#modern mai would be a art major

[firemaition]

headcanon that mai is actually like amazing at art and she becomes famous not only bc she’s firelady but bc of her paintings of izumi and zuko and the whole gaang

[rusted-fairy-wings]

literally nobody asked for this butttttt….

Here are my HCs for what everyone would be studying if I were to do a Ninjago College AU because if I have to suffer so do they!

Zane: culinary arts. I think if he didn’t have to worry about saving the world all the time, he’d love to just cook for people as a job.

Nya: engineering. Specifically mechanical engineering. She’s already got a clear inclination for it, and we love to see a woman in STEM.

Jay: engineering again, but this time electrical. I feel like that one’s for obvious reasons. Just combines his inventing/STEM interests with his powers.

Cole: double major in psychology and art. I’m a big fan of artist Cole, and it’s something I think he’d really focus on if he had the time. Psychology because he’s grounded enough to consider the idea that art may not lead him to a lucrative career even if he wants it to. He wants to help others. Specifically I could see him studying child psychology.

Kai: hear me out—political science but with the intention of going to law school. He has a very strong sense of justice and would want to make things he sees wrong with the world right. He wants to be the type of lawyer that sticks up for the little guy.

Lloyd: sorry but we’re skipping Lloyd because in a modern/college AU there’s no tomorrow’s tea and he’s still in high school. He has no clue yet what he wants. He’s considering studying astronomy though. But he’s kinda like “this is a future me problem” and a bit scared to think about his future.

Pixal: computer science girly!! She loves coding and finds it relaxing, so she thinks “why not do this?”. She accidentally stays up til 3 am sometimes because she’s genuinely having so much fun on her studies.

Skylor: like Zane, culinary arts. She wants to own her own restaurant one day. Zane is the first of our 6 ninja she meets and befriends in this AU because of this.

[dogtoling]

General life- and blog update , since I assume at least a few people might have been wondering where I've been and what i've been up to recently. I obviously haven't been posting or drawing much this year in general. This will probably be an important post if you care about stuff on this blog, and I already rambled on Sheezy, but that site isn't very populated yet and it's also very good at hiding journals so let's just ramble again...

The summary of this post if you hate reading: I'm heavily considering just stepping away from Splatoon. That decision obviously would affect this blog (mostly, my OCs, which is kinda most of the blog at this point). I don't think the blog itself will go anywhere, and I'll probably use it for something in the future... alternatively i'll cherry pick stuff from here into an archive for people who like the worldbuilding.

Longer post under cut:

So what have I been up to this year? The answer is quite simple: NOTHING. Like, actually absolutely nothing. Aside from Art Fight, this has probably been one of my worst art output years of all time, which is really frustrating. That's between my horrendous mental health and depression chasms this year and a complete lack of both focus and inspiration (which can also get chalked down to the depression to a degree, yeah). So the very real reason to why there hasn't been much activity on this blog this year is because I just haven't Done Anything in general.

Now because I know there will be a few people who think "that's fine! you shouldn't judge yourself based on productivity!" you're right! I also agree. However the issue for me specifically is that most (if not all) the time I spend NOT drawing or creating, I spend sitting around wishing I could start drawing or creating, because that is like the 1 thing that keeps me sane on this freaking earth. Unfortunately coming up with OC scenarios in my head doesn't really result in output I can feel fulfilled by in any form as much as I wish it did, lol.

Now; The Issue. It doesn't take a genius to see that if you spend 9 months trying to finish like a dozen OC pages that you COULD do in a week or 2 if you wanted to, then there's probably more than just the problem of executive dysfunction (even though that's at least 60% of it for sure). Obviously my other major problem is that I live by imaginary rules and structures that make sense, but aren't actually useful at ALL in reality and are more than a hindrance if anything (the mental to do-list in my head that says i can't do X until I've done Y doesn't do very much if task Y takes 10 months and I also don't want to do it, and it also has no structured ending).

How does this tie into stepping away from Splatoon, you may ask. Well, the issue is that I have foreseeably fallen out of love with the series. Which isn't exactly news lol. Currently, I'm not even sure i will get the next game, if and when the time comes. Yes, the loss of interest is also expected, given that Splatoon 3 has ended and every fandom has this kind of downtime and lukewarm in-between-titles period. But the truth is that modern Splatoon (almost 10 years old!!!!) is tangibly different from the way the series was back when I fell in love with it. That was Splatoon 1, and while the series has improved in a lot of aspects and is thriving, it's grown in a direction that I just don't really like. Splatoon 3 had the most freaking horrendous, immersion breaking story mode they could've done, then they followed it up with a DLC story that was pretty cool but also compounded a lot of my fears about the series' future and played into every single thing i do not want Splatoon stories to be - fully character focused, random fucking villain, mundane event that's unrealistically world-threatening just because a kids video game needs a scary climax even though it's immersion breaking AGAIN, the whole thing taking place in cyberspace and thus offering basically no worldbuilding even though there is SO MUCH WORLD. I COULD GO ON.

The gist of it is that nowadays, rather than playing Splatoon and being inspired and excited at what comes next, I mostly find myself dreading what dumbass plot they will do next to throw a wrench in the otherwise good stuff. And when that's like THE main approach I have to what's supposed to be my favorite series, it is HARROWING. I can't even really blame the game for this; the story is NOT its selling point, the developers probably do their best to get the bits to us that they really want to tell, and at the end of the day the game is unfortunately a product. Worldbuilding for Splatoon is fun to a point. It's less fun when in order to actually write or create something coherent, instead of filling in the blanks, the blanks are 90% of the freaking thing. At that point you're just better off making something of your own instead of being anchored onto an IP that gives more problems than answers and occasionally shoots you with like a machine gun. Working in the realm of Splatoon is frustrating because more often than not, the questions I have ARE NOT MINE TO ANSWER, and the likelihood that the specific-ass questions I need answers to will ever be actually addressed is really low.

Tying this back to my OCs. Obviously I love my OCs more than I love myself which admittedly isn't that high of a bar but you get the point. The problem is that I spend a lot of time mulling over worldbuilding that, again, frankly isn't mine to do. Because if I want it to be Splatoon, then it should be mostly accurate to how Splatoon is! But the problem with that is that there's really not THAT MUCH worldbuilding in the series that you can work with, and most of the core game mechanics are just abstract enough that it's actually horrendous to try and come up with workarounds and ways for things to make sense that don't require just constructing a full knockoff version mirror dimension of the game and saying fuck everything that's in place here because Inkopolis Plaza literally has no roads in or out of there and I have no fucking idea how that's allowed when your only option is to jump the fence (or, nowadays, take the train which also isnt connected to a street as far as I remember). Between the face value issue and the lack of REALLY IMPORTANT worldbuilding, like - I will always come back to this - THE INK TANK'S FUNCTION 10 YEARS DOWN THE LINE - there's a goddamn ocean of plot holes and things that end up being obstacles to creativity rather than inspiration. I feel like I'm pretty solidly at the point (and have been for a while) where hanging onto Splatoon is really only contributing to creativity block and frustration with lack of freedom and the ability to actually do things.

So I guess those are my reasonings that I've put together just sitting here for the time being. The TL;DR is that I wish I could just do stuff without Splatoon's canon getting in the way, which is a really stupid problem to have if you're making Splatoon OCs. I feel this frustration extremely strongly every time I have to work with actual bigger aspects of the world; we still don't have an Inkopolis map, we don't know what the world around Inkopolis looks like, we don't know what the wilderness is like aside from Just Normal Forest and Desert and very few snippets as to what modern wildlife MIGHT be, I still don't know how the fuck the Inklings teleport to the goddamn arctic ocean to play a turf war at Shipshape Cargo co. These are all actually really important things if you're trying to establish a setting in any kind of storytelling that's outside of immediate city bounds (and even there, you need to know the layout of the city and its important areas). Also a fucking mutant bear and a baby salmon and a squid not wearing suitable gear went to space and fought on a rocket in space. These are some things that would give me peace of mind to not have to deal with in my own writing, probably.

So where do we go from here? Unsure. I haven't really made a decision on this front yet, though right now I'm leaning more towards actually going ahead with trying to do my own thing. That will result in obvious design and setting changes for my OCs whenever I get around to it. This blog probably won't go anywhere (again, unless I impulse delete it during a mood swing like i've almost done on like three separate occasions this year), but it will probably get less use, and I will probably end up making a new blog to post about whatever I end up doing once I get to a point where it feels like it makes sense. There's a chance that I will delete this blog and put all the interesting stuff on an archive blog for the people who are here just for the worldbuilding. My actual true passion for a long time now hasn't even been Splatoon anymore, it's just been cephalopods. I'm kind of done having Splatoon get in the way of the cephalopods, as thankful as I am that it introduced me to them...

If you read this to the end heres a treat for you = 🍪

[lacrimosathedark]

THAT'S IT! This is a Janet Drake Defense Post

As may be obvious, I spend a lot of time reading fanfic. And there's this trend that drives me nuts, and it's villainizing Janet Drake.

I'm not gonna say she's an A+ mother. She's not. She chose her career and adventures over spending time with her child much of the time. But fandom portrays her as some rich pompous ice queen, which is never shown.

Janet Drake mostly appears in the story Tim's introduced, and in the story she dies.

So, let's start from the top: Haly's Circus.

This event is the only time we see her really interacting with Tim before her death, but it shows that at least when he was young, she was an active part of his life. She was worried about bringing Tim because it might scare him. And then rightfully scolds her husband for being sexist because Jack Drake actually IS a jerk.

...I don't like the art in this comic. Or that the writer doesn't know how kids speak.

But Janet is being supportive of Tim's clear interest in Dick's performance.

And then tragedy strikes and she acts like, y'know, a mother.

Her priority is getting her son and herself out of there.

Also worth noting that the Drakes sent a copy of that final photo of the Graysons TO Dick, which is how he has it at all. If both of them were stuck up pricks, would they even bother sending a photo to a grieving child performer they hardly know? I can't imagine Jack really bothering, but I don't see why Janet wouldn't.

And then, by the time she's dying, we know that Tim's parents have been away for a very long time, he never knows where they are, but they've communicated enough that he knows that they've been fighting.

They're passive aggressive to say the least. This marriage is clearly not working anymore.

EDIT CUZ I REMEMBERED A THING:

It's worth noting that this is a time before smartphones. This comic was released in 1990, which was when pre-paid mobile phones had just started existing. Coverage isn't universal NOW, so back then it was even less, and Jack and Janet are archeologists (or archeologist adjacent?) so they're going to be in less developed and populated areas most of the time. It's unlikely they'd have consistent access to a functional phone that could call the states to talk to Tim regularly.

This isn't to defend their absence, because fuck that, but it's to give it some context. I don't think they were trying to ignore or abandon Tim. Communication was just not readily available and Janet seems to get wrapped up in work...and Jack's an asshole.

Also for note, Janet is probably the one sending Tim postcards in the first place. It being signed "Mom and Dad" is what makes me think that. Jack would have put himself first if he wrote it, it woulda said "Dad and Mom". That's admittedly pure speculation, BUT IT FITS SOOOOOO

My thought is if this were made modern, Janet would be sending extremely scattered texts and Tim would get next to nothing from Jack unless Janet prompted him.

END EDIT

(Fair warning, this story is a few levels of Yikes, but I'm gonna stay on topic)

Bad guy Obeah Man does...something? to the pilot, and they crash, and he has a group of people kidnap the Drakes and their assistant Jeremy.

Danger really puts some things in perspective, for Janet, at least. And that continues for her. Jack is a bit delusional and in denial, thinking he has any control of the situation.

They are tied up and filmed for ransom, their assistant killed right in front of them.

Jack just keeps raging, but Janet is having regrets. Notice how she doesn't cry until Tim is brought up. Could be nothing, could be something.

And then she dies.

Her only other major appearance is when Tim is having a fever dream from the Clench and everything is kind of okay for a minute.

Tim very clearly loves his mom. And we may not get a lot of characterization for her, but she's not cold or callous like people write her constantly.

And now, we finally have a little more about her as of Batman 134.

I haven't really been keeping up since the Gotham War stuff because What The Fuck Was That My Guy, but I recently saw this specific comic.

The multiverse is fucked up again, some way some how, and Bruce is lost (again) and Tim has to get him back (again). This time, Tim is going in after him. But he doesn't end up going straight to Bruce.

He goes to see an alt of his mom.

Tim missed her so much that he ended up going to her before Bruce.

And her immediate reaction is to run up and hug him. Does that look like a mother who doesn't love her son?

"Do you have anyone to take care of you?"

"I don't know how this happened, this miracle...but I just know, in my heart of hearts, it was to show me...that every version of my son is a good one."

Tell me again that this woman is heartless and didn't want her son, I fucking dare you.

And we get more meaning to the name "Robin" and a little crumb about Tim's grandmother. As a treat.

This is all to say, please stop writing Janet Drake as a cold, heartless bitch.

Small final note though: Jack Drake is, in fact, a shitty person and a shitty father. He does still love Tim and Tim loves him AND THAT IS NOT UP FOR DEBATE, but the relationship is a mess. If either parent is actively abusive, it's 1000% Jack "smashed a TV because my son wasn't listening to me and threatened Bruce Wayne at gunpoint" Drake. Probably part of why the marriage was falling apart.

Anyway, yeah, let's retire the "Jack and Janet Drake are Bad Parents" tag and replace it with "Jack Drake is a Bad Parent" and "Janet Drake's C+ Parenting" or something.

[monstersdownthepath]

Homebrew Horror: Unwanted Amalgam

(Art source, and probably one of the better fanart pieces of this critter I've seen!)

Remember to eat your veggies, don't just scoot them around on your plate.

Malevolent boogeymen known by many names in many different cultures across the Inner Sea, Unwanted Amalgams are twisted aberrations formed from wasted and (as their name suggests) unwanted foods. Believed to be spirits embodying wasteful gluttony, Amalgams don't just rise out of plates of uneaten broccoli at a child's table or leftovers which go sour after they're forgotten, but instead arise from truly egregious displays of carelessness; whole banquets squandered when a noble grows full after a single dish and orders the rest disposed of, countless "ugly" pieces of produce thrown away by farmers and citizens alike for no reason but appearance, or truly impressive amounts of food being hoarded away from hungry mouths and left to rot.

Amalgams weave their bodies from this unwanted food, knitting countless pieces of edibles together into humanoid shapes whose general appearance depends on the most common form of food within them: an Amalgam constructed mostly of wasted meat may resemble a towering troll or ogre, while a primarily produce or grain-based one may look more like an especially tall and willowy elf. The one displayed above is one of the rarest types, constructed of wasted sweets and confections, and ambulates more like an insect than a human, with limb proportions to match. Regardless of their general shape, the ways they move and carry the weight of their amorphous bodies prevents anyone from mistaking them for a human in all but complete darkness.

Because they arise from food waste, Amalgams are a more recent boogeyman, ones that have begun to haunt the modernizing world as food production begins to exceed its demand, stalking through urban areas where people can afford to waste food as, in their minds, more will always be available. Due to their recent appearance, they are poorly studied and poorly understood, and have little desire to talk specifics about their motivations, origins, or desires beyond the immediately obvious... though they ARE quite talkative. To the point many wish they would stop.

The Amalgams possess a twisted sense of justice which the vast majority of them are incredibly vocal about, launching into soliloquy at the slightest prompting or provocation. Though they are all born from an incident of incredible magnitude, they are motivated to punish any act of wastefulness or gluttony they observe, no matter how small. Everything from a restaurant throwing away hundreds of pounds of perfectly edible food down to a child refusing to eat their vegetables may incite the wrath of an observing Amalgam, who will confront these unfortunates and command them to perform some task for it to spare them a terrible fate. These tasks are set by the whims of the Amalgam and run the gamut from the mercifully ordinary (finish your meal) to the nonsensical (gather 100 red objects and place them in a circle in one's front yard) to the impossible (slay a monster with an inadequate weapon), but failure to complete them within an arbitrary time limit sees the victim pummeled into helplessness by the horror and, in a cruel reversal of fate, consumed by it.

Attempting to fight for one's life against an Amalgam is no easy task. Their aberrant physiology renders them impervious to many reliable tricks, and whatever strange forces animate their bodies also knits them back together with frightening speed (to the point of returning them from death), though the ever-reliable fire and acid damage can destroy them beyond their ability to regenerate. Magic which affects only plantlife also affects Amalgams, even if they aren't entirely made of plant matter, and of course all Amalgams subconsciously desire to be eaten, rendering them extremely vulnerable to any hungry beast that attempts to take a bite out of them.

Unwanted Amalgam CR 6

Neutral Evil Large Aberration Init: +3; Senses: Darkvision 60ft; Perception +13 Aura: Frightful Presence (30ft, DC 15, 2d6 rounds)

------ Defense ------

AC 18, touch 12, flat-footed 15 (+3 Dex, +6 natural armor, -1 size) HP 48 (8d8+14), Regeneration 3 (Acid, Fire, bite attacks) Fort +6 Ref +5 Will +8 Defensive abilities Pull Together; DR 4/--; Immune critical hits, precision damage Weaknesses Vulnerable to Putrefaction, Yearn for Purpose

------ Offense ------

Speed 40ft, climb 40ft Melee Bite +10 (1d8+5 plus Grab), 2 slams +8 (1d6+3 plus Grab) Space 10ft; Reach 10ft Special Attacks Many-Armed Grapple, Swallow Whole (1d10 bludgeoning, AC 13, HP 5) Spell-like Abilities (CL 8; Concentration +9)

Constant--Spider Climb At-will--Dancing Lights, Ghost Sound, Prestidigitation 1/day--Dimension Door

------ Statistics ------

Str 20 Dex 16 Con 17 Int 14 Wis 15 Cha 13 Base Atk: +6; CMB +11; CMD 25

Feats Combat Reflexes, Great Fortitude, Intimidating Prowess, Multiattack

Skills Acrobatics +18, Climb +22, Intimidate +21, Knowledge (Local) +11, Perception +13, Stealth +11, Survival +13 Racial modifiers: +8 to Acrobatics, +4 to Intimidate

Languages Aklo, Common, any one local language

SQ Compression

------ Ecology ------

Environment any urban Organization solitary Treasure standard (rations, pilfered items)

------

Combat: Before battle, Unwanted Amalgams will clamber out of reach and repeatedly intimidate creatures to weaken them before leaping in. It will also use its surprise round to intimidate the enemy it wishes to punish most, if possible. Amalgams are simple creatures in a fight: They attack with their slams and attempt to grapple as many creatures as possible, swallowing the smallest among them while beating the rest to unconsciousness or death.

Morale: Amalgams are fierce fighters which pursue their prey relentlessly; they always fight to the death, though their supernatural resilience prevents some deaths from being the end of them.

------ Special Abilities ------

Many-Armed Grapple (Ex): Amalgams can produce upwards to six additional limbs as a free action to maintain grapples against an equal number of Medium or smaller creatures, allowing them to grapple multiple creatures at once while still being able to make two slam attacks. When not grappling a creature, these excess limbs are instantly re-absorbed.

Pull Together (Ex): An Amalgam's severed portions remain animate when they're severed, crawling back towards the whole at a rate of 10ft a round at the end of the Amalgam's turn. Each round the Amalgam ends adjacent to a severed piece of itself, it absorbs the piece (regenerating the severed portion instantly) and regains 1 HP. A severed piece can be destroyed with at least 1 point of Fire or Acid damage, or damage done by a bite attack. In addition, an Amalgam that is slain will return to life 1d4 hours later at 0 HP unless its remains are burned, doused in acid, or consumed by one or more other creatures.

Swallow Whole (Ex): An Amalgam can swallow Small or smaller creatures grappled by its claws without needing to transfer them to its mouth first; if it succeeds the check to pin the creature, it simply raises the creature over its head and drops them into its waiting maw. When a creature cuts its way out, the hole instantly closes behind that creature.

Vulnerable to Putrefaction (Ex): Regardless of their composition, Amalgams are treated as both Aberrations and Plants for the purposes of harmful spells (such as Blight) and abilities (such as Favored Enemy). A Putrefy Food and Drink spell cast on an Amalgam deals 2d8 Acid damage to it, and if that spell is cast on its remains, its body is destroyed utterly and it cannot return to life (see Pull Together, above). Inversely, a Purify Food and Drink cast on an Amalgam restores 2d8 HP to it and grants it the benefits of Haste for 1 round.

Yearn for Purpose (Ex): All Amalgams subconsciously desire the destiny of all food: to be eaten. Bite attacks made against them resolve as touch attacks, and damage from bites both bypasses their Damage Reduction and suppresses their regeneration for 1 round.

[make-friends-with-the-rats]

we interrupt your regularly scheduled program to talk about

Late 1890s Waistcoats

---

Believe it or not, men's waistcoats actually have changed throughout the years, and the waistcoats that were worn in the late 1890s are really quite different from the modern waistcoat worn today. So, if you are ever planning on dressing up as a newsie, there are a few things to keep in mind that, while they may seem minor, can add more authenticity to any costume/cosplay.

There are three major details to pay attention to.

First, waistcoats in the 1890s were comparatively shorter than the waistcoats of today. They generally fell just an inch or two below the natural waist or the slimmest part of the torso. You would never or very rarely see a waistcoat extending to or below the hips.

Second, the arms eyes (arm holes) of the waistcoat were very tightly fitted. Modern waistcoats commonly have larger arms eyes to allow for greater size range.

You'll notice that the costumes of both versions of Newsies have done a very good job on these details:

Third, waistcoats for daywear in the 1890s were generally cut very high up at the neck. Necklines did dip lower depending on the purpose of the waistcoat, for example evening wear dipped very low to show off the starched shirt front beneath, but the newsies would not have had particularly low cut waistcoats.

In the 1992 movie, Pulitzer wears one of these evening wear waistcoats. Compare to Denton's below, which is much more typical of daywear:

Denton's waistcoat is also an example of the notched collar/lapel which was quite common in the late 19th century.

Waistcoats could have a variety of collars, or no collar at all. A very fashionable collar, particularly in 1899, was the peaked lapel or step roll collar, which looked like this:

Be careful with this one, as modern peaked lapels tend to take after the 1920s style which is a little more streamlined and should be avoided.

A third common collar type in the 1890s was the shawl collar:

Taking all this into consideration, it is actually quite easy to turn a modern waistcoat into a late 1890s waistcoat. In order to achieve a shorter length, tighter arms eyes, and a higher neckline, you can simply take up the shoulder seam of any waistcoat for a more historical look.

It's that easy! Not taking into account fabrics and patterns, your modern waistcoat is just one alteration away from being the waistcoat of a newsie in 1899!

---

Image sources:

1896-1899, Plate 020 - Costume Institute Fashion Plates - Digital Collections from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries (oclc.org)

1894-1899, Plate 029 - Costume Institute Fashion Plates - Digital Collections from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries (oclc.org)

Full & Informal Evening Dress 1890s (gentlemansgazette.com)

Fashion Plate | V&A Explore The Collections (vam.ac.uk)

[thescarlettbitch]

Worshipping Inanna / Ishtar

This is an informative post about how Inanna was worshipped, or believed to be worship, back in her time, and at the end I'll share how I worship her.

Ritual sex - her high priestess would have ritual sex (whether it was true sex or symbolic is unknown) with the new king to ensure his fortune.

Gender non-conformity - her cult was primarily composed of those outside the binary, and shows men and women adopting the opposing dialect and engaging in sex with each other.

Music and art - most of her myths are in the form of Hymns, and most of her followers were artists, musicians, or dancers. Specifically, war dances would be done in her temple.

Libations - a libation is the ritualistic act of pouring a liquid offering straight from a container onto the earth. In depictions, the person doing the offering was naked.

Unfortunately, due to the passage of time, many specific rituals have been lost. I've scoured and this is really all I can find about her ancient original worship, and a lot of it is disputed because no one knows what was a metaphorical ritual or an actual ritual.

That being said, here is how I worship her in the modern day.

Self-confidence - Inanna was not one to be meek, it is said by many experts and proven in her myths that she was headstrong and didn't care how she was perceived. To honor her, I wear whatever I want. I have a very alternative style and I used to fear people looking at me. She has helped silence my worry and in turn, helped me gain confidence.

Non-conformity - I'm nonbinary, and although my femininity is a major part of my identity, so is masculinity, and so is androgyny. Learning that she had a queer cult following was so liberating, as before learning that I felt like it was wrong of me to work with her. So every little thing I do that isn't in the social construct of the gender binary is for her.

Libations - lucky for me, this is one area of her ancient worship that can be done in a modern setting. I don't have a "proper" container, I just use a normal glass. I've done it with water, coffee, tea, lemonade, and even kool-aid.

Honey/Butter cakes - in, I believe, Inanna and The God Of Wisdom, Enki welcomes her with honey/butter cakes and alcohol. I have only made a honey cake once before and it was shit, but I plan on trying again soon to combine both into a honey bourbon cake. I know they didn't have bourbon back then, but it's a local good I can find and adds a personal touch.

Self love - my fiancé lives across an ocean, so some things we can't do together (both living with family and thin walls), so to honor and worship her, self love is a great way for those in similar situations and she enjoys it from what I've seen.

Offerings - usually dates, sometimes cherries, often lemonade or tea, and more recently honey whiskey. These offerings might not be "traditional" in style, but they work for me and her. I have a small glass from an old Costco tiramisu and an iridescent bowl I got half off at our local grocery, both have an 8pointed star on them. Usually I sit them out for days at a time, or at least over night, and then either ingest them or just toss it in the trash (any other alternative isn't doable in my current situation)

Music - I listen to a variety of music with her, songs about sex, love, anger, fighting, injustice. She loves it, and if you want more detail on this I have a post about the songs on her playlist here.

Driving with the windows down - I love driving, and I feel like doing so with the windows down is an easy multitasking way to cleanse myself and invite good vibes in. Usually I do this while playing her playlist.

Making posts - it may seem a little silly, but a way I honor her is keeping her and her family alive. They are old deities, their civilizations and worshippers lived about 6,000 years ago, and some of her family have had their names lost to time. Making posts about them helps get word out, and keep them "alive".

Digital temples - I play the sims 4 and I saw someone talk about how they wanted to make a temple to their goddess in the game, so... I'm making my own. And will probably have my sims "worship" her via a club. Some people don't see this as an act of worship, but I do. As @thrashkink-coven said in this post, the gods are as modern as they are ancient. I know she enjoys it.

I will go through and make a full post detailing specific UPGs (personal practice things not backed in historical fact) with her, for anyone interested.

[coolbeansnico]

I've caved. Here's my Avatar The Last Airbender uni au and modern/non bender au headcanons.

Here's what I think the main kids uni majors/minors would be:

Aang: wildlife conservation with a minor in political sciences

Katara: medicine, education minor

Sokka: engineering, polisci minor

Toph: geology with a martial arts minor (changed my mind, education minor)

Zuko: forced to do law & politics by his family but switches to history/anthropology, keeping politics as a minor

Azula: law w a psychology minor

Mai: forced to do politics by family but wants to do art, history minor

Ty Lee: training in acrobatics and performance at a performing arts school and works at the circus

Suki: human relations and activism, martial arts minor

Yue: Dance major (same school as Ty Lee, polisci minor

☆

Living situations:

Katara and Sokka flat together and eventually Aang becomes a permanent resident

Toph lives right across from them, she likes her own space and independence but she'd never want to be too far from her friends

Zuko lives with Iroh above his teashop and works there part time

Suki has a sharehouse with the kyoshi warriors (her hockey team)

Ty Lee and Yue get assigned room-mates first year and became pretty quick friends, they continue to live together afterwards

Azula has her own apartment (of course). So does Mai, but she spends so much time at Azulas she basically lives there. Neither of them would admit it but they much prefer it to having whole houses to themselves.

---

General modern au/non bender au hcs:

(Pretty obvious) Ethnicity n nationality hcs:

Sokka and Katara r Inuit and from Alaska

Azula, Zuko and Mai are all Japanese American

Ty Lee is Japanese and Mongolian

Toph is Chinese and Singaporean (born in Singapore)

Aang is Bhutanese (so is Gyatso), but he grew up in Singapore. Him and Toph were childhood friends

Yue is Inuit and Sámi and her family lives in north-east Canada

Suki is mixed Chinese, Filipino and French-Canadian and live in an island off of Quebec

Have not decided where the uni would be but probably BSSU (Ba Sing Se uni) cause I know a lot of ppl use that as the uni name

I don't know a ton about US and Canadian geography so if y'all have ideas for what states or provinces the characters would hail from (especially what state/city Zuko, Azula, Mai and Ty Lee grew up in) I would def appreciate the suggestions

☆

Aang has a Tibetan Mastiff called Appa and Sokka has a Siamese cat called Momo (he found him behind a dumpster looking for food scraps and Sokka knew he'd found a kindred spirit,,, much to Kataras initial dismay)

Aang grew up in a sort of hippie/alternative living foster home that taughtbuddist beliefs, he never knew his real parents but he was okay with that.

I'm a fan of bigcorp ceo Ozai but also political tyrant Ozai works as well so I'm srsly torn on that. Politician Ozai would either have to be a nation ruler or American ambassador because I like to think Zuko and Azula moved around a lot as kids so he couldn't have a job that keeps him in ine place. That's why I like the idea of ceo Ozai. He would still have a lot of political power and it would still mean moving around a lot plus him being super corrupt and exploiting his workers is fun for angst.

Oh and!! Zuko and Azula lived in Singapore for part of highschool and their family visited a lot for holidays. Since Tophs parents and Ozai worked together, Zuko and Azula were around at The Beifongs a lot and entertained themselves by making fun of Toph for hanging out with a "poor tree hugging commoner" like Aang

---

I may add more to this so look out for a part 2

♡♡

I'm currently working on drawing them (and maybe chara profiles with sexualities, pronouns, character aesthetics/how I think they'd dress, interests ect) :] I've done the boys and the (non fire nation) gals are next!!

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

So, controversial topic. taking in count that in a month, the webcomic "scarlet lady" is gonna end ¿what are your feelings about it?

I know that there's people out there that don't like it for the chloe salt, but i have to admit that the damnation that chloe went through, at least for me, gave her more agency than canon, for the fact that it wasn't manipulated by outside forces like canon did, it gave her the right to choose to be better or worse.

Another great element is that it does what canon refused to do: five back Adrian his agency by letting him vent his frustrations AND let him realize that his father is a bastard.

If you don't agree, that's more than excellent, i want to know your take in this topic, that being positive or negative 😄👍

My friend, you are talking to a big Scarlet Lady fan, so I'm happy to give my thoughts! Get ready for some gushing and in-depth discussion of the adaptation process. That's really what all fanfiction is, but Scarlet Lady is more of an adaptation than most since it's a true canon rewrite that often requires you to know canon to fully appreciate its jokes and meta commentary.

Before we get into it, I want to give a link to the comic for those who haven't read it. The artist/writer is @zoe-oneesama and this is page one of the comic. I'd follow the comic link if you haven't read it as the comic is nearing its end, so going straight to Zoe's page will spoil you on elements of ending.

General Thoughts on Adaptation

Adaptation is an art, not a science. There are things that are objective elements of a story. Things you really cannot change if you want people to feel like you're telling an adaptation of a given tale. But there are also plenty of elements that are more subjective. Things some people might consider vital, but that aren't truly necessary to stay true to the story's core. (Yes, the character core thing applies to stories too!)

For example, to be a Cinderella adaptation, you need to have some sort of big reveal moment where "the prince" finds Cinderella, but that moment doesn't need to involve a slipper and the prince doesn't need to be an actual prince. My favorite modern Cinderella adaptation is A Cinderella Story: Once Upon a Song and it twists both of those elements while keeping the major story beats in place, making it fully deserving of the Cinderella label while also being its own unique story that isn't a straight retelling, it's an adaptation.

I bring all this up because, as readers of this blog may have already guessed, Scarlet Lady does a lot of things that I personally would not do when adapting Miraculous. A big one being that I prefer a more complex take on Gabriel, but that's simply a matter of preference. A complex Gabriel is not a requirement for adapting Miraculous. Complex Gabriel vs comedic villain Gabriel is just a choice you have to make when it comes to adapting canon because canon is such a mess that both options have straight up backing in the source text. Even if they didn't, Gabriel's core role - villain - is one that leaves you a lot of room for interpretation based on other factors that we'll talk about in a second.

I'll close off this section with this: having read all of Scarlet Lady, I'll be so bold as to say that Zoe and I almost perfectly align when it comes to identifying the flaws in Miraculous because I've agreed with pretty much every change she's made. She did a fantastic job staying true to the core of canon while also telling the story she wanted to tell. It's not the way I'd redo canon, but it doesn't need to be for me to call it a fantastic story. Plus a lot of the different choices I'd make come down to narrative style and tone.

Narrative Style and Tone

I'm a novelist at heart, which means that I favor serialized storytelling. For those who don't know that word, it means stories that are one coherent whole just broken into chunks. Stories where the order matters. You can't start watching at a random episode, you have to start at the beginning. And skipping an episode usually means that you'll have no idea what's going on.

Miraculous is not a serialized show. It's primarily an episodic show, a word that means that episode order doesn't matter. Every installment stands alone.

Obviously Miraculous isn't completely episodic, but that's fine. Purely episodic narratives are rare these days. Most stories have at least minor serialized elements even if those elements are often ignored for multiple episodes at a time. This is where both Miraculous and Scarlet Lady fall. They're mostly episodic stories with serialized elements popping up every now and then.

Miraculous does this element poorly because it acts like it's a purely episodic show and then takes that to an absurd extreme. Rules, characters, and lore can never be counted on to stay the same from episode to episode even though that's not actually how episodic stories work. Scarlet Lady doesn't make this mistake. It understands that episodic narratives should have STORIES that stand alone, but that the WORLD the stories take place in must stay consistent.

Now that we've gone over the basic format stuff, let's talk about tone.

Generally speaking, tone is the vibe of your story. It can be serious, silly, dramatic, and so on. One of Miraculous' biggest flaws is that its tone is all over the place. It's a silly romcom that brings in serious topics in serious ways and then handles them with all the grace of a hippo performing ballet in a china shop because of course it does! Those topics are horribly suited to the show's overall tone so it has no way to properly address them.

This is one of the many things I love about Scarlet Lady. It takes the show's absurdist tone and honors it. That's why Zoe's version of Gabriel works so well! He's a silly cartoony villain in a silly cartoony comic as he should be. It's also why my versions of Gabriel tend to be more complex. More serious serialized narratives are where more serious complex villains thrive. Neither option is better than the other, it all comes down to how you're adapting the original work. Zoe's choices are perfect for her version's style and tone. If mine are even close to that good for my preferred style and tone, then I'll be a happy author.

Narrative Weight & The Chloe Thing

This is getting long, so I'll end with a note on Chloe since you brought her up as it's another great example of the fact that there are very few choices that are inherently right or wrong when it comes to adaptation.

I don't know if I'd say that I'm a Chloe fan, but I certainly don't hate her. I also love what Zoe did with the character! It's a prime example of a thing that I've talked about before: the issue with Chloe is not a lack of redemption. The issue is that Chloe was given too much narrative weight to be what canon made her.

Quick definition: narrative weight is the importance a narrative places on a person, event, thing, etc. The more time you dedicate to an element of your narrative, the more weight that element has in the eyes of your audience. The more they expect the element to matter. The way that you develop the element will also shape audience expectations.

In the context of canon, Chloe has more development than almost any other side character. We know more about her family, her childhood, her personality, and so on. This was an absurd choice for canon to make because Chloe is not actually important to the story they told. You could pull her out of canon and almost nothing would change. Gabriel can make akumas do whatever he wants so, lore wise, he didn't need Miracle Queen. In fact, he arguably shouldn't have made Miracle Queen. He could have just taken the miracle box and jumped right into the plot of season five. Similarly, Chloe being mayor was an absurd one-note moment that's easily replaced with something more logical.

Because of this, there are a lot of things you can do when adapting Chloe. Everything from turning her back into a one-dimensional mean girl to redeeming her to what Zoe did: take Chloe's narrative weight and petty brat behavior and lean into both to make Chloe a main antagonist while also acknowledging the fact that Chloe is a messed up teenage girl who needs some serious help. I'm super excited to see the end of Chloe's arc in Scarlet Lady as I think it's going to be one of my favorites in the fandom. That is admittedly not a high bar as I'm very picky when it comes to Chloe content. I think most of it falls flat because most of it fails to let Chloe hit some sort of rock bottom when she absolutely needs to if you want to do anything interesting with her. She's not the kind of person who will easily change or see the error of her ways.

Conclusion

Scarlet Lady is a fantastic adaption of Miraculous and Zoe is a fantastic and funny adapter. The comic might not be to your tastes - and that's fine, nothing has universal appeal - but it's still a great example of how to honor source material while doing your own thing with it, which is a true skill. One of the problems with many modern retellings and reboots is that the people running the show don't understand how to adapt a narrative. They take far too much creative freedom and end up with something that doesn't feel anything like the source.

If I found out that Zoe somehow got hired to adapt something I love, then I wouldn't have any concerns. I'd have no idea what she'd do with it, but I'd be confident that it wouldn't spit in the face of the thing I love. I'd personally read a hundred Miraculous re-imaginings with her at the helm.

[nights-at-crystarium]

on authenticity

My mood in the recent months keeps going from bad to worse. Today I randomly fell into the rabbit hole of checking out other patreon artists, which always grounds me in reality and cheers me up, perhaps in a weird way. Essay incoming \o/

Authenticity is a blob of a word that sounds almost pretentious nowadays. It gets sneered at. You either sell your soul, or you don't earn with your art.

What's authentic, being true to yourself, will vary from person to person. It's like a sliding scale of suffering that you will tolerate in exchange for a coin, while convincing yourself that you have fun.

The harsh truth of modern world is that if your art pays for your living, you've already reached success, no matter how you may feel about the type of content you actually make for that money. Insert the meme furry nsfw art here. Or not furry. Or even sfw, but comms, lots of comms every month. Or merch. Anything that sells. Products first, art second.

Marrying passion and profession is virtually impossible, yet I'm doing it, only thanks to your support. I'm acutely aware that, even as I choose to be "real" and talk about an artist's money-making in a raw way, it's still patreon talk, and yes, I'll plug the link as well, so technically this entire post is an ad *fingerguns*

I just feel so privileged being able to create whatever the fuck I want, literally, I take no comms/requests/guidance on what and how should I draw/write, I post experimental, sometimes provocative stuff, and still make enough to survive. This sole fact should get me through the day, whatever other struggles I may be facing currently (I am. I don't wanna talk about it rn, instead I distract myself with this text), I should always remember the unique place in life I managed to carve for myself.

There are madmen (gender-neutral) who toss $10-20 at me every month. The majority "only" pledges $1, the notorious tier that gets treated as a tip jar with no rewards by many other creators. All of my rewards are the same at $1 and $20 (save for the one-time digital artbook download at $10, just to be perfectly clear), it's a conscious choice and a risk I continue taking because it's how I am. I used to split rewards between tiers in the past, before xiv, and it was a lot of busy work while it made me treat my art less as art and more as product. This pic goes into the cheap box, this pic goes into the expensive box. Every month. It's. Definitely not for every artist.

Logistic hell of splitting and delivering rewards, different posts with less comments per post, also my discord roles/channels would have to be split, nowadays it's just patron, whether you give me $1 or $20, there's no visual disparity, you're hanging out in the same cool kids' club, and collectively making happy noises on Fragments Fridays.

Could I be making more money if I got rid of the $1 tier? Yeah. But, mercifully, after 2 years I don't need to. I legit make enough currently, my only worry is to keep what I have. Patrons don't stay forever, 2-5 people would leave every month, about the same number would join (hence my patreon ads, I need to keep people reminded of it, even if it makes me feel guilty every damn time). I did Research (tm) in the past to find out that my "bleeding" numbers are below average, i.e. it's good, people generally tend to stick around.

I put a lot of emphasis on the $1 because I'm kinda proud of what I managed to accomplish while staying self-detrimentally humble. Literally doing an impossible thing in a world that keeps burning down. So yeah if you've been feeling bad for only giving me $1, what matters is that there's enough $1s to make a difference. Together you're creating a phenomenon, and you should be proud.

There are many stupid little principles, hills that I'll die on, that make up my authenticity. I chose to speak of it here and now in order to sorta sell myself, so it feels hypocritical x'D But if I don't shine a spotlight on this, who will. I'm old and jaded and increasingly terrified of how insincere the internet's becoming. Everything's fake, sugarcoated, polished for sale. My art's always been a scream of defiance against all that, now that I'm more or less established, I wanna scream louder. Thanks for hearing my screams. You can scream with me too if you want.

[thesimscurator]

Dream Town Makeover: Mini-Save File and Challenge

The Story:

With the loss of all its industries, Evergreen Harbor became a severely depressed area. The government took notice and has begun a project of green urban renewal here: they have passed some new green policies and are working on more, and they’re flooding the area with improvement grants, creating jobs in city planning, green technologies, commissioned public art, and more. You are an aspiring interior designer who is thrilled by the prospect of redesigning and revitalizing Evergreen Harbor's many dilapidated houses, old train- and shipyards, defunct factories, and small, cramped apartments. Your brain is filled with visions of light, airy, modern, open-plan spaces, reclaimed shipping container tiny homes, old train cars turned into cafes, junkyard salvage repurposed to furnish chic industrial apartments. Time to roll up your sleeves, build a client roster, level up your handiness skill, vote for improvements to the local apartment buildings, and otherwise get busy!

The Backstory:

I’ve always thought that Eco Lifestyle and Dream Home Decorator make an excellent pack pairing: Eco Lifestyle lets you change the open parts of Evergreen Harbor through gameplay, and Dream Home Decorator lets you change lots through gameplay, so together you get the whole shebang! But there’s a pretty major problem with trying to do this in the default save: namely, interior decorator gigs generate at random using all the occupied and community lots in all the worlds. So the more packs you own, the more worlds and lots you have, the less likely you are to be randomly assigned gigs in Evergreen Harbor. This mini save file aims to enable you to play out this excellent pack pairing by having absolutely nothing and no one in any other world except Evergreen Harbor, so that 100% of your randomly generated gigs will be in this world. And while I was at it, I also went around and ensured that all the lots would start out rundown, outdated, dysfunctional, and otherwise gross. It’s just more fun to make over stuff that’s lousy to begin with.

Save file specs:

The only world with anyone or anything in it is Evergreen Harbor, to keep your interior decorator gig options focused on revitalizing this area. Neighborhood stories is completely disabled for everyone, even unplayed households, to prevent randos from moving into other worlds and muddying your gig list. Aging also begins disabled, though you may turn this back on if you wish—that’s just down to personal preference.

E.H. is fully populated, except for one living space per neighborhood in which your interior designer sim will live (you have to be a resident of a neighborhood in order to vote for improvements, so you'll need to move around a bit). Patina Wainscot is your default interior designer, but you should feel free to just move her in with one of her many relatives and replace her with your own sim if that’s how you’d rather do the challenge. Each of the other households has sims whose careers and preferences have been deliberately set to make sense and give you plenty of renovation guidance--they rarely have dislikes, for example, so you have positive guidance on what to build. Be sure to read their family bios and ask about their careers, as this will give you some good directions, too! If you don't have certain packs, some sims' careers may not show (conservationists from Island Living, political activists from City Living, etc.), but this shouldn't impact the game too much.

Community lots all start out set to generic, so you’ll need to manually set the lot type to whatever you envision the space becoming at the start of your game. I have done this so that you can set your own aspirations for these spaces based on the packs you actually own—if I had pre-set the train car to “Cafe,” for example, and you didn’t own Get Together, that lot would simply disappear. This save file is a canvas for YOUR vision of Evergreen Harbor. I make some suggestions via the lot descriptions and the ambitions of the people in the town, but ultimately, the direction this takes is completely up to you.

Dream Town Makeover Challenge Rules:

One sim, one vote! Even if you have the influence to spam an N.A.P., you must use it to convince other sims to vote for your preferred measure instead of piling votes on it yourself. You may also not cheat N.A.P.s away--use the repeal process! You’ll need to do quite a bit of this, as all neighborhoods begin maxed out on N.A.P.s. This ensures that you get to do the gameplay associated with improving each neighborhood, rather than it just happening in the background without you. So here’s the gameplay:

Your N.A.P. goal is to repeal two N.A.P.s of your choice in each neighborhood, and replace them with Modern Development and Green Initiatives to revitalize the town.

Once you have passed both initiatives in a neighborhood, you will need to move to the next one in order to vote there and start the process over again. This means that the challenge will take a minimum of 12 in-game weeks (or three sim years) to complete—4 weeks per neighborhood.

You are a green interior decorator! That means your handiness goal is to apply eco upgrades to all new appliances you install as part of a renovation. Work on that handiness skill and stock up on upgrade parts before you head out to a gig!

Your lot goal is to remove negative lot traits from the spaces you renovate and add positive ones. Depending on the packs you own, you may or may not even have all of these lot traits, so you may simply ignore anything you don’t own. But do what you can with the packs you have. Here’s the guide:

Currently, all groundwater in Evergreen Harbor is contaminated, so all lots have the "Grody" challenge. This can only be removed when a neighborhood passes "Green Initiatives," which uses phytoremediation to clean the aquifers. After you pass this N.A.P., remove “Grody” from all lots in that neighborhood, and replace it with “Natural Well.”

Most places are also "Filthy," and may potentially be infested with “Mold.” You may remove either or both of these lot challenges if you have completely renovated a lot--one room doesn't count!

You may not take renovation gigs in any of the apartments before Modern Development gets passed in that apartment’s neighborhood—nor may you make any structural changes to your own apartment (this includes changing wallpaper and flooring). In this story, Modern Development = landlord’s permission to make structural changes to the space. Once this N.A.P. is in place and you have used its newly expanded windows to good effect with your renovation, you may add the “Natural Light” trait to the renovated apartments.

Traditional-style houses and apartments all have “Maintenance Issues.” You may remove this challenge if you have replaced AND applied eco upgrades to all appliances on the lot.

If you have both Seasons and For Rent, you can play out replacing outdated heating and cooling systems with geothermal. Just remove all the cast iron radiators and box air conditioners from a lot and add a thermostat. Once you have done that, you may add the “Geothermal” lot trait!

None of Port Promise is grid connected, so all lots there are “Off-the-Grid.” You may connect them to the grid only after Modern Development is passed in Port Promise, rezoning the area for homes and businesses.

The whole city is overrun with raccoons, in the form of "Cat Hangout" being on every lot (I have gone through and manually changed all stray cats in this save file into raccoons). Lock your door if you don't want them in your house! There are two conditions required to remove them: 1) Some N.A.P. that cleans up the trash in the public areas of the neighborhood is passed (either Green Initiatives or Modern Development will do this), and 2) You have completely renovated the lot to remove all stray garbage from the lot itself. Once the trash is gone, the trash pandas go, too!*

This one isn’t a part of the challenge, but just so you know what’s up: "Reduce and Recycle" is a permanent lot challenge everywhere except the Pinecrest Apartments, which have a trash chute. No getting rid of this one—that's just the way city garbage collection works!

You win the challenge when you have completely made over every single lot in Evergreen Harbor, changed the lot traits via the rules above, and passed Green Initiatives and Modern Development in every neighborhood.** Good luck!

*Pro Tip: for some truly adorable chaos, pass the “We Wear Bags” N.A.P. before you remove the raccoons. With this N.A.P. active, all the raccoons will show up in little hats, and it is delightfully ridiculous!

**Note: You are, obviously, totally welcome to play other sims in this save file at any time before, after, or during working on this challenge. They each have their own ambitions, as stated in their family bios, and (with a few exceptions, mostly elders) begin at low levels of their careers and skills, so you can have fun playing out their dreams as stretch goals or side quests.

Save file requirements:

This mini save file is not limited in terms of packs I used while creating it. However, since the whole point is basically for you to personally redo everything, there aren’t many packs you actually need in order to play this challenge. All that will happen if you don’t have some of the packs I used during setup is that items in the original, ugly versions of lots may be replaced or missing. But you’re about to replace them with your own designs anyway, so this is no big deal!

You also may not be able to play with certain features, but they are also basically non-essential (if you don’t have Cats & Dogs, for example, the city will not be overrun with raccoons, so you won’t play that particular aspect of the challenge). And while the sims of Evergreen Harbor often do have careers drawn from other packs (Knox Greenburg is an activist with “Speak for the Trees,” which came with City Living, for example), I have taken care to only use CAS content from the required packs, so no one should appear naked or bald for you, even if you don’t have any of the optional packs. So, with all of that preamble, here are the . . .

Required packs:

Eco Lifestyle – This whole save file is just Evergreen Harbor, so if you don’t have Eco Lifestyle, you won’t even be able to see it.

Dream Home Decorator – The entire gameplay concept and challenge at the foundation of this save file is the interior design career, so you really do need this pack to play it.

That’s it! Everything else is gravy. But the gravy is pretty good! Here are some highlights from recommended-but-completely-optional packs:

If you have Island Living, the save file starts with the electrical global policies in place, so there will be lots of power outages in Evergreen Harbor. I deleted the sim I used to enact them, so if you want to remove them as a stretch goal, I suggest playing with Summer Wainscot (or your own Conservationist). Work your way high enough in the career to become an Environmental Manager, and then you can repeal some of the global policies that haven’t worked—or put new ones in place. The organic food one would go especially well once you’ve established Bobby Wainscot’s urban food forest.

If you have For Rent, lots of houses will have “Maintenance Troubles,” “Mold,” and/or the many additional utilities appliances that came with that pack, making playing in those houses more eventful and chaotic. Plus, you can split the two families in the side-by-side houses in Grims Quarry into two separate households, turn the old storage lockers on the docks into micro apartments, and otherwise have fun with the features of this pack.

If you have Get to Work, Spa Day, Cats & Dogs, Dine Out, and/or High School Years, you can actually own/open the kinds of businesses some of the sims in this save file dream of starting with their small business grants, which is fun gameplay. Plus Cats & Dogs gets you the raccoons.

If you have City Living, you can play through the process of raising money and doing charity organizing work with Speak for the Trees as Knox Greenburg, which I’ve always felt was especially appropriate gameplay for him and really lets the whole “Eco Master” thing become active.

If you have Discover University, Claire Waxton will start out with a Biology degree and bunch of student loan debt, which acts as an extra challenge if you decide to play out her ambition of running a successful home candlemaking business.

If you have Seasons, all the kids in town (plus Jeb Harris) will be in Scouts, and you’ll see that holidays are a bit modified: the people of E.H. reject the consumerism of Winterfest and Love Day, so those holidays are gone, along with all traditions about adding decorations. But they love New Year’s resolutions, and celebrate New Year’s Eve with a Polar Bear Plunge in the quarry. And they love the spirit of gratitude that comes with Harvestfest, which they’ve leaned into even more by remembering the seven principles with a Kinara. Plus, they really value community, so they throw a Neighborhood Block Party on the first day of summer every year.

If you have Get Together, there will be a few clubs for the people in town, most of which are divided out by age category and two of which are just there as a little nod to the text for the “Back to the Old Days” N.A.P.

No mods are required for this save file!

Credits:

I used Srsly’s Blank Save as the base for this save file. A huge thank you to Srsly for keeping a totally unpopulated, completely bulldozed save file available to the public! It makes the work on contained mini save files like this SO much shorter.

All the sims in this save file are by Maxis, though one, Claire Waxton, is a recreation of an EA trailer sim the team never officially released. The recreation was done by SimpleSquare. I also ran out of sims from Eco Lifestyle and Dream Home Decorator before I ran out of space in the town, so I wound up doing a pack-limited makeover of the Parenthood trailer family to round out the community. They are still by Maxis, just with looks by me to remove the Parenthood content.

The original creators of all the starting lots are listed on the Evergreen Harbor map at the top of this post. Most of these lots were edited by me to a greater or lesser extent, but the overwhelming majority of the credit goes to the original creators' incredible creativity. Thanks to all the featured creators!

How to Download:

Step 1: Backup your existing saves. To do this, go into MyDocuments/Electronic Arts/The Sims 4 and right-click on the folder titled “saves.” Select “copy,” then paste the folder to any other location on your computer. I usually just copy it to the desktop so I don’t lose it, but you may have an alternative hard drive or other location where you like to back up your saves.

Step 2: Download and unzip the Dream Town Makeover save file, but DO NOT PUT IT IN YOUR MODS FOLDER! Put it in the saves folder instead (MyDocuments/Electronic Arts/The Sims 4/saves). If the number of the save file matches the number for a save you already have in game, change it to any number you do not already have a copy of, but keep the same number of digits. To get more specific: by default the Dream Town Makeover file name is “Slot_12162024.save” and if you happen to have another save file with that exact same file name (unlikely), the game will overwrite one with the other. If that’s true for you, you can change the file name to “Slot_12162025.save” or “Slot_22162024.save” or anything else that replaces a digit with a different digit, but you cannot change it to “Slot_1.save” because the game needs a total of eight digits in the file name to run the save properly.

Step 3: Open your game, click the save file titled “Dream Town Makeover,” and start playing!

Download the Dream Town Makeover save file

P. S.: I wanted to make Evergreen Harbor feel like a really established community, so households are quite interlinked (except for the Tinkers, who are brand-new to town), and there is A LOT of tea in this save file. Have fun discovering it all!

Support me on Ko-fi!

[snow-lavender]

little thoughts about the brutus cmv

"that the people would see me too as a poet/and not just the muse" is really interesting coming from fable. because he kind of has a point. the aether is inherently derivative and dependent on the other three realms. if it's a work of great art, the other three major gods serve as muses

especially from fable's point of view; in more modern conceptions, the muse of an artist is often mistreated, exploited, and under-credited. (they're also usually like. women suffering under misogynist structures of art and finance, but fable has such a victim complex i can see him being fine with co-opting that /j)

similarly, "i'll never forget that you showed me how to make art" alerion made the other realms for his siblings, which then inspired the creation of mortals. the works of art that fable is driven to kill by losing to alerion also owe their existence to him, in a way

it is so weird seeing trees in full leaf knowing this cmv was filmed, what, two weeks ago? that is NOT how i'm used to trees looking in early may. why is it so green.

"frater meus" hits harder when you remember that vo'lete is largely based off latin. fable is calling alerion his brother in his own language while rationalising why he has to die

obviously the song choice is fucking incredible, you don't need me to tell you that. espicially when that fourth verse hits my god

also alerion desperately crawling backwards and fable shouting why and how this is for the best down at him. peak cinema

it seems like when fable is stewing on the bench there's actually blood on the tip of the sword? like it's mostly out of frame but i swear it's red in some places

in conclusion:

[a-student-out-of-time]

The Post-Tragedy Horrors of Despair Time

Hello everyone, Mod Bubbles here!

This Halloween, I decided to do something a little different. Rather than a dedicated post or song parody, I've decided to share a worldbuilding analysis. A pretty fortuitous one, since we've recently completed Chapter 2 of Despair Time.

I'm sure it's no exaggeration to say that DT is a pretty dark fangan, especially within its own context. I wouldn't say it's as grimdark and nihilistic as some people are convinced it is, but there's some elements to it that I feel are worth analyzing going forward.

See, it's been established that DT is set within the Hope's Peak continuity. This would mean that the canon games sans V3 (and if you want to have fun with it, other fangans like the Another series) have all happened here.

According to a Q&A, DT is set around 70-80 years after the end of the Tragedy, so if you wanted to estimate based on in-universe dates (such as Makoto's Hope's Peak brochure saying 2010 in the earliest version of the game but 2014 in a re-release), that would put it sometime around 2080 to the mid-2090s. Veronika backs this up in Chapter 2, when she mentions the Tragedy happened "almost a century ago."

Why do I bring all this up? Because if you looked at DT, you'd probably never guess it was that deep in the future. I know I didn't at first. And this is all by design, but it goes beyond simple cosmetic details. Allow me to explain to you why this is probably the darkest timeline that could've happened after Class 78's victory over Ultimate Despair.

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Modern Stagnancy

So if we look at the obvious, the world of DT looks pretty much identical to our own, which should be a good thing. When you consider that this is set after The Biggest, Most Awful, Most Tragic Event in Human History- an event that saw societal collapse, wars happen for the sake of destruction, massive pollution, rampant murder, and countless killing games- then it almost seems utopian.

Cities have long since been rebuilt, the skies are clear, there are functional trains, movies, celebrities, schools, music, art, Ted-Talks, the internet, all the trappings of normality. And that's really the problem.

Once the recovery efforts were underway, the goal of those in power was to rebuild things exactly as they used to be. Bear in mind, the world looks like our modern day, yet this is set deep into the late 21st century. In that context, the world almost seems stunted in its growth or even that it's regressed, given that CDs and DVDs are used rather than USBs or digital downloads.

Not only that, but this extends to societal attitudes as well. Nico was the victim of bullying over their status as an enby by everyone who knew, including their own father. It's almost the 22nd century and anti-LGBTQ bigotry like this still exists.

In that context, it feels less like the world is recovering and more that it's been stuck in its pre-Tragedy status quo, right down to continuing the Ultimates program that contributed to The Tragedy in the first place. And who would be motivated to do that?

2. Hope's Peak And Their Kin Are Stronger Than Ever

Probably one of the most contentious aspects of DR3's ending is that, after everything the people in charge of it were responsible for- exploiting their students, covering up crimes, human experimentation- Hope's Peak Academy was rebuilt by the survivors, now with Makoto as headmaster.

Now, one could make the argument that Makoto is a better example of hope and thus better suited to lead the school to follow its stated ideals than the Steering Committee ever was. That very well may be true, but as they also proved, nobody stays in charge forever. And now, because of his decision, Hope's Peak isn't contained to Japan.

There now exist Hope's Peak branches in every major country on Earth, with two in the United States. Teruko and co. are students of the East Coast Division's 27th class, meaning that one opened almost thirty years ago. This would also mean that Japan's Hope's Peak would have seen over 150 classes since its inception.

I bring all this up because, as has been made very clear by canon, Hope's Peak is a terrible place even in concept. When you remove the idyllic aspect of fostering talent and guaranteeing its students are set for life, the truth is that ultimates are stunted in their development. They're only encouraged to excel in their particular field, whether they really want to or not.

In addition, Hope's Peak has always quietly held this belief that only people with talent hold any worth; those without talent are just "ticks" who leech off the success of their betters. Characters like Byakuya and Nagito echo those very same sentiments, this extreme elitism that encourages people to view the "99%" as inherently inferior.

Even if you wanted to say Makoto managed to undo that idea, can we really say this divide would never come up again? No matter how many years pass or how many divisions of Hope's Peak are set up across the world? That seems really far-fetched to me.

Consider Min's bonus video. As she explains, she was never scouted by the school. Instead, America's Hope's Peak announced something called the Ultimate Contest for Eminent Students, where eligible high school students would be allowed to take a test, the best of whom would be admitted to the school when they graduated. The catch is that they had 12 years to prepare. Min, who was only 5 at the time, wasn't initially going to participate, but then the founder of a company called XF-Ture Tech approached her family- who was quite poor- and wanted to sponsor her in exchange for her participation.

She spent her entire life preparing for that test. And when she passed, she realized it was all really just an experiment to create their ideal version of the Ultimate Student. She even doubted that she was the best in terms of raw score, just that she met their desired expectations by cutting out everything else in her life for that test.

It also extends beyond just Hope's Peak itself. Those with power and influence now hold a strangle hold over the most vulnerable people out there, as we can see with the Lacroix family.

Rose wanted to help her family out of their financial limitations using her painting skills and her photographic memory, which lead to her becoming an art forger. However, at 15, she was found out and her family faced tens of millions in fines. This would've been the end, but then they were bailed out by a billionaire named Richard Spurling, founder of the Spurling Foundation. In exchange for clearing her charges, Rose had to sign a contract that meant she doesn't own the rights to anything she paints.

She hates what her life has become, where she can only ever really paint things at the whims of the Foundation because it was the only way her family could survive that mountain of debt. The exploitation there is undeniable.

No matter where you look, there's still exploitation and experiment abound with the school, corporations and the wealthy. And if you think the Spurling Foundation sounds bad here, they're implied to be responsible for something much worse.

Which is also brings us to Xander. See, there's a curious detail when we first meet him in the prologue:

And I agree. Xander being the Ultimate Rebel really doesn't fit him, as he's better described as the "Ultimate Revolutionary." Except there's no chance Hope's Peak would call him that, instead paying lip service to the idea in a digestible format to still support the status quo.

Xander is an activist who works to oppose corruption, but the ones who benefit from corruption wouldn't want him to flaunt that. It's a subtle but very clever detail that shows those in power still maintain a hold even over their beloved Ultimates.

They probably had no issue throwing the obviously corrupt under the bus to save their own hides, and raised Xander up with a quasi-supportive title. It gives them a chance to look like they're supporting what he's doing while still tying an element of a "rebellious child" to his image with the name.

Had Xander survived, he had a good reason to want to bring them down, especially the Spurlings.

3. Illness and Poverty

Xander's bonus video clued us in on what I believe is one of the most important parts of DT's continuity: the fate of the town of Chariton, implied to be where he lived. It seemed to be a small town, home to a couple hundred or a couple thousand people, where the only hospital for miles was "dinky, understaffed" and barely able to handle a minor flu outbreak. They were completely unprepared for what became known as the Chariton Incident.

When he was around 14, the town was hit by a disease that caused those infected to decay from the outside in; their limbs would stop working before their organs did, meaning they would just lay there and feel themselves slowly dying. So many died that nobody was left to move the bodies, so they were left where they fell, rotting in the summer heat.

The cause of this outbreak? A contaminated river that served as the town's water source. Chariton was an impoverished community, where people had no money to treat their water, get medicine from a nearby city or to even move out. It's also implied, based on Xander's anger, that Duke Spurling was partially responsible and that he got off the hook, which may be what drove Xander to become the Ultimate Rebel. Especially when you consider he's the only surviving member of his family.

Duke Spurling is, as the named implies and Dev has confirmed, the younger brother of Richard Spurling. The money and influence needed to get his brother off the hook is the very same that has the Lacroix family under his thumb.

So as we can see, Chariton was a major event in DT's canon. Not only does it showcase corruption, it also showcases understated but still prominent problems in the post-Tragedy U.S. If you pay attention, you'll also notice Teruko, Min, and Rose mention poverty playing a role in their lives.

As we can see, poverty plays a major role in their lives, and that extends beyond a personal level. Chariton's poverty is why the incident happened at all, and a big reason is because it's also an example of a medical desert.

"Medical desert" is a term used to describe regions whose population has inadequate access to healthcare. This can be all healthcare in general or in specialties such as dental care or pharmaceuticals. This is an especially prominent problem in rural areas, but it can affect urban ones too.

If that sounds implausible to you, today it's believed that around 30 million Americans- over 1% of the population- live over an hour from a hospital. Can you imagine how bad the problem is in a world after The Tragedy? All the damage to infrastructure, established institutions, the economy, and the population? I doubt Chariton was the first to see something this bad.

Ace's execution gives us more clues. In the Death By Illness section, there are several newspaper clippings on the wall, most of which are readable. One flashes on screen saying "Unexplained Illness Kills Thousands," which I believe is another reference to Chariton (why else would it flash on screen?), but there's more as well:

"More people are dying of cancer than ever before"

"Flu season claims thousands of lives"

"Falling rates of survival for hospitalized patients"

"Antibiotic-resistant infections a growing threat in this hospital"

One is harder to read, but I believe it mentions Chronic Kidney Disease being tied to an early death

Now, the interesting thing is that most of these are modern headlines, and they can be pretty misleading. The cancer one is actually based on the fact that more people are living longer lives, thus are reaching ages where they develop cancer due to their cell infrastructure breaking down naturally. It doesn't mean there's more cancer cases overall across all ages.

The only one that's not true is the falling rates one. Which suggests that not only was it Chariton, but healthcare infrastructure in general after the Tragedy seems to be a mess.

See, I was assuming that these articles are identical to what we see today. But it's also possible that the cancer one is now literally true, and it could be because The Tragedy was rife with this kind of horror. We know that terrorism, coups and wars happened for no reason other than to spread despair across the world.

Could you imagine how many nuclear, chemical, biological and radiological weapons were used? How many diseases and hazardous materials were seeded into the environment? If it's unsafe to drink tap water after a serious hurricane or earthquake, how bad is the problem when contamination is the goal?

And this doesn't even touch on how disturbingly easy it would be to spread long-term illnesses such as HIV or CJD in contaminated food and medical supplies. Some diseases have latency periods that last decades, meaning they could still be killing people even by the time DRDT is set.

Antibiotic resistance is also a very real and serious problem. Even today, some strains have become immune to even the strongest antibiotics available. This has given rise to Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococci or VREs, which are immune to basically every medication we can throw at them.

Now, it's still possible to deal with them, such as with naturally antimicrobial metals or experimental treatments such as CRISPR and Phage Therapy, but in a world that saw such a massive hit to everything? I'm certain antibiotic-resistance bacteria have become much more serious, potentially resulting in epidemics over the years.

And when these things happen, it's always the poor who suffer the most.

4. Lethal Repetition

Now we come to the most obvious example, something highlighted by the same reveal that DT is set nearly a century into the future:

Veronika, who provided us with information on the effects the Tragedy still has, apparently has never heard about The Killing School Life.

Now, it's important to keep in mind that most of the Killing Games in DR were pretty secluded and motivated. SDR2 was only broadcast to Future Foundation with the goal to allow Junko to escape into the real world, for example. However, DR1's Killing School Life was broadcast globally as a means to break humanity's hope by showing the Ultimates slaughtering each other. Instead, Makoto and co. managed to reinvigorate the world's hope and played a pivotal role in ending the Tragedy.

...And yet Veronika apparently hasn't heard any of it.

Now, there's two possibilities here, neither of which are good:

One is that the Mastermind has removed their knowledge of previous killing games, specifically. Now, I actually consider this an unlikely explanation because, not only does Teruko seem to vaguely remember the Killing School Life happened, but what's the goal in doing so for the participants?

The canon games all had solid reasons why the other masterminds erased the participants' memories: the revelation that they'd been killing their friends, the fact that their past identities were supposed to be undone to save them, even the fact that they weren't even who they were supposed to be in V3.

But what's the purpose of suppressing the memories of the Killing School Life in the participants themselves? Especially since this game is also apparently being broadcast to the outside world, although we only have MonoTV's word on that. Is it to undermine everything the survivors achieved or to get the participants not to consider the same strategies?

The other, more plausible explanation to me is that the mastermind isn't the one who erased their memories. The outside world did.

It's possible that, in the decades since the Tragedy and the drive to return things to the status quo, knowledge of the Killing School Life has been suppressed. It would be so easy to blame Makoto's decision to rebuild the school, but it's just as plausible that his attempts to genuinely reform the school were undone over the years.

Corporations and those that came after had a vested reason to improve their own reputations, and why would they allow their connection to the Tragedy to remain public knowledge? The entire thing began as a revolution of lower classes against the rich before it became a whirlwind of mindless violence.

So what does this mean for DT? This is more hypothesizing on my part, but I'd say this could tell us a lot about the potential motivations for this very killing game. Could it be someone trying to remind the world about this event and how we got here? Is it more retribution against the wealthy? Is it someone who was inspired by Junko to slaughter her friends? Or is it something else entirely? And what role does Teruko have if someone involved is so hellbent on trying to kill her?

For now, we can only speculate. But I can tell you that, based on what we've seen here, DT is probably the darkest future we could've gotten out of the canon series.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

[fatehbaz]

the very Sacred Oak Flat is in danger of becoming an open pit copper mine. turning a sacred site into a 1000-ft pit. Apache Leap, ancient petroglyphs, extremely important rituals since time began; these things are Oak Flat. the federal government is ignoring many legal protections as well, including 200 yr old treaty promising to protect the land forever, national park designation, and on the national register of historic places. this project is so, so evil. I want people to know about it. Please read, talk, care about it.

Nice, thank you. The impending destruction of Chi'chil Bildagoteel by the US government and one of the planet's most infamous mining companies.

Over the past 3 years, I’ve written here about defense of Oak Flat, also called Chi'chil Bildagoteel by Chiricahua Apache from San Carlos reservation. (A summary of the site’s importance and history. A summary of the legal challenges to the mine. A summary of Apache Stronghold and other Indigenous-led campaigns. A photo collection featuring Indigenous-led actions in February 2021.) But all of these posts predate the developments that have occurred from the beginning of 2022 until now (March 2023). And the legal case, the fate of the site, is about to be settled this very month.

Well, then, there’s Rio Tinto, the copper mining leviathan, despised across the planet, bane of Australia, so-called Rhodesia, Latin America, Papua, etc. They're the second-largest metals/mining company on the planet. For well over a century, open-pit copper mines have been infamous for the scale of their destruction and I like how you describe it: giant pits, gaping wounds. Oak Flat is destined to belong to Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of Rio Tinto. Just before widespread news of Rio Tinto’s interest in Oak Flat, Rio Tinto had earned an especially-notorious reputation for destroying Indigenous/Aboriginal sites in Australia. A summary of the news about the “atrocity” at Juukan Gorge, when in May 2020, Rio Tinto destroyed an important sacred cultural site containing Indigenous shelters over 45,000 years old, and Rio Tinto leaders apparently had foreknowledge of the area’s cultural importance. Here’s a look at what is perhaps the oldest surviving human art on the planet, some petroglyphs and shelters up to 50,000 years old, being destroyed by the truly astonishing scale and diversity of destructive mining operations in Western Australia. And here’s a look at many other ancient and modern Indigenous sacred sites being destroyed by mining in that region.

Sacred Land Film Project put together some informational graphics:

Anyway, a basic summary.

Originally, this mine was kinda known as, like, “the John McCain Land-Grab Deal” because Senator McCain sold out the state of Arizona and Indigenous people by basically promising a formal transfer of land and the creation of what would become a major mining site at Oak Flat. Mining in the Oak Flat area was technically prohibited decades earlier by an Eisenhower presidential/executive order, but in December 2014, McCain sneaked a hidden last-minute rider onto a must-pass defense spending bill.

In May 2020, Rio Tinto gets caught destroying those sites at Juukan Gorge.

So, in October 2020, Indigenous activists discovered that the supposed date of the land transfer finalization had been quietly and suddenly moved up like a full year, meaning that the site might have become a mine beginning in December 2020 or January 2021.

At this point, the Oak Flat mine was becoming known as, like, “Trump’s Rushed/Hurried Mining Deal,” since the Trump presidential administration seemed to want to quickly act on the mine before any potential presidential transfer of power might occur in January 2021, “just in case” they lost the November 2020 election.

So this is when Apache Stronghold and other Native advocates really started finally getting national recognition in headlines. They organized a Day of Action and statewide events around the Solstice in 2020, and by January 2021, they had forced the case into court.

In the January 2021 case of Apache Stronghold v. United States, an Arizona judge ruled against Native advocates, but advocates got the case heard by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. While the case was being argued, in February 2021, Apache Stronghold also participated in a newsworthy relay from Oak Flat to the courthouse in Phoenix, when Native advocates held a candlelight vigil.

But in March 2021, the US Forest Service announced that it was temporarily withdrawing its environmental impact assessments for the land transfer, putting the mine on hold.

In October 2021, the three judges on the appeals court ruled against Apache Stronghold again.

Over a year later, in November 2022, the court then announced something unusual: The court was willing to rehear the case en blanc (before a panel of all 11 judges).

And now, “Biden’s attorneys” will be arguing against Apache Stronghold and for the land transfer.

Throughout this entire process, Apache Stronghold has consistently been vocal, active, and dedicated to stopping it.

Here are some headlines from the past couple of years:

And from March 2023, this headline, one more time, for impact:

So, beginning on 21 March 2023, the case is being heard, again, for what is presumably the final time, with US government attorneys arguing that the land will belong to the mining companies by summer 2023.

[jellolegos]

you mentioned that palaeography in hotd can be considered your special interest, yet the only thing i know about it is that it studies writing in historical context

SO please tell me more?? was it high valyrian that sparked the interest? if it was, what moment did? and has grammar changed over the years? does it have an interrelation with cultural events? i will read literally anything you would like to ramble about

genuine curiosity of a linguistics major

and, cannot miss a chance to say, your art is absolutely utterly stunning :)

thank you in advance!

Oh of course! My apologies, I think I may have been misleading, I've mostly been interested in the type of script they are using in the show. Unfortunately I've always been a bit more numerate rather than literate (as I am certain you'll pick up on as you read my writing, it has never been my strong suit) so honestly I haven't a clue about linguistic aspects! But, I believe the creator of the languages in the HotD/GoT universe is actually on here, his blog is: @dedalvs :)

Mostly what I meant by 'Palaeography' is since we have such a lovely opportunity to see book pages in HOTD I've been very much interested in what script model the artist was attempting to imitate.

I, I think like a lot of other hobbyists of niche interests, am always interested to see what gets translated from real life to screen. Just as I'd imagine you're interested in the conlang aspects of HotD! So I've been really interested to see what they're trying to do with the books in HotD. Without futher ado...

Hotd, Palaeography, and a Needlessly Thorough Examination of a Manuscript Page

All manuscripts I talk about here have clickable digitised links, so if you want to take a peep beyond what I talk about, feel free. They are really lovely manuscripts!

Disclaimer before the yapping commences that I am a Pre-Conquest gal and most of what I'll be talking about is Post-Conquest, and also that my research at a graduate/post-graduate level has been more involved with manuscript materiality (which I am again, happy to talk about, just not on this already-overly-wordy ask), rather purely palaeographic pursuits.

I should also say that none of this analysis is significant for any reason relating to the plot; this is just an examination of the prop art!

Also I am definitely NOT an expert in any way, shape, or form, so there are absolutely things I am missing here, there, everywhere... you have been warned.

Onto the yap...

Explaining the Frame

Before I fully get into it I think it is a little bit important to establish why historians study scripts at all. In a modern world, where writing is ubiquitous and literacy rates are high, it can be sometimes hard to understand why scripts are historically consequential (and why Pre-Reaganite/Thatcherite austerity, there were such things as tenured Professors of Palaeography!).

I think the best way to frame this is to use an example:

Above are two paintings. They are depicting the military action and are created with the same tools and by artists living in the same century and a half and in broadly the same geographical location. Now, if I were to say something like 'These are both paintings of military actiom, therefore they are the same', technically I wouldn't be incorrect. But I would be missing a huge component of these pieces!

In other words, just like painting, the form is just as important as the content itself; a scribe does not simply choose to write differently one day to the next but rather scripts, like any other art form, are nuanced and just as worthy of study as the actual text itself. As vehicles of text, how that text is manipulated, displayed and otherwise portrayed, can often tell us (as historians - amateur or not) a great deal about the surrounding historical period.

So something that is important to remember as I describe what is essentially, font analysis, is that the value placed on said font in an academic context is the result of historical weight placed on script that is almost entirely alien to a world where I can easily swap between Arial and Papyrus.

So, what script do they use in the HotD manuscript??

I can tell you its most certainly attempting to imitate a form of textualis. As one of the most profuse (spatially and temporally) script models, I would say it's a great choice. I think it the popular conception of manuscripts (what a manuscript should look like), this is what people would probably choose precisely for that reason! Textualis is/was popular from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries across Europe.

MS545 -14thc.

It was developed as a documentary script (aka used for documents, such as charters) but came to be used more often in prestige non-documentary manuscripts (like liturgical volumes, or conceivably, like Nymeria's history).

A charter with the seal intact from Magdalen College, Ox

It comes in different forms called 'grades', what those 'grades' are really depends on which scholar you want to follow. From my teaching, they are precissa, quadrata, semi-quadrata, and rotunda (from highest grade to lowest grade). Without getting into too much detail, different grades of textualis are often determined by the shape of the minims (aka bottom of the letter).

(Clockwise from upper left: Precissa [all letters are terminated neatly at the baseline - MS233 -14thc], Quadrata [all letters have little diamonds at the bottom - MS545 -14thc.] Semi-Quadrata [minims with intermittent attempts at feet - MSStowe17 - 14thc] Rotunda [rounded out minims - MS Add. 2. 263]).

Part of the reason this distinction is made, both between different grades of textualis and also between scripts used for documentary text and those used for non-documentary text is because manuscripts were/are valuable objects. It will obviously take longer for a scribe to diamond off every. single. minim. than it would for them to have letters flow into each other.

Something that is often forgotten in our modern period of relative book ubiquity is that manuscripts were objects subject to market forces as much as they were art pieces or vehicles of text. All things 'manuscript', from the scribes writing it to the pigment and vellum, were subject to various degrees of scarcity and luxury (which is actually what my research is about!). Below is an example of a scribe advertising their different grades of script.

MS e.Mus 198* - 14thc.

A closer look...?

Beyond just going 'yea they kinda look similar!' (deceptively, a lot of what manuscript scholarship is, lol), I can pull out a few things point me in the textualis direction. Let's take a look at the shapes of 'O' 'N' and 'G'. Our 'o' here is distinctively six-sided, which is also present on the main body of the 'g'. The 'n' similarly has a pronounced parallel line shape, with tapering on the curves.

Generally textualis has a very compact look with attention to downstrokes and neat parallel lines creating almost a 'box' effect with the x-height (aka how tall the x's are). I'm not sure how best to explain this but there is a keen dynamism in different parts of the stroke, with drastic differences in width between various parts of the ascenders/descenders in a letterform. The thick and thin elements of a letterform (such as the short corners on the 'o' or the often hairline strokes that connect the upper loop on an 'a' to the bottom loop), are really exaggerated in these scripts in a way you don't see with other earlier or later scripts.

For reference (an oversimplification to be sure, but a helpful one! Note that some of these scripts are geographically restricted, used only in Insular or Continental scribal environs)

^ Here are some real life examples of those same letter forms (L to R - LPL MS209 13thc, LPL MS75 13th c , LPL MS545 14th/15thc,)

While textualis was one of the more popular script models, other scripts were also popular in England at this time (roughly, lol). Anglicana and then Secretary hands rose to prominence, as you can see they look quite a bit different from textualis.

(MS Ashmole 35-15thc.)

These were considered lower grade scripts, used more often for documents as they can be written more quickly (important when you have many things to write!). So if we were able to take a peek at some of those scrolls that are in the Dragonstone Library, maybe we'd be able to find HotD's equivalent.

There is some crossover between these scripts and some sticky stuff about regionality, I know very little beyond surface-level, so I'm just going to point you to the resources I linked at the end.

Am Dipl. Dan LX- 15thc. with some other ones

The broad point is that textualis is most certainly a major mediaeval script, one I believe served as reference for the HotD manuscript, but it was not the only one present during the high middle ages. Now... would this script have been used at all during the succession wars that served as HotD's inspiration...?

Inspiration and Historicity:

If we're going on what scripts would have looked like in the period of the Dance's inspiration (Empress Mathilda), I would say this particular script is a bit late. Textualis reaches its more formalised state beginning at the end of the twelfth century (really, the thirteenth but..), so a little early for Rhaenyra's/Mathilda's 1115. Instead, assuming that this is entirely like our own mediaeval period, we'd be looking at the script that precedes it, called protogothic. Here are some examples:

(MS Digby 83 - 12th c England)

(CC MS 95 -12th c England)

A vernacular hand (aka. non-Latin, here old English), may look a little different. Here's one example, in what I would call Anglo-caroline script. Again, just like our documentary/non-documentary, purpose, and cost factors weigh into the script model chosen for a piece of text, so does the language (although Anglo-caroline was not restricted to vernacular!):

(MS 180, 12th c England)

You can probably see how the more formal textualis is an evolution of protogothic, rendered more professionally as the high middle ages came to pass. There is definitely a lot of interesting discussion about how script models take hold as lay literacy rates increase, as scribal practice begins to move from monasteries and limited courtly settings to 'professional scribes', but I won't get into it here.

The Critique (that no one asked for):

If I had to give an artist who did the HOTD prop a few pointers (my opinion that they definitely didn't ask for + I think they did great overall + mandatory 'script is highly variable, some of these pointers may not apply'), I would say the following:

1. Textualis in the real world, generally but not always, tends to have a two compartment 'a', it retains this from protogothic which in turn stole it from Anglo-caroline. Scripts in England prior to Anglo-caroline (which was a combination Anglo [English/Insular] and caroline [Continental/Carolingian] - see timeline above) more often used single compartment 'a's, so the dual compartment is a bit of a bigger deal.

MS Douce 366- 13thc

2. 'S' letterforms in textualis tend to be very compact. They often come in two shapes, the 'long s' and our more familiar 's' shape. In both forms there is attention to maintaining a compact figure, so when you have an entire page the x-height is strictly adhered to. By having some extra little whirly lines, the page image in the HotD manuscript is less neat overall. One exception tends to be sentence-initial 'S' letterforms, which are exaggerated because they start the sentence.

MS Bodl476- 13thc

Above are three 's' letterforms, spelling 'zacharias. Susci-(tavit-cutoff). We finish 'zacharias' with a familiar s. The next sentence starts with an exaggerated word-initial 's' which is purposefully larger and with significant spurs to signal the start of the sentence. Finally, we also have a 'long' s which looks like an l with an overhang, or an 'f' without the cross. You'll notice that the first 's' does not exceed the height of anything else in the word. Similarly, the 'long' s generally fits with the aspect of the script model, made with a thick downstroke. Only the second 'S', which is the largest, is purposefully flared to start the sentence.

On rewatching, we do get something similar-ish to majuscule letters to start sentences on other pages

It may seem a little silly, but I think the HotD script lacks this same internal logic and the flairs, which aren't technically incorrect, work against the overall appearance of the page, rendering it messier.

3. Some addtl. silly ones: 'i's in textura are not frequently dotted, those marks above letters are abbreviation marks e.g. p(er), domin(us). 'T's are usually crossed at the top rather than the middle until the late mediaeval period (again, carry over from previous scripts). Plausibly, it could look like this one from the lower Rhineland, which is less attached to that compact look overall:

MSDouce 185- 14thc.

But you'll notice a few things. The 'i's are marked with hairline marks (Michelle Brown calls these 'a light serif'), not the big dots we get with the HotD manuscript, and those 't' bars are really pretty high with exception where one letter flows into the next ('noctis' and 'peste' in line 1, 'est' with a long 's' is one I also often see with a high t bar).

A lot of this criticism on the letterforms, which is most certainly very annoying (who really gives a fuck), again just comes down to the fact that all historical scripts had an internal logic to them, and so these tiny tweaks could make the page as a whole look a little better.

4. There appears to be a great deal of space (imo too much) between the lines of text. Vellum is expensive! Even when there is deliberate space left empty in manuscripts, its not generally between the lines of text; the goal is to be relatively economical with your space, keeping significant breaks in text for mostly 1) thematic changes (ends of chapters, verses, etc.) 2) poetry lineation 3) dramatic visual effect.

(MS 52 - 9thc, - notice how space is filled with punctuation and drawn out terminal strokes to keep the diamond shape [dramatic visual effect], MS218 - 10thc. [poetry lineation])

5. Very very annoying but: in my opinion would be very difficult to rip a manuscript the way that Rhaenyra is able to. There is a very good reason why we have so many manuscripts from 1400 years ago, and that is because those things are BEASTS. There's definitely a phenomenon of survivorship bias, but any royal manuscript would be made with a well prepared skin and would be very difficult to tear.

I am aware that the very clear message of the scene is Rhaenyra's disregard for history and norms (literally ripping apart the annals of history with her bare hands), I wonder if we could have the same effect but with Rhaenyra pulling out a pen-knife or the like. She would still be destroying the manuscript, just with the weapons of war rather than with her hands.

Example of embroidery to repair a manuscript (Morgan Library)- Again, absolute beasts compared to modern books.

On manuscript physics...We also see one of the manuscripts have this wild separation between the text block and the spine:

Unlike modern book manufacturing, manuscripts usually have a very solid connection between the text block and the spine. This might be harder to verbalise than it is to show, so...The House of Stopan has lovely videos of the process, which I will be stealing for example here. Pages are sewn together on "cords":

Those cords are then cut short and frayed, then pulled through the book boards (which were usually actual pieces of thin wood, here however he's using a thicker cardboard). They're then glued to the boards.

A piece of leather (or other material), is then draped over and glued to the spine + on the outside of the boards. Those points of elevation on the spine, which I've seen added for purely aesthetic reasons in modern books (such as collector's editions), in manuscripts are actually the leather being smoothed over and shaped to the cords underneath.

The leather/material is prepared specifically so it conforms to the text block beneath. Pieces of thin cardboard or supporting material may be added between the cords on the spine.

If we take a look at this intact 11th c. Greek binding (sorry, only one I could find available!) you can actually still see the cords. In other words, I believe that an entire separation of the text block from the spine wouldn't really be plausible with a high grade manuscript (such as a courtly copy). I am no expert on manuscript manufacture, but within my knowledge of bookmaking, it stood out to me a bit! Happy to be corrected on this one especially :]

MS1175- 11thc

6. If I had to make one final note, so much of the series emphasises the fact that this is 200 years before GoT. There are attempts to archaeise various aspects of the keep and the armour. I would personally choose a script model that is a little older. I think there was probably a choice made about how accessible they wanted the manuscript text to be (so that dweebs like myself could actually read what's on the page), and I think using a slightly older script model like uncial/half-uncial would still reach that benchmark while appearing 'older'.

The Rushworth Gospels- 9thc.

Quite strangely enough Merlin, for all its historical inaccuracy actually does a really good job of hitting most of those notes I mentioned above (two compartment a's, neatly written 's's, etc.). Whether this would've been the actual script model used in Merlin's actual period is a whole different thing... and actually closer to my research interests!

As I mentioned at the beginning, I am not an expert in any sense of the word. For further reading you can check out Guide to Scripts Used in English Writings up to 1500, Cambridge History of the Book in Britain Series, A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 (although the plates kinda suck ass so beware.. the tragedies of photocopy technology), as really lovely books/series if you are interested! I find them to be very approachable reading for specialists/non-specialists alike and they are written by really the people who actually know about these things.

Scene.

[teddywesworl]

ok y'all said you want director's commentary so I'm gonna start by saying a couple things about 🪑 since it recently celebrated 2k kudos

🪑DIRECTOR'S COMMENTARY LET'S GO

1.

A fun fact about the poems at the beginning of each chapter is that I took two of the poet's classes in college, and she might be solely responsible for convincing me I was a good writer and should pursue the skill. I don't know how she'd feel about me using her poetry to thematically frame an explicit fanfic, but that's neither here nor there.

As a poet, she (I'm not naming her here in case she might possibly name search on tumblr, lol) is obsessed with transformation and with the discord between the material and spiritual self. Blackberries, Brambles in its entirety goes as follows:

Akhmatova wrote, "O look!—that fresh dark elderberry branch is like a letter from Marina…" And she was right, branches criss- cross, words sharpen. We lop them down, fit them into envelopes. But I forget: you don't do letters: Too much tangled in thickets and desperation. Did I say envelopes? I meant elevators. See, I've snagged favourite sweaters in high rises, snarled hair in hedges, given up skin scrapings for blackberries, tongueburst, the sweet stain, explosion under light canine pressure. Don't you just wish you were a dog sometimes? No panic. Romping through brambles. Even in delirium, near death, Akhmatova remembered. Her bitter friend had been dead a long time. Love. Don't think I'm thinking about you. Anything but you.

Akhmatova here being Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and the Marina in question is Marina Tsvetaeva. You can go on as much or as little of a research spiral about them as you like; many of the layers of this poem are in the reference to Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, but I was mostly interested in the commentary on the cost of pleasure. I've snagged favourite sweaters in high rises, snarled hair in hedges, given up skin scrapings for blackberries. What are you willing to pay for happiness? Wouldn't it be nice not to think about it? Wouldn't it be nice not to be afraid to pay?

2.

Obviously the other major literary framing device is A Room With A View. The movie, specifically, but obviously the Forster novel as well. A Room With A View is about the clash between tradition and modernity, familial duty vs. adventure and romance, etc. etc. etc. And like, listen, the Duffers have not put this much thought into Steve Harrington, but his arc, despite them, is that of the ultimate privileged 80s all-American masculine symbol taking a slow, deliberate turn toward Otherness. He was supposed to die a static character. He did not, and now we're all writing fic about it.

I probably didn't need to have Eddie literally whack the point home with a hammer with the you're Lucy line in chapter 2, but here we are.

3.

The other bits of ~Art~ in the Steve chapter are Elton John's The Fox and Bruce Springsteen's The River. As follows:

But if you’re wily, you will leave them lying, snared up in the traps that they set for you, Elton sings. And it’s an evergreen affair— Steve lifts the record out and replaces it with The River. Springsteen sings, you're walkin' tough, baby, but you're walkin' blind and that’s not really better.

The Elton John record, you may recall, was a compromise between Eddie and Nancy. The inclusion of these lines in particular was very vibes-based, but hopefully the vibes are semi-coherent. Snares. Traps. The hunter, the fox. Btw the next lines after these are:

As temptation taunts the fox Into the hunter's waiting lair

Which, okay. Teasing out the vibes just a little. Argyle interprets Nancy as Lucy (and implies, without meaning to, that Steve is Cecil--a character that represents old money and tradition and duty and, like. Being trapped). Nancy would probably also view herself as the titular Fox. And Steve has bought into this line of thinking! He sees himself as the snare! He has internalized the idea of life with him being a trap! He is Bullshit, etc.

Eddie complicates this self-concept. Through him, Steve becomes the Fox and Lucy. Temptation taunts the fox into the hunter's waiting lair, after all. And, you know: 🪑🪢

(The Springsteen lines are just. All Steve.)

Ok I have to go feed some horses. More.... later. eventually.