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monarch-afterdark · 5 months

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Titan History: The Awakened Gods

Welcome once again to Monarch: After Dark, the digital gateway between you and the organisation dedicated to understanding and navigating this troubled new world we live in.

For today's communication, we embark on the undertaking of rounding off the remaining handful of Titans known to have been awakened by Monster Zero in 2019. Currently, the Monarch database does not hold enough information on each Titan to warrant giving them their own entries, whether due to digital sabotage, loss of data amid containment breaches, or some other cause.

If more data does resurface, we will act accordingly and revisit these Titans as is relevant, but for now, let us round off the remaining Awakened Gods.

(Pictured above: Part of a global Titan map, containing the locations of outposts and the name of the Titan they are studying)

This list will be compiled based on numerical order of Monarch outposts.

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Titanus Leviathan

(Pictured above: Infamous 1933 photo of the Loch Ness Monster, possibly the first notable sighting of Leviathan)

Formerly contained within Outpost 49, Leviathan was found within Loch Ness, Scotland by Monarch. This Titan gets its name from the aquatic counterpart to Titanus Behemoth from the Hebrew Bible.

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Titanus Quetzalcoatl

(Pictured above: A stone carving of Quetzalcoatl, found on a temple in Teotihuacan, Mexico)

Formerly contained within Outpost 57, Quetzalcoatl was found within Machu Piccu, Peru. This Titan gets it name from a feathered Aztec serpent god.

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Titanus Sekhmet

(Pictured above: Depiction of Sekhmet in ancient Egyptian artwork)

Formerly contained in Outpost 65, Sekhmet was found in Cairo, Egypt. This Titan gets its name from the Egyptian goddess of medicine.

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Titanus Baphomet

(Pictured above: A statue of Baphomet flanked by two children, unveiled at the Satanic Temple in 2015)

Formerly contained in Outpost 68, Baphomet was found in Volubilis, Morocco. This Titan got its name from a perversion of the name of the prophet Mohammed, later associated with a goat-like diety in the 19th Century with ties to Satan.

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Titanus Mokele-Mbembe

(Pictured above: Recovered footage from Outpost 75, showing Mokele-Mbembe's escape obscured by smoke, circa. 2019)

Titanus Mokele-Mbembe, formerly contained in Outpost 75, in Jebel Barkal, Sudan, got its name from a water-dwelling diety in the Congo River Basin, later becoming popularly depicted as a sauropod-like cryptid in the 20th Century.

In reality, the Titan is a massive quadrupedal beast with a snake-like tail, a head much like a hairless elephant, with jaws that open like a crocodile's, a horn atop its head that glows a faded green, and downward-facing tusks.

When Monster Zero awoke the world's Titans, the director of Outpost 75, Dr. Kearns, refused to kill the Titan under the belief that the military just wanted an excuse to kill the Titans. Mokele-Mbembe killed most of the outpost's staff upon its escape, pulling some into its mouth with its trunk. Upon reaching the surface, Mokele-Mbembe battled Monarch forces and the Egyptian military before being pacified by the ORCA.

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Titanus Abbadon

(Pictured above: Artistic depiction of Abbadon battling Christian, from The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan)

Formerly contained in Outpost 77, Abbadon was found in the Devil's Tower, Wyoming. This Titan got its name from a place of destruction, the 'sister location' to Hell (Sheol), a name later used for an angel who commanded an army of locusts in the Book of Revelations.

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Titanus Yamata no Orochi

(Pictured above: A woodblock print of the storm god Susanoo slaying Yamata no Orochi, by Toyohara Chikanobou)

Formerly contained within Outpost 91, Yamata no Orochi was found by Monarch in Mount Fuji, Japan. This Titan gets its name from an 8-headed serpent from Japanese mythology.

While the only current footage relating to Yamata no Orochi shows its outpost collapsing from the Titan's escape, it is known that the Titan had attacked a cruise ship in Japanese waters before being pacified by the ORCA. The Titan has been reported by one account to also have multiple heads.

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Titanus Typhon

(Pictured above: Depiction of Zeus aiming a thunderbolt at Typhon, upon a black-figured hydria, circa. 540-530 BC)

Formerly contained within Outpost 92, Typhon was found within Angkor Watt, Cambodia. This Titan gets its name from a serpentine giant from Greek mythology, the father of monsters.

A member of Monarch's primary mythology department, Greg Keyes, had lost vital information regarding Typhon during the Titan's awakening in 2019. To this day, he still working to retrieve this data from a corrupted database.

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Titanus Bunyip

(Pictured above: Artistic depiction of Bunyip in 1935, by Gerald Markham Lewis)

Formerly contained in Outpost 99, Bunyip was found by Monarch within Uluru (Ayer's Rock), Australia. This Titan gets its name from a swamp-dwelling creature in South Australian aboriginal folklore.

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And there you go! We apologise for being unable to provide much more information on these Titans, but rest assured we are hard at work scouring our databases and working to recover what we can so that we can provide more detailed accounts in future.

Until next time,

Monarch: After Dark

#monarch #monarch after dark #monsterverse #godzilla king of the monsters #godzilla kotm #godzilla 2019 #leviathan #loch ness monster #cryptids #quetzalcoatl #sekhmet #baphomet #mokele-mbembe #abbadon #yamata no orochi #orochi #typhon #bunyip

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paladin-of-nerd-fandom65 · 8 months

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Pretty cool answers got some more if that’s ok?

1: what is something the duo believes in? Like Bigfoot, mothman, etc…

2: what’s their opinion on cops in general?

3: you mention in a earlier post that Chris accidentally brushed his teeth with Jake’s toothbrush, was there any other gross moments the duo received?

4: you might’ve answer this before I think but what’s something that makes the duo really angry like super-saiyan angry?

5: what bets does the duo regular make? Like sees who’s faster for example?

6: what does the duo like to do with those respective girlfriends? Like hand holding, kisses on the cheek, etc

1) Well given that well….its the DCU where Greek pantheon gods, biblical demons, descendents of the Norse pantheon (New Genesis and Apokolips) and many others are all legit characters, it’s likely those cryptids indeed do exist anyways. Mainly the Duo though would give some attention in saying the Loch Ness Monster and the Congo’s Mokele Mbembe are real. Unlike in our reality, they have some actual evidence

2) Whilr they certainly have very good allies in Dan Turpin, Maggie Sawyer and especially Amy Rohrbach (in addition it of course Jim Gordon, Renee Montoya and even Harvey Bullock), Chris and Jake are overall more cautious around police officers in general and prefer not to overly rely on them as they both are aware of the systemic issues and structural problems many police departments have, the ones that we in the real world would acknowledge. This is especially true for Bludhaven as their police department is stated in being more corrupt than even Gotham’s.

3) Well, there only two incidents they are willing to talk about including the time Jake was dared by one of his classmates to not shower for a few days, hoping to break a record from an urban legend at their school. While he was able to beat said record by one messily minute, by the end of it he’d smelled and I quote from Chris “like if a foot and Brussels sprouts had a baby….who went Number 2 on their diaper.” Once Jake finally beat said record, Mar’i and Chris immediately gathered up some clean clothes, dragged Jake immediately straight to the bathroom and shut the door behind them so he can finally shower.

The other time would be when Chris and Jake love did some volunteer work at the local zoo, especially when it came time for cleaning some of the animal enclosures. Most difficult of all being the chimpanzees given their usual methods of warding off intruders. One of their ‘items’ they threw literally hit a fan (thankfully an air conditioner fan not a person) from across their habitat.

4) Easily hurting their loved ones and best friends like each others real badly and especially right in front of their eyes while gloating/laughing about it. During the brutal duel and beat down against Victor Zsasz on Jake, had he not been restrained by a power dampening anklet with traces of kryptonite in it, Chris for sure would’ve gone absolutely ballistic on the deranged criminal and rightfully so.

Also hurting innocents just to spite them or being careless is another way to get the two real ticked off. Even Chris and Jake have shown amazement on their ability to hold back during the few times Mongul nearly annihilated large swathes of Bludhaven and Metropolis, merely pounding him down rather than outright incinerating him.

5) Along with who can fly and/or run the fastest, they also made bets on Who can Eat Raw Onions without Crying (Chris won that one), Who’s the better poem writer (Jake), Who Can Curl Their Tongue (Jake again), Who can Annoy Hawkman first (Chris) and Who Can handle Spicy Hot Wings (like we’re taking spices including Habenero and Ghost Chili Peppers) with their Powers Shut Off and Without Milk (a Tie since they both made it two Twenty Wings before rushing for the Gallons)

6) Hand Holding, Quick Cheek Kisses, Sitting Close to each other when taking a seat, Paying for Lunches (Chris and Thara often make reservations at a local Big Belly Burger in Metropolis while conversely Jake and Meredith are regulars at a Bomp N Stomp in Bludhaven), Going to the Movies together (Especially Kaiju movies for Meredith of course), and helping each other out with their homework at their nearby libraries; all these are common place for the Duo regarding Thara and Meredith respectively

Thanks for the asks and your compliments @pin-crusher2000 . It’s very appreciated :-D

#chris kent #jake grayson #starburst duo #mari grayson #thara ak var #Meredith Robinson #sfw

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cryptiids-au · 9 months

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Pinned Post // Introduction

Hello and welcome to the Cryptiids AU blog!

Run by-

Candy/Congo - @oobilygoobilyweezerbeezers

Ultra/Lake - @solgavee

Brew - @xegnarpzonmyzeeptilisqueech

More information about the blog below!

hello everybody my name is markiplier

so this blog isn't really that serious. it's just a silly little thing that we all came up with one day

all of the characters* from inanimate insanity have been turned into cryptids, mythical creatures, and just silly little guys (interesting kinds of animals)

feel free to ask us about it, we can probably give more in-depth explanations

here are some tags we'll probably use:

cryptiids - general nonsense relating to the au

cryptiids art - art of the au/relating to it

cryptiids answer - answering asks or questions we get (if any)

will edit if we have anything new to add!! see u guys later :3

*contestants from all 3 seasons, mepad + mephone4

#cryptiids #ii au #inanimate insanity au

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rhythmantics · 1 year

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So first of all, I did not know you had a tumblr??? Second It Will Not Obey You SLAPS. And third my question: How in god's name did you do so much research for your fic??? What is your secret. How do you go about organizing or even knowing where to start for that matter. I struggle with research cause I never know where to start or stop and often I'm really uncertain if the info I'm gathering is even needed or if it's extraneous. I am both stupid and a perfectionist HELP ME

Hi Anon, thank you so much! I always appreciate viewer support and I hope you're enjoying all the art on this blog that isn't in the fic. In any case, I don't know if this method will work for you, or if it's how other authors do research, but here's my process. It's pretty long, so I'll put it under a cut for you:

First, I start with a story. When I say story, I don't really mean a beginning-middle-end, this happens and then that happens; it's a little more vague than that. For me, a story is more like a feeling, some truth or impulse, and all the writing or plot structure or everything else is built around it. I don't generally bother with things like plot structures (which I think should be descriptive and not prescriptive anyway), and I do make outlines, but you'd be surprised by how barren they are. Here's the original from 2016, with some spoilers blacked out:

And as you can see, I threw about half of it away during the writing process, haha. A surprising amount remains, though!

Something that comes about from approaching the story as a single entity is that oftentimes, things just fall into place. A big fight taking place in the congo where most of the cryptids from the Kur flash-forwards get called up, or the gang getting shot down over the Amazon like in the first two episodes of the show - little coincidences like this happen all the time. I think it's because, while writing, my brain starts making connections that I'm not consciously aware of - I often go by what "feels correct," and I've rewritten whole chapters multiple times before to chase that feeling of "correct."

How that ties into research is twofold: first, I'm a naturally curious person, and I'm constantly reading about stuff like mythology or ancient history or science etc. on my own. I like to have an approximate knowledge of many things - that way, there's more for my brain to make connections to. For example, I already knew about the chinese five-element system (wuxing), and remembered mystic hotspots from the show, and Excalibur, and video games, so when I decided on a plot device to keep Zak and Francis together during the main story, it was fairly easy to land on the idea of a quest to power up a special weapon only Francis can wield by hitting up mystical hotspots, each one themed after one of the wuxing.

The second part of the process is this: I have the general vibe or concept of the story in my head, and now I've settled on something concrete plot-wise - the magic weapon wuxing powerup quest. That makes it really easy to start researching specific details. I know I need a magic weapon, and I know this magic weapon has to be tied to Sumerian mythology, so I start digging around in Sumerian mythology for magic weapons, and find Sharur, the talking mace wielded by the Sumerian god Ninurta. Then I do some more research into the wuxing and see that each element is attached to a color, so those are the colors Sharur changes into. Now, a big part of the original show was its globetrotting nature, so obviously, I need to make each of these hotspots a different part of the globe. (And incidentally, "mythic hotspot" doesn't really roll off the tongue, so I rooted around myths for power spots etc. and found the Quechuan word "huaca," which has a meaning very similar to what I'm trying to make each huaca out to be).

So I scatter the huacas out so they're all roughly equidistant to each other, and none are too similar in geography or concept, and we go back to existing connections: I want to have one in China, because 1) I'm Chinese, 2) there's plot reasons (Sharur uses the wuxing because it was enchanted by a Chinese guy), 3) China has a long history comparable to India, the latter of which already featured extensively in the show. So I root around for the "secret science" parts of Chinese history and stumble across this semi-mythical Xia dynasty with its emperor who may or may not exist. That feels very Secret Saturdays to me, so Yu the Great and his tomb are now the second huaca. Now, we know so little about Yu the Great that there's not too much to draw from for how his tomb looks, but I already know about the tomb of Qin Shi Huang - his tomb's excavation was put on pause because ancient records spoke of him having a scale mercury replica of China complete with flowing mercury rivers, and while these claims were initially considered massive exaggerations if not outright lies, they DID find a TON of mercury in the tomb, making them go "unless..."

Mercury obviously fits right in with this huaca being "metal"-themed, so it's a perfect reference. The idea of a scale replica of China was blown up into the idea of a magically-powered VR simulation of ancient China. Now I need a cryptid for this arc, and hey, howdy, turns out Yu the Great has a serpent-slaying myth, Xiangliu! And what's this? Xiangliu's blood was so virulently poisonous that after it was slain, when the floodwaters came, the land became barren! There is such a strong pro-environement and pro-taking care of animals even when they seem monstrous vibe in TSS that if this story is seen through the lens of TSS, it looks a lot like a cautionary tale for why you don't just murder rampaging animals - they're natural parts of their natural environments, and there are repercussions for messing too much with the food chain.

And hey, doesn't that sound like a lesson Francis should learn? The last huaca, we got as far as Francis going from "I don't want to be here" to "I guess I'm stuck here." This huaca, we need to highlight how different he and Zak are, and how shortsighted - and human - Francis's ideals are, where he repeats Yu the Great's mistake, and humanity's mistakes as a whole.

Again, a lot of these connections aren't necessarily being made consciously. In the moment, they just sort of "feel right," which I know is unhelpful, but I can't really explain it any other way.

For an arc that had more secondary research than already knowing things ahead of time, the arc in the Congo took the longest to write (there was a two-year hiatus between it and the previous arc), in large part because I had so little to go off of. Myths from the Congo area are fairly sparse on the ground (for many reasons), and the ones I did find didn't really feel very TSS or IWNOY. I knew that this was the arc where everything went to shit - that we'd been building to that for a while - but I didn't have in my notes exactly how things went to shit, or even what the huaca was going to be. I knew it would be wood-themed, but this being the Congo Rainforest, pretty much anything I did would count. I knew I wanted to do something with the origin of humanity and/or the lemurians, because Africa was where humans first evolved.

So, actually, I wound up doing research into pretty much everything - all the cryptids from the area, all the myths from the area I could find. Previously, in my research on lemurians when working out what their Deal would be, I found out that a lot of writings on lemurians came from occultists in the 1900s, who also had many (racist and misogynistic) writings about where THEY think the first humans come from, about mystical ancient societies that were hyper advanced, etc. etc., which fit with the way that the lemurians seemed to have a veritable magical paradise in Shangri-La before the nagas massacred them. I could at least use the names from these hippies, because I couldn't find comparable mythology from the actual area, but I stripped out the... less savory parts.

I wanted to use the eloko/biloko when I found them, because their myths give them magic bells that compel people who hear it to do what they want - much like how the lemurian's charisma was set up (this being one of those interesting little coincidences that happen when the story "feels right.") Doubly so when I found out that eloko/biloko sleep in trees, which - wood-themed huaca. But I still wasn't really... piecing anything together.

So I switched tracks and started looking into Gilgamesh, the man, the myth, the legend, at the center of this all. Read the Epic of Gilgamesh (or, re-read, rather), and found the myth regarding Utnapishtim and Gilgamesh's quest for eternal life. An old man gifted by immortality from the gods? Given that I already had in my notes that the lemurians struck a deal with the devil with Kur and became what they are, and the eloko/biloko were a failure as a result of the lemurians going "wait, not like this" halfway through, Utnapishtim sounded like he could fit in as a lemurian from this original hullabaloo. And in the original Gilgamesh myth, the plant Utnapishtim points Gilgamesh to, which would grant him all his youth and vitality back, gets stolen from him by a serpent. Hey, nagas!

Okay, so now I had the origin of the lemurians, Utnapishtim's character being involved, even a hook for the nagas, and thus Argost, but it still wasn't coming together. SO...

... I gave up and started looking at biblical stuff. I'm a sellout hack. BUT, at least you can argue that biblical stuff is always potentially relevant, because the Saturday line has biblical names (Zakariya/Zechariah, Solomon, Elijah, Samuel) and Zak is set up with a minor Jesus reference (sacrifices himself for the good of mankind, is dead for 3 (minutes) and is resurrected). Specifically, I started looking into the "secret science" part of biblical stuff - apocrypha, or non-canonical texts. There's tons of interesting stuff in there, but it turned out to be mostly useless, aside from the chapter titles, but it did help to form this idea of making deals and regretting them - and I'm realizing now as I'm writing this that this was another one of those unconscious connections - ch12 is literally named after the part in Goethe's Faust where Faust makes his deal with Mephistopheles ("Die Wette biet ich" - "the bet I offer").

So now that I'd been freed to do biblical stuff (which, hey, also fits in with the wood theme, because Garden of Eden, get it?), I had access to the imagery of the snake tempting eve with fruit. And suddenly, everything started to come together. Themes of trying to defy what you are by nature, the nagas as betrayers, Kur and its entourage as demons, getting what you wished for but at what cost, a fall into darkness as the major players fail to defy their natures (and the consequences that result) - once I started, I couldn't stop.

So it's a bit hard to answer your question because it's all so intuitive, but I guess if I really had to say, the real answer to where to start and where to end is to just pick a topic you like so much that you wouldn't mind doing tons of research on it, even if most of it winds up being unusable. I LOVE ancient history and mythology, so even if nothing I read is useful, I don't mind reading. And not minding the reading means I have so much already floating around in my head for when I need to write something new. If you forced me to write, say, a crime drama or sci-fi story - two fields I have much less interest and much less knowledge on - I would also be pretty lost! At that point, I'd have two options - either I write something by the numbers just to get it done, or I do enough reading on the topic that I find something about it to love and care about, and then write based on that.

I think more is always better. Anything you don't immediately use becomes a potential connection for something else down the line. I'd say a good 30% of weird little factoids featured in IWNOY are things I knew before I did research for it, and now, for other projects I'm doing, the stuff I learned for IWNOY sometimes becomes relevant.

And I would always try not to worry too much about overstuffing or making your first draft bad. The secret is, most of the actually good writing happens in the editing. Your first draft exists for the purpose of existing. It's fine if it's riddled with holes, if the dialogue sucks, if there's way too much exposition and "essay-style writing" (what I like to call it when you randomly infodump all the research you've done - I've done this sooooo many times), or if it's so bad you have to delete the whole thing and start over (this is a regular part of my writing process!). The point of draft 1 is to throw the damn spaghetti against the damn wall. Edits and revisions are where you tastefully arrange it so that it's good and an art piece, haha.

#it will not obey you #answers

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