#this was fun i like excessively detailed headcanons with very little basis in canon!

[ratgrinders]

I can't get over how not a single person has voted for Ivy as their favorite rger; it's very funny, but also a LITTLE sad cause I personally would love to know more about her, as right now we have. Nothing. Her being Fabian's foil could imply that she has some kind of rich family, but absent parents, but she didn't seem to show any sign of being posh like Fabian is/was, she was just... mean. Same goes for Mary Ann in terms of knowing nothing about her, especially not how she contrasts to Gorgug. I really hope we get more information! Do you have any guesses?

Yes it's so funny 😭😭😭😭but also understandable unfortunately lmaooo. She's the Rat Grinder we objectively know the LEAST about, she's had maybe like what, one and a half scenes? We know she's besties with Oisin, and that type of dynamic within the larger group of the Rat Grinders is VERY interesting to me, but other than that??? Nothing. I DO hope we learn more though ghfsfks just because right now there's not a lot to dig into!

As for the second part of your question, oh god WILD speculation time only tenuously based in canon under the cut lets gooooo:

I think the basis for the Rat Grinders status as the Bad Kids' foils is that they have what the Bad Kids want, but have superficial beef with the Bad Kids based on the version of them they have in their head. So you got Kipperlilly who wants Riz's tragic backstory despite her allegedly normal and whole family at home. Oisin is rich thanks to his family while Adaine struggles with money thanks to hers, and maybe seems to have beef with the Elven Oracle as that's what led to Kalvaxus' defeat. Ruben has the song of the summer just as Fig is in the middle of an artist's block. Etc, etc.

So going off of that, what does Fabian want more than anything else this season? To not be lonely. I think it'd make sense then if Ivy actually had a really present, loving(?) family who nonetheless still turned out kind of mean. I think she has no problem living up to her family's expectations, no matter what they are. As for the family itself, well the Gloom Stalker subclass is "at home in the darkest places i.e. in primeval forests". And what's the nearest dark forest with a population of wood elves? Sylvaire, formerly the Forest of the Nightmare King. Specifically Arborly, since that's the town near there that protects the entrance to the forest. I think Ivy is possibly how the Rat Grinders got the Nightmare King connection in the whole reviving a dead god thing. Of course, this is all WILD speculation.

As for Mary Ann, what does Gorgug want? This is a bit less clear as his arc developed over the course of the season, but I'd say he wants a stronger connection to his artificing (and by proxy, his gnomish parents), he wants a balance between that and barbarian and a healthy relationship to his rage, and I think part of what ticks him off so much about Mary Ann is just how uncaring she seems, that she can seem so unengaged about things and still be such a great barbarian while he has to CONSTANTLY balance and filter his emotions and focus to succeed in his two classes. So I think it's possible Mary Ann was also adopted by a different species, but this time by barbarians so there was never any struggle on her part to relate to the classes of her parents. Her parents just Got rage immediately, she grew up with an innate understanding of it and is able to perfectly modulate it despite seeming so monotone outside it. And I think it'd be very funny if specifically Mary Ann, and only Mary Ann, has no outward beef with the Bad Kids and is actually kind of ok with Gorgug lmao.

I can't WAIT for all of this to get Jossed by the end of the season lmaoooooooooooo.

#this was fun i like excessively detailed headcanons with very little basis in canon! #dimension 20 #fantasy high #fantasy high junior year #original post #fhjy spoilers #rat grinders #ivy embra #mary ann skuttle

[therealvinelle]

The illustrious then-@keerka, who now goes by @troquantary, sent me the following ask. Tumblr, of course, ate it, but luckily for us all I store all my asks on an outside server, so it wasn’t lost.

(A moment of silence for the fact that I took so long to answer this one that the ask was eaten and the asker got a new blog in the meantime.)

This was the ask:

Hi! When you have time, I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on the worldbuilding in Twilight and its logical consistency (if that's not too vague a question to even pose). For me it's almost hard to assess because the canon universe feels very...sparse? Kind of undeveloped? But that also means more room to develop headcanons, so I'm not complaining. Curious to know what you think, though!

This is my answer:

I think I’ll divide my answer in two sections, first I’ll give you an example of a franchise that has poor worldbuilding, then get into my thoughts on Meyer’s worldbuilding.

Supernatural.

Low-hanging fruit, but all the better an example for it. 

Supernatural introduces us to a world where everything is real. Everything that goes bump in the night, every myth and every monster, it’s all real, and 99% of them are out to hurt people. Who will stand against this evil, you may ask? Why, a scruffy but all-American bunch of self-declared hunters. These people are not organized, in fact most of them work alone. They are all outlaws. Their expertise is questionable, as Bobby Singer is considered remarkable for the fact that he usually knows what something is.

That’s it.

These people, all of them independent, most of them weird as fuck, are it. You’re in 21st century America, your country wields the most formidable military force in the world, and if something supernatural is wreaking havoc in your town you’d best hope one of these hunter nutjobs happens to have spotted the right newspaper clipping.

We’re offered no explanation as to why the American government doesn’t know about the supernatural, or why the world doesn’t look completely different. In our world, people don’t believe in ghosts because ghosts aren’t real, but in the world of Supernatural, people don’t believe in ghosts because [footage not found].

There’s no demon nor government conspiracy to keep the world at large ignorant, in fact this subject is never broached.

Hunters would make sense if they were bountyhunters, but they’re not. The secrecy could make sense if the angels were behind it, but they’re not.

“Maybe the military does know!” you might say, “it’s just that they don’t let the hunters know they know!” Well, we would have found out in season 5. Dean and Sam were caught up in the apocalypse, the government would definitely have gotten involved with that one.

Then we have the fact that the supernatural entities aren’t internally consistent either. We have angels, demons, humans - good, got it. I know what these three are in relation to each other. But, wait, we have wendigos, banshees, ghosts, witches, vampires, and tricksters as well. How do they all fit into the same world? How does the Christian God and every pagan pantheon, both of which are canon per Supernatural, fit into the same world? Who knows? Not Supernatural.

Supernatural is a world that is written on an episode-to-episode basis, by writers who wanted that gritty bounty-hunter aesthetic for their show about supernatural marks.

Back to Twilight.

Twilight, by comparison, makes a great deal of sense to me. 

I’ll admit that some of this is me reading into the text a lot, but I do that with every fandom I’m in. Twilight is a rare one where I can find an answer to every question.

We have these insanely powerful vampires whose exploits leave no survivors and whose numbers are kept low because it’s so hard to create a new one. They’re kept in line by a powerful organization no one can fight, and new laws are created as Aro discovers new threats (Immortal children, his debate on what to do with Renesmée). There are at least two other supernatural species out there, but of the two mentioned one is in place to protect humans, and the other was run extinct by the very organization that keeps vampires in line as well. None of this is fantheory, this is canon as Meyer created it.

Of course, I’ve gone some strange places in guessing why the Volturi exist, why the world of Twilight looks the same as ours, and why the supernatural world appears so limited. However, all of these things are extrapolated from canon. And I can extrapolate very easily because Twilight canon is consistent.

And this here segues into section two of my reply to you, as I imagine you (and many others reading this) are now saying “It’s not solid worldbuilding if the fans are doing all the work!”

Well, again - the difference between her and a lot of other authors is that when I overthink her work I find satisfying answers. That’s not a given, for instance I can’t do that with GRRM’s A Song and Ice and Fire, and half the point of that series is the worldbuilding! (My complains are many, I had to cut them from this meta, but the big one: why don’t the peasants revolt?)

I can’t think of a single plot hole in Twilight, nor of a logical inconsistency. Something either makes sense right off the bat, or I can look a little closer and easily piece together a logical explanation.

More, there’s no excess. I suppose this is what others don’t like about Meyer’s worldbuilding, but I enjoy it. Characters don’t prattle fun facts about things that ultimately don’t matter to the story, and if they do then it turns out later that yes, it did matter. Quite notably, when Carlisle gives Bella a crash course on vampire history, Meyer skips all of it except the part about immortal children, because that’s what was important. Later in that same book we meet Amun and the Romanians, and learn what the world used to be like, so it’s not like Meyer hadn’t come up with it. She left it out because it would have been off-topic and meandering.

This is where Meyer’s approach to worldbuilding comes in. It seems to me that she created the people and the story first, and then let the world they lived in fall into place around them, rather than the other way around. Now, there’s no right way to worldbuild, but I personally prefer authors who do it this way. To my tastes it generally leads to better stories, as this kind of author will show you the world through the story. We discover it as we go along and it becomes relevant to our characters, and if we don’t learn everything about it then that’s fine, though we’ve been given enough clues to guess. Consistency is key in this.

By contrast, authors who do it the other way around and build the world in full detail first, usually end up with worse stories. They get lost in their worldbuilding more often than not, their worlds end up so complex they’re inconsistent, and the story gets off-topic. Too much worldbuilding distracts from the story while adding nothing.

(There are of course exceptions to both, and I have more thoughts on this, but overall this has been my experience with fiction. Too much worldbuilding is in fact too much.)

The world should always serve the story, not the other way around.

(Again gonna use GRRM as an example. I don’t give a fuck about Aragorn’s tax policy. It’s not important to the story.)

So, these are my rambly thoughts on how I think.

There’s also the fact that, judging by Twilight and The Host, Meyer is just plain good at worldbuilding. She gets very good ideas, and she’s intelligent enough to successfully implement them into a story (look to Supernatural for an un-intelligent way of impleneting good ideas). And that’s all I ask.

#long post #it's getting long and late so we're hitting post #twilight worldbuilding #troquantary #twilight #twilight meta #twilight renaissance #a song of ice and fire #supernatural