boct-kimerakal

[boct-kimerakal]

of obsolete orisons & persistent prayer

the end is the beginning or whatever cliché nonsense...

i’ve been twirling a glass (an idea) - but beginning another project seems incredibly ill-advised. i should perhaps focus the themes i’ve been thinking about on my active lore worlds instead. BUT! i’ll describe the concept anyways, because i may want to come back to it... i’m a long-suffering little prick in an ivory tower wasting it all away musing silly fiction. I KNOW!

i was toying with the idea of using the setting of obsolete orisons to stage a silly little post-apocalypse, exploration-into-the-world-before type of story. which is one of perpetual my weaknesses when it comes to media i like - yet i never really find such a story with as much appeal to me as i think the setting could give...

divorced from the existing characters & plotline, this would focus on humanity. maybe the other characters might make cameos (as opposed to being acknowledged but not, well, interacted with!) i’m not entirely sure about it though! given most of the present characters exists as reflective of my headspace or as artsy little depictions of things in my life, which is silly..

but like! post-apocalypse sci-fi aaand ancient deities & shrines seems FUN TO THINK ABOUT! but also [loose hand wave motion here] on a meta level the whole point of OOO is that.. the fact gods “exist” is some kind of irony? that these concepts have lore, personality & avatars is like. the ugly & sardonic joke of an irreligious person, who yet still engages with the culture - me! (ME, ME, ME! how selfish...)

and the worshipping populace, while relevant, is for the most part not given any faces in the plot. besides the whale priestess & stormherald, both of whom are supposed to be an attack on ezya-niru / force the concept of a god into a reconciliation with humanity & confront interpretation bias - affirmatively finding self & demystifying itself in the process, losing claim to divinity. the sole exception would be placidity, but his character is an inquiry into itself (and was spawned for character development with others), & was left in here because i had no other place to put him.

so is my want to create this plotline.. born just out of the aesthetics of it? if so, then i don’t think it has much value and i don’t think i should go through with it because of obsolete orisons is, too, intended as a ANALYSIS of that - aestheticism which is fine and nice until you disregard too much context for visual appeal, & how it can bleed into exoticism and, i suppose in this case, become orientalist-enabling? since OOO’s visuals very much find their root in the gazillion cultures of south / southeast / east asia since it was meant to reflect my surroundings (but not be representative of).. which is so funny. that i always, personally, regard OOO in the eyes of the very thing i fear! how dumb! of course, i’m doing all this within my own understanding of the world & those terms and i could be. very easily. rebuked! another opportunity for me to bring up that i failed school and have no formal education RAAAAH!! fire emoji. and even if i didn’t, i’m kind of comically narrow-sighted & -minded.

then.. again.. oh, the plotline could be a good foil (is that the right word?) for OOO as it is. OOO is ANCHORED in myself, this little project would be the exact opposite, and would be an attempt for me to make something within the world with nothing to do with me. though it’s typical to my story-making process, it is more poignant here, in the context of OOO. (& of course, that sort of perfection remains in theory, in practice that’s not possible since i’m the creator) - BUT LIKE! an attempt to have a cast, rooted in the world, on the praying side of prayer. which oh! the irony! i could play with the pursuit of permanence & certainty, create characters of faith and of collectives and of societies, as opposed to the lonesome & ever-uncertain, ephemeral spectator ezya-niru is, and the monsters & the divine beings (which are one in the same) that exist on the fringes the rest of the current cast is. OOO would remain the idea of the world at large, and this would contradict it as the actual focused observation of a scattering few of characters and their lives. which isn’t revolutionary or anything, this is just my MY STUPID COUNTERPOINT! but it’d be this weird imperfect balance so... it seems fun.

AND LIKE, and here we have a brief aside, i’ve always FELT - and this is comical - closer to my maternal grandmother in religion (buddhism + taoist pantheon) than to my father & his family (goan-cultured roman catholic). which makes close to no sense, if you know me. i don’t even know who she is a devotee to or what she seems to pray about, have no grasp of the lunar calendar, can’t understand the shrine. i don’t know most of what she knows! so i say this in a way that should... invoke judgement, scrutiny, the possibility that i level her beliefs to aesthetics. perhaps i just dislike organisation.

he called her religious values backwards once and i had to roll my eyes and bite my tongue. he also called her ill-informed, as she knew not the full doctrine, but i don’t think that’s the point? since it’s both what raised her and community, to her! at least from what she does about it & says to me, the latter of which is not in as large amounts since.. language barriers & my own obstinance. he then described his understanding of her religion to me, only for him to kind of.. actually... be not totally correct?

some key points he got right, that the theology was blended, but he kind of maybe? blatantly ignored important context, like her origins & upbringing, and the mechanics of folk religion. not to mention his own religion, and how he inherited it... and ALSO! he also believes, of course, in a different value system and cosmology so him finding fault in hers, i can’t as much criticise, since he doesn’t hate or harm her for it. BUUUT! he easily dismissed it as lesser (by what measure, he didn’t exactly say, but he is dismissive of her intelligence as a result & in general finds believers of other religions ill-informed or, and i say this with little to no clear definition, unsophisticated?) compared to his more organised religion! which i feel might mean he awards it less value & sees it as having no competition to his beliefs, so he doesn’t think it’s worth researching? from what i’ve seen, he kind of outright disregards most things like it? odd! (that fed the long-ongoing disillusionment process - of me half-believing he knew it all. which oh! how silly!) i have an opinion i can’t put into words, and maybe it’s obvious but i feel like it’s a big concept (IN MY MIND AT LEAST! I’M SILLY & STUPID!) with words like indicative or whatever.

I SUPPOSE.. all that isn’t actually relevant. ehrm! but i guess i can say the exposition sort of sets up my background! i love observing religion & religious community, & what constitutes as religious, it’s such a fascinating aspect of culture. (but ULTIMATELY. i struggle a lot with remembering, and am totally lazy about actual research! it’s like a profound but passing interest) but it’s something i’ve danced with aspects of through of obsolete orisons, mostly with core concepts & what i call “human uniqueness” (because i keep forgetting the term. it’s ironic but also not ironic! i’ll explain one day!) but OOO as it is now is meant to be more. internal. i focus on religion in theory & practice a lot more in the waiting world and shifters. tWW as a playground for structures, macro-level progression, cultural integration & blah! & shifters more as a personal repository for real-world religions & religious cultures, whiiiich reminds me i have to look into sikhism.

WHICH UH. WHAT A TANGENT TO GO ON HUH! but basically i am SO CONFLICTED over a stupid thing like this.. make-believe entertainment project. maybe i’ll just make concepts for it / redesign characters into it, and if it doesn’t work, i just move on and waste it. i have free time anyways!

i guess this post just really. shows off. that i am LOST IN MY EMPTY HEAD!! ENTRENCHED IN MY BIAAAASES. save me from my mind and tear me from the flesh, tear from which my very concept is born and let me lose all definition and let me FAAADE into EVERYTHIIIING to the affect i am NOOOOTHING. [this is playful/ironic i PROMISE you i got over this when i turned 17!!! please don’t send me back to brain jail!!!]

[boct-kimerakal]

right! they’re just paper kites!

me when the heron & the hummingbird.

contemplating on furthering my education lately (well, when am i not) but it’s going TERRIBLY as usual because i am the laziest human person alive. also. gripping the floor. i don’t have the necessary qualifications because i couldn’t even make it into ITE. fire emoji. learning my paternal family’s recent history (3 generations up) got me massively side-tracked though and i am now pondering both their stupid school life as well as considering abyasa’s & aguilar’s family histories and. gripping my own shoulders. two words. INHERITANCE DISPUTE.

abyasa’s company (and it’s fortune) and her relationship with her siblings has been up in the air / messed with at random for far too long. i think i need to arrow in on it a bit or i’ll get nowhere (as i do with.. most other things) literally no one expected the company to go to her and for the most part i think her older brother is just extremely relieved it wasn’t him. he & abyasa have this light bond over the fact neither liked the cards they were dealt - but while abyasa was busy drowning herself in thick & honeyed guilt, he was probably out & about actually doing things that made it pretty obvious to his father the company wasnt going to go to him. with fadilah’s striking independence and her start-up, he never considered her either which leaves me with. abyasa and the younger brother i keep CONSIDERING adding to the family dynamic. BUT IT’D BE SO CLICHÉ THOUGH. which puts me off from the idea because it’s a story so easily told it practically writes itself and while i actually want to challenge myself, i don’t think i could tell it in any unique way.

anyways. the idea here is that when her paternal grandfather passes, everyone starts a riot because abyasa is named as an inheritor of assets AGAIN. i just haven’t decided WHAT KIND OF ASSETS. I’M THINKING. THAT MOST PROMINENT. AMONG THEM. IS A PROPERTY WITH SIGNIFICANT MEANING TO THE FAMILY. with the tragedy here being that abyasa is this shameless disavower of tradition and family values (varying perceptions, some that she’s money-minded, others that she hates the family, others that she unfairly exalts western values etc!) and everyone being convinced it was a mistake. whatever, i’ll figure it out.. i don’t think i dare to struggle reading through property laws, owch... no way...

buuut. if i go through with this. definitely some restless uncles & aunts out & about. i’m also thinking about all the stupid slights between relatives, who didn’t attend whose weddings, who showed up during Hari Raya Puasa. considering also that, instead of a brother, she had a cousin who was closer to her father but they didn’t get it because... well, cousin, duh? it’s also important to consider exactly how insanely tentative abyasa’s extended family is around her because they’re muslim and she ISN’T. the only person who actively interacts with her at present would be fadilah, who really does it despite herself.. though she is partly convinced she can bring abyasa back. the rest speak about her with immense hesitation since by right she is disowned by them, and they would much rather fully ignore her! but that’s hard to do since she owns KERIS global...

on aguilar’s end. well, being engaged / legally married to abyasa is a problem in his own family SIGH! but it’s something i’ve been procrastinating on thinking about because i’m so repetitive. again with the money. i briefly thought up how that’d strain his relationship with some of his siblings and i’m still like 50/50 on how his mother reacted to the news. i’m ALSOOOO much less immersed in aguilar’s background than i should be, despite having MANY, MANY ideas about it - they’re just so Uncertain because his context is a lot less close to home than, say, abyasa’s? and it something i’m trying to coax myself out of via research. i’ve also been using him a lot more as an outlet for sociological & anthropological studies HAHAHA... ha... even if his expertise is broadly in archeology and - tentatively - studies of religion across central & south america (this may change) + most importantly, the vague study of the impacts of emissaries through human history (which is understudied but legit & relevant in the alt. earth of shifters LAWL)

was tempted to write up what aguilar’s scholarship application essays could have potentially looked like earlier in the month but i don’t have the necessary intelligence... or strength of mind... for that. katalyst i’m shaking my fist at you specifically. your 5 billion essays made me ponder this so much. what is wrong with you by the way. you freak of nature. actually this reminds me! i’ll probably map out abyasa’s & aguilar’s speech patterns soon (like words they favour, speed & tone etc) there was something else i was going to write but i forgot it 🤍 bless 🤍 shoo boct, go do something else

[boct-kimerakal]

i SUPPOSE it goes on (my love)

most delightfully so.. the bumbling & egocentric fool rambles on!

SIIIGH. read through my posts, then checked through my toyhouse. to! assess my standing! since! i’m trying to refocus on my education and myself, but i feel COMPELLED to get my storytelling hobby in order, because little bits & pieces of who i am are ingrained in these little guys.

& i’ve noticed something? over the course of 2024, i’ve come to realise i’ve lost grasp on the character creation and setting experimentation process. it used to eat me alive, it used to BE me. i was that one guy, with colour and concept and i ENRAPTURED. NOW? most of my newer characters feel boring, and the plots i jam them through even more so! all so sluggish, dragging you along. they don’t feel ALIVE or REAL! i’ve always been a mile-a-minute with stories and colour and characters, so i know how to handle variety of projects at once without excessive repetition, and actually! not letting up is part of how they’ve always felt fresh. BUT I’VE SLOWED DOWN AND BECOME BORING! AT THE SAME TIME.

slowing down comes from a place of trying to get a grip on myself, i think. but even then i’m still slow & ugly when it comes to education, especially self-directed learning. still! trying to split that focus has slowed down this.. once-upon-a-time, all-consuming maladjustment.. in a way that has been pretty jarring for me.

AAADDITIONALLY? my character creation process has long relied on bouncing off others, be it 1-to-1 or larger communities ie. closed species. AAAAND. independent character creation is.. not as fulfilling to me? i think it’s a lack of being surprised, lack of originality from within myself. i seek exciting & new insights, differing opinions, variety in expertise & experience - that which i only really find in OTHERS. i’m relying more now on observation of the world around me (which, while i used to do it a little less, still i used to do it too!) than really engaging with other character-creators... and ISSUE: i’ve discovered it’s infinitely more fulfilling for me to observe people! and listen to the their stories they tell about themselves! and the people around them! than to create characters emulating that, because I did not hear or experience as much before. BUUT my silly characters help me REMEMBER things, and developing keeps me centred because background projects help me focus.. and keep me entertained.. since i break in the absence of something to ponder, but also some days might need it to be easier than goings-on in the world - so making stuff up! (which is why i’m making this stupid dissection at all!) dual blades though - because now there’s more things to remember than there are ways for me, isolated & individual, to create compelling characters. and i know it’s not necessary or even possible to scoop the world into a bottle, but i feel antsy knowing my characters are LACKING.

AND.. the way i develop characters and the little bits of the “why-“ & “for who-“ have changed drastically since i clawed my way out of closed species system hell too? that period had me stuck in a mode of thinking i both loved & detested, especially unto lore-worlds. AS beautiful and layered and fluid as my characters from that period WERE… and how they WERE SO ARTFULLY & DELIGHTFULLY built upon / were woven into structures that weren’t mine, i feeel? like? i got too ravenous with it. this hunger to expand, expand, expand..! WHICH was usually engaged with by creators, from what i remember! but that made me uber reliant on said engagement. fostering it in myself is difficult, and the waiting world is the utmost evidence of that. now of course, i don’t really engage with anyone to the point of overlapping character development interests! no one really fulfils the list of criteria because it comes from a very personal, rather too-specific place! & i reflect that, even before i cut off all-but-one contact, i was driving myself crazy with lack of this specific engagement, so said criteria is not new.

besides that! there was also, perhaps even more critically, the episodic story-development method. for projects like EoT or Curiosity! went from built to fit into books to fit into TV shows, basically whatever was the primary mode of media i’d be consuming. this one i think i’m still actively trying to break from, since my silly projects aren’t meant to be linearly told, entertaining, educational or moral or.. whatever else i’m forgetting to mention here. i might lean into different modes of story-telling, though, to format the content or plotline for more story-like projects! but i won’t hold myself to it. (eg. TTRPG-session format for T2T, Curiosity! continuing with it’s hypothetical TV show format - in contrast to, say, the waiting world & it just continuing as a sandbox) this paragraph actually isn’t super new to me, it’s something i’ve been doing for ages already. i’ve always employed different formatting, i think i’ve just become lazy with creating plotlines in more open worlds without an “episodic” quality.

i’ve also? gotten hideously protective of what characters i am proud of. to the point i don’t want to describe them to strangers AT ALL, and parading them around or boosting viewership is terrifying! so what i’m saying is i’m a coward... yea... & i lose a lot of the helpful criticism that could come from scrutiny of my “work” as a result. as much as i write about abyasa & aguilar, a bulk of their lore - or even uncertain concepts within it - feels too personal & tedious & controversial for me to want to share. there is also way too much context, that i feel so pressured to bring up, then explain, when describing my characters! am i crazy, boct? be it the context they exist in (eg. abyasa & indonesian nationalism & fractured identity), the context they were created in (eg. ské/sky & lise/lizzie and my kid self dealing with being mixed, but doing so while elevating one side over the other) or the context of the world (eg. the waiting world and it’s explicit purpose of being something same-but-different / no cultural basis in reality but having ideology similar only as happenstance, rooted in the context of the world) or.. whatever else there is. oh it’s silly but i feel like this part, specifically, is so.. toxically PRETENTIOUS.

STILL! upon sharing my characters, i realise i consistently feel pressured to tailor them to be well-received - meaning the compulsion to strip them of their identity half the time! which is what i used to do! i did it to MYSELF! when we even LOOK at esra - what does their characterisation scream to us, boct? PRETENCE! moving on though, the second someone looks at my characters i get so skittish, i need to swathe them in bubblewrap. it might have to do with the level of detail i BELIEVE i consider for them? every single original character i enjoy has unsanitary aspects, that aren’t played up for villainy or the sake of a crucial moral dilemma in the story, but that also aren’t harmless, enjoyable or typically compelling! they most simply exist as components of the character! but it’s weird to have telajan be racist, or have a whole bunch of characters to be things like ignorant in one-million-other-ways, and tell people about them + expect them to engage with them - without making that point about them into a great evil within the story, or their weakness, or something they eventually overcome with the “main plot” of the course of their lives... even if again! i’m not even framing these into stories! crying into my arms. not to mention, my own ignorance! oh.. pipe down, brain demons.. (social deviance theories & normative relativity please don’t drown me!) i’m lost in “what might be social deviance to me / to you differs” etc., & context & stuff like that & media (il)literacy.. there’s too much to consider..

which.. IS STUPID! AND DEFEATS THE POINT OF STORYTELLING! & I’M NOT EVEN A STORYTELLER! THESE STORIES ARE FOR MY OWN AMUSEMENT! TOLD TO THE MIRROR! CHALLENGES TO MYSELF! head in hands. no really, what was the point of this entire dissection? CIRCLE BACK: there is so much colour and sparkles in life and i feel like i kill it with my stories nowadays, as opposed to before, when my stories would make the colour bleed into my life & the sparkles shriek in my ears.

i look back on projects like harrow’s thread from when i was 15 - which had so much less consideration! but still somehow feel alive to me, and i wonder if i’ve just become even worse of a useless over-thinker? but then i spin shifters around in my head and it’s like! no! i haven’t! different things are just important to me now, things that also don’t invalidate the importance of past projects because i recognise what about them mattered (character-interaction in harrow’s thread, themes of generational expectations, justice & responsibility! / or the outpost & my first attempt at tackling/understanding mental health stigmas! / or even the first iteration of shifters & family + shoddily constructed political intrigue! / or healthy but norm-defying relationships - which is better defined as socially divergent? maybe? - in the end of times!) during the time i made them! but there’s also.. TOO MUCH OF IT NOW! I KEEP WANTING TO LEARN & RE-CREATE MORE! and instead of being overwhelmed, i just KEEP FAILING EVEN THOUGH I HAVE MORE MATERIAL TO WORK WITH! and i’ve been doing LESS CONSTRUCTIVE THINKING! [my love it kills me slowly - slowly! i could! die! ... silk by wolf alice. you’re so akan-inra & ezya-niru core...]

so have i gotten bored - or just boring?

[boct-kimerakal]

i’ve been struck by AoWSLaA

arrgh. visiting the old house has BLESSED me with vision.

falling to my knees. gripping the floor. i want - no! Need! - to make stories and they will most certainly be terribly-made but i must make them! OH! IT’S COME BACK TO ME! THE FLOW TO FEED THIS TERRIBLE NEED I HAVE TO SPIN CHARACTERS! SO MANY FASCINATING PEOPLE & LIVES THAT I MUST CAPTURE IN THIS LITTLE BOTTLE OF FICTION! i think i’ve just found me way out of a funk and have become, again, gripped with the voracious desire to learn & to be lately - and i need to make characters again to really hone my learning & memorising abilities.

coughs & coughs & explodes. AoWSLaA is a story. a story with a start and an end! i really need to delve into siblinghood with this one, for whatever reason it feels so deeply necessary to do so. i found old sketches of lise/lizzie & ské/sky and something HIT me, something UNRAVELLED. they are siblings and it hurts them so deeply that they cannot connect with each other at all despite DESPERATELY wanting to. lise chose to live so that ské would have someone to look up to, ské looks up to lise so much that lise is completely unapproachable.

OH! i’m rethinking the “vague setting” concept, at least how i pitched it to myself in earlier iterations (not written here but i know what i’m talking about)! i’m thinking a lot also about the cultures of this AoWSLaA in parallel to reality, and for whatever reason how that affects humour and social commentary within the story. keeping the setting vague in the way i previously intended, i realise, plays into a cultural hegemony & i’m not super sure i want to skew the story & how it’s understood and who it’s understood by in one way BECAUSE the audience is - while imaginary, since my stories are for me - something i want to make vague. but given the story is told in english purely because it’s the only language i speak, i don’t know what to do about this. SIGH. god forbid i don’t overthink something completely. i have to think more about translation of concepts. i could build a vague structure of societies & societal norms in the scope of the world to inform setting and what constitutes as deviance, & if i do this i really have to not go in-depth while ESTABLISHING A READABLE IDEA OF NORMS? alien, but not impossible to understand the views & engage with them. the jokes & metaphors have to have root in the world itself and that’s so stupidly funny.

also - aviator’s & west’s consistently neutrality in every iteration of this story since i was the beautiful age of NINE, bugs me massively. every time i try to re-write this - one thing is consistent - they have almost no opinions about each other and hardly interact. at least, in my memory... when i was younger, it was mostly the case of aviator being “token goofy silly boy love interest” which was cute & fun when i was little but! it made them cardboard. & now they’ve. very much been grown out of that. but one thing is that they’re just friendly with west and west hardly seems to regard them at all. so now i’m contemplating playing up that neutrality, and making myself some fun out of actually exploring it. neutrality between people in long-existing friend groups FASCINATES me and i want to see if i can make them more interesting to me by doing this. a sense of familiarity without much sense of connection or care, or maybe even little “chemistry,” or maybe high “chemistry” juxtaposed against little to no actual deep care for each other.

also! i must remember rose. i can’t find a single drawing of rose but rose was important.

[boct-kimerakal]

notes notes notes!

think think think - then don’t!

scattered notes / half thoughts / to-dos. there was more i’ll ponder it later on. later on, at some point. somewhen.

abyasa does not ever deal with The Thing and i find it so funny. oh to give her a problem that she makes, in her mind, into one of the greatest battles of her life - and for her to just literally never deal with it, until the day she dies. is so funny to me. she’s just like oh let’s just ignore the writhing all-consuming heron in the back of my mind. thanks okay bye. oh hummingbird is definitely concerned about it and aware of it. sorry my beautiful heron you have to deal with THE CRISIS THAT IS BEING A MIND IN FLESH!

i just think aly going through the horrors of corporate espionage with two teenagers and some dude is really funny. especially considering the fact aly probably hates corporations and actually most organised institutions but in a very “this is so over-complicated way!” oh my god would aly be an anarchist if they knew what that was? they genuinely don’t think much ever so it’d be a very loose and surface-level understanding of the concept though.

akan-inra, ezya-niru, the bog bodies by rabbitology. that’s the thought.

okay i’ve been thinking (in the artsy abstract terrible way i do) about science communication and education lately and i am. staring directly at my ocs! staring directly at my ocs! in a way that makes me so unwell! shifters-wise, i am so entertaining giving telajan an education-oriented social media account and then making it plot-relevant. for the waiting world (because i am all over the place, presently. what’s it like to have your mind jumping back and forth like a haywire elevator through a skyscraper! well, this...), it’s. oh. trick and education privilege is something i think of a lot. which by the way! exists in contrast to hawk and how hawk was educated (very oversimplified but. communal, accessible but lacking in expertise) and that makes me ponder all the so-very-many different educational systems in TWW. oh my god. falls to my knees. knowledge. why am i stupid. this could be so fun to describe.

i’ve actually betrayed myself and continued to think about trickhawkrex (harbinger) and i hate to say it, but i’m either still extremely secretly (as in - stressor unknown to me) stressed OR i actually like thinking about them. or both! anyways. trick had top surgery for a flat chest because she’s cool like that, rex has a girlfriend who actually hangs out with them sometimes and hawks lost her tooth when she met trick & rex and still refuses to get it replaced, just to because she thinks the gap is cool.

i think it’d be Uber Funny if harbinger hawk killed a sphinx and i can’t really explain this one. bye.

SURAKSHA EP BY PINKSHIFT. MIGHT ALSO TO BE BLAME FOR THE MENTAL ILLNESS. their friendship is so profound and devoted (even if they totally suck at the start) and it makes me sob on floor crying. the songs from the EP can totally be applied to self-identity versus their surrounding society + upbringing in it versus cultural heritage. probably. i’ll word this in a clever way when i’m not pointing at them all and screaming INHERITED GUILT. me when i stare at this three and wonder to each what the word home means. oh, trick would be all careful and deliberate and artful about it, i love their kaleidoscopic heart. rex would feel torn in two and feel a grief.. most definitely. and hawk just wouldn’t know! btw. head in hands. to me by pinkshift is so trickhawkrex dynamic! their acceptance of each other and each other’s terrible self-complication. i reckon hawk might never have been able to forge such a strong bond with them if hawk hadn’t first totally ignored them because - if hawk had actually liked the two idiots - they’d probably have been insufferably faux with them. so oh! they’re all just incorrigible - i hate them!

quick interlude (lies) for the obnoxious parallels between fishtragedy and heronhum. which i may expand in later.. they’re divided into strictly static roles - aly, the sworn defender, lover, the follower. & sonya, the over-achiever, the loved, the leader. whereas on the other hand, for the heron and the hummingbird, they’re all that to each other? there is a freedom and a fluidity which they are afforded, that aly and sonya could never have. labels are not boxes for heronhum, but temporary descriptors, waxing and waning with time and context. but circumstances (and their own biases, this need to cling to the narrative) force aly and sonya to find their selves in clear definition. there is no room for fluidity, they don’t have the necessary time/space/resources to develop that (!!!) also needed to metion: both sonya and abyasa struggle with accepting their own humanity. both sonya and abyasa have this wariness of money. sonya clawing herself up from poverty and abyasa having it all from the start... they’re so polarising when put side by side, that the similarities they have are sooo GRNRGHR to me. they)re my false equivalence duo, who never actually interact closely within the plot but look. in a weird thematic way they do. is this too much? might retcon this.

i can’t believe there is more (there is always more) but i’ve been thinking in nebulae lately and modern religions in the waiting world and. there’s something here. an upheaval. more TBA. probably. at some point. LOOK! THESE ARE NOTES! SHUT UP! BYE! TECHNOLOGICAL AND EDUCATIONAL ADVANCEMENT AND RELIGION ARE COOL TO WATCH AS COMPLICATE EACH OTHER AND THE THINGS BUILT AROUND/WITH THEM.

chin in hand. staring straight ahead. maybe work out the dangsahana coastal language and ethnic groups a bit more. i should probably think more on social hierarchies in kodyssi though because the merchant upper class was something i like developed in a hazy dream state once... then forgot. but something about?

instead of working on the harbinger AU maybe i should fall back into working on the end of times.. i quite liked it. even if only three characters were actually developed and not cardboard. and also

finding a way to incorporate a supernova remnant into one of my five million lore worlds is hitting again. save me save me space sciences i know nothing about save me.

I SHOULD BE THINKING ABOUT WAITING WORLD BG STUFF. I REALLY JUST! KEEP PROCRASTINATING. OH MY GOD. REMINDER TO SELF. maybe do something fun like mineral deposits and segue into culturally/economically relevant jewellery or exports. or for whatever reason the functionality of storm and flood protections because yay! urban planning! on dangsahana since i’ve been too lazy to flesh out other regions besides vague handwavey maybe-retconned-soon-facts.

ART! HISTORY! TRICKHAWK! THERE WAS A THOUGHT! IT DIED! BYE!

old copy paste so i don’t lose it: but! mostly just rough concepts surrounding her youth and the socioeconomic class she grew up in and what she would be exposed to in terms of non-inherited culture. sooo environment outside her family, the type of friends she had? i’m also thinking about sonya in contrast. ah i really want to make sonya contrast her in an art and culture sense but sonya’s whole thing is her dead-centre steadfast obsession with academic greatness (instead of economic, because she scorns wealth and doesn’t believe in the feasibility of perfect meritocracy) making her disconnected from artistic cultures (inherited art + popular media art) etc. in a “waste of time” way. in her eyes expression will never equate to change? which means ABYASA has to have the art root but i. don’t know. i mean heron would have been exposed to a lot of literature and time to think but her entire thing is feeling culturally askew (isn’t sure what cultures make her up/what she identifies or agrees with) all the time and then ignoring the conversation completely. but the reason why i really want to include it is! views on art culture and it’s relationship with ideological sentiments in different socioeconomic classes with different relationships to the government and the different notions that are entertained within them.. but ALSO sonya and abyasa are from entire different countries. narrowing it down to regions that i can’t even begin to compare. but there’s no NEED for them to be perfect environmentally-controlled narrative comparisons SO LIKE WHY AM I BOTHERING WORRYING!! and like oh there’s a fascinating case study of punk culture in aceh and ohhh. cultural integration. and i want to put that into shifters somehow. but it doesn’t make any sense because even though shifters takes place in the future, it is based on Real World Things!! which means i have to look at the waiting world but looking at the waiting world requires me to make up but the borrowed concept and it’s history and how/why it was integrated into the new environment

i haaate all my thoughts, they’re like little half-ideas that plague me and taunt me because there are so many! and they dance around in little circles! and i have naught the dogged resilience nor the ability to retain information to pursue them in any greater way. anyways! i could be doing something useful with my free time but instead i fill it with little fictional characters .. how i ache for competence

[boct-kimerakal]

well i’ll be. a repost... from MEEEE? actually, this was intended as a discord message in reply... but i think i just got too into typing it over here and then i got too lazy to transcribe this over to discord. because i’m actually secretly a CAT and we’re anecdotally LAZY. PLUS. i SUUUUPPOOOOSE there’s also no pressure to ever reply if i put it on here for you to just read first! since OC yappage can tucker a guy (ghost) out... if you ever see this that is. i’ll likely NEVER do this again because of course i’ve got an air of mystery to maintain, but for now you get a little interview sesh since i’m FUELLED BY GREEN TEA.

first. can i just say actually. with a twirl of my hair even. that a society of faun goths is something so extremely whimsical i’d have never ever thunk it.

ANYWAYS. these were the thoughts i was too GROGGY to convey to you THIS MORNING!! again. the back and forth compounding of guilt insecurities captivates me and i said it earlier but i really like how you set it up, it’s so TERRIBLE AND INTRICATE. i like that it feels like light is danger but dark is safety but that that was also born from more of the danger side of associations of danger/safety. and that that gets FLIPPED by meeting finlay. in a way that is so profound it must simply mean something definitive. if that makes any sense....

AND.. MAY I.. ASK QUESTIONS TOO.. WELL I SUPPOSE THIS ISN’T A DIALOGUE! I’M ASKING THEM! you don’t have to answer them of course! they can be fun thought exercises for you. even though you’ve probably thought of them already... oh whatevs, it’s just that i’m a curious little cat and one of my faaavourite things to do is ask questions. questions as bold as:

is there a particular reason why faust has always wanted children and, if there is, does it affect how he views silas and silas’ upbringing?

and the teeth thing makes me feel something actually. by the way oh my GOSH will you come up with anything for what he could wind up looking like?

ohhh, would he fearfully imagine what he could wind up looking like based on his features at present? see the shadow of a monster in the woods and fear it could be him? pre-teen silas seems like a dreeeeaamer, who’s never had a dreeeeaam. nightmares abounding and what not..

alsoooo, faust’s position? he can’t give it up? what’s that about..

& fake antler accessories.. is that a normal faun accessory or does he need to make those / get those made... would he model them after faust’s or create his own unique shape..

if he starts to PREFER darker clothes does that mean he liked lighter clothes before.. am i reading this wrong.. or was he just neutral and then a preference came about..

i don’t want to ask tooooo many of course, so i’ll leave you to it now.. not to forgot to mention, you’re having such a LOVELY CONCEPTY TIME!! i’m not snoopin for definitive answers.. i just loooove spitballin

i SHOULD mention the way you’ve described in detail his design and your process has COMPLETELY ENAMOURED ME. i’ve never been so deliberate about the designs of my characters ever and seeing such a structured thought process on character design is SOOOO COOOL!!

sorry for being annoooooying :3 forgive me also if you DID say something and for WHATEVER REASON my reading comprehension totally failed to grasp it. i guess in that case i DO fail to COMPREHEND YOUR VAST AWESOMENESS!! unfortunately this is the fate of everyone who’s had the misfortune of knowing me. :3 hehehe. i skip n’ dance away. gootbye spectralstitions on tumblr

Part 2 of my Silas design ramble post! This one gets more into the relationship Silas has with how he looks & his relationship with another important character...

That's right bitches it's CHILD SILAS!!!!!!! Oughghhu he is so little and soft I just want to pet his big ol ears and THROW HIM AROUND. These are drawn in order of toddler -> kid -> preteen -> mid-teens. I have SOOOO many different possible ideas floating around for Silas's upbringing so I'm going to TRY to be a little vague for the sake of not writing a massive amount. But I DO know that the name of Silas' caretaker is Faustus Rose, or Faust for short. So VAGUELY what I'm thinking is that Faust wants a kid so very desperately and Silas is like an answer to his prayers. But he ends up feeling very guilty about Silas for the rest of his life, thinking the fact he wanted this kid so bad makes him to blame for how hard his life ends up being. Yeah as you will soon see, Faust has all the constitution of a wet noodle and he's kinda just pathetic about everything.

The name "Silas" means "of the forest", and I think it's a name Faust would have chosen very intentionally. Like a prayer of some kind to have him turn out like any normal commonfolk kid. And although Faust is smitten with Silas and doesn't care that he's more or less raising an imp, A LOT OF OTHER PEOPLE CARE. THEY CARE A LOT. The rest of his community has a very "what the actual hell is that burn it with fire now" attitude towards Silas. Well, once they find out about him, anyways. Faust is very secretive about him, but it becomes increasingly more difficult to hide an entire person as that person gets bigger and more curious about the world.

I dressed little baby in Silas in white because 1. my fauns historically lived in very deep dark woods with very little sunlight and dressing in dark colors meant camouflage from bad scary things. and 2. fauns love upholding traditions. So combining those two lore bits means fauns still wear all blacks and dark colors to this day and are basically not so subtly an entire civilization of goths. White and brighter colors in general are more associated with being easier to spot by dangerous things, so if I went with my idea of Silas being abandoned by his bio mother, it'd make sense that she'd have wrapped him in white to attract something to eat him.

In childhood, Silas' tail grows longer, but the appearance of his buttons makes Faust hopeful that Silas will at least grow antlers and that maybe he'll grow up to resemble fauns well enough to fit in with his peers mostly okay. It's a small bit of relief for him. Silas also comes into his very cheery, sweet, and curious nature, and so they have a couple of fun and hopeful years together. Silas does start to hear a few fucked up things firsthand, though it causes confusion more than anything as he's not quite self-aware enough to understand that he looks different from the people around him. And OOUUGHH I think when Silas first notices his buttons he gets SOOO excited and is always yapping about how excited he is to grow antlers just like Faust.

Eventually though Silas stars interacting with non-Faustus fauns out in the real world (He probably sneaks out to be real) and oh it does not go so well. By kids his own age, he's relentlessly and violently bullied, with a particular incident where his tail nearly gets cut off. And by adults he's treated like an actual freak and always assumed the worst of (picturing him trying to give someone a thing they dropped and they immediately assume he's a thief). It starts fucking him up real fast. Faust really pushes to have Silas stay indoors as much as possible and homeschools him as a part of this, but once the cat is let out of the bag so to speak they can't really fully go back to how things were.

Silas becomes uber-shy to the point of selective mutism for a few years and is pretty much guaranteed to be constantly scared and miserable unless he's with Faust which I'm sure does not establish any sort of alarming pattern of behavior at all. Faust's solution to Silas' problems is never to move away (he can't do that! he can't give up his position! *shoots him*) and it isn't to build up his self confidence. Instead he tries to help Silas find "solutions" to hide everything he doesn't like about himself and what he gets bullied for. That's most clearly seen in the fourth drawing, with the gloves and fake antler accessories (and his developing eye marks are covered by makeup). Oouughhh Like. Silas starting to freak out that some of his teeth are growing into fangs and becoming utterly hysterical over it, and Faust's response is "Oh no my sweet darling innocent baby angel this is so horrible and awful Oh this is so unfair. Don't worry my love I will teach you how to smile and talk without showing your teeth. Maybe we can even shave them down!" and OUUGHHHH THE ANGST OF "Is this happening to me because I'm a bad kid" and Faust getting speared through the heart LOL.

Silas also starts to prefer darker clothes and cloaks, partially because of the safety he feels in hiding and partially because it's more in line with typical faun fashion.

Once Silas starts noticing how different he looks from the people around him and how other people regard him, every single new development just completely shatters him and he considers the way he looks to be moral failing on his part. He's terrified of his own body -- Especially considering he has no reference point for what he's going to end up looking like. Eventually he just avoids looking at himself entirely. And Faust although very loving is also so soft and useless that he spends all those years kinda just reinforcing all of Silas's insecurities and feeling guilty without actually doing anything to help him.

Finlay coming into his life, not giving a second thought as to how he looks and describing to him a gigantic world out there full of people who look ten times weirder than he does, is the little thing that in the long run ends up turning his life around lol. Finlay is the first person he talks to outside of his own bubble and he quickly becomes obsessed with the notion of going on adventures around the world with people who are kind to him and maybe even finding other people who look like him. The reality of it ends up not being so black and white, but his belief that it IS is the only thing that keeps him going and gives him hope for the future. Even though it causes a lot more trouble down the line....

WELL. HOPE YOU ENJOYED MY SILAS RAMBLE. Writing this made me realize I have like ten thousand ideas for what his childhood could look like and I think I need to spend some time pouring over a google doc and dumping every last thought I have about him.

[boct-kimerakal]

maybe dumb!

maybe just having fun!

like many people i push a lot of stupidly useless information onto my characters, i realise, in an effort to make them feel as tangible as possible. i think i’m crazy but i want them to be people i’d see on a train. actually, sometimes i put effort into noting details while on the train just so i can go “hehe. i will give that to my weirdo character.” i want them to be too much and simultaneously boring. excitingly so. i haven’t been able to say a coherent word the whole day (totally spaced out!) and now it’s all tumbling out.. this is a shifters post. probably. since that’s where all this whimsy goes nowadays. i’m just an odd little guy, oh my!!

like! rotating giana and su xue and their dumb teenage acne. every little physical trait in the entire cast of shifters actually, moles and scars and eczema and bitten lips as a result of habit. aly’s family’s history of breast cancer and sonya consistently leaving a little point when she cuts her nails and telajan insisting on never wearing shoes i when it’s rainy. like why do i even assign them this stuff. like oh! maybe i just want them to be individual people because it’s so fascinating! even if people aren’t always interesting to me! i’m just one of those funny little people who likes conceptualising.. funny little make-believe people.. how lovely..

[boct-kimerakal]

idiots (in space)

oh, me shutting up was never an option

i’m trying to get things written down to prove to myself that i have clarity of mind to do so but oh! this is rather boring.. instead of dishing out concepts on more current projects, it might do me some good to format information for older lore. i think i’ll do a basic summary of my characters in The End (that wasn’t) and what the project looks like in progression

d’aja evantala is human & their broody but smart-talking leader, who took charge of the marooned, memory-erased crew after they woke up in a spaceship crammed full of strange starry monsters! once they clear the ship, their first task is to go to space shell and get it refuelled. from there, the story.. unfolds? the world before them just saved from certain intergalactic doom by a group of faceless heroes, they fumble into cleaning up messes said heroes left, while also creating new ones as they struggle to recover their identities! d’aja discovers she’s proficient at increasingly criminal skills and that begins to contrast her seemingly staunchly virtuous (lawful good..) nature.

“dragonfly”/ namir is a satyr who seems to have a lot of trouble controlling his anger. he is also physically aggressive and very much in denial about how much he wants to rip things apart at the start. when the crew is hired as mercenaries to steal something from a museum + space station (i call this the give us back our gods quest, TEEHEE!! the story is broken up into quests as homage to their dumb TTRPG theming), dragonfly bonds with some ancient satyrn (yes, saturn / satyr pun..) weapons technology and officially (& reluctantly) embraces his role as the party’s barbarian. he discovers also his ex-wife and the family he gracelessly left behind. unlike most of the others in the crew, he couldn’t even remember his name upon waking up and was given one by sylv.

sylv being.. a sardonic cowboy werewolf gunslinger! who refuses to transform out of their partial wolf form, they say they’re stuck as a wolf but no one is sure that’s true. unlike the others, wanted posters (with their human mug on them, no less!) clue in sylv to their forgotten past early on in the story (an infamous incident at space 7-11..) this leaves sylv to adamantly renounce and hate their past self. being particularly unforgiving of themselves, sylv fails to notice any redeemable actions in their past - outright ignoring some preeetty important details. they’re slow to the draw as a result of excessive caution and stubbornly obedient to d’aja, favouring not thinking for themselves - lest they recall anything!

then there’s kasko AKA chompers! a goblin and arguably the second-most competent member of the crew after d’aja. a magi-tech artificer with a pleasant disposition and lightly mischievous nature, but otherwise insufferably responsible. funnily enough, despite her being one of the oldest characters in this story - she’s the most in flux character-wise. right now i’d say her overarching story is her slowly discovering all the baggage she had prior, and that fracturing that put-together sense of self she has right now. nicknamed chompers once again by sylv, who was unfortunately bitten by kasko during their first encounter.

the next character is reverie, the ship’s databanks given sentient AI and a holographic body. now unfortunately extant, reverie is struggling to really define who she is and what she wants. a tech wizard (haha.. their wizard..) by default, though she’s figuring out that isn’t her primary interest.. as the ship’s data integrates into her new persona, she offers the crew of the mythos (which is tentatively their ship’s name..) insights into their pasts. sometimes grossly misinterpreted by her newfound biases. she has a giant T-REX shell, created by chompers for her to possess, should she feel like it.

AAAND last but not least. arby! well, arbitrator. he’s a big old dragonborn cyborg with magical healing abilities and a connection to a unique red flower presumed to be found on his home planet. their cleric, essentially. he’s a huge amicable guy with a surprisingly stern & cold worldview! and a giant silver staff - affectionately dubbed the big fork! like kasko, i haven’t figured out his whole deal but he has a terrible relationship with namir and is convinced he’s making up for something horrible he did in his past. he feels incredibly guilty for unexplained reasons and while you think that’d make him closer to sylv - they actually avoid each other like the plague! sylv becomes extremely close to dragonfly and since arby & namir have mysterious beef, they don’t mesh well. arby is very isolated in this group.

and thaaaat’s the main characters! i’ll yap about the supporting cast soon. since this got unintentionally long..

[boct-kimerakal]

even more of The Eye

oh my god. it just keeps going

future me needs to know i fed my cat 2 hours late because of this stupid AU and that i really need to work on perceiving the passage of time when i’m fixated. future me might also need to know that the reason why writing out my lore on this site works is because an imaginary audience pressures me to write out and format my lore in a way others can digest! and that it should perhaps schedule up recording more information on actual projects such as the ACTUAL waiting world and assorted original stories!

back to the trickhawkrex AU which i’ve tentatively chosen to refer to as the harbinger AU.. because of totally-not-plot-related-reasons

i think i should mention my current (and likely brief) and intense fixation on this AU is likely my stresses (my commission artblock.. my tourism and hospitality course starts soon.. my ever-looming academic guilt.. plus i think i’m going crazy..) and something i watched recently and my caffeine intake today coalescing into this gross unsightly mess.

i also think i’m going to drop this in a week since sudden stress-based fixations tend to just help me cope. BAHAH. i think i’m finally just caving to embracing that i use my ocs to suit my whims and that i don’t take them seriously at all. they feel so meaningless as a result sometimes though.. hashtag the reluctant storyteller with art for no audience. kissy face.

anyways.

they’re going to drive me nuts at least for the next week.

i’m considering that rex is overtly and aggressively positive and that feeds into trick’s general whimsical optimism and is overall unbearable for everyone else they’ve ever come across except hawks who for whatever reason is actually put at ease by it.

trick and hawks are both generally cynics though when it comes to their views on people, politics and inherent goodness and stuff. blargh. but rex is genuinely so full-hearted about his belief in the humanity of others that it can be so annoying or gut-wrenching, depending on the context.

images relevant to fertility (and plant life) tend to drive AUtrick genuinely insane because of their rejection of restricting feminine sociocultural ideals and symbols. anyways. their chest-binding is contrasted heavily with depictions of the yakshini, especially in the context of lust and of bodily perception? AAAALSO. trick might actually be like me in this AU. so less beef with being associated with a social gender (but beef with it being used to restrict or define. stressful & contradictory), more that they’re freaked by their biology. as a result most people close to them default to they/them and most people who aren’t, tend to go with whatever trick seems closer to in visual presentation but if they ask trick just shrugs their shoulders.

rex as a fem-presenting guy is bothering me slightly because it feels like surface-level repetition? since another character i talk a lot about is hummingbird and he is also like this! but also my ocs are so smothered in context that they’re so. different. to. me. i’m just worried he’s going to get perceived as derivative which HAHAHA. why am i worried about this. my stupid fictional characters can have the same surface identity oh my god shut up boct slash kimerakal.

you know what’s funny is trick’s kerala malayali ethnic identity half actually came up first in their mech pilot AU and it’s just kind of cool that there’s folklore to draw upon for this AU. i love coincidence.

OH AND. trick’s reliance on hawks makes them super duper lovey-dovey affectionate towards hawks. it isn’t a personal emotional investment, it’s an emotional response to their desires being met. i think i’m a fan of fixation being recognised and then navigated and eventually dissolved actually, instead of being suppressed entirely or made uber creepy.

meanwhile on hawks’s end, they’re openly in this for achieving their goals! hawks only really gets comfortable with trick and rex due to familiarity over time and repeated life-or-death situations and requiring trust to navigate that as a team. only then do they begin to care about and rely on them and then they achieve a level of sincerity in their relationship which is fun.

also, i figure both trick and hawk are cognisant of the loveless but intense dependency they have on each other at the start of their relationship and The Awareness is what allows them to get actually close eventually without it being unhealthy! as they become familiar with each other! rex meanwhile has to deal with the fact they’re intently dependent on each other and maintain his relationship with the both of them without feeling like a third wheel, knowing they literally can’t do anything without each other. none of them are happy about the reliance by the way but they’re all tryhards that need to have that perfect hunt record. & hawks is a liability with no abilities, & trick is a liability when not properly fed, & rex can’t work solo as someone whose abilities are more focused in support. which all makes me super duper insane actually.

they’re so “god you’re a piece of work” guys!! they are!! they do not at all like being forced to improve themselves and each other for the sake of their stupid goal. but here they are. just 3 haters.

i’m still mad embarrassed about the tropey feel of their relationship though HAHAHA. like oh their friendship feels a little hollow to me because i’m leaning too hard into something right now, i just don’t know what. working on fixing this. well, working on fixing it at least for this 1 week.. then i’ll go back to normal and forget this entirely.

BTW!!! whenever i hear a cool song i imagine these idiots fighting something to death. oh my god help me out here guys. i have so many art ideas for them and zero ability HAHAHA.

trick absolutely keeps their spray paint art thing in this AU, it’s just a lot more lowkey maybe. they usually tag stuff as a result of their fights as sort of a callsign thing. plausibly could incorpate this into their fighting style and the magic they have (which isn’t a result of being undead. it’s like the weird binding deal thing they have with hawks) i feel like they’re into a commissioned mural scene because they’re the insufferable definition of lawful good. which is comically contrasting with their whim-chasing vibe and assumed disregard of authority. oh my god also they’re a digital artist and make OCs with rex (literature nerd) which is funny. rex draws a little too!

hawks also has their musical background (hobbyist bassist) and is probably involved in a punk rock scene somehow or least an admirer of it. but i don’t really know for sure yet because i’m not set on the context and locale. which sigh. means research time. rex probably maintains some kind of literary and theatric proficiency. which i think is fun!! but also he is probably critical about the assorted western literature that dominates in global influence and he’s maybe not keen on dissecting the context of that. he also favours literature from his home and ideas relevant to his stuff. hawks and rex bond over poetic art forms beeteedubs. i love being annoying about artistic practices and cultures in my ocs.

eat you alive by tokyo tea room is super themcore by the way. like so super themcore. oh my god i feel so insufferable right now HAHAHAHA. katalyst if you see this shut up i’m not crazy. ...maybe.

also mischief does exist in this AU I JUST DON’T KNOW AS WHAT!! he is definitely not a normal cat. he is going to be a mythical animal. he is going to be a part of their dumb team.

by the way!! <3 they’re a majorly cocky trio and their vainglorious artistically-melodramatic nature makes the three of them really embrace the idea of being unkillable and reckless. i want them to really lean into the immortality and invulnerability of youth. ironic considering one of them has literally died once.

my name isn’t katherine by k.flay also fits all of them. important information for me to remember. oh right! the harbinger AU very much leans into their self-importantance and their waning teenage anger. anyways. it’s also called the harbinger au because the three of them meeting most certainly precedes some pointlessly convoluted and conspiratorial plot like in every piece of media within this genre. i’ll decide what it is by the end of this week or never at all.

rex, trick and hawk are all alternative monikers but i can’t think of a good reason why they’d use them. maybe i’ll make it so that they’re just nicknames for each other but that might make me want to give them new nicknames actually. they all mark successful hunts with various callsigns and maybe it could be related somehow. maybe i’ll give them a team name overall though. also, the stuff they capture/kill/banish has significant impacts depending on what it is and in the world of the assorted supernatural, i figure it’d be quite hard to tell if what you’re dealing with is a saveable overtaken person, a protected mythical creature or a purely harmful spirit etc.. so agents tend to have to really pick up on-the-spot analysis skills, lest they get fired and jailed for harming something.

oh my god the dynamics of this world is so not the kind of lore i typically work on nowadays. this feels like reaching back into my past. and the embarrassment is catching up with me because again. FEELS CLICHÉ!!! also, they all have friends outside their group trio and i feel like i really need to emphasise this. it’s pretty crucial to their dynamic dare i say.

anyways, horrible little subject-to-context behaviour + personality description time!

trick is by disposition cavalier and brazenly sweet. they’re extremely relaxed in their character and, as a result, confident, blunt and very open. (less tact/cunning than prime trick) still wily but more insufferable prettyboy than usual. they exude a careless whimsy i feel a lot of people find pretty enthralling? oh!! they’re a bit gluttonous and love constant snacking. hashtag luxalia (their og campaign setting) callback. they’re usually pretty mellow? but hyper and excitable about specific interests (such as hawks blood, the thrill of the hunt, their art) and i wanna say? obliviously keen? like!! they usually notice things very easily! and very well! but are usually unwieldy about how they act on the information, especially of the emotional kind. plus, they are regarded by most within The Eye as sensible and mature despite their excessively energetic tendencies because they’ve seen trick in action. oddly trustworthy thing.

rex is also an insufferable prettyboy actually and they play off each other’s vanity really well. rex is externally more reserved, & therefore doesn’t talk as much which makes him seem either a little ditzy/aloof/self-interested or edgy! depends! but he’s more “aggressively intelligent and way too positive” towards those familiar with him. also he’s whimsy enabler and LUUURVES shenaniganery. i figure there is a guardedness to him because he’s more affected by perceptions of him? he can be so sharply spiteful, which is funny in contrast to him believing in the goodness of others more than the other two. i think it’s important to him that negativity doesn’t negate goodness. he also has a righteous anger, i think, that makes him more confident. he can also be very “i’ll make you love me despite what you dislike about me and it’ll kill you.” he can come off as insecure? but otherwise reliable to an unreal degree. boy does NOT believe he should be the responsible one.

hawks is outwardly selfish and hostile, being dead-set on her goals. most positivity comes from her thrill-seeking adrenaline-craving and she’s a lot more friendly in high-pressure moments. she’s hardly comfortable with being sincere towards strangers and that usually makes her either off-putting & unlikable OOOR mysterious & extremely alluring? depends on who you are i suppose. she’s still genuinely helpful when it comes to actions, i figure, and it probably takes people by surprise. she’s sardonically cranky and prone to inciting conflict as a result of it, but she’s working on it. probably. she’s defensive of assets but not emotionally invested in them but also working on that. probably. her indifferent demeanour is also probably conditioned and not innate. not super different from her prime form TBH.. except maybe she’s a little more prone to emotional language, more comfortable in domestic settings and there’s less violent ferocity. maybe i’ll do more to set them apart.

oh!! and. as a trio in this AU, they’re all insufferably affectionate with each other because it’s stupid and cute actually. the three of them all overthink in different flavours and i think that’s funny. they’re also all nerds in different flavours too. the three are very dedicated to the job.

[boct-kimerakal]

The Eye..

it’s a trickhawk AU but rex is here too. trickhawkrex AU even.

ehrm okay so basically i got a bit too insane and like hey haha. here’s this. the three of them are young adults working for an agency known as the eye (fun fact: it’s a reuse of an old AU) which has one purpose and that’s to eliminate dangerous supernatural entities. and BY GOD will i use this squint a little at the misinterpretation/misuse of + modern day exoticism of asian mythology by mainstream media. and also to stab at my own hypocrisy (yet again) (as most of my original lore does)

... also monster hunter trope funny. yeah i’m probably going to private this because i feel weird about talking about lore entwined with cultural backgrounds online HAHAHA. do i just feel uncomfortable discussing the topic because i’m deluded into feeling like it’s going to be tokenised and capitalised on?! but also i don’t want to sandpaper them into pop culture!! like our backgrounds do matter & can be so important to context & not used as just a gimmick actually

ehrm considering this takes place somewhere in the UK (might retcon/redevelop. i always struggle with working with real places, and ones i’ve never even been make me worried!!) the current brief background concepts (and BEAR WITH ME!! THIS IS SUPER BIASED. THIS A PROJECT BORN FROM BIAS) are

a) i was thinking trick is of anglo-indian (father’s) and malayali (kerala specifically, mother’s) ethnic heritage, with family in kerala? raised christian but disconnected from religion. that got made worse by the whole pseudo-yakshini thing where after they almost died, they kind of became halfway one and now ask their mother a lot about her heritage (before she got married, converted and immigrated. which by the way my aunt is a hindu convert to catholicism but she still creates shrines except for catholicism now. which is fascinating and i’m leaning into this a lot) i feel like it leans more into folkloric than religious but we’ll seeeee? i was thinking also trick and their mother both identify with queerness in some capacity and it’s something they talk about. trick moreso in social gender and body stuff and their mother moreso in sexuality. also! their mother is a professor of some kind (her original lore has her in some akin to sociology BUT. HM.), father in something government. which is vague. and there’s a lot of govt. jobs. so give me a MINUTE.

b) rex is from a taiwanese family with a taoist background. taoism mostly because i’m projecting a little bit again. i totally love being mixed and knowing nothing from either side guys. wow this hasn’t been showing in recent lore at all. anyways! rex is a international student whose parents are foreign (and they’re finance people) with a permanent residency in the UK. thinkin. his maternal grandmother and grandfather moved in recently too due to getting old and safety concerns. i’m not fully sure about this yet but yeah. also there’s abandonment guilt here. also his family tree is more like a family forest btw he has like 6 uncles & aunts on his paternal side. lunar new year visits back are hell for him. i may actually change this to be hongkong but i’ll have to think about the implications of that and kind of stare a bit at political stuff so hold up.

c) i’m torn between making hawks an international scholarship student or having immigrant parents and being raised here. hawks is also central asian, but i’m once again struggling to decide between uzbekistan and kazhakstan. because background is important but like not in a put-you-in-a-box way. agh, sorry i think i really dislike when characters are caricatures of cultures as an attempt at representation? i feel like this has been out into words before in a way better than i will though. anyways researching cultural and economic information is not something i’m awesome at so it’ll take me a sec. the family is irreligious but there are some ideas of spirituality her parents have that she also possesses. she has a half-brother. her family being nuclear and very estranged from her relatives due to her mother remarrying feels like crucial information to mention.

i want to also involve the culture of their setting too and the other non-native cultures that have been infused into it because i feel like that’s cool and neat for countries with large immigrant populations and. ponderous. hm. i feel like i lost the plot thinking about the background LAWL okay back to the beef of it. oh that was terrible to say.

PLOT CONCEPT?! > comically borrowing some ideas from The End Of Times which is an old dead lore world of mine. wait hey.. actually.. this can be referred to as the conceptual successor of that.

trickhawk is a lot worse in this by the way. hashtag mutual parasitism! so this is not the same as original trickhawk sorry not sorry.

The Eye is a publicly known agency that deals with supernatural threats that have suddenly become commonplace after some kind of seal was broken. workshopping this but it’s your usual lame “oooh myths are real and this ancient secret society that has been dealing with them forever gets officially recognised by global governments as an enforcement body but also like. it’s a sovereign entity with no official oversight and everyone is kind of worried about that actually.”

trick and rex were both employed by it around the age of 17 and have been partners since. they were part of a larger team as apprentices before going solo. rank at the lower levels of this organisation is probably relaxed and field agents get a lot of free roam since they tend to have unique abilities and also this used to be a SECRET society up until 30 years ago and stricter administration hasn’t caught up with it well.

trick is here as a result of being kind of afflicted by a curse maybe. yakshini-adjacent abilities that they gained at age 15 after getting straight up hit by a car, which have been freaking them out. they’re essentially partially undead and not pleased about it. supernatural ties are luckily an employable skill in this world so boom! that! and rex is here due to receiving a divinely blessed weapon which i think is also the cause of some guilt in his family. the power he wields has ties to the goddess mazu and oceanic themes. which fun fact! trick also values coastal symbols due to their family in kerala. i think it’s something that binds them.

UHM SO. trick and rex meet hawks in school and gets called away to deal with a supernatural thing that happens to be in the vicinity, hawks stubbornly and unfortunately gets involved. finding out what trick is, hawks offers blood to trick for a ticket into the agency which she believes will help her out. why. great question. I’M FIGURING THAT OUT.

hawks getting involved in some level of magecraft (something not innately magical employees of the eye tend to do) as a result of needing to succeed makes her siphon magic off of trick who constitutes as a magical creature. yay they’re both parasites. this is not symbiotic as they’re both being harmed? rex kind of is there to heal both and maintain the cycle. FYI rex’s divinity does contrast a bit with trick’s more malevolent mythic nature but. thinking of how yakshinis have different regional interpretations. thinking about that but not doing anything with it.

anyways oh my god this is so cringe and tropey AND UGH I HATE IT BUT I WANT TO THINK ABOUT IT FOR WHATEVER REASON. them as a trio dynamic is so appealing to me all of a sudden. also trick’s exaggeratedly friendly obsession with hawks in this AU is hitting me some kind of way. (it’s me going “oh i saw a character dynamic i like but it’s not me-coded enough. going to do it my way now”)

also! new tag.

[boct-kimerakal]

wonder & whimsy

oh, i am really in it now

i guess there is this profound sorta? fascination? i have with science and the academic + even though our scientific world is far from perfect and skewed in ways i haven't yet learnt about, even though i don't have the capacity or conviction to really step foot in it (despite the opportunity) (ah) (we'll figure it out)

which i why i think an (un)surprising amount of my characters wind up brushing against or being completely submerged in academic fields ... ah!! help!!

there's these big overarching themes of change and preservation that are relevant in shifters and i guess i just want to yap about it. especially in tandem with the environment and conservation. methinks i'm delusional.

(pick-up sticks)

i have been thinking about the future of telajan from pick-up sticks. binturong boy's from sarawak and prepping for living overseas in a fictional island state city (in which pick-up sticks takes place) and he's looking at environment science, ecology etc. most likely wildlife conservation sciences. notably, he's a shifter and i think that plays pretty well into his passion for the animal kingdom but i haven't yet decided which came first. this is his passion largely because of childhood experiences, i’d say. staying with his grandparents culture in him a fondness for nature, and when he got older it became this sort of heavy nostalgia. to indulge the nostalgia, he’d turn his attention towards local forests and, getting more invested, he maybe starts to get worried, then starts to look things up? one thing leads to another - our boy’s suddenly a low-key environmental activist. he never rally talks about it to save face i think, but he’s got social media (i barely have any i have no idea, what’d he’d use, i’m sorry..) and oh boy! his reposts are very in your face. nobody in his immediate friend group will really ask him about it until they bring up future careers, though. there were probably also outside like school-based enrichment programmes about the environment that he decided to think twice about. his interests deepens come graduation and he might make it his whole personality for the first year HAHA but it’s fine.

in the story, he’s sort of the key puppet for themes of conservation on the pick-up sticks side (which by the way! sort of accidentally became one of the critical overarching themes in shifters in a really weird and convoluted way. like, i went into it going “oh! shapeshifters! and strange entities! representing and giving you traits of existing animal populations! a storm of the dead / extinct entities! simple allegory - great way to talk about evolution, earth history, the fascinating nature of discovery and categorisation [ie. taxonomy] and our current modern extinction crises” but then i made 0 characters with that in mind. BUT THEN. the characters i’d already made sort of began to lean this way without me, like? intentionally doing that .. how do i explain..)

OOOOKAY back to our favourite binturong boy. his addition to the main investigator team (aly, giana, su xue, donny) lets me knit the conservation theme into the whole corporate conspiracy arc which. oh wow! works a bit too nicely when drawing up large corporations against environment protection. considering also poking at corporations based on ideas of environmental protection and goods production environments like impacts. dunno.

(paper kites)

aaaaand on the topic of preservation v. change (or modernity) i really want to talk about abyasa/heron too. bias i know but it's a critical bit of her character. she's javanese, indonesian. on one hand, she considers herself massively removed from her heritage, which can be simplified as a failure of preservation. she's embraced this illusory modern global trend entirely, isolating herself further and further from her background out of this need to excel, be seen as modern and be relatable. yet simultaneously she feels a horrible guilt about it. this worsens when she takes over her father's companies - which is supposed? to be ironic? given the name KERIS.

on the other hand, her pet projects are all rooted in conservation. sustainability, ecosystems and environments, i don’t know!! this isn't occupational, but she has a soft spot for these things and the resources to fund stuff. this can be simplified into her championing preservation, and i just really want to think about it. i want to say there’s this human and identity aspect that she's removed from, this fear she has of people and politics (exacerbated by her new position and the cutthroat world of corporations) and also. herself (at least, in the above context), like how she’s interacting with that world and who she is within it. plus, the rapid pace of change and development, something she is especially privy to as the ceo of a heavily sci-tech involved corporation.

but maybe she sees it as: plants and other animals don’t partake in human society, they’re just impacted by it. hence, she sort of finds it easier to interact with them? and more important to try to maintain them? she has that ... human disconnection. a greater loyalty, i think, to the world and the unknown. i also think a lot about how this sort of sews itself into the theme of inheritance which is. critical to her side of the plot, paper kites. i’m so abnormal about how many ways inheritance and what we learn and receive from those who came before us can be seen and used for narrative inspections in just two people.

there was going to be more but i’ve forgotten it! so until next time, future me.

[boct-kimerakal]

assorted trickhawk stuff

you know, so i don’t go insane ...

second lore dump because!! some thing pretty sweet and surprising (and hopefully positive? maybe? i don’t know yet?) happened to me recently!! and i GUESS i’ve been completely overwhelmed by it!! AGH!! so i’ll be putting all the typey-typey fixation energy into dumping out the drafts in ye olde cache. i have to divert the energy somewhere! look! healthy coping mechanisms to deal with my unbearable whimsy! {i say as i am getting increasingly flustered} now i will punch a wall.

once again, largely airing laments and concepts about the duo, these bits will just be trickhawk stuff that ambiently sit in my brain and not plot-relevant lore facts. to be fair though, the plot is their whole life, that’s what Kau Bakari is about, the life of two annoying, tragic artists who collided and now won’t part. so like. hmph. i need a better word for it. the main storyline maybe? like what i focus on when i tell people about them + get art of them. i do not want to call it the juice of the plot thank you very much

first of all.

trick fell down a staircase at age 16 and has a massive scar on their waist that i continuously forget to include in references and it’s been driving me insane. this has been canon for literal YEARS, since before they were even an independent character (they started off as someone i was playing for a TTRPGish campaign thingy)

i feel like i don’t bring this up enough either but oh my god! these two constantly climb up into like rooftops and billboards and AGH! there is so much i want to say about them wishing to see their waiting world from far away, as opposed to living in it and being a part of this terribly complicated organism. they want to watch their world change and grow and [loud sobbing]

another thing i haven’t noted down anywhere yet (and really should before i forget) is that trick has a light sensitivity issue and consistently needs to wear tinted spectacles. it’s a rare genetic defect, common among (but not limited to) the ottu and dyskkin populace especially and i think about it a lot. because like? trick and hawk both love the idea of the beach and stuff, the coastline, the idea of “things beneath the water, things beyond the horizon” you know? and here trick is, struggling to see it in full sunlight, when it can be seen in full clarity, when the most people are there. but. it plays into the fact these two tend to go places where/when others can’t or won’t. their early morning trips, their late night dances in plazas. (in their young adulthood at least, before Everything Else) “seeing the world without being seen” energy - and there’s an irony it holds, given they are both artists, making art that they want seen.

god i have so much to say about legacy and heritage and permanence and stuff and how it effects + is discussed and viewed by these two, but i realise that might need a big fat essay post so i probably shouldn’t put it in the fun fact dump! so uhm! next!

so back to goofy things. hawkes has these issues with pent-up energy she’s working through and trick, well, trick is obsessed with good fun. hawkes tends to want and need to fight, there is a physical ferocity that courses through her and my god! is it hard for her to understand. describing it is fine for our little wordsmith but explaining why? that’s beyond her. she used to start fights because she craved the thrill, and how it soothed the aggression, restlessness. and trick? trick loves a challenge, and, bless that fact, because they spar constantly. it’s just so refreshing for hawkes that they can vent this energy, especially without needing to get people mad / getting into trouble to do so. this is also partly why hawk learnt to dance(? aforementioned unnamed art form), though there’s a different feeling in a fight! ...though also. me when. me when a familiarity & mutual understanding create a natural rhythm and turn a duel into a duet. still, after they distance themselves, hawkes has to put some work into finding another way to cope.

i think sooo much about how they complement or parallel each other and it rots my brain something truly wicked. i will not stop trying to cook up ideas for how their respective art forms (music / murals) changed after meeting each other, then how it evolved as they became increasingly dependent, right up until they had to pull away from each other.

more on dumb quirks, i don’t think i have it written down anywhere that trick absolutely loves the sound of bells, or that hawkes hates wearing fuzzy things (itchy!) then there’s hawk’s relationship with trick’s cat mischief (wherein the silly kitty torments hawk! by way of always sitting on her lap, instead of trick’s, rendering her incapacitated)

FYI hawkes’s earrings have little bells in them which absolutely delight trick, because trick can recognise hawk’s approach from a whiles away because of this! which. jumping around. is so special and important to trick whenever their eyes are failing them [they often forget the spectacles / choose not to wear them]

i still haven’t gotten started on the fact trick gets outfits tailored for hawk, or that trick decorated hawk’s instruments, or that hawk consistently gets weird gifts like oddly smooth rocks for trick, or that trick lets hawk co-sign their murals because her lyrics get incorporated into them or -

[boct-kimerakal]

finally mentioning my other lore worlds

trip2temasek mention yippay yay?!

no images. all you get is thoughts. too bad.

i feel like i don’t talk enough about trip2temasek, and that’s thrown a wrench in it’s development so i WILL. i’m not exactly sure what the plot centres around yet, which is problematic if you’re trying to build up story-centred fiction ... whoopsie.

below the ‘read more’ is more discussion and concepts than, like, actual fully formed ideas? this is also one of the few things i’m going to add additional tags to (tentatively) (never mind i did not)

AH!! they’re so. squishes them. first though? a lament. there’s so many crucial aspects of life in singapore i want to explore with these characters but i’m so. broken up about it, you know? like exactly who do i want to use, and for what? i also want the main cast to be BOTH: surface level “haha funny relatable” symbols of singaporean culture AND feel like actual people, ones with problems and not just problems to discuss an overarching societal thing or interpersonal dynamic thing. like! you COULD use them to interact with a topic or understand it, but that’s not what “they’re for,” if it? makes any sense? but at the same time.. i do want their characters to represent and highlight things.. finding the balance. trying to not make them cardboard. wish me well. secondly. i’ve been killing myself about further development. because. like. i’ve lived here all my life and it’s definitely had an effect on me. but like!!! growing up with pop media and on the english speaking online world instead of.. actually being.. messed me up a tad!!! like it’s beta description was literally: “my difficult, obscenely distant relationship with the only home i have ever been given. i’m definitely using them to puzzle out and get a feel for the world around me - something i apparently alienated myself from. i feel barely singaporean - but it’s the only community i have been permitted to represent. yet as i develop the story, the culture still feels foreign - i feel like i’m working with material that isn’t mine, so i’m cautious and tip-toesy. i await the day i’m not!” so there’s THAT as i work with it. i’ve got to go ask people questions. blessed by having family with diverse social circles. still need to expand outside of that too.

i also don’t know how i want the mirror city to WORK. it’s like: all urban areas in our world have a mirror version with a high concentration of inhabitants in the other world. you can cross over at points where the population is the thinnest. ulu ulu areas yea. vice versa that’s how stuff enters our world. duh obvious. and in typical freak accident way, our protagonists trip and fall in. except i kind of hate that? i don’t knoooow. i just feel so bored of it, but none of them are going to actively seek this out so i can’t figure out any other way to mash them into the plotline!!

alternatively, instead of the lot of them going missing for 8 months (which is an insane amount of time) they? go to and fro? maybe through dreams, or just being led in and out for certain time periods. but balancing jobs and school and stuff while having a DND styles adventure might be terrible for them.

either way though, the community cat plays into this. maybe they all fed or cared for the cat at some point and the cat strings them along. i feel like a good way to keep things cohesive / bring them together.

ps: this mirror world is also an in-between between “the beyond” which i’m hoping can be interpreted any number of ways by various theologies? so i’m ending this bit off with maybe simplest option, best option? or i might keep exploring, we’ll see!

okay, now. yeo xin en. she’s the only developed character at this point and i think that’s really funny. schoolgirl XMM ah lian stereotype. look i was in N(A) in secondary school and the stereotypes about us were crazy. i think we built a solidarity for resisting it but that’s irrelevant. back to xin en - she plays up the stereotypes. a lot. the fast-talking, huffy, short-tempered, dialect-speaking truant, vaping in the bathrooms and stealing from 7-11 and messing with.. girls? oh she’s a lesbian. and also she hit a kid with a chair during PE :heart emoji: she definitely has school counsellors chasing after her! i’d like if maybe she’s forming a mutual understanding with her form teacher as the story goes along, because i’ve seen these really positive things happen in school and the genuine student-teacher bond is REAL guys. (i don’t know how she’d do this though, if she was missing for 8 months) i feel like expanding on her home life and, by extension, her relationship with jacqueline wong (haha tiger mom. literally) another member of the group. there’s definitely an uneasiness that eventually becomes a mutual understanding, informing jackie on how to better raise her own children + yeo xin en to understand the context of her parent’s upbringings but also recognise that the way they treat her is wrong.

though? i’m still unsure about jackie and xin en both being singapore chinese? because uncle chew is also (i might make him fervently identify and distinguish himself as peranakan though. the ethnicity is often brought up as some kind of embellishment and never really well-represented so!) they’re from different dialect groups (hokkien/teochew) / religions (this one is a WHOLE THING about buddhist and taoist identities in singapore and i need another essay for it) and different socio-economic classes. so there’s that. and i still think i want them both to be generationally singaporean, to highlight the different experiences between families under the same racial identifier... we’ll keep on thinking!

also. thinking about community club active old lady / mdm. aisyah .. her character has gone through sooo much development but none of it has stuck. she’s supposed to be in her 60s and an empty nester, waiting for her children to give her grandkids because she’s itching for something to care about? which is why she goes on so many “expeditions” (community club stuff) to keep active! super encouraging, peppy, would’ve been a great teacher if only her circumstances hadn’t cheated her of it. i wonder if i should make her fascinated by history or something of the like, to have a character to act as a conduit for info-dumping ... but ahh. i want her to be more than that. she likes baking though, and that’s one thing that will never change. she can make you a hell of a kueh platter.

everyone is roughly described with a “D&D/‘western’ fantasy TTRPG style” class but that’s mostly just for fun, so don’t take it too literally. i just thought. “hey haha funny trope. going to making it singaporean now. it’d be silly.” which goes to say this will inform their designs, behaviour and the vibes of their abilities, but not so much beyond that. don’t expect spells or whatever. probably don’t do that. any magic will be vague (generally commanding fire), neither ritualistic nor defined (a fire spell, conjuration chants etc).

also. ONE MORE THING. i bring a certain ‘i don’t know the languages my grandparents spoke’ energy to the table in a way that is so seductive it’s unbelievable (confusion and regret) and so what am i going to do? beam that onto one of my characters. the problem is i don’t know who. i can’t beam it onto xin en, there is a MASSIVE POINT to her using her CL dialect (hokkien) instead of only 华文. like? the whole: it isn’t being gangster, it’s important to her heritage and who she is. which is pretty basic in the context of singapore, yea..

last thing, the other teenager, is someone i’m so uncertain about too? the wizard of the group + top sec school (if ykyk) good student. gender is for once something i’m considering really hard because of the SG cultural context and the story i’m trying to tell! but i’m not. really sure about making this a storybeat yet. considering maybe this edge of “fear of the western cultural value supremacy mindset” vs. “what people here consider western values and thusly reject” + “wishing to be engaged in local social activism” vs. “focusing on being the top student mentality” but. eh ?? overall, i’m not still sure yet about the entire character outside “competitive intellectualism” so yea..

OKAY. done. finally. just really rough thoughts, didn’t yap much about the other characters because again. uncertainty! but we’ll see, we’ll see. i’m just sooo distressed over myself in relation to them and it’s been halting development so much. sigh. curse of internet childhood.

[boct-kimerakal]

heron and hummingbird. again.

oh my god hi! your favourite pretentious rambling prick is back!

i think if someone walked up to me and asked about them i would just puke. hurl. everything all up at once. metaphorically, pertaining to their lore or actually like. physically? probably both. i hate being normal it’s so boring i would like to make silly stickers of them and paste it on my wall. and also on my bag and maybe like everything i own. my cat would appreciate that i am so sure.

i think one thing i forgot to mention in the freak-exposition prior to this one is about the literature fact. abyasa would never dare write her own poem, story etc. she doesn’t have enchanting enough words, the lyrical sway, the power over prose. visual art is something i figure she’d be more comfortable creating, even if she isn’t very good at that either. aguilar, on the other hand, in terms of visual art was one hundred percent was the art teacher’s favourite in his early school days. though lack of practice is a factor since he’s mad busy, i say he can still draw up decently proportioned sketches of stuff ... it’s a helpful skill okay

so you know how purple throated sunangels live in cloud forest biomes. okay yeah. well. aguilar loves that biome too. i think he would be so right at home in a cloud forest environ and it’s so funny to me. i love this soggy archeologist.

abyasa loves trying new food!! she genuinely finds so much joy in it!! aguilar didn’t (really only seeing the appeal of the cultural study, evolution, similarities despite lack of interaction, unique creations, how people bond over meals or recipes passed down etc, not so much food as it is, in the moment, eating, tasting the tastes) until she explained her thought process on how tasting all sorts of flavours was such a fascinating thing to her - that in their evolution resulted in this wonderful specific experience - environment, culture, biology, all these things intersecting to create the meal sat before them. then he kind of just melted before her and started chowing down on like dry as hell dried squid or something. idk.

envision this thirty-seven-year-old woman exploding with childlike wonder, learning cool stuff while checking the latest science articles in her cushy hotel room!! with her eccentric little best friend, who is capable of shape-shifting into a horrible hummingbird monster at will, somewhere in the back trying to fit his belongings into a suitcase, frustrated because he has the same amount (if not fewer) things than before but somehow NOTHING IS FITTING IN.

but also she is so horribly serious outside of any environment where she isn’t isolated from anyone but aguilar. so uptight and unbelievably normal, you guys. she can be so normal! how does she do that! sobbing into my hands. i’m degrading. deteriorating. it is horrible and awful; kill me for how they so wholly consume my mind.

I’M CRYING SOMEWHERE, INTERNALLY, IN THE METAPHORICAL ONLINE WAY I GUESS! I MEAN TO SAY I AM OVERWHELMED WITH AN ABSTRUSE EMOTION! EXPRESSED ONLY THROUGH A GUTTURAL SCREAM! i obsess over them something horrible, which is hilarious given they are the catalysts to terrible turmoil in the context of the world of shifters; their quiet yet blatant hypocrisy raking the soil that other’s livelihoods depend on. unintentionally, of course, because of abyasa knew she’d shatter on the spot and aguilar would disassociate from himself. ah! ignorance! is it bliss?

(me and the gang when the discoveries that we made out of curiosity because, unlike the typical avid researcher we are able to fund ourselves, suddenly come under scrutiny by some for use to make profit & for others to twist into a religious doctrine we fundamentally disagree with & upset a tender status quo among the elite that has a ripple effect that worsens to a tidal wave once it hits everyone else, especially those that we consistently feel so much aimless guilt about having it better than)

i exist to spite myself (run-off sentences! god! i hate them) down this slippery slope i go, of over-explaining my characters (i need to be killed, methinks) until they lose nuance or whatever it’s called.

sooo yea. sobbing and crying. i think about this so often. they once had a discussion in their university days where they realised should they ever be two alone in some vague sci-fi context, where they were the last sapient custodians of a planet that was now all their own (from the human social perspective), that they’d be happy. aguilar and abyasa, arguably both people’s people, requiring society to really thrive and finding it hard to exist in isolation (what to watch and study? who to engage discussion with, challenge?) not ideal, of course, they much prefer a world suffused with other human lives! but still, that they could be content with just the other is revolutionary for both of them. all upon someone else’s balcony, with half-finished drinks in hand. maybe abyasa has something fizzy and aguilar has an iced tea.

oh my god? i’ve been thinking so long about their music tastes. and i’m still lost! i’ve got nothing guys. how can this be. unrelated though. abyasa loves food as it is, as it is presented, but aguilar is arguably obsessed with adding spice and stuff. he likes stuff a little too much.. a little too intense.. i ponder that aspect of him so often, his relentless craving for exposure and experience. he is so insane for that. good for him good for him. all i want to do is doodle them but my GAWT!! drawing people. impossible. how people be doing this. that is crazy.

their relationship is sooooooooo brainrottable aboutable. those aren’t words. this is isn’t right. but WHATEVER. i love them and i jump for joy. in their thirties, you could describe them both as confident, say they both take over a room, that people take notice if they exaggerate their entry but GOD. IT’S A DIFFERENT VIBE! aguilar? it’s like, heads turn, they look. allured, and should he speak? most people would be curious what someone like him would possibly say, how he’d speak and why and what about. he enamours, enthrals. her though? by making her presence known, abyasa makes a room go silent. no one wants her to say anything, otherwise they’d have to snap to action. she commands, you know? neither were this way before, they definitely rubbed off on each other and became this way somehow. it’s sooooo strange and wonderful to me how they’ve known each other for 18 years so much can change and yet some things never did. what do you want to bet i have those 18 years on my brain in rotation trying to figure out how they evolved. linearity is ridiculous to me so this will be hell to explain and i’ll save it for. another day.

okay i’m DONE there’s a lot more but god bless but time is real and prevents me from getting too insane and too silly 🤍

[boct-kimerakal]

heron and hummingbird rubbish

or, alternatively titled, i am still insane

finally kicking this out of my drafts. welcome back, future kimerakal, to boct’s rapid descent into. well. i’d say insanity, but i think we’re past that now. sigh. get ready for some loser yapping way too much. this will be an abyasa (heron) and aguilar (hummingbird) indulgent gushy post at some point in the near future, i just have to spew out some nonsense first. that being said:

AH! it’s so difficult for me to give characters (ahem, the titular heron and hummingbird) that i so terribly favour viewpoints and whatnot that differ from my own ... i obsess over them and thus see fit to inject them full of broadly similar behaviour, petty preferences, thoughts (etc.) that align with my own! (though they are fundamentally unlike me at first glance)

for whatever reason, it’s so difficult to deviate these two from notions that don’t flagrantly pander to my biases... yet! characters i obsess over similarly (cough. cough. fish tragedy...) are much easier to flood with things i am either neutral on (sometimes things i hadn’t thought of up until someone else mentioning it) or just fundamentally disagree with because, for characters like them, that’s the whole point! to be different from me, so i can cognise the lives of different people! (and to spit in my face!) not to mention, beyond that, they are also supposed to not.. have an explicit point, but be, you know? so to be reflective of humanity’s being. because it’s much more fun thataway..

and that reminds that should apply to heron and hummingbird too, that they don’t exist to appeal to me or whatever but also! i made them up you know! maybe i should get to be indulgent with my fantastical silly people. but that’s so contrary to my character creation process! like things may line up occasionally, but they shouldn’t outright echo my opinions. but, at the end of it, they are characters in fiction, there’s lengths to which i can go in fleshing them out because of my limits in perspective as the creator... ah! sigh! the plight of the boring overthinker

so if you read through that truly terrible block of melodramatic jetsam for this common grievance (of which i’m sure most can elucidate in fewer words than mine) in the world of making up stupid imaginary people, then welcome to the true blood of the post: my rambling insanity about every little insufferable heronhum thought i’ve had in the last year or so

they’re stupid little people from the year 2046 in a world where shapeshifters started becoming commonplace in 1967 after these weird inexplicable creatures showed up. so much to say about that but i think about them first instead always. abyasa is a CEO of some kind of a biotech company (figuring it out) and aguilar is our favourite whimsical little unemployed archeologist.

oh yeah baby. list time.

(1) - they’re nerds. they’re the insufferable nerds. they’re know-it-all’s, smarty-pants, the guy most people can’t stand. they’re perpetually spewing facts no one asked for to everyone around them, stranger or not. aguilar was always like this, he used to thrive on being, not so much the smartest guy in the room, but the smart-alec that everyone deplored up until his expertise was necessary (for what reason? attention and rights to smug grins, most likely). abayasa, on the other hand, just really likes sharing information. and she used to be shut up for that, which she didn’t much like. while it had the downside of making her a nervous, bottled-up wreck, it also did contribute to making her a little more conscientious and atmosphere-sensitive than aguilar.

(2) - aguilar only started dressing more (by the standards of the mass cultural consciousness, at least) femininely after meeting abyasa in university. there was always a fear, i suppose, that he adored fashion (the bulk of which was feminine-aligned, especially what he considered attractive or fun) and wanted to be a part of it because he craved attention. and while he did (and still does), he didn’t want his dress sense associated with that! attention for merely dressing out of the norm makes him frown. he’d just like to be sparkly in peace, thank you very much! it isn’t a statement, it’s just fun being pretty. seriously, he wants to catch notice for his charm, unbearable whimsy or brilliance, not so much what he wears (he considers it a shallow attention, he much prefers enthralment of an intellectually-stimulating root. though, it’s a fun bonus to have people swoon). then along came abyasa, who loved to let people assume what-all about her (and he realised that was ridiculously fun) so he simply stopped caring about being misunderstood.

(3) - they’re legally married for the sake of ownership rights and etc. abyasa can’t trust that her property will be used the way she wants it to be in any hands but the hands of aguilar, who she has poured her whole soul to. aguilar, on the other hand, simply needed his family to stop suggesting he get married soon. because it was very annoying. this reason is rather silly, he admits, but he’s never possessed much anyways. not that he cares much for that which he possesses either. (blergh! property rights! the materialist reasons behind modern marriages and their ties to legality, pertaining to the transfer of property rights and also, like, patriarchy or whatever! at least, that’s what these two croon about) THOUGH, they still tell everyone they’re engaged - fiancé and fiancée because of a bet they made, wherein they’d throw the ‘marriage’ event only once they, well, to put it simply, revived a dead eldritch entity. also! they’re platonically in love. isn’t that crazy?

(4) - how is abyasa is the CEO of an extremely wealthy business, what is happening. uh okay. i’m working on it. but a (in her POV) terrible outcome: inheritance. (as if she wasn’t raised in that wealth and continuing to benefit from it long before she was bequeathed her father’s company) that out of the way: i’m assuming she coordinates business activities, but sends out surrogates to actually secure deals, attend meetings etc. which means she has an inner circle she trusts to make decisions on the same wavelength as her own (or those who she trusts to think differently from her, but still keep the company afloat without crossing any of her lines) i think, once she was keener in her oversight, but now she’s relaxed into her trust of these ‘regents’ of hers (which, ultimately, will lead to terrible distress as she realises they weren’t carrying out her will the way she wanted them too. which! whoops! challenges her views on freedom, influence and the greater good!) three cheers to the plight of the wealthy that wishes to be good, especially that of the inheritor! and the hypocrisy of the comfortable philanthropist. a bleeding heart who cannot remove the cog from the system, lest the backlash be worse, but who wishes also to not be so obviously complicit. not to forget the terrible confusion that is power over others, and whether you have the right to solely decide what is good too :3

(5) - oh my god i already sound so stupid. anyways there is more. woe. abyasa likes shifting into her javan pond heron form and just sitting on aguilar’s shoulder. it’s really funny and somewhat inexplicable. when she’s especially sad, she’ll also turn into a bird and just go? fishing? what? girl why? also, she tends to display the off-season plumage when she’s sad. it’s become a tell for aguilar.

(6) - aguilar’s family is very close to him and very, very nosy about abyasa, they want to know everything about his strange, uber-wealthy indonesian woman who seems to be marrying into their family at some point. and while abyasa is, supposedly, estranged from her family, they’re all somehow still on their tiptoes trying to get an sensing on aguilar. both these stupid horrible bird nerds are acutely aware of this and like to muddy the situation further by confusing their respective families with strange off-handed (assumedly false?) comments.

(7) - okay so this one is horrible and cute. because i hate them profoundly. abyasa loves being close to water, aguilar is so obsessed with and affectionate about this and loves this about her and likes dragging her out to see waterfalls and rivers and beaches. i should also present the worst part: which is that they find just about anyplace fascinating because they both have this strange fascination with everything. litter-choked river that smells awful isn’t an ideal first date for most, but these two will start yapping it up about ecology or whatever if they stumble upon a place like that. that said, aguilar doesn’t take her to water bodies clogged to near-death with debris when wanting to bring joy and whimsy back to her life, of course! it’s not exactly feel-good!

(8) - aguilar says he can’t stand literature (he was always far too blunt for all that verbal devilry, metaphor and misdirection) but reads and writes because he doesn’t understand it and is obsessed with it for that reason. as a result, boy can wax the hell out of poetics. abyasa, meanwhile, has always read because she lives in a world of empirical fact and it’s boring to limit herself to it! it’s so very fun to appreciate art and abstract. to her, it’s fact that black-and white absolutes can’t encompass it all.

(9) - coffee freaks. that’s all guys that’s the post. they love all sorts of coffee. you don’t know how much it plagues me. envisioning them making coffee together at 6:45am in the morning and sitting side-by-side and sipping it.

(10) - it’s horrible and evil and awful how they rot my brain!! aguilar taught the woefully uncoordinated abyasa to dance. he’s so physically comfortable. it’s insane to her. awareness of his body and his movements probably lends to him being such an incredible shifter. dude is so confident! abyasa reckons this divine and loves it about him, the confidence in his personhood he exudes is crazy. abyasa has always been awkward about herself, too-aware of every joint and tendon in her body. her confidence resides solely in strategy, networking and communication. not so much bizarre activities - like! i don’t know, parkour or dance.

(11) - abyasa was named after her mother (kardinah)’s closest childhood friend, who passed away when kardinah was seventeen. suffice it to say that personal connection kardinah had hoped to find in her daughter by naming her after her dear friend might have been what worsened their relationship further when along came abyasa’s radically different ideals. here is the person who was meant to embody everything she cares about (family, religion, history), and she fundamentally disagrees with everything she believes in! abyasa never even learnt to speak javanese.

that’s all for now. but. want to know something horrible? there’s more. there is so much more. i will be posting it. later on.

[boct-kimerakal]

sewage systems of the combined continent but i get mad off track

+ all the stupid tangents i go on, as i try to get a feel for their general concepts. yay! welcome to another instalment of my annoying Wings of Fire expansion pack (thrum of life - ToL) set roughly? 150? 200? years in the future? time frame is still shaky

i’m really stupid so forgive me if there are things here that just! don’t make any sense! yea, yea i’m not very good at this.

i was thinking about the icewing barrens of ToL - rocky, cold environment, dominated by scrubland with little infrastructure resources. the population is largely dependent on fishing/whaling and gull-catching for food + mining / setting-up quarries to export ore for income. t’was formerly deemed a seventh circle city and hasn’t received much aid since the abolishment of circles! - and how the settlements there are largely tunnelled into the cliff-sides and such since sloping canyon-like territory doesn’t lend much to city building ... and i was thinking. wow! the sewage system here probably sucks? since age of settlement (when most of the homes were dug out) + it’s hard to install it into a literal mountainside. for water overflow from rain and stuff, in most places it’s probably funnelled into the canyon river but flooding is commonplace. as for sanitary sewage, individual homes probably have large basins to collect waste and deposit it in large rudimentarily constructed channels. and there’re a particular area dragons dispose of their business. tried to keep it away from the river for a long time.

after this city became more densely packed (advancement in technology and the icewing kingdom’s new dependence on currency led to boom in demand for ores and for pay checks i suppose, which made the dragons, who’d come to be realised as impoverished in the context of this new society, settle here for income? OH AND. the ai-shurna crystals mines which are like. pieces of solid, tangible animus magic which can be found nearby here too), the river at the bottom of the canyon (which is the main body of the population - mines & quarries + their surrounding homes spread out like spidery little limbs) probably became mad polluted and got used to flush the accumulating waste. also it’s a slum city, i think? whatever.

that whole thought led me to the sandwing canyon slum-city on the new nightwing/sandwing border - surrounding the demilitarised zone - which probably also suffers the same fate of “poor sewage system.” the more arid environment (but there are plants here guys it’s not just rock) means less rain? so i figure rainwater is fervently collected for drinking. given the nature of the city, no official aqueducts or water conduits flow through it so water collection is a community effort. but the river here probably isn’t going to have a great time with the increasing population density either.

fun fact? most sandwings in this city wind up joining the military for better prospects, which the rest of sandwing society finds tidy and convenient and doesn’t bat an eye about. it’s part of the pull factor of this place, sandwings falling behind financially tend to wind up here, chasing the chimera of a guaranteed job. (truth is; with the explosion of prospects, there have been a growing number of rejects, so they just wind up stuck here)

whiiiich, by the way! despite the resource-stripped landscape due to nightwing annexations (sandwings are still battling that one out, at least in hearings - through constantly opening negotiations. they really don’t want a war But If That’s The Cost...), sandwings overall don’t have as high a poverty rate as the nightwings expected. mostly due to their commitments in magi-tech (partnership with skywing government) and other collaborative projects. their exponentially recovering economy threatens the new nightwing government, because while they were economically crippled they couldn’t afford a war! but now they can!

oh, but the silkwing and nightwing cavern-integrated civilisations have excellent water supply & sanitation systems largely because they were more recently built from scratch (nightwing departure from rainwing territory was a slow migration if you are curious. reliant on small groups of pioneer families and everything, what with the process of building their cities from scratch / silkwings. on the other talon. clawed their territory out and ditched. and then had to work with it. so the early silkwing experience was crazy, i should ramble it up soon) i realise i am stuck in “hmm sewage in the cave house” so let me just drop the general idea.

okay so: anyways. that was just a little tidbit that got me thinking more about sewage systems. most pyrrhian tribes, following the first contact with pantala, picked up with hivewing method for sewage extraction and treatment (which was refined due to the fact they lived in hives which are madly impressive architectural and engineering monstrosities if you think about it? does anyone ever think about how they get water through the hives. would they have rainwater collection basins at the tippytop. that wouldn’t be enough would it. also i think a lot about hive expansion btw that one is even more insane) - because of its efficacy and incomparable standards of hygiene.

modern infrastructure was developed to this sewage system + older sewage collection systems were renovated to this standard (say maybe eg. the communal toilets & bathing platforms mudwings had, because while their sanitary sewage removal + wastewater treatment system was pretty good for its time, it was difficult to implement in individual homes / the fact that for a long time rainwings & skywings diverted untreated domestic wastewater into irrigation / the nightwings whose sewers channeled into something closer to cesspits? not exactly definite yet but yeah?) i can’t say what exactly the hivewing system is yet but i suppose it’s something closer to ours. hashtag i’m just guessing!! my worldbuilding sucks!!

i have so many stupid concept ideas though. i can yap about how storm & sanitary sewage treatment was refined by leafwings who have an excellent specially cultivated (insane plant magic genetic engineering?!) algae-based wastewater cleansing and recycling system. or the one where they use UV light that was developed by a rainwing-hivewing joint venture. which is really cool by the way. science in this world is still very much divided by the dragon nations btw. international hires in scientific institutes are rare. and as you know the nations are divided by their dragon subtypes. kitty cat emoticon here. oh the situation in ToL’s science world is Soo fascinating, you wanna hear aaaaall about it one day.

also! please never ask me what the “tech level” is!! technological advancement is not a linear process!! comparisons to time periods in reality don’t really work out here!! especially in a stupid dragon world wherein literal magic is also used as a tool to forward tech advancement despite gaps in their knowledge!!

OH AND. UNIQUE CASE. SEAWINGS. see! they have both a land civilisation and an underwater one! and it was because of this i was considering retconning the “being able to breathe underwater and have gills” shtick but that undermines a significant portion of the canon and i simply can’t. so i did something else. let me get to it.

right now i’m partially ignoring the fact that a large portion of the seawing populace is still nomadic -

first one is easy. water supply and sanitation system standards are that of the continent’s general standards in out-of-water settlements (the new tropical seawing capital + surrounding cities etc) which kind of bugs seawings living outside these coastal cities, but since the water is treat as it’s released it’s okay.

okay. water supply isn’t so much a problem in the sedentary underwater communities, seawings who choose to live a life underwater are adapted to the intake of seawater (reniculate kidneys?) but i’m guessing they’re probably better off getting the necessary fluids out of their diet? either water water supply isn’t as dramatic a necessity, so that leads me to drainage systems. yeah, as you can imagine they probably just don’t have them either. this is probably a facet of why nomadism is preferred? because dense populations of large aquatic life, mass producing waste would make the ocean rather unpleasant, i fear. (or maybe i’ll think of something like. uh. pressure based waste diversion conduits and toilet chambers with air pockets but that might be hard to construct. i don’t know i’m an idiot!! not a dragon engineer!!)

but maybe this is kind of why in both seawing societies (tropical and coldwater) there’s sort of a two-sided supremacy mindset. seawings that live sedentary lifestyles fully underwater > seawings that lives sedentary lifestyles largely on land and vice versa. the “we have toilets and adhere to the global standard” thing is something the overwater guys have over the underwater guys.

okay. pivot time. the tropical seawing majority nomadic culture + the coldwater seawing minority nomads, meanwhile, have a simple standard of “do your business in private!” given that they’re nomadic and wide-spread, there’s no egregious build up of waste due to sedentary population density. which - go figure - is why the cultural majority never really took to the building of latrines. plus, there’s a general spiritual belief (not unique to seawing culture) surrounding the cycle of life.

but! this! (not-so-fun fact time!) feeds into the stigma of seawing society being lesser and the perpetuation of rather vicious stereotypes. especially around nomadic cultures, which isn’t great but i’ll get more into that at some point. the ToL dragons have a much more dramatic prevalence of nomadic cultures and i will also get into this. at some point. anyways.

so this was the sewage pondering?? a little odd but a crucial tidbit of worldbuilding! a welcome escape from trying to figure out legal systems and modern medical crises responses, at least.

[boct-kimerakal]

your name is literally hawkes talon

what the hell. bird.

this (and like 8 other lore dumps) has been sitting in my drafts for so long... just throw it out there with the tag so i can keep track.

i think a lot about the waiting world (original lore world! no way!) but i just never talk about it anywhere. EXCEPT when i try to spew it into my notes.. now the problem with notes, is that it just feels so tedious to type things out there? it’s much smoother on this platform, who knows why (the font and formatting soothe me..)

anyways, i’m here to talk about the background / basics anji-ola punk rockstar serving major aggro daily. need to write the scattered notes (vague ideas..) somewhere because the toyhouse profile is so horrendously long already

okay, expect a lot of REALLY bad world-building in a ‘notes for later’ style. really simple & kinda lame rn.

background first? hawkes is kondhani which is one of the? sixty-three... ethnic groups in anji-ola i intend to develop. thinking about it so hard. it’s one of ethnicities with the most diaspora communities, so you tend to get [insert location name here]-kondhan when askin’ - hawkes specifically would be denovo-kondhan.. hmmm. kondhani was up until recently a nomadic culture and in the wake of the mandated settlement no real kondhani “homeland” (like, a heartland or significantly large-enough settlement by government standards?) emerged? unlike, eg, the dysikkin majority being located surrounding dangsahana and the people being associated with the denovijihari region.

hm. both groups are similar in that they were never associated with a particular nation / organised behind any form of leadership, they emerged as socio-cultural entity after the breakdown of the kodyssi thalassocracy and the people diffused across the rest of the landmass (which i HAVE NOT named) <- i say this not knowing a THING about how these categorisation systems work, it’s just a best guess? do correct me if i’m horribly wrong with my word choices.. ehrm! that out of the way!

ALSO. punk rockstar is an approximation. there really isn’t a punk culture + musical genre in anji-ola - nor do rockstars even exist, because rock music is a culture thing. believe it or not. there is nothing in anji-ola that could act as prelude to this culture. (something, something? the ubiquity of rock music in this era due to the present western culture hegemony? dunno.. but the term’s a good way to set an Expectation for hawkes and her music) that said. pondering my orb. electrical technology is a thing and has been applied to music relatively similarly? HRRM.

time to answer the ‘why can she beat you up?’ question. (sigh.. my main issue with worldbuilding is! ugh! describing the hard-to-articulate parts. i need visual elements, sigh... but like, come on man.. i have to DRAW it? myself?) anyways, hawkes has perfected a form of kondhani dance that imitates physical fighting! but pretty. problem is i haven’t named it yet or really messed with the overall tradition behind it. and in my mind there’s a specific look to it, an aesthetic uniqueness. i’ll have to hammer out the logistics of it all..

the art form is considered more in the realm of dance than martial arts though! but i figure there isn’t as big a distinction in the context of anji-ola.. they’re codified more as physical training traditions? but ugh, i haven’t done my research so take these as notes for my future self (hopefully, a future self that actually DID THE WORK)

lastly. the reason hawkes wears red so aggressively is it’s a celebration colour in kondhani culture and usually worn to funerals & weddings in kondhani tradition (but there are no taboos on dressing casually in red!) by the close ones of the deceased / newly weds respectively. ehrrrm hm. yea.

character stuff next time. probably rant it up with trick too.