#plain doll posting

[warmcoals]

🦑Serious Stuffy Sunday🦑

[valdotpng]

happy birthday bubbo!!!!!!!!! i still love u to death!!!!!!!!

[desertomb]

Doll sketch I did today 🩸

[fantomette22]

Pretty accurate Bloodborne fandom discourse experience on Tumblr lmao

[lost-in-yahargul]

uhh the doll doing maintenance on herself

Keeping those joints in good condition!!

[swallowtail-ageha]

The doll is maria and maria is the doll. They are each other's mirrors of what they could have been had their lives taken different turns. The villain and the innocent. Do you see my vision do you see it

[missfiorear]

He's crying because he thinks his secret has been discovered.

..

..

..

(God, don't take this shit seriously, I just feel like drawing but all my ideas are stupid, throw rocks at me 😭)

[phoenixcatch7]

Kintsukuroi

'What if I put a clock pendulum in my torso' was the sort of question Bruce had come to expect when visiting Oracle.

"Pendulums are dependant on a stable base," he replied, because the last time he'd assumed they were being unserious Tim had tried to fit a chemistry test lab in his mouth and accidentally leaked the fumes through his mask.

"It'd be so aesthetic though," said Barbara, not looking up from the dozen screens she was surrounded by. "Listen. It would look so cool - Spoiler, robbery on fifth and main - Especially if I put a clock face over my heart."

"I thought you were trying to fit a super computer in it?"

"I was, but progress is slow. It's hard to fit it and enough padding to protect it plus leave enough room for ventilation. If I add the pendulum I might at least get inspiration." She gave a heavy sigh and pushed away from the desk, gliding in her chair to where her doll body was resting on a table, the glue separating the two halves of the smashed torso still glistening. Bruce followed, peering over her at the many scanners and wires hooked into it, flashing and beeping.

"Any luck?" he asked, and they both knew he wasn't talking about the computer anymore.

"Nothing."

He squeezed her shoulder, and she leant into it. They stayed there for a long moment.

"I just don't understand!" Barbara finally burst out, hands clenching on her chair arms. "I glued nearly every single piece back together! I made sure every splinter I could find went exactly where it should! I know the contract is still there. She's worked with more missing pieces before. But she's just not responding!"

"It's not you," Bruce soothed. "You've more than enough determination and strength to puppet, and we know the human body's state doesn't affect performance."

"That's the thing!" Barbara threw her hands up angrily, nearly smacking Bruce in the face. There was a chatter over comms, and both reached for their own. "One second," she said tightly, and wheeled back into the glow of the monitors. "Copy. BW, you're nearest? Thanks. Try and avoid the sniper this time. Wing, backup is in five."

She muted again and spun around, pinning Bruce with a heavy stare. "Is there anything, anything you can think of? We've - nothing I've tried has worked."

"Well...." He trailed off, one hand coming up to rub at the chin of his mask - a quiet night meant the opportunity to forgo the practical but muffling gas mask for his favoured plain black.

It was far from the first time a doll had been horrifically damaged. The incident with Bane came to mind - Batman had been in a very similar condition, body shorn clean in two and tossed to opposite corners. It was an awful memory, but the expression on Bane and the audience's faces as his bloodless body fell apart like a rotting tree trunk and then kept moving was a silver lining he'd always treasure.

But he'd been repaired and back on his feet in weeks, if bearing the incandescent fury of the doll for several more. It had been months for Barbara, and still nothing was happening.

"There's something we're missing, and I doubt it's on your side."

"I know THAT-"

"Listen," he demanded, and her jaw clicked shut mutinously. "There's something we're not seeing. Batgirl is in no shape to demand it herself, it seems. So its inaction is something we can't fully rely on."

"You've got the most experience with the dolls of all of us. Can you.. I don't know, sense anything?"

"Nothing more than the usual, with the Patriarch Doll, but we might get more if we return to the doll house -"

"No." Barbara interrupted again, but Bruce did not take offence. "She's not going anywhere. She doesn't want to head back to the cave."

Oh?

"She doesn't want to, or she doesn't care to?"

"I say she doesn't."

Interesting. This was likely a case of the doll exerting its will. The bats were well versed in avoiding the few lines their wooden bodies drew in the sand, treating them with the wary respect one would give a favorite blade or a highly trained attack dog. They could work together, share the highs and lows of life with them, but never get complacent. The dolls were forever a foreign, inhuman presence, and as with all wild creatures they would never be so arrogant as to assume full understanding. For Barbara to so strongly decide for the doll meant she was most likely not the only one deciding.

Which meant the solution would not be found in the cave.

"Perhaps there are upgrades she wishes to have?"

Oracle paused.

"Maybe," she conceded. "But there's practically a limitless amount of things I could do, and I wouldn't know where to start. And I could more easily do them when she's up and walking."

Not that then. If the doll wanted something to change but not receive upgrades or heal, than what?

... Not heal.

Batman hurried to the table. Oracle watched him with hawk eyes, but another call on the comms turned her away with a final warning glance.

Recovering every single splinter from a damaged wooden object and perfectly reattaching it was nigh impossible on a good day, never mind in the dead of night with a moving target. The dolls always returned to the cave to regenerate scratches and nicks they couldn't buff out, or accepted plaster to transmute with whatever supernatural power guided them.

The batgirl on the table, divested of all covering and armour, was still as chipped and scuffed as the day nightwing recovered last splinter.

The pieces fell into place.

"She doesn't want to be perfectly rebuilt," he realised. "She doesn't want the damage to disappear as it normally does... She wants it to remain visible. A different type of repair, then."

Oracle spun in her wheelchair to face him.

"Why?" she asked, something sharp in her eyes. Bruce chose his next words carefully.

"Perhaps she thinks such damage doesn't need to be hidden away," he said, slowly, and didn't comment when she turned away. Though she put on a strong face, and the doctors had recently released her full time, it would be a long time until the young hero was able to truly heal her mind.

"She doesn't need to do that for me. She's just causing me trouble."

"I don't think she is," he tried. "Dolls tend to reflect their puppeteer even after they accept us. You can't deny your trajectory has been changed."

They both sent a significant look to the enormous super computer taking up the wall.

"You've said you almost feel better able to protect Gotham now, with your reach and skills. Do you really feel that way?"

"I - I don't -" her mouth worked silently, and Bruce waited. "I mean I guess... But a part of me always assumed it'd be temporary, you know? Once I fixed batgirl.. It'd all return to normal." Her voice wobbled, and Bruce didn't hesitate to crouch before her, wrapping her in a long armed hug. She buried herself in his chest, regardless of the chilled metal.

"It's okay if you don't," he whispered into her hair, and held her as she shook. "I'm just throwing ideas around."

"I do though," she rasped. "I think I do feel that way. There's so much that can't be solved by violence, and it feels good to be out there but... I think I can help even more people, this way."

"That's good," he praised, "that's good. You can do whatever you set your mind to."

"You stole that from a parenting book verbatim."

"It's applicable to the current situation."

"Fine," she sighed, and pushed him away to roughly scrub at her eyes. "I'll give the doll another chance. Find some glitter glue or something, I don't know."

"Any materials you need will be provided," he promised. "I wouldn't recommend glitter glue or our usual tar."

He moved to pat her on the hair as the emotions of the moment faded, making sure to keep his unsheathed claws out of her hair.

"Once you fix her, though, I would recommend you puppet the doll during night hours still," he told her. "It wouldn't be good to put your body through twenty hour days."

"I've got a good system set up for now, but thank, B-man."

The computer dinged with another alert, and oracle spun to squint at it with a muffled curse, typing furiously. Batman escaped to the other side of the room, where the folders he'd originally come looking for lay. She waved, distracted, as he left, and although the doll could not smile, he could feel it on his face all the same.

@puppetmaster13u I summon thee dear mutual ^^

[lesbianvamp1reeee]

embers

[serpenttailedangel]

The (entirely undisclosed) writing system Brin came up with in the World of Elan drives me nuts. Symbols were made with consideration for the schwa sound and their version of S looks like an O. (Or at least, whatever the first sound in their word for 'sun' is, that letter looks like an O.) The schwa accommodation alone means it's not the Latin alphabet. The S/O thing is probably further proof it's not the Latin alphabet, but could also indicate they're not speaking English. Which is kind of a moot point because everything pre-Riyria is implicitly localized into English if for no other reason than that most of the Fhrey language is blatantly localized and in Legends and also the old writing in Riyria does not match modern speech which is, itself, portrayed in English.

Anyway, it's not the Latin alphabet nor does it seem to be a cipher of the Latin alphabet because, again, it's got schwas. Assuming I read the bit about Brin and Roan discussing schwas correctly, anyway.

So they're not speaking English probably and they're also definitely not writing with the Latin alphabet or a 1:1 cypher... yet in Death of Dulgath, Payne makes a point of explicitly stating that his name is spelled with a Y and an E rather than an I, and Royce later makes a quip about his name being Pain after all.

(Not even gonna get into all the other times etymology is made up for words in the story, or the apparent vowel shift that managed to happen during the only few centuries of the empire where reading was wide-spread.)

I understand this is all still something that can be handwaved by saying "it's just localized into English" but my brain is still churning over this. Like...

Royce's whole entire name comes from a misread of Roy, a couple city segments reduced to initials, and someone slurring the words "male" and "born" together. And I'm gonna just ignore that the E in Royce is silent and the implications that has on the in-story alphabet. I'm not ignoring it. "Royce" only has three phonemes in it and even if you assume that the actual city section symbols were swapped out for Latin alphabet letters, how much space does that leave for the name Turin claimed while dropping him off at the orphanage? Did Brin invent a whole entire alphabet with useless extra letters despite her writing system actually being tailored for the language it was made in? Did the local language morph to the point of dropping certain sounds but keeping the old spelling, thus generating silent letters? Why? The vowel shift that I said I wasn't gonna get into seems, at least from how I read it, to mean that words are outright spelled differently between Fariland and Esrahaddon's time, which seems to imply that they adjust spellings to stick to pronunciation more readily than English does. But his last name is just comes from slurring the words "male" and "born" together. Given that there's no necessary reason for those words to be the same, what's his real name.

I understand that any second-world fantasy I read that uses names that sound like English words technically has this problem, but most of them don't also reference inventing an a writing system that explicitly isn't English and then making me think about it.

Realistically, I don't want Tolkien levels of worldbuilding. I like conlangs and fantasy writing systems, but when they're on the level of needing to read an appendix to learn that the fantasy language actually has a formal and informal you but only in certain cultures and some of the characters didn't use it and there were nuances to the social interactions I read that went overlooked due to all utterances of "you" being translated with the same word in English, you are expecting too much of me as a reader. But like... there is a little part of me that wants to know what their real names are when you tie their names to a bunch of words that I'm assuming were localized.

Also I'd like a Fhrey dictionary. I just... I need to know the pattern for the words. I want this.

[warmcoals]

the love of a doll

[katyahina]

It is really interesting to speculate about the meaning of this.. Messengers are associated with the dreaming Hunters and the Dream, but what if those of them who are too far from the Dream are under a lot of strain and the image of the nice person that cared for them is just the only thing they can rely on?

^ In regards to Doll being a 'vessel' of Moon Presence in some regard, this reminds me of Crawlers, other Nightmare creatures! Their larger variants have multiple Messengers sticking out of their guts. I have a personal headcanon on them, but imagine: whereas Winter Lanterns imitate the Doll (and by doing so, Moon Presence), Crawlers are meant to imitate corpse of Kos with the ripped guts. Both are sort of mockery from the Great Ones. A sort of punishment maybe, because if Messengers are souls of the deceased, could Messengers crampled into Crawlers or Winter Lanterns be somehow "failed" spirits? Ones that are yet still to "atone", or, in the case of Moon Presence, ones not taking part in the cycle of the Hunt for one reason or another?

(Retranslation script I always use: ( x ) Internal filenames: ( x ))

Hunters of Hunters had reasons to believe in "proper" burial that further connected to the Hunter's Dream, and Winter Lanterns are referred to be 'failed' Messengers! It might be extention of that fucked up concept of people being cursed for not being properly buried in the eyes of whatever God.

Doll and Gehrman both have interesting connection with the Nightmare Realm, too! Gehrman, strangely, shares the cry with Orphan of Kos, but even if that's to be blamed on simple reuse of assets he still more strangely feels relief after OoK is freed! Whatever prompted that link but who is to tell that spiritual connection with a Great One he helped to torture would not guarantee his own negative emotions helped to give "shape" to Nightmare? It is a lot of power, and the Doll is probably a horrible memory. Maybe the blood and guts' on the dress of Winter Lanterns is a reflection of his pain, memory of an innocent person he trained to be a ruthless murderer, thus ruining that soft version of her and... it didn't end well for Maria, did it?

Alllllright, and before I devolved into a crying cat meme- Doll, strangely, is asleep sometimes, which a doll should not... need? Meanwhile, we find Maria asleep too. I've always loved the idea of their spiritual connection where when one is asleep another is awake, and vice-versa! Ideally, Maria would die and be "reborn" within the Doll, in a way. Could be a spiritual thing of latching onto an object that resembles you (Doll also has Maria's brooch, boots and ribbon but in her hat now ( x )). Or could be Moon Presence's way to further "glorify" her as one of the greatest Hunters. Because, she is Flora of the Hunt. In any case, Kos said no, so Maria's soul is in two states... Winter Lanterns are amalgamation of the two, as well - a gentle singing woman in a dress, but also this dress is bloodied and the woman is aggressive, and don't forget Kin metamorphosis because both Maria and the Doll are close to Eldrich Horrors now!

I don't have much to elaborate on other options as they are much more self-explanatory! Paleblood Hunter wakes up without memories, so Doll could be the most striking person for them, but who is to tell other people would not see THEIR comfort person terribly distorted in Winter Lanterns' place? My personal opinion though is that heads of melted Messengers is a crucial part here.. but I think ALL variants could work so well that seeking 'logical' appeal is pointless ;-; It boils down to what feels more appealing, I suppose..

[pupspuppet]

Time for a nap

Yes, that’s Caspian, she’s my go to OC for dark fantasy stuff. I still need to work on more ref sheets for her XvX

[desertomb]

Drawing the girls and their gestures :}

[butchladymaria]

That ask about nobody really seeming to realize the horror of the doll is so true. How she's dehumanized despite not being human to begin with is THE thing that drives the point of how Bloodborne's true horror is misogyny, to the point that nobody even questions why a creature made of paleblood who barely understands what it is to be a human is so easily taken for granted, abused and neglected just because she resembles a woman, and the fact that she resembles Lady Maria yet is completely different from her, having an exact copy of one of the characters who impacted the narrative the most alongside the other old hunters (and YES very gender nonconforming) put into a role that's so passive and so unquestionably perceived as "the role of a woman"... God sorry for the huge ask, Miss Doll gives me the slimy brainworms lol. But yeah i don't know why either nobody talks about it or act like she is just an extension of Lady Maria. Despite their obvious, glaring connection it's so much more interesting - and horrifying - to think about her like a failed Galatea, her only sin being the fact that she is unfortunately her own person, despite nobody in the narrative having wanted her to be her own anything, just a vessel for what they desire... Rolling on the floor biting my nails just thinking about her right now ughh

YOU GET IT. i'm not going to add to this because you've said it so perfectly. this is a divine take, and my inbox is merely the conduit. i am simply joining you on the floor and tearing up the carpet with my Teeth and Claws. i am stapling this to the walls and ceiling. you are everything to me anon.

[lost-in-yahargul]

Also for research purposes!