You made the unexpected turn into Trolls and i decided it looked interested and followed you! Still haven’t actually watched anything, just kinda immersed myself in the fandom.
the trolls world is just ripe for nonsensical world building, amvs (we callin them fancams now? i'm not sure), and lore mechanics... and then shockingly, trauma dives.
like! because of the kind of media it's in, there are some horrific and tragic implications that are only glanced at, simply left untethered. there's not enough time to cover 2 decades of trauma in an hour thirty minutes for little timmy. But I Have The Time. I will sit with those implications.
and then!!
they get to have their cake and eat it too because of that very same media.
of course they're going to be dancing and singing with the people who only seconds ago tried to eat them! that's just what you do!
of course they're going to tell the people torturing them to death that they deserve to be treated with kindness! everybody does!
the picture it paints for me is of these like. incredibly anxious little trolls, with a whole culture around an almost toxic kind of positivity with very big troubles, and even bigger hearts. and that's like. joey kryptonite. they almost got me back in the first film, but i was mostly satisfied with the character arcs. so i didn't feel the need to break out the fandom playdough.
and then the third one came in with a steel chair like 'hey what if branch was just one part of an entire tragic family. what if they ALL had decades of trauma because of a bad decision they made as teenagers, which permanently skewed the trajectory of their lives. what if they needed some space to define themselves outside of their Band Titles (and by proxy their role in the family) and were then punished for that decision by the narrative, denying them the chance to reunite again. what if a promise sat forcefully broken for just as long and yet the bond didn't disintegrate. what if the love was still there.'
and i never stood a chance
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[6]
Oh there we go! We have a winner: Deep Seated Insecurity!
I think I was hoping for something more dramatic but this will do! The sheer terror in her eyes when he spells her deepest fear out to her is DELIGHTFUL.
Oooh she goes for the Denial but Watanuki hits back with the Deep Backstory Sadness. Watanuki is winning this hands down.
I never considered until now that maybe the reason Watanuki can’t remember the taste of his own cooking is BECAUSE of his wish? He traded away all memories of his past - but because the taste of his food is so heavily keyed into how he was raised and his earlier experiences it will ALWAYS register as ‘nothing’ to him? That’s fascinating! What an interesting way to wring out the last remaining pieces of his past in a way that he STILL can’t experience and might NEVER be able to taste - but Doumeki can! And he likes it so strongly that he basically never stops eating it.
That’s such a special kind of love - to adore the pieces of someone that they can’t know themselves, and might never actually recognise, but you’re there to appreciate it for them all the same.
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Roughly 24 hours of progress on my project for this year's Desert Bus Craftalong so far, out of an estimated 180 hours. So we've got a ways to go yet, but I think this moon came out pretty well.
As is tradition, I'm not telling what the subject is, but that silhouette might look a little familiar...
Also, if anyone needs a reminder, today (May 27) is the last day of the Craftalong submission period, so if you're thinking of submitting a craft idea for this year, get it in before midnight PDT!
(Yes, I started this before submissions even open, because if I didn't, I'd never have enough time to finish by the deadline. Cross stitch takes a lot of time! Also I procrastinate working on the pattern a lot.)
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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)
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have you ever thought of redesigning ellen joe from zzz? i feel like she had a lot of potential but only having a shark tail and nothing else is such a weird decision 😭
damn have i ever even said anything abt playing zzz over here? i dont remember...anyways yeah i have. i made a vague tweet like a day or 2 ago about her actually lol. my guess is she's a thiren/beastfolk and happens to be one of the more human looking ones like nekomiya n seth but when u do a shark person you kinda gotta have more than just the tail cause she really just looks like a girl with a tail
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