#there will probably be more streams since I want to explore the medium more

[corvidaeconundrum]

Thank you to everyone who joined the stream! It was extremely chaotic, stressful, and fun! Even if it was mostly me just not knowing what to draw and being odd because of that, performance anxiety hits hard

To those who had to leave or couldn’t make it, here are some of the drawings! -César

These two WIPs from stream will be made into full paintings soon

[clairedaring]

/surprise leap out from your screen! Hahahha!

Yo Claire, first! I gotta say, I didn't expect to read BL meta essays when I followed your blog, but now that it's part of my dashboard, I like it! I'm not familiar with BL culture and stuff (the only BL stuff I really like is this Japanese manga named The Summer Hikaru Died, and even then I'm more sucked in by it being of the horror genre with interesting philosophical explorations), so these essays are so interesting to read!

And another thing! This post about the highest-grossing GDH movies mentioned The Medium (which I liked!), and that reminded me: I need Thai horror recommendations!

I don't know if you're into it, but maybe some of your friends do? And they can give me some good stuff? It's been so long since I've watched Thai horror—I grew up with that shit, man. I figured that someone who watches a lot of Thai media probably knows quite some newer Thai horror films I can watch on a weekend or something. Thanks!

(P.S. I realize I still have so many thoughts about สาธุ. I'm rewatching it when I have the time and realized there are still more details I forgot from the first viewing. A lot of them is embodied by the actors so well! I hope to find the time to write some essays/rambles about those things these days! Honestly... this is the only thing I can contribute to the สาธุ/The Believers tag 🫡🥲)

Hiiii Lyn! You are always welcome in my humble inbox.

You cannot imagine my happiness knowing you will soon fill he สาธุ/The Believers tag with insightful metas/essays. No pressure though but I am now indeed impatiently waiting for more สาธุ posts.

Aw, I'm so happy to hear that you've enjoyed the BL metas I've put on your dash even though queer love series are not usually ones you would watch because they're mostly romance based. ಥ_ಥ

Okay now onto the main part of my answer. Even though romance and comedy are indeed my favorite genres of series, as an enthusiast and follower of Thai actors and their works, it is inevitable to come across horror works (films or series) starring my favorite actors. Even though I'm not the biggest fan of horor (i'm a huge scaredycat), the genre has never stopped me from watching works of my favorite actors before -> I've definitely watched more horror media than I wanted to (┬┬﹏┬┬). I'll separate my recommendations into two part: one for series and one for films.

Thai Horror Anthology Series Recommendations

1. Girl From Nowhere Season 1 & 2 (2018 -2021)

Synopsis: A mysterious, clever girl named Nanno transfers to different schools, exposing the lies and misdeeds of the students and faculty at every turn.

Thoughts: although it would qualify more as thriller than a horror, girl from nowhere offers sharp commentaries about violence, sexual assault, bullying and various social issues. The series is more like an anthology with each episodes presenting a different story. The way my jaw dropped when I found out that the storylines in the episodes are inspired by actual real news reports/stories. Watching both seasons, you may feel that S1 is less budgeted than S2 which is true because S1 wasn't funded by Netflix Thailand. After picking S1 for streaming, Netflix decided to invest in a S2 for GFN and the cinematography for S2 is just immaculate.

2. After Dark (2020)

Synopsis: When the night falls, humans are more of a threat. Composed of 4 interlinked horror stories:

"Blind Date": Pink, a dating app addict, meets Q, a mysterious handsome guy. They establish a deep connection that ends up with Pink having a strange pregnancy which haunts her until the end.

“Requiem of the Adolescent”: Lada, a nurse hired with a vast amount of money to take care of Her Serene Highness Srisaang. Her terrors awake when her patient abnormally gets better.

“Death Channel”: Off and Boat, a successful youtuber and an idol team up to create a paranormal activity channel that has been sponsored by an anonymous user, they never know what is waiting.

"Into the Hole”: Chai, a charismatic person is a one-night stand expert in hopes to record a sex tape to earn a dime. Then he meets Dao, a charming woman. His mischievous behavior continues, but this time it would not be as easy as before.

Thoughts: it's gory, gross, raw, rough and scary as hell. some of the most visually traumatic series i've ever watched. incredible acting performances.

3. Angkhan Khlumpong The Series (2021)

Sypnosis: It is made based on ghost stories that people called and shared on the "Angkhan Khlumpong" radio program.

Thoughts: Episode 5 'Imaginary Friend' is scary as hell. All the episodes are quite scary in general. The stories rely a lot on jumpscares but Thailand is really good at making scary ghosts, the makeup team is always going all the way.

Note: Netflix Thailand is producing the sequel series Terror Tuesday: Extreme (2024), which comes out in 10 days (August 20). Netflix Thailand has never really disappointed with their budget so I'm pretty sure it'll be spooky.

Thai Horror Films Recommendations

1. Hoon Payon (2023)

Synopsis: Tham searches for his brother Te in order to deliver the news of their parents' passing. Te is ordained as a monk at a temple on Don Sing Tham Island. On arrival, Tham meets Jes, the grandson of the former abbot. Jes makes hoon payon, enchanted effigies of the dead. Tham learns of a rumour that Te vanished after murdering the abbot. Tham doesn't buy the story nor does he respect the villagers' strange reverence for the sculpture of Pho Pu Sing Tham. Though his appearance is unsettling to Tham, Pho Pu Sing Tham is said to protect them. Soon, a girl goes missing, a wild predator roams the island, a vengeful ghost is rampant and worse yet, the figure of Pho Pu Sing Tham is destroyed. The enraged villagers prepare to curse and hunt down the unknown culprit.

Thoughts: I watched this for Up Poompat who plays Te and I was genuinely shocked by his performance. Not scary enough as old Thai movies but still very thrilling.

2. Shutter (2004)

Synopsis: Tun, a young photographer, and his girlfriend, Jane, were driving home after drinking with friends, when suddenly they crash into a girl that was walking in the street. Panicking, Tun tells his girlfriend to run away. The next day, Tun discovers mysterious shadows in his photographs, and his girlfriend start seeing strange things in his house.

Thoughts: This is a classic Thai horror film and arguably the best horror film Tong Banjong (the director of The Medium) has ever directed. Director Tong's forte is really horror so please don't mind that the next 3 recommended films are all from him. They are truly THE classic horror films of Thailand.

3. Alone (2007)

Synopsis: Conjoined twins Ploy and Pim are very close until Pim meets a boy named Wee, causing her to decide to separate from Ploy. The surgery is performed but Ploy does not survive. Years later, Pim and Wee are living together in South Korea when Pim suddenly has to return home to take care of her mother after she has a seizure. While back home, Pim is haunted by a ghost from her past.

Thoughts: I really don't know what Director Tong is lacing in his horror films but they're always keeping me on the edge of my seat and most of the time my hands glued to my eyes 😭

4. Phobia (2008)

Synopsis: A horror movie anthology containing 4 stories-Loneliness: a woman confined to her apartment starts to receive texts from a stranger, Deadly Charm: a group of high school delinquents get cursed by a student that they bullied, The Man in the Middle: Four friends go on a camping/rafting trip that turns out far differently then they had planned, The Last Flight: A flight attendant has to accompany the body of a princess, the wife of her lover.

Thoughts: Another horror classic from GTH studio. I can't remember the details to all these stories but I can assure you when I was closing my eyes through half of this film because of how scared I was. I wanna say it's because I was young when I watched it but I'm sure I'd still be keeping my eyes close shut if I watch it again.

5. Phobia 2 (2009)

Synopsis: A horror omnibus consisting of five stories - Novice: a teenager takes refuge at a Buddhist sanctuary after committing a crime, Ward: a biker has to stay overnight in a hospital room with a strange man after an accident, Backpackers: a Japanese couple hitchhikes across Thailand until; they accept a ride from the wrong person, Salvage: karma visits woman who has successful business fixing up cars that were involved in fatal accidents, In The End: the movie crew working on a horror sequel experience a night of real fear.

Thoughts: They're all scary but I think the scariest segment is 'In The End'. I would say this is one of those rare occasions where the sequel outdid its predecessor Phobia.

6. Sick Nurses (2007)

Synopsis: A group of sexy nurses who harvest organs are haunted by the vengeful spirit of one of their dead patients.

Thoughts: this is more slasher than horror but i remember watching this when i was younger and i was scared as heck. I don't even dare to search up the trailer to embed here.

Bonus: 'not purely horror, only has creepy elements but deserves a honorable mention on this list because it's super underrated' film

Malila: The Farewell Flower (2017) dir. Nuchy Anucha Boonyawatana

Synopsis: Former lovers Shane and Pich reunite and try to heal the wounds of their past. Shane is haunted by the tragic death of his daughter, while Pich suffers a grave illness. As death approaches, Pich dedicates his remaining time to making Bai Sri, a ceremonial ornament. Meanwhile, Shane decides to become a Buddhist monk until one night at a graveyard, he encounters his lover in another form.

Thoughts: not horror but i think this film is the first that pops into my head while watching The Medium. Similar feels in their portrayal of Thai rural village lifestyle and Buddhism being a big part of both stories.

You may notice that most of these horror films from GTH Studio share similar directors, screenwriters or other creative staffs with The Medium. And that's because GDH 559 is basically the successsor of GTH Studio (which got dissolved in 2015). I've always a big fan of GDH films and I do try to watch as much GDH/GTH works as possible, but horror is really not my forte so I can only offer you these humble recommendations. I hope you'll enjoy at least one among the ones in this list.

[drorder]

[okay, all of what I have written here was originally written as a Discord message, which I realized had become way too long to be coherent with discord formatting, so part of the way through, ai started writing it like the first draft of an essay. So that’s why the tone is odd at the beginning]

I think… idk. I feel like the NCCTs, as well as CPUK, are part of a kind of modern wave of web-fiction that draws a lot from EXTREMELY quick-witted improv characters, and lots of audience interaction. AND, crucially, use of video games to creat basically live theatre, but in a way that actual live theatre can’t possibly do.

The examples that come to mind are CPUK and NCCTs, as well as Half Life VR But The AI Is Self Aware, and probably SaltyDKDan’s Friendlocke? (If anyone has more examples, I’d love to have em, just so i can kinda do more meta on this.)

I wouldn’t call it a medium, bc, of the examples I can think of, all the mediums have been different, but this variation seems crucial to the ‘genre’, because for all the examples I can think of, the storytelling can only be possible with that specific medium.

I think another thing that characterizes the genre is a dynamic between the showrunners and the audience. This kind of fiction always has a defined leader(s) , usually the person streaming, GMing, and/or improv-acting as a character outside themselves in the story, who pretty much has the final say on direction of the story.

It also has a wider audience of people who obvi don’t really know the showrunner(s), and so they have a bit of distance and respect there. The audience is not an audience in the way a movie/play audience or reader of a novel would be, since this audience, due to the story being hosted online, can interact and chat with each other, and influence how they see the story.

Idk. I’m just kind of musing here. I’m realizing, as I explore this idea, that in most of this vein of web-fiction I’ve seen, the viewer interaction is pretty minimal. Everyone can interact with each other and basically act as a Greek Chorus, which influences the fiction because, for instance, in a Twitch stream, the live chat and donation messages show up onscreen. However, there’s still a bit of a line dividing the audience from driving the plot the same way the showrunners are: I think the Greek Chorus comparison works very well here.

However, bring this back to NCCT, this line gets broken, a bit, when NCCT2 begins. We become participants and driving forces in the story in a way we wouldnt as a Twitch chat watching CPUK. Interestlingly, tho, there is still a line drawn between us and the fiction, in the form of the Nelson plot-device. We can discuss and Greek-Chorus the story outside Nelson because of the mechanic of the quotation marks, and when we do participate and drive the plot, we aren’t interacting as separate entities with different motives— we are all just a combined, somewhat chaotic voice, which usually has more impact on the story when we are all unified in our aimss.

[At this point, I decided to cut and paste what I’d written into this post. I might come back and redraft this into something more coherent, because I def want to:

- explore more how NCCT varies from this genre I’ve characterized, and therefore make the way I’ve defined the genre more decriptive of CPUK and HLVRAI and Friendlocke, where the audience is more of a greek chorus than participants in the story. I feel like I tried to stretch my original description of the genre too much to fit the NCCTs, and i think i could fix that.

- Explore what kind of people make up the audience, which is def different from the average audience for movies or books, bc this type of fiction is hosted online, in pretty?~ niche circles, with a lot of queer young people, and i think, also neurodivergent people, in the audience. So there’s some exploration and connections to be done there. ]

[cmyknoise]

so like. i don’t think dsmp should have a reboot in terms of like. how reboots typically are. same story same characters just told in a ‘better’ way now that they know better. 

i wouldn’t mind the title of dsmp 2 or whatever related to ‘dream smp’ though. 

i think it would be fun if they made another server with all the same people, or at least most of the same people (whomever wants to return), and just. started fresh, completely fresh. new characters, new lore, new story. completely and utterly. not a sequel either or at least not a complete sequel. no one referencing events of the dsmp (unless, maybe for a handful of characters it applies to their lore if they chose). 

like the idea of a “reboot” with rehashing the same characters and story and lore is bad. 

but if they simply just make a new server on 1.19 and invite all the people that is already on the server and go ‘play and make stuff up as you go’ then that is absolutely fine, and i actually encourage it? 

because a lot of the newer people, like eryn or cpk or aimsey, and even some of the moderately new like hannah and boomer and foolish and puffy, etc, will then get to be there from the beginning, and have more of a chance to story tell, if they wish to. they’ll also have more time to make things their own instead of trying to shoehorn in things to an already active and ongoing plot. 

i think in this sense, if they make a new server that will be fine and okay, even if some peoples’ stories from the dsmp end up not getting told? its overall their choice with how they want to continue their characters, and that includes not at all, and if they chose that they’d rather start something new, that could be fun. 

besides having new characters with new stories and plots being told through the minecraft medium can be SO fun. 

we see this with so many other minecraft based fandoms, how they do “reboots” without being related to prior ones, or seasons if you will. think of the last life/third life/double life series, where they all have lore and stories and stuff but it’s reset, for the most part, every season. then they tell something different. 

like. honestly a reboot or season 2 could be VERY GOOD if it’s actually a blank slate, or like 98% a blank slate (again some characters i think could benefit or have ways to be connected to the dsmp as their backstory and have it work). 

i think you guys are just really scared of change and things ending up horribly. 

if, and i mean if, the reboot is how i’ve said as some sort of blank slate server where these guys get to do stuff all over but new with different characters, it will ultimately be good. 

the dream smp as a server has been ongoing for 2+ years. some of these people haven’t even gotten to explore or play on the server due to lore. think of cc!dream. he had to do a whole out of character stream after the prision break because he genuinely hadn’t seen most the builds that happened since he’d been imprisioned, and he wanted to see them. let alone actually just getting to play minecraft with friends. 

the dsmp has become so lore heavy that it is story being told through minecraft, not minecraft with a story being told. 

they don’t get to mess or fool about much anymore, and again i think a reboot would let them be able to do this. 

we’d get that nostalgic feel of how casual rp was on the dsmp during 2020, we’ll get to enjoy new characters and immerse ourselves in a new story with new lore. 

this is a good thing, i think. i genuinely don’t think most the cc’s on the server would even be for a total reboot. a lot seem to want to be done with the dsmp story like, 6 months ago. 

i think a lot want to do new things, so a “reboot” will probably just be a season 2 type deal with a new story, new characters, new world, etc. and i am excited for that.  

[random-thought-depository]

Continuing from my last post about science fictional “hyperspaces” (wow, I think that might be the most viral original post I ever wrote; it’s amazing what being reblogged by @argumate can do for a post!):

As a science fiction writer, these are the features I find attractive about “hyperspace” that incline me to favor it over other explanations for “fast” interstellar communication and travel:

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Hyperspace lets space still feel big. Wormholes/portals and instantaneous “jump drives” tend to make space feel small (though wormholes lend themselves nicely to space outside the wormhole network feeling big and to a feeling of sharp discontinuity between “known” or “civilized” space within the network and “unknown” or “wild” space where the network doesn’t reach). Start-anywhere go-anywhere jump drives without serious limitations have the additional issue that they’re more-or-less equivalent to teleporters, so they create the ultimate MAD setting where defending multiple fixed locations from a peer adversary is very difficult, and they minimize the strategic advantages of sustainable stationary banditry over unsustainable hyper-exploitive mobile banditry, and since the likely implications of that are very depressing I prefer to avoid it (except maybe if I was deliberately setting out to write a dystopia or explore the idea).

I want space to feel big in my writing, to give the reader some feeling of the vastness, grandeur, and inhuman scale of the universe. For my main science fiction setting, I think I’ll give hyperspace travel an effective “speed” of something like 5-10 c in Sol’s local neighborhood. That way interstellar journeys are more manageable than they’d be with journeys through our space, but journeys to other inhabited solar systems usually take at least a year or two (Sol to Alpha Centauri may be less than a year in hyperspace, but add in travel time to and from the Sol and Alpha Centauri hyper-limits, which is probably going to be at least a couple of months for each leg, and it’s probably about a year).

---------------

Hyperspace feels more like the sort of thing that might plausibly be useable to almost hairless apes with near-future-ish technology. With warp drives and wormholes and jump drives and so on I get the niggling feeling that’s the sort of thing you should probably have to be on approximately the level of an Orion’s Arm Archialect to do. Real theoretical warp drive and wormhole proposals tend to involve stuff like exotic forms of matter and energy and very large amounts of energy. Hyperspace would be a natural phenomenon, so it’s easier to explain it in terms of people exploiting natural phenomena we just don’t know about now, no weirder than being able to travel faster than rowing would allow by building a sail to catch the wind.

You can say that there are some rare atoms that naturally have a structure that extends into hyperspace. With human senses and 2020s technology they just look like ordinary atoms of silicon, iron, etc., but with the right kind of machinery you can detect them, sift them out of the surrounding 3D atoms, and concentrate them. Once you’ve got enough of them, you can make them the core of a pair of transmitters that you can use to send and receive radio messages through hyperspace. With more energy, you can “push” on these structures and “push” those atoms into hyperspace, and then if those atoms are part of a larger solid object the rest of the object and anything touching it gets dragged along with them (with a certain size limit, perhaps related to mass being “pushed” and energy used, so you don’t have to worry about accidentally sending the whole Earth into hyperspace the first time you try this - that’d be one heck of an oops; maybe a later disproven small theoretical possibility of that happening would go down into the history books along with “before they exploded Trinity they were worried it might ignite the atmosphere”); thus you can send a whole ship into hyperspace instead of just information. When you want to leave hyperspace you can reverse the operation and “push” the ship back into our space.

That gives you a nice highly valuable “handwavium” that can be a hook for various plot and worldbuilding points, e.g. there’s not much obvious economic reason to colonize Mars IRL except maybe tourism (anything you could mine there you get more easily from near-Earth asteroids, and it’s too inhospitable to make much sense as a settler colony), but maybe there’s a huge mother lode of these hyperspace-touching atoms somewhere on Mars. These hyperspace-touching atoms would be especially valuable if the process of using them for communication or in hyperdrives “strained” these structures and at some predictable rate caused some of them to “snap,” causing the atoms to become ordinary 3D atoms of silicon or iron or uranium or whatever. Then there’d be a continuous need for (relatively) large amounts of new ones even in a steady-state economy; you couldn’t just keep recycling them and recycling them and just do a little mining to make up for recycling inefficiencies. This would also be an interesting limit on use of hyperspace; using hyperspace radio or doing a hyperjump involves destroying a small amount of a precious resource, so people wouldn’t want to do it frivolously. This might augment that sphere analogy limitation on hyperspace communication I talked about in my other post; even if a hyperspace radio message from Saturn to Earth got there a little ahead of a radio message through our space, you’d probably send a radio message through our space for anything that isn’t time-critical, because the message arriving ten minutes sooner usually just isn’t worth the predictable cost in “snapped” hyperspace-touching atoms.

--------------

Hyperspace would be an environment, so you can do interesting things with it.

Since hyperspace offers a short-cut because it’s more compact than our space, I like to pull on the idea that it’s like our space but in a more compact state, so it’s similar to what our space looked like when the universe was younger and smaller. Going to hyperspace might be a little like time travelling back to a few tens or hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, before the first stars formed. The environment of hyperspace might be a little like the inside of a giant molecular cloud, but ��warmer” and extremely impoverished in heavy elements. The gas density might be a few thousand to a few billion atoms per cubic centimeter (by comparison, sea level air is about 10^19 molecules per cubic centimeter while the interstellar medium averages around 1 atom per cubic centimeter). The gasses and plasmas in hyperspace would be almost pure hydrogen and helium. The cosmic microwave background temperature in hyperspace might be around 50 K; that’s warm in comparison to what it is in our space (around 3 K), and warm enough to probably be a big part of the reason hyperspace has no stars (present day star-forming giant molecular cloud regions have gas temperatures around 10-20 K), but by human standards it’s deeply cold; it’s upper atmosphere of Uranus temperature. With no stars, I’d guess hyperspace would be a place of more-or-less total darkness outside the range of any lights humans passing through might bring with them.

Alternately, if I want hyperspace to have a murky and mysterious quality and be a place where visibility isn’t good and sensors don’t work well (so a vibe a bit like B5 hyperspace), I could say the Big Bang nucleosynthesis era lasted longer in hyperspace and there produced a substantial amount of heavy elements, some of which then condensed into dust (probably more like smoke if it’s similar to interstellar dust in our space - nanometer to micrometer particles). This dust would probably be pretty insubstantial on human scale distances (again, if it’s like the interstellar medium matter in hyperspace would be about 99% mostly hydrogen and helium gas and plasma and 1% dust, and even a relatively “dense” hyperspace with billions of atoms per cm^3 would have less than a billionth the gas density of sea level air), but over AUs it would scatter light and that effect might add up. This would make hyperspace similar to a dark nebula.

If I want to take the “hyperspace is a scary place” further, I could add sources of energy that might further confuse sensors and add dangerous radiation and other dangers to the mix. Maybe hyperspace has a few large black holes or something, with energetic accretion disks and polar jets fed by all that relatively dense gas and adding turbulence to it. Or maybe spacetime in hyperspace is “lumpier” than spacetime in our space and hyperspace has weird “rivers” formed by something related to whatever force drives cosmic expansion and some of the gas/plasma gets caught in that and accelerated to large fractions of the speed of light and then slams into the low-velocity material in the “still” parts in places, creating lots of turbulence and various other interesting and scary things (powerful magnetic fields, radiation, locally intense heat, maybe some of these collision zones are even giant naturally occurring inertial confinement fusion reactors; maybe that’s where the heavy elements in the dust come from). Maybe hyperspace has a lot of cosmic strings; it makes a certain intuitive sense that, hyperspace being more compact than our space, its cosmic eggshell might be densely veined with cracks.

This gets into another interesting aspect; hyperspace might have something equivalent to terrain; hyperspace travel may be easier in some directions than others. And there’s lots of worldbuilding and plot hooks you could hang from that idea.

For example, let’s look at that idea of hyperspace having “rivers” formed of exotic spacetime structures and filled with gas/plasma streams moving at high fractions of the speed of light. If the edge of these “rivers” has a gradual enough velocity gradient and the plasma in the “rivers” is ionized, with enough skill a spacecraft pilot might be able to catch that “current” with a magsail and ride it, then when they’d gotten about as far as they needed to go they could leave the “river” and do magsail braking against low-velocity plasma in the “still” areas. Just gotta be careful to stay well away from the dangerous collision zones! This might be a huge part of the short-cut offered by hyperspace travel! It could be that distances across hyperspace are only modestly shorter than distances across our space (say, Alpha Centauri is 1 light year away in hyperspace), but the really big savings is you can catch one of these hyperspace “currents” and use it to get up to large fractions of c without expending any fuel. A set-up like that does raise some awkward questions about conservation of energy, but I could say something like “the hyperspace ‘rivers’ are areas where dark energy is being converted into kinetic energy, slightly slowing down the expansion of the universe in the process.” It’s not like we know much about how dark energy works, or even what it is, so for all we know that’s a thing that might happen under certain conditions.

Those collision zones would generate substantial radiation, including light, so unlike a calm hyperspace a turbulent hyperspace with energetic “currents” would probably have light. Don’t know how bright it would be; all that dust (made of heavy elements built up over the eons by inertial confinement fusion in collision zones, I like that idea!) would absorb a lot of light over cosmic distances, and stars are pretty bright but most of our space is pretty dark.

That set-up would make hyperspace travel kind of like sailing; there would be “currents” or “winds” you want to catch, and travel might be a lot faster along directions where the currents are favorable. Travel times in hyperspace might only loosely correlate with distance; Alpha Centauri might take longer to reach than Zeta Reticuli. There would also be hazards you’d need to avoid, e.g. the collision zones.

Maybe part of the explanation for the Fermi Paradox might be that Earth is in the middle of a big “still” part of hyperspace; few ships went here because we’re in the middle of a cosmic doldrums that takes years to crawl across.

With a set-up like this, hyperspace may have “weather” that influences interstellar commerce, and “climate change” on historical timescales that influences the trajectories of interstellar societies. Ages when hyperspace is particularly turbulent might cause Dark Ages as hyperspace travel becomes very dangerous. Ages when hyperspace becomes unusually calm might also cause Dark Ages as there are no fast hyperspace “currents” to ride and hyperspace travel becomes relatively slow. In one age hyperspace “currents” may be arranged such that a world is isolated; a few thousand years later the hyperspace “currents” might have shifted and that previously isolated world might be much more accessible and back in the mainstream of interstellar civilization.

One wrinkle: a turbulent, energetic, opaque hyperspace such as this probably wouldn’t be good for sending radio signals across. Maybe the universe actually has multiple “basement” levels, hyperspace is just the one that’s “closest” to our “living room” level and the only one that’s “close” enough that ships can travel to and from it, but there’s a clearer layer that’s “farther away” but still “close” enough that you can send radio signals through it, and that “deeper” clear layer is the one used for interstellar communication. Bonus idea I like: the deep clear layer is even more compact than hyperspace (by orders of magnitude) so it’s overall a much better short-cut in every way except being “too far away” to send ships through it, so finding a way to send ships through it is a huge potential breakthrough that tantalizes generations of scientists and engineers who so far have not managed to figure out a way to do it.

Really, on that note, I like the idea that the universe is analogous to an onion with many “layers,” and hyperspace and the deep clear layer are just the layers that are most easily accessible from our space. There are a lot of “basements” below the deep clear layer, and generally as you get farther “down” the “basements” get smaller, denser, and hotter; going “down” is a little like time travelling to eras closer and closer to the Big Bang (though this isn’t a completely reliable rule - the deep clear layer is smaller than hyperspace and perhaps warmer, but seems to be a lot emptier; maybe most of its matter has been sucked into black holes?). Maybe the whole thing is a bit timey wimey wibbly wobbly and if you go “down” far enough you eventually hit what 2020s science knows as the moment of the Big Bang. As well as “basements” there are also “attics,” but they’re less accessible because going “up” is harder than going “down.” If going “down” into the basements is a little like time travelling to the early universe, going “up” into the attics is a little like time travelling to the deep future, to places that look kind of like what our space may look like in the deep future black hole era (assuming the Big Rip doesn’t destroy our universe before that deep future proton decay story has time to play out). The “attics” are vast, empty, and deeply cold; cosmic microwave background temperatures a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero and precious little else to generate energy, maybe one atom in every cubic kilometer of space. They probably expanded too quickly for stars to ever form there. The total number of layers might be large; maybe hundreds or thousands, maybe billions, maybe a number so big it would need to be expressed in scientific notation. I like this idea because it makes hyperspace feel less implausibly convenient for humans; we’re just taking advantage of a particularly convenient part of a big macrostructure that’s mostly inaccessible to us.

----------

Hyperspace is a natural phenomenon, so it probably isn’t going to be neatly quarantined to just being a thing humans can use for communication and travel. Hyperspace-related phenomena are going to show up in nature, and this offers a neat explanation for any exotic soft SF-ish natural phenomena you may be interested in incorporating into your setting.

Hyperspace (and other “basements” of our universe) also gives you a built-in parsimonious explanation for any other bits of soft SF technology your setting might feature. Want your setting to have e.g. Star Trek style forcefields? You can say they work through interaction with one of the “basement” layers of the universe.

On that note, I have an idea for a more hard SF version of the Babylon 5 “going beyond the Rim” thing or Stargate ascension, based on the “onion universe” concept I described above, which might serve as a partial explanation for the Fermi Paradox. Maybe some “layers” of the “onion” are “superhabitable” to advanced machine intelligences (though not to primitive flesh and blood beings like us). You know the aestivation hypothesis? If advanced machine intelligences could move to an “attic” they wouldn’t have to wait billions of years for our space to cool down; the cosmic microwave background temperatures in many of the “attics” would already be some tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Maybe they could move to a nice big cold “attic” and live there and “mine” a nice compact “basement” that is rich in matter and energy, getting the best of both worlds. Most of these “attics” and “basements” would be completely inaccessible to humans, but beings with better technology and more resources might be able to access many more of them (or maybe even get beyond the “onion” and search the entire multiverse for universes with conditions more to their liking). So the universe’s most powerful and most enduring civilizations might usually leave our space and move to another “layer” or universe that has conditions more ideal for them, and thus be mostly undetectable to us.

--------------

See: the concept of hyperspace is loaded with potential plot and worldbuilding hooks if you use a little imagination, and I like that!

[stay-midnight]

Foolish - The supposed valentine special

Lee Felix x Male Reader

Word Count: 2.7K Words

a/n: aaaaaaaa, the delay for this is too long 😖 i changed the concept of it from a valentines date to an anniversary date instead, hopefully it’s okay hhshs. I cannot it was supposed to be soft but somehow i made the smut escalate in the end. Tbh, I was expecting balcony sex—

Triggers: Explicit Smut, Fluffy as fuck I guess—, It’s soft.

Kinks/Warnings: Soft Dom Felix, Sub Male Reader, Anal Sex, Safe Sex, Licking, Teasing, Nipple Play, Nipple Biting, A lot of foreplay, Multiple Positions, Mentions of Fisting, Make-Out Sessions, A lot of Praise, Consensual.

Felix’s hands were getting sweaty and how fast he was tapping his thigh, he was getting nervous by the minute as the clock’s hands were moving closer to 8 PM — the time of your arrival. He licked his dry lips every half a minute as his head kept turning towards the door as if it was about to swing open. He brushed his blond hair back, taking a shallow breath.

You see, Felix prepared for one week for this, too make it as special as possible for your anniversary day.

1 year.

He loved, cherished, kissed you a bunch of times, and did a lot more with you in that one year of you and him being together.

Felix would do a lot more in even more years to come. In the future, he’ll propose to you, maybe even adopt children if you ever want. He just want to spend time with you, staring at you lovingly like a fool in love.

In the present now, though. He wants to enjoy this anniversary with you. He got his friends to decorate your shared apartment — the walls are decorated with colored paper and the pictures you collected throughout the years.

Frame by frame, all of them are important to you and him — Holding special memories that can’t be replaced or forgotten.

Felix felt his breath hitch as the door handle started turning. A profound mixture of excitement and nervousness built up in the pit of his stomach.

. . .

You were humming happily as you walked up the stairs of your apartment, the medium-sizedbag dangling from your fingers. You were frantic to spend time with Felix.

Today was your one year anniversary and thus you want to relieve all stress piled up from work and just spend quality time with your man.

Face-to-face with your apartment door, you turned the knob and found it wasn’t locked which made you raise your eyebrow in confusion. You turned the knob and swung it open.

Then petals of red roses fell in the front of your vision as a clear romantic music started playing. “Lixie?” you murmur, still a bit dizzy from the suprise.

After taking a moment to regain your thoughts, you noticed the picture littered across the walls of your apartment it was you and Felix.

Then finally, in all his beauty, Felix standed in the middle with the most warmest and cutest smile that seems to always set your world alight.

You suddenly felt some wetness at your cheeks and your vision suddenly becoming blurred due to the stream of tears just freely flowing down.

Felix saw the way you were crying and walked over to hug you, “Happy Anniversary, babe.” you snuggled your wet face into neck wetting his part of the shirt there.

“F— Fe, hng.... L-Lix. Th— Thankss.. for this..” you hiccuped as he pulled you away from his neck, then kiss the beads of tears falling from your eyes away.

“Shh, don’t cry, Y/N” He comforted, gently combing your hair. You smiled and clung to him like a koala as you felt every feeling of stress leaving your body.

You wrapped your hands around his neck and kissed him and he kissed back immediately, savouring the taste of your lips with passion.

Both of you perfectly molded with each other he finally slipped his tongue in your mouth, exploring your warm cavern.

Then he pulled away which made you whine, “Let’s continue that later~ but for now, let’s celebrate and eat.” he winked at his first statement then pointed at the table which had alot of food.

“Can we finish that much?” you said looking at the overloaded table.

He grinned, “We’ll give it to Changbin and the others as thankd for helping me decorate.”

You pouted and looked at the bag you had, “I only got you some strawberry cake for our anniversary...” you said, frowning.

“I’ll make it up to you...” you mumble wiping your tears away with your wrist, taking a sit down at the table then Felix sat next to you.

“You don’t have too... It still means alot to me that you’re here now.” he smiled sheepishly while you look away shyly.

“Still my gift is inferior than your suprise...”

“Any gift you give is in a high regard. Eat Y/N~ before I eat you~” he joked but there was a slight bit of truth in that. You hit his chest but he could tell how flustered you were.

“Cute....” he praised which in turn cause you to glare at him playfully as he gave you that a grin.

. . .

He reached out for your hand after eating to dance at the sound of the melodic, sweet music playing in the backround.

You look at him with love as both of you swayed along to the tune, Felix even spun you around like how people do during ballroom dances causing you to laugh as he catched you before spinning you back around to his caring embrace.

“I love you so much, Y/N...” he whispered against your ear.

You shivered at the sensation of his hot breath when he spoke, “I love you too, so so much....” you said back, turning your head to meet his caring gaze and his smile. He leaned towards you, connecting your lips as the music creased. You felt literal sparks flying across your body because of that.

You yawn as you pulled away from him, even though this was fun — You did just came back from work so you were tired and Felix now just noticed that.

He smiled before grabbing your hands and dragging you to your shared bedroom.

. . .

He pulled you on the king-sized bed which made you smile goofily as you laid there. You were still on your work clothes but nothing can be more comforting than being near with your loved one.

You liked skinship as much as he do, that’s probably why you fit together so much.

You rarely fought as well, most of it being teasing or playful fighting. Now that you remember, the only time he got mad when you didn't tell him that you were coming home late. He was angry, you were extremely tired. Instead of reasoning with him at that time, you fought fire with fire.

You always see him around the apartment since his work is a comic designer so he’s working at home, he barely leaves unless for jogging or grocery purposes.

You were snapped out of your thoughts as Felix played with your hair. Combing and stroking it. You leaned in to his soft touch, sighing at the calming sensation.

You leaned your head back so you could look up at him and he was showing a cute smile which made you smile back at him as well.

You initiated a kiss suddenly, suprising him. He kissed back before pulling away then leaned back down again as if he couldn’t get enough of your lips.

. . .

It started with small pecks at each other, now turning into a deep make out session with him. As you felt your neck was about to break off any second now due to the uncomfortable position you were kissing him in — You flipped him over and straddled him before leaning back in, biting his bottom lip teasingly as his hands worked their way onto your buttocks, kneading it teasingly.

He groaned at the lip bite before he grabbed your waist and switched positions, with Felix on top of you — staring down at you with a mixture of lust and adoration.

“You’re so pretty and handsome...” he praised, raising your shirt slightly before leaning down and planting kisses down your tummy, slowling pushing it up while also trailing his lips upward to your chest — leaving a line of saliva.

You giggled silently at his praise before gasping at his warm lips making contact with your skin, a tingling and wet sensation was apparent on your torso as Felix was tasting you up.

He removed your shirt completely and slipped his hand down to wrap around your waist. He lifted you slightly before attaching his lips on your nipples, licking and sucking on it.

You sighed as you let your own body be taken over by pleasure, Felix hummed before moving to the other nipple, this time though — he clamped his teeth down on it causing you let out a moan at the numbing pain.

When he pulled away he was content to see your chest, wet from his saliva, and your nipples — hardened and puffy.

He looked down at you, lovingly with a hint of need and lust, you stare back at him with half-lidded eyes because of the pleasure he gives.

“You look so unreal...” You whisper with a smile, the sight of Felix’s face, basking in the moonlight shining from the window at your side, you brought up your hands and caressed his cheek, “What have I done to deserve you...” you added in a soft tone.

He smiles at your compliments, “You don’t have to do anything, because even I don’t deserve someone as loving and caring as you...” he whispered, grabbing your hand on his cheek and kissing the top of it.

You pull him down by the neck, kissing him in the lips, moving with such passion as he sneaked his tongue between your lips — tasting every corner and crevice inside your warm and wet cavern.

His other hand is trailing down to your pants unbuckling your belt skillfully with one hand, pulling it down ever so slowly.

You were being patient with his teasing but at some point your patience were wearing thin, cracks started to form on your small facade as you thrusted your hips up, hitting the bulge in his pants.

He grinned in satisfaction as finally he slowly unraveled you. He removed his shirt, making you stare at his sculptured body, drool forming at the sides of your mouth

Finally, he pulled your boxers down, making you hiss at the feeling of cold air hitting your erect dick. He hummed, giving it a few small strokes to get you more riled up.

“Lix, Lix... Please.. I want— No, I need you inside me already.....” you said with desire, letting out a shaky breath as he pulled his hand away.

“Well of course, what my love wants, he gets~” he said, reaching over the nightstand drawer to grab the blueberry-scented lube and condoms.

He undressed himself, removing his shorts and boxers — throwing it somewhere in the dim room.

You glimpsed at his hard cock with a pretty pink tip, you still wondered how he manage to fit that inside you, you looked away in embarrassment at your own circling thoughts.

He chuckled lowly at that, “You can look, Y/N... I already ruined you so many times with it so what’s the point of looking away, hm?” he teasingly spoke with a husky voice.

You look at him and poked your tongue out at him playfully, causing him to snicker before squirting some lube into his fingers and lifting your legs a bit for easier access to hole.

Felix then finally slowly inserted lubricated finger, watching in awe as your hole clenched around his finger, You let out a shaky sigh, Felix’s fingers weren’t exactly big, but it still feels good. One time, he even fitted his whole fist inside you due to how tiny his hand is.

He added another two fingers, knowing that you can take his short fingers plus, he also has a need to be inside you, to be connected to you.

He pulled his fingers out, then smiled at you breathing heavily at how much he played with your fluttering hole.

Felix placed on a ultra-thin condom after biting the packet open, aligning the tip of his cock against your rim — applying a small pressure but not inserting it just yet.

You let out an impatient whine as your hole tried to suck his dick in, pathetically clenching around the tip. “Please, please Lix~ No more teasing...” you babbled, trying to sink your hips down but failing as he grabbed it with a bruising grip.

He slowly then inserted it inside you with a chuckle, watching as your face relax and your mouth forming an “O” shape. Once he saw your face relax, he thrust up into the hilt, hitting your prostate dead-on — His hips flushed against your ass.

“Ah!” you gasp out, your own neglected cock felt like bursting any moment now on how full you were. You relax yourself for Felix to move more easier.

He then started pulling out, groaning lowly before thrusting back in, “So good, so good...” you breathed out, loving the way his cock drag against your wall everytime he thrusts in.

He started a medium pace, lewd and wet sounds surrounds the room, you close your eyes and wrap your hands around the top's neck.

“You feel so good, Y/N...” he said, breathing heavily as he pursued a faster pace, the sound of skin against skin was audibly clear now — the way his hips smack against your ass was driving you crazy.

He pulls out for a bit and you let out a sound of disappointment before he asked you to flip over and you followed his command, going on all fours.

Felix shoves his cock right back in, you moaning loudly. He hits your prostate multiple times before using his other hand to slide his hand to your chest, pinching the hard bud of your nipple hard, he laughs shakily as you screamed at that.

You felt like your eyes were rolling to the back of your head as his hand roamed your inner thighs, flicking your tip teasingly before finally wrapping his hand around your hard cock, jerking it off messily and out of pace.

You didn’t know anymore, you rocked your hips back and forth — you didn’t know if you wanted to meet his hard and precise thrusts or or to buck against his hand wrapped around your base, you let out wordless whines and unidentified babbles that Felix wanted to coo at.

Felix saw that your knees were quivering, so he decided to change positions again, this time you were speared on his cock as if it was your throne, your back flushed against his sweaty chest.

This was one of your favourite positions as Felix held you close to him, increasing the feeling of sweet intimacy between the both of you as he impaled you up and down his cock.

You moaned as he hit your abused and swollen prostate for the umpteenth time, before you turned your head to meet his, sharing a hungry but a much needed kiss.

Drool dripped down your chin as your aching cock uselessly bobbed up and down in time with his thrusts, you felt lightheaded as you didn’t even realize you came, spilling on your sheets as it dripped down from the tip — your mouth releasing a drawn-out weak moan.

Felix’s thrusts turned sloppily as he saw your red tip spurt out white ropes and the sporadic clenching, he was close too.. After a few more minutes of thrusting into you and overstimulating you, he came inside the condom in a deep groan.

Felix only held you tighter against him, both of your chests heaving up and down at the tiredness. Slowly, he started pulling out of you before laying down on the bed slowly as you seemed too out of it.

He threw the used condom at the small trashbin after tying it at the side of your bed. He went to the bathroom to get some towels momentarily to clean you up.

He also got a small sheet of fabric to cover the cum-stained bed cover.

Once he saw your eyes turned more normal than the dilation it had earlier, he smiled “Good?” he asked in a heart-warming gaze.

You nodded, “Very good...” you smiled as he wiped your lubed rim and around it carefully.

“I really love you...” you said with a giggle at the end.

“I love me too~” he teased.

“Felix~!” you whined, crossing your arms around your chest.

He chuckled before going closer to you and connecting your lips, “I love you..” he mumbles sweetly against your ear.

You hummed in great appreciation, reeling him down to cuddle in his bare chest — to which he complied, combing your hair.

“You are the best thing that ever happened to me, Y/N.” Felix breathed out, smiling as you fell in a tired sleep.

[astermacguffin]

The semantic logic of AMVs

I finally finished the post I promised to @katebushstandean , so here's my contribution to the blossoming field of spn amv studies.

In this post I made about fanworks and intertextuality, I argued that AMVs can be referred to as a "discourse between discourses." What I meant by that (and I elaborated on this in the post) can be summarized in this argument structure:

(1) AMVs are typically a dialogue/discourse between a song and a show/film.

(2) A song is already a discourse of its own (i.e. it's the dialogue between music and lyrics).

(2) A show/film is already a discourse of its own (i.e. it's the dialogue between the visual and auditory elements of the show/film).

(C) Therefore, AMVs are typically a discourse between discourses.

I want to push this argument even further and argue for a more generalized theory of meaning that should (ideally) be applicable to any piece of media.

LAYING THE FOUNDATION

Let's start by analyzing at least just one medium at a time. Take music, for example. Without lyrics, how does music convey meaning at all? Now, I won't go too much into either music theory or the psychology/sociology of music (since I don't think I'll be able to give these subjects any justice anyway), but I want us to look at music more structurally/linguistically. (I am certainly not a linguist, but I am a training logician and I think it would be interesting to extract the logical/semantic relations that occur in music if we treat it as a "text".)

If we want to break down music into its smallest possible units of meaning (the same way we break down language into morphemes in morphology), then we would probably end up with notes, beats, and chords as our basic units (among other stuff, like timbre). Obviously, we cannot subject music to the same reductionist approach we do with either natural or formal languages (e.g. breaking down language into morphemes/propositions/subject-predicate relations/functions).

This is due to the fact that music doesn't really agree that much with the principle of compositionality—that "the meaning of the whole is a function of the meanings of its parts and their mode of syntactic combination." (If you disagree with Montague semantics, you might even argue that the same is true for natural languages and that only formal languages are truly compositional, but I digress). Generally, there is "more than the sum of its parts" when it comes to music; the meanings of a chord don't solely depend on the meanings of the individual notes that make up the chord.

Anyway, back to music and meaning-making.

Yip Harburg has this interesting quote on songwriting, which Adam Neely references here at this mark (15:29–16:10), a quote he originally got from Ben Levin. The quote says: "Music makes you feel feelings, lyrics make you think thoughts, songs make you feel thoughts." I think this quote best encompasses what I mean when I argue that songs are "discourses" of their own.

But even without the lyrics, music on its own is already "discursive." A single note played once doesn't really "mean" much, in the sense that we can't really gather as much meaning out of it alone. The note's relationships with other musical elements is what opens up the realms of meanings that we can attribute to it. (This concept is explored much better in here.)

The same thing is true with natural languages. Morphemes and words have meanings on their own, sure, but they don't really say that much on their own until you place them in a specific order with other morphemes/words. A single sentence is already a discourse between the units of meaning that compose the sentence.

I have been using the term "discourse" a lot, but what do I mean when I use the term? Without spending too much time explaining my own theory of discourse, let's define a discourse as a "series of discursive units." A discursive unit consists of two parts: a prompt and a response. What's important to know about responses in a discourse is that you won't really be able to fully grasp what they mean without knowing what the prompts are (i.e. what they are responding to).

When I describe song and lyrics as "discourses", what I think I really mean is that they are "discourse-like" (hence the description, "discursive"). The words of a sentence treat each other as their own prompts/responses; they're not as meaningful alone, but when taken together, meaning emerges. The same goes with music.

Taking this to a more macro scale, we can treat each episode of a show as their own discourses, and each episode "responds" to the others in some way. The harmonies, tensions, and contradictions that emerge from the "conversations" between these episodes are what we often respond to when we make fanworks (fanart, fanfics, meta, and the likes).

Generally, there are two kinds of "conversations" that happens within and among pieces of media:

The intra-discursive (the conversations that happen within a single text, like how a show's episodes converse with each other), and;

The inter-discursive (also called the intertextual, or the conversations that happen between different texts).

Now that we have established these terms and concepts, we're FINALLY talking about AMVs.

THE DEAL WITH AMVS

I've already touched upon this in my intertextuality post, but it's worth repeating. What I believe AMVs do is reveal the intra-discursive using the inter-discursive. What this means is that by making the subject text converse with other texts (e.g. by making clips from Supernatural "dialogue" with a song of your choice), you are somehow extracting the implicit discourses present in the original text.

When we talk about fanworks (and transformative works in general), we often talk about it in terms of recontextualization, as well as adding something new that wasn't there in the original text (e.g. fix-its). But a neglected aspect of fanworks that I believe AMVs bring to light is the revelatory power of fanworks, like the way it makes the people (may it be the audience or the original creators) confront the implications and implicit meanings already present in the text.

(Learn more about the semantic logic of AMVs below the cut)

Another interesting thing that AMVs do is that it often makes the subject text subservient to the song. More often than not, it's the show that has to adjust to the song; it's the show that has to be sliced and diced in order to fit the song. This is simultaneously a form of violence and a form of liberation—violent in the sense that goes against authorial intent (with "author" here used loosely to refer to the forces that brought the piece to life, may it be a single person or an entire production team) and liberating in the sense that the latent or supressed narratives are brought to light.

Even before the AMV is done, this discursive process is already made explicit by the act of editing. In most editing softwares, you get to see the timeline of your material and an explicit divide between the audio and the visual elements. The audio stream is already a discourse of its own, and the same goes with the video stream.

When you vertically slice these juxtaposed streams and cut out a portion of it, you now have what I call a "semantic moment" locked in time. We can imagine the audio being divided into these little semantic moments (e.g. the chords, a key change, a shift in dynamics or tempo, etc.) and something similar can be said with the video (e.g. vital scenes in the show). Now, a semantic moment doesn't have to be special or eventful; in fact, most of them aren't. In fact, all of experience is nothing but a series of semantic moments (i.e. moments of extractable meaning).

Now, imagine an AMV playing in front of you right now. Let's represent the audio as a series of semantic moments from A1 to An and do something similar to the video, from V1 to Vn. If we represent the flow of time from left to right, then we can talk abstractly about experiencing an AMV like this:

A1-A2-A3-A4-A5...-An

V1-V2-V3-V4-V5...-An

Every moment of our experience of the AMV can be divided into a series like this. AMVs are art objects that unfold over time: they are temporal, and therefore we cannot immediately access all parts of the semantic "discourse" of the text all at once—we have to wait for them to happen.

Let's say I want to analyze Semantic Moment number 6 because something interesting happens there: the chord suddenly shifts into a minor key while at the same time, the video shows a character turning their back to the camera. Now, there are three possible ways to handle this (none of which are mutually exclusive; we usually perform these modes of analysis simultaneously):

Vertical analysis - analyzing the discourse between A6 and V6. What meanings are brought up when we take these two elements in conjunction? What associations do we have with minor keys, with people turning around, and how these associations influence the other?

Horizontal analysis - analyzing the discourse between A6 and its earlier counterparts, A1-A5, or between V6 and V1-V5. Earlier, we have discussed that a single chord or a single word on its own doesn't mean that much; it's their relationships with other elements that bring out their "meaning space." What "narratives" or "metaphorical gestures" are brought upon when you consider these semantic moments as discourses/texts as a whole?

Diagonal analysis - analyzing the discourse between A6 and V1-V5, or between V6 and A1-A5. Here, you make the semantic moment converse with the "history" of its counterpart. What are the events that happened in the earlier parts? For example, knowing that the earlier parts of the song were in major key before the turn-around scene might influence our reading of it. Similarly, knowing that the earlier scenes depict a happy relationship might influence how we read the minor shift.

Again, we often do these analytic slices as quick as possible (and often simultaneously); it's not something that we often do consciously (unless the subject text is actually that dense and difficult). It's instinctual to us to bring up these comparisons and engage with the explicit and implicit discourses of meaning happening with any kind of text we interact with.

Now, here's where it gets more complicated. Unless the AMV in question is just a scene lifted from the show and overlaid with a song, it would usually involve a bunch of cutting and joining between different scenes/episodes. What this means is that you're taking an already temporal object and reassembling it into a new order in time. This means that we might've initially thought of as V1-V2-V3-V4-V5...Vn might actually be V3-V1-V6-V19-V8...Vn or some other permutation.

Again, this process is simultaneously violent and liberating—violent because you are destroying its intended order, and liberating because you are negating the tyranny of linearity and contiguity. What I mean by this is that people tend to focus on the discourse of the semantic moments depending on how close they are in space and time. For example, we might focus on how V1 is in dialogue with V2 and how V2 is in dialogue with V3, but the farther the semantic moments are, the less likely we are to notice their discourse.

What AMV editors do is rebel against the tyranny of this habit and bring into light the connections that might have gone unnoticed without the intervention. We often talk about how certain fanworks are more analytical than transformative (e.g. fanfics that function more as character studies and meta analyses of the source text), and there certainly is a spectrum of this among different genres of fanworks. I believe that AMVs, no matter how transformative they are, cannot help but invoke a certain analyticity in their production and reception.

And that concludes my AMV essay. I'll probably add more to this when I gather more thoughts (like how these three posts are related in some way).

Lemme know if y'all wanna hear more about my theory of discourse or something else related. Support your content creators and reblog!

[tea-with-veth]

Hello, and welcome back to The Tea Party, where I interview authors from the Minecraft Youtube fandom! Today’s guest is the one and only @aenqa, author of Protected, as well as a number of brilliant Dream SMP fics! 

Tell us about yourself!

Sure! So, I go by Aenqa online, and that's what all my social media is under - AO3 and Tumblr being my main accounts. I use both she/her and they/them pronouns and I'm a writer who's especially into MCYT and Dream SMP fic right now!

How long have you been writing?

I've been writing my whole life, really - I still have my very first "book" which was a few pieces of stapled-together printer paper that I made when I was around five years old. I've been writing fic for probably about a decade, since I was a teenager. For MCYT stuff, I've been writing since about August 2020. :)

Your fics have a lot of traction-- Protected alone has 9.5K kudos on AO3. Was there a moment for you where you went “holy cow this is big” or was it more gradual?

It was definitely gradual at first. When I was publishing Protected, it was getting a decent amount of traction, but it was pretty typical for fics at that time. When I completed it, I think it was around 1K kudos. Then there was a moment after it was completed when the whole "medieval AU" became a HUGE thing in the DNF fandom after the King George storyline happened in the Dream SMP. People were actively seeking out medieval content, and I happened to have a really long, completed story in that vein already written. I started getting a lot of mentions and recommendations on Twitter, and that's the moment when I was like, Woah. There are suddenly a ton of people reading this who want to see more from me. That was a totally unique experience for me, and it was really cool!!

Did that ever feel very intense or stressful, or was it generally smooth sailing?

It was stressful at times. When you have a fic that gets popular, there are some people who feel more free to criticize it or make slightly mean jokes about it online, which was a little strange to get used to. But overall, it was a really great experience. It was so exciting to see people talking about something I had written. And I'm super proud of Protected, so it made me really happy that it was bringing other people joy, too! Plus, it made me feel like I had something of a built-in audience for other fics I wanted to write, which was also really amazing.

What have you been writing recently?

I've been focusing a lot more on Dream SMP fics recently, rather than RPF. Although I dabble in a lot of different areas (like AUs or canon-divergent stuff), I'm really interested in fics that are more-or-less canon-compliant. The characters and character relationships in the Dream SMP are really rich and interesting to me, and I love being able to really dig into them and explore them in a way that can't always happen through the streaming medium. Both my AO3 stuff and the shorter fics I write for Tumblr tend to center around those characters, especially the SBI characters. But really I just love writing anything that revolves around the Dream SMP - it feels like such a fun and expansive playground for making fan content. There's so much potential from almost every angle!

I'm also really glad people seem to be enjoying my Dream SMP stuff, because as happy as I am with how Protected came out, I'm not overly interested in RPF in general, and I don't want to be seen as just a DNF writer. It makes me happy when people who find me through Protected are willing to give my other works a try. (Though there's certainly nothing wrong with being just a DNF writer!)

So, talking about readers, and the MCYT community in general, what are some things you really love about the community? And is there something you'd like to see change?

There are some things I really really love about the MCYT community. There are so many FANTASTICALLY talented fanartists and writers in this community. The sheer amount and overwhelming quality of fanwork for the Dream SMP, for example - and the way it communicates with and even influences canon - is so fascinating. I've met some really amazing people in this space and made some incredible friends, people who are just genuinely kind and immensely talented. I think there's a really cool writing community of people who are genuine to each other and support each other's work. 

I do think the MCYT community in general might be going through some growing pains as it gets bigger and bigger. I generally wish people could stop picking fights with each other over characters - although I understand the impulse to defend your favorite or preferred character at times. From my perspective, it's much more interesting to think about and explore the complicated characters and relationships in the story than to go to war over who's "right" in a complicated moral situation. I don't think that flaw is anything unique to MCYT, though. I think it's something a lot of fanspaces have to deal with.

A lot of young authors are getting started writing with the MCYT fandom-- are there some words of wisdom you have for them?

I would say the best thing you can do for your writing is to find other people who are on the same wavelength as you and want to write with you. Are you writing 100% for fun? That's awesome! And writing is so much more fun when you have friends who hype up your stuff and write along with you, regardless of the reception you get from internet strangers. Are you writing to improve your craft? That's great! And fanfiction can be a great place to get a lot of writing done and practice and hone your skills. You should find people who are willing to really push you, to beta for you, or give you comments and be honest with you and really push you to improve. 

At this point, I feel like I should give a shout-out to my friends who have done that for me. There have been several and I hate to name them specifically for fear of leaving someone out, but I have made several writing friends in this space who have made me a better writer. It's been an incredibly gratifying experience for me and I really hope that every young writer finds a friend or two like that, because it turns writing from what can be a somewhat lonely, intimidating experience into something that can be communal and collaborative, and fun. It also might take a bit of an ego check to accept criticism from other people, but once you can do that without taking it personally, you'll see major improvements - it's worth the wounded pride! 

Before we go, any final thoughts or shoutouts?

Shout out to the Free Real Estate discord (that's our title right now at least, I'm sure it'll have changed by the time the interview gets posted, but they know who they are...) you guys rock and I love you all dearly! and shout out to the lo-fi hip hop beats girl, she always has my back.

Check out Aenqa’s work on Ao3, and go follow her on Tumblr! The next Tea Party will be with HognoseSnake, coming soon! As always, if you have suggestions for who I should interview next, or questions you’d like to see answered, let me know! I’m saving ideas in my inbox, and I really appreciate them. Have a great day guys, and take care. 

[monstersdownthepath]

Spiritual Spotlight: Hanspur, the Water Rat (and Ashkaelae)

Chaotic Neutral God of Rivers, River Travel, and Smugglers

Domains: Chaos, Death, Travel, Water Subdomains: Exploration, Murder, Rivers, Trade

Inner Sea Faiths, pg. 58~63

Obedience: With the assistance of another priest of Hanspur or by yourself, simulate the act of drowning. You can do this by fully submerging yourself in a body of water, exhaling all of your breath, and painfully inhaling water instead of air. Alternatively, you can lie on your back with your head at a lower elevation than your legs while water is slowly poured on your face and up your nose. If you choose the latter method, you must cover your face with a cloth while the water is poured. When you conclude this simulated drowning, contemplate your life and how your goals coincide with the teachings of Hanspur and the Six River Freedoms. Benefit: You gain a +4 sacred or profane bonus on Survival checks attempted while on or near rivers.

Just reading this makes my sinuses burn and my lungs itch, and not just because it’s springtime and I have allergies! As anyone who’s ever been in a body of water large enough to slap their face with a wave can attest to, inhaling large amounts of water sucks. While this Obedience requires only one wet breath, some... well, some pretty severe complications can arise from it, if your DM ponders even slightly what doing this to yourself every day would do. Dry drowning and secondary drowning are both real dangers from brief immersion, let alone concentrated efforts at simulating one of the worst fates someone can experience (I say this a lot but basically anything that deprives you of air is pretty terrible). The ‘simulation’ will likely only last a few seconds while the rest of the hour is spent recovering from your experience and meditating, but even that may not be enough to offset the fluid likely building up in your lungs. Priests of Hanspur must sound atrocious, coughing themselves ragged every day! No wonder it’s recommended your ritual is overseen by another priest, either, because they’d likely be skilled in helping you manage your symptoms.

Dangers of daily drownings aside, keeping up with the demands of this ritual is pretty easy so long as you’re somewhere with easy access to water. In Hanspur’s homelands, the River Kingdoms, this is pathetically simple! Everywhere else? It’s a lot harder! While I do appreciate that there’s a secondary ritual you can do if total immersion is impossible, but what happens if you’re stuck somewhere with no easy water access? Your waterskins won’t carry you for very long, even if you pilfer them from your party as well. Better invest in a Decanter of Endless Water! Or do something ridiculous like fill the party’s Bag of Holding up so you can just hop in and out whenever you need to.

That benefit is also the weakest I’ve seen in a long time, granting a bonus to only a single skill type and only while near rivers. Survival checks aren’t even all that commonly made, unless your DM is kind enough to let you use Survival to navigate with river rafts rather than Profession or Ride checks. Hanspur really doesn’t want his faithful straying too far from the River Kingdoms, which is only further exacerbated by how his Boons work, so if you’re not the type to linger near rivers you may just want to skip him entirely.

Boons are gathered slowly, typically obtained when a given character has 12, 16, and 20 hit dice. Unlike fiend-worshipers, servants of the Eldest, and devoted of the Empyreal Lords, characters worshiping Neutral gods do not have catch-all classes… but Neutral-aligned characters can enter the Evangelist, Sentinel, and Exalted Prestige Classes earlier than Evil characters, classing in as early as level 6 (they need +5 BAB, 5 ranks in a single skill, or the ability to cast lvl 3 spells); entered ASAP, one can gain the Boons at levels 8, 11, and 14. 

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EVANGELIST

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Boon 1: River Sage. Gain Hydraulic Push 3/day, River Whip 2/day, or Hydraulic Torrent 1/day.

Hydraulic Push and Hydraulic Torrent live in the same niche of “giant water spouts what push stuff around,” with Torrent being obviously an order of magnitude more powerful than Push. While Push has a range of Close and can target only a single creature or square, Torrent is a 60ft line that Bull Rushes or attempts to destroy everything it encounters, so it really depends on if you’re thinking you’ll need three small streams or one really, really big one. Notably, Torrent can Bull Rush targets of any size, unrestricted by the limits of your pathetic frame, while Push contains no such limiter removal and thus likely means you can only blast creatures up to a size larger than you.

Also of note, Torrent attempts to shatter everything it comes into contact with until it runs into something or someone it cannot destroy or push past. The Strength score the Torrent uses is equal to your caster level plus your casting ability modifier, meaning it will start out barely stronger than you are but will eventually be able to punch holes in iron and shatter stone. Hell, with a lucky roll, it may be able to do that anyway. Your choice on which two to take wholly depends on if you want to push three Medium critters around or launch one Colossal one.

What? River Whip? I don’t see any spell like that here! Lets move on! (alright alright; i just don’t like it. it’s good as an emergency weapon but more or less anything else is better in any scenario)

Boon 2: River Scion. As a free action you can breathe underwater, as if affected by Water Breathing, for a number of hours per day equal to the number of Hit Dice you possess. These hours need not be used consecutively, but must be used in 1-hour increments.

A disappointingly weak Boon. Really, what else is there to see or say? If you need to go underwater, this ability is great and has zero downsides. If you don’t, this Boon doesn’t exist. It’s a very binary Boon that relies on your environment, which means that if you’re overjoyed if you’ve remained in the River Kingdoms, but in a desert or jungle or mountain peak, you’re going to be extremely disappointed upon hitting level 11.

Boon 3: River’s Embodiment. 1/day as a standard action, you can transform yourself into a Huge water elemental, as per Elemental Body IV. You can stay in this form for 1 minute per Hit Die you possess, and can dismiss this effect as a free action.

Finally, a transformation ability that doesn’t suck! What does suck is that this is a level 7 spell being granted to you 1/day, when other Boons are equivalent to level 9 spells in power. Hanspur could have at least given you a little bonus on top of it, or made it 2/day, but it’s hard to complain about the force you become under Elemental Body IV. You become immune to bleed, critical hits, Sneak Attacks, and on top of it all get insurmountable DR 5, and the stack of stats you get? Mmmm-mm! Chef’s kiss!

+6 AC, +8 Con, +4 Str, all for the price of -2 Dex (more than made up for with the +AC). And, of course, a swim speed and the power to collapse yourself into a destructive Vortex, but those are only useful if you’re in water, while the rest of the stat buffs are far more universally useful. You’re not exactly the destructive and terrifying Fire Elemental or the deceptively sneaky Earth Elemental, but a wall of surging water can still wreak all manner of havoc on your enemies, your new dual slams able to smash ships (and bones) to pieces, and since Water Elementals are capable of speech and gesture, you can merely bask in your new tank stats while still casting spells.

There’s also the much more amusing but niche use of transforming while already polymorphed by a hostile effect, as having a new polymorph effect used on you while you’re already changed can end the first automatically.

While I wish the effect was usable more often, or at least broken into 1-minute increments, I can’t call it a bad Boon by any means.

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EXALTED

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Boon 1: River Guide. Gain Obscuring Mist 3/day, Haunting Mists2/day, or Aqueous Orb 1/day.

I love the name of this ability because two of the three spells do the opposite of guiding people. Now I’m a big fan of Obscuring Mist; it’s a simple staple in my list for almost every caster I make just because of how versatile it is! But now that I know there’s an alternative, it may have competition. Both Obscuring Mist and Haunting Mists do roughly the same thing, but one could argue that Haunting Mists does it better; in addition to granting concealment and shutting off an enemy’s eyes, it deals 1d2 Wisdom damage and shakes up anyone starting their turn inside the mist... But as a Figment spell with the Fear descriptor, there are a great many creatures immune to its unique power, and True Seeing allows one to see through it perfectly, whereas Obscuring Mist remains impenetrable to the apex predator of the Illusion school.

While it cannot be dispelled by wind or motion like a tangible fog, it’s important to note that there’s no way to protect specific creatures from the sanity-damaging effects of Haunting Mists, and its casting distance of 20ft and 20ft spread means that you will likely always be caught in its radius. The range means using it offensively is painfully limited, unless you want to cast it from invisibility after sneaking into the middle of an enemy formation, which... you probably, definitely don’t want to make a habit of.

It’s great for covering your retreat, but not your advance or setup like the normal Mist is.

Aqueous Orb is a good choice if your party is getting screwed over by the mist more than the enemy, creating a big ol’ 10ft ball of water that intercepts and engulfs anything that moves into it, or which it moves into. It deals 2d6 nonlethal damage whenever it rams into a creature and a further 2d6 to everything it has engulfed each round, but the damage isn’t so much the main draw as the fact it’s a massive, roving Sphere of Grappling, snaring and drowning any creature it manages to get ahold of if they fail the Reflex save. It’s a fun little spell that’s great for mopping up and controlling minions, especially ones you don’t actually want to kill, and even at its worst it can become a makeshift barrier in a narrow hallway since there’s no written way to actually move through it beyond wasting 2, 3, or more rounds by slamming into it and swimming through to the other side while your party books it in the other direction.

Boon 2: River Traveler. As a free action, you can grant yourself and any allies within 30 feet of you a swim speed of 60 feet. This effect lasts for 1 round per Hit Die you possess or until you dismiss it as a free action, whichever comes first. Your allies must remain within 30 feet of you or lose this benefit. In addition, you gain a +2 profane or sacred bonus on saves against spells with the Water descriptor.

See, this should have been added to River Scion as a bonus. River Scion and River Traveler feel like they could have combined into a single Boon to make something decent, but as it is they both fall into the same niche: Solves the encounter they’re meant to solve, useless otherwise. This ability is noteworthy for having no restrictions about how many times it can be used, essentially letting you switch swimming off and on at will. The fact it doesn’t take an action is incredibly important, because using the massive 60ft swim speed the ability grants actually removes the bonus, as getting further than 30ft from you makes it fizzle.

I don’t really understand why it would grant 60ft of movespeed if they’re restricted to a 30ft bubble, nor do I understand the purpose of the bubble in the first place. It makes exploration a slog, and escape scenarios more finicky than they should be. Since it can be activated whenever you need to as a free action, the duration feels unneeded. There’s so much about this ability that conflicts with itself that it bugs me too much to say much in the way of positives. The +2 to saves vs Water spells is a fun little ribbon, though most Water spells tend to be harmless utility spells rather than ones you’d need to make a save against.

Boon 3: River’s Depths. 1/day as a standard action, you can cause one creature within 30 feet to begin drowning, filling its lungs with water. The target of this ability can attempt a Fortitude save (DC = 10 + 1/2 your HD + your Wis mod) to negate the effect. If the target succeeds, it is staggered for 1 round. If it fails, the target immediately begins to suffocate. On the target’s next turn, it falls unconscious and is reduced to 0 hit points. One round later, the target drops to –1 hit points and is dying. One round after that, the target dies. Each round, the target can attempt a Fortitude save to end the effect. This ability affects only living creatures that must breathe and cannot breathe underwater. This is a curse effect.

Now this one’s just insulting, being a technically weaker version of a level 5 spell, Suffocation. It’s weaker in four ways: 1) It fails against creatures which are amphibious which, if you’re in the River Kingdoms, is many. 2) It’s curse effect, which can mean some creatures are resistant or immune to it. 3) It has a 30ft range, unlike Suffocation’s range of Close (25ft + 5ft/level). And, finally, 4) Just ONE successful save ends the effect entirely, while Suffocation continues to torment and stagger the victim for 3 rounds until its effects finally expire.

It’s hard to ignore fact that it’s a basically a Save-Or-Die with excellent DC scaling, but I can’t get over it being weaker than an existing level 5 spell! ... Granted, Suffocation could probably get away with being bumped an extra level or two higher given how frighteningly effective it is at shutting down any creature who needs to breathe even if they succeed their save. I’m probably slamming down too hard on an ability that, again, is a Save-Or-Die at best and an unavoidable stagger at worst (good for making some emergency repairs against a powerful full-attacker), and for extra fun can be used without any components involved, so you can just drop it on someone out of the blue and they’ll have no idea who just tried to kill them. While I am disappointed it doesn’t meet the power of other Boons, it’s undeniably effective against a large portion of the creatures you’ll be fighting, even at 1/day.

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SENTINEL

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Boon 1: River Warden. Gain Wave Shield 3/day, Masterwork Transformation 2/day, or Quench 1/day.

Wave Shield is one of those rare spells that are amazing to have, but not especially good to prepare or to waste a precious Spells Known slot on. It’s an immediate action spell that grants insurmountable DR and Fire Resistance equal to half your caster level in response to a single incoming attack, which isn’t stupendous at low levels but is a generous equivalent to immediate, on-demand temporary HP as you get higher and higher level. If a creature relies on a lot of little hits rather than a few big ones, blocking even one of them can save you in the long run, and if your DR cancels out the damage from a poisoned or diseased attack, all the better!

It’s not an especially strong spell given how it only works once before fading away, but it’s better than the other two options by a country mile. Masterwork Transformation is something you’ll rarely need more than a few times in a campaign before masterwork items fall into your laps (or you can simply buy them), and by the time you gain this ability it will likely no longer matter. That being said, if you’re in a low-wealth campaign or have been forced to scavenge for your gear, Masterwork Transformation will save you THOUSANDS of gp over the course of your life, because as a spell-like, the material components are ignored and thus you can slowly upgrade your entire party’s armaments for free. Given its ability to affect a generous 50 pieces of ammunition per casting as well means the Ranger and Gunslinger will adore you, and you can work in tandem with a mystic craftsman (PC or otherwise) to get all of your favorite gear enchanted without discarding your precious family heirloom sword for that masterwork one you looted.

Not to mention the simple joy in taking all the gear off a bandit clan, Masterworking all of it, and selling it for a tidy profit.

Compared to the combat utility of Wave Shield and noncombat utility of Masterwork Transformation, it’s hard to make a case for Quench, which falls into the category of ‘niche spell’ like Water Breathing and Water Walking in that it will instantly solve a handful of scenarios and be utterly useless in the rest. Yes, you may need to put out a forest fire or stop a building you’re in from burning to a crisp, but you’ll have to decide if it’s worth giving up three emergency DR 4/-- and Fire Resistance 4 bandages... as the martial-focused Sentinel. If you plan on fighting a fire that day or encountering a magic item that can generate fires (which Quench shuts off for 1d4 hours) and no one else in your party bothered learning Quench, by all means, but as the Sentinel having the DR is probably better in most cases.

Boon 2: River Champion. 3/day as a standard action, you can sculpt water into the form of a melee weapon that you are proficient with. You must have enough water to form the weapon, an amount equal to the weapon’s normal weight. Once formed, the weapon behaves as a weapon of its type with an enhancement bonus of +1, which increases by 1 for every 5 additional HD you have beyond 5 (max +4). This weapon deals double damage to creatures with the Fire subtype. The weapon dissolves into ordinary water after a number of rounds equal to your HD or as soon as it leaves your hand, whichever happens first.

Boons which call weapons to your hand are alright in cases where your signature weapon has been taken from you, and by the time you receive this ability you will have a signature weapon, but such times tend to come few and far between. This one also has the additional caveat that you don’t actually create the weapon from nowhere, there must already be water around to make it, at least enough water to match the weapon’s typical weight. The good news is that a gallon of water weighs about 8 pounds, and a trident--Hanspur’s holy weapon--weighs only 4, with most other weapons barely ever approaching 10, so you can reasonably carry around an emergency weapon in a waterskin or in your backpack... And you know, now that I think about it, it’s kind of cool to be able to turn a glass of water into a dagger.

But when will you need to? How often do you find yourself bereft of a usable weapon often enough to need an emergency armament like this? I can see the niche in front of me, making a new weapon as-needed against creatures whose DR makes them difficult to damage with your normal gear or taking advantage of that delicious little tidbit about doing double-damage to fire-based creatures, but they take your whole standard action to make and last for only a single combat (if that), and you can’t even shuffle around the +1 bonuses for additional effects!

Don’t get me wrong, it’s by no means bad (unless you’re both in a waterless area and haven’t filled your waterskin), especially at 3/day, but I can’t help but wonder when you’d actually need it at level 11+ when you likely already have a primary weapon and several backups. 

Boon 3: River’s Renewal. When completely submerged in water, you gain Fast Healing 2. You can recover a total number of hit points equal to twice your HD in this manner each day. At 20 HD, if you fall below 0 hit points and your body is fully submerged in a river, you automatically stabilize.

As a final Boon, I wish the Fast Healing had a higher threshold than just 28 points a day (+2 per level). In combat it likely won’t matter, and while out of combat it’s a decent amount of healing, usually enough to spare a couple spell slots from your healers or some potions, it’s just not all that impressive for a third and final Boon. Sentinels are the only followers of Hanspur who don’t get some method to easily navigate the seas, so taking advantage of this Boon to its fullest extent relies on an outside method of gaining water breathing or a swim speed.

Funnily enough, you can carry around a Bag of Holding filled with water and use it as a recuperative pod in case you don’t have access to a deep puddle, which is dubiously useful but not entirely terrible. HOWEVER, the little addition at the end is also a kick in the teeth; why does that only happen at level 20? Why can’t that be a base part of the Boon? It’s just insul--Wait, it only works if you’re submerged in a river, too? You can’t stabilize with some good old pond water? The mighty ocean? Can’t take a dip in a bathtub to stop bleeding out? Come on, Hanspur!!! Be a little more generous to your worshipers!

I dunno, maybe I’m underselling the out-of-combat healing this Boon offers, but it just doesn’t feel worth it to put up with the Water Rat for your entire adventuring career just for an extra 1/8th of an HP bar.

You can read more about him here.

[thegreenwolf]

Betting on the Ponies (originally posted at my blog at https://thegreenwolf.com/betting-on-the-ponies/)

(Above:  Breyer Classic Arabian Stallion made over into a winged unicorn with real wings from a barnyard mix rooster I raised for meat.)

If you’ve been paying attention to my social media or my shop links at all, you may have noticed that I haven’t really been posting much in the way of new hide and bone art for the past year or so. It’s not that I’ve stopped; I still make some fun things for my Patrons on Patreon every month, and I make some bone, tooth and claw jewelry on Etsy to order. But ever since events dried up, I haven’t been regularly making new batches of costume pieces or other Vulture Culture art. My usual M.O. was to make all sorts of new things for an upcoming event, and then once the weekend was done and I was home, post whatever hadn’t sold on Etsy. And since there haven’t been events…well…I’ve just found myself doing other things.

Some of that is because I’ve had to scramble to make up for the lost income; events were a pretty big chunk of my “pay”, and losing them meant having to tighten the belt. I also lost several other income streams thanks to the pandemic making it unsafe to be around groups of people, which didn’t help. So I had to rely on what was left, along with adopting a few new sources of bits and bobs of cash here and there.

And, honestly, I’ve needed a bit of a break. I’ve been making hide and bone art for over two decades now, and while I love it, any artist eventually wants to explore different media for a while. Sure, I’ve stretched my Vulture wings in new directions, going from costume pieces and ritual tools to assemblages and the Tarot of Bones. But ever since the Tarot came out, I’ve been feeling….not really burned out, but a little creatively wrung out, at least. I’ve really appreciated my Patrons and Etsy customers who have helped me keep a hand in that particular medium, while also allowing me to head off in other directions, too.

Which is to say that if you have been paying attention to the aforementioned social media and shops, you may have also noticed that I’ve been increasing the number of customized Breyer model horses and other animals I’ve made over the past couple of years. This might seem like a heck of a departure from skulls, bones, and other dead things. But in a way it’s really me getting back to long-neglected roots.

(One of my favorite customs I’ve done on one of my favorite molds, the Breyer semi-rearing mustang. )

See, I was a horse girl when I was a kid. Or, rather, I was a wannabe horse girl. I never got to lease or own a horse, and even now in my early 40s I’m still about the greenest rider you’ll find. (Seriously, I need one of those kid-proof horses that’s seen it all, done it all, and is probably more trail-smart than I am.) But I was obsessed with horses from a young age. It started with my very first My Little Pony that I got Christmas morning, 1983 (Applejack, if you must know), and then exploded further with a book on how to draw horses and my first Breyer model (Black Beauty 1991 on the Morganglanz mold) in my preteens. Horse actually took over for Gray Wolf for a few years as my primary animal spirit during my teens, so we have a very long history indeed.

And since I couldn’t have a real horse, I ended up collecting model horses, mostly Breyers with a few old Hartlands for variety. I had over 100 at the peak of my collecting, but I had to sell them all in my early twenties when I was between jobs. In hindsight it was probably for the best because having less stuff made it easier to get through the period of my life where I was moving about once a year, but I do miss that collection.

Back then I did my part to add to the artistic end of the model horse hobby, mostly with badly blended acrylic paint jobs and terrifying mohair manes and tails. But it made me happy, and that was the most important thing. Even though I only knew a couple other collectors in my little rural area, and my only real connection to the hobby was through the quarterly Just About Horses magazine Breyer put out, my collecting really made me happy in the same way that my first fur scraps and bones would catch my interest a few years later.

2020….well, it sucked. We all know that. Pandemic, political stress, financial roller coasters and more made it a really tough year for anyone who wasn’t wealthy enough to hide away and weather it all. And many of us found ourselves with more time at home, in need of distractions and solace. It ended up being a time where many people rediscovered their love of childhood hobbies. I’m one of those people. I’ve been slowly edging my way back in for the past few years, starting with repainting a few old Breyer models found at thrift stores, and then gaining momentum as I found that not only was I much better at customizing these models than I used to be, but I was having fun without the pressure to make a living off of it. (Yes, I love my hide and bone art, but when an art form is your bread and butter, it changes your relationship to it. But that’s a post for another time…)

So 2020 saw me really ramp up my customization efforts. I had to stop for a few months in summer and fall when I moved to a spifftacular new living space on the farm I’ve been working on the past few years (with, by the way, THE best studio space EVER!) but as the days shortened I found myself making more dedicated time to repainting and otherwise customizing models. I even started keeping a few of the models I’d bought to customize that were in better condition to create a small, but slowly growing original finish collection, and that really helped me feel like I was back in the (not actually a) saddle.*

That’s why a well-established artist of organic, pagan-influenced arts made from fur and leather and bone and feather suddenly started painting all these secondhand plastic ponies. It’s giving me that deep injection of childhood nostalgia balanced with adult skill and perspective, and it’s offered me a much-needed break from the exhausting schedule I’ve been living the past decade or so. Because suddenly, even with the time spent rearranging my income opportunities to make sure I could stay afloat, I found myself with a little time that hadn’t been scheduled to death, and when I thought about what I wanted to do with that time, I gravitated toward one of the few creative outlets in my life that was purely for fun.**

(Yes, this IS fan art of “The Last Unicorn”! I used a Breyer Stablemate rearing Arabian for the unicorn, and a Breyer Spanish fighting bull for the Red Bull. A LOT of fun to make this particular project.)

In a way having all my events canceled was one of the best things that happened to me, because it made me slow the fuck down. I no longer had several weekends a year where I had to spend weeks beforehand making art and otherwise preparing to be away from all my farm responsibilities for 4-7 days at a time, with all the packing and moving and setup and vending and teaching and teardown and going home and unpacking and exhaustion that goes with each event. I realized just how much each one was taking out of me, especially as I’ve gotten older. And I also recognized how much pressure I had been putting on myself to ALWAYS MAKE MORE STUFF FOR ETSY EVERY WEEK OR ELSE.

So the model horses are really sort of a symbol of the childhood joy I’ve managed to recapture, wresting time and energy back from my workaholic tendencies. I’ve even been thinking about what my professional life is going to look like once the pandemic eases up enough to allow events again, and whether I’ll put the same amount of time toward vending and and teaching at conventions and festivals as I used to. (There are a few favorites that I’m not going to miss for anything, so don’t worry about me dropping out entirely.) But for the first time in a very long time, I’m relearning to prioritize myself, and figuring out that maybe I don’t have to go hell-bent for leather every week, every year, in order to keep the bills paid and the critters fed.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s okay for this dead-critter-artist, pagan-nonfic-author, teacher-vendor-farmer, to indulge herself with something fun, and bet on the ponies to help her get through the tough times.

(P.S. Amid everything going on, I am back to working steadily on my next book, which I mentioned in this blog post almost a year ago. As a recap, its working title is Coyote’s Journey: Deeper Work With the Major Arcana, and it’s a deep dive into that section of the tarot using pathworkings with the animals I assigned to the major arcana of the Tarot of Bones. It’s not just a Tarot of Bones book, though; it’s a good way to get a new, nature-based angle on the majors in general, as well as hopefully gain a better understanding of yourself. My goal is to have it out later this year, self-pub of course, and at the rate I’m going it may end up being my longest book! Stay tuned, and if you want to get excerpts of the work-in-progress, become my Patron for as little as $1/month!)

*At the height of my “horse girl” phase, I had a really beat-up pony saddle I’d bought for ten bucks at a yard sale, and got a cheap saddle stand for it and put it in my room. And yes, I occasionally sat on it and pretended I was riding an actual horse. Hey, it made me happy at the time, and it was the closest I was ever going to get apart from a trail ride every few years.

**Yes, I do sell my customs. But I don’t make them on a schedule, I take commissions VERY sparingly, and I’m getting to stretch some new creative muscles, especially in the realms of sculpting and painting, so this is primarily for my enjoyment. The sales are just a side benefit.

(My ode to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a Breyer deer repainted to resemble the Columbian black-tailed deer that frequent the farm I live on, along with hand-sculpted Amanita muscaria mushrooms, real and fake moss, and real lichens from fallen branches.)

[hanniiesuckle17]

Little Stars

A/n: THANK YOU GUYS SO MUCH FOR 1.5K!!! THISMEANS SO MUCH TO ME SO HERES A LITTLE IMAGINES I WROTE OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD THAN K YUO GUYS AGain

(this is way longer than I thought it would be! also not edited lol sorry)

Word Count: 3.4k

Warnings: maybe like one or two curse words, sexual tension??

Summary: Y/n is an up and coming artist. The problem is her collection deadline is one past up and coming. Lacking motivation since the job was assigned she is stuck the day before her deadline with no paintings or photos and thoroughly depressed. That is until shes see inspiration outside her window. Inspiration by the name of Lee Felix.

Genre: Fluff, strangers to ‘lovers’, 

✧

Empty. My brain was empty. I had two months. Two months to come up with a small exhibit for a local gallery I was signed to. Two months. For five paintings. Or photos. Or both. TOO MANY DECISIONS. Decisions...granted I should have made...two months ago. 

I sat near the biggest window in my apartment. Sunlight streamed through the glass, casting a natural glow on the stark white canvas. I just needed a theme. A subject. I know! I could do a five-part exhibition on tea kettles!

“Oh for pete’s sake, I’m going crazy,” I said head in my hands. 

I can’t paint teapots. Flowers are overdone. What the hell am I supposed to paint? This exhibition was a huge deal. I had nothing and my deadline was tomorrow night.

That’s it. I’m done. My short career is finished. I should just throw away all my paints and pencils and chalk and coal and trash all the canvases that littered my apartment. I glanced at my phone which sat a few feet away from me on a small wooden table littered with tubes of paint and jars filled with brushes and blades covered in paint. 

An hour had passed and I still had yet to touch my brush to the canvas. Groaning, I rested my forehead against the linen canvas. “Come on, Y/n. Search your artsy soul for inspiration.” I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I tried to imagine the canvas being filled by something beautiful. Something worthy of love and legacy. Something that could burn a hole in my life and set it on fire. Something to ignite my passion again.

When I opened them, of course, the canvas was still empty and my brain was too.

With the thousandth aggravated sigh of the hour, I sat up and looked out the huge window near me. My eyes caught on a flash of blonde hair. Down on the street, a boy with light hair and bright eyes was bouncing along with two other boys. They were joking around and laughing, as people who’s entire job wasn’t on the line would do. For some reason, I couldn’t take my eyes off of him.

All of a sudden I could see the brush strokes of his hair on my canvas. The delicate lines of his eyes. I needed to paint him.

I launched myself out of the chair and rushed to the door. My feet took the stairs two at a time and I jumped the last three before sprinting out onto the street. My head turned in all directions trying to find the boy I saw from my window. Once again, I found his blonde mop bouncing and laughing down the street, away from my apartment.

“Hey!” I called out, running to catch up.

Good grief boys walk fast. “Hey! You! With the blonde hair!” At my words, the three boys turned around, astonished someone was running at them. After a few words, the boys started running away. “No! Wait! I need to talk to the Blonde Guy!” I yelled out of breath. Desperate, I ran after them. Thankfully they turned down an alley only a few feet away that I knew was a dead end.

I put my hands on my knees catching my breath. The three boys stared at me a little fearful. “Look, I just need to talk to Goldilocks. I saw him from my window and there was just something about you. It inspired me.”

“Well... yeah. We’re kind of famous. We get that a lot.” The boy with doe-like eyes and dark, almost black hair said like it was obvious. The boy with blonde hair elbowed him in the stomach making the other laugh.

“You’re famous?” I asked, finally standing upright. They looked between each other surprised.

“You don’t know who we are?” The youngest looking asked. He reminded me of a fox I painted once. “Sorry. We thought you were a crazy fan.” To be honest I hadn’t really been keeping up with the news or popular things lately. I had been holed up in my apartment trying to paint. “We’re from a group called Stray Kids. I’m Jeongin. The rude guy is Jisung, and that’s Felix.”

My eye immediately darted to the boy now known to me as Felix. “Felix...” I said looking him over. He was even more entrancing up close. He had soft sun spots dancing across his cheeks and nose that brightened up his face. Freckles. How cute. How different.

“Yeah...what’s your name?”

“Uh- I’m Y/n, Y/n L/n.” 

Jeongin’s eyes widened. “Hyung! Isn’t she that painter that Hyunijn likes? He dragged us to that gallery last year to see her stuff.” Jisung nodded and looked from me back to Felix. “Our friend loves your stuff. He made us take a bunch of pictures of him in front of it.”

“Oh, that’s awesome.” I couldn’t take my eyes off Felix, and he noticed. 

“Do you think we could like buy a painting off you? That would shut him up for like a solid six months.” Jisung said pulling out his wallet. “How much are we talking?”

“For something I have with me? Not in a gallery? Probably like....Fifteen.” I said, still quite distracted. My imagination was spiraling out of control with how I wanted to paint the boy in front of me. How I wanted to capture his image. Photograph him. 

“Fifteen bucks? Great! That’s awes-”

“Fifteen hundred.” 

Felix burst into laughter as the look on Jisung’s face fell. His hand was frozen, extended out in front of him, already prepared to give me fifteen dollars. My heart skipped a beat watching Felix’s bright grin. He practically glowed.

“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll let you choose any painting you want from my apartment and I’ll sign it for...Hyunjin, was it?” The boys nodded. “I’ll give it to you if Felix will help me finish my new exhibition. It shouldn’t take long. I’ll even-”

“Sure.” 

Felix shrugged with a small smile, stuffing his hands in his pockets. He looked me over with a soft and happy gaze. It seemed I intrigued him as much as he intrigued me.

“My apartment is just around the corner.”

“Cool. Just a heads up, I’ve never modeled except for like album jackets and stuff.”

“Don’t worry about it.” The closer he got, the harder it was not to smile. Jisung and Jeongin were joking behind us, something about Felix finally getting into a pretty girl’s apartment, but it all kind of faded away as I walked back with Felix. I felt the passion to paint again burning in my stomach.

✧

Felix patiently waited as I opened the door to my apartment. When we entered I hastily cleaned up some random junk cluttering the counters as he looked around. There was nothing I could do about the multiple canvases lying in stacks all around the living room. 

“Wow. You are really good.” He said looking at a large canvas painted with bright and happy colors near my kitchen. Why did the compliment feel different coming from him?

“Thank you very much. I’ve had a bit of a dry spell recently.”

“For how long?” 

“Give or take three months.”

Felix chuckled and looked at the other paintings near him. While he explored my art-filled apartment, I set up my camera on a tripod near the window and adjusted the position of my easel. “So, how is this gonna work?”

“Um...I’m not entirely sure. I’ve never been inspired like this before. I really have no idea what medium I’ll end up using...so I’m sort of using...all of them.” Felix laughed again watching me frantically prepping everything I could possibly need. I didn’t miss the lingering stares he cast my way. 

“We’re doing photos? Should I like put on a base or something?”

“NO!” He was a little shocked at my outburst. He probably wasn’t used to being photographed without makeup. “Sorry. I just- I don’t want you covered up. I want to paint everything. Everything about you.” I looked to see a shy blush on Felix’s face as he came to stand near me by the window.

“So, I sit here?” He motioned to the windowsill, overlooking the street on which I discovered him. The light hit him perfectly, bouncing of his cheekbones and practically giving him a halo.

I nodded quietly and adjusted a few settings on my camera before returning to my easel. Felix looked at me with a smile. I laughed seeing he was trying to pose and stay very still. 

“You don’t have to do that. I’ll ask you to be still if I need to.” 

The sound of the camera clicking filled the apartment as Felix watched me paint him. The lines came easy to me as if I had painted him many times before. He watched as I painted the lines of his face and his eyes quickly appeared on the canvas, staring back at me just like he was. 

“Do you want some music? This will take a while. I’ve got five pieces to do.” Felix chuckled, his adam’s apple bobbing up and down and his eyes crinkling into crescent moons. 

“Music would be wonderful.” With a smile, I shoved my wet paintbrush behind my ear, streaking my cheek and possibly my hair, and shuffled over to turn on my stereo. Felix let a curious grin slip onto his lips. “Classical?” 

“Do you like it? It helps me focus.” He nodded and looked out the window. His eyes closed as the sound of soft violins floated through the apartment. “So, Felix, what���s your favorite book.” He was a little shocked at the random question, but that happy smile returned.

“Ummm...let’s see,” While he thought I continued painting, the basics of his face and form already done. I quickly painted the window and background so I could go back to focusing on the shadows and details of Felix’s face. My hands worked quickly, shading in the dark patches behind the cushions and curtains. 

“Peter Rabbit.”

“Like the kid’s book?”

“Yeah, what’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing! It’s just different. I knew there was something special about you.” I said with a laugh, grabbing a smaller brush and looking at the shadows behind Felix. He tilted his head, resting it on the window. 

“Why did you pick me?” 

The movement of my brush stopped. My eyes met the dark brown stare Felix held. He smirked noticing the heat rushing to my cheeks. “I thought you looked like a shooting star.” His eyebrows rose and he tried not to laugh.

“That’s quite the artist's answer.”

“Well, I am an artist.”

He chuckled and started playing with the edge of his sleeve. “So, a shooting star?” Again, I blushed. The painting was almost finished I just needed to finish the details of his eyes and cheeks. “Yeah. I don’t know. You just seemed so full of life. Something fleeting. Something...ephemeral.”

“Ephemeral? As in not lasting? What am I supposed to turn into dust after you’ve finished with me?” He laughed, his eyes crinkling. My eyes trailed down his cheeks to look at the stars dancing across his skin. The freckles scattered about his cheeks. Delicately, I began placing each and every spot as Felix told me about his life.

“It’s finished.” 

“Can I see?” He said jumping up from the window sill. I shook my head and grabbed the still wet canvas. “Come on, Y/n! Let me see!” He chased me around the living room trying to carefully grab the painting. I laughed when his arms wrapped around my waist and he pulled me to him. 

“You can see it when the collection is complete! We have more art to make!” He laughed and let me place the painting away to dry. Together we walked over back to the window and he sat back down, watching me expectantly. 

I scanned through the photos the camera captured. They were fantastic. They were the perfect candids. I could edit these into black and white and it would be gorgeous. Felix came to look over my shoulder. He gasped at the pictures. 

“How the hell did you do that?” Felix gently took the camera and scrolled through the pictures. “Seriously. You were busy painting. How did you do this?” I shrugged and cleaned some of my brushes while he looked through the photos. 

“Sometimes it is not about the angle or the position. It’s just what the subject is doing or feeling.” I took the camera and scrolled to a certain picture. “Like this one.” Felix looked at the picture. It was him leaning against the window, his eyes crescents and aimed somewhere off frame. “Do you know when this was?” He shook his head and looked to me.

“When I called you a shooting star.” Felix looked at the photo again, seeing it in a new light. 

“So, what’s next?”

I felt so close to Felix. Like I had known him for years. Had it really only been a few hours? My eyes traced the lines of his shoulders and back. The perfect canvas.

“Can I...paint on you?”

His eyes widened for a millisecond and he let out a breathy laugh. “Have you done it before?” I shrugged and wiped my paint stained hands on my jeans. When I looked up he had moved a little closer.

“I’ve never really wanted to. Like I said, I don’t want to capture your image...covered up. It should be seen naturally.”

Felix smiled. “So, where are we doing this?” He said softly. My heart thumped against my chest. I pointed to an open space on the wood floor and he nodded. I grabbed some body paints I had lying around in a cabinet and brought them over to Felix. 

“Let me know if anything gets uncomfortable and I’ll stop.” He nodded and slipped his shirt over his head. I motioned for him to lie on his stomach and he followed my instruction. Felix shivered when his tan skin touched the cool wood floor. 

“What got you into painting?” Felix asked, resting his head on his arms. I picked out the brush I wanted to start with. My palm rested on his shoulder as the brush hovered over his back. 

“I’m not really sure. You see...I really sucked at math.”

Felix let out the largest laugh, one that shook his whole chest. I took the opportunity to start painting. Soon his lower back was filled with swirling colors of blues and purples. “Is everything okay?” Felix asked, interrupting his own story.

“Yeah, just an awkward angle.” 

“You can adjust if you want to. I don’t mind.” My skin started to crawl when  Felix turned to me in the eye. Like he was inviting me to come even closer to him. He smiled at the blush on my cheeks before turning his head away. Hesitantly, I situated myself above Felix, slowly resting some of my weight on the lowest part of his back possible. I saw him smile when he felt my knees on either side of his hips. 

Felix continued his story about something one of his friends named Chan did the other night. The sound of his low voice mixed with the music still playing guided my brush like it had a mind of its own. When I looked at my work, a nebula with hundreds of little stars was born onto his skin.

“I think it’s done.”

Carefully, I got off of Felix and helped him up. I set the camera up again and it started taking pictures. Taking Felix’s hand I pulled him in front of the lens and positioned him with his back towards the camera. He watched me as I positioned his body, my hands unintentionally lingering on his shoulders.

Felix turned to me as I began to pull away. “I didn’t know art could be so intimate.” I looked down to see his hand on my arm, his body was slightly turned at the waist towards me and his eyes bore into mine. Never had I felt this passionate about something other than art. I liked Felix. A lot. More than I should admit after just meeting the man. “Is it supposed to be like this?”

I shook my head, hoping he wouldn't notice I stepped closer. “No,” His hand slid around the base of my back. “Maybe you are a shooting star. I couldn’t have wished for something this incredible.” He smiled and looked down at me.

“Can I kiss you? Sorry...I just-”

“You really didn’t have to ask.” Felix, let out a small laugh, almost a giggle, making me smile. My fingers traveled up his neck and into the edge of his blonde hair. “Well, are you gonna do it or are you gonna chicken out, Felix?”

“Oh shh.”

His lips tasted like strawberries. He was gentle and slow, like he was savoring every moment. When he pulled away I rested my forehead against his. “I do not regret putting off my work until the last minute.” He laughed, his eyes brightening and lighting up the whole room. 

✧

Standing in the gallery felt like a second home. My exhibition hung on the wall .It was one of my greatest yet. The gallery had given me an extension after seeing the semi-finished product. A group of rowdy boys walked towards me, a familiar and handsome face leading them.

“Y/n!” He called, running up and greeting me with a kiss. The other seven boys followed after him. One of the taller ones hung towards the back clearly nervous.

“You must be Hyunjin?” I asked reaching for his hand. His eyes widened and he shook my hand vigorously. His sharp features lifted into a grin and he laughed. “You might want to let go of my hand eventually.” 

“Oh. Sorry. I’m just such a big fan.”

“I know. Felix has told me all about you. I’ve got a painting signed for you in my car.” Hyunjin’s jaw dropped and I swear he almost fell backwards had Jisung not been there to catch him.

“So, what is your collection called?” The boy Felix pointed out to me as Chan asked. Felix proudly wrapped an arm around my waist as I guided the group to the first piece.

“It’s called Little Stars.” Felix, blushed when I lightly pinched his cheek. The boys marveled at the first painting. It was one of Felix sitting in my window. It was the only piece in color. We moved on to the second piece. The photo I had shown Felix of him smiling. 

The next photo was a frame I had cropped to show just his eyes. Even in black and white Felix still managed to bring color and life with just a single look. “Wow, Felix! I had no idea you were this cool looking!” Minho said, marveling at the photograph. Felix kicked him as we moved forward. 

The second to last photo showed the painting I did on Felix’s back. He was completely turned away from the camera, but you could see my hands on his shoulder and waist. I had edited the photo so just my hands and arms were seen. Felix smiled and kissed the top of my head before the both of us led the group to the exhibit finale.

“DAMN FELIX!” Jisung yelled.

“Jisung. We are in an art gallery. Don’t yell.” Chan scolded.

“Sorry, but Felix got game.”

I laughed and looked at the photo; it was my favorite. Felix was half turned towards me but you could still see the nebula and stars on his back, his hand was gripping my waist tightly and he smiled down at me, our foreheads pressed together. You could see my fingers pulling away from the base of his hair, giving movement to the photo.

“This is incredible, Y/n.” 

“Well, it’s all you so I should say so.” He kissed my cheek with that bright smile of his. “You really are my shooting star. I’m getting everything I could ever wish for.”

✧

Requests are open, my lovelies!

Masterlist

[penguiduck]

Writing Fight Scenes

I’ve had a lot of readers mention that they don’t feel comfortable with fight scenes.  Well, that’s understandable. It’s challenging writing about experiences you’ve never had.  But with some perspective and practice, you can most certainly work toward writing those fast-paced, heart-pounding scenes with ease.

To give you some background, I practiced competitive martial arts for six years.  I competed in tournaments and trained hard to perform well in the ring. It was a contact sport, and even if I wasn’t sparring, training often left me with bruises, usually of the physical nature, sometimes of the emotional persuasion.

This experience gave me a lot of perspective when it comes to writing fight scenes.

Whenever I step into the ring, I have a flexible strategy in mind that combines what I know about myself, my opponent, and what I’m going to learn about them in the next two minutes.  I’d like to share some of these thoughts and perspectives with you, and how your character may think before and during a match of their own. Of course, my fighting experience is limited to a contact sport.  Your story may very well be far more violent with higher stakes, but strategies may be of similar foundation. Once you take a fight into deeper consideration, aside from the depiction of two fighters merely exchanging blows, you can begin to enrich your writing experience.

I’m including examples from Yu Yu Hakusho because that’s the fandom I write the most for, and as you know, there’s a lot of fighting involved!  But remember — anime and writing are two completely different mediums. There's no one narrating everything that our beloved characters are doing on screen. You just see it. That is why you, as a writer, must paint those scenes through words for your readers.

Nevertheless, this advice really stands for any sort of writing, so do with this information what you will.

A well-written fight scene is never about just trading blows.  There are other conflicts at play, whether between the fighters or even in the heads of your protagonists.

Allow me to elaborate:

1. Who is your protagonist?

Whenever I am preparing for a sparring match, the first thing I worry about is me. I must be self-aware. 

I think about my own fitness.  How am I doing? Do I have any existing injuries or ailments?  How is my weight? My body type? What are my strengths and weaknesses?  What do I have in my toolbox? What techniques do I know? What techniques am I most versed and confident in?  

I also think about my overall wellness. Have I been eating well?  Drinking water? Sleeping? How is my emotional state of mind? What are the stakes?

Is my uniform clean and pressed?  What about my equipment? Headgear?  Mouth guard? Shin guard? Did I replace that torn lace?

I recommend using these questions to bring your character’s own reflection to the forefront in whatever way makes most sense for them.  How is your character’s fitness? Is she in good fighting condition? Has she been injured previously? What has happened since the last fight that might impact her state of mind? 

It’s possible that she’s recovering from an illness or injury.  Perhaps her mentor died a gruesome death. Maybe she’s frustrated because she lost use of her right hand, temporarily or permanently, and has had to compensate with her non-dominant hand.  Or perhaps she’s lost the will to fight, having experienced something traumatic.

Hiei had to constantly think about his own state of health throughout the Dark Tournament after his fight with Zeru.  His arm had been sacrificed to his Dragon of the Darkness Flame, rendered useless, and he was in terrible pain. He never let it impact him, of course, being the stoic warrior he is.  His personality allows for little inner dialogue to be shared with the audience, but as a fighter, he was most certainly considering what options he had with his handicap. And, as a writer, perhaps you would like to elaborate on his thoughts for your readers.

What has your character been practicing lately?  Is her weapon of choice the same? Has it been upgraded?  Has she been training with a different weapon or technique?  Is she perhaps nervous about using something new?

Maybe she just repaired her sword, and she’s unsure if it’s as strong as it was before.  Perhaps she’s been studying a new technique, and she knows she’ll need to use it in this battle.  

Remember when Kuwabara first introduced his spirit sword in Maze Castle?  He was so proud of himself, and that whole battle was an introduction to his newfound technique, how he manipulated his sword, and how he was able to harness his spirit energy.  It’s far more interesting to see this development and exploration than to just watch him stab at Byakko a dozen times.

My point is that while your character probably should keep her emotions out of the ring, she may not be able to.  There are so many things that could be on her mind, plaguing her thoughts, especially if there’s a lot riding on this battle.  I think it’s really important to not only acknowledge the physical part of fighting but the emotional toll it can take a fighter, too.

Think about the fight between Yusuke and Toguro.  Toguro had just killed Genkai, and Yusuke took that very personally.  This was not a simple battle of strength or wits. This was a battle of emotions, and it wasn’t until Yusuke was able to master his feelings and reach beyond that “six foot wall of crap” as Genkai so affectionately calls it that he was able to finally defeat Toguro.

And the catharsis that came from defeating Toguro? It was made all the more powerful because Yusuke went through that emotional journey. It wasnʼt just a fight — it was a calling, a purpose, and a lesson.  It was painful and potent, and it made him realize just how much these experiences shaped him as a person.

2. Who is the opponent? 

Before I participate in a tournament, I do my research.  Who is likely to be competing? Who is in my weight class?  What do I know about these competitors? If I don’t have answers, I would find them.  I’d chat with my instructor, my fellow martial artists. Has anyone else from my school fought these people before?  What were they like? Are there videos online of their performance?  

I find as much information as possible. I make calls, send texts, take people out to lunch, scour the internet for information.  Even if your character lives in a less technologically dependent world, I would imagine that he might talk with friends, look through old records, listen to gossip and hearsay.  He might watch battles leading up to his own fight in an effort to learn more.

And if this pre-work isn’t possible, that’s okay.  Fights in your story may be entirely unpredictable, but your character can also learn things about his opponent during the match.  

When I step into the ring and ready myself to compete, one of the first things I want to find out is on which side my opponent is dominant.  In other words, are they right-handed? Or left-handed? Right-footed? Or left-footed? Maybe they only focus on one side during training (which is silly, but that’s another conversation).  But there could be an underlying reason why as well. Perhaps they injured themselves in the previous round or maybe they just don’t like exposing one particular side of their body for whatever reason.

This information is critical because this tells me what I need to watch out for, which side of my own body I should be guarding, how I may penetrate my opponent’s defenses.  How can I catch them when they least suspect it? Where can I knock them off balance? My instructor always told me to watch the shoulders — shoulders move before the rest of the body.  You can tell what your opponent is about to do by watching their shoulders.

Your character may wish to discover the same thing.  Maybe his opponent uses a two-handed sword and is very clearly right-handed.  This may give him some information on where his blind spot is — or maybe he just needs to disable his opponent’s right arm.  The possibilities are endless, and understanding his opponent will give him leverage, offering him many options.

Understanding an opponent’s technique is also important.  In martial arts, practitioners often favor a strategy or skill.  This seems obvious, but it’s vital that you understand what it is — only then you can combat it.  

Consider Kurama’s matches with Gama and Toya during the events of the Dark Tournament.  The English dub did a wonderful job voicing Kurama’s inner conflict during these fights, struggling with first his inability to move and then his imprisoned spirit energy — if you were to put these scenes into writing, explaining his thought process would be fascinating.  How does Kurama overcome these obstacles? He seeks to understand his opponents before he defeats them, which, unfortunately, also means he risks injury to himself until then.

Your character’s thoughts about the fight, interpreting for your audience what he feels he might need to do to secure victory, is just as important as detailing the fight itself.

3. What about the writing?

The writing will come once you begin to dissect your characters and their motivations for fighting.  Your characters aren’t one-dimensional, or, at least, they shouldn’t be!  

Your fight scenes shouldn’t be, either.  It’s not about two fighters trading blows. It’s about an artfully curated dance.  Two opponents are engaged in a craft that they both know well, and whether they’re fighting to win a tournament or for their very lives, they have reasons and complex thought processes that should make their fight interesting.  

There are two players here, and unless the fight is grossly one-sided, they’re both thinking and acting independently of one another.  My advice is to thread their actions and consequences together — weave the fight scene as if it’s a stream of conscious thought, separated into paragraphs, each with a shift in perspective, for clarity.  

Instead of writing:

Yusuke charged at Kuwabara and punched him in the face.  Kuwabara punched him in the mouth. Yusuke then kicked him in the stomach.

Try this:

Yusuke had little patience for Kuwabara’s bad jokes, and he rushed toward him, landing a blow square in the side of his head.

Kuwabara flew backward with a grunt, stabilizing himself before launching himself at Yusuke, returning the favor.  His fist collided with Yusuke’s jaw, a blow hard enough to knock the teeth out of any regular human.

Yusuke expected him to retaliate, and although he was nearly knocked off balance, he swung his leg around, making full contact with Kuwabara’s stomach.

You may also find it useful to deviate from the fighting itself.  You can speak to a character’s inner dialogue or thoughts, whether about the fight or something else.  You may choose to have them begin a brief conversation. Or you may describe what other characters are feeling about the fight as onlookers.

There are many ways to make these fight scenes seamless and interesting — take some time to explore your options!

Just a few more general tips that might help:

If you’re going to use a thesaurus, be mindful about it. I use a thesaurus when I write because I suffer all day, every day from tip-the-tongue syndrome.  But words, even if they generally fit the same definition, can have vastly different connotations, so before selecting a word from the thesaurus, do some digging.  Look at the exact definition and perhaps Google some common usage. Punch, slap, and stroke do not mean the same thing, even if a thesaurus might say otherwise.

Read your writing out loud.  If you’re unsure, this is the best way to understand your cadence, the flow of the battle.  Use your best Morgan Freeman or Jorge the Ogre voice.

Consider a beta reader.  Sometimes having a second opinion is immensely helpful.

Remember that there are no strict writing rules.  You write whatever your heart desires in whatever manner your heart desires.  Experiment and explore with different styles and techniques to find whatever works for you.

I hope you find this information useful!  Please feel free to suggestion additional blog posts you would like to see from me in the future.  ^_^  Of course, please reblog this if you found it helpful!

Pictures are, of course, not mine.  They are shots from the anime or other official derivatives.

[canmom]

Animation Night 40 - Live Action × Animation

Hello friends! It’s THURSDAY. You know what that means. Unless you followed me this week, in which case: it’s the day of the week where I stream animated films on Twitch.

(No good excuses for the lack of long essays on Lupin or GitS - at this rate I’ll probably end up doing a full Lupin writeup when we get around to our second Lupin night. Such is life!)

Tonight, we’re going to take a break from heavy contemplative artsy anime to go somewhere fun. We’ll be taking a look into a technique that has recurred throughout the history of my medium of obsession, which is compositing traditional & stop-motion animation with live-action!

Now, compositing animation in general with live action footage is now pretty much universal in films with any sort of fantasy elements. This is because 3D CGI is now very mature, to the point that paying a studio artists to go down the sculpt -> retopo -> rig -> mocap/animate [-> cleanup mocap] -> physics sim -> shade -> render -> composite pipeline is often a cheaper alternative than practical effects. Nowadays, you can get extremely good camera tracking and compositing even with free software like Blender (check out Ian Hubert’s tutorials if you want a quick introduction to that kinda thing!)...

Compositing traditional animation into live film on the other hand is much, much rarer, to the point that there’s only a handful of films that have tried it. The reason for this is basically that doing the camera tracking/perspective projection by hand, accurately enough to be convincing, is very very difficult, and therefore time-consuming, and therefore... expensive. Outside of a few one-off novelties which could be sold on ‘what if The Cartoons came to life’, it’s not been worth it for studios...

Well, those one-off novelties are our subject for tonight! Namely: Who Framed Roger Rabbit by ‘very famous old dead dude’ Richard Williams, Space Jam by Warner Bros in their heyday, and even a certain mr. Ralph Bakshi’s Cool World because we gotta give him a nod some time, right? (This may prove to be a mistake.)

So, let’s start with the big one in this arena: Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Richard Williams is a biiiig name in animator circles mostly because he wrote hands down one of the best books on animation, The Animator’s Survival Kit, which did a great job of exploring the nuances of what can be expressed in motion, and basically set the tone of animation pedagogy ever since as far as I can tell!

But, he’s also known for two major films. One is, of course, his passion project The Thief and the Cobbler, which like a more extreme iteration of Takeshi Koike’s Redline he pursued for more than three decades on and off since the 60s. Eventually the studio funding it got tired of seeing no return on their investment; Allied Filmmakers sent the unfinished parts of the film off to be finished as quickly as possible, and released in a hastily recut form to compete - rather unsuccessfully - with Disney’s Aladdin.

Subsequently, fanmade ‘recobbled cuts’ of the film aiming to recreate Williams’ vision became popular as a kind of cult hit among film nerds. It’s a troubling film to talk about because, for all its immense technical achievements in cinematography and composition inspired by Islamic art, it is overwhelmingly orientalist, featuring names like Vizier Zigzag and Princess Yum-Yum and an excuse plot in which these stock characters go through macguffin-oriented motions. This is a good description of a lot of Williams’ animation: incredible technical skill applied to deliver stories that are just, not very interesting...

It was in the wake of losing creative control on Cobbler that Williams went into a depressive retreat and penned The Animator’s Survival Kit; though some of his examples are clearly from that film, he never explicitly talks about it by name, and has avoided commenting too much, it seemed like it was a fairly sore subject right up to his death.

In any case we’re not here to talk about either of those; there’s enough Williams hagiography out there. Instead, let’s focus on his other well known film: Who Framed Roger Rabbit, directed Robert Zemeckis. This film elaborates on the common gag that animated characters are actors who, when off the job, live typical actor lives, imagining a ghettoised ‘toon town’ where the animated characters live that’s just a district in Hollywood. That it’s a metaphor for racialised capitalism in America is kinda obvious, right? But when I first watched it I was young enough that it went totally over my head, so it’s gonna be fun to rewatch with adult eyes...

The plot plays around with hardboiled detective tropes, but what really ‘sells’ it is the fantastic moment to moment gags and acting: the human actors doing a stellar job of acting around invisible cartoons (greenscreen tech not yet existing), and Williams and his crew (often working late from hotel rooms per anecdotes in Survival Kit!) doing an equally fantastic job of making their characters interact with the environment to make them all seem part of the same scene, knocking things over, casting shadows etc.

A lot of the film’s thing is to play on the different ‘rules’ obeyed by toons vs humans: instead of physical logic, toons play by a kind of emotive logic. Roger Rabbit’s a kind of Loony Tunes main character, and as such his interactions with the world are driven by the need to create laughs at all times; his wife Jessica Rabbit is a ludicrously exaggerated sexy girl character who kind of strains against this inescapable role. It’s a very clever film with a lot going on, and it’s no surprise it revitalised the animation industry in the States when it came out...

Ironically given how much Roger Rabbit built his reputation, Williams himself wanted to break from the slapstick funny animal mode that dominated American cartoons at the time (and still does! though now more CGI), trying to push animation into more varied, creative directions. He died while working on another passion project, a two-person project working with his wife playing on Greek mythology. The film tries for something really quite ridiculous, with every frame being a meticulously shaded pencil figure drawing; it is no surprise that Williams only completed a short ‘prologue’ before his death.

Williams is an odd dude; it’s easy to treat him hagiographically because of his immense technical skill, and he definitely did a lot to push this medium into interesting places, but he was also very ‘of his time’; I was immensely frustrated watching Cobbler that someone so creative with his visual inspiration could not also extend a little humanity to the people who inspired his film. Well, Roger Rabbit leaves the writing to someone else, and lets Williams handle the technical character-acting magic, and this is perhaps where he shines most...

‘What if you could fuck a cartoon’ does seem to be a recurring motif of this kind of animation/live action crossover, and that brings us to Ralph Bakshi and Cool World...

So. Ralph Bakshi is another one of those animation auteurs with a distinctive style who you have to caveat a little before recommending lmao. With a background as a very young Jewish migrant in Brooklyn, Bakshi soon became very embedded in American counterculture. He got his first jobs in animation right at the bottom rung, as a ‘cel polisher’ responsible for cleaning dust from animation cels before photography, but worked his way up until he was directing films. Not content to work in the largely kid-targeted ecosystem, Bakshi was one of the people who went hard on pushing the ‘adult animation’ model, including its fumbling early experimentation with ‘haha, sex’. Most of his films (with exceptions like Wizards and his LotR) draw on the place he grew up, typically using very abstract archetypal characters; sex work is a major theme.

This video essay covers Bakshi’s work from a much more informed perspective than I can. My impression is, well, at his best Bakshi will take you into some fascinating psychic terrain; at his worst he leans entirely on shock value. At the time of Cool World, which is afaik his only time compositing animation with live action, Bakshi had made a few early films, like... sigh... “Coonskin” which was a dubious attempt to intervene positively against the medium’s history of racism, or, like Fritz the Cat, a film about a horny student cat which in reptuation relied almost entirely on the shock value of talking about sex in an animated film.

Cool World doesn’t go quite as edgy as these, but it’s definitely not as far afield as he’d go later with films like Wizards or his Lord of the Rings. It also predates Bakshi’s interest in xerox-based pseudo-rotoscoping, which means the animation ages a bit better than say, LotR.

So, Cool World. This thing came out in 1992, four years after Roger Rabbit, and it’s honestly kind of bizarre that it did, because if the opposite were true I’d be like, oh, Jessica Rabbit is a parody of Holly Would (yeah we’re on like, James Bond film level puns here).

The plot basically hinges on the idea that a toon world exists in parallel to the real world as an alternate dimension rather than a physical place; a man called Frank gets isekai’d there during a traffic accident. In Cool World, he discovers one other human (or in the film’s parlance, ‘noid’) man has been transported to Cool World previously and used it to support an artistic career. Before long, Jack the cartoonist commits the cardinal sin of fucking a drawing; this transforms Holly Would into a real girl (or noid), and she attempts to find a way to remain in noid form permanently, threatening the fabric of reality and risking various people getting turned into ‘doodles’ themselves. Ultimately both guys get permanently turned into drawings, allowing them to stay with their waifus in the drawing dimension.

Which like, phew there’s a lot going on there! Naturally a lot of the like, setpieces hinge on the ability to create things through a drawing pen, and the notion of escapism into a world of like, heightened libidinal blah blah...

Some interesting tidbits from this film’s production include: Bakshi claiming he primarily made it to make money because his paintings were hardly selling; Bakshi clashing hard with the studio because he wanted to make it an R-rated horror comedy instead of something PG-13; and the sheer chaotic improvisational process of the film, wherein:

The film's animators were never given a screenplay, and were instead told by Bakshi to "Do a scene that's funny, whatever you want to do!"[4]

It honestly kind of amazes me that this resulted in a film at all!

In any case the critics absolutely hated this movie, and it failed catastrophically at the box office, one of Bakshi’s least successful films. Almost seems like a disfavour to the guy to show Cool World as our first look into his work, but hey, there’s not a lot of examples on this theme. And I kinda want to see just how bad it gets w friends lmao.

Well, things were quiet in the compositing traditional animation front for a bit, but throw on four more years and we get Space Jam! While the previous films are the work of ‘big name’ animation auteurs, the main big name associated with Space Jam is actually basketballer Michael Jordan, who had discovered a very lucrative gig in lending his name and image to advertising, and now sought to make a big deal of his return to basketball after somewhat unsucessfully trying a switch to baseball. For reasons best known to him and the other marketing execs he was working with, he thought it wise to narrativise this career change through a feature film featuring Looney Tunes characters.

The first examples of Jordan collabing with Warner Bros were some Nike ads in 1992 where Jordan appeared alongside Bugs Bunny; these were apparently successful enough to convince Warner Bros execs that they could still make money off Bugs et al., and they greenlit a full film.

There’s a cute anecdote on Wikipedia about this:

One thing I heard was that [producer] Ivan Reitman, when they were thinking about going ahead with this movie, had phoned up Robert Zemeckis about Who Framed Roger Rabbit and asked, 'Do you have any advice on what we should do to make a movie like this?' And he said, 'Don’t do it, it nearly killed me.'

Reitman disregarded this advice, and they went ahead with the film, letting Bruce W. Smith - who had worked on Roger Rabbit - direct the animation. It soon became apparent that the project would be so difficult they had to rope in many different studios, despite many animators feeling pessimism about the ‘doomed marketing scheme’ underlying the whole thing. Smoothing the way a bit was the advent of computer tech that made the production less reliant on physical cels for compositing, overtaking contemporary CGI-heavy vfx movies like Independence Day for the number of composited shots.

While Roger Rabbit used physical sets and composited animation into them, Space Jam would take the opposite approach, filming the whole thing in a large greenscreen room with other NBA players taking the role of toons in the sports sequence. While the main characters are traditionally animated, CG was used for the backgrounds, drawing on camera tracking tech from the VFX industry. In those days, raytraced reflections were still too computationally expensive (how much things have changed!) so a lot of fakery had to be used; there were also some quite interesting developments in compositing motion blur and such...

And what is this technical stuff in service of? It’s a film about basketball! What is there to say about the plot? It’s pretty tropey; the main reason to watch is to well, see the Looney Tunes characters pretending to have physical presence, and the ‘sports anime’ meme-ness of a world where basketball inexplicably takes overriding importance over all affairs. The villains are a group of aliens who download the abilities of major basketballers in a scheme to abduct the Looney Tunes characters; the Looney Tunes kidnap Michael Jordan to try and win the crucial basketball game and avoid getting taken away to a space themepark or something. It’s an excuse plot, let’s put it that way!

You know exactly what you’re getting into there, and it’s become somewhat emblematic of 90s capitalist pop culture. In internet culture, it got kind of associated with the indie RPG Charles Barkley Shut Up and Jam! Gaiden, which borrowed the theme for its trailer as part of its sendup of the whole 90s basketball... thing??, and more broadly the use of the theme in a remix meme.

As is often the case with this kind of meme from mostly white chan culture (c.f. also the use of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s opening theme in bait-and-switch memes), there’s an obvious tension there... it’s not a coincidence that it’s mostly Black guys who get this ‘comedic symbol’ treatment right? Though I gotta admit, with so many semiotic balls in the air, trying to evaluate what Space Jam is doing in the context of like, the origins of Looney Tunes-style slapstick cartoons in vaudeville and minstrel shows would not be something I want to attempt lightly.

It’s been quite a long long time since I’ve looked into anything Looney Tunes; I remember they had a pretty distinctive aesthetic in their more sci-fi episodes, so it’s going to be fun to revisit it again in the guise of a weirdly elaborate marketing exercise from when I was 5 years old!

...and that’s our main feature films covered, but we also have a handful of shorts to round out this exploration of live action/cartoon mixing. In the very early days of the medium, having live performers interact with cartoons was a favourite trick of early animators like Winsor McKay in work like Gertie the Dinosaur, and even earlier than McKay, we had examples of actors interacting with drawings through simple editing tricks like The Enchanted Drawing by J. Stuart Blackton:

...who would go on to create some of the earliest stop-motion animated films such as The Haunted Hotel, integrating animation with live action through editing rather than compositing. Stop motion would be used extensively in the VFX industry, most famously by Ray Harryhausen with films like Jason and the Argonauts but also in films like Star Wars, until CGI and animatronics came to supersede it with less headaches for the filmmakers.

On the other end of the timeline, @mogsk​ tracked down a delightful little MTV short combining stop motion composited shots with a segue into a uh, dream sequence using photos as a stop motion element, reminiscent of ‘pixilation’. I am going to throw this in even though it only kinda fits because it’s a cool short!

Honestly, it’s not a surprise that we don’t have many examples to pick from; all these films were enormously taxing on their creators and lean pretty heavily on the gimmick, which between them they pretty thoroughly explore! But I’m glad we have a few, and I think it’s going to be fun to explore them...

Animation Night 40 (four zero!) will commence in about 10 minutes (7:10pm UK time), streamed at twitch.tv/canmom, and I look forward to seeing you there ^^

[retphienix]

There are so many fucking games I want to play for the blog and I hypothetically have the time, but the energy, the attention span, the drive?

In more positive terms here are some various titles I plan to give a shot for the blog.

Let's do a 5am state of the blog kind of thing to clear some thoughts, eh?

Morrowind (Current Game ramble)

For the moment the blog is more or less on break with me playing Morrowind ""For the blog"" but mostly for me, because that's just a game I've wanted to explore. Not that every other game on the blog isn't that, just that I looked at Morrowind and said "That'll be a terrible game to present naturally. That's a stream game, or a condensed video, not a liveblog" and then did it anyway.

I'm loving Morrowind! Honestly the sense of mystery, fantasy, and adventure is just chef kiss levels of perfect to me.

But it's terrible in a photoset, I'm not particularly interested in doing another format for the game, and it's a game with less 'intense narrative themes!' and more 'Incredibly different game design compared to modern Bethesda' in terms of discussion material and let's all be real here:

We're all fucking tired of that conversation lol.

So there ain't much to talk on in depth, it's more of a "Here's a newbie seeing new things!" playthrough with nothing to talk about after the fact, which ain't a strong point for the blog- again- that's a stream/video kind of thing.

ANYWHO- Morrowind fun, about the only news I can offer on that series is that it might abruptly end and become a 'for me' series because I'm not particularly interested in beating the game nearly as much as I'm interested in exploring aimlessly and seeing what happens.

I'm not playing Morrowind for the end goal of beating the main quest, or beating the DLCs. I'm playing it to wander into caves and find new pants, so if I reach a point where I'm satisfied with what I've shared and my motivation has not borne a new end goal then I'll end the live blog and move on to a new game :P

Backlog

The short statement I'll make is that this blog is a hell for my backlog.

Even without infinite money on hand I've ended up with so many physical and digital games just sitting here waiting to be played either because they caught my eye or because of recommendations by various people over the years.

I keep sitting down, cataloguing my backlog, realizing it's pointless to catalog, deleting it all, and then starting over yet again.

The fact is, if anyone recommended it it's probably still sitting in a text document somewhere, or physically on my shelf, and I don't remotely know when I'll get to it.

I've yet to hit the point where I decide to turn this blog into work, so I have never sat down and gone "Well, Retphienix NEEDS to post! Sit down, 8-12 hours minimum, let's play the next game!"

And part of me wishes I'd do that, but the fact is this isn't a job. There's no money here, there's the opposite even! I don't remotely see it that way, but if you squint and tilt your head I've spent a lot of money on this blog over the years.

Capture devices (a lot of them!), consoles specifically bought for the blog, controllers out the wazoo, I've gone through multiple computers for this thing, and the games, my lord the games- so many games.

And that's fiscally, what about manpower? So many hours have gone into this blog, so many hours poured into the background of making all this work, researching shit, putting my all into formulating my opinions clearly for posts, writing, hell video shit even though it's mostly clips as my one step into edited content became an impromptu awkward hiatus from doing more lol.

What was I on about.

Despite all that nonsense, Retphienix is a passion project. Not a job.

If I lack the passion in some sense then the work doesn't get done "just for the sake of the work". And I don't mean lost passion as much as "No motivation on x day; tired on y day; interested in doing something else on z day" etc.

If things aren't clickin' I don't force it, so the blog has all this backlog and isn't put together in a way that facilitates burning through it quickly.

I do sometimes wish things were different though, I know I'd still enjoy such a playstyle, but I can't justify "faking it til you make it" in a format that literally isn't built to pay and was never intended to.

I can't work myself for nothin'.

Hypothetical "Next" games

While the backlog is a wild wasteland of titles, there are some that just kinda guarantee their spots sooner rather than later.

Yakuza 6 and 7 along with Judgment, obviously. The series is one of my all time favorites and I generally have some of my absolute most fun on the blog side of things with those games, so it's a winner on two fronts. It's just fun to react to, post out of context things for, and talk with other fans about and for whatever reason tumblr has a healthy enough fanbase for the series that my meager blog gets some attention there.

Dragon Quest has a strangely weighted chance all things considered. DQ has many of the same advantages as Yakuza- it's a series I adore, it's fun to talk about in this format, and the fandom is big enough to occasionally spill my way making the blogging experience a bit more fun. It's also a series where I don't know what'd come next to be fair. Probably DQ4? I mean, might as well continue on from that point since I have 1-3 done. I can't exactly justify replaying the entirety of DQ11 no matter how much I want to! Turning on the games above gave me DQ goosebumps which kinda settled how likely it is to show up sooner rather than later, lol.

Jeez. I looked at one of my surviving lists and that's like all that's popping out at me.

Other series feel like giant leaps with no gas in the tank, like do I want to start playing Kingdom Hearts? Not really, not right now. Do I finally play Lisa? Eeeeeeh. Persona? Hmmmm.

I haven't the fuzziest. There are so many one off interesting titles, but if the drive ain't there they might as well be textbooks.

Perhaps instead of any major next game I'll just do some afternoons exploring random titles for a bit here and there with no intention of beating em.

The idea is enticing as hell, but the feeling of not giving the game's a "real shake" feels bad.

We'll see. The only certainties seem to be Yakuza and DQ, as much as I'd prefer far more.

Side project hypotheticals

Outside of the basic live blog stuff I'm still interested in exploring scripted stuff. Mostly to prove to myself that I can overcome some anxieties and break from the meandering pace the last effort gave- I can write! That much I know! So just gotta trick myself into writing for a video and then make the video after the fact lol.

Current thoughts are on a video exploring the monster taming sub-genre. It's a genre near and dear to my heart, and one I know some weird things about as is- but mostly it's a genre I KNOW I know very little about despite that, so I'd like to give it an overall look, or perhaps just explore some random entries, I haven't a clue lol. I'd mostly like an opportunity to talk about some interesting entries in the genre, things like explaining my adoration for DWM while explaining how the flaws make it really rough today, or the interesting mash of genres that is Lost Magic, or the more modern take that mashes idle-like mechanics with Siralim Ultimate.

Won't lie, playing the demo for Monster Hunter Stories 2 threw a wrench in that plan because it made me want to talk about it and how the genre might have a new breath of life after really grinding to a halt as pokemon became what it is today, but all to be seen or not lol.

As far as other things like streams? Not really.

The concept of writing a bit more on games is tickling the back of my head lately, but that mostly just means "more posts that aren't live-blogging" as I haven't the fuzziest where I'd share such nonsense.

Really it's all up in the air as far as retphienix content is concerned, beyond the live blogging obviously.

5am closing

It's fun to explore what games have to offer, both on the individual level, the personal level, and as a whole- as a medium.

So I like Retphienix.

And I like all I've made here.

I hope to continue for a long, long time- no matter what future formats might look like.

[vancampemily]

Emily VanCamp on Sharon Carter’s Return in ‘Falcon and Winter Soldier’ and the Mysterious Power Broker

SPOILER WARNING: This story discusses events from Season 1, Episode 3 of Disney Plus’ “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.”

The last time Emily VanCamp appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Sharon Carter, she was illegally aiding Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) in 2016’s “Captain America: Civil War” — and stealing a kiss from him for good measure. Sharon’s actions force her to go on the run; she doesn’t return for either “Avengers: Infinity War” or “Avengers: Endgame.” VanCamp never expected she’d appear in the MCU again.

While shooting the Fox medical series “The Resident,” however, the 34-year-old got a call asking if she was interested in reprising Sharon Carter in the Disney Plus series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” starring her “Civil War” compatriots Anthony Mackie (as Sam Wilson) and Sebastian Stan (as Bucky Barnes).

“Marvel, when they call, you always answer,” VanCamp says.

In 2014’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” and “Civil War,” Sharon is an idealistic young agent who is always keen to do the right thing — she’s the niece of S.H.I.E.L.D. (and Marvel) legend, agent Peggy Carter, after all. But when we meet her again on Episode 3 of “FAWS,” titled “Power Broker,” Sharon is a changed woman. She thinks nothing of gunning down a series of goons when she swoops in to Sam and Bucky’s rescue in the (fictional) lawless island nation of Madripoor, where Sharon’s been holed up since “Civil War.” She scoffs at Sam’s idealism, telling him, “You know the whole hero thing is a joke, right?” She lives in a posh penthouse that doubles as a showcase for major stolen art. And she is curiously well-connected within Madripoor’s network of villainy, so much so that some began to speculate that Sharon could be the as-yet-unidentified Big Bad of the season, the Power Broker.

Understandably, VanCamp couldn’t outright spoil whether Sharon is indeed the mastermind behind the sudden proliferation of super soldiers on “FAWS.” But she did have some revealing insights into her character, as well as what it was like to return to the MCU after so many years away.

How did it feel to be invited back to play Sharon Carter?

Great! I was thinking about it the other day and realized it’s been about eight years since I started on this journey in the MCU, which is crazy. It’s amazing to get to jump back in in this new medium, because with the movies, you’re trying to fit in so many characters into two hours, and with the streaming, six hour version of this [show], you get to tell the story with a little bit more depth.

It always felt like there was so much left to explore. The last time we see her, she had kissed Captain America and then disappeared.

I know! There was quite a bit of backlash about that. With Sharon, it was always trying to fit her in and these movies are just too big, and it’s completely understandable. To get to see who she’s become over this long period of time, and independent of Captain America as we know him, is really interesting to me. The intrigue for me was to see who is Sharon now.

You mentioned the backlash to that kiss. What did you make of that?

I mean, look, you have to laugh. Some of these storylines play and some of them don’t. But, you know, I thought that was an amazing film. It’s just one of those things.

Personally, I thought that the chemistry between you and Chris Evans was pretty evident. I was a little surprised by how strongly people felt about it.

Yeah, I think we all were. I mean, we certainly did our best. And I think one of the best things that came out of that scene, to be honest, with this amazing dynamic between Sam and Bucky. You really do get this glimpse into the Falcon and Winter Soldier buddy dynamic. You want to see more of that, and we get to see it, which is fantastic.

How specifically did Marvel pitch Sharon on “Falcon and the Winter Soldier” to you?

When [executive producer] Nate Moore called to pitch the idea, what I love is he’s been on the journey, too, and I think had a very similar perspective as to what we’ve seen and we haven’t seen for Sharon. Because obviously, she’s had to be on the run. We don’t know where she’s been. All of these kind of crazy ideas to explore.

It was surprising to see how disillusioned Sharon had become since “Civil War.” How did you develop for yourself how she got to that particular point?

Through a lot of conversations, because it could have really been anything. What we do know is she sacrificed a tremendous amount for the cause. When she’s on the run, we don’t know where she’s been, but certainly you can imagine there would be some sort of, you know, I mean — how do I put it? There’s quite a bit more edge to Sharon than we’ve ever seen. She’s not that wide eyed young agent anymore. She’s a little rough around the edges. Do we find out exactly what she’s had to do in order to be where she is now and survive? No. But we get a sense that it hasn’t always been easy, and that the sacrifices she’s made weren’t always worth it in her mind. That was kind of cool to see that chip on her shoulder that we never really did see before.

It’s quite a different approach to Sharon, who I don’t think ever really got to be that dark in the comics. She was always a do-gooder kind of character in a lot of ways.

And that’s where you trust Marvel at the MCU, which is different than the comic books. They give you this Bible for your character of the different versions of the character from all the different comic books. It gives you a jumping off point, but really, the beautiful thing is they allow you to kind of create your own version of the character within the MCU, and they do that with the story as well.

You get this fundamental idea of who the character is, and I tried to implement into films who Sharon was — that deep respect, and sense of integrity and loyalty that she has. Then to strip away that after being in her mind quite wronged — to put that on its head was just a really fun idea to me. There’s still a few more episodes to see where we go with that, but it was just fascinating that we would take a different route completely with her.

When did you realize that you have a lot more action to do than you ever did in the movies?

It was talked about while the scripts were being written, like, “Well, you’re gonna have to do fight training. We’ve got some sequences for you that are going to be a little harder than maybe you’ve done before.” That always excites me. And the training was definitely much more intense than it’s ever been. We had the best stunt team and they take such amazing care of us and just really prepare us for those moments. In Episode 3, there is a crazy Sharon fight sequence. She’s kind of on her own. It was just really fun to tackle that. In that version of what we were doing, you can’t really hide behind weapons or superpowers. It’s just really gritty fighting, and so that was that was super cool to learn all these new techniques and kick some butt.

How much training did you have to do?

As much as I possibly could fit in. I was shooting “The Resident” at the same time. Luckily, both shot in Atlanta. The great thing is Marvel has a special stunt stage on its own. They’re all in there every day making choreography and teaching and training, and kind of just leave it open for whenever you can be there. So whenever I wasn’t shooting “Falcon and the Winter Soldier” or  “The Resident,” I would be in there as much as I possibly could. We went through several different versions of how she fights now versus who she was as an agent. It’s fun to figure out how to give her that raw edge, but also show that she’s a trained fighter. There’s a mix of scrappy street fighting with her technical background. There was no way around putting the time. As much as you may only see little glimpses on air, you have to be ready, or else you really will get your butt kicked.

The show has yet to reveal the identity of one of the main villains, the Power Broker. So what would you say to people who noticed several signs in this week’s episode that the Power Broker could be Sharon?

Well, that’s a good question. I mean, the Power Broker could be anybody. Also, there are several characters that have yet to be seen. So, I mean, I can’t say anything.

I know that you can’t spoil anything, but I’m sure as you’re reading the script for this episode, you’re also seeing the possible signs about who Sharon could be. As an actor, how do you figure out how to metabolize all that into your performance?

I think for Sharon, the biggest goal — as you see in Episode 3 and we’ll continue to see — is she wants to be pardoned. She’s been on the run. Enough is enough. She’s sacrificed enough. And — if I’m talking about reading the scripts in sequence — that’s her main goal, and rightfully so. She comes from this bloodline of agents and has this tremendous love for her life that she had, and now she’s stuck in this sort of pirate land, and doing things that she’s probably not really wanted to do. So I think that’s her main goal, to get back to some semblance of the life that she had, if that’s even possible. I mean, that was my biggest take. This is her ticket. She sees [Sam and Bucky], and as much as in her mind there are many reasons that she would just want to lash out and ruin their lives, they’re also a ticket for her to get her life back. So that’s an interesting dynamic to see as well.

I have to ask about a different show you were on, “Revenge.” There was some talk of a possible revival of the show with a new character who would be guided on their revenge plot by someone from the original series. Would you ever want to revisit that world as well?

It’s been talked about, and I know that they were going to revive maybe in a different way, and I was super supportive and excited for that, too. I just don’t know that they really found a way that makes sense or that they really want to do yet. But, listen, I mean, if I’ve learned anything in this industry is never say never. I do feel that, you know, in terms of Emily Thorne/Amanda Clarke, her story really did come to an end. But again, you never know. I mean, I honestly didn’t think that I would be playing Sharon again, and here I am.

Source : Variety.com

[hellyeahheroes]

Building Aqualad in D&D 5e

I told myself I will do at least one more of these for the Pride Month. This time it is technically for two characters who are two sides of the same coin. Despite opposite backstories they both share simlair abilitties. Kaldur’Ahm, raised in Atlantis leader of Young Justice and future Aquaman and leader of Justice League is in many ways what Jackson Hyde, his less-experienced, surface-raised gay counterpart from comics may become if he is allwoed to grow. So we will try to make a build that reflects on both of them and basically let YOU roleplay this growth.

As always (since I lifted template for these posts from Tulok The Barbarian we will kick it off with stating our Goals. First of all, we need to have power to use water as a weapon. Second, we need to have a variety of ways in which we can face our enemies. Finally, we need to be able to move as well on both surface and underwater

For Ability Scores we’ll be using Standard Points Array (15, 14, 13, 12, 10 and 8). If you want to roll or use point buy, use this as a guideline and keep in mind our Multiclassig Requirements will ask for at least 13 in Wisdom and Dexterity. Kaldur’ahm seems good in pretty much everything but Jackson does not...anyway, we will prioritize stats we need the most.

Strength: 8. Kaldur wore some heavy armors but we don’t really need this one.

Dexterity: 14, two-weapon fighting is traditionally associated with high Dexterity.

Constitution: 13, both have taken hits from some heavy hitters

Intelligence: 12, Kaldur is strategist of the team

Wisdom: 15, Kaldur is pretty stoic and Jackson has patience of a saint to put up with some of reckless people he is working with.

Charisma: 10, you either have Robin challenge your authority or you follow a smaller, angrier Robin. 

For D&D way to say species, Race, whichever version of the character you want to be, your mother was from underwater kingdom of Xibil and your dad is Black Manta, a living proof of human assholery. There is no half-human half-Xibilian race, so we will go with Triton. You get +1 to Strength, Constitution and Charisma, can breathe on both surface and udnerwater, have land and swim speed of 30 feet, resistance to cold damage, ignore drawbacks caused by deep underwater enviroment, can communicate simple ideas to sea creatures, know Common and Primodial and can cast Fog Cloud once per day, heavily obscuring area in a 20 foot radius. Apparently Tritons come with a built-in smoke grenade. Atlantean training is hardcore.

We will build a custom Background, pick up Insight and Investigation as your skills, a proficiency in any campaign-relevant language and any thieves’ tools and Safe Haven feature from Faction Agent background, meaning you have a way to communicate with hidden allies providing you with a place to stay get information, but they won’t risk their lives or revealing their secret identities for you.

Now for Class Levels:

Level 1: We Will kick things off as a Ranger. First level Ranger gets proficiency in simple and martial weapons, light and medium armors, shields, Strength and Dexterity saving throws and three skills, pick Perception, Stealth and Survival for whenever your team gets separated again. 

Your two features we will swap for those from Unearthed Arcana. Favored Foe lets you mark a target with a Hunter’s Mark number of times equal your Wisdom Modifier per long rest, letting you deal extra 1d6 of damage whenever you hit the target with a weapon attack and gain advantage on Perception and Survival checks to track it down and you can as a bonus action move it on to another target once icurrent one drops to zero hit points.

Deft Explorer lets you pick one of 3 features. Rowing adds 5 to your walking speed and ensures your climbing and swimming speed is equal to it. This is a little better than Triton giving us flat 30 feet of swimming speed.

Level 2: 2nd Level Rangers gets to pick a Fighting Style. Druidic Warrior is from the same Unearthed Arcana and lets you pick up two Cantrips from Druid’s spell-list. Which is nice since we get Spellcasting on this level as well.

Rangers know a specific number of spells, which we will use to roleplay some of kaldur and Jack’s powers and/or gadgets. Cantrips you can cast as many times as you want and they scale with your level, while spells you need to extend spell slots to cast (they regenerate on a long rest). You can know spells of level you have spell slots for avialable and every time you level up as a Ranger in addition to learnign a new spell you can unlearn one in place of another. if Spell asks you to make an spell attack you add your Proficiency and Wisdom modifiers to it. If it asks target to make a saving throw it must beats a DC equals sum of those two numbers +8.

Shape Water gives you limited, harmless control over water, mostly small stuff but may be fun to better roleplay.

Thorn Whip lets you make a spell attack against a target within 30 feet of you, dealing 1d6 damage on a hit. If it’s Large or smaller you also pull it 10 feet closer to you. This will be our Water Whip. Some of you may wonder why I’m getting is this way when a 3rd level Way Of the Four Elements Monk can use Water Whip which is actual water and deals more damage. The thing is, Monks cast this from their Ki Points, which is horribly limited. With this you can cast Kaldur’s iconic water whips as many times as you want.

Longstrider lets you for an hour increase your speed by 10 feet, which will also increase your swimming speed as well due to your Rowing abilitty..

Cure Wounds lets you cure 1d8+Your Wisdom modifier of damage dealt to you or someone else. Be it medipack or reassuring word, you know a thing abotu staying in combat.

Level 3: Tritons for some reason get Gust of Wind at this level, letting you choose a line and blow wind forcing all creatures in it to succeed a Strength saving throw (agaisnt your Charisma not Wisdom) or be pushed 15 feet away. I guess it’s some gadget picked from your teammates? Or maybe you can refluff it as a stream of water?

Anyway, some of you were probably wondering why I picked Druidic Warrior for Aqualad’s fighting style over Two-Weapon Fighting, since it is such an iconic thing done by Kaldur and Jake. Don’t worry, we will amend this one. 1st Level Fighter gets to pick another Fighting Style - Two-Weapon Fighting lets you add your dexterity modifier to an attack you make with your off-hand weapon.

You also get Second Wind, letting you regenerate 1d10+Your Fighter Level of Damage as a bonus action once per short or long rest. This keeps you up in combat longer, and whichever version of character you use, they are known for their heroic determination.

Level 4: 3rd Level Ranger gets to Pick a Ranger Conclave. I was thinking which one would fit best and arrived at a conclusion that it’s Monster Slayer from Xanathar’s Guide To Everything. Apparently it included Xibil, who wuld have thought.

Slayer’s Sense lets you a number of time equal your Wisdom modifier per long rest observe one creature in line of sight within 60 feet from you as an action. Unless it is shielded from divination magic, you learn what kinds of damage resistances, immunities or vurnerabilities it possesses, if any. Meanwhile Slayer’s Prey lets you as a bonus action designate one creature within 60 feet that you can see and deal it extra 1d6 of damage on your first weapon attack that hits on each turn. These two fit the idea of Kaldur as someone more level-headed, waiting for a good moment to strike.

Unearthed Arcana will let you pick Primal Awareness - it grants you a number of spells you can cast without expending a spell slot but the price is you can do it only once per long rest. As in, only one of all those spell per long rest. I guess it is some sort of Atlantean Sorcery focused on being one with the ocean. I will be marking these spells as (PA) when listing them with other spells you get (which now will also include Monster Slayer’s bonus spells, neither of which counts against your normal number of spells known).

Speaking of which, spells of this level:

Detect Magic (PA) lets you sense magic in the area of 30 feet, as long as it is not  separated from you by (deep breath) 1 foot of stone, 1 inch of common metal, a thin sheet of lead, or 3 feet of wood or dirt. If you sense something you can use your action to also learn what school of magic it is and see its aura around any obcject in the room.

Speak With Animals (PA) lets you talk to fish and other animals too, no wonder you replaced Orin as Aquaman. They won’t tell you much but at minimum will inform you of monsters in the area and what they have seen within past day. If you persuade them (read: the DM) the ycan do you a small favor too.

Protection From Evil And Good lets you grant yourself or another protection against aberrations, celestials, elementals, fey, fiends and undead, imposing disadvantage on their attacks against the target, making the target imune to being charmed, frightened or posessed by these creatures and if that already happenned, they get an advantage on future saving throw to shake this effect off. Raven’s dad? A fiend. Ghost of Nabu? An undead. Whatever crawled from the sea to eat Arthur? Probably an Aberration. New Gods? Celestials. And I think Klarion counts as a fey.

Detect Poison and Disease lets you identify all kinds of poisons and diseases present within 30 feet from you, unless you are hidden by the same barriers as listed under detect magic. I guess you need to see them to be able to tell if this fish is poisonous or not.

Level 5: On this level Triton allows you to cast Wall of Water once a day. You can shape water into a straigth wall 30 feet long and 10 feet high or round one 20 feet long and 20 feet high, either of them 1 foot thick. It counts as difficult terrain, attacks passing through it have disadvantage and all fire damage of attacks or spells is halved, but if anything that deals ice damage is flung through it, it freezes 5 feet of the wall, turning it into a block of ice with 5 AC and 15 HP that is not filled when broken with an attack.

4th Level Rangers get an Ability Score Improvement, bumb your Dexterity for better attack rolls and armor class.

Level 6: 5th level Ranger gets an Extra Attack, letting you attack twice for each attack action.

And now for the spells, since you just got access to 2nd level ones:

Beast Sense (PA) let’s you strap a camera to an animal and see through its eyes and hear through its ears, but you cannto do anythign else while you watch it.

Locate Animal or Plants (PA) let’s you name a kind of animal or a plant and you know where, as in derection and distance from you, to find closest one within 5 miles.

Darkvision let’s you for 8 hours with no concentration see for 60 feet in the dim light as in bright and in darkness as in dim light, but iwthout discerning colors. This is something that you, as a Triton player, has spent last 5 levels yelling at DM you should have and WotC did a mistake to not let you have it. 

Zone of Truth allows you to make it impossible to lie in a 15-foot radius. Creatures who are in the area or enter it must make a Charisma saving throw or are unable to tell a lie on purpose and you know they have attempted the save and passed or not. I’m not saying this would have solved so many issues in Young Justice but it sure owuld make things easier. Or not, I’m sure Vandal Savage’s Charisma save is like +15.

Level 7: We hop back to Fighter to get Action Surge, letting you once per short rest. Meaning you can in one turn make your full attack and cast a spell, make four or five attacks if you also use your off-hand weapon, or cast two spells. In fact, this is the only way to cast two spells (as opposed to a spell and a cantrip) in a single turn.

Level 8: 3rd Level Fighter gets to choose a Martial Archetype. Eldritch Knight  lets you for a bond with both your weapons, meaning you cannot be unwillingly disarmed unless you are incapitated and if you drop the weapon, you can use your bonus action to summon it to your hand as long as you’re on the same plane of existence.

You also learn two Cantrips and 3 1st Level Spells from Wizard Spell List. They work the same as your Ranger spelsl except using Intelligence instead of Wisdom.

Booming Blade lets you make a single attack. If you hit you deal extra 1d8 thunder damage and if and the target willingly moves before start of your next turn it is dealt 2d8 thunder damage. 

Shocking Grasp let’s you make a single meele spell attack, with advantage if target is wearing metal armor, to deal 2d8 lightning damage. Both this and Booming Blade increase with levels and let you imitate some of minor electric powers shown by both Jackson and Kaldur

Shield lets you add +5 to AC would you be hit by an attack, potentially making it miss you. I guess in your case it owuld be a water shield.

Absorb Elements grants you as a reaction resistance to acid, cold, fire, lighting or thunder damage - you cast it as a reaction when you take one of those types of damage and it lasts until start of your next turn. And during your next turn first time you hit a foe you deal extra 1d6 damage of that type. Kaldur withstood hits from Black Lightning and his dad runs around with a heat-beam blasting cooking pot on his head, this will be useful.

Chromatic Orb lets you make a spell attack against a target and deal it 3d8 of your choice  acid, cold, fire, lightning, poison, or thunder damage. Most of the time you will likely stick to cold and lightning or thunder which are most fitting the character but you can refluff other options as special weapons for one-time use.

Level 9: Back to the Ranger, on 6th Level you get another form of Deft Explorer. Canny allows you to pick one more skill from  Animal Handling, Athletics, History, Insight, Investigation, Medicine, Nature, Perception, Stealth, or Survival to get proficient in OR get your proficiency bonus to it doubled. Personally I would go with History - you know a lot about the world and have good memory and a number of times my party got themselves in trouble by failing a simple History check would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Also, you get Favored Enemy, since apparently Favored Foe only replaces the first one. Choose one type of creatures:  aberrations, beasts, celestials, constructs, dragons, elementals, fey, fiends, giants, monstrosities, oozes, plants, or undead, or two races of humanoids. You get advantage on Survival rolls to track them and Intelligence checks to recall information about. Yes, that’s it. You see why I forgot this feature on America Chavez build on this level? To be fair you also learn one language spoken by whatever you picked, which mixes well with Kaldur being fluent in multiple languages. Though Ancient Greeks are not valid choice on any setting except theros and it would be extremly fucked up anyway.

Level 10: 7th Level Monster Slayer gains Supernatural Defense, letting you add 1d6 to escape being grappled by or to saving throws forced on you by targer of your Slayer’s Prey.

Our Spell for this level is Protection From Poison. The target that is poisoned has effects of one poison neutralized and for an hour makes all saving throws against poison with an advantage. Which is somewhat better than Kaldur’s resistance to poison of some udnerwater flora and fauna.

Level 11: 8th Level Rangers gain an Abilitty Score Improvement, keep investing in your Dexterity. You also no longer slow your movement for moving through difficult terrain and nonmagical plants and you get an advantage on saving throw against magical plants to impede your movement. I would say this applies to moving underwater but consult your DM.

Level 12: 9th Level Ranger gains access to 3rd Level Spells.

Speak With Plants (PA) make you make all plants in 30 feet from you GAIN SENTIENCE so you can question them or make difficult terrain normal one for the duration. I know some Aquaman comics argued there is a sea-faring force similiar to the Green that Arthur (and apparently in our take also Kaldur) can tap into but man, this is ridiculous. 

Magic Circle is a force field of 10 feet radius and 20 feet height. At your choice it can be used so that creatures cannot enter or leave area inside it and pass a Charisma Saving Throw is they try to bypass that by teleportation, have disadvantages on attacks against creatures on the other side and cannot frighter, charm or possess them. This is likely another gadget or you somehow enchanced water to do it.

Protection From Energy is list a better version of Absorb Elements - continuous resistance to acid, cold, fire, lightning or thunder damage up to an hour on Concentration. Again, your dad wears a cooking pot that shoots heat beams.

ALTERNATIVES: Magic Weapon can be a good choice too since your blades/whips are weird and if DM doesn’t throw a pair of magic weapons your way, this will help you roleplay them better.

Level 13: 10th Level Unearthed Arcana Ranger gains the stealthsuit - once every short or long rest you can become invisible until start of your next round 

Level 14: 11th Level Monster Slayer becomes a Magic User’s Nemesis, letting you attempt to foil an enemy within 60 feet of you from casting a spell or teleport by forcing a Wisdom saving throw on them. if they fail, their spell or teleport is fasted. I don’t even want to count how many times it would get Vandal Savage and rest of the Light in a tight spot.

 Our Spell for this Level will be Water Walk, letting you for one hour give up to 10 creatures within 30 feet an abilitty to walk on water as if it was solid ground. It os not exactly water pillars Kaldur uses to save people from burning buildings but maybe if you combine it with Wall of Water...

level 15: 12th Level Ranger means another Ability Score Improvement, you should have Dexterity around 18 so now focus on Wisdom since more and more of your spells and abilitties require saving throws.

Level 16: 13th Level Ranger gains more spells and acess to 4th level spells

Locate Creature (PA) lets you locate a specific creature you know or a nearest creature of a type you have seen up close that is within 1 thousand miles, except if its in a different form or at least 10 feet of running water crosses the area between you and it. If the creature is moving you know its direction. Basically, if your team wants to track someone specific, like Ras Al’Ghul or Deathstroke or your dad, you can do it.

Banishment let’s you push a target into a portal to somewhere else if the fail Charisma saving throw - if the target is native to this plane of existence, it will be back once the spell ends. but if it’s not from around here and you hold the concentration for 1 minute, they are permamently sent back home. So theorethically you could roleplay this as kicking Darkseid into his own Boom Tube, just saying.

Freedom of Movement is basically a better version of your 10th level Ranger feature - you ignore difficult therrain and spells that would reduce your movement or make you paralyzed or restrained, being  underwater does not impede your movement or attacks, you can spend 5 feet from your movement to automatically escape all nonmagical ways of impeding your movement or restraining you. Beast Boy will likely joke about you being slippery like an eel once you use it to escape being grappled by Grodd or Monsieur Mallah or ultra Humanite... Young Justice has fought a lot of gorillas, come to think of it.

Level 17: 14th Level Ranger gets Vanish, letting you Hide as a bonus action like a Rogue of a...2nd fucking level wtf Wizards... and make it impossible to track you by nonmagical means.  Also, you get one more option to pick for Favored Enemy.

Level 18: 15th Level Monster Slayer gets Slayer’s Counter - if the target of your Slayer’s Prey forces you to make a saving throw you can make one attack against them. If you hit you deal normal damage and automatically succeed the saving throw. If you miss, you still roll as usual. Your old man’s cooking pot beam? Like a Dexterity save. Dark Robin’s toxin? Probably Wisdom. M’Gann trying to clean up your mind? Intelligence. I liek this abilitty because you have an image of someone like Psimon trying to mess with your mind and getting punched in the face.

Our Spell for this level will be Death Ward, letting you protect someone from dying. For 8 hours after you cast it, the spell goess of if one of two things happen - the target is reduced to 0 hit points, in which case it’s reduced to 1 instead, or is outright killed, in which case the effect that did it is negated. It has only one charge but it will likely protect someone from becoming another statue or hologram in your team’s hall of fallen heroes.

Level 19: 16th Level Ranger gets final Abilitty Score Improvement., go for Wisdom since more and mroe things you do require saving throws.

Level 20: We will finish with a 17th Level Ranger for a set of 5th level spells.

Commune With Nature (PA) let’s you gather informations about the area within 3 miles or 300 feet underground, letting you know three facts about terrain and bodies of water, prevalent plants, minerals, animals, or peoples, powerful celestials, fey, fiends, elementals, or undead, influence from other planes of existence or buildings in the area. Doesn’t work in towns or dungeons.

Hold Monster - you force a Wisdom saving throw on any creature and if they fail, they become Paralyzed until spell ends, you break concentration or they succeed another saving throw atr the end of  each of their turns. I would play it as you wrapping your water whip around the target.

Greater Restoration let’s you remove one effect that charmed, petrified, cursed, reduced abilitty scores or hit points maximum of the target.

Overview: My take on Aqualad is a Triton Monster Slayer Ranger 17/Eldritch Knight Fighter 3. Let’s now see how well does it work.

Pros: You are pretty well-rounded in both defensive and offensive ways, letting you be able to deal damage and to mess with your enemies. Second, you have multiple ways to protect yourself or your allies. Third, there is no terrain that will stop you, if your DM loves using tricks related to that you two will have a blast trying to outmaneuver one another. Finally, you are pretty good at information gathering, meaning you can be team tactician, setting up plans for combat.

Cons: Your Constitution is mediocre, meaning your concentration will run out fast and your Hit Points aren’t that imnpressive - on average you should be slightly below 150 which is not bad but could be better. We didn’t cap either Dexterity or Wisdom - while +4 is not that much worse than +5, sometimes it will make a difference. Finally, a lot of your abilitties are situational and/or once per day, meaning there will be a lot of times when you won’t be able to utilize your strategic powers well.

Overall however, all these weak points fit your character - whenever you build Kaldur or Jacke, you are a team player. You don’t operate alone, you lay down a plan and you protect and support your teammates. A good party that works together and doesn’t underestiamte you will be grateful to have you on board

Alternatives: 

Pick a  Shillelagh as a Druidic Warrior Cantrip, replace your swords with a staff and for other fighting style pick Great Weapon Fighting, then maximalize Wisdom and Constitution. Fits well with you beinga tactical person as now you punch with your Wisdom. But it does stay away from Aqualad’s iconic blades.

Instead of Canny pick Tireless as your second Deft Explorer, giving you more ways to regenerate damage - you will be mroe a determinator than a wise guy, pushing you a bit closer to Jack than Kaldur.

In you want to sacrifice electric powers, grab Battlemaster archetype for Fight or even consider replacing it with Cleric - Protection, Solidarity or Unity Domains will work pretty well for you as a great team player.

- Admin