#anyway I can go more in depth but i will control myself

[kajiimotojiiro]

Motokiko and SKK for the ship meme?

Motokiko is. Hi. Hello anon I am so normal about them. To get to this point I have like 8000 fics in my head about them and they're actually healthy I swear I prommy they're obsessed with each other. It happens.

As for SKK... maybe surprisingly it's not something I think about much? Or maybe unsurprisingly I seem to love torturing myself with rareships in bsd.

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[genderdog]

chat is it normal to feel completely desensitized to feeling constantly sick that when you’re actually sick you feel like it’s not enough to warrant it

[nebula-remnants]

oh man... you have no idea what i'm about to drop on you all.

HEY!!! so. I made a GIANT list of headcanons for Sun and Moon that are all autism related since I have an excuse to now. I gave twitter a warning but I forgot to here so sorry to anyone who clicks to keep reading and goes into this post unprepared.

I did want to make an attempt to make this easy to read so, Green is just going to be for regular but still have some in depth meaning for why it's on this list, Orange is for a headcanon that is more serious!! I try to word myself correctly and explain why these ones are important in the case of accurate. (sometimes PAINFULLY accurate) representation. I wanted to go in depth for symptoms that are less discussed. so i'm going to discuss them the best I can regardless because their just as important to representation. ideas that stray from canon and are more my interpretations of how I think they'd act in certain situations will be pink

Both get frustrated when you mess with their stuff (this could just be a cleanliness deal for the daycare exclusively, however the barrels aren’t exactly a major mess since there are so few of them, so it can also be taken as wanting items a certain way. I kind of headcanon it as a bit of both tbh

I think Sun would have a strong sense of justice. He is a “hero” character as far as old theater traits go. And his canon behavior suggests he’s both petty and controlling of his environment. I believe those traits are a result of his current situation, but with this headcanon a sense of justice would go in perfectly because it means he’s strongly bound to his moral beliefs. Now it’s good to mention a strong sense of justice is NOT always a good thing!! Having a strong sense of justice does not automatically mean someone has all the correct moral beliefs, but it can sometimes make people self righteous (especially when they aren’t self aware.) but anyways moral righteousness does not always mean correctness!! I really like this headcanon especially because it’s complex, it falls into morally gray areas. Has good intentions but can hurt people by accident. Some of this applies to Moon too but I have less canon material to work with.

I think Moon would go COMPLETELY non verbal when upset, but it would go easily unnoticed because people might just assume he’s always quiet. which y'know. isn't okay obviously, but for his circumstance I do feel it would be at least accurate.

I don’t think they would know about being autistic themselves. LET ME EXPLAIN. So if the Fallfest thing is right they’re potentially from the 70s, that makes them old. Plus they’re robots. It’s not like someone realistically would go and diagnose them with autism, unless like, the guy that made them was autistic and was projecting onto them HARD. but what i’ve noticed from older family members that went nearly their whole life without a diagnosis?? They kind of just. Suffer and think it’s normal. My father has ADHD and kind of went most of his life thinking he was just a problematic kid in school, actually i still think he does 😭 (spoiler: he had a hard time focusing on subjects he wasn’t hyper fixated on and was treated without any accommodations even considered) the reason i bring this up for Sun and Moon is i think they sort of just go about their business thinking it’s normal and everyone experiences those things. So basically I think they’d be undiagnosed in the fnaf universe (or could have some outdated information about autism stored somewhere, like I even did a few years ago. because in my opinion I haven't really seen any widespread information until more recently and that's how I found out LATER in my life, when some damage was already done). Someone tell them please

I think masking would be minimum, they probably try a little bit but give up and decide they don’t care anymore (like I said, it’s possible that they’re older, so give them a break)

On the topic of not being aware of symptoms I headcanon Moon (or at least pre security breach one, maybe, idk) as the kind of autistic to have a hard time realizing he’s upsetting or genuinely scaring people. He’s being whimsical, but like, wouldn’t realize unless specifically told so. I don’t believe a potential nicer form of moon would be there to intentionally hurt people (i don’t like the idea of him being evil just BECAUSE) but i think he could still cause all kinds of distress by accident. I certainly don’t think he’s shy (and i believe Kellon Goff corrected himself in a later tweet and said Moon wasn’t exactly shy himself but he used a shy part of his life to bring Moon to life, if i remember correctly (correct me if i’m wrong bruh i don’t wanna misquote the man himself 😭)) Canon Moon probably isn’t shy but instead he gets to be fluent in being awkward in a conversation

I mean don’t get me wrong I adore the idea of shy moon but it’s most likely not going to be anything we see in canon. But in an au? Or in your own headcanon? Go crazy, make that man shy, be a little self indulgent. You’re not required to stick to canon to a tee.

I definitely think Sun and Moon would have clashing sensory needs. being opposites but also having a common root in an issue whether they want it to be there or not is like their whole thing. A lot of clashing except maybe the clicking they do. They fidget and click a LOT and the clicks are so pleasant to my brain so i think that could be maybe a similarity. As far as clashing sensory needs I think, y’know, if they were to be given separate bodies, because I actually really like that idea of seeing how their dynamic plays out that way (lots of fighting, so much fighting)... I DONT CARE IF IT MOST LIKELY WON’T BE A THING IN CANON BECAUSE OF THE DYNAMIC STEEL WOOL IS LEANING INTO SHSHHSHSHSH I CAN DREAM. 

Anyways I think Moon would have sensory issues related to lights (duh) and sound (MAYBE sun for sound too, if he has less control of it. Just because he’s generally louder doesn’t mean he couldn’t have an issue with unwarranted sound. And if anything, in the daycare I think that would contribute to his burnout MORE.) thought i definitely think Moon would be more reactive to noise and lights considering he’s much less used to them (that doesn’t exactly dwindle sun’s ability to become overstimulated to a sound because he’s used to it, but he might have a much more subtle response to it after a while like the snappy behavior/burnout in hw2. While I imagine Moon for once having a much more obvious response. (kind of like how he reacts to the lights in ruin but probably only half as much)

I think they both reacted to overstimulation through getting snappy, so like in an au where they’re physically separated and they have clashing sensory needs that’s… an easy argument starter. Visibly doing some small behavior that screams irritation on Sun’s part. And moon probably stares at you, but angrily (you can’t tell because he doesn’t have fucking eyelids)

I think the movements they do in canon are some form of stimming. Like I mentioned before, I think they enjoy the clicking. Moon does the movements with his head and rotating his face a LOT. and i began associating it with stimming a while ago. As for negative stims when stressed and anxious. Their wires are exposed. There may not be evidence for it but maybe that’s something they mess with. Also, no evidence for this but I felt like there damage in ruin was both from the situation and themselves, can be taken as a more self destructive (kind of like how scratching/hair pulling can be considered stimming at times for humans) but most likely accidental form of this. Or more likely a stress habit and causing more damage from fighting for control (idk man I kind of lost myself on this one)

Also!! The staff bot parts in their room, and later in Ruin more parts from endos are present. I think they fidget with parts on occasion. This strays from autism related headcanons but Those parts being there in the first place i think is Moon’s doing, and based on his behavior in ruin along with similar cases recorded in security breach i take it as frustration/misguided anger. And eventually because those parts are yk, there after Moon did whatever it is he may have done, i wouldn’t be surprised if the stuff in their room is occasionally fidgeted with as a distraction. The only evidence I really have for this is that in Ruin those items are all sorted. Someone was doing something as a distraction.

There’s no way they would be flirted with in a roundabout way and immediately understand, you need to be DIRECT AND TELL THEM WHAT YOU WANT!!!

I think Sun might easily misinterpret all kinds of things he's told, and be completely confident with his interpretation, while while recognize when he's a little unclear, decide it's probably not important if someone wasn't being clear, and then forget.

For whatever possible circumstance this would EVER come up I don’t think Moon would enjoy phone calls, nor would Sun but I think he likes yapping so he’d probably talk your ear off and then get really sidetracked. Moon would just respond with simple one word answers, or not all (me, i do that, i’m projecting) I don’t think Moon is shy in canon but i do headcanon he just, sucks at holding up a conversation (projecting again)

basically canon but hypo verbal Moon and hyper Verbal sun. (this gets a little too personal and realistic and a second) I just want to say that because it’s a trait associated with autism and instead of them just being considered too quiet or too loud, they are literally just being themselves. This also goes along with the idea where they wouldn’t realize they have autism, and just think whatever they’re doing is considered normal for everyone else so hey might recognize people think of them poorly but might not realize what someone has a stick up their ass about until someone is like “ermm you talk too much/too little 🙄” actually i definitely think they would get criticized on a daily basis for that. I have my own ideas about how they would react in an immediate situation vs over time after being told over and over again. And basically, I think Moon would kind of… NOT react at first but it would get to him later on and that’s when he goes completely quiet or makes sure to avoid people. I think Sun would react negatively on the dot (in one way or another) and stew in frustration for a bit, and sometimes it might come back to him on occasion.

A part of me wants to believe moon is capable of yapping but he spaces it out, like I think he’d randomly tell you a fact and then go quiet for a while. OR!!! OR!! He’d tell you a joke then wait for you to laugh as he stares at you intensely and silently.

I think Moon would mutter to himself a lot, but so quiet and muddled from an outside perspective it's completely incoherent. Sun too but a little easier to hear. Speak out loud in a quiet voice but still loud enough that still makes people briefly pause wandering if he’s speaking to them.

What if they were both heat sensitive… imagine getting to go outside (if they were part of Fallfest than maybe first time and years) but it’s during the summer, and they're both fatigued and miserable. I see a lot of people say sun would absolutely love summer, but considering if he is from Fallfest, and assuming they shut off animatronics when not in use, he’d realistically he might not even be used to summer at all. Then in this case it would actually be sort of an ironic situation where he grows to dislike summer heat.

okay ya'll I think it's done for NOW. I have a few I left out because they were half baked, or too vague for what I wanted to say so I may edit or add onto this in the future. a whole load of this ideas are also things I wanted to implement into my AU so!!

UGRHHHH IK I HAVE AUTISM BUT ITS NOT LIKE I EXPERIENCE EVERYTHING MENTIONED HERE SO I HOPE I DIDN'T MESS UP ANYTHING BUT LET ME KNOW!!

[dom1re]

Hi 👋🏽 I so admire your arts too!! If it’s ok, I’d love to know more about your approach to shading and rendering. I always find your use of colour so calming and complementary. 💖💖

Whereas I tend to be over saturated and why I often draw in greyscale

When I read that you liked my arts too I died. I was down on the floor. Crying tears of joy. Then I realized I have a response to draft so I got up.

So here ya go!! I hope you find something interesting here. I organized it into 3 parts for easier reading:

Rendering Overview

Picking Colors

Shading (or winging it and hoping for the best)

Also if anyone has any tips I'm all ears!! I’m always trying to optimize my process, make it quicker + cleaner

Rendering Overview

My current rendering process on Procreate (click and swipe):

1. Rough sketches

This is where I try to get the anatomy and pose right. I can get up to 3 reps in here depending on how refined I want it to be. Yep I care a lot about my lines...

2. Clean line

... coz it's my favorite part!! I get such a dopamine rush seeing the sketches come together into a clean line lol. Here I use the Selection Tool and Liquify to resize and adjust the forms (gotta move away from doing this too much tho)

3. Color

First I create a flat base layer and color over it using Clipping Mask (pretty standard I think). Then I divvy my drawing into as many layers as possible - one each for skin, hair, shirt, waistcoat, trousers, etc - as I color them all. More on this below.

4. Shade

ewww shading... my least favorite part. I use Multiply layers and gray colors, again pretty standard. I usually have 1-3 layers here, stacked on one another, depending on the desired depth. More on this below.

5. Finishing touches

This stage involves a lot of small (but important imo) things, which vary depending on the drawing:

Tinting lines (Because shading makes the colors darker, lines need to get darker too)

Highlights on hair, face, clothes, eyes, etc. I can never make up my mind between Overlay/Hard Light/Soft Light layers for this

Little wisps of hair or lighting effects 

and voila I have something to share with the world. wooo

Picking Colors

Ok about my colors… I wish I had some fancy technique to show but tbh I just eyeball them and try them out a bunch. Now if I’m using a reference I could use the color picker, but I don't like to coz the results are way off for whatever reasons (ex. lighting in the img). Anyways it doesn’t have to be the same color as the reference; as long as the colors “make sense” to me I'm happy.

But what if the colors I chose are too saturated or too dark? I use the Adjustment Tools for this. I can just select the layer (or an area using the Selection Tool) and edit its darkness and saturation. I found this way easier than painting over or color-dropping repeatedly.

This is why I leverage as many layers as possible. It allows a modular control on my rendering - I can change the color of my character’s skin, eyes, or waistcoat patterns and keep all other components unaffected and clean. Sometimes I have like 100+ layers and it drives me batshit crazy but the pros still outweigh the cons. Or so I tell myself

( + I would love to understand grayscale and use it as freely as u do. I watched bunch of vids on it but something about it just hasn’t stuck with me yet 😔)

Shading I guess

Similar to coloring, I create several Multiply layers and stack them together for depth. For example:

This is again for that modular control but honestly I wouldn't be doing this if I was good at shading... I feel so lost every time, I just don't know how it works. But one ‘hack’ I’ve come up with is shading skins and clothes differently. I use reddish gray for skin (and brown/red hair), and just gray for everything else.

The character feels more lively and natural with a bit of red undertones in their skin. I don't think this is the best way to render skins though. Just a little shortcut til I get to study the topic more.

Something else I do to get over my fear of shading is using good references. I’m always lurking on Pinterest for them but alas, I can’t always find that perfect image with perfect lighting and poses. It’s kinda sad funny how the quality of my rendering depends so much on the reference:

(it's not a 'bad' reference per se - I chose it really for the pose, not for shading)

At the end of the day tho I’m just a learning artist so I try not to be too harsh on myself. Someday I'll render shiny shoes and shirt creases without refs. I yearn for that day 

Well on that cheerful note thanks for coming to my Ted Talk your interest in my rendering approach! I’ve been wanting to document it for my own records so this was great.

I picked up digital illustration just last year and self-learning it has been a fun but lonely process. If you have any tips or more questions talk to me ANYONE PLEASE I’m dying to talk about it if you can't tell by the sheer length of this post. For which I'm sorry but hopefully it wasn’t too dense a read ok I’m really done now bye!! 

[keyboardandquill]

On creating a wiki for your worldbuilding

Do you have a lot of lore to keep track of? Whether you're an author, a Game Master, or simply someone who really really likes worldbuilding, this post is for you.

Here's a quick overview of what I'll be talking about:

Platforms people use to create personal wikis

Formats and organization systems you may find useful when creating your own wiki

A brief look at the actual content you might put in your wiki (I'm planning a more in-depth post on that later with more images and demos)

And because this is gonna be a long'un, I'm putting a read-more here! I'll also make downloadable epub and PDF versions of this post available for free on my Ko-Fi at some point in the future.

(I'm also planning to reblog with a list of links later on, but I want this initial post shows up in search)

Also now that you're here, I'm going to say this isn't, like, super comprehensive or anything. I'm just talking about stuff I know a little about or have experience with. Please feel free to reblog with additions and/or corrections as needed!

What is a wiki?

According to Wikipedia, "a wiki is a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser."

In this case, you'll likely be the sole person making updates to your wiki. The web browser part is optional these days as well, as you'll soon see.

Platforms for creating wikis

Websites for creating worldbuilding wikis

WorldAnvil

This one is actually designed for people who want to create big worldbuilding wikis.

Pros: Worldbuilding prompts! Those are great. It's got a pretty comprehensive set of article types too.

Cons: Kind of expensive to upgrade for features like making your wiki private, and it does NOT work well with adblock turned on, so if you don't want to pay for a membership you'll get inundated with ads. I'm not a huge fan of the interface in general and a lot of it isn't intuitive, but I like what they're doing so I support them anyway.

---

Tiddlywiki/Tiddlyhost.com.

In addition to having a cat as its icon and also a silly name, each 'article' you create with this is called a 'tiddler' which makes me think of Chuck Tingle. I haven't used it much myself yet, but I did make an account and it seems pretty neat.

---

Miraheze

A community-hosted wiki platform that runs on MediaWiki (which is what Wikipedia runs off of).

Pros: It's not Fandom.com.

Cons: You have to request a wiki and can't just make it yourself, as far as I can tell. I haven't actually looked into this one as much.

---

Neocities

An option for if you want to go super oldschool and create a website using only basic html and hyperlinks (without the handy shortcuts of bbcode or Markdown). Monthly cost is $5 usd if you want to have more space and your own domain.

Pros: 100% control over your content.

Cons: Doesn't support PHP databases for wiki software, and can be fairly labour-intensive to update if you break a link or something.

---

Fandom.com

Unfortunately, this one is the top result you'll get when you look up how to make your own wiki. I'm only including it here to tell you to stay as far away from it as possible!!

Its staff are known to ban wiki creators from their own wikis and a bunch of other nonsense that I'm not getting into here.

Programs and apps/web apps for creating worldbuilding wikis

Obsidian.md

My personal favourite. I'm planning to make a whole post about how I use it in the near future as part of this article series.

It's a markdown-based application that you can get on just about any platform (Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android, etc) which is great. Obsidian is really easy to pick up and use and also has great themes and community plugins!

Best thing is, it's FREE and you only have to pay if you use their publishing service, which... I don't, so.

---

Notion

I've heard this one is pretty good too. Idk if it costs anything. It's another "second brain" style app (might be markdown also?) and I think it might do more than Obsidian, but I haven't checked it out much myself.

---

Microsoft Word/Google Docs etc.

...Or just about any word processor that lets you create internal hyperlinks. Word may work best due to the collapsible headings so it doesn't get too unwieldy, but *shrug* whatever floats your boat.

---

Excel/Google Sheets etc.

Or, again, any spreadsheet creator that lets you create internal hyperlinks.

I'd recommend having some basic spreadsheet knowledge before doing this. It could get complicated. Before I started using Obsidian, I was using Sheets to keep track of my glossary, notes about characters, and plot ideas.

Types of formatting & organization systems

There are as many organization systems as there are people who want to organize their stuff. Everybody needs something a little different! I find the ones that work best for me are systems that have a lot of customization options.

Here are a couple I know of.

Johnny Decimal

This system is absurdly simple in its concept and yet so versatile. From their website (it's just johnnydecimal dot com but I'll link it in a reblog later):

Take everything you need to organise and sort it in to, at most, ten large buckets.

Make sure the buckets are unambiguously different.

Put a label on each bucket.

Their website has a better explanation than I can give in this post, but I'll sum up the appeal of this system as quoted from their site: "There's only one place anything can ever be."

Usefully, part of this method is creating a directory for the rest of the system.

So if you're like me and tend to shove things wherever only to lose track of it later, this is a great system—especially when used in conjunction with the Zettelkasten Method (see below).

---

Zettelkasten Method

Originally devised as an extensive paper-based knowledge management system, Zettelkasten is meant to easily add new entries to a knowledge base while giving each one a unique ID for easy 'linking.'

The creator of this method said 'it is not important where you place the note, as long as you can link to it.'

As with the Johnny Decimal system, I can't explain it super succinctly (nor can the website, if I'm being honest), so I'll include a link in a future reblog for a video that gave me an excellent run-down of the basics.

Setting up your own system

An organization system is only useful if you can actually, y'know, use it.

It can be fun to set up a super-detailed organization system with predetermined categories for everything, but is it easy for you to use? How will you navigate it?

Making decisions

There will be a lot of decisions to make as you set up your system. The only set-in-stone rule I follow is... don't set anything in stone. It's okay if you decide something that doesn't work later on.

Figuring out your categories

My advice: go fairly broad. You can always sub-categorize. I'm going to go over my own wikis for Athenaeum and Rocket Boosters in detail in a later post, but here are the starting top-level categories I'd recommend for worldbuilders:

A meta category for notes about your database, templates, and any relevant research you've done.

Characters, including main characters, minor characters, and important figures

Worldbuilding

In the last category, which is the main reason for the existence of my wiki, I might have:

Culture

History

Locations

Organizations

Lore (if relevant)

Technology

Transportation

I'll go over the nuances of these 'main' subcategories in that future post I mentioned. In other words, the stuff that actually goes in those categories!

Determining the importance and relevance of worldbuilding elements

You'll need to figure out whether a topic is complex enough to deserve its own entry, or if it should be a sub-heading under another entry. It's okay if you decide on both! I have short subheadings under some entries that amount to "see [link to main entry on that topic]."

I've also decided to expand subheadings into their own topics, and I've removed topics as their own entry and shoved them under subheadings. I do this a lot, in fact! So it's okay if you don't know.

Templates

Will you be creating several of one type of entry?

Individual character profiles

Towns and cities

Factions

(to name a few)

It might be handy to figure out the basic types of information you'll need about each of those things and create a template for them.

A character template might have spaces for the basics, such as name, role, age, and so on.

Some characters will have a lot more information, and some might have even less than what your template dictates! And that's fine.

A word of warning about using system-creation as procrastination

Creating a wiki can be a daunting task. You might decide it's not for you, and that's okay. But you might also decide to go headlong into the process and work on every minute detail, and that is also okay, but.

But.

Beware of using your wiki as an excuse to procrastinate your actual writing/session preparation. Yes, use it to keep track of all the lore you've injected into your manuscript/campaign/whatever, just make sure it stays in its place as a companion to your main project rather than becoming your main project.

How formal should your entries be?

Honestly this one's entirely up to you. I have a mix. Some entries are written like Wikipedia entries with a thorough explanation of the topic with proper punctuation and formatting, while others are simply bullet-point lists of thoughts and ideas that I can return to at a later date.

What methods do you use to keep track of your lore and worldbuilding? Let me know in a reblog or comment!

And please make sure to check the notes. I'll be reblogging with links, and then reblogging that reblog to make sure they're, y'know, actually visible in the notes.

[artist-issues]

I know you have kind of commented on this topic in one of your posts, but what do you think of the fact that Tolkien hated Disney and thought of Walt as a "con-artist" (if I remember correctly) because of how much would be changed? Even though I very much love Disney movies, considering how Tolkien studied mythology, folklore and history from other cultures in-depth, particularly those of European background, I do understand why he was not fond Walt's work at all if we view it from his perspective. Other people seem to share a similar sentiment. I ask you because you often analyze Disney movies and their themes quite in-depth. This whole thing is interesting.

Well, I'll preface by saying I'm not much of a Tolkien apologist. I don't connect with him or his mentality as well as I might flatter myself by saying I do C.S. Lewis' mentality. C. S. Lewis had this beautiful way of blending genuine good-faith enjoyment of something and careful, intentional critical thinking. He could be a reasonable analyzer of media, and a childlike consumer of media, at the same time. Don't know if I've mastered that myself, or if I ever will, but I really admire it.

Which is besides the point, sorry! 😂

But Tolkien was different. First off, Tolkien said some things about interpreting the meaning of his own stories that I don't agree with. He keeps insisting he wasn't trying to "say" anything with Lord of the Rings, or infuse it with any particular "meaning." Truth of the matter is, though, that is not true of any good storyteller. What they believe about the world bleeds into what they create, if they're creating genuinely. So Lord of the Rings is about how small decisions matter, doing what you can with what you're given instead of trying to control everything matters—whether Tolkien likes it or not, whether he was always conscious of it or not, that's what his story says.

He also criticized weird things to criticize about Lewis' works. For someone who was Lewis' friend, I don't know how he could've looked at what Lewis was writing and been surprised, or disgruntled, at the hodgepodge of mythology in works like Narnia. I don't know what made him think a "children's story" would feel like anything other than...made for children.

But anyway. All that to say, I don't always agree with Tolkien, or feel like I understand him. His response to Disney movies is just one of those things I don't get. I can speculate, but I don't know.

Like I said, I think he was so used to thinking of fairy tales and literature in a way that is much...higher, and more layered, than how the everyday layman thought of them, that when a Kansas cartoonist started retelling fairytales without any apparent grasp of that layering, it really rubbed him the wrong way.

I guess it would be like if someone came along twenty years from now, pointed at Disney's The Little Mermaid, and said, "look! A cartoon about fish! I'm going to make an TikTok dance about fish and call it 'The Little Mermaid,' and retell it that way!"

First of all we'd be like "IT'S ABOUT SO MUCH MORE THAN FISH, it's not just an CARTOON, are you BLIND?!" And then secondly we'd probably go, "and what? A TikTok dance?! Are you kidding me? You want to take this beautiful pillar of traditional animation and living color and musical mastery and drag it down to the level of middle school girls flapping their hands around cringily??"

That's probably how Tolkien felt Disney was treating Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Because back then, the medium (TikTok dances, animation) was just associated with sort of lowbrow humor and silliness. Walt was still inventing the whole "animated film to be taken seriously" thing. And back then, Tolkien would've seen the comedy characters of the Dwarfs and their character development as very shallow in comparison to the mythos of Dwarfs in literary and oral-tradition history. He had the most background knowledge. So what he was comparing Walt's movies to was, for him, like comparing grape Gatorade to aged Italian Wine.

As far as Disney being a "con artist..." yeah, I think that's a little bit of a stretch. He was definitely selling something, but if you can look at Walt Disney's life and see dollar bill signs, instead of a guy who genuinely made what he liked because he liked it, you don't know much about Walt Disney. He didn't adapt fairy tales because he thought they could make him money. He adapted fairy tales because he adored them, just like he had a train in his backyard because he adored them. Ask his brother Roy how much Walter "Let's Invent Smell-O-Vision and Drop Flowers on the Audience of Fantasia" Disney was thinking about exploiting the public for financial gain.

Like I said, Tolkien was responding to Walt Disney because he was Tolkien, and it would've been like asking a Bird to relate to a Krill. They were way too different to ever understand each other on the level that either of them preferred being understood at.

[leonenjoyer69]

I hope you don't mind this ask, but I'm in a huge Jekyll and Hyde hyperfixation rn (both TGS and OG novella) and I saw a post from you about how "Cotard's Solution" fits his Vibe; did you ever go on a ramble of Will Wood songs that fit Jekyll/Hyde? I'd love to hear them! I'm usually either an emo rock or hyperpop fan but I'd love to dip my toes into more Will Wood ever since my friends have shown me his songs :] I hope this isn't too much of an ask!

OF COURSE I DON'T MIND HEHEHE >:3 (also I'm so so sorry I kept forgetting about this 💀 BUT I'VE FINALLY DONE IT), I did originally connect a bunch of will wood songs to TGS characters in this post, and then I talked a bit about my Jekyll and Hyde playlist here (tho these are all various artists and Chonny Jash, not will wood, still a good collection of songs imo! Especially if you like emo rock and Hyper pop!!), but I would gladly go into detail about a bunch of Will Wood songs and how I connect them to TGS/J&H once more >:3

I LOVE WILL WOOD I'M SO NORMAL (also if there's any specific song from that first post, the honorable mentions in this, or my playlist that anyone wants an explanation for, just ask, bc idrk off the top of my head what to explain lmao, and if I have the thinking capacity to, I love explaining my reasoning!! :3)

OKAY OKAY, I'm probably not gonna hit many songs, but I'll try to get a few :3 I usually don't do these this in depth and I don't wanna make it too horribly long 💀

FIRST UP, A FRESH ONE I HAVEN'T TALKED ABOUT (bc apparently it hasn't been on my main playlist... I'm kinda slow sometimes): SKELETON APPRECIATION DAY

HEAR ME OUT, the "bones" could be interpreted as Hyde, or just all of Jekyll's hidden parts-- anything that isn't the perfect gentleman he prefers to show. And like!!! The lyrics can be connected so easily!! "While my cracking backbone lacks but backs up my false starts" transformation, next.

"All nightmares start as dreams and I hear my subconscious screaming" I don't even feel like I gotta say anything on that one.

"All love starts as a scheme, So wake me up, I'm tired of sleeping" bro literally didn't believe Lanyon loved him, the 'waking up' could be the first transformation.

And like!! The chorus!! "Bones, bones, bones, let me see your bones / Well, I don't wanna know if the feeling follows home /Bones, bones, bones, hell, we're all alone / If I come home, baby, will you show your bones?" Hell, I can see this as Jekyll asking (or at least wishing for) Lanyon to be more vulnerable, but!! Better yet, Lanyon asking/wishing that of Jekyll, since he knows how Jekyll just tends to cover everything up.

Idk, maybe I'm just talkin outta my ass, but I think this is really up there on my list of TGS-able Will Wood songs.

NEXT (another fresh song I haven't rambled about before): HALF-DECADE HANGOVER

I LOVE THIS SONG SM!!! I EAT IT UP EVERY TIME IT COMES ON!! PROBABLY MY FAV WILL WOOD SONG RN!!

Anyways, this song is so so soooo angstily Jekyll coded, let's go straight to the lyrics >:3

"Wonder how I didn't die / This is not my life. I'm no survivor, I only happened to survive" right out the gate, first lines. Bro literally drank chemicals and now shares half his life with an entirely different consciousness.

"Down the days I have left, with one eye open"- could be him drinking the potion, with the one eye open being only half of him--"That was me screaming "Bitch, I am reality" / And stumbling off to lose myself in a brown paper bag cause me and / Sweet Evan Williams got a date down on Avenue / A staving shakes scraping change till daybreak / Turns out anyone can eat out the trash / Then wake up on the freeway mid-crash" could literally just be Hyde doing stupid shit and Henry regaining control 'mid-crash', ie when problems arise because of either of them tbh.

And the chorus!!! "Cause I was drunk when I made my bed / Now with a half-decade hangover I lay down in it /What have I done? Don't know what I've said / It's a half-decade hangover, either this, in jail, or dead / It's a half-decade hangover, Jesus Christ my aching head" bro was at his worst when he made that potion, and now he's stuck with the consequences. And the "this, in jail, or dead" those are the only options he thinks he has to deal with Hyde now!!

"Tripped on a couple steps, and collapsed on the stairs / Broke my neck on the backs of those who I've hurt and scared" my guy has been lying to everyone around him for years, but now everythings falling apart and it's coming back to bite him in the ass so hard now.

LAST LYRIC BC AT THIS RATE I'LL THROW THE WHOLE SONG IN-- "Sober, but still so much still hangs over / Please believe me when I say I poured my whole past down the drain / Say that a second chance is a chance I can take" first of all, the poured my whole past down the drain could be him literally giving up the man he was and taking the potion, OR, him dumping all the potions in that one scene, teehee. Secondly, the second chance part and the lines that follow in the song, totally him at Lanyon.

Next: OUTLIARS AND HYPPOCRATES

This one to me is a very Hyde song, specifically him talking to Jekyll.

"Cause I doubt that you would even if you could change / You think it makes you special, but it makes you strange / I doubt that you would even if you could change / The things that make you special are the things that make you strange" could be Hyde tellin Jekyll that he wouldn't get rid of him, even if he could, because it makes Jekyll fell better about his "lonely prince" persona, as Jasper put it lmao.

"I am the shadows cast aside by gallows, and you the red-hot sky" I just really like thinking about this line with them bc ✨imagery✨. Like, shadow Hyde, check. Gallows? Hell yeah. Red-hot sky? We got color AND, by proxy, sun and moon references, Let's go 🗣️

"You become immune to my toxic fumes / My dose-dependent presence in your life / It's all subjective, all due respect to the collective mind" I mean like. Toxic looking green potion. 'Collective mind', they're both parts of the same guy.

"Horrified at the sight of my reflection in your eyes, I don't belong there" mmmmm bodyswap mishaps 🤤

"Well, it's your conclusions that make mine delusions, so I make you sane / You can thank me later" idk how to explain it but the way this is said just gives major Hyde vibes, you get it, right chat?

"Who'd want to belong to anyone? (Ay, ay, ay, ay) I mean, what do people even do? / So, if you love me, let me let you go, my love (ay, ay, ay, ay), so I can be no one" him and his little crush/loathing on Lanyon, the silly

Next!!: MR CAPGRAS ENCOUNTERS A SECONDHAND VANITY

Literally the Jekyll and Hyde song ever. I mean, it starts with "you're trying to replace yourself" 💀

"Carving out a fact from a reckoning! /Beckoning your back, skin sagging off its skeleton / Levitating off the ground / Is another man wearing your face" LIKE DO I EVEN GOTTA SAY ANYTHING? This whole song is about false identities 😭

"All the other false identities / Remedies or enemies to mitigate your memories / Shuddered at what they found / When they stripped away the grace" like...

"Damn, I thought you're not your imposter / You're so sure you're not gonna get caught / Dead in your own skin / But you didn't choose what you were born in" this song gives big vibes for chapter 14 and 15, with the constant switching and fear of identity reveal and such.

"What you feel and what you do, are those things really you? / And if not, then what is? (Never, never, never) / So, my God, what's wrong with you? / And I'm still asking who that is" I really like thinking about this part as Lanyon asking Jekyll those things, even without an identity reveal! Since he puts up this gentleman facade and hides everything, Lanyon barely knows who Jekyll is.

"You'll never take me alive, baby (this is not enough) / You'll never take me alive (this is not enough to prove it yet) / You'll never take me, you'll never take me, you better pray that I die (no, I need to hit the bottom)" This part feels like a simultaneous Hyde and Jekyll part, with Jekyll being the parenthesised parts. Hyde being all cocky n shit while Jekyll tries to figure things out or something, idk lmao running low on explanation brain cells.

Honorable mentions that I just don't feel like explaining in depth rn, but probably could!!

The Song With 5 Names- very Jekyll coded

Dr Sunshine is Dead- kinda Jekyll coded, but VERY Hyde coded

2econd 2ight 2eer- the Hyde song ever

6up 5oh Copout- another mega Hyde song, if I could animate it would be over for y'all

Against The Kitchen Floor- Jekyll and Lanyon, these gay people make me upset

Cicada Days- also very Jekyll and Lanyon :(

Hand Me My Shovel!- Jekyll coded, I like to think of him making the potion

Basically, 90% of Will Woods discography can be spun to fit these silly characters. I love Will Wood guys :3 sometimes I wish I could verbally ramble about this kinda stuff, but also words are hard (and it makes me feel annoying lmao) 💔💔 but anyways!!! Thank you for the ask! I hope Will Wood consumes you just as well as it has most of the TGS fandom :3 <333

[iztea]

How to start an art account?

well obviously by posting art but i guess this is not what you wanted to hear so i'll go more in depth

i think the biggest piece of advice i can offer when starting an art account is to not become fixated on numbers or likes and let external validation be your main source of motivation because in the beginning you will simply lack the visibility regardless of the quality of your art so if you start with the mentality of " i want to get big and get tons of likes and be popular" then you'll just give up prematurely as growing an audience takes a lot of time and effort and it's never something stable or consistent (unless you and the content you post are but that's another can of worms) If you want to post on instagram, you can even disable the likes option so that they won't influence you

What i do suggest, however, is to take the first step, which is also the hardest one: post one (1) artwork online. The rest will flow naturally, you don't have to force anything (it took me sooo many months to start posting again on instagram and here on tumblrr; i was always waiting for Something that never came until i finally did it and then it became "routine" fun, even. This is also general life advice from yours truly that I myself don't follow but i digress).

Really now, just post for fun, scream into the abyss, share your art with whomever comes across it. Don't think too much about it and live in the present or in a day-by-day manner. If you start with no expectations, you can't become disappointed, so just don't expect or wish for anything. Don't even think of yourself as an artist or an art account, you're a person who likes to draw and shares said artwork online. That's all there is to it. The rest is not in your control.

From my observations, there are two routes you can take your art account down on:

a) use your account strictly for art== the post-and-dip type, the ~mysterious type that never engages with their "audience"

b) the talkative personality haver art account that besides posting art also shitposts, replies to comments, answers questions etc (like me god i tried to be mysterious but i can never stfu so maybe it was never a choice in the first place sniff sniff) anyways pick your poison! Or try to be both. Or neither. Don't even listen to me that's just what i noticed

Last but not least, be patient. If your art is objectively good skill-wise, it's only visibility that you lack and that will come one way or another. Just focus on improving your skills by drawing what you personally enjoy. it's a win-win situation. And trust me, you can definitely tell when the OP really had fun with an artwork, you can see it in everything so practice that..... having fun and enjoying yourself is crucial that's ur lifeline brotherrrrrrrr As always, there's a mental and concrete side to anything so i guess this was more ~psychological advice, if you want actual tips for posting your art online, i've answered similar CCs before so you can check my courious cat account for that

Hope it helped!

[neetily]

Why do you write/enjoy noncon/dubcon?

in the wise words of one of my friends: because it's hot, next question.

but for a more in depth answer, i'll elaborate on some possible theories below. warning for obvious discussion about rape.

there's something incredibly fun about exploring the absolute worst in humanity, and that includes rape. delving into those extreme situations and emotions is enticing, both as a reader and as a writer. it's interesting exploring everything attached to the act of rape itself, because it's so dark and taboo. it's also a safe way to explore such horrendous topics, yknow? like it's purely fictional, and no one is getting harmed, so it serves to ease some curiosity whilst still remaining safe.

and i could probably make the point about being a victim of rape myself, writing and enjoying noncon/dubcon stories allows me to gain control back over the situation in a sense. a sort of reclamation of that which was stolen from me, but now i am in control of the story and its outcome. it's almost cathartic to an extent, even if i am technically the victim in these stories. it's still my retelling, and my story, and my ending. as a rape victim myself, i am here to say: fantasising about noncon/dubcon scenarios is absolutely A OK. i do it too. gaining that control back has honest to god helped me with healing, and even if you haven't been raped before, it's still okay to fantasise about it for the reasons below and more! we're all adults and understand the implications, you shall not be thought crimed on this blog.

a lot of noncon/dubcon is less about the act of rape itself too, and more about the power struggle. the loss of autonomy, being manhandled and physically overpowered into submission. which parallels what a lot of other kink/bdsm is centred around, the exchange of power. of course, i am not claiming all kink/bdsm is rape play, but the themes are consistent throughout i think! it just so happens that rape is at the more extreme end, but i don't think it's solely about the act of being raped itself that is so alluring.

because typically, when it comes to fantasy, you're going to imagine something out with the realm of normality, right? rape seems as far from normal as possible when it comes to sex... but because it's just a fantasy, and you're in control of what does/doesn't happen throughout the scene/play, then it's fun, right? if you enjoy those things i mean.

but when fantasy becomes reality we can all collective understand that rape irl is not fun or cool B-) these two things can coexist.

anyway i dunno man. it's just interesting to me first and foremost, i think.

[spaceyshideaway]

𝐻𝒾𝓉𝓉𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒯𝒽𝑒 𝑅𝑒𝓈𝓉𝒶𝓇𝓉 𝐵𝓊𝓉𝓉𝑜𝓃

When reflecting on my life, I realized it was nothing but a Sisyphean journey. Obstacle after obstacle, and just when I think I've made it to the top and can finally breathe, my boulder will fall back down the mountain... pulling me down to hell like a deadly ball and chain. As Ellis Grey once said, "The carousel never stops turning. You can never get off." Life goes on regardless of whether you are ready, and there is no time to catch up. Therefore, I have decided to take charge of my life. I will explore the depths of the universe, wander far and wide, and try to understand why I have always felt like the universe's punching bag.

I am hitting the restart button and erasing my past. I believe that it is important to learn from your past, but if you let it define you, can you really consider it your past? My past has never been a shadow; it has always been mixed with the present, and I could never walk away from it. Today, I am reclaiming myself, and I am becoming someone else. I will learn to carry myself like the person I aspire to be.

With this, I have three goals:

Become healthy, both physically and mentally

Improve my financial situation

Gain self-love and confidence

I will become the best version of myself, I already see a therapist but it's time to find a psychiatrist, a primary doctor, and lastly overcome my worst fear... a dentist. This will be a challenge, I have had a huge fear of the dentist since I was 16, and they drilled into my teeth without proper numbing... I felt EVERYTHING. However, the person I want to be has great health and does not let fear control her, so a dentist appointment will come but first let's do the easy part!

I used to be extremely resilient. Started working at 16, in order to be able to have money to get away from my house. My father was always more inclined to help out my brothers so I knew from an early age that if I wanted to do anything in life, I had to provide it for myself. I think the best example of this was when I had to work for over a year to save up enough money to pay for college while my father paid for my brother's tuition. Anyways, COVID eventually came and my hours got cut at my job, and I had to drop out. Going from working 50 hours a week as well as attending school full-time, I had my first major manic episode. I never fully recovered and created a long list of job instability and mental instability. It's time to change that, in February I am starting a certificate program that will improve my qualifications to expand my career options. Until then, let's just get a job that will pay the bills.

Lastly, I want to know what it feels like to walk into a room and not feel small. I want to stand tall, with grace and flair. I want to be a powerful force of nature that leads with empathy and confidence. I want to take pictures of myself again, and not only walk the earth but leave a mark. It's hard to make an impact when I am constantly sitting in the corners or just not even showing up. I let clothes wear me and hide me, I try my best not to exist or step on toes. I put myself last because I believe other people will always be better than me. I'm not saying I want to be better than anyone, but I am saying that I just want to allow myself to exist unapologetically.

This is the beginning of my journey and the reclaiming of my power. I invite you to come watch, or if you are feeling up to it... come hit the restart button with me and we can guide each other. This is the community I want to build, and I hope to see you in it.

[i-am-a-meat-popcicle]

Are you interested in more Fe3h worldbuilding lore because there's so much implicit stuff!! You can look at the character and country name and what they reference, the way the dress, or even what Fe3h is inspired from ( did you know the game take a lot of inspiration from Irish culture )!

For example, did you know that Sothis correspond to the Egyptian goddess Sopdet? She's the personification of the star Sirius, a reference to how Sothis come from space which lead to her being called "Fell Star" by the Agarthans. But more importantly, Sopdet is linked to the annual flooding of the Nile! It join how Sothis flooded Fodlan "In the land of Thinis, where the old gods are said to live, the False God has awakened. Its looming, heteromorphic vessel was resurrected to sink the world to the depths of the ocean. It will bring extinction to all children of men, and salvation to all beasts of the land, sky, and sea. [...] And soon, a flood aptly named Despair will drown this world. [...]" ( from the book "Romance of the World's Perdition" in the Shadow Library of the DLC ). Also, she's the goddess of the fertility brought to the soil by the flooding which tie with how Sothis created the Nabataean, the current humans, magic outside of Dark Magic and the crest. It's implied she created more than that in the book of Seiros ( it says she created all plants and animals ), but we can't take it by words with how the current Nabataeans rewrote the past to found the Church of Seiros to protect their kind.

For more crest lore personally I love this dialog from Linhardt A support with Byleth:

"Well, I don't see how Crests have much use in times of peace. Certainly there are Crests that make you stronger and could be used in engineering. And I suppose Crests that increase magical abilities might help doctors heal injuries... Still, the possibilities seem limited. It's as if Crests were designed to be used only in times of war. Their power meant to bring about death and destruction. I cannot prove what I say is true, but suppose for a moment that it is... The longer this war goes on, the more useful my Crest research becomes. But if the war were to end today, we would go on living, perhaps not using the power of our Crests at all."

( Very sorry for the unwanted ranting! I have no control over myself when it comes Fe3h lore )

Short answer: I'm just a little weirdo that gets hung up about weird details in games, and Fe3h has a lot of weird and interesting details. Long answer [and I might even talk about unrelated stuff too, sorry I don't often have the chance to talk about fe3h]: About fe3h, the game is surprisingly good at giving you just enough information to ask more questions, and then when you start paying more attention you're hit with more moments of "wait a second- what?" "That doesn't seem right." And part of that has to do with the fact that a lot of the time the information that characters give you [or Byleth] is somewhat unreliable, due to them either keeping vital information to them selves, they don't know the whole story, they're trying to manipulate you, or they're outright lying to you.

I remember I had a lot of hang-ups about Dimitri blaming Edelgard for what happened in Duscur because I had a hard time believing that a fourteen year-old would be able to orchestrate the assassination of a foreign nation's king [especially when considering the timeline of events for Edelgard herself]. However, in Dimititri's case his perception of the truth was warped by multiple factors. Such as his severe lack of sleep and rest, possible malnutrition, his abysmal emotional state, implied schizophrenia [or something like it idk I'm not a doctor], and the fact that Edelgard was, indeed, working to kill him and all of his friends for a year. It's not so much that he logically believes it or that Edelgard was responsible for Duscur, it's that he had to fight her anyway, and her involvement with it may as well make her responsible. [still kinda bullshit but it makes sense as to why he's being the way he is]

A better example would have been how Tomas/Solan tries to manipulate Claude into thinking that there was some kind of church conspiracy with information about the immaculate one only for Claude to later stop listening to him after he found out who Solan really was and what he wanted. But that was one of the things that were solved in-story which left me less room to chomp on and obsess over. [not a bad thing- this is good story writing.]

The other reason is that sometimes the writers mess something up but depending on what that is it can be more interesting to find an in-universe reason why something doesn't add up. For instance the whole thing about the Red Canyon. It's implied to be called that because the Nabateans were genocides there. The funky thing there is that Nabatean blood isn't red, it's green. What this can imply is a few things, that Nabateans have red blood in a human form, or there was a mistranslation somewhere between the Nabateans and the humans they worked with, or it was deliberate [which makes more sense now that I think about it]. Basically, it was probably called something along the lines of "bloody canyon" or something due to the tragedy that happened there, but it got changed to red canyon because The saints [or just Rhea/Sieros] wanted to both keep the history a secret, but also wanted memorialize what happened.

The game is filled with little stuff like this that give me so many little brain worms, and that tends to be the start of it. The rest of it comes with me mentally writing fanfic with an oc and I start to go: "Like what are their bathrooms like, how does the plumbing systems work, what tools are available, if magic exists how does it work, does magic still follow the law of conservation of mass, how does magic and using it affect the body, etc."

Like, the implicit stuff and the inspirations are definitely a factor, but it's primarily my little brain going off the rails and asking way too many questions that probably doesn't matter.

[puckpocketed]

Autumn Hockey Diaries - Defencemen, Hockey Blinders, and the Hand of the Narrative: Brock Faber In 2 Minutes and 9 Seconds

[Foreword: This essay is not what I thought it would be. It's probably not what you think it will be either. I've cut down a lot of the content because it was approaching thesis length, and I've got a lot of uni-related writing to get through. Appendices of cut content and extra reading will be published some time down the road. Look for #puckmortems.]

Brock Faber is not on the agenda. Brock Faber is a gliding figure in the middle of my screen, on occasion. More often, he is a hunched over body on the blue line, or he’s directing traffic behind the net, or he’s a blurry smear of green-red-white on the outer edges of where the play is happening. Nonetheless, it's like he’s never off the ice. “how do i even begin to write about a rookie” I say into the void in a despondent blog post, not long after I reluctantly accept that the itch won’t leave until I do. This is deeply inconvenient. I’m already in the middle of researching for another piece, halfway through an ice hockey book which I picked up in an attempt to familiarise myself with forward cycling and forechecking systems. Ironically, I have the Flyers vs Wild game up to watch an entirely different 21-year-old defenceman. My eyes snag on Faber anyway. 

Let’s rewind a bit.

HOW DID I GET HERE?

Those following along already know this, but I’ve been meaning to write about the Anaheim Ducks. They caught my eye in December 2023, not long after I plunged heart-first into hockey — and then, of course, the Drysdale-Gauthier trade happened in January, and the idle research project I had going on kicked into high gear. I began to dig and dig and found narrative after narrative, and as I tried to sift through sensationalised click-farming and journalism, I felt the other narrative, capital ‘n’ Narrative, begin to close in. I was out of my depth; the rebuild was an abyss, Drysdale was inextricably linked to the media’s whipping boy, Trevor Zegras, and I was a little too fond of the Ducks to be any more lax with my research.

I wanted terribly to have clips and analysis on hand, real proof to throw in peoples’ faces when they made assumptions. There was too much to say, and too much tape to watch, and far too many books I needed to read in order to have the correct language and technical knowledge to do that kind of piece justice. I resigned myself to becoming one of those guys drawing over gameplay with a virtual marker one day. Afterwards, I picked up Take Your Eye Off the Puck: How to Watch Hockey by Knowing Where to Look by Greg Wyshynski. Unsolicited review: it’s got relevant information but all of that is sandwiched between unfunny Xennial sarcasm and Harry Potter references that are transparently desperate attempts at being accessible/relatable/fun — save your money unless you can hold your nose about all of the above. The man himself is possibly the worst thing you can be as a human being: annoying on Twitter. Any quoting from his book that I do is purely because, on occasion, he has anecdotes to share that can’t be found elsewhere.

So there I am, days out from the fallout of January 8th and rewatching Drysdale's first match.

WHO IS NUMBER 7? THE CALDER RACE, AND HOCKEY BLINDERS

But Brock Faber, number 7 a beacon on his back, surefooted and scanning the ice like a centre, is always just there. He’s skating every other shift, he’s on the penalty kill, or controlling the gap on a Flyer forward, he’s somehow also anchoring the power play — and really who is this guy? His name sounds familiar. The usual skim of articles turns up hype and speculation, opinion pieces written after Connor Bedard was confirmed to be out for 6 weeks with a broken jaw. They float Faber as a possible Calder contender, should Bedard somehow fail to catch up after his recovery.

And that’s where I’ve heard Faber’s name. He’s part of the class of poor bastards who have to share their debut season with Bedard, the fourth-coming of Gretzky — similar to Bedard’s draft year, yet infinitely worse because it’s the goddamn NHL and being in a different draft class doesn’t do you any good if you’ve got to share actual ice with him. All are afterthoughts, are footnotes in Bedard’s wake. When you speak of the rookies of the 2023-24 season the spectre of the Next Next Next One looms, and you can’t help but let slip the pity you nurse for those who would be the sweethearts of national media coverage, the new wave, if not for that monstrous boy and his, at the time, 33 points in 39 games.

There’s a border here. I step around it tenderly — helped along by a heavy dose of cognitive dissonance — when watching ice hockey, it isn’t to be crossed. I call them my ‘ice hockey horse blinders’, hockey blinders for short. They’re required safety equipment at this point, mandatory so that my sanity stays intact against everything ice hockey can be (aside from the best sport in the world): the retributive justice, the implications behind calling a player ‘soft’ for daring to protect themselves in a scrum; the insular masculist locker room culture which, in the end, is built upon rituals and language that degrades women and positions queerness as lesser-than.

One must also avoid thinking too hard about the way players are bandied about and dealt with like livestock, the way that they’re workers who sell their labour, too, and how they only really get to self-advocate when the collective bargaining agreement rolls around; how even then they’re hampered by all these unspoken traditions, arbitrary codes. Breathe and forget for a moment, for at least sixty glorious minutes of skating and violence, that for any athlete — for any prodigy — to exist and thrive, a child’s life was appropriated, taken in hand and moulded to fit a pipeline of production, because sports is a business the exact same way music and movies are.

The more I learn about Brock Faber, the harder it is to keep the hockey blinders from slipping off.

 “Brock Faber shouldn’t be possible,” is what people write about him in one form or another. They marvel at his strength, his size, his resilience; release article after article about how another rookie d-man would likely buckle under the weight of the work, how none of this was ever expected from someone so young and untested. Yet, the longer I sit with it the more unsettled I am. I watch his time on ice tick up and up with each game, hear on broadcast and read online that he’s on track to break the record for rookie average TOI. As of writing, he’s got 430 minutes on his next teammate for total time on ice. The only players on the Wild ahead of him are their goalies. The longer I put off finishing this essay (months now, from the time I first committed words to document) the wider this gap will grow. They say no one ever expected this from him, but an insidious thought creeps in: hasn’t the Narrative demanded this all along?

TIME, HAUNTING, AND MINNESOTA

Turns out I wasn’t wrong about Faber’s presence on the ice. The Wild have him skating minutes that usually go to veterans. He skates for 28:49 in the Philly match. Between the 10th of December and the 6th of January, Faber played 13 games. In 10 of them, he spent over 24 minutes skating. In half of those games, he logged over 30 minutes of ice time.

(NHL.com, highlights mine)

These are playoffs numbers, and they don’t just call it “playoffs hockey” because of the physicality. Exhaustion and injury go hand in hand, and playoffs hockey claims it’s tributes every year — rarely is it that this pace is sustainable, evidenced by how no teams make it through playoffs completely healthy. Top d-men are capable of it, yes, but it’s best avoided. When it happens, it’s an aberration. Poor management of ice time can result in sloppy play due to exhaustion. For the player who is exhausted, who fears exhaustion at critical junctures, they may choose to limit themselves, to compromise on plays to preserve their energy. More salient: every surplus minute extends the timeframe for possible injury, and every additional responsibility piled on top of that opens the door to potential burnout. So why do that to a rookie? What would compel any coach to do this, considering the risks?

Is Faber that good?

The question warrants another step backwards. Trouble is, this is where the tape begins to skip, a reverb-stutter-reverse that’s impossible to ignore. How far back to go? Does it start with the injuries that gutted the Wild’s d-core, shifting Faber into the limelight for sheer lack of options? Maybe further? Maybe it began in the mere hours between when Faber lost a devastating final match with his college team and signing with the Wild to play his very first NHL games — the third of which was the fucking Stanley Cup playoffs. 

Or perhaps it kicked off with the Wild buying out the Parise and Suter contracts in an effort to purge the team’s culture and start afresh? This was Wild management signalling that they’d take the salary cap penalty for now, but they were banking on a significant cap rise in the coming years. The subsequent “devastation” when Gary Bettman announced that the salary cap would only be going up by 1 million the following season — guaranteeing the Wild’s next few years would be lean ones — is what led to Faber being traded from the LA Kings for the Wild’s Kevin Fiala, after all.

But maybe linearity isn’t the play. The Narrative cannot be temporally bound, so why should this essay? The weft and warp of the Narrative sprawls out in four dimensions: the present weaves itself into the past; futures that never were dig their way down into the seams of time to rip into the present; and history is a concertina of repetitions and echoes, the same threads again and again.

Time and history are a deep well, I hover and put my ear to the dark, and Minnesota is the sound that echoes down. Minnesota, Minnesota, Minnesota.

Minnesota, the State of Hockey — and Brock Faber is a Minnesota boy. The Gophers, his college team, are a Minnesota team. He grows up going to Minnesota Wild games. And, because no kid gets to play for the team they grew up watching, he gets drafted 45th overall by the LA Kings. That’s the business; when you play hockey you are at the mercy of the draft lottery and the end-of-season standings. 

(@ mnwild via Twitter/X)

Only, this is the Narrative we’re talking about. The moment someone says ‘unlikely’ or ‘never’, it emerges and reasserts itself: sometimes things can be right out of a movie script. In Faber’s case, a dream. He talks openly about just how happy and grateful he is to be there. A real hometown hero — the title conferred upon him by media and fans and the ever-present Narrative. Faber doesn’t get to escape it just because the chances are slim, just because all the other Minnesota boys were scattered at the draft.

The Minnesota Wild as a franchise is held within its grip, too.

What do you call a Cup drought when it’s never rained in the first place? Meet the Wild, a middling American expansion team that’s not quite young enough to excuse their limping performance anymore, not quite old enough to have a sterling legacy to fall back upon. “Advancement seems there for the taking. It’s the least they could do after teasing this forsaken market April after unfulfilling April,” writes Brian Murphy; an embittered rally against the Wild’s historic floundering, even as he gushes about Faber’s first few games. Playoffs made in 13 out of 23 seasons aren't awful odds…until you read a little further to find out they’ve never come within sniffing distance of the finals. They are, it seems, perpetually on the cusp of — something. I couldn’t tell you what. Destruction? Greatness? Glory, even?

(via sergeifyodorov)

Just over 5 years ago, the front office asked for continued support in an open letter to fans. There would be a little patience required, but not too much — not when glory was just around the corner. The letter does not mention the vortex of rumours surrounding the locker room, the two veteran contracts they had to excise. They wouldn’t be rebuilding, of course, no need to panic and no need for a teardown — they had the pieces in line and were ready for a real effort, a deep run at the playoffs and a Cup, and “nothing less.”

Funny, a little over 5 years before that there was yet another letter asking for yet another small stretch of patience, right after acquiring two very familiar contracts. Parise and Suter, for those unaware, were brought in as two experienced players who would push the Wild over the line from “perennial playoff team” to Cup winners. Big name free agents, with lots of clout to go with them — and of course they chose Minnesota, says owner Craig Leipold, citing their “strong ties to the area.” Glory was, once again, just around the corner — what could go wrong?

And this time there’s been no letter but now they have Brock Faber, so bright and talented and so willing to just keep going, taking what he’s served, assignment after assignment. They have Kirill Kaprizov, a true superstar, ‘The Guy’, the kind who plants a flag and becomes the franchise. They’ve got Marco Rossi, yet another of their rookies who has made an incredible, unexpected splash — NHL-ready against the odds. The final season of the Parise-Suter buyouts will come in the next two years, and with it will arrive the much-needed relief of league-wide cap increases.And now, we see, the Narrative keeps the wheel spinning, keeps the story going in that reverb-stutter-reverse — and glory is just around the corner.

DEFENCEMEN AND THE SIZE ISSUE

Let’s talk about what it means to be a top pairing defenceman in the modern NHL. The Minnesota Wild’s d-core is fried from season-derailing (and in Jared Spurgeon’s case, ending) injury, yes. But normally, filling in wouldn’t fall to a defenceman in his rookie year. Where another team might’ve spread the responsibilities, Faber is given the lion’s share of downed d-men Brodin and Spurgeon’s duties. He's the power play quarterback, a given presence on the penalty kill; he’s out on the ice during OT; at times sent out as a catch-all shutdown defenceman versus the league’s best forwards (I watch him try to keep up with McDavid reviewing an earlier match against the Oilers and I think, with my heart in my mouth: you are so fucking young). It’s more than just a lack of options. To answer my own question: Faber might actually be that good.

I’m talking around it, but the Norris Trophy isn’t handed out to defencemen who can’t rack up points. And on the whole, defencemen who aren’t geared toward offence don’t score. The debate comes around every season now, I assume, to just make a new award for the best defensive-defenceman — this is entirely down to how the responsibilities and expectations of d-men are undergoing rapid evolution in the shadow of elite skaters and puck movers like Cale Makar and Erik Karlsson. The age of pure stay-at-home defencemen — those that play shutdown to the exclusion of all else — is seemingly winding down, has been for a while. “Offensive-defenceman” is no cute rejoinder for d-men who happen to have a little offensive upside. From Bobby Orr until now, it’s become synonymous with a set of traits that define the league’s best blueliners. Skating prowess is part of it, being able to carry and protect the puck is part of it, but the best of the best are able to seamlessly transition from defence to offence, joining the rush from the d-zone after a turnover, to become lethal in the slot.

Where Brock Faber lands on all these metrics begins with who he was before he arrived in the NHL. He makes a strange case amongst all the rookie defencemen I’ve had the chance to research, a mixing pot of what’s usually found desirable in a prospect — and a few quirks that separate him from the pack. I was shocked when I found out Faber played an exclusively defensive role for the Gophers right up until he signed with the Wild — and before then had spent no time on the power play. “I just hated getting scored on by these kids in college,” says Faber in his interview on the Wild’s official team podcast [43:31]. He goes on to tell the hosts; it actually feels easier to play in the NHL at times, because his teammates know where they’re supposed to be, and if he pushes up on an opportunity he can trust someone else to drop back and fill that gap — he is certain that this has smoothed the bumps in his offensive leap forward. And how has he done? Incredibly, by all accounts. Of the many scouting videos, podcasts, and articles I’ve perused, this trajectory is… rare. At least, for top defenceman prospects. He’s got it all backwards, see; as opposed to the archetype of the puck-moving, dynamic attacker who has leaks in their defensive game (presumably, something that must be worked on as they come into their own in the NHL), he came in a defensive powerhouse, a shutdown-d, and had to learn to let go of the blue line and attack. It took two months for the Wild to ease him into taking on Spurgeon’s role as PP1 quarterback, but since then he’s been a standout player.

Past the power play, Faber’s point and goal production has skyrocketed in comparison to his pre-NHL career — seemingly out of nowhere. He’s got the skating and the stick handling ability to do it, and now it seems he’s begun to hone that killer instinct. Coach Evason, before his dismissal, let out a critique of a then-struggling Wild: "Brock Faber can't be our best player every night.” On a streaky, at times unstoppable, at times paper-thin Wild defence, Faber was a boon.

One very obvious way Faber has adhered to the specifications laid out by scouts is his height and weight. It’s said that defencemen take a little longer than forwards to start showing up in the NHL from the time they’re drafted. It’s the body-size issue, according to some. The d-men who make the cut are older, bigger. The myth goes: while rookie forwards might get away with being 5 '9’’ and underweight on account of agility and hockey sense (and more than a little help from coaches who send them out while the puck is in the o-zone), when you’re a blueliner, and hence the only thing standing between Auston Matthews’ finisher, Nathan MacKinnon's rush, and a clear shot on your goalie and the back of the net, you can’t afford to be small. 

We’re living in a post-Statistical Analysis Revolution hockey world, though, so we know a little better about size. An alternative explanation to the size myth is something I’ve only ever heard of in oblique references — specific to d-men, coaches call it the “200 game” threshold for development. Further inquiry, (including appropriation of university catalogue access and trawling JSTOR), has turned up little helpful literature on the origins of this belief, aside from a stub of an article that called the cutoff “artificial”, taking note that prospects who failed to perform to standards by the 200-game mark were written off as doomed AHL ‘tweeners. I did, however, find a very interesting statistical analysis write-up by the folks over at Dobber Hockey.

Undersized forwards don’t float through on skill and quickness alone; one of the biggest predictors for success is, according to Dobber and Mat Porter, falling within the league average for size and weight. The theory here has been dubbed BT, short for “breakout threshold”, and represents the number of games taken for any given player to become competent and start producing consistently in the NHL. That number, for the average player? 200 games. And contrary to stereotypes, undersized defencemen and forwards struggle.  Furthermore, a stat that defies intuition arises when examining those on the taller end. Data doesn’t lie: “Bigger defencemen and exceptionally-sized forwards need 400 NHL regular season games.” Porter posits that growth spurts can be a detriment to young players just entering the NHL; the jump in body mass causing a mismatch in their expectations of their bodies, a “simple physics” problem, necessitating a slight buffering period as they readjust their physical and spatial awareness around the changes.

The belief remains, however, that larger is better. I’m understating just how much it pervades hockey discourses. It’s present in scouting reports and has had measurable impacts on drafting; I hear it on hockey podcasts; it’s thrown out casually during interviews by coaches and fellow players; it's the first thing you'll hear from a caster who isn't familiar with a player's game. I can’t read or listen to anything about Faber without stumbling across it — the preoccupation with size.

The language used to praise Faber and players like him has my stomach twisting in a discomfort that I find hard to quantify — players, coaches, and the media all talk about him, and the hockey blinders slip. He’s a “workhorse”, a “stud”, he’s got “a man’s body” — and call it projecting, call it reading too deeply into innocuous statements, but the closest thing I can compare it to is hearing my AFAB body spoken about as an object whose value can be reduced to its function, its usefulness, its closeness to sexual maturity.

Elite athleticism is produced when you derail a child’s life and set them on the path, just the same as all the other entertainment industries — think: the k-pop idol machine, pageants, child actors and models who then become adult celebrities, and, of course, the emerging phenomenon of the child influencer. For men’s sports, there’s something extra on top of the commodification of children’s bodies — it’s the vernacular of near-fetishistic worship; of the masculine, the oxymoronic youthful-but-mature, the virile.

I’ll be very clear here: I’m not reading anything malicious from specific people, I’m not accusing anyone of crimes, and in no way am I implying that ice hockey is unique here. Just the opposite, in fact. I know professional sports hinges upon producing stars, that the commodification of young bodies is endemic to the business. Those stars are, stripped down to the basest definition, workers who perform with their bodies and sell their labour, whose bodies will inevitably be coveted and revered for their adherence to the Platonic ideal of their respective crafts. MYTHMAKING: THE SHIFT

“Brock Faber’s play in overtime of the Minnesota Wild’s Dec. 14 victory over Calgary almost certainly has been long forgotten,” says Judd Zulgad in yet another article covering the miracle of Faber’s rookie season. Zulgad is wrong. This overtime play has been repeated, over and over again, a new myth constructed around Faber before our eyes. “He’s completely exhausted, but not only [gave] a second effort, he’s got the wherewithal to bump the puck back so we can gain possession and get a line change,” says Wild coach John Hynes — this particular quote is a favourite for the beat writers who mill out post-game fluff pieces.

The overtime starts like any other: face-off at centre ice, 3-on-3. The broadcast takes note that Brock Faber is starting, that he’s developed offensively in his rookie season. Things fall apart not long after.

Overtime line changes are tricky business. The margins for error are razor thin with 3-on-3; a sloppy line change during OT is a free odd-man rush for the opposing team. Almost guaranteed instant annihilation, and a pretty rude thing to put your goalie through to boot. You must, must clear the puck from your zone before changing over. This is how Brock Faber ends up on the ice; trapped with the puck in the Wild’s d-zone for 2 minutes and 9 seconds. 

Time trickles on as he engages in a scrap along the boards. The broadcast takes note of just how long he’s been on the ice around the time that I do, and then he stumbles. And what you’ve got to understand about Brock Faber is that the comments about his poise aren’t for nothing: Faber doesn’t fall, he doesn’t lose his edges. His skating, his balance, his ability to leverage his reach — is elite.

He takes a knee after the play moves away, slow to get up. The casters say what we’re all thinking as he skates back to the safety of the bench: “he’s running on fumes.” How can anyone watch this and feel anything other than sorry? He is barely there. He is carved down to the marrow, and all that made him wonderful to witness — his beautiful skating, his steadiness, his mastery of the craft — is cut away by exhaustion. Watching him tip over, watching his desperate last-second handling of the puck — it feels less heroic every time. I replay the overtime again and again to write this section and I ache. I am with him out there, losing my feet and my breath just the same.

When he makes it back to the bench, finally, there is no relief. The cameras voyeuristically linger on his pale, worn face, his eyes sweat-stung, as he slams his stick against the boards, each hit shuddering through his body. I want to take it from his hands. I want to wipe his brow and tell him he can rest, rest, rest. Later, giving an interview, instead of taking up the accolades he’s recounting how his turnover led to that endless overtime stretch. He is, of course, not wrong. But he’s not seeing the larger picture.

Consider: this is the kid who grew up watching the Minnesota Wild fail year after year, who likely held a secret hope that they’d draft him when it was his day — this Minnesota boy and his home-grown, Minnesota heart. He never once thought of himself as separate from Minnesota, because this is home, this is where his hockey dream was born; and this is where it must, to him, be fulfilled — of course he’d take on everything they ever asked, swallow down his duties and only ever be grateful.

There is no other way this could’ve gone.

THE HAND OF THE NARRATIVE

I'm trying to love ice hockey with my eyes open. If you haven't figured it out by now, my writing is rarely just about players or hockey concepts. It's about me - these posts are essentially a diary I've chosen to publish. Recently, I had a lecturer read this essay. She commented that it read like someone trying to come to terms with loving hockey. She was right.

"It would be just like the Minnesota Wild to carry on with their perennial early playoffs exits." That's how this paragraph started, when I was first drafting this piece. I'll be transparent; I believe in the potential of this team, and I want them to make an honest effort to win the Cup - but I need it to happen some other time. Armchair GM/coach moment: they aren't ready. They didn't feel ready to me, with their captain out and a rookie d-man holding their blue line together, and injury after injury piling on as the season entered its last weeks. I saw them pushing for another run at the Cup, saw their continued use of Faber in all situations, and thought, ah - see you in another five years. Wanting it simply isn't enough. And Brock Faber, as good as he is, cannot sustain this team on myth. No one person can.

I started this essay terrified Faber would get injured from over-use and play through it for the sake of the postseason, like so many players do; or that he would hit the infamous 'rookie wall' and flame out in his development (in the back of my mind, the question is still there). A few days ago, the Minnesota Wild were mathematically eliminated from playoffs contention. I breathed a little easier. I liked this team too fucking much to see them suffer. I wrote this essay with a kind of despair over Wild management and their preoccupation with Win-Now at the cost of the future. I wondered if Kirill Kaprizov's prime would run its course with the Wild barely scratching the surface of a playoffs run year after year. I wondered at times if the hand of the Narrative would intervene and make it so. The Minnesota Wild are haunted like that.

There are pages worth of writing to add to this essay that I've cut for brevity, and for the sake of telling Brock Faber's story in a way where it wouldn't be obscured by it.

I considered talking about my athlete friends. I spoke to them, informal interviews, we talked about the kind of mentality instilled in children who dream of going pro. You never say 'no'. You love your sport, you let it turn you inside out, you would do anything to keep going. Most of all, you think I'm still young. I can play through this pain. And once you aren't young anymore, you think I'm not young anymore. I'm running out of time. I have to play through this pain. And when your best years are behind you, your ideas about your body and your health are so twisted that you will grind the cartilage in your knees away to make the jump, you will play yourself into irreparable nerve damage just to be remembered, just to have the chance to touch greatness.

This is the truncated version. This is what I fear most when I think of the crushing weight of the Narrative upon someone like Brock Faber. He's hardly the first young athlete to be put in this position, he won't be the last. This essay is about him in the loosest sense that I'm covering the beats of his career and his team. It's not about him at all in the sense that it's about me and my crisis of faith.

To break character: I've been talking about the Narrative with a capital 'n', as though it is an entity with a will of its own. Sometimes it feels that way. It's not, and it doesn't, and it feels that way because we care so much. The hand of the Narrative is just how I rationalise the coincidences, the eerie parallels, the compelling threads of story that exist in sports.

I've wrestled with how to conclude this piece for months now. Since I started writing, I've taken up sports photography, produced poems and essays and assignments about hockey, and I've started ice skating - and in the process I've fallen in love with my dilapidated local rink. I'm now covering the AIHL, which zero people on this website care about. A lot has changed. I still don't know how to finish this, so here are some closing thoughts:

The hand of the Narrative is as real as we make it.

My leftist ennui about professional sports under capitalism could probably be explored on another platform - in a different essay that won't be hosted here.

That thesis I'm never writing about haunting, hauntology, and hockey is probably a symptom of some greater preoccupation. (There's an unfinished manifesto sitting in my drafts.)

If you're a Wild fan reading this - sorry for the editorialising about the Minnesota Wild. I'm quiet about it, but I do love this team and I want to see them be the best version of themselves.

Brock Faber deserves the Calder. He deserved it when I first started this piece, when maybe five people were talking about it, and he deserves it now.

Despite the turmoil of the season, the disappointments, the setbacks - I am still so excited to watch this team and write about them.

I think I'm going to love hockey for a long time.

[autumnbrambleagain]

Hey I started reading Proselitize three days ago and it's so engrossing and amazing I really have to praise it.

Caves of Qud is a game that really rewards thinking and examination of its contents, and it's so wonderful to see a story engage with that.

Also Annaface is such a wonderful character. I relate deeply to her desire to be Monstrous (I just reached the scene with the skin, and WOW). I'm a disabled trans woman, and I find myself pushing my personal style further when head out to public, because if people are gojng to stare they're going to stare on *my* terms. It's not quite the same, bit i feel a kinship in some ways, you know.

Anyway, you've made some wonderful words.

Live and Drink, water-sib.

Ah thank you thank you thank you! On an increasingly depersonalized internet comments like this are a joy to see still out there in the wild

The main reason I started writing Proselytize in the end is because Qud has so much IN it, and the gameplay only lets you engage with it SO far, and it was frustrating not getting to explore the themes it presented in excessive depth. What does it mean to be friends with the goatfolk and neutral to Mechanimists and see them assault a pilgrim in the jungle? Do you have an obligation to help? How can you even help? Are you the bad person for being friends with them? Or does the occasional stranger die nameless in the jungle, and that's how life goes?

What actually happens, narratively, emotionally, socially, personally, when you fucking slaughter an entire Templar war party and proselytize the least of their squires and take her on adventures with you? How completely fucked up is that person's life from now on? What is this actually going to do for your friendship?

What is the end game of Qud with the game still in early access? What happens to an all-powerful player-character who only has to fear getting caught flatfooted by chrome pyramids or surrounded by sludges? How do you settle down into a world built around violence and harsh faction politics? What do you DO with your infinite power to kill and alter the world? What SHOULD you do with it??

What does it mean to be Weird? Everyone in Qud is weird, radical body autonomy is one of the keywords of the game's design philosophy. I can play as a two-headed, four-armed talking fox-thing and Qud goes "hell yeah here's how that works mechanically for you" and everyone in the game looks at me and goes "yeah that's just another person really." What does it take for people in Qud to think of you as a monster? How do you DEAL with your physical appearance being a site of violence for the people around you?

I could have done a lot more with Annaface facing backlash for how she appears, but 1) this is a fanfiction and it's not my main creative focus, so I didn't want to burn myself out emotionally by going too deep in bad vibes town for it; and 2) Annaface has the special privilege of being the companion of one of the Main Characters. Which brings the other theme I wanted to get into, my favorite theme,

How Fucked Up it is for things like Main Characters to exist. How ontologically terrifying it is for a Main Character to enter the narrative, and how fucked up is it getting swept along with their narrative? What about a Qud stuck in a stalemate between several Main Characters?

We're finally at the Brambled Fae section, who is explicitly a collective of Main Characters who knows it is a Main Character. It is a universe-crossing, intentionally-and-textually-literal-self-insert-Mary-Sue-dimension-parasite that dominates even the narrative of other main characters when it's around. What happens to a fanfiction that gets infested by something like this? What happens to a person when they can save and reload and control multiple characters? What does that mean for the people around it, caught in its fiction?

And yeah wrt trans stuff, my reaction to Qud was "this game is fine" until I got to the Bey Lah questline, which introduces the keywords "trans" "deer" "taur" "lesbian" and the social exploration of basically all of those. The absolute shock that we have a game in tyool 2024 that has trans characters and themes and it's real and genuine and coming from a writer who actually knows what they're talking about and is putting it in out of a genuine desire to have that be part of the world in an earnest and organic way that doesn't feel forced or pandering or just putting the trans flag on some character's bedroom?

I mean, Qud is a game where you can go up to it and say "Hey, I actually want to play as a non-binary multiple system with 10 limbs" and Qud goes "sure, here's the mechanics for how that works, and here's other characters in the game who have the same kind of things you have going on"

For a game to take that, to take the "hey i feel weird in the real world, i want to be weird in a game" and go "yeah same buddy! here's a bunch of other weirdos, only they're basically normal in this universe, have fun"

I flirt with other games, but Morrowind has been the dominant focus for 20 years for me because it lets you just go out there and kind of live a fantasy life. But even then, Morrowind is steeped in the late 90s/early 00s cultural consciousness. It is weird, but it is a very specific kind of weird that doesn't leave a lot of room for acknowledging or being types of weird outside the weird the game wants. Vivec is nonbinary, but the game calls him a hermaphrodite (which, to be fair? in 2002? was a word without nearly as much overwhelming stigma as it has now), and he's the only one actually allowed to be enby. You're still a man or a woman in Morrowind. The weirdest you can get is a cat or a lizard, and you face actual prejudice for it and it's explored textually in plenty of ways, and it's, honestly, a very strong, realistic look at a colonized nation that itself commits acts of colonization and racial aggression and it's still very impressive! But it's intentionally a game that leaves very little space for you as a character, and forces you to carve your space out, and as time goes on I'm increasingly tired of having to fight for my space in a hostile world. The themes of Morrowind are becoming exhausting with legislation everywhere turning against transpeople, again. The themes of Morrowind wrt racism, colonization, and slavery are exhausting 20 years later where we're still seeing racial genocides and the world's reaction is "hmm, sure is a thing huh." It's exhausting being in a game that's so weird, but your weird is only accounted for Up To A Point.

Qud's weird is "yeah that's fine too" and that's just fantastic. I was really hoping there'd be more than 2 games in the past 20 years I could form an emotional connection with, but there we are, I guess! Fanfiction was inevitable at this point; Morrowind has had 20 years of modding to expand it out into something massive and make it the animal crossing with adventure game of my dreams. Qud's had less time baking in the oven at full heat? So. Fanfiction!

[it-was-dead-when-i-found-it]

Ok I actually kinda hate the "enemies to lovers" trope even though I'm writing an entire novel using it... I swear I'm going somewhere with this

See, most of the time enemies to lovers is really personal: the characters hate each other because they hate each other personally, no matter how petty it is. They get mad at each other because they're rivals, because one slighted the other, because they're on two sides of the same war... You name it. The problem is that, no matter how they start out, whether they hate each other personally on principle, it always *becomes* personal. And it's hard to get from "I hate you" to "I adore everything about you" smoothly, ya know? And the longer the enemies phase is drawn out, the more awful stuff they do to each other, the less I can get behind it because that pain compounds. And yeah yeah "analysis as characters in a story and their symbolism and meaning" but it's hard to trust someone after they've repeatedly caused you torment and pain. When two characters you're supposed to root for wind up hurting each other, it can not only drive a wedge between their believability as a relationship, but also a wedge between the character and the audience.

I'm sure LOTS of people have found workarounds, but my personal favourite is to never make it personal *in the first place.* And it adds an extra level of depth that you can use to add MORE pain to your characters! If you have two characters who are pitted against each other by forces outside of their control, they have no *tangible* reason to hate each other outside of duty. And of course they'll hate each other, because one is always the bad guy to the other. But what happens when they are removed from their influences? When it's just two people standing in front of each other? What happens when they start to question their influences? What happens if they realise that, in another world, they'd get along *really well* with their enemy? What happens if, god forbid, they had to *work together?*

Anyway, that's my soapbox rant on enemies to lovers. There's a lot of untapped potential there, to ask some hard hitting questions! Anyway I used this tactic in my novel where an assassin is sent to kill a god, and after they wind up stranded on an island together they realise maybe they were both wrong and they're both cute... Of course there's the added tension of "I love you but I really hurt you before we knew anything about each other so I'm convinced you'll kill me given the chance (Actually you've loved me for years), but I'm going to sacrifice myself for you anyway to make amends" which is SO FUN

[sunny-haven]

One thing I've found myself frequently doing nowadays is sleep hypnosis... and something about that to me has an inherent sexiness to it. And though I've often done late-night erotic hypnosis with others and they went to bed soon after, that isn't exactly what I mean.

Oftentimes, I'm gentle with the pleasure I give. It's soft, mixed in with me cuddling them, caressing them, or sometimes wrapping them up in my tail. There's a sense of control I have over their bodies specifically, the knowledge of which is almost always there but it's something I don't often focus on. That I can not only control how someone feels to the point that I can not only put them to sleep, but have them hanging on the edge of sleep, feeling more and more tired but unable to go off the edge and fall into a deep sleep until I give the word. These sentiments are mixed with ones of comfort, of safety, that all their worries and distracting thoughts can melt away and they can focus their sole attention on me. The purring of my body (the size of which often dwarfs theirs) feeling like a full-body massage, my lavender scent making their body feel heavy and cozy. I'll also let my hands roam, gently pleasuring them while snuggling them, spooning them, or whatever it is I'm doing.

Exactly how much I'll focus on these aspects depends on the person and my relationship with them, but generally, I tend to find putting someone to sleep hot (though someone sleeping themselves isn't). There's also an emotional pleasure and satisfaction for me when I do, because oftentimes (though sadly, not always), the person sleeps much better when I put them to sleep. It's especially satisfying with people who struggle with insomnia, because hearing about how grateful they are that I gave them a much better sleep always warms my heart.

Sometimes, if I'm able, I like to also affect the person's dreams as I'm putting them to sleep. I've found this to be very hard to do though, as many subjects I've met don't remember their dreams well (either all the time or randomly), or they just have dreams unrelated to what I suggested. There have been a couple of cases where I'm able to make people have complex, in-depth dreams, though even with the same person, it's not consistent. More often, it seems that they'll have retain pieces of the dreams I give them or have certain "feelings"... which is usually arousal, because I often like to make my subjects dream and fantasize about me~

But yeah, sleep hypnosis has been nice. I think one of my favorite ways to put someone to sleep, which I only developed recently, is with my lavender breath. Despite my fursona being a dragon, I had struggled for a long time to think of a sort of "breath weapon" that is typically associated with dragons that would fit my sona. It was with @/nocturnowlette that I came up with the idea of a "lavender mist" that I can breathe out, a very concentrated mist of lavender that can put people in trance easily and, if I make it concentrated enough, put people right to sleep. It's always super lovely when I can put someone to sleep within seconds just by using my lavender breath on them~ Kinda makes me feel like the goddess of sleep in a way.

This isn't an invitation for people to reach out to me if they're having trouble with sleep, by the way. While I do enjoy sleep hypnosis, it works best when I've already been hypnotizing them (often for other reasons that not everyone would find appealing), and there have been many times in the past where I wasn't able to focus on the stuff I've outlined because the subject's interests and my interests didn't line up (or I didn't know if they did) and the subject had a harder time sleeping... or the sleep hypnosis didn't work in general.

Anyways, I hope you all have a lovely day, and a good sleep that makes you feel well-rested. <3