#asks: amara

[11thsense]

Winter Archiving

[scaly-freaks]

noooo, their matching frown, her little pout 😭 aegon and jaehaera are very personal to me, we love a girl dad 😭

I forgot I deleted the wip LOL. Let me just repost it here so this ask makes sense ✨

[lavandulalurker]

So this has been what's preoccupying my thoughts lately. Here’s my iwatex oc!

Her whole story is that she's from the Heliopause and has been trained to be a soldier since she was young but after landing on Vertumna she decides she wants a career change, and becomes the colony's first delivery woman!

[boxdstars]

does mara keep natty's photo in a locket or inside a portcigar or carry it around at all

YES! In her teens she has a little locket circa late sixth/seventh year. But as an adult she has her Natsai’s photo in her little watch pocket on her classic pinstripe vest. It’s be something vaguely scandalous for the era, but c’mon - Amara is such a wife girl. She’ll pull it out and stare longingly at it from time to time.

Here’s a 1920’s Natsai doodle <3

[rockybloo]

I need to know Bitterbat’s reactions to the dresses 👀

I know you said dresses plural but realistically that man ain't makin' it past reacting to the first without doing something

[redo-rewind-if]

Victoria/Victor Zhang (she/her or he/him | 31) often seems cold and serious, wielding their glare like a weapon. But you know there must be more hidden under the surface.

Victoria keeps her straight black hair in a neat, short pixie cut. Usually gelled back without a strand out of place.

Victor prefers to wear his straight black hair long, held in a tidy ponytail. You'd wager it hit around his waist, if he ever wore it down.

They have honey brown eyes, pale skin, and cheekbones that could cut glass. V stands at a respectable 5'8" with an elegant build. They don't have any visible scars but they do have a small beauty mark just to the left and below their bottom lip.

V is practically always seen wearing formal business attire. A suit, perfectly polished loafers, with a tie neatly in place. Pinstripes. They tend to stick to a monochrome color scheme with the occasional navy blue.

August Astaire (he/him | 27) is an interesting man, always wearing a dagger sharp grin you can't tell is real or fake.

His dark brown wavy hair falls messily down to his shoulders in a way that should look terrible but (unfortunately) doesn't. Complimented by his fair skin and pale green eyes.

August is on the taller side (5'11"), with a slender but muscular build. He has numerous scars, the most notable of which runs up from his jaw onto his right cheek. He also has a couple of tattoos, including a full sleeve on his left arm made up of thorny red roses and black butterflies.

August is most well known for his signature red coat he wears nearly year round. Yes, even in the summer. Beyond that, he is often seen wearing plunging v necks, tight pants, and boots. His entire wardrobe seems to be nothing but black and red with not a single other color in sight.

Amara Ingram (she/her | 25) carries herself with a sunny, carefree disposition. But don't underestimate her, appearances can be deceiving after all.

Her shoulder length black hair falls in tight curls that halo her head, her warm brown eyes shine with an unexpected cunning, all complimented by her dark brown skin.

Amara stand proudly at 5'5" with a fairly average build (not extremely slim nor very muscular). She has a handful of scars on her hands, arms, and legs from a few small engineering accidents. (Nothing to see here! I swear!)

She prefers comfortable, practical clothes above all else. Loose fit jeans, chunky sweaters, sneakers and sandals all rank among her favorites. She leans towards a more neutral color palette with some small pops of bright color here and there as accents.

[thelonelyshore-if]

i am so so torn between Croft and Yasmin that i just can't wait to ruin both of them. thanks for making a queer gal like me lose my mind

Hehe you're absolutely welcome. Sorry for the struggle to choose...I think ruining both of them is the best possible compromise ;)

[odbuoyjemmity]

what do you think unit 919’s music tastes would be like?

hmmm okay

mog: girl would love goth music and also some sub genres of metal or punk. she's very pretentious about it. also she canonically enjoys the opera

hawthorne: rock. he does air guitar through all the good solos

cadence: rock and pop except she pretends she doesn't

anah: pop. loves it. i want her to dance around her room to it. give that girl a break

lam: some kind of really niche indie stuff

thaddea: death metal

francis: baroque

mahir: gregorian chanting i think he would really like a lot of music not in their language and take as an opportunity to practise

arch: also baroque and whatever the nevermoor equivalent is of ceilidh music for him to play along to on his fiddle

[shrimpbat]

lol that meme/shitpost you just did made me curious about amara's powers

OOO NEAT I'm glad I could make you interested! ♥ I'll explain a lil since I like loredumping teehee.

So Insanity Demons are what their names describe them as; demons that can inflict insanity on a person or outright steal the sanity of a being to feed themselves.

Amara (and her brothers) have the ability to warp the perception of one's reality, confuse someone immensely, or cause one's logic and reality to crumble. They don't do this to the innocent, though.

[scaly-freaks]

“Milk Carton” — Self-explanatory, it was the only song I could think of that has the perspective of someone who survived a kidnapping. I also believe that establishing what is going to happen in the beginning helps build up a sense of dread. We know that a kidnapping is going to happen, we just don't know when.

“In the Pines” — A truly haunting song. The song was originally written by Lead Belly, but the first time I heard it was this Kurt Cobain documentary called Montage of Heck, where the final scene is Kurt performing the song at MTV Unplugged. There’s this moment in the song where Kurt makes this face that is absolutely chilling, almost like he’s Colonel Kurtz staring into the heart of darkness. The lines, “you caused me to weep, you caused me to moan, you caused me to leave my home / I wish to my Lord that I’d never seen your face / I’m sorry you were ever born,” also felt pertinent. All in all, I felt it sets the Southern setting, especially the North Carolina region, where you say Aegon takes Amara.

“Rampage” — I felt that this accurately captured Aegon’s demeanour. I don’t know whether they might have known each other prior to her abduction, but most kidnappings occur with someone who knows you. There will be a lot of songs where you just feel looming dread, and this is the first of them. “Milk Carton” is disturbing, but there’s no dread, because there’s no anticipation. Whereas “Rampage,” I’m going to assume, seems to be spoken from the perspective of a lover of a boy whom, it’s heavily implied from the references to the Columbine Shooters and Tate Langdon in American Horror Story, is ultimately going to shoot up a school. When I was a kid, my parents would play this song called, “Six O’Clock News,” about a woman whose lover goes on a shooting rampage, who has just learned she’s pregnant with his child. I always was very shaken by that song, and I can’t imagine what it must feel like to have loved someone who committed such atrocities; just the sheer guilt, the discomfort regarding how to mourn them, the thoughts of I should have known, I should have seen the signs…was unthinkable for me as a child, and is unthinkable now. In “Creek Blues,” another song from the same album as “Rampage,” you sort of get this mosaic of such “signs.” He shows the speaker his daddy’s guns, he kills dogs and leaves them to die by the nearby creek. I think, for me, I wanted to build up a sense of dread over the songs, until it reaches its pinnacle, sort of this mounting pile of evidence that something terrible is going to happen. I discuss the notion of warning signs in relation to violence and abuse in the explanation for “Sometime After Midnight.”

“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” — Chosen mostly because it inspired this creepy, creepy short story that we read in high school, about the immediate moments preceding the abduction of a teenage girl from her home. Incredibly unsettling story, and absolutely heartbreaking. The story, called “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” was adapted into a movie in the 80’s. Honestly considering removing it, given that I’m trying to build up dread, and it’s not really a dreadful song. Let me know if you think it should stay.

“Sometime After Midnight”— I wanted to convey a sense of looming doom; there’s this moment in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, where there’s this extensive idyllic depiction of Bavaria, and then this war plane crosses the sky. This section starts out with the understanding that it’s the account of a character’s mother, and that she wrote it while awaiting deportation to a Nazi death camp. And this endows the image of the war plane cutting across this clear blue sky above this bucolic Bavarian landscape with a feeling of absolute dread; they have no idea what is going to happen. It’s the equivalent to the tomb in Arcadia, or the ending of Irréversible: it’s a portent of doom. “Sometime After Midnight” is one such prelude; the speaker remarks to herself that she knows that she spent all day getting ready for the date, but that she has this feeling in her stomach that makes her feel uneasy. She remarks that she’s been told that bad things happen after dark, and then looks at the setting sun. It’s the equivalent to a puzzle piece falling into place. I do truly believe that there is an intuition that people have that something’s off, and that many, especially women, choose to ignore this feeling, tell themselves that they’re being silly or paranoid, only to realize that their gut was right. It’s meant to convey dread, and banality. While the speaker may have considered her day preparing for the date innocuous, just a bit of fun, in retrospect, the day will become far more significant.

            I was too young to remember 9/11, but when I’ve asked my parents and my friends’ parents their stories of that day (I grew up very close to New York), they all reacted differently—my boyfriend's dad saw the second tower get hit from the train window, and stayed on the train, my friend's dad was in the South Tower and ran to the Hudson to get on one of the many boats that were trying to take people off Manhattan—but one thing detail was the same in all of their stories: there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky that day. The reason why this detail has crystallized in their head is because they should have known. It was only in retrospect that the day that began like any other became that day. We trace the final day of murder victims, what they wore, their last words to their parents and loved ones, because we want to prepare ourselves for the possibility that our banal, commonplace lives could be torn apart at a moment’s notice, that one day we might walk out of a door and never be seen again. I believe that we have an intuition about people, but not about events. The speaker of “Sometime After Midnight” does not know that this is the last day; she may not have spoken to any of her parents or friends or loved ones but instead spent all of it getting ready for a date that will end in either her abduction or her demise. She may have a gut feeling, but by the time she feels it, it's already too late. This is her last day, and all that she can do is watch "the sky turn black by the window-side."

“Bad Things”— Another song that I felt exuded dread, although in this case, the fear actually becomes realized. The opening riff almost hits like a stuttering heart, with this insistent clapping noise; it immediately evokes both despair and anxiety. The song's chorus reads like a nursery rhyme you tell children: bad things happen, and you are powerless to stop them. The chorus is also apt for a kidnapping: you leave home, and you never come back. I had never been able to decipher the spoken part, but in looking at the lyrics, they’re really chilling, given that they’re spoken by Jim fucking Jones. The lyrics read as such: "You’d have wanted to run, you’d have had to run with them, because anybody could’ve run today, they would have wanted to. I know you’re not a runner and your life is precious to me.” It’s essentially Jim Jones gaslighting his followers in the leadup to their mass suicide, telling them that they actually have agency over their fates. They chose to stay and kill themselves alongside him, he argues, because they didn’t run when they could have. They freely chose to stay with him and die with him. But this isn’t true; the inner circle would punish those who attempted to escape, and the event that precipitated the Jonestown massacre was a group of Jones loyalists gunning down the Congressman Leo Ryan and defecting members of the People’s Temple on an air strip as they tried to leave. Jones manipulated his followers into believing they had a choice, that, if they wanted to leave, they could have, when they never did. I think I recall Aegon using this rationalization in Chapter 10 of YSMMC: it was Amara's choice to go to the cabin, so he bears no responsibility for any of the acts he felt licensed to subject her to as a result of this choice. And, as in Jonestown, Amara’s “choice” in YSMMC wasn’t much of a choice, because it was either that or a confrontation with Jace, and Aegon knew this, and exploited it to his advantage. He helped create the conditions that would cause her to choose. It all reminds me of when I was reading Chapter 17 of YSMMC, and I was reminded of this passage from Lolita:

“Get in,” I said. “You can’t call that number.”

“Why?”

“Get in and slam the door.”

She got in and slammed the door. The old garage man beamed at her. I swung on to the highway.

“Why can’t I call my mother if I want to?”

“Because,” I answered, “your mother is dead.”

In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads… at the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go. (140)

That is to say, Jim Jones, Humbert in Lolita, and Aegon in YSMMC all act as if the decision by their victims to have sex with them was their victims’ choice, when they were the ones who set up the conditions that forced their victims to do what the men say. And, even if Amara freely chose to go to the cabin, she didn't choose any of the acts Aegon subjected her to there. I figured that this would be the approach of Aegon in this AU; tell Amara that it was actually her choice. This song sort of represents the pinnacle of the lead-up: the kidnapping that we've been expecting has finally occurred.

Anyways, as always, thank you for the opportunity for me to sharpen my character analysis approach to get ready for school; the methodology that guides my interpretation of characters is essentially the New Critical close reading method, and requires that I reconcile all aspects of their character and actions with each other, to explain their motivations, etc. It's a great challenge to have to analyze characters when their writer is right there to correct you; you're a lot less likely to cast generalizing statements about characters; it's harder to pontificate falsehoods when God is right there, if that makes sense lol. It forces me to be much more discerning, and therefore hones my analytical process, so I thank you again for that!!! X Caroline

Absolutely insane descriptor behind each song in this playlist, and the thought put into them? Girl, you are going to ace your impending studies. I consider myself lucky that this silly little hobby I picked up attracted people who treat it as something real and genuine which then pushes me to improve.

I only really fix someone's analysis if I think it's interpreting a sensitive topic in a way that I don't think is conducive to open-minded discussion; that responsibility kind of feels like it falls on me to fix since it's my work they're reading.

But your analysis, as well as others who have had their interpretations, I love to ingest, because as a writer, it's so easy to feel like these characters are just mine. But in reality, I read an amazing book and I hold those characters in me in a way that the writer might not recognise or identify with. Someone might extract the gentleness of Aegon and Amara and want to hold that close, whereas I might have written that particular chapter/passage from a place of extreme violence and trauma. Both are correct because both are tangled up with human beings. And when someone gives me their approach, I get to experience this familiarity of my characters from a whole other vantage which is so, so fun.

I'm a fan of every song you've chosen, and even though I know I can't write this AU right now, the lyrics to each are painting scenes into existence. For instance, as I was reading (and listening), a scene came to me where Amara tries to escape from the moving truck, and when Aegon gets her back, he choke-slams her into the horizontal part of the seat, her neck bent at a crooked angle as her head hits the car door. He's kneeling on the gears and the brake, one arm angled up against the roof of the truck, crouched over her like a malignant beast in a painting. The physicality of him filling up the space while she curls up and tries to push at his chest with her feet...yeah.

The Lolita comparison and the instances in YSMMC where Aegon created an inescapable situation and then handed her the illusion of choice...YES. Exactly it. If we're speaking in terms Helaena would use, Amara is an insect missing several legs, and Aegon is the spider slowly spinning the web in circles around her. Or a ladybird around which he's drawing a shape and she keeps trying to avoid the new lines he's putting on the page, without realising she can just step over them. She regularly suffers from what I like to call a fuck fog but there's so much more happening when Aegon decides to actively manipulate her. The Targaryen trauma train is so real, and it's just inconceivable every single one of the siblings hasn't developed their own methods of "playing God" when things don't go their way.

Anyway, urgh, fucking juicy ask. Delicious. Nibbling on it like a chicken leg.

P.S. Before I forget, I didn't envision Aegon knowing her before he kidnapped her at first, but I sort of like that now. There's a scene in Room where she screams at her mother for telling her to "be nice to everyone" and that's why she helped her eventual kidnapper look for his dog that didn't even exist. Maybe Amara gave Aegon a smile in passing a few times at the place she worked, and it was never anything more complicated than that. A scrap of kindness he decided to poison and taint.

[deva-arts]

...i doodled and then i colored it and i can't stop thinking about them now so help

(yes I chose the most on the nose names ever so what)

[deadandphilgames]

Im pretty sure the community captions feature has been discontinued by youtube. Dnp have awlays been really good about making sure their vids are captioned, so i think that the dnpg caption issue os probably unintentional or they forgot about it, but they will 100% sort it out, they always do. I think they might have payed people to caption their main channel vids, so maybe theyre hiring someone idk.

yeah youtube community captions were discontinued, but phil has been using amara.org consistently since the feature was discontinued, and dan has used it to. they leave a link in their description box (i checked the latest upload from both dan and phil - the link is there) , but i believe they do have someone do the english subtitles and the community is for other languages. but none of the gaming videos have that link in their description, and also the last 6 videos (since golf) only have auto generated captions, so if they are getting them done by someone, theyve got a backlog of 6 videos

[boxdstars]

if i have not said already: short hair amara ambrose Invented Lesbianism

she’s so mother to me, my god. these witches gay, good for them. good for them

[rockybloo]

i recently came across some picture of Sabrina Carpenter's heart dresses, and i cant help but immagine how Sweetheart would look in them, (ESPECIALLY in the Pink One)

I looked 'em up and saw like two pink ones so i drew her in both

[redo-rewind-if]

AAAAA yay thank you! anyways, i wanted to ask how would the ROs react to a MC who comes home crying?

Oooh, starting with a bit of an angsty one I see. Very nice. 🤭

V: Is the type to offer silent support. A shoulder to cry on and a kind ear to listen. All soft touches and gentle, careful words. Seems to know exactly what you need without you ever having to say it.

Amara: Immediately pulls you into a hug and leads you over to sit down. Tries to distract you and offers every comfort she can think of. Your favorite food, a good movie, anything to bring a smile back to your face.

August: The moment you walk through the door, August is by your side asking what happened and if he needs to kill someone (said jokingly, of course). Assuming MC doesn't want to talk about it, he'd simply offer to hold you for as long as you want, until you're all out of tears to cry.

[wundrousarts]

I would love to see Lam in your style!!

Ask and ye shall receive 🤝

I like the idea of her having glasses, to fit her Oracle knack, but they’re fake, to fit the idea of her sort of being in disguise/hiding :) Giving Nevermoor characters glasses is a great hobby of mine lol