#i also try to keep to some basic genetics. will have to create a family tree at some point. not looking forward to it tbh. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

cellarspider · 2 months

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13/?? Science interlude!

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We return to Prometheus, where I am taking a break to ramble about my job. A thing that I love. It will be a nice change. Also: weird blood!

I have been informed that some methods of accessing tumblr do not play well with long alt text rambles. To keep the flow between the main text and alt text separate, I’ll be copying the longest ones below the main text and citations. Captions that I think are going to be long enough to need this treatment will be marked with “Overflow Ramble [number]”, so they’ll be slightly easier to find. It’s not a perfect system, but Tumblr is not a perfect website.

And I am going to need the overflow space this time, because we’re getting into genetics!

After electrocuting a decapitated alien head until it exploded into a shower of green gore, the creatures that claim to be scientists stuck a bit of the goop in some sort of very science-y DNA machine, leading to this:

“Let's have a look at its DNA. Isolate the strand. Okay. Compare it to the gene sample?”

“[Overlay… Processing… Processing… DNA MATCH.]”

“Oh, my God. It's us.”

I want this preserved for posterity, because this made me absolutely hoot. They avoided fake science technobabble by going so far in the other direction that it becomes equally meaningless.

What the scene is trying to say is “this alien shares the vast majority of its genetic material with humans, indicating that they are in fact related.”

I will get to how one would actually determine that, but first: The head turned into green goop. Green goop. Humans are notably not prone to turning into green goop. Otherwise Nickelodeon would’ve probably been shut down within a week.

(Image credit: Rich Fury/KCA2021/Getty Images for Nickelodeon)

This annoyed me so much that years later, I dug up a possible explanation that backfills this with cool biology.

Humans, and almost all vertebrates have hemoglobin-filled blood. And on a tangent that I must follow: The only vertebrate that doesn’t is the icefish Channichthyidae family, commonly known as the white-blooded fish.

You’ll never guess what’s special about them.

Yes, somehow these fish manage to live without hemoglobin, their blood only having 10% of the oxygen carrying capacity of their red-blooded cousins. Hell, most of them also lack myoglobin, which stores oxygen in muscle. The loss of myoglobin isn’t just a one-off event either, genetic studies have shown that these icefish have seen four distinct branches of their family tree lose myoglobin independently of each other. They have a wild series of adaptations to permit this, but basically they were already in such cold-oxygen rich water and moving so slow that they didn’t need all that extra oxygen-having stuff. They lost it, kept going, got bigger hearts, weirder muscles, and just kept going. They’ve actually expanded their range in the past 30 million years or so!

I love them! Evolution is wild. You know what’s also wild? There’s green-blooded vertebrates. Yes. You read that right. Yes, they still have hemoglobin. What they also have are staggering levels of biliverdin, which human bodies only produce when breaking down hemoglobin–when a bruise takes on a greenish hue, it’s because the dismantling of the blood under your skin has created biliverdin. While it’s generally been thought of as just a breakdown product, some research suggests that it also has protective effects against a number of diseases. In moderation, though. If you have enough of it to actually turn a bit green, you’ve got jaundice, which is not a thing you want to have.

But for a number of fish species, bush frogs, and skinks, they have way more biliverdin.

(Austin, C. C., & Jessing, K. W. (1994). Green-blood pigmentation in lizards. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A: Physiology, 109(3), 619-626.)

Humans usually don’t have much circulating biliverdin at all, so the table above compares someone with untreated jaundice to a number of other species–fish with two to fourteen times that amount, and the green-blooded skinks have twenty-two times as much! These creatures have green blood and turquoise-colored bones, and we still don’t know why. Maybe it’s protection against diseases, maybe it’s protection against parasites like malaria, maybe it’s to make them really blend in with foliage. Could be all of those at once, could be none of them, we don’t know! What we do know is that, as with the icefish, the green-blooded skinks in particular have independently evolved this feature four different times. (Rodriguez, Z. B., Perkins, S. L., & Austin, C. C. (2018). Multiple origins of green blood in New Guinea lizards. Science Advances, 4(5), eaao5017.)

(https://australian.museum/blog-archive/amri-news/amri-three-tiny-green-blooded-frogs-sing-like-birds/)

(https://web.archive.org/web/20180619143048/https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2013/09/30/why-do-mysterious-lizards-have-green-blood/)

We have no mammals identified with biliverdin-filled green blood, you would need a lot of tweaks to how our bodies function to make this work. But it’s not literally impossible, like I thought in the theater! I’m quite sure the prop department didn’t do this level of research on the subject, but think about it!

I love biology! It’s! So! Weird!

And because I love biology, you’re not getting rid of me yet. My chosen field is genetics. This movie has presented me with a laughable sci-fi depiction of what we do.

So! What do we actually do, when we want to find out how related we are to another species?

I’m going to get into excruciating detail, so here’s the top-line summary: We extract the DNA, mash it up into readable little chunks, use some wicked cool machines to do the actual reading, and then we compare the target DNA with our DNA, and do some cooler stuff the movie isn’t aware of. A competent analysis would not only be able to tell you how much overlap two genomes have, but also be able to estimate how long the two species have been genetically distinct.

Is this way more than the movie needed for this plot point? Yes. But they didn’t actually have to do this at all, they could’ve just said the truth that science fiction usually ignores for budgetary reasons: “there’s no way these beings independently evolved to look so much like us, we have to be related.”

(Although even Star Trek, despite being the classic example of “putting a rubber thing on an actor’s forehead to make them an alien”, actually does acknowledge this. Precisely once. TNG s6e20, “The Chase”. It has never been mentioned again in the main line series, possibly because Rick Berman didn’t like it.)

Now. Time for me to take you all on a grand tour of DNA sequencing and phylogenetic analysis. You are all getting into the Willy Wonka boat with me. You have no choice.

So! You have a sample you’ve taken from a non-human mammal, one that’s never been genetically analyzed before. You are very lucky. You get to do fun stuff.

But before you get to sequencing, you have to purify any DNA in the sample. Your sample is full of all sorts of other biochemical gunk, and when cells are happy, DNA is packed away in the nucleus–you need to crack those open to get at the DNA.

Next, you need to break the DNA into chunks, that’s #1 on the diagram above. For most of the past twenty years, this has meant chunking DNA down into pieces 25-50 letters long–just enough to probably get something unique over most of the genome, though you will have some areas that look identical at that tiny scale. In recent times, we’ve been getting better and better at what’s called “long read sequencing”, which at this point means fragments of several thousand DNA letters in length–though that’s still pretty short, compared to human chromosomes though: the average length of a human chromosome is 134 million letters long.

Depending on the sequencing technology and its needs, the sample may also need “amplification”: getting copied over and over using a protein originally harvested from hotspring-loving bacteria (#2). I always love that bit just as a concept: it’s one of many places where the modern study of genetics uses the microscopic, biological machinery of proteins for our own use!

After everything’s prepared, Then the sequencing itself can occur. That too is wild–the most common versions these days use tiny little fluorescent proteins to tag each letter of the DNA and read the sequence of lights (#3!). Some use infinitesimally tiny electrical modulations as DNA passes by a microscopic reader. There’s loads of different ways, anything works, so long as it can be read by a computer.

All this takes place in machines that are either small enough to fit on a countertop, or big enough to look like a fridge, and come in Apple White or Cheap Plastic Appliance.

Because you have a new species, you’re building what we call a reference genome. This tries to capture as much of the entire genome sequence as possible. Here’s an interesting wrinkle, though–A lot of samples won’t be just DNA from your target species! You might be picking up microbial DNA along the way as well. That can be really interesting and worth knowing about, though! Some people spend their whole careers studying the genomes of microbes found on people’s skin, or in their bodies. You’ll be computationally sorting out which sequences are in contiguous, mammalian chromosomes, which are from mitochondrial DNA (those cute little powerhouses have their own genomes!), and which come from microbes.

At the end of it, you have sequenced an entire genome. Because you want to find out how related it is to humans, you compare it to our reference genome–The human reference genomes we use is an assembly made from multiple individuals.* We use the reference genome as a common point of comparison that we refer to when studying genetic variation.

*Though if you’re working with data form the Genome Reference Consortium as is usually standard, one anonymous African-European donor, RP11, is still the backbone of the reference, accounting for 70% of the latest assembly.

(https://mk.bcgsc.ca/telomere-to-telomere-human-genome-assembly/posters.mhtml)

So, we’d compare this new mammalian genome to our own–how much overlap would we find? A lot. How you define our similarities and differences from other species can change the answer, but you’ll expect a lot of overlap. Some areas of the genome diverge faster than others, others are highly conserved–generally the more stable it is, the more important it is for our function.

Through many, many, many studies and corroboration with the archaeological record, we’ve worked out how to estimate how long ago two species diverged from each other. Actually, you’d rarely be comparing between just two species at this stage–get out all the other relevant reference genomes you’ve got! Compare them all! Build a phylogenetic tree–the modern version of that “tree of life” idea that Darwin popularized. Then you’ll have a more accurate sense of how your mystery species relates to everything.

(https://www.embl.org/news/science/a-new-tree-of-life-allows-a-closer-look-at-the-origin-of-species/)

I’m going to go off on a tangent to end this post, because that’s just the start, taking the entire genome of a single individual. This is what most people think is what we always do. But no! That’s expensive overkill for most experiments. Once you’re familiar with a species, and you’ve sequenced DNA from many individuals, you can identify areas where lots of them have sequence variants. These can be completely benign, differences that make us all unique, or make an individual more susceptible to disease. This allows us to target what we want out of DNA sequencing: Are we trying to diagnose an illness? Identify a person from a tissue sample? Or are we doing something more exploratory?

Depending on what you want, you select anywhere from a handful of locations, up to tens of thousands. The closest many people have gotten to this stuff is through ancestry services like 23andMe, which uses this kind of sequencing.

But that’s not all! There’s so many different targets to choose from, depending on what you want to do! So many techniques to get DNA in different ways! And we still haven’t gotten to the part that I actually work on.

I’m a computational geneticist. I get all the gigabytes of data that comes out of these experiments and I get to dig into the details, the patterns that emerge between genetic code and the details of the organisms we study, the connections between genome sequence and other, wilder things we can collect data on, the dizzying complexities of what goes on every microsecond of every day in every cell in your body.

I love my job.

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Citations for alt-text rambles:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_YuTMDkWfI 2. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.116129 note: this source lists the image as credit to “J.M.B.”, which is not how I’m used to seeing images credited. Those are the initials of one of the authors, but I thought it meant “Journal of Molecular Biology”, so I went on a half hour wander around the internet trying to find where the hell this fish blood came from. 3. https://www.thebhs.org/publications/the-herpetological-journal/volume-13-number-4-october-2003/1729-01-hyperbiliverdinemia-in-the-shingleback-lizard-tiliqua-rugosa 4. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1439-0264.2009.00952.x 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandrill#Characteristics 6. https://www.vogue.com/article/dune-part-two-costumes-jacqueline-west-interview 7. http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.29564.08327 8. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357946568_New_approaches_and_concepts_to_study_complex_microbial_communities 9. https://karobben.github.io/2023/10/30/Bioinfor/PacBio/

Overflow Ramble 1

the fuckin “DNA MATCH” machine. I already wrote a 380-word alt-text about this thing last time. I’m not doing it again. I’m going to talk about things I like instead. Such as Dune: Part Two! Yes! I mentioned it last week and then didn’t ramble about it after seeing it. Well, NOW I WILL. tl;dr it’s good, go see it. I only vaguely remember the book, but I liked the changes they made to center the fact that no, Paul becoming Lisan al-Gaib is not actually a good thing.

Man, it’s nice to see a movie where the costumers and set designers got good time to work on their craft. (cite 6) Even the generic Harkonnen soldiers looked great–reminded me a lot of my beloved Warframe, probably because the costume designer was using H.R. Giger for inspiration there. Everything felt real. Even the stuff that definitely wasn’t–the gigantic spice harvesters and ships felt like living, physically present beings. The sand worms looked great. The movie did a fantastic job visually communicating the massive size of so many things. Especially because the camera remains restrained: no weightless zipping around, the camera itself follows paths and finds locations that make sense.

Chakobsa continues to be a fantastic conlang, now the work of both David and Jesse Peterson. It’s heard a lot more in this movie, and there are some great flourishes with it. While there isn’t as much Arabic vocabulary in it as in the original books, I remember from DJP’s work streams that he definitely was using the grammar of Arabic as one of his touchstones. Most key words remain Arabic though–jihad was removed, but it made me double-take in the theater when Stilgar referred to Paul as the Mahdi.

I’m of two minds about lowering the Arab influences on the Fremen–on the one hand, missing representation, which included some explicit ties to real world anti-imperial struggles in North Africa and the Middle East. On the other, these first two movies are about how the Fremen are manipulated by a colonial power, using their adherence to a faith that was manipulated by a different colonial power. They become both hapless victims and also perpetrators of colonial violence, with only Chani seeing through it.

I think the general decisionmaking process on cultural changes was motivated by a desire to remove some of Frank Herbert’s bad ideas–particularly around the Harkonnens, thank fuck. That seems to have been the thinking around altering the Fremen a bit as well. Did it succeed? Not my place to say. On all other notes, I have no reservations recommending the movie. It’s a very earnest attempt to bring that world to life, and I think it succeeds.

Overflow Ramble 2

A figure showing the basic steps of the standard Illumina sequencing method (cite 7). It is broken into four sub-figures:

Library Preparation. The genome is snipped into small fragments, then adapters are attached (“ligated”) to stabilize the molecule and make it behave. This creates a “library” of DNA that will be read from.

DNA library bridge amplification. The adapters on DNA fragments stick to a prepared plate, which is covered in little clusters of molecules that specially attach to those adapters. Biochemical processes are then carried out in repeated cycles to duplicate (or “amplify”) those fragments in such a way that the clusters on the plate are all filled with copies of just one DNA fragment.

DNA library sequencing. The DNA is modified so that the four letters it’s made out of all glow a specific color, with each DNA letter shining in sequence. This is pure awesome and I love it.

Alignment and data analysis. Because of some details on how step 1 is done, you have lots of fragments that create an overlapping patchwork of sequences. This allows (most of) the genome to be pasted back together by looking for overlaps (“contiguous sequences”, or “contigs” for short).

Congratulations! You have just attended an abridged graduate-level introductory lecture on Illumina sequencing.

Overflow Ramble 3

A diagram of PacBio Systems’ sequencing technology, Single Molecule, Real-Time Sequencing, or SMRT Sequencing, because scientists love acronyms. Pretty much every step is different from how Illumina does it. I cannot find a diagram that’s both brief and also good at explaining what it’s showing, so this is the best I could find. It’s split into four parts with attendant text, which I’ll try and explain as well.

“SMRTbell template. Two hairpin adapters allow continuous circular sequencing.”

Library preparation basically involves taking a longer chunk of DNA and splitting it in half lengthwise, in such a way that the two strands of DNA will form a single-stranded loop. This is called a SMRTbell library. Why? I have no idea!

“ZMW wells. Sites where sequencing takes place.”

Then, these are fed into SMRT Cells, which contain zero-mode waveguides (ZMWs). I was once told what this means, and I have completely forgotten, but it sounds like something from Gundam.

“Modified polymerase. As a nucleotide is incorporated by the polymerase, a camera records the emitted light.”

What I do understand is that at the bottom of each of these little holes, they stick a molecule which the DNA sticks to. This molecule, a polymerase, has precisely one job: make more DNA, an exact copy of what it’s latched onto. So you give it this loop of DNA, feed it a soup of free DNA letters, and it starts cranking out a new strand.

“PacBio output. A camera records the changing colours from all ZMWs; each colour change corresponds to one base.”

Each one of the DNA letters given to the polymerase has a special modifier, on it which flashes a color when the polymerase slots it into the new strand it’s making. A camera picks up this flash. And, because the DNA is a circle, the polymerase doesn’t know where to stop–it just keeps going and going until something breaks or it runs out of letters to work with. This means that even if the camera misses a flash the first time, it will have more chances to see it, and confirm what it already saw.

Wait what in the fuck this figure was from somebody’s thesis (cite 8), but that wasn’t what actually got this into search results. What got it there was a github page with a vtuber avatar sitting in the corner?? What??? (cite 9)

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#Prometheus 2012 #Prometheus (2012)#I go rogue and refuse to talk about the movie #or rather I spend 4600 words talking about a quarter of a scene as a springboard to talk about my job and how cool it is #I kind of envy people who work on wild population genetics #but also their sample sizes are tiny and bad for my particular specialty #so I'm giving a broad overview on how reference genome assembly works and I've only ever done phylogenetics on intraspecific variants #yes this is how much I talk about bits of my job that aren't even directly my job #because working in genetics is SO COOL #tomorrow we'll be back to analyzing inexplicable characters and androids poisoning people don't worry

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michaeljoncarter · 9 months

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Why teh hatred for Inhumans? Just curious. :P Didn't they inspire the X-men?

no, they didn't. the x-men were actually around before the inhumans were created, and as far as i know, there was no real link between the two… but the fact that i completely understand where you could get that idea kinda perfectly sums up the issue with them later on lol

so basically, back in the mid-2010s when the mcu was in full swing, marvel reeeeally wanted to capitalize on one of their biggest franchises--the x-men--but couldn't because the film rights for them still belonged to fox... so they decided to try to get around this by pushing the inhumans, whose concept of "humans with genetic powers" is on its surface similar enough to mutants, in their place

the issue with this was/is that if you look even a little past the surface, the inhumans are quite possibly the worst possible group to try to turn into x-men 2 because where x-men stories deal heavily with themes of discrimination & oppressed groups, the inhumans are much more about… eugenics. like… just straight up eugenics

to shamelessly copy & paste from a couple screenrant articles about the failure of the inhumans show (and also just… inhumans concept in general) rather than bother to type out an explanation myself:

The Inhumans' Slave Class Makes The Heroes Impossible To Root For:

The real root of the difficulty that fans have connecting to Black Bolt and Medusa's mismatched clan isn't in their powers or their struggles; it's tied to their very origin story itself. Black Bolt and Medusa are descended from a lineage with its roots in eugenics or forced breeding to ensure that desirable traits become more common. It's a topical discussion with roots in our world like other Marvel properties, but it also ties into some of the darkest corners of human history. Eugenics is a widely disavowed practice and difficult for many to discuss with roots in the Nazi party. The Inhumans began as a race of homo sapiens who were experimented on by the alien Kree. When the Kree learned via a genetic prophecy that they'd be overthrown by one of their unwilling soldiers they stopped the experiments altogether. Cast out, their experiments dubbed themselves the "Inhumans" and formed their own society with its own rules and laws. These laws include the caste system which was seen in the show, as well as the system which keeps Inhumans without superpowers in a slave class called the "Alpha Primitives."

Agents of SHIELD Proved Inhumans Don't Work - By Turning Them Into Mutants:

It's easy to forget that even Marvel's best writers and artists were people of their times. In the case of the Inhumans, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were directly influenced by the now-discredited science of eugenics, which was much more common back in the 1960s. This led them to create the Inhumans as a superhuman caste-based society, that appears to have had three tiers: - The Inhuman Royal Family sit at the top of this caste pyramid, holding the position by virtue of inheritance. - Then there are the general Inhumans, who - importantly - are never shown working. - The lowest caste are the Alpha Primitives, a slave-race who have been genetically engineered to have low levels of intelligence and only the most basic skills; they perform all the work. It's immediately easy to see why these tropes and concepts are, to put it mildly, problematic. According to the comics, the caste-based society has been forced upon the Inhumans because of limited resources, but that's really only a justification. It also brings with it disturbing questions of whether the secretive Genetic Council control breeding in the lower castes, given there aren't many resources to go around. This, sadly, is probably a major reason Inhumans series historically haven't tended to last long. One of the better runs launched in 1975, by Doug Moench and George Perez, and it lasted just 12 issues; another definitive run by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee launched in 1998 and fared no better. The core concept just doesn't resonate.

ymmv on whether or not they have any appeal or staying power as a concept, but the issue here isn't whether or not their premise is busted. the problem & reason why i and most people who hate them hate them came from how marvel decided to go about replacing mutants with inhumans in the comics, which was via a FAMOUSLY terrible event that had the inhumans--and there really is no other way to explain it--just straight up commiting genocide

the inhumans flooded the earth with the "terrigen mist" that simultaneously activated the latent powers of people with inhuman genes who came into contact with it AND fucking killed or sterilized people with x-genes. and as if that wasn't enough, for some godforsaken reason, it was the mutants who were painted as villains in this scenario for trying to stop them, not the inhumans for doing it in the first place

as i'm sure you can imagine, a storyline that had a group whose core premise is Literally Eugenics killing & forcibly sterilizing arguably the most famous fictional allegory for oppression...ever went over about as well as a lead balloon

i really can't stress enough how much i am NOT exaggerating here. i know this might sound like typical "tumblr blowing fictional thing WAY out of proportion," and like. yeah, sure, but really, this shit was SO crazy that no matter where you looked, most people were saying versions of the same thing

to this day, it's still probably the most bizarre thing i've ever witnessed on the Comic Book Internet. marvel fucked up so bad that they somehow managed to momentarily dissolve boundaries & bring like every type of person together in united hatred of this bullshit. weirdly beautiful, in its own, incredibly annoying way

i can't even begin to get into the specifics of all the bullshit that happened during this era. if you want a summary, these three posts made as all of this was happening lay it all out pretty well. there's also this more recent resetera thread & this reddit post (one of many, but this one has my favorite comments of any i've seen) discussing it, both full of lots of good salt

like the vast majority of people, i had zero opinion on the inhumans before marvel used them to throw this little film rights hissy fit, but i came out of it fully a hater. this shit was so busted, it made me lose interest in marvel altogether, and i've only within the past year or so started to pick it back up

from everything i've seen, fans of the inhumans were just as annoyed by this as x-men fans, and i've heard the few inhumans series that exist and put a much more critical lens on their concept are actually pretty good. i can definitely see the potential in a fucked up concept like this, but the specific version of inhumans presented in this era?? genuinely some of the worst shit marvel has ever published

my hatred is undying and just completely irrational at this point. i won't be satisfied until every character that was pointlessly inhuman-ed to their detriment has been put back the way they were & all traces of this dogshit era have been well and truly erased from history

#ask #anonymous #LONG post #this ask gave me flashbacks fjgnkjfn #the mid/late-2010s x-men fan struggle #i've had trips to the emergency room that i enjoyed more than ivx #scott summers should be the first fictional character to be considered an actual irl martyr for how brutally they slaughtered him

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sweetbabymantykes · 7 months

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Actually, Dhelmise isn't a single celled organism, that's a common misconception. Seaweed is a macroalgae, which is a multicellular form of algae. Single celled marine algae are diatoms, too tiny to see with the naked eye and also kinda what glass comes from I think?? I dunno I only know about the big stuff.

That said, research is still being done in regards to what type of seaweed Dhelmise should be classified as. While it seems many will develop a preference for green algae, it's rare for them to consist of that alone; most will still have traces of brown and red algae, and records exist of specimens that opted more for those than the usual green. Oh, but no correlation has been found between algae type and their color, I should mention— trying to figure out how and why exceedingly rare red Dhelmise form is an entirely different can of Orthworms, let me tell you. (Not as difficult as finding a way to ghost and anchor-proof a pokébean container, though...)

The issue is already complex just by virtue of the fact that they technically consist of multiple different organisms in the genetic sense, such as, say, both dead man's fingers and giant kelp. It's like trying to classify lichens. The real kicker is that the species consistently shares the same general body plan and shape, even between populations that primarily utilize entirely different types of macroalgae.

In fact, depictions of them from hundreds of years ago, when they were first encountered by sailors, share a remarkable amount of similarity in basic shape. Though, they did apparently vary in size to a greater degree; some used rocks and driftwood and would be small compared to today's average, usually described as shorter than a human. Others may have made use of entire Wailmer and Wailord falls— perhaps the remains of their unfortunate prey— if some other depictions and descriptions from those times are to be believed. (It is important to take into account the possibility of embellished stories and the like, as interesting as the latter sounds...)

Dhelmise really are quite the mystery, even among other ghost types! It still isn't well understood what causes them to form in the wild to begin with. We know from captive individuals that they are capable of asexual reproduction through fragmentation, similar to many other types of seaweed, but that creates genetic clones and wouldn't explain the diversity amongst wild populations. The prevailing theory involves souls lost at sea, but there is little conclusive evidence to support that.

Ah, I should probably stop rambling on about this now, though. I tend to get a bit carried away, which is weird given how I used to not be interested at all in this sort of thing... What getting reverse chosen by your first Pokémon while visiting family on the coast does to a mfer. Sorry 'bout the wall of text!

I feel like a fraud. I got a fact about aquatic pokemon wrong. It's fine, it's fine, I can still keep my reputation, Dhelmise isn't a water type, it's a grass type. And I actually don't know that much about kelp to begin with, so I guess that's what my problem is, haha.

That aside, man. I could listen to people tell me about other pokemon forever, don't apologize! My sister is really into ghost types but she's not really chatty, either, so it's really nice to hear about them from someone else. Previous Johto anon in a fight with your dad- give this a read! Everyone else, too, I had no idea about their historical 'chains'...

#pokemon #irl pokemon #pokemon irl #asks #dhelmise

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script-a-world · 6 months

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Submitted via Google Form:

I am creating a world where there have been interracial marriages since like they met and it's been thousands of years since. It's a very interconnected world now with basically no racial purity (is there a better way to say that? because that seems rooted in racist vocabulary and my world is the opposite). The only people who do not mingle are those akin to the uncontacted tribes in real life. Mainly, I'm trying to figure out how to figure out what people look like - there's only so few people out that are very mixed race, there's too many that are mixed but only specific mixes like White/Black, White/Asian, White/Hispanic. No..now, this isn't taking place on Earth but they are still human and I'm only able to come at it with how real actual people look like. No, bascially all of my world will be people who look White/Black/indigenous American/indigenous Pacific Islander/indigenous Asian/East Asian/South Asian/Hispanic/etc... Everything gets mingled, churned up in the gene pool and spit out. I'm not sure how to go from there. There are so so few actual examples that are very mixed. Also, I'm not at all an expert at looking at faces so yeah.. a lot of times I'm not even sure what I'm looking at in a racial trait. Hell, there are real life instances of let's say, looking at a Chinese and Japanese side by side, someone can tell them apart and where the differences. I still have no idea what they're looking at. Hell even someone actually Chinese couldn't tell what the differences were. Of course, I don't need to get very specific in details at all, but I have to have some sort of description that isn't well a lazy description that says nothing.

Feral: So, this ask gives me the idea that you were raised in a pretty racist culture (I can relate) and are trying really hard to leave that behind. And I want to encourage you to push into real education. Intention is not enough when it comes to shedding what we were taught, often subliminally, and consciously relearning - and that doesn’t feel good the way the color-blind approach many nascent liberals tend towards does.

It seems like you’re still caught in certain patterns of thinking, especially in the idea that eliminating racial distinction and sublimating and homogenizing is anti-racist when it’s actually kinda colonialism in a fancy new hat. And the “races” in your ask - a mixture of racial identities, ethnic identities, and very broad geopolitical groups - already have a huge genetic diversity within them and in several cases do in fact already overlap with each other.

There’s also a misunderstanding of how physical traits are genetically passed. They aren’t amalgamated like mixing blue paint and red paint and creating purple paint. Skin color, hair color, hair texture, and face and facial feature shapes and sizes don’t just meet in the middle between what the two parents have - and keep in mind that this kind of thinking is usually only applied when thinking about the children of a racially-mixed couple and not of say a white parent of Italian descent and a white parent of Scandinavian descent.

And there are traits that can seem to disappear from a family line only to pop up generations later. A more diverse gene pool will not produce a population of individuals indistinguishable from one another; there will be even more diversity of physical traits - specifically traits that we’re not accustomed to seeing together in our more racially segregated world.

Utuabzu: Something you should seriously consider is the background of your world. Is this the planet humans (or equivalent species, but let's just assume you're asking about humans) evolved on or is it a colony? Because if it's the former then it's pretty unlikely that you could homogenise the entire global population without some sort of catastrophic bottleneck event, something that reduces the global population to a small number in a single location that then recolonises the planet. Because the reality is that most people don't want to leave their communities of birth, not permanently anyway. People like to live in the place they consider home, and to live in a culture they understand, and absent a significant push or pull factor they will want to stay roughly within their home environment. This is part of why you don't generally see mass migration between countries with equivalent levels of economic development and political/social stability.

Given that, it's pretty hard to see how you could get enough migration around the world for long enough to homogenise the gene pool. There's probably always going to be general regional trends. There's also what Feral said about how genetics works. Appearance isn't just controlled by one or two genes. It's controlled by a huge array of genes that we still don't entirely understand, and many genes impact multiple seemingly unconnected things. A good example of this is that the gene for red hair also produces pale skin, because it prevents the production of eumelanin (the black pigment) while allowing the production of pheomelanin (the orangy-brown one). This is also why red haired people freckle - freckles are made with pheomelanin - and don't tan - tanning uses eumelanin.

Now, if you aren't writing about the home planet, you could have a fairly homogenous population due to something called the founder effect. Basically, because when a new population is established the genepool is limited, the traits of the founding individuals can have an outsized impact on the later genepool, with normally recessive genes spreading to enough individuals that the trait they code for becomes extremely common. So long as the population is predominantly composed of descendants of these founders, this effect is likely to remain active - so, so long as there isn't mass immigration that outnumbers the people born in the colony to at least one parent descended from the founders. This is easily enough accomplished by having the colony be really far away, and thus having an unreasonably long travel time for most people. If it takes many years to get there, few people would be willing to abandon their whole lives to migrate to a place they've never been.

A final thing to consider is that race is not and has never been a genetic or biological category. It's a social one. It can be correlated with certain physical traits, but it doesn't necessarily need to be, and in many parts of the world the salient 'racial' categories share most phenotypic traits. In others 'race' isn't particularly correlated with phenotype at all, and is instead primarily about culture or even religion. And not every society even has a concept of 'race'. You can simply not mention it, and instead have characters with a range of phenotypic features that nobody ever comments on, and it can be assumed that 'race' is not a relevant concept in that culture.

#google submitted #evolution #race #genetics

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warriors-cats-smoke-and-mirrors · 7 months

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heyo uhhhhhhh i have a question, how do you decide what to work on for your rewrite? I'm trying to make one of my own but I can't decide what to work on.......

Hey! Sorry for the late reply—life's been reeaaaallll busy lately.

To answer your question...currently, for the reason stated above, I haven't actually been working on this a whole lot. If I do have time for planning/writing, it's typically another project. But I can tell you what I was doing and will eventually be doing again.

(This is gonna be long. Sorry not sorry.)

This entire rewrite was born of the idea that there was another apprentice when Firestar came to the forest. You take that main idea, let it evolve if necessary (in my case, that other apprentice became Firestar's sibling, and then grew to be the main character), and then make a list: what are the main things I want to change from the original series? What world-building changes are there? And, for Smoke and Mirrors, what changes would be caused by this new character? That early on, you don't worry about the how—you just want to get down the what.

(I'm still figuring out a lot of the how. It's a process.)

From there, I personally began with the Allegiances. I went through the originals (as of right now, just The Prophecies Begin) and made basic notes on each character—if they aren't around from the beginning of Into the Wild, when are they born? When do they die? Who's their mentor? What's their rank? Do we know who their parents/siblings are? Do they take an apprentice?

Then, of course, came the arduous process of trying make sense of the families less incestuous, which, in my case, meant making the Clans bigger by creating a lot of OCs, changing some of the original story's rules (Warrior/Medicine Cat Code, I'm looking at you), and shifting around some backstories. Any physical appearance changes happened at this point, too—I don't know a lot about cat genetics, and I'm not about to go researching them, but some things are just common sense that the Erins...did not necessarily follow.

And now, finally, we're up to where I am now—the timelines for each Clan. Same as the Allegiances, I went through, made a list of what events happen in what season (and which book), and am now adjusting it to fit the version of events I want to tell. Some things happen right where they did originally. Other things don't happen at all. And quite a few things get shifted to another book.

(In this story, Redtail doesn't die in Book 1 because I want Firestar and Company to have more of a connection to him. As a result, I've only just now reached his death in my personal notes, and it ends up not happening until my version of Forest of Secrets—a whole two books later than it should.

Unfortunately, this also means dealing with the consequences of your own decisions. Redtail doesn't die until Book 3, which means Tigerclaw's schemes are also behind—Forest of Secrets is the book where ThunderClan is meant to find out about his betrayal, but if his plans don't even really start until then, is it possible to still have that reveal? If I want to keep it there, I have to figure out that pesky how. Otherwise, I have to figure out when it'll happen instead.)

From here, the plan is finish the timelines, continue with Allegiances as necessary, and create the character profiles and world-building changes as I go. And then it's off to the races. Drabbles? One-shots? Full-length chapters? Who knows! It'll happen if and when it happens.

I hope this helps give you some ideas! Thanks for the question, and sorry again for the late reply!

#warrior cats #warrior cats rewrite #warriors #warriors rewrite #warriors au #asks #warrior cats smoke and mirrors

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acertainmoshke · 1 year

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Hello, your w.i.p.s all sound interesting! Hope you don't mind questions! I love worldbuilding and To Die Among the Stars has really caught my attention. It sounds like a sci fi/found family type of story. Do you know why the first FTL test was a disaster? I'm hoping they tested it remotely/without humans before testing it with humans. Judging by your use of “mental wellness centers” I'm guessing this isn't a particularly nice future for some people. So probably not. Was the new crew briefed on why the first one failed, to try and avoid the same mistakes? Have they tested FTL on sentient androids yet or are they like Data from Star Trek, rare and highly experimental? Why did they choose to combine cat and human DNA to get Peppermint? (Not judging, I'd love to read something with a catgirl in space!) Have they tried merging other species with humans before? Oh noo, have they tried bringing back dinosaurs and mammoths? XD Has Space Jurassic Park happened? Sorry for all of the questions, your story blurb there just really intrigued me! I couldn't help myself.

Please please please don’t be sorry!! I love questions and talking about worldbuilding. So, in order:

1. The first test was a decade before the story and it was a huge disaster in the news because it was manned. It wasn’t technically the first test, though. They knew the technology worked and had run small scale tests around the solar system in tiny unmanned crafts. However, putting it together into a system that would work long-distance was too expensive at the time to plan for very many tests. They tested each part but not everything working together. Several trained astronauts and scientists were killed. It has been a while, so things are less expensive now and have been improved. However, this one is manned so they have the data on how people physically and psychologically react to FTL. I don’t want to be too spoilery but…it’s still not perfect.

2. The new crew did have a few weeks of training, much of it on the reports they’re expected to prepare, but also some cursory knowledge of ship upkeep and planetary life should they get that far—for liability reasons, mostly.

3. Both Void and Peppermint are dubiously legal experiments. Void is arguably the first provably sentient android and was kept quiet because they were unable to repeat their success. Also, important to note, unlike Data it doesn’t look human at all. It was like the 30th test and they were running short on funds, so it’s housed in a clunky metal body and honestly is a bit goofy looking.

4. Peppermint is…ok, meta explanation is I wanted an excuse to have a catgirl in space. But this type of genetic experimentation is banned because of eugenics (cruel, futuristic society still has some standards). So January, the scientist who designed both of them, had to keep them quiet too. Nominally, the point was to create a human enhanced with animal abilities, and they tried a bunch of different types. Peppermint was the only one to survive past infancy, and while they are basically a person with cat traits, there are downsides that make it currently unmarketable, either for military or private sector uses. January doesn’t care, she is kind of a mad scientist who does things to see if she can. Technically Void and Peppermint belong to her, so she brought them along to space. They’re the only ones who didn’t actually volunteer.

5. Ok space Jurassic Park has definitely happened NOW. I honestly didn’t consider a lot of the worldbuilding for this story outside of technology and living conditions (I did the least planning for it yet somehow I’m a third of the way through and have barely started the others). But yes this is a world where the justice system is like now but worse, same with healthcare and other factors of life for regular people. But if billionaires in real life can fund random space travel, rich people in my story have definitely funded extinct genetic experiments (which are legal because they aren’t on people). There have definitely been incidents, both with exotic extinct pets and with extinction zoo experiences, but on a less centralized scale than in Jurassic Park.

Thank you so much for this ask and feel free to send more if you have thoughts or questions! I love being made to actually think about the logic of my world!

#moshke writes #answering questions #is a tag I have now!#writeblr #to die among the stars

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uniqpathlab0023 · 4 months

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What is the ‘Diabetes Test in Noida Care’?

Types of Diabetes and Their Possible Causes

What are the risk factors of diabetes?

Conclusion

Living in the era of the pandemic, getting to know about some other rising health concerns is already overwhelming. In the 21st century, Diabetes is hailed as a silent killer threatening the lives of millions of people every year. The burden of diabetes in India is currently above 76 million and increasing rapidly day by day due to several triggering factors such as a sedentary lifestyle and consumption of high-calorie unhealthy food.

Even in the last few decades, diabetes test care has advanced bringing several novel medications to regulate blood sugar levels and devices to monitor glucose and insulin levels continuously. Still, there is a large part of the society where basic diabetes care facilities aren’t available to the patients. Drawing attention to this crisis, the theme “access to diabetes care” is actively revolving around providing support to manage their condition and avoid complications.

What is ‘Diabetes Test In Greater Noida Care’?

One of the complicated diseases, Diabetes test affects almost the entire body if it remains uncontrolled. From creating several issues with your blood vessels and heart to increased risk of eye conditions or sending tell-tale signs of kidney failure and frequent infections and so on. However, keeping things under your control and pushing such complications away from you isn’t unachievable. Our experts have shared some important tips to regulate sugar levels and lead a healthy life. Here is what you should do:

Managing blood pressure and cholesterol by not stressing too much and taking your prescribed medications on time.

Try to remain active throughout your day including 30-minute walks, exercise, or yoga

Pay attention to unusual symptoms, swelling in legs/ ankles, skin darkening, urine infections, etc.

Follow a healthy diet– restricting high-calorie or carbohydrates in your diet. Prefer to take home-cooked meals as possible. I

If detected diabetes, never miss taking insulin, or oral medications and monitor your blood sugar daily.

Visit your ophthalmologist at least once every year.

Refrain from excessive alcohol intake and regular smoking.

Keep your sleeping schedule intact

Take your oral health seriously as diabetes can affect your gum and teeth health.

Types of Diabetes and Their Possible Causes

Diabetes is a long-term medical disorder characterized by blood glucose levels that are frequently above normal. There are two types of diabetes, namely:

Type 1 diabetes

Type 1 diabetes is thought to be an autoimmune reaction in the body where the body’s immune system attacks its immune cells that produce beta cells in the pancreas. Also called juvenile or insulin-dependent diabetes, in type 1 diabetes, the pancreas can produce little to no insulin. Insulin therapy is necessary for Type 1 diabetics to manage their blood glucose levels. It frequently appears in childhood or shortly after that.

Type 2 diabetes

A common form of diabetes is associated with lifestyle and genetic factors. The pancreas' capacity to generate insulin may gradually decline with time. Insulin is a secret that helps break down the sugar into glucose, converting the food into energy. However, if the inulin level decreases in the bloodstream, the sugar levels increase simultaneously. The primary causes of Type 2 diabetes are obesity, a sedentary lifestyle, genetic factors, age, and gestational diabetes history.

What are the risk factors of diabetes?

There are numerous risk factors associated causing diabetes. The HbA1C test is beneficial to confirm the likelihood of diabetes and take effective measures to avoid diabetes complications.

Let’s discuss the main risk factors for diabetes.

Family history - The major risk of developing diabetes is having family records of this health issue. Commonly, this health risk passes from generation to generation. So, if you have type 2 diabetes, it must be that your family record has encountered this disease.

Excess body weight - Gaining weight above normal is also responsible for developing diabetes in people. Excess deposition of fat near the abdomen region is linked with insulin resistance.

Physical inactivity - The lack of physical activity or having a sedentary lifestyle can lead to type 2 diabetes. Exercise enhances the body's use of glucose and insulin.

Age - The risk of developing type 1 and 2 diabetes begins in childhood. Type 2 diabetes is more common in older adults, but obesity in children also increases its risk in younger ages. Diabetes can occur at any age and its risk increases after age 45.

Conclusion:

Summarize key points.

Encourage readers to prioritize diabetes testing in Greater Noida.

#health #healthcheckup #health care #diabetestestingreaternoida #healthcare

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antbloxxer101 · 6 months

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What is MageQuest?

Here's a super short summary of MageQuest's world so that I can start sharing posts related to it and sound slightly less crazy lol

MageQuest (MQ) is a project where I try to combine all of the stories i've made over the years into an organized timeline. the main two stories are Mage War and Khaki's story.

Some of my first stories were created literal years ago, so I will constantly be changing some aspects and dynamics of it as I build more of the world.

there has been many inspirations for it from many different video games and medias i've consumed over the years. the biggest ones I can remember though is sumikooneesan's yt series Eighty-Six, as well as warrior cats, wolfquest, and fallout new vegas, so if you enjoy any of those you might be able to enjoy magequest :D

Because it's so long, I can't possibly explain everything it has in store, but I plan on posting art and analysis relating to it!

I'm also working on a toyhouse World that has a complete timeline and other info about MQ that will be ready soon ^_^

Here is an intro page that has a timeline, faction list, and content warnings. Please read the content warnings before going into this

v Basic World info

Setting

MQ focuses on a private wildlife reserve. Everyone that lives in it are called inhabitants. The inhabitants include:

Animals, mostly mammals, avians and reptiles. Humans included.

Humans are put on the same level of rights as animals because they are all sapient. there are also non-sapient animals but don't think about it too hard lol carnivores need to eat.

Prehistorics, animals from past eras that have somehow survived the ice age and other planet transformations. Many are hybrids of modern day animals, which keeps the ancient species' genetics alive. They have extremely long lifespans and are considered immortal.

Factories. I can make a seperate post about them, but a factory is basically an alien organism consisting of smaller organisms that function as its lifeforce. The organisms are simply called organs. They come in many different shapes and sizes, and they have different roles to fill within the factory. They are considered invasive because they harm the normal wildlife ecosystems. Some phenotypes are parasitic. The factory has one overseer that can control everything, and its family lineage is fully sapient.

The reserve is located somewhere in the Americas, but this is not fully specified.

Anything else outside of the reserve such as governments or civilizations are not really established or focused on. The reserve is private, meaning it's not owned or monitored by any proper government.

Everything below is a short summary of each faction and the story's premise.

Factions / Groups

Nautilus - the conservation group hosting the reserve. Workers are called Nautili

Pyrrhopia - an ancient factory living in the mountains.

The Syndicates - the Old Syndicate, consisting of the old conservation group members, and the New Syndicate, formed by some of the wildlife, also called the Sight Seekers.

The Orchid - an alliance formed between the Old Syndicate and Pyrrhopia.

Unaffiliated/Other - anyone else who isn't a part of a particular faction.

Serengeti - another game reserve in Africa.

Many animals have a connection to multiple factions, but have the highest affinity to / feel comfortable in only one.

v Diagram of the factions' relationships with each other

Nautilus

The reserve is owned by a conservation group. The group has changed names and goals over time. It used to be a smaller conservation group of researchers and veterinarians.

Their headquarters and labs are underwater. Nautilus and Nautili have an aquatic theme.

They are partnered with the Serengeti wildlife reserve for projects and funding.

The original conservation group and Pyrrhopia had a war similar to the Emu War in real life. The group used nuclear power to try and destroy the invasive factory in the mountains. They failed, ending up in a terrible state due to the nuclear fallout.

Nautilus arrives to help the original conservation group recover, and they combine into one organization, keeping the name Nautilus.

Once TITAN, former head researcher, becomes the director of Nautilus, the goal changes more towards complete control over the animals and unethical experiments, rather than maintaining their health. This causes the main conflict throughout the timeline.

Pyrrhopia

An ancient factory that has existed before the conservation group.

It's current overseer is Kymurtykry, or just Ky (one / he / it). Pyrrhopia is also referred to as Ky's factory.

The factory has survived two near-extinction experiences, one caused by another factory, and the other caused by the original conservation group attempting to nuke them. They are extremely knowledgeable of the reserve, intelligent, and strong.

Ky and its descendants' lineage are called the Murkits. They have high rankings in the factory.

The Murkits have a confusing naming convention, but they are usually called the second half of their name (ex. Tikra and Tokri)

Ky's children, Komu and Tikra, help manage the factory and coordinate any plans moving forward.

Diagram of the Murkit lineage

The Orchid

At some point Titan kicks out the old members of the conservation group because they didn't enjoy his unethical approach to the reserve. The surviving members form the Old Syndicate, and flee to Pyrrhopia. The two factions look past their previous antagonism to fight against Nautilus. They create the Orchid to combine forces.

Sight Seekers

The Sight Seekers is founded by inhabitants Hayden, Sorbet, Hila and Khaki.

This syndicate started as a conspiracy group. Wildlife kept finding 'easter eggs' around the reserve, like animal or human remains, or factory organ parts, hinting to the nuclear fallout and other aspects from Nautilus's past. The members are very interested in these findings, and enjoy searching for them. They have built a den to collect all of this proof.

Their goal is to collect any info they can about Nautilus. Anything that Nautilus gives them, as well as any other proof described above. They plan to use it to find a way to escape the reserve or to rebel against Nautilus. Nautilus knows this, but the things they're doing isn't too different from the Orchid. They're prepared.

Plot Summary

Everyone and their mama and dog hates Nautilus. Nautilus has done a few experiments, called projects, that has traumatized their animals and every few years unrest grows and an invasion on Nautilus takes place. Because their labs and headquarters are underwater, its super easy for them to relocate if a facility gets destroyed, creating a cycle of unrest, rebellion, rebuilding, then more unrest. Their time is running out as the wildlife and other factions become stronger and more powerful.

Nautilus's Past Projects:

Raptor Project - An experiment to see if a hybrid dromaeosaurid can produce a hatchling that is only one of the two species. In the result, the subject (a Velociraptor/Deinonychus hybrid) produces three eggs: One a full deinonychus, the other two velociraptors. The project was a success.

Coastal Project - Ash and Khaki are taken into Nautilus to be trained as a research and combat wolf, respectively. The project was unsuccessful; Khaki develops a habit of hunting and eating avian workers, and attacking project workers.

Serengeti Project - A project testing if animals from one location can adapt to another, this new place being the Serengeti. The animals struggle to survive amongst the chaotic prides and clans. Nautilus forgets about the project for a while, then Serengeti cancels it themselves and sends back the animals.

Aphotic Zone Project - Nautilus, taking inspiration from the Serengeti Project, decides to send their wildlife to a temporary holding reserve in order to decrease their stress and unrest. They convince the Serengeti to let them send more animals. This buys Nautilus time to plan while not being at risk of an invasion from their haters. Unfortunately, the Orchid knew of this project from undercover agents, and have taken it into their own hands..

thats it for now! All art and posts are centered around these factions, their dynamics, and the wildlife's life inside the reserve :P

#bloxxlore

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the-forest-crack-i0 · 2 years

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Game Fix / Crack: The Forest v All No-DVD [Codex] NoDVD NoCD | MegaGames

💾 ►►► DOWNLOAD FILE 🔥🔥🔥 The Forest — As the lone survivor of a passenger jet crash, you find yourself in a mysterious forest battling to stay alive against a society of cannibalistic mutants. As the lone survivor of a passenger jet crash, you find yourself in a mysterious forest battling to stay alive against a society of cannibalistic mutants. Build, explore, survive in this terrifying first person survival horror simulator. Enter a living, breathing world, where every tree and plant can be chopped down. Below ground explore a vast network of caves and underground lakes. Key Fetures: Chop down trees to build a camp, or start a fire to keep warm. Scavenge food to keep yourself from starving. Build a small shelter or a large ocean side fortress. Lay traps and defences to keep a safe perimeter. Explore and build during the day. Defend your base at night. Craft weapons and tools. Bunker down during the evening or bring the fight directly to the enemy. 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chibi-tsukiko · 2 years

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Hi Em, how are you?

I have questions for W&D Wednesday if that’s okay🙈

Does being a child of the damned or the light mean that child’s parents are demon or angel? With Takashi being a child of the damned, does that mean his father is demonic? For some reason I originally thought Takashi was a descendant and Ryuji was Azenean.

Why is Ryuji’s father so cold towards his son and hates all magic users? Are the Zenko family Nobles or work under Takashi’s father?

When Ryuji is tasked to hunt down magic users, how do they track them? Do they leave a sort of magical signature or footprint whenever they preform magic?🤔

How did Ryuji get his characteristic scar under his eye?

How did they mistakenly kill Ishida’s sister, Sora, as a magic user if she wasn’t one?

Where was Ishida when this all went down? What happened when he found Sora?…if it’s not too big of a spoiler😅🙈

I was reading your OC-tobers.…again🤭😅, they’re very addictive… what happened after Ryuji lost consciousness in the burning building??😱 Does Ishida save him?

I really didn’t mean for these to be Rishida focused. It just sorta happened 😅. I’m missing these boys.

I hope you have a good day. You’re a gem💜

Hello buttercup!!! and HOLY MOLY I'M ON CLOUD 9!!! This is amazing!! Let's get into these answers! 😆🤗

I apologize for the length up front...😅🙈

1. Technically speaking, both Children of the Light and Children of the Damned are “descendants of angels and demons.” And the angelic/demonic blood (or power) gets passed down genetically. So Takashi’s Father is demonic, but not a “demon” in the traditional sense of the word (like the monstrous ones). The Han demonic family line goes back generations. I hope that makes sense!

Also! You are not crazy! Originally, Takashi was a descendent, and Ryuji was Azenean. However, as I wrote the story and developed it, I changed it. Mostly because Takashi was born with powers…therefore, he needed to be a direct Child of the Damned. Ryuji was changed because I adjusted his family background to fit in with the story and in order to have his backstory make more sense tied in with Takashi’s a Drele fit better than an Azenean. :)

2. The Zenko family does work under the Han family. They were a noble family that joined forces under the Han family. Ryuji’s Father has always hated magic users because he feels threatened by them and is envious of their powers since he himself doesn’t have any powers. So when he hears that the Han family doesn’t want anyone to threaten their control over the lands, Ryuji’s father offers to create and train a group of Assassins to hunt and kill all the magic users.

3. Because the Han family controls much of Nubik territory, they have spies and soldiers constantly walking around who would see magic users and give out their locations. Magic signatures can only be traced and felt by other magic users. In some cases, they would use other magic users to help track down their friends. But for the most part they just gathered intel on where they lived and went from there. And even as magic users tried to go into hiding, people would rat them out to try and stay in favor with the Han family (and avoid punishment).

4. Ryuji got his scar under his eye after he tells his Father he is quitting being an Assassin and basically that he thinks what his father is doing is wrong. And his Father back hands him. 😤The family ring his father wears, cuts under his eye.

5. Ryuji was not told who the target was. Only that there was a magic user that lived in the house on the hill. This was his first mission and the team was reluctant to have him with them so they didn’t give him any information. In fact, when they arrived at the house, Ryuji was told to keep watch from another hill top & to shoot his arrow if necessary. Minutes in, Ryuji heard and saw explosions coming from the house, he saw the leader of the assassination team come out and a person (he did not realize it was a child) firing magic explosions at him. So, to protect his comrade, he fired. When he came down from the hill, he saw that it was a young child and he saw the broken glass. Horrified, he realizes that she was throwing potions, she was not the magic user. He’s completely distraught over this mistake, but the team doesn’t care. “It’s one less magic wannabe” is what they tell him. But when Ryuji returns home, he tells his father he is quitting the team. Unable to cope with his mistake. Furious about his son’s embarrassing behavior, Ryuji’s father sends him to a Warriors Academy. Where he meets Takashi. 🤗

6. The “flashback” scene about what happens to Sora (and how Ishida responded to it) is written here 😊

7. Takashi goes to get help and tells Ishida that Ryuji had gone back into the burning building to save the young girl. When they see the building has collapsed, Ishida digs through the rubble and nearly uses all of his magic to heal Ryuji when he finds him. ♥️

THANK YOU SO SO SOOOOOO MUCH FOR SENDING THESE IN!!! 😘😘😘 I hope I was able to answer everything for you!! If you have more questions or want me to clarify more things let me know!!

I'm gunna tag the rest of the W&D gang because I figured you guys may have the same kinda questions or may wanna know

Tag list : @littleturtle95 @phoenix-and-dragon @khaleesiofalicante @my-archerboy @clumsyowl-in-a-fandom @radisv @raziyekroos @magnus-the-maqnificent @spotsandclawsthings @shadowhuntingdemigod @elettralightwood

#wretched and divine #wretched and divine q&a #ryuji zenko #takashi han #ishida tetsui #emsaskbox

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babblingstacey · 2 years

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Welcome!

Thought I'd update my pinned post with some info about me & my tumblr. Also a handy place to find links to my mods.

Reblogs: BabblingStaceyReblogs

(updated October 6 2023)

Basic info

I believe I'm much older than most simblrs out there! I played the original Sims way back when, then didn't play any versions until a month into the pandemic for something to do. I've always loved storytelling so this was perfect to rejuvenate my creativity.

I don't really play any other games, to be honest.

I do not have a gaming computer I just play on a laptop. I don't have any fun reshades, only editing I do to my screenshots is cropping and occasionally will brighten them. So they will not be high quality but I enjoy taking them/telling stories anyway.

I'm terrible at CAS but I love to build. I don't know how good I am at it, but I do it for my own amusement anyway. Gallery ID BabblingStacey.

I've had this tumblr for a very long time but only started sharing my gameplay through over the few years - mainly because I kept taking screenshots with nowhere to put them.

My game and blog is LGTBQ+ and BIPOC friendly. If that bothers you, then this is not the simblr you want to follow. For the record, while I'm a CFBC straight middle aged white CIS woman, I try to keep my gameplay as diverse as possible. If I do get something incorrect, please send me a message. (unless you are a TERF or racist, then you can kindly just fuck off).

My avatar is my simself, or as close as I can get to one.

Gameplay (I've been swapping a lot, just to stop from getting bored)

Current: Gerdie the SuperSim, using @lostinsophiesave save file. Gerdie is from my Julissa the Unlucky Chef and Gerdie the Genius. gameplays, but in a brand new save. I just like this girl.

Current: Power Pop Legacy. My own little legacy, inspired by power pop songs from the 90s. Making it up as I go along. Using Prxnce Love Letter Save File

Previous play and mods/CC below the cut (it got really long)

On hold: Yvette's Wandering Life with Yvette Deaton, a continuation of Anna's Vagabond Challenge. Using @haledela's savefile.

On hold: Landry's Growing Together with Vanessa Landry. Just a little family I'm exploring the new update & pack with. Vanessa was created by NoMoreBadTownies on the gallery, the rest of the fam were created with her genetics. Total vibing, no real storyline so far. Vanilla-lite gameplay in ratboysims' amazing save file.

On hold: my own legacy challenge. Mainly on hold because I need to replace a lot of B&B CC in my homes anyway because I've been deleting a lot of problematic creators who leave their content locked behind paywalls for too long for me to be comfortable with using any longer. I've done Not So Berry (the updated version) in a previous save and started my current legacy with the Chromatic Legacy Challenge but during the 6th gen I decided I wanted to write my own that fits more of the way I like to play. You can see my plans here: BabblingLegacy, I update it as I get an idea for a generation. Using SweetieWright's save file. I do change up the houses/lots a lot, but it's a great way to have a starting point.

On hold: Tianna the Wolf with Tianna Pancakes, daughter of Iggy. I really wanted to play this pack - I'm not even that much of a occult simmer but man, this is a lot of fun. Using Fleuralia Save File. On hold because there are now triplet toddler wolves and...i needed a break.

Previous Play: Iggy's Frogs with Iggy Pancakes (again). Just one post.

Previous Play: Aliens Stole My Parents scenario. Can Anna & Kasen Deaton get their father back? Using @anotherplumbob save file.

Previous Play: Stuck in Their Shadow Scenario with Nova Curious. Just a a quick scenario play.

Previous Play: Teenage Kicks. 5 Willow Creek teens transferred to Copperdale High. How will they survive high school? Will they actually all go to school at the same time? Time will tell! Using lilsimsie's save file.

Previous Play: Globetrotter Challenge with Iggy Pancakes. Using lilsimsie's save file.

Previous Play: My Perfect Life challenge with my Sim June Yamamoto. Also with lilsimsie's save file.

Previous Play: Robles Family. Started as a Sim Scenario Making Money. Used @anotherplumbob save file, though I've downloaded random lots/households from the gallery to fill out the world's.

Yvette getting electrocuted, since I needed an image to break up the text.

Abandoned: Iggy's Making Money Scenario with Iggy Pancakes. Using Fleuralia Save File. Started because I was bored, abandoned because it did the trick, got me interested in a different challenge. Maybe I'll come back to it to finish it but it's not looking likely.

Abandoned: Expansion Berry Legacy, created by @becciisiim, featuring the Shaffer family. However, I'm not doing the generations in the same order as the original. Using @ratboysims's save file. Abandoned because I got bored. I may come back to when I feel more inspired.

I prefer to play one household and don't really play occults very often.

I have all the packs except for some kits and stuffpacks.

I play with mods, a partial list: MCCC , WonderfulWhims, UI Cheats, Personality Please!, Meaninguful Stories, First Impressions, Control Any Sim, many from LittleMsSam (@littlemssam) and Bienchen.

I use a lot of Maxis Match/Mix CC; some of my faves: Clumsy Alien (@clumsyalienn) , Okuree (@okruee), LittleDica (@littledica), Peacemaker (@peacemaker-ic), CharleyPancakes (@charlypancakes), myshunosun (@myshunosun) and probably a bunch more. I've been trying to use less build/buy CC but use it for my own gameplay frequently.

#justthefact

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fellowstrangetownappreciator · 3 years

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The Strange Case of The Strangetown Metamorphosis

There is a mysterious Sim that appears in Strangetown.

That's like saying "there is a fish that appears in the ocean", I know, so I'll be a little more specific.

They are an adult whose memories show inconsistencies with those of their family members. Something is missing!

Alright. That's also not saying much, that's like half of the premades in vanilla, non-clean hoods.

They are immediately recognizable by their appearance and, dare I say it, have distinguishing features unique to them.

Well, that also kinda fits everyone...

They feature in more than one installment of the series.

Again, not that helpful. I mean, almost everybody from the base game hoods is (for better or worse) represented in TS3 or TS4.

They appear in TS2 for PSP!

Hmm...

They are a member of a wealthy family connected to science and paranormal.

And...

They are somehow connected to (possible) cloning.

I imagine that now you’re probably rolling your eyes and asking: Why didn’t I just simply say I was going to talk about Bella Goth?

Because... I’m not!

It’s Loki Beaker. In this mini-essay I’m going to speak about Loki, what is the mystery around him, what hints are there and what are some of the theories and which one do I fancy.

It’s basically a routine round of the popular game “connect EAxis’ oversights and glue them together into a headcanon”.

So without further ado, let me introduce you to:

The Mystery of Loki Beaker!

0: Preface: Loki who?

“As soon as he perfects his latest invention, Loki is sure to get the recognition he knows he deserves. In the meantime, he keeps himself busy by trying to assemble a nuclear reactor out of common household items.”

On the first glance, Loki as a Sim seems quite straightforward. He is a Knowledge Sim with a very eccentric personality. All his trait points are in the extremes, as you can see:

He is a scientist, a competent one at that, as proven by his high career level and the fun fact that some of the game’s horrible machinery you can buy for Aspiration points is attributed to his creation.

(It explains why are the Beakers the only ones who have the stuff lying around by default. It is normal for a Strangetown family to own a non-buyable reward object or two but those are career rewards, the Beakers are the only one who canonically own Aspiration points rewards.)

Even though he knows his stuff when it comes to his profession, he is very corrupt and tests his questionable projects on his captive, Nervous Subject.

To say that Loki is unpopular would be an understatement. No one but his wife Circe likes Loki, even his own sister is indifferent towards him. Yes, he has a sister. Her name is Erin and she also lives in Strangetown with a colorful collection of roommates.

Nothing mysterious about him so far. (apart from his eyebrows)

1: Characterization fallen apart

And then The Sims 3 happened. It was actually quite late into the game’s life cycle, the early 2013, when a beautiful nordic-themed world was released on TS3 Store. Its name was Aurora Skies and it featured Loki, Erin and their parents.

TS3 Loki is a child and Erin is a toddler.

Now I haven’t actually played Aurora Skies. I own (and love) TS3 but the price range for the Store worlds is too high for me, content-to-money wise. So there might be some hidden clues about the Beakers in their house or relationship panels that I haven’t been able to inspect but... not to sound cynical but I doubt it. I doubt such attention was given to detail of this family in Aurora Skies, as they don’t even have individual bios.

But... that is... fine? I mean, we have Loki’s TS2 bio...

Nope. Sure we do. And it would be fine if hair color and ambitions weren’t the only thing Loki and his younger self (from now on referred to as smol Loki) had in common.

Let’s take a look on smol Loki’s personality.

The first noticeable thing is that there is not a trace of Loki’s trademark villainy. He’s not Mean Spirited, he’s not Evil, he’s not even a No Sense of Humor Sim. His extreme neatness and hyperactivity are nowhere to be seen either. While it is true that TS3′s capabilities of defining personality are very limited as it picks “outstanding points” rather than a position of each trait on a scale, and it only has 5 slots (and tiny teeny 3 for children), it doesn’t make any sense still for the devs not to pick some more loki-esque traits for the precious slots they had.

Unless...

They didn’t care about Loki’s personality and there were no deeper intentions.

Unless the devs were trying to purposefully show us new angles of his character that either got suppressed while he was growing up, or manifest in ways that TS2′s scale system wasn’t able to show.

Could the Lucky trait in particular have had something to do with the change?

(Also, those traits of smol Loki are reason why I usually go for a Family Secondary Loki in TS2 and thus make Strangetown the purgatory of two unstable blonde Knowledge/Family sciency guys.)

We also must not omit that even though smol Loki didn’t display any of them, he still had all of Loki’s signature traits in him, as Loki in TS2 has his actual personality synced with the genetic one, meaning that there was something in there that caused him not to act so mean that got lost as he grew up. In other words, something brought up the worst in him.

And that’s not all. Smol Loki is not a regular TS3 child. You see, in TS3, premade children aren’t particularly known for being highly skilled experts. Neither are in TS2, for that matter, and it’s okay. It’s realistic.

Smol Loki has a skill maxed.

It is very rare for a premade regardless of age to already start with a maxed skill and I personally don’t know of any other premade children that do.

And it’s writing.

What does writing have to do with Loki? Does Loki write? Probably he has to, those academic papers aren’t gonna spawn out of thin air, but that’s not what the writing skill in TS3 (or the hidden writing skill in TS2) are about. They’re about creative writing only.

Ok, ok. How high is Loki’s Creativity skill, then? In TS2, skills are much broader, they more resemble skillsets than individual skills, and writing categorizes under Creativity. Bring out the skill panel!

Two. He has 2 points in Creativity. That is... low. That is actually very low, especially for a Sim that has supposedly been writing for fun since childhood. (and was a prodigy, while we’re at it) It is safe to say, I think, that if the player doesn’t make him do it, Loki doesn’t write anymore and he hasn’t been doing that for a long, long time.

While I would cynically admit that the dissonance in personalities might be just the lack of damns given from EAxis’ side, this seems to me too on the nose to be unintentional.

They would have no reason to bring the Beakers back without the “evil scientists” thing in mind. I mean, that’s what they’re iconic for. That’s what they’re recognizable by. (apart from their eyebrows)

So the person who was in charge of creating smol Loki probably knew they were recreating “Loki the mad scientist”.

So when they were picking the skill they use to demonstrate that this kid is gonna go far, they thought... “evil scientist = writing”...?

I would understand going for Creativity in general. I mean, Loki’s an inventor. That comes with the territory. But creativity as such isn’t really a skill in TS3. It’s divided to different activities.

Wouldn’t it make more sense just in general to pick logic, then? I mean, Loki isn’t that extremely logical by default but it is his second strongest skill and a feature unmistakably connected to being a scientist.

That’s what leads me to believe that writing plays a role in the story and it was chosen on purpose.

So how did a sweet little family-oriented boy talented with words transform into the ruthless catboy inventor we know and love?

And that, my friends, is the mystery of Loki Beaker.

2: A closer look at our environmentalist friends, the Beakers

If we want to get the full picture and come to a satisfying conclusion of some sorts, we need to inspect smol Loki’s surroundings. Maybe there is a clue to the continuous force or a traumatic event that shifted smol Loki’s direction in life?

Loki’s and Erin’s parents are named Gundrun and Bjorn. Even though their age would still allow it, they’re not present at the start of TS2′s Strangetown play, they’re long dead. Bjorn died before Erin became an adult and Gundrun died shortly before her son’s engagement to Circe. Because they died by the time Loki had (presumably) already long enrolled in his current life-path, we can safely rule out any tragic early death of parental figures scenario as a possible answer.

Gundrun is the only Beaker that canonically also writes. She has 5 points in the writing skill. She also shares some traits with Loki, namely the smarts and ambition.

But she has little to do with science and is way more business-oriented which is a trait she shares with Circe’s ancestors, for example her father. Maybe the families knew each other from business ventures even before they moved to Strangetown? It is stated in their memories that Loki and Circe first met when they were children. But I digress!

Anyway, I don’t see anything in Gundrun that would suggest any abusive behavior towards her son that might have triggered his drastic change. Possibly but not necessarily she might’ve been a bit absent but nothing out of ordinary.

And now the father, Bjorn.

Bjorn is the sciency half of the couple and works as an Aquatic Ecosystem Tweaker. Again, he has zero traits that would raise any red flags and he shares 4 out of 5 traits with either smol Loki or Loki. (I don’t know if Loki is a “natural cook” but he cooks quite well, so I think that counts.)

What’s interesting about Bjorn, though, is his speech that serves as a flavor text for the Aurora Skies store page.

(Image transcript: “Do it for science! Science is everywhere around us, but at Aurora Skies it’s not just something you learn; it’s something you do! We need bright young minds to make the dreams of the future a reality. Even now we’re finding more uses for garbage to help the planet. Charging batteries, powering machines - the sky is the limit. Just this last year we created a modified Hot Air Baloon using garbage as fuel and turning it into pure air with a pine breeze scent. Now you can have efficient travel and an amazing romantic adventure with no cost to the ozone (or your nose)! Every year we’re creating more and more exciting things in the world of science. Garbage-powered hearts, heart-powered cars, solar-powered cats; what will you think of next! It’s all up to you. Do it for Science! Did you know? Hot Air Balloons are an epic form of travel based around the simple principle that hot air is lighter than cold air. They lift in the air based on the heat system in the balloon. Increasing the temperature of the air inside the balloon makes it lighter than the air outside and the balloon begins to float. More air is required to lift heavier things; that’s why the balloons have to be so huge! How cool (or hot!) is that?”)

From this piece of text we can see Bjorn’s passion and dedication to “green” science. Nothing in his traits suggests he fakes it, so I think it’s safe to believe that this peppy idealist is a glimpse into Loki’s father’s genuine self.

He might have encouraged his children to follow in his footsteps (”We need bright young minds to make the dreams of the future a reality.“) and smol Loki, who later in life seemed to have similar levels of enthusiasm (science is his One True Hobby), might have been receptive to that.

Now just close your eyes for a second and imagine an alternate reality in which Loki picked up where Bjorn left and instead of a energy-refilling machine that electrocutes you if you’re not happy enough, he invented “solar-powered cats”.

Still no hints on what could’ve messed Loki up, though.

Let’s take a look at the parents in TS2. Even though they’re not present and aren’t even resurrectable, they’re still coded in the game for purposes of genetics, memories and family trees, so some of their characteristics are salvageable.

And by the Watcher, they were both Romance Sims.

They were workaholic Romance Sims who cared about the environment and liked recycling (and Hot Baloons).

And they were both extremely Nice and very Sloppy, if their personalities on wiki are something to go by. Which they unfortunately aren’t, at least not completely because most ancestors don’t simply have “their own” personalities and use presets instead, so they tend to be quite similar.

The same goes for most of the Beaker clan, unfortunately. Fun fact is that there is no Knowledge Sim in sight (before Loki, of course). Maybe they weren’t a scientist family, but a bunch of Romance Sims who used to spend their free time in between woohoos saving the planet with eco-science. (3 out of 6 of Loki’s and Erin’s ancestors were Romance Sims, 2 were Fortune and 1 was Family)

But! There is one outlier. Her name is Gertrude Beaker. She is Loki’s paternal grandmother.

And similarly to her grandson, she certainly has a personality to remember.

She doesn’t use a preset, this is a personality that someone went and manually assigned (...or generated) for her. And she is Neat, Outgoing and doesn’t have a nice bone in her body. But unlike Loki, she has a sense of humor (which makes her even more dangerous, in my opinion) and is extremely Lazy.

She is a Fortune Sim and the only Beaker who shares the darker sides of Loki’s personality. (to be clear, I don’t mean their taste for cleaning but the round 0 of Nice points)

Because she doesn’t feature in TS3 at all, it is safe to say that she wasn’t in her grandchildren’s lives until the family moved to Strangetown. Could she be the corrupting influence on smol Loki?

As far as personality comparison goes, she seems to be the only possible culprit, the only one who’s personality shares the same unpleasant qualities he became infamous for. But! That’s not saying much. There is no evidence she actually did anything.

There’s not even any evidence that she ever met her grandson, given he has no memory of her dying which means she might have died before he was even born. That would be a solid evidence on the contrary and would rule her out. But I’m leaving some maneuvering space for theories here because she is the only Beaker ancestor with custom personality, after all, and that is suspicious.

That’s all the Beakers we know of if not counting Atom and Ceres, who came after Loki, so they’re not relevant to the question of his childhood. Or... are they?

3: And that’s when the trouble began

Another part of this question that might help us discern what happened to Loki is the when. All we know so far is that there is a big void of unknown between smol Loki and regular Loki and the point of transformation happened in there somewhere.

Thankfully, we have something to give us an idea. It’s this snapshot in storytelling pictures for the Beakers:

It shows smol Loki destroying a dollhouse. It seems to be in an impersonal environment of some sorts. The cheapest bed in the game is against a bare white wall, the window is hid behind blue curtains and there doesn’t really seem to be anything else but the dollhouse, a teddy bear in the background and that... very unpleasant bed.

It clearly tells us that Loki’s shift started in his pre-teen years.

And seeing that room which is definitely not in the Beaker Castle at 1 Tesla Court, it makes me think of a hotel or a cheap apartment the family was staying in while moving from Aurora Skies to Strangetown. Maybe the castle-like something the household inhabits at the start of the game wasn’t a property of the Beakers at all, maybe that was where the Salamises used to live and now it belongs to Circe?

Anyway, could it had been leaving Aurora Skies that sent smol Loki down an existential crisis and settling in the not exactly welcoming environment of Strangetown, enrolling in a local school, that sealed it?

But why all the stuff with writing? This would work with any other hobby but somehow it had to be writing and it’s our task to find out why.

4: Not your average tragedy

Now in our search we already have some ideas but it wouldn’t be thorough if we didn’t take into account smol Loki’s actual personality. I mean, we went into what traits he doesn’t have but what about those he has?

Namely Lucky and Family-Oriented.

I think Lucky is a very interesting choice. There’s nothing inherent about Loki Beaker that would make you go “that’s one lucky guy!” (if you don’t count his relationship with Circe as a stroke of luck, that is) and the same goes for smol Loki.

But... it could be a clue. His metamorphosis either couldn’t be triggered by trauma because he’s lucky and it would avoid him, or it must’ve been something tremendously horrid so he’s lucky he’s still alive.

Now we know we are searching for something that happened in his late childhood, verging on the start of his teenage years. His family was going through the turmoil of moving to a desert and he has already known his future partner Circe. Meanwhile Erin-

Oh, wait. Erin.

Smol Loki was Family-Oriented which implies he would probably have a good relationship with his little sister, as he would’ve naturally inclined to protect her and help his parents take care of her. But!

Not only do they have an amicable but distant relationship as adults but Erin seems to forget that Loki even existed in her childhood.

He has the usual set of memories of a sibling growing up well but she doesn’t, she has no Loki-related memories at all, not even of his marriage, which was a quite recent event.

Could the reason for Loki’s “downfall” be somehow related to his sister? Was there a dramatic event in which she lost a part of her memory?

5: Theories!

Ok, we’re finally here! Now I try to present some theories about what might’ve happened.

1. Burdens of the golden child

In Aurora Skies, Loki used to be the little wonder every relative was gushing about. With his father as an acclaimed scientist and a very liked person in general, there was little to no adversity his son had to face. He followed his passion and having nobody to really compare himself to, nor anybody who would terrorize him, he prospered.

But then the Beakers moved. Strangetown was... different. It was way smaller than Aurora Skies, so everybody inherently knew everybody and everybody had to interact with everybody... because the small space of a desert community didn’t leave them with any choice. And it was bleak and unfriendly. No one except for the Salamises knew the Beakers, so they found themselves under scrutiny from their new neighbors.

So Loki, who used to live thinking he was unique, was now sitting everyday in a much smaller classroom with Pascal and Vidcund Curious, whom he was immediately being compared to. But he wasn’t like the Curiouses. He was a kid of a scientist but wasn’t a science kid. He didn’t have much in common with Pascal who approached him and tried to befriend him at first but he wanted to. In Strangetown, nothing seemed to be cooler than being really, really into science. Pascal’s and Loki’s communication attempts were rather poor, though, and in the end, they never made friends. Loki slowly began to disdain the oldest Curious boy and it culminated a few years later in high school when Pascal made an attempt to woo Circe. It was even worse with Vidcund. Ever since Loki’s first day at the new school, Vidcund had been eyeing him with a disgusted look and Loki became quick to reciprocate.

In Strangetown, nothing seemed to be cooler than being really, really into science. Even Circe was on it! She was the only person his age he has know in Strangetown before his family moved in and he liked her. Not “like” liked her, yuck! But he thought she was cool. Her family used to visit the Beakers in Aurora Skies and they played together. She was a friend! Or so Loki thought. She seemed to like hanging out with the Curiouses much more.

In Strangetown, nothing seemed to be cooler than being really, really into science, yes. But not in the eyes of Buzz Grunt, the son of a general who lived in Strangetown. Their family were the self-proclaimed protectors of the hood but at the same time they weren’t shy to show a strong distaste for all that made Strangetown an important desert settlement in the first place. And little Buzz, although Loki doubted he understood the nuances, was very fond of asserting his dominance over his less sporty and hyper-masculine classmates.

Suddenly jealous of the Curious brothers, under pressure from both the adults and his peers comparing him to them and bullied by Buzz, Loki’s social life fell apart. He started having problems... and he came up with solutions. He has always liked science but from back then on he hyperfixated on it to prove everybody who picked on him for being a worthless parody of a science kid wrong.

Not only his social life and self-confidence were busted, though. Moving away from Aurora Skies to Strangetown that had much higher prices for housing because of the limited space, the living standards for the Beakers lowered. It was chaotic and uncomfortable. Plus, almost everybody in Strangetown was loaded. Why, Circe and her parents lived in a small castle! Loki felt like they’re the only “poor” family around and it played into his new-found insecurities.

And then there was Erin’s accident. She suffered a severe head injury and even though she fortunately survived, she was never... the same. She had issues with her memory. Loki tried to convince himself that he’s big enough not to cry but when they were visiting Erin in the hospital and she didn’t recognize him, he cried. It was his little sister! And... it was all his fault anyway! If he was quicker and pushed her to safety, she would’ve been fine! Or even better, he wished the car would’ve hit him instead.

Loki was becoming more and more snappy, focused on his grades and projects, unavailable. The siblings never mended their relationship, Erin, even though she recovered, never got to make new memories with her brother. Not remembering them growing up together, he was like a stranger to her. A scary mean teenage boy she didn’t know and, even though she was a very friendly child, she was too intimidated to willingly spend time with him. And Loki was always busy and moreover, he felt guilty and inexplicably angry, so he postponed approaching her, until it was too late, he was in college, she was in high school and it was too awkward.

And... there was no time to write anymore.

2. Gertrude the Neat and Mean (and Lazy)

Ok, Loki doesn’t have any memories of his grandma. But hear me out! Erin does not have any of him either and yet they met. This theory doesn't require any additional write up – he simply got under the influence of his 0 Nice points granny and she cultivated him to be just like her.

My personal take: This is maybe my least favorite theory of them all, even though it is quite straightforward. It doesn't take much into consideration and demonizes Gertrude, who as far as we know, might not done anything wrong.

3. The accident

This theory takes advantage of TS3's canon sciency machinery, namely Cerebralizing Brain Enhancing Machine 2.0.

It can, among other things, change a Sim's personality. There is (quite unfortunately, in my opinion) no chance of consequential failure in the actual game, the most it can do is to (non-fatally) electrocute your Sim. But...

Imagine smol Loki sneaking into his dad's laboratory, most probably at his workplace.

He was curious. Ever since his father showed him all the equipment in there, all he could think of was the machine that made people smarter.

Maybe it could make him smarter?

I mean, Loki knew he was already quite smart. At least, he's been told he was and he had no reason not to believe it.

But he could be even smarter.

He could be like his dad. Or his mom. Or Erin. Everyone was talking about how clever young Erin seemed. Loki was proud of her but part of him just wanted that, too.

So what if... he went to dad's laboratory, just for a little while, and made himself smarter?

He made all the necessary preparations. It meant to memorize dad’s schedule, so he knew just the time when he could sneak into the laboratory. It also meant to get a good costume so he won’t be recognizable on the security footage!

And then finally, he was ready. To infiltrate the laboratory was easy enough but it only made Loki more nervous. He was on the edge but determined. He wanted to make it big in the world. He needed to seize the opportunity. And fear... fear was there to be ignored! Hands, stop trembling!

His confidence grew a bit once he got to the machine itself. He knew how to run it thanks to his dad and it made him feel competent and ready.

Little did he know that there was a huge oversight. Although Loki could operate the technology on a very basic level, his knowledge went nowhere near deep enough for him to detect that the machine has yet another set of settings and those currently expect an adult user. It wasn’t configured for a child patient.

But unaware of that, the boy in his patchy dinosaur costume climbed on top of the machine and with his eyes wide open and his heart racing he connected the Brain Enhancer to his system. Then, with his hand sweating, he pushed a button on a remote he was clutching to.

When Bjorn, alerted by Loki’s screams, rushed into the laboratory, it was way too late.

As his terrified father was calling the ambulance, the child was alive and even still awake. He was too weak to cry. He just watched Bjorn, wishing for death and looking for signs of wrath in father’s eyes.

There were none. Only fear.

Physically, Loki Beaker managed to recover just fine. With the power of advanced medicine and plastic surgery, the burns he suffered were reduced to nothing but almost invisible scars.

But inside, he was never the same. Literally. Even though the procedure backfired horribly, it still worked to some extend - but even that extend was warped. Loki succeeded in giving himself the Genius trait but several of his traits were replaced also, including the Lucky trait that probably saved his life.

6: Conclusion!

I like Loki very much. (no sh*t, who would’ve guessed) He’s a very controversial and over-the-top character who tends to be rather unpredictable in the actual gameplay. I started writing this giant thing to find an answer to his backstory that would satisfy me and hopefully also some of you.

With a heavy heart I conclude I’m not successful.

First I have to admit I originally planned to present 5 theories instead of 3 but I scrapped 2 of them.

First was about Atom time traveling and replacing Loki, creating himself again and again in a time loop (would explain the huge personality difference between smol Loki and Loki-Atom) and it was very far-fetched but fun, alas I realized it was out of character for Atom, since he seems to love his sister and his Plumbot so much he would hardly leave them behind to pull that off.

The second was about Nervous and the corrupting power of Death he has inside that would slowly drive Loki and Circe “evil” even though it’s unclear whether they first adopted him with being a lab-rat in mind. But it would not make sense since a change like that would be visible on their personality panels. That’s not that important, though. What made me not include this theory is that it feels uncomfortably victim blame-y. It’s not directly since it wouldn’t be Nervous’ fault anyway but any attempt to shift the blame from Loki and Circe in this situation feels uncomfortable.

(To be clear, I don’t think the Beakers deserve demonization. In my opinion, the best way to treat them narrative-wise is like eccentric people capable of feeling love and doing good things sometimes, yet irredeemably self-centered, morally bankrupt and deserving a lifetime in jail for child abuse they have done on Nervous. Not one-dimensional but still villains and still objectively bad people.)

And those 3 theories above? They could’ve been better.

I think I like the first the most, even though I still feel like something is missing. I just tend to like relatively grounded explanations and this one doesn’t feature the supernatural nor any deus ex machina gadget.

What about you? And do you have any other theories? Sky’s the limit! It’ll make my day to hear them!

Whatever your takes are, they’re all valid.

#loki beaker #strangetown #premades #the sims 2 #the sims #simbrl #headcanon #ts2

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autisticsupervillain · 3 years

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I don't talk about my inFAMOUS hyperfixation enough, so here's some stuff.

Dark Danny and Kessler are basically polar opposites of each other as far as Evil Future Me villains go.

Kessler: I fucked up, destroyed the world, and lost everyone I ever cared about. I need to go back in time and make sure that doesn't happen.

Dark Danny: I fucked up, destroyed the world, and lost everyone I cared about. I better go back in time and make sure that does happen.

It gets me wondering... what if Dark Danny was The Beast that Kessler wanted Cole to destroy?

Let me introduce the inFAMOUS Phantom AU.

The year is 20xx in the not so distance future. Danny Phantom finally dropped his heroic charade and embraced his ghostly nature, going on a rampage from Wisconsin to Amity Park, decimating all he sees. The Guys In White only manage to capture and contain him using their newly aquired Conduit unites. Conduits are humans who have the Conduit gene, a genetic failsafe that, when activated, could give the bearer extraordinary powers. The Conduit gene was only able to be activated recently thanks to the advancements pushed by their head scientist, Cole MacGraph.

Cole is put in charge of containing Phantom. His technology is several years ahead of the rest of the world, after all, and it's jis discoveries that unlocked the secrets of the Conduit gene and allowed Phantom to be captured to begin with.

However, Phantom is incrediblybclever and quickly thinks up a plan to escape. Taking the form of his younger, human self, Danny Fenton, Phantom tells him of his origins. Of the ghost portal that turned him half ghost, of the grand heroic adventures he had.... and of how his parents kept trying to kill him, despite his heroic deeds. Phantom claims that his ghost half and his human half have separate personalities, and that his ghost half came to despise the human race for their hatred of him.

"Please... I just want to go home. I miss my friends... I miss my mom... Wait, my parents... the Fenton Ghost Catcher! You can separate my two halves! That way my ghost half will dissolve when separated from his host!"

This is all an elaborate lie, painstakingly sprinkled with enough truth to be believable. Daniel Fenton is dead. All that happens when the Ghost Catcher is used is that the ghost (Phantom) is expunged from his non-ghost containment chamber. Phantom uses the opportunity to possess Cole with an invisible duplicate while the Conduit team recontain him. He then uses Cole's notes and free access to the facility to carefully plan his escape, whilst assassinating the Conduit team to ensure they don't stand in his way. He also kills Cole's family, both to keep them from questioning his odd behavior and to give his own strange behavior an excuse. Of course he's getting strangely close to the Conduit team, he's grieving and needs companionship.

Fortunately, Phantom didn't plan for Cole having friends outside the GIW. When Zeke Dunbar strangely stops receiving Cole's calls, he goes undercover to investigate. Putting together what happened from Cole's notes on Phantom, Zeke frees Cole with the Fenton Ghost Catcher in front of what remains of the Conduit team. Cole and Zeke escape as Phantom slaughters what remains of the Conduit team, as well as the rest of the GIW.

Zeke urges Cole to help fight off Phantom, but Cole instead becomes obsessed with resurrecting his family. He ignores Zeke's attempts to reason with him, runs away again every time Phantom shows up wherever he's hiding. Until it's to late. To late to fight back. To late to do anything. As far as Cole knows, he's the last man on Earth when Phantom sends Zeke's battered body flying through his door.

Phantom recognizes him and laughs, taunting him over the sob story he had about his family. "The best part is that it's all true, to a degree. I didn't even have to lie to trick you."

But, as soon as Dan tries to blast him, Cole is saved by two words.

"Time Out."

Clockwork appears and gives Cole a Time Medallion, before deciding to strike a deal with him. He offers Cole the chance to go 20 years back in time in order to prevent this future. Cole accepts. Taking the name Kessler upom arriving in the past, Cole gets to work.

Firstly, Kessler rejoins the GIW under his new identity, quickly rising through the ranks with his forehand knowledge and scientific prestige. He pushes development of the Conduit project ahead by several decades, giving himself powers and creating a cult of personality around himself in the process. Anyone who opposes his hostile takeover is quietly disposed of and Cole MacGrath finds himself expelled from college on mysterious grounds, never getting a chance to join the GIW.

Kessler creates a weapon called the Ray Sphere, a device designed to explode and kill any non-Conduit caught in it's blast. The Conduits will have their powers supercharged by the bio-electricity absorbed from all non-Conduits killed in the explosion, artificial advancing their development.

Kessler manipulates Cole into detonating the Ray Sphere in Empire City, before using the GIW resources to launch a hostile take over the city to "control the damage", all whilst having the government create a cover story so that Phantom doesn't get involved. Cole is forced to adabt and become stronger to survive with all the odds stacked against him, exactly as Kessler intended, forging Cole into the hero that he himself was not. After Kessler kills Cole's girlfriend to keep him from getting distracted from his mission, he challenges his past self to a climactic final battle to prove he's become as strong as he needs to be.

Cole emerges victorious and Kessler uses his final breath to show Cole visions of the future. Of the massacre of mankind, of the death of his family, of the sob story that Phantom manipulated him with. Cole is sent reeling from the revelation that Kessler is his future self and it is now up to him to save the world. As a reminder of the task he must now uptake, Cole grabs the Time Medallion off Kessler's body, not knowing it's true significance.

But, of course, that is only one path thay the parade might take. There is an equally valid timeline where Cole takes the opposite lesson from all the hardship he endures. He learns not to be responsible, but to be strong. Not to be compassionate, but to be vengeful. Not to save lives, but to gain power. While in one world Cole becomes a FAMOUS hero, in another, he becomes an inFAMOUS villain.

Both Coles set course to Amity Park, with their best friend Zeke by their side. One hoping to save the world, the other hoping to destroy the competition. Good Cole takes the sneakier approach when challenging Phantom. He has Zeke create a distraction for the Fentons by claiming to be an investor interested in their research, while Cole sneaks downstairs. MacGrath trashes the ghost portal, alongside anything else that might be useful to Phantom in the fight against him, before carving "meet me in Central Park, Phantom" into the wall with lightning.

Evil Cole takes the more direct approach, instead blasting the Fenton building apart with a giant thunder bolt. What Cole wasn't prepared for was for the Fentons to survive and for their ghost weapons to be able to harm him, forcing him back long enough for Danny Fenton to transform into Danny Phantom.

Either way, Cole MacGrath comes face to face with a Danny Phantom who is varying degrees of pissed.

Their fight is suprisingly even and both end up bring good counters to the other. Cole's resistance to mind control is sufficiently enough that he can ward off Danny's possession, his Radar Sense counters invisibility thanks to homing in on Danny's bio-electricity, while his own projectile versatility is strong enough to match most of what Danny can throw at him and then some. Danny, meanwhile, has actual flight to counter Cole's gliding, shapeshifting and Intangibility to dodge attacks, and is a better close range fighter when compared to Cole's over reliance on range. Evil Cole also has in edge in that he's willing to leverage civilian lives to give himself an edge, either by using them as hostages or by outright draining their bio-electricity to heal himself. Either way, it's a long fight that sends the two flying and fighting across all of Amity Park.

It comes to an end when Sam and Tucker and the sidelines realize Cole's weakness to water, spraying him with a hose to incapacitate him long enough for Danny to get close. Zeke rushes in to help, as do Sam and Tucker, but Danny ends up grabbing Cole's time medallion, sending the five flying off to meet Clockwork.

When there, the five witness Danny's evil future firsthand, with even Evil Cole suprised by the raw power on display by Dark Danny. Clockwork appears and explains how he sent Kessler back in time to alter history and prevent this future, but that plan "failed" so now he's going to "kill" them. However, Cole is able to quickly deduce the importance of the medallions and throws one on him and Zeke. Evil Cole only gives more to Danny and Friends upon Zeke's insistence. The five run into the future, coming face to face with Dark Danny himself.

Dan recognizes Cole, Zeke, and Clockwork's medallions, commenting about how "even dead, MacGrath's a pain in my ass". Cole and Danny try to fight him, but neither can get any good hits in, and the five are forced to run away. Cole only manages to save Zeke at the last second by blasting his time medallion, causing him to do the same to the rest of the medallions to keep Dan from following them into the past.

Cole initially thinks that that's the end of it. Danny saw his future self and was just as horrifed as they were. He's scared straight and won't be a problem anymore. Evil Cole, meanwhile, immediately goes back to trying to kill Danny to eliminate the competition. Either way, Sam and Tucker interrupt and point out that Dark Danny could still come back. He has the time medallions and if he puts them back together, he could travel back in time to prevent his past from changing. Indeed, Dark Danny is trying to do just that, as he has enough Vlad in him to try putting the advanced tech back together.

Cole and Danny are forced to train together to defeat Dark Danny, giving Danny the opportunity to learn who Cole is and what his deal is. Especially seeing how destroyed all the Fenton tech, so teaming up is the only real option. This gives Cole the opportunity to test his mettle against Danny's villains, from stomping Technus by draining all his technology to working together to beat Vlad.

Within the span of a few months, Cole and Danny are stronger than ever... and they'll have to be, because Dark Danny has arrived. The Ultimate Enemy is here, and they're the only ones who can stop him.

#danny phantom #infamous #danny fenton #cole macgrath #dark danny #kessler #zeke dunbar #sam manson #tucker foley

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isabellehemlock · 3 years

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Hiatus Announcement

Hi loves, so as I talked about here, I’m taking a semi hiatus. I have two months of stuff queued up, so hopefully I can basically support content creators in our fandom - just from afar as I delete the app for at least one month, and potentially a little longer.

This is for a few reasons which I’ll talk about under the cut, but I’ll keep it vague for privacy reasons, and because it’s a bit exhausting to rehash all of this. CW/TW for mental health issues, and c-ptsd mentioned, but not detailed, nor the reasons behind it. Chronic health issues, and the American healthcare system is also discussed, though fairly vaguely. But figured I’d mention it anyway!

I had shared back in March about needing a fandom break from tumblr, and though that was essentially only a small part of my fandom experience, it obviously had a pretty big impact on my mental health. I returned in April, and wrapped up a big fic in May and basically tried taking care of my mental health by curating my feed as best as possible and changing my privacy settings and just really focusing on how I could offer the kind of support that wasn’t personally draining for me - which most consistently seems to be hyping up the content creators in our fandom :) I love to see so many talented people in our fandom and cheer you all on!

I also focused on writing and drawing more than ever, and honestly I did mean what I talked about here on the anniversary, about how much this fandom means to me.

However, what I haven’t shared - since this primary/personal blog has basically turned into a fandom blog - was that I’ve been dealing with some chronic physical health issues since the end of April. Some dear friends are aware that I have a genetic condition that requires me to take weekly infusions to combat the long term effects of this.

Unfortunately my insurance has been denying me this treatment since April. I have now gone fifteen weeks without it.

I recently learned (just last week actually!) that I won an appeal and my hospital and med team are coordinating to get me an infusion asap. But it hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not sure when it will :/

All this to say that I simply do not have the mental, and physical energy, to keep up with real life of being a wife and mother (my kids have been home full time since March 2020, and bless them for their patience as we homeschooled with bundles, vs online school, but this new Delta variant is scary because they do not have options for vaccines yet), and helping take care of other family members who also deal with chronic health issues, and trying to nurture relationships that have fallen to the wayside during the pandemic, and embrace new ones I have made over the last year, and write, and draw as a way to combat stress and as art therapy for myself and be on tumblr trying to keep up.

So for now, I’m staying in a fandom server, and reshifting my focus on my WIPs which should keep me busy through October. I genuinely hope to be back before then!

I am hoping by taking a step back from one more app to manage, I can shift and refocus my limited energy to some things I need to take care of in real life (mostly med management, and organizing things before my kids go back to school next month). People who are close to me know how to reach me, and please know my discord app is open for DMs if again there’s anything I need to update on a fic or a meta post of mine, or you need some encouragement from me in regards to something you created, or just want to talk :)

I am so grateful for the support you’ve given me so far, and I hope to return refreshed and restored!

Plus, maybe I'll finally whittle down my marked for later list (there’s currently 200+ fics for me to read!).

I was hoping to wait till I finished the last two bingo fills - so feel free to keep an eye on them on my AO3 - but I’m not sure if that will take a few more days.

So I’m logging off now, and wishing everyone well.

And please know my mental health is stronger then it was back in March (yay!), I just unfortunately am dealing with a lot of personal stress right now, but it’ll all be okay! I will return, and until then fill free to browse my pinned posts. And I hope you enjoy some things I queed.

Until then loves, be well and God bless ~ Katharina

#hiatus announcement #until September loves #be well and God bless #cw tw mental health #digital boundaries #just a break from tumblr #still around in the fandom and will continue to write and draw #much love to you all

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gthreepio · 3 years

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i’ve been thinking about the future of the mcu and realized there’s a LOT that i didn’t know/didn’t remember in terms of where things are going so i figured i’d sum it up incase anyone else was in the same boat!!

quick recap of (unresolved) mid-credit scenes:

doctor strange: mordo (a sorcerer that is one of strange’s mentors, who by the end of the movie becomes disillusioned with magic/the ancient one and quits) confronts pangborn (the paraplegic who healed himself with the mystic arts, who tells strange about mystic arts in the first place) and steals his magic because according to mordo, there are “too many sorcerers." of note, this guy is typically a villain in the comics but hasn’t been thus far...

gotg2: ayesha (leader of the sovereign, a golden skinned alien race obsessed with genetic purity), after spending most of the movie chasing the guardians for stealing some stuff, is revealed to have created an artificial being named “adam” which is presumably, adam warlock. (other stuff that is less relevant: kraglin appears to take up yondu’s mantle; the ravagers regroup and several old and obscure comic book characters are introduced [charlie-27, aleta, martinex, mainframe]; the watchers are watching things.)

far from home: j jonah jameson basically tells the whole world spider-man’s secret identity, and frames him for what happened with mysterio....making him public enemy #1. ALSO, turns out nick fury and maria hill in the movie were ACTUALLY the two skrulls from captain marvel (talos and soren) attempting to do their job, while the real fury (and presumably hill) is ... up in space on some spaceship!!!

wandavision: monica (who we can assume is photon) is called by “an old friend of [her] mother’s,” up in space, which presumably means fury, talos, or carol. ALSO, wanda sits in the middle of nowhere reading the darkhold and hears the voices of her children who.. by all accounts, should not exist.

aaaaand what we know about future movies (i’m not even going into the tv series.....):

black widow:

takes place after civil war

nat confronts a “dangerous conspiracy with ties to her past,” likely has to do with taskmaster who has apparently taken over the red room where nat was trained as an assassin

prominent new characters: yelena belova, who will take over the mantle of black widow after this; alexei shostakov aka red guardian, an ollllld marvel hero analogous to captain america except for the soviet union.

tony stark will make an appearance... SOBS

shang-chi and the legend of the ten rings:

shang-chi has never been seen in the mcu before, but he is, essentially, a superhero that is a master martial artist, and in some adaptations can also create duplicate (fake) versions of himself to confuse opponents

main villain will be the the mandarin who we have *sort of* seen before... he is the leader of a terrorist organization called “ten rings” whose main goal is to destroy world peace. brief history -- in iron man 1: one ten rings cell kidnaps tony stark and tries to force him to make weapons (he of course, makes his suit instead). stark and ten rings become enemies and fight a bunch. nat and nick fury fight them too. in iron man 3, the villain aldrich killian hires a dude to pretend to be the mandarin and claim responsibility for a bunch of stuff, but its not the ten rings or the mandarin at all. this makes the mandarin v mad and he has a dude kidnap the faker to punish him. they also briefly show up in ant-man, when a ten rings agent tries to buy the yellowjacket suit that darren cross is selling. BUT IN SHANG-CHI....... looks like we are FINALLY going to see the real mandarin after over a decade!!

the villain razor fist will also show up, he is lesser known... he has no superhuman powers but he has surgically replaced his hands (1 or 2, depending on the version) with a steel blade, and is highly skilled at hand to hand combat.

besides the presence of these characters, the only bit of plot we know is “shang-chi is drawn into the ten rings organization and forced to confront his past.” so... yeah. we don’t know much at all.

eternals:

quick explanation: the eternals are an immortal alien race who have been secretly living on earth for thousands of years. they were created by the celestials, who are most prominently in gotg2.

more entirely new characters!!! their names are: thena, who can form any weapon out of cosmic energy; gilgamesh, who can make a super strong exoskeleton out of cosmic energy; ikaris, who has superhuman strength, flies, and can project cosmic energy out his eyes; kingo, who can shoot cosmic energy projectiles from his hands; makkari, who creates sonic booms, has super speed, and is deaf; phastos, who has enhanced intelligence, and is also gay (and married with a kid!); ajak, who has healing powers; sprite, who can project illusions; sersi, who can manipulate matter; druig, who can mind control; and dane whitman (black knight), a human with a mystical sword.

regarding the plot... it seems the eternals have kind of dispersed, but have to come together again to fight the deviants, who are their “evil counterparts” (also created by the celestials, though i’m unclear on why). thena and gilgamesh have apparently been in exile, unclear why; sersi, who is posing as a museum curator, has apparently been in love with ikaris for centuries and it seems as if their love story may be central to the film; and kingo is a bollywood film star in his spare time. aaaaand that’s pretty much all we know.

directed by chloé zhao of nomadland fame!

spider-man no way home:

based on the post-credits scene in far from home, peter parker will now be known as spider-man to everyone. unclear if he’s going to be seen as a bad guy due to mysterio framing him, but i guess we’ll see!

jamie foxx is electro, and alfred molina is doctor octopus; which is VERY interesting considering they played these roles in other spider-man franchises, once again stirring up excitement for possible multiverse.

there have been *multiple* reports that andrew garfield, kirsten dunst, tobey maguire, and emma stone will be in the movie but tom holland has repeatedly denied this... so... who knows.

there are also rumors that matt murdock / daredevil (from netflix) will be in several scenes! not confirmed though.

MJ is still his girlfriend and i hope it stays that way!!

doctor strange will be featured in the movie, taking on the mentor role now that tony stark is gone :( this will be interesting as i.. haven’t really seen them interact much before. because of this inclusion some people speculate that the film may draw inspo from some comic storylines where peter’s secret identity is restored with magic.

doctor strange in the multiverse of madness:

scarlet witch is essentially co-starring!!! it’s going to be really interesting to see if they bring vision or the twins into this at all, though i’m not counting on it.

seems like mordo will be the main villain -- recall the ds1 post credits scene where he is apparently running around trying to steal people’s magic.

america chavez will make her debut!!!!!! i have no idea how this plays into anything but i am so excited!!

regarding the plot, all we really know is that strange has been researching the time stone, mordo messes with him, and this results in him accidentally unleashing “unspeakable evil.” presumably there will also be heavy involvement of the multiverse, and who knows what kind of craziness that will bring!!

initially was going to be directed by scott derrickson who did ds1; however he stepped down to being just EP due to “creative differences.” i am presuming this is because derrickson really wanted to make this more gothic and horror than disney was comfortable with. i REALLY hope they keep some of those elements though and don’t erase the idea entirely! anyway, it will be directed by sam raimi now (of evil dead and spiderman 2002 fame).

the film also reportedly ties in with the loki series (will loki show up!?) and spiderman 3 (which is obvious enough, given that strange is in that movie and those curious electro and doctor octopus castings...)

thor: love and thunder

directed by taika waititi again, hell yeah!!! and he has stated, the film will be “so over the top now in the very best way" and would make ragnarok look like a "run of the mill, very safe film" .... so.... oh god

so many great returning players!!! including.... valkyrie (now the king of new asgard), jane foster, lady sif, korg, star-lord, mantis, drax, nebula, and kraglin (takes up yondu’s mantle after he dies in gotg2)

in this movie, thor isn’t thor anymore.... it’s JANE!!! she gets cancer :( and is undergoing treatment while simultaneously being thor. i’m a little nervous how this will be handled, but i’m excited. (it’s based off an amazing comic series by jason aaron)

the big bad: gorr the god butcher, played by christian bale! the gist of it is, this dude HATES gods because nobody helped when his family was dying and in need. his weapon is “all-black the necrosword,” forged from the head of a celestial, and allows the user to create wings and fly at extreme speeds. honestly, he sounds cool as fuck.

valkyrie is going to be made canonically bisexual!!!

it will explore more of korg’s backstory, and also include... space sharks!?!?! an alien race from the comics.

taika has called the script “very romantic” so take that as you will

black panther 2

will again be directed by ryan coogler

not much is known at this point, does not have an official name

t’challa will NOT be recast (which i’m happy about) so..... honestly no idea what to expect for this one. i think we can probably expect shuri to have an expanded role. all we know so far is they will be “exploring the world of wakanda.” not clear to me how this is different from the upcoming wakanda D+ series.

tenoch huerta has reportedly been cast as a villain, but no one has any idea who. there’s also rumors that donald glover is in “informal talks” to play a role. note all of this is unconfirmed.

captain marvel 2

will be directed by nia da costa (candyman!) and written by megan mcdonnell, who is one of wandavision’s best writers!

will take place in the present day

will feature kamala khan / ms. marvel, monica rambeau / photon!!! this will be so interesting.... kamala is a huge fan of carol’s in the comics, she is her mentor/idol. the ms. marvel series will also resportedly lead into cm2. and monica, well, monica knew her when she was a little kid. wandavision implies that there’s some bad blood between carol and monica though, not sure why. maybe because carol left and never came back? (until endgame)

post-credits scene of wandavision appears to tie into this, having monica go up into space at the reqeust of her “mom’s old friend.” again, not clear who that is. this could also be a tie in to secret invasion though, so we’ll see. or both.

zawe ashton has been cast as an unknown villain... a lot of people are actually speculating that she may play rogue? which would be fascinating, as there’s a comic arc where rogue steals her powers and memories. BUT there’s still no confirmation that X-men exist in the MCU so for now i remain skeptical.

they are looking to cast a ‘john boyega’ or ‘michael b jordan’ type which makes me wonder if they are going to create a new character, a “younger” war machine to be her love interest? (note: carol and rhodey are a huge thing in comics!) carol obviously does not look her age but her and don cheadle.... that just doesn’t work. which is why i wonder.

ant-man and the wasp: quantumania

in addition to scott and hope, pretty much all the major players are returning including: luis, hank pym, janet van dyne

cassie lang has been recast with an actress 5 years older, which is really making me wonder if they are going to make her stinger in this movie! (aka one of the main young avengers)

the villain: kang the conqueror! this dude time travels. original name nate richards. in the comics, kang travels back in time to rescue his younger self (nate) from an attack that would help shape him towards a life of villainy. kang also gives him some fancy armor. his younger self actually is like, what the fuck dude? and renounces his destiny, becoming a hero. and he makes his armor look like iron man, calling himself iron lad. who is a young avenger. which also makes me wonder about cassie lang.

otherwise not much is known!

guardians of the galaxy vol. 3

james gunn is returning, i’m mixed about this...he really does *get* the guardians though.

based on the gotg2 post credits scene, i think we can assume adam warlock will be a HUGE part of this. there are multiple versions of him, some villainous and some heroic, but no idea how this is gonna turn out.

no word yet on whether thor will be involved, or if those ravagers they introduced will be involved.

fantastic four

will be directed by the spiderman guy, john watts.

otherwise we know literally nothing.

aaaaand that’s the roundup!

#mcu #marvel #black widow #shang chi and the legend of the ten rings #eternals #smnwh #spiderman: no way home #doctor strange in the multiverse of madness #dsitmom #thor: love and thunder #tlat #black panther 2 #captain marvel 2 #ant man and the wasp: quantumania #amatwq #guardians of the galaxy vol. 3 #gotg3 #fantastic four #mcu thoughts

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