-mortem part you said that your past games (like the OG Fallouts and Arcanum I assume) had systems that were too complex and that it was okay to simplify or change them. Would you go back and redo Fallout with that in mind? What is your philosophy when designing? A: I don't think I would simplify Fallout's systems. In fact, I think they have been oversimplified in recent games, but I would consider simplifying their presentation. I would keep skills and traits, but I would change character creation and advancement to make it more casual friendly. This might seem like splitting hairs, but I believe that initial presentation is a huge part of onboarding players to your IP. It's possible to make rich and deep system mechanics without throwing a page of numbers at the player early in the character creation process, when many players have no idea of what character they want to make or what traits/skills/perks are important. As I showed in The Outer Worlds with skills, you can delay some decisions until the player has experienced the game and decided what they would like to explore in terms of player characteristics.

Q: When you created Fallout, did you view humanity from a cynical or hopeful perspective? On one side, the game has raiders and plenty of human flaws, besides nuclear war. On the other, humanity perseveres in the face of adversity, and changes, and tries to break the cycle through the Master/NCR/Brotherhood. A: Fallout represents many viewpoints. Some people on the team were cynical and liked to explore the darker side of human nature, while others were optimistic and hopeful that people would emerge from a cataclysmic event with a desire to make sure it never happened again. I always liked that Fallout showed that blend of perspectives.

Q: What were some setting ideas/content/artwork you considered for Fallout, but never publicly talked about or revealed publicly? A: We always wanted an equivalent to GURPS disadvantages in Fallout, but the closest we could come were traits, which were a blend of advantages and disadvantages. I eventually made flaws in The Outer Worlds.

Q: Did you establish that the Fallout timeline diverged from ours during Fallout's development? If so, did you establish when it more or less occurred (i.e. the timeline went in the Fallout direction and the transistor never caught on etc.? A: We always thought there was a divergence, but we never thought it was a single event where the timeline diverged, i.e. the invention of the transistor. Instead, Fallout represented a future that the 1950s thought might happen.

Q: Fallout was originally a sequel to Wasteland (according to Campbell) and many references remain in it. Did you see it as feasible to integrate it into the Fallout series, or at least made Fallout compatible with it? A: We made Fallout with ideas that were independent of Wasteland. It might be possible to merge the two, but I would always wonder what the point was. Why are you trying to force these two disparate IPs together?

Q: Do you remember why the Jackals and Vipers were cut? Were there any plans to involve them in the later development stages, or were they cut early on? A: I am not sure, but they seemed to be included as background information for characters like Ian. They weren't cut as much as they weren't explored.

Q: Were there any notable technical limitations, where the creative solution became an important part of the game's identity? A: So many. We explored making Fallout a 3D game, but the limitations of 3D games at the time pushed us back to an isometric game. Similar technical issues removed height features from the game. I am not sure what people consider part of the game's identity, but we surely wrestled with technical limitations.

Q: What is the one question you never get asked but wish it was? A: Why are you so awesome? :) No, seriously, fans have asked some very insightful questions over the years. Some of our answers have been "I don't know. We just kind of went with our gut feelings on that." I know it's not what people want to hear, but it's true.

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Leonard Boyarsky Text Q&A

Q: What were some of the setting ideas you considered for Fallout, but never talked about publicly? A: I think we’ve talked about all of them publicly at this point Q: What would you name the aesthetic design of Fallout 1 and 2? No, it can't just be called "Fallout style". A: I originally called it retro future fifties, I think, but the kids call it atompunk these days :P Q: What were the rules made regarding what did and did not fit Fallout's art style? A: We were very loose with our rules, especially since we started out as a non-retro fifties Road Warrior-centric inspired RPG. We also had to work with what we had in terms of time and budget, so we were a lot more flexible about what fit the setting than we would be now Q: Does the original artwork that you made (especially the unplugged television) still exist in a higher quality medium than what comes with the CD? If yes, will there ever be a book that is the Art of Fallout? A: I don’t know if the original 3d art files exist anywhere, and, if they did, what would have to be done to use them since they were made in PowerAnimator on Unix SGI machines. I have some of my original sketches in a sketchbook, but that’s about it. I wish I knew what happened to the clay heads, though, I made the Overseer’s and would love to have been able to keep it Q: What's the significance of the giant heads all over Fallout? Is it just Art Deco or something more eldritch/mysterious? A: We just thought they looked cool Q: I know that the talking heads were made with clay models and then digitized. Were the overworld sprites clay models too? A: The only other clay model was the Deathclaw, everything else was modeled in 3d programs Q: Many of Fallout's inspirations are worn on its sleeves, Mad Max, for instance, but are there any sources of inspiration which do not get enough love? A reference that you hoped everyone would pick up, but nobody did? A: The Hard-Boiled comic book mini-series by Frank Miller and Geoff Darrow and the City of Lost Children movie Q: Were there any notable technical limitations, where the creative solution became an important part of the game's identity? Specifically in terms of artwork. A: The whole reason the intro was on a TV was so that we could add noise and have a reason for any people to be fairly small in the frame but still have impact due to the difficulty of making realistic human beings back then. Also the reason for the clay heads. We also used the pixelization that was inherent in the color palleting process to make everything look dirty, which I was always very proud of but no one noticed... Q: Did you ever elaborate on your idea of the commonwealths? Tim Cain mentioned you came up with the idea while designing the alternate US flag (which DOES look cool and distinct), but did anything come out of it? A: Not that I remember Q: What's the one question you are never asked, but would like to be asked? A: I can’t think of any offhand (I’ve done a lot of FO interviews over the years 😝). If I think of any I’ll bring them up during the chat

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Jason Taylor Text Q&A

Q: What is the one thing you are particularly proud of in Fallout, but never seem to get proper credit for? A: When working on the original design we had quite a few brainstorming sessions. I remember coming up with these ideas: suggested game tile: Vault 13, reason to leave the vault: faulty "water purification chip", source of mutations: genetically engineered virus call FEV (Forced Evolutionary Virus) Q: Were there any notable technical limitations, where the creative solution became an important part of the game's identity? Or any other solutions that involved non-obvious resolves? A: Because we started out with the GURPS ruleset, we necessarily had hex-based maps. I don't know of any other CRPGs that did that. Q: Many of Fallout's inspirations are worn on its sleeves, Mad Max, for instance, but are there any sources of inspiration which do not get enough love? A: Brotherhood of Steel (designed by Scott Campbell) always felt like a nod to Pure Strain Humans in Gamma World. Ask him though! Q: Fallout was originally a sequel to Wasteland (according to Campbell) and many references remain in it. Did you see it as feasible to integrate it into the Fallout series, or at least made Fallout compatible with it? A: My understanding was Interplay did not have the copyright to Wasteland, and we weren't willing to pay for it, so we had to be careful to "not be too close to it and get sued". Q: What is the one question you never get asked, but wish it was? A: I'm not as famous as others, so I never get asked anything. :) So I would like to be asked, "What did you work on?" After Tim Cain I was the first member of the team, joining as Lead Scriptor. Because there was nothing to script (because we didn't yet have a game engine), I designed and coded a number of foundational data structures used by engine/map editor (e.g. 6 different types of map objects). Also, I wrote a number of tools including Framer, which imported Maya-rendered GIFs, allowed you to adjust offsets and animation speed, and exported .frm files containing animation and game data.

[rosecorcoranwrites]

September Reading Roundup

It's time for this month's reading roundup, but first, a little announcement that no one but me will care about: I'm staying off the internet until the election. Well, mostly. I'll still post to Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram when the mood strikes me or when I have a writing update. I'll still post Rant Rave Reviews on here and Youtube (the theme this month is spooky stories, of course). But I won't be interacting much (ie, I won't be spending hours reading through Twitter and Tumblr and watching random Youtube videos I've already seen). If you @ me or retweet or reblog a post, I'll probably respond in a day or two, but other than that, I'm becoming a recluse.

The reason for this is twofold. First, I'm offering it up. For those of you who aren't Catholic, "offering it up" is sort of like giving up something for Lent. You discipline yourself by enduring some deprivation (either natural, like pain, or of your own choosing, like not watching hours of Youtube). At the same time, you offer up your (albeit, in this case, slight) suffering as a sacrifice for some good. I'm offering it up for America. Not the election, America. Because, not to get political or anything, but no matter who wins the garbage fire that is the 2020 election, America is doomed unless our culture changes. As I said to a friend recently, if this was the 90s, we could weather whatever storm Trump or Biden brings, but people hate each other so much right now that our country is pretty much over. Unless...

I don't know what I'm praying for, but I'm praying, praying that come what may, God in his Providence will drag something good out of all of it, kicking and screaming if need be. I will also be doing a rosary novena with my diocese October 14th through October 22, and then another one with the USCCB October 26th to November 3rd. Join me if you would like.

On a lighter note, I'm a volunteer writer-in-residence again at my hometown library, so I'm obligated to focus on writing this month, and need write, research, and workshop without distraction. I have two Forensics and Fiction books all tabbed and ready to read, plus a book about army nurses in the Vietnam War. The plot of book one in the alternate-history/fantasy/mystery trilogy is fast congealing, and I want to strike while the iron is hot. I need to focus! My ultimate goal is to be ready to write a little each day in November, returning to my heretical NaNoWriMo ways.

I'll let you know how it all turns out in my first Novemebr post, which will be a reading roundup of October. Until then, let's take a look at what I read this month:

Two Six Shooters Beat Four Aces: Stories of a Young Arizona by Barbara Marriott Ph.D

Genre: History - Anecdotes

Why I read it: Arizona book club pic

What I thought of it: While it's clear that Marriott is an excellent researcher, she is either a bad writer or in serious need of an editor. Individual paragraphs proved internally repetitive, and the overall structure of each chapter was slapdash. It needed smoother transitions from anecdote to anecdote or more section breaks and section headers.

Would I recommend it: No, everyone in my book club, including myself, hated it.

7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

Genre: Supernatural Mystery

Why I read it: I'd been wanting to for a while; the premise caught my eye

What I thought of it: The body-hopping time-loop stuff was brilliant, the characters likable, and the story delightfully twisty. The last twist and conclusion were unsatisfying, though.

Would I recommend it: Yes!! Despite it's flaws, it was an exciting, fun, and original book. I will definitely be reading Turton's next book (which involves a closed circle of suspects and, possibly, demons!?).

The Exorcist by William Blatty

Genre: Horror

Why I read it: I'd been meaning to for a while, and writing research gave me an excuse to do so

What I thought of it: I like that it doesn't pull it's punches; I'm kind of shocked that it's only been censored a couple times, actually. It presents demons as they are: hateful, grotesque jerks who get off on picking on humans. I also liked that there was a murder mystery subplot. I'm not sure I approve 100% of the ending, theologically speaking, but that's a pretty minor quibble.

Would I recommend it: Yes, but it is not for the feint of heart. Trigger warnings for child sexual abuse, adult sexual abuse, language, violence, the works.

How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps by Ben Shapiro

Genre: Nonfiction - politics

Why I read it: It's a long story that I shall tell about in my memoir of library life, but not here. Also the cover is 10/10

What I thought of it: It was ok. I already knew most of what he said. I disagreed with some of it, like seeing the constant moving of people from town to town in 1950s as a positive thing; in actuality, "company men" in the 50s were moved around so they wouldn't have community ties but instead ties to the company, which is anti-human to the extreme. I did think it was interesting that he combatted the idea of America's greatness being built off the backs of slaves by pointing out that slavery was actually terrible for the south, as reliance on slavery retarded their economic system well after the Civil War.

Would I recommend it: If you're into political books, sure.

American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI by Kate Winkler Dawson

Genre: True Crime - forensic history

Why I read it: I love historical true crime

What I thought of it: It was ok, but kind of didn't make the case for him being "The American Sherlock Holmes" (even though people really did call him that back in the day), in that a lot of his conclusions ended up being a little dubious. Still, from a research perspective, it did establish when various forensic practices started being used in the USA.

Would I recommend it: Maybe? I personally liked Father of Forensics more. I'd say this book is, like, 3/5 stars, just because it could have been tightened up a bit.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Genre: Horror

Why I read it: It's spooky season!

What I thought of it: Having already seen the movie, I knew pretty much what was going to happen, but I love Gaiman's turn of phrase.

Would I recommend it: Yes, especially for children who are too young for scarier fair but still want a creepy story.

The Horror at Red Hook by H.P. Lovecraft

Genre: Horror

Why I read it: It's still spooky season!

What I thought of it: I honestly liked this a lot more than the Cthulhu mythos stuff. Rather than vague demoniac blasphemies or black cyclopean gulfs, there's a real tangible cult that sacrifices (reanimated?) corpses to a pale, dancing, snickering Thing on a golden pedestal. I dig it.

Would I recommend it: Yes. Just... ignore the racism. That goes for all of Lovecraft's stuff, by the by.

Herbert West: Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft

Genre: Horror

Why I read it: Turns out I like HP Lovecraft. Who knew?

What I thought of it: You gotta love mad scientists who try to reanimate the dead, right? I think this one would make an excellent mini-series.

Would I recommend it: Yes.

Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

Genre: Essay - illustration/comics

Why I read it: I loved Hyperbole and a Half, and was excited when I saw Brosh was coming out with another book.

What I thought of it: It was okay. Not as good as her first book, but for an understandable reason: medical complications and her sister's suicide (that's not a spoiler, as the book is dedicated to her sister). Thus, the book had a heaviness to it that the first one didn't. Still there were some parts that made me laugh so hard I cried.

Would I recommend it: Maybe? I'd say borrow it from the library, but don't buy it, unless you are also suffering a loss. It might be really relatable and cathartic in that case.

The Rats in the Walls by H.P. Lovecraft

Genre: Horror

Why I read it: I like HP Lovecraft

What I thought of it: Not as scary as I had been led to believe by my brother, but still a good story. I plan on reading Lovecraft Country at some point, which supposedly flips Lovecraft's racism on it's head, and so help me, if it doesn't make reference to this story and chattel slavery, I'll throw a fit.

Would I recommend it: Yes. I like that the cat didn't die. :)

The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft

Genre: Horror

Why I read it: I just... I just really like Lovecraft, okay?

What I thought of it: I find the sea inherently creepy, so when you have a decrepit backwater filled with a fishy stench and secrets, it's gotta be good.

Would I recommend it: Yes, especially if you liked the Fishing Hamlet part of the Bloodborne DLC (which I could not help but think of the whole time reading this novella).

The Thing on the Doorstep by H.P. Lovecraft

Genre: Horror

Why I read it: You know why.

What I thought of it: So if you've read enough Lovecraft, especially Dunwich Horror and Shadow Over Innsmouth, you already know what's coming... or do you? Right away, HP establishes that there is a special knock the guy uses with his friend, so I assumed the twist end would involve the Thing appearing in the guy's body but not using the knock, thus revealing itself to be (redacted for slight spoilers). I was wrong. That's not how it played out, and the way it played out was so much creepier!!!

Would I recommend it: Yeah! I really liked this one!

Haunter of the Dark by H.P. Lovecraft

Genre: Horror

Why I read it: Yup

What I thought of it: Same ol', same ol, but what I thought was cool in this one was that the supposedly superstitious Italian Catholic immigrants totally know what's up and spend their stormy nights keeping the Haunter at bay with nothing but candles and flashlights. What a neat detail!

Would I recommend it: Yup. :)

[lokiondisneyplus]

The director Christiana Ebohon-Green (EastEnders, Call the Midwife, Soon Gone: A Windrush Chronicle) and the actor Wunmi Mosaku, 33, (Luther, End of the F**king World and Misha Green’s upcoming HBO/Sky Atlantic drama series, Lovecraft Country) have met before. In fact, they have worked together, on Ebohon-Green’s Bafta-longlisted short, Some Sweet Oblivious Antidote. They both have fond memories of the sun-dappled shoot by the Thames, with a (mostly black) cast of actors. But not every experience on set has been so joyful. Amid some laughter, a few tears and many weary sighs, they swap horror stories of industry racism, discuss solidarity among black creatives, and the opportunities and risks involved in a move to the US.

CEG: I’ve worked on a lot of mainstream television drama, so I’ve often been the only [black person] on set. For me [having this wider conversation about racism] is a relief. Sometimes, you air issues and people are like: “Oh yeah, we know! We’ve solved that! Can you stop going on?” So I’ve been very careful about what I said and assumed people understood.

WM: I’ve always been quite scared about talking about race. You don’t wanna rock the boat because you want to keep working. That’s been a real revelation to me these last few weeks, that we all need to speak up! This is real, and you’re not crazy and you don’t have to just be grateful.

CEG: Often it’s just this feeling that it’s me going round in circles trying to fulfil these never-ending lists of expectations, that they wouldn’t ask of other people. Some years back, there was a big thing in the paper about: “We’re going to tackle diversity at the BBC.” So I wrote to them and said: ‘Well, what about those of us that are experienced, mid-career? I’ve been trying to progress and I’m just hitting brick walls.’ I then had all these painful meetings with people who sat me down and told me why I wasn’t ready, in their opinion, to do slightly bigger, long-running series. Then, later, somebody said to me: “Oh, I heard you were playing the race card” and I felt so offended and hurt. Like, what does that mean? I’m trying to get things I shouldn’t? Then, finally, it’s like: ‘Oh, no, you’re playing the race card, but you’re upset with me for calling you out on it.’

WM: I think, for me, just trying to be the “non-threatening black woman”, constantly being, like, super-bubbly! And relatable! It takes a lot of energy! The energy you have to put into playing into the system of white supremacy, so that you can be just given a chance … Like the other day, my friend said to me: “You’re just always so happy on set!” And I was like: “Oh my God! No, I’m fucking not!” Do you have period pains today? So do I! I just don’t feel like I have the freedom to have a sour face without it being seen as a bigger thing. The amount of time black people spend trying to placate, be accepted; if we could put that into our work, into our families, into our dreams …

CEG: Yeah, you spend a lot of time, early on, trying to figure out what they want us to be. I can’t figure out who that person is … Apart from a white male. And I can never be that.

WM: Ha ha! Right. If I were to [produce] a TV show or a film, I think that representation would be paramount. But it’s also about the opportunity for those people to become the heads of department. I’ve had someone in costumes say to me, right at the beginning of my career: “This outfit would work, if it wasn’t for your stupid thighs.” My thighs! That can press 200lbs! I feel like I have a very typical west African physique, and that is part of my blackness!

CEG: I’d like to see people just hiring, and for it not to be about schemes and training; assuming that people don’t have the experience, or are a risk. They need to know that diversity is going to strengthen the product. There isn’t going to be a black person doing something that just doesn’t feel realistic … Y’know, the black character in a world where they’ve got no black relatives or friends. I have these stories that I want to tell – about black women, incidentally – and it’s been really frustrating. At some point, I might follow you to America, Wunmi. There’s more work, I think, but aren’t you scared about the guns? I’m scared about the guns.

WM: Terrified of the guns! I honestly never wanted to come to America. It wasn’t part of my goal as an actor. It was because of my husband, who’s African American. But being here has completely opened my eyes to, first of all, what the African Americans have done globally. Like, if it wasn’t for WEB DuBois and their history of talking about Pan Africanism, maybe Nigeria wouldn’t have had independence. As much as I have been scared of guns and violence, and police brutality, I have grown in a way that I never would have [in the UK], because I was always trying to be nice and, like, not talk about racism … But it is scary. My husband went to the store yesterday and I heard sirens and helicopters and he didn’t come back for like a while and I was scared.

CEG: Here [racism] is much more undercover, but it’s definitely stopping creatives getting further. Over there, it seems there are more opportunities, but there’s more risk?

WM: Yeah, but there’s also more community. Misha Green has created this amazing show, Lovecraft Country, and her passion is showing the whole spectrum of blackness and celebrating it. That’s something that I really appreciate being here.

CEG: I think there is more of a community among black directors here [in the UK] than I’d realised. Somebody has created a WhatsApp group! There are a lot of people coming through, which is a good thing. It’s just, then, that competitiveness over jobs. Hopefully that will change when there are more opportunities.

WM: Well, the hierarchy of race … it’s so ingrained. It’s not just one costume designer, it’s the whole system. I had an executive tell me drunkenly that “colonialism wasn’t all that bad”. She managed to turn the conversation to gender inequality: in her opinion, the most important fight. That “Women are the niggers of the world” quote was brought up. She said: “It’s true! We are!” It’s exhausting. Even when you fight back, she’s still in power. She and others like her are still in control of the stories we tell about black lives.

CEG: My parents were from Nigeria as well. As a child I was fostered into a white family, miles away and I didn’t see my family except once every couple of weeks for an hour or so. That feeling of being an outsider has always stayed. In the industry, I’ve been judged by a lot of white, middle-class men. They don’t know anything about you, but suddenly, you’re excluded. I just feel like, this time, I’m not gonna be silenced by: “You’ve got a chip on your shoulder”, or: “You’re playing the race card”. No. That’s served you all well over many years … Sorry, I’m getting a bit emotional, but just … people’s whole lives have been limited! You know, you can get killed on the street!

WM: It’s true. It’s traumatising living it and seeing it. It’s traumatising talking about it. It’s so much and then [advocating for change] falls on our shoulders? It’s too much. Like, we feel it. Globally, we feel it.

CEG: After university, I thought I’m gonna go into a career that’s just joy – no politics and difficult stuff – and, stupidly, I kind of thought that this would be it

[bubonickitten]

i'm so happy you got into tma!! i've always enjoyed seeing you write meta posts for dragon age, so seeing you write meta for tma is such a treat! thank you for your words! i hope you have a lovely day :)

Thanks!! it’s been awhile since I’ve written meta for anything, I forgot how much I liked it. Once I realized how emotionally invested I was getting in the characters, I should’ve known I’d end up having to make a dedicated TMA meta tag. 

And not to be dramatic of anything, but TMA really is a masterpiece of horror imo. I like horror, but it’s always a minefield because so much of horror really does (sometimes unintentionally, sometimes not) employ some really awful racist, ableist, etc. tropes, or rely on sexual violence or hate violence as a narrative device without making any critical commentary on those subjects. So sometimes there’s a horror story that has a neat premise, but then it’s so saturated with unnecessary and harmful tropes that I just end up feeling alienated and frustrated. 

Even a lot of supernatural horror falls back on Lovecraft, and a lot of people don’t realize how racist and xenophobic his works really are. admittedly, there are some cool, more recent transformative works that reappropriate Lovecraft into something new (e.g. some stuff in the New Weird genre), but sometimes people just grab the aesthetic without knowing its roots. And I get it, it’s a cool aesthetic, I love monsters and tentacles and things that slumber in the deep and the dark -- it just ends up being bad when people aren’t conscious of what Lovecraft was actually saying. which, I know, is how tropes work sometimes -- creators reuse tropes because they’re so salient in fiction, but sometimes the roots are really horrible and we just don’t know the history, and horror is a genre that is really susceptible to that. 

Getting off topic -- what I mean is, I really think Jonny Sims is a brilliant writer and this is one of my favorite horror stories I’ve come across. He’s a master at character development and foreshadowing. I’m on my third time listening through and there’s just so much detail that I didn’t notice on my first listen, so many thematic elements and parallels and keywords that he snuck in from the very first few episodes that become so important later. It starts out as having a horror anthology vibe, with really brilliant short stories embedded in a larger framework, but then you realize that every single one of those stories is connected to the larger metaplot. 

I joke about Jonathan Archivist Sims and his conspiracy corkboard thinking, but I’m really sitting here listening with my own conspiracy corkboard during each episode -- sometimes reading too far into things, sometimes not, but damn is it enjoyable to try to pick apart the web (so to speak). 

I think it’s incredible how well Jonny Sims manages to pull all those strings together. It’s partly because he had the whole plot mapped out before they even recorded episode one, but it’s impressive to me, because I always have trouble following through on a story -- I’m not good at being decisive or consistent with my writing, I’m always changing my mind and losing the threads of what I was originally trying to do, and honestly most of the time I don’t have an end in mind anyway, so I end up giving up on things too early. 

One of the other things I appreciate is just... how compassionate Jonny is when writing his characters. One of my biggest complaints about Dragon Age was always that I felt like certain characters weren’t written with real compassion and weren’t given a chance to grow and so much of their potential was wasted. Jonny Sims, otoh, puts his characters in some dark, painful situations, which can be heartwrenching and anxiety-inducing to listen to (especially when it’s characters I relate to), but he also allows them to grow and change throughout the story, and that adds to their complexity. Even the characters I hate, I can still wrap my head around their motives. Without giving away too many spoilers for anyone who hasn’t listened and wants to eventually, the Big Bad is repulsive in every way but his motives are so realistic and emblematic of real world horrors like imperialism, Machiavellianism, totalitarianism, and a willingness to abuse, manipulate, groom, and oppress others for self-profit. 

Jonny Sims manages to utilize common fears, horrors, and phobias to present some really clever and thoroughly unsettling short stories. Even the ones that explore a fear that I don’t personally have make my skin crawl -- he’s just that good at descriptive imagery and conveying psychological horror. And a lot of the episodes also have social commentary (which is a hallmark of good fantasy, sci-fi, and horror for me) -- sometimes it’s subtle, but then sometimes he comes out with these episodes that knock the wind out of you. Especially the most recent episodes. He comes right out of the gate sometimes with a treatise on war or institutional violence or xenophobia and it’s... well, it’s powerful. 

And, god, I could write forever about how this story deals with the question of what it means to be human in the most horrific of circumstances -- what choices we make, what we are versus what we do, whether we grow or stagnate, the importance of human connection and trust and love even (and especially) when the world seems against you. The potential for character studies is... oof, I want to write an entire essay.

You know those books that are like, “The Philosophy of [Fiction Story]”? Oh, I am so tempted to write a full essay on the philosophical concepts presented in TMA. Especially existentialism, lmao. “What use is a philosophy minor?” people asked. Apparently the answer is, “Spend time during quarantine writing a treatise on existential philosophy in a horror-tragedy podcast I binged within a week and now can’t shut up about, because it’s been nine years since I had a philosophy class and I forgot how much I enjoyed pointlessly navel gazing about the nature of existence.”

I’ll shut up now. TL;DR if anyone wants to ramble at me about TMA, chances are I’ll be excited to respond. I’m having trouble focusing on creative writing right now, and I think my hype over this podcast might be helping me with writer’s block a little bit. 

[stan-denbrough]

So everyone likes to say “Stan wasn’t afraid, he was offended, because the book says it.” But, the book also says he’s “barely 11″ and his vocabulary is limited, like all children, so “offended” is the best word he could think of.

I think a better word would be disturbed. And that might not be a hard word to conjure for an erudite little child boy “in whom neatness and order are not simply ingrained, but actually innate.” However, offended is definitely not the right word when Stan goes on to describe how he feels. 

Stan says that, yes he’s afraid at the time. He has self preservation instincts. But he’s less afraid in hindsight than the other Losers are of their encounters. Stan is not staying up at night still freaking out about the ooga booga oh so scawy~ clown man. Stan is staying up at night freaking about existential dread and confusion. I know what that feeling is like, and disturbed is the only way I can describe it.

It’s not the kind of horror that makes your heart pound, it’s the kind of horror that makes you think. And you don’t like the conclusion you come to when you think about it. Maybe “chilling” is another good word for it but who really knows. Offended is fine, it’s just the jumping off point I used as an excuse to write this whole thing.

Stan says that God told man about the tilt of the planet and said “Figure out the rest lel kek,” and according to Stan, the Rest is intuitive from there. Stan is afraid, offended, disturbed, what have you, that if dead children can walk and a clown can change form and eat children, that the Rest was not intuitive. 

Look at the subtext of that. Stan is worried that God is either not all powerful like he’s been taught, that there are universes where the moon is a square, universes beyond comprehension because they weren’t made for humans, or that God is malevolent, and is actively trolling humanity, or hiding the infinite variations of Truth from humanity. Or maybe God doesn’t exist at all. 

When you’re a little boy in the 50s, who does like science, and clearly has a humanist reading on religion (probably due to coming from a liberal and largely not practicing household), being told “The universe is way more complex and vast and uncaring than you thought, so deal with that bombshell at 11, heh, nothing personal kid.” is probably uh... well offensive. 

Stan basically found himself the protagonist of a Lovecraft story. Pennywise isn’t a mere child killer to Stan, he’s a Lovecraftian eldritch horror. And Stan was reacting appropriately to that. He’s less worried about someone killing children than he is about the knowledge that magic is real, evil is tangibly real, there are things beyond our understanding, meaning that there probably isn’t a God or if there is He’s not the only Power, what you think you understand about your world and your life and your own existence could be totally wrong. 

It’s why a popular horror trope is to have a character sob out “Oh God” or “please God” and for the monster (only if it’s sentient and capable of speech) to mockingly reply “there is no God” or sometimes “I’m God” or something like that. 

Stan occupies that role within the narrative. It makes sense why he’d be uniquely traumatized enough to the point he couldn’t cope when he learned It was back. Pennywise represents a crisis of faith for him, or some horrible realization about reality. The rest of the Losers see Pennywise as a movie monster, a villain to be defeated. Stan realizes the true nature of reality, that the universe is capable of birthing something like Pennywise, that the laws of physics are more like suggestions than laws, that this is not the end, it’s just the beginning. 

And by the time Stan grows up, he can’t rely on childishly chanting the names of birds because he’s even older and wiser now. And he’s managed to mostly block out the realizations he had a child (mostly). But when Mike calls and it all comes rushing back, he can’t just list birds like that’ll solve anything. Stan was able to save himself as a child because he still had a belief to cling to, something to anchor him and comfort him (his special interest is birbs!!), but with the cynicism and weariness of adulthood, nothing could have saved him.

Don’t get me wrong, he still loved birds, but he didn’t childishly believe birds could protect him, birds had no Power for Stan anymore. They couldn’t combat Pennywise, who operates on a kind of metaphysical plane where children’s beliefs become fact. Eddie and Ben say that people use crucifixes to ward off monsters in movies. Stan says “I’m Jewish” and it’s cute and all. 

But the bird book was Stan’s crucifix, appealing to a higher Power that Pennywise was forced by his own internal logic to respect. At the very least, it was convincing enough for child Stan that he wasn’t afraid enough to be appetizing for Pennywise anymore, so he let Stan go. Stan became a metaphorical atheist as an adult, as I think most adults tend to do at least a little. He had no “crucifix”, so when the Lovecraft revelation returns to him, the only thing he could think to do to protect himself and his sanity was to die.

[thesardonicwriter]

Poems I Wrote in 2019

Yes, yes, I sometimes write poems. Because I’m a musician and write songs. Some of them aren’t long enough to be songs or I never put music to go with them, but all of them relate to how I was feeling at the time they were written. Sometimes a poem is easier than a journal entry.

Nightingale

What is a nightingale?

Is it something that we strive to be?

No, it is something that we wish could be reached.

What is a nightingale?

Is it an idea that brings us joy?

No, it is an ideal that no one can be held to.

What is a nightingale?

Is it my love for you?

No, it is something that I fake to bring joy.

What is a nightingale?

A nightingale is a simple songbird.

Nothing special for you or me.

Nightingale was written near the beginning of the year. I was still struggling with self identity. Hell, I still am now, near the end of the same year. I was in my final semester at community college after two years of not doing what I wanted to do. I felt... trapped. I felt like I hadn’t done anything important for the past two years and they had been a waste. 

What We Must

A lie is something easily told and easily believed

Because it is easy to want the better half

Of a world that revels in the dark and the hurt and the pain,

Of a world that pushes down that which makes us special.

The truth is something hated and revered, loved and despised

All for the same reasons a lie is believed.

A thing full of more pain than the word itself, a more tortured soul

Than a wannabe poet with a broken, leaking pen.

We do what we must to make people smile.

We do what we must to push forward.

We lie to make others happy.

We lie to make ourselves miserable.

Could the truth truly be an answer to freedom,

Or will it be the final nail that keeps the coffin lid down?

The first shovel of dirt has already been thrown on the roof

With a thundering, deafening blow that lingers in dark air

A lie is something that is wanted to avoid the pain

A lie is what I have told to you, my dear.

The truth would crush you, I am certain, for it is true

You say that you love me, but I cannot love you.

As you can probably tell, this was written about someone I was dating. He was really nice. A good friend of mine that I now no longer talk to because of a lot of reasons. We were pressured into our relationship by two other friends of ours. They were convinced that we would be perfect for each other. It was pretty great, but he wasn’t right for me. He had a lot of things that he needed to work out, mostly involving his parents. He also told me he loved me after a week together. Not wanting to break up with him after so short a time, I went along with it. I’m not proud of this, but I told him that I loved him when I don’t think I ever really did. I ended up breaking up with him after four or five months together. 

Special

Did you know

That I am not a special person?

If you’d look, I could show

How my mental state will just worsen.

I wish that it was much simpler to just go

To a state of being a much better version

Than who I am.

I want to be H.P. Lovecraft.

I want to be e.e. Cummings.

I want to be able to write past a rough draft

I wish that I could stand with the kings

Of literature and art, with a future graphed

To a level where people will take cuttings

Of works I have done, but I am too daft

To be more than I am.

I am not special, and neither are you.

1 in a million is a phrase for a reason.

There are hundreds of things we can do

Hundreds of things we can be, no matter the season,

That can change the world, but I know it is true

My name will not be remembered, but that’s not treason,

Because maybe I am the difference.

Ha. I think I’m much more depressing in my writing than I think, looking back now. Anywho, don’t worry about me. I’m doing fine. This was really just me coming to terms with the fact that, again, it’s okay to not be super famous or well known. That was what I wanted for a while and then I realised how much that would suck ass. So. I’m happy to just write these little things and live my life to the fullest without worrying about other people’s opinions of me.

Fragile

I think I came to you because you’re fragile

And I thought that I was strong

I could see my touch pulled you down

And lifted you up to a level you couldn’t keep

Something keeps bringing you back to me

No matter what I say or do

You keep coming back to me, back to me

I keep you near, and forget you when you’re gone

I’ve pulled you into my world, dragged you down

I’m drowning in your love, you’re slipping into my reign

I don’t recognise who we were supposed to be

This isn’t what I wanted, but what you asked for

I’ve shown you the dark parts to send you away

I’ve pulled you down with me, carved out a person

That’s just like me

I know that I can be reckless with your heart

I’ve left it broken and bruised, fragile and hurt

But still you come back again and again

Your fire a little weaker, your light fading fast

I stand tall, you slouch next to me

I’m far too messy and hardly ever kind

Please get out of my atmosphere

Before you break apart and go down in flames

This was what I wrote when I actually came to terms with what I was actually feeling in the aforementioned relationship. Yeah, that’s what I thought was happening. I think I did have somewhat of a good influence on his life. He started standing up to his parents more often (he’s 22 but was struggling with that part. I think he’s doing better with them now). Even if our relationship didn’t end up being happily ever after, I can at least say that we changed.

400

400 dollars

What shall I spend it on?

I know the thing.

A fucking WiFi juicer.

I... um... FUCK JUICERO

Carve

Carve, carve, carve.

Must we make things this

Hard, hard, hard?

Hold my hand, push you back, it’s just not in our

Cards, cards, cards.

Force, force, force.

We’re far in, can’t change the

Course, course, course.

Just one more day, I yell until I’m

Hoarse, hoarse, hoarse.

Mark, mark, mark.

Ink on my arm, igniting the

Spark, spark, spark,

Of inspiration, of things knocked out of the

Park, park, park.

Carve, carve, carve.

I’m yours, you are not mine.

I was in love with the same girl for five years. Actually. Literally. Five years. She was everything that I thought I wanted and of course the most unattainable person in the whole country to me. I’d been in love with her since we were sat next to each other in orchestra and she complimented my doctor who t-shirt. God, that girl was practically perfect in every way. We even dated until she moved to California to become an astro physicist. After talking to some professionals who helped me with romantic obsession (an actual thing I didn’t know I suffered from), I’ve gotten over the memory of who she was here. We’ve both changed. I’m sure if I went to talk to her now, I wouldn’t recognise her.

10 Years My childhood defined.

A world opened up to me.

Stories written. Stories read and refined.

One thing to show me what to be.

A moment of redemption for you.

Hours of distraction for us.

A destiny nobody knew

Entertainment as an added plus.

A start from 2008.

A reboot that created a phenomenon.

The end that was destined, fate,

Yet never viewed as a pawn.

Four words that were never small

Four words that we all stan.

Four words that will end it all:

I am Iron Man.

END GAME HURT ME, OKAY?!

Meanings

A hug means I need you.

It means my life is falling down.

It means that you are constant

And I cannot be alone.

A kiss means I love you.

Or rather an idea that relies

On us being together for it to exist

And words spoke to still hold meaning.

A call means you miss me.

It means that I was on your mind.

It means that I didn’t answer, again

And I couldn’t be bothered.

It all means nothing to me,

But everything to you

Yet somehow I can’t let you go

And you thrive on what I give

Drops of love, here and there.

Kernels of affection, to and fro

You still haven’t realised

What it means to me.

Oh man, romantic/love obsession is a hard road. Especially when you let yourself get roped into a friends with benefits situation with someone you have a crush on and form a connection that turns into romantic obsession because of unresolved issues from when you were a teenager. Nothing like it.

Unremarkable 

Two lives are never the same.

It’s simple enough to say. 

It hurts enough to count.

It holds enough weight that someone will remember.

If two lives are never the same, 

Can one ever be unremarkable?

Will there always be something to remark upon

And will you make remarks to me?

History doesn’t repeat, 

At least not the way people think it does.

There are always similarities,

But two lives are never the same.

Unremarkable.

Never has there been a greater injustice 

Uttered to those who would wonder

What is worth it and what is broken now

We’re all worth it. Everyone. We’re unique. No one can be the same as someone else. This is just the truth, my friends.

[ravenquote]

OoC: Favorite Characters

I decided to focus on villains or anti-heroes, it’s hard picking just favorites in a general sense.

1. Harleen Quinzel A.K.A Harley Quin - DC Comic Universe I have been in love with this woman since September 1992 when she first aired in the Batman Animated series, Joker’s favor. Due to her brilliant creators of Paul Dini and Bruce Tim, led with the voice talents of Arleen Sorkin. She was born from her own raw desire to help people in her own best way possible, using her talents of understanding, reading and in many sense controlling people. Sadly, like Alice in wonderland, she fell into a realm of madness and uncertainty. She has been one of the most complex characters in animated history with large backstory and many turns and takes. Extremely popular on various forms and has made many appearances over the years even scoring some of her own comics and shows and now movies. When she was first created, she was merely a fill in and not meant to take and yet here she stands, a triumphant beauty whose overcome Abuse, trauma and degradation.

2. Azula - Avatar the last air bender animated television show + comics What can i say about Azula? In many retrospects she’s fierce, powerful, driven and just intelligent! I think a lot of people forget something pretty important about her: SHE WAS FOURTEEN! This young teenage, overthrew governments, taking whole cities and was the closest to killing the Avatar compared to anyone else. Not to mention her pure intelligence! People compare to playing a game of chess when it comes to moving people or controlling their actions. No, to this woman it was checkers. I truly believe if she didn’t become as over-confident as she did, the war would have ended with her taking the world. With the right nurturing, she would have become the most feared overlord the world would ever see.

3. Loghain Mac Tir - Dragon age book (The Stolen Throne by: David Gaider) and Dragon age Origins the Video game. Yeah, there’s a theme so far i am guessing you are seeing. I can’t help but appreciate sheer intelligence. Loghain is sort of obvious in the video games, it’s clear his intents. At the same time, there is far far more than what is merely on the surface with this man. An obvious villain, almost to the point of it being boring. Yet, why in the games are so many people hesitant and trusting of him? This man had proved himself, over and over, that he had his country in his heart and would do anything to protect it and keep it from the true monsters of the world. People. He was never shy about the routes he’d take, the lengths he’d go, he was brass, courageous, and deceptive. He called things out, forced people to seeing the bigger picture, he didn’t need to control or lie to people about things. He got what he wanted in the most unique ways possible, not his title, not his money, not his charisma but by being true in what had to be done. 

4. Sylvanas Windrunner - Blizzard Entertainment Video games I don’t see her as a Villain, an Anti-hero, yes. Look, we all know Blizz can’t seem to understand women or know how to write them on a large scale. I seriously feel bad for both, Piera Coppola and Patty Mattson as they have to watch this poor woman get brutally torn to pieces. I will always, always have a soft spot for her and remember the days where in many respects was like Illidain, and (above) Loghain. A woman who saw the bigger picture and would sacrifice anything to save everything she cared for. I wont drag on for her, simply because i know the most people who are doing this and following are from the Blizzard franchise and i know we have all heard many many layers to this continued argument about this particular character. If ya wanna PM about it or rant at me, bring it. I’m an Alliance player at heart, but i only got into w.o.w because of this woman. Both sides are shit. *drops mic*

5. Aaravos - Dragon Prince, Netflix television animated show. Okay, seriously, if you haven’t seen the show yet: DO IT! Just as with this theme, INTELLIGENCE, INTELLIGENCE, INTELLIGENCE! Tactful, charming, knowledgeable, i mean...look at that face! He is hands down perfect. Sadly, we still know very little of him but goshdamnit! Love! Love! Love! I can not wait to know more of him and see more of him. 

6. Maleficent - Fairy Tale story / Disney The jist of her, from stories and movies, is general: She was snubbed or insulted by the royal court and took her revenge on the child they were all celebrating. I’m sorry, but this has always been fantastic to me. What is more painful and hard to deal with then your own child being cursed? Claim petty if you want, but no, oh no my dear friend, this is a brilliant revenge. A normal person would blame the man in charge and curse him, but meh, whatever. Kings wont remember how they snubbed others, this is proven time and time again in many stories. Will this act ever be forgotten? Will the generations always remember not to snub a powerful faerie? You better believe it! She made a ever lasting mark, an impression that has lasted since the 13th century! Throughout the years no one has changed these facts: Maleficent was powerful, she was disrespected and she took her revenge onto a child. Normal stories like these over the years have changed both villains and heroes, or even circumstances. This classic has even seen the beautiful creation, directed by Robert Stromberg from a screenplay by Linda Woolverton, and still they honour the root of what was and with a focus on the villain and her origins.  How many villains get this?

7. Narberal Gamma - Overlord Anime/ Manga series Who doesn’t love a maid? Not to mention a Battle maid. Narberal is...mm, i don’t even know how to express her. She’s just generally cool, powerful, intelligent, loyal and honest with everything around her, just a demeanor of a refined perfection. She’s enjoyable to watch. Another thing i enjoy, she’s not the main villain. The show itself has many “villains”, i say in such way because it’s never really clear or obvious what you can count as villain or hero in a lot of ways. Yes, some are obvious but even then in many cases showed within it’s all about circumstances, who you are following, why you are following them. I enjoy the not so cut and dry of “good and evil”. This character also helps continue that ploy, helping and yet also killing people.

8. Carmilla - Castlevania Netflix series I’m a huge vampire fan, been so since middle school. I’m not as quick whipped as i use to be about the lore, history and so on when it comes to many Vampires and their origins. With such said, damn she made me bring out the books again, especially because she was one of my favorites to read about. I mean, Lesbian vampire. Do i need to say more? For now, i’ll only focus on the more recent adaption of her. So, yeah theme? We get it, intelligence. The world truly is a chess board for her, however she does not expect people to just flip the board on her. God, Jaime Murray, thank you so much for that wtf moment cause you expressed her sheer just horror at watching everything fall around her with perfection. Throughout the points we see Carmilla we see her truly be the tact master, stirring the pot and also showing her prowess in form. There is also a lot of restraint i don’t think people will give her credit for. We see how she expresses her emotions in violence, but i also think we are seeing it in a very, very pulled back way. I look forward to seeing how she changes her circumstances and sets things back into her own order in the coming season.

9. Akasha - Book series: The Queen of the Damned by Anne rice and movie: The Queen of the damned. Ah yes, the books that helped start the joys of vampires and how could i not fall in love with someone toying into the very beginning and trying to draw into the beginnings of a creature known throughout the world and time. Why do i choose Akasha considering i already touched base on vampires? Simple, she will always deserve a spot on any favorite list of anything. She gave so little cares about anything and only wanted the world to die and feel her wrath. Not to mention Aaliyah played this part so beautifully well it deserves every recognition it can get. I know she doesn’t seem to quite fit with the rest, but this is partly why she is so low on the list.

10. Callisto - Xena television series Last but certainly not least, we can’t forgot about this one. Good? Bad? Surely just pure chaos! She does what she wants and cares little about the consequences. It’s been ages since i’ve last seen the show i will admit, so my bases on her is a bit rusty. However, i will always remember her out of the many other villainous people we meet in the Xena universe. Fun, witty, combatant, you never knew what she was really going to do. As soon as she popped into a episode, i would recall fondly sitting at the edge of my seat just wondering how or why she did the things she did. There is my list of favorites, i’m sure you can see the themes between them all as many of them have common traits, inspirations and personalities. Hope you all enjoyed! Tagged by: @olivia-lovecraft​ tagging: *boops* you!

[katsukiboom]

Hiya! I’d appreciate if I could get some fluff with shoji, tokoyami, and tomura? Their s/o is just showering them with love and praise especially when they feel insecure? I love them so much but if requests aren’t open just ignore!

Requests are always open now my dude! It just takes a bit longer to write now ;; but here these are! I hope they’re good enough, Tomura’s especially - I had to change it a bit since I don’t really think he gets insecure about his things????? I don’t know, I could be wrong but yeah lol I hope you like them! ♥

MezouShouji

You played with a few soft strands of whitehair while resting your chin on his shoulder, trying your best not to diverthis attention from the book on his hands. Every now and then one of his limbsbecame a curious eye that sent you a glance that told you he was smiling, evenif you couldn’t see it – he must’ve been making sure you weren’t falling asleepon him, something he always scolded you for doing, but you couldn’t help itwhen he was so warm and cuddly, almost like your own personal teddy bear.

The 1-A dorms were quiet as most thestudents had chosen to spend their free day outside enjoying the sun, but youtwo had decided it would be better to just relax indoors, reading and takingsome time for each other like you hadn’t been able to do the last few weeks dueto the stress of exams. Now, with him sitting on the floor against your bed andyou sprawled out on the mattress you took the opportunity to make him feel better.

“Sho-kun, can I tell you something?” youasked softly, your hand finally leaving his hair and searching his own,something he seemed pleased on giving into. Your gentle giant tilted his headand hummed in response, his eyes carefully looking at you and making you feel abit nervous; he was accidentally intimidating, and while it didn’t work fullyon you since all he showed you was care and kindness you knew he was afraidhe’d scare or hurt you without meaning to. Placing a soft kiss against histemple, you felt him tense up as you spoke, “I’m really glad I can see thisside of you and that I can call you mine. These moments are some of the best,mostly because you’re here with me and I wouldn’t imagine sharing them withanyone else.”

Shouji placed the book on the floor andcarefully removed himself from under your touch, confusing you for a minutebefore you saw him get up and walk around the bed, sitting and then lying downon it with his arms open – you loved his hugs, they always made you feel safe.Crawling into his embrace, you placed your head on his chest and wrapped onearm around his waist, his heartbeat soothing you. “You claim you’re lucky tohave me,” he said, the vibration of his deep voice making a shiver run downyour body, “but you’ve done wonders to me as well. I’ve never felt more… normalbefore, and you’re to thank for that.”

His left hand drew slow circles on yourback while the other grabbed yours, and you knew you were staring into the verything Shouji never showed anyone – his insecurities. You wanted to be bigenough, strong enough to hold him and tell him it would all be okay. “And I’venever felt more at home,” you added and you looked up.

You saw him blushing for the first timethat day.

 TokoyamiFumikage

Mina always had a way of saying things atthe wrong time accidentally; that’s why, when you were chatting one day duringbreak and she loudly asked how you ended up dating Tokoyami instead of anyother of the boys, you knew he was bound to hear it since he was always nearyou. You also knew she didn’t mean to say it as if it was something bad but youcouldn’t help but feel he’d take it to heart even as you explained your side ofthe story, and it became true when he spent the rest of the day saying next tonothing to you, something you didn’t take kindly to but you waited to see ifsomething else happened.

When classes were over and you werereturning to the dorms you felt a stare pinned to your back, turning aroundonly to realize it was your boyfriend who immediately looked away when he wascaught. A smile appeared on your face as you stopped and waited for him, and ashe got to your side he tried to walk around you but you grabbed his wristfirmly and held him in place. “So,” you spoke, “can we talk in private now orwhat?”

He gave you a little glance and took amoment to reply but ended up nodding softly, following you as you led him tothe dorms’ building and into his room, surprised glances of many of yourclassmates glued to you but you ignored them blissfully as there’d be time forexplanations later. Silence wasn’t uncommon between the two of you but you felthe was slightly distant that time, and you hoped you could fix that before itturned worse.

“What is it now?” you asked as you werealone. “Is it because of what Mina said today? You know that wasn’t meant assomething bad,” you explained as you stared at your surroundings, a room youwere far too used to by this point so nothing in it scared you anymore, noteven the suspicious-looking skull that decorated one of the shelves. “SometimesI even wonder how we got together…how I got so lucky.”

“I feel like you might be the only one whofeels you’re… lucky,” he was quick to retort as he left his bag and jacket ontop of his bed, not even looking back as he spoke. “They look at us funny, I noticed– it’s like we’re some sort of circus show, the good-looking one and the bird-head,and I do not want you to be affected by that wronged perception. You should bewith someone-”

“I should be with someone who makes mehappy,” you cut him off as you closed the space between you and hugged him fromthe back, something that never failed to startle him. “You make me happy Fumikage-kun, and I wouldn’t change anything ofwhat we have built together, not for anyone or anything else. I love you andthat’s all that matters to me.” He was silent for a while until you felt himleaning back slightly against your touch, and you buried your face on thefeathers of his nape. God, you loved the feeling. “Stop thinking about thatnow, how about we go to my room and get the copy of that one Lovecraft book youlove so much? We could read it again together!”

The cheer on your tone made him stifle asmall laugh and he turned around to face you, wrapping his arms around yourwaist in the process – he was a bit smaller than you and you always found thatadorable about him, but you were sure he’d blush if he could. You placed a softkiss on top of his beak and he smiled at you, letting you know that the worsthad already passed.

“Every day, I’m more and more convinced I’vefound the princess of my dreams in you.”

 ShigarakiTomura/Shimura Tenko

Screaming.

That was all you heard that morning andeverything you wished you could shut off – you knew better than to get involvedbut when thuds and slaps were heard you were almost certain something bad wason the rise at the hideout until a purple warp hole opened right on one of yourbedroom’s walls making you sit upright on your bed, a certain light-blue hairedindividual coming through it and landing harshly on the floor.

“I’ll kill you all!” Shigaraki screamed asthe portal shut off, but then he was left panting as he punched your carpet. “Whydo I have to work with such incompetent people!?”

“T-Tomura-kun?” your voice was but awhisper, and even though you were still half asleep fear ran through your veinsas he turned to you, red tired eyes piercing through yours with an aura of whatyou could only describe as death. “Is everything okay?”

The damned question, something that alwayspissed him off but you couldn’t help but ask, both for your lover’s sake andyour own worry. He hissed in reply and quickly got up and walked up to you, astrange, twisted smile on his lips. “Are you taking the piss out of me too? Ifeel like that’s become the main show here,” you could tell he was talking outof anger, but the way his hand creeped up the blanket slowly had your heartracing; you still weren’t sure how far he could get when he was like this. “I couldkill you if I wanted to; I could kill everyone here just by touching the rightthing.” And like that and before you could reply, his hand grabbed your forearmand you yelped loudly, his pinky barely half an inch away from your skin.

“I… I know you wouldn’t do that to me,” youreplied, your voice now gentle and trying your best to hide any signs of painor concern. You gazed straight into his eyes, pulling off the smile he had oncetold you he liked. “I know you, Tomura, I love you and I’m here for you – if you’rewilling to lose it, lose me, then doit, lower your finger and it will all be done.”

He seemed to consider it for a moment butyou weren’t phased by it; he let out a loud grunt before pushing you back ontothe mattress and climbing on top of you, his fists on each side of your head asif locking you below him. You’d lie if you said you cared at all. “You are veryannoying,” he said, closing his eyes as if trying to calm some distant voiceinside his head. You recognized it, and immediately wrapped your arms aroundhis waist and pushed him down on you, briefly leaving you breathless.

“I will always be here to bring you back,and I’m willing to be yours for as long as you want me to. Come to me wheneveryou’re feeling angry or… like you want to kill anything, and I’ll try my bestto understand… or even help.” He didn’t utter a single word as he listened toyour rambling, and you weren’t really sure if he was truly listening or justclosing himself inside his thoughts. Silence fell upon both of you for whatseemed like ten full minutes but then he lifted himself up on his elbows, thatsame death glance directed towards you now accompanied by a little grin, one heusually had when he was winning a battle.

“I have the best player two,” he whisperedbefore he let his lips crash messily against yours.

[jcmorrigan]

New Game +

The F/O? Tony Dracon from Gargoyles. (Whaaat? It’s not Gio this time? What is this sorcery?) The S/I? Rachel Rosalind - woman who has given up on adulting to become a gangster, but looks too innocent and incompetent for anyone to believe she’s running with Dracon’s mob! Yeah, I decided to share some slightly older writings from the f/o’s I haven’t published yet, since here is where the selfship community thrives. Anyway, I wanted to start with the angsty hurt/comfort one first - running on the premise that Gargoyles is a Disney property, so it makes sense for the KH mythos to touch down there, right? (Also, all B.G.P. writings are third-person rather than first-person and I don’t feel like editing them.)

***

It came from their shadows.

           A single streetlamp illuminated Rachel and Tony as they worked to hoist the recently acquired missile launcher into the bed of the truck with no license plates. A single streetlamp was enough.

           It was impossible to tell whose shadow set it off. But one of them elongated far past human, gaining height, gaining dimension, lifting up off the street until it was standing and continuing to grow from there.

           “I still can’t believe we actually pulled this off,” Rachel muttered as she lashed down the launcher. “If the cops catch on, we are so dead.”

           “They’re not gonna catch on,” Tony deadpanned, throwing a sheet up to cover the weapon. “If anything – “

           His sudden stunned expression alerted Rachel that something was very, very wrong. He’d gone dead silent, and when she looked, she saw a terror in his eyes that was usually reserved for Goliath.

           She whipped around and got a look at the thing, now towering about as tall as one of the skyscrapers that bordered it.

           Rachel, being Rachel, had read a fair bit of H.P. Lovecraft. (While not being blind to the writer’s obvious biases, of course. And feeling a little bit of the old White Guilt having to explain this to Glasses, who really trusted her enough not to care.) She had also seen the popular fan depictions of Cthulhu and the Deep Ones, and monsters obviously spawned from the same breed of cosmic horror, starting to circulate the Internet as believe-it-or-not memes.

           So when she got a good look at the enormous thing, it wasn’t without a dash of “ia, ia” coming to mind. Its face was covered by writhing tentacles, leaving only a pair of yellow eyes like car headlights, glowing in the dark. Its blackness almost blended it into the night, so you weren’t quite sure if you were seeing an apparition or something solid. However, if your eyes adjusted, you could make out its jagged limbs, its broad chest – the hole that punched straight through it, allowing you to look from one side of the creature to the other. In the shape of a heart.

           Literally heartless, Rachel thought, and she wasn’t wrong.

           Was it friend or foe? To the Dracon syndicate, that question never mattered. If it was magic, it was foe. End of story. The good tried to rein them in while the bad tried to upstage them. This thing, however, did not seem so much good or bad as it did simply feral.

           It lumbered forward two slow, shaking steps, giving the impression that it was a sluggish creature. Then, like a whip, cracked its hand toward the truck, which went spilling.

           Rachel hit the pavement, hearing the crunch of metal some feet away from her. Luckily sparing her the crash. She was sure there was asphalt mixed into the skin of her cheek with how she’d scraped the ground. However, that was only a momentary worry, for the creature was now doing something rather odd: gathering up a ball of light – no, an absence of light, the physically impossible embodiment of the absence of light in its claws. The streetlamp’s influence dimmed.

           The magic was launched into the air and exploded, raining down as tinier spheres.

           That put fire in Rachel’s engine. She leapt to her feet, dodging each ball of precipitation. One of them didn’t quite miss, and where it touched the skin of her upper arm, it burned. Oh, this thing had to go, before it wiped both her and Tony off the map.

           (Where was he? Where was he? Where was he? Where was - )

           Now, ordinarily, Rachel might have seen this as a doomsday-type scenario. Tonight, however, was different. Tonight, she had just so happened to co-opt in the illegal acquisition of an entire missile launcher.

           A launcher that had clattered to the pavement when the truck was thrown.

           She had no idea if it was too bent out of shape to use. So she girded herself for the possibility that she might be dead meat anyway.

           (Where was he?)

           The launcher mounted onto her shoulder. She took aim, shakingly. Then steadied herself. Just like shooting a person, with gun or bow. Bigger target, bigger weapon.

           The trigger was pulled. The projectile blasted off with a fiery trail.

           Then it collided with the eldritch face, melting it down upon impact and taking the body down to scrap in the explosion.

           The chunks fluidly morphed into intangible shadow, flitting away to hide in the corners of the city. Save for the upturned truck and the scorch marks on the ground from the onslaught of magic, it was as if that giant abomination was never there.

           Rachel forced herself to breathe. Dropped the launcher, not even bothering to let it down gently. Stared awhile, afraid the thing would reforge itself from the depths of the dark. No idea what it was. No idea where it had come from.

           But she had no space to ask questions about it. Not while one still prevailed:

           Where was he?

           “T…Tony?” she called out tentatively. “TONY?”

           No answer.

           “GOD DAMMIT, TONY, YOU BETTER NOT BE DEAD, OR I’M GONNA KICK YOUR ASS FROM HERE TO AVALON!”

           A sound. Not a vocalization, but the slamming of something like a fist against metal. Relatively distant.

           Rachel’s heart fluttered as if pressed against a defibrillator. She knew exactly where he was, what was happening.

           She flitted around a corner, into an alley where a large metal dumpster was situated against the wall. The source of the noise. Her gait slowed; she knew what she would find, and her heart was already breaking.

           He was curled up on the other side of the dumpster, pressed into the corner where it met the wall, his breathing a series of erratic gasps as his knees were pulled to his chest, face buried in his crossed arms. Not a sight he would ever want anyone to see: Tony Dracon, scourge of New York City, caught in a panic attack.

           Rachel approached gingerly, quietly. Sat down beside him. Softly said “Hey.”

           “I’m…fine,” he choked out. “You know it’ll…stop.”

           It always did. (If he didn’t pass out.) He would get back up, brush it off, pretend it had never happened. If it had been anyone but Rachel to come across him in this state, he probably would have shot on sight.

           As it were, even knowing he would self-repair in time, Rachel couldn’t leave this alone. She shuffled closer, pressing into him, then gently moving her arms around him and pulling him toward her.

           He was wrapped around her instantly, nearly choking the life from her. One of her knees locked through his, legs tangling on the asphalt. One of her hands gently buried itself in his hair, entwining with the two-tone strands.

           As the years had passed, the white had taken over more and more of his hair. He acted like it hadn’t changed at all. She knew better. Everyone knew better. Its gleaming moon-white was a beautiful contrast to the raven-dark, even if it did prompt a few unnecessary jokes from clients about Tony being an “old man” so soon in life. (Jokes answered with a fist to the lip.) It stood as a mark of his fear, the repository where he kept it when it wasn’t flowing through him, the badge of shame.

           Which was why, when Rachel entwined her fingers in the white, he always felt as though she were digging at the core of it, teasing the fear apart, dissipating it.

           For a moment, there was nothing outside of the sphere of them, all eyes shut to give the illusion that the dark existence extended no further than a neat radius around their bodies. Rachel’s fingers stroked through Tony’s hair again and again, softly, slowly.

           “It’s gone,” she whispered. “Offed. Eighty-sixed. I killed it.”

           Guided by instinct, finding each other in the dark, they kissed, affirming that they were all there was.

           Then she felt him gently push her away; “I’m fine.”

           Rachel snapped away, getting to her feet. Best they pretend that never happened. However, it wasn’t like she was unafraid herself. No, Tony had spent his fear and would bounce back, but her dread was starting to settle in. As he stood beside her, she tried to say something optimistic.

           What came out instead was “That thing came from nowhere. And it turned into nothing.”

           The unspoken implication that it could return at any time, without warning.

           His turn, now. Tony’s hand settled in on Rachel’s shoulder; “If it shows up again, we’ll just have to teach it its lesson a second time.”

           She wouldn’t begin the trek back to the apartment without clutching his hand tightly in hers. “I mean, we’ve played this game before, right?” she babbled. “It’s…it’s like a Gargoyle. It’s like one of the Archmage’s things. We do this shit all the time.”

           “And we always come out on top.”

           “Yeah. We do. We do, right?”

           “We do.”

           Now he was her only stability in this dark night, despite things being quite the other way around earlier.

           “It’ll be fine,” Rachel panted. “Tomorrow morning, we’ll wake up, and it’ll be over. We’ve played this game before.”

 ***

           She could barely sleep that night, plagued by nightmares of things that came out of the shadows. He was like a corpse next to her in his unmoving restfulness, and she checked him for a heartbeat out of an irrational impulse.

           She had no idea if he was awake or asleep when he instinctively pulled her closer, protectively.

           At least there was that.

 ***

           The news reports the following morning made it clear that this was not, in fact, the game they were used to playing.

           The dark creatures had infested the city the night prior, and they were still running rampant in it on this newly-dawning day. Citizens were…devoured. In a sense. Not eaten, but something different, where they simply melted away in the grip of the critters.

           Wherever one human died, more of the creatures spawned. The implications of this weren’t lost.

           They looked almost comical in the footage. People ran in terror from armored knights half their size, like children playing dress-up, loudly clanking as they charged with limbs flailing. Big-eyed, rounded ant-like creatures swarmed; children reached out to pet them.

           Their hands didn’t get the chance to touch.

           “Okay, so this is different,” Rachel said as she stared at the screen, glassy-eyed. “This is very, VERY different.”

           The only thing she could even think to compare it to was Demona’s curse that had caused her to lose time unexplained until she had later heard of the petrification effect. A city of stone. But even that wasn’t a parallel at all. The only thing it had in common was the infection, the certain doom that flowed with it.

           Rachel was frozen, watching the reports in a dead dismay, fearing when the wave of darkness would reach her and –

           Tony had stood. “Well?”

           She flinched, following him with her eyes. “Well what?”

           “Well, are we going to teach them not to mess with us, or what?”

           “Tony, we CAN’T,” Rachel insisted. “If we pick a fight with those things just because – there are too MANY. They’re KILLING PEOPLE.”

           “Ordinary people,” Tony corrected. “We are not ordinary people.”

           “ – Perhaps most bizarre,” the news anchor was relating, “is what happens if one of the creatures is destroyed. Eyewitness reports in multiple accounts claim that if one of these creatures is struck with enough force, it will leave no trace of its existence behind. The only remains, according to these accounts, are foreign crystals and scraps of as-of-yet unidentified metals.”

           Those were the magic words that broke the spell. “…They drop gems?” Rachel repeated in awe. “They drop MONEY?”

           She looked back to Tony. “Suddenly, I don’t think fighting them is a bad idea after all.”

           “We kill,” Tony told her. “We collect. We profit.”

           “Is there even going to be a market with – “

           “You always forget about overseas, Cupcake.”

           “Are we doing this? We’re doing this.” Rachel sprang to her feet, pushing aside her inhibitions to make room for the pure, unadulterated avarice that kept her in this business more than any threat ever could. “Let’s go fuck up some monsters.”

           The selection of weapons was a sacred ritual. After some deliberation, Tony settled upon a projectile weapon from days past – a relic from a raven-haired robbery, one of only thirty or forty to survive the shipment’s destruction when the largest Gargoyle had first put in an appearance. Not a laser gun, technically. The laser was for sighting only.

           Rachel, on the other hand, was in the mood for something closer-range. Something that would allow her to palpably feel the revenge she was taking for the prior night. Her cheek was still raw, her arm still sensitive from the impacts. (Despite some careful, experienced nursing from one who’d been getting this type of scrape far longer than she had.)

           Most of all, for the memory of him curled against the dumpster, momentarily fragile.

           Switchblade? No. She hoisted up a (relatively) heavy crowbar, smacking it into her palm. “The ones on the news were all tiny little shits,” she growled. “Figures we’re the only ones to get the huge fucker. Not fair.”

           “Did it drop anything when you shot it?”

           “I didn’t pay any attention! I was kind of distracted by almost dying, thank you!”

           “Well.” Tony clicked the safety on his weapon. “We can safely assume the bigger ones drop even more loot.”

           “They better. If I see another one of those huge fuckers, I’m beating it to death with my own hands.”

           “I love it when you talk threatening, Cupcake.”

           She managed a smirk back at him. “And I love it when you’re a cocky egomaniac.”

           Weapons pointed away from each other so that neither was accidentally hurt in the midst of another quick, forceful kiss.

           “Let’s go,” Tony declared, and they moved out.

           It didn’t take them long to find a square filled to capacity with the insectoid ones. A hundred pairs or more of yellow eyes turned to regard the fresh blood.

           The fresh blood that was armed.

           Rachel’s crowbar slammed through beast after beast, scattering shadows and clinking crystals. At a command from Tony, she dropped to her knees, leaning as far back as she could, and he fired over her, the projectile blowing the center of the swarm to smoky bits.

           It wasn’t the game they were used to playing. But the increased stakes made it all the more fun to compete.

[tessatechaitea]

Scarab #6

I don't know what's happening on this cover but I definitely have a new sexual fetish.

This comic book stars a raccoon. Rating: A+.

Most of the weird dialogue in this comic book probably comes from John Smith's high school notepads full of terrible poetry. I mean, this part about winter isn't too bad! I kind of like it. It's almost as if William Carlos Williams and H.P. Lovecraft were caught in a Star Trek transporter malfunction where their minds were melded but they had to overcome the horror of their new two-dicked physical existence to continue writing poetry. I knew John Smith was English from his previous work on 2000 A.D. and other British comic book periodicals but then he uses the phrase "Chinese whispers" in this issue and I think, "If I hadn't already known he was English from his previous work on 2000 A.D. and other British comic book periodicals, I'd now know he was English by his use of the phrase 'Chinese whispers.'" Here are some of the ideas John Smith throws into a two-page account of Scarab's recent adventures that he couldn't bother writing into full scripts but wanted everybody to know he thought up anyway: a television at the Waldorf haunted by the 20th Century, a pervert breaking the spirits of kids with his Zoo of Shame, The Phantom Barber stealing scalps from runway models, the world's sexiest man raped by Tarot cards, and the Electric Fetus Machine which manifests as a large organ whose music foments rebellion in fetuses. Is this how the British writers took over DC's adult comic books? By occluding our minds with so much random and weird pseudo-philosophical garbage that we couldn't think straight? Sure, I guess an Electric Fetus Machine sounds like a way better story than Batman beating The Riddler near to death. But is there really any substance there? I suppose there could be if the idea were fleshed out and some kind of theme built around the idea of fetuses rebelling. Maybe all of these ideas John Smith throws out are just a game of Chinese whispers where he takes, say, a story by John Barth from Lost in the Funhouse about the thoughts of a sperm considering how the race toward life is pointless and, maybe, they should all just give up, and he turns it into the Electric Fetus Machine so that when I read it, I don't instantly think, "Isn't this a John Barth story?" Instead, I think, "That's a better sounding story than the one where the guy is raped by the Three of Wands!"

Meanwhile, Scarab spends his downtime watching Eleanor turn into a Dr. Seuss tree. Or a mushroom cloud (because remember the theme established by the beginning quote and title?!).

Try to ignore Scarab's ass in the previous scan. It's phenomenal. If you're training to be a comic book artist, you need to spend a lot of time getting the ass right. And once you do, you'll never get an ass in pants right again because all you have ever learned to draw is a naked ass which readers will know is actually under skin tight Lycra unless the colorist completely shits the bed. The guy in the jar on the cover is a Russian experiment in psychotropic warfare called a Gloryboy. There are three of them and they're some kind of pacifist dream come true. They constantly mutter Vertigo phrases in a tonal frequency that makes normal people vomit and shit themselves. It's the Brown Note theory of winning battles but taken to the Vertigo extreme. Instead of a whomping bass sound system, the noise comes form a naked albino in a jar composed of dream matter. Maybe they're not composed of dream matter. And maybe they're not about pacifism at all. It seems they've been altered and experimented in such a way that they can give voice to "the Scream over Hiroshima!" That sounds pretty bad. It's probably some form of psychic bombardment, comparable to a nuclear blast, which drives everybody in the vicinity completely insane. Or maybe it really will just be a thing that pacifies everybody because have you ever tried to do anything while shitting yourself? I mean other than read the ingredients in your shampoo. And even then, I bet you take your eyes off the bottle for a moment to really be in the moment. As an aside, do women find shitting as enjoyable as men or is it just the fecal matter pressing up against our prostate as it passes that makes a big shit feel so good? The Russians test the Scream Over Hiroshima on London. What it does is project into the minds of everybody who hears it the entire reality of what happened in Hiroshima. It's the truth of war. It's pure horror and death and consequence. It probably also makes everybody shit themselves. But when it's done, they'll all understand, on a physically primal level what war is. And the assumption is that everybody will finally be against it, I guess? I've been on Twitter for many years and the one thing I know is that even physically experiencing the horrors of the bombing of Hiroshima isn't going to change the minds of most idiots. I mean, if you didn't become a vegan pacifist hug machine after hearing Sting's song, "Russians," why would you become one after living the horror of fifty thousand lives snuffed out in an instant?! Some people, you just can't reach. London turns into a burning chaotic mess as everybody flips the fuck out from suddenly experiencing the most painful thing they've ever experienced. Scarab arrives after it's all over and everybody is afraid of him. Surprise! There's nothing he can do. He just observes the mess and meets a psychic who tells him that Eleanor is coming back. And isn't that the most important part of this eight issue story? That Louis the Scarab's love returns to him while the rest of the world falls into death and chaos? Scarab #6 Rating: C. Smith seeded this issue with more story ideas than story. The main story is an idea that really goes nowhere as well. It's a thought experiment. It's a minor philosophical musing. And Scarab doesn't do anything but distract himself from his wife's condition. But it also wasn't uninteresting. So I think that means it's a C? What am I, a high school teacher? I don't know how to grade shit!

[fantroll-purgatory]

Name: Zariak Sakana

Meaning: Surname means fish, first name doesn’t have one. She’s part of the original twelve I was inexperienced with making.

(Awwww, babywriter trolls! I remember the first one I wrote, who was also originally a Life player, now that I think about it…)

(I’m gonna say right off the bat that she’s gonna need a bit of a whole core replacement, or rather, an insertion of a core. She’s got the skeleton of a character, but none of the meat! Let’s give her some fluff.)

Mod CD here just for a few additional notes. You know how I love trying to justify names that have no meanings. I discovered that in one of H.P. Lovecraft’s old stories, there’s a land called Zar where “dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten.” So I think we can justify this name along with some ideas SA posits later. Go with the flow, even if it means forgetting your dreams!

Blood: fuchsia

Sign: Pisci

(SIGN OF THE DRUID)

(My thoughts for her sign lean more towards…)

(PIMINO, SIGN OF THE EMPATHETIC)

Lusus: Gly’go’dyb

Trollian handle: diligentSeafoam[DS]

Typing Quirk: capitalizes z, replaces e with -E

(This is good, easy to scan and type.)

Weapon: a custom designed trident

(Checks out with what we know of the Batterwitch’s caste.)

Can I recommend adding a flag to the trident? It doesn’t change the function of it in any way, but it’s a nod to the design note of you basing her outfit off a color guard uniform. 

Special abilities: none except canon fuchsia blood ones

Outfit: I actually based this off of the color guard uniform at my school when I first designed her. The half skirt and long sleeved shirt with tights. She also has a small crown too, as seen in this version.

Personality: Zariak is a silent brooding type, not wanting to form attachments. She knows she’s going to die when she’s 9 sweeps, and doesn’t want to think about it. She also knows she has to kill multiple lusii daily to keep her planet from being destroyed, and she hates it. She cares about these random trolls lives and how she ruined them, but like hell she’ll show a weakness like that. She’ll just pretend she’s the average heiress. Go with the flow.

(I think part of what she’s missing here is that Fuschia air of mystery? As well as that bad-praxis part of Fuschias where they WANT to do things, but often fail at actually DOING them. Maybe she needs to be a bit skittish around lowbloods or something? Not in the “they could hurt me” way but in the “oh my god what if I break one?” the way a lot of people are when unexpectedly handed a baby. Don’t want to drop it!)

Lunar Sway: Prospit

(I think keeping her Prospit is a thing that would be good for her. Though her broodiness and mask of “just your average tyrian” is very Classic Derse. Make her true self shine through a little more, even when she’s just trying to pathologically go with the flow.)

Prospit dwellers also tend to be the more mutable and go-with-the-flow types. Remember, dersites are prone to rebellion while prospitans are prone to acceptance. There’s also the Destiny conception- Zariak has already decided she’s doomed to die and believes this is the natural course of things. This is a destiny idea that ties her to Prospitan tendencies for sure!

God tier: Knight of Life

(I see where the Knight is coming from. This is actually a really brilliant class for someone like her, who has the DESIRE to go out and help people but is holding herself back. Knights (like Karkat, Latula, and Dave) also have a habit of hiding their feelings behind glasses and facades, regardless of their Lunar Sway.) (Life Players meddle even when they don’t think they are- just look at our Heiress Trio of Jane, Feferi and Meenah. I’m not sure that Zariak has that kind of pushiness that life players really do. If anything, I’d wonder if she’s a Doom player, ESPECIALLY with that Ghosty land you have planned for her.)

I’ve gotta agree on the Doom front. She’s someone who is overwhelmed by all rules and standards, but the Inevitability around her. She feels crushed by her fate and all that underlying reciprocal developmental energy is stuck inside. She has to push past her hiding and crack into that Rogue of Life inverse. 

(This means her Sgrub path would be in learning how to weaponize that fatalism she’s carrying into something that she save her team with! Passively use her privledge and energy that she’s carrying around to enact things like policy change! Or game-breaking loopholes!) Fetch Modus: unsure as of now

(Maybe… spearfishing? Oh! Or like Go Fish? Something silly and ocean related? She’s missing some interests, which is where I often get my Fetch ideas from.)

I know I’m knocking on the color guard thing a lot, but I’m kind of tempted to bring it in here, too. Special routine for items? Special routine for items. 

Land: Land of Ghosts and Rocks

(Are the rocks part of the Quest? Because Rocks and Ghosts sounds more like a Land of Adjective and Quest title.)

The sprite is over a year old I’m so sorry. But thank you for looking at this!

And here with my design notes!: 

I wanted to keep the same basic design elements you’d mentioned, but in general try to make her both a little more Generic Heiress, since that is the kind of role she’s desperately trying to project. I made her skirt pink so she could rep her blood color a little more openly, added some cool detailing to the now black tights, and gave her that Long Fuchsia-Caste Hair. 

Braids were a common feature of Color Guard Uniform, but I didn’t want to futz with that too much/make her design busy, so she gets a pulled back tyrian stripe implying a low ponytail instead. She got her crown, too, and some Traditional Fuchsia horns. 

Other than that, she just needed a few proportion and color tweaks!  (Thank you for submitting another Troll! I had a lot of fun working through her!) -SA

[thetygre]

30 Day Monster Challenge 2 - Day #15: Favorite Great Old One/Monster God

1.      Nurgle the Great Unclean One (Warhammer)

I think you can tell a lot about a person by knowing which of the Chaos Gods is there favorite. I’m not saying there’s a right answer, but I’ve always been a Nurgle man myself. Nurgle is more than just the daemon god of disease and entropy; he’s the god of the value of life. Nurgle loves all of his children equally, down to the smallest virus. It can be hard for people to accept that, to realize that they have as much cosmic significance as a single-cell organism, but that’s just because they don’t realize how much love the Urfather has for that little cell. In Nurgle’s phlegmatic embrace, all of us are equal, regardless of race, gender, or cell count.

Nurgle asks only that you spread the love he has so willingly given, so that all may be his children. Death and disease are natural parts of life; we struggle to fight them so, but they always come back to us. Through Nurgle, we may exalt in the power of pus and the greatness gangrene. We grow stronger with each infection, and every tumor is a sign of endurance. We do not die when the Plague Bearer calls us; we merely transform for the vermin and bacteria that consumes us, to be reborn in the eternal cycle. Truly, Grandfather Nurgle moves in wondrous ways.

2.      Ithaqua the Wind Walker (August Derleth)

It should come as no surprise that the god of all wendigos is one of my favorite Great Old Ones. The Ithaqua Cycle is probably the best thing August Derleth wrote, for what ever that’s worth. Ithaqua is just such a chilling god; the image of some skull-faced giant thing turning around a mountain is the stuff of nightmares. Ithaqua is the primal urge inside life, the need to do anything to survive in an unrelenting environment. He walks in the cold places of the world, but also in that cold space between worlds, spreading his cannibalistic madness from world to world. Ithaqua himself seems hardly necessary, or the countless wendigos that follow him. It’s the chaos and horror he causes between people in a desperate situation, pitting one man against the other and breaking taboos until only the strongest is left. Ithaqua is the cold and brutality of the North personified.

3.      Lolth the Queen of the Demonweb Pits (Dungeons and Dragons)

Lilith is so pastiche these days. You know where the real rebellious queen of evil action is at? Spiders, man, and Lolth is the Spider Queen. Lolth has been in Dungeons and Dragons since the beginning. Wherever the dark elves go, Lolth goes too, like any deity, and her absence from a setting is noticeable. She’s one of D&D’s greatest villains, and countless adventurers have lost their lives in the Demonweb Pits. Her entire realm is an arachnid hell crawling with spiders as small a mite to as big as her spider-golem palace. Lolth is an entity of contrasts; her priesthood is a strict matriarchy, but Lolth herself is absolutely insane. It’s hard to tell if there’s anything left of the elf goddess she used to be. Beneath the layers of scheming, beauty, racially motivated hatred, and plans to conquer the known multiverse lies a beating heart of blind hunger, an overwhelming instinct to survive by strength alone.

4.      Saaitii the Hog (William Hope Hodgson)

Saaitii is actually what got this particular entry in the challenge. See, I wanted to do just ‘Top 10 Great Old Ones’, but then I was worried that not everybody would know what the Great Old Ones are and it’s kind of an arbitrary category that Lovecraft wanted people to change from story-to-story for fun, so then I just broadened the category to ‘monster gods’ and now here we are. Anyway, Saaitii is a monster that William Hope Hodgson’s occult detective Thomas Carnacki encountered in his monster-hunting stories. The locals tell Carnacki that Saaitii is the ghost of a boar wrongfully killed long ago, but Carnacki suspects that it’s an extradimensional something using the spirits of dead hogs to try and come through.

First off, I just want to know what William Hope Hodgson’s deal with pigs was. This is explicitly his second pig monster story, following the pig men from The House on the Borderlands. But the usage of that aesthetic is definitely refreshing a little unsettling. In an age of meme-tentacles, we need new and different cosmic horrors. Pigs can be disturbing; we think of them as cute at best and filthy at worst, but rarely evil or malevolent. Even the meanest boar has a kind of nobility to it. But the Hog brings up images of mindless, vicious cruelty, dark things in the forest and filth. The concept of a higher life form like some extradimensional whatsit coming into our world through ‘lower’ lifeforms strikes a little close to the karmic bullseye for some, turning the tables on humanity and reminding us that in the eyes of the cosmos, we’re just so much more food.

5.      Ogdru Jahad the Seven Who Are One (Hellboy)

You’d think there’d be more dragons on the list, but so far it’s just the one. Seven. 369. Whatever. The Ogdru Jahad are the Hellboy/BPRD universes Great Old Ones, and the source of… a sizable amount of trouble there. Not all of it, but most of it. At the dawn of time, the Sons of God formed the mud of creation into seven great dragons that were filled with the shadow of the moon, for whatever reason. Things would have been fine and dandy there, but one little angel named Satan, for reasons that are still unclear, took the fire of God and filled the dragon with it, giving the Ogdru Jahad life. The Ogdru Jahad birthed their 369 offspring, and the angels had to fight them off before the whole Creation thing could get rolling. From that day on, every human culture has been warned about the Ogdru Jahad, and they have been ingrained in the human consciousness as the Dragon, from Tiamat to the Beast of Revelations.

It’s a nice fusion of Judeo-Christian Biblical lore and cosmic horror. I honestly don’t think it would work if it wasn’t for the fact that Satan is notably absent from the Hellboy series and, as of BPRD: Hell on Earth, the Ogdru Jahad are winning, where even their smallest children can cause natural disasters. I love conflating the image of dragons with cosmic monsters. Cthulhu as Leviathan, flying polyps as oriental dragons, hunting horrors as wyverns; it’s a direct play to the archetype that both types of creatures fill. The Ogdru Jahad illustrate that perfectly, simultaneously something the most modern of cosmic horror and the most ancient of monsters.

6.      Flowey the Flower (Undertale)

Flowey’s final form gets in on design alone. There aren’t a lot of monster designs that actually freak me out, but Flowey is just horrible. Of course that’s also because it’s a genius bit of sprite animation, with the usage of textures contrasting so hard with the rest of Undertale. It looks like something that ate its way inside out from at least three Madoka witches. The claws, the eyes, the mouths; it all makes something perfectly awful and abhorrent. And, of course, the music. I actually think Flowey’s boss theme rates pretty low compared to other Undertale boss themes, but the title is just something else. How are you supposed to do better than “Your Best Nightmare”?

7.      Rom the Vacuous Spider (Bloodborne)

It’s Rom. C’mon. Look, I know she’s not actually a Great One; she’s Kin, like Mergo’s Wet Nurse. But look at her. When I think, “What’s my favorite eldritch monstrosity boss from Bloodborne?” I keep coming back to Rom. Just look at her dumb, stupid face. One of her attacks is just falling over. That’s the most relatable a video game has been for me since I was an undergrad. Rom doesn’t want to hurt anybody; she’s just a giant, stupid bug/fungus thing. You could just walk away, man. You could just leave poor Rom alone. She’s doing her best trying to grant people eyes and you’re over here hassling her. In front of her kids, man. Just leave her alone.

8.      Moder the Bastard of Loki (The Ritual)

Y’know, as a jotun, this guy could have been on the giant list, but I feel like its design and concept are too unique for that. This is a special monster, a kind of revelatory creature. Its design is just out of this world, blending human and stag and those creepy little eyes. But there’s so much more to it than just a great design. Its ability to create illusions essentially gives it access to shapeshifting, tying it to the actual mythology of Loki and Norse giants. The actual ritual to appease Moder, where it picks a person up and impales them on a tree, is reminiscent of the story in Norse mythology where Odin impales himself on the World Tree Yggdrasil to gain the knowledge of the runes. Before a person is killed, Moder shows them something precious to them, or a defining moment in their life; it is, in its own way, giving the person a revelation about what is vital in their own universe. Moder, like any good monster, delivers a message about the meaning of reality to the people it encounters.

9.      Set the Slithering God (Conan the Barbarian/Marvel Comics)

I like this comic book version of a god. The actual Egyptian deity Set is fairly complex, and actually examining his character and divine portfolio gives insight into how Egypt’s culture changes over time. Comic book Set, on the other hand, is the god of snake villains. He is the snake villain to end all snake villains. Marvel cooked him up for their old Conan comics based off an offhand mention in one of Robert E. Howard’s stories because they needed Conan to have a nemesis. So Conan’s nemesis, the arch-wizard/priest Thoth Amon, worships the dark god Set, regardless of the fact that Thoth Amon appeared exactly once in the very first Conan story. Now, it’s fifty years later and Set is apparently one of Marvel’s Primordial Ultra-Deities.

It’s that mixture of traditional myth and the cosmic I like again, though this time it’s less H.P. Lovecraft ‘cosmic horror’ and more Jack Kirby ‘cosmic action’; new gods and a new mythology for a new medium, but still the same old story. Set is the Serpent, like the Ogdru Jahad, manifesting in human lore as everything from the serpent in Eden to Leviathan. He was the first murderer, able to absorb the power of any other god he ate, and even today he seeks reptile supremacy. Wherever there is Set there are snakes, enacting the cosmic cycle of death and rebirth while lounging in decadence.

10.   Haos the Ultimate Bio-Weapon (Resident Evil 6)

… We’re going to do this now, and then we’re never going to do it again. Because we’re going to talk about something good that was in Resident Evil 6. One of the most infuriating things about RE6 is that it had some of the most incredible monster designs in the Resident Evil series. Great designs. The kind of monster designs that other games only wish they could achieve. And they were wasted on one of the worst games the series has produced. One of those designs was Haos, the apparent ultimate bio-weapon engineered by (ugh) Neo-Umbrella in a secret facility at the bottom of the ocean good lord I’m putting this on a list with William Hope Hodgson.

Haos deserves a better game; its design is unnecessarily fantastic. It looks like a ningen crossed with a jellyfish. It’s some far future stage of human evolution driven to its most extreme and bizarre form. There’s something forlorn and sad about it, but also beautiful and powerful. Its concept is purely apocalyptic; Haos will rise from the bottom of the ocean before it finally dies and dissolves into a gas that will spread across the world, turning humanity into zombies and monsters. Herald of a world of gods and monsters and all that. Even its name is kind of cool; ‘Haos’ is literally Siberian for ‘chaos’. And every day I have to wake up with the knowledge that this wonderful, horrible monster was stuck at the end of a Resident Evil 6 campaign. It’s depressing. So here’s to good old Haos; at least here you’ll get some respect.

[yourdlmatchmaker]

I think this one is the longest match up I’ve answered so far… :’)

“Hello there, this looked fun. Could I have a long match-up please?

1. Physical appearance: 5'4" (163cm) 100lbs (45kg) very long dark reddish brown hair, dark brown eyes, olive skin (Mix of Thai, English and German) My look has been compared to a scaled down (in height) fashion model – that is long legs, very skinny, high somewhat hollow cheek bones, narrow face and a high forehead with almost no bust to speak of and a teeny tiny waist, I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

2. Personality: Oh my, where do I begin? Well, I’m definitely an extreme introvert. People usually seem to think I come across as very professional and aloof. I try to be kind and courteous to everyone I meet, but if they do or say anything that bothers me I can be a little prickly and sometimes downright vicious. Little do they know though that I’m like that, because I’m terribly shy around strangers and have a very strong desire to make people happy and protect them. I fear getting close to others, because I don’t want to hurt or be hurt and have a very hard time finding people I can bond with in both an intellectual and emotional way, so I hide behind distance and politeness. Just because I’m shy at first though, doesn’t mean I won’t be a chatterbox once you get to know me though. Once I’m comfortable with you I’ll share (almost) all of my ideas, random musings and gripes, if I think you’ll be receptive towards it anyways. That takes a very long time though and so far only two people have gotten to that point with me. For people that I’m friends with normally I tend to act in a sort of motherly way, giving them advice and helping them with their problems – sometimes admittingly to my own detriment. As well as taking care of them when they are sick or having emotional issues. I don’t like to help people, but on some level I feel like I must do so especially if I know them.

I’m normally a very logical person, so much so that I will occasionally say the wrong thing or offer ideas or advice when it’s not what the other person is looking for, which I realize after the fact but because I really like to just ‘fix’ things I have a hard time understanding that sometimes people need to emotionally vent, and I often just get confused by it. I’ll try to “be there” for them despite that but it is still difficult.

Despite my size and shy disposition I’m actually extremely hard to intimidate and will stand up for myself and other people very quickly. It doesn’t matter who my opponent is or how big, strong or powerful they are, I will stand my ground possibly to the end if I believe in my cause strongly enough (though because of my protective nature it is very easy to make me back down by threatening other people). No matter how many feminine things there are that I love, for some reason I always feel like I end up coming across as a bit too masculine and I often feel a bit more male than female. This isn’t necessarily out of a desire to be male, but rather I feel like I have more masculine than feminine qualities and also feel like I am sadly bereft in the supposedly more girlish personality traits of my sex. Despite this though I have no real desire to change my personality or sex, I am who I am after all. Nevertheless I remind people more of their brothers and sons, and my tiny social circle is all boys (at the moment.)

3. Scorpio (Sun), Gemini (Moon), Gemini (Rising) (The last two are important because despite having almost all of the Scorpio traits, once you get to know me I never shut up. ^_^;)

4. Hobbies/Interests: Drawings, painting (I like both fine art and illustration and can work in several different mediums – acrylic, watercolour, marker, ink and even digital art. Fantasy art, Surrealism, Manga and Impressionism are examples of styles I can do, and I’m still working towards improving my hyperrealist style.) I’ve been obsessed with making art since I was a very small child and at this point it’s really become my life’s work. I dedicate so much of my time, energy and resources to this that I forget to eat or sleep and become a bit of a shut-in. Reading: (Most of my books are non-fiction, though I do enjoy some older fiction on occasion – The Silmarillion, The Great God Pan and pretty much anything by H.P. Lovecraft being some examples. My library contains field guides, books on botany, mycology, medicine, artbooks, anatomy, geography, geology, microbiology, mythology, occult/witchcraft, religion, linguistics, phrasebooks, particle physics, cartography, calligraphy, history, psychology, genetics (…probably a lot more but we’ll be here for far too long.) Gardening: I love growing all sorts of things, but especially herbs and flowers. My living area is full of plants of many different kinds and I devote a significant portion of my time and energy to them. I also like to grow tropical plants from the seeds of fruit that I buy at the grocery store. Manga and Anime: I don’t seem immediately like the sort of person who would love popular culture, but the fact that I can enjoy some fun stories while reading or watching in a language that is not my native tongue has always been the main motivation behind this obsession. I’m also madly in love with cute things and ink drawings. Video Games: Another thing people probably wouldn’t expect by looking at me but… I have a HUGE collection of games (on my computer) of many different kinds. Like with anything else I do, I have to play everything in it’s original language (it’s more fun and respects the artistic integrity more.) I mostly like JRPGs and Visual Novels now, but I used to love Sierra games when I was younger, and some FPS like Doom. There is no type of game I won’t play. Though gaming is generally the lowest thing on my list of priorities these days. Cooking: I like to cook, can can do many different styles. Mostly Thai, but also frequently Japanese (both traditional and modern), Italian, German, English etc. I can cook pretty much anything though I don’t like baking as much. (I’m not super fond of sweets, except on the rare occasion when I must have them.) Fashion and Makeup: I am completely unable to leave the house without makeup and sunscreen and always have to make sure my clothing is at least presentable and neat. I actually enjoy applying makeup and like experimenting with it (I hate doing my hair though, the length is too much so I usually bun or ponytail it.) I also like a few Jfashions, Mori-Girl, Otome-kei and Classical Lolita especially. Unfortunately I’m also a very active person so I usually end up dressing in a more Korean style instead (tight high-waisted jeans, long sleeved tight black shirts and heeled boots – is running in heels a skill? XD), but when it’s practical to do so I love wearing the frilliest dresses I can find with a very poofy petticoat, a bonnet and floral designs. Hiking: I like to forage in the forest for mushrooms and plants when I can. I find that the fresh air and beautiful scenery calms me down and energizes me. Studying Languages: I haven’t had as much time for this lately, but it’s a side hobby. Unfortunately Japanese is the only one I’ve gotten particularly far in… (There are not enough hours in the day or night.)

5. I like: Tea (Especially Earl Grey, must be high quality or I get a stomach ache… yeah I know, its true. @_@), coffee (espresso in lattes or specialty black coffee made in a French Press, no drip :P), Self discipline, Quiet time, Nature, Music (all kinds, though especially symphonic metal), WalkingI love: My cats (though I get along quite well with all felinekind and animals in general (save humans :P), Plants (I mean every kind of plant, though trees and flowers stick out a bit), Fungi (even molds, though not when they’re growing on my food), Beautiful things, Art Supplies, Bright and pastel colours, Antiques, Books, Art, Paintings, Illustration, Shopping for art suppliesI dislike: When people look untidy, Foul smells, People that bore me, Small talk, Sloth, Loud noises, Erratic behavior, Selfishness, People who act overtly friendly and try to get close to you too fastI loathe: Cruelty (especially towards animals and children), Cowardice, Deliberate ignorance, People who complain a lot, Irresponsibility

6. I was unable to bond with my sole caregiver due to extreme child abuse and neglect on their part, In addition to that I was not allowed to attend school until my teenage years (I was educated very strictly at home, supposedly because I was too advanced to fit in at school – though it might also have been to keep me prisoner at home all the time. >_<). Due to this I have had a very hard time fitting in with society as my childhood was mostly spent alone, reading, drawing, playing computer games, spending time with the cats that I lived with and going out into nature (I made friends with a couple of squirrels.) Much of what I knew about people and the world was gleaned from books, magazines and the internet – although I was allowed to associate with a few family friends on occasion. I did have a very good intellectual education (though often held to impossible standards), but because I was so cut off from more normal ways of socializing I still have a very hard time relating to other people.“Relationship-wise” I’m umm… actually extremely submissive in private (^_^;) (Not something most people would expect as I seem very proud and dominant normally). I’m also very easy to embarrass as I’m not very comfortable talking directly about certain sorts of… umm… “romantic” things and avoid almost all forms of public affection. Above all else I look for people who can understand and relate to me via interests and experiences and who I can also relate to in the same way. Probably the same thing most people look for… but figured I should mention it. Would rather not be paired up with Ruki, I have a huge personal grudge against him that dates back to More Blood – and a part of me still plots his doom. (I apologize deeply to all the Ruki fans though.)

Hope this wasn’t too long, I feel a bit silly. (^_^;)

Take your time and have fun with this.

Could I please be anonymous?”

Admin Abi: Oh my~ what a long and detailed match up!! I really enjoyed reading it and I NEED to say that I felt identified with many parts!! Well~ I hope you get to see it “anon-chan” ;D and I thank you for the long wait. Long reply for a long match!

*finishing your match up*

Your romantic match is…

Reiji!

I must say/confess…I seriously I thought I was reading Reiji’s female description! I don’t intend to offend you and I apologize if I did. But you see…I want to explain myself a little more as to why I said it…

I'll tell you how you two met! After some time that you were studying in a school, you just wasn’t able to fit. Your parents then decided to change you into a more private school. They even changed you into a night-time school. During that time of the day, they thought you would be able to fit more since there would be less students as well as to keep your high level of education. They sing you up to this school and to be honest you weren’t very sure or excited about it. It would mean to adapt one more time and start all over again. Adapting to the time, education system and…met new people once again. On your first day you had a hard time finding your classroom…you were lost and let’s say you didn’t know exactly how you ended up in the chemistry laboratory. You knocked and…a handsome and elegant man opened. He seemed somehow annoyed, but he asked you what is that you wanted. You showed him your schedule and asked him where you could find your class. He gave you the directions and you thank him. This encounters seem to happen constantly since you seemed to always cross paths. He was always polite (and annoyed) and gave you instructions whenever you needed. One time you asked a girl of your class if she knew him so you could thank him properly for all his help. She was surprised and told you that he was no other that Reiji Sakamaki, the most popular family in school. She was more surprised that you get to be in good terms with the second eldest of the brothers.

“Reiji is well known to be the perfect gentleman…but he is unrechable. He’s cold towards everyone and thinks of himself above all. No one has see him dating any girl and he just closes himself in the chemistry laboratory, yet he is the top student in school. I really think you shouldn’t try to catch him, you’ll end up rejected” the girl told you. It’s not like you had those intentions with him in the first place, you just wanted to thank him. The next day you went to his class and simply left him a small note telling him how greatful you were. He was impressed? You couldn’t tell to be honest. You kept having encounters with him, you discovered that he was a little more open when you both were alone. He showed you his perfectionist nature as his sadist part. Yet…you seem to be unavoidable attracted to him. You of course were polite and a lady at first and that gave you extra points! He never confessed to you directly? He just simply let know that you now belong to him~.

He can’t believe how many things you both have in common. Just like you Reiji has an interest in botanics and science. You both have created a small garden with all types of herbs and a small section with flowers. You two sometimes have disagreements since you both are very logical, so you tend to discuss about some things. There were times in which you had troubles with him since he can’t stand being told what he should do (I mean it wasn’t your intention to offend him…you just tried giving him some advice!). Yet…even Reiji had it difficult to make you afraid…you were so difficult to intimidate, how you do it?.

He also had some troubles accepting or at least trying not to change you that much about your preferences. He sometimes have problems dealing with your more masculine nature…but well no one is 100% perfect. He sighs loudly and you know that you are doing something that is bothering him. He also doesn’t like that you tend to hang more with men that girls, yet he knows that even though you are nice and such with them…no one could provide you with the things he offers for you like a deep connection both mental and emotional. He also don’t mind the fact that you have social problems…I mean he manages to keep you with him almost all the time. He’s pleased whenever you dress like a lday or all cute just for him…it makes him feel good with the fact that he gets to know you better than anyone.

He understands what is like to grow alone and being force (in a way) to always give your best and being the best. He felt like he needed to have you all by himself and you fekt the same. You had someone to care for (well not literally but as a target to your attentions and love) and so has he. He always take care of you no matter the circunstances, he has found you and has no intention to let you go…never!

Your dates are mostly staying at his room, having a nice cup of Earl Grey tea (of the highest quality, who you think he is?) and discussing for hours about deep and serious topics. He enjoys your vast knowledge in literature, sciences, botanics, medice, linguistics, witchcraft (which he also has used), gentics…man, he can talk to you for hours and just like you said there are times you both wished the day had more hours to keep going. Even your drawings, pieces of art and knowledge in general never cease to stop to amaze him (he won’t admit it though…his biggest attempt to praise you, would be telling you “you did a good job” or “Indeed you are right about this”). Your interests are so vast that is incredible to make you both stop (Reiji is the one that always stops the conversation in order to go to sleep). Reiji sometimes have problems with your huge invest of time in your video games…but he accepts that a break once in a while is important. You small walks also doesn’t bother him that much…he has one of his familiars keeping an eye on you at all moments so he doesn’t have to worry and can concetrate on his chores and experiments in peace.

Reiji is a true gentleman: he always remembers the important dates, the things that you like and those you don’t. I can tell you that he knows perfectly that you are rather new when it comes with romantic things, so he doens’t push you into hand holding or kissing since he, himself, doesn’t like it. Your submissive nature with his dominant one makes a great combination, he feels so proud that he gets to see your true nature…and that you show it just for him…not just in a “pervert way”, but also as the chatty and even your akwardness. Because that true self with imperfections and all…is what makes you perfect to his eyes. You are so perfect together: YOU TWO HAVE SO MANY THINGS IN COMMON THAT HE SHOULD THANK HEAVENS FOR SENDING HIM SOMEONE AS PERFECT FOR HIM AS YOU!!

I hope you liked it and that I made sense? I feel that in some parts I wasn’t very clear or…maybe that was just my imagination…?

Either way hope you get to see it and like it of course…and thank you for your patience again!!

[rosymaplemoth]

Hey there I was wondering if you had any book or online recommendations for information on outer gods/great old ones? I've been wanting to interact with them a bit creatively but it's been hard to find a concise source ^^;

I’ll do my best!

One thing to know about Yog-Sothery/the Cthulhu Mythos (I am going to start calling it Yog-Sothery because that is the best name ever) is that it is a living, malleable universe. While H.P. Lovecraft’s original texts are the authorities, countless other authors have added their own twist– this is something that the Old Man himself encouraged in his lifetime. Still, I’d take these outside sources with a grain of salt, ESPECIALLY the ones who tried to pass off their stories as collaborations (yes, I’m referring to August Derleth).

I would recommend starting off with HPL’s work, and that’s what I’m going to recommend here, as I’m still not as familiar with other Yog-Sothery writers.

The only downside of this is that I feel like Lovecraft’s work focuses more on how humans interact with or are affected by these beings, as opposed to the beings themselves actually doing things. Off of the top of my head, I can really think of only two Outer Gods/GOOs that make physical appearances (and one of them is an aspect of a GOO). I mean, unless you count Dagon. Is Dagon even a GOO? I don’t know. I feel like HPL’s fishy gods are more accessible.

First of all…

What is the difference between a Great Old One and an Outer God?Oh lordy, I’m not entirely sure. I’m not even sure HPL himself really differentiated between the two. I personally classify an Outer God as being directly created and/or descended from Azathoth itself. (This family tree is a bit tongue-in-cheek (I see you on there, HPL), but I still use it as a resource)

That limits Outer God classification it to Azathoth Nyarlathotep (who I kind of treat as both an avatar Azathoth itself and a child of Azathoth)The Nameless MistDarkness

I also throw Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath in there, though The Dunwich Horror talks about Yog-Sothoth as an ‘Old One’ so who even knows. WHO KNOWS.

And again, this is just me, because according to Derleth there are like five gajillion Outer Gods.

I’m going to list the Lovecraft stories that include/mention Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, and Shub-Niggurath below. This is going under a cut, because this post is already super-long.

AZATHOTH

“Azathoth”

Surprisingly, Azathoth doesn’t make an appearance here, but this fragment of a never-finished novel was conceived as a journey for someone to meet the Daemon Sultan.

“The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”

Pretty much the master source for both Azathoth and Nyarlathotep. Again, Azathoth himself never makes an appearance– thank goodness for our hero– but you do learn what it is and its role in the cosmos. He’s really described in the story’s climax.

“The Dreams in the Witch House”Or, how to become a cultist that worships Azathoth. The protagonist only escapes this fate because he knows what Azathoth is, and the madness it entails.

Azathoth is mentioned in a few other stories, but it’s mostly just “the chaos that lies in the center of the universe listening to mad piping bla bla bla bla”.

NYARLATHOTEP

“Nyarlathotep”This is a good place to start for him. I mean, he’s right in the title. This is a story about how an average, ordinary human might meet him, and the consequences of listening to his words. Also some folks theorize that this story was inspired by Nikola Tesla, which I think is pretty fun.

“The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”HE IS SO BEAUTIFUL HERE. Ahem. Though allusions and mentions and threats of him are made to throughout the story (seriously, read it) the beautiful pharaoh himself makes an appearance at the story’s climax.

“The Dreams in the Witch House”Or, how to become a cultist that worshiwho is that beautiful man?! Nyarlathotep shows up here as ‘the Black Man’, a cloven-hooved avatar straight out of a witch hunt.

“Fungi from Yuggoth Sonnet No. 21″About Nyarlathotep and his relationship with Azathoth.

“The Haunter of the Dark”Or, how to piss off an avatar of Nyarlathotep. I think this one is important because it introduces one of my favorite HPL artifacts, the Shining Trapezohedron, a beautiful gem that induces madness and grants knowledge from the Crawling Chaos himself.

“The Whisperer in Darkness”Your mileage might vary with this one. Some people say that Nyarla shows up in this story impersonating a human, others don’t. I think he does, because this is a fun story and everything is better with Nyarla.

SHUB-NIGGURATHI think part of the reason I included her on this list is because I was hoping, almost praying that I’d find more stuff about her. There isn’t. She scarcely shows up in HPL’s works, and when she does it’s mostly as a chant (IA! SHUB-NIGGURATH!) and her being mentioned as The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young or as the Lord of the Woods– a title that I find much cooler, especially since she’s one of the few gods that Lovecraft explicitly refers to as a ‘she’. I love her.

OH! HPL also said in a letter that she’s Yog-Sothoth’s wife. Some people write them as divorced, which I think is 100% more fun, but I love me some drama.

YOG-SOTHOTHYog is almost as confusing with Nyarla when it comes to avatars– no, I’d say he’s MORE confusing, as at least with Nyarla it’s pretty obvious like “oh hey this ridiculous prettyboy is Nyarlathotep”.

Might as well start with the story that everybody ever knows that I’ll be talking about…

“The Dunwich Horror”Okay, so to be fair Yog-Sothoth himself doesn’t make an appearance here (though some do argue that he’s the bolt of lightning that struck Sentinel Hill at the climax). I’m putting this here because Yog-Sothoth is ridiculously important for this story. I mean, he’s the father of one of the protagonists. You also learn more about his motivations (though the mileage might vary because Old Whateley is a douchecanoe) and about the nature of the GOOs themselves in the biggest appearance of the Necronomicon.

“Through the Gates of the Silver Key”Yog is actually pretty chill in this story (and I’m not even talking about ‘Umr, I’m getting to him later) as he gives Randolph Carter choice. He offers to share his knowledge of All and will not harm him… himself. I mean, the whole madness-inducing thing is typically due to humans being exposed to knowledge so vast that our puny brains literally cannot comprehend it.

Then again, it could be argued that Yog is nicer to Carter because he’s an ‘aspect’ of him. Some humans are ‘aspects’ of gods, I’m not sure how exactly that works but I tend to think of it as… the gods are kind of like mirrors, and some pieces of the mirror end up in the souls of humans. Or something. I don’t know. I need to re-read this. Carter is an aspect of ‘Umr at-Tawil who is an avatar of Yog-Sothoth and aaaaaaa

‘Umr at-Tawil(I personally believe that ‘Umr is an avatar of Yog-Sothoth, and some other sources do too. I’m just putting this here because there are some people out there who classify ‘Umr and Yog as two different entities.) He watches over Ancient Ones and welcomes the protagonist and… you know, it’s been a hella long time since I’ve read this. I’m just going to list this here as a resource because it’s important, I just don’t want to mess up on the details.

I hope this helps some! … You know, except for the part where I ramble about Yog-Sothoth and end up just kind of like “???” because ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ makes very little sense.

HPL fans, please confirm or let me know about changes or anything. I’m really not an expert, I’m just a nerd. Also, August Derleth still grinds my gears.

[aetherscribe-blog]

Writers that Changed Me

The authors of my life who inspired me to follow their footsteps.

   I hate to have to decide my absolute favourites and so, for the safety of both my mind and those in my immediate vicinity, this list is not in order of favouritism.

1. Derek Landy (The Skulduggery Pleasant Series)

   “Detective, magician, warrior... oh yes, and dead.”

   Derek Landy is a mad genius. Not only does he encapsulate best way of “getting to the point” in a story without so much unnecessarily fluffy words but he manages to deliver this in a way that leaves me tearful in either comedy or tragedy. His characters speak and interact with each other in such witty sarcasm in even such dire situations sends me a clear message - that the readers may love and be flabbergasted by the incredible worlds that Landy creates, but his characters have no such compulsion to enjoy the dangers they are constantly thrown into.

2. JRR Tolkien (The Middle-Earth Series)

   “It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

   He started it all off - the hero that the fantasy genre got and deserves. I won’t lie, I do not admire Tolkien for his writing as much as I admire him for his ideas and his pioneering of the genre. He’s the reason why so many writers can spend so long on perfecting the setting of their stories, trying to imitate the rich culture and history of Middle-Earth. Without him, I bet we wouldn’t have such things as Dungeons and Dragons or many of the other fantasy role-playing games and of course, far less of the fantasy novels we know today. It goes without saying that JRR Tolkien truly changed the imaginative world.

3. Michelle Paver (The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness)

   “Suddenly death was upon them. A frenzy of claws. A welter of sound to make the ears bleed. In a heartbeat, the creature had smashed their shelter to splinters.”

   These books. These goddamn books. The first instalment of this series, Wolf Brother, was where it all began for me and ten years from now, I can proudly say that it was this book’s rich atmosphere that would set me on the path to being a writer. You can tell that she did her research here because for the entirety of this young adult’s book you truly feel like a stone age hunter from every animal Torak tracks to the release of air from his lungs as he looses arrows from his bow. The beautiful thing is that this book based on the ancient world is steeped in supernatural beasts and creatures, setting up my foundation love for finding wonder in a believable world.

4. Darren Shan (The Demonata and the Saga of Darren Shan)

   “It is good to be taught humility when we are young. If we do not experience pain as children, we will cause pain as adults.“

   Darren Shan brings out the little kid in me and subjects my inner child to untold horrors. Usually, saying such things would only result in a court hearing but here, Mr Shan does it with all that horror that involves lots of gooey blood and slime. If one were to pick up one of his books, they might toss it aside thinking it to be immature or childish and to be fair on the man, that’s the audience he was going for in the first place. And yet, when one reads on, they feel themselves becoming like the kids they once were with mischievous shenanigans and cheeky comments. Then Mr Shan proceeds to take that child and gleefully show them images of their family being murdered brutally by demons, vampires or any other horror monster he can imagine. It’s simple, straightforward and helps to bridge the gap between child’s horror and adult horror in a satisfying transition.

5. Neil Gaiman (Sandman, Coraline, American Gods and Neverwhere)

   “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

   Nobody has ever been able to whisk me away to a whimsical and creative world as easily and in such a state of willingness like Neil Gaiman. Describing him simply as a fantasy writer would seem incorrect yet accurate at the same time, as he bases many of his stories in the real world with strange and bizarre things happening within them that the main character can’t help but tumble into. He makes many references to things such as folklore, mythology and ancient pantheons so that although these worlds are amazing and astounding, we feel an odd familiarity with them. Many writers do a good job of presenting a world and dropping the reader into it but Neil Gaiman doesn’t have to try this hard; if he shows us a world, we want to dive headlong into it.

6. Brian Jacques (Tales of Redwall)

   “Even the strongest and bravest must sometimes weep. It shows they have a great heart, one that can feel compassion for others.”

   The Tales of Redwall series once dominated my childhood and sat here as an adult, it took me a long time to work out just why that was. For anybody not fully aware of the Redwall books, it consists of a fantasy world which is home to anthropomorphic animals who remain locked in conflict with each other in one way or another. It would sound very tame and childish if not for unexpectedly brutal and vivid fights and scenes. Then it struck me that these animals actually personified different characters. Matthias, the mouse monk who seemed frail in stature but fierce for the defence of his friends, or Lord Brocktree, the badger warrior whose might was equalled only by his sense of justice, and Cluny the Scourge, the rat warlord who was equal parts traitorous as he was cunning and evil. These tales took a medieval world and made them appeal to the imaginative senses of children, and for that I am forever grateful of Brian Jacques.

7. Terry Pratchett (The Discworld Series)

   “Stupid men are often capable of things the clever would not dare to contemplate.”

   The late Sir Terry Pratchett was the greatest author the modern world has ever seen. Yep, i said it and I mean it, anybody who disagrees with me knows where to find me. You can’t really argue with the works he left behind, such as Discworld which speaks for itself as a series of 41 books. None of them were lazily done either, for those who believe it’s either about quality or quantity will realise that Terry Pratchett had both under his belt and hat. Every book was a parody so ridiculous in it’s nature that it took on a value of it’s own, every book of his leaving me in stitches more than once. This humour wasn’t even meaningless either, as every book for all it’s silliness never failed to be coupled with some inside meaning; a theme that encompassed the morale of the tale. Terry Pratchett made the art of writing seem so easy and real that all of those writers who were crazy enough couldn’t help but try it themselves. Rest in peace, Mr Pratchett. *Salutes*

8. Philip Reeve (The Mortal Engines Series)

   “ “You aren't a hero and I'm not beautiful and we probably won't live happily ever after" she said, "But we're alive and together and we're going to be all right.” “

   Oh boy, where to start with this one. Philip Reeve certainly had his imagination cap on for this series, as it’s hard to imagine a post-apocalyptic future where Earth cities are now upon the backs of motorised platforms, their only way of surviving and thriving is to chase down other cities and pull them apart. Anybody who is still with me at this point gets to hear the real beauty of these tales though  - the characters. They have a way of tearing you away from what you imagine as a conventional hero and instead of perfect protagonists, we are given characters who could easily be seen as villains should they have made one single different choice. It takes the story and brings it down to earth, as the people who are often perfect in these stories usually end up being villains, traitors or far too nice to last five seconds in this brutal world. In other worlds, we get to cheer on far-from-perfect heroes and watch either love or hate blossom between some of the least likely people imaginable.

9. Eoin Colfer (The Artemis Fowl Series)

   “If I win, I’m a prodigy. If I lose then I’m mad. That’s the way history is written.”

   I remember the controversy back in the day when Artemis Fowl was released alongside the Harry Potter series and through the natural course of people favouring the latter, Eoin Colfer’s first release was often slandered as being a rip-off. Because of this unfortunate rumour that spread like wildfire, I didn’t read Artemis Fowl until recently whilst I was away on holiday. I was happy to discover that it was more like a blend of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Terry Pratchett and Ocean’s Eleven. The character of Artemis himself gives us a very long list of reasons to hate him. He’s rich, thinks himself superior to everybody else and he’s pretty much the one causing all the trouble in the story by trying to con a fairy community of their gold, as well as getting his butler to dirty his hands in his place. This should all make him the villain and yet despite all this, you can’t help but love Artemis because throughout about 99% of the story, he is the one who is in control and he is the one moving the plot forward. He is the perfect example of a proactive character who is loved, even if what he does cannot truly be seen as the right choice.

10. HP Lovecraft (Dagon, The Call of Cthulhu, The Dunwich Horror)

   “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest fear is fear of the unknown.”

   My love for Lovecraft’s works is possibly my most recent of all the authors on this list as his is possibly the most adult of them all. When one thinks of conventional horror, they like to imagine gothic horror with supernatural beings such as demons and vampires and ghosts, beings that were created with the intention of scaring people who at one point had been steeped in religious teachings. Lovecraft created cosmic horror with the intended goal of scaring those who did not believe in anything other than science. He relied on stories of people being subjected to horrors that could not be explained by science and yet were so real to defy conventional methods of possibility. This logic-shattering experience made characters question the laws of nature themselves, often leading to the inevitable Lovecraftian fate of insanity, madness or even outright despair because the brain simply could not handle the fact that existence was being questioned as an outright lie. Lovecraft left a terrifying legacy that neyond the visible safety of the campfire, truly anything that our minds could or could not conceive could be looking upon humanity with disdain... and we would be little more than insects to them.

   This was a big one, I must admit. If you were engaged enough to read all your way to the very end then thank you so much for staying with me the whole way! Happy writing everyone!

-CR