#WHY IS THE OCEAN SO BIG

[theskywaslookingback]

Why are bodies of water so terrifying? They’re just… they’re so large. When I try to picture them in my mind it’s like I have to minimize them for my own sanity. I picture a river, just a normal river where people swim and fish and play, and in my mind I can see both sides of the land so easily and the water itself is only about waist deep, but I know that’s not true. I know that the deepest part of the Congo is 722’. Seven! Hundred! Twenty! Two! Feet! I’ve seen men pull fish out of those waters that were more than ten feet long! A fish! Almost twice as long as I am! And there’s not just one monster fish swimming around in those waters, no, there’s thousands, millions, of fish and snakes and crocodiles and sharks and so many things I can’t even start to think about without my body trying to go into shock. I can’t think about the ocean without my stomach turning over with dread because it’s just so big. It holds so many animals inside of it that are so large I could look at them from one side and not be able to see the other until it swam all the way past. These things just exist out in the world, and people fish for them on purpose. People get on boats that aren’t even half as large as the animal they want to see and go out to the middle of nowhere, where no one else exists and if your boat were to capsize there would be no hope of quickly swimming to land, and then these people put on suits and they get into the water with these millions and millions of creatures so they can photograph them and study them and they do that because they want to. I don’t even understand what could compel someone to do something like that. I don’t understand how they hear the call of the void and not shrink in fear. I don’t understand how they choose to look at it instead.

[inkskinned]

so i wrote a book that comes out soon and having that be real feels like falling down stairs because i wanted this since i was 7 years old so now what do i want after it.

so tell me why today all i care about is the word trundle, that the word trundle exists. of course i have things to do and emails to send and a world of suffering to protect but today my brain won't let me look away from the sheer linguistic improbability of trundle.

i saw a truck doing it. i imagine animals did it first. or people maybe. to trundle comes direct from old english. cows do it on occasion, but more often sheep (in my experience). someone had to name lope and someone had to name slog. the verbs to run and to leap make sense; they are singular and important distinguishers.

but we can bask rather than relax. we can scuttle rather than crawl. sometimes when i move in dance class it is to undulate rather than roll. someone had to name things like sonder and whimsy. of course we had words for tangible things like tree and grass and root. i love those words, i'm eating them.

i don't know the word for this thing. where it's real-now. sometimes i feel it when i am dating someone i actually like-and-love and i realize that is real, i am dating them and it's real that i like-and-love them. sometimes i have this feeling when i have been planning a vacation or an event for weeks-and-months and it finally happens - the feeling this is happening, it's happening right now.

it happens randomly sometimes too. i will be at the carnival or at an ice cream stand or with the last light of summer in my hair and i will feel it again, that sense - i have waited my whole life for this, and im finally experiencing it, and i need to pay attention to it.

but it's real! how amazing! how horribly tragic! it's real. it exists. the moment is here.

i have no idea what to do with it.

[bestial4ngel]

Got hit with the urge to make fish dividers

(fish pngs credit)

[thelucidduchess]

[which-qsmp-egg-would]

Poll's Origin Story (kind of)

Stardust wanders. That's their whole thing. They are a spirit, or more accurately an... entity? Minor deity? It's a little complicated, but what is important is that they wander, and they wander wherever they want. One day, they ended up in just the right place at the right time.

That little egg that Stardust found ended up being Poll, Of course.

It's a little hard to glean how long Poll was in the Federation labs and why they were made. Like many of the other eggs, Poll doesn't talk about what happened (if they remember at all) and generally pretends like it never happened. As far as they could figure out though, Poll had gone through all the testing and was in storage until the right set of islanders arrived.

Having spent their entire life surrounded by Federation employees, Poll's dragon form was *very* different from what it is today, to say the least.

After spending a little while around Stardust, their form changed to the one we know and love! Although since their papa is a shapeshifter too, their form resembles the dragons their genetics are from instead of their papa.

[changewingwentz]

Hello to who sees this answer and/ reblog what color reminds you of sleep token, as in the whole band in general (specifics with the guys & esperas/the choir are also welcomed)

[cowboysorceror]

I am goddamn begging for the selkie AU lore holy shit. There’s SO much potential there. KONS JACKET SPECIFICALLY BEING TORN AS SHIT??? 👀👀👀

OKAY SO it's still percolating it's still cooking & @mamawasatesttube is responsible for a lot of it BUT as for Kon specifically... man... obviously Cadmus (and later Lex) have his coat in the early days. but he doesn't actually even really KNOW how messed up that is bc he's a kid and no one told him!!! he doesn't understand that that's his basic personhood and it belongs to him. he knows almost nothing about his selkie heritage or what it means, and so he doesn't know why he feels miserable and discontent and can't stay away for very long and is just kind of sickly ☹️ and ofc when Clark eventually realizes what's going on he is capital H Horrified and immediately tries to help him get it back. but it's a process and it's a very bitter and traumatic thing for Kon to realize how deeply he was being manipulated (very analogous to canon in that regard).

and for Kon's jacket being a bit patchwork - selkie coats are essentially an outwards extension of the soul! they're very unique and personally individualized, and can be both altered and damaged by painful relationships with that part of their identity (or just physical trauma). some of the threadwork on Kon's jacket is work done to repair damage from the neglect/abuse of his coat by Cadmus, and some of it is Kon trying to make it his own! Selkie coats are magical which makes them somewhat fluid :)

[happyk44]

Jason and Thalia: It's about right or wrong.

Percy: It's about if they brought it upon themselves.

Nico and Hazel: It's about right or wrong and if they brought it upon themselves.

[dkettchen]

Honestly Law has the power to literally just drop these ppl in the ocean and let them drown bc they're devil fruit eaters but I guess he hasn't considered that option huh

[foggyfanfic]

There comes a point when you are doing too much research for fanfic, and that point is probably way before you’re looking up the interactions between the Cocos and Nazcas plates in order to decide where you would put a fictional island if you want it off the coast of Colombia.

[rxttenfish]

Is there even any infrastructure for humans visiting merfolk underwater settlements? Or are they too deep for humans to comfortably dive/swim in? Or maybe the merfolk just say, "of course we don't have any support for you under several hundred feet of water. literally why would you even try?"

there's not any infrastructure for human (or any other sophont besides gorgons that already live there, anyhow) visitation! mostly that's because this is a bit of a first contact situation, albeit one that was born more out of political isolationism and not necessarily caring about the land-based sophonts...

basically, the current political entity overseeing all existing or known merfolk settlement is a fairly old one, that slowly grew from a smaller polity into a more all-encompassing unit by swallowing up its neighbors. it's more of a complicated shell game than this necessarily makes it seem - like i said, a lot of time has passed, and significant cultural shifts have happened within that time, as well as shifts and establishment on how its government and policies would function, so it's a little bit more of a larger conglomerate containing within it many smaller governments, who are allowed independent control of the populations within their allotted territories, just so long as they take up the job of translating the broader governmental laws and taxes down onto that population. the details are rather vague, and so long as the results are what the larger governmental body asked, the intermediary areas are allowed a lot of different ways to interpret what that means.

however, one of the things that got lost in that shuffle of politic and history was the presence of merfolk inland. historically, merfolk have actually periodically spent time inland! usually it was still very tied to the water, being more like seasonal beachcombing using temporary shelters and housing, but they utilized the land a lot more for potential resources and ways to live. the nomadic families especially used to take advantage of these opportunities, and there was much more interaction with landfolk in these contexts.

the exact way it was lost varies, in that not everyone agrees what came first or what was the reason or who did what, but most of this was probably limited and then lost due to the larger governmental body, in the process of colonization, banning merfolk from going up onto the land in order to prevent political enemies and refugees from fleeing up and onto the land, using it as a base of operations, or otherwise using it as a means to escape to other bodies of saltwater. like i said, these periods inland were mostly seasonal, and merfolk did still majorly depend on the water, so what merfolk did make settlements inland mostly ended up vanishing over time anyways - either through simply vanishing into landfolk populations, or through dying out, it wasn't particularly sustainable.

but, time still went on, and this ban remained, and somehow it slowly disseminated into popular thought that the land was just not really very interesting in the first place. sure, merfolk knew there was stuff up there, and other animals and even fairly smart animals, but that doesn't necessarily make it worth investigating. travel over land is hard for them, and it's hard for them to live on land for long periods of time, and everything that they need and depend on is in the ocean anyways. there's a lot less space to the land, there's nothing that would interest merfolk, it would be uncomfortable and painful for them to visit (a lot of myths and legends about the land and what lived there got started in this time, with a lot of focus on undead monsters that had dried out and were lit from within by the hateful light of the sun, and a lot of merfolk made a habit of coming up with scary stories about the weird things that must've lived in such an extreme environment), and there was a lot more political movements and such focused on other merfolk to begin with.

even moreso because merfolk still, technically, did go out onto land? it just wasn't very large portions of land, that is. mostly they would set up on much smaller islands and atolls, which would mostly be used for manufacturing or more technical jobs that required being done in the air. they really just needed the space, not anything specific already on the land itself, and the space was all functional, very little exploration or relaxation areas. sometimes these were used specifically to produce novelty items or experiences, but usually this didn't go much further than exploring the uniqueness of being in open air for the first time, and wasn't really pursued as much more than that.

so merfolk still knew the land was important and needed for ecological functioning - something they had learned the hard way, after an earlier period in their history pre-unifying government became known for a particular and acute ecological disaster, felt even harder by all merfolk on account of the properties of water and everyone living in the ocean. they view the land as functional in its own right - a needed recycling facility that operates itself and helps keep them alive, and one in a place that they had no interest in and could set aside for such tasks.

they also knew there was life up there, even intelligent life, but considering the period in time when merfolk ceased interacting with land-based societies, and the predominant view that what makes something sapient for them being a multiplicity and plural nature to it, on top of the complex interweave of language and meaning, they basically just viewed it as "smart animals". i've compared it before to like if we actually discovered warrior cats was real and there was a population of feral cats in a national park that had their own tiny society. it's interesting, for sure, but it wouldn't be the kind of thing that they might feel too passionately about, and can easily pass it off as a curiosity and a thought experiment all of its own.

the fact that this has changed at all, and especially in such a small time frame and with such major turnaround and abrupt interest in the outer governing body is actually really odd, and a major question and mystery in what i'm writing! the starting interest happened only just in the previous generation, and now they're making major steps towards introducing themselves to land-based civilizations in just miranda's generation, even to the point of sending her inland as an ambassador and an active participant in this shift.

most people on the land already knew that someone was in the ocean and actively preventing anyone else from crossing it or even getting particularly close, but they had no context for this any more than anyone else, and thus they might not raise as many questions about why this is happening than they should, especially since they don't know merfolk history. even most merfolk don't necessarily have all of the details of this shift, but they do know more than nothing, and certainly can note how odd it is and how weird such a change is.

likewise, neither civilization has very much to accommodate for the other, given as they barely even knew of each other by the time they were already designing how it was laid out, so the issues humans have accessing merfolk spaces is at least mutual, if nothing else. it's also something very likely to change over time, depending on how said first contact goes.

[ghost-likes-drawing]

Has anyone else realized that Quesadilla Island is most likely an Island in the northern hemisphere because it's "SNOWED" at spawn during the build up to Christmas and southern Hemisphere Winters happen in the June-Sept timeframe while Northern Hemisphere winters happen in the Dec-March time frame?

*pushes my middle school science special interest behind me* anyone?

[stuck-in-the-ghost-zone]

yeah these guys were never friends and only see each other as coworkers

[raayllum]

Going through Tales of Xadia again and completely forgot about this, I’m screaming:

Among the few extant records of Startouch elves are the Scrolls of the First Elves, now kept in the Great Bookery of Lux Aurea. But of course, not all history is preserved in books—one of the rhymes recited by Moonshadow elf children in games of triple skip recalls these beings:

Startouch, Startouch, what’s your name? Earth and Ocean join our game Startouch, Startouch, far away So with Sky and Sun we’ll play.

[woso11]

[konfizry]

Anyway speaking of the sun did I ever tell you about the tales of arise eclipses