#error!martlet

[cybers-sillyzone]

*sketch of an error martlet martlet design i made in chemistry...:

*i'll finish later when i have my ipad :3

[cheddarchandelure]

The Divine Court: an Undertale fanon concept.

The idea of a multiverse has already been explored greatly in Undertale fan works, but screw it here is my own idea!

What is the Divine Court?

Throughout the UT Multiverse, there are all sorts of scenarios. Anything can happen. Sometimes this leads to a person absorbing seven souls and becoming a god. This has happened enough to where there is a decent amount of gods spread across the multiverse. Eventually, some gods came together and decided to form the Divine Court, a group of divine beings dedicated to protecting the multiverse

What is the Divine Court's deal?

Everyone in the Divine Court was a mortal at some point in the past, and are still the same people they once were, only much more powerful. With their newfound omnipotence, these people became aware of the great suffering across the multiverse and decided to do something about it. The Divine Court's goal is to seek out and protect timelines that are threatened. There are many threats throughout the multiverse after all. (Ex. Error Sans) Every member in the divine court must pledge to an oath that they will only ever use their divine powers to protect the multiverse and never to harm it. Despite becoming gods, everyone in the Divine Court still cares greatly for mortal life

Who is in the divine court?

Since anyone across the multiverse could theoretically become a god, the Divine Court is made of many diverse beings. Some are humans, some are monsters, some are darkeners, and some are everything else. While they still go by their mortal names, every god in the Divine Court is given a codename, often being "The god of X". For example "Martlet, the Goddess of justice." Some mortals have even joined the divine court to lend aid when needed, often times these mortals are loved ones of their respective god. Mortal members of the Divine Court are referred to as angels. (Not to be confused with THE angel). For example, A godly Undyne could have a mortal Alphys as their angel. While some details still need to be worked out, I'd imagine the Divine Court would have a form of central leadership, perhaps the same gods that founded the Divine Court all those years ago. Afterall Every court needs a judge.

Where can I learn more?

I am working on stories that involve the Divine Court. I technically have one that involves a member of the Divine Court, but not the Court itself. You can read it here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/56226520

I am planning to tie this fic into a larger story involving the Divine Court eventually. If you wanna use the Divine Court in your own story then shoot, be my guest. But some credit would be much appreciated!

I'll keep working on this concept so stay tuned for more!

[karmaspidr]

Do you think theres more to vengeance clover than simply being a genocidal maniac?

Absolutely.

Clover's killing spree is motivated by his desire to deliver 'justice' to Monsterkind for what had happened to the Fallen Children but it's even deeper than that.

At the beginning of the Neutral Run Final Boss, Flowey revealed that he had Reset Clover's journey hundreds of times, each run ending in Clover's death with potentially even more in between. Can you imagine that, dying hundreds, maybe thousands of times but being unable to remember it?

Except, Clover definitely remembers. He can learn from previous runs, doing better each time and making different choices despite Flowey's insistence that he shouldn't remember anything. If a Monster can experience deja vu after a Reset, then a human like Clover would remember much more.

All that trauma, buried deep within Clover's subconscious, waiting to be let out. Eventually, that anger was released in the form of the twisted justice that we know Vengeance Clover for. He marched through the Underground, hunting down dangerous Monsters, potentially not even releasing that he would have never even considered something like this a few hours ago.

But despite the pain... despite the anger, suffering, trauma and corruption of Clover's morals, he still keeps a sense of honour. He doesn't attack Monsters that do not threaten him. He (in most instances I hope) honours Starlo's duel. He spares Martlet not once but twice. He even searches Zenith Martlet's memories not to find a weakness but for a reason to kill her.

And most notably, he fulfils the mission. Clover could have simply left the Underground, with no King and dozens dead. Instead, he takes the time to free the souls of his brethren, the reason he jumped into the Underground in the first place. The Axis fight alone proves to us that he cares deeply for his fellow humans. That devotion may have even been strengthened because of the pain that Monsters caused him.

Many people see Vengeance Clover as a mass murderer with extremist ideals.

What I see, is a kid with dreams of being a hero, tortured by a false god and Monsterkind's inability to see the errors of their ways. A kid who was forced to compromise his morals for the sake of survival. A kid who, despite the pain and suffering, still shows signs of goodness. A kid who became the very thing Monsters feared.

Humanity's Vengeance and Monsterkind's Punishment. True Justice.

That is who Vengeance Clover is.

[chromatasia]

Thank you so much for acknowledging that Martlet deserves to be the Ink character of the UTY verse. Could you share your ideas you had for her? I'd love to hear them!

HEHE OF COURSE!! i am not immune to silly characters with scarfs shrugs

pluto and i were bouncing ideas back in forth for a while so i’ll summarize our overall thoughts and some extra stuff ive thought of (probably while writing this)

so the initial idea came up based on my post about martlet Remembering Resets like sans does and the idea of oh what if she got to explore the multiverse too (maybe the determination injection made her see that oh goodness there is a Lot Of AUs just. there.) then pluto mentioned possible ink and error martlet and i got Ideas… but my first attempt to draw ink martlet ended with fully realized spiral avatar martlet oops! but i finished the design yesterday lol

as for character! ink martlet has taken it upon herself to be the guard of the multiverse, flying through the space between the aus and making sure everything is going well. she’s pretty similar to base uty martlet, save for probably some backstory stuff (that i haven’t thought of yet. el oh el)

there’s no actual plot line… yet >:) we threw around some ideas (vigilante-sheriff starlo and multiverse exploring feisty five and a ceroba searching for a universe where her family doesn’t end up. gestures to uty) but there’s no designs (maybe once i learn how to draw star…)

btw for character design she’s based on eastern bluebirds (though i initially just looked up “blue and brown bird”) with ink’s general style! now that i think about it since i was just kinda doing colors for the actual paint she’d probably have ink the same color as the human souls. maybe throw in a determination serum one just for fun hehe. also adding from my Brain blast during math today she’d wear her hair half up to look like a paintbrush (doodle of it down below)

[teammelodies]

Peak at the Toriel Dialogue for the Astrea Mod

As you can see, there's some kinks to work out. Ramble under the cut (Spoilers for UTY obviously)

OKAY SO MODDING IS SOMETHING!! But yeah, I decided to take on the task of making the silent protagonist no longer silent. Astrea isn't the quiet type, None of my soul OCs are. Which means, I gotta not only CHANGE existing dialogue, but ADD to it! add the fact that the human's dialogue is coloured (in my headcanon anyway but clover's inner thoughts in the geno route are yellow so why can astrea's outer dialogue be the same?) and that i gotta account for ALL the routes, and i have my work cut out for me.

And OH-HO-HO! Lemme tall ya, it was pretty difficult to get Astrea talking without any issues. I kept getting error after error. Mind you, i started adding dialogue in the wild east first. I did fix it, of course. I just had to make the object talking a variable in whichever script it was. Which, there's MULTIPLE 'clover' objects i had to change to make Astrea chatty. The player object itself, the sitting saloon object, the raft sit object, the 'player npc' object...

Didnt have to do much except add some things that allows it lo look like astrea is talking.

Modding is complicated. Fun, yes, but complicated.

So now I wanna talk about the coloured text. Anyone who's played or has seen someone play the UTY Geno route knows that there's some text that appears in the endgame after beating martlet. Said text is coloured yellow. I am still yet to figure out how the game determines the colour of that text so i can change it to Astrea's shade of yellow. (and maaaaybe add something else too) And once i DO figure it out, i'll be able to change the step code i currently have to that so that it'll be a little more efficient. Less likely for accidental clashes in code that way.

[gilligansgarden]

THIS ONES A DOOZY. KINION FOR DAVE HARLEY YALL.

there is severe overlap in several places but here we go. each character is, starting clockwise, from center to edge:

ylfa "little red riding hood" snorgelsson (dimension: 20), hata no kokoro (touhou project), hank venture (the venture bros), grace (ready or not), falin touden (dunmeshi), rapunzel (tangled)

wendy (don't starve) alan (alantutorial), fil (baccano!), sunny (omori), jyushimatsu matsuno (osomatsu-san!), martlet (undertale yellow), amanda young "the pig" (saw), basil (omori), mabel pines (gravity falls), wendy darling (peter pan), moana of motonui (moana), the razor (slay the princess)

flandre scarlet (touhou project), conan (future boy conan), collector (the owl house), agatha prenderghast (paranorman), spear (primal), huntress wizard (adventure time), gaara of the sand (naruto), mahito (how do you live?/the boy and the heron), ralsei (deltarune), pinocchio (guillermo del toro's pinocchio), harley quinn (lego batman), oricka rourst (snowbound blood: a vast error story), chané laforet (baccano!), isaac moriah (the binding of isaac), stain edwards the forever boy (don't hug me i'm scared the tv show), care (petscop), emu otori (project sekai), greg (over the garden wall), lilo pelekai (lilo & stitch), nanami kiryuu (revolutionary girl utena), ponyo (ponyo), flame princess (adventure time), princess fionna (shrek), princess kumatora (mother 3)

HONORABLE MENTIONS: clover from undertale yellow. mob from mp100. midori asakusa from keep your hands off the eizouken! chihiro from spirited away. sackboy from littlebigplanet. the cosmic prince from katamari damacy. the player from inscryption. ena from the web shorts by joel g. finn the human from adventure time. susan strong from adventure time. THERE'S TOO MANY ALRIGHT. MY GIRLTHING HAS MULTITUDES. thank you so much for to playing my game ♡

[uty-confessions]

whenever I see people talking about how bad the writing is and undertale yellow, I can't help but wonder to myself if we actually played the same game, or if I'm just the weird one. I tend to look at things from the bigger picture, so when people say that the situation with starlo turning against you is poorly written, or over the top, or contrived, I consider it actually in character--it's very clear that if we look around, clover entering town and becoming the main center of attention for starlo was the last straw, because we know that starlo has been going way too far for a while now, between things like the rock droppers, and the sandstorm fan. on top of this, he's been so wrapped up in trying to keep one person happy, namely ceroba, that he forgot to ask the opinion of everyone else. to the point where he's even forgotten to ask the opinion of ceroba herself, because again, he gets very very wrapped up into things. he's a flawed character that needs to LEARN. the same thing goes for his appearance in vengeance, where he brings rubber bullets to his dual with clover. this makes sense for him, even though it was a very, very stupid thing for him to do. he can't bring himself to kill clover--even in neutral/pacifist, he's literally CRYING when he's at his last bullet. but in vengeance, he hadn't learned the lesson yet that he needs to get his head out of the clouds, take things seriously, and acknowledge the opinion of others. and then we get to the people who absolutely hate ceroba and her arc. and yes I get it, her whole goal was to kill clover--however it's clear that she shows a lot of care for them throughout any route, because she gives them the benefit of the doubt in neutral if you kill starlo. she constantly asks if clover is okay with what's going on in town. and although she just dumps her own stuff onto them, it's not as if clover is one to freely share their backstory. everyone acts as though clover has been mistreated, as if frisk never was ever during their story, but a lot of the characters actually realize the error of their ways and try to ask for forgiveness and make up for it in some way. did we all just miss that part?? did we miss the part where starlo and martlet desperately try to defend them??? and yes, it does make sense for clover to want to give up their soul, and maybe even not regret it. I mean, their whole schtick is justice. they see throughout pacifist that monsters aren't as evil as they previously thought, and that there's no justice in keeping them trapped forever. I don't know, maybe I'm just giving the game too much benefit of the doubt, but undertale has its own contrivances and issues as well. like ceroba and undyne both have similar arcs in that they want to kill you, but all the other characters around you speak positively of them. how is frisk expected to want to be friends with undyne, besides just being the most special of special cases, and wanting to be friends with everyone? we have to allow at least a little bit of contrivances, and suspend our disbelief a little bit. idk. you don't have to like it, but let's not treat undertale like it's perfect and untouchable while looking at yellow like it's significantly worse, somehow.

☆

[literarygoon]

So,

I almost forgot about this!

On Twitter the other day, fellow UVic and UBC writer Ruth Daniell (who just had a baby, on the same day I left my job at the Nelson Star) reminded me of the first piece of creative non-fiction I ever published in This Side of West: “Far Away”. She has an awesome painting in there of her future husband. 

It’s a story about a woman named Cat who I was in love with for half a decade. I ultimately wrote a column about her for The Martlet called “I fell in love with a lesbian” and then a piece for OCW Magazine called “Somebody who isn’t there”. But this one, this is the very first piece.

Last I heard, Cat is now non-binary and lives in Halifax. They have a new name (same as Raylan’s father in Justified), a new life, and a new partner. I’m happy for them, and have no plans to look them up. I’m sure they’re taking care, and living life to the fullest.

I’ve decided to re-type the text of “Far Away” below for your reading pleasure, while correcting two small editing errors. If you get your hands on this issue, it also includes work by these compatriots: Josh Thompson, Rosemary Westwood, Jenna Spearing and Darius Kinney.

It was edited by Chelsea Rushton and copy-edited by my friend Bergen Geddis’ mother Sam Van Schie. 

The Literary Goon

Far Away

Will Johnson, This Side of West

Cat lifts the joint to her lips, nods as she inhales.

The crimson dragon on her forearm dances up her wrist. It looks like he’s watching her get stoned. She got the tattoo in Thailand, along with the rose on her shoulder. She hates the rose, a black silhouette framed with red. It looks inflamed.

She lets her arm sink to her lap. Smoke curls out of her mouth. We’re sitting on a blanket, and she picks at tiny pills of lint. She offers me the joint, pinched between her fingers.

“I’m good,” I say.

She raises it to her lips, takes a quick toke, then stubs it out in the grass. She roots through her beaten up backpack, retrieves a film canister, then pops it open and drops the roach in.

We’re quiet.

Nearby, the Yukon River gurgles as it winds down Miles Canyon. The constant burbling is punctuated by motorboats every few minutes. One roars by, bass-heavy speakers pumping. It rounds the corner, just below the jutting rock we’re sitting on, and sprays a solid arc of river water into the air. 

“I can’t decide if that’s hot or totally fucking obnoxious,” Cat says as it speeds away.

We lie in the sun. She’s reading The Tenth Insight, sequel to The Celestine Prophecy. After a couple moments she realizes she is too stoned to pay attention and tosses the book aside.

“The more theories you learn about, the less you give a shit about God,” she says. I’m scribbling in my journal and write down her words.

She thinks for a moment, twirls her finger in a curl of my hair, then settles on her back and closes her eyes.

*

Cat came to Whitehorse to run away from her ex-boyfriend Sean. She drove up from B.C. and took a job helping out at a local hostel. I had just arrived in town, about to start an internship at the Whitehorse Star. When I asked her why she left Powell River, she laughed.

“In that town, you either get knocked up or you get out,” she said. She looked at her lap for a moment, then looked out the window.

The next day we walked along the river and took pictures. The last jutting sheets of ice were slowly sagging into the water. A couple locals were sitting on the rocks down the bank, playing guitar over the rushing current. We saw a beaver sitting on its haunches, watching us curiously.

Cat didn’t offer much information about her past. I didn’t ask. Instead she laughed and made fun of me as I waded into the shallows of the river, posing for ridiculous pictures. I felt young.

The first time I kissed her, we were crouched in the shallow end of the local swimming pool. Beads of water trickled down her forehead, collected in her eyebrows. Our lips touched tentatively.

She smiled at me, then stood up and headed for the change rooms.

Everyday when I got off work, I would wait on the corner until she arrived on her bike. With each day getting longer than the one before, the sunshine stretching into the evening, we had more and more time together. We skinny dipped in a half-frozen lake, jumped off a bridge, hiked through the nearby foothills.

Then Sean showed up. The first night he arrived, she laid in my bed with tears trembling in her eyes. “Why do I have to choose a life?” she asked. I massaged her shoulders, kissed her ears. She moaned and swore, mostly at herself, then stormed out of my house. I stood in the doorway, watching her go.

She started smoking. She stopped sleeping. When I asked her if she loved him, she nodded. She wondered what would happen if he stayed. I waited on the corner for her each day, but she started to be late. Once she didn’t show up at all.

I tried to focus on my job. A couple evenings she came out with me on assignment, taking pictures while I jotted notes. She loved to watch me interview people, told me she was jealous of my job.

I felt bad asking her to choose between us, but I was panicked she would disappear. I hated the idea of her being dragged back to the town she hated. A week after Sean arrived she took him back to the airport and said goodbye. That night she cried with her face against my chest.

I tried to kiss her but she turned away.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

*

As we lie by the river, I can feel Sean between us. The afternoon warmth feels like insects scrambling across my skin.

“Do you think anybody would care if I took off my shirt?” she asks. Without waiting for an answer, she peels off her T-shirt and leans back on her elbows, tiny pink breasts exposed.

Some teenagers came to our earlier spot, stood near the bank drinking beer and jumping off the rocks. Cat, disgusted, gathered up our stuff and took us further downriver. She likes being alone.

I attempt to write in my journal, but find myself writing what I want to say to her. My notes turn into a dialogue as I imagine her responses, but I can’t bring myself to say anything out loud. I reach out and take her hand in mine, but she slips it away after a couple seconds.

*

The first thing Cat did when Sean left was hack off most of her hair. A couple days later, unsatisfied with the pixie cut, she asked me if I would shave her head. 

We biked to Superstore and shoplifted a razor. 

After it was done, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror. “This is it,” she said. She ran her hand roughly along her scalp. Hunks of hair were scattered across the bathtub, clumps caught in the drain. 

She loved that her new haircut made people mistake her for a boy. On Canada Day she laid topless in my lap for over an hour while hundreds of people milled around us. No one even noticed. She debated going for a mohawk, but decided against it.

*

Lying by the river, I tell her I want to jump in the water. I invite her to come with me, and she shrugs. She’s on her period, doesn’t feel like getting wet. Together we pick our way through the sharp slate rocks, hopping from ledge to ledge.

I stand on a rock several feet above the water and try to convince myself to jump. Cat sits above me, her leg dangling down, with a distant look on her face.

“You’re beautiful,” I say.

“Fuck off,” she replies, with a smile.

I look into her bleary eyes. She’s getting freckles, a smattering across her nose and cheeks. She gazes down at me. I know that things can’t be the same. There is a heaviness in her shoulders since Sean left.

“You gonna jump?” she asks.

I hesitate only for a moment, then toss myself into the shadowy current. When I surface, gasping from the cold, she claps and smiles at me like a small child.

*

Near the end of the summer, I drive Cat up to the edge of the Alaska Highway and drop her off on the shoulder. She’s decided to hitch-hike back to B.C., and has spent the last couple of days giving away and selling most of her stuff.

While we drive I barely talk, hiding behind my sunglasses. I’m on my lunch break and don’t have much time.

Cat lugs her backpack out of my car, then shrugs at me. Her hair is a thick stubble. After a long, quiet moment she kisses me and says goodbye.

As I drive away, I see her stick up her thumb in my rearview mirror.

The Literary Goon