#tl;dr i'm easy going and up for anything

[cuppajj]

Tbh i just want to know why you like hollytaya but not eternalberry or b x a at all? Pitaya is a shitty person to hollyberry too. But they get a pass and eternal sugar doesn't? You say you can see b x a as a onesided thing but then why not hollytaya too? Why would she like pitaya and not es when they've both treated her badly? If she can forgive pitaya for what they did even though they never said sorry or made up for it then why cant she forgive es too? Not trying to start shit, i'm asking a legit question because I'm confused, like i see everyone hate bxa all the time but love hollytaya even though they're like. The same thing? And pitaya has done shitty things to hb too? But it's ok when they do it I guess? Idk i just dont get it man

Haha ok so I wrote more than I thought I would, I guess this serves as my case for why I like Hollytaya.

Here’s the TL;DR: I think Hollytaya has a good character arc attached, Eternalberry is good and I do like it, but I still prefer Hollytaya more.

I go into your comments more specifically under the cut:

So!

I disagree with some of what you said about Holly and Pitaya. Let me explain:

I’m not out here going to parade Pitaya as the most innocent guy around, because that would be misunderstanding Pitaya’s character. Yes they’ve definitely terrorized HB’s kingdom, took her throne in her absence even. But in summation they’ve (1) historically had a respect for Hollyberry’s strength, and 2) already had an arc where their relationship with her improved.

Let’s walk through their interaction in the Red Dragon story:

Cookies and their villages are being attacked and burned down. Hollyberry starts out believing Pitaya’s up to no good again, because naturally, the Red Dragon’s name being attached to such awful things makes sense. She fights them early on, but it’s a little too easy because their power’s been sapped. After questioning them (with juice, which they really like), Pitaya’s honesty is tested when they make the proposal to help them get their strength back. Holly and Wild don’t believe them at first, but by the end of the story, Pitaya proves to stay true to their word.

The shittiest thing Pitaya’s done to HB, as far as we can tell, is threatening her kingdom, burning farms (implied but could be any other dragon too), and taking her throne in her absence. But something to note is that Pitaya doesn’t go out and hunt cookies specifically. Hollyberry admits this is true:

(And if Pitaya was one to not burn cookies in their houses, and instead… burn cookies outside of them, she might’ve brought that up, no?)

It seems like Pitaya, despite being one of the many dragons that plagued the Hollyberry kingdom, wasn’t the worst one to. They were definitely the main (or strongest) one, if the legend of Hollyberry defeating them got so much fanfare, but possibly not the worst… I’d wager the kingdom would be a little more hesitant to make Pitaya part of their culture if so. Who’d want to see replica taxidermies, statues, paintings, and get merchandise and plushies of the dragon who killed entire families? Why would Hollyberry (or any of her family) approve of that??

I don’t think Hollyberry would be this trusting out the gate if Pitaya was known to be anything else, especially someone who goes out backstabbing and hunting cookies for sport. They might be a nuisance, but they stay true to their word. Pitaya is honestly more reliable than Starscream.

(Something to note too: in the screenshots I’ve shared, they’re making a deal to help each other. Later on though, after Holly learns about the binding contract, she asks if that is what she and Pitaya made. Pitaya says no since it wasn’t in dragon tongue, thus showing that they were willing to take Holly on her word.)

And be for real /nm, when was the last time we saw a ship between rivals who had years and years and years of fighting each other, coming together as allies against a common threat?

Jumping ahead to the climax of the story, it does look like for a second that Pitaya was using Hollyberry to break her soul jam. But it’s not the entire truth - in order to defeat the Red Dragon (a facsimile of Pitaya made by DE), Holly has to sacrifice her soul jam that is partially bound to the contract Pitaya made (was tricked into making) with DE.

Pitaya was almost pulling a Beast move there, getting Hollyberry to agree to destroying her soul jam. BUT it’s not for any devious plot, it’s for protecting the cookies and kingdom they used to terrorize. They even do it in Dragontongue, meaning their oath can’t be broken. If Pitaya was that conniving and evil, would they have wanted to put themselves in a position like that?

Even when they and Holly find another way around the oath, they still stay true to their word, once again proving they don’t need to force themselves to do the right thing. They respect Holly, despite all the fighting they’ve done, and the countless times she’s defeated them (they are lowkey mad when she left after the war! They want her back!! They want their rival back to fight!! That was their whole thing in the story mode). Holly, versely, respects Pitaya’s strength and honesty. They might be the same dragon that took the throne, but they’ve changed, so much that they’re willing to give up their old menacing ways.

You’re right that Pitaya never apologizes for what they did, but what they chose to do in the Red Dragon story instead was arguably more powerful than what words could do. And Holly never forgives them, yes, personally I wouldn’t want her to—but regardless, she knows them well enough to know all the actions they take are genuine.

Now here’s what I have to say about Eternalberry:

There’s a reason why I’m not as uncomfortable with Eternalberry as I am other BxA ships, and it’s for the reason that Eternal Sugar didn’t hurt HB as much as the other Beasts with their ancients. Her tactics relied on psychological and emotional manipulation above anything else, and while HB was affected by it, she had a good support system with her to keep her from spiraling too far. Awakening even helped her understand how to talk to Eternal Sugar, arguably in a similar way to Pitaya!

But with the way ES reacts… how do we know she listened? Hollyberry does the hero thing by telling her she can change, but Sugar is so hellbent on keeping her that despite acknowledging for a second, she slips right back into doing anything she can to keep Holly there and make her hers.

When the paradise begins to crumble and Holly does her thing protecting Eternal Sugar despite everything, we get The Yuri Scene:

But note that Eternal Sugar is asking if Hollyberry changed her mind. Changed her mind on leaving most likely, all because she protected her from falling debris? That’s just what Hollyberry does, she protects those who she believes can possibly change! It’s certain HB believes ES can, but the question is if ES actually wants to.

Now- ES does say she’ll think about it! But it’s, for now, up to interpretation. Was she really promising to do that, or was she too lovestruck by what Holly just did to say anything but yes? (It’s really funny to me to imagine that she simply yes ma’amed Holly, because whoa… woman just protected her.., awoogah!!!!!)

Personally, this strikes me as more one-sided than Hollytaya. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall ES saying sorry either. She did lighten up after listening to Holly, but she was too lovestruck to really do anything else. Well, beside make the garden prettier for her return… but that’s ES assuming Holly will return, which as Holly says, depends on whether or not ES commits to changing the same way Pitaya did.

If the other BxA ships like Mysticcacao, Burningcheese, and Shadowvanilla were closer to Eternalberry in how the beast was actively encouraging the ancient’s happiness and comfort in exchange for their company—not threatening them or hurting them or psychologically tormenting them first thing—then I’d probably be more comfortable with them. It helps that ES’s whole thing is happiness, so there was no incentive for her to really get into Hollyberry’s head until she started doing what she didn’t want, which was try to leave.

I don’t want Holly to forgive ES either, because the stuff she did was unforgivable. But if people can look past that and construct ideas for how they’d come together as partners, then people who like Hollytaya can do the same!

You’re right in how Sugar and Pitaya are similar, just different antagonists with different methods and different ways Hollyberry overcame them. For me, and I’m sure others who like Hollytaya, it’s the fact the two of them came together as allies despite everything, and all that I said above.

There’s one thing Hollytaya has over Eternalberry though, and that’s the fact Pitaya became an ally. The two of them worked together to stop a common enemy, and in the process, understood each other a little more. It’s a foundation us Hollytaya fans like to run with, and a very good launchpad for any hero x villain/rival x rival ship. Holly understood ES, but they haven’t had enough time to really work things out. Holly told ES that she’d give her a chance if she fixes herself, and that made ES go from desperate and angry to eerily calm really fast… but who knows if that was because she was actively listening, or because the Hollyberry she loves (or loves the idea of) shone through? I wouldn’t put it above ES to love the idea of Hollyberry instead of her - keep in mind how she was elated whenever HB did anything but be the strong-willed defender of her people, ready to take on any challenge including ES’s mentality and methods themselves.

And again: I don’t dislike Eternalberry (bc don’t get me wrong, I love me a good toxic yuri situationship!), I just prefer Hollytaya. There’s a whole lot of juice in a ship between ES and HB that can be explored, but I prefer the character development Holly had with Pitaya and the rival x rival dynamic. They’ve known each other for much longer too, enough for there to be more juice than Eternalberry, at least for me. I don’t see Hollytaya as one sided either, there’s a mutual respect between them that can turn into mutual feelings for each other.

If you prefer Eternalberry over Hollytaya, that’s fine! I’m not going to dislike people for shipping them, or any BxA for that matter. I just hope I helped you (and anyone else) understand my thought process is all! I went off on a ramble, so hopefully all of this makes sense and is easy to read. Sorry if it’s not 🥹

[ao3scrapesearch]

Hiya! I know it's been a little while but I just wanted to let you know I finally got around to making the web version of that fic poisoning tool I made about a month ago. It's at https://tricksofloki.github.io/ficpoison.html if you're interested :)

OHOHOHO!

Alright, I gave this a little test on my own fic over here. Quick little review/notes for anyone interested! (But the tl;dr is that I approve based on my initial review of the original code and based on using this web tool to automate running the code.)

This version is super easy to use. I'll be honest; I was struggling trying to figure out how to run the code locally before because that is not a coding language I personally use, and this website takes out all of the hard part of doing that. You need to do the one time task of creating a work skin to enable the "poison" CSS used, and you need to make sure that work skin is enabled for any work you're going to use this on. The code to put into your work skin is available at the link. If you already have a work skin you use, you can just add this class to it. (I think the tutorial I linked to does a good job walking you through how, but I'm open to doing a tutorial on this blog if anyone wants that.)

If you're poisoning an existing fic, first have a backup copy. Once you poison it, that copy is going to be annoying to UN-poison if you ever want to, so you should keep a private copy on your PC or phone or wherever so you have the unpoisoned version available. Once you do this, your copy on AO3 is poisoned, and it would take a fair amount of effort to unpoison as the author. Upside: as the author, you can see all the CSS stuff in the background, so if you really need to unpoison a copy as the author with full access to it, it's not impossible. Just really annoying.

For reference, here's what I can see as the author with access to the edit page:

I can clearly see where the poison is if I really wanted to go back through and unpoison.

And here is what I can see in a copy scraped with nyuuzyou's code:

You can definitely see it's messed up by looking, but you don't see an active callout to where exactly the poison code is. Keep in mind that not every scraper uses the same code as nyuuzyou, and more sophisticated code may pull something more sophisticated than the plain text from nyuuzyou's tool. Other scrapers may be pulling fics with the formatting and everything, and I don't know exactly what that output looks like. Depending on what their output is, if they can see the class for the poison, they can pretty easily code something to remove it. That's me being overly conservative, I suspect. I haven't heard of any scrapers who have bothered with anything more than plain text, and this isn't an issue unless they're grabbing the full HTML. (Translation: From what I know, this is NOT an issue. Yet. So this is not a weakness of the poison tool. Yet.)

Based on the output, anyone who's doing a half decent job of cleaning up the data they scrape would toss my fic out of the dataset. It's full of what look like typos because the poison got placed mid-word, so it looks like I just suck at writing. If your goal is to get tossed out of the dataset, this is perfect. If a scraper isn't paying attention at all, you can contribute some really terrible training data if they leave your fic in the set because your poisoned fic is going to be full or words that don't even exist thanks to the word placement.

As far as using the tool, I used an existing fic. I went into the edit page for the chapter, scrolled to the bottom and left the text editor on the default HTML mode. I copied everything in that box. (Easy method: click into the box where you can type out the fic, and press "Ctrl" and "A" to select all, then "Ctrl" and "C" to copy.) I went to the tab with all-hail-trash-prince's tool, and I pasted it into the box on the left.

I clicked "Apply poison" and the poisoned fic appeared in the right box. I copied the poisoned fic from the right box, went back to my fic on AO3 with my custom work skin already enabled, and I pasted the poison fic in place of the original fic. I clicked the preview button to make sure it would look normal, and it did. So I clicked to update the chapter with the poison block included.

I loaded the chapter with the default Microsoft screen reader turned on, and it didn't read any of the poison data, only the real fic that is visible on the screen, so success there.

So that brings us to applying this to a brand new fic. For those, you're going to go through the motions of posting a fic as usual, but instead of clicking post when you're done, you're going to swap that text editing mode over to HTML and copy everything in there. Take it to the poison tool, paste it in, and grab your poisoned copy. Go back to AO3, make sure your poison work skin is enabled, and then replace the original fic with the poison fic, making sure to stay in the HTML editing mode while you do.

(Sneaky quick edit after posting: sometimes the tool leaves you with a dangling <p> or </p> or <em>. Make sure you always preview the chapter after poisoning it, and you can go back in to the rich text editor to delete any of the floating tags that were accidentally put in by the poison.)

The last downside I notice is that your word count is immediately wrong. My 34k fic looks like a 43k fic after poisoning the first 16k words. Technically, you don't have to tell people the true word count of your fic but like. That feels a little rude to the reader, so I think it would be kind to briefly put the true word count either at the bottom of your summary or in your first author's note.

To me, the downsides of having to create a custom work skin (that trash-prince has kindly already written for everyone) and having the wrong word count displayed... are nothing. In comparison to having my fic be easy to scrape, I'll take those slight downsides any day. From what I know of the current scraping landscape, this is a reasonably effective way to make your fic useless to anyone who scrapes it because people are out there that will be scraping AO3 again.

I'm curious to hear anyone else's thoughts if they check this tool out or try it for themselves, so don't be shy! I'm one person, so maybe I can't catch everything. If you're seeing something that I'm not, I want to hear about it.

And if anyone wants a more visual step by step, you are welcome to yell my way. If this text post is clear enough for everyone, I won't bother, but if a more visual walkthrough will help anyone, then I'm happy to do it!

EDIT: Just tossing in a summary of feedback I've seen from others below!

The tool is pulling from a list of most popular English words, which means it may add inappropriate verbiage to G-rated fics. See this ask for info. trash-prince has made adjustments based on the initial words spotted, but please kindly report any other concerning poison words you find, particularly slurs and other wording that cannot be interpreted in a SFW way.

[darkshrimpemotions]

Was talking to some WWDITS friends and had a Realization. This is a synthesis of a lot of conversations that I've had over the past year or so, so I'll try to credit any of my friends who put specific pieces together for me.

In the early seasons, Nandor both casually touches Guillermo and allows a level of easy familiarity and touchiness from Guillermo that we see him shy away from in later seasons. I had just assumed this changed because Nandor found out Guillermo was a vampire killer, but now I'm rethinking that assumption in light of season 6.

Nandor has NEVER been afraid of Guillermo. His reaction to his little familiar being a vampire killer has mostly been amusement or excitement. He gets a kick out of it! He thinks it's cool! He even brags about it. And he demonstrates multiple times (3x01, 5x10 for example) that he trusts Guillermo with his life.

So what if that's not the reason? Given what @karofsky and others have pointed out about the constant camera checking and the comments from Nandor in 6x11 about being glad the cameras will be gone soon, given how touchy Nandor is in general with the people he cares about as both karofsky and @bom-beii pointed out to me, given how Guillermo KEEPS going back in for affection despite getting rebuffed, like it's something he was used to getting from Nandor and forgets is not okay anymore... (I genuinely can't remember who said that first but it's an EXCELLENT point, like who keeps seeking affection from someone who never gives it and has never given it? Most people would give up and be afraid to ask anymore!).

What if Nandor becomes less and less comfortable with this level of casual intimacy in front of the cameras as he becomes more and more aware of how much he craves it and how important it is to him? From Guillermo specifically?

Like before Nandor started realizing his feelings, touching Guillermo was no big deal. But the second his feelings for Guillermo really started to assert themselves, he started realizing how much more he wanted and started pulling away because of it? (Thank you @badgerswake for yes-anding me on this!)

I mean, we see via Marwa in 4x06 how MUCH Nandor wants to say sweet things to Guillermo, touch Guillermo, cuddle him and kiss him, and tell him how important he is. "I don't know what I would do without you," she says. And once she touches him, it's like she can't STOP, like she has too many feelings to express in a single hug or kiss. And how many little moments do we see Nandor reach for Guillermo's hand only to then jerk away like he's affronted at the touch HE initiated?

I wonder when Nandor realized if he ever embraced Guillermo he would be unable to stop? And I wonder when he decided that was something he wanted to keep just for THEM, not the cameras? I'd say sometime in mid-season 2.

TL;DR: With the cameras gone, Guillermo is never getting anything done again unless he can do it with Nandor hanging off his body and whimpering any time Guillermo stops playing with his hair. I, for one, wish him a very get cuddled forever.

[not-ishmael]

A Revised (not so) Brief Study Into The Nature Of Deltarune

Disclaimer: This is a revised version of a theory I came up with back in 2022, having played just the first two chapters. Now I'll take into account chapters 1 to 4.

TL;DR:

For some time I've been quite intrigued by the appearance of some very particular leitmotifs that Undertale's and Deltarune's OSTs have in common. This took me down a rabbit hole that brought me to the realization that it's quite possible that DR Sans and UT Sans are one in the same, and the Reset Theory on Deltarune is probably right.

This forces me to believe that Deltarune is a prequel from the perspective of the characters, and a spiritual sequel from the perspective of the Soul/Player.

The Pre-Sequel Theory

First and foremost, pardon my English. It's not my first language and sometimes I mess up.

Secondly, this is a LONG post. There's a lot –a LOT– of text and no images at all to ease the reading. I advice jumping into it only if you don't have anything better to do for a bit. The PDF I first wrote this on is 6 and a half pages long.

Index:

Motivations.

Clues in Undertale.

Clues in Deltarune.

The Delta Rune.

Blood.

Conclusions.

Problems with the theory.

1 Motivations:

I've always been fascinated by soundtracks and ever since Undertale came up, its soundtrack wasn't an exception.

More recently I've been a bit more focused on the leitmotifs that Toby Fox uses in both Undertale and Deltarune. As many people noticed, they share a lot of common themes. For many of them it's easy to understand why (for instance, for common character's themes, like Sans', or the theme for Justice) but for some others it's not that simple.

Assuming that this commonality in themes was proof of a direct relationship between the games, I tried to study its nature and what elements outside the soundtrack can be used as evidence of this connection. This brought me to Sans ,because of course it did.

Trying to validate these assumptions took me down the rabbit hole that theory crafting around Sans has always been, and the musical side of my reasoning ended up being but as small part of the whole proofing. Regardless, I'm quite happy with the result, albeit it's not free of problems that I'll address and discuss at the end of the post.

With that out of the way, let's begin by talking about small details that Undertale gives us, and how it hints us that its past is somehow connected to Deltarune:

2 Clues in Undertale:

There’s a lot of non-music related hints that point towards a possible connection between both games in Undertale. Here's a summary of all the hints found within this game:

To begin with, there's what we know about Sans' backstory:

Both him and Papyrus appeared one day in Snowdin, seemenly out of nowhere.

In Sans’ lab there’s a broken machine and a poorly drawn picture of 3 people we don’t recognize, with the words ”don’t forget” written on it.

Sans insists a lot about about how he gave up trying to go back (somewhere, sometime, or both).

On the other hand, there’s the famous Gaster’s Entry 17, that could imply some knowledge of the Dark Fountains by the former Royal Scientist. Another Gaster related piece of evidence is goner Clam Girl. Soon before the release of Deltarune Chapter 1, in the Switch version of the game, Clam Girl would turn into a goner and say that the time to meet this Suzy ”... is fast approaching”, before disappearing with the sound Mystery Man makes when disappearing himself. Although Suzy is not written the same way as Susie, there’s no reason to believe that Clam Girl is not talking about Deltarune’s Susie. This not only hints to Undertale and Deltarune being connected, but to Gaster being behind the whole connection, since she turns into a goner sprite and disappears the same way Mystery Man does. I know Mystery Man is not confirmed to be Gaster, but it’s definitely related to him in someway.

There must be something going on with Papyrus as well, since he’s Sans’ brother and comes to Snowdin with him, but in Undertale he doesn’t seem to be as knowledgable as Sans. Since Papyrus doesn't bleed, as does Sans, maybe they're different in some way, and don't share as big a past as previously thought.

2.1 Sans’ lines during combat:

During the fight against Sans, nearing the end of the Genocide Route, we get some snippets of his backstory within his lines of dialogue. He begins, after the Player’s first attack, by saying:

our reports showed a massive anomaly in the timespace continuum. timelines jumping left and right, stopping and starting...until suddenly, everything ends. heh heh heh... that's your fault, isn't it?

We don’t know who is he working with, but it seems they know very well about the power to control the timeline, since they were monitoring it.

Sans continues with:

knowing that one day, without any warning... it's all going to be reset.

look. i gave up trying to go back a long time ago. and getting to the surface doesn't really appeal anymore, either. cause even if we do...we'll just end up right back here, without any memory of it, right?

to be blunt...it makes it kind of hard to give it my all.

In these lines we get a bit more information. Sans is –understandably– depressed about the whole reset situation, but mentions ”going back” to somewhere. We know it’s not somewhen because he doesn’t remember earlier timelines –besides the occasional déjà vu– and it’s not the Surface, since he mentions it right after that line. So, where else would Sans be trying to go back to? It can’t be anywhere in Undertale's universe, since he can move freely through the Underground –even through teleportation– and he specifically states that it’s not the Surface. Thus, it can only mean somewhere outside this universe.

A bit after that he continues with:

all i know is... seeing what comes next... i can't afford not to care anymore.

What does he mean by ”seeing what comes next”? He doesn’t know the future, nor what the Player did in other timelines. So, what is he talking about? Back in 2022 I had no clue what he could be referring to. Now I'm inclined to think of the Roaring, or the End of the Prophecy.

2.2 Sans’ secret lab:

After Sans gives the Silver Key –which happens to be a reference to a book about timetravel by H.P. Lovecraft– to the Player we can access his Secret Lab, hidden underneath his house. Inside of it we find:

A covered up broken machine.

Blueprints for a machine written in un- readable symbols.

A badge.

A photo album with:

A picture of Sans, happy, with other people the Player doesn’t recognize.

If the Player already fought Asriel: A second picture appears, showing Sans, Frisk and their friends.

After the v1.001 patch of the game, if the Player has talked to Clam Girl and knows of Suzy, from the back of the photo album sticks out a poorly drawn picture of three smiling people with the words ”Don’t Forget” written on it.

The first three items, although interesting, don’t give us much to work with. The machine is covered up and the blueprints are unreadable. The badge could become another huge hint in the future, if during Deltarune’s festival Sans happens to win a badge for winning at something. But this is purely speculation so I won’t be taking it into account –for now–.

The pictures and the drawing, on the contrary, give us much more information. Let's discuss them a bit more in depth:

2.2.1 The photo album:

By the time the Player gets the Silver Key, possibly after the battle with Asriel, they (and Frisk) have met every main character in Undertale’s story. Thus, the people in the first picture, who neither the Player nor Frisk recognize, can’t be anyone we know. They could be random people from other places in the Underground Frisk hasn’t met –although, from a storytelling perspective, this doesn’t make much sense– or they could be from Deltarune's universe -which makes a lot more sense storywise-.

Furthermore, there’s the poorly drawn picture. Since this picture only appears after talking to goner Clam Girl, a character heavily tied to Deltarune -specifically, to one Deltarune Character-, and it has the words ”Don’t forget” –words that don't mean anything special in Undertale, but are extremely important an present in Deltarune from the very beginning– written on it, it’s safe to assume that the three poorly drawn characters are a trio from Deltarune. Due to Frisk not recognizing them, they have to be characters that only appear on Deltarune. What trio of characters do we know from Deltarune that fit these characteristics? I’m fairly sure Kris and Susie are two of the three, but the third is a bit more complicated. My first suspect was that it was Ralsei but, since he’s a darkner and he can't go into the lightworld, it can't be him. My other candidate are either Noelle or Dess, since Berdly dies in the Snowgrave route of Chapter 2 –and Toby Fox likes to keep all possible endings as canon– and we don’t know of any other important lightners that don't appear in Undertale as well.

2.3 Darker, yet darker:

Gaster's Entry 17 states:

ENTRY NUMBER 17, DARK, DARKER, YET DARKER, THE DARKNESS KEEPS GROWING, THE SHADOWS CUTTING DEEPER, PHOTON READINGS… NEGATIVE THIS NEXT EXPERIMENT, SEEMS VERY, VERY INTERESTING… WHAT DO YOU TWO THINK?

At the beginning of Chapter 3, Ralsei explains to Susie that the Dark World is what happens to reality in the total abstence of light. When it's darker than dark. Darker, yet darker. So dark you could take away the light that wasn't there: photon readings... negative.

It's now that we can say, with absolute certainty, that Entry 17 talks about opening a Dark Fountain within Undertale's Universe. And Gaster, to whom we talk to outside the Deltarune chapters, is responsible for it.

I don't really like to get into Gaster while theory crafting. Sans is enough of a controversial rabbit hole for me. But after Ralsei's exposition in Chapter 3, I can't look the other way.

The connections between WD Gaster and Sans run deep. Not only are they 2 out of the 3 characters whose speech is characterised by the font that names them, but UT Sans' infamous attack is called "Gaster Blaster". Furthermore, it's known that Sans and Alphys shared a past, and Gaster could be this missing link between the two of them. Could it be that Gaster is referring to them at the end of Entry 17? Hard to say, and we can only speculate. But it would make sense that Sans, if he had come from Deltarune's Universe, would try to study Dark Fountains with the Royal Scientist and his pupil, as well as the passage of time, as evidenced by his comments during the fight against him at the end of Undertale's Genocide Route. It would also explain what he meant by "i gave up trying to go back a long time ago". He gave up researching the Dark Fountains after Gaster was consumed by the experiment and scattered through time and space.

3 Clues in Deltarune:

Back in 2022 I had only played Chapters 1 and 2, a quarter of the game. Even though this wasn't much content to work with, the leitmotifs Toby Fox used gave us a lot of information.

3.1 A brief introduction to leitmotifs:

*This part is skippable if you know what a leitmotif is*

For those who don’t know, a leitmotif is a small piece of melody that appears many times in a composition, and is associated to a character, a place, or an idea. Examples of this are the main themes of characters: a simple, recognizable melody that is associated to a specific character. For instance, the main melody in Nyeh Heh Heh!, which would be Papyrus’ leitmotif, or the common themes in Spear of Justice and Hammer of Justice, which would be Justice's leitmotif.

Soundtracks are rigged with leitmotifs, and neither Undertale’s nor Deltarune’s soundtracks are an exception. Since each one is associated to a specific character, place or idea, the use of the same ones in both games is something to keep in mind.

3.2 Leitmotifs that appear in both games:

The first song that plays inside Deltarune's , in Chapter 1, is Beginning, which has 2 leitmotifs in it: Once upon a time –from Undertale–, and Don’t Forget, –from Deltarune–. This second leitmotif appears in several other songs in all chapters.

The song that plays in the menu after you finish Chapter 1 is called Before the Story, which has the exact same melody as in Once upon a time. This leitmotif is one of the most –if not he most– used in Undertale’s soundtrack. For me, it’s kind of the ”Undertale theme”, for how much it appears in the game –same as Don't Forget would be Deltarune's theme–.

There are some other Undertale leitmotifs in Deltarune’s OST that I won’t be taking into consideration. These are the character’s leitmotifs, like Sans’, and other that represent important emotions like Determination, Justice, Despair and Hope –These leitmotifs are a bit difficult to recognize if you’re not deep into the music side of the games. Determination can be heard, among others, in Undertale’s Determination and Deltarune’s Rude Buster; Despair corresponds to the melody in Undertale’s Burn in Despair, and appears in Your Best Nightmare, Vs. Susie, at Queen’s basement, right before the Spamton NEO fight, and again in Chapter 3's Bit Roots; Justice is heard in Undertale's Spear of Justice and in Deltarune's Hammer of Justice, and Hope is sometimes called ”Snowdin’s theme”, which is used in Undertale’s Snowdin Town and Hopes and Dreams (thus why I prefer to call it Hope’s leitmotif) and in Deltarune’s A Town Called Hometown–. These leitmotifs being in both games is to be expected, since they either represent common characters or common emotions to both games, and Toby likes to reuse leitmotifs from old projects, so they're not really relevant to the theory.

Going back to the theory, the use of the words ”Don’t Forget” as a title for the most present leitmotif in Deltarune is a bit on the nose, taking into account the poorly drawn picture in Sans’ Secret Lab. The soundtrack acts as a constant reminder to not forget –pun intended– that drawing. But this isn’t the only insinuation Toby left in the game’s music. There’s another, much obscurer, clue: the name of the song Before the Story. Since it plays at the menu only after you play Chapter 1, it can’t be referring to ”before the story” of Deltarune, since that story has already begun. So, what if the Story is Undertale’s? If so, since it uses the most important leitmotif of Undertale in a song called ”Before the Story”, this would imply that Deltarune’s story happens before Undertale's.

Back in 2022 this was enough proof for me to be convinced of this theory. And yet, in 2025, it rained.

3.2.1 It's Raining Somewhere Else.

What is there to say about this. What is there to add. In 2015 Toby told us that It was Raining Somewhere Else. Ten years later he showed us where.

In Undertale this song is directly related to UT Sans' relationship with UT Toriel, and how this friendship is the reason he helps us throught the Underworld. In Deltarune, however, this songs plays after we leave the Church at the end of Chapter 4, on the way home. Nevertheless, it's back home that we learn of the friendship DR and DR Toriel have.

Not only the titles, not only the melodies –althought in Deltarune it sounds distant, almost like an old memory brought back by the smell of the rain–, but the context of these two songs connects them between games. Moreover, a slowed down version of the song can be heard at UT Sans' Secret Lab, as if the "Don't Forget" message inside it wasn't enough of a giveaway.

3.3 Non-musical clues:

How the Player interacts with the world seems to also imply a connection between games. Specially those lines that point to the Player knowing characters –or things about characters– that Kris doesn't know yet. For example, the first time we meet DT Sans there's the option to tell him that we're happy to see him again, something that makes sense for a Player that has already played Undertale, but doesn't for two characters who just met, as Sans points out.

This in and of itself is not enough to prove that the games are both a direct sequel and prequel of each other but, in combination with everything else, it heavily add to that idea.

Besides these interactions, which could be taken just as silly easter eggs, like the annoying dog appearances, there's another non-musical clue which brings us back to UT Sans: the Warp Doors, which look just like UT Sans' bedroom door, fire animation and all. What's more, Mystery Man's door in Undertale uses the same sprite as well.

I'm certain that Undertale's Underworld is not a Dark World, since there are no Dark Fountain to be found, nor darkners, the style of the menu is the same as in Deltarune's Light World, and to break The Barrier you need 7 souls, not just one. This complicates things, for the Warp Doors only appear inside Dark Worlds in Deltarune. But then again, in Deltarune, monsters seem to only possess magic powers inside Dark Worlds, while in Undertale all of them have this gift.

4 The Delta Rune:

Both the appearance of the Delta Rune in the two games and its name are big indicators of the connection between games. Even though in Undertale it’s not well known what its original meaning was, there’s a prophecy that sounds remarkably alike to that of the Delta Rune Legend from Deltarune. In Undertale there are two interpretations: either the Angel will murder all monsters, or free them all from the Underground. Additionally, in Deltarune, the Legend Ralsei tells us says that the Angel is to be defeated by three heroes: two lightners -a human and a monster- and a darkner.

Since the Delta Rune is older than written history in Undertale and it’s original meaning was lost to time, that one of the 2 interpretations for this symbol is so close to the Legend Ralsei gives us, with an evil Angel instead of a benevolent one, could mean that, originally, both Runes had the same meaning behind.

5 Blood & Magic:

Back in 2022 this part of the post began with:

TL;DR: As always, blood seems to be the biggest issue around Sans’ theories. To summarize, unless we get undeniable proof that DR monsters do bleed in some way before turning into dust, UT Sans bleeding could be a huge weak point for this theory.

Welp. We got it. Susie bled.

It’s fair to say that UT Sans does bleed in Undertale's Genocide Route, before turning into dust outside the screen. And he’s the only Undertale monster that does. We know he bleeds because he does it from the mouth, as well as the ribs, far from where the Player cuts him, which would only happen with regular bleeding around a digestive system rather than with ketchup stored within his rib cage.

Three years ago this was a huge nuisance, but now, knowing that a Deltarune monster can and does bleed, it' becomes another huge piece of evidence for this theory.

However, there's an issue. At the end of Chapter 1 a monster –not The Monster Kid– asks Kris if it hurts to be made out of blood, implying that other monsters don't bleed. This looks to be in direct contradiction to what we see Susie say (i.e. "Everybody bleeds") and do. As of now, I've no idea how to explain this line of dialogue.

5.1 Magic:

Deltarune monsters having magic powers is a highly debated topic. Nevertheless, Sans does teleport in Chapter 4, appearing both at his shop and at the Cattenheimer's home. Furthermore, it's implied that Catti holds some magical powers, which makes it all the more interesting that Sans teleports to her front yard.

6 Conclusions:

With all this in mind, I’m quite sure that, at the end of Deltarune, Sans will end up being stuck in the Undertale universe, possibly using the machine he keeps covered up in his lab. Since Papyrus doesn’t seem to be much different to any other monster in the Underground I don’t think he comes from Deltarune’s universe, so I fear a tragic end for that Papyrus, specially after his dissappearance after Chapter 3.

This ending would make sense of the whole ”Your choices don’t matter” thing. The Weird Route seemed to contradict this statement but, if just Sans is going to Undertale, whatever you do on Deltarune’s Universe won’t matter to Sans’ end. Undertale’s story is already written and the end we got will remain untouched, as Toby said. It also implies that our actions don't matter to Deltarune's end either.

We now know that the End of the Prophecy is a tragic one, as evidenced by Ralsei being terrified of what's to come, and Susie being enraged and in denial. A tragic end would also align with Sans' depression in Undertale, and him being the only one to come from Deltarnue's universe.

But, if Deltarune is a prequel, how is it that the Player recognizes the characters that both games have in common, and it’s advised that the game is played after Undertale? I believe that Deltarune is a prequel from Sans’ perspective, and a spiritual sequel from the Player’s. The Player, being the meta-being that it is in both games, doesn’t need to abide by the same temporal rules the characters are forced to follow. Thus, there's no contradiction in Deltarune being a prequel to Undertale. A Pre-Sequel.

7 Problems with this theory:

UT Papyrus seems to not know anything about his brother’s possible past in another universe, and acts as if they had been together since forever. They both appeared one day in Snowdin and his past seems as mysterious as Sans’, but they can’t be directly related since Papyrus doesn’t bleed.

There's a contradiction between Susie bleeding and the monster kid asking Krist if it hurts to be made out of blood.

I don’t know how will Sans get to Undertale’s world (my guess is Gaster, but he’s a bit of an easy-way-out in theory crafting).

Grillby’s. Sans’ convenience store, ’Sans, appears to have the same façade as Grillby’s in Undertale, with the name of Grillby rubbed off. This small detail is a possible proof against the sequel thesis, albeit it could just mean that Hometown had a Grillby’s before Sans’ convenience store and it closed down for some unknown reason.

Although some problems still remain, the list of issues with this theory has been greatly reduced after playing chapters 3 and 4. Furthermore, we now have great new pieces of evidence that point directly towards a connection between games.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Hello I have more Welsh questions I hope that’s okay!

As always, the Duolingo disclaimer because some of their choices seem suspect. Like the first word they made sure to teach me was draig and it did seem a little racist to suggest to me THIS IS GOING TO COME UP A LOT IN WALES YOU HAD BETTER LEARN IT. Of course maybe I’m racist for assuming that’s connected to the Welsh mysticism nonsense and not the flag, or maybe draig does come up often on the streets of Aberteifi. I am here to learn with an open mind and minimal ego.

Anyway. Question one is indeed about places.

1. How do you decide whether a place needs a y with it? I can’t seem to tell, some countries have it and some don’t which confuses this dumb American. Plus it seems like no cities have it?

2. Also on the topic of cities, I can understand that there are places in Wales that have English names and that some don’t. Looks like Abertawe : Swansea v Aberystwyth : Aberystwyth. Two parter - part one, why did some get renamed while others stayed Welsh? Part two, is it preferred to just use the Welsh name? I’m wondering what common practice/preference is.

3. On the topic of common practice, I have a question that I am desperately trying to make as inoffensive as possible because it’s really about the trustworthiness of Duolingo than anything else. But it’s teaching me words that I want to make sure are appropriate. Ysgrifenydd/ysgrifennyddes and gŵr tŷ/gwraig tŷ. Are these still appropriate to use?

Thank you so much! I know you’re not the Welsh ambassador to the internet (or are you??) so I appreciate you being so generous with everyone 💛

I am, of course, 100% the Welsh ambassador to the internet. Or at least, I work in the Tumblr consulate. Ignore the people who say I'm just some random with airs and graces, they're just jealous and you're not to listen.

Okay, so:

1. Definite Articles and Placenames. It's not so much a thing you need to work out grammatically as it is just... part of the name. This sometimes happens in English too - Netherlands is an acceptable country name now, but originally it would have been the Netherlands, just because that's what the name meant. The lands that are low lying.

Welsh just has more country names than English that mean something like that, I think. Some are the same, e.g. (the) Netherlands/(yr) Iseldiroedd; that's a fairly one to one translation, in fact. Some are the same, but a bit more literal than the English has become; Switzerland (the Land of the Swiss) has lost the "the" in English by now, but in Welsh it still clings on as y Swistir.

And then sometimes, we have a very different word for somewhere, but it's no longer clear what the fossilised grammar was. I suppose the biggest example of that is Scotland - yr Alban. It's a bit lost to time, now, but 'Alban' has the same Old Irish root there as the word 'Albion'. Why the definite article? Unknown.

But, we do it for smaller places too, including cities. Welshpool's Welsh name is y Trallwng, which means, like, "the boggy pool", and I suppose it was once a notable enough bog that it was THE bog when giving directions, so the article stayed. This also spills over into Wenglish - the Hafod and the Gower in/around Swansea should both more correctly be Hafod and Gower, but at some point it was THE hafod when giving directions, and the Gower is the abbreviation of the Gower peninsula.

Anyway: TL;DR it's just part of the name, rather than a grammatical choice.

2. Translated Placenames. Part 1:

The short of it is, "Did enough English people settle there that they needed an English name/ the Welsh became Anglicised?" That's usually the rule. Sometimes this meant Anglicisation (Caerdydd-Cardiff), sometimes a ropey-to-exact translation (Penybont - Bridgend), and sometimes a completely new name (Abertawe - Swansea), depending on how easy the Welsh was to say and whether or not there was feature of note that the English focused on.

Occasionally, though, you get the opposite - Wrexham was Wrexham first, and got Cymricised to Wrecsam. It's a rare example of an English city we nicked, see. Founded by the Saxon house of Mercia, on land they'd nicked from north Wales, and then the Welsh reclaimed the area and went 'Ooh, nice city, was this here before?' It's possible it was first called Caer Fantell in Welsh, but it was Gwrexham by the 13th century, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Part 2: You use the name in the language you're speaking, UNLESS it is under active contention for some reason. The national parks are currently pushing to only be known by their Welsh names, for example, ditto a few of the mountains; so, Eryri instead of Snowdonia, Bannau Brycheiniog instead of Brecon Beacons, and yr Wyddfa instead of Snowdon. Also, in recent years they started inventing English language names for villages in Gwynedd for English tourists to feel more comfortable with, which has caused the outrage you'd expect; but those won't be coming up on Duolingo.

With that said, it's sometimes a Welsh Nash signal to only use the Welsh placenames even in English, so don't be surprised if you see people do it.

3. Appropriate words. Not sure what you mean by appropriate here, but I'm guessing you mean because they're gendered terms?

Welsh is a gendered language; that's how it works. In the modern day, there is a slide towards a lot of the old 'feminine' endings being dropped in favour of the masculine becoming used as a gender neutral term, but that's still under development; officially and formally, you still gender it.

I certainly prefer Not doing that. My first two graduate jobs were Conservation Officer and Conservation Manager; my preference was to use Swyddog Cadwraeth and Rheolwr Cadwraeth in Welsh. But others (usually older generations) would write Swyddoges Gadwraeth and Rheolwraig Gadwraeth sometimes, which I personally thought was a bit old fashioned and patronising.

But, I know middle aged women who prefer it, because it makes it clear that it's a woman doing the job. One person's oppression is another's liberation and all that. Also, cis though I am, I am admittedly not always comfortable with the strict trappings of gender, and that probably plays a part.

Bonus answer: dragons are the national animal and very much a symbol of identity, so that's just them being cute lol

Anyway! Thank you so much for trying to learn Welsh! Croeso a diolch.

[wolkentage]

Meet My Couple Valentine's Challenge 🤍

@misspepeshi tagged me in her new challenge and I had so much fun doing this!

Alexander's and Nico's relationship is a mess and I'm living for it. They originally met through Gr!ndr, where Nico was looking for a one-night-stand to distract himself from his upcoming job interview. tl;dr Nico lied about having experience with BDSM and pestered Alexander until he eventually agreed to meet. Alexander figured out Nico had been lying to him within 30 minutes and the whole night ended in a disaster with Nico being utterly embarassed yet completly heads over heels after being lectured about the risks of his actions by Alexander for another 20 minutes. (We stan a responsible dom in this house.) They agreed to simply forget about the whole fiasco and block each other's numbers – only for them to run into each other the next day for Nico's job interview.

Turns out Alexander is none other than the CEO himself who wasn't aware of their weird situation, either. (Anything HR-related is handled by his twin sister). Nico did get the job and they both try to be professional and don't speak about what happened that night but of course things aren't as easy since Nico secretly has a huge crush and now it's often like walking on egg shells when they're in the same room. Doesn't help that Alexander's son is a huge fan of Nico (kids, aren't they lovely?) and constantly invites him over for dinner and other shared activities.

I'm tagging @sadraccoon061 @cawthorntales @herzblau @dandylion240 @sugarcream-sims @simscici @tikay21 and @onestormeynight

What is the challenge about? The challenge is inspired by the "Understand My Ship in 5 Minutes" challenge. It is very similar, but Miss Pepeshi wanted to make a version that was solely dedicated to our beautiful sims!

What do I have to do? Easy! Select a Meet My Couple template of your choice, and fill it up! To differentiate between your sims, you can use different colors!

How can we share and see each other's challenges? It is important that you use the hashtags #meetmycouple or #meetmycouplechallenge, so we can all see your couple and share it forward! Don't forget to tag others on your post! Feel free to tag me as well. This way, others will get to see your couple (or couples) and get to participate as well! Keep it going!

[suzukiblu]

How did you spread your Ko-fi/ comms? I've had a Ko-fi of my own set up for a little over a month now but I'm struggling to get any commissioners. Do you have any tips?

disclaimer: This is what worked for specifically me and my specific situation/style/etc and I don't know your specific audience or how you typically interact with them, so take or leave what I say in terms of what seems like useful or helpful information to your own situation. I do have some more specific advice for you in the back half, just I'm gonna be starting out with the "this worked for me" stuff.

Anyway actual answer/info behind the cut, hah. God, this is so long and only mostly organized, I apologize, I just get INTO it sometimes when I get asked this kind of thing.

First and foremost, for clarity's purpose and all: I have been on the internet for literally twenty-five years and am WELL established in fandom, as well as someone who has been reasonably popular and/or well-known in multiple fandoms on multiple sites at multiple times. There are literally people following me who were reading my stuff ten or fifteen or even the full twenty-five years ago. Given your profile says you're in your twenties I may have LITERALLY been online longer than you have been alive, haha.

So like, I've been at this a minute and have a LOT of experience in engaging and maintaining an active audience because that's a thing I value having and therefore do my best to encourage; it just works best for my process. So if you're feeling a little vexed with the response you're getting, know that this is all coming from a much-experienced Old(tm) who has had issues getting commissions and attention several times themselves and just currently has a decent chunk of followers and a very communicative "yes and" writing style and is, as a writer, WILDLY prolific. Like. WILDLY prolific. Genuinely, I am not trying to brag or talk myself up here or anything, I just straight-up feel like I haven't written at all if I don't break 2k in a day ( and even 2k feels kinda low to me at this point ), and I write EVERY day.

Literally. Literally every day. Like I missed two days after I got COVID and solo-drove four hours and needed to sleep for a week to recover, and I missed one day at the beginning of this month because I was real burned out from writing 32k more than usual last month and just needed to veg for a day. That's it, that is it all. Those are literally the only days that I have not written in like, the past SEVERAL months. Like, the high end of "several", to be clear. Occasionally I have a lighter day and only write a few hundred words, but typically I do somewhere in the range of 2.5-3.5k, and on my more productive days I can break 5 or 6k easy. That is the kind of person that you have asked for advice here, haha. 😅 So like . . . I'm low-key a freak, productivity-wise. Like I am the living embodiment of that one interview where George R.R. Martin is staring at Stephen King with visible fear in his eyes as the dude describes how many billions of pages he writes a day like it's no big.

tl;dr: I write SO. SO. MUCH. So much, and ALSO I have a backlog of something like two million words on AO3 and definitely hundreds of thousands more words under my tags list on here on top of that. People get a LOT of content when they get into me, I am MADE of content. I have built up a lot of momentum over time, that's just what's worked for me personally.

Also I'm cheap, ngl. I'm just--I'm very affordable, Ko-fi-wise. So I am sure that helps, considering!

ANYWAY. Some of this advice is not going to sound relevant to Ko-fi, but it is relevant to how I personally use Ko-fi, so yeah, here we go:

Always remember: everyone on the internet has social anxiety. Yes, even the people who don't actually have social anxiety. Just go into everything assuming most people you meet on here are gonna be shy or nervous or just feel awkward striking up a conversation with you out of the blue, especially if they've never really spoken to you before. It doesn't matter if they don't actually have social anxiety, thinking that way just puts you in a mindframe to be mindful when you're talking to them and being mindful in your communication makes people more comfortable with things like messaging you with questions and the prospect of going through the commission process with you.

Generally just assume the best of people's intentions whenever possible, and when their intentions are clearly not the best, just move on and don't engage. It is a lose-lose situation; you are not gonna convince them of anything and you're just gonna look like a dick to people who don't have the context and leave a sour taste in their mouths. Which, long story short, people are just way more likely to enjoy your stuff and WAY more likely to commission you if you're putting your best foot forward whenever possible. I definitely try not to get too negative on here myself; like I'm not doing any toxic positivity or anything, just I am here to vent some feelings and make some friends and enjoy the process, and I wanna cultivate a setup where other people can benefit from that too.

Link. Link link link. How easy is it to find your Ko-fi link? Make it easier than that. Keep it in your pinned post and on the front page of your actual blog and in your back pocket and stapled to your sleeve. When you post a commission, link your commission info in the description. When you talk about your art in general, link your commission info in the body of the text--like for example, "I'm trying to use my Ko-fi more" or "I finished up my last commission, I have some slots open again". ( used my own Ko-fi links for reference here, obviously, hah, but specifically linking to your main page OR just straight to your actual commissions page are both useful options. linking your main page introduces you as a person more effectively, while linking straight to your commissions page removes a step for people and makes it easier for them to find the info they're looking for. )

Communicate! Remind people that your Ko-fi/your commissions exist every now and then. Like, definitely not daily or weekly, but depending on how often you update your blog in general, maybe once every month or couple of months give people a heads up if you've got commission slots open/available. That way they're not awkwardly peering at the pinned post you put up months ago wondering if you're still actively open or just forgot it was in your pinned, and also it gives a heads up to people who might've been thinking about or meaning to commission you that you're available for work.

Post consistently in general; not just about commissions or Ko-fi, obviously, just like making yourself available and open to people and hanging out WITH people. Answer as many asks as you have the spoons to. Talk about stuff you like and stuff you're excited by and into. Like obviously not everyone can do this but I personally post a lot on here and I definitely UPDATE a lot on here; generally speaking if someone swings by my blog once or twice a week, there's gonna be at least a few hundred to a few thousand words of new stuff for them to read ( or SEVERAL thousand, even ). Or to look at, when I'm feeling arty.

Answers asks and make personal posts. Like I'm not saying trauma-dump on your followers or use Tumblr like a diary, definitely, but it's a good idea to give people a bit of an idea about yourself in terms of things like talking about your dog being cute or if you're going to be out of town on vacation or how your process works or just new or different things that you're trying out/experimenting with/interested in. Bluntly put, you want people to remember you are a person who wants to hang out with them and not just a Content Generator to be "liked" and then scrolled on past, and you want to engage with them and try to talk to them when they talk to you and generally be, like, approachable. In my case I just do my best to assume the best of every interaction and try to notice who's regularly popping up in my notifs and remember what I can about them. This does not always work for me because my memory is swiss cheese, but I do what I can there because I very much appreciate people engaging with my stuff ( and also my me, haha ) and I think communicating that kind of thing to people usually makes them feel good, and in turn you feel better about what you're doing and how people are responding to your work, and then you're more motivated TO work and maybe they catch some mistakes for you or have good ideas that vastly, VASTLY improve what you had in mind. The circle of fandom! The life cycle of a WIP!!

Which leads us into: you need to be doing things that are very recognizably You(tm) and cannot just be picked up for free just any random anywhere. Which like, that can be an issue with fanart, obviously, because the internet is FULL of free fanart, so what you probably want is to be looking to court people who are looking for art of their fics/AUs or their own original characters. Like your style is very distinctive for sure, that's definitely a good thing, so leaning into your personal interpretations of characters is a good idea, and it does look like you're doing that with the stuff of yours I've seen. I would just say lean into your own designs and own little quirks of styling and stuff you really love to draw and go hard on all of it. Once you really feel it out, the stuff you are REALLY vibing with is the stuff that is gonna resonate with people the most significantly in the long run, in my experience. Even if it doesn't always get the same level of response as less niche stuff does, it'll very likely get a more DEVOTED response, and people who'll come back for more of it. I did not write so dang much of Darcy Lewis in my MCU days because her fans were uninvested in seeing new content for her, put it that way.

Also, I AM in fact cheap; I have a few different price options on my Ko-fi and two-thirds of them are five bucks or under. The nature of how I personally do Ko-fi means I'm adding words to already-established stories, though, so people are coming in invested and more willing to donate so they can find out what happens next. Which, like, is obviously not something that works with art commissions, unless you're doing something like "when I hit this donation goal I will draw the next page of this comic script I have written in thanks for hitting the goal". But honestly, sometimes doing a limited amount of projects and getting people interested/invested in said projects is more cost-effective in terms of your time and energy and less overwhelming than doing a million different things all at once. Plus it gets your audience more story to chew on in the long run and I have NEVER met anyone who complained about a fuller narrative happening to them.

Mind, I don't actually know if you're the comic-making type, comics are just the first example I thought of, but also you do have to make sure you're giving people enough content to be invested in to begin with. Sticking with the comic example, people aren't gonna donate to see more of a comic if they don't know they LIKE your comics, so doing some shorter ones and posting a nice selection of those first and THEN doing a donation goal is more respectful of your audience because you're clearly actively interested in them and want to make things you can share with them, not just, like, collect their Ko-fi donos, and at the same time it's also just better advertisement for you. Ethical marketing, basically; there's plenty of content you shared freely, and you're also posting the things that get crowdfunded for everyone to see and not paywalling anything, and ideally building some community and making some friends along the way. Which, like, obviously substitute whatever works for you for "comic" here; I personally just find having overarching narratives/stories/settings helps people get invested and enjoy themselves more with your stuff, and also be likelier to REMEMBER your stuff. Come up with an AU, do some little comics or illustrations in it or some design work for it. Just make a thing that is very specifically YOU and what you like.

On that note: get niche. Get weird. You REALLY don't wanna be making stuff that is not as You(tm) as possible and can just be picked up anywhere. You wanna make the kind of stuff where people go "I wanna see more like this, fuck, who else is even MAKING this, alright OP please do me a solid and have more of this on your blog--fuck YEAH you do, look at all this, okay I live here now". In fandom terms: yes, everyone loves Timkon, Timkon'll get likes, it'll probably even get comments, but if you really want to find the diehards who are gonna lock in and ENGAGE, you wanna make sure you also do the niche shit that you're telling yourself everyone else is gonna think is too weird or just not be interested in. Shut up, imposter syndrome, people LOVE weird! People WANT weird, this is fandom, we're a largely queer subculture that's reclaiming our modern mythologies from capitalism, we're not here for the normie shit! We'd be rereading canon again if we just wanted the normie shit!

Seriously, being openly weird and leaning into said weird is a VERY definite reason that people recognize and remember my writing as opposed to, like, just consuming it and moving on without even noticing there was an author involved. If people vibe real hard with the themes you get really into working with or really like the unique parts of your style/voice or appreciate the way you handle certain subjects/characters/weird niche shit, they're a lot likelier to remember you and either come back or just stick around from the start. Like attracts like and your "like" will be delighted to have found you, and you will get to enjoy the benefits of BEING found by your fellow niche weirdos and all be thriving together! Everyone wins!

Also, I have some more specifically tailored practical advice/critique that is based off my immediate reactions to what I saw when I clicked over to your blog/Ko-fi, which definitely take with a grain of salt because I am giving it without being familiar with your process/situation/audience and from a different position. I'm just trying to be less general and offer some stuff that might be more specifically useful to you. So like, please feel free to hit me up in DMs or asks if you wanna talk about any of this in more detail or get some clarification on anything I'm saying here, this is just what I've got from my initial impressions and off the dome.

Also-also, again, this is all based on what's worked for me personally, so I'm sure there's some stuff that might not be applicable to or just not vibe with you because of that. So like please don't take this as me trying to smack down what you've been doing so far or anything, I'm just trying to be thorough in building on it and also, like, my graphic design experience definitely slipped into some of this, hah.

So to start I took a quick look at your blog to see how easy it was to find your Ko-fi and then a quick peek at your Ko-fi itself to see how it was set up. I found your Ko-fi immediately, which was good! Having it in both your bio and your pinned is definitely the right idea. I did have to expand your bio to find the link that was listed in there, which not everyone will do while scrolling past, but that's just like, nitpicking on my part since you do have the pinned post directly beneath it. I just am very much "make literally everything as easy as possible for everyone ever in every possible way".

It'd probably be helpful to mention that you're open for commissions in the "about" on your Ko-fi's front page so people don't have to scroll too far or click any links to find that out/have that confirmed. You may also wanna either slim down the descriptions in your commissions listings or break them up into paragraphs; you wanna do your best to avoid big solid blocks of text because people are likelier to only skim those and therefore less likely to absorb the information.

Skimming is also bad because it means people are less likely to notice that something you're describing appeals to them, and are way MORE likely to end up confused. "Confused" ups the chances that they just decide they don't wanna bother you by asking for clarification, given they might feel stressed by asking or pressured to buy or just like they're bothering you.

Avoiding text blocks is also just gonna make your descriptions wayyyyy easier to read for people who are dyslexic or have vision problems or possibly didn't learn English as their first language ( depending on their fluency for that last one, obviously, but you never know so yeah ). Basically you wanna make the commission process as quick and effortless and A-to-B as possible for people; your goal is "how can I make this process as close to one-click shopping for people?" Your goal is to become the Occam's Razor of commissions.

Your promo sheet on Tumblr I'd say could be an issue in the sense that it's a little difficult to read; you want people to not have to think about it to clock it as what it is. I only immediately knew it was a commissions sheet because I went in looking for one, and you want people to INSTANTLY know it is a commissions sheet. Like, before they even process anything about it, they should have the instinctive recognition of "this is a commissions sheet" and be primed to read a commissions sheet.

The main issue I see is that the sheet's layout is pretty dense and lacks visual flow in its composition; the prices are scattered and the font on the header is hard to read at a glance; my reflexive assumption from the moment it took to recognize it as text and the overall layout of the graphic was that it was a border, not a header. And like, I figured it out like half a second later, yeah, but that first couple of seconds can disorient or confuse people or just make them just scroll by without stopping to read, because it's not a tall image and the image is ALWAYS your best chance to catch somebody's eye, especially when deliberately going for art commissions.

The first thing I actually read off the sheet was "X no NSFW GORE", which I was initially unclear on the meaning of and had to reread to realize what you meant, but either way is not the first thing you want me to read; it should definitely be on the sheet and very visible, but not positioned to be the first thing someone's eye goes to. It belongs off to the side in a lower corner or just over on the right-hand side. Right now it's too high and too emphasized in comparison to the actual header, which is very much what you WANT people reading first.

There's almost no negative space on the sheet and some of the example art you've included is shrunk down so small that it's REALLY hard to read unless you've seen the larger pieces before, so I think considering doing two or three complementing slides so you can spread out your offerings/pricing and make your examples bigger would really be helpful there. I think it's a really good idea to include multiple pieces as examples, it shows your range and makes it clear what people are gonna be getting for their money; that's definitely the way to go imo. You just also wanna be sure that people can see the details and get the full vibe of your art and the work you put into it. Like, I REALLY love that pic of Match you have down at the bottom, full disclosure I realize we have like never spoken but it is literally my phone background and has been since the day I first saw it ( my lock screen being the complementing Kon pic, natch ), but you can't see any of the cool little details I know are in it with it shrunk down that small. I wanna see his eyes and the detail in his hair and the phone cord wrapped around his throat and the heart freckles, I LOVE those dang heart freckles! And like, those are also interesting little quirks and creative things that will make people think, "oh, I like how that looks, if I commission this person I'll get a cool pose or creative styling or fun details out of it!", so they are definitely the kind of thing you should make sure to show off when you are showing off your work.

I personally tend to go for vertical posts over horizontal ones, given Tumblr is meant to be scrolled and it's more important that people's eyes get caught by something in the scrolling process than that your graphic expands across the screen in the best fit; a lot of people won't even click on the image to expand it anyway. You do want to make sure it'll stay readable if they DO click, of course, so I'd personally recommend stacking two or three horizontally-composed sheets on top of each other to make the POST'S composition vertical. Scrolling down is how people traverse this site; you want to lean into presentations that read well when they're being scrolled down.

The accompanying text below the actual sheet is also not as neatly balanced/formatted as it could be, so it looks less . . . hm, less INTENTIONAL, maybe? Less thought-out than it could be, at least. It makes it harder to read at first glance and doesn't give off a professional vibe. Using bullet points or indents or headers can help with that kind of thing and just make it easier for the eye to follow along and for people to read/focus on what you're saying. ESPECIALLY when you're doing promos/price lists you want to have the most stripped-down and functional version of the text you can manage. You wanna get your point across as clear and succinct as you can and make sure there's negative space around your text so the words can be read quickly and the text itself can breathe, visually-speaking. Negative space is your friend.

Yes I realize talking about the VISUALS of text is a little weird but listen man, you're an artist, you get what I'm saying here. You wanna make the actual first-glance look of your text aesthetically appealing and easy to follow through at the pace and in the order you want it followed. Which like, takes some practice, obviously, but again, I have been here for twenty-five years, haha. Just this is a very visual site and very scroll-oriented, so you wanna do your best to be eye-catching! That's why I frequently post my finished fics with a little accompanying image, just to make sure they stick out to people in the tags.

uhhhhh okay this was a lot, lol, sorry for dumping a ton of info all at once there, but hopefully some of it will be helpful to you! Even if some of it probably sounds weird and way too concerned with curb appeal, haha. Sometimes you just gotta put in some grind and build your momentum, sometimes it's really just that; in the meantime, just try to be approachable and enjoy yourself! If you build it, they will come.

[thelordfool]

HELP ME PLEASE!!!!!

Long story short: I'm unemployed and will not, unlike what I originally thought, qualify for unemployment benefits.

Please read the readmore for additional context on why I'm unemployed. This post is basically a continuation/update/redo of this post. I'm suffering a sickness with no medicine the past week, applied for almost 100 jobs the last two weeks, am disabled/queer/nonbinary/tired of ebegging. I'm also in the negatives in my bank account because my car payment came out, so I need to get that covered.

pp/vm/ca

$250/$1151.51

i need at least $511.51 of this by the first. please spread if you're financially unable to help, every person this reaches helps! here's the breakdown of the costs: $640 - car payment + late fees $380 - rent $131.51 - negative amount in bank currently

Oh hey thanks for stopping by to read this annoying tale of woe and being angry at capitalism. Prepare for wall of text.

I once had two jobs. The first job, at a chain restaurant, was a bit of a clique-y experience where I was working my damndest to be the best bartender they ever had. I still have all the cocktails memorized. However, I continually faced discrimination in the form of severe misgendering, no matter how often I corrected them. I was also set up for failure. Usually, when someone gets hired for a position, there's some amount of training to be done, no matter how experienced they are, right? I was going in nearly entirely inexperienced into the role. I knew how to make cocktails, sure, and was and still am very good with people and selling. But I was trained for two days. Two. Then, on my first night alone (a Friday), I was watched by one of the bigwigs at corporate who saw every little flub and failure. This caused a demotion-ish. I was demoted to barback but was allowed the same privileges. Until their next visit. That upset the hell out of me - I was well trained by that point and could do it all, with one hand tied behind my back. I digress. It was about 2 months following my demotion when i finally walked out. A new bartender had been hired and she thought I was being a total creep by looking at a ticket that had just come in. She stormed off to report me to the manager who, even after hearing my side where I had asked her if there was anything on the ticket that I could grab, said that I "needed to communicate better," and "you should be learning from her," and "you're a grown man, you should know better." I don't think I need to explain why that was so upsetting.

But I didn't report them, because I just wanted to be done with it. I was also working another bartending job, and everythign was literally perfect other than the hours, honestly. I loved the product the distillery made, I loved the people I worked with, and most of all: I had my own regulars. Last month, they hired a new hospitality director, who announced there would be some restructuring, including getting rid of servers while also making a full dinner menu to serve alongside drinks. I said nothing of it, despite my disagreements, and she assured us all that no one would lose their jobs, but just moved into different roles. We all kinda grumbled about it, and I told her that under no circumstances would I work back of house. Easy peasy. Till it wasn't, and I came home to a voicemail while on break with my partner that I'd been let go due to the restructuring. So much for no one losing their jobs, right? I hadn't been the only victim of this. I have my suspicions as to why the new hospitality director did these things, but I've no energy to throw around conspiracies. All I know is that I was shafted by both of these places and I'm tired of being broke. I'm applying, still going to fight, and... sigh.

tl;dr (why did you click the readmore?): i left a job due to discrimination and lost another due to company restructuring and i'm tired and sad and aaaaa.

[windcarvedlyre]

Finished Paralogism! I have... mixed feelings.

I'm sure Albedo fans are eating right now and definitely don't want to rain on that, it's just... tl;dr, I feel like the trailer really overhyped that quest and both the plot and the way they've dealt with Durin and Albedo's loose ends felt underwhelming.

Everything felt easy and perfect. It started off really interestingly- was Albedo actually turning corrupt? Was Subject Two alive and actually the one hiding the bodies? Is what Albedo was doing horribly misunderstood and there's some reason he won't talk about it?

Then we find out the entire trial was a performance by many people involved, and... on its own that's an interesting twist! But it turned the entire plot into 'Albedo and co. execute a plan they've been setting up offscreen against a problem that's built up offscreen and it goes completely flawlessly.' The ominous Venti on the banner and the trailer shots of him didn't come to anything besides that we know that he's revealed himself to at least Albedo, Varka and Dahlia, all also offscreen, and Traveller yet again didn't ask him about Khaenri'ah even though we had an opportunity at the end.

It's fun to see everyone in Mondstadt working together and helping civilians, but Durin's return could have been something huge and scary and not fairly easily prevented by a skeleton crew, even with Albedo's genius and Venti's backing. Genshin's weird cheapness with things they really shouldn't be cheap with didn't help here, because we were supposed to see this as a big dangerous monster invasion but they kind of just roughed up Mond a bit, threw a few handfuls of hilichurls at us and made us pause to heal soldiers we never saw fighting elsewhere. It grated on me that they couldn't even animate Not Hertha leaving the trial room, only cut to Paimon telling us what she was doing.

Between that and the way it culminated in Durin becoming a human, it felt like Genshin being a gacha may have steered the game's priorities a little too much again. I could be being overly cynical, but towards the end my thoughts were mainly 'man I hope this isn't it for Mondstadt-focused plot' and 'you can tell Durin's going to be playable because they gave him his own model' and I really wish they weren't. orz.

It's a huge shame because I felt like the summer event was setting up something really clever involving names and fate? That maybe Mini Durin being turned around would in turn mean Teyvat Durin would be fated to do the same too. But alas.

[nedlittle]

hey i don't mean to be mean or anything i'm just wondering about that marauders fans post.

how would a marauders fan art benefit jkr? how would a fanfic about gay and trans characters benefit her? i feel like it does her more harm that people think of her characters as queer. and i think most marauders fans already know not to buy her books or go to the wizarding world or watch the new show or whatever.

like when it comes to spending money everyone's careful to not support her except terfs and people support her ideology and whatnot.

i'm trying to think of how someone posting headcanons about these characters on tumblr can somehow benefit jkr

again, i don't want to come across as hateful or anything i'm genuinely trying to understand your point

thank you for asking this in good faith. i've been having trouble wording stuff lately, so apologies if this isn't as coherent as i'd like.

participating in the marauders fandom continues to benefit jkr simply because you cannot divorce the marauders from their larger context. the fandom may have turned the marauders into something more than glorified side characters, but they cannot exist without the framework of the harry potter universe which has bigotry baked into its very core. imagine we're all playing in a sandbox. marauders fans may be making beautiful sand castles and art with their own two hands, but they're using the sand toys that jkr left for them and the sandbox that they're playing in is in her backyard and in order to play you have to get your hand stamped by joanne personally.

it would be so easy for people to just....make their own ocs or switch to a different fandom. the marauders are hardly characters to begin with, but the inability to let go of a text which gives them basically nothing as characters ensures that the bloated corpse of the harry potter fandom continues shambling around long after it should have died.

and for the most part, the marauders are not relevant to normies. i think even if someone was a big fan of the books in middle school, but has moved on, they aren't going to think of the marauders beyond the characters we actually see on page. the prevailing cultural view of those characters in the context of how they were written is not "look at this cool and diverse friend group coming of age in the 70s and sticking it to the man" or w/e it's "those guys who were mostly in the background." most people do not think of these characters as queer because they aren't doing the mental labour of filling in jkr's world for her.

but because this fandom is so popular--it trends every other week, pinterest is filled with it, youtubers are making video essays on marauders fandom as a queer utopian reclamation of hp--jkr sees the continued relevance of people talking about her characters. she does not see the caveat that you are taking this character who is just a name on a page in some supplementary material and making her into a black lesbian (which is a whole other thing where ppl treat diverse headcanons as a "punishment" for bigoted authors in the same way that twitter libs will qtwt homophobes like "i hope your kids turn out to be gay" which is....not activism but anyway). she doesn't see desi james potter and gay trans boy remus lupin, she just sees the interaction between creator and consumer. she sees this as "people still care about the art i have made and must agree with my views". it makes her believe she still has an audience, which she definitely does unfortunately, which is why we're getting the series reboot and theme parks and merchandise for a piece of ip that peaked what? 15 years ago? i'm not looking that up

tl,dr in jkr's brain support of her work = support of her views

[apple-onigiri]

DISTANCE IN VAUGARGE (revamped edition)

IMPORTANT: this post was deleted and made again to make edits and not spread misinformation (because i made a stupid mistake and took earth's entire circumference and accidentally treated it like it was only half of it! it's really funny because i did think that this feels way too big of a distance... happens i guess! especially at 4am lmao but it did uh, increase all the numbers by a whole Two so. unfortunate! gotta fix it!!)

@cyten0 (sorry to tag you again just figured you'd like an update and an actual correct answer, and you're still the one who inquired about this) asked if i could provide more information about my calculations for traveling across vaguarde, and since it seems too long for a reblog and i want to categorize it properly on my blog, here it is in a whole separate post!

this honestly started out as a curiosity about what climate the northern island could've had given its distance from the equator compared to earth's countries and uh. spiraled into me thinking about this. don't ever think about anything guys

TL;DR (for people who don't want the super fun math part): it's 1111.4 km/690.59 miles from dormont to bambouche in a straight line and somewhere in the ballpark of 250 hours of constant travel by foot to cross the distance. with a bonnie-ordained preteen-friendly tempo of around 5 km/h (3.1 ish mph) and eight hours of travel per day from 8am until 1pm and then 3pm to 6pm to set up camp properly early, it'd take around a month or so to make the trip, not counting any and all longer stays to refill supplies and any irregularities caused by going to a town and not having to set up camp or pack it back up.

ok quick geography lesson: the lines on the globe running horizontally are the latitude. they go up to 90 in each direction from the equator, which is 0, so there's a 180 in total. obviously for specific locations you'd use decimals but who caressss

longitude is important too here - the vertical lines - but less so. they go up to 180 on each side of the latitude's version of the equator, the prime meridian, as well but it really doesn't matter where that meridian is placed here, the only thing that matters is that the lines are in a correct distance to each other.

here's the globe id5, in her infinite wisdom, bestowed upon us (i'm completely normal about the existence of any and all maps. in the original post i said can be trusted with them but that is! clearly not the case!) that i added all the southern hemisphere latitude lines onto, as well as the longitude needed for my insane needs (math)

i obviously assumed the planet is the same size as the earth because i genuinely see no reason why it couldn't be other than to make my life sad and hell also. the general distance from one pole to another is 20,000 ish kilometers. (if you for some reason want the planet to be smaller or bigger, cool trick, literally just multiply the 20,000 by it. want it to be one third of its current size? multiply by 0.3. two-and-a-half times bigger? 2.5!) so what i did was draw out the lines onto the actual map and measure the estimated distance based on how big of a chunk it is out of this 20k.

it seems dormont is at about 19 degrees, while bambouche is at 11. easy here!

just divide the whole distance by 180 and you get 111.(1) km (that 1 in a bracket telling you that that one goes on foreeeeever if you let it). since we're looking for the distance of 8 degrees, and we've got a distance of one, you can either multiply it by 8 or subtract the one degree times 2 to get 889. ish. any decimals are the enemy here at this point.

you do the same for the other direction - both bambouche and dormont seemed to be about 2 degrees from the longitude lines, so you do the process with just multiplying by 6 at the end or subtracting the one degree times 4 and get 1333. ish.

it's pythagorean theorem time!! it looks like a lot of big numbers but they do that only to get added nicely, it's okay, they're not that scary and they don't bite pretty promise with a cherry on top, and you get the resulting distance of 1111.4 kilometers like that!

here's how it measures up in reality for some scale:

(hey it fits into all of france now!!)

the average recorded speed of a preteen - which the party logically must move at most of the time - is about 5 kilometers per hour (3.1 ish miles). with a travel plan of 4 hours of travel since 9am until 1pm, a two hour break, and another 3 hours until 6pm, because you need to set up camp and things like that need time, it's safe to assume they'd be crossing around 35 km/h a day. and this is still a really good pace!!! very endurance-heavy! divide the total distance by that and you get an estimated time of travel in days, which here is 31; just around a month.

this is, while less than my initial busted calculations, still a lot! lots of walking. so i uphold my statement that they better have sent a letter to nille ahead of them and that the vaugarde postal system is robust enough to deliver it in a timely manner right after the entire country defrosted, to keep her from worrying to death!

[not-poignant]

Hi! I’m sorry if this has been asked before, but I was wondering if you’d be willing to speak to how writing Underline the Rainbow feels after writing in the Fae Tales universe? I’m reading both kind of at the same time, and even just approaching Efnisien in UtR or Gwyn in Game Theory feels crazy because I change tab and BAM the one that’s terrible has swapped. And especially with character relationships - was it hard to write Augus with Mosk after a whole universe worth of writing where he’s with Gwyn? And then follow-up question: if someone were to (hypothetically) write a one-shot where Efnision from Underline the Rainbow and Gwyn from Game Theory met by some weird wormhole - how would that go??? Hypothetically, of course.

Hallo,

I think the main thing to remember is for me, it's a 13 year difference. Well, like a 10-13 year difference, between these two characters.

And for me, Efnisien as a fae is not at all the same as Efnisien as a human. I had to change a lot to make human Efnisien work, because fae Efnisien was literally born evil, to a degree that even Crielle found hard to control. She didn't need to abuse him in the canon, she didn't need to brainwash him, he literally came out that way.

But humans aren't really like that, and I decided to give him a more foundational experience to sort of train him into what he becomes.

was it hard to write Augus with Mosk after a whole universe worth of writing where he’s with Gwyn?

If anything it was easier - again, I've had ten years of Augus and Gwyn! I've given Augus and Gwyn many, many happy endings across many different stories. They have had so many versions of meeting, falling in love, solving (some of their biggest) problems, and finding their found family and giving them closure.

So like, after a decade of that, it felt very easy and natural to start pairing Augus with other people, and playing around with Gwyn's character a bit more. Because I was ready for a change! Mosk and Augus also have chemistry in the canon, especially from The Ice Plague book 2 and onwards. So that definitely felt natural.

if someone were to (hypothetically) write a one-shot where Efnision from Underline the Rainbow and Gwyn from Game Theory met by some weird wormhole - how would that go???

That would be up to them!

If they were writing it they could decide how they wanted it to go. :D

If I were writing it, honestly, if Gwyn knew it was Efnisien he'd assume it was weird magic and probably give serious thought to killing him, or at the very least like, sequestering and probably tormenting him with magic to find the 'truth.' And if he'd never met any version of Efnisien he'd be like 'well that's a human and I could not give a smaller shit about any humans.'

(This is why I'm not good with hypotheticals. I feel like folks who write Fae Tales fanfic would do this way better than me x.x)

But yeah the TL;DR is mostly that like, time and millions of words on a character means it becomes a lot easier to change things up in bigger ways. For folks just discovering the stories, that's a very different journey! But for me, and a few of the readers around, it's been a slow journey that has tracked through some major life events in our lives, that has seen both pre and post-pandemic, that started when some of us were working other jobs, hadn't had children yet, were still in high school, were getting our diplomas or degrees, etc. 10-13 years is a long time from Game Theory to Underline, and there's a whole world of life in between that both for the characters and for me and for a few others, and I think that's when it becomes much easier to depart from something, because when you're slowly giving the same two characters a similar kind of closure every two years or so, one day you go 'oh I'm ready to do this for other characters now' and 'Gwyn would be fun as a villain and folks have been asking for dark!Gwyn for a while.' :D

[mogruith]

@nemo-of-house-hamartia How do they reconcile the fact that Corazan is Eilistraean and Minthara instead was Lolth-sworn?? Would it prove a point of contention between them? Would they ever return to Menzoberranzan, or have they discarded every single connection with the Underdark?

I'm taking this out of the comments section 'cause I need room to answer all this lol

You didn't realize you hit my "unhinged rant" button, so I apologize for the novel this spawned. Thank you for your interest in my silliness, it's really made my day - my week, my month, really!

Anyway, here's my rants. I'm doing my best to make it easy to read (Tech Writer powers activate!) but I'm cobbling this together over a lunch break, so I apologize if it's messy. I've tried to highlight things that give you the TL;DR.

Lolth-Sworn:

Just for a little background: Coranzan grew up a Lolthite in Eastmyr, Menzoberranzan himself. He wasn't a die-hard or anything but that's just "how things were" for him.

He rejected her after his and Z'ress' Blooding and he had something of an epiphany about it. I won't go into it here but Coran still carries some Lolthite views, such as ambition being an admirable quality among other things. So they're not too different in some values - except that they disagree on HOW one achieves their ambitions.

But boiling it down, Coranzan and Minthara have a shared goal on Lolth: that Lolth's rule in the Underdark is a blight on Drow and if they can hamper her ability to rule, they should try and do as much damage as possible.

Lolthite Beliefs:

Through the game I see Minthara giving way on a LOT of Lolth-typical concepts except maybe in her view of power, ambition, and some governance.

She feels the way her mother raised her was terrible and a bad example - which was merely the way most drow were raised. She's so horrified by her mother's way, it chills her when she sees what this does to people like her and Orin - being "lost to madness and blood".

She's so enraged by Lolth's betrayal despite the fact that she was likely raised to EXPECT betrayal from Lolth (I am reading Daughter of the Drow and was fascinated to read this there).

She rejects the Baenre name - that's a huge part of her identity. This woman is rebuilding herself from the ground up, picking up each piece and analyzing it to see if it is a value she still has and discarding it if not.

Besides the fact that she's rejected a lot of Lolthite beliefs, I think there's a pattern to it: Minthara seems to feel that the drive for ambition and power is good but the societal norms that came from Lolth should be mostly rejected. So, generally speaking, Coran is aligned with her on this.

Eilistraean Beliefs:

The biggest point of contention for them is Coranzan's belief in Eilistraee. Minthara is pretty anti-worship-of-anything after rejecting Lolth. She calls Coran "my little marionette" for worshiping Eilistraee.

However, purely by values, Eilistraee is not the worst goddess and I think she and Minthara line up in some ways - mainly in rejecting and dismantling Lolth's hold on Drow and that Drow should be self-sufficient. Eilisitraee does not teach drow to become dependent on her and do her bidding, she bids them to be free and to consider helping other drow be free (only if you choose to join the Clergy). However, I still think Minthara would feel Eilistraee expects you to sacrifice too much of yourself to achieve those goals and that it shouldn't just be done for the sake of it.

So, they disagree on this aspect, but Coran is no preacher, so it's not a constant fight. He's not trying to convert her - or anyone for that matter - and the only Eilistrean thing he does is support her life of exile on the surface. When she first joins the camp, he gives her the attention he would any drow who has recently arrived on the surface, as is his Eilistraean mission. But he doesn't bark about Eilistraee, he just acts as she'd like him to: ensure drow succeed on the surface.

Coranzan worships separately: he privately performs the evensong for personal reflection every day (if possible) and he and his sister Z'ress regularly dance in the moonlight and make it no business of the rest of the camp - but they don't hide it either.

He understands Minthara doesn't agree with it and finds it all very silly - and their disagreement deepens when she comes to understand how Coran was treated in the Church of Eilistraee (gender issues are still a thing there and it took him 150 years to become a Cleric and Sword Dancer of Eilistraee).

She would surely believe the Church of Eilistraee is holding him back. Through the story, he clearly demonstrates strength of character and leadership - a rare and now welcome thing to find in a Drow man - but the Church of Eilistraee holds on to gender-based beliefs that are weirdly in common with Lolthites and that suppressed his ambitions.

In time (a little post-BG3), due to convincing arguments from Minthara and Z'ress, Coranzan will relent to their perspectives. Although he does not reject Eilistraee entirely, he will leave the Church of Eilistraee, and he changes the way he believes - he proactively pursues taking down Lolth's prized servants rather than the passive/reactive response that seems to be pretty common with Eilistraeans.

Menzoberranzan:

I've always felt that returning to Menzoberranzan openly as an apostate is insanity. If Lolth herself doesn't fuck you up, her people will.

Nonetheless, I have stories that I'm still figuring out where Coranzan does covertly return to Menzoberranzan post-BG3 without Minthara for months at a time. They are agonizing stretches of time and he loathes being in that hateful place without her or Z'ress. But it is to gather intelligence and find sympathetic rebels - as Eilistraean Secret Moondancers would do - to help their cause and build their new House. Eventually, he'll stop going and send others in his place.

Let me back up and give context:

First off, Coranzan lived most of his adult life around Waterdeep or the Promenade of the Dark Maiden (which is in the Undermountain below Waterdeep).

So in the Epilogue, when Minthara talks about founding a new House in "your name", he is hesitant but agrees - his family hasn't had a House in a generation or so now (which is why he and Z'ress have only first names). So, he leaves the Church of Eilistraee and decides that founding a House with Minthara is his future. He believes he can achieve far greater things with her than with the Church.

His thought is to return to the Undermountain near the Promande. That is to avoid getting too close to Lolth's domain so they have a chance at surviving. So they found (with a lot of help) a place to get started by clearing and rebuilding a section of the many ruined cities of the Undermountain (which is considered part of the Underdark).

The rebels that "swarm" to Minthara's and his' cause against the Spider Queen are the collective that shape the new House.

From there, they regularly make attempts to sabotage or hinder Lolth, House Baenre, etc. with their newly made forces. Being a smaller force, they favor guerilla tactics rather than going straight to warring with the Lion's Den that is Menzoberranzan.

So, technically they live in the Underdark post-game but there's a fair bit that stands between them and Menzoberranzan.

If you made it through this... thank you, truly! I appreciate it! If you are at all interested in what I wrote, comments, asks, and stuff are most welcome! If not, thanks again and I hope you have a good rest of your day/night!

[polysucks]

hii!!! i just wanted to ask if it's okay to draw the starks as indigenous, as a non native myself? I wanted to draw lyanna in atla katara's animated style, and I understand that the water nation is heavily inspired by Inuit culture.

Oh my god, Hi!

I'm genuinely very sorry to turn your question into a whole thing but I think you have opened a door for a conversation that needs to be had and I am so so so excited you asked!!!!! I also have fatal yapping disease!!

I am so honored that you came to me to ask if it was okay for you, someone who self identifies as not a descendant from the land's first peoples to make art that depicts the culture of the land's first peoples.

I am not an authority on what is respectful, or disrespectful when depicting any culture.

No one truly is.

tl;dr at the bottom of this I prommy.

This post includes links to references and educations that go to websites outside tumblr, and are best viewed on desktop devices and with adblockers. Nothing malicious, I just linked everything from my desktop with a variety of adblockers in play lmfao

When it comes to the design of the Northern and Southern Water Tribes of ATLA, there's alot of mixed opinions! But the consensus, from what I've seen, seems to be that any representation that goes beyond the surface zeitgeist caricature and doesn't feed into harmful stereotypes is positive representation. Everything boils down to the roots of representation.

Now, as far as representation goes, I am NOT a good person to ask--I am white passing. So much so that I have red hair. I can throw a stone and hit five pieces of media where I feel I can see myself (I mean, why do you think I latched so hard onto Sansa?) But I'm someone who exists severely intersectionally and that is what representation means.

"...positive representation can build self-confidence in individuals. It offers them role models to look up to and people and characters to be inspired by ... They can be the superhero, the doctor, the actor or whoever they want to be...We all benefit from learning about different experiences and expanding our notion of what is “normal”" - What Exactly Is Media Representation, Anyway? By Yasmina Tawil for the Arab Film Institute blog

When depicting any culture you are not rooted in, or have any personal experience with, the ultimate question is: what are your intentions?

because, baby-- the fact that you even asked in the first place means you already have respect in your heart.

Okay, sure, you may have asked because you're an artist and you don't wanna get cancelled. It's easy to get cancelled as an artist, today's society hates artists (that's fascism for you, but like, not gonna touch that one rn lmfao)

I'm not assigning that mentality to you. I'm not assuming anything about your intentions.

But I am mentioning it because alot of us do think that way, because the fact is that this type of thinking is extremely common and way more widespread in our current environment than we would like to say. This mindset is detrimental to our human way of thinking, our sense of community, and prevents art from being made long before the idea is even formed. There are too many artists that are too afraid to ask. That are too afraid to post their work. Because of Woke.

Okay, jokes aside-- we're afraid of being cancelled.

We're afraid of being disrespectful.

We're afraid of stepping on toes.

And the easiest way to combat this-- both, the overwhelming fear and shame, and the possibility of doing a disservice to a culture-- is to have an open heart and mind.

Cultural Inspiration

Lyanna Stark in similar garb to Katara is (personally) SOOOOOOO on-brand bro. Not even joking.

and there's soooo many parallels I could write a whole essay-- man i just might holy fuck dude what a concept

I base alot of my personal headcanons for Northmen and First Men fashion off of native Athabascan cultures, which are adjacent and/or descendant of ancient Mongolian cultures via the Bering Land Bridge. but I also get jiggy w it as far as man, this is fantasy. If you can mix pirate culture w viking culture for the Ironborn, you can mix european medieval fashion with indigenous talent and taste.

And at first glance (Idk I gotta do more research into this one tbh) this seems to be where the artists for ATLA also got their vision for the water tribes!

Thanks to Meemawdean's amazinggggggg requests, I drew a series of NDN Stark Depictions (Lyanna) (Sansa) and a couple of other scragglers that spawned a FUCKTON of questions pertaining to indigenous culture and how I depict it in my art that alot of people were too embarrassed or afraid to ask publicly. But I will give you the answer I give everyone. Online, and IRL:

It's not that serious.

Get jiggy with it.

Like for example I was getting my hair did back in october. and I was talking to the [white] stylist about being native and how my hair is sacred.

She got so upset about touching it, about how I asked her to cut it and style it. She was so scared to fuck it up.

I told her that if I didn't want her services--whether she "fucked it up" or not-- I wouldn't have come here. That just because something is sacred, doesn't mean you can't use it.

Even if she did give me a bad haircut (which she didn't!!! My hair looked amazing) I wouldn't be upset because it was with good intentions. Hair is temporary. It will always come back.

I honor my hair as sacred. That doesn't mean I can't cut it, dye it, burn it, style it, lose it, or play with it.

I do all of that out of love for myself, love for my body, love for my hair, love for my ancestors, love for my culture.

Some can argue that I'm doing my body, my culture, my ancestors a disservice, that I'm being disrespectful.

But any expression of love for your fellow man, no matter how misguided, uneducated, or rooted in opinion or ignorance it is, as long as it's with the pure intention of love, is sacred. and should be regarded as such.

So make art!

Have ideas!

Cut your hair!

Tattoo your body!

Ask questions you're afraid of being called stupid or insensitive for!

whats the worst thing that happens? Your feelings get hurt?

Feelings are temporary. They will always come back.

tl;dr

yeah man draw indigenous people. we don't really give a fuck, for the most part, as long as you do a little research and show some respect and love and like. give a fuck about what you're contributing to the image of these cultures :3

[relleytrots]

On Hunger and skittishness

OP reads: I have been DMing for a group of DnD-players, and we plan on trying out VtM V5. I've previously done a one-shot with some of these and a problem we noticed was that even with just one hunger, doing test felt punishing since it always risked triggering the Beast, either through a messy crit or a bestial failure. Coming from DnD, my players love doing lots of rolls for all sorts of things and I feel like heavily reducing the amount of rolling will be less fun for them, but I also feel that rolling as much as we're used to and their characters are gonna lose control all too quick. How can I keep the high amount of dice rolls that my party likes while mitigating the impact of hunger dice and the Beast?

Part of me - the oldschool second ed. Vampire enthusiast - says "this isn't Dungeons and Dragons, get used to it, adapt to what a new system does."

That's not helpful, so the rest of me says you should read - closely - the list of consequences for Messy Criticals and Bestial Failures. Either the Companion or the Player's Guide or both advise that you can consider these lists interchangeable.

You'll observe that none of these are "immediately wig out and make a frenzy check". Hunger, a Stain or Aggravated damage all create opportunities for trouble later on in the game, but none of them force a loss of control. Yes, it'll happen sooner or later, but you don't have to have your characters Hulk out the moment you see a red die with fangs on it.

The only shitty one in my opinion is "fail test" - it's boring, and it overrules the dice so what was the point of rolling in the first place? Masquerade Breach is also one to be careful with as it'll have consequences in later scenes, and can easily take over the session if you use it carelessly.

(I have a character who's still working off the Masquerade breach they accidentally racked up seven sessions ago. Bestial Failure when you're in a church and there's a reliquary radiating True Faith - not a good time. Great story fodder, but your players might see that as an unfair punishment for one bad roll two months back.)

I personally like Compulsions. They feel meaty - the Beast is making you behave in a particular way, guiding your roleplay in a direction you might not have planned on it taking, but not forcing your character to do anything you don't want them to.

Compulsions don't forbid actions, they just impose penalties to deter players from ignoring them. Hunger, Dominance, Harm and Paranoia are the bedrock of the Kindred experience, and one of them should fit whatever's going on. You also have the Clan specific ones in your back pocket if you need something special.

The main thing to remember is that a Messy Crit is a success with consequences. The player still gets what they want out of the roll, but it happens... vampirically. You can, and should, ask the player what this looks like: how the Beast within peeks out.

There is a much-discussed example of "but I'm rolling to research in a book how does that happen vampirically I am very smart" - easy, character gains one Hunger and goes on about their night. As Storytellers, we can always kick the consequences down the trail to when they'll have a better impact. Extra Hunger dice are a great way to do this.

The next most important thing is that a Bestial Failure is very unlikely. The character needs to fail the test in addition to showing that one-in-ten skull on a Hunger die, and V5 has so many built in ways to manage the prospect of failure.

Blood Surge for extra dice? Willpower damage to reroll up to three non-Hunger dice? And, if all else fails, we as Storytellers can steeple our fingers, lean in with a smile, and offer the ol' devil's bargain of Success At A Cost.

TL;DR - V5 gives you, the Storyteller, a lot of tools to interpret the outcome of a roll and adjust its impact beyond merely succeeding or failing at the task in hand. You need to become familiar with those tools, and experiment with medium-term consequences that don't hit until later in the session, or even later in the story.

Read, try, fail, reflect, learn. That's how it goes. You'll get there.

[cerastes]

Hey. It's been a while. I think it's right to update you on stuff so tl;dr I'm probably not going to be around for some time, and if I am, it'll be in a diminished capacity, but if you're interested, do check under the cut. I'll also immediately state that I am not in any dangerous situation, it's other stuff, but I'll immediately dispel that before the cut just in case you just wanted to know that in particular.

Let's talk for a bit.

Long story short, the economy here is in shambles. The idea was for me to already have a new job, but that's not gone according to plan. I've been eating into my savings for a while now, and the people that told me that I had a job lined up for me September or at the latest October, meaning, this month, have been ghosting me. It seems to not be an option anymore, and no explanation was ever given to me. A shame, because it came from a place of relative trust.

This has eaten away at my nerves somewhat, and though it is the month of my birthday, I can't help but notice that, between the economy being this bad here, how hard it's been to land another job, and the fact that I'm eating into my savings, well, it's got me more than a bit worried. I'm not in any immediate danger of losing the roof over my head, or starving, or anything like that, but after a few months of "well, my savings take yet another hit this month with no end in sight", it's been rather rough, you'll understand, and it's compounded a bit. For just a second, and not as a primary, secondary, or even tertiary plan, more like a twenty-eighth measure if anything, I did entertain the dark idea of maybe asking for a bit of help here, and the moment that thought came up, I realized, "Ok, this is truly and well affecting me, I never want to do that", because, again, it's not like I'm in any immediate danger of homelessness or anything that grave, but it's been weighting on me enough that, even as a distant glint in the horizon of an idea, I did consider it. I don't want to sound like I'm blowing my own horn here, but for over a decade that I've had this blog, and the community/following/whatever you want to call it that has grown around it, I've never once asked for something like monetary help, because I think that can be a slippery slope. I've seen people far bigger than me, and some smaller, too, get addicted to asking for donations or help, or simply start taking it for granted when they ask for such a thing. My friends will tell you I writhe in agony when I receive a gift such as a game or something over the mail. My logic is that I don't need it, not in a proud way, but rather, in a "I wish you would spend this money on yourself instead, or on someone that truly needed it". With this in mind, I realized that, for me to even slightly consider that as an option, for the first time in my life, it meant that it was biting away at me far, far more severely than I thought. It's translated to other parts of my life as of late; I've not been depressed or anything, but I've felt this itch, this remarkably implacable feeling of "my man, you don't deserve to be taking it easy right now, something has to change, progress needs to be made".

I went out to wander for a few days, then arrived at my cousin's farm. He and his wife live a humble, hard working life, he invited me to stay for a while, I accepted, it was real nice, we hanged out, went exploring creeks and mountainsides while knocking back a few beers, the whole shebang for two guys that grew up in the middle of nowhere. Anyhow, it's true that the whole exposition that was the previous paragraph is something at play, but I also just... Haven't really wanted to be online at all. I don't want to check anything, read anything, and I feel a deep sense of alienation that I've not really felt in a long time. I suppose this is one of those good ol' Bro Is Going Through It, if we're to summarize it in a few words. It's easy for me to dispel negative thoughts and bounce back normally, because I've done a great deal of personal building and homework on knowing myself inside out, but not even this black belt in Drimobrain has helped this time around, and well, it bothers me, obviously, bwahaha. It's the first time in a few years that I really sincerely do not understand what's up with me, and while it's not really something I would consider me being rock bottom or anywhere near those depths, I do think I'm still below surface level, which is something I don't admit to easily, but have no choice to. I would love to be able to give this malaise shape and firmness through written or spoken word, but right now, it's a work in progress.

What bothers me the most is the sense of alienation I spoke of before: It makes no sense for me to feel this way, I'm treated with love and kindness every day, no one's silencing me in any way, I don't deal with barbs or hostility. So why is it that that's how I feel? Or perhaps it's something that feels similar, but I've no clue what it is, so I'm compounding it with alienation?

Regardless, it's all compounded into me just... Not wanting to be online. In the words of a friend of mine, "Dreamer has a fetish for self-development and growth", and, well, yeah, she's got that right despite the wording, I like to feel as if I'm improving every day and becoming better every day, even if slightly, and right now I feel like I'm just degenerating. Is it because my mood has been sour overall? Maybe. It might as well just be the fact that I Just Don't Want To Be Online For A While, and capricious clown that I am, if I want to do something, I do it, and if I don't want to do something, I don't do it. I'm tied to nothing and no one except my desire and drive to do or not do things. I can't change that, nor do I want to change that. And in this case, my heart's said to me, "fuck going online, go out, do things, try to get a job".

I also almost got recruited into something fucking vile that I thankfully noticed in time to avoid, but that's a story for another time.

There you have it. Am I leaving the internet/blue website forever? No, of course not, I like it here. Are things hard right now? They are, to be honest. Are they the worst it could be? Not at all. Do I have complete clarity of what's up with this fog inside of my head? No, and that bother me quite a bit. Are things going to be alright? Yeah, I think they will be.

I do regret it's in October of all months that this is going on, because it's where my shitposting power is at its apex due to my birthday, but hey, things happen, not necessarily for a reason, but they can be handled in such a way that it gives them meaning. I'm a fervent believer in that. I'm sorry this isn't the update you may have been hoping for, full of Lucina cosplayer blowjobs and other such hijinks, but hey, they can't all be Rainbow Road, haha.

So in case we don't see each other for a while, I hope you're all doing fine and dandy. I'm alive, I'm trying to be well, and most importantly, most fundamentally, most quintessentially,

I stay silly.