#4. the entire existence of changelings. just. just in general.

[elegantjellyfishwerewolf]

Why I don't like "Wizards"

In general, I think that the "Stories of Arcadia" began to slide after the release of "Three from Heaven", but more on that later. In this post there will be many comparisons of "Wizards" with "Trollhunters" due to the fact that they are a direct continuation.

1. The first thing I didn't like was that the narration was too fast, and if this is still acceptable in the first series, then in the rest such narration begins to annoy, because it does not allow you to delve into the story and concentrate on at least one action.

For example, already in the second series, a lot of things happen: the arrival at Arthur's castle, the interaction of Claire and Morgana, the acquaintance of Jim and Deya, Steve becomes a knight, the trolls escape from Camelot. Of course, there are episodes in which the narrative goes normally, for example, in 4 episod, but basically the story does not have the ability to concentrate on one moment and continues to throw out new information to us.

2.The second problem, for me personally, is the characters. 1. I really didn't like that Steve's intelligence was cut so much, he wasn't a very smart character before either, but he could still come up with interesting ideas to solve problems (for example, when in the second season he guessed to use umbrellas to help trolls), but then they made a complete jerk out of him who, throughout the entire viewing, only irritates with his tantrums. If you remove him from the series, literally nothing will change, because his "knight's arch" didn't really lead to anything. After the battle of Kilahed Bridge, he says he will continue Lancelot's cause and bring back the Knights of the Round Table, but in the end he did nothing of it. 2. Another character who, in my opinion, has become worse in "Wizards" is Claire. I'm the only one who thinks that in the two weeks she spent in Camelot, she became too good at using shadow magic, considering that she studied with Douxie, who himself said he didn't understand anything about shadow magic. And even after becoming such a professional magician, for some reason she still can't guess to open a portal under Jim and only then, after escaping from the fortress of the Secret Order, try to bring him to his senses, BUT NO! Instead, she tries to convince Jim to enter the portal himself, and when she tries to open the portal under him, Morgana has already arrived by then, and she has to retreat. 3.The third character is Douxie. I immediately say that I do not hate him, the only thing that confuses me is his age. He is 900 years old, just think about this figure! And with all this, he behaves like a teenager who is 18-19 years old. The authors are trying to show us that he has changed since the events in Camelot by showing his younger version, but these changes can happen in a maximum of 2 or 5 years, BUT NOT IN 900 YEARS!!!! While watching it, the thought did not leave me that it was a 900-year-old man who, for some reason, continues to behave like a teenager.

4.Morgana. After The Wizards, I hated her. The authors tried to make her an ambiguous character, but in the end they created a bunch of plot holes. In Wizards, she says she wants to help all magical creatures, but in Troll Hunters, when Angor asked her for help, she tricked him into serving her and killing Merlin's champions. She also stole troll children and used creepy experiments to turn them into changelings (also against their will). Yes, even in the series itself, she contradicts herself when she gives Gunmar a sword that can control the mind. 5. The secret Order. I have no doubt that the authors came up with these characters only when they were writing the script for "Wizards", and that they did not exist initially. Because after the battle on the Kilahed Bridge, they say they will now try to change the world. AND THEY DECIDED TO DO IT ONLY AFTER 900 YEARS!!! SERIOUSLY!!!!!! You say that they have been recovering all this time, but I will say that only Belrog needed to be restored, and the rest of the Order members could try to carry out their plan to steal the seals alone. AND WHERE WERE THEY WHEN GUNMAR AND MORGANA ARRANGED ETERNAL NIGHT?!!?! I very much doubt that magicians of their level would not have felt such a strong release of magical energy.

3.Plot holes. There are too many of them! Literally in every episode I noticed one or another plot hole. Of those that were very noticeable: 1. Deya could not be the first hunter because Kanjigar said that troll hunters tried to kill Gunmar many times, but never won. 2. Morgana couldn't create a changeling in a couple of days, which also grew so fast. 3. When the moment came to conclude a deal between Angor and Morgana. 4. Creeper's poison created the Order of Janus, changelings could not create an order in a couple of days, and Morgana could not create such a number of changelings. 5.In the third season of trollhunters there was shown the battle of Merlin and Morgana and it had happened not only in another place but also there was no Douxie on the scene. 6. Blinky said that the confrontation between Merlin and Morgana lasted for centuries, as a result, it happened within a couple of days.

There were also many minor inconsistencies in the plot: 1. The battle on the Kilahed Bridge was different from the one we were shown in the third season of "Troll Hunters".

2. The design of the Deya is different from the statue in the forge of heroes.

3. WHY THE HELL CAN MORGANA OPEN PORTALS WITHOUT A STAFF?! Then why didn't she just create a portal in the finale of the third season and fly out of it? 4. The process of creating the amulet is different from what we were shown in the third season.

5. Where did Belrog get the staff of shadow if it was destroyed in the finale of the third season? AND WHERE DID THIS STAFF GO AFTER THE EIGHTH EPISODE?!! 6. The hand that is used to create the amulet is also different from the one that was shown to us in "Troll Hunters".

7. During Morgana's incarceration, she was wearing a helmet and a raincoat. 8.Wendel's appearance is also different from the one that was shown to us in "Troll Hunters".

(This is probably going to sound like a quibble, but why didn't Jim react to Draal in any way?)

And this is the main reasons why I can't perceive wizards as a direct continuation of the trollhunters series.

4.Of course, there were moments in this show that I liked, for example, the acquaintance of Blinky and Aarrg, the storyline of Merlin and Douxie, but, alas, the cons in this show outweighed the pros for me.

#trollhunters #root #tales of arcadia #toa #trollhunters rott #wizards #art #3below #trollhunters rise of the titans #fanart #this is my opinion

[retroactivebakeries]

Cup, Ring, Staff, Sword: The Fair Folk

It is sometimes said that the best way to play one tabletop rpg Exalted's Fair Folk would be to just use the rules from Nobilis.

So I played around with that a bit.

Preface: I'm just gonna to assume you're already familiar with Exalted's Fair Folk, because. I do not have the time or willpower to explain their whole deal here.

To play one of the Fair Folk, use Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine.

The Fair Folk probably work best if they start with 3 to 5 levels of miraculous arcs at character creation.

Skills

The basic nature of the Fair Folk is represented by the Superior Fae skill. It's what they use to shape the chaos of the Wyld, beguile others, and feed on emotions, dreams, and souls.

Superior Fae 0: You might have a distant faerie ancestor. Maybe you were raised as a changeling-child in a Fair Folk court.

Superior Fae 1: Your faerie lineage actually has some power to it.

Superior Fae 2: You're something like the minor servitors the Fair Folk create for themselves — similar in nature, but lesser in power and status.

Superior Fae 3: You're the typical Fair Folk.

Superior Fae 4: You're a Fair Folk of considerable power.

Superior Fae 5: You are peer to the likes of Balor and Laashe, mantled in the legend you have forged for yourself.

Some other common Skills include:

Changeling

Enthralling Glamour (neé the Titov Family Magic)

Superior Dreamer

Superior Physical Control

Superior Vitality

Bonds and Affliction

Common examples include:

I can't exist within Creation without feeding on people.

Iron [or some other thing] is my bane; I can't bear its touch.

I bear [my Cup Grace]; thus, people want me to be part of their lives.

I bear [my Ring Grace]; thus, I alone can define who I am.

I bear [my Staff Grace]; thus, I can't willingly break my word.

I bear [my Sword Grace]; thus, I am a thing of terror and glory.

The GM can be pretty generous in just letting players get some of these at chargen just as like, a freebie.

Genre

Either Techno and Epic Fantasy is probably the best fit, but they may want to raid another genre for some additional parts:

The Gothic genre might be a good fit for focusing on the intrigues and politics of faerie courts.

Experiencing prosaic, everyday life in Creation is Immersive Fantasy from the alien perspective of the fae.

The Road of Trials could work for questing against the great powers of the deep Wyld.

Reality Shaping and XP Actions

Players in Chuubo's are always allowed to take out-of-genre XP actions, but for the Fair Folk, doing so is often going to get flavored as an exercise of their reality shaping powers.

If you want to actually accomplish something beyond what the XP Action itself could normally do, you'll need to use Superior Fae or another appropriate skill to make this reality shaping something productive, rather than just cool.

To organize things, each color of XP action is associated with one of the Fair Folk's graces. The Cup is associated with purple and red actions, the Ring with black and green actions, the Staff with blue and silver actions, and the Sword with gold and orange actions.

Arts of the Cup

Shared Actions and Shared Reactions involves drawing others into stylized, sometimes surreal interactions with you. It's a prime opportunity to have an emotional impact on someone, or feed on them.

Foreshadowing and Sympathetic Actions shape opportunities to draw someone or something that catches your attention into your orbit.

Arts of the Ring

Rituals and Transitions are used to shape and explore illusory worlds governed by alien laws or to create minions and treasures, playing out in a montage or eliding the description entirely via Transition.

Corruption, Trauma, and Transformation demonstrate the unassailable power of laws of your nature, even in the face of forces that seek to twist and warp it. Wicked Actions demonstrate that yours is a strange, alien, and predatory nature.

Arts of the Staff

The Slice of Life and Discovery actions shape illusory social contexts for you to react to, and — with some efforts — for others to be ensnared within.

Defining Actions and Science, Faith, and Sorcery let you bind yourself to oaths and relationships, or understand and shape the rules of societies.

Arts of the Sword

The Be in Trouble and Never Say Die! actions shape opportunities for you to dramatically demonstrate your heroism in the face of insurmountable odds, and to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Obsessive Actions and Suffering Adversity shape opportunities to suffer travails and ordeals, building your legend and glory through overcoming such hardship.

#exalted #cmwge

[rabbit-exe]

15 Questions 15 Mutuals

tagged by the generally very cool and good @argyleheir for purposes of question-answering; here we go baybeeeee

1. Are you named after anyone? technically! it's not actually anyone I knew well, but my first instance of hearing what would become my name (rowan) was some random boy that lived in my neighbourhood. so, changeling-like, I stole it from him without remorse.

2. When was the last time you cried? I don't remember, I don't really keep track - more than a week ago, I guess, because I don't remember doing it recently.

3. Do you have kids? no, and I do not ever intend to! I don't dislike children with any great degree of vitriol, it's just not a responsibility I'm keen to take on.

4. Do you use sarcasm a lot? a fair bit, but only in a playful, bastardly manner.

5. What sports do you play/have played? I used to do horse-riding, before my entire body decided to really lean into the chronic illness.

6. What's the first thing you notice about people? I don't. as soon as I encounter a person my brain retains no information about them at all because I'm trying to figure out how to interact with them successfully and not say something weird, which is a problem, because I have an internal clock that counts down whenever I'm in a social situation and when it hits zero I inevitably say something weird.

7. What's your eye color? grey-blue

8. Scary movies or happy endings? Scary, baybee! I'm a big wimp, but I love horror as a genre, even if I can't really watch a lot of the films because I have such an incredible startle response that it makes jumpscares intolerable.

9. Any special talents? I'm decent at writing and drawing, and I used to be able to balance up to twelve spoons on my face simultaneously until I got older and the shape of my face changed, which is a shame because it was my one party trick outside of listing facts nobody wants to hear about parasitoid wasps. I also apparently have a very good ear for music.

10. Where were you born? scotland, in a hospital that no longer exists.

11. What are your hobbies? writing, drawing, ttrpgs, reading, makin' little guys to write and draw about, amateur taxidermy, playing music (piano and ukulele) and singing (autism bonus round: learning about parasitology, corvids, vultures, mortuary science and the funeral industry, medical history and hilarious history in general, interesting diseases, animal facts)

12. Do you have pets? yes; a tiny little cat called Sigyn (full of violence), a much older and larger cat called Varjak (full of soft big man), and my mother owns a horse named TJ (full of hay).

13. How tall are you? 5'8"-ish

14. Favorite subject in school? english and biology

15. Dream job? I do not dream of work, brother (as a child I wanted to be a doctor, but now I'm aiming for mortician - I say aiming, because my body and brain are in a state of hilarious disarray what with all the various ailments and I'm borderline confined to my bedroom)

tagging people (with no expectation that they should do this, just a little suggestion, like poking a frog away from a road): @onearthbrieflygorgeous @theleastgothgoth @crisis-response-specialist @ziracona @star-rott and anyone else that follows me that wants to give it a go, feel free to tag me in your own responses

#hare.txt #ask meme #tag game

[villains4hire]

Eve Ruhn’hakarae, Shifter Knight.

1. Rune-hah-car-a is how you pronounce it all together if you need to know how to say it.

2. This verse will have everything from a fantasy, modern and sci-fi verse and use Eve’s already existing icons.

3. This will be using DnD 5e for a base, but I don’t expect to completely adhere to everything and just a general idea. I expect your character from that Universe/Fandom if working with mine or against her to either scale her down in terms of level to be equal to yours or you scaling up. It doesn’t matter if they don’t plan on adventuring, however, though I will say I am open to her being a Teacher of sorts given her nature.

4. Eve for this AU variant will be a lot more chill and using the Changeling Race with my own flare to it, though she will still be eh, I’d say somewhere between Lawful Neutral and Lawful Evil as the DnD alignment system is somewhat flawed inherently. She will also be focusing more on shapeshifting for fighting style, and while I have it based in DnD? I’m just going to give a general idea as to not limit my own descriptions of form shifting, striking while shifting and utilizing those powers, etc.

5. This will be using my homebrew subclass called Shifter Knight which utilizes transforming into monsters and all that entails, however, I have extensively balanced this subclass, going from the ENTIRE CR 0 to CR 8 monster list of DnD 5e to balance all the powers, monsters, etc that this class can become as a Shapeshifter Arcane Warrior, while also not overshadowing Rune Warrior or Moon Druid to give it an identity of its own. I can link the page privately if you desire to see it, but I am adhering to it and the balances, limitations and counters the class has to it compared to something like Rune Knight who doesn’t need verbal or somatic components for example to use its abilities, albeit not counting as spells, so they can’t be counterspelled, but are affected by things such as a Beholder’s Anti-Magic Cone which would force her to stay as normal or stay in the form if standing in it. I say this because this took a lot of work and totals in around 13 pages for this subclass alone.

6. Some monster abilities I will actually roll for as if using a higher level Eve? Some of her forms have petrifying-like abilities or even at lower levels though more similar to that of the Cockatrice. Then remember some abilities are outright nerfed/changed to be once per turn or allowed to make a save at the end of their turn. I say this mechanical stuff to hopefully make an understanding that I’m not using the straight-up stat block and rather my 13 pages of rulings on the subclass.

7. As with the nature of the character? There’s quite a bit of body horror. I’d read her forms and tell me which isn’t ‘comfortable’ to use, if any.

Eve’s reference, basically only a recolor was needed as her race was originally based off the Changeling to begin with, though I will be keeping my variations and deviants.

Do I want them to die: Eve to some degree I will allow to die. Separate timeline and bad ends are fully fine, however. They just need plotting. Will I have/get icons: I’ve given her icons. Tag: lvl 5, lvl 10, lvl 15, lvl 20, epic lvl - shifting tides (fantasy/modern verse, basically puts her in a DnD like universe or modern universe with a gun as part of her arsenal compared to normal) - shifting space (sci-fi verse) Either within the far future or within the depths of space like Star Wars, Star Trek, Star Finder or even something like Final Space. Age: Several Centuries to thousands of years, depending on what level, but I’d be fine with her advancing at the same pace as yours. Sex: AMAB. Gender: Trans Female, she/him. Eve has no real concept of human gender standards. Race: Quarter Tiefling (Zariel Subrace), Changeling (Base Race and Statline Used) Sexuality: Has no real sexual preference but is active. Personality traits: Silent until she knows you. Blunt. Cruel if pushed to the point of fighting. Can be passionate. Can be loyal. Can be hard to guess. Is somewhat mysterious. Can be extremely loving, but it’s rare. Though is capable of platonic friendships that are deeply intimate as well or motherly. Can be fun, likes adventure and exploring. Has a grim sense of humor, but can be joking. Wise with experience, but had a time where she wasn’t as knowledgeable and is only really skilled in what she’s studied in and battle. Calculating, somewhat cautious at times. She likes to eat people sometimes, but tends to lean toward mostly in battle or just bastards. Pretty relaxed underneath it all. Mental traits: Has an alien mindset and viewpoint to certain topics or things, but has much more humanity than one would guess. Physical traits: She’s around 6′4, has fluffy long flowing hair, and he’s rather muscular, though the definition is hidden by the nature of a Changeling’s body. Though their height can vary when using a Changeling’s ability to around 3′0 to 10′0 depending on what common race she’s disguising herself as at the time. Then her monster form height can widely vary depending on looks. Otherwise, she can rip most people in half even without Storm Giant’s Belt. Has hooves and a tail as part of her quarter Tiefling bloodline.

Powers: statline and skills, racial powers, items, then classes and feats. Keep in mind that this is scaled down significantly the lower lvl she is for her tagline. This is to give a good idea of what she’s capable of and to be able to scale her down.

Statline:

HP: 240ish at max level or in epic levels. (Average for Fighters is around 170 to 240ish, especially if toughness is taken)

Strength: 18, Belt of the Storm Giant (29 strength) when wearing it at higher lvls.

Dexterity: 10.

Constitution 20.

Intelligence 16.

Wisdom 12.

Charisma 8.

Skills:

Athletics. Acrobatics. Survival. Perception. (Fighter Class and Background). Persuasion. Intimidation.

Saving Throws:

Strength.

Constitution.

Movement:

It vastly depends on what form she currently is using.

Languages:

Common, Deep Speech, Giant, Elvish. Undercommon.

Racial Powers:

Standard Stats:

Her main power as a Changeling is to Shapeshift into any race or species she knows of that is medium or smaller as an action. She does not gain any benefits from the race doing this, merely acting as it without others assuming her true nature. She often disguises herself as an Elf, though will take the shapes of monsters when dealing with them or passing by if she doesn’t intend to fight them, though sometimes has to tap into her arcane reserves for the more complicated, powerful forms.

Her mixed bloodline even by Changeling standards has made her natural physical traits different compared to the average Changeling.

Eve’s tampering of her own life and form has made her cease aging.

Items: (Keep in mind the more insane things such as the ‘Belt of Storm Giant Strength’ or anything like that in terms of legendary rarity is kept to lvl 15 and above.

Main Equipment: For her armor, it is either none before lvl 10 or Storm Giant’s Bone Full-Plate, an extremely sturdy armor, giving quite the defense when morphing it onto her forms and resistance toward lightning. A magic +3 longsword with a fire enchantment on it. A magic +3 great-axe with a wounding enchantment, designed to cause massive bleeding against targets when used and is her usual main weapon. Then a magic +3 great axe of dragonslaying as a situational weapon. A few magic javelins returning for utility. (They return on throwing them). A backup greataxe of +3 that deals fire damage and a +3 shortsword. Dagger of +3. A bag of holding. A backpack. Butcher’s Kit. Mess Kit. Rations.

Minor Magic Equipment: A ring of slowfall, as to avoid being killed through great heights or teleportation. Potions of flying if dealing with flying enemies, mostly for utility. A few potions of supreme healing, only three or four at the most. Then quite a few superior healing potions, around six to eight. Rope of Climbing.

Major Artifacts that require attunement: Belt of the Storm Giant’s Strength. A Mantle of Spell Resistance. (Both self-explanatory) Ring of Evasion, it’s used when failing dexterity based saving throws.

Classes and Feats: this segment will be starting only with fighter and its subclass.

Fighter (20 levels put into):

Fighting Style: Great Weapon Fighting, an expert in two-handed weaponry to do more brutal strikes with her greataxe or natural attacks.

Unarmed Fighting: Increased Prowess in using her Changeling Claws and forms natural attacks when it comes to physical brutality.

Adrenaline Surge: Tapping in her adrenaline reserves using her arcane shaping? Eve is able to gain a massive burst of energy to strike another four times to a total of eight within around six seconds, or to grapple the enemy.

Changeling Regeneration: tapping into her chaotic ancestry and form’s nature, she may regenerate a certain amount of hp.

Changeling Fluid Strikes: her attacks are as confusing as the perception of her form in the field of battle, swinging with intense speed and unnatural accuracy as she shifts and changes her form. While she may not be faster than some species when not transformed? In any of her forms, along with her true form? Eve’s amount of speed and brutality is near unmatched.

Chaotic Endurance: the nature of Eve’s being is truly chaotic, few can outlast a being with such chaotic genetics, further augmented by their own designs. Eve has the ability to overcome or shrug off some of the most horrible effects.

Subclass Shifter Knight: The amount of times she can shift isn’t infinite, but can be devastating if using her abilities to swap to different forms for certain situations or to utilize certain abilities while transforming. It uses the Eldritch Knight’s Spell Table for the amount of ‘Spell Slots’ that count toward Arcane Form Shapes. I will include a power list, a short descriptor of the humanoid characteristics if she’s not using the complete natural form. I have cut some of the forms of course as not all are needed or don’t fit with the theme compared to playing an actual game of DnD for example, so some might be altered to reflect lore strength.

Footnote: you need two hands to swing a great-axe, but nothing in the rules states you can’t do a somatic gesture for a spell with one hand while holding the great-axe in the other. I will also be using a form of ‘altered’ latin for my own spells.

Chosen Monster Typings:

Aberration. Giant. Monstrosity.

Monster Forms and Power List CR 0 to CR 1/2:

( Figura Diaboli Pullus ) Cockatrice (Monstrosity, Small): Dark Vision 60 ft. 40 fly ft. 20 ft. Petrifying Bite (Temporary Petrify). Forms a razor beak and face shape to support it with wings, her skin turns to that of a cockatrice’s in color with glowing yellow eyes with no pupils.

( Figura Magna Canis ) Worg (Monstrosity, Large): Strong Bite with knock prone once per turn. Keen hearing and smell like that of a bloodhound. 50 ft. Dark Vision 60 ft. Her humanoid form she sprouts a large amount of white fur akin to the texture of her hair and its pure white color, then has a long biting snout and often could be mistaken as an unnaturally large Werewolf standing in around 8′9.

Monster Forms and Power List CR 1 to CR 3:

( Figura Hastae Coleoptera ) Ankheg (Monstrosity, Large): Strong, Acidic Bite. Acid Spray Line. Dark Vision 60 ft. Tremorsense 60 ft. 30 ft. Burrow 10 ft. She is around 9′0 in her humanoid form for this and has brown, spiked chitin and mandibles to replace her mouth.

( Figura Basilisci ) Basilisk (Monstrosity, Large): Petrifying Gaze 30 ft. 20 ft. Dark Vision 60 ft. Strong Poison, Strong Bite. She stands around 10′0 as this form grows countless red brownish spikes on her back and tail. She has countless large sharp teeth in a new reptilian maw and scales.

( Figura Faciem Abactor ) Doppelganger (Monstrosity, Medium): Immunity to charm once per turn. Dark Vision 60 ft. 30 ft. Shapechanger (Works like Doppelgangers, not Changeling’s). Ambusher. Surprise Attack. Read Thoughts. Her skin merely goes pure white and she becomes completely smooth on her face, being utterly faceless.

( Figura Cerebrum Tentamenta ) Grell (Aberration, Medium): 10 ft. Fly 30 ft (Hover). Resistance to Lightning. Immune to blind or prone once per turn. Blindsight 60 ft (Blind beyond that radius). Strong Beak. Restraining, Paralyzing Tendrils. Grows a large beak in her humanoid form and has many reddish tendrils sprouting from her back that are constantly reaching and waving. She becomes faceless.

( Figura Avis Leonis ) Griffon (Monstrosity, Large): 30 ft. 80 Fly. Dark Vision 60 ft. Keen Sight. Beak. Strong Claws. She grows massive brown feathered wings in this form with brown feathers on her body as well, then talon hands and feet with a beak for a mouth. Her hair becomes more similar to feather down and her face, neck, and shoulders becomes feathered in a white mane standing in around 8′7.

( Figura Piscium Hominis ) Merrow (Monstrosity, Large): 10 ft. Swim 40 ft. Dark Vision 60 ft. Amphibious. Bite. Somewhat Strong Claws. In this form she’s around 9′0 and grows fish merrow scales, then reddish fins on her back while her hair is also replaced with feathers. Then furthermore: her tail becomes that of a merrow’s tail with red fins every so often going up for the behind of it.

( Figura Tauri Hominis ) Minotaur (Monstrosity, Large): 40 ft. Dark Vision 60 ft. Charge. Labyrinthine Recall. Reckless Attack. Strong Gore. She grows strong minotaur horns and her hair grows a bit longer, her body becomes much more broad and toned, and she stands around 9′5 in this form.

( Figura Spiritus Arachnidis ) Phase Spider (Monstrosity, Large): 30 ft. Climb 30 ft. LIMITED Ethereal Jaunt. Spider Climb. Web Walker. Strong Bite, deadly poison. She is around 8′5 in this form and her skin becomes pure white with a phase spider’s pattern of light blue on it and grows multiple glowing light blue eyes and mandibles to replace the features on her face.

Monster Forms and Power List CR 4 to CR 7:

( Figura Rostri Vermis ) Grick Alpha (Monstrosity, Large): Stone Camouflage. Strong Tail. Strong Beak. Strong Tentacles. Resistance to Piercing, Slashing, and Bludgeoning based on level. 30 ft. 30 climb. Dark Vision 60 ft. Tendrils grow on her back, she grows a beak and is around 8′7 in height.

( Figura Cerebri Comedentis ) Mind Flayer (Aberration, Medium): 30 ft. Dark Vision 120 ft. Magic Resistance once per turn. At will with 6 round cooldown: Detect Thoughts, levitate. Strong Psychic Tentacles. Extract the Brain. Mind Blast. In this form, she is around her same height and the tendrils appear around her wrists, her tongue becomes that of a xenomorph-like mouth and her skin turns purple.

( Figura Cerebrum Visus ) Mind Witness (Aberration, Large): 20 ft fly (hover). Immune to prone once per turn. Dark Vision 120 ft. Telepathic Hub. Brutal Bite. Brutal Psychic Tentacles, can grapple up to large. Eye Rays, roll 1d6. Take action. Multiple tendrils sprout from her back, along with tendrils with eye stalks at the end. Her skin turns red, and she grows a powerful maw on her mouth, and she’s around 9′0. Her eyes and tendril eyes change in a glowing psychedelic arrange of colors when using her eye rays.

( Figura Dentes Petrae ) Roper (Monstrosity, Large): 10 ft. 10 climb. Dark Vision 60 ft. False Appearance (Rocks, Cave Structures). Grasping Tendrils. Spider Climb. Brutal Bite. Tendril 50 ft reach. Reel 25 ft. In this form Eve is around 9′5 and has 20 ft long tendrils sprouting from her back that can stretch to 50 ft, regenerate and so on.

( Figura Petra Hominis ) Stone Giant (Giant, Huge): 40 ft. Stone Camouflage. Rock. Pickup Boulder. Rock Catching. Eve’s skin merely turns gray, and she stands around 15ish feet tall. 10 ft reach. 15 ft reach with a weapon.

( Figura Dentes Bufo ) Banderhobb (Monstrosity, Large): 30 ft. Dark Vision 120 ft. Immune to charm, frighten once per turn. Resonant Connection (allows tracking of a target in one mile if having a possession of theirs). Shadow Stealth. Brutal Grapple Bite. Tongue 15 ft, necrotic damage, bonus action bite. Swallow Whole (Medium or Smaller), restraint, blind, necrotic digestion. Shadow Step. Teleports up to 30 feet to an unoccupied space of dim light or darkness, Eve can see. Cooldown 6 rounds, cannot use attack or bite with this ability. Eve is around 10′0 in this form and has a large, subtle maw to which she can easily consume a target. Her skin turns green, her hair becomes a greenish tint.

Monster Forms and Power List CR 8:

( Figura Serpens Draconis ) Hydra (Monstrosity, Huge): 30 ft. 30 swim. Dark Vision 60 ft. Hold Breath. Multiple Heads. Reactive Heads. Wakeful. Massive Regeneration. Strong Bites. Limited Multi-Head Attacks. She stands around 20ish feet tall with strong light green and dark green scales and fins with strong, powerful jaws. Four hydra heads with long necks sprout from her back in this form. Reach 15 ft.

( Figura Ignis Custos ) Fomorian (Giant, Huge): 30 ft. Dark Vision 120 ft. Odd Physiognomy. Stealthy Hunter. Brutal Fist. Reach 15 ft. Evil Eye, Deals Psychic Damage. Curse of Evil Eye, Deforms Target. Eve is around 17ish foot tall in this form. Her skin turns gray, her glowing eyes fused into a reddish fiery one, think akin to the eye of sauron from lord of the rings. This is one of the few forms she has an actual pupil in, it is a large black slit of the void as its fiery gaze trails to its targets. She has no mouth, lips, or nose in this form and most of the eye takes up her face other than the chin. This is her favored form other than Hydra and then Cloaker in certain situations.

( Figura Dentium Pallium ) Cloaker (Aberration, Large): 10 ft. fly 40 ft. Dark Vision 60 ft. Damage Transfer once per turn against a target that hits her. False Appearance, can disguise herself as a dark leather cloak. Light Sensitivity. Strong Bite. Tail Hit. Restraint Large or Smaller, blinded with advantage. Screech 60 feet, causes fear to single targets. Phantasms, long rest, the cloaker makes 3 duplicates unless in bright light. Roll a 1d4 whether or not an illusion is hit. Eve becomes around 10′0 and has a white underbelly, then a blue back and big maw. Then her arms have a cloak attached to her body and then spikes on her tail.

Shifter Knight Feats:

Shifter Bond: this allows the Shifter Knight’s fighting styles to influence their natural attacks, armor or otherwise depending on what they have chosen. It also gives the Shifter Knight the ability to keep the effects of their equipped items and ability to use them in combat, it also optionally allows the Shifter Knight to use the plate they are wearing to form natural armor on their forms. Along with limited resistances, a large telepathy reach while transformed, monster feats and powers that while not perfectly replicated for all? They are impressive in the arsenal they offer, along with the Shifter Knight’s ability to easily learn new forms from books in a matter of time or instantly upon observing the creature they wish to become.

Shifter Prowess: this allows the Shifter Knight to fight with their equipped weapons that change in size with them, and use their humanoid forms combined with their monster forms and monster size. For Eve's case? She simply adopts the aesthetic of the creature onto herself when deciding to use her weapons, and may equip them seamlessly for the weapon she has equipped prior to transforming. Granted, she is only able to use one of her natural weapons in either or hand for whatever main attack she is making, so either a claw or tendril and so on when wielding her great axe.

Shifter Strike: natural weapon attacks from her claws and transformations other than things such as poison penetrate magical resistance and immunity.

Shifter Enlightenment: this allows the user to expand their typing choice dramatically outside the normal through true genius. The Shifter Knight no longer ages once full maturity is reached, and finds learning new forms through books rather easily.

Improved Shifter Bond: the Shifter Knight is capable of delivering a strike in the midst of transforming, whether the natural weapon of the creature or using a one-handed weapon that’s currently equipped. The Shifter Knight is able to tap further into her ability to use her inner arcane augmentation forms to use them more frequently by merging the spell slots of her arcane forms from CR 4 to CR 8 together. Albeit it is not infinite by any means, it is the philosopher's stone of self-augmentation and inner arcane might to be a brutal, abominable dervish of claws, teeth and powers in a grotesque flurry of death and overwhelming strength.

Trained Feats and Stats:

Trained Strength, Intelligence, Constitution: Eve has left herself rather versatile in terms of her trained traits, utilizing her knowledge and items to further the effectiveness of her deadly shapes.

Trained Toughness: through training and arcane augmentation? Eve’s endurance has been increased to supernatural levels.

Great Weapon Master: Eve has specifically trained to be a master when it comes to her brutal strikes.

Grappler: Eve is capable of wrestling and using the sheer advantage to the wrestling ability she has, using tendrils, claws or other odd appendages or even maws to swallow unfortunate foes depending on the form she currently has. Then in general is capable of taking out individuals in take-down techniques.

Motivations: To adventure and increase her physical and mental skills. To eat all kinds of things and people. To have a bit of fun when she can. Otherwise, finding love is always nice either with friends or lovers. Killing things is always fun as well as enhancing, making new forms and studying various artifacts, animals and creatures.

Backstory: Eve’s lineage hails from the mighty Changeling Shapers of the world, born in a mixed bloodline, highly encouraged within her society to ever make their pool of genetics as chaotic as possible. Eve’s morality reflects that of her society, that while she leans toward something neutral? Her willingness to experiment, shape life or contribute to the study of it through self-shaping augmentations? Has left her with a rather questionable sense of right and wrong, leaning somewhere between Lawful Neutral and Lawful Evil, as she is a warrior by nature, her family, friends often indicating it might have to do with her bloodline, though her scholar-like nature and questionably unethical practices and viewpoints to other monsters and people is a direct result of the Shaper Society and its viewpoints when it comes to expanding their power, influence and strengthening their chaotic natures down o the very core of their being.

#lvl 5 #lvl 10 #lvl 15 #lvl 20 #epic level #shifting tides #shifting space

[promptsconceptsandideas]

Don't have any names for these characters, they are all mainly just drafts of character ideas. Feel free to use these for your own ideas or stories, I have no real intention to use most of these but I would still like to see them used, so if you do use them please show me what you create if you remember to!! You can change anything you want about these characters, of course, since they aren't really fleshed out or anything. Trigger warnings: Violence/Cannibalism, Slight horror aspects, cult mentions, slightly sensual writing?, referenced animal death and taxidermy

1. Queer changeling child (They/Them), becomes obsessed with taxidermy at a young age and begins to fall further and further down a rabbit hole starting from that young age, collecting bones and fur and then slowly beginning to gather carcasses and even buying a few things, until their family forces them to move to a city area to attempt to stop their obsession. It only gets worse as they get older, though, and for a while, they're satiated by books and occasionally buying a smaller piece of taxidermy, but they miss the feeling of collecting their own pieces. Neighbors' pets started going missing around that time, and soon the pigeons and rodents that would often be around the building where they live stop appearing as often. They later move from the city back to a more secluded, wooden area after their parents mysteriously disappear. 2. A non-human pretending to be human (They/Them) in a small town. They're terrible at hiding it, though, but no one in the town quite cares since everyone knows that the entire time they've been their the place has been safe from the worse things in the woods. Some people who visit the town are unhappy with their existence, even to the point of attempting to "exorcise" them from the town. Most of those people are out of town before they can even hear about these threats, though. The town doesn't enjoy when people threaten the people of the town. 3. A cannibal vigilante (He/They) who eats whoever he catches. He somehow never catches anyone who is innocent, and the local police slowly begin to stop trying as hard as they used to when it comes to catching him. One of the police officers ends up catching him on complete accident, just scouting out a general area after a lot of break-ins and murders around that area, but gets attacked by a random person. He's saved by the vigilante, though slightly traumatized as he realizes they absolutely do not cook who they eat he watches him rip out the person's throat with their own teeth, chewing at the meat of the area and drinking the blood. They don't really seem to notice him staying until they're done with their snack, seemingly, turning to look at him with wide eyes - not out of fear, but more just seemingly naturally large eyes - tilting their head at him and approaching him. He leaves the area with some blood on his lips and clothes, but slightly less afraid of the vigilante and much more sure about stopping investigations around them. 4. A priest in a cult who has actual direct contact with their deity. Much closer than anyone has, that is, not even the leader of the cult. They allow themself to be splayed out on the altar, hundreds of limbs all at once, separately, never, always touching his body, blessing him, kissing him, many heads and many lips, and they all look at him so fondly. He will never know their god, but he knows it more than anyone here ever would.

#character concept #writers on tumblr #character creation #concepts #original character

[rolandrockover]

Why Unholy Is the Only Real Demon Song

This little essay was supposed to be called "Why Unholy is not a demon song", which in the end I preferred not to implement, because it could have led to unnecessary Misperceptions (0). Why this could be so, I suppose, should become clear in the course of reading. I would like to approach the matter, however, only slowly, in which I first of all put the question into the room, what basically, a demon actually is. In the general explanation of terms, a demon is defined as a spirit or a fateful power, roughly but foundationally. Starting from this spirit sphere of its existence it exerts influence on the human being. This definition is to form the essence of my line statement to my way of looking at the textual content of Unholy. In the course of the history of mankind and the parallel developing of mythologies and religion formations it is to be observed how the conception of a demon has developed slowly from spirit form up to various to a variety physical manifestations. This pure embodiment of the concept of a demon remains of course to be metaphorical.

However, it may well be seen that those very symbolic embodiments form the bridge to what is accepted as a demon in our common western culture: A supernatural being, with powers, bat wings, attachments to hell, evil red eyes, or just simply… Gene? A mixture of trash, fantasy & pop culture. Within this framework we can see or read them everywhere. In books, movies, or computer games, or wherever. I would like to say goodbye to this concept as quickly as possible, but before that I want to also ask what the pre '92 so-called demon songs were all about?

God of Thunder:

is a potpourri, made up of Greek and Norse mythology, an inverted changeling becoming a derivation of Superman, and … Rock and Roll? In other words, it is nothing less than epic nonsense (1). When I claim that they had no clue what they were writing and singing about, I don't think I'm taking too big a risk. I close this song for the sake of simplicity without further ado as Atmospheric Dadaism, that basically served its purpose quite well (2).

Almost Human:

obviously serves the werewolf motif - with a good dash of horniness. As much as I love the song, not much more can be said about it.

War Machine:

is hitting the shit a lot harder. It more or less gives free rein to a fantasy of violence lead by a call for regency of the fist over society - If of necessity, then even by pure forceful breaking the laws of nature in two. Similar to God of Thunder Demons merely make it in as a side note, but this time only to demonstrate the pure wickedness of the non-demonic spokesman. The latter gets pure satisfaction by calling for the release of all demons, and finds pleasure in the midst of the chaos he creates. Does that make this song a demon song? Only very conditionally, in my opinion. One could ask oneself if this could be a foreshadowing of the planned removal of the make-up for the release of Creatures of the Night, considering that the title character is "only" human, and not a changeling, werewolf or anything else, thus demonstrating that this human being, the unmasked Gene, is quite capable of not only competing with demons, but even being superior to them in pure attitude. If this were indeed the case, I would find it rather regrettable not to have been true to this line in the following years. (3).

And what about Unholy?

What is that actually about? It's about mankind, or, more precisely, it is about mankind and its fundamental core structures. Or even more precisely, about their elected representatives, and their ways and methods to direct and control this man-made world. In a nutshell: a social psychological exposition… from the point of view of a demon! And this demon speaks quasi as the personification of the entire history of mankind in its fundamental order, and, more or less accuses all of us of being complicit in it. And Gene (4) gave it a mouth to be able to do that.

So, if for this purpose it is expressly considered that the sphere of spirit within which a demon exists represents nothing else than a splitting off of our own negative qualities - a pure projection of ourselves, this must be understood as a distancing, or rather as a washing clean of our own sins (5). This alone is the reason for the conception of demons. You really have to let this abstraction sink in a bit first, in order to be able to understand it properly at all. Only then, with this full awareness of what hard stuff it basically is, should one also approach the fact that this entity's indictment certainly does not ponder the sunny side of our society. And let us add to this that the history of mankind is built at its core on war and enslavement (6) - for which power was clearly needed. And to gain, or increase, power, control is necessary. Speaking of control, let's also touch on the subject of religion, using the example of the Christianity in Unholy. I will try to concretize the symbolism contained in it a bit the way i see it:

In the search for meaning in existence, it is natural for man to have faith and spirituality (7). This natural need for faith is basically intercepted, and replaced by the substitute product of religion, which serves to take control over the life of soul and faith. One might say, thus isolating the seeker of faith from the true divine streams of this world respectively this universe. From this point on, the cycle of pain would begin. Suicide is forbidden in the Christian religion and represents a sin and does not permit the entrance into the promised heavenly kingdom. So should one dedicate oneself to this scheme devoutly on all fours, one just gets a cross placed on his grave after his death. This would bring no benefit to oneself, neither here on earth nor a uncertain kingdom of heaven, nor whatever bliss - because the cross only serves smybolically to demonstrate to the living that ones spirit belonged fully and completely to the power superior to one forever. In Unholy, furthermore, it is suggested that suicide is the true salvation from this misery. Which would also make more than just sense within this structure, if the body (enslavement) and the spirit (religion) are controlled by a power superior to me.

Unholy, however, might want to penetrate Christianity a little further. One could well see the demonic values split off from man, as a parable to the fall of Lucifer from the kingdom of heaven. And why? In the Kingdom of Heaven of God, there are two realms on His side. The right (hand). And the left (hand). To dwell at the right hand of God is usually considered the more preferable position because authority, power and strength are inherent in it (8). The Bible also mentions that Jesus was favored to sit in this place after his resurrection (9). On the left side of God, on the other hand, the Bible revealed, would be no one - and this should not change until the coming ages (10). Opposite it often remains asked whether this had not been the place of Lucifer. And so much for the father of lies.

In this, Unholy differs from the old, classic demon songs, and that is why Unholy is the only true, dogmatic demon song. It is about the evil that men do. To other men. It probably wouldn't even be too thoughtless to sound out a little less how very overrated Unholy supposedly is. Because in my own opinion, at least the lyrics of this song is still merciless and completely underrated.

Unholy (1992)

Side notes:

(0) However, as life goes, this title has also led to some huge misconceptions in the past. But hey, so what?

(1) Richard Wagner twisted through a pop culture distortion would not be a bad description either

(2) I am, of course, sticking to the final album version, and not the demo (thought out by Paul Stanley alone, with a greater emphasis on the Greek mythology).

(3) If you wanted it that way you could include Not for the Innocent (and All Hell's breakin' loose) in this attitude scheme, although I don't see any demon motif in it at all, but only the attempt to express that one is dealing with really bad guys here. If Kiss were universe-building in their lyrics, one could assume this (and the apocalyptic theme of the Lick it up videos) was as a direct consequence of the intended world overthrow out of War Machine. Sadly, this attitude was overthrown, too, as I have already indicated.

(4) Or Vinnie for that matter. Or both. I don't care, it's all about the content here.

(5) And we are all aware of these sins. That is why we're feeliing so…

(6) From deepening sexual debauchery, involved in it, or just general sexuality, in detail apart.

(7) Even in certain ape species such as gorillas, place-based spirituality has been observed, with identical behavioral patterns noted. Ask Jane Goodall.

(8) (Genesis 48:14 - 19, Exodus 15:6, Isaiah 23:11, 41:10, 45:1, Revelation 1:16 - 17, etc.)

(9) (Matthew 28:18)

(10) (cf. Revelation 22:3)

#Kiss #Gene Simmons #Vinnie Vincent #God of Thunder #Almost Human #War Machine #Demon #Demon Song #Unholy #1976 #1977 #1982 #1992 #Richard Wagner #Matthew #Genesis #Roland Rockover #Youtube #God #Jesus #Exodus #Creatures of the Night #Lick It Up #1983 #Lucifer #Christianity

[nazumichi]

i was sort of jesting when i tagged that post with trollhunters, but further inspection proves that i have basis. which is new.

#raii talks a lot #1. jim fights himself in the pit foreshadowed by toby mentioning a similar instance in the troll party/book ep #2. claire becomes possessed and her entire deal is “oh evil shadow self/not the only one making the decisions here” #3. jim becoming another being by losing his humanity also foreshadowed by point 1 #4. the entire existence of changelings. just. just in general. #there’s definitely something else i’m missing i can feel it particularly from the other series’s #good chunk of the show is “hey what if there was me. but different. and we fought.” and i like that

[feather-dancer]

Tales of Arcadia Fanfic Recommendations - Part 5

Can you believe we’re here again? I certainly can’t, five fanfic recommend lists is getting a bit on the silly side and yet here we are! This one started building within 24 hours of the last one and it seems about the right time to chuck it into the wilds for peeps to enjoy.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

If at all interested in my own writing you can find it here!

General Trollhunters

Falling in the black - Jim had accepted his fate the moment he began pouring out the elixir Merlin made into the bathtub, all that was left now was to go through with it and hope he was doing the right thing.

Night of the CreepSlayerz - Morgana was defeated and the Trollhunter left Arcadia with many of it’s former residents in search of a brand new Heartstone  thus the protection of the town fell to those left behind. It is not quiet though, far from it in fact, for in the fallen Market an evil yet stirs with a siren’s song...

and in the dark i can hear your heartbeat - It’s a long trip to New Jersey and for the only human not the easiest on her feet, still she has Jim with her. Jilaire fluff.

Champion - Angor ponders over what became of the troll he once was after he was forced into servitude by the Pale Lady.

A Mutually Beneficial Relationship - By chance, Angor Rot meets the Trollhunter Tellad-Urr.

General Wizards

A wizards associate - A lovely little tale of how Archie and Douxie possibly met for the first time. You never know what your kindness might produce.

Saudade - There was always gonna be an After when the Order had been temporarily beaten back and the successor to Merlin was forced to flee to keep Nari safe but this was never going to be an easy thing to bear. Follows multiple characters including stop offs with Jim n Co. and Zoe picking up the pieces of suddenly not being in the same town as her centuries long best friend. Does eventually go Zouxie!

Eye of the Hurricane - A lost moment after arriving at Hex tech, Douxie goes to take a breather and is given the chance to chat to Zoe, freshen up and wonder what on earth they’re gonna do now Jim has been captured. Zouxie fluff.

A Bit of Simple Magic - Technically before Wizards but since it has a couple mentions directly from Wizards I’m popping it here. This is shameless Zouxie fluff based on Teny’s artwork and I am HERE for it.

afterimage - An unusual one. A popular take is that certainly Skrael and Bellroc might have been human before becoming what we know them as now and this is a little bit of dabbling with young Bells who is figuring out they don’t appreciate gender nor long hair with the expectations it brings very much.

When You Least Expect - Panic attacks can happen to anybody and if Wizards had anything to say, Douxie has an awful lot of material should one be triggered.

Cantus In Memoriam - Some mercies are gifted like a blessing but to the hands that take it, it's a lie they need more than anything. The Arcane Order has lost, it’s true, but Douxie will take no joy in ending their long vigil.

alight - I may be a tiny bit biased here because there’s a reference to Ghost!AU but you know what screw it the author is great and deserves the love. Jim wants to go back to his second life, the one he thought would have been forever before he was revived into softer flesh but there is no guarantee he will be the same as he was then. Sometimes the possible comforts are worth the leap of faith it will take to get there.

Jim the Baby-Handed - Jim is home again, human and there is no getting around how things have shifted in his absence. Sometimes however, all you need to do is ask.

Stricklake

Strange Treasures - There is an aftermath to everything, even the Eternal Night and one that leaves Barbara wondering how she stands in it and particularly with regards to a certain changeling adrift himself who had once upon a time tried to kill her son.

The Only Constant - If Walter was offered the chance access his human appearance again after the Eternal Night, would he do it for her despite it would literally be walking into the unknown?

Tumblr Drabbles - He loves Barbara, he truly does, but after everything he had done to the final insult of Angor Rot coming for his own life and in turn threatening her in the process perhaps walking away is for the best. A broken heart in exchange for her life. The second one is an entirely different and is almost innocent Strickmar fluff, almost.

Alternate Universe

Another Dark Prince (Working Title) - Fate can be a strange thing sometimes. Gunmar could have escaped the Darklands far sooner but in lacking the army to go forth with his conquest is relegated to the shadows with his son and the changelings minding them whilst seeking the reopening on the Bridge for the third time. Following this thought further, perhaps a fatal accident could have led to the death of Barbara and a five year old Jim swept into the arms of a troll he would kill in another life on a promise to the deceased to keep him safe. Wouldn’t that have been a thing?

Arcane Blight - Another horror fic! There is something rather unsettling going on in Arcadia, one that contains no trolls in the conventional sense but doesn’t stop them being here, and the household the Lakes moved into seems to be treated with fear and distrust. That said there is the chance it’s more the location that’s the issue particularly with a school existing in fear of a certain ginger haired lad...

Mohs Scale - The fantastic Don't Listen to Kafka series got a new update! Sometimes you just want to help out your bestie who is going through very weird changes as his body is slowly becoming less and less human by giving him a pedicure.

Eternal Night - Gunmar was defeated at the Eternal Night but did not die, no he survived blinded and bound in chains by the mercy of the formerly human Trollhunter. Beware, even the presumed subdued still have their teeth.

Amnesia - Jim is in a blue body that cannot be quite right but he doesn’t know why, found half drowned by trolls and taking into their care. Cut off from those who might have known his old life and flung into a new strange one without his memories this boy is in for a ride while he tries to piece back together anything that makes sense.

Hope Dies Last - Nari said they would rip his soul to shreds if they caught him during her rescue from the Order’s stronghold, she spoke a very nearly fatal truth.

Fear of Fears - An AU of an AU in a sense, an alternate take of the fabulous Sunshine series and somewhat darker as the situation that starts far more innocently rapidly spirals out of control when Jim attempts to sneak out for Halloween but even then nobody could have expected the result. Heed the warnings in the tags they’re there for a reason.

Moirai - There is a danger when you take up the Skathe-Hrün that you may gain the attentions of eyes you would much rather did not and in Claire’s case, it is the notice of the assassin Angor Rot.

He lay dreaming - A follow up in a sense to the above, sometimes on rare occasions Angor by choice or not begins to dream.

The Pursuit of Stone; A Chance Meeting - Another part of the highly recommended The Heart of Janus series that has lore threads spread far and wide, a fine example both of why I adore Sam in his chaotic... Samness and another beat in the story of Otto Scaarbach’s rise to Grand Commandant in that even in the most unlikely places you may still find an ally, a future tool to be ultilised.

The OP in the very second of typing this had a sudden realisation that when the author sees this post will no doubt start laughing for. It’s for a good reason tho, promise.

The completely unrelated to this fandom fic

hell calls hell - This Overwatch R76 fic is an absolute bruiser of a read set in an alternate universe of royalty and political intrigue that I started reading blind and... Could not stop. The summary simply is A trained assassin sent to kill an emperor and his son encounters more than he bargained for and while true, does not do justice for the sheer amount of world building bursting from every seam being as much part of the plot as the very fabric the entire thing is soaked in.

#trollhunters #Wizards #ToAWizards #Tales of Arcadia

[virovac]

Nature of  Ghouls

Lovecraftian Xenology #3: Ghouls [by  Leila Hann Before continuing with Carter and the Pussycats, I'm going to be taking a closer look at the creatures that made their debut in "Pickman's Model" before receiving their official name here in "Dream-Quest." This is going to be a tricky one. Reading "Pickman's Model" in isolation gives you a very strong impression of the ghouls, what they are, and where they come from. However, reading it alongside the other, earlier Dreamlands tales - particularly "Celephais" and "The Festival" - one walks away with a completely different interpretation. As for their reappearance in "Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," well. On one hand "Dream-Quest" does silly things with other stories' continuities and perhaps should be best ignored. On the other, in the case of the ghouls, "Dream-Quest" not only expands on them in much greater detail than their debut story ever did, but is also the source of their official name. As such, I'm going to be taking the continuity approach, and looking at the ghouls within the framework of the Dreamlands series as a whole. ​The funny thing about "Pickman's Model" is that while the narrator is probably reliable, he's mostly relaying information that he learned from Richard Pickman, who seems to be much less so. As I noted while reading that story, there's a very obvious disconnect between the actions that Pickman depicted the ghouls performing in his art - particularly the "Subway Accident" piece - and what they could have possibly really done. Throughout his presentation, Pickman comes across as very much a showman, trying to create fear and horror in his audience and reveling mean-spiritedly in his success. Then, there's the detail of him interacting with the ghoul who tried to walk in on him and the narrator in the same way that a circus animal-tamer would with an unruly beast; not at all what you'd expect from a man who's trying to talk down a sapient, malevolent, possibly transhuman demon. As such, I think we need to take Pickman's art with a hefty grain of salt when it comes to inferring things about his models. This is supported by the ghouls' appearance in "Dream-Quest." They are described as hideous, frightening, and generally unpleasant, but they don't seem to be all that dangerous (unlike the zoogs, who are said to be dangerous to MOST people besides Carter, the ghouls don't even get an aside to this effect). Other than their antisocial habit of eating bodies from cemeteries that the deceased's friends and families would probably rather stay in their coffins, they really don't seem so bad. As far as the stories have reliably communicated, the ghouls are thieves and desecrators, but not the murderers and causers of disaster and misfortune that Pickman would want us to believe in. In fact, everything about the ghouls, from their appearance to their diet to their penchant for tombstones, scary noises, and dark, underground spaces, says that they aren't a force of destruction so much as one of horror. And, looking at "Pickman's Model" from that angle, we can definitely see how Pickman was helping them grow stronger in their element. Camel Spiders and Harnessed Horrors There's an animal called a solifugid, also called a pseudoscorpion or a camel-spider, that came to the western public's attention some time ago. Its a scary-looking arachnid, and one that you could easily believe was deadly if you saw it. Solifugids are mostly nocturnal, and so when they're forced to venture out of their lairs during the day they prefer to stick to the shadows...including the shadows of people, which they will chase after for that purpose. They're fast enough to keep up with a running human, and the rubbing of their legs when they move creates a squealing noise that could easily be mistaken for an aggressive vocalization. They also are always on the lookout for soft fibers to line their nests with; they got the name "camel spider" by being seen climbing on the bodies of dead or sleeping camels to cut off bits of their hair. In some cultures, this association was so great that people came to believe that the solifugids had actually killed the camels themselves. Less commonly, solifugids will crawl up onto the head of a sleeping human for similar hair-stealing operations. More than one American soldier sleeping in a tent in Iraq or Saudi Arabia has been woken up by a six inch specimen crawling across their face to see it opening its deadly-looking mouthparts just below their hairline. The solifugid is also completely harmless. In fact, its one of the only members of the arachnid class to have no venom whatsoever. It can even be a beneficial creature to have around, as it preys heavily on other arachnids including spiders and scorpions that actually are dangerous. During the early to mid 2000's, there was a rash of hoaxes about solifugids growing to lobster-size, being venomous, and even using a fictitious numbing agent to paralyze sleeping humans so they can slowly disembowel them alive. Someone was finding a misanthropic delight in taking this creature, which seems to have been practically designed by nature for this purpose with its appearance and habits, and crafting it into an instrument of irrational fear. This fear didn't come from nowhere, mind. The legend of the camel-spider harnesses the very rational human fears of venomous insects and being threatened in your sleep. But it takes those abstract rational fears and uses them to prop up a concrete figurehead of horror that is, itself, irrational. I'm an amateur horror writer myself, and I fell in love with the solifugids the instant I learned about them. I even had the pleasure of meeting a few during my time in the Arava Desert. I don't think that my soft spot for these arthropods and my choice of genres is a coincidence. In the Dreamlands, the cruel realities of the universe seem to be embodied in the Outer Gods, and anthropomorphized in their soul and messenger Nyarlathotep. If the ghouls are, as Pickman's art implied, meant to be like the witches of Puritan superstition, responsible for everything that goes wrong for humanity at the whims of a universe beyond our control, then it would make sense for them to be minions of Nyarlathotep. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Lovecraft to cast them as such in "Dream-Quest" if that was really his intent; the story already calls for Nyarlathotep's agents to appear in numerous scenes, and the ghouls could have been among them. But they aren't. Instead, Carter meets the ghouls back on Dreamlands Earth, in entirely friendly circumstances, with them as the loyal servants of Carter's (trans)human friend Pickman. The ghouls are creatures of the relatable and imaginative Gods of Earth, not the apathetic and inhuman Gods of Space. Rather than being a cause or manifestation of our problems, the ghouls might even be one of our defenses against them. The witch was created so that we would have some kind of enemy to hunt down and revenge ourselves on when we suffer a tragedy caused by impersonal forces of nature such as disease or weather. The boogeyman in the closet exists because the darkness it hides in is so much worse, and putting a FACE on the unknown lets us believe that we can deal with it in a form we understand. The ghouls are indeed connected to the nightmarish witch superstitions that Pickman referenced, but it is a metafictional connection: they are the legend of the witch and boogeyman, and an embodiment of the psychology that leads to the birth of those legends. They harness the rational fears of human powerlessness, victimhood, and mortality, and embody them as an irrational archetype-creature, and in this form - as Carter just demonstrated in the latest episode of "Dream-Quest" - our fears can be useful tools. Even if the purpose of that tool is just confronting other people with their fears for fun and (in the case of Lovecraft, King, etc) profit. At several points in both "Pickman's Model" and "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," Lovecraft described the ghouls as being "gargoyle-like." They even look a lot like Gothic gargoyles, with their doglike faces, hoofed feet, and (in the case of at least one or two specimens that Lovecraft described) devilish horns. The purpose of the gargoyles in the European cathedrals wasn't to honor or appease the Devil; it was to mock him, and thereby rob him of some of his power. Ghoul-Changelings and Pickman's Transformation Given that Earth's Dreamlands are shaped by metaphors and symbolism taken from the subconscious of human dreamers (at least in part), its hard to say what is and isn't "literally" true about its inhabitants. Unlike most Dreamlands creatures, however, the ghouls are quite active in the waking world as well if only for brief periods at a time. As such, there are some objective observations that can be made. 1) Ghouls inhabit a network of caves in the Dreamlands' deep underground that contains portals to various urban dungeons and necropoli in the waking world, particularly in the New England area where the dream-sorcerers may have interacted with or even deliberately summoned them. 2) Ghouls eat the corpses of humans and other sapient creatures that they recover from both the waking world and the Dreamlands, but seem to be less interested in live prey. They also collect old tombstones and grave-goods. 3) After they've finished eating, the ghouls toss the bones into the chasm beneath their cave complex, which over time has become positively covered in bones, and attracted giant worm scavengers. 4) Richard Upton Pickman turned into a ghoul. The former three points are fairly self explanatory. The fourth, however, raises a lot of questions. In Pickman's art, he portrayed ghouls exchanging their own young with human babies in the classic fairy changeling mould, with both the changelings and the stolen babies eventually becoming ghouls themselves. Pickman also portrayed a Puritan-era changeling that bore a great physical resemblance to himself. Some readers have taken this to mean that rather than simply being a descendant of the Native American dream-sorcerers like Carter, Pickman was the descendant of a ghoul changeling, and the character he depicted in that painting was one of his own ancestors. Others, that Pickman was himself just one of many changelings from throughout history, and that he identified himself with an earlier New England instance out of whimsy. However, I find it a bit conspicuous that while Carter identified the fully transformed ghoul-Pickman and specified that he had once been human, he never mentions the possibility of any of the other ghouls being the same. Thus, its possible that what happened to Pickman is actually unique, or at least very rare, and that the changeling scenario depicted in his art was purely symbolic of the horror-artist's role as a devil's advocate to the rest of humanity and an ambassador to the dark forces of the universe. ​ Pickman's transformation. ​I'm inclined to believe that what caused Pickman's transformation was not him being a ghoul pup switched with a human at birth, but a product of him being both a) an almost obsessive devotee of horror, and b) a powerful dreamer with access to the Dreamlands, perhaps helped along in accessing them by some recovered magic from his oneiromancer ancestors just like Carter was. It could even be that rather than his art depicting something that had or could have already happened with the ghoul-transformation, Pickman's acts of imagining and drawing a transformation were what CREATED THE POSSIBILITY for such a transformation to actually happen. An idea of his was made real through the power of his dreaming, warping his own flesh into one of his ghouls in a similar - but more visceral - manner as Kyle being transformed into Kuranes. Another question about Pickman's transformation pertains to him having mostly forgotten how to speak English by the time Carter met him again in the Dreamlands. Did his transformation rob him of his English, or did he just forget it after spending so long in the Dreamlands interacting only with other ghouls? For that matter, how long HAD Pickman been a ghoul by the time Carter stumbled into the bone pit? Months? Years? Centuries? Time in the Dreamlands seems to work in arbitrary ways, as evidenced by how Carter can be timelooped in the waking world while living through consecutive centuries as an explorer in the Dreamlands. In "The Silver Key," we learned that the Dreamlands (or at least, Dreamlands related artifacts) can even send you BACK in time. Origins? Since time in the Dreamlands interacts in very unpredictable ways with the waking world's timeline, its very difficult to say when and where the ghouls first came into existence. Since Pickman's art is also of questionable waking world veracity, we can't really tell if the ghouls have actually been popping up in the New England witch tunnels since the 1700's, and - even if they have - they could have been born in the Dreamlands from an event that had not yet happened in the waking world's timeline and popped out of those tunnels earlier in history as we waking earthlings perceive it. Another interesting fact to point out here is that Randolph Carter, Dreamlands explorer extraordinaire, only knew about the ghouls BECAUSE he met Pickman during his waking life. Its possible that the ghouls are a manifestation of some core archetype within the human collective unconscious. The Horror, the Boogeyman, the terrifying friend to artists and writers who delight in confronting their fellow humans with humanity's frailties and fears. The creatures that appeared in the dreams of H.R. Giger and caused him to wake up in heart-stopping terror on so many different nights, and yet that he adopted and came to love. Even if his own fear of them never diminished, it became HIS fear, and they became HIS monsters, and he began to feel possessive of them and delight in sharing their terror with others who lacked his mastery over them. The creatures that appeared in the dreams of Stephen King and inspired him to turn the anxieties of the modern United States against it, while cackling about keeping the hearts of fictitious young children in his study. The creatures that haunted the dreams of H.P. Lovecraft, and inspired him to write stories like "Pickman's Model," delighting in his own ability to scare Weird Tales' readers just as Pickman delighted in scaring the narrator. There is a moment in "Pickman's Model" when the ghoul walks in on them and Pickman has to go make it leave, when PICKMAN HIMSELF is described as looking terrified. And yet, despite that, he was able to reassert control over the ghoul and command it to leave him alone until he wanted it to return. I suspect that if Pickman ever stopped being afraid of the ghouls himself, they would have abandoned him and sought a fresh artist to inspire. Such is the relationship between the horrorist and the monster. There is another possibility, though. And that is that rather than being a universal manifestation of horror that serve as muses to numerous masters of the craft, the ghouls are the specific nightmare-turned-minion of one specific master of horror. Kyle/Kuranes dreamed Celephais and its people into existence, and then abandoned the waking world entirely to rule them for all time. What might another instance of this look like, if the dreamer in question was less of a sensitive too-good-for-this-world melancholic, and more of an angry misanthrope with a fixation with his Salem ancestry and an almost monomaniacal obsession with showing us fear in a handful of grave-dust? Perhaps it was just Richard Upton Pickman who loved his own, personal, imaginary monsters so much. And, through the power of the Dreamlands, they were able to love him back.​

So ghouls are a combination of guardians, Halloweentown, and irreverance of 4chan.

A more benevolent take than my past one.

#dreamlands #ghouls #lovecraft

[kryptsune]

Souly Damned Saturdays!~

🌼Welcome to Souly Damned Saturdays! I am your host Kit! Today I am going to be taking a break to talk about one of my main characters! I mentioned her a few posts ago but her name is Evelyn Rogers. I am also going to explain how covens work. Let’s get started! 

Character Profile:

Name: Evelyn Rogers Species: Human (witch)/ Celestial? Soul Flower Type: Lily         Color Type: Vibrant violet 

Human Appearance Description:          Hair Color: Black         Hair Style: (image provided) with a braid on the left side         Skin Tone: Pale         Height: 5′6″         Other Details:                    -Thin ribbon tying back braid                   - Black ribbon chocker with pendant                    - Ruby studded silver earrings

Infernal Appearance Description:         Name: Lilith          Soul Flower Type: Lily               Color Type: vibrant violet (middle) that pales with ice along it’s petals           Infernal Title: Infernal Princess         Eye Color: Icy blue when looses herself         Hair Color: White          Hair Style: (image provided) with a braid on the left side         Skin Tone: Pale         Contract symbol mark placement: Shoulder blades         Extras: 2 sets of white wings that have a gradient of icy blue.          Other Details:                     - Slender fingers with black painted nails (sharp tips)                    - Black horns that swoop backward                    - Pointed ears (more below the cut)

Special Abilities or Powers:              - Can read minds              - Dream walking              - Can pull out deepest desires              - Forces those under her power to tell the truth              - Truth touch (will gain the trust of those touched)              - Mental suggestion               - Lust touch              - Levitation              - Blip (Teleportation)               - Dark ice/fire element              - Calming touch (Weapon: Those she has a specific bond with ie: Beast and Costello give her their abilities when it comes to weapons but she does not have a specific weapon herself.)

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Eve’s Contract:

Eve’s soul is unique as it appears to be linked to the past ancestry of humans linked by the Vinculum Infernalis. Due to this her soul is far more powerful and can utilize more of their own abilities. The first contract she ends up bound to is Cubans. In exchange for her life as well as their own protection she works at the club as their little songbird. She becomes an undercover agent to infiltrate the boys enemies or rivals since the human soul has the ability to mask demonic presence. She ends up with a second contract to Costello for other reasons (spoilers). In addition to being able to use the abilities of the boys, the contractee is also able to wield their specific weapons. Each one corresponds to a specific Prince and the higher level the more powerful.

Unbeknownst to Eve her father is none other than one of the three most powerful beings in existence. As such she does not know her true lineage. Her father, Kalthiel, watches her from afar and aids when he is able but she does not know of his involvement. Her conception was a byproduct of her mother’s deal with the Broker. Unfortunately her ancestral blood caused her to be baden and in desperation she made a deal to have a child. A child that would one day be a tri-brid. One of mortal, Celestial, and Infernal blood.

Fusion:

Fusion is an interesting scenario since Eve is contracted to not one but two princes of Hell. She gains many abilities and one of those is being able to fuse her bound soul with that of her demonic counterpart(s) creating a fusion of herself and their own hellish forms. The soul however can only stand so much and if that goes beyond its limit the human soul could be damaged permanently. This form is dangerous for anyone and a last resort at best.  

Eve’s Ancestry /The Vinculum Infernalis:

Humans in this universe do not believe in the existence of monsters very much like our own world. They are nothing but stories and myths. Demons are the exact same. There is a story that may allude to the fact that demons were created with monsters as punishment for humanity's evil. That is neither confirmed or denied. What is known is that demons used to walk the surface regularly a long time ago.

Humans in their lust for power (a very debatable comment) made contracts with these creatures in exchange for their souls, something that demons covet to gain more power themselves. Those that made these contracts became witches/ warlocks, having Infernal blood and magic infused within their very being. As every demon is unique so were the souls. The first covens were formed after 12 survivors managed to break their contracts leaving the magic within their souls present. As they began to have children that magic too was passed down. Humans with any type of magic are extraordinarily rare and one mage soul can rival over 1000 regular human souls. Eve appears to have a connection or blood relation to one of these surviving lines.

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Other Classifications:

The Legend of Lilith (Lillum): It is unclear if this history happened or not because the Princes refuse to discuss it. (That can’t be good) The truth of this prophecy, or for most harbinger, is that a generation will be born with power equal to that of their fathers. Since the Princes can not have offspring it takes a very specific mix for this to be possible. Such things are up to fate. All that is known is that it will rival the Celestials if it comes to pass as one of Celestial, Infernal, and mortal blood has to be the one...or there could be more. Legends and prophecy tend to be incredibly vague. 

The Covens and their Patrons: After the formation of the Vinculum Infernalis the Princes decide that instead of regarding the mortals with disdain as they did during their Celestial reign they become patrons instead. In total there are 7 covens with a hierarchy of who is the most powerful. They are as follows:  

Coven Names in Prestige Order (greatest to least): 1. Lust - Circle of the Siren (Costello/ Valentine)

2. Pride - Requiem of the Hallowed (Carthus/ Dusk)

3. Envy - Elysium (Sanneth)

4. Wrath - The Acolytes of Flame and Forge (Boss/ Azrin)

5. Greed - Coven of the Blood Moon (Crimson/ Grimm)

6. Sloth - The Desolate Forgotten (Gin)

7. Gluttony - Circle of the Ancients (Ouro)

Those of the first blood line under the Vinculum Infernalis are the most powerful of their coven and seated at a special rank due to their rarity. Unlike those of the first line the members of the coven are not Infernal/Celestial blooded. 

The First Grimoire: Just because their bond and Infernal blood comes from their ancestral line does not mean that they are as powerful as they once were. In fact there is a Grimoire for each specific coven that only a direct descendant from the line can utilize and open. It is incredibly rare and the first bloodline (the ones that first made the deal) are thought to be dead so the books reside in the highest ranks of the 7 covens until such a time comes that they can be opened. There are Grimoire for every acolyte (the book chooses you type deal) but not anywhere close to those labeled the first Grimoire. These tomes are written entirely in High Infernal Script. These are incredibly deadly and powerful Infernal artifacts and each comes with a specific name: 

Lust- Willbinder, Memoire of Blackfire

Pride- Featherfall, Legacy of Pride

Envy- Ash, Oath of Lasting Night

Wrath- Flameward, Boon of Slaughter

Greed- Sapience, Soul of Desecration

Sloth- Draughtbane, Tome of apathy

Gluttony- Apostle, Ledger of the Devourer

Coven Organization (Hierarchy): Each coven is organized by the will of the Prince that is its patron. They can recruit neophytes with no prior ties if they deem them worthy enough to be inducted into the coven. There is still a process and ceremony that needs to be followed. Once the initiation is complete they are tutored by generally a well learned acolyte (think of them as TAs) while Dominus and Magus are the instructors. If they prove their worth then they will be given a grimoire that chooses them to become an Acolyte. They are then placed under a bond similar to the Vinculum Infernalis but not nearly as strong and there is quite a lot of fine print.

*The First Bloods- A specific rank for those that are of the first bloodline. They actually have Infernal/Celestial blood within their veins which makes them some of the most powerful of the witches/warlocks. Their souls are also marked if they are a part of their first bloodline. 

1. Mortiferum Magistrum- The heads of the covens and the most skilled practitioners. They run more of the direct communication between the Infernal Realm (their patrons) and those under their coven. Some have spoken directly to their Patron but for the most part they are dealing with dukes or lords. There is only one of this rank in each coven. 

2. Dominus- The recruiters with approval from the Mortiferum Magistrum. Their job is to maintain the order within the lower levels of the coven. They are also teachers along with the Magus. 

3. Magus- A magus’ job is to teach their acolytes higher level abilities and possibly prepare them for Magus status as well. In each coven there can be an unlimited number of Magus but only 2 or 3 Dominus. 

4. Acolyte- Servants of the coven and the second lowest tier these are the students. 

5. Neophyte- Those that possibly have potential but have not yet proven themselves to the rest of the coven. You have to start as a Neophyte first. The only exception to this are the First Bloods. 

The Cult of the Fallen One (THE LITERAL DEVIL):  

Hedge Witches/Warlocks: The Hedges probably nicknamed as such due to the phrase “hedging one's bets” are dangerous and rebellious. They are mortals with a craving for power and magic that were neither chosen or of the First Bloods. These are the types of mortals that will make contracts with Imps and Changelings in order to reach a certain end. Sometimes that is wealth, power, magic it just depends. They are not Infernal blooded. These are the souls that end up in the Kingdom of Envy under Sanneth. He does not take kindly to greedy and foolish mortals. The Hedges are the ones that originally proclaimed witchcraft pointing to the covens effectively thinning their once steadily rising numbers. 

They are reckless and generally only care for their own ends. They are the ones that give witches and warlocks a bad name. Unlike those of the coven they gain no such immunity from the Infernal Pit. It is easy for lesser demons to trick these mortals into freeing them to cause chaos in the mortal realm. This includes cracking open Purgatory for some unsavory Infernal Blooded Hybrids to slip through. 

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#demons #Souly Damned #SD Saturdays #worldbuilding #info #askbox open #original content #Celestials #Evelyn Rogers #Lilith

[sbooksbowm]

The ‘Does This Make Sense?’ Check - Chapter 4, Part 5, Preservation

Part 1 covers the introduction of Chapter 4, The Bookbinders

Part 2 covers the methodology of this chapter and the bookbinders’ motivations

Part 3 covers how fic binding completes the communication circuit via fan reciprocation 

Part 4 covers how fic binding challenges traditional publishing norms 

The Redundancy of Preservation

Anthony Grafton writes that to understand books, we must interview them in their environment, so to understand bound fic, book historians must attend to two fannish environments: the unstable digital distributing platforms from which fic came, and the material preservation form born in fannish response [1]. The history of fandom media illustrates the instability of digital media in myriad ways: links break, sites crash, URLs expire. Many of the binders have experienced fic loss���returning to bookmarked fic only to find it had disappeared, deleted without any indication of what it may have been—but few said that it wholly or significantly influences their desire to bind fic. In response to the question, ‘Who or what do you trust to build a reliable archive of fic, if anyone?’ the binders unanimously cited AO3, but with trepidation. One binder wrote ‘I do not have unshakeable faith that they will be able to remain successfully funded for the foreseeable future or that laws won't be passed that lead to the site being shut down. The key to survival is redundancy, both digital and offline’. Another echoed, ‘the entire internet is ephemeral, and I have had too many technical snafus to put my entire trust into digital format’. And a third: ‘I’m going through my bookmarks and archiving them to the Internet Archive so they are protected against author removal’. The binders share a general wariness towards relying on digital forms, and while preserving fic is not the only or driving reason for binding fic, it is on the list. Preserving works in print also communicates their legitimacy, especially that of queer works, which historically have been condemned or outright destroyed. Bound fic counters the pitfalls of digital sites, where fan work may be lost without warning, but lacks the real-time feedback in comments and kudos and the links to additional fan works, although those still exist online. Bound fic also counters fallacies of traditional publishing, which tends to ignore fan works. As I discussed in the Introduction and Chapter 3, although works like Pride & Prejudice & Zombies emerge from commercial publishing houses, I reiterate that they are not fanfiction precisely because they were not written in nor attend to a fannish context in the way that bound fic does [2].

The binders change the text in preparing it from digital for print form. All of the binders cut comments and many exclude or rearrange any combination of summaries, author notes, and disclaimers, and kudos and hits statistics. One lacks sentimentality around these excisions: binding fic ‘is less of an archive project than a pleasure project’, so the concern for preservation pales to readability. Binders range in their approach to formatting metadata: two binders include metadata (author, title, tags, archive warnings, etc.) as a ‘copyright page’, with content warnings and research notes as appendices. Another includes summaries and tags because to make ‘these books to feel like a true physical version of what’s there on the web’. One binder of 104 fics has modified their typesetting process to expedite the time from screen to print in attempts to bind as many fics as quickly as possible:

Nowadays I drop everything in and go, for two reasons. I try to do a lot of fics and [editing out Author Notes] is a huge time suck. But these notes are also significant as part of the metatext. In the future these will be of interest to any scholar studying early years of online fandom and just contributes to these books being a time capsule of a phenomenon that is very specific to our time and place.

By favoring production speeds over editing, this binder prioritizes print preservation (and documents a book’s environment for a future book historian); ten binders move metadata and extratextual information to appendices or smaller, side bindings to avoid interrupting reading flow without eliminating the information. Although the lack of text editing seemingly counters the attention to craft, the binders distinguished between the craft of the book—its binding, endpapers, and internal ornamentation—from the content of the text itself. Formatting a text can be the most time-consuming task, so reducing that process expedites the production of a volume significantly.

A few themes emerge regarding losses in transforming fic to print form, including accessibility, interactivity, and malleability. Only people with copies of the fic can read those copies, although the fic remains online for the time being. The loss of hyperlinks and comments strips the fic of its community context. Printed versions inhibit the writer’s ability to edit and update the fic, and one binder noted that ficbinding’s greatest strength and weakness is that it makes fic ‘a fossil of a fixed point in time…It leaves no room to adapt’. But the gain is a hard copy and a sense of long-term preservation independent of online activity: ‘As long as Modern English can be read and the book remains undamaged by water, fire or other problematic time-passing problems, it is here and real’. This kind of preservation aligns with a history of recovering lost works via their textual commentaries; were every copy of Harry Potter to be lost and the internet wiped, one could reconstruct the events of the series via bound copies of Annerb’s ‘The Changeling’ and dirgewithoutmusic’s ‘boy with a scar’ series. Similarly, where the digitally-linked community disappears, it is reforged through sharing the copy with the author, who ‘gets to see how a reader put different materials together to best represent their work’. One binder wrote, ‘I think this is a case of having your cake and eating it too: the electronic copy is still there for the wider audience to read, the text is set in a permanent form which has its own artistic value’. The gains of permanence, the opportunity to create a physical object, and the ability to thank the writer for their work through bound fic outweigh the instantaneous losses of accessibility and digital interactivity.

One of my final questions to the binders concerned the long-term preservation of their library: where will their bound works go if they can no longer take care of them or die? One binder was in discussion with the University of Iowa special collections, which is home to a notable fanzines collection. Four posed sending the volumes to fandom friends, two want to bequeath them to family, and two have explicitly stated their wishes in their wills. One added that he firstly trusts fans to appreciate fan-printed books as both ‘stories worth reading’ and as art objects, rather than non-fans who do not understand the connotations of the works. Binding fic is a momentary win in the long-term battle against information loss, and these personal libraries prolong the question of how and where these works will survive. One binder articulated the long-term value of these volumes: ‘I think that people making fine binding versions of fic absolutely validates this place in libraries, and I have no doubt that some of the books made by the fic binding community will make their way into the special collection libraries or museums and other institutions’. Ensuring that preservation will most likely be a self-undertaken project, in the way that all things fandom are.

Citations

Anthony Grafton, ‘Codex in crisis: the book dematerializes’, in Worlds made by words: scholarship and community in the modern West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p.311.

If you actually go back and read the drafts of the Introduction and Chapter 3 that I have posted, I have not yet explained this. Basically, adaptive works like P&P&Z don’t meet Coppa’s criteria (fic made to fannish standards, written about stories currently owned by someone else. Pride and Prejudice is in the public domain, etc.). I’ll have a post next week about this issue with upcoming reimaginings of The Great Gatsby to elaborate further on this really fun question.

#does this make sense check #chapter 4 #fic binders #bookbinding fic #fic binding #preservation #Anthony Grafton #phew! #that is it #we did it #thanks for sticking with me

[silver-spider-art]

ToA: Trollhunters vs Wizards

First I don’t want to come off like I don’t think people should enjoy Wizards. Its a fun story and as a stand-alone or an AU its funny with so many call backs to favorite characters, and many emotional moments. Lots to enjoy on its own. However, it is AU. It doesn’t fit in the same timeline of events as what was hinted at and implied in ToA:Trollhunters. I believe the biggest reason beyond the tight time frame the crew had to work under is just that the main writers that were responsible for the majority of the original script for ToA:Trollhunters didn’t return to Wizards for whatever reason (they are back for the movie so fingers crossed). The people who wrote Wizards mostly had teleplay credits on ToA:Trollhunters (edited the screen play but didn’t write it) so while they’d been deeply involved in the original... well clearly a lot of ideas were lost in the swap.

So, why do I say the timeline was screwed up by Wizards version of events?

The opening of Wizards tells us that it’s the late 12th century and then says the present is 900 years later. We know that the current year is 2016 because Enrique’s crib in the Darklands lists him as born in 2016 (so while this doesn’t directly set the shows date it can’t be much past that and assuming Enrique is less than a year old, we can say it is 2016). Now 2016 - 900 is actually 1116 which is early 12th century, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

This drastically changes how we understand the history of this world. If Deya is the first Trollhunter, then all other Trollhunters existed between 1116 and 2016. We see at least 14 troll statues in the Hero’s Forge and we also see several others in storage when Claire retrieves Angor Rot’s head for Morgana, so we can assume a minimum of ~20 Trollhunters. This gives us an average of 45 years as the life span of a Trollhunter. And yes that might seem long to a human but we are told the oldest troll was 5,352 years old and since Vendel, Blinky, Arrrgh, and Draal are all there to see the first Trollhunter chosen and thus well over 900 years old (Draal is straight up said to be 1200 years old during ToA:Trollhunters), then to be chosen by the amulet would be a quick death sentence. Now, while Blinky does only say that the Trollhunters date back to the age of Merlin, this is implied to be further back than the lifetimes of the trolls of Heartstone Trollmarket. Draal talks about spending his entire life training to be worthy of it. Kanjigar pushed his son away to protect him from the dangers of the Trollhunter’s duty implying Draal was young and not an adult during this time, and the absolute faith the trolls have in the amulet and their reliance on the protection of the Trollhunter implies that they’d grown up seeing this as normal. Yet as shown in Wizards, Draal was an adult when the amulet was made. If this was the case he would've seen the amulet pick literally anyone other than him for 900 years and have no reason to think it’d pick him now. Also while showing Jim the box of stones to try in his amulet Vendel talks about Maddrux the Many from legends of old. So old they’d all forgotten what the stone’s actual power was, thinking it was the power of great strength and not the ability to make copies of yourself. 900 years, as we’ve established, isn’t long for a troll. Would you call something a legend of old if it was an event you were alive for? Even if Maddrux didn’t hang out in Heartstone Trollmarket, Maddrux wouldn’t have been an ancient legend. Vendel would've been alive for every Trollhunter to have ever been, so would’ve Blinky, yet they talk about the Trollhunter and the amulet in a revered way that doesn’t befit something which happened within a single lifetime, a single troll generation. 900 years is long for humans, but not for trolls. They would all have to have such bad memories if this is to be believed. 

Another point of contention is Angor Rot. It is shown in a flashback that Angor Rot gets power from Morgana in 1297 with the location stated as Bulgaria, Black Sea... which Wizards shows us Angor Rot taking Morgana here after she drowns... but Camelot is in England/UK (in the normal legends)... that seems quite the journey for a dead girl he randomly found but  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. He calls her forth by 4 names Argante (queen of Avalon or another name for Morgan Le Fey), Pale Lady, Baba Yaga, Eldrith Queen. So one, Angor Rot knows who he’s calling to, he’s not addressing the other spirits that Wizards showed using this place. Also it implies that Morgana has gained quite the legacy of power and influence. Now, when he gets her attention he says “Gunmar’s war for the surface lands has ravaged my village. I need the power to protect my people.” This very heavily implies that the war is ongoing. Based on Wizards, Gunmar was sealed away 181 years ago. It’s also strongly implied that all the Gumm-Gumms except Bular are gone now. So... who’s destroying Angor Rots village? Also we see Morgana’s hand in this scene, so either she’s really good at manifesting or she hasn’t been sealed yet. And if it was a manifestation, why would she make a physical ring? Regardless, she tells him he’s to seek Merlin’s Champions and kill his Trollhunters. Angor Rot was later sealed away in an ancient ruin of Aysa-Thoon in Ranthambore, India (which is in the middle of a tiger reserve btw). It’s old and overgrown implying he’s been there a while. Otto also says he found the location in old tomes so at the very least Angor Rot has been sealed away for centuries. So he runs around killing Trollhunters for ~300-400 years. If this is after the Killahead Bridge battle as Wizards would have us believe, then the only trolls on the evil side killing Trollhunters are just Angor Rot and Bular... which just seems off to me for how everything else is talked about in ToA:Trollhunters. 

The Janus Order and the changelings are another confusing point that Wizards makes worse. When asked about changelings Blinky says that in the Old World Gumm-Gumms stole their young and did something unnatural to them and that their main purpose was to spy on the surface lands. Blinky also says that the Janus Order is an ancient guild of changeling spies, as old as they are mysterious. The phrasing of both these points imply that changelings have existed for a very long time by troll standards, not something that happened well within the lifespan of every troll seen in the show. In Wizards we see all of one changeling who’s already an adult and implies his power is new. Gunmar uses plural when he talks about Morgana’s changelings but they are also very clearly a brand new thing. From ToA:Trollhunter we know that human babies and changelings are exchanged through fetches into and out of the Darklands but if Wizards is to be believed and all the Gumm-Gumms except Bular were sealed away after the Killahead Bridge battle in 1116... who was stealing the babies? Bular? Considering how much Bular hates changelings I have a hard time picturing him setting up the exchanges to get the Janus Order established entirely on his own. If we assume there were a few changelings left loose after Morgana was sealed away... maybe... but Morgana and Gunmar just met and have worked together for like 3 days max... why are they so reliant on each other. And if most of the changelings were made after Morgana was sealed away then why are changelings like Otto so beholden and worshipful towards her? In his Janus Order orientation speech Strickler calls her their Lady Creator and that seems undisputed by any of the changelings. It is implied that Morgana is the only reason their are changelings. NotEnrique says he’s centuries old which means he’d been waiting in the Darklands as a baby until he was needed which I always took to mean that all the captured troll babies had been changed by Morgana before she was sealed away. If Morgana isn’t actually needed to make changelings, then why do they worship her and answer to her over Gunmar? Also Morgana only whispered to the changelings like Otto, never to Gunmar in the Darklands, so she couldn’t have helped set up the changeling magic from that side. 

Then there is Morgana and Gunmar’s relationship. What we see in Wizards, Morgana becomes the champion of the 3 new elemental villains, she makes a changeling (off screen) and sends him to kill her brother, only then does she go see Gunmar. When Morgana talks to Gunmar she immediately brings up the Eternal Night, which... if she’s the champions of the 3 elemental beings who want the humans dead to bring balance to the world... how does the eternal night help them? It certainly wouldn’t help Nari of the Eternal Forest and I can’t think of any reason the other two would want that either. It only helps trolls (trolls who don’t realize that all their food sources need sunlight to exist). After we see her add the mind control power to Gunmar’s Decimaar Blade we don’t learn anything else she does for the Gumm-Gumms. To be honest, if I were Gunmar at this point I’d assume she set me up. Some sorceress shows up, is the king’s sister, she frees your son with a new troll hybrid thing you think is impure in order to get you to trust her and gives you a weapon upgrade to make you think you should go all in on the next battle and then you and your whole army gets locked away for 900 years... kinda no reason to think she ever had your back, especially not to the point that you trust people who say they’ve gotten visions from her in a worshipful way. She very clearly did Gunmar no favors in Wizards. 

Merlin, oh Merlin... one, he’s entirely useless in the entirety of Wizards and always doing something wrong or just not having any power to do anything which is just baffling compared to the power he was throwing around in ToA:Trollhunters. As we see Morgana get sealed away in Wizards, it’s Douxie doing the sealing and Merlin has already fallen down and is asleep for some reason. This despite the fact that in ToA:Trollhunters he claimed he needed to use nearly all his power to seal her away and that was why he was asleep. That her being free meant he could get his power back which just... isn’t how anything happened in Wizards. Also Merlin very pointedly claimed that Jim couldn’t defeat Gunmar as a human, that he would die. But, in Wizards Merlin had originally been building the amulet for Arthur, a human. It was only afterwards that he decided to make it for trolls. So was the only reason Jim had to be a troll because the Jim he met was a troll? Because that is just really fucked up. The speech he gave Jim about needing to sacrifice his humanity, it implied that Merlin had planned this all out, seen this moment... but Wizards Merlin was just constantly in reaction mode and was completely backing Arthur and ignoring literally anything anyone else said until right before they went to the trolls for help. Merlin didn’t give a shit about trolls and they also hated him... but afterwards they love him to the point that they’ll talk worshiply about him? And why did they have to go back to the past? Merlin was so insistent they go back to the past at the start of Wizards... implied like they needed to flee the enemy but a moment after the kids are lost in time he just defeats the skull ship and no one that’s left on Camelot is in danger  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. 

Also when Merlin and King Arthur go to the trolls to ask for help, at this point in Wizards it’s mostly been shown to be a battle between Gunmar and King Arthur for territory. It’s implied that the other trolls have until recently been more hurt by Arthur than Gunmar and Gunmar is only now trying to force them to join because he needs more recruits. Yet in ToA:Trollhunter the war was stated to be mostly a disagreement between Gumm-Gumms and all the “good” trolls and the humans just the victims. Everything in ToA:Trollhunters implied that humans didn’t stand a chance against trolls, Gunmar was endlessly dismissive but in Wizards King Arthur and company were a real danger to trolls, Cal/Deya was nearly taken out by an arrow. In fact the trolls of Dwoza were so useless that they needed humans to train them how to fight. They had no warriors? Where were Draal and Kanjigar during the fight with Arrrgh? So all of the trolls who would become the Heartstone Trollmarket trolls (including Bagdwella) had to be trained to fight by humans before Killahead but then were so disgusted by human Trollhunter Jim that they fainted? That they thought the very idea that a human could fight a troll was laughable? Yeah, that doesn’t make sense. 

And Killahead Bridge, let us not forget. It is the portal to the Darklands but as Cal/Deya walks over it she dismissively says its nothing but a bridge over a dried up river so clearly Wizards is saying that Gunmar isn’t actively using the bridge as a portal, in fact we see no portals or any sort of magic used by trolls in Wizards, not even the door like in Heartstone Trollmarket, Dwoza just has a physical door. The only person who seems to have known that the bridge was a portal was Merlin as he is making battle plans. This also implies that the whole point of the amulet was just to seal Gunmar away in the Darklands. Which is just... why? The amulet hadn’t even been tested against Gunmar yet at this point. This brings up so many questions about the Darklands that are more confusing like how anyone figured out the fetches if travel back and forth from the Darklands wasn’t a thing until after the bridge became a sealed door. 

As for the Trollhunters themselves, what were they all doing if every other Trollhunter existed between Deya and Kanjigar? Deya defeated Gunmar and sealed him away leaving only Bular and Angor Rot and the changelings. We know they weren’t fighting the Janus Order because Blinky had to look them up in a book and Blinky has actively been involved in several instances of Trollhunters (at least Kanjigar and Unkar) so he should know. Jim killed both Bular and Angor Rot, to whom everyone else just died. So what were they doing? Just cleaning up Gnome messes and Goblin battles? If there were no other Gumm-Gumms to fight, why was it a revered position that anyone wanted. The way Wizards sets up the timeline its more a curse that just means you have a countdown timer until Bular kills you. Also every single Trollhunter in the void tells Jim its suicide to fight Gunmar, even after he killed Bular. But by Wizards logic the first time the amulet was used against Gunmar it was able to seal him away forever with hardly a fight. If anything they should think Bular was more powerful than his father by that logic. It all just makes no sense. 

There is more, like character backstory elements that upset me. For example how Arrrgh’s trauma over his treatment as a pet by Gunmar was ignored by Wizards and how his fear of violence was intrinsically linked to that trauma which fueled his insistence on pacifism and how Wizards showed him just casually hitting people after swapping sides with out any issues and that is just very upsetting to me, but that’s a very different rant. 

In conclusion, Wizards has a lot of fun elements to it and can be a very fun watch, but it comes off like fan fiction to me, an alternate universe unconnected to the rest of canon. It doesn’t understand the world building that was established in ToA:Trollhunter and absolutely breaks its own timeline. 

I’ve always pictured the line of Trollhunters stretching back to the Broze Age and the beginning of humanity, a war that has lasted several millennia, long enough that every troll in Trollmarket grew up in war, their lives shaped by it. A war that stretched out into their parents and grandparents generations. Which is completely doable from what we know of troll ages. Gunmar could easily be 4,000 years old (he looks it with all his cracks) and still not beat the oldest troll on record. Merlin always felt inhuman and ancient (centuries long nap and he just has to crack his spine), so he could be far far older than the Arthurian legends and have gone by many names. Also I clearly wasn’t the only one with this idea as if you read the Trollhunters novels or comics based after ToA:Trollhunters those authors assumed as I did. One novel has Jim and the gang go back to 501 AD to see Gunmar lose his eye to Orlagk. The Comics show an early Trollhunter interacting with humans from the stone age. To me this makes so much more sense. Trolls are old and long lived, it only makes sense that their perception of what constituted ancient be very different to what we humans see as ancient. They are also shown to be very slow to change, which is why it makes sense that the Trollhunter mantel is something that has been around longer than the current living trolls.

So anyway, I just really hope the movie doesn’t rely on too much of the nonsense that was shown in Wizards and is a fun romp. I loved full troll Jim and I miss half-troll Jim already. It just feels like his whole sacrifice was meaningless, that by undoing it and showing that humans can fight trolls just fine that it had been for nothing. Its just very disappointing. But that’s just my opinion (but then I’ve always voted for a Jim who can change back and forth and really have one foot in each world). 

#trollhunters #toawizards #tales of arcadia #toa wizards #toa trollhunters

[trollhuntersshardborn]

Act 1 Summary

Okay, so since the fic will probably never be updated again, I wanna tell exactly how it was supposed to go down. I just don’t have the inspiration or energy from it, and I just need to put the story to rest.

Okay, act 1. Let’s briefly go over chapters 1-4.

The story takes place in medieval Europe. The year 1315 to be exact. The prologue covers the gumm-gumm trolls rampaging through a castle looking for a past occupant. A princess from three hundred years ago. Apparently, she was deemed a witch and burned at the stake, but that’s like, oh well, to the trolls. Why they are looking for her would be addressed later. 

Later that night, the gumm-gumms raid a nearby farm for food (humans). This is the Ward family farm, owned by Larkin Ward and his six children. The oldest daughter is named Nadia, and she’s just a peasant girl trying to live her life and in perpetual fear of being married off and taken away. In the raid, Nadia runs away in fear as her entire immediate family is killed and/or eaten. But before the same thing happens to her, the Trollhunter Nakrik shows up to fight off the bad trolls. And he’s joined by a woman with super strength! But this seems to be for naught as Nadia’s heart gives out due to fright. But it’s okay, she gets better. She comes back to life for some reason.

So the Trollhunter and his “human” friend take the survivors (Nadia, her granny, and a visiting boy named Edwin/Edmund (I kept forgetting his name)) to the Royal Trollmarket nearby. Now, Royal Trollmarket was the largest market in Europe, housing a massive cavern with every good and ware you can think of, and in the middle of it is not a Heartstone, but a massive fortress that serves as the palace! Nadia is introduced to the world of trolls, fae, and other things, as well as made aware that now she’s an immortal being called a Shard. This is explained to her by a fellow Shard, the “human” friend named Elisi.

The basic story of Shards is that they’re immortal beings created by Merlin himself. Magic pulled from a Life Stone (which did as the name suggests, creates life from two separate souls) so Gunmar couldn’t use it to raise an army overnight. Merlin separated this magic into eight segments and had them enter eight human maidens upon birth. The point was to keep this magic AWAY from Gunmar, so these girls could be anywhere in the world and their powers and immortality wouldn’t activate until their very first death. Merlin also gave each girl a unique “gift” to protect herself and her life magic, but basically Shards still use their Life Magic to create new life between other souls, so anyone who had a Shard on their side could theoretically create a bunch of living beings overtime. So in this time of war between Gunmar and whoever is Trollhunter, having a Shard would come in handy. That is, if she feels like creating an army.

So far, no Shard is willing to be a baby factory to make this army for either side. Elisi is married to a troll named Richta, a gentle potion maker who’s very protective of his family. Nadia has an underlying phobia of being reduced to a perpetual mother, and doesn’t take well that this is now what she is. Reduced to a blubbering mess, she retreats into the market and ends up in a small library. The librarian, Dictatious, begrudgingly lets the girl hide there, but realizes she’s a fast learner when she tries to read and interpret trollish.

Now, the Gumm-gumms realize there’s now not one, but TWO of the eight Shards in one place right now: in the Royal Trollmarket. Bular decides to go on the offensive, and with the help of a changeling underling named Corvis, he unleashes a pack of creatures called rust rats. Now, rust rats exist to kill and eat trolls, however whatever's left comes back to life as a rust zombie, and they infect anything they touch with their rust. So with zombie trolls in the market, everyone runs for the closest safe place: the palace. The only people not marching there are the Nakrik, Elisi, and another character named Grim or Black Knight Grim, for long. Grim is another human in Team Trollhunter, decked out in sweet black armor, a fearless horse, and basically any weapon you can think of to get the job done. He’s from a family of monster hunters who specialize in killing trolls, and he’s so skilled and well prepared that he’s taken on an entire squad of gumm-gumms alone. More on him later.

The fighters in our cast wipe out the zombie trolls and zombie causers, which is the signal for the gumm gumm army to storm the place en mass! Out numbered and outmatched, the remaining party makes a run for the castle. Nakrik, the noble trollhunter and good friend that he is, makes sure the others get in safely before squaring off against the entire army by himself. But he not only fights all these gumm gumms, but also Bular the Butcher, and a general named Alora Darren the Undying, mother to Bular, wife to Gunmar and (HOLY SHIT) a Shard herself! More on her later!

Fortunately for Nakrik, he’s saved by the king of Royal Trollmarket, King Gholgolm the Fourteenth, a thirty foot tall centaur troll who’s so big he can’t even get out of the front door of his palace. But just making it half way out the door to kick some ass is enough to scare the army away for a time. The palace fortress closes itself off so the invading forces can’t get in, and everyone just hunkers down tight for a plan. See, now all the survivors are trapped with no way out since the gumm-gumms have all the exits covered and are occupying the surrounding trollmarket. So while the heroes are trying to come up with a plan, news of Nadia, another Shard, reaches the king’s ears and he asks her to the throne room. He asks her to be the Shard that makes the army he needs to win, and she tearfully declines. Nadia just can’t bring herself to be reduced to a baby machine as she’s always feared, but has no other way to be of help. But Dictatious does see a use for Nadia, and to calm her brings her to the royal library. 

Here in the library are more characters to be introduced to (I hated how chapter 4 is a character dump episode, how do I get you guys to care about everyone?!), there’s Dic’s brother Blinky, also there’s the royal wizard Rundle and his family, Vendel (son and apprentice) and Kilfred (elder who’s barely understandable and laughs with a grandfatherly “ho ho ho ho.”) Everyone’s excited to meet Nadia, but Dictatious explains something about Shards that wasn’t addressed. Each Shard has a unique ability to protect herself with based on their title. Elisi is the Maid of Fortitude, and possesses “the strength of ten trolls.” Alora, still outside the palace and trying to get in and kill everyone, is the Eternal Arsenal, and can create any weapon she’s well versed in. Dic has deduced that Nadia is the Maid of Intelligence, who is a fast learner with a perfect memory. She can be a living archive, and recall knowledge used for tactics. Nadia... doesn’t take being this inferior well and nearly has another breakdown. But her grandmother lets her in on a little secret. Unrelated to being a Shard, Nadia has magic in her bloodline. Turns out granny is a witch, and the family gift of magic tends to skip a generation and is only present in the girls. So Nadia, with her newfound magic talent, and her ability to remember all knowledge she’s learned could be a living magical archive and the potential to be a powerful witch is very likely. She’s hesitant, but once Rundle starts showing her how to cast spells and how to recite them, she quickly becomes fascinated. 

Meanwhile, the gumm gumm army is trying to invade the castle, but can’t seem to find a weak link in the walls or “moat” of indefinite voids that troll caves seem to have. But Edwin has managed to sneak out in his “trolls are going to eat me” panic, and when confronted by Alora and Bular, promises to show how he was able to sneak out/in if he’s left alive and can get “his girl” out. Turns out he has a huge crush and Nadia and wants to get her out of here with him. It’s agreed and Alora sends him back in along with her own wizard troll, Skeeziel, to sneak inside the fortress and open the front doors from inside. Edwin goes to get Nadia to get her the hell out of here while Skeeziel sneaks around and assasinates whoever gets in his way and manages to get the doors open. So now everyone needs to evacuate further into the castle, closing off the outside halls as the army starts to make their approach. Edwin somehow manages to escape the chaos, without Nadia, and makes it to the surface... only to run into Gunmar, who promptly eats him.

Everyone’s in a near panic! Gunmar himself is going to storm the now vulnerable palace and there’s no way to fight in these much more cramped corners. King Gholgolm decides he’s going to fight Gunmar and give everyone enough time to live/escape. Rundle figures he can open a portal to the surface with help from his father and son, along with Nadia. The four of them can keep a small portal open long enough to get everyone out. Nadia only has the confidence to try and help with the others nearby. The portal is a success, and Nadia desperately tries to hold up her side of the magical baggage as the castle is slowly evacuated. King Gholgolm faces off against Gunmar at the entrance of the castle, but its not even a fight. Even as such a large troll, he’s no match for Gunmar’s prowess and sheer determination (foolish horse-monster! while you sat stuck in your own castle, I practiced the blade!). Gunmar then wrestles what he really wants from the king: the location of the Heartstone rumored to be growing in the east. The King does say there’s one in China, before Gunmar kills him. The rest of the army storms the palace.

Seeing that the King has failed, Nakrik then rushes off to fight off the army and Gunmar himself as well. Elisi goes with him. The stress of her friends probably not going to make it gets to Nadia, but she’s kept on course. Nakrik is soon stuck fighting with Alora, and he yells at Elisi to fall back and protect the survivors. She reluctantly does, leaving Nakrik to his fate. Soon, the army is about to overtake the portal room. Only Nadia, Vendel, Rundle and Kilfred are left. They start to debate who should stay to keep the portal open long enough for the others to flee, but little old Kilfred makes the decision for them. He shoves Nadia, and his son and grandson into the portal just as Gunmar manages to break through. The portal closes, and Kilfred looks up to Gunmar with a large grin and one last “ho ho ho ho” before snapping his staff and causing an explosion of light bright enough to be sunlight. Kilfred is dead, the survivors are safe on the surface, and Gunmar is temporarily blinded and enraged. His victory in Royal Trollmarket is a hollow one.

Among the survivors on the surface is young Prince Thalfie, Gholgolm’s son, who now must lead his scared and frightened people to somewhere safe. As soon as Elisi insists that they need to wait for Nakrik, the amulet makes its way to the group. Nakrik didn’t survive. And the amulet chooses Elisi’s husband, Richta, to be the next trollhunter.

Act 1 ends with Nadia still frightened by this terrifying new world, but now has the hope to survive it with her new skills. Elisi is now horrified that her husband is going to suffer the fate of all Trollhunters, and Thalfie begins to lead his people to the Black Forest for shelter. Rundle promises to continue to train Nadia. End of Act 1? Not quite.

The last thing to see in Act 1 is Alora wandering the surface, heavily injured, fighting off tears, with the Sigil of Angor Rot on the right side of her face.

Okay, now Act 1 is over. 

Act 2 and 3 will be tomorrow, since part of the reason I had such trouble writing was I couldn’t fully plot out Act 2 much.

Oh, shit, that’s right. Then there’s Forged in Darkness. Remind me to tell you guys about that first before getting into Act 2.

And...... that’s it for Act 1.

#shardborn summary

[adozentothedawn]

This has been on my mind for a while and since I’m once again in this weird limbo of wanting to write yet also not wanting to, I finally did it for watcher wednesday. :)

@orime-stories, @brightoncemore, you up for it? Everyone else is invited as well of course. Specifically priest watchers would be interesting I think, because they logically tend to have the most opinions about the gods, but of course you’re welcome to use any kind of watcher you feel would be interesting. :)

-

What does the Watcher (Favaen) think about the gods?

1.     Abydon: Besides Eothas, Abydon is certainly Favaen’s favourite. Before finding her place in the Eothas clergy, she spent a few years as an acolyte of Abydon and has some experience blacksmithing. She appreciates his straightforwardness and his earnest representation of his portfolio. He stands for doing things yourself with hard work instead of shoving the work on someone or complaining about it, which is something Favaen can support.

2.     Berath: Berath is neutral ground for Favaen, as they should be in her opinion. Death is a fact, nothing to be worshipped or cursed, just a necessity. What comes after is what’s important. Berath has to exist as a mediator, and they do their job well. Of all the gods, Berath is the one Favaen can interact with the most naturally. They are a respected superior of sorts, but not someone to be worshipped.

3.     Eothas: Eothas is a lot of things for Favaen, the hope that everything can be made better, the assurance that you can redeem yourself however many attempts you need, but also home. He is the star she uses to orient herself, while she is the lantern other people follow. He is the unobtainable perfection she strives after, but knows she will never reach, which is why she doesn’t believe in just blind following. No mortal can reach the actual star, and sometimes there are obstacles in your way, so you have to find your own path as close to the star as you can, even if that sometimes means taking detours. Eothas is the destination, the light guiding the way, but not necessarily the way itself. She regrets the events of the Saint’s War but trusts that he knew what he was doing. The destruction of Caed Nua hits closer, but her absolute love for Eothas is so ingrained in her being that even through her conflicting feelings she cannot let go of the hope that his cause is worth all suffering on the way.

4.     Galawain: Favaen considers Galawain a joke. A dangerous one, but a joke nonetheless. With his one minded pursuit of, well, pursuit, without actual care for his followers, she deems him hardly worthy of the title “god”, much less “the changeling god”. She particularly despises his hypocrisy of demanding constant improvement and strife from his followers yet feeling threatened by actually being challenged.

5.     Hylea: Hylea has always been an ally of Eothas, and as such deserves a certain amount of reverence in Favaen’s opinion. Especially the birth aspect of her portfolio is an important and valued aspect of hers in the Eothas clergy and therefore for Favaen. She also appreciates Hylea’s support of the arts but is a bit weirded out by the bird aspect.

6.     Magran: Favaen has a sort of begrudging respect for Magran. As much she despises Magran’s attitude to suffering, at least Magran sticks to her guns and has an actual motivation. Favaen highly disapproves of said motivations and of course there is the issue of Magran murdering her god, but even so Favaen can admit, painfully, that Magran does mean well, in her own fucked up way.

7.     Ondra: Like with Magran Favaen can recognize that Ondra does have some good intentions, but Ondra annoys her more on a personal level with her refusal to even consider learning from the past. Her tendency to cover up uncomfortable truths, especially at the cost of Abydon, makes it even harder for Favaen to respect her.

8.     Rymrgand: There is no god that pisses Favaen off more than Rymrgand. Even Galawain has at least some vague thing that he does, but Rymrgand’s only contribution to the world is him lazing around in some corner being an asshole to everyone who actually tries to better the world. He doesn’t even pursue his own goal and forbids his own followers from assisting his cause, which is his greatest crime in Favaen’s book. He claims something, sets an expectation, and then makes it a crime to reach for it, leaving everyone who places their trust in him in an endless spiral of misery. And the greatest insult for Favaen is that he is entirely aware of the suffering he causes and doesn’t care at all. He doesn’t even enjoy it like Skaen does, he does it exclusively because he deems it “in his nature”, which is about as far away from Favaen’s believes as you can get.

9.     Skaen: Skaen is a special case, because as much as Favaen despises his methods, she understands his reasoning. Since even she can realize that attempting to convert a god is bound to be met with failure, she aims for the misguided souls following him and strives to better their lives and turn them towards more productive endeavours, such as, though not limited to, the faith of Eothas. For Skaen she holds less hatred and more frustrated pity than for Rymrgand.

10. Wael: Wael is a fascination for Favaen. She would never trust them with anything important, but there is something about their childlike joy that makes it impossible for Favaen to truly take offense at their carelessness. For Favaen Wael is a delightful distraction every once in a while. The fact that Wael isn’t one to hold grudges and is in general one of the more forgiving, or at least distractible, gods is certainly helpful as well.

11. Woedica: Favaen, unsurprisingly, does not like Woedica. In a way that also comes from a place of jealousy, though she would never admit that. The art of talking anyone into anything without the need of bloodshed is a talent that she considers horribly wasted on Woedica’s selfish ambitions. Woedica’s hypocrisy is what really makes Favaen despise her. Justice isn’t a concept Favaen is terribly wild about in first place, as it often gets in the way of the far more important process of true redemption, but Woedica’s appropriation of the notion just makes Favaen loath her even more. Berath makes a much better leader in her opinion.

#Pillars of Eternity #watcher wednesday #asks and tags #Watcher Favaen

[whatamonsterousau]

~Valve Monster AU~

Howdy, I figured I would go into detail about the characters considering that’s probably really important for people to know! In summary before we begin: monsters are real and make up basically the whole cast in this au, currently got two games in the mix, might add more someday. Let’s begin!

Half-Life

Gordon Freeman : Demigod, not something he’s entirely aware of, nor is he aware of whatever kind of power he might have as a result of this. Which means as a result almost nobody else is aware of this.

Eli Vance : That’s a Human Person! That’s just a fuckin’ dude!

Azian Vance : Kitsune, spends like 90% of her time in a human form. Not that she prefers being human, more that she’s worried other humans would prefer her as human. Most in the lab knows though, they all trust each other.

Alyx Vance : half-kitsune, Magic is weaker than her mom’s but she’s stronger (among other things) than a regular person and can make weak illusions at a moment’s notice. So overall, seems human at a glance, 100% not human. (Or would it be 50% not human?)

Barney Calhoun : Not directly recognized as a monster, but his lineage used to have Valkyries which are considered nonhuman.

Isaac Kleiner : Witch!! Potions on the side of science!!! Finding where the “normal” laws of the world end and where “magic” begins! Still pretty scatterbrained tho.

Lamarr : She’s a will-o-wisp and Kleiner’s familiar! She’s very lovely but isn’t afraid to spook people by taking surprising forms. Especially Barney. love Iand magic) is stored in the flying fireball!

Gina Cross : A pixie! Not the kind with wings or anything, she’s just very short and some nonhuman qualities about her. And maybe magic at her fingertips that she’s more than willing to apply to experimental items. Also, by proxy, she can’t be possessed, which is good for working with ghosts.

Colette Green : Decended from giants!! She’s tall and durable, but careful when she has to be. It doesn’t get in the way of her throwing herself into her work, but it can be tiresome.

Arne Magnusson : A tommyknocker, overall he’s much more comfortable underground. Likely nocturnal too. Overall not a fan of cities.

Wallace Breen : This man is also a human person, just a shit one.

Adrian Shepherd : Changeling, though this wasn’t discovered until he joined this military. Bit of a shock to his family.

G-Man : Ghost, and a powerful one at that. Might be acting under someone or something as a representative.

Left 4 Dead

William “Bill” Overbeck : Undead of some kind, technically always falling apart and decaying. Hates it, but can’t seem to die, so it’s better to just recooperate and keep going.

Coach : Selkie, and balancing a life out of the ocean with his husband and son and in the ocean with his family. He’s having a nice time. At least until the au really kicks off but ehh—

Francis : A ghost, more specifically some kind of vengeful spirit? Well, he tries to be nice but it isn’t his fault he catches on fire sometimes.

Nick : Vampire! Overall he. Probably gives the most general difficulty to the team just trying to vibe by existing but that’s okay they love him anyways.

Louis : Witch! Nephil though they’re not allowed to learn too much magic and too powerful magic because of the nephil thing. Too much magic misuse makes the half-Angels fall, even if there are good intentions. :pensive:

Rochelle : A flower Nymph! Seeing as she is a walking plant, more or less, she’s probably the most obviously not a person, which sucks for her but she can manage.

Zoey : Jersey Devil, the cryptid. In the au there’s more than one, probably not just really centered to any kind of Jersey, and she’s one of the younger ones. She can take a human disguise kind of form that works on anyone who can’t see through magic.

Ellis : Werewolf, in a pack with his friends. He doesn’t have any obvious bites, but he’s not a born werewolf. Here, lycanthropy is a really easily spread disease, so if you like. Donate blood or something that could lead to infecting someone else.

Thank you for reading if you took the time to read and I hope you liked it ^^

#Left 4 Dead #Half-Life #Half Life #Half Life Au #L4D #Left 4 Dead 2 #Left 4 Dead AU #L4D2 #Left 4 Dead 2 AU #cursing #monster au #AU Main Cast #exposition #Valve Monster AU #AU #Value Monster AU info

[comicteaparty]

February 10th-February 16th, 2020 CTP Archive

The archive for the Comic Tea Party week long chat that occurred from February 10th, 2020 to February 16th, 2020.  The chat focused on Betrayal by Alex Lewis.

Featured Comment:

Chat:

Comic Tea Party

BOOK CLUB START!

Hello and welcome everyone to Comic Tea Party’s Book Club~! This week we’ll be focusing on Betrayal by Alex Lewis~! (https://alexmakescomics.com/betrayal/)

You are free to read and comment about the comic all week at your own pace until February 16th, so stop on by whenever it suits your schedule! Discussions are freeform, but we do offer discussion prompts in the pins for those who’d like to have them. Additionally, remember that while constructive criticism is allowed, our focus is to have fun and appreciate the comic! Whether you finish the comic or can only read a few pages, everyone is welcome to join and chat with us!

DISCUSSION PROMPTS – PART 1

1. What did you like about the beginning of the comic?

2. What has been your favorite moment in the comic (so far)?

3. Who is your favorite character?

4. Which characters do like seeing interact the most?

5. What is something you like about the art? If you have a favorite illustration, please share it!

6. What is a theme you like that the comic explores?

7. What do you like about the comic’s story or overall related content? 8. Overall, what do you think the comic’s strengths are?

Don’t feel inspired by the prompts? Feel free to discuss anything else that interested you!

Delphina

Just finished reading! I really found the part with Aune's "book of secrets" such a heartbreaking sequence. Alex using the blue pen kind of reinforces the themes of differentness and being an outsider not only in her outside world, but even just in the context of being honest about her own feelings. https://alexmakescomics.com/2019/06/07/chapter-six/

I also really felt for her in Chapter 8, when talking about her relationship with Aune and saying "the more time I spent with her, the more of myself I lost trying to keep up with her. It didn't matter to me at all. I liked myself better when I was with her." Just again, this theme of finding something to define herself when she'd been adrift, but not always in an honest or healthy way. https://alexmakescomics.com/2019/08/11/chapter-eight/

Eilidh (Lady Changeling)

I like the art style - it's very unique!

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

I like the way the comic ends on sort of an open-ended note. It's not very often that we get completed comics here on CTP, and I think this comic's ending is weirdly satisfying in its incompleteness. Like we don't know whether Aune and Alex make up, but we know that they're both open to it, y'know? I also looked into the Harold Pinter play Betrayal (which this comic is partially based off), and it's pretty interesting the ways they're similar and different. Like the story regards a group of friends and their romantic relationships (and them betraying each other, of course), but the main group of characters is two girls and one boy rather than two men and one woman. I'm curious how many of the changes are due to it being partially a memoir of the author's life and how many are the result of just creating an interesting fictional story about high schoolers.

I also really like the comic's use of flashbacks to tell Alex's story - flashing back to her childhood contextualizes her experiences as a highschooler really well.

RebelVampire

I really like in general how the story is told with a non-linear timeline. Not a lot of stories can actually pull them off successfully, because you run a high risk of confusing the audience. However, despite this one time jumping around a lot, it was never confusing. I think I chalk this up to the fact that the focus on the comic is not the plot itself but the relationships. So you don't need to know the timeline exactly to be able to empathize, experience, and understand what is going on in the relationships. So this is something I really enjoy about the comic. I really love non-linear when it's done well, and this is done well in that regard.

What I enjoy about the beginning of the comic is just how damn awkward everything is. Like, everything about their interactions is exactly why ill never go to a high school reunion. Cause there's this expectation to be super impressed with ppl (hence shallow comments) while also being a mind reader (like knowing someone doesnt go by an old name anymore). It's embarrassing and horrible and the comic really hit at some of my deeper social anxieties that while I've grown from, never will quite be gone. So bravo for making benign horror XD(edited)

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

Woah, I was not expecting to read a completed comic here! That was a nice change of pace. I really agree with the people praising the non-linear timeline. Using a highschool reunion as a framing device was an excellent decision

I wonder if the main character was gay or asexual?

Alex_makes_comics

Hello, I'm Alex. I made this comic - and I'm crying reading your comments. I've never had people review this book before. Some of the chapters only had about two views before this week so... This is very big for me. Hooboy. In answer to ongoing questions: changes to the Betrayal script from Harold Pinter's play were made to make it fit my experiences. The play is always a question of who is betraying who in a toxic love triangle. It's a jumping off point for me to talk about my memories. I went to see it and it hit a chord, after which I immediately sat down and wrote this. I love how the title of the play conceals who is betraying who: betrayal is a flexible concept. Hiding behind Pinter's words meanwhile ,when I have to, makes it easier to share my memories with others without self censoring. I am always terrified of people I know reading this book! In answer to the question of orientation, I'm bisexual if that helps anyone

RebelVampire

My favorite moment in the comic I would say is the ending. I like that it's open-ended and that there's no clear leaning one way or another. It's kind of up to the reader to judge the events they just saw. Not to mention, I feel the open-ending nature fits the mood of the comic in that relationships aren't straight forward and constantly in a flux. So having the ending be not entirely clear suits that well. As for a favorite character, I'm honestly not sure I could pick one in this case. Everyone is so human and I feel like picking a favorite would kind of be like picking a side. Or kind of like your friends trying to ask you to rank them in terms of how much you like them. That would be a challenge I'm not up for in this case. As for interactions, definitely Alex and Aune. The relationship there is fascinating from the way the story is told, so I'm never quite sure what to make of it, especially when knowing how the relationship sours. And since its through their interactions we get to know Aune, it almost feels like a character study in a way whenever the two interact.

Before I blather too much in one day, one thing I like about the comic is how different the kid versions of the characters look as opposed to the adults. I feel it's more true to life since a lot of adults do change a ton from how they looked at kids. So while theres definitely similarities, the age progression just felt really natural.

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

I agree with what Rebel said about the age progression feeling natural. If I could describe this comic in one word, I would maybe choose "realistic."

It does a great job of protraying that feeling of growing up and leaving things behind

Emotions and drama that feel so important as a child and as a high schooler turn out to really not matter that much at all

Comic Tea Party

DISCUSSION PROMPTS – PART 2

9. Given the story’s title, in what ways do we see betrayal throughout the story, and which moment stuck out to you the most regarding the subject? What can be learned from the story in regards to dealing with it?

10. What do you think the story can teach us regarding the nature of relationships and how they change as we grow older? In what ways do these events perhaps relate to your own life or what about the storytelling makes them relatable in general?

11. What do you think the story has to say about growing up in general, both in regards to how we change and how the people around us change? If applicable, why do you think coming of age stories like this are important?

12. How do you interpret the end of chapter 10 where Alex and Aune finally interact? What do you think each character is feeling? Overall, do you think their relationship can be repaired after the damage is done?

Don’t feel inspired by the prompts? Feel free to discuss anything else that interested you!

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

12) i didbt read the ending as starting to repair a relationship. I saw it as leaving your past behind. Also she doesn't seem to understand the damage she did to their relationship, so i don't think the main character would want to reconnect

Kabocha

Oh, dang. So I just binged the entirety of this comic, and there's something about this that feels a little... close to home, I guess? I really empathize with Alex -- the feeling of having someone who you love just kind of up and ditch you like that... That hurts. Granted, her situation was a bit more complicated, but... hhh. I think at best, she might go the route of wanting to be friendly with Aune later, but it just isn't gonna work out. That pain still exists, and even if Aune is past it, Alex pretty clearly isn't. And I think it's understandable. It's not a grudge, but more like that kind of awkward avoidance because you don't wanna get hurt again. just... aaaaaaaaaa. This was a very good read. Thank you @Alex_makes_comics.

RebelVampire

I do think what @Eightfish (Puppeteer) touched onto is the comic's strength: realism. Every event in this comic is so relateable since I think everyone can say they've at least been in a similar situation at least one of those times. So it forms a real connection with the reader so easily, thus allowing it to pull on the heart strings. Let's talk about themes and stuff though! So for in regards to betrayal, the moment that stuck out to me the most was the classroom convo between Alex and Aune where Aune is kind of distant and doesn't seem to really like anyone anymore and wants Alex to do break up dirty work. The reason this stuck with me is you can so clearly see it as a betrayal, and yet at the same time, it's such a benign thing. Like nobody is being literally stabbed in the back, nobody is having money stolen, no one is stealing anybody's lover. It's just...distance and a friendship falling apart for various reasons. Which I think is really the sad part. Since rather than dealing with betrayal, I think this story shows the many different forms it can take. And that sometimes its not this overdramatic thing. Sometimes its a slow burn that just singes for hours and hours.

However, I do like the story's maturity in that it shows us relationships are hard and need active maintenance. Cause without that, they fall apart. Additionally, as we grow older, its sad but common place friendships wont last. People change all the times, especially interests. So in the end those changes will drive people apart. At the very least I certainly haven't talked to my high school friends in years since many of them moved, got married, had kids, etc. Even during high school I had friends drift away. And I think these are pretty universal experiences, which is what I think makes the storytelling as relateable as it is.

As for the end, I kind of interpret it as "not ready." From the expressions, I think both Alex and Aune clearly felt awkward. Like the elephant in the room. They both wanted to talk about it seriously, but also both didn't want to talk about it. Too many feelings still fresh, coupled with maybe not enough desire to fix everything yet. So while I do believe most relationships can be repaired given time and effort, both parties need to be ready. And I just don't see that happening yet from how things ended.

Comic Tea Party

DISCUSSION PROMPTS – PART 3

13. What are you most looking forward to seeing in regards to the comic?

14. Any final words of encouragement for the comic?

Don’t feel inspired by the prompts? Feel free to discuss anything else that interested you!

Kabocha

As I said before, I'm really glad I read this. It felt very personal, and it was kinda cathartic to read! It also was kind of nice to see someone else kinda express the awkwardness of meeting again with someone who you felt hurt by. And just... Yeah. Thank you for this comic.

Alex_makes_comics

Hi, Everybody. I'm not sure if this is the last day of Betrayal book club, or if tomorrow counts still, but I wanted to use this opportunity to thank everyone for reading and engaging with my work, before you start on the next webcomic. I have never been through a process like this. Most of the time, I make comics and release them into the internet, never to be seen again. It's a long and lonely process, full of self questioning and self doubt. You've all really restored my confidence. Just knowing that you read and genuinely got what I was trying to achieve is amazing. I was worried about the ending of chapter 11, that it might put readers off, but seeing you all bouncing ideas off each other about "will they"/ "won't they" get back together reassures me that I did the right thing. This was my first completed graphic novel,and I have learned a bit since making it. I am currently working on draft 2, which involves a full redraw. I have about half of the book done. The redraw is going to be 30% more cartoony in style, to give the book a clearer aesthetic. I am aiming for stronger lines and colour themes. I'm also adding new pages throughout. Part of this is to have Aune more visible in the background of scenes between Alex and Jonas, because they're all in one school: you can't avoid people completely in these situations. I'm also making some of the school scenes noisier to play on the "benign horror" elements - thank you for this term, Rebel Vampire! My goal is to redraw everything, update the website, then print a small batch to sell at cons. If anything bugged you about the current draft that you think I have to know, you are more than welcome to tell me. Otherwise, in case you want to know when the new version is out, I have a mailing list here: https://mailchi.mp/e64c62c2d202/alexmakescomics Thank you again for everything. You really don't know how much you've helped me these two weeks. It's been mind blowing.

RebelVampire

What I'm most looking forward to seeing in regards to the comic is just more people finding it. It's a really touching, raw, and personally gripping story. Not only is the storytelling well-done with its use of time, but just overall, its one of the few stories where I can actually say it really got me thinking about life, relationships, and other things. And not a lot of comics can do that.

Comic Tea Party

BOOK CLUB END!

Thank you everyone so much for reading and chatting about Betrayal this week! Please also give a special thank you to Alex Lewis for volunteering the comic and creating it! If you liked Betrayal, make sure to continue to support it via some of the links below!

Read and Comment: https://alexmakescomics.com/betrayal/

Alex’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexmakescomics

#ctparchive #comics #webcomics #indie comics #comic chat #comic discussion #book club #bookclub #webcomic book club #webcomic bookclub #comic tea party #ctp #betrayal #Alex Lewis