#if they do it’s fodder and is exalted

[batfossil-fr]

+1 imp finished

[of-nyon]

getting back into flight rising after a two year hiatus, if there's one thing in my life I need more of it's online jpeg collecting (NOT NFTS I'm obviously taking about my silly long term quest to get one of every item on neopets as much is reasonably feasible but sure let's add dragons on top of that)

[the-chattering-tower]

I made Torchbound so that I could do Typical Fantasy Kingdom Shit and also Whatever I Wanted With Fire Aesthetic, and then. completely just didn't do anything with the Royal Family aspect of it bc turns out I don't actually care much about Royal Family Drama and Politics

For the longest time it has just been Veritas as the sole representative of the Royal Family and they specifically Do Not Give A Shit about Being The Heir. Now that I put my brain to it, looking through my unsorted dragons I finally acquired them two siblings, and an assistant for one of said siblings, and perhaps an old. however the fuck do you say dajka. Fancy Royal Babysitter. Anyway

But also ofc the Royal Couple are Assholes so I don't. really wanna have them? Like I'm not gonna acquire new dragons for them bc I'm at max capacity, but also all the dragons without lore I have sitting around? I love them way too much to turn them into Asshole Royals who Don't See Their Kids As People and also Threw One Of Them Into The Wyrmwound (which is a fun thing I came up with like ten minutes ago)

I dunno. Torchbound is weird. There's implied royalty I guess

[corvid-convergence]

considered getting into exalting bc its something to do on the site + i could use the extra money

....and then immediately remembered i absolutely hate going into the coli so yk what maybe not lol

[gaolerdeathmetal]

Hi, I'm still relatively new to FR (I've been there for a year) and I wanted to ask you how do you grind 1000+ gems? I sell fodder dragons + buy gilded chests when I have treasure but still it brings me like ~50-80g.

Sorry if I bothered you!

exalting leveled fodder on top of hitting the max lucky streak through glimmer and gloom is pretty much all i do these days (you can find guides on how to do g&g quickly, when you get used to it it takes a max of 12 mins to get 75kt)

then you trade all the treasure you get with someone on the items for sale forum looking to trade their gems for treasure! theres usually a few of those threads up at a time :)

.... HOWEVER. since its night of the nocturne i heavily recommend grinding the coli/bond with all of your familiars (look at the post below) to get a bunch of chests and sell those! the best places are bamboo falls, redrock cove, boreal wood, rainsong jungle & harpy's roost. good luck!

[redfloonrising]

much better!

[golddragon-fr]

Man I really wanna do another fodderlocke, but the way I train fodder these days isn’t like. Easily adaptable to how the base fodderlocke assumes folks level fodder

[rising-blood-moon]

I've got 12 dragons on exaltion row but I'm too lazy to level any of them

[samaralee-rising]

pffft went to the AH for exalt fodder and grabbed the first 5kt hatchling without looking and it's a triple sanguine so now I feel like I have to keep her and do something with her XD

[mesetacadre]

So, like, have any of you actually ever had a conversation with a fascist offline about what they believe? I have.

To be clear, this wasn't a sit-down-let's-talk conversation. He (the only one) tried to start shit, and we (me + 2 comrades) confronted him in the act and regrettably got into a 30-minute "conversation".

Fascists, individually, are very mentally feeble. They are cowards who always seek to start conflict while trying to make themselves out to be the victims. This is, of course, until they gain enough popularity and canon fodder to throw 20 unstable fascists at anyone they don't like. But until this exaltation occurs¹ and their organizations enter a relatively stable cycle (in contemporary liberal democracies, they last between 2 and 7 years before disintegrating), there remains a contradiction between their aggressive desire to seek confrontation and their individual and collective insecurities. Fascist ideology is mostly not rooted in reality (more on this later), and it also has an important component of self-hate. They are an inferior specimen, unable to achieve what the fascist martyrs before them achieved (in Spain, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera usually occupies this position), and to add injury to insult, it's those who they perceive as weak and undeserving who rule over them. They ignore this perceived inferiority by joking about being chads, the superior race, or non-degenerates. But behind their rhetoric and "humor" there is usually a tinge of insecurity and hate against anyone who doesn't fit their increasingly narrow standard, including themselves.

This fascist we talked with kept referring to Jewish conspiracies, to the freemasons in every position of power, to old Falangists, to fascist "theorists", to some kind of esoteric spiritualism within the bounds of Christianity, somehow, and hyperborea. He talked about communists, how they were already in the government (referring to the social-democratic PSOE), how we were degenerates, how the day will come, etc. He attempted to scare us by saying that he was an ex-member of this more notorious fascist party and that they were looking for him to beat him up, which isn't something you admit to people you're trying to start conflicts with. After a while of his ramblings, one of my comrades couldn't help but laugh at him. It was all very ridiculous; I don't remember exactly what he said that made my comrade laugh. He got slightly more agitated, and the conversation ended in ~5 minutes.

Individually, fascists are also not the brightest people you'll encounter. For somebody to internalize fascist beliefs, they have to be unconsciously willing to never dig deeper about their beliefs, to contrast them with one another, or to contrast them with other fascists. They'll read a text (they may be stupid, but a lot of them do read more than you'd expect) about, say, the concept of race, and never really address the fact that it contradicts their own beliefs, or a fellow fascist's beliefs about the nation or about Europe.

And a really interesting thing is that fascism is far from a monolith. It's more akin to an entelechy². The specific contradictions of fascism manifest themselves much more between individual fascists than within a single individual. Like I mentioned before, there are contradictions when it comes to race (racialists like the nazis vs anti-racists like Falange Auténtica), to Europe (the idea of a Great Europe vs every idea of Nationality/Empire, which generally coexist poorly), to the nation (its intersection with race and/or Europe and how it interacts with these), to the reaction against progress (a conception of fascism as progressive, reactionary, or neither³), to science (a realist position based on scientificism such as race science and Kameradschaftrecht (nazi feminism) vs metaphysical conceptions, such as esotericism or the Thule society, reliant on aesthetics and mysticism), or to the economic policy (bourgeois positions, corporatism, vs workerist positions such as Strasser or Bombacci).

These contradictions aren't unique to the contemporary fascist situation of fragmentation and the peculiarities of social media either. Back in the 30s and 40s, there was a lot of disagreement on who counted as fascists. On one end, during the rise of the NSDAP, there was a small cadre of orthodox fascists who narrowed fascism "a la Italiana", and did not consider nazi-fascism to be fascism because of its differences on the scientificist conceptions of race. The Nazi party repressed this small wing. On the other end, it was a prevailing position in the USSR to not consider fascism to start with Italy's fascii di combatimento, but rather in Russia's Black Hundreds, having a broader conception of fascism.

This fascist we talked with considers himself a Carlist⁴, while another member of his groupuscule considers himself a national-socialist, while being Moroccan, and a third is a run-of-the-mill reactionary concerned with the 2030 agenda, globalism, immigrant invasions, the great replacement, that sort of thing. When fascist groups are relatively small and lack any form of inertia and/or formalized structure, their activity is extremely sporadic. There is no discipline to be found, no real planning or broad strategy, they are, rather, a group of similarly-enough-minded friends who sometimes like to do some vandalism or threaten/agitate leftists of any stripe. Their only method of growth is to generate controversies, fights, have a provocative tweet go semi-viral, to generate noise. When it comes to agitation for the fascist, concrete ideology is not relevant. They appeal to both rage and the satisfaction of, for example, seeing x annoying leftist org get their posters ripped off. Discussions of fascist theory rarely, if ever, influence their pragmatic activity, sometimes it's more similar to a circlejerk to see who has the most esoteric, exaggerated and offensive positions.

This is not to say fascist infighting is irrelevant, far from it. Fascists have their own petty disputes between groups, periods of extreme fractionarism, inter-fascist and intra-fascist violence. But when it comes to the philosophy of action, to how they apply all these beliefs, you'll be pressed to find meaningful, material differences. Some might be more or less aggressive, more or less esoteric, more or less contrarian, more or less effective. But they all rely on building that momentum, that controversy -> confrontation -> growth -> controversy cycle. The moment fascist groups lose that momentum, or one too many campaigns fall flat and fail to garner attention, they'll start to turn against themselves, to deteriorate their own structures in the permanent search for conflict that their beliefs demand. There is no way to hold the belief that, for example, race is a scientific category that makes the white/national/aryan/european/whatever race constantly threatened to disappear without exhorting you to seek conflict, whether it's against immigrants or other fascists who don't place as much importance on race.

If you find yourself in the context of a few small fascist groups festering and seeking conflict, it is a strategic error to confront them outright. Unless you're willing to downright kill them or injure them severely enough (with the bigger threat of legal repercussions that entails), fascists will be able to turn your explicit opposition against them into ammunition to attract more reactionaries to their own ranks. The best you, as an organized communist, can do in the period before exaltation, is to quietly collect information about them, study their patterns, and exert as much opposition as is possible without letting them turn it into a visible confrontation. If you're going to cover up their symbols and posters, do it when they can't film you or try to start a fight. If they're threatening someone to provoke them to then cry and hue about the rabid leftists, use the fact that they have low numbers, record them, and intimidate them without physical violence. Even if you can leave them writhing on the floor in a fight, they can use that as ammunition, but they can't use a video of them putting their tails between their legs and running off. You can't debate with fascists, this much is clear. You also can't just use violence to scare them away, because they'll use that violence to gain momentum, and then you can end up with an actually decently-sized and consistent fascist organization.

This is how we have been opposing these small groups of fascists attempting to grow through controversy. We opposed them non-visibly, effectively and professionally. When this group of about 15 fascists total (they never appear with more than 4 at a time because of their inconsistency) encountered this, they were at one point scared enough to stop all activity for about 2 months, and after that have yet to appear again. Meanwhile, other, more infantile orgs, overreacted by opposing them with full force and very publicly, which only encouraged the fascists to keep going and wasted energy in a futile back-and-forth, as well as putting their members in unnecessary risk by engaging in unplanned situations.

¹ Throughout this entire post, all analysis of the behavior of fascists offline assumes this exaltation has not occured

² Entelechy here means an impossible ideal, built entirely in the imagination, or with an unstable and shoddy manifestation.

³ Fascism often positions itself as a revolutionary movement, while other times it places more importance on the opposition against progress.

⁴ Carlism is a Spanish political current originating in the rejection of Isabel II as a legitimate heir to Fernando VII, it became very intertwined with Franco's dictatorship and the Falange during the Civil War

[nevros-fr]

Nevros is back again with FR Archive crawling, this time Festivals!

The current dom scene looks like this:

Raffle that accepts dragons for tickets and reduced treasure/gem payout compared to exalting.

Public buy that accepts dragons only for payout and usually more than what you would get when exalting.

Badges given out for participation/sending dragons.

Exchange fodder for art

Lots of booth games and activities to participate in.

I had a few big questions that I wanted to answer about when did each of these events get established. When did each of these events start to show up? The disclaimer is that I only looked at festival push weeks to preserve my sanity. Massive shout out to Daenaryen for maintaining the festival thread masterlist!

If you have specific non festival weeks that had those events that predated the dates I found, feel free to share it!

Well it was pretty early into FR. The first festival was informal, there was a celebratory thread but no formal booths and events. July 2013 rolled around very quickly and kickstarted the festival week tradition we have had for the past twelve years. You would not believe it but randomized gacha critters were a thing from the very first event 2013. I really thought it was a later addition but maybe it’s just a return to our roots. 

The next month, we had our first raffle, banners, and plot line going with Fire in 2013. Festivals at this time were mainly participation based. If you play games at the booths, you get tickets for the main raffle. No dragon donations at all!

Shadow changed the trend in February 2014 where it accepted dragons for tickets and payouts. This was also the dark ages where you kept track of every single dragon ID.

Next in March 2015, we have the first public buy from Wind!

Light’s festival in June 2016 had the first fodder for art thread. They also offered daily participation badges for sending dragons to the raffle. Previous art threads were free, “your character here style” commissions, and not more than 2 users running the booth.

Finally, I have a feeling that this kicked off the Light/Plague rivalry but I don’t have proof but Plague rocked up to festival pushes with a whopping 22 events when previous years had a range of 3-6 events. Mad lads plague!

That is my brief look! I may or may not be working on going through each of the festival weeks to look at what events each one has. Do we have more or less booth variety? In any case, stay tuned :0c

[saltminerising]

i know its a complete and total waste of food, but i always make sure to feed my fodder before exalting them. something about the thought of sending them off hungry makes me so sad😭 im gonna pack this baby's lunch with their favorite plants and bugs before they leave me idc how much extra food i waste doing this!!!!!

[quietlywatchingwritingreading]

Just a friendly PSA for Flight Rising Right now:

-Right now Water/Ice are having a conquest battle

-Next week Plague is having a (uncontested) conquest for their Festival Dominance

-After that, Nature is having a conquest battle because Riot of Rot.

This is a lot of Conquest Battles in a row, and it looks like theres quite a few conquest battles planned for November as well.

Anyone wanting to find homes for their dragons, might want to keep them off the Auction House this month. Any dragon on the Ah is viable to be exalted in a heated dominance battle, regardless of price. Fodder prices might also get pretty high, do to the sheer number of conquest battles this month.

[mcalli-fr]

Hatchery owners...please don't do this...

If you're going to sell dragons, you have to be okay with people exalting them.

I won't begrudge anyone who blocks or blacklists folks who are obviously abusing their cheap/free hatchery as a personal fodder farm, but to check in with dragons later to make sure they're not exalted? Come on now.

What if I adopted a dragon, kept it for a while, then traded it to someone else who then exalted it? All you know is the dragon was bought by me and is now exalted. Should I be punished for not keeping the dragon indefinitely? Really?

Most hatchery dragons end up with the gods. It's just the name of the game. You gotta be okay with that.

[imagineitdearies]

Do Astarion and Tyrus ever joke about their past as a way to cope? OR do they prefer to avoid the subject "We were Cazdor's slaves, it was traumatic but but don't have to go into details".

Hi anon! Hmm, what an interesting question. I think my answer has more to do with how I generally have characterized these two when it comes to humor.

Astarion's humor in my opinion is actually pretty cute and harmless, silly, when he actually means it in the game (mimicking Halsin, making really lame puns and innuendos). But in the case of trauma and his abuser I'd say he jokes about it as a defensive mechanism to shock people, make them back off and leave him alone, or to hide his true feelings about something. Like when he's making fun of Cazador's "grand ceremony to honor one exalted vampiric master," there's clear anger behind it, not actual levity. Maybe this would change after enough years of healing, but I do clock him as the type to avoid thinking about it even for joke fodder--he did spend a lot longer living it, after all.

Tyrus is a different case. Of course, he's not up for jokes very often during the awful traumatic events of PS, but he does have a streak of dry, occasionally-dark humor running through him that I think will come out a lot more as they get farther from the past and Cazador is truly permanently dead in his mind. And he loves making Astarion laugh when he can; Astarion's always enjoyed Tyrus's strange (sometimes unintended) humor.

Problem is, our boy's offhand, dry remarks about his past may not be so funny to those hearing about it for the first time (poor Cynda).

**Cue Astarion chuckling at Tyrus's dry joke about Justiciars not being very creative torturers, while everyone else stares at the two of them in confusion/horror**

No doubt Tyrus would specifically enjoy making fun of Cazador--though I think everyone finds that enjoyable, to be fair.

Thanks for the ask anon! Hope you're keeping well 🥰

[morgana-ren]

if gortash survived and gale become god of ambition would gortash change or stay with bane?

Oh, he is absolutely staying with Bane.

See, there's ambition, and then there's ambition. While both Bane and Gale can be considered to have some degree of hold over the idea of 'ambition,' it is in very separate ways.

Gale is a more wispy, arrogant version of ambition. Ambition in general. Needing favor bestowed to follow a dream or perhaps a whim. Wishing for a little extra push. A look in the right direction, the right kind of attention, the simplest detail to bring together a complex spell for the first time. The right book, the right time, the right person.

The studious wizard; the eager bard; the bright-eyed swordsman; the gifted student; the young and the hopeful and the hubris.

Bane is grit and hands in the dirt. He is the fire that forges the blade and the hammer that shapes it. He is the desperate, the angry, the cruel, and the brutal. He is strength and power, and if you do not have it of your own volition, you do not deserve it.

The hellbound boy; the sneering warlord; the cruel architect; the ruthless king; the empty-eyed killer.

Bane will not give you ambition, but he will show you how to claim it if your nerves are iron enough to withstand. He is blood under the nails, tears long dried, and fury so hot that it burns even the wielder. He is lack of forgiveness. He is brutality. He is might is right and compassion is weakness.

The desperate do not turn to Gale. The hopeful turn to Gale. The arrogant. The needy. Those wishing they were recognized. Those chasing a dream. Those with the stars still in their eyes.

The desperate turn to Bane. They are not hopeful. They are tears long dried and hatred and blood like fire. They will mould the world like clay because they can, and because you cannot stop them. The world showed them no pity, and you shall receive none in turn.

Bane is the Black Hand that destroys and crushes and burns, and rebuilds in His image.

Gale is the ethereal hand that guides like a gentle wind from time to time. Indifferent and so terribly soft that sometimes you cannot even feel it. Inconsequential. Pointless.

Gortash is not a starry eyed child. He is whipped and flogged and wrung dry. He cannot count on anyone but himself, and he will tear down the walls with his own two fucking hands if he must. He is domination and tyranny through deceit and intelligence and strategy and strength.

Gale would wash his hands of Gortash-- and Gortash would never look to such an unrealistic ideal in the first place. Blood begets blood. He knows this. No adorable ideals spouted by arrogant heels will change this. Death, blood, strength, and cruelty. These are pillars-- they are not follies.

Gale, against Bane, is yet another frivolous, useless God with no real point but their own self-worship. Followed by fools, depended on by fools. Bane does not offer meager blessings and pageantry. He offers change, if you are strong enough to take it. He offers power, if you are clever enough to keep it. He offers a doctrine that will justify and even exalt you for these choices. Wash away the pain with blood and rebuild in your own--and his-- image. Take what is yours by right.

Show no mercy, for you shall be shown none. This is the way of the world. The strong eat the weak and take as they please. You can be fodder-- or you can be king.

No God can hand you this power. But Bane will smile as you take it.