I think theres something really interesting with the opening episode of season 2 of Misfits and Magic. Each of the main four has kind of gotten the lives they always wanted, but not in the way they hoped
-- K finally is the (dark?) Chosen One she's always wanted to be. She lives in shadows and whispers, she's affecting change and using her spooky online persona to influence the world. But it has come at a terrible price. Shes sucked into virtual spaces and pulling away from her friends and loved ones, plus it's hell on poor Teddy to boot. She can finally be a crusader but shes ungrounded and cares more about The Cause than her own quality of life (or Teddy's life)
-- Sam is famous and beloved. Shes reached new hights of fame and popularity, seemingly without much difficulty. Things just seem to continually work out. But her reliance on her charm is unintentionally causing her to be kind of a menace to those around her. Her PA and producer and Tony Danza bend to her whims, even at their own expense and mental health. Without a check on her charm magic she can priorit her own happiness without having to consider others. Sam makes it work, why cant they do it too? So people dont get too close because of their stress and her fame. She is a caring and thoughtful person normally but right now is using her gifts in unhealthy ways, which may be to her detriment later
-- Evan finally has stability and a dry bed and some control over his shadow and other demons. He has the predictability hes always craved. But even after overcoming his obstacles he is still very much the same as ever--still alone, still terrified to put down roots, still afraid of his own shadow. Evan did all this work to fix his problems and his life is still kind of the same as it always was. Hes still scraping by on the margins in survival mode. Stability and a quiet life doesnt necessarily mean hes able to build a life where he can thrive
-- Jammer has his community, a team, job prospects, a potential love life. Hes living the basketball dream he was always working toward. But he also can't really be his full self. He had some profound experiences at Gowpenny and cultivated skills, but he doesnt share it or talk about it for fear of becoming an oddity. He's all about connections and the team but he doesnt trust those in his day to day with important aspects of himself--and can you really be part of the team without trust?. He has always been focused on the group but now it may be harming or stunting him in unforseen ways
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hello if you are still accepting death note submissions, how about astarion
amazing submission thank you
verdict: no to both investigative questions. could astarion beat kira? probably, but not the normal way.
could astarion intuit the mechanics of the death note
no.
could astarion identify light yagami
no.
listen. i love astarion very much. he's very clever. but only in all the wrong directions. he has no ability to plan ahead. or really plan at all. he's too impatient to sit around and analyse clues. his plan for beating cazador was to walk into cazador's palace fuck around and find out. 10000% he couldn't beat light at his own game, so that's out, but honestly it might be more effective to beat light yagami NOT at his own game (like ending a chess game by just upending the chessboard) because L tried that and it didn't really work out.
what im saying is if the rest of the worm gang figures out that light is kira, astarion could probably beat him from there. but if you left astarion to his own devices and went "can you find kira" he'd give up.
i do think he might like, accidentally eat light or something though. that counts.
could astarion survive
ok here we run into some interesting questions. for the other ones ive been kind of waffling between whether im putting the character in the death note universe but borrowing their contextual abilities from their own universe, vs putting light yagami/kira/etc into the character's universe... i think due to baldur's gate being the way it is we have to put light in bg3, because astarion's backstory is so contextual and historical you cant really remove him from it while preserving all the relevant factors. what im talking about is two things
can light yagami figure out astarion's surname
what happens if you write an undead person's name in the death note
which are linked - because does light know that astarion is a vampire and therefore undead? the most straightforward way to find astarion's surname is to find his tombstone, but in order to do that light would have to know that astarion had died.
more to the point, the first rule of the death note is:
The human whose name is written in this note shall die.
where we run into TWO problems. the death note takes place in the 'real' world where there are only humans and obvious non-humans (ie animals and shinigami), so there's really no need to make any finer distinction.
but astarion is 1) an elf and 2) a vampire. so does the death note work on elves?? maybe? but an undead vampire ISN'T a human, not in the normal sense and also not in the extrapolated sense where you can assume elves and humans having similar personhood probably have the same rules apply. vampires are undead! that's very different! you cant kill a vampire with a heart attack!!! his heart isn't even working!!!
ALSO
You cannot kill humans at the age of 124 or over with the Death Note.
if we say aging stops when vampires die the first time, then astarion was 39, but then we're saying he's dead, in which case he probably can't die again. if we say aging continues as a vampire, then he's over 200, and he's excluded by this rule.
so i feel like astarion survives due to some stupid loophole.
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Can you expand on what you mean by Baron being "too cool" to really fit a horror monster? It's a very interesting concept and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is it that they're too active/involved/tangible and it detracts from their scariness?
I feel like I should preface this with a wall of disclaimers lmao 1/I am a hardcore, down-to-the-marrow, avid, deeply sincere horror enthusiast, esp. horror creatures. this usually means my mileage is vastly different from the average populace's, and my scaredy bone has been disintegrated by longterm exposure. most things in a piece of horror media won't scare me! so I practically never use that on its own as the scale to talk abt horror experiences, but when something does scare me it's always a special occasion to be treasured. 2/canon d20 is never really meant to be horror horror, and for good reasons: it doesn't fit the company's output, it takes a kind of carelessness in production estimation that is always a huge risk, it's often vulnerable in a way that kinda goes against how TTRPGs usually facilitates vulnerability, and for most people it's just! stressful! d20, even with the "horror-themed" seasons, generally just plays with horror tropes and stays focused in its goal of being a comedy improv tabletop theater show. 3/fantasy high's chosen system is DnD, which as I've mentioned before is before all a combat-based game system, which means the magic circle of play is drawn based on stats that facilitate and prioritize combat. want or not this affects every interaction you have in the game, and given fantasy high's concept from the ground up (everyone's going to school of DnD stuff to get better at DnD) it's doubly relevant. 4/This Is Fine I have no quarrel with this. my meters are internal, I do not ask this show to be anything it doesn't advertise itself to be, and what it is is fucking great! I like it! when I expand on this ask's question it will be like a physicist going insane in a lab. that's the mindset we're going in with.
disclaimers done. my stance on horror as a genre is that it's a utility genre rather than a content genre or a demographic genre; it is the discard of narratives. it's the trash pile. horror, above being scary, is about being ugly and messy, it's the cracks on the ground any story inevitably steps over to stay a genre that isn't horror. the genre's been around long enough to develop a codex and a general language that medias and makers and enthusiasts of the genre can use to talk about and build onto, but if you go into individual pieces there's really no unifying Horror Story. one person's beautiful life can be another's horror story, it's just how it is.
this makes The Monster a deeply intriguing piece of the genre. thing is a monster is in a decent percentage of any story - it's just when the antagonist force steps into something past a certain line traced out in the story's world. monstrousness is in pretty much every western fantasy story, it's in any story with a hero and something to vanquish or win; more than anything it's a proxy of that thing up there. the line in a narrative's world. the monster is the guard of the unknown lands, where heroic, civilized people don't tread.
what does this mean in the context of horror? the genre is about that perceived lawlessness, that "unknown land" so to say. we're in the monster's home. that's the literary context that we often walk into a horror piece with; the monster knows more than you about where you are. it may not understand you, but it holds more information than you, and with that it moves swifter than you, has more covered than you, and is more assured in its existence in this context than you. it's a struggle to catch up to it, it's nigh impossible to get one over it, and you're never sure it'll 100% work, because you just don't have the information necessary to.
with that framing you can kinda see where I'm coming from here: horror's often about the breaking of rules. I always think a monster's most effective when it breaks well-established rules of both existence and visual storytelling. think Possum (2018) or Undertale's Omega Flowey or the Xenomorph Queen - unique change in medium, unique change in graphic, unique change in design language, etc. in that sense I actually really like how canon baron plays out: they don't really function like anything else in the fantasy high universe, the bad kids have not managed to kill them when they've felled literal gods, their domain in fhjy literally introduces new mechanics to encompass their existence! from an experience design standpoint they slap mad shit. BUT! I can't help finding their character, like as a character riz (and the other bad kids, eventually) interact with, to be very... coherent? in design. this is kinda hard for me to articulate in words, it's more often a sense you get once you've looked at enough of these scrumptious fuckers, their general design and the way they show up is just kinda too clean, so to say. always kinda newly made? fresh unboxed. it, once again, makes sense for their lore - they are looking for more about themself from riz - and their function - they're an antagonist in a game experience, they're meant to be interacted with in a way that produces results and meshes with the existing magic circle - but that shininess takes away from the implied history they should have dominion over and the person they're haunting doesn't.
from another angle there is kinda something there about how put-together canon baron is as a concept; the domain they call home is riz's deep-seeded fears, extremely vulnerable things he's drawn borders around to quarantine and refused to walk into. things that from his perspective would irreversibly shatter certain pleasant fictions his world is built on top of. canon baron, While Extremely Cool, I feel is kinda too neat to connect with and signify the apocalyticized mess that'd result from this paradigm shift. the part where they're in riz's briefcase and looking through every mirror is Very Cool And Fucked Up! but ultimately the show draws a line around them as well, by making game-physical, tangible spaces they're in (the mirrors and the haunted mordred manor) and put riz and the bad kids there only when they need to confront stuff. riz is meaningfully narratively away from baron's unknown land for most of fantasy high.
with that and all of my disclaimers in mind my conclusion here is if canon baron wants to be a Horror Monster they'd have to cross way more lines. be a Lot more invasive. hence (holds up my class swap baron like a long cat)
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