#the waiting world

[bookwyrminspiration]

god I would be UNSTOPPABLE if I was capable of consistently initiating tasks. just you wait. you'll be waiting a while but just you wait

[boct-kimerakal]

your name is literally hawkes talon

what the hell. bird.

this (and like 8 other lore dumps) has been sitting in my drafts for so long... just throw it out there with the tag so i can keep track.

i think a lot about the waiting world (original lore world! no way!) but i just never talk about it anywhere. EXCEPT when i try to spew it into my notes.. now the problem with notes, is that it just feels so tedious to type things out there? it’s much smoother on this platform, who knows why (the font and formatting soothe me..)

anyways, i’m here to talk about the background / basics anji-ola punk rockstar serving major aggro daily. need to write the scattered notes (vague ideas..) somewhere because the toyhouse profile is so horrendously long already

okay, expect a lot of REALLY bad world-building in a ‘notes for later’ style. really simple & kinda lame rn.

background first? hawkes is kondhani which is one of the? sixty-three... ethnic groups in anji-ola i intend to develop. thinking about it so hard. it’s one of ethnicities with the most diaspora communities, so you tend to get [insert location name here]-kondhan when askin’ - hawkes specifically would be denovo-kondhan.. hmmm. kondhani was up until recently a nomadic culture and in the wake of the mandated settlement no real kondhani “homeland” (like, a heartland or significantly large-enough settlement by government standards?) emerged? unlike, eg, the dysikkin majority being located surrounding dangsahana and the people being associated with the denovijihari region.

hm. both groups are similar in that they were never associated with a particular nation / organised behind any form of leadership, they emerged as socio-cultural entity after the breakdown of the kodyssi thalassocracy and the people diffused across the rest of the landmass (which i HAVE NOT named) <- i say this not knowing a THING about how these categorisation systems work, it’s just a best guess? do correct me if i’m horribly wrong with my word choices.. ehrm! that out of the way!

ALSO. punk rockstar is an approximation. there really isn’t a punk culture + musical genre in anji-ola - nor do rockstars even exist, because rock music is a culture thing. believe it or not. there is nothing in anji-ola that could act as prelude to this culture. (something, something? the ubiquity of rock music in this era due to the present western culture hegemony? dunno.. but the term’s a good way to set an Expectation for hawkes and her music) that said. pondering my orb. electrical technology is a thing and has been applied to music relatively similarly? HRRM.

time to answer the ‘why can she beat you up?’ question. (sigh.. my main issue with worldbuilding is! ugh! describing the hard-to-articulate parts. i need visual elements, sigh... but like, come on man.. i have to DRAW it? myself?) anyways, hawkes has perfected a form of kondhani dance that imitates physical fighting! but pretty. problem is i haven’t named it yet or really messed with the overall tradition behind it. and in my mind there’s a specific look to it, an aesthetic uniqueness. i’ll have to hammer out the logistics of it all..

the art form is considered more in the realm of dance than martial arts though! but i figure there isn’t as big a distinction in the context of anji-ola.. they’re codified more as physical training traditions? but ugh, i haven’t done my research so take these as notes for my future self (hopefully, a future self that actually DID THE WORK)

lastly. the reason hawkes wears red so aggressively is it’s a celebration colour in kondhani culture and usually worn to funerals & weddings in kondhani tradition (but there are no taboos on dressing casually in red!) by the close ones of the deceased / newly weds respectively. ehrrrm hm. yea.

character stuff next time. probably rant it up with trick too.

[akanemnon]

Wow, not even 5 seconds in and they're already starting a fight.

FIRST - PREVIOUS - NEXT

MASTERPOST (for the full series / FAQ / reference sheets)

[junotter]

Part 2 of my modern avatar au, The Gaang (part 1)

[botanicallyinclinednerd]

Polites died believing that the world is kind, and yet his death contributes to Odysseus deciding to become a monster. Absolutely devastating

[oscarlovesthesea]

ok but he was fully flirting here. I think it's so funny that Charles was like "idk if I'm in love with you but we have all eternity to figure it out" and then literally an episode later he was like "welp time to start thinking about this!" and immediately started openly flirting with Edwin. you go bisexual king

[vepppy]

going thru my screenshots to find something else but found this trisha video screenshot instead

[egophiliac]

*shaky thumbs up* I just finished ch5...... y-you were not kidding about it being a heavy one.....

:)

(how's that going so far, Mal)

[feketeribizli]

spider society meeting more like gay brunch

[cacaocheri]

small flash warning!!!

i made this video in like under two hours <333 enjoy <333333 it's been so long since ive made a proper shitpost

[teaboot]

One time in grade 11 band class I let a girl go through my iPod and she started laughing and I was like "What's funny" and she read out loud, "Papa Roach, Breaking Benjamin, MCR, Get Scared, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails... and then fuckign Pussycat Dolls?!"

And I'm never gonna forget that

[sunderwight]

Bingqiu AU where Luo Binghe's the chosen village sacrifice to the evil deity who lives up the mountain.

Normally the village sends maidens, but they've more or less run out of expendable girls of the right age and, ahem, "virtues". So of course Luo Binghe's early life bad luck kicks in. In the wake of his mother's death there's no one to really care about what happens to him, he's fairly pretty, and the village leaders decide that if they dress him up like a girl the teenaged homeless kid should pass well enough. And hey, y'know, he's probably got a hard life ahead for him anyway -- dying in a brothel of some venereal disease or on the streets of exposure or starvation. At least as a sacrifice, everyone else gets to benefit from his loss! And the kid will get added to a shrine and be remembered as a hero! If anything, he should be happy about this!

Binghe is not happy about this.

But he's also a skinny underfed nobody who is easily overpowered, dressed up like a bride, and tied to a post. So. Not much he can do but wait for the evil deity to come and do whatever horrible thing he's gonna do to him.

Meanwhile, Shen Yuan is pretty sure he's been isekai'd into the over-powered hero of some kind of supernatural adventure story? He's not totally sure because he doesn't recognize the setting, but the signs are there. He's got a shrine-like base of operations (though it seems to have become corrupted/ruined, probably he has to restore it somehow), he has a very resilient and handsome new body with spiritual energy of some kind flowing through him, and a very clearly magical sword. Plus lots of neat starter powers! Though it feels like he has other abilities that have been blocked somehow? Probably he has to level up in order to access them.

When he treks out of his "base" and finds what seems to be a distressed maiden, he takes it for his beginner hero mission. The girl claims that she's been doomed to be sacrificed to an evil god. That sounds a little above Shen Yuan's pay grade for dealing with, so he unties her and decides that they had better just get out of the whole region altogether. He already packed up anything useful from his base, anticipating he might get caught up in an adventure once he left, so they follow the river away from the settlement until they reach another one.

While they travel, Luo Binghe tells Shen Yuan about the cursed deity, Shen Qingqiu, who was cast out of the heavens for slaughtering one of his brethren and has apparently being do-who-knows what to maidens from the local village in exchange for his "protection" ever since. Sounds like a real asshole! And also mid-level boss type bad guy at least. Shen Yuan hopes he doesn't have to fight him, but he probably will.

Thank goodness he found Binghe, though! Clearly the helpful little sister type! He's definitely going to require her assistance if he's going to figure out how to navigate this world and level up his skills enough to take on a god.

[boct-kimerakal]

boctlore directory

a good old world masterpost

everything you need to know (well, the basics at least) of my lore worlds that i’ll post about on here, at some point. mostly for archival’s sake.. future boct this goes out to you <3 you wanted me to “get more organised” so here it is.

i SWEAR you’ll find at least one goofy. (hopefully?) let’s just say i’m diverse. there’s more TBA, i’m just the cosmos’ laziest creature.

non-inclusive of my not-original stuff, maybe i’ll make a separate post for that one (looking at you, pondwater from hit indie horror survival game signalis) but here it is gang! 🤍 an ode to all the girlies who talk & think too much.. MY APOLOGIES FOR THE SHEER MUNDANITY OF MY MIND...

The Waiting World - think: neon signs and city streets, think ruins in the forest, think graffiti, think clashing architecture, tension between peoples, think of questions like “what’s yours? what’s mine?” and the indomitable nature of, well, the natural world. the waiting world is a fantasy world focused on an archipelago nation (anjikhani-olahra) - 39 years independent after 171 years under the palms of a number conquering ghonsunwa (earthly realm) nations - as it experiences rapid advancement, a globalising world and unbalanced world power dynamics. a world between worlds (ghosunwa/underworld/knockoff-earth & ghonshogwa/aboveworld) inhabited by some pretty neat-lookin’ guys with horns and tails.

despite all it’s culture, it’s inter-ethnic quarrels, it’s own grand moral debates, it’s fight against pervasiveness of less sanitary aspects of its cultures (invasive, native, a mix of both), it’s fight to preserve identity at all, as well as over what it is achieve modernity - the waiting world is reduced in the eyes of both the other realms to the middleman, a hotspot for smuggling and crime. and stories follow characters as they exist in the context of all of that, pulling at the threads of the world around them. a world, waiting for them to unravel it!

my main guys from this world are trick and hawkes from the [Kau Bakari] plotline and trust me. i can yap about them forever. it was so hard not to

Shifters - an alternate earth where, in 1967, these undefinable entities (basically representing major classes under chordata... categories scare me) called emissaries rolled up! they warned of a ‘storm’ of dead fragments of emissaries. they also offered people the ability to make pledges, adopting the traits of one specific animal species - as shapeshifters. but they’ve always existed, and offered shifting far more selectively before, long ago. why suddenly give more away? was that a reparation for the storm? why are they here? why show themselves now? and the storm? what does this mean?

it’s a world with multiple stories, some intersecting, most others not. my current babygirl storylines are

[Paper Kites] about a jet-setting CEO and her archeologist fiancé, on their way to finding out big secrets about the emissaries. i’m very abnormal about them, i will actually pay you to listen to me talk about them. they’re in aroace love by the way did i mention that.

[Pick-up Sticks] a look into the effects of that CEO and archeologist’s curiosity - oh-so-far-away, the little people hit by a corporate conspiracy, political upheaval and never-before seen shifter tensions

Trip2Temasek - it’s just a silly thing - framed like a classic TTRPG campaign! but with fun flavour. a Singaporean twist, to be exact. six silly pinnacles of Singaporean character tropes. a bird-having, plant-raising void deck uncle (the druid) + an overworked tiger mom (the barbarian) + a deviant 16-year-old ah lian (the rouge) + the perfect prefect from the top school just over (the wizard) + the over-eager community club lady (the cleric) and, of course, the community cat (the bard) - who all get flung into a thriving, ancient forest-city mirroring singapore, inhabited by spirits, young gods and beastly creatures.

i dance around a little with casual racism, materialism, individualism/collectivism, the price of progress and maybe a little bit of the guilt of being privileged. not-so-uniquely Singaporean experiences. if i post about it, it’ll probably be cute moments between the characters or full-on breakdowns about my disconnection from my national identity! yippee!

Hysteria! Starforged - it’s a big mess of a sci-fi world about an inter-planetary war - with too many criss-crossing motivations. the point is no one is really sure what’s happening, it’s just a lot of a lot. there’s two big “sides,” but unfortunately no good guys. one’s the legion. it absorbs, it’s one goal being uniformity in morality across the stars to prevent... warfare (irony!) - life is a lot more complicated than that though, so they wind up just making things worse - they (attempt) to install their law and cultures in every planet they absorb.

the other is called the council, an allegiance formed to oppose the domination of the legion. they suck too! in their desperation to get an upper hand and escape the reign of the legion, they exploit lesser-equipped planets and their own allies. they have enlisted entire planets without spacefaring ability into their intergalactic war, just to have numbers. almost none of the other planets have planetary governments so a lot of “tinier” international wars happen. do you see where this is going. hysteria. hysteria starforged, even.

and my main trio are just a little gang. three girls against the world, (two soldiers pulled from one war to another and a dignitary from a country that no longer exists!) and god, there’s a lot of World.

The Ending That Wasn’t (to be renamed..) - another sci-if one, but i got silly with it. silly and goofy even. six idiots wake up on the brig of a half-destroyed ship floating around space, with absolutely NO memory AT ALL! space-styles, “i’m too dumb for rules” D&D - if it played by one lonely geek.

space ikea, quantum toasters, a robot t-rex that the sci-fi goblin is SWEARING to you is a house pet on another planet. my colourful cast of stupid idiots saved the world once - in fact, literally JUST BEFORE they woke up. they just don’t remember it. they barely remember anything - and as they, through typical D&D party shenanigans, make petty criminals out of themselves, they realise that maybe they were pretty big deals, actually. matured, world-saving heroes that you are by the end of the campaign, even. starting from scratch is a little awkward.

they’ll figure it out, eventually. no tag yet - i’m taking name suggestions still...

Of Obsolete Orisons - post-apocalyptic, in a lovely, overgrown, “we’re rebuilding” way. - avatars of natural forces walk the earth when they fancy, most worshipped as gods. wardens of equilibrium represented the pillars of balance until, well, they suddenly couldn’t - and then the apocalypse came.

30 years afterwards, an avatar who thought it’d be fun to just be a guy separates themselves from divinity, gets into silly shenanigans as it discovers the world before it. the least interesting of my many, many lore worlds. i poke a little bit at the personification of the world around us in the form of divine consciousnesses, as well as perfection and pre-determinism, nothing fancy, i’m just amused and intrgued.

MORE TBA - eventually lawl

[akanemnon]

So many questions... so little answers

FIRST - PREVIOUS - NEXT

MASTERPOST (for the full series / FAQ / reference sheets)

[keziasorro]

Forgot to show my other old Arti comic from Twitter. Aint sad this time :)

[spaciebabie]

im so tired of begging my legislators ta not take my rights away bro. like yes please mr republican senator do not pass this dumbass law. yes sir i will tell you everything you want to hear so you'll listen 2 me. queer people are the devil you're right and joe biden is the worst menace this country has seen yeah you're right. can you not take my rights away now. you fucking bitch.