onlyaverysmallwish

[onlyaverysmallwish]

[onlyaverysmallwish]

i'd also been idly playing with the idea that the majority of the story is told through the wolf's and sirree's povs right up until the very end of the story, when vanya is all alone For Reasons, when the audience will finally get to see inside his own mind and his own feelings and get more of an Understanding to his own thought processes

and. uh. the more i write at this the more i realize it wasn't totally Idle and tbh i've really just taken it for granted that that is How This Will Go

[onlyaverysmallwish]

maybe i will someday develop at least an ounce of discipline. for now i just have this paragraph to share. bc i'm already writing The End

Vanya reads on, unerringly, even as his heart hammers in his chest. He’s coming to something, he feels, something big, something ugly. Some great ghastly dead thing plopped in the middle of the stream which he has for so long sidled around, pretended not to notice. Reassured himself and everyone around him that it was nothing worth getting concerned over. Just a fetid rock. Just a meaty sandhill. The water would wear it away with time, carry the viscera out to some great depth where it could finally be truly forgotten.

[onlyaverysmallwish]

i never made it to this part of the fic (tho i do have large chunks of it written. as usual orz) but i still really like this moodboard i made for the third task

so the premise of the fic is that the witch grandmother has given vanya three Impossible tasks to complete in order to lift the curse she placed upon sirree. the third of these tasks is to travel to the grave of the lubov (an old mythical creature accidentally killed by the oostali people eons ago) and retrieve its eye

what happened is that oostali mortals at the time wished to do a good deed for the lubov and built it a house. however, the house was very large and complicated and the lubov starved to death before it could find its way out smh

now the house (castle) still stands and the lubov’s remains are somewhere inside it thinking emoji

[onlyaverysmallwish]

moodboard for the second task from the fic vanya was created for

i really should have done these in order tho bc they were set up in such a way that each one is meant to bleed into the other and is a big part of what makes them supposedly Impossible lies down

anyway the second task involves a long abandoned ‘factory’ where some oostali residents used to make decorative eggs and yes they are 100% based off faberge eggs bc why wouldn’t they be lies down in oostal they’re called top-top eggs tho bc i named them after A Song nobody else knows probably lmao

nobody is sure what happened to the artisans who made the eggs. they’ve been gone for a long time. the mystery of it all is one of sirree’s favorite subjects. she also has a fondness for the little decorated eggs, so vanya occasionally picks one or two up for her whenever he happens across the place. 

the task is to search through all the remaining eggs (there’s still hundreds to thousands of them scattered across the factory) for The One (1) which isn’t decorated on the inside

[onlyaverysmallwish]

there’s a line in the fic also where haru kinda muses to herself about the fact that oostal seems to have a lot of locations with this haze of distant tragedy and emptiness over them, and there’s something about the concept of it being this mercurial land with a long, half-forgotten history where large pieces of it have Died Off in utter silence that i find. fascinating…………

[onlyaverysmallwish]

idk if it’s mentioned on the oostal page or not and i’m too lazy to check but it sort of exists as a ‘mirror underbelly’ to the cat kingdom which is a description i can’t really explain further atm lmao but oostal, while already being kind of a parallel, fluid dimension, also has its own Underbelly in the form of a dream world. it’s assumed this dream world has very strong ties to the afterlife but no one really knows for absolute certain

as perhaps expected bc of that, vanya’s grasp of that dream world is Good, and it’s relatively easy for him both to enter and to navigate it. he’s guided sirree there a number of times to show her things he found interesting

[onlyaverysmallwish]

i want to shout a contextless spoiler into the void but i can't decide which one and also have to cook dinner wheezes

[onlyaverysmallwish]

i printed out the original fic and im editing it to see what i can change and what i can keep and this was a great idea actually i don't feel quite so lost lmao

[onlyaverysmallwish]

and for the record i'm still tweaking the tasks but right now they are as follows (also keep in mind for the RP blog, the story itself has already happened and vanya has Failed and moved on to his next gamble for the book):

the basic gist is that grandmother will give him what he wants if he brings her three specific gifts: a summer berry from the sown forest, a certain special painted egg from an abandoned factory, and one of the lubov's eyes

the sown forest is in perpetual winter. this task is further complicated by a couple things, such as the fact that the forest may not even be Real in the first place so nothing can actually grow there, and that the creatures that live there despite that have an evident unshakable aversion to vanya himself. by the time of the story he understands that they have access to the berries he's after but they refuse to engage with him

the abandoned top top foundry used to produce jeweled and painted eggs before its artisans mysteriously vanished some time long ago. the factory still sits untouched, but most of the eggs that were in-progress or finished have been stolen by now. this is admittedly the task i'm the shakiest on bc i have not completely thought it through lmao. the one thing that's decided is that the berry vanya obtains from the sown forest is also necessary for him to discern The Right Egg. but he can't eat it, both bc he physically Can Not Make Himself and bc he has to take it back to grandmother

i've mentioned the lubov before but it's a creature that is long dead by the time of the story, although the house the ancient oostali built for it still exists. albeit quite different from its original layout. my original idea was that vanya would scheme to switch out the eye with one of the Wrong eggs and thus trap the bureau and haru while he could run back to grandmother and come back to free them later. probably. but they would have outsmarted him (having grown quite suspicious of his motives and all as the story went along) and left him trapped instead

these three tasks really are the building blocks of this story tho so i really need to get them all worked out lmao

i just feel kinda like a motor burning out after just spinning my wheels furiously for a few minutes when i get too stuck into it tho rip

i feel like. when it comes to Impossible Tasks in fairy tales, there's different flavors. there's the ones that must be overcome by simply being clever and thinking way Way outside the box, finding loopholes and exploiting them, and there's ones that aren't strictly impossible but are so incredibly taxing and ask for so much sacrifice, effort, pain etc. from their hopeful achievers that they may as well be

and i've been wanting to incorporate a little more of the latter into the tasks grandmother has given to vanya. bc right now as they're written they are very much more straightforward 'find the loophole' situations with vanya really having to think and plan out how he'll move through them

but it'd be nice if as well they had an element of hardship in them-- something that is painful, something that is vastly onerous to him that he's trying his damnedest to steamroll through

and i think it'd also be nice if some of them do rely a little on him not resorting to some of his worst flaws and instincts, or at least would be Easier if he didn't

[onlyaverysmallwish]

i feel like. when it comes to Impossible Tasks in fairy tales, there's different flavors. there's the ones that must be overcome by simply being clever and thinking way Way outside the box, finding loopholes and exploiting them, and there's ones that aren't strictly impossible but are so incredibly taxing and ask for so much sacrifice, effort, pain etc. from their hopeful achievers that they may as well be

and i've been wanting to incorporate a little more of the latter into the tasks grandmother has given to vanya. bc right now as they're written they are very much more straightforward 'find the loophole' situations with vanya really having to think and plan out how he'll move through them

but it'd be nice if as well they had an element of hardship in them-- something that is painful, something that is vastly onerous to him that he's trying his damnedest to steamroll through

and i think it'd also be nice if some of them do rely a little on him not resorting to some of his worst flaws and instincts, or at least would be Easier if he didn't

[onlyaverysmallwish]

since i mentioned pictures from my (2) trips abroad back in 2012 and 2013 and how randomly they've kinda inspired me to draw something Big again, i wanted to share some of the ones that i probably fall back on for oostal/story vibes lmao

[onlyaverysmallwish]

idk if i want to share a lot of this as i'm working on it like i usually do (i probably will tho fair warning lmao) but tbh it feels good to spend a lot of time on A Thing for once

carved out a minute to go back to an old favorite medium

[onlyaverysmallwish]

with the comment yesterday about my drawing looking like an illustration from a book, and something unrelated i just spied on the dash, i have a sudden extreme desire to try making like a mock illustrated book page/excerpt for this story

[onlyaverysmallwish]

still working on this but i just would like to say i really like thinking about how his clothing fits him and how it'd. Behave?? when he's not standing like a little person

my drawings of him may not always reflect it but since he's based on the cats of tcr, he is meant to be shaped like an animal, not like a human, and his clothes follow that design notion of an animal who's put on a human outfit

so i like to imagine that some parts of his outfit which look totally normal and natural when he's standing get kind of uncomfortable-looking when he sits or crouches

or at least it becomes somewhat clear that his clothing fit really wasn't originally intended for him

carved out a minute to go back to an old favorite medium

[onlyaverysmallwish]

carved out a minute to go back to an old favorite medium

[onlyaverysmallwish]

the so-called Dream World used to exist on the same plane as the rest of oostal before the ancient oostali built the lubov's house and inadvertently killed it. since then, the house and its surrounding environment have gradually shifted in appearance and size and who knows what else and sequestered itself into its own little pocket dimension that can only be reached in slumber

no one really questions how, much less understands it