#morphic

[antialiart]

As of today*, Morphic has been part of my life for half of my life. As a milestone it's a little different from my half-life day for The Quest for the Legends back in 2014 - there, it was half of my life spent actively working on it when it was still in progress, while Morphic was officially finished inside four years, and while I've never stopped thinking about it and occasionally working on or posting extras, it doesn't have quite the same meaning. But nonetheless, that also means this smug asshole disaster man has been part of my life for half of my life, and that is worth at least a little stylized doodle.

I've just recently been picking up the pace on working on the upcoming Morphic rewrite, and hopefully I can keep that up more regularly, which is exciting.

* That's based on counting the day I started it as May 10th 2007, which is technically the day that chapter one was first published, on the Serebii.net forums, unlike with TQftL, whose June 19th anniversary was based on the creation date of the original Word document. I've considered this to be Morphic's anniversary because I don't know the exact day that I actually started to write it - by the time I checked, the only copies I could find of the original document had obviously newer creation dates. I do know on May 9th I posted in the QftL thread that I'd been working on a new fic, and that on April 30th I made a fateful post in a thread about Pokémorphs on the forums, mentioning that I'd once been considering writing a Pokémorph fic and musing that I might pick it up again. And I do also have a document, last modified January 25th 2006, where I'd written down a couple of paragraphs of my first initial idea of the opening of the fic, with placeholder character names, before putting the idea aside until that fateful thread.

[antialiasis]

Today is the 17th anniversary of Morphic! I would have liked to have time to do more for it, but didn't work out that way - however, I did today put together a couple of little drabbles for Thousand Roads' anniversary drabble bingo game.

[azrimar]

The art is old, but here's the refs for the main characters in this blog! I am sure nobody remembers them anymore xD My old blog was active at the time, but that was years ago

The first one is Adamai, a Morphic fey who is both smart and dumb at the same time. A chaotic dumbass, but brilliant with magic. Also mindfucked from Eldritch forces. He can acquire creature forms by touching the creature in question, but can not become energy creatures. The grey one with white hair is Arzhel, a Kivuuli who is basically batshit insane... in a fun way. But what do you expect from one who fucks with eldritch forces so much? He's chaotic, full of energy, has no filter, and is, like the others, a chaotic dumbass. The black and purple one is Katira, daughter of Adamai. She is a Reshviik, an amphibious race. Adamai took Reshviik form and sired her and a couple siblings, and she was the one who decided to come find her father and join him in all his shenanigans. She's spunky, quick witted, smart, and a bit of a goofball. She's resistant to the effects of Eldritch forces, but it's still caused a FEW things in her mind! And finally, there's Koltho, a Dhaebru. Fairly young, as far as his kind go, fresh into adulthood. He's the most sane of the bunch, a skittish and nervous thing, but also rather sweet. He and Katira have a thing with eachother, both being around the same age (Young adult newly matured) She finds him adorable and despite her chaotic nature, he finds her endearing. Not that he really understands these feelings he has for her... He's rather new to all this. I'll be redoing their refs, probably after Artfight. But this is what I got for now!

[carryoncastiel]

[soranatus]

PETE WHITE in The Venture Bros: “The Morphic Trilogy” (2018)

[antialiasis]

Aww, they’re adorable! <3

Jean and... also, Jean for @antialiasis

[ballofbitter]

When the curtains call the time Will we both go home alive? It wasn't hard to realize Love's the death of peace of mind [x]

[wild-magic-oops]

Can't resist a kiss

[antialiart]

Katherine as a Tyroguelia.

[antialiasis]

Groundhog Dave, the 16k-word Morphic time loop extra, is finally up on TCoD. If you've been following this blog for a while, you may have seen me intermittently talk about it. Long story short, Dave is trapped in a time loop on the day of chapter 13, and we explore how he responds and unravels.

Content warnings: This is a whump fic. It features some strong violence including gun violence, suicide and suicidal thoughts, brief vomiting, a deluge of strong and demeaning language, consumption of alcohol, heavy emotional distress, existential horror, and a whole lot of children dying.

Some rambling below the cut about how it came to be and my favorite bits in it.

The first inkling of this story was when I saw someone in the Groundhog Day tag on Tumblr writing a Newsies time loop fanfic titled Groundhog Dave. I have never seen Newsies and have no idea who that Dave is, but I think of Morphic Dave every time I see the name, so instantly I pictured Dave in a time loop on the day of chapter 13, and I could not stop intermittently thinking about it. Eventually, I started writing it.

I don't remember the process of beginning to write it super well, but I remember waiting for a coach at Port Authority with Negrek after seeing the actual Groundhog Day musical and typing up the bit in the third iteration where Dave rages at God on my phone, which was definitely one of the earliest bits I thought of. I know that for a while, what I had written up in the document was the first four iterations and a bit: the original, the one that more or less spawns the Dave and Mia Discuss Family AU, the one where he snaps and gets himself killed, the one where he wakes up after that and decides he can experiment and figure this out, and the summary of his next few goes. I know the document was stuck there for a while, with intermittent tinkering and vague ideas but nothing really in the way of writing progress. On August 12th 2021, I posted in the Thousand Roads Discord about how I'd just written an entire NaNo day's worth of Groundhog Dave, and I'm quite sure there I was referring to the scene where Dave is at the hospital, fails to shoot himself to end the loop, and talks with Cheryl. In 2023, I started doing regular sprints working on it (thanks, Negrek), which was what finally got me past the finish line; before that, the document stood at about 8500 words, while it ended up at about 16500 (though with some bits and notes at the bottom).

The actual ending went through a series of iterations as I was working on it. My first idea for an ending for it was just a cruel, "He does finally fix everything and all the kids live, and then he goes to bed and wakes up in the canon timeline, because he cannot have nice things." This wasn't a super satisfying idea, of course, by itself. I went back and forth through various possibilities from there over the story's development time. At one point or another I considered different variations on whether he does manage to stay in a Better Timeline or whether he ends up back in the canon one at the end, how exactly the loop ends up breaking (initially I was genuinely thinking the loop would break one way or another once nobody dies and the Character Development would have to be leading up towards that, but later I realized it was actually tastier if he does manage it and the loop just keeps going anyway; the precise nature of the Character Development involved was also a bit back and forth), and whether the whole thing would be completely unexplained in the vein of Groundhog Day itself or if I would make more ambiguous use of Lucy's recurring penchant for being involved with bizarre supernatural happenings in non-canon extras.

I'm pretty satisfied with what I did end up with, at any rate. My first inkling of the Lucy thing was just sort of ending with ambiguous Lucy, and I wasn't sure that would really work, but it felt a lot more appropriate to actually do that once Lucy tied more into his overall character development - the couple of early iterations where he takes things out on her specifically as if it's her fault or she should have intervened, his general guilt about actually using her to intervene, the repeated conversations in the car where she manages to confront him at the right moment with why he's so mean, him managing to choose to let go and not be an ass to her in the final scene. I'm also pleased with what I landed on with the several different things happening for the first time in the final iteration: him actually mustering the ability to articulate how much he needs the kids for his life to be worth anything, and affirming that he'll keep doing it even if he'll never get to live in the good timelines, and being forced to confront the ways in which he's been cruel and unpleasant to the kids despite how much they mean to him and choose not to, and finally being able to express an honest vulnerable emotion to Jean, accept her offer for emotional support and ask her to stay up with him because he needs that. Something just feels a lot stronger to me about it with a greater degree of ambiguity about the end of the loop, no one single obvious switch that's the thing like someone was dutifully waiting for him to just say this one magic word. (Similarly, what exactly Lucy did in fact have to do with this, if anything, had to be ambiguous. The loop cannot be a concrete phenomenon with a clear singular cause, or it would have just felt wrong. I have realized I have strong feelings on when fiction should be deliberately ambiguous, not because there is a concrete truth that the author is arbitrarily concealing to force you to guess, but because one way or another establishing any concrete truth would detract or distract from the story being told.)

Some little things I enjoy in this story:

Dave's increasingly frazzled awakenings in the first few loops just really tickle me.

Him knocking on the door, then realizing Cheryl heard his sky-rant and just immediately turning around to go on an ill-advised suicide mission to the church rather than have to try to explain that to her amuses me greatly. What a timeline.

My favorite bit of said suicide mission is actually the bit where he's lying there dying and manages to spend that time being restlessly, angrily impatient about how long it's taking and grasping hard for some sense of satisfaction in having killed this stranger, without ever managing it. The most pathetic possible suicidal rampage of revenge.

The hospital bathroom scene is still my favorite scene in the whole thing. It presses my particular whump buttons extremely hard, and it's just extremely representative of Dave and his problems, him mercilessly bullying himself and Cheryl trying very genuinely to reach out to him and let him know he's not alone while he compulsively rejects it, adamant that he doesn't need anyone or anything even though he's acutely suffering, resenting her for it and shooting back at her efforts with pointless, uncalled-for sarcasm. It also has some of my very favorite lines: "There was a knock on the door and he lowered the gun quickly, like a kid caught playing with something he shouldn't," "What the actual fuck did she think he was doing in here," "Still there?" answered irritably with, "There's only one door. Do the math," when he came so, so close to not in fact still being there. So fond of it.

The offhand unelaborated upon mention that Dave has at one point or another read enough to not bungle a suicide by gunshot is extremely some precise button that I have.

I'm also deeply fond of the iteration where Gabriel dies. Dave tries so hard to force himself to decide he can live with that and just decidedly does not succeed. I enjoy him sitting there irritably thinking maybe they should have just done this in the first place when the others attempt to safely reach the police, silently pretty much convinced that would have been a better idea and thinking all this could have been avoided (but without actually consciously admitting to having been wrong, of course), only to immediately go, "He'd always known this was a bad idea. Why'd he even fucking let them?" when the consequences come knocking. You fucking let them because you thought it was probably a good idea at the time, Dave.

I really enjoy how much Dave cares about the kids, can't not care about the kids, while most of the kids have a hard time grasping how much he cares because he's so persistently Like That. Loved to write the multiple times Jack viciously accuses him of not caring about Gabriel, and the way Dave's idea of disabusing him of the notion is just to be an asshole to him, because he's incapable of expressing sincere emotional sentiment. Lucy, similarly, keeps probing him about what he's going to do if the loop doesn't stop, and he just keeps answering in evasive, defensive irritation as if she's challenging him somehow, until he finally manages to realize that no, she was worried that if his efforts wouldn't end the loop he might just stop bothering. (Only then he's finally been driven far enough to actually manage a smidge of emotional honesty.)

Similar recurring horrible dramatic irony I enjoyed: Dave hates Jean's evolved form so, so horribly much when it's just a hypothetical manifestation of Something Horrible Happening To Her that he's trying to stop and not what his daughter really looks like. One of the things that only quite felt right when I'd finally landed back on him ending up in the canon timeline was that he then actually has to confront the cruelty of that with himself and affirm his unconditional love for her, instead of being 'rewarded' with the cuter, unevolved Jean.

I always get a kick out of how relatively easily Dave in nonsenscial situations just slides from adamant atheism into antitheism without a pause. He's perfectly genuine about thinking God doesn't exist, of course, but there is a level on which he kind of wants him to, just so he can face him and walk backwards into Hell, and as a result you get these situations where he sort of entertains the idea far more easily than he rationally should given his priors. The yelling at God about why he isn't curing malaria instead of whatever this is is pretty unique to the very particular mental state he's in on that iteration, but the multiple times he offhandedly thinks maybe this is literally Hell are total nonsense in his professed belief system but nonetheless a place where his mind is just inclined to go.

Meanwhile, I also enjoy the bit where Mia gets him to contemplate that he might be experiencing proof that souls exist - but he's less willing to entertain that in the same way because it doesn't have the same emotional valence for him, so it's not something that properly occurred to him before that, and then he just throws up his hands and moves on.

Thanks if you read it! I would love to hear any thoughts on it.

[messiahzzz]

[antialiasis]

Awww, the boy with his card games! Thank you <333

Birthday drawing for @antialiasis

[chilljustacat]

Baldur's Gate 3 locations 38/?

[waterdeeping]

I hope that wasn't our last kiss. I'd take a thousand more if I could.

[durgetavoc]

Also, I finally got the infamous Morphic Pool Angst™ scene.

And damn.

Durge is just… broken. She feels like she missed something, like she failed somehow. "Maybe I should have told him to stay back," she thinks, but it felt so symbolic for him to come with her to stop the Netherbrain—to finish what they started. And then, to try to start over. Thanks to her companions and her own journey, she believes in second chances. She believed in him.

But when the Netherbrain began speaking, saying it respected Durge once but never respected Gortash, Durge’s heart sank. Anxiety churned inside her, a terrible premonition taking root. She wanted to tell him to run, just to get away, but—1) She was frozen. 2) She had to keep up her role as leader, focused on her target. 3) There wasn’t time, because the moment that thought crossed her mind, he was already gone. Dead. Instantly. At her feet.

The world had never felt so silent after that. A void tore open inside her, but she kept going, kept pushing forward. She had no choice. Even when the Emperor finally saved her and the group, she wasn’t really there.

And then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw his lifeless body, carried into the Astral Plane. She followed, and it was impossible to pull her away. As she knelt there, fragments of memories began flooding back.

And then it hit her— The breakdown.

For the first time, after the shock settled in, she truly sobbed for his death and said "I think I liked you too sorry". Overwhelmed by grief, regret, and memories. Even when her friends tried to reach her, pleading with her to come back to camp to rest, she refused to move. She stayed there, who knows how long, in that dimension. Staring into the abyss, as her butler might have put it.

Then came the anger. The rage.

She turned it into her new purpose. She took Gortash’s mantle, letting it become a physical reminder of her determination.

She would save the world, as promised, symbolically with him by her side. She would repair the mistakes of her past.

And maybe. Maybe she'll be in peace.