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Some Sentients.
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follow me on twitter: @eornhart

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this has happened to me a few times and at this point i'm just really confused like. i'm not sure what people expect to happen when they start a conversation yelling and cursing at me bc the only outcome to that is me immediately revoking all communication privileges. like. do they think i'll sit and listen? or that i'll want to keep talking to them? if they wanted me to snip them out of my life it's a really roundabout way of asking fhdjfh...

idk i feel like there's also some kind of like, expectation that people are obligated to be friends? like someone can't possibly not want more friends? like keeping people who treat you poorly is secondary to the idea of having more 'friends'? like somehow, "is uncomfortable and rude" isn't enough of a reason to hard block and drop someone from my life

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autumn

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i don't mean to sound so angry @ vaati fandom for the last post rip. the online multiplayer game community (where i've been the last couple months) is really bad regarding toxic masculinity, misogyny and transphobia so i'm probo just a lil sensitive

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getting kind of tired logging on to tumblr and seeing "i did a female version of this male character" and it's a pic of the character with boobs slapped on their chest and they're wearing a dress

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ARTICLE, October 11 2019

ARTICLE, October 11, 2019

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You don’t have to keep giving this company your money, just saying.

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hi there just wanted to say I recently discovered your Demon Princess VaaZel fanfic and it made me cry a lot (menaing you did amazing). Besides I just find out that you are the artist of many popular Vaati pics so yea I am amazed haha. To be honest you inspire me to pick up writing as a hobby again and your massive art improvement is also goals. Oh and I love how PERFECT you described Vaati in that fanfic he was just like he is in my head, up to the vegetarian detail even! Keep going 💜

!!! 

oh my goodness thank you so much? :”’) i keep getting surprised (in a good way!) when people dig up my stories and tell me they still enjoy reading them. 

sometimes i remember how much the character meant to me when i read messages like this :’) i have a complicated relationship with the character but at the end of the day he helped me through some tough times. thank you so much!

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Abyss watchers is probably my fav boss fight in Dark souls 3 ///////

I rlly wanted to draw them, I love their design <3

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some more adopts! wanted to do some fun stuff with tiefs and outfits this time. as always buyer gets unwatermarked art after purchase! dm if you wanna take a spiky kid home 💙

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oh! we’re keeping it a little slightly kinda sorta undercover regarding the details just in case since it’d be awesome if we go the publishing route some day and publishers can be kind of strict about how much we’d already talked about a story beforehand.  but @meoln‘s been drawing his characters for it and posting it from time to time! i might also at some point :’) 

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also i haven't stopped writing actually, i've been busy cowriting an original piece with meoln, so a lot of creative writing energy's been going in that direction ha.

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Hello! It's your motivational Wolfie here to tell you that you're an amazing artist in every sense of the word and I am proud of you! :D

!!!!mirror motivational fleets here to tell you that you’re an amazing sweetheart of a person who i’m glad to have met while in the fandom and i’m proud of you too!i hope you’re doing well, thank you so much :’)

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I’m an old reader of your fics, which I forgot about around when you started Asphodel, during a long break. I was looking around the site when I saw some of your stories and got nostalgic. I looked at your account and noticed you stopped updating. Instead of begging for updates, I’d like to thank you for writing those stories. Also, I hope your birds are doing well. I haven’t checked out your Tumblr since I forgot about your stories and I remember you would often post cute pictures of the birbs.

AAA oh my goodness thank you so much :’’’’) this warmed me so much? I still do feel bad about not finishing Asphodel; I was really excited about that story and I still have the outline for it complete. I’m still floored and so happy to this day when I hear that people really enjoyed the stories that I put so much into..It’s not so much that I lost interest that I stopped writing but I guessI guess things changed, in a good way. I leaned on Vaati and his fandom heavily during tumultuous and lonely times in my life and the effort I’d put into the stories and the worlds and arcs I’d built had been both an escape and also something I ended up being really proud of personally. I don’t need that escape or that validation anymore, now that I’m in a better, happier, and calmer place in life; it’s hard because I simultaneously miss and don’t miss those days. 

I still sometimes think about dropping another update, finishing that 2/3rds done chapter etc. I’m currently engrossed with other hobbies, other OCs, and just enjoying the kind of freedom I hadn’t had back when I was projecting onto a character who’d felt trapped and angry. I’d like to think I’ll go and finish it one day though

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loz

there's a post somewhere about how ganondorf's death is often presented almost as a holy death, deeply dignified and with appropriate silence. i think the term the person used was like a kind of anti-martyrdom, like. "a holy death, but not of something good". i'm not sure if i'm using the terminology entirely correctly, but that's something that's always hit me. like. i don't think that comes from just the general seriousness of the plot, but also that there's a quiet acknowledgement that fate

itself was against him - and the inherent tragedy of that. like. they’re So Close to digging just a little further and questioning that concept of fate + supposedly inherent character weakness in the first place. this is present in oot - zelda acknowledges him as pitiful, someone who couldn’t control the triforce. and in tp, zelda seems to do something like a quiet prayer. this aspect of zelda herself isn’t present in wind waker (iirc), but is embodied by the king, who directly compares himself.

That’s a concept that a friend of mine talks about a lot ( @betterbemeta ) in almost those exact words but I asked her and she said she wasn’t sure of the specific post, just that she didn’t get it from someone else.

But, yeah, I feel like… there’s this interesting sort of counter-narrative within the Zelda series, I think? There’s the main narrative, which is the Legend and the Cycle and that it is Correct to perpetuate the Cycle and live out the roles people are given.

But there’s also a lot of counterpoints, of things making it clear that the Cycle is hurting people, that you will not be rewarded or kept safe for perpetuating it- and in Wind Waker this is very interesting, because, a lot of the evidence points to Ganon’s stance- “Your gods abandoned you!” being correct. 

Hyrule was destroyed. Most of its people were killed. Two young people who were active servants of the god at the time were murdered and nothing protected them. Ganon comes across as someone who’d know- because he’s acting as the Divine Opponent, here.

And there’s this scene, late in Wind Waker, where he reads Tetra’s dreams with his power.

This scene sticks with me, because it’s Ganon doing something unnecessary. He’s got no reason to treat Tetra hospitably at this point. He’s got no reason to tuck her into a bed, which he does, or acknowledge that she’s a child, or wonder who she is besides Zelda. 

And, yet, we have this. unexpectedly introspective soft scene, and while it’s followed by the puppet Ganon fight, the things he says there don’t seem just like villainous trash talk, but, nearly a plea for these kids to realize how messed up their situation is. They’re allegedly agents of the gods who are being chewed up by their Fates, used and cast aside, and while he has an agenda in not wanting this to happen (as their given Fate is to be parties in his execution) there’s a bleak humor Wind Waker Ganon has about the situation that, to me, has never actually been contradicted within the Zelda games. Words to the contrary ring hollow. In practice, we watch Hyrule desolated, we watch its executioners throw him on vulnerable populations (in Twilight Princess, the Sages know enough of the modern Twili to recognize Midna in her cursed form- so they had to have known the people they were leaving at the mercy of a wounded, panicked Ganon who was nonetheless fully capable of killing a person with his bare hands at that point).

In Breath of the Wild, which doesn’t even depict Ganon as a person who can argue his point (though the sequel may shed new light on that), he still nonetheless seems correct about the nature of the cycle; Zelda is unabashedly a survivor of child abuse who was forced to pray in sacred springs starting at age seven. 

BotW is basically the series’ most detailed thesis yet that the Cycle broke Link and Zelda and tore pieces from them they’re not getting back. Both of them lost a century. Zelda’s passions and interests were sublimated to force her into a passive role. People they knew and were close to died. Link’s habitual silence is depicted as a product of the anxiety that the hero role pressed on him, and he was also a human shield just to guarantee that of the Champions, Zelda at least could make it, that left him critically injured.

The only real coherent defense raised by the Cycle- which is meta-wise, “justified” by Skyward Sword, which establishes it as an unholy curse- is “this is the only way to save Hyrule” which is never challenged or argued or defended. It’s merely accepted. And we keep watching young, vulnerable kids following the paths laid out by their predecessors and being torn apart by these events.

Link and Zelda don’t look like people who are protected by benevolent gods that shine over them. Repeatedly, the deities of the Zelda setting are depicted as not especially loving. In A Link To The Past, the Triforce itself says it doesn’t care about good or evil, merely that Link has proven his worth and should now make a wish. Other characters in the setting describe it as fickle or a troublemaker. In Skyward Sword, Zelda, regaining Hylia’s memories and thus the clearest potential insight into how Hylia was thinking and feeling, states that Hylia obtained a mortal incarnation basically as bait for Link, who would be driven by compassion to protect his friend, and thus get functionally conned into acting as Hylia’s champion.

I think this is why fanworks that put the chosen three on the same side make sense, because, in this way, Ganon is more a contemporary to the heroes than the King of Hyrule, who, no matter how often he dies, never really has that sense of being a martyred hero who’s lost fragments of himself. Daphnes was able to choose his own death, and the death of his kingdom, on his own terms using the Wind Waker and then the Triforce; Rhoam controls the narrative at the beginning of BotW.

Ganon?

Just from what we know about BotW’s sequel (which is not much at all) Ganon is having a bad time. In a way, his fate seems to combine elements of Link and Zelda’s- he was confined for a long time in a death match with another force (Zelda), and he was heavily and brutally injured and may have lost consciousness (Link) only to awaken in an unfamiliar future where he’s been all but forgotten (both of them).

And part of this is the need that the games seem to have, to have everything be Ganon’s fault, but to never acknowledge or explore the relationships Ganon actually, has with the various entities he ostensibly commands. I love Wind Waker, but, as friends of mine have pointed out- there’s only flimsy excuses at best for Ganon to put the various boss monsters in the environments they’re found in. They’re themed to their environments so that they seem fitting elements, rather than something foreign placed there that’s disrupted an extant order.

It leads to this sense of Ganon more as a pariah than as a true Source Of Evil. Because he’s blamed for everything, including things that don’t actually seem to further any of his stated objectives and in fact, might even work against something he is stated to want (e.g. the withering of the Deku Sprouts in Wind Waker, which are stated to be a potential way to drain the Great Sea and leave the Land Below accessible once again- the big thing Ganon wants- but they’re stated to fail because of Ganon’s magic; or him outright saying he wants the sun to shine on Hyrule when earlier in the game Daphnes accuses him of cursing the entire sea into a state of darkness because he wants everything to be dark)

Ganon’s not blameless and harmless- like. he absolutely did shit and is rarely sorry for it or sorry but not enough to stop- but, it definitely feels like his role as Hyrule’s Enemy is a degree outside of his control, much as the Hero or Princess roles are out of Link and Zelda’s. This is a game series about people being forced into roles that cause them to suffer, and then the end takeaway is I guess It Was Worth It because the Bad Man Died.

It’s this situation where the narrative tells us we are dealing with a demon man who hates everything and the only holiness or justice can come from his death, and then at the same time we’re shown a guy who is a power-hungry jerk with a large list of offscreen and frankly mystifying crimes that don’t seem to add up with anything he seems to want or value or even his sense of humor. And it ends up leaving the whole Cycle… feeling rather bleak.

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me: i'm doing ok

emotionally absent father who i hardly ever talk to sends me one nice message out of the blue

me: i'm doing not ok