melsrainpod

[melsrainpod]

was prescribed SSRIs a week or so ago. it's been a week of slowly getting more and more tired every day, and I'm just trying to hold steady because I don't have any other side effects and the tiredness is somewhat manageable. but it's so hard to think, like I'm wearing ankle weights and wading through knee-deep water.

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Have a doodle. My sleep schedule's been whack, so I give my exhaustion to Robin.

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She's pouring water from her wineskin on her head to cool off, bumping for probably a thousandth time against her horns. She's surprised to find water flowing not just from the opening, but from several small holes around it, where her thorns punctured the leather.

When Willowfine asks her if she's okay, she feels the punctures on her palm knit themselves together. "I'm good, thanks," she says through her teeth, hissing at the sensation. The sigil burns as she closes her fist, fingertips pressed flat against her palm.

hmm but think about cressida losing herself and not coping with that. her horns, then there was that sogil burned into her hand right? and then the claw things last envelope… hmmm

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can we talk abt the music and lighting in wyrdwood s2e4? and it changing for each of them? and especially happen's music being so beautiful i was going insane over it

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Head and Heart.

Must kiss Beatrice...

This isn't Beatrice...

I couldn't choose between Beatrice as she was or the bog body, so I did both. The Fog had so many devasting moments, but I thought Happen's crisis of love and faith was very striking and painful.

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Okay, I don't think anyone is talking about it, but I haven't seen Unwinding Wyrdwood yet (and probably won't until the season is done), but it's been haunting me since I've watched The Fog this morning.

Happen did a Reverse Dob and I am not over it.

In the Last Season of Oxventurers Guild, there was an episode where there are tapestries that "predicted" the deaths of all the main party, and Dob's one included an unseen figure holding him in a loving embrace while plunging a dagger into his back.

So when Happen took out a dagger and went to approach Beatrice, I just paused the video and had to yell a little. I have no idea if Luke intended it to be a conscious reference, it probably was just the logical choice, but the parallels of it are too strong for me to not consider it poetry.

And then, Praise Cadence, the dice went in the exact middle of the possible rolls (yes, I know, 10.5, but shush). And Johnny took this opportunity and ran with it and created one of the most powerful and crushing moments of the series so far. If there are three storytellers at the table, those being the DM, the players, and the dice, then all three converged in this serendipitous moment to create the best story beat ever that not only sets up the future continuing crisis of faith for Happen, but also, maybe unintentionally, looks back at The Guild and nods solemnly at it with a knowing look.

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I'm trying to make a big horror movie recommendation list on letterboxd based on both individual episodes and the characters of Wyrdwood. It's very much a work in progress, but I figured I'd share the link. I have a bunch of movies in mind, but let me know if you have any additions!

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while there's nothing to do at work, decided to give the names of the Wyrdwood S2 episodes so far their own pseudo-calligraphy treatment

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hey i made this fanfic writer meme. drop in my ask which one u think i am!!!!

(okay to rb!)

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he robin on my oat til i cake

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Singing and music were on my mind recently, especially in relationship to Wyrdwood party. I'm not quite ready to get into the proper worldbuilding, I kinda want to learn a bit more about musical instruments and remind myself of Heorth's various regions, so I'm introducing a spin-off of Worldbuilding Wyrdwood —

Heorth Headcanons!

The Northwest Team and their relationship to singing and music, with maybe some exceptions because I still can't think what Morven would do, under the cut.

Willowfine is the most musical out of the team. She's not formally trained, none of them are, but she lived all her life participating in circle singing when doing menial work and singing hymns to the Green Mother, so through years of practice she's developed an ear for the harmony and a pretty good control of rhythm (you gotta keep in time but also remember where you are in the rondo/rota to make it flow nicely!). Sometimes she hums lullabies when she's on watch at night in the camp. Her and Agrimonia together are probably improvising duets, and maybe even do some lilting, who knows!

Where the cult of Green Mother is all about harmonies and singing hymns, the cult of Cadence is all about chants, so Happen has only been exposed to rhythmic chanting in whispered tones. Part of me really wants to make a 12-tone serialism joke here, but honestly even that chaos might be too orderly for Cadence (and the 12-tone equal temperment has not been invented yet). Although the cultists sometimes scavenge dead tree branches and dried reeds for makeshift recorders and pan flutes, and turn to Cadence to tune them (which, as you can imagine, works about half the time), Happen himself is non-musical and also hasn't heard much of the "popular" music, and is consistently baffled by others' knowledge.

Lug, who Happen thought would know a similar amount of music to him (none), is actually quite versed (pun intended) in the tunes that travelers carry with them. The wildlife in the woods is smart and wouldn't approach someone who's making a lot of noise, and Lug frequently hums to himself whenever he has to travel alone through the woods, taking advantage of that. The melodies he's humming come from whichever bards and minstrels ask for his services, and he doesn't particularly care about the actual content of the songs — as long as the melody is catchy, he'll pick it up for his arsenal.

Robin has amassed quite a lot of knowledge of the working and drinking songs of his community, although his contributions usually start and end at the response to someone's call. He'll happily answer "way-hey and up she rises" if someone asks "what do we do with a drunken sailor?", but if you ask him how does the song go further, he won't be able to tell you. Osric has taught him some drinking songs, but not deliberately, more just from the fact that Robin was always around to witness his friend get a bit too tipsy on the mead and cider. Also, while Robin has two left feet and couldn't even count to one if you give him a song, he absolutely loves festival music and dances. He gets carried around by the people around him, and that's all he needs to have fun!

Cressida hates festivals. Cressida hates the drunks who go to and fro at the late hours of the night singing their stupid songs, she hates market days because the influx of customers means more work for her to do, and a hubbub of the busy streets makes it harder to think properly, she hates the stupid repetitive songs she's heard eight times just this weekend, and if you ask her, she'll tell you that she despises bards, but you will sometimes catch her sneaking to hear one of the extremely few traveling groups she likes and record the sound onto a wax cylinder. Cressida would hate Robin, but only when she's sober. As soon as you get her drunk on wine, she could rival not just Robin, she could rival Osric by the volume and willingness to sing drinking songs. Some of them she starts herself, but she's mostly there to yell "AND AFTER ALL / YOU'RE MY WONDERWALL" at an unfortunate soul who just learned how to play lute and went to test their skills at the local tavern. Drunk Cressida hates Sober Cressida, but the feeling is incredibly mutual, and they're extremely glad they're separated by two skinflasks of wine and a good night's sleep.

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I think I'm gonna start making a more conscious effort in building up my "writing" and "coming up with ideas" muscles. Since the first season I've had this thought of expanding on the known universe of Wyrdwood with fan lore, so why not make it a semi-periodic segment —

Worldbuilding Wyrdwood!

This all started because I've thought a bit too much about how Willowfine was chiseling the message on a copestone and how normal Latin alphabet is probably not good to chisel out but Futhorc (old Anglo-Saxon runes) was basically made for carving, and I've made a post that you can find somewhere on my blog. But I'm still thinking about it, including calligraphy and introducing elven scripts into the Wyrd phonetics (I don't think I'm up for the challenge of conlanging Wyrd, though), and so we turn to Cressida.

Cressida is, for one, part elf. She is born with this ancestry, and born into a wealthy family, so she would have been taught Elven and Wyrd and their writing systems as well. For two, she's also a banker, so she has to write things down for her own job instead of relying on just memory alone, which will lose the bank so much money in so many ways. And, as we all know, she's a wizard, so she has to write down her spells and study them from a tome (as opposed to sorcerers who can just spew out magic tubes all over Heorth, those magical nepo babies).

Because she's a wizard, she's carrying the tome around, but I think it also doubles as her personal diary. Spells she's researching, various runes, gossip about her teammates, old lists of what to get from the market — everything is a very mildly organised mess, but everything is perfectly legible (by her) in astonishingly good calligraphy. She even probably has a family heirloom metal-nibbed dip pen, but she uses magic to make ink, because she's so much above doing manual labour. If an onlooker were to look at a random spread, they would be amazed by the craft but wouldn't understand anything due to the various embellishments and a non-zero amount of Elven translations.

There is one thing, however, that is Cressida's downfall — she has absolutely zero artistic ability. There's a spread in the diary section that has just one name on it, written in big letters with a lot of cute hearts around it, and in the corner there's a stick figure with what probably was supposed to be hair but it appears to be a box on their head with one half of it fully filled in and the other showing the off-yellow of the page. When Happen points at it and asks about the box one evening at camp, Cressida yelps, slamming her diary shut, and promises to burn Happen alive if he tells anyone. The split-tone box stays a mystery.

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I'm wondering if Robin sort of... got Morven's sixth level. We haven't seen her updated character sheet yet, and while nothing appeared to have changed on Robin's, if I was them and had planned out some updates to Robin I wouldn't be revealing everything in one go. I think it's likely that as his new abilities are revealed his character sheet will be updated. I'm wondering specifically if we're going to find out that he has more than 4 hit points the next time he takes damage.

What I find really interesting is that magic circle isn't a sorcerer spell. Unless Morven has a feat that gives her some wizard or warlock spells (entirely possible tbh, Andy did say he took a bunch of feats), she literally couldn't cast it if she tried. This definitely supports @incandescentorrery 's idea about Morven as Robin's warlock patron, which I'm personally very into, though I could also see him being a wizard. I think it would be interesting if he ONLY got sixth level features, like he's got one third level spell slot and one prepared spell and that's it.

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Andy gave an answer to it in the post-episode talk of the podcast release of Mossfold. I'll put it under the cut, because it is still meta and we could come up with our own theories still!

From what I remember, Andy said that the whole idea for his characters for the season is the bleed between the two — Robin getting more impatient and snappy, Morven getting more soft and caring, and as part of it he wanted to give Robin a spell. Now, I don't remember him giving an exact reason for why he chose Magic Circle, but he did ask Johnny if he could choose from non-sorcerer spells if something fit more.

Additionally, Magic Circle is an evocation, which Zack reminded them all after the first episode, so it should take 10 minutes to cast, but Andy and Jane came up with the solution on the podcast — Robin's whole deal with his one spell is that he can only cast it in a highly emotional state almost as a self-defence, and, Andy reasoned, Robin has been stressed for at least 10 minutes for the spell preparation to work.

So I'm pretty sure it will be just the normal (adult) human man character sheet still, just with one spell in the back pocket for emergencies. As for Morven, she might have lost on one thing in the leveling, but I'm not sure, and honestly she's a sorcerer, she can deal with this

I'm wondering if Robin sort of... got Morven's sixth level. We haven't seen her updated character sheet yet, and while nothing appeared to have changed on Robin's, if I was them and had planned out some updates to Robin I wouldn't be revealing everything in one go. I think it's likely that as his new abilities are revealed his character sheet will be updated. I'm wondering specifically if we're going to find out that he has more than 4 hit points the next time he takes damage.

What I find really interesting is that magic circle isn't a sorcerer spell. Unless Morven has a feat that gives her some wizard or warlock spells (entirely possible tbh, Andy did say he took a bunch of feats), she literally couldn't cast it if she tried. This definitely supports @incandescentorrery 's idea about Morven as Robin's warlock patron, which I'm personally very into, though I could also see him being a wizard. I think it would be interesting if he ONLY got sixth level features, like he's got one third level spell slot and one prepared spell and that's it.

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I know it probably won't sway many people, not nearly enough to put up a fight, but I've thought of more Merilwen/Happen justification than I've put in the propaganda

Both rangers and druids are tied to the nature and exploration. Both Happen and Merilwen mention hunting as part of their provisions gathering methods, and a hunting party of two, one of whom can turn into a wildcat or a bear, depending on the needs, is extremely powerful.

While Merilwen was mostly reliant on magic, her primary weapon was still a bow, even if she wasn't that great at it in battle. Happen could teach her how to use a bow more effectively, and Merilwen could share the teleporting bow/arrows with him for quicker getaways.

Plus I just think Merilwen in her cat form would be incredibly playful with Happen's sprites, and that's just cute :D

Propaganda under the cut (Disclaimer: there's a joke in one of the propagandas that some may feel like is hating on another ship but I'm choosing to believe it's rather hating on the mom stuff/archetype that is forced on a character. Also, the joke literally wouldn't work if I took it out so it stays.)

Merilwen x Happen:

“honestly I just thought about it after listening to OWLS, and how Happen would absolutely tell people to not underestimate the owls (they are the wolves of the woods), and one of the owls turns out to be a wildshaped Merilwen”

Lug x Robin:

“tired: lug & willowfine are the parents of the wyrdwood group

wired: lug & robin as the tired group dads.

- the sunshine one and the grumpy one

- when morven is first introduced, lug is the only one who is able to explain it to robin in a way he understands. in the beginning the group often puts it on willowfine to explain things to robin and usually she flounders and lug has to fix it

- when robin comes back after morven’s first adventure with the group, everybody keeps telling robin how useful morven’s magic is compared to him. while everybody else is trying to figure out how to discreetly bring morven back out, lug sees the value in robin just as he is”

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belatedly, because I forgot about time, but

I am ready for the start of season 2 of Wyrdwood!