#yeah it was about this one in particular

[magnificent-buckless-butt]

Tumblr theory: I feel like we should all have been BBC Sherlock fans at some extent (no, no need for the extra Johnlock drama). Because for years we had to put up with the joke "there's more season in a year than in BBC Sherlock". You'll have three episodes and then that's it, see you in a couple of years. Oh, why? Because the actors busy becoming Smaug and Bilbo, Strange and Everett Ross or whatever's good for their career.

The return of Sherlock after his death was even more unhinged: you got first a minisode reminding you you've been crazy for having waited all that time thinking there would be a season 3 then first episode mocks all the wild theories you made to explain how Sherlock faked his own death. (To this day, I still don't know if they honored us or despised us.) Oh and obviously season 5 is still up in the air since the show was neither officially ended nor canceled.

What I'm going for is: BBC Sherlock had us wait. This is something I especially noticed when the Marvel series aired, one episode per week. People drew wild conclusions on the spot, without having watched half the season while also complaining it wasn't fair that they had to wait a whole week for the next one. And I'm here like. Wow, did society damaged our patience so much. And even excluding Sherlock, it was the norm to wait one week? Heck, in my country, to see the new season, you'd have to wait around 9 months for the dubbed version to be ready so you knew you'd be almost one year late to the party.

In summary: chill guys. Bath is the rare shows that doesn't release it at once and have you wait. Relish in the nice feeling that you don't have to watch it now or you'll get spoiled tomorrow and that's obviously your fault duh.

In summary 2: actually I think I just hate Netflix.

[abstractfrog]

Happy 1 year anniversary to Mr Sherlock Holmes! Here's a litttleee celebratory comic from me

[secondbeatsongs]

if you write fic there will come a day, btw, when you look back at your WIPs and published works, notice some fun trends that line up with something in your dnd character's backstory, overlay that with the general vibe of whatever's going on in your brain, and go, "ah. fuck."

[sevastiel]

Behold ye, my Protoframe oc, Darius.

(Ft @doggojin and @thatfluffyboi's Chanho n Sol, they make an delightful trio tbh)

Some extra deets (lots of notes on him be warned) post cut! :)

Separated into physical and psychological/lore.

Physical notes :

Spanish-Mediterranean, mid-to-late twenties, looms at a ridiculous 6'6" (200 cm I believe? around there.) but is normally hovering an inch or two off the ground. Thankfully, he's gotten into the habit of tucking his legs in a bit so he doesn't hit every single doorframe that he passes through. He lost his left leg from the knee down due to an unfortunate incident with a landmine, and had a prosthetic for several years before the techrot.

Darius's body is made up of connected pieces held together by sentient energy, and all of his organs have either been replaced by the techrot-sentient hybrid growths, or are no longer necessary and have been removed. He currently lacks the entirety of a regular digestive tract as we would know it, and subsists mostly on energy. However, should he require physical mass for either rebuilding/modifying himself, or creating other sentients, he can 'eat' by putting materials in his mouth, pulling his bodily pieces together, and allowing the techrot systems to dissolve things into more workable particles, or pushing things between separated segments of his body (usually his chest) and letting the sentient bits pick things apart and feed them to the rot for storage. (This takes longer and is less effective at energy conservation) Extra notes on this later when we discuss his abilities.

The connective energy between segments is manifested in string-like bundles of force, which are manipulatable and can be 'touched', though unless he's focusing on keeping his energy properly contained you will likely get a light zap, and with prolonged touch you'll likely be able to feel them hum with power. They normally have about the same tactile strength as woven spiderwebbing of the same thickness, stretching easily but ultimately severable with either enough effort or something sharp. Should you sever all the connections, the piece will just fall off. Removed pieces aren't controllable by him any longer, but are re-attachable, and although he's got a body plan that his form defaults to, every single bit of him is entirely modular except for his cranium. Removing his jaw takes some effort, as there are technically still segments of flesh (his lips, basically) holding it on, but it is possible. If he really puts his mind to it, though, he can remove a segment, and maintain the links through mental focus, or by tethering them to something that he/they can feed off of. Through this, he can make replacement limbs for others, or additional armor, given they've got the bio-energy to keep the segments active.

Bodily segments are almost entirely made of toughened armor plating, with the majority of flexibility being located on the twin pieces that make up his chest/torso, as this is also where the majority of the techrot based organs lie. Although he does need to breathe, each segment intakes oxygen individually, through the softer and more porous dark insides. He has full sensation in any piece of him that he's linked to, as the energy connections serve as a nervous system, and can 'digest' pieces if he's in desperate need of energy/materials in a pinch.

Being modular, he can, in the same way he summons other sentients, simply craft himself differing body parts whenever he so pleases. The larger the piece, the more effort/thought it takes, since it requires a greater complexity of systems for nutrient, oxygen, and waste management. Due to his own lack of knowledge, he doesn't manifest any replacements larger than his own legs, and would rather just spit out a patch and slap it onto injured areas and let the techrot do its thing. This is why his 'armor' looks less dramatic compared to actual caliban, because why the hell would he want that much weight throwing him off balance? He'll accept the techrot/sentient's desires and keep his form adjacent to it, though.

Ability wise, he's functionally pretty similar to a vampire. While he technically could subsist entirely off of regular food, it would require a lot of time and careful dieting to gather the proper resources his body needs, and his energy levels would be rather constantly low. So, instead, he just eats as much techrot as he can and prays for the best, or drinks directly from power generators when he can get away with it, or anything similar. Pure energy as a baseline keeps all his sentient systems running, and metals/proteins allow his techrot systems to keep going. Thankfully for him, he's got two boyfriends who are both quite energetic, and really don't mind his needs as much as they should.

Manifesting sentient fighters usually happens in the same way as he manifests new pieces of himself, but with the added caveat that they don't need functional internal systems for long term usage, and he can charge them up with his own power to keep them running as long as he needs. This is obviously extremely resource intensive, but if it keeps those he cares about safe, (and since it appeases the eternal need to consume and create and consume and create and consume and create) he'll do whatever he must.

Due to all of the above, he prefers particularly tight or comfortable clothing,, as it helps mitigate the changes that happen depending on his energy levels. The less he's got, the looser his pieces, and things will just fall off if he's dead tired (lol). So... Avoiding that is nice. Additionally, although he needs his chest cavity within reach for making sentients at a quick notice, he does like looking in the mirror and not seeing his own body immediately as so blatantly inhuman and monstrous. The straps he uses for his military harness are half to hold things and half to straight up just keep himself together. The mask is for keeping his eyes clear of gore while he's in the middle of shit, because that was a severe issue beforehand. Take a bite, get blinded bc there was more fluid than you expected, have to panic and try and fix that mid combat, leaving you even worse off than you were previously? No thanks.

--

Psycological notes and lore:

Before Entrati got his hands on him, he was a well respected mediator that worked on communications for the ICR, and worked directly with the Hollvanian government and its military to allow for the ICR to remain in the city.

Coming from a well off and well expecting background, from a young age he was put through his paces and taught to be the finest edition of a modern renaissance man, giving him very little time to do anything but his studies, and very little affection from anything but perfection. Even then, kinda mid. As such, he is a well mannered and well spoken fellow with a deeply repressed childish nature that only ever comes out at the worst possible times amidst the best possible company.

Having been tailor-made for communications work, he was also ensured a healthy dose in very many other skills that might come up from time to time while traveling. (Including, but not limited to, sewing (which he hates), cooking (which he has extremely low patience for), midwifery (which thank god hasn't come up yet), medical triage (unfortunately has), general electrical and mechanical knowledge (much better for him now than it was before), a few languages, and so forth. Post becoming a protoframe, much of his knowledge has degraded due to the changes required for his brain to be able to control his bio-energy, leaving him constantly irritated when faced with a challenge that he knows DAMN well how to deal with, but cant remember specifics on.

He deals with irritation and anger very expressly, not one for subtlety or sarcasm when it comes to his displeasure. This man will Not be the one making snide jabs across the table, he would instead pull you aside privately and explain quite logically the behaviors he's disliking and see if either an agreement can be reached or if another specialist should be put forth. A trait learned from his parents, no doubt, but also one that helps considerably when it comes to governmental relations and respect.

All of his emotions are generally delt with highly logically, which, when it comes to more positive or soft feelings, gets very awkward and confusing for him very fast. One might find have found him before sitting on a bench, staring up at the falling leaves. If you asked him what he was thinking about, he'd respond that he's trying to comprehend why exactly he should be feeling happy about witnessing something so mundane. He wouldn't leave, of course, he'd still watch, but there will always be a part of him that shies away from emotions as a whole. All the sweeter, imo, when he really starts feeling and letting himself feel. Love is a strange thing, isn't it?

During his time in Hollvania, he got infected through volunteer work, doing his best to actually be helpful past the eternal red-tape. He hid it for as long as he could, taking extra care to frequently wash, scrub down, and then properly bandage and ointment up the affected bits of his arms so he wouldn't risk spreading anything, but it didn't do much for him at all. He was needed to maintain good relations, often running intermediary briefing dialogues to keep both sides as up to date as possible on the ICR's doings, so duty really did pull him in half. (haha) As the rot progressed and claimed more of his body, leaving him weaker and more frequently ill, it was less and less ethically feasible for him to keep working, despite it more or less being the only thing he really knew how to do, and there being very few people who could replace him. If he wasn't doing something, if he wasn't being productive, solving problems, keeping people happy, then what was he?

And then he heard of a man with a miracle cure, our good old Doktor Friday, and the fact that it worked. Naturally, Darius paid him a visit, already having used his infected status as an excuse to let him do a bit more hands on assistance wherever he could. And Entrati indeed did give him a cure, listening and nodding along to all the reasons Darius gave as to why he would likely be a good test subject, especially if it meant that if it worked, Darius would be in an excellent position to grant Albrecht significant funding for expanding his cures to the greater populous, who needed them desperately.

Well, it sure didn't fucking do much, did it, leaving him visually better, but when word got out that the others who'd taken the cure had become super-spreaders, you bet your ass he started panicking immediately. He'd been in rooms for extended periods of time with everyone in command, just his presence might have been enough to entirely destabilize the local government, or absolutely gut the ICR. So, once more, he claimed a stomach illness to take some time off. This was a very big problem, so back he went, livid as all hell, to hunt down Entrati.

He got the whole spiel about unforeseen mutations within the techrot responding strangely, and although he didn't believe it, he already had nothing left to lose. He wasn't a soldier, sure, he had training in fencing, could handle a gun, but he couldn't help like the others could, and he could not go back to the one thing he'd been set up all his life to be. And Entrati had a bit of a twinkle in his eye when he said that there might be something that he could do, but it would take time, and multiple tests, to be able to make it all work. There was another strain Dr E was experimenting with that, as he was shown samples and heard the explanations, seemed to be able to nullify the techrot almost entirely. (It was actually just subsuming it, but visually, the two outcomes were nearly identical.)

So he said yes. Like a fucking idiot.

The initial dose laced him with the helminth strain, preparing his body, granting him strength, even though it hurt so very much, the pain leaving him borderline insensate, unable to do anything but lay there and cry as he felt his very flesh twisting and saw Entrati approach with the second dose after a few hours.

Number two was a low dose of the sentient strain, modified, following Caliban's biological approach, and the reaction between the two was violent, techrot subsumed with a rapid hunger and made to serve a new master. Darius's body quite literally began tearing at the seams, and Entrati took his time with the process, utilizing several more small injections, so he wouldn't die of pure blood loss.

When all was said and done, his twisted body was held together by a scant few threads of power, and he was very much unconscious, having fallen into a coma that would last multiple days, fed with an occasional battery set into the new cavity within his chest.

Wisely, Entrati was not there when he awoke, starving, terrified, and in great pain. All he could focus on was the hunger, that pulsating desire that screamed at him to consume, create, consume, create, consume, create, his human mind utterly overwhelmed by the twin techrot and sentient desires. It took him some time to figure out how to move again, much less walk, and the hunger only got worse by the second.

When the Hex found him, they came across a crying, shattered man, tearing into mounds of freshly killed techrot with his bare hands, stuffing wires and flesh alike into his mouth with an inhuman voracity. He was guarded by bizarre automatons, whos' origin was quickly made apparent by him reaching into that glowing gash that bisected his entire body and pulling out another, his own form splitting and reshaping as he dragged it free.

It took quite some time for him to regain his humanity. Quite some time to mediate the new desires of his reformed body with his own. The urges have not left him, but at least he's got a choice, now.

Prince of both worlds indeed.

[nattikay]

OC lineup! All the characters that currently exist in this "story"

[d8tl55c]

[bandtrees]

they would get divorced in one universe just to find eachother in another one

alternatively titled: sometimes you're the level-headed token flesh-head impulse-control-and-polycule-member of a stubborn, eccentric, and hearty telephone-headed drug addict, and there's cruelty in the world you deem fit to suicidally fight, and that either goes about as well as you'd expect it to, or you learn about love and the value of your life and junk along the way

[sysig]

Reverberations, configurations (Patreon)

[shouyuus]

whats the ask that's just sitting in ur brain rn

its actually not an ask it's an idea that came to me as i was going to bed the other day of an arcane-adjacent universe where things aren't as bad as they are in the canon arcane universe but still there are like tensions between piltover and zaun, right. (but everyone is alive, thank gods)

and vi, being who she is, gets roped into being a 'liaison' between the two cities (by cait, who is the warden like she is canonically in league) so she gets assigned to show you, by all accounts, a nepo-baby inventor from one of the rich merchant clans, who's enrolled in the academy, around the undercity for a day. as a show of good diplomatic relations.

she's kinda annoyed, but knows it has to be her (otherwise mYLO or CLAGGOR will do it and it'll end up being a disaster). so when she meets you outside the academy gates, she's already decided that she doesn't really like you -- you with your prim little outfit and your gold-gilded umbrella, hooked around your arm.

but jayce assures her that you're more than meets the eye, and that you're one of the most promising talents the graduating class has to offer, to which vi only rolls her eyes. but powder wants to get into the academy next year (and ekko's already been admitted for the fall) so she's gotta play nice.

still, she's shocked when you turn out to be way more than meets the eye -- and your umbrella, if you can even call that thing an umbrella, with all it's weird gadgets and tricks, turns out to be just as surprising as you are (there's a thin longsword hidden in the handle, just as a sneak peak), and you're much more capable of handling yourself than she'd initially imagined.

maybe this day won't turn out to be such a drag afterall.

and. the fact that you're really, really cute? yeah. that doesn't hurt either.

[chiropteracupola]

Make me a boat of elm and I’ll row myself to sea / Soon I’d miss the anchor that never let me leave / Thinking on my darling, lonesome at the helm / Oh, make me a boat of elm, a boat of elm...

my half of an art trade with the amazing @emilybeemartin — here's Colm, from her trilogy Creatures of Light! ...from longstanding tradition, we know full well that I will always be found drawing the most melancholic boatsguy you have on hand.

[macbethz]

Imagine being modified and trained since birth to be the perfect servant to the infallible god-computer that your entire society revolves around to the point that you don’t believe in free will anymore. In fact free will as a concept is counter to your very purpose, which is to act as a living repository for unchanging information about the future. And then your perfect god shoves that highly engineered overclocked brain into the body of a heroin addict. And it’s not part of some grand plan it just destroyed your life by accident. Not even by accident, it doesn’t have the capability to commit “accidents” because it’s not sentient. It just miscalculated. It’s just a computer.

So there is this show called travelers (2016)-

[uniiiquehecrt]

Voice actors are NOT the same as actors.

It takes a specific kind of skill-set and training to be able to warp and meld the voice. It takes a certain kind of talent and dedication to hone that talent into the ability to meld the voice and invoke emotion with one's voice alone. Actors are used to using their voice secondarily to their body language and their facial expressions. It's all mirrored back on camera. They do have nuance. But it's a different kind of nuance and a different kind of training to produce that nuance.

Voice actors might get their likeness transposed on their character's design, and maybe their mannerisms might seep into the character's animation. But when it's all said and done: their presence is in their voice. They are bringing a character to life, showing that emotion in their voice, trying to keep a specific accent, drawl, pitch, tone in that voice and keep it consistent for their recording sessions.

The voice actor is like a classically trained musician who can play first chair in a competitive, world-renown orchestra. The actor (who fills the voice actor's role) is like a moot who played violin in beginner and intermediate high school orchestra and thinks they can get into Juilliard with that 2-4 years of experience.

This doesn't mean that the HS orchestra moot can't play. They can even be really good at it. Maybe they won competitions and sat first chair. But they are not in the same league as the person who's been training their whole lives and lives and breathes to hone their craft using the instrument and all of the training they've ever acquired to perfect it. They are not meant for the same roles. They are not in the same caliber. You do not hire the HS equivalent when you want to play complex music in a competitive orchestra.

Actors are not the same as voice actors.

And furthermore, actors - especially big name actors - taking the roles of animated characters for big budget films or TV pilots makes no sense anyways when - at least in the case of TV pilots - there's not a point to hiring a big budget actors anyways. That money could be used elsewhere (like paying your animators), and the talent that is brought onto the screen for X character could then be hired on to voice said character no recasting required.

I wouldn't say voice acting as a profession is in danger exactly, but it's certainly being disrespected and overlooked for celebrity clout, and this has ALWAYS been an issue. Shoot, even Robin Williams knew that much - which is why he tried so hard not to be used as a marketing chess piece for Aladdin and got royally pissed off when it happened anyways. People shouldn't go to any movie (but especially not animated films) because "oh famous actor is in it". People should go because it's a good movie and the voice acting is good.

People who honest to god think that voice actors are replaceable because "oh well anyone can voice act" or "I like xyz celebrity so naturally it'll be good" ... Honestly I just wish you'd reassess your priorities because you're missing the point and are part of the problem.

Voice Actors ≠ Actors.

[saltyyetbland]

ngl im fucking terrified of how the fandom will act when the asian ccs get added and they are confronted with asian customs such as honorifics, asian cultural norms, and the language itself (ie words that are common in one language that sounds like a slur in another) and i know most of the fandom will be open and welcoming but idk im probably being way too pessimistic as someone who is asian and has seen the bs that people can spew esp regarding things like stereotypes

[mirroredmasquerader]

This is one of the first few things I drew in color for this nonsense I think

[skrunksthatwunk]

i just know his ass has a debilitating urge to chew ice constantly (<- projecting)

[pergaminaa]

Manon Blackbeak core