zethdoesart

[zethdoesart]

[2/4] Bells Hells: LAUDNA →

I pick it up. Just press my forearms and my cheek against the Sun Tree as it's the first warmth she's felt in some time. And she closes her eyes and starts to embody her Form of Dread. But this time, you see her normal mourning veil you see her normal mourning veil cracks and crumbles and falls in the same way that the leaf does. She takes the Sun Tree and embodies it. From onlookers, it looks like branches start sprouting from her shoulders. You see an entire life cycle season's worth. You see an entire life cycle season's worth. Or years worth of seasons as the branches bloom and then wither and then fall. Until eventually, she drops it.

[zethdoesart]

Cozy-spooky beats with Laudna!

Happy showcase day folks! It was a blast working alongside such talented people over at @artists-guild-of-exandria!

Have a smiley day!

(Some closeups under the cut)

[zethdoesart]

idk how to word this properly but wrt the fanfic thing you reblogged earlier. Why do fanfic writers have such different expectations than any other content hosting platform?

Like lets take youtube as a point of comparison, Engagement like comments and likes largely exists to boost the works place in algorithm, thats why youtubers put in calls to action and other engament bait. Few with decent reach even read the comments and the audience shouldnt try to develop any weird parasocial relationship with the youtuber. Fanfic authors ask for likes (kudos, because the websites gotta use nonstandard language for some reason) and comments despite them not having any impact on an algorithm, and seem to want the audience to try and develop a relationship with the author based on tumblr posts like that one.

Why the radical difference in behaviour away from the norm? And honestly with all the (usually) metaphorical blood spilled online about parasociality why are authors really surprised that the audience tries to keep their distance as is best practice with any other content producer?

okay I am going to answer this as kindly and as calmly as I can and try to assume that you are asking this in good faith. because my friend, the fact that you feel the need to ask is, to me, The Problem.

[this is, for the record, in response to this post]

fanfiction writers are not *posting content.* (I also have reservations about engaging with the term "content producer" or "content creator" but let's put that aside for now, I'll circle back to it.) you say "they seem to want the audience to try and develop a relationship with the author" as though it is strange, off-putting, and incomprehensible to you, when in fact that is the point of writing fanfiction. it is a way of participating in fandom. it is a way of building community and exchanging ideas and becoming closer with people.

if authors wanted to solely ~generate content~ that would get them attention (?? to what end, the dynamic you have described seems to equate algorithmic supremacy as winning for winning's sake, as though all anyone wants to do is BUILD an audience without ENGAGING with them, which I cannot fathom but let's pretend for a moment that is, in fact, true) then like. if that were the case why on earth would they choose a medium in which they categorically cannot succeed and profit, because it isn't their IP?

you are equating two things that are not at all the same thing. to the degree that parasocial relationships are to be avoided, and "that person is not trying to be your friend they are trying to entertain you, please respect their boundaries" is a real dynamic -- which it is!! -- like. you have to understand that the reason that is true for the people of whom it is true is because it is their JOB. they are storytellers by profession, and they are either through direct payment, or sponsorship, or advertising, or through some other means, profiting off of your attention. i don't say this to be dismissive, many wonderful artists and actors and comedians and any number of a thousand things that i enjoy very much go this route but they do so as a *career choice.* and so when you violate the public/private boundary with them, you are presuming to know a Person rather than their Worksona. the people who work at Dropout or who stream their actual play tabletop games or who broadcast on TikTok or YouTube are inviting me to feel like i know them to the degree to which that helps them succeed in their medium and at their craft, but there MUST be a mutual understanding that that's a feeling, not a fact.

however.

a fanfiction writer is not an influencer, not a professional, and is not looking to garner "success." there is no share of audience we are trying to gain for gain's sake, because we are not competition with one another, because there is nothing to win other than the pleasure of each other's company. we are doing this for no other reason than the love of the game; because we have things we want desperately to say about these worlds, these characters, these dynamics, and because we *want more than anything to know we are not alone in our thoughts and feelings.* fanfiction is a bid for interaction, engagement, attention, and consideration. it is not meant to be consumed and then moved on from because we are NOT paid for our work, nor do we want to be. the reward we seek is "attention," but attention as in CONVERSATION, not attention as in clicks. we are not IN this for profit, or for number-go-up. there is no such thing: legally there cannot be. we are in this because we want to be seen and known.

like. please understand. i am now married to someone i met because of mutual comments on fanfiction. our close friend and roommate, with whom i have cohabitated for over a decade now, is someone I met because of mutual comments on fanfiction and livejournal posts. that is my household. beyond my household, the vast majority of my closest personal friends are people with whom I built relationships in this way.

you ask why fanfiction writers want THIS and not "the norm," but the idea of everything being built to cater to an algorithm to continue to build clout, as though the only method of reaching people is Distant Overlord Creator and Passive Receptive Audience being "the norm" is EXTREMELY NEW. this is not how it has always been!! please think of the writers of zines in a pre-internet fandom, using paper and glue and xerox to try and meet like-minded people in a world that was designed for you to only ever meet people in person, by happenstance, in your own hometown. imagine the writers of the early internet, building webrings from scratch to CREATE a community to find each other, despite distance. imagine livejournal groups, forums, and -- yes, indeed, of course -- comment threads IN STORIES -- as places where people go to *converse.* in the past, we had an entire Type Of Guy that everyone knew about, the BNF ("Big Name Fan") whose existence had to be described via meme because it was SO DIFFERENT THAN THE NORM. treating fellow fans like celebrities or people too cool for the regular kids to know was an OUTLIER, and one commonly understood to lead to toxicity.

in the past, I have likened writing fanfiction to echolocation. i am not screaming because I like hearing the sound of my own voice, though i can and do find my voice beautiful. i am screaming so that the vibrations can bounce back to me and show me the world. the purpose is in the feedback. otherwise it is just noise.

does this make any sense? can you see, when i describe it that way, why an ask like yours makes me feel despair, because it makes us all sound so horribly separate from one another?

perhaps I will try another metaphor:

a professional chef who runs a restaurant will not have her feelings hurt if you never fight your way into the kitchen to personally tell her how much you enjoyed the meal. that would, indeed, violate a boundary. professional kitchens are a place of work, and you have already showed her you enjoyed the meal by paying for it, or by perhaps spreading your enjoyment by word of mouth to your friends so they, too, can have good meals. you show your appreciation by continuing to come back. if a bunch of people sitting around randomly happen to have a conversation about how much they love the food, it wouldn't hurt that chef's feelings to not be included in the conversation. however: EVEN IN THIS INSTANCE, it is ADVISABLE AND APPROPRIATE to leave a good review! you might post about how much you like this restaurant on Yelp, and it would probably make the chef feel great to see those positive comments. but the chef doesn't NEED them, because the chef is, again, *also being paid to cook.* that's why she started the restaurant, to be paid to cook!

i am not being paid to cook.

i am at home in my own kitchen, making things for a community potluck where i hope everyone will bring something we can all enjoy together. some people at the potluck are better bakers, some better cooks; some can't cook at all but are great at logistics and make sure there's enough napkins for everyone; some people come just to enjoy the food, because that's what the party is for. and if I, as this enthusiast chef who made something from my heart for this reason alone, learned after the fact that a bunch of people got together in the parking lot to rave about my dish but no one of them had ever bothered to tell me while I sat alone at my table all night, occasionally seeing people come by to pick up a plate but never saying anything to me -- of course that would bother me, because I am not otherwise profiting off the labor I put in. this is not a bid to be paid, because if someone WERE to say "hey, great cake!! here's five bucks for a slice" i would say no, friend, that is not the point and give them the money back. i'm not trying to Get Mine. I am in it to see the look on your face. I'm in it so you can tell me what about it moved you, so that I can say back what moved me to make it in the first place. so we can TALK about it.

because what happened in the first place is this: one time I had a cake whose sweetness, richness, flavor, intensity, and composition moved me so much that I *taught myself to bake.* so I could see how much vanilla and sugar was too much, so I could learn how to make things rise instead of fall flat, so I could even better appreciate the original cake by seeing for myself the effort and talent and inspiration that goes into making one even half as good.

learning to do so is a satisfying accomplishment in and of itself, yes.

but I also did it because at the end of the day we should EAT the cake. and it's a lonely thing, to eat alone when a meal was always designed and intended to be shared.

so, to answer your last question: i'm not surprised, i'm just sad. because somehow two things that were never meant to be seen as the same have been labeled "content," and thus identical. and it diminishes both the things that ARE intended to be paid for AND the things that are not, because it removes any sense of intimacy or meaning from the work.

i hope you know i'm not mad at you for asking. but i'm frustrated we've come to live in a world where the question needs to be asked, because the answers are no longer intuitively obvious because we're so siloed.

[zethdoesart]

"what's the worst thing you can do as an artist" is not "shade with black" or "not use references" or whatever the worst thing you can do as an artist is hate yourself. and that includes the person you used to be

[zethdoesart]

Because Catholicism and by extension Christianity are so big and normal I don't think a lot of people consider how strange the Vatican is just conceptually. Like yeah in the capital of a long-dead empire there's an opulent temple district that acts as it's own sovereign nation, still speaking the dead language of that empire for their rituals, ruled by a prophet-king chosen by a secret conclave of the high priesthood. Yeah his followers eat a lot of fish in the spring.

[zethdoesart]

[zethdoesart]

Smiley Pride, Bells Hells! 🌈🏳️‍⚧️

[zethdoesart]

Happy Pride critty role friends I want to talk about Laudna gender.

Is this a weird choice? I don’t know. I have a lot of feelings about her approach to gender that feel clear in my heart, but I haven’t been able to fully voice them outside of rabid growling in my friend’s dm’s so here we go.

Is she cis? No. But also yes. I think Matilda Bradbury was a cis woman when she died, but Laudna is something different. And I think she feels like she doesn’t quite meet the criteria for woman, the same way she doesn’t quite meet the criteria for person in the world of Exandria. When she was confronted with an angry mob in What Doesn’t Break, and Imogen tells the mob “she’s not a thing” Laudna agrees simply with “I’m a Laudna.”

Laudna’s gender is very based in performance. She wants to dress like a lady, she wants to go to fancy balls and be seen as one. There was of course the time that Orym asked her to disguise herself in white robes and she was very uncomfortable, but there was also that night when Fearne switched everyone’s clothes as a prank, and while the rest of the group laughed about it, even though Laudna didn’t say anything, Marisha acted deeply uncomfortable, holding herself like she had some core part of herself stolen.

Laudna wants to be beautiful. She worries over her smell (with Orym growing flowers on her on the travel to the hartmoore, Deni$e with the makeup outside that small town, asking Imogen if she still smelled after the raven queen tied their souls together) and when she is feeling at her worst, she’s disparaging of her looks. (It doesn’t show in the transcript but I know when they reunited after the solstice, Fearne stumbled her way into saying maybe we can put lipstick on a pig and get the Issylra group new outfits too so they can feel a little better and Laudna grumbled that the pig would look better than her.)

When she meets powerful women, she seems in awe, and when she dares to speak to them, she starts with calling them beautiful. (meeting Vex and Kiki. Also her view on the women in the woods in What Doesn’t Break, and the paladin were all admiring) And the most powerful woman in Laudna’s life, the one with her thumb on Laudna’s brain, has divided the world neatly into Maidens or Monsters. Laudna knows which one of those she is.

She’s not the cis plus that comes with interrogating gender binaries. She has a blunt understanding of gender and knows that she does not meet the criteria. She’s cis minus, and she knows she’s missing the pieces needed to construct a whole woman.

What I’m trying to say here is, there’s a trans story that can’t happen outside of the fantasy genre. (I love these.) A woman who isn’t quite, who had to build herself out of disparate pieces, and she has so few of them that even the wrong clothes might break the careful balance she made. And best of all, over the course of campaign three, she was loved by her friends, accepted by them even when she got ugly. She was desired, a happy ending was made for her, and I think, given time, she’ll find an understanding of gender that includes her.

Laudna spent a long time as a monster, but I think, removed from the societal pressures to fit in, Laudna would be happy with she/it pronouns. And like maybe down the line old lady Laudna is happy to be defined more like a creature but i don't know for sure because 30 years is a long time to build trauma. It’s nice to think about.

I’m old. When I was young, “it” was a cudgel wielded against women who didn’t conform well enough. I mean, it still is, but man the ninties and early aughts were fucking Rough for queers. (It’s bad now, too, friends, and I’m sorry. We march on.) In my non fanfic writing, I’ve been writing characters that use it pronouns, and giving focus to stories for it/shes has felt… well it’s felt good. I love a monster story, and I really love when the monster gets to be a hero.

Laudna’s gender is important to me. Her gender might boil down simply to “I’m a Laudna” and hell, name/name’s a very valid gender. But yeah. It felt very good to watch a monstrous woman, who doesn’t always fit her gender, who’s afraid sometimes of fucking it up get to be the love interest, and the hero with the hail-mary spells, and a part of a community that loves her.

Happy Pride.

[zethdoesart]

Bells Hells in Daggerheart

Just a little master post for anyone who wants to find all of my card spreads for them.

Ashton

Fearne

Chetney

Orym

Laudna

Braius

Imogen

Dorian

Fresh Cut Grass

It was a very interesting exercise to convert Bells Hells from D&D 5e to Daggerheart. And honestly, I'd be curious to hear other people's takes on the builds and/or how they'd do it. Or even other people building Vox Machina or the Mighty Nein in Daggerheart.

But yeah. This was a fun little exercise.

[zethdoesart]

Happy Pride Month!

Faust is back for the 5th time! If you want to use the flag of your choice as an avatar, they're under the cut. They're free to use as long as it's for personal use only.

[zethdoesart]

I thought I might share one of my new tattoos. A couple years ago, a dear friend and I coined the term “fish bag moment”

A fish bag moment might be sitting all alone in an empty new apartment after coming out and upending your life, or starting a new job in a brand new line of work because it’s closer to your dreams

It’s what happens when you take a leap of faith or make a hard decision for yourself, when the future is so hard to visualize and everything feels scary. You’re just a fish in a bag and you can’t see where you’re going

But you’re on your way to a bigger aquarium

[zethdoesart]

Do we fuck with butches with slow and chill hobbies? Butches that draw and make art? Butches that cook? Butches that don't love working out? Butches that crochet? Academic butches? Butches that read a lot? Butches that prefer to stay indoors? Introverted butches? Shy butches?

Do y'all fw that?

[zethdoesart]

a bad dream?

[zethdoesart]

Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner's roadblock to art isn't even technical skill it's frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach's capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That's how you build on the technical skill. Throw that "won't even start because I'm afraid it won't be perfect" shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck.

[zethdoesart]

[zethdoesart]

lol at youtube that's kind of funny I wonder what song they picked—

ld;fkaslfklasf;lalds yes the one where the dramatic bisexual fishes for a kiss from her lesbian lover, of course, silly me

[zethdoesart]

a peaceful repose 🍃