#kids doll house

[civetside]

happy first day of halloween

[helaenalyst]

this came to me in a vision and was drawn in a trance

[lunarharp]

..polly pocket au.. (<- a type of doll.)

[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)

[reshramlove1ob]

If this wasn’t so expensive it’d be over

[dreamdroplittlesarchive]

dollhouse kitchen

[90s-2000s-barbie]

January 29, 2005 🧼 🧽

[oioioioikqq]

i have a little au where christopher goes through the unification, stays alive and becomes an adult, i think it would've change a lot of things, but right now i have 🤏🤏one specific headcanon in my head

after unification christopher becomes the warden of children's building instead of edward, which means, besides other duties like debut/inspection, he also has to organize the unification process

i think christopher would try to prove that unification isn't a necessary thing and shadows can live without it so dolls stay alive, but he couldn’t really stop this, so every time the doll and shadow are invited, christopher then sits next to the box where the unification happens, and just stays here all night, refusing to leave

he would feel guilty that all those children with whom he spent his childhood are dying in the box right now, and moreover, he not only can't do anything about it — he organizes it himself as the warden of the children's building

[momachan]

Paraphrasing John Steinbeck: "I guess there are never enough 'comic' books."

[thehousehag]

The colors :)))

[roomba-mangga]

taking a little break from writing for a few days to cool down the brain but first... yaad&thistle au fic preview under the cut. this is clocking in at 12k atm, i haven't finished drafting all the scenes yet, but i am deeply enjoying this one.

[aquateenpatrolsomethingshowshow]

santa spoiled him or smth lmao

[beththemudkip]

And here they all are in their new home!! Sooo freaking cute!

[lolotheparagon]

Meet Cela and Cera, two porcelain dolls that Florabelle's grandma gave to her on her 5th birthday and were her fave toys. She always talked to them after school, help them face the windowsill so they can see her everyday and outside of Parfait, they were the only friends Flora had

6 years later, Flora sold them to a charity shop as she finds them freaky and she doesnt need them anymore now that she has new friends and a girlfriend in her life. But when she arrives home to find them back on her windowsill, its almost like they're watching her...

[bariumsalts]

I keep thinking about a passage I read as a child in James Dobson's "Bringing up Boys" where he argues for only giving children toys stereotypical for their gender by citing a study in which girls and boys were given both trucks and a dollhouse to play with. Apparently the girls had tea parties with the trucks and the boys turned the dollhouse components into catapults. But I have found myself lately thinking- so what? Why do children have to play with toys the way adults would? What's wrong with giving girls toy trucks to play truck tea party? If the boys aren't being destructive, why not let them play besieged dollhouse? One of my favorite things about children is the unique perspective and creativity they hold: why stifle that? Why would gendered play require limiting their access to toys?