#eldritch erased

[zoomerinaboomercostume]

songstress would probably be a shard of some bigger horror

i need to reread her info tho

You do that.

[agentc0rn]

Just some small lads (both of whom gone rogue with power)

[arabella-strange]

imo the Grand Demon of Loathing is going to hit them all with reasons they hate (or could hate) themselves already:

Dorian's is all the reasons he was in the closet, all the reasons he was overshadowed by Cyrus, all the people he failed to be good enough to help (all the reasons someone he might love would not want him)

Imogen is her father's disgust, Liliana's choosing power over love for her daughter, Imogen's hypocrisy of also wanting power for personal gratification and lying to her friends (and herself) about it, her deep deep desire to be normal and the knowledge that she was a freak instead, her inability to save Laudna and her own doom to be alone (and deserve it)

Ashton's their many many failures, the times when they should they could rise above others and proved how pathetically they fall instead, it's FCG's death and the Nobodies' departure and parents who didn't care about them enough to reject power -- and their inevitable same fate, and all the reasons they deserved to be left behind

Orym's is being just a small little guy, just a toy soldier in front of a monumental horror, his inability to save people, and his inability to stick to his own better principles when those he loved most would have wanted him to (the ways he is letting down their memory and dragging down his friends now), and possibly his Fey doom to be alone and shackled forever, because he's just not as powerful, not as strong, not as good as they were or as he tells himself he is

Fearne's is her dark side again, her flightiness and selfishness, all the times she was a ditzy fool in the face of the grave seriousness of the world, all the times she made terrible choices and others paid for it (all the people who were glad they left her)

And perhaps most of all

Laudna's is already out there—all the negging Delilah has done to isolate and control her; it's the way she is powerless and her friends are special, it's that she always drags everyone down and they deserve to be free of her, it's that she is not fun-scary but just a rotten mistake and it would be better if she let herself go and stopped pretending to be worth saving

= Dominox has to be about preying and drawing on the ways that people shrink when they believe they DESERVE the worst of what they get. It's about pure Loathing and "insecurity"—it's the howl of the Abyss.

Fun!

[p.s. I do think Chet's beats coulda been more powerful if Matt had had another week to think of them. Like yes I guess Chet is haunted by accidentally killing people but he has been pretty resilient about that prospect. What he hasn't been so casual about is hurting his friends. It's why he chewed Ashton out so bad after the first Shard incident. It's why he peacocks so hard to all the higher-ups they meet. He doesn't want to be discounted and he really doesn't want to lose another family. I think if he gets Dommed again, it would also have to be about that.)

[scholar-of-yemdresh]

Bare with me now but I think certain portions of fandoms reactions to a piece of explicitly aromantic media is telling in a way.

So I think TSV's lack of romance from the get go probably weeded out most of the types of people who aren't capable of interacting with media beyond shipping or romance. But even still I see the occasional er take or reaction to the SV's handling of & lack of romance.

I love how the most impactful plot and story relevant relationships are non romantic. I love how almost romantic relationships/attractions are exes,in the past, made the F up (Hayward the F we're you yapping about man?)or not on screen... All but one which brings me to the reason for my post.

But the strong reactions to episode 36 are tickling me.

A lot of people are upset about the ending specifically how they think the tragedy is excessive and depressing for no reason. Personally I belive Sebastian and Devereux did make it out at the end and that last bit was a ptsd flashback to the incident and I do agree that it'll be a bit much for the NPCs we've been following for a whole 1 hour+ episode will meet a grisly end for horror reasons I guess.

BUT the reactions by people who's interpretation of the ending as being more tragic I feel is interesting. I do not believe people would be as upset if it wasn't a romantic relationship that was centered. If Seb & Dev had been unambiguously "just" friends getting sucked into some nightmare Scooby Doo plot, if it was centered primarily on Dev & his sister, if it was only about those non romantic relationships and an unambiguous Bad End, I Don't believe certain portions of the fandom would've cared as much.

I feel people were waiting for a romantic narrative, wanted their cute assumed white yaoi boys to ship as a reward for "sitting through" all the aromantic relationship stuff. Were hoping for a cute soft fluffy romance that they could ship, the right kind of queer representation.

The aro/ace older woman, the Achillean trans man, the sapphic trans woman, all the myriad NB/agender main/major characters is fine...but where's the cis (white) yaoi boys?(nevermind that both of Seb & Dev's VAs are POC)

Idk I guess this is a fundamentally uncharitable assumption to make about people but I notice things and maybe I'm projecting too much

[cairafea]

rough sketch of the winged lion to familiarise myself with drawing big cats

[quietwingsinthesky]

1 or 34 for the master pls thank u :333!!!!!!!

extremely funny to me how quickly this got away from me alsjfjfkskkdj. i started thinking too hard about okay but Who could bring the master to his knees. the doctor? hey wait remember that time ten had a god complex for a little bit. what if he got worse about that, actually. and then it just kept going-

This is not the Doctor whose arms he died in.

Oh, the face is the same, but the eyes are all wrong. Still ancient, as old as the Master is, but they’ve gone hard like bone. He doesn’t spare a glance around the room at the cowering scientists or the politician that wanted to use the Master, who gave him such easy access to a perfect plan before the Doctor landed his TARDIS on top of the machine and crushed it. Only to one human, the one assigned to hold the Master’s leash.

“Give him to me,” he says. The Master curls his fingers. A step closer, and he’ll let the Doctor taste lightning again.

His assigned guard all but throws the leash at the Doctor. (They’re all terrified. Something’s… wrong, there. Not a misplaced sympathy of his own — let them fear their betters — but it’s the Doctor, it’s how he ignores them, how he holds himself like. He looks every bit a Time Lord.) The Doctor catches it, turns it in his hand, and yanks. The Master feigns a stumble, energy surging through his skin and bones, rattling up dangerously until-

The Doctor pulls harder, knocking him off-balance and to his knees. He twists, but there’s a hand in his hair, painfully dragging his head back until his neck screams in pain. The pinprick of a needle is barely a whisper above it, but the sluggish cold that spreads from the injection spreads no matter how he struggles. The Doctor grips his hair tighter.

“There. You’re stabilized,” the Doctor notes. The Master pants, his limbs growing heavier. “And sedated. You have to be so difficult.” For the first time, the Doctor’s voice falters from the detached tone he’s taken so far. It’s harsh, as thick with accusation as with self-reproach, “I asked you to come with me.” The Master is having a hard time ordering his thoughts. They stretch too far for him to see the whole of them, his sense of time and of himself going numb.

“How?” he lands on, more important than any other question. The Doctor’s grip begins to loosen, letting his head sag forward. His body wants to follow. His vision of the floor he’s kneeling on blurs.

“You were living on borrowed time,” the Doctor says. “I have all of it to work with at my fingertips. When I saw you again…” There’s the absent trail of fingers through his hair. The Master recoils from it instinctively, though that sends him further down, barely holding himself up on his hands. The collar draws tight around his throat when he falls, forcing out a gasp, but it loosens again. “It only took a few decades. I’d have given more to you.” The Master lifts his hand, slowly, and forces it out in front of him. It’s humiliating to crawl, but his limbs can barely keep his weight. He barely moves himself forward a few inches before the collar is a hard barrier against his breath again, and this time, he doesn’t receive any slack. He has to scoot back towards the Doctor.

“You’re going to live,” the Doctor says, without mercy. He steps around the Master, the leash dragging along the floor with a mocking hiss.

“And the rest of you,” the Doctor’s voice grows louder. It becomes a proclamation, a warning. “I won’t hurt you. It’s a stupid and dangerous thing you were doing, but that’s… that’s what you love most, humans. Stupid, dangerous things.” Where’s the sickening fondness, the Master wonders. Where’s the disappointment, even, in his favorite pet species? All he can hear in the Doctor’s voice is carefully controlled anger. “I’m not going to hurt you for putting the whole world in danger,” he repeats, as though he’s reminding himself of that fact, and then, the Master can hear him smile. Regeneration after regeneration, and the Doctor always talks different when he’s smiling. “I don’t have to. If you ever try anything like this again, you won’t have existed in the first place to come up with the idea. I will take you out of this timeline.” He pauses. “Or maybe I’ll just make you kinder. Buy you a coffee on a bad day and change your life forever. You can exist, just not like this.”

He sounds powerful, and worse, he doesn’t sound scared of it. The Master uses the last of his strength to drag himself back up to his knees. The Doctor is surveying the room, memorizing faces, lost in thought about time to tamper with. The Master puts a hand around his own leash. He tries to pull.

All that does is get the Doctor’s attention.

His eyes. The Master is afraid of his eyes.

“Sorry,” the Doctor says, “I’m not going to carry you. You’ll have to crawl.” The Master is searching for anything familiar in him. And what there is, what little there is that he recognizes, is only because of how easily he could have seen it in a mirror instead. “If you pass out, I’ll drag you,” the Doctor offers like a compromise. He turns away from the Master, snaps his fingers, and the doors to the TARDIS burst open.

He takes the Master prisoner. He saves the world. They are both, after all, the Doctor’s alone to decide what to do with.

[whump prompt]

[iamblueraspberry]

Small pen doodle i did at work last week.

The greater the anger the more Eldritch I appear.

[il3x]

i think broken horses by the mechanisms is a dalinar song. in spirit.

[unboundtravels]

‘ you’re just another set of bones to lay to rest . ’ ( for One )

𝐥𝐲𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐬  𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 :  𝐩𝐢𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐞  𝐭𝐡𝐞  𝐯𝐞𝐢𝐥  — [Accepting]

@brutalage

The comment irked her to some degree, though her poker face remained impenetrable. She looked toward Savage with a disinterested look, through narrow eyes. She saw how little she thought of him. Just some crazy crackpot, he was probably thinking. She could see it in his eyes, the way he measured her up to standards he had set via his own expectations for this planet. For this world. It was here that she began to realize that Vandal Savage had not been measured against her standards... for all of the worlds she had been too. She took a sharp inhale, sitting in the chair near his fireplace... in his home... in his study. In his trophy room. She had made the great Vandal Savage and all his mansion's staff, all the kingsmen and kingshorses... look like great big fools. She should be giddy at this sort of thing. She should be excited and giggly like she usually is.

Not bored...

and yet she was. She was bored of him. He imagined he was big. This man across from her imagined that he must be the center of the universe. This man must've imagined that in the great, long, unending list of conquerers— that his name would leave an impression. It was boring. Simply boring. All due to the fact that she had seen this act done before across several civilizations and times. She knew it by heart. This disgusting ideology that only one singular being can be ruler of all. That one man can be the god-king emperor. Her eyes narrowed, as she sat lounged, leaning back in the chair within his study. Her legs were crossed over one another, her elbow resting on the armrest and her fingers covering her mouth as she stared quietly, through narrow eyes.

She must remind him of his place. 

She moved to rest both of her arms against the armrest, fingers dancing on the edge before firmly tightening. Her legs uncrossed as she braced herself to stare firmly. She took in one exhale, turning her nose up just a bit at him. Finally, she stood, and slowly. Then it happened, inch by inch... moment by moment passed... the room growing heavier, until this sudden chill ran down... the fire in the study beginning to go out.

The two were in darkness. Pale moonlight streamed through the curtains, but it was total darkness. The Doctor rested her fingers softly against her lapel, before silently and slowly... one hand sunk down to her side. She had no weapons, and yet she was prepared to shoot down Vandal Savage. Her imposing nature, her chill. Vandal Savage was not in the room with The Doctor. No. He was in the room with someone who was eldritch in their nature. Someone very old and endless. A woman who had lived much longer than him, and had seen much more. Someone who had seen the turn of the universe, and had known from the very start her place in it all. Despite knowing her fate, this figure still warped destiny to her own desires, fighting it day and night... and winning. 

The slowly growing shadow behind her choked out the pale light from the edge of the curtain. A trick the figure had picked up over her long travels: the ability to use her mind like a scalpel... and right now, her cuts were precise and methodical. Her eyes and their piercing white glow seemed to be the only other light in the room when the chill darkness snuffed everything else out... aside from, again, a few streams of moonlight from behind the curtain. She took something from her coat pocket, resting it between her fingers and caressing her thumb over it, but never taking her eyes off of Savage... keeping his locked on her...

Until she spoke...

And her voice carried her words with a weight that perhaps even not the immortal self-proclaimed king could lift. 

"You are small." 

[gr1m330]

so yk when u get an idea for a fic series but u realize u suck at writing but cant get a scene out of ur head so u decide to mash up a bunch of manga panels to fit ur rough ass rambles. yeahhh. was supposed to be zelthur but man is is hard to fit words in these.

[zoomerinaboomercostume]

I saw you eldritch erased post and wanted to put forward this

Phoenica's family instead of being magic girls are people who sing lullabies' to Azathoth to keep the thing asleep

i think it would fit nice

That would be interesting. How would you change the Songstress though?

[occasionalsnippets]

I have a question for Eldritch MC if they faced a being who has plot manipulation what would they do if a being manipulate the plot where they ending up defeating Eldritch MC or if a being went to the real world and force the Eldritch MC where they longer op

In terms of meta discussion, this type of thing wouldn't ever happen because I as the author have control over who gets what power. There isn't really "defeating a god", they've existed, they still exist, a dead god is still a god. Even if there's plot manipulation, the past still happened, the character still exists and the MC is still the protagonist the story. The IRL within the story isn't really considered the "real world" anymore given our IRL is the actual IRL. A world within a story is still just a story and it's not like they can ever go back anyways.

[mudstoneabyss]

worst pictures in existence but they were so lesbian married btw. gay as hell to keep a photo of yourself with a woman and her son on your desk

[superat626]

Some Beckett sketches I needed to get out of my system

[transgenderdoctorwhomst-old]

rory williams is literally the most insane character. in love with the local batshit girl. best friend growing up was crimes georg. got erased from existence and turned into a plastic roman. 2000 years guarding a box. also the most normal man you've ever met. it's like he practices being normal. his hobby is Being Normal. he's a normal nurse who wants a normal life with two and a half kids and a picket fence. he's perfectly happy with the Fucking Insane life he has with amy instead, regardless.

his problem solving skills involve "tactical suicide" and "telling the eldritch entity possessing the tardis it should torture him and amy instead of killing them". these work. he also steals and carries around future and alien first aid stuff, apparently.

he became emperor of rome for a bit. he narrowly dodged becoming king of camelot. he knows how to dual wield a shortsword and a gun.

rory williams is a Perfectly Normal Man, despite all of this.

[honourablejester]

I’m realising as I browse around that I really love lore when it comes to ttrpgs, games and game worlds. And by that I don’t mean I like to obsessively learn lists of dates and wars, and the names of leaders of factions, I mean …

I like learning weird, juicy details about the worlds of games. I like finding little nuggets that say things about the set-up and culture and assumptions of the world. I like finding fragments of ideas to hang whole story and character concepts off.

I love that in D&D 5e’s Spelljammer, the Astral Sea is full of the corpses of dead gods that you can fully sail up to in your ship. Just. Floating out there. Waiting for you to rock up to them.

I love that in Sunless Sea, the king of the drowned is the way he is because he fell in love with an eldritch sea urchin from space, and successfully married it. His niece is an angry sentient floating mountain whose mother is a goddess-mountain and whose father is a face-stealing humanoid abomination. This is fine and normal.

I love that in Starfinder, there are mysterious bubble cities in the surface of the sun that the church of the sun goddess discovered and cheerfully occupied despite having no idea who the hell built them or for what purpose.

I love that in Dishonored, the entire industrial revolution that has built the empire we’re in the midst of saving or destroying was built on the properties of whale oil harvested from eldritch tentacled whales that live half in the oceans and half in an eldritch void personified in the form of a weird-ass black-eyed shit-stirrer of a deity who was formed from a murdered and sacrificed child. And this is largely a background detail.

I love in the Elder Scrolls that the dwarves up and fucking vanished, as a race, at some point in history and absolutely nobody has any clue what happened to them or where they went, but their technology is so insane that ideas like ‘they time-travelled’ or ‘they erased themselves from existence’ are absolutely on the table.

I love that in Numenera, so many incredibly advanced civilisations have risen and fallen on this world that it’s absolutely littered with bonkers science fiction artefacts that have caused the current medieval-esque society built over top of them to develop in bizarre ways, and also you can find a mysterious artefact that absolutely baffles and delights your character, but that you the player will fully recognise as a slightly-more-advanced thermos flask.

I love that in Fallout, an irradiated post-nuclear apolocalypic hellscape, there’s a cult that worships the god of radiation as they have come to understand it, and they are mysteriously immune to radiation with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. They’re not ghouls, the usual result of fatally irradiated humans with some resistance, they’re perfectly normal humans who can somehow just tank rads all damn day. It could be a mutation, but Lovecraftian gods apparently do also fully exist in this setting, so it’s also possible that maybe they were on to something with this Atom thing.

I love that in Heart The City Beneath, there’s a mass transit train system that they tried to hook up to the eldritch beating god-thing buried under the city so that they could metaphysically chain the stations together more easily, which went horrifically and metaphysically wrong in entirely predictable fashion, and now there’s a whole order of train-knights who have to keep people safe from the extradimensional weirdness magnet the network has become.

That, and all the fantastic little details you can stumble across. There’s a biotech augmentation in Starfinder called an angler’s light that gives you a little angler-fish bioluminescent antenna on your forehead, and it was developed by asteroid miners who needed light but also both hands free for work. In Dishonored there’s a festival that everyone pretends is outside of time so nothing you do during it can be held against you. There’s a god of snuffed candles mentioned in a single line from Heart The City Beneath who has pacifist cannibal priests, and that is literally all the information you get on him.

While things like the history and geography and timeline of a world do also fascinate me, I’m not really here to memorise stuff like that. I’m here to find weird little nuggets of information and worldbuilding and delight in them. Give me funerary customs and weird myths and oddly specific circumstances and baffling little objects and absolutely bonkers cosmological implications. Give me the corpses of dead gods, and aesthetic movements with highly specific backstories, and bureaucratic fuck-ups of titanic scale, and mysterious things that seem to break all other rules of your setting with absolutely no explanation because people in-universe have no fucking clue how they work either. Why are the Children of Atom immune to radiation without ghoulifying? Not a clue, but Confessor Cromwell has been cheerfully standing in that irradiated pond that kills the player character with about 10 minutes of exposure for the last year and he’s still absolutely fine.

I just. I really love lore. I like my settings to have some meat in them, some juicy details to dig into, some inexplicable elements to have fun trying to explain. Particularly that last bit. I feel like a lot of people when building worlds feel like the rules have to be absolute and everything has to have an explanation, but nah. Putting some weird shit in makes everything immediately feel bigger, more real, because we don’t have even half an idea of how our world truly works, there’s always something we just don’t fully understand yet, and you can put that in a fictional world too. Some mysteries, some contradictions, some randomness, some weirdness. There’s a line, obviously, this depends on execution, but a little bit of mystery really does help.

Lore is awesome. And weird lore is even more so. Heh.