Is there a story you despise but whose worldbuilding you like?
Bro so many. I could never list all of them if I tried. Part of what fascinates me about bad books is seeing the lost potential and reverse engineering better stories in my own imagination.
Short list:
I love everything about the dragons of A Song of Ice and Fire. Don’t actually despise the series, a lot of it is very good, it’s just not my cup of tea. But the dragons, man. Nuclear bombs that are your pets. Special but subtle magic bonds. No matter how close those bonds are, no one can ever fully control them. They never stop growing. The implication that they aren’t naturally occurring animals and were in fact created artificially via lost magic. The weird fucked up cultural practices that developed believing it would keep them connected to dragons. The implication that that magic wiped out the empire that created them because they were never satisfied with their already unmatched power.
Bad YA book called Shiver about werewolves whose transformations were tired to temperature as opposed to the moon or their emotions. Shame the book around that interesting concept sucks ass.
The lore of Genshin Impact is super interesting. There used to be tones of gods but most died off in a war with each other. The surviving gods each have a country that they exercise varying degrees of control over, some ruling directly, some indirectly, some just kind of being around. Each country’s culture is shaped by its god’s values and personal hang ups. The gods nuked one atheist country into oblivion. The gods let a handful of designated cool people have elemental powers if they want them bad enough. My personal headcanon is that it’s only socially acceptable to dress differently from the norm when you are a designated cool person, explaining the incredibly drag copy-pasted npcs. Used to play the game but realized I wasn’t having fun, i was doing busywork so i could earn gambling points, so I stopped.
Stephenie Meyer’s The Host is about a race of body-snatching aliens who travel the universe “peacefully” conquering planets and “improving” the cultures of their hosts. One host ends up not being fully dead when a new alien is inserted and so the alien learns that taking people’s free will is bad. Genuinely fantastic sci-fi premise that could have opened the doors for a critique of colonialism and assimilation, or just a fun romp, but because it’s from the author of Twilight all the attention goes towards a love triangle/trapezoid that’s also deeply uncomfortable.
48 notes
·
View notes
after having an entire hour long conversation with my coworkers about what "degendering" is, and the importance of using trans people's pronouns when you know them- rather than always defaulting to "they/them" no matter what- and still getting "they/them"ed by people I trusted not to fucking do that to me, I have decided that the name and pronouns circle of introductions for new additions to the group will now include the very clearly stated boundary that they do not use "they/them" pronouns for me.
your move, cowards!
3K notes
·
View notes
My take on a Sonadow fankid! She actually existed for a while now, but the trend gave me motivation to finally draw her!
Most sonadow fankids are purplish and tube-grown, so I decided to make her neither!
Background for the story under cut, in case it gets long!
So in this AU, stories from the more recent games happen when Sonic and Shadow are at most around 20 years old. Back then Sonic was rambunctious and reckless as we know him to be, and Shadow was a depressed, traumatized emo kid. While at first they were rivals as depicted in the games.
Over the years tho, just like their friends, the two matured. They started getting along a lot more, and became official friends, which eventually lead to dating. They both were afraid of getting serious though, so they took things slow and casual. Due to some of their unresolved issues, they couldn't get any closer. But not for much longer.
Some of it has been brought on by a Particular Event, and some of it due to restructuring how they go about saving the world, but things changed. As Forces has shown, putting so much responsibility on One Guy isn't wise. Sonic felt so quilty for failing, but it never should've been his job alone, so they created an organization, to share the load more evenly!
The org became global, with local groups of heroes being recruited all around, meaning that now the characters we know and love now had more time to take care of their personal lives.
While for some the change hasn't been much, Sonic, and to a lesser extent, Shadow, struggled quite a lot. Many of things happened in between, but eventually both of them grew to quite enjoy the domestic life.
They moved in together, and started taking things to the next level, now that both have done some healing and therapy. They found that they get along quite great. After a bit longer, they decided to start a family :)
Shadow came up with the name. He wanted to honor his sister's memory, but Mar-Mar was also a symbol of all his progress. He did go to therapy to make sure that he can handle them sharing a name, to see if it's a good idea, and well, it was!
She's now 4 and very loved, and her dads love each other very much as well. For a certain Sonic though, things won't go so great.
2K notes
·
View notes
Regent’s Brilliance
—
i have made embarrassingly little progress on listening to COUNTER/Weight since the last piece of fan art I drew like six months ago, but I’m working on it. In the meantime, here’s Aria!
346 notes
·
View notes