#Formative Myths

[sistersorrow]

Broke: vampires are real, and they act just like in the stories

Woke: vampires are real, but the stories are inaccurate

Bespoke: vampires are real, the stories are inaccurate, and vampires made up those stories to keep humans ignorant

Baroque: vampires are real, and the stories are inaccurate, but vampires reacted to things like Dracula and Masquerade the same way the mafia reacted to The Godfather and now actively try to play out the tropes

[everytimewetouch-dot-mp3]

cang qiong dragon god shen yuan is probably like so old that time doesn’t have meaning? like he transmigrated into pidw as a dragon and and the system gave him a few missions that functionally amounted to ‘claim this mountain range as your territory and defend it from demons’

sy didn’t realize that he was actually laying the foundation for cang qiong mountain sect before its creation. some terrifying demon demigod (one of the first heavenly demons, maybe?) pursues a band of cultivators to his mountain range, and he protects them. they settle his mountains and start cultivating, and because they’re protected by a literal god (who they call lord canglong, and they name the mountains after him) people want to study there.

so cqms is born, and sy takes a nap. when he wakes up, those cultivators he saved bring another group of cultivators, all named 'wen' to his mountain, and they ask his permission to lead the peaks next. another nap, and he wakes up to the wen generation asking his blessing for the ming generation, so on and so forth up until the qing generation. this time he recognizes names: qingge, qingfang, qingqi. this generation's leader, qingyuan. and the one whose bow is shallow and perfunctory, qingqiu. ofc sy isn't super pressed about standing on ceremony or whatever—he's only experienced like six years in this world, and most of them were spent either establishing the mountain as his territory or helping his little cultivators fight off some world-ending cataclysm or other. but he remembers the scum villain’s name, and he’s not a huge fan of the way sqq’s already proving himself to be an arrogant old shit

just like every other time, after he’s met and blessed this generation of peak lords, shen yuan falls asleep. shit!!! he meant to stay awake this time, but the system putting him to sleep is just too powerful! he’s probably missed luo binghe, damnit!!! what’s the point of transmigrating into this shitty novel if he doesn’t even get to meet the only character worth the pixels it took to type him into existence??

but as soon as he sees that fluffy-haired boy curled up in one of his caves, bruised and weeping and wondering what he’s done to be so universally hated, shen yuan knows. that’s his protagonist, and he’s really too pathetic like this. he’s really just a child. and shen yuan might have been easily annoyed by the concept of kids in his first life, but this isn’t just some whiny kid. this is the protagonist. so he does his best to calm tiny lord luo down.

and at first when lbh realizes it’s the fucking dragon god canglong speaking to him, the poor kid falls on his face kowtowing and apologizing for the intrusion, but lord canglong just…asks him what’s wrong. and then listens. and then he allows binghe to…to touch his hand???? not only that, he pats binghe’s head?? and tells him it isn’t his fault??? that one little head-pat is filled with so much spiritual power that binghe almost passes out, and soon after he recovers, lord canglong sends him back down the mountain with a renewed sense of purpose. lord canglong said binghe wasn’t stupid, wasn’t incompetent, wasn’t a failure, and binghe was determined to prove himself worthy of the sect’s guardian deity’s kindness.

and when luo binghe turns to walk down the mountain back to qing jing peak, that google translate voice pipes up in shen yuan’s ear with an update he hadn’t realized he was waiting for.

[Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations! Important things must be said three times! USER_002 has completed the quest {From the Ground Up}! B-points +500 USER_002 has initiated the quest {Master of Masters}! New skill [Shapeshifter] has been unlocked! Would USER_002 like to activate [Shapeshifter] now?]

shen yuan slammed the bright glowing [YES] faster than any quest the system had ever given him. that’s how he learned that he was, in fact, just naked in front of luo binghe, and the [Shapeshifter] skill didn’t come with an auto-clothed setting. thank fuck he’d already sent the protagonist away!

[sergeantsporks]

I like how I can read a greek myth and I'll be like "Oh, well that was nice" but then someone writes a musical based on the same myth and I can feel it rewriting my cells on a molecular level

[drawsoneverything]

Maybe there's no one else like you

[szynkaaa]

Just a gal and her Stone Monkey

this image pose template from here

HC since SWK cane change his size, the same applies for his Azure Dome form. So he can be as big as a mountain, or the size of a big yaoguai, or normal sized (whatever normal sized is for the Stone Monkey)

Much later on:

Slight NSFW under the cut

[ryllen]

i only realize zayne's arms is full of scars when he rolled his sleeves higher on Exclusive Tutorial

[mugwot]

funnyjokespunperson

[bonesmarinated]

小黄龙 Yellow Loong (from Blackmyth Wukong) GOAT transformation and a generous scholar 👉帥哥👈

[bizarrelovetriangel]

(inspiration)

[imaginal-ai]

"Zeus and Ganymede" (0001)

(The Queer Affairs of Zeus Series)

[carebooks]

to all those new comers to the Percy Jackson world and being off on shipping Percabeth because Poseidon and Athena are uncle and niece, it’s stated in the books (specifically The Lost Hero) that gods don’t have DNA the way humans do.

and if that still doesn’t convince you or you may think it’s not a real or valuable explanation, let’s recall other ways that births happen in both greek myths and the Riordanverse:

- Zeus birthed Athena from his brain

- Athena’s demigod children are born the same way. out of her mind. so Annabeth is already way off from the usual goddess birth route

- Zeus also birthed Dionysus from his thigh

- Hephaestus was born from Hera and Zeus, but in a lot of versions its actually Hera who just had him by herself. she got pregnant and it happened. they’re gods. (then chucked him down a mountain) again, they’re gods.

- Hebe, goddess of youth, was born from Hera and a piece lettuce she ate

- in the Trials of Apollo, we learn that Kayla Knowles, daughter of Apollo, has a human father, Darren. meaning she has two fathers: Darren and Apollo. no mother involved in her creation whatsoever.

- Zeus has impregnated quite a large number of people during his time and in various different forms. one of the weirdest ones by far was when he came to a queen in the form of a swan, embraced her as that swan and nine months later she gave birth to two eggs. they hatched and inside was Helen of Sparta (as in Helen of Troy), Clytemnestra, Castur and Pollox.

- Poseidon and Medusa had a child and that child was born from Perseus cutting off Medusa’s head. that child was Pegasus. (yes, that Pegasus) (also some other dude was born too)

- Aphrodite was born out of sea foam made from the severed genitals of Ouranos that fell to the oceans

have i convinced you already? are we done here?

[margaretkart]

Hephaestus and Dionysus bonding over trauma ✨

In the myth, where Hephaestus made a golden throne to trap Hera, and no god (not even Athena or Ares) could find a way to convince him to release her. That is until Dionysus steps in to try his chance and surprisingly succeeds.

Although there aren't many sources how he did that, many claiming he managed by making him drunk enough to trust Dionysus, but i also believe it would be something more than that.

After all these two managed to survive Hera's cruelty and maybe by sharing his trauma with his mother Semele and how he tried to hide from Hera, would be key factors of winning his trust.

[refinedstorage]

Black Myth: Wukong

Game Science, 2024

[khaire-traveler]

Honestly, I'd love to write a respectful retelling of the Hermes and Crocus myth someday, as well as the Hyacinthus and Apollo one. Those myths just connect strongly with me, personally, for some reason, and I have a deep love for them. The thing that often stops me is the overall negative perception of retellings in the HelPol community. Some people get rabid over them. ☠️ I fear nothing I write, regardless of how meticulously I try to write it, would ever be good enough for the wider community, and I'm sure I'm not the only writer in HelPol who avoids writing retellings due to this. I would do my best to be respectful to the original culture, and yet, still, it likely would never be enough. I'm kinda just complaining lol, but I feel like people hate these sorts of things so viscerally within the community that even when a retelling has a genuinely interesting story to tell (Hadestown, as an example), they will not only ignore it but will actively despise it. It's discouraging. It stops actual worshippers from creating myth-based retellings, and in my opinion, that's a problem. Many people are upset that worshippers don't create retellings, then create an incredibly hostile space for such things to be created. If you want more content about the gods from worshippers, create a space that welcomes such things. This isn't to say feedback shouldn't be welcome; it's just to say that hating all retellings with such a fierce passion also prevents retellings from actual worshippers being written.

[szynkaaa]

The Shape of Monkey

EDIT 22/01/2025 @blackknight-kai has made some additional interesting observation about the shape of monkey and their fur placement with things that I previously missed, please check out her post for the details

xxx

Some of my friends were talking about the monkey design in Black Myth Wukong, in terms of how much of monkey features the DO/SWK has, and how we wished they devs added a bit more "monkey" ness to the DO, which then made me realize, the devs did do that, but just not for the "normal" game model that we use to play.

The anatomy here is pretty much very normal, the only few traits pointing at him being a monkey are his feet, tail, his face and his fur.

My friend (who doesn't even play BMW or knows about JTTW but is a certified monster fucker) said she doesn't count him as a monster because his shape is too human LOL

This is how he looks in Chapter 5 ending animation:

very human shaped.

which brings me back to the monkey that looks more like a monkey in the game

The Stone Monkey is a two phase we fight in the final boss battle, after we defeat him he breaks and out comes the Broken Shell of the Great Sage

After you finish the first playthrough, you get the Stone Monkey as a transformation, called the Azure Dome.

If you do the True Ending, you transform into the Azure Dome for the first time towering over monkeys and beat the shit out of the four heavenly kings and Erlang. Great fight 10/10

proprotionally speaking, his arms seems a bit longer, or least looks like it due to his big hands. His tails is also longer (don't have a screenshot of that unfortunately), and his ears are pointed. I also think that his mouth structure is a lot more monkey like with it being more pointed forward than his normal model.

Canonly, SWK can change his size into very big or very small, but I don't think in JTTW it was ever described that he had a Stone Monkey form. He is a stone monkey, or monkey born from stone.

I really love that the devs took it literal and created a form and transformation that looks like a monkey and you can see from his tecture that he is supposed to be made from stone

He punches people and also when he dodges he walks on all four. So I guess that is the closest to a monkey we will get from DO/SWK

Chapter 6 ending animation also goes with a more "monkey" like anatomy for Wukong's design

point ears, longer limbs, shorter legs. I love that they added the red face blush here too. His tail is never shown in the animation, but looking at his pilgrim outfit set and the pulge in his pants (no not that one), he probably hides his tail inside his pants. it's kind of a cute detail

The Old Monkey we see also has more human like proportions:

all the other monkeys in the background (beside DO) are more monkey.

Here are the models I pulled from the game

I also love that each monkey has a different fur "pattern", gives them more variety

This one we only see when you reach the normal ending, when the DO did not break the cycle and the headband is put back onto his head, we see this monkey in the fetal position and then it zooms out to the stone egg and sad credit song plays. You can watch the clip here.

I think it's clear that the devs are trying to show an unbron monkey still in the womb, the stone egg/birth stone being the womb in this case, waiting for the next DO to come and finish SWK's revival.

I guess the stages of growth could be like this:

Why did Game Science went for a more human-like approach for the Monkey in terms of design?

We don't know the answer, it was never mentioned anything in the game about it and I have not come across any interviews about it yet.

I do think that the choice to make the Stone Monkey more monkey like and the "normal" monkey more human like was a deliberate choice by the devs.

For the animation, I believe the Game science gave the studio some references on "hey this is how our monkey looks like" and then let the studio do its own thing style-wise, hence why in Ch. 5 animation monkey has a more human like anatomy but ch. 6 comes with more monkey like anatomy

My personal HC is that SWK has a more human-like anatomy to show that he has a high level of cultivation maybe? We have seen in the game there are few yaoguais that are able to take on human appearances, such as the Pingping and the 5th spider sister. And yes, I also hc that SWK does have a monkey-form too that he can transform into.

I'm really begging for Game Science to release an artbook with concept art and background info on why they did this and that

[redbootsindoriath]

A couple of unfinished LOTR drawings: Gandalf and the Balrog, and Gollum.

Usually I wouldn't post stuff that never got past the doodly part of the art process (aside from some of my comics), but then I remembered I enjoy seeing other people's art process, so this is for anyone else out there that likes that.