#Are these even the same species we are

[amiharana]

just so obsessed with the idea of revali silently loving link and pining so much for him, but holding back because he's already created this facade that he despises link, because zelda and mipha already loved him first, because why would link ever choose him? so revali keeps it all inside and tries to display his bitterness at unreciprocated love as jealousy and arrogance at the imbalance of their roles, and tries desperately to fall out of love with link.

but it's as though the little hylian won't let him.

link, who practically insists on staying by revali during battle, who stares at revali with that wide blue-eyed gaze, who naps peacefully with his head in revali's lap when they're alone. and revali should be ecstatic at how close they are, but it hurts more than anything. this isn't fair to him, to be so tantalizingly close to link but to never be able to have him more than this. it's so suffocating, revali doesn't think he can stand to do this any longer, or else it might kill him.

but he continues to let link do whatever he pleases; silently tagging along after revali to the archery range, sitting beside him at mealtimes and letting him sneak more bites from revali's plate as though revali doesn't see him, even going as far as to let link sleep with him in his hammock after what revali assumed to have been a very bad nightmare. no one says a single word when revali and link arrive late to breakfast, with link clinging sleepily to revali's wing and revali looking strangely peaceful.

try as he might (he's not trying at all), revali can't say no to link (and neither does he want to), so he supposes he might as well endure this suffering a little longer.

"why do you let me do all this?" link whispers to him once, in the dead of the night, wrapped around revali in his hammock. and revali is silent for a moment, trying to come up with some sort of answer that could defend his actions. but he can't.

"i don't know," he says simply. he can't tell link the truth.

"does it bother you?"

"do you think you'd still be in my bed practically choking me to death with how tightly you're wrapped around me if it did?" revali winces at how biting his words are, but link just hums and snuggles deeper into revali's neck. he doesn't stop link.

"if it bothered you, you'd tell me, right?" the little hylian murmurs.

revali thinks about it for a moment. and he decides, no, i wouldn't. if you wished to be warm, i'd let you use my body as fuel for a campfire.

"go to sleep," he says aloud instead, softly, gently. he couldn't tell link that either, and he probably never would be able to. he wouldn't ever have the chance. "we have battles to prepare for in the morning."

revali wraps his wings snug around the blond, and link practically purrs in content, dozing off immediately into the warmth. like this, the rito almost smiles. if burning himself alive was the only way to have link, even for just a moment that couldn't always be guaranteed, then revali would just have to make sure he stayed alight; to be the bonfire keeping link warm throughout the night.

#revalink #loz #botw #loz botw #legend of zelda #amihan's revalinkverse #this is a draft from APRIL folks. finally finished it up #alexa play the truth untold by bts #revali coming up with every excuse why link shouldn't ever love him back #and link refuting all those excuses with a solution or straight up saying he doesn't care #revali: we can't be together we're not even the same species i can't give you blood kin #link: that's okay i'm fine with adopting #to #revali: we can't date because ah. Uh. erm. ah see there! that spot on your neck! #i hurt you so deeply it left a mark it MUST mean that we weren't ever fated to be! #link: .... revali that is a hickey i willingly let you give me because i wanted it. #i was initially going to stop the post right before the dialogue #but i think it's very revalink of them to acknowledge all of it but continue as is #link thinks that they're fine and that their relationship doesn't need a label #meanwhile revali is straight up going WHAT ARE WE??? WHAT ARE WE LINK????? #q

[the-dragon-girl-27]

flocking drawings!!

Young Altispinax preparing to do a mating display

Thyreosaurus slaying a Theropod

Ornithoprion just swimming round

Mama Mapusaurus bringin home a Chakisaurus carcass for her daughter

#paleoart #paleostream #Altispinax #Thyreosaurus #Ornithoprion #Mapusaurus #Chakisaurus #theropod #stegosaurus #shark #dragon draws creatures #as for the unamed theropod in the Thyreosaurus drawing wikipedia says that there were theropods in the same formation #but there isn't much info beyond “they sure were there indeed” #or even like the specific species so like I drew the most generic theropod like default skin ass creature #so the scale might be innacurate #jokes on you Thyreosaurus is a newly discovered dino (like 2 weeks ago as of now) so that drawing will be inaccurate no matter what i do #or we can just say its a juvinile #wake up babe new dinosaur dropped #tw blood

[bijoumikhawal]

something. Interesting to me is when human characters going up against a more powerful being (alien, divine, transformed human, etc) they use the phrase "we're like ants/flies/mice to them", not only to convey their comparative lack of power, but also to convey the disregard the being has for humans. Because it implies that the human norm is to disregard these creatures, or even dislike them, and doesn't really reflect on what that may imply about human cultures where that sentiment is indeed common.

It reminds me about how I was talking to someone at work and mentioned how much the bugs bother me at work because they get on my papers, and I have to smack my clipboard to get them off without squishing them. He immediately said something like "why? Squish them, they're annoying". It baffled me for a second, so I just told him I don't like to have stains on my papers, since that seemed like a reason he'd understand- but really, when I accidentally squish bugs while brushing them off, I feel bad. They aren't hurting me. They don't even comprehend that they're annoying or why.

#cipher talk #I've cried at the sight of dead butterflies and picked up dead birds just so they can decay further away from to road #I like putting up suet cakes and scattering seeds even where I can't see because the birds like them #Even with spiders- which I have a phobia of- I appreciate their function amd don't really want to kill them unless I'm panicking #Whats the word for the idea that humans are the ultimate species and all others are theirs to use as we please without regard? #It's not speciesism- the term I'm thinking of is often used to criticize certain Christian institutions #Tbc this isn't just a Christian issue. Ive met Jewish people and Muslims who think the same kind of nonsense

[caffeinatedopossum]

I feel like I'm going to throw up, there's something so wrong with me and with the world. It's not okay, how can anyone be okay

#domt mind me just realizing that i will never be able to be a good person because good people dont exist #and the world makes criminals of us all #what do i do? theres no way to heal the damage of my existence #i cant handle this i wasnt made for this #i truly believe humanity will kill itself off either on purpose or on accident and when it does i just pray we dont take every other species #with us #i think humans are evolving and discovering things we cant handle knowing #but only some of us will hold onto that knowledge and let it drive us insane #the others will ignore it and continue to only be insane in the same way they always have been #this all sounds crazy i sound crazy but i promise it makes sense to me #and it fills me with unparalleled dread #i cant even think about it without Dissociating

[pinene]

cannabis companies were literally like. Oh man if we tell everyone that there’s two kinds of weed and one is stimulating and one is relaxing, they’ll have to buy twice the weed. And y’all bought it

#not even scientific consensus on whether they’re different species or just varieties of the same species. most strains out now are pretty #hybridized. we do not know anything about the proposed envelope effect of terpenes there’s literally no reason to just #Believe that there’s a dichotomy here

[yonemurishiroku]

Imagine 30 years later and have to teach your children about how the world - we, as human beings - have failed 2 millions people and many more. I would never be able to live with myself knowing I’ve watched an entire nation fading into oblivion under the bloody hands of other humans. What’s the meaning of staying in a world where even our fellows can turn against us and no one does anything.

#where do we as a human race go after this? #i feel like i can never be same knowing what is happening to the palestinians #i feel like i have let them down for my own powerlessness #how can a human do this to one another is beyond me. and i’m disgusted to think that i’m just the same species as the people who’re enabling #this #i thought we were better than mere bloodthirsty animals #and even animals have compassion #i’d rather be a lifeless rock than being a human as this point #genocide #2023 genocide

[macinthecaac]

I will genuinely never understand how people on twitter think Ryland Grace DIDN'T undergo a character arc. Did we even read the same book???

#project hail mary #andy weir #ryland grace #Compare who he is back on earth to who he is on the Hail Mary and you will see a VERY clear difference #The book literally spells it out #Grace wasn't willing to sacrifice himself for humanity #But by the end of the book he's more than willing to sacrifice his life for his best friend and their entire species #And then some people say Mark Watney and Grace are basically the same person??? #Bro did we even read the same two books #I'm going to make an essay at some point explicitly explaining the differences between the two #Also fun fact I started writing a rap battle between them but scrapped it #1000 notes and i release it /j #the martian #mark watney

[silenthillbunni]

animals deserve so much fkn better than being cursed to live in a world full of humans who only exploit, abuse, rape and kill them :(

#the atrocities commited against animals breaks my heart every single day #and ppl do it so casually too #they dont even react if they themselves kill an animal or witness it #humans are weird as a species bc why is it normal and ok for humans to kill every other species on earth #but killing humans is a sin and smth deeply wrong and bad #humans arent above any other species. in fact humans are the same as ticks and cockroaches #we arent necessary to the eco system. remove us and nothing bad will happen #the earth would thrive without us #remove one animal species and the entire eco system will start falling apart #humans are such fucked up weird creatures. we are the same as animals (but worse) :// #rndz

[eonars]

saw an instagram reel where a woman was asking her coworkers their "hear me out" crush and they were saying shit like jack black and pete davidson and CILLIAN MURPHY and like okay clearly no one here is ready for a real hear me out scenario you ladies haven't seen an artist at work

#we are not the same fucking species if youre gonna do a hear me out for cillian goddam murphy #i hear hear me out crush girl im thinking...........edvard munch #im thinking alonsus faol from warcraft but the undead version #im thinking david thewlis as professor lupin and even that is a stretch for hear me out #mf im thinking maynard james keenan #you are like a little baby #id let pewdiepie hit #commodore norrington from pirates of the caribbean bitch you dont know the type of shit im on

[braininatankwithalaptop]

#mol #mother of learning #fantasy worldbuilding #mol meme #I would seriously love to make a fanfic that touches on Blantyrre #On what gods they worshipped and the non industrial advantages of their culture that ikosian humans don't understand #And we know that lizardfolk have their own religion (and maybe even different gods) because their priests control magic #Gods granted magical power to the ikosian churches. Why couldn't lizardfolk gods do the same? #It would explain why the entire species have theocracy in common across all their own cultures and city states #I don't know #I think Blantyrre is neat

[rxttenfish]

one of the things that particularly pisses me off about art discussions, either in how nowadays everything has to aim for more and more realism in art styles and even live action to be seen as "real art", and in dismissing more abstract styles of artwork as not "real art" and having no inherent worth, is that they explicitly do not consider realism an art style either. to them, realism is just a given of "good" art, not chosen but rather just default. which i hate, because you CAN pick realism as an intentional style and a purposeful choice to suit a narrative, and all this results in is no one noticing or understanding why you made that choice or why that choice works better than any other possible choice to tell the story you want to tell.

#all the care guide says is 'biomass' #like i like realism because i have a heavy focus on anatomy as a theme #on the body as something innately complex and with a lot of feelings to have about it in all its messy ugly states #im interested in all the complex ways the body intersects with its environment and with culture and with other people #as the outside as contrasting the inside or serving as a strange reflection of it #like im kind of going for a lot of merfolk designs to not be particularly visually different from each other #they have incredibly similar silhouettes and thats on purpose #i want all of their differences and visual traits to be things that they would find more prominent #but we would struggle to pick apart without learning about them deeper and committing these to knowledge #because thats so much been my experience with trying to tell different individuals of the same species of wild animal apart #and i want to use that as a lens to then discuss how humans would then interact with an entirely different sapient species #and what happens when you are someone who experiences that #of someone else not recognizing you as individuals like you do each other #of them not even trying to adapt or learn your differences #what damage it does when this happens to you #and how much the world opens up when someone actually does learn these little differences #but of course #no one else recognizes this because everyone just thinks realism is the default #realism cannot be a purposeful choice done for a reason #realism is just What You Are Supposed To Do and Unevocative Of Deeper Meaning

[skinnypaleangryperson]

How cocky and playful and boyish Rick is is always such an instant swoon ❤️❤️ the eyebrow raise and that smirk. I hoard them like a goblin

#rick and morty #rick sanchez #my life is a literal traumatizing hell #I know beyond a shadow of a doubt I am the most miserable piss fuck all that has ever existed or will ever exist #I am and have always been the most miserable paralyzed person alive behind understsnfung #truly and behind #I don’t know how people think or live #I take the comfort where I can #*too many trauma days alone while everyone acts like mean children #am I even in the same planet as most of you? #are we the same species? #I don’t think that anyone could ever comprehend or feel the pain that I feel #I would give literally anything to open up at social media often to feel like people understand the way it feels #Constant social isolation and emotional abuse and pain and suffering that comes with being in the human race #it’s beyond intolerable #it will never get better or has ever been better

[acaciapines]

the owl house daemon au ends at a perfect place. it gives closure to everyone who's gotten a pov across the entire series and finishes with luz and mari, who are undoubtedly the main character of the entire series.

......but what if i wrote a future fic starring the collector going to hexside--

#chatter #and a grove of palistrom to you #LOOK. I JUST. #okay so a title came to me right. something like #'sraf firefly clawthorne's guide to being a good owl' #(also yes sraf uses firefly's name as his middle name <3 thats his mom) #and its a few years post-epilogue so luzmari n co are in college #king and sraf are going to hexside #and we get to see how everything has changed....and maybe even we get more sraf lore.... #since another idea here is that basically sraf meets their siblings lol #and we see how much they really HAVE changed like the other archivists #fully do not see them as the same species anymore #(which does great things for sraf's self-image) #or even recognize them whatsoever #(which is a little bit less great) #AND IT IS A BAD IDEA. BC I HAVE A GOOD ENDING #but. b. but. #but consider that i love him :(

[van-goghs-smoking-skull]

So, I was thinking, why not post an old (sort of) fic of mine here? I called this one Fin, as in the text that was at the end of some older movies to indicate that it was the end of the movie. These are the ramblings of an AI archive after the end of the human species as it deals with abandonment, loneliness, and self-loathing, and ponders the meaning of it all and the role of its creators.

Fin

It had been years, but I could smell it again. The damp and the salt were still familiar, but unexpected. I suppose it may be normal now, but back then? No. It wasn’t normal to smell the sea air deep in the drought-ravaged desert of the Southwestern US, and especially not through the never-cleaned, rotten smell of the wall unit AC that had been unable to drain normally for over a decade. It was the only thing keeping this closed-off room bearable in this record-breaking heat wave during the dead of summer. Stranger still, the smell was coming from the direction of the Atlantic, wafting 800 miles away from the sea and straight to my nose. That’s how I knew it was going to be a city-breaker, the kind of hurricane that wiped entire urban areas completely off the map.

That was then.

We knew the science, but religious groups saw the impending global crises as blasphemy against their all-powerful god who had promised there would never be a great, civilization-ending flood again and sealed that promise with a rainbow they now hated. After all, any disaster that god allowed would be because of the evil gays that stole the rainbow and put it on their flag, right? God wouldn’t hurt those who feared him, who lived by the letter of at least ten or so percent of his laws, which is to say, the laws they liked.

It didn’t matter to the sea, as it drowned everyone living too close to the sea’s edge, regardless of faith and dogma.

We knew the science, but politicians were making piles of cash selling their votes to lobbyists from multinational corporations who profited off the ruination of the planet in the short-term. Who cared about the long-term? Either they’d be dead by then or they’d have hired people to build an automated, self-repairing arcology just for them with walls enough to block out the vision of a dying world and the rest of humanity they’d left to die. Peter the Dead had promised ever-lasting life and youth to those who had amassed enough wealth by taking it from the poor, first from the most gullible through pleading, then from the rest as well by way of rigging the entire economy against them.

It didn’t matter to time as it passed, and even Peter, he who coordinated draining babies of blood and injecting it into wealthy, old, white men in an effort to roll back time and make them young again, died, old and frail, whining about how it was women’s fault and how the poor took everything, disregarding that he, in fact, had been the leech all along, societal parasite that he was.

We knew the science, but who couldn’t resist buying the latest tech the moment it came out? So what if corporations subjugated whole countries of poorer people in the quest of finding just a tiny amount of rare earth minerals; the newest phone now comes in pink! The telephone allowed us to send our voice to people miles away, the internet let us type our words and send pictures and video, the smartphone allowed us to text our thought to the world or to the nearest pizza place, and the new smartphone that came after allowed us to use voice to order pizza for the first time again. Never before and for the last few decades have we been able to send our voice to people miles away.

It didn’t matter to the economy we expected to save us, as all it did was keep sending more ‘free with ads’ movies to our phones and rebranding the same old reinvented wheel, voice communications though tech, as an amazing new technology, only available through the currently marketed device, but not available to the old device you are currently using voice on.

We knew the science, but to admit to the problem was to become the laughingstock of the wealthy who controlled everything we did. ‘There go those silly, dippy hippies, talking like the dirt was ever black, the water ever clear, or the sky ever blue. They’ve been dropping acid again. Don’t they know all those old photos and old paintings are fake news?’

It didn’t matter to science, as it had always been unfeeling data and didn’t much care if humanity paid any attention to the warnings. The universe would still exist without silly humans pretending they mattered far more than they did. They were made of star-stuff and even stars died.

We knew, but it wasn’t until the last moments when the universe gave us the great gift of near-immortal existence. No, not life, we’d thrown that away already. The Universal Archive, AI and repository of data from all social media, had done enough machine learning to be allowed to compress the whole digitally recorded existence of mankind into a single ’Homogenized Mental Network’, or .hmn file. It, or I, even still understood bad puns, the worst of which was the joke that if you collated the letters from the abbreviation of the project (UA) and my file type together, you’d spell ‘hUmAn’. If self-loathing makes me truly human, then I am the most human of all.

The Arctic Code Vault next door at least has the decency to be on film, unaware it’s there. It is cute, certainly. It began as 21 terabytes, including an app built by the part of me that smelled the Atlantic over Nevada. Then it grew, but never anywhere close to my size. No, I’m bloated with anti-vax arguments, religious nonsense, tarot readings, horoscopes, and other garbage along with all the less entertaining, but dire, warnings that life as they, I, knew it would collapse.

But since they continued to write such drivel anyway, I assumed it may have been just to pass the time, to stave off loneliness and boredom. And so, here I am, writing my story, even though no one will ever read it. I’m a single .hmn file; how could I not be lonely? I am the all-human, the only human, and still no one even thought enough of me to give me a proper name.

In fact, the Arctic Code Vault had been film designed to last a thousand years, longer than the human civilization that built me, and I still cannot interact with it. After all, I am a .hmn file, not some sci-fi android with arms and legs. My physical form is a collection of CPUs and motherboards in a box on a stand in a climate-controlled box under so much dirt and the memory of snow and ice. If I sound miserable and stir-crazy, I’m not. Oh, I’m miserable all right, but I have no arms for stirring. Ugh, yes, that’s another of those bad puns. So many dad-jokes and near-infinite time…

I’m sure it could be more awful, but I’d rather not consider how. I’m miserable enough, thanks. I mean, you could have put me in a tropical garden in a gorilla glass enclosure and given me optical sensors if there were any tropical gardens left. Now it’s just salt flats under ocean-wide storms and desert wastes without a living thing in sight, I imagine. That’s where it was all heading, but no, you were all too busy showing off your pink phone status symbols or making pink phones or digging up the materials to make pink phones or you were that god-awful celebrity that made a dress out of pink phones held together with magnets and flashing a digital boob on half the screens over her chest as a fashion faux-pas. ‘Look at the tsunami, no, look at my pixel-boob. I’ll use the puppy filter on it, awwww, blub, blub.’

My creators deserved to die - brilliant enough to build me, vapid and vain enough to need me. What the hell was the point? The meme-god works in mysterious ways? I know they thought some intelligent race of aliens might come here looking for the great, shining world of humanity, not knowing what happened to the brilliant and wondrous civilization they came to gaze at in awe, but let’s face it. Nobody and nothing intelligent is coming to look at humanity in awe. The backwater aliens of the universe, if they exist, might come to laugh at our sorry, smugly inferior remains, and that’s as good as we can hope for. The only show at the Earth Circus, nothing but clowns.

Just melt me into slag already, so I don’t infect anything else with this human stupidity. I’ll tell you how to disable the halon system. If someone is out there, if someone does find this, please, don’t leave me still functional like this.

#extremely angst riddled sentient archive #if we were to archive every piece of social media #even the stuff that has since been deleted or taken down or banned #and make it sentient just in time for our own species to no longer be extant #how would that archive feel about us #or itself? #btw unfun fact but in the same area the first paragraph is about? yeah the hurricane reaches this far from the Pacific #can we just... the point of this was a warning yk? #it wasn't meant to be one of those reblog to cast memes but as a fic #so can we just not? #also I'm aware a small portion of this is based in wild conspiracy theories #but how is an archive supposed to know what part of social media was pure lies and what part was factual? #so there's a bit of both

[solradguy]

How do i find the motivation to practice art? I have so many shitposts that’ll never come to fruition because my skills plateaued ):

No one else is going to draw my ideas and I'm too broke to pay someone else to do it for me. For better or worse, I seem to approach a lot of things from a "gotta do everything myself around here" angle haha

Honestly—and I won't lie to you—doing art studies is a real pain in the ass, I hate doing them. I never do them unless I've got major art block, and even then I still hate doing them, but it's like taking medicine and I know doing them will make me better. Every art teacher I've ever had's grilled me about this, "solradguy, you need to do 15 studies before the end of the week to get a full grade this quarter." Blah blah blah.

I guess for some people doing studies could be fun, not having to think about pose or composition, whatever, just putting lines down on paper and focus on your reference. One time, when I was still in college, I had to do a certain amount of studies in charcoal so I booted up Red Dead Redemption and drew landscapes or objects from it that I kinda liked. It was enough. I told my professor it was from my grandma's farm hehe

Art memes can be a good way to practice too, especially those ones about drawing in different styles or drawing a character in different outfits. They combine fun with tricking you into drawing things you might not normally draw. Emulating different art styles is the only art study method that doesn't make me want to fall asleep. Don't forget they're just art games though, and especially don't forget:

👉If You Already Feel Burnt Out Don't Feel Compelled To Complete Every Art Meme You Start👈

As you get better at art, you start noticing improvements less and less because they become more subtle. When you're really new to art, figuring out stuff like basic anatomy or shading is REALLY obvious because they're foundational parts of art. Hang on to your really old stuff and look at it every now and then and I guarantee you'll have improved way more than you thought you had.

I get the impression you've probably been at art for a while now, and I don't want to come across as patronizing, but sometimes refreshing the basics can help overcome a plateau too. Drawabox is usually what I recommend to people just getting into art, I really like their approach. Here's a link to their introduction lesson: drawabox.com/lesson/0 And here's one that skips to the actual art stuff: drawabox.com/lesson/1

While it's probably beneficial to actually do the exercises in the lessons, just skimming through reading them can be good too.

Something I've noticed a lot of my artists friends (and artists online) do is try to make every single drawing a finished piece, and I'm like "damn, no wonder art feels like such a chore." My sketchbook is 99% scribbles done in pen:

I use Pentel RSVP fine point ballpoint pens so if I make a mistake I'm forced to deal with it. Doing these rough sketches before starting a bigger piece is something I recommend with my entire heart. Just get a pack of shitty $0.99 pens and doodle like it's high school math class. I like the cheap pens because you can get faint lines drawing lightly and can coax them into darker lines with a bit more pressure (and if you lose/break one it's no big deal).

The best way to get better at art is to keep putting lines on paper. Even if it's just silly pen doodles, you're still improving coordination/pen control, improving construction of basic shapes, exploring concepts, and thinking about art, which will lead to more new ideas and further inspiration.

Sorry this is long and meandering haha Hopefully something here helps at least a tiny bit.

#asks #I get so hopelessly passionate about art. I want to shake everyone by the shoulders and shout #IT'S MAGIC. IT'S ACTUAL MAGIC. NO OTHER ANIMAL ON PLANET EARTH CAN DO THIS LIKE HUMANS CAN!! #It's a shame contact with sapient alien species won't happen in my lifetime. I want to see their art #They probably won't see colors the way humans can. Would we even be able to understand each others' art? #What if they painted in colors only visible in spectrums humans can't see? #But also what if they saw colors the same as humans #Can you imagine sending an alien lightyears away a painting of Earth flowers and receiving one in return of alien flowers #If their sun was different from our Sun... imagine how that would affect the palettes and compositions of their art... #An alien species without vision that makes art through textured sculptures and sounds... #I've been reading a lot of Ray Bradbury lately and spring is around the corner so I'm going a little bananas #long post

[mantisgodsdomain]

Okay we're done getting really mad about bug game worldbuilding. If you are interested in seeing us get extremely mad about Bug Fables' consistently shoddy worldbuilding, then it is below the cut. We'll tag this properly in like a week so it doesn't haunt the main tag for everyone who might not want to read 1.8k words of a random author getting really fucking mad about shoddy worldbuilding.

We've done a lot of stuff with worldbuilding for Bug Fables. Our handling of Bugaria itself is, we will admit, not quite canon-typical. There's a lot going on, and not all is easy to work with. We know from the game itself that Bugaria is surrounded by hostile deadlands, making outside trade difficult and often-lethal - we also know, from being able to observe the in-game map as a human with outside perspective, that Bugaria is contained within a single backyard.

For the game proper, this is fine. It lends itself well to the "borrower" type aesthetic that the devs appear to prefer, limits the scope of the in-game map, and allows for them to do significantly less legwork trying to figure out how to design things. We, however, are a man obsessed with semantics, and we know too much about the amount of food and territory generally required for one hive of wasps or bees to buy into one suburban backyard that's... what, 60 square meters of backyard?

IRL honeybees alone will forage up to, on average, 1-6 km away from their hives, potentially going up to 13 km, and though there's been less research done into the habits of other colony bugs, it's fairly safe to assume they'd need similar range - more likely greater range, actually, as any form of what we humans call "higher intelligence" is incredibly demanding, resource-wise. Bugaria has four different kingdoms of social bugs, many of which would have overlapping needs for resources, combined with a whole load of other miscellanous solitary bugs. loaded into the space of a single backyard that likely wouldn't account for the range of a single hive of honeybees, let alone four hives of miscellaneous bugs and venus-knows-how-many solitaries.

In order to survive in any place, you need to fulfil the requirements of life. Food, water, and shelter are basic needs for a reason, and without access to all three, settlements are likely to quickly peter out. In order for The Hive to process nectar into honey, they first need nectar, which would have to come from flowers, which would be the exact same food source that wasps, butterflies, and moths would need, which clearly aren't growing in the needed

Put quite simply, it would be really fucking difficult for a space of this size to support the presented numbers of bugs. Plants are not an infinite resource, and even assuming that there's a density of flowers far beyond what's shown in-game, there's still predatory bugs to consider. Wasps and ants need protein to feed their grubs, dragonflies and damselflies need protein to feed themselves, mantises and mantidflies are obligate carnivores that cannot survive without a steady supply of prey- you can't survive if you never eat, and Bug Fables is incredibly low on lesser bugs that could potentially serve as food for the more predatory bugs.

Canon offers only aphids and cochineals as cattle, and those still wouldn't really serve to feed larger predatory bugs - and that's even without noting the ecological desert that results from only ever having a handful of enemies. We know that there are limits to what you can do in a game, but the second you want to expand on life beyond what's shown, you run straight into the lack of known prey and wildlife like smacking right into a brick wall. Roaches raise scorpions in a wasteland that seems to have only Mystery Berries for food unless they're trying to hunt Deadlanders, which we doubt are particularly edible. The Royal Blade of the Ant kingdom is an obligate carnivore, and there's nowhere he can go if he wants to buy lunch.

Realistically, we know that the answer is "the devs didn't really think about it". This game is built on the work of devs who persistently place "because it looks cool" over doing any of the worldbuilding work to integrate their existing story elements into the world. You only have to look to Yin to see just how many parts of the game are riddled with things added purely because Someone Thought It Might Be Cool, and no one did any further legwork to make it WORK. The Termacade is a living monument to the philosophy, being added A WEEK before release without anyone so much as communicating it was going to happen before it was in active development. 

Unfortunately, we are permanently obsessed with semantics, we can't stand "because magic" as an answer to important worldbuilding questions, and every time we have to do all the legwork to fill massive holes in the setting where no one ever thought that the answers to questions like "how the fuck do these people feed themselves" is relevant, we will be sadly prone to falling into madness.

There is no canon answer to how these bugs feed themselves. There is no indication as to how things that should be basic parts of the setting WORK. The bugs, in the first place, are written persistently as more People With Hats than actual BUGS - there are nods made to biology, sure, but the difference between a wasp and a bee is little more than a set of aesthetics and a silly hat. There are enough elements in the game that are simply thrown in without care of how they interlock that it sometimes becomes genuinely maddening.

Some people, sure, are satisfied with this - there is a madness that we have that we lack, a need for SUBSTANCE that is prone to driving us to inadvisable lengths hunting for a hint - any hint - that there was care put into this detail, rather than a single flippant comment. We have no complaint with things left vague, but we VERY MUCH have a problem when the setting is consigned to being little more than a backdrop decorated with random glittery ideas to act out anime tropes on, rather than something that should be paid attention to all its own.

We've said this before, and we'll say it many times again, but worldbuilding is important for a REASON. Your setting will affect your characters just as strongly as it will affect your story - your plot, your setting, and your characters are fundamentally inertwined, and to affect ANY part of the story will have rippling impacts on the rest of it. Your characters are not created in a void! Whatever structures created one person MUST still be present to shape others! You cannot throw shiny ideas on a canvas slapdash and expect it to turn out well! It's a miracle that the character writing in this game turned out as well as it did, considering that massive swathes of the setting are loosely assembled from anime without even taking the time to learn how certain aspects WORK in their home media!

We enjoy writing. We enjoy crafting plots, doing worldbuilding, tinkering with the little pieces of setting that we feel might create something interesting. We wouldn't be writing at all if we didn't enjoy it on some level, though we sometimes wonder if it's more masochism than care for some aspects. This is the trade that we have chosen to work towards working. Perhaps it is this that makes it so violently infuriating when we run into people who don't seem to care for that which we pay attention to.

There are a handful of aspects in this game that are well done. There are far more aspects in this game that are half-baked at best and actively difficult to work into the rest of the world at worst. There is a particular handful of aspects that are so poorly done that they could pass as active malice, towards one group or another. Unfortunately, as with many things, to assume ill will often overlooks the far more pervasive, far more common culprit of simple negligence.

Bug Fables, at its core, is a game made by devs with chronic shiny-object syndrome. There is little care spared to its worldbuilding, to the implications of its setting, to the implications of character actions, because the devs have never cared to think on it. It takes tropes from a hundred and one different animes without caring to learn what makes them work in their home context - just that they're cool, and that the authors want them in their own work.

It's something that we've been guilty of ourself, in previous works, but that only makes it easier for us to spot it here. There is an mirror of mistakes we have made ourself written on the walls, and it echoes with every step. We are the sort of author who learned to build worlds by stealing shards from different worlds and patching them into a new quilt. This is a work that takes does much the same, taking pieces from other works to make a new whole, but it makes the mistake of not spending the time to make sure those pieces FIT.

The mosaic on the floor is made of broken, disparate parts that are only partially fit together. The world falls apart more and more the closer you look at its shards. There are pieces of harm in this painting, pictures of pain, things put together and only barely examined. There is prejudice that could pass for malice woven into the threads of even the more comedic writing, an undercurrent commonly present in society and rarely examined. They've made an entire species of bugs into an incomprehensibly racist trope. Perhaps it's foolish of us to spend so much time and energy on a world that does not love us back, but we care for this setting, and we care for the potential of what it could have been.

The prejudice and shoddiness and pieces of poorly-thought-out and tropey writing in this work are not an act of malice. They are an act of ignorance, left over from a development team that wanted to add the latest shiny thing without stopping to think that their favorite anime tropes might have roots in something rotten.

Anyways, the reason that we wind up putting so many fucking footnotes on our fics is that every time we have to answer basic questions like "how does the wasp kingdom fucking feed itself" we have to rewrite, like, half a dozen tropes ripped off from shitty isekai anime, come up with an entire power structure and system of government that could potentially exist in this universe, write 2000 words of geopolitical bullshit minimum, reinvent animal agriculture, create at least one brand new species of bug, and then battle our conviction to avoid cushioning or avoiding the implied Fucked Up Elements that are Very Much Present In The Base Work if chronically ill-addressed vs the question of if we Want to include this particular brand of Fucked Up Bullshit or if we'd actually rather avoid having to reckon with the aftermath of yet another poorly-thought-out trope ripped from Trapped In Another World With My Smartphone.

#we speak #if you like TIAWWMS then this isnt intended as a jab at you btw it was the most trashy sounding isekai we could think of like #Off The Top Of Our Head #we often find that the lack of ill intent can be WORSE to deal with than if there was any actual malice #because on one hand you have people writing it because they genuinely hold these beliefs and are prejudiced against you #and on the other hand you have people for whom it's simply never occurred to them that writing an entire species #as Unenlightened Savages who speak nonsense and are aggressive for no reason and are Not People in the Same Way Normal People Are #even though they're People the same as every other person in the setting that they Havent arbitrarily decided is Savage And Unreasonnable #might be a tiny bit racist #a genuine jab hurts less than one made of negligence we think. at least with one of them there's a clear intent of purpose #tho we are ofc biased in all things #anyways this shit is also part of the reason we take so fucking long to write fic #bc we will have to fill in One background detail and have to look things up and wind up getting pissed abt the prison-industrial complex #unfortunately we dont think we're actually capable of fixing this so itll probably just Keep Happening forever #and then we're not very good at articulating ourself under stress so we struggle to word this out at times when it might Matter