#theres three very specific blorbos this post is about

[so-very-small]

“so what g/t thoughts do you have about your fav character?” thoughts? thoughts???? i do not think about my Blorbo. i see them and my vision goes black and when i come to i’m gnawing on my phone like a hamster on a wooden doorstop. “g/t thoughts” i can’t even see a good edit of them without screaming and wanting to throw up and you assume i’m capable of thinking of them as a giant? i’d combust. i’d burst into flames so hot that i’d self cremate and take out half the living room as well. there are no g/t blorbo thoughts here. there is only fangirling so intense that i don’t speak in words, but rather screaming so high pitched only dogs could hear. god forbid what kind of rabid creature i’d become if i thought of them as a giant.

[utilitycaster]

Whoaaaa holy shit something just snapped into place reading you mention the concept of creating a shape of negative space bc i've been thinking so long abt the "unspoken things/quiet part" of characters. I've often had this feeling that fandom will go a million and nine yards to red string board an ocean of depth for their favorite blorbo over.... what comes down to what's technically extrapolating based off of xyz canon, but said canon will be like "this character fidgets once, half his dialogue is quoting an in-universe play he tries to recreate (by ruining ppl's lives), and he doesn't understand why someone wouldn't want to be called a monster, therefore he is AUTISTIC and that drives his logic," or "this character has xyz vague background and is TRAUMATIZED because of WAR" inventing an entire character and it's like. Oh boy. This might be a matter of not being invested enough in these characters to TRY and delve so "deep" but I keep thinking that none of this is actually. written or feels purposeful in the context of How Storytelling Works/the Narrative to MAKE me invest or think that it's worth doing so. I always wonder how many people are trying so hard to project a better story onto something without understanding that the story actually needs to BE THERE and ADDRESSED, even subtly, and token moments aren't enough. But then that gets me thinking about how Thereness needs to exist for something to be subtle but written as opposed to Conspiracy off loose projection.

I was kinda thinking abt Laudna and how to use her as an example, because she's one of those characters for whom like, yeah I as a person totally understand the cycle of being upbeat and normal and everything and then having a random spiral of Bad Upstairs before being normal again, but narratively how do you portray that and why does everyone do it so much better than her. With equal screentime, everyone feels like they have so much more meat to their motivations and psychology despite some being significantly less fraught backstory wise. What's happening here because things just feel like they come out of nowhere with her with "oh so that matters all of a sudden?"

Hi anon,

Yes to all of this! With regards to your first paragraph - I feel that a lot too. It's a tricky situation because I think it's completely valid to project things onto characters and imagine them to have specific qualities that either you have or simply that you wish to see in fiction. It only becomes difficult in a fandom sphere when people insist that this is a fully evidence-based endeavor and not a personal interpretation (especially because a lot of that evidence is, as you say, either very much open to interpretation, or else totally spurious. The number of times I've had to shoo people off my posts for talking extensively about how an immensely self-absorbed character who never thinks about others unless forced to clearly has ADHD...but I digress). And as for the conspiracy element, especially when works aren't as good - absolutely. If you haven't read this, which I reblogged a few weeks ago (has Good Omens 2 spoilers) I highly recommend you do because what you're saying resonates a lot with OP's post, both in terms of our need as fans to project or find similarities with characters, and the fact that when people are disappointed by a work sometimes they try to create a better one, but instead of just writing fanfiction and calling it fanfiction they go full conspiracy theorist and assume there's some secret twist, and fall so hard into that all-crumbs-no-schnitzel (to borrow a metaphor from that post) fanon echo chamber they forget it is, in fact, only fanon.

Which brings us to Laudna. Before I go deeper I want to cover three things. First: for me at least, this criticism comes because I know Marisha is capable of doing this negative space work. It didn't come up much with Keyleth since we kind of knew her whole deal very early (which, to be clear, is valid; not every character needs this), but it's present with both Beau (her relationship to her father is masterfully done; the hallmark of good negative space work is that when the reveal comes you say oh of course) and to a lesser extent Patia, who, like all the Calamity characters, conveys a story much greater than the one that unfolds over a single night. Second: I think part of why a number of us in the fandom are so frustrated is that we have been doing that work of generously interpreting Laudna since the beginning, but nothing ever sticks, so it's becoming less and less worth the effort.

I'd have to go back through my archives pretty extensively, but early on, the going expectation for Laudna was that she would explore the idea of being one of the bystanders in a larger story as someone killed simply because of a passing resemblance to someone the Briarwoods wished to send a message to; that we'd get insight into Whitestone during the occupation from someone who wasn't freed by Vox Machina but rather killed, indirectly, because of them. However, not only have we not gotten that, but she also was chosen for being special: Delilah chose her as a vessel because of her inherent sorcery. So then it was perhaps about that tension between finding power in her sorcery vs. warlock levels - Pâté seemed like a clear setup for Pact of the Chain, after all - but then Marisha admitted she had no intention of taking that third warlock level, and always just planned to play Laudna as exclusively leveling in sorcerer, until FCG attacked. And meanwhile, there's no exploration of those sorcery powers, either.

Speaking only for myself, I've been interrogating "hey, why is her backstory that she was chased out of everywhere but for the most part everyone is mostly fine with her?" and "in 30 years she did nothing about Delilah? Really?" for quite some time. There's a number of questions that are not just unanswered, but lack the hints that this negative space work would provide. And to be clear there are ways to explain those things! This meta does a good job of talking through why she may have been chased out, and I've floated, in the past, that even Delilah's unwelcome presence was better than the absolute silence of being truly alone. But the work to support these fandom theories, again, is not really being done at the table, and moreover, even if it starts being done...it's episode 70. It should have come up in some capacity.

Marisha said (to be clear, somewhat jokingly) in the 2022 ComicCon panel that "Yeah. I don't want to think anymore. I'm tired," re: Laudna but the thing is...honestly, in my opinion? A character with Laudna's premise requires far more work than Beau or Keyleth to do well. Not only is she tied into one of the most famous events and entwined with one of the most famous villains of Campaign 1, but she's got 50 years of backstory! Beau and Keyleth are in their early 20s! (I could make a whole other post about this but character intelligence does not equal how hard they are to play; Imogen is an immensely tough concept that Laura's doing a good job with and she's lower INT than Laudna. I'd rather play a wizard than a character like Grog any day of the week because I genuinely believe that the acting burden for making a character like Grog sympathetic and believable without going into cheap mockery and parody is immense).

Going back to that statement, it really does feel as though every 4-Sided Dive episode or panel, when Marisha talks about Laudna, it's always just that she was envisioned as being over her trauma, and the premise was always just "make that creepy girl from her nightmare". And even then: it's fine if she'd done that - simply made a creepy character who was here to be creepy and cheerfully macabre - but through gameplay it's become clear that Laudna is not over that trauma (her arrested development being one of many options), and has acquired new traumas to boot, and for that matter never was really over it given that she displays intensely but they come up so inconsistently that there's never any follow-through. I agree with you completely that the idea of her often seeming fine and happy and then having spirals is believable and true to life, but one does need to actually follow through on the spirals - I think a lot of us finally threw up our hands when Laudna's believable, well-played, and justifiable anger and resentment after being thrown across the world away from half the party, essentially pushed into a fight that isn't her own, being betrayed by Bor'Dor, and feeling Delilah's return melted away without resolution. If you want to make a character who's over their trauma and go-with-the-flow, I feel as though step 1 is to not have an eternal reminder of one's trauma permanently stuck in one's head. "Warlock who dislikes their patron" is actually a premise that requires quite a lot of thinking and effort, and we are consistently not seeing it.

I think what's most telling is that the defense of Laudna for the weird freakout this past episode is both vehement, and in conflict with itself. Is Marisha just making a joke (that didn't really land with anyone at the table nor much of the fandom, and was taken at least semi-seriously by both)? Or is it actually great and good that Laudna is incredibly traumatized and clingy and we should all hope she becomes even more clingy and codependent? When even the people who are shielding Laudna from even a whisper of criticism can't agree what Marisha's doing, it's pretty dire, especially when that criticism is "this character feels directionless and incoherent."

So getting back to negative space: It's my hunch that there just...wasn't a lot of clarity to Laudna's motivations, and the questions in her backstory weren't answered. She's creepy and she's kooky, Sun Tree corpse, Delilah in her head, met Imogen two years ago, was friends with a little girl at some point (which we only know from 4-Sided Dive, which is, to be clear, bad that it's never come up in-game). We don't know how she feels about her sorcery powers other than a vague enjoyment of their creepiness...but she also sees them as a way out from Delilah...but she also barely engages with Delilah and hasn't done anything to get rid of her. We have no sense of how she got to "the worst thing that's happened to me already happened" because while it's completely fair to play her as feeling that way 30 years later, I highly doubt she felt that way as she cut herself down from the Sun Tree. So as a result, it's hard to pick a direction because that foundation is lacking.

The thing about that negative space is that to do it well, you really need to know what you're trying to convey. Which is also why, as you say, characters with much simpler backstories are fine; Fearne was basically hanging out at her grandmother's place until EXU and her parents left when she was very young; she is curious about her parents and loves her grandmother and is a chaotic fey entity who was sent into the Material Plane with the Weave Lens, and mostly she just wants to explore and have fun and hang out with her friends. Ashley just needs to...play Fearne like that, which she does with aplomb. The complex setup for Laudna demands a huge number of answers in the backstory, and my guess is that Marisha does not have them. I think the problem isn't with the acting (in fact, I'm fairly confident it isn't, because, again, I know from past characters Marisha can do this); it's that Laudna's concept prioritized the aesthetic, mechanics, and facts of the backstory, and didn't adequately fill in her beliefs and motivations, so she's just flailing. I also suspect from the most recent 4-Sided Dive and the most recent SDCC panel that Marisha is specifically looking for interparty conflict, and to be clear that's valid...but again, to do that believably and well, Laudna's philosophy and motivations and characterization need to be much more clearly established than they are.

[computerpeople]

What's the plot of your au?

in 2018 due to at the time mysterious consequences the sun "exploded", replaced with a massive black light spot in the sky. While it didn't really explode, it caused a massive flash of hot light, and when the light was gone, the sun was black and the sky looked wrong. like a dream or a broken videogame, everything was colored wrong, or misshapen or actively breaking physics. animals were mutated, people reported spotting horrible, mutated monsters that look straight out of horror movies. people were mutated, too, developing psychic powers or animal like characteristics. Its actually very similar to fear and hunger, which is funny because I've been rping it longer than fear and hungers existed. NOT SAYING THEY COPIED ITS JUST A FUNNY COINCIDENCE.

It mostly started as an excuse for me and my friends to put all of our blorbos together even if they werent from the same sources (which im very much used to, but apparently they werent as much) and since its me, i chose the aesthetics and i based it off of my ocs universe birdlime. its a post apocalyptic wasteland that takes inspiration from things like adventure time, yume nikki, (now) fear and hunger, welcome to nightvale, eckvanet, homestuck, etc etc. its very much like a serious apocalypse rp server, but instead of being zombie bloody dirty colored its purple and greenweirdcore jakecoded colored. we have three cities, St Lovette, which is the city run by my oc Juno's father, who died and Junos taken over, theres Desert Bluffs, a small cult commune ran near St Lovette by Kevin Lauren and Diego, and recently my friends wanted to start working on a more clearly technologically developed city based off of zaun from arcane. There is also the underworld, which they often rp hades characters in (i dont play hades much but im planning on picking up hypnos eventually)

It was a public server for a while before I ended up having a psychotic episode and not being able to handle it anymore, nothing was wrong with the server specifically i loved it. but my social skills never really recovered after that, and i still really struggle to interact with people in general. the ppl in my server currently are all very acutely aware of how actually bad my mental health is and are the only ones i rp with who know about me having DID which effects HOW i rp. uhmmm so sorry to everyone who was in the public one

[nihiltism]

ok now that ive explained my dearest beautiful blorbo drosera in all her awful awful detail in my last post. i can show you my playlist for her and explain why theyre all there.

most of this is relating to the first part of her story and not post trigger ill note buuuut! heres it all. teehee. some just. scattered thoughts abt it

theres a couple different subsections here? like theres a couple that are The Vibe (musical aesthetically), since sera is a Very violin + strong percussion coded character stuff like cypress queen ends up there. tir na nog is also there for similar reason but i want to note that it is Really not that applicable to her as a song. i mostly just added it because i liked it. but i also really liked the line (the world you left, it forgot your name) in relation to sera and that was good enough for me to add it to the list. in general her musical vibe is foresty tunes but like. Preferably foresty tunes about spite and murder and if theres metal there thatd be cool. so like. thatd be why terrathaw and the quake is there. but also wolves of the revolution but less metal. metal is kind of The Genre I Associate With Her Emotionally like i do think she would listen to this shit. this would be why theres an mgr jumpscare there. but also because i thought itd be funny. but also i will admit that my beloved oc probably listens to angst music which is why the soad jumpscare is there. ive been wanting to draw a mini amv with her to the (i saw her laugh) bit of revenga because yknow. kind of relates to the betrayal if you really fucking stretch it. also because its really cool. its a song that probably fits her The most personality wise. speaking of the betrayal do i have to explain hangman. no. cool. i think the first six are all songs that fit her Story (or just vibe) in one way or another and the last three are ones she'd actually listen to is basically what im getting at. idk this is all over the place. hangman gives me really evocative drosera art ideas for when i have an actual ref for her and i think the second half of the horror and the wild specifically fits her a lot. i like the remember me bits and the mutterings of all your fears bits. also the (you passed your fingers through my hair and called me child. witness me old man i am the wild) feels like a double meaning because it Does kind of evoke that longing for acceptance while also a retaliatory spite against the people she wants it from. yknow. wolves of the revolution just fits her entirely i dont think i need to explain. also!!! krystallomantia is what i very much consider to be what her boss theme would sound like if she had one!!! thank you and goodnight!!

[snickeringdragon]

please tell me everything about something you are very very normal about

im sure you were expecting a blorbo or something but youre going to hear about biology now anon.

im just gonna share a bunch of animals i like :] warning for insects, arachnids, and other creatures

lets start with this. this is a polyphemus moth! (Antheraea polyphemus) belonging to family saturniidae (giant silk moths) which s known for having some of the largest moth species in the world!! including THE largest species the atlas moth (Attacus atlas) but this aint about him. these photos are of a pair i found that had likely mated shortly before this! the female (left) was eggbound :] you can tell which one is female ans which one is male by the antennae!! females will have smooth antennae and males antennae are covered in that like. feather like shit. males use this to pick up the females pheromones :]]

heres another moth i found!! this little fella is an alianthus webworm moth (Atteva aurea,) arent their patterns gorgeous? :]

this is my favorite snake!! the rhinoceros viper (Bitis nasicornis,) with such beautiful coloring, the little horns on their nose, the fat fuck friday swag, and everything else these guys are just Flawless. also i have a plush of one named lightning! you can find a photo of him in my pinned post :] rhino viper fun fact! theres a species in the same genus called Bitis rhinoceros and yet that one ISNT the rhinoceros viper. isnt this shit crasy.

this fella is a thresher shark! specifically Alopias pelagicus, the pelagic thresher. there are three extant species of thresher shark and ill admit im not actually too familiar with them! but i DO like treshers as a whole! they use their long tail fin to whip shit. thats fucking awesome. i saw a thresher at an aquarium when i was a little kid and i was so scared it was so funny. thats why theyre my favorite shark now :]

these are eastern pondhawks! Erythemis simplicicollis, now i HAVE seen these in person but i cant find my old photos of them :( the color variation you see here is sexual dimorphism! the females are that beautiful green color and the males are that beautiful blue color! incredible.

cobalt blue tarantula. Cyriopagopus lividus. must i say anything more. its a bright ass blue spider.

and with these ive hit my image limit! what a wonder animal to end this on, this is Deinonychus antirrhopus, a dromaeosaur (raptor!) and my personal favorite dinosaur! if im not mistaken, the "velociraptors" in jurassic park were actually based of deinonychus and not velociraptor! i dont really go there tho so please note i very well Could be mistaken. fun fact! the most well known species of velociraptor (there are two) is Velociraptor mongoliensis :]

all images that were not taken by me (everything except the polyphemus moths and alianthus webworm moth) were just grabbed from the wikipedia pages for these guys. biology so cool

[ambrosiafaery]

Heya Vtubers! It's nice to see people moving over from twitter - as much as people joke about "amping up the cringe" to drive people off, tumblr's more welcoming than you're expecting!

My ask box is definitely open if people have questions and I've seen some help starter guides floating around, and figured why not make my own too?

This isn't about how to use tumblr though it's about a lot of the common in jokes/memes that float around. Tumblr culture works very different than Twitter culture - memes dont really come and go, they stick around. Part of this is because you can reblog posts multiple times - and yes I know good memes stick around on twitter too, but it's a very different slowness to Tumblr meme culture

This does in fact mean someone can and will flood your dashboard with repeats of the same post and yes I'm looking at you reg

We've got some silly weekly traditions like out of touch thursday, wizard wednesday, and fingers in his ass sunday and yes people Do re-reblog that shit every week. If you tell me "I like your shoelaces" I will, very stupidly, blurt out the first thing that comes to mind and it will be "Thanks I stole them from the president"

The rest shall be under a readmore because this got Very long. It's not all the memes but its a lot of my favorites that I see pretty often.

the "color theory" post

if someone says anything about color theory especially if they mentioned "children's hospital" they're likely referring to this

The skeleton wars preceded my entry onto tumblr but that was in fact a thing learn your history

Mishapocalypse was also a thing, but more relevant, is our newest holiday, Nov 4-5th

I hate to say you had to be there, but it really was a sort of manic energy you can experience in the moment. It didn't matter if you liked supernatural, destiel, sherlock, or anything, we All held hands on Nov 5th

The queen's death came mildly close, but there won't another queerbait like it. This is also the origin of the superhell meme for my fellow LGBT+

Speaking of the queen, tumblr had been waiting to celebrate her death for a Long time. People will be respectful about how her death affected shit for everyone, but they aren't going to be respectful towards her or the royal family here. We had our crab raves ready for Years before she finally kicked the bucket.

We did enjoy the sexyman polls btw, even if you twitter people were silly enough to host them offsite

"Daily Dracula" isn't just tumblr specific, but it is very popular here. It's an email newletter that sends snippets of the classic novel in real time with dates from the book.

horse plinko.

I don't have room for the entirety of the Connecticut Clark saga but its a lovely comic and Cark and Malfina are All our blorbos

You may be familiar with tumblr celebrating the Ides of March (also a very real holiday respect our traditions), so heres another history meme we've got. If people joke about the value or copper or Ea-nasir, theyre referring to this post

Around 2017, there was a time where nazi, pedo, terfs and other sorts of shit blogs were taken over by someone using Toy Story's Woody as an icon and Howdy Pardner as a blog title. Eventually the whole thing got out of hand but whoever originated Woody's Roundup was pretty funny

Popularity on tumblr is hard to gauge, but theres a few blogs out there that just Everyone knows.

We know Sixpenceee for the "Sixpenceee Heals" incident among others,

we know about thejorie's Three Weed Smoking Girlfriends,

we had bone stealing witches at one point, but not sure if they're still hanging around

thecybersmith is well known for being the Human Pet Guy among other incredibly weird takes. i think they also went to twitter but they've got a Reputation here for sure

we are Very Aware about John and Hank Green due to an incident when editing other people's posts was a thing, and people edited one of John Green's posts to be very nsfw. There's a bit of a back and forth on this one whether it was actually funny or not, but this incident did drive them off tumblr which makes John Green's recent string of tweets Fascinating

The wizard blogs are special to us, please be polite to them and pay your wizard tithes on time. I don't listen to the wizard council though, I'll cast transmute idaho if I want to.

People are sometimes really bad about reading the op of a post, and one-time-i-dreamt is well known for jumpscaring people with posts that seem like almost real encounters until you realize the blog title means this was something someone dreamed

There's definitely more but i woke up in a cold sweat at 3:30 am to write this and its now 5am so I'll leave it at that. add your favorite tumblr specific memes if you'd like.

tumblr loves to beat a dead horse (or put it in a plinko) so dont be afraid to reblog old jokes, or put a new spin on an old joke, or be like Reg who regularly reblogs the "i control the paladins" tiktok fifty times in a row when people get a bit too weird in their notes (not an exaggeration. I learned tumblr hotkeys for you my beloved mutual)