#(i.e. the sort of thing that's fun to do for fun but should never be put in production code)

[sufficientlylargen]

#Excel is actually a decent editor for writing Java#it makes it very difficult to make some of the most common Java mistakes#like writing code in Java

"Lol"

"Lmao" even.

Is this an "I have written too much Java" emotion or an "I refuse to touch Java" emotion?

I am, perhaps, overstating my aversion to the language - I don't really hate Java, I just don't find it terribly fun to work in (although it's been years since the last time I had to, so maybe IDE advances have made it more palatable now). I've worked on some Java projects that were quite well put together, but I've also seen my share of code with types like ProducerFactory<FactoryProducer, IGatewayFactoryFactory>.

In general if speed is not an essential part of a project I prefer to write in Python for its terseness and extremely effective syntactic sugar (context managers, generators, etc.), and if speed IS essential then various C variants, Rust, or even Go will almost certainly outperform Java. So it's not entirely clear to me why Java is still used outside of legacy code.

[krysmcscience]

It’s finally done, guys – five whole pages of Narilamb AU comic AND MORE be upon you! (If you have trouble reading any of the text, view the full-size! These pages are huge!)

Yeesh, this took forever. <:)

There’s probably a ton of inconsistencies and anatomy/perspective wonkeries, but this was mostly just comic practice, so Oh Hekkin Well, Lol <:D

(Yes, I am aware the Gateway’s door isn’t present in the Afterlife, and the actual way in is just a pentagram portal. Yes, I put the door in there anyway because Artistic License, i.e. it felt more impactful for there to be a prison door of sorts to walk through to freedom, rather than just a bland boring portal on the ground. 😠)

anyway, i hate backgrounds so much lmao

Alternate ending and a buttload of bonus art under the cut, followed by goofy AU rambles and headcanon stuff:

I’m calling it the Revival AU. It’s not all that creative a title, and someone else has probably used it already, but I am too lazy to really care, LOL

Alternate ending page, which you will Definitely need to view the full-size for, Whoopsie Daisy:

The alternate ending was actually the first ending I finished things off with, because I had a brief badbrain moment where I forgot the emotional beat I initially wanted the comic to end on, and I tend to write comedy, anyway. I later remembered and drew out the proper ending, but I preserved and finished this one, too, because it still makes me giggle.

They had to go back for the followers off-screen in the AU’s real ending. And by ‘they’ I mean just the Lamb, because they weren’t about to ask three newly freed cats to go back into what used to be their prison. The Lamb DID spend some time watching Narinder and the bois enjoying the outdoors first, though:

In other news, here’s the Lamb and me making fun of my anatomy-drawing ‘skills’:

Meanwhile, if you’re wondering why the Lamb is just a-okay with how things went down vis a vis Their Murder, this bonus comic should answer at least some of your questions:

Ah, yes, also this is how they get engaged outside of the alternate ending. Forgot to mention that bit. XD (I already refuse to believe that Narinder is capable of flirting normally, so why would his initial marriage proposal be any better???)

Oh, and before any of them get a chance to actually head back to the cult grounds, there is one potential problem:

And by ‘problem’ I mean something Narinder intends to ignore for At Minimum a thousand years. Cuz he’s a petty bitch like that. :D

what do you mean i drew the lamb too tall compared to the background? clearly they’re standing on top of baal and aym lmao, why else would you think those two aren’t in this one??? (aym and baal got way too excited about finally being outside, you see, and their silly modes are nothing to sneeze at)

And, speaking of heading back to the cult grounds, I’m sure y’all would love to know how the Lamb’s followers felt about the brand new change in management:

It all went better than expected. <:D Tiny ramble now, feel free to skip down to the next comic.

Before you ask, no, the Lamb does not have any actual powers anymore, other than the immortality Narinder definitely grants them. The Red Crown just thinks it’s funny to suggest otherwise, and Narinder does nothing to discourage this. Also, the Lamb and Narinder aren’t actually married here yet, but, uh. Pretty safe to say that particular ritual directly follows the events of this comic. XD

Given how quickly he mellows out in canon, Narinder probably chills out a lot in this AU once he’s in charge of the cult, too, if only because 1.) He’s finally free, and 2.) He’s equally smitten with and distracted by the Lamb. He’s definitely in charge at least 95% of the time, though, because the Lamb never actually wanted to be a cult leader and, now that their time as a vessel is done, they just want to be a normal(ish) sheep who’s wholly devoted to their hot new divine husband.

Some followers do still have some valid concerns about these two being together, though, which I’m sure at least a few of you might share…

Unfortunately for any such concerns, the Lamb is a bonafide masochist in this AU. :D

They’re also 100% a sub, obviously

Anyone at all: Your relationship is problematic and potentially toxic

The Lamb: fuck yeah it is, it’s so hot~ OuO

Here’s just the last panel, made transparent for whatever nefarious purposes y’all might have for it:

Additional exchange Narinder and the Lamb have at some point, probably after the Lamb does a fatal whoopsie while out on a mission trip or in response to things getting a little too sadistic in the bedroom, ahaha:

Look, there is a very important distinction between life and death, and if you don’t understand that, then you’re probably not worthy of being the God of Death, anyway. (At least, according to Narinder, and ONLY Narinder.)

Last but not least, have these shittens:

~Such creative naming conventions I have utilized, lololol~ :D Anyway, there's a few deets on them in the rambles down below.

The rest is all ramble, so before I get to that, I’ll just say – likes and especially reblogs are very much appreciated!!! :D If you happen to really really REALLY like my stuff, meanwhile, I do have a link in my bio to my ko-fi page, where I’m accepting commissions and donations if you’re especially generous… ÓuÒ

Now, BE FREE IF YOU AIN’T DOWN FOR READING MY GOOFY RAMBLES

First ramble is re: Baal’s question of ‘Did it really work?’, since I didn’t feel like expanding on it in the comic proper, and it’s arguably pretty vague? He doesn’t ask because he doubts Narinder or his capabilities, exactly, but because neither Baal nor Aym have ever actually seen their god at full power before (he’s still technically not at full power here, either). It’s not expressly stated how soon the brothers were brought to Narinder after his imprisonment, but whether it was early on or after a length of time for Shamura to (somewhat) recover from his attack, he must have already been weakened, since I have no doubts that there was a huge battle that accompanied the Bishops working together to trap him. So, between that fight with all four of his siblings, sharing his power with a variety of vessels over time, and being chained immobile for a thousand years, he must have been severely weakened by the time he lent the Red Crown out to the Lamb, which would have only weakened him further.

I like to think this is how the Lamb is able to defeat him if they refuse to be sacrificed, despite how it took all four Bishops working together to subdue and chain Narinder in the first place.

All that aside, the three cats have been trapped in the Afterlife for so long that Baal also wanted verbal reassurance that they are all, indeed, actually able to leave it now – something that I headcanon isn’t possible without a significant amount of power (i.e. the Red Crown’s cooperation with its bearer/vessel).

(On a semi-related note, I don’t headcanon Aym and Baal as twins. I like sweetheart big bro Baal and snarky little goth bro Aym too much to have them be that close in age.)

Ah, teeny thing: If you noticed I switched up the art style for Narinder on the second page, that was intentional. It's sort of a visual indicator that there has been a Big Change for him - that being, how much power he has after sacrificing the Lamb. As for why I changed up his arms in the grass rollin' pic, I don't really subscribe to the notion that his arms are spooky bones because they're horrifically injured (beyond chain-chafing scars, that is), but rather just because he's the Bishop of Death, so he can change how normal-to-spooky they look at will. At some point I might doodle out how I imagine his appearance to range between least to most eldritch... 🤔

Next ramble, regarding Narinder’s feelings towards the Lamb...he was initially too focused on being freed from his imprisonment to form any real attachment to them. They were a tool for his use, first and foremost, but he did notice their intense devotion towards him. It was impossible not to notice, because the Lamb was always very happy to see him, even if it was because they died during a crusade (yet again). He wasn’t originally planning to revive them once he was freed, either, because he saw no real point to it – after all, they were already dead when they first met him, just as any other mortal would be when meeting him in the Afterlife, so death has very little real consequence in his eyes. But, once the chains were off, and it really sank in that he stood to lose the most devoted follower he’s ever had, he decided…why put their soul to rest for good or leave them stuck in the Afterlife when he could just as easily revive them again? And why not reward them for their hard work, anyway? Not only would it cost him nothing by comparison, but the future devotion that could come of it would surely make up for his (bare minimum) effort in reviving them.

He wasn’t expecting to get a full dose of that devotion and a smiling face so soon after killing them, though~ :3c (because the Lamb is a bonafide freak, and not-so-secretly into the fucked up power dynamics going on here, lol)

I should mention here that I am firmly of the belief that any non-god/vessel who crosses through the Gateway and into the Afterlife just straight up dies. So, Aym and Baal? Also straight up dead, from the second Shamura brought them through. Their souls were just never put to rest so that Narinder could have some company – if only according to Shamura. Narinder kept the two around mostly out of bewilderment, because honestly, who are these kittens, and what is Shamura’s game here, anyway??? They never even explained anything, they just tossed these kittens into the Afterlife and LEFT!!! At any rate, Aym and Baal being dead is how I explain why their souls apparently become lost in the void if they’re killed, along with the added complications required to revive the two because of it.

So, with those deets in mind, and given a bit of time, if Narinder hadn’t chosen to revive the Lamb, and also hadn’t chosen to put their soul to rest, they still would have woken up at some point, despite being as straight up dead as Aym and Baal. Who, don’t worry, were also properly revived while Narinder was waiting for the Lamb to wake up. Because I am also firmly of the belief that, first, the dead cannot leave the Afterlife without the use of a ritual/relic (and can't stay in the living world for long regardless), and second, dead followers’ devotion isn’t anywhere near as potent as that of the living, given how much more the living stand to lose.

Final ramble, regarding the Lamb’s feelings towards Narinder, and why they’re so devoted to him…

Well, you don’t spend most of your life on the run with your steadily-dwindling herd, trying to evade the ongoing genocide of your species, without becoming a little fucked up in the head. Maybe a lot fucked up in the head. Life is suffering, so might as well have fun with it, right? Maybe start finding death and pain to be kind of hilarious, even a little bit hot, once everyone you know and love is dead and gone, leaving you all alone? And maybe after that, there’s something comforting in how, despite the cold, cruel uncertainties of life, at least you can always count on the inevitability of death, patiently waiting for you until your very last breath? Who knows. Either way, as soon as the Lamb was killed, and they learned that the literal God of Death was offering them a second chance at life and vengeance via effective immortality, they were 100% ride-or-die-devoted all at once. Turns out death is kinder than life – go figure. (Of course, it helps that Narinder is 100% their type.)

They weren’t put off by Narinder’s thinly-veiled sadism or manipulations, either – they’re not too different in those regards, albeit opting for vastly different methods. It’s a very ‘two sides of the same coin’ sort of deal. In order to stay alive once they were made the last of their kind, the Lamb had no qualms with using others to their advantage, and that did not change once they were revived and expected to run a cult. They didn’t care for the position of authority, though – being a sheep and all, they’re much more of a follower than a leader, and thus greatly appreciated Narinder’s need for control. With how they had to keep on their toes for so long, the Lamb was also pretty good at reading people by the time they died, so they could recognize that a lot of Narinder’s posturing was just that – posturing. Dude’s 95% bluster and only 5% bite. He could obviously be vicious when he wanted or needed to (the Bishops' injuries were clear proof of that), but underneath his outer layer of cruelty was a generous layer of tsundere, and underneath all THAT was a soft squishy middle sibling velcro cat in desperate need of attention and affection.

(Which, for the record, he Did Not feel comfortable getting from Aym and Baal – Narinder still has no idea why the fuck Shamura sent them to him, beyond acting as keepers at best or trying to sabotage his attempts to escape at worst. Which, he thought HE sabotaged in turn, by guiding the kittens into being his devoted disciples instead. He thought he was very clever for it. ‘I outsmarted Shamura!’ he thought, despite that there was never anything there to outsmart. ‘What do you mean, Shamura sent your kittens to me for company?’ he demands of Forneus later. It may or may not lead him to pull Shamura out of Purgatory just so he can shake them and scream about how they should have Fucking Explained that!!!)

But, getting back on track as to why the Lamb was so willing to be sacrificed, I cannot stress this enough – if you pay even a minimal amount of attention to what he’s saying, Narinder is REALLY NOT SUBTLE about his intentions. ‘Death is of little consequence.’ ‘Followers are for you to use to your advantage.’ ‘Sacrifice a follower to absorb more power.’ So, yeah, the Lamb knew exactly what would be expected of them once the other Bishops were dead. They knew Narinder would expect them to die for him one last time. But, after all, death is of little consequence (not to mention hot), so when the time came, they wanted to see him freed, even if it meant oblivion for them in the end.

He’d given them a second life, and the ability to avenge their kin, and they felt indebted to him for that – so, while they were still pretty glum about the possibility that they might not get to see him free of his chains, nothing beyond their devotion and debt to him mattered. They never wanted all the drama and expectations that came with the Red Crown’s power, anyway, so, better for Narinder to have it back so that he could deal with it. What he did with the Lamb afterward would be up to him, and seeing as he was their god, they’d accept his decision gladly.

Were they in love with him by that point? Oh, obsessively so, but only in the devotional sense – romance was nowhere on their mind nor radar. That is, until he unexpectedly revived them again, told them he still needed them, and then offered down his hand to help them up.

The Lamb fell HARD for him in that moment. :3c

And now, a tiny shitten ramble. Lu and Li are twins, because sheep tend to have those a lot, and are conceived not long after the Lamb and Narinder’s marriage ceremony. Lu is the minutes older one, but Li is much more mature. I have put no further thought into these two, other than that they are utter menaces, birthed by the Lamb, cling hard to both their parents but especially Narinder (who spoils them rotten), and they are both genderfluid, using whichever pronouns/names they feel like at any given time. They are also both intersex, same as the Lamb, who was initially infertile up until Something Something Vague Magic, which I have also put no further thought into ¯\_(シ)_/¯

oh, and before anyone tries to suggest i headcanon this AU’s lamb as trending more female due to them giving birth or whatever, no, no, a thousand times no, they might have a vag, but they've also got a dick, and even if it's not as big as they'd like, they still know how to use it

Finally, the very tentative name for the Lamb in this AU is Yazdi, which is really just another name for the Baluchi breed of sheep XD (Not that the Lamb is this specific breed, I just didn’t like any of the other sheep-related names I found, ahaha...)

THAT’S ALL FOR NOW (collapses into an exhausted pile of goopy limbs)

[goomyloid]

"when noelle finds out kris hasn't been 'kris' this whole time, how will she feel when she realizes she's been reconnecting with someone completely different?"

this sentiment i've seen a lot is an interesting thought but it never actually clicked with me all that much for some reason, and i wasnt sure why or how to put it into words until somewhat recently.

like, i guess i think about it in similar terms to kris's relationship with susie; i think it's unfair to say that kris and susie aren't really friends or something just because that person is 'not kris.' at least by this point, they clearly enjoy being around each other, it's a two-way street. kris is still there, and is always there... on a normal route. that's when our role (so far) amounts to merely 'opening up opportunities' for kris, i.e. giving them a reason to go on Epic Adventures (with the goal of closing dark fountains) all while winning battles with the Power Of Friendship, etc.

sure, we control their specific movements, which will always feel limiting to them (which leads into my assumption that no matter what we do, kris will always hold some level of resentment towards us -- no matter how luxurious the prison cell is, you will always be trapped).

all of this is my long-winded way of explaining that when the two work in harmony, the boundary between kris and the player becomes less distinct. that's why the separation between the two didn't feel as important in chapter 1, where there wasn't really an opportunity for things to go 'wrong,' so to speak. so if we follow the path of least resistance -- how the story 'should' go -- then i think it's fair to say that at least SO FAR, kris is still there, working with us when they have to, not shutting anything out in particular, becoming real friends with susie, and reconnecting with noelle.

the time they spent together in cyber city wasn't 'fake' -- kris is still there, emoting, our voice going through their mouth, they're having fun with noelle (i always think of kris saying "Nooooo" when noelle asks if they need a dog treat, they had no reason to actually howl like that, i swear to god they're just enjoying being a little goofy like old times)

(there's also plenty of other examples of our prompts (presumably) coming out of kris's own mouth in their own voice, they're just in control of HOW it comes out, i.e. yelling "NO" or barely muttering "yes" after spamton neo. but this post aint about that so im moving on)

all of this is the normal route, of course. i dont think i need to explain how much this differs in the weird route, lol. we force kris down a path they Very Much Most Likely Don't Particularly Want to Go Down, but we make them. they dont want to say Proceed, but they have to, which is when that voice comes out as US, not them. from the soul or something, probably, a voice beaming commands into noelle's mind regardless of whether or not kris actually says anything out loud, hence noelle still hearing us even when kris is down in battle.

this disharmony is what manifests as friction between kris and the player, and while we dont Really know what all is happening inside kris's head, i sort of always imagined it as kris closing off/almost going dormant, as some form of protest maybe, maybe to at least communicate to noelle -- the only one who can see something's wrong, not just different -- that this isn't them, it's something else. kris wouldn't do this, and she knows this. that's why when it's all over and berdly has been ice'd, all we know is that they "look kinda..." out of it, distraught, barely there, maybe. i heart dissociation and all that

basically, the split between kris and the player (in my own probably-not-end-all-be-all-correct interpretation of the story thus far) becomes more rigid only when our interests conflict, and the more we work together, the less reason kris has to dissociate, for lack of a better term, and the 'kris' that susie comes to know and noelle comes to reconnect with isn't exactly the wrong 'kris' at all. sure, they're being controlled but that doesn't mean they aren't still THERE.

and if the story continues down along the path of us micro-managing everyone's goals into fruition (noelle getting close to susie comes to mind), kris will still work against us in some ways no matter what we do, but finding some kind of 'happier path/ending' is probably far closer to what they want rather than Manipulating Their Childhood Friend into Killing Their Classmate. just a hunch

anyway the TLDR is i don't really know if the initial question will end up being a problem in the same way that everyone thinks it will, on a normal route. sure, they'll all be shocked and maybe horrified to find out kris is being controlled and whatnot, but that doesn't make the time they spent together any less real, because despite it all, kris was still there.

[shadamypositivity]

a negative post under the cut (not from me, I'm just commentating on it)

(See OG post below.)

due to the nature of my blog normally I wouldn't even bring this up but a) I'm bored while IT is working on my computer (AGAIN) and b) i like a good discussion.

I'm gonna skip over the obvious fallacies of shadamy being a fake ship (bc what does that mean, I have no idea) and that SEGA never acknowledges it (they clearly have) or markets Shadamy (if the Shadamy Sakura series and them being marketed together didn't clue them in, then they are willingly ignorant abt it lol)

I did want to discuss the Amy Rose Minnie Mouse aspect and her "purpose of the franchise" bc i actually have a lot of thoughts to this! And before I go one, it should go without saying but I do love SonAmy, it's very cute and they're characters who can have good chemistry and deserve good things! Anyway, here's my thoughts.

Amy being created to be Sonic's Minnie Mouse as far as I had read it was pressure from the company to make Sonic more marketable (i.e. adding girl character, hero saves damsel quests etc). What i love about how they went about it was flipping the script, especially for the era, it was more commonplace for damsel characters to be the sweet, love interest (Minnie, princess peach, princess daphne) that the hero pursues as a goal to complete as well as a reward for his efforts.

Sonic being adverse to Amy's advances, who is supposedly created to be the love interest, is unique and adds to his personality which was a really good move imo. it added to the edge that Sonic kind of gives as a protagonist, his sass, his impatience, his cock sure nature while also being altruistic and loyal of course, but him viewing Amy as a friend that he occasionally has to rescue and bear the affections of is objectively silly and fun.

Now, pertaining to Amy's purpose of the franchise being Sonic's endgame love interest, I do take a lot more issue with. Not only does it invalidate Amy's space in this franchise, making her no more than a romantic reward for the ending of Sonic's hero's quest (because, if SEGA thinks Sonic won't "slow down" for Amy now, it implies he will have to undergo some sort of change or, less noble, when he seems himself ready to reciprocate Amy's feelings on his terms, irregardless of how long he makes Amy wait for him) but it also ironically makes Sonamy make less sense canonically.

Like, if Amy is only meant to work as Sonic's female, romantic counterpart, why does SEGA not let it happen canonically? Because it's not a ship war thing honestly, most of the GP already assumes they are and there's plenty of valentines merch to suggest otherwise, so...why not just do it? probably because it doesn't make sense for Sonic's character and I don't just mean for SonAmy, honestly, I mean it for any and all Sonic ships. It isn't that Sonic doesn't love or wouldn't have romantic feelings, it's that I think he doesn't allow himself those attachments. Friends are everything in this world and I've always loved this franchise for showcasing an array of lovely strong friendships, but the difference in friends and significant others is that there's compromise, there's balance, there's giving up things, there's building a home and a family and doing things as 2 as opposed to only needing to worry about yourself. friendships are no less of a love than romance but there's also a lot more grace in friendships when it comes to responsibilities and emotional compromises. I'm getting into the weeds a bit here but what I mean to say is that Sonics character doesn't make sense for a romantic partner, free like the wind and on an eternal hero's journey. It has also never appeared to be a want of his to be able to have these things (but im willing to be proven otherwise) Maybe down the road it would, but that's not fair to Amy or any other partner for that matter. Amy's whole world doesn't need to revolve around waiting for her hero to be ready to accept her, especially to a character so full and rich in love and affections to give.

It doesn't escape me that one of Amy's most defining and strongest showing was because of Shadow. This is kind of where I can get extremely biased and go on and on about how great a story arc would be for Shadamy to become endgame. Briefly, Sonamy being canon kind of takes away from Sonic's character, while Shadamy enriches. Amy who obsesses and does everything for the attention of her first love finding her own purpose and making her world bigger by being her own hero which was the case for her finding her courage after feeling useless by helping Shadow to remember his promise just by being herself. Shadow who is jaded and hurt and isolated from friends and the world he now lives in finding love and affection and strength in those things because of Amy Rose's big heart. Idk, it's all very poetic to me.

So in conclusion, Sonamy and Shadamy good, but writing wise, Shadamy has a lot more going for it. One of my irl friends who watches sonic things over my shoulder has always taken issue with Sonamy being the canon default bc of her pursuing and Sonics pushing away. When I introduced her to the idea of Shadamy she hoped on with more enthusiasm haha probably bc it was around the mosth era and that was a pretty good showing for them haha. anyway. these are my humble thoughts. I'm not all knowing of this franchise or think myself correct in every way but idk. I don't think its fair to rule out character shipping just bc it wasn't the original intention. that happens all the time with things after all (RIP canon zutara) so maybe op can take a chill pill 😅

[gentle-hero-blog]

Fun Samus n Adam fax yayyyy bc I'm writing ANOTHER thing about them

Samus:

she can eat A LOT but she's also fairly picky. She also gets nauseous easily as a lasting effect of Phazon sickness

(EXTREME HEADCANON TERRITORY) Chozo have minimal sex dimorphism and basically no concept of gender - this is why we never see any quote unquote “female” ones (I like to believe their language doesn't even have indicators of gender, i.e. when Raven Beak calls her "nadaha" [daughter] it translates more literally to "child"). so I think the GF Academy was really her first exposure to the complicated world of human gender expression (since the age of 3 at least). she vibes with some of it and really Doesn't vibe with the rest

“Lady” was actually a name she was trying out for a while after joining the Academy (^see above). She warmed up to Adam a Lot when he just went with it. Nowadays she doesn't use it anymore, except in an inside-joke sort of way with him

Loves Joey to death if i'm being honest. she sees him as a little bro and he sees her as The Most Amazing Spectacular Hero In The Universe (as per the s&j comics)

Has complicated feelings about slowly becoming a Metroid. at what point does it stop? can she still call herself a person? it feels to her as though she's lived in a different body at every stage of her life and highkey she's tired of it

Laser-focuses on other people's problems to avoid processing her own. ruh roh

LOVES fixing stuff/solving puzzles and very little can snap her out of it when she's in the zone. she'll often work on her gunship to clear her mind and forget to do anything else

BONUS: some misc. metroid DNA effects

scaly skin on back, arms and calves

raspy scratchy voice (FANS SELF FURIOUSLY) and basically i think if she were to scream it would sound like a metroid shriek

suit develops a ridgy, almost organic texture on the plating; colors shift (less vibrant, starts to tinge with green)

unexplained Cravings. gets real grumpy and finds it hard to think when they hit. anger and stress cause them to flare up especially hard (like in Dread)

something weird with her eyes.....when the cravings hit the irises dilate

Adam:

I usually envision him as anywhere from 10-20 yrs older than Samus

Definitely not weak per se (highly trained soldier. duh) but he's no powerhouse like Samus. easily throwable individual

eyestrain McGee. this guy does not wear his readers as often as he should

tolerates animals and actively avoids young children. I think he could maybe bond with a cat or something if given the chance though

he and ian didn't have much of a choice about going into the military. It was a very strict family tradition

enjoys music a lot. I imagine he'd have a nice singing voice too but this guy would NOT sing i'm sorry

(entirely 100% self-indulgent) his favorite song is Pink Pony Club. The unit was in hysterics upon finding this out

was in advanced placement at the Academy due to being large-brained which meant his classmates were all much older. one of these classmates was Rodney Aran

(more self-indulgence) that being said, the one and only quote unquote "date" he has ever been on was with Rodney, who asked him to the Academy's equivalent of prom. it was uncomfortable and bad

similarly to Samus, he has complicated feelings about the AI situation. that was NOT done with his consent. but at the very least he can finally drop the commander act and just be a catty snark

AI Adam is a lot more talkative than his former self. the main reason for this is that he will no longer lose his job for telling someone to suck his entire ass

Joey reminds him of his brother. who said that

Both:

they don't necessarily Identify as such (I don't think they like. care), but both are likely some flavor of aroace. adam finds the idea of romance/sex borderline repulsive and samus just doesn't think about it often beyond Boobs Are Cool (she does get very flustered when girls are nice to her though)

transgener. yay 🥳🥳🥳

Sooo introverted YAYYY. lowkey they first bonded over being the quiet ones in their unit (“bonded” meaning they stood next to each other in awkward silence at some sort of gathering and thought aaahhhhh thank god another quiet person)

they're just comfortable around each other idk. it's nice :] on the other hand they also Get On Each Other's Nerves So Enormously Bad

not all is well between them. there is defo some silent resentment on Samus' part for some of his past actions and their way of solving problems does NOT always align. they are, however, making the most of it AND i love them

[tyrantisterror]

At Sea Without a Map Post-Script

After two months of so, my little writing experiment At Sea Without a Map has come to an end. And because I'm vain, I not only felt compelled to share it, but to talk about it in depth after the fact, so here we are. This is going to be long, though, so I'm not only going to break it into sections, but put it all under the cut for the sake of your dashboard. So go ahead and dive into the depths of the Sea of Monsters with me one more time!

Part 1: Never Stop Blowing Up

The writing process of Wizard School Mysteries Book 3 was really strained - not because of the book itself, mind you. When I was actually able to work on it, Book 3 came together really well - I think it required the least substantial rewrites of any my novels thus far. It's just that real life was kind of beating the shit out of me while I was trying to get it done - or maybe the better metaphor was that it was just slowly but steadily draining me of energy all the time. I'm honestly surprised I got the book out in roughly the same amount of time as the first two - by the way life had been treating me, it should have taken longer.

But when I got done with it I was accutely aware of how tired I was. I still had the creative drive, but fuck I needed something simple as a palette cleanser - something easy, and more importantly, something that was allowed to be bad. I needed something creative to do that was surplus to requirements and fully within its rights to suck ass so long as I had fun making it.

Around this time, I decided to rewatch Dimension 20's Never Stop Blowing Up. Brief explanation of what that is: Dimension 20 is an actual play show, i.e. a recording of people playing D&D and other TTRPGs. I'd say its reputation is built on the contrast of its main DM, Brennan Lee Mulligan, who makes these meticulously crafted campaign plans, and his chaotic band of improv comedian players who promptly derail those plans spectacularly. Like, a good deal of the show's humor comes from Emily Ashford or Ally Beardsly doing something so off-the-wall that it shatters whatever the scene was going to be and creates a far more absurd and zany spectacle in its place. Which is why Never Stop Blowing Up is pretty notable, because it's the one campaign where Brennan himself is the agent of chaos, fully unleashing his own brand of madness that the players struggle to keep up with. And fuck does he seem to have fun with it.

Of course, all of the analysis above is purely from the outside looking in - it's likely that a lot of the "chaos" is played up for the audience. But still... there is something to the idea of a person who's been working on meticulously structured stories letting loose and just doing something extremely stupid.

So I decided to give myself a Never Stop Blowing Up moment - a short story that would be simple by design, with no standards to live up to or goal beyond "have fun telling a silly little story." I then came up with a few key criteria:

It can't be set in the Midgaheim/ATOM universe. I don't want the burden of figuring out where this story would fit among others.

It's gotta be a romance. People who've read my books might have picked up on the fact that I like to write about people falling in love, for the same reason I like to write about fire-breathing reptiles and friendly monsters (i.e. I use writing to indulge in things I'll never experience in real life). I've only used romance as subplots in my fiction before, and tend to feel a bit guilty if I focus on it too long - like I'm being self indulgent. Well, this is all about self indulgence, so the romance should be front and center.

It's gotta be SIMPLE, episodic even. Not complex plotting required.

I almost chose my xenomorph romance for this, but I had developed its outline to the point where it would be too complex to fit. I then considered a sort of superhero story that could be pitched as "what if Bringing Up Baby but Katherine Hepburn's character is a Harley Quinn-esque supervillain and Cary Grant's character gets turned into some sort of horrifying genetic mutant in the first ten minutes." That one hit a weird roadblock when I got to the character brainstorming phase (the first phase of any writing project I do) - I was trying to figure out what the mad scientist who turns out Cary Grant-figure into a mutant would be named, came up with the name "Dr. Skullfuck," immediately realized that having a character named "Dr. Skullfuck" is a Mark Millar-ass writing move that I could not allow myself to do, but then couldn't stop thinking of the name "Dr. Skullfuck" and giggling, which just brought all thinking to a grinding halt on that project.

(I'll still probably do it someday, though - just, you know, without Dr. Skullfuck)

Inspiration struck again, though. I'd been getting into Epic: The Musical, a musical retelling of The Odyssey, and it put me in the mood for a sea monster story. But, more than that, it got me thinking about one particular archetype from sea monster stories - but that brings us to the next part of this Post Script...

Part 2: It Was Always About Calibani

Ok, so, one of the big changes Epic: The Musical made involved Odysseus's encounter with the sirens, and before you read more of my rambling, I'd like you to watch two animatics for the two songs in question here:

A summary: one of the sirens takes the form of Odysseus's wife to try and tempt him into getting in the water, Odysseus tricks her into giving him directions, captures her and the rest of her kind, and proceeds to have his men slaughter them horribly. In the OG story the sirens don't die - nor does their song involve imitating a man's wife, for that matter, it's just a really pretty song.

This is done for an important narrative purpose - Epic: The Musical is focused on analyzing the moral ambiguity of Odysseus, and how it is constantly challenged by the impossible choices he is forced to make in his attempt to get home. At this point in the musical, Odysseus has decided to stop trying to be a compassionate man, shirking all mercy in favor of utter ruthless pursuit of his goals. These two songs are meant to be unsettling as hell - this is the beginning of a series of heartless choices by both Odysseus and his men that will culminate in the mutiny and complete annihilation of Odysseus's crew, as well as Odysseus himself being so hopelessly stranded that nothing short of divine intervention will save him.

I bring this up because when I first heard these two songs - specifically while watching these two animatics - it, like... it devastated me. I was so horrified and sad, so shaken by it. And part of it was for the reasons outlined above, but admittedly that wasn't the gut reaction I had. No, my immediate reaction was, and I quoute my own broken brain verbatim here: "You can't kill the sirens! They're not for killing, they're for loving!"

...now, those of you who know me are probably not surprised by this very stupid sentiment coming from me. One of my more popular posts is just me talking about how down bad I would be for various folkloric monsters whose whole shtick is "looks like a pretty lady but Watch Out." But as a person filled with immense self loathing and doubt, my brain immediately looked at that very stupid sentiment I expressed and said, "Wait, no, that's fucking dumb, I'm fucking dumb. The sirens are remorseless murderers. These sirens in particular preyed upon a man's love for his wife, who he has not seen in twelve years, to convince him to let them kill him. They are, by all standards of morality, Very Fucking Evil, and if they were not women you would not feel bad about them getting killed."

And as my brain argued with itself over this topic, I got to thinking about the various monstrous/othered sea women of The Odyssey - not just the sirens, but the witch Circe, the nymph Calypso, the monsters Scylla and Charybdis. And I thought about the others of their kind in other myths and folktales - selkies, mermaids, etc.

There's an archetype of sea monster that focuses entirely on one specific anxiety sailors are prone to, namely the fact that (for a good deal of human history) being on a boat meant spending a lot of time away from women. The horror of this monster is how it uses that desire for female company to tempt people into danger - like a mirage, it leads you to expose yourself to danger in pursuit of an illusory comfort.

But, unlike real world mirages, these monstrous sea women DO exist in their stories. More than that, they're often, like, sad and lonely. Their narrative purpose is just to be a temptation, but that doesn't change the fact that they do have lives of their own in these worlds. And, softie that I am, I can't help feeling sad for them, especially the ones who actually seem to want the same companionship the sailors they tempt want. Sailors don't stay with their Circes, they don't marry their Calypsos. The sirens live on a barren rock, alone, Scylla is left to wallow in misery at her monstrous form, and the selkie always has to leave for fear of being trapped by a person who won't love her on her terms.

I realized I had my hook for this simple, easy, silly little sea monster romance story: I was going to give a sea woman the happy ending she'd never get from anyone else.

Sailor may be the protagonist, but make no mistake: At Sea Without a Map was always, always, ALWAYS about Calibani.

The goal with Calibani was simple: I was going to set up a fairly standard Monstrous Sea Woman, but where other stories would let her be in one episode of the travel narrative and move on, this one would stick around. She'd be an unambiguous predator of human beings - an open and admitted maneater - but she would have no true malice to her. She, like all predators, eats what she can get to survive, and it just so happens that she's adapted to eat humans. And the story would pose the same question to the reader that my brain posed to me during Different Beast: is there any way you could make a siren-style sea monster sympathetic? Can you make a normal person who doesn't have my particular brain rot look at a maneating siren and think, "You're not supposed to kill her, you're supposed to love her!"

One of the few unavoidable plot points of At Sea Without a Map was that Calibani and Sailor's relationship would become romantic. What kind of romance it was could have varied substantially - it could have been one-sided, it could have been toxic, it could have been far more tragic OR far more comedic. But it was always, always going to be a romance of some sort - the goal of this experiment was to make you, the reader, love Calibani. All else was icing on the cake.

I decided to base Calibani's personality on Miranda from The Tempest - i.e. a sweet girl who is both wordly and naive, who understands the strange setting of our "lost at sea" story far better than the audience viewpoint character does, but views the mundane world of the audience viewpoint character with wonder and naiveté. In fact I almost named her Miranda outright... except I already had a character in the setting I chose for this story who had that name, and as an allusion to the same Shakespearean character no less. So I settled on naming her after Miranda's adoptive sibling (of sorts), Caliban - more fitting in some ways, as Caliban is a fish-human hybrid who is arguable more native to the magic island in The Tempest than Miranda herself.

(Calibani isn't the only Tempest name homage, either - her mother, Sycorax, takes her name directly from Caliban's unseen but oft-spoken of witch mother. Dr. Antonia Warefore takes her first name from Antonio, one of the human villains in The Tempest who hopes to use being lost at sea as a way to perform a coup. And the mothman Iriel takes her name from Ariel, the wind spirit in The Tempest who aids the wizard Prospero in controlling the magic island. If Sailor has a "real" name, it's probably either Ferdinand or Miranda, the two lovers who manage to blend civilization and the wilderness together with their romance.)

Visually, I wanted Calibani to not be any common archetype of sea monster woman, but rather something that evokes the popular images while still being her own thing. She's not a mermaid or a siren or a selkie - she's basically "what if a sea serpent was also a girl." In-universe, she's chubby because she, like all marine megafauna, needs blubber to survive. Out-of-universe, she's chubby because I've found that routinely drawing cute chubby girls is good for my mental health.

Part 3: CYOA

Now, while we live in a post-Muncher society where shame and cringe are emotions only the cowardly should experience, I am nonetheless Very Catholic about expressing my own feelings of, like, liking girls and shit. I cannot help feeling guilty when publicly expressing adoration of women without, like, an excuse - it's gotta be a joke or something, you know? I can't be genuine about it, or else Jesus will beat me with a cane for disrespecting women with my lecherous gaze.

But luckily I've cultivated a loyal audience of fellow monsterfuckers, which meant I had an excuse lined up: if I made this a choose your own adventure type deal, a story with audience participation, then you all would be my accomplices. And Jesus can't cane all of us! He doesn't have enough hands! I found a loophole bigger than his stigmata!

Plus I love collaborative story-telling - there's a thrill in not having total control of where the narrative is going. As Brennan Lee Mulligan must know, there's a joy in having to deal with the chaos thrown your way by letting others grab the figurative ball, even if just for a moment.

Part 4: Offbeat Melody

Since I did not want to set this story in Midgaheim, I decided to steer myself away from a vaguely medieval setting altogether. But I also didn't want to limit myself with the need for "realism" that putting it in a normal sea would require, and making a new setting whole cloth would start pushing this project into "not easy" territory.

Luckily, I had a setting lying around that I hadn't played with in a while, which just so happened to have a location that was PERFECT for the sort of Never Stop Blowing Up style madness I was aiming for. For a few years I ran a Monster of the Week TTRPG campaign called Offbeat Melody, and one of its core setting elements was taking the goblin universe hypothesis in paranormal science (yeah it's a real hypothesis) to an illogical extreme. We had specifically seen glimpses of the Sea of Monsters in Offbeat Melody, i.e. the parallel universe where monsters like Nessie, Ogopogo, Champ, and the like all hail from. Well, why not have a whole story set there? It's literally a universe devoted solely to creating sea monsters - what better place to strand our modern Odysseus?

Offbeat Melody was always sort of a Never Stop Blowing Up project, or at least NSBU adjacent. Some of my most unhinged story-telling moments are in that campaign - you could make a supercut of just the "commercial breaks" in the various sessions and it'd basically be an I Think You Should Leave episode. Taking one obscure corner of its multiversal world and exploring it in detail was perfect for this project.

Part 5: Monster by Monster

With our main romance as sorted out as could be for a CYOA story, it was time to figure out the "episodes" of this sea voyage. I settled on there being ten to roughly align with The Odyssey - just in terms of number, mind you, not in a one-to-one comparison. The first was, obviously, Calibani herself, which left nine more slots for me to fill with monsters. Let's go through them together in brief:

Tree Storks - any lost at sea story eventually has to get its protagonist into an island at some point, but this immediately begs the question, "Why don't they just stay on the island where it's safe?" The answer to that question has to be, "it's not safe there, actually." The Odyssey does this quickly and cleverly with a one two punch: the first island seems safe until you realize the food on it brainwashes you into forgetting everything except your desire to eat it, and the second island is full of delicious sheep but also giants who will eat you just as easily as they eat the sheep. When other islands show up in the story later, you immediately regard them with suspicion, because you don't know HOW they're going to be fucked up, but they definitely will be. My goal with the second episode was to establish the same sort of danger - that land is NOT safe, that islands WILL be fucked up and dangerous in ways you might not expect.

I also wanted to establish that this is not just a sea of monsters, but a very WEIRD sea of WEIRD monsters. It couldn't be any old monster on this island - it had to be one that was unique, unexpected, and maybe just a bit silly while still being menacing.

I've always felt that there's a lot of un-mined horror potential in storks, cranes, and herons - any bird with a long neck and spear-like beak it uses to stab smaller creatures from above. Just imagine yourself in a frog's place in the world - tiny, going about your business, when suddenly something shoots down at you from above and impales you before you even feel the shadow fall over your face. Or perhaps you did see the shadow - some of these birds spread their wings to create shade specifically to attract fish, and then spear the poor little bastards.

Well, what do people often look to islands for when out at sea? Shade - the shade of a palm tree. And palm fronds kinda resemble feathers, don't they? Wouldn't it be both ludicrous and terrifying is there was a stork big enough to mimic a palm tree - and wouldn't that be a DEVIOUS trap for a sun-drenched sailor to fall for? So the Tree Storks were born.

The Globster - I made a list of sea monster archetypes in the early planning for this project, and one I wanted to include was a kraken, i.e. some sort of tentacled sea beast. But I didn't want to do JUST a big squid or octopus, or even a riff on them. I wanted to take the idea of "big sea monster with lots of tentacles" into a stranger direction.

Since the Sea of Monsters is explicitly the home universe of lake and sea monster cryptids, I thought it might be fun if ASWaM's kraken equivalent was a globster - just a big ball of rotten meat. I love drawing monstrous faces, so I decided it'd just be, like, MADE of hideous rotten faces, all melting and congealing together, with its tentacles doubling as the tongues of its many mouths. A perfectly wretched image that, like the Tree Storks, would do well to establish how Fucked things could get in this setting. Plus similar monsters had appeared in Offbeat Melody, which would make for a fun sense of familiarity for the, like, five or so readers of mine who had listened to that campaign before.

Captain Peter & the Dolphin - Another thing I did in the early planning stages of this project was make a list of the different sea voyage stories I know and love, the most contentious of which is The Life of Pi. That's a story that I love on a literal level but kind of hate on a figurative level - its whole theme/message is that doubt is the worst thing you can have, that if you don't commit to believing something with zealous conviction you are a coward. As a person who thinks doubt is valid, that "I don't know" is sometimes the ONLY truly valid answer to a question, I have issues with that message.

But I can't help loving the beautifully ludicrous idea of a non-anthropomorphic tiger sailing the ocean on a big Odyssey of its own. Like, if that story didn't actively hate me for being agnostic, it would be one of my favorites.

So I decided to, you know, just steal the idea of a tiger Odysseus. The tiger in The Life of Pi is named Richard Parker. Richard Parker also happens to be the name of Peter Parker's dad. Hence we get Captain Peter - the figurative son of Richard Parker, if you will. And to ratchet up the absurdity of a tiger Odysseus, I made him a pirate and the sole sailor of his voyage. Somehow, this tiger has manned a boat on his own.

Captain Peter was intended to be the hero of another story - a sign for the readers that it IS possible for a stranded person (or, in this case, tiger) to survive out here. To that end, he had to rescue our heroes from another threat, but not one that would be interesting enough to take the focus off of the tiger pirate. Originally I planned for that threat to just be a big shark, but I ended up liking my shark design too much to put it in a role that small, so I quickly designed a nasty dolphin for the role instead. I think that worked out well, honestly.

Dr. Neptune - Episodes 5 and 6 were the mid-point of this journey, so I wanted the two monsters of those to escalate things significantly. I figured episode 5 was probably a good place to FINALLY give some meaningful exposition on what was going on, and there are a lot of stories about mad scientists doing weird shit on islands in my big list of sea voyage stories I love. So we get Dr. Neptune, a classical brain-in-a-jar mad scientist who's affable enough to give more-or-less accurate exposition but loony enough to be a problem. This also felt like a good spot to remind the reader that Calibani is not just a girl with a tail but rather a Sea Monster herself, and one that we'd been making stronger by allying with.

With his human-but-not-quite nature and cyclops eye, Dr. Neptune could sort of be seen as the Polyphemus of this story, couldn't he?

The Crocodisle - One of the sea monster archetypes on my list was "the island that's actually a sleeping monster," of which there are many in mythology and folklore. My favorite is the Jasconius from the voyage of St. Brendan, mainly because it's more or less benign and actually comes back to help St. Brendan and his crew at the end of the story. I always love when I can find an old story with a friendly monster in it.

When thinking of my own spin on the island monster concept, I remembered the only Magic the Gathering card I had as a kid, which I still have and love to this day: The Sandbar Crocodile. This card already inspired Crocogon's color scheme in The Atomic time of Monsters, but I felt I could go to that well again one more time, and so made a crocodile that wasn't just a sandbar, but a whole damn island to itself. And, like Jasconius, it turns out he's pretty chill.

I did not think of the pun name "Crocodisle" until I was actually writing the chapter in question.

The Femdom Mermaids - These three were a late addition to the roster. When I had Calibani bring up mermaids early in the story, I realized as soon as I wrote her rant about them that we'd HAVE to meet some later on in the story.

The readers had significantly shaped Calibani and Sailor's romance by this point, and I decided that it could be useful to have a chapter that was devoted to showing definitively how these two were good for each other. I thought the mermaids could provide a good contrast: have them act out a seemingly more benign take on the monstrous sea women trope (they abduct our hero to protect and care for them!) only for it to quickly feel MORE deranged than Calibani's comparatively simple desire just to eat him.

The spirit of Calibani's rant about mermaids was taken from weird* girls I knew in high school complaining about cheerleaders, so I wanted the mermaids to look like the sea monster equivalent of popular kids to Calibani's chubby weird girl. Two of them got the names of famous beauties - Helyne = Helen of Troy, Clio = Cleopatra.

(*when I say "weird" I mean it in a complimentary and affectionate sense)

Bob, meanwhile, kinda... rebelled, I guess? Before I had names for them, I listed "bob" by her as just, like, a descriptor for her hair cut, but then I liked it as her name, and once she was named Bob she became more than just a mean popular girl. She was a weirdo too, the little punching bag of the two mean popular girls who did their dirty work and smiled through their abuse because hey, at least they included her. It gave the trio an easily defined dynamic, helped make two of the three more visibly nasty, and gave us comic relief in an arc that could very well have gotten too uncomfortable otherwise.

And I guess it worked - readers REALLY loved Bob, and were very vocal about it, and I realized mid-arc that I had accidentally made her too likable to just leave in this arc. So Bob got to be rescued from her awful friend group thanks to readers like YOU.

Lord Ironteeth - yeah, this was the shark that was too cool to be a minor threat. When I drew his noggin, I realized he would need a chapter of his own, one with gravitas. I decided he'd specifically be the threshold guardian -once we beat him, we'd know for sure how to get home, even if there were a few more threats in store.

Spindle Inc and Sycorax - when I was a kid I used to have this recurring nightmare about being on some sort of underwater sea station that had this huge sea serpent trapped inside it. I'd look at the sea serpent from a window within the station and see it coiling in its tank, only for it to look at me with fury. In that glance I would suddenly realize two things with absolute clarity: first, it was going to break free and kill everyone, and second, we deserved that destruction for what we had done to it. The terror of the dream was less that the sea serpent was going to break free, and more the guilt of knowing that all the mayhem that was about to unfold was our fault to begin with.

I thought that would be fun to homage with the penultimate chapter of this story. OBVIOUSLY the sea serpent was Calibani's mom, obviously the trauma of its capture was why Calibani grew into a predator that specializes in hunting humans, obviously we would have to free the sea serpent despite that running counter to Sailor's goal of getting home. Easy, easy, easy plot point to include.

Spindle, Inc. is the primary antagonistic force in Offbeat Melody, so they easily slotted into the role of the arrogant humans who captured this monster for nefarious and selfish motives. They could tie a lot of other plot threads together too - Dr. Neptune was a scientist who worked for them as a contractor only to get screwed over (i.e. they stranded him in the Sea of Monsters, expecting him to die, and then used his research to make their own base of operations in it), we'd learn of him through a spindle briefcase left behind by some unfortunate rogue agent who got eaten by the Globster while he was trying to escape, hell they could even be one of the possible origins of Sailor themself (more on that later). Very useful villains, Spindle.

The Abyssal Mother - I knew the last sea monster would need a lot of punch to it. I briefly considered just a big whale - the Moby Dick to Spindle's corporate Ahab - but it felt underwhelming after all that came before. So I went for arguably the most dramatic possible sea monster, a full on Cthulhu-style elder god. If you're a frequent follower of this blog, you might know I have particularly high standards for Eldritch Abominations, so I realized this was going to be a pretty big challenge for me to live up to, and decided to keep the cthulhu in question reserved to the last few entries as a result - the less it appears, the less it has to live up to.

I realized I had a good angle when my experiments with the Cthulhu "squid for a head" concept ended up having a face framed in shadow - you know, the same visual that our protagonist has in most appearances. That provided some very juicy parallels between the two that made this final monster feel particularly noteworthy to me, ones that I'll leave you to ponder, since they tie into...

Part 6: Themes

I did not set out to have a theme in this story. I just wanted to make a sailor and a sea monster kiss. That was my only goal.

But I really don't begin with theme in ANY of my writing. I figure out topics I want to address, but for all my novels I feel like the themes didn't start coming together until about halfway through the first draft, when enough of the elements of the story had been set down and interacted with each other enough for me to realize what I was saying with them. A huge part of my second and third drafts for my novels have focused on making the themes of my stories more concrete and unified.

Well, ASWaM is very much a first draft of a story, but it's a simple enough story that I think the theme found itself pretty well despite lacking subsequent drafts to refine it.

ASWaM is about doubt and direction. It's about being adrift in a world that is in many ways hostile by nature, about not feeling like you're where you're supposed to be or even WHO you're supposed to be, and about setting off aimlessly in the hope that maybe you'll find your way to that mythical land of "what my life is supposed to be."

When I began the story, Sailor had amnesia and wore clothes that obscured their identity as a way to make it easier for anyone to step into Sailor's role. Sailor had to feel like You, the Reader, and so we don't know their name, their gender, their eye color, their hair color, even their skin color (note that their hands are always wearing gloves, and their face is always in shadow).

But it also meant Sailor is, well, undefined, at least at the start of the story. Sailor doesn't know who they are, what they are, how they came to be. Sailor feels distinctly that they should be Something Else, should be Somewhere Else, should be Someone Else, should not be who/what/where they are. Sailor is plagued by doubt, by a need to go in a different direction, by a need to be other than they are.

This initially contrasts with Calibani, who begins the story very confident that she is doing exactly what she was designed to be doing and acting exactly like she should be. As they interact, they begin to shift each other in opposite directions - Calibani questions her existence and nature, sometimes to a self destructive degree, and Sailor begins to find something about who and where they are that they like. They find a healthy middle ground together - doubtful enough to want to be better people, but with love for themselves that allows them to not feel the need to up-heave their lives entirely.

I knew at the start that I would build an expectation for there to be some answer to the question of who Sailor is and where they came from, because those are the questions that begin the whole narrative. I brainstormed a number of answers to those questions, but once I got a few chapters into writing the story and saw this theme of doubt developing, I realized I couldn't answer them. From a thematic standpoint, the doubt HAD to remain. So I gave hints to possible answers, bits of evidence to support the possibility of them being true, but never planted a smoking gun that answered it for sure.

Sailor can't know the answer because NONE of us know the answer. Outside of blind Life of Pi style faith, you cannot know for sure that you are living the life you're supposed to live. All you can do is figure out whether you're happy with the life you've got, or if you need a change. Sailor will never know who they are supposed to be, but they did learn who they are, and they love that person now.

For those curious, the possible Sailor origins are:

Occam's Razor: they're exactly what Dr. Neptune theorized, i.e. a human who got stranded in the Bermuda Triangle (or the Devil's Triangle or any other number of paranormal triangles) and fell into the Sea of Monsters. The trauma of that experience gave them amnesia. It's just brain damage and bad luck.

A Spindle Experiment: Dr. Warefore mentions that Spindle has been trying to find a way to make a human who can evolve like the denizens of the Sea of Monsters. Sailor may well be an attempt to do just that, perhaps one they wrote off as a failure and abandoned (they do that a lot)

A Deep One: Sailor is the offspring of one of the denizens of the Sea of Monsters (most likely the Abyssal Mother herself) who has somehow been tricked into believing they are human, to the point where they seem to be human to everyone else, even other monsters. Maybe a human summoned a sea monster to breed with on earth, and Sailor ended up being subconsciously drawn back to the Sea by their blood. Maybe Sailor never actually lived on earth at all, but was only made to THINK they had as part of the transformation into a human.

The Platonic Ideal of a Sailor: the Sea of Monsters is full of archetypal concepts, and arguably a sailor trying to find their way home is just as archetypal as any sea serpent, mermaid, or kraken. Our only proof that humans aren't native to the Sea of Monsters is Dr. Neptune, and he's not as reliable an expert as he claims to be.

This theme of doubt and direction also made the compass more important to the narrative than a simply mechanic for audience participation - a compass, after all, gives direction, and the feeling that Sailor is not where they're supposed to be, that they need to head in a different direction, is ultimately the catalyst of the plot. The compass is, in many ways, the antagonist of the story - the force that keeps Sailor from accepting themself. I realized this a little after I started making the different directions have personalities - initially they just represented broad concepts (North = follow conventional wisdom ala the North Star, South = preserve your short-term self interest at all costs, East = act with curiosity and be willing to take calculated risks, and West = throw caution to the wind and do anything that seems novel and exciting), but over time they became little characters themselves.

Since it was our thematic antagonist, I decided to pepper in some ideas about what the compass might be in-universe - and, in a move that would no doubt frustrate the compass, we also don't know for sure which of those is "correct." Is the compass a poltergeist, some amalgamation of dead sailors who try to steer other lost souls home? Is it a malign entity that leeches off of those desperate enough to seek its aid, living through them while pretending to aid them? Is it a device Spindle made to lure sailors to their clutches, OR to guide their experiments in human/monster hybrids? Was it a cursed item that forced a sea monster to assume a human shape? Who can say - the compass sure can't, it can only tell you a direction to go in.

Part 7: Q&A

Since this was an interactive story, I felt it was only fitting to add one last interactive element to this post-script write up, and some of your happily obliged me by sending in questions.

When I noticed how fast readers were falling for Calibani, I figured there was a good chance we'd end up staying in the Sea of Monsters. By chapter 7, I figured it was more or less a given, and by the end of the Lord Ironteeth encounter I was almost 100% sure Sailor would remain at sea. There was always a chance, though - while a look at the polls shows that the audience got more and more on the same page towards the end, there were always dissenting voices, and the desire to get an answer to the question of Who Sailor Was remained strong, as a number of people kept trying to find angles where they could get that AND stay with Calibani.

I was surprised early on by how easily the audience fell in love with Calibani, to the point where I made a few posts commenting on it. I mean, I shouldn't have been - as I said earlier, I have cultivated an audience of fellow monsterfuckers on here, and I know at least a few of them saw my bait and knew they could get me to be freaky in a way we found mutually agreeable (thank you all again for helping me escape being caned by Jesus for being horny).

Like, we REPEATEDLY ignored developing the plot in the Tree Storks chapter for several days just to spend more time with Calibani - something that I enjoyed immensely (this whole thing was an excuse for me to write and draw a cute chubby sea monster girl as much as possible aftter all) but also knew as a storyteller was not what most would consider a good story call. I like how it turned out, but it defied conventional narrative wisdom, you know? I was surprised.

On the other side of the coin, I was also surprised by how the audience NEVER chose an option that was humorously disastrous. I gave plenty of them, and, like, generally in collaborative storytelling there will be at least one moment where your collaborators decide to do the really, REALLY stupid thing that makes everything spiral out of control really quickly. I figured at least once the audience would choose the troll response, but no, you guys worked hard to keep Sailor and Calibani alive. You refused to let them hurt each other, refused to let them throw themselves into danger, refused to imperil them for your own chuckles. It was very sweet and unexpected.

I say "you refused" but to be fair it's not like NO ONE voted for the troll options - they generally got a handful of votes, just one that was beaten by a landslide of more reasonable options. Hopefully those of you who voted for the troll options enjoyed Bob throwing you a bone by disintegrating Dr. Warefore - that was my consolation prize to you.

Yes. I knew at the beginning that there would be two endings for this story: either Sailor leaves the Sea and goes home, or Sailor stays there forever. Or, you know, Sailor dies as a result of you guys choosing several stupid options in a row, but as stated above you guys avoided those scenarios pretty decisively.

Had Sailor gone home, the following would have occurred: first, they would forget everything that happened in the Sea of Monsters. Second, they would wake up in a hospital, having been found in the Atlantic Ocean by a human-recovery charity run by... oh, isn't that funny, some tech company named Spindle Inc! Spindle would foot the medical bills and even offer Sailor a job, but Sailor would decline because even now they're still not sure what Spindle even does. Sailor would go back to their life and find it familiar and utterly mundane, but not particularly happy. Their father died when they were 18, their mother was never in the picture, they have no siblings. They worked an office job and were sort of a nonentity - that position has long since been filled, but Sailor gets a new job and lives out much the same life: simple, mundane, dreary. Every now and then they get a pang of desire to leave, to go to sea, but they push it out of mind. They never even see the ocean again as long as they live.

Sailor would have gotten the normal life they thought they were supposed to have, the normal memories and name and identity, the mundane life of a normal person. And they just had to trade everything they found in the Sea of Monsters to get it. A question is answered, a direction is followed, but is it the right answer, the right direction?

Well, I think doubt would have remained.

I had a very vague idea for there to be some sort of man-eating giant in, like, a crystal castle. He got cut to make way for the mermaids.

I wanted to fit in a big whale and a giant crustacean, but there wasn't room or an interesting angle for me to want to make room for them. Saved for a possible sequel, I suppose.

I also wanted to have a scene with, like, DOZENS of sea monsters, including some of the ones from Offbeat Melody, but the goal of "this should be EASY you dumbass" made me kill that idea pretty quick.

Thank you!

The primary inspirations were:

The Odyssey and Epic: the Musical

The voyage of St. Brendan

The many "weird shit happens on an island" movies in Toho's filmography, i.e. Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, Son of Godzilla, Yog Monster of the Deep, Matango, etc.

The Island of Dr. Moreau

The Boy and the Heron

Ponyo (specifically Ponyo's parents - I wanted Sailor to have the same desperate energy as that wizard who fucks the giant sea goddess)

The Life of Pi

Slay the Princess (perhaps most obvious in the use of second person narration, multiple voices in the protagonist's head, and falling in love with a creature that has tried to kill you at least once)

I'm going to use this to springboard to a related point in a second, but first a genuine yet humorous answer: Yes, absolutely yes, I am enough of a big romantic sap that I would give everything about my life away to be with a person who loves me and explore a world of monsters in a heartbeat. Hell, I would have jumped in the water the minute Calibani asked and died with her fangs in my neck and a smile on my face. I am dumb this way. Do not follow my example.

On that related point, though... Most stories like this, I daresay ALL stories like this that I know of, end with the hero abandoning the fantasy world in favor of reality, never to return. And that seems like the proper choice and lesson on the surface - we don't want to tell audiences to give up their real life in favor of a fantasy, after all. That's encouraging escapism, and that's not healthy!

But, like... textually speaking, the fantastical world IS real to the characters in these stories. And it's often not really an escape - was Sailor's life devoid of conflict and suffering in the Sea of Monsters? Fuck no! It's just that they figured out how to deal with that conflict and suffering - they built skills and a support system, they adapted, they learned how to overcome what was there.

I think it can be argued that sometimes the return to a "normal" world is, in itself, an escape - the idea that your life can spiral into chaos but that's ok, you can just reset everything and go back to The Way It Was and Should Be is just as unrealistic and unhealthy an idea as You Should Escape to A Better World. Sometimes your plans for your life fall apart, sometimes you're thrown into a place you never intended to go, sometimes you have to learn skills you never anticipated needing and ally with people you never thought you'd befriend to deal with problems you never dreamed you'd have to overcome. And sometimes it's ok to look at your derailed life, your Not Where You Should Be life, and say, "Well, I've learned how to live here... maybe I can stay."

Especially if there's a cute chubby sea monster girl who loves you.

Bob was never supposed to appear past chapter 7, but about halfway through that chapter I realized the audience and I myself would be heartbroken if we didn't rescue her. Definitely for the best - she provided some well-needed comic relief in the final chapters.

This is gonna sound snarky, but, yeah - there were 58 choices with four options a piece, and we only chose one of the four. While some of the options would have similar results, almost none would have had identical outcomes. And some would have been VERY different.

Like, to go back to the beginning: when Calibani attacked, we could either throw a net on her, harpoon her, try to drive around her, or hide below deck. We picked the net, but for the other three options:

Harpooning would result in us hitting her in the thigh, causing her enough pain that she collapses on our deck and we, horrified at the violence we committed, just sort of push on. Calibani would be wounded for at least the next chapter, perhaps longer, and significantly weaker (and probably harboring a great deal of hidden resentment while also being genuinely scared of Sailor). She would be vulnerable during the stork attack, forcing Sailor to take a more active role in that chapter.

Trying to steer around her would result in us essentially fighting her with our boat, resulting in the boat capsizing and Calibani getting tangled up in it. We'd wake up alone on Stork Island and have to travel in search of our boat, alone and vulnerable among man-eating trees. We'd run into Calibani again, also beached and in trouble, end up recruiting her to help us get our boat out of the sand.

Hiding below deck would end in a sea storm that leaves us inside our boat as it's beached on Stork Island. We'd fend off the storks alone, and run into Calibani once we get our boat out to sea, as she got away more or less unscathed.

All of these would have majorly changed the trajectory of our relationship with Calibani and our identity as Sailor, despite seeming to have the same component parts on the surface. Now account for how similarly slight changes in the other options could have gone, and we could have had a very different story indeed.

Part 8: Our Girl

I just think she's neat!

[taswritesstuff]

ellipsus: an honest review

(this is pretty much directly copied from an insta post i just made. if you're seeing this before monday 4/21, when this goes live on insta... cool! you got in early. also, check my instagram out)

what is ellipsus?

ellipsus is a writing platform designed for collaboration, but it can definitely be used alone. i, personally, only write solo, so this review mostly focuses on the solo writing experience (with a few mentions of collaborative features).

features

there are sort of 4 main parts to ellipsus when it comes to writing: folders, documents, the main writing doc, and drafts. you can make folders to house multiple documents, and you can even put folders into folders, which allows for a TON of organization.

inside each document, you have the main document and the drafts. the way it’s meant to be used is as follows: you do all your writing in the main doc, and then you can make drafts that copy everything in the main doc. any changes you make in the drafts doesn’t change the main doc.

that, however, is not how i use documents. i like to make a document about one topic - for example, character development and worldbuilding - and then make drafts that relate to that topic (i.e., a draft for each character bio). this allows for even MORE organization beyond folders, microfolders, and documents.

ellipsus also has templates like word and google docs, but i don’t have much to say as i haven’t tried any of the templates out. as of right now the templates don’t have previews (outside of the ellipsus blog), just names, which has made me hesitant to look into them any further because... you know... i don’t really know what I’m getting into. this is just something to note.

pros

LOTS of organization via folders within folders, documents, and drafts

built-in collaboration tools (such as version history, a chat box for collaborators, and commenting on drafts)

lots of formatting tools (such as headings, a divider, quote/code, indents, and more)

the platform is constantly being improved & updated

if you’re a font nerd like me: new fonts are added fairly often, and the selection is pretty good right now! it has a good variety of different font types.

IT'S FREE!!

cons

you can’t switch between fonts in one draft/the main doc - only one font for the entire thing (diff headings can have different fonts)

can be glitchy sometimes (though i’ve never lost work!)

you can move documents between folders, but you can’t move drafts between documents. (this might not seem like a big deal to some, but i accidentally made a draft in the wrong doc once and wasn’t able to move it, which sort of threw off my organization :/)

ellipsus is only on web, which is great on computers but makes it difficult & not fun to use on mobile

should you use it instead of word and google docs?

i’ve been using ellipsus for around 2 months now, and i’d say it’s a great alternative... but it doesn’t have everything. in some regards, i’m still finding it difficult to completely transfer over from google docs, which I’ve been using for years. one thing i love is ellipsus' stance completely against ai, and its commitment to staying that way. i still mostly use google docs on my phone, since ellipsus is hard to use on mobile.

final thoughts & comments

i think ellipsus is a great tool, and that everybody should try it out! maybe you won’t transfer over to it completely right away (or ever), but it’s still something to look into. is it perfect? no, but it’s improving all the time.

interested? find them here:

tumblr: @ellipsus-writes

website: https://ellipsus.com/

blog (also linked through website, but i think more people should look into it for new features, features you may have missed, and current writing news): https://ellipsus.com/blog

happy writing!

[godricgryffinsnore]

hey you don’t have to honor and entertain this request whatsoever, i understand ppl have more important things than romione.

BUT if you ever had the time and the mood for it… i was thinking an enemies to lovers romione oneshot?

again absolutely no pressure pls, you’re already posting so much amazing content and i adore your creative brilliance my dear. lots of love xoxo

Trapped With You ♡ : A Romione Fan Fiction.

pairing : Ron Weasley x Hermoine Granger

summary : When Ron and Hermione’s never-ending bickering reaches catastrophic levels, Harry Potter takes drastic measures to force them to sort out their differences. But being locked in a broom closet together might just lead to something even more unexpected.

warnings : Excessive banter and bickering, Harry being absolutely done with his friends, Slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers romance, Cheesy and dramatic confession, Mild suggestiveness. Please let me know if I missed any.

author's note : English is not my first language, so please forgive me for any grammatical errors or spelling errors. Re-blogging is completely fine with me, but please don't copy my work. I love you all. Enjoy <3. This is a drabble, i.e., an extremely short fan fiction.

word count : 1k

main master list <3

della's note : Babe, your requests make my day. I love it when people come out to me and request. I love to bring your imagination to my page! SO THANK YOU FOR REQUESTING! Anyways, this one took me a while to plan because I HAD to bring out the banter and the humor between the golden trio. It was fun writing it. I hope you like it, anon <3

banners : @roseschoices and @uzmacchiato

The war of attrition between Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger began with a rat and a cat, as all great and terrible feuds do.

It was a battle waged in huffs and eye-rolls, sharpened sighs and venom-laced barbs, all revolving around the infamous day Crookshanks allegedly tried to devour Scabbers. Ron had declared Hermione a “pet murderer in the making.” Hermione had sniffed that Ron’s rodent was “one flu away from the afterlife.”

And so, the war raged on.

Harry Potter, unfortunate third wheel and reluctant referee, had endured it all: the passive-aggressive silence, the not-so-passive-aggressive arguments, the glares that could melt steel. By the time Christmas came around, he’d had enough.

“I’ve had enough.” Harry’s voice cracked as he clapped his hands together like a weary parent. “I am sick of being in the middle of this nonsense. You two need to talk. Like, proper talking.”

“Hard pass,” Ron grumbled, shoving a spoonful of mashed potatoes into his mouth.

“I’d rather discuss the legal ramifications of beheading house-elves,” Hermione said primly, flipping a page of Hogwarts: A History with unnecessary force.

Harry narrowed his eyes. Then, with the steely determination of a Chosen One who had fought trolls, basilisks, and Voldemort himself, he set his plan into motion.

—

Scene One: The Great Hall Showdown

At breakfast the next day, the tension between Ron and Hermione reached unbearable levels.

“Could you not breathe so loudly, Ronald?” Hermione snapped, buttering her toast with the force of someone stabbing a mortal enemy.

“I’m eating, Hermione. What, should I stop breathing entirely?” Ron shot back, waving his fork in exasperation. “Would that finally make you happy?”

Harry groaned, rubbing his temples. “You two are worse than my Aunt Petunia and the neighbor’s cat.”

“She’s not that bad,” Ron muttered. “At least the cat has the decency to leave sometimes.”

Hermione gasped. “You insufferable, immature—”

“Oh, here we go,” Harry mumbled, resting his forehead against the table as they devolved into another argument about proper eating etiquette, feline instincts, and something about Ron’s socks being a personal offense to Hermione’s entire existence.

—

Scene Two: The Library Duel

Later that afternoon, Hermione sat in the library, attempting to read in peace. That was, until Ron plopped down beside her, dropping his bag loudly onto the table.

“Do you mind?” Hermione hissed, glaring at him.

“Oh, terribly,” Ron drawled. “But then I thought—why should you have all the fun? Let’s ruin each other’s day.”

“Your mere existence does that just fine.”

“Well, at least I’m good at something,” Ron shot back.

Madam Pince cleared her throat loudly, and the two fell into a furious silence, glowering at each other over their books.

Harry, two tables away, just sighed. “I swear, I’m going to move to another country.”

—

Scene Three: The Potions Incident

During Potions class, Hermione and Ron were assigned as partners. Naturally, disaster ensued.

“Ron, you have to chop the ingredients finely, not turn them into mush!”

“Well, maybe if someone wasn’t breathing down my neck, I could do it properly!”

“Breathing down your—Ronald, you are butchering this potion!”

“Maybe I want to butcher it,” Ron retorted, throwing in an extra scoop of powdered root just to spite her.

The cauldron exploded.

Harry wiped potion sludge from his face, his expression eerily blank. “You two. Are. A nightmare.”

—

Scene Four: The Quidditch Match

During a Gryffindor vs. Slytherin match, Hermione was in the stands while Ron was keeping goal. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop them from bickering.

“Ron! Pay attention!” Hermione shouted as he barely dodged a Slytherin Chaser.

“I am paying attention!” Ron yelled back.

“No, you’re yelling at me!”

“Well, you started it!”

The Quaffle soared past him into the hoop. Ron groaned while Hermione smugly crossed her arms.

“Merlin’s beard,” Harry muttered. “They’re going to kill each other before I get a chance to.”

—

Scene Five: The Closet of Doom

“Harry, let me out of this closet.” Hermione’s voice was clipped, and somewhere in the dimly lit, broom-scented space, Ron let out a dramatic groan.

“Oh, brilliant plan, Potter,” Ron snapped, his tone dripping with sarcasm. “Locking two people in a broom closet. Revolutionary. Where’d you get the idea? A romance novel?”

“Shut up, Ron.”

“No, you shut up!”

“Both of you shut up!” Harry yelled through the door. “I am not letting you out until you sort this ridiculousness out.”

Footsteps retreated, and with a final, victorious chuckle, Harry was gone.

For a long moment, there was only silence. Hermione sighed. “This is your fault.”

Ron groaned. “We are not doing this again.”

Silence stretched between them, thick and heavy. Ron shifted uncomfortably. Hermione sighed again. The air was excruciating.

Ron exhaled sharply. “You drive me absolutely mental, you know that?”

Hermione smirked. “Good.”

Ron grumbled, running a hand through his hair. “I mean it. You make me want to scream half the time.”

Hermione arched a brow. “Only half? I must be losing my touch.”

Ron huffed a laugh. Then he went quiet, his fingers tapping against his knee. “I think I like it.”

Hermione tilted her head. “Like what?”

“This.” He gestured vaguely between them. “The arguing, the banter. The way you call me an idiot every other day. I think—I like it. And it’s really bloody annoying, Hermione.”

Hermione blinked. “Excuse me?”

Ron inhaled sharply. “I think I might be in love with you. And it’s driving me mad.”

Hermione took a slow step forward. “You are an idiot.”

Ron swallowed. “Yeah?”

She grabbed his tie, pulling him closer. “Yeah.”

And then she kissed him, just to shut him up.

—

Harry, waiting outside, heard a suspicious silence followed by the distinct sound of lips meeting. He closed his eyes and sighed so deeply it was almost spiritual.

When the door finally opened, revealing Ron and Hermione flushed and suspiciously quiet, he crossed his arms. “I knew it.”

Ron grinned sheepishly. Hermione adjusted her sweater, suddenly very interested in the floor.

Harry pointed a finger at both of them. “Don’t involve me in your nonsense ever again. I mean it. I refuse to spend another second of my life refereeing your ridiculous, slow-burn romantic comedy. I am done.”

He turned on his heel and marched away, muttering about needing a vacation.

Ron and Hermione exchanged a look.

“Well,” Ron said, scratching the back of his head. “That went well.”

Hermione smiled. “Yeah.”

And for once, they didn’t argue.

[wodniars-void]

Do you have any headcanons *you* would like to share? Maybe some about Terra? 🧡

Thanks for the ask, Starlight!!!

Boy howdy DO I INDEED. Buckle up!!!!!

I feel so strongly that he is the type who would listen to like, dad rock and Jimmy Buffet. He got his music taste from Eraqus <3 He is either listening to the oldest music you've ever heard on a wax cylinder phonograph or there is a CD in a boombox blasting 80s power ballads and dad rock. He never figured out the music function of his Gummiphone so Chip, Dale, Ienzo, and Data Riku just helped him burn a bunch of CDs. Silence is Weird post-kh3 so he'll usually have music playing while he trains and does chores and stuff. He also has a portable CD player and headphones to be considerate of when Ven and Aqua maybe don't want to hear Holding Out For A Hero for the 50th time, but it's more likely you'll walk in on him woodcarving with Margaritaville playing in the background.

Secondly. Secondly. I think for his birthday Aqua makes something like peanut butter brownies, to account for his dislike of sweet things. Like how the Rockin' Crunch ice cream has a chocolate and nut shell, his ideal desserts usually include dark chocolate and nuts. There's this one chocolate place I know that sells frozen bananas covered in chocolate and peanuts and they absolutely rule. Disney Town would make him one to celebrate his return and he would cry. He has tried pecan pie and was deeply disappointed by how much he didn't like it. It sounds so appealing but it was So Sweet. If he's really craving a treat he might have a bit of dark chocolate, or some honey roasted nuts, maybe even a scoop of vanilla ice cream :)

Okay now. Post kh3 I headcanon he becomes a magnet for the kids without really meaning to, he just exudes a comfy and non-judgemental vibe. He understands having really complicated feelings about darkness, or someone who passed, or someone who hurt them. He's a safe and open space to both talk about things and seek refuge from them. He's the number one lil guy collector <3

He ends up visiting Lilo and Stitch fairly often, more Stitch than Lilo, but as above, he collects Lil Guys without meaning to and Lilo is not excluded. It's really comforting to him to see that Stitch escaped and found a happy life and made friends :) He hasn't told Lilo why he ended up on the spaceship so she keeps guessing what his Space Crimes were. The truth is he didn't do any crimes and was wrongly imprisoned without due process or fair trial but I think Minor Space Traffic Violation is the funniest option he's "confirmed". He may have done some Space Crimes after he broke out of Space Jail but that's different. He didn't get arrested for those

Okay this one is a long one and is practically an au so grab a snack and drink some water. Settled? Comfy? Okay let's go :3

Long story short: Post KH3, Terra can see ghosts. He's had Visions before, of both the past and the future, it's an innate magic ability that sort of does what it wants. He's also died, really severely, moreso than like, anybody ever. And he himself was a ghost in multiple senses for a while. So when he gets put back together, that split & death lingers. And being connected to death while also having magic Sight mixes weird, thus, ghost vision! Which leads to some fun Dark Road themed adventures :3

Long story long: Terra has visions, right? Glimpses of things from both the past and the future, that are never quite explained. For example, he should by no means know what young Xehanort or KH2 Riku look like, and yet he sees them on the Destiny Islands, and reacts to seeing them. Which indicates that happened in-universe rather than purely for the viewer. We don't know why this happens, but given Terra's other unique magical abilities (i.e. the Lingering Will), I assume it's one of the Wayfinder Trio's odd magical quirks, like Aqua being able to enchant items.

Well, being split apart messed with that innate magic. I don't know the exact mechanics, something about death mixing funny with seeing things other people can't. Something about being a ghost and being connected to other ghosts and being able to recognize yourself in others. The wires got a little crossed, essentially.

Which means post KH3, readjusting to being alive and everything, he just starts to See more often? Flickers of people around the Land of Departure, whispers in empty rooms that were never there before. (I personally believe the Land of Departure is basically like, mega haunted. Lots of lingering keyblade wielder spirits. But I'm only focusing on one set of ghosts here.) It's not anything he's not used to, he's had Visions his whole life, but the increased frequency is weird. But things don't come to a head until a late night trip to get a midnight snack leads to a literal run-in with one of the Dark Road underclassmen, which is a shock to both of them.

Thus, cue the Dark Road shenanigans, maybe some contemplation on what it means to be a ghost, idk this part is mostly an excuse to let the wayfinders and underclassmen (and upperclassmen) interact. I like them :3

TLDR: Because of his Visions and complicated relationship with death Terra gains the ability to see ghosts and it turns out to be a nicer deal than you'd usually expect :3

Okay this ask took a LONG time to answer and that's entirely on me. And it's long as hell, thanks for enabling me Starlight <3 This was really fun to work on and think about!!!! Tune in next time for more Terra Thoughts!

[captain-violence]

Really no one asked for a post but here is a post on:

ImaHana headcanons!!

When they met in middle school, it was a spark at first glance. Definitely not love more like...interest? Imayoshi could see the dirty and the ugly before Hanamiya even said a word. Hanamiya hated it and therefore hated him. Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

The start of the relationship was simple. Imayoshi wanted to see how far he could go with shaping this individual and Hanamiya wanted to see 1) what this weirdo is all about and 2) how can he use it against him/other people. (Imayoshi did think Hanamiya was real pretty though)(( and easy to manipulate. Boy was he wrong))

Definitely an on and off kind of relationship. Especially during high-school considering they had other stuff going on in their lives. Studies, basketball. Not that Hanamiya needs to study a lot but he gets comfort in solitude and he knows where/how to reach Imayoshi anyways.

Hanamiya calls him Shoi and Imayoshi calls him Mako-chan because he thinks it's funny.

Takes a couple of years in university to stabilize their relationship but if someone were to ask they would both say they have been together since middle school.

Different aesthetics boyfriends. Imayoshi is proper and put together. Casual but proper. Hanamiya is tattoos, dark clothes and piercings. (In their adult years)

Imayoshi ends up working as a state agent of sorts, Hanamiya is a nurse because he can hurt people under the guise of helping them (Hi I'm a CNA and I think nursing would rly fit him lol)

Hanamiya is a cat person. Imayoshi is a goldfish person.

They like watching horror movies together and laugh about how stupid/unrealistic they are. Hanamiya loves gore movies because he doesn't have to think, just watch, and Imayoshi loves psychological horror.

Hanamiya sleeps with two covers because he is always cold (because his heart is).

They get married at one point but it's mostly because ' I tolerate you'( I.e I love you and I want to spend my life with you.) It's nothing extravagant. Imayoshi doesn't really propose. More like asks if they should get married. Casual conversation. Courthouse wedding with Hanamiya's mother and Imayoshi's little sister as witnesses. They do keep the pictures framed in their living room.

Hanamiya's mother loves her son in law, he is the perfect match for her son. Someone who brings out the best in him.

Imayoshi's father has taken a distance from them but his little sister loves Makoto and has gotten help with homework on multiple occasions. Hanamiya is a surprisingly good teacher when he wants to be.

They're just not really people who want kids and they're content with that.

Touou and kirisaki team knew they were definitely hooking up/in a relationship but are wise enough to not say anything. (Hara may have hinted but got kicked)

They are each other's first. But not their only.

Imayoshi loves hearing Hanamiya sing. Hanamiya hates hearing Imayoshi sing. Not only is he tone deaf but he gets the lyrics wrong (probably on purpose).

Same size shirts, not the same sized pants/underwear.

They play online games/video games together. (Sly-fox and Misto-kun romance)

Hanamiya definitely had mental health issues. (Depression, feelings of mania, sadistic tendencies etc etc) Imayoshi knows and has seen him in high highs and low lows and Hanamiya trusts Imayoshi to never use it against him. And he hasn't. Because they can get pretty low but not THAT low.

Rarely fight, small arguments and witty remarks are common but don't really leave a mark. Definitely the people who can go to bed angry though and keep it up until one of them (Imayoshi) says sorry.

Play basketball together on occasion. 1on1 usually ends in a pile on the ground, laughing because Hanamiya is openly cheating (for fun).

Inside jokes galore. Side glances and snickers at things only they understand.

They both cheat a lot when playing card games.

Thank you for the question!! Hope I can covert you into ImaHanaism hahaha. @wsknbfanaccnt

[soft-pine]

some days i think so much about your bodily autonomy + dean video and how people throwing him around, touching him is conceived as hot (see the alley fight scene between dean/cas, the way that abaddon pulls his head back in s9). idk. i’m just sad at the way people talk about him like he’s an object. they do that to jensen too and it kinda makes me sick to my stomach.

and then every time i’ve tried to bring it up i get laughed at or have been laughed here. anyway. it was a really really good video. i’m glad you made it.

hi anon! thank you for your kind words and i'm sorry you've had these experiences where people aren't taking your feelings and concerns into account. that sucks.

i think this kind of thing in fandom is tricky because there is one layer/level to it where i can kinda get behind the like crowd chanting like "cover him in blood" and everything. like putting blorbos in Situations(tm) or through The Horrors. and I think there is an element of fun to that. like this is fiction.

however, i think a lot of the themes and patterns of harm that happen to dean in spn are really serious. and they're really serious things that also happen a lot to people in real life: objectification, sexualization, assault, lack of bodily autonomy starting from very young childhood. and most of the time when i want to talk about these kinds of things, i also get criticized for being overly serious. (which i get so much in all aspects of my life it honestly doesn't carry much weight anymore). because yeah, i EXTREMELY do not find any of these situations hot. i don't find the abbadon scene hot. i don't find the multiple times dean is assaulted by the police and shoved or grabbed or slammed against things hot. i don't find the scene when he's about to get his heart ripped out for cacao hot. i don't find the scene where he's about to be made glythor's host hot.

i think it's hard to hold these two kinds of duality in fandom. because on the one hand, we are engaging with fictional material and an inherent part of that is the sort of lack of stakes. fiction is where you can play around with these themes in a safe way. so i think it makes sense that people sometimes don't approach these scenes with the gravitas that would be necessary in the real world. and that really is okay i think.

but it's also important to say that if you're really analyzing a character and talking about the emotional, physical, and psychological ramifications of everything they've been through then there absolutely should be space for engaging with that really seriously. and with dean specifically, looking at everything he's been through from just the small ways so many people feel entitled to kiss him unprompted up to the huge awful consent violations and assaults, it paints a really sad picture.

i personally can't speak much about the jensen situation. i am not in it for the actor men. i think the only salient point i have to offer about that is, yes, i do think people can get kind weird about them in ways that put me off a bit. however the important thing is, i think, thinking about stuff that he will see or have to engage with or not. i.e. are people being inappropriate to him at cons versus like posting wild stuff on tumblr that he will for sure never see. (also like leave their kids ALONE!) but of course, how people are sensitized to act online has some effect on the norms they will behave within in public so of course there is that layer to it. but i think it's important to be careful and clear about which boundaries have an actual material effect on his life or not? i'm not trying to discount how you feel or things you're critical of that are real harm! but in a public ask answer, i want to make it clear i'm not going after thought crimes here, you know.

all this is to say my blog will always be a place where i am most often swinging toward taking these things pretty seriously and shying away from making light of these kinds of scenes. because i'm overly serious person, you're always welcome to send me stuff that gives you the ick or makes you sad like that and hopefully get some validation and listening to those feelings.

you would not believe the posts that i see and sometimes make a private little sad face about. i am extremely delicate about dean and being in fandom has toughened my skin in unimaginable ways and yet i still sometimes see a compilation of dean sleeping peacefully or something and see it includes the scene from 5.16 and remember it's actually him pretending to be asleep to reach for the gun under his pillow right before he's shotgunned to death at point blank range and then have a whole time about it. so all this is to say. while i want to maintain a live and let live mentality, on soft-pine dot tumblr dot com, it's really serious dean times always.

thanks for sending! i really hope you feel heard and please let me know if you don't. <3

[dailypolyhedra]

Hi, these shapes are so cool! I love math, but I’m realizing I never learned much about 3D solids besides the very basic shapes (cones, spheres, uhh those saddle hyperbola things, etc)

Would you be able to explain some of the terms or show me where I can learn more? I think I’ve checked Wikipedia for some but it was not beginner friendly lol. I know I could look it up myself (and I probably will once I finish writing lol), but sometimes I think it’s more fun or helpful to ask someone instead!

I’m mostly curious how they’re named, like why some have “great” in the name or how i.e. a 12-pointed star is differentiated from a 12-faced regular solid with missing corners or whatever those Rubik’s cube lookin things are. But also like literally any other terminology, like the random scientist last names that pop up in the lists of features lmao

Idk why I wrote this like a professional email it’s just a tumblr ask but oh well lmao

Thank you for the ask! I've been intending to make some sort of reference post for the terms (polyhedra-related and not) used on this blog and, while it could still be a little while until that is made, you've reminded me to add that to my to-do list.

I will make the disclaimer that I am certainly more of a shape enthusiast than an expert, so if someone more knowledgeable comes across this and notices something I've said or linked is incorrect/inaccurate (keeping in mind that I have simplified some of the definitions), please feel free to correct me! This goes for all of my other posts as well.

I won't cover every term here, but some of the most common ones I use in the daily polyhedron posts are:

convex polyhedron - a polyhedron for which the line connecting any two points on its surface is always "inside" the polyhedron. For non-convex polyhedra, this is not true.

uniform polyhedron - a polyhedron with faces that are all regular (i.e., having all sides of equal length and all interior angles of equal measure) and vertices that are identical.

star polyhedron - a non-convex polyhedron with a star-like visual appearance, usually created through stellation (extending the edges or faces of a convex polyhedron) or augmentation (adding - usually a pyramid or cupola - to a convex polyhedron).

Schläfli symbol - for regular polyhedra, a notation of the form {p,q}, signifying q regular polygons with p sides meeting at each vertex. This can be modified to represent non-regular polyhedra, for instance, t{p,q} would be a truncation of the regular polyhedron {p,q}. Star polyhedra may have fractional values for p.

vertex figure - the polygon exposed when a vertex of a polyhedron is cut off.

dual polyhedron - the polyhedron whose vertices correspond with the faces of another and vice versa. A self-dual polyhedron has a dual that is identical to it.

With regards to "great," it is a prefix used to 1) refer to a specific kind of stellation (extending faces) or 2) distinguish between similar polyhedra or conjugates (for example, the great cubicuboctahedron is named as such because it is "spikier" than the small cubicuboctahedron).

The last name of the discoverer of a polyhedron - usually a mathematician - often appears in the name of that polyhedron if it cannot be named using typical polyhedra nomenclature (e.g., the Szilassi polyhedron). This is far from a general rule, though, and it varies depending on the polyhedron.

Here are a few links that may help further with the information above/cover terms I haven't mentioned (as I definitely have not covered everything):

Hope this helps! If not, that terminology post should be coming at some point, and feel free to send more asks for clarification.

[sapphire-weapon]

@ the anon who asked me about storytelling in RE: thank u for ur patience. i didn't want to answer your ask while i was crashing out about nakanishi's incompetence, because you raised some good questions that i was too heated to answer properly.

i'm going to post ur stuff here so that i can go thru it piece by piece instead of answering ur ask directly.

so here's a question: when you talk about wanting good stories from resident evil games, is there a certain standard and criteria that you set your expectations for because, this is resident evil we are talking about and alot of the times, the franchise it's self isn't really standing out purely because it's sophisticated and groundbreaking story but it's gameplay. At least from what i've seen being discussed amongst people that play these games almost religiously.

so. good question. i think it's important to denote that "a good story" and "a good resident evil story" are two completely different things.

vendetta is a great example. on a macro level, zoomed out and compared to other things, the story is fucking dog garbage bullshit trash. but boy is it a great fucking resident evil-ass resident evil story. i fucking love vendetta, man. it's so fucking stupid. damnation and DI are great, too.

in my mind, a good resident evil story hits the following criteria:

wacky science that leads to something adjacent to a horror movie-style outbreak of some kind

an eccentric villain

some villainous conspiracy plot looming over the whole thing

almost comical amounts of death and destruction

has a certain sort of internal logic that makes it feel consistent with everything that's come before, even if it ultimately changes or bungles the lore

at least one moment that makes you go "THAT DOESN'T MAKE ANY FUCKING SENSE" or "did this guy even have a plan???" or "oh god, this is stupid. oh god, this is fucking dumb. holy shit this is fucking stupid and dumb" -- but like. in a fun way. not in a "i'm genuinely annoyed by this" kind of way.

a sense that the villains deserve to get beaten, because not only are they evil, but they're bad at it and/or are the architects of their own demise due to their blinding hubris (i.e. marcus and nicholai were just bad at being evil; wesker and saddler got hoisted by their own petard. chief irons was both.)

hopefully that helps to explain, at least partially, why i'm so hard on RE7. because RE7 doesn't hit a single one of these criteria. i'm less hard on RE8 because it at least hits most of them, even if it doesn't reach all seven of them.

next thing, would you say that re2makes and re4makes story is good but that quality only goes so far within the limits and the allowance of what the development team can make of it and it's characters? my final question: would you say that both those games and stories, characters and structure could or would be considered masterfully written or does it just work so well because it's what the game needs in order to function? now granted, i don't play many of them as much as i play other titles that are more focused on the overall storytelling and characters instead of gameplay being at the forefront so i wanted to ask, just how *good* of a resident evil story is for you, overall. That's all, i hope it makes sense!

i'm not entirely sure what you mean by this.

i don't think RE2make's story is... exceptional or anything. it's fine. it does what it needs to do. when it first came out in 2019, i played through leon's campaign first, went "that's about what i expected it to be," then made it halfway through claire's campaign and lost interest and never picked it back up again until RE4make inspired me to do so.

RE4make's story, however, is exceptional. it is. it is not just a good resident evil story -- it is a good story. a genuinely good story. it...

RE4make is upsetting because people who came into the fandom through RE4make will inevitably have a very skewed perception of what RE's story quality is or should be. RE's storytelling has never been even remotely close to how high-quality RE4make's is, and it will likely never be that good again.

but to your point, it was held back slightly by the demands put on it from OG. OG prevented RE4make from going full-throttle on the eagleone romance, when the devs clearly wanted to fully turn RE4make into a proper fairy tale. and ada has no place in RE4make, which turns her presence into an annoyance.

and i don't even say that out of bias. i mean that genuinely. she was more relevant in OG RE4. she just was -- and that was because shinji mikami had the idea in his head that, even though they say at the beginning that umbrella was finished, they weren't, really. umbrella had just been pushed into the background, and they were still up to their same old bullshit, still pulling the strings behind the scenes -- and ada's character existed in RE4 to try to showcase that and also to build a bridge between leon and wesker's characters. (and, in fact, mikami would later go on to say that he was disappointed that, in RE5, umbrella was just... gone. disappeared from the story. because that wasn't his intention when he wrote RE4. but that's a different story all together.)

but the way that the devs rewrote RE4's story for RE4make left no room for ada's character -- but she had to be present, because she was present in OG. they did their best to try to tie her relevance more to luis's character rather than just leaning on whatever stupid shady bullshit wesker was doing, but i don't really feel like they pulled it off. i still don't think that she added anything to the overall narrative. you could delete her from RE4make entirely and barely have to change much of anything at all.

[nyoomerr]

Tips for writing shizun-is a teacher I wish to fuck blorbo Shen Yuan and 300 women but only truly want one man blorbo Bingge? They are so tasty but I want to characterize them accurately 👌👌

they are indeed the tastiest 😌🍴 and i'm glad that you enjoy my characterization of them enough that you trust me to give advice on them!

that said, i'll go ahead and add my usual sort of disclaimer when giving writing advice -- this is how i interpret these characters, and it's highly unlikely that everyone will agree with all aspects of my understanding of them. feel free to take/leave whichever pieces of this advice suit you personally!

(after all, i don't even take my own advice to heart all the time. there are always exceptions, especially in fandom / fic, where the guiding principle should always just be "do whatever is most fun!")

⬇ ⬇ all advice under the cut to avoid clogging ppl's dashes ⬇ ⬇

for writing shen yuan,

he's an asshole! i often see sy portrayed as kind and innocent as a heavenly saint, but this is the same guy who delighted in harassing the writer of his (not) favorite book. he's argumentative and a bit mean, and he enjoys being those things, particularly when it makes him feel as if he's "won" something. to write this part of his character,

within his own narration, i'll include casual insults directed at anyone/thing that causes him a mild inconvenience

in conversations between him and someone he dislikes, i try to ensure he's never the one to disengage first unless something forces him to, instead writing him as always wanting to get the last word in.

whatever quips/insults/methods of revenge he enacts, i try to ensure that they match his own image of who he is. when he's sqq, his bitchiness doesn't "win" anything unless the way he enacts it fits within his image as an aloof immortal. even when he's a NEET in his original world, he has an image of himself that he wants to maintain (i.e. "winning" on the internet means "people believe you're right.")

he can be sweet, but it's an attitude reserved for people/things he likes very much. even then, it only reinforces his bitchiness; i try to always write him as most mean when someone is attacking something he likes.

he's conditionally oblivious, not completely so. although oblivious!sy is super fun, he's really only "oblivious" to things that would be inconvenient for him to know/understand, and even then, it's less that he doesn't notice and more that he doesn't want to notice. to write this part of his character,

i still have him notice whatever is happening, but within his own narration he'll complete whatever mental gymnastics are necessary to reach a more convenient conclusion than the obvious one.

i try to portray these mental gymnastics as increasingly frantic / borderline panicked depending on how big the jump is between "what is easy for sy to think" and "what the reality is." kinda as if sy can tell that his own excuses are falling apart in real time and is desperately trying to cover it up.

a lot of "what is easy for sy to think" lies in his comphet, but not all of it. it's also easy for him to think that he's right - so when he makes a reasonable assumption, and then he learns new information that disproves that assumption, i usually take that as a chance to throw in some mental gymnastics, too.

when he does finally allow himself to understand, it's often because he's reached the tipping point of "what is easy for me to think is now actively harmful to me or someone i care about." i'll often write sy doing his mental backflips for chapters on end without any sign of stopping, but then very suddenly come to a halt and recognize the truth when he's faced with irrefutable proof that his assumptions are making things Worse (i.e., binghe is crying).

for writing bingge,

his motivation for chasing after a sy of his own lies primarily in the emotion of "this isn't FAIR" as opposed to a genuine desire to have a happy life with sy specifically. it isn't fair that he got a cruel sqq while bingmei got one that grew to care for him, it isn't fair that bingmei is happier in his life than bingge is in his ""objectively"" more accomplished life, etc etc. to write this part of his character,

he'll expect sy to treat him just like sy!sqq treated bingmei right out the gate, because sy doing so would make things "fair" for bingge. when sy fails to meet these expectations, i'll write bingge experiencing the frustration of a child denied the treatment their sibling got, not the distress of a man being rejected by someone he loves.

he has to learn to want sy romantically, and learn how that's different from just vaguely wanting "whatever bingmei had that i didn't." when he reaches this point, i'll try to write some key change in the way he treats sy in order to show that his mental framing of the situation has changed. often, i change the way bingge addresses sy at this point (i.e. calling sy with a diminutive instead of by his name).

he has very firm ideas about what is "good," and very little of them actually match what he wants. by the time bingge reached a position of power, he'd spent a lot of time reinforcing particular ways of thinking and acting because they were what kept him alive during difficult times. to write this part of his character,

he'll lash out at anything that has the chance to hurt him, because striking first is how he's survived. bc of this, i'll write him as very quick to lash out at sy or run away from their relationship if he gets even the slightest hint that sy might have messed up somewhere... but only after bingge has grown to like sy enough that he's emotionally vulnerable to what sy might do to him.

before that point, i'll write him as just mildly frustrated that this nice new toy he found isn't playing with him correctly.

he was only respected and listened to after he became powerful and scary, so he'll resist showing any other side of himself. i'll often use this as a point of conflict, highlighting how 'what makes a good romantic partner' has very little overlap with 'what makes a scary emperor' and forcing bingge to hesitantly change his habits.

i also have tips i wrote specifically about the bingmei-ification process here, if you wanted to check those out :>

anyway, i hope these help a bit! thank you again for trusting me for advice, it's very sweet of you. good luck with your own writing adventures, i'm sure you're going to kill it!!! 😤💪

[ofoceansandtombsanew]

Sorry: I thought of another Makima comment/question. But before I bring that up, I am very excited to see that you are writing something for JJK!!!! I know it's going to be so perfect and give me all the feels!!!

Okay so I read your response to my question, (I'm the one who asked about character study), and I just wanted your thoughts/opinions on the jealously issue that arises with Himeno. I know you mentioned Makima being jealous of Himeno's relationship with reader, and I want to know how much of that you think is nature or nurture. It's obvious she is possessive of reader due to her nature as the Control Devil, but do you think that is equally due to nurture? i.e. what she has learned from movies or from other humans' interactions with their significant others? I love the moment when she catches Himeno with her arms around reader's shoulders. I cannot imagine the range of intense emotions and inner turmoil she felt seeing that!!! And do you think that was a recurring feeling she experienced when someone got a little too close to her beloved? I feel that is a trait that will carry on to Nayuta and all other reincarnations (as possessiveness does in the Canon!)

Thank you so much for your time once again!

Hi again, I love talking about character studies and motivations so keep 'em coming if you ever have another question \^o^/

(As for that JJK fic... it is certainly going to be a grand ride and it is going to be a bit of stray from what I typically write. I'm having fun working on the draft, it's going to come with a surprise I hope people appreciate when it's finally up and posted!)

I think that as far as Makima's jealousy though, it's a mixture of both. It's in her nature to be possessive as one who is the physical embodiment of the fear of being controlled but I attribute her behavior to nurture as well. If you're someone who has been deprived of affection your whole life, you're bound to be possessive of whatever affection you receive. That's essentially how Makima's jealousy works as far as my fics goes.

When she has a shift in how she views the reader and their relationship changes, that affection is something she prefers to have to herself. But Makima is someone very patient and we see in the canon, she has no problem playing the long game to get what she wants. She won't lash out out of her emotions even if she wants to. So during the moment where she saw the extent of the reader's friendship with Himeno, there were quite a bit of ideas she had concerning Himeno and making her disappear entirely.

But at that point in time, Makima views the reader a beacon of light for the sort of relationship she can hope to have with someone one day. The reader has, at this point, never succumbed to Makima's abilities. The reader has recognized Makima's loneliness and reached out to comfort her even though at that point, the reader's opinion of Makima was quite low. Add to the fact that Makima and Reader's relationship has improved exponentially by that point, it's something she doesn't want anyone impeding on. Not even someone who was there first as "your friend".

And yet, Makima doesn't lash out despite how much she would like to. Because the key thing Makima has always desired is being able to have a relationship with someone built on equity rather than fear and control. She doesn't want to mess that up having a jealous fit. She is afraid of losing that affection she receives from the reader, but she is more afraid of there being a day the reader succumbs to the influence of Makima's powers.

So she relies on intimidation in the moment Himeno encroaches on someone Makima claims as her own. And when she feels that is failing, she decides to rely on good old-fashioned communication when the reader prompts her to be honest as to why she is upset during their date.

But when their relationship is solidified as a couple, I see Makima making it more apparent when she is feeling jealous or needy. Lovers should be honest with one another, after all. Especially after she reveals her true identity and it didn't scare the reader off. They have their contract, marriage in Makima's eyes. It's the ultimate insurance of their relationship. So it does increase a bit from then on.

Kishibe encroaching on their peaceful life.

The reader's death at the hand of the Rat Devil, destroying precious life Makima held so dearly to her heart. It's an unforgivable crime to take that away from her.

I feel that jealousy would even extend to your family as well. Your family is her family now, something she's always desired. A family that she didn't need to make her own through force. So I feel if the reader has any siblings or close family childhood friends, Makima would feel some type of way about it.

It never makes it into the final draft, but there was a small joke in my outline about how Makima would view the reader making a contract with another devil as cheating. It was something I was only planning on being some sort of gag, but I don't think it would be too far from the truth. Makima would prefer to be the only devil the reader ever has a contract with.

And when it comes to her future incarnations, they definitely have varying degrees of possessiveness regardless of the quality of their lives. Nayuta doesn't showcase it during the sequel mostly due to the fact that for an indiscernible amount of time, it's only ever been just her and the reincarnated reader. So I imagine that when the two of them begin interacting with other people on the regular from schoolmates to even Power, it begins to come out more.

But Himeno, fun as she is, is strict about that. So Nayuta isn't allowed to let those feelings run rampant no matter how much she would like to.

[thenugking]

Where is Lee post-epilogue? I know they romance Wyll, so does Karlach's ending impact that (i.e. going to Avernus) or did something else happen? Does their ending align with canon or have you taken it a different direction?

Aaaa this was a very fun question to answer, thank you!

So right now, the canon is that Lee, Wyll, Karlach and Astarion go off to Avernus together at the end of the game. (Astarion is also romancing Wyll and doesn’t entirely hate the idea of going off somewhere with no sun, Wyll talks to Karlach before the end of the game and goes, “look we’re all planning to go and fight devils in Avernus anyway, if you choose to live you won’t be alone”.) It made a lot of sense when I was playing the game--I’d never done the Avernus route before, romanced!Astarion’s lines for origin!Karlach indicate he’s more than happy to join his loved ones for the trip, Lee gets to end the game going off on a brand new adventure with their three closest friends.

I’ve been wondering a bit about changing it up since then though. It’s not a bad ending, but I don’t know if it’s the most thematically fitting one? I’ve been wondering about having the other three go to Avernus while Lee stays on Toril to try to help rebuild the city and make reparations for everything in their backstory, rather than running away to kill more people. I might also end up swapping a few of my OC’s endings round, and have Karlach become a mindflayer in Lee’s game?? Not sure about that one yet though--part of the appeal is just to have Lee’s in-game epilogue not be shit (going to Avernus with Karlach overwrites a lot of epilogue dialogue for being Durge and for romancing Wyll) but I don’t want to base a story decision on gameplay bugs. I'm definitely going to replay Lee eventually though, so hopefully once I do that, I'll come out with a more solid idea of what I'm doing with them here.

Anyway. Whether or not Lee goes to Avernus or stays to rebuild Baldur’s Gate, they’re eventually going to realise they have unfinished business and that they need to find a way to stop the Dead Three, or at least free the people they’re torturing in their various realms and put their souls to rest. I don’t know how they do this, I don’t know if this actually can be done in Forgottem Realms lore, but I fundamentally do not vibe with any lore where people get tortured for eternity so I’m doing it anyway.

The point is, Lee’s remembering more of their past. They’re remembering how terribly they treated Gortash and wanting to set him free from Bane as some sort of reparation. They’re remembering that they had two sisters once, and Orin might be free from Bhaal now (Lee stays away from her themself, but they ask Jaheira to keep an eye, and Orin seems to be doing well and less murderously!), but no one ever did anything to help Helena. 

I do not have detailed thoughts for much of this. There’s a few things here and there--Karlach and Lee initially have a disagreement over Saving Gortash, but Karlach is a better person than he was and ultimately doesn’t think he should be tortured eternally either. Orin is involved with Fighting Bhaal, I also want to get Real!Sarevok (not the fake BG3 one) to meet Lee and give advice, maybe also Imoen. (I’m not sure yet whether to accept the Journal of Villainy canon for Imoen. There’s a lot in it that I reject, but I am a vampire fan and it would give me a reason tokeep her around during BG3. Ask me again once I’ve finished BG2 and have a stronger grasp on my Charname’s story.) Helena comes to some kind of peace with Lee, Orin, and her mother and gets her soul put to rest, because oh my god the shit I've put her through making up backstories. Lee and Orin have a conversation, Orin reaffirms that she wants Lee out of her life, because you do not get to keep your sister after doing All That to her, Lee lets her go. It's very bittersweet. Also I guess we’re rescuing Ketheric’s soul somewhere in all this. The only thought on that I have is that he’s probably even less thrilled to see Lee again than the rest of these people are.

Eventually, Lee’s going to want to settle down and not be in a position where they end up going out and killing people, even if for good reasons. They’re going to keep living with Wyll and Astarion, and probably also Karlach, and several years down the line, maybe some kids. I think Wyll definitely wants kids, Astarion would prefer to be a Cool Uncle figure with fewer responsibilities, and Lee is a mixture of enthusiastic and terrified. I don’t know if there’s a fostering system in Baldur’s Gate, but if not they’re getting one invented, because they very much want to be sure they’re safe around kids before committing permanently to this. Any children are absolutely going to be adopted, rather than biological.

Other than that, Lee continues learning about those they killed from Withers, because they want their victims to be remembered. They keep making their little bone sculptures, they just ethically source their bones now. They stay in contact with all companions except Minthara (she was not thrilled about Orin being spared). They keep trying to grow, and be better than they were yesterday.