#stellar revival

[swimmingtrunks]

Are Shepard’s friends finally giving her a taste of her own medicine, or are they actually all a little face blind when it comes to different species? IDK! Mostly I made this because Traynor looks just enough like my shep in ME3 that it throws me off sometimes.

Bioware, I beg of you, whatever you end up doing for the next Mass Effect game, STOP USING CHARACTER CREATOR ASSETS TO MAKE GAY ROMANCEABLE CREWMATES.

Cut up comic for easier tumblr reading (hopefully) below the cut!

[rhaaclaws]

I was thinking about Signalis again and realized that Andros would've loved it so much. and would've gotten a little obsessed with theories

[undergroundbillions]

petition for marla and john from flop of the heap to play mommy and poppa in the rag dolly revival

- mod wowf🐾

[ask-sebastian]

Plus, the animation in the music video is top-shelf! (⌐■_■)👍 ♪♬

Dropping the video here for everyone's enjoyment!

🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘

[ayoyoungg]

SCREAMING!! AND CRYING!!

ATBO covered B.A.P’s Warrior!! And it’s really good (as expected)!!

[gifti3]

So asmos birthday is coming up.....

[2-eeillustration]

Finished some concept art doodles of Optimus for that #Return_0 x TF AU I've been cooking as an art challenge for tonight's stream-- TL;DR the matrix brought him back from the dead after Cybertron war ended to save Megatron from the bigger bad in my OC universe!

(Optimus turns into a train/stellar engine in this AU 🚄☄️)

I also got down even more lore down during stream too (Thank u badgersnaps for bouncing ideas and helping me write the Prime related stuff; summary below!

-Optimus was executed by Megatron at the end of the war- but in this AU the Prime Matrix is reviving him; powered by the main seal engraved in its core.

-As the strongest of the Seals, the Seal is of the planet Cybertron itself, is "Cybertron is Threatened by an Outside Force ''. And with Megatron being controlled by PROVIDENCE, this seal is activated. It's by far the strongest seal, but only just strong enough to force Optimus alive again. So, he needs to fulfill the other seals to be able to act and move properly. (effectively keeping him in perma-overclock)

-The reason why the Cybertron Seal wasn't active during the Decepticon war was because the Decepticons were born of Cybertron. They aren't an Outside threat. PROVIDENCE however , is.

-OP's main objective is to prevent PV from using its its control over Megatron to unlock the coordinates to their home planet for assimilation...

[millylotus]

Super Villain Summer Internships [Everlasting Trio, DpxDc]

Everlasting Trio don’t know what they’re going to do for college, so they decide to just bite the bullet and do a few internships. Although they all forget to tell each other that they’re each interning with villains.

Danny is with Mister Freeze, going under the name Blizzard

Danny is basically the one doing a bunch of intern work while also not, at first he was just kinda there cause he liked being cold

But then he and Freeze begin to bond over feeling responsible for things that aren’t really their fault, Danny promises to help Freeze revive Nora

They have a father-son relationship, in how they’re actually pretty similar in personality & powers

Sam is with Poison Ivy, under the name Blood Blossom

Sam is the only one to have a legal internship because Ivy actually wrote her down as her legal lab assistant

She and Pam are very Big Sis-Little Sis energy, Sam is the annoying younger sibling who wants to do everything their big sister does

Pam finds this devotion to their ideals adorable, and supports Sam in their joint endeavors

Tucker is with Bane, going as Ruin

Tucker acting as Bane’s tech guy, he’s been working on a new type of venom for Bane he doesn’t get into many fights but if he needs to he doesn’t back down

They have an Uncle-nephew relationship going on but also Tucker gets a bit obsessive about making the best venom that they have Frankenstein & Frankenstein’s Monster going on too

It’s mainly just Tucker getting to cackle evilly while Bane just say “Alright chiquito, have you eaten breakfast yet? You get angry when hungry.”

The batfam is not prepared to deal with two mini rouges and a secret mini rouge who they haven’t met yet but are still worried about

A couple weeks into their internship the Gotham Rogues have their bi-monthly meeting where The Everlasting Trio is introduced to everyone

Ivy, Freeze, & Bane were also surprised to see that their interns actually knew each other/are dating

The Everlasting Trio are the entire reason why the Gotham Rogues are even talking to each other at the moment

Now the bats are even more confused & concerned because the rogues are usually at each other’s throats

It’s the only thing keeping them from taking over tbh

When the batfam find out that the three interns they’ve had to deal with for like most of June, all know each other and are actively in a polycule, they feel like everything makes so much more sense

The trio do have an ulterior motive to this whole thing, at first it’s just indulging in their less than stellar morals

Until it’s not

They become more enthralled in their ambitions, Sam begins to care less and less about the world outside of plants, she cares less about the civilian casualties, she begins to use ecto-science on plants

Pam & Harley are very concerned because they’re both on their path to redemption and Sam is going in the other direction

Danny becomes just as obsessive as Mister Freeze with trying to bring back Nora, he’s bringing in ecto-science in an attempt to bring her back through re-bonding her soul back to her body

Freeze isn’t against this exactly, but he’s unsure if it’ll bring the real Nora back, he’s still gonna go with it

Tucker has fully fallen into the mad scientist idea, he wants to make Bane the best version of himself the best human possible, his new version of venom is directed by ecto-science and such

Bane of course wants to be stronger but he knows at some point Tucker is gonna go to far, so he’s willing to hold the kid back if need be, but he isn’t going to actually do it he wants Tucker to go bad

By the time the Trio reaches the point of no return their bosses realizes this is not going to go their way anymore

Everlasting Trio: You’re just afraid to take it, One. Step. Further.

The fight to take back Gotham from the Everlasting Trio is a long one

Sam has complete control over Robinson Park [biggest park in Gotham] along with its botanical gardens and such

The surrounding neighborhoods are overrun with plants, she has people asleep and under her control for the most part

Tucker has most of the upper districts running wild on the venom he’s made, people are now more powerful than Superman himself and have lost their minds in their blind rage, they’re all mainly under his control

Danny has the east bays and the graveyards near by, everything is frozen over, the bodies in the harbor and in the ground have been reanimated into ice soldiers and are under his control most of the time

Ivy, Harley, Freeze, & Bane have to call in the bats for help with the Trio and their plans

They split up to go for their kid, with a few bats behind them to back them up

Ivy & Harley pull on Sam’s care for the rest of the world

Bane brings Tucker down from the high, making him think this through

Freeze gets Danny to realize that nobody he brought back is who they first were

By the end of it the trio is subdued after a big fight and some impassioned speeches

They’re admitted into Arkham Asylum, they promise their mentors that they’ll do better, that they’ll get better & make them proud of them

Admittedly I completely forgot to mention the trio’s family back in Amity

Let’s just say they don’t all know the nature of their internship

Jack & Maddie are aware that Danny is interning under an important doctor but they weren’t sure who he is

Angela & Maurice don’t know what’s going on with Tucker he hasn’t given them any stable information, he wanted to keep it that way with them thinking he’s still a good kid

Jeremy & Pamela know exactly what Sam was doing, she made sure of it, she wanted them to know they’re baby girl was running with villains now

Jazz is actually living in Gotham while this is going on, she going to college at GU for psychology, she’s interning at Arkham

She’s actually close with the bats, having met Jason, she’s one of the few psychs they trust at all

She knows that Sam is working with Ivy, she’s tried reaching out to her but Sam refuses to talk to her

She’s only ever seen Blizzard from afar, and was unable to connect him with Danny

She didn’t even know Ruin existed until the bats told her, and even then she didn’t know he was Tucker

When they’re taken down Jazz finds out who they are and she’s crushed, she feels she not only failed Sam, but also Danny & Tucker as well

Since the trio are all 18+ by the time they’re arrested nobody from Amity is sent anything to tell them they’ve been arrested

For about a week Jazz is actually their therapist at Arkham before she’s re-assigned when it’s realized she knows them personally

Jazz ends up telling the Foleys and the Fentons what happened

Then Amity gets the broadcast of their very own Samantha Manson being arrested in Gotham, New Jersey for eco-terrorism

Everything else just blows up in their faces after that, The three families don’t even dare show face around for awhile

They go to Gotham to actually visit their kids in Arkham

The Foleys are so disappointed in their son for what he’s done, Tucker can’t even look them in the eyes as the yell at him about everything

For the Mansons it sprouts into a huge shouting match with Sam almost jumping to table to try and physically fight her parents

All the Fentons do is stare at each other, they try to ask Danny why but he’s not cooperating with his biting remarks and not wanting to even see them for almost a week

Regarding their sentence and institutionalization the trio only has about five years or until they show sufficient mental stability for two years straight

This is another one that's been sitting around for awhile. And I also remembered the the banner i made for Batfam & Everlasting trio content

Main Story Index [It's kinda messy but it's got links to most everything]

[torchship-rpg]

Dev Diary 17 - Complex Dice Tests

We lied! Today was going to be about the meta-campaign mechanics, but we did a really cool system overhaul instead and we simply have to tell you about it.

Basically, we overhauled a part of our dice system in a pretty major way. It’s involved some fairly dramatic changes to how rolls are done, though all the other systems we’ve created plug pretty seamlessly into it (and as we’ve integrated it, it’s actually let us effectively cut systems now that they’re covered automatically by the new system). It’s one of the deftest bits of game design we’ve ever done and we gotta brag about it.

Development of the Previous System

One of the things that has been a problem for Torchship for a long while is that it wanted to be a dice pool system (roll X dice, looking for Y amount of Z+ results), which doesn’t just have binary pass-failure outcomes. We wanted players to feel competent in their fields, but we also needed there to be interesting difficulties and complications so that stories aren’t just a stateful progression of experts effortlessly performing the tasks they’re experts in.

This is surprisingly difficult!

Nailing down exactly how it would work has gone through about a half-a-dozen iterations, all of which always felt like hacky temporary solutions. The version we came up with before this, which the game has been using for about a year, involved two thresholds on each roll; a “Difficulty” to do the thing, and a “Complexity” tacked onto it that you had to reach to do it without any extra problems.

This served the purpose, but its various incarnations slowed the game down a lot more than it should have, and put too much stress on the GM to work out what these two targets would be and how complications would emerge from it. It was a clunky solution which required a lot of experience to use properly, functioning just well enough to build systems around without ever being stellar on its own.

It Must be Tuesday

While working on Must be Tuesday: Revived Edition, which uses a similar dice pool system, my wonderful editor Lexie came up with a really clever system while we were working out the dice odds. In that game, you have a “Skill” target from 6+ to 3+ with a variable dice pool and a number of Successes needed. 

Our partial successes there comes from a concept of ‘Scrapes’; dice which are 4+, but don’t meet your Skill target. If you reach the number of Successes you need when you add your Scrapes to your rolls meeting your Skill, you get a partial success! Brilliant, isn’t it? That means everyone has a chance to get by on even hard checks using their worst skills, but it’s never easy.

When we poked at Torchship stuff after testing that system out, we found ourselves wondering if something similar wouldn’t fit here as well. It wouldn’t translate 1-1; Must be Tuesday is about teenagers fighting monsters in a horror/comedy setup, where nobody is doing anything really complicated, and even the people who are the best at things are still only as good at it as, you know, teenagers. It’s not a good tone fit, but it inspired the system we used.

Complexity Certs & Complications

The solution we came up with, which we are so proud of we bumped a whole dev diary for it, is the idea of Complexity Certs.

Basically, we’ve ditched the previous Complexity target from before. Your dice Test just has a single, easily determined Difficulty. In ideal circumstances, you roll a number of dice determined by the tool you’re using, needing to get results over your Cert target. Get as many of those as the Difficulty, you succeed, otherwise you fail. Simple binary outcome to a simple problem.

But you’re playing cosmonauts. You know, you boldly go places you probably shouldn’t. You don’t face simple problems.

When the GM calls for a roll, they can tack on Complexity Certs in accordance to the situation you’re facing. Essentially, they’re saying this roll is a test not just of the ‘Primary Cert’ that determines if you pass or fail, but it’s also a test of some extra skills that have come up because of the number of moving parts involved in the situation.

So while you still only have one Difficulty, you need to meet that difficulty using multiple dice targets to succeed without qualifiers. If you just meet the difficulty on your Primary Cert, but not the Complexity Certs, then the GM can hit you with a Complication that can emerge naturally from the Cert in question. Conversely, you could end up in a situation where you have a better value on your Complexity Cert than the primary, so you could fail, but avert other disasters.

Or you could fail at both, and now you have two problems!

This system elegantly compresses a bunch of things the system needed to do into one quick judgement call by the GM in the moment. We don’t need to have specific penalties for working remotely through a robot, working in a spacesuit, or doing things in low gravity; the GM can just add the Drone Operator, EVA, or Cosmonaut Certs to the Test as Complexity Certs. There’s no limit to the number of Complexity Certs that can get added either, so you can sum up really complex situations with a single roll.

It also made the game’s group test mechanics much simpler and more impactful. Helping can be a complex game design challenge; you want people to be able to give each other a hand, but you need to make sure people can’t simply do it on every single roll to avoid slowdown and the trivialization of gameplay challenges. The way Help works now is allowing you to lend a friend one of your Certs to take on a Complexity Cert, basically monitoring a potential problem for them while they focus on the main task. 

As you get XP for Helping or being Helped on Checks where somebody is rolling with a higher Cert than you, you might want to point out potential problems with people’s plans that relate to your expertise as they come up so you can be the one to solve them. It also means that the presence of a Complexity Cert acts as a prompt for characters to step in and help one another out, and rewards a properly multi-disciplinary crew working together to tackle complex problems. 

You know. Like… like a Star Trek.

Examples

The example we use in the game rules is as follows.

Let’s say you are at a shooting range with your laser pistol, and you want to shoot a target. That’s a straightforward Sharpshooter Cert test. You either hit the target or you don’t. Easy!

But let’s say you’re doing the same thing but in a combat situation where you might get hit in return. The GM can (and is encouraged to) add the Soldier Cert as a Complexity Cert to the roll; Soldier is the Cert that covers tactics, movements, and the use of cover, so if your dice meet the difficulty using your Sharpshooter target, but don’t from your Soldier target, then you probably hit the target but exposed yourself to danger in the process.

Suddenly, we can see the difference between an Olympic target shooter and an infantryman.

Or let’s say you’re a guard posted in a reactor room; if you are doing some shooting there, the GM could throw in Damage Controller as a Complexity Cert to represent the chances of you breaking something vital in the antimatter reactor by throwing lasers everywhere. Suddenly, you have a really good reason to cross-train your guards in engineering skills, at least enough that they know not to shoot the matter/antimatter exchangers.

Or maybe you’re trying to incapacitate an unfamiliar alien creature without killing it; the GM could add Life Scientist. What if you’re doing it in a spacesuit? Add EVA. Knocking out a piece of machinery? Add Technician. Aiming a remote turret instead of doing it yourself? Drone Operator.

Which means you could, conceivably, be in a spacesuit operating a tablet controlling a gun drone non-lethally shooting a strange device on a strange alien in a combat situation inside an engine room… and it all happens with one roll and no need for infinitely stacking penalties.

Knock-On Changes

The biggest knock-on change this has caused is a need for finer gradation between Certs so that the differences come up more often and are less severe. For that reason, we moved the game to d10 pools from d6s; yes, this was an enormously annoying change to make through our draft, and we’re still working out how to rebalance advancement through it. It also means we have to do yet another pass through the Traits, which we were midway through… oh well! 

(We have a cool new lever that’s come out of, actually; we can have Traits just make Complexity Certs just not count in appropriate circumstances. Freefaller characters get to ignore 0g penalties, for example, which includes adding Cosmonaut as a Complexity Cert to a lot of rolls). 

I’ve submitted Torchship to Metatopia again this year, and I’m really looking forward to running it on the other side of a year of rewrites and de-heartbreakerification. I’m confident it’ll go much better this time around. 

Anyway, next Dev Diary will be about the Zinovians, and then we’ll do the meta-campaign mechanics. Unless something even cooler comes up.

[crowcalico]

I recently stumbled across your art, it’s absolutely stellar,

and wanted to know if you had more to share about your dungeon meshi au?

again, your art is just incredible, thank you so much for Blessing our eyes with it

First of all, thank you so much for the kind words 😭💛 I really appreciate it!

And yeah I’ve been thinking about my Genshin Meshi AU recently, and I really want to bring it back once I have the time!

Here’s some extra tidbits of info:

- Diluc is three years older than Kaeya (like Laois and Falin) but since Kaeya is half-elf they were unsure whether he was actually the younger or older one. But of course, young Diluc decided that Kaeya was undoubtedly his baby brother and nothing would change that.

- The Mad Mage: Scaramouche is the one to turn Kaeya into a Chimera, and the two develop an interesting dynamic, with Chimera Kae blindly following his orders but also protecting him when he feels threatened.

- Crepus died of illness in this AU, which did cause a small rift between the ragbros since Kaeya stayed at magic school throughout the funeral, but they reconciled and are now close again.

- Albedo was the one to revive Kaeya after his death, using dark magic he learnt from Rhinedottir, and is very skilled in creating familiars.

- Childe is Kabru in this AU and he was very excited about getting to fight Chimera Kaeya, but he was squashed like a bug like Kabru and sulked about it for a good while after his revival. He also hates the thought of eating monsters, and dislikes monsters in general due to his experience in the dungeon as a child (like how he fell into the abyss in canon).

Thank you again!!

Bonus sleepy chimera Kae doodle:

[rhaaclaws]

ANDROS EVENTTTTTT literally so happy to finally finish his ref sheet after. months

I also realized I've never made an introduction for him on here? Despite being one fo the characters with the most amount of work put into them?? sooo expect that soon + I'm working on his toyhouse page

[miquella-everywhere]

genuine question:

why are you so into the idea that Godwyn was supposed to be the final boss?

diegetically speaking, that was Miq's first choice too, but upon realizing he couldn't be brought back (or properly killed) he settled for Radahn

A better question would be did anyone truly believe that Radahn of all people was going to be the final boss?

Evidently not if you consider that there were net zero MiqRad fanfics on Ao3 before the DLC came out.

You had everything in the base game regarding Miquella's intentions with reviving Godwyn set up perfectly. Golden Epitaph, the Eclipse, everything regarding the Wandering Mausoleums, the statue of them embracing in the Haligtree. The love and immense effort Miquella put into trying to grant Godwyn a true death was there. But then for the DLC to turn around and have Miquella be like "Nope! Radahn!" and reduce Godwyn to a dungeon decoration and have his lore be, "His Knights are waiting for his corpse to knock someone up," is genuinely braindead writing.

And worst of all we don't even get any crumbs regarding Miquella and Godwyns relationship. It doesn't say anywhere in the DLC that Godwyn was Miquella's first choice, and the fact that the DLC frames Miquella's "crush" as something that he felt since his younger years is fucking stupid because it cannot be proven with any base game lore.

THERE IS LITERALLY MORE PROOF TOWARDS MIQUELLA LOVING GODWYN IN THE BASE GAME THAN ANY FORM OF BASE EMOTION TOWARDS THE PROMISED RETCON.

....and yet the DLC gives us absolutely no, zero, zip, nada, negative, absolutely nothing regarding Miquella and Godwyns relationship. FUCK. THE DLC DOESNT EVEN GIVE US ANYTHING ABOUT GODWYN HIMSELF.

Radahns inclusion is a shameless disgraceful rewrite that ruins Miquella's character.

The Eclipse is forgotten, Miquella's love for Godwyn is forgotten, the entire base game plot revolving around the core of Miquella's character is forgotten, and it is infuriating.

From a storytelling perspective it is just absurd that all this build up was abandoned for something that cannot even be supported with any base game evidence. And since this is coming from Fromsoft, the people who had an incredible track record of making such satisfying and stellar DLCs and put the most effort in their larger than life stories, makes it hurt even more.

It just hurts man :(

[monstrousproductions]

Hi! Sorry to bother you, but I had just finished the latest tsv episode and. well first of all I wanted to congratulate you on the absolute stellar performance of getting drowned. Very disturbing (overwhelmingly positive)

I can't stop thinking about why Rane would get in the water with a shark. You knew he tried to drown himself before and now you stand before him (the other Faulkner, his warped reflection, the bride to his trawlerman) and he's asking you to get in, it's fine, the water isn't even that deep here!

The faith! The trust! Like Faulkner said, it's eating them all but he's the only one awake to hear the bones crunch. I truly believe Rane expected him to do something unhinged in that pool, but either trusted him enough to believe the katabasian bait or thought themself physically able to overwhelm him should the need arise. Except they didn't know he's done that before! How could they? And they still tapped his arm even when they knew he had murdered Mason.

The anglerfishery of it all.

This is the best death for Rane I could imagine. They're one of my favourite characters: a pragmatic fanatic, so terribly faithful and treacherous at the same time, utterly fascinating in their devotion.

I wish that when Faulkner looked down at Rane through the mirror of the surface, he finally saw something other than his own face. I don't think that's the case though, and that, too - him taking away their personhood during the last moments of their life, is part of Rane's tragedy. This is his revenge - for killing Carpenter, for making him into a hollow mouthpiece, for pulling him out of that tank. And they're not even allowed to die as Rane - they die as Charlie, as Faulkner 2, as Mason, as sister Thurox. Terrible! I love it!

Sorry for the ramblings. I just really, really enjoyed Rane. Once again congrats!

No need to apologise, I'm certainly not going to complain about people messaging me to be nice about my performance! Thank you so much 💖

Honestly I think Jon deserves so much praise for Rane - all his characters feel so rich, even if we don't see that much of them "on screen" so to speak. It's easy to feel like even the relatively small roles in TSV are fully realised, fleshed-out people with rich inner lives, even if we never really see that side of them. And I think he's made a show that invites you engage in that if you want to, so that you can approach Rane and ask what their motivations are and why they might make the choices they do, and have fun chewing on that.

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, and again for being so kind about the performance! I loved playing Rane, can't wait to revive the character in The Tequila Verses, the upcoming TSV spin-off sit-com set in Rane's crab-themed, beachfront cocktail bar they open after surviving Faulkner's attack.

[ryin-silverfish]

LMK S5 trailer, Chinese pantheon infodump, and some ideas

…Man, normally, I feel the urge to write fix-it AUs after rewatching episodes and coming across particularly bizarre theories and takes, not before the new season's even out.

Thanks, S5 trailer.

Consider this your spoiler warning, because the rest of this post will all be my personal opinions about a few major story beats that were revealed + the rough outline for a fix-it AU.

It's also a bit ranty, and features some criticisms of the general narrative, so if that's not your cup of tea, feel free to avoid this one.

Li Jing becoming JE/the regent of the Celestial Realm is just hilariously absurd. I mean, it makes a teeny tiny bit more sense than the "Nezha will be the new JE" fan theory, but that's not a very high bar.

1) In-universe, he had done a grand total of nothing while shit was hitting the fan, and only showed up after it was all over. Which, tbh, isn't too far from his role in FSYY. No, wait, at least in FSYY, he killed Luo Xuan via a pagoda to the head, after the guy had all his fire-based magical treasures neutralized and taken away by Princess Longji.

Yeah, congrats, LMK's Li Jing, you've somehow become even more useless than your FSYY and JTTW counterparts——which is a true feat.

2) Even if someone's making him JE/regent, it wouldn't be the Ten Kings. To put it simply: the Underworld doesn't have that authority. They are the most pathetic of all divine bureaucracies, who pretty much only show up to get pushed around and revive the occasional dead guy in JTTW (and I still love them).

Like, they ain't no Hades or Satan. Just the 10 judges of the Dead People Supreme Court. To heavily paraphrase Di Ting in the original JTTW novel:

"How much power do Underworld gods really have? (幽冥之神，能有多少法力)" "...Certainly not enough to stop a rampaging demonic macaque who's as strong as SWK, if I say the truth out loud in here and piss him off. Just send them to the Buddha, please."

An analogy: if the Celestial Host is the imperial court, the Underworld is the ministry in charge of judicial processes and prisons. They don't even have authority over the imperial censors who answer directly to the emperor, let alone the power to determine a successor to the throne during a major crisis.

If this was to make the tiniest bit of sense, Li Jing would be the one commanding THEM, not the other way around. Or if it's Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha himself giving orders to Li Jing…for some reason.

But we know that ain't happening bc of the show's strange aversion to showing Buddhist deities on screen, not to mention it would be very OOC for Ksitigarbha, whose job is granting relief and salvation to souls in the Path of Hell, not judging and punishing them like the Ten Kings.

3) If you must make Li Jing the emperor/regent, you have a more mythos-accurate and obvious choice than the Ten Kings, considering you already got the Four Divine Beasts involved!

Yes, I'm talking about their bosses, the humanoid "directional + elemental gods": Lord Father of the East (Wood), Queen Mother of the West (Metal), Emperor Zhenwu of the North (Water).

No South though...because our mythos can't agree on a single directional god of the South, but for shit and giggles, just imagine Zhurong, Yandi, Huaguang, and the Star of Fiery Virtues all sitting on the same narrow bench, staring awkwardly at each other.

Maybe we can have Ziwei, Great Emperor of the Central Sky and North Stars, who is one of the Four Sovereigns(四御) in Daoism (two of which could also be an alternate choice, but maybe a bit too obscure for foreign audiences).

He commands the stellar deities and heavenly bodies——which the Four Divine Beasts would technically fall under, as guardians of the four quadrants of the sky, each in charge of 7 Lunar Mansions.

4) But if you already have these deities, why the hell would any of them make Li Jing the regent? Wouldn't it be more likely for them to create a Celestial Council of Regents themselves, with Devaraja Li Jing under their command as the leader of what's left of the celestial army?

Like, you can still have them, or one of them, going after the gang and ordering Li Jing to put the fillet on SWK.

I can see Zhenwu the Demon-Vanquisher doing that, since the fillet isn't too different from what he did to Huaguang and a lot of the demons he subdued in JTTN: feeding them magical water/fire pills that would corrode/ignite their insides whenever they tried to resist.

(Yeah, compared to that, the fillet would look like the lenient option, since it's just pain and won't actually dissolve/cook you alive from the inside out...)

And it wouldn't be bc he thought SWK was to blame for the Brotherhood's epic fuck-up...somehow. Like, what even is that logic?!

I mean, I can kinda see the Ten Kings doing it as a pre-emptive "Don't blame us for our shitty security, blame that guy over there!" move...except they are no longer answering to any higher authorities who'd hold them responsible at that point!

"What about Li Jing?" You may ask. Yeah, WHAT ABOUT LI JING? Why does Li Jing have to get involved in this?

If he's forcing the Ten Kings to pass judgement on the gang (which surely doesn't look like it in the trailers), why's he enlisting the help of the weakest faction and not, y'know, his celestial soldiers and other gods?

If the Ten Kings get Li Jing to be their enforcer...well, how the Eighteen Hells did they manage that? What could the Ghost Supreme Court and their crappy prison-torture chamber-soul customs office complex even offer Li Jing as a bribe?

And if their goals were to avoid responsibilities by blaming someone else, how stupid did they have to be to actively involve/create a higher authority who can punish them once the cat gets out of the proverbial bag, instead of, I dunno, just stay where they are and keep their head down???

So in my fix-it AU, it's more of a "Better safe than sorry" scenario, where every demon working for the new Celestial Council must prove their loyalty via swallowing the water/fire pill, now that even more dangerous demons have escaped and are running around in the aftermath of S4.

And Great Sage and company are not exempt from that new law either——"If you are truly righteous and Not Like Them and not planning to rebel, what's there to be afraid of?"

Horrified by the Demon-Vanquishing Mansion's 16th century standards of "justice" and "mercy", they naturally would not have any of it, and thus the conflict begins.

Not only would this show the fallout of Azure's misguided rebellion——that, in trying to make a better world, he had made it 120% worse for both humanity and demonkind in less drastic and more realistic ways aside from dooming reality to irreversible destruction, it would also help with the major show-not-tell problem about Celestial cruelty bc the "good guys" in power saw no problem with this kind of shit.

If you want your lawful antagonists who take Order to its extremes, the warrior sovereign in black leading an elite army of demon-hunters + penal legions made of "reformed" demons would be a better choice than the Ghost Supreme Court, don't ya think?

(Fun fact: in Zaju plays, Zhenwu was often said to be the boss of Nezha and Erlang, so him commanding Li Jing wouldn't be too out of place either.)

Now, you may ask, why do I even care? After all, isn't it clear that the show is neither mythos-accurate nor trying to be, considering the JE got K.O.ed by a Bodhisattva's cat of all things?

Not to mention the season's not even out yet, so why jump to conclusions so quickly? Maybe the actual episodes will have explanations that make sense. Relax.

...Cause I don't mind less-than-stellar animations if the story's good, and since I keep noticing the less-than-stellar animations, it clearly isn't good enough.

Also, it's not like it's only the implications that are absurd——my problem is with the whole premise of "Li Jing becoming the new JE/Regent" and "The gang is prosecuted by the Ten Kings for bullshit reasons, even though these guys should not, and never have the power to enforce anything over SWK."

I don't like calling narrative choices "wrong" per se, and prefer to see it on a gradient of "least to most narrative potential". When it comes to adaptations, if the option that is faithful to the original work will result in a less interesting story, then I'll happily take the one that isn't as faithful and takes creative liberties, but makes a better story.

And here, I feel like being faithful to the Chinese mythos inspirations will add to the narrative potential instead of subtract from it, and the idea they come up with kinda...goes against how Chinese pantheons work, in a very simplified and "westernized" manner.

Mostly bc I am a Chinese Underworld mythos lover and think they deserve better than being ominous Hades/Grim Reaper knockoffs. And out of all the possible Chinese gods, Nezha's asshole dad is the least qualified or interesting candidate to fill in the power vaccum left by JE's death.

[operafantomet]

I was wondering if you could make a photoset of Raouls who had fake facial hair?

I know Jay Armstrong Johnson had a fake mustache on Broadway and unless I’m wrong, I believe Matt Leisy wears fake sideburns in the current World Tour

...I was today years old when I learned Jay Armstrong Johnson's Raoul moustache was not real...!!!

That is a perfect fit to him, though! Stellar work.

As for Matt Leisy, his sideburns has varied quite a bit in size. They've been big and fluffy, small and neat, and non-existant. The latter may only be due to press performance, but still - definitely solid and fluffy sideburns here, in March 2019:

And definitely none here, in August 2019:

He has also been seen with smaller, neater, curvier sideburns. And in addition, in this curtain call closeup from earlier this year it definitely looks like wigwork, and that they are coming loose:

My best guess is that he wears additions as a general rule, but that he's maybe sported his own from time to time?

I am 99% certain Anton Zetterholm wore fake sideburns when he played Raoul in the Stockholm revival. But it matches his hair well, so I may be wrong.

And Li Chengxi in China, as there is a solid conture outlining the sideburns, and they slightly overlap the hair:

And I think Nadim Naaman in West End can be added to the list. Most good photos of it comes from backstage photos, and I think he for some time switched between sporting his own hair and a wig. But these are definitely fake sideburns:

I would furthermore add that some Raouls wears a wig, and in these the sideburns might be a part of the look. But these are way harder to tell apart.

But more Raouls with fake moustaches? I have NO idea tbh!