#thematic swap

[starrysnowdrop]

“As the lightning cracked down, so did her spirit. Rage roared louder than thunder in her soul. The rain poured but for once, her tears didn’t. She was letting go.”

~ J. L. Meraki

As yall might’ve seen the palette swapping of your OCs going around, I got inspired to do the same. But I didn’t stop at just swapping colors, oh no. I wanted to do a whole re-theming, a Thematic Swap if you will. So here she is: Thematic Swapped Hali!

So what did I swap out? First, I went for her hair and eyes, and I just randomly picked purple for both (it’s personally my favorite color). Then I thought, hmmmm, purple aether in FFXIV is Lightning… so why not make Hali lightning themed instead of water themed? Finally, I took it a step further and swapped out her canon jobs. Instead of being a healer and support with Astrologian and Dancer, why not have Hali kick ass with a melee job? So I chose Monk so she could beat up and take all her anger out on her enemies.

Even though this was never meant to be taken seriously, perhaps this would be Hali if anything ever happened to Aymeric and he was killed, maybe with most of her friends and family dead as well. Hali would take out her rage on those who cause pain and suffering in the world, so she would shed her Warrior of Light title and become an anti-hero. Jury’s out on how she would have her hair and eyes change however.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

doing chibi is a good design exercise bc it forces u to think on shapes n essential details, essentially thumbnailing ur designs. its also a terrible design exercise bc it ends up looking cute no matter what

[burstfoot]

Have to say I am a big fan of Texas and Lappland's accent colors swapping to each other's in their respective alters. That shit's nice

[midmodmar]

We were a couple of kids stuck in the panopticon but I wanted that spotlight shining directly on us.

[somesortofstyx]

Rolling the idea around in my head that the Goat is from a reality that is, at Least aesthetically, a mirror of The Lamb's. Lambs are often depicted as innocent and pure for sacrifice, and in the game our lamb deals with a lot of creatures that are very "demonic" in design. Goats, on the other hand, are often associated with more satanic sacrifices and imagery already. So imagine if in their world, the gods and enemies they face don't look demonic... They look angelic. Pale forms and eyes and haloes and wings. Goat enters Lamb's reality and nearly trips over themself when they see the Mystic Seller because usually things that look like that want to Kill Them. (And as a bonus, Lamb's form/magic we glimpse in the final boss fight has feathered wings - so maybe the Goat's has more batlike wings and an impish tail instead~)

[un-pearable]

incredibly funny to me how thematically incoherent sonic-eggman role swaps are. like even when they did it for real in archie the extent of their thoughts theme-wise were uhhhhh he’s a veterinarian

[magpie-sphinx]

my collection of thematically opposite element primal reps is finally complete!

[juney-blues]

save me osaka firefox theme

save me in these trying times

[artist-issues]

So this part in the trailer, where Grover gets bullied and Walker Scobell looks like he’s going to stand up and start a fight, is why I think this Percy Jackson show might be good.

That’s exactly how Percy responds. He’s got that whole “protect my friends” Achilles’ heel, fatal flaw, thing. He’ll always do the right thing…unless the right thing is to not do for a friend. I feel like Walker Scobell nails that immediate righteous-anger-triggered thing with his face and everything right here.

That makes up for the whole race-swapping hair-swapping nonsense.

[rememberdamonn]

Well written characters have a core conflict that consists of a goal that the character wants/needs to achieve, and an obstacle that gets in the way of that goal. For Damon, that core conflict is Love vs. Fear. His goal is love - to be loved, to have love. The obstacle that gets in the way of that goal is his own fear - fear of being abandoned/betrayed/rejected, fear of not being enough, fear of letting people down, fear of losing his loved ones... in short, fear of losing love. Every majorly bad decision that Damon makes, he makes either in reaction to or in anticipation of that fear being realized. When he kills Jeremy in S2, and Aaron in S5? He does it because he’s just been abandoned and rejected by Elena/Katherine. When he hides the cure from Elena in S6? He does it because he’s afraid that if she becomes human he’ll lose her. When he feeds Elena his blood in S2? He does it because he’s afraid he’ll lose her in the sacrifice. These seeds are planted throughout the entire show. In 4x15 when Damon sires Elena to turn off her humanity (another thing he does out of fear), Stefan tells him that it was a mistake because despite Elena losing her brother, she still has Damon. Damon’s reply? “I’m not enough.”

There's a conversation that Stefan and Damon have in 7x22 that lays it all out neatly:

Stefan: You really think I did the right thing by taking Caroline against her will?

Damon: One hundred percent.

Stefan: You said that's how you know you love someone. And for a second there, I actually believed you. I thought that my love for Caroline was so strong that I would do anything to protect it. But then I realized, that's not love, Damon. That's fear. That night that you put yourself down, it wasn't because you love Elena. It was because you were afraid if you didn't, you would do something terrible, and you would lose her forever. And that fear was so powerful that it overrode any love that you felt for me, or Bonnie, or anybody else. I refuse to be ruled by fear. I refuse to be you.

In 7x10 when Damon is forced to face the truth while in the Phoenix Stone, he tells his mother, “Give me a chance to let you love me.” This is representative of Damon’s entire journey throughout the show. Damon doesn’t let people love him because he’s scared that they won’t. That’s why he tells Elena in 3x19 that he doesn’t want to have to live up to anyone’s expectations, and he tells Bonnie the same thing in 8x10 when he reads her his letter. Damon’s self sabotage and his insistence on pushing everyone away is a product of the fear of what will happen if he lets people love him - but by giving into that fear, he ensures that he’ll never get what he wants most.

In order for Damon to have a successful, satisfying ending, he has to 1) overcome his fears. He does this in 8x16 when he attempts to self-sacrifice for the right reasons, in direct contrast to his self sacrifice in 7x22 for the wrong reasons - a sacrifice he makes out of fear:

“There is a girl waiting outside for you, and if you go in there with me and get all screwed up, you're gonna have problems with her, and you're gonna blame me.” - Damon to Stefan, 7x22 (S7 is written to be a tragedy but that’s another post)

And 2) he gets the chance to let himself be loved. That’s why Delena has to be endgame. Damon finally getting a chance to let himself be loved is central to his character in a way that makes any other ending a tragedy for him.

So what about Stefan? Stefan’s goal is Choice. The same way that Damon has lost in love, Stefan has repeatedly had his choices taken from him. Katherine takes Stefan’s choice away when she compels him, bloodlust takes Stefan’s choice away when he becomes a ripper, Klaus takes Stefan’s choice away when he enslaves him. This is why Stefan is so protective of Elena’s ability to choose, and it’s also why narratively, Stefan’s worst crime is taking Damon’s choice away when he forced him to become a vampire. Morally, it’s far from the worst thing Stefan has done, but thematically it’s the misdeed that matters the most. That’s why it’s brought up again and again.

The obstacle that’s getting in the way of Stefan’s Choice is Vampirism. Whether it’s his own or someone else’s, Stefan can’t choose the life he wants to have or the person he wants to be without vampirism getting in the way. For Stefan to have a successful, satisfying ending, he has to 1) reconcile his relationship with vampirism. He does this by escaping his vampirism when he’s cured. And 2) he has to have the opportunity to choose. That’s why human Stefan is immediately on vervain, and that’s why he maintains the ability to choose to sacrifice himself even after Damon attempts to compel him in 8x16. Is it the best way to have Stefan accomplish his goal? Personally, I don’t think so. I would’ve preferred to see him accept his vampirism rather than escape it, and I would’ve preferred for him not to die. But in a finale where one brother makes a choice to sacrifice himself and the other brother gets the girl, it’s clear which has to be which for their arcs to resolve in a thematically satisfying way.

[moe-broey]

Fuck tjis shit I'm making base Alfonse my greeter again

AWESOEM......

[pfffsfic]

maybe it was a mistake to stake this blog on a crossover fic when that inherently has a tinier audience than non-crossover content. I had ideas floating around for pure TAWOG content (like the story that would eventually become pfffs) and also pure GF content. like I have a ton of ideas for my own take on a monster AU entirely separate from classical monster falls. a few highlights: dipper would be a sasquatch in it. stan's a shapeshifter. ford's invisible, which you probably think isn't a monster, but then how come there's one in Hotel Transylvania, huh? anyway,

[bacchuschucklefuck]

Can you expand on what you mean by Baron being "too cool" to really fit a horror monster? It's a very interesting concept and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is it that they're too active/involved/tangible and it detracts from their scariness?

I feel like I should preface this with a wall of disclaimers lmao 1/I am a hardcore, down-to-the-marrow, avid, deeply sincere horror enthusiast, esp. horror creatures. this usually means my mileage is vastly different from the average populace's, and my scaredy bone has been disintegrated by longterm exposure. most things in a piece of horror media won't scare me! so I practically never use that on its own as the scale to talk abt horror experiences, but when something does scare me it's always a special occasion to be treasured. 2/canon d20 is never really meant to be horror horror, and for good reasons: it doesn't fit the company's output, it takes a kind of carelessness in production estimation that is always a huge risk, it's often vulnerable in a way that kinda goes against how TTRPGs usually facilitates vulnerability, and for most people it's just! stressful! d20, even with the "horror-themed" seasons, generally just plays with horror tropes and stays focused in its goal of being a comedy improv tabletop theater show. 3/fantasy high's chosen system is DnD, which as I've mentioned before is before all a combat-based game system, which means the magic circle of play is drawn based on stats that facilitate and prioritize combat. want or not this affects every interaction you have in the game, and given fantasy high's concept from the ground up (everyone's going to school of DnD stuff to get better at DnD) it's doubly relevant. 4/This Is Fine I have no quarrel with this. my meters are internal, I do not ask this show to be anything it doesn't advertise itself to be, and what it is is fucking great! I like it! when I expand on this ask's question it will be like a physicist going insane in a lab. that's the mindset we're going in with.

disclaimers done. my stance on horror as a genre is that it's a utility genre rather than a content genre or a demographic genre; it is the discard of narratives. it's the trash pile. horror, above being scary, is about being ugly and messy, it's the cracks on the ground any story inevitably steps over to stay a genre that isn't horror. the genre's been around long enough to develop a codex and a general language that medias and makers and enthusiasts of the genre can use to talk about and build onto, but if you go into individual pieces there's really no unifying Horror Story. one person's beautiful life can be another's horror story, it's just how it is.

this makes The Monster a deeply intriguing piece of the genre. thing is a monster is in a decent percentage of any story - it's just when the antagonist force steps into something past a certain line traced out in the story's world. monstrousness is in pretty much every western fantasy story, it's in any story with a hero and something to vanquish or win; more than anything it's a proxy of that thing up there. the line in a narrative's world. the monster is the guard of the unknown lands, where heroic, civilized people don't tread.

what does this mean in the context of horror? the genre is about that perceived lawlessness, that "unknown land" so to say. we're in the monster's home. that's the literary context that we often walk into a horror piece with; the monster knows more than you about where you are. it may not understand you, but it holds more information than you, and with that it moves swifter than you, has more covered than you, and is more assured in its existence in this context than you. it's a struggle to catch up to it, it's nigh impossible to get one over it, and you're never sure it'll 100% work, because you just don't have the information necessary to.

with that framing you can kinda see where I'm coming from here: horror's often about the breaking of rules. I always think a monster's most effective when it breaks well-established rules of both existence and visual storytelling. think Possum (2018) or Undertale's Omega Flowey or the Xenomorph Queen - unique change in medium, unique change in graphic, unique change in design language, etc. in that sense I actually really like how canon baron plays out: they don't really function like anything else in the fantasy high universe, the bad kids have not managed to kill them when they've felled literal gods, their domain in fhjy literally introduces new mechanics to encompass their existence! from an experience design standpoint they slap mad shit. BUT! I can't help finding their character, like as a character riz (and the other bad kids, eventually) interact with, to be very... coherent? in design. this is kinda hard for me to articulate in words, it's more often a sense you get once you've looked at enough of these scrumptious fuckers, their general design and the way they show up is just kinda too clean, so to say. always kinda newly made? fresh unboxed. it, once again, makes sense for their lore - they are looking for more about themself from riz - and their function - they're an antagonist in a game experience, they're meant to be interacted with in a way that produces results and meshes with the existing magic circle - but that shininess takes away from the implied history they should have dominion over and the person they're haunting doesn't.

from another angle there is kinda something there about how put-together canon baron is as a concept; the domain they call home is riz's deep-seeded fears, extremely vulnerable things he's drawn borders around to quarantine and refused to walk into. things that from his perspective would irreversibly shatter certain pleasant fictions his world is built on top of. canon baron, While Extremely Cool, I feel is kinda too neat to connect with and signify the apocalyticized mess that'd result from this paradigm shift. the part where they're in riz's briefcase and looking through every mirror is Very Cool And Fucked Up! but ultimately the show draws a line around them as well, by making game-physical, tangible spaces they're in (the mirrors and the haunted mordred manor) and put riz and the bad kids there only when they need to confront stuff. riz is meaningfully narratively away from baron's unknown land for most of fantasy high.

with that and all of my disclaimers in mind my conclusion here is if canon baron wants to be a Horror Monster they'd have to cross way more lines. be a Lot more invasive. hence (holds up my class swap baron like a long cat)

[landoffreaksandfrogs]

idk if you thought abt this yet but...whats aranea like in ur bloodswap au...

no SOLID solid ideas, but heres a few rough concepts

a couple of notes

alpha araneas kosode is folded right over left, rather than the traditional left over right, to represent her death, as if she were "prepared for burial"

she wears black half-moon glasses to represent both sn0wman(the 8ball) and the green moon

i wanted to keep some japanese inspiration and i felt aranea as a miko would maintain that while also keeping her distinct from damara

still a huge nerd

[altblock-tm]

maybe I’ll talk about Masked swap au one day but for now this is all you’ll get

[kakusu-shipping]

Finally putting down finalized thoughts on my DRV3 is a Next Gen game run by Monaca Towa Self Insert AU, which despite how it sounds is infinitely less complicated than base DRV3