copperhawkthoughts - Tumblr blog

[copperhawkthoughts]

Very interested to see how Orym ‘Survivor’s Guilt’ of the Air Ashari handles the fact that FCG’s death releases him from his bargain with Nana Morri

[copperhawkthoughts]

Orym's argument against Ludinus Da'leth and the Ruby Vanguard is essentially "The purpose of a system is what it does."

This is a systems theory coined by Stafford Beer around 2001. He posited there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do." It does not matter what someone tells you a system does if it does not reliably do that. The things it does consistently do are the actual purpose of the system.

Ludinus (and Liliana) claim the purpose of the Ruby Vanguard's violence is to free Exandria of oppression from the gods. Orym's point is that they have not consistently protected anyone from oppression. They consistently murder innocent people, indoctrinate vulnerable people into doing terrible violence (including children), support a ruling class that dominates the population through mind control and eugenics, and seek to release a predator so terrifying that the warring alien gods and native primordials worked together to seal it away as a threat to both of them.

So the logical conclusion is that the purpose of Ludinus' system is not to free anyone from tyranny, it's to install himself as the tyrant. And it does not matter what Ludinus says it's for or even what he believes it's for. The purpose of a system is what it does. And Orym has been personally and repeatedly victimized by what it does. Why wouldn't he keep reminding them of that?

Add onto that, the Ruby Vanguard is a death cult. They lure people in with believable lies. They use propaganda to control how people view them and to convince people to support them. Liliana has been groomed into a true believer who genuinely thinks what she has been told is true and that Ludinus' system does what he says it will. She has been convincing other people of this for years. Not because she's an inherently bad person but because everyone generally tries to convince others that what we believe is true. It is actually dangerous to let a cultist try to talk you into the cult's perspective. That's why Orym shuts it down.

Orym was already on edge but it's fully in a breakdown after FCG's sacrifice. One more iteration of Ludinus' system consistently murdering the people he loves. But he still told Imogen he wants her to have a good relationship with her mom again. He wants Liliana to make it through the other side of this. But that has to involve consistently stating the reality of what's happening against what she believes.

Ludinus believes in the rapture of the revolution. Burn everything to the ground on a fundamental level and a new perfect society will grow, with him to guide it. The reality is that kind of power vacuum consistently leads to horrific violence and conditions often get much, much worse. Especially for vulnerable people, who often do not survive. A lot about the gods' relationships to mortals probably needs to change, but this an incredibly dangerous gamble to fix it.

The purpose of a system is what it does. Any suggestion otherwise is cold comfort to Orym's family in the ground.

[copperhawkthoughts]

Shout out to Aabria for giving us a(n apparently) non-Kryn Luxon-worshipping group who decided that, rather than using multiple consecutive lives to learn more about themselves and, by extension, the Luxon, they were going to speed-run the process by splitting their children’s souls in half

[copperhawkthoughts]

I wrote a fic about my own theory of this! It basically goes:

- Aeorian mages were just starting to unlock the functions of a Beacon incl. consecution right before the fall. Ludinus was working with that team of researchers and not on the Factorum Malleus directly

- Ludinus was consecuted (unknowingly) and shipped off with the Aeorian Beacon to Molaesmyr just before the fall of Aeor. I don’t think this is consecution like the Dynasty practices it - with a religious ritual involved. I think it was more science based/brute forced.

- the world went to hell in a hand basket as/after Aeor fell and it was the dark ages for centuries, with information gathering and communications severely hampered by the magical upheaval and the loss of knowledge

- Ludinus, fuelled by hate, plots revenge on the gods from Molaesmyr and ends up accidentally killing himself/corrupting the Beacon he had in the process of trying an underbaked attempt at whatever it is he was doing (early attempt at malleus key?)

- is nevertheless reborn in Molaesmyr, eventually leaves with the rest of the survivors when the slow creep of the corruption he unleashed grows too powerful

- makes his way to the Empire, rises to power, gets ahold of Beacons again…biding his time

I am pretty sure that my theory doesn’t hold up anymore based on facts we learned after I formed it, but I still like to rotate it in my mind…Aeorian Ludinus my beloved

Ludinus theory -> a big question

I've seen a lot of re-iterations of a Ludinus theory that I personally think makes a lot of sense, but then raises huge questions.

Theory: Ludinus was a consecuted mage of some sort in the age of arcanum, who died and was sucked into a beacon during the calamity. He was reborn years later, and started to research his past as he remembered it, investigating the Aeorian ruins, recovering a beacon, and trying to recreate the factorum malleus. He was pissed bc everyone and everything he loved was destroyed by the gods; he wants revenge.

Why this makes sense: Ludinus knows too much, but also is probably not 800 years old since elves don't usually live that long. He talks about the Calamity like he was there. However, if he was alive the whole time, it's strange that he would start researching Aeor at some random point around 580 PD. He could've done research any ol time; makes me feel like he started regaining his pre-Calamity memories in Molaesmyr or right before he got there.

Subsequent question: If that's true, then the Aeorians understood consecution. So how come there aren't a bunch of ancient Aeorian mages remembering who they are and re-starting the god hammer agenda in their new bodies just like Ludinus? Surely they could all work together or find each other. Something isn't adding up.

Tinfoil hat theory 1: The gods (perhaps miss Raven Queen) have some say in which souls actually get to come back into bodies, and the Aeorians were not deemed acceptable. That would explain why Ludinus is so conerned with her ascension.

Tinfoil hat theory 2: Ludinus died next to a different beacon than the one that was on Aeor (he was elsewhere for some reason) and the Aeor one was destroyed, which is why he's so angry about everything being destroyed.

I really feel like Ludinus being a consecuted Aeorian makes sense because of his general timeline, obsession with being close to beacons, etc. But I also feel like that leaves a HUGE plot-hole: where tf are the rest of the Aeorians, if they figured out consecution???

plz drop your theories below.

[copperhawkthoughts]

Dressed to the Neins - Vox Machina

It’s done, and I’m really pleased with how it turned out! From the back there’s something that feels very ‘early-mid 90s aviator covered in patches and graphics’, or even a little battle jacket-y, which wasn’t deliberate but I definitely don���t hate it!

Also it’s fully symmetrical top and bottom, so there’s no reason I can’t wear it with Grog and Vax at my shoulders sometimes if I want.

Here’s the link to the project page on Ravelry, which has some technical details of how I turned the squares into this cardi:

https://ravel.me/CriticallyTangled/vmc

Also if you wanna see this without the terrible Tumblr-compressed quality you can find me on TikTok:

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMMCK2UQm/

[copperhawkthoughts]

✨Jester’s Culcake ✨ Had to repaint this piece because the original file was lost - I like the new version way better though 👀

[copperhawkthoughts]

Is it very sad? Yes. Was it incredible storytelling? For sure. But really, what this truly is, is an unprecedented once in a lifetime opportunity for

✨Moon alien PC✨

[copperhawkthoughts]

Eadwulf will always be famous to me for the fact that Caleb put being retraumatized by his former teacher on hold solely to admire Eadwulf's massive forearms

[copperhawkthoughts]

Vox Machina crochet project is done and I’m about to start playing my first ever D&D campaign so you know what that means…

✨OC crochet fanart time✨

[copperhawkthoughts]

Dressed to the Neins 2 - Vox Machina

All of the character-inspired blocks in my Vox Machina project series, in one place without annoying TikTok involvement, and with links to the Ravelry project page (with notes!) for each.

Top down, left to right we have:

Scanlan

Percy

Keyleth

Vex

Grog

Tary

Pike

Vax

[copperhawkthoughts]

Dressed to the Neins - Lucky D20

I forgot to post this one!! Aah!

This one was a lot of me making up stuff as I went along, and let me tell you I scrapped hours of work and so many ideas in the process. Them’s the breaks though - sometimes all you can do with your life is Guess and Check.

The end result is pretty simple - it’s a plain granny square with rows and rows of SCBLO and HDCBLO, and I’d love to say it’s entirely because I wanted something that wouldn’t detract from the more ornate character squares - and I am glad it doesn’t - but it’s mostly a skill issue.

Also at one point I had wanted to get a colour for each character in there, but I tried it and it was bad. It stopped being so ugly once I stopped trying to shoehorn sapphire, yellow, and orange in there, so now the bands of colour simply reflect the core of the D20 rather than the characters.

I thought a lot about the best way to surface embellish the hexagon to get the D20 to read, but ultimately fell back on the tried-and-true backstitch pattern I use in cross stitch - you can see it in the title card - and I think it worked ok!

(Fun fact, I first figured out the D20 stitch pattern while making cross stitched TAZ:Balance fanart 🤓)

[copperhawkthoughts]

Yes for sure! I will post the finished project on Ravelry once it’s done, with all the notes I can think of.

If you are just interested in the squares themselves, the pattern info, modifications, and round-by-round colour layouts are available now in my Ravelry projects - I’m @/CriticallyTangled there

Hope that helps, and I’m always happy to answer questions!

Dressed to the Neins 2 - Scanlan

Tumblr gets the design meta that’s too long for TikTok:

When I’m picking a pattern and colours for these, I’m looking at character art, I’m thinking about the character, and sure, a lot of it is picking pretty colours that go nicely and fit the vibe - but there’s a bunch more to it than that. It’s real ‘the curtains are blue for a reason’ hours over here.

imagine there is a brown and white square underneath a pink and purple square, and then a hand reaches out and pinches the pink and purple square in toward the centre on both sides, letting the brown and white square show underneath. Almost like hands extended in friendship peeling back a mask to reveal a soft underbelly. Visual metaphor!

the Juniper green and Pike blue colours are at the centre of the square to represent things Scanlan values most highly in his heart of hearts - not just Pike and his mother themselves, but what they represent - genuine love and family

the ‘heart’ rounds are then bordered by a thin round of the same purple as the background - this is the Scanlan colour

the quatrefoil shape is made up of alternating rows of lavender and magenta - colours that are close to, but not the same as, the Scanlan purple. This represents the flamboyant, carefree, rakish persona Scanlan spends a long time inhabiting - one which isn’t exactly him, in the end

the brown and white ‘underbelly’ rows represent a simple gnome of humble origin. These colours carry on in thinner stripes through the quatrefoil mostly because that’s how the pattern works, but I think it makes a nice representation of how that first Scanlan is never really gone, no matter how deep into his own mythos he gets

similarly, the background is purple because as much as the colourful layers are a persona, that persona is also not not Scanlan

the border row is the Juniper colour again to emphasize how important family is to Scanlan throughout his story - Juniper’s death and Kaylie’s life being major turning points for him

Pattern: ‘Lise’ by Polly Plum (free on Ravelry!)

Yarn: Sweet Georgia Tough Love Sock in Birch, Bison, Evergreen, Summer Sky, Lavender, Huckleberry, Jam Tart, Dark Orchid

[copperhawkthoughts]

It’s still happening

I’ve typed and deleted several versions of this post, but I’m finally ready to speak:

What the fuck did I do that the only blazed posts I get are NHL RPF and lovingly made gifs of Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins??

I don’t even like the Pens

[copperhawkthoughts]

Please reblog, I’m trying to make up a god

[copperhawkthoughts]

Dressed to the Neins - Vax’ildan

Last but not least, our bird boy, our sad cheese, our broody time guy…..Vax

Notes:

I said in the video that the flowers caught my eye and it’s true - one of the elements I was looking for on my scroll through Ravelry was something like snowdrops. The problem with corner-flowers in a lot of these afghan block designs is that the colour you use for the ‘petals’ (in this case white) shows all the way around the square for that round, which I didn’t want. This pattern has the stitches between the corners worked into the BLO of the previous round, and then the next round is worked into the unworked FLO of the same round, neatly hiding the extra white stitches. So clever.

There is basically zero chance that the designer intended the pie-shaped elements to be interpreted as bird skulls. They are probably just meant as additional feathery texture, like looking at an upside-down feather duster. In all the examples I found on Rav, the rounds that make up those elements aren’t even all worked in the same colour. That said, death of the author, baby. They look like bird skulls to me!

If I’d had my druthers, the popcorn stitches (below and between the ‘skulls’) wouldn’t have been the off-white colour, but they’re part of the same round as the points of the skulls, so they more or less had to be. They sorta look like vertebrae to me now, like the coiled spine of a dragon skeleton, say.

I wanted this square to be very monochrome, so the only touches of colour are the green of the snowdrops (remembrance, life) and the peacock and orange for Vex and Keyleth. I gave Vex the outer of the two coloured rounds so that she’d have the feather-like corner details.

I swear, I promise, that I didn’t realize I was doing this until after it was done. But. VORB. ⚫️⚫️⚫️

[copperhawkthoughts]

Taryon Squarrington 2.0!

Once again I do not know what happened to the captions 😩. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMMhXDb3P/ has the autogenerated ones…

In this incarnation of this square I put the multicoloured yarn in the centre - I think it looks like an opal, and Tary and Percy were always doing artificer things with opals.

I wanted more yellow involved, so I switched the white single crochets for more gold - now they’re not diamonds themselves but rather the prongs of a jewellery setting. I also added a pop of true yellow around the outside. Fun fact, yellow and gold were both part of my original design notes, but I worried it would end up looking too much like Pike’s square and changed my mind. I changed it back. I think it works!

The red, both the shade and the quantity, makes this version a very bold square. It’s loud, attention-grabbing, and liable to make a nuisance of itself. ✨Taryon✨

Anyway I feel better about this version - I think it’s the one that’ll make it into the final project.

[copperhawkthoughts]

simply cannot look at the little daemon guy in the daggerheart character creator without seeing mr tealeaf--