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batsythoughts · 1 year ago

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hiii, can we have a second part for the yandere! bruce with baby trapping 🥹 maybe some pregnancy kink

Of course you all can! I'm always willing to do continuations of any works I do or requests if you all ask nicely and I feel comfortable with it! And sorry this took so long to write. A lot of family stuff came up and I needed to take a step back for a while.

Part 2 of Yandere! Bruce Wayne and baby trapping!

As stated in the request, there is smut under the cut. Minors please do not interact with the post.

It had barely been a week since Bruce and you found out you were pregnant

Alfred had been discreetly informed so he could go buy your prenatal vitamins without any of the kids finding out

You all had agreed to do a reveal to them fairly quickly so they didn't find out themselves by accident

After some consideration, the both of you decided on a cake with a simple message

Bruce even got you to agree to let the message say 'It wasn't Jason'

"It's a bet the kids have on who would have a baby next. It's a family joke we have that's been going on."

You simply smiled at the explanation while saying it was okay as long as it was in a certain color

The next night a dinner, before anyone could get up from the table, Bruce said that Alfred made a special dessert for everyone

They all looked at one another in confusion as they tried to think of what the occasion was for a 'special dessert' to be made

When Alfred came in and set the cake in the center of the table, the kids stared at the written frosting with blank expressions

Jason was the first to react while throwing his hands up with a cheer

Dick started out with a huge grin before his eyes widen as he stared at Jason with disbelief all over his face

Tim and Damian shared a look for a moment before giving their congratulations

Cass smiled while looking between you and Bruce while asking multiple questions regarding the baby

Bruce smiled at the sight of all the people he loved celebrating the surprise of a new addition to the family

He gently took your hand in his while watching you happily eating the slice of cake Alfred cut for you

The first trimester was definitely interesting for the whole family with the random nausea, food cravings, and mood swings

Everyone worked together to help you deal with it as best as they were able to

Got a craving for something in the middle of the night that's not in the manor? Alfred told everyone and now Red Hood is in the store grabbing two of everything.

Your back hurting a little after getting off work? Tim has the heating pad on the couch for you as Cass gets a scented bath bomb that you might like so you can relax after dinner.

Randomly started crying? Dick and Alfred both stand nearby to hear you let out cries of whatever caused it

Damian would even offer to make you drinks that he had been taught were beneficial to both you and the fetus

Bruce was pleased that they were being so accepting of the situation instead of thinking you had been the one to cause the situation

The best thing though was a weekly ritual that only Bruce got to be apart of

An hour before he would go on patrol every Friday, you both would sit on the bed as his hands lightly caressed your stomach to carefully feel your body change over time

Even in the beginning when there wasn't anything to feel, Bruce enjoyed reliving the fact that he had gotten you pregnant successfully to keep you around

But he was still felt like you could do a bit more to be committed to the family

He wanted you to quit your job so you could be focused on him, the kids, and the baby with all your energy

Besides, he had more than enough money that you wouldn't have to worry about providing for yourself ever again

At first Bruce suggested going part time so you weren't straining your body too much while the baby was developing

You were hesitant at first, but relented and said you would ask your boss if it would be possible

It wasn't entirely what he wanted, it was just the start until you gave birth

You were beginning to tell the difference in your body after the two month mark with a slight firmness in your stomach

Bruce felt ecstatic as the days got closer to your due date

He did become concerned about the fact that you were showing a bit more than what was normal with all that he read

He even brought it up with the doctor at one of your appointments to ask if everything was alright

As they got the machine ready for the ultrasound, the doctor and nurse assured Bruce that everything should be alright with your hormone levels

The doctor began asking questions on how you were feeling and any issues you were experiencing

As they moved the wand over your stomach, the nurse stopped to look at the screen with a concerned look before her expression shifted to surprise

You became worried while asking what was wrong as the doctor focused on the screen before she got a similar look

"There's, um... there's two."

The screen was turned to face you both better as she pointed out the very close, but individual little blobs

You and Bruce stare in shock before you squeeze his hand with a soft coo

The doctor made sure to give you plenty of copies of the pictures before you left and made the next appointment

Bruce felt proud that you were giving him not one, but two children that would bind you to him for the rest of your lives

You told everyone that evening the news and they were thrilled by the prospect as well

Bruce had even signed up for a 'Baby and Me' class that meet up weekly

Of course that meant that everyone went and sat around you to retain any and all information that was being said to the class

A few of the other participants were judgemental and would whisper about how it should only be the expecting mother and father in the class

All the kids were quick to speak up and shut that down real quick with the woman who started it

"Wow Debra, that's really great advice. I'm sure your husband is proud of how outspoken you are."

"Speaking of husbands, where's your husband Debra?"

"Oh, he's working late like he always does? He must be worried about providing for you and the baby."

"I'm sure it's a very happy and loving marriage you have with him."

"But how long will it last, Debra?"

You quickly told the kids to behave while Bruce held back his smirk as the class finally began

Everyone paid attention to everything that was told, even asking questions about how to assist you through the whole process

Bruce was very proud of all his kids for being so willing to learn along with you during this stage in your life

As the weeks passed, the twins were growing healthy and making themselves known to the world

Their kicks profound enough that Bruce could sit on the other side of the couch and see the bumps they would make

He loved it most went you put headphones on your stomach while playing a small list of songs you made for the twins

"They can feel the vibrations! It is proven to be beneficial for development."

He only smiled while kissing the side of your head

Bruce had even made sure to have the baby room ready for the birth long before they were due

It did take a bit more time to keep the room neutral with the fact it was agreed to be a surprise of what you were having

But he made it work terrifically for whatever combination of twins you were carrying

With the help of Dick and Jason, of course. They refused to let Bruce try to put together the cribs and changing table that would hold their little siblings

It was always so adorable how you would go in to see the progress and coo at how everything was coming along

You of course gave an opinion on where you wanted things to go and the boys would move them without question or complaint

There was already two dressers full of baby clothes that all of them had picked out when going out shopping for any reason

Bruce adored it most that you had gotten a few maternity dresses that were elegant enough to wear to any galas he would attend

The looks that you would get from most of the people there didn't bother him

Despite the different reasons for the stares, he felt proud of the fact that everyone knew that you would always be his no matter who would try to change it

It became even better when he got a message from Alfred one day saying you had returned to the manor not long after you had went to work one day

He was worried when he finally returned that night to find you sulking in your shared room eating a bowl of fruit while wrapped in multiple blankets

Bruce hated the sight of you upset, but he hated that you seemed to be purposely hiding away the bump he was loving more every day

He sat down beside you as he waited for you to tell him what had happened at your job that morning

It took a few minutes before you finally mumbled out that you had impulsively quit your job

While he felt overjoyed, Bruce played the part of being concerned while asking what had occurred to cause it

You took another bite of your fruit while leaning in to rest your head on his shoulder

"One of the guys put his hand on the upper part of my stomach despite me telling them all not to do that. Then he asked me if... if my milk had come in."

Bruce clenched his jaw before apologizing for what happened, but gentle assured you that everything would be okay with him still providing for all of you

It took a few minutes of Bruce reassuring you that your actions were valid to preserve your self respect from the unsavory coworker you had

You gave a weak nod after a couple minutes before leaning further against for comfort

He held you to his chest while softly kissing your head and whispering affirmations to lift your spirits

That evening everyone noticed that you were feeling upset, but didn't push for an explanation so you could tell them if you felt comfortable

You gave a tired smile to the whole table while saying it was just a bad day at work and they shouldn't worry themselves

They all let you have a quiet night without arguments over anything until they went down to the cave to get ready for patrol

Bruce watched you prepare for bed with worry as you absent-mindedly went through your routine without a word

Before you could get into the bed, Bruce gently lead you over to the full length mirror he got for you that stood in one corner

He stood behind you as he rested his hands at the swell of your stomach while swaying back and forth

He placed kisses along your neck as his fingers danced over the bump while whispering against your skin

"You're such a good momma." "Doing your best for them already." "Providing me with the greatest gift."

Bruce continued with his praise as he watched the reflection until you finally cracked a smile

He carefully turned you around before connecting his lips to yours before guiding you over to the bed

He made sure you were completely settled in for the night before giving you a kiss and promising to return safely

The night had went by with only a few attempted muggings and a failed robbery of a gas station before the whole family returned

Bruce took a shower in the locker room and changed like every night so you wouldn't wake up from the noise

Bruce had tried to remain as quiet to not disturb you as he entered the room, but he saw that you were turning around under the comforter with soft whines

He thought you were just having a weird dream until you pushed up from the bed with a groan before meeting his gaze

He almost asked what was wrong as he walked towards the bed, but the words didn't need to be said with the way you bite your lip to keep back a pout

Now, you and Bruce had sex a few times since the pregnancy had started, but after you began showing he didn't want to potentially cause you any discomfort

He wouldn't deny the fact that he thought you were beautiful during the day doing any little thing

However, staring at you in the his bed with the light of the moon streaming in through the window and accentuating your features while one of the straps of your nightgown sliding of as you give him that pleading look

Bruce couldn't get in the bed quick enough after taking a moment to admire how breathtaking you were in that moment

He gently pushed you back to lay down on the mattress before lifting up the lower part of your sleepwear

He couldn't bother to remove your underwear as he pulled it to the side and immediately latched onto your clit

The startled moan you let out was a melody Bruce never wanted to forget as he passionately worked his tongue over the small nub

Wasting no time, he moved one hand to rest on your hip while the other went to prepare you

You laced your fingers in his hair the moment he pushed a finger into you for the first time in months

He slowly moved his hand as he listened to the way your breath hitched with each whine you gave before pushing a second finger in

He had only been at it for a minute before you gave a small cry and came undone by his fingers and tongue

Bruce smiled to himself as he worked you through the spasms before trailing kisses up your stomach, leaving a few attentive one underneath your breasts, until finally reaching your mouth

He didn't even give you time to protest the kiss as his abdomen pressed against you while lining up at your entrance

He made sure to go slow as he felt you shake slightly under him with your nails softly digging into his back

He kept his thrusts shallow as he pulled away to watched your expression as you let out small whines of pleasure

He moved one hand to rest on the side of your stomach as the other held your chin to keep you looking at him

He groaned at the way you tightened around him as he felt a small kick come from your lower stomach

He sweetly kissed you again before pulling away enough to speak with a smirk spread across his face

"Oh, aren't you just a beautiful momma?" "Still able to take me so well after so long." "I should just keep you like this for the rest of our lives."

Bruce gave a small laugh at the last thought as he gave one final thrust before you tightened around his cock

He almost let a small taunt out about you enjoying the idea of him already keeping you there, but just smiled as he trailed a finger over your cheek

It didn't take much longer for Bruce to find his own release with a deep groan

He waited a moment before pulling out and going to the bathroom to get a warm washcloth

He affectionately shook his head when he saw you had already fallen back to sleep with a calm grin on your face

He gently wiped the mess between you thighs away before tracing his fingers over you stomach for a a few moments

He quickly got rid of the cloth before putting on a fresh pair of boxers and slipping under the covers

Bruce moved his arms around you while laying down to get a few hours sleep himself

The next couple weeks, Bruce made sure to shower you with as much affection as he thought you deserved

You and the others simply assumed it was because you were steadily getting closer to your due date

But he did it to help build the emotional vulnerability you would ultimately go through after giving birth

He knew you would go through a strong surge of hormones that would cause you to rely on him even more

It all going to be for the best in the end because Bruce just needs you to realize how much he truly loves you and will always be there for you

What better way is there to convince someone to agree to marry you?

Bruce already had a ring picked out and the speech he would give on what each of the kids would do to be included in the wedding

He would still have you pick out all the important things that you wanted like the flowers, dress, location and every other aspect you wanted

But he had to be patient until after the twins had been born for at least a few months before asking you

But to get you to be apart of the family more than you already were? Oh, Bruce was nothing but determined.

#batman #bruce wayne #bruce wayne x reader #batman x reader #yandere bruce wayne #yandere bruce wayne x reader #bruce wayne x you

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dailypj · 10 days ago

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✨Day 178

First attempt !! (at doing the assembling part, I have several sheets of paper with messed up colors on this very desk)

I will probably try again at a later date because the head could have gone a lot better 😭

Pj - 7goodangel

Under the cut is the page (+ tutorial) for any1 else who wants to make this

(Note: no explanation on the regular folds, just extras like the blobs and accessories)

Alright for the head blob thing I used cardboard, but tbh I’d actually recommend some sort of light clay for this because it’s a lot easier to cut and won’t awkwardly bend the paper

Put one piece on top, carve around it, put the other piece on the other side, and the black strips on the top and bottom, then just glue onto the head

^ right here is the steps for the scarf, rlly should’ve got screenshots as I was making it but oh well

First I glued the little piece right where it’s shown on the screenshot so that the scarf won’t cover too much of it, then wrapped and glued the long piece over top of it

For the hanging part of the scarf I made 2 sides and glued them together so that there isn’t a pure white on the back, but warning: the glue will make it heavier and the craft won’t be able to stand on its own, so you could just omit one of the sides

For whichever way you choose, you’ll then fold the top part in order to glue it onto the part of body the head will go on (doing it this way makes it so it sticks out a bit instead of being completely flat)

And lastly the tail.. I intended it to be double sided like the scarf, but it’s a bitch to cut and the underside turned out not to be visible anyway lmao (I already spent way too long figuring this out as it is so I don’t feel like editing it 🙏)

@popupiko @la-mirk <- tags for people who asked for the full thing to print

And I’d love to be tagged myself if anyone who makes this decides to post it :3c

#paperjam #daily pj #utmv #shy art #paper craft pj #I have been working on this for 5 hourssssss

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lexo-is-pesto · 11 months ago

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I'm so excited to finally post this.

My full Murder Drones reference! so hopefully I can keep up consistency

Obviously, this is full of my own head canons so close ups and explanations under the cut (it's a LOT) >;]

To be totally honest my focus was on the main characters, and I think that shows in the designs of the Manor Drones and Cabin Fever Squad. BUT I'll still do my best to explain my process here.

For the Disassemblers I decided to do very different builds for each but the same color pallet.

My idea here was that since each have a different designation letter, that was akin to their model type. That's also why "the company" was able to clone J so easily, they just had her model on file. (also like to imagine there are 26 different forms of the Disassemblers Imao).

I had all the colors remain the same to show their unity and of course the Absolute Solver-ification of the basic Worker Drone color scheme. Essentially, I just took the monochromatic WD colors and put the highlighter yellow over it that Cyn loves so much.

For J I did a more lean and strong build. I wanted her to exude that leader energy. I also made her Core a star shape for similar reasons and then I also noticed that N and V had caution stripes at the top of their legs but as far as I could see J didn't, so I decided to add those to the very top of her legs to finish the garter belt look she's got going on. For her hair, I actually really like the pigtails I just flattened them out a bit because the big cutesy poof they had didn't fit her style in my opinion. I brought it back for her worker form though.

With V I gave her a round yet sharp look. (My favorite added detail is the sharp shoulders) I did make her the shortest of the DD because everyone loves the small but vicious archetype. For her core I made it a sword or spear shape, because she's extra violent. And finally, I made her legs a little more pointed than J's to finish off the sharp look.

Last but CERTAINLY not least, N's design is meant to be soft and plushy but still has a little edge to it. His hair is fluffy but the tufts curl to be sharp, His core is meant to look like a heart but it's upside down so the point is still facing the top (which makes it look more like a club but whatever) I gave him a rounder torso than the other two and his elbow and kneecaps are softer too. His general construction is still menacing, though, so don't get too comfortable with all the fluff. I also spent a LONG time contemplating if I should make his thighs black to look like little biker shorts to contrast with J and V's sock looks but went against it because I love how the hazard stripes stand out against the white.

For N and V's worker forms I basically took out all the sharp edges and rounded them out. J's still a little sharp though not as much.

With the Workers I did the opposite of the DD. They have the EXACT same body types (minus Uzi because she's little) and instead I changed their color schemes to all be unique to their eye lights

Since Worker Drones were made to... well... WORK I think their initial manufacturing would be pretty uniform. A copy and paste if you will. It was only when they were left to their own devices that the WD started to customize themselves. Thus came the wigs and clothes.

I like to think the color started with those infected with the Solver, so Yeva and Nori gained color and then passed that on to their kids. Thats also why Alice has color, but Khan, The Manor Squad, and some other drones in the colony don't. Does not explain Lizzy and Thad though (maybe they have a distant relative that had the solver idk)

It was a lot harder to infer about what a base WD body would look like Maybe I was just looking in the wrong places, but I had to infer with things like the worker helmets, we see every WD except Uzi wear one but they seem more coordinated with their outfits so I decided to just continue my color head-canon that its naturally monochrome and you can customize it if you want to!

I added a light to the feet of the worker drones to match the hand lights. I don't think there's a canon reason for the lights but, on the workers at least. I think they're there to help them do grunt work in the dark! to light their ways in caves or tight spaces so they could do their job better. Now they're just another robot cosmetic

For the Parents, I gave them wrinkles because I thought it was unfair that Khan was the only one who got them. So, Nori gets crow's feet hurray! No but I probably had the most difficult time with these drones. It was hard to separate the canon from fanon since we know so little about them, but I fought off all the demons to keep their designs relatively grounded. Minus Khan's scar. And Alice's more natural horns. and-

I also gave some drones eyelashes. just cause. if I thought it fit, I added it and if it didn't, I didn't add it.

Now you may be wondering "Lexo what's up with all the cracks!?" the idea here is that it's the solver taking over. We see in Cabin Fever and Home that the solver virus fundamentally changes the body of a drone. The crack in the casing is basically this process. Depending on the stage of which your drone is at it changes the intensity. We see Cyn being the main host and essentially patient 0, so she has the most cracks. It starts at the core then spreads until it reshapes you entirely and you become a Disassembly Drone. Unless you stop it in time. Thats why J, V, and N have the pale lines on the bottom of their torso, they're more pretty and cleaner since they achieved the solvers "final form" so to speak. Nori and Yeva on the other hand, have repaired cracks but they're still messy since they were stopped mid-way. Alice, however, did not stop the spread with the solver cure since she was "abandoned" so instead she just cut out her core entirely. Yup. Shes functioning on pure insanity and spite at this point. And then of course with the new hosts, there is light spreading. TL: DR the cracks are a zombie bite.

But that's it for my Murder Drones head canons and designs! If you read all the way to the end, you're a champ and I love you. Have a cookie superstar <3🍪

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leafdragon16 · 1 month ago

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So another idea came to mind just now

For Wheeljack's facial mods I heard you're still working on their structure and such. May I present my reference? I've been using a wasp mandible reference for the the way I've been drawing your wheeljack. It also reminded me of preying mantis and tiger beetle. Thought about how his jaws were supposed to split apart, and it gave me an idea.

I did a few concepts of my own and settled on this for his jaws. It's not exactly canon to your design, but I wanted to do my own take on it and wanted to know your thoughts! Just thought this was pretty cool :D Here's a little bit of what I had in mind!

This fic just has me locked in and has given me so many ideas and I love it so much

NECRO. GRIPPING YOUR SHOULDERS. NECRO OH MY GOD THIS IS ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE

Ok normal for exactly 2 seconds because I started rambling and drew some small diagrams so I’m putting it under the cut because this got LONG (and it also is looking like it won’t initially post with the readmore TUMBLR so I will probably go back and edit this post a few times upon posting it lol)

EDIT: Okay it is not posting the readmore for some reason so apologies for any nuked dashboards lol

I WILL ANSWER YOUR QUESTION BUT LET ME FREAK OUT ABOUT THAT ART REALLY QUICK BECAUSE I HAD TO SIT DOWN AND PROCESS IT FOR A FULL 30 SECONDS BEDORE I COULD EVEN BEGIN FORMULATING A RESPONSE. I KEEP SCROLLING BACK UP WHILE TYPING JUST TO STARE AT IT

THAT IS TERRIFYING. HE IS ALL TEETH!! THERE IS NOTHING BUT TEETH IN THERE!!! THERE IS TOO MANY TEETH FOR ANYONE TO RIGHTFULLY HAVE WHICH IS EXACTLY THE AMOUNT OF TEETH EX!JACKIE SHOULD HAVE!!!

ALSO THE CIRCULAR SCRAPLET TEETH FAINTLY VISIBLE AT THE BACK OF HIS THROAT?? OH MY GOD?? I HAVE BEEN STRUGGLING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO PORTRAY THAT FOR SO LONG I AM LOSING MY MIND. I AM STICKING MY HEAD IN THERE

OH AND THE ADDED DETAIL OF THE PLACES WHERE HIS JAWS CONNECT ADDS SO MUCH. I DON’T KNOW HOW TO EXPLAIN IT BUT IT LOOKS SO MUCH MORE RAW AND MONSTROUS AND NOT CYBERTRONIAN AND EGHFGRHGFHSGDHFHBDGRFRGRGRGGRR

Ok I will move on to my explanation now but thank you so much!! This is so gorgeous and I love it so much!! This is the sort of thing that would make someone hide their face for centuries and give their teammates nightmares if they were looking it dead in the face (looking at you Ratchet). This is exactly the level of terrifying that I was going for when I originally started writing this fic. It encapsulates it perfectly! He is an absolute nightmare in the best way possible

I have been having a lot of trouble figuring out how his facial mods would work, and that’s mainly because I haven’t been using any references LOL. When I first tried doodling his face wayyyy back in the first post about this AU I used a few screenshots of Terrorcon Breakdown, but I only used it loosely. I absolutely LOVE the insect references for his jaws, it really helps clarify the structure and when I opened the ask and saw them (particularly the mantis) I went “huh that’s actually really close to what I had in mind!” And the got completely blown away by the concept at the bottom LMAO

I originally based his facial mods (or at least how they unhinge) a lot on Predaking. His jaw splits down the middle and at the sides to create two halves (I THINK), and I thought it looked really cool so I wanted to do something like that. But especially now that I’ve been playing with how his jaw works again, I’ve been thinking that it would be better if it splits into three parts like how you drew it. It is more visually cohesive, and it also just makes more sense looking at it! It allows his lower jaw to drop down much further and his mouth to open much wider and just in general isn’t as awkward. I may have downloaded your art both to keep it forever and also to draw a few diagrams, I hope you don’t mind^^

(I had to take a screenshot of your art bc Tumblr won’t let me download it until I post this, so sorry for nuking the quality LMAO)

While I do like the Predaking jaw, I think it works on Predaking but not on Wheeljack because Predaking’s face is so long and his is so flat. So if his jaw were to split into only two parts it would be very awkward, you can see all the lines in the drawing on the left where I kept redrawing his jaw because conceptually it didn’t make sense. Like I mentioned before it also doesn’t really allow his jaw to unhinge, which is a very important part of his design lol.

On the right however, it splits a lot more cleanly! It just all around looks more natural and less awkward and has a lot more maneuverability. I also love the addition of the teeth on the walls/sides of his mouth!! I added a few in my references bc it looked better and made his jaw come together a bit more in it’s horrifying-ness, but the addition of even MORE teeth just amplifies that. It also implies that when he latches on to something, all of the teeth dig in and make it extremely difficult to pull away, allowing him to just drag it into his mouth and shred it to pieces. If he bites down on someone, even if they’re strong enough to pull away they’re not getting their limb back in one piece. The way the teeth are curved in will ensure that they have to rip through their own plating to get away. He looks like a living iron maiden and I am OBSESSEDD

Plus the way his jaw splits is so much more extreme in a way that is so. LOOK AT HIM. When he opens his mouth it’s like a giant tear separates the upper half of his face from the lower half. Horrifying to behold and also looks like it would be painful even though it isn’t, which is exactly the vibe I was going for. He just doesn’t look Cybertronian. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Anyway sorry for the long rant, his jaws have been on my mind a lot because I’ve been struggling with the concept so I kind of just dumped all of the thoughts I’ve been having for 2+ weeks plus all of the thoughts I had when seeing your references and art. If you don’t mind I may be borrowing the references because they really do help illustrate how a split jaw would work. And also if you don’t mind this may be the canon design from now on, just because IT’S SO COOL!! And it makes so much sense conceptually, I actually cannot put into words how much I love this. It fits right in with the worldbuilding!

TLDR: Absolutely god tier take on his design thank u Necro

#MY GIANT CAT OCTOPUS INSECT GARBAGE DISPOSAL LITTLE GUY!!! HE LOOKS SO COOL!! HE IS SO SILLY!!#tw body horror #cw body horror #tw bugs #ask to tag #experiment!wheeljack #experiment!wheeljack au #EXW au #Horror Show #quadracon #<- should I make this a tag? I’m making this a tag #tfp wheeljack #transformers prime #tfp #transformers #maccadam #leaf speaks #not my art #fanart #I WILL ASK YOU THE SAME QUESTION I ASKED CEDAR #CAN I PUT A LINK TO THIS IN THE NEXT CHAPTER #WITH CREDIT OFC #OUGH I AM STILL GOING CRAZY ABOUT THIS I LIED AT THE END I DID NOT PUT DOWN ALL MY THOUGHTS IT’S JUST THAT MY OTHER THOUGHTS HAVE NOT BEEN #RATIONALIZED BEYONG INCOHERENT SCREAMING #HE LOOKS SO FERAL!!!#HE LOOKS LIKE HE’S ABOUT TO EAT SOMEONE AND THEN HAVE CATHOLIC LEVELS OF GUILT ABOUT IT!!!#AND I KNOW I’VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT HIS MOUTH MAINLY BUT ALL OF THIS IS INCREDIBLE #YOU HAVE AN AMAZING GRIP ON PROPORTIONS ESPECIALLY WITH TRANSFORMERS #AND HIS EYES. THE SHAPE OF HIS EYES AND HOW DEEP SET THEY LOOK IS MAKING ME GO CRAZY #IDK HOW TO EXPLAIN IT BUT THEY ARE SO SHAPED AND MAKE HIM LOOK EVEN MORE FERAL AND I AM FOAMING AT THE MOUTH

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tyrantisterror · 6 months ago

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At Sea Without a Map Post-Script

After two months of so, my little writing experiment At Sea Without a Map has come to an end. And because I'm vain, I not only felt compelled to share it, but to talk about it in depth after the fact, so here we are. This is going to be long, though, so I'm not only going to break it into sections, but put it all under the cut for the sake of your dashboard. So go ahead and dive into the depths of the Sea of Monsters with me one more time!

Part 1: Never Stop Blowing Up

The writing process of Wizard School Mysteries Book 3 was really strained - not because of the book itself, mind you. When I was actually able to work on it, Book 3 came together really well - I think it required the least substantial rewrites of any my novels thus far. It's just that real life was kind of beating the shit out of me while I was trying to get it done - or maybe the better metaphor was that it was just slowly but steadily draining me of energy all the time. I'm honestly surprised I got the book out in roughly the same amount of time as the first two - by the way life had been treating me, it should have taken longer.

But when I got done with it I was accutely aware of how tired I was. I still had the creative drive, but fuck I needed something simple as a palette cleanser - something easy, and more importantly, something that was allowed to be bad. I needed something creative to do that was surplus to requirements and fully within its rights to suck ass so long as I had fun making it.

Around this time, I decided to rewatch Dimension 20's Never Stop Blowing Up. Brief explanation of what that is: Dimension 20 is an actual play show, i.e. a recording of people playing D&D and other TTRPGs. I'd say its reputation is built on the contrast of its main DM, Brennan Lee Mulligan, who makes these meticulously crafted campaign plans, and his chaotic band of improv comedian players who promptly derail those plans spectacularly. Like, a good deal of the show's humor comes from Emily Ashford or Ally Beardsly doing something so off-the-wall that it shatters whatever the scene was going to be and creates a far more absurd and zany spectacle in its place. Which is why Never Stop Blowing Up is pretty notable, because it's the one campaign where Brennan himself is the agent of chaos, fully unleashing his own brand of madness that the players struggle to keep up with. And fuck does he seem to have fun with it.

Of course, all of the analysis above is purely from the outside looking in - it's likely that a lot of the "chaos" is played up for the audience. But still... there is something to the idea of a person who's been working on meticulously structured stories letting loose and just doing something extremely stupid.

So I decided to give myself a Never Stop Blowing Up moment - a short story that would be simple by design, with no standards to live up to or goal beyond "have fun telling a silly little story." I then came up with a few key criteria:

It can't be set in the Midgaheim/ATOM universe. I don't want the burden of figuring out where this story would fit among others.

It's gotta be a romance. People who've read my books might have picked up on the fact that I like to write about people falling in love, for the same reason I like to write about fire-breathing reptiles and friendly monsters (i.e. I use writing to indulge in things I'll never experience in real life). I've only used romance as subplots in my fiction before, and tend to feel a bit guilty if I focus on it too long - like I'm being self indulgent. Well, this is all about self indulgence, so the romance should be front and center.

It's gotta be SIMPLE, episodic even. Not complex plotting required.

I almost chose my xenomorph romance for this, but I had developed its outline to the point where it would be too complex to fit. I then considered a sort of superhero story that could be pitched as "what if Bringing Up Baby but Katherine Hepburn's character is a Harley Quinn-esque supervillain and Cary Grant's character gets turned into some sort of horrifying genetic mutant in the first ten minutes." That one hit a weird roadblock when I got to the character brainstorming phase (the first phase of any writing project I do) - I was trying to figure out what the mad scientist who turns out Cary Grant-figure into a mutant would be named, came up with the name "Dr. Skullfuck," immediately realized that having a character named "Dr. Skullfuck" is a Mark Millar-ass writing move that I could not allow myself to do, but then couldn't stop thinking of the name "Dr. Skullfuck" and giggling, which just brought all thinking to a grinding halt on that project.

(I'll still probably do it someday, though - just, you know, without Dr. Skullfuck)

Inspiration struck again, though. I'd been getting into Epic: The Musical, a musical retelling of The Odyssey, and it put me in the mood for a sea monster story. But, more than that, it got me thinking about one particular archetype from sea monster stories - but that brings us to the next part of this Post Script...

Part 2: It Was Always About Calibani

Ok, so, one of the big changes Epic: The Musical made involved Odysseus's encounter with the sirens, and before you read more of my rambling, I'd like you to watch two animatics for the two songs in question here:

youtube

A summary: one of the sirens takes the form of Odysseus's wife to try and tempt him into getting in the water, Odysseus tricks her into giving him directions, captures her and the rest of her kind, and proceeds to have his men slaughter them horribly. In the OG story the sirens don't die - nor does their song involve imitating a man's wife, for that matter, it's just a really pretty song.

This is done for an important narrative purpose - Epic: The Musical is focused on analyzing the moral ambiguity of Odysseus, and how it is constantly challenged by the impossible choices he is forced to make in his attempt to get home. At this point in the musical, Odysseus has decided to stop trying to be a compassionate man, shirking all mercy in favor of utter ruthless pursuit of his goals. These two songs are meant to be unsettling as hell - this is the beginning of a series of heartless choices by both Odysseus and his men that will culminate in the mutiny and complete annihilation of Odysseus's crew, as well as Odysseus himself being so hopelessly stranded that nothing short of divine intervention will save him.

I bring this up because when I first heard these two songs - specifically while watching these two animatics - it, like... it devastated me. I was so horrified and sad, so shaken by it. And part of it was for the reasons outlined above, but admittedly that wasn't the gut reaction I had. No, my immediate reaction was, and I quoute my own broken brain verbatim here: "You can't kill the sirens! They're not for killing, they're for loving!"

...now, those of you who know me are probably not surprised by this very stupid sentiment coming from me. One of my more popular posts is just me talking about how down bad I would be for various folkloric monsters whose whole shtick is "looks like a pretty lady but Watch Out." But as a person filled with immense self loathing and doubt, my brain immediately looked at that very stupid sentiment I expressed and said, "Wait, no, that's fucking dumb, I'm fucking dumb. The sirens are remorseless murderers. These sirens in particular preyed upon a man's love for his wife, who he has not seen in twelve years, to convince him to let them kill him. They are, by all standards of morality, Very Fucking Evil, and if they were not women you would not feel bad about them getting killed."

And as my brain argued with itself over this topic, I got to thinking about the various monstrous/othered sea women of The Odyssey - not just the sirens, but the witch Circe, the nymph Calypso, the monsters Scylla and Charybdis. And I thought about the others of their kind in other myths and folktales - selkies, mermaids, etc.

There's an archetype of sea monster that focuses entirely on one specific anxiety sailors are prone to, namely the fact that (for a good deal of human history) being on a boat meant spending a lot of time away from women. The horror of this monster is how it uses that desire for female company to tempt people into danger - like a mirage, it leads you to expose yourself to danger in pursuit of an illusory comfort.

But, unlike real world mirages, these monstrous sea women DO exist in their stories. More than that, they're often, like, sad and lonely. Their narrative purpose is just to be a temptation, but that doesn't change the fact that they do have lives of their own in these worlds. And, softie that I am, I can't help feeling sad for them, especially the ones who actually seem to want the same companionship the sailors they tempt want. Sailors don't stay with their Circes, they don't marry their Calypsos. The sirens live on a barren rock, alone, Scylla is left to wallow in misery at her monstrous form, and the selkie always has to leave for fear of being trapped by a person who won't love her on her terms.

I realized I had my hook for this simple, easy, silly little sea monster romance story: I was going to give a sea woman the happy ending she'd never get from anyone else.

Sailor may be the protagonist, but make no mistake: At Sea Without a Map was always, always, ALWAYS about Calibani.

The goal with Calibani was simple: I was going to set up a fairly standard Monstrous Sea Woman, but where other stories would let her be in one episode of the travel narrative and move on, this one would stick around. She'd be an unambiguous predator of human beings - an open and admitted maneater - but she would have no true malice to her. She, like all predators, eats what she can get to survive, and it just so happens that she's adapted to eat humans. And the story would pose the same question to the reader that my brain posed to me during Different Beast: is there any way you could make a siren-style sea monster sympathetic? Can you make a normal person who doesn't have my particular brain rot look at a maneating siren and think, "You're not supposed to kill her, you're supposed to love her!"

One of the few unavoidable plot points of At Sea Without a Map was that Calibani and Sailor's relationship would become romantic. What kind of romance it was could have varied substantially - it could have been one-sided, it could have been toxic, it could have been far more tragic OR far more comedic. But it was always, always going to be a romance of some sort - the goal of this experiment was to make you, the reader, love Calibani. All else was icing on the cake.

I decided to base Calibani's personality on Miranda from The Tempest - i.e. a sweet girl who is both wordly and naive, who understands the strange setting of our "lost at sea" story far better than the audience viewpoint character does, but views the mundane world of the audience viewpoint character with wonder and naiveté. In fact I almost named her Miranda outright... except I already had a character in the setting I chose for this story who had that name, and as an allusion to the same Shakespearean character no less. So I settled on naming her after Miranda's adoptive sibling (of sorts), Caliban - more fitting in some ways, as Caliban is a fish-human hybrid who is arguable more native to the magic island in The Tempest than Miranda herself.

(Calibani isn't the only Tempest name homage, either - her mother, Sycorax, takes her name directly from Caliban's unseen but oft-spoken of witch mother. Dr. Antonia Warefore takes her first name from Antonio, one of the human villains in The Tempest who hopes to use being lost at sea as a way to perform a coup. And the mothman Iriel takes her name from Ariel, the wind spirit in The Tempest who aids the wizard Prospero in controlling the magic island. If Sailor has a "real" name, it's probably either Ferdinand or Miranda, the two lovers who manage to blend civilization and the wilderness together with their romance.)

Visually, I wanted Calibani to not be any common archetype of sea monster woman, but rather something that evokes the popular images while still being her own thing. She's not a mermaid or a siren or a selkie - she's basically "what if a sea serpent was also a girl." In-universe, she's chubby because she, like all marine megafauna, needs blubber to survive. Out-of-universe, she's chubby because I've found that routinely drawing cute chubby girls is good for my mental health.

Part 3: CYOA

Now, while we live in a post-Muncher society where shame and cringe are emotions only the cowardly should experience, I am nonetheless Very Catholic about expressing my own feelings of, like, liking girls and shit. I cannot help feeling guilty when publicly expressing adoration of women without, like, an excuse - it's gotta be a joke or something, you know? I can't be genuine about it, or else Jesus will beat me with a cane for disrespecting women with my lecherous gaze.

But luckily I've cultivated a loyal audience of fellow monsterfuckers, which meant I had an excuse lined up: if I made this a choose your own adventure type deal, a story with audience participation, then you all would be my accomplices. And Jesus can't cane all of us! He doesn't have enough hands! I found a loophole bigger than his stigmata!

Plus I love collaborative story-telling - there's a thrill in not having total control of where the narrative is going. As Brennan Lee Mulligan must know, there's a joy in having to deal with the chaos thrown your way by letting others grab the figurative ball, even if just for a moment.

Part 4: Offbeat Melody

Since I did not want to set this story in Midgaheim, I decided to steer myself away from a vaguely medieval setting altogether. But I also didn't want to limit myself with the need for "realism" that putting it in a normal sea would require, and making a new setting whole cloth would start pushing this project into "not easy" territory.

Luckily, I had a setting lying around that I hadn't played with in a while, which just so happened to have a location that was PERFECT for the sort of Never Stop Blowing Up style madness I was aiming for. For a few years I ran a Monster of the Week TTRPG campaign called Offbeat Melody, and one of its core setting elements was taking the goblin universe hypothesis in paranormal science (yeah it's a real hypothesis) to an illogical extreme. We had specifically seen glimpses of the Sea of Monsters in Offbeat Melody, i.e. the parallel universe where monsters like Nessie, Ogopogo, Champ, and the like all hail from. Well, why not have a whole story set there? It's literally a universe devoted solely to creating sea monsters - what better place to strand our modern Odysseus?

Offbeat Melody was always sort of a Never Stop Blowing Up project, or at least NSBU adjacent. Some of my most unhinged story-telling moments are in that campaign - you could make a supercut of just the "commercial breaks" in the various sessions and it'd basically be an I Think You Should Leave episode. Taking one obscure corner of its multiversal world and exploring it in detail was perfect for this project.

Part 5: Monster by Monster

With our main romance as sorted out as could be for a CYOA story, it was time to figure out the "episodes" of this sea voyage. I settled on there being ten to roughly align with The Odyssey - just in terms of number, mind you, not in a one-to-one comparison. The first was, obviously, Calibani herself, which left nine more slots for me to fill with monsters. Let's go through them together in brief:

Tree Storks - any lost at sea story eventually has to get its protagonist into an island at some point, but this immediately begs the question, "Why don't they just stay on the island where it's safe?" The answer to that question has to be, "it's not safe there, actually." The Odyssey does this quickly and cleverly with a one two punch: the first island seems safe until you realize the food on it brainwashes you into forgetting everything except your desire to eat it, and the second island is full of delicious sheep but also giants who will eat you just as easily as they eat the sheep. When other islands show up in the story later, you immediately regard them with suspicion, because you don't know HOW they're going to be fucked up, but they definitely will be. My goal with the second episode was to establish the same sort of danger - that land is NOT safe, that islands WILL be fucked up and dangerous in ways you might not expect.

I also wanted to establish that this is not just a sea of monsters, but a very WEIRD sea of WEIRD monsters. It couldn't be any old monster on this island - it had to be one that was unique, unexpected, and maybe just a bit silly while still being menacing.

I've always felt that there's a lot of un-mined horror potential in storks, cranes, and herons - any bird with a long neck and spear-like beak it uses to stab smaller creatures from above. Just imagine yourself in a frog's place in the world - tiny, going about your business, when suddenly something shoots down at you from above and impales you before you even feel the shadow fall over your face. Or perhaps you did see the shadow - some of these birds spread their wings to create shade specifically to attract fish, and then spear the poor little bastards.

Well, what do people often look to islands for when out at sea? Shade - the shade of a palm tree. And palm fronds kinda resemble feathers, don't they? Wouldn't it be both ludicrous and terrifying is there was a stork big enough to mimic a palm tree - and wouldn't that be a DEVIOUS trap for a sun-drenched sailor to fall for? So the Tree Storks were born.

The Globster - I made a list of sea monster archetypes in the early planning for this project, and one I wanted to include was a kraken, i.e. some sort of tentacled sea beast. But I didn't want to do JUST a big squid or octopus, or even a riff on them. I wanted to take the idea of "big sea monster with lots of tentacles" into a stranger direction.

Since the Sea of Monsters is explicitly the home universe of lake and sea monster cryptids, I thought it might be fun if ASWaM's kraken equivalent was a globster - just a big ball of rotten meat. I love drawing monstrous faces, so I decided it'd just be, like, MADE of hideous rotten faces, all melting and congealing together, with its tentacles doubling as the tongues of its many mouths. A perfectly wretched image that, like the Tree Storks, would do well to establish how Fucked things could get in this setting. Plus similar monsters had appeared in Offbeat Melody, which would make for a fun sense of familiarity for the, like, five or so readers of mine who had listened to that campaign before.

Captain Peter & the Dolphin - Another thing I did in the early planning stages of this project was make a list of the different sea voyage stories I know and love, the most contentious of which is The Life of Pi. That's a story that I love on a literal level but kind of hate on a figurative level - its whole theme/message is that doubt is the worst thing you can have, that if you don't commit to believing something with zealous conviction you are a coward. As a person who thinks doubt is valid, that "I don't know" is sometimes the ONLY truly valid answer to a question, I have issues with that message.

But I can't help loving the beautifully ludicrous idea of a non-anthropomorphic tiger sailing the ocean on a big Odyssey of its own. Like, if that story didn't actively hate me for being agnostic, it would be one of my favorites.

So I decided to, you know, just steal the idea of a tiger Odysseus. The tiger in The Life of Pi is named Richard Parker. Richard Parker also happens to be the name of Peter Parker's dad. Hence we get Captain Peter - the figurative son of Richard Parker, if you will. And to ratchet up the absurdity of a tiger Odysseus, I made him a pirate and the sole sailor of his voyage. Somehow, this tiger has manned a boat on his own.

Captain Peter was intended to be the hero of another story - a sign for the readers that it IS possible for a stranded person (or, in this case, tiger) to survive out here. To that end, he had to rescue our heroes from another threat, but not one that would be interesting enough to take the focus off of the tiger pirate. Originally I planned for that threat to just be a big shark, but I ended up liking my shark design too much to put it in a role that small, so I quickly designed a nasty dolphin for the role instead. I think that worked out well, honestly.

Dr. Neptune - Episodes 5 and 6 were the mid-point of this journey, so I wanted the two monsters of those to escalate things significantly. I figured episode 5 was probably a good place to FINALLY give some meaningful exposition on what was going on, and there are a lot of stories about mad scientists doing weird shit on islands in my big list of sea voyage stories I love. So we get Dr. Neptune, a classical brain-in-a-jar mad scientist who's affable enough to give more-or-less accurate exposition but loony enough to be a problem. This also felt like a good spot to remind the reader that Calibani is not just a girl with a tail but rather a Sea Monster herself, and one that we'd been making stronger by allying with.

With his human-but-not-quite nature and cyclops eye, Dr. Neptune could sort of be seen as the Polyphemus of this story, couldn't he?

The Crocodisle - One of the sea monster archetypes on my list was "the island that's actually a sleeping monster," of which there are many in mythology and folklore. My favorite is the Jasconius from the voyage of St. Brendan, mainly because it's more or less benign and actually comes back to help St. Brendan and his crew at the end of the story. I always love when I can find an old story with a friendly monster in it.

When thinking of my own spin on the island monster concept, I remembered the only Magic the Gathering card I had as a kid, which I still have and love to this day: The Sandbar Crocodile. This card already inspired Crocogon's color scheme in The Atomic time of Monsters, but I felt I could go to that well again one more time, and so made a crocodile that wasn't just a sandbar, but a whole damn island to itself. And, like Jasconius, it turns out he's pretty chill.

I did not think of the pun name "Crocodisle" until I was actually writing the chapter in question.

The Femdom Mermaids - These three were a late addition to the roster. When I had Calibani bring up mermaids early in the story, I realized as soon as I wrote her rant about them that we'd HAVE to meet some later on in the story.

The readers had significantly shaped Calibani and Sailor's romance by this point, and I decided that it could be useful to have a chapter that was devoted to showing definitively how these two were good for each other. I thought the mermaids could provide a good contrast: have them act out a seemingly more benign take on the monstrous sea women trope (they abduct our hero to protect and care for them!) only for it to quickly feel MORE deranged than Calibani's comparatively simple desire just to eat him.

The spirit of Calibani's rant about mermaids was taken from weird* girls I knew in high school complaining about cheerleaders, so I wanted the mermaids to look like the sea monster equivalent of popular kids to Calibani's chubby weird girl. Two of them got the names of famous beauties - Helyne = Helen of Troy, Clio = Cleopatra.

(*when I say "weird" I mean it in a complimentary and affectionate sense)

Bob, meanwhile, kinda... rebelled, I guess? Before I had names for them, I listed "bob" by her as just, like, a descriptor for her hair cut, but then I liked it as her name, and once she was named Bob she became more than just a mean popular girl. She was a weirdo too, the little punching bag of the two mean popular girls who did their dirty work and smiled through their abuse because hey, at least they included her. It gave the trio an easily defined dynamic, helped make two of the three more visibly nasty, and gave us comic relief in an arc that could very well have gotten too uncomfortable otherwise.

And I guess it worked - readers REALLY loved Bob, and were very vocal about it, and I realized mid-arc that I had accidentally made her too likable to just leave in this arc. So Bob got to be rescued from her awful friend group thanks to readers like YOU.

Lord Ironteeth - yeah, this was the shark that was too cool to be a minor threat. When I drew his noggin, I realized he would need a chapter of his own, one with gravitas. I decided he'd specifically be the threshold guardian -once we beat him, we'd know for sure how to get home, even if there were a few more threats in store.

Spindle Inc and Sycorax - when I was a kid I used to have this recurring nightmare about being on some sort of underwater sea station that had this huge sea serpent trapped inside it. I'd look at the sea serpent from a window within the station and see it coiling in its tank, only for it to look at me with fury. In that glance I would suddenly realize two things with absolute clarity: first, it was going to break free and kill everyone, and second, we deserved that destruction for what we had done to it. The terror of the dream was less that the sea serpent was going to break free, and more the guilt of knowing that all the mayhem that was about to unfold was our fault to begin with.

I thought that would be fun to homage with the penultimate chapter of this story. OBVIOUSLY the sea serpent was Calibani's mom, obviously the trauma of its capture was why Calibani grew into a predator that specializes in hunting humans, obviously we would have to free the sea serpent despite that running counter to Sailor's goal of getting home. Easy, easy, easy plot point to include.

Spindle, Inc. is the primary antagonistic force in Offbeat Melody, so they easily slotted into the role of the arrogant humans who captured this monster for nefarious and selfish motives. They could tie a lot of other plot threads together too - Dr. Neptune was a scientist who worked for them as a contractor only to get screwed over (i.e. they stranded him in the Sea of Monsters, expecting him to die, and then used his research to make their own base of operations in it), we'd learn of him through a spindle briefcase left behind by some unfortunate rogue agent who got eaten by the Globster while he was trying to escape, hell they could even be one of the possible origins of Sailor themself (more on that later). Very useful villains, Spindle.

The Abyssal Mother - I knew the last sea monster would need a lot of punch to it. I briefly considered just a big whale - the Moby Dick to Spindle's corporate Ahab - but it felt underwhelming after all that came before. So I went for arguably the most dramatic possible sea monster, a full on Cthulhu-style elder god. If you're a frequent follower of this blog, you might know I have particularly high standards for Eldritch Abominations, so I realized this was going to be a pretty big challenge for me to live up to, and decided to keep the cthulhu in question reserved to the last few entries as a result - the less it appears, the less it has to live up to.

I realized I had a good angle when my experiments with the Cthulhu "squid for a head" concept ended up having a face framed in shadow - you know, the same visual that our protagonist has in most appearances. That provided some very juicy parallels between the two that made this final monster feel particularly noteworthy to me, ones that I'll leave you to ponder, since they tie into...

Part 6: Themes

I did not set out to have a theme in this story. I just wanted to make a sailor and a sea monster kiss. That was my only goal.

But I really don't begin with theme in ANY of my writing. I figure out topics I want to address, but for all my novels I feel like the themes didn't start coming together until about halfway through the first draft, when enough of the elements of the story had been set down and interacted with each other enough for me to realize what I was saying with them. A huge part of my second and third drafts for my novels have focused on making the themes of my stories more concrete and unified.

Well, ASWaM is very much a first draft of a story, but it's a simple enough story that I think the theme found itself pretty well despite lacking subsequent drafts to refine it.

ASWaM is about doubt and direction. It's about being adrift in a world that is in many ways hostile by nature, about not feeling like you're where you're supposed to be or even WHO you're supposed to be, and about setting off aimlessly in the hope that maybe you'll find your way to that mythical land of "what my life is supposed to be."

When I began the story, Sailor had amnesia and wore clothes that obscured their identity as a way to make it easier for anyone to step into Sailor's role. Sailor had to feel like You, the Reader, and so we don't know their name, their gender, their eye color, their hair color, even their skin color (note that their hands are always wearing gloves, and their face is always in shadow).

But it also meant Sailor is, well, undefined, at least at the start of the story. Sailor doesn't know who they are, what they are, how they came to be. Sailor feels distinctly that they should be Something Else, should be Somewhere Else, should be Someone Else, should not be who/what/where they are. Sailor is plagued by doubt, by a need to go in a different direction, by a need to be other than they are.

This initially contrasts with Calibani, who begins the story very confident that she is doing exactly what she was designed to be doing and acting exactly like she should be. As they interact, they begin to shift each other in opposite directions - Calibani questions her existence and nature, sometimes to a self destructive degree, and Sailor begins to find something about who and where they are that they like. They find a healthy middle ground together - doubtful enough to want to be better people, but with love for themselves that allows them to not feel the need to up-heave their lives entirely.

I knew at the start that I would build an expectation for there to be some answer to the question of who Sailor is and where they came from, because those are the questions that begin the whole narrative. I brainstormed a number of answers to those questions, but once I got a few chapters into writing the story and saw this theme of doubt developing, I realized I couldn't answer them. From a thematic standpoint, the doubt HAD to remain. So I gave hints to possible answers, bits of evidence to support the possibility of them being true, but never planted a smoking gun that answered it for sure.

Sailor can't know the answer because NONE of us know the answer. Outside of blind Life of Pi style faith, you cannot know for sure that you are living the life you're supposed to live. All you can do is figure out whether you're happy with the life you've got, or if you need a change. Sailor will never know who they are supposed to be, but they did learn who they are, and they love that person now.

For those curious, the possible Sailor origins are:

Occam's Razor: they're exactly what Dr. Neptune theorized, i.e. a human who got stranded in the Bermuda Triangle (or the Devil's Triangle or any other number of paranormal triangles) and fell into the Sea of Monsters. The trauma of that experience gave them amnesia. It's just brain damage and bad luck.

A Spindle Experiment: Dr. Warefore mentions that Spindle has been trying to find a way to make a human who can evolve like the denizens of the Sea of Monsters. Sailor may well be an attempt to do just that, perhaps one they wrote off as a failure and abandoned (they do that a lot)

A Deep One: Sailor is the offspring of one of the denizens of the Sea of Monsters (most likely the Abyssal Mother herself) who has somehow been tricked into believing they are human, to the point where they seem to be human to everyone else, even other monsters. Maybe a human summoned a sea monster to breed with on earth, and Sailor ended up being subconsciously drawn back to the Sea by their blood. Maybe Sailor never actually lived on earth at all, but was only made to THINK they had as part of the transformation into a human.

The Platonic Ideal of a Sailor: the Sea of Monsters is full of archetypal concepts, and arguably a sailor trying to find their way home is just as archetypal as any sea serpent, mermaid, or kraken. Our only proof that humans aren't native to the Sea of Monsters is Dr. Neptune, and he's not as reliable an expert as he claims to be.

This theme of doubt and direction also made the compass more important to the narrative than a simply mechanic for audience participation - a compass, after all, gives direction, and the feeling that Sailor is not where they're supposed to be, that they need to head in a different direction, is ultimately the catalyst of the plot. The compass is, in many ways, the antagonist of the story - the force that keeps Sailor from accepting themself. I realized this a little after I started making the different directions have personalities - initially they just represented broad concepts (North = follow conventional wisdom ala the North Star, South = preserve your short-term self interest at all costs, East = act with curiosity and be willing to take calculated risks, and West = throw caution to the wind and do anything that seems novel and exciting), but over time they became little characters themselves.

Since it was our thematic antagonist, I decided to pepper in some ideas about what the compass might be in-universe - and, in a move that would no doubt frustrate the compass, we also don't know for sure which of those is "correct." Is the compass a poltergeist, some amalgamation of dead sailors who try to steer other lost souls home? Is it a malign entity that leeches off of those desperate enough to seek its aid, living through them while pretending to aid them? Is it a device Spindle made to lure sailors to their clutches, OR to guide their experiments in human/monster hybrids? Was it a cursed item that forced a sea monster to assume a human shape? Who can say - the compass sure can't, it can only tell you a direction to go in.

Part 7: Q&A

Since this was an interactive story, I felt it was only fitting to add one last interactive element to this post-script write up, and some of your happily obliged me by sending in questions.

When I noticed how fast readers were falling for Calibani, I figured there was a good chance we'd end up staying in the Sea of Monsters. By chapter 7, I figured it was more or less a given, and by the end of the Lord Ironteeth encounter I was almost 100% sure Sailor would remain at sea. There was always a chance, though - while a look at the polls shows that the audience got more and more on the same page towards the end, there were always dissenting voices, and the desire to get an answer to the question of Who Sailor Was remained strong, as a number of people kept trying to find angles where they could get that AND stay with Calibani.

I was surprised early on by how easily the audience fell in love with Calibani, to the point where I made a few posts commenting on it. I mean, I shouldn't have been - as I said earlier, I have cultivated an audience of fellow monsterfuckers on here, and I know at least a few of them saw my bait and knew they could get me to be freaky in a way we found mutually agreeable (thank you all again for helping me escape being caned by Jesus for being horny).

Like, we REPEATEDLY ignored developing the plot in the Tree Storks chapter for several days just to spend more time with Calibani - something that I enjoyed immensely (this whole thing was an excuse for me to write and draw a cute chubby sea monster girl as much as possible aftter all) but also knew as a storyteller was not what most would consider a good story call. I like how it turned out, but it defied conventional narrative wisdom, you know? I was surprised.

On the other side of the coin, I was also surprised by how the audience NEVER chose an option that was humorously disastrous. I gave plenty of them, and, like, generally in collaborative storytelling there will be at least one moment where your collaborators decide to do the really, REALLY stupid thing that makes everything spiral out of control really quickly. I figured at least once the audience would choose the troll response, but no, you guys worked hard to keep Sailor and Calibani alive. You refused to let them hurt each other, refused to let them throw themselves into danger, refused to imperil them for your own chuckles. It was very sweet and unexpected.

I say "you refused" but to be fair it's not like NO ONE voted for the troll options - they generally got a handful of votes, just one that was beaten by a landslide of more reasonable options. Hopefully those of you who voted for the troll options enjoyed Bob throwing you a bone by disintegrating Dr. Warefore - that was my consolation prize to you.

Yes. I knew at the beginning that there would be two endings for this story: either Sailor leaves the Sea and goes home, or Sailor stays there forever. Or, you know, Sailor dies as a result of you guys choosing several stupid options in a row, but as stated above you guys avoided those scenarios pretty decisively.

Had Sailor gone home, the following would have occurred: first, they would forget everything that happened in the Sea of Monsters. Second, they would wake up in a hospital, having been found in the Atlantic Ocean by a human-recovery charity run by... oh, isn't that funny, some tech company named Spindle Inc! Spindle would foot the medical bills and even offer Sailor a job, but Sailor would decline because even now they're still not sure what Spindle even does. Sailor would go back to their life and find it familiar and utterly mundane, but not particularly happy. Their father died when they were 18, their mother was never in the picture, they have no siblings. They worked an office job and were sort of a nonentity - that position has long since been filled, but Sailor gets a new job and lives out much the same life: simple, mundane, dreary. Every now and then they get a pang of desire to leave, to go to sea, but they push it out of mind. They never even see the ocean again as long as they live.

Sailor would have gotten the normal life they thought they were supposed to have, the normal memories and name and identity, the mundane life of a normal person. And they just had to trade everything they found in the Sea of Monsters to get it. A question is answered, a direction is followed, but is it the right answer, the right direction?

Well, I think doubt would have remained.

I had a very vague idea for there to be some sort of man-eating giant in, like, a crystal castle. He got cut to make way for the mermaids.

I wanted to fit in a big whale and a giant crustacean, but there wasn't room or an interesting angle for me to want to make room for them. Saved for a possible sequel, I suppose.

I also wanted to have a scene with, like, DOZENS of sea monsters, including some of the ones from Offbeat Melody, but the goal of "this should be EASY you dumbass" made me kill that idea pretty quick.

Thank you!

The primary inspirations were:

The Odyssey and Epic: the Musical

The voyage of St. Brendan

The many "weird shit happens on an island" movies in Toho's filmography, i.e. Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, Son of Godzilla, Yog Monster of the Deep, Matango, etc.

The Island of Dr. Moreau

The Boy and the Heron

Ponyo (specifically Ponyo's parents - I wanted Sailor to have the same desperate energy as that wizard who fucks the giant sea goddess)

The Life of Pi

Slay the Princess (perhaps most obvious in the use of second person narration, multiple voices in the protagonist's head, and falling in love with a creature that has tried to kill you at least once)

I'm going to use this to springboard to a related point in a second, but first a genuine yet humorous answer: Yes, absolutely yes, I am enough of a big romantic sap that I would give everything about my life away to be with a person who loves me and explore a world of monsters in a heartbeat. Hell, I would have jumped in the water the minute Calibani asked and died with her fangs in my neck and a smile on my face. I am dumb this way. Do not follow my example.

On that related point, though... Most stories like this, I daresay ALL stories like this that I know of, end with the hero abandoning the fantasy world in favor of reality, never to return. And that seems like the proper choice and lesson on the surface - we don't want to tell audiences to give up their real life in favor of a fantasy, after all. That's encouraging escapism, and that's not healthy!

But, like... textually speaking, the fantastical world IS real to the characters in these stories. And it's often not really an escape - was Sailor's life devoid of conflict and suffering in the Sea of Monsters? Fuck no! It's just that they figured out how to deal with that conflict and suffering - they built skills and a support system, they adapted, they learned how to overcome what was there.

I think it can be argued that sometimes the return to a "normal" world is, in itself, an escape - the idea that your life can spiral into chaos but that's ok, you can just reset everything and go back to The Way It Was and Should Be is just as unrealistic and unhealthy an idea as You Should Escape to A Better World. Sometimes your plans for your life fall apart, sometimes you're thrown into a place you never intended to go, sometimes you have to learn skills you never anticipated needing and ally with people you never thought you'd befriend to deal with problems you never dreamed you'd have to overcome. And sometimes it's ok to look at your derailed life, your Not Where You Should Be life, and say, "Well, I've learned how to live here... maybe I can stay."

Especially if there's a cute chubby sea monster girl who loves you.

Bob was never supposed to appear past chapter 7, but about halfway through that chapter I realized the audience and I myself would be heartbroken if we didn't rescue her. Definitely for the best - she provided some well-needed comic relief in the final chapters.

This is gonna sound snarky, but, yeah - there were 58 choices with four options a piece, and we only chose one of the four. While some of the options would have similar results, almost none would have had identical outcomes. And some would have been VERY different.

Like, to go back to the beginning: when Calibani attacked, we could either throw a net on her, harpoon her, try to drive around her, or hide below deck. We picked the net, but for the other three options:

Harpooning would result in us hitting her in the thigh, causing her enough pain that she collapses on our deck and we, horrified at the violence we committed, just sort of push on. Calibani would be wounded for at least the next chapter, perhaps longer, and significantly weaker (and probably harboring a great deal of hidden resentment while also being genuinely scared of Sailor). She would be vulnerable during the stork attack, forcing Sailor to take a more active role in that chapter.

Trying to steer around her would result in us essentially fighting her with our boat, resulting in the boat capsizing and Calibani getting tangled up in it. We'd wake up alone on Stork Island and have to travel in search of our boat, alone and vulnerable among man-eating trees. We'd run into Calibani again, also beached and in trouble, end up recruiting her to help us get our boat out of the sand.

Hiding below deck would end in a sea storm that leaves us inside our boat as it's beached on Stork Island. We'd fend off the storks alone, and run into Calibani once we get our boat out to sea, as she got away more or less unscathed.

All of these would have majorly changed the trajectory of our relationship with Calibani and our identity as Sailor, despite seeming to have the same component parts on the surface. Now account for how similarly slight changes in the other options could have gone, and we could have had a very different story indeed.

Part 8: Our Girl

I just think she's neat!

#At Sea Without a Map

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lastchancestardomm · 14 days ago

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Now that I can look at the seventh comic and be lucid, I've written a bunch of headcanons about our new older and domestic mercs, and have lovingly pointed out the obvious, as I do~

To get it out of the way, I think the writers took the term 'domestic' a little too literally, they REALLY domesticated Scout and Soldier– which is something I'm not upset about.

Scout with a mullet and four Scoutlings was something I wasn't prepared for, though. Soldier and Zhanna having kids is something I was FULLY prepared for, however, because I already had it in mind way back in a post about my final comic predictions.

WE GOT HEAVYMEDIC CANONIZED TOO, FUCK YEAH!!! And, of course, their child is was the mpreg baby. Their kid, which is the baby baboon from the end of the sixth comic (now all grown up), was born from Classic Heavy. And sorry not sorry, but Archimedes is their kid's godfather.

Sniper and Bronislava are also together (or, more accurately, it was implied). No one talks about this new revelation, though, which makes me a bit sad.

Speaking of Sniper, nice to know that he's still sniping! He clearly took his job very seriously during the Gravel Wars, plus I also don't think he'd give up his passion very easily. I do want to imagine he has a nature photography side gig though, since he's all about being alone and having a steady hand, and after the Gravel Wars he'd need some form of income!

The dalmatian seen throughout the epilogue also belongs to Pyro! It's the puppy he adopted from the second comic, but now, seven years later, it's all grown up! I'd imagine Pyro would name it Flame, or maybe Matchstick. Something simple and fire-related.

Speaking of Pyro, I can't help but remind you all that Pyro and Engineer are canonically roommates. It's nice to know they've reunited.

And, even though it was probably unintentional, the parallel between RED Pyro having a dog and BLU Pyro having a cat (see End of the Line) is godly.

Also, it's nice to think that now that all the craziness of the Gravel Wars has died down, Spy has finally moved in with Scout's mom and settled down. They have been canonically fiancés for ages, y'know! (because you know Spy wouldn't have fully committed like that at the beginning 😒)

Miss Pauling sadly was not in the ending! However, I do think she was canonically the person Scout was talking to at the end, which would be fucking amazing if that was true.

Last tangent because I'm not putting this under a cut and it's getting too long. My explanation for why Tom Jones's ghost is present at the ending (because the ONLY time he's interacted directly with the main cast was Soldier snapping his neck) is because not only is he like obligated to be there (Merasmus x Tom Jones fr fr) is Merasmus, while in prison, oversaw through the magic prison toilet brew or whatever Spy disguised as Tom Jones admitting to being Scout's dad and totally misinterpreted it. Merasmus then held that belief, and after dying and becoming a ghost, he invited Tom Jones to Scout's Smissmas party for that reason.

Anyway that's all :P

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itsgirlcraft · 4 months ago

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TW gore/veins, bloodshot eye

...so guess who just made a Rainbow Pickaxe™ minecraft texture/pixel art ahaha-

This is. Specifically the Steve Labs version- yes that one-off video with Assistant Steve and everything-

And yup this is ALSO for my TWA AU lol, but I got an idea for a mod too 😅

Uhhh @its-indigos @dracl-dragon

I think yall would be interested?

Explanation under the cut :3

So like- au first-

In TWA, there's 3 rainbow pickaxes: TSS, RQ, and Steve Labs here. Currently, I'm imagining RQ to be bedazzled with jewels and is very shiny and sturdy. TSS is probably (mostly) like that one drawing I posted, but a bit more...idk, element-based? Fire n water and all that.

And then there's this one. I imagine he has a fleshy texture. You can feel his heartbeat in the handle, his anxious breathing. Sure, the other two have faces, but this...is different. Tbh, this texture is just gory bc I didn't feel like adding the limbs directly. But I imagine he has at least 1 semi-functional hand, maybe both. That's why he can drag himself around as a dropped item.

I'm not quiteeee sure how I wanna design that part, like where his mouth, other eye, ears maybe, etc, go. I'd base it off of the configuration of his body in the crafting grid (head middle-left, torso center, legs middle-right), but that doesn't quite...work well?? Idk what to do with his legs.

Yeah and so. Eventually the main TWA gang find the Steve Lab, which is like. Immediately after the video ends, so Rainbow has just escaped and is trying to get away from the lab. And the group run into him nearby, which accidentally alerts Labs!Assistant/Sabre to Rainbow's location. The unexpected company ofc makes them curious, and while the gang try to convince Rainbow to trust them, the Labs duo come over and just barely see Rain before he hides behind the group's legs.

As for the mod idea- ahahaa it's uhhh interesting? There's three variants of the pickaxe, this one is the first. You can either a, find him just in a chest/out in the wild, b, craft him yourself, or c, steal it like. From another player or maybe the lab itself. Form 1 is just called the Rainbow Pickaxe, and its little like..tag thing? Says "you can feel his heartbeat. It's very fast.." When you first mine/hit something, the tag becomes "It appears to be bleeding. Its eye is pleading in silence."

If you find him, his relationship with you is more neutral, and if you craft him, it's already negative. The more you use him, the more he bleeds, and the worse it all just..is. Sometimes you can hear crying if he's in a chest, whether or not you use him. He's probably got decent enchantments and/or abilities, so you'd *like* to use him. If you drop him, he starts running away. If you manage to catch him, the tag becomes "Why couldn't you give me freedom?"

Form 2 happens if you gather the necessary materials to transform him back, it's also possible if you simply summon him and don't turn him into a pickaxe at all. It's probably, like, decently midgame, maybe redstone-infused diamonds, idk. But whatever it is, it takes effort to achieve. If you crafted him originally, he's gonna attack and run away. You won't get to have a good relationship for a long time, maybe never. If you found him, and especially if you didn't/barely used him, he'll have a good relationship with you. If you used him a lot, you'll have a more neutral relationship.

In this form, he becomes a Steve again. Since he's not exactly well-versed in ✨️life✨️, he doesn't have a good grip on his powers, if any. He has pickaxe-shaped horns and wings/tail. If you have a good enough relationship, which requires further development once you turn him back, he'll give/trade you the "pure pickaxe." This is the diamond pickaxe with his energy partially infused, and it provides many good things for you, such as being a dynamic light, weapon, and tool, all in one. It has the tag, "he trusts you to wield his vessel once again."

In the positive relationship, he can help ofc with mining, but he prefers aboveground resource gathering, despite being better at underground exploration. He can glow, as well as use said pure pickaxe before he gives it to you. If you've talked to him, either through the chat or thru paper/books, he'll slowly start speaking to you, starting with a "Thank you" when you turn him back.

In the negative relationship, he escapes and leaves you behind, actively avoiding you. He doesn't attack much - he's more like a frightened animal. Same with the neutral relationship. In the neutral one, you can gain his trust, it's just a bit harder since he's now a person. Providing him with resources can help.

The third form happens if you decide to kill him at this point: the "haunted rainbow pickaxe." Which can only be obtained if you go thru this whole process, and is on a similar power/utility level to the pure pickaxe. It's similar in mechanics to the first form, but more intense. Sometimes it will cry out in pain. The tag on this one ranges from "his heart beats no longer. Only cries of pain are left behind." to "my wails of betrayal haunt your mind. I trusted you. Why?" to "no turning back now." Mostly depending on how much you use him.

He can't be turned back. One key difference between pure and haunted is that this has no light, and has a special attack which sometimes damages you/gives you negative effects. The haunted texture is a more gruesome form of the og variant, while the pure texture basically just removes the gore. There's still an eye on it, though. Sometimes the haunted form will grow a mouth on its handle and bite you.

#my post #favremysabre #pixel art #minecraft texture #steve labs! rainbow steve #steve labs! rainbow pickaxe #rainbow steve #rainbow steve pickaxe #my aus #the weirdest adventure au #steve labs

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sev-rh · 3 months ago

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I don't go to the ATLA fandom much but I am very curious to know more about your AzuTara fankid 👀👀

OK SO HESR ME OUT

there is a part of the comics where ursa (Azula's mom) gives her face away for the mother of faces right? and she got another one. WHAT IF the mother of faces gave ursa's face to an unborn child? and with some complications (most coming from the consequences of the post war), said child lost her parents? (lost by fleeing or they died, idk), AND Katara finds the child, and takes her under her wing to take care of until she finds an orphanage or a way to get a family to adopt the child.

nonetheless it goes wrong, and that travelling takes her to the fire nation.

That's when Katara joked about the kid looking a bit like Zuko, and asked if he actually had a lost child, which takes Zuko to say "I mean, not that I'm aware of. But to be fair, that child looks more like Azula than me" and the joke started spreading around until it got to Azula (let's ignore half the reason why she would be at the palace), and, to Katara's surprise, Azula actually agrees with it, she explained how unsettling this kid looked like her.

Sokka said it might be some ancient genetics or just coincidence, Zuko disagrees, but he's on his way to search for his mother so that doesn't really matter to him.

With that, Katara actually finds a way to get Azula to help her co-parent the child (aka, Azula became soft for the child). they don't have a friendship, but they have a kid to take care of until they find a good orphanage (they didn't even searched anymore, they got too used to the everyday life to lose it).

The kid was named after Kanna.

Against all odds, Kanna loved her "I'm not your mother" parents, they were caring, and helped her throughout her missed schooling. She waterbended for the first time around Azula, and was excited to show Katara, but she made a plan with Azula to show her other mother in a special moment, Azula didn't see a reason to disagree.

Well, she'll regret it.

With Zuko's long search for his mother with the help of the rest of the Gaang, they actually found her (like the comics), and "Ursa" insisted on having her face back, to remember who she was.

That's the thing, Ursa didn't know the price of having her face back was by stealing her face back from a child's face. The mother of faces was hesitant to give her face back because of that, but by the end of it, the spirit accepted.

Kanna was gone by the time Ursa got her face back, without a body to bury. The only thing that confirmed the existence of Kanna in that world was her toys, the workers who spoke to her and taught her, Azula and Katara.

By the time the Gaang+Zuko came back, they knew something was off. What was supposed to be a welcoming comeback from Zuko's mother actually felt like a funeral.

With Zuko's explanation of how they got his mother back, Azula and Katara had a theory as to why Kanna was gone, and to why Kanna looked so much like Azula.

It wasn't that she looked like Azula, it was that Kanna had Ursa's face.

Azula and Katara weren't friends, they had Kanna as their relationship string, and when that was cut, the only thing they shared was grief.

It takes time until Azula confesses to Katara that Kanna was a waterbender.

I haven't thought about what would happen after :}

#azutara #kazula #azula #katara

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pixiel · 9 months ago

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Help Rem/Pixiel afford a Wheelchair!

I asked before looking for advice on getting a wheelchair - the best advice I've gotten so far is to open up my own fundraiser on GoFundMe to help me afford it! So here's my story explaining why I need the help;

I would be really thankful if you reblogged this post even if you can't donate yourself!

(explanation/story under the cut!)

Hi! My name is Rem / Pixiel. Some of you might already know me as the person who made the first Old Tumblr fix after the layout change! I haven't talked too much about myself online, so for those of you who don't know me let me talk about my health a little bit; I have Hypermobile-Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, Arrhythmia, A floppy heart valve, balance issues, Suspected POTs & MCAS - and a myriad of other smaller comorbidities to go with it. I have daily pain in my wrists, hands, knees, neck, shoulders and hips. Basically all over my body! I tire easily due to my heart problem and have to take extra care not to injure myself. I’m currently someone who uses a cane (a really fab looking one!) but while it helps me get around the house and to and from the shop a few doors down the road - going beyond that around town often results in me having a lot of pain in my hips and knees, usually leaving me unable to do anything for the next couple of weeks - struggling to move around the house and get things done due to the pain. This is something I’ve put off for a long time, but I think it’s time I got a wheelchair. Unfortunately, as I am on benefits barely covering the cost of living, this is not something I can afford on my own; especially now that the government is trying to change the rules and make it more difficult for disabled people to afford anything or put us on vouchers. I need a wheelchair that is light enough for me to move and fold, one that isn't too bulky, as my rented house is not wheelchair accessible - as well as being a powered chair, as with my wrist pain I'd unlikely be able to use a manual chair without injury. After doing my own research I really love the idea of the "Monarch Carbon Lite Powerchair" though I'm currently working with a mobility provider to find the perfect chair for me! If you can help me pay towards my new Wheelchair I will be incredibly thankful! Please share and help me be able to afford it - so I can go out and about and live my life without injury and pain holding me back!

#wheelchair #gofundme #fundraiser #disabled #Pixiel #actually disabled #cripplepunk #ehlers danlos syndrome #powerchair #go fund me #ambulatory wheelchair user #donations

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peapodsinspace · 10 months ago

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sorry for not posting art for a minute, but I’ve been working on an au! here’s

Mob Sailor 100

aka mob psycho x sailor moon

[Image ID in alt text]

I just started watching sailor moon so I doubt this is very accurate, but it’s not really supposed to be!

In this au psychic powers still exist, but they just aren’t as strong on their own! But these gems basically can make them stronger and easier to use!

And you get the gems from a spirit usually, but I imagine you may be able to just stumble across them if you’re lucky

Not all ESPers can use their powers without transforming, but some can! Either way the gems do strengthen powers

Now, I’m gonna do a lil explanation / extra thing/ for all of them under the cut! Just thoughts while designing + story bits (if there’s even a story)

First up: Mob!

I imagine that when mob was very young, he came across / was given one of those gem thingies so he has been able to transform for a very long time!

From what I understand, in sailor moon the girls are destined to be? Anyway, for this au there are people that are basically predisposed to becoming sailors, just like how ESPers are. You just need one of the gems to actually be able to transform.

The plot is basically the same as the normal mob psycho plot, so mob goes to Reigen looking for someone to talk to & becomes his student!

Ritsu

Now, since mob has been able to transform basically all of his life and only certain people can actually become sailors, it makes sense that Ritsu would be one, too! And he gets the gem from dimple. It’s just like when he awakened his powers in canon! Also, Dimple is basically like Luna in this au.

On a design note, I wanted to make him look similar to mob but still contrast him well. Partially because they’re brothers, but also cus they wear the same uniform, so their designs would be similar anyway.

Teru

Like mob, Teru also got a gem from a young age! His story is basically the same as his canon one too.

Fun fact: he likes his outfit much more than everyone else likes theirs! Most of them feel at least a little silly after doing a cutesy transformation, but Teru thinks it fits his energy

As far as design notes go, I don’t have much to say other than I just noticed a coloring error on his coat, and his pants are supposed to have pinstripes

Shou

Now, this is where it starts getting a little different from canon stories! Shou’s father found several gems, so he took one for himself and saved the others for later. He gave one to shou and some of the other ESPers under his control!

Shou is “sailor cinnamon”, because all of the villains are named sweet things instead of savory/ spicy things! It’s one of the reasons Shou calls himself “sailor hot cinnamon” instead! It’s to try and distance himself from his father / his father’s plot, and also because being called cinnamon makes him feel silly.

Design notes: the lace came to me in a vision so I just had to add it /joking

Serizawa

WAWA!!!!!!!!!!! Okay, so when serizawa was young his powers were very strong, like in canon. So when he met Shou’s dad he got the umbrella to help him feel safe outside of his room, but he was also given a gem!

He’s named “sailor allspice” to match with the sweet theme, but allspice isn’t sweet on its own, it’s just paired with sweet flavors! Sorta like how Shou is just “cinnamon” and not “cinnamon sugar”

Design note would be that there was a period in his designing process where he looked like a cowboy

Reigen

Last but not least, our favorite “sailor”! Like in canon, Reigen doesn’t have any powers. He fakes a transformation by wearing that outfit under his coat! He ties up the coattails under it to keep them hidden, and keeps his (non magical) gem in his coat pocket.

He does most of his jobs against fake villains! A lot of criminals will try and make it seem like they have powers just to intimidate people! So that’s what Reigen usually deals with!

Dimple

Here’s a bonus section for dimple! The only thing that I’ve changed about him is that one of his cheek blushes looks like a crescent moon, so he resembles Luna!

Alright!! If you got this far, then thanks so much!!

As always, feel free to send asks about this au! I don’t exactly have a plot going for it, especially since I don’t know much about the actual plot of sailor moon… but still!!

Enjoy!

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lotusarchon · 8 months ago

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As I have the app around, I may as well just dive into this before disappearing again. To the people in my post a few days prior and in my dms, I promise I'm not ignoring any of you, but I genuinely can't muster the energy to speak to anyone else currently. I'm only here currently because someone found my unmentioned hetalia account, which I left unmentioned for a reason...you know who you are...you scared me...😭

Ah, okay well. If you're not aware of who I am, hi. I'm a dude that wrote fanfiction for this fandom I got pulled into. A year ago I had a few different accounts but I had to delete every single one just because I kept getting harassed, from one thing to another. I'm hoping I don't have to do it again this time around.

I haven't gone offline as anyone thought. I did attempt to take my life (twice, 2024 is something else) but in the end it didn't work out, so I've been hiding in my secret account to relax in hetalia for a bit. In between that I've also been stalking the account myself since it showed up just to see what it was up to, and...oh wow that's a lot.

This specific account has been on my ass like a tick since..two days ago. Two days of my 'supposed' death.

I've also recently found out that someone else who was pretending to be a friend of my friend's and a concerned citizen happened to be friends with them;

And hence why I chose not to reemerge my head back then yet. It turns out there's a few people who may have been following me who are acquainted with these people and...yeah, I didn't want to take the risk. I'm hoping no one is going to inform them I'm not actually dead―I blocked both accounts to avoid being noticed.

There's a lot of yapping I'm gonna be doing so expect a lot of that, BUT piece of advice to anyone that actually cares: do not engage with either blog. Don't send them hate mail, don't go gloating that I'm not actually dead, and don't fucking yap about anything. These blogs went as far as to harass my friends who have no part in this, and they also wrote nsfw of my adult oc and my friend who is a fucking minor. Do. Not. Engage. With. Them. Please!! Block, block, block. Just block them! They're actively going out of their way to harass and stalk MINORS.

Under the cut, I am rambling more on personal feelings rather than doing this professionally. I'm still pretty moody actually and well yeah...

Trigger Warning for some topics below!

Okay uh. I've never done this before so excuse me while I put this in question format lmfao..

"Why aren't you dead!?"

Joke answer; god doesn't want me.

Long answer: I'm not the type of person who says something like that ...like that. I really was intending to go through with it, but evidently I was too tired from crying and fell asleep. I figured that I couldn't handle people fucking around with me and hid in my secret blog. Hetalia fandom is so nice for a fandom about countries. Point blank sorry to burst many of your bubbles, but I'm not dead yet. Put the birthday canon away, slut. I'll die next season.

"What the fuck did you even do?"

Exist.

No okay, realistically it's a lot. I'm not going to play the victim here's and I'm not going to lie to people and say "oh hey my mental illness/trauma made me do that" because that's bullshit. I'm also not diving too deep into any explanations just because my hands hurt..but also I don't want to remember anything less I have another panic attack.

A year ago I met this girl who became my friend over a fandom. We chatted, but I fucked our friendship up when I lashed out at her and another friend wrongfully because of my own stress. While I did beg one of them to stay, the chick that runs kokomichanstuff, Mariin, I ended the friendship with her just because I knew what I did was bad. There really aren't any excuses for that. I don't think anyone should have to deal with anyone else's bad attitude regardless of mental health or not. I didn't bother to keep Mariin around because I did bad, and no amount of apologies would fix it. She already said she wouldn't forgive me, so I knew it made no sense to keep up a facade. I genuinely had no idea she would've been mad that I begged one person to stay but not her, even though she expressed not wanting to be my friend. I also don't remember truly if what I did was enough to earn THIS type of harassement, but I'll take it as divine punishment. But basically, over and over again Mariin has stalked me and found a way to harass me. According to the posts she made, she's made a new friend I (sadly) hurt who wants..revenge. Hooray.

Mariin's already namedropped them so um, yeah, I hope it's okay to mention them?? . Neveah was someone I also hurt really badly by bullying and lashing out at her out of jealousy over something ridiculously dumb in my old server and account. I confronted her later on apologizing but specifically also adding that she didn't need to forgive me because I messed up. Long story short, she claimed she had forgiven me.... but then went to her friends (Mariin mentioned) Geno, Toga etc to badmouth me, including sharing sensitive information I sent to her. Neveah's friend Geno made a post mocking me which I found and responded poorly too, and then more drama escalated from there because literally every single one of Neveah and Geno's friends came to bombard me, sent me hate mail and surprise, Mariin took the chance to come back. I don't know how the fuck those two (Mariin and Neveah) managed to speak, but sometime later a few accounts appeared that went after people who were once associated with me or used to be associated with me. A few days ago the account made supposedly by Neveah made a post accusing me of being a r*pist, groomer and pedophile and yeah. That went badly.

Uh. Wow this is a mouthful. But. Yeah, I'm...not really a good person, and these things are just embarrassing and..ick. I hate myself for the shit I pull. But, I will say, while I can accept Mariin harassing me like this, the other parties just...genuinely could've handled this better than what they did to me. It really wouldn't have been so hard to ask me instead of listening to one side, but maybe that's me. Regardless, I admit I was wrong. I just..I'm not happy other people are getting involved.

"Why didn't you just say something sooner instead of all that nonsense? Wasn't that too dramatic?"

Sadly it was, but I don't think any of you understand when I say that I CAN'T. I can't say anything because it's just me, me, me. It's just me, and people aren't going to believe me. They never do. When that shitshow happened with Neveah, everyone was blaming me. Even up till recently, someone in my current server told me I was the one who overreacted over getting bullied and harassed. I'm not mentioning them here but holy fuck, that shit hurt. The anons coming in my inboxes telling me "people are offering you advice and you don't want it", it fucking hurts. It genuinely hurts because every single time I try to speak up against anything, or stand up for myself, I'm the one who's in the wrong.

Geno, Neveah, Mariin, fucking Toga and Deja and the entire fucking crew. They're never the ones who get wronged, and they haven't lost anything. Even when Mariin's account gets deleted, she's fine. She has people that actually fucking listens to her, all of them do.

I don't. There's no one aside from the few friends I have who would actually listen to me and not just immediately jump at me, and I'd rather just not have them involved in anymore drama that revolves around me.

Yeah, holy shit, maybe attempting to kill myself from the stress was overbearing but you guys have no fucking idea what it's like. Every time, every time I make a report or say something, I'm the one who's told I'm at fault. It's either, "You're don't look like a child, it's not their fault they want to touch you," or, "You overreacted," or, "Maybe you shouldn't have said anything," or even, "You're so ungrateful, I'm trying to help you."

It. fucking. Sucks. It. SUCKS. Its terrifying that regardless if it's my real life or on the internet, no one listens, no one cares and the one who's left hurting is Ali because who fucking cares. Who gives a shit right?

"....did you try to kill yourself over Nezha?"

Everything started with Nezha, and I'm not even fucking kidding. I don't remember how I met Mariin but I knew for a fact it was something about him. And when we broke our friendship off, I got attacked a LOT about his age. I want to pretend that maybe it was all Mariin, but with how things are, I don't doubt for a second this fucking fandom were jumping me for a character who already has a confirmed age.

I could tell you that I was just stressed about Mariin, but that'd be a lie. Everywhere I go with this fandom, I'm always getting hassled about Nezha's age. From the beginning I was already stressed, because I continuously kept getting anon after anon calling me names and accusations for a fictional fucking character.

I don't deny that Mariin didn't have a part to play. She most definitely made things worst for me with using Nezha to slander me further. It's just my luck that the people in this fandom are idiots that'll listen to anything anyone says.

Think of it this way; the pot was near burning on the stove, it just needed some more fuel.

"Why didn't you just listen to the anons?"

Sighs

Mind you, this was supposedly when I was DEAD. Trust me, I've had far worst flooding my inboxes. Before it was about Nezha's age. Recently, it was to kill myself and the accusations.

I'm not saying the advice was ever bad. But the anons were strangers for all I care who had no idea what the fuck was happening. I've tried blocking anons before, I also went to far lengths to ignore them, but there's only so much I can take. Every day, day in day out on any blog I've made, ever since I started writing for Nezha, I've been receiving dozens and dozens of hate I've had to delete constantly. Not even counting the ones that just randomly told me to die!!

"just ignore them" I'm not a child. I. know. I know, I know, I've been trying, but when people don't respect my boundaries and don't even bother to listen when I say I've done it, how do you think I'm going to feel?

"oh but you should put that as your trigger then it's not their fault" oh yeah, "hey everyone 🥺 when people don't listen to me I cry". How do you think it'll sound? Plus, why should I need to add that when I wasn't expecting anyone to actually act like this on the internet to begin with?!

"Why don't you just move to a different platform then if the hate is that bad?"

Ignoring Mariin for a bit, even if I were to go into another platform to write fanfiction (and I highly doubt there's many I'll feel comfortable in), why should I, and what makes you think the hate will stop there?

AO3 is a place where THE worst people write porn. And you wouldn't believe that I've had to delete quite a number of assholes on there for Nezha's age. Don't mention Twitter where the nonsense started about his age, and don't bring in bluesky because there's a word limit and I'm not limiting myself to that. Even Wattpad has them yelling about Nezha's age. WATTPAD!! Genuinely what makes you think I'll be safe anywhere I go?

I hate Tumblr but this account is my safe space from reality at this point. It used to be the place that made me not want to die. Just because you guys are jerks, why should I need to go?

This also goes back to Mariin and the harassers. Even in my fake death I can't know peace. If I were to move out, wouldn't she get to live her life peacefully while I'm miserable trying to understand a place I don't want to be in?

"Then just leave the LMK fandom!"

Again, why should I? LMK is my comfort show. I genuinely enjoy writing for silly legos, and I also love learning about things I didn't know about before. Why should I have to leave just because the fandom is filled with jerks? Why don't you guys just leave instead if you're butthurt about anyone daring to speak an opinion?

"The accusations-!"

Are lies.

I was r*ped before. Why would I find any pleasure r*ping anyone else? How does one even do that through online?

I was groomed online and assaulted in real life. Why would I think of hurting another human being, most less a child, like that when I still can't even read anything that correlates to it? Why would I find any of those things pleasing?

I turned 18 in 2024. It's not an excuse and I've been doing my best to not interact with minors, or at the very least avoid speaking about topics that are inappropriate for them. Even though I still forget I'm an adult on occasion, I know better than to pull up on my younger friends and start talking about nsfw. I've only ever spoken weirdly to my adult friends.

I recently saw someone comment on the account that I'm Islamphobic/don't support Palestine, so that makes me problematic. I grew up in an Islamic family, I have trauma with that specific religion (inclu. Hinduism and Christianity, long story). I don't interact with anything regarding religion if I can and I also don't judge someone based on their religion. I judge you based on how you speak to me. If you have a weird icon, I don't like you, if you speak weirdly, I don't like you. Additionally, I'm the type of person who feels guilty for making someone upset. I can't support myself, most less for others. No, I don't agree with genocide but it's genuinely too much for me to keep up with.

And finally, how the fuck is liking a character who's an adult make me a proshipper? Jesus Christ again with Nezha. I hate this.

"You have no proof!"

Of course I don't. I don't keep bad memories around. I wouldn't have remembered my own childhood if I didn't get triggered about it. I block bad memories out. Many interactions I've had that are bad, I delete. I don't think about saving, I delete.

Even interactions with friends I usually delete because it's just weird not seeing a blank space. I don't hate them but leaving a spot full feels weird.

I don't have any proof I'm none of the accusations but neither does Mariin, to be frank. So if you chose to believe her because you just genuinely don't like me, good for you, but you look like sheep being led by a drunk shepherd. Either you'll end up in a slaughterhouse and starve, your pick.

I'm not going to say, "Oh ask my minor friends!" Because...they're kids. I feel horrible my friend got roped into this to begin with, the last thing I want is for anyone else be involved when they barely know shit.

Yeah, rambled a bit. I didn't want too but I got carried away, whoops.

This is the only post I want to make about this issue. Don't bring it up, don't uhh, don't mention me to the account, and please just allow me to rest in peace. I just want to write and feel free, not deal with this shit, okay?

Also. Please stop involving my friends into beef you have with me. It's really not their fault they have to deal with someone like me.

Goodbye. I'm deleting the app again until I return. Adios

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