#GUTS OVER FEAR

[disgruntled-lifeform]

Thank you to all the very lovely loomers who helped me in my hour of need, here is what I settled on for my potential warp

I will be trying to figure out how to set up Kettricken later this week and would love to drag you all along for that wild ride ^_^

[transjudas]

Frank Iero + the fear that people will hear your deepest most personal thoughts and feelings and think you’re “crazy” and walk away. (x, x, x)

[skrunksthatwunk]

reread the first 3 volumes of berserk (aka the black swordsman arc) today and started Really paying attention to guts this time and my takeaway is that he is TERRIFIED way more often than i thought. like puck mentions fear in the mix of emotions he's sensing from him but he is truly wide eyed quivering princessmoding his way through a lot of this ordeal

[brown-little-robin]

my last week, a visual demonstration

[kashilascorner]

What were the prose Tristan authors eating for lunch when they wrote Mark and Tristan's dynamics seriously it's so toxic but also like they keep hanging around each other? Toxic exes except family instead of lovers

[no-fxn-club]

.

[vile-wizard]

I need to clean my room now. It is dire.

[rawliverandcigarettes]

You said you're excited to spend more time on Sur'Kesh in Empire of Preys, and I'm excited for that too! We only got to spend like a minute on Sur'Kesh in canon, and I've always wished that we'd gotten to see more of that world. What do you imagine salarian architecture and design sensibilities as being like? I won't ask you to spoil the story, but I'm curious about any worldbuilding you've done along those lines that you'd like to share!

HELLO!!

Sorry for taking so long to reply to this wonderful ask! I kind of pondered a lot on what to talk about and how much I should talk about; but since you focused on architecture, I think I'll focus on that!

So, in The Empire of Preys, we spend most of our time (barred from one scene that takes place in a more remote city) in the country of Nkoma. What we call country and what salarians call country differs slightly, however: think of it more as an administrative district that exists more for the sake of resource repartition and ease of organization at a medium scale rather than a place, or an identity with strong cultural attachments that would involve nationalism or things like this --this would be much more true for cities (a practice encouraged and mirror by asaris) and clans in general.

There are two main focuses in Nkoma.

The first one is the city of Talat, considered a hotspot of diplomacy (where the administrative body called the Grand Symposium has its seat --basically where the Salarian Union is being ruled), business and tourism that spreads from the remnants of an old volcano all the way to the seaside coast. Its main landmark is a huge water dam used to control the level of the internal lake, assist with irrigation of the agricultural activity spreading around the city, and also partially turned into a luxury hotel. It's also the city that looks the most like the Citadel, Thessia, Armali, and every huge metropolis in the galaxy: it has tons of immigration and is the most overtly capitalist, with the least amount of relics from their past that isn't directly turned into museums.

The second is the city of Leyjung, which is Nkoma's second biggest city (and the biggest focus of the two within the narrative). It is much deeper inlands, deep within the rainforest --it's actually pretty close to the STG quarters that we see ingame (and MAYBE, maybe, we could see it in TEoP as well....)

It's a very old city with tons of history: it is roughly divided between the old town (tucked inside a valley following a large river) and the newer town that looms over it from the cliffsides. Both towns are riddled with technology; it's just that the old town still preserves a lot of its ocher-based and troglodyte buildings that allows for natural temperature regulation on top of being monuments to the city's past as a huge capital of the (since defunct) phassen empires.

The traditional structure of the salarian clan does not account for individuality. Therefore, the oldest kind of salarian building is the House: a very long building built over generations that try to account for the needs of the clan, a place where every salarian with a clan is always welcomed (but they have, for example, no concept of individual bedrooms; though people with importance within the clan have individual offices). The whole clan very rarely live together all at once; they generally have small individual open rooms that will sustain a dozen of salarians at a time (for example a ton of small kitchens rather than one big room where everybody eats all at once, and no real concept for group meals except for big celebrations). They also include walk-in showers everywhere; the goal is just to let water splash over you for a few seconds to cool off, and you're not even expected to remove your clothes while doing so (they also have communal pools for longer soaks, where public nudity is 100% fine).

Leyjung still has a large number of old clan Houses that have not been repurposed into commercial hubs or broken into smaller apartments like in Talat; most notably, the biggest Linron House is still in use while being considered a remarkable historical artefact as the history of that clan and that town stretch back for at least a thousand years.

One of the biggest challenges of the architecture of the town is to account for the extreme humidity: the rainforest surrounding and permeating the town is so dense that, twice a day, once at dawn (feshe qer) and then a little after midday (selecat qer), huge clouds of vapor start rising from the surrounding canopy as the air gets more and more suffocating, until it all breaks down into a brief torrential rain that soaks everything back late in the afternoon, and makes the evening and night the most pleasant temperature-wise. It happens... basically every day.

The town's architecture is therefore very concerned with avoiding wind and thunder damage, as well as trying to prevent stagnant water from swamping down the infrastructure. For example, hydrophobic plexiglas is very widely used. A lot of streets meant for pedestrians, especially in the older town, kind of follow this format (sorry for the janky perspectiiiive I'm bad at thiiis)

Using a lot of non-corroding mesh fence and avoiding to put salarians directly on ground, using a lot of triangular structures to let the rainfall glide to canals that are pushed back to the main river, with a ton of plants to absorb the excess humidity as much as possible and provide some relief from the heat.

The main problem that Leyjung face is: when is modernization too much modernization? What is preserving tradition, and what is refusal to change? What's opposition to galactic gentrification, and what is straight-up xenophobia? What's power to the individual VS what is the destruction of the collective?

Let's have Elections about it, maybe!! Surely that will solve everything!!

[rineedagger]

[dutybcrne]

Kaeya is rather touch averse, cringing away from casual contact people give him under the guise of being distracted or idle movement. He's used to it, the Ragnvindrs and Adenlinde got him used to frequent affectionate physical contact, but it can still be entirely Uncomfortable if he's touched by someone outside those he is close to or someone he's otherwise Allowed to touch him.

[bunny-heels]

kinda tempted to try and make some sort of space for people who enjoy gore who aren't weirdos

[tmae3114]

Sometimes I think about the dynamic between the MQ Hero and the Mysterious Stranger because it’s just so fun. The way the hero knows that the Mysterious Stranger is Up To No Good but has no proof and ends up helping anyways because ultimately these are problems needing solved. The no-nonsense attitude the hero takes with the sheer I’ll help fix this mess but this conversation is Not Over energy every time they talk. The immense knife cat energy the Mysterious Stranger exudes in every conversation. There’s something almost playful to it, in a way

And I wonder

Zorbak tells us that the Shadowscythe weren’t directly affected by the Reset the way the rest of reality was, so we can deduce that the Mysterious Stranger wasn’t affected either

Do you think the Mysterious Stranger ever missed the pre-Reset dynamic? The errand running, the deliberate sneakiness, the banter?

[beecampbell]

my absolute worst red flag is that feeling of disgust that shakes through me whenever i find out someone is a christian and i think ill keep waving it

[homosociallyyours]

(cw for gun violence & racism mentions in tag post)

[pinkfey]

one of the neighbors called the police on my brother bc he’s been yelling at my parents outside for the past half hour

[labyrynth]

wwx stan/jgy anti salt shh

i just think it’s SO funny when ppl are like “umm wwx is NOTHING like jgy bc wwx is Moral and Good and Kind and Just whereas jgy is Evil and Greedy and Power Hungry and Selfish. wwx ONLY ever did what he thought was RIGHT and JUST!!! jgy MURDERED his father AND his sworn brother AND all of those innocent women!! wwx would NEVER!!!”

uhhh except that wwx would. bc he did.

like are we forgetting the whole mutilation and torture and “feeding a guy his own flesh” thing or are we just ignoring it?

like okay we’ll put that aside. are we forgetting the whole “intentionally and gleefully torturing hundreds to thousands of enemy cultivators to death” thing or are we ignoring that too?

okay fine. we’ll put that aside too.

what about the whole “intentionally and gleefully torturing potentially hundreds of non-combatant wens and others tangentially affiliated with them who may have been caught up in the war” thing? are we ignoring that too?

yeah that’s the funny thing about military bases is that actually, there tends to be a lot of non-combatants there too. you know, doctors, servants, prostitutes, etc. all i’m saying is that wwx wasn’t exactly discerning when he was on his happy fun torture joyride.

(it’s ok tho we all make bad decisions sometimes. unless you’re the son of a whore. in which case you’re just evil. uwu)