ariadne-mouse - Tumblr blog

[ariadne-mouse]

[ariadne-mouse]

sigh.... everybody do the wenis 🫳🤜 the wenis is a dance ✊🔄 everybody is a genius 🫵 🫵 who knows it in advance 🦵👟

[ariadne-mouse]

With the increasing distortion effects this Game Changer feels a bit like I'm descending into madness

[ariadne-mouse]

help me Game Changer On Every Other Monday, you're my only hope

[ariadne-mouse]

It frightens and discourages me how pervasive "tribal" stereotypes and imagery are in the fantasy and adventure genres.

It's all over the place in classic literature. Crack open a Jules Verne novel and you're likely to find caricatures of brown people and cultures, even when the characters are sympathetic to the plight of the colonized peoples - incidentally, this is the biggest reason I can't recommend 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to everyone, despite Captain Nemo being one of my favorite fictional characters of all time.

You can't escape it in modern cinema, either. You'll see white heroes venturing bravely into jungles and tombs to steal from natives who don't know how to use their resources "properly." You'll see them strung up in traps, riddled with sleeping darts, forced to flee and fight their way out. Hell, Pirates of the Caribbean, a remarkably inclusive franchise in many other ways, had an extended sequence of the white heroes escaping from a cannibal civilization in the second film.

And when fantasy RPGs want a humanoid enemy, the "bloodthirsty natives" are the first stock trope they jump to. World of Warcraft is one of the most egregious examples, with the trolls - blatant racist caricatures with faux-voodoo beliefs, cannibalistic diets, Jamaican accents, and a history of being killed in droves by (white) elves and humans - being raided and slaughtered in nearly every expansion.

It doesn't matter how vibrant and distinctive the real-world indigenous, Polynesian, Caribbean, and African cultures are. It doesn't matter how much potential these real civilizations offer for complex and sympathetic characterization. Anything that doesn't make sense to the white western mind is shoved under the same "savage" umbrella. They're different. They're strange. They're scary. They have to be escaped, subjugated, eliminated, ogled at from the safety of a museum.

Modern writers, directors, and developers don't even seem to realize how horrifying it is to present the indigenous inhabitants of a place as "obstacles" for non-native protagonists to overcome. "It's not racist," they say, "because these people aren't really people, you see." And if you dare to point out anything that hurts or offends you as a descendant of the bastardized culture, you're accused of being the real racist: "These aren't humans! They're monsters! Are you saying that these real societies are just like those disgusting monsters?"

No, they're not monsters. But you chose to design them as monsters, just as invaders have done for hundreds of years. Why would you do that? Why can you recognize any other caricature as evil and cruel, but not this?

This is how deep colonialism runs.

[ariadne-mouse]

Campaign 3, Episode 92: “Broken Roads”

[ariadne-mouse]

Alert: this is a very stupid post and not to be taken seriously.

So when it was revealed the first attack on Keyleth was Ludinus trying to test drawing out Vax, folks were pointing out that Ludinus would have had to stay up to date on Vox Machina romances in order to have the information to make that plan, which is very funny. I posit an additional hypothetical: if the preliminary attack had accidentally been fatal for Keyleth herself (I say accidentally because Ludinus would want to wait to execute the plan in full later, so wouldn't have killed her then) then Ludinus would have lost his bait and would have to figure out another way to draw out Vax.

And you know what that means. Matchmaking. Get the sad bird man to fall in love again so he can threaten the new person. Ludinus using every iota of his skill in manipulation and patience and influencing of events to set up Situations, and he needs it because as a celestial champion Vax is not just walking around into your average coffee shop. He becomes the king of tropes. He reads trash romance to get ideas and runs into Caleb at a naughty book store in Rexxentrum and it's very awkward for both of them. With centuries of experience and villainy, HOW has it come to this-

[ariadne-mouse]

Something about how Aeor, on the eve of the Calamity, was planning on just... straight up testing a weapon on another city with no apparent provocation, and then a millennium later the Vanguard kills six people on a test run and specifically makes it impossible to resurrect them for no apparent reason

[ariadne-mouse]

Orym is struggling. ❤️‍🩹

[ariadne-mouse]

aimee casting darkness and when aabria asks who can see through magical darkness she waits a couple seconds for everyone to realize They Can't before raising her hand to say "i do :)"

[ariadne-mouse]

people who don't follow chess I promise this post is really funny

[ariadne-mouse]

"And he lets go and drifts out to the front of the grove, and is gone."

[ariadne-mouse]

Bothering the beast

[ariadne-mouse]

I was looking through some older CR art I've done, and was reminded of a jesties piece I did. I love it so very much and may as well put it here on Tumblr too for yall <3 Jester and Essek's friendship makes my heart mushy and means the world to me.

[ariadne-mouse]

the stakes are realer now than ever

and this loss cannot be in vain.

c3e91

[ariadne-mouse]

you know, it really does make perfect sense in retrospect why ludinus was not only okay with trent's volstrucker program, but also admitted to finding it useful for his own means. when imogen asked liliana how ruidusborn are awakened (exalted, presumably, for the purpose of being a potential vessel for predathos), liliana responded, "through turmoil. and training."

that's....not very different at all from how trent created the volstrucker. the only real difference is that ludinus' exalted ruidusborn are for an even worse, potentially world-ending purpose

[ariadne-mouse]

how mortifying does it feel to be Seen, homeboi essek