#forbidden toon lore

[askpinkietai]

Had a weird one in the dream department today! It started with wanting to create a couple of Muppet-type characters in a Sims-type game, to a teacher's exasperation, for some reason. And then this slowly expanded to answer why there was a puppet character option in a Sims game to begin with. Well, in this world, puppets are another sentient race that co-exists alongside humans, and always have. Their origins are shrouded in mystery, but they've been around basically as long as people have. The sphinx at Giza is in the likeness of a giant puppet. They're mostly very similar to the various "human-type" Muppets like the Electric Mayhem band, rarely any furry or monster-type puppets, and rarely any bigger to require more than one hand to operate. Kermit would be around the baseline size. And speaking of the hand, that's the biggest mystery.

All puppets have an organ called the Extremity, which is literally a hand up their ass. An arm operating the puppet that disappears into a shadowy void. Puppets are naturally adept at lining themselve up with a wall or signpost or something, anything where the arm can basically disappear around the edge. You normally only notice it when they're walking out in the open. They don't like talking about it, and the idea of even trying to remove a puppet from their Extremity is taboo, considered a capital crime the world over. It's just kind of a thing society accepts. And puppets are everywhere in society. They have a natural aptitude for any job or role, but also have a natural need to entertain, so they're usually drawn to anything that gives them some kind of spotlight. There's just as many puppets in the government as the entertainment industry.

I guess alongside such obvious puppet-based settings such as The Muppets and Greg the Bunny, I'd compare it visually with the Grumpuses from Bugsnax, as well as other series where clowns or toons are species alongside humanity with their own sort of rules, like Bonkers and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Just kind of an interesting dream concept. Like I dreamed my way into the forbidden Muppet lore~

#weird shit I dreamed about #Muppets

[thetooncrew]

hello please give me some forbidden b the keeper lore 🥺

B is a ‘keeper’, which are the tooned equivalent to greek gods! they and their siblings, long before the creation of the universe, kept the balance of life itself in their hands - especially B, who was tasked with keeping destruction and death in order.

When the universe was created, though, many, many of the family had either died off or been demoted. One of these unfortunate happenings was the fall of B, who was seen as a fickle accessory to the universe rather than a friend to it. His siblings banished him to walk the mortal realm eternally, only not killing him outright so that he could still do his job, just in a very limited way.

Somewhat connected, Rosie’s home species worships B (or Aapabetu - this is not his actual name, just a translated version of ‘Royal Death’) and constantly celebrates life because of his existence. The actual Rosie tries not to impose on him too much because of this, but it does make things a little awkward if they go out to eat (she needs his explicit permission).

#squidspeak! #tooned birthday 2023 #his actual name is infinitely long

[tanadrin]

So all the terrible retcons and geographic inconsistency (Kul Tiras wtf) and the time travel and the bullshit with the night elves is bad (Illidan is the worst character ever, don't @ me), but the most frustrating part of WoW lore to me is its failure to explore certain complex emotional themes in a really satisfying way--like, the people who expound and expand on Warcraft lore are canny enough to notice that these emotional themes *exist*, but not clever enough to actually work with them or build them out, and so the whole thing collapses into rule-of-cool melodrama. There's nothing wrong with rule-of-cool melodrama; I love rule-of-cool melodrama. But Warcraft lore is *begging* to combine that rule of cool melodrama with some really rich and interesting emotions and character interpretations, it sets them up and is all ready to knock them down, and just... doesn't.

Take the conversation between Saurfang and Garrosh in the Borean Tundra, in WotLK, the one that ends with Saurfang saying "I don't eat pork." I think that's emblamatic of the big theme that unites the Horde, that makes it make sense as a faction. The Alliance, after all, started as a defensive association in the face of the Orc invasion; its renaissance after the creation of Durotar and the invasion of the Scourge is only natural. But what is the theme of the Horde? Is it honor? Strength? Sheer brutality? Well, none of those things. Orcs claim to value honor and strength; the Forsaken are certainly various shades of very dark gray at best, the Tauren and the Orcs *do* seem like natural allies of a sort, but all the races of the Horde have something even deeper in common: trauma. The Orcs are still (cf. Saurfang) dealing with the emotional turmoil of having been both forced and partially complicit in the atrocities of the First and Second War--after which their homeworld was destroyed, they were forced into concentration camps, and they had to rebuild their culture and their identity from the ground up. They have to find a new place in a new world, and there's this tension between the younger generation that doesn't have firsthand experience with any of this and just remembers that the Horde used to be a name that struck fear into the hearts of their enemies (Garrosh Hellscream, for instance) and the older generation that remembers how awful that time really was, and doesn't want to see the old ways revived because it might just destroy their people for good this time. Then there's the Darkspear Trolls and the Tauren, who were both driven out of their old homelands, and fell in with the Horde as natural allies with similar cultural points of reference; and the Blood Elves, whose suffering in the Third War was severe enough to radically alter their culture, coupled with being betrayed by their ruler who decided that joining the Burning Legion and abandoning them sounded like a better time than rebuilding Quel'Thalas.

And then there's the Forsaken. Oh, man, the Forsaken. The Forsaken and Sylvanas are some of my favorite characters in all of WoW, because sure, you could look at it and say, "okay, creepy undead who like green things that go plop and mad science = evil, bad guys." But you'd really be missing what makes the Forsaken interesting. They're not the Scourge--they explicitly broke away from the Scourge when Arthas left Lordaeron. They're not invaders, either. They're in fact mostly the human population of the destroyed kingdom of Lordaeron, the inheritors of that land, but who are treated by the Alliance as interlopers with no right to the very towns and villages they have *always* called home. They're treated as monsters by every living person who ever knew them, and they can't help but regard themselves that way, too. "What are we, if not slaves to this torment?" is one of the casual interaction lines you get when you click on Sylvanas: they do not *like* being dead. But Sylvanas is ruthless and cruel and after Arthas is killed, wins the Val'kyr over to her side so she can keep making more Forsaken. Why?

Simple. Let us imagine: you are an ordinary person, of no unusually great or poor moral virtue. You are hurt, badly. Grieviously. In a way you will never recover from. And everyone you love, all of your friends and your family, the whole society you come from, now sees you as an unredeemable monster that should, no, must be destroyed. How long must you be called a monster before you decide--fuck it, I *will* be the monster they call me. Because, at least that way, no one can ever hurt me again.

The overpowering motivation for the Forsaken is not power or bloodlust; it's not money, or forbidden knowledge. It's making sure no one in the whole world is ever able to make slaves of them again. To make sure they will not be hurt. And the biggest misstep the Alliance ever made was not reaching out to Sylvanas with overtures of friendship as soon as she established her kingdom--because like it or not, she has the support of the people of Lordaeron, and thus a damn good claim to her position. Maybe, if they had, they could have influenced the Forsaken, shown them that they had friends and didn't need to resort to amoral methods to defend themselves. But as it stands, they only have allies of convenience in the Horde (at least until Sylvanas becomes Warchief), and they know that no one in Azeroth is quite happy to see them continue to exist and be free. Everything else about the Forsaken--their use of dark magic, their development of a new, even more destructive plague, their recruiting former servants of the Lich King and raising new Forsaken from among the dead of the ongoing wars--makes perfect sense from the standpoint of a people that knows they are under threat from all sides, and will do anything to survive.

(The Draenei could have been something like this, too, FWIW. Like, a broken people, a people of exiles who are most comfortable in the shadows and with moral ambiguity. But then Metzen had to go make them Righteous Space Goats. I mean, come on. They're just boring now. They were never going to be Horde-aligned--there's too much history with the Orcs  there!--but having a group like that on the side of the Alliance, to help drive home the point that there is not a clear good guys/bad guys distinction here, would have been really nice.)

That actually makes them a pretty damn good fit for the Horde. Moreover, it creates an interesting point of tension with the Alliance, which is clearly *not* always the good guys. I mean, there's the matter of orc concentration camps, but also consider the refusal of leaders like Daelin Proudmoore to contemplate peace (and the subsequent, somewhat... forced turn of Jaina Proudmoore from dove to hawk) and the steadfast refusal of many on that side to deal fairly with the races of the Horde just because they appear monstrous. And arrogance, hoo boy. Dalaran, Gilneas, the Night Elves--huge swathes of the Alliance are characterized by being arrogant and not a little cruel.

And what of Sylvanas becoming Warchief? I don't know where the BFA lore is going (I'm not playing retail anyway), but right now it looks like they're setting up another Garrosh type situation, and preparing for Thrall to retake the Warchief-ship, but if they do that it would be a real pity. First of all, because, well, we saw that already in Mists of Pandaria! What, are we going to besiege Orgrimmar again? Second of all--Sylvanas and Garrosh are *very* different people. Garrosh was, well, Proud; hence the Sha of Pride. He wanted glory and power, he wanted war for war's sake, so he could live up to his father's reputation as a warrior. He was willing to sacrifice everything else that made the Horde the Horde for that. Sylvanas, though, has one overriding motivation: Keep Her People Safe. Punish the people who hurt her is a strong secondary motivation--but it's part of that first one, because if she can make her enemies' victories painful enough, she might discourage them from trying to press their advantage. And her people *trust* her on this: "Dark Lady watch over you," they say when you take your leave. She is not an autocrat--she is their beloved protector. So, she makes the ruins of Lordaeron uninhabitable. She annihilates Teldrassil. Does she spend very many Orc and Troll and Tauren lives doing so? Very well. They aren't *her* people.

I don't think this has to be a tragic flaw leading to her downfall. It sure doesn't make her a good leader for the rest of the Horde, though (even though, on an emotional and aesthetic level, I am 3000% here for Warchief Sylvanas, even more than Warchief Vol'jin, who also had a lot of the creepy threatening vibe that made him a much more interesting choice than either Thrall or Garrosh). But you could make it one, and you could do it very well--they've already mentioned in the tie-ins that Calia Menethil, Arthas's sister, teeeechnically has a claim to the throne of Lordaeron. And, even more interesting, is no longer quite among the living, even if the mechanism of that unlife is happy fun magic instead of evil death magic. Moreover, she has some sympathy for the Forsaken. You could have a squaring-off between them, and you could have a Queen Calia--maybe. If you could bridge that gap and make her understand that the Forsaken feel fundamentally apart from the other human kingdoms now, if she could come to understand just how much evil the Alliance has done to them, if she could really grok what it's like to be them. Then you could have a leader who understands their trauma--but also wants to heal it, rather than lash out at anyone and everyone that might conceivably be a threat. That, too, would be very interesting.

(There’s a reason that, while I loved the Alliance as a kid, I only play Horde toons as an adult. It’s not just that the Horde feel more interesting and vivid to me. It’s that the hypocrisy and the arrogance of the Alliance stands out in much greater relief now. The Horde aren’t good guys--nobody’s the good guys, here--but they don’t lie about their motivations, and they don’t act with cruelty and then play the victim in response. Jaina was an important exception, but they badly mishandled her character in the runup to MoP, which I find very hard to forgive.)

But knowing Blizz, even if they go vaguely that route, they won't stick the emotional landing. There is a very good, if very OTT and melodramatic (in the best possible way), series of fantasy novels or games lurking *behind*, or perhaps parallel, to Warcraft's lore. It is a shame that Blizzard has done so much to obscure it with obnoxious cruft, retcons and timeline compression, repetitive use of the same handful of characters, stupid-ass time-travel plots that create ten thousand plot holes and inconsistencies, shitty tie-in novels (cf. everything by Richard Knaak), and a total failure to make half the world's characters (i.e., everyone in the Alliance) at all interesting. I have a daydream of doing my own version of WoW lore and posting it somewhere like on AO3, but one of the things that makes WoW lore simultaneously so interesting and disappointing to me is that it's embedded in the explorable, realized space of video game worlds. Hard to reproduce that in print, I think. Might be worth it to try.

#world of warcraft #lore #warcraft lore #the forsaken #sylvanas windrunner #the work of chris metzen and its discontents #but hey #at least i got full chain of the scarlet crusade on my warrior in classic

[disresemble-the-place]

Beyond

Words: 880

Characters; Wheezy & Smarty [No ship!]

Notes at the end of the story to prevent spoilers. 

His blue smoke filled the room. With no doors or windows open it had no chance to escape. No need. They were immortal anyway. Or so they thought. Until recently it was assumed Toons couldn’t die. That information was private though. Releasing it to the public would cause an outrage. 

With bloodshot eyes he looked at the smoke and tried to detect shapes or patterns in it as his thoughts ran wild. Toons were dangerous. This was a fact. Unkillable, fast, flexible and with extreme stamina. Humans on the other hand.. were fragile in every way. They didn’t even get that old. While toon on human violence was strictly forbidden that didn’t mean it didn’t actually happen. After all, all crime is technically forbidden. Doesn’t mean shops aren’t getting robbed or people aren’t being killed. 

Before the war, toons got a job here and there- but nothing big. After the war, people were obviously looking for some fun and relaxation. The toon business was booming, that is.. if you were an acceptable toon. Soft, cuddly or funny. Or just being able to make them smile. 

How sad that description didn’t fit him or his friends. Not only did their looks work against them. The one thing humans desired of them would mean their temporary downfall. Toons can’t die. But even their fake deaths hurt and sometimes they came back with a lot of memories lost. Often good memories. He shuddered at the thought. 

Of course there was jealousy. Who wouldn’t be jealous of never being allowed in the limelight. Playing the role of the bad guy was tiresome, it started to hurt. So like many like him, they quit the business all together. 

He added some fresh smoke to his collection in the room and sighed. Truth was, as long as one could entertain, being immortal didn’t sting so much. His mind wandered to a better place, a happier time. From when he was younger. Well, not actually younger, he didn’t age, but younger in being around. 

He made a vow to help humans. To use his talent as an immortal being to server them. He’d take up heavy or dangerous jobs and asked very little pay in return. All he wanted was kindness, which was often given to him. But humans are fragile and short lived.. it wasn’t long before his friends passed away. His heart broke so many times, he stopped keeping count. If one were to look in his room they would find a book filled with photographs, drawings and writings of his friends now lost to the hands of time. 

“I think...” Answering a question that was asked long ago. “We should do it..”

He half expected a gasp or a protest but all the pink-clad weasel had to offer was a sigh of relief, like he was hoping for that answer. 

“There is a very big chance he’ll betray us.” 

“Aren’t we counting on that?”

Painful questions were often asked when it was just the two of them. It didn’t feel fair making the decisions for the others but they would discuss it as soon they had a good plan. 

Instead of answering the other asked his own question. “What do you think.. is after this?” 

Toons weren’t burnered by things like death, so why ever think about what lies beyond? 

For the first time in a while he looked at the other, feeling warmth and comfort filling him. He looked into the other’s eyes and knew he was thinking the same things as he did in their moment of silence. They had all loved and lost and none of their kind seemed to care a little bit. Everyone they knew was hellbent on ‘making it’, on saving their own skin no matter the costs and if some fell into obscurity then so be it. They just didn’t work hard enough, didn’t want it enough. 

Being alive was suffering, even they if they had each other. Especially since they had each other. They knew that they would continue to lose those who they held dear. Even if they stayed in their part of town, they would always find a human that loved them dearly. A human who would breath live into them. Who spend their free hours catering to them.. only to stop one day out of boredom in the best case.. or leave this world in the worst case. He couldn’t remember how many funerals he had attended, either in person or in spirit. Neither could the other. 

So when someone offered them a way out.. how could they say no? First it would tackle the problem of this wretched world they lived in. It would take revenge on those that wouldn’t stop making attempts at making them laugh. It would wash away all those who ignored them, beat them or abused them. 

They knew there was a big chance they wouldn’t survive either. That they would be betrayed as soon as their new leader got what he wanted. But really, was that so bad? It would mean the end of this cruel song of immortality. 

“I think they will be all there..” 

He saw that look in the other’s eyes. The look that screamed ‘comfort me, I’m scared.’

“And so will we. Together.”

__

Notes; I just had this weird idea that the Patrol are death seekers. We don’t know where toons come from and yeah one could argue they aren’t THAT old considering animation isn’t that old either, but like i stated before I have my own ideas about the origin of toons and that’s the one I’m sticking with. This is also vastly different from my own ‘canon’ but I wanted to try something new. 

I think they don’t mind dying because they are tired of the lives they lead but there is ‘no way out.’ There is no death or retirement. It’s just this over and over and over again. Now I know this is a little odd in the movie setting [as there was no internet in the 40s/50s] but I do like to imagine the following; 

A character will remain alive as long as people love them. There is fanart and fanfiction for EVERY character under the sun, even the slightest of background characters have fan made lore and love. I think these characters know someone loves them dearly- but they will have to deal with the fact that humans get tired of them [moving fandoms] or pass away. This is of course extremely painful. Now that the Patrol has faded into obscurity, they don’t receive new love anymore and the feeling of grief and loss start to gnaw at them.

They fully knew that this would be a mission ending in their death and they were cool with it. 

“But Wheezy seemed scared of dying in the movie, though.” Correct, but I think i tackled this in the story by making ‘dying’ as a toon still a painful thing and something that can lead to memory loss. I think he was scared of losing the moments he had with his friends and wanted to prevent that. 

#wfrr #wheezy #smarty #toon patrol #who framed roger rabbit #movie canon