#AtFotS

[piyo13sdoodles]

and the final crop of atfots-tober art challenge!!! part 1 and part 2 can be found at those links :) i just realized the last 3 are all about birds lol

[captainsupernoodle]

The fact that Cliopher HAD A HABIT of HUMMING a BANNED POEM when he was working happily... Incredible. The layers. He thinks he's all subtle and mature these days but he loves Aurora so much that it's just! Part of his regular routine! IN the ultimate no aurora allowed zone! POV you're a trapped rogue anarchist poet & your secretary not only had the balls to tell a joke AND meet your eyes AND tell you good morning like you're a human being BUT ALSO HUMS. YOUR #1 BANNED POEM. DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF YOUR SALAD. AS YOU'RE WRITING POLICY TOGETHER. POV you're a guard who knows your emperor is secretly Bard Robin Hood and the absurdly collected guy who's been quietly restructuring the government out from underneath itself hums Greatest Hits from the Bureau of Censorship IN the oval office so like. He's gotta know right. POV you're a regular guard or misc palace staff and there's a guy humming the Fuck The Emperor tune. In front of the emperor. And you've just gotta stand in the corner staring at the wall or pick up the dishes and leave like you're not listening to melodic high treason.

[captainkirkk]

Concept: trans!His Radiancy AU where the Moon Lady gives him the "gift of life" during the lunar eclipse.

It's not like the God Emperor can hide a pregnancy for 9 months so suddenly the retirement plan becomes so much more important. They're not just rescuing HR from the throne, they're rescuing his daughter Aurelia too.

HR tells them he's having a baby and doesn't know how he can do this alone and almost immediately the household are like

[dedeuteros]

HOTE reading playlists!

I am picky about the ambiance I have on when reading- can't stand looking up "reading playlist" and finding noting but contemporary piano- so I spend some time maybe once a week cherry picking songs for my own background sounds.

So here is all four linked in one place for anyone else interested. These are my babies and are subject to change. I try to match overall tone and.. instrument? of each book, as well as some songs which are shoehorned in for particular scenes. Best played shuffled, don't be scared to skip what isn't quite to the beat of the scene.

[aluradragon]

Fitzroy Angursell impkin

[starfollies]

Boooook. Beeeeg booook.

Also, they aren’t the same dimensions. It is a bit maddening.

[mxfistofele]

i need the next lays of the hearthfire book to make me feel less depressed about the situation of the world

[the-anchorless-moon]

I really wanna see Urumë's perspective on atfots because it must be hysterically funny. Like ok POV you are the sea witch. Another day another adventurer who shows up asking for a boon like an idiot who didn't see all your Large Birds. Sure. At least this one isn't, like, 25. You set him to an almost impossible task, one of the classics, whatever. Lock the door and leave him too it. Eventually you remember humans need to be watered regularly so you wander in to check on him. You open the door and your first thought is Where did all these baskets come from. You don't own this many baskets. Nobody owns this many baskets. Did he bring them with him? Wait, has he been making them? What the fuck. Who does this. You literally did not ask this of him. You look in the baskets and realize that he has been using his many baskets of mysterious origin to sort the grains by color. The baskets are in rainbow order. Who does this.

You find out later that he'd already accomplished your impossible task at this point. The man just likes sorting.

Who does this.

[dragoncharming]

our Cliopher: I'm from a different world. You're surely seeing the magic of my Zunidh.

what other Artorin sees:

[hydraxx]

starting with your heart (bright heart)

Rating: Teen and Up Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Category: M/M Fandom: Nine Worlds Series - Victoria Goddard (Lays of the Hearth-Fire) Relationship: Artorin Damara | Fitzroy Angursell/Cliopher "Kip" Mdang Additional Tags: Asexuality Spectrum, Canon Asexual Character, Complicated Relationships Summary: “Fitzroy.” Cliopher waited until he looked up, and calmly met the golden gaze. “If you asked anything of me, if I said yes, it would be because I wanted to say yes. Because you are not the Emperor, you are my fanoa, and I do not fear to speak the truth of my heart to my fanoa.” Kip finally gets a chance to explain what "I don't mind" means.

heyo, it's "projection: the fanfic"

canon asexual kip has my entire heart, okay, and i need his loved ones to understand.

[lavenderteacat]

While Im on my little Lays of the Hearthfire kick (SPOILERS FOR AT THE FEET OF THE SUN / ATFOTS): fitzroy with a "I dont need google my fanoa knows everything" tshirt that he wears everywhere (kip is mortified)

[piyo13sdoodles]

first 10 days of inktober/drawtober! this year i decided to challenge myself by making the arbitrary rule that i can't use any pencil drafting of any kind--so all of this is drawn directly with marker (you cannot imagine my suffering. i hope, at least, that by the end of the month i will come out of this with a much better sense of how to draft quickly and get a good composition without having to erase too many times). i started with sharpie, and then switched to a sakura marker (2mm width) when the sharpie started to run out + i got a migraine from sharpie fumes, lol.

the theme i have given myself is at the feet of the sun, the book by victoria goddard. you can see the corresponding chapter written in the corner of each of these, if you want to follow along. since atfots has 77 chapters and october has 31 days, i am aiming to illustrate a scene approximately every 2-3 chapters!

[captainsupernoodle]

atfots, a brief summary:

Part 1: The Care & Feeding of Your Viceroy: Understimulation & Socialization

Interlude: It's a Wonderful Life

Part 2: SO YOU WANTED A BIG ADVENTURE EH

I Went to the Palace of the Sun and All I Got Was This Basket of Mud: The Universal Application of Office Skills

Part 3: we are going to healthily communicate if it KILLS us feat. lizard

[inimitablereel]

the star paths: an At the Feet of the Sun festivid

commentary below the cut

So this was my first time making a vid for a book, and I've got a lot to say about the process...

Around the time of the festivids submission deadline I got persistently mildly sick and was coping by rereading a lot of Victoria Goddard books (actually not At the Feet of the Sun, I hadn't gotten there yet) and also trying to think of vid ideas while I was lying in bed coughing. Exactly one person (Tafadhali) requested Nine Worlds for festivids and more specifically requested the Lays of the Hearthfire subseries, so I knew I was trying to focus on those specific books.

A brief digression on my general conception of book vids: The two book vids I'd seen before this year's festivids that stuck in my mind were absternr's Nona the Ninth vid and Rhea's Machineries of Empires vid, both of which are great and I'd highly recommend watching if you've read the corresponding books. They both throw in a lot of different concepts from their worlds in ways that I assume aren't necessarily tied to a specific moment in canon (like a pile of skulls for nona the ninth or troop dynamics for machineries of empires), to put together the overall sense of that really complicated worldbuilding. So you have a vid that conceptually starts from specific characters or beats and then spirals outwards to have a full picture of what the vidder thinks the book is about. (To be clear, this is my reading, not a conversation I've had with the vidders, though I did talk to absternr about Barbie World in the very beginning idea generating phase.) So to make a book vid, I had this sense that I needed a really specific concept and to do a fair amount of storyboarding for what was my main idea and what other things about the book I wanted to pull in. I'm calling this discussion of book vids a digression because that's... not quite what I did here. A lot of the key concepts of Hands of the Emperor are not terribly visual (though if you have an idea of how to vid Kip achieves universal basic income, I'd love to see it). When I started trying to think of a key concept/emotional center of either the worldbuilding or Cliopher as a character that was easier to make visual, I came up with the corn sorting in At the Feet of the Sun. From there I thought, well, why not just do the whole section where Kip travels to the Sky Ocean? It's a really visual part of the book and also just going with here are the things that happened in this part of the book in order is a storyboard already built perfectly for me, without any planning required.

(I think you could also definitely make a more conceptual Kip character study vid starting from that corn sorting scene and his journey into the cave of his heart and spiraling out into scenes from his different lives. I hadn't really considered this option when I was coming up with vid ideas... I think you'd probably want to do a Kip faceclaim (and possibly also one for the emperor), which I was avoiding because I didn't want to go find actors. Unless you count a small child, an old man, and a beaver as a faceclaim?)

Once I'd gotten the idea to do a Sky Ocean themed vid, I didn't really think it would work? I'm a little afraid of book vids (stil honestly, I don't know if I'll make another one, though I had fun with this one), and I wasn't sure it'd be interesting to watch or long enough to be a full vid. This was a festivids treat, so I didn't have a length requirement, even though I ended up hitting over a minute anyways, but I just wasn't sure I had enough content to be interesting. From memory 8 months after having read the book, I was only coming up with like 3 scenes from the Sky Ocean trip from memory 8 months after having read the book (the corn sorting, the stair climbing, and I already knew I wanted to end with the new island, even though it's not quite in the sky ocean section). So I went through and reread the section of the book and highlighted every visual description of a moment, sort of color coded by how important I thought it was to include things. I ended up with 28 things highlighted, but as I kept going I highlighted less and less once I realized there were definitely going to be enough moments to include. (Also the reread portion of the vidding process was happening while I was still feeling pretty bad, atfots is a good thing to read while sick but that doesn't necessarily facilitate obsessive highlighting.)

28 highlighted passages turned into a list of 10 visuals I definitely wanted to find and 15 things I might or might not include (which in the end I included half of). This list was basically 20ish tiny research projects for me. Almost everything I'd written down from the star paths had a corresponding real world thing, but not everything was easy to find a video instead of still images, which would be harder to make into a nice vid. (The things I couldn't find a real version of were Kip's coral firepot - firepots are super real, but traditional ones are earthen not coral, and mostly I was finding lots of videos of modern things for grilling parties - and the kinds of birds at the sea witch's island, boobies with white feathers and black feet - they're kind of close to juvenile masked boobies? But I assume they were intentionally chosen to be a nonexistent bird since they're definitely magic.) I wanted to get the right specific types of animals, but those were all pretty easy to find. The HoTE support group discord was (unknowingly) helpful in my attempts to find the right kind of boat - I went searching through chat history and ended up on this New Zealand museum page, which has great images but I wanted videos (and I knew I needed boat building) so I started searching for types of boats and ended up at https://www.vaka.org, which had multiple whole documentaries that were super useful (and a major part of the footage for this project). In general I was trying to deep dive enough to get something that was Right but not really looking for any particular images for anything or to spend too too long on any of these mini research projects. The harder to find videos were actually the ones I started with because they're so specific to the book and fairytale-esque - e.g. there's lots and lots of videos of corn, but not a lot of sorting it by color into baskets. (You can find videos of corn piles, apparently a way people store corn is just kind of leaving it in a big pile, but it wasn't really visually appealing or something that said sorting to me.) I couldn't find anything close to what I really wanted for carrying Kip carrying the basket of mud up the stairs, so I split it out into three separate ideas: basket backpacks (which I didn't end up including), carrying mud (which gets you videos of beavers, I guess no one else wants mud), and climbing stairs (weirdly hard to find for such a common activity, I kept getting how to install stair lights which is not quite the right visual, before I started looking up stair climbing races, which was better).

My vidsong was also a little research project. Since I had such a strong narrative outline (by stealing it from the book), I didn't feel like I needed the song to be saying anything specific, so I wanted it to be some kind of Polynesian music, preferably something sort of thematically about journeys. While I was still trying to decide whether to do the vid, I asked on the discord if there was a real world equivalent of the Lays, and Victoria Goddard answered and pointed me at the band I ended up using, Te Vaka. I also listened to a bunch of smithsonian folkways and someone's Poly Jams🌺 spotify playlist before deciding that literally the first song I had found from Te Vaka on youtube was such a bop that I couldn't not use it. And it's about dancing and community, which is perfect for Kip!

This wasn't a project where I did any particularly complicated video editing. I think I went from having a zillion youtube videos downloaded (and one hour long documentary) to having a full vid in a day? Mostly I just put things in the order they happened in the book trying to beat match the music more or less and breaking things up with shots of sailing the vaha. My one still image editing thing is I did put in some clamshells on the island at the end, but I did that in davinci resolve, which is the video editing software I use, without breaking out photoshop or anything. (The first draft of my vid had somewhat more and more obvious clamshells, but my beta said it was a little awkward, so it's hopefully more subtle now.) I had originally thought about doing some color editing to make things look more magical, but honestly coming from the northern hemisphere all these shots of sunshine over oceans are pretty magical looking as is in January (and I didn't want to do the extra work :p)

This description of process would be incomplete without saying that rattyjol responded to my discord message asking for someone to look at a slightly secret visual fanwork and reassured me that it was obvious to someone other than me what was even happening in this vid.

[dedeuteros]

Mage of Nowhere in Particular

[hellotailor]

GAV hi hello I’m reading At The Feet Of The Sun and I am DYING. I keep stopping every few pages to be like KIP!!! and either like scream quietly or like metaphorically roll around in all the ridiculous pining. I GENUINELY didn’t think we’d get this I know you said it was satisfying but I thought you meant by the end not Kip constantly Having Thoughts and Refusing To Think About Them from a few chapters in. Also turns out everyone already knows the secret name and Rhodin is a conspiracy theorist (although honestly I fully expect someone will come across telepathic dinosaurs at some point bc why not) and Kip is absolutely SATURATED in protective magic he can’t feel bc HR loooves him and and and! I’m only like 30% of the way through and I can’t believe I have to stop to do things as boring as ‘sleep’ and ‘have a job’ when I COULD BE READING. Anyway sorry hope you don’t mind me sending you this you’re one of like 2 people I know who��s into the series.

i COMPLETELY understand, i was staying up till like 4am each night to finish that book. simply COULD NOT put it down... hard to remember the last time i found a novel so emotionally satisfying.