#like this has to culminate to Something

[technically-human]

can you draw Edwin doodling embarrassing shit like ‘Edwin Rowland’ or a little doodle of Charles’s face with hearts around it then Charles comes up behind him like what are you doing?

He had some very specific embarrassing doodles in mind

ko-fi

[bonefall]

i just thought of something about frostpaw’s design having a wolf motif and her huge autopsy scar - it reminds me of how in multiple fairy tales (particularly ittle red riding hood, like you mentioned in the design post), the wolves in those stories have their stomachs cut open. i just thought that was cool :3

I hadn't even considered that, but it makes it work even better. The fairytales don't even just have the wolf get their belly cut open-- they also get filled with stones and tossed in the river.

There's a clear image in my mind that when Frostpaw is put under the human tranquilizer, her mind falls backward and plunges her into liquid void. A dream takes hold, bubbles forming in the dark, her body cradled by clear water as far as she can perceive.

The unspoken knowledge of her dream tells her that she's in a raindrop, the river, the lake, and Riverstar Himself. The embodiment of water. And He is endless.

Her problems are washed away by the sheer vastness of his being, and she's just beginning to wrap her head around the marvel of it all when she opens her eyes in a den. Warm, comfortable, surrounded by hay.

The vision sloshes in her mind like dancing waves. She has a boiling desire to understand what it meant-- and the only thing that comes to mind is the Tribe of Rushing Water's philosophy that all things are connected by the river. That living by the Lake, fed by the southern delta, which rushes down from the mountain's waterfall, makes their cultures kin.

She decides to start there, and will go further south if need be. Thus begins Book 3 of BB!ASC, The Source of the River.

[aliusfrater]

[spaciebabie]

wukong takes you on a date to get $7 cheese tea and it sucks. as in the date. not the tea. also you dont know that its a date.

[fandomsandfears]

something something kpop demon hunters allegory for reform systems vs punishment systems. The demons are in this eternal punishment and control by Gwi-ma. They are chained to him and made demons because they lived with such heavy shame and doubt or guilt. They did terrible things in life and have to live eternal with that shame instead of being allowed to rest.

Not all demons hold onto the guilt as clearly as Jinu does maybe, thinking about the demon that Rumi semi interrogates about the thoughts Jinu gave her.

Thinking about the mystery of Rumi's father and mother and their story. How Rumi's mother must have seen something so similar, seeing the humanity that lives in these demons. The possibility of them to reform if they find a way to face their guilt or shame and allow an understanding of their own humanity instead of being focused on the monstrous actions they've done.

The new Honmoon being focused on this idea of reform, of embracing ones mistakes with the effort of doing better and learning as we move forward. Accepting our flaws and trying to do better. Instead of the Honmoon of years past that we understand via Celine and the lessons she was taught and she passed on. The shame she ingrained into her girls and that we have to assume was just as ingrained into her because how hard she holds onto it as a defense and not as an attack.

The old Honmoon punished flaws and mistakes, which perpetuated both the pressure mounting on the hunters themself, but also the system that shut out the demons and likely made more in the long run. The new Honmoon encouraging reformation and understanding of ones flaws and mistakes so long as you can move forward instead of dwelling on these things you can't change.

[miraclemioart]

mashing together my two teenage years interests for dopamine

[true-blue-sonic]

Alternate Sonic Rivals 2 wherein the teams are as follows:

Sonic and Silver

Espio and Rouge

Tails and Shadow

Knuckles and Metal Sonic

for maximum hijinks, silliness, and incompatibility on all sides.

[rxttenfish]

Omg what DOES Aaravi do as a monster slayer?

the short answer is that it varies with how much of my own stuff im willing to bring in, im afraid

mostly im waffling back and forth on this point right now because if i was a little closer to monster prom canon i might be able to have more fun with it and include a wider variety of situations and it wouldnt be such a downer as it would be in the other case...

mostly, the thing that monster slayers are in the redesign universe is a hate group, plain and simple. a particularly violent and nasty one too, at that - they're focused primarily out of human-majority societies and cultures that have much smaller minorities of other sophonts and/or that contact with those sophonts is new and recent, hence why there's such a strong sorting between "humans" and "monsters". "monsters" isn't a real category in any sense of the word, it's just a social marker for an out-group that is seen as particularly dangerous and frightening and, thus, "not normal". this is also why it doesn't really specify between monsters that are sophonts and monsters that are just normal animals...

primarily this hate group arose out of existing environmental/hunting groups, semi similar to things like forest rangers, and has even common ancestry with witches (or, one of the definitions of "witch"... witch can refer to a human with some innate workable magic, witch can refer to anyone who works with/studies magic as a job, or witch can refer to a supernatural concept/creature which is basically just the trope we have of the witch, as any malignant supernatural person who uses that supernatural prowess for evil. this is different from magic, because magic in this universe is just... another Thing That Exists, not necessarily any different from, say, engineering as a job or study, and belief in the impossible and supernatural is of course going to exist unrelated to that).

as in, there's a fairly universal need in most communities to be able to manage magic somehow. usually there's wildlife or plants that have their own innate pools of workable magic, and those need to be treated and handled differently as a different form of danger in the world, or there's magical aquifers locally, which means that all of that magic is just available as free energy to be used by anyone who has the chance to grab it, and if workable pools of magic aren't regularly maintained to recycle the magic that makes it up, then it can build up wild magic and tends to explode particularly dangerously... so you need someone who has learned how to deal with all of that, and so you get the origins of witches, and the origins of other people specializing to deal in magic and magic-heavy things, and from that you get people specialized in hunting or otherwise managing animals that utilize magic in their biology in some way.

(which, to be fair, nearly everything on this alternate earth is, in some way. magic really is just... free energy for anyone who can grab a little of it, and most life will be able to at least do a little bit of that. humans are a prime example, since even non-innate magic users will still hold and maintain very small pools of magic internally, utilized primarily for metabolism and to offer a slight boost to the immune system and other such things. this is even what souls and ghosts are - just the pools of magic inside of a person that can get shaken loose through particularly traumatic events, although the systems that lead to ghosts are poorly understood (and also different from a soul, the animating supernatural concept... theres a lot of confusing terminology in this universe, and i do that on purpose). it's just that species that either live in or around magical aquifers or are uniquely adapted for it that are magic specialists, where it makes up a much larger part of their biology, and who cannot live without that magic. a human without magic might just be slightly immunocompromised, a demon without magic is dead!)

this is where you get monster slayers, though. because they were a specific movement within this larger group of people who focus on magical life, where they particularly focused on the danger posed by magic specialist wildlife during a time when nonhuman sophonts were being introduced to and "challenging" the dominant culture where they came from, and ended up connecting the two. it's a purposefully very messy grouping without a lot in common other than this specific group targeting them, and their primary goals might be similar to creating and enforcing a human-only community devoid of large, dangerous wildlife around that area that could possibly injure someone. the fact that this also ends up targeting a lot of disabled humans (vampires, zombies, etc, they're just humans who have a specific magic-derived "virus". there's very few benefits to this, it really is just a disability) isn't seen as a problem either in their eyes, mostly because they're also often stereotyped as being dangerous or endangering other people by their sheer presence, so they get sorted in with the other targeted groups as well.

there's also a lot of people and things that we have in real life that would get labelled "monsters" in this specific line of belief, even if i haven't gone into that as much, mostly because i worry that people will think that because i'm writing aaravi as sympathetic that i'm supporting her beliefs or the beliefs of monster slayers too - or that, again, i'm still just in the awkward middle ground where i'm not sure how much i want to go into this and REALLY kill the mood.

(also, because it does kind of miff me when people write fantasy settings but provide some kind of distinction between real wildlife and fantasy monsters in a way that shouldn't actually exist in that fiction. lions and tigers and bears should be considered just as dangerous and frightening as any speculative creatures you put in your work, especially when there's not any one unique feature that tidily separates the world into "animals" and "wildlife". hell this is even what i try to get at with my merfolk, since they really aren't any different from humans, as just another naturally formed sapient animal species.)

and, to be clear, i WANT this to be upsetting. it shouldn't be something comfortable or easy to talk about, let alone witness. it's something that also has to be seen and judged and understood in order to understand aaravi herself, just as much as how you can't understand miranda unless you understand what it actually means for her to be a genocidal monarch who expresses ultimate control over anyone who happens to be under her and is willing to do anything to maintain control in the groups of her equals. for both of them, they're supposed to equally be representative of those who suffer by and under the system they are a part of (aaravi is not allowed to leave the monster slayers even if she wanted to, her being discovered as half-human would mean her potentially being targeted and killed and her family potentially also targeted for association, having her entire self worth tied to her ability to lose her own personhood and perpetuate violence that no one else is capable of or wants to do, or else be blamed as the reason why innocent people get hurt and killed), while also actively perpetuating it (both have a vitriolic hatred of anyone who either "can't do their job correctly" or "isn't hard enough to withstand the pressures of their job", aaravi especially targets and is quick to punish other slayers to try and cover her also being "part monster", she upholds and feels incredibly defensive over her family name and how great her family was at being slayers, she hunts and kills a lot of other people just for them not being human that makes them even more guarded and scared of humans and more likely to retaliate in order to try and keep themselves safe, which also means its harder for anyone else to stop being a monster slayer because even more taboo gets connected to them or being one).

a prime example is actually her grandma, who is still around. aaravi's from a line of monster slayers, which is to say her family was already in this hate group, they were born into it, and aaravi was just the latest in the long line of it all. her mom did work on trying to get out, did meet aaravi's dad and left to where no one else in the group knew where she was, where she could try to start anew and they wouldn't be able to find her, to have a family with someone who she had been taught to view as nothing but dangerous and frightening and not someone to be trusted... and then he turned out to be a garden variety asshole who just... left. never really was very interested in aaravi or salil, got bored with aaravi's mom once she tried settling down after getting out, didn't really do much to support her in trying to remake her life from a brand new foundation, and just left one day without a note or saying anything or anything at all, really.

all of which served as mundane trauma that pushed aaravi's mom back into the monster slayers even harder. it just confirmed a lot of old beliefs that she had burned into her mind after not really helping her to undo or confront them, and she had very little else left to go back to, and she had two kids now that if anyone else learned were the result of her having a tyst with a monster would get hurt and killed as much as she would, serving as a representation of the mistake that had just been confirmed in her mind as such.

it's why it came down on salil so much harder than aaravi, and why aaravi looking so nearly human is so important for the way the story functions. aaravi got pushed harder and harder to both try and make up for her mother's mistake, pushed to become another monster slayer and pushed even harder to be a GOOD one that would be great enough to make up for all that her mother had done while still living up to the legacy that her mom could only think of herself as having ruined, to shove all her monster parts into a deep dark little box that she would never tell anyone else about, who was told over and over how dangerous it was and what would happen if this got out. but salil... salil is much more obviously inhuman, much more obviously something that she can't hide or obscure, and so salil kind of...

well, already their mom was reverting hard onto "all monsters are dangerous and cannot be trusted and NONE of them are EVER going to be good, only lie about it to hurt you even worse", and there was a lot harder... fear, from her, that he picked up on. really, both of them picked up on it, and still aaravi doesn't know and is terrified of the possibility that their mom was scared of them, or thought that they would hurt her, or even outright hated them for being monsters. and because salil was much more obvious about it, a lot more got targeted and felt by salil, a lot more their mom tried a lot less with him, a lot more she just tried to hide him in the house and not tell anyone about him or that he existed. its why when he ran away one night, it was very easy for her to come to the conclusion that he had been found and killed by monsters, and it was very easy for that belief to be passed onto aaravi.

it's also why aaravi's grandma has such a... particular situation. she was also such a prominent monster slayer within that community and group for so long, and so many of the leaders within the community think back fondly of her, but its this very same reason that she can't talk about the amount of doubt she's also felt about it, the mounting regrets and guilt that has built up, the knowledge of what happened to her daughter and to her grandkids, and the knowledge that she can't really DO anything to help it either, even AS someone who holds such an esteemed position and even BECAUSE of it. she's effectively just built up more and more distance from the community over time, isolated herself more and more from these old friends of hers, gone quietly silent in her old age, but its also why shes never been able to fully shake it, and why that connection STILL exists and shes STILL expected to uphold it when it does. she's older than she used to be, more vulnerable, and she has a granddaughter who doesn't have a mom or a dad anymore to look after her, who is at least part of what monster slayers want to exterminate, and there's a lot at stake here that she just can't make herself risk.

so, yeah... i hope this provides a little bit of clarity as to what aaravi in the full redesign verse being a monster hunter MEANS and what she does, because it's not... very pretty, really.

if i write it, i'll likely end up focusing more on the animal side of it, least of all because i can't see aaravi taking miranda on a hunt for a person, but also because it adds in more layers of aaravi feeling disingenuous and doubting herself. she feels like she's lying to miranda, making it more palatable, more acceptable, than it really is, not showing her the full thing and letting herself be judged as is, but also aaravi is ABSOLUTELY not prepared for that conversation and doesn't know how to breach the subject of "i'm basically a serial killer for hire" with miranda, and is equally as scared by the thought of what if miranda actually DOESN'T have a problem with that and doesn't react. but it's also just close enough to still hit that uncomfortable realm with aaravi, just close enough to killing a person that she keeps seeing herself in the eyes of the wildlife, doesn't know which end of the gun she's more scared of being on and doesn't know how to handle any of it.

[frozenartscapes]

I would love a scene in Spy x Family, post-reveal, where Anya gets kidnapped/is in danger and all the highly dangerous adults she's met and endeared herself to all team up to save her in a high-intensity, super satisfying series of fights all set to No Sleep 'til Brooklyn by the Beastie Boys

[thevioletcaptain]

.

[robotsafari]

listen. i may be the riku guy (certified real and true ✅) but im also the kairi guy.

[violetsandmagpies]

i love so much how our perception of what beatrice and benedick are to each other is so quickly and clearly established then blown to pieces.

immediately we understand that there's antagonism there, but it's at least something that's generally amusing to everyone else— "there is a merry war betwixt signor benedick and her. they never meet but there's a skirmish of wit between them." as far as leonato, hero, & co. are aware, the only thing that's passed between beatrice and benedick at this point are some foul words and no one ever suspects it could be anything more, after all how could it be? they argue ALL the time!! and yet only 79 lines later the prince and his posse have returned and beatrice and benedick are interacting for the first time in who knows how long and she ends that whole sequence with "i know you of old."

in an instant there's new subtext to beatrice asking after benedick, underlying the anger that she holds towards him, and twining itself through their first verbal spar. i've always thought of it as the audience getting a little italicized oh moment of our own as our worldview warps and reshapes to admit this fact in. it isn't just that beatrice doesn't really like this guy (understatement of the century, i know), it's that something happened between them and more than just being angry, she's hurt.

and here, benedick's carefree façade slips as he snaps to, eyes widening, jaw slackening a bit as her words completely shift the tone of the scene for a precious few seconds. in the space that stretches out before pedro interrupts their aside. after all, its in the silence after that line where the air becomes tense, intimate, almost illicit as this moment begins to feel increasingly stolen between the two of them. and, in a way, isn't that reminiscent of who knows how many stolen moments from their (perhaps not-so-distant) past? no, we don't know exactly what happened, but we know it was something kept closely between the two of them, so how could they not be thinking about it all over again. suddenly the pain we first saw in beatrice alone is, for a fleeting second, shared as they stew in their inconvenient emotions, finally face-to-face again, yet still unable to talk about it and then the moment breaks, shatters, and they are drawn apart all over again. lines must be reformed, propriety must be kept, all outward displays of emotion pushed back into the corners of their hearts, papered over with sniping and snarking.

[obligatory-name-change]

the setting itself can be the monster... but also... a lover? much to think about

[skhardwarevers1]

nobody let me come up with ideas for romcoms

[antisocialxconstruct]

.

[sunderwight]

Look I'm sorry to anyone who thought the Saja Boys were a real band, but it was obviously fake from the beginning.

Huntr/x has been doing this gimmick for years where they'll put on a performance and some actors dressed up like demons will "interrupt" it or get into some choreo fights on stage and stuff. If you're a fan you know, the demons usually symbolize things like industry corruption, Mira's struggle with her family, Rumi being in the closet, etc, and there's lots of hints and secret messages to the fans in what they're wearing or how they show up. Check out huntresx5evah on blsky they've got an extensive examination of the "demons" over the years and what the messages to the fans are.

In the concert before Golden was released, the demons were dressed like flight attendants. That was the indication that something new was about to take off. @/queenhuntrixdontmiss and I speculated that it was going to be a new single and low and behold, it was.

But then the live performance got cancelled. It's an open secret that Rumi was having vocal issues, so that was probably not planned. They needed to buy time for her to recover, so, enter the Saja Boys -- a fake band of guys really clearly pretending to be demons, they release ONE single, do a bunch of b-tier variety shows for a week, nearly all of their public appearances have Huntr/x right there, keeping the hype and energy up until Rumi can get her throat polyps removed and furthering the routine where Huntr/x are supposed to be secret demon hunters and the Saja Boys are supposed to be secret demons.

Then the whole thing culminates in the Golden live performance at the idol awards, the big act with Huntr/x fake "break up" and the subsequent theatrics to make it up to fans for failing the first Golden performance. Huntr/x takes their obligation to fans very seriously, I've no doubt that they all felt terrible about having to cancel, so a free show was the obvious recourse to try and make it up to people. And they pulled out all the stops!

But the Saja Boys were never real. I mean they got real guys to pretend to be a boy band and do the dancing and lip syncing obviously, but come on, most of them didn't even have names.