#or even if other characters are somewhat aware- but our main character has been massively underplaying the situation

[captainkirkk]

I'm a big fan of hurt/comfort tropes where the hurt is ongoing and escalating. Characters trying to cope with their situation and insisting that it's fine, they're fine, even as things get worse and worse and worse - especially if no one around them knows what they're going through.

Characters hiding their illness, even as they grow sicker and sicker. Characters trying to cope as their homelife becomes increasingly abusive or neglectful. Characters ignoring their injuries, only for them to become infected. Characters being stalked/ tormented by a villain and pretending that everything is fine, even as the villain continues escalating. Characters left homeless as winter approaches and their money dwindles.

I could go on. There's something very satisfying about seeing a character frantically trying to pretend like everything is okay until eventually they can't hide it anymore and get caught (and helped) by the people around them.

#and seeing characters attempting to self-soothe and all their maladaptive ways of coping on their own #that's the good shit #tropes #whump #hurt/comfort #or even if other characters are somewhat aware- but our main character has been massively underplaying the situation #and convincing everyone it's not as bad as it seems (even though it's actually Much Much Worse) #my posts

[ye-bloodeh-liar]

I just finished AC Valhalla – A résumé.

I finished the "main story" of Assassin's Creed Valhalla. These are some thoughts of mine. (This was saved in my drafts for two weeks or so. But my stance hasn't altered. Actually, I'm even angrier now.)

Disclaimer: This obviously contains some spoilers here and there. You've been warned, but tbh, who even cares about the story at this point. Also, I know I don't have many followers, and I suspect none of the few that will come across this post will actually be interested in it. That said, if you like reading people's rants about things, regardless of your interest in video games, this might be something for you. I just needed to get this out of my system somewhere. This is a rant (well, vent? I'm venting, I guess) written as it came to my mind. There's no real structure, I think. Sorry for that in advance.

After Origins, which I thoroughly enjoyed and actually played again between Odyssey and Valhalla, and Odyssey, which's name was perfectly fitting since it felt like a fucking odyssey to grind through, I hoped, actually, I was convinced, Valhalla would right Odyssey's wrongs. You see, Odyssey had one big problem for me: It did none of the things that made and still make me love Origins. In short: The world was massive, but felt copied and pasted, uninteresting to explore and lifeless. Basically, it was a lot of green sprinkled with some olive branches. A lot of the times the only way to know roughly where I am was pulling up the map because based on my surroundings, I could've been anywhere. Compared to the intriguing world of Origins, where you always knew in which area of the map you currently were, this was a shitshow. I mean, just walking through the desert in Origins had more atmosphere than the whole city of Athens (the main fucking city) could ever muster up. (Oh, remember the times of AC Brotherhood, where Rome actually felt like a city even though it wasn't actually humongous like the new games are? Or how atmospheric the whole of AC II was? I mean, Venice? Hello? M a s t e r p i e c e) But I can overlook that. The combat didn't feel heavy, or to put it better, "impactful" like it did in Origins, but more like poking the enemies to their deaths with something that made sword-y sounds. But I can overlook that. The loot system improved a bit, in the sense of giving the option to modify your loot and being able to combine different armor pieces, however, Origins outfit-system was more up my alley. But I can overlook that. Funnily enough, compared to its predecessor, Odyssey looked worse. In Origins the fabric of your outfit look like actual fabric and, I can't stress this enough, waved in the wind. In Odyssey everything felt more static and somehow "fake". But I can overlook that. To me, Origins' story was masterfully done. Personally, I'd say, that this is the closest we've ever gotten to the Ezio-Trilogy. The voice acting was top notch. Bayek was a great character, and the side characters like Aya/Amunet were equally intriguing. I still remember the first time I saw the first confession cutscene after killing Medunamun. It gave me shivers and goosebumps and got me excited for what was about to come. What I want to say with this, is that Origins made me care; care about its characters, care about their backstory and motives, care about the world, etc. After I had finished the DLC The Hidden Ones I felt like I had actually witnessed the igniting spark of something epic, namely the Assassin Brotherhood, in such a chilling way, even though they basically were just chillin' in a cave. Because that's what character building gives you: payoffs. Well, Odyssey did none of that. All it did made me care about was to get all the loot, because that's what my mind always goes for in any game (I'm that kind of stupid ape). I didn't care about what would happen in the end – I just wanted to get there. I wanted to know how the story would end, but in whichever way it would, I knew I wouldn't care for it in the sense of being disappointed or yearning for a different outcome for the character I was so invested in, because, as I said, nothing got me invested in the character(s) in the first place. That's what bugged me the most about Odyssey. Not the flimsy feeling combat, not the husk of a world I found myself in, not the downgrade in design and animation, etc., but the lack of care it invoked.

Now, when Valhalla was originally announced, I was excited as I could be for a video game. Ubisoft was clearly aware of their mistakes with Odyssey and tried to show that they're willing to listen to their fanbase. A world where every area has its own identity? Sounds great. Heavy combat? Hell yeah. Gear and loot that actually matters and is special (unlike in Odyssey where after a few hours of playing you find yourself carrying the same fucking bow 25 times)? Oh my. Choices not for the sake of choices, but story? Yes please. I mean, if you have to implement choices. Even though choices don't really make sense in Assassin's Creed, but that's another topic.

Well, did it deliver (for me)? No. And to be completely honest, I prefer Odyssey, even as the grindfest that it is, over Valhalla, and me replaying Odyssey seems a lot more likely to me, than going through all of Valhalla again. I'm not going to list all of the points mentioned above again in full detail: The world is a bit more intriguing than Greece, but a shadow of what Egypt was. The combat feels heavy, yet every weapon looks too big (????) and it still feels a bit off. My biggest grudge of the minor points is actually the look/the graphics: How on earth does Valhalla manage to look less real than Origins? The fur and pelts on the armor, every piece of cloth, i mean just e v e r y t h i n g looks somewhat plasticy (at loss for a better word here; just compare Origins' outfits in motion to Valhalla's) Anyway, let's get to the real problem here, because all boils down to the point I've mentioned before: Invoking care.

This became very apparent to me after forging the fourth (?; was it the fourth? They all blur together. That's how e n t i c i n g they are. Great.) alliance or so. I didn't give a single fuck about the characters in those arcs. It was very clear that they'd be soon replaced by other characters in the next alliance's arc, which I probably wouldn't care for either, especially, since they all felt somewhat the same: empty. Alliances felt like checklists to do. Even Wincestre, which had an interesting beginning, somehow managed to loose all of its "darkness" after the first two quests. But I could overlook the dreary sidequest-like alliance arcs, if they served the main storyline in some way or form. Now you might ask, what main storyline? E x a c t l y. Looking back, there is none. At least not really. And there where a lot of times playing the game where I found myself wondering, if this alliance-arc-thing I was currently dragging myself through was in fact meant to be the actual story. But it shouldn't be. Was it? I have no fucking clue. My conclusion on what Valhalla's main overarching story is, is what follows:

Eivor's parents got killed when he was a child (never seen before lol), got adopted, and is now part of the Raven clan with his "brother" Sigurd//Sigurd comes home from some raid with the Assassins Basim and Hytham//(Eivor gets the Hidden Blade; I mean, this is an Assassin's Creed game. Big moment. Done in 2 seconds.)//Sigurd and Eivor aren't happy with the new King of Norway.//Sigurd and Eivor fuck off to England (with Basim and Hytham) to set camp there.//Eivor starts to forge alliances throughout England to make his clan's hold on England stronger.// Sigurd and Basim do their own thing.//Eivor meets Sigurd and Basim two or three times throughout his alliance forging.//Basim seems a bit off.//Sigurd says that he was told (by Basim?) that he is a descendant of the gods.// Sigurd wants to "pursue his destiny"// (sidenote: the last few things are all within one (!) short cutscene in a small house. d e v e l o p m e n t.)//Sigurd gets captured and tortured and loses his hand.//Eivor rescues Sigurd.// Sigurd is back in the settlement.//Sigurd distrusts Eivor because Eivor doesn't believe Sigurd and Sigurd thinks Eivor wants to take his title as the jarl (jarls are the bosses of settlements).// And then the end sequence hits. This is where I want to go into somewhat detail again. We go from Sigurd distrusts Eivor to "Eivor, I don't wanna be the boss of the town, so I don't hold a grudge anymore, let's go back to Norway and I'll show you I was right all along" like it's nothing. It's literally just that: You walk up to Sigurd, he says this (more or less) and you sail away. Again: development is taken very seriously in this game. Honestly, at this point I didn't even know that this was going to trigger the ending. My genuine thoughts were "Oh my, finally, after all this grinding, the story is going to start." when in reality of course, ironically, it was going to end. Absolute belter. So you sail to Norway with Sigurd, which takes fucking forever, because OF COURSE you have to sail (for everyone who didn't play the game, yes, sail, that means looking at a viking longship while occasionally moving the stick slightly to change its directions slightly) to your original settlement in Norway, for what feels like far too long, only to say Hi to your dad. Fucking lost it. I thought we were going to assassinate the King? Nah bruv let's just have some quick family talk instead. Some action? Nah. Just get back to the longship. A N D S T A R T S A I L I N G A G A I N. Where? Just around the curve of our settlement in Norway. Yes, they pulled the old trick of the ending is literally just right around the corner of your starting position hehe. Absolute belter. Is this to make it seem like something is about to happen? The calm before the storm? It doesn't work like that. Well, then you actually sail through a storm (lol), which doesn't matter, because Sigurd just says "Let's keep going" and, well, you keep going. Also, to this point the weather conditions have never affected neither Eivors health, nor the ship in any way whatsoever, so why should I be impacted by a storm now? Like, it's a nice thing for atmosphere, but at least make the ship harder to steer or something. Then you walk up a mountain. Funnily enough Sigurd walks in manner that shows that the walk against the storm isn't easy, whereas you, hah, you can just yeet yourself up that mountain like nothing. I could sprint up there. Fucking sprint. Anyway, Eivor and Sigurd enter the Isu temple, because of course, we had to throw an Isu temple in there, I mean, i t ' s A s s a s s i n ' s C r e e d. Was it hinted at before in the story? Not really. Were we chasing or searchig for it? Nah, better get that next alliance going. It just suddenly was. Again: development. So we walk to the main platform of the temple and activate the machine and bam we're in Valhalla (because at some point Ubisoft realised that maybe they should include what is literally in the name of the game). Again, were we looking for Valhalla? Like not in the sense that every viking was, but more in the sense

of was it the main objective of the game? Did Eivor look for a way to Valhalla? Was there anything that led us here other than Sigurd having had a few dreams (that only got mentioned, like, twice?) and being influenced into thinking he was a demigod or something? Nope, Eivor was looking for that next alliance to forge. So, Eivor realises that his experience of Valhalla is fake and he wants to get out. But fake-Odin doesn't want to let him go. In a really weird cutscene (jump to 6:30), Eivor eventually escapes Odin and enters a door with his settlement-family (look, I'm all here for metaphors, but this, this is just utter rubbish. It just doesn't make sense, and there is no payoff whatsoever). Odin actually had a build-up of some sort. In every assassination sequence he's there and talks with Eivor. I actually thought there would be some cool payoff/ending/reveal here. But nah, this ain't it chief. Yet somehow, until here, I had hope. I thought maybe now, building on all this confusion, there's gonna be a relatively good ending. Something enticing. Something that made everything somewhat worthwile. And Ubisoft went: Lol nah. So, you're out of the Isu machine again (for all the non-AC-peoples here: basically like the matrix. Eivor gets hooked up to the machine and experiences alternate reality: Valhalla), and Basim is there. What a twist. The guy that showed up like three times and went from friendly in the first time to super suspicious (like glaring-in-your-face-suspicious) in the two-or-so other major cutscenes he was in, has now been revealed as the enemy. Congrats to that. What a twist. The thing is, and this bothers me a lot actually, it could have been anyone there. It didn't need to be Basim. It wouldn't have felt out of place if it wasn't him. Why? Because Ubisoft failed terribly at making you connect to any character and at building any actual story (or character). It could have been Gunnar, the friendly black-smith in our settlement, and it would have been as fitting as Basim. Then Basim says that this is "for his son". Ah yes, the lost son of Basim, which was mentioned once. Right. Eivor defeats Basim by hooking him up on the Isu machine and gets back to the settlement with Sigurd (in my ending at least. There seems to be a possible ending in which Sigurd doesn't come back.) Cut to the modern day, where Layla now knows the coordinates of the Isu temple, goes there, hooks herself up to the machine, becomes the overseer of time with the other overseer of time which already was hanging out there (I mean yeah, great idea, terrible execution. Build it up, then you can have a payoff. This was just straight outta nowhere, and who cared about Layla anyway.) Anyway, meanwhile Basim, who was still hanging on that machine a fuck ton of years later, pops off, and is now living in the modern day. The idea here is, that we lost the hero (Layla) which caused the (just established) vilain (Basim) to do his fuckery in the modern day. But why should I care? Basim was basically nonexistent in the basically nonexistent story and suddendly I should feel sad or shocked, because he's in the modern day? Is this supposed to be intriguing? And yeah, Layla is "gone". Layla, who had no character building over three fucking games. Why should i be bothered? Why should I care about anything that just happened? Remember when a side character (Lucy) died in AC Brotherhood? That was intriguing. Why? Because they built her as a character we (Desmond) trusted, even though it was in the modern day (which no one really cares about in AC). And this is why Valhalla broke me and Odyssey didn't. Valhalla failed to make me care on a much deeper level. It's just a lot of nothingness. Empty characters in a nonexistent story. And by nonexistent, I mean non-built at all. When I play the game now, I have no actual reason, and throughout the game never actually had any actual reason, to continue. It was a chore. I didn't bother if after three hours of grind I would eventually get a mini-snippet of a husk of a story, and neither do I care now. Everything in

this game is so devoid of sparking curiosity and screams of lacklusterness to the point where I don't even know what I have actually expierenced. For fuck's sake Ubisoft, make me care again. At least once in 40 hours.

May I sum up Valhalla's "story" and content in the glorious words of Catherine Tate: Am I bovvered? The answer, sadly, is a holistic no.

#assassins creed #ac valhalla #sorry for the rant #this is my longest post yet #am i bovvered #sidenote: this is actually the first time that i'm genuinely pissed at ubisoft #i wasn't even this mad with odyssey #and that thing got a lot of hate #maybe i'm gonna delete this again

[silent-silver-slip]

For the behind the scenes asks: 1, 4, 16, 18?

Me? Buzzing with excitement to respond to an ask? Always! Thank you for asking lovely. ♥️♥️♥️ I am somewhat sorry for such a long post, but I am incapable of writing small things it appears. 

1. What was the first fandom and/or pairing that you wrote fic for?

Oh god, I think it was Harry Potter? I started out with original works before branching into fanfiction, so I’m not certain though.

4. Do you outline before you start writing? If so, how far do you stray from that outline?

This one’s a bit up in the air to be honest! Sometimes I outline and sometimes I don’t. Almost always, I never outline anything under like 5k, which is normally written with a basic idea that keeps growing. There are also a number of longer things that I’ve done before that didn’t really have an outline either (some of my novellas happened this way). However, a number of my longer works do get an outline - either beginning with one or I hit a roadblock and begin to sketch an outline out and then it ends up being massive and more than I expected.

Parts of my outline go into depth and parts don’t, so as a result I usually keep pretty close to it. Occasionally an extra scene or a side character will take over a bit, but usually it’s very very close which is nice and helpful.

16. What is your most underrated fic?

Oh no, decisions. [I then leave this question blank, and forget to come back to it...] Okay, so I went back and started going through my fics and I was in struggle town, let me tell you.

In the end, I picked up two main ones that I think are my most underrated ones?

There’s the broken bones of our childhood which is an HP fic and actually sparked a piece of writing that got published online in the AZE which is neat. And the other is Everybody Knows (the deal is rotten) which is a Naruto fic that’s based on Orpheus and Eurydice and their legend, but is about family instead. One of these I appreciate because of the meaning behind it and it’s writing style, and the other was a lot of fun to write and I’m pretty proud of it.

18. What is a line/scene you’re really proud of? Give us the DVD commentary for that scene.

Firstly, this assumes I remember anything I write and it doesn’t just vanish from my brain straight away. I barely know what I did yesterday, let alone an actual scene or line I wrote.

I’ve been staring at a few passages for a while, and this is awful I cannot make decisions. However! I figured I’d go with one that I haven’t mentioned in an ask response before and also isn’t too tricky to explain and comes with a good explanation? And fit my current mood I guess.

This scene comes from tonight’s our time which is a Naruto fic. It was a short fun piece to write and definitely related to something I felt back in summer. My comments are in italics.

And she reaches out, offering her hand, and Minato grips it, tight. Their hands are sweaty and gross, because of the weather and how it’s somehow still humid even as the sun sets, streaking the sky with pale purples and pinks and oranges. (Fuck yeah, I love the sunset! And the sunrise! The sky just looks so pretty almost all the time okay. But also - just the idea of people reaching out to each other even when it’s uncomfortable because they want to and they love each other regardless?)

The sky, however, is not what Kushina or Minato pay attention to. Rather, then launch forward, uncoordinated and laughing, towards where the sprinklers send water over the grass and pavement, turning it dark. (The idea of not paying attention to the sky because someone else is there and more important, more beautiful, definitely strikes a cord with me. And launching forward, laughing and unbalanced and just complete chaos? I can imagine it and it feels so good? Just letting go and- and I don’t even know, living, I suppose.)

They don’t go through the edges of the sprinkler, where the water’s a mist and light, they run through the worst of it, laughing and holding hands. Immediately, they’re soaked, clothes plastered to their skin as droplets of water run down their arms and faces and necks. Minato’s hair falls over his eyes whilst Kushina has flyaway strands finally pinned down, and she rubs a hand across her forehead, shoving them to the side so they stop irritating her. (Not gonna lie, this was partially me just working on descriptions, but hey. If it’s hot and humid and gross even at like 8.30pm, hell yeah I’m gonna run through the worst bit of the sprinkler if my friend wants too as well. That weather is gross and you’re dying, okay? Trust me on that one, it’s not fun. But, well, to meet up with a friend after so long, there’s not much I won’t do.)

Now out of the sprinkler, they turn. The weather no longer feels so hot and muggy. It’s cool and warm and the perfect temperature, even though their clothes have darkened with water and their hair will definitely turn fuzzy. (More description stuff.)

Looking at each other, they laugh, loud and wild and happy. This is, undoubtedly, what life is all about. Laughing and living, looking at each other and grinning. They’re adults but that doesn’t mean they have to leave childish acts behind them. (They’re just so happy!! They’re in their like twenties and they’re “adults” but they’re having such a fine time and they’re loving and happy and it’s just glorious. This is what we all deserve, okay? Around work and uni and life in general - we deserve to be happy and loving and loved in return, laughing and glorious and far frome alone.)

Because of the challenges I had figuring it out, there are a few of the ones I was tossing up beneath the line.

My favourite bits are in bold.

Scene from i don’t believe that love was made to break:

“Hey look,” Reggie says, “the sun’s rising.” And it is, painting the sky with colour. The sun itself is a circle of orange and the lake is fractured by every golden ray, colours rippling across the water.

Yet not one of them watches it. Instead, they are caught by each other. How the sun makes them glow. How the light gentles their faces. How they smile at each other.

The day grows warmer, the sun goes higher, and they are trapped in a single moment, aware of the way they are pressed up against each other, the way they are happy, the way they are loving without reserve.

Scene from the sea isn’t yours but you’re still the sea’s which may or may not be an AU of my own AU:

Sometimes kindness is an innate part of us, sometimes it’s there regardless of whether or not we know it. Sometimes kindness is apologising and saying ‘What can I do to help?’ Sometimes kindness is helping when help isn’t wanted but needed anyway.

In one world, there would be an information network growing in the shadows, spreading further and further with no one aware of it but one boy. In another world, there is no information network growing, but something else grows instead—hands stretching out, faces looking down. Kindness shared is kindness that can be passed on. Small things can stack, one on top of the other, and sometimes they lead to massive changes that are unforeseen. When a boy extends his hand out to a homeless child, she reaches back cautiously, but their story will end in trust and loyalty, (always).

Scene from Wayfinders‘ epilogue:

“This is what it means to be human.” The words seem to shock everyone and Toru smiles as he watches heads turn to one another, muttered discussion growing once again. “It is human to fight when the odds are against you,” he says. “It is human to say ‘we will keep living’ when it seems impossible. It is human to find a way to survive when an army marches towards you.

“It is human to fight. Sometimes this is against another opponent in a test of strength and sometimes it is against grief that threatens to overwhelm you. Sometimes you fail. Sometimes you fall. Sometimes you bow your head and give up. But you are not alone. Someone will reach ask if you’re alright. Someone will gift you a kind word. Someone will reach out a hand. There will always be someone reaching out a hand.

“A new era is dawning,” Toru lifts his chin, looks not to everyone below but to the sun overhead, shining down. “A new era is dawning and it is not one of war. It is one of peace, of love, of acceptance. It is one of kindness, of family, of friendship.” He smiles. “I speak not only to my people now, but to all of you. Let us remember hope, in times of hardship. Let us remember kindness, in times of cruelty. And let us remember to reach out and lift one another up high for you are never alone.”

(There are so many things Toru wants to say. He wants to engrave the lessons he learnt into people’s skin. He wants them to know what he does, that kindness is not a flaw, that mercy is not a weakness. But they will only learn that in time. And they have the time. They have the opportunity. Toru will see that they have all the time in the world.)

 (In the end, there is only one village that hears the words Toru does not say. One full of ghosts and laughing people. One full of refugees and fighters. One full of survivors and graves. Uzushio hears him and hears what he says with every word that escapes his lips.)

 (The sea will never die.)

#ask #zazujoy #ask game response

[firstagent]

Review: Digimon Adventure: (2020) Episode 17: The Battle in Tokyo Against Orochimon

In this episode, the team rallies together to take down a giant ferocious Orochimon, keenly aware that the more dire problem is happening everywhere around them.

Despite the fireworks, there isn’t a ton going on here. In fact, as far as the plot is concerned, it’s all about winding down the last episode and hyping up the next one. On its own, there isn’t much to stand on. Orochimon shows up and overwhelms the team, they regroup to rally and beat it. It doesn’t take a new form or a resolution of a personal conflict or even a dramatic speech. The little moments inspiring them are pretty subdued. It’s all straightforward, but still a perfectly good fight in its own right. The talking points all lie in the periphery.

The primary formula is very simple, and for an episode like this simple is sufficient. When you’re advancing the story outside of the main fight, the main fight doesn’t need to be complicated. Still weary from their first fight against Eyesmon, Orochimon shows up with unforeseen multi-head tactics they simply weren’t ready for. Taichi realizes their disadvantage and calls for a retreat, everyone except Yamato scrambling to get away. They hide, settle their nerves, form a better strategy, and come back stronger, with six crest boosts all they need to win. It’s a strength that it doesn’t rely on anything more than that. This series has always been more confident going for the big boom, so allowing itself to give us a battle with no frills and succeeding is a good step.

Not that the kids didn’t need a moment to psych themselves up. Usually these come in the form of a big powerful speech about determination or everyone reflecting on what they’ve learned about themselves so far. This time it’s more casual, everyone pointing out that they went through some trials while they were split and came out of it with some fancy Ultimate forms. It’s nothing remarkable or memorable, but, peppered with the tiniest bit of comedy, works well enough for the moment. Taichi and Yamato don’t give us anything new as far as their characters, but they do open up to each other a little more. Yamato continues to press the urgency of their mission, telling Taichi about Takeru for the first time. Taichi plays down the Orochimon threat as he’s seen enough danger to not be afraid of it.

The takeaway during their hiding that is useful is Koshiro vomiting the connection between this pocket dimension and the real world. The synchronization of time between the two worlds leads to a bunch of conclusions. Most critically, Eyesmon caused the blackouts by pulling massive amounts of data to this side, and Orochimon’s attacks are causing problems in real-world Shibuya. There’s no reason to think any of this is wrong, but he’s deriving all of this off of limited information. The extent of his speculation and the confidence he puts into them makes for a rather dubious plot dump and one of the few unwelcome exaggerations in the episode. It doesn’t help that at the moment, nobody can actually do anything with this information.

Still, it is a good excuse to spend some quality time in the real world and even give Takeru some actual screen time. We don’t learn a ton about him, though. He’s home alone, somewhat but not disturbingly calm, staring at his phone with Yamato’s contact info, and just sort of riding out the trouble. Considering everything going on, he’s… fine? I guess? It’s not all that striking. It does cement his parallels to Hikari, who is right in the middle of trouble. Orochimon’s attack sends their GPS on the fritz and a mob separates her from her mother. Yet she too is only kind of concerned. That’s a little more disturbing. Both of them see Taichi and Yamato in action, which is bound to stir something up in them.

Despite little happening, their presence is more significant than anything else going on in the episode. Between them and the return of the ominous countdown timer (who doesn’t love a good ominous countdown timer?), signs suggest something massive next time. An episode mainly centered around promising big developments in the next episode is working at a disadvantage, but this one handles the role just fine. It doesn’t go overboard with its own action, relying on good animation, music, and sound to keep us engaged. More importantly, it fulfills its goal, as the next one looks like it could blow us away.

My Grade: A-

Loose Data:

There are advantages and drawbacks to throwing in another EMP after the threat of one in episode three. On one hand, you don’t need to explain the concept again. On the other hand, it does feel like a recycled concept that’s scary but not all that novel.

Joe’s line about his falling exam scores is awkward, makes no sense, and feels like something rejected from the dub of Zero Two.

One rather annoying omission from them hiding in the subway was a proper explanation of how Yamato, Sora, and Joe wound up here. The opportunity was there, the need was there, and they just… didn’t bring it up. Feels unlikely it’ll get covered now.

Man, Mimi can’t help but drag the appearance of Palmon and Togemon. Girl, that’s cold.

There’s something nice about seeing both the kids and Digimon exhausted but satisfied after a big win like this. It both sells the energy they put into the battle, but also lets them revel in it for a moment before the next shoe drops.

See reviews of every Digimon episode at Digimon: System Restore! Support the site by joining our Patreon!  

#digimon #digimon adventure: #digimon adventure (2020)

[homestuck-info]

The Homestuck Epilogues: Bridges And Off-Ramps

Andrew Hussie has released a massive explanation of his intents behind the Epilogues and plans for the future of the franchise. Fitting to his theme on subverting delivery of content, its in the newest episode of Pgenpod.

You can listen to the full episode here, with the message around the 1 hour mark, or read the transcript below:

The Homestuck Epilogues: Bridges And Off-Ramps ; By Andrew Hussie:

The history of printed version of The Homestuck Epilogues is also the history of The Homestuck Epilogues themselves, because I originally envisioned releasing them only as a book like this, to even further emphasize their conceptual separation from the main narrative. If you know anything about the epilogues, you probably already understand that conceptually distinguishing themselves from the story by their presentation as "fanfiction" is an important part of their nature and what they are trying to say. In the form of a book (which you can read from one side, or flip upside down and read from the other) it somewhat carries the feeling of a cursed tome. Something which maddeningly beckons, due to whatever insanity it surely contains, but also something which causes feelings of trepidation. There's an ominous aura surrounding such a work, probably for a few reasons. The sheer size of it means the nature of the content probably isn't going to be that trivial. The stark presentation of the black and white covers, its dual-narrative format, the foreboding prologue combined with an alarming list of "content warnings", and even the fact that an "epilogue" is delivered with a "prologue" first, all adds up to a piece of media that appears designed to make the reader nervous about what to expect from it. Such is the nature of a cursed tome retrieved from a place which may have best been left undisturbed. It is also the nature of any creative inclination to reopen a story which had already been laid to rest - a reader's desire to agitate and then collapse the bubble which contained the imagined projection of "happily ever after", simply by observing it. There exists inherent danger in a reader's eagerness to collapse that bubble, or to crack that tome. There is also danger in a creator's willingness to accommodate that desire. It's a risk for all involved. It should be.

Obviously, it wasn't released as a book, until now (the plans for printing it had already been made, but were just delayed until well after its release on site). We decided to just release it all on the site so everyone could read it right away if they wanted. There was a long tradition of making all content freely accessible on the site, and we just produced one utterly enormous update which we were perfectly aware would cause a massive amount of discussion and agitation in the fandom. Overall it was probably better to just get it out there, let people read it relatively quickly, form their opinions on it, and then begin discussing it critically. In other words, people were going to feel something from all this, so it seemed better to just let it out there, allow the maximum number of people feel whatever it would cause them to feel, give people time to process those feelings, and then move on to whatever comes next.

But what comes next? That's a good question. I feel like the work does a lot to suggest it's not merely following up on the lives of all the characters after a few years, but also reorganizing all narrative circumstances in a way that points forward, to a new continuity with a totally different set of stakes. In this sense, I think it's heavily implied to be a piece of bridge-media, which is clearly detached from the previous narrative, and conceptually "optional" by its presentation, which allows it to also function as an off-ramp for those inclined to believe the first seven acts of Homestuck were perfectly sufficient. But for those who continue to feel investment in these characters and this world, ironically the very elements which could be regarded as disturbing or depressing are also the main reasons to have hope that there is still more to see. Because, as certain characters go to some length to elaborate on, you can't tell new stories without reestablishing significant dramatic stakes: new problems to overcome, new injustices to correct, new questions to answer. There can be no sense of emotional gratification later without first experiencing certain periods of emotional recession. And by peeking into the imagined realm of "happily ever after" to satisfy our curiosity, we discover that our attention isn't so harmless, because the complexities and sorrows of adult life can't be ignored. Nor can the challenges of creating a civilization from scratch, when several teenagers are handed god-status. It turns out the gaze we cast from the sky of Earth C to revisit everyone isn't exactly friendly, like warm sunlight. It's more like a ravaging beam, destructive and unsettling to all that could have been safely imagined. Our continued attention is the very property which incites new problems, and the troublemakers appear to be keenly aware of this. So they spring into action, and begin repositioning all the stage props for a new implied narrative. But "implied" is all it was. There was no immediate announcement for followup content, and I'm not announcing anything here yet either. More time was always going to be necessary to figure out what to do next, including what form it takes, the timing, and all those questions. For now I think it was alright to just let things simmer for a while, and give people an extended period of time to meditate on the meaning of the epilogues and why they involved the choices they did. But regardless of anyone's conclusions about it, I can at least confirm that it WAS designed to feel like a bridge piece since its conception.

Is it this way because an epilogue SHOULD be this way? No. It is this way because I thought that was the most suitable role for an epilogue to play in the context of the weird piece of media Homestuck has always been. The story experiments a lot with the way stories are told, and in particular messes with the ways certain stretches of content get partitioned and labeled. Playing with the labeling I think has ways of bringing attention to those labels, what they actually mean, and how they affect our perception of the events covered under certain labels. It can even get us to wonder why certain labels exist at all, and can expose "flaws" in the construction of stories which include them. For instance, "intermission" is such a label. But perhaps another way of saying intermission is, "whoops, the story is getting too long, here's a break from the real story with a bunch of dumb shit that doesn't matter". It's seemingly a tacit admission to a problem. And by continuing to toy with that label as the story rolls along, you start to unpack the nature of that problem by implicitly asking questions about it. If you have one intermission because the story got long... can you have two if it gets longer? Can you have even more than that? Once you have a multitude of intermissions, don't you have two dueling threads of content, one supposedly "irrelevant", and the other important? And if that's true, then is it possible for the "irrelevant" thread to accrue more importance, throwing its entire identity as "optional content" into question retroactively? And if that can happen, is it possible the two threads can flip roles, with the intermissions becoming more important than the main acts? Then once the story goes through the motions of answering "yes" to all of this, isn't it also fair to ask, why bother with this examination at all? Was it pure horseplay and trickery? Actually, yes, sort of. There is a trick involved. The gradual realization that intermission content is nontrivial forces the reader to reevaluate their perception of the material, which was originally influenced by a label presiding over that material, and what they believed that label meant. It relies on the reader's presumption about the label's meaning to disguise certain properties of the content (like relevance), and therefore disarms the reader initially, leading to the potential for subverting expectations about the content later in surprising ways. In other words, you can use whatever it is the reader already presumes they know about stories in order to control the perception of what they are reading, just by gradually shifting the boundaries of whatever it is they've been well trained to expect from certain elements.

So now the label "epilogue" has been toyed with in a similar way, and also in a manner which exposes an apparent flaw with the label. Or actually, just by using the label "epilogue" at all, it seems the story is admitting to an apparent flaw. If another way of saying intermission is "whoops, story's too long, here's a break", then an alternate way of saying epilogue is "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's some more". And we know right away this label will be subject to the same kind of trickery, since there are two story paths of eight epilogues each, prefaced by a shared prologue. It's already an unhinged implementation of the label before you even read it, which means it's probably time to get nervous about whether it satisfies your expectations about what the content existing under such a label should provide. Before you read it, it's already an invitation to start questioning what an epilogue even is, and whether it's kind of a silly idea even if applied conventionally. Take a 50 chapter novel with an epilogue, for example. Why isn't the epilogue just called chapter 51? Why was the choice made to label that content differently? Should we consider it an important part of the story, or should we not? If it's not important, why are we reading it? And if it is important, why is it given a label which is almost synonymous with "afterthought"? Is it a simple parting gift to the reader, to provide minor forms of satisfaction which the core narrative wasn't built to provide? Is it actually important to deliver those minor satisfactions? If it really is important, why didn't that content appear in chapter 51? And if it isn't, why bother at all? What are we even doing here?

By going down this path of questioning, it sounds like we're assembling a case against writing epilogues altogether. But actually, there's really nothing wrong with them. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to include in any story. It's just that the more you ask questions like these, the more you are forced to think about the true nature of these storytelling constructs, the actual purposes they're meant to serve. And with something like Homestuck, where issues like this are heavily foregrounded, like what should be considered "canon" vs. "not canon", or even more esoteric concepts like "outside of canon" or "beyond canon", then the issues you uncover when you ask such questions about an epilogue can't really be ignored. My feeling is, there's almost no choice but to turn the conventional ideas associated with epilogues completely inside-out, because of the inherent contradictions involved with crossing the post-canon threshold and revealing that which was not meant to be known. Stories end where they do for certain reasons, answering the questions which were thematically important to answer, and leaving some questions unanswered for similar reasons, and the reader is left with the task of deciphering the meaning of these decisions. Under the "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's more" interpretation of an epilogue as a flawed construct, by reopening an already closed-circuit narrative, what you're really doing is introducing destabilizing forces into something which had already reached a certain equilibrium, due to all the considerations that went into which questions to answer, and which to leave ambiguous. And these destabilizing forces became the entire basis for the construction of an entirely new post-canon narrative, for better or worse.

These are the types of things the epilogues let you to think about, along with a few other ideas. Like the fact that all narratives have perspectives and biases, depending on who is telling the story, even in the case where it's unclear if the narrator has any specific identity. The suggestion that all narratives are driven by agendas, sometimes thinly disguised, other times heavily. There's also stuff to think about just due to its presentation as fanfiction, and that it's the first installment of Homestuck which included other authors (contrary to some speculation I've seen, every word of all seven acts were written by me alone). By deploying it as mock-fanfiction, and including other authors, I'm making an overt gesture that is beginning to diminish my relevance as the sole authority on the direction this story takes, what should be regarded as canon, and even introducing some ambiguity into your understanding of what canon means as the torch is being passed into a realm governed by fan desires. If the epilogues really prove to be the bridge media they were designed to feel like, then I expect this trend to continue. The fanfiction format is effectively a call to action, for another generation of creators to imagine different outcomes, to submit their own work within the universe, to extend what happens beyond the epilogues, or to pave over them with their own ideas. And I believe the direness in tone and some of the subject matter suitably contributes to the urgency of this call to action.

I also think many of the negative feelings the story creates isn't just an urgent prompt for the reader to imagine different ideas, or ways to resolve the new narrative dilemmas. It's also an opportunity for people to discuss any of the difficult content critically, and for fandom in general to continue developing the tools for processing the negative emotions art can generate. Sorting that out has to be a communal experience, and it's an important part of the cycle between creating and criticizing art. I think not only can creators develop their skills to create better things by practicing and taking certain risks, fandom is something which can develop better skills as well. Skills like critical discussion, dealing constructively with negative feelings resulting from the media they consume, interacting with each other in more meaningful ways, and trying to understand different points of view outside of the factions within fandom that can become very hardened over time. Fandoms everywhere tend to get bad reputations for various reasons, maybe justifiably. But I don't see why it can't be an objective to try to improve fandom, just as creators can improve their work. And I think this can only happen if now and then fandoms are seriously challenged, by being encouraged to think about complex ideas, and made to feel difficult emotions. I believe when art creates certain kinds of negative feelings in people, it can lead to some of the most transformative experiences art has to offer. But it helps to be receptive to this idea for these experiences to have a positive net effect on your life, and your relationship with art.

So now I'm looking to all of you on the matter of where to go next. Wherever the most conscientious and invested members of fandom want to drive this universe, as well as the standards by which we engage with media in general, that will be the direction I follow.

#homestuck #epilogues #andrew hussie

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Andrew Hussie writes into Perfectly Generic Podcast about the Homestuck Epilogues

Transcript below comes from Reddit as well as the PGenPod wiki.

The Homestuck Epilogues: Bridges And Off-Ramps

by Andrew Hussie

The history of printed version of The Homestuck Epilogues is also the history of The Homestuck Epilogues themselves, because I originally envisioned releasing them only as a book like this, to even further emphasize their conceptual separation from the main narrative. If you know anything about the epilogues, you probably already understand that conceptually distinguishing themselves from the story by their presentation as "fanfiction" is an important part of their nature and what they are trying to say. In the form of a book (which you can read from one side, or flip upside down and read from the other) it somewhat carries the feeling of a cursed tome. Something which maddeningly beckons, due to whatever insanity it surely contains, but also something which causes feelings of trepidation. There's an ominous aura surrounding such a work, probably for a few reasons. The sheer size of it means the nature of the content probably isn't going to be that trivial. The stark presentation of the black and white covers, its dual-narrative format, the foreboding prologue combined with an alarming list of "content warnings", and even the fact that an "epilogue" is delivered with a "prologue" first, all adds up to a piece of media that appears designed to make the reader nervous about what to expect from it. Such is the nature of a cursed tome retrieved from a place which may have best been left undisturbed. It is also the nature of any creative inclination to reopen a story which had already been laid to rest - a reader's desire to agitate and then collapse the bubble which contained the imagined projection of "happily ever after", simply by observing it. There exists inherent danger in a reader's eagerness to collapse that bubble, or to crack that tome. There is also danger in a creator's willingness to accommodate that desire. It's a risk for all involved. It should be.

Obviously, it wasn't released as a book, until now (the plans for printing it had already been made, but were just delayed until well after its release on site). We decided to just release it all on the site so everyone could read it right away if they wanted. There was a long tradition of making all content freely accessible on the site, and we just produced one utterly enormous update which we were perfectly aware would cause a massive amount of discussion and agitation in the fandom. Overall it was probably better to just get it out there, let people read it relatively quickly, form their opinions on it, and then begin discussing it critically. In other words, people were going to feel something from all this, so it seemed better to just let it out there, allow the maximum number of people feel whatever it would cause them to feel, give people time to process those feelings, and then move on to whatever comes next.

But what comes next? That's a good question. I feel like the work does a lot to suggest it's not merely following up on the lives of all the characters after a few years, but also reorganizing all narrative circumstances in a way that points forward, to a new continuity with a totally different set of stakes. In this sense, I think it's heavily implied to be a piece of bridge-media, which is clearly detached from the previous narrative, and conceptually "optional" by its presentation, which allows it to also function as an off-ramp for those inclined to believe the first seven acts of Homestuck were perfectly sufficient. But for those who continue to feel investment in these characters and this world, ironically the very elements which could be regarded as disturbing or depressing are also the main reasons to have hope that there is still more to see. Because, as certain characters go to some length to elaborate on, you can't tell new stories without reestablishing significant dramatic stakes: new problems to overcome, new injustices to correct, new questions to answer. There can be no sense of emotional gratification later without first experiencing certain periods of emotional recession. And by peeking into the imagined realm of "happily ever after" to satisfy our curiosity, we discover that our attention isn't so harmless, because the complexities and sorrows of adult life can't be ignored. Nor can the challenges of creating a civilization from scratch, when several teenagers are handed god-status. It turns out the gaze we cast from the sky of Earth C to revisit everyone isn't exactly friendly, like warm sunlight. It's more like a ravaging beam, destructive and unsettling to all that could have been safely imagined. Our continued attention is the very property which incites new problems, and the troublemakers appear to be keenly aware of this. So they spring into action, and begin repositioning all the stage props for a new implied narrative. But "implied" is all it was. There was no immediate announcement for followup content, and I'm not announcing anything here yet either. More time was always going to be necessary to figure out what to do next, including what form it takes, the timing, and all those questions. For now I think it was alright to just let things simmer for a while, and give people an extended period of time to meditate on the meaning of the epilogues and why they involved the choices they did. But regardless of anyone's conclusions about it, I can at least confirm that it WAS designed to feel like a bridge piece since its conception.

Is it this way because an epilogue SHOULD be this way? No. It is this way because I thought that was the most suitable role for an epilogue to play in the context of the weird piece of media Homestuck has always been. The story experiments a lot with the way stories are told, and in particular messes with the ways certain stretches of content get partitioned and labeled. Playing with the labeling I think has ways of bringing attention to those labels, what they actually mean, and how they affect our perception of the events covered under certain labels. It can even get us to wonder why certain labels exist at all, and can expose "flaws" in the construction of stories which include them. For instance, "intermission" is such a label. But perhaps another way of saying intermission is, "whoops, the story is getting too long, here's a break from the real story with a bunch of dumb shit that doesn't matter". It's seemingly a tacit admission to a problem. And by continuing to toy with that label as the story rolls along, you start to unpack the nature of that problem by implicitly asking questions about it. If you have one intermission because the story got long... can you have two if it gets longer? Can you have even more than that? Once you have a multitude of intermissions, don't you have two dueling threads of content, one supposedly "irrelevant", and the other important? And if that's true, then is it possible for the "irrelevant" thread to accrue more importance, throwing its entire identity as "optional content" into question retroactively? And if that can happen, is it possible the two threads can flip roles, with the intermissions becoming more important than the main acts? Then once the story goes through the motions of answering "yes" to all of this, isn't it also fair to ask, why bother with this examination at all? Was it pure horseplay and trickery? Actually, yes, sort of. There is a trick involved. The gradual realization that intermission content is nontrivial forces the reader to reevaluate their perception of the material, which was originally influenced by a label presiding over that material, and what they believed that label meant. It relies on the reader's presumption about the label's meaning to disguise certain properties of the content (like relevance), and therefore disarms the reader initially, leading to the potential for subverting expectations about the content later in surprising ways. In other words, you can use whatever it is the reader already presumes they know about stories in order to control the perception of what they are reading, just by gradually shifting the boundaries of whatever it is they've been well trained to expect from certain elements.

So now the label "epilogue" has been toyed with in a similar way, and also in a manner which exposes an apparent flaw with the label. Or actually, just by using the label "epilogue" at all, it seems the story is admitting to an apparent flaw. If another way of saying intermission is "whoops, story's too long, here's a break", then an alternate way of saying epilogue is "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's some more". And we know right away this label will be subject to the same kind of trickery, since there are two story paths of eight epilogues each, prefaced by a shared prologue. It's already an unhinged implementation of the label before you even read it, which means it's probably time to get nervous about whether it satisfies your expectations about what the content existing under such a label should provide. Before you read it, it's already an invitation to start questioning what an epilogue even is, and whether it's kind of a silly idea even if applied conventionally. Take a 50 chapter novel with an epilogue, for example. Why isn't the epilogue just called chapter 51? Why was the choice made to label that content differently? Should we consider it an important part of the story, or should we not? If it's not important, why are we reading it? And if it is important, why is it given a label which is almost synonymous with "afterthought"? Is it a simple parting gift to the reader, to provide minor forms of satisfaction which the core narrative wasn't built to provide? Is it actually important to deliver those minor satisfactions? If it really is important, why didn't that content appear in chapter 51? And if it isn't, why bother at all? What are we even doing here?

By going down this path of questioning, it sounds like we're assembling a case against writing epilogues altogether. But actually, there's really nothing wrong with them. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to include in any story. It's just that the more you ask questions like these, the more you are forced to think about the true nature of these storytelling constructs, the actual purposes they're meant to serve. And with something like Homestuck, where issues like this are heavily foregrounded, like what should be considered "canon" vs. "not canon", or even more esoteric concepts like "outside of canon" or "beyond canon", then the issues you uncover when you ask such questions about an epilogue can't really be ignored. My feeling is, there's almost no choice but to turn the conventional ideas associated with epilogues completely inside-out, because of the inherent contradictions involved with crossing the post-canon threshold and revealing that which was not meant to be known. Stories end where they do for certain reasons, answering the questions which were thematically important to answer, and leaving some questions unanswered for similar reasons, and the reader is left with the task of deciphering the meaning of these decisions. Under the "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's more" interpretation of an epilogue as a flawed construct, by reopening an already closed-circuit narrative, what you're really doing is introducing destabilizing forces into something which had already reached a certain equilibrium, due to all the considerations that went into which questions to answer, and which to leave ambiguous. And these destabilizing forces became the entire basis for the construction of an entirely new post-canon narrative, for better or worse.

These are the types of things the epilogues let you to think about, along with a few other ideas. Like the fact that all narratives have perspectives and biases, depending on who is telling the story, even in the case where it's unclear if the narrator has any specific identity. The suggestion that all narratives are driven by agendas, sometimes thinly disguised, other times heavily. There's also stuff to think about just due to its presentation as fanfiction, and that it's the first installment of Homestuck which included other authors (contrary to some speculation I've seen, every word of all seven acts were written by me alone). By deploying it as mock-fanfiction, and including other authors, I'm making an overt gesture that is beginning to diminish my relevance as the sole authority on the direction this story takes, what should be regarded as canon, and even introducing some ambiguity into your understanding of what canon means as the torch is being passed into a realm governed by fan desires. If the epilogues really prove to be the bridge media they were designed to feel like, then I expect this trend to continue. The fanfiction format is effectively a call to action, for another generation of creators to imagine different outcomes, to submit their own work within the universe, to extend what happens beyond the epilogues, or to pave over them with their own ideas. And I believe the direness in tone and some of the subject matter suitably contributes to the urgency of this call to action.

I also think many of the negative feelings the story creates isn't just an urgent prompt for the reader to imagine different ideas, or ways to resolve the new narrative dilemmas. It's also an opportunity for people to discuss any of the difficult content critically, and for fandom in general to continue developing the tools for processing the negative emotions art can generate. Sorting that out has to be a communal experience, and it's an important part of the cycle between creating and criticizing art. I think not only can creators develop their skills to create better things by practicing and taking certain risks, fandom is something which can develop better skills as well. Skills like critical discussion, dealing constructively with negative feelings resulting from the media they consume, interacting with each other in more meaningful ways, and trying to understand different points of view outside of the factions within fandom that can become very hardened over time. Fandoms everywhere tend to get bad reputations for various reasons, maybe justifiably. But I don't see why it can't be an objective to try to improve fandom, just as creators can improve their work. And I think this can only happen if now and then fandoms are seriously challenged, by being encouraged to think about complex ideas, and made to feel difficult emotions. I believe when art creates certain kinds of negative feelings in people, it can lead to some of the most transformative experiences art has to offer. But it helps to be receptive to this idea for these experiences to have a positive net effect on your life, and your relationship with art.

So now I'm looking to all of you on the matter of where to go next. Wherever the most conscientious and invested members of fandom want to drive this universe, as well as the standards by which we engage with media in general, that will be the direction I follow.

#homestuck #upd8 #homestuck epilogues #andrew hussie

[rayroute-clear-saeran-text-sound]

BRO ZEN X READER X SEVEN KINGDOM AU PLEASE!!!!!

Aaaa thank you for requesting this!!! I missed writing for our Kingdom Boys 💐 Context: An au made by us taking place in Europe. Seven is a jester, Zen is prince of France.

Silky fabric was in contact with almost every inch of your skin as you went farther into your dark closet, picking through the dresses you almost never wore. You never were a fan, and tried to get away with wearing anything else when you could.

"Too long...definitely not...too flashy...that color is not flattering one bit..." You murmured hundreds of absentminded critiques of everything within the confines of your closet, not happy with anything. It wasn't that you were stuck up or ungrateful, you just did not like wearing dresses. In fact, you would rather spend all day out in the woods getting dirty than inside doing princess things. Did that make you a disgrace as the heir to the L/n throne? You hoped not. You were always worried about being a disappointment to your parents who were counting on you, but you also wanted to be happy and not condemned to a life of being just a pretty face for a prince to use to gain more power. Now why were you picking out a dress in the first place? Your parents had decided to give you a little nudge to find a suitor by throwing a grand masquerade ball. The King and Queen had invited every family with an eligible bachelor they could think of. You, on the other hand, were not enthused. It was a combination of all the things you hated: suitors and formal functions. After sifting through your dresses for what seemed like the umpteenth time, you groaned into your hands. Well, you thought it was a groan, but it was more like a loud cry of frustration. Someone in the hallway seemed to take note, as they poked their head in.

“Everything alright, miss?" You looked up at the voice, and were very pleased to see a familiar mop of red curls that paired along nicely with a goofy, crooked grin.

"Evening, Seven." You motioned for him to come in, and at first he hesitated. "Oh come on, I know I'm royalty, but you don't have to avoid me like the plague." Out of everyone in the castle, including your own parents, Seven was probably the one you were closest to. "If anyone asks, just say that I was upset so you came in to make me laugh. It wouldn't even be too far from the truth." Seven shrugged and bounced into the room, his signature smile back on his face.

“Well, I guess that is my job as the royal fool. I can't deprive a lady in need of a good joke or two, now can I?" He shut the door behind him just in case, and came to take a seat on your mattress. "What seems to be the problem?" He asked you, but you knew he was already vaguely aware of the answer.

“You're going to laugh at me if I tell you."

“Awe, come on, no I won't." His golden eyes turned pleading, and you let out a relenting sigh.

“Well, you know that the masquerade ball is tomorrow night, and I can't find a dress that I like, but my parents are expecting me to look beautiful for all of the princes." There was a beat of silence, and then Seven broke out into a ruckus of laughter. "Hey, you said you wouldn't laugh!" Your face flushed, although it wasn't necessarily from embarrassment. You always had a similar response any time he laughed, it sounded so natural and musical, and you always became happy whenever it would ring in your ears.

"Sorry, sorry! It's just that it's such a princess problem that I can't help but laugh." You now instantly felt guilty, as you knew that he and the other servants had way more pressing challenges in their lives than worrying about what dress to wear. "Okay, no, I'm sorry. I swear it. What can I do to help?"

"I don't know." You sighed, slumping onto the bed next to him.

“What don't you like about them?" He questioned, hoping that if you talked it through with him he could come up with a solution that would make you feel confident in yourself. All he really wanted was for you to be happy.

“Is everything an option...?" You chuckled awkwardly, brushing stray locks of h/c hair behind your ear. "No...I guess the main problem is that they're all too flashy and sparkly. That's not me, you know? I'm not fancy."

“Oh believe me, I know." Seven chuckled, reminiscing on how many times he had seen you sneak in late at night, covered from head to toe in mud and grass stains. You broke him from his memories when you pointed to a f/c ballgown. It was nice and simple, not overly loud or sparkly.

"Well...I do like that one, the only problem is the length and the sleeves. Long ballgowns don't suit me." What Seven really wanted to tell you was that you would look stunning in anything, but he knew he had absolutely no place in saying that. So, instead, he opted for a crazy solution.

"The length is the issue? Then, let's just cut it!" Your eyes lit up, and you almost immediately hopped up to find scissors and retrieve the dress. "Okay, put it on and we can go for it." Seven turned his back to you, closing his eyes and placing his hands over them as an extra measure. Once you had slipped the ballgown on, you tapped his shoulder to alert him that you were done. He turned to you, and it took all of his self control to not react. However, he had no control over the blush that rose to his cheeks. "So, where do you want it cut?" His voice cracked on the first syllable and he cleared his throat. You didn't seem to notice, and for that he was thankful.

"Um, about here?" You put your hand a little under halfway up your thigh, a length considered to be a violation of one of the unspoken rules of social functions.

"T-There?"

“Yeah. They can call me a wench if they want, I just want to be comfortable." Seven nodded and began cutting, shaking his head as he did so to keep his thoughts straight. "And the sleeves off."

"You got it, miss." He was trying to keep everything as smooth as possible, without any of the edges looking jagged.

“I guess maybe a part of me is hoping everyone will be put off by this. I hate princes. They don't give me respect." You thought back to the countless suitors you've already had try to court you, and none of them saw you as a person, only as the key to potential property and wealth. "They expect me to apologize for everything when they're the ones who wronged me." You had even been hit by a bachelor before, and that was your final straw. You had vowed to be done with suitors, at least for a while, but your parents were pressuring you to find a prince.

“You deserve better, someone who will see you for who you are rather than just a kingdom. You should be owed at least that much, as you're one of the kindest people I've ever met. Who else would treat me so good?" No one of your status and social class had ever referred to you as kind; usually just strange or rude. But something about Seven's words hit you, and you smiled softly. The jester stood up, placing the scissors back in their original place. You looked at yourself in the mirror, and for the first time, you loved yourself in a dress.

“Thank you, it looks just like I wanted!" You wrapped him in a hug, tilting your chin up to place a chaste kiss on his jaw in thanks. His face darkened to a color that likened his hair as he smiled goofily.

“I-I'm glad you like it, miss!" He exclaimed through a stutter and bolted out of the room before he said something stupid that should never be said. You found yourself unable to fight off a grin, something that usually happened after spending time with Seven. You figured it was appropriate for him being a royal fool.

Next morning

Seven rubbed his eyes as he blearily stared off into space in the massive ballroom. He was dimly aware of both Saeran and Vanderwood grumbling about his uselessness as they continued to decorate the grand room for the soon-to-be-held masquerade ball.

“Can you just tell us what you're thinking so we can move on and get this done? Some of us have other tasks to do." Vanderwood huffed, smacking the redhead lightly. Instead of reacting and hopping right into his work like normal, Seven continued to stand tiredly.

“I just can't believe she's going to maybe find a fiancé tonight." He murmured softly, still somewhat lost in thought.

"You have got to be kidding me." Saeran shook his head, strands of hair that perfectly matched Seven's falling into his eyes. "I know you like her, but you have to understand that it will never happen. Your classes are just too different."

“Yes, but she doesn't even want to marry a prince!" Seven didn't need to have her, he knew that was impossible; but that didn't mean he was happy about someone else having her, either. Especially when she didn't want them in the first place.

"What, and you think she'll marry you?" Fantastic, exactly what he needed; another spat with his brother early in the morning.

"You know that she can't do that, she has to marry a prince." Vanderwood chimed in, hoping to end this discussion so the work could get done. "We can't exactly make you a prince." He muttered, and Saeran froze in his place.

“Or can we...?" Saeran had to admit, every time he witnessed the interactions between the princess and his twin, even he could feel the spark between them. Not only that, if his plan was successful, Seven would stop his incessant whining. Vanderwood exhaled deeply, knowing he would be sucked in to the twins' scheme whether he wanted to or not.

“I can probably dig up some spare ball clothes if you work on your character." The brown haired male rolled his eyes as Seven thanked him and Saeran countless times. Although he didn't expect much of that night, he knew he would at least get to dance with her, and that was enough for him.

Ball of a Lifetime

You were waiting anxiously in one of the empty corridors outside of the main ballroom, waiting on your cue for entry. You were wearing the custom dress that Seven had helped you with the night prior, and when your mother saw what you did to it she almost had a heart attack. Of course, you left Seven's involvement out for his sake. You were also wearing an intricate black mask with f/c accents and jewels to match your dress, only covering the top half of your face, e/c eyes shining through. Everything was rather quiet, and you were desperately wishing that Seven could be there to fill the silence with his horrendous so-bad-they're-good jokes.

“You look nervous, princess." The voice that called out to you made your shoulders tense, as you hadn't heard the individual approach you. The man chuckled at your expense. "I apologize, I didn't mean to scare you." The voice had an almost comically thick Scottish accent. You turned to face the mystery man, and came face to face with a rather charming male. His face was covered in a detailed black and red mask to compliment his ornate red, white, and black suit. His flaming red hair seemed somewhat familiar, but you assumed that it was only because you had just been thinking of Seven. Eyes of melted gold shined through the mask, and again, you concluded it to be the light playing tricks on you.

It couldn't be him, he's a fool for Christ's sake... You thought to yourself as the stranger stuck out a hand for you to shake, which you cautiously accepted.

“I am prince Luciel from Scotland. And you're the infamous princess Y/n, I presume?" You had never heard of a prince Luciel from Scotland in your life, but you were never all that interested in politics, so you supposed he could exist. That being said, he definitely wasn't well known. But, you couldn't seem to shake the feeling that he was reminiscent of someone. Just as you were about to respond, you were cut off.

"Now presenting, princess Y/n L/n!" Your father's booming voice recited, which was your cue to enter the ballroom with a flourish. You quickly and politely excused yourself, unsure if you were more grateful or disappointed. Something about him seemed off to you. You politely excused yourself and stepped into the ballroom, greeted by hundreds of pretty faces all flashing you smiles, most probably fake. You zoned out whatever speech your father made about the purpose of the ball, and were still staring into space when your first suitor came along. He was a tall and admittedly very handsome man with long silver hair tied back. You had never seen an albino in real life, except for a rabbit one time. His red eyes shimmered with positivity beneath a stunning silver and white mask, and you caught yourself blushing as he brought your hand up to his lips and kissed it lightly.

"Evening, princess. I'm Hyun Ryu, prince of France, but you can call me Zen." You quirked an eyebrow at his nickname for himself, but decided it was fairly accurate. You felt a wave of calm wash over you in his presence. "May I have this dance?" He inquired you as the musicians began playing their tune, the first of many that night.

“It would be my pleasure." He put his hands on your waist with much more confidence than your loose grip on his neck. There was quite a large height difference, and you had a hard time looking him in the eye.

"You're very gorgeous, do you know that?" You have heard that line countless times before, yet you still found yourself blushing at his words.

"What do you really want? My kingdom? My wealth?" You sighed, knowing that this would be a long night. However, Zen only laughed.

"No. I could care less about your wealth, and I'm fairly bad at managing my own kingdom." You narrowed your eyes, still skeptical. "Actually, when it was announced that you were having a courting masquerade ball, I was immediately excited. I'm, um, actually one of your fans." His cheeks were dusted in pink, the first time you had seen his confidence falter.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand. My fan...?"

“Yes. I watch you in press conferences, and I instantly fell in love. You're so independent, and you couldn't care less about what others think. You know what you want, you aren't afraid to stick up for yourself, and you don't need a man to come and save you. It's nice and refreshing from all of the other women who throw themselves at me." You chuckled nervously, the sudden compliments catching you off guard. You were thankful that he was acknowledging your need for autonomy, and that he was already aware that you would need to be your own woman in any relationship. You put him on your mental list for potential fiancés until he proved otherwise. For the rest of the song, the two of you danced in a comfortable and happy silence, the rhythm you two had going stopping as the music faded out in preparation for a new piece. "As much as I don't want to, I must let you go. I see how the other men are eyeing you." Zen leaned down to plant a kiss on the top of your head, winking to you. "Just remember, all men are beasts, so watch yourself." You rolled your eyes with a smile.

“Alright, Zen. Thank you."

“Anytime." And with that he stepped away, leaving you to your own devices with the other men. The rest of the suitors blurred together, as all of them were definite nos from you. All they were interested in were your looks, money, or kingdom.

“Sexist prick..." You muttered under your breath as the man you had just been dancing with strode away. There was a call made by your father that this would be the final dance of the night, and at the end would be the grand unmasking. Your father and mother took the opportunity to step onto the dance floor as the King and Queen, reliving the night they met with winsome smiles on their faces. Just as you were bitterly thinking how ironic it was that on the final dance of your ball you were left alone, you felt a finger tap your shoulder.

“Would you mind if I had this dance?" The humorously over the top Scottish accent rang pleasantly in your ears, and you once again turned to face the ginger who grinned at you devilishly.

“Not at all." You couldn't hold in your sigh of relief, as you got the feeling prince Luciel wouldn't be as bad as his predecessors. He placed his hands at your waist, definitely lacking the confidence that the other princes you had mingled with that night possessed. You placed your own hands on his neck, and he seemed to jump at the contact, but composed himself.

“Sorry, it's, ah, been a while since I've danced."

“I can tell." You chuckled, Luciel joining a split second later. The longer the dance went on, the more you were convinced that he flat out did not know how to dance, which seemed improbable. If you were royalty, dancing was drilled into your curriculum by the time you could walk. He kept stepping on your toes, profusely apologizing when he did. You smiled softly, and decided to do something you never had the chance to try; you began to lead the dance. He seemed to relax, now that some of the pressure was off. The tune you were dancing to was a familiar one, a classic Irish melody. You knew by the key ritardando that the song would be ending within the next minute. Luciel seemed to realize this as well, and stiffened once more.

"Okay, um, listen, Y/n. Don't freak out, please..." Confusion coursed through you, as he seemed all nervous again. Despite that, he leaned in as if to kiss you, but not just on the cheek; he was making for your lips. You had to say it was bold, as it was an unspoken rule that you never fully kissed someone on the first dance. However, you were all about breaking unspoken rules. You didn't move away as he pressed his lips to your own for a brief moment. He pulled away rather quickly, eyes darting to the exits as the song continued to draw to a close.

"You act as if you're saying goodbye." Luciel chuckled nervously, accent slipping for a moment.

“Yes, about that..." The accent had dropped completely, and you couldn't stop your eyes from widening. 'Luciel' got close to you again so that when he lifted his mask slightly, only you could see his face.

“Seven?!" You whisper-yelled, a million questions buzzing through your head. The song had finally faded, and the countdown for the unmasking had begun. Seven dashed away, muttering a thousand apologies under his breath as he went. He left you standing there with countless problems. No doubt about it, Zen was the best out of the qualified suitors. And yet...

Am I really in love with a fool...? You asked yourself as you stood there alone, your own mask still on as others cheered and tossed theirs haphazardly into the air.

#kingdom au #mystic messenger x reader #mystic messenger fanfiction #mystic messenger #mysmes x reader #mysmes #x reader #seven x reader #saeyoung x reader #luciel x reader #luciel choi #saeyoung choi #707 x reader #707 imagine #choi twins #zen #zen mysme #zen x reader #hyun ryu

[francescasportfolio]

INGLORIOUS BASTERDS (2009) REVIEW PART ONE (CHAPTERS 1-4)

Set in the Second World War, a group of spunky, vengeful Jewish-american mercenaries navigate their way through enemy territories, killing every Nazi they come across, combined with a grief ridden jewish girl, a German double agent movie star, and a chilling anti-hero. If the Basterds’ German fiends are smart enough to give them the information they want, they give them a special mark to ensure they remember their nationalism for the rest of their lives.

Tarintino works in his usual way of chapters, splitting the story into neat chunks and carefully constructing the tension, so at that last chapter (in this case CHAPTER 5) the audience is ready to fall off their seats in anticipation.

CHAPTER ONE

Interestingly, our story doesn’t commence with an introduction to our protagonists, but with a dairy farmer named LaPedite accused of hiding Jews and the ‘villain’ of our story COLONEL HANS LANDA OF THE SS. The farmer seems on edge and somewhat acknowledges his fate, yet Landa introduces himself very politely, complements the farmers daughters and asks before doing anything inside the farmer’s house. However, Tarintino drops in slight peculiarities to ensure we understand who Landa is, for example, he only shakes the hand of the daughter with blonde hair and blue eyes-- the only one who looks aryan. Landa makes small gestures like grabbing the daughter’s arm who is getting him wine, although masked with a kind comment, Landa’s power is being asserted. The Colonel himself, is telling the farmer that he is the weak in this situation, yet leads LaPedite to believe he is in a position of power with his meticulous manners. 

But, Landa places another finger on LaPedite’s throat as he asks him to switch to speaking english, although both are more comfortable in french. The audience is always posed with the question ‘Does Hans Landa know?’, does he know that the Jews under the floor boards cannot speak english? 

Landa is terrifying because the audience can never quite tell if he is ignorant or not, everything he does points to him being so until the moment he reveals he knows more than you ever thought he did. In this chapter, we see this when he sets about asking questions to LaPedite about a jewish family, the Dreyfus’, they seem easy and uncompromising until the camera lowers underneath the floor boards where the family lay, trying to catch their breaths in their mouths. Landa continues and confirms the interrogation is complete, LaPedite has kept his cool and made it through. Until, Landa asks for another glass of milk, and the tension is drawn out making us squirm in anticipation. The score builds, and Landa utilises the Dreyfus’ incompetence in english to create a ‘masquerade’ which will ensure they are executed. Hans ushers LaPedite’s daughters back inside, thanking them for their service, but like Landa’s other scheming up until now, everything is not quite as it should be. German soldiers gather around the floorboards and the music explodes with the sound of gunshots, which feels vaguely reminiscent of Hitchcock’s suspense filled scores. Tarintino does an excellent job of using framing and shadow to visually show us Landa’s brooding presence over our story. More intriguingly though, is that Landa lets one of the family get away, Shoshanna, who will hold great importance later in the film. He aims at her before playfully pretending to shoot, Landa takes great pleasure in other people’s distress, like a child playing with toys.

CHAPTER 2

Finally, we are introduced to the Basterds and Aldo the Apache, Aldo explains the premise of their mission and a ‘debit’ each of the Basterds owe him. One hundred Nazi scalps. What is interesting about Tarintino is his creativity with violence, unlike typical slasher movies the gore in Tarintino films is in context, it holds a deeper connotation to the character or situation. For example, Aldo and his Apache Indian style techniques, or Shoshanna and her use of fire later on in the movie. Moreover, although there is a large volume of Basterds, the majority of them are characterised by a particular event, object, or name. In the ‘ditch’ where the Basterds have ambushed a Nazi patrol, we are introduced to nearly all the Basterds. Most notably, Hugo Stiglitz, who gets a whole tangent dedicated to his origin story. This movie is so fun to watch because it is self aware, it lets you know you are watching a movie, we see this through the on screen text and out of context distorted guitar that lets us know who Hugo Stiglitz is as a character in our story. Moreover, Utivich is good at scalping, Hirschberg is tiny with a massive machine gun, Wicki can translate and Donowitz is known as the ‘Bear Jew’. The scene progresses and although we have already been introduced to Sergeant Donowitz, we are informed of his character as the ‘Bear Jew’, Tarintino’s dialogue is snappy and unconventional, it sounds more like crass poetry than conversation, using alliteration and rhyme which makes his scripts so memorable.  We also get some insight into the nature of the Basterds, although they are living in great times of terror and hardship, they laugh in the face of adversity. They make fun out of the patriotic germans that refuse to divulge information and cheer as Donny beats them to death as a result.

CHAPTER 3

Shoshanna is still bitter four years after the massacre of her family, working at a cinema. We are introduced to a new character, Fredrick Zoller, a happy-go-lucky Nazi soldier who takes an interest in Shoshanna. Zoller seems sweet, and somewhat charming, perhaps he mistakes Shoshanna’s dismissing behaviour for mysterious charm and a cold exterior wanting to be broken into. However for shoshanna, we know it isn’t so romantic, he represents a psychotic regime that killed her entire family. Tarintino employs a specific trait of his writing that makes it so unique, the characters have a seemingly innocent conversation about German cinema, as Shoshanna’s cinema is playing one of Zoller’s favourite directors. Shoshanna shares her mixed feelings about the movie Piz Palu and through this minutiae, Shoshanna lets Zoller know her actual mixed feeling about the Germanic position. Zoller seems unaffected, not listening to the actual substance of Shoshanna’s argument, so he goes on. Zoller asks for her name, her paper’s say ‘Emmanuelle Mimiueux’, and he presents himself, surprised at Shoshanna’s little reaction and so he leaves. 

The next day, Zoller’s presence in the movie is instated. We are in a bar, with Shoshanna and he is there at the window, waving. He is becoming a pest. He comes in to see Shoshanna, when they are interrupted by a wave of excited german fans, all asking for Zoller. Zoller is a Germanic war hero, he explains rather proudly his exploits, and even shares that Dr Goebbels is making a movie about him. Shoshanna is pushed over the edge of tolerance and storms out, leaving Zoller confused, but unfortunately, wanting more.

Until now, Zoller has been relatively chivalrous, complementing Shoshanna and somewhat respecting her boundaries but Tarintino doesn’t want us to forget he is still a Nazi war hero. Instead of asking her in person, Zoller sends a Gestapo Major to force Shoshanna into a car, not knowing the meaning of the endeavour. We find Shoshanna at table full of Nazis, meeting Dr Goebbel’s himself. The entire scene is now from Shoshanna’s perspective, a calculated move to ensure that the audience feels the same dread she is feeling, when Hans Landa eventually enters. She had been called to this meeting to convince Dr Goebbel’s to change the premiere of Zoller’s film to her cinema. In this scene, language is also used as a device to upkeep interest in the situation, having Goebbel’s being only able to speak German and Shoshanna, French. 

Later, when a dolly shot looms up to Landa, we feel the atmosphere change from a hazy uncomfortableness to honest dread. Landa persuades Zoller to let Shoshanna stay, as he must talk to ‘Mimieux’ about security measures. Everything checks out, the others leave. Landa then commences a mind tournament with Shoshanna, interrogating her by the condolences of her dead aunty and uncle Mimieux. Shoshanna keeps up and doesn’t break a sweat, however, Landa orders Strudel and a glass of milk for Shoshanna. Landa forgets what he wanted to ask her, but puts his cigarette out in the strudel. He knows and Shoshanna knows that he knows. The waiting and the silence is where the real terror lays, this is because there is a factor of uncertainty-- and Tarintino abuses this terrifically.

Shoshanna will host the premiere of Nation’s Pride, herself and Marcel, her projectionist devise the 350 35mm Nitrate Film Scheme. The main aim, to burn it down. 

CHAPTER 4

Next, we travel to England, meeting our new foreign exchange basterd, Archie Hicox. Tarintino uses yet another expositional sequence that is disguised as a formal chat with his General, Ed Fenech. Hicox explains he was a film critic before the war, and adds another force to our Nazi Vendetta, he is to be apart of the english operation KINO with the German movie star, Bridget Von Hammersmark. The aim of the game is to blow up the basket full of their rotten Nazi eggs at the Nation’s Pride premiere, and Hicox is to join the basterds and Hammersmark in France.

Their rendezvous is in a basement tavern, the German speaking basterds and Hicox pose as Nazis to meet Von Hammersmark. Aldo and Donowitz share some concerns, alerting the audience, Stiglitz is calm but sharpening his knife, Hicox tries to reassure them but it seems to fall flat.

The opening shot of the La Louisianne Tavern is of drunk German soldiers, which Hicox assured us there wouldn’t be. The scene is doomed from this point on. Von Hammersmark sits casually with the drunken soldiers, reacting to a comment a soldier makes, replying ‘the character is the character’, although she is german herself, she tells the drunken Nazis her position nonchalantly through the silly game they are all playing and they applaud her for it, missing the subtext of course.

Eventually, she joins the basterds, and they attempt to discuss the developments of Operation Kino, almost getting to the end of her sentence before being interrupted by a soldier, Wilhelm, that has had a baby and wants her autograph. He pesters their table for a while longer before Hicox looses his temper, talking for a sustained amount of time, enough for the drunken soldier notices his peculiar accent. This is where the magic of Tarintino’s writing resides, the terms of which turn the scene sour are so particular to the situation that they become iconic. The scene progresses as our Gestapo Major that we met earlier reappears, what is interesting about Hellstrom is his similarities to Landa. He plays with the minds of the characters surrounding him, interrogating Hicox about his accent as his first introduction, however this is where he sets himself as a weaker antagonist than Landa. Our characters already know they should be weary of him, so all his friendly actions and notions to play drinking games seem slimy. 

We can see the other characters losing their cool now, Stiglitz’s distorted theme tune is coming back with some flash scenes of the atrocities he faced at the hands of Nazi’s. The drunken soldiers are still loud and raucous and Hellstrom is still being arrogant, making jokes that aren’t funny. Throughout the scene, Tarintino has dropped some visual breadcrumbs for us to pick up along the way, Von Hammersmark’s shoes, the Scotch, her autograph and now, Hicox’s final mistake. Hellstrom urges them to try some Scottish Scotch, asking for new glasses but not wanting one himself. Hammersmark opts for champagne, so three glasses are needed. Tarintino again illustrates his ability to take the nuances between cultures and shape them into plot points. Hicox signals for the english three finger gesture, as opposed to the German. He tries to cover it up, but he and Hellstrom are now in a Mexican standoff with Stiglitz not being able to help himself but join in. 

Hicox finishes his scotch, and the scene erupts in a complete shoot out. No Basterd survives. One thing that I have always found bittersweet about Tarintino’s work is his lack of remorse for killing off main characters, they always make sense and move the story along, but are still a bit of a downer when you were starting to get attached to the character. 

The aftermath reveals Wilhelm, the new dad and Von Hammersmark shot in the leg, but alive. After making a deal with Aldo for Hammersmark, Wilhelm is killed by Bridget on account of him calling her a traitor. She gets away, but the plan is ruined. A short interrogation with fingers in bullet holes and the reveal of the development in operation KINO being the Furher attending the Premiere, propells our characters into a ‘How-I-broke-my-leg-mountain-climbing-story’ for Hammersmark’s injured leg, and Aldo and the film star settling on her escorts being Italian over German, the plan isn’t foolproof but the Basterds can brazen through it, so they think.

The last part of our chapter is brief but integral, Landa visits La Louisianne Tavern. We see a different side of Hans Landa, as he was a detective before the War, it is almost as if he is arriving at a crime scene. Scanning the blood-soaked, basterd filled room, he finds the autograph signed Bridget Von Hammersmark. We are now informed, that Landa knows.

#inglourious basterds

[itsclydebitches]

I've been meaning to ask but did you happen to notice the end shot of the new opening? How Oscar is still at a distance from the group and Qrow is even further away? What do you think about that?

I did notice that, anon. I was originally going to include it in my recap and then pulled back, just because it’s one of those details likely to generate feelings of being “too critical” and “reading into things.” But hell, let’s briefly discuss it here. 

Generally speaking, posters (or in this case an end group shop) helps tell the audience who the primary characters are and what their ranked importance is to the story. Sometimes, a character functions to represent a specific idea or an event. 

Non-It!Georgie only gets to be on screen for the first ten minutes or so, but his death starts our story in motion, it drives our characters, and shooting him from the back allows him to simultaneously function as a generic child as well as an individual. That’s what It does. Lure children away. This shot thus encompasses the heart of the film. Normally though, when images focus on characters and those characters are all fairly equal within the film, we see a balance in the frame: 

When there are characters deemed more important to the plot or the thematic elements of the film, they are either made larger compared to the others around them: 

(note how big Cap and Tony are compared to, say, Rocket and Nebula) 

Or, more commonly, you place minor characters further in the back. This both cues the viewer in to who the primary protagonists are while also adding depth to the picture: 

No one is going to be confused about who our hero is. If we went into Goblet of Fire and got two hours of following Krum around while he trained for Quidditch, people would have felt cheated by this poster, considering that a poster’s primary function is to tell you something about the film. That “something” needs to be accurate. Nevertheless, we sometimes end up with posters that are rather misleading, if not in the characters involved, than in the overall tone… 

[Tumblr is being a butt and won’t let me upload it, but everyone go google the poster for My Sister’s Keeper and observe the supposedly happy family playing with bubbles.]

Perhaps RWBY’s final shot—functioning a lot like a poster and drawing from many of the same industry standards as film/television—is misleading as well. However, I’m inclined to assume that their design team works under similar expectations of how people will read a group shot and thereby organized the characters accordingly. Team RWBY gets to be in the foreground, front if not centered. Team JNR surrounds them, a little farther back. They’re protagonists, but they’re always second to RWBY. Winter and Ironwood stand above them, back-to-back, suggesting that they’re both primary antagonists (which fits with what we saw in the premier) and somewhat looming over our heroes. And then the rest of the space is taken up by this new team, which frankly isn’t something I expected. This shot + the amount we saw them in the opening implies that they’re integral to this volume, more-so than the three characters who are regulated to the back of the shot, filling in the space rather than being a part of the primary action. 

Penny I get. She’s actually still connected to the group, it’s just that her ability to fly gives designers the option to balance the frame a bit. It’s Oscar and Qrow who worry me. Not just because of how disconnected they are from the rest of the cast, but because of how their actions here aren’t aligning with everyone else’s. The whole group stares off at some unforeseen challenge/foe/whatever, raising weapons in defense. Oscar, meanwhile, is in the process of running forward. Which looks a bit weird when every other character except Penny is hunkering down. In contrast, Qrow is just standing there. I realize he’s the ‘play it cool’ type, but that pose doesn’t look like he’s about to join whatever battle the main group is prepping for. 

Of course, these particular details could very well be “reading too much into things.” Whoever designed this shot could have just thought running and posing looked cool, not considering whether that fit with the rest of the action. I’m more concerned by the choice to put Qrow and Oscar in the background as opposed to this new special-ops team. Because when you’re designing an image like this, you don’t really go, “Ah yes. These two characters get a lot of screen time, have important character arcs, and are all around integral to the volume… they should go in the back where they’re much harder to see.” This shot heavily implies that our five new Atlas characters are more important than the three characters (Qrow, Oscar, and Ozpin) who all had HUGE conflicts last volume that the story has yet to satisfactorily resolve. I’m well aware that new settings necessitate new characters, but RWBY keeps growing its already massive cast and frankly we shouldn’t be devoting that much time to characters we’ll probably abandon (like Ilia, Sun, Glynda, Neptune, Bart, etc.) once a volume changes. If this image and opening accurately reflect how much time will be spent on developing this team. 

And, to be frank, even if we don’t abandon them… with a main cast of eleven all vying for screen time and development, we really don’t need to add five more protagonists to that mix. 

I mentioned a few weeks ago my concern that neither Ozpin nor Oscar showed up in the Volume 7 poster. An end shot like this just reinforces those concerns. 

#Anonymous #rwby #rwby volume 7 #rwby volume 7 spoilers #mymetas

[spiftynifty]

How come it seems like lm and jds can talk more candidly about their intentions regarding other ships like allurance and even k/l but not sheith? I don't understand why they can clarify things like allurance and how it was there from the beginning or flat out state that they never intended for k/l to be a thing, but when it comes to the topic of shiro and keith they won't just clarify what they did or did not intend/want their relationship to be? I'm confused by it. :(

Ooof this is an excellent question and I suspect a complicated one. 

First off, they can be candid about Allurance because 1) it’s a hetero couple (and therefore “acceptable” to executives and conservative parents) and 2) it was strongly implied and built up for almost the entirety of the series before they officially, canonically, became a couple. There’s no ambiguity there. They can be candid about kl because Allurance technically “kills” the ship by virtue of existing, but more importantly kl is the fanship that they have been directly asked about on more than one occasion and probably straight up badgered about it more times than we’re aware of. When your production studio gets blackmailed in the hopes of making k/l canon, that ship is being brought to your attention. 

Also, Afterbuzz is run by kl fans who have anti-like tendencies. They angle kl questions in nearly every interview, and I was pretty miffed by the way in this interview they heavily, heavily implied that only Sheith fans hated s8 “because their ship didn’t become canon” and yet in the same breath talked about how Allurance wasn’t good and came out of nowhere (something JDS delightfully shut down). In the live chat for the recent interview, people from all ship alignments kept begging the hosts to ask about why SK’s friendship wasn’t included in the final season. In the saltiest tone you can imagine, one of the more vocal kl hosts decided to answer the question (”they helped each other grow and evolve and since they’ve done that, we don’t need to see their friendship anymore, it got lots of screentime in other seasons”) and never let the showrunners actually speak on it, instead moving swiftly to another topic that aligned more with the hosts’ own interests. It was almost like she was afraid of what the answer would be. Was she afraid they’d say “well actually, on the matter of that, Sheith was our intended endgame” or was she trying to save them from having to talk about something NDAs prevented them from talking about? 

So why CAN’T they talk Sheith? I have a few theories. This gets long and a little rambly, so I’ve thrown it under a cut. 

1) Don’t ask, don’t tell. Except for post-s7, the showrunners themselves have never been asked about Sheith’s relationship in an interview. I think most Sheiths were afraid of rocking the boat and potentially upending a SK endgame by drawing too much attention to it. We were/are definitely the quieter side of the primary vld ships and honestly most of us were not expecting our ship to be canon. 

But vld ships and the ship wars are notorious across geekdom for vitriol and death threats, and the creators didn’t want to add any fodder to either side. In the middle of production it would have benefited no one for the EPs to say, “yeah sheith is meant to be viewed romantically” or “no, we can’t go back and change the story to make that true”. Either one would have resulted in an uptick of harassment from antis towards them, towards other fans. And nevermind the production side where DW/WEP weren’t ready for even a hint of m/m until right before s7 dropped. It was only AFTER they got the greenlight on gay Shiro that showrunners could finally be vague and say “some people will interpret [sk] as brothers, others will say it’s 100% confirmed they’re in a relationship”. Which is, in my opinion, a pretty interesting way to respond to that question. But again, if that interviewer hadn’t been brave enough to ask it, I highly doubt it’s something that the showrunners themselves would have ever brought up.

2) Sheith was actually intended to be romantic, but was blocked. We know now that Adam being greenlit as Shiro’s boyfriend happened right before (like a week or less) before s7 dropped. This was a show that had been in production for almost 4 years by this point, and the showrunners stated they picked Shiro to be their rep early on in the process. When they planted that idea in executive’s heads is anyone’s guess, as is when the proper fight for it began. I suspect their immediate team of directors, writers, and in-house producers were well aware and supportive, but kicking that up the chain was another story. I also have a suspicion that it wasn’t until season 6 was complete that the matter was brought up because greenlighting everything we got in s6 knowing Shiro was gay the whole time puts a lot of eyes on Keith. 

And really, it was Keith who was the problem all along. 

In every version of Voltron, Keith is the main protagonist. He’s the leader of the team, the primary “image” of Voltron, and thus, certain things about him need to be maintained. I’m not sure if this is sheer coincidence or not, but he is the only person on the team who stayed visually the same to his OG counterpart. All of the other paladins have gone from white dudes (and a white lady) to POC, or have had a genderswap. There is much debate about Keith’s race with people creating their own headcanons but ultimately Keith can pass as white. While the handbook states Lance is Cuban, Hunk is half black-half Samoan, Shiro is Japanese and even Pidge gets “Italian”, Keith is just listed as... human. Which is a surefire way to not upset fans who have HC’d him as POC while also not-NOT saying he’s white. Everybody “wins”. 

In addition I’m confident a major stipulation of the OG Voltron owners (the “gatekeepers”, as a few of the VAs and the showrunners themselves have darkly alluded to) was that Keith could not be LGBT. We know now he was meant to end up with Acxa, a fact that was already obvious to many of us from their Weblum meetcute. But that relationship was never scripted. 

Setting aside the fact that the OG Voltron owners (WEP) didn’t want Keith to be LGBT, I’m sure executives at Dreamworks would have struggled with the idea as well. Shiro stans can come at me all they like about this but Keith was always meant to be the primary protagonist of the show, of every version of Voltron, and making the main, masculine hero of a well-trodden, oft-rebooted franchise gay/bi would have been an ENORMOUS move for animation. Making him end up with the other main, masculine hero would have honestly broken the internet and the minds of countless conservative executives, and been a major benchmark not just for cartoons, but ALL media. Animation often trails behind TV and movies in terms of social progress because something something “protect the chillllldrennn”. And right now I’m struggling to think of a popular live action TV show, or movie, with an older audience, where the main masculine hero is lgbt, and in a relationship with the other main masculine hero. Feel free to offer me examples in replies but the fact that I’m struggling to think of anything is pretty telling. In short, if this revolutionary move still isn’t happening for the live action 13+ audience, asking for it to happen on a cartoon with a 7-11yo boy demographic is like asking for the moon. Keith couldn’t be gay, because immediately it would have been obvious to anyone that he was already very much in love with the other LGBT character on the show. Hell, it’s already pretty obvious in canon that this is the case, and dodging the question about his sexuality is dodging the confirmation that he’s in love with Shiro. 

I’d like to believe that one of the solutions to the Adam Problem that was proposed was that KEITH ends up with Shiro, but they were laughed out of the office. The pair’s incredibly close bond aside, it would have been the absolute easiest fix production-wise. They already have their shared history doing most of the legwork, all that’d have to be changed is:

-adding Shiro to the L/K scene in 8x01, just sitting there as Keith encouraged Lance.-Re-recording a couple of Shiro’s lines in 8x05 to make him seem at least somewhat upset that Keith was kidnapped-Showing Keith and Shiro hanging out in the video episode. You could just use the shot of Keith and Pidge but replace Pidge with Shiro.

And the best part is, you could change just one or two of these and then do the wedding epilogue you always intended (but write something that doesn’t insist Shiro retired) but with Keith instead of Rando. Not to mention, there is a slight, slight possibility there was a S/K scene (or two) cut along the way. I strongly disagree with the theories that have floated around about the “massive edits” done to s8, but I think there could be truth to the idea that a Sheith scene was cut to make room for Crew Member, or an effort made to downplay the Sheith friendship that comes off way more intimate than any interaction Shiro has with [man]. It’s more likely that SK scenes never existed at all in this season as the showrunners had to cave to pressures to “have more action”, had no idea what to do with Shiro besides relegate him to a stiff cardboard general, and perhaps had to follow strict instructions about the kind of friendliness an out & proud gay man could show to the men he’d enjoyed good interactions with before. 

All this to say, the Sheith battle is messy. It’s fine for the showrunners to say “getting the greenlight for Shiro was a battle” because it’s a battle they won that makes everyone look pretty good. It makes Dreamworks look like they Learned Something and are going to be more open to LGBT content in future properties. It makes WEP look not-terrible because they can add “allowed a character who wasn’t really an OG Voltron character to be gay” to their list of “generous” things they allowed for this re-envisioning of their property. It’s self-congrats all around.

Blocking Sheith has the opposite effect. It reveals that WEP is homophobic because they could allow Pidge to be a girl and Allura to be black but making the hero a non-straight man? That’s TOO FAR. It reveals that Dreamworks higherups are homophobic because they weren’t ready for two LGBT protagonists, just one plus a background character with 3 lines who is literally never named. No one wins, and to be asked about Shiro and Keith and be honest about it could potentially be the showrunners saying, “god, we wanted to, but we were blocked at every single turn”. And thus DW and WEP are the outed villains of the story.

3) Shiro and Keith were never meant to be read as romantic. The showrunners don’t say anything because there’s simply nothing to say. Sometimes the most incredible ships are happy accidents. Sometimes people genuinely don’t realize what they’re doing. I felt a little disheartened watching the AB interview because the way they talked about wanting to include more [man], or how they “hoped viewers would read between the lines” re:Shiro/Curtains, was so casual and flippant it was like they genuinely thought most people would be fine with Shirando if only there had been more scenes between them, as though completely severing Shiro’s relationship with Keith and instead only showing scenes of Shiro bonding with a new character would come off as a good move rather than a baffling (and somewhat hurtful) one. 

I do believe that certain directors were absolutely fans of the pair and angled in what they could. Chris Palmer is behind the famous “shiro loves you baby” art and responsible for the eps that include Shiro’s gay panic, the Sheith hug, “As many times as it takes”, Shiro falling into Keith’s arms, and “We have to stop, Shiro’s out there!!” among others. Steve Ahn was the director behind 2x01, 3x01 with heavily grieving Keith, Blade of Marmora, and the episode where Keith screams Shiro’s name so loud he astral projects and then Shiro holds his hands over the controls. He also got really soft when he talked about the pair in an episode of Form Podcast (before JDS kinda hastily shut him down). And even Eugene Lee, he directed The Black Paladins which is an episode so Sheith I still can’t believe it’s real, and 7x01, the other episode so Sheith I can’t believe it’s real. All three of these guys were the original series directors, which is pretty inchresting. 

But that doesn’t mean the showrunners were necessarily onboard. Maybe it was really important to them to show a positive male friendship since that never happens in media, just as they felt having Allura sacrifice herself was a powerful feminist move. However the thing I keep circling back to is JDS’ early interview about The Winter Soldier and how if he ever got the chance to do that, he hoped it would be in the future when things could be more progressive, hinting that he wanted to throw more overt romantic undertones if he himself ever got a fight like that to write or direct. It’s pretty interesting that he wrote the Black Paladins, which mirrors the Stucky fight in Winter Soldier so much that it actually rotoscopes one of Bucky’s moves. I’d also point out that JDS’ favorite characters are Shiro and Keith, and I find it impossible to be a fan of both and not also be a fan of how much they love each other, and how much that love straddles the line between romantic love and friendship.

This got long, but I hope it was helpful. The likely final-ever showrunner interview will be on Let’s Voltron sometime this month, and I do hope that now that the series is over someone is brave enough to ask them, “so... what was going on between Shiro and Keith? In a perfect world, what would have happened there?”. In a way it doesn’t matter though. There is always the risk of them saying “nothing was going on there” and us agonizing over whether that was a lie to protect their careers or bald-faced honesty in the face of an NDA or fucks-given that might have expired with their contracts. 

But I think the best we can hope for is the same situation that happened with the Avatar creators and that live action movie: 3 years from now when the NDAs are well and truly expired, JDS & LM may come out and say, “SO, on the matter of Shiro and Keith, it’s time to come clean.”

#sheith #vld meta #voltron #askspifty #it's still wild to me that people say they're brothers #like really i have questions about your siblings if that's the case #Anonymous

[homestuckhomestuckhomestuck]

The Homestuck Epilogues: Bridges And Off-Ramps: pgenpod ep52

by Andrew Hussie

The history of printed version of The Homestuck Epilogues is also the history of The Homestuck Epilogues themselves, because I originally envisioned releasing them only as a book like this, to even further emphasize their conceptual separation from the main narrative. If you know anything about the epilogues, you probably already understand that conceptually distinguishing themselves from the story by their presentation as "fanfiction" is an important part of their nature and what they are trying to say. In the form of a book (which you can read from one side, or flip upside down and read from the other) it somewhat carries the feeling of a cursed tome. Something which maddeningly beckons, due to whatever insanity it surely contains, but also something which causes feelings of trepidation. There's an ominous aura surrounding such a work, probably for a few reasons. The sheer size of it means the nature of the content probably isn't going to be that trivial. The stark presentation of the black and white covers, its dual-narrative format, the foreboding prologue combined with an alarming list of "content warnings", and even the fact that an "epilogue" is delivered with a "prologue" first, all adds up to a piece of media that appears designed to make the reader nervous about what to expect from it. Such is the nature of a cursed tome retrieved from a place which may have best been left undisturbed. It is also the nature of any creative inclination to reopen a story which had already been laid to rest - a reader's desire to agitate and then collapse the bubble which contained the imagined projection of "happily ever after", simply by observing it. There exists inherent danger in a reader's eagerness to collapse that bubble, or to crack that tome. There is also danger in a creator's willingness to accommodate that desire. It's a risk for all involved. It should be.

Obviously, it wasn't released as a book, until now (the plans for printing it had already been made, but were just delayed until well after its release on site). We decided to just release it all on the site so everyone could read it right away if they wanted. There was a long tradition of making all content freely accessible on the site, and we just produced one utterly enormous update which we were perfectly aware would cause a massive amount of discussion and agitation in the fandom. Overall it was probably better to just get it out there, let people read it relatively quickly, form their opinions on it, and then begin discussing it critically. In other words, people were going to feel something from all this, so it seemed better to just let it out there, allow the maximum number of people feel whatever it would cause them to feel, give people time to process those feelings, and then move on to whatever comes next.

But what comes next? That's a good question. I feel like the work does a lot to suggest it's not merely following up on the lives of all the characters after a few years, but also reorganizing all narrative circumstances in a way that points forward, to a new continuity with a totally different set of stakes. In this sense, I think it's heavily implied to be a piece of bridge-media, which is clearly detached from the previous narrative, and conceptually "optional" by its presentation, which allows it to also function as an off-ramp for those inclined to believe the first seven acts of Homestuck were perfectly sufficient. But for those who continue to feel investment in these characters and this world, ironically the very elements which could be regarded as disturbing or depressing are also the main reasons to have hope that there is still more to see. Because, as certain characters go to some length to elaborate on, you can't tell new stories without reestablishing significant dramatic stakes: new problems to overcome, new injustices to correct, new questions to answer. There can be no sense of emotional gratification later without first experiencing certain periods of emotional recession. And by peeking into the imagined realm of "happily ever after" to satisfy our curiosity, we discover that our attention isn't so harmless, because the complexities and sorrows of adult life can't be ignored. Nor can the challenges of creating a civilization from scratch, when several teenagers are handed god-status. It turns out the gaze we cast from the sky of Earth C to revisit everyone isn't exactly friendly, like warm sunlight. It's more like a ravaging beam, destructive and unsettling to all that could have been safely imagined. Our continued attention is the very property which incites new problems, and the troublemakers appear to be keenly aware of this. So they spring into action, and begin repositioning all the stage props for a new implied narrative. But "implied" is all it was. There was no immediate announcement for followup content, and I'm not announcing anything here yet either. More time was always going to be necessary to figure out what to do next, including what form it takes, the timing, and all those questions. For now I think it was alright to just let things simmer for a while, and give people an extended period of time to meditate on the meaning of the epilogues and why they involved the choices they did. But regardless of anyone's conclusions about it, I can at least confirm that it WAS designed to feel like a bridge piece since its conception. 

Is it this way because an epilogue SHOULD be this way? No. It is this way because I thought that was the most suitable role for an epilogue to play in the context of the weird piece of media Homestuck has always been. The story experiments a lot with the way stories are told, and in particular messes with the ways certain stretches of content get partitioned and labeled. Playing with the labeling I think has ways of bringing attention to those labels, what they actually mean, and how they affect our perception of the events covered under certain labels. It can even get us to wonder why certain labels exist at all, and can expose "flaws" in the construction of stories which include them. For instance, "intermission" is such a label. But perhaps another way of saying intermission is, "whoops, the story is getting too long, here's a break from the real story with a bunch of dumb shit that doesn't matter". It's seemingly a tacit admission to a problem. And by continuing to toy with that label as the story rolls along, you start to unpack the nature of that problem by implicitly asking questions about it. If you have one intermission because the story got long... can you have two if it gets longer? Can you have even more than that? Once you have a multitude of intermissions, don't you have two dueling threads of content, one supposedly "irrelevant", and the other important? And if that's true, then is it possible for the "irrelevant" thread to accrue more importance, throwing its entire identity as "optional content" into question retroactively? And if that can happen, is it possible the two threads can flip roles, with the intermissions becoming more important than the main acts? Then once the story goes through the motions of answering "yes" to all of this, isn't it also fair to ask, why bother with this examination at all? Was it pure horseplay and trickery? Actually, yes, sort of. There is a trick involved. The gradual realization that intermission content is nontrivial forces the reader to reevaluate their perception of the material, which was originally influenced by a label presiding over that material, and what they believed that label meant. It relies on the reader's presumption about the label's meaning to disguise certain properties of the content (like relevance), and therefore disarms the reader initially, leading to the potential for subverting expectations about the content later in surprising ways. In other words, you can use whatever it is the reader already presumes they know about stories in order to control the perception of what they are reading, just by gradually shifting the boundaries of whatever it is they've been well trained to expect from certain elements. 

So now the label "epilogue" has been toyed with in a similar way, and also in a manner which exposes an apparent flaw with the label. Or actually, just by using the label "epilogue" at all, it seems the story is admitting to an apparent flaw. If another way of saying intermission is "whoops, story's too long, here's a break", then an alternate way of saying epilogue is "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's some more". And we know right away this label will be subject to the same kind of trickery, since there are two story paths of eight epilogues each, prefaced by a shared prologue. It's already an unhinged implementation of the label before you even read it, which means it's probably time to get nervous about whether it satisfies your expectations about what the content existing under such a label should provide. Before you read it, it's already an invitation to start questioning what an epilogue even is, and whether it's kind of a silly idea even if applied conventionally. Take a 50 chapter novel with an epilogue, for example. Why isn't the epilogue just called chapter 51? Why was the choice made to label that content differently? Should we consider it an important part of the story, or should we not? If it's not important, why are we reading it? And if it is important, why is it given a label which is almost synonymous with "afterthought"? Is it a simple parting gift to the reader, to provide minor forms of satisfaction which the core narrative wasn't built to provide? Is it actually important to deliver those minor satisfactions? If it really is important, why didn't that content appear in chapter 51? And if it isn't, why bother at all? What are we even doing here?

By going down this path of questioning, it sounds like we're assembling a case against writing epilogues altogether. But actually, there's really nothing wrong with them. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to include in any story. It's just that the more you ask questions like these, the more you are forced to think about the true nature of these storytelling constructs, the actual purposes they're meant to serve. And with something like Homestuck, where issues like this are heavily foregrounded, like what should be considered "canon" vs. "not canon", or even more esoteric concepts like "outside of canon" or "beyond canon", then the issues you uncover when you ask such questions about an epilogue can't really be ignored. My feeling is, there's almost no choice but to turn the conventional ideas associated with epilogues completely inside-out, because of the inherent contradictions involved with crossing the post-canon threshold and revealing that which was not meant to be known. Stories end where they do for certain reasons, answering the questions which were thematically important to answer, and leaving some questions unanswered for similar reasons, and the reader is left with the task of deciphering the meaning of these decisions. Under the "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's more" interpretation of an epilogue as a flawed construct, by reopening an already closed-circuit narrative, what you're really doing is introducing destabilizing forces into something which had already reached a certain equilibrium, due to all the considerations that went into which questions to answer, and which to leave ambiguous. And these destabilizing forces became the entire basis for the construction of an entirely new post-canon narrative, for better or worse.

These are the types of things the epilogues let you to think about, along with a few other ideas. Like the fact that all narratives have perspectives and biases, depending on who is telling the story, even in the case where it's unclear if the narrator has any specific identity. The suggestion that all narratives are driven by agendas, sometimes thinly disguised, other times heavily. There's also stuff to think about just due to its presentation as fanfiction, and that it's the first installment of Homestuck which included other authors (contrary to some speculation I've seen, every word of all seven acts were written by me alone). By deploying it as mock-fanfiction, and including other authors, I'm making an overt gesture that is beginning to diminish my relevance as the sole authority on the direction this story takes, what should be regarded as canon, and even introducing some ambiguity into your understanding of what canon means as the torch is being passed into a realm governed by fan desires. If the epilogues really prove to be the bridge media they were designed to feel like, then I expect this trend to continue. The fanfiction format is effectively a call to action, for another generation of creators to imagine different outcomes, to submit their own work within the universe, to extend what happens beyond the epilogues, or to pave over them with their own ideas. And I believe the direness in tone and some of the subject matter suitably contributes to the urgency of this call to action.

I also think many of the negative feelings the story creates isn't just an urgent prompt for the reader to imagine different ideas, or ways to resolve the new narrative dilemmas. It's also an opportunity for people to discuss any of the difficult content critically, and for fandom in general to continue developing the tools for processing the negative emotions art can generate. Sorting that out has to be a communal experience, and it's an important part of the cycle between creating and criticizing art. I think not only can creators develop their skills to create better things by practicing and taking certain risks, fandom is something which can develop better skills as well. Skills like critical discussion, dealing constructively with negative feelings resulting from the media they consume, interacting with each other in more meaningful ways, and trying to understand different points of view outside of the factions within fandom that can become very hardened over time. Fandoms everywhere tend to get bad reputations for various reasons, maybe justifiably. But I don't see why it can't be an objective to try to improve fandom, just as creators can improve their work. And I think this can only happen if now and then fandoms are seriously challenged, by being encouraged to think about complex ideas, and made to feel difficult emotions. I believe when art creates certain kinds of negative feelings in people, it can lead to some of the most transformative experiences art has to offer. But it helps to be receptive to this idea for these experiences to have a positive net effect on your life, and your relationship with art. 

So now I'm looking to all of you on the matter of where to go next. Wherever the most conscientious and invested members of fandom want to drive this universe, as well as the standards by which we engage with media in general, that will be the direction I follow.

#transcript #huss #epilogues #theory time

[thelightofthingshopedfor]

Dear Yuletide writer,

as far as I can tell from the sign-up summary, you matched with me because of either Silent Hill 3 or Avengers Academy, because I was the only one who requested or offered the other two super-tiny fandoms I nominated. if you feel like doing one of those after all, though, go for it!

I feel like...most of the fandoms I requested aren’t too likely to lead to fics with my major DNWs, probably. I wouldn’t want to see dubcon or significant manipulation in a relationship that’s supposed to be positive and healthy, for instance. I’m not opposed to explicit sex scenes of any kind, although I often end up skimming them because I’m the type of ace person who is just Not Interested in most of the physical aspects, so...you’re welcome to write sex scenes but you absolutely don’t have to feel like you need to.

in general, my biggest DNW is unhappy endings. I’m thrilled to see my favorite characters go through all kinds of hell to get there, but I like things to be okay or at least hopeful by the end. if canon is the unhappy part in one way or another, I’m always happy to read fix-it fics. Between post-canon fix-its that could reasonably happen in the future and canon-divergence AUs where things are okay now because of some mid-canon change, I have a slight preference for the former, but both are good.

as for stuff I like, well, the other thing implied by my main DNW is that I do often enjoy fairly dark fics, as long as they end okay. I also like Loki a lot, as you can probably guess from my requests. if you ended up matching me on Avengers Academy Loki and/or you want to take a stab at one of the other two Loki-centric requests, the Loki fics I’ve actually written are pretty representative of stuff I like in my Loki fics, which basically boils down to “sympathetic interpretations always, with loads of angst and/or whump on the way to a reasonably happy ending”. I tend to take a somewhat lighter tone in general with my Avengers Academy fics (I’ve written 10 of those and only one of them doesn’t involve Loki, so...yeah I have a one-track mind where Loki is concerned), although I did also write a pretty damn whumpy fic for AvAc Loki. I’m very invested in the relationship between Thor and Loki as brothers, although Thorki is usually a personal squick just because of the pseudo-incest. for things that aren’t necessarily Loki-related, I like found families and deep friendships, sibling bonds, stories about characters reclaiming their own agency from some outside force and/or figuring out how to take control of their own narratives, and probably plenty of other things that aren’t coming to mind at the moment. I’m equally good with plotty fics and little slice-of-life or introspective pieces. I will always always always be happy to see queer characters, especially asexual ones.

more detail about my specific requests, basically just expanded versions of what I wrote in my sign-up:

Silent Hill 3 (Heather Mason). I love this game and that's mostly because of Heather--she's resourceful, brave, and incredibly tough, and the game is essentially all about her reclaiming her agency (in a very literal, physical way) from people who used her for their own ends. Anything that gets into Heather's head would be great, whether it's a missing scene of some kind during the game or something afterward that explores what she does next and how she recovers from a frankly massive amount of trauma. I would also really love to see something involving Angela and/or Maria from Silent Hill 2; I'm not sure how the timelines would line up, but the way Heather basically said "fuck you, you don’t own me" to the cult makes me want to see other female characters find their own agency as well, and it would be really awesome if Heather found a way to help them do that, either by helping them directly or just by influencing the way the town operates. in general, I love these games for their atmosphere and symbolism, so anything you can do along those lines would be great.

Avengers Academy (Loki). I still miss this game. I especially miss Loki, who was a snarky little bastard but really not a bad dude. Mostly I'd be thrilled to see anything that focuses on him (or her, I super loved Loki’s canonical genderfluidity) developing actual friendships at the academy, with any characters who might be relevant (Steve, Natasha, America Chavez, Nebula, Union Jack, Angela, Jane Thor, really anybody). Working things out with Thor and/or the rest of his family is always good too; Loki's Frost Giant storyline didn't involve Thor at all, for instance, probably because it was written well before Thor was added to the game, so I'd be interested to see how things went when he found out his brother was a Frost Giant. I’m also always happy to see crossovers of some kind with other Marvel universes, especially considering AvAc was an interesting patchwork of film and comics canon; meta stuff where characters are aware of their multiverse counterparts is always fun (again, my own AvAc fics are pretty representative of what I like...and if you wanted to build off anything in those, I’d be thrilled). and hey, if you want to pick up or expand on any of the plot threads the game never really got around to, like more about the Academy’s supposed mole, the actual nature and origin of the timefog, or other worldbuilding-related stuff, that would be awesome. I’d also be happy to see something post-canon, showing what characters are up to now or doing some kind of reunion. 

Loki: Where Mischief Lies - Mackenzi Lee. I had a lot of issues with this book and I'm not sure how much of that is just me not appreciating what the author was doing with an unreliable narrator (in part because I'm already pretty attached to certain interpretations of Loki) and how much is the author not quite doing it right, but I'd love to see something that would...make it make sense internally in terms of Loki's motivations and actions. It doesn't necessarily have to be a fix-it, although I'd love one of those too, with Loki reuniting with Theo and/or actually reconciling with his family. A giant crossover that includes this Loki with other major versions of Loki could be fun too. I’m planning to write up some kind of actual review to articulate what about this book didn’t work for me, and I’ll update this post with a link when I do that, although...again, I know nobody else offered or requested this one. (if you think it sounds fun or you just want to read this book in general, my library actually has the ebook on Hoopla, so it’s worth checking to see if your library does too.)

Marvel Contest of Champions game (Loki, Thor). The way this game handles Loki continues to piss me off--sometimes it's kind of fun and it strikes a similar balance to recent comics as far as his loyalties and motives are concerned, but most of the time it's like "here's our Loki, his design is based on current comics Loki who's mostly an antihero or even sometimes a hero now, and here's an event storyline explicitly based on the MCU where Loki literally had a redemption arc and a heroic death, but our Loki is still a villain because of reasons". I want the game to fix that, but if they won't, I'd settle for fic. like with Loki: Where Mischief Lies I know nobody matched with me on this one, and this one is probably less accessible--I mean, the game is totally free, but I think all the Loki content so far has been in event storylines, which means you can’t really pick up any of that now (unless somebody on Youtube has been very thorough, I guess; I’ve done some grumbling in my CoC tag but it’s not really helpful as a background). so unless you just happen to have been playing this game regularly for the last few years, it probably won’t work to pick up this one.

#yuletide #yuletide 2019

[xanderhelios]

{ @xanderhelios @wrathful-red }

Xander sat in his room - his own, not Keef's. He knew when his family returned from picking up Red, the Tallest most certainly on board. Xander had stood in the shadows at the edge of the room, watching his family departing from the ship into the main hangar of the Massive, holding his other far weaker and already sick looking human father. 

He couldn't seem to bring himself to visit Dib. He was still angry and hurt. Keef was, so why shouldn't he be? Two of his fathers had thrown their entire family to the wayside so they could have their own private, mutual crises. It was selfish, and it was cruel. 

The boy hadn't gone to speak with Red, either. He was immediately in full-tilt searching for Pur and Mira, putting Dib in treatment, and taking back his responsibilities as Tallest. Xander wouldn't be surprised if Red didn't have the time to come see him - not that he much wanted to see the Irk. He'd finally formed bonds, he had been allowed a family, and for what? Only for it to be taken away when they proved to him that they didn't want their family whole anymore. Dib and Red might both be back, now, but things could surely never be the same. 

Flopping back into his bed, the boy stared up at the ceiling. Their family had been to hell and back so many times. He'd begun his bonds through deception and aided torture. Of course they'd never trust him. Rolling onto his side, he yanked his blankets over his head and closed his eyes.

Red had been incredibly busy since the moment that he had stepped foot aboard the Massive. The Tallers had done incredibly well in the absence of the Tallests, but as always, there was a never ending amount of work to do. Tracking Pur was also taking much of his mental energy. It became clear when he returned that something was incredibly wrong - the other Tallest had not so much as checked in with his mate. With a relationship as theirs, that was unheard of. Even if he had cloaked his ship- he would have let Mika know of his plan, not leaving him worrying and wondering. 

But even for all of this, the Tallest did not forget about his smeets, of the reports he had gotten as to Xander's self harm and depression. At his first opportunity, the first time there was the slightest of lulls in his workload the Tallest made his way to the boy's room, pausing outside of the door. 

He breathed a heavy sigh as he pondered what he was to say. This conversation was, in many ways, even more nerve wracking than the one with Keef had been. But after just a moment he straightened himself up and knocked lightly on the door. 

Xander only rose his head slightly at the knock, tugging the blanket down off his eyes to narrow them at the door. It could really be anyone, other than Dib. Keef often checked up on him during the day, would bring him food and drinks that often went barely touched. He wasn't aware it was Red standing behind the door with his fully human senses. 

Sighing deeply, he settled back into the bed in the darkness of his room. "Come in," he called quietly, hoping that they wouldn't hear him but knowing whoever it was would let themselves in anyway, especially if it was Keef bringing something to eat. 

The Tallest did not miss the words and quietly slid the door open and stepped into the room. It was dark, though the Tallest could still see just fine in the low lighting. He could make out the vaguely Xander shaped mass on the bed and so he directed his words there. "Hello, Xander. I think that you and I need to have a talk. May I come in and sit down with you?"

"I guess so," Xander replied, his voice just as quiet. He immediately tensed when he discovered it was Red coming into his room, not having expected the Tallest to make time to come by. He kept himself in the safety of his blanket cocoon, unmoving aside from his steady breathing. 

The Tallest nodded at the quiet and reserved response, glad to have been granted entry at all, even if it was somewhat reluctant. As he stepped in and sat down in the boy's reading chair he replied softly, "Thank you, Xander."

He quieted for just a moment to gather his thoughts before he said, "The first thing I need to say is to let you know how sorry I am that all of this happened. And I am, Xander. I am so incredibly sorry. I know that these last few months have been hard. They have been hard for everyone but particularly for you. I have not been a good father to you. I want to make things right for you. You deserve much better than what I have given to you."

Xander couldn't help but heave a sigh as Red spoke, immediately diving into apologies and grievances. He slowly sat up, his hair disheveled from his blankets and eyes reddened from crying and rubbing at them. He looked tired, though the majority of what he'd been doing lately is sleep. 

"No, you haven't. And don't think Miguel didn't notice you were gone, too. How could you just leave without saying goodbye? Why do we mean so little to you?" Xander spat, venom and dejection both in his voice. 

Red let out a soft sigh as the boy began to berate him- he deserved it all, of course. When Xander had finished he replied softly, "You and the others mean the universe to me. I know that what I did does not demonstrate that very well. But I was not in my right mind when I made that decision, Xander. I had been made the universe's plaything for days on end and when that veil was suddenly lifted the weight of what had happened because of me came crashing down on me all at once and then Dib had left me before I could even wrap my head around any of it. I made a bad decision, the worst decision I have ever made, in that moment. But never once was it because I did not care for you or our family. It was because I thought that you all deserve much better."

The Tallest looked at his son imploringly in the half light and continued, "I regretted it as soon as I had done it. But then I was terrified to face my consequences. That does not speak to your character, it speaks to mine. I love you, Xander. You are my son and nothing will ever change that. I hope that you will give me the chance to prove to you that it is not something that I take lightly."

"We were all scared, dad," Xander replied, his voice lowering again as he dropped his eyes back to his hands, twisting together in his lap. Hearing the tone of Red's voice, practically pleading with him, had softened his anger and just made him feel sad. "How is this gonna be okay? How do you think we can all just go back to how things were before you and Dib left? Before he got sick? Everything went wrong and everyone ran away instead of trying to fix it. It isn't fair."

Red lifted himself out of the chair and moved to sit down beside Xander on the bed as he replied, "Yes, there are those of us who ran away. It was a stupid decision. A mistake. But people make mistakes when they feel they do not have other options. I know that having to experience the consequences of those mistakes is not fair. But know that this has taught me so much. It has taught me what is truly important. And that is you. This family. Things will be alright because we will make them alright. It may take time and hard work. But if all of us are willing to work for it, we will be okay."

Xander sat still as he listened, becoming more overwhelmed with each word his chosen father spoke. Even as a human he could hear the sincerity of his words - a sincerity that stung at his eyes. With a small whine, he reached his hand out, taking Red's in his own. It was a small action, but a large enough gesture for the boy who still wasn't ready for an embrace. 

He didn't know how any of this would be okay, or how he would be able to quell the hurt and sadness that had overwhelmed the last month. He felt lost, even more so without Pur and their work to distract him, leaving him alone with his thoughts and hurt and his own guilt.

"I don't know if I can believe that yet," he muttered under his breath, eyes still trained on his free hand. 

Red accepted his son's hand and squeezed the fingers affectionately, though he did not comment on the gesture. At the boy's admittance the Irk looked down at him with a soft, albeit tired smile. "That is quite alright that you do not believe it yet. I will believe it enough for the both of us until we can prove to you that we are men of our word. I just ask that you move forward with an open mind and give us the chance to do that."

Xander nodded slowly. What more did he have left to lose by trying to trust them? Probably everything. It would be a worthwhile payback for what he had done to Zim.  "I'll do my best," he said. After a beat he added, "Any luck finding Pur and Mira?" 

The Tallest chittered sadly and replied, "Not yet. We have Invaders following the course that had been laid out by Pur to see if there are any clues, but we simply do not have any answers yet." His antennae fell as his mind turned to his little brother. If anything happened to the violet-eyed Irk the responsibility for it would be on him. He had not admitted to anyone just how scared he was about it. "We will find them. Everything will be okay."

Whether he was trying to convince the boy or himself was anyone's guess.

Xander rose his eyes up to Red, then, his mouth downturned in a frown. “Is there anything I can do to help?” He asked, not releasing his hold on the Tallest’s hand, but noted on closer inspection that he again wore the orok around his neck. Keef still wouldn’t wear his own, not that Xander blamed the redhead at all. Though it did make his family feel almost as split as it was when Red and Dib were gone.

At least when Dib was on Earth, he wasn’t worried about death.

Red turned to look down at the boy with a soft smile and replied, "Actually, I think that there is. I am great with speeches and military aspects of leadership, but Pur has always been the brains of the Tallest. I don't think that would shock anyone to find out. But I am… somewhat lost without his intellect. I cannot think of a better person than you to help advise me in his absence. If you are ready to put on some clean robes and leave your room, that is."

Confused, Xander blinked at Red and then looked down at himself. It was true he was a little worse for wear, having hardly left bed since first watching his family return to the Massive. He wasn’t sure how ready he was to leave, but on the other hand, maybe having a task to focus on would help. He’d been studying under Pur for over two years now, and while he was sure he’d never match the Tallest’s intellect, he was getting there.

“...Okay,” he said finally, the smallest of smiles tugging at his lip. “Um. Can I have some time to like. Shower and eat first?”

Red smiled more widely when his son accepted the offer. The desire to get him out of his room was a great deal of why he offered this in the first place. Xander was much like Dib and did not do well with idle hands. Too much time left to their own devices to brood and they became self destructive. He gave the boy a nod and replied, "Of course. Get cleaned up and dressed, I will have dinner brought up to the bridge for you." 

The Tallest let out a soft sigh, his antennae twitching nervously as he asked, "May I give you a hug, Xander? I have missed you very much."

Xander had been ready to release Red’s hands, to throw the blanket off to get up and start getting ready, but the Tallest’s words caught him off guard and gave him pause. He looked up to his father, noting the twitching antennae and the tenseness in his jaw. He’d become adept at reading Irken body language - you had to, living with them and calling them family.

With a breath, he nodded. “Sure,” he said, making the first move and tucking himself against Red’s chest, wrapping his arms around the Tallest’s waist.

Red was almost surprised when Xander moved in to give him that hug- it was not as tight as the boy used to cling to him, but it still brought a deep and rumbling purr in his chest. He wrapped his arms around the boy, burying his head in Xander's hair as he rubbed small circles on the human's back with the flat of his palm. "I love you, Xander. Thank you for listening to me and for giving me another chance."

The boy nodded against his Irken father’s chest. While he didn’t return the sentiment, he did revel somewhat in the touch. After a few silent moments he pulled back, rubbing his face as he scooched away to the edge of the bed to reclaim a bit of distance. “I’ll be on the bridge soon,” he said.

Red folded his hands in his lap as soon as Xander had released his grip. He was fine with the contact ending, not wanting to make the boy uncomfortable.  But as always, he let his children decide when they had enough of a hug. 

When Xander stood the Tallest followed in suit and gave a nod before turning toward the door. "I will see you then." Without another word Red turned and made his way out of his son's chamber. 

Xander stood still until the door clicked shut behind the Tallest, a dopey grin starting to tug at his features, one of the first in a long while. The thought of his human father’s illness, a missing uncle, and their still-broken family gave him pause, but with a shake of his head, he was walking to the bathroom to clean himself up and change.

There was work to do.

[wepon]

the homestuck epilogues: bridges and off-ramps, by andrew hussie*

the history of the printed version of the homestuck epilogues is also the history of the homestuck epilogues themselves because i originally envisioned releasing them only as a book like this to even further emphasize their conceptual separation from the main narrative. if you know anything about the epilogues, you probably already understand that conceptually distinguishing themselves from the story by their presentation as fanfiction as an important part of their nature and what they're trying to say. in the form of a book which you can read from one side or flip upside-down and read from the other, it somewhat carries the feeling of a cursed tome, something which maddeningly beckons due to whatever insanity it surely contains but also something which causes feelings of trepidation. there's an ominous aura surrounding such a work, probably for a few reasons. the sheer size of it means the nature of the content probably isn't going to be that trivial. the stark presentation of the black-and-white covers, its dual narrative format, the foreboding prologue combined with an alarming list of content warnings, and even the fact that an epilogue is delivered with a prologue first, all adds up to a piece of media that appears designed to make the reader nervous about what to expect from it. such is the nature of a cursed tome retrieved from a place which may have been best left undisturbed. it is also the nature of any creed[?] of inclination to reopen a story which had already been laid to rest, a reader's desire to agitate and then collapse the bubble which contain the imagined projection of happily-ever-after simply by observing it. there exists inherent danger in a reader's eagerness to collapse that bubble or to crack that tome. there is also danger in a creator's willingness to accommodate that desire. it's a risk for all involved. it should be. obviously it wasn't released as a book until now. the plans for printing it had already been made but were just delayed until well after its release on-site. we decided to just release it all on the site so that everyone could read it right away if they wanted. there was a long tradition of making all content freely accessible on the site, and we just produced one utterly enormous update, which we were perfectly aware would cause a massive amount of discussion and agitation in the fandom. overall it was probably better to just get it out there, let people read it relatively quickly, form their opinions on it, and then begin discussing it critically. in other words, people were going to feel something from all of this, so it seemed better to just let it out there, allow the maximum number of people to feel whatever it would cause them to feel, give people time to process those feelings, and then move on to whatever comes next. but what comes next? that's a good question. i feel like the work does a lot to suggest it's not merely following up on the lives of all the characters after a few years but also reorganizing all narrative circumstances in a way that points forward to a new continuity with a totally different set of stakes. in this sense, i think it's heavily implied to be a piece of bridge media, which is clearly detached from the previous narrative and conceptually optional by its presentation, which allows it to function as an off-ramp for those inclined to believe the first seven acts of homestuck were perfectly sufficient. but for those who continue to feel investment in these characters and this world, ironically the very elements which could be regarded as disturbing or depressing are also the main reasons to have hope that there is still more to see because, as certain characters go to some length to elaborate on, you can't tell new stories without reestablishing significant dramatic stakes, new problems to overcome, new injustices to correct, new questions to answer. there can be no sense of emotional gratification later without us first experiencing certain periods of emotional recession. and by peeking into the imagined realm of happily-ever-after to satisfy our curiosity, we discover our attention isn't so harmless because the complexities and sorrows of adult life can't be ignored, nor can the challenges of creating a civilization from scratch when several teenagers are handed god status. it turns out the gaze we cast from the skies of earth c revisited aren't exactly friendly like warm sunlight. it's more like a ravaging beam, destructive and unsettling to all that could have been safely imagined. our continued attention is the very property which incites new problems, and the troublemakers appear to be keenly aware of this so they spring into action and begin repositioning all the stage props for a new implied narrative. but implied is all it was. there was no immediate announcement for follow-up content and i'm not announcing anything yet here, either. more time was always going to be necessary to figure out what to do next, including what form it takes, the timing, and all those questions. for now i think it was alright to just let things simmer for a while and give people an extended period of time to meditate on the meaning of the epilogues and why they involve the choices they did. but regardless of anyone's conclusions about it, i can at least confirm that it was designed to feel like a bridge piece since its conception. is it this way because an epilogue should be this way? no. it is this way because i thought that was the most suitable role for an epilogue to play in the context of the weird piece of media homestuck has always been. the story experiments a lot with the way stories are told, and in particular messes with the ways certain stretches of content get partitioned and labeled. playing with the labeling, i think, has ways of bringing attention to those labels, what they actually mean, and how they affect our perception of events covered under certain labels. it can even get us to wonder why certain labels exist at all, and can expose flaws in the construction of stories which include them. for instance, intermission is such a label. but perhaps another way of saying intermission is "whoops, the story is getting too long, here's a break from the real story with a bunch of dumb shit that doesn't matter". it's seemingly a tacit admission to a problem, and by continuing to toy with that label as the story rolls along, you start to unpack the nature of that problem by implicitly asking questions about it. if you have one intermission because the story got long, can you have two if it gets longer? can you have even more than that? once you have a multitude of intermissions, don't you have two dueling threads of content, one supposedly irrelevant and the other important? and if that's true, then is it possible for the irrelevant thread to accrue more importance, throwing it's entire identity as optional content into question retroactively? and if that can happen, is it possible that two threads can flip roles with the intermissions becoming more important than the main acts? then once the story goes through the motions of answering yes to all this, isn't it also fair to ask "why bother with this examination at all"? was it pure horseplay and trickery? actually yes, sort of. there is a trick involved. the gradual realization that intermission content is non-trivial forces the reader to re-evaluate their perception of the material which was originally influenced by a label presiding over that material and what they believed that label meant. it relies on the reader's presumption about the label's meaning to disguise certain properties of the content, such as relevance, and therefore disarms the reader initially, leading to the potential for subverting expectations about the content later in surprising ways. in other words, you can use whatever it is the reader already presumes about stories to control the perception of what they are reading just by shifting the boundaries of whatever it is they've been well-trained to expect from certain elements. so now the label "epilogue" has been toyed with in a similar way, and also in a manner which supposes an apparent flaw with the label. or actually, just by using the label "epilogue" at all, it seems the story is admitting to an apparent flaw. if another way of saying intermission is "whoops, the story's too long, here's a break", then an alternate way of saying epilogue is "whoops, i forgot some shit, here's some more", and we know right away this label will be subject to the same type of trickery since there are two story paths of eight epilogues each, prefaced by a shared prologue. it's already an unhinged implementation of the label before you even read it, which means it's probably time to get nervous about whether it satisfies your expectations about what the content existing under such a label should provide. before you read it, it's already an invitation to start questioning what an epilogue even is and whether it's kind of a silly idea even if applied conventionally. take a fifty-chapter novel with an epilogue, for example. why isn't the epilogue just called chapter fifty-one? why was the choice made to label that content differently? should we consider it an important part of the story or should we not? if it's not important, why are we reading it? and if it is important, why is it given a label which is almost synonymous with afterthought? is it a simple parting gift to the reader, to provide minor forms of satisfaction which the core narrative wasn't built to provide? is it actually important to deliver those minor satisfactions? if it really is important, why didn't that content appear in chapter fifty-one? and if it isn't, why bother at all? what are we even doing here? by going down this path of questioning, it sounds like we're assembling a case against writing epilogues altogether, but actually, there's really nothing wrong with them. it's a perfectly reasonable thing to include in any story. it's just that the more you ask questions like these, the more you're forced to think about the true nature of these storytelling concepts, the actual purposes they're meant to serve. and with something like homestuck, where issues like this are heavily foregrounded, like what should be considered canon versus non-canon, or even more esoteric concepts like "outside" of canon or "beyond" canon, that the issues you uncover when you ask such questions about an epilogue can't really be ignored. my feeling is there's almost no choice but to turn the conventional ideals associated with epilogues completely inside out, because of the inherent contradictions  involved with crossing the post-canon threshold and revealing that which was not meant to be known. stories end where they do for certain reasons. answering the questions which were thematically important to answer and leaving some questions unanswered for similar reasons, and the reader is left with the task of deciphering the meaning of those decisions. under the "whoops, i forgot some shit, here's more" interpretation of an epilogue as a flawed construct, by reopening an already closed-circuit narrative, what you're really doing is introducing destabilizing forces into something which had already reached a certain equilibrium due to all these considerations that went into which questions to answer and which to leave ambiguous, and these destabilizing forces became the entire basis for the construction of an entirely new post-canon narrative, for better or worse. these are the types of things the epilogues let you think about, along with a few other ideas, like the fact that all narratives have perspectives and biases depending on who's telling the story, even in the case where it's unclear whether the narrator has any specific identity. the suggestion that all narratives are driven by agendas, sometimes thinly disguised, other times heavily. there's also stuff to think about just due to its presentation as fanfiction, and that it's the first installment of homestuck which included other authors. contrary to some speculation i've seen, every word of all seven acts were written by me alone. by deploying it as mock-fanfiction and including other authors, i'm making an overt gesture that is beginning to diminish my relevance as the sole authority on the direction this story takes, what should be regarded as canon, and even introducing some ambiguity into your understanding of what canon means as the torch is being passed into a realm governed by fan desires. if the epilogues really prove themselves to be the bridge media they were designed to feel like, then i expect this trend to continue. the fanfiction format is effectively a call to action for another generation of creators to imagine different outcomes, to submit their own work within the universe, to extend what happens beyond the epilogues or to pave over them with their own ideas, and i believe the direness in tone, with some of the subject matter, suitably contributes to the urgency of this call to action. i also feel that many of the negative feelings this story creates isn't just an urgent prompt for the reader to imagine different ideas or ways to solve the new narrative dilemmas. it's also an opportunity for people to discuss any of the difficult content critically, and fandom in general continuing to develop the tools for processing the negative emotions art can generate. sorting that out has to be a communal experience, and it's an important part of the cycle between creating and criticizing art. i think not only can creators develop their skills to create better things by practicing in taking certain risks, fandom is something which can develop better skills as well. skills like critical discussion, dealing constructively with negative feelings resulting from the media they consume, interacting with each other in more meaningful ways, and trying to understand different points of view outside of the factions within fandom that can become very hardened over time. fandoms everywhere tend to get bad reputations for various reasons, maybe justifiably, but i don't see why it can't be an objective to try and improve fandom, just as creators can improve this work, and i think this can only happen if, now and then, fandoms are seriously challenged by being encouraged to think about complex ideas and made to feel difficult emotions. i believe when art creates certain kinds of negative feelings in people it can lead to some of the most transformative experiences art has to offer, but it helps to be receptive to this idea for these experiences to have a positive net effect on your life and your relationship with art. so now i'm looking to all of you on the matter of where to go next, wherever the most conscientious and invested members of fandom want to drive this universe, as well as the standards by which we engage with media in general. that will be the direction i follow.

*i have no way to verify this statement

#homestuck #posting this because i think it's helping me let go of the desire for a proper final conclusion #[waves] goodbye

[eponymous-rose]

Talks Machina Highlights - Critical Role C2E19 (May 22, 2018)

Tonight’s guests are Travis Willingham and Matt Mercer (both in human and pillow form)!

Pre-show is blessed by a Tess Fowler original!

Announcements: Critrole.com is the new website, there’s a new partnership with Stack-Up and some fun merchandise associated with that (see website for details!), hardcover comic will be on sale on May 31 (see website for details!), the Stream of Many Eyes will be featuring most of the cast starting on June 1 (see... website for details? okay, no, it’s on the WotC website), Travis wants to be a red panda in the next Honey Heist (I... don’t think that’s on the website), there’s now a Talks Machina Instagram account that will feature behind-the-scenes stuff (you know where to go).

@critrolestats for this episode: last time two player characters fought each other in the main campaign was episode 99 (feat. Jon Heder’s character), the Mighty Nein has collectively earned over 6,250 gold since the campaign started, and the party has given Pumat Sol 5,030 gold since they met him, a substantial amount of which went toward Caleb’s paper and ink.

Matt’s Jester voice gets brought up again, and Brian points out that he’ll probably have to cover for Laura for a bit going forward. Matt: “That’s if Jester survives...” 

Travis: “We’re just going to have the baby and put it on the table and that’s going to be our new mini.”

If Fjord had lost the gamble with the Gentleman, he would’ve taken the money but mostly just would’ve been appreciative that he was brazen enough to make the gamble. It was a test to see how the party adjusted, how they held their own. Matt: “Everything with him is very much a power dynamic game and trying to read whoever he’s talking with. That’s how he got where he is today.”

Fjord’s been very cautious when it comes to asking questions about the things he needs to know about his backstory, and that might change going forward. Travis is very aware that as soon as he figures something out, Matt will throw him a curveball. Matt points out that every story will have a different pace of unveiling, based in part just on pure geography and where the party happens to be at any given time. He mentions that Fjord’s backstory is a little more complicated than some of the others. Travis is delighted to actually not know some big parts of Fjord’s backstory (including the identity of his warlock patron), and Matt talks about what a gift those backstory gaps are to a DM, because it establishes both investment and the opportunity to surprise the player.

The fight scene in the Leaky Tap was mainly just meant to be flavor and establishing that locales are dynamic and evolving, a little different each time you walk in. Travis: “Taco Tuesday.” Brian: “Sacrifice Saturday.”

Gif of the Week: steeple vs. staple is an important distinction.

Matt had four or five different possible story hooks prepared for the party based on where they decided to go. Brian points out that Matt generally has his contingencies covered; Matt explains that a lot of it isn’t very detailed but lends itself well to getting fleshed out later. He also talks about the balance between leading the narrative (to keep players from being overwhelmed) and providing the open-world feeling.

Fjord is “a little bit... kind of... somewhat” relieved not to be going back to the Menagerie Coast. There’s some unfinished business he’s not sure how to confront yet. Matt: “Expertly danced around.”

Matt didn’t intend for Fjord to take the “devour” thing literally. Travis makes a lot of faces about that. Matt points out that it made for a very cool visual. Brian: “Yeah, deep-fjoat.” Travis is a little concerned the next weapon may be a mace.

Travis was disappointed not to get to find out what was going on with the orc, but he was determined not to metagame it. He’s hoping Molly and Yasha bring it up again.

Liam and Sam put together a whole list of cons Nott and Caleb have at their disposal; they haven’t even showed the list to Matt.

On the goblins, Matt mentions: “There are reasons why they were there. None that came to light or were investigated fully.” A history check may have discerned where those goblins came from.

Fanart of the Week: Yasha’s necrotic shroud.

Travis’s big reaction over Nott’s backstory was when he started to realize what she was looking for from Caleb. From Fjord’s perspective, he has a massive sense of empathy and compassion for Nott after that reveal; there was a lot in what she was saying that Fjord recognized. He’s looking forward to talking to her about it later.

After building so much, Matt loves the backstory reveals because they really exemplify the players’ chance to make it a true collaboration and do some creative building of their own.

Matt was not expecting Yasha to tell Trent she was from Xhorhas. “Oh, you just made yourself real interesting.”

Travis went back and watched Caleb’s backstory scene at Liam’s urging (they enjoyed the scene as it played out, but when it unexpectedly got as intense as it did, Liam wished the rest of them had been there to enjoy the reveal; it also avoids having to repeat all the information verbatim in the future). It worked in the spirit of experimentation, but in the future they’re probably going to limit it to shorter scenes at the DM’s discretion.

Matt: “I feel that anything is capable of deep evil, and anything is capable of deep good.” Brian: “So for you, evil isn’t a permanent characteristic in that regard.” Matt: “Yeah.”

Travis: “I didn’t think there was any hell deeper or hotter than shopping... and then I went to the library with Caleb.” Brian: “If you cut out everything in the episode that bored Travis, there wouldn’t be much left.” Matt: “Oh, I’m never catering to this motherfucker.” He points out that they’re still finding the balance there as well; he hasn’t had a character in a long time that’s actively trying to research everything in the world around him, but they’re looking for solutions to prevent in-game info dumps.

Talks Machina: All The Stars Of Critical Role Are Out Tonight

Travis got asked “would you like to rage with that?” by a Starbucks barista. He’s embarrassed that he had “non-cool groceries” with him at the time. A debate ensues about what exactly would constitute cool groceries.

Matt talks about going through the TSA checkpoint and one of the agents telling Sam “Right this way, Mr. Shorthalt.” Taliesin had a metal pepperbox gift from a fan in his bag that he forgot to check, and the TSA guy said, “It would be Percy, wouldn’t it?”

On pricing magical items, Matt uses his judgment about the item’s relative usefulness to somewhat arbitrarily pick a value within the suggested price ranges for that rarity in the DMG.

Matt has had extremely vivid dreams of himself wandering around Exandria on several occasions, and always feels warm and fuzzy afterwards. One dream about the Age of Arcanum heavily influenced his designs.

In a melee fight, Fjord would be most interested in fighting either Caleb (as the only one he’d be likely to beat) or Yasha (to get his ass kicked).

Favorite bad decision snack? Travis is all about shaved ice and Oreos dipped in peanut butter. Brian’s weakness is Cheeto Puffs and animal crackers dipped in cake frosting.

Travis does the Jester voice with the little Jester doll, and Matt pounces on it as the solution for Laura’s upcoming absence.

Matt won’t comment on what the jerky was actually made of. Dani: “Maybe they’ve also tasted baby.”

Brian tells a story about beef jerky. Matt: “Brian... you may be my favorite supervillain.”

#critical role #critical role spoilers #talks machina #talks machina spoilers #long text post

[lucalicatteart]

Nanyevimi Basics

Just a short bit of notes about timelines, trade routes/ land stuff, and going over basic concepts like the gap in history, global areas, blood incompatibilities between species, etc. Since these are kind of background details of the world that I may end up referencing a lot just when generally speaking about it, I thought it’d be good to have some general info about this stuff all in one place.     (info under read more)

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This isn’t actually too long (or at least is shorter than some of the posts I’ve made), but I’m going to provide an outline of the sections (like a little table of contents), just because the topics are all so scattered and unrelated (since it’s really just.. “Random Misc. Things You May Need To Know About The World’), so that it’s easier to just go to the section you want to read lol...

Topic Outline (in order):

Main Info/ state of world

timelines/ explanation of the history gap

explanation of what ‘global areas’ are

current day travel routes and map stuff

interaction between species (blood incompatibility, mating, etc.) 

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-- MAIN INFO / WORLD STATE  ---------------

Main things to note about the world: 

Humanoid intelligent species have existed in the realm for well over 500,000 years (though most history prior to the point has been lost due to a gap in history spoken about later in this post)

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That means a lot of stuff is old and a lot of things don’t make sense lol, or at least you end up seeing a lot of things like, species that seem to have no ancestor (because whatever they evolved from was so far in the past that all information on it has been lost), weird ruins that nobody knows the point of, stories and religions and things where nobody is even sure where they originated from anymore, etc.  (though this doesn’t actually impact too much since of course most average people just focus on what’s around them.. like if you’re just a humble little elf farmer or something you’re not really going to care about solving 40,000 year old mysteries, you’re just going to focus on events directly in your lifespan and your immediate surroundings)

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Currently in the world, many groups are disconnected. Despite efforts by a few international councils and stuff to establish worldwide trade routes and things like global areas, everyone still exists pretty isolated from each other and the realm can really come across more as many little distinct pockets of people scattered everywhere, rather than some broad interconnected network of societies. Though this is clarified a lot more in the later section about global areas. 

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magic exists, which impacts a lot of different things. If you haven't read the post on types of magic (HERE (link)), at the end of the post it explains how magic is used in daily life in Nanyevimi, common attitudes towards it, etc. Which may also be important context to consider when thinking about the world. I didn’t include anything about magic in this post since I already covered a lot of ‘The Basics Of Magic' type of stuff in that one.  But if nothing else, at least know: 1 - Magic is extremely dangerous and risky and mere exposure can cause health problems, especially with higher level magics.. 2 - 95% of people in the realm either can’t do magic or can only do it a little bit/low level magics (or are capable of higher level magics but choose to use magic extremely sparingly because... dangerous lol).. 3 -  magic is used in minor ways to occasionally help people with things or do things that wouldn’t be possible through any other means, but fully magically integrated societies that use magic for everything and etc. would be extremely rare.. 4 - magic has a lot of  dynamics to it’s use, and while it’s still partially mysterious/not fully understood, it does still seem to have  recognizable patterns/systems that determine how it can be used, whether something will work or not, who can use what type of magic, etc.,, even if these rules deal in vague concepts that are hard to figure (like someone’s “inherent magical energy level” is a super abstract measurement lol).  for much more detail than that, just read the post about magic lol

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NOTE: At the very beginning of planning my world, I did FORMERLY have the idea that Nanyevimi could be connected to earth (our real world) somehow (where it’s like, a secret realm existing technically alongside earth but very separate to the point neither really know about each other), but I’ve since decided that this is NOT the case.  The more that I planned other aspects of the world, the more that a connection to earth/our real world became kind of incompatible and nonsensical, so I’ve done my best to go back and change all of that (remove any instances it was referenced, etc.), but there may have been a few places that I missed it or something.  So just be aware that THIS post is currently the most updated TRUE info about the state of the world (updated last on September 20th, 2019), and ANYTHING in other posts that contradicts something written in THIS post, should be considered inaccurate. So if you see some old stuff about the human realm being connected to Nanyevimi or some other random nonsense that I contradict later, please disregard it (and maybe let me know so i can go back and edit what I missed!)    ANYWAY though, Nanyevimi has NO association with our world/earth/the human realm and is an ENTIRELY separate fantasy world!!!! 

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There are probably a little over a hundred unique humanoid intelligent species (humans, elves, jhevona, etc.) thought to exist in the world (if counting subspecies as separate groups. if not, then the number is a bit smaller). All of these groups have different lifespans and magical ability and biological needs and etc., so this can be another reason for the seeming disconnection through the realm  (like, the huge gap between species who live to be 8000 years old on average to those who only live up to 200, cultural/technological differences between magic and non-magic species, various groups having entirely different standards as to what climates they have to be in for survival/what resources they must consume to live (food, blood, magic, etc.),, as well as things mentioned  later in the post, like how blood of one species can be dangerous to another, and how pretty much no species can mate with other species (meaning like, merging their societies or something is less plausible)). Basically: there are massive cultural*(1), physical, biological (like “I’d literally die if I visited this climate”,etc.), technological, communication based, etc. barriers between many many groups, which overall makes it somewhat difficult to interact cohesively across the realm.   *(1) (By ‘cultural’, I mostly mean timescale based.. like all other cultural stuff like customs, language, etc. I feel like can be overlooked, since you can adapt to that sort of thing, but with varying lifespans and people’s entire societies literally operating on vastly different scales from one another, it seems like much more difficult to overcome)

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A few of the main things in the world that scholars are unsure of (not that there aren’t plenty others, but these are like, the Main mysterious things in the world that actually impact people in the sense that not understanding them makes everything complicated lol) :    ---- why the random history gap occurred 500,000 years ago and what it even was    --- basically everything about magic lol.. why it exists. what it is. why some rules apply in some scenarios and not others. why the hell it’s so dangerous that mere exposure to it can make people sick/infertile/etc. how it’s passed on from person to person. etc.    --- why blood is so weird and species have so many blood incompatibilities despite no physical properties of various bloods really seeming that different     --- what a soul is and what ‘’soul’’ magics really are, what is actually being transferred when souls are worked with or moved, and again like, whether souls have innate “magical properties “ or etc.     ---  what “inherent magical energy” really is (as well as why some species posses more than others, the means for how it is drained (when using magic) and restored (naturally by the body??), why you can seemingly grow it by means of soul absorption (and again, what are ‘’souls’’ and how are they linked to ‘’magic’’, etc.)))

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Species lean towards being taller in Nanyevimi.. like technically the ‘humans’ in Nanyevimi are pretty genetically similar to humans in our real world, but they’re taller in Nanyevimi. That’s kind of just across the board like, animals tend to be bigger, humanoid people tend to be taller, even stuff like plants tend to grow larger, etc. Of course there's plenty of tiny stuff, this isn’t a definite rule, but things do trend towards slightly larger rather than smaller. This is why the heights for characters/species/  etc. will probably seem oddly tall lol

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While there have been some myths and legends of this existing, the land has no magical properties. Sometimes in magical/fantasy worlds there will be stuff like, magic forests or magic rocks or other like, natural resources that somehow contain magic, so I just wanted to specify that while this is a magical world, this type of thing really isn’t seen in Nanyevimi. Magic is inherent in some of the humanoid species in the realm, but doesn’t seem to naturally occur anywhere outside of that.  Though there can definitely be like.. fake magical natural things. Like if a mage casts an enchantment over a forest to make it act in a certain way or serve a magical purpose, it could SEEM like a magical forest or etc.,, but natural parts of the land/world themselves are not inherently magical, in this case it would be caused to act magically by an external force (the mage). There are only a TINY handful of exceptions to this, usually in the form of water or gems (such as a lake that seems to contain magical energy itself, or stones that seem to hold a magical property), and by tiny handful I mean like... maybe 3-5 things existent in the entire world lol. And even for those, it’s hard to tell if it’s genuine, since there are probably millions of years of history of this land, much of which has been lost,.. Thus, who would even know if the “””genuine magical lake””” wasn’t just some fake-magical resource that a mage created 800,000  years ago and nobody knows the origins anymore so they just assume the magic is inherent, when again, it’s merely external. 

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Most species are fairly small. There are a few majority populations (elves, certain types of humans, certain subspecies of jhevona, etc.), but many groups make up only a tiny fraction of the world. So even though there is a wide variety of all different types of species and groups of people, a lot of them live in more isolated areas (which may have something to do with why they’ve got such different anatomy or abilities or etc, like they evolved in a weird niche pocket on their own for so long) So.... there is A LOT of variation, but often more powerful/unique/strange species tend to exist in more isolated areas and in smaller numbers and be more rare, so it’s not like EVERYONE in Nanyevimi is going to be some wild super all powerful mage god with 10 arms and 30 eyes and the ability to levitate or etc. lol.. The vast majority of people in the world are just... fairly normal looking humanoid creatures, who can maybe do a LITTLE basic magic or maybe even can’t do magic at all, that just kind of go about their day hanging out in their village or etc.  While species varied in abilities and appearance DO exist in smaller amounts in some places, and you’ll occasionally come across some 15 foot monster creature or some extremely powerful dangerous mage, like 80% of people you come across in travels or something are just going to be typical everyday folk who can’t like, destroy people’s minds with magic and don’t have any bizarre abilities or strange anatomy or etc. Most elves, humans, Jhevona, vampires, etc. aren’t out here doing anything crazy or growing into all powerful god creatures or getting into wild magical plots and etc., they just like.. hang out in the town they grew up in and farm vegetables or write books or something, maybe occasionally purchase an enchantment from someone or try to learn a spell.. etc. Basically: Though I tend to focus on the small pockets of people with wild abilities or write a lot about rare types of magic (since I find them most interesting lol), I still always want to stress that overwhelmingly Nanyevimi is definitely not some wild dangerous fantasy world where everyone is some variation of monstrous creature with impossible powers and ancient mystery plots ruling their lives. Just like the real world, while there are some unique fascinating things you can focus on, a lot of those things are much more rare/uncommon, and most people are just... fairly normal going about their daily lives. Though I’ll discuss a lot of smaller species and more rare/hidden away areas because it’s fun,  I don’t want to give the impression that EVERYTHING is like that universally or something lol

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Some areas have ‘’’’’modern’’’’’ technology (computers, smartphones, etc.), others don’t. Some areas have magical technology, others don’t. Some places have a currency system, others don’t. Some societies are collective/mutually share all resources, some buy and sell in a market style set up with currency, some barter, some do none of those things. Some places have kings and queens, some collectively rule themselves, some are ruled by religious figures, some have democracies, some have authoritarian dictatorships, some have something else entirely. Some places have binary genders, some places have more fluid systems, some have entirely different gender systems or exist in such a way that the concept doesn’t even apply. Some live in families (like parents and children in a house), some live in large collective community homes, some have entirely different societal organizations of living. Some have skill based hierarchy, some have money based hierarchy, some have hierarchy based in some other abstract concepts unique to the species, some have little to no societal hierarchy.. etc. etc. etc.  Basically, the world is extremely varied (especially with how isolated many groups are culturally and lack of outside interference, people don’t often share technology/religion/social systems/ideas with many others, so there are pockets of people doing entirely opposite things from one another even living with in the same general area, etc.), so I really can’t generalize much about it.  I wouldn’t be able to give much generalized info like “most people are ruled by royalty” or “most people have this economy”, because really ‘most people’ doesn’t really exist, since things are so varied. While some broad concepts can apply (like “most people in the world are not expert level magic users” or “most people know to avoid blood of unknown species because it’s proven to be hazardous in the past” or “most species average lifespans fall within the range of around 60 for the shortest living species, and 900 or so for the highest” etc.), overall there’s not really a Common or Typical way to be, or a general way most places in the realm function. 

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LASTLY , even though I do stress how disconnected things are, remember that all of this is like, GENERAL info. There are plenty of places where there is some amount of conflict or people trying to take over land or fighting their neighbors or etc. I don’t want it to seem unrealistic like “oh everything  is perfect and peaceful at all times and nobody talks to each other” lol, like.. obviously it’s a broad and varied world so it DOES happen, but here I’m just meaning to say like, GENERALLY, there are not as many conflicts as you would expect  there to be, for some of the reasons given, and especially broad scale huge conflicts barely ever happen. Like they haven’t had a world war really in the past 50,000 years, and they’ve only had maybe a few hundred conflicts that were like continent wide or between many neighboring nations in that same timescale (which sounds like a lot but like.. it’s spread out over 50,000 years lol..).  Most conflicts are between smaller isolated groups who actually have the basis to conflict with each other.  Like for example if two similar groups  actually want the same resource or etc. (since in a world where everyone’s at a totally different level of technology and societal organization and many people may not even live off of similar diets (if their species even has to eat at all), it kind of reduces the amount of people in direct need for the same things, unless those groups do actually exist in fairly similar ways).  And some groups do genuinely have a historical basis for conflict, such as the whole beef between some groups of elves (though of course not ALL) spreading general hostility towards jhevona for their philosophical beliefs, which has been going on in some form for like, probably like 400,000 years or something like, they’ve just historically had on and off periods of conflict about this. Or like between alliance elves VS. elves outside of the alliance (rooted when they split their belief system about 10,000 years ago, ). Or the specifically Fanyiniri elves’ historical basis of issues with the Avirre’thel (which is like 20,000 years old, AND is actually a good representation of how a lot of conflicts in the world are since it’s like.. They’re not fighting anymore REALLY and they haven’t been for probably 10,000 years, but the groups still have some degree of underlying tension. That’s a good example for how a lot of things actually play out in Nanyevimi it’s like... A lot of.. ancient stuff that happened forever ago but some societies still remember it since some people live to be like 10,000 years old, and some don’t, so there are just disconnected varying levels of underlying tension and confusion everywhere, yet not uniformly enough for ACTUAL conflicts to initiate.. More just for everyone to feel vaguely unsettled and afraid of the larger world and want to isolate and protect themselves from whatever magic and nonsense is out there, even if they don’t know why or only have the mythical remnants of ancient conflict in their culture.) ANYWAY, stuff still happens. There are still plenty of little issues and corrupt governments and internal conflicts and land disputes or whatever that can be focused in on a micro scale, like between two neighboring cities or between two groups of the same religion or etc. etc. I don’t want to make it seem unrealistic and disingenuous with the idea that “everyone keeps to themselves and nobody fights” sentiment.   But my MAIN point with stressing the whole “isolation and lack of conflict” thing above is really to just get across that broad, massive, wars and etc. are very very uncommon , and that this isn’t like an Epic Fantasy World where there are always Super Combat Death Faction World War Save The King Oh No Take The Throne And Uh Oh The World Is Ending And The Battle Between Good And Evil Is Such That It Can Literally Destroy The Entire World type stuff lmao. In Nanyevimi it’s usually more like:  “eh, these groups slappy hand at each other every few thousand years and this dude doesn't like that guy and there’s some really intense internal political infighting going on over here and uh oh, is that a cult? and oh well here’s some religions that disagree and a little clan of elves that doesn't like another clan of elves, But Overall None Of These Conflicts Are Far-Reaching Or Disastrously Broad To Be Able To Destroy The Damn World Or Cause An Apocalypse Or Whatever". I’m not necessarily trying to emphasize that the world is utterly peaceful, but more that none of the conflicts that occur in the realm are that massive or broad reaching, they usually occur with small groups infighting amongst themselves, or little historically based group conflicts here and there, but nothing is going to like, literally end the world or something. I know a lot of fantasy worlds will have like.. big World Destroying stakes involved and ‘super evil faction’ vs. ‘super good faction’ fighting each other to Determine The Fate Of The Entire Universe, so I guess I just wanted to explain like... it’s not Like That lol. The same underlying reason for emphasizing stuff like that a majority of people are not wildly powerful mages or etc. Like... overall I kind of aim for the world to be pretty average, with a lot of cool magic stuff under the surface and interesting topics and history I like to go over, but.. at the end of the day,  most everyone is still just.. a humble little elf hanging out on a farm picking flowers.. There’s no big world war or super powerful society destroying mage battle looming in the distance.. Of course there are plenty of historical/political conflicts here and there and a handful of ominous magical experiments and evil mages and etc., but overall it’s just.. an elf watching the sunrise holding a bunchel of flowers in a mundane magically enchanted bucket.. you know?

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Also, certain things are impossible to do with magic. You can’t do everything. Please see the post on magic to learn about those limitations. 

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-- TIMELINES/ HISTORY GAP ------

here’s an explanation of the image of the timeline (full sized/more visible image is in the photoset above, but i put a small one here too lol) 

- Unknown Time -  (any time prior to roughly 500,000 years ago) Nearly nothing at all is known about this time. There are like a few ruins/ structures and evidence of civilizations before this time, but  legitimate historical records or solid information is fairly absent (despite people being pretty confident that records must have existed). 

Other than a few small losses of information here and there, historical record in Nanyevimi has been “mostly” in tact for about 500,000 years (meaning, there is some form of continuous recording of at least most significant world events since that time.. Obviously some, if not a majority of, things will be lost to time, or not recorded, etc. but like.. in GENERAL, ‘recorded history’ is here being used to mean that there is at least some decipherable amount of information allowing scholars to piece together at least a VAGUE  world timeline, etc.), seemingly starting with some of the early societies of that period. 

However, history seems pretty nonexistent before that point, as if everyone began writing everything down all at once, or moreso as if something happened around that time which somehow destroyed all records, ruins, and relics across the entire realm prior to that point (yet somehow was never mentioned in these future writings... You’d think if there were some worldwide disaster, even if the past were entirely eradicated, those who survived would write about their experience of the disaster event, but there’s hardly any indication of anything like this. In the records we have from before this time, no natural disasters or anything are really mentioned, and no true explanation has been given. All we know is that.. SOMETHING, at some point, seemed to happen around this time, and many people forgot a lot of things. But since everyone forgot everything, nobody actually gives any clear answers as to what happened, or any sort of specific event or cause. )

It is known that advanced humanoid species (practically no different than those today) have existed in some form for far longer than 500,000 years, and scholars occasionally find things that date back to that time, however for the most part any knowledge or understanding of that world is absurdly sparse,  and basically anything that occurred before the ~Magical Point Where Recorded Nanyevimi History Began~ has been entirely lost. 

We DO have records and writings from immediately AFTER this happened (like, documentation of everyone being very understandably concerned to have  gaps in memory all of a sudden) but anything PRIOR to this point in time, is basically just a mystery. We know about the aftermath, but nothing about the event itself. A lot of history just suddenly picks up out of nowhere around 500,000 years ago, in vague texts written by massively confused societies that have huge memory gaps and basically are barely functioning,, but anything before that point just seems either suspiciously obscured, or gone entirely. 

- Faded Time - ( 500,000 to about 300,000 years ago) There are a FEW actual documents and things from this time, history was still recorded, but it is so long ago a lot of it has been lost or forgotten. Though unlike the lack of information in Unknown Time, the fact that so little is known about the Faded Time period is not seen as mysterious or supernatural in origin. It’s really just attributed to like... it being old as hell, and things naturally being lost over time and etc. Considering the time period, the amount of info we have is reasonable, and doesn’t seem to just abruptly stop or not fit together correctly (like is the case for Unknown Time). We have about as much information as you’d expect to have about this time period, nothing unusual at play, though it is still understandably sparse. 

- Ancient Time - (300,000 to 50,000 years ago)  Much more in the recent past. Though obviously still old and a lot of information from this period (especially around the beginning of the time period) is scattered and fragmented, there are a pretty reasonable amount of things known about this time. 

- Modern Time - (50,000 yrs ago to Current Day) Much more connected and  better kept info. Most things from this era are not vague or mysterious at all. Though obviously due to the isolation of the realm and societies keeping to themselves, there are plenty of secrets and mysteries and gaps in the information of scholars, but overall this is the most well documented period of time. There are a handful of beings that have actually been alive for most of this time (like you’ll hardly find  even one single creature that’s over 100,000 yrs old, that just really doesn’t happen,  but there ARE a small amount of 40,000 - 20,000 year olds in existence and etc.), which absolutely helps contribute to the better continuity and documentation of events in this period.

- Lost Era - (basically the same period as Unknown Time, anything prior to the memory gap roughly 500,000 years ago)  Everything is lost, there have been like, legit maybe, 1,000 artifacts or signs of past civilization found from this time period (none of which are actual written record or any form of information.. it’s more like ‘oh a random piece of a jar’ lol), out of probably billions, entirely gone , no history exists

- Disrupted Era - ( 500,000 to like, a little over 300,000 or so years ago) A period of time with evidence of lots of war and conflict. Most of which is thought to be driven by the mysterious occurrences and the fact that history just randomly evaporated, which obviously like... having a mass memory gap occur overnight can cause a lot of issues within societies lol.  This is probably the most similar thing to an apocalypse documented in known Nanyevimi history, where problems are just compiling on top of problems and everyone is running around panicking, basically everyone’s way of life is in upheaval or under direct threat nearly all at the same time, and of course some people respond to this badly.. It’s just like.. disaster upon disaster and nobody knows what to do. 

Like, groups and places suddenly seem empty as if they don’t even exist anymore even though nobody remembers exactly what it was , everyone has sudden gaps in memory and places and things that just feel off without being able to articulate why, societies are disoriented, infrastructure and etc. is suddenly missing that people assume surely must have been there before but they can't recall what was formerly in it's place, certain techniques for doing things have been lost and nobody can remember how to operate certain items anymore or etc., entire groups of people who were once pivotal to economies now seem to just be gone leaving nothing but an awkward gap in their place, etc. 

 It would be similar to if people in the USA suddenly woke up and there were no cars or roads  and all existence of them had been removed and nobody remembered what they were at all, but other stuff was till in tact. Certain things would seem totally off and impractical with nobody being sure why (like “Why do I have a job so many miles away from my house? I can’t walk that far... did I used to get there another way? It doesn’t make sense for me to even have agreed to work there..” or people seeing just huge gaps of land in the middle of cities (where car manufacturing plants or car dealerships used to be) and being like “What’s with this blank plot of land?? Shouldn’t something be here??”, people randomly missing members of their family and all evidence of them (because the family members worked in the auto industry or their identity was so intertwined with cars that when erasing all evidence of cars it was easier to just wipe them away entirely) and being like “Why do I have four seats at my table, and four beds in my house, if only three people live here? And how did I have children?? If I have no wife to have children with? Where did the kids come from?”,, (or alternatively not wiping away those members of the population and instead they’re still present but just suddenly have a massive amount of their memory gone) , etc. 

So like, take the above scenario of if all cars were missing in the US, but then add maybe 4 other major things (like if internet and electricity and etc. were suddenly gone as well) and then also just evaporate a few entire states out of the country, and also some of the wildlife, and also maybe 400 plants or something. Like it wasn’t just ONE thing, it was multiple seemingly significant things, places, people, ideas, technologies, entire societies, just... all of a sudden missing at once with no memory of that. Or at least this is the closest thing we can estimate that it seemed like, based on the few records that exist of the aftermath of this period. 

People of course didn’t forget everything, it’s not like everyone suddenly had no idea who their family was or how to walk or how to speak and etc., many things were maintained, but it’s more like everyone in the world just suddenly woke up from a slumber with random bits of significant information missing, certain groups of people and places and items entirely gone, huge stretches of knowledge (some of which were very important to certain cultures or societies to be able to function correctly), certain cultural traditions and ideas entirely lost, etc. 

 So of course, immediately after this happened, there was a lot of societal upheaval and reorganization, as people had to rework entire economies or learn new ways of doing things since their old ways had been lost overnight, fill in their gaps in systems and relearn certain knowledge as soon as possible. This strange erasure of history and etc. seems to have sparked a lot of land disputes, fighting over resources, and various other conflicts, which seemingly led to an entire age of general aggression and widespread issues until finally societies kind of settled back in place and found ways to restore the former balances that were going on. 

( Side Note: I make it sound like it happened all at once, but there’s actually no definitive evidence of this. Because the spread of information was slower back then, and additionally seemingly some technologies had just been lost, there was really no way to spread word quickly or send out messages like “hey, our population seems to be undergoing some sort of mass memory loss, is that happening with you guys too?”. The few records that do exist from directly after the 500,000 year mark (in Faded Time) do suggest that it happened relatively around the same time, as there don’t seem to have been cases of people who had lost memories interacting with those who still had them (implying that at the least if it happened in one area it happened in the next closest area soon enough after that they wouldn’t have time to communicate before the other area’s memories were messed up), but nobody is sure if it was actually EXACTLY at the same time, or if it was more like, over the course of a week or two. 

Scholars are also unsure if this happened to EVERYONE, or only certain people in certain locations. Every existing record from every location around this time period seems to describe the same phenomena (albeit sometimes in different ways/ various interpretations, depending on religion/culture of the group), but the records from this time are still very scattered and limited.

 Additionally, it’s thought that society was more concentrated to a central area around this time (or at least, the “main” society, like large trade cities and etc. where most of the population was kind of spread in just a few areas centered around huge trading routes or significant resources, there are thought to have been certain cultural hubs in various locations across the world), and also these larger societies were probably the main ones producing the records,, so it could also be the case that this event really only impacted certain areas or civilization hubs that were connected with each other, and skipped random groups who lived 2000 miles away in an isolated forest or etc. 

We know at least that it was extremely significant and impacted seemingly all record-keeping societies of the time, but nobody can be sure if this happened everywhere, as there were likely plenty of scattered smaller societies entirely disconnected from the main lands/cities/trade who probably didn’t even have writing systems or keep records, or maybe did them in different ways (like some random group of Jhevona that stayed isolated far in the mountains and only kept records with magical orbs or something, thus no evidence would really be found from them, etc.). 

So anyway! I just wanted to clarify that as well. As far as is known in the few existing records we have, it’s assumed this happened at the same time and affected everyone, but it also may be likely that it could have happened over the course of a few days or more, and there’s no explicit evidence that it actually affected LITERALLY everyone, only that it affected everyone who’s records have ever been found. As there is literally no indication anywhere for people to even remotely give a good guess as to what the cause of this was, what it was for, why it happened, where it came from, or what it even WAS (a spell??? a weird natural disaster that had strange effects? etc??), there’s no real basis to assume details of who it could have effected and who it wouldn’t have, or how long it would have taken, since it’s literally just,, we know nothing about it except that there are vague records and evidence to support it occurred. )

- Restful era - (roughly 200,000 years to Current Day) Everyone is tired of fighting and confusion stemming from the disrupted era, and just begins to isolate.  Communication and tech also helps allow for more  global peace keeping efforts and these groups additionally aid in reducing conflict. Obviously people, especially lower lifespan groups*(1),  still have issues,  but largely it’s pretty peaceful. Most people have also forgotten about or just plain moved on from the weird loss of history thing, and have now filled most of the gaps left in society and re-acclimated to life. Groups don’t even remember where their conflicts originated or that any history was lost, they just know they kind of want everyone to mind their own business lol. Large scale wars and interconnected multi-country conflicts and etc. are fairly uncommon from this point on, and people have seemed to really either just agree to disagree or move on. Things seem readjusted, most people have the resources they need.

Nanyevimi  (as a whole, of course there are plenty of exceptions to this but it’s just much less common now than it was in the past) is kind of at a weird  period of stagnant isolation between most people groups ( not in a hostile way), where like anyone who did have conflicts, after legit thousands of years of fighting just got tired of it or etc. It has to be considered that with lifespans being a lot longer for many species in the realm, conflicts are also happening on a different scale, if at 2,000 years old you’re still beefing with someone over some minor land conflict you had when you were 33 years old it’s just going to seem useless after a while and you’ll probably both give up on it.   

Especially with increased standards for international intervention in the past 30,000 years  and stuff (like having mediator countries step in if two others are about to go to war, programs to kind of foster some positive relationships and mutual terms of agreement between groups even if they’re wildly different, at least enough cooperation to not start shit, for the sake of the greater good, etc.), most people barely get involved with neighboring countries at all, and especially not in a negative context. 

(Another theory on the existence of so much peace currently is that extremely conflict prone societies may have all died out during the major time of conflict, and those societies that put more of a cultural focus on peace keeping or self-isolating are the only ones who lived through that period. Like, when basically everyone on the entire planet is blowing each other up with magic and wrecking the world and scrambling for resources, the groups who ran away and hid far in the mountains or snuck around trying to keep peace with everyone/cooperate as best as possible are probably the ones who made it out of that era alive, while the more conflict eager or uncooperative ones simply perished during the disrupted era, or dying age, right after the main upheaval.  Especially since from the few documents we do have from the disrupted era, it’s clear that hundreds (or even thousands) of groups died out during this time, entire species being killed off and societies collapsing unable to cope with the chaos of the memory loss event (and this isn’t even including the possible groups who vanished seemingly as a result of the memory loss event), so the idea of “many groups died out and only a few remained who possibly leaned towards certain societal characteristics that helped them survive” is not extremely far fetched.)     

( *(1): Typically groups with lower lifespans (60 - 200 yrs avg lifespan) tend to be known for having more conflicts, because their generations phase in and out so quick, and they’re not around long enough to get a real grasp of envisioning he future and deeply considering how they'll impact it. Whereas a species that lives 2,000 years on average will probably have like.. seen history repeat itself 600 times already, have had plenty of lifetime to level out emotionally and learn what mistakes not to repeat, to think heavily about the future and take time with decisions because they know they'll be around for a long time, etc. etc. 

Obviously there are exceptions to this but it’s like, a common idea (with reasonable evidence to support it) in Nanyevimi that people/societies tend to get a bit more relaxed as they get older, especially when people are living thousands of years, it’s unlikely that you’d live to 800 years old and still be going around starting petty drama with everyone you meet or something, since by that time your behavior has probably either gotten you killed, or you’ve learned not to repeat the same mistakes and found better ways to cope with the world, etc. So species with lower lifespans are generally seen as more conflict prone, though again, this is not ALWAYS the case. ) 

- Dying Age - (500,000 to about 450,000/460,000 years ago) This was the primary period where many of the conflicts of the disrupted era occurred, Right after the memory loss thing. Though the various conflicts and issues seemed to continue on until around the restful era, this period of time was like the WORST of it, many bad things seemed to spring up at once...  lots of wars and confusion, weird viruses, natural disasters that were maybe previously prevented by a certain technology which was now lost, seemingly entire species having gone missing, more issues with societal function after the loss of everything prior, a large reduction in the population of the world and shrinking or death of many societies, etc. 

(sidenote: most of the old records from the earlier periods of this time (since obviously during the latter bit of the era this was starting to fade out and people were getting their shint back together) are almost humorously dark like.. catastrophic to an absurd degree.. where some ancient elven scribe or something is just like:

“Well, ..hmm.. so.. I do not remember my name, nor my occupation, nor what I am doing in this town, though I am told it is my home. My father has died, I have no food, my house (I assume it is my house?) was lit on fire last night, and there are men coming from the east to kill us (those in the village I supposedly belong to), apparently.. Oh yes, also from the south and north (at least not the west, but that is because the entire west has exploded, or so I am told). I also have contracted a strange illness. I tracked down a fellow who claims to practice medicine, however he simply died in front of me as he was struck by a stray brick resulting from a nearby magic duel. There are still people fighting outside of my home currently, though the men from the east, north, and south, should not have arrived yet, so this conflict is unknown. Luckily, what they do is not my business, as they are outside of my house, and while in bad shape, the remaining walls shall protect me.   One of the villagers believes that we should start sacrificing children to their god, another would like me to cut off my toe for a spell, the other wishes to construct a dictatorship in response to the widespread conflict... I am not sure I trust any of them. I would seek religious advice, but a star fell from the sky yesterday and crushed the church (but it is okay, because everyone in the church disappeared a few days ago, anyway). My teeth are also falling out. There is a mountain in the distance shooting fire and smoke into the sky, but we are unsure what this means... 

Anyhow, I am leaving with my wife tomorrow to find a place to live far in the woods away from society, because everyone is blasting magic upon one another, and it feels unsafe so we-.. oh hmm.. My wife has just died by random lightning strike.. Well.. I suppose on my own then, I shall leave for the woods. Though, the woods is on fire also, and strange screams are coming from it, and the trees are oozing black liquid, I still think it shall be for the best if I can leave this area before those men from the east, north, and south get here. Perhaps I shall head west. If it has exploded, there should be no people there, correct? Ah well, my finger has just crumbled into a pile of dust and a hoard of rats are currently scurrying in through my fireplace somehow, they are now biting at my flesh (joke is on them, my flesh has been infected for 2 days now, so I hope it shall sicken them).. I suppose I should stop writing and deal with these matters. Wish me well on my journey.” )

- Time of Progress  - (300,000 to like.. maybe 100,000 or so, I know the timeline is inaccurately sized (jumping straight from 300,000 to 50,000 lol, but this is around the timeframe it would be) Technology and science grows (or at least, restores itself to a point of functioning past what may have been lost), and better travel allows people to communicate and share more wisdom and information with each other faster/more efficiently, which ends up helping  various areas of study and helps progress certain societies and systems in the realm (though everything is still largely isolated, and technology/knowledge  isn't anything CLOSE to evenly distributed (you can still be in a place with electricity and then travel like, not even 100 miles away and find people who have never even heard of electricity in their lives, etc.), this more just means that, the few societies and groups of scholars who DON’T want to be isolated, now have new ways to communicate with other people who are actually open to communication,, and there are less barriers to communication in general, were any of the isolated groups to wish to start acting more collaboratively.).  

- Elven Times - (roughly 30,000 years ago to Current Day) Period where elves became the majority group (by population size) in the entire world. Which like.. isn't really that significant, but is usually still counted in history books and stuff since groups like the Elven Alliance are still one of the most prominent political and economic powers in all of Nanyevimi, and even though their height was probably like 5,000 years ago, they still hold a LOT of influence around the realm. 

Also because this signifies the dying out of many smaller species, and the reduction of species that were more prominent on the world stage in the past (like certain groups of Jhevona). Which isn't caused by the elves, but it’s still of note that many populations have recently (like, in the past 60,000 years or so lol) seemed less able to survive, less able to reproduce, etc. and is something currently a good bit of scholars are looking into (especially since magic exposure/use  is known to cause stuff like infertility and health problems, even though magic has been around this entire time (so why would it start causing worse problems now?), people wonder if its somehow getting more dangerous/unstable, or more powerful, or something that would end up causing higher level magical species (like Jhevona and other obscure groups) to increasingly grow more and more infertile and unhealthy, while evolution starts to favor species with lower levels of inherent magical energy/non-magical groups (like elves or humans). Thus possibly predicting the eventual dying out of higher level magic species/stronger magic in favor of less magical or non magical groups (which also is supported by the general observation that species tend to grow less and less magical as they evolve over time), though this is of course all speculation. 

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ALSO IMPORTANT TO NOTE: most common people don’t know about any of this stuff!!! lol.. The 500,000 year ago collective memory gap is like... something a majority of the population doesn’t even know of, or really care about, since it is.. SO long ago, and history has picked up and continued since then. A lot of this is stuff that only the most obscure and dedicated scholars would get into. This information, generally, does not affect the world at large or really influence many current cultures or anything, since these issues are so ancient. Kind of similar to how a mystery on earth dating 20,000 years ago, probably wouldn’t impact your daily life, and you likely wouldn’t even know about it unless you were a scholar or something. 

Though since some species in Nanyevimi can have pretty long lifespans, they can tend to have a more lengthy view of what counts as ‘recent history’ (like humans may consider anything in the past 10 - 100 years to be Recent, whereas some societies in Nanyevimi may view ‘recent’ as more like 100 - 2,500 years or etc.), most average people in the realm really don’t care much about anything that happened over 20,000 years ago, and tend to focus more on modern history. 

So though I’m writing this information for context, I do want to clarify that it’s not like, it’d be common knowledge for everyone, you’’re not going to find the 500,000 year ago memory gap or something being brought up in casual conversation or etc.(unless you’re chatting with a scholar), a majority of people aren’t even aware of history any further back than maybe 5,000 - 20,000 years (depending on the culture/ species of the group in question.) 

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ALSO NOTE - there are plenty of other time distinctions, and individual cultures and groups of course have their own custom calendars and timelines, may mark different historical events or eras, etc. This is just like.. the broadest and vaguest possible way to categorize a few important historical periods but, is by no means comprehensive. In an actual history textbook or something there would be A LOT more detail and many more events and time-periods that are distinguished and marked on a timeline. 

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-- GLOBAL AREAS -----------------------

“Global areas” or “global cities” are a very specific type of area that is meant to cater to many different groups of people of various species, backgrounds, etc. They are often primary areas for trade (though there are plenty of trade cities and traveling hubs that aren’t in Global Areas), and usually have a variety of resources and housing types, as well as Global Learning Centers (a specific type of school, described more in detail in THIS (link) post about schools).

 Areas where many groups of people live in harmony have obviously existed in some form for hundreds of thousands of years, but the specific initiative of forming Global Areas (usually done by international groups promoting peace and unity in the realm, and more efficient travel/share of knowledge. often some of the same groups who will step in and try to de-escalate wars, or mediate conflicts between others, etc.) is more recent, mostly being established only in the past 15,000 years or so ago. 

The main thing that distinguishes a “global area” from a “normal place where a lot of different people happen to live”, is that global areas are specifically constructed with the idea of accessibility for as many different people as possible in mind. While a regular city or area can certainly have a wide variety of people in it, there is no guarantee that there are accurate resources available for all of those people. Whereas the very nature of a Global Area is such that it kind of makes a promise to be as broadly accommodating in every way as possible, and there is some amount of guarantee that no matter the background of the traveler, they will be able to find some form of comfort there. 

(similar to what separates a ‘global learning center’ from ‘regular school with a diverse population’. Global learning centers are making a GUARANTEE and are designed specifically to cater to anyone who attends there, whereas while normal schools can certainly introduce accommodations, it’s not promised that they will and they have no technical obligation to.)

Global areas often feature various types of climate controlled housing (since some species have to be in certain temperatures), a tremendous amount of language resources (as well as free magical technology for residents who need it, like enchanted earrings that will translate speech for you, in the case that your language is so rare they actually don’t have any other resources on hand for you, etc.), massive markets with such a variety of food and products that no matter your culture or species based diet requirements, you can definitely find something you’re able to eat,, have plenty of cultural representatives and diverse councils of people who represent their own species, so that no decision is made without considering the needs of like, nearly every group of people, and there are different things set up like resources and etc. to help people avoid stuff like culture shock or feeling alienated,, having many different versions of things (like a clothing shop that specializes in designing for species of various anatomy (people with wings, 10 foot tall species, 2 foot tall species, people with multiple arms, tails, animal legs, etc.), or having  multiple ways to get to the top floor of a building (magical lift system, normal stairs, non-magical lift system (for people who can’t use magic or who have trouble being around it, but also couldn’t use the stairs), etc.etc.) 

The reason that this is kind of strange/that global areas are rare in the context of how most of Nanyevimi is, is because : 

The way that everything is lined up is like,, in one country everyone is one specific  type of elf and they all mostly speak their own language and they use magical technology and have cell phones and computers and rooftop gardens and they use a silver coin with a star in the middle for their currency , but then you travel just a mere 300 miles away and suddenly EVERYTHING is completely different, it’s a country primarily inhabited by orc-like people who all speak a totally different language and use fire to light their homes, communicate everything by letter and travel on foot, they use dried animal pelts for currency and have no conversion for the currency you’ve brought from the previous land, etc. etc.

Things like language barriers and cultural differences are easily overcome, especially if in a group that can use magic, but sometimes things like people existing literally on a nearly different timescale than your own (thus processing the very nature and importance of events and perception of their entire existence differently than you), or having such vastly different biological needs from you (one can only live in the heat, one in the cold, one must eat metals to live, other is allergic to metal, etc.), the uneven spread of technology, and stuff like magical areas vs. non-magical areas,  can sometimes make it much harder to relate to or trade with others (at least harder than it would be if most people lived generally around the same timespan and had similar physical needs and the technology to effectively communicate across longer distances). 

Groups generally don’t isolate in a hostile manner or for negative reasons, and most cultures are generally pretty open to negotiation/trade/cooperation if prompted, but just in general societies in Nanyevimi seem to lean towards keeping to themselves in a neutral manner, generally just because they have so little in common with the people around them, have natural environmental barriers between them, or have no real need for things like expanding or invading other countries or forcing people to assimilate to their ways or etc. 

Like for example, if you’re a small  2 foot tall squirrel species that lives in trees and has a lifespan of just about 50 years old on average and your highest daily concerns are just making cool huts out of grass and finding enough berries and writing cultural story songs in your language to pass on to your offspring before you die, you’re probably not going to be very concerned with the giant 19 foot tall humanoid water creatures that live a little off the coast of your forest and live for 8,000+ years and spend most of their time building underground monuments to their group of 22 celestial gods and eating fish and that don’t speak any language you think you could even come close to understanding because you literally can’t even produce the same noises with your mouth anatomy. And yeah, they take small pebbles from the shore sometimes, but overall they don’t bother you or interact with you and they’re just so far outside of the scope of any of your most pressing daily concerns and you feel like you couldn’t even comprehend the way they’re living anyway so, you kind of just leave them be? And sure, if they were being killed or needed resources or something (assuming they’d even be able to communicate that to you), you’d help them out since, why not? You have nothing against them. But, for the most part you just don’t think of them, you’re busy with your grass and your songs. Maybe a few members of your squirrel group get curious and go out to attempt to talk to the others occasionally, or create a religion based off of these strange water beings and leave them flowers at the shore from time to time to maybe gain luck from them or something,,  but overall they just seem so abstract to you, never make contact with you, and aren’t causing you any harm so?? you just don’t think about them often.

Like almost in a way there’s SO MUCH variance in so many ways between different groups and species and etc. that it ends up being difficult to establish a more concrete sense of uniformity or unity across the realm. Small areas can group together, and plenty of species can exist alongside each other and etc., but the wide variance in biology and technology and inconsistent travel and communication systems and isolating environmental factors and etc. make societies exist more in little isolated centers and tiny civilization pockets around the world, rather than all being one huge interconnected system where everyone knows about everyone else and trades with everyone else and etc. 

( though there are plenty of global organizations and international councils that try to promote unity and safe travels and will help represent you or give you a translator or etc. if you have to be traveling between a lot of countries,,  trains that run between large areas and etc..  and a handful of  broad sources of global connection on a large scale that are present and available and at least somehow accessible from some areas. and of course, global cities and stuff. But these things aren’t present everywhere, and are not super widespread)

The current state of Nanyevimi is kind of just like, a bunch of little distinct pockets of people (towns,  cities, villages, etc.) within slightly larger distinct pockets of people (countries) all of which likely don’t really have much to do with the pockets of people beside them (with the exception of a few major conflict areas, or major areas of unity where there’s a lot of alliance between groups in the area) and just kind of sit alone doing things in their own ways, with the occasional like, interference of a global council or something asking permission to build an international railway through the area or asking if it’s okay to escort travelers through the lands or etc.  Other than communicating for only the most utterly necessary of trade or resource exchange, most groups don’t go forming political alliances with other groups or trying to integrate others into their culture or take over their lands or etc., they just want to keep to themselves. 

(Note: though you do see people more often connect with those of a similar species/lifespan/culture, due to having some sort of common ground with them (like a group of Jhevona having communications with another culturally isolated group of Jhevona in a city not too far away from them, since they evolved from the same society and speak a similar language or etc.), but sometimes even then people still  may not talk or trade with each other, or at least no more than they would any other group. And sometimes this may  actually go the opposite way and they have more grounds for conflict with another group, due to shared culture lol.. Like Group A and Group B who have the same religion arguing over who is right, while utterly ignoring/staying isolated from their neighbors Group C, D, and E,, , since they have so little common ground with the other groups that they couldn’t even find something to have a conflict over in the first place. So, SOMETIMES, if a group is in an area where there are many similar groups around them (a village of humans with a few other human villages in the surrounding area, or humans and elves, etc.), you may see less isolation and more connection and cooperation in the region, but even then, that’s not guaranteed and there are still plenty of places where people choose to stay away from others regardless (or cases where rather than unity, their similarities serve to  promote conflict instead)) 

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BUT ANYWAY, this is context on why “global cities” are kind of an actual distinct thing, since you would think like, “every city is a global city”, but usually cities are pretty much just the people in the area and not much else. Like for example, most large cities in Navyete still are mainly populated by vampires/avirre’thel, since the entire population of Navyete is like over 96% Avirre'thel due to them being an extremely isolated people generally. Even though they’re still large bustling cities with many inhabitants, those inhabitants are mostly all people who speak the same language and are from the same culture.  Then compare that to some of the major coastal cities in Asen, which,  though they are right next door to Navyete, have a massive variance in population and are usually places where you find businesses and schools and groups and species and cultures from legit all over the entire world collected in one place. 

(Asen is a very “global country” overall, despite being originally founded by the Fanyiniri and elves still being the slightly dominant population in the area by most measures (especially if you count rural areas), Asen has operated as an independent country free of the Fanyiniri for like 10,000 years, and it just so happens to be really conveniently located for hubs of global trade and etc).

So, yeah. Something being a 'global area’  (cities, learning centers, travel hubs, etc.)  is actually fairly unique and uncommon in the realm as a whole. Though there are many attempts to unify the realm (like people always suggesting ‘universal languages’ or like, having every living species classified in a registry to keep track of them all, or to have like, established communication networks or councils involving every culture/nation in the world, etc.), these usually, hardly ever work or even get off the ground as an idea (since with most things there’s a lot of criticism of if that should even be a goal in the first place, implications of that, doubting why everything needs to be uniform/standardized in the first place and why we can’t just let everyone have their own independent cultures,  etc. etc. It’s usually some professor brings up an idea and then his colleagues split into  groups of differing opinions on the matter and argue about it for a few years and then eventually drop it) , so , Global Cities and stuff are usually the closest thing to a unified society that exists. Little tiny pockets of the world where, at least on a smaller scale, you can find the extremely rare event of like 50+ unique humanoid species all chilling and trying to get along with each other in one space

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-- TRAVEL ROUTES  --------

This will be really brief but I just wanted to establish the information of this map for future reference lol. 

This is basically showing the MOST major routes for traveling and trade in Nanyevimi. Though there are of course plenty of smaller roads and etc. like, literally everywhere. The lines shown in pink are JUST the like.. commonly established, frequently traveled, very well known about, ways to get from one area to another. 

(note: This is in reference to routes for traveling between countries/continents/etc., not WITHIN them. Every territory of a group of people is going to have their own unique transportation system, and they usually travel WITHIN the interior of their own nation far differently than they would when traveling between outside nations or across the land. While some of these routes DO pass through pre-existing territories, they’re often (but not always) mutually agreed by all parties to be neutral land (since everyone collectively has a use for them), meaning trade routes may be somewhat plain and not have the same level of customization as the usual transportation within a country.

Like for example, there may be a group that lines the roads in their cities with gold and uses magical platforms to hover from place to place, but the trading road that passes through the outer edge of their territory is just a plain wide dirt road lined with bricks and a few tiny shops here and there. While some groups do see it as a business opportunity and set up elaborate cities and stuff around the trading road (even if they technically don’t own the road Itself, they may own the area around it), others think more like “well why would we dedicate resources and time to sprucing up some random ugly ass road, when we have our Perfect Beautiful Cities right here within our own territory? who cares what all those scraggly travelers see lol. We don’t need to show off.” And others don’t even think about it at all and it’s just a plain barely formed dirt path going through an unkept nasty forest (these are usually the more dangerous ones ghgh).

But anyway, the main point is that when I talk about how people travel or what roads are like, I mean the ones connecting territories and specifically designated AS trade roads. These same things generally do not apply for roads that native people use to get around in their own spaces. “Trading roads” are often given their own special designation, and treated differently by the locals depending on their culture (whether they ignore them, barely do anything, try and make them as nice as possible, line them with frightening row of armed guards, etc.), but overall they’re generally not as specialized or unique as the roads/transport you may find actually within a native area of a nation where locals spend all their time. ) 

It’s kind of thought of as one big road/route (referred to by many different names, depending on the culture) that connects most significant places in the realm all together. Though many parts of it are well maintained by local governments and etc., plenty of sections and areas are still pretty dangerous to pass through, or are NEAR dangerous areas, so traveling is still absolutely NOT easy or simple or anything just because there’s like.. a single vaguely established road network that many people use/know about. 

Establishing and maintaining this broad route around the world has been another initiative really upkept by groups that are for global unity and increased connection in the realm (similarly to people who worked to establish/maintain Global Cities/Areas, who are usually attempting to promote easier travel, increased spread of knowledge, etc.), and it’s become most established probably just in the past 15,000 years. Though plenty of the portions of the road and routes have been used for likely hundreds of thousands of years (especially ones which occur along coasts or natural resources, which early groups would have flocked to and been passing through/living around anyway), the attempt to connect them all and bridge gaps (making safe paths through previously dangerous areas, etc.) was started more recently. 

Despite these attempts to make travel more safe and systematic, the most common way to travel is still in large groups due to the possible dangers. Usually instead of just one or two people setting out alone, it’s more of a scheduled thing? Like a group may send letters and notices ALL around in as broad of an area as possible (or phone calls/emails/magic notes/etc. TOTALLY depending on the level of technology available in the area) saying “hey everyone, we’re traveling along this route in a month of two. anyone who wants to come, especially if you have valuable skills like medical or combat knowledge, please meet us at this place on this date, and bring as many supplies as you can!”. 

It’s common for people to set out on roads with 15 - 40 people all together, even if they’re entirely unrelated groups and not all going to the same place (like maybe 2 of the people there will duck out of the group at an earlier place once they get to their stop, and don’t intend to travel down the entire route, etc.). This can get complicated, since it can end up being SO many different types of people from all various cultures, religions, species, groups, (some who may even have a pre-existing conflict with another), but generally they practice road neutrality. You can get kicked out of a travel group for being disruptive, stealing, hurting others, etc., but GENERALLY the case is that anyone is accepted, under the premise of “we all have a better chance of getting there if we go together than alone, so put any differences aside and let’s just walk along a road for a few days without any of us being bastards, regardless of who you’re walking alongside”.

Some areas have established travel groups that can be rented (usually coming with a cook/food forager, a medic, 2 guards, and a general assistant), so you pay a certain fee and the trained group of professional travelers will accompany you to your destination, but this is more rare. Royals of course hire their own groups, but still will usually have 20 or so people with them when traveling. If you’re very strong and very bold you can travel alone or with only 1 or 2 people, but it’s generally seen as a sign of power (meaning: people will either see you alone and be like ‘oh fuck better stay away from that guy.. if theyre alone that means they must be SUPER strong’, or they’ll see you as a big target like ‘hey. who does that idiot think they are?? arrogant ass, too good for traveling company?? lets rob them’ ). Some places have groups of traveling guards that will walk with you for free, you just have to catch them on their route (so they walk the same area back and forth on a schedule, you just need to follow along behind them at the right time as needed). etc. etc. 

Like mentioned, every area is at a different level of safety and development, so this can be really complicated (especially the politics of the road, two groups of travelers with conflicting interests, people taking advantage of groups, local governments trying to take advantage of or control traveling groups, guards waiting until they’re in a dangerous area to suddenly demand ridiculous fees from the travelers and threatening to abandon them alone in the scary woods if they don’t pay, etc.etc.) and I could never explain it ALL in a short section, but I’ve mentioned most of the general gist I guess of some of what goes on. 

Explanations of map image: 

main route (pink) - this just represents the large international traveling/trade road/route mentioned above  

global areas (yellow) - these spots are supposed to show where all existing global cities/areas are. Though obviously they’re way large and not to scale, since if I actually made them the right size on the map, they’d be a tiny barely visible dot lol. Especially if it’s just a single city, I kind of had to make them huge looking so they were able to be shown lol.. Despite being oversized though, the locations are shown fairly accurately and give a general idea of where they are.

isolated (gray) - these gray portions are to show areas where the population who inhabits that area tends to be very isolated from others. This is significant in the context of the map since these areas are often avoided or more difficult to travel to, not due to the people being hostile to outsiders, but merely because they’re much less likely to agree to run giant ass roads through their lands lol. Many  cultures/species/people groups/etc. in these areas just kind of want to be left alone and don’t really want a huge center of trade or giant crossing areas going right through their country, since they feel it may attract conflict or interrupt their way of life. Thus, if you travel around there, you’re unlikely to find accommodations or lodgings, you’re probably just walking along a dark dirt road in unkempt wilderness, if you see locals they may just ignore you, you’ll have to sleep in a shelter of your own making and hunt your own food, etc. The area isn’t hostile and nothing there is out to get you, but they also don’t give a shit about you being there, so while they’ll let you pass through, you’re kind of on your own for food and shelter and etc. and don’t expect the roads to be nicely kept up or anything. 

avoided (dark purpley sort of) - these areas are similar to the ‘isolated’ portions, except it indicates that these are areas travelers and traders actively AVOID passing through, and are very unlikely to build roads through or travel across. Though this is often not even due to the people groups in the area, and is commonly more because of climate or wildlife (like for example the very northernmost and very southernmost continents are mostly colored purple, because it’s so cold and harsh there that travel is literally impossible for most people and the climate is extremely deadly). Though of course sometimes this is because of the people, like for example, the Thastanri (I write all about them in a post HERE (link)) have now taken to being actively hostile to outsiders and go through great efforts to shoo away travelers (even sometimes kill them) due to their history of having their lands and people destroyed by random adventurers trespassing in their settlements so they can hunt dragons (as well as dragons being nearly extinct because of this, and the Thastanri wanting to protect them). But I would still say  that in a good 80% of cases, the purple areas are colored that way just because of something about the land or climate in the area being inhospitable and extremely risky to travel to.

 And even the remaining 20%, probably a majority of that is just stuff like “there’s a war going on between two groups around here so it’s kind of a not safe place”, rather than random nonsense stuff like “the people who live here just kill outsiders on sight for no reason”. So the purple areas are similar to the gray, in that they both indicate areas where there are not many open trade routes or large maintained roads for travelers, but for the gray ones it’s more just due to the isolated culture of the people there, and for the purple ones it’s MAJORLY just indicating extremely hazardous climates or impossibly difficult landscapes (and,, occasionally, is because of hostile cultures/groups of people, but this is more rare). 

So yeah, there’s some context I guess on travel in the realm, and where certain things are located or etc.

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-- INTERACTIONS BETWEEN SPECIES ----------

And this is just a few general things about like, stuff that most people consider when interacting with other groups and etc. 

~ BLOOD ~

 Many scholars and cultures theorize that blood itself, has supernatural properties and something to do with the nature of magic, while others (which is a more common view) claim that though some blood can indeed have magical properties, that is more reliant on the already existing magical aspects instilled in the person themselves by their soul/magic/etc (as there’s still debate as to where precisely magic comes from and what indicators are present on a physical or tangible level). Some people believe all bloods to have differing special properties depending on the species, and some say they’re all virtually the same with little difference, especially when you look at them under scientific examination. 

Regardless of whether there are some secret magical properties or not, it is at least known that most species have a huge list of incompatibilities and harmful effects that can occur due to the mixing or accidental consumption of blood. Which is one of the things that has lead some people to believe blood contains magical properties in the first place, as it can have such varied reactions in others. 

Even if, when examined in a lab, two bloods have seemingly no large difference (like obviously blood will vary by species and all blood has normal variations in it, but I mean like.. it’s not like you’ll compare two of them and one is of such absurdly different composition that you’re unsure if it’s even blood, etc. Most of them seem fairly in the same range, and there are no currently recognizable properties that correlate with or account for the differences that have been noticed in blood, etc. ), they may still have wildly varying effects in certain applications, hinting at some sort of undetectable inherent properties. 

This is something that most people are aware of (despite maybe like, extremely EXTREMELY isolated cultures who have never interacted with anyone before), and though obviously your everyday person is not going to know EVERY single blood incompatibility that exists in the realm, they will still likely at least know the ones that affect them personally (like how their own blood and the blood of the few groups closest to them tend to interact). 

Since blood’s  harmful properties have been around seemingly since like.. forever, it’s of course become part of cultures in the form of myths and little nursery rhymes and stories to teach children to never play with blood or touch blood, especially from another species.  Even if your everyday average person in the realm doesn’t have a deep scientific knowledge of blood or species evolution or the properties of magic, they probably at least grew up hearing about avoiding the blood of others. 

Though it’s not always harmful, sometimes the blood of one species can be healing to another, or do absolutely nothing, or even get them high or put them in some weird state of goofy delirium, make them pass out, help them sleep better, fix their vision, etc. etc. But a good majority of the time, the blood of one species usually either seems to have neutral interactions with others, or entirely negative ones (ranging from mild sickness/nausea or light skin burns or something (if the blood is just coming into contact with the skin), to like, full on.. contracting progressive deadly diseases or having seizures or dropping dead on the spot). 

In rare cases sometimes just being AROUND the blood of another species can be harmful to one (like, you don’t have to ingest it or get it into an open wound, just having a drop smeared on your skin could hurt you), but usually blood actually has to  get into the body somehow to actually be harmful to a person. 

Again, nobody is really sure exactly what the properties are that determine this. It’s thought that it may have to do with inherent magical ability (like since magic itself is such a dangerous and degrading force, species like the Jhevona who naturally have much more magical energy than other groups, would have more hazardous, or “stronger” blood, due to their magic being more potent (maybe a mage’s blood is gradually poisoned by magic exposure just like the rest of their body?). Thus like, a Jhevona drinking a human’s blood (a non-magical species) may not do much, but a human even just accidentally getting Jhevona blood into a cut on their finger would become instantly sick and possibly die (due to.. seemingly.. magic poisoning??)), and while many blood incompatibilities seem to follow these rules (”stronger” blood harming “weaker” blood, etc.), there are plenty of exceptions to this rule that nobody can explain, so it’s really still a kind of uncertain thing. 

Especially since sometimes the effects of blood are just seemingly like, random and nonsensical (like “oh this very specific type of elf blood can heal wounds for certain species, but for other species it infects their limbs and makes them fall off” lol ), it’s really hard to get a grasp of what underlying mechanism is actually at play here. 

But anyway, so that’s a thing lol! I will probably reference this often in things, and I can elaborate more on details or specific or etc later, but for now just.. know it’s a concept that exists, like.. Blood is a big thing in Nanyevimi and there are a huge range of various effects and incompatibilities associated with coming into contact with the blood of another species, so it’s something many people are aware of and are likely always keeping in mind wen interacting with others (like “oh, am I incompatible with them blood-wise? Or are they one of the ones that’s okay? I just don’t want to be offering them a tissue for their nose bleed some day and then I randomly drop dead because I touched their blood. this is important for me to know before I interact with anyone” etc.). 

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~ MATING ~

A majority of separate species in Nanyevimi cannot mate with each other. While one race of elf could mate with another race of elf, or a subspecies of Jhevona could probably mate with another subspecies of Jhevona, stuff like a human and an elf being able to have viable offspring is pretty much nonexistent, because they are entirely different species*** and have too many genetic differences.  

Many  humanoid species (but definitely not all lol) do have compatible enough anatomy to like.. have sex, at least in some form, but as far as actual mating/producing lineage would go, it pretty much could never result in a child. Those that are EXTREMELY similar in anatomy and also genetics (such as being descended from the same ancestor species) can sometimes produce children, but the children are often deformed or have health problems, or are fairly normal but infertile (as pretty much all half-species children are) and will not be able to reproduce their family line any further than that. 

(like for example groups of elves descended from the continent of Aviinine could likely mate with Avirre’thel/vampires, since they literally have the same ancestors, and this can actually lead to pregnancy, but even still the children have many health issues and die early, if they even are able to be born).

But many are not even close enough to do that. Like for example a Ythrili and and Verrucalt would just have such different anatomy that they couldn't even have sex in the first place, particularly the Ythrili is the one who is the most different in this scenario, their genitalia don't necessarily even resemble that of many other humanoid species and thus they can't even mate (or even really engage in sex at all) with anyone other than their own kind in the first place. Or like, some humanoid species with more animal traits (like “cat people" or the Uvra Istill with their like.. furry hooved lower halves and strange body anatomy), are so different from other species there would just be no way for it to produce a child in the first place, as for some of them (like in the case with the ythrili) they just don’t even have the anatomy to do so, or whatever possible sex things they could vaguely manage, definitely would not lead to reproduction. 

Another thing to consider is magical ability. The more “normal” humanoid species (unlike more animal looking or bug related species), regardless of whether they’re magic capable or not,  could generally all be thought of as being at least able to attempt to mate with each other, as their anatomy physically is,, usually,  compatible, however there can be a lot of issues with magic vs. non magic species and carrying children. Particularly with a non-magic species carrying a magic child, depending on the level of magic. 

So for example, a humanoid demon (Jhevona)  is one of the most inherently magical species to exist. Even if a human were to be able to somehow successfully become pregnant after mating attempts with a Jhevona, they still could not carry a Jhevona child, they would just straight up die, and no amount of healing magic could save them from the processes that are going on internally. 

Though scholars and doctors are still unsure of the exact nature of magic and what physically is occurring when magic is done, how energy is stored, what exactly determines the effects magic has on  a person, how it’s passed down genetically, etc. etc. ,  they at LEAST know that, generally, a species with a higher inherent magic level does not do well genetically with species who are less magical. 

 One theory about this is that it could be due to the genetic transference of power. Like perhaps parents of magical children naturally give some of their energy to the child while it is being processed in the body, and if the parent carrying the child is non-magic, yet the child is magic, it is going to be expecting to receive a stronger energy than the parent even has to give. 

 So like, to use oversimplified video game terms again to help describe magic lol, say they need maybe 200 MP to develop, and the parent has 0MP. But since the child's life force is actually stronger than the parent (being that they have magic in their genes somehow), the parent (rather than the child) would actually be the one to die. As they would slowly (or in some cases fairly rapidly) be having whatever inherent energy they posses (if there’s no magical energy to feed from, maybe the child starts taking physical energy by degrading their body, or from the person’s “”soul”” or etc.) devoured by the infant in an attempt for it to nourish itself, since it has to get that 200 MP somehow. Likely though, the parent still wouldn’t even have 200 mp to give, so it’d be more like.. the parent’s entire lifeforce is drained away and it dies, but the child was only able to get 80mp from that, so it dies as well.

 Now if the Jhevona is the one carrying the human's child, then it doesn't seem to kill the parent, and usually will be fine (as power is more balanced), but in this case if the imbalance is severe (such as with demons (most powerful species basically) and humans (least powerful humanoid species)), then  now the child may die, as it is thought perhaps the parent's body is naturally trying to bestow them with more energy than they can handle, causing their system to be overwhelmed and they usually just get destroyed, though not as dramatically as the first scenario (especially since again, exposure to magical energy itself is thought to be toxic, especially for non-magical people, and especially for a weap unborn non-magical infant.. even just being within the magical parents womb may expose them to enough magical energy to kill them, kind of like exposure to nuclear radiation or something). 

So in one case, the parent is too weak for the child's expectations and they slowly but often violently and painfully suffer to death, and in the other case, the child is too weak for what the parent's body is naturally attempting to nurture them with, and so they die pretty early on and silently, usually before even being fully developed, often just resulting in a miscarriage. (Also, this would still apply even with other magical species, if the magical “level” of the species weren’t balanced, such as an elf with a Jhevona, perhaps the problems wouldn’t be as severe, but likely the parent/child would still die, and even if born the offspring would be deformed or infertile)

Then another example could be a human and a vampire/avirre'thel, as vampires originated as simply elves who had given up their magical abilities (before eventually evolving into something more genetically distinct), thus they technically are also inherently non-magical, just like humans, so you would think  there would be more of a balance.

 However, complications would still arise from them having stronger life forces/souls/whatever inborn quality it is that controls this sort of thing which experts still don’t entirely understand, meaning that though they would still be more balanced magically, an Avirre’thel child would require slightly more energy than a human may be able to bestow them with healthily, though it is much less likely to entirely kill them as in the case of demons/jhevona. 

The main issue in this case would actually be the differences in genetics.  Vampiric/avirre’thel  anatomy has some marked distinctions, especially in the way they biologically process food, chemicals produced in their body (having different types of saliva and also producing poison in their fangs, etc.) , how they intake energy, the vast amount of health problems (due to the original deals during creation of the species they did get all those disease curses, Avirre'thel have a 89% higher rate of disease and illness than any other comparable species, like 1 in 4 of them has some unique vampire lifelong condition, and probably one out of every 2 you meet is having some more minor health condition ), etc. 

Though either way it is (the vamp carrying the child or the human doing it), it is unlikely the the parents will die (though still much more probable than if they were both breeding with their own species), it is very likely that the child may die from complications, either during birth or soon after, usually revolving around the systems being incompatible. 

Like for example, humans need food to survive, while vampires/Avirre’thel only need life force in the form of blood, so to work that out, the child's body may require both and mix them, or may kind of have one but more of the other, or etc. Either way it is likely to be an inefficient mix (like they need blood (bc vampire) but their body is incapable of processing it correctly the way that a full vampire would and converting it into energy when they receive it (a trait from the human), therefore no matter how much blood or food you give them, the body is processing it wrong, and they starve to death even though they're being fed, etc. OR they have more of the immune system of a human but can still catch vampiric diseases, which are way too much for their human immune system to handle and they die, etc. The human traits cannot process the speed of regeneration that occurs in a vampire thus the cells begin to repair themselves incorrectly and the child just dies of some strange form of magic cancer, etc.  

While technically slightly more possible to be born, most of these children wouldn't make it past a year old, 4 if lucky. If there were somehow 10 million Avirre’thel + human children born, 9million would die, allt he rest would be born but die in a month or maybe a year at most, and perhaps FOUR out of those 10 million could actually live into maybe their 30s, still with health problems, and live into late adulthood or so (before likely dying of disease), and they would still really need to be helped by mages or something, like have constant healing magic or medical treatments every day of their life to help them with their body not being able to do basic functions, etc. (and of course, they would still also be infertile/unable to produce further offspring).

For a last example, a Jhevona who is of a subspecies that they have generally quite low level magic, and an elf that is of a subspecies with a higher than average level of magic, could possibly actually work out. As long as: 

1. The blood of both subspecies is compatible (beyond magic, another thing is blood (though blood is thought to be  tied in with magic somehow). Since a ton of species have a long list of incompatibilities blood-wise, sometimes even coming into contact with the blood of a species incompatible with yours can make you sick, so they would have to be sure that both specific sub-species of their own species that they are, are compatible types (though i'd guess you'd do that before having sex anyway) , and aren't just going to repel instantly once mixed (like the parents body rejecting the baby’s cells, etc.)

 2. They are definitely sure that their inherent power levels are fairly equal and one isn't extremely more magically capable than the other (since even within species there can be a lot of variation, some subspecies of demons/jhevona and elves are more or less powerful, other factors that affect “lifeforce”/”soul” strength, or whatever the hell vague concept determines all this magic stuff (scholars still don’t know), and like mentioned, if a baby is trying to take more power than a parent can give or vice versa, it won’t work well, so they have to be balanced). Which is... something so extremely vague that it’s very very very hard to actually measure and be sure of, so you’d likely not actually be able to test for this but, you could guess I suppose. 

 and  3. Genetically, whatever subtype of their broader species that they both are, their biology is not extremely different in the way they process food, or regenerate health or any other essential process (like some Jhevona process food directly into magical energy rather than physical energy or etc. which would mean competing biological systems for the child to have to genetically fall between somewhere). This also includes making sure there are no immune system incompatibilities or diseases that either group is prone to that would end up being disastrous for the child’s immune system if it were to be weaker/stronger than one of their parent species.

 Again, the child would be definitely infertile , but if it meets all conditions above it COULD, potentially, be born successfully and live a reasonably long and somewhat healthy life.  

 Also another example just to note something: a magic doing human and non magic doing human would be able to mate exactly the same as two non magic humans, as the magic of humans is not inherent. Humans can only use material magics ( energy borrowed for outside sources/through external means,, and ONLY if they trained for like 30 years lol) and its impossible for them to use abstract magic (since it draws upon inherent power, of which they have none). So even a human who has struggled through trying to learn a few tiny basic feats of magic despite their non-magical nature does not posses any more inherent power or a stronger soul or anything than a non magic using human. One is simply borrowing or channeling power from something else, but they biologically are exactly the same, so it would have pretty much no bearing on childbirth, outside of maybe if they had modified their own biology with magic somehow, which is mostly impossible through solely material magics anyway. 

So anyway: a majority of separate species can’t breed with each other, and even when they can, the children usually have many complications and can die or even cause the parent carrying the child to die as well. While relationships between certain species living closely with each other may be common in certain areas, childbirth and actually mating within those relationships is generally impossible, due to the fact that.. they are like.. different SPECIES lol.. 

***( I know a lot of fantasy stories have their groups be more connected or etc. but that’s just always seemed a little unrealistic to me? lol.. Like if you have two species (even though everyone calls them “fantasy RACES”, in some cases it’s obvious their biology or etc. is so different they would be like.. fully genetically different SPECIES) with such different anatomy and functioning and etc. and then you say they can somehow just like.. effortlessly mate and produce a viable hybrid offspring with no issue?? I’m not a biologist, but I thought that like, to breed and produce fertile offspring and etc., you do have to have some similarities? So like if one party is like a 10 foot tall bat winged animal person that harvests all of their energy from magic rocks and has 4 eyes and 2 hearts and other random genetic/biological differences, and the other is like a regular elf with an average humanoid anatomy that harvests energy from normal food and etc., I just feel like it’d be hard for the body to reconcile those differences when making an offspring and actually have something that functions? The same way that a human couldn’t mate with a dog, and a cat couldn’t mate with a horse, etc... idk..  Anyway, so I do define the different groups in my world as fantasy SPECIES, not fantasy “races” (though there are some species that have sub-species within them, or distinct ‘’races’’ or ethnic groups or etc. WITHIN their own species), and since they are indeed fully separate species with differences in genetics and anatomy and the way their bodies function/process things or the layout of their organs and etc, I feel like it makes the most sense to have a rule that like.. most of them can not mate with each other and it wouldn’t be realistic for that to be the case (especially considering things like magic toxicity and etc.)?? But, if this is unrealistic or something, let me know! Obviously since I have people who like.. feed off of magic energy or have random cat ears or whatever, I’m not going for absolute biological accuracy lol, but certain things like the classification of groups as different species and how certain things like that work, I do want them to at least seem like they make sense.) 

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And that’s about all of the essentials!!! Hopefully, at least lol. I’ll add anything new if it comes up, but I think this is most of the general context necessary to understand the world as a whole and what type of environment it is, and some of the main concepts I mention a lot in other writings (blood incompatibilities, the memory gap, global areas, etc.). But always let me know if there are any questions or if I need to clarify something! Thanks for reading, have a great day~ 

#worldbuilding