#tdtwb tmnt

[shyalia]

Happy One Year Anniversary

to The Day the World Broke by @saladmix!!! She deserves all of the recognition for writing such an incredible and in-depth story, please go show her some love!!

To celebrate and show my immense appreciation, I spent the last two months working on an animatic for it. It's not perfect, but the vision is there and I'm honestly proud of myself for completing a major project like this. 100+ frames later (not all of them made the cut, unfortunately) it is finally complete just in time for the anniversary!

I'm about to ramble, I apologize in advance lol. Feel free to scroll down to the next blue text to see the animatic, please mind the spoiler and trigger warnings!

This fic is so important to me and holds a special place in my heart. I came across the first chapter the day it was posted, so early that it didn't even have any hits or kudos yet. The title and little description intrigued me so I clicked on it, and I'm so glad I gave it a chance because I was hooked from the first paragraph. Little did I know how much it would impact me that evening after raving about it to my best friend, during and after reading it. I'm not kidding when I say it has been on my mind every day for a full trip around the sun. Its AU is so unique that I haven't read anything like it before. The writing is beautiful, the storytelling is captivating, and the characterizations of the boys are so in-depth and relatable and a joy to read, the plot is insane and every chapter blows my mind... I could go on about it forever!!

I've read that first chapter more times than I can count, and the rest of it several times as well because even at 300k+ words, every single word is worth the time and energy. I'm always finding subtle details that are easily missed in earlier chapters that come up again later and I have a "WAIT HOLD UP" moment, like @saladmix is a genius I swear. When going back through chapters to locate details for my artwork to make it as accurate as I can, I always find myself getting lost reading because it just pulls me in, even though I already know what is about to happen... it's just that good.

Honestly, I can't get enough of this story, it means sooo much to me. It has inspired me to become a better artist, to have the courage to write my own stories, my enjoyment of reading has been rekindled, and most importantly, it brought friendship. @saladmix is such a kind person, she is so supportive and funny and a pleasure to talk to, I'm thankful to have her as a friend. Keep on being awesome, girl!!

Okay, I'll stop rambling and let y'all see this animatic that I worked so long on! xD

Please be forewarned that it contains spoilers up to and including chapter 23, so if you have not read that far and want to avoid spoilers, save this to watch at a later date!

TW for brief images of knives and guns, and for light sensitivity as some very bright frames come up. I apologize if you're sensitive to those types of things!

[saladmix]

This magnificent comic of my fic The Day the World Broke, specifically a section of chapter one, was drawn by my dear friend Gabs! You can check out her linktree here to all her different places <3 Gabs is an incredible artist and does really special work so please go and check her out!

[shyalia]

AHHHHH THE CHILLS I got listening to this audio, it's so on point it's driving me insane. No joke, we were literally talking about this the other day lol. It's creepy and eerie and such a unique sound for an eldritch monster to make, that now whenever I hear windchimes I am put on edge.

ok so, i really like The Day The World Broke by @saladmix, and I am so in love with the description of how the bell monsters sound, it gave me such a vivid sound in my brain, so I wanted to try and recreate it!

This first one is what they sound like from a distance (it's just wind chimes and wind sfx)

headphone listeners beware for this next one, but it's how I imagine them when much closer. it's not exactly the effect I wanted (i wanted louder and clearer bells), but i did scour youtube for a WHILE and sat through some incredibly crunchy change bell ringing, so this will have to do.

[shyalia]

I would like to introduce my new (accidental) OC! 

Meet Cordelia Hunt, aka "Cory"!! She is a lemur mutant in the TMNT AU world of The Day the World Broke by @saladmix. And in case you were wondering... yes, she's that lemur mutant.

Fun fact, the ring-tailed lemur is my favorite animal. Around 6 months-ish ago, I asked Saladmix if I may make a small request for a lemur mutant to appear in the story somewhere. Nothing specific or anything, even just a glimpse of one would suffice. To my delight, she had a spot in mind, yay! -fast forward 4-5 months to her debut-

Now, it wasn't intentional for her to become a fleshed-out character when she was added to the story. She was a no-name background character who served a purpose and that was to be the end of it. But, a couple of weeks ago after chapter 24 was posted, my brain wouldn't shut up about her. Cue all of the headcanons, personality, things she's accomplished in the past, what happened when the apocalypse hit, and how she got to where she was at that point in the story, etc etc etc. All at 2am when I should have been sleeping. (Because of course, when else would inspiration strike?) 

With Saladmix's permission, Cory now has her own story living inside my head that I may write someday. But in the meantime, here's some details on her:

She was adopted as a young girl, roughly age 2-3. Her adoptive dad was a dhole mutant, a humble man, and a hard worker. Made an honest living and did everything in his power to raise Cory well. It was just the two of them, and they were very close. She considered him her real dad, being with him for as long as she could remember.

She worked as a mechanic in her dad's auto shop in New York City. She had displayed an interest in her dad's work from a young age and he willingly taught her. She became quite skilled in working on vehicles and knowing how to repair them. 

Because of her auto repair knowledge, she was taken into the group she is a part of when we meet her in the story. Despite not agreeing with their actions, she joined this group fairly early in the apocalypse. It's more out of necessity for survival rather than desire.

She had a passion for geology and was saving up to go to school to study it. She had a big collection of rocks, minerals and fossils in her room, her most treasured one being the aventurine quartz.

When she was younger, her dad wouldn't let her bring an entire bucket of fancy-looking rocks home but allowed her to pick one "special" one to remember the day by. She kept that tradition ever since, always ensuring to bring home a special rock from each adventure. Every. Single. Time.

Her favourite colour was green- close second being blue- as it reminded her of nature. A lot of her spare time was spent in Central Park, or outside of the city to go hiking.

She was part of her high school's track and field team, even if she would have preferred other extracurricular activities. She made the top record in the Triple Jump at a track and field meet in her freshman year, beating it again in her sophomore year and has been undefeated since. Some claimed she was cheating since her species is known for their nimbleness and leaping, but the school board accepted it nonetheless.

She was an unfortunate target for bullies during her younger years. They would often pull on her long tail and call her Zoboomafoo or King Julian, mocking her with "Move it move it". Lame insults (because bullies are lame and always go for the cheap shots). But she became self-conscious and when she was anxious, she always held onto her tail to protect herself and feel less vulnerable.

I've got more, but will save that for if/when I actually write her story! Let me know if that's something anyone would be interested in reading?

[shyalia]

A precious moment from Chapter 26 of The Day the World Broke by @saladmix! I could NOT resist drawing a quick sketch of this moment because it made me squeal and kick my feet, I was so excited! I've been hoping this would happen eventually for soooo long, y'all have no idea. “I think you’ve earned your stripes.”

HECK YEAH, HE DID! Go little Mikey, go!

[shyalia]

"I'm so sorry. I'm sorry."

Last but not least, Mikey's trauma spotlight! This is from a scene in Chapter 7 in the TMNT horror AU fic The Day the World Broke by @saladmix.

The poor boy is UPSET!! He didn't mean it, and he tried his hardest to take it back. Unfortunately, there was no reversing what had happened. And he'll carry that with him for the rest of his life.

I had fun trying to design a techy blaster glove that would be designed by none other than World 5's very own Tello.

CW: Blood. Lots of blood.

[saladmix]

Oh my god this is SO VERY PRECIOUS I LOVE THESE! look at the boy! He’s doing his best out here he’s trying so hard 😭😭😭 ugh I love how you capture expressions they’re so good and the moments you picked are so fun. He needs and hug and for someone to laugh at his jokes please. Ugh I love them so very much thank you so much for sharing this artwork I’m so blessed that you like the fic enough to draw things from it!! Truly makes my whole week.

SO, continuing with the doodles of "The day the world broke" by @saladmix (great fic go read it right now) I have some of Mikey, moments of his that I loved, he is my favorite and I think it shows, he has great energy and it makes my readings happy I always say. MY BOY 💕💕💕, I'M SO EXCITED (and scared) to see how things go for him in this fic

[saladmix]

Answering some fun timing questions from @niniiiitiiin here, celebrating the one year anniversary of The Day the World Broke!

When does the story take place?

So the story kicks off in May. May 5th to be exact. It was very late in the school year, nearing that final sprint to graduation for four of the crew.

Then, as April and Casey mentioned, it's been about five months since then. That means the majority of the story takes place in October! Spooky season!! As Shyalia pointed out, that means we literally ended up time traveling to the present.

Birthdays!

Casey Jones - December 29, 2004. He is the oldest at 18 but almost 19! This also makes him a Capricorn.

Leo & Raph - April 23, 2005. This makes them Taurus. They recently turned 18 at the start of the story.

April - July 8, 2005. She turned 18 mid apocalypse and missed that birthday :(

Donnie - February 17, 2006. He's 17 and there is a brief time when he's the same age as his two older brothers! Fun. He's also an Aquarius.

Mikey - Nov 3, 2007. The baby! His birthday is COMING UP, quick someone google how to throw a birthday party at the end of the world. He's a Scorpio :D

[saladmix]

On Sunday we hit the one year anniversary of The Day the World Broke and I am SO excited! Check it out guys, 300K+ words and one full year later we’ve been on a lil JOURNEY!

Planning to have the next chapter up on the anniversary but in the meantime if anyone wants to talk shop I’m happy to answer any world building or characterization questions!

[saladmix]

HII I LOVE YOUR FIC SO MUCH!! IT MEANS THE WORLD TO ME!! SERIOUSLY THE BEST THING I'VE READ THIS WHOLE YEAR!!

this might have already been answered but I'd like to ask what was your inspiration for writing a tmnt horror story? and what are some of your favorite horror books/movies/etc. ?

again "The Day the World Broke" is so amazing I don't even know how to properly articulate how good it is

AHH THANK YOU this fills my cold dead heart to the brim with joy <3 I'm so glad you're enjoying it I'm truly so warmed by the fact that it has gotten any pick up at all given the wild genre!

And thank you for sending questions omg please don't mind me as a ramble for forever because I could talk about this kind of stuff all day (and I have, much to friend and family despair).

The impetus for TDTWB was actually me driving back late at night from a friend's place. It was REAL foggy, the kind of fog where you can't see in front of you and have to rely on the small road markers right as they come into sight. The mist in the story is almost its own character, I love how alive it feels (and how it sometimes very much IS alive, SOS). But that's where I kind of originally built the idea out on that drive home.

But I consume a huge amount of horror/suspense media so there are so many elements of different things that have kind of come together and coalesced into this story. You see a lot of elements of Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and Evil Within baked into it, especially with the monster element. I really wanted to go big or go home with some of those creatures. I myself love a good creature flick but there was nothing more fun for my friends and I screaming in front of a game when a new horrifying monster came on for us to fight. It just reminds me of those times, where it's scary, sure, but mostly the feeling of 'Oh my goooooood what the hell!' that I really enjoy.

There are also a ton of other movie influences and some of them are more subtle and based on singular scenes that get kind of expanded upon. For instance, there's a scene in the First Omen (skip over if you don't want to be spoiled for the scene, but it is in the trailer!) where our girl is sitting in a dark room, saying it isn't real, and a voice answers back "what's not real?". That stuck with me for a while I really loved that so a lot of Leo's Demon Shredder experience is kind of build on that singular feeling of sudden dread.

But as with some of the good horror movies, it's not just about the scares and the monsters. A real desire for me when writing horror is digging into that humanity piece, a concept you can see across a lot of horror series and books. I wanted each of these boys to have their own arc to contend with and some are more subtle and others are more, how you say, extremely obvious. But they were all very purposefully built in. It was important for me to make these characters vibrant and dimensional and it was not hard, because it's TMNT and we love these turtle boys! But I was hyper-aware that I'm doing an AU version that is pretty atypical, with what is essentially a regular family of teenagers having to navigate the end of the world. So I'm so touched that people love them as much as I do!

I don't even know if I'm answering the question at this point! My goodness. But I WILL wrap it up with some of my favorite recent media that I've consumed, otherwise this list would grow beyond anyone's desire to read <3

Books:

Hex by Thomas Oldeheuvelt (This felt like a really unique premise that really speaks to the whole humanity is the monster theme)

Sister, Maiden, Monster by Lucy A. Snyder (Not for the faint of heart! But boy was it a wild trip that I thought about for weeks after I finished it)

Movies:

Heretic (just came out, super eerie for me I loved the build up)

Smile 2 (I love me a movie that trips into Uncanny Valley, I found the scares unique and fun, but for me I loved the character, drew me right in!)

Oddity (SOOOO eerie, super obsessed with it)

TV Shows:

The Haunting of Hill House (I highly recommend this one for the family drama behind the horror, it's such a fun, beautiful time)

Thanks for the ask!! I really loved it, and I love talking about this story and horror so please ask away any time. Thank you so very much for reading the story too!

[saladmix]

SCREECHING oh my GOD he is having SUCH A BAD TIME look at his little face and Ol' Shreddy is so SCARY HERE UGH I love your design for him!!! the neon eyes and the mask and the classic shredder elements look SO cool!

Ugh just...amazing work, I love his expression it's so haunted and the clawed hands all over him I feel bad who did this to him!! Couldn't be me.

Thank you SO much for this it truly is so exciting to see the amazing artwork that has come out of this it makes me so happy you are SO FREAKIN TALENTED <3

Do you feel it?

once again asking you to read the day the world broke by @saladmix !! this took me an unreasonable amount of time to finish but it's done now!!

without shredder under the cut :3

[rgbfall]

ok so, i really like The Day The World Broke by @saladmix, and I am so in love with the description of how the bell monsters sound, it gave me such a vivid sound in my brain, so I wanted to try and recreate it!

This first one is what they sound like from a distance (it's just wind chimes and wind sfx)

headphone listeners beware for this next one, but it's how I imagine them when much closer. it's not exactly the effect I wanted (i wanted louder and clearer bells), but i did scour youtube for a WHILE and sat through some incredibly crunchy change bell ringing, so this will have to do.

[shyalia]

This scene is so dear to me! It's fun, it's silly, it's throwing the boys for a loop meeting one of their dimensional counterparts for the first time! I tried to make the photos a mixture of candid and posed, and Mikey's little writings on the Polaroid images are a little hard to read because it's a challenge getting details in that are that tiny, but they are:

Donnie in a chair at his computer: Donnie, the IT guy

Donnie and Mikey selfie: Best bros (with a smiley face and a fancy S)

Leo smiling at his phone: Leo, just ask her out already!

April and Casey posing, Casey holding rabbit ears over her head: April + Casey (with a heart)

Raph pulling his eyelid down and sticking his tongue out: What a loser! (With a tongue-out smiley)

Mondo skateboarding: Epic trick Mondo!! WOW (double underlined, with a star)

Raph mid-noodle slurp with their dad at the table: Raph + Dad (with a heart)

Leo folding laundry: Mr. Responsible (underlined, with a star and a shocked smiley)

Their dad drinking tea: Tea time (with a heart)

@shyalia sent me another amazing piece and I had to share it. Look at the lad! The attention to detail is so sweet, and 2012 Leo looks so good look at this turtle, suddenly realizing he's got to guide four versions of him and his brothers that got to live a normal life and therefore have no ninja training through a whole dang apocalypse. She captured everything SO perfectly, I love it!

This is a scene from Chapter Four of The Day the World Broke, and you can check out an excerpt below the cut!

“My room, welcome,” Mikey jumped in, and then he jumped up, giving a classic butler bow and spreading his arm wide to gesture to the glory that was their simple but definitely awesome room. “Pleasure to host you. If I knew you were coming I would have straightened up.” 

He wouldn’t have. But it was a nice thing to say, right?

“You live in a house?” Leonardo asked, and for the first time he seemed to look around a little more closely. Mikey saw his eyes linger on their photo board, which was mostly Mikey’s because their dad had gotten him a polaroid camera for his birthday last year and he definitely went a little overboard with it. But it was so cool, you know, and the retro vibes were awesome. He liked having actual photos that lived somewhere other than his phone because one time he’d lost his phone and all his photos and had to listen to what was basically an hour-long lecture from Donnie about proper cloud storage. 

“Where else would we live?” Donnie asked, sounding dismissive. Mikey didn’t take offense, sometimes Donnie just sounded that way, especially when he was overwhelmed. Did Leonardo know that? He definitely had his own Donnie by the sounds of it. How similar were they? Did he have a Mikey? Did he want to meet himself?

What was he saying, of course he did. 

“We live underground but I suppose…there’s a first for everything,” Leonardo said, and Mikey watched him take a few steps forward to take a closer look at the pictures. He saw him linger over one he’d taken of Raph and their dad at the dinner table. Nothing special, it had been Mikey’s candid phase where he was trying to capture the essence of life but Raph messed it up and looked at him mid-noodle slurp. 

“Underground? Like a cave?” Mikey asked. He didn’t know anyone who lived underground, aside from the wild fancy rich people houses he sometimes saw on HGTV. Man, he bet those guys were sitting pretty now, in their underground furnished bunkers with backup generators and an indoor vegetable farm. They didn’t have to worry about anything. Oh, to be a billionaire with a crazy house. 

Leonardo stepped back from the photo wall and tilted his head, a half-yes. “Sewers, technically.” 

Oh no. That was the exact opposite of a billionaire bunker. The sewers? Mikey was about to ask some extremely important follow-ups but Leo cut him off. 

“You live in the sewers?” Leo asked, voice still high and stringy. He let out a strangled sounding whine and Mikey saw his fingers grip harder around his head. “Oh my god why?”

Can you just ask people why they live in the sewers? You probably can’t just ask people why they live in the sewers. Technically Mikey didn’t know the answer to that question but it felt like a real Mean Girls moment. Oh my god, Leo, you can’t just ask people why they live in the sewers. He almost said it, but the joke fell flat on his tongue, like the weight of the situation burdened his humor too much. 

Read more here! Pay attention to the tags and warnings!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/50818507/chapters/128379037

[shyalia]

I'm literally obsessed with this! The attention to detail, the expressions, the eerie setting with the fog rolling in, the blocking of the panels and the dialogue bubbles... everything is so perfect and it truly captures the spooky vibes and the typical sibling banter of this fic!!

This magnificent comic of my fic The Day the World Broke, specifically a section of chapter one, was drawn by my dear friend Gabs! You can check out her linktree here to all her different places <3 Gabs is an incredible artist and does really special work so please go and check her out!

[saladmix]

I had the JOY of watching this piece come together and it was so incredible to see. As always the detail and the expression and the MOMENT chosen is just so amazing! I love the glove too it looks so cool and high tech, I sure hope nothing happens to it!

Anyway I’ll never get over this, and it’s so so cool to see moments from the fic depicted in such an incredible art 💖💖💖

"I'm so sorry. I'm sorry."

Last but not least, Mikey's trauma spotlight! This is from a scene in Chapter 7 in the TMNT horror AU fic The Day the World Broke by @saladmix.

The poor boy is UPSET!! He didn't mean it, and he tried his hardest to take it back. Unfortunately, there was no reversing what had happened. And he'll carry that with him for the rest of his life.

I had fun trying to design a techy blaster glove that would be designed by none other than World 5's very own Tello.

CW: Blood. Lots of blood.