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Today's the day! The Cosmere RPG is out and I can show you my favorite pieces I did: Syl!! What an absolute joy to paint! AD: Katie Payne / Johnny O'Neal

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A few years ago I designed herald statues for a hallway in the Kholinar palace as part of a fan project. Last autumn Dragonsteel and Brotherwise asked me to render them more fully for the Stormlight RPG world guide and the Stonewalkers campaign.

Do you have a favourite herald? :)

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reading stormlight archive

kaladins pov: a trial awaits me at every step, i am constantly challenged and i am chagrined by my incapacity to do something right

other povs: is kaladin god????? how the fuck is he doing that??????

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#just entomology things

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Brandon Sanderson, slapping the Cosmere: This bad boy can fit so many different magic systems in it.

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“Regardless, your moons are home to a group of voracious entities known as aethers. Though the true aethers on other worlds have a symbiosis with people, the ones on your moons have become insatiable, aggressive, and fecund.”

“I���m not allowed to say that word,” Tress said.

“No, it means … actually, that word means something very close to what you think it means, but it’s a more polite way of saying it.”

obsessed with the implication that tress knows the word fuck but does not say it out of politeness

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murderbot is a type of person who says "are you stupid? ghosts don't exist" but will be calculating percentages in its head on how to defeat ghosts because well. what if they DO exist.

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Character lineup, that is 100% just an excuse to draw Venli and Szeth standing next to each other.

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Top 10 Stormlight Archive Trans Headcanons:

1. transfem elhokar. ever since i first saw this one i knew it must be true. if elhokar had bonded design her first truth would be im a woman and then from there she would work on all the bigotry

2. transmasc lift. if this was a different series it would be canon. to me that weird little girl is very much actually a weird little boy

3. transmasc hoid. i love this one because despite no like textual reason its just fun

4. transfem kaladin. thank you self soulcasting. and also many other transfem kaladin fics. i love this one because kaladin is the quintessential “transition would absolutely not fix them but it would create unique new issues” character ever

5. transmasc or transfem jasnah. she could go either way and i like both interpretations. is she performing femininity hard because she’s scared of being caught not performing it enough? yes. you see my point

6. transmasc sadeas specifically transmed trans guy sadeas is basically canon to me. thank you wasp cup. because if sadeas was trans he would be an insecure asshole about it. but it also makes sense when you think about his whole i want a shardblade bad thing that he has going on

7. transfem leshwi. i love when people explore the relationship she would have with her different physical bodies as one of the Fused. i love when they infuse some transfemininity into leshwi

8. nonbinary eshonai. feel like i have seen this in a fic before but if i haven’t it’s a brilliant idea anyway. how would the world be different if eshonai got to meet the sibling

9. this is a space for general spren gender-isms. from design in yumi making herself a human woman body to syl’s antics in WaT to the Sibling being canonically nonbinary i just think spren conception of gender is fun and trans in a different, not exactly human way. as it SHOULD be because spren aren’t humans

10. you. the reader. congrats you’re trans now say your radiant oaths and get that spren hrt

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Murderbot would hate this but I think theres a case to be made that part of the reason ART and Murderbot click so well is because ART is, to some degree, also a bot-human construct.

Like obviously PHYSICALLY it's just a bot. But it is a bot who has been raised to believe on some level that it is human - at the very least, that it has more in common with humans than it does with other bots. There's an angle here about ART who is kind of like a bird who has been raised by and imprinted on humans, who believes itself to be human, who doesn't recognize itself in other birds, who doesn't understand why the other humans don't see it as an equal. It's in a shitty bind, because humans wont see it as one of them but it can't live as a bot. So it's living in the kind of subtle insidious misery which is why animal husbandry experts pretty universally agree that having animals imprint on humans is bad for them. (This is the problem with the siloing of academic disciplines. A zoologist could have told the MI department not to /purposefully make the superai imprint on humans/)

And so, for our hyper-intelligent and socially deprived metaphorical African Grey, what a fucking miracle that while out on its own it stumbled into a /human-bird hybrid./ Murderbot is quite possibly the only person ART has ever been able to be completely itself around, the only person who can really understand the totality of what ART is in all its messy contradiction. That's why their relationship is so life-altering for both of them, because they're both people who feel adrift and isolated outside of the realms of both humans and bots, and they can understand one another both in their humanity and their inhumanity.

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You started it!!! What do you think? Do you like it?? How far are you? Which parable is your favorite???? What do you think of Nohadon?

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I am not over how Taravangian just tossed Moash aside.

Rayse had this whole plan with Moash, had been building him up. Looked at him and went "whoa this guy's messed up like my other blorbo." In Oathbringer, pre "you cannot have my pain," Moash is still respected by some of the Fused and his pain and passion are rewarded by Rayse. After killing Jezrien, he's given a new name and Odium takes away his pain. Yes he's used, but Leshwi respects him and taking away his pain is sort of helping. RoW Odium is intrigued by Moash, tasks him with a very important mission, and uses Moash as a bridge to connect to Kaladin. Moash is practically Odium's Bondsmith if that were a thing. And then Moash's eyes are burned out and his gift is severed and he's left in darkness and in pain and sorrow till Odium's gift returns.

And then Taravangian kills Rayse, who admittedly was dying after overstraining the Shard by trying to reach Kaladin (akin to Leras locking away Ruin or Tanavast going against Honor), taking the Shard of Odium, and he just tossed Moash aside. Taravangian looks over Rayse's plans and throws most of them out of the window in favor of his cleverness and planning and his rivalry with Dalinar and barely even looks at Moash. He's not "dramatic enough" to function as a champion against Dalinar, so Taravangian pulls together the whole "20 years in one day" thing at the last minute, having Dalinar as both champions technically. He leaves Moash in emotional and physical agony for five days before showing up to stab his eyes in bindpoints with crystals (that Moash didn't agree to) and went "have you considered that the Old Odium was an idiot I'm in charge now and I say emotions are good Here's all your old emotions back. If you can handle them, you can go fight." And then stabbed his eyes with crystal spikes. That Moash did Not Agree To and sent him to fight against the Windrunners. Of course Moash acts like That in the back half of Wind and Truth He's going through the wringer and is trying to feel almost like he did when he and Odium worked together.

Moash's position in Wind and Truth leaves him once again looking for Kaladin, looked over for a Kholin, and played by Taravangian, just like in Words of Radiance. At the end of WoR, when Moash is told that Dalinar becoming King was one of the options, the other being to kill him, he thinks "he'd been played for one of the ten fools. and the worst part is he didn't even know how."

And on Taravangian's "moash isn't a dramatic enough opponent for Dalinar" line of thought - Moash parallels Dalinar in several ways. One easy example, all through out Rhythm of War, Dalinar's trying to learn about being a Bondsmith and using Connection with memories and Moash is sharing Odium's visions with Kaladin. Again, Moash in RoW is practically a Bondsmith. I long for the day (dustbringer book I'm betting) when we get a "you cannot have my pain moment" with Moash. When he walks away from Taravangian. When he finds some way to take a third option like the listeners of old, and the Willshapers now, and like Renarin and Rlain and Bo-Ad-Misram now, Sja-anat, and so many more.

Rayse builds up Moash and Taravangian just ignores him. Sends him on an errand. In the book that also featured a whole thing about children turning from the life set for them by their parents/ usurping them.

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Spellcheck.

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Oathbringer sketch page. Man this book was great.