#that one really fucked up alien comic where the aliens were trying to breed with humans since their hive was dead

[rotsmell]

INTRODUCING AM: A trapped monster being that was pushed to the brink of becoming nothing but mindless and started the apocalypse via their overindulgence and breeding of mutants before meeting someone that helped them recover. HEAVY TRIGGER WARNINGS ON BIO. STATED AT TOP OF BIO.

TAG DUMP AS WELL

[brave-clarice]

“Clarice” Liveblog: Episode 4

Since today is International Women’s Day, I decided a (somewhat) timely viewing might be in order.

she’s running! finally!

what are these unnecessarily graphic autopsy scenes?? what narrative purpose are they serving?

“Tony, don’t be a dick.” Murray sucked in Episode 2, but I’m falling for his bluntness tbh.

“I heard that on a search of Catherine Martin’s apartment...” hey! a book reference!

Clarice didn’t live through Hannibal’s mind games to be manipulated by this chump.

an incredibly weird flex: making Krendler the victim of career sabotage?????

oh boy, I do not like where this Ardelia subplot seems to be going. Ardelia’s ambitious, but she’s also loyal. C.S. + A.M.!

“you’re speaking to me like a roommate about a case I’m investigating.” she IS your roommate, and she literally spoke to you the same way about a case SHE was investigating, Ardelia! where was your by-the-book attitude then?

Clarice is not behaving any differently than she has in the past, and Ardelia’s chewing her out over it, like...?

“I would never have compromised you.” I’m sorry, that’s just a nasty, passive comment, and I hate it. :)

“Might be aliens!” Nod to the X-Files? LOL.

“I understand that one of you is a sociopath whisperer and one of you’s a sharpshooter” Clarice is ALSO a sharpshooter!!! WHEN IS THIS GOING TO BE SHOWN?!

And “sociopath whisperer”? she treated Hannibal like a fellow human being with dignity. that’s the secret.

Clarice’s Pinto!

they’re going to BALTIMORE. *waggles eyebrows*

missed opportunity for Clarice to mention that she’s been to Baltimore several times before in her “rattling death trap” (wink!)

yay for casual sexism.

please DO NOT expect me to feel bad for Krendler.

“so James Hoffa is in your crawlspace? He has the Lindbergh baby? That’s great news!” I laughed.

STOP MAKING KRENDLER A GOOD GUY.

behold: someone who might have actually lived in the early 90s!

iirc Ardelia dated somewhat regularly...so idk why she’s being characterized as this standoffish two episodes in a row.

lol, uh, do agents call each other “agent”?

“your friend Clarice, the Bureau decided to shine a light on her. Overnight she’s a star.” easy enough to see how a veteran agent who’s stuck might view Clarice’s situation like that...but that doesn’t make it true. the Bureau didn’t “shine a light” on Clarice--Jack Crawford used her as bait for one of the most notorious serial killers of all time. she almost got killed and recycled. her career never takes off (which I really hope these show-runners remember).

it finally hit me...since they can’t include Jack Crawford, Clarice’s “angel,” they must be trying to combine his character with Krendler’s?

and, uh...it doesn’t work.

“They didn’t do a favor when they threw you to the cannibal.” Hannibal reference!

and yay, some self-awareness from the writers re: all the stuff I just ranted about!

what time of day is it? everyone’s been wearing the same clothes all episode, but a trip to Baltimore from D.C. takes just under an hour one way.

she’s just pretty

Krendler’s excuse for treating Clarice the way he did is so comically stupid. spare us, dude.

but tbh this is the Krendler we should be seeing - shaming Clarice for doing the right thing.

the girls are fighting. :( and for no reason.

honestly...this conflict is so artificial and manufactured for cheap drama and god, I hate it so much.

Ardelia graduated as Academy Valedictorian!!! obviously both race and gender factor into her career path within the Bureau, but that is sure as heck “a leg up”! so why is she telling Clarice “opportunity’s like nothing to you”?!

not to belabor the point, but Clarice’s “opportunity” was to “wheedle a crazy man with come all over [her]” and then to almost die in another crazy man’s basement. no big.

“I love you, but who do you think you’re talking to?” no, Ardelia, who do YOU think you’re talking to???

Ardelia Mapp, ARDELIA FUCKING MAPP, just threatened to report her best fucking friend, goodBYE.

as @special-agent-pendragon​ pointed out, Ardelia knows something about how traumatized this version of Clarice is by what happened in Belvedere (that “opportunity” that made her a “star”). she knows Clarice has mandated therapy sessions, knows that she’s seen multiple men die in front of her in the past few DAYS. she maybe even knows about Clarice’s flashbacks/bad dreams. so knowing all that, it’s downright thoughtless and cruel of her to treat Clarice this way just because she’s angry and bitter.

me too, girl

I hate to see Ardelia get the short end of the bureaucratic stick, but maybe it’s a lesson about priorities that this OOC version of her needs to learn.

Krendler sacrificing himself to save his team...a lamb, if you will... surejan.jpg

their person of interest purchased a ticket to BUENOS AIRES.

“I graduated second in our class” no! she was valedictorian! is this show’s Achilles heel really going to be Ardelia Mapp?!

systemic racism is a theme worth highlighting just as much as the sexism that brings down Clarice’s career. I just hope they don’t throw Ardelia’s awesome character away to do it.

no one as brilliant as Ardelia should be surprised that the Good Old Boys were using her to get at Clarice. they just so happened to pluck her out of cold cases to investigate ViCAP, her best friend/Academy roommate’s team? why is she shocked???

I’m so mad. Ardelia is guilt-tripping Clarice, dumping all her anger and fears about the future on her, and for what? damn, our girls deserve better than this.

there have to be better ways to expound on the theme of racism than the heroine’s closest friend and confidante throwing her under the bus.

Clarice’s boss just called her out for going into a dangerous situation alone without informing anyone of her whereabouts. so what do the writers make her do? that exact same thing! except now she’s an agent with a team, not a trainee on her own. ugh.

and to wrap up by far the worst episode of the series to date, a cliffhanger! #Yikes.

I’m really disappointed. Last week’s episode was a little dull and less than impressive...but this? For all I’ve been complaining about the Clarice-is-traumatized subplot, that was somehow better than whatever this was. Plus, nothing I was critical of last week was addressed or fixed.

The Good: Some funny lines, a Hannibal reference (along with a Baltimore trip and a mention of Buenos Aires), and a couple of good allusions to the novels. Someone telling Clarice that it was wrong for the Bureau to throw her to “the cannibal” as a trainee. (She knows this, it’s just nice to hear it out loud.) Almost no trauma/flashback scenes, thank God. Clarice going for a run! Oh, and Rebecca Breeds is beautiful, as usual...though she, also as usual, doesn’t have much to actually do.

The Bad: Everything else. The Ardelia subplot made me genuinely upset. It’s not necessary for the show-runners to force a conflict between Clarice and Ardelia to get their messages across! Maybe people who haven’t read the books are eating this up, I don’t know. But to me it’s a total betrayal of their dynamic. The costumes are still boring and still not very 90s. There’s no character development. (Except for like...Krendler?) AG Martin and Catherine don’t exist in this episode, making everything from last week feel even more unfocused. They added a new deep state/big government type twist to the existing conspiracy subplot, which...why??

I just didn’t like it.

Clarice still needs better costumes. What she really needs is character development, though. The show-runners don’t think the movie had time to flesh Clarice out very well...but Jodie Foster was given more to do than look sad all the time! Rebecca has shined so far when she’s had the opportunity. Of course the show has to have a plot, but the heroine should also feel like a real person.

Sorry about all the negativity in this one. Hopefully, this is the worst episode of this show we’ll ever have to see and the Ardelia nonsense is resolved next week. I’ll take another week of boring costumes, etc., as they put the canon characters I love back en route to their proper arcs!

[janiedean]

Do you think hollywood will ever get out of its “woke” phase or will it only get worse from here?

... I sat on this for a while and I honestly don’t know how to take it, because woke means absolutely nothing put on like that and it’s not like if movies address social justice issues or start caring about accurate representation or whatnot or what we mean for woke it’s automatically a bad thing, but like the problem with any hollywood production is that hollywood makes movies thinking about money first and artistic value later unless we count a handful of directors/people who can go a good movie that will make money (spielberg/zemeckis etc) or who are at a point in their career where their CV is so out of this world good that they can afford to do whatever they want and/or are huge names who made history who have their own money/circle/clout or their own production company (scorsese, clint eastwood etc). also the second contingent problem is that most people only watch mainstream movies that were released recently which means that everything that comes out these days is supposedly groundbreaking when in truth it’s not 99% of the time.

ps: this rant has very vague spoilers for the 2019 joker so like... thread carefully but it’s really really vague xD

now, since I apparently decided to go at this pseudo-seriously even if I think the question means all and everything, I’ll try to, but basically:

if by woke we mean performative representation/performative social justice themes/*insert-token-character-here*, it’s a 100% question of what the studios think the audience wants vs what makes money vs milking the thing until it’s dry. I mean, I’m talking in general about a genre no one on tumblr cares about, but as someone who loves bad/trashy testosterone-driven action movies every single time I see one with the Badass Female Character Inserted By Force Because The Studio Said They Needed At Least One Quota Because Otherwise People Say It’s Not Feminist I roll my eyes a lot because if I’m watching a genre which is the male equivalent of the female empowerment romcom (ie: if romcoms are the-empowerment-fantasy-for-girls the trashy action movie is the same for guys) I don’t need the Fake Strong Female Character in it because I’m not watching it for the feminism, but until people will worry about the bechdel test as the ultimate proof a movie is good then we’ll get the token character that makes no sense, but since these days the hype is there, you’ll get it because the studio wants the money;

on the other side, if we mean people want actual representation and should push the studios to have it/not whitewash characters etc it’s an entirely legitimate complaint and I don’t think hollywood should *get out of the woke phase* or whatever, but my issue is that most of the time it ends up turning performative as well. as in: you know the dark tower movie? (yeah, yeah, I hate it, I earned the right to trash talk it) when they racebent the lead everyone was screaming at how woke and progressive it was... except that they didn’t wanna hear/didn’t want to discuss the fact that the only reason they did that (imvho) was that they adapted seven books in one movie, cut the female disabled character who’s also mentally ill who’s actually black in the original canon and since they didn’t want to get called out on having done that, they racebent the lead so they looked progressive, but do we really think that doing that rather than adapting the actual black character they had which would have required at least some effort is more progressive? idk but I think it’s not. anyway: i’m all for people pushing for this, but they need to be coherent. in the sense that for all I don’t agree with clint eastwood’s political views, if you watch gran torino where the protagonist becomes friends with his vietnamese hmong neighbor, all the hmong characters were actually cast from hmong actors and if you look at interviews online with hmong people about that movie the opinion is that even if the script could have been better for some of them, they were delighted that he cast from their community and didn’t cast from another asian ethnicity that for any producer would have meant the exact same thing because figures if producers gaf about accurate casting when it comes to that. but like, hollywood won’t gaf about that until people are vocal about needing good and specific rep and not just generic ‘as long as it’s X it’s fine’;

that also goes for wanting more movies with minorities having a role - hollywood will go for giving minorities roles as long as it gives them good money/clout, but it won’t care for good movies about minorities or minority actors having good roles until people are vocal about it and/or it means money loss if they do it wrong;

(caveat: this obviously excludes actors from minorities whose work transcended that - meaning, for example will smith gets cast 85% of the time based on part and not on his skin color because he’s uber famous and he made his name in a specific genre and so on, but like we’re talking about the people who made the Upper Level of Superstar Hollywood)

anyway tldr: hollywood american movies were always 95% made for the money and reflect what they think the audience wants to pay for, which means that if hollywood producers think that people want fake woke movies then they’ll give them the fake woke movies.

this also goes hand in hand with the other problem I mentioned ie that people don’t watch movies that aren’t recent so hollywood can get away with pretending to be original when it’s actually not. now since we don’t wanna diss anything, i’ll mention a movie I actually did like *drumroll*... joker.

or, to specify what I mean:

tldr, I thought that joker was a very well-executed and planned and shot movie which had a good idea and went down well on it and was basically the batman movie nolan dreamed he was doing with the black knight and whose point was telling you that a sick system that abandons the weakest people in it (poor, mentally ill etc) and mocks them as if it’s their own fault that they aren’t better than that eventually breeds chaos and hurt and crime and it’s the fault of the system/the people in charge who don’t see it. now: that’s the least original idea in existence and I’ll go on it in depth later. except that..

when I go look at recs especially from american media, there’s a polarization between ‘OMG THIS INCITES VIOLENCE IT’S HORRIBLE IT’S DANGEROUS’ and ‘OMG THIS IS A NEW MASTERPIECE I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT BEFORE GROUNDBREAKING AMAZING NO ONE EVER DID IT BEFORE’, which to me is imvho showing very clearly where we have the issue;

as in, issue one: OMG IT INCITES VIOLENCE BLAH BLAH it’s the oldest excuse in existence that has been disproved over and over and it’s just another proof of how puritan/calvinist is the viewership because the point is not inciting violence, it’s showing that as stated not giving a fuck about people who need help means growing discontent that then explodes... which again, you don’t need to read freud’s theory about the masses to know that if the majority of the population lives in shitty conditions you get revolutions;

issue two: the only original/innovative think joker has going for itself is that it’s a movie that has a way wider audience than usual *and* an actual comic book/genre film to discuss the aforementioned issue going in depth into it and not sugarcoating it. but other than that... the deconstruction of the hero/villain in a corrupt world was already in watchmen if you want a genre movie and there have been endless others pointing that out except not that mainstream (because again everyone knows what batman is and who’s the joker, watchmen is a lot more niche), the spectacularization of THAT THING on television was already in network that came out in the year of the lord 1976 and the entire movie was basically an homage to taxi driver when it came to how it was filmed/structured and I guessed 95% of what was gonna happen in the first fifteen minutes. it’s nothing groundbreaking whatsoever, but apparently everyone thinks it is because they haven’t seen either of the above movies or any other that predated this one;

now, joker is a movie I actually liked so I don’t see the lack of originality as a bad thing because that wasn’t the point, but like just to say one, hearing people say that mad max fury road was revolutionary feminist action movie and nothing else ever happened before it when there have been four alien movies before, the valid terminator movies (one and two obviously), kill bill and so on, as in stuff that existed in the eighties was honestly meh because I did like MMFR but again it was hardly groundbreaking (maybe it is for this decade and for other reasons but not for the plot). now, both of these are good movies, but like....... 95% of nolan’s movies are hailed as top originality masterpieces and imvho he’s good but not that good and if people think dunkirk is the best war movie ever it’s because they haven’t ever seen an actual effective war movie (like I can’t even believe some people said it was like two hours of saving private ryan’s first twenty minutes, five minutes of SPR were endlessly better than all of dunkirk and SPR is hardly the best war movie out there), same for about anything he does. now, that’s way beyond the wokeness discourse, but the point is that if people don’t watch other movies and then think that hollywood’s performative woke stuff is peak progressive movie when it really really really is not then hollywood isn’t going to bother producing better stuff that’s both progressive and quality (which can happen I mean have we all seen philadelphia, even if that is like... not exactly mainstream hollywood and it was a risky movie to make but anyway not the problem). tldr: people need to stop acting like the last ten years of movies have been the only era in cinema where you got progressive movies because it’s not true and for one I can 100% assure you that for all its faults tied to the era, the defiant ones is a lot more seriously woke and effective when it comes to discussing racism in the US than 85% of the contemporary stuff I see.

so, idk what you meant with the original question, but imvho: hollywood will produce fake-performative woke movies until the audience contents itself with fake-wokeness instead of actual good material or until people decide to finally stop watching only blockbusters and also give money to indie filmmakers or like nonamerican filmmakers and anyway hollywood goes where the money goes.

which mean that if the activism irl doesn’t stop being performative and becomes serious and therefore automatically turns into people asking for serious rep and not the token character/plot, you’ll keep on getting fake woke movies. (also the day people stop saying GO WATCH THAT MOVIE BECAUSE IT’S WOKE without having even seen it and having read the summary on tumblr will be amazing, but that’s not the day.)

that said, since the idea behind a lot of the fake wokeness is actually right (ie: we need more women/minorities of every kind in movies or television/we need more rep that aren’t blonde blue eyed tall white guys/we need to cast ethnical minorities properly etc) we can hope that people actually grasp the message and we get more and more movies that cast people correctly or who have good rep for the good reasons and I’m all for it because that is a good thing. fake wokeness is not. 

but anyway: hollywood stops being each single trend it is when that trend stops selling. that’s your answer. and until we all think that the oscars are top cinematography choices in existence, it’s not gonna happen.

to end it all: no one is obliged to watch hollywood movies. actually, it’s highly advised to spend your money on either foreign movies or indie movies or independent movies or riskier projects rather than hollywood blockbusters if you don’t want fake progressive stuff also because those movies usually gaf about the issues they touch and if they get money maybe it means more of them get made.

and this was my rant, idk if that’s what you wanted to hear but I guess that’s what I had to say on the topic.

[tape-hiss]

Hello! This month's Tape Hiss is an Aetherian history lesson and is a little late, because I did a whole comic that went along with this. You can read it here, although be warned, it's NSFW. It concerns Cuppra (one of the Aetherian founders) and Suuhl (one of the reifa, or as most people including me call them, the skullbirds.) This post will expound on the comic a little bit, talking about what Aetheri was like at the time, how the war and post-war stuff unfolded, what Cuppra and Suuhl had to do with it all, and even a bit about skullbird culture.

So I've talked about the founders and the war-post-war events before both inside and outside of the comic, but even so, I think this side comic shows some things I've never really talked about before. The most immediately noticeable one is that Cuppra is hanging out in the palace--what's up with that?

What's up with it is this: Cuppra was an ethkarin, which is essentially a very fancy courtesan-slash-journalist. This occupation doesn't really exist in the same form in present-day Aetheri for reasons that will become obvious. The gist of it is that it used to be very typical for the Cynn, their spouse, and most nobility to have one or many ethkarin on the side--it wasn't a secret at all. I've talked some about the attitude towards marriage or what passes for it in Aetheri, and the weird disconnect I've mentioned between how the upper and lower classes each view sex and relationships was even more severe in pre-war times. Upper class Aetherians arranged partnerships and had children with people chosen for good breeding, or whatever, but if you didn't really much care for your designated partner, then you had  ethkarin to fill in for the rest of the relationship--intimacy, sex for the fun of it, and so on. Ethkarin were not employed just for sex, but also for their company and care. A little like hosting, but also not very much like hosting at all. Most ethkarin lived in-house; some of them had multiple clients, some of them did not.

The journalist bit of the job comes from the fact that part of being an  ethkarin involved retaining all of the goings-on in the palace and noble circles, scandalous or otherwise, and relaying this in columns in the press under a psuedonym. At this time in Aetheri, ethkarin were the only way anyone knew what went on in the palace. This part of the ethkarin job was not exactly a secret from their clients, either--it's just the way things were.

Outside of the upper classes,  ethkarin were viewed as essential parts of Aetherian society--an important ally to the regular people in keeping their rulers accountable. Aetheri has never had a puritanical view of sex, but the difference between classes is that outside of the nobility, the norm is to commit your life to whoever you like, good 'breeding' prospects aside. You love and have fun freely until you find the one person you really truly want to commit the rest of your hundreds of years to, and then you love and have fun with them for the rest of your days. Being an ethkarin was just a job, and usually this didn't clash with their actual love lives at all.

So Cuppra was one of the Cynn's ethkarin, in fact a favorite of theirs. Cynn Nadha, shown here in what used to be normal Aetherian royalty getup, was not a tyrant, or cruel, or careless...Cuppra would describe them as just sort of unable to relate to the people outside the Palace walls, which power will do to you, I suppose. Personally, the Cynn was quite nice, and Cuppra enjoyed working with them. So you can see immediately where Cuppra's role in the post-war revolution starts to appear.

(This occupation died out pretty soon after the revolt in the postwar period, because pretty much the entire upper class was deposed in one way or another, and the government that Escala instituted afterward was both way less extravagant and way more transparent. The transparency part has sort of faded over the years to present day--it's not that Numair or his predecessors take any extreme measures to hide what they're doing from the public, it's more that centuries of the government more or less being good stewards of the people has led the public to just expect the government to get on with it without having to be babysat. This has mostly worked, at least until recently.)

Aetheri in the immediate pre-war period was doing a lot of elbow-rubbing with other nations, though none so much as with the reifa, or skullbirds. To put it simply, the reifa were a very large nation with a tribal structure, and all of those tribes were represented by one figure who was voted in on an ad hoc basis. This figure during their interactions with Aetheri was Radh, the big cardinal-colored fella here.

What the Aetherian royal family wanted was to establish colonies offworld where the thyft weren't a problem; the reifa also wanted to spread abroad, as their world had little land suitable for them, apparently, and also they were adventurous types. The spirits had the magical means to establish and keep connection with offworld bases, and the reifa had the physical and otherwise strength necessary to help protect both the colonies and Aetherian cities from whatever lay beyond the borders. Thus, a partnership was born.

Suuhl was not a soldier--they were an artist. The reifa recorded things via drawings and etchings rather than through words. Even their simple hieroglyphic written language was really just shorthand drawings, and reading their language was not unlike reading road signs. Suuhl was essentially the historian brought along with the delegation to Aetheri to record whatever was worth taking note of. So Suuhl hung around the palace quite a bit, and that's how they and Cuppra met.

A note on the reifa: if you think the spirits are a little cavalier about sex, they're really nothing compared to the reifa. I'm not going to get too specific about these guys as more abut them will come out over time in the main comic, but suffice to say that sex in the culture of the reifa was a nexus for social bonding. It was as normal for friends to have sexual relationships as it would be for them to, like, plan a road trip together. Reifa were pretty loose in terms of romantic partnerships as well: polygamy was sort of the norm, but it didn't strike any of them as weird if a reifa were to have just one Big Favorite that they were romantic with. They also really, really did not care about species, so long as everyone involved was sentient and consenting.

The only strife that Cuppra and Suuhl had early on in their relationship was due to Aetherian attitude, not reifa. Most Aetherians did (still do) very much think that interspecies relationships were out of the question--it's probably rooted in their experiences with the thyft, which has hardwired them to regard anything that is clearly sentient but not a spirit to be a potential threat, or at least untrustworthy and beneath them. I think Cuppra felt for quite a while early on that, while they and Suuhl had been fooling around for a time, they would be crossing some sort of terrible line if it went any farther than that. Suuhl, obviously, thought this was incredibly stupid.

(And if you're wondering, the Cynn never knew about Cuppra's relationships outside of work. They never took much of an interest in their ethkarins' personal lives, not because they didn't care at all, but because you just don't do that with ethkarin.)

Now for a timeline of sorts:

The war starts to go bad when it becomes clear that Aetheri doesn't quite have the capability to make permanent doors between their world and Earth required for getting troops and supplies through consistently. They can't defend their colonies on Earth from the native monsters who very much want these literal aliens to fuck off. Someone in the world of the Palace gets it in their head that physically attaching their own universe to Earth's is the best way to make passage between the two stable, and the top magic users for that sort of thing began massaging this theory.

Meanwhile, the reifa living in Hymntup (the old name for Escalus, the capital city) have mostly integrated extremely well with the regular citizens. People have been organizing by neighborhood to drive off the thyft as they come hunting, and the reifa, having the physical ability to hurt the thyft where the spirits' magic cannot, are well-liked in their new home neighborhoods. Things are going well.

Then two things happen close together: a group of magic-users under the direction of the Cynn tries to move the universe and succeeds only in snuffing out a few others, followed by what can only be described as a culling, wherein a large group of the thyft all enter Hymntup at once and begin killing anyone they can get their hands on.

These two events completely destabilize both the war effort in the colonies and the home front in Aetheri. It doesn't take long for the reifa to realize that they suddenly cannot go home, that their world is gone, and that this was a result of Aetheri's little experiment. Radh totally and immediately withdraws the reifa from both the front lines and out of their communities in Hymntup, and they convene just outside the city in order to talk about what happened and what to do. The culling by the thyft starts immediately after this, while news is spreading to the rest of Hymntup about what they've inadvertently done to their new friends, and while the communities are now short of the people that were helping them defend against the thyft the most.

The Palace--completely protected from the thyft and out of touch with the rest of the city--was busy at this moment trying to do damage control elsewhere. The withdrawal of the reifa from Aetheri's Earth settlements kneecapped the forces there, and it was quickly turning into a slaughter. The monsters on Earth just Knew something Big had happened, but they didn't know what, only that Aetheri had done it. Aetherian forces were being routed out of their settlements so quickly that the most the Cynn could do was try to get them all evacuated before the monsters of Earth got them. At the same time, the Palace is trying to figure out what the hell just happened--no one had expected anything to go catastrophically wrong with the whole world-moving thing, more that it just wouldn't work at all, if anything. What the Cynn and the Palace was not paying attention to was any of the issues going on down in Hymntup, leaving everyone there to essentially fend for themselves.

This was when the fires were lit. Someone somewhere decided that, absent the help of the Aetherian army and the Palace and the reifa, people would have to take matters into their own hands to stop the culling the thyft were enacting on them. It was probably one of the neighborhood defense groups who thought they would do a controlled burn around the city to clear the trees away, ridding the thyft of their habitat, so that they'd have to cross miles of bare land to get to Hymntup and would be easily spotted as they did. It had been a normally damp year, and the trees were massive, so perhaps they poured more magic into it than was necessary. Or perhaps they just underestimated the amount of strength it would take to control the fires once even one tree was engulfed.

Either way, the fire got out of their control in the early morning hours, and by the time it was spotted by the city at large, it had multiplied and multiplied on itself, eating its way up a tree tens of stories tall. Hymntup was under-equipped to deal with a large fire at that moment as it was, what with the war and the culling taking its toll on their population, but brigades of people showed up to try and contain it, only to find that they couldn't. Instead they fell back and began encircling the city with fire repellent spells, in case the blaze in the tree did not burn itself out as they hoped.

Of course it didn't. There was a lot more dead wood in those trees than people had thought, and one by one, they all caught, until you could not see from Hymntup in any direction but for a wall of fire. The spells around the city offered protection from the brunt of it, but limbs kept dropping from overhead as they burned, damaging buildings and requiring constant response to keep the fires they brought with them from spreading within the city.

All of this time, no one in the Palace did anything about this. The only reason Hymntup did not burn to the ground was because of its own citizens turning out to protect it. And the people in Hymntup realized this, and resentment grew and grew. The fruitless war, the accident that destroyed whole worlds, the lack of any kind of help at all--what use was this government anyway?

Cuppra was at the Palace during much of this time, and they witnessed exactly what was going on. The government there was occupied with withdrawing from Earth, negotiating for prisoners of war with the different tribes of monsters on Earth who had taken them, trying to reverse whatever had happened to the worlds that had disappeared, trying to communicate with Radh and the reifa about this, and deciding what, exactly, to do and say if they couldn't reverse this problem. No one really raised the alarm about the fires until they had gotten totally out of control, and even then, upon finding out that Hymntup citizens had already worked to protect the city's borders, the Cynn sort of dismissed it. They figured, maybe, oh, great, so there's spells around the city, everything is already taken care of then--without another thought for what was actually going on down in Hymntup.

What they did not do, did not even think of doing, was try to send word ahead of the fires in any way to the other towns along the river. The people of Hymntup had to do that, too, using the river as a safe road to the next town, on bespelled boats to outrun the fire. Because of this, Ryvar and most other small towns along the river were able to spell their borders against the flames, and they weathered all right. There was nothing to be done, though, for the people that were still on the roads, or in camps and outposts farther out in the forest--there was no way to even find them all in time.

And then Aetherian soldiers began to come home from Earth. Most had not been warned ahead of time that their entire homeland was burning down. By the time they began arriving, the trees immediately around Hymntup had all completely crumbled, and in every direction the smoke was so thick that they couldn't see much beyond the nearest burned logs; the fires were still near enough that the smoke was luminous, meaning there was a constant, hellish orange glow about the place. The air quality was so bad above ground that most residents had to remain indoors or use the tunnels beneath Hymntup to travel, unless they had spelled masks so that they could breathe. After being so soundly and brutally defeated and driven off of the face of the Earth, this wasn't much of a welcome home.

As Suuhl explains in the comic, despite the fact that the reifa had every right to be completely furious with Aetheri, most couldn't really bring themselves to. They may never be able to go home, but they figured that if their world was truly destroyed, it would have gone so instantaneously that no one there would have noticed, before they simply ceased to exist. And, some of them postulated, there was always the chance that their world wasn't destroyed after all, merely made inaccessible and unable to be seen by the movement of the universes. Considering that in the face of the destruction around Aetheri--and the fact that their pulling out of the fighting on Earth and in Hymntup had gotten a lot of people killed--as a whole, the reifa couldn't do much more than grieve.

This is also where a lot of animosity starts to brew in certain groups of spirits towards the reifa. A lot of the Aetherian soldiers and the loved ones of those who had been killed placed a lot of the blame on the reifa's sudden pull-out on Earth. This is true and fair, to an extent--the war was already on its way to a loss when the whole world-moving thing happened. It wasn't just the reifa going AWOL that resulted in the war being lost, but it didn't help, and perhaps the routing at the end of it all wouldn't have been quite so bloody and brutal with them still fighting. This resentment stays with these Aetherians well after the last reifa had died...and it later served to reinforce the intense dislike by traditionalists for the immigrant monsters in Aetheri in present day.

But aside from those spirits, the reifa were mostly welcomed back. A lot of Aetherians felt they could relate to the intense sadness that the reifa were dealing with now in the face of losing their own world; it sort of bonded the two races together. Aetheri was the reifas' home now, whether they or the spirits liked it or not.

Meanwhile, the tensions between the Palace and Hymntup at large were growing. The Cynn was slowly realizing that things were about to get very bad, as stores of food in the city began to run low and it was clear that no current crops would be surviving or new ones growing for a while under the intense smoke. They didn't have a plan. No one had a plan. The Cynn was even loathe to open the Palace gates and its own stores of food to the populace--in fact, they sort of hid the fact that there were any stores of food in the Palace at all, though everyone in the city knew. Riots started, first just a few here and there, people attempting to get into the Palace one way or another and tangling with the Aetherian army guards in doing so, until pressure built and one day, seemingly out of nowhere, nearly a thousand people (Hymntup had a bigger population back then) showed up at the gates of the Palace and demanded to be let in. The Cynn didn't want them let in. A riot started. The people managed to overrun the guards at the gate, but the layout of the palace grounds worked against them as they would any attackers: they were shuffled into narrower paths between high walls as the land spiraled up around the hill to the Palace, and as they were, Aetherian soldiers were able to attack them from atop the walls...which they did. No one's really sure who gave those orders or if they were even given, but either way, this riot resulted in a couple hundred civilian casualties.

This, of course, escalated things. The Hymntupians (Hymntupites?) were furious, naturally, and more and more talk about undermining the Cynn's power one way or another was starting to be heard. The Cynn, meanwhile, was becoming paranoid--Cuppra would attest that they had almost a complete personality change after the riot at the Palace, becoming convinced that there was an organization of Aetherians out there who were plotting to kill them. This wasn't true (yet), but either way, the Cynn stepped up policing in Hymntup, which really only resulted in innocent people being subject to military brutality for anything that could even distantly be perceived as ill will towards the Cynn--including (and this was the last straw) publicly mourning for the Aetherians killed in the Palace riot.

So for some context, at this point, Cuppra and their siblings were already deeply involved with their communities. Escala (a bellfounder by trade) and Russi (a magical handyman? more or less) were part of their neighborhood's watch team, and they were working closely with the reifa in their neighborhood to help prevent more people from being hunted by the thyft. Ubis (an accomplished healer by this time) donated quite a lot of his time to holding health clinics in his community, doing things like teaching people very simple healing spells that anyone with a lick of magic could do for themselves. Cuppra and Suuhl were the ones that had convinced both of their communities to work together in the first place against the thyft, and they were both sort of well-known as liasons between the two (at this point, plenty of people suspected their relationship, but only Cuppra's siblings knew anything about it for certain.) 

Their roles stepped up quite a bit after the fires started: Escala and the neighborhood watch team were now responsible for feeding the community, pooling resources between neighbors and receiving goods smuggled out of the Palace, a task that became more and more dangerous as time went on; Russi was now working overtime in crews keeping the fire wards around the city maintained, designing spells to filter the air through cloth masks, to filter the ash out of the water, and so on; Ubis's healing talents were well in demand between the smoke and fires and violence in the streets; and Cuppra, of course, was a vital link to knowing what was going on in the Palace.

Here is stuff that I am telling you is what happened, but that has never been actually historically confirmed in-universe, and most Aetherian scholars consider it matters of debate.

1) It was Escala's idea to do a coup, in the end. Escala had a magnetic personality even if he wasn't terribly charismatic, and he had a way of convincing people without really trying. Things were usually very simple to him, mostly because he rarely got emotional about much of anything and had a really sharp, concrete sense of justice. In his view, it went like this:

The Aetherian government has the means and obligation to aid the people, which it is not fulfilling.

The Aetherian government is also now getting in the way of the people helping themselves.

Therefore, get rid of the government and put their resources to better use.

If this cannot be done peacefully, then it will be done violently, because it must be done.

As time went on and things got more and more ugly, people started to come around to this point of view, first in Escala's neighborhood and then beyond, until there were actually enough people on board to even consider revolt.

2) Cuppra is the one who assassinated the Cynn. This was also Escala's idea, because to him it made the most sense to have the person who was already allowed in the Cynn's presence with no suspicion in their most intimate moments commit this act. He figured, this method had the lowest risk and highest chance of success. Like Escala, Cuppra also had a unique personality--they always came off as gentle and unassuming, and no one ever tended to suspect them of anything. Cuppra did not want to do this, because while they were never in love with the Cynn, Cuppra did have some affection for them, or used to. It saddened Cuppra a lot to see the change in the Cynn's personality after the war. Before, perhaps the Cynn could be described as a bit airheaded and careless, but with their paranoia came a cruel streak that slowly started to infect every interaction they had with everyone, including their ethkarin. Cuppra wasn't exactly in denial about this. They knew the Cynn wasn't going to just step down, and they knew that the cruelty that the Cynn displayed now hadn't come from nowhere and likely wouldn't be going away. But Cuppra wasn't much of a killer, and the whole thing haunted them in one way or another for the rest of their days.

Again, this bit is debated historically in Aetheri. All anyone really knows for sure is that the Cynn was murdered in their bed, stabbed once in the back through the heart. Only Cuppra ever knew exactly how it happened.

Things happened very quickly after that. Escala led the revolt, more or less, directing people up into the Palace grounds from the tunnels underneath, where they were able to surprise the army and the nobles. It was over fast, but it was bloody. There is very little violence in general in Aetherian history before and after this point (especially compared to human history) not because Aetherians are a particularly peaceful people, but because in a world where almost everyone has magic and most can use it to a lethal degree if they so choose, any violence at all usually escalates very quickly into atrocity. Generally more thought is put into things before physical force becomes an option for Aetherians...and it helps that there hasn't historically been much that seemed worth exacting that much violence over. In this case, however, the combination of everything built into a revolution that saw hundreds killed just in storming the Palace, and hundreds more later as revolutionary forces and the parts of the military that hadn't immediately abandoned their loyalties to the royal family clashed. At the end of the few weeks that the revolution took, what was left was a palace with quite a bit of the insides burned out (including the throne room), a completely extinguished royal family (and several noble houses as well), a dissolution of all of the retainers and officials that had reported to them, and quite a few revolutionaries who were surprised that they'd gotten this far.

The Palace's stores of food were opened up immediately to the public. It didn't solve the famine, but it was enough to feed the city for a few weeks while other plans could be made. The Palace was actually left pretty much empty while the Aetherians got to work expanding lrecca hatcheries and mushroom farms, harvesting river kelp, thinning out the livestock before they starved, spelling the food they had to be preserved indefinitely--anything they could think of. The other towns along the river were doing much the same, with their own stores of food. This was all happening under Escala's guidance, as he'd found himself in a weird position wherein he'd started giving good direction during the revolt, so people kept looking to him for more afterwards, so he just kept doing what made sense.

And then at some point Russi made her reappearance. She'd been largely absent during the revolt, because it turned out that she was busy creating a huge construct out of dragon bones and compacted earth. She didn't tell anyone she was doing this (these dragons were another ally of the spirits in their bid to colonize a bit of earth, and several of them had lived and died in Aetheri as the reifa did, so using their bones for this seemed a bit wrong--but on the other hand, this was big magic, and there wasn't much material better than bone to do a big magic like this.) Her plan, she explained, was that she was going to send this construct north until it had gotten far enough up into the mountains that it could see the sun. Then it would quite literally swallow the sunlight coming down on it, storing it in its stomach, before turning around and walking home. Then it would park itself in the fields around Aetheri, and shed light enough to grow crops by. Russi planned to make another one, too, so they'd always have one in the fields and one in the mountains, but she confessed she'd like some help doing this next one.

This is a lunatic plan, of course, and it was met with a mixture of wonder and laughter (and a little bit of revulsion, and a little bit of hope.) But Russi's siblings knew her plans usually panned out all right in one way or another, so Escala let her send the first construct shambling off northward and solicited enough volunteers to help her make the next one. And then more, to go afield to other cities and help them make their own constructs, because as nuts as Russi's idea was, it worked. Aetheri starts putting itself back together again, and life goes on, albeit leanly for a long while.

And now the falling action:

Escala sort of ends up as the new Cynn accidentally the way he fell into every other leadership role. He creates the Ettaldhmi to temper the Cynn's power. His Cynnship is long, fair, and humble; he rids it of the ostentation and ritual of the prior royal family, wears the same clothes he wore as a bellfounder, leaves the throne room burnt out and shut away, and takes office instead in a small suite at the top of the Palace, with what became a nice view eventually, when the skies cleared decades later and the ash lands started to absolutely burst with greenery again. The trees never came back, but neither did the thyft, and the ash-filled soil that was left was fertile enough that the Aetherians could hardly use all of the crops they grew.

Russi's constructs, even after the sky had cleared, continued to walk back and forth from Aetheri's river to the mountains in the far north, though eventually they stopped collecting sunlight. They seemed to gain a mind of their own, but eventually they each wound down at some point, resting wherever they fell out in the vast grasslands.

Ubis opened the university in the capital city, which I have already gone on about.

Cuppra and Suuhl both worked with Escala quite a lot, lending a little compassion to his otherwise reason-focused administration. They helped make peace with the Laith people to the north, who were very displeased with all of the smoke and the large constructs rambling through their territories, and they continued to each be a liason to the other's species. They were inseparable to the end of their days. Cuppra lived to the ripe old age of 1056, and Suuhl passed soon after--some would claim that they had died of grief. In fact, that's what Aetherians said about all of the reifa. The reifa were never the same after loosing their homeland, naturally, and one by one over the centuries, they just seemed to fade away. (This is actually another sticking point in the historical literature, because no one's sure if the description of the reifa 'fading' is literal or not.) Either way, Suuhl was not the last reifa in Aetheri, but they were one of them. The last one--Radh--outlived Escala's successor, and then seemed to evaporate from living memory.

Escala was succeeded by his child Yturra, who after their father's death (because he thought these ideas were nonsense in life) renamed Hymntup to Escalus, and oversaw raising the statues of the founders we see in the comic today. The newly-coined d'Escala family continues a quiet, unspectacular reign into the present day.

And now you know...........................the rest of the story.

Thanks for reading! I know this is a long one. I hope it strung some events together for you! It you have questions about this particular point in Aetherian history, let me know!

[blossommirage]

I found random questions so I’m gonna answer them all haha im bored

1. Do you ever doubt the existence of others than you?

Most people

2. On a scale of 1-5, how afraid of the dark are you?

Probably 4? It’s not panic attacks but i get tense

3. The person you would never want to meet?

My gf’s ex

4. What is your favorite word?

Buffalo

5. If you were a type of tree, what would you be?

A gay one

6. When you looked in the mirror this morning what was the first thing you thought?

i gotta pee

7. What shirt are you wearing?

some shirt jean gave me with a webcomic on it

8. What do you label yourself as?

lesbiab

9. Bright room or dark room?

bright

10. What were you doing at midnight last night?

watching dunkey with my girlfriend

11. Favorite age you’ve been so far?

this one’s okay

12. Who told you they loved you last?

girlfriend

13. Your worst enemy?

ptsd

14. What is your current desktop picture?

Highway Blossoms

15. Do you like someone?

my girlfriend

16. The last song you listened to?

Some Utada song idr what

17. You can press a button that will make any one person explode. Who would you blow up?

my first boyfriend

18. Who would you really like to just punch in the face?

my girlfriend’s ex because other than abuse her she also sounds like the shittiest human

19. If anyone could be your slave for a day, who would it be and what would they have to do?

no thats creepy and weird, all i’d want is for my gf to eat me out all day and she already does that

20. What is your best physical attribute? (showing said attribute is optional)

I have a beauty mark next to my lip its ok

21. If you were the opposite sex for one day, what would you look like and what would you do?

probably have panic attacks

22. Do you have a secret talent? If yes, what is it?

i’m secretly a cat pretending to be a person

23. What is one unique thing you’re afraid of?

Statue of Liberty. I don’t know either.

24. You can only have one kind of sandwich. Every sandwich ingredient known to humankind is at your disposal.

uhhhh meatball sub

25. You just found $100! How are you going to spend it?

fate go and love live money, also a vibrator

26. You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere in the world, but you have to leave immediately. Where are you going to go?

I guess like philly and back since that would take the least time

27. An angel appears out of Heaven and offers you a lifetime supply of the alcoholic beverage of your choice. “Be brand-specific” it says. Man! What are you gonna say about that? Even if you don’t drink booze there’s something you can figure out… so what’s it gonna be?

Jack Daniels, my mom likes it and I don’t drink

28. You discover a beautiful island upon which you may build your own society. You make the rules. What is the first rule you put into place?

u have to be a queer lady to live here this is the new amazon GET THE FUCK IN

29. What is your favorite expletive?

heckie

30. Your house is on fire, holy shit! You have just enough time to run in there and grab ONE inanimate object. Don’t worry, your loved ones and pets have already made it out safely. So what’s the one thing you’re going to save from that blazing inferno?

Laptop would be the hardest to replace

31. You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?

MY FIRST BOYFRIEND

32. You got kicked out of the country for being a time-traveling heathen who sleeps with celebrities and has super-powers. But check out this cool shit… you can move to anywhere else in the world!

Canada, I guess.

33. The Celestial Gates Of Beyond have opened, much to your surprise because you didn’t think such a thing existed. Death appears. As it turns out, Death is actually a pretty cool entity, and happens to be in a fantastic mood. Death offers to return the friend/family-member/person/etc. of your choice to the living world. Who will you bring back?

john entwistle or carrie fisher

34. What was your last dream about?

I was moving back to america from begium again and my laptop got stolen and this dude in the airport fell in love with me but i was just trying to find my computer

35. Are you a good….[insert anything you’d like here]?

I’m an okay musician

36. Have you ever been admitted to the hospital?

Yeah

37. Have you ever built a snowman?

I think so? It never snowed where I grew up but I feel like I did this once.

38. What is the color of your socks?

barefoot, fight me

39. What type of music do you like?

I listen to a lot of genres, mostly jrock or 90′s alternative

40. Do you prefer sunrises or sunsets?

sunsets

41. What is your favorite milkshake flavor?

strawberry

42. What football team do you support? (I will answer in terms of American football as well as soccer)

Falcons, I guess. I’m more of a baseball girl.

43. Do you have any scars?

I have one on my stomach from an operation, one on my left index finger from a glass shattering while i was doing dishes

44. What do you want to be when you graduate?

neurotypical

45. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

having PTSD

46. Are you reliable?

probably not?

47. If you could ask your future self one question, what would it be?

do i get better

48. Do you hold grudges?

probably

49. If you could breed two animals together to defy the laws of nature, what new animal would you create?

whatever makes gatomon real

50. What is the most unusual conversation you’ve ever had?

i once mentioned a love live porn comic to someone and they went “oh shit i read that too” it was weird

51. Are you a good liar?

i dont think so

52. How long could you go without talking?

indefinite, i guess

53. What has been you worst haircut/style?

No idea, i don’t think i look good with short hair

54. Have you ever baked your own cake?

yeah, it was rad

55. Can you do any accents other than your own?

noooooooo

56. What do you like on your toast?

i dont realy like toast

57. What is the last thing you drew a picture of?

literally 0 idea

58. What would be you dream car?

good gas mileage

59. Do you sing in the shower? Or do anything unusual in the shower? Explain.

if i’m home alone, which is never

60. Do you believe in aliens?

sure

61. Do you often read your horoscope?

not really ever

62. What is your favorite letter of the alphabet?

q is rad

63. Which is cooler: dinosaurs or dragons?

dragons

64. What do you think about babies?

they’re ok

65. Freebie! Ask anything interesting you can think of.

my favorite key to write in is C# minor

[mr-villainous]

All except 35 and 65

1. Do you ever doubt the existence of others than you?

Nah

2. On a scale of 1-5, how afraid of the dark are you?

like 1

3. The person you would never want to meet?

Trump

4. What is your favorite word?

Villainous

5. If you were a type of tree, what would you be?

I am the Mighty Oak

6. When you looked in the mirror this morning what was the first thing you thought?

Damn.

7. What shirt are you wearing?

Reverse Flash Shirt!!

8. What do you label yourself as?

a Villain

9. Bright room or dark room?

Dim

10. What were you doing at midnight last night?

Trying to get a fucking download to work.

11. Favorite age you’ve been so far?

The age before I started to feel old. so like.....10.

12. Who told you they loved you last?

@mrs-villainous

13. Your worst enemy?

The wicked cocktail of my pain and laziness

14. What is your current desktop picture?

It’s a slideshow of a bunch of comics and games

15. Do you like someone?

a bit.

16. The last song you listened to?

I want to know what love is

17. You can press a button that will make any one person explode. Who would you blow up?

maybe my brother-in-law.

18. Who would you really like to just punch in the face?

Trump

19. If anyone could be your slave for a day, who would it be and what would they have to do?

Someone with the authority to set some shit up for me. They would have to set some shit up for me.

20. What is your best physical attribute? (showing said attribute is optional)

Hair. Everything else is just a fucking nightmare.

21. If you were the opposite sex for one day, what would you look like and what would you do?Terrible. I’d play video games XD

22. Do you have a secret talent? If yes, what is it?

I can do that thing where you turn your eyelid inside out like kids do at camp. It hurts. 

23. What is one unique thing you’re afraid of?

It’s not incredibly unique as I’ve learned lately but I’m afraid of driving/riding in vehicles.

24. You can only have one kind of sandwich. Every sandwich ingredient known to humankind is at your disposal.

Fucking subway’s oven roasted chicken, italian bread, american cheese, mayo, olives, Parmesan cheese, toasted for half the regular time. Boom. fucking perfection.  

25. You just found $100! How are you going to spend it?I’d buy a gift for a friend of mine, and then I’d probably take Katie to a nice dinner and movie.

26. You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere in the world, but you have to leave immediately. Where are you going to go?Fucking Japan. Literally the only place I’m interested in traveling to for myself. Like I’ll go places with/for other people, but the only place I’m interested in personally is Japan.

27. An angel appears out of Heaven and offers you a lifetime supply of the alcoholic beverage of your choice. “Be brand-specific” it says. Man! What are you gonna say about that? Even if you don’t drink booze there’s something you can figure out… so what’s it gonna be?

What fucking angel is this. Did fucking Captain Morgan die and become patron saint of getting you fucking wasted? Kraken Spiced Rum.

28. You discover a beautiful island upon which you may build your own society. You make the rules. What is the first rule you put into place?

Only people that don’t annoy me can join my happy go fun island of neverwar.

29. What is your favorite expletive?

Bitch. I like it a lot.

30. Your house is on fire, holy shit! You have just enough time to run in there and grab ONE inanimate object. Don’t worry, your loved ones and pets have already made it out safely. So what’s the one thing you’re going to save from that blazing inferno?

Fucking......I’d burn. I don’t give a fuck. 

31. You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?

Nothing.

32. You got kicked out of the country for being a time-traveling heathen who sleeps with celebrities and has super-powers. But check out this cool shit… you can move to anywhere else in the world!

Japan. I told you Japan is super neat to me.

33. The Celestial Gates Of Beyond have opened, much to your surprise because you didn’t think such a thing existed. Death appears. As it turns out, Death is actually a pretty cool entity, and happens to be in a fantastic mood. Death offers to return the friend/family-member/person/etc. of your choice to the living world. Who will you bring back?

My late Brother-in-law.

34. What was your last dream about?

Pretty sure I was trapped in a supermarket that turned into a school. Then I had no shoes and I ran through the wall into an endless forest that was on top of the sky. I don’t dream often, but when I do, it’s like a fucking Doctor Strange fucked up multiverse collage.

36. Have you ever been admitted to the hospital?

Yeah, a couple times for really bad migraines that caused seizures and once for an allergic reaction

37. Have you ever built a snowman?

Yea

38. What is the color of your socks?

Black

39. What type of music do you like?

Classic Rock, Eminem, showtunes, Daft Punk type shit.

40. Do you prefer sunrises or sunsets?

Sunrises, I think.

41. What is your favorite milkshake flavor?

Chocolate. 

42. What football team do you support? 

The Dallas Cowboys, Oakland Raiders.

43. Do you have any scars?

Very slight ones from my knee surgery, a couple from fights, one from cutting an apple, and quite a few from being dropped as a baby.

44. What do you want to be when you graduate?

worth something

45. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

My body.

46. Are you reliable?

Not really. I sleep a lot and I don’t have many resources or abilities. 

47. If you could ask your future self one question, what would it be?

Winning Lotto numbers.

48. Do you hold grudges?

Yeah, for a while. I try to eventually forgive shit, but sometimes it takes me quite a while. 

49. If you could breed two animals together to defy the laws of nature, what new animal would you create?

A sloth and a cat. Ideally, it’d be hypoallergenic, keep the appearance of the cat, but the personality and pace of the sloth.

50. What is the most unusual conversation you’ve ever had?

There’s quite a bit there to draw from. I can’t even figure out where to begin. Pass.

51. Are you a good liar?

I like to think so.

52. How long could you go without talking?

Oh fucking days at the least. I used to be very talkative but every day I seem to get more quiet. Unless we’re counting singing, cos I’m singing anytime I’ve got a chance.

53. What has been you worst haircut/style?

Egg-in-nest.

54. Have you ever baked your own cake?

Yar. 

55. Can you do any accents other than your own?

Not consistently. Katie says my british is terrible but I say it’s pretty fucking fab. I do a good pirate as well. But like I said, I’ve got no consistency.

56. What do you like on your toast?

blackberry jam.

57. What is the last thing you drew a picture of?

Probably stick figures wrestling.

58. What would be you dream car?

One that drives itself and has no windows so I ain’t gotta see the terrifying bits.

59. Do you sing in the shower? Or do anything unusual in the shower? Explain.

Yeah, all the fucking time. I also play this game in the shower where I cup some water in my hand, then I throw it up, and try to catch it. I see how many times I can catch the water until it has all splashed away.

60. Do you believe in aliens?

I believe aliens are possible.

61. Do you often read your horoscope?

Nah.

62. What is your favorite letter of the alphabet?

Probably V.

63. Which is cooler: dinosaurs or dragons?

Dragons, by fucking far.

64. What do you think about babies?

They’re pathetic. They can’t do shit on their own. Fucking shameful.