#i love you forever fantasy high

[natjennie]

I'm not gonna be able to make this coherent but I just want to say. as someone who grew up as a teen with undiagnosed PCOS who was so fucking angry at everything all the time. and as a person in their 20s now who is a chronic people-pleaser and is constantly doubting and blaming myself for everything. the bit where the bad kids were remembering their past injustices hit so fucking hard I can't even describe it. fig and riz's especially. just.

when you're a teenager the whole world feels so unfair and there's nothing you can do about it. you're trapped and no one listens to you and you can't stand up for yourself in a way that matters and things are wrong and it feels like no one else can see it. you're so mad at everything but there's no productive way to channel it so you're just stewing in all of your hatred and of course it turns inwards. where else can it go. you're mad and you're mad at yourself for being mad and you hate the state of the world and there's nothing you can do to fix it and that makes you even madder. and the rage turns to frustration turns to sorrow turns back to rage and it's horrible.

and when you're forged in that, you grow up feeling like everything is your fault and you have to try to take care of everyone else and work and work and work for them to love you. and you shove your needs and your questions and your justice down into a little box hidden in your chest that overwhelms you with grief and confusion whenever you peek inside. the shame and the doubt and the guilt get all mixed together in with your soul and it hurts to imagine a world where you deserve good things. everything is so confusing and helpless you don't even bother to try.

but then. cassandra holds your hand. and ankarna does too. and they remind you that there is room in the world for doubt. there is room for mystery and you don't have to have all the answers. and at the same time, there is a time and a place for righteousness. when you see something wrong in the world, in yourself, in your loved ones, you cannot be afraid to stand up against it. it seems dark and muddled now but a new dawn in breaking. you choose your purpose, you choose your next steps. but you will have dignity and strength when you struggle, when you falter, when you don't know what to do next. have the serenity to except the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference. hoot fucking growl.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

soon it'll be dawn again

transcript under the cut ⏬

page 01

Fig: no way? - you're still up?

Riz: Wh– yes?

Riz: Why'd I not be.

page 02

Fig: I me~~ean - that took.

Fig: whole day.

Riz: Yeah?

Fig: 'm beat.

Riz: you should sleep.

page 03

Fig: nah. my guy's still up

Fig: I wanna hang out.

page 04

Riz: That's really nice.

Fig: Hah! - Nobody ever expects an Archdevil rockstar to be nice.

Riz: … yeah. - 's just budget work tho. (the stuff I'm working on) - I've heard it's boring.

page 05

Fig: yeah, but you do it…

Riz: It keeps things going, right? - Nothing happens if nobody sits down and - does the thing.

Fig: That's right… - though. Yeah.

page 06

Fig: sometimes it's someone else who - doesn't want the same thing to happen.

Riz: … - mm.

page 07

Riz (off screen): …It took me a long time to get that not everyone likes doing what I do. - 's probably because you guys are so nice– - or. - kind.

Riz (off screen): to anyone too, not just. - the people you /love/.

page 08

Riz: that's not how it is elsewhere. - The world's– not. hostile. - but 's not like it's kind.

Riz: So I'm doing as much as I can now… 

page 09

Fig: Hey.

Riz: ?

Fig: Go dig some dirt with me.

page 10

Riz: [blank speech bubble] - oh you meant like - actual dirt. (not incriminating information)

Fig: o yea.

Fig: there's clay in the backyard soil. - sometimes when I'm sun deficient or something I go touch dirt for a bit.

page 11

Fig: here u go

page 12

Riz: uh

Fig: now we make a thing! - 'm pretty good at freehanding a bowl.

Fig: I'll show u

page 13

Fig: just– yep, flatten that out as evenly as u can, then–! - actually ur nails'd be so good at cutting out the strip. [larger than usual space] wait. - wait. wait u can carve patterns with them! we HAVE to try

Riz: uh - What. do I carve?

Fig: anything!!!

page 14

Fig: and– yep just seal the inside uh. seam?

Fig: yep that works - okay time's up! all contestant hands up

Riz: [blank speech bubble] - okay - wh. what's next?

Fig: haha - watch this.

(sound effect text): FWOO—MP

page 15

Riz: WH– DON'T JUST DO THAT???

Fig: Now it's fired!

Riz: THAT WAS NOT SAFE

Fig: (actually it's just dry. if u add water rn it'll dissolve)

Fig: ok catch!

Riz: [blank speech bubble] - careful!!

Fig: dw no need haha

page 16

Riz (thought bubble): oh - it's warm…

Fig: now I want you to throw this.

page 17

Fig: u gotta do it - c'mon

page 18

Riz: wh– - It's like 3AM right now

Fig: oh it's not /fired/ fired it's not gonna make a loud noise

Riz: And then just? leave a pile out here?

Fig: pour water over it & it'll be gone I told u

Riz: but

page 19

Fig (off screen): RIz.

page 20

Fig: I've done all this before.

Fig: Can you trust that at least?

page 21

Riz: no, I– - I do. - I trust you.

page 23

Riz: okay what happens now

(sound effect text): glob

page 24

Fig: we do it again!

page 25

Riz: wh. [larger than usual space] What do you mean. (this clay's too wet also)

Fig: see! you're already learning

Fig: [blank speech bubble] - there are flows that are futile to fight. - The world changes.

Fig: Things change.

page 26

Fig: I've learned my lessons with "forevers". - But - as an artist

Fig: I can give you one thing: - You can always do it again.

page 27

Fig: most of everything depends on the rest of the world, - but this. - making new. - that's yours as long as you want it.

page 28

Fig: So?

page 29

Riz: Yeah. - Yeah! - let's make another one.

[screamingblogger]

baron my best friend, my enemy, my worst fear, my beloved, best thing to come out of this show, true vision of a worst nightmare and most importantly riz gukgaks fake romantic partner that he made up in a pure moment of asexual panic I’m so glad you’re back please leave forever

[scalpho]

i love a good old narcissus bit but alternatively. anyone else up thinking about the transgender implications of being deeply enamoured with a blurry reflection of you that is referred to as and sounds feminine

[captaincleverusernamehere]

“Adaine is a little guy now. Like a little guy guy. Like she has lots of little guys.”

[starstruckodysseys]

i’d love you if your name was written nowhere 🤝 whatever you do, you’re gonna do great

[jerreeeeeee]

as much as i enjoy the more wholesome fantasy high parents like jawbone and sklonda and the thistlesprings there’s something so compelling and achingly real about bill seacaster that makes him my favorite. he and fabian have a relationship that is so deeply unhealthy and entrenched in distorted ways of viewing other people and parenthood and the world, and yet is so fiercely and undeniably loving. like, is bill seacaster a good dad? what does being a good dad even mean for someone like bill? bill seacaster has such unrealistic and toxic expectations of fabian and a myopic, entirely self-centered way of relating to him for most of his life, and yet, you truly get the sense that even if fabian disappoints him again and again and never steps out of his shadow and never becomes the man bill wants him to be, bill will never love him any less than completely and unconditionally. bill seacaster is a man who has built his entire life and sense of identity around doing whatever he wants and never facing consequences and never thinking about anyone else. bill seacaster becomes disappointed in his son. and he finds the idea of that so unacceptable that, instead of demanding that fabian meet his expectations, bill loves him so much that he reconsiders his entire concept of himself and the purpose of his life, and he grows. a man whose legacy and identity was based around selfishness and narcissism and unwillingness to bend, and fabian makes him change.

[sesamie]

(closeup on fig from fantasy high handing gorgug some drumsticks. handwritten text reads, "The music is right, but the medium is wrong!")

i'm really really loving fantasy high so far...the friendship between fig and gorgug is so important to me. i want them to start a band and be bard-barians together

[nnonbinarycreature]

i have a lot of thoughts about how meaningful rp and character interaction couldve happened this season but we just didnt. get them

hey ally why did you say kristen wants k2 back bc she likes the idea of having a sister while only having like. 2 interactions w/ her actual sibling. whats that about

[sunflowermp4]

obsessed with this new dynamic between kristen and her goddess. go girl lose your religion!

[natjennie]

STOOOPPPP the way I knew it was gonna be about her horns coming in but then I had the audacity to think for a second oh maybe emily forgot but OF COURSE she went straight for the jugular she nailed it figggggggg when her horns grew innnnnn RAHHHHHHHH

[bacchuschucklefuck]

Can you expand on what you mean by Baron being "too cool" to really fit a horror monster? It's a very interesting concept and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is it that they're too active/involved/tangible and it detracts from their scariness?

I feel like I should preface this with a wall of disclaimers lmao 1/I am a hardcore, down-to-the-marrow, avid, deeply sincere horror enthusiast, esp. horror creatures. this usually means my mileage is vastly different from the average populace's, and my scaredy bone has been disintegrated by longterm exposure. most things in a piece of horror media won't scare me! so I practically never use that on its own as the scale to talk abt horror experiences, but when something does scare me it's always a special occasion to be treasured. 2/canon d20 is never really meant to be horror horror, and for good reasons: it doesn't fit the company's output, it takes a kind of carelessness in production estimation that is always a huge risk, it's often vulnerable in a way that kinda goes against how TTRPGs usually facilitates vulnerability, and for most people it's just! stressful! d20, even with the "horror-themed" seasons, generally just plays with horror tropes and stays focused in its goal of being a comedy improv tabletop theater show. 3/fantasy high's chosen system is DnD, which as I've mentioned before is before all a combat-based game system, which means the magic circle of play is drawn based on stats that facilitate and prioritize combat. want or not this affects every interaction you have in the game, and given fantasy high's concept from the ground up (everyone's going to school of DnD stuff to get better at DnD) it's doubly relevant. 4/This Is Fine I have no quarrel with this. my meters are internal, I do not ask this show to be anything it doesn't advertise itself to be, and what it is is fucking great! I like it! when I expand on this ask's question it will be like a physicist going insane in a lab. that's the mindset we're going in with.

disclaimers done. my stance on horror as a genre is that it's a utility genre rather than a content genre or a demographic genre; it is the discard of narratives. it's the trash pile. horror, above being scary, is about being ugly and messy, it's the cracks on the ground any story inevitably steps over to stay a genre that isn't horror. the genre's been around long enough to develop a codex and a general language that medias and makers and enthusiasts of the genre can use to talk about and build onto, but if you go into individual pieces there's really no unifying Horror Story. one person's beautiful life can be another's horror story, it's just how it is.

this makes The Monster a deeply intriguing piece of the genre. thing is a monster is in a decent percentage of any story - it's just when the antagonist force steps into something past a certain line traced out in the story's world. monstrousness is in pretty much every western fantasy story, it's in any story with a hero and something to vanquish or win; more than anything it's a proxy of that thing up there. the line in a narrative's world. the monster is the guard of the unknown lands, where heroic, civilized people don't tread.

what does this mean in the context of horror? the genre is about that perceived lawlessness, that "unknown land" so to say. we're in the monster's home. that's the literary context that we often walk into a horror piece with; the monster knows more than you about where you are. it may not understand you, but it holds more information than you, and with that it moves swifter than you, has more covered than you, and is more assured in its existence in this context than you. it's a struggle to catch up to it, it's nigh impossible to get one over it, and you're never sure it'll 100% work, because you just don't have the information necessary to.

with that framing you can kinda see where I'm coming from here: horror's often about the breaking of rules. I always think a monster's most effective when it breaks well-established rules of both existence and visual storytelling. think Possum (2018) or Undertale's Omega Flowey or the Xenomorph Queen - unique change in medium, unique change in graphic, unique change in design language, etc. in that sense I actually really like how canon baron plays out: they don't really function like anything else in the fantasy high universe, the bad kids have not managed to kill them when they've felled literal gods, their domain in fhjy literally introduces new mechanics to encompass their existence! from an experience design standpoint they slap mad shit. BUT! I can't help finding their character, like as a character riz (and the other bad kids, eventually) interact with, to be very... coherent? in design. this is kinda hard for me to articulate in words, it's more often a sense you get once you've looked at enough of these scrumptious fuckers, their general design and the way they show up is just kinda too clean, so to say. always kinda newly made? fresh unboxed. it, once again, makes sense for their lore - they are looking for more about themself from riz - and their function - they're an antagonist in a game experience, they're meant to be interacted with in a way that produces results and meshes with the existing magic circle - but that shininess takes away from the implied history they should have dominion over and the person they're haunting doesn't.

from another angle there is kinda something there about how put-together canon baron is as a concept; the domain they call home is riz's deep-seeded fears, extremely vulnerable things he's drawn borders around to quarantine and refused to walk into. things that from his perspective would irreversibly shatter certain pleasant fictions his world is built on top of. canon baron, While Extremely Cool, I feel is kinda too neat to connect with and signify the apocalyticized mess that'd result from this paradigm shift. the part where they're in riz's briefcase and looking through every mirror is Very Cool And Fucked Up! but ultimately the show draws a line around them as well, by making game-physical, tangible spaces they're in (the mirrors and the haunted mordred manor) and put riz and the bad kids there only when they need to confront stuff. riz is meaningfully narratively away from baron's unknown land for most of fantasy high.

with that and all of my disclaimers in mind my conclusion here is if canon baron wants to be a Horror Monster they'd have to cross way more lines. be a Lot more invasive. hence (holds up my class swap baron like a long cat)

[lovecolibri]

"She's bad. Ya'll are weird about this."

[daincrediblegg]

Going to have to do a prestige war historical/fantasy drama show retrospective at some point because we need to talk about how shogun did more with one season than GOT did with eight

[straightuppotato-art]

OC-tober Day 4: Re-Design

My boah (cowboy accent) Nathan got all dolled up now <3

[starstruckodysseys]

fuck. fig and ankarna. just two flame gals missing their girlfriends. a piece of themselves