#vanilla notes

[bourbontrend]

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[pachix]

https://www.geoguessr.com/vgp/3007

[nenelonomh]

of course everything is falling apart, your new life will cost you your old one

[gilbirda]

me after 1.6 dropped

[cuppajj]

baau wip collection!! some of these i want to get back to

[xxplastic-cubexx]

hiiiii do you think you could draw movie stewart's charles...... if it's ok to ask

i offer you a humble peepaw my friend

[kkaags]

wanted to see how far i could push c+

[humhowellujah]

i'm drunk off two lavender martinis what the fuck do you MEAN dan and phil went on a step by step recreation of their japan trip as a part of a HONEYMOON episode for their sims. be so fr rn be so serious please. dan howell you have 4 minutes to respond . phil, keep it up babygirl. lavender martini recipe in the tags

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

sugar sugar rune x twst au word salad

“The heart is yours to take, but you must not allow yours to be taken.”

The concept of this AU borrows a lot of ideas from the animanga Sugar Sugar Rune! ^^ It’s an older shojo series that I always think of when Halloween season arrives. Sugar Sugar Rune is about two years witches who are best friends, Chocolat and Vanilla, who compete to capture the most hearts in the human world. Whoever is victorious will become queen of the Magical World—but with love comes danger. If their own hearts get stolen, then they can lose their lives.

I should add, I currently don’t intend to write a fic based on this, I just wanted to braindump my ideas out and speculate on how this AU would work.

And now, without further ado…!

I think a good place to start is to explain the key points about the world and other relevant lore! Then we will get into the characters. (No story spoilers though, this AU won’t follow the original plot of Sugar Sugar Rune to a T!)

So the Magical World of Sugar Sugar Rune is where all magical creatures, including witches and wizards, reside. In the Magical World, ecure (or hearts), crystallized emotions, serve as an energy source and currency. Mages must frequently venture into the Human World in order to "harvest "pick up"/harvest ecure since humans have the unique ability to regenerate their hearts even when already stolen. Contrasting humans, mages only have one heart. That means if a mage's heart is taken, they will surely die. When mages fall in love with one another, they exchange their hearts during their wedding vows. They have to be careful who they fall in love with, as they can literally "die of a broken heart" if their partner betrays them. It's ill-advised for a mage to fall in love with a human, as while humans lack the ability to "pick up" hearts, a mage has to voluntarily hand their heart over if they reach a certain point (the color red)

Speaking of red!! Ecure/hearts can come in various colors depending on the emotion associated with it. Each color (and thus emotion) is associated with a different value, which roughly aligns with the value of the Japanese yen. The values are, as follows:

Yellow or Jaune - surprise, fear (5 ecure)

Orange - love at first sight, crush, infatuation (300 ecure)

Green or Vert - friendship (350 ecure)

Rainbow - happiness, delight, amusement (500 ecure)

Pink or Rose - the beginning stages of love, sweet love (1000 ecure)

Purple or Violet - lust, forbidden love (2500 ecure)

Blue or Bleu - respect (3000 ecure)

Red or Rouge - passionate love (5000 ecure)

Black or Noir - hatred, jealousy (no known value, hurts mages) I think this works really well with the concept of Blot in Twst—

White or Blanc - innocence (no known value, purified black heart; has restorative or healing properties)

Besides serving as energy and currency, ecure are also a way of counting points for Queen Candidacy. In the Magical World, the ruler is determined not by birth by through a competition in which candidates compete to see who can collect the most ecure (I believe over the span of a year). In the original Sugar Sugar Rune, the two candidates are Vanilla and Chocolat. The former is shy, sweet, and sort of a crybaby, with her mother being the current queen. Chocolat is the daughter of the queen's former competitor and comes off as more of a brash tomboy.

So what I'm proposing for the Sugar Sugar Rune x Twst AU is :DD basically keep all the lore but replace the two protags with MALLEUS (as Vanilla) AND LEONA (as Chocolat). They won’t be besties like the original MCs were, but more like traditional rivals because it would be funny lmao

Malleus is the more regal and composed of the two (he is literally a crown prince), so he has that obvious parallel with Vanilla. Not only that, but he's more withdrawn and has deep insecurities about being alone (also similar to Vanilla). I think his reputation could play well into the AU as well; in the Magical World, everyone fears him so he’s used to being alone—but in the Human World, he’s beloved for being awkward and mysterious (reflecting the international Twst fandom’s adoration for the guy). Malleus would feel obligated to win to carry on his family’s legacy but also because he feels like if he doesn’t, he has nothing left. No friends, no people to keep at his side—but if he has the status of King, then he’ll have a whole nation looking to him. Since his mom is uh… “with the stars”, the current Magical World queen could be his grandmother, and Malleus may feel like he has that legacy to live up to.

Leona, like Chocolat, is the underdog. What he lacks in status (as crown prince) he makes up for in intelligence and charisma, which nets him many followers in the Magical World. He comes off as tough and hard to approach to humans who aren’t used to his demanding attitude though, so it puts him at a disadvantage in the competition. He’s very much the “bad boy” similar to how Chocolat wasn’t a traditionally girly girl, but it’s ultimately the heart of gold buried underneath his hard edges that will eventually put him toe-to-toe with Malleus. I think Leona’s reasoning for wanting to be King would be similar to what he expresses in his original source material—to prove himself worthy, regardless of the family or order he was born in. Maybe he was almost not considered to be a candidate at all and his brother Falena was supposed to compete? Or alternatively, Falena is Malleus’s real competitor but Leona snuck into the Human World as an upstart/self-imposed third entry 😂

Chocolat and Vanilla have a mentor mage in the Human World named Robin (who is a famous rock star fjsvwisnksks). He’s the one who explains things to them and serves as their guardian figure while they room together and study at a human school for the Queen Candidacy.

What I’m thinking is that Leona and Malleus will venture into the Human World under the guidance of… Crowley 🤡 LISTEN, IT WOULD BE FUNNY Crowley does a lot of the exposition in Twst, so he could reprise that role here. He is also vain and thinks highly of himself (but ultimately cherishes his students) like Robin. Picture Crowley having to mediate between Leona and Malleus fighting every second of the day while living together—

That’s honestly all we need to replace to get the AU rolling. If we want to, we could expand the Queen (King now I guess) Candidacy to have more candidates. Then maybe the other Twst characters could also participate but the story could still center on Malleus and Leona as the two to “keep an eye on”/audience favorites.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this 🤔 but I do think this could be a fun AU for like. Yume/self insert scenarios so you can angst about whether your feelings are real or fabricated so [insert mage of choice here] can harvest ya like a plant… Or angst about not being able to be with [insert mage of choice here] because they might literally perish… Many possibilities!

[dragonpropaganda]

you should talk about your thoughts on rw fanon (looking with huge eyes)

Oh god, there's a lot of major misconceptions have concreted into fanon, mostly around ancient society and ascension.

First things first! Ascension is not death! They are entirely separate things treated entirely separately by the text of the game. I can see where the interpretation is coming from, but it doesn't really align with how the text treats either subject. Five Pebbles may want to remove the self destruction taboo, but from his reaction to the rot it's clear that he doesn't want to die. Conflation of ascension and death only comes up as an offhand possibility that pebbs makes on iterator 4chan, when he's going into the possibilities of scenarios that even the other sliverists are doubtful of! (let me make clear that I am not a sliverist by any means)

Ascension is more of talked about as a form of transcendence, yeah? A Bell, Eighteen Amber Beads talks about their sitution as being "To have grasped at the boundless infinites of the cosmic void…", not as them seeking an end to life.

The beta dialogue goes into more detail, mentioning the "infinities of time and space" and the "boundless fractal planes of spirit and reality...", though this dialogue was cut and it's hard to tell how much it reflects the concept as in the released game.

As for the cultural misconceptions... there's A Lot to talk about, but the first that comes to mind is the common conflation of the five natural urges and the christian concept of sin.

It is true that the negation of urges is mentioned by moon as an alternative method of ascension, but much of what we know about the culture of the people who the fandom calls the ancients (which makes discussion of the depths a mess but that's something for another post entirely) points towards the urges not being seen as shameful.

Even the first urge does not seem to be particularly scorned! Being a warrior is presented as a cause for bragging in the Shaded Citadel pearl, being comparable with being an artist and a fashion legend. The second urge, also does not seem to be suppressed. Multiple sources attribute some level of honour to parenthood! The aforementioned pearl also mentions Seventeen Axes, Fifteen Spoked Wheel as being a "Mother, Father and Spouse" without any hint of shamefulness. Nineteen Spades, Endless Reflections expresses pride about having progeny, mentioning it alongside their owned land and esteem among their peers.

After some peer review, an esteemed friend has told me to add a section on purposed organisms as well! This is not so much my area, so I might be a bit off on some things.

As moon says, the majority of purposed organisms were tubes in boxes, and that the primal fauna of the world are almost entirely extinct. A lot of the fandom seems to ignore the first part, and i can't say I blame them, but the evolution of the creatures is so much weirder than people think.

Concept art for the creatures has this interesting quality to it, where the organic parts of the creatures have an almost... melty quality to them.

In the concept art, the flesh appears as if it's almost defying the machinery to form an animal shape. It's as if it's conquering its own artificiality the way the foliage grows over the (stone, brick and concrete, not mostly metal as some think!) ruins.

Of course, it's hard to really tell how much of this reflects the finalised concept, most of the integration is much smoother in the game, in line with a seamless kind of biomechanical design. There was always an intention of biomechanical strangeness, as shown in this screenshot of the devlog before the term "slugcat" even existed!

That said, the melty nature of the concept art shows a level of wild change inherent the biomechanical nature of the creatures, as if they truly are the result of these "tubes in boxes" almost revolting against their own boxes.

and considering centipedes... some tubes may not have had boxes in the first place!

[envcry2]

dating reveal misunderstanding

[noncredible-naramon]

AND ANOTHER THING about 1999 -- I love these worlds that let us come into contact with "normal" people. I feel like we've been getting more of that over the last few arcs of story from DE, and it's in my opinion a very good choice.

Every workday for a tenno is a nine-hour breakneck sprint through hostile territory while everyone in the squad is doing Unlimited Blade Works simultaneously. We do shit like wipe out the crews of entire galleons with a bow and arrow because it's more fun than using a rifle. We convert the entire world into particle physics and melee our way through by interpreting the three intelligible pixels like some kind of divination.

We've been trapped in a torture nexus for eternity. We've trained with every weapon imaginable over thousands of years. We regularly hang out with talking fish and entities from other star systems, to say nothing of the incomprehensible eldritch horror who sometimes hangs out on our porch to jumpscare us when we're coming inside. We haven't just been to the Void, we regularly go there to pick up groceries for our friends, who are ghosts.

As a result, this can make one a little jaded about the whole Tenno experience. You can forget what you are actually doing. You can lose track of the stakes.

And then you meet someone like the Hex, or the Ostrons, or the Solaris, and they say "hey can you uh. blow up this tank? I know it's a lot to ask but we could really use the help" and suddenly you realize. "Oh. You people are out here risking your lives, and I could wrap this up in five minutes and be home with pizza. Yes I will explode the tank. Should we get pepperoni or just straight cheese?"

It gives an immediate, satisfying story outlet for all this power, and lets us feel the amount of progression you've had to get this far, plus I personally think it's a lot of fun.

[diagonal-queen]

vanilla extract

[nenelonomh]

study tips

plan your studying around tests:

check your syllabus for tests and be generally aware of how far you're into a unit/topic

don't cram, but ramp up the studying as you near the test date

studying doesn't have to be 2 hours of flashcards; it can be 20 minutes reading over notes

methods of studying:

don't limit yourself to notes - you're going to get bored and inattentive, and then you will dread study.

USE THE INTERNET! it's the best resource for studying - all the information is out there are there's always quizzes and games for whatever your studying.

for students who study anatomy especially, or anyone who needs to memorise information, find a song version of the information on youtube. LEARN THE SONG. SING THE SONG.

flashcards!! i have a love/hate relationship with flashcards. they're great for vocabulary, but not for a deeper understanding of a concept. if you want to grasp anything that can't be related in less than 3 sentences, don't put it on a flashcard.

when you study using flashcards, DO NOT simply read them. of course - read your notes, but take advantage and test yourself. ACTIVE RECALL!

make sure to answer practice questions. this is key to your success and confidence in an exam.

taking breaks:

make sure to take breaks. it may not seem important - may even seem like a waste of time. but i promise you that you will crash significantly less if you take time to take care of yourself.

as you get closer to exam dates, you'll notice less time to do other day-to-day activities and leisure time. you must learn to prioritise. try to meal prep before exam season to lessen the load. write up a calendar/schedule to ensure that you get enough exercise, sleep, food, and social time.

if you find yourself taking too many breaks (more than you would like) - try to make your studying more enjoyable. gamify it!

end notes:

a link to my study corner, here. it's a masterlist of all of my study-related posts.

hope you enjoyed this mini-post ❤️ nene

[glyphes]

real subtle there, astarion

[locosquif]

A DESPERATE MISTAKE