#magical academia

[henrywinterapologists]

“Magic is the art of thinking, not strength or language . . . ”

Christopher Paolini

[newts-fest]

I (Kidansong) had planned to post about this on the first, but I can’t hold out any longer!

This fest has been a passion project of sorts for me for over a year now, and I am so excited to finally make it public 😁 I can’t wait to see who takes part and what we create!

Join our Discord and/or follow our Tumblr for more details as they’re revealed 🥰

[brightwitchbrews]

Ghost Lights

A Ghosts of Grimwood novelette about two sisters struggling to reconcile their ambitions, until a fatal mistake haunts them beyond death.

A journey through realms of myth, and a sister’s ultimate sacrifice, may be the key to a miracle of magic.

✨ Dark academia

✨ Magical academia

✨ Underworld

✨ Bittersweet

✨ Gothic alchemy vibes

✨ Close sisters

✨ Sibling rivalry

Artwork by Zack @paintcapsule

~~~

📚 Ghost Lights

[hell-is-otherpeople]

[learning-to-love-the-novel]

Pinned post v.0.1

Learning to Love (working title) is a gay fantasy novel that I've got like 50k words of notes about and maybe 5k words of actual text for (it's all random scenes from like the middle of the story and I can't fucking post them anywhere but I need to talk about this thing)

Setting: post-apocalyptic. Before the catastrophe it was a high magic society, about as technologically advanced as we are right now, except with magic instead of technology.

Characters: mostly magical academia people (several magical colleges/research institutes stayed fairly intact as social structures throughout the catastrophe). Basically, if you're someone from academia who also likes fantasy and mlm romance, these guys should be up your alley.

Story hook: newly Ph.D. guy comes back home, finds his professor dad a grumpy asshole (moreso than before) who mistreats his live-in maid/Ph.D. student. The student finishes his Ph.D., professor dad seemingly kicks him out, student is bummed, professor's son offers to go on some adventures together with him.

Creation notes (&reasoning behind some tags on this post) and tag list (to be updated) under read more

Learning to Love originally started out as a global AU fanfic for Alfabusa's If the Emperor had a text to speech device video series, itself a fix-it fanfic for Warhammer 40.000. But, as I worked out more and more of the details, I realized that calling it a fanfic is sorta dishonest.

The point of the Warhammer characters I was playing with, their essense, is war. War is their life, their purpose, the source of their tragedies... I didn't want to write about that. And if you keep that out of your wh40k fanfic, is it really a wh40k fanfic? Especially if it's a global AU, set in a world that bears no resemblance to wh40k or any of its versions? Personally, I don't think so.

Thus, Learning to Love is not a fanfic anymore. I changed most of the "inherited" characters to be barely recognizable, kicked out some primarchs from my story, remade others entirely (or maybe rather made up new characters in their place? hard to tell sometimes), put a couple OCs with no wh40k precursors in. But the main pairing started out as Magnus x Captain General Little Kitten (as anyone from that fandom can probably already tell), and their dynamic is still a version of that. (A very optimistic version.)

This is why this post is tagged with If the Emperor had a text to speech device and the several Mittens pairing tags. Don't worry, I'll only tag posts where I talk about Learning to Love's fanfic origins with that, which I can't imagine there's gonna be a lot of.

This change brought a problem: there were suddenly a lot of unnamed characters on the cast, because previously I'd just keep the wh40k names of their prototypes, and now I had to come up with all new names. The main duo is still unnamed as of now. (I might just leave the professor's son's name as Magnus... He's not even one-eyed anymore, I don't think this qualifies as copyright infringement)

Tags:

(I will add on to here as I post)

#Corrinthim lore -- the continent this takes place on is called Corrinthim, so that's just gonna be the lore of the post-apocalyptic fantasy setting

#dramatis personae -- the basic information on my characters will be here.

#story spoilers -- you guessed it, these are posts about what happens later in the story

#backstory -- also guessed it, characters' backstory

#backstory spoilers -- specifically the parts of backstory that are meant to be revealed later in the story

List of character-specific tags: #Alexander Yunt

[knightshadeacademy]

Inspiration for magic schools

[bicokun]

I kinda love the implications of a world in which horses could have evolved from ancient centaurs, as that also opens up the possibility that humans also descended from centaurs, which would make horses that world’s closest species to humans, rather than apes. Or would there have been an apelike common ancestor to both centaurs and modern apes as well? Did the homo genus just… end up with six limbs when they broke off from apes? And then lost one or two sets in subsequent populations? Or did an ancient apelike animal get magically fused with an eohippus by some ancient beings having fun and both parts evolved into modern horse-like and human-like parts until some subsection of the population either evolved back into full humans or horses or were otherwise magically restored to what they would have been? Many such possibilities.

Given how wizards are themed around higher education, with their universities and ivory towers, I wanna see more fiction that goes into their published papers.

Like, there should be massive drama in the Wizarding world about how Fantasy Wikipedia says "There's no consensus about the origins of skydoves" when in fact, there very much is, everyone knows they were created in the first or second dragon wars, and that's uncontroversial. One single wizard at the University of Towers who thinks they're an offshoot of mermaids DOES NOT MEAN IT'S AN OPEN ISSUE.

Papers that are rebuttals to other magical discoveries. Like, look, that spell just won't work, and you can't call it a "theoretical exercise" just to cover up the fact that you've not been able to cast it. You can't combine Ichthyomancy with completely unrelated elemental summonings, that's just not how magic works, in all due respect.

Thesis defense would be significantly scarier when all your reviewers can cast Everburning Fireball on your ass.

Learning Theoretical Evocation from a hungover lizardman TA at 8am, because the professor for this course has been off on the Elemental Plane of Circles for half the semester trying to finish her paper on how Centaurs predate horses rather than the other way around.

Speaking of which, the life of a wizard graduate student... You keep getting called to go on "quests" which are just overgrown research expeditions to help out some professor's project. You spent nearly a month in that damp castle capturing all the spinfrogs you could find, all to help your professor's project on the possibilities of concentrated soul essences. To this day, you still get dizzy whenever you see battlements, let alone a donjon.

[liivn]

[spookysalem13]

[shisasan]

June, 1936 Journals of Anais Nin 1934-1939 [volume 2]

[golden-astrum]

rainbow of magical girls 🌈

[newts-fest]

[mentally-ill-for-bes]

It's almost hilarious how even when Viktor is trying to get rid of his humanity it just highlights how partial he's to Jayce. His villain speech isn't even threatening, he searches for Jayce to talk especifically, he is still trying to convince Jayce to join him or to see the benefits of glorious evolution, I would say even trying to impress him. He touches Jayce's forehead even when it's not necessary to know his mind, he keeps the blanket even when he does not feel cold or warm long ago. He could have easily kill him but instead he decides to talk more with him about glorious evolution hoping he to accept him without realizing that Jayce is what makes him look the most human, the most desperate for company and understanding

[namedvesta]

𝑆𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑜𝑣𝑠𝑘𝑖 𝑐𝑟𝑦𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑠 𝐻𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠, 𝑏𝑦 𝐿𝑖𝑣 𝐹𝑟𝑒𝑒 (𝟤𝟢𝟤𝟤).

[peacefulandcozy]

Instagram credit: acalmwalk

[etherealyearning]

Northumberland