#t the arcana

[realboutfatalfury]

i am thou, thou art i

[nabesthetics]

rubs hands together like an evil little bug

[minacoleta]

Realized no one has seen all the cards laid out yet… honestly I can’t get over how cool they look lined up. Here are the first nine!

[nomx33]

I downloaded arcana twilight again

time to see what I've missed in these months I've been gone

[dreamtydraw]

You know the time is bad when suddenly the voices in your head tell you you should replay The arcana / mystic messenger:…

[soft-girl-musings]

what if I start playing the arcana again in 2024

[lunastarhawk]

WiP Wednesday

ToM part 27 is well underway, and I'm really excited for this one :)

Here's a silly snip...

As Altheia glanced around now, everything seemed to be in place.  Nadia, Nazali and Mazelinka were sat at one end of the table making small talk; Selina and Muriel stood in a comfortable silence together in a far corner with drinks in their hands and Theo spinning on the spot nearby with arms outstretched.  Portia, meanwhile, had gone to fetch Julian. Altheia looked up as Aisling returned with drinks for her and Asra, and smiled at her.  She’d certainly warmed to her, and was glad that Asra had found someone he could connect with.  The day before, Asra had taken Aisling to the tea shop that served the best peach tea in all of Vesuvia, and Altheia certainly wasn’t going to mention that he’d only found out about it after he’d promised to take Aisling there. “I’ve no idea what this is,” Aisling said as she handed Asra a cup. He looked down into the cup with a dubious frown.  “It… it’s blue.” “Aye, it is.”  Aisling looked down into her own cup, pondering the drink inside.  “Barth wouldn’t tell me what’s in it that makes it blue.” “You probably don’t want to know,” Altheia said with a wry smile.  “It’ll get you very drunk though.” “Oh!  Grand.”   Aisling took a sip, and almost immediately grimaced; Asra followed suit, and then coughed with his face screwed up in disgust. “Maybe hold off on it until you’re drunk enough not to care about the taste,” Altheia laughed, holding up her own glass of orange-flavoured rum.  “This is the good stuff.  Came from a bottle.  Get tipsy off that, then the punch in the bowls on the table.  Then the blue… whatever that is.  If you’re still standing by then.  Ignore Julian if he tells you to start with Salty Bitters, they're disgusting.” “Good idea.”  Asra glanced over at Barth to make sure he wasn’t looking, then turned and discretely poured both his and Aisling’s drinks into a plant pot. Altheia was glad that there were no secrets between her and Asra anymore.  When they’d returned from his gate after Altheia had banished the shadowy echoes and sealed up the portal to the void between realms, Asra had told her everything.  She knew now what Judgement had said to him - that without the Fool travelling between the Major Arcana realms, they had nothing to bind them together and were beginning to drift apart.  Where there had been an ocean between them, with the watery realm of Cups connecting them since time began, there was now simply a void.  That the Fool couldn’t return while they were trapped in the physical world as a vessel for Altheia’s soul.  That they couldn’t return even if she died, and that if she did die they’d be lost to the decay of the body into the earth.  They could only return if she found that part of her self that had been lost to the sea between the realms when she’d died and Asra had thrown her ashes into the sea at the Lazaret.  And that if the Fool couldn’t return to continue their journey between the Major Arcana realms, the only way to stop the realms from drifting apart and causing irreparable damage, would be for Altheia to take up that journey herself, sailing between the realms forever. But for tonight, they'd set all of that aside. Because tonight, this small gathering of people on a rooftop garden, was for Julian.

[alnazarcana]

the modern au arcana sprites reek of millennial (derogatory)

[torpublishinggroup]

5 Literary Encounters with Legendary Beings

by a cat

Many mortal constructs began as stories, we say, confident in spite of our unwillingness to invest the research hours necessary to prove such a thesis. Why else would we tell time? 

Anyway, having thus established the relevance of myth within our lives, let’s talk about something more fun than the ticking of the clock. Let’s talk about vampires, werewolves, and other myth-folk* by running down some awesome books within whose pages they reside. 

Check it out!

Wolfsong by TJ Klune

Werewolves are for kissing. Don’t believe us? Let the gay lycans of TJ Klune’s Green Creek series melt your heart, and then achingly break it. These books are about a pack of werewolves, yes, but it’s important to remember that many mythical beings are people too: Given to all the messy yearning, loving, and hurting that comes with being alive. 

Masters of Death by Olivie Blake

Vampires kind of have an image problem, unhelped by numerous depictions of bloody splatterfests and exploitative aristocratic legacies. Now who better to act on an image problem than a real estate agent? Viola Marek might be a vamp but she’s also got houses to sell. Unfortunately, one of them is very inconveniently haunted, and this is the inciting incident in Masters of Death by Olivie Blake—a story about (among other things) how immortality doesn’t actually spare the indignities, gifts, and difficulties of life. It just gives you more time to experience them. 

Ebony Gate by Julia Vee & Ken Bebelle

And the next entry in our rundown of legendary entities is an urban fantasy full of assassins and dragon magic in San Francisco. Here’s a partial list of the mythical beings encountered within this thrilling debut: 

a guardian foo lion

a shinigami in a business suit

a cat yokai

a LOT of ghosts

Spring’s Arcana by Lilith Saintcrow

The mythical and magical entities that populate our stories often embody aspects of our mortal lives. From this oblique angle, we as narrative-enthusiasts can sneak up on emotional and abstract truths otherwise inaccessible. But our lives change, and so do our stories, and Spring’s Arcana by Lilith Saintcrow is an excellent candidate to demonstrate this phenomenon. Nat Drozdova’s mother is sick, and she must cross an America full of modern divinities (the God of Money, Law and Order, the King of Thieves, etc.) in order to procure a stolen relic for a winter goddess in a skyscraper office who has the power to save her ailing mother. 

Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

“Toadling was, more or less, lucky. She was not harvested by the flesh-smiths nor devoured by redcaps, nor raised in the retinue of a great lord of Faerie. Instead she was thrown to the greenteeth, the slimy swamp-dwelling spirits who devour unwary swimmers. Boy-children they eat, always. Girl-children they eat, mostly. But occasionally their numbers will fall, or one of them will be seized with some murky maternal instinct, and they will raise a child instead.”

This snippet comes from the beginning of T. Kingfisher’s twisted fable, and already we are blessed with a dearth of fae folk. If you like mythical beings in fiction, pick this one up as soon as you can!

━━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━━━━━━━

*Tor Blog-cat’s Note: Diligent readers may note that the introduction to this book roundup seems to imply the veracity of werewolves, vampires, and other beings of legend. While this question certainly lays beyond the scope of the Tor Publishing Group to answer, we do heartily encourage all readers to show kindness to any vamps, wolves, etc. that might or might not exist <3

[orangetintedglasses]

if you were a deity, what would you be the god of?

flora and fauna you’re friendly and a benevolent force to those who respect you and your domain, but a true force to be reckoned with to those who disrespect or threaten the balance of the natural world. the forest is nothing to fear for those who take care of it, but it isn’t uncommon for people to go missing with only their faces outlined in the bark on a tree.

[swansworth]

I don't know if I'm qualified to say this given I am white; so all the dear Arcana fans of color out there, please chime in. I genuinely want your input. I find this deeply wrong:

This is not a dig at AKrCos herself.

Rather, I am deeply upset that all of the Asra cosplayers who are promoted by the actual game developers are white. Asra himself is a nonbinary person of color, the creators literally drew them that way. And yet, all the team promotes are these white washed versions of him.

And calling it "Meet Asra in real life!" is even worse to me. There is not much representation in this game, there's Nadia, Asra, and Muriel. Promoting them as white is wrong. The "real" Asra would be brown, not white.

There are so many talented cosplayers in the Arcana community and many of them are people of color. Where is their recognition? Why aren't they being promoted and asked to do these events?

Representation matters. So please, start actually having some.

[Side note: I did spend time trying to research AKrCos to see if she is perhaps light-skinned or of a mixed ethnicity and all I could find was that she was from New Jersey and now lives in Florida.]

[animelover329]

I don't know about anyone else, but I've been getting back into fandoms I was in between 2014 and 2020.

It's been strange. I see all of the fanart I saw during those times, and I see new fanart with it. I remember finding the fanfics and art for the first time and experience it that way too. It's like I'm falling in love with all of it again.

It's also making me feel really old. Like, the biggest one I'm looking back at right now, Yuuri!!! On Ice, it released in 2016..... and now it's 2024, and I'm not a teen anymore, and I'm not obsessing over it like I did back then. But even 8 years later, I still feel the same emotions, just with nostalgia interlaced with them.

It just feels so weird, but I love it. I love going back and being able to see things from a new perspective and being able to look at things closer.

It's a nice, bittersweet change.....

[clownattack]

Fr tho why are people reading the dorian tales.

[minacoleta]

O

The next installment of my Chikara major arcana- The Fool represents different things, upright or reversed, but the key features made me think of Chuck. Innocence, a free spirit, but also reckless and inconsiderate… makes me think of the FIST days.

[clericofmystra]

My knowledge cleric is clearly living her best life!

(aka the party finished exploring the dank crypt, Larissa passed all the checks on the Book of Lost Gods, and we got three inspiration points)

[little-red-fool]

Apprentice Lonan