#only including games i started in 2024. 'games i made' includes games i made that came out 2024 (i started alonas in '23)

[suzuran777]

BL game magazine Cool-B will be ceasing publication this month

After 20 years, BL visual novel magazine Cool-B is publishing its final issue at the end of this month. As someone who was always looking forward to the new information featured in the magazine, I'm sad to see it go, though I do understand the reasoning behind it. Due to rising manufacturing costs, in 2024 Cool-B was re-branded to Cool-B Kiwami, and the publishing schedule was changed to quarterly instead of bi-monthly. So for some time, it seemed like the magazine would continue with this new schedule. However, unfortunately in October 2024, another announcement was made on their social media in which they mentioned that the magazine would end publication in January 2025, as the contract with their publisher was also coming to an end.

Compared to 20 or even 10 years ago, the BL visual novel market has changed a lot and the number of newly released games is much smaller nowadays. Despite that, Cool-B continued publishing information, working closely with BL visual novel writers and artists to publish short stories and illustrations. The opinions of fans were important to them too, as they would organize yearly popularity polls and included game sales statistics and information about which new games people were looking forward to the most. The magazine's editors always seemed passionate about their work and even in their final statement, they mentioned that they want to find a way to continue, though right now they are unsure how.

Cool-B started publication in 2005, though its predecessor Binetsu Ouji released its first issue in 2002. Around this time, there were several other magazines which published information about BL visual novels, which I've written about in this blog post. All of them were eventually discontinued, which resulted in Cool-B becoming the only BL visual novel magazine. The other day the official Twitter/X account revealed the cover of the final issue, and instead of featuring a single game on the cover, they decided to include all of the previous covers. The text "最終号:BLゲームは不滅です" roughly translates to ''Final issue: BL games are immortal" implying that there will always be BL game creators who are passionate about their projects who will continue making new games in the future. And I think they're right, as earlier this week Parade (known for NO, THANK YOU!!!, Room No.9 and Lkyt.) announced their fourth game "lesson" which is scheduled to be released this year. The cover of the final Cool-B issue also teases a completely new project by Yura from Tennenouji (known for Miracle No-ton, Luckydog1 and Friendly Lab) as well as a completely voiced remake of a BL visual novel that was released in 2001 called Seraphim Spiral. Carnelian's new project Tokyo Gentou (or Tokyo Phantasmagoria) is also scheduled to be released this year, as well as the second part of Ooe which many BL fans are looking forward to, as part 1 was incredibly well received.

Including the final issue, Cool-B published 118 issues of the magazine between 2005 and 2025. They also had their own otome game magazines, Sweet Princess and Bitter Princess. As it's a bit difficult to see what's on each cover in the image above, I uploaded another image which should make it a bit easier to see. I also compiled a list of all the games/game franchises featured on each cover which you can check below. Some official game titles are rather long, so sometimes I wrote the name fans typically use when they refer to these games, but I think you should still be able to find it on vndb (visual novel database) if you want to learn more about these games.

1) Gakuen Heaven. 2) White Shadow. 3) Hanamachi Monogatari. 4) Torus Zero. 5) Lamento. 6) Messiah. 7) Gakuen Heaven. 8) Laughter Land. 9) Messiah. 10) Lamento. 11) Lamento. 12) Kichiku Megane. 13) Magia Mystica. 14) Ore no Shita de Agake. 15) Square na Kankei. 16) Maid★Hajimemashita. 17) Messiah. 18) Fanatica. 19) Togainu no Chi. 20) sweet pool. 21) Messiah. 22) sweet pool. 23) Kichiku Megane. 24) Luckydog1. 25) Hanakage. 26) Luckydog1. 27) Gakuen Heaven. 28) Hanakage. 29) Luckydog1. 30) STEAL! 31) sweet pool/Lamento/Togainu no Chi. 32) Luckydog 1. 33) Gakuen Heaven. 34) Togainu no Chi. 35) DRAMAtical Murder. 36) Gakuen Heaven.

37) Luckydog1. 38) Shingakkou. 39) Luckydog1. 40) Taishou Mebiusline. 41) Luckydog1. 42) DRAMAtical Murder. 43) Luckydog1. 44) DRAMAtical Murder. 45) DRAMAtical Murder. 46) Luckydog1. 47) DRAMAtical Murder. 48) Omertà. 49) DRAMAtical Murder. 50) Gakuen Heaven. 51) Luckydog1. 52) Si-Nis-Kanto. 53) Omertà. 54) Taishou Mebiusline. 55) Luckydog1. 56) DRAMAtical Murder. 57) DRAMAtical Murder. 58) Luckydog1. 59) Tsumi naru Rasen no Ori. 60) Togainu no Chi. 61) Gakuen Heaven. 62) Tokyo Onmyouji. 63) Luckydog1. 64) Luckydog1. 65) Taishou Mebiusline. 66) Luckydog1. 67) Togainu no Chi/Lamento/sweet pool/DRAMAtical Murder. 68) New World Order. 69) Luckydog1. 70) Luckydog1. 71) Taishou Mebiusline. 72) Omega Vampire.

73) Luckydog1. 74) Togainu no Chi/Lamento/sweet pool/DRAMAtical Murder. 75) Taishou Mebiusline. 76) Luckydog1. 77) Hashihime. 78) Paradise. 79) Luckydog1. 80) Luckydog1. 81) Paradise. 82) Nie no Machi. 83) Luckydog1. 84) Omega Vampire. 85) Luckydog1. 86) Nie no Machi. 87) Luckydog1. 88) Luckydog1. 89) Uuultra C. 90) Tokyo 24-ku. 91) Friendly Lab. 92) Lkyt. 93) Uuultra C. 94) Dystopia no Ou. 95) Uuultra C. 96) Slow Damage. 97) Luckydog1. 98) Tokyo 24-ku. 99) Hashihime. 100) Luckydog1. 101) Luckydog1. 102) Hashihime. 103) Friendly Lab. 104) Suito wa Hakumei. 105) Haiiro no Arcadia. 106) Hashihime. 107) Hashihime. 108) Hashihime. 109) NU:Carnival. 110) Tokyo Satsujinki. 111) Friendly Lab. 112) Luckydog1. 113) Hashihime. 114) Psychic Eclipse. 115) Luckydog1. 116) Ooe. 117) Luckydog1/Friendly Lab/Miracle Noton.

Some additional information which I thought was interesting -There are three games featured on the cover of the magazine that were never actually released and cancelled, which are White Shadow (2), Torus Zero (4) and New World Order (68), so you won't be able to find these on vndb as it unfortunately deletes these entries. I did include all three of them in a previous post about cancelled/unreleased BL visual novels if you want to check them out! (I just noticed all the typos in these older blog posts…please bear with me). Two of these game developers are still around, as Core recently returned as Procyon, and Holicworks still releases games, so perhaps some of their ideas were re-purposed, or scrapped for other ideas. There's actually a fourth game which hasn't been released yet which is Suito wa Hakumei featured on issue 104, though its status is currently unknown.

-In total, 31 of the covers feature characters from the Luckydog1 games, therefore Tennenouji is also the creator that was featured the most on the covers. Friendly Lab also has 3 covers (4 if you include the one with all of the Tennenouji game characters), therefore the total number of Tennenouji covers is 34, which is almost 40% of the covers. I'm assuming that Cool-B staff always worked closely with Yura, but Luckydog1 does have many different games, with the covers featuring Luckydog1, Gian-carlo's LUCKY HAPPY LIFE, Gian no Tame Nara Sekai o Kowasu, Luckydog1 + Badegg, Mr. Giancarlo and the Vita and Nintendo Switch ports of the first game. In the 117th issue, Yura did mention that the series was finished now with the release of the PC version of Mr. Giancarlo, and that she wants to focus on a completely different series now.

-The company with the second largest number of covers is Nitro+CHiRAL, with a total of 20 covers (about 23%). Among the Nitro+CHiRAL, games, DRAMAtical Murder has the most covers, advertising the first game, fandisc, anime and vita port. Of course, Nitro+Chiral is also known for its crossovers between their own games, so there are multiple covers which feature characters from different games together, promoting events such as the Chiral Night. Some of these feature the Chiral Night's mascot Naito-kun as well.

By the way, the magazine would always come with different postcards if you pre-ordered it from a specific website, and these postcards would feature new art from even more games, so fans had a lot of things they could collect. These were limited-edition, but you can still find people selling them second-hand on websites like Surugaya, Yahoo auctions, Mercari and more. Other than publishing magazines, Cool-B also released several artbooks, such as the Hashihime, Uuultra C, and Taishou Mebiusline official artbooks. I'm not quite sure what will happen to the sales of this as other stores like Stellaworth also sell them and they're often out of stock, but only time will tell.

To conclude this, I do hope they will be able to continue publishing information as they're clearly passionate about what they do. I always had a lot of fun guessing what kind of game would be on the next cover, as well as collecting postcards of games I liked. It's kind of sad that any future games won't have this, as the magazine would often publish original short stories and promotional material about these new games too. Even if the development of some games took a long time, it never really felt long as we would usually get updates every two months when Cool-B was released. Cool-B would often publish new chapters of manga too, such as the Paradise and Hashihime manga, so I do wonder what will happen to these and if they will be published somewhere else.

[bobzora]

games i played in 2024 tierlist

[fans4wga]

26 July update from WGA's Chris Keyser

From the WGA: With SAG-AFTRA now on strike and new levels of solidarity across all Hollywood unions, we are witnessing the spectacular failure of the AMPTP’s negotiating strategy. In this video, WGA Negotiating Committee Co-Chair Chris Keyser lays out what this moment means and how we move forward. To learn more about the WGA strike, visit https://www.wgastrike.org.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Fellow members of the WGA East and West. It's been a while since our last video and quite a bit has happened in the meantime. So on behalf of the negotiating committee and leadership, I wanted to give you an update on where we are and what the near future at least is likely to bring.

We've been walking side by side on picket lines in New York and Los Angeles for a little over 12 weeks now. Only now we're joined by thousands upon thousands of members of SAG-AFTRA who, like us, have finally had enough.

This is the endpoint and the fruit of the AMPTP’s game plan. For 11 weeks, they negotiated with everyone but us. They claimed it was just practicality, that they could only do one thing at a time, which is not normally a point of pride. But events have made clear what we knew from the start: that not only was it a strategy, it was their only strategy. Negotiate a deal with a single guild and impose that deal on every other guild and union in Hollywood, whether it addresses the needs of those unions or not, all with the implicit threat: if you want more, strike for it.

Wow. It’s their 2007-8 playbook applied to 2023 as if nothing has changed, as if the accumulation of economic insults and injuries inflicted on us over the past decade would be borne in perpetual silence, as if the giant of labor had not awakened. But it has. And you only need to look as far as the front gates of every studio in LA and New York to see the evidence.

Two unions on strike willing to exercise their power, despite the pain, to ensure their members get the contract they deserve. For us, that means addressing the relentless mistreatment of screenwriters, which has only been exacerbated by the move to streaming; the continued denial of full MBA protection to comedy variety and other appendix A writers when they work in streaming; and the self-destructive unsustainable dismantling of the process by which episodic television is made and episodic television writers are paid.

It means addressing the existential threat of AI and the insufficiency of streaming residual formulas, including the need for transparency and a success-based component. All of these will need to be addressed for there to be a deal because in this strike it is our power and not their pattern that matters, not their strategy. Their strategy has failed them. Now they're in the midst of a streaming war with each other, an admittedly difficult transition. And as they face the future, their interests and business models could not be more different from Disney to Sony to Netflix to Amazon.

We root for their success, all of them. They root for each other's failure. We are the creative ammunition through which they will succeed. They are each other's apex predators. And yet, in a singular shared dedication to denying labor, they have shackled themselves together in what increasingly seems like a mutual suicide pact, as the 2023-24 broadcast season and the 2024-25 movie schedule and its streaming shows disappear, melt away week by week.

So what does this mean? What does it mean going forward? How do you play chess against an opponent who insists on screaming checkmate at every move regardless of how the board looks and the game is going?

You stay firm, you stay resolved, because our cause is no less existential than when we started and our leverage is increasing every day. Alone we withheld our labor with the support of our union siblings and the Teamsters and IATSE and the Crafts, we were able to delay the vast majority of production. Now with SAG-AFTRA on strike, those few studio projects that remained have also shut down. And it's not just the obvious delays. If this strike drags on, it's the actors with conflicting obligations and the directors and the double-booked studio facilities and release date chaos that the companies must now also contend with. Some of their most valuable product could well be delayed for years.

Add to that, no promotion of movies or television shows and famous faces on the picket lines and social media speaking directly to their customers. For the tech companies and the mega corporations, that should be their nightmare scenario: WGA and SAG-AFTRA side by side. Our bargaining agenda may not be identical, but our cause is the same. Our army of labor, defending labor has increased 17-fold in the past two weeks alone.

Even so, even with all this wind at our backs this negotiation won't happen overnight. It's not because the negotiations themselves are so complex. Once the companies fully engage, it could go very quickly, but because their strategy of many decades has just fallen apart and they didn't see it coming, and it's going to take them a minute to regroup, 'cause the companies have things to work out internally, and saying no to labor in unison is a lot easier than saying yes. So either together or separately, as their divergent interests might suggest, they will come back to us, despite their understandable concern about how they've navigated this transition to streaming, which is on their heads and not ours; and their worries about costs and their worries about Wall Street; despite this being a season of doom and gloom, none of them are walking away from the riches of this business, and certainly not over the equitable minimum compensation to writers.

They didn't get the deal they wanted; that's fine, it happens all the time. They're not taking their ball and going home over it. And since we know they come from union families themselves, and since they've denied that “even-in-Hollywood-you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me” ugliness of threatening to starve us out and leave us homeless (which we assume they understand also means making our children homeless,) they will come back to us. Although I will say they took a long time to deny that statement, longer than I would have had it been ascribed to me.

But what does it matter? You can starve a labor force slowly or quickly. The effect is the same. It's not like day rates for comedy variety writers and endless free drafts for screenwriters in exchange for a single paid one in four-week mini-rooms isn't cruelty. It's just cruelty written in contract language instead of a press quote.

So what can we expect from the companies as all of this plays itself out? They will try to convince Wall Street that taking a strike, prolonging it unnecessarily, losing their content stream in the process—that all of that is just smart business and no reason for investor concern. We will be talking to Wall Street too, and reminding them that for all these companies, all of 'em including Netflix, the bill, the price for making nothing, will eventually come due. And Wall Street is listening already. Here's Michael Pachter, managing director of equity research at Wedbush on Yahoo Finance the other day: “I think the studios are completely wrong on this one. Content is their lifeblood. They're feeling really foolish about this."

Wall Street isn't the only one listening. We've been talking to union pension funds too about the risks the companies are taking. We talked to CalPERS, the largest public pension plan in the country, talked about the loss of programming and the cost to the industry, and we heard strong support from its board for our struggle and the promise that the companies will be hearing from them, from CalPERS, and demanding answers on behalf of its 2 million members.

To us, of course, they will continue to plead temporary poverty, but we know the drill. These companies support billions into the streaming wars and taken short-term losses these past three years, because they know that to the winner will go the spoils. We're patient, will they share that with us when the time comes? What are the chances?

Since 2017, the last time the studios negotiated with us outside of COVID, the big six companies alone have made $150 billion in profits off our work, while they slashed our pay and degraded our working conditions. Maybe if they had shared a tiny piece of that then, made $1 billion or so less, this year wouldn't seem so costly. As it is, there is no iron law that these companies are entitled to record profits every year, and it isn't some great travesty if their shareholders or their CEOs get a slightly smaller slice of the massive profits we helped create if some balance is restored.

Look, no one denies that corporations exist to make a profit and no one wants our employers to be profitable more than we do, but the singular pursuit of corporate profits to the exclusion of their social and human cost is a real problem in this country—it’s a real problem. A corporation's bottom line is not the same as the world’s, and there is nothing in our studio's bottom lines today that accounts for the quality of our lives or for our dignity, for the comfort of our retirement or the security of our families. Their numbers have no conscience, but the people who report them as victories ought to.

In their refusal to recognize that, these companies have also extracted an awful price, which is laid at their feet and for which they are responsible. Losses to the economies of New York and Los Angeles and everywhere that film and television are made, terrible losses that mount every day, thousands of people out of work; not just us, all the crews, the crafts, the janitors, the drivers, the businesses that thrive when Hollywood thrives, the restaurants, the stores—for what? For nothing. So they could avoid coming to the table to negotiate the deal they will one day give us. Measured today that is the painfully mixed legacy of our employers, weighed against every beautiful piece of work we have made with them.

And if history is a guide, they have only temporary stewardship over a kind of national trust, which is Hollywood. Our story, our sometimes conscience, our public conversation, our diversion of the worst and best of times, our greatest export, the repository of our imagination. They have some obligation to more than just their shareholders to behave accordingly.

Unfortunately, it seems big tech, mega corporations, and some of the people who run them, as the saying goes know the price of everything and the value of nothing. So they have built a business model that no longer works for human beings who cannot be paid minimum for 10 to 20 weeks a year and make a career out of that, be paid for one draft of a screenplay that demands a year of labor, be paid a few episodic fees for a show about which to take years to decide be paid a daily rate.

And now we have a first glimpse of what they offered our actor colleagues. We are not 170,000 Willy Lomans to be used and then discarded. We know what the companies believe they have the power to do. We know what they think machines can do and do without any of us. Oh yeah, we've seen the writing on the wall and it's plagiarized.

The thing is this: the difference between what you CAN do and what you SHOULD do is the greatest single difference in the world. Knowing that is the only real protection we have against a dystopian future. And if the companies sometimes forget that, writers will do it for them.

I can't know exactly how long it will take this revolutionary moment, and you've heard again and again what is happening today has not happened in 63 years, but I know that's not always how it feels, revolutionary and defining, even though we celebrate that on picket lines together, which is the right thing to do. That's not always how it feels when you go home at night. I know how tough this is: to strike, to hold the line. I know it gets tougher every day even with SAG-AFTRA marching beside us, how hard it is to face the uncertainty of when it will end, when we'll get back to work, how we'll pay the bills. I know it's hardest for those who've just gotten started, for those for whom the world opens doors more reluctantly, battled their whole life just to get here; but hard too for those struggling to maintain their long careers, who find work tougher and tougher to come by, or those with families with children or parents to take care of.

These companies understand the cruelty of what they're doing. It's their plan to starve us just a little, to exact as much pain as they can so that we wish more for the pain to end than for the better life we dreamed up. That we're more afraid of the uncertainty of the present than the certain devastation of the future. It's societally acceptable economic torture inflicted by management on labor every day, then blamed on labor for daring to fight back, for refusing to be complicit in its own mistreatment.

Here's how I know that's not going to work. Not with us, not with the writers, because we haven't come all this way, fought to have these careers in the first place, all the adversity, and marched together for all these months, only to let it slip away on our watch—because there is no point in rushing back to jobs that may not be there in a year or two anyway. Because the business, as the companies have twisted it, is now untenable, unsurvivable for so many of us, because even success is not enough to keep going, because this guild is younger than it's ever been and more diverse. And this young diverse membership knows from hard personal experience the system is broken and that it will not be fixed unless they fix it. And those of us who came before them will not let them down, because we and the writer's guild are the beneficiaries of all those who came before us who gave up everything for us.

Like the writers of 1960, the year I was born, who struck for 22 weeks and who gave away all the TV residuals for all the movies they had ever written so that we could have a health insurance and pension plan and residuals from that date forward. $15 billion flowed to writers and their benefit plans because of that sacrifice. Because writers are brave, because now it's our turn.

So what's our job? Even as we welcome SAG-AFTRA to our side, we are still responsible for our own deal, and so we must remain focused and diligent. We must continue to march, picket signs in hand. But we should also remember this and with pride, that before there was SAG-AFTRA, before even the Teamsters and IATSE and the laborers and the electrical workers and the musicians and the plasterers came to our side, there was the writers. Alone then, we looked at the blank page and began to imagine the future. With no net but each other we typed the words, what if?

And then we took a step into the darkness and found that it was light. And then we were joined by the crews and the drivers and the actors. The actors got a bit more fanfare when they showed up, but that's okay, we wrote the script. The WGA, still small, not alone anymore after all these decades. Hollywood labor has finally linked arms and found its voice, and that voice says enough. There is no road to longterm prosperity that burns a path through your own workforce. We are not your enemies. We are not merely a cost to be borne. We are your partners and your greatest asset. And we are, as you acknowledge yourselves, irreplaceable, but by accident or design and it doesn't really matter anymore, the business you are running no longer works for those who work for you.

What is the point in continuing to deny that? Why deny it when everyone else in the business to a person tells you it's true? Do you think it's a coincidence that two unions are on strike against you for the first time since Eisenhower was president? You can't exactly accuse us of being quick on the trigger. The effect has a cause, it has a cause. And there is no profit in insisting on the answers to the past for the questions of the future.

But if you want instead to invest in something that will reap you fortunes, I have a tip. And if you are visionaries, envision a solution, not a stalemate. Because this isn't a war we're in, it's a negotiation, it's just a negotiation. There is no face-saving here for either side, because there is no winner or loser. It's just a deal. And when you come to remember that again we will be here as we have been here all along.

And at this point with 170,000 writers and actors aligned against your intransigence, that is as generous as I can be, as close to an olive branch as I can offer. But if you insist instead on the same threatening rhetoric, on saying you would rather starve us than pay us, I would remind you of this: You are fighting for a dollar, we are fighting for survival. We are fighting for our home: writing is where we live, and we will defend that home with a bravery and stamina and ferocity that you will come to understand someday, which is why you cannot break us. You cannot outlast us, you cannot.

And not just because we have the will, because we have power. Nothing in this business happens until we start to write. And we will not start to write until we are paid.

Union now. Union forever.

[absolutebl]

Best 24 of BL 2024 - Quirky Awards

ONLY shows that ENDED their runs in 2024 are up for awards.

SHOCK & AWE AWARDS

1. Biggest BL surprise of 2024:

Cherry Magic Thailand. TayNew's version was truly a lovely experience and very much its own take on the original, an adaptation rather than a remake. I'm so relieved and grateful that GMMTV managed to pull it off, and sad it wasn't more widely available.

2. The “that country did WHAT?” award:

Meet You At the Blossom from China. From start to finish it is exactly as it claimed to be, wuxia BL, including more than the expected amount of sexual claiming (dubious consent to the point of rape) and actual kisses, wife language, floaty sleeves, you name it. FROM CHINA!!!

3. Biggest casting whoa! where did you come from? award:

Up & Poom in My Stand-In. I mean, WHERE did you two come from and how did this happen? Holy smokes. My goodness are we grateful!

4. That studio did WHAT now? award:

Youku putting Unknown out wide and easily avaiable on YouTube (for most of us). It's just really rare for a Taiwanese BL to get any kind of distribution. And to do that with arguably the best TaBL of the year and not some sad little mew mew? Amazing.

5. I’m sad you were ignored award:

Sugar Dog Life - such a charming JBL, so hard to find. I'm so sad it didn't get distribution. It's charming, one of my favorites of the year, worth tracking down if you can.

6. 2024 BL That Actually Made Me Lose My Mind Award?

I gotta be honest, it was The Sign. I was such a chaotic mess of a show but never once was I bored. It was the only one that drove me into memes and captions and silliness.

I did go a bit feral for a while over Love for Loves Sake and Wandee Gooday not to mention The Only One (until it went tits-up).

NARRATIVE AWARDS

7. Best story 2024:

Cherry Magic (Thai remake). I know, but it worked just as well in another country, if not better. I always enjoy this kind of magical realism concept (after all Color Rush is one of my all time favorite BLs) and despite the increased length, the pacing was solid on this one... even from Thailand.

8. Best narrative structure 2024 award:

Love For Love's Sake. A KBL isekai about a man who must win a game by convincing a reserved teen outcast to fall in love with him. Of course, that teen represents himself and his own unhappiness. I drowned in this show and liked it that way.

9. Best 2024 dialogue (script) award:

We Are, it was just so much fun. And so FUNNY.

10. Favorite scene 2024:

Like anyone needed to ask. Unknown, of course.

11. The most rewatchable BL of 2024 award:

We Are

It's just all the couples are so cute and the core friendship group is so charming and endearing.

ACTORS & CHARACTERS AWARDS

12. Best performance of a queer actor in a leading role:

no award this year, yeah the whole damn industry should be thoroughly ashamed of itself

13. Best pining 2024:

The Time of Fever. That feeding him orange while lying on the floor scene ALONE.

14. Best wingman 2024 (The Namgoong Award)

Yai in The Sign.

15. Biggest OMG I LOVE you boys together, YAY!

SailubPon from Pit Babe & This Love Doesn't Have Longbeans, from the softness of one to the health code violations of the other. Sure their shows are bonkers, but man are these two good at bonkers (and bonking).

With a nod to BigPark from Monster Next Door.

16. Most unexpected return of a BL pair? award:

OffGun. There were rumors that Off was out at the beginning of 2023. And then they came back with 2 shows in 2024 (Cooking Crush and The Trainee)!

17. Well aren't you two just the prettiest? award:

I dithered a lot (Babe's damn waist and OMG The Sign's sex scenes hawt), but in the end it had to go to GreatInn. They were just so good at showing their characters having FUN together. There is a lot of beauty in enjoying sex and another person's company. It's so rare to see that portrayed in a BL (and it shouldn't be rare).

18. LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

I'm actually giving it to OffGun. Ya know, where others falter, these two just keep going. It's kinda amazing.

RANDOM PICKS

19. Favorite Linguistic Moment of 2024:

The general flirtatious banter from Last Twilight.

20. Biggest disappointment of 2024:

Addicted Heroin (Thai version). Some of the very best original material + one of my favorite Thai actors (who I've been waiting eons to see in a BL again) and THIS was the result? They could have fixed China's worst BL mistake, instead the made everything worse. I'm gonna be bitter for a really really long time.

I gotta sat The Only One comes a real close second tho. And I'm still mad about Last Twilight, too.

21. Best Wardrobe/Prop Use 2023

Meet You At The Blossom - I love a pretty boy pissing contest over who has the biggest sleeves. Twirl you beautiful bastards, TWIRL!

22. Best Queer Rep 2024

Again, not great this year. I loved the fun sex and play in Wandee, but there were precious few femme characters, and in general it felt like we took some steps back from queerness this year. So I'm gonna give it to Deep Night, because at least they gave us honest poly for the first time.

23. Best Meta Trope call out

Love for Love Sake - Korea taking to task the Dead Fish Kiss when they are often the worst offender was...... amusing.

But Deep Night having male sex workers having to act like they were in a BL for a couple chicks...... literally gay for pay depicting gay for pay and just, well, that's frankly a gut punch. There was some sarcastic clapping on my side of the screen.

24. Well aren't you getting all Live Action Yaoi retro with your bad self?

Dominant Yakuza and Wimpy Corporate Slave gets my vintage af award. I flipping LOVED it. Would I recommend it? Only if you, yourself, are a bit vintage.

Final question: which of the 24 was the hardest for me to pick?

20 Biggest disappointment of 2024. Look I had some pretty high expectations of some returning pairs, some great ideas, and some intriguing remakes. 2024 was full of disappointments.

2022's Version of the Quirkies

2023's Version of the Quirkies

Remember I only pull from shows that were completely finished by the end of 2024.

(source)

[moonshynecybin]

I’ve only been into/started following MotoGP for a few months. Can I ask how exactly did Marc getting the Ducati seat go down? I’ve seen references of it being jorge messing up/rejecting the seat and that somehow leading to Marc masterminding his way to it but don’t fully get it. Thank you :))))

lmao it was awesome. under the cut shes crazy shes long shes the war of the roses shes game of thrones shes ducati being fucking STUPID !!!!!

okay so the beginning of this season going towards the middle was like. genuinely dominated by discussion of who would end up with the second factory ducati seat, and there were 3 main candidates for the position: 1. enea bastianini, who had the seat but who had had a spotty 2023 marred by injury and was delivering inconsistent results in the early part of 2024, 2. jorge martin, who had been basically promised the seat ahead of them uno reversing and signing enea, and who had contended for the title the year before/was leading the world championship early in 2024, and 3. marc marquez, 8 time world champion and arguable GOAT of the sport, who was doing insane comeback rides on a year old bike that he had very little time to adapt to. on pure results, you would have to go with martin (it was p clear it wasnt going to be my girl enea....), but marc looked uh. very promising and very dangerous (apparently his data, ESPECIALLY in the left handers, was like. bonkers), and who was also undeniably a better business asset to ducati as a company trying to sell motorbikes. and as we all knowwwwww, ducati had BY FARRRR the most dominant bike on the grid, so they are staring down the barrel of like. deciding between three excellent riders for one, extremely coveted seat. they think they hold all the cards here, and after a bit of rampant speculation the ducati bosses say everybody calm the fuck down we will make a decision about the gp25 seat at MUGELLO. forza. and with that the stage is set.

but again. ducati had basically promised jorge martin that seat. in fact, there was a provision in his contract that said if he won the world title in 2023, he would automatically be promoted to the factory team. like if marc doesnt come in on his merry way essentially doing a year long AUDITION for that seat up-to and including crowd-commanding theatrics, then it is undeniably martin's bike to have. and it looks like ducati kinda thought they should honor that too! because it was reported (unofficially but through a multitude of reliable sources) on the thursday before mugello that jorge martin WOULD be signing with the factory ducati team to be in red for 2025 IMMINENTLY. and he shows up to the presscon with the moon shinging out of his ass and we didnt rlly have a reason to doubt him so things are looking pretty locked up tbh

so another piece of the puzzle. for the last few years one cog in the wheel of ducati's dominance has been them having EIGHT bikes on the grid, and as such having insane amounts of data to comb through and synthesize while developing the bike. at the time, the team with the most factory support is pramac racing. but YAMAHA have made a promise to a young shirtless man named fabio quartararo that they will get a satellite team for 2024 to help with THEIR efforts, and pramac's contract with ducati is expiring so theyre the top choice. yamaha offers them a fuck you amount of cash and full factory support to leave ducati and come run the M1s with them. and the thing is, it is EXPENSIVE to run an independent team and this sugar daddy style deal would essentially lock down their immediate future quite nicely, so they are thinking HARD about this— because if they lose jorge martin like. what the fuck are they doing not taking that deal. and YOU are asking me girl what the fuck does this had to do with marc marquez WELLLLL. ducati know that marc wants a gp25. and pramac has the factory spec bikes. and marc's famous ass is a VERY valuable little bargaining chip in their eyes. so ducati APPARENTLY wanted marc on the same deal jorge martin was on (complete with the promise of factory promotion if he won the championship) at PRAMAC in order to keep marc, jorge martin, and pramac all under the umbrella of ducati racing. they think problem solved :) we get to keep everything and everyone :) marc gets a current spec bike, jorge gets to be on the factory team, and we can still run eight bikes :) awesome.

WELL! marc catches wind of all of this and goes. fuck you i want to be a factory rider on a gp25. like why on earth would he move from busted satellite team to busted satellite team that doesnt even have his BROTHER ? so instead of keeping all of these negotiations behind closed doors he trots right the fuck up to the press at mugello and says hello yes i have ABSOLUTELY no intention of riding for pramac, in fact i only have the intention of riding with factory teams. big smile. fuck you. press run wild. domino tipped. pramac pissed off. ducati SWEATING.

AND i guess the ducati CEO (claudioooooo) was there. and some big sponsorship guys (audiiiiiii) were there. and it has been LONG been reported that gigi daligna really wanted marc for that seat (and that pecco REALLY didnt lmao). like bad. some would say carnally. and then i guess they looked at his data. and thought about how well he had already adapted to the gp23. and how badly he was beating bez and company. and i suppose the idea of actually losing marc and him going to a KTM or an aprilia scared the actual genuine NIPS off of these guys and literally by sunday night they had apparently called jorge martin to let him know that it wasnt going to be him and he went over to aleix and got that aprilia contract signed genuinely immediately (and enea later signed with ktm and pramac with yamaha). so the aprilia news was announced on monday and we knew marc was the choice from that, and then they announced it officially in the dumbest smuggest little video of all time a lil while after. but not before marc took a selfie in a shirt that said FACTORY PILOT that he later lied about and said wasnt on purpose. king. done and dusted. insanity.

so to recap: in the course of four days, marc essentially pulled a coup out of thin air by just. deciding to exercise some muscle with the press, which caused ducati to lose two bikes, secured the best seat on the grid for himself, and made sure that two of the riders that finished top four in this year's championship (including the CHAMPION) are on much worse machines going into next year. like he literally created the best possible outcome for himself by virtue of his reputation, media savvy, and sheer force of will. it was absolute crazy shit and SO much fun to watch play out live

[stellaefelices]

On Angeal’s Wings

I just want to put forward some information I’ve come across in the Crisis Core Complete Guide because the developers have provided us with some details that go a long way towards helping us understanding his character.

Angeal receiving white wings was intended to be an indicator of his moral alignment. In Crisis Core, he is positioned as antithetical to Sephiroth because he resisted the malignant influence of Jenova and did not wish to be a force of destruction or suffering as Sephiroth did. The implication here is that Angeal and Sephiroth both had a choice.

“Nomura wanted the three SOLDIER 1sts to have different varieties of wings. He says that Angeal's wings are white to symbolize that he didn't go in a negative direction, and that Sephiroth could have been like Angeal.” (Crisis Core Ultimania, 2007)

This is further supported by the Crisis Core Complete Guide, which has this to say about wing colour:

“The wing which Genesis has on his left shoulder in this game, and which Sephiroth has on his right shoulder in FFVII and AC…According to the development staff, the wings were made black based on the notion of good and evil.”

Angeal and Sephiroth receiving their wing on the same side shows that they are directly opposite. Genesis was fundamentally different from them both, and thus received his wing on a different shoulder, but his purpose before his final battle with Zack was world destruction, and so his wing colour was black. The white wing was unique to Angeal, and the series continues to use white feather symbolism to represent him. More on that under the cut.

“Angeal teaches the principles of humanity with his words, actions, and his whole self. His honest way of life is something indispensable Zack cannot forget.” (Crisis Core Ultimania, 2007)

“Even though he succeeded Angeal’s will, Zack finds himself not only unable to help anyone but also confined in Nibelheim, and is racked by a sense of despair and powerlessness. Angeal gets him back on track, and Zack decides to rise up from it again. This decision is represented by the mental image at the start of chapter 9.

The white feature, as well as being a symbol for Angeal, is also a symbol for ‘wings’. The “wings” which cross the ‘blue sky’ is Angeal, and it also includes the hint that in order to reach those heights, dreams, he needs to overcome many difficulties.”

Given the prior information, this scene in Rebirth is of particular interest.

“Asked if there's any meaning behind the single white feather that flutters by Cloud and Zack in the opening of FFVII Rebirth, Nomura jokes that it might be hinting at something, punning on the Japanese word "anji" (暗示) and the first half of either Angeal or "angel." (FF7 Rebirth Ultimania, 2024)

This makes sense, especially considering the ending scene of Crisis Core:

I get the impression that no matter what world/timeline/Lifestream fragment Zack is in, Angeal is there to watch over him, as his will had always been to help him (as well as Genesis).

“He has said, "If you are to live as a hero, as a SOLDIER, and as a decent person, you must never forget your honor." Those words made a deep impression on his younger colleagues, especially Zack, and lived on in them.” (Crisis Core Ultimania, 2007)

Angeal is portrayed as a lasting positive influence in the world of FF7. His legacy is carried on first through Zack, and then Cloud. They are all dedicated to Angeal’s cause:

There were definitely issues with how he was presented in Crisis Core, but I think they’re trying to rectify past mistakes regarding Angeal in The First Soldier. Maybe give them a chance to do so? PSP was a highly restrictive format to try and tell a fully fleshed out story, after all.

[cityof2morrow]

CO2 Skills: Custom Skill Tokens

Published: 7-17-2024 | Updated: N/A SUMMARY I use mods to make more diverse sims in terms of personality traits, body types, and lifetime wants. They’ve made my sims more complex and interesting to play overall. Still, the skill-building system feels limited alongside these mods. Being a decent pianist shouldn’t automatically make it easier to paint, spy, DJ, garden, become a career slacker, work as an architect, and play every other instrument in-game. Being clean certainly benefits barbers and pet owners, but shouldn’t they also be good at cutting hair and animal care? By default, sims can develop at least 40 skills - 4 toddler skills, 7 basic skills, 4 hidden skills, 6 life skills (AL/FT), and 11 talent badges (OFB). This custom skills pack builds directly on the existing skill-hobby system in Sims 2 in the following ways:

60+ new skills taken from other games in the simsverse (Sims 3, Sims 4, console titles, etc.)

100+ new skills related to university majors, career tracks, and popular mods from the simsverse

New skills are linked to certain objects, interactions, and career levels

All TS2 content creators are welcome to link these skills to your creations if they choose BUT this is meant to be non-intrusive. These will be linked to some of my custom careers, majors, and objects.

DETAILS Basegame Compatible – but skill-related objects and mods may require expansions. * These are skill TOKENS ONLY - custom objects, mods, majors and career tracks which use these skills will be published on this site under the #co2skills, #co2careers, and/or #co2edu  tags. Modders, feel free to implement these and if you do – please share!

GENERAL INFO

Skills are invisible tokens activated by certain interactions in-game.

Sims can’t develop the same skill twice and they can’t sell or gift them to others.

Skills do not appear in inventories or the UI.

Some repetitive and animal-specific skills were excluded.

An index of all skills and their GUIDS is included with this download. If you have custom skills to add to the list, please ask/message me.

A “SKILL TREE” FOR SIMS 2 Where do these custom skills fit in gameplay? Imagine a system with three levels of expertise… LEVEL 1 = basegame skills (body, charisma, cleaning, cooking, creativity, logic, and mechanical). ^^This level already exists in the basegame and everything starts here. You need 2 or more basic skill points before you can advance. LEVEL 2 = some custom skills, life skills (AL/FT), talent badges (OFB), supernatural/magic (AL) ^^This level exists if you play with expansions. I’ve added a few new skills here related to existing supernatural and woohoo gameplay. LEVEL 3 and up = remaining custom skills and university major skills

^^The bulk of new skills come into play here and help make sims’ hobbies, careers, and lifestyle choices make more sense.

Unlock level 3 skills by earning 2-3 points in a level 1 or level 2 skill, a talent badge, and/or attending university.

Use the skill trees below for reference. Skills are grouped by their basegame skill/hobby affiliation, but some (ballet for example) may appear in multiple categories.

You do NOT need to earn all skills/badges at one level to unlock the next. The point of this project is that your sims can finally specialize in activities and professions related to their true personality.

BODY Body skill is already linked to tai chi and the restocking badge, but the skill is named differently across games (athleticism, fitness, health/sanity, etc.). Unlock new ways to develop a sim’s physical and mental strength.

CHARISMA Charisma links to the sales badge while range of hobby-related interests fall under film and literature. Branch off and concentrate on related skill areas.

CLEANING The cleaning skill is linked to three badges (cosmetology, gardening, and fishing) and enthusiasm for animals and the environment. Specialize in ways which better reflect their lifestyle.

COOKING Venture into new worlds of taste and make magic in the kitchen! This may be especially useful for those who want more challenging gameplay in terms of food-related careers, businesses, and custom food mods.

CREATIVITY & DANCE By default, creativity makes earning badges in flower arranging, pottery, and sewing easier. It also relates to the hidden drafting/dance skills.

…because a sim who hates art should be able to become a master pianist without magically becoming a master painter too.

LOGIC & UNIVERSITY Logic contributes to the register/cashiering badge and the hidden study/homework skill. Now, sims can pursue new schools of knowledge. Certain majors will now require students to learn theory and technical skills in their areas of study.

MECHANICAL Mechanical sims can more easily earn a robotics badge and now, they can also unlock a host of new mechanical/tech-related pursuits.

SUPERNATURAL Sims with supernatural abilities can enhance their craft by building a range of new skills.

OTHER Some of the new skills require TWO (2) or more types of basic skill points. Herbalism, for example, requires both cooking and gardening skill.

DOWNLOAD (choose one) SKILL TOKENS from SFS | from MEGA TEMPORARILY PAUSED- Update Coming January 2025.

* These are skill TOKENS ONLY - custom objects, mods, majors and career tracks which use these skills will be published on this site under the #co2skills, #co2careers, and/or #co2edu tags. Modders, feel free to implement these and if you do – please share! CREDITS Thanks: Echo, Ch4rmful, Gummi, ChocolateCitySim, Sufficeittosay, WHoward, Jelly Meduza and the rest of the Sims 2 modding community. Sources: Beyno (Korn via BBFonts), EA/Maxis, Magic Skill (Echo, 2006), Offuturistic Infographic (Freepik).

[zoloteh-volossya]

BG3 Fanfiction Statistics, Part 1

I’ve seen some discussions of BG3 fandom trends floating around tumblr that spoke from experience but lacked hard data to refer to. As a fan of Baldur’s Gate 3, fanfiction, and graphs, I therefore thought it would be neat and illustrative to go through AO3 and document some of the statistics this fandom.

I did a similar exercise back in January and posted the results here. However, I was a bit unhappy with this analysis – it was missing some data that I consider to be relevant, I didn’t end up discussing the results much, and I only posted it to reddit. Most discussions for the creative side of fandom seem to happen on tumblr, so I made this account to post it here.

I will try and be as transparent as possible when discussing how I obtained and processed this data. A copy of my spreadsheet can be found here and contains all of the data I will be discussing. Most of the data I feature in this essay will be presented as graphs. Below each graph I will discuss the patterns shown in the graph and provide what I believe to be some relevant and/or interesting number values. If you want to see all the numbers, please refer to my spreadsheet. If you don’t care about the numbers and/or my thoughts about them, feel free to skim through and just look at the charts!

A note before I start – I gathered this data between July 21, 2024 and July 24, 2024. It is out of date as of my writing this and will be even more out of date by the time you read it. However, I believe the general fandom trends will hold up over time – the same patterns that I observed in January are largely still present in July.

Due to the tumblr post image limit and my preponderance of graphs, I will be breaking this behemoth of an essay into two parts:

General Fandom Statistics, the Player Character, and the Women

The Men, a Character Comparison, and a Pairing Analysis

We are currently in part 1. Part 2 can be found at this link. The rest of part 1 is below the read more because this is very long.

GENERAL FANDOM STATS

This information was found by looking at the side bar when browsing Baldur’s Gate fics. Therefore, this data set includes fics from the previous two Baldur’s Gate games. However, given that the games were released in 1998 and 2000, respectively, most of the fanfiction for them was likely posted to FF.net and the error from including what little fic for them was posted to AO3 is likely small.

At the time of my data gathering, there were 31,043 Baldur’s Gate fics on AO3.

RATINGS

To the surprise of nobody in the BG3 fandom, Explicit fic is the largest category, at 38% of all fics produced. It’s followed by Mature (24%), Teen and Up (20%), General (12%) and Not Rated (6%). Not all of the Explicit and Mature fics are necessarily horny – those warnings also apply to extreme violence (hello, Dark Urge). But let’s be real, most of them are tagged that way for sex.

WARNINGS

Speaking of extreme violence, let’s take a look at the warnings used for fics in this fandom.

Just about half (50.2%) of BG fics have no warnings at all. About 17.6% have warnings for graphic depictions of violence – lower than I would have expected, honestly, for a video game that features as much murder as this one does (at least, how I play it...). About 5.4% of fics feature a warning for rape, 4.7% feature major character death, and 0.5% feature underage sex.

CATEGORIES

AO3 allows users to select any categories from a list of possible options (F/M, M/M, F/F, Gen, Other, and Multi). F/M, M/M, and F/F are pretty self explanatory, Gen fics don’t focus on a relationship, Multi fics focus on a relationship between three or more people, and Other is a catch all for fics that don’t fit into any of the previous categories very well. For shipping with nonbinary (NB) characters, I have seen a variety of approaches. Some people select the category closest to the NB character’s presentation, some select multiple categories, and some select Other.

One very useful tool that I will be introducing here is the use of “otp:true.” When “otp:true” is entered into the “Search within results” bar while filtering tags, AO3 will only return fics that have just one pairing tagged. This filters out all fics that have background pairings or multiple focus pairings. Results with “otp:true” are typically solely focused on that particular pairing.

With all that explanation out of the way, the results:

We can clearly see that the most common category for Baldur’s Gate fics is M/F, with 43.3% of all fics featuring a M/F pairing. 36.4% of all fics feature a M/M pairing, 10.6% feature a F/F pairing, 11.7% are more General, 8.0% feature Multiple people in a pairing, and 10.9% are Other. These percentages add up to more than 100% because a fic can be tagged with multiple categories.

Things change a bit when you filter for “otp:true” and only include fics that focus on just one pairing. In this case, M/M predominates, with a whopping 46.0% of fics. M/F follows with 31.2%, F/F with 11.1%, 7.7% are General, 9.7% are Other, and 3.0% are still tagged as Multi (presumably for fics where the only pairing is a threesome or such).

CHARACTERS

As a last look at more general content before I begin a deep dive into looking at the various characters, I took a look at the 30 most popular character tags.

This was a surprise to me the first time I looked at it in January. In the previous two video game fandoms I was in that had a player character (Mass Effect and Fire Emblem: Three Houses), the player character was the most popular character tag in that fandom. In this case, though, Astarion has the most fics that feature him, and by a pretty significant margin (~5,000 more fics than Tav). He appears in 63.0% of fics. Tav is next, at 46.7% of fics. Then we have the rest of the six Origin characters: Gale (34.5% of fics), Shadowheart (23.7%), Karlach (20.5%), Wyll (18.6%), and Lae’zel (15.9%), as well as Halsin (15.8%) and the Dark Urge (15.3%). That they all are next to each other makes sense, as fics that focus on one character or pairing will often tag the entire ensemble. Lae’zel only showing up 16% of the time seems low, though, for a member of the main cast. To me, this indicates that not many fics are true ensemble fics that include all of the main cast.

After this block of main characters, we drop a bit to Gortash, who shows up in 7.4% of fics. He’s the most popular villain by far, followed by Cazador (4.7%) and Raphael (4.6%). Orin only shows up in 2.9% of fics and Ketheric is featured in only 1.1% of fics.

Jaheira shows up in 4.4% of fics, but her values may include fics from the earlier Baldur’s Gate games. Poor Minthara is the 16th most tagged character and only shows up in 2.5% of fics. Rolan (a tiefling NPC) shows up in more fics than she does.

Despite being featured in previous Baldur’s Gate game fics as well as BG3, Minsc does not seem popular – he’s #25, being tagged in 1.3% of fics.

One thing I did note was the comparative lack of focus on the overarching plot of the game in BG3 fics. I’ll use the Emperor as a barometer for this, as it’s inextricably interwoven into everything having to do with the Absolute, the mysterious artifact, and our protagonists’ immunity to it. Yet, it only appears in 535 fics of over 31,000 – approximately 1.7% of all BG fics. This tells me that there isn’t much engagement with the actual illithid plot of the game in most fics – at least not to the extent where major plot relevant characters are being tagged.

CHARACTER PAIRING STATISTICS

Most of my time for this analysis was spent collecting data for the various pairing tags. I went through the top 300 pairing tags by order of popularity (ending with Mystra/Cazador, of all things) and recorded how many fics each rating had and how many fics each category had both with and without “otp:true” applied. Coincidentally, this included all the pairings with 5 or more fics in them at the time – by sheer luck the 301st pairing tag had only 4 fics. I judged that I could ignore pairing tags with fewer than 5 fics without affecting the results of my analyses too much (also it had taken 4 days to get this far and I was tired).

However, a lot of authors tag their fics with both, say, Astarion/Tav and Astarion/F!OC. But for this exercise I’m not really looking at how authors refer to the Tav/Dark Urge/self insert character in their tagging nomenclature. I’m more interested in how many fics exist for, say, the pairing of Astarion and the player character.

To this end, I combined the numbers for Tav, Dark Urge, OC, F!OC, M!OC, NB!OC, Reader, and You for each character ship. In order to avoid double counting fics, once I had added the numbers for a particular tag I excluded that tag from all future counts.

[X]/PC = [X]/Tav + ([X]/Dark Urge with the [X]/Tav tag excluded) + ([X]/Original Character with the [X]/Tav and [X]/Dark Urge excluded) + ([X]/Reader with [X]/Tav, [X]/Dark Urge, and [X]/Original Character excluded) and so on.

This process dropped the total number of pairings from 300 to 162. However, it also introduces an error. Some fics ship characters with an OC who is not a Tav/Dark Urge/self insert. In condensing all pairings with original characters to the “PC” supercategory, I am ignoring that and counting their original character as a Tav/Dark Urge equivalent. Unfortunately, this is just something I have to live with in order to be able to make the data more manageable, as there is no way to tell which fics are using the OC tag to represent a Tav/Dark Urge and which are not on a mass data scale. I don’t think it will skew the results too much, at least.

I pulled out the top 20 ships for each major character in BG3 (Tav, Dark Urge, the PC, Shadowheart, Karlach, Lae’zel, Minthara, Astarion, Gale, Wyll, and Halsin) before and after I combined the player character tags into the PC supercategory. For each character, I then determined how much of each fic category (M/F, M/M, F/F, Other, Multi) they had, both for all of their pairings and for their pairing with the PC specifically.

Let's start by looking at the player character and its two representatives.

TAV

Tav is in 71 of the top 300 ship tags in the BG3 fandom.

Astarion completely dominates Tav’s ships, with a whopping 9,235 fics (1,839 otp:true fics). In fact, in order to be able to see the tiny little boxes that represent everyone else, here’s another version of this chart, this time with Astarion excluded.

There, that’s a bit more legible. The next highest is Gale, with 2,909 fics (652 otp:true) – less than a third as many fics as Astarion. Halsin comes third with 1,304 fics (207 otp:true) and Shadowheart is the first canon woman to show up, with 806 fics (132 otp:true). Astarion has more than 11 times as many fics with Tav as Shadowheart does. Karlach comes next, with 724 fics (186 otp:true). Raphael comes sixth, with 176 more fics than #7 Wyll who has 442 fics (100 otp:true). Lae’zel is #11 with 300 fics, under Gortash, Rolan, and a threesome with Halsin and Astarion. Minthara is the least popular main character to ship with Tav. She’s #15 with 146 fics (33 otp:true), and has fewer fics with Tav than Zevlor, the Emperor or Haarlep. In a marked improvement from the state of affairs in January, however, she no longer has fewer fics than Kar’niss.

Taking a look at the fic category breakdown, we can see that M/F and M/M predominate for Tav, while there is very little F/F. Dividing the values by the total number of fics, 59.8% of all fics and 50.2% of otp:true fics are tagged M/F, 35.6% of all fics and 34.9% of otp:true fics are tagged M/M, 7.6% of all fics and 4.4% of otp:true fics are tagged F/F, and 13.2% of all fics and 14.2% of otp:true fics are tagged Other. As the proportions of M/F and F/F fics drop when otp:true is applied, I assume that it is more common for M/F and F/F pairings to have background ships or be a background ship (remember that if it is not otp:true, we have no idea if the pairing with Tav is the pairing category being counted.)

THE DARK URGE

The Dark Urge is in 38 of the top 300 ship tags of the BG3 fandom, a bit over half as many as Tav.

While Astarion once again is the most popular character to ship with the Dark Urge (2,165 fics), this time he actually has competition! Gortash/Dark Urge comes in at a very respectable second place with 1,594 fics (about three quarters of Astarion/Dark Urge’s total fic count) and actually beat Astarion by over 100 fics once you apply otp:true (562 fics for Astarion vs 691 fics for Gortash). But after Gortash we once again drop down to numbers we struggle to even see on the chart. Gale is the most visible with 402 fics total (Gale has fewer fics total with the Dark Urge than Astarion or Gortash have with otp:true applied). After that we have a group of Halsin, Shadowheart, and Karlach, all with between 120-150 fics. No other pairing has over 100 fics.

Dark Urge/Tav (99 fics) and Dark Urge/Orin (87 fics) have more fics than Dark Urge/Wyll (83 fics) or Dark Urge/Minthara (80 fics). For Wyll, this is a sign that his pairing with the Dark Urge is not very popular (he drops from #7 with Tav to #9 with the Dark Urge). For Minthara, however, this is a significant climb in the rankings – she was #15 with Tav and #10 with the Dark Urge.

But what’s really interesting to me is the fic category breakdown for the Dark Urge.

The Dark Urge has noticeably more M/M content than Tav does (47.0% vs 35.6% for all fics, 56.9% vs 34.9% for opt:true) and slightly more F/F content than Tav does (10.2% vs 7.6% for all fics, 5.2% vs 4.4% for otp:true), and correspondingly less F/M content. At 13.4% for all fics and 12.8% of otp:true fics, the proportion of Other fic stays just about the same as for Tav.

THE PLAYER CHARACTER

The PC is a combination of Tav, Dark Urge, Original Character, Reader, and You. The PC is in 64 of the top 162 pairings of the BG3 fandom (losing 5 pairings from Tav as I combined Tav/Tav, Tav/Dark Urge, Tav/Reader and so on into one PC/OC category).

The player character was involved in 76.0% of all pairings and 62.1% of otp:true pairings (that is, if you add up every fic for every pairing which the PC is in and divide it by sum of all fics for all BG3 pairings I tracked). This means that over three quarters of shipping in the BG3 fandom is with the player character. It’s not surprising, but it is notable – that’s a very large proportion.

Holy smokes, Astarion! He dominates the rankings even more than before. This time, I was curious to see how much. See below for a proportional representation of all of the PC pairings (note: because many fics have multiple pairings, this circle does not represent the total number of fics but rather the total number of times any pairing with the PC has been tagged).

Astarion composes a full 45% of all pairings with the PC, Gale is bit over 13%, Gortash is 7.3% for all fics and 11.3% of otp:true fics, while Halsin has the opposite trend with 6.3% of all fics and 4.9% of otp:true fics. Shadowheart, Karlach, Raphael, and Wyll all are between 2% and 4% (with Raphael once again beating Wyll). Lae’zel is down at #11 with 1.4% and Minthara is all the way at #16 with 0.9%.

Out of curiosity, I went through all of the PC’s pairings and sorted them by the gender of the person being shipped with the PC.

Oof.

85.7% of all PC ships are with men, 10.4% are with women, and 1.9% are nonbinary beings (Haarlep, the Emperor, and Omeluum). When you apply otp:true, 87.1% of the player character’s ships are with men, 9.9% are with women, and 1.3% are with nonbinary beings.

SHADOWHEART

Welp! Let’s take a look at that 10%, starting with Shadowheart.

If you add up all the fics for all the pairings that include Shadowheart and divide that by the sum of all fics for all 162 pairings I collected, you can see that she is present in 7.0% of pairings. Interestingly, this is true both for all fics and for otp:true fics. She is in 30 of the top 300 ship tags and 24 of the 162 pairings that remain once the player character tags are consolidated.

(I have shortened Shadowheart's name to SH and Shart in various charts to keep the labels from taking up too much room in the graph.)

Lae’zel/Shadowheart is in close competition with Shadowheart/Tav. When all the player characters are condensed into the PC, though, that gap widens.

Shadowheart has 980 fics with the PC, 694 with Lae’zel, 226 with Karlach, 111 with Gale, 61 with Astarion, 51 with Nocturne, 36 with Halsin, 26 with Minthara, and 21 with Wyll (her least popular ship with a main character, at #12). 7 of her top 20 pairings are threesomes – Aylin/Isobel/SH at #8 with 35 fics, Karlach/PC/SH at #9, Karlach/Lae’zel/SH at #10, Astarion/PC/SH at #13, Halsin/PC/SH at #14, Karlach/Wyll/SH at #17, and Gale/Lae’zel/SH at #18.

Lae’zel/Shadowheart has an unusually high number of otp:true fics – almost half of its total fic count. It seems more popular to ship Shadowheart with women than men – both her ships with Lae’zel and Karlach are more popular than Astarion, Gale, or Wyll and her threesomes with women have more fics than her threesomes with men.

The fic category breakdown for Shadowheart matches this expectation.

Boy howdy is Shadowheart fic gay! She has over twice as much F/F fic than M/F fic, just looking at raw numbers of fics. Looking at the proportions of her total fic count, F/F fic represents 71.4% of all of her fics, M/F fic is 35.2%, Other is 10.0%, and Multi is 18.8%. (These percentages add up to more than 100% because many fics tag multiple categories.) This also means that we can’t know that these numbers necessarily include Shadowheart – witness the numbers of M/M fics. All it means is that these categories were on fics in which a Shadowheart pairing was also tagged.

Looking at the otp:true numbers gives us a better picture of what fics where only Shadowheart is in a relationship are like (though this not necessarily an accurate idea of patterns for her overall, as less than a third of her total fics are otp:true). 76.4% of otp:true fics are F/F, 19.8% are M/F, 3.8% are Other, and for some reason 1.2% (9 fics) are M/M. Over three quarters of Shadowheart’s otp:true pairings are femmeslash.

Shadowheart’s fics with the PC character follow pretty much the same pattern as her ships more generally, albeit with slightly less F/F (likely from the loss of the relative behemoth that is Shadowheart/Lae’zel).

32.9% of her pairings with the PC have the M/F tag, 68.1% are tagged F/F, 11.3% are tagged Other, and 18.5% are tagged Multi. Applying otp:true, 25.7% are M/F, 62.6% are F/F, and 12.3% are Other (this likely includes a substantial portion of nonbinary PCs).

KARLACH

Karlach is present in 6.0% of all fic pairings and 5.4% of otp:true fic pairings. She has 31 ship tags in the top 300 ship tags, which condense down to 26 pairings when all player character stand ins are combined.

Her second most popular ship after Tav is with Wyll, though unlike with Shadowheart the pairing is not popular enough to give Tav a run for his/her/their money. Condensing all the player characters widens this gap significantly.

The PC is overwhelmingly Karlach’s most popular ship, with 890 fics. Wyll is second, with 327 fics – less than half as many. Shadowheart and Astarion follow with 226 and 157, respectively. Dammon is next, with 91 fics, and then Lae’zel has 65. She then has a number of threesomes, Minthara (#9 with 32 fics), and Gale (#11 with 18 fics). Halsin is her least popular pairing with a main character, coming in at #15 with 11 fics.

Surprisingly, for all that Karlach is fairly butch, her pairings with men are relatively more popular than we see with the more femme Shadowheart. The category statistics illustrate this clearly.

Compared to Shadowheart, Karlach has a lower proportion of F/F and higher proportions of M/F and Multi fics. F/F is tagged on 51.8% of her fics, M/F on 42.5%, Other on 12.3% and Multi on 27.7%. (Remember that fics can be tagged with multiple categories and that just because a category is tagged doesn’t mean that Karlach is involved in that category.) Looking at otp:true gives us a look at fics where she is the sole focus. F/F is 55.0% of her otp:true fics, M/F drops to 34.4%, Multi drops to 6.1%, and Other stays fairly high at 10.4%.

In Karlach’s pairings with the player character, things change significantly.

It immediately becomes clear that the large number of M/F fics in her general pairings were largely due to her relatively popular ships with Wyll, Astarion, and Dammon. F/F dominates Karlach’s pairings with the PC with 64.0% (67.8% with otp:true applied) of fics, which puts her at just slightly less than Shadowheart. M/F is tagged in 28.5% of her fics with the PC (14.0% with otp:true applied), Multi is tagged 19.4% but drops to 1.2% for otp:true, and Other remains high with 18.0% of fics and 20.2% of otp:true fics with the PC.

Back in January, I noted that of the main cast, Karlach had the highest proportion of ships with nonbinary OCs. I didn’t track the breakdown of OC subcategories this time, but the high numbers in the Other category bear it out.

LAE'ZEL

Counting all fics for all pairings in which Lae’zel is tagged, she is in a mere 3.8% of BG3 pairings, though it rises to 4.5% when otp:true is applied. She is in 23 of the top 300 ship tags, a number that drops down to 18 when I consolidate the player character tags together.

Shadowheart/Lae’zel has twice as many fics as Lae’zel/Tav. Looking at the situation with the PC does not change this much.

Unlike any other main character, Lae’zel’s most popular ship is not with the PC but with Shadowheart. She has 694 fics with Shadowheart, 355 with the PC, 65 with Karlach, 26 with Gale, 26 with Wyll, 25 with Astarion, 16 with Minthara, and 12 with Halsin. She is in an unusually low number of threesomes – only 4. It’s notable though how skewed her numbers are towards women – a threesome with Karlach and Shadowheart has more fics than any of her pairings with a canon man. The various whole team multiship pairings, none of which have more than 11 fics, comprise most of the tail end of her ship list.

Speaking of the tail end of her ship list, what happens when we condense the player character tags is that Lae’zel does not reach a full 20 ships – she drops to 18 pairings. She has more than this, of course, but my methodology ignores all pairings with fewer than 5 fics (which means that my friend’s Lae’zel/Astarion/Tav fic is not counted). Therefore, Lae’zel’s 19th and 20th most popular pairings have 4 fics or fewer. I have represented these missing pairings with little :( emojis, because this is a sad state of affairs.

This is a symptom of a state of affairs in which Lae’zel is just not very popular in the AO3 side of BG3 fandom. Her most popular ship is Shadowheart’s second most popular ship, and the numbers crater after that. No Lae’zel ship other than Shadowheart and the PC has more than 100 fics.

Lae’zel’s most popular ships being women is demonstrated clearly by the fic category breakdown.

Wow! At a whopping 76.3% of all of Lae’zel’s fics and 88.9% of Lae’zel’s otp:true fics, Lae’zel has a higher proportion of F/F fic than Shadowheart. Granted, they’re both sizable portions of each other’s total F/F count. 26.1% of Lae’zel’s fics have the M/F tag, though this drops to a mere 7.1% when otp:true is applied. Other is tagged in 11.6% of fics but drops to 2.0% with otp:true. 18.1% of her fics are tagged Multi but this likewise drops to 4.4% with otp:true.

The pertinent question for Lae’zel is how much of her F/F count is due to her pairing with Shadowheart? How gay are her pairings with the PC?

The answer is... still pretty gay! F/F is not quite as dominant, with 67.3% of all her fics with the PC and 80.0% of her fics where only Lae’zel/PC is tagged – but 80% is a still a really high proportion! This indicates to me that a lot of the M/F in the “All Fics” chart likely does not involve Lae’zel. M/F is tagged in 33.5% of her fics with the PC, a number which is more than halved to 12.7% when otp:true is applied. 13.2% of her fics are tagged Other, which drops to 5.5% with otp:true – much less than for Shadowheart and Karlach. It seems either Lae’zel is not as popular for nonbinary OCs or that a large proportion of the Other tag is from mind flayer Tavs/Durges and people don’t write Lae’zel with a mind flayer love interest.

One other notable fact is that Lae’zel is the only female companion without any otp:true M/M PC fic. It could be due to her low fic numbers in the first place, but I prefer to think that Lae’zel fans are simply more fastidious about correctly tagging fic. It certainly fits her character.

MINTHARA

Ah, Minthara. Unquestionably the least popular of the main romanceable characters in BG3, her pairings only comprise 1.1% of all BG3 fanfic pairings, a number that rises to a whopping(/sarcastic) 1.4% of otp:true pairings. She has only 14 ship tags in the 300 most popular ship tags for BG3, a number that drops further to a mere 9 pairings once I’ve combined all the player character tags.

What’s notable about Minthara’s ship tags is the popularity of the Dark Urge relative to Tav. Minthara has 146 fics with Tav and 80 with the Dark Urge. This is a higher proportion than other main characters have. It may be because more people write her on evil routes (which likely disproportionately feature the Dark Urge) or because she has some very good lines for the Dark Urge and their Slayer form.

Another observation is the lack of primary non-PC ships. The other characters that I look at all have a major non-PC ship – Shadowheart/Lae’zel, Karlach/Wyll, Gale/Astarion, Wyll/Astarion, Halsin/Astarion. Minthara doesn’t really have that. Her most popular non-PC ship is Orin, at #5 and with a mere 45 fics. This is illustrated clearly once all the player character tags are combined.

The PC dominates Minthara’s pairings to an extent not seen with any other character, not even Astarion. She drops from 234 fics with the PC (65 otp:true) to 45 fics with Orin (26 otp:true), 32 with Karlach (16 otp:true) and 26 with Shadowheart (11 otp:true). Every other pairing has 16 or less fics. Tying into that, Minthara has very few pairings with 5 or more fics. She does not even have enough for a top 10! I have replaced her missing pairings with the :( emoji because this is sad.

Another notable thing about this chart, though, is how few fics Minthara has just in general. Lae’zel and Wyll, the other neglected companions, both have at least 500 fics with their most popular partner. Minthara does not even break 250. In fact, none of her pairings with someone other than the PC have over 50 fics.

Another interesting fact is that Minthara is the only character in this analysis to not have any threesomes or moresomes in her pairings with over 5 fics. She doesn’t share, it seems.

For some reason, Minthara has 8 ships with Councillor Florrick of all people. And it’s not all by the same author, which is what I would expect for a somewhat out there pairing. Presumably someone out there wrote a really good fic which then inspired others to play with the idea. In a small fandom like Minthara’s, one fic like that can make quite a difference.

As can be expected, Minthara’s fic categories are pretty damn gay.

F/F is tagged in 79.0% of her fics (77.6% of otp:true fics). M/M is tagged in 21.3% of her fics (17.1% of otp:true fics), Other in 6.1% (4.6% otp:true), and Multi in 8.9% though it drops to 1.3% of her otp:true fics. With these numbers, Minthara is arguably the gayest major character in the BG3 fandom by fic count, though Lae’zel beats her when you take otp:true into effect.

This pattern holds true when looking at her ship with the player character. 77.8% of her fics with the PC are tagged F/F (73.8% of otp:true fics), 23.5% are tagged M/F (15.4% otp:true), 8.5% are tagged Other (10.8% otp:true), and 9.4% are tagged Multi (3.1% otp:true). The latter is a bit confusing given that she has no multiship pairings. It may include collections of Reader/[X] fics that include Minthara.

PART 2

Welp. I’ve run into the tumblr post image limit. For part 2 of this essay, which discusses Astarion, Gale, Wyll, and Halsin and then compares all 8 of the main characters against each other on a variety of metrics, see this link.

[if-whats-new]

What's New In IF? Issue 31 (2024)

By Aj, Dion, Briar, Jen and Peter

Now Available!

Itch.io - Keep Reading below

If you read the zine, consider liking the post: it helps us see how many people see it! And sharing is caring! <3

~ EDITORIAL ~

Apologies for the delayed Issue!

As you might know, we unfortunately had to delay this Issue due to some personal matters. But as promised, it’s finally here! We wouldn’t want you to miss out on any news.

As this Issue says on the front page, it contains news from November 23rd to November 29th.

But! The Events should be updated to match their status on December 4th, as they are more time-sensitive.

Issue 32 should be released on time. That means two Issues this week!

We want some feedback!

As we’re starting to get a hand of things, we would love some feedback from you guys! What you enjoy, want more or less off, how we could improve... Anything goes! We even have a nifty form.

We hope you enjoy this new issue!

AJ, DION, BRIAR, JEN AND PETER

~ BE A PART OF THE ZINE ~

THIS ZINE ONLY HAPPENS WITH YOU!

Want to write 1-2 pages about a neat topic, or deep-dive into a game and review it in details? Share personal experiences or get all academic?

WRITE FOR THE COLUMN!

Prefer to be more low-key but still have something to share? Send us a Zine Letter or share a game title for Highlight on…!

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!

Came across something interesting? Know a release or an update announced? Saw an event happening? Whether it's a game, an article, a podcast… Add any IF-related content to our mini-database!

EVERY LITTLE BIT COUNTS!

Contact us through Tumblr asks, Forum DMs, or even by email! And thank you for your help!!

~ EVENT SPOTLIGHT : Videotome Jam - "Waiting" ~

November 16th to December 1st 2024

Videotome Jam is a two-week-long game jam for games made in any of the Videotome engines with the optional theme of "Waiting".

What is Videotome?

Videotome is a series of small homebrew IF/VN engines made by Freya Campbell (communistsister), an indie game developer focusing on narrative games that are usually:

science fiction, horror, &/or romance

close to 100% LGBTQ characters

free/PWYW with low tech requirements

liable to make players keysmash due to feelings

Videotome was first released in April 2022 as a part of a game entry for the Domino Club collective. The initial idea for the engine was to make writing text-heavy games as hassle-free as possible, focusing not that much on the visual presentation format, but more on the writer's experience. It would allow writers to write in a notepad and then it would somehow grab the .txt file and parse the lines into an array, spitting them out one line at a time as a kinetic novel.

At the moment there are four engines available:

Videotome, for linear, no frills text / images / music;

Videotome ADV, adding a more conventional layout with ignorable choices and branching;

Super Videotome, for more fully featured and freeform image/canvas use;

Videotome Heartbreak, adding a stat raising dating sim & storylets structure to the above.

If you're more interested in the process of making these engines, check out the devs blog post - Words, Friction, Syntax: Stuff I thought about when making Videotome. (The post also includes a very interesting case study concerning other game engines Freya has experience with.)

If you want to check out some examples of projects made with Videotome, take a look at this collection. It includes games made by both Freya and other devs.

~ ENDED ~

The Educational Jam has ended. Check out the thirteen entries and learn something new!

The voting for ECTOCOMP 2024 is officially over! Check out the results!

You can now check out all 16 entries to the Videotome Jam!

Disabled Rep VN Jam has a very simple premise but a very important message. Check out the submissions!

~ ONGOING (VOTING) ~

A Very Hallmark Game Jam has entered the voting phase. You can now vote for your favourite out of the five entries.

~ ONGOING (SUBMITTING) ~

Media depicting healthy examples of polyamory isn’t that common. The PolyJamorous 2024 is trying to break the status-quo!

This year’s Yuri Game Jam is in full progress. The devs have until December 2nd to submit their projects.

Once upon a time, a game jam was held to create stories around the theme of fairy tales… and that game jam is the Once Upon A Time VN Jam. It’s running from October 1st to January 31st.

Concours de Fiction Interactive Francophone 2025 is for all French-speaking enthusiasts. Submissions are accepted March 3rd 2025.

Are you perhaps a fan of more somber, melancholic themes? Then check out the Dying Year - Visual Novel Jam! You have until the end of the year to participate.

The Black Visual Novel Jam is all about working with creative professional developers who work in visual novels to bring more Black stories to life. The goal is to create a space where Black creators can show their unique storytelling through visual novels.

IF Short Games Showcase 2024 is a great way to shine some new light on your projects made in the past year (Jan 1, 2024 to Dec 31, 2024), regardless of whether or not they are previously released! You have until January 15th 2025 to join.

Winter Visual Novel Jam 2024 is here! You have until January 1st 2025 to submit your projects.

Are you familiar with Decker? Then why not take a part in the Deck-Month 2?

Another bitsy jam is here. This time with the theme "better late than never".

~ OTHER ~

PIZZAPRANKS is accepting submissions for their Indiepocalypse Issue #61. If you’re a dev and would like to try out your luck, definitely check it out! Any game is welcomed, not only IF.

~ NEW RELEASE ~

You stand at the edge of a vast and foreboding cave system, its mouth yawning like the jaws of some ancient beast. This is no ordinary cave—it is the entrance to the Caverns of the Forgotten, a labyrinth of twisting tunnels, hidden chambers, and unfathomable mysteries that have claimed countless explorers before you.

Generations ago, invaders brought magic to the Kingdom of Jubai, setting battlemages at the top of the noble power structure and leaving everyone else oppressed. Now, a secret organization of mage hunters has risen up, phoenixlike, to stand against the mages' power and overthrow their rule. Can your secret order of mage hunters save the kingdom, or will internal strife tear you apart in Magehunter: Phoenix Flame (CScript)?

Today is your first day of work here at Toy Maker’s TOY BOX (Ren’Py). Pull apart stitches or rip off an arm or two; we support whatever you must do to ensure that you only save toys of the highest quality. Should you ever feel unsure, there’s no need to panic! Simply toss the trash where it belongs: the incinerator. After all, it’s of the utmost importance that inspectors upkeep the Maker’s image.

You're struggling for friends in a new town and decide to check out a cute diner! — 'That New Diner', huh? Odd name for a restaurant, but I see advertisements for it everywhere. Might as well check it out. Who knows, maybe I'll meet somebody?

What does the glass sound like? Quite tinkly. It crumbled into sand under the feet of all those worried people circling around. As for you, there was darkness in your eyes for a long time. And the glass has melted into silence long since. But what is this place? And who is this stranger standing in front of you? And most importantly, where — or who — did the bullet hit? — Monarch (Ren’Py) is a short visual novel game that was made during Ukrainian Micro Visual Novel Jam in 10 days.

Halloween is a big deal in Port Gillain, steeped as the town is in old folklore and ghost stories. You, the local psychic, regularly attend the festivities. This year, you can bring a friend. The Second Sight: All Hallow's Eve (Twine) is a companion story to The Second Sight: Dead Reckoning.

Your Aunt’s House (Adventuron) is a short story about mourning. @kessielrg

The story centers around Larry, a cab driver eking out a meagre existence in a dystopian near-future, until he unwittingly finds himself centre-stage in the midst of a technological revolution. — For the first time this multi-media project can be experienced in the form of an interactive novel. Larry Folger Volume I contains all the chapters of the ongoing narrative complete with music from the series.

Your feather, my wing is a game about getting close to the object of an experiment that your 'super-secret lab' leads! It's all about fun, fluff and cuddles. Nothing serious and if anyone from the "normal world" came to this organization, they'd be disappointed by the lack of pathos, mystery and seriousness. But do you care?

Nestled at the edge of an ancient forest, Ravenwood Hill looms like a shadowed sentinel against the pale moonlight. This is no ordinary place; whispers of its dark history echo through the trees, carried by the wailing wind. The townsfolk speak of disappearances, of mysterious lights flickering in the mansion atop the hill, and of secrets buried deep beneath its crumbling foundations. In Ravenwood Hill, you are the only one brave—or foolish—enough to uncover the truth.

As always, don't forget to check out the submitted entries to the events mentioned in the previous pages. They deserve some love too!

~ NEW RELEASE (WIP) ~

Iberian Tales (Twine) - Life was once tranquil on the isolated coast of your city, surrounded by a loving family and promising prospects for success in your societal position. However, tranquility shattered as flames engulf your city, escape becomes the only viable option, if luck favors you enough to evade the soldiers blocking your path that is. @iberiantalesif-game

The Thorned Garden (CScript) is a Harem Intrigue game where you can die at any turn. Build up skills and connections to survive and climb the rankings. @opossumfern

Locked in a luxurious but ominous hotel, you are forced to face trials alongside five other people. Who abducted you and for what reason? What does the future hold with different organizations fighting for power over the world? And just how much is at stake when you play a twisted game without rules? Whether you want it or not, welcome to the Threshold (Twine). @thethreshold-if

5 days (Ren’Py) - Every step forward feels like another memory slipping through your fingers and yet, the world moves on — forcing you to find a way to follow, even when it feels impossible to let go.

~ UPDATES ~

As Gods Fall (CScript) released Chapters 4 and 5. @asgodsfall-if

Knight of Greenhaven (CScript) released Chapter 2.

Lost in your eyes (CScript) released part five of Chapter 3 on Patreon. @kathrinesadventures

Saturnine (CScript) added new content to their demo. @satur9-if

The Thousand Of Us (CScript) added new content to their public demo. @ivanwm-05

Weeping Gods (CScript) added new content to their demo. @jcollinswrites

The Summoner (CScript) released a part of Chapter 4.

Ashenmaw - Dragons of Marrowoods (CScript) added a part of Chapter 1 to their demo. @ashenmaw-if

Our Life: Now and Forever (Ren’Py) added Step 2 introduction scenes to their public demo. @gb-patch

Wasteland Pony Express added new content to their demo. @katieaki

The In-Between (CScript) released Chapter 11. @dalekowrites

Crown of Exile (Twine) released Chapter 10 on Patreon. @ramonag-if

~ OTHER ~

350p Adventure has been ported from Infor 6 to PunyInform. You can either download it or play it online in your browser. — (Some interesting trivia: The game is sometimes called Advent, because the system it was created on in the 70s would not allow filenames to be more than six characters long. This game is sometimes considered as the very first text adventure.)

~

As always, we apologize in advance for missing any update or release from the past week. We are only volunteers using their limited free time to find as much as we can - but sometimes things pass through the cracks.

If you think something should have been included in this week's zine but did not appear, please shoot us a message! We'll do our best to add it next week! And if you know oncoming news, add it here!

~ MAYBE YOU NEXT? ~

We did not get a submission this week. But if you have an idea for a short essay, or would like a special space to share your thoughts about IF and the community...

Shoot us an email!

~ HIGHLIGHT ON ~

A couple of games that we thought were cool.

Your favourite game here?

Do you have a favourite game that deserves some highlighting?

An old or recent game that wowed you so much you spam it to everyone?

Tell us about it! And it might appear here!

WE LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU ALL! WHETHER IT'S GOOD OR BAD, OR EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN...

Have something to say? Send us a message titled: Zine Letter!

As we end this issue, we would like to thank:

our awesome mysterious anon!

all you readers who liked, shared, and commented on the last issue! What might be tiny actions are huge support and motivators to us! Thank you for cheering us on this journey!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

And see you again on Saturday!

AJ, DION, BRIAR, JEN AND PETER

WHAT'S NEW IN IF? 2024-ISSUE 31

[ravenstargames]

✦ LOST IN LIMBO — 2024 WRAP-UP + 2025 MILESTONES

And here we are, after the holidays! Another year has come to an end and this one was simply incredible. You can anticipate what our most important milestone was for 2024, but there has been a lot going on this past year that maybe we all have forgotten. So let's see what these four friends have accomplished this year, and what's coming for a 2025 that already looks promising!

Good news is that we achieved every goal we set up for this year! Isn't that awesome?! We published our first demo, hosted our very first casting call (and it was nuts!) and so much more! Let's see it :3

✦ OUR STUDIO, RAVENSTAR GAMES, WAS OFFICIALLY FOUNDED ON JULY!

Let me tell y'all that when you finish college, keep studying because it turns out the job market is absolutely devastated and cannibalized, and then have an existential crisis, the last thing you think about is saying "fuck it we ball" and open a studio. I mean, we are literally four people with no stable jobs (well, Kayden is an exception) and with no previous experience making a game entirely by ourselves.

So this was a huge step for us. A scary one. A terrifying one, and still is. But we've survived so far, so let's hope we can still do just that—survive at least long enough to start living. Calling this our job would be a dream come true, but there's still a long road ahead until that!

✦ WE SUCCESSFULLY FUNDED LOST IN LIMBO ON KICKSTARTER!

And you were right if you thought this was our most important milestone of the year!

Honestly, I low-key thought we weren't gonna make it. As I said—four people with no budget, paying for what we couldn't do ourselves with what our grandmas give us on Christmas—what were the chances anyone would be interested in helping us fund our game?

But we still had to do it, because making it this far and not risking not being funded would be madness. So there we were, opening Photoshop with tears in our eyes, watching our mediocre bank accounts get obliterated and working on the Kickstarter graphics with nothing but glitter and Jesus.

Also, we were asking for a lot of money and it was our first project. We've seen firsthand a lot of projects fail, a lot of people being scammed, and a lot of projects not going like the audience and devs wanted. So I thought we were a bit doomed.

Well, turns out there are people who believe in us and our project, so I was proved wrong. Maybe our graphics were really cool in the end, huh? I worked my ass off on those! /silly

So 980 people donated almost 60k euros and on September 27th, Lost in Limbo became officially a thing. Which is wild. I don't think I believe it still, honestly.

Of course, not everything went smoothly! As first timers we made a lot of mistakes, but we knew we were going to mess up something. Sometimes it was us, sometimes it was Backerkit or Kickstarter...Truth is watching a million YouTube tutorials, reading articles or learning about other devs' journeys doesn't make you ready to run a Kickstarter. There's some stuff you can only learn while running it!

So we ordered our merch, had our 🎉first delay🎉 because we made a mistake with our pins, and managed to deliver our digital goodies to our backers without blowing up (almost) anything.

✦ WE FUNDED OUR VERY OWN SOUNDTRACK!

And it'll consist of 19 original tracks by our wonderful composer Tomás Palazzi! 💜

✦ WE RELEASED OUR FIRST DEMO!

And overall, people seem to enjoy it! In fact, we recently reached +10k downloads and +71k views on itch! T^T

Of course, getting our demo out there was nerve-wracking, but we received a lot of love, and that includes wonderful and constructive feedback from a lot of folks who love our project and want it to succeed in its best form. Incredible content creators played our demo, reviewed it—and we've met amazing and stunningly creative people in the process!

However, as with anything you publish for others to see, not everyone is going to like it, and I think as a team we needed to also be exposed to that. There have been negative reviews that have helped us improve, and some others that have made us realize that our game, just like any other, isn't for everyone, and that's okay—our game isn't perfect and it won't ever be, and that's okay. As creators and creatives, accepting the critiques that help us improve is as important as letting go of the ones that contribute nothing, and to accept there are some things we don't want to change.

Of course there have been nasty or rude reviews, (most of them private) and albeit there were very few of them, but that was guaranteed. We try to have a few laughs at those!

✦ WE CREATED OUR OWN DISCORD SERVER!

And it's brimming with life!? We are almost 400 members and I may be biased, but it's full of amazing, supportive, and incredibly creative people. It feels so strange to see people talk daily about your game, about your characters—theorize, laugh, ask stuff...I can only hope our members feel at home as much as we do, because even if we can't interact with everyone all the time, just reading y'all makes us extremely happy :')

✦ WE STARTED WORKING ON OUR EXTENDED DEMO!

And it's going great! The script is doing better than expected, even if I'm editing more stuff than I originally planned. Implementing feedback we received during our survey is helping me improve the pace, storytelling and dynamism of the script. I'm an overthinker so I know I'm most likely editing / adding more stuff than I planned, but so is the way of the west.

Raquel has (as you all know) been working on the reworked sprites, and for now there's 4/7 done! 💜 We also have finished one of the new backgrounds and one is close to being done. That's 2/3!

Also, thanks to y'all buying extra stuff via Backerkit, we've managed to raise a bit more money and have been able to commission Airyn for help on the extended demo, as well as Allie (our editor) and the wonderful, the Ren'py Jesus, Feniks, to help us with our programming adventures! So technically we didn't reach our second stretch goal (outsourcing) but the extra coins have allowed us to hire some help!

That's all for 2024! Phew! Now, our plans for 2025 are quite simple (me when I lie).

First of all we want to ship our Kickstarter merch (more on that on a Kickstarter update coming soon!)

Finish production for our Kickstarter artbook

Release our Extended Demo

For now, we are aiming for a June 2025 release of the prologue, and the first chapter of every route will follow soon after.

Open our Patreon!

We have to think about this thoroughly, plan it, and make sure we can offer quality stuff worthy of your support. Some of you have asked a lot about a Patreon but we want to make sure we make it right!

On a personal note—this year I have been working on my OCD, as last year, and booked with two therapists. My therapist (the one who diagnosed me last year), and a different one specialized in OCD. This year has been full of highs and lows, but I'm in a much better headspace than I was last year, to the point of my meds being lowered! ✌️

I also enrolled for my PhD program like a month ago, and I got accepted after a lot of college shenanigans that almost became my villain arc. So this year is going to be funny for me!

Every member of the team has had their personal issues to deal with this year. Mental health, family, etc. It hasn't been an easy year for us, but I'm happy to say we've been there for each other.

And I think that's all! Overall it has been an insane year. Very productive, very nerve-wracking, and incredibly awesome. We can only hope this year is as good as 2024 if not even better, both for us as people and for our game. We hope your 2024 has been good, and we also hope you are excited to make 2025 a year you can be proud of; but most importantly, a year in which you can take care of yourself, be at peace with who you are, discover new things about yourself, and crave a path to the future you want to live!

Talk to you all soon! 💜

[hannahssimblr]

Photoshop Tutorial #1 - Change Background & Add Reflections

Before & After

You will need

Photoshop

Internet Access

I was inspired to make this tutorial after facing a dilemma in my game. I wanted my sims to swim in Brindleton Bay, but, shock horror, the water there is not swimmable. Luckily, I know how to change the background of my screenshots to make it appear as though it is - and I'm going to bring you through the process of how!

Starting off, in game, I brought my sims to Tartosa and got my desired shot. Then, heading over to Brindleton Bay, I got some shots of the horizon that I wanted as a backdrop.

Here's a picture I took:

Okay! Let's open up Photoshop!

For reference, I have Photoshop 2024, but most if not all of the features I've used should be included in older versions too.

Here's our image! Now I'm selecting the Background layer in the layers panel and press CTRL J twice to create two duplicates.

I'll turn off the bottom two layers for now, (by clicking the eye button, for newbies) and go to the properties panel. this should be on the right hand side, above the layers panel, but if it isn't, simply go into window > properties to switch it on.

With the layer selected, I click remove background and voila! Photoshop has... er... done her best to remove the background (she sometimes gets it wrong, but at least it's a help)

You'll see that a layer mask has been created. (circled in image).

If you haven't used layer masks before, the only important thing to know is that black will erase and white will add.

So with my brush tool (shortcut B) selected and set to black, I can go around the image and erase all of the parts I don't want.

If you have a steady hand and a tablet/cintiq you can do the same job a little quicker with the lasso tool (shortcut L) by selecting any unwanted area and simply pressing delete

Once I've removed all that needs to be removed, I see that there's a little slice of her hair that needs to be added. I can change the brush colour to white and paint it in.

Done! Easy!

Okay, let's switch off this layer for now, and switch on the one beneath it.

This is the layer I want to make look like the Brindleton Bay sea. So I'll make sure to pull an image of the water up as reference for colour.

This time I'm going to create a layer mask using the polygonal lasso tool

It's easy.

Find the lasso tool in the tool panel on the left of screen (the third icon from the top - or by pressing L on your keyboard)

Left click & hold, and a menu will pop up. Select the polygonal lasso tool.

Click around the area you'd like to mask, in my case, the sea. Tip: if you hold down the shift key while clicking, you will be able to create perfectly straight lines.

Click on the layer mask button at the bottom of the layers panel (pictured)

Everything except the selected area should disappear!

A small thing here, but I don't want the reflection of the rock in the water in my picture. I'll select the layer (not mask), take the eyedropper tool (shortcut i) with the sample set to all layers, and use a soft brush (B) to paint it away.

Next I'm using adjustment layers to edit the colour of the water, to try and make the blue turquoise paradise look more like the horrible green bog water of the bay.

You'll find these next to the mask button in the layers panel.

For my picture, I'm using hue/saturation for the colour and levels for the light. you can fiddle around with any of the adjustment layers to find what works for you.

I've shown the adjustments I've made for my specific scene below, just for reference.

When I'm happy with the colours/lighting, I select all adjustment layers (shift + L click to select multiple), then right click and choose create clipping mask. This is to ensure that the adj layers don't affect any other parts of the image, just the area I want it to.

And there! My water is looking sludgy, just like I wanted.

Okay! I've decided that I'd like some texture in the water. It always annoys me that sims water looks so flat. So here's where Pinterest enters the story.

I like Pinterest because unlike Google, the majority of the images are not watermarked. You're also slightly less likely to find AI slop.

I wanted some water ripples, so I searched for something like Water Texture, found one I liked, and dragged and dropped it into my photoshop file.

From here, I transformed it (CTRL + T) by resizing & rotating the bounding box, then grabbing the corners while holding CTRL to create some kind of perspective that works for the image.

I didn't bother bringing it all the way to the horizon, because I intend to fade that out with a gradient anyway. I had to sacrifice the bottom of the image for the sake of correct perspective, but that's fine. I will crop that out later.

With the texture layer selected, set the blending mode to soft light. It blends nicely!

Now! Another layer mask! These are our friends

With the texture layer still selected, I create a layer mask.

This time, because I had nothing in the image selected first, the layer mask will appear white. That just means nothing has been masked yet.

With it selected, I find the gradient tool (shortcut G) if you press G and the paint bucket tool is activated, simply navigate to the tool panel on the left of the file, hold the paint bucket tool down and select gradient.

I'll change the colour to black, and make sure I have the foreground to transparent gradient selected.

Other settings are pictured.

I'll drag the gradient over the area I want to mask. In this case, the top of the water texture to make it appear as though it's fading away towards the horizon.

(Doubly make sure you've selected the mask, not the layer while performing this action.)

Looking good!

Time to drag the layer above your adjustment layers and create a clipping mask again.

Alright! Let's do the background.

I'll drag that image of Brindleton Bay that I took earlier into the file.

I want to place it below my sea layer, and above that original background layer (I am going to leave that untouched for insurance reasons)

Then, using the move tool (shortcut V) I'm simply going to move it to the correct place. Basically I just want the horizon lines to match up.

Tip: hold the shift key to drag an image in a straight line.

Enter to confirm.

You can see that the sky is now unfinished, but it's such an easy fix. I'll just select the sky colour with the eyedropper tool, then use the paint bucket tool & brush tool to fill in the sky.

Done!

Now - note that the sea doesn't quite blend in with the background. To fix this, I'm going to take my eyedropper tool (shortcut i) and select some of that dark green colour beneath the mountains.

I will create a layer (+ button on the base of the layer panel) and drag it above that sea texture layer I created earlier.

Then I'll create a layer mask to clip it to the sea.

I'm grabbing that gradient tool again (G) and creating a nice gradient on the horizon.

The horizon line is a little sharp, in my opinion, I want it more faded. So, using a soft brush (B) and that same green colour, I'm going to create a new layer & place it above that green gradient, this time I'm not clipping it.

Holding down the shift key, I'm going to draw a straight line right across the horizon. This helps to blend it all together a bit better.

Now! for Reflections!

Firstly, I'm going back to that sky layer with the Brindleton Bay mountains, and I'm going to duplicated by pressing CTRL + J

I'm dragging it above the sea layer, but below all of the other clipping masks. This will automatically create a clipping mask for the new layer.

Next, I'm going to edit > transform > flip vertical

With the move tool (V) I'm moving the image upwards so that the horizon lines meet and it looks like the lighthouse and mountains are reflecting in the sea.

Note: make sure auto select is off while using the move tool on a layer that lies beneath several others.

This leaves a little bit of a mess on the bottom on the canvas, which can be fixed by creating a layer mask & the gradient tool set to black, and dragging a gradient over the bottom of the image until it blends nicely into the sea.

With the mountains reflection done, I'm going to move onto the people.

I'll turn that top layer that I worked on earlier back on.

Then I'll duplicate it (CTRL + J)

Right click on the layer mask of the duplicate and select Apply Layer Mask from the dropdown. This simply bakes the layer mask into the image. Usually I try to edit non-destructively as much as possible, but in this case it's fine to destroy.

I'm going to rename this layer Reflection

With that new, reflection layer selected, I'll go to Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical, just like before.

I want to add a little water/shimmer effect to their faces, so I'm going to Filter > Distort > ZigZag

I'll just mess around with the settings here until I find something I like.

This is optional, obviously, I've done reflections in edits without doing any of this, but it just adds something a little extra to water scenes, I think.

Here's a time I didn't do that.

anyway, my sims are looking a bit crazy now, but it's fine, because I'm going to, you guessed it, add a layer mask and gradient.

But first, using the lasso tool (L) I'm going to draw around one of the characters and drag her into place. I can move the bounding box around a bit to make her shoulders meet in the right place.

Then I'll do the same for the other character.

Tip: Hold CTRL while moving, warping or resizing something for a smoother, more precise experience.

Now, I'm doing what I said I would, and I'm creating that layer mask. We know how to do it by now, right?

Make sure everything is deselected first by pressing CTRL + D

Create layer mask

Select Gradient (G) set to black

Drag gradient over bottom of reflection (If you ever need more precise gradients, you can select the round gradient at the top of the file. I needed it to blend the reflection on the right more, because the characters are not at an even height.)

In the Layer panel, change opacity to 20% (or whatever you like) and hit Enter to confirm

Using Crop (shortcut C) I'm going to crop my image, cut off that pesky strip at the bottom and just basically make the framing of the picture a little bit nicer.

And viola!

I could edit this image more, throw in bounced light, splashes etc etc but I'll leave it like this.

The only thing I will add in is a little lens flare to indicate sun, so again, I'm taking to Pinterest and searching for one that works.

Tip: make sure the background of a lens flare image is completely black. Otherwise it will be harder to use.

Below is the one I have chosen.

I'm simply changing the blending mode to screen, moving it and resizing it with the transform tool (T), and fiddling with the opacity until I'm happy.

That's it!

I made a video running through this whole process, with all of my shortcuts in the bottom right hand corner so that you can see exactly what is happening.

If there are other tutorials you'd like to see in future, please let me know!

And I'm more than happy to answer any questions!

Good luck <3

[accio-victuuri]

010225: LRLG submission 🔴🟢

what a great way to start the year! a very long submission from lrlg! yaaaay!!!!! let me start with the last part of the post which is a message from lrlg.

It's been a long time since we last met. Isn't it a bit too long? All the work in 2024 is completed. We have entered a new year. Let's meet more often. Happy New Year!

i’m crying!!!! it’s been so long!!!!!

i will try and include as much as i can — especially one that have candy potential. the first part is bobo talking to his team and it’s a long convo but the important part is this:

staff: “How come when I went to the store to look at it, there were men’s rings?”

🟢: "I don't know. I can't go to the store."

🟢: "You can choose a pendant. There are many styles of pendants."

staff: "Only the dragon tablet and nothing else”

🟢 “Buy gold and strike it yourself”

staff:"It's too much trouble"

staff:"Just go with the gold bars and styles."

staff:“Buy ready-made”

HAHAHAHAHAHA IM CACKLING AT YIBO. Why are you like this. His staff has it hard. Why do you wanna make them hand made the gold jewelry you want???? and is this for XZ? part of the new year gift?

🟢 "Good, the only purpose is safety first"

🟢 "Absolutely"

🟢 “The express delivery has been waiting for several days.”

🟢 "It was sent by xx. If you don't go back, I'll find someone to pick it up."

🟢 "good"

the next two paragraphs are convos between wyb and his staff again. they are talking about wyb having enough time to go home ( probably spend time with xz ). then another convo about accessories.

🟢: "What did you order?"

🔴: The food I ordered hasn't arrived yet."

🟢 "I'm hungry."

Staff: "It'll probably be ten minutes. Sorry it's late."

🔴 "You're so busy. You're abusing your employees."

🟢 "Ah? Ask her."

Staff "Sorry I watched the game late"

🟢 "It's okay, I was hungry early"

🔴: "Table Tennis"

Staff "You watch it too"

🔴 "Well, mainly you are playing it out loud"

Staff "Ah, hold on to a little bit"

🟢 "Have you ordered any fruit"

🔴 "You have a big heart, dare to watch the live broadcast"

"Hey"

Staff "Then we must be on the same frequency, order fruit slices"

🟢 "I am your boss, right?"

Staff "But he is your boss"

🟢 "Okay, okay"

the next part is them finally getting their orders! HAHAHAHAHA! they ordered too much and WYB was telling his staff that when he finishes filming he will give them some time off.

Staff: "xx is here, why don't you go and take a look first?"

🟢 "Okay, you go first"

🔴 "Take a few bites of this"

🟢 "I'll come back to eat"

🔴 "Hey, there's no onion"

🟢 Chew chew chew "delicious"

🔴 "You're born in the year of the dog"

🟢 😨

🔴 "My gloves have been bitten through"

🔴 "It's so bad"

🟢 "There's water in the cabinet. I'll roll it for you when I get back. You guys eat first."

Staff "I still have two new ones."

OMGGGG they are feeding each other! and yes XZ he is a puppy! Your puppy!!!! 🥹🥹🥹😂😂😂

the next paragraphs is when WYB has already left and XZ is left with the staff. it makes me feel things that XZ is so familiar with WYB’s staff. they are truly a team that he can even joke with them. you can tell the familiarity.

Staff "I'll treat you guys to a good meal tonight"

🔴 "I'll charge you a lot"

Staff "Hey, the boss isn't here?"

Staff "XX is here"

and they are talking about a watch that was sent.

🟢 "Why aren't you eating yet?"

🔴 "It's only five minutes, you should be back in fifteen minutes."

🟢 "I grabbed the cantaloupe, it's sweet."

Staff How come yours is already cut? I just took two pieces."

🟢 "XX has already cut ones, you didn't get them

Staff "They just cut it. Do I dare to take it?"

🔴 "It's cold whether you eat it or not"

🟢 "Wash your hands"

—-

🔴 "Is it so difficult to eat a meal?"

🟢 "Didn't I ask you to eat first?"

🟢 "Oh, then it's no different from eating at home"

🔴 "You're the one who said all the words"

🟢 "Why are you cursing?"

🔴 "Which word did I use to curse?"

🟢 "You cursed in a very civilized way"

🔴 "The sauce is too salty"

🟢 "Good God"

LOL they never change with the bickering! and how they go back to talking as usual after.

——

🟢 Let Brother X take you there this afternoon"

🔴 "No need for XX"

🟢 "What did you buy?"

🔴 "There are dogs all over your pants"

🟢 "Are you a little dog now?"

🔴 "Yes, you are a little pig dog"

🟢 👊🏻

🔴 "Hey, how can you be so disrespectful?"

🔴 "Why do I feel that this sauce is different from what I ate before?"

Staff "Salty and sweet"

🟢 Change the chef"

🔴 "Hiss"

🟢 "I'll pick you up in the afternoon"

🔴 "No need, I don't know what time I'll be back"

🟢 "Call me when you're done"

the last part is labeled as a funny story among WYB and his staff

🟢 "Who ate the spicy noodles?"

Staff “Everyone in the room ate them."

Staff "Too spicy, that spicy strips they bought online"

Staff "xx had a nosebleed after eating it"

🟢 "Let me taste it"

Staff "Don't eat it, I ate a small piece and now my stomach is on fire"

🟢 "Medical insurance can't be used anymore, this is how it is"

😂😂😂😂 anyway, WYB! Don’t eat that spicy thing!!!!

-END.

i am not authorized to translate the entire thing but these are the ones that stood out and included xz and wyb interaction! this is such a simple part of their life but that’s how it is. i’m glad they get to spend time together. the question is, when was this. lol. this post as you may have noticed is more on the translation and a tiny bit of commentary from me. i will do a longer reaction and crying post later. 🫶🏼

in the meantime, enjoy ^^

[elumish]

My Experience With Digital-First Royalty-Only Publishing (Part 1)

Disclaimer: this is just my experience and my not reflect everyone's experience with this story of publishing.

The Concept:

The are two major distinct components of this sort of publishing: that it's digital first and royalty only. Digital first means that their primary business model is based in selling ebooks rather than physical boks. They don't sell in brick-and-mortar stores, but for my publisher, at least, you can buy physical copies of the books, which are made to order. Royalty only means that authors aren't paid an advance for the book. Instead, all of their payment is directly from royalties, which they start getting paid immediately (as opposed to needing to earn the advance before you get paid any royalties). Generally, these royalties are higher than for traditional publishers.

This is considered indie publishing, as opposed to traditional publishing through one of the Big Five (Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan). I have basically only seen this for romance publishers, though there may be others that I haven't seen.

This is not vanity publishing--I don't pay my publisher, they pay me.

My Publishing Story:

In 2023, I wrote 10k words of a new story in three days, mostly on my phone. After a bit of random internet hunting, I decided to send it in to the publisher with a series plan for another three short pieces (10-15k words) that would together make one full story. A couple months later, they responded and asked if I would make it a full novel and also write another two in the same series. I agreed.

In April 2024, the book was released.

The Submission Process:

A number of digital first romance publishers (including those that give advances, like Harlequin) accept both agented and unagented submissions. That means that you don't need to already have an agent to submit to them, as opposed to most more traditional publishing companies, which only accept agented submissions.

Pro: lower barrier to entry, you get to avoid the querying process

Con: you have to advocate for yourself

Every publisher has a different submission process and different guidelines--some have broad word/topic guidelines and anything within that is fair game, some have specific calls for stories (e.g., we want stories of 30-80k words about billionaires), some have specific imprints or subgenres with different guidelines (e.g., historical romance for 50-80k words, fantasy romance for 60-100k words).

Generally they also request a summary, an equivalent of a query letter, and sometimes also some verion of a series plan.

The Contract:

Probably my biggest issue with working with this publisher was the contract. After a bunch of back and forth after they sent me the contract, they told me that they don't negotiate their contracts with unagented authors.

This is a sort of nuts line to draw, and to be totally honest I almost decided not to publish with them because of it. It would be totally reasonable for you to not publish with anyone who has that policy.

Ultimately, I decided to still publish with them for three reasons: 1) I did a lot of internet sleuthing and couldn't find anyone talking about issues with working with the publisher any time in the last decade, 2) I was comfortable enough with the contract terms to agree to them, and 3) the book is a niche enough subgenre that there's basically no chance I would get it published elsewhere.

If it was a different book or I was in a different stage in my career, I might have made a different decision.

Editing:

The editing I received was primarily copyediting rather than developmental editing. There was a little bit of developmental editing, but the vast majority was copyediting. I'm not so arrogant as to think that that's because my writing is just so perfect that it didn't need developmental editing.

There were ~3 rounds of editing that I went through with my editor. She would make a combination of edits in track changes and comments, and i would either accept, reject, or change. There were some things I rejected because they were intentional stylistic choices, and there were some things I accepted even if I didn't love them because they were part of the publisher's style guide. Everything else was a negotiation.

Overall, I didn't give in to something that I hated, and I don't think my writing suffered for the editing. There are choices that I wouldn't have made, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm right.

Part 2 will include marketing, payment, and my path forward in publishing

[blazescompendium]

Blaze's Compendium Entry #9:

Turbo Granny

Warning: Faith and religion are important real life topics, that tackles the culture and way of life of millions of real life people. It is a cultural expression, and must be respected by all means. Here, we use a video-game ( some times) and other media series only to ignite the flame of learning about the matter, using its art when well depicted, but we do this with all due respect to the cultures we talk here, grounded by real life sources, cultures and people. And i mean this with respect. Hope you all enjoy.

Turbo Granny is a somewhat modern Yokai that has been popularized lately by pop culture. In 2024, Turbo Granny has made a resurgence due to the hit anime: Dandadan and her apparition in Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance, both happening in the spam of just 4 moths.

But before that she also made cameos in the anime Mob Psycho circa 2018, Hell Teacher in 1997 and was first introduced as a playable monster in Shin Megami Tensei Devil Summoner Soul Hackers in 1997. She was absent from the franchise for some decades, upon her return in 2022 for Soul Hackers 2, which coincided with her debut in the -at the time- new manga Dandadan.

Despite that, its origins are so obscure, that I was enticed to dig deep into the lore of this monster and understand if it is even a real urban legend. And here is what i found.

First information that we have about her is that she hails from the Hyogo region in Japan. Supposedly. Hyogo is a southern Region of Japan, between Okayama and Kyoto. Capital is Kobe. So i started by researching about the area, to see if anything about the Region itself has any connections to the particular legend, but did not found anything. The biggest news on the region in the timeline we are looking after was a big earthquake in 1995.

Both western and Japanese Wikipedia pages for this region did not include any mention about Turbo Granny. SMT VV compendium mentions the specific location: MT. Rokko, that is located in the metropolitan area of Kobe. Could no find anything about Turbo Granny on this specific location as well, at the western web.

Addendum: I know that blog posts are hardly scientific accepted sources. However, since we are dealing with an urban legend that survived via word of mouth, this kind of data gathering is the most optimal.

However, using the key words: 六甲山 妖怪 (Mount Rokko Yokai) I could find more content than before. This particular blog mentions some variations of the Yokai, like the way she is called 100km/h hag in Hokkaido, for example. However it lacked any sources and seems to have more of a comedic purpose. Other sites specifically mentions the highways around Mt. Rokko and their tunnels as specific apparitions spots for this creature, but then again no source of whatsoever.

Highway and tunnel at Mt. Rokko, supposedly where the Turbo Granny legend began.

Other Japan web content, showed me the Yokai has been discussed in forums lately, like this one that mentions its resurgence in pop culture as of lately.

But it also mentioned something about the legend being from the Edo period, that could run faster than a horse. And the user speculates that the modern take evolved from there, when cars were introduced in Japan. They, however, provides no source for this information. (Hold this information with yourself for now)

A common thread in all discussions online about this particular monster, be it on Japanese forums, or blog posts, are the outcomes the encounter with Turbo Granny can lead to. From what I could gather, those are:

1- Nothing happens, the granny just scares you. 2-if she passes your car, you get a curse 3- if you passes her, your car will break down completely in less than a week. (Terrifying)

They also speculate that this legend could be from 2ch, which brings us to the first myth about this legend, it did not in fact originated on 2ch! Since the SMT game Soul Hackers, from 1997. 2ch was created in 1999.

But if you keep going through the Japanese web enough, you find more blog posts talking about this Yokai. For example, this other one.

That mentioned the Turbo Granny, but divided in categories. The blog mentioned that this guy called Toshiro Yamaguchi described a version called 60km/h hag that could just run at the max speed of 60 km/h. The Turbo Granny we know can reach up to 100 km/h. Other blogs mentions 140 km/h or as fastest as the target.

This also became a common thread in all registers of this Yokai.

Still in Japanese web, I forgot to check Japanese wikipedia. It got some interesting results, as some interesting variations, and some lore. But only contained one source: This book:

口敏太郎 『本当にいる日本の「現代妖怪」図鑑』 笠倉出版社" In a direct traanslation:

''Illustrated catalogue of modern yokai from Japan that really exist'' This book was released in 2007, 10 years after the granny being featured in the Soul Hackers game, so it is not a good original source.

Sadly I could not find this book anywhere on the internet, only the illustration it has about the Turbo Grannny:

The Wikipedia article states a bit of lore from the book. Keep in mind that I have to use machine translation, so feel free to correct me:

''鞠つきをしている最中にひき逃げされた少女の霊が、自動車以上のスピードで道路を疾走する「鞠つきマリちゃん」[1]'' It mentions that it is the ghost of an once a little girl who died after being hit by a car, playing a ball game in the highway or tunnel with friends.

This is an interesting report, but so far is the only place I have found that contains it. It can be just an invention of the author, or just a regional tale. Other sources generally do not touch on the origins of the ghost.

It all gave me the idea to go at Google Books, and check what i could find on the matter.

You see, earlier in the research I was discussing at Discord if this creature could be a SMT OC, which would be huge. That is because the oldest citation about this ghost was from Soul Hackers, in 1997.

But this was ruled out, going by Google Books, found this book mentioning her at the 29th page, from 1996:

'走るお婆さん: 日本の現代伝說' (Direct translates to: Running Granny: Modern Japanese Folklore)

This book seems to tackle a lot of modern Yokai and Urban Legends in Japan at the mid to late 90s. Its descriptions says:

''A four-legged grandmother chases you in a car at 100 km/h? If you remember the phrase "purple mirror" until you're 20, will you die? If you ride the lion statue in a certain department store, will you pass the exam? Among other urban legends about sex, food and more, the third edition of the anthology that collects and deciphers the modern legends of turn-of-the-century Japan.''

At the 29th page:

(No. 5, June 1994, Issue 6), Kayoko Ikeda's discussion on modern legends titled The Secret of the Running Grandma was published. In that, there are mentions of the Turbo Grandma (with a piece of paper on her back that says 'TURBO' as she rushes by) and the Dash Grandma, who runs along the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway…"

It also had a mention in the 103rd page:

… There are many modern yokai, like Turbo Grandma, who chase after motorcycles and cars. Also, there are ghosts that get into vehicles, such as in the story of 'The Vanishing Passenger' (The White Thread of the Earring, page 22). These eerie phenomena often manifest when they are reflected in the rear view mirror, often occurring around 2:00 AM…"

This means that we can go even further back, to 1994 as the oldest report of this Yokai. And this book states that it was recorded by a woman called Kayoko Ikeda. I went by her name through Japan web to find her complete list of works, and sure enough I followed the path to the book:

ピアスの白い糸―日本の現代伝説 The white thread- Modern Japanese Urban Legends

Supposdely, this book should mention Turbo Granny, but i can not find it online, nor check its index clearly. There is however, a chapter dedicated to car related Yokai and legends, which can be what we look for. It seems to fit with the page 22, mentioned in the other book.

Ikeda who is a translator of German to Japanese, was involved into it. But could not find much of her work related to Yokai. But she is in fact, an academic.

By this, we can kind of conclude the book White Thread from 1994 was the first recorded instance of Turbo Granny in a book. At least, I personally could not find anything else older than that. The idea of the White Thread book was to report urban legends that were being told around at the time, so it may be just that this was really the first person to write about that.

Similar case happened to the Saci, from our entry #7 in Brazil, which was a popular word of mouth legend up until it started to be recorded in books.

Another name that was hot in this research was of Toshiro/Yoshitaro Yamaguchi (山口敏太郎.). He is a celebrated occultist and urban legends enthusiast in Japan, have written several books, currently also makes videos for the internet discussing the case, but it seems he was a frequent apparition on television shows, and somewhat of an authority in the matter.

For example, Yamaguchi has mentioned the Turbo Granny several times, like this one, where he compares her to other Yokai. But Yamaguchi has published several books, and I lack the Japanese knowledge to verify every one of them, that is assuming I would find it online. But it is clear that he mentioned the creature more than once online.

The other claim I went to check was if the idea of Turbo Granny having an Edo Period ancestor checked. And it kinda surprised me.

By combining Edo period and Turbo Granny in the Japanese web, i was directed to a blog article that aimed to find this originnal legend:

The article traces a parallel to another Yokai: Yama-Uba.

Yama Uba is a yokai that is a monstrous hag, that acts like a witch and often is a sort of Japanese Baba Yaga, or Boggeyman. The connection is interesting, because Yama-Uba is often reported to attack travelers on their ox-cars at roads, and in at least one tale they ran pretty fast for an old hag. The story is called:

''Three Talisman'' (三枚のお札』だろう)

The story is about a monk that was hunt down by the YamaUba, and used its magical talisman to escape. During most of the tale, the Yama Uba was running after him with supernatural speeds.

The author of the article speculates that the parts of the tales showing the Yama Uba running after the travelers, that tried to escape by foot, horse or ox-cars, stuck in the collective mind, and slowly evolved to the imagery of a hag running after cars nowadays.

Yama Uba is a very well documented Yokai, being popular as a bogeyman. There are several tales and folklore regarding her, but it checks out that she indeed had tales about chasing her prey.

Personal theory

Now it is time for that part of my text where I give my personal theory, which is totally my own and based on what I have read and researched. This can be debated and disregarded, but it was my own conclusion. Feel free to disagree with me. And even better, if you are a Japanese citizen who had contact with this legend, let me know and correct me if necessary.

Urban legends are extremely hard to pinpoint, and we can only presume their origins, specially with a big language barrier. But we often can also use deduction and a bit of ''taxonomy'' to co relate myths and folklore that could have birthed the legend, the time and place.

I like to compare this to when a paleontologist finds an incomplete fossil, and have to rely on the closest sibling specimens to try and understand the biology of that animal.

In this case, my Personal theory is that I agree with the said article, and i really think that Yama Uba, and its associated imagery birthed the idea of a hag chasing after vehicles, and people.

If you take a close look, the oldest mention I could find about the Turbo Granny is from 1994, then 1996 and then it appeared again in 1997 in SMT. The idea is that this legend was already been spoken about before the internet exploded, and just slowly was registered. If I had to guess, Id say this legend could have originated by word of mouth in the mountain highways and tunnels of Kobe, in the late 1980s. Those places are naturally where people speed up the most with their cars, and even some times host car meet ups. Initial D is a good example of this culture.

Imagine the big showdown that those two would put up....

Of course, i am not Japanese and i can be completely wrong on that interpretation, but at least the connection with Yokai, and the start of the registration of Turbo Granny is factual and can be assured. It is weird however, that Shigeru Mizuki never registered this Yokai, because even if it appeared as late as 1994, he would probably get to know it. But the man was not all powerful.

I had ran across Japanese people online theorizing the Yokai is a warning against old people causing traffic accidents, but it was just that one person, really. I do not believe much in this theory.

The legend probably spread around Japan during the 90s, appearing in probably occult magazines such as the ones the SMT dev team had access, and the rest is history. Surprisingly Kaneko's commentary on the hag for SH book, has no mention of his sources.

''The ghost of an old woman appears on the highway and runs at full speed. She only overtakes cars without causing any harm, and is more of a frightening presence than a horrifying one. There is also the "Dash Granny" of the same kind. There is also the "100km Granny" which causes accidents in cars that overtake her. It's an old woman running on all fours. There are all kinds of old people, like the Jumping Old Man or the Dash Old Man. Anyway, when you're driving at night, apparently there's one that passes you at incredible speed. Apparently it has the word "Turbo" written on its back, or a piece of paper with that written on it stuck to its back. What's more, it's written in hiragana. Personally, I wrote "Porsche Turbo" on its kimono. Still, old people play a lot of important roles in yokai.'' -Kazuma Kaneko, Soul Hackers Subete (machine translation)

Turbo Granny strikes back: The resurgence of the legend.

Turbo Granny gathered a recent cult following, due to her appearance in pop culture media. SMT was a pioneer in this regard, followed by the after mentioned Hell Teacher manga.

Mob Psycho 100 also featured the Yokai, but due to unforeseen forces, 2024 has became the Turbo Granny year and she is indeed having a brat summer.

When the Dandadan animation hit Netflix at the start of October, the Yokai was instantly recognizable. It became one of the main antagonists and characters of the work, that also dabbles in other Yokai and spirits.

Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance not only re added the monster, but also gave her an unique side quest, where you have to hunt down the hag through the pre apocalyptic Tokyo, stop her, and photograph her for an occult magazine.

And finally, my favorite piece of media related to the granny...

In 2017 the Turbo Granny was the star of a Broad Wimax commercial, which is a company that sells internet connection. They commercial was about how their internet speeds were able to be faster than the Turbo Grannyy, and it was starred by a comedian. The whole commercial starts as a documentary, but gets progressively funny.

Conclusion

As any urban legend, Turbo Granny will forever be a mystery in terms of origins and original sources. We can say for sure this was not invented by Dandadan artist nor Shin Megami Tensei devs, since the legend was around for a long time. It seems people in Japan recognize it as popular as the Slit Mouthed Woman, for instance. This makes this Yokai unique because of how modern and popular it is, through pop culture.

Of course, Dandadan mangaka added his own flavor to the monster, but that is part of the fun.

Honestly it is pretty cool to witness that kind of popularity for a specific Yokai, and watch how the legend slowly evolves and change over time. Who knows?

I hope this put your itch to know this hag's history to sleep!

Turbo Granny at the Soul Hackers for 3DS opening.

Special thanks to Eirikr for the help with the Kaneko commentary!

[nadas-dirthalen]

I Saw Solas's Origin in an Achievement Icon and It Opened My Eyes on 15 Years of Lore

— PART SEVEN: if you haven't read previous parts, do it now! —

[ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 8 ] [ 9 ] [ 10 ]

Welcome, friends and travellers! I wanted to get some thoughts recorded before Veilguard's release so I could see if I am right about an absolute BOATLOAD of theories I have.

In short: I saw the achievement list when it was released. I have seen the backstory hints for Solas included in said list. AND MY MIND WAS BLOWN.

You have been warned: THIS COLLECTION OF THEORIES INCLUDES SPOILERS FOR EVERY DRAGON AGE GAME AND ALL PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL UP TO AND INCLUDING OCTOBER 18, 2024.

Come sit down with me. Make a nice cup of tea (and hide it from Solas). We've got a lot of unpacking to do.

(Image from Brianne Battye's Won't Know When. it's a great read! not the spoiler, though.)

Today's Discussion: The Tragedy of the Evanuris (3/3)

— Pestilent Doom Upon All the World —

Welcome back! If you're new here, go read all the other parts. Yes, I know there are six of them. There's a reason there are six of them! The context is building as we go, I promise.

If you made it this far, you're a hero. Thanks for bearing with me through the muddled chronology of the earlier Evanuris. I promise: it matters, for when we get to Solas in future (soon!!) instalments.

Now, the most immediate threat to Thedas: the blight. We know the story of Ancient Elvhenan ends (in one sense) with Solas creating the Veil, sealing the Evanuris in their prisons, keeping the blight from consuming all Thedas. We know that the blight involves red lyrium, but not how it involves red lyrium. We know that Ghilan'nain and Andruil have had contact with it, but not how.

The truth is: all the Evanuris are guilty, in their own way. Ghilan'nain's and Andruil's story is only part of the blight's story—and figuring out the rest of it will piece together some of the final gaps in the puzzle that is Solas Dragonage.

Let's begin.

"Blackened Hearts" and Portents of Doom

Pestilent Hate

"Banal Malas Elgara" — What WAS the Blight's Beginning?

Andruil: Huntress of the Void

Mythal: Intervention, Too Late

Ghilan'nain: Mother of Monsters, Who Once Was Most Sensitive

One Mistake Becomes Everyone's Weapon

"Blackened Hearts" and Portents of Doom

There is a reason I went over all the Evanuris, even the ones not most immediately related to Veilguard. It was to establish a pattern: the Evanuris all harvested from the Titans to do horrible experiments on both spirits and corporeal people.

The Titans are living organisms. We see Shaper Valta describe their song as "breathing." Red lyrium contains the Blight, and the Blight only affects living things. We even see red lyrium growing in the Fade.

There is not an Evanuris among the bunch who is not guilty of taking from the Forgotten Ones. Mythal mined their bodies for lyrium, which she made into people. Sylaise and June did the same, each with their own horrible experiments. Elgar'nan took it one step further, sundering spirits under his domain. Dirthamen shoved additional spirits/demons into the bodies of his worshippers—and animals, trees, etc. Falon'Din may have made it his mission to kill all Titans entirely, but blackened their hearts instead (we'll get into the meaning of that very shortly).

Not only do these actions solidify Solas's motivations for imprisoning all of the Evanuris, regardless of the blight that would threaten everything—it also sets the stage for that blight to emerge.

Every Evanuris did something that could have prompted the blight's beginning. Their wretched crimes doomed all of Thedas. It's just a matter of figuring out the exact moment that doom took shape.

Long has it been debated in the DA fandom about whether red lyrium began the blights, or whether the blights caused red lyrium to start growing within the Titans. I could not decide which argument I believed more...

Until I saw Solas's Manifestation memory icon, and then read World of Thedas.

Pestilent Hate

Remember how I said a couple of times before that the Titans are named similarly to spirits/demons in World of Thedas?

Long have many of us in the fandom wailed over the fact that Spite is on this list. But I think that, collectively, most of us overlooked Pestilence.

Let us go over what we know. According to both the Chant of Light and the Dwarven faith and ancient elvhen texts, Titans shaped the world. They are living beings, whose blood is everywhere. They are named in the same fashion as spirits, and can evidently be "turned" in the same ways as spirits, likely because all spirits are formed from Titans' thoughts.

All four of these Forgotten Ones have been "turned." We also know that what "turns" a spirit in Thedas is trauma: usually the trauma of passing through the Veil.

Seeing the name Pestilence, I checked my theory against all other sources available to me, starting with what we know of the blight thus far.

Ancient elven sources refer to the blight as a plague that spread through Andruil's lands (more on that later). Again, it is mentioned as a plague in a blood-memory on a Tevinter statue. The Chant of Light also makes mention of the word "plague:"

There in the depths of the earth they dwelled, Spreading their taint as a plague, growing in number Until they were a multitude.

But I wanted to go one step further. I wanted to see if pestilence would be mentioned explicitly, in any way that might point it back to the Forgotten Ones.

(17) The Seven struck against the Archon With all their twisted magic, But no pestilent hate could turn aside Tevinter's Ferryman. (18) Across the plain, the Archon saw, Where the defilers stood, corruption, Blackness all consuming, Threatened to engulf his land and all his people. With fire and lightning he strove To cleanse the spreading poison from the earth, To no avail. Magic could not undo What evil had done.

There: the Seven (the Magisters Sidereal, the ones who went to the Blackened City) turned pestilent hate against the Archon when he tried to stop them. That magic is then described as defiled, corrupted, a blackness all consuming, threatening to engulf his land and all his people. It is likened to poison spreading through the earth—which we now know can be interpreted as the Titans' domain.

But magic could not undo what evil had done, in much the same way that flinging fire and lightning at a demon will not persuade it to revert back to its former, friendly nature.

I do not believe the Magisters were the first ones to bring the blight to what would become the Silent Plains. In fact, I do not believe that to necessarily be Andruil, either, who famously stalked the Void to hunt the Forgotten Ones.

I think the real culprit comes sooner: the foundation of every Evanuris atrocity.

The mining of Titans for people.

"Banal Malas Elgara" — What WAS the Blight's Beginning?

One of the first songs I posted about, way back in part 2 of this series, may hold the key to our entire understanding of the Blight.

Ir sa tel'nal Mythal las ma theneras Ir san'a emma Him solas evanuris Da'durgen'lin Banal malas elgara Bellanaris, bellanaris.

Isatunoll Mythal gives you dreams Lyrium within Becomes Solas Evanuris Little stone boy...

Here is where I paused, because I remembered something about the elven language: a word that does not appear in this song, but is cited in World of Thedas vol 1. Something I had not considered, even when I wrote part 2 of this theory, because the realizations are happening that fast.

Banalhan: "This place of nothing," the Elven name for the Blight, or, rather, where the Blight comes from.

If "Banalhan" is where the Blight comes from, and "-an" is the suffix that denotes a place name, then what is the root word for Blight?

Banal.

The rest of the song would then become:

Blight you give to the Many-Spirit (Titan) Forever, forever.

Oh.

But hang on a moment: we don't see Mythal wielding the Blight like Ghilan'nain is in Veilguard. We haven't seen her do it even once! In fact, Solas describes Mythal as the lone voice of reason among the Evanuris, and laments the fact that the others killed her.

Mythal is known not for her greed, nor her impulsivity, but her wisdom and restraint. It makes me think that this codex about the ancient elves sealing the Deep Roads belongs in this portion of the Evanuris's history: before the rise of Ghilan'nain, and before the end was near.

In the light of the veilfire, the runes seem to shift, coiling and uncoiling like snakes. A thunderous voice shatters the stillness, shouting: "Hail Mythal, adjudicator and savior! She has struck down the pillars of the earth and rendered their demesne unto the People! Praise her name forever!" For a moment, the scent of blood fills the air, and there is a vivid image of green vines growing and enveloping a sphere of fire.

Part one seems to be what we know: Mythal struck down the Titans and farmed people. But then?

The vision grows dark. An aeon seems to pass. Then the runes crackle, as if filled with an angry energy. A new vision appears: elves collapsing caverns, sealing the Deep Roads with stone and magic. Terror, heart-pounding, ice-cold, as the last of the spells is cast.

Elves hurriedly sealing the Deep Roads. Terror, as the last of the spells is cast. We know that Terror is the name of one of the Forgotten Ones, and I would imagine that this codex describes that Titan turning.

But if this Forgotten One is Terror? What came next confused me, for a time.

A voice whispers: "What the Evanuris in their greed could unleash would end us all. Let this place be forgotten. Let no one wake its anger. The People must rise before their false gods destroy them all."

This is the exact same language that's getting used about the blight in Veilguard—namely, by Solas, who hinted at this concept in Inquisition as well. The blight threatens to end all creation, so what is it doing associated with Terror, not Pestilence?

"Pestilent hate" does not refer only to Pestilence's hatred. It refers to hatred that spreads like pestilence, from those "blackened hearts" of the Titans.

Many have thought of it before I: the blight is the Titans' defence mechanism against the Evanuris's war effort and subsequent crimes.

Mythal was wise enough to seal it all away. But the others?

Andruil: Huntress of the Void

Many of you are already familiar with Andruil, and so I will be brief.

Before I dive into the blight material, I'd like to draw quick mention to: yup, Andruil was also taking spirits. She took the "screams of the south wind," which I am going to interpret means "spirits of the Fade in the south."

She took the gathering storm, trapped its fury in golden limbs, and strung it with the screams of the south wind. Andruil, blood and force, your people pray to you. Grant that your eye may not fall upon us. Spare us the moment we become Your prey.

Since we know that the Titans are un-sundered in her time, this does still count as stealing from the Forgotten Ones in the same way as mining lyrium does.

Back to the blight, and to the hunting codices that many of us know and love.

One day Andruil grew tired of hunting mortal men and beasts. She began stalking the Forgotten Ones, wicked things that thrive in the abyss. Yet even a god should not linger there, and each time she entered the Void, Andruil suffered longer and longer periods of madness after returning.

I want to draw attention to this first paragraph because of the mention of its timing. Prior to this codex, the Evanuris loved fighting the Titans! They loved mining the Titans for lyrium! For people! This is the first mention we see of venturing to the Abyss being an inadvisable thing to do. This tells me she went after the Titans became "wicked things." Now, there was a danger. Now, there was blight.

Andruil put on armor made of the Void, and all forgot her true face. She made weapons of darkness, and plague ate her lands. She howled things meant to be forgotten, and the other gods became fearful Andruil would hunt them in turn.

Important to note: the wiki lists that darkness and taint/blight are the same thing. Additionally, Andruil howled things meant to be forgotten. Knowing what we know now about lyrium, and about how darkspawn hear a unique calling—I'm going to wager that Andruil heard the songs of these twisted/tainted Titans, whether or not that counts as the Calling.

Plague ate her lands. We know "lands" refers to Titans (remember that Elgar'nan was asked to tame the land). Therefore: plague (blight) ravaged the Titan of her domain.

Most importantly: the other gods became fearful Andruil would hunt them. They weren't afraid of that before. It means she must have changed.

(I'm not going to discuss the lyrium armor at this point; every Evanuris has done many a Lyrium Crime, and I do not think there's anything super substantive in Andruil wearing lyrium armor, save for the fact that it is probably red, as her art in The Missing [comic image pictured above] suggests.)

My key takeaway is: Andruil did not create the blight, nor did she discover it. The Evanuris knew about the blight, and Mythal's elves had tried to seal it away. Andruil's crime is that she stalked the Forgotten Ones again, bringing the blight back to the pantheon.

Mythal: Intervention, Too Late?

Remember that Solas refers to Mythal as the lone voice of reason among the Evanuris? He was likely referring to what came next in that codex.

So Mythal spread rumors of a monstrous creature and took the form of a great serpent, waiting for Andruil at the base of a mountain. When Andruil came, Mythal sprang on the hunter. They fought for three days and nights, Andruil slashing deep gouges in the serpent's hide. But Mythal's magic sapped Andruil's strength, and stole her knowledge of how to find the Void. After this, the great hunter could never make her way back to the abyss, and peace returned.

We all know the point of this codex: that Mythal stepped in to intervene when Andruil came back carrying the blight. I want to draw attention to a few key facts here.

Mythal is clearly using lyrium/Titan-based magic, while Andruil is using the "air"/Fade-based magic. Remember that Andruil's bow was strung with screams from the wind: this is that. Mythal's magic counters Andruil's, just like templars' magic counters mages' magic.

Mythal then takes Andruil's memories away from her with this lyrium-based magic. The only way that we are aware of how to do that is by then Shaping the memory into the Stone. This is where a lot of people link Andruil, Sera, and the Small Painted Box found in Origins and referenced in Sera's dialogue (another theory I have no time to elaborate on—I am positive it is located somewhere, if you go hunting!)

Andruil is never mentioned as getting these memories back. But that does not mean that knowledge of the blight halted there.

In fact... Andruil raised up a mortal to the ranks of the Evanuris, just like Mythal did for Solas. Since we know Solas's origin. . .

Ghilan'nain: Mother of Monsters, Who Was Once Most Sensitive

"As you were raised up from mortal men to stand with our Creators, our Makers, so raise me up now to defend this world." — Inquisitor Ameridan

Ghilan'nain is oft cited as a follower of Andruil. We know, though, from the stories of Mythal, Falon'Din, Sylaise, and even June, that followers of the Evanuris do not necessarily mean mortals who chose to follow them. Rather, we know that follower most often means creation.

Ghilan'nain is a creation of Andruil, who created many monsters for Andruil to hunt. In fact, as the goddess of sacrifice, that seems to be what Andruil wanted the most from her "followers."

My most important question is: where did Ghilan'nain come from, to make her the way that she is? It's likeliest that Solas came from the same Titan that Mythal initially locked away (or another similarly blighted Titan). Yet, Solas is not... Like That™, the way Ghilan'nain is.

(AKA, I don't see him sliding around on tentacles, creating all manner of horrors under 12 different mountains in Nevarra.)

Ghilan'nain seems to be the strongest proponent of and most skilled wielder of blight magic among the Evanuris. I think it has everything to do with the Titan she came from. And I think we can guess at which one that is, based on a few key details.

First, we know that the Titan Mythal sealed away was likely Terror. Second, we have a codex from another of the Forgotten Ones: Geldauran.

There are no gods. There is only the subject and the object, the actor and the acted upon. Those with will to earn dominance over others gain title not by nature but by deed. I am Geldauran, and I refuse those who would exert will upon me. Let Andruil's bow crack, let June's fire grow cold. Let them build temples and lure the faithful with promises. Their pride will consume them, and I, forgotten, will claim power of my own, apart from them until I strike in mastery.

Geldauran is speaking out against specifically two of the Evanuris: Andruil and June. If Geldauran had first been mined by Mythal, wouldn't Mythal's name also have been mentioned, as Mythal's horrors are the first among the Evanuris (as far as I can tell)?

But no: there are only two mentioned here. I believe Andruil and June, therefore, were both mining from Geldauran.

What was Ghilan'nain doing, before joining the Evanuris? Staying away from all the elvhen, creating.

Ghilan'nain kept herself apart from the People. She used her power to create animals none had ever seen.

I'm imagining this means she is hanging out nearby her Titan, down in the Abyss.

The skies teemed with her monsters, the land with her beasts.

And this? We know skies means the Fade, full of her monsters. What monsters are known to inhabit the Fade? Demons. As for the land, that's the Titans' domain, and it encapsulates every other creature: anything corporeal.

Andruil hunted them all, and after a year of killing, approached Ghilan'nain with an offer: the gods would share their power with Ghilan'nain, but only if she destroyed her creations, for they were too untamed to remain among the People. Ghilan'nain agreed and asked for three days to undo what she had made.

The creations were hurting the elvhen: the Evanuris's other creations. Their other property. And so Ghilan'nain, spirit of Geldauran, was asked to leave the Titan's domain, promised the power of the Evanuris instead.

(We won't go over the "which monsters did she kill and why did Pride stop her hand" here, because it is not relevant for a discussion of the blight, except to say that griffons are peculiarly resistant to the blight.)

Let's assume that this Titan, Geldauran, was a spirit of Creation, or something similar.

What is the opposite of creation? Life? Pestilence.

While I believe that the blight is the defence mechanism of every injured or angered Titan, I believe that Pestilence affords Ghilan'nain with different abilities than the other Evanuris, save for June/June's domain (who, also, as Architect? 100% was "improving upon" his own creations with what sounds like the fires of a forge).

This is also why I think that Ghilan'nain and Andruil's relationship matters as much as it does. I'm not the first to speculate that it's Andruil making up Ghilan'nain's second torso. I'm not the first one to have latched on to how Solas said Ghilan'nain was, "most sensitive of us."

Conclusion? Ghilan'nain did not invent the blight. Once, she may have even created beautiful creatures on purpose.

I believe that there may have been a point where Ghilan'nain tried to cure Andruil of the blight. A point where she was more aligned with Creation/Healing than Pestilence. Where what she wanted was to populate the world with good things, healthy things. The halla we see in the open world (not the insectoid monstrosities painted in Hormak and other temples). The griffons, maybe.

But somewhere along the way—perhaps even because of Andruil hunting her Titan—Ghilan'nain changed. And when she changed, (re)discovering the blight as it was brought back by Andruil?

No one could keep it a secret any longer. And if there is one thing we know about the Evanuris, it is that every single one of them has done unspeakable acts in the name of augmenting the lives of their creations, to the detriment of everything and everyone else.

Thirst for power among the Evanuris would threaten to blight the world, and it was all of their fault at once.

One Mistake Becomes Everyone's Weapon

This—THIS is why I spent 6,000 words going over the other Evanuris. Because the blight is not the fault of just Andruil, or just Ghilan'nain, as so many of us believed for so long.

In fact, the blight sounds like it first made its appearance because of Mythal. Mythal, the only one to turn away from it and try to keep others away from it, lest everything else be destroyed.

Every single other Evanuris has expressed nothing but interest in it, that we have seen. Elgar'nan is using it in Veilguard, from what we know. Falon'Din maybe wanted every Titan to die, not live in peace. Dirthamen might have tricked the Magisters Sidereal into entering the Golden City just to blight them all and escape himself. Sylaise and June both pushed their creations to the limits of what is possible, bending life to their command and their image.

Every single one of them had an archdemon. A blighted dragon. All but Mythal (that we know of).

THIS is why Solas cannot stop with just imprisoning Ghilan'nain and Elgar'nan, or Ghil and Elgar'nan and Andruil, or even any six of the seven.

The tragedy of the Evanuris is that every single one of the pantheon was unstoppable in their greed. Every single Evanuris caused the events that led to the blight. Every single Evanuris ignored Mythal's warnings.

And they all killed her, in the end.

----

AAAAA THANK YOU for reading this far, AGAIN, if you have! I'm trying to finish up the entirety of my theory collection before Veilguard drops, so stay tuned!

Also: I am essentially FULLY OFFLINE to try and avoid game spoilers! As these reviews have just gone live today (10/28), I am not reading my notifications/replies, and am appearing here only to continue posting my theories. I have heard that the embargo has been broken at least once already and I refuse to risk it, so I will respond to messages and notifications once I have played Veilguard for a bit.

(Mutuals, if you need me, you may DM me, as long as you do not mention the reviews in any capacity.)

This series is close to its end. It should wrap up after 9 or 10 parts in total.

Coming Up Next: The Story of Solas Evanuris, Da'Durgen'lin.

[not-freyja]

LU Write-A-Thon

This our second monthly LU Write-A-Thon, spearheaded by @hotcheetohatredwastaken and myself, will run on July 1, 2024 from 12 am to 12 am GMT (7pm to 7pm EST starting June 30). There is one goal in mind with this event---write as many productive words within that day as humanly possible.

Originally a fun game amongst friends, we are now opening this up to the general fandom-body-public (and happily so) by popular demand!

The event will be hosted on discord, and the link will go out via a reblog/reply/edit combo on this post a few hours before the event starts.

We're so excited to have all of you come and write with us, and the event rules are right here blow the cut:

What counts as writing?

Writing fanfiction or original fiction, leaving or answering comments, outlining, drafting, storyboarding, personal journaling, and (writing) homework---basically, anything that furthered yourself, the LU writing community at large, or your stories with a positive word count, can be included in your final word count.

(Editing previously-written works can also be included, but only if it produces a positive word count, and only those new words may be counted. The goal is to get new words on the page).

What CANNOT be counted as writing?

General chatting, talking about already written works, etc, will not count towards your final word count. Words counted must, as previously stated, further yourself, the writing community, or your stories. This does not mean that you can't chat with your fellow writers---the ⁠⁠chaos-chat thread was created for such a purpose!---but the main goal of this event is to produce and engage in writing in one form or another.

What is a sprint, and what is the schedule for the sprints?

Sprints are (voluntary) periods of concentration in which writers will write as much as they can within a time limit, with some friendly competition to be the one with the most words by the end of the sprint. These will be hosted in the ⁠⁠sprint-bot thread. Every hour, the times :00 to :15 will be dedicated to a 15 minute rest, and then a 45 minute sprint will run from :15 to :59. Moderators will start the sprints periodically---writers can jump in as desired.

Do you have to participate in the sprints?

No. You can write on your own if you wish, just make sure to keep track of your total and only count what is written in the window of 12am to 12am GMT (7pm to 7pm EST) on July 1. Additionally, you can write in the suggested breaks between sprints, but again, make sure to keep track of your word count on your own then.

How should I count my words?

There are two main ways that you can count your words---using the Sprinto Bot in the ⁠⁠sprint-bot channel, or keeping track of them yourself. If you are keeping track of them yourself, especially if you're counting words other than fiction writing where your word count is easy to find, please take care to be as accurate as possible---you can use an application like Google Docs or Word to give you your exact word count, even if you have to copy and paste your ao3 comments into them to get it.

If you're handwriting, this gets a little bit rougher to calculate, but we'll encourage you to give it your best estimate.

We'll be on the honor system here: play fair, and report as accurately as possible.

Where/When should I report my words?

Final word counts will be reported in the ⁠⁠word-count-total channel. We encourage you to make ONE post at the beginning of the marathon with your word count; then, as the event continues, you can edit your post and update your word count there.

You can update your word count at any point during the marathon in the channel mentioned above---in fact, the breaks between sprints would be a great time. And once the event is over, there's a period of grace of up to 6 hours for everyone to get their word counts in, but no more writing is allowed during this time. After 6 hours (6 am GMT; 11pm EST), the thread will be locked, and no more additions will be made. So be sure to get your final count in as soon as possible, once the event is over (or even before, if you must dip early).

What if I can only write a little?

That is fine. We are going to be playfully competitive, but it is not a contest---it is a group project. We are using teamwork to make the line go up. Every word counts, and any amount of writing is a fantastic amount of writing. The goal is to do better than last time AS A GROUP, not individually. So do what you can, and be sure to have fun with the rest of us!

WORD COUNT TO BEAT: 88,978